#2367 - Jesse Welles

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out!

The Joe Rogan Experience.

Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.

Cheers, sir.

Cheers to you.

Nice to meet you, man.

Good to meet you.

I've enjoyed your songs.

How did you uh well first of all, how long you been doing music?

Um, I think

most of my life, you know.

Um

Did you grow up in a musical family, or is it just something you picked up on your own?

No, I

everyone

worked and made art when they weren't working.

Oh, okay.

But, uh,

no music, really.

But that I I liked I liked music.

Like, what kind of art did your family do?

Like, my mom would always paint.

She put, like, murals on the on the walls of the house and stuff.

And my old man's a mechanic.

Um

and he would be tinkering around

making all sorts of fun stuff, usually with his welder and whatnot.

So I mean they were I felt like they were artistic folks, you know,

but they didn't they didn't necessarily do music.

You know, they're smarter than that.

And so

I only know of you from the videos that you put up on Instagram.

And specifically, I think it was the United Healthcare guy was the first first one, right?

Which was really good, dude.

The lyrics, and the timing of it all, you captured the moment.

And that song to me was like, yeah, that's what the fuck is going on.

That's what's really going on.

They don't give a shit about you, and they're just trying to make money.

And

that's why when this guy got shot, there was this reaction from people.

Yeah.

Which is very rare when someone gets assassinated, when people celebrate.

Right.

When someone's not like a mass murderer or something.

It was bizarre.

It was bizarre.

I mean, it must mean something is up.

If people are celebrating

somebody's death.

Yes.

Something is wrong.

And all kinds of across both sides of the aisle.

It's not a political thing.

It is a human thing.

They're like, these people, they take your fucking money, you pay them.

And then when something comes up, you don't get covered.

And there doesn't seem to be any repercussions.

And to fight it, you have to go to court.

And you usually don't have the money to go to court and they have a lot of fucking money right and they you know have been doing this for a long time and now they're using ai

to make sure that they pay less so they're using ai to approve cases and the the numbers are even lower than they were before so united healthcare always had a lower number than industry standard right yeah now it's even with with ai they're going to be able to chop it down to even lower it's like what at what point in time does this become against the law like at what point in time is this, like,

it's a con game.

Like, you're paying, you're thinking you're going to get covered.

And they're like, nah.

The system would have to be revolutionized.

I mean, you can't have health for profit at that point.

You'd have to socialize the medicine at some point.

Which I agree with, up until a point.

The problem is human nature.

And, like, if you, like, if you hurt your...

shoulder and you want to get you need to get an operation on your shoulder you want to go to a guy who does the lakers you know what i mean You want to go to a guy who is like, this motherfucker is the cream of the crop.

He is dialed in.

He's been doing this forever.

He's super focused and motivated.

And he drives a fucking Mercedes, right?

And the reason why he drives a Mercedes, he makes a lot of money doing what he's doing.

You don't want someone to not feel appreciated, not have...

the motivation to

continue to get really great at their craft.

Like there's

a thing with just human beings.

There's a financial motivation that people have because it's a quantitative thing.

You could see it on a ledger.

You know that you're making more money because you're doing this and you're working harder and you're getting this reward, whether or not it makes sense or not.

As soon as you eliminate that and everybody gets the same amount of money and everything, and then

you lose all the killers.

You lose all the.

All I mean is that you just don't want to have to go to an urgent care and it costs $500 to get a pack of hands.

100%.

Well, that's a giant scam.

So, and but that's that's a scam that so many folks are stuck in, you know?

that's only part of the scam.

You know the healthcare scam, it goes so deep.

There's so many different layers to this fucking horrible den of vampires.

Right.

You know, because it's whenever you can make profit off of people and you're involved in a corporation and then the corporation has an interest

for its stockholders want more money every year.

They want more money every quarter.

So that's what they try to do.

That's their focus.

And when you're doing that with people's lives and people's health, like that, that should be illegal.

That's where it gets fucked.

I suppose that's why folks were.

You know,

it was upsetting to see.

You know, I felt like I actually had kind of an unpopular opinion about it.

And that

why are we celebrating somebody's death?

Like, that seems far out.

To celebrate the murder of somebody with a gun?

Not only that, I believe unrelated to him in his case.

Like,

I mean, how far out is that?

And so I have I didn't want

you know, I'd I make I make these tunes, but that one in particular, I was like, how do I even

how do I address this?

What do you even say?

So that I so how do you approach something like that?

Do you sit down with a pad and pen or do you start writing?

Like, how do you how do you do start singing?

Step one is avoid the work.

So

I went

for

some long jogs.

I wrote a song about

Amazon instead and put up like Amazon is Santa Claus.

And I kept sitting there and it kept getting, you know, the situation was snowballing with the United Healthcare.

thing and I was like, okay, you gotta write.

And at that point, it's it's a research project.

Let's write 2,000 words so that we can have 300 to sing and boil down the essence of the issue and make it rhyme and

put a jolly tune behind it.

That's really

how that goes about.

That sounds like super similar to stand-up comedy.

Yeah, I think.

You can boil it down.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Get everything.

and you don't

it's just punchlines.

So find the punchline of everything.

Find the punchline of everything.

I never had the attention span to tell too much of a story or anything like that.

So I like I I like just keeping it in punchlines.

So I always like mit you know, Mitch Hedberg and Stephen Wright

at we're so good at that.

Just come out and lay out a bunch of punchlines immediately.

If one doesn't land on to the next one.

Well, they their whole that was the daunting thing about their act, which is so impressive, is that it's all non-sequiturs.

So every subject is new.

Every time they open their mouth, it's a new subject.

Right.

Which is kind of crazy.

It's a crazy way to do comedy.

Yeah.

But when you're an absurdist, it's probably the best way because it's an absurd way to think, right?

You're just going from one subject to the next in each minute burst.

Yeah.

Somebody asked me if I want a frozen banana and I said no, but I want a regular banana later, so yes.

Yeah.

That's like such a ridiculous joke.

I used to love listening to him in particular when I was in traffic because it would like chill me out.

Like if I was headed to the airport in LA and it was just fucking cluster fuck on the highway, I'd just throw on some Mitch Hedberg and just start giggling.

It was just silly.

You know?

He's one of the coolest.

He was awesome.

He was awesome.

He was awesome.

Let's play that song.

Jamie, can you find that one?

The United Healthcare song?

I want to play it so people know what we're talking about.

Only 2% of people in the winter sputter.

So if you get sick, pray to God for help.

Cause your doctor's got to pray to United Health.

Way back in 77, Mr.

Richard T.

Burke started buying HMOs, putting federal grants to work and 50 billion buckaroos.

Last year, the warrant buffet of health, the Jeff Bezos a fear.

Now CEOs come and go and want just went.

The ingredients you got, bake the cake you get.

But if you get sick, cross your fingers for luck.

Cause old Richard T.

Burke ain't giving a buck.

Commoditize health, monopolize fraud.

Here's the doctors we own and the research we bought.

They own the pharmacies and a lot of the meds.

They should start buying graves to sell us when we're all dead.

There ain't no you in United Health.

There ain't no me

in the company.

There ain't no us in the private just.

There's hardly humans in humanity.

There's hardly humans in humanity.

This episode is brought to you by by the farmer's dog.

I think we can all agree that eating highly processed food for every meal isn't optimal.

So why is processed food the status quo for dog food?

Because that's what kibble is, an ultra-processed food.

But a healthy alternative exists, the farmer's dog.

They make fresh food for dogs.

And what does it look like?

Real meat and vegetables that are gently cooked to retain vital nutrients and help avoid any of the bad stuff that comes with ultra-processing.

And it's not just random ingredients thrown together.

Their food is formulated by on-staff board certified vet nutritionists.

These people are experts on dog nutrition and they're all in on fresh food.

The farmer's dog also does something unique.

They portion out the food to your dog's nutritional needs.

This ensures that you don't overfeed them, making weight management easy.

Research shows that dogs kept at a healthy weight can live up to two and a half years longer.

Head to thefarmersdog.com/slash Rogan to get 50% off your first box plus free shipping.

This offer is for new customers only.

This episode is brought to you by Squarespace.

Have you ever been shopping online and the website just gave you the ick?

Let me tell you, that wouldn't happen if they used Squarespace.

Squarespace design intelligence empowers anyone to build beautiful, more personalized websites tailored to your unique needs.

And with Squarespace payments, it's super easy to manage payments with just a few clicks plus with Squarespace's integrated and optimized SEO tools there's all the help you need to get people to your site head to squarespace.com slash Emma for a free trial and use code Emma to save 10% on your first purchase fuck yeah dude that's a great song that's a great song and it's interesting to me how few people are doing what you're doing.

I don't know of anyone else.

I'm sure there probably is a few people out there that I miss, but I don't know of anybody else who takes things that are in the zeitgeist, these big stories that come up and turns them into a catchy tune and does it in a way where you laid out

really the problem and the whole thing, like you said, in punchlines.

Yeah.

You know,

there's a lot of folks doing it right now and

more every day.

But there was, I mean, there's a precedent for that kind of work.

Um,

especially as far as like Woody Woody Guthrie was really

the

I was reading, I was reading a Woody Guthrie biography,

um,

and uh

my old man was in the hospital, he had just had a heart attack, and we didn't we didn't know like what way it was gonna go or whatever.

Anyway, I don't know, just seeing him all hooked up to that stuff and thinking if he were,

if he died,

I've hardly had any time to even know him.

He's hardly had any time to know anything.

We don't get very long down here.

And I'm reading this Woody Guthrie biography, and I was just like, oh,

I'm going to do...

I'm going to do this.

I'm going to

sing the news.

Because that's really what Woody

was kind of doing in his day.

Because there's folk music around him, and he'd team up with Pete Seeger, and he was on radio programs, and he could have played.

He had the choice.

He could have played standards.

He could have played country western music and stuff like that.

But he liked making folks laugh, and he liked telling it how it was.

I like both those things.

I saw Woody Guthrie live when I was a little kid in San Francisco.

Arlo or Woody?

I think Woody.

Which one was alive back then?

Was it Arlo?

Yeah, Woody died.

Okay, so it must have been Arlo.

So it was 19.

Let me guess the year.

I was 11.

Yeah.

So maybe, yeah.

10 or 11.

Yeah.

No, it was San Francisco, so it had to be...

I lived there until I was 11.

So it was probably around 9 or 10.

Now that I think about it.

But yeah, he performed live.

God, I wish I could remember more of it.

I mean,

Arlo played this kind of...

he went a little more surreal with it, which is super groovy.

But

he carried, you know, he carried on the torch for his old man.

So, what he died in what year?

67.

67.

Yeah.

He got a Huntington's disease and was laid up in a home for quite a while.

He lost the ability to speak.

What is Huntington's disease?

Some rare genetic disorder.

I don't really know what it does other than,

yeah, look, he was pretty young.

Breakdown of nerve cells in the brain.

Yeah.

His mother also suffered from the same illness.

Yeah.

So what causes that?

You know, why do I have a feeling?

Maybe not.

Why do I have a feeling there's some environmental toxin involved?

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know what I'm saying?

He was sitting next to, he was in East Palestine.

Pennsylvania?

No way.

No, no.

I'm kidding.

You're joking.

But, I mean, well, obviously it's a different time, but there's so many parts of the country that have been polluted by industrial waste.

Right.

There's so much horrible shit out there.

I mean, maybe he was riding on trains and boxcars and stuff.

There's no telling what they were hauling around and that sort of thing.

But he, you know, he played the political tunes.

He

really...

I don't...

And maybe he's a continuation of

a long-standing human tradition of like bards

going from town to town and singing the news.

I don't know, maybe there was some medieval dude going around singing about the king, you know, and I don't remember, but maybe, maybe, maybe there was just because I don't, I, like, I don't know if it's a uniquely American tradition, but

when I do it, I like to, I get romantic about it and kind of think of it as a uniquely American tradition because you got the freedom to do it, and no one's gunning me down in the field there or anything for anything I say, you know.

know, so I get to,

you know, yeah, that's why I doubt if anybody was ever doing anything the way you do it when they were doing it for about the king.

Just like

the knights go hunt him down or something.

Yeah, maybe a few guys tried, but I bet they killed him.

Or maybe you hired,

you co-opted the bard.

You turned him into your fool, your jester, or whatever.

And then he sang songs for you about how fat the neighbor king was.

I think that's a different guy.

I'd think you're dealing with a different guy.

The guy who is the jester.

That's the fucking vampire familiar.

You know?

You know?

Like in Blade, the guys will get close to the vampires because they eventually one day want to be a vampire.

They promised it.

Who is in the Lord of the Rings?

Who was like Theoden's dude?

Worm tongue or something?

Anyway.

I don't remember.

I don't remember.

People very close.

But

that's always the Dracula story.

There's always a familiar.

There's always a human that does the bidding of the vampire.

Oh, that guy.

Yeah, perfect.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Same kind of guy.

Fucking creep with a

questionable hard drive.

Did he

was he in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest?

Was he?

God, that seems weird.

Billy Babbitt.

He would be so old.

Yeah.

One flow over the cuckoo's nest.

Was it 67 or something?

It was a long time ago.

I mean, but was it...

Yeah, that guy's been in everything.

That's him now?

Oh, not now.

That's him now.

Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

Yeah.

Isn't that crazy?

Time is such a motherfucker.

Okay.

He was in One Flow Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Far out.

Oh, wow.

75.

Yeah.

75.

That's a great fucking movie, too.

Yeah.

That's an eye-opening movie about healthcare.

Speaking of which.

Well,

yeah,

in an era of sanatoriums, you know, and stuff where you.

Right.

And then people glorify that as like, we need more mental health institutes.

That's why there's so many homeless people on the street.

I'm like,

have you ever been?

We definitely need more mental health.

100% of those people need care, but do they need the kind of care that they were getting?

Before they were released on the street when they were giving people electroshock therapy and fucking cooking their brains.

Those, at least whatever's going on in one floor of the cookie's nest is essentially a prison.

Yeah.

Well, they're all with electroshock therapy.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

And lobotomies.

Until, like, 67.

Yeah.

They were just cooking people's brains with a wand, getting in there and scrambling up your brain.

It's, it's so.

Dude, they did lobotomies for decades.

Yeah.

Decades.

Until enough people had their loved ones turned into zombies that they were like, hey, maybe we should probably fucking stop that.

Didn't they lobotomize

Kennedy?

Yep.

Apparently, she was just wild.

Yeah.

That's all it was.

Well, first of all,

lobotomized.

I don't know if you, yeah, probably.

Yeah, I mean, first of all, the men were wild.

She was wild sexually.

Is that part of the accusation that she was very promiscuous?

They had a problem with her, and they wanted her to calm down, so they fucking scrambled her brains.

And apparently, she became non-functional.

Like, they really kind of they, you know, they dialed it up to 10.

So, and that was it for her.

This is the part of the show where I talk about AG-1, which I've done for years.

And usually, I like to talk about routine.

And don't get me wrong, because routine is super important.

And AG-1 is exactly the kind of daily, easy routine that can help you feel healthy and help you get the nutrients that your body needs.

But even if you love a routine, isn't it nice to switch it up a little?

Well, here we go.

After 15 years of the original, AG1 has introduced three new flavors, tropical, berry, and citrus.

It's still daily, it's still routine, but it's no longer one flavor fits all.

And honestly, the best part is that's the only thing that's changed.

Besides new flavors, we're talking about the same science, the same 75 plus ingredients, and the same exact benefits.

I partnered with AG1 for so long because they're committed to constantly improving.

And now that includes offering three new flavors.

Subscribe today and choose tropical, citrus, berry, or the classic original variety.

If you use my link, you'll also get a free bottle of AG D3K2, an AG1 welcome kit, and five AG1 travel packs with your first subscription.

Just go to drinkag1.com/slash Joe Rogan or head to the link in the description to get started with AG1 and try the new flavors yourself.

That's drinkag1.com/slash Joe Rogan.

When Kennedy was 23, doctors doctors told her father lobotomy would help calm her mood swings and stop her occasional violent outbursts.

23.

So Joe Sr.

decided, 23, decided that Rosemary should have a lobotomy.

However, he did not inform his wife, oh my God, until after the procedure was completed.

The procedure took place in November of 1941.

Sins of the Father in the book, 1996 biography.

James W.

Watts, who carried out the procedure with Walter Freeman, both of George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences, described to Kessler as follows.

After Rosemary was mildly sedated, we went through the top of her head, Dr.

Watts recalled.

I think she was awake.

She had a mild tranquilizer.

I made a surgical incision in the brain through the skull.

It was near the front.

It was on both sides.

We just made a small incision, no more than an inch.

The instruments Dr.

Watts used looked like a butter knife.

He swung it up and down to cut brain tissue.

We put an instrument inside, he said, as Dr.

Watts cut.

Dr.

Freeman asked Rosemary some questions.

For example, he asked her to recite the Lord's Prayer or sing God Bless America or to count backward.

We made an estimate on how far to cut based on how she responded.

When Rosemary

began to become incoherent, they stopped.

What a tragedy.

Holy cow.

Yeah.

Scroll back up.

Go back up.

Scroll up so I can hear it.

How many folks were getting these?

The nuns of the Covenant thought that Rosemary might become involved with sexual partners and that she could contract a sexually transmitted disease or become pregnant.

Her occasionally erratic behavior frustrated her parents.

So she got expelled from summer camp and she was staying, it says, and staying only for a few months at a Philadelphia boarding school.

Kennedy was sent to a convent school in Washington, D.C.

Kennedy began sneaking out of the convent school at night.

The nuns in the convent thought that she might be involved with sexual partners and that she might get an STD or become pregnant.

And so then they decided to give her a fucking lobotomy.

Imagine that.

You send a young, healthy girl to a convent with a bunch of fucking creepy nuns and she just like breaks out in the middle of the night, like go to hang out with her friends or go meet up with a guy or fucking something.

And so they go, well, the solution to this is cut her brain

and have her talk until she can't talk anymore.

And then we know when to stop cutting.

That's insane.

Meanwhile, Kennedy's got his

running his escapades.

Oh, yeah, they all were.

The father was.

I don't know whether it's true or not true because we used to say it, and then there's been things disputing it.

But of course, who knows how much money is involved in this in the first place?

But supposedly, Kennedy Sr.

was involved in illegal liquor during the time where there was prohibition in this country.

I thought he was a mobster.

He definitely knew some people, which was what helped his son win Illinois.

Yeah.

It's just like, I don't know what's true and what's not true in terms of him being a moonshine runner, but it tracks, you know, and the whole family.

Seems like an incredibly lucrative business to get into during Prohibition.

I don't know who

wouldn't be running liquor.

Especially when you can control the police, you know, especially when you had money and you were involved and you had your foot dipped in all sorts of organized crime.

And, you know,

then you had souped up NASCAR cars that they were using to drive those sort of NASCAR.

Yeah, I guess that's the roots of.

Yeah.

So

if it weren't for Joe, we wouldn't have had wouldn't have had Dale.

Right?

Wouldn't have had

the loop.

Yeah, it's

just

a crazy practice that they did for a long, long time just to get rid of people that were a problem.

So what's the modern lobotomy?

What are we doing right now that we're going to read on wiki or you know whatever?

Well, there's probably a few of them.

15.

Probably quite a few.

Holy cow.

I'm sure gender transition for children.

I'm sure that's going to be on that list.

Or taking,

I don't know, like

prescribing benzos and stuff.

Oh, that's going to be on that list for sure.

You know,

just like a chemical lobotomy.

Well, benzo doesn't give you a chemical lobotomy, but it does make you 100% hooked on it.

Yeah, well, it's just the diffic the the stress you would undergo getting out of the addiction, you might never

you might never come come back fully or get your life all the way back after an addiction like that.

Well, I know several people that have had that problem, and it is a real struggle.

Right.

Like Jordan Peterson has publicly talked about it.

It took him over a year to recover physically just from being addicted.

And that's actually going to rehabs and stuff like that.

There's a lot of folks, most folks, they ain't going

nowhere.

They get off it and then drink themselves to death or do cocaine or do something else.

Yeah,

find something else.

Or the psychiatrist puts you on some new kind of pills to satisfy whatever the fuck was wrong with you in the first place.

You can get off one and hop over to the other.

Uh-huh.

Yeah.

Go back and forth.

It's a real problem.

And when someone gets on that ride, it's hard to get off.

It's hard to get off to take this pill to fix it ride yeah that ride is a very popular ride yeah i

i mean

folks like having a

having a doctor tell them it's all right you know i guess it's like a

it's like if they get it there

an authority figure told them it's all good to take this pill you know or whatever not only that with especially with benzos especially in the early days nobody even told them that it was almost impossible to get off of.

I mean,

a patient kind of figure that out pretty quick.

Well, they don't because they keep taking it, right?

You keep taking it because you're addicted to it.

If you

forget a dose,

you start feeling those withdrawals come in, you know?

Well, apparently, with

find this out if this is true.

Apparently, one of the things about benzodiazepine is that it alleviates anxiety, but if you stop taking it, your anxiety maybe even elevates past where it was

before you first took it.

Oh, yeah.

So there's like a slingshot effect.

As I was saying, when you get off of anything, all sorts of stuff rattles loose in your head, man.

For sure.

For sure.

And

everything gets worse for a period of time.

But what I was going to get at is it's one of the few where you could die if you get off of it.

Right.

It's like that and alcohol.

Those are like the two things, right?

So here it is.

During early withdrawal, an individual may experience a return of anxiety and insomnia symptoms as the brain rebounds without the drugs.

But it doesn't say

a rebound.

How long does it last?

Many people stop taking these medications, experience increased anxiety or restlessness, referred to as rebound anxiety.

Rebound effects from benzo withdrawal, such as anxiety or insomnia, typically last two to three days.

I don't think that's true.

I don't think that's true.

I mean, the insomnia itself is

enough to cause all sorts of different things.

Yeah.

How long does benzo?

Benzo belly.

What is that?

Benzobelli

can depend.

Is it like a diarrhea?

Such as the type of dose of benzo the.

What does it mean?

Industrial belly.

Some people experience.

What does it say?

What does it say it is?

Benzobelli.

What to know?

Put that on.

Common side of.

Oh, cramps.

Yeah, gastrointestinal symptoms.

Oh, well, you're

fucking poisoning your inside.

It's a pepto list.

Your body's like, what are you doing?

Oh, look at you could get nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pain, bloating, ingestion.

You know how they do that at the end of the commercial?

Yeah.

Indigestion, loss of appetite, constipation, weight loss,

bloody diarrhea.

You might want to die.

That's the craziest ones.

When the side effects of antidepressants are suicide.

Yeah.

There ain't no you

and United.

They make, they make.

Folks are making money.

As long as they keep the money rolling in.

Yeah, as long as they keep mushrooms illegal.

There's a lot of things that could be fixed in a very natural way that people have been doing for thousands of years that you can't do.

At least in Texas, they opened up Ibogaine again.

So that's new.

Where, you know, they're going to do these, they've done them so far, these trials with soldiers.

And it's super effective, man, especially for getting off drugs.

Yeah.

Like, really, really, really effective.

Like 80% for one dose.

And in the 90s for two dose, people just quit pills, quit everything, quit drinking, whatever's amazing, whatever's fucking with you.

Yeah, yeah, there's natural tools out there to figure out, like people get in patterns, right?

They get in these terrible behavior patterns, and they don't know why, they don't know how to get out of them, they keep falling into them because they're like tightly grooved into the way you think.

Yeah, and unless you can leave for a moment the connection that you have to this existence where you're completely continually trapped by your patterns unless you can leave and look at those patterns you just you're just fighting against so much gravity and so much momentum and and and then whatever you're the life that you've chosen the path you know you're around the same people you're there's so many things that make it very difficult to really change your life outside of escaping briefly and getting a look at it from you know some so does like ivogain like like smooth out all the ruts Ibogaine, so I've never done it, so I can't really speak to this, but from the people that have done it, what they explain that it does, first of all, it actually stops physical addiction.

Somehow, they don't totally understand how it's doing this, but it stops

physical addiction and sort of rewires the way your brain, and for lack of a better term, looks at addiction.

It also is...

It's not a drug that you could abuse recreationally.

Apparently, it's not a fun time.

And it's a 24-hour 24-hour experience.

And this 24-hour experience.

Is it psychedelic?

Yes.

And this 24-hour experience is essentially a review of your life and showing you, like, you remember this happened, and these guys beat you up after school, and then that sent you down this road, and then this is why you think about this.

And it, like, lays out why you're in all these different fucked-up patterns in your life.

Do you have a like a spirit guide?

I don't know.

I don't know.

I mean, I think it's.

I've gained counsel.

you mean while you're doing it yeah yes yeah yeah yeah they they have centers what is the place called in Mexico that

former Republican governor Rick Perry is an advocate of this right and he went to that is it beyond B-E-O-N-D

they have to they've for a longest time they've been doing these things down in Mexico because it's legal there right does ayahuasca do something similar yes that's a lot of people go down to Costa Rica and do that or there's certain churches that have a religious exemption in America.

Right.

Which is wild.

What?

What?

You can go to church and really meet Jesus.

Yeah,

like for real, for real.

Utah or Wyoming and New Mexico, you know, places like that.

It's like, you know, somewhere where, like, well, how many followers you got?

You got 1,400?

All right, well, don't get too big.

I've been to a church in a couple basements.

Really?

Well, you know, the weird thing is if anybody wants to start a new church now, like, good luck.

They'll crawl up your fucking ass with a microscope.

Like, if you want to start a new church now, it better be a Christian church.

Like, you better be following the same religions that people have been following for thousands and thousands of years.

Because if you try to cook up a new religion today, they will waco you, son.

They will fucking.

Well, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean.

You get a good following.

Religions.

They get weirder and weirder.

I don't, like, in America, they get weirder and weirder kind of the more west we went, the more we manifest destinied out.

You have like Puritan pilgrims

land and, you know, in New England,

and the weirdest of them move a little bit more west, or they just go to the Quakers just go to like Nantucket, you know, they'll be on an island and be isolated.

But, you know, eventually, in about a hundred years, you've got Mormons.

Yep.

You know?

And then

give it another hundred-something year.

Then you got Scientology out in California.

Yep.

Right?

Have you seen American Primeval?

No.

The Netflix series?

No.

Really good.

Really good.

And it's about, you know, the settling of the West, but a big part of it is the Mormons.

Right.

And how fucking gangster the Mormons.

We think of Mormons as being like these really sweet people.

Uh-uh.

No.

Not back then.

No, no, no, no.

Nothing was in the West, man.

Yeah.

It was death incarnate.

Like, I don't know.

I imagine it like Blood Meridian, like McCarthy's, McCarthy's book, where basically,

you know, it follows the story of this kid who goes on a scalping mission, you know, where their job is to go down into Guadalajara and then come up in through the States.

And they just, they scalp pretty much everyone they meet indiscriminately and then take those scalps back for dough.

It's like, you know, for a bounty.

Which is crazy.

How much is the scalp worth?

I don't know.

Imagine that.

You just find some dude who's like

fucking

taking care of a lawn or something like that.

I take that over on the bottom of

my scalp.

Some people live.

Grow back.

Yeah, yeah.

These people that lived.

Yeah, it's really crazy.

I've seen that picture as like someone had been.

Guy had a top hat on over this giant

wound over the top of his head, which I wonder how long he lived because he basically had like an open

skull

facing the earth.

I guess you play dead while it's going to be dead.

Maybe they just let him live.

I don't know, man.

This episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter.

There is such a thing as having too many options to choose from, like when you're scrolling on the TV trying to find something to watch, or...

Have you been to one of those ice cream shops where they have hundreds of different toppings to choose from?

It's overwhelming.

The same thing can happen when you're hiring and you get inundated with applications.

Well, it's time to stop stressing and use ZipRecruiter instead.

Their innovative resume database can help you find and connect with the best people for your role.

Try it for free now at ziprecruiter.com slash Rogan.

What makes ZipRecruiter's resume database so special is the advanced filtering feature.

You can use it to hone in on exactly what you're looking for from the hundreds of thousands of resumes that are uploaded monthly to the site.

And when you find a potential candidate, you can unlock their contact info instantly.

Skip the candidate overload.

Streamline your hiring with ZipRecruiter.

See why four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day.

Just go to this exclusive web address, ziprecruiter.com slash Rogan.

Again, right now,

try it for free.

Again, that's ziprecruiter.com slash Rogan.

ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire.

Chihuahua's bounty program

offered fortune seekers 150 to 200 Mexican pesos for each Apache, depending on age and sex.

Men worth 50 pesos more than women and children, and children.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Today that equates to about $8,200 per scalp.

Yeah.

Which is far more than most prospectors would ever make in the California goldfields.

$8,000 per scalp.

That's crazy.

Yeah.

How many people, just innocent people, that just happened to have dark hair got scalped?

And

oh, they would, like in McCarthy's book, at least, which it follows the Glanton gang, I'm pretty sure at times they kill some of their own gang.

I'm sure.

Just because they were dark-haired.

The most prolific of these operatives was an Irish-American named James Kirker, who led a massacre of more than 150 Apaches in 1846 and ultimately killed at least 320 Indians during his bounty hunting campaigns.

Scalp trade, $8,200 for scalps.

You imagine like if you, if you have a lawless country, which is essentially what the Wild West was.

And then you offer up $8,000 every time you kill a person.

Yeah.

Ooh, you can get rid of people quick.

And you're going to have the wildest of the wild are going to go out there and tame that land, man.

The craziest of the craziest.

Yeah.

And that's essentially.

Calls them out.

And that wasn't that long ago, man.

That's what's so crazy.

You know, we're talking about 150 years.

Like, what is it?

How long ago was it?

Not that long ago.

In California, scalp warfare eliminated nearly 90% of some tribal populations.

Holy fuck.

Were they doing that into the 1890s?

That's crazy.

Yeah.

That's 135 years ago.

How crazy is that?

It's pretty wild.

That's hard to believe.

Direct government support for bounty payouts.

Whoa.

Direct government support for bounty payouts with blunt calls for the extermination of tribes and mass murder of men, women, and children, provides an important new perspective on the question of genocide across the long arc of Euro-American interaction with Native communities.

The Apache scalp that FBI agents seize in 2022 is one of thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, that were taken, redeemed, displayed, and in rare cases like this one, preserved as a part of a long and gruesome history of scalp warfare.

So it was in an auction house?

That's how they found it?

Whoa!

FBI investigating Apache scalp seized from Fairfield Auction House.

The item was seized from the Poline Art Antiques and Auction House as part of an investigation into the illegal trafficking of human remains.

Whoa.

And like when

someone kept that.

When does the karma come in on this bloodshed that

founded

well?

I'm certain it did for the individuals involved.

I just wonder if it's generational, if these things,

if the universe will continue to sort itself out

over this time.

I think this is a very unique time for understanding people.

I think

we have to, you know, when people look at all the conflict and all the drama with human beings right now, you have to realize, like,

yes, yes, we could certainly live better lives, and

we can certainly have a better civilization than we have right now.

We can do better.

But we also have to realize what we're coming from.

Like, to make an adjustment from 1890 to 2025,

I mean, this is a big swing of this fucking battleship.

People were horrible all throughout human history.

And I think that's what we really have to come to grips with.

It's not just, I mean, we can go back to the Mongol invasions in the 19, what was it, what is your year 1200?

How long ago was that?

What year was that?

With the Mongols.

I think it was in the 1200s.

Yeah.

You know, I mean, the Inquisition.

We can go to World War I, World War II.

People were fucking horrible forever.

And it's just more people are talking about it now than ever before.

You know, you had universities in America, which were the anti-war movement started in the 1960s and the hippies, and they were starting to get acid and realize, like, there's more to life.

Like, this is bullshit.

The way our parents are living is bullshit.

They're miserable and they're going to die.

And

it takes a long time to turn this big-ass battleship around.

I think we have to give ourselves some understanding about the past and realize part of the reason why we're so fucked up today is like look what we come from right yeah look what we come from i know we can do better we definitely can do better we should do better we could we should have a way better life way better society but look where we come from right we come from madness yeah absolute chaos chaos and bloodshed my friends it's just the the ability that

a person has to sign off a person in the government say yeah okay give them some money so they go kill some indians indiscriminately.

Give them $8,000 per scalp and a little less for the women and children.

You know, 130 years ago, 140 years ago, 150 years ago, that's nothing, man.

That's nothing.

You know, that's your great-grandpa.

He was alive back then.

Hard to believe.

It's far out.

It really is, man.

I wonder if things are,

you know, probably seem a lot cleaner

as far as chaos and bloodshed now in the continental

US and the Union and stuff, but who

is sending folks to go do that abroad

to to protect the homeland, you know, under the under the auspices of

protecting the homeland.

Who's doing the exact same thing

as they were doing then, just in a different way?

Because

I really think

we stay this

as much as has changed, and we can measure that.

We totally can.

But I think also we stay the same,

you know.

Well, until we're forced to change.

Yeah.

Until something, or until we recognize the need to change collectively.

Yeah.

But there has to be a discussion of it.

It's not something that just organically happens.

You know?

I think of like,

do you ever see

this Hollywood, but Apocalypse Now?

Sure.

With Francis Ford Coppola, and he's got like Martin Sheen and Marlon Brando and

Dennis Hopper and Robert Duvall and all those cool cats and dope movie.

But

it's written on this

premise of a book that was written in

like 1899 by Joseph Conrad, like Heart of Darkness.

Oh, wow, it's that old.

And Heart of Darkness

was talking about

a conquest of, I believe, the Dutch, I'm not sure, into the Congo.

And

some

atrocities and stuff that were happening there, treating people as subhuman.

And I don't know if there I don't know if there was scalping or anything, but I think that there was slavery and that sort of thing.

But Coppola was able to adapt that and then put the Vietnam War as the new premise.

Going into,

I think Sheen's mission

in the movie at least was to go.

go upriver into

Cambodia or Laos, I'm not sure which,

and take out a rogue

U.S.

general who had basically enslaved a population of

indigenous there.

All that to say,

I wonder if, like, in Vietnam,

if the folks fighting out there felt like in that moment, in that moment where

you're killing somebody,

if you realize at that point that nothing has ever changed

and that this is this is

this is there's something prime evil in

man with this violence, that this violence is innate?

Or

is this violence innate?

Is this how folks are and there's no helping it and there's nothing that's ever going to change it?

Because you can get kind of cynical that way.

Or,

and I kind of tend on this more idealistic, and at times it seems naive or stupid to

have an ideal that folks

could live in harmony and peace without taking one another's lives, you know.

The problem is they've never done it before.

That's mind-boggling.

Mind-boggling.

Because it is in all.

I think it's

in a lot of us, deep down.

I don't...

Well, it has to be.

Because that's the only way we survived.

That's the only way we got to where we are today.

Right.

Because we existed before language, we existed before empathy, before we understood each other, before we can communicate.

So any being that you didn't know from somewhere else wanted what you had, and they would try to take it by force.

So the bigger, stronger ones survived, and that's why the best genetics kept going and going and going.

I mean, it was survival of the fittest.

It exists in nature and exists with humans.

And that's the basis of our DNA, unfortunately.

Like, that's how we started, right?

And so that the way it manifests itself today is fucking drone warfare and bombs and, you know,

dropping bunker busters out of B2s.

You know, that's what it is.

Or B12.

Is that what it is?

The B12?

What's the big one?

B-2.

B2?

Feels like it should be a bigger number.

It's because it looks like a spaceship.

You see how they they flew it over Putin?

Like, look at my dick, my flying dick.

You see, Trump did that when Putin was in Alaska.

They flew a bomber over his head.

Like, what are we doing?

Why are we fly?

Why are we flying the radar-resistant bomber over Putin's head?

It sounds like a show of force.

Look at my dude.

This is what these games.

But, like,

is it, yeah, I I just I

I wonder, is it within

humans

to

to exist in like in peace without without well, we certainly can

be done in small groups, right?

Like if you, me, and Jamie, I've said this before, but you know, about other guests, if we were on an island all together, we wouldn't lock each other up.

We wouldn't, we'd just

figure it out.

Like, yeah, okay, I'm gonna go fishing today.

We need firewood.

You wanna get the firewood?

firewood?

I'm gonna go for a long jog.

Okay, get that jog in, get your cardio in.

But you know what I'm saying?

Like, we wouldn't,

there's only a limited amount of us.

We wouldn't have a need to go to war.

And most war today is about resources.

Most war today is about controlling parts of the world where there's an infinite amount of money in the ground, whether it's oil or now it's rare earth minerals and stuff they need for batteries.

And that's what a lot of it is.

I mean, that's what a lot of the conflict is in this world, and that's gross.

It's scary, it's scary.

But if you ask the average person, like, what are the odds that there will be no more war in your lifetime?

And they'll say 0%.

Yeah, everyone will say 0%.

It's so far out.

It's just, I don't, like, I think,

you know, the folks that go to war, like if you

signed up and went to, and went to Iraq and, you know, and like oh

03, 06 or so, you know, and you're securing

or not maybe not Iraq, but you're going to Afghanistan and you're securing opium fields and stuff and you're out there, you're risking your life, you got the gun on

you are prepared to take somebody's life

but for but for what

and and like we need opium.

What do you ask for?

But we'll fight.

We'll fight.

We'll fight.

It seems like for the sake of

just for the sake of the hunt or something like that.

If you asked the soldiers when they were signing up, hey, do you want to go to Afghanistan and guard poppy fields?

They've been like, what?

No, I want to fight terrorism.

Right.

Motherfucker.

I want to stop the people that did 9-11 from doing it again.

That's why a lot of people signed up.

But then the reality kicks in once you're standing around poppy fields with a machine gun and you're like, oh,

oh, this is a scam.

You know, I don't know how much internet access they had while they were over there, but if they did and they ever Googled, what percentage of all heroin comes from Afghanistan?

The answer they would have got is 94%.

They would have been like, wait.

This episode is brought to you by Visible.

I want to let you in on something.

Your current wireless carrier does not want you to know about Visible because Visible is the ultimate wireless hack.

No confusing plans with surprise fees, no nonsense, just fast speeds, great coverage without the premium cost.

With visible, you get one-line wireless with unlimited data powered by Verizon's network for $25 a month, taxes and fees included.

Seriously, $25 a month flat.

What you see is what you pay.

No hidden fees on top of that.

Ready to see?

Join now and unlock unlimited data for just $25 a month on the Visible plan.

Don't think wireless can be so transparent?

So visible?

Well now you know.

Switch today at visible.com slash Rogan.

Terms apply.

See visible.com for plan features and network management details.

This episode is brought to you by Tocovas.

You can't have a good time in bad boots.

That's why you need Tocovas.

Tocovas crafts quality Western boots for everyone.

From generational ranchers and lifelong cowboys to first-time boot buyers.

Each boot is handcrafted with over 200 meticulous steps for broken-in comfort right out of the box.

There's no compromise between quality and style.

And it's not just boots.

Dakovas offers a wide selection of men's and women's apparel, bags, and fine leather goods.

They even have slip-ons and sandals.

They aren't boots, but they still bring the Western flair.

Right now, get 10% off at decovas.com/slash Rogan when you sign up for email and text.

That's 10% off at T-E-C-O-V-A-S dot com slash Rogan.

See site for details.

Takovas, point your toes west.

What is this?

So then it takes it takes a larger,

it takes essentially a psyop in order to get men to fight for the interests of the people who are performing the psyop.

Yes.

You have to create a psyop that puts a narrative out there that makes it noble for us to be doing what we're doing.

Noble.

Noble.

We're such suckers.

It's a noble cause.

What's more noble than letting somebody live?

Yeah, we're less suckers now than ever before.

But yes, a lot of us are suckers for these narratives.

Well,

I'm a sucker for it.

Oh, I am, too.

Everyone is.

Did you ever read

that War is a Racket?

Smedley Butler?

Smedley Butler.

Did you ever read it?

No.

It's really good.

It's not long.

It's really good, and it is essentially essentially outlining what we're talking about.

But it was in 1933.

Right.

And Smedley Butler, who, when he went to all these places and did all these wars, he thought that he was doing good.

He thought he was protecting people.

But then at the end of his career, when it all, like, the fog of war had kind of faded and he recognized the patterns, like, oh, each time.

Pull it up, Jimmy, just so we can get a look at it.

Was Smedley the one where there was a coup and they had asked him to

take it?

They asked him to overthrow the fucking government

a documentary I used to watch by Francis O'Connelly I think is his name but it's called Everything's a Rich Man's Trick and he would always talk about Smedley D.

Butler.

Yeah, he was a bad man

in a good way.

But

this thing that he wrote so you can get just a...

If you just go to the Wikipedia site, War is Iraq.

I mean, it was before even World War II.

There it is, right there.

It contains this summary.

Make that a little larger, please.

Eric Scroller.

Who makes the profits?

It says war is a racket.

It always has been.

It's possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious.

It's the only one international in scope.

It is the only one in which profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to be to the majority of people.

Only a small inside group knows what it's all about.

It's conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the very many.

Out of war, a few people make huge fortunes.

Butler confessed that during his decades of service in the United States Marine Corps, I helped Mexico, especially Tampa, safe for American oil interests in 1914.

I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the national city bank boys to collect revenues in.

I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.

The record of racketeering is long.

I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909 to 1912, where I've learned, where have I heard of that name before?

I don't know.

I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916.

China, I helped see to it that standard oil went its way unmolested.

Looking back on it,

I might have given Al Capone a few hints.

Kind of crazy.

Yeah.

Because they've been doing that forever.

And if it wasn't for this one guy writing about it, this one very decorated man

who

pull up the thing about the coup where they tried to enlist him, which is part of the reason why I'm sure he wrote this.

He was like, what the fuck is this?

Like,

you guys want to take over the United States government with force?

Now, imagine if they were successful.

Imagine if a military coup really did work in, like, 1930 or whatever it was.

How fucked we would be now.

I don't know.

It'd be it.

Like, it's interesting how

history pivots oftentimes on, like, one or two crucial figures.

Right.

And this guy saying no to this, who knows what would have happened if he said yes.

Is that the premise of Man in the High Castle, Philip K.

Dick?

Is it?

I don't know.

I should read more, Jill.

I got it.

The business plot?

Is that what we're talking about?

Not the coup?

The coup.

We're talking about the coup.

No, nothing in his Wikipedia says coup, but business plot comes up at the end.

What is the business plot?

That's what I think he was talking about.

This was all military, like the military-industrial complex stuff before it started.

Right, but wasn't there a thing where they tried to enlist him to do something?

I think, I mean, this was after he was retired.

He's gone on anti-war lectures.

It might have moved into his whole career here.

And Ku wasn't like a highlighted paragraph.

Is that just in Wikipedia, though?

Can you just see if there's anything about it online?

Because it might not be something that Wikipedia would put in.

He had a whole bunch of nicknames.

Did he?

Did he see that whole list of nicknames?

You kill a lot of folks.

You get a lot of nicknames.

Gee whiz.

It's so weird to see when when you think about going

to the London business plot pops up.

People used to have fun nicknames.

Business plot to business plot.

So it was a business plot, so it's not necessarily like a military coup.

Like, what was the actual plot?

The Wall Street put

political conspiracy in 1933, the United States, to overthrow, oh, this it is, overthrow the government of the President Franklin D.

Roosevelt and install Smedley Butler as dictator.

Butler, retired Marine Corps Major General, testified under oath that wealthy businessmen were plotting to create a fascist veterans organization with him as its leader and use it as a coup d'etat to overthrow Roosevelt.

In 1934, Butler testified under oath before the United States House of Representatives Special Committee on Un-American Activities on these revelations.

Although no one was prosecuted, the Congressional Committee

was prosecuted.

You would think that that might put you in jail.

You're trying to overthrow the fucking government.

These folks get away with it.

But it's kind of crazy.

No one was prosecuted, although no one was prosecuted.

The Congressional Committee final report said there's no question these attempts were discussed, were planned, and might have been placed in execution when and if the financial backers deemed it expedient.

You know, it's funny that no one was prosecuted, but if you did insider trading, you go straight to the pokey.

Martha Stewart.

No one was prosecuted for that.

They put Martha Stewart in jail for lying to the cops.

there's actual, you know, there's

Congress folks that do it all the time.

They made an example out of the, out of Martha Stewart, I suppose.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

I mean, there's Nancy Pelosi's now estimated to be worth $400 million.

You know, and that she's just a good job.

What a great job.

It's a great job.

What a great job to have.

I should have gone into it.

What makes you wonder when you have $400 million and you're 82 years old, shouldn't you be like going on cruises and just like enjoying your time off?

And why are you still working

what are you doing lust for power no i really care about

these people are clinging with the with their dying breath to to every ounce of power no no no i care i care about the american people

who who really genuinely believes that anybody cares about us oh there's some lobotomized no no pun intended suckers out there no there's some suckers out there and then there's a lot of bots there's a lot of people that aren't real people um that are

commenting on both sides of the internet.

Like on the internet.

On both sides of it.

Stay out of the comments, kids.

Stay out of commentary because it's not real.

If you're interacting with narratives that are propped up, might be propped up by AI, might be propped up by bad state actors.

There's a lot going on, folks.

It's not all people talking about things, and that should be illegal.

Are there bot wars now?

100%.

Yeah.

Yeah, 100%.

Just bots fighting against bots versus your bots.

100%.

It's probably a giant chunk of the internet.

Are they actual bots or are they like people in a call center?

Both things.

Both things.

Both things are real.

There's AI, for sure, that people are running programs that are

saying certain things.

But there's also people that get hired to do it.

You know, there's some, these pro-American sites, you know, and then people have done like an IP trace and they find out these people are in fucking Karachi.

They're in fucking Pakistan.

They're in India.

They're in China.

It's like, who knows who's doing it and why they're doing it?

But there's a bunch of foreign countries that would have a vested interest in keeping America very unstable.

You know, it's really good to have us at each other's throats politically.

That's good for them.

It's good to crush our faith in democracy and make people consider communism.

And

it gets really weird when you have a bunch of people that are throwing a bunch of opinions into any sort of real

important

discussion about civilization.

And you realize, oh my God, 80% of the people talking aren't just people.

They're either being hired to do this, or it's AI, or they're bots.

It seems to be like manufactured chaos

in order to

take the air out of the room, to suffocate information.

Also, to make laws so they can clamp down on dissent.

And

the more you can have chaos online, the more it becomes unmanageable, the more you have to manage it.

Right, right.

Right?

And the more people ask you to come in and save them.

Please save us.

Save us from this.

There should be laws.

I mean, that's the hate speech shouldn't be legal.

That's kind of the idea behind like the false flag and

gun gun exacts.

like uh

I don't know I think that's what got us into Vietnam I think like Vegas

yeah like the Mandalay Bay thing like there's all the Vegas one

that's a weird one that's a weird one that one is gonna I that's gonna bother me forever that because that one actually happened while I was awake and paying attention and and and it just

nothing nothing lines up with it you weren't there were you were you in Vegas at the time no no no I was sitting in Nashville but I just met

I was paying attention.

Yeah.

That was a crazy one.

And there's multiple reports of more than one person shooting.

And then there was like, how did he get 400 pounds of equipment into his room without anybody noticing it?

Yeah.

That seems crazy.

Like, you've got...

A rifle case is a very distinctive kind of case.

Like, I'm assuming he's carrying...

like, you know, some kind of pelican box.

So like something, some snap-down box.

Like, that's a pretty big box, man.

If you got a bunch of those and you're bringing them in along with boxes of ammunition, like how much does that weigh?

How strong are you?

If you had to carry 400 pounds of shit into a hotel room,

that would take a long time.

That dude wasn't doing all of it.

That's what I'm saying.

I mean, didn't like the security guard witness go on Ellen to explain it?

Did they?

Yeah, see, was that?

Is his name Jesus?

Yeah, Campos.

Jamie's all over this.

Are you all over this one?

I've been all over this from the jump.

Oh, okay.

It's one of the ones I know a lot of people.

Speak to us, young Jamie.

You haven't said anything wrong yet, but

there's a really good website someone put together called like the Las Vegas Shooting Map.com.

And they've got tracked little, it's a Google map, but there's like little dots for YouTube videos, cell phone footage, 911 recordings, photos.

It's a complete timeline from the

time before the concert started to like five days after.

What is the best theory about why that happened?

Conspiracy or a real conspiracy?

What's a conspiracy?

Give me the juiciest one first.

The conspiracy that you read online, like especially on a place like X.com, would be that there was a...

Let me try to word this right.

I think they were worried about the Saudi family or whoever's in control in Saudi Arabia was worried about MBS taking over.

And there was an event happening that he was in Vegas for, and they tried to use this chaos to take him out.

Whoa.

He found out about it.

And then this leads to this

event happening the next month in November where he got all the families to come to Four Seasons.

There was like

kidnappings and extortions and all sorts of money.

He basically was pissed that he found out about it.

Oh, that happened a month later?

Yeah.

Whoa.

People have heard about that event happening, but tying it to the Las Vegas shooting, not a lot of people have done.

I just read about that part recently.

Holy shit, dude.

But there's not a lot of proof of any of that happening, but that's the conspiracy.

I thought it was like metal detectors in the casinos.

I mean, that's part of part of it.

People thought that they were trying to create an event so people would have to get body scanned in every casino.

Because there were people in the state government that had stock in these

in these security systems.

Oh, God.

That's, I mean, it's diabolical.

God, I hope that's not true.

But there was, apparently, like, there's shells that were found in places that were outside of that hotel room.

Outside of the hotel room?

Yeah, or away from those windows.

Some people think that the second window was broken after the fact.

That one don't make no sense.

That's just.

And he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, allegedly, right?

Yeah.

So is the idea that he's a Patsy?

I guess.

That's what.

I mean, if you're going to follow that conspiracy I just laid out, then 100% you'd have to be.

But again, there's not a ton of evidence for that one.

There's some.

Wow.

Yeah.

Wow.

Mysteries.

What's the other theories?

Enigmas.

Sort of what he was getting into where it's like there was this like

tie-in to just get body scanners everywhere.

That one makes sense.

The funnest one I'll show you a picture of.

You know how there's like a playing deck of cards that's got like every conspiracy from like the last 20 years in it?

Have you ever seen that going around?

No.

No.

Just like the Twin Towers are in one picture.

And the one with Vegas, I'll show you.

It's very.

Sam Tripley pointed this out to me the other day.

I'll show you.

You ever get into the Oklahoma City bombing?

I'm familiar.

That one gets real.

I'm familiar.

That one gets real.

We got Ruby Ridge, Waco,

Tim doing hissing, possibly with the team.

Yeah, those are all big.

What I'm getting at, what is this?

This is the playing deck card.

It's the Vegas card.

It's got this, it says that there's...

Is that a tattoo?

This is Jason Aldean's tattoo, who was the guy on stage when the shooting started.

What?

It just so happens to be it's a Jack and the Ace.

Now, that's a coincidence, but that's a crazy coincidence.

It's like how that could have been planned.

Don't know.

Yeah, but that's his fucking name, bro.

Jason L Dean.

That's ridiculous.

That's a crazy connection to make.

His literal name is Jason L.

Dean.

Oh, J-A-L.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, there's a microphone and a jack and an ace.

Yeah.

Yeah.

With a J and an A on it.

It's wild.

So

that's silly.

Yeah.

That's silly.

That one needs to be shut up.

That's outrageous.

Yeah.

But

it's just

when you think that someone might have done something like that, someone might do a mass shooting so they could take out one dude.

Like, blame it on this guy.

Like, how much planning has to be involved in that?

And then, like, how do you get the pathsy?

You get this guy who's just like a...

a degenerate gambler.

That's what he was, right?

He was just a poker player, right?

He made a bunch of money playing video poker, which is like

if you make that much money playing video poker, they're not gonna let you keep playing.

Really?

Dana made money playing blackjack, and they're like, you can't play here anymore.

Like, if you're good and you're making money, they say, we don't want you to do that.

Yeah, they booted Dana out of the palms back in the day.

That's what it was with the Palms, I think.

But with, like, I don't know, okay, see, was that to destroy information?

Is that the conspiracy

there?

That,

like, in the Oklahoma City bombing there was there was

info in the building that they wanted perhaps because I know some of Bill Clinton's stuff maybe disappeared

I don't know the specifics on that but what I was getting at was the specifics of the bomb itself

That a fertilizer bomb would not be able to do that kind of destruction and that destruction was the way a bomb generally works like it goes from this is where the bomb detonates and then all the energy goes outward right if you are are parked

right in front of a building, how does the building blow outward this way?

And why were there all these reports of the FBI

and bomb units pulling additional undetonated bombs from the building?

Right.

Look at how the building blew outward.

I know.

It's kind of crazy.

Absolute devastation.

I mean, but it really depends entirely on the size of the bomb, right?

So if you have a bomb, like see where that blue area is?

Like, that's where supposedly, I think, where the bomb went off.

If you have an immense bomb that is right there and it just blows up, and that's the force of it all around, like in a sort of conical effect, that kind of makes sense.

But a lot of people

think that the amount of power that you would generate from a fertilizer bomb is not really capable of doing that kind of damage.

And Alex Jones,

who

was the first person that I ever ever heard talk about this, he played all these news reports of them talking about

finding additional bombs.

Right.

Like, it was on the news, so they were talking about the FBI or whoever it was.

Was the ATF in that building?

I believe something like that.

Maybe they would have had

some information.

Well, they changed some of the laws after this episode is brought to you by the farmer's dog.

I think we can all agree that eating highly processed food for every meal isn't optimal.

So why is processed food the status quo for dog food?

Because that's what kibble is, an ultra-processed food.

But a healthy alternative exists, the farmer's dog.

They make fresh food for dogs.

And what does it look like?

Real meat and vegetables that are gently cooked to retain vital nutrients and help avoid any of the bad stuff that comes with ultra-processing.

And it's not just random ingredients thrown together.

Their food is formulated by on-staff board-certified vet nutritionists.

These people are experts on dog nutrition and they're all in on fresh food.

The farmer's dog also does something unique.

They portion out the food to your dog's nutritional needs.

This ensures that you don't overfeed them, making weight management easy.

Research shows that dogs kept at a healthy weight can live up to two and a half years longer.

Head to thefarmersdog.com/slash Rogan to get 50% off your first box plus free shipping.

This offer is for new customers only.

This episode is brought to you by blinds.com.

Here's the deal.

Before blinds.com, getting custom window treatments used to mean booking an appointment, waiting around for a quote, and crossing your fingers wouldn't cost a fortune.

Blinds.com said nope and totally changed the game.

While some overpromise or overcharge, blinds.com delivers custom window treatments on your terms, your style, your space, your way.

Want to do it yourself?

Cool.

Want that full white glove treatment or somewhere in between?

They've got you.

No matter how many window treatments you get, installation is one low cost with no hidden fees.

Shop on your time, talk to one of their design pros for a free virtual consultation or just get free samples and handle it your way.

Blinds.com has covered over 25 million windows so they know what they're doing.

Plus, every order is backed by their 100% satisfaction guarantee.

You can't lose because nobody covers windows better than Blinds.com.

Right now, my listeners get an exclusive 40% off your entire order.

Just go to blinds.com and use the promo code Rogan40 at checkout.

Limited time, offer, rules, and restrictions apply.

Some explosives could have been in their possession even or something.

Oh,

it blew up because of the other thing blowing up?

Perhaps, but they didn't say that.

And it's pretty odd that the ATF offices would have just bombs laying around.

Yeah,

that doesn't really make any sense.

Like, why do you guys have bombs in the break?

We're studying.

Yeah, we're studying actual live bombs.

I don't think so.

That doesn't make any sense.

They're pretty good about taking care of bombs.

But see if you can find anything about reports of additional bombs from Oklahoma City.

They were looking for a second person for a while.

Yeah, they were looking for a second person, too.

But I mean, there's also this problem with the fog of eyewitness accounts and everything after a c a catastrophe.

Like one thing that happens about events is no one really re like if you're there and some fucking thing blows up, it's it's entirely dependent upon your makeup, whether or not you can even objectively recall exactly what happened.

Depending upon like how freaked out you are by this and how used to being freaked out you are.

Like maybe you're a veteran, maybe you've served overseas and like you can actually give an accurate account of this'cause you've you've been around crazy shit.

But if you haven't, it's very likely that, you know,

people are very confused afterwards.

I would have been totally shook.

No credible evidence of additional bombs being found.

Initial confusion.

This is AI over you.

AI.

In the immediate aftermath of the

AI, by the way, that still thinks the COVID vaccine saved millions of lives.

In the immediate aftermath of the bombing, some news reports and individuals speculated about multiple explosions.

Okay, news reports.

Why would they say that if there was no reason to say that?

Conflicting reports.

Some theories suggested a second, even third bomb were involved, citing nearby seismograph readings and witness accounts.

Seismograph.

So there was multiple seismograph readings.

Experts.

Expert disagreement.

Oh, I love when they call in the experts.

However, experts, including

physicists and engineers that are not named, stated that the second tremor recorded by the seismographs was likely caused by the buildings collapsed, not another bomb.

Go to sleep, America.

Conspiracy theories.

Some conspiracy theorists continued to promote the idea of additional bombs, even though there were news reports, often citing discrepancies in the observed damage or expert opinions.

Yeah, the observed damage is kind of crazy.

The damage is kind of crazy.

Yeah.

It looks like it's blown out.

You know?

That's That's a huge, huge demo job, man.

Well, it's just weird.

You know, it's, and it's his, Timothy McVeigh's reason for doing it.

All of it is weird.

Right.

Like,

it was revenge for the government's intervention with Ruby Ridge and the Waco.

Right, right.

So he was going to take on the

extremist organizations get infiltrated by the government when they find some suckers.

Well, didn't they find like the folks who were going to kidnap the governor or something?

It was just like, wasn't it all the gov?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It was 12 out of 14 people were government agents.

Oh.

So then who?

And then those two guys went to jail.

So the two that weren't?

Yeah, exactly.

And the two that weren't, it wasn't even their idea.

They were like dorks that were LARPing.

Right.

Like, yeah, man, we're going to blow up the government.

Right.

They're fucking losers.

They wanted friends.

You know, they wanted friends, and they found friends and these extremists.

And they thought that these guys, you know, they fucking meet up and talk about kidnapping the governor.

Like, they thought it was all bullshit.

Those guys literally said, they thought we were never going to do this.

Yeah.

And then the feds come knocking on their door.

One of the wildest ones, they radicalized this young guy who was 19 years old.

I believe he was in Dallas.

They radicalized him.

And then they gave him a bomb that was fake and then gave him a cell phone to detonate the bomb.

bomb.

And then

when he tried to use the cell phone to detonate the bomb, they arrested him.

Because even though it was fake, even though it didn't work, even though they gave it to him, even though they talked him into doing it, they arrested him for terrorism because he was willing to listen to them.

Which is crazy.

Why do you do that?

Well, also, you're doing it to a young guy who probably...

Like, this is the first time in his life, he felt like he had any purpose.

Like, you've mind fucked him into believing that he's doing this for a greater good.

You know, you're mind-fucking him to telling him that like, you know, he's going to put a dent in the great Satan by detonating this bomb and you're going to go down in history.

You're going to be huge.

And he's just a dumb guy, just a dumb dude who they talk into it and then they arrest him.

Like, we stop terrorism.

You fucking made it, bitch.

You made it.

Fix the problem, fix the problem.

It's kind of like the pharmaceutical industry or something.

Well, it's a pattern.

Yeah.

It's a pattern.

But it's just a weird one that

we tolerate under the rule of law.

Like, that seems pretty crazy that you guys made a plot to kidnap the governor.

You got

12 out of 14 of the people who were involved were working with the government.

And then,

you know, it should be like, well, okay, whose idea was it?

It was Mike's idea.

He was the first one to say, Mike, you work for the government.

This is crazy, Mike.

You can't arrest Tom because it was your idea, Mike.

You fucking asshole.

But yeah, yeah, yeah.

But I was working for the government.

I mean, it's like, I'm fine, right?

And then he gets, they all get

just disappear.

Nobody hears them.

Nobody knows their name.

Nobody knows who they are.

They're probably doing it right now.

They go into the private sector.

I don't know.

Who knows?

Who knows?

Over with.

I mean, who knows who is instructing

them to do something?

Sure.

Who knows who was instructing them to do what they were doing in the first place?

why did you guys decide that you were going to kidnap the governor?

Is there higher-ups that told you this was a good idea to plot this?

Like, what are we trying to do?

I just wonder how much within those

within even these buildings, like,

what's the communication like?

in a huge organization like the FBI or something.

Are there people over on floor two that have no idea what's going on on floor four?

100%.

You know?

100%.

And 100%.

Just pockets, pockets of intelligence, little microcosms of

people working, you know.

Well, talking to people that actually work in the government, they'll tell you there are people that are in charge of each individual office, and they're like a czar of this office.

You got to get through them.

And they can put the kibosh on anything you're trying to do.

And they're hiding information from the rest of the office,

hiding information from other agencies.

Yeah.

And when I was a kid, I dated this girl who worked for the government, and one of her jobs was, this was like really

the very beginning of computers.

So

91, maybe, somewhere around then, maybe two, maybe 92.

And her job was to help

distribute information.

Say if the Navy did a study, that the Army would have access to it.

So it was all on a database.

So this was like really, really early on.

Right.

Because they didn't share information with each other.

But they still don't share information.

Now, though, they're in competition with each other.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And some of them don't like each other.

There's agencies that don't like those fucking pussies over at the CIA and those faggots over at the FBI.

Like, there's still like a lot of that stupid shit that goes on.

There's a lot of that stupid shit that goes on, just like there's people that root for the fucking dolphins and other people root for the raiders.

People get tribal.

People get really weird, man.

They get tribal with every damn thing that they do.

Every damn thing that they do.

And then it's us against them.

Xerox is going to take over the copying world.

Fuck all those other pussies.

It's like as above.

So below, man,

the patterns go down forever.

Well, we have the patterns of territorial apes.

That's the problem.

We have the consistent patterns of territorial apes, and those patterns find their way into everything.

They find their way into fucking poetry slang.

I mean, it's music.

Yeah.

Music's like that.

Oh, for sure, right?

Yeah, comedy's like that.

It is to some extent.

Yeah.

Yeah, and in certain circles it is.

In certain circles, it's not.

But

it's like that with everything.

Everyone is fighting for dominance in this really gross, weird way.

And I think it's just our genetics.

I think it's the pattern of how we got here for the first place and how the human reward systems are all set up.

They're set up to try to conquer things.

And whether you're conquering video game development or fucking, you're making the best folding phone, it's like we're going to kick ass over Google.

Everybody has their own little thing, their little realm they're trying to conquer.

Right.

And it feels great.

No, I don't think it does.

You don't think it feels great to kick ass at something?

Well, I mean, you want, like, I think

certainly does the pursuit of excellence is like the most joy-rendering thing that there is.

That aspect of it, but the aspect of crushing your enemies.

I wonder how much fun.

Well, you don't have to have, like, I don't, this is the thing, is like playing guitar or something.

I don't have an enemy.

But you're an artist.

You're not a corporation.

I just.

I'm a corporation.

Are you an LLC yet?

Did you sign up for the Devil's Deal?

What is

Limited Liability Corporation?

A lot of people do.

I don't have a record deal, and that's what you're saying.

No, no, no, no.

When you start making money, they tell you to form an LLC.

What is it going to do?

It's like you become like a little corporation, and that way you pay yourself from the corporation.

You can lease a car from the corporation.

That'd be kind of cool.

You'll probably have to do that someday eventually.

I'll be in a corporate.

Maybe after this podcast, you'll have to do that.

Call it bottomless wells.

that's the most fun and it does seem like it is what

anytime you're you're in a hard place or anything like that mentally or

yeah like the the best way out is like find something to try to get good at or try something you know and then try your best at it Yeah,

and it just seems innate.

I think so.

Like,

no matter what it is.

Right, but the problem is if that thing is making money, then it gets weird, right?

Like if your whole thing you're good at and you try to get better at is just making money,

that's when things get really squirrely.

Because the same thing that makes you really good at writing songs could make another person really good at being a psychopath.

Because the best way to make money is to be completely feelingless and not give a shit about who this is going to impact.

Ship all those jobs overseas.

Look how much money we're going to make.

Do this to that.

Fuck all the...

Listen, if we don't take care of this environmental pollutant and we just let it leak out, we save X amount of money.

Right.

Do that.

Right.

Then

that's where things get weird.

You figure out the best way to make money.

Like you're really good at making money and that becomes your creativity.

You get really creative about moving around the law in order to make money.

You get really creative about how you establish relationships with people and how you can, you know, make sure that laws are passed, that it favor what you're doing.

That's a strange art.

very weird art that's a dark art that is that is the dark arts it's a dark art snape never taught about that one dog well it's not a creative art but it is creative in some ways it it taps into that same thing but in a very negative way

you know maybe positive for that person's bank account but negative in terms of its impact but do they even care about their bank account at that point like what is it to them it's just something totally different that's the world they live in man like if you're a fucking prison warden

the world you live in is like, these are the rules in order to stay alive as a prison warden.

This is what you're going to do.

If you're a prison guard, if you're on the floor with all these inmates, this is what you do to stay alive.

This is what you do to maintain order.

This is what you do to make sure people listen and fall in line.

Once you're there,

you have to do that.

Right?

Like, if you're there,

if you're a prison guard, this is what you do.

And I think if you are a guy who is in charge of

like you're an economic hitman, like John Perkins, you know that?

You ever read that book?

Uh-uh.

What they do is they would give enormous loans to countries that definitely couldn't fucking pay it off, and then, you know, come in and start extracting resources.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, China does that.

The United States does that.

Many countries have been involved in that kind of shit.

And they're creative in that way.

Are there NGOs doing that?

I'm sure.

Like, is that what...

I'm sure.

Is that what

Billy?

Billy G is up to?

Billy G?

Yeah,

Microsoft.

Oh.

Well, he's involved in

a lot of the...

Do you give a big loan or, you know, give a big favor out and then

just take whatever you want from them after that?

Because

everyone's got notes once they...

Yeah, well, it's called philanthropitalism, you know, and that being a philanthropist is actually very profitable, which is weird.

No, I.

Like, Bill Gates made hundreds of millions of dollars off of the pandemic from just from vaccines.

Dude, philanthropy is far out.

I have a song about philanthropy.

Do you?

It's called Philanthropist.

Let's hear it.

Put it on there.

Jamie will find it.

You know, like real true philanthropy, when you're, you know, you're giving money away because you're just a kind person is wonderful.

It's beautiful.

You know,

I like it when it's done silently.

That's the only way to properly do it, right?

Here we go.

When I was just a boy, my mama asked me this.

She said, Son, what do you want to be?

I said, a big philanthropist, potato as my oil,

and illness is my business.

With guns is my retirement, and war as my mistress.

I'm gonna be an oligarch with a whole bunch of rocket heads.

I'd get them two sides fighting and I'd empty both of their pockets.

And if I got bored, hard money we ready.

I'd try my hand in dabbling in social engineering.

I'm gonna be a billionaire with a big foundation.

We used to rule in shadows, but I'd come right out and I'd rule the nation.

I'm gonna do all my own laundry in a third world nation.

Stay

Experiment with the locals like some philanthropic saint And I never make a cure

Not get you a treatment plan

You can die in slow installments And I'll bleed you while I can And I travel around the planet

And a big old mystery jet

What I did would be my business And what you did I would collect if I was a philanthropist Just run around philanthropist

Not a whole lot of help just for myself, but I gotta make it look convincing.

You nailed it.

That's philanthropalism right there.

Dude.

In a song.

It's far out.

That's a great song.

It shouldn't be.

It shouldn't be allowed.

It shouldn't be allowed.

Well, it shouldn't be that easy to trick people.

Who believes it?

That's why I'm just, I'm like, who in the hell would

think that this is

good things happen because of it, but more bad things happen than good a lot of the time.

And you're holding an entire nation hostage or an entire group of people hostage by lending them money.

Well, that's not freedom.

No.

You're going to be free.

Yeah,

it's real weird.

Because there's certain people that are like genuine philanthropists, philanthropists, but even them, when you're donating money to specific organizations and you find out that most of their money goes to overhead, most of their money goes to employee salaries, which are ridiculously high.

And you go, oh, this is a scam.

This is clearly a scam.

You aren't kind people trying to fix the world.

You're profiting off of this idea of being a kind person that wants to fix the world.

And you're doing a little bit of help.

You're doing about 10% of help, maybe 20% of help, maybe even 30% for a good organization.

But the reality is, it's about you.

Yeah.

Which is crazy.

You know, imagine if just you said, hey, man, my friend's sick.

Do you think you could donate some money to my friend?

You know, because he doesn't have any health insurance.

And we were like, yeah, man, what do we got to do?

And then everybody gives you money, and then you take 70% of it.

And we go, hey, dude, what the fuck?

And you're like,

you're like, hey, man, I worked to get that money for him.

I had to call you guys.

I really, I put in the time.

I need some of that money.

I need 70% of that money.

You'd be like, what the fuck are you talking about?

Your friends would never talk to you again.

Everybody would hate you.

But meanwhile, if you do this for an NGO, you get celebrated.

Right.

Insane.

It's real.

It is insane, and it's real.

The weirdest thing about it is this isn't a conspiracy theory.

This is real.

This is really how most of them operate.

Some of them, it's 90%.

Some of them it's 90, 10.

Yeah.

There's good ones out there, though.

There's really good ones where most of the money goes to the charity.

And that's awesome.

There's real people out there that are really kind people that are genuine philanthropists.

And most of them live very humble lives.

Right.

Because that's you don't make a million dollars a year if you're doing it right.

Right.

You just don't.

Right.

You know?

You just don't.

And if you are making a million dollars a year, hmm,

chances are you might be a vampire.

Yeah.

What do you

I mean, that guy was all over the

all over the flight logs and everything.

Which guy was?

Which guy?

Gates.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

All tangled up in all sorts of stuff, man.

Yeah.

He was tangled up in all sorts of stuff after that guy went to jail.

After he went to jail and came out the first time.

Yeah.

Gates was hanging with him still.

Yeah.

As were many people.

It's real weird stuff, man it's real weird

because it seems that it's like

once you develop a network of people that trust a person like that and like come come hang out with him he's cool you know it's a good place to go and get your freak on like because if you're a really rich like international businessman and everybody knows who you are like a bill gates type character you can't just go get some head like what do you do how do you how do you how do you go get your fuck on you know what do do you do?

Is that who Jeff was?

I don't know.

Was he the fixer in that?

I would just be speculating.

This episode is brought to you by the Montana Knife Company.

I'm very excited to do this ad because my good friend Josh Smith owns the Montana Knife Company.

It was founded by Josh, who is one of the most experienced master bladesmiths in the world.

He makes amazing knives.

I fucking love them.

I have a bunch of them.

They're barely over a hundred master bladesmiths in the world, and this guy's been one since he was 19.

He makes the sharpest knives you will ever use right here in the US of A.

Designed, tested, and built by hunters.

Montana Knife Company is a hunting knife company first and foremost, but they also make some of the best chef knives on the planet.

I use them all the time in my kitchen.

And the best part is all of Montana Knife Company's knives are backed by a multi-generational guarantee promise.

If you ever need your blades sharpened, just send it back and they'll sharpen them for free.

These knives sell out within minutes of being released, so head over to Montana Knife Company.com to see what's available now.

My favorites, the insanely sharp Speed Goat 2.0, I carry that with me every time I go to the mountains.

Montana Knife Company, working knives for working people.

This episode is brought to you by the Wellness Company.

You ever wake up with a sore sore throat and fever and think, oh great, I'm getting sick?

You can miss work, try to see a doctor, or sit for hours in urgent care.

Well, not anymore.

Get a medical emergency kit created by Dr.

Peter McCullough.

This isn't some cheap first aid kit.

This kit is genius.

It's like having an emergency care in a pharmacy in your home.

It's got real doctor-prescribed meds like ZPAC, Ivermectin, Amoxicillin, and more.

Flu, bam, take a Z-PAC.

STREP, pneumonia, sinus infection, UTIs, infections, COVID, over 30 conditions, you're covered.

Just match your symptoms to the guide or talk with their telehealth doctor.

No waiting rooms, no pharmacy lines.

Order online in minutes and get $50 off with code Rogan at urgentcarekit.com slash Rogan.

Get yours now at urgentcarekit.com/slash Rogan.

Promo code Rogan.

I would just be speculating, but a good friend of mine who's very intelligent said this to me.

He said, there's people that want certain experiences and there's people that provide these powerful people with experiences and that's how they fit into the social structure.

They're there to help.

They can keep their mouth shut and they help people get these experiences.

Right.

And then there's probably some sort of a wild rush of being naughty and doing things you're not supposed to be doing.

We can get away with it because we're worth $800 billion or whatever the fuck they're worth.

They're trying very hard to get away with this one.

I don't know if the people are going to

forget.

People are never going to forget.

The problem is, do we have any power?

What do we do?

You know, what do you do?

I mean, you definitely can change the way you vote, like if it comes up again.

But the problem is, this is a bipartisan issue.

It's bipartisan.

I don't know.

I heard it as a Democratic hoax.

Yeah.

I don't think that's true.

Well, it's certainly not a hoax if you go to jail.

Certainly not a hoax if Ghelene Maxwell's in jail, too.

So she's in jail for sex trafficking.

Excuse me.

She's in jail for sex trafficking.

But the question is to who?

Who's she in jail?

You have to be sex trafficking to someone

in order to go to jail, right?

So who?

How's that work?

She's been in jail for years.

So like, how's that work?

Is she looking at a pardon?

Are they going to.

I don't don't know, but they just moved her to another prison.

They moved her.

It's supposed to be a nice prison, as far as prisons go.

They move her to

kill her?

Could be.

But why would you waste the money to move someone if you wanted to kill them?

I'm sure they could kill her pretty easy.

I don't know.

You know?

But the question is: does she have dead woman switches?

You know what I mean?

What's the dead man switches?

When tripwire?

Yeah.

Like, if I die, I want you to do this for me.

And then whether it's in Israel, whether it's in Canada, whoever the fuck the person is that you have that you give this information to,

you just say, if anything happens to me, let this loose.

And then you tell them, like, look, I have this, that, this, and that.

I have all these tapes.

I have all these videos.

And if anything happens to me, all this goes online.

So, leave me alone.

If that were true, that's a real thing that people do.

It's called a dead man switch.

Dead man switch.

Yeah.

That's how people maintain life.

If you have information that's really sensitive, they have to trust you.

If someone trusts you to not tell something that can ruin their empire of hundreds of billions of dollars and put them in jail possibly,

they have to trust you.

They're not going to trust you.

They don't trust you.

But if they know...

that you know that if you tell, they'll kill you and then they know that if they kill you, you have the dead man switch.

Okay.

We got a stalemate.

Let that motherfucker live.

This is mutually assured destruction.

Exactly.

Some kind of nuclear standoff.

Yeah, they're pointing missiles at each other.

Information missiles at each other.

It's dark, dude.

But it makes for a good spy novel.

If just America, the way it actually really works, it'd be a crazy novel.

You'd be like, this is nuts.

Like a Tom Wolf is something or another.

Yeah.

Just with the, if you actually knew the actual facts, I bet it would be quite fascinating.

You know?

Like we have these narratives that we assume are real about even about history.

And I bet a lot of them are full of shit, too.

You know?

Bill Murray was on the podcast.

It was really interesting.

And he read Bob Woodward's

story about his good friend John Belushi.

So he said, I read five pages of it.

I was like, oh my God, they framed Nixon.

Right.

Isn't that crazy?

Well, I mean, isn't Bob Woodward?

He's known to have been hired, or at least worked with CIA.

He was an intelligence agent.

Yeah, he was intelligent.

And he first

builds the narratives.

It was also his first job as a journalist.

Yeah.

Which is how?

How did the senior journalist not get that job?

You're literally going to take down a president.

I didn't see that aspect of it in all the president's men.

Who is that?

Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford?

Yeah.

Yeah, you don't get that.

You don't get that.

Because that was before the internet.

And, like, they could get away with a movie like that.

I kind of wonder if they...

I don't.

Listen, I'm sure this.

I'm

actually, I don't know anything about.

Do you know Tom Hanks?

Tom Hanks, the actor?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I don't know him personally.

Okay.

I just wonder if every every once in a while

when

the government needs to explain something to the public in a way that puts us in the best light,

if they commission a movie through Hollywood and stick Tom Hanks in it, man, he's just explained so much to us over the years.

With Charlie Wilson's war, it's like, here's how the

this goes.

You know, Forrest Gump is kind of a nostalgia fest

about the Vietnam War.

It kind of makes light of it.

You know, the Polar Express.

I actually don't know about the Polar Express.

Well, my friend Sam was telling me, my son friend Sam Triple was telling me that, and I had heard this, that during World War I, they had a problem that soldiers were not shooting at the enemy.

They didn't want to kill them.

They didn't want to be there.

And so they were firing their guns, but not even aiming them at the enemy.

So to combat this, they started making movies.

And then in the movies, these war movies, the soldiers would shoot the enemy and they were like really heroes.

And so then in World War II, people were much more willing to shoot the enemy.

Gee.

Isn't that crazy?

Yeah.

Like, so the intelligence communities have been deeply involved in movie making from the very beginning because back then movies were the most powerful narrative in all of society.

Right.

And there was no counter-narrative, not to speak of, nothing that went global, nothing went global or even that was like publicly mass distributed.

There was nothing.

I mean, you might have people in coffee shops saying, hey, man, I read this and this and that.

But there were small groups of people.

Most people were in the dark.

Even if you had a counter-narrative, you'd be like Pete Seeger and get blacklisted in the 50s, you know, a musician.

You'd be Smedley Butler.

But you're right.

Who was in a.

The end of his career.

Yeah.

It's a wonder he survived

his own tell-all there with War is a racket.

Yeah.

So

it didn't seem to do a whole lot, whatever.

World War II is just

six years after.

I know.

Crazy.

Isn't it crazy, though, that they made movies about war to encourage people to just shoot the enemy when they see them?

Because most people, it's probably so abstract to them.

Like, they're from, like, especially if they had just gotten there from Europe, right?

So imagine if you're dealing with World War I,

like, a lot of those people probably recently arrived in America, right?

And then now you're being sent over to France.

Now you're being sent over to Germany?

Like,

you're involved in a fucking war now?

You're in a trench war?

Well, I don't know America was pretty, was really not wanting to get in with World War I anyway.

Was it the Lusitania?

Some folks think that even might have been

a false flag.

Do they think that was a false one?

It could have been.

Well, I mean, that's a long, there's a long history of false flags that got us into war.

I mean, it goes back to Nero burning Rome, you know, and what they did with the Gulf of Tonkin incident is.

What happened with Nero?

Well, let's go pull that up.

Nero was so crazy, dude.

You know one of the things Nero did?

What?

He beat his pregnant wife to death, and then he found a slave that looked like his wife, a boy, castrated him, and said that this is my wife, and paraded this person around.

Sporos is his name.

French stuff, man.

Yeah.

And just fucked this poor dude with no dick that he had his dick cut off.

And then

passed that guy off to someone else, and that guy eventually wound up committing suicide.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Nero was a complete, total psychopath.

So there was

this one false flag incident.

See if you can find what Nero did.

You know, that was also like Hitler.

Hitler burned the Reichstag.

That was a false flag, too.

The Gulf of Tonkin one was a crazy one because that was, what was that, 67, 68 or something?

So we had already been in Vietnam for years at that point.

No, no, that was the.

They had some limited operations.

Right.

But it wasn't like we were full-scale soldiers invading Vietnam.

Right.

Is this a precursor to like Tet Offensive or something?

I don't know, but this was the incident that dragged us in.

Burning Rome, burning Christians.

Year 64.

During the Principate of Nero, the night between July 18th and 19th, a fire broke out in Rome within nine days, destroyed or badly damaged a substantial part of the city, leaving many dead or homeless.

Rumors circulated the fire had been set by Nero, who, it was claimed, sought to divert blame from himself by holding responsible a new sect of aggressively proselytizing Jews known as Christians.

Wow.

Most recent scholarship has rejected the popular view of Nero as an arsonist who fiddled while Rome burned, in quotes.

Largely ignored, however, has been the question of whether or not the Christians generally regarded as innocent scapegoats of Nero might, in fact,

have played some role in the fire.

There's controversy.

Yeah, the chapter considers the problematic nature of Christianity and Rome and Roman attitudes towards Christians in the first century CE and suggest based on this evidence that Christian involvement is not out of the question.

Not out of the question, but the narrative has always been that Nero did it to divert attention.

But the point is,

look, they tried to do that with Operation Northwoods.

It's one of the things that Kennedy vetoed.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff signed off on an operation to do a false flag event where they were going to blow up a drone jetliner, blame it on Cuba, and they were going to arm Cuban friendlies and attack Guantanamo Bay.

And they were doing this so that they could drag us into a war with Cuba.

And Kennedy vetoed it.

But it was signed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

They're like, sounds good.

Right.

There's fucking smugglers around.

I mean,

is this what

the Bay of Pigs is?

No, the Bay of Pigs is a different thing.

The Bay of Pigs is after that.

And the Bay of Pigs, the problem with the Bay of Pigs was that they planned it without Kennedy knowing.

The men were already there.

Yeah, and then they had air support, and that was part of their mission.

And then Kennedy denied air support.

And then

the men on the ground got slaughtered.

And so

my friend Evan, who was a Ranger, he believes it's very possible that some of the people involved in that might have been involved in the assassination of Kennedy because they had a huge grudge.

And these were, you know, hardened assassins.

Yeah, if that was something that you'd go and mine

people out of that operation.

There was a lot of people that hated Kennedy after that.

A lot of people.

We don't think about it now because we think of Kennedy as like being loved, but there was people that celebrated when he got murdered.

Gee.

Yeah.

That

I can't imagine.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, it's like today.

Like if Trump got murdered, there's people that would celebrate.

You know?

Or if Kamala Harris had gotten murdered on the campaign trail, there's people that would celebrate.

There's gross people on both sides of the aisle.

It is, I mean, it's a sign that

something's not good when we're celebrating just death.

No.

I feel you know, I feel like.

Well, it's certainly a society that's lost its way.

If that's the only solution is to kill people.

You know?

Or if you don't like how the results turned out, you do everything you can to destroy that person.

Which I think the most interesting version of that is happening right now in New York City.

That Mondani guy that who's essentially

like at the very least a socialist, but kind of leans towards the communist direction.

Right.

Both sides are trying to get rid of that guy.

They're like, we can't allow him to be mayor.

Okay.

But like, but the people elected him.

He won the Democratic primary and he's like 44% ahead of everybody else in the process.

So there's still you sorry, you gotta kind of fill me in.

So the actual election is not until November, right?

So they have the primary first.

Mondani won.

And he won over Andrew Cuomo, who used to be the governor of the state.

And everybody thought he was going to win.

And then people are like, holy shit, this communist guy is going to be the fucking mayor of New York City.

And he's promising to jack up taxes and he's promising to have like city-funded grocery stores and a lot of communist ideas.

And so both the right and the left are like, we got to get this guy out of here.

There's no way.

But it's like, if you believe in the democratic process, like this is what the people wanted.

Let's find out if it works.

Let's find out if it sucks, if it makes New York City even worse.

Well, then in a few years, you get to vote again.

Yeah, I was going to say,

how long is mayorship?

I think it's four years.

Four years.

Right?

Is it a four-year term for mayor of New York City?

It has to be, right?

Because in two years, you're basically just using the time to campaign for your re-election.

Because you'd probably, by the time you got in there, it's like 24 months later, you got to do it again.

You're like, ugh.

So

what are the two sides doing to

bring him down?

Talk about getting him out of the country.

There's people that are talking about, is there a way to expel him from the country?

To revoke his citizenship.

Yeah, there's talk of that.

Yeah.

People are trying to figure out any way to get rid of this guy.

But he is a citizen, of course.

But he wasn't born in America, which freaks people out.

He's a Muslim.

He's from Uganda.

That's where he's from.

He's only been in America for for a certain amount of years, and he's only been a citizen, I think, for seven or eight years, something like that.

And he won.

If you believe in this thing,

that's what people voted for, and you got to do better.

That's the game.

That's what the folks want.

That's what the folks want.

Yeah, well, the thing is, there's a lot of people that live in New York City, that live in, you know, any city, really, that don't feel like their needs are being met by the government.

Right.

And they don't feel like the government has their best interests.

And if some guy comes along with some radical ideas that he says are the solution, well, if the people believe him and it's not true, you've done a terrible job.

You've done a terrible job of both distributing information and taking care of these people because they're looking for any kind of a solution.

Even a solution that might wind up

causing a bunch of corporations to leave the city and a bunch of money to leave the city and a bunch of jobs to leave the city.

Yeah, that doesn't

th is

things are things are desperate, right?

What, the politicians really controlled by like

three main things, like special interests,

donor class, and multinational corporations.

So anybody who looks like they're disentangled from any of those things is looking pretty appealing.

Exactly.

Exactly.

That's why he's way ahead.

He's ahead by 44%.

Everybody else has like 12%, 20%.

I think the highest one other than him in the most recent polling was Cuomo, who's still running somehow or another.

I don't know how he's doing it.

And it's like, is he an independent?

Like, how is Cuomo running?

Is that what it is?

Yeah.

So he's running as an independent because he couldn't win the Democratic primary.

Yeah.

But he's still way behind this guy.

Yeah.

According to polls.

But the problem with polls is, of course, who the fuck answers polls?

Not you.

No, not me.

I think polls are just made so that news people have something to talk about.

I wouldn't be surprised if they're the ones.

Well, they probably are.

They probably go to the poll center and they say, run this poll because

I got to have something to talk about on Wednesday.

Yeah.

You could rig them.

Right.

So you could rig them, like, say, if you went to a specific group of people that you knew leaned right.

and you started asking them questions on things or a specific group of people, a specific part of the city that you knew was more progressive.

You would go there if you wanted to rig polls and then you push that narrative out.

This is how the people feel.

It's like, okay, but who's answering?

A very small percentage, and mostly dopes.

Mostly dopes are answering polls.

Sorry, if you answer polls, but most of the people have nothing else to do.

Because if you call me, I never met anybody who's answered a poll.

Bingo.

I met a lot of folks.

You met a lot of folks.

Exactly.

You ever met anyone who answered a poll?

No, and the presidential polls are the weird ones because sometimes they're wildly wrong.

And yet, somebody got paid to make those polls.

I think it's the news.

I think the news is an incredibly lucrative business.

It's an entertainment business.

There's not news every day.

There's nothing to, and they got to run 24 hours.

Yeah.

They're making up new.

They should call it the old because it's always the same shit happening, man.

Like, it's not even.

Yeah.

It doesn't matter where you...

where you're getting it either.

It's also a lot.

I mean, CNN tried to separate themselves from that when they realized it was financially

kind of devastating to the company to have like really bad editorial comments, which is what they did.

That's why they got rid of all their head newscasters.

Okay.

Because everybody was terrible and everybody hated them.

So they just got rid of most of them.

Right.

And they tried to go objective with the news.

But the problem is, like, that way people aren't outraged.

And the only way people are going to pay attention now, because you spoiled them.

You gave them candy and now you can't give them filet mignon.

Like, this is bullshit.

I want Cheetos and I want snacks.

Right.

Like, you've you ruined them.

And you gave them this for decades.

And so now, if you want your ratings, you have to give them outrage.

You have to have a bunch of people yelling at each other on TV so they pay attention.

I feel like the most

colorful people that they would have had on their things have gone indie now.

You know, like Tucker Carlson has

his podcast.

And like,

let's see.

Candace Owens was with like Daily Wire and now she's like got she's got her own

big thing and there's and then there's smaller there's smaller ones.

You got like

breaking points is one.

You know, the real problem is the left ones never succeed once they're fired.

The people that leave CNN, they're always like dismissed.

Well, the talent, I mean, we have to be talented to do that, to sit there and look at a camera and just talk for like hours about, you've got to be really talented.

You got to be really dedicated.

And

you have to understand how people are receiving what you're saying, too.

And the problem with like a CNN type job is that you're being told what to do.

You show up.

You read the news as written by these people.

You have a teleprompter.

You really can't stray very far from the narrative.

And, you know,

you're allowed to elaborate inside the narrative as long as it fits with what CNN is trying to promote.

Right.

And as soon as you deviate from that, you're cooked.

You're gone.

Yeah.

So

then there's really no,

there's not much career for you at all.

Yeah, because once you leave, everybody knows you're a propagandist.

Like, no one's ever going to really truly believe you.

And you weren't coming up with anything yourself.

It was all fed to you.

Exactly.

It's a drawn.

Exactly.

And then we also watched as you did

elaborate on your own about whatever you thought about the narrative.

You're a dope.

You're a dope that's only on television because they put you there.

You're not like, you didn't rise through the ranks.

Like, this is one of the most interesting people I've ever heard talk on television.

Like, no,

that's not that at all.

You're not sincere.

What people like is authenticity.

You know, you want to know that someone is actually telling you what they think.

And you don't get any of that from them.

As soon as you don't get that from people, you never want to listen.

Whether you believe Tucker Carlson or not, he's being authentic.

Like what he's saying,

he believes.

Right.

This is who he is.

And that's why he works.

That's why it works outside of Fox News when he left.

Those folks, all these folks who do.

I think even Bill O'Reilly, after he got kicked out, you know, from broadcasts he has, he's got his podcast and stuff.

They really believe their stuff, stuff, man.

Yeah, whether they're right or wrong.

Yeah, well, it's not about that.

I feel like the public has to understand that at the end of the day, these guys are,

whether they believe it or not,

this is entertainment.

These guys are entertainers.

This isn't the new, they're telling you stuff, they're feeding it to you, and you gotta take things with a big ass grain of salt because this stuff is these are entertainers.

Well, there's definitely that aspect of it.

And if you're not entertaining, you're going to get removed from your job and you're going to get replaced by someone who's better at your job.

Yeah.

Or hotter.

You know?

Someone who's got

a nice rack and a short skirt and who's really good at talking.

Like, wow.

I just want to watch her talk.

I guess that's for the cable folks or something.

Yeah.

I mean, that's part of the gig, right?

Like, how many of those ladies on Fox News just look hot as the sun while they're telling you whatever the fuck they're supposed to be telling you?

Yeah.

It's a special kind of hot too.

That like ice queen hot.

That's a spe that Republican like hard-nosed hot.

I don't get it.

I don't get it, man.

I don't get it.

That's the that's the cheapest that's the cheapest thing they can pull over on the on the sex applications.

The applications is to have is to have sex appeal.

Yeah, but they've always get I mean, that's how they sell cars.

that's how they sell everything.

People use that for everything because we're dumb.

I'm optimistic, man.

I think we're going to wake up.

We're going to say,

I don't care what the hot lady on Fox says.

They're murdering people.

I'm optimistic, too, and I think you're right.

I think we are doing that right now.

I think, believe it or not, your songs are a part of that.

You know, whatever percentage

you reach, it's not zero.

There's people that you reach.

That United Health, how many views did that get, all told?

I don't know.

It has to be millions.

It got a lot of looks.

Millions and millions and millions.

I know.

I sent it to a lot of people.

The tunes

get passed around.

Some of them get passed around.

Did I repost that?

I reposted it, right?

Yeah.

Okay.

If I reposted it, I could find out how many people just saw the one that I reposted.

It'll be a lot.

It resonates, man.

It's like people are fucked.

How long ago was that?

When you shared the list, that one blew up, too.

Yeah, that was a good one, too.

How long ago was that?

The United Health one.

That was in December.

What is it, Jim?

You posted it eight months ago.

Eight months ago.

Alright, this is going to take a while because I'm a chatty Kathy.

I posted it.

It was December 15th, 2024.

Oh, that's not that long ago.

Okay, so here's Federman.

That's around that time.

Let me find it.

There ain't no no you.

Come on, cocksucker.

Where are you?

There's no shortage of stuff to make to make tunes on.

How do you decide what to make tunes on?

Do you just sit and when something like resonates with you and pisses you on?

Yeah, when when something is like, you know, gee,

gee, I got

I got something I could say about that.

Um

Then that's that's when you that's when you do I can't find it.

I know it's on here.

How would I search for it?

I don't think you can because you're trying to see the views.

You need to

found it.

Here we go.

Sorry.

Okay, view insights.

6,742,803 views.

The watch time is three years,

104 days, 17 hours, 13 minutes, and 8 seconds.

Folks got too much time on their hands.

There's a lot of people on the toilet right now, bro.

They need something to listen to.

You ever go to the toilet without your phone?

It's weird.

You just sit there like, wow, I'm alone with my phone.

Spacewalk without oxygen.

No one knows how to do it anymore.

Yeah, it's.

Read the Dr.

Bronner's bottle.

But the thing thing is, like that, the six million plus people that heard that, like that, that affects the narrative.

And then, you know, the list one, that affects the narrative.

And this one that you did on philanthropy, that affects the narrative.

Everyone's like throwing their coins into this big pile and trying to figure this out.

And it's more so now than I think has ever happened at any time in human history.

There's more discussion.

It's just, we're so upset that it's not fixed.

and uh it

it's on its way in the right direction i think it's just not satisfying the pace with in which progress is happening every everybody can get on now too i mean like that's it's just like i prop up my iphone and like play a tune mm-hmm everyone can just like get in yep

phone in front of their face and like get it out there you know yeah yeah anyone can now, which is great.

I mean, it allows guys like you to just all of a sudden have a following, you know.

All you have to do is have some talent, some talent, some creativity, some hard work.

Bam, there you go.

It's kind of cool.

I mean, that's the beautiful side of social media.

It's good.

There's no, there's no rules as far as especially in the music industry and stuff, there's no rules anymore.

Anyone who tells you that they know what to do or that they know what they're doing, they're so full of shit, dog.

Nobody knows what they're doing.

Yeah.

And like we want, we want people to know because we want to ask, like, what could I do to, you know, to have, to be successful or whatever.

Nobody knows.

No.

Nobody knows.

And there's no gatekeepers or anything like that.

All you have to do is want to play music.

Yeah.

And then go and do it on your phone and see if anyone likes you.

And if they like you, you're, you know, that's good.

Yeah.

Then everybody will come to you and say, I know how to make this bigger.

And they don't know what they're talking about either.

No, they're generally vampires.

And they're trying to take a piece.

Yeah.

They're trying to clamp on to you.

Oh, they come out of the woodwork, dog.

Have you had people offer you a bunch of money?

Not a bunch, but they'll offer you a little for a lot.

You know, a little for a lot.

Yeah.

They want your future, right?

Yeah.

They'll go, I would, you know, here's

there are all sorts of folks in the early days coming through labels and stuff going, here's we'll give you

10 grand for like 30 songs or something like that.

And it was like, this is insulting.

Yeah.

I don't want any of this.

I don't want any.

I don't need any of this.

Oliver Anthony was going through that right after Richman from Richmond.

Right.

Richman North of Richmond.

That song came out.

Like they just came after him with all this money.

Oh, they will.

All his fucking promises.

They will.

All this money.

They give you so much up front and you don't even, like, if you don't know, it's just a big-ass loan that you're never going to recoup.

And then you're not even, you're not living off your own dough at that point.

You're just living off of borrowed money like everybody else in the States.

And you're attached to them forever.

Yeah.

You're attached to them forever.

They own your masters.

You'll never see it back.

I mean, I assigned to a label when I was like 22.

I've been through

all that crap.

How old are you now?

I'm 47.

Are you really?

No, great.

No, I'm going to be 33 this year.

Yeah,

I believed you.

I was like, man,

kids living good.

Hello.

I'm just joshing you.

But, you know, this is a new time where

you really can become hugely successful and get a gigantic following with no one attached to you.

Yeah.

Where you don't have to have all those people.

They're not going to help you.

No, they don't.

Too many cooks in the kitchen.

Way too many people wanting to do it.

And too many people eating at the dinner plate.

And, dude, when anybody gives you money, like if the label comes in, let's say Chris took, let's say he took the deal, you know, or whatever.

If Oliver Anthony took the big deal,

then he's got all these people up there in the office with tax write-off MacBooks telling him what to do with his music because they open their wallet and they're going to have to give you notes.

They're entitled to give you their opinion at that point, and you wouldn't be able to just do whatever the hell he wants to do.

You know, and I think it's so important for artists to be able to do whatever the hell they want to do because that's the only way they can be themselves.

Exactly.

And then that's the only way you can be successful is to completely be yourself at all times, 100%.

Nothing but yourself.

And you see that one thing that does happen when people do take the money is that part goes away.

Because even though you think you're kind of sort of being yourself, everybody knows you're not totally.

You're not totally being yourself anymore.

And dough will change your life

in a way that you might not like be ready for or something it's gonna you're gonna think i got this dough now i can i can leave this town i don't like or i can get the house that i was wanting when it was really it was it was being

in that town and kind of having things difficult pressures around you and stuff that was creating these diamonds that was putting you in this situation to make good art and stuff like that yeah and you take away all your discomfort and then realize you can't make art and you're not happy

and and then you start getting nostalgic about the good old days when you were broke and shit like that it's just it's better it's it's better to just take only what you need

well then there's also the problem once you become successful of worrying about not being successful anymore about maintaining it that's terrifying

i gotta keep this going like i can't i can't fall off but if i can't be less successful i can't i i used to be poor now i've got money i gotta make sure this doesn't go away and how you temper your thoughts and you you measure you you're measured in what you say no no you it's

your measure of success is like how much can i be myself and uh and be happy be happy that way if you can still be 100 yourself all the way to the end of the line then that's your success yeah like that's but that's a smart way of looking at things most people look at things in terms of what is the way that's the most profitable.

So they'll avoid certain controversies.

But we know that

we know even from talking about people whose business, whose art is money, it creates misery to be chasing the bank account, to constantly have the dough.

You create bad art.

Your albums start to suck.

You might be getting in bigger, bigger places and stuff like that.

But yeah, it's going to fall off.

And when it does, you know,

then

you have some existential problems to deal with at that point.

Well, there's always the devil's bargain, right?

That fucking story is as old as time.

That's the Robert Johnson story, right?

They thought he sold his soul.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Van Halen definitely sold his soul to the devil.

You think so?

No.

I don't look like Eddie Van Halen, dude.

What?

You look a little like Eddie Van Halen.

I fucking love Eddie Van Halen.

Yeah, he's the man.

Oh, my God.

He was the man.

He is the Robert Johnson of the late 70s.

Angus Young sold his soul.

Isn't it funny, though, that that story was like always around?

The story of selling your soul for success.

Yeah.

It's an interesting

metaphor.

But it doesn't make any sense as far as like Robert Johnson.

He's like, he sold his soul, I guess, so he could play and then not be successful in his lifetime and die poor.

And then we would all find him later at Entroy.

I think the thought was that he was so much better than everybody else.

There's no way he could have gone that far ahead without some help.

Right.

He's spooky good.

Yeah.

He's spooky good.

He's working in the future.

But that's always, there's always guys like that, like Hendrix.

If anybody sold their soul, it's Hendrix.

Yeah.

Not that I think he did, but it's like when that guy came around, everybody was like, what the fuck is going on?

In every generation, there's a player, man.

Yep.

And I mean, maybe you could trace the line.

Johnson, Hendrix, that's skipping a few.

But to Hendrix, Eddie Van Halen.

And then you've got like Steve Vai and Josatriani and like

these virtuosos.

Stevie Rayvon, so important to Texas, too, Stevie.

We have a photo of him on stage at our club.

Because, you know, I own this place that used to be a theater that he performed at.

Okay.

And there's a photo of him on stage in 1983.

So as you're walking to the stage, there's a photo of Steve Rayvon on stage.

And he's back.

He's so cool.

I don't know if you've seen him at Austin City Limits, slinging his guitar behind his back.

Oh, he was the coolest.

Playing with his teeth.

He's got all his scarves and stuff.

I almost got to drive him once when I was driving limos, but he wouldn't take limos.

What did he want?

I drove Jeff Beck.

He wouldn't take limos.

Jeff Beck.

He only took cabs.

Okay.

They'd get him a limo.

He's like, eh, I'm getting in a cab.

Okay.

He'd hop in a cab and talk to the cab driver.

He didn't want to be Mr.

Fancy.

Yeah.

Fucking limo.

Yeah.

Isn't that cool?

I was pissed, though.

It's like, fuck.

I almost got to drive Steve Raybon.

That is

one of those talents every generation.

But it also shows you how dumb limo drivers are, like the companies.

Like, you let a fucking psycho like me, a 21-year-old maniac, drive one of the greatest guitars of all time.

Like, I was a bad driver.

Like, I was a reckless kid.

Like, all of a sudden, I had this job driving limos because I wore a suit.

Like, you're going to trust me?

What?

Steve Rayvon?

I mean, safer than the helicopter pilots and stuff.

In the end, yes.

No, I'm just kidding.

I mean, I was a good driver when I was driving limos.

It's kind of crazy.

Thank you.

But it is kind of crazy that they let a 21-year-old me just at the helm of a car with one of the greatest musicians of all time in the backseat.

It's always, it's fun to think back on that.

Like

when I was 18,

I did a radio program for KDYN Real Country Radio every Saturday morning.

It was called Dial-a-Deal, where people call in.

It was basically like an on-air Craigslist, you know.

But I was alone at the station after football games.

You know, football game would be like Friday night, go to bed, all beat up, wake up at like 5 a.m.

Go into the station, record the obituaries real quick, because those are going to run on on Saturday, and then

and then do like a you know, an on-air Craigslist radio program, and you're just like 17 years old with the entire radio station to yourself.

Wow.

I was a total dumbass, too.

I could have been like, anyway, here's Grand Funk Railroad, you know.

Did you have a specific list of things that you're supposed to play?

The list was like programmed in, and then you had to record weather.

So you would pull up the National Weather Service on the screen, and then you would record yourself doing the weather saying you know winds are gonna be southeast south southeast northwest out of the 15 miles an hour or whatever you do the obituaries but um no you didn't actually DJ it was just like you would hit the space bar music would start playing and be like okay folks if you can't tell by the music I'll go ahead and tell you myself it's time for dial-a-deal remember Our numbers up here are 667-4567 or toll-free at 888-325-KDYN.

That's 888-325-KDYN.

Remember, no commercial real estate advertisement.

Please limit your calls to once per program.

And keep in mind, I can't always keep track of these numbers up here myself.

So if you remember them on your end, you're doing me and you a favor.

Let's get back to the dialing and a dealing.

And then people would call in and they'd be like, I'm looking for my dog.

And I'd be like, somebody find that dog.

And then, you know, list off their number.

Or.

Did you ever play any of your songs?

No.

No, it was a classic country radio station.

So I'm up there listening to like Willie, Whalen, Hank Sr., Hank Jr.

And then also

they were playing like some modern.

I remember Brad Paisley was being played on here, and he just shredded.

But

no, I couldn't.

I couldn't.

I was in a grunge band at the time.

I couldn't play.

Wait, really?

Yeah.

I think the, yeah.

I couldn't put.

Once I printed out the track listing

for the record that I had made, I would make CD records and sell them at school like five bucks a pop.

I made more money selling records in high school than I ever did as an adult.

I

printed out all the song listing.

Anyway, the album was called Mom, I'm Gay.

And all the,

I left a bunch of them like at the radio station.

I remember the guy who was running it, he came to me and he was like, Did you print these out?

Are these yours?

And it was just kind of awkward after that.

A small town in Arkansas

not far out that's funny but I you know

folks folks will let a let a young person do all kinds of stuff I guess they see an aptitude in you they trust you so they let you drive a limo you know I think they just needed a job they needed someone to do the job it's that simple and most people would only temporarily keep that job and they would leave right right high turnover Yeah.

Yeah.

There was high turnover at the radio station because we weren't making any dough.

Right.

You know, the day.

What year was this?

This was in 1927.

No, uh,

2010,

2012.

I did a lot of radio when I was young and doing the road.

So I'd do like morning radio shows in the middle of nowhere.

Yeah.

And it was the only way to promote things.

Like, say, if you're going to do some gig in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, like you get on local radio, you tell everybody drive-time radio, so you're on the air.

It's like 6:30 in the morning, and let everybody know you're going.

Radio was a weird thing, man, because it was like a local connection, and all that stuff is kind of gone now.

You know, local connection used to be fun.

There was something about listening to the local radio in the morning when you're on your way to work that was kind of cool.

It was great.

And you knew that most of your friends were listening to.

They had a program called

like I I forget what it was, but on

every morning they would go through the sponsors of the radio station, which were all local businesses, and they would say, Here's a cup of coffee for Burns Drug.

And it was just like a call out to Burns Drug, Burns Pharmacy or whatever, and then you'd hear the sound of a coffee cup.

The obituaries ran, you'd listen to them, you'd be like, Oh, Janine died.

Damn it.

We gotta go to the memorial.

Uh they would tell what the Hillbillies, like the mascot was the Hillbillies, and like how high school football was doing and stuff like that.

I wonder if anybody's creating that in podcasts.

I wonder if there's any good local podcasts that are just about the community that you could like tune into every day.

Like, here's the news, you know?

I might have to start one.

Why not?

This local.

Why not?

Anonymous and local.

Yeah, just don't even say it's you.

Make him another name.

Yeah.

Yeah.

This is Bob Butts.

And people go,

I know who that is.

No, you don't.

I heard that dude.

I'm not who you.

Are you going to do a different voice?

I know you,

but you don't know me.

Are you going to change your voice?

You should do that.

No, I can't.

Do the local news with one of those things like an FBI informant.

We went into the house at 4.30 in the morning.

You know?

You know what I mean?

Those are spoilers.

But they have those people on TV with their face blacked out.

Those vice.

Are you sure that the government was involved?

100%.

They had to know.

The information came down from the top.

Show their face.

Yeah, show their face.

They get to get them killed.

Oh, man.

How many

do you do a lot of live gigs?

Yeah.

How many live gigs do you do?

Do you do like in in a week?

Do you do a bunch?

Like, how do you do it?

No, I just scheduled tours.

So, like, tomorrow I'll na I'll announce a tour and I think it's like 20-something dates, and then I'll go out for

two months and play, you know?

You just play solo?

Do you bring something?

No, I bring a band.

Oh, that's cool.

A whole band.

And then, right now, I've just been in festival season, so I just played the Newport Folk Fest.

Shout out, Newport.

Do you do any of these songs, like United Health?

Oh, yeah.

You do all of them?

Yeah.

Nice.

I got because I'm just always putting out albums.

Like, yeah, like on Friday I'll put out another record, too.

How many albums do you have so far?

Like five or six.

You know, kind

I wrote like

a hundred songs in 24 and just like put them all out.

And that's what's great about being indie is like you can just you just put out music as soon as you make it.

Right.

So um so there's but there's a lot of tunes to choose from right.

Usually you know in the set I'll play a lot of these uh a lot of these topical

ones and then bring the band up and then we'll play the other records that I got

But no, I was just at new

new Newport and then we did Edmonton Folk Fest and

Here in a little bit I'll do Farmaid and Healing Appalachia Farmaid

was

like last year around this time John Cougar Mellencamp sent me an email and was like, Jesse, I would like you to play at Farmaid.

But it was from a weird email address and I didn't believe it was him, but it it was totally him, just like emailing through his like girlfriend's email or something.

That's hilarious.

And so I like I showed it to a

to one of the

like one of my friends, he m helps manage,

and he was like, I'll I'll vet this out.

We'll see if this is legit.

And sh sure enough it was anyway, go down to FarmAid, and that's like one of the first gigs that I play as this iteration of myself.

but got to you know got to meet a lot of cool people and and get to be friends with with a lot of them too Lucas Nelson is

it was very cool to meet him last year and now I think we'll be doing a tune together here before too long but nice

him I got to meet Charlie over there at FarmAid David Charlie Charlie Crockett oh Charlie's awesome he's super I really enjoyed talking to him yeah he's great he was a great guest what a wild life that guy's lived.

Yeah.

That's like, that comes out in his music.

There's something about like hard living, like living an authentically difficult life that like you hear it in the way they sing.

Yeah.

You hear it.

It's real.

Yeah.

You know, like there's like an intangible element to certain songs.

You know?

It's how it be.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, AI is not going to fix that.

They're not going to, you know what I mean?

Like AI is not going to overcome that.

No, I don't know.

That's the, maybe the only thing that AI is not gonna overcome.

Who would be worried?

I don't understand why musicians are ever.

You know, they're they're making like let me send you something, Jamie.

I don't know if you've seen this, where they made a female indie, like emo, whatever it would be, band lady, and

it's really fucking good.

Yeah.

Like you listen to it and you're like, holy shit.

I sent it to Patrick

from the the black keys

and uh

and he was

his answer was like pop music is ai has been for a while good thing i suck at drums and make it human

yeah

uh i'm gonna send this to you jamie because you you you hear it and you're like oh my god this could be a fucking giant hit and the crazy thing is that ai makes this in seconds right i mean in literal seconds like you watch this guy put in the prompts, you watch it make this song, and then you listen to the song, and you're like,

Right.

Oh, my God.

And it's better than most of these songs.

Like, listen to this.

Create a square avatar of a fictitious female alternative slash indie singer and a name for her.

Wow.

Sadie.

Sadie Winners.

Sadie Winters.

Okay.

Song is about walking away from someone who never really saw her worth.

She's going to create the song lyrics.

Look at that.

Wait, how many seconds was that?

That was like about four seconds.

Look at that.

That's got a bridge.

Did you even read any of these?

You don't care.

I don't care.

Put my lyrics in.

The lyrics that happened in four seconds.

Yes.

And then hit create.

Let's listen.

This is the world premiere.

I was paper.

You were scissors.

Cut me out.

She's a good singer.

Good singer.

Ooh, that's nice.

Pretty good.

Where are we, Rick?

Where have we found ourselves?

How crazy is that?

I mean,

look at that.

Jewel even says, Jewel goes, wow, it's a great melody.

Yeah.

Listen,

artists, everything that can be replaced will be replaced.

Okay?

And pop music was already AI.

Patrick has a great point.

Yeah.

I don't think artists, if you what you're making,

I don't think you got nothing to worry about.

Well, it's not a worry.

It's I mean, for some people, I'm sure it's a worry, but it also is just a concern that there's a new element of society.

That there's

creativity is being replaced in si in at least a form right in front of our eyes.

Like we're regardless of what you think about pop music, there there are some people that are making pop music in a as a creative endeavor, and that just did it way better than they do and did it like that.

They'll have to find something else to do.

They'll have to find something else to do.

I'll have to listen to something else in JCPenney.

Talk.

Who still goes to Jay-Z Penny?

I mean, are they still around?

Is there a JCPenney?

Yeah.

At where you are?

I go with JCPenney.

I'm not knocking it.

I'd go if I needed something.

I'm just saying I haven't seen one in a long time.

I see targets everywhere.

I don't see JCPenney anymore.

I'm just the music like that always, yeah, I feel like I'm in a, yeah, I feel like I'm in an academy or

you're buying sneakers somewhere.

You just need something to go in the background, some non-confrontational music to

carry you through.

But what you said, I think, is right, that if you can be replaced, you will be replaced.

Yeah.

All things that can be replaced will be replaced.

It's how it has always been as long as man has been around.

Everything that can be replaced will be replaced.

But there are things that are irreplaceable.

right?

Yeah,

I mean, that's kind of in every

new iteration of technology, we're seeing things get replaced, right?

Right.

Like when I was a bit a kid, um, VHS was the newest technology.

Like, oh my god, you could watch a movie at home.

Yeah, no one ever thought Blockbuster was ever going to go away.

Of course, there's always going to be a blockbuster.

Every Friday night, everybody goes to Blockbuster to find a movie to watch.

Gone.

Yeah.

Doesn't exist anymore.

Gone like that.

Like real quick.

Streaming, internet speeds pick up.

It's over.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, remember record sales?

Oh, my goodness.

They would make millions and millions and millions just from selling records.

Now it all went away.

Napster came along, and some people freaked out, and, you know, some people lost a lot of fans because they freaked out, too, like to try to stop the tide of inevitability.

And he didn't.

Hepfield and

I mean, Metallica was eventually kind of right.

about

what they said about Napster, right?

Oh, they knew.

Yeah.

They knew what was going on.

Well, they they knew it was going away.

Yeah.

It was all going away.

I mean, everybody kind of understood that this is, if you're logical and objective, you could pretend, like, oh, don't worry, we're going to be fine.

But if you're logical and objective, you go, oh, this is just the first bullet that landed in this never-ending war

with digital information.

Like, you're not going to be able to prevent this from happening.

Yeah.

I think the record companies have figured out how to make money off of streaming and to make sure that the artist probably doesn't get all that much of it.

Well, this is the beautiful thing about being independent.

If you're independent, you can make money off of streaming.

And if you're independent, you get all of your touring revenue, which is really where it's at.

You get all of it.

Just make enough to pay for another tour.

Well, it depends on how successful you are.

But this is what's really crazy about some of the deals that some of these artists are signing where the label gets a giant percentage of their touring money, which didn't used to be the case.

It used to be like an artist.

They got to find a a way to pull it in somehow because they're not selling the records.

Exactly.

They get a piece of merch, they get a piece of this, they get a piece of everything.

They just own you.

Yeah.

And what value do they provide other than you getting the security of saying, I'm on Warner Brothers?

Just standing in the way every time you try to put out an album, they go, I don't hear a hit here.

It's like, well, because there are none.

Okay.

Wait for the next record.

It's out in two months, you know?

But they want to make as much as they possibly can off of one record.

And the one record, it puts an immense amount of pressure on an artist

without developing the artist at all.

What's Hunter has done?

The music industry is a shallow money trench where good men die like dogs, you know?

It's a racket.

But don't you think that now less of it?

Because there are people like you out there.

There's quote, you know, Tyler the creator, didn't he make most of his

everything that was just created by himself online, right?

I don't know.

Isn't that the case?

I don't know.

You don't know?

I don't know.

You don't know?

But you can.

That's too hard.

I don't know.

Who knows?

Was it a weird one?

Him specifically, I don't know, but I would say

that's the story that's being told.

Okay.

But some people have done it, right?

Yeah.

Oliver Anthony for sure did it.

Yeah, yeah.

And it's, you know, it's a new pathway.

If you have something that really resonates, like your United Health song or any of your songs, like, that's all you need, you know?

And then that one thing could change everything, and then people listen.

Totally, yeah,

and the fact that you're able to do it completely independently, you're able to have

like a truly authentic voice.

Like, it's like when you sing about who's the guy that created it, that doesn't give a fuck.

What's his name?

Richard T.

Burke.

Yeah, Richard T.

Burke.

You can sing about Richard T.

Burke doesn't give a fuck.

Like,

it's

no one's in your ear.

Nobody's telling you to be careful.

Yeah, no one's.

So, like I'm hearing.

I'm like, yeah.

You know,

people know.

They know when something is authentic.

It's real weird.

They're fucking...

The way people tune into a song, it's

there's something going on with songs.

You know, it's not just like a bunch of music and a bunch of lyrics.

Like, it changes the way you feel.

Yeah.

It's a drug.

Yeah.

It's a weird, like, a good song is like a good drug.

Yeah, dude.

Have you heard Freebird?

Oh, fuck yeah.

Dude.

I've heard that song about a thousand,

more than a thousand times.

Yeah.

A hundred thousand times, maybe even.

Yeah, if you don't think music's a drug.

Listen to Freebird.

Listen to that fucking guitar solo.

Looking with the devil.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

A whole lot of love.

Don't, don't, don't, don't, don't.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Just fired up.

There's songs that change the way you feel that if that was a drug, that would be a very valuable drug.

Yeah.

You know?

They're little mood capsules, man.

Yeah.

I want to feel melancholy.

Here's Yesterday by the Beatles.

Right.

Right.

Yesterday.

Yeah, there's a bunch of songs like that.

Captain Jack.

You know?

Captain Jack.

Captain Jack will get you high tonight.

Oh, I was thinking of

fantastic

Elden John.

Captain Jack is one of Billy Joel's greatest songs.

It's a great fucking song.

It's a guy living on Long Island.

It's great.

It's a great song.

It's like you listen to it, it, you're like, God damn, he nailed it.

He fucking nailed it.

He's one of the greats, man.

Dude,

I really appreciate you coming in, and I really love what you're doing.

Thanks for having me.

I just wanted to

have you in here, shoot the shit with you, see what your process was and how you think about things.

And I really enjoyed it.

Thanks for having me, Joe.

My pleasure.

Tell everybody what's the best place to find you and find your stuff.

I'm

you know, I'm online.

So go, you know, get get online.

Do you have a, what is your Instagram?

Uh, Wells Music.

Wells Music.

There it is.

W-E-L-L-E-S.

Yeah.

So it's wellsmusic.com.

Tour dates

are all there.

Yeah.

Go out and see them.

Support.

Dude, continued success and best of luck to you.

I really, I really enjoy what you're doing.

Thanks very much.

My pleasure, both of you.

All right.

Goodbye, everybody.

This episode is brought to you by Life Lock.

I bet you've probably been to the doctor's office in the past few months.

I bet you had to hand over your personal info, like your insurance, your ID, maybe even your social security number.

And I bet you weren't thinking about how your doctor is just one of many places that has your personal information.

If any one of them isn't careful, it's a good bet they could accidentally expose your details to hackers and identity theft, putting you at risk.

It's not like you can avoid all these places either.

Sometimes you have to go to the doctor, the dentist, hell, even your employer has your personal info on file.

Fortunately, LifeLock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second for threats to your identity.

If your identity is stolen, a U.S.-based restoration specialist will fix it guaranteed or your money back.

There's also plans covering up to $3 million for stolen funds and expenses.

Don't take chances with your personal info.

Help protect it even when it's out of your hands.

Save up to 40% your first year.

Call 1-800-LIFELOCK and use the promo code JRE or go to lifelock.com/slash J-R-E for 40% off.

LifeLock for the threats you can't control.

Terms apply.