#0030 - Bernie Sanders

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On this episode, we cover the Joe Rogan Experience number 2341 with guest Bernie Sanders.

The No Rogan experience starts now.

Welcome back to the show.

This is the podcast where two podcasters with 89 hours of Joe Rogan experience get to know Joe Rogan.

This is the show for all those who are curious about Joe Rogan, his guests and their claims, as well as for just anyone who wants to understand Joe's ever-growing media influence.

I'm Michael Marshall.

I'm joined by Cecil Cicarello.

And today we're going to be covering Joe's June 2025 interview with Senator Bernie Sanders.

So Cecil, how did Joe introduce Bernie in the show notes?

The show notes say Bernie Sanders is the senior United States Senator from Vermont.

See him live on the Fighting Oligarchy Tour, and then they give a URL for that.

And is there anything else we should know about Bernie Sanders?

Well, he is the longest serving independent in the United States congressional history.

He maintains a close relationship with the Democratic Party, having caucus with the White House and Senate Democrats for most of his congressional career.

Actually, he sought out the party's presidential nomination in 2016 and 2020.

Sanders has been viewed as one of the main leaders of the modern American progressive movement.

According to Politico and New York Times, Sanders doesn't push or create large bills or legislation.

Mainly, he just uses his political influence to sort of shift those bills left and so people can sign on and

essentially influence smaller parts of the bills.

That's sort of his only route of being effective here in the United States because most people in the United States are not as far left as Bernie Sanders is.

In July 2016, while Sanders was in the primary election against Hillary Clinton, there was a leak of the Democratic National Committee's emails.

These emails appeared to show that the DNC favored Clinton over Sanders.

And here's from the wiki quote.

Staff repeatedly discussed making his irreligious tendencies a potential campaign issue in the southern states and questioned

his party loyalty.

DNC chair Debbie Vosserman Schultz,

she called his campaign manager an ass and a damn liar.

He went on to lose that primary to Hillary.

He also lost his presidential primary to Joe Biden in 2020.

And he's spending a lot of time traveling the country right now, telling people that billionaires are bad.

So I figure this interview opportunity was him starting at the tap.

So in this interview with Joe, what did they talk about?

Well, mostly the state of the average American, the economy and what.

Bernie would have done if he was in charge.

Most of the conversation centers around billionaires as Trump Sanders is there to publicize his fighting oligarchy tour.

And they do spend some time talking about Trump and his lawsuits and some other odds and ends.

Yeah, absolutely.

So we're talking Bernie Sanders here.

So our main event has to be democratic socialism.

That's what we're going to talk about.

But before we get to the main event, just after we talk about there being big money backers to things, we're going to say a thank you to our Area 51 all-access past patrons.

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But now it's time for our main event.

A huge thank you there to this week's Veteran Voice of the podcast.

That was Jay in Oregon announcing our main event.

Remember, you can also be on the show if you send us a recording of you giving us your best rendition of it's time.

You can send that to noroganpod at gmail.com, as well as how you want to be credited.

And it's really important you send it to us and not Joe Rogan, because it turns out a lot of people make that mistake between our two email addresses, which we will come to.

But yes, yeah, we get a lot of Joe Rogan's email.

We certainly do.

So as I mentioned, our main event this week is Democratic Socialism.

And this is a bit of a departure for us, for the main show at least,

because I'm going to mostly agree with Joe's guest here.

And in many places, so is Joe.

Joe's going to agree an awful lot with Bernie Sanders here.

And so, given that, I thought it's worth staying upfront, state my biases here.

It's important to get our biases kind of up there so you can know this is what's affecting us politically.

I'd say I'm a socialist or a democratic socialist.

I fundamentally believe in a strong social safety net.

I believe in helping the most vulnerable people in society.

And I believe that the cost of that whole system should be covered by taxing the wealthy.

I personally, I would pay higher taxes for better services and for better support for the people who need it more than me.

And I think the wealthier you are, the more of an obligation you have to society to help society.

That's kind of where I am here.

Sure.

It sounds exactly where I am.

I wanted to echo your sentiment here, Marsh, and also tell people that while you may have not had an opportunity to vote for Bernie Sanders, I have done so twice in primary elections.

So

I did as well.

I'm the reason there was electoral fraud in America.

I just kept, I couldn't help myself.

No, that's not true.

That is not true.

That's not true.

But as we'll see, when Joe is talking to someone like Bernie Sanders, Joe seems to think the same way.

Yeah.

And I think we said before that Joe does genuinely seem capable at times of recognizing some of the issues in society.

But then often in the conversations he's having, he's too often like persuaded that the answers to those issues lies in counterproductive conservative policies.

So I can recognize I believe the Democrats when they say this is an issue, and I believe the Republicans when they say this is the solution.

And often the solution he's putting forward isn't a good solution.

So we're going to see a different side of Joe throughout this interview, I'd say.

Do you wonder like if...

And I wonder if he really does believe these things, because I've seen him shift his opinions so frequently on so many of these things.

The only thing I think he really does believe when it comes down to his consistency level, and we'll find out on this episode, is climate change.

I think he's a climate change denier.

The other stuff, he feels more malleable.

Like he feels like whoever's in front of him, he's going to bring that energy back.

Yeah, I think that's true.

Although I do genuinely believe that when he expresses, you know,

feeling like the little guy in America gets screwed over by the system and how hard it is to make ends meet on a minimum wage job or when he's talking about education and how that should be free.

How

does he be consistent on on too.

Yeah, I think so.

It's just the problem is he's consistent on that as a value set, but he isn't then consistent in following through what would entail in society to make that safety net a reality for a lot of people.

He will, when it comes to taxation, as we'll see in this episode, in fact, he'll fundamentally misunderstand how his own taxes work.

And

that means he's quite malleable to guests who are who recognize that he can be swayed and manipulated or redirected towards harmful, in my opinion, harmful policies that

harm the issues that Joe is talking about caring about.

Okay, so we're going to start the conversation really early in the show.

Joe and Bernie are talking about how things are different for this current generation versus past generations.

How much different is that than past generations?

It's that we've always had rich and poor, no question about it.

It's worse now, Joe.

What do you attribute that to?

I attribute it to

decades-old attacks on the working class of this country.

I attribute it to horrific trade agreements, which have allowed corporate America to throw millions of workers out on the street and move to China, Mexico, and other low-wage countries.

I attribute it to a corrupt political system in which billionaires have significant control over both political parties.

So that, for example, right now in Washington, the national minimum wage is $7.25 an hour.

So you've got millions of workers today, you know, making 10, 12, 13 bucks an hour.

You tell me, how do people survive on 13 bucks an hour?

When we were kids, or at least when I was a kid, you worked for a large company.

You had something called a defined benefit pension plan.

You know, that means that means you work for me for 30 years.

When you retire, you're going to get X hundreds of dollars a week.

That's long gone.

Corporations have gotten rid of that.

So you got something like half of older workers in America have nothing in the bank when they face retirement.

So I think to answer your question, I think you got a rigged system controlled economically and politically by very, very wealthy and powerful people who could care less for working families.

Now, couldn't.

Couldn't.

I hate that.

I don't know why Americans do that.

I wasn't going to pick up on that.

I was going to let Bernie go with that.

It's not Americans.

Don't do that to me.

I say couldn't.

Come on.

Okay.

Well, you stand alone in America with being dramatically correct on

that particular idiom.

But what Bernie's saying there, that is a 90-second answer to the question, what went wrong?

And I think this is a very strong, accessible summary of Bernie Sanders' political philosophy.

And I think the other thing is it's also pitched at the issues that people actually face.

The people listening to this are going to face these issues way more than the kind of figures that George had on who want to push their solutions, your kind of Mark Andreas and billionaire Peter Thiel type figures.

What Bernie's talking about is so much more real to the average person, I think.

And when we think about those people who are pushing their solutions, how many of them have shown this kind of understanding of the issues in America and the causes of those issues?

You know, corporate America moved jobs overseas.

They were allowed to do so because billionaires wield way too much political influence.

And the downstream effect has been hollowing out the structures that used to protect workers.

It's a 90-second answer and it says so much about what Bernie's worldview actually is.

Yeah, and it's great to see him easily diagnose and then explain the problem in a very short amount of time and being very succinct.

It's almost like he walks up to America, the car, opens the hood, and he's like, well, there's your problem.

And Peter Thiel's just gnawing on one of the tubes in there.

And that's really it.

Like he's really just like, yeah, this is a real simple, there's real simple answers to a lot of these questions that we just can will have a very difficult time.

putting forth because the system we've created reinforces those people in power.

And we're going to see that, I think that's the theme throughout this entire episode.

Yeah, it really is.

And if we, if we're we're going to be critical, we could say that what Bernie Sanders is espousing there is maybe overly simplistic or one-dimensional.

It's not the only issue in American society.

And I think those are that's fair criticism.

But I also think this is such a significant issue in American society that is not being worked on.

And the reason it's not being worked on is because it goes against the interests of the people who do have political power to work on these things.

The people who are funding political campaigns aren't going to be saying, I'm going to give you all this money in order to stop me being able to give you all this kind of money.

That's not the kind of thing that typically happens.

Exactly.

We're moving on to talking about healthcare in this next bit.

So I add all of that up and you have,

and then just look at other things.

I mean, you tell me, tell me about the healthcare system.

Does anybody in America think this healthcare system is working?

Well, you could tell by the assassination, when the assassination of the United Healthcare guy, when that happened,

there was people celebrating.

When is there ever someone gets assassinated on the streets of New York City and people celebrate?

Right.

That's terrible.

It's terrible, but it does speak to how people feel about insurance companies.

Right.

Well, and I think rightly so, because it's not what you're paying for.

What you're paying for is you're hoping that you never get sick, but if you pay your insurance, you will be covered.

What they're trying to do is make it as difficult as possible for you to get money from them.

You got it.

The more money, the more I can deny you, the more money I make.

Right.

And that's the bottom line.

And when you're dealing with these enormous corporations, like we're talking about this diffusion of responsibility, the people that are doing it, it's like, this is what I have to do.

This is my job.

They don't even think about it.

Imagine.

Anywhere else in the world having a conversation that's understandable.

A health CEO got killed because of evil business decisions.

It's like, other than Russia, that's not a place where things happen.

But here in the United States, we're having that conversation.

I think Joe does a really good job of what, what I think a lot of people contend with, the cognitive dissonance of that act.

They contend with that.

And I think Joe does a good job of articulating why that was a frustration for a lot of people.

And I just wish he would do that with other industries, right?

He's only doing that when it comes to health industries, but he's had other billionaires who are moguls in their industry sit across from him.

And he doesn't even have this conversation.

He's had both, both

Elon Musk and Zuckerberg that we've listened to, and neither of them, he's talked about the perils and the dangers of social media, not a single time.

Yeah, I think that's fair.

I'm also, I was slightly surprised to hear

Joe saying to Bernie, rightly, that people are feeling this way about insurance companies so much so that they're cheering the assassination of an insurance company, CEO.

And Joe saying, well, rightly so because the industry is this bad.

I was surprised to hear him saying rightly so, even about kind of the cheering on an assassination.

I was trying to see, I was trying to think and even find in our other kind of notes when Luigi Mangioni has come up before, but I don't know that Joe has had this kind of

understanding, if not sympathy with, and certainly understanding for the people who are

supportive of Mangioni.

And I wonder if that's Joe tacking his sales to Bernie Sanders, because Bernie Sanders does a thing in the middle there saying, yeah, it's terrible, but it shows what people are feeling.

And Joe takes that redirect from Bernie Sanders and just heads back off down the track that Bernie sent him on.

Okay, so now they're going to talk about

the way in which manufacturing in the United States has shifted to other places, and they're going to focus mainly on Detroit here.

People don't know this.

Yeah.

But if my memory is correct, Detroit used to be in the 50s.

Third richest city in the world.

You got it.

Yes.

Yeah.

We've talked about it multiple times.

It's disgusting.

And especially me as someone who loves American automobiles, I'm a big fan of what Detroit made during that time.

And to see what what happened to Detroit now, the last time I was in Detroit, it actually seems to be picking up.

There's a lot of small businesses and a lot of artists and a lot of people that are proud to, like Shinola, companies like that, proud to be in Detroit.

But there's just so many abandoned buildings.

It's insane.

You could buy a house there for 500 bucks.

It's really crazy.

Like

giant factories where every window is smashed, all the pipes have been torn out, and it's just this hulking.

And it's not just Detroit.

Right.

I mean there are other communities corporations say hey i mean and

that path is unsustainable right i think so yeah

i i think most american manufacturing is gone and is not coming back i think there is a lot of talk about this idea of getting our manufacturing base back up.

And right now, if you were to talk to people, I think conservative people, some of them, maybe not all of them, but certainly some of them would think that tariffs would be the way to do that, right?

That that's what they've been told.

They've sort of been told this by the right, that this will fix American manufacturing by

sort of reducing our reliance on others because it's too expensive and creating that industry here.

I think for a lot of reasons, tariffs won't work and they're a tax on the American people.

But I think like

the solutions that are presented on the right are not good solutions.

Yeah, yeah.

It's like, let's go back to how things were.

And the modern world just just doesn't work that way.

It's very, very rare that there is a factory that creates something from scratch without using parts imported from a different factory that creates those parts.

And everything is like an amalgamation of several different,

and all those factories are based in lots of different places.

And I think the thing is, when those solutions come up from people like, you know, the right-wing, like Trump, I think Trump is at least speaking to there being a problem.

I think he has some ability to recognize that there is a problem.

It's just that his solution is the complete opposite of helpful.

But people see the jobs go away and they want someone to acknowledge that that is a problem, that manufacturing has, it's not a problem that manufacturing has gone abroad.

It's a problem that jobs haven't replaced them, entry-level jobs and blue-collar kind of jobs, manual labor type things.

Those reliable jobs haven't replaced them.

So people see a lack of jobs and that's the problem.

They want that acknowledge.

And Trump does acknowledge it.

But then what he'll do is he'll then lie to them about what caused problem and then lie about what will fix it.

You know, the problem is foreigners, the fix is tariffs.

Neither of those things are quite true.

And I think too few politicians are speaking about it as a genuine issue, partly for the reason that the corporations are holding way too much power and have too much political influence.

So to speak out about the offshoring of jobs to China or whichever parts of the world is to speak out against the corporations who may well be putting money in your pack.

I think those are genuine things.

The only thing is that Joe seems unwilling or unable to make a connection between what the problem is and why politicians aren't speaking out about it.

And especially when his guest list is just a steady stream of those corporate interests.

It's very hard to say corporations are the problem when you keep hanging around corporation leaders.

Yeah, no, that's a great point, Marsh.

I think they do articulate it very well.

I think that the right has reached in and found that pulse and knows

where to poke and prod to make the American people follow what they have to say.

And I think they do have a finger on the pulse of what is bothering some Americans.

I think their approach is completely backwards, though.

We think that they are approaching it as a conservative, meaning let's bring back all the industries that left instead of saying, well, hey, it's actually a lot harder to do that.

Why don't we embrace new industries?

and become a leader in them.

What they're doing is demonizing those new industries because that's where the money is pushing them, right?

So like we look at green energy versus the oil and gas industry.

The United States is clearly in the pocket of the oil and gas industry and any green energy initiatives get smashed.

And so Joe is even on that train, right?

Joe has many times talked to these people who've said, no, you know,

solar farms are ugly and they pollute more than actually other forms of pollution from energy, et cetera.

Wind turbines kill whales, yeah.

Exactly.

Yeah, wind turbines.

Or wind turbines, once you have them, you can never get rid of them.

They're like, they're tumors that just pop up from the land.

So Joe is embracing all of these big oil company sort of ideals too, because he's being fed these by these billionaires and by these other very rich people who come on and by the politicians he interviews.

So I think, you know, Joe isn't embracing those new industries.

He's just poo-pooing them and saying we need that old.

And that's just a bad way to think.

Moving on, they're going to talk about, again, these jobs moving, but Bernie's going to bring up Mexico here.

I'll never forget, Joe, early on when I was elected to Congress, this was when we had the NAFTA agreement, I went to the Maquiladora area.

You know what that is?

It's a special zone in northern Mexico, near the border.

where the government there, this is back decades ago, allowed American and other European corporations to settle and got tax breaks there.

So it attracted all these corporations.

So I went there with a congressional delegation, and this is what I saw.

You saw these beautiful new factories.

Now, this is 25, 30 years ago.

And then we said, all right, I want to see where the workers live.

And I'll never forget this as long as I live.

Do you know those large cardboard boxes that refrigerators come into and stove those big?

That's where people were living.

They were living literally in cardboard boxes, making, I think at that point, now this is a long long time ago, 25 cents an hour.

So workers in America were thrown out on the street and people in Mexico exploited in a horrible way in these big, shiny new factories at the time.

So what you got, and I believe this strongly, you asked me, you know, how does it happen?

Why does it happen?

I think especially right now and for many decades, you have the prevailing religion of the oligarchs and the corporate world is greed.

That's all.

I want it all.

And I don't give a shit if I have to step wall over you, throw you out on the street, take away your social security.

I want it and to help with you.

And that's why you end up with a situation in America where, you know, the top 1% now wants more wealth than the bottom 93%.

Millions of people struggle.

I will point to other conversations that Joe has had in the past where he has also maintained this idea.

He has said, I don't think it's fair that we in this country exploit other people around the world.

I think not only should we have good fair wages in this country, I think we should have fair wages around the world.

He's going to go on to say that the blame here is more quarterly profits.

I've heard him say that before.

And it sounds like he either understands this or he's able to match the energy of Bernie.

I'm not sure which, but either way, I think it's positive.

Yeah, I think so.

I remember there's the interview where he was talking about how to stop so much illegal migration into America.

And his solution was, let's raise the standard of living in other countries, which is not the conservative GOTU position on that.

But I also, I think this, just that one clip there, it's testament to Bernie's ability to anchor things back to values and root causes throughout.

American jobs went away.

Why?

We could say, well, because foreign workers are going to work for less.

If you leave it there, people are going to stick with demonizing those workers.

How dare those foreigners undercut your good American workers?

But Bernie does a very good job of humanizing them.

It's not the fault of those workers, they're being exploited.

Here's the situations they're in.

The real issue here is corporate greed, which means you want to find workers who will work for almost nothing that you can't exploit.

So he's able to keep coming back to his core message, which I agree with, but even if you don't agree with it, you can't kind of fault that.

He's good at bringing it back to that core message, which is the corporate greed is what is rotting things from the inside out.

There's a great cartoon that I've seen multiple times, and it's an image of a very rich guy guy in a suit.

And behind him are a giant stack of cookies.

Then there's a person on the left who's in a workman's outfit with like a hard hat.

He has one cookie in front of him.

And then there's a person on the on the right, clearly a brown person who is in sort of rags.

And the billionaire looks over at the worker and says, that immigrant wants your cookie.

And I think like there's, there's a really, I think that there's a great, that's a great way to depict it.

And I think Bernie does that almost every time he talks.

And he does a great job of articulating who we should be looking to to make sure that this changes and who we should be saying they hold the responsibility.

And Bernie does a really good job, I think, throughout this interview and even in this, like you suggested, in this very short piece of saying the responsibility lies here.

Let's make sure we place the responsibility in the correct place.

Yeah.

I mean, the billionaire in question in that particular cartoon is specifically Rupert Murdoch.

That is a big, that is genuinely, it's a drawing of Rupert Murdoch, who I think just joined the left-wing woke deep state with the release about what Trump brought about Epstein.

I think that's the current story is that

he's actually part of the left-wing woke deep state.

We need to figure out what cookies we were making to make him eat to turn him left.

Once we figure that out, we're giving everybody cookies.

Yeah.

All right.

Now,

like I suggested before, they're going to talk about why those, we need these quarterly profits.

And here's that clip.

But here's another amazing fact who do you think owns these corporations you know you remember there was a day where somebody actually owned general motors or john fort they're now owned by wall street firms you got three wall street investment firms blackrock you're familiar with blackrock they're charged in state street exactly yeah check it out on google they are combined the three of them combined are the major stockholders of 95 percent of american corporations how's that that's not good That's power.

Right.

How did that start, and what could have been done to stop that from happening?

Well, I think it's,

again, it's greed.

These guys are smart.

They're hardworking.

They're motivated.

They want more and more.

So if I can buy this, I can buy this.

I can sell this.

Right.

But they're all doing it within the law, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Right.

But which is, is that the problem?

Yeah.

But who makes that law?

They do.

What a great turn.

It's there's an interesting tie here that I will tie back to another show that we did.

Ian Carroll got famous doing inter, like sort of videos in the supermarket talking about where products come from and talking about corporate greed.

And he got very, very famous doing those sorts of things and then shifted to conspiracies.

I'm not sure exactly why, but he did.

And there's sort of a tie-in here to Joe's audience.

And I think there was even a discussion about that sort of thing while Ian Carroll was on the show.

I think often we find conspiracies in all these places, and we think there's some sort of, you know, governmental cabal that rules us and has subtle machinations.

And the true answer is that there is.

It's called Wall Street and corporate greed.

That's not a conspiracy that rich people influence the world exponentially more than you and I and everyone else.

If anything, the weird conspiracies keep people from sort of combating the real and true issues of wealth and power.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

People want to find the shadowy secret elites in charge of the government.

And in doing so, they overlook the extremely public billionaires and corporations that have all of that influence.

Yeah.

You know, what I love is at the end there,

Joe's saying, yeah, but if they're doing it by the law, is that the problem?

And Bernie, nice and simple, who makes that law?

Joe, they do.

That is such a killer exchange at the end here, because that is so easily missed.

People can come away thinking, well, everything is legal.

So why wouldn't someone take all that they're legally able to take?

If they're allowed to it under the law, then that's kind of fine for them to be doing that.

And I can see people people stopping at that thought.

I have conversations with my dad about this kind of thing, and he stops at that point and says, well, it's all legal.

You know, you pay, you only should pay the amount of tax that legally you have to pay.

And if you can find legal ways out to it, that's absolutely fine.

But the point here is that.

that that next step that that Bernie takes Joe and his audience on, that's the important watch.

That's the important step, which is the only reason that is legal is because money buys access, which buys you favorable laws.

We don't have, you and I don't have access to the laws that allow us to skip out on certain amounts of tax and do all these kind of things because we don't have the money to buy those laws for ourselves.

And I'll keep coming back to it throughout this throughout this show because I think

this episode and Bernie Sanders is the perfect comparison point

for Mark Andriessen, for example.

Mark Andriessen came on Rorgan Shaw specifically to help build a clamor for laws that would make it easier for him to attain wealth at your expense.

Who makes the laws?

Mark Andreessen makes that law and he wants your permission to do so.

Yeah, what a great, it's a great contrast between these two, right?

And I think it's almost like Mark Andreessen is Bernie Sanders Lex Luther.

He even already has the hairstyle.

He has the perfect hairstyle, so it matches.

Talking back about healthcare again.

So, you know, the issues that we talk about is in the richest country on earth, why don't we have the best health care system in the world?

Why do we have 85 million people who are uninsured or uninsured?

And as you were mentioning a moment ago, I mean, he deals with the insurance companies and the drug companies.

And the function of the current healthcare system is to make these guys very rich.

And it works.

They make zillions of dollars.

And every place you go, in my state, the cost of healthcare has gone up this year like 10, 15%.

People can't afford it.

And we lose thousands of people every year.

People get sick.

They can't afford to go to the doctor.

They die.

So, you know, one of the fights that I hope we can win is to have the United States join every other major country on earth and guarantee health care to all people as a human right.

Well, we've talked about that a lot on this show, that if you view this country as a community, the most important thing is to protect the most vulnerable members of your community, period, right?

I agree.

And if

we spend insane amounts of money on all sorts of things that people don't agree with, and I think generally most people would agree on some sort of a national health care system.

They do.

Most people.

Like

there's concepts of socialism that everyone agrees with.

One of them is the fire department.

Right.

Right?

Everyone thinks that everyone, every citizen, should have access, the same equal access to the fire department.

And we all pay into that.

That's right.

And we all believe in education.

We all believe that there should be free public education.

And most people believe that the university system should also be funded.

It would benefit everyone.

You got it.

It would benefit everyone to have more educated people that are doing better in the world.

You'd have better GDP.

You'd have more successful people.

Absolutely right.

Yeah, I just want to point out to Joe that there's more vulnerable people in the United States than just sick people, trans people, immigrants, people who live in poverty.

There's a whole bunch of people.

And sometimes they are in the sights of Joe and being attacked attacked by Joe.

Yeah, yeah, they absolutely are.

And the thing is, we've heard Joe talk this way before about how the fire department should, you know, we all agree a socialist version of the fire department, how education should be free as well.

But he only seems to bring that argue, that argument up to people who agree with him or people who can do absolutely nothing about it.

He doesn't bring it up to the billionaires.

He doesn't bring it up to Republican

politicians who'd come on.

But he's right.

And I think it's interesting hearing him articulate each of those points.

If everyone agrees education, I mean, not everyone agrees education.

I'm not even sure if you still have a Department of Education or if you will have by the time this episode goes out.

We have a wrestler that was part of it.

So she's still.

So yeah, not everyone in America does agree with education, but the majority of people do.

And it's interesting he's articulating each of these points that most people would agree should be free.

And he's right.

And I think that is how you could, you could genuinely build a

popular winning argument in America for democratic socialism if you didn't call it democratic socialism and if you didn't have influential billionaires sat in front of piles of cookies with conflicts of interest using their media platforms and their checkbooks to demonize democratic socialism.

That's the problem.

On a policy-by-policy basis, these are ideas that people don't just want to get on board with,

but they assume are obvious to everyone.

It's not even like, oh, that would be a nice idea.

It's a, well, yeah, we all agree with that.

But when you package them together and call it democratic socialism and let other people define what that term means in the popular consciousness, people don't get on board with it.

Yeah, they've actually done several polls in our country about lots of left-leaning, far-left-leaning policies, in fact, and they are often widely accepted and would be welcomed.

The problem is, is that it's named both democratic and socialism, and both of those are demonized words in our country.

And so you're going to, you're not going to, you'll never get a lot of these things passed.

There were so many people in this last bit that didn't even know they were on Medicaid, right?

So they had no idea that they were using Medicaid.

It was called something else in their state.

And they thought, well, I'm not on Medicaid.

I'm on this.

And it turns out that they were on Medicaid.

It was just called something else.

Same thing happened with Obamacare.

When Obamacare came out, they're like, oh, I don't like Obamacare.

And they're like, well, do you like the ACA?

Yeah.

Oh, that's the same thing.

If it's called something, you can demonize it, which is why they called it Obamacare.

It made sense for them to call it Obamacare because then they could demonize it over and over and over again.

And that's the problem with a very short soundbite society is it's super easy to demonize stuff and they're very good at it.

Yeah, especially for a society where the media is in large parts or large sections of the media kind of captured by corporate interests.

You have people who have a conflict of interest with a particular policy.

They don't want a policy to come in that's going to harm their bottom line.

And they have enough money that they can just work out the calculation.

How much would it cost me to

turn people against this law so it doesn't come in?

And how much would it save me if the law doesn't come in?

And if one of those numbers is bigger than the other, it's worth spending the money to stop the law coming in.

And that's the equation that they're doing, unfortunately.

This next clip is them talking about how to actually make America great.

If you want to make America great again, less losers.

How do you make less less losers?

Don't stack the deck against them.

You know, one of the first things that you'd have to do is figure out why these communities and these cities have been the exact same way for decade after decade.

Back to Jim Crow and the red line laws and all these, why is nothing being done to fix that or to correct that problem?

And it becomes this political beach ball that they just bounce around in the air at a concert.

You know, and everybody, it's like there's certain things that just keep coming up that make you just go, well, how are we still talking about gay marriage how how is that still coming up and it's like poof throw it up in the air i just want to point out too like poor people don't have a lobbyist or a super pack so often what the reason why the the the the most vulnerable people among us get screwed is because they don't have somebody who can easily go there and manipulate the ways the the way the law works to help them out Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Like the deck isn't stacked against people by accident.

Yeah, you can't rank.

You can't stack a deck.

Yeah.

You can't stack a deck unless you first hold all the cards.

And you can't unstack a deck if you don't have access to the deck.

And this is the thing: once you have access, then you can be stacking it and stacking the deck.

So Joe talks like these things just happened.

But then when he's saying, well, you need to figure out why these communities and these cities have been the same way.

Why are there decks stacked against them?

Why you've got to go back to Jim Crow and red line laws and why is nothing being done?

Things were being done, Joe, but you called them DEI and you cheered when those things got cut.

Because when there are corporate interests that

benefit from things remaining the same or remaining in power, they're going to have the money to demonize things.

And they demonized the measures that you would otherwise support, Joe Rogan, to try and dismantle the stacking of the deck because they called it positive discrimination and they called it affirmative action and they called it DEI and

diversity hires and all this kind of stuff is how the deck remains stacked and any attempt to unstack the deck were undermined.

And similarly, we're still talking about gay marriage and abortion and trans people because those are political footballs that are being thrown around by the very people Joe Rogan has on this show.

Absolutely.

So, you know, Casey Means was on talking about abortion, you know, and how important it was for women to not be in the workplace.

You've got a mother should be venerated and celebrated.

And I just think abortion is wrong.

And all these kind of various things were coming up.

We don't know her views on gay marriage because Joe didn't ask, and she was smart enough not to just bring those up in the current climate where abortion is a much more comfortable thing for her to be discussing than her views on gay marriage.

But I genuinely wonder what would have happened if he'd have pulled at that thread or if he'd have pulled the thread for several other of his

deeply religious, conservative, often incredibly rich guests that come on pushing a very specific regressive worldview.

It's interesting to see Joe sometimes get close to the idea of privilege, right?

It's very interesting to see him push himself and feel like he's getting a little closer to that each time.

And that's refreshing in some ways to see someone who I think would vehemently push back on the idea of privilege, but also be able to articulate all the underlying factors that would lead someone to believe that privilege exists.

Yeah, it's a branding issue at that point.

Don't use the word that triggers Joe Rogan or people like Joe Rogan who hear the word privilege and immediately shut down and get defensive and switch off rather when you talk through the concepts behind it, they would agree.

Again, each one of the policies seems not just acceptable but obvious.

But when you package it in a name they don't like, you react to the name and not the content.

All right, we're gonna take a short break.

We'll be back right after this.

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Now they're moving on to taxation.

At a time of massive income and wealth inequality, you don't give tax breaks to billionaires.

You demand that they start paying their fair share of taxes.

And one of the problems that we have, it's not just an American issue, it's a global issue.

A lot of these zillionaires are hiding their money in tax havens in the Cayman Islands and elsewhere.

And that's an international issue.

But I think we have to have a fair tax system which says that individuals and wealthy and corporations that are making a whole lot of money start paying their fair share of taxes.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: What is their fair share?

I don't know.

I mean, you know, under Eisenhower, the very rich paid at their upper levels, 90%.

But let me be very honest with you, Joe, on this one.

90% is kind of crazy, though.

No, no, that's not, of course, that's just for the, you know, your billionth dollar.

You know what I mean?

It's not your first dollar.

So if you make a billion, you pay $900 million?

No, no.

No, no, no, no.

That's not what it means.

It means on your $900 million, you're going to pay 90%.

Okay.

All right.

It's not okay.

He doesn't understand it.

He clearly doesn't understand it.

You can hear how he says,

okay.

He doesn't understand it.

He doesn't get it.

It's all, you pay a normal tax rate on all money below X.

In this case, he's suggesting a billion dollars.

So you have a billion dollars, then you make more money and you pay 90% of my 90% of your taxes on that money that you make over a billion.

It's not hard to understand, but he doesn't understand it.

No, that's true.

And we know Joe doesn't understand how progressive taxation like this works because we've covered him not understanding it before when he's talking about when he was in California, I think talking to Mel Gibson, he was talking about it.

And that is a problem because it colors entirely how he talks about taxes with billionaires.

And if we're going to be critical of Bernie Sanders here, Bernie doesn't do a very good job of explaining that here.

I don't think he does it.

He's saying the way he's talking about the numbers isn't good.

If he was to say to Joe, when you make a billion dollars, the first billion dollars, you won't pay tax on.

And then...

any single dollar after that you will pay tax on so you'll you know if he was talking in those kind of ways i think joe could get it this isn't good communication necessarily from bernie especially when this is a a core subject for bernie this This is one of his strengths is how to tax the billionaires.

I think it's a bit of a missed opportunity there.

He's trying to do lots of other stuff at the same time.

It's a little bit of a missed opportunity to be able to explain this to Joe in ways that Joe could understand.

If he took the time and really broke this down, you know, drew some diagrams or something,

he could make a bit of an impact there.

Yeah.

And a lot of this conversation, because the United States tax code is crazy, right?

You have to have like a degree in it in order to do it really, really well.

And that's what people do.

They go out and become accountants and understand these tax codes really, really well.

It's a difficult system.

And so I'm going to give some sort of rough numbers here, but they're not necessarily true because the way that we're talking, what we're talking about is income tax.

And a lot of people who own a lot of things don't necessarily get an income.

Instead, they borrow on that stuff and then they have tax-free ways to get around actually getting taxed on all that giant wealth.

But let's just presume that we're going to tax their wealth, right?

If you were to tax Elon Musk's wealth with the tax system that he's suggesting, which is, you know, a billion dollars, you get 90% tax rate after a billion dollars.

Bernie's suggestion, he's sort of, that's just the one he's brought up here, but obviously he doesn't think that no one should pay taxes till you get to a billion dollars.

Yeah, he doesn't think that either, but let's just, let's just presume that that's what's being said.

If you were to do that, even if you were to do that, and that's a preferential world, right?

Even if you were to do that, Elon Musk with that tax rate would still have $38 billion.

Zuckerberg would have $21 billion.

Bezos would have the same.

And Warren Buffett would have about $15 billion.

All the one billionaire people out there, the people who are in the ones, they'd have about the same amount of money.

And the only people who would suffer would be none of the billionaires because they are billionaires.

They don't suffer at all.

They literally don't suffer like anyone else in the world.

So we shouldn't be crying about if they have to pay taxes on their money.

Yeah, I agree.

And the thing is, this is the problem with real solutions to problems.

They sound genuinely complicated.

And so they're very easy to misunderstand.

You know, Joe thinks that a 90% higher tax rate is you lose 90% of your income.

It's, that's just not true.

And when it, when it's not easy to understand, it can be easy to deliberately misrepresent.

Yeah.

How long would it take to explain, even as you're just doing there, what a 90% tax rate over a billion dollar means compared to how long does it take to lie and say they want to take 90% of your income?

And it's much easier to sell that lie because

it's simple.

It will land a 90% tax rate.

They want 90% of your money.

You've earned your money and they want 90% of it.

It's very easy to do.

The same thing happens with stuff like inheritance tax.

This has been a big thing here in the UK.

It takes a long time to explain that inheritance tax only applies, for example, to estates worth over a certain amount.

I think it's like 3 million for farms in the UK.

And they have to be ones that you've transferred in ownership less than X number of years before someone dies.

So you don't get to say, you're going to die next year.

So I'm going to give you my farm now.

And how they got all these kind of specific carve-outs.

All of this is messy and complicated and filled with these kind of caveats and needs to be properly understood.

That takes time.

It takes no time at all to say death tax.

They want the death tax.

Are you going to go for the death tax?

And people therefore will feel that they want to defend what they earned.

My granddad, who died a couple of years ago, he was exactly like that.

He was doing all sorts of things, like withdrawing cash from his bank account on his pension and buying gold and hiding cash and gold in a safe in his house to keep his the amount of money he had in his bank account below a certain threshold because he didn't want to have to pay inheritance tax.

The inheritance tax threshold in the UK is half a million pounds.

And I think when he died, he had about 10 grand in his bank account.

He's like, well, you know, I don't want them taking any of the money.

But people fundamentally don't understand

how much money wealthy people have.

They don't know what, it's almost impossible.

I don't know what a billion dollars is.

I try to think about this stuff a lot and I don't know what a billion dollars is.

I can't possibly comprehend that.

And the thing is, it is in the interests of wealthy people to keep it that way by muddying the waters as much as possible, by pushing things like death tax as the way you think about inheritance tax to stop people coming for the extremely wealthy people who should be giving more back to society.

I find it interesting, Marsh, that in this particular episode, we hear him sort of give an actual pushback.

What do you mean by that?

What do you mean by the 90%?

Tell me what that is.

That's kind of crazy to give that kind of money up, even though Joe doesn't understand it, right?

Joe didn't do any bother to understand what Bernie's even talking about.

He is at least in some ways pushing back.

I don't remember him saying anything to Trump that was even remotely a pushback.

Even the things like when he's talking about

the election fraud, he just lets Trump slide completely.

Here, at least he's pushing back the tiniest bit.

But like, I'm just surprised to see this.

I'm just surprised to see that there's a, there is some sort of pushback and some sort of, and I don't say it, it, it, it, it stems from any knowledge, but I think it stems from Joe's self-interest more than anything else.

But I think like that's really interesting to see in this particular moment, he's pushing back.

Yeah, I was about to say self-interest because the thing is, when it comes to a lot of the stuff that Trump was saying, Joe isn't going to be on the receiving end of the kind of issues that he was talking to Trump about.

I mean, if it was, he wouldn't have pushed back on the tax cuts because either he's going to be unaffected or he's going to get a tax cut.

He's not going to be like, oh, I don't think you should give me that.

Whereas what Joe thinks Bernie is suggesting is taking 90% of Joe's money.

Yeah.

And Joe is pushing back for that reason.

Okay, so now they're going to talk about wages.

The issue with it being virtually impossible for one person to sustain the entire family these days, one worker, the father or the mother, whoever it is, to sustain the entire family.

That's a giant issue.

All these issues when it comes to labor, when it comes to minimum wage, I think you and I are in agreement on all these.

I think the minimum wage in this country is ridiculous.

I mean, $7.

What?

It's insane.

It's insane.

How do you live off $7?

You go to Jimmy John's, you get a sub.

How much is a sub?

How much is a sub, like a big sub at Jimmy John's?

Some guy was just did a TikTok video where he's like, they're trying to say that minimum wage, $15 is too much.

I think he had a sub that he bought for $25.

So imagine that's your lunch.

So imagine you have to work three and a half hours just to pay for a sandwich.

Imagine how insane that is.

It's insane.

That's insane.

Like, how do you eat?

And how do you eat dinner?

How do you eat lunch?

How do you eat breakfast?

I have talked to people who make 10, 12 bucks an hour trying to raise a kid.

Jesus.

That's right.

Yeah.

Well, the argument against that is, hey, these are entry-level jobs that are supposed to be for kids.

No, and that's factually incorrect.

Yeah, of course that's true to some degree.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: To some degree.

But if you have grown adults that are working those jobs, now it becomes disgusting.

That's right.

That's exactly right.

Especially when you're dealing with an enormous corporation.

You got it.

Right.

So we put a lot of pressure.

You know, we are trying to raise the minimum wage, federal minimum wage, to $17 an hour.

That's a reasonable amount of money.

It's going to be real difficult to live off of $17 an hour.

But at least that's right at least you can get a sandwich in under two hours worth of work

good on joe here even if he is struggling with the math problem he created

yeah absolutely although i do i do like when he's asking how much is a sub because it reminded me that whenever there's an election in the uk there's always politicians who go on the media and someone's going to ask them how much is a pint of milk these days because it's an illustration of how much they might be completely out of touch you don't know how much things actually cost the average cost so joe being having to genuinely ask around and have the producer look up what the price of a sandwich was does suggest that he's maybe not somebody who has to really look carefully at his bottom line and you know do his weekly outgoings on a daily basis.

What I think is so funny is like a pint of milk in the United States is like what you buy at the gas station to like, that's a single serving of milk here.

It's not like you would go to the store and buy a pint.

We get gallons of milk.

Yeah, like, no, you'd, well, you'd buy like a bottle of milk is a pint.

No, we don't, I don't, like, you would do that in a gas station.

They don't sell, like, if you go to my gas, my, the smallest you get is a quart.

You can't get it.

I don't know what a quart is or a gallon.

I don't live in the medieval times.

Like, I can work with quartz.

It's your system.

We took your system for granted.

We got rid of it when we got rid of you.

That's the thing.

We sent you over on the Mayflower with pints and quartz.

And you know, they're roughly equivalent to like a liter and a, I don't know what a pint is.

A pint isn't a liter.

A pint is

is like a literature so it's like a liter like you would get a liter of milk here yeah but we we would sell milk in a liter as well but you would the classic question was how much is a pint you can still buy a pint of milk at the supermarket anyway all that aside all that digression aside what we are seeing here we're seeing the effects of joe having been talking to bernie sanders for the last 45 minutes because as he's talking about how hard it is and you know in these minimum wage jobs and this minimum wage isn't high enough especially if you're doing this kind of job and we look down at it in these kind of ways he even brings up about especially when you're dealing with an enormous corporation, which almost feels like he's trying to get a pat on the head from Bernie that he's actually listening, like a listening comprehension test of like, I remember the corporation stuff as well.

And

I think when Joe is talking about it and when he talks about it generally, when it does come up, I think he does believe it,

not just while he's saying it.

I think Joe does believe these things.

I think he believes it whenever he thinks about it, but he doesn't think about it often enough.

So I think when it crosses his mind, he will be able to say, yeah, minimum wage is too low.

And actually these corporations are taking advantage.

But then in the next breath, when he's not holding that particular thought in mind, he'll be pro-corporation when he's talking to some incredibly rich person who may have made their money from exploiting the workers.

All right.

Now we're going to talk about universal health care.

If you had healthcare is a human right.

right all right as people in almost every other wealthy country have and not attached to your job, that would be a major step forward, right?

Yes, absolutely.

All right, Joe, you lost your job, but you know what?

Your family still has health care.

Imagine if you were a diabetic and now you don't have access to insulin because now you no longer have

so this is the way I frame it.

We are the wealthiest country in the history of the world right now.

With all of this artificial intelligence and robotics, we are going to be wealthier, correct?

Correct.

All right.

So we're not in the 1820s where people had to work 100 hours a week to grow food to eat, right?

Right.

You're not in the 1920s.

You're in 2025.

You have all of this productivity out there.

How do we utilize it to create a decent standard of living for all people?

Let me ask you this.

With all of this technology, can we wipe out poverty in America?

Well, we should be able to.

You should be able to.

We should have been able to do that a long time ago if that was something that was

politically motivated.

If you wanted to do it.

But it's easy enough.

It's not profitable.

Pardon me.

If it was profitable to wipe out poverty, which it should be.

Like overall, as a community, like I said, less losers, higher challenges.

If we love the country.

Yeah, if you really love America, you want more people to have a chance.

I honestly think this is such a well-presented point.

It's such a well-presented point that I'm going to skip over a cheap shot about Bernie Sanders remembering what it was like in 1820, having to work 100 hours a week to grow food.

But this is a really well-presented point.

Look at the scope of it.

He starts, healthcare is a human right.

It shouldn't be tied to your job.

America is the wealthiest country in the world.

It's getting wealthier.

America should use that wealth to improve the lives of Americans.

Simple, clear messaging.

Each step flaws from the last.

You can see the chain of logic working there.

How can you afford to end poverty?

Well, America is getting wealthier.

You know, you can even see how this would work.

There's even this kind of appeal to patriotism, to American exceptionalism.

We are number one.

And the way that we show that is by being the best for Americans, because Americans are number one.

I think that's really solid.

And we also see some interesting

sort of rhetorical techniques or conversational techniques that Bernie's employing here.

We'll come back to some of those more in the toolbox, but I think it's really stark here.

Bernie keeps stopping to ask Joe questions mid all the way through each step of this.

And it's sort of to make sure that Joe is following and asking Joe to fill in the gaps that he's in.

How would we do this?

And Joe answers.

And what does this mean?

And Joe answers.

And what it means is Joe, first of all, gets to the conclusions for himself.

and therefore feels like he's not just been given Bernie Sanders talking points.

He's kind of come to this point himself, but he's also serving to lock down Joe's conversational options a little bit so he can't spiral off into other talking points.

He can't kind of go off over here and start talking about aliens or hunting or the things that he likes to talk about because he's been asked a very clear question with very clear parameters and he wants to please Bernie by this point by answering.

And so Bernie keeps him fully on track.

but makes it seem like Joe is generating the solutions as they go or arriving at them with him.

It's a really skilled bit of

conversational rhetoric, of bridge building, I think.

Yeah.

Golds comes right in as a school teacher and he does a great job at that.

Yeah.

Next bit, they're talking about universal basic income and meaning from work.

The question of meaning, like giving meaning to people, like just, and then my fear is also the same fear that I had when I'm talking about climate change, that it's going to be exploited.

Once people are entirely dependent upon the state for universal basic income, then it becomes the question of like now your entire life, like all the money that you get being from the government.

The problem is, if you step outside the lines, if you do anything that the government doesn't like, if there's a

pull the plug on you, or if a new administration comes in and says, you know what, this is unprofitable.

These people have to figure it out for themselves.

The United States is really $37 trillion in debt.

We can't sustain this.

People have to do the, you know, you have to adjust, learn to code.

Right.

Remember that?

Right.

Yeah, that kind of shit.

Well, how do you give these people meaning?

What do you do with all the drivers?

Like, think about how many truck drivers in this country.

This is going to be the first thing that goes away.

You're right.

Taxicab drivers, Uber drivers, truck drivers, gone.

And the question about like factory workers, a lot of people say, yeah, well, those people, those jobs are terrible anyway.

It'd be great if those jobs went away and people, you know, they're free to pursue their interests.

But what interest?

You got it.

You're a 60-year-old man.

You've been working for this factory.

You're looking looking towards your retirement.

And now all of a sudden, the plug is pulled.

All the money's gone.

Your 401k has been erased.

Your company's been bought out by another company.

Now everything's automated.

There's no jobs.

What do you do?

I think that is the question.

Right.

So if you have what Andrew Yang was talking about, this giant epidemic of automation in this country, and the solution being universal basic income, but that's not the solution for meaning.

And how do we convince all of these people

that they have to not just take this money from the government, but also take action to give themselves meaning in their lives?

There's a lot to get into here.

I want to start at the beginning when he mentions that, you know, well, what happens if we have universal basic income and then suddenly people are dependent on the government for this sort of thing?

And then the government can make decisions based on

the way they're getting their money and can control them in some way.

We are already one Kevin bacon away from that basically what we have is a state run by corporations and they control our jobs so if you at least pull away one method of profit here out of the equation you can remove one mechanism for power so i

at least we are partly in control of how much that that's handled right now it's essentially uh you know

it's essentially uh unilaterally controlled by business, whereas in other ways, it could at least be controlled by us as a group.

Yeah, exactly.

He's talking about what happens if you step outside the lines of the government.

Well, what about right now if you step outside the lines of what your employer wants?

Or if your employer just finds a cheaper way to do your job, well, now you no longer have healthcare in America, at least, you know, especially when needing time off to see a doctor can be one of the ways you've stepped outside of the lines of your employment.

You know, how can Joe not see that that is so much worse than if you were getting that money universally basic income from the government, where if you need healthcare, the healthcare is there and you have the time to go seek healthcare and not just have to put up with it because you've got to make another shift.

Yeah.

And, you know, you lose your job.

It's not as devastating because you still have this level of care that everyone gets.

And then you can find a new job or pursue other interests, et cetera, et cetera, instead of.

I have to find a job right away because if not, I'm going to wind up on the street.

And that is a totally different way to live.

And Joe seems to think that those two things are equal and they're not equal.

And also the other thing he mentions too, and he spends a lot of time talking about this.

How are you going to find meaning if you don't have a corporate overlord looking over your shoulder and making you do stuff?

How are people possibly going to find meaning, Marsh, if they don't have their job to wake up to every single day and do that?

He doesn't understand that there's other ways to find meaning in life other than your work.

Yeah.

And actually in the either the toolbox or the gloves off, we will actually come back to he does understand that for himself, but not for other people.

Exactly.

Great.

Great point.

Exactly.

But what Joe is talking about here is kind of the personal responsibility issue.

Like, we all have to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and give ourselves meaning.

But in his example of this 60-year-old man who suddenly loses his job and never developed what Joe would see as an independent sense of meaning, well, maybe that guy never did get what Joe would call an independent sense of meaning because he spent all of his years having to work hand to mouth to survive.

Yeah, survival is below self-actualization in the Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

You know, the point point is, if you take away the threat to survival, people will have the space to find what it is that they want to be doing without having to just stay on the corporate grind the entire time.

And Joe also isn't grasping the point that if we shift the duty of care over

onto the people who do just buy up and sell companies and ditch workers, people will have the safety net to find their way.

He's saying, well, what about if your job just disappears overnight?

And now, what are you going to do for meaning?

Well, what if that's actually part of the duty of care when it comes to owning a company or selling a company?

If when you buy up a company, you either have to retain those workers or give them substantial payouts because you're so hugely affecting their lives.

Okay, it's going to get more expensive to buy a company.

And so maybe fewer companies go around buying and taking over other companies and asset stripping and mergers and things.

But so, so what?

Like with landlords and houses, that doesn't mean that companies just go away because a billionaire didn't buy them and asset strip them.

the economies of it will change slightly but we would prioritize the people and not the profits in the businesses and it would just shift the priorities here

last bit in our main event this is talking about meaning still

trying to think here and i wish i had better answers for you you're asking correct me if i'm wrong i mean the question that you're posing is if in years to come in the near future technology is going to replace work right human labor correct yes what do human beings that replace what do they do now?

Yeah.

And,

you know, there are, it's a good, because work has been so essential to human existence forever, right?

Right.

And you're suddenly taking that away.

What do people do?

How do they relate to each other?

All I would say at this moment is the answer is not to fall in love with your AI creature out there.

Yeah, don't do that.

But also, how do you find meaning?

If all you're doing is just getting a check and you can just stay at home and stare at the TV and the money keeps coming and then you eat processed food all day and it's all subsidized,

what is life?

Like, what do you, how do you, how do you re-educate a giant percentage of our population to find meaning, external meaning?

Find something else, find

a thing that you can do that not maybe even that's profitable that these computers can't do?

To be honest, this is where I get off the Joe Rogan train on this episode.

This is where I I think Joe has kind of lost it for me.

This feels like an existential version of welfare queen rhetoric.

Exactly.

We can't just give them money because then they won't have any meaning for themselves.

That's exactly right.

You know, maybe people never had the opportunity to develop their own meaning in that sense because they've had to work to survive, especially when those jobs are exhausting, long hours, physically demanding.

People get home.

They're so exhausted by the job, they can do nothing else.

Like, Joe doesn't mean it this way, but this argument leads to the heads of companies telling people that working their minimum wage job is good for the soul.

This is keeping you in meaning.

The reason we keep you in this minimum wage job is it's good for your soul, which to be honest, is only that minimum wage above how people used to justify feudalism and slavery.

The work is good for the soul.

And in all of this, nobody is worrying about whether super rich CEOs have meaning in their lives.

How are they going to keep their meaning when they're so wealthy that they don't need any further money in their life, that they've got everything they could possibly want?

I think that's a bigger existential threat that you have so much abundance that you could, that there's nothing you could possibly imagine that you couldn't acquire within a moment's notice.

Like, I don't know how those people, that to me, is a bigger threat to how to keep yourself motivated and having meaning.

But because those are the wealthy and they're the ones in power, they're the ones at the top of the chain, they're the ones with the political connections, etc.

We don't ask those questions about them, we ask it about the people most vulnerable at the bottom of the chain.

Yeah, we spend our time worrying about how poor people are going to find meaning instead of how rich CEOs are going to get a soul.

Yes, yeah, exactly.

We're going to take a quick break and then move on to our toolbox section.

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Wow.

So that's the tool bag, and something just fell out of the toolbag.

So for this toolbox, Marsh, we're going to be shifting a little bit.

We're going to be talking about rhetoric.

Yeah, so we're going to talk about the way that Bernie Sanders uses rhetoric and conversational devices to essentially meet Joe where he is and then tack him over to where Bernie wants him to be.

This kind of bridge building idea, because Bernie does a load of stuff in this interview where he's finding ways to connect with Joe and to connect with Joe's audience and to express his ideas in the language language of their concerns.

And it's really interesting at several moments in this interview.

So we're going to get started with our first clip.

This is early on in the podcast, 30 seconds in.

He asks, basically, he says, why are you here, Bernie?

I think

I start off with Joe, trying to take a deep breath and doing what is not often done.

Where are we as a country today?

What's going well?

What's not going well?

And I don't think we don't have that kind of basic discussion.

And to my mind, I think in America today we are facing more serious crises than we have in the modern history of our country.

This is a pivotal moment in American history, and what happens now will depend, determine the lives of our kids and future generations.

What specifically concerns you?

I'll tell you what concerns me, the issue of wealth and power.

All right.

I'm kind of old-fashioned, and I believe in democracy, and I believe that everybody should have a good shot at living a decent life.

And what I worry about right now, and this is an issue, Joe, and it's part of the problem, that it just ain't talked about very much.

And I applaud, by the way, you and the other podcasters who give people the time to really seriously discuss things rather than seven-second soundbites, you know.

But if you take a look at where we are as a nation today, this system is not working.

It's broken.

It ain't working for ordinary human beings.

So you have an America today where we have more income and wealth inequality than we've ever had in the history of this country.

That's just a fact.

You have

one man, Mr.

Musk, owning more wealth than the bottom 52% of American families.

One man, 52% of American families.

You got the top 1% owning more wealth than the bottom 93%.

You got CEOs of large corporations making 350 times what their workers make.

And meanwhile, in this richest country in the history of the world, working-class people are getting decimated.

I like that in this,

does a very clever thing by, and a lot of people do this to Joe, they flatter the sort of long-form interview style that Joe has maybe not pioneered, but certainly attached himself to and sort of branded himself as.

And Joe is immediately more receptive when you do that.

It's, you know, we've watched other people do this and Bernie does it here too.

Just by complimenting the format, Joe can get on your team.

Yeah, you put a little coin in him and he rolls over and flops around.

It's very much coin operated at this point.

But what Bernie's doing is he's speaking to one side of Joe's values, the side that we see sometimes.

You know, the system is broken.

There's too much centralized power.

Working class people are struggling.

These are things that Joe has talked about in the past.

And from the off, 20 seconds in, Bernie opens, this is his framing.

These are the people being screwed.

This is the way that it's happening.

And while he's doing that, he's flattering Joe about how willing Joe is to talk about these things at length.

It is absolutely not just pandering to Joe, but butchering him up so you can slip him into whatever position you want him in later, essentially.

Yeah, you can trust that chicken however you want once you ply it correctly.

I want to say, too, it's really interesting he's bringing musk up so early in the interview.

And we will see if that pays off and how far he pushes with the musk stuff.

Now they're going to talk about how people are struggling.

Man, anyone who lives paycheck to paycheck understands that every single day is a struggle.

You know, you've got to figure out how you feed the kids, rents, cost of housing in America off the charts, healthcare off the charts.

So right now, as we talk, there are people worrying.

My landlord, you know, is going to raise my rent by 20%.

What the hell do I do?

Where do I go?

What schools do my kid go to?

How do I buy decent food?

for my kids.

My mother is ill.

How do I afford prescription drugs for my mother?

My car breaks down.

You know, so you, you know, if you have money, no one thinks of it.

Your car breaks down, go to the mechanic, you got it fixed.

You know what?

A lot of people don't have a thousand bucks in the bank right now.

If you don't have a thousand bucks, your car breaks down.

How do you get to work?

If you don't get to work, you get fired.

If you get fired, your whole life is disrupted.

So I think this is a really perfect example of how to talk to a very large, very broad audience like the one that Joe has.

He's talking about the concerns of feeding the kids, cost of rent, cost of housing, healthcare, cost of drugs, dealing with landlords, cost of your car breaking down.

These are all everyday concerns that actually are massive issues for people if any one of those steps is going to be tricky.

This kind of stuff speaks

way more to my upbringing and what I experienced growing up than anything we've heard in Joe's interviews with Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Mark Andriessen, Peter Thiel, all the rest of them.

Like Joe likes to think of himself as representing the average guy in these spaces.

But these are way more the kind of things the average guy has to deal with in life than will the FTC shut down my cryptocurrency company?

This is real concerns.

I think Bernie does a great job kind of coming out and framing it around the concerns of the audience as well.

Yeah, a great point.

Okay, now they're going to talk about another subject that is

sort of near and dear to Bernie's heart.

It's campaign finances.

Now, I want to go to another issue, which is very rarely discussed.

All right.

You ready for for it?

I'm ready.

All right.

Hang on.

Here we go.

And is the

problem I think that we face as a country is not just economic disparities and all the stuff that we're talking about, the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.

It is political power.

Right now, and I doubt that there are many Americans, whether you're a progressive as I am or a right-wing Republican, I don't think people can disagree that we have a corrupt campaign finance system.

Argue with me?

No, I agree with you.

Yeah.

All right, so let me talk about what it means.

Okay.

As a result of the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, I think it's 15, 16 years old, what it says is you're a billionaire.

You have now the constitutional right because your money is your freedom of expression, right?

So you don't like Bernie Sanders?

You can put millions or hundreds of millions of dollars into a campaign and express your view about how terrible Bernie Sanders is.

Right.

And you can buy that election, right?

That's your constitutional right.

I think that's probably the worst decision that the Supreme Court has ever made.

So what is the result of that decision?

The result of that decision, let's take us to where we are today, is that Elon Musk, and I know Elon was on your show, and he's here at Austin, huh?

Yeah.

Okay.

And we could talk about Elon, but he spent $270 million to elect Trump as president.

Okay.

I think that's absurd, that any one person What's the most someone donated towards the Harris campaign?

They spent a lot of money on Harris's

billion dollars just over the course of a couple of months.

You got it.

All right, let me talk about it.

So I'm not here just to say it's a Republican.

That's my point here.

Right.

Okay.

So Musk spends that money, and what's his reward?

He becomes the most powerful person in government for three or four months.

Okay, fine.

Joe counters here with what about ism, and he says they, by the way, he's like, they paid $1.5 billion for Harris.

They, he never defines.

They is not a single person.

No, it's not.

Absolutely.

And obviously what Bernie is talking about here is an individual spending that amount of money.

But this is actually a really excellent step, I think, from Bernie, the way he talks about this.

He's coming for Musk 15 minutes into Joe Rogan's show.

You can hear in Joe's tone of voice, he is not happy with it.

Joe bristles because he likes Musk.

He had him on the show.

Essentially, they work together to get Trump into power.

I mean, Joe may not think of it that way, but that is absolutely what happens.

You can see when it cuts to Joe's face during this bid, he doesn't like where this is going.

You're coming after the two people that we've said regularly that receive almost no criticism on Joe Rogan episodes is Elon Musk and Donald Trump.

And here he's coming after that.

So Bernie knows he's touching on a sensitive spot.

Joe's reaction is to try and shift his focus to Harris.

Well, you're saying that about Musk, but what about Harris?

Well, Elon gave $270 million, $270 million.

Well, Harris spent six times that.

Bernie could have easily been drawn into a tit for tat, you know, defend Democrat spending, saying, well, maybe, you know, it came from a much wider base, came from more people, what all this kind of stuff.

Instead, he takes a step back and says, essentially, that amount of money is a bad thing, regardless of which party it is.

I don't care which part it is, neither party should have it.

Nobody should be able to buy access like that.

And Joe can't push back because when Bernie isn't defending the Democrats, but is saying this is bad on both sides, nothing like this should happen.

What is Joe going to say to defend that?

I think it's fine.

He can't do that.

And so he's got nowhere to go.

He's boxed in.

And that leads us to the next thing that Bernie kind of does once he's kind of boxed in a little bit.

But what you have right now, and I just saw this the other day,

you are a Republican member of Congress, okay?

And you say, you know, there's a reconciliation bill, which we can talk about in a minute, that this is Trump's big, bad, big, beautiful bill that's coming up literally on the floor of the Senate very shortly.

So let's say you're a Republican representing a low-income district.

And you say, you know,

I got a lot of people on Medicaid in my district, and kids can't get to college, and I worry about food programs.

I don't think it's a good idea to give tax breaks to billionaires and cut back on Medicaid.

You make that announcement today.

What happens to you?

It's over.

You're exact.

You're finished.

The swarm comes for you.

You got it.

Yeah.

It's not a swarm.

It's the problem is it's already been established, right?

That these laws have been established.

The power has been given to these people.

The money has started flowing, and it's been flowing for a long time now.

And this is the issue with starting something that you can't stop.

Well, you can't stop it.

You can stop it.

And you've got to stop it.

Okay, but if you do stop it, all these people are going to throw all their money at stopping you from stopping, correct?

Right?

Exactly.

They're going to come up with the best commercials with American flags.

This country's all about competition and freedom.

You got it.

The freedom to donate to the party of your choice.

You got it.

Stop these people.

You're writing their ads for them.

They're going to pick it up

with the American people.

We could write them.

Yeah.

I mean, we could all write them.

So that clip immediately followed.

There was no gap.

It went straight on.

So Bernie goes from that criticism of Musk, which Joe didn't like, to saying, well, actually, all the money in politics in particular is bad.

There shouldn't be the amount of money.

And then he rolls into, and they're coming for your healthcare, and a criticism of politicians being unwilling to push back against the money.

And when he says the money, he means Musk.

We've established he means Musk.

And by the next time he invites Joe in, Joe is on board criticizing politicians for having too much money in it.

And that really strong criticism of Musk has now ridden unchallenged.

kind of in there.

So when we hear they're talking about the money, I don't know whether Joe realizes that when they say the money, they're talking about Musk.

He says the swarm is coming.

And Bernie's like, it's not the swarm because it's not.

And I can't recall any other time on this show where someone directly came for Elon Musk by name with receipts.

And Joe didn't just have to sort of sit with it, but was actually going with it by the end and was joking about it and saying, yeah, the money's going to come for you.

So I think it's a really skillful bit of stuff by Bernie here.

Yeah, I agree.

Really great stuff.

Next bit is talking about child care and another problem in the United States, and that's paying for childcare.

What are the most important years of human development?

You're a human being.

What are the most important years?

That's right.

Zero to four.

How's our child care system doing?

Yeah, not so good.

It's a disaster.

So you've got a rational society says, okay.

The kids are the future of America, right?

You talked about the sense of being a community.

So if I love this country and I want this country to do well into the future, I have to worry about the the children.

Correct?

Right.

Absolutely.

Right now, for economic reasons, when I was a kid, by the way, this now shocks some of your younger listeners here.

There was one worker in a family who could actually bring home the bacon and pay the bills.

Yeah, back in the old days.

Back in the old days.

Yeah, man.

So I grew up in a working-class family.

We didn't have any money, but dad went out to work, mom stayed home, and that was it.

Yeah.

Made healthier people too that way.

Yeah.

It did.

I think in many respects it did.

well something happened where they sort of devalued uh the woman's role as a mother and by convincing them that they have to be a part of the workforce i think that's part of it i think the other half is women legitimately wanted you know careers as well and the other thing that happened maybe most significantly is you needed to stay alive two breadwinners to stay alive yeah that's the problem the real problem was financially it just seemed so difficult for one person to pay for everything exactly the only way to do it was to have both parents working Yeah, and Joe's not wrong here.

It's virtually impossible in the United States for anyone without a really, really good paying job to have one person stay home.

You have to have, I mean, the climate now, it's almost impossible if you have children to not have two breadwinners in the home.

And they can talk about this as a cultural issue all they want, but they essentially make it economically impossible for something like this to happen.

And then they complain all the time, but complaining does nothing.

And the conservatives, if they really cared about women taking care of children and staying home, they would fix that issue, right?

The issue of making it so that it's possible for one person to stay home.

And, but what they really want is to devalue women's voices.

That's what they really want to do.

And so what they'll do is they'll just want, well, they just want women to have less power and shut the fuck up.

And

raising wages won't fix that.

So creating a misogynist culture that says that we've pulled women out of the home and that's where they belong, that will create that.

Yeah, I think so and the reason i wanted to include this clip in particular i think there's a fascinating moment here because it's that point where joe is bringing up well something sort of happened where they devalued the woman's work women's role as a mother and convinced them to go into the workplace we know that talking point he got that from casey means that was what they talked about in the casey means interview we heard her saying this to joe that women's roles and mothers have been devalued we could probably even do we have a clip that we'll do even

i have two i found two from that particular episode so i'm going to play the first one and then i'll play the second one right after.

And we've also bought into this idea that like both parents need to be working all the time for women to have any value in society, which is insane.

And forgotten that parenting is the most precious, incredible act we possibly could do, I think, as humans and raising healthy, strong, critical thinking people.

And then the second clip here.

Tech has a great side and feminism has a great side, but they get weaponized culturally to say like, yeah, you know, like we were talking about earlier, women don't cook.

Being a mother is second-class citizenship.

It's associated with like being property enslaved.

Get out of the workforce, rise the corporate ladder.

So here we have they're talking about women in the workplace, and Joe is parroting what he heard a couple of months ago.

It's still in his Etcher sketch from when he talked to Casey Means

about

these kind of things.

And these are now opinions that are in Joe's brain.

And Bernie rolls this perfectly.

He said, well, it could be that, but also women want to work.

It's about, you know, women actually want to to be out in the workplace.

And also families need to incomes.

And Joe is then saying, yeah, that's the key thing, is it?

You need the money to survive.

And Joe is suddenly back on and he's right into lockstep when Bernie takes that little point a step further.

This was such a clear fork in the road conversationally.

This was a real conversational fork.

With a different guest, we take a different road there.

We take the other road down.

Yeah, feminism and wokeness is coming for the right to be a mother.

And now you have to be out there.

And that's what's destroying the family.

And that's what's keep, that's the road we're down.

But Bernie, because he adds back in, he recognizes that that folk is out there and puts, it makes it very clear that it's a fiscal thing, it's an empowerment thing, it's women actually want to be out there.

Joe is back on board and we're heading down the right track.

And it's kind of as easy as that when you're paying that close attention to which direction this conversation could go.

All right.

So now this is the last bit here.

It's several clips, but it's talking about climate change.

So we're going to start when they start discussing climate change is a really clever and great way that Bernie handles this particular portion of the conversation.

But, you know, the other thing that

I would do, and you know, look, you've got to deal with this climate change issue.

And I know that, you know, there are some people who think climate change is a hoax.

It ain't a hoax.

I think the last 10 years have been the warmest on record.

And we can create millions of good paying jobs, transforming our energy system away from fossil fuel to energy efficiency, to solar to wind and other sustainable energies.

This episode is brought to you by Paleo Valley, 100% grass-fed beef sticks.

I swear we didn't edit that.

That's exactly how it appeared on the show.

We cut from a, it's important to tackle climate change into an ad for beef.

That's amazing.

It's grass-fed methane-fueled beef

talking about here is outstanding.

All right.

So we wanted to play that just because we thought it was really funny, but it does lead into the rest of the, that little bit there that gets gets cut off by the ad.

We cut the rest of the ad, and then he literally continues speaking here.

Yeah,

I think the climate change issue is very complicated.

And I think, uh, did you see the Washington Post piece that they wrote where they did this long-term view?

First of all, the reality is that the Earth's temperature has never been static, right?

We could both agree on that, it's always been up and down, there's been ice ages and heat waves.

And then the Washington Post looked at it.

What was the time period that they looked at?

That essentially they found that we're in a cooling period, that the Earth over the past X amount of years, and this was like a very inconvenient discovery, but they had to report the data and kudos to them for doing that.

Scientists have captured the Earth climate change of the last 485 million years.

Here's a surprising place we stand now.

So look at the far end of that graph and you see we're in a cooling period.

Well, I'm not sure.

I didn't read that article, but

the scientists who are out there, I think.

I know, but there's a lot of money involved in that too, Bernie.

That's part of the problem.

There's a lot of money involved in this whole climate change emergency issue, and there's a lot of control.

And that's a big part of this problem.

Not only that, if we're just talking about primarily carbon and carbon footprint, what are we going to do about China?

Because China and

China is like what percentage of

they are the major

polluter right now in terms of carbon.

We're number two.

We used to be one.

They're number one right now.

I think they have an enormous percent of global.

I think it's

very high.

It's very high.

This is it's not an American issue.

It is a global issue.

And all I can tell you is that we are, in my view, going to see more extreme weather disturbances in the coming years than we have ever.

And we're seeing them right now.

So I think this is really interesting because so far.

What we've seen Bernie talk about is Medicare and Joe agrees and taxes and Joe agrees and education and Joe agrees.

Even on topics like women in the workforce, Joe backed down from positions he's held elsewhere that he got from Casey Means in order to be agreeable to Bernie.

But this is how he responds when Bernie brings up climate change.

This is pushback.

In fact, what he does do next is he kind of goes into this long monologue that rants through all sorts of conspiratorial climate change talking points, like quite quickly, in fact.

Yeah, absolutely.

Here's his talking points.

What about ism when he talks about China?

He talks about, you know, shadowy funding.

He's blaming green energy and neglecting the fossil fuel industry.

He's talking about the data, in this case, very misframed and cherry-picked data.

All this would be super easy to show if a single person who knew about climate change could talk to him for 10 minutes.

Yeah, exactly.

But instead, what he's done is he's heard this from various of the people or he's read it in articles that he's found that's kind of aligns with his bias.

And then the way he rattles them off, this isn't the calm, chatty Joe that we've seen elsewhere in this conversation.

This is Joe trying to win.

He's trying to win this bit of the conversation, which he isn't doing.

He's gone from being kind of the student to being an opponent here.

And interestingly, he also tries to do Bernie's jiu-jitsu on him.

He tries to engage Bernie at their mutual level.

You know, there's too much interest and special interest, special, too much money and special interests at play, and that makes things untrustworthy.

You can't trust when there's money there.

But unlike Joe, Bernie doesn't back down and take this middle ground ground meeting to sort of come back because his position is based on evidence and familiarity with the science and not just a wherever there's money, it is automatically corrupt position.

Right.

And what's interesting, from the numbers alone, Joe talks cumulatively in this whole conversation for about 40 minutes in this whole two-hour conversation.

And more than five of those are in this climate change exchange alone.

So Joe really clearly is invested here.

Yeah.

They're going to continue on with that, that train of thought.

There's two more clips on climate change.

Right, but scientists don't agree.

Well, this is where it gets confusing because scientists that are in agreement,

there's all these entanglements.

Whenever someone's discussing something, whether it's economics or whether it's health issues or pharmaceutical drugs, there's financial entanglements.

I think we both agree with that, right?

Yep.

And I think this is part of the issue with this whole climate change emergency as well, because it's not just that we could all agree pollution is a major factor.

It's a huge issue in the world today.

We could all agree with that, right?

I think one of the things that we have to recognize is that there's whenever there's an issue that everyone can agree on, you're going to have a bunch of people that capitalize on that issue and they look to gain more money.

They have financial issues that they push forward in order to capitalize on this issue, but then also power and control.

These things like they're they're trying to institute in the UK where they have these 15-minute cities, this concept where you're not allowed to travel.

They'll be able to look at your carbon footprint.

It's, yeah, see, that's the problem.

That the problem is giving people that are in power, these people that we've all discussed that have so much money and so much control over our societies, multinational corporations, giving them more control over citizens.

And this is a vehicle for that.

And this is what's dangerous about this whole climate change emergency, because it allows these fucking creeps that have been controlling people and controlling what you do and what you say and how you spend your money when with people that already live in check-to-check and you put additional constraints on them and you make them even more scared and then you put additional measures where you can look at their carbon footprint you can look at the amount they travel what do you know put a carbon tax on these people let's figure out how to extract more money from them That's what bothers me about this climate change emergency.

Not that we can all agree pollution is a terrible thing.

Everyone should agree to that.

The beautiful earth that sustains us and all life on this planet is being poisoned as we speak.

We're killing all the fish in the ocean and sucking them out in giant numbers.

94% of all the big fish that are in the ocean are gone over the last, you know, whatever it is.

When you go to war against nature, you lose.

So, yeah, I think this shows really Joe's reaction here.

It shows which of his values he's willing to bend on and which are his core values, essentially.

Just as you pointed out, RFK dropped all of his equality talk in favor of his anti-vax policies when it came to the crunch.

This is the stuff that Joe really feels at his core.

This isn't just talk.

He's not willing to just roll with things.

He has to kind of really push back on this stuff.

And this makes him malleable by anyone who agrees with him on climate change positions.

Because if you parrot his climate denialism, he's going to follow you into other conservative policies and therefore into conspiracy theories and onwards.

But once you challenge this, he'll get off your train and he'll really bring this to a bit of a halt, really.

And so, yeah, it's topics like this and reactions like this that we get a sense to really hear and find out who Joe Grogan really is.

Yeah, that's that's really true.

It's it's also funny that he mentions this, and I just want to bring this up because he he he clearly has a problem with corporate interests controlling you.

He's like, these fucking creeps, he says, while he's talking about this, they control you, they make make this, they create this climate crisis so they can control you.

But he's missing that they already control what they do.

It's just a different group of creeps, right?

He's saying these creeps will control you when it comes to green energy.

Well, he's forgetting about the oil industry creeps who already make sure that we don't have good public transportation and we don't have a public transportation overhaul or that we have cars that they very specifically

that we can't buy here in the in the United States that all over the world are much more fuel efficient.

And I have to buy a bigger car here that is much less fuel efficient here in the United States.

The people who make those decisions are already interfering in our lives.

And he overlooks that.

Yeah, he does.

And also, I don't know what could possibly be done to make Joe aware of the fact that 15-minute cities aren't happening in the UK.

They're not a tool of evil totalitarian control.

I can just walk to the supermarket, Joe.

That's all it is.

I can walk to the supermarket.

That's as evil as it gets i can buy my pint of milk without needing to go to a garage

all right last clip um this is uh the final beast a piece about climate change

yeah because humanity losers exactly we're worshiping the almighty dollar you got it above the money you know you asked me when i ran for president one of the interests it's you know it's something else to run for president because you get around you meet all kinds of people and you learn all kinds of things and one of the things that i did we went to a lot of uh met with a lot of Native Americans.

And one of the reasons is, you know, their tradition

was going from way back, respect for nature, that they understood back, way back when, that you kill off all of the buffalo, you ain't going to have nothing to eat, right?

Right.

They understood that.

And you understand that you live in harmony with nature, which is, I think, what you're talking about.

Absolutely.

And if you lose that harmony, I worry about the future of humanity.

Which is the problem with financial competitiveness.

When you put that almighty dollar above above all else,

then all you think about it, and you're only alive for 100 years, so it's just hit the gas.

Hit the gas for 100 years, and who gives a shit what happens after I'm gone?

I'm going to die with the most toys.

Yay, I win in the dirt.

That's exactly right.

Yeah.

And that is, which takes us to another issue.

Okay.

And that is artificial intelligence and robotics.

So, yeah, I think Bernie recognizes he's hit Joe's button here.

And we are 40 minutes into a two-hour interview.

He knows that

he can't just stick on this one topic because he's not going to get as far as he wants you, basically.

So what he does is, first of all, he slows the whole conversation down.

Joe is accelerating up.

He's going into Joe

trying to win the argument mode.

He's throwing out lots of different things.

So Bernie pauses it back to explaining this one time when he was running for president.

Oh, you meet so many people.

And his tone just...

takes all the weight out of it, takes all the energy out of it.

It's so gentle.

It's so slow.

We're no longer kind of rutting heads.

It'd be very easy to to get caught up in Joe's energy.

And he does the opposite.

He meets that energy with a lack of energy almost.

And then he pivots to appealing to nature

because, you know, Joe's kind of interested in nature and stuff.

And he's saying about Native American wisdom about nature.

And that's not a bad bet that that's a better entry point into how to deal with the environment for Joe than what the scientists say.

And we talk about that for a while.

And Joe kind of indicates that he's kind of warming up to what Bernie's saying.

This for me is the point that you made about Mel Gibson hit a brick wall on Christianity, so he pivoted to the lost arc because going through conspiracy theory is going to get Joe to where you want him to be.

This is Bernie doing that.

You can't get him through the environmental science, but you can get through Native American wisdom about nature.

And then once that's kind of diffused a bit, Bernie moves on because he knows he's onto a loser.

He moves on to a topic he knows Joe will engage with him on and therefore carry his message to his audience rather than be oppositional to his message.

Bernie is using like aikido on him.

Like he's got Joe in wrist control here and he just moves moves him where he wants he's like steven segal like flipping people around he does such a great job of using joe's energy to just match just change joe's energy by by giving joe okay well let's let's let's slow the conversation down it's a rhetorician recognizing they can't win this particular argument let's move on to something else i'll get joe to agree with me on nature and then we move right on to something else and it's not an issue anymore.

It's really great.

It's really a good, it's really a good way for Bernie to get the other message that he wants out when he knows that I've hit something that I can't change.

Yeah, and Bernie Sanders isn't the guy to persuade Joe Rorgan that climate change is real.

And we could have got bogged down in that and not get to any of the other stuff that Bernie wants to say to Joe's audience.

I'm the last person that thinks I'm smart.

Trust me.

Okay, Marsh.

Something good?

Well, the thing is, it's kind of so much of it is good, isn't it?

I agree with almost all of of it.

So, I'm actually going to flip this back and I'm going to have to pick up something bad.

I think the way they discuss meaning in a post-world, a post-work world, it's an interesting question.

It's an important question, but I don't think either of them really fully grapple with the question properly.

Because Bernie seems to agree with the idea that work of any stripe is what gives you meaning.

You know, moving a broom is what will give you meaning because it's important.

Work is such a core part of your life.

And at best, he might just mean within the current system, but at worst, it's sort of saying like work for work's sake is kind of good for the soul.

I don't really agree with that.

And Joe seems to think that without work, the proles are going to struggle to know who they are.

So maybe we should let the underclasses have their work, otherwise they'll be just lost souls.

So I don't think that's great.

I think it's not a very nuanced way of thinking about that particular issue.

Yeah, I agree there.

And I'm going to do the same thing.

Mostly good, but what's bad?

I'm going to say what really frustrated me is the very end of this, both of them talking at length about the CBS lawsuit that Trump brought.

And I don't think either of them knew very much about it, yet they still talked about it at length.

And it was frustrating to listen to because Joe has sort of,

Joe sort of has the Republican standpoint on this, which is, you know, that they edited this interview and.

Bernie is basically saying, no, they didn't.

And he doesn't have enough knowledge to counter what Joe is saying.

So in my opinion, the end of this, Joe really does come out on top there because Bernie has to completely retreat.

And that's the end of the show.

And so I feel like, I feel like it was a total loss on that point.

And it really gave, I think, Joe's listeners.

what could be a reason why Trump is right about this and why

Trump is being attacked by the media when neither of them really understand what is actually happening with that lawsuit and what happened with that interview.

Yeah, no, I think that's true.

I think that's absolutely true.

Okay, well, that is is it for the show this week.

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