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Home » Bernie Sanders on Joe Rogan Experience Podcast #2341 (Transcript)

Bernie Sanders on Joe Rogan Experience Podcast #2341 (Transcript)

Read the full transcript of senior United States senator Bernie Sanders’ interview on The Joe Rogan Experience Podcast #2341, (June 24, 2025).

The Joe Rogan Experience with Bernie Sanders

JOE ROGAN: Mr. Sanders, great to see you.

BERNIE SANDERS: Good to be with you, Joe.

JOE ROGAN: Great to be. You’ve got a bunch of notes.

BERNIE SANDERS: Not all that much.

JOE ROGAN: Have you prepared for this?

BERNIE SANDERS: I am well prepared.

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s a good time for you to be in here because the world’s gone haywire.

BERNIE SANDERS: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. What are your thoughts on this?

America’s Current Crisis

BERNIE SANDERS: 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.

JOE ROGAN: What specifically concerns you?

Wealth and Power Inequality

BERNIE SANDERS: I’ll tell you what concerns me. The issue of wealth and power. All right? I’m kind of old fashioned and I believe in democracy and I believe that everybody should have a good shot at living a decent life.

And what I worry about right now, and this is an issue, Joe, and it’s part of the problem that 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 sound bites, you know, but if you take a look at where we are as a nation today, this system is not working. It’s broken. It ain’t working for ordinary human beings.

So you have an America today where we have more income and wealth inequality than we’ve ever had in the history of this country. That’s just the fact you have one man, Mr. Musk, owning more wealth than the bottom 52% of American families. One man, 52% of the American families, you got the top 1% owning more wealth than the bottom 93%. You got CEOs, 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% 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 live 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 of housing in America, off the charts. Health care, 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? How do what schools do my kid go to? How, how do I buy decent food for my kids? My mother is ill. How do I afford prescription drugs for my mother? My car breaks down, you know, so you, you know, if you have money, no one thinks of it, your car breaks down, go to the mechanic, you got it fixed.

You know what, A lot of people don’t have 1000 bucks in the bank right now. So 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.

JOE ROGAN: That than past generations?

BERNIE SANDERS: It’s that we’ve always had rich and poor. No question about it. It’s worse now, Joe.

JOE ROGAN: What do you attribute that to?

Attacks on the Working Class

BERNIE SANDERS: 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 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. That means you work for me for 30 years. When you retire, you’re going to get X hundreds of dollars a week that’s long gone. Corporations have gotten rid of that. So you got something like half of all the workers in America have nothing in the bank when they face retirement.

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

Now, 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 got these companies that are owned by other companies that are owned by supernatural. You know, we got involved in my office, we used to be the chairman of the labor committee, Health, education, Labor.