The following is a conversation with Cenk Uyghur, a progressive political commentator and host of the Young Turks. As I've said before, I will speak with everyone, including on the left and the right of the political spectrum, always in good faith, with empathy, rigor and backbone. Sometimes I fail, sometimes I say stupid, inaccurate, ineloquent things, and I frequently change my mind as I'm learning and thinking about the world. For all this, I often get attacked, sometimes fairly, sometimes not. But just know that I'm aware when I fall short and I will keep trying to do better. I love you all. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got saley for Esim when you're traveling policy genius for insurance, ag one for health, masterclass for learning element for electrolytes and netsuite for your business. Choose wiser, my friends. Also, if you want to get in touch with me for a variety of reasons, to give feedback, submit questions for AMA, and so on, go to lexfreedman.com contact. And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle.

I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by Saley, a brand new eSIM service offering several affordable data plans in over 150 countries. I've had a bunch of experience when I was traveling where it was a legitimate pain in the ass to get a sIm card or an eSim working and being abroad in the foreign land, far away from home, all these signs and ways of life you don't understand all around you. All that combined with the fact that you don't have access to this little tablet of wisdom, which is the smartphone, it can be a real pain in the ass. So a great esim that works, easy to set up, is worth its weight in gold. That said, when I was in the Amazon, it was also nice to have no reception whatsoever, to be completely disconnected from the world. At first it was painful, but after going rapidly through all the stages of grief, I was able to discover freedom. I was able to, let's say, quiet the mind to a degree that I'm not usually able to in the busyness of urban life.

And the smartphone certainly is a thing that creates that turmoil in the mind. You can always look, and something in there can just perturbate the mind. And now it's off to the races. So not having a smartphone to do that is a really nice catalyst for peace. Anyway, when you are traveling, you should have a smartphone and it should work and it should be easy. Go to salee.com lex and choose the 1gb saley data plan to get it for free. That's salie.com lex to get one free gig of Saley. This episode is also brought to you by PolicyGenius, a marketplace for insurance. All kinds, life, auto, home, disability, and so on. Really nice tools for comparisons. Having talked to Peter Lovells, I realize how awesome it is to create a website that compares stuff, whether it's hotels, neighborhoods, and whatever else, it's nice. Some of it is an interface challenge, some of it is a data challenge. All of that. When a company, when a service does it well, it just makes life easier. You can compare stuff. You could choose the thing that's right for you. I know how powerful it is because most people do it poorly.

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That's policygenius.com lex. This episode is also brought to you by ag one the thing I just drank and I sometimes drink twice a day and I'm traveling for a bit here and I don't have travel packs and so I will be going without ag one for a couple of days and I'll miss it because it makes me feel like home. So I need to get the travel packs. It's just a really, really nice multivitamin that provides a nutritional basis for a crazy physical and mental existence. All the crazy stuff I do diet wise, I'm still doing mostly one meal a day, mostly low carb. And so for that, you know, it's nice to make sure you're getting all the right nutrition. I find when I'm extremely stressed, my ability to enjoy a long run or enjoy a hard training session in jiu jitsu is diminished. The physical challenge is a kind of catalyst to let whatever the underlying reason for the stress come out and pass through you, and maybe you even get a chance to let it go. But when you're in it, sometimes it's rough. Anyway, Jugista is still a huge source of happiness for me.

I think the puzzle of it. I still try to train with a very large variety of people, from white belt to black belt. As I've talked about with Craig Jones, it can be sometimes a little bit difficult. Certain people, especially the lower ranks, go a little bit too hard. So you have to figure out that puzzle. Let them submit you a few times, kind of let them chill out. But it's still a fascinating puzzle of human psychology, of human sort of biomechanics, from arms and legs, and sort of pressure and dynamic movement and transitions, all that kind of stuff. It's just a fascinating game. It's a fascinating, dynamic game. It really is not like chess, because chess is a static game. There are elements of chess, but it's not discreet. It's continuous. And sometimes the subtlest movements make all the difference, and the timing of those movements can make all the difference. Anyway, go check out ag one. They'll give you one month supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag one.com lex. This episode is also brought to you by Masterclass, where you can watch over 200 classes from the best people in the world in their respective disciplines.

I really enjoyed the one that Martin Scorsese did on filmmaking. I'm fascinated by dialog and film and the contrast that that dialog has with, say, podcast. Because podcast is a single take, if you will. It's sort of genuine, relaxed conversation. It's not really planned. There's not a script. And so it's a single take. Now, you take film, and depending on the director, you're doing 510 2030 takes on a single piece of dialog. And you're crafting that with the lighting, with the mood, with the intensity of the faces, of the actors and the music, all of that. And the final result, honestly, is looking for the same kind of thing. It's looking for something real. Now, great interviews, great conversations arrive at that. Something real, like a, like an improvised dance, let's say. And sort of great film arrives at something real, like a great choreographed dance. And it still does have similar elements, like I think about with lighting and all the kinds of things I have very little idea about. But as someone who can appreciate it, I can reach out to towards that and try to achieve that in some kind of way.

To really see a person, to really bring out the beauty of that person is something I would love to do. And I listen to a lot of great interviewers in podcasts, and I'm just in awe. Inspired, truly, truly inspired and humbled. There's just so, so many people that do a much, much better job than me. And I learned from them. I'm inspired by them. Yeah, it's just great. I think I really enjoy just being a fan. Masterclass lets me be a fan of all these cool people. Get unlimited access to every masterclass and get an additional 15% off an annual membership@masterclass.com. luxpod that's masterclass.com luxpod. This episode is brought to you by element. My daily zero sugar and delicious electrolyte mixed. And my favorite flavor is watermelon salt. But there's a bunch of other flavors that are great. And like I said, when I'm training really hard in jiu jitsu, especially in the Texas heat, this is something I notice most clearly because I usually don't like drinking water during training. And so what happens is I drink some element beforehand. I train for, you know, an hour and a half, a bunch of hard rounds, and you just, I mean, you're drained from water.

Just, just, you know, I don't know. I don't know how many pounds of water I lose, but it's a lot. And you kind of start to feel shitty. And the moment I drink elements, just, just within a few minutes, you just start feeling much, much better. And you just feel viscerally. The effect of electrolytes, of sodium, potassium, magnesium on the body water and electrolytes, it's quite incredible. And the same is actually true when you're fasting. And it's been actually a while since I fasted for more than 24 hours. So most days I fasten, I guess you could say 24 hours. I eat one meal a day, 22 hours or whatever it is, 23 hours. But when I do even longer fasts, element is a lifesaver. It just removes the headaches and even helps with the hunger and all of that. Get a sample pack for free with any purchase. Try it@drinkelement.com. lex this episode is brought to you by Netsuite, an all in one cloud business management system. In this episode with cenk, I talk a lot about capitalism. Now. I think I disagree with him, and I do in the episode, and I'll have to really think through it.

And really my favorite episodes is when I'm really challenged to think and learn for weeks and months afterwards. But I don't think our capitalist system is as broken as Cenk suggests. So he feels that companies have completely captured our politicians, our government. But I think that a significant number of companies have undue influence on our politicians, but not as much as Cenk says. And I have a lot of hope primarily. Underlying that hope is a kind of sense that even among the politicians, there's integrity. Not every politician, but a lot of them. I don't think that money can so easily buy the human heart, can so easily corrupt the values of the people who want to serve. So I don't know. I just think if you want to make money, you're not going to go into politics. There's a lot easier ways, cleaner ways, more pleasant ways to make money. It's just such a dirty game. And I think you go in that game to try to help. So anyway, but yes, corporatism is very serious problem. So the way out to me is great companies, quite honestly, and celebrating those companies. And that's something I try to do, call out bullshit, call out shitty behavior on the parts of companies when they do it, but celebrate companies when they do great stuff anyway, underlying the, the flourishing of our nation is great companies and the very system of capitalism.

So if you're running a company, you should be using the best tools for the job of running that company because it's an incredible machine with so many moving pieces. And so it's not an easy job to run it, no matter the scale. Over 37,000 companies have upgraded to Netsuite by Oracle. Take advantage of Netsuite's flexible financing plan@netsuite.com. lex. That's netsuite.com lex. This is Alex Freedman podcast. To support it. Please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Cenk Uygur. You wrote a book, a manifesto that outlines the progressive vision for America. So the big question what are some defining ideas of progressivism?

Yes. So in order to do that, Lex, we gotta talk about where we are in the political spectrum. And in fact, there's two different spectrums. Now, people often think of left right, and that's true. That exists. But layered on top of that is now populist versus establishment. So I'm center left on the left right spectrum, but I'm all the way on the populist end of the second spectrum. So where does progressivism lie within that? Well, I would argue that it's exactly in those places. It's populist and it's on the left. But it is not far left. So far left is a different animal. And we could talk about that in a little bit. So in terms of what makes a progressive, so expand the circle of liberty and justice for all and equality of opportunity. Now, people will say, well, that seems pretty broad and all american, but is it? Think about it. So expand the circle of liberty. Everybody's in favor of that, right? No, absolutely not. So, uh, certainly the king of England was not in favor of expanding the circle of liberty. And the founding fathers that we're going to expand it, and they expanded it to propertied white men.

And then progressives have been their progressives because they expanded the circle of liberty. They then from then on, as we were perfecting the union, progressives always say, expand it further, include women, include people without property, include all races, and at every turn, conservatives fight against it. So that doesn't mean if you're a conservative today, you don't want to include women or minorities, et cetera. But, but today you would say, for example, well, I don't want to expand the circle of liberty to, for example, undocumented immigrants. And maybe you're right about that. And we could have that discussion in terms of a specific philosophy. And I don't believe that undocumented immigrants should immediately be citizens or anything along those lines. But I do believe in expanding liberty overall. And the contours of that are what's interesting. And then you see justice for all, everybody's for just no. Right now, marijuana possession is still illegal in a lot of parts of the country. Now, a lot of right wingers and left wingers agree that it should be legal. But for my entire lifetime, black people have been arrested at about 3.7 times the rate of white people.

And the entire country has been fine with it. So is that justice? No, they smoke white people. Black people smoke marijuana at the same rate. Black people get arrested about four times the rate. That is an injustice that an enormous percentage of the country was comfortable with. Well, progressives aren't comfortable with it. We want justice for all. So the equality of opportunity is an interesting one because the far left will say, at least some portions of them will say equality of results, right? So progressives just want a fair chance. So free college education, but afterwards you don't get to have exact same results as either the wealthiest person or we're not all going to be equal. We don't have equal talents, skills, abilities, etcetera.

There's a lot of questions I can ask there. So on the circle of liberty, yes. So expanding the number of people whose freedoms are protected. But what about the magnitude of freedom for each individual person? So expanding the freedom of the individual and protecting the freedoms of an individual. It seems like progressives are more willing to expand the size of government where government can do all kinds of regulation, all kinds of controls on the individual.

So, Lex, what we're probably going to talk about a lot today is balance. And so a lot of people think, oh, I'm on the right, I'm on the left. And that comes with a certain preset ideology. So the right is always correct. The left is always correct. I, so there's two problems with that. Number one, how could you possibly believe in a preset ideology if you're an independent thinker? It's literally by definition not possible. If you say I lent my brain to an ideology that was created 80 years ago or eight years ago or 800 years ago, and I'm not going to change it, you're saying, I don't think for myself. I, you know, I bought into a culture. And by the way, there's a lot of different forms of culture you could buy into, religion, politics, sometimes racial, et cetera. So that's why you need actually balance. The second reason you need balance other than independent thought is because the answer is almost never black and white. And that gets into a really interesting nuance because mainstream media, in my opinion, is the matrix and its job is to delude you into thinking corporate rule is great for you and we should never change it.

And the status quo is wonderful. So they have created a false middle. What mainstream media calls moderate is actually, in my opinion, extremist corporate ideology. So for example, they'll say, Joe Manchin is a moderate. None of his positions are moderate, other than potentially gun control in West Virginia. He's not for gun control. The people of West Virginia are not for gun control, generally speaking. So, and he uses that and they usually have these shiny objects where they're like, you see this? I'm a moderate because of guns, or I'm a moderate because I'm a Democrat from West Virginia. But wait, let's look at your positions. You're against paid family leave that polls at 84%. So you're a radical corporatist who say that women should be forced back into work the day after they have birth. You're against a higher minimum wage. You're against, you're for every corporate position, and they all poll at 33% or less. So Joe Manchin is not at all a moderate. And this applies to almost every corporate Republican and every corporate Democrat. They're all extremists in, in supporting what I call corporatism. So you have to get to a balance in order to get to the right answer.

So that's an interesting distinction here. So you're actually, as far as I understand, pro capitalism.

Yes.

Which is an interesting place to be. That's the thing that probably makes you center left and then still populist. You're full of beautiful contradictions, let's say this, which will be great to untangle, but what's the difference between corporatism and capitalism? Is there a difference?

So I really believe in capitalism. I don't think that there's really a second choice. Where it gets super interesting is the distinction between capitalism and socialism, because that's not at all as clear as people think it is. And people often say socialism and communism as synonyms when they're not synonyms. Right? And so I view it as there's basically four distinct areas. It's obviously a spectrum. Everything is a spectrum, right? On one end you have communism on the left, and on the other end you have corporatism on the right. Okay? And I would argue that capitalism is in the middle. And so communism, we know state owns all property. You're not allowed to have private property. So I will piss off a lot of people in this show. And so I'm asking for their patience. Please hear me out. And because don't worry, I'm going to piss off the other side too. Okay, so communism makes no sense at all. Totally opposed to human nature. It never works. It always evolves into dictatorship because it is not built for human nature. We're never going to act like that. It's not in our DNA. You could try to wish it into existence and they have and it never works.

And it's because once you have almost no rules in terms of, uh oh, we're all equal. And even though communism eventually winds up having an enormous amount of rules, right, it creates a power vacuum. When you say, hey, there's no structure of power here, right? We're all equal. It's a flat line. One guy usually gets up because that's human nature and goes, I don't think so. I think if you're going to leave a power vacuum, I'm going to take that power vacuum.

That's actually a really interesting way to put it. Because when everyone is equal, nobody is in power. And human nature is such that there's, everybody's, there's a will to power. So when you create a power vacuum, somebody's going to, to fill it. So the alternative is to have people in power, but there's a balance of power. And then there's like a democratic system that elects the people in power and keeps churning and rotating. Who's in power?

That is exactly it, Lex. You got it exactly right in my opinion. Okay, so that's why communism never works and can never work. So they, it's an idea of like we're all going to work as hard as we possibly can and take only what we need. Where, when, when has that ever happened in the history of humanity? Right? We're just not built that way. So, okay, we can get into that debate with my friends on the left, etcetera. Now corporatism is just as extreme and just as dangerous. And that is basically what we have in America now. What we have in America now. And this is another giant trick that the matrix played on everybody that they, they did in a shell game. And all of a sudden extreme corporatists like Manchin and almost every Republican in the Senate or moderates, oh my God, Mitch McConnell all of a sudden is a moderate and et cetera. As long as you're not a populist. Populists are never moderate. Okay, but if you love corporations and corporate tax cuts and everything in favor of corporations, you're magically called a moderate when you actually, according to the polling, have super extreme positions that the american people hate.

And by the way, that's part of the reason for the rise of Trump. We can come back to that. Okay, but the second shell game is taking out capitalism, putting in corporatism, but still calling it capitalism. Okay, so what is corporatism? It is when corporations slowly take over the system and create monopoly and oligopoly power so that snuffs out equality of opportunity. So how do they do that? And when people say the system is rigged, they oftentimes can't explain it that well. And then mainstream media goes, oh, you sound conspiratorial. Rigged? Yeah. I wonder how. Yeah, super easy to explain it. Here's one of dozens of examples carried interest loophole. So that is for hedge funds, private equity, the top people on Wall street, that's part of their income. They get two and 20, right? So 2% is a flat fee no matter what happens to the fund. And 20% of the profits of the fund goes back to the people who invested it. It's not their money, it's not their investment. What they're getting is actually just income and should be taxed at the highest rate. But it's because of this loophole, it's taxed at a much lower rate at around 20%.

So do you know at what income level you go above 20% if you're a regular Joe, it's at $84,000 a year. So these billionaires are getting the same tax rate as people making $84,000 a year. It's unbelievably unfair. And that's corporatism taking over and starting to rig the rules. I'm going to pay less taxes? You're going to pay more taxes. Okay, so again, I can give you dozens of those examples. So, and mergers, so that they get to oligopoly power. That's how you rig a system, lowering the corporate tax rates, making sure that there is no real minimum wage, making sure there's no universal health care. We all get become indentured servants of corporations. They take away power from the average guy, give it to the most powerful people in the world. So, and, but the most important distinction, Lex, is that corporatism hates competition. It wants monopoly and oligopoly power, whereas capitalism loves competition and wants to free markets. And I remember, uh, you know, we started young turks back in 2002. So we've been around for 22 years. Longest running daily show on the Internet ever. Uh, and so we were pre Iraq war.

And the Iraq war starts and Dick Cheney starts handing out no bid contracts. I'm like, what part of capitalism is a no bid contract? You can't negotiate drug prices. That is the most anti free market thing I have ever heard. It's almost like communism for corporations. They get everything. You there and you get nothing, right? So it's, it's preposterous, it's awful, and it kills the free markets and it's killing this country. And it is the main ideology and religion of the establishment.

Are all companies built the same here? So when you say corporatism, it seems like just looking here at the list by industry lobbyists, it seems like, there are certain industries that are worse offenders than others, like pharmaceuticals, like insurance, oil and gas.

Yeah.

So it seems to me it feels wrong to just throw all companies into the same bucket of, like, they're all guilty.

No, they're not all guilty. So let's make a bunch of distinctions here. So, first of all, can you, first of all, are they quote unquote, guilty? No. They're doing something that is logical and natural. Right. So if you're a company, do you want to pay higher taxes or lower taxes? Of course you want to pay lower taxes. Right. Do you want to have higher employee costs or lower employee costs? Of course you want lower employee costs. Right. So, but the government needs to understand that and protect us from that power that they are going to exercise to get to those results. And if you, if you think free markets is, there is no government, you, you read it wrong. Go re, go back and reread Adam Smith. He says you must protect against monopoly power. If you do not protect against monopoly power, you will have no free markets. And he is absolutely right. So second distinction is between small business and big business. That's why republicans will always be like, oh, we're doing this for small business. That's why we got the biggest oil companies in the world, $30 billion in subsidies. What happened to small business?

Right? So I run a small business. And so if people were to say, like, hey, maybe there should be exemptions for some of the regulations if your company has less than five employees, ten employees, 50 employees, et cetera, there's some logic in that, because businesses have different stages of growth and they have different interests and different needs in those stages of growth. And we want to facilitate small business growth because that's great for the economy, that's great for markets, freedom, etcetera. But the bigger corporations, even there, there's a third distinction. It isn't that there are certain industries that are worse. There's just that there are industries that are better at lobbying. So anyone who, like, right now, number one donor in Washington, a lot of people make a mistake. They think it's a pack or they think it's the oil companies or the banks. No, it's big pharma. Okay, and who has the most power in this country? Big pharma. So we can't even negotiate the drug prices. I mean, look, guys, think about it this way. That's like saying, okay, here's a bottle of water. And normally in the free market, that would cost about a dollar, right?

And in the, uh, for Medicare, the drug companies come in and go, no, I'm not charging a dollar for that. What? I'm charging $100. And the government has to say, yes, sir, thank you, sir. Of course, sir, we'll pay $100. That's, that's why compared to communism, because I can't imagine anything more diametrically opposed to the free market. Then you, the consumer, have to pay whatever the hell a corporation charges. That's insanity. Let alone the patents, let alone the fact that the american people pay for the research and then they make billions of dollars off of it and we get nothing but robbed by them. So it's about lobby power. Oil companies have huge lobby power. Defense contractors have huge lobby power. It's not that they're more evil, it's just that they have figured out the game better and they have basically taken the influence they need to capture the market, capture the government, and snuff out all competition.

Well, or a lot of competition, figured out the game better. So I think a lot of companies are good at winning the right way by building better products, by making people happier with the work they're doing, and winning at the game of capitalism. And then there's other companies that win at the game of lobbying. And I just want to sort of draw that distinction because I think it's a small subset of companies that are playing the game of lobbying. It's like big pharma.

So, Lex, first of all, you have to set rules for what makes sense, not, oh, I don't like this industry, or I don't like this company, or, hey, this company is not doing that much lobbying at this point. They will later when they realize what's going on. So, for example, in my opinion, AIPAC has totally bought almost all of Congress. And so now other countries are going to wake up and go, wait, you could just buy the american government. So AIPAC is going to spend about $100 million in this cycle and they're going to, and then they're getting 26 billion back. So every country in the world is soon going to realize, oh, take american citizens that live there, get them a tremendous amount of money and just buy the us government, right? So that. But for corporations, they've already realized that on a massive scale, right? So, for example, in the two industries you gave automotive, so in New Jersey about a decade ago or so, one of the most powerful lobbies is car dealerships. So at the national level, you got pharma and you've got defense contractors, et cetera. At the low local level, guys who have huge power.

Number one is utilities. Number two is real estate. And then car dealerships are hilariously, among the top, right? Because it's local businesses that are, you know, financing the politicians at the local level. So they passed a law saying that you have to sell through dealerships, but Tesla doesn't sell through dealerships, and it was intended to bully, intimidate, and push out Tesla out of the market. They then did that in a number of different states throughout the country. So does that make any sense in a democracy? Of course not. Why, you could. Why do you have to sell your product through a specific vehicle or medium? You can sell it any way you like. That's the most anti free market thing possible. Why? It was just total, utter corruption and. But it's not. But it's perfectly legal. The Supreme Court legalized bribery. So then what happened in that case? So then Elon came in and gave campaign contributions and reversed it. So now we're in a battle where it's an open auction, right? Different companies are buying different politicians, and then they're pretending to have debates about principles and ideas, etcetera. So now let's look at tech.

In the beginning, Facebook was not spending any money in politics, or almost any money in politics. So what happens? They're getting hammered. They get it pulled into congressional hearings, and Facebook's got fake news, and, oh, my God, all these trouble from Facebook. Then Facebook does the logical thing. Oh, it turns out I need to grease these sons of bitches. Okay, so then they hire a whole bunch of Republicans consultants. They go grease all the Republicans and most of the corporate Democrats, and then all of a sudden, we're no longer talking about Facebook at all. And Facebook are angels. And now we've turned our attention to who, Facebook's top competitor, Tick Tock. Funny how that works. Okay. And by the way, then Donald Trump goes, oh, and Tick Tock's big, dangerous company. They're working with China, okay? And then Jeff Yaz comes in on this cycle, part owner of Tick Tock, and he doesn't want Tick Tock banished, of course, right? So he gives Trump a couple of million dollars. Trump turns around the next day and goes, we love tick tock. Tick tock's a good company, right?

So that's a big contributor to influencing what politicians say and what they think. But it's not the entire thing, right?

No, it is. It's 98%. I'll go on mainstream media and they'll be like, oh, I see what you're saying. I can see how that influences politicians about 10%. I'm like, no, no, it's 98%. So. And even a lot of good people think it's 50 50. They have principles and they have money. No, they have money and this smidge of principles. That's why I wanted to clarify. 98 tube.

Okay, so how do we fix it? So it's really interesting and nice that you're pro capitalism and anti corporatism. So how do we create a system where the free market can rule, where capitalism can rule. We can have these vibrant flourishing of all these companies competing against each other and creating awesome stuff.

Yeah. So in the book I call it democratic capitalism as opposed to Bernie's democratic socialist, right. We can get into that distinction in a minute. But so as Adam Smith said, and anyone who studies capitalism knows, you need the government to protect the market as well as the people. Because, so, like, why do we have cops? Because if we don't have cops, somebody's going to go, well, I like Lex's equipment. Why don't I just go into his house and take it? Right? So you need the cops to protect you and that's the government. So people say, oh, I hate big government. Do you? Right. It depends. Right? If your house is getting robbed, all of a sudden you like the government, but you also need comps on Wall street because if you allow insider trading, the powerful are going to rob you blind and the little guy is going to get screwed. So that's this easy example. And so if you don't have those cops, the bad guys are going to take over. They're going to set the rules, rig the rules in their favor. So that, that's why you need regulation. And so the Republicans on purpose made regulation a dirty word.

They're like, oh, raw regulation is bad. And, and then sometimes on the left, people fall for the trap of all regulation is good. A guy I like has a great analogy on this, Matt Stoller. He's one of the original, I would argue, progressives. And there's about four of us. I'm sure there's more, but that have stayed true to the original meaning of progressivism and populism. Me, Matt Stoler, David Siroto, Ryan Graham. Okay. And they used to be in that original blogger group. There was guys like Glenn Greenwald and other interesting cats, right? But they went in different directions. So Matt has a great line. He says, if somebody comes up to you and says, how big a pipe do you want? There is no answer for that. It depends on the job, doesn't it? Right? What are we doing? What are we building? I'm going to tell you the size of the pipe depending on the project. So when people say, are you in favor of regulation or against it? That's an absurd question. Of course you need regulation. It just means laws. Right. So don't kill your neighbor is a regulation. Right. So my idea is a simple one and one we're going to keep coming back to balance.

So when my dad was a small business owner in New Jersey, and they inspected the elevator six times a year, that was over regulation. And I said to my dad, so should they not inspect it at all? I'm a young kid growing up. And he said, no, no, you got to inspect it at least twice a year. I said, why? He said, because in Turkey, sometimes they don't inspect it and then the elevator falls. Okay, so, so bounds of reason, correct. Regulation to protect the markets and to protect the american people.

Yeah. But finding the right level of regulation, especially in, for example, in tech, something I'm much more familiar with, is very difficult because people in Congress are living in the 20th century, before the Internet was invented. So, like, how are they supposed to come up with regulations? Yeah, that's the idea of the free market, is you should be able to sort of compete. The market regulates, and then the government can step in and protect the market from forming monopolies, for example, which is easier to do.

Yeah, but that's a form of regulation.

Right. But then there's like, more check in the elevator twice a year. That's a more sort of specific. Watching, micromanaging.

So, Lex, here's the deal. There's no way around the laws are made by politicians, okay? So. And so you can't give up then and go, oh, it's a bunch of schmucks who I think most politicians are just servants for the donor class. I, the, you know, the media makes it sound like they're the best of us. Oh, they deserve a lot of honor and respect, and they kiss their ass, et cetera. I think, generally speaking, they're usually the worst of us, especially in this corporate structure. Right, because they're the guys who their number one talent is. Yes, sir. No, sir. What would you like me to do with your donor money, sir? Absolutely. I'll serve you completely or 98%. Right. So in this structure, the politicians are the worst of us. But at some point, you need somebody elected to be your representative to do democratic capitalism so that you have capitalism, but it's checked by the government on behalf of the people. It's the people that are saying these are the rules of the land and, and you have to abide by them. So the, how do you get to the best possible answer, which is related to an earlier question you asked Lex, which is the number one thing you have to do is get big money out of politics.

Everything else is near impossible as long as we are drowned in money. And whoever has more money wins. And by the way, when it comes to legislation, again, that's true about 98% of the time. Like, we predict things ahead of time. People are like, wow, how did you know that that bill wasn't going to pass or was going to pass? It's the easiest thing in the world. And we like literally teach our audience on the Young Turks watch, you'll be able to see for yourself. And now, like, our members comment in, they do these predictions, they're almost always right because it's so simple. Follow the money. So if you get big money out of politics, and I could explain how to do that in a sec, then you're at a place where you got your best shot at honest representatives that are going to try their best to get to the right answer. Are they going to get to the right answer out of the gate? Usually not. So they pass a law. There's something wrong with the law. They then fix that part. They, it's a pendulum, you know, you don't want it to swing too wildly, but you do need a little bit of oscillation in that pendulum to get to the right balance.

By the way, I was listening to Joe Biden from when he was like 30 years old, the speeches. He was eloquent as hell. It's fun to listen to, actually. And he has a speech he gives or just maybe a conversation in Congress. I'm not sure where, where he talks about how corrupt the whole system is and he's really honest and like fun. And that Joe Biden's great, by the way, that guy, I mean, age sucks. You know, people get older, but he was talking quite honestly about, like having to suck up to all these rich people and, and that he couldn't really suck up to the really rich people. They said, come back to us ten years later when you're like more, more integrated into the system. But he was really honest about it. He's saying, that's how it is. That's what we have to do. And that really sucks that that's what we have to do.

Yeah. So we did a video on our TikTok channel then and now of Joe Biden. This is when I was trying to push Biden out.

We should say you're one of the people early on saying Biden needs to step down.

Yeah, I started about a year ago because I was positive that Biden had a 0% chance of winning. And. And it turned out, by the way, two days before he dropped out, his inside advisors inside the White House said, yeah, near 0% chance of winning.

Yeah.

So we were right all along.

You got a lot of criticism for that, by the way.

But, yeah, yeah. Well, we can come back to that. Yes, I did. And. Which makes it Tuesday for me. I get a lot of criticism for everything. And by the way, democratic party, you're welcome. So. But Biden's a really interesting example. I'm really glad you brought it up. So the video on tick tock was just showing Biden then, Biden now. And you're right, Biden was so dynamic. When you see how dynamic he was, we did like side by side. Right? And then you see him now going, barely finish anyways. Right. You're like, oh, that's not the same guy. I get it. Right. So. And that got like 5 million views because. Because it resonates. They're like, yeah, yeah, of course. Right. But when he first started to the point you were making, Lex, he wanted. In fact, I know, because I talked to him about this. His very first bill was anti corruption. Why? Because at that point, everything changes. In 1976 to 78, the Supreme Court decisions that basically legalized bribery. But remember, Biden is ancient, so he's coming into politics at a time when money has not yet drowned politics. And in fact, the american population is super pissed about the fact that it's begun.

They don't like corruption so early Biden, because he's reading the room, is very anti corruption. And the first bill he proposes to get money out of politics, okay? But as Biden goes on for his epic 200 year career in Washington, he starts to get not more conservative, more corporate, because he's just taken more and more money by the middle of his career. He has a nickname, the senator from NBNA. Okay? MBNa was a credit card company based in Delaware. And the reason he had that nickname is because there isn't anything Joe Biden wouldn't have done for credit card companies and corporations based in Delaware, which are almost all corporations, okay? So he became the most corporate senator in the country and hence the most beloved by corporate media. And corporate media has protected him his entire career until about a month ago. So, for example, in the primaries both in 2020 and 2024, if you said the senator from NBNA I guarantee you almost no one in the audience has heard of it. If you heard of it, good job. You know politics really well, okay? But the reason you didn't hear of it is because the mainstream media wouldn't say that's outrageous of Joe Biden to be such a corporate stooge.

They'd say, that's outrageous of you to point out something that's true and something we reported on earlier. Okay. And so they protected him at all costs. Now, finally, when you get to this version of Joe Biden, we, he can't talk, he can't walk. He's, he bears no resemblance to the young guy who came in saying that money in politics was a problem. Now he's saying money in politics is the solution. And in 2020 he said, well, I can raise more money than Bernie. I can kiss corporate ass better than Bernie. I'm the biggest corporate ass kisser in the world. So I'm going to raise a billion dollars and you need to support me. Now, of course, he doesn't say it in those words, but that was a message to the establishment. And booted is Klobuchar, Obama, Clyburn, everybody goes, that's right, Biden, Biden, Biden, Biden. Not Bernie. I don't know that there's anybody in the country who instinctually dislikes Bernie more than Barack Obama.

Oh, that's an interesting, I'm not taking that tangent at this moment because you mentioned mainstream media. What's the motivation for mainstream media to be corporatist also?

So first of all, they're giant corporations. So they're all multi billion dollar corporations. In the old days, we had incredible number of media outlets. So you go to San Francisco, there'd be at least two papers and there'd be a paper boy. And I'm going all the way back, paper boy on each corner. And they're competing with one another literally. They'd be catty corner, right? And one guy's going, oh, here, all this details. They're trying to get an audience. They're trying to get people interested. So they're populists. They're interesting, they're muckrakers. They're challenging the government. Fast forward to now, or not now, but about a decade ago, five years ago in that ball, in that ballpark, now there's only six giant core media corporations left. And it's an oligopoly, right? And they're all multibillion dollar corporations. They all want tax cuts. Half of them are also, especially about 20 years ago during the Iraq war, half of them are defense contractors. So they're just using the news as marketing to start wars like the Iraq war. And then gE, which owned MSNBC, makes a tremendous amount of money, so much more money from war than it does for media.

That media is a good marketing spend for these corporations. Now, that's part of it. That they themselves want the same exact thing as corporate. The rest of corporations do for corporate rule, lower tax cuts, deregulation, so they can merge, etcetera. But the second part of it is arguably even more important. So where does all that money in politics go? So, for example, in 2022, it's just a midterm election, not, no presidential, should be lower spending. A ridiculous $17 billion are spent, okay, on, on the election cycle. Where does the 17 billion go? Almost all of it goes into corporate media, mainstream media, television, newspapers, radio. They're buying ads like nuts. So we have a reporter at Tyt, David Shuster. He used to work at MSNBC, Fox News, et cetera. And David once did a piece about money in politics at a local NBC news station. And his editor, or GM, spiked a story. And David goes into his office and asks him, so why this story is true? It's a huge part of politics. If we're going to report on this issue, we got to tell you what's actually happening. So he says, David, come here.

It puts his arm around his shoulders, takes him to the big newsroom, and he goes, you see all this money in politics paid for that.

That's really fascinating. So big corporations are giving money to politicians through different channels, and then the politicians are spending that money on mainstream media. And so there's a vicious cycle where it's in the interest of the mainstream media not to criticize the very corporations that are feeding that cycle. So actually direct, it's not like corporations, because I was thinking one of the ways is direct advertisement. Like, pharmaceuticals obviously advertise a lot on mainstream media, but there's also indirect, which is like giving the politicians money, the pot, or super pacs, and the super pacs, and spend money on the.

That's why media never, mainstream media never talks about the number one factor in politics, which is money. Like, we all know. I mean, you now, we, as we talked about earlier, we see it with our own eyes open auction. Any country, any company, anybody that has money, the politicians will now literally say, I am now working for this guy, as Trump says, because he gave me a strong endorsement, which means a lot of money. Right? And so. And the press never covers it. Almost never. Right? So you're telling me you're doing an article on the infrastructure, build or build back better, etcetera, and you're not going to mention the enormous amount of money that every lobbyist spent on that bill? That's absurd. That's absurd. That's 98% of the ballgame. And the reason they hide the ball is because they don't want you to know this whole thing is based on the money that they are receiving. And by the way, that, one more thing about that, Lex, it's that the ads themselves, actually, they work, and they work pretty well. But that's not the main reason you spend money on ads. You spend the money in ads to get friendly coverage from the content, from the free media that you're getting from that same outlet.

And so since every newspaper and every news, television station and network knows that the democratic party and the Republican Party are their top clients, they're going to get billions of dollars from them. They never really criticize the Republican and Democratic Party. On the other hand, if you're an outsider, they'll rip your face off.

That's also really interesting. So if you're an advertiser, if you're a big farmer and you're advertising, it's not that the advertisement works. It's that the hosts are too afraid. Not like explicitly, just even implicitly. They're self censoring. They're not going to have any guests that are like controversial anti big pharma, or they're not going to make any jokes about big pharma. They're not going to make. And that, and that kind of, that continues and expands. That's really interesting.

Sometimes it's super direct. When I was a host on MSNBC, I had a company that I was criticizing in my script and management looked at it. And by the way, I used to go off prompter a lot, and it drove him crazy. Not because I wasn't good at it, I think my ratings went up whenever I went off prompter, but because they couldn't pre approve the script. And what do they want to pre approve? Hey, are you going to criticize one of our sponsors, one of our advertisers, etcetera. So they, we had a giant fight over it. And the compromise was I moved them lower in the script but kept them in the story. Right. So sometimes it's super direct like that, but more, way more often. It's implicit, it's indirect. You don't have to say it. Right. So I give you a spectacular example of it so that you get a sense of how it works implicitly. So since Ge is a giant defense contractor, they own MSNBC. At the time of the Iraq war, they fired everyone who was against the Iraq war on air. So Phil Donahue, Jesse Ventura, Ashley Banfield. But Ashley Banfield, they did something different with, okay, she was a rising star at the time.

She goes and gives a speech in Kansas, not really even having a policy position, but just talking about the actual cost of this Iraq war and how we should be really careful. They hate that. So they take their rising star and they take her off air. Okay. And she goes, okay, good, let me out of my contract. It's okay, I'll go. Because she was such a star at that time, she could have easily gotten somewhere else. And they go, no, we're not going to let you out of your contract. Why not? You're going to pay me to do nothing? Yeah, not only that, we're moving your office. Where are you moving it to? They literally moved it into a closet. Okay. And they made sure that everybody in the building saw her getting taken off the air and moved into a closet. The closet is the memo, right? That's the memo to the whole building. You better shut up and do as you're told. Okay? So that way I don't have to tell you and get myself in trouble. It's super obvious there are guardrails here, and you are not allowed to go beyond acceptable thought.

And acceptable thought is our sponsors are great, politicians are great, the powerful are great.

So how do we, how do we begin to fix that? And what exactly are we fixing? Is that the, the influence of the lobbyists, the influence of, like, it feels like there's, companies have found different ways to achieve influence.

Right?

So how do we get money out of politics?

So it's very difficult but doable, and we will do it. So, but in order to do it, the populist left and the populist right have to unite because, and by the way, that is why we have the culture wars.

That's why you're voting for Trump.

No chance. Okay, so we can get into that in a minute. So the culture wars are meant to divide us. If I, we, if we get united, we have enough leverage and power to be able to do it. But you can't do it through a normal bill, because if you do it in a bill, the whole point of capturing the Supreme Court was to make sure that they kill any piece of legislation that would protect the american people.

Speaker one, you're saying the Supreme Court.

Is also captured by this oh, 100%. So, okay, so let me explain again. People, for the uninitiated, they think, oh, that sounds conspiratorial. Well, in this case, that's actually somewhat true, because people now know about this. It's the Powell memo, right? The most infamous political memo in history. Louis Powell writes a memo for the Chamber of Commerce in 1971 that's basically a blueprint for how the chamber of commerce can take over the government. And Louis Powell explains, one of the most important things you have to do is take over the media. But even more important than that is taking over the Supreme Court, because the Supreme Court is the ultimate arbiter of what is allowed and not allowed. And he says, we need, quote, activist judges to. To help business interests on the court. Okay? And then Nixon reads the memo and goes, that sounds like a really good idea. How about I put you on the supreme Court? And he puts Louis Powell, the guy who wrote the memo on the supreme Court, where he's the deciding vote in Belani and Buckley. So, melanie, those two decisions are 76 and 78. And what they say is, yeah, yeah, I read the constitution, and it says that money is speech.

No, it isn't. And, no, it didn't. That's not even close to true. They just made it up and they said, okay, and corporations, they're human beings. No, they're not. That's preposterous. Right? And they have the same inalienable rights as human beings and citizens do. And money is speech, and speech is an inalienable right. So corporations can spend unlimited money in politics, and there goes our democracy gone. Okay, so citizens united just shot a dead horse with a Gatling gun and made it worse and put it on steroids. But it was already dead in 78, so that's why every chart you see for the rest of your life, you'll see this. Every chart about the american economy starts to diverge in 1978. So until 38 to 78, we have golden 40 years of economic prosperity. We create the greatest middle class the world has ever seen, and our productivity is sky high. But our wages match our productivity. After 78, productivity is still sky high. Best in the world. Okay? Sometimes people. Oh, the american workers, lazy. Not remotely true. We work our ass off, okay? But wages flatline. And they've been flatlining for about 50 years straight.

And the reason is because the supreme Court made bribery legal. So in order to get past the supreme Court, you only have one choice. That's an amendment. And so you have to get an amendment. Amendments are very difficult, but. So, for example, you. You need two thirds of Congress to even propose the amendment, so. Well, why would Congress propose an amendment that would take away their own power, right? Because almost everybody in Congress got there through corruption. Their main talent is, I can kiss corporate ass better than you can. Right? So I. They take the most amount of person with more money in Congress, wins 95% of the time. Right? But the good news is the founding fathers were geniuses. And they put in a second outlet. They said, or two thirds of the states can call for a convention where you can propose an amendment, and after an amendment is proposed, then three quarters of the states have to ratify it. That is what makes it so difficult, because getting three quarters of the states, there's so many red states, so many blue states, getting three quarters of the states they agree is near impossible.

But there is one issue that the whole country agrees on. 93% of Americans believe that politicians serve their donors and not their voters. So this is the one thing we can unite on. If we unite on this, we push our states to call for a convention. We all go to the convention together, we bring democracy alive, and we propose amendments to the constitution. And the best amendment gets three quarters of the states to ratify. You go above the Supreme Court and you solve the whole thing.

So if 93%. If people want this, why hasn't it happened yet? I mean, the obvious answer is there's a corporate control of the media and the politicians, but it seems like our current system and the megaphone that a president has should be able to kind of unite the populace left and right, so it shouldn't be that difficult to do. Like, why hasn't a person like Trump, who's a billionaire, or on the left, a rich businessman, run just on this and win?

Well, eventually they will, right? And so that's why I actually have a lot of hope, even though things seem super dark right now, so. And that's why I was for Bernie. So I'll. I can come back to that. But why hasn't Trump done it as easy? He's like, what am I, a sucker? The guy gives me money. I do what the guy wants. Why would I get rid of that? That's how I got into power. And so that's how I'm doing it now. I get. Go to Miriam Adelson and say, give me $100 million, and I'll let Israel annex the West bank, right? So go to the oil companies and give me a billion dollars, and I'll give you tax subsidies. I'll let you drill, I'll take away regulation, why would I stop that?

You think he likes money more than he likes being popular? Because there's a big part of him as a populist in the sense that, like, he loves being admired by large masses of people.

Yeah. So. And you're absolutely right. But that is the fault of MAga. And so, Maga, you're screwing populists in a way that is infuriating. Okay? And smart libertarians like Dave Smith have figured this out, and that's why he's just as mad at Trump as I am. And. And it's because he took a populist movement and he redirected it for his own personal gain. Maga, figure it out. Come on. Right? And so if you say, oh, you think democrats have figured out that these policy. No, they largely haven't figured it out either. And I think there's blue Maga and I could talk about that as well. But for those of us on the populist left, yeah. We're not enamored by politicians. And for example, when Bernie does the wrong thing, we call him out. Well, I'm not, Bernie's not my goddamn uncle. I don't, I don't like him for some personality reason. It's not a cult of personality. You do the right thing, I love you for, you do the wrong thing, I'm gonna kick your ass for it. Right? So. But Donald Trump does this massive, ridiculous corruption over and over again. And maggots, like, I'm here for it.

Love it. As long as you're doing the corruption, I'm okay with it.

Speaker one, what is, what does Trump say about getting money out of politics? Does he?

Speaker two, he says nothing about it. Go, maggot. Why haven't you held him to account like, so when Bernie helped Biden take out $15 minimum wage from the Senate bill, on the first bill that was introduced in the Biden administration, we went nuts. We did a petition, we sent in videos to Bernie, our audience going, don't kill it, Bernie. Don't kill it. And so Bernie then reintroduced it as an amendment. It got voted down. But he did the right thing. Right? That is us holding our top leader accountable and saying, you better get back on track, okay? Because we're not here for you and your personal self aggrandizement. We're here for policy. Right. And if Maggot was actually here for policy, they would absolutely level Trump on the fact that he, I mean, remember what he ran on drain the swamp? That's why he won in 2016. Right? I, so I predicted on ABC right after the DNC and Hillary Clinton was up 1012 points, whatever she was. And I said, trump would win, okay? And they, the whole panel laughed out loud, right? They're like, get a load of this crazy guy. I said, he's a populist who seems to hate the establishment in a populist time.

And so. And drain the swamp is. Is a great slogan. And I knew he would win when he was in a republican debate. And he said, I paid all these guys before I paid them, and they did whatever I wanted. And I was like, that's so true. Right? And people will love that, and especially republican voters will love that. I actually have a lot of respect for republican voters because they actually genuinely hate corruption.

So what would an amendment look like that helps prevent money being an influence in politics?

So I started a group called Wolfpack.

Nice name.

Thank you. Wolf Dash pack.com. and. And the reason why I named a wolfpack is because everyone in Washington I knew would hate that name. It's a populist name. And everybody in Washington Snickers. Now you're supposed to name it Americans for America and just trick people, et cetera. No, no, no. Wolfpack means we're coming for you, okay? We're not coming for you in a weirdo physical or violent way. We're coming for you in a democratic way. Okay? So we're gonna go to those stake houses. We're gonna get them to propose a convention. And we did it in five states, but then Democratic Party started beating us back. We'll get to that. And, and so we are going to overturn your apple cart, and we're gonna bring, put the american people back in charge. So what is the amendment say, number one? A lot of people will have different opinions on what it should say, and that's what you sort out in a convention. So, for example, one of the things that conservatives can propose, which makes sense, is term limit, because with, the reason why these super old politicians are in charge is because they provide a return on investment.

So, you know, if you give to Biden, Pelosi, or McConnell, they're going to deliver for you. They love that return on investment. They don't want to risk it on a new guy. The new guy might have principles. Ew. Or, you know, might want to actually do a little bit for his voters. Boo. Whereas these old, you know, and every corrupt system has these old guys hanging around that help maintain power, etcetera. So my particular proposal and amendments would be a couple of things. One is end private financing of elections. So if, and look, if you're a business person, you're a capitalist, you know this with absolute certainty. If somebody signs your check, that's the person you work for, right? So if private interests are funding politicians, the politicians will serve private interests. And then you're going to get into a fight like Elon did in New Jersey where the car dealerships and Tesla are getting into an auction. Can I hear 100,000 million, 2 million, 3 million. Right. And now you got to go bribe the government official. That's called a campaign contribution. And this is a terrible system. Right? And the private financing go to complete public financing of elections.

That's when the conservatives, because they've been propagandized by corporate media. Yes, mainstream media got into your head too. And right wing media got into your head too. And right wing media also financed by a lot of this corrupt interest. And so they tell you, oh, you don't want to publicly finance. Oh my God, you'd be spending like a billion dollars on politicians, brother. They spending trillions of dollars of your money because they're financed by the guys that they're giving all of your money to.

So can you educate me? Does that prevent something like citizen United? So like super pacs are all gone in this case. So all gone. So indirect funding is also.

Indirect funding's gone. Direct funding's gone. You have to set up some thresholds. Not everybody can just get money to run. You have to prove that you have some sort of popular support. So signature gathering, you would still allow for small money donations, like up to $100, something along those lines.

That's not 5000 or whatever it is now.

Yeah, I think 5000 is too high. But those are fine debates. Yeah, you know, but you basically want to create an incentive. Everything is about incentives and disincentives. Again, capitalists realize this better than anyone else. Right? So you want to set up an incentive to serve your voters, not your donors. So if you take away private donors, well, there goes that incentive. And that's gigantic, right. And then if you set up small grassroots funding as a way to get past the threshold to get the funding to run an election, well then good, because then you're serving small donors, which are generally voters, right? So that's what you want. And ending private financing is critical. But the second thing is ending corporate personhood. So this is where you get into a lot of fights because you have two reasons. One is some folks have a principled position against it. They say, well, I mean, the Sierra Club is technically a corporation. ACLU is technically a corporation. And so if you end corporate personhood, then they, you know, that could endanger their existence, right? No, it doesn't endanger their existence at all. Right? So it doesn't endanger GM or GE's existence.

It doesn't endanger anybody's existence. Corporations exist. We're not trying to take them away. I would never do that. Right? That's not smart. That's not workable, et cetera. We're just saying they don't have constitutional rights, so they have the rights that we give them. And by the way, read the founding fathers is also in my book. They hated corporations. The american revolution was partly against the British East India Company. And so the tea party in Boston was against that corporation. They threw their tea overboard. It was not against the british monarchy. And so they, and all the founding fathers warned us over and over again, watch out for corporations, okay? Because once they form, they will amass money and power and look to kill off democracy. And they were totally right. That's exactly what happened. And so it's not that you don't have them, it's that you, through democratic capitalism, you limit their power. They definitely, you can give them a bunch of rights. You say, hey, you have a right to exist. You have a right to do this, this and this, okay? But you do not have constitutional rights of a. Of a citizen.

And so you don't have the right to speak to a politician by giving them a billion dollars.

And you believe that the people will be able to find the right policies to regulate and tax the corporations such that capitalism can flourish still?

Yes. You know why? Because I'm a real populist and I believe in the people, so I drive the establishment crazy because they don't believe in the people they think. Have you seen Maga, have you seen these guys? Have you seen the radicals on the left? We're so much smarter. You know how many Ivy League degrees we have, right? And we know what we're doing. No, you don't. No, you're, see, everybody to some degree looks out for their own interests, right? Why I like capitalism and why I love democracy is because it's the wisdom of the crowd. And so in the long run, the crowd is right. Oftentimes in the short term, we're wrong, okay? But the wisdom of the crowd in the long run is much, much better than the elites that run things. The elites say, well, we're so smart and educated, so we're going to know better what's good for you. No, brother, you're going to know what's better for you. You. And so here's something that a lot of people get wrong on the populace left and right. They think, oh, those guys are evil. They're not evil. I've met them. I worked at MSNBC.

I worked on cable. I went to Wharton, you know, Columbia law. It's. I know a lot of those guys. And so they're not at all evil. They don't even know that they're mainly serving their own interests. They just naturally do it. Right. And so they think the carried interest loophole makes a lot of sense. Right? They think corporate tax cuts makes a lot of sense. You not getting higher wages, you not having healthcare makes a lot of sense. It doesn't make any goddamn sense. But they get themselves to believe it. And that's another part, portion of the invisible hand on the market speaker one.

So there's problems with every, every path. So the elite, like you mentioned, can be corrupted by greed, by power and so on. But the crowd, I agree with you, by the way, about the wisdom of the crowd versus the wizard and the elite. But the crowd can be captured by a charismatic leader. So the problem with populism, and I'm probably a populist myself, the problem with populism is it. It can be and has been throughout history captured by bad people.

But if you say to me, trust the elites or trust the people, I'm going to trust the people every single time.

Well, that's why you're such an interesting, I don't want to say contradiction, but there's a tension that creates the balance. So to me, in the way you're speaking, might result in hurting capitalism. So it's easy to, in fighting corporatism to hurt companies. So to go too far the other way.

Yeah, of course.

So, like when you talked about corporate tax. So what's, what's the magic, what's the magic number for the corporate tax? Because if it's too high, companies leave.

Yeah, companies have so much power right now. This pendulum has swung so far, and, guys, we're almost out of time. The window is closing. The minute private equity buys all of our homes, the residential real estate market, we're screwed. We're indentured servants forever. Okay, there goes wealth creation for the average american. So you're right. Likes to that. It's not a contradiction. It's a tension that is inevitable to get to balance the reason why people kind of can't figure me out. They're like, well, you're on the left, but you're a capitalist, et cetera. That's not a contradiction. That's getting to the right balance. And in order to do that, like, if you say, well, if we change the system, I'm afraid of change because what if the pendulum swings too far in the other direction? Right. Well, then you would be opposed to change at all times. So if you do that, it actually reminds me of the Biden fight. Right? So I'm like, guys, he has, he has almost no chance of winning. He stands for the establishment. He can't talk. But then the number one pushback I'd get from Democrats was, yeah, but what if we change it?

So scary. We don't know about Kamala Harris. What if it's not Kamala Harris? It's so scary. Don't change the, and I'm like, yeah, but if you say change might be worse, it also might be better, and you're at zero. Anything is better, right. And right now, in terms of corruption in America, we're at 98% corruption, so we got 2% decency left, brother. This is when you want change. And so to, and Lex, if you actually have wisdom of the crowd, just like in supply and demand and how it works in economics, it works the same way in a functioning democracy. You go too far, you come back in. So, for example, when Reagan came into office, me and my dad and my family, we were Republicans. Why, at that point, the mar, highest marginal tax rate was at 70%. 70% is too high right now. Then he brought it all the way down to 28%. That's too low. Right. So, and, but, and that's how the, the system modulates itself. Already we were headed towards corruption. And because it's the eighties now, we're past 78. Magic 78 marker. Right. So, and even Carter was way more conservative economically than people realize because we're already getting past it by the time it's in his administration.

But the bottom line is, yes, you're going, whenever you have real wisdom of the crowd, whether it's in business or in politics, you're going to have fluctuation. You're going to have that pendulum swinging back and forth. You don't want wild swings, communism, corporatism. Right. You want to get to, hey, where, where's the right balance here between capitalism and what people think is socialism?

Yeah. So I guess I agree with most of the things you said about the corruption. I just wish there would be more celebration of the fact that capitalism and some incredible companies in the history of the 20th century has created so much wealth, so much innovation that has increased the quality of life on average. They've also increased the wealth inequality and exploitation of the workers and this kind of stuff. But you want to not forget to celebrate the awesomeness that companies have also brought outside the political sphere just in creating awesome stuff.

Look, I run a company, and so I don't want companies to go away, and I don't want you to hate all companies. I think young Turks is a wonderful company. Right? We provide great healthcare, we take care of our employees, we care about the community, etcetera. And we're building a whole nation online on those principles in the right way to run a company. Right. But, guys, we're at the wrong part of the pendulum. The companies have overwhelming power, and they're crushing us. We're like that scene in Star wars with a trash compactor is closing in on them. The walls are closing in. We're almost out of time because they've captured the government almost entirely. They're only serving corporate interests. We've got to get back into balance before it's too late. And that's why I care so much about structural issues. So I formed Justice Democrats. So that's AOC, etcetera, right? That's. People notice the squad. They know it as just democrats, et cetera. I'm one of the co founders of that. And my number one rule was no corporate PAc money. Okay? So you're not allowed to take corporate PAc money, by the way. Now, Matt Gates and Josh Hawley have stopped taking corporate PAc money, and they've become, to some degree, on economic issues, genuine populace.

It's amazing. It happens overnight. All of a sudden, they're holding. They're talking about holding corporations accountable, et cetera. Now, just democrats wound up having other problems. They got too deep into social issues, not economic issues.

There's a general sort of criticism of billionaires, right? This idea. Now, you could say that billionaires are avoiding taxes and they're not getting taxed enough. But I think under that flag of criticizing billionaires is criticizing all of companies that do epic shit, that build stuff.

Oh, okay.

So create stuff that. That's. That's what I'm worried about. I don't hear enough, like, genuine, you know, I like celebrating people. I like celebrating ideas. I just don't hear enough genuine celebration of companies when they do cool things.

Okay, so are you. Right? Not about companies, but about capitalism? Yes. Because, you know, you look at life expectancy 200 years ago, and you look at it now and you go, wow, holy shit. We did amazing things. Right? So. And what happened in the last 200 years, we went from dictatorships, more towards democracy, wisdom of the crowd. We went from, you know, serfs and indentured servants and a nobility that holds the land, to more towards capitalism. And boom, the crowd is right. Things go really well. The advances in medicine are amazing, and medicine is a great example. So. And on our show, I point all those things out, and I say, look, we hate the drug companies because of how they capture the government, right? But we don't hate the drug companies for creating great drugs. Those drugs save lives. They should save my life. They save countless millions upon millions of lives. So the right idea isn't shut down. Drug companies, companies. The right idea is, don't let them buy the government. Right? So. And I know we get back into our instinctual shells, so on the left, they'll be, oh, we should get rid of all billionaires.

Why? Like, how does that fix the system? Tell me how it fixes the system, and I'm all ears. Right. My solution is end private financing. Then you can be a billionaire all you like. You can't buy the government. Right. That's a more logical way to go about it. I've never worn an eat the rich shirt, and it drives me crazy. I'm like, you would have eaten FDR. Right? And FDR is the best president, most populous president, in my opinion. And so, no, there's wonderful rich people. Of course. Of course there's a range of humanity, right? But you don't want to get rid of the rich. You don't want to get rid of companies, but you also don't want to let them control everything. So, okay, I'll give you an example that's really. And that informs a lot of how I think about things, which is my dad. So my dad was a farmer in southeastern Turkey, near the syrian border. No money. In fact, his dad died when he was six months old, and he. And so they were saddled with debt and no electricity in his house, like, as poor as poor gets. And he wound up living the american dream.

And so how did he do that? What made the difference? Well, what made the difference is opportunity, right? So I'm a populist because my dad was in the masses, right? And. And the elites say the masses are no good. We're smart, you're not. We're educated, you're not. Uh, we. We meritocracy. We talk about that. We have earned merit. And if you're poor, middle class, you have not earned merit, okay? You're useless or worthless. And I hate that. So what did Turkey do back in the 1960s that liberated my dad. They provided free college education. You had to test into it, okay? But the top 15% got a free college education at the best colleges in Turkey. So my uncle saved all of our lives when he came to my dad and said, do you like working on this farm? And my dad's like, fuck no, right? It's super hot, it's super hard. It's. They got to get up at four in the morning. If they're lucky, the family next door gives them a mule. If they're not, they got to carry the shit themselves. Okay, he's. So my uncle told him, work just as hard in school and you'll be able to get a house, a car, pretty girls, etcetera.

So my dad works his ass off, gets into the school, and he comes out a mechanical engineer and starts his own company. He creates a company in Turkey, hires hundreds of people. He then moves to America, creates a company here, hires tons of people. Right? So do I hate companies? No. My dad set up two companies and. And I saw how much it benefited people. I saw how much employees would come up to my dad 2030 years later in the street and hug them. And they tell me as a young kid, your dad's the most fair boss we ever had and we love him for it. Right? That's how you run a company. And he taught me the value of hard work. But the reason I brought up here is because he taught me look like skill and ability is a genetic lottery. So you're not going to just get the rich to win all the genetic lottery? No, there's going to be tons of poor kids and middle class kids who are just as good, if not better. You have to provide them the opportunity, the fair chance to succeed. You have to believe in them.

So this isn't about disempowering anyone, it's about empowering all of those kids who are doing the right thing or smart and want to work hard so they could build their own companies and add to the economy.

What, what, in general is your view on meritocracy?

So. I love meritocracy. I wish that we lived in a meritocracy and I want to drive towards living in a meritocracy. So that's why I don't like equality of results. So, okay, now people that are on the left will get super mad at that and go, what do you mean? Well, okay, brother, let's say you're at work and you got one guy who's working his ass off. And the other guy, let's go. I don't care. I'm not going to do it. Right. Well, the guy who works super hard has to pick up the slack. Now he's working twice as hard. Right? And now you want the same results. You want the same salary as that guy. No, brother, no. He's working twice, four times, ten times harder than you. That's not fair. Fairness matters. I lived. We wound up. I mean, we were in the suburbs of Jersey, but we wound up in freehold eventually. And we lived across a farm, which is kind of in central Jersey. It happens, right? And it was called fair chance farm. Okay. I was like, how did I get. This is amazing, right? And I love that. That's the essence of America, and that's what I want to go back to.

So. So we've got to create that opportunity of not just because it's the moral thing to do, but because it's also the economically smart thing to do. If you enable all those great people that are in lower income classes and middle income classes, you're going to get a much better economy, a much stronger democracy. So that's the direction we got.

So, again, it's about balance, but what do you think about Dei policies, say, in academia and companies? So the movement as it has evolved, where's that on the balance? Is that.

Yeah.

How far is it pushing towards equality of outcome versus equality of opportunity?

Okay, so now we're getting into social issues, right? So this is where we all rip each other apartheid, and then the people at the top laugh their ass off at us and go, we got a fighting over trans issues. They're killing each other. It's hilarious. And they're so busy, they don't realize we're running the place. Right. Okay, but let's engage. Some people will look at Dei and go, well, that just gives me an opportunity. Just like anyone else. I love Dei. Another person will look at it and go, no, that gives. That says that you should be picked above me, and I hate Dei. Right. So the reality of Dei is a little bit more complicated. And so. But you got to go back. So, first, did we need affirmative action in the 1960s? Definitely. Why? All the firefighter jobs in South Carolina, as an example, are going to white guys. All the longshoremen jobs in New York, LA, wherever you have it, are all going to white guys because that's how the system was. Yes. Also in the northeast. Right. So we now are in a civil rights era. We decide we're going to go towards equality minorities, in that case, mainly black Americans, had to find a way to break in.

I'm not trying to, like, if you're a longshoreman and it's a good job, you naturally want to pass it on to your son. I get your instinct. I don't hate you for it. Right. But we got to let black kids also have a shot at it. Right. So you need it in the beginning, but at a certain point, you have to phase it out. So when I was growing up, it's now in the late eighties, early nineties, I hated affirmative action. And I've been principled on it from day one. And to this day, I don't, I'm not in favor of affirmative action. I say it on the show all the time. Why? I'm a minority, being a Turk and grew up Muslim. I'm an atheist now. But, but generally speaking, a Muslim is certainly a minority in America, and I pretty much a hated one overall, so. But I didn't check off Muslim or Turkish or any ethnicity when I applied to college because I believe in a meritocracy, as we were talking about. But we don't really have a meritocracy now. And so, but, so I can come back to that. But, but right now.

But, so I didn't check it out because I didn't want an unfair advantage because I want to earn it. I want to earn it. So now I'm in law school and I'm hanging out with right wingers because at that point, I'm a Republican. And one of the guys says to me about one of our black student going to Columbia, he says, oh, I wonder how he got in here. God, that is the problem with affirmative action. It devalues the accomplishments of every minority in the country. You have to transition away from it if you don't have it sets up a caste system. And that caste system is lethal to democracy. So does dei go too far? In some instances, yes. But is it a boogeyman that's going to take all the white jobs and make them black, as Trump would say, black jobs. Right. And give minorities too much power, etcetera? No, the idea isn't to rob you and to give all the opportunity to minorities. The idea is to make it equal. But as the pendulum swings, did it swing too far in some directions? Yes. The left can acknowledge that, and the right thinks, can acknowledge that.

Of course, at some point, you got to give a chance for others to break in so they have a fair chance.

Speaker one, by the way, Michelle Obama had a good line about the black jobs and the DNC, where somebody should tell Trump that the presidency might be just one of those black jobs anyway. But why do you think the left doesn't acknowledge when di gets ridiculous, which it, uh, in certain places and in certain places at a large scale, has. Has gotten ridiculous?

Because people are taught, uh, to just be in the tribe they're in and to believe it a hundred percent. Like, I've gotten kicked out of every tribe. I'm the. I might be the most attacked man in Internet history. Partly because we've been around forever and partly because I disagree with every part of the political spectrum, because I believe in independent thought. And the minute you vary a little bit, people go nuts. And so the. The far left tribe is going to go with their preset ideology, just like the far right tribe is. So, for example, on trans issues, we've protected trans people for over 20 years. On the Young Turks, we fought for equality for trans people and for all LGBTQ people for two decades. We did it way before anyone else did. When Biden came out in favor of gay marriage in 2013, we're like, this is comically late. So, like, we were all supposed to, like, congratulate him in the year 2013 that he thinks gay people should have the same rights as straight people, and then he had to push Obama to get there, right? So, on the other hand, I'm like, guys, if you allow trans women to go into professional sports, not at the high school level, but professional sports.

But let's say they go into mma or boxing, and a trans woman. I mean, it happens in boxing. It happens in MMA. Punches a biological woman so hard that he. That she kills her, right? So you're gonna set back trans rights 50 years. I'm not trying to hurt you. I'm trying to help you. You have to do bounds of reason. So when I say simple things like that, and I say you give LeBron James every hormone blocker on planet Earth, he's still gonna dominate the WNBA. Okay? It would be comical. He might score 100 points a night. Okay? And they'll say, that's outrageous. And they've. Some have called me Nazi for saying that trans women or that professional league should make their own decisions on whether they allow trans women or. Or not. So why do they say that? Because they're so besieged. They think, we cannot give an inch. We cannot give any ground. If you give any ground, you're a Nazi. Okay? So we've got to get out of that mindset. You're not. You can't function in a democracy and be in an extreme position and expect the rest of the country to go towards your extreme position.

So why do you think we are not in a meritocracy?

So because of the corruption. It's so, for example. But there's also. But remember, corporate media is the matrix, and they plug you into cable, right, in the old days. Now it's a little bit different because of online media, but especially ten years ago. And remember, we started 22 years ago. So I've been losing my mind over how obvious corporate media corruption has been for decades now. Right, but no one acknowledged it until online media got stronger. But one of the myths that corporate media creates is the myth of meritocracy. Not that meritocracy can't exist or shouldn't exist, but they pretend it exists today. So the problem with that myth, Lex, is that it gets people thinking, well, if they're already rich, they must have merited it by definition. So all the rich have merit. And the reverse of that, if you're poor, middle class, well, you must not have merited wealth. So you're no good. We don't have to listen to you. And that's a really dangerous, awful idea. And so if we get to a meritocracy, one day, I'll be the happiest person in America. But right now, it's, look here, I'll give you an example that I put in the book, and they.

And it's not us. This other folks did this YouTube video. I can't even quite find who they were, but it was a brilliant video. And they said, okay, we're gonna do a hundred yard race. But hold on, before we start, anyone who has two parents, take two steps forward. Anyone who has went to college, take another two steps forward. Anyone who doesn't have bills to pay for education anymore, take two steps forward. They do all these things right, and then at the end, before they start, somebody's 20 yards from the finish line, and a lot of people are still at the starting line. And then they go, okay, now we're going to run a race. The guy who's right next to the finish line wins, and they go, meritocracy.

Okay, so the challenge there is to know which disparities, when you just freeze the system and observe, are actually a result of some kind of discrimination or flaw in the system versus the result of meritocracy of the better over the better runner being ahead.

That's right. There are some parts that are easy to solve, Lex. So, you know, if you donated to a politician, and he gave you a billion dollar subsidy. That's not meritocracy. Right.

So if you follow the money, you can see the flaws in the system.

Exactly. And so, and again, nothing's ever perfect at any snapshot of history, right? Or of the moment. You're gonna be at some point in the pendulum swing. But if you let. If you trust the people and you let the pendulum swing, but not wildly, then you're going to get to the right answers in the long run.

So you think this woke mind virus that the right refers to is, is, is a problem but not a big problem?

No. So the right wing drives me crazy. So look, guys, your instincts of populism is correct. Your instincts of anti corruption is correct. Right. And I love you for it. And so, and in a lot of ways, the right wing voters figured out the whole system screwed before left wing voters did. I shouldn't say left wing motors because progressives and left wing have been saying it for not only decades, but maybe centuries. Right, but democratic voters. A lot of democratic voters, some of them actually like this current system. Some of them, a lot of them have been tricked into liking this current system. And the left should be fighting against corruption harder than the right. But right now, unfortunately, that's not the case. So there's a lot that I like about right wing voters. Okay, but you guys get tricked on social issues so easily. Right? So how many people are involved in trans high school sports? And a girl who should have finished first in that track thing in a race in the middle of Indiana finished 2nd. First of all, this is the big crime. This is. And how many people are involved?

About 713 out of a country of 330 million people. And you can't see that that's a distraction. Right? So, and every, everything they did, that is like bait that the right wing media puts out there, they run after. I mean, Tucker Carlson doing insane segments about Eminem should be sexier. Potato. Mister potato head has gender issues. Guys, get out of there. Get out of there. It's a trap. Okay.

Yeah. That doesn't mean that there. Absolutely. It doesn't mean that there's larger scale issues with things like Dei that aren't so fun to talk about or viral to talk about. An anecdotal scale. There is di does create a culture of fear with cancel culture, and it does create a kind of culture that limits the fear, freedom of, uh, expression, and it does limit the meritocracy in another way. So you're, you're basically saying, forget all these other problems. Money is the biggest problem.

So first of all, on AOC as an example, and I don't mean to pick on her, but she won through the great work of her and shoicach Chakrabarty and Corbin Trent and others who are leaders of the justice Democrats that went and helped our campaign. They were critical help. And we all told her the same thing. So it's not about me, me, me. And so we all said, you've got to challenge the establishment and you got to work on money in politics first, because if you don't work on money and politics and you don't fix that, you're going to lose on almost all other issues. But she didn't believe us because it's uncomfortable. And all the progressives that went into Congress, they drive me crazy. They think, oh, no, no, you're exaggerating. No, these are, and the minute they get in, all of a sudden my colleagues. Right. Your colleagues hate you and they're going to drive you out. You're a sucker. And, and Jamal Bowman, Corey Bush, what did they do? They drove them out. Marie Newman drove them out. Right. And because they're not on your side, they're not your colleagues. And what happened to $15 minimum wage?

And I remember talking to one of those congress people, I won't leave out the name and saying, hey, you know, they're not going to do $15 minimum wage. And he's like, oh, Cenk, you're out of the loop. Nancy Pelosi assured us that they are going to do $15 minimum wage. I'm like, I love you, but you're totally wrong. Money and interests are not going to do $15 minimum wage. You have to start fighting now. Right? And they didn't get it. So they lost on almost all those issues because it's all about incentives and disincentives and rules. If you don't fix the rules, you're going to constantly run into the same brick wall. Now, the second issue that we were talking about is in the culture wars. The rest of us are stuck between the two extreme two percenters right, on both sides. So the two percenter on the left goes, you know, if you're a white woman, you need to shut up and listen now, okay? That's ridiculous. No, you don't. If you're a white woman, you have every right to speak out. You have every right that every other human being has. And so would I love for all of us to listen to one another, to have empathy for one another and go, hey, I wonder how a right winger thinks about this.

I wonder how a left winger thinks about this. I wonder why they think that way. Right? I love that, and I want that. So I want you to listen, but I don't want you to shut up. So that 2% gets extreme, and I, and I don't like it. But on the right wing, you got your 2% who think that that's all that's happening on the left, and that's all that's happening in american politics. And they think the entire left believes that tiny 2%. Right. And so they hate the left. And they're like, oh, I'm not going to shut up. I'm not going to wear a mask. I'm not going to do any of these things, and I'm not going to do any. That's a freedom. And then a Republican comes along and goes, oh, yeah, that thing you call freedom, that's deregulation for corporations, because you shouldn't really have freedom. Companies should have freedom, right? And then the guy goes, yeah, freedom for ExxonMobil. No, brother, they tricked you. Yeah.

The 2% on each side is a useful distraction for. Yes, for the corruption of the politicians via money. Still, I'm talking about the 96% that remains in the middle and the impact that Dei policies has on them.

Yeah. So here's where it gets absurd. I'll give you a good example of absurdity. So in a school, I believe in California, they noticed that latino students were not doing as well in AP and honors classes, so they canceled AP and honors classes. Oh, come on. What are you doing? That's nuts. No, your job is to help them get better grades, get better opportunity, etcetera. That's the harder thing to do and the right thing to do your job isn't. I'm going to make everything equal by taking away the opportunity for higher achievement for other students. If that's what you're doing and you think you're on the left, you're not really on the left. I actually think that's like an authoritarian position that no progressive in their right mind would be in favor of. So. But it's all definitional. So here's another example of definitional communism. Like they say, oh, my God, Kamala Harris is a communist. Well, when you're telling on yourself, brothers and sisters, when you say that, that means, a, I don't know what communism means, and b, I don't have any idea what's going on in american politics. Kamala Harris is a corporatist.

That's her problem. Not that she's a communist. She's on the other end of the spectrum. Right. The idea that Kamala Harris would come into office and say, that's it, there's no more private property, we're going to take all of your homes and this down government property to all your cars, etcetera. She was not going to get within a billion miles of that. Her donors would never allow her to get within a billion miles of that. That is so preposterous that when you say something like that, it's disqualifying. Like, I can't debate someone who thinks that democrats are communists when they're actually largely corporatists. You see what I'm saying?

Yeah. So let's go there. So when people call her a communist, they're usually referring to certain kinds of policies. So do you think, I mean, I think it's a ridiculous label to assign to Kamala Harris, especially given the history of communism in the 20th century and what those economic and political policies have led to, the scale of suffering that led to. And it just degrades the meaning of the word. But to take that seriously, why is she not a communist? So you said she's not a communist because she's a corporatist. Okay, but that, that can't be. Okay. Everybody in politics is a corporate. Just almost everybody in politics a corporate. But that doesn't mean the corporations have completely bought their mind. They have an influence on their mind and issues that matter to those corporations.

Yep.

Right.

Like, yep.

Outside of that, they're still thinking for the voters because they have to win the votes.

Barely.

Okay.

So here, let me give you examples. So you see what I'm saying? So if you just wanted votes, you would do a lot of what Tim Walls did. Okay. And. And by the way, a lot of what Bernie did. That's why Bernie, who had no media coverage, went from, like, 2% in 2015 to by the end, about 48% because he was just doing things that were popular. Right. And that american people wanted, et cetera. Right. Because he's not controlled by corporations, by the way. Neither is Tom Massey on the right wing side, on the republican side. Right? So it's not all. That's why I always say almost. All right. So if you're doing things that are popular, people love it. So today, what would Kamala Harris do if she actually just wanted to win, right? So number one, she was trying to pass paid family leave, right? Now, why? It polls at 84% and even 74% of republicans want it. Why? Because this says, hey, when you have a baby, you should get twelve weeks off bond with your baby, uh, right now. For in a lot of states that don't have paid family leave, you have to go back to work the very next day or you have to use all of your sick days, all your vacation days.

Just have two, one or two weeks with your baby. Right. So conservatives love paid family leave. Liberals love paid family leave. That's why a poll so high. So why isn't she proposing it? It's not in our economic plan. Tim walls already passed it in Minnesota. He showed how easy it was. If you want votes, it's. And then you know what's going to happen if you propose paid family leave. The Republicans are going to go, no, our beloved corporations don't want to spend another dollar on mobs. Right. And they fall for that trap and then you're in infinitely better shape. So why doesn't she do it? She doesn't do it because her corporate donors don't want her to do it. $15 minimum wage layup. Over two thirds of the country wants it because it not only gives you higher wages for minimum wage folks, but it pushes wages up for others. And what do the elites say? Oh, that's going to drive up inflation. You shouldn't get paid anymore. Wait, wait, wait. Hold on. So you're saying all other prices should go up, but the only thing that shouldn't go up is our wages? No, our wages should go up.

Okay, so these are all easy ones. Here's another one. Anti corruption. Why isn't she running on getting money out of politics? It pulls it over 90%. Why isn't Trump running on it anymore? He won. When he ran on it in 2016, he didn't mean a word of it, but he ran on it. It was smart. They don't do it because they're corporate donors. Take their heads off. If they do.

So in contradiction to that, why did she propose to raise the corporate tax rate from, whatever, 21% to 28%?

Because that's easy. Because that is something that's super popular and she's not going to do it. That's why. So, guys, this is, this is where I break the hearts of blue MAGA. Blue Maga thinks, oh, my God, these Democrats, they're angels. And the right wingers and the Republicans are evil and, and they, they work for big business. But not Kamala Harris, not Joe Biden. Right. Okay, well, Donald Trump took the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%. So that's trillions of dollars that got transferred because guys you got to understand, if the corporations don't pay it, we have to pay it because we're running up these giant deficits. And eventually either they're going to, not eventually, they keep raising our taxes in different ways that you're not noticing. They keep increasing fees and fines and different ways for the government to collect money. So we're paying for it. And on top of that, eventually they're going to cut your Social Security and Medicare because they're going to say, oh, we don't have any options left anymore. Yeah, you don't have any options left anymore because you kept giving trillions of dollars in tax cuts to corporations.

So we're going to have to pay for that. So then Trump, then Biden says, oh, my God, I'm going to bring corporate taxes back up to 28%. I'm like, wait, hold on. They were a 35. You already did a slight of hand and said 28. Okay. Then he gets into office and Manchin says, no, 25. That's the highest. I'll go. And he goes, okay, fine, 25. And then while you're not looking, they just dump it. They don't even do 25. It's still at 21. So I hear me now, quote me later. I do predictions on the show all the time because you, you should hold me accountable. You should hold all your pundits accountable. If you held all your pundits accountable, we'd be the last man standing. And that's kind of what happened. Okay. So I guarantee you she will not increase corporate taxes.

So would the same be the case for price controls or the anti price gouging that she, so it's not price.

Controls as price gaping.

It is price controls. But I mean, minimum wage is price controls also.

Now we're going to get into a lot of minutia, but I'll try to keep it broad. So price controls are a disaster. They never work. If you say, oh, here's a banana, it has to stay at a dollar a pound and make up a number. Right. Well, supply and demand is going to move and then that's going to, and so the minute it moves to $2 where the price should be, then you're going to run into shortages. So we all know this, it's a bad idea. Right? But are there laws against price gouging? There already are. And they're a good idea. So why, like, you have a natural disaster all of a sudden the water, that was a dollar, now they're charging $100. The government has to come in, democratic capitalism, they come in and go. No, I'm going to protect the people. So you're not allowed to price gouge. You may be charged $2, et cetera, but you're not going to charge 100. But it is temporary. We get, we get that done, we end the problem there and then we bring it back to a normal supply and demand. Okay. So that's what she's proposing.

It's, that's all political because the price gouging has already passed. They did it in 21 and 22. And so now the grocery stores are actually low margin business. She re, she says grocery stores. That's how I know she doesn't mean it. Cause the grocery stores weren't the problem. Consumer goods were the problem.

Yeah.

Those companies.

She's following the polls where most people will say that the groceries are too expensive. So she's just basically addressing the most popular thing. Yeah.

100%. And you could tell in which proposals she means it and which proposal she doesn't because of the, of the framing. Right. So this is a mediocre example. But in housing, she said we have to stop private equity from buying houses in bulk. I'm like curious that they put the word in bulk there. Why does it have to be in bulk? Why don't we just stop them from buying any residential home? Like you could set up normal boundaries. Right. For example, Charlie Kirk was on Young Turks this week, by the way.

Sorry to take that tangent. I really enjoyed that conversation. I really enjoy that you talked to, that was like civil. You guys disagreed pretty intensely, but like, there was a lot of respect. I really enjoyed that.

Thank you.

I was like, that was beautiful. You and Charlie Kirk. And I think Anna was there.

Yeah, that's right. So, yeah, quick tangent. And look, I, I've done a lot of yelling online. Okay. And I, I yell when a. There's a issue that you should be passionate about. 40,000 people, 25,000 women and children slaughtered in Gaza. If you're not emotionally upset by that and you think it's no big deal, I think that's a problem. But when you add gas lighting on top, that's what drives me crazy. And then when you add filibustering on top, then that sets me off. So for all my life, right wing has gone on cable and filibustered. They take up so much more time than the left wing guests. And the left wing guests always like, goes, okay, well, I'm offended. He's taking up too much time. No, brother, go over the top. Go over the top. You're not going to talk over me. I'm going to talk over you. Okay? So, and, and then when you gaslight and you go, oh, no, 1200 people in Israel being killed is awful, which it is, but 40,000 people being killed in Gaza is no big deal. We should keep giving them money. Keep killing. Keep killing. And that, that's normal.

No, it's not normal. I'm not going to let you say it's normal. That's nuts. Okay. When used, like we were against the Iraq war, there was only two shows that were on the air nationally were against Iraq war, us and democracy now with Amy Goodman. And, and at the time, I used to yell all the time because mainstream media would gaslight the fuck out of us. We're going to be greeted as liberators. Me and Ben Mankowitz on the air. Ben doesn't yell as much. He's now the host turner classic movies. But we're, he's saying it in a calm way. I'm saying it in a screaming way. We're not going to be greeted as liberators. When you drop a bomb on someone's head, they don't greet you as a liberator. Stop saying insane things. And seven out of ten Americans thought that Saddam Hussein had personally attacked us on 911. We got light into that war by corporate media. Okay, now there's one, there's a couple of good things that Trump has done. One is get people to realize corporate media is the matrix. Right? And so now. And get them to an anti war position.

He himself doesn't have an anti war position, but his voters do. And that's a positive. We can come back to them. But these days, the reason why the Charlie Kirk conversations are going great, and Rudy Giuliani and Mike Lindell. And historically, though, we've been, go back again, ten years, 20 years, we've always been respectful. When someone comes on our show and we have a debate, as long as they're not yelling, I match the tenor of the host. Right. You and I are having a reasonable conversation. I'm not raising my voice. I'm not yelling at you for no reason. Right? So now when Charlie's not going to battle anymore for like, talking points, I'm shutting off my mind. All I'm doing is yelling at you. Then I'm gonna yell back at him. But now he's saying, okay, let's have a reasonable conversation. Great. I love it. I love reasonable conversations.

It was great. It was refreshing. And what were we talking about? You buying up housing.

Yes. So Charlie, when he was on, said hey, listen, you know, I think that there should be a cap, though. I forget if you said 10 billion or 100 billion in assets. If you have less than that, you should be still be able to do real estate as an investment, even if it's residential. But above that, it gets to. Okay, that's good. No problem. Well, we can have a debate about that. We can figure out is the right number. Ten, 125. No problem. You could put in reasonable limitations, but. But we got to get them to stop buying the homes. So when Kamala Harris says, oh, we'll stop them from buying homes in bulk, I'm like, okay, there's the loophole. And so they're going to use that loophole. And besides which, it's not going to pass. Wall street owns the government, so there's no way corporate Republicans and Democrats, which are about 98% of politicians, are going to limit private equity. And. And so when do we ever get a little bit of change? When Democrats are in charge, they do five to 15% of their agenda. And that's not because they're warm hearted. It's a release valve, right?

Oh, see, under Obama, we got about 5% change. And what was that? That was Obamacare, right? That was most of the change that we got. And what's the greatest part of Obamacare? And now a lot of right wing also agree, almost all of right wing agree about this portion, which is they got rid of the bias against pre existing conditions. Why did they do that? Particularly because the country was about to get in a fucking rage. We all have pre existing conditions. If you deny me when I'm sick, what the fuck's the point of insurance, right? And the anger had gotten to a nuclear level. So they'll release valve, get rid of pre existing conditions. Let's go back to just milking them regularly. And, oh, by the way, put in a mandate so that they have to buy it from us. Right? Do you know who originally came up with, uh, Obamacare? The Heritage foundation. It was their proposal. Romney did it in Massachusetts. It was called Romneycare. So I think this is a super important election, but I've earned the credibility to be able to say that, because in 2012, I said, this is a largely unimportant election.

Mitt Romney and Barack Obama's policies on economic issues are near identical. Obamacare was literally Romney care. Right now the left says, oh, the Heritage foundation, it's so dangerous. Project 2025. Well, brother, they're the ones who wrote Obamacare. And you say that's the greatest change in the world, right? So that's why the Democrats. Yeah, I'll take the 10% change. Overall, I think Biden did about 15%. Obama did 5%. But they're going to. They'll also march you backwards by deregulating like Clinton did and Obama did their bank bailouts, like Obama did. But 10% is better than 0%. But it's not to help you. It's the release valve. So the system keeps going.

Is it possible to steal, man? The case that. That not all politicians are corporatists? Or maybe. How would you approach that? For example, this podcast has a bunch of sponsors, and I give zero fucks about what they think about what I'm saying. Like, they have zero control over me. Um, maybe you could say that's not. That's because it's not a lot of money, or maybe. Maybe I'm a unique person or something like this. But, um, I just think it's possible to have. And I would like to believe a lot of politicians are this way, that they have ideas, and while they take money, they kind of, uh, see it as a game that, you know, you accept the money, kind of go to certain parties, hug people and so on, but it doesn't actually fundamentally compromise your integrity on issues you actually care about.

I can steal man. Almost anything, I guess. Still, man. Trump. I could steal, man. Conservatives easily. Right. Corporate politicians, the hard one. So, first, it's not all politicians. We can start out nice and easy. Tom Massey. Now, Holly and Gates taking, not taking corporate PAC money. Uh, Bernie, the squad, they don't take over bank money. You could disagree on either end of those, uh, folks on social issues, but generally, they are a thousand times less corrupt. They're more honest. And part of the reason you might hate this squad is because they're so honest. They tell you their real opinion on social issues that you really disagree with. A lot of the corporate politicians won't do that because they're trying to get as many votes as possible so they can fellate their donors, uh, when they get into office and do all their favors for them. Okay, but you see, I'm already falling apart on the steel making of corporation.

Yeah, politicians, let's exhume in on that. So if you take corporate PAC money, you're. That's it. You're. You're corrupted.

I.

Can you imagine yourself say, you're a politician, you're a president, you're a human being, you're a person with integrity. You're a person who thinks about the world. You're saying, if I was a corporate PAC. And I gave you a billion dollars. You still, you'll be, I could tell you anything.

So, Lex, everything is a spectrum. Humanity is a spectrum. So can you find outliers who could take corporate PAC money and still be principled enough to resist its lure? Yeah, and, and I would hope that I would be a person like that, but I wouldn't take over bank money. But if you force me to, I think I would still stay principled and do it. Could you find 1020 other people in the country? Yeah, but on average, that is not what will happen. What will happen is they will take the money and do exactly as they are told.

I think most people have integrity. Okay, okay, hold, so what I'm more worried about is when you take corporate pack money, it's not that you are immediately sold is over time.

Over time. That's true.

Yeah, I get it. But I wonder if, if the integrity that I think most people have can withstand the gradual slippery slope of the effect of corporate money, which if what I'm saying is true, that most people have integrity. One of the ways to solve the effect of corporate money is term limits. Because it takes time to corrupt people. You can't buy them immediately and then the term limits can happen. You should. For the listener, Cenk is shaking his head.

Yeah, no, so look, you're right that over time it gets way worse. And as we talked about earlier, Biden's a great example of that comes in anti corruption, winds up being totally pro corruption by the end. And, but he was also here for almost all of it as we started, in a world that was not run by money in politics, and is now completely run by money in politics. So does it get worse over time? Cinema is a christian cinema, and Arizona is a great example that comes in as a progressive, doesn't want to take PAC money, cares about the average person, et cetera. Over time she becomes the biggest corporatist in the Senate and a total disaster. But if you say that the majority of politicians have, I don't know if this is what you're saying, majority politicians have integrity.

No, let's start at the majority of human beings. And I think that politicians are not, there are not a special group of like sociopaths.

I think they are.

They lean a little bit towards that direction, but they're not like only sociopaths go into politics. It's like you have to have some sociopathic qualities. I think politics, but they're not completely sociopath. I think they do have integrity because sometimes for very selfish reasons, it's not all about money, even for a selfish person, for a narcissist. It's also about being recognized for having had positive impact on the world.

Yeah, I get it, but. All right, so let's break it down. So first human beings, then we get to politicians. Do human beings have integrity? Well, it's a spectrum. So some people have enormous integrity. Some people have no integrity. So there is not one type or character. Right. So some people have a ton of empathy for other human beings, and they literally feel it. Like, I feel the pain of someone else and I'm not alone. Most people feel the pain of someone else. If you see it on video, a baby being hurt, an overwhelming majority of human beings will go, no, right. You have empathy. That's a natural feeling that you have. Some people have no empathy because they're on the extreme end of the spectrum. Serial killers and Donald Trump. Okay? And so I'm. I'm partly joking, but not really. He has never demonstrated any empathy that I have ever seen for any other human being. I'm going to trigger some right wingers because they think every terrible thing he said is out of context or joking or not real or fake news. But his chief of staff didn't make it up. He called people who went into the military suckers and losers.

Why? Why did he say that? If. Just hang with me for a second. Don't have your head explode. Okay? I'm not saying the likes. I'm saying to the right wingers out there. Right? So the reason is because if you're like Trump and you don't, you literally don't feel the empathy. You think, why the hell would I go in the military, get killed for someone else? What a sucker. No, I'm going to stay out of the military. I'm going to stay alive. I'm going to make a ton of money, and I'm going to look out for myself. And he assumes, because everybody does this, you assume that everyone thinks like you do, but they don't. So Trump assumes everybody's as much of a dirtbag as he is. And because he doesn't feel it, he doesn't feel the empathy. And so he's like, yeah, you'd be an idiot, a sucker and a loser to go into the military and have sacrifice for other people. So you see this spectrum. Even if you think Trump's not on that end and you think I'm wrong about that, you get that there are people on that end, right? So you have a spectrum of integrity, empathy, et cetera.

That's what I would call your hardware. You layer on top of that, your software, okay? And the software is cultural influences. Your parents, media, your friends, all these are cultural influences. So now, when you're in certain industries, they value more integrity. So religious leaders, if you're doing it right, which is also very rare, right. But if you're doing it right, you're supposed to have empathy for the poor, the needy, the whole flock, right? So that profession is incentivizing you towards empathy and integrity, okay? And even then, a giant amount of people abuse it. Right? But, okay, good. In politics, it creates incentives for the opposite, no integrity. And that software, to your point, over time, gets stronger and stronger and stronger until it takes over. Now, you might have someone with a lot of integrity like Tom Massey, right? Republican from Kentucky. And whether I agree with him or disagree with him on policy, I get that the brother is actually doing it based on principles. And there isn't any amount of money you can give Tom Massey for him to change his principles. Why? He's on the principled end of the spectrum as a human being.

Right. So is Bernie. They're on the same part of that, that spectrum. Right. But for most people, the great majority of the spectrum, if you overload them with software that incentivizes them to not have integrity, they will succumb. And now let's switch to politicians in particular. Why do I think that they're, on average, far more likely to be on the sociopathic part of the spectrum? Because of the incentives and disincentives. So this changes every congressional cycle. And when just Democrats were winning a lot, it got all the way down to 87 and a half percent. But on average, for congressional elections, the person with more money wins 95% of the time. It doesn't matter if they're a liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat or any ideology. They have 95%. Okay, so now let's say you got the 5% that went in that are not hooked on the money. Well, they're going to get a primary challenge, then they're going to get a general election challenge. And 95% of the time, the one with more money wins. So eventually this system cycles through until only the core, almost only the corrupt, are left.

Wait, hold on a second. Is that. Is that real? 95%. So if you have more money, 95% of the time you win, huh?

Yes.

I like to believe that's less the case for. For example, for higher you get.

Yes, that's true. You're right. So you know why? So the presidential race is, ironically, in some ways, the least corrupt. So let's dive into why. If you're running a local race anywhere in the country, you're going to get almost no press coverage, meaning congressional race, right? If you're running a Senate race in the middle of Montana, you're going to get almost no media coverage. So that's where your money in politics has the most effect. Because then you could just buy the airwaves, you outspend the other guy, you get all the ads, plus you get the friendly media coverage because you just bought a couple of million dollars of ads in the middle of Montana. So the local news loves you. The tv stations, the radio stations, the papers. So some of the papers are principled. They might say, oh, no. But overall, they're not calling you a radical, they're not calling you anything, and you're buying those races. But when you get to the presidential race, that's much harder, because presidential race, you have earned media. Free media that overwhelms paid media. Perfect examples. 2016 Hillary Clinton outrages Trump by about two to one, but she loses anyway.

Why? Because Trump got almost twice as much earned media as she did. And the earned media is better. It's inside the content, right? It is definitely better. So in a presidential election, as long as you got past the primary, you could actually win with not that much money. And. And that's part of the reason why I have hope, Lex, because all you got to do is get past a republican or democratic primary. And now that's very, very, very difficult. But Trump did it right? Now, he took it in the wrong direction, but he did get, leave a blueprint for how to do it. And so once you get to the general election, you're off to the race. You could do any goddamn thing you like, okay? You could be super popular. You don't have to give a shit about the donors. You can get into office. You could bully your own party and the other party into doing what you want, and you can get everything done. You could even get money out of politics. So don't lose hope. I mean, we even started Operation Hope at Tyt. And our first project was to knock Biden out.

And everybody said, you guys are nuts. That's totally impossible. And we knocked Biden out, right? Did we do it alone? Of course not. We were a small part of it. Right? But we laid the groundwork for hope, and we laid the groundwork for when he flopped in the debate. People had already been told, remember, he's bad, he's old, he's not right. And the debate proved it. If we hadn't done that groundwork, and not just young Turks, obviously, but Axelrod and Carville and Nate Silver and Ezra Klein, etcetera, Charlemagne, the God, Jon Stewart, all these people helped a lot. So that when the debate happened, it confirmed the idea that out there that he was too old and couldn't do it. So my point is, hope is if you lose hope, you're done for. Then they're definitely going to win. Right? Hope is the most dangerous thing in the world for the elites. So whether you're right wing or left wing, I need you to have hope, and I need you to understand it's not misplaced. We just got to get past the primary and we're going to turn this whole thing around.

So you're basically a presidential candidate who's a populist who, in part runs on getting money out of politics. Okay, well, then let's talk about Donald Trump.

Mm hmm.

So, to me, the two biggest criticisms of Trump is the fake lecture scheme out of that whole 2020 election. The fake elector scheme is the thing that really bothers me. And then the second thing, across a larger timescale, is the counterproductive division that he has created in, let's say, our public discourse. What are your top five criticisms of Trump, speaker one?

Okay, so, number one, I have the same exact thing as you. The fake elector scheme is unacceptable, totally disqualifying. So the fake elector scheme was a literal coup attempt so he doesn't win the election. For folks who don't know, I need to explain why it's a coup attempt. Because you just throw out words and then people get triggered by the words and then they go into their separate corners. Right? So the January 6 riders, they were not going to keep the building. That was not a coup attempt. It's not like, oh, the maga guys have the building, I guess they win, right? No, that was never going to happen. So what was the point of the January 6 riot? It was to delay the proceedings. Why did it matter that they were going to delay the proceedings? Because if you can't certify the election, they wanted general confusion and chaos so that the Republicans in Congress could say, well, we don't know who won, so we're going to have to kick it back to the states. In the states, they had the fake electors ready. Remember, the fake electors are not Trump's electors. There's both candidates have a slate of electors, Biden's electors and Trump's electors.

They go to the Trump electors first in this plan. And the half the Trump electors go, no, I'm not going to pretend Trump won the election when he didn't win the election. So they're like, shit, now we got to come up with fake electors. Okay? So they enlist these Republicans to go, yeah, I'll pretend Trump wondehe. Right. And so they sign a piece of paper that's fraud. And that's why a lot of them are now being prosecuted in the different states. And so the idea is the republican legislature, legislators then go, we're sending these new electors in, and we think Trump won Arizona and Georgia and Wisconsin. Right? That was the idea. That was the plan. And then you come back to the House at that point when there are two different sets of electors, the rule, constitutional rule, is the House decides, but the House decides not on a majority, because the Democrats had the majority at the time. They decide on a majority of the states. They vote by state. And the Republicans had the majority of the states. So in that way, you steal the election, even though Trump didn't win, you install him back in as president.

That is a frontal assault on democracy, and I loathe it. And then Trump on top just blabbers out, well, sometimes you have, if there's massive fraud in an election, in other words, I think I won. I don't even think that. I'm just saying that I won, right? He says you can terminate any rule, regulation, or article, even in the Constitution. No, brother, you cannot terminate the Constitution because you'd like to do a fake electorate scheme and do a coup against America. Fuck you. Okay, so I'm never going to allow this wannabe tyrant to go back into the White House and endanger our system. And so you want to endanger the corrupt system. I'm the guy. Okay? Let's go get that corrupt system and tear it down. If you want to endanger the real system, democracy, capitalism, the constitution, then I'm your biggest enemy. So I'm never going to take that risk. And you see it every time he goes to talk to a dictator. Look, guys, I'm asking you to be principled, right? I asked the left of that. And we drive away some of our audience when we do that. So we got the balls to do that to our, to our own side.

So for the right wing, be honest, if it was Joe Biden or Barack Obama or Kamala Harris that went and wrote, quote unquote, love letters to a communist dictator who runs concentration camps, you would say communist. We knew it. Look at that. And Trump literally says about Kim Jong un, we wrote love letters to one another. I fell. We fell in love. If a Democrat said that, they'd be politically decapitated, right, their career would be instantly over. Right? But Trump, whatever, is Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin? I'm not. Don't get into Russia, Russia, Russia. But it's just that he's a strong man, right? Kim Jong, undeveloped, or any victor or bond. Duterte in the Philippines, anytime. It's a strong man that says, screw our constitution, screw our rules. I want total loyalty to one person. Trump loves them. He loves them. He said once, he's like, oh, it's great. You go to North Korea or China, and when the leader walks in, everybody applauds and everybody listens to what he says. That's how we should be here. No, brother, that's not how it should be here. You hate democracy. You want to be the sole guy in charge.

As a populist, you should loathe Donald Trump.

Speaker one, I agree on the fake electric scheme. Can you steal, man? And maybe educate me on. There's a book rigged that I started reading. Is there any degree to which the election was rigged or elections in general are rigged? So I think the book rigged, the main case they make is not that there's some shady fake ballots. It's more the impact of mainstream media and the impact of big tech.

So rigged is another one of those words that triggers people and is ill defined. Right? So let's begin to define it. So the worst case of rigged is we actually change the votes. Right? So a lot of Trump people think that that's what happened. Nonsense. That didn't happen at all. Okay, so then you move. And by the way, some on the left thought the votes were changed in the 2016 primary, and it was literally rigged against Bernie. No, that did not happen. Okay? That is a massive crime and is very risky and is relatively easy to get caught. People who are in power are not interested in getting caught. They're not interested in going to jail, et cetera. It is a very extreme thing. Could it happen? Yes, it could happen. Have I seen any evidence of it happening in my lifetime? Not really.

Given how much people hate this, you probably just need to find evidence of one time, like one. One vote being changed, where you can trace them, saying something in some room somewhere that would just explode. Yeah, just that evidence just doesn't seem to be there.

And by the way, for the right wing who say, verify the vote. Goddamn right. Verify the vote. Right? So you want to do have different proposals, like paper ballots, recounts, hand recounts, which by the way you had. Not the paper ballots, but the three recounts and a hand recount in Georgia and so many of these swing states. He lost. He lost. He lost. There was no significant voter fraud. Now say, second thing in terms of, of rigging is voter fraud. So how in the right wing believes. Oh, my God, it's voter fraud everywhere. Not remotely true. Heritage foundation does a study. They want to prove it so badly. And it turns out no matter how much they moved the numbers, the final number they got was it happens 0.006% of the time. Okay. It almost never happens. They found, like, 31 instances over a decade or two decades.

So it's what counts as voter fraud.

So a lot of times these days, it'll be Republicans who do it because it'll be, and it's not nefarious. It's a knucklehead who goes in, and I heard they're having the undocumented illegals vote. So I voted for me and my mom, even though she's dead. But that's fair. They're doing it. No, brother, that's not fair. That's not how it works. You're under arrest.

So what about non citizens voting?

So it's preposterous. Of course non citizens shouldn't vote and they don't vote.

But there's not. You don't have to prove citizenship when you're voting, right?

No, you do. I mean, it's. So. It depends on what you mean by prove and when you vote. Right. So you're not allowed to vote as a undocumented immigrant. So that happens up front when you go to, like, again, it's a hall of mirrors. Like, there's so many different ways to create mirages. So the Republicans will say, well, when you go to the voting booth, they don't make you show a passport. Yeah, that's true. But you showed it earlier when you registered. Right. And so, and we can get into voter id laws. There's all sorts of things, but we got to speed up the spectrum. Right. So these things almost never happen. Voter fraud happens super rarely. Uh, and not enough to swing elections. And by the way, sometimes if there is an issue, they'll redo an election. There is actually a process for that. And it happened in North Carolina because republicans did vote or fraud in this one district. Okay. And it wasn't the candidate himself, it was a campaign person. And they did ballot harvesting. And then. But ballot harvesting, again, it depends on what you mean. If you're just collecting ballots, that's okay.

He changed the ballots that's not okay. And so they had to redo that election. So now the real place where it gets rigged is before elections. And there's two main ways that things get rigged. One is almost exclusively. No, that's not fair. I was going to say Republicans, but democrats do it, too, in a different way. So Republicans would come in like, Brian Kemp is the king of this in Georgia. So he was against Trump doing it ex post facto. He's like, no, you idiot. We don't cheat after the election. We cheat before the election. Okay? So they'll go, well, I mean, you got to clear out the voter rolls every once in a while. And that's true because people die, people move, and you got to clean out the voter rolls. So then they come in and they go, we will clean them out, mainly in black areas. Okay. Oh, look at that. There goes a couple of million black voters. Well, some of those, I suppose, are real voters, but they'll have to re register, and then they'll find that out on election day. And, oh, well, now, sorry, you couldn't vote this time.

Remember to re register next time. And so do they go, hey, we're going to take black people off the voter rolls. No, what they do is we're having more issues in these districts. Right. Here's another way they do it. How many voting boosts do you have in the area? So, primarily republican areas will get tons of voting boosts. So you don't have to wait in line. You go in your vote, you go to work, no problem. You're in a black area, run in a. In a republican state all of a sudden. Hey, look, that city. Well, we sent you four voting booths. Oh, you got a million people there. Well, what are you gonna do? I guess you gotta wait in line the whole day. You can't go to work, et cetera. So that's the way speaker one, I.

Refuse to believe, is there. It's. It's only the Republicans that do that. I would say so.

That's why I paused.

Yeah, that just seems too obvious to do by both. Yeah.

No, no. The Democrats are so weak likes. They mainly don't do that, but they do do the third thing, which is gerrymandering. So both Republicans and Democrats, also their favorite flavors of.

Yeah. Of messing with the vote. Okay.

Yeah. So gerrymandering is the best way to rig an election. That way the politicians pick their voters instead of the voters picking their politicians. Right. So all these districts are so heavily gerrymandered that the incumbent almost can't lose. They'll push most of the voters into one district, most of the voters in another district, because they don't want competition. Right. So they're. Then you're screwed. The vote isn't rigged, but the district is rigged so that the incumbent wins no matter, almost no matter what. Right? So that's why we've gotten so polarized, because the gerrymandering creates, like, 90% of seats that are safe. So they don't have to compromise, they don't have to get to a middle. They could just be extreme on either side because they already locked it up. Okay? So that's the number one way to rig an election. Now, finally, the last part of it is maybe the most important, maybe even more important than Gerrymander, and that's the media. So it just happened to RFK Junior, it happened to Bernie in 2015. It happens to any outsider, right or left. The media, if you're an outsider, will say, well, radical number one, they don't platform you, right?

So they're not going to have you on to begin with. Nobody's even going to find out about you. If nobody finds out about you, you're done for. Right? So Bernie broke through that because he was so popular and the rallies were so huge that he, local news couldn't help but cover him. Jesus Christ, what are all these people doing in the middle of the city? Right? And he slowly broke through that. But do you know that in 2015, as he's doing this miraculous, this run against Hillary Clinton, nobody thinks he has a chance. And here comes Bernie, and he's almost at 48%. This is. He had 7 seconds of coverage on ABC that year. They just will not put you on. That is the number one way they rig an election. Bobby Kennedy junior, sitting at 20% in a primary, no town hall. 20 percent's a giant number. Right? And you're not going to do a town hall, you're not going to do a debate. 12% in the general election. A giant number in a general election. No town hall, no debate. If no one finds out about you, they don't know to vote for you.

Right? If they don't find out your policies. Corporate media rigs elections more than anything else in the world.

Now, this is something you've been a bit controversial about, but the general sort of standard belief is that there's a left leaning bias in the mainstream media because, as I think studies show, a large majority of journalists are left leaning. And then that there's a bias in big tech employees of big tech companies from search engines to social media are left leaning. And there, that's a huge majority, is left leaning. So the conventional wisdom is that there is a bias towards the left.

Yeah.

So do you think, first of all, I think you've argued that that's not true, that there's a bias, uh, in the other direction. But whether there's a bias or not, do you think that how big of an impact that has on the result of the election?

Okay, so let's break that down. Uh, tech and media are totally different. So let's do media first, and we'll do tech. So on, uh, mainstream media, corporate media. And I actually think that right wing media, like Fox News, is part of corporate media. They just play good cop, bad cop. And so in that realm, the bias is not right or left, except on social issues. Okay, so. And that's where that image comes from on social issues. Yes. The media is generally on the left and right wing. Sorry, but, like, this started in the 1960s, and the right wing got super mad at mainstream media saying that black people were equal to white people. That's not the case anymore. Okay, right wing, calm down. I'm not calling you all racist. But in the 1960s, were there racism? Was there racism? Of course. Of course. They wouldn't even let black kids into the schools. Right? It was massive segregation in the south, but a lot in the north as well. And at that point in mainstream media says, well, I mean, they are citizens, they should have equal rights. And the right wing goes, bias. Okay, yeah, I mean, you're kind of right.

It is a bias. It is a bias towards equality in that case. But that is perceived as on the left. Now, fast forward to today. You don't have that on the racial issues as obviously as much as you had it back then. But on gay marriage, that existed for a long time, where the media is like, well, they kind of should have the same rights as straight people. Right? And the right wing went bias. Right. So, okay, you're kind of right about that. But at the same time, I would argue their position is correct. Right? So. But can they go too far? Of course they can go too far. Okay, now, but that's not the main deal, guys. That's to distract you. The main deal is economic issues. And again, we say it ahead of time, and you can see if we're right or wrong. Right. So we will tell folks when we get to an economic bill, you will see all of a sudden, the guys who theoretically disagree, Fox News and MSNBC, close ranks. And you just saw it happen with price gouging that issue of price catching. All of a sudden, there's a lot of MSNBC hosts, CNN hosts, Washington Post writes an op ed against it, and everybody panics, is like, no, no, no, no, no.

You can't control anything a corporation does. This is wrong. This is wrong. Right. Oh, what happened? I thought you guys were hated each other. All of a sudden. You totally agree. Fascinating. Okay. Same thing happened on increasing wages when they were talking about increasing the minimum wage. Stephanie rule giants screed against it on MSNBC. All of a sudden, Fox News and MSNBC agree. Right? Do not touch beloved corporations. So now that gets us to a real bias. It's not left or right. It's pro corporate for all the reasons we talked about before, corporate media, corporate politicians. So if you don't believe me today, whether you're on the right or the left, watch next time. An economic issue, where do they fall? How do they react? When anytime it's a corporate issue, where does the media go? Right. So that's the real bias of the media. And so since the real bias of the media is pro corporations, that is not a left wing position. That is considered more of a right wing position. I even think that's a misnomer because to be fair to right wing voters, they're not pro corporations, they're not pro big business, they're not pro corruption.

But the republican politicians are. So gets framed as a right wing issue. Right. So if you think that they, that the corporate media is too populous, you just don't get it. They aren't, they aren't, they hate populism. So now when you turn to tech. So tech's a complicated one because, yeah, people write the code. If they're left wingers, they're going to have certain assumptions and they're, they might write that into the codes or the rules. And so, but they're also, generally speaking, wealthy. They're usually white, they're usually male. And those biases also get go in. And there's a lot of people on the left who object to that bias. Right. Okay. But that's a fair and interesting conversation, and one we have to be careful of, and one, we could find them, hopefully find a middle ground. But that's not the major problem. The major reason why big tech gets attacked is because they are competitors of who social media competes with mainstream media. So mainstream media has been attacking big tech from day one, pretending that it's a. They're really concerned. Yeah, they're really concerned because that's their competition. And they're getting their ass handed to them.

So I did a story on the Young Turks about CNN, article about all the dangers of social media. I'm like, guys, this is written by their advertising department, okay? And they're advert, and they, in fact, they go to the advertisers and they find a random video on YouTube or Facebook, right out of billions of videos. And they're like, look at your ad is on this video. Do you denounce and reject every big tech company and every member of social media and the advertisers? Like, shit, yeah, I do. Right? Meanwhile, they're doing Milf island on TV.

Okay, I didn't know that.

There's literally a show that came out recently where it's moms and their sons and they fuck each other. Oh, wow. Okay. They don't. They don't have sex with their mom. They have sex with a different mom or date date. But then the shows all. Then they go off into a corner, etcetera, right? I'm like, you're doing this kind of like the worst, degrading, ridiculous, immoral programming, and then you found a video on YouTube that has a problem. Get the fuck out of here. You're just trying to kneecap your competition.

Let's talk about the saga of Joe Biden. So over the past year, over the past few months, can you just rewind? Where have you maybe tell the story of Joe Biden, as you see from the election perspective?

Yeah. So about a year ago, I. I'm looking at the polling, and first of all, I have eyes, right, and ears. So whenever I see Biden, I'm like, this is a disaster. And then I go and talk to real people. And when I say real people, I mean, not in politics. That's not their job, right? Because people involved in politics for media have a certain perspective, and it's colored by all of the exchanges and mainstream media, social media, etcetera. Real people aren't on Twitter having political fights. They're not watching CNN religiously, et cetera. Whenever I was at a barbecue, you guys all Democrats in some barbecues? Yeah. What do you guys think of Joe Biden? Like, almost in unison, too old. Every real person said too old. So I look at what real people are saying. That's why I thought Trump was going to win in 2016. I go in the middle of Ohio, I can't see a Hillary Clinton sign for hundreds of miles, right? It's Trump paraphernalia everywhere, right? So that's not end all, be all you could say. It's anecdotal. But you begin to collect data points, right? But then the real data points are in polling.

Okay? So now I'm looking at Biden polling. He's in the thirties. No incumbent in the thirties has ever come back to winter. I. So I'm like, it's already over. Then all of a sudden, oh, my God. Trump takes the lead with Latinos. It's double over by the. Later in the process, Trump took the lead with young voters. I'm like, this is the most over election in history. A Democrat cannot win if they're not winning young voters. That's impossible. Trump's cutting into his lead with black voters. This thing is over, right? And I go tell people, and they're like, you're crazy. Why do they think I'm crazy? Because MSNBC is lying to them 24/7 telling them that Joe Biden created sliced bread and the wheel and fire. And by the, and my favorite talking point was he's a dynamo behind the scenes. I'm like, okay, let me get this right. It's like an SNL skit, right? I'm like, so behind the scenes is like, all right, Sally, get me the memo on that. And we're okay, we're going to do this. And I'm in command of the material. Then he goes in front of the cameras anyways.

Why would any politician do that? Why? Why would they be terrible in front of the camera and great off camera? Doesn't make any sense. But once you get people enough propaganda, and MSNBC created blue maga, right, they'll believe anything. So they believe that Biden was dynamic and young and that he was the best possible candidate to beat Donald Trump, when in reality, he was about the only Democrat who couldn't beat Donald Trump. So, number one, I don't co sign on a bullshit. I don't care which side you're on. Number two, as you heard earlier, I can't have Trump winning. It endangers the country, it endangers our constitution, et cetera. So I'm going to do something about it. And so I start something called Operation Hope on the Young Turks. And we asked the audience, what should we do, right? So there's different projects in Operation Hope. And. But the first project that pops up is knocked by now the race, okay? And so then I ask our paying members on Tyt, I say, guys, you're going to vote, and then I'm going to do what you tell me to do. If you say, no, I like Biden, or I think Biden's the best candidate.

Or even if he isn't, we're not going to be able to win on this. So don't do it. Right. Should I enter the primary against Biden? Okay, 76, 24, go. Enter. Right? I'm a populist. You tell me to go. You're my paying members. You're my boss. I'm gonna go. Okay. So I enter the primary. Now, I'm not born in the country, so people are gonna freak out about that. I'm a talk show host. Like, the establishment media despises me, right? So I'm not gonna get any airtime. In fact, we consider hiring the top booking agent in New York. We talked to him and he says, well, you know, I'm actually in New York this week. And he says, I'm going to go talk to those guys and I'll come. I'll come back to you. And he was really decent because normally, you know, he charges a lot. Just take the money, right? And go, oh, yeah, yeah, I'll get you on. But he was a wonderful guy. He said, I talked to them. You're banned. So don't. Don't do it. Like, you're not. You're banned at CNN. You're banned at MSNBC. And I think you're banned on Fox News, but I'm not sure.

Okay, so, so long odds. Why do you do it? Because if you think we're going to crash into the iceberg, you might as well bum rush the captain's course, right? I'm lunging at the wheel, so what difference can I make? Well, I can make a difference by going on every show on planet Earth and going, he's too old. He's in the thirties. He has no chance of winning. No chance of winning. I go on Charlemagne show Breakfast club, right? Charlamagne agrees. All of a sudden we're having buzz and then people go, oh, Charlamagne said he has no chance of winning. Then Charlamagne's on the Daily show, talks to Jon Stewart. Jon Stewart does a segment. This is not necessarily causal, but buzz is building, right? So then Jon Stewart does a segment, if you remember, and people got super pissed at him. Too old, can't win. And all that buzz is building. Meanwhile, unrelated to us, David Axelrod and James Carville. And I'm like, guys, figure it out. Who does Axelrod speak for? The top advisor for Barack Obama. Who is James Carville? The top advisor for the Clintons. This is the Clintons and the Obamas sending their emissaries to say, we can read a poll he's going to lose.

Change direction. So when the debate happens, we laid the groundwork. If we hadn't laid the groundwork, debate would have been the first time that blue Maga would have thought, oh, maybe Biden can't win. Right? But since all of us said it and strange bedfellows. I loathe Nancy Pelosi, but she was on our side. I got a lot of issues with Bill Maher. He was on our side. Right? I got a lot of issues with Axelrod and Carville, and they were on our side. So the people who believed in objective reality kind of independently made a plan. Let's show people objective reality. And we did. And we drove him out and it made all the difference.

So you think he stepped down voluntarily or was he forced out?

Both. So again, it depends on what you mean. So was he forced out? Of course he was forced out. You think he just woke up? He's like, oh, yeah, you know what? Screw my legacy. I don't want to be a two term president. I just drop out for no reason. No, we forced them out. Of course we did. Right? And when I say we, I had a tiny, tiny, tiny role. The people who had the major roles, Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama and all those folks, but even they were not the main driving force, the number one driving force were the donors. What is the source of power of Bernie or Massey? The people. Right. What is a source of power for Biden? The donors. The donors made Biden. He is the donors candidate and the donors. That's why he told the donors, nothing will fundamentally change that. Like you can if you say, lex, no, cenk, I think you're too extreme that Biden works for the donors 98%. I think he only works for them 80% or 55%. Fine, we could have that debate. But you can't argue that it isn't his source of power and you can't argue it anymore, even if you were going to argue it earlier, because once the donors said, we're not giving you any more money, he didn't have any options.

He couldn't. He couldn't go on. So. But was he forced out at like, knife point or something? No. So was it voluntary? Yeah. Ultimately, if Biden decided to stay in, there was nothing we could do about it. And so he had to voluntarily make that decision. But he voluntarily made it because he had no choice left.

Yeah, I wish he stepped down voluntarily from a place of strength. So I think, I think presidents, I think politicians in general, especially at the highest levels, want legacy and to me, at least one of the greatest things you could do is to walk away from at the top. I mean, George Washington, to walk away from power is, I think, universally respected, especially if you got a good speech to go with it and you do it really well, not in some kind of cynical or calculator, some kind of transactional way, but just like as a great leader and maybe be a little bit even more dramatic than you need to be in doing it. Yeah, I thought that would be a beautiful moment and then launch some kind of democratic process for electing a different option.

Not only did I agree with you 100%, I reached one of his top advisors, one of the guys you see in the press all the time, as in his, in his inner circle. I never said that before because we were in the middle of it. And I'm never going to betray anyone's confidence, and I'll never say who's who it was, okay? But he was gracious enough to meet with me as I was about to enter the primary. And look, it's smart, too, because get information, intelligence, et cetera. Is this guy going to be trouble or not trouble, right? But at least he took the meeting. And the case I made is exactly the one you just said. Lexdez. I said, if he drops this about ten months ago, I said, if he drops out now, they built statues of him, right? The Democrats, if you're right winger, you hate him, I get it. But the Democrats would have said he beat Trump and protected democracy in 2020, and he steps down graciously now to make sure we beat Trump again in 2024 and he lets go of power voluntarily, you're, he's going to be a hero, an absolute hero.

But if he doesn't, you're going to force all of us to kick the living crap out of him and tell everybody he's an egomaniac, which he is, and he's doing this for two, so that he could be. If you don't know Washington in that bubble, if you're a one term president, you're a loser. If you're a two term president, you have a legacy and you're historic. He's running for one reason, one reason only, my legacy. I will be a two term president. I will be considered historic. I'm like, brother, now, you're going to be considered a villain, the villain of the story. You're handing it right back to Trump. You're not going to win. And, you know, look at the numbers. Any political professional knows you're not going to win. So you have hero or villain and you get to choose. But if you think you're going to be a hero and be Trump, that is not a choice you have. That is not going to happen. And they didn't believe us, but by then they did.

Were you troubled by the, how Kamala Harris was selected after he stepped down?

Yes and no. So I argued for an open convention. And so if Biden has stepped down when we were trying to get people into the primary, knock him out, then it would, that would have been a perfect solution. Then all the governors could go in, walls, Bashir, Whitmer, Kamala Harris goes in. Obviously they have a real primary at that point. Me, later, Dean Phillips came in. Me, Dean, and I mean, Marianne wouldn't drop out. Me and Dean would definitely drop out because our whole point was get other people in the race, make sure we win. Right? So, okay, then you would have had a great primary. It would have been the right way to do it, both morally, you know, constitutionally, et cetera, but also as a matter of politics, because you would have gotten a lot of coverage for your young, exciting candidates and you would have legitimized the idea that you're protecting democracy. Okay, so that didn't happen because of Biden. It is what it is. So now when Biden drops out, at least do a vestige of democracy. Go to the commission and do what it's designed to do, which is pick a candidate.

Ezra Klein made a great case for this in a New York Times podcast that he did that made a huge difference and he was great for doing that. So I believe in an open convention, but I know Democrats that love to anoint because they don't trust the people. So they think the elites are geniuses. Don't worry, we'll pick the right candidate. Yeah. I remember when you picked Hillary Clinton. How'd that work out? Right? And I remember when you said Joe Biden was the right candidate in 2024. How'd that work out? Do not anoint. Right. So, but in the end, they didn't. So what happened was Biden does the first announcement, he either forgot or on purpose didn't put Kamala Harris in there. So there's all this Kumbaya now. No, they don't like each other. Okay. And Biden's been screwing her over the entire she's time she's been vice president. So he doesn't put her in the original statement. And I'm like, whoa. I do a live video immediately. I'm like, Kamala Harris is not in the statement right in the middle of my video. They put out a second one. Go, okay, okay, fine. Kamala Harris.

Right. Because that's too much for the president not to.

I think it was like really like somebody like stormed into the room. I said, you absolutely must.

Speaker one. I don't know. I wasn't there, but probably. Right. Or they plan. I don't know. But the bottom line is it was glaring that he didn't put her in the first letter. Okay. So he had to put her in the second one. Fine, no problem. But Obama, Pelosi and show Schumer did not endorse Kamala Harris. That's huge. Normally, the Democrats would all endorse her and would all say, she's anointed. Shut up, everybody. And then MSNBC would scream, shut up. Shut up. She's anointed. Right. But they didn't do that. So then Kamala Harris had to win over the delegates. And I thought she would win them over in the convention, but she locked them up in two days. And she, I know because I know delegates because I ran and the delegates are calling me saying, she's on, she's getting on our zoom right now with us. Right. She went to all the states and worked her ass off and locked up enough delegates to get the, to get the nomination in two days.

Speaker one. Yeah, but come on. It's Biden endorsed, of course. So why is that? And of course, why not say, sort of lay out walls and Shapiro and Kamala Harris and the options to say, let's like at least the facade of democracy, of a democratic process.

There's what should happen and what is likely to happen. So should Biden not have endorsed? Yeah, of course. I think Biden should have done the same thing as Obama and Pelosi and not endorsed and say, hey, we'd love to have a process where we figure out who the right nominee is. And at that point, I'm really worried about Kamala Harris because she's doing word salads nonstop. Right. So I'm like, don't make the same mistake we did before and just pick someone out of a hat. Test them, test them. You get stronger candidates when you test them. The authoritarian nature of the DNC drives me crazy. They don't believe in testing candidates. They don't believe in letting their own voters decide. And look, when we were in the primary, they canceled the Florida election. And then, and they took me, dean and Marianne off the ballot in North Carolina and Tennessee. I'm like, guys, if you're going to make a case for democracy in the general election and you cancel elections in the primaries. Do you not get how ridiculous you look, how hypocritical you look? Right. So I didn't want them to Biden to endorse anyone, but I'm shocked that they didn't all endorse her because normally what happens is they all endorse.

So bottom line, Lex, is did she like earning in a perfect system? Not even close. Right. But did she earn it enough in this imperfect way where at least she showed some degree of competence that assuaged my concerns? Yes. So because a normal Democrat would bungle that they wouldn't go talk like Hillary Clinton wouldn't have talked to the delegates, she would assume that she's the queen and that they would all bow their heads. She would, you know, so the fact that she did elementary politics. Correct. For Democrats, it's like a big win.

It just really frustrated me because it smelled of the same thing of fucking over Bernie in 20, 1516 and RFK. And just the anointing aspect. Now, they seem to have gotten lucky in this situation that it's very possible that Kamala Harris would have been selected through a democratic process. But I have to say, listening to the speeches at DNC walls was amazing. Shapiro was really strong. And Kamala actually was much better as compared to her as a candidate previously. But personally don't think she would have been the result of a democratic process.

So you don't often give your opinions, but when you give the opinions, I actually agree 90, like a huge percentage of the time in this conversation. So I fought for Shapiro in the primer and when she was trying to pick for a vp because I thought, there's no way she's going to pick walls. He's way too. Not just progressive, but more importantly populist. Right? So I didn't think she'd go in that direction. And Shapiro actually did a bunch of populist things in Pennsylvania. That's part of the reason why he's so popular. Pennsylvania, he looks like a smooth talking politician, but his actions are pretty good. And so Shapiro was great. Walls was great. The Obamas are legendary. Even Clinton at his advanced age makes terrific points in a speech where you go, well, that one's hard to argue with. Right? And so they all, I'm shocked at the competence of the DNC. Shocked at it. But of all those, Lex, so you can give a good speech and Obama's give a mean speech. But I saw Obama as president. You know, he didn't deliver on that. So but the one guy that stood out is waltz.

And the reason is because he's a real person.

Yeah, real person. Populist.

We all got to work towards picking the most genuine candidates. So here on the right wing side, for example, I would prefer a Marjorie Taylor Greene to a Mitch McConnell any day. Marjorie Taylor Greene is genuine. She. She might be genuinely nuts. I don't agree with her. She might be even more right wing than others, but I believe that she means it. And I'll take that any day over a fraud corporatist like Mitch McConnell who's just going to do what his donors command of him, etcetera.

I got to ask you, because I also love Bernie. Still got it. I love Bernie. I always have. I enjoyed his. I think he might still do it, but I enjoyed his conversations with Tom Hartman. He's a genuine one like Bernie. Even if disagree with him, that's a genuine human being.

Yep.

So just talk about that. Does it trouble you that he's been fucked over in 20, 1516 and again, 2020? He seems to be. And why does he keep, like, forgiving people?

Yeah. So I love Bernie for the same reason you were saying it, because he's a real person. He's a populist. He means it. And that is so rare in politics. He's. I feel like I'm diogenes. And I went looking for the one honest man and found it in Bernie. And so I did a video in 2013 saying Bernie Sanders can beat Hillary Clinton in a primary in 2013. That video exists because why did I think that? I didn't say it of any of the corporate politicians and the guys who were supposed to challenge her and stuff. Because populist and honest. Right. And the country's dying for an honest populace. Dying for it. Right? So love the brother. Now, that doesn't mean that he's right on strategy. And he drives me crazy on strategy. So two elements of that. Number one, in 2016 and in 2020, for God's sake, attack your opponent. You said something about Trump that I disagree with where I'm defending Trump. Okay. You don't like what he did to the public discourse. No, I don't mind it. I would. And I'll tell you why. Yeah. Because at least he got a little bit past the fakeness.

Like, he's a con man and he's a fraud overall, and he does everything for his own interest, but at least he doesn't speak like a bullshitting politician. Right. And he's not wrong that you have to bully your own party to amass enough power to get things done. And he showed that that's possible. So the problem with the Democrats is civility. So my whole life, they're like, oh, no, no, don't say anything. Let's lose with civility. Right? So, for example, in debates, you know, whether it's on tv, online, or whatever, Democrats or people on the left are always saying, I'm offended. I never get offended. No, after I'm done, you're going to be offended. Okay, fight back. Fighting back wins. And we couldn't get Bernie to fight back in 2020. He, he was one state away. He won the first three states he crushed in Nevada. All we needed was South Carolina. But in order to get South Carolina, we all knew. Everybody on his campaign, everyone who's in progressive media, we all knew, you've got to attack Biden. If you don't, they're just going to tsunami. You know, corporate medias and the corporate politicians are going to run roughshod over you.

You have to make the case against them. And so two times Bernie flinched. One in 2016 in the Brooklyn debate, they asked, did the money that Hillary Clinton taken from the banks affect her votes? And he said, no, of course it affected her votes. Of course it did. You have to say yes, and you have to show it and prove it. The bankruptcy bill, when she was first lady, she was totally in favor of the american people and against the bankruptcy bill because it has the banks. You can't discharge any debts that the credit, you know, credit card debt and bank debt, etcetera. It's an awful bill. It's one of the most corporatist bills. She was on the right side as a first lady. She becomes a senator, takes banker money, and all of a sudden she flips over to the banker side. Say it, Bernie, for God's sake, say it right then in one of the debates in 2020, his team prepares attacks against Biden. They're not personal. They're not like, I. You can sense by now if I'm in a political race, my objective is rip the other guy's face off. Right.

Yeah.

Politically, rhetorically, never physically, yes. And so, but. But I would get it to a point where they think, I don't know if I'm going to vote for Cenk, but I know I'm not voting for the other guy. Okay. So you got to do that if you want to win. So they prepare this. He says, I'm going to do it. He goes on the podium and doesn't do it because he can't. He's too damn nice. He just can't attack the other guy. Now that's problem number one in strategy. Problem number two is something you alluded to. So Biden gets in office. Bernie thinks they're friends. Friends. They're not friends. Biden's just using him, so he uses them to get the credibility. And then he eviscerates 85% of the progressive proposals that Bernie put forward. Biden throws away $15 minimum wage. That was Bernie's signature issue. Doesn't even propose the public option. Dumps paid family leave for no reason. I can go on and on, and Bernie co signs on it because he thinks he's in an alliance. He thinks Biden's on his side and he thinks we're going to get things done. And to be fair to Bernie, like I said earlier, obama got only 5% of his agenda passed and Biden got 15%.

Okay, so you're right, Bernie. You got three times more than under Obama. But you're wrong. That is not fundamental change. And without fundamental change, we're screwed.

Let me ask you about another impressive speech. AOC, is it possible that she's the future of the party, future president?

No. So AOC, in my opinion, lost her way. And so in which way? So it's tough talking about these things because people take it so personally. Right. And, and that's why you'll see very few politicians on our shows because we give super tough interviews and the words on the street. Right. Like, don't go young Turks. They'll, they'll ask you super hard questions. Right. So there's only a couple do it like Rokhana does it. He's brave. We'll get into shouting matches sometimes in the middle of bills and stuff, but at least he's there to defend his position. I respect him for the Tim Ryan, a little bit more of a conservative Democrat. When he was in the House, he would take on any debate, etcetera. So there's a couple of good guys that do it, but generally they don't have. So what this relates to AOC, because when AOC is running, we do 34 videos on her, we get her millions of views. We found adjust Democrats and now launched it on the show. Our audience, Ryan Grimm documents it in one of his books. Our audience raises two and a half million dollars for those progressive candidates overall.

And at that point, AOC and all those Rashida Tlaib, etc. They're all dying to come on a Young Turks. Makes sense. I would, too. Of course, it's not because it's the Young Turks. Any media outlet, and most media outlets, almost all the media outlets reject them. We cover AOC more than all the other press combined. Right. And she wins for a number of reasons. That's one of the reasons, but there's many others, and she did a terrific job herself. She then takes Shoy Khandhe, and Corbin, who were the shortcode, was the head of just Democrats, and Corbin was communications director for just Democrats. Then shortcop made one of the most brilliant political decisions in, arguably, in american history. He said, he called me and he said, cenk, I'm going to go from head of just Democrats to running AOC's campaign. And I'm like, well, the other candidates are going to get pissed, and you're staking the entire enterprise on one candidate. And I'm like, sure. I'm not in it. I'm doing the media arm. You're, you're in the, in the trenches. You're the guy making the decisions. So I'm going to trust whatever you say.

You sure? And he said, yeah, I'm sure. So him and Corbin go over to AOC's campaign. AOC then wins that miraculous win. Then she hires shortcode to be her chief of staff, and she hires Corbin to be her communications director. Within six months, they're gone. And once they're gone, AOC then goes on an establishment path. Okay, because why were they gone? Oh, they insulted one of her colleagues. Yeah, that colleague who's a total corporatist and was selling out one of our policy proposals. If you don't call out your own side, you're never going to get anything done. But if you call out your own side, you become Persona non grata, and it is super uncomfortable. And we couldn't get them to do things that were uncomfortable. Now she's going to find that outrageous, and she's going to be very offended by that. And she's going to point to a bunch of things she did that were uncomfortable. And to be fair to her, she does, she has, she's. Until that speech, she was pretty good on Palestine when we desperately needed it. She's pretty good on a bunch of issues. Cory Bush did that campaign on evictions, et cetera, on the capital status.

That was great. AOC's original sit in, in Pelosi's office, that point, we're all still on the same team. It's a spectacular success. Me, Corbin and shortcode are saying, do it again. Do it again, like, not, don't abuse it. Like, don't be a clown and do it every other day. But, like, when it matters, you need to be able to challenge Pelosi. Right. And see, in my opinion, she just got to a point where she got exhausted being uncomfortable. It's like, it's really hard. The media hates you and they keep pounding away and calling you a radical and you're destroying the democratic party, you're destroying unity. So whereas if you go along, all of a sudden you're a queen and, and now all of a sudden the mainstream media is saying, oh, AOC, she.

Could be the, I mean, there's some degree to which you want to sometimes bide your time and just like rest a bit. And I think from my perspective, maybe you can educate me. She seems like a legit progressive, legit, even populist, charismatic, young, like a lot of time to develop the game of politics, how to play it well enough to avoid the bullshit. I guess. She doesn't take corporate PAc money.

That's right. No, she's still true on that.

So as far as just looking in over the next few elections, like, who's going to be running, who's going to be, who's going to be a real player, she just seems like an, to me, it seems like an obvious person that's going to be in the race.

So while I fight for the ideal, I'm very practical. So, for example, in she wins and then one cycle later, after 2020, there's these guys who want to, quote unquote, force the vote. And it was on the speakership of Nancy Pelosi and they wanted to use it to get Medicare for all. I'm like, guys, forcing a vote is a terrific idea on the speakership. Okay, who's your alternative? Oh, we don't have an alternative already. Giant red flag. Okay, what's the issue? You're looking to have them vote on Medicare for all? Oh, you don't know politics. So I love Medicare for all. We have to get Medicare for all. But if you, if that's the first one you put up without gaining any leverage, you're going to get slaughtered. Put up something easy. Force a vote on $15 minimum wage or pick another one that's easy paid family leave. These are all polling great because if you force a vote on that, you could actually win. And if you win, you gain leverage and then you do the next one and the next one, and then you do Medicare for all. Not bullshit gradualism that the corporate Democrats do, but actually strategically, practically building up power and leverage and using it at the right times.

So if I thought that's what AOC was doing, I would love it. Right? So I don't need her to force a vote on Medicare for all. I don't need her to go on some wild tangents that don't make any sense and is only going to diminish your power. But when they eviscerated all the progressive proposals and build back better, how did that happen? Manchin and cinema used every ounce of leverage they had. They said, I'm just not going to vote for it. I don't care. Okay. You know, the status quo is perfect for my donors, so I don't need you. I vote no. Okay. Now take out everything I want. And Biden did, right? Progressives had to push back and say, here is two to three proposals. Right? Not everything. Not everything. Two to three proposals, they all pull over 70%. They're all no brainers and they're all things that Joe Biden promised. We want those in the bill, otherwise we're voting no. At that point, the mediaev, what would have happened is the media would have exploded and they would have said AOC and the rest are the scum of the earth. They're ruining the Democratic Party.

We're not going to get the bill. They're the worst. You have to withstand that. If you cannot withstand a nuclear blast for mainstream media, you're not the person because that's, you have to go run that obstacle course to get to change. If they had stood their ground, they definitely would have won on one to two of those issues. Instead, they went with a strategy that was called, it was literally called trust. Biden. Speaker one.

All right, so big question. Who wins? Who wins this election, Kamala or Trump? And what's Kamala's path to victory? And if you can steal, man, what's Trump's path to victory?

Yeah. So there's not enough information yet. So since I make a lot of predictions on air and then brag about it unbearably, people are always, they'll stop me in the streets and they'll be like, predict this. Like, predict my marriage, brother, I don't know anything about your marriage. How could I possibly predict something without having any information? So in the case of the, this campaign right now, I got Kamala Harris had 55% chance of winning. Okay? Which is not bad. Doesn't mean she's going to win by 55 because then that would be a ten point margin. That's not going to happen. Right. But I say around 51 to 55, but it's nowhere near over because of a lot of things one, the Democrats are still seen as more establishment, and. And people hate the establishment to. If war breaks out in the Middle east, which is now unfortunately, bordering, unlikely. Right. If that war breaks out, all bets are off.

You mean a regional war?

Yeah, like Iran. Israel gets to be a real thing, not just a pinprick and a little bombing here and an assassination there. But no, we're going to war. Right. If that happens, then all bets are often, no one has any idea who's going to win. Okay? And if they're pretending that they know, that's ridiculous because it's so unpredictable. And then the third bogey for her is if she goes back to word salads. So that, so there's three phases of Kamala Harris's career. She's not necessarily any different in terms of policy. She's. You can frame it in a bad way. You could frame it in a good way. You could say, oh, she's just seeing which way the wind is blowing. And then, oh, she's a tough cop, prosecutor. Oh, and then she's doing justice reform when you need. People want justice reform. Oh, she's a waffler. Right? Or you could paint it as, she's pretty balanced. Right? She prosecuted serious criminals very harshly. But then on marijuana possession, got them into rehab. And you know what? That's actually what you should do. Right? So I'm not talking about policy. So there, you could have one of those views about Kamala Harris.

And I get it. I'm talking about strategy, stylistically. So Kamala Harris, until the second debate in the primaries in 2020, is a very competent politician who's in line to be the next Obama. Right? She's killing it. District attorney, attorney general, senator. And then the first debate, if you remember, she won. She had that great line about, you know, there was a little girl on that bus that was integrating the schools, and that girl was me. And Biden being the knucklehead that he is, he's caught on tape going up that reaction, brother. Okay. Because she's criticizing his segregation policy on busses back in the seventies. Right? So anyways, so she's doing terrific. And then after that debate, until Biden drops out, is a disaster area for Kamala Harris's career in the primary. She starts falling apart. She can't strategize. Right? She's for Medicare for all. No, she's not. She's for Medicare for some. What's Medicare for some? I don't know. Right? And she goes in the next debate and Tulsi Gabbard kicks her ass and then goes. Then the third debate gets her ass kicked again, and she's starting to drift away. Then at this point, and this is funny, I have more votes for president than Kamala Harris does because Kamala Harris dropped out before Iowa because that's how much of a disaster her campaign turned into.

When she was leading, she was leading. Right? So then she becomes vice president and Biden because probably because of that bus line, Jill Biden caught tremendous feelings over that line. Okay, so Biden's like, here, have this albatross around your neck. It's called immigration. Good luck. I'm not going to do anything about it. I'm not going to change policy, but I'm putting you in charge of it to get your ass handed to. Okay? And she does. So that's a disaster. And then she starts doing interviews where she's like, we have to become the chain being but not the thing we were and the unbecoming. And you're like, what is going on? Why can neither one of them speak?

Yeah.

And so, but then the third act shocks me. Biden steps down. She goes, grabs all those delegates in a super competent way that we talked about earlier. And then she goes out and gives a speech. I'm like, oh, that speech is good. Okay, another one. Another one. I'm like, wait a minute. These are good speeches. No more worst salads. Then she picks Tim walls and shocks the world. I'm like, that's a correct vp pick. That is a miracle. Right? And then she goes and does the economically populous plan. All those proposals about housing that people care about, grocery prices that people care about real or not real. That is correct political strategy. So this Kamala Harris is back to their original Kamala Harris, who was a very competent, skilled politician.

And as I was telling you, offline, she's doing, whoever's doing her TikTok is, is like blowing up and they're doing risky, edgy stuff.

Yes.

I did not expect that from somebody that kind of comes from the Biden camp of just like, be safe, be boring, all this kind of stuff.

So you have to give Kamala Harris ultimate credit because she's the leader of the campaign and she makes the final decisions. But there's, there's apparently a couple of people inside that campaign that are ass kickers, and they're, and they have convinced her to take risk, which democrats never take. And it is correct to take risks. You cannot get to victory without risk. So the vice president pick was, is the bellwether when Hillary Clinton picked Tim Kaine. I said, that's it. She's going to lose because Tim Kaine is playing prevent defense. He's, he's, he's wallpaper. I mean, he'd be lucky to be wallpaper. He's just a white wall. Right? It's just, and when he speaks is white noise. He never says anything interesting. Is the most boring pick of all time. That's saying we already won. Haha. Okay. If Kamala Harris had picked Mark Kelly, that's the Tim Kaine equivalent. Okay. Oh, he's an astronaut. I don't give a shit that he's an astronaut. What is he saying? Is he a good politician? Does he have good policies? Is he exciting on the campaign trail? Is he going to add to your momentum? Mark Kelly? He might be a good guy, but number one, he's a very corporate Democrat.

And number two, it's like watching grass grow. Oh, he's terrible at speaking, if you ask me. Right. So, so I thought for sure she's going to pick Mark Kelly because that's what a normal Democrat does. Or if they want to go wild and crazy, they'll go to Bashir. So I was like, please let it be Shapiro, because he's at least not bad. He's done some populist things and he's strategic. He's really smart. I need smart candidates. Dumb candidates don't help. They don't have a mind of their own. They can't take risks. They're not independent thinkers. They're going to lose. So she picks the smartest, most populous candidate. Boom, boom, we got a winner. That's a good campaign.

Speaking of risks, when they debate, when Kamala and Trump debate, what do you think that's going to look like? Who you think is going to win speaker one?

Oh, that's not close. Kamala Harris. Yeah. Unless she falls apart, unless she goes back to the bad era. Right. That's risk number three.

Hold on a second for all. I guess in a debate you don't have, you can have pre written. It seems like when she's going off the top of her head is when the word word salad sometimes comes out.

Sometimes, yeah. We'll have to see, right? We'll have to see. Because she hasn't done any tough interviews. She hasn't really been challenged. So I hope to God that doesn't happen.

That she doesn't fall apart, you mean? Yeah, because I hope she does a bunch of interviews, right?

Oh, definitely. Definitely. I'm like, I'm, this is gonna sound really funny. I'm too honest but, but I am, like, in, in the context of Kamala Harris probably shouldn't. Come on. The Young Turks, we do a really tough interview and it would hurt her. Okay.

Do you, though? Like, it's tough, but, like, you're pretty respectful. Maybe I just have my sort of, like, I'm okay with a little bit of tension. You're pretty respectful. Even when you're yelling, there's, like, respect. Like, you. You don't do like a gotcha type thing. There's certain things you could do. Like, you said this in the past. You can say a line from the past that's out of context. It forces the other person to have to define the context. Sort of debate type tactics over and over. You don't seem to do that. You just ask them questions genuinely, and then you argue the point, and then you also hear what they say. The only thing I've seen you do sometimes tough, that you sometimes interrupt. Like, you speak over the person if they are trying to do the same.

Right.

Which.

Only if they're filibuster.

Yeah, if they're filibustering. But, like, that. That's a tricky one. That's, um.

Yeah, it's a trick, right? No, but, Lex, the problem for her coming on our show isn't that we would be unfair to her. It's that we would be fair. So we would ask questions. She is going to have trouble answering.

Other core corporate stuff.

Right? I mean, like, so Biden said he was going to take the corporate tax rate to 28%, and he barely tried. You say you're going to take it at 28%. Why should we trust you? Right? You guys said $15 minimum wage, and then you took it out of the bill. Why should we trust you? Right? Those are very tough questions. She's never going to get that in mainstream media. Mainstream media is going to have faux toughness, but in reality, they're going to be softballs. Right. And so the debates. You're right, Lex, is. Is a little bit easier because Sarah Palin proved that you could just memorize scripted talking points. And she admitted it later. She's like, she was super nervous. She memorized the talking points. And no matter what they asked, she just gave the talking point, which, by the way, people barely noticed because that's what all politicians do. She just admitted it. And so, no, Trump's a disaster in a debate. He's a, he's a one man wrecking crew of his own campaign. So any competent debater would eviscerate Donald Trump. I mean, they just on any given topic, when he says something like, here, let's take one lunatic conspiracy theory that he just had recently.

And by the way, if you're a right winger and you keep getting hurt every time I say he's a lunatic or I insult Donald Trump. Don't like, you're. You sound like a left winger. I'm offended. I'm offended. I'm offended. Get over it. Get over it. Okay, so we, we have disagreements, hear what the other side is saying. And by the way, I say the same thing to the left, okay? I say, you, you think everybody on the right's evil, you're crazy. No, they just have a different way of looking at the world, which, by the way, is an interesting conversation. We should talk about that in a minute, too. But. So I do it to both sides. But, okay. Trump says, oh, I don't think there's anyone at Kamala Harris's rallies. It's all the pictures are AI. Okay, so let's say he says that in a debate because he's liable to say anything, right? You just say, okay, so you think every reporter that was there, every photographer that was there, every human being that was there, they're all lying. They have a conspiracy of thousands of people, but none of them were actually there.

Do you understand how insane you sounded?

So this is a good place to. Can you steal, man, the case for Trump?

Yeah. Yeah. So Trump is a massive risk because of all the things we talked about earlier. But there is a percentage chance that he's such a wild card that he overturns the whole system. And that is why the establishment is a little scared of him. So if he's in office here, I'll give you a case of Donald Trump doing something right, something wrong first and then something right. So he bombs Soleimani, the top general of Iran, and kills him. That risks world War three. That risks a giant war with Iran that devolves Iran is four times the size of Iraq. If you're anti war, you should have hated that he assassinated Solomon. But after the assassination, Iran doesn't want to get into it. Even though they're in a rage and they do a small bombing, you could tell if it's a small or a big one, right? So that's them saying, we don't really want war, but for our domestic crowd, we have to bomb you back. Right? And that's when the military industrial complex comes to Trump and says, no, you have to show them who's tough and bomb this area. And Trump says, no, they did a small bombing, not a large bombing.

I don't want the war. I'm not going to do that bombing. That was a shining moment.

Yeah. For, for me, one of the biggest deal, man, for Trump is that he has both the skill and the predisposition to not be a warmonger. He, I think, better than the other candidates I've seen, is able to end wars and end them. Now, you might disagree with it, but in a way where there's legitimately effective negotiation, that happens. Like, I just don't see any other candidate currently being able to sit down with Zelensky and Putin and to negotiate a peace treaty that both are equally unhappy with.

So on the one hand, almost all other politicians are going to be controlled by the military industrial complex, and that complex wants to bleed Russia dry. And that's what the Ukraine war is doing. It's a double win for the defense contractors. Number one, every dollar we spend to send to Ukraine is actually not going to Ukraine. It's going to us defense contractors. And then they are sending old weapons to Ukraine. The money is to build new weapons for us. So a lot of people don't know that. So the defense contractors want that war to go on forever, and they're an enormous influence in Washington. The second win is they're depleting Russia. And Russia has gotten them themselves into a quagmire like we did in Iraq and Afghanistan. And they're bleeding out. So they, the military and stroke complex wants Russia to bleed out for as long as humanly possible. They actually care more about their own interests, of course, than they do about ukrainian interests. So, in fact, there's a good argument to be made that Ukraine could have gotten a peace deal earlier and we prevented it. So. But the bottom line now is probably how a deal gets done is they let go of three more areas in Ukraine.

They already lost Crimea. They'd have to let go of three more regions. And that is tough, because at that point, Russia is a little bit encouraged. Every time they do an invasion, they get more land. They might not get all the land they wanted, but they get a lot of land. So that's, it's a very difficult issue.

But literally, which, which person, if they become president, will end the war?

Trump will end that war because Trump will go in and he loves Russia and Putin anyway.

I just disagree with. He loves Russia. The implication of that, meaning he will do whatever Putin tells him.

I think he'll do 90% of what Putin tells Speaker one.

I just disagree with that. I think. I think he wants to be the kind of person that says fuck you to putinous while. While patting them, while patting them on the back and being, you know, but out negotiating Putin.

So I don't like talking about Russia because there's so much emotions that go into that topic. The right wing. The minute you mention Russia, they're like, oh, it's a hoax. And all this baggage that comes with it, et cetera. To me, Russia is not any different than Saudi Arabia or Israel. For Trump. You give me money, I like you. You get by my apartments, I like you, right? If you don't give me money, I don't like you. It's not that complicated. So, okay, take, like, don't worry about the Russia part of it. Like, the bottom line is Trump thinks, what do I care about those three regions of Ukraine? I want to get this thing done right. So he'll go and he'll say, Ukraine, we're going to withdraw all help unless you agree to a peace deal with Russia. And Russia wants those three regions. That's the peace deal. That's it. So Ukraine will lose a part of their country and we'll get to a peace deal.

See, I hope not. I hope not. I think Trump sees themselves and wants to be a great negotiator. So. And I personally want the death, the death of people to end. And I think Trump would bring that much faster. And I disagree with you, at least. My hope is that he would negotiate something that would be fair.

He's not. His anti war record is so complicated because moving the embassy in Israel and killing the top iranian general were super provocative, and they could have easily triggered a giant war there. And then you know what's going to happen if you get into any kind of real war, Trump's going to want to prove his buttons larger. So then he's going to do massive, ridiculous bombings. I mean, I worry about nukes. And so we had Giuliani on the show, in the, on, on the RNC, and I asked him this question. I said, you know, he keeps saying, oh, they wouldn't do it if I was in charge. I'm like, what does that mean? Because it sounds like what it means is they wouldn't do it because they know if they did it, I would do something insane like attack Russia or use nukes. And Rudy said, yeah, that's what it means. So that means you have to at least bluff that and you have to get them to believe that he's a madman. That's the madman theory of Nixon. And Nixon. And Rudy said that too. He was very clear about it. But the problem is, if you get your bluff called, and so if you actually attack Russia, you're going to start World War three.

So, so that's why. Yeah, if you could, if you could just get away with bluffing, maybe, but he's playing a very dangerous game and he massively increased drone strikes. On the other hand, he didn't bomb Iran further. And on the other hand, he started the process of withdrawal from Afghanistan. So not black and white, complicated record. And one thing, I give him another piece of credit here. I think I'm taking the steel manning too far. The credit was that he changed the rhetoric of the right wing. They went from the party of Dick Cheney. War is great and let's, you know, all Muslims are evil. And so he hates Muslims, too. But that's a different thing. Right? But like, oh, we have to attack the enemy, we have to start wars, etcetera to, now, republican voters are generally anti war and hate Dick Cheney. Oh, I'll take it. I'll take it. So that's a great thing that Trump did, even if he didn't mean it, even if he does these provocative things, that could lead to a much worse war. Even if I'm worried that he'll be so reckless he'll start a bigger war, at least he did that, right?

And so I'm happy to have our right wing brothers and sisters join us in the anti war movement. And, and I'm not being a jerk about it, like, I love it. And, and any, and so this is another thing the left does wrong from time to time, which is if you agree with a right winger 2%, they'll be like, oh, welcome in. Come on, vote for Trump. Come on in.

Yeah.

Woohoo. Water's warm, right? If you, if you disagree with the left 2%, they're like, that's it. You're banished and you're a Nazi. Well, brother, how are we going to win an election if you're banishing everybody there is a right. So hold up. These republican voters are coming at your anti war position. Take the win. No, they're magga and I won't deal with them even when they agree with you. That doesn't make any sense. That doesn't make any sense. Take the win. Right? So when Charlie Kirk says yes to paid family leave, when Patrick bet David on his program says yes, roughly says yes to paid family leave, take the win.

RFK Junior. You said some positive things for a while about RFK Junior, and I think you said you would even consider voting for him, given the slate of people. This was at the time when Biden was still in. What do you think about him? What do you think about RFK Junior as a candidate, as a person? He's been on the show, right? Yeah.

Yeah. So he was on our show. People love that interview. You could check it out anytime. Right. And why do people love it, whether they're right or left? Because we're fair. We actually asked him about his policy positions. He explained them. I challenge him, and then he explains, and we give him a fair hearing. But I knew Bobby a little bit before he ran, when he was an environmental lawyer, and his legal work is excellent. And. And he's been on the right side of most of the issues for most of his life. So, a, I like him on that two, on his wildlife, the dead bear and the worms and all that stuff. Right. So there's two important lessons you should get about out of that. Well, one's just about Bobby, but the other one's a general one that's really important for you to know, no matter what you think of Bobby Kennedy. On the personal front, I have a friend that's very similar to him. In fact, he's one of my best friends. And. And I know why I. This is my theory on why Bobby and my friend are led a wild life.

Both of their dads young, died young. When my friend's dad died, he was 18, and his dad died in his arms. And he has a motto, what is lived cannot be unlived. So if I had a great time and I thought it was hilarious to dump a dead bear at Central park, then I lived it and I had a great time and nothing you could do about it, okay? And sometimes that'll get you in trouble, and sometimes you'll have a fantastic time. Right? And. And obviously, Bobby's dad was killed when he was young, and maybe that got into his head of, like, you better live strong and. And, you know, live an interesting life. And so I don't begrudge him that. Even if I begrudge some of the things that he did in that life, I get why he did it. So I don't hate him like other people hate him for some of those personal stuff. Right? So. And I like him for all the things that he did. Positive holding, you know, fossil fuel companies accountable, protecting communities that had poison dumped into the rivers, etcetera. Right. So the thing that affects everybody is when he gets, like, corporate media smeared the hell out of him and they didn't allow him to speak.

And then they did the needle in a haystack trick. So whenever it's an insider, they find the best parts of their lives and then they amplify. So Joe Biden is average Joe from Scranton. Motherfucker's been in DC for the last 52 years. You think we don't have eyes and ears? Okay, like average Joe from Scranton. Who are you kidding? So there's a guy named Fred Thompson who's an actor, and he was a senator from Tennessee later. And he had this great little trick that he would do is a red pickup truck that he would campaign with, right? So he looks like a regular Joe, right? But he's a millionaire actor. But here's the funny part. He would drive to the red pickup truck in a limo, and he would drive back from the campaign event in a limo. But the press never reported the limo. They only reported him in the red pickup truck as if that's what he drives. See, that's the theater of politics. Why? Because Fred Thompson was a corporate Republican, so they loved him. So they go, yeah, sure, yeah, red pickup truck. Oh, go, Fred Thompson. Right. So, but if you're an outsider and they don't like you, then they're going to look at the haystack of your life and they're going to try to find needles.

So they've done this to Trump, they've done this to Bernie, they've done this to Bobby Kennedy Junior. And with, with Bobby, they're like, ooh, there's some juicy needles in here. Okay, so they find those and they go, you see this? The only thing but you should know about Bobby Kennedy Junior is that he found a dead bear and put it in Central park. Oh, wait, wait, wait. I found another one. The other thing you should know about Bobby is that he once said in a divorce deposition that he had a brainworm. That, by the way, it turns out that affects millions of people and it's not that big a deal, right? But look, he is a radical. Oh, he is. This defines them completely. The spectacular case of that actually happened to me. So I ran for Congress in 2020, and the New York Times, LA Times, CNN, they all butchered me with needles. Okay, so they said is a long history of making anti muslim jokes. Well, first of all, they didn't even say jokes. They said anti muslim rhetoric. I'm like, I'm muslim. I mean, I'm atheist, but I grew up muslim. My family's Muslim, my background's Muslim.

You don't think that's relevant in the story? And they did it based on one joke I told about. And they said, oh, also, of course, they say that I'm anti semitic. That's like, that's, you start with that. That's, that's just baked in for everyone, right? So they said, I had made a joke about how Orthodox Jews and Muslims, they think that getting into heaven is a little bit of a fashion contest. Okay? So they, the Orthodox Jews go in there with the russian coast from the 18 hundreds and the giant russian hat, you know, the Muslims going with their robe and the skull cap and stuff, and God's looking around going, no, no, no. Ooh, nice outfit. Come on in. Right? Like, do you really think the creator of the universe gives a damn what you wear? Okay, so the New York Times took that and said, long history of being anti semitic and anti Muslim. Right? Okay, so there's this. Oh, this is a famous one, relatively. I did a joke about bestiality, like, a dozen years ago.

Very nice.

So I start out the joke nice and dry, and I go, look, is the horse going to object if he's the one getting pleasure? Now, Anna is my co host. She's younger at that time, and she's like, that seems like a bad idea, Jake. I'm like, of course it's a bad idea. Okay, but I'm being dry. But some people are laughing in the studio and stuff. And then, and then I say, you know, if I was emperor of the world, I would make that legal. And they cut the tape. If you watch the rest of the tape, I say, now, would the horse object? No. So. But they cut the tape. So the New York Times. So originally a right winger did that, and then a Yde, like a establishment troll in that primary started putting out those tapes to everyone. Jake Tapper retweeted it. Didn't look to see if it's edited or not edited. The New York Times implied that bestiality was part of my agenda.

Jesus, please tell me that's part of your wikipedia. The bestiality thing is part of your.

I don't know. I don't know. But, guys, so in that, in those stories, I'm not important. And even Bobby Kennedy Junior is not important. What it reveals about the media is what's important. So they're going to find those needles, whether it's. And even if they don't have the needles. You know what? We'll cut the tape before your joke jokes punchline. Right? So we'll just run it and we'll lie about you. Who cares, right? And so. Oh, they also said that I had David Duke on to share his antisemitic point of view. If you watch the interview, I told David Duke, you're an anti semite, you're a racist, you're a bigot, you're an idiot. Right? It was the toughest interview he's probably ever had in his life. And other journalists got mad at that part, and they were like, no, guys, you're just flat out lying. Like, I watched the interview. Did any of you watch the interview? He takes the guy's head off, right? And so the New York Times issued a correction on that one. So they're like, okay, fine. He was being sarcastic when he said, sure, you're not racist, Dave, but one.

Of the sources of hope to all this is there's a lot of independent media now, but mainstream media has a lot of power still and cares. A lot of power. You think they're going to die eventually?

Yeah, definitely. So two things about that that are super important. First of all, this is why I tell people to have hope. I don't believe in false hope, right? So if you think Kamala Harris is your knight in shining armor, she's going to come in, she's going to get money out of politics, she's going to ignore the donors. That's false hope. That's crazy talk. Right? So I. Why am I in favor of Kamala Harris? I'm gonna live to fight another day. I'm worried that Trump's gonna end the whole thing, and then we're not gonna have an opportunity to actually get a populist win. Right? So. And I'm encouraged by some of the things she's doing, and maybe she does even 25% of her agenda. But I'm not gonna give you false hope that she's your savior. Right? But I believe massively in hope. And number one, because it's true to. To the point that we were talking about earlier, Alex, and how last 200 years have been choppy. But overall, fantastic, terrible things have happened in that time period. Some of the worst things that have ever happened in history. But overall, life expectancy is higher.

Everything is, you know, incomes are higher, health is better, etcetera. Right? So hope is not misplaced. It's real. It's empirical. Okay, so now we talked about how you could get money out of politics, and that's a legitimate hope. But media is another place where we have huge hope. So of all the corporate robots, the most important robot is media. So when mainstream media has you hooked in at the back of your neck, you're going to believe all these fairy tales about how politicians are nice people and they're trying to do the right thing and donor money doesn't have any influence on them. Right? So once you unplug from the matrix, um, well, then you begin to see, oh, yeah, that. Hey, look, he took the donor money, did what the donors wanted, took the donor money, did what the donors want 98% of the time. Right? So then you see clearly. So now what's happening at large. Mainstream media is losing their power. And now online media swarming, swarming, swarming, swarming. And so this goes back to why I started the Young Turks. So let me touch on that here, and then we can come back to it if you want.

So in 1998, I write an email to my friends and I say, online video is going to be television. And unsurprisingly, and they say, you're nuts. That's never going to happen. At that point, we're still doing AOL dial ups, like, right, online video barely exists and television's mammoth. I say, guys, it's just a matter of logic. Like, for me, there's so many ironies. I'm known for yelling online sometimes, but in reality, I'm obsessed with logic. So when you have gatekeepers, gatekeepers pick based on what they want, what the powerful one, in that case, advertisers, politicians, etcetera, they are never going to design programming as good as wisdom of the crowd. When people start doing online video, I'm like, boom, there's no gatekeepers. This is democratized. Wisdom of the crowd is going to win. So if you start with no money, and let's pick a different example, not the Young Turks. Let's say Phil DeFranco, he's been around forever, okay? And he also does news. And so Phil starts doing a show and he doesn't have any money, just like us. And so what does he, what does he have to do to get an audience?

He has to do a show that is really popular. He's got to figure out a way. How do I get their attention? How do I keep their attention? And he starts doing a great show, right? And so every year it's us and Phil for best news show for like a decade, right? And meanwhile, I'm back over at CNN, Wolf Blitzer still droning on from a teleprompter. You put Wolf Blitzer online without the force of CNN with him, he gets negative seven views. No one's interested in what Wolf Blitzer has to say. It's not personal. I don't know, the brother, right? I'm just saying institutionally, logically, et cetera. So I'm like, these guys are gonna win. So when YouTube starts, we go on YouTube right away. We're the first YouTube partner. So I am literally the original youtuber. Okay, nice. Susan Wojcicki, the former CEO of the late Susan Wojcicki, wonderful woman. And if that triggers you again on the right, you're wrong. She was a terrific person. And when she started her own YouTube channel, I was the first interview because we were the first YouTube partner. So I love that. But let me connect it back to the hope.

When mainstream media has you hooked, you got no hope because you don't have the right information. You have propaganda, you have marketing, you don't have real news. When you're in the online world, it's chaotic. And don't get me wrong, it's got plenty of downsides, right? But within that chaos, the truth begins to emerge. And so, for example, young Turks has had dozens of fights with different creators throughout history. Why? When you're number one in news online, the algorithm rewards anyone attacking you, because then you get into their algorithmic loop. It's not an accident that we've been attacked dozens of times. One, we're independent thinkers, so anyone, if we don't match their ideology, they're going to attack us. But number two, they get in our algorithm loop. It's too hard to resist, right? So all of a sudden, they think that we're being funded by Nancy Pelosi or the CIA, and we're off to the races. There's another fight, right? But our competition is a graveyard. And so we've won all, almost all of. All of those fights. Why? Because we try really hard to stick with the truth, with logic, and we don't do audience capture.

Even if our audience is going in one direction, we don't think it's right. Well, Anna and I will come out and go, no, sorry, guys, love you, but rent control is not a good idea, okay? Etcetera. So in that world, the people, it's going to take a while, guys, but people who are telling the truth are eventually going to rise up. And when they do, now we're free. And now the second part is even more devastating for mainstream media, because I'm a businessman, right? I keep looking at their revenue for CNN, etcetera, and they have a massive problem. People don't realize how big the problem is. That thing is going to capsize. I don't talk about it often because I don't want more competition. I also have a company, right, in the online world, etc. But, but I'm too honest. I gotta say it. I gotta say it. So there they have two revenue streams. One is ads. That's why they serve advertisers. And politicians are huge advertisers. As we mentioned, the second revenue stream, depending on the company, is arguably more important, which is subscribers. So now what happens in a business normally is.

So they started out low and then they got high and now they got a ton of subscribers. At its peak, cable has 100 million households. Right. So they're raking in unbelievable money from subscriber fees and they got advertising on top. So when you're all the way up here, your costs start to rise. Why do they rise? Because then the on air talent has leverage. And as an example, there's many others. The, and so the on air talent, like Sean Hannity says, I do a program that brings in x amount of maybe a hundred million, maybe 200 million. So give me 40 million a year. And they do. Sean is making 40 million a year last I checked. Okay. So I don't know if he's still getting that kind of money. And I'm just basing out a reporting. Right. But that's a monster. So they have all these giant costs, but the minute you lose, you go from 100 million. Now we're at, I think, around 70 million. You just lost a giant chunk of your revenue. Now when your costs are higher than your revenue. Nighty night. It's been nice knowing you.

Yeah, it's going to collapse and it's going to be painful.

But what we need, guys, is like, sorry, last thing on that is we need the print guys, like AP, Reuters. Intercept the lever the sororita runs. Whatever Ryan's working on now, it's at Ryan Grimm said we need those badly. We need someone to collect actual information and do the best they can. And presenting it in an objective way, we all got to support that. So you can't lose text that's so important. The tv guys are just actors. You can lose them overnight and it won't hurt you. It'll help you.

Yeah, just, it's going to be a, a messy battle for truth because the reality is there's a lot of money to be made and a lot of attention to be gained from drama farming. So just constantly creating drama and sometimes drama helps find the truth, like we were mentioning. But most of the time it's just drama and it doesn't care about the truth. It just cares about drama. And then the same is like conspiracy theories. Now, some conspiracy theories have value in depth, and they allow us to question the establishment institutions. But the bottom line is conspiracy theories get clicks. And so you can just keep coming up with random conspiracy theories. Many of them don't have to be grounded in the truth at all. And so that's the sea we're operating in. And so it's a tricky space, too.

But Lex, look at all the people who are the biggest now, because we've now had a couple of decades at this. Right? Uh, and I mean, as an industry. So I would argue you're huge and you don't do that. You don't do the conspiracy theories, you don't do the drama at all. Right? Um, Rogan is huge. Yeah, maybe there's drama, but he's genuine, right? I got a lot of issues with some of his policies. I mixed opinions on Joe in a lot of different ways, but I don't doubt that he's genuine. People can sense that. Right? And he's huge. We're genuine. We're huge. So this is the market beginning to work.

Yeah. So speaking of Joe, let me ask you about this.

Here we go.

I didn't actually know this, but when I was prepping for this conversation, I saw that you actually said at some point in the past you can beat up Rogan in a fight.

Yeah.

No. You said that you have a shot. It's a non zero probability.

Yes.

Do you still believe this?

Yes, but the probability is dropping. It's dropping every day.

I think it's the. Probably the stupidest thing I've ever heard you say. So I didn't much. I wrestled and did jiu jitsu and judo and all the kinds of fighting sports my whole life. And I just observed a lot of really confident, large guys roll into gyms. He's ripped, he could deadlift, he could talk all kinds of shit. And he's beliefs he's gonna be the next world champion and he just gets his ass kicked.

Yeah, of course. Okay. And I've seen, like, I saw this israeli MMA fighter take on an anti semite who was huge and thought that, you know, he believed in, like, Nick Fuentes's conspiracy theories or something. And the MMA fighter dismantled him and I loved it. Okay. And then he, like, we tweeted back and forth, etcetera. So, guys, first, let me just assure you I get it. So now let me tell you why I said it and then why I think it's a non zero chance. So Michael Smirkonish had written this blog like 1015 years ago on Huffington Post. We're both bloggers at that point about the wussification of America. Now, he was saying the left is a bunch of wussies, right? So I wrote a blog saying, hey, Michael, so I would rather debate you. So if you want to debate about how we're wussies, let's do it. Let's find them. But you know, you're mentioning physicality, right? And how you guys are tougher. So if you prefer, only in a prescribed setting, right. And we're not going to go do it in the streets like idiots. Right? But if you want, we'll have a boxing match or whatever you want, and we'll see who's tougher.

And he panicked and he cried to mommy, which was Ariana Huffington. And, oh, Jake's intimidating me. Right. Okay, all right, well, who. Who's the wussy now, bitch? Right? So that is not to actually get into a fight with poor Michael Smirkonis, right? It's to prove, hey, don't use rhetoric like that. That's dumb. And this is me proving that it's dumb. Okay, so now, Joe had said. I forget what he said at the time, and he'd said something similar. Right. And I'm up to here with Joe at that point. I don't know if we'll ever talking yet.

Right, but you've been on a show and I really. That was a good conversation. It was a great conversation a while back. Yeah.

Yeah.

I hope he has you on again.

Yeah. So I get it.

He. I bet you. I don't like this take. You have a lot. I bet you he hates it because him, as an MMA commentator, he gets to hear so many bros. Yeah, it's all about the mindset, bro. Now to steel, man. The point you're making, which I do think it's the stupidest thing you've ever said, but the actual intent, which is whether you're left or right, there's. There's strong people on the left. Like mentally strong, physically strong. Like, I think the whole point is not that you can beat them, but you're willing to step. You're willing to fight if you need to. That's.

It's 100%.

So it's not like I believe I could beat him. It's like I'm willing, like all this shit, you know, calling the people on the left wusses or whatever. I'm willing to step in the fight even if I'm on train, even I'm out of shape, I'm willing to fight. Yeah, I get it. I understand that. But it's just pick a different person. That's why I wrote down on my genuine curiosity, is if you can beat up Alex, Alex Jones versus Cenk, that.

That.

That. The legitimacy. I would pay for that, because you're both untrained. You both got, I would say, the spirit.

No, no. He has. Look, I'll give the same fairness.

Yeah.

I think I got an 8% chance of being beating Rogan.

You're nuts.

I know. I got it.

Hold on. All right.

And I think, to be fair, Alex has an 8% chance of beating me.

Oh, wow.

Okay. Okay. Because you never know. He catches you on a lucky punch. I got punched in the ear once, and you lose your balance, and then you're in a lot of trouble. Right? So I can get lucky. Alex Jones can't. Lucky. It's me against Rogan is harder. Like you. If you said to me, you don't have 8% chance, but Alex does. Okay, I'm not gonna. It's. It's fine. Right. So why would. Does Alex stand almost no chance? He asked me. So, first of all, it's not just because I'm big and he's big one. I wrestled.

Oh, you wrestled?

Yeah. If you wrestled, then you're like, I watched this show with my kids, physical 100. It's like a korean show where they try to find out who's the best, best athlete. They have one thing where they have to wrestle away the ball and keep it this big, giant ball. I'm like, every wrestler is going to win. Every MMA fighter is going to win. And every time they win, and they're like, dad, how'd you know that? Because we get trained, we're not going to lose to a non wrestler in a wrestling contest. It's not going to happen. Right. So you can get lucky, but it's unlikely. So, one, wrestling. Now, that was from a long time ago, but at least you know the mechanics, right? I. Number two, I've gotten into about 30 actual street fights in my life. And you can say street fights. Not the same as MMA, of course. That's true. Obviously true. Right? But it's not. No experience. It's some experience. And the most important part of a street fight is being able to take a punch to the face. Okay.

Yeah. Knowing what it feels like to get punched in the face.

Yeah. So I've been punched in the face. I don't know. Dozens of times in my life, I used to start fights by saying, I'll let you take the first punch. Okay. So I didn't start the fights. They just started because they'd punch me in the face. Okay, so. And then. And then for Alex, the main thing and also true for Rogan is it's about willpower, right? So if you. If. If Joe has a 92% chance, in my opinion, of knocking me out or beating me, because he has the skill and he's trained and he knows what he's doing. So all the willpower in the world isn't going help you if you get kicked upside the hat. Right? So. But in the unlikely circumstances that I've worn him down, right. Then I'm a little bit more in the ballgame, because I got willpower for Alex, he doesn't have the willpower I have. Okay. I'm. Because to me, the idea of losing Alex Jones is unthinkable. I would do anything not to lose anything.

Let me just say. So that's beautiful. I love this. I would pay a lot of money to watch the two of you just even, like, wrestle. But with Joe, I think I just. I have to say, it's like, it's. It's .001% chance. You have a chance before you even get to the mentality. And the other thing is, on the mentality side, one of the fascinating things about Joe is he's actually a sweetheart in person like this, but there's something that takes over him when he competes.

Brother, we've been around 22 years in the toughest industry in the world. Right? If you like. Do you have any idea how hard it is to run a 75 person company and make money online and survive after all the guys who took billions of dollars went, I hear you. Tremendous willpower. So. But overall, you're. This is not the hill I'm dying on. Okay. Joe would win. I get it.

I think we're all allowed one kind of blind spot, I suppose so you.

Don'T think a huge, a big guy that still is in good shape, that was a wrestler that's been in a lot of street fights, you still think. .001.

It depends on street fights, but. Yeah. .001. I just see.

And it's such a minute disagreement because. So take me out of it. So you take out the willpower part of blah, blah, blah. I think it's one to 2%. Yeah. He could catch the guy on about, you know, I think you're lucky.

I think it's because I've talked to. So I trained with a coach named John Donaher, and we talk about this a lot, and I think technique is just such technique is the thing that also feeds the willpower. It actually builds up your confidence in the, in a way that, like, nothing else does, in the, in a more actionable way. Because you won't need that much willpower.

No, I.

If the technique is backed. But, like, you don't have to be, like, a tough guy to win debates if you're just fucking good at debates. Right. So I think we just don't understand the value in sport, and especially in combat of technique.

No, there are great irony. I actually totally agree with that. That's why mentioned the physical. 100 techniques. Going to win every day. Like, almost every time we're having a debate about whether it's eight or one or 0.01. Either way, technique wins. We agree.

Okay, beautiful. In the, uh, one of the controversial things you've done in the nineties as a student at UPenn, you publicly denied the armenian genocide, which is the mass murder of over a million Armenians in 1915 and 16 in the ottoman empire. Um, you have since then publicly, uh, and clearly changed your mind on this. Tell me the process you went through to change your mind.

Yeah. So when you're a kid, you're taught a whole bunch of things. That's the software that we talked about earlier, right? So cultural software is media, family, friends, social media, etcetera. And so growing up in any tribe, whether it's a religious tribe or an ethnic tribe, you're going to get indoctrinated into that tribe's way of thinking. So you take a turkish person who's super progressive, loves bernie, believes with all their heart and peace, and you tell them something about kurds, and they'll say, oh, no, not those guys. They're terrible and evil, and we have to do what we do to them. You see, that's the tribe taking over, right? And so you tell any religious person what's wrong with the other religions. They're like, oh, yeah, yeah, that's totally true. You get to their religion, tribe takes over. Know, how dare you? I'm offended. Right? So I grew up with turkish propaganda. So I'll tell you a couple of funny instances of it. When we were kids, we'd go, turkish american day parade. I'm like ten or twelve years old. It's in the middle of New York. Because I grew up in Jersey. That's why I got in all those fights.

And, and we would chant in Turkish, Turkey is the biggest country. There's no other country that's even biggest. And I was like, this is crazy. I'm like, dad, isn't this crazy? America's big, China's big. Why are we chanting this nonsensical chant? Right? So that's the beginning of being realized. You're indoctrinated. I'm in college and I read about some battle that the Ottoman Empire lost. And I'm like, that can't be right. The Turks have only lost one war. World War one, right? And I was like, oh, my God, I'm an idiot. I got taught that in third grade in Turkey. Of course, that's not true. That's ridiculously untrue, right? All those thoughts are in your head. You don't even realize it. And so on the armenian genocide, I read the turkish version, and the turkish version has all of these evidence, right? So it's real in that it exists. But here, I'll give you a great example of it. I think it was Colonel Chester. He's some random american military guy after World War one. And he says about the Armenians after the mass march, the forced marches, he says they returned the area fat and entirely unmasacred.

Okay? I'm like, hey, that's an american colonel that's saying that. So that's obviously true. You see, they didn't happen, right? Or at least in the way that the Armenians say. Now, as a grown up, I look at it and I go, are you kidding me? That guy's obviously trying to get a contract with the turkish government, right? Nobody returns from a forced march fat, entirely unmasacred. Right? So that's propaganda. And so it. And that one was so indoctrinated that it was tough to let go. So in at Penn, I write that op ed, etcetera. And then over the course of time. And so Anna and I disagree on things from time to time. And we've been co hosting now for. She's been at the young tourists for 18 years and co hosting for, you know, almost 18. And so she's armenian. And by the way, I love America. I mean, look at. We came to America because a lot of this country, land of hope and opportunity. That's part of why I fight so hard for the average American, for the american idea. So here's a turkin and Armenian doing a show together, and it becomes the number one online news show.

That's the beauty of America, right? So she's telling me things, and we're having some on air discussions about it, etcetera. And then it just dawned on me, like, no, this was, this too was obviously propaganda. So at that point, once you realize that, it becomes easier. That's why I'm trying to unplug people from the matrix, because once you realize this propaganda, oh, my God, it gets infinitely easier to start telling what's true or not true.

So maybe by way of advice, how do you know when you're deluded by propaganda? How do you know you're not believing a kind of. How do you know when you're not plugged into the Matrix? When you are plugged into the matrix.

You have to keep testing it against objective reality. Okay? They said something. Did it happen or did it not happen? So here. Here's an easy one. Alex Jones, for a long time, especially under Obama, kept saying, they're gonna put us on freeback apps, all the FEMA camps, and they're gonna put us in a lot of south. I know it. I know it for sure. Right? Nobody's been in a FEMA camp. Obama left. There was no FEMA camps. So what I asked, like, for the right wing conspiracy. Guys, guys, has any of their things ever come true? Like, they always say all these crazy things that never, ever happen. So the third time, it doesn't happen. Can you please start to wonder, maybe I'm on the wrong side. Maybe. And. But. But that's not just for right wingers. That's easy, right? But it's also for mainstream media. And that's where I get the biggest pushback. And that's where. Because my tribe is. Is what the kids call PMC, professional management class, okay? Their career. You go up the ladder, you have a distance route, that route, etcetera. And so for that class, the status quo is pretty good.

So when you get. When Biden gives you 15% change, you're like, what else do you want? That's amazing. He just course corrected a little bit. Now it's perfect, right? But for the average guy who needs 100% change, not 15, they look at it and they go, what the fuck? He only did 15%, and everybody's declaring him a hero, right? So those are the hardest guys to get through on. And those are the guys who get most mad at me. Not the right wingers, the establishment. That's why I. I'm nails on a chalkboard for them, because I'm on the left. But I call out their crap and their marketing and propaganda. And that's why I mentioned earlier, no one. Probably not. He might not even consciously know it, but no one dislikes Bernie more than Obama, because if Bernie got into office, he'd embarrass Obama by doing a lot more change. And Obama told us that change wasn't possible. You could only get 5%. And so if Bernie does 50%, then Obama's humiliated, and his record and his legacy is ruined. Right? So he. I don't think he makes that conscious decision. Right. But it's subconscious.

It's a way of thinking. So if you're watching Morning Joe test them, he says something that Biden is for $15 minimum wage when Biden takes it out of the bill. Know that morning Joe was lying to you. He says that Biden said he was for the public option, but he never even proposed it. When morning Joe still defends them, and you see an objective reality. Biden didn't actually propose that, bill. You know that they're lying to you. Tested against objective reality. Did it actually happen or didn't it?

I mean, there's some of that stealing some of the conspiracy theories. Do you think there's some value to the conspiracy theories that come from the right, but actually more so come from the anti establishment? I mean, for me, there's a lot that raise a bit of a question. A lot of them could probably be explained by corporatism and the military industrial complex, but there's also a lot of them can be explained by creepiness and shadiness in human nature. Epstein is an example of that. There's a lot of ways to explain Epstein, including the basic creepiness of human nature, but there could be bigger explanations underlying it.

So sometimes when we have long, thoughtful conversations like this, I'll say it depends a lot, and then people get frustrated by that. But then you're frustrated by the world, because it depends. So conspiracy theories, if you say, are they all right or are they all wrong already? The question is wrong. So it depends. What is the conspiracy theory? So if it's, you know, some of the absurd ones we've mentioned here, that's easily disproven. Right? Um, on the other hand, um, there's a conspiracy theory, uh, about JFK's assassination, which was the conspiracy theory that Lee Harvey Oswald, from, like, 12 miles away, shot a magic bullet that went like this and hit, like, 13 people and came out Kennedy's brain. Or that the government might have wanted to cover up an assassination of the president for whatever reason. Okay, come on. Now. I'm, of course, doing hyperbole. And, like, the JFK enthusiasts will be like, no, it did. The bullet didn't actually go like this. It didn't actually hit 13 people. I'm. I'm. I'm kidding, guys. Okay, but in terms of. Is that conspiracy theory. Real. That JFK was not just killed by Lee Harvey Oswald?

Almost certainly. Right. And so if you read real books with tons of information, the most likely culprit is Alan Dulles, the head of the CIA that he fired back when there was a deep state. There actually was a deep state. They did coups against other countries leaders all the time. But they tell us, oh, they wouldn't do it to our own leader. But remember, that's not the CIA. He'd left the CIA already. Right? So he get. You know, so I don't know if it was ex CIA guys. I don't know if the mob was involved. I don't know any of those details. But I know some things that are obvious. That bullet didn't magically hit him from over there as Jack Ruby killed Lee Harvey Oswald. Jack Ruby was a mobster who, on the record, had said that he hated Kennedy. All of a sudden, he became patriotic overnight and shot the assailant who was unguarded. Maybe less likely. Okay, so let's speed up, though. So my point is, yeah, some conspiracy theories could be true. It depends on objective reality. Right. You get to Epstein again. I always do it ahead of time because I want you to test me and see, does it match objective reality?

So I said, the minute that it happened, you'll have your answer based on whether the video in the hallway worked or not. If the video in the hallway works, there'll be just as many conspiracy theories, but it'll show actually who went in and didn't go in. Okay, but if the video in the hallway doesn't work, they definitely killed him. Okay, so a couple of days later. Oh, the video in that particular hallway happened to not be working, and the guards both happened to be on break at the same time. And the most notorious pedophile criminal in the country happened to be unguarded, and that is the one time he decided to hang himself. Listen, man, the only way you believe that is if you got mainstream media to get you to believe that. The word. That, the minute the phrase conspiracy theory is mentioned, you have to shut off your mind and you have to believe whatever the media tells you.

Yeah, well, it's interesting. You just mentioned. Do you think the CIA has not grown in power versus.

No, no, they've greatly waned in power.

Interesting.

So. So, in the old days, the CIA has an actual deep state, and because the country was run by a bunch of families. Right. So you go to Yale. The skull and bones thing was real. Right? And you go to Harvard, you go and half the. Look at the Dulles family, right? Half of them go into government, other half go into banking. Why are the central american countries called banana republics? Because we, America did a coup against one of those countries because a banana company wanted it. Okay? Because they're like, how dare you charge whatever you want for your natural resource. We, american corporations have the right to all of your natural resources at the lowest possible rate. Alan, get rid of these guys. Okay? And Alan would. And so. And sometimes they would go extrajudicial, right? Like, potentially with the JFK assassination. So now. And by the way, you pissed off J. Edgar Hoover. He was just going to put a bullet in your head, and we were done with you, okay? Fred Hampton, among others. So. But nowadays, that's not how the world works. So a small number of families cannot control a country.

And an economy this size, new people pop up. Well, Mark Zuckerberg wasn't part of those families. Elon Musk wasn't part of those families. Neither was Bezos. Right? For any. For you to believe those conspiracy theories, you have to think that Bezos and musk, etcetera, were like, oh, you guys are still running the country, no problem. Go ahead. They're not gonna do that. Right? So now we've gotten into a system where it's the invisible hand of the market that runs the country, but unfortunately, it's for only for the powerful, and so it's more of a machine, and they don't do. And this is super interesting and ties to what we were talking about earlier, Lex, which is that they don't do political assassinations anymore. They do character assassinations. That's the needle in the haystack thing. So. And if you do an assassination of someone, you build up their status. They become a martyr, and you build up their cause. But if you do a character assassination, you smear the cause with the person, and the cause goes down, not up. So the market found a better way of getting rid of agitating outsiders.

Well, that's, you know, one of the conspiracy theories with Epstein is that he's a front for, like, a, I guess, CIA, and they're getting data on people, like, creepy pedophile kind of data to the. They can use to then threaten character assassination. And they put them in this way, put the people in their pockets.

So, look, we're not in on it, so we. There's no way we can know. Right? But I just always go back to logic. So he has dirt on a lot of powerful people. He dies in a way that is an obvious murder, and not a suicide. And then you begin to think, who would have enough power to be able to get away with that crime? And that is a very limited number of either people or governments. Right. So that's probably your answer. Without knowing anything that's internal.

Yeah, that's crazy. We don't have the list of clients. What is the best way to achieve stability and peace in Israel and Palestine? In the current situation and in the.

Next 510 years, if people wanted to get to peace? It's relatively straightforward. There's already a deal that was negotiated. The Saudis agreed to it, and they're an important player in this game. The Palestinians and the Israelis have initially agreed to it. Even Hamas has kind of agreed to it. That deal exists and it's just waiting on the shelf to get done. Right. And it's pretty straightforward. Israel gets out of the West bank and Gaza Strip, but they keep an x percentage. It used to be 4%, then it went up to 6%. It's probably a higher number now. The Palestinians keep losing leverage as we go. Right. So you remember how hard it was to get a deal on Ukraine. I thought that's a very complicated one. Israel is much more straightforward. Get the hell out of the occupied territories. Keep some of the God like. Those settlements are the worst thing. They're cancer. But anyway, I don't know. There's. But there is an answer to the settlements, and it's probably that Israel keeps them, even though that drives me crazy. No right of return for Palestinians. There'll be symbolic right of return for a couple of families.

And so Palestinians go, no way, guys. You have no leverage. Take the deal. Take the deal. Okay, so you're not going to get a right of return. Israel's not going to allow millions of Palestinians to go and vote in Israel. It would end the jewish state. You have to get to a practical solution. So, honestly, the number one person blocking it now is Netanyahu. It's not even. That's obvious. That's. That doesn't take a lot of courage to say that. He says publicly, I don't want a palestinian state. I'm against a two state solution. He's been monstrous. He's one of the worst terrorists of my lifetime. So that's easy. The right wing of Israel has lost its mind. So the Smotrich and the Ben Guvier is openly talking about ethnic cleansing and driving them into other arab countries. I mean, this is the definition of ethnic cleansing. So. But is like, I know that the Arabs are going to take the deal. Saudi Arabia cannot wait to take the deal because they just want to get business going. Right.

Do you think Hamas takes the deal?

So I had ever solution where you don't need Hamas, but yes, Hamas would definitely take the deal. Hamas already publicly said that they would even get rid of that Israel doesn't have a right to exist. But there's so much propaganda in american media, it's maddening. Right. So. And this idea that you don't deal with Hamas is so dumb. So the reason it's dumb is you don't negotiate with your friends, you negotiate with your enemies. Well, I don't want to negotiate with them. I don't like them. Well, then you're not going to get to peace. Right. But still, there is a path that doesn't include Hamas. So make a deal with Fatah that runs the best West bank. Then they get. Right now, Fatah went into Gaza Strip, they wouldn't be able to manage it because they don't have enough credibility. They're mainly seen as in cahoots with the occupiers, whereas Hamas is hardcore and fighting against the occupiers. But if Fatah delivers a piece, not only a peace deal, but a palestinian state, then they come in as heroes. So you make the deal with them, you let them run the Gaza Strip, and you empower them to drive out Hamas.

That way they do your dirty work for you, in a sense. Right. But good, because Hamas is a terrorist organization. They're not helpful. And especially if the Palestinians get a state, the violence has to stop immediately. That's the whole point. The trade is you get a state, Israel gets safety and peace.

So no more rockets. That Israel.

No more rockets. If you do any other rockets when and Israel does the barbaric thing they just did, even I would say, hey, brother, we had a peace deal, okay? So if you violate a peace deal and you do a bomb, they're going to do a bomb, and their bomb is much larger. Okay? So that. And by the way, can it work? It already has worked. Israel already did it with Egypt. So Egypt was a hundred times Hamas, Egypt gathered all the arab armies and actually physically invaded Israel when Israel could lose. And they did it several times. And Lex, at the time, all not just the right, like the. The war hawks, but most people thought there's no way Egypt will keep that peace deal. Oh, they're suckers. We're giving back them the Sinai peninsula back, and then they're just gonna keep bombing and attacking us. There hasn't been a single bomb from Egypt since the peace deal. Peace deals work. War gets you more war. Peace deals get your peace. And, and if you should, never. This is true of all of life. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

So if you're saying, well, I'm not positive that a peace deal is going to be perfect and twelve more rockets might be fired, well, brother, what's, what do we have now, right? We have endless rockets. Now, if Israel is supposed to be a safe haven for Jews, and I get it and I want it, okay, then become a safe haven. The way that you're a safe haven is stop the occupation. It's not complicated. And the reason they're not, let's be honest, the reason the right wing government of Israel is not stopping the occupation is because they want to take more and more land. And so they have, throughout time, taken way more of the West bank than they had originally. And now Netanyahu is saying, I want a corridor at the, in the middle of Gaza and I want a corridor at the border of Egypt. Now we're back to occupying Gaza physically, let alone through power and etcetera.

So Bibi has to go.

Definitely.

What's the role of us in making a peace deal like that happen?

It's going to sound outlandish, but I can get you a ceasefire almost overnight if BB's gone. And because the israeli negotiators have said publicly, plea, not publicly, got leaked and it was in the israeli press, you have to give us a little bit of wiggle room. If you don't give us a little bit of wiggle room, obviously they're not going to do the deal. And he's like, I know, right? That's why he's not giving them the wiggle room. So don't ask for land in Gaza. Get the hell out of Gaza. You ceasefire. That's the easy part. So the hard part is the occupation. Ending the occupation. But even that, I can get it to you in two months as long as Israel actually wants a deal. So go to an election, get rid of Netanyahu, put in. You know Benny Gantz. Is Benny Gantz an angel? No. He's the one that ordered all the bombings of Gaza to begin with. Right? He's. Look, I. Benny Gantz has got massive war crimes on his record, so don't worry, he's not a softie. Okay. But he's not my favorite guy in the world, to say the least.

But Benny Gantz can do a peace deal if he wants to. So look, only one group of people can actually settle this, well, is actually two groups of people. One is the israeli population. You voted someone who wants to do a peace deal, you'll get a peace deal. Okay. Number two is the american president. So if I'm the american president, I'm saying a hypothetical, right, or any american president that actually wants to get a peace deal done, you just say, I'm going to cut the funding. Israel will do the deal immediately. They don't say they want to cut the funding because AIPAC gives them $100 million. It's not complicated. Not 1% complicated. Yeah. So, Lex, tell me this, okay? So if the US president said, I'm going to cut the funding, do you think that it might have a giant problem for Netanyahu? Might it hurt his government? Might they have to go to an election? Would israeli politicians, let alone the population, begin to really, really worry that they're going to lose an enormous source of funding and weapons and.

Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely. So why wouldn't we use our leverage? It's crazy not to use our leverage.

Yeah. And this is where we go back to the steel man of Trump. It feels like he's the only one crazy enough to. To use that leverage. By crazy, I mean good kind of sense, bold enough, not giving a shit about convention, not giving a shit about pressures and money and influence and all that kind of stuff.

Yes, but with the biggest asterisks in the history of the world, which is 12% chance he does that, and that's great, but in huge chance he does the opposite and he goes, let's call it 80 again. 80%. Oh, yeah. Miriam wanted me to give Israel to West bank. To Israel. So you have it, guys. Now you just occupy the whole thing forever. Okay? A giant war. Oh, yeah. I'm going to prove how tough I am. I'm going to nuke Iran. Oh, no, what are you doing? What are you doing? Like, it's. Trump is a massive risk. He's an enormous amount of risk. If you were running a company and not a country, would you hire Trump as your CEO? Everyone watching just screamed inside their heads, no. Okay. You would never take that kind of risk with your company. You got an 80% chance the guy's going to blow up the company. You. No way. No way. And you know it, too. If you're. Especially if you're a businessman, you know, you're not going to hire that loose cannon to run your company. It's. It's unacceptable risk. But you're not wrong. We talked about it earlier, but as part of that risk, there's a sliver in there that he could accidentally do the right thing.

We talked a lot about hope in this conversation, zooming out. What gives you hope about the future of this whole thing of humanity, not just the United States of us, humans on earth.

So why am I center left and not center right? It gets to that question. So you look at the polling, not just here in America, but in almost any country, and it almost always breaks out to two thirds of one third, right? Two thirds of the people say, let's be empathetic, let's share, let's be, let's do equality, justice, let's be fair, right? One third goes, no, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me. Okay? That's just the nature of humanity. And so, and usually the same third goes, no change. And the other two thirds go, well, some change, because if you don't do any change, you're never going to get to the right answer. For the wisdom of the crowd to work, for free markets to work, for everything to work, you have to keep changing because the times change and the culture changes and the situation changes. That's why there's amendments in the constitution, because you need to be able to change the document from time to time. Be careful with it, right? But you need to allow for an avenue for change. So now, why does the one third keep winning in so many different places?

Because they have more money and power. And by the way, if you're more selfish, you're more likely to get more money and power. Right? And I wish that weren't the case, but it is. And these are not blanket rules. They're on average. So that third winds up winning in so many circumstances. But the bottom line is we are a species that requires consent. So, I mean, I'm a stone cold atheist, so. So I don't think we're kind of like apes. I think we are apes, okay? And so, and all the scientists out there are going, well, of course we are. Everyone else is going, that's crazy. Okay? So when you look at it as a species, different species react in different ways. Snakes have no empathy because it's not in their DNA. They. And that's why we have a sense of what a snake does, right? So for good news is for higher level apes like us, bonobos, chimpanzees and humans, we all roughly want consent. So a chimpanzee, for example, who has a violent, you know, reputation, and they are violent. And unfortunately, we're pretty close to them. But what people don't know is a leader doesn't win through violence, especially for bonobos.

They leave. They win by picking lice off of other chimpanzees, by going and doing favors, going to a hunt, getting food, and giving it to someone else. Because what they're gathering is the consent of the governed, and that's how you become the alpha. You don't do it through physical dominance. You do through consent. So that's how we're hardwired. That's in our DNA. That two thirds, in the long run, will win. And that. And we will have empathy. We will have change. And that's the hope that we're all looking for.

Hope has got the numbers, it seems like.

Yeah. And, in fact, one more thing, Lex. Look at history. Hope and change always win. And so, again, conservatives don't catch feelings. There is a need for conservatives because you have to balance things out. If you just had, even though wonderful two thirds, that still wouldn't be the ideal system. You need. You need a Winston Churchill. If you're in the middle of world war two, you need someone to say, regulating, you know, six inspections of the elevators is too many. Right? So you need that balance. And conservatives have a role, and it's a really important role. But having said that, they're assigned to losing throughout history because they're fighting on losing ground. A conservative says, no change, but the world is constantly changing, so they're destined to lose. That's why the founding fathers won against the british monarchy. That's why the civil rights movement won. They didn't win overnight. It took them a hundred years to get equal rights, let alone pass slavery. Right? So we won on women's rights. We won on gay rights. We keep winning. But every snapshot in, in time makes it feel like we're losing. There's a bad guy in charge.

We aren't living under corporate rule, etcetera. But in the long tide of history, change always wins. So the empathetic, generally speaking, left wing. But again, don't worry about the titles, right? People get obsessed with the labels. The two thirds, that's empathetic. That includes a lot of right wingers. Right. You win at the end in history every single time. So we fight forward. We, we, we're tough when we need to be. We need that willpower to win any fight, right? But we're civil and respectful to the other side because they are us. So, progressives all the time. And we say, look, and I, this is like the ending of my book, which is we for conservatives. You have a lot of empathy for inside the wagons. So conservatives are great to their family, generally speaking, to their community, to their church, to anyone that's inside the wagons. But they have, they set up electric fences and barbed wire around their wagons. So if you're on the outside, you're the others and you're going to get electrified and it's constantly right. And so I like to think the left wing has wider wagons. So we view the world as more us and not you.

But the good news of that is if we win, we're not going to do Medicare for only the left, we're going to do Medicare for all. You're all going to get universal healthcare, we're going to do higher wages for all. The right wing is not going to be left out. And if we're. And Lex, I can tell you a fun story. It's about my family and I'm sure that parts of it are apocryphal because it's from like 500 years ago, but it gives you a sense of the old Mark Twain quote, if it's really Mark Twain's of change happens really gradually and then all of a sudden. So my mom's last name in Turkish is Yawasha. It means slowly. It's a weird name even in Turkish. And so one day we're walking past the mosque in Istanbul when I'm a kid and it says on the mosque, yavasha, we're like, what is this? Okay, so it's a small little mosque. We go inside and my dad starts asking their mom questions, okay? So he says, why is the true, why is the mosque name that? And he said, well, do you don't know? And he said, because my dad said, my mom, my wife's name is, last name is Yahwasha.

He's like, oh my God. And he's like, your ancestor was the admiral of the ottoman navy when they conquered Constantinople. Okay, so grandpa from 5600 years ago came up with the idea. So you can't ever conquer Constantinople because there's a giant chain in the, underneath the Bosphorus. All the ships get stuck on the chain. There's cannons on both sides. Half the ancient navies in the world are at the bottom of the Bosphorus, right? So hasn't been conquered in over a thousand years. Nobody thinks it can be conquered. Grandpa comes up with the idea of why don't we build giant wooden planks over land and grease them and pass our fleet overland onto the other side? Everybody goes. Because whenever anybody proposes a new idea, no matter how logical it is, they go. It's impossible. No way it's going to work. Oh, you're crazy. This is an unconquerable city. What are you guys even doing? Every day, mammoth the conqueror comes up to grandpa and says, all right, how's your plan to do this project going? And grandpa says, slowly. And he names them commander. Slowly.

Yeah.

And one night, after the whole thing's done, they pass the entire ottoman fleet over the land, wind up in the middle of the Bosphorus, and the Holy Roman empire concedes they surrender because change happens really gradually, and then all of a sudden.

Good story. Well, Cenk, thank you for fighting for that change for many years now, for over two decades now. And thank you for talking today.

Appreciate it, Lex, thank you for having the conversation.

Thanks for listening to this conversation with Cenkar. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Hannah Arendt. Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely through the state and a machinery of violence. Thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in the apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.