Best of 2025: Trump's End-Times Fascism w/ Naomi Klein

Summary

The Majority Report with Sam Seder

Best of 2025: Trump's End-Times Fascism w/ Naomi Klein
Episode Date: January 1, 2026
Summary by Podcast Summarizer

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Episode Overview

This episode features a highlight from The Majority Report’s “Best of 2025”—a wide-ranging, in-depth interview with best-selling author and activist Naomi Klein, co-author (with Astra Taylor) of the influential Guardian article, "The Rise of End Times Fascism." The conversation, led by Emma Viglin, explores the contemporary evolution of right-wing politics under the resurgence of Trump, the blending of disaster capitalism, tech oligarchy, and apocalyptic narratives, and the profound threats to democracy and the planet. The show’s latter portion includes banter and commentary on Eric Weinstein’s public scientific feud, and Sam Seder’s recent appearance on Patrick Bet-David’s show (Valuetainment), where he debunks right-wing immigration myths.

The episode is rich in irreverent humor and clear-eyed political analysis, maintaining the show's signature mix of accessible insight, leftist perspective, and sharp, candid exchanges.

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Key Interview: Naomi Klein on “End Times Fascism”

(Start: 08:09)

Background & Framing

• Naomi Klein discusses her Guardian piece, “The Rise of End Times Fascism,” co-written with Astra Taylor.
• The discussion builds on her body of work, such as The Shock Doctrine, but notes key differences in today’s political moment.

Evolution of Disaster Capitalism

• Klein notes that while her concept of the “Shock Doctrine” (governments and elites exploiting crises to impose regressive policies) remains relevant, the Trump era is marked by a more aggressive, premeditated manufacture of crisis.
• Naomi Klein [09:27]:
  “Honestly, I’d rather it be another book than this particular book. I’d love for The Shock Doctrine to go out of print and no longer be relevant…but the book describes a particular strategy that is very popular for the right globally, which is trying to throw so much at the public in a time of crisis that our minds get scrambled, we lose our narrative.”
• She warns about the limits of looking only to history—arguing today’s cumulative crises and far-right strategies also differ in critical new ways.

AI, Privatization, and Capitalist “Preppers”

• Trump's team is “openly creating shocks and vulnerabilities” to exploit.
• The Trump administration’s aggressive use of AI and its privatization agenda are compared to previous historic “technocrat” takeovers after crises (e.g., the “Chicago Boys” in Pinochet’s Chile, “Harvard Boys” in post-Soviet Russia).
• “When they’re talking about an AI-first strategy for the federal government, basically replacing many of those federal workers with bots...these should be seen in the lineage of wholly unqualified young men who have run roughshod over governments.” — Naomi Klein [10:41]
• AI’s environmental impact (“a vampiric technology”) is highlighted:
  • Massive energy/water use
  • Schmidt and Silicon Valley’s “build back better” campaigns utilize bipartisan alliances, not just Trump’s Republican base.
• “This is really a vampiric technology...it builds this mirror world by draining our world of what we need to live.” — Naomi Klein [16:25]

The “Network State,” Bunker Capitalism, and Tech Utopianism

• Klein explores the convergence of libertarian tech billionaires’ “network state” dreams (Peter Thiel, Patrie Friedman, seasteading) with apocalyptic prepper fantasies of the religious and nationalist right.
• “They want luxury lives serviced by machines and indentured servants with absolutely no rights...all of this foresees collapse, and it’s being dreamed by the very people who are accelerating the collapse.” — Naomi Klein [26:18]
• This “bunker state” mentality connects market libertarianism, AI accelerationism, and climate collapse denial/acceleration.

Overlap of Apocalyptic Narratives: Religion, Tech & Nationalism

• “End times fascism” refers to the blending of religious rapture narratives, tech billionaire “escape hatches,” and Fortress America nationalism.
• These actors are “giving up on the future” for the many as they plan their own exit strategies—whether spiritual, technological, or geographic.
• “All of them are within this apocalyptic narrative. They are…treasonous, really. I’ve never used the word ‘treason’ before…to this world.” — Naomi Klein [35:56]
• Emma Viglin [31:00]:
  “It is actually the same thing—it’s just a different letter in front of fascism or a different word in front of fascism.”
• Klein emphasizes the need for the left to create counter-myths, countering nihilistic right-wing apocalyptic ideology with stories rooted in humanism, environmental stewardship, and collective struggle.
• “We need our own myths. We need our own transcendent stories. And I think the Left, at its best, has been able to do that.... We are the people who are faithful. We are committed to staying.” — Naomi Klein [36:56]

Building a Broad-Based Coalition

• Despite the grim scenario, Klein sees potential in the clarifying effect Trump-era accelerationism provides:
  • The stakes are “life or death.”
  • There is an opening to build broader coalitions opposed to the “machine” agenda, including disaffected elements of Trump’s own base.

Memorable Quotes

• Naomi Klein [16:25]:
  “What worries me most immediately about AI is that this is really a vampiric technology...it devours energy on such a huge scale.”
• Emma Viglin [31:51]:
  “It is actually the same thing—it’s just a different letter in front of fascism or a different word in front of fascism.”
• Naomi Klein [35:56]:
  “They are treasonous—to humanity? Yeah, yeah…to this world. Not just humanity. Like, to creation.”
• Naomi Klein [36:56]:
  “We need our own myths. We need our own transcendent stories. And I think the Left, at its best, has been able to do that.... We are the people who are faithful. We are committed to staying.”

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Additional Segments

1. Weinstein vs. Carroll: Science Feud Breakdown

(From ~39:09 - 55:11)

• The hosts share and riff on a viral Piers Morgan segment where self-proclaimed outsider physicist Eric Weinstein is harshly critiqued by physicist Sean Carroll.
• Carroll details why Weinstein’s "Geometric Unity" lacks scientific rigor and is not taken seriously in the field.
  • “It is 100% possible to have a good idea and have it have an impact on what physicists do. But it’s not easy.” — Sean Carroll [42:34]
  • “Eric’s paper has none of that.” — Sean Carroll [43:49]
• Weinstein’s angry rejoinders and accusations of a “distributed idea suppression complex” (DISC) are lampooned by the hosts.
• Sam Seder and crew hilariously analyze Weinstein’s failure to meet scientific standards, poking fun at his ego and lack of transparency, ultimately likening his position to an undergraduate ignoring an assignment prompt.

2. Sam Seder vs. Valuetainment Panel: Immigration Myths Exposed

(From ~62:46)

• Seder recounts his recent appearance on Patrick Bet-David’s “Valuetainment” podcast, where he squared off against right-leaning hosts pushing disinformation about immigration and Social Security numbers.
• Key points:
  • Right-wing myth: “2 million+ Social Security numbers given to non-citizens means mass voter fraud or illegal immigrants getting benefits.”
  • Seder fact-check:
    • All recipients are legal immigrants—green card holders, temporary protected status, etc.
    • The program began under Trump (EBE program, 2017).
    • Non-citizens cannot vote; Social Security cards are for tax purposes.
    • Immigrants pay into the Social Security system, often without ever receiving benefits.
  • “They’re here legally. They’re paying into the system, and most will never get the benefits...but they [the PBD hosts] keep calling them ‘illegals’ and implying it’s some kind of conspiracy.” — Sam Seder [70:54, condensed]
• Seder describes the studio dynamics—the hosts talking over him, refusing to correct each other, and relying on real-time Googling.
• The segment highlights the persistence of anti-immigrant sentiment even among those who are themselves immigrants, and the willingness of right-wing media figures to spread misleading narratives.

3. Tariff Policy, Trump’s Economy, and Left Populism

(Throughout, especially 96:24 – 105:33)

• Seder and co-hosts discuss the economic consequences of Trump’s tariff proposals and the mythology around American manufacturing revival.
  • They explain tariffs are a regressive tax—hurting the working class more than elites.
  • Without larger industrial policies (e.g., the CHIPS Act model), tariffs alone achieve little except economic pain and inflation.
• Klein’s argument about the “shock doctrine” nature of such moves is echoed in this economic analysis.

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Notable Episode Quotes & Timestamps

• Naomi Klein [16:25]:
  “...AI is really a vampiric technology...devours energy on such a huge scale.”
• Naomi Klein [26:18]:
  “All of this foresees collapse, and it’s being dreamed by the very people who are accelerating the collapse.”
• Emma Viglin [31:51]:
  “It is actually the same thing—it’s just a different letter in front of fascism or a different word in front of fascism.”
• Naomi Klein [35:56]:
  “They are treasonous—...to humanity? Yeah, yeah. To this world. Not just humanity. Like, to creation.”
• Sam Seder [70:54, condensed]:
  “They’re here legally. They’re paying into the system, and most will never get the benefits...but they [the PBD hosts] keep calling them ‘illegals’ and implying it’s some kind of conspiracy.”
• Sean Carroll [42:34]:
  “It is 100% possible to have a good idea and have it have an impact on what physicists do. But it’s not easy.”

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Memorable Moments

• Klein’s elaboration on why current right-wing “apocalypse prep” is “bunker capitalism,” connecting libertarian fantasy, privatization, and nativist nationalism ([23:01]–[29:45]).
• Seder’s blow-by-blow dissection of the Valuetainment panel's misinformation, highlighting the gulf between right-wing rhetoric and policy reality ([62:46]–[85:09]).
• The panel’s gleeful, extended evisceration of Eric Weinstein’s scientific self-mythology, with hosts embracing their outsider status while lampooning “DISC” paranoia ([39:09]–[55:11]).

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Structure

• Introduction and Banter
• Main Interview: Naomi Klein on “End Times Fascism” (08:09–38:42)
• Science Feud Recap: Weinstein vs. Carroll (39:09–55:11)
• Seder on Valuetainment: Immigration Myths Debunked (62:46–85:09)
• Economic Policy Analysis: Tariffs and Shock Doctrine (96:24–105:33)
• Listener Interaction & Wrap-up

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Tone & Style

• Irreverent, insightful, sharply critical—humor and accessibility mingled with clear progressive analysis and historical perspective.
• Direct language, candid reflections, and a deep skepticism of right-wing and establishment myths.

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For Listeners New & Returning

This episode is essential listening for those seeking to understand the connections between right-wing techno-libertarianism, disaster capitalism, climate acceleration, and the rise of “end times” narratives in American (and global) politics. It’s also a showcase of The Majority Report’s commitment to pushing back against misinformation—whether on national TV or in viral podcast showdowns—always with facts, historical context, and plenty of wit.

Transcript

[Sam Cedar]

The Majority Report with Sam Cedar. The destiny of America is always safer.

[Tom]

In the hands of the people than.

[Sean Carroll]

In the conference rooms of any elite.

[Sam Cedar]

They are unanimous in their hate for me and I welcome their hatred. We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The Majority Report with Sam Seymour.

[Emma Viglin]

Though.

[Adam]

And I get the feeling you've been cheated.

[Sam Cedar]

It is Thursday, January 1, 2026.

[Emma Viglin]

Good job.

[Sam Cedar]

Thank you. I spent a lot of time gearing up for that. This is the five time award winning Majority Report. We are broadcasting live to tape steps from the industrially ravaged Gowanus Canal in the heartland of America, downtown Brooklyn, usa. And yes, it is our famous best of that we do. Emma Viglin.

[Emma Viglin]

Hello here. Hello.

[Sam Cedar]

There she is.

[Emma Viglin]

Hi.

[Sam Cedar]

For the best of of 2025. Now, I know what you're thinking. It's 2026. Why are you still harping about 2025? Well, we had such goodness in 2025 that we actually have to spill over into 2026.

[Emma Viglin]

Well, not maybe goodness politically in basically any possible way, except for Zoram Mamdani, obviously, but pretty good. Yeah, there's our silver lining.

[Naomi Klein]

But.

[Emma Viglin]

But yes, we had great interviews and lots of great guests in 2025, I will say.

[Sam Cedar]

And of course we're all at home now recovering out that we had last night.

[Emma Viglin]

I don't do.

[Sam Cedar]

We're recovering this. We're recording this much earlier, incidentally.

[Emma Viglin]

I don't know about you, but I'm just. I just don't really care. It's probably the holiday I care the least about 100%.

[Sam Cedar]

So you did not go out for a New Year's party?

[Emma Viglin]

Probably. I mean. No, I did not. Most likely. I mean, it's just in New York City in particular, it's so expensive for getting home.

[Sam Cedar]

It's amateur hour.

[Emma Viglin]

Every bar, if you want to just like do something casual at a bar. Every bar is, you know, reserve these days. And you got to pay to get in. It's like I might as well just watch a movie.

[Sam Cedar]

Yeah, yeah. I'm more of a Flag Day guy. You save your New Year's celebration for Flag Day. I get hammered. He's waving the flag around. Oh yeah, it's awesome you do that. Really? That's like. Like a Tuesday, right? Hopefully.

[Naomi Klein]

Right, Right.

[Emma Viglin]

To your service, good sir.

[Sam Cedar]

I. Last night was at the top of the Empire State Building. I always spend New Year's at a reflect gala. Like a gala. Black tie affair. Black tie affair. I go wear a Tux on the.

[Emma Viglin]

Top of the Empire State Building.

[Co-host or Producer]

That's true.

[Sam Cedar]

It's very exclusive and. Exactly. And I watched the ball drop. It is quite possible that I watch the ball drop. Like, I'll sometimes watch that with, you know, my son, but he doesn't care about that.

[Emma Viglin]

Right.

[Sam Cedar]

And there's this. This fireworks. You can see fireworks and stuff like that. I don't. I'm not a big New Year's. I used to. My big thing was I used to work on New Year's. That's where you get, like, the big bucks.

[Emma Viglin]

Perspective.

[Sam Cedar]

Well, not just comedy. I'm. I'm actually thinking back as like, a waiter banquet. Bartending is what I would.

[Emma Viglin]

That makes sense.

[Sam Cedar]

Yeah. You can make a real killing.

[Emma Viglin]

Lots of drunk people wanting to tip you.

[Sam Cedar]

Right. But I. It's amateur hour. You don't want to go out with that. You don't want to deal with that.

[Emma Viglin]

That's what I'm saying.

[Sam Cedar]

People drinking for the first time and then vomiting all over themselves. We don't need to see that. But we do have. If you've recovered, we do have a great interview that you did.

[Emma Viglin]

Yes.

[Sam Cedar]

With.

[Emma Viglin]

No. Just. No. Just Naomi Klein. Well, Astro Taylor did co author the piece with her, but I spoke just to Naomi Klein.

[Sam Cedar]

She's one of my favorite guests.

[Emma Viglin]

I mean, at the risk of being a dork about it, like, I don't think there's. There's few guests that we could have that would make me more. Not nervous, but anticipatory. Like, Naomi Klein is a hero for sure of mine, so.

[Sam Cedar]

And you sort of made sure you booked her when I was on vacation.

[Emma Viglin]

I want some girl time. But also, obviously, the crowd you out for strategic purposes.

[Sam Cedar]

No, it's like. It's like. It's like having a walker and getting up to the edge of the stairs and hearing footsteps behind you.

[Emma Viglin]

That is incredibly vivid. But people who don't know Naomi Klein, obviously, you should. Writer of many, many important books. Activist, professor.

[Sam Cedar]

No logo. Shock doctrine.

[Emma Viglin]

Shock Doctrine. Of course. I mean, we interviewed her for her recent book, Doppelganger, which is really great as well. She has a book coming out based on this premise. I'm not sure exactly of the title, but this is the thesis. Her and Astra Taylor, another phenomenal guests of ours, a frequent guest of the Debt Collective, are writing a book together called the Rise of End Times Fascism. Or I think that that's the premise. That was the title of the Guardian article. That is like the framework of our discussion. And so they're coming out with this book next year. But we already spoke a lot about like what she's. Her thesis is about this current political moment. And yeah, the nerves wore off for me like five minutes into the interview. So then it's a, it's pretty smooth sailing from there on out.

[Sam Cedar]

And her husband, Avi Lewis is running for like NDP or something like that. Yeah, he's a documentary filmmaker. They also did a great film together called the Taking, about a factory in, I want to say Argentina maybe that was basically taken over by the workers. It's definitely. Do I have that right? The take? Did I get that right? The take? This was. It's an old film, but yes. So stick around. This is a great interview that Emma did. And then we'll have our famous Matt picks where he picks from an entire cavalcade of, of possible like clips or interviews and he puts it on to the end of the show and then you get the full show. Now look, here's the deal. Tomorrow is Friday, January 2nd. You and I may do a little live stream, a little livestream like we'll see, but we may not. So we will, there'll be a either a best of show or our livestream. And we will. If you're on the app, you can get the [e-mail] it's free. We don't track you, really out of laziness more than anything else. I suppose we could make a lot of money off of that.

[Co-host or Producer]

But we will send you Peter Thiel.

[Sam Cedar]

Peter Thiel.

[Emma Viglin]

Or the Biden campaign.

[Sam Cedar]

Or the Biden campaign, anybody. But instead what we'll do is we will send you a notification if we're on live. Okay, so check that out. In the meantime, enjoy this interview with Naomi Klein and Matt's picks. And one way or another, we'll see you tomorrow. And we are live for sure on Monday. Bye. Bye.

[Emma Viglin]

We are back. And we are joined now by Naomi Klein, New York Times best selling author of nine critically acclaimed books, professor of climate justice at the University of British Columbia. Her latest piece in the Guardian is co authored with Astra Taylor and called the Rise of End Times Fascism. Naomi, thanks so much for coming on the show today.

[Naomi Klein]

Well, it's great to see you again, Emma.

[Emma Viglin]

Great to see you. Obviously your work is so important to understanding just 21st century progressive politics and activism and what late stage capitalism really looks like. And I've been getting a lot of texts from friends saying, well, what book should I be reading right now to kind of grapple with the Trump administration? And I've Been encouraging folks to read the Shock Doctrine because, like, we're not far off from that book being it's almost 20 years old. And it occurs to me that we're seeing this evolved form of the disaster capitalist project, the Shock Doctrine. The Trump administration is seemingly openly creating shocks and vulnerabilities to exploit them, not just exploiting shocks as they happen. What's been your assessment of that?

[Naomi Klein]

Sure, and it's been. I mean, that book is certainly having a revival. I'm hearing about it all the time. And, you know, it's always gratifying when a book can have a life like that. But honestly, I'd rather it be another book than this particular book. I'd love for the Shock Doctrine to go out of print and no longer be relevant, but I think because the book describes a particular strategy that is very popular for the right globally, which is trying to throw so much at the public in a time of crisis that our minds get scrambled, we lose our narrative. We're creatures of narrative. We're sort of told that nothing we knew before this moment even applies. There's often a kind of an urge to sort of blank the slate. And so I think just knowing that this is a strategy and understanding the strategy helps drain it of its effectiveness. Right. So I think that the Shock Doctrine is still useful in that way. I also do want to say, you know, I know we'll get to this because I think there are ways that this follows a familiar script, and there are ways that the script is different and our reality is different. And I think there are always dangers of only looking to pass precedent, to understand our reality, like only looking to history and imagining that the present is just a repeat of the past. And the danger in that is that we don't see what's new. Right. So I think that we are seeing a combination of tactics we've seen before in the United States, but also around the world, often pushed by the US Government and its various arms. And it's really now coming home. But we're also seeing things that we haven't seen before because of the cumulative effect of the successful deployment of this particular strategy, which is why the piece with Astra is called End Times Fascism, which is different than forms of fascism that we've seen before. So I hope we can talk about what's different as well as the same. But what's the same is like, you know, when I see, for instance, Elon's Doge boys running rampant and, you know, and just decimating the US Government, creating markets for Musk's own products. You know, when they're talking about an AI first strategy for the federal government, basically replacing many of those federal workers with bots, if they're replaced at all. You know, I think that they should be seen in this lineage of wholly unqualified young men who have run roughshod over governments often in the aftermath of coup d'. Etat. You know, I've talked about the Doge boys as being part of a lineage of the Chicago boys in Pinochet's Chile, or the Harvard boys in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, or what were called the Berkeley Mafia in Indonesia after a coup d' etat there. So there's often been this 1, 2 strategy of first comes the shock, and then sort of in the wreckage of the shock comes the, the rapid fire privatization, deregulation, government austerity. So I think that there are those commonalities, but they're really going for the absolute heart of the government now. And so there's old and there's new.

[Emma Viglin]

You can see how he's almost exploiting the results of a culmination of shocks which include, you can go back to the war on terror and trace what the administration is doing, which is the expansion of the surveillance state under the war on terror, the collapse also of the, of the economy and how in after the recession of the Great Recession, wealth just continued to be concentrated. Also after Covid, the wealthy got richer at the end of that and there was a mass exploitation via greedflation where there were naturally occurring bottlenecks and inflation due to Covid. And then when that ease and subsided while prices still kept going up and you saw record profits for folks at the very top. And so like that culmination has created this, this baseline kind of almost nihilism or level of anxiety that it feels like Donald Trump is kind of perfect for that moment of reality because he's a president that almost he transcends truth and reality and is very much somebody who makes his own reality by lying the entire time. And it's like it's an escape hatch to the dystopia that we're living in, even as he exacerbates it.

[Naomi Klein]

Yeah, there's, there's, there's definitely a lot going on. And you know, one thing I would clarify is that, is that in the instances that I was talking about before, like these earlier instances where you've had an exploitation of a political shock, and here I think it's worth mentioning that while it's true that Trump is creating the shocks that he's also exploiting. Right. That also was the case in Chile in the sense that the Chicago boys economic policies backfired massively under Pinochet. And even though it was done in the name of reducing inflation, it actually led to inflation spiraling. And then there were the bailouts. Right. I mean, because this is the thing, is that they win either way. And I think this is what's important, and I think a lot of people do understand this about Trump's economic team is that you've got people who are very skilled at profiting from both a market upturn and a market crash. Right. Especially if they have their hands on the levers that allow for the bailouts if it's needed. So they're not worried about the consequences of their economic wreckage, particularly. But I do think that, you know, he did have to draw back from some of the tariffs just because I think partly he hadn't reckoned with the. And this is what I mean about history being cumulative, right? Like, because we are, you know, 50 years into the neoliberal project. The economy is much more financialized than it was, you know, when there was the Nixon shock, for instance. So some things stay the same and some things change. But you're talking about the nihilism at the heart of this project. And that's really what I've been grappling with. And I think a lot of us have been where we're like watching this and we're like, okay, don't you also have to breathe air and drink water? Like, don't you, don't. You're like, okay, maybe you can send your kids to private schools. You're not worried about what happens to public schools. And these folks are all grifters and they see all kinds of market opportunities in education. I think it's really important to understand that not just in the sort of for profit university or like Jordan Peterson seminar racket, Right. Which is very real, but also just the AI, the idea that AI should be teaching our kids that a lot of the work of education in K through 12 and post secondary can just be done through AI. And by the way, Emma, like, this is not. This is a bipartisan project. And just if I could just add a little factor which I think is important for us to remember as we're bombarded with information. There was a similar kind of AI push in the early days of COVID where a lot of these big tech companies, and this was really being spearheaded by Eric Schmidt, you know, formerly CEO of Google, saying, okay, well, in the Name of the pandemic and, you know, keeping us safe from this virus. We're going to have this build back better, which is really going to digitize everything, right? So we'll have. And it was also couch, much as we are in this moment of, you know, China is out AI ing us, they use more telehealth, they use. They have more smart, quote, unquote, smart cities, which are cities where you have AI embedded in absolutely everything. So Eric Schmidt went on a major lobbying campaign to sort of rebrand Covid recovery as this major, major push for AI Everything in schools, in health care, in cities. And the person who took him up on this was Cuomo as governor. He was. He put him in charge. I mean, he was incredibly excited about this. So this is not just a Republican move. And as we know, there are a lot of powerful corporate Dems who have very deep ties to many of these Silicon Valley figures who have been pushing for exactly this. It turns out that it's, you know, not Cuomo, but Trump who is opening up, you know, all of the doors for their wildest dreams. So, AI, in addition to all the things that we should worry about, AI in terms of its impacts on jobs, in terms of its impacts even in the dystopian AI singularity nightmares that we hear about. As somebody who's been engaged in the climate struggle for a long time, what worries me most immediately about AI is that this is really a vampiric technology. Technology, right, in the sense that, like, I mean, a vampire technology in that it builds this mirror world of our world by draining our world of what we need to live, right? Like, of water, of energy, of a habitable climate, because it devours energy on such a huge scale. So this is another way that this Trump agenda is really at war with just life on Earth. You know, it's. It. You have this deregulation of, you know, health and human services and environmental regulations. And by the way, we have not even seen the start of it. They've got all kinds of big plans, apparently, for Earth Day, where they're going to really, really declare war on the whole ngo, NGO sector. But then you have AI which is really the massive environmental threat, because you've got Schmidt before Congress saying, well, we're going to. We need to triple our energy use in order to meet our AI needs and keep up with China. It's basically this new Cold War discourse. So that's why I think the moment we're in is different, because it's just simpler in the sense it's Just so clear. It's like it's a life or death choice. Are we on the side of life? Are we on the side of an animate world with humans and other life forms? Or are we, are we throwing in with the machines? And I actually think, you know, I'm smiling because I actually think that this is like, maybe our best hope of building a broad based coalition.

[Emma Viglin]

Clarifying.

[Naomi Klein]

It's clarifying. And it's also, I have to tell you, sorry I'm talking so long, but like, you know, last time I talked to you, I just published Doppelganger. And as you know, I listened to way too much Steve Bannon to write that book. And, you know, I'm really struck by the fact that, you know, Bannon as the kind of the voice of the MAGA base, really latched onto this idea that, like, Big Tech is waging war on you. You can't trust Big Tech. You know, it's a war on the human. He was using all this discourse. So a lot of people who voted for Trump thought they were voting against the big tech anti human agenda. And, you know, it's just one of the many ways that Trump is betraying them. It's not just the price of eggs. And I think that this piece of it has the best potential, appealing away a significant portion of the Trump base. Not everyone, and we don't want everyone, but some of them. And, you know, here I don't want to, you know, I don't think we should give much credence to the idea that Bannon himself is serious in taking on Silicon Valley. I think he's absolutely talking out of both sides of his mouth. But it's telling that he needs, that he feels he needs to put on this show for his base of sort of, you know, taking on the tech oligarchs and so on.

[Emma Viglin]

Well, because as you write in this excellent piece in the Guardian, the rise of end times fascism, I've been speaking about Trump as the privatization president. But your thoughts on this are more evolved in that it is the end times almost enclosure presidency. And that works very neatly with the tech oligarch project. And you rightly point out that the infrastructure for their mass accumulation of wealth was frankly the result of the Democrats embracing the tech Bros. Especially under the Obama administration. And these are the monsters they've created, much like the Democrats have created this monster of authoritarianism cracking down on political speech of protesters against genocide. Right. And so these are lessons that we should be learning. But this whole concept of the network states, I'm sure you've read a lot of Gil Duran and what he's reported on about how these, this, this religion with these tech billionaires. Could you expand on that a little bit? And how this, the network state, the private city, the bunker for the rich is in effect, this agenda, but they're selling it in different ways before the public can catch up.

[Naomi Klein]

Yeah, absolutely. And Gil Duran's done terrific reporting on this. I've been following it for a really long time because this is the sort of logical extension of Milton Friedman's libertarianism that was sort of at the heart of the Shock Doctrine, right? Like this extreme idea that, you know, government is always the problem and that it's tyranny to have a functioning government. And really all you need from the state, in Friedman's view, was, you know, protection for property rights, you know, and policing. But interestingly, his grandson, Patrie Friedman, has taken this even further. And Patrick Friedman is really at the heart of this hyper libertarian idea that is sometimes talk called the Network Society, but is really this idea of, well, why do we live in countries at all, right? Why can't we start our own countries where we'll be absolutely free to make our own, our own rules, you know, pay the level of tax that we decide, like, why, why should we listen to anyone? Like, basically, it's like a temper tantrum. Like, you are not the boss of me. Right?

[Emma Viglin]

And let me just interject for a sec just to say how contrary that is to Steve Bannon's almost like fetishization, romanticization of the state. Yeah, yeah.

[Naomi Klein]

And I want to come to that because once again, I think we can make a mistake where we. In overplaying the extent to which those visions are actually in conflict. There are ways of resolving them, and I think it's important for us to understand how they can be resolved and are being resolved analytically on Steve Bannon's war room in real time. Because I think, but at the same time, like I said before, there are ways that there is a fissure that can be exploited if we do it right. So this Network Society idea, it's been around for a long time. I wrote about it in my book On Fire, where I was looking at this idea of how it was intersecting with a preparation, like a preparation for the super rich. Originally, the idea was, okay, we want our own countries just so that we can do whatever we want, right? But then it was like, well, what about climate change? So if you look at their, if you, if you look at the plans, there was this idea of Seasteading, Peter Thiel is always involved. Whatever it is, Peter Thiel is giving it some money. So there's, there's the seasteading idea, and that didn't really go very far, but it was the idea that you could start your own countries in international waters on floating oil rigs, and you could, quote, unquote, vote with your boat. So if one floating nation had better rules than the other one for your.

[Emma Viglin]

Business, these people are freaks, incidentally.

[Naomi Klein]

And so then it turned out actually most rich people didn't want to live on floating oil rigs. So they came up with another idea, which was this is this thing called Prospera, which is in an island in Honduras, which is currently being challenged in court, where they're pretending they have their own little country, their own little island state, and basically it's a glorified med spa. Patrie Friedman, once again, grandson of Milton Friedman, got his Tesla key embedded in his hand. So the idea is like, okay, it combines all of these niche Silicon Valley fetishes around, like biohacking, right? So they're upgrading their bodies for the future. But then a lot of these projects are foreseeing a future of collapse, right? Like that's the subtext of all of this, is things are going down. And the going down may be about viruses, it may be about climate impacts, which is, you know, one argument for a floating nation, right? You don't have to worry about sea level rise, you just keep rising with the seas and, you know, all of it's solar powered, renewable powered and so on. So I think two forces have really converged. One is this idea of wanting total freedom for capitalism and no state whatsoever. And the other is this idea of things are going to get really bad and we need our private escape hatches, right? So this is where I know you mentioned the war on terror. I think about the wave of privatization of the US military, the US surveillance state, and players like Blackwater and Erik Prince. I mean, they're all swirling around this, right? The idea is that you have, you have your own private armies. One of the reasons they like AI so much is because it sort of solves the problem of who's going to serve you and tend to you in your little private states. But the real dream world is the Gulf states. Honestly, it's, you know, they want to have a. They want to have luxury lives serviced by a combination of machines and indentured servants who have absolutely no rights, who are, you know, migrant workers with absolutely no rights. So that's their dream world. And you would think that it is highly. I mean, I think the thing that for us to understand is that it foresees collapse and it foresees collapse and it's being dreamed by the very people who are accelerating the collapse in the ways that we've already talked about, including by going all in on AI, which is an absolute energy hog and water hog and is draining our real physical world. So they're saying collapse is inevitable and oh, by the way, we're accelerating it as we prep for it. And then you have Donald Trump saying, you know, positioning himself as this hyper nationalist, make America great again. And you have the MAGA base who identify themselves primarily as nationalists, but their vision of nationalism is also the nation state as bunker. And this is where I think it's really important for us to understand, even if they claim to deny climate change, do not think it's real. I don't think that we can understand what's happening on borders, what's happening with offshore detention facilities, which Trump did not invent. You know, Australia was doing it, Italy was doing it. You know, it's been going on for over a decade now, this idea of, you know, relatively wealthy countries offshoring migrants into these sort of legal black holes. It was happening on Nehru in the Pacific Islands, Manas, Christmas Island. Libya was doing it for Europe. And now the Trump administration is doing something similar with. It's actually being billed as a kind of an economic development opportunity for countries like El Salvador. So I don't think we can understand Trump's economic agenda or I think it's helpful to. I think of them as super sized preppers in the sense that I think all of this.

[Emma Viglin]

Yeah, well, exactly. I mean, it's occurring to me as you're speaking. It's like the protectionism is the bunker state or like the just like the rapid onshoring without first years long of domestic capacity being built up that would justify the tariffs. Like they're putting the cart before the horse, but there's no horse, for lack of a better phrase. But that the, the key point that you made there about the overlap and we should be really careful not to overstate the fissures on the right because it's just so different. Like the Democrats, frankly, are the Republicans in this movement. They acknowledge that there is like doom on the horizon. And the Democrats talk about things like, and how we should be maintaining our system, which is part of the reason that the right now has this salience that it shouldn't have, because they're at least acknowledging that there's a level of anxiety and there's a problem and that our system is collapsing. But there is key overlap between, as you write, the religious end timers, the network state, but also Christian and white nationalists. That piece that came out in the Wall Street Journal with Elon Musk talking about his fears about the collapse of Western civilization and that even though the population is increasing, he's concerned about population decreases. Well, what is he referring to? He's referring to Europe and the United States. Okay, so like, yeah, the tech guys may be different than the neocons, but they still see life in the global south as dispensable. And it can justify the genocide in Gaza, it can justify protectionist policies and climate accelerationism that doesn't take them into account, but builds walls up here. It in fact is actually the same thing. It's just a different letter in front of fascism or a different word in front of fascism.

[Naomi Klein]

Yeah, I think that's really well said, Emma. And you know, I think it's, it's the reason why we ended up calling it end times fascism and we played with different, different names is because I think it gets at the narrative structure of all of these movements. Right. And it is the same narrative structure as the Rapture. Right. You know, and not all Christians believe in the Rapture, by the way. It is not clear that this is actually biblical text, but this very powerful interpretation of biblical text, that there is going to be this, that there's going to be the return of the Messiah, there's going to be this moment when the righteous get sucked up to their golden city in the sky and then the final battle rages below. And everybody who has not been selected for this elevator ride is left to drown, burn whatever it is. I mean, it's the most violent part of the Bible. But the point is that for people who believe in it, they're psyched. They're very psyched. This is what they're working towards. And this Freud called it the death drive. But I think it's really important for us to understand that whether you're religious or not, that story, that apocalyptic story is so deeply encoded in our culture. No matter what your faith is. I mean, versions of it are in every Hollywood disaster movie, Right. It's so deeply encoded on so many sci fi stories. Right? So you have this secular version of it and you also have the simultaneous people who seriously believe in it. Like apparently Mike Huckabee, very dangerous that people who actually believe in it are in charge of, you know, policies like in Israel, because Israel. In this story, Israel is where it all goes down. And the, you know, the return of the Israelites to this land is the conditions under which the Messiah comes back. So you've got all of these apocalyptic thinkers and messianic thinkers, first of all, inside the Netanyahu government. Right, who desperately want to destroy Al Aqsa and build the Third Temple. I mean, they're driving towards this story. So you have people who actually are religious fanatics who believe it, and then you have kind of the muffs and the teals who are sort of dabbling with the religion. And weirdly, Peter Thiel has been talking more and more about how he actually is religious, never mind his, like, gay party lifestyle. He thinks the Antichrist is here, and it's Greta Thunberg. I mean, it's just beyond the stuff that's going on. Yeah. So, I mean, there's a way, like, you know, in Doppelganger, I quote Philip Roth, the kind of king of doppelgangers, who said, it's too ridiculous to take seriously and too serious to be ridiculous. And I feel that way about all of this. I mean, it's so ridiculous. No, Elon Musk is not going to upload his consciousness, you know, into the AI singularity and live in the ether on Mars or whatever the story is that he thinks is going to protect him and his multiplying kin from the fires that he is helping to unleash. But, you know, we have to take it seriously because it has material effects on all of our lives. Right. And that's why what we try to do in the piece is say, okay, well, what do all these people have in common? You know, whether they are actually religious extremists who believe the end times are coming and they're psyched about it, or whether they are the billionaires who are bunkering down and getting ready to do their exit, or whether it's the Fortress Nation crowd who are like, okay, which critical minerals can we bring into our bunker nation state? And which people can we send to, you know, like a deep, dark dungeon somewhere else with no. Absolutely no rights? You know, all of them are giving up on the future. All of them are within this apocalyptic narrative. They are, you know, treasonous. Really? I've never used the word treason before.

[Emma Viglin]

To humanity. They're treasonous to humanity? Yeah, yeah.

[Naomi Klein]

To this world. Not just humanity. Like, to creation, like, to the. And I'm using that kind of language deliberately because I actually think it's very important that we understand that we're not going to win this by sort of snarkly going, I guess it wasn't about the price of eggs. No, it wasn't. It was not about the price of eggs. They are tapping into incredibly powerful myths, Right? They're giving people a profound sense of nihilistic purpose in their lives. And I don't. And I think that while, you know, I've made the argument for the Green New Deal and eco populism and we need all of that. Like, we need to improve people's material circumstances. We need to continue to fight for universal health care, for debt cancellation, for a living wage, for heat pumps, for all. For all of that good stuff. But we can't kid ourselves that we can beat these sort of incredibly powerful myths only with material offerings. And here I'm drawing on work from Richard Seymour, who talks about this in his really great book Disaster Nationalism, which touches on a lot of these themes. We need our own myths. We need our own transcendent stories. And I think the Left, at its best, has been able to do that. And, you know, the offering that Astra and I make in the piece is, you know, these are people who are. Who are treasonous to this world, and we are the people who are faithful. You know, we are committed to staying. They're all. They're all planning their exit strategies, whether it's a golden city in the sky or whether it's a floating oil rig, you know, in the Atlantic. I mean, they're out of here. And we, like, we need to really think about that. Like, we need to think about what we're willing to fight for and who we're willing to fight for and what it means to be so completely uninterested, you know, in the, you know, wonders.

[Emma Viglin]

Counter narrative. Yeah, a counter narrative based in humanism. And that is we have no leaders. We have very few leaders right now who are advocating for that.

[Naomi Klein]

But look, I live on the west coast, so I'm not only worried about the humans, I'm worried about the salmon and the orcas. And, like, you know, I think you get witchy with this shit.

[Emma Viglin]

Wildlife. Yeah, Yeah. I should expand.

[Naomi Klein]

All of life, you know.

[Emma Viglin]

Yes, all of life.

[Naomi Klein]

Astro is saying, and this is her line in the piece, like, Elon Musk wants humanity to eke out a living on two dead orbs, you know, the Earth and Mars. And we have all of this beauty and wonder and life. Abundance, diversity. Hey, abundance. Tell Ezra. Funny.

[Emma Viglin]

Well, Naomi, thanks so much for your time today. It's always wonderful to get your perspective. People can read the Piece, it's called the Rise of End Times Fascism in the Guardian, co authored with Astra Taylor. Thanks so much. Really appreciate your time today.

[Naomi Klein]

Great to talk with you. Take care.

[Emma Viglin]

Great to talk to you.

[Sam Cedar]

All right, let's have a little more fun. This, this clip, this is from an hour long interview on Piers Morgan and I seriously contemplated dedicating the entire fun half to this, but this is a compilation. Was it put together by Piers Morgan?

[Co-host or Producer]

It's no, put together by Twitter user. That's really great on this stuff. At the bad stats. T H E B A D S T A T S Now just a.

[Sam Cedar]

Little bit of background and I only know so much because there's only so much science Eric Weinstein that I can handle and in science. But Eric Weinstein, he was doing this about a year or two ago, right? Or it was three years up to.

[Co-host or Producer]

Like four years ago. He has a geometric unity theory with, you know, some parts that aren't exactly filled in all the way about like the Shia.

[Sam Cedar]

Well, let's not, let's not editorialize on that because you're not a physics professor, nor am I. No, you're not a physics scientist, nor am I. You're not a researcher. You don't do anything. So we're not going to judge.

[Co-host or Producer]

English major.

[Sam Cedar]

You're an English major. I did a little religion in political science. But we are viewers and so we have seen Eric Weinstein on countless podcasts going on talking about how he is an autodidact when it comes to physics and he has figured out some grand theory about physics and he is being completely neglected. No one will deal with his theory because it could be so revolutionary that in many ways probably embarrassed a lot of scientists.

[Co-host or Producer]

He also has a theory about the distributed idea suppression complex or disc, which is, you know, partially in why he's not, you know, have the Nobel.

[Sam Cedar]

Are you making up.

[Co-host or Producer]

No, he made that.

[Sam Cedar]

Okay, I just want to make that clear.

[Co-host or Producer]

Coined the distributed idea suppression complex.

[Sam Cedar]

Okay, so there is a distributed idea suppression complex that is that we're a part of. That we are a part of. We're like the. We're like the pawns, essentially.

[Co-host or Producer]

Yeah, we're just tendrils.

[Sam Cedar]

And he's going out there, he's got this like incredible physics theory that nobody's showing any respect for. And so Pierce Morgan had. What number is this?

[Co-host or Producer]

Oh, it's. Let's see.

[Sam Cedar]

Piers Morgan brought Eric Weinstein on with a guy named Sean Carroll. Sean Carroll is a physicist. And where does he. Is he at the affiliate with the university.

[Co-host or Producer]

Sean Carroll, it looks like he's educated at Villanova and Harvard, I'm not sure. At California State Institute of Technology right now.

[Sam Cedar]

Okay, Cal State tech, whatever.

[Co-host or Producer]

In 2007, Carroll was named NSF National Science Foundation's Distinguished Lecturer by the National Science.

[Sam Cedar]

Oh, right. Okay. Well, probably the heart of the discovery, but here he is talking to Harry Weinstein and honestly, You know, like the first time the Walking Dead came on. And you would say if someone had never seen it, you're like, this is gonna be a little bit gory. This might make you feel uncomfortable. I would give you the same warning.

[Co-host or Producer]

Can I make another analogy? This is like there's a TikTok thing where it's like we put an amateur professional basketball player to go join this street ball match and they cleaned up. That's sort of like what happens here.

[Sean Carroll]

I would like to let people out there know who might be working outside the academic physics community that it is 100% possible to have a good idea and have it have an impact on what physicists do. But it's not easy. You have to do a certain amount of work to show that your theory is worth the time, that it is respectable, that it is interesting, that it is promising. The first thing you got to do is make sure that your theory makes contact with modern physics as it is understood. If you have a new paper out, business are going to look at it. They're going to look for, you know, where's Lagrangian, where's the interactions? Is the proton stable? Is there dark matter? Like, how does it fit into what I already know. Eric's paper has none of that. You would also ask, have. Has the theory been shown to be viable in a very basic way? Is it stable? Is it free of anomalies? Is it finite in the sense of the quantum mechanical calculation that I already mentioned? Again, none of that is there. Are there any new predictions? Eric says completely correctly, string theory doesn't make any new predictions here either. But also, I really don't want people to get the idea that string theory has some dominant picture in my department at Johns Hopkins. Let me just finish and then you can talk that. I think it's a good system. In my department at Johns Hopkins, we have six professors in the theoretical physics group. One of them does string theory, and even he only does it sort of half time. I wish we had more. Honestly. This is very typical. Even at the most stringy department, maybe half the people who do string theory. There are plenty of other approaches being advocated and many of Them do make different predictions, and we're looking for them.

[Co-host or Producer]

Just explain really briefly. Eric Weinson says, well, if string theory can get away with some of this stuff, which he'll explain why string theory is valued, why can't mine? That's all this is about.

[Naomi Klein]

Right.

[Sam Cedar]

And the other thing that Sean Carroll is explaining is that we're not just dedicated to string theory. We have a lot of other people doing a lot of other. Pursuing a lot of other theories.

[Co-host or Producer]

Not that Eric would know anything about that.

[Sam Cedar]

No. Well, of course, because disc inhibits that type of communication. We should also say that Carol is now at John Hopkins. All right.

[Sean Carroll]

Ology and astrophysics and elsewhere. And finally, does your theory solve any interesting problems that we already thought we had? That's. That's the reason why string theory became interesting, because we had this problem with quantum gravity that it gave infinite answers, and string theory solved that problem. And again, I see none of that in Eric's paper. So it's very possible that somewhere in Eric's theory there are interesting ideas, but he has given us no reason to think that it is a promising theory. I encourage other people who would like to have an impact on the research agenda of modern physics to take these easy steps rather than going on podcasts and talking about their victimization.

[Eric Weinstein]

I do all sorts of things that you have no idea of, because your attitude, which you repeat in other podcasts, and I highly advise you to spend more time in your physics department and less time on YouTube, is that this is not a serious thing.

[Co-host or Producer]

Nobody's taking, I mean, a little bit pot.

[Sam Cedar]

Thank God. This, like. I just love the idea that, like, you would go on to a show and get indignant, because it's quite clear the person I'm having a debate with is not aware of the other things I do when I'm not here.

[Co-host or Producer]

And, Oliver, you, the guy most on YouTube, is like, Stay off of you.

[Sam Cedar]

But it's just like. Like the idea that, like, you don't know all the different things I do. I took a walk today in the park. Also this weekend I saw a movie. I bet you didn't know that. Did you know that I bowl on occasion? No, you don't. You couldn't possibly know. You couldn't possibly know that I did paintball just six months ago. Nor were you aware of the fact that sometimes I do synchronized swimming. I do so many things that you have no idea about, sir.

[Eric Weinstein]

Is that this is not a serious thing. Nobody's taking it seriously. And your mis portrayal of this.

[Co-host or Producer]

Go back to get that part and.

[Eric Weinstein]

Their reaction to things that you have no idea of, because your attitude, which you repeat in other podcasts and I highly advise you to spend more time in your physics department and less time on YouTube, is that this is not a serious thing. Nobody's taking it seriously, and you're misportraying. Trail of the situation is nearly constant for reasons that completely elude me.

[Sam Cedar]

Pause it for a second. Pause it for a second. No, no, keep. Keep the image up there because I want you to look at Piers Morgan's face, because Piers Morgan is going to himself. Cannot believe I'm watching this complete meltdown. Like, he is sitting there going, like, the person who booked this on my show is going to get a medal.

[Co-host or Producer]

Popping bottles tonight.

[Sam Cedar]

Oh, my God. Like, he is just like, this is fantastic. It is one of those moments where. And this is the thing that Piers Morgan's job I envy on some level, because all he does is he puts, like, people in there. And his whole job is to sometimes just, like, not smile. Like, I just have to pretend like I'm showing respect. And it's just.

[Co-host or Producer]

I'm going, oh, I'm stirring.

[Sam Cedar]

I'm doing nothing. I'm just watching this physics professor gut Eric Weinstein in front of me, and I'm just going to pretend like I am not, like, laughing. Like I would imagine. There was literally, like, tremors in his throat where he's just. Turn my mic down. Turn my mic down.

[Sean Carroll]

The good news is I have read Eric's paper. Here it is. I actually have it here, right here. And it's worse than you think. You know, it just very quickly, it starts off by saying the author is not a physicist and is no longer an active academician, but is an entertainer and host of a podcast. This work of entertainment is a draft work in progress, and it may not be built upon, so we're not allowed.

[Sam Cedar]

That is a cut by the Piers Morgan people, incidentally, to heighten how sort of, like, brutal this is. This is like, you know, the slow mo close up the actual. Like, if this was Walking Dead. This is the slow mo of, like, you know, whatever. The weapon crashing across somebody's face.

[Co-host or Producer]

This is bullet time in the Matrix.

[Sean Carroll]

Starts off by saying the author. The good news is I have read Eric's paper. Here it is. I actually have it here, right here. And it's worse than you would think. You know, just very quickly, it starts off by saying the author is not a physicist and is no longer an active academician, but is an entertainer and host of a Podcast. This work of entertainment is a draft work in progress and it may not be built upon. So we're not allowed to think about Eric's theory and write a follow up paper about it.

[Eric Weinstein]

I know you're very much allowed to.

[Sean Carroll]

Everything that is normally done in scientific discourse. You hope that people build upon your theories, you don't try to prevent them. And later on it's my theory.

[Sam Cedar]

No one else can take it. No one else can take it. No one. It is mine. No one's. Incidentally, if anybody talks about bleaching, putting bleach inside to get rid of the thing, that's my idea. Go ahead.

[Sean Carroll]

And later on it says, this document is an attempt to begin recovering. I'm going to read this. This document is an attempt to begin recovering the rather more complete theory which at this point point is only partially remembered and stitched together from old computer files, notebooks, recordings and the like dating back to as far as 1983. And this is why this paper is not going to appear in the peer reviewed literature. It's not serious. It's that dog ate my homework kind of thing. If you have a dark matter thing, if you have a dark matter prediction, if you have a dark energy prediction, I want to see a plot in the paper. I want to see redshift versus hundreds. I want to see a calculation of a relic abundance so I can figure out how much dark matter is supposed to be. If you do that, people will pay attention to the theory. It's very possible.

[Eric Weinstein]

Sean. First of all, how dare you. Second of all, if you're going to.

[Sean Carroll]

Go read your paper.

[Sam Cedar]

No, Sean.

[Eric Weinstein]

How dare you cast shade and aspersions of the kind that I wouldn't seek to cast on you, but I will now. Okay, I'm not seeking your favor, nor do I need to seek your approval. As you know, you failed to gain tenure at the University of Chicago. You're not highly regarded in the field. And again, I'm only returning the shade in which you just yourself cast. I wouldn't have done this otherwise. You then spent time as a non tenured faculty at Caltech and you only gained tenure in a non standard professorship. You're not a leading person in the field. My belief structure about this is that you imagine that I'm coming to you saying, oh, Sean Carroll, tell me which graph I should do so that I can please you. As you know, because you've read the paper, what you said about Lagrangians is false. What you said about predictions is false. My concern is what you did is that you seized upon something where people have built on my ideas since 1994. The equations that Natty Seiberg and Ed Whitten introduced that took over the world were called the insufficiently nonlinear equations when I was at Harvard in 1987 and introduced them. The question why appear as an entertainer rather than as a physicist? First of all, neither you nor I are trained as physicists. Sean, you're actually trained as an astronomer. What you have in this situation is that you and I are both interloping in a field that is not the one to which we trained. That doesn't bother me about what you're doing. I've enjoyed some of your papers. I've thought very poorly of others. You have a wide range of interests. I think you're very creative. Your intellectually insulting aspect reminds me of you as the Marie Antoinette of theoretical physics influencers. I'm not here to please you. You know that there are tables in the document that you're reading that have plenty of predictions. You know that it solves plenty of problems. What you are doing is creating an environment of fear where every university worries, what does it mean to talk to this person? And what I would say to you is you are commenting on the effect that you are in fact inducing. You in a small cadre of people are like intellectual border collies of physical sciences, casting shade dispersions on those who are succeeding where the quantum gravity, string theoretic and M theoretic programs are failing.

[Sam Cedar]

Sean.

[Sean Carroll]

Look, I mean, I didn't say anything about Eric as a person, his history, or anything like that. I said things about the paper. Everything he says about me is like 90% true. As many things he says. The paper is not giving us any reason to think that this approach is promising. There is no quantum mechanics in the paper. There is no attempt at showing that this solves any of the known problems of quantum gravity. Again, it's just not just about Eric. It's about anyone. If you want to make an impact on the physics research community, you have to give them a reason to think that what you do is promising.

[Eric Weinstein]

Sean, you have a serious problem with dark energy that you're developing. And it's going to go right through having being a problem with lambda CDM to eventually being a problem with the Einstein field equations themselves, perched as they are atop the space of metrics as a completely inadequate space of field.

[Sam Cedar]

Definitely. I'm going to. I'm going to try I improve my credibility by saying these things now. Now, honestly, to me, I mean, it Sounds like he puts those things. It sounds impressive. He certainly knows the name of these different things, and he has stacked them on top of each other.

[Co-host or Producer]

He's avoiding the thing. There's a guy named Timothy Nguyen who back in 2021, pointed us out about geometric unity where there's a whole sort of like, part of the paper where it's like, well, there's this thing called the Shyab operator that makes this. This complexity understandable to physics. People who study physics. I don't know what that is anymore. I lost my notes to that. So that's literally in the paper.

[Sam Cedar]

Like, I don't.

[Co-host or Producer]

I lost my notes to what this. Com. This function is. And that's what he points out. Like, there's a paper here by Timothy Nguyen. It's titled People can Read it as PDF that sort of originally Explore this A response to Geometric Unity by Timothy Nguyen. People should read that. What the Sean Carroll here is saying is pretty much what any physics person that reads this paper.

[Sam Cedar]

That's a paper written like somebody who's not addressing. I mean, in any. In any academic field, you have a construction of the way that ideas are presented so that there can be some type of, like, unified way of assessing ideas. Eric's too much of a free thinker to be constrained by such things. It seems. Like, where does it listen? Just a little bit more. We got a little bit more here.

[Eric Weinstein]

Top the space of metrics as a completely inadequate space of field content. What you've just said and what the aspersion that you have just said, Cash cast. You are simply not qualified to say what you have said is that I have given no reason. Let me imagine that that paper, which was a draft rush to get to an April 1 date, remains in a world where Sam Altman and Elon Musk continue to compete for better and better AIs. What would you say if at some point those AIs then got to that paper and said, holy cow, that is exactly what we've been missing. This thing solves all sorts of problems. And the problem that we have is that a group of influencers with a penchant for being. And this is becoming one of my least favorite words, although I didn't have any negative association until recently. Debunkers.

[Co-host or Producer]

So what if AI says you're wrong in the future? Is Eric's rejoinder.

[Sam Cedar]

I mean, that is. I mean, if AI says you're wrong in the future, you're in trouble. Trouble, buddy.

[Co-host or Producer]

It'd be nice if AI came around and said I actually should Be in the NBA. I should be playing two guard.

[Sam Cedar]

AI in the future will be telling me that this should be the six time award winning majority report. Ladies and gentlemen, Vox populi Road. Wait. He published this paper on April Fool's day and this carrier rush. Oh my God.

[Co-host or Producer]

This is from that Timothy Nguyen paper. Unfortunately, the details for this unification, as far as the authors can tell, are hardly provided and thus the central insights of the theory are not possible to verify. Our conclusion is that even supposing the previous second concerns could be addressed. The volume of missing or inexplicit computations renders a formulation of geometric unity largely incomplete.

[Sam Cedar]

I will say this. I have no doubt that Eric is light years and perhaps that's the wrong analogy. More advanced in physics than I am for sure. So I only suggest this analogy as a way of. When I was like in. I don't know, maybe I think it was. I can't remember. Maybe it was like a freshman year of college and had a. An assignment. I can't even remember. It was in philosophy then in high school. I don't think that I was aware of what philosophy was. We didn't have that authority. And I basically was supposed to write about. I don't know what it was. The, you know, the pragmatists versus. I don't. I don't know what it was. But I decided instead I'm going to write my own philosophy. The assignment and the teacher just put at the end, the professor at the end of. It was like, this was interesting, but this was not what. What we're looking for.

[Co-host or Producer]

You're like, how dare you?

[Sam Cedar]

Yeah, how dare. How dare you. You clearly don't know you're part of these education influencers. Someone's trying to disk me out of this. Do you not realize, like, oh, I'm sorry, I need to compare and contrast two different of your philosophies because you can't handle the truth. You can't handle the true philosophy. My. Which is undoubtedly like using like when one group of kids show up at the parking lot with bush beer and the other group of kids have Genesee and a fight breaks out. What can we learn from this?

[Co-host or Producer]

Oh man, I have the paper here. It's worse than you think.

[Sam Cedar]

Oh my God.

[Co-host or Producer]

That was a real treat.

[Sam Cedar]

That was a real treat. That was pretty impressive. Well, we're not going to get to the other part. We got to read some IMs and get out of here. That was fantastic.

[Co-host or Producer]

Maybe have Sean on. I watch the whole thing again.

[Sam Cedar]

Is there a place where we can send like an email to Eric and ask him to do more of those debates, just like.

[Co-host or Producer]

Eric versus Science Communicators. I would subscribe monthly.

[Sam Cedar]

Yesterday I was in Fort Lauderdale, Florida for less than 24 hours. Stayed at a very corporate hotel. Not particularly fancy, but I did have a nice pasta dinner at the bar as I tried to watch the Celtics heat. And apparently they were blocked from there.

[Co-host or Producer]

Blackout restrictions.

[Sam Cedar]

Ridiculous. Not a suburb. So I went on there, and on the plane ride down, I had watched a video that Patrick Bet David and his crew of guys did on Elon Musk's presentation in Wisconsin. Now this was. They did this video before Elon Musk became, you know, it became clear that Elon Musk. Musk was literally like radioactive. And the video was Elon Musk and his buddy going over all of these Social Security numbers. And so the first thing I want to try and do on the Patrick Bet David show was to bring this up and talk about it. But what was fascinating is how quickly they wanted to get away from this. So here is this first clip of that. I watched the video of you guys on the plane down of when Elon Musk was in Wisconsin blowing up his whole brand, essentially. And he was on stage with a guy named Garcias. Do you guys remember this video?

[Rob]

Of course.

[Sam Cedar]

Yeah.

[Adam]

Okay.

[Sam Cedar]

It was like two days ago.

[Rob]

Yes. The Social Security numbers spiking in the last four years.

[Sam Cedar]

The Social Security 2.2 million new non.

[Rob]

Citizen Social Security numbers.

[Emma Viglin]

Yes.

[Sam Cedar]

And the amount of misinformation from every single person, all of you was astonishing to me. What was it? What was the misinformation? I mean. Well, I almost feel like we should go through the whole video.

[Rob]

This is coming from a socialist.

[Sam Cedar]

No, no, no.

[Co-host or Producer]

Credibility.

[Sam Cedar]

Socialist system that has never worked.

[Rob]

Go for it.

[Sam Cedar]

First off. Yeah. You seem to not understand that these were not undocumented immigrants who were getting these Social Security numbers. They are non citizens. Now. When you came to this country.

[Rob]

Yeah.

[Sam Cedar]

You were an immigrant. Your parents came legally. Every single one of those people who got those Social Security numbers are here legally. They're not citizens, just like you weren't when you first came to this country.

[Sean Carroll]

Yeah.

[Sam Cedar]

You get a green card. Your parents get a green card. They go through a process.

[Tom]

Yeah.

[Sam Cedar]

All of those people. And to understand they got their. They got their Social Security card.

[Rob]

I really want to see your point.

[Sam Cedar]

Well, the point is you referred to them as undocumented and illegal. You did.

[Rob]

I said non citizen. Excuse me, don't say everyone here. I said non citizen. Correct.

[Sam Cedar]

I can't remember which one of you got it wrong. I think you just be, you're thinking, but we can play the video and go through it.

[Sean Carroll]

But I'm still trying to get to the point.

[Sam Cedar]

I just want to make. Well, the point is they're not on, they're not illegal, they're not undocumented. They're all legal. Right? Okay. That went on like this. They kept like, you know, a bad. What's the point? So because they wouldn't let me go through it, we're going to go through this video so they can see. And it is true that Patrick bet David never said that they were illegal, but at least two other guys on the, on the panel did. And Patrick, Ben, David never corrected them. It's all like this mysterious thing. And in fact the guy on stage with Elon Musk, who himself was also an immigrant, said this guy, it started from like 55 seconds in this. This. Yeah, right there, right there. 40. 40. Yeah. Just before this guy says this. And we found this by accident. And this isn't political, by the way. My parents, immigrants, yeah. This country's been great to us. My brother and sister all born in Spain. I'm pro legal immigration. This is not, this is not political. This is not political. This is about America and the future of America. Posit he's going to show A chart of 2 million-plus Social Security numbers given out under a program called the EBE that is enumeration providing a Social Security number beyond entry after they have entered. They are all legal. This is a program that was started under President Donald Trump in 2017. It is a coordination between the Social Security administration and Homeland Security to give Social Security cards to people who are in this country legally. Maybe they have a green card, maybe they have temporary protected status, etc. Those numbers are definitely higher in 2024 because you had a lot of people on temporary protected status from Haiti because of all the unrest there, from Ukraine, from Afghanistan. We had a big surge. And none of the, I should say all of these people are legal. Some percentage of them may ultimately become citizens. But the Social Security card they get literally says on the card, you cannot use this to vote. And what happens is these people pay in to Social Security and most of them will never get payouts because you need to be an American citizen to get payouts. Now the ones that ultimately become citizens as opposed to going back home will get Social Security, but the most of them don't. So we have undocumented immigrants in this country pay about $22 billion into the Social Security fund. These folks several billion dollars that they will never get payouts from. So just listen to this. From this. And with that, in, with that knowledge, and there are a lot of good people in the system that pointed us in this direction. I want to, I want to honor them. Right now. They're working the government today who took risk to show us these numbers and tell us what's going on.

[Rob]

Pause it right there. Okay, so can you zoom in? So do you know what this is if you, if you're watching this? So this is new non citizen Social Security numbers issued. The furthest one to the left is 2021. That's Biden's first year. Okay, is there a way to see what that number is?

[Sam Cedar]

I can read it. I can't zoom in because it's a video, but it's 270,425. That's first year. To be clear, they're not showing you 2016. I mean 2017, 2018, 2019, because they don't want you to know that this program started under, under Trump. Also to be clear, you'll notice that in 2025 they're at a little bit less than half of what's in 2024. Donald Trump has been president for most of 2025, and they already got half in the first two or three months. That's because the program is actually working. The program is taking in. Now there's no doubt there was more immigrants let in in 2024 again because of all these different. But the program is getting them into the system, having to pay taxes and not getting any of those Social Security benefits. But go ahead.

[Rob]

I can give it out. Social securities. Second, it looks like 590, if I'm not mistaken. Third year looks like 964. And fourth year is over 2 million. But is it 2,095,000?

[Sam Cedar]

Yeah, 2,095,247.

[Rob]

And can you, can you do me a favor and research? And then this year in the first few months, which means this is. Is that really 960 in the first few months?

[Sam Cedar]

900. 600.

[Rob]

That is wild to be thinking about. Rob, what, what is the year that we've given out to the most Social Security numbers out to non u. S. Citizens. Can we just kind of see. So 2. 2.1 million. That means out of 340 million people living here, 1% of Social Security cards were given away just last year in 2024 to people that aren't supposed to be here.

[Sam Cedar]

Wait a second. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Whoa. Aren't supposed to be here.

[Co-host or Producer]

I find it very interesting.

[Sam Cedar]

I didn't pick. That's the first lie. So now watch if Patrick bet David corrects him. They are supposed to be here. They are here and they are put into the system and they're paying taxes and they're getting no benefits out good.

[Sean Carroll]

To people that aren't supposed to be here.

[Rob]

They're not. These are not. What is the most.

[Sam Cedar]

What's the most positive? You see how he said these are not. These are not. And you if he knows because he is one, he came to this country from Iran. His family, I think were refugees. He probably came in under if not the exact same program that these folks from Afghanistan, these folks from Ukraine, these folks from Haiti are something that is similar in 1980. He knows this. Just think about like what has to be going on in your head.

[Co-host or Producer]

That's why he knew when you brought it up on the show that he didn't himself say it exactly.

[Sam Cedar]

He remembered that because he was walking a line. I'm going to let these guys say it. That's the way I do it. Go ahead.

[Rob]

One million. That means out of 340 million people living here, 1% of Social Security cards were given away just last year in 2024 to people that aren't supposed to be here. They're not. These are not. What is the most? What's the most? What's the most? What's the most? All right, now he's Social Security numbers in a year to non citizens. What Was that? Over 2 million. So the record is in 2024. Over 2 million.

[Co-host or Producer]

Wow.

[Rob]

That is absolutely insane. So now very basic. Why did this happen? What percentage of them do you think going to be voting Republican? What percentage of them are thinking people voting on the left?

[Sam Cedar]

Oh, positive. Listen, I am not able to see into the future, but I will tell you what percentage of those people will vote Republican and vote Democrat. 0%. Because on their Social Security card that they received, it literally says the words this card is not eligible for voting purposes. They, they did. I mean obviously you can see they don't, they don't do any research. They're just willing to lie about this stuff. Go ahead.

[Rob]

It is. What was the motive, Tom? Lots of questions. Your thoughts on this?

[Tom]

Well, my thoughts on this is obviously first of all, I really appreciate this guy saying hey, I'm in favor of legal immigration and thanking the people that were working in the SSA Social Security Administration who cooperated with them. And.

[Sam Cedar]

This guy is supposed to. This guy is supposedly like their policy expert, they always defer to him and his big commentary on this, which he has no idea what policy is. He has no idea. It's the eb. The thing that he really appreciates about it is that the guy Garcias was nice to the people at Social Security Administration who obviously either told him, either told him them the wrong information or told them, you know, how to present it as if this is nefarious. That's the policy guy's response. But let's see, does he imply that these are undocumented people? Go ahead.

[Tom]

First of all, I really appreciate this guy saying, hey, I'm in favor of legal immigration. He's polite and thanking the people that were working in the SSA Social Security Administration who cooperated with them and said, hey, you're here looking for waste and fraud. You need to see this. So that means that there are people in the Social Security Administration who are realizing what was happening. And what do I think about this? I think the administration in power at the time was a Biden administration and the support of Schumer and Pelosi were very, very liberal on this issue. They were issuing Social Security numbers to noncitizens. They were helping people who got here to stay here and work here legally.

[Sam Cedar]

Okay, right there. Boom. Right there. No, no, no, no. They were not helping people who got here to stay here and work illegally. Incorrect. Incorrect. Perfectly legal. Now, of course, he doesn't like the 900,000 in this year. In two months, at this rate, it could be a much bigger number, but they are legal. These people are doing exactly what these people supposedly purport to want, which is you need to be legal and they're paying their taxes and they're not going to get their Social Security benefits unless they end up being citizens, which is also supposedly what they want. Continue on. It's just the whole segment. It's a 16 minute video. We're not going to go through the whole thing, but we can't even get through the first three minutes without all, all of them lying about this.

[Tom]

Were issuing Social Security numbers to non citizens. They were helping people who got here to stay here and work here legally. And by the way, Vinnie, I'll give you something here. Let me ask you a question. So every state in the nation, you have to be a citizen and you have to have a Social Security number to get a real estate license or an insurance. Insurance license. And Pat would know something about that. He founded that vision and built one of the largest insurance distribution companies in history. And guess what? We would go to the states and say, well, all the person has is an itin, which is a temporary number. Sorry, can't be an agent if he has Social Security number. And then they lied to us about citizenship. Guess what? The state of California, state of Texas wouldn't know you. Now you're. Now you've got this. So they're giving Social Security numbers out to people, I believe, knowing full well that they're helping them hide in plain sight as illegals.

[Sam Cedar]

Because there you lied again about it. A job.

[Tom]

And they. And they say, do you have a Social Security card? Yes, I do. I'll show you my Social Security card. My number right here.

[Sam Cedar]

And you fill out a.

[Tom]

What's it called, an i9 with. Is that. I think that's the form that an employee has to fill out to say that they're a citizen. An i9. And so this is the previous administration giving Social Security numbers out so people can hide in plain sight who are actually not citizens.

[Sam Cedar]

And the main goal was for what, Tom? To change the voting block.

[Tom]

Yeah, there it goes. You fill that out and you have to show something. So here's my Social Security number.

[Sam Cedar]

Yes, he found out that, yes, you have to fill out an i9, but everything else they're talking about is a complete fabrication. And Vimy is going to say that they're doing this to change the electorate again. They cannot vote. Just like Patrick Beck, David's parents, when they first got here and they just had a green card or they had a visa or they were here under a. Maybe there was a specific law about Iranian refugees. I think it was in the late 80s that he came could have been. Theoretically, they could not vote until they became citizens. And he knows it. He knows it. He knows that every dollar that he has made, aside from there being maybe lax regulation about certain practices, is a function of him being able to come into this country, have his parents get a visa, and he is targeting all of those other people, letting the people to the left and to the right of him literally lie about these people and demonize them.

[Co-host or Producer]

It was just three months ago that Patrick bet David had the whole H1B kerfuffle where he took Elon and Trump's side on that. And I would just encourage any of PBD's listeners to look up do H1 can H1B visa holders get SSNs, and.

[Sam Cedar]

You'Ll find, in fact they 100% get it through the EB program.

[Co-host or Producer]

Yep.

[Sam Cedar]

Good angle was for what Tom? He. To change the voting block.

[Tom]

Yeah, there it is you fill that out and you have to show something. So here's my Social Security number. Here's my driver's license.

[Sean Carroll]

Yeah.

[Tom]

And guess what?

[Rob]

I just found it. I found a year with, with the most given.

[Sean Carroll]

Rob.

[Rob]

So more than 37 million Social Security numbers had been issued by the end of 1937. That's a total had been given. In the next dozen years. The number varied with the number of new entrants into covered employment. It reached at a peak of 7.6 million given in 1942, but dropped to 2.7 million post war period, 46 through 50.

[Tom]

Okay, but wasn't the first year the starting point? Because there's only like 90 million Americans.

[Rob]

But to hear me out, this continues then the highest number of Social Security numbers issued in a single year was 9.1 million in 1990. Here's a more detailed breakdown. Thank you for social. Rob, do me a favor, type this in in Google and you'll see exactly what I'm looking at.

[Sam Cedar]

Now that is why I kept saying Google it. Because I found out that that's the way they do their research in real time. Great. And I told them on the show over and over again, google it. Okay, go forward a little bit because the other dude who sits on his right, I can't remember what that other guy's name is. Okay, so here we go. This is Tom, guys is awesome because he pretends like he's the. He's the wonk. The wonk. And he never has anything to say.

[Tom]

I believe, look this up. I believe the Family Support act was if you were claiming dependence on your tax return, they had to have a Social Security number. And sometimes people wouldn't get Social Security numbers for their kids until they were 6, 16 and going to get a job.

[Sam Cedar]

That's true.

[Tom]

I think that 15 million in two years was so that people could.

[Sam Cedar]

I guess the idea is that they thought the angle and this like Patrick Bet David I think realized very quickly, like, wait a second, these are not illegals. They're non citizens. I'm going to let these guys run with the whole conspiracy theories associated with it. But I need to come up with an angle and the angle I'll come up with. And because of course he had no idea about any of this before he ran is Biden allowed much more immigrants in that year than in other years. They're also a little bit hampered by the fact that under Trump that number is half after three months that it was in all of 2024. So they're flying blind. Here. But he is going to, he is going to like hang on to this like number of immigrants. Like Biden just let in a bunch of immigrants. So it's just anti immigrant sentiment of which Patrick McDavid was not born in this country.

[Co-host or Producer]

Yeah, when they say illegal, they mean foreigner.

[Sam Cedar]

Go ahead.

[Tom]

Social Security number on their tax return. Taxes to identify a dependent.

[Rob]

Okay, so then the title here is what New non citizen Social Security numbers issued New non citizen. What is the most we've done for new non citizens? I'm really curious at this point. Most Social Security.

[Sam Cedar]

Look it up before the show given.

[Rob]

To non US Citizens.

[Co-host or Producer]

Edit this out of the clip.

[Rob]

Are you able to find it? Do you see any of it?

[Sam Cedar]

It keeps coming back to 2024 with.

[Rob]

Yeah, you keep seeing that. Me too. I keep seeing the same thing as well.

[Sam Cedar]

Guys, hey back.

[Rob]

Can you also look, maybe you find something that we're not seeing. Adam, what are your thoughts on this?

[Tom]

So.

[Co-host or Producer]

Get off your phone.

[Sam Cedar]

Adam, the.

[Adam]

I'm doing the math here. That's what I'm sort of doing right now. So we talked about last week, this gold card.

[Rob]

Adam, have some water?

[Adam]

No, I was doing math in the middle of it. But we talked about the gold card last week.

[Sam Cedar]

Yeah, they do. Incidentally, when they don't know what they're talking about, they immediately pivot to something that they do know about. So you're talking about Social Security numbers from immigrants. And let's see. I'm doing the math here. Oh, Trump. Trump is doing also something that has to do with immigrants, where you can buy citizenship. Okay, that's what I'm going to go with. Go ahead.

[Rob]

Some water.

[Adam]

No, I was doing math in the middle of it. But we talked about the gold card last week.

[Naomi Klein]

Yeah.

[Adam]

People are paying $5 million to get access to America. $5 million. How many people that he said that he did this? Like a thousand people already. They're trying to raise billions of dollars of potentially trillion dollars. Why would you, why would you pay. Just come in illegally, go through this whatever nonsensical waste, fraud and abuse process.

[Sam Cedar]

Okay, let's be clear. They're not coming in illegally. Again, these are for non citizens. The reason why they say non citizens is because they are here legally. They're just not citizens. And the process, the waste and fraud process he's talking about is literally compel them to pay taxes and knowing that they will unlikely even receive the benefits from that.

[Adam]

I'm just part of America. So it just seems like the people who are doing things right are put you know, are not. Not prioritize. People who are skipping the line, not going through the door, are just skipping the line and able to cheat the system.

[Sam Cedar]

So do you know what happens? These people are literally going through the system. They are part of the system. They are so systematized. They have a number and that's sort.

[Co-host or Producer]

Of the hallmark of being in the system.

[Sam Cedar]

Literally are in you the number. They're so in the system they have like a multi digit, like further into the system. Unless we were to physically shove each legal immigrant into a computer. Go ahead.

[Adam]

Skipping the line and able to cheat the system. So do you know what happened this weekend in. In the uk? Did you hear what they hosted? So this past week in the uk, the uk they hosted the summit to end illegal immigration. It was called the organized Immigration Crime Summit put on by Prime Minister of the UK Kira Summer. 40 countries participated. $33 million is what they're putting towards doing what? Prosecuting smugglers who are basically helping to smuggle people into the UK and into Europe. And it's not. Not the countries that you would suspect to be there. Obviously the US was there, France was there, but Vietnam was there. Why is Vietnam there? Iraq was there. Because this illegal immigration or mass migration is not just an American thing. It's not just a UK thing. It's happening all over the world. Essentially people from poor countries, authoritarian countries are like, what the hell am I doing here? And they're going to cross the border illegally. The rich people are going to be okay.

[Sam Cedar]

Oh, sorry, that I just need to use illegal again. I don't know if we need to go through this. Although it's pretty funny. There's another eight minutes on this and it's basically six minutes and they're just basically telling us. So when you see in the PBD thing, when I start to bring this up why all four of them start to lose their minds and start. To me, it's because they must have known. They had no idea what they were talking about.

[Co-host or Producer]

Yeah, they didn't know. They're showing their ass and then they panicked. It's a good point that he brings up at the end there that it's actually not just a conspiracy against the west, that there are displaced people.

[Sam Cedar]

It's. Right. And also that they're living in places that are authoritarian and bad regimes. Like understanding that the dynamic of immigration is far more often about where they are being unlivable. For instance, let's say you kept cooing their government over the course of 100.

[Co-host or Producer]

Years destroyed their Oil industry.

[Sam Cedar]

You destroyed their oil industry. You wrecked their economy.

[Co-host or Producer]

You.

[Sam Cedar]

You shipped to people down there and, like, created gangs, essentially. You. You created a market for illicit drugs that could destabilize countries, and then people want to leave. I mean, that's basically what we're looking at. Fascinating.

[Co-host or Producer]

I'm happy PBD is a citizen. Be nice if he could extend that grace to other people.

[Sam Cedar]

It's just, I. It is so hard for me to understand the mentality, and I should say, like, you know, one of the things that I came to understand when I was down there is that the show is a loss leader, more or less. I mean, I don't know, maybe it. Maybe it breaks even. Maybe they make money on the show. Although you look at the numbers, the numbers are really good. But, you know, they flew me down. That cost money. They put me up at a hotel that costs money. I assume they do this with other guests. They probably treat them even better. And they got four people sitting in there. They got a studio. That's not the old studio. That's not the bank they used to be in. They moved the whole studio. Studio into, like, an airport hangar.

[Co-host or Producer]

Wait, that's a different studio than the one you were in?

[Sam Cedar]

Yes. They took all of those things and dropped it in there.

[Rob]

Weird.

[Sam Cedar]

And they bought another building. And the other building is a big business building that houses Patrick Beck, David's newest business. He sold the php. I can't remember what that stands for, but that was a business where they would sell insurance, but they would also really drive their revenue through membership. Like you become a member and a salesman at the same time. There's some great videos about it, actually, that break it down. But he sold that and he started another business. And I was told by somebody in the building that he's got 50 business consultants working for him as part of a business consultant business. And that. I'll tell you, that building was a lot bigger than this one. And so that dynamic is. The show is like a way of getting his name out there and establishing his bona fides. And it's on a private airport. I imagine he maybe has a private plane there. I don't know. But I just don't understand how you can be an immigrant yourself. Have. You know, I think he has, like, a $25 million house. I'm not sure, but a very. You know, I saw a picture of it from some article. I don't know if it's the same place. He drove a Porsche 911 Carrera with, like. I mean, he's living the life. All because as an immigrant he and his family, his parents were allowed to come into this country under some form of visa. Maybe it was a refugee thing. I think he was in like a refugee camp, I think at one point, I'm not sure. And he was allowed to come into this country and he wants to like not just shut the door behind him, but demonize these people. And these are all legal immigrants. Every single person he was referencing in that segment are legal non citizens in this country.

[Co-host or Producer]

What do you think 1979 Vinnie and Adam would have said about refugees from Iran?

[Sam Cedar]

Oh my gosh. I mean they're younger than me, significantly younger than me as my understanding. But I remember 1979 in this country that was 14. And if you were Iranian or Sikh or frankly, you know, like, like you were nervous, you were nervous. I mean really amazing. And just, I just don't understand the mentality of somebody like that. How can you sit there and it's really, I think it's like for them it's just capitalism. We're just making money here and we'll make it any way we can and that's it. But it still just is hard for me to, to like wrap my head around it. All right, should we play this one more clip? Just because the picture of Judge Janine, you've seen Howard Lutnick, is that his name? Howard Lutnick, say his 97 year old mother in law who lives in his mansion probably literally has 24, 7 care unrelated to Howard. Like I mean, like I'm saying someone he hired would not complain if her Social Security check was monthly or if.

[Co-host or Producer]

She did, he would think she was a criminal.

[Sam Cedar]

Yes, you've heard Harris Faulkner, is that her name? Say we're at war. We're at war, Trade war that we started the entire world, the entire world. And therefore people are going to understand that if their 400 way, 401ks crash, they can't retire, you know, within a year or two or three or four or five from when they thought they could or they're going to retire with, you know, whatever 10% less than they thought they would. People will understand. It's called patriotism. Well, here's Judge Neen with a very similar take. It's amazing how these incredibly wealthy people are not so upset about their ability to retire enough.

[Judge Janine]

And this is what Donald Trump ran on and he's delivering. And you know what? I don't really care about my 401k today. You know what? Not that I can afford it. Not that it isn't important. Not that I'm not at a point in my life when I should be worried about my 401k, because I am. But this is what I believe. I believe in this man. And I believe that what we're seeing now with his bringing in a trillion dollars in business and manufacturing and companies moving back to the United States and seeing what we saw during COVID when we couldn't, we had all those supply chain problems we couldn't get at medicine in this country. Other countries were prioritizing themselves before they were sending stuff.

[Sam Cedar]

I should just say that fortunately for us, pharmaceuticals are exempt from these tariffs because about 40% of our pharmaceuticals are manufactured overseas. China, India, and 80% of them have ingredients from those countries. So this is not to build out any industry whatsoever that she is talking about in terms of supply lines. Now, to be fair, Biden did do that with the CHIPS Act. It was those chips, it was those that slowed up, like stuff for cars. And we saw it with computers. But this is not an industrial policy as we talked about with David Day. And if it was, you would see a whole host of other supports from the government. Not willy nilly, same tariffs on bananas as you get on dishwashers. We're not going to grow bananas in the US there's not going to be suddenly a huge rise in the banana industry in New England, for instance. Do it.

[Judge Janine]

Countries were prioritizing themselves before they were sending stuff to us. It's about time we recognize we've got to have manufacturing in this country and we need to bring them to the table. And Donald Trump is the only one who could do it because he's got the biggest consumer base in the world. He's not afraid of anybody.

[Sam Cedar]

He's bought.

[Judge Janine]

He's to the wall in terms of.

[Sam Cedar]

You know what I mean?

[Sean Carroll]

Say that again.

[Judge Janine]

Yeah, you know what I mean. And it the end, it's going to help the working class. And who's complaining? My last point.

[Sam Cedar]

Who's complaining?

[Judge Janine]

Wall Street. Too bad. He's helping the middle class. And finally, I think it's going to be over this summer.

[Sam Cedar]

All right, Dana, we have. Wait a second. Now, again, tariffs are a regressive tax. That means they hurt the working class more than anybody else. It's just that Wall street is sensitive to it because they know that we have a consumer based economy. And if you're going to create that type of inflation, it's going to hurt the stock market. Kowalski from Nebraska says, technically, Sam, we can grow bananas and coffee in Hawaii. It might be time for us to reach back to our colonies like the Philippines and start turning them into crop plantations. Fair, Fair. The mill rind. AI will fix the robots. Detective Dubois. Sam got valuetained so hard. Tim Pool's emotional support Beanie. As soon as Sam starts to make them look dumb, they resort to yelling over each other. It would be comical if it wasn't so sad. When they say they weren't supposed to be here, what they mean is, I don't want them here. Exactly.

[Co-host or Producer]

It's like chimpanzees, like, reacting to a new chimp being introduced into the cage, and they just start, yeah, jabbering spikeless.

[Sam Cedar]

The great and powerful Dr. Oz. John Miller. The turning down of the volume of the shouting red face was hilarious, especially after he says, I'm not yelling. It was pretty cool. The setup they had, they had, like, little panels where you could actually control each mic. 2, 3. In terms of the way that you were getting the mix in there. I don't know how that happened, but the problem was I didn't know, and they didn't know which number he was. And so I kept, like, turning myself down in my own ears. And so you'll see by the end of the like. Like, at one point, I'm wearing the headphones here.

[Co-host or Producer]

Is this too loud?

[Sam Cedar]

Because it was. He was too loud. I mean, aside from him yelling. Just his mic, for whatever reason, was cranked up online and he was sitting next to me, like, six inches away from me.

[Co-host or Producer]

His face was so red.

[Sam Cedar]

But the funny part is, is that, like, I sit down and he's, I think, like, considerably shorter than me, and I sit down like this, and he goes, do you want me to lower your chair? I'm like, no, I'm fine. So I don't know if they ever put us in two or three shot or something. Daniel from Virginia. It's called a mixer. No, it's not. It was a distro. It was like a mixer, but a distribution box as well, because they were sitting on everybody's.

[Co-host or Producer]

To have each of the mics independently adjustable is. Boggles my mind with complexity.

[Sam Cedar]

That means that they must have a mix minus that goes to the five of them, the five seats, or that somehow there's a mix minus in these boxes that are right here. There's a lot of money invested in that studio. And, you know, they may do a million views a day, maybe more, which is more than we do, but not that much more. And we don't fly in guests. We're going to Have Matt Dust in studio next week. He's the only person we allow in studio for whatever reason. Dummy leg. There are four dudes in Florida with broken ankles and busted backs from all the pivoting and goal post pushing they did yesterday. Well done, Sam. It's not easy to trying to explain progressive policies, reactionary rockheads like that. They really, I think, think I'm a communist. And then they were very fixated on who do you like in the presidential election. And I'm like, I, I really, that's.

[Co-host or Producer]

An I tuned in and they were like, I don't say somebody.

[Sam Cedar]

I, I, I, I don't, I don't, I mean, I said, you know, I think like I can tell you who I think is going to be running, but I need to see what their policies are. Come on. What's that about? Just about like how I decide who to vote for for president. Like what? Like I don't, I kept waiting for what the gotcha was. I'm like, I don't have a name.

[Co-host or Producer]

I think they wanted to say like you just say like AOC so they could just do their bash AOC package or something like that. But you said McGovern and they.

[Sam Cedar]

Yes. Who's your favorite politician? Well, I mean, you know, Jim McGovern from President. He would actually be pretty good.

[Co-host or Producer]

Can we Google Jim McGovern?

[Sam Cedar]

Well, he doesn't look pretty sexy.

[Co-host or Producer]

Google Jim McGovern. Woke Adam quick.

[Sam Cedar]

I wonder if that's the first and last time anybody's ever gonna say the name Jim McGovern on Patrick Bank Davis Show. I have not heard from Congressman McGovern for the thanks for the shout out on the PDB here.

[Co-host or Producer]

Shout out. Dixie Savage is on the weekend.

[Sam Cedar]

Hey, Sam, any opinion on Sean Fain and Giannis Varoufakis supporting these tariffs? I was surprised to hear that. I'm not terribly surprised. I mean, certainly from a car standpoint, this is going to be helpful to the car companies. And Trump has threatened the car companies and Ford came out with like they're going to do even a discount. And Thane's primary agenda is going to be to strengthen the UAW. In Varoufakis. I think broadly speaking. I mean, look, I am in favor of tariffs as part of a bigger industrial plant. We need much more of this from our government. But doing tariffs without the supports mechanisms doesn't do anything in doing tariffs in this way where it's just we're going to do it per country, not based upon an industry. Again, you know, like there's, there's probably a list of 100 or 200 or 500 or thousand products that make as little sense to produce or to try and build an industry in this country, you know, Allah, bananas, despite the fact that we could level Hawaii and just grow bananas there. And also to do it without any ramp up to say, like, you know, under the CHIPS act, there's this country company tsmc, they're from Taiwan, they came in to build semiconductor chips. They don't have the workers in Arizona to fill all these positions. They had to bring in like a thousand workers. And the idea is over time they're going to train, but they can't do that because they just don't have, have the workers yet who know how to work in these factories because these are, you know, high tech factories. So the idea that you can just do this overnight without any planning, without any government support. If Donald Trump came out and said like, we're just doing the, you know, tariffs on vehicles or let's say like solar panels. And we're also simultaneously passing legislation to retrain coal miners to assemble solar panels. And the job is going to be just as well paying and we're going to send them school and we're going to, you know, provide these support. And we're, we're, we're, we're giving, you know, an enterprise zone. You know, I'm just, we're going to give you subsidies to build it in West Virginia or into Pennsylvania, whatever it is. That would make some sense, broadly speaking, from an ideological perspective. I am all in favor of tearing down the fake free trade regime that we have. Because it's fake. It's not, it's not a free trade regime. It's, we don't allow labor to go across borders. We allow capital to, we, We allow empowerment from corporations over the sovereignty of various countries. I am also not in favor. So what Sean Fain says is really not that surprising to me.

[Co-host or Producer]

I'd also say, like, it's got, this whole thing with tariffs is kind of avoidance of the real issue with our competitiveness. Byd, the car company that you're going to hear more and more about because they're out competing us, it was given $2.1 billion in subsidies from the Chinese state two years ago.

[Sam Cedar]

Of course, of course we have to.

[Co-host or Producer]

Be spending, investing in things that matter for the next century.

[Sam Cedar]

And here's the problem is that the story these guys like to tell is that government has no role in this.

[Co-host or Producer]

Exactly.

[Sam Cedar]

And when they see industries outpace us because they've been supported by government. Because the fact of the matter is, and this is going to come as a shock to a lot of these people, the pursuit of profit is not. Sometimes it can be in the best interests of society, but not always. I don't know what the percentage breakdown is. I would say it's much less than I think we give it credit for. If you ever talk to somebody who's like, who does, like, VC work in the medical field, they have all these stories of these amazing medical devices or drugs, but they're just not profitable, so they don't invest in them. Number 13, do you think there's no possibility the military gets too concerned about Trump's behavior? Don't they swear to the Constitution? I mean, we'll see. I don't know. I'm not in favor of a military coup. I should just go on record saying that I'm against the military coup. I. But I think the, this reality show that we're going through is.

[Co-host or Producer]

I'd be more worried about corporations personally.

[Sam Cedar]

Tim Pool fan Sam, I think your PBD episode was even more painful to watch than your jubilee episode. You know, the funny thing is, is that, like, I'm going back to the airport, I'm in the car and I'm going. Like, there were four guys talking over me the whole time. And it never really occurred to me during the, the. That being in there, like, hey, wait a second, I should call this out. Like, it just sort of like that's what's going on in my head most of the time anyways. It just happened to be embodied. But I was like, I wonder what would happen if I invited Patrick McDavid on this show and had him sitting in this studio and we had to, like, walk him through stuff. Like, there is a big advantage. And frankly, like, when we have guests on. I try to, I try and do my best to be fair about it. There is a big advantage when you're asking all the questions. There's a bigger advantage if you have four people who are talking over the. The person you've asked the questions of when they try to respond to it. But even with that said, I feel like they should be embarrassed by what happened in that studio. Not just by their own behavior, but by how I encountered everything they had to say that was even remotely substantive. They got me on the. I couldn't pick a presidential candidate. Company townie. Waiting for the crash was so boring. So we just caused a crash. All right, five more of these. Vermont Ben, has trickle down economics ever worked for working class people? I've been hearing it my entire 33 years on this planet, but I keep getting caught in recessions and bailouts for corporations. No, correct. I walked them through that Kansas situation and they just had nothing to say. Davey Hill. Davey. Davey Hellbender. Did Patrick's dad work for the Shah? I don't know. I wouldn't imagine that he's there until 1989. I think he was Christian. I think that was. That was part of it. Phineas. Herb, the next time Trump orders the military and protesters, does someone say, no, I don't know. I don't know. The massive network audio most likely like Rednet or something. I don't know what that means.

[Co-host or Producer]

Look into it.

[Sam Cedar]

All right, two more official Penguin Rep. Rickets has the advantage. Ricketts is popular with independence in Nebraska. Advantage to Osborne is state. Republicans are sliding further right while people within the state are growing tired of the constant culture war. And the final IM of the week. Thames Darwin. Most important, to impose tariffs with no preparation for them while slashing the social safety net amounts to shock doctrine tactics. I suspect we're going to be talking more about that in the weeks and months to come. We'll see. I wasn't looking when I just got caught between the truth and life. Won't make me feel any better. Yeah, no.