Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2341 - Bernie Sanders
Uploaded: 2025-06-24T17:01:03.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2341 - Bernie Sanders' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-06-24. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2341 - Bernie Sanders' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-06-24. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2341 - Bernie Sanders

Mr. Sanders, great to see you.
Good to be with you, Joe.
Great to be with you. You've got a bunch of notes.
Not all that much.
Have you prepared for this?
I am all prepared.
Well, it's a good time for you to be in here because the world's gone haywire.
Yes.
Yeah. What are your thoughts on this?
I think I start off with, Joe, trying to take a deep breath and doing what is
not often done.
Where are we as a country today?
What's going well? What's not going well?
And I don't think we don't have that kind of basic discussion.
And to my mind, I think in America today, we are facing more serious crises
than we have in the modern history of our country.
This is a pivotal moment in American history.
And what happens now will depend, determine the lives of our kids and future
generations.
What specifically concerns you?
I'll tell you what concerns me.
The issue of wealth and power.
All right.
I'm kind of old fashioned and I believe in democracy.
And I believe that everybody should have a good shot at living a decent life.
And what I worry about right now, and this is an issue, Joe, and it's part of
the problem.
There's just ain't talked about very much.
And I applaud, by the way, you and the other podcasters who give people the
time to really seriously discuss things rather than seven second soundbites.
But if you take a look at where we are as a nation today, this system is not
working.
It's broken.
It ain't working for ordinary human beings.
So you have an America today where we have more income and wealth inequality
than we've ever had in the history of this country.
That's just a fact.
You have one man, Mr. Musk, owning more wealth than the bottom 52% of American
families.
One man, 52% of American families.
You got the top 1% owning more wealth than the bottom 93%.
You got CEOs of large corporations making 350 times what their workers make.
And meanwhile, in this richest country in the history of the world, working
class people are getting decimated.
Today, and again, we don't talk about it in Congress for reasons that I hope I
can get into.
We don't talk about it in the corporate media.
60%, 60% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.
Now, I grew up in a family.
I don't know your background, but I grew up in a family that lived paycheck to
paycheck.
And anyone who lives paycheck to paycheck understands that every single day is
a struggle.
You know, you got to figure out how you feed the kids, rents, cost the housing
in America off the charts, healthcare off the charts.
So right now, as we talk, there are people worrying.
My landlord, you know, is going to raise my rent by 20%.
What the hell do I do?
Where do I go?
What schools do my kid go to?
How do I buy decent food for my kids?
My mother is ill.
How to wipe forward prescription drugs for my mother.
My car breaks down.
You know, so you, you know, if you have money, no one thinks of it.
Your car breaks down.
Go to the mechanic, you got it fixed.
You know what?
A lot of people don't have a thousand bucks in the bank right now.
If you don't have a thousand bucks, your car breaks down.
How do you get to work?
If you don't get to work, you get fired.
If you get fired, your whole life is disrupted.
60% of American...
How much different is that than past generations?
It's the, we've always had rich and poor.
No question about it.
It's worse now, Joe.
What do you attribute that to?
I attribute it to decades-old attacks on the working class of this country.
I attribute it to horrific trade agreements, which have allowed corporate
America to throw
millions of workers out on the street and move to China, Mexico, and other low-wage
countries.
I attribute it to a corrupt political system in which billionaires have
significant control
over both political parties.
So that, for example, right now in Washington, the national minimum wage is $7.25
an hour.
So you've got millions of workers today, you know, making 10, 12, 13 bucks an
hour.
You tell me, how do people survive on 13 bucks an hour?
When we were kids, or at least when I was a kid, you work for a large company,
you have
something called a defined benefit pension plan.
You know, that means you work for me for 30 years.
When you retire, you're going to get X hundreds of dollars a week.
That's long gone.
Corporations have gotten rid of that.
So you've got something like half of older workers in America have nothing in
the bank
when they face retirement.
So I think to answer your question, I think you've got a rigged system
controlled economically
and politically by very, very wealthy and powerful people who could care less
for working families.
Now, I don't want to romanticize the old days because that would not be true.
But there used to be a kind of a culture.
If I was a boss and I ran a factory, I had a little bit of concern for you,
right?
You know, in general, I would say, I know your wife, how's your mom doing and
all that stuff.
That's gone.
You've got these companies that are owned by other companies that are owned by
super nationalists.
You know, we got involved in my office.
We used to be the chairman of the labor committee, health education laborers.
I got involved in a lot of stuff.
And when workers were on strike, we would call up and see what was going on,
see how we can help.
So we'd call up to the company and we'd say, you know, why are you cutting back
on health care for your workers?
Well, we don't make that decision.
It's owned by somebody else.
Call up somebody else.
Well, we're owned by somebody.
You know how it is.
It's just huge.
These huge conglomerates own the bloody world.
And these guys don't give a damn about the needs of working people.
So I would say that the economy becomes less and less personal.
I have no risk.
You're my worker.
I have no care about you because right now I'm owned by an international who
doesn't know that you exist.
And there's also a diffusion of responsibility.
Absolutely.
It's not even in your hands.
Exactly.
So the local boss might say, hey, listen, I'm really sorry, but I didn't have
any decision in here.
Right, right, right.
There's nothing I can do.
There's nothing I can do.
So I add all of that up and you have, and then just look at other things.
I mean, you tell me.
Tell me about the health care system.
Does anybody in America think this health care system is working?
Well, you could tell by the assassination, when the assassination of the United
Health Care guy, when that happened, there was people celebrating.
When is there ever someone gets assassinated on the streets of New York City
and people celebrate?
Right.
That's terrible.
That's terrible.
That's terrible.
But it does speak to how people feel about insurance companies.
Right.
Well, and I think rightly so, because it's not what you're paying for.
What you're paying for is you're hoping that you never get sick, but if you pay
your insurance, you will be covered.
What they're trying to do is make it as difficult as possible for you to get
money from them.
You got it.
That's the more money.
The more I can deny you, the more money I make.
Right.
And that's the bottom line.
And when you're dealing with these enormous corporations, like we're talking
about this diffusion of responsibility, the people that are doing it, it's like,
this is what I have to do.
This is my job.
They don't even think about it.
Right.
Exactly.
And this all started when?
Like, when?
So, Michael Moore had that brilliant documentary, Roger and Me.
Yeah.
I know Michael.
Michael's a good friend.
He's a great guy.
That documentary is fantastic.
And it shows the impact of a corporation taking all their factories, moving
them away like that with no warning, no recourse, nothing anybody can do, decimates
basically all of Detroit.
That's right.
People don't know this.
Yeah.
But if my memory is correct, Detroit used to be in the 50s.
Third richest city in the world.
You got it.
Yes.
Yeah.
We've talked about it multiple times.
It's disgusting.
And especially me as someone who loves American automobiles, I'm a big fan of
what Detroit made during that time.
And to see what happened to Detroit now, the last time I was in Detroit, it
actually seems to be picking up.
There's a lot of small businesses and a lot of artists and a lot of people that
are proud to, like Shinola, companies like that, proud to be in Detroit.
But there's just so many abandoned buildings.
It's insane.
You could buy a house there for 500 bucks.
It's really crazy.
Like giant factories where every window is smashed, all the pipes have been
torn out, and it's just this hulking monument.
And it's not just Detroit.
Right.
I mean, there are other communities, corporations say, hey.
That path is unsustainable, right?
I think so.
Yeah.
I mean, look, if we are, and again, it gets back to what we want as a nation,
but you had corporations saying, hey, back then, not now, I could pay workers
in China 25 cents an hour.
Why the hell do I want to hire you for what it was, and I'll never forget, Joe,
early on when I was elected to Congress, this was when we had the NAFTA
agreement.
I went to the Maquiladora area.
You know what that is?
No.
It's a special zone in northern Mexico, near the border, where the government
there, this is back decades ago, allowed American and other European
corporations to settle and got tax breaks there.
So it attracted all these corporations.
So I went there with a congressional delegation, and this is what I saw.
You saw these beautiful new factories.
Now, this is 25, 30 years ago.
And then we said, all right, I want to see where the workers live.
And I'll never forget this as long as I live.
Do you know those large cardboard boxes that refrigerators come into and stoves
us?
But that's where people were living.
They were living literally in cardboard boxes, making, I think, at that point,
now this is a long time ago, 25 cents an hour.
So workers in America were thrown out on the street, and people in Mexico
exploited in a horrible way, and these big, shiny new factories at the time.
So what you got, and I believe this strongly.
You asked me, you know, how does it happen?
Why does it happen?
I think, especially right now, and for many decades, you have the prevailing
religion of the oligarchs and the corporate world is greed.
That's all.
I want it all, and I don't give a shit if I have to step all over you, throw
you out on the street, take away your Social Security.
I want it, and to hell with you.
And that's why you end up with a situation in America where, you know, the top
1% now owns more wealth than the bottom, 93%, and millions of people struggle.
It's also a corporate culture of competitiveness, right?
So they're competing with all the other corporations, and you have to keep up,
and there's no way other than to increase your profits every quarter.
That's right.
That's right.
That is exactly.
You do the right thing by workers.
All right?
That's a perfect example.
So, you know, you've got Wall Street.
Here's a fact.
When we talk about it, it's not only income and wealth inequality that bothers
me.
It's concentration of ownership.
So right now in America, in virtually every sector of our economy, whether it's
agriculture, transportation, financial services, whatever, you've got a handful
of giant multinationals controlling that sector.
But here's another amazing fact.
Who do you think owns these corporations?
You know, you remember there was a day where somebody actually owned General
Motors or owned Ford.
They're now owned by Wall Street firms.
You've got three Wall Street investment firms.
BlackRock.
You're familiar with BlackRock.
VanGuard and Sage Street.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Check it out on Google.
They are combined, the three of them combined, are the major stockholders of 95%
of American corporations.
How's that?
That's not good.
That's power.
Right.
How did that start and what could have been done to stop that from happening?
Well, I think it's, again, it's greed.
These guys are smart.
They're hardworking.
They'r