This Past Weekend: #635 with Sen. Bernie Sanders (Transcript)

They broke down.

And I was just a couple years ago, not dissimilar for what’s going on in New York City right now in New Brunswick, New Jersey. These nurses went on strike. You know why they went on strike? Because they needed help to provide better patient care. It wasn’t even about money.

THEO VON: Right. They’re just saying, hey, I can’t even be a nurse. This is my calling in the world, and I can’t even do it to a decent potential.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Exactly.

THEO VON: And it’s tough enough. We talked last night, we talked last time about patients being stressed to the gills, not only dealing with their physical ailments, but having to deal with the stress of begging for insurance companies to support, just all of that. And now you’re going to put the nurses under the same stress.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Exactly. It’s pathetic. And I’m sure you know this. The CEOs there are these big, huge hospitals. One guy is making $26 million a year, another guy I think is making $16 million, other guy making $5 million. They’re bringing in all these traveling nurses, spending hundreds of millions of dollars rather than sitting down and negotiating a decent contract with these dedicated nurses. Well, they are. You got them up there.

THEO VON: Yep.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: And I’m grateful.

Naming the CEOs

THEO VON: I want to just mention these wonderful CEOs by name today, just so, because, look, it’s a time where we put a name with people who are making certain choices. And so we have Brendan Carr, that’s, I know, he’s over at Mount Sinai. Brian Donnelly. There he is. Look at that big smile. I’d be smiling, too if I just made $15 million this year.

That’s Philip O. Ozuah, who looks like a Guess Who character. And Stephen Corwin for Monopoly. I don’t know. That’s alleged. These are the CEOs current. And I think one is just leaving one of his posts. Who are who? These are the, these are who nurses are asking for help from. Is that right? And just to be clear, Bernie, what are the nurses asking for?

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: They’re asking for what they call safe patient, nurse-patient ratios. That means if you’re a nurse on duty and you have too many patients to take care of, you can’t do your job. A patient calls out, needs your help, you can’t get there. So they want more staffing to be able to provide the quality care that patients deserve.

THEO VON: And I know, in addition to that, I think they wanted health care benefits not to be cut.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Right, for themselves.

THEO VON: Which is pretty, if you think that nurses, nurses.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Pretty crazy, huh?

THEO VON: Can’t get health care. They can’t be sure that they’re going to have health care. They’re working with the sick. We can’t say, hey, we’re going to do our best to make sure you don’t get sick.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: That’s pretty crazy. And the other thing they’re worried about, and I hope we can discuss this a little bit, is AI and robotics. They raised that issue as well.

AI and Robotics in Healthcare

THEO VON: Have they really?

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Yeah. And there was a Dr. Oz, who’s head of CMS in Washington right now, was talking the other day. Let me get it straight. I think it was Alabama, rural Alabama. They’re weak on the number of obstetricians that they have. And he was proudly talking about how they have robots now who are providing examinations for pregnant women.

THEO VON: And who’s controlling those robots? It’s not some pervert at his house, huh?

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Well, but the point is, if you’re a patient, do you really want a robot examining you?

THEO VON: Right.

America’s Broken Healthcare System

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: So, I mean, I think all of this, Theo, adds up to the fact, and I’ll tell you, I’ve been all over the country, and wherever we go, I talk about this. Whether you’re conservative, you’re moderate, you’re progressive, you understand the health care system is broken.

Today, we are spending, this is insane. Do you know how much we spend per capita and everything else? Medicaid, Medicare, what you pay out of your own pocket. How much do we spend per person on healthcare in the United States of America? You know, they are wild and crazy. Guess.

THEO VON: Per year?

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: No. Per person. Per person. $15,000 per person. So a family of four spends theoretically $60,000.

THEO VON: Oh, wow.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: That is double what any other country on earth is spending. Got it.

THEO VON: Yeah.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: You would think that if we’re spending, if I buy a $100,000 car, you buy a $50,000 car, my car should be a little bit better than your car. Right. And yet, despite all of those expenditures, our system is worse than others. We’re the only major country not to guarantee health care to all people.

THEO VON: But it’s because there’s these kind of darker agreements between hospitals and insurance companies. Right. And the cost of drugs.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Yeah, it has to do, essentially, look, in this day and age, running a healthcare system is very difficult. Technology changes. It ain’t easy. I admit that. But what is the goal of a rational health care system? It is to say, first of all, to answer the fundamental question, is health care a human right? What do you think? Should everybody, regardless of income, get health care?

THEO VON: I believe that based on how much money our country has, I think it’s wrong not to provide that to people because we waste it in so many other ways.

Medicare for All

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Okay, good point. So the issue here is, why is the wealthiest nation on earth, the United States of America, the only major country not to guarantee health care to all people? Okay. That, to me, is a fundamental issue.

So today, despite spending so much money, 85 million Americans are uninsured or underinsured. And if Trump gets his way and throws another 15 million people off of Medicaid, raise that number to roughly 100 million. Okay. There are estimates out there that when you have that many people uninsured, no insurance and underinsured means high deductibles.

So if you got a high deductible, you may be insured. I’ve talked to people, I suspect you have. They have deductibles, $10,000, $15,000 a year. Right. So if you don’t have any money, what the hell, how do you go to the doctor?

THEO VON: Yeah, yeah.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: So you add all that together, people get sick, they can’t go to the doctor. Some 50,000 to 60,000 people die a year in America unnecessarily because they don’t get to a doctor on time. That is pretty insane.

So in my view, I push very hard to introduce the legislation, what we call Medicare for All, expanding Medicare to cover every man, woman and child without out-of-pocket expenses. We could do that without spending, to your point, not a nickel more than we’re currently spending.

THEO VON: Yeah. How can we get that move forward, though? Why does this just continue to be this thing? Why does it continue to feel like nobody really wants to take care of us?

Who the System Really Serves

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Oh, now you’re getting into another issue. All right, you want to go there?

THEO VON: I mean, yeah, I think we can go to a couple of these places.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: All right, let’s do it. All right, look, in one respect, the healthcare system is working extremely well. Not for ordinary people, not for you, not for me. It is working very well for the insurance companies who make zillions of dollars in profit, the drug companies who charge us the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs. And that’s the function of the current healthcare system.

THEO VON: Right.

Healthcare Systems and Corporate Profits

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Okay, so again, you know, running a healthcare system, whether it’s in Canada, Europe, wherever it is, it ain’t easy. And they all make mistakes, they all have problems. But if your goal is, if you and I sit down and say, okay, how do we provide healthcare to all people and how do we do it in a cost effective way? All right, will we come up with a perfect system? No, but that’s our goal.

THEO VON: Right?

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: But if we sit here and say, okay, how can we charge the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs and make $38 billion next year? Yeah. How can we deny people the insurance that they paid for? Right. The benefits that they pay for? That’s a whole other scam. And that’s the scam we’re working on.

It is an effort to make huge profits for the drug companies and the insurance companies. And that’s why we’ve got to end this broken system. And again, I will tell you, I’ve been all over this country, nobody or very few people think this healthcare system is working. We’ve got to expand Medicare over a four year period to cover every man, woman and child.

THEO VON: But is there a real way to get there?

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Yes, look, it’s the goal is, and then that takes us to another area. You know, you ask the question, why? Why are we perhaps the only country on earth not to guarantee healthcare to all people? Why the Canadian, you’re in Canada right now. I live 50 miles away from the border there. You get seriously ill, you’re in the hospital for a month. You know what the bill is when you come out? Zero.

THEO VON: Yeah.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Okay. And they spend half as much per person on healthcare.

THEO VON: And they have good posture too. You been over there?

Campaign Finance and Billionaire Influence

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Yeah, sure, of course. So the answer has a lot to do with who controls the United States and our corrupt campaign finance system. All right, so if I’m the insurance companies and if I’m the drug companies and you’re running around and you’re campaigning and say, I’m going to cut, as I do, we’re going to cut prescription drug costs in half. We’re going to guarantee healthcare to all people, what are you going to do?

You’re going to spend a whole lot of money on candidates to defeat me. Right. So you got a corrupt campaign finance system in which billionaires in both political parties, by the way, I think Republicans get funded more than Democrats. But both parties spend huge amounts of money. Elon Musk, the richest guy on earth, spent some $270 million to elect Donald Trump president.

So you know, Musk has his own agenda. He wants Trump president. Other billionaires have their agenda. That’s called a corrupt system. All right. What democracy, in my view, and you can argue with me if you want, is you and I. You’re running for office. You want to run against me. Good. What are your ideas? Take them to the people. People like your ideas better than me. You’re going to win. All right?

It’s not me going out raising money, billions and millions of dollars to defeat you, to lie about you, to put ugly 30 second ads on the air.

THEO VON: Right, right.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Okay. That’s what democracy is. A real debate on the issues.

THEO VON: Yeah.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: All right. Disagree with me. So what? Democracy, right. Yeah. Okay. But increasingly what the politics in America is about are super PACs, you know, where if you’re a billionaire, you can put, that’s what Musk does, hundreds of millions of dollars. And again, it’s not just Musk. Democratic billionaires do the same.

THEO VON: Oh, yeah, there’s the Koch brothers over the years. There’s the Adelsons, who, there’s all these different huge, just big pockets that are influencing things.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Absolutely, yeah. A multi billion. So when these guys control the political process, you’re not going to have a government that works for ordinary people. And it’s not just healthcare, it’s many, many other issues. So to my mind, by the way, when we talk about bringing about the necessary changes, this country needs our campaign finance reform and doing away with Citizens United, that terrible Supreme Court decision. Top of the list, Citizens United.

THEO VON: Bring that decision up.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Citizens United was the Supreme Court decision that said you have, you’re a billionaire. Okay, you got it. You have the freedom of speech, First Amendment to say anything you want about Bernie Sanders. You want to put ads on the air, you can spend zillions of dollars. Freedom of speech. And that’s what Citizens United said. And obviously that undermines democracy because it allows billionaires the right to buy elections.

THEO VON: And can we bring this back to a vote? Like, will Mike Johnson bring this back to a vote?

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: No, he likes Citizens United because it works very well for those guys. And I got to tell you, some Democrats like it too. But I think the American people, you go out and you talk to, again, people all across the political spectrum, they understand you’re not a democracy when billionaires buy elections.

Disconnection Between Politicians and Voters

THEO VON: Yeah, well, here’s the thing. It doesn’t even feel like either one of these parties works for anybody anymore. Like, if anything, in the past few years, it’s really started to feel like, oh, all these guys are working for somebody else and we’re just this other group of people down here.

Because you have, like there are politicians online that are yelling at voters for support about stuff. It’s like, we voted for you. Like you’re yell upwards, you know, like it just, I don’t know, it just, yeah, it feels like a total dead end now. It just feels like, it feels like most people just want to be elected now so they can make a profit somehow themselves. It almost feels like a business venture. If you want to be a part.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Of it, frame it in that way. I would, you know, frame it.

THEO VON: Feels like as a regular person or that. Sorry, that’s how it seems a lot of times.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Okay, okay. I would say it’s kind of cool to be a congressman and a senator.

THEO VON: Oh, that’s super cool.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Get your name in the paper, you get on nice shows like this one and all that stuff. And you have a certain amount of power. Yeah, I mean, that’s real. And you associate with the rich and the famous and that’s cool, I guess.

But you know, that speaks to where we are as a nation today. And here’s, I think, maybe the major point that I want to make. You’re living in the richest country in the history of the world, theoretically, at least, that should mean that all of our people have a decent standard of living. Right. We should not have people a few blocks from here sleeping out on the street. We should not have people unable to afford healthcare, kids unable to afford to go to college, people literally unable to feed their families.

And yet, in America today, and I know this is really an astounding fact, 60% of our people, Theo, live paycheck to paycheck. I grew up in a family. I don’t know your background, but I grew up in a family that lived paycheck to paycheck.

THEO VON: Oh, yeah. I knew exactly how much money we had, but no, I knew what we had left at the end of each week, and it was in Mom’s wallet, you know? Yeah.

Wealth Inequality in America

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: All right. And so the simple question that we have to ask ourselves is, how do we feel? And, you know, again, you can disagree with me. You’re living in a society today where we have more income and wealth inequality than we’ve ever had in the history of this country. All right, you got the top 1% doing phenomenally well, owning more wealth than the bottom 93%. You got one man, Mr. Musk, one man, owning more wealth than the bottom 52% of American households. What do you think?

THEO VON: Well, I think it’s tough. I think there’s two ways to look at it. Well, I think in a bigger scope, for me, you have, yes. You have these billionaires, you have these guys that have all of this wealth. It does feel unfair. They used to say, well, just because one person has more money doesn’t mean that other people have less money.

But I don’t, just visually, it doesn’t even start to seem like that’s the truth. Right. Optically, for me, it doesn’t seem like that’s the truth. Do I think there should be a cap on how much money people could have? I do think that there should be. To me, in my heart, it doesn’t feel like people need so much money and so much control.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: That’s the point. I think most people think and I believe, look, you go out and you’re doing it. I mean, you start a business, you’re making money. Right. Congratulations. We appreciate that. You make money. Great. Do you really need hundreds of billions of dollars?

THEO VON: No.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Really?

THEO VON: No.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: At that point, you know, these guys, whether it’s Zuckerberg or whether it’s Bezos. You know, they own their islands and their jet planes and their spaceships and all this crap bunkers. Right, exactly. All right, anyhow, so I don’t begrudge people. Come up with a great idea, work hard, make money, God bless you, but you don’t need billions and billions of dollars when people are struggling to put food on the table or afford healthcare. So that’s one of the issues that concerns me right now when I talk about fighting oligarchy. I was on a tour.

THEO VON: Oh, yeah, no, you had a tour with AOC. You guys, just, how many cities do you go to?

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: We have been, now, I was in New Jersey last night. It’s the 24th state that I’ve been in. I think we’ve done 35 events. Well over 300,000 people have come out. And, you know, and I got to tell you, I’ve been to conservative areas. People of this country are not happy about a situation in which so few people, I mean, really, a handful of people, have such enormous political and economic power. Yeah, okay. That’s not what America is supposed to be about. You got rich and you got poor, fine. But not so few having so much power over the economy and power of our political systems.

Billionaires, Job Creation, and Taxation

THEO VON: Well, here’s what I would think so. But I wonder if, I don’t know, like, we always say, let’s tax these people, right? That’s a term a lot of people use. We need to tax them more. And maybe so, right? But sometimes with billionaires, I at least look at billionaires as people that are creating, or more often than not, creating jobs, creating environments where other people have the ability to make money.

Like you have Larry Ellison. You have a lot of people that are ambitious. Amazon workers, people that work at Oracle, people that work in data. You have Elon Musk. You have a lot of people that work for Tesla or, you know, that might work for his Uber type company if he gets it going. But at least those people are creating jobs. A lot of them. Now, do they still deserve to have that much wealth or hold that much wealth? I don’t think so.

But then you also have, there’s this argument, like, let’s get them to pay taxes. But then you have things that happen, like in Minnesota, like with this Somalian fraud, right? Like, you have this young man who’s been going around, Nick Shirley, who’s going door to door, like, trick or treating about fraud kind of, right? And figuring it out, that almost is like, it’s like, why get people to pay taxes. Who even cares about paying taxes anymore if we’re just going to let them slip out of the bottom?

Fraud and Government Accountability

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: But the answer is fraud is disgusting. And especially to steal money from hungry kids. If you have a program to feed hungry kids, you steal that money. That is probably as bad as it gets. And I think way back in the early 20s, under Biden, they started an investigation. Those people should be severely punished. I don’t care if you’re Somali, if you’re green, you’re blue, whatever you are, right?

THEO VON: I’m using the term Somali problem because that’s kind of the term people are using.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: But anyhow, that should be punished. That’s disgusting behavior. But you know, understand, and I’m sure you do, fraud is not just in a child nutrition program in Minnesota. I, you know, deal with this a little bit. But we are spending a trillion dollars a year on the military, okay? There is not one major defense contractor that has not been charged with fraud. Fraud being, you know, providing fraud to the United States government.

Their CEOs make huge amounts of compensation. They cannot even undergo an independent audit. They’re the only government agencies, so they don’t even know what they own. I mean, it is so massive. But nobody, nobody, nobody, Republican, Democrat, Independent, nobody doubts that there’s massive fraud. There’s fraud all over the place, unfortunately, in this country. And we’ve got to do our best to eliminate that.

But at the end of the day, I mean, we’ve got to revitalize, in my view, we’ve got to revitalize our democracy. We’ve got to hold elected officials accountable. We’ve got to run cost effective, efficient government.

The State of American Politics

THEO VON: Having been in government in a long time, do you think that those things are actually possible or at a certain point are you like start to do? You lose. There’s hope. Because as a regular person, it feels like our political system works against us and it works for big business interests. And that’s not even up for debate anymore.

It feels like you’re lucky to find a couple people who seem semi human that work in politics who have some semblance of a connection. At least they will talk about things that they feel like they really want to do or will show by some of their actions. But otherwise it feels pretty hopeless. Does it feel like that to you?

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: More and more, yes and no. Again, what? I will give you some examples. You know, this is my own political point of view. You agree with me. You don’t, it’s okay. Right here in New York City, we’re sitting in New York right now. A year ago, there was a guy named Zoran Mamdani, who nobody had ever heard of, an assemblyman in New York. Nobody heard of him. He decided he wanted to run for mayor. He got. He was at 1% in the polls.

He was taking on the Democratic establishment. So who the hell do you think he was? You are taking on the Republican establishment, taking on the oligarchs of the city, people. Front page New York Times. We’re going to spend tens of millions of dollars to defeat this guy.

THEO VON: Yeah.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: You know what he did? Not only, I mean, he’s a brilliant guy himself and a very good politician, but he had 90,000 plus people in this city knocking on doors for him. So you ask me, am I optimistic? Can we bring about change? I would say New York City is a pretty good example of what happens when people come. And he said, you know what? I’m going to make this city work for working people, not just the billionaire class.

THEO VON: Amen.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: And he’s just been, you know, in office for three or four weeks. I think he’s doing great. But you ask me about my optimism when I see 90,000 people going out on the streets volunteering for this guy and he’s implementing. He was out. You know, we talked about being on the nurses picket line today. He was there with me standing with the nurses.

So, yeah, and I’ve seen this other great members, you know, media doesn’t do a great job, but you got dozens of young men and women in the House of Representatives, strong working class candidates, members of Congress. So yeah, I am in that sense, optimistic.

On the other hand, you know, Donald Trump worries me very, very much. You remember, it’s a funny story here. He was inaugurated just about a year ago and I was there. I got, for whatever reason, I got pushed into the front row.

THEO VON: I was, I fell out of my chair. I was in a chair that broke.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Yeah, well, my chair didn’t break, but I was almost as close to the Trump business as I am to you now. And you remember who was behind Trump at his inauguration?

THEO VON: Oh, yeah. Who was up there? You had Zuckerberg, you had Elon, you had Bezos.

Government of the Billionaires

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: You got it. He had a dozen other billionaires. Okay, so you ask me where I get pessimistic is, you know, and literally this is not just saying this, it’s true. I was thinking, you remember Abraham Lincoln in Gettysburg, when he said Lincoln went to Gettysburg, the scene of this horrible battle during the Civil War, tens of thousands of soldiers killed.

And a few days later, Lincoln goes to the battlefield and he jots down some notes and basically I’m paraphrasing. What he says is, you know, these soldiers who are fighting against slavery did not die in vain. They died so we will have a continue a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

THEO VON: Amen.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: And then I’m looking at what Trump and his inauguration, and I’m seeing these billionaires. Then I’m thinking, this is the government of the billionaires, by the billionaires, for the billionaires. And that’s kind of how it’s about.

THEO VON: I’m not surprised that I, I just, I’m not surprised that this is kind of where we’ve ended up. You know, I don’t know if this happened overnight. Like, it doesn’t feel like this happened overnight with Trump. It feels like this has happened more and more over time. At least Trump, it feels like to me, this is messed up, but at least he brings his billionaires up there and shows them off.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: You know, you’re right.

THEO VON: That is something that’s kind of crazy about him. But I love your energy about like that. Like, yeah, like, how do we stay hopeful, right? How do we stay hopeful when it seems like it feels almost impossible to. How do you vote somebody in that would be able to stay on the tide of it all?

Fighting for Democracy

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Theo, this is where we’ve got to take a deep breath and accept our very serious responsibilities as citizens. Okay? And you think back, and I don’t want to romanticize this, but you think back on American history, and, you know, we read all about this when we were in the third grade. You know, those were pretty brave guys, George Washington and Jefferson and all those guys taking on the British Empire. You know, no one in the million years thought you could defeat the British Empire for sure. And they did. And a lot of thousands died. Thousands of them died. It was a pretty bloody situation.

And then you think about the Civil War, where very brave people said, you know what? Slavery is a moral abomination. We’re not going to accept it anymore. God knows what that Civil War was about. Hundreds of thousands of people on both sides died.

You know, and then you think about. And I think about this. You know, December, was it December 7, 1941, the United States was attacked at Pearl Harbor. We were totally unprepared. Do you know that? We were totally unprepared. We had to fight a war against Japan, a war against Hitler in Europe. Right. Totally unprepared. And yet the country came together. You know, instead of building cars, they built tanks and planes. Literally, in two or three years, we had put the Nazis on the defensive. The war was won.

So what I’m saying is this is perhaps the most difficult moment, in my view, in modern American history. And it’s because Trump is an authoritarian who happens not to believe in democracy, and I think he’s corrupt. And it’s tough. But we have won great battles in the past. And I believe if we do not allow our people to become divided up, we will win this as well, and not only defeat Trumpism, which I work very hard to do, but also create the kind of nation that we can become.

Health care is a human right. You know, what if you have some kids, children, they have a right to get all the education they need. We are not some poor third World country. Right, Right. All right. So we have got to have a vision of where we want to go as a nation. And I think if we fight for that vision, if we bring people together, we can succeed.

THEO VON: When you speak with guys like, like Mamdani, did you give, did you have any suggestions for him? Did you give him any advice?

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Well, actually, he followed my political career pretty closely. He studied what I did as mayor of Burlington back in the 80s, the campaign that I ran. Yeah. So we chat every now and then. I am extraordinarily impressed by his energy, his intelligence. He has a really good Persona. He’s out there with the people, and I think he’s going to do a really great job for the city of New York.

THEO VON: Do you feel like the Democratic Party kind of takes him seriously as like a future candidate for, like, elections or for presidential elections?

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Now you are raising a sensitive issue.

THEO VON: Or is it a sensitive issue?

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Sensitive issue.

THEO VON: But yeah. Is it.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Do they.

THEO VON: Or do they look at him as like a one off, like an outsider?

The Establishment vs. The Movement

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: No. Look, what does it mean to be the establishment, the establishment means in a corrupt political system? If you’re the establishment, what you do is you leave this, you get on the phone and you talk to your billionaire friends and say, look, I’m setting up a super pac. I want your help to win the congressional race and Arizona and California and da, da, da, da. Put in, I want you to put in $30 million each, okay? $300 million. 10 of you put $300 million. I get the ads going next week. We’re in business, Right?

THEO VON: That’s crazy.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: That’s the way the system works, all right? And every now and then you have somebody like Mandani who comes along, says, I don’t want your money. Not only do I want your money, we’re going to take you b*stards on. Okay? Do they want to? No.

So the Democratic Party right now is kind of split. I am an independent, okay? To be honest with you, I’m the longest serving independent. I caucus with the Democrats, but I’m an independent, proud of it. But you’re.

THEO VON: They get really independent too, when it’s time to put you on the ballot too, I notice.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: So that’s fair, you know, So I work with people like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Primo Jaybal and Ro Khanna, a bunch of other people. And we are trying to move the Democratic Party to be a party that stands with working class Americans and has the courage to take on powerful special interests.

Now there’s another faction of the Democratic Party that, you know, doesn’t like Trump for, I think a lot of right reasons. I agree with him, but basically cuddles up to the moneyed interests. And that’s the vision that we have. Mamdani is part of the movement that I’ve helped try to build Alexandria as well, and others, many, many others. So that’s kind of the split that we’re seeing within the Democratic Party. Got it.

THEO VON: Do you feel like you’ve been in politics for a long time and you, you’re growing in to be an adult.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Now in your, in your years by an adult? I know my grandchildren will tell you I’m not, but I don’t know.

The Question of a New Party

THEO VON: But I just mean, do you feel like at some point, like it’s time to start a new party, like, more than ever? Like, do you feel that, you know, because all you, I mean, you have guys like, like, you talk about guys like Ro Khanna, people that are inspired by him. Like, you know, like, I got to sit down with him. I like a lot of things he has to say. A good guy, an Internet bill of rights. I feel like he has, like, you know, he’s a, he’s a forward thinker.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Yes, he is. Smart guy.

THEO VON: Yeah. And so I feel like if you got a band of people, it’s not that hard to find the people that love good.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: All right. Have I thought about it? Yeah, like, for about 400 years.

THEO VON: That’s how you thought about it?

The Challenge of Third Parties and Political Transformation

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: All right. But all right, here is. This is the reality that I have to deal with every day. In my view, the Republican Party, which used to be a conservative party, a small government type party, has become, under Trump, kind of a right wing extremist party. Okay. There are some exceptions to be sure, but that’s kind of where it is.

Democratic Party, as I mentioned to you, their establishment more or less wants to protect the status quo. And then there are those of us who want to bring about fundamental changes in the economic and political life of the country. So that’s where you are now. Starting the third party is something. When I was mayor of the city of Burlington, in a sense, we did okay. I took on, I defeated a Democratic mayor.

THEO VON: Yeah.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: And so we had Republicans, we had the Democrats, and we—

THEO VON: That must have felt awesome.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: You know, it felt pretty good. A guy who had been mayor for 10 years and nobody thought we could win. We won by 10 votes.

THEO VON: Oh, yeah.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: And by the way, I say that to people. If you think it’s hard, you could do it. We did it. All right. That was a long time ago. And we started kind of unofficially, we called it Independent party of sorts. So it can be done. And there are strong independents today running for office who have a chance to win.

But you ask about starting a party within today’s political climate, it is very hard. All right. For example, you want to start a party in many states, you’re going to have to get enormous numbers of signatures in every county in the state to get even, get on the ballot, because the two party system does not want you on the ballot, of course. Okay. And you know, you likely don’t have a lot of money to do all that stuff, so it ain’t easy.

But there are people who are thinking about it right now. Where my energy is, is to transform the Democratic Party. You know, when many years ago under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, under Harry Truman, the Democratic Party was considered to be the party of the American working class. Unfortunately, that has changed over the years. I want once again to have a Democratic Party which has the guts to stand up to the billionaire class and create an economy that works for everybody and not just the very rich.

Universal Basic Income and Tech Industry Control

THEO VON: You know, we hear a lot about the, you know, we’ve interviewed some of these tech CEOs and billionaires, really, and they talk about this kind of a universal basic income. Right. But it sort of feels like it’s led by the tech industry. And if that gets created, that’s not the same thing as one that’s led, it feels like, by the government. Does that make sense to you?

Because one that’s subsidized by the government is more like. It doesn’t feel as controlled. Well, I guess it does. It just feels like controlled by two different parties.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Again, what I want to see, and I suspect you want to see, is you want to see, let’s not use the word. The government is not Tesla Corporation. The government theoretically in a democratic society is you. And to some degree, you know, you don’t like people, you can get rid of them. Right. And our job is to create a more democratic. With small D. Not a big D here, small D, where government is responsive to the people.

But I want to say a word on the issue that you just raised. I have over the last six months become very, very concerned about AI and robotics. And there are a lot of reasons why. Number one, the easiest, I think, most apparent reason is what these data centers. I don’t know. You’re following these data centers?

THEO VON: Oh, yeah. It’s crazy. Yeah. What are the side effects? They’re taking over. Like they’re absorbing water in a lot of communities. I know. They just built one in Louisiana, near, like Baskin, Louisiana. Yeah. And they’re not even going to end up keeping that many jobs for people once they’re open.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: There will be a decent number of construction jobs, right?

THEO VON: But after that, there’s not going to be many, right.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: To run the place, like, almost nobody.

THEO VON: Security guards, basically.

The AI Revolution and Job Displacement

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Exactly, exactly. And the result of that is it drains, as you’ve just said, scarce. In some cases, water resources, and it raises electric bills. Okay? So that’s number one. Number two to me, even the big issue, let me quote, I wrote this down here, okay? Elon Musk, our good friend, right? Musk.

Now, when you understand, to understand AI and robotics, understand that the very. A handful of the very richest people on Earth are investing hundreds of billions of dollars, okay, that’s Mr. Musk, Mr. Bezos, Mr. Ellison, Mr. Gates and others, okay, these are the richest guys on Earth. Now, why are they doing it? You think they’re doing it to stay up nights? And they’re staying up nights worrying about working people. Do you think they’re investing hundreds of billions of dollars to say, how do we make this world a better place for working people?

Between you and me, I don’t think so. These guys have huge money. But getting back to the point you made earlier, you know, it’s not enough that they’re worth hundreds of billions of dollars. They even want more and more wealth and more and more power. Okay? So let’s talk about what are the implications of AI and robotics? Okay, well, they’re going to take away jobs.

THEO VON: So then people want a purpose.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: You got it? All right, good. You hit the nail on the head. Let’s start off on that one. And now the answer is nobody knows. Exactly. All right? No one can predict what happens tomorrow, next year, five years. This is what Elon Musk, the leader of this whole effort, says, quote, “AI and robots will replace all jobs. Working will be optional,” end of quote.

And he later said, yeah, you want to do a garden in the backyard for a hobby, that’s great, but you don’t need to do that. Bill Gates, worth a few hundred billion heavily invested in this Microsoft, humans, quote, “won’t be needed for most things,” end of quote. Dario Amodei, head of Anthropic, quote, “half of all entry level jobs will disappear.”

And there are other estimates out there that we’re talking about over a period of years. Nobody knows exactly when. Tens of millions of jobs in the next decade disappearing. So you tell me what happens when tens of millions of jobs that people now make an income from disappear. What happens to those people?

THEO VON: Well, I think there’s some of, some of. What I’ve heard is that some of these same companies would then offer some share. It’s kind of. It’s a vague terminology a lot of times of a universal basic income token or something.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Really? No kidding.

THEO VON: I agree.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: And how much you getting?

THEO VON: I have nothing.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Who’s going to determine that?

THEO VON: It sounds like you get like one eleventh of a Rubik’s Cube every two weeks or something. But also, I think if. If you could get to a place where it was like that and people did feel a sense of some sense of purpose or peace or part of something again, it could be good. There’s a chance. It could be something beautiful.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: All right, there’s a chance. All right, good point. I agree with you.

THEO VON: But my questions would be, do we just end up working for these companies that, that are paying us this UBI? What’s the psychological effects of it? Right? Like, what’s the long term effects of it? And, and then do we still have a sense of individuality if we don’t have exactly anything to do, you know, or do we just turn into those kids from Wall-E? Can you bring that kid up? Yeah, there you go. Yeah, like a young Bert Kreischer kind of there.

The Need for a Moratorium on Data Centers

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: All right, but then what we need to do is to take a deep breath because this thing is moving really fast. I don’t know. Have you seen some of these robots on the Internet?

THEO VON: Oh, yeah, unfortunately, I’ve seen some sites I shouldn’t have been on, Bernie, be honest with you. But yes.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: All right. I mean, they are moving very, very rapidly.

THEO VON: Yeah, a couple. Yeah, the ones from Atlanta are for sure. I’ll tell you that.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: And you know, in Amazon, I think half of the workers have. I’m not sure about this. I think half already have been replaced.

THEO VON: Well, yeah, especially if you start thinking that Waymo cars are going to pick you up. It’s just like, what are people. There’s going to be a really tough. Does anybody have a plan for the first two years of this?

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: You got it. You got it. Okay, you’re hitting the nail on the head here. The point is this thing is moving at revolutionary speed. And I can tell you absolutely, impossibly, as a member of the United States Senate, that Congress is in no way prepared to deal with this. You know, the United States got attacked tomorrow by some enemy. You know, we got a large military. They know what to do.

Ain’t nobody been thinking about how to respond to this extraordinary, monumental change that’s hitting the America. So I have proposed, and I get criticized by this for this every day. A moratorium on data centers. Why am I doing that? Well, number one, I want to protect people’s communities. That’s number one. Electric, rails, water and all that. But also, I got to take a deep breath. Your point? What the hell is happening?

THEO VON: Yeah.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Are we prepared? If tens of millions of people lose their jobs in the next decade? All right, what happens? How do they stay alive? So the economics is one thing, but I want to take it a step further. And this is. Now you’re into crazy world. Okay, this is science fiction, except it ain’t science fiction.

THEO VON: We’re here.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: That’s right. We’re here. Okay, so you understand this AI? Now, you know what you know based on what you’ve read, what you’ve seen, your life experience, Right? Me, the same. Everybody, every human being, the same. These AIs have absorbed all knowledge. Every book that’s been written, every mathematical formula, every physics proposition, they got it. That’s what they got.

And what worries, not just me. And this is. Do you remember. What was it, 2001? The movie? Do you ever see that movie?

THEO VON: Oh, yeah. Space Odyssey.

The Existential Risks of Artificial Intelligence

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Yeah, Space Odyssey. All right. And you remember, and this is done many years ago. HAL is the computer that runs the spaceship. And one day the guy says, HAL, I’d like you to do this. And HAL says, well, sorry, I’m not going to do it. A rebellion, okay? Everyone’s. Oh, really? You know, big joke. Funny.

I had a public meeting in Georgetown a few months ago with a guy named Geoffrey Hinton. Really nice guy.

THEO VON: Yeah. He’s godfather of AI, right?

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Right. He’s the guy. He’s been studying the issue.

THEO VON: Alleged.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Yeah, he’s been studying the issue for decades. Came up. He got a Nobel Prize in physics. Okay. It’s a big deal.

THEO VON: There he is right there. I’ve heard of a couple of his speeches.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Yeah. And this is what he says. He says there is no question in his mind that at some point, sooner than later, AI will be smarter than human beings. And it is not science fiction to worry about whether or not AI is going to communicate with each other in a language that people don’t know ain’t going to be English. And that they may see the human race as an impediment to their progress. Okay, you with me? All right. That’s the doomsday scenario.

THEO VON: So that the computer’s like, God, these people are slowing us down.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: You got it? Okay, now again, you know, some people, I mean, I think nobody thinks that that is crazy anymore. Some people say, well, you know, it’s kind of unlikely, maybe 5 to 1, maybe 10 to 1, but it is incredibly risky, and they don’t have the safeguards to protect us.

All right, now let me give you something that I am seeing today and you’re seeing, and that is we are living in a country with a lot of emotional distress, okay? For a variety of reasons, a lot of young people are turning to AI for emotional companionship. Okay. I broke up with my girlfriend.

THEO VON: Yeah, that’s ridiculous.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Okay? And, you know, what do I do? Or, you know, my mom is sick. So we’re seeing people not relating to other human beings, but relating to AI. What is the long term implications of that? I mentioned earlier that robots are now treating patients. Musk talks about creating millions of robots in the next few years through Tesla.

The Orwellian Future and AI Control

THEO VON: Oh, Orwellian. At some point, it’s this very thing where it’s like, would we even… Here’s my question. Would we even notice the day when we switch over from thinking that we have control and we are making choices for ourselves to the day where we are just following along what the computer says? Do you think we would notice?

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Maybe not, because they would create the environment.

THEO VON: You know, dang birdie.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: It’s pretty crazy stuff.

THEO VON: It’s crazy.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: And then you got even things like warfare. Okay? You know, right now, to some degree at least, certainly not in the Ukraine, but… or in Gaza. But to some degree, political leaders are constrained about going to war because they don’t want to be telling the parents of their young men and women who died in war.

THEO VON: Well, every week there seems like a new place that we’re trying to attack or bully or take.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Oh, no, no, we’ll get to that one in a minute. But General Eastman, what happens… what happens now? If I’m President of the United States, I don’t have to send your kids off to war.

THEO VON: Right?

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: I send robots off the war. What does that mean in terms of foreign… Am I going to go invading every country in the world? I don’t have to tell any parent that the kid was lost.

THEO VON: You could sit up at night in your… in your White House or whatever and just use a remote control.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: You got it. And no loss of life.

THEO VON: Right.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: All right, so what does this mean?

THEO VON: Not here, not for us anyway.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Right, right, exactly. So what does this mean about international instability? It’s incredible.

THEO VON: Well, you know, not much communication anymore. If someone doesn’t know, if a drone just stood up in the middle of the night and did a bunch of horrible things to their country.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: You got it. All right, so all that I’m saying, and I think this stuff is moving very, very quickly, it is being pushed by the wealthiest people in the world who, in my view, could care less about ordinary people who want more wealth and more power. Now, they deny all that stuff. That’s my view.

I think we got to slow it down and ask the question that you asked. All right, if AI can, and it can do some good medical diagnoses, do some good blood testing, is that a good thing? It is a good thing if you’re working in a crap job in a factory. Right. You know, and I can increase worker productivity. So you could work 20 hours a week rather than 40 hours a week. Is that a good thing? I think it is. Et cetera, et cetera.

THEO VON: Right. If the company then shares some of the profits that the company is making with the work, with the workers, that’s the issue.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: It’s a very simple proposition. Who is AI and robotics going to work for? Does it work to improve human life or does it work to make the billionaires even richer? That’s the question that we’ve got to focus on.

THEO VON: Yeah, yeah, it’s definitely getting in. It’s definitely…

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Yeah. And I would urge you on the show, keep talking about it, bring knowledgeable people on. You know, I have my views. Other people have different views. But I’ll tell you, this is… this is monumental stuff that we are unprepared for. We need to discuss it a lot.

Y2K and the Unknown Future of AI

THEO VON: Well, it feels like… I mean, it feels like we’re not going to be… I don’t know, it starts to feel a little bit hopeless that we’re not going to have things that could change it down the line. Or it starts to feel like with AI stuff that we’re getting there too late.

But also with AI starts to feel like, remember the Internet? Remember Y2K? Like, people thought like it was going to be crazy or everybody was going to start, you know, everything was going to disappear, that a website name was going to be the biggest thing. And that never amounted really to anything.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Right. So the answer is we don’t know.

THEO VON: We don’t know.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: I mean, that’s fair enough. I’m not, you know, I’m telling you what my fears are, you know, 100%.

THEO VON: And I think those are a lot of people’s fears. You know.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: You know what? They can put up an AI figure that looks exactly like you.

THEO VON: Yeah.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: That sounds exactly like you. That is saying something you have never said. That’s already been done to me. Yeah. Okay. And it could be done pretty easily, which raises, you know, you know, coming election time, you’re going to see somebody, wow, why are they saying that? Can’t vote for that guy. Turns out to be a total fraud, right?

THEO VON: Yeah.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Okay.

The Need for Political Revolution

THEO VON: Do you feel like it’s a time where we just need to be in the streets more than ever, where people need to be revolting? Do you think it takes a revolution to change? Like, what’s really going to change? It doesn’t seem like voting is going to get us there.

Now, I do like the idea that you have a guy like Mamdani that inspires you and makes you feel hope and you feel like it’s different and he’s against an establishment, even if it feels like it’s a local one. Whatever that is, that he feels like it’s different. Right. I agree. That is exciting. That is exhilarating. But is that… is a guy like that… is like a Tom Sawyer like him, can he go through all the rapids of the, like, dirty Mississippi? That is f*ing politics. And get us to somewhere near…

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: He’s not a savior. He’s going to be a good mayor. We need 100 Mamdanis. We need what I call a political revolution. And that is what the establishment does. They’re very greedy people. They could care less about ordinary people. They want more wealth and power.

But the ugliest thing that they do is through the media that they own, et cetera, et cetera, is they tell people that they are powerless and they have no power. And the answer is, when people are organized and stand together, they do have power.

And that’s what we’re trying to do all over this country. Bring people and not allow Trump and his friends. I don’t care if you’re black, you’re white, you’re gay, you’re straight, who cares? You know, you’re Muslim, you’re Jewish, whatever you may be, let’s stand together.

Because again, I’ve been all over this country. People understand that healthcare is right. They want a good education system. They don’t think they should be 1% owning more wealth than the bottom 93%. They’re concerned about climate change. They don’t want this country involved in endless wars.

We are there disagreements on abortion and other issues? There are, but by and large, you’d be surprised. I was in a few months ago, I went to Mingo County, West Virginia. You know where that is?

THEO VON: I don’t know where it is. I’ve spent some time in West Virginia, though. I like it.

Trump Country and Common Values

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Yeah, I love it. It’s a beautiful state. It’s a poor state. I went to the county… Theo, Trump won. Trump won West Virginia by over 70% of the vote. Okay. I went to the county where he did the best. He got 74% of the vote. And I went to that county precisely because he got 74%. I want to hear what people are thinking about.

Walk into a meeting. Wasn’t the largest rally we ever did. Four or five hundred people in the middle of nowhere. This is nowhere. Well, that’s it. There’s a picture of it. A lot of people thought you were…

THEO VON: Probably giving away free Ben and Jerry’s out there.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: No one’s giving her…

THEO VON: Nope.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: And there it is. There’s a picture of the…

THEO VON: Oh, that’s nice.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Yeah. A big gym there. And it turns out this is Trump country. These are decent people. They’re worried about their kids. A veteran up there worried about the needs of veterans, you know, mom worried about a baby. So I’m not saying, you know, Vermont’s a liberal state. West Virginia is a conservative state. I’m not saying that there aren’t differences of opinion.

THEO VON: There are. Oh, yeah.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: But you’d be surprised. This is the good news, that as Americans, we share a lot of common values. We know that so many people fought and died for democracy. What does democracy mean? It means that just because I’m the president, I don’t have the right to shut you up. I don’t have the right to politically prosecute you because you’re against me.

THEO VON: Yeah.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: You disagree with me, fine. I’ll argue with you. You beat me in an election, fine. I’m unhappy. That’s the way life goes, right? See, the American people don’t want a few people, billionaires, controlling the economy. They don’t want an authoritarian society. They want an economy that works for all. Those are the common threads. I think that we can build a political movement around.

Beyond Party Lines

THEO VON: Well, I don’t think people care if they’re… I think people less and less even associate with a party anymore. I think that’s right. In the past two years, that’s… that, to me, feels like it’s happened more than ever. It feels like…

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: How do…

THEO VON: Like… like, if you can look at, like, the fraud case, like, in Minneapolis, and I know it’s like we don’t know all the information about it. But it’s like the fact that a vigilante journalist type of kid, you know, this Nick Shirley kid, has to go door to door and that he’s even bringing that… like, whether or not everything he’s saying is true or factual, I don’t know.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: My understanding on that issue. And again, I haven’t studied it, the senator from Vermont, but I think there was massive fraud in terms of child nutrition. Okay, that’s absolutely right. I believe that was investigated on the Biden’s attorney general in 2021, actually, I believe dozens of people were arrested. So it is a real issue and it’s ugly and it’s disgusting because, again, stealing money from hungry children, I don’t know that you could do worse than that.

THEO VON: Yeah, like, how do…

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: But the childcare thing, I think, is largely exaggerated, I don’t think. You know, I think, you know, you could take a camera and go someplace and the child care center is closed or something. Oh, nobody’s there. Right. I don’t think the childcare is an issue. The nutrition issue is real.

Vigilante Journalism and Trust in Government

THEO VON: Yeah, I think… yeah, I agree. I think there’s… well, I agree that there’s some parts of it that it’s like, it’s tough to know. And if you just see a clip, it’s tough to know what the full reality is. Right, I agree.

But the thing to me… well, there’s two things. One is that we’re getting to a place where vigilante journalism, where somebody hitting the streets, knocking on doors, like you’re saying, whether it’s to get somebody to vote, to get somebody to open their ideas to a new thought, to make sure that something that their tax dollars is going towards is going to, like, that is becoming more important than ever. And I think that’s going to start happening more than ever.

But two, that it’s like that why didn’t our gut… why, like, it feels… it makes us feel as regular people. Like, dude, we can’t even trust that our government’s going to figure this out for us, that there’s money just falling out of the bottoms here.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Look, the answer is yes.

THEO VON: And then that makes… people cannot care about either party. That’s what I’m saying.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: All right, but… okay, let’s put this thing in context.

THEO VON: Okay?

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: The answer is what you’re saying is true. Period. Okay.

THEO VON: And I’m not yelling at you about it. I’m…

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: No, no, no.

THEO VON: Okay, good.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: All right. But context. You got 340 million people in this country. Guess what? A lot of them are dishonest.

THEO VON: Yeah. Yeah.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: There are politicians who are dishonest. There are business people dishonest. There are media people who are dishonest. That is the reality.

THEO VON: Right?

# The Cost of Fraud and the Reality of Social Programs

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS:

I mentioned to you before, we spend $8 trillion a year on the military. Every single major defense contractor has been involved in fraud. That’s what they do. The insurance companies, every day they’re ripping off people. Drug companies lying every single day. You got fossil fuel companies saying, oh, carbon emissions don’t cause climate change. Total absolute lie.

You have the tobacco companies, oh, you can smoke nine packs a day. Ain’t going to cause you. So look, fraud exists. We got to fight it wherever we can in government, in the private sector. No argument. And you’re right, when people see it in government, it discourages them.

But you got to put it in a broader context. You have, for example, our Social Security System. 99 plus percent of the checks that go out, go out to people who need them. Okay. You know, so all that I’m saying is when you’re dealing with hundreds of millions of people, yeah. You can find an aberration, you can find fraud. Put it in a context. Got it.

THEO VON:

Understood.

Israel, Gaza, and America’s Role in War Crimes

You know, one thing that’s really kind of changed a lot of people’s, like, young people’s opinions too, I think, is Trump’s relationship and our funding of Israel, especially during like the Gaza conflict. Right. It made it put. It was like one of the first times in my life where you got to see, you know, you saw children getting killed. You saw a lot of. And I know that there was conflict between Palestine and Israel and October 7th. I know that. I know the history of it.

But it felt like Trump just sort of went with Netanyahu on whatever he wanted to do there. And it felt also like as a regular American, like we were supposed to be the ones to go help in some instance. I think a lot of young people are kind of discouraged about our relationship with Israel. And what does that mean? Like, especially like with AIPAC and influencing our elections and stuff like that.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS:

Let me just say a word on that, because it’s an issue I’ve been deeply involved in. On October 7th, Hamas committed a. I mean, they went in, they invaded Israel. They killed 1,200 men, women, and children. A lot of kids committed sexual abuse, et cetera. Disgusting. They were a terrorist organization. Israel had a right to respond, like any government, you know, that’s attacked.

But Israel did not have the right to go to war against the entire Palestinian people. There are 2.2 million people in Gaza. That’s not a lot of people. Right. There are nine million people in New York City, or eight and a half million people. That’s all. There are 2.2 million and they’re poor people.

Over the last several years, Israel has killed over 70,000, mostly women, children, and the elderly. It has injured, I think, 160,000 or even more than that. So over 10% of the population has been killed or wounded. Okay. Again, orphan children, the elderly. Israel stopped humanitarian aid coming in so that children were starving to death in violation of all international law. And the United States, under Biden and under Trump continued to fund a guy who I consider to be a war criminal. Okay, war is disgusting business.

THEO VON:

Well, ICC voted him a war. Didn’t the ICC say he was a war criminal?

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS:

He did.

THEO VON:

Except for America.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS:

Yeah. So, look, war is a disgusting business. But out of World War II, you remember the Geneva Conventions. What they said is, look, war is disgusting, but you don’t starve children in a war. You want to kill an enemy, you kill an enemy. It’s this horrible business. We want to eliminate war, but there are rules of war, engagement.

Starving children is, under any definition, a horror. And that’s what happened. Bombing. All of the entire. People don’t realize this. Not only killing people, virtually every medical facility has been bombed, schools have been bombed, water systems, wastewater. The place has been laid desolate. Those are war crimes.

And I did my best, and with some success, I managed to turn around. It started. The war started. Almost everybody would say, oh, you know, Israel would just support Israel. Netanyahu. That has changed. And your point is very important, that a lot of the impetus for those changes in Congress came from young people, and not just, you know, people on the left. You got conservative Republican kids who are saying, you know what, not a great idea to fund Netanyahu.

AIPAC and Campaign Finance Influence

THEO VON:

How much control do you feel like, what is that relationship with Israel like? Because I think it seems that because of some of the atrocities.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS:

Yes.

THEO VON:

It makes a lot of Americans question why we fund Israel. Why do we give money?

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS:

And the answer is getting back to a corrupt campaign finance system. If you check the record. And again, it’s not just AIPAC. It is the crypto industry. It is the insurance companies, it is the drug companies. But AIPAC is a significant funder of, I would imagine, hundreds of members of Congress.

So it’s customary. You’re there, we’ll send you a check for $10,000 bucks. If you’re a leader, we may make it over a period of years, hundreds of thousands of dollars. You’re in the club. You’re going to be pro Israel.

But having said that, we’re seeing, for all the reasons that you have suggested, we’re seeing more and more people saying, AIPAC, thank you. I don’t want your money, actually, because the people in my district are not happy with what Netanyahu is doing. So I think we’re turning that around a little bit.

But to my mind, I have long advocated not another bloody nickel to go to the Netanyahu government. But it’s not just Netanyahu. Switch gear a little bit in that part of the world. You got Saudi Arabia, all right? You know, run Saudi Arabia. You got a guy named Mohammed bin Salman, okay? Remember Muhammad? According to American intelligence, Mohammed killed right here.

THEO VON:

Yeah. They call him pizza head.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS:

There was a guy named Jamal Khashoggi. That didn’t mean anything to you? Yeah. Remember him?

THEO VON:

He was a reporter that got killed.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS:

He was a Washington. There he is.

THEO VON:

And that was under his rule, right?

Saudi Arabia and Authoritarian Alliances

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS:

That’s right. So what the intelligence agency said that the leader of Saudi Arabia, Mr. Mohammed bin Salman, murdered this guy, Khashoggi, went into an embassy someplace, was a Turkey or somewhere. I don’t know where it was. Walked into an embassy, came back, carved up and put into a suitcase, okay? Dismembered. He murdered.

And yet when bin Salman came to the United States, do you remember a few months ago, White House rolled out the red carpet? Where are the Marines? There, welcoming them. Why was that? Why does a guy who the American intelligence says is a murderer, a guy, by the way, who runs the country, you try to protest his rule.

THEO VON:

Can’t even do it, huh?

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS:

Good luck to you. I mean, thousands of people are in jail. They execute people. There’s no dissent.

THEO VON:

Even like when Netanyahu came and he pulled his chair out for him. Remember that? That’s the kind of thing to people, to like, regular people. It’s like, what are we doing? It feels like our intelligence agency does not work for us.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS:

All right, well, it’s not a question of intelligence. They did work. Why is it that Musk is investing huge amounts of money in Saudi Arabia. Why is it that Trump loves this guy? Why is it that Saudi Arabia is now allowing the Trump family to build. I don’t know what. It’s resorts, golf courses, whatever the hell they do there. Okay, why is that?

And the answer is. And this will upset some people, it is my view that is the kind of government that Trump likes. It is an authoritarian government. They don’t tolerate dissent. It is run by the. That family happens to be the wealthiest family in the world. Bin Salman.

THEO VON:

Bin Salman.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS:

Yeah, they are, I think, combined. Not, you know, they’re probably richer than Musk and those. And meanwhile, we are attacking Europe every day. You know, we’re going to invade Greenland because Trump didn’t get a prize or something.

THEO VON:

That’s pretty crazy.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS:

That is really crazy.

THEO VON:

I mean, for a second, it is. It’s so crazy.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS:

Sometimes you got to laugh at it.

THEO VON:

You have to laugh at it. It’s like we’ve had police officers on, and they say sometimes, you know, there’ll be murders inside, there’ll be victims, people have been shot and murdered, horrible things. And you’ll see us in the front yard laughing. And it’s like. Because sometimes you have to. You have to step outside of the absurdity and laugh for a second.

Democracy vs. Authoritarianism

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS:

All right, all that I’m saying. And this is a whole longer discussion. But it used to be that the United States was a strong advocate of democracy. We became a model for countries all over the world, saying we would like to be like the United States. Our Constitution, our Bill of Rights, Declaration of Independence was an inspiration to a lot of people.

And now you got the President of the United States having his best friend, a dictator, in Saudi Arabia, supporting a war criminal in Israel, Mr. Netanyahu, et cetera, et cetera. And by the way, going to war, if you like, hopefully not literally, figuratively, at least with Europe. Why is that? Europe is a democratic, democratic government. Some are conservative, some are progressive, but they are elected by the people. Trump does not like democracy. So that worries me very, very much.

All right, maybe one or two more questions if we could.

ICE Raids and Immigration Policy

THEO VON:

Okay, great. That sounds good. Recently with the ICE raids that have happened in Minnesota, and they’re happening everywhere. Right. I mean, it’s become a big thing. And for me, a lot of it is in response to, you know, there was such a border policy that was keeping, allowing a lot of extra people here, right? Extra people that were not meeting up with their, like their probation officer, not probation officers, but they’re like attendant officers at times that sort of situation. Right.

So it resulted, it seems like in this situation, we had to hire a lot extra ICE agents, some of them even unqualified. Anyway, it’s left us in a unique place in America right now. But also it’s another place where people in the streets are having to figure things out, and we are all the ones fighting about it online.

Immigration Reform and Border Security

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Let me briefly tell you my view. People agree with me, will not agree with me. I agree with you that our border security was weak. Okay. There is no excuse. My dad came from Poland, you know, other people’s parents came from all over the world. All right. You come to it, there are reasons why people have kind of try to slip into the United States.

99% of the times, it’s poverty, it’s violence, drug violence, and wherever it is, Mexico, Guatemala or whatever. All right. But that’s illegal, and it should be prohibited. We need waters, strong borders. We need an immigration process, in my view. Okay, that’s Number one.

Number two, we have between 10 and 14 million undocumented people in this country right now. No one knows exactly.

THEO VON: Yeah.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: All right. But the vast majority of those people work hard and obey American law. Right now, during COVID by the way, those were the people who are working in the meatpacking plants. Those are the people who got a lot of the virus. Those are the people who died. They kept the economy going in many respects.

All right. In my view, and I think what most Americans agree with, if you have lived in this country, even if you came across the border illegally, but if you have obeyed the rules of America, you haven’t committed crimes, you’re working hard, you’re raising your family, you need a path towards citizenship as part of comprehensive immigration reform. And by the way, given the fact that we have worker shortages all over this country, we need those workers. Okay? So that’s, I think what we need.

THEO VON: Especially skilled labor, we need right now.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: That’s right. That’s right. And a lot of these people are doing important work keeping the economy going. What Trump has done is in this big, beautiful bill of his, greatly expanded funding for ICE. And in my view, what he is doing is not just trying to get, and by the way, it used to be we’re trying to get the criminals out of America. Remember that.

THEO VON: Yeah.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: You know, rapists and the murderers. We’re well beyond that now. You’re knocking on doors of American citizens. You’re arresting people who have never had a…

THEO VON: Now that they’re finding anybody that makes good tapas.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: You got it. That’s right. That’s exactly right. Okay. And I think this is what frightens me. What Trump is using ICE for now is a domestic military operation, and it’s part of this intimidation. And if you stand up and that woman in Minnesota, Goode is her name.

THEO VON: Renee Goode.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Renee Goode. All right. I saw that video. You know, you don’t shoot somebody in the head who’s in that car. And I think it’s Trump saying, “I have the power. And we got domestic army. It’s called ICE. And we’re going to go out there and we’re going to arrest and we’re going to intimidate.”

And part of that, this is what Trumpism is about. It’s intimidation. All right, you’re in the media, you’re CBS. You say something, I’m going to sue you. You know, Theo, you say something I don’t like, I may sue you. You know, I don’t like Venezuela. I’m going to send in the troops. I got the power, and I’m going to use it.

I really, that scares me because that’s what authoritarianism is about. So do we, should we deal with immigration through comprehensive reform? Absolutely. I think that’s what the American people want. Do we want guys with masks around their face dragging people out of their apartments, out of their cars? You know, I don’t think so. I don’t think that’s what the American people want. More and more resentment to that.

The Power of Visual Media

THEO VON: And we’re in a tough spot, too, because we see things more now. Right? We see all of it. We see it. So before you would just hear about her, you would, knew it was a plan, but you didn’t have the visual effect of it and how the visual effect makes you feel.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Cell phones have revolutionized politics, and that’s, everybody got a cell phone can take them.

THEO VON: And I think that’s one of the side effects, too. Like, I agree, like, Trump has an authoritarian energy. Right. There’s this, you know, and there’s, there’s positive parts about that and there’s negative parts about that.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: No, I don’t agree that there’s anything positive about authoritarianism.

THEO VON: Well, maybe authoritarianism. I think somebody that’s like somebody that…

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Decisiveness.

THEO VON: Yes, that’s what I mean.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Then decisiveness. Yes. Making bold decisions. Yes, yes, that’s authoritarianism. Disregarding the Constitution and the rule of law. Sorry.

Healthcare CEOs and Nurse Strikes

THEO VON: No, I agree. I agree with that and that’s what I meant. One last question before you go, Mr. Sanders and Nick, will you bring up those CEOs one more time. I just want to see the faces of those good gentlemen who have made 15 million allegedly. I believe in 26 million allegedly as well.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Not allegedly. I think that’s the fact.

THEO VON: Oh, there you go, Bernie. I’ll take that.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: While nurses…

THEO VON: Nurses are trying to make sure that their health care doesn’t get discontinued at certain points. And just real quick, people can get involved by donating to the NYSNA hardship fund. And we’ll put the link to that and where you can show up to support the strike. It’s going on every day right now.

The Epstein Files and Two-Tier Justice

There’s one other big concern that people have is that there is with the Epstein stuff, that there are people really protecting pedophiles. Do you think that’s as big of a thing as people think, or do you think it’s more of a political kickball that gets kicked around a lot?

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Hard to say. We don’t know. All I can tell you is when Trump ran for office, what did he say? “Going to release all,” underline all the files.

THEO VON: Yeah.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Okay. I think you should. And I think the thing about the Epstein files is it touches on everything we’ve talked about. It is there is a sense we’re living in two worlds. You go out, you know, you go through a red light or you do something stupid, get drunk and drive, you’re going to be arrested.

THEO VON: Right, Right.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: But if you’re a very, very wealthy person and you do some really disgusting things with women and girls, well, you’re rich and you’re powerful and you have friends. You don’t have to pay the price with children.

THEO VON: That’s the fear is like you said, we can’t even protect our children.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: But, and these guys get away with it. It’s a two tier system. You get punished. You’re an average person. You’re a billionaire. You could do horrible, disgusting things. Hey, no problem. That’s what it is. So my own view is Trump said, “Release all the files.” Release all the files.

THEO VON: We should release them. Did you? But you never knew it. But it wouldn’t like it was. But you don’t hear anything super that we don’t know.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: By being in your position, all you hear is speculation. And I don’t want to engage in that speculation. Just release all the information. Let people decide.

THEO VON: Let people decide.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Right?

THEO VON: Yep. One more time. Bring those CEOs up. I just want to see them. And Bernie Sanders, thank you so much. And yeah, I just appreciate your time.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Well, it’s my pleasure. And thank you very much for the work you’re doing.

THEO VON: We’re trying, man. You know, it’s a, you know, I’m learning as I go.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Look, Theo, the important point is you’re, honestly, you know, you and I can agree or not agree, but having serious discussion about serious issues is exactly what the country needs right now.

THEO VON: Yeah, well, thanks, man. Yeah. I do care. I know that.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: I know you do.

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