Dan Carlin is a podcaster, historian, writer, and podcaster. He has been with me for a long time, and I think he's one of the most fun people I've ever met. He's also a great coin collector, and we talk about a bunch of other stuff. He's a great podcaster and a great human being, so I really enjoyed having him on the show. I hope you enjoy this episode, and if you do, please remember to give him a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever else you get your podcasts. I think you'll agree that he's a pretty cool dude and I really appreciate him for taking the time to come on the pod and talk about all the cool stuff he's been up to over the past few years, so thank you to him for coming on and talking about coins, history, and all the other cool stuff that goes on in his life. I really hope you like it, and you'll give it a listen, because it's pretty cool. Have a great rest of the week. -Joe Rogan and Joe Rogan - The Facts: 1:00:00 - Dan Carlin 2:30:00 3:20:30 - What is a penny? 4:20 - How much money was a penny worth? 5:40 - What was a coin worth back then? 6:15 - What kind of metal was it made of? 7:30- How much does it weigh? 8:00- What do you think it looks like now? 9:20- What is it weighs? 11:00, what does it look like today? 14:15- What are you going to do with it? 15:00? 16:30, 17:20, 16:10 - What's it weigh more than gold and silver? 17:40, 18:10, 19:30? 18:20? 19:10? 21:40? 22:40 Is it worth $1, or is it worth more than $5,000? 25:30 26:00 & 27:10 27: What is the value of a coin? 29: What do they use it for? 35:00 + 32:30 + 35:20 36:00+ 35:30 & 35:40 + 36:50
00:01:06.000They probably had some dead metal type thing and then some kind of bronze and then you get into the silver and gold and how much is mixed into the rest.
00:01:45.000Well, the beautiful thing about your podcast is you can research things in advance so you know what the fuck you're talking about by the time you speak.
00:02:21.000I always hope everybody gets a chance in their lives to have people that they admire turning around and telling them something like that because it is the neatest feeling.
00:02:28.000And when you realize all the crap you put up with for decades in other jobs and other businesses to say, okay, I'm 51 or whatever, and they really like what you do, you just...
00:02:37.000Everybody should feel this way, so I appreciate that.
00:02:44.000Think about all the other stuff you did, all the broadcast work you did before.
00:02:47.000It really prepared you for this podcast, because obviously this medium is so incredibly new, and this ability for you to just put something out.
00:02:56.000I mean, I see when you put out new podcasts, they're regularly at the top of the heap of all the podcasts in the world.
00:03:03.000That's incredible when you think about that, that it's just you and you have a guy who helps you with editing.
00:04:07.000It seems hard for long-term podcasters to understand that this is still the beginning.
00:04:11.000It's almost impossible for us to predict because when you really think about what we're doing now, In terms of, like, you could put a YouTube video right now, you could make a video, and it could go viral for whatever reason, and a million people all over the world could be watching your video,
00:05:16.000The point is that you're absolutely right about this stuff.
00:05:20.000Before I got into podcasting, I was in the era where Mark Cuban made it big, and everybody was just going to start a high-tech company and sell it for billions of dollars.
00:05:37.000So I was in one of these companies with a bunch of buddies, and we were pushing what we called amateur content back then.
00:05:42.000So we're talking 95, 96. And one of my jobs was to go with the staff to all these venture capitalists and try to sell them on the idea of what amateur content was going to become.
00:05:53.000Joe, we went from place to place to place with all these people who are supposedly the ones who can see the future.
00:05:58.000And every one of them, and I mean every single one, said, Nobody's gonna view amateur content because if anybody could make anything anybody wanted to see, they'd be paid for it.
00:06:07.000And I kept talking about the quantity has a quality all its own idea, right?
00:06:11.000Where you say, listen, if only 1% of this stuff is worth watching, you're still gonna have millions of pieces of content uploaded all the time.
00:06:24.000And it wasn't just because, you know, I was in with a bunch of tech people who understood this, too, but one of them had taken me off the radio and said, we're going to put you on the Internet.
00:06:47.000But once that happened, it was in the back of my head going, okay, someday we might be able to do this on the Internet, that kind of thing.
00:06:53.000But the point was that these people at the Venture Capital meetings, all these hardcore guys who are inventing our future and funding it, none of them saw this amateur content thing coming.
00:07:01.000There was one thing that they were doing quite a long time ago.
00:07:04.000There was some internet radio channel that they had tried to put together.
00:07:09.000And they had funded it and spent a bunch of money on it, and they hired a bunch of people to do it.
00:07:13.000And Bobby Slayton was actually one of the online broadcasters.
00:07:17.000And I did his show, and he was talking about how they were having a hard time Yeah, too far ahead.
00:07:41.000Where, you know, they're like sending full files to each other or something.
00:07:44.000But, you know, it's funny because somebody's going to write a book someday about the history of this and how it got started and all that kind of stuff.
00:07:49.000And it's crazy to think about that we're actually due to sort of a serendipity, good timing sense that here we are, like I said, in the first 10 years, 15 years of what's not just going to be a phenomenon, but it's going to be a huge part, I think, of the future world that people grow up in.
00:08:05.000Not our show specifically, but this world we're creating.
00:08:10.000Yeah, and look, anyone could have been.
00:08:12.000I mean, there's been a lot of barriers to keep people that are really talented, interesting, funny people from getting their stuff out there.
00:08:18.000And that thing was always like, they didn't know how to start.
00:08:23.000I've talked to so many funny guys, and they just go, well, how do I get started?
00:08:28.000I'm like, well, you've got to go sign up at an open mic night.
00:08:30.000It just seems too much, and the idea of it is too daunting.
00:08:34.000But if you just sit in front of a camera, That's all you have to do?
00:08:38.000Turn your cell phone on and start talking.
00:08:40.000Here's what I think about Donald Trump.
00:08:42.000This is what I think about Harvey Weinstein.
00:08:44.000All you have to do is have a unique take, be funny, be interesting, somehow engaging, and it doesn't even have to be visual.
00:08:50.000I mean, God, there's a hundred, maybe more, really funny, what I would call Twitter comedians that just say funny shit, they write funny shit on Twitter, and they have huge followings because of it.
00:09:25.000And I remember Eddie Murphy saying something about if he hadn't gotten on Saturday Night Live, he doesn't know how he would have exposed himself to the public.
00:09:32.000Well, these days, if you're that funny, and you put that on audio, and you put it out there, you no longer need the facilitator, the gatekeeper, to open the doors for you.
00:13:17.000Well, I guess I need a computer for that.
00:13:19.000Everybody's waiting for that in the virtual reality realm, too.
00:13:21.000What's the must-have thing that then next Christmas everybody's got to have the virtual reality set up under the tree for, you know?
00:13:27.000Well, I think one of the things that's setting Android ahead of the curve, in terms of Android versus Apple, is that these Android phones, they slide into these headsets now, and they act as virtual reality screens.
00:17:20.000I mean, from a creative standpoint, it's so easy, and I tend to have a personality that does this anyway, to look at the negative, dystopian, you know, things that can happen, the big brother things, which is totally the way I see the world.
00:17:30.000But my kids, when I look at the creativity...
00:17:34.000So in my family, I come from a family of people who worked in film.
00:17:37.000So when I was a kid, I had a Super 8 camera.
00:17:48.000So like you said, my daughter comes up, it was only two weeks ago, and she's taken all of her school plays that she's done.
00:17:55.000She's taken scenes out of them, she's backed it with music, and she's turned it into like a movie promo that you see at the beginning of the theater.
00:18:02.000And I'm looking at this and I'm going, this is so dang creative.
00:18:05.000And it's made, you know how hard it would have been for her to get a Super 8 camera and the editing device.
00:18:10.000I mean, this makes it available to all these people.
00:18:14.000And so theoretically, if it doesn't go the Dan Carlin dystopian Blade Runner way, it could easily be like this.
00:18:20.000And this is how I used to sell the amateur content to the venture capitalists in the 90s by saying, it's going to be a creativity revolution.
00:18:26.000And Joe Rogan's nine-year-old is already taking part in it.
00:18:29.000And you're not even sure how she did it.
00:19:14.000If you're out there, you're going to hear me talk about this.
00:19:17.000Now, this may be a personal one-to-one conversation with someone in your audience, but somebody did something that is both flattering and absolutely terrifying to me recently.
00:19:26.000They went, and they said it took hundreds of hours, and they culled a ton of my shows, and they made little clips of all the things I said, and then rearranged them and created an Absolutely new show about politics, unfortunately, with me,
00:19:42.000and you cannot tell that they've cut this thing 9,000 different times, but it's my voice saying a whole show of political stuff that I never said.
00:19:51.000The guy said it took him hundreds of hours.
00:19:55.000Yeah, but you turn around and you go...
00:19:56.000Okay, somebody's gonna take a little time.
00:19:58.000He said at the beginning, this is not Dan Carlin really saying this, but some guy's gonna take like some obscure weird segment, put it on the internet, and I'm gonna be chasing, you know, that group going, no, it's not me, that guy did it.
00:20:07.000Well, you don't even have to do that anymore if it's just audio.
00:20:09.000What they're doing now is you could take 40 hours of audio, which obviously you and I both have way more than that.
00:20:15.000They take that 40 hours of audio, and they can essentially have you say anything.
00:20:51.000Do you remember when Oscar De La Hoya got caught wearing fishnets and high-heeled shoes with boxing gloves on?
00:20:57.000He was coked up and he was hanging around with some crazy Russian strippers and he was having a good old time and he just thought it was fun to dress up like a girl.
00:21:05.000You know, I thought it's funny, but he was very deeply embarrassed by it.
00:21:09.000Obviously, he's Mexican, so Latino boxing fans were not taken very kindly to that.
00:21:15.000So he just said, look, that shit's fake.
00:22:32.000The problem is, all you have to do is have a few people say it's real, and then a few people say it's fake, and the people that want it to be real...
00:22:46.000I mean, it's even this way, like, I was talking about piracy earlier and trying, you know, I have these old line advisors who will say things like, you need to be charging for your new shows and more money.
00:22:56.000And I sit there and go, our competition is piracy, man.
00:23:17.000But the Obama birth certificate was a real issue because there was people that were examining it and they were putting it through Photoshop.
00:23:23.000They're going, look, this is clearly fake.
00:23:45.000All it took was enough people to show you the original image.
00:23:49.000Photoshopped image and say, look, here's why when we put it in Photoshop, you see all these layers, clearly it's fake, and then they just fucking run with it.
00:23:56.000They just run with it on their online forums and on their...
00:23:59.000They got the little Twitter group of right-wing people that want to think that Obama's a Kenyan Muslim who's some sort of Manchurian candidate.
00:24:14.000When you put an image in Photoshop, it breaks it down into layers.
00:24:18.000Like it shows you how this is how you would edit something in Photoshop.
00:24:22.000I think the point you made earlier when you started talking about that though is the key one, which is If you want to believe this, here's your evidence, and you're going to ignore, and if you don't want to, the opposite.
00:24:32.000I wrote a piece that never got published in the late 80s called The Death of Objective Truth, and I thought at the time that this was because you couldn't have arguments anymore, because no one would accept your source.
00:24:43.000If you said, okay, the New York Times said this when I was a kid, that was a starting point, right?
00:24:47.000Okay, if the New York Times says this, okay, we both believe it, now we can have a conversation about what the New York Times says.
00:24:53.000Nowadays, I can't have political discussions with people anymore, because it never gets past ground zero, right?
00:25:00.000We start, I make a premise, you challenge the premise, I bring in a piece of evidence, you say, I don't believe that evidence at all, here's the other evidence, and boom, Jonah Goldberg, who's like a standard conservative columnist, wrote a piece a couple months ago where he said, I can't even have fun political discussions anymore,
00:25:16.000because you never get past the beginning of the talk.
00:25:19.000We disagree over the fact that That isn't even what we're talking about.
00:25:24.000Here's reality, now let's talk about it.
00:25:26.000Wait a minute, that's your reality, that's not my reality.
00:25:28.000And so you can't even have the kind of fun political discussions we had as kids or teenagers, because there's a basic disagreement on what reality looks like to different people.
00:25:37.000Yeah, well there's these tribal agreements.
00:25:57.000But I'm saying, you can't, just because you don't like Donald Trump, ignore the fact that the Clinton Foundation is super fucking shady, that Hillary Clinton is clearly a liar, that they definitely did something with the DNC to rig the primaries, to keep Bernie Sanders out.
00:26:15.000Donna Brazile coming out about all this stuff too and she's showing how it was all done and how Clinton sort of hijacked the entire DNC during the campaign, made everybody dependent upon her campaign.
00:26:26.000The whole thing is tribal because people didn't, they wanted so badly to get Donald Trump and make sure he wasn't in office.
00:26:36.000That they were supporting someone who didn't even support gay marriage until 2013. I mean, she was a creepy person in so many different ways and still is.
00:27:07.000You're seeing it right now with people that have an inability to, in any way, say anything negative about Donald Trump, because he's the president and because he's a Republican.
00:28:20.000So if I'm seeing stuff that doesn't back up my theory on how things are supposed to work, I feel like I have to sit back a little bit and go, okay, what are we seeing here?
00:28:28.000And you mentioned a bunch of fundamental societal changes we're going through when we started talking, whether we're talking about amateur content or everybody being able to broadcast and all that.
00:28:36.000We didn't even mention the fact that our broadcasts are international now, so you're not just talking to Americans anymore.
00:28:41.000And it makes me start to wonder about the basic idea of, are we smart enough?
00:28:46.000And this goes against all my principles, so it's hard for me.
00:28:51.000And does our modern society require us all to be more intelligent or in touch or understanding of the facts than, for example, American voters 75 years ago had to be?
00:29:05.000It's about what you were talking about.
00:29:07.000The fact that we're having discussions over stuff that either isn't real, or you don't understand the issue, but you have a very strong opinion one way or the other about it, or some talk show host you trust told you this is the way it is, so you're going to believe it.
00:29:21.000Let's say we've always had uninformed or tribal voters, because we always have.
00:29:26.000Is there a tipping point where if you have, if it's changing 10% every decade, that you say, okay, we used to have 20% of people who really didn't know what was going on.
00:29:37.000I mean, I'm starting to look back and go, if you can't have basic discussions about reality, Mm-hmm.
00:30:00.000And I can't decide if the trust I've always had in the people was misplaced from the get-go, or if the challenges of this modern society that we have, and an entire generation and generations behind them, let's be honest, growing up in a world of 140 character conversations and all these different things,
00:30:17.000if that doesn't fundamentally change us in a way that you might say, listen, in the 50s we could handle our voting responsibilities better than now, because the challenges to human beings now are greater.
00:30:27.000I don't know, and I don't have an answer, which is why I'm sort of backing off and kind of observing instead of yakking about it for a change.
00:30:33.000Well, I mean, I think it's important to talk about it just because we're all trying to figure it out together.
00:31:37.000And so if you say to yourself, are we more flooded than we were 75 years ago?
00:31:40.000And if we are, does that require more from the average voter than we required 75 years ago?
00:31:45.000And let's be honest, the dirty little secret of the American system, as everyone who studies it knows, is that once upon a time, this voting franchise was actually in relatively few hands.
00:31:55.000And you had to, I mean, the old idea behind running a farm, I used to read this left-wing writer who said it was all part I don't know.
00:32:04.000I think it was more of a voting requirement that said, hey, if you can run a farm, you can't be too much of an idiot, so that'll be our requirement.
00:32:11.000I don't know, but you do feel like as democracy's taken over, because we're really a republic, but we've been moving more towards a democracy for 200-some years...
00:32:19.000If that happens and you turn around and go, okay, now we have no qualifications.
00:32:36.000If I'm telling you that the 20-year-old kid in my neighborhood just bought a $7 million house from YouTube, this kid is obviously very wealthy.
00:33:03.000And, you know, these people, these 320 million people, this newfound responsibility of being able to chime in and communicate, they're used to just being able to talk shit at the gas station.
00:33:13.000They're not used to this being permanent.
00:33:17.000Political arguments on Twitter are crazy, dude.
00:33:33.000Is a deeper and deeper connection that we're going to have with each other.
00:33:37.000And I think we're going to get past language and we're going to get past culture in some sort of a weird way.
00:33:44.000And it might take a hundred years to do this, but I really believe there's going to be some sort of a universal operating system that allows us to exchange thoughts in a way that everyone understands.
00:33:54.000Some sort of a Rosetta Stone for the human mind.
00:34:15.000And someone's talking in Spanish, you will hear the translation in English in real time, and you'll be able to understand what they're saying.
00:34:21.000So that's what Esperanto was supposed to be once upon a time, right?
00:34:25.000It was going to be the common language, and we would all learn it, and because we would speak it, there would be no more wars and no more awful things, they thought.
00:34:36.000Well, Esperanto's been around for longer than this, but, I mean, the big push came after the First World War was over, and the League of Nations was formed, and they were trying to figure out, how do we never have a world war again?
00:34:46.000Well, we have to understand each other, first of all, and, you know, what if you could understand all the speeches and all the demagogues in all these other countries, right?
00:35:15.000And listen, that's the common problem because when people look at these regimes – We'll take the standard one that you talk about the Nazis, but there's a bazillion regimes like that.
00:35:24.000The first thing you do is you have to dehumanize the people you want to go after, because obviously we have human feeling towards each other.
00:35:30.000But if you can say something, and I think this is what's been most depressing for me, is that we seem to be backsliding on how we see people.
00:35:38.000But I mean, this idea that Well, for example, one of the things I see all the time, all the time, and I don't know where it comes from on Twitter and everywhere else, is this idea that different races are inferior to white folks because white folks built all this, and therefore we must.
00:35:51.000And you turn around and go, okay, one, how is that helpful?
00:36:10.000I mean, there's a bazillion things you have to do in this life.
00:36:12.000The idea that you have to be responsible for pushing back racism in America seems a heck of a lot of responsibility to put on an average Joe or Well, I think that these conversations are very, very important, and I think we're having them more so than ever before.
00:36:25.000And these conversations show how ridiculous it is to have blind allegiance towards people that have the same amount of melanin as you do.
00:36:35.000All human beings essentially either came from—actually, there's some speculation that some of them might have come from Europe thousands of years ago as well—but we're talking about hundreds of thousands of years ago, the very first Homo sapiens, they believe, came from Africa.
00:36:49.000Everybody migrated out of there and moved wrong.
00:36:51.000We essentially came from the same source.
00:36:53.000So all this idea of race is just based on a particular amount of time in a particular climate that forced people to adapt to that climate.
00:37:03.000In the colder, darker climates, you see paler skin.
00:37:06.000In the sunnier, hotter climates, you see more melanin.
00:37:10.000And the idea that these people that live with...
00:37:13.000The people that have more pale skin are superior than the people that have more melanin.
00:37:21.000If you take into account all the socio-economic factors that cause people to live certain ways, people that are isolated that live in certain tribal traditions, these things are all easily explained.
00:37:35.000And if you want to chalk it off to intelligence or the superiority of the white race, in 2017, you're a fucking moron.
00:37:43.000And this is a it's a good thing that we can have these conversations so you can expose these all these Charlottesville people that you see walking around with fucking swastika tattoos like Jesus Christ you fucking dummies those people that were involved in that those riots and all that racial bullshit that just went on These people,
00:38:02.000they need to see the reaction that the rest of the world has.
00:38:06.000And they are isolated and insulated in their weird little worlds.
00:38:09.000And when they go global with that shit, and they march with those tiki torches down the street, and people mock them and talk shit about them openly online, they get to understand how the rest of the world sees this ridiculous ideology that they subscribe to.
00:38:23.000This is the power of Free expression and communication that we're experiencing in 2017. And this is the power to nip a lot of this shit in the bud.
00:38:32.000If we can get past this tribal nonsense that we're all taking part of.
00:38:39.000There's tribal nonsense that's male versus female.
00:38:42.000There's tribal nonsense that's white versus black.
00:38:45.000There's tribal nonsense that's left versus right.
00:39:03.000The idea that it's still around is still mind-boggling.
00:39:06.000This kind of racism, this open, blatant racism, still exists in 2017. It's way less prevalent than it was 1,000 years ago.
00:39:15.000It's way less accepted than it was 2,000 years ago.
00:39:19.000And I think that's a blip in time, as you know, but probably better than anybody that I know.
00:39:24.000Yeah, but you know, it's funny because I... There's a part of me that thinks that there must be something deeply embedded in the DNA or our code or whatever that...
00:39:36.000Because it's either that or people run into this stuff and it appeals to them.
00:39:41.000So let's say, you know, the first time you ever hear a speaker...
00:39:44.000And look, let me draw a distinction because I'm one of those people that actually buys into the idea of, you know, I'd love to get to a place where we judge people by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.
00:40:11.000It would be like, no, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
00:40:13.000We should still be noticing race for all the, you know, these people need help.
00:40:17.000I guess what I'm saying is that there's a pendulum, and I'm looking at this, I feel like we're right in the middle of this right now, so it's so hard to analyze it.
00:40:25.000So everybody take this with a grain of salt.
00:40:27.000But I wonder if there's not a pendulum involved.
00:40:30.000So, for example, I tend to buy into most of the theories, for example, about racism that have always been put out there.
00:40:36.000But I think some are less helpful than others.
00:40:41.000And I think they come from academia because I think this is sort of what academics do, and I think that's their job.
00:40:47.000But a lot of times they'll come up with theories.
00:40:48.000So one of the ones that drives me crazy is white privilege, okay?
00:40:53.000White privilege is true in the sense that, like one African-American guy said to me, he said, I would love to forget about race, but white people won't let me.
00:41:00.000He says, every morning I wake up and am reminded and you don't have to deal with that.
00:41:10.000You have to be able to see how telling somebody that you were born with something that you didn't earn is going to be received on the other side.
00:41:19.000There are some people that have become these white supremacist types or anti-racial group because they're so upset about their perceived position.
00:41:49.000And again, I'm analyzing from within the maelstrom that we're in now, but that might be a reaction-counter-reaction thing.
00:41:55.000To say that we could have a society where you judge people on the content of their character, not the color of their skin, that might be as upsetting for an African-American activist as a white supremacist, because this society right now pays really close attention to your race for all kinds of reasons.
00:42:12.000I mean, I'm one of those people that believes we're all going to be a nice...
00:42:51.000That's literally what you had to worry about.
00:42:53.000I mean, you had to worry about someone who was the other.
00:42:55.000Well, and again, we forget in this time and place that the other didn't happen to be a skin color thing.
00:43:01.000I mean, you could be the Carolingian Empire that's being attacked by the Vikings.
00:43:06.000And to an outside observer, you all look like a bunch of blonde-haired, blue-eyed guys.
00:43:10.000But to them, the Vikings are the other.
00:43:12.000And in a tribal sense, they're as inferior and awful and barbaric as anything you can think of.
00:43:17.000So we make the distinction now based on this or that thing.
00:43:30.000Well, here's a perfect example where we have a blind spot of this was in Iraq.
00:43:36.000When we took over and killed Saddam Hussein and overthrew him, and then the Sunnis and the Shias went into a full-scale civil war, and everybody's like, whoa, whoa, what the fuck is going on?
00:43:49.000So many people had no idea there was two competing sects of Muslims that lived in that area.
00:43:56.000They had no idea there was a power struggle.
00:43:58.000We may be talking about The population as a whole, but come on, the people in the government understood this really well.
00:44:04.000I mean, this is why the first George Bush didn't want to go in and topple Saddam Hussein directly the way the second Gulf War did, because he didn't want to own that mess.
00:44:12.000And we knew that those groups were there because we were encouraging them and funding them to overthrow.
00:44:17.000I mean, there was a big Shiite rebellion against Saddam at one point after the first Gulf War, which we were funding and hoping for.
00:44:25.000The Kurds have been for a long time our friends, and we've been pushing for something there less than a state, but more than what they had under Saddam, because the Turks don't love them.
00:44:34.000Well, whenever you overthrow a dictator, you leave a power vacuum.
00:44:38.000And that power vacuum is never filled in a nice and calm and democratic way.
00:44:43.000I mean, look what's going on in Libya.
00:45:19.000This is not the kind of cavalier mindset you ever want to see in someone that possesses the power to overthrow a government, and someone who possesses the power to wield nuclear weapons.
00:45:30.000This is a person who's a chicken hawk.
00:45:33.000You're completely shielded from the idea of actually engaging in actual visceral combat yourself.
00:45:40.000You're outside in flying around in jets, having catered food.
00:45:45.000You're in war rooms making decisions while you're in air-conditioned buildings.
00:46:28.000I think the question of asking about dictators is really important because I think sometimes you have to ask how much of the fact that the country is held together is only because there's a dictator.
00:46:40.000So we'll use the Yugoslavia example because it's pretty classic.
00:46:43.000For those who don't know, Yugoslavia was a country made up of a bunch of different independent countries now.
00:47:14.000Iraq is not even a real country because if you didn't have an iron-fisted dictator holding it together, it wouldn't be together, right?
00:47:22.000So then when you take the one linchpin as awful, and Saddam Hussein was awful, awful.
00:47:28.000I'll give you a book to read that will just, you have to, it's the only book I've ever read that I had to read another book afterwards before I went to bed at night because it was so horrible.
00:47:43.000He would tell you what is scrawled on the walls in the prisons at Saddam Hussein's prisons that the prisoners would write in their own blood.
00:47:51.000But the point is, is that if there hadn't been a regime like that, would you have even had an Iraq So, if you say to yourself, okay, this guy is the only reason this country is held together, what if you pull out that linchpin, right?
00:48:04.000Yes, but if you could look into the crystal ball and find out, yes, but we're going to lose a million people in warfare between all these people if you pull the Saddam Hussein character out of there too quickly.
00:48:39.000Well, Iran has been on our naughty boy list since 1979. They used to be our best friend in the region, even better than Israel early on, because the Israeli relationship really got tight after, like, 73, 74. But Iran,
00:48:54.000we overthrew a government there with the British.
00:48:57.000Kermit Roosevelt was one of the people involved in that.
00:49:21.000Then on the other side, you have Iran as a friend.
00:49:24.000I mean, we had this whole area sussed for a while, and the 1979 revolution screwed everything up.
00:49:29.000And you could make a decent case that it's since 1979 that all this crap that we're dealing with today, including modern terrorism directed at us, stems from all that.
00:49:40.000I mean, that's the domino that begins tumbling that explains a lot of things, including the 82-83 Lebanon involvement and all that stuff.
00:49:47.000Yeah, it just seems like such a global mess.
00:49:50.000When you look at all the potential pieces that are in place that could cause chaos.
00:50:39.000What it basically means is buying stuff, military stuff.
00:50:42.000And the meeting was kind of about how important it was that countries don't start shifting over from, say, our tanks to another country's tanks.
00:50:51.000And it wasn't because we wanted to sell them tanks.
00:50:54.000It was because we wanted to sell them spare parts for the tanks.
00:51:24.000It used to be called petro-extortion, petro-blackmail, because in the 70s, and you and I are old enough to remember this when you had the long gas lines and all this, when OPEC punished countries like the United States for supporting Israel, the first thing you realize when somebody can do that to you is, oh my god, job number one has to be make sure no one can ever do that again.
00:51:41.000You can't control our foreign policy by saying you'll cut off the oil.
00:51:45.000Because if you do that, we'll just come and take the oil.
00:51:47.000We'll make sure you can't shut down the Western world because you don't like our policies.
00:51:53.000But then you say, okay, not only are we in there for the oil, but these countries that are our friends in the region who help Who help keep open access to the oil.
00:52:03.000These are places that should be using US equipment.
00:52:05.000And if they're using US equipment, we can sell them US spare parts.
00:52:08.000So you're not only keeping the oil access, which is important to us, but you're also keeping the one industry in this country we still make a ton of money in.
00:52:15.000Which is we still sell great military equipment and great military parts, and we send our advisors and our maintenance crews in every place all over the world to keep that stuff in running operation.
00:52:52.000I used to have a discussion board online, and some dude came on the discussion board and was saying he was this giant hacker, this famous hacker.
00:53:10.000So three days later, this letter arrives in our mailbox the same day I get an email saying, we'd love to have you come over to Central Command and blah, blah, blah.
00:53:18.000It looked like my daughter did it on her printer.
00:53:20.000There was no, like, you know, government seals.
00:53:54.000You take it to Washington, D.C. There'll be a car waiting for you.
00:53:57.000And I looked at my wife and I said, this hacker is just going to take a photo of me at the airport standing there like an idiot and then put it on the website.
00:55:03.000I go up to the room, I open up this, and it's all legit.
00:55:06.000Long story short, it's all, and there's people at this meeting, you're not allowed to say, but there's people that if they sat next to you would know exactly who they are.
00:55:12.000And so I get to the meeting, and it's all like Pentagon, everything's confiscated at the door, and you get this military guy who walks with you everywhere.
00:55:20.000So if you have to go to the bathroom, this dude has to walk to the bathroom with you.
00:55:23.000And so it's a table in this room, and Mattis is at the head of the table, and then a bunch of soldiers standing in like a circle around the table, just sort of standing there.
00:55:33.000So you've got like a cordon of soldiers.
00:55:35.000And I'm sitting down there with all these other people, and I have no idea why I'm there.
00:55:38.000So I open up the packet, and it's everybody at the meeting.
00:55:40.000And everybody's got like three pages on their bio.
00:55:44.000And then I open it up, and then there's this little teeny piece of paper that says, Dan Carlin, podcaster.
00:55:49.000And they went to, like, Wikipedia, which is all wrong anyway, and printed it, and I thought, oh yeah, these august people at this meeting are so excited to be at this meeting with Dan Carlin, podcaster, right?
00:55:59.000So the meeting goes on for a while, and then it breaks up, and all these people know each other, so they go off in their little corners and start talking during the lunch break.
00:56:57.000And what they're going to say is they're going to do exactly what they were going to do anyway, but they'll be able to say, we solicited the outside opinion from all these different people.
00:57:54.000But it was one of those get-togethers where you just...
00:57:57.000I really wasn't as prepared as I should have been because I was pretty darn sure the whole thing was a hoax.
00:58:02.000I mean, first of all, if you're going to send me a letter, can it look like a letter that the U.S.? Does it have to look like something where you printed the label on your brother label maker printer or something?
00:58:12.000Maybe they have multiple filters to leave in the possibility of plausible deniability.
00:58:17.000And the German guy, by the way, turned out to be like a West German general that was cooperating with the U.S. government as part of an exchange program.
00:58:24.000But the whole thing seemed like, I just thought it was this hacker dude figuring out he's going to really embarrass me in front of the whole forum, you know.
00:58:48.000All I can say is that both Mattis and his aide, which was Vice Admiral Harwood, they are, generals these days are so good at PR, because you get this wonderful thank you note where they go, oh, it was so great to have you.
00:59:00.000Here's my, please contact us if you, and you're thinking to...
00:59:06.000And I mean, I do think there's a little bit of the PR involved, and I think, you know, having the podcaster there might have been good for PR. Well, for sure.
00:59:13.000Maybe they thought it'd shut me up with my criticism, right?
00:59:35.000Not only was he cool, but he knows his history, which, you know, I have a soft spot in my heart, but he was talking about, you know, we're talking about the Middle East, and he's talking about the history of this and the history of that, and I'm sitting here going, and, you know, I know that history pretty well, and I was sitting there going...
01:00:40.000If you realize, and if you don't, you're an idiot.
01:00:43.000That you will actually hurt your long-term goals.
01:00:47.000If, for example, you hit a school and kill 200 little children, you realize, listen, the whole policy is really held hostage by the potential for a disastrous mistake.
01:00:57.000Because if the goal is to win hearts and minds, and listen, that's the only way to win this kind of thing, then you do damage to the goal with a mistake.
01:01:13.000And this war is particularly weird when it comes to that because of the use of drones.
01:01:18.000The use of drones has changed the entire idea of what war is because if you look at what happened during the Obama administration, this is one of the things that people don't like to talk about that are supporters of Obama.
01:01:31.000I believe the number is higher than 80% of innocent civilians that were killed by drones.
01:01:47.000Imagine if there were some criminals that were holed up in a building and you had 100 people in the building and 20 of them were criminals and you killed everybody.
01:01:55.000So you killed 80 people that were just secretaries and plumbers and just folks doing their job, living their life, children, their families.
01:02:04.000You killed all those people to get to those 20 people.
01:02:07.000Everyone would freak the fuck out if you did it physically yourself.
01:02:11.000If you ran in with a machine gun and gunned everybody down.
01:02:14.000You just, I had to kill everybody, that's the only way to get to the bad guys.
01:02:17.000Nobody would forgive you, and it would be front-page news, and it would be a horrific crime.
01:02:24.000But it happens constantly when it comes to drone warfare in Yemen and parts of the world that we're not even supposed to be at war with.
01:03:00.000So you imagine the period between no gunpowder and the mass use of gunpowder weapons.
01:03:05.000That's an RMA period in history, right?
01:03:08.000But normally, what appears to be fast, like the transition from no gunpowder to gunpowder, is really relatively slow by modern standards.
01:03:16.000So you have several generations to get used to the changes.
01:03:21.000But the speed of the pace of change now is so quickly that by the time you begin to say, okay, we've been using the current weapons systems and setup for five years now, we think we're starting to understand it, it's obsolete, right?
01:03:32.000What I said, and this is so long ago that we've been podcasting a long time, Joe, but I remember years and years ago when we first started using these drones, I said, we're going to screw this up because we're using them the same way the United States used atomic weapons, which is as though no one else will ever get them.
01:03:50.000And when other people get this stuff, those are going to be the rules they operate under too.
01:03:55.000But our attitude, and I've never understood this, but we have a very, maybe it's the, maybe it's how democratic republics work in the sense that we can only really think short term because the politicians are only rewarded short term.
01:04:07.000But I mean, if you say, listen, these are the goals of our drone program for the next five years, you're not incorporating what's going to happen when China gets drones.
01:04:35.000Easy to say when you're the only ones with it.
01:04:36.000So when you talk about the drone warfare, I would suggest that the problem of collateral damage, for lack of a better word, is one we've been dealing with for a long time now.
01:04:57.000So if you say something like, yes, Joe Rogan, sure, we killed those 200 kids at that school and it's regrettable, but that's an unusual thing.
01:05:04.000It's not like World War II where we carpet bombed whole cities.
01:05:08.000But is that the standard we can operate with?
01:05:10.000Well, I would suggest that the question is, does it hurt or help what you're really after?
01:05:15.000If Joe Rogan's children were killed in a bombing raid that another country launched, there is nothing that they could do to stop Joe Rogan from hating them for the rest of his life.
01:05:28.000And if Joe Rogan hating them means Joe Rogan's going to find a way to make you feel his pain, you just created another enemy while you were trying to eliminate enemies.
01:05:37.000This is what's so scary about terrorism.
01:05:39.000And you just changed not just the people that were directly affected, but the people that saw that as well.
01:05:46.000And, again, all I tell people, and people get offended, Joe, I've never understood, people get offended where I say, just put yourself in the other guy's moccasins for a minute.
01:05:57.000Because what people say to me, I had some guy get screaming mad at me saying, basically, he followed the dominoes saying, are you saying we deserved 9-11?
01:06:05.000And I said, if that's really where you took that, if that's where your argument goes, I said, then you totally misunderstood me.
01:06:40.000They've got the countryside and they've got the cities.
01:06:42.000And they've got a ton of the population that's under 30. And in the cities, they'd love to dance.
01:06:47.000And they'd love to, you know, the Iranians are not like the, you know, You said they all seem like Muslims to us, but they're all very different from each other.
01:06:53.000And the Arabians, for example, are known to be kind of Spartan and Stoic, whereas the Persians, as they used to be called, are a fun-loving, food-loving, dance-loving.
01:07:11.000It would be pretty darn easy if we treated them right, the same way my stepdad said, you know, you can destroy the Soviet Union by dumping Elvis records, porn, and blue jeans on them, which kind of is what happened.
01:07:23.000There's a way, I think, to approach this Muslim world thing, and let's not pretend it won't be totally destabilizing, because if you drop porn, blue jeans, and Elvis on those countries now, you're going to have a counter reaction with all these clerics and whatever that are freaking out.
01:07:36.000But at the end of the game, You won't end up looking like the bad guy.
01:07:40.000If you're bombing them, it is so hard to look like the good guy when you're bombing people.
01:07:46.000And so if you could say to me, listen, Dan, these are killers who want to hurt us, and we've got to take them out.
01:07:52.000But then I would say to you, you have to take them out in a way that doesn't screw up the main mission, which is, let's stop people from wanting to kill us.
01:08:00.000Right, like the way they took out Osama bin Laden.
01:09:11.000Again, this is a military history major talking, so I think differently about this, but in a sense, that would be so much easier for us to beat.
01:09:17.000I mean, the funny thing is we know how to beat big countries in war.
01:09:21.000Yeah, but if we're engaging in thermonuclear warfare, nobody wins.
01:09:26.000If we can stop them from ever getting to that point, that's the success.
01:09:29.000The success is keeping them fragmented, keeping them beaten down, and that if we could do that, we could keep them...
01:09:35.000But they are showing that they can destroy...
01:10:40.000And against certain things, it's extremely effective, right?
01:10:44.000It's not effective against everything, but sometimes it's...
01:10:47.000I mean, if you could do to Martin Luther King what we could do to people now, his sitting...
01:10:53.000For example, one of the things you young people may not know is one of his effective protests was to go to these all-white...
01:10:59.000Counters in the south where they wouldn't serve black folks and just sit at the counter and wait to be arrested and then when he was arrested Time magazine would be there to get and there's a great photograph of him you know being handcuffed just for the audacity of sitting at a soda counter right it was very powerful but it was powerful because you saw violence initiated against somebody who was totally peaceful right if today you could go up to him And just tase him,
01:11:22.000or do something that was not physically violent, then he wouldn't get what he needed out of that, which is he needed that photograph of him being physically manhandled for the simple, or like, not to change subjects, it's the same subject, but like the pictures that were coming out when I was a kid,
01:11:38.000you can open up those giant Life magazine books with the great photos of Life magazine, and one of them was famous.
01:11:43.000It was a black protester in the South.
01:11:45.000Alabama or Mississippi, and he's standing there with his arms at his side, not resisting at all, and the police officer has sicked a German shepherd on him who is biting him, right?
01:11:55.000And you look at yourself right there and you go, okay, that photograph right there motivated so much public opinion in a different direction, but what if they didn't need to use a dog or a water cannon?
01:12:05.000What if they could have just injected you from behind, the guy falls limp and you just carry him off silently?
01:12:10.000Well, you just diminished his power to make a difference.
01:12:56.000If all he's doing is saying, do I really have to sit at the back of the bus in 1965 or something?
01:13:03.000This kind of thing motivated a lot of people.
01:13:06.000But if you, you know, it's like 60 Minutes did a great piece, I want to say 1992, 1993, where they were showing all of the new anti-protester weapons that were in development.
01:13:16.000And what's funny is several of them have arrived.
01:13:18.000One of them is the sonic cannon, which they deployed against anti-New World Order protester types.
01:13:24.000Isn't that what they used against people that were in Cuba?
01:13:52.000See if you can pull that up and figure out what the fuck that was.
01:13:54.000Imagine instead of that powerful photo that made a difference, imagine if you could have just aimed the sonic cannon and people leave because it's painful.
01:14:01.000Well, does that reduce the value then of that non-violent protest that was so powerful?
01:14:12.000So, a group of American diplomats in Havana, Cuba, have suffered severe and unexplained hearing loss over the past year, which U.S. officials believe was caused by a covert and advanced sonic device.
01:14:23.000So this is something that we're not even aware of.
01:15:14.000You just go down and then let the next row get hit too.
01:15:18.000Because that was a powerful sign of who's right and who's wrong in this whole thing.
01:15:23.000But if you could just deploy that sonic cannon and all those people had so much pain in their ears, they just had to leave and nobody got beaten.
01:15:31.000Does that undercut the power of nonviolent protest to make change?
01:15:35.000It's fascinating that that might have been in the minds of the people who designed this thing.
01:15:39.000Well, it's so abstract, the idea of this sonic weapon that you don't hear, but that affects your hearing and it causes injury to your body, but you don't hear it.
01:15:51.000That's not going to affect us because it's not a bat, right?
01:15:54.000A bat that hits a person, we understand it.
01:15:57.000Where you get a picture afterwards that you can circulate.
01:16:00.000Well, remember the Chicago convention in 68 that everybody, you know, where the protesters were beaten so badly on television and all that stuff.
01:16:08.000If you didn't have to beat them, does it lose a lot of its power if you just deploy the sonic cannon and everybody goes away because it hurts?
01:16:15.000It seems to me like you would have just defused one of the most important movements.
01:16:19.000I would call that one of the big political things that happened in the United States in the past 50 years.
01:16:24.000And if there was no actual violence, it's not a thing.
01:16:28.000Isn't it fascinating that we have to see something where we go, oh, I know what that is.
01:17:20.000And there's a book called On Killing by a U.S. Army psychologist, David Grossman's his name, where he talks about killing in terms of distance.
01:17:54.000In other words, you almost have like a dual character that comes out when you know you don't have to see this person.
01:18:00.000And truthfully, all I really want from Joe Rogan is to answer me.
01:18:03.000And the best way he can answer me is if I call him something.
01:18:05.000Well, anybody who does anything negative where the public is aware of it, like, say, this Louis C. Case thing or something like that, where you can immediately find and target.
01:18:15.000Now I have a reason to go after this person.
01:18:23.000And then people from all over the world can just pour their vitriol and anger and bitterness and whatever it is because they have some sort of a righteous anger.
01:18:33.000Well, there's a reason I can be angry at this person.
01:18:36.000Or I saw what Kathy Griffin did when she held up that head of Donald Trump.
01:18:53.000Like, death threats and hate and anger.
01:18:55.000You know, Joe, you've taught me a lot about the whole social media thing, though, because I would come in here, the audience doesn't know this, but I would have questions about that stuff, and you've thought more about this than I have, and you were able on several, I quoted you, where, you know, I mean, because I try to make sense of this stuff, and like I said, you're farther along, I think, the road of thinking about some of this stuff,
01:19:12.000and it gave me some shortcuts, but I mean, I do, because I think it's a fascinating phenomenon, because it's never been available.
01:19:18.000I mean, when do people ever have this kind of power?
01:20:20.000There's a physical proximity question, too.
01:20:22.000You're not going to go up to this guy and say this stuff to his face because he might knock you in the head.
01:20:26.000The good thing about a letter is maybe if someone is an honest person, they can express themselves in a letter in a way that they would have a difficult time doing it in person.
01:20:35.000Yeah, they feel embarrassed or they have...
01:20:37.000When you're writing something, you have the opportunity to really think about your words, and edit, and go over it, and then decide, this actually represents my real thoughts, and, you know, as imperfect as it is, send it.
01:20:51.000But when you can do that any moment of any day, with your phone, in the middle, like someone's talking, yeah, hold on a second, hold on a second, fuck you, fucking asshole.
01:21:02.000Look at the trouble these athletes or celebrities get in with what was obviously, I'm just about to board the plane, and boom, they get off the plane and there's a huge firestorm because something was taken wrong or not the way you meant it.
01:21:23.000I think we went through all these rudimentary steps, right?
01:21:25.000We went through grunts, and then we had verbal language, and then we had written language, and then we had the printing press, and then we had the ability to broadcast, and then we had social media, the ability for anybody to broadcast.
01:21:37.000And I think as we move into augmented reality, and what I've been thinking about more and more is this Rosetta Stone idea, this idea that we're going to come up with some sort of a way of communicating ideas that's not limited and restricted to language.
01:21:52.000As a military history fanatic, do you know what I instantly think of?
01:21:56.000I instantly think of the fact that could you start a war if one country's average Joes and Janes on social media or whatever passes?
01:22:32.000Which is what I tried to explain to my daughter, is that we are in an era where we are seeing what happens when you hand humanity these tools that they've never had before.
01:22:41.000And there's two ways of looking at it.
01:22:43.000The optimistic one, which is going to free up, open up, or the pessimistic ones, which say maybe something like, can our representative democracy handle this?
01:22:52.000And not because we can't handle communication, but maybe like you would say, the kind of communication that we have where these are little teeny chunks.
01:23:00.000We're not having deep, you know, philosophical, coffeehouse, Ben Franklin kind of conversation.
01:23:04.000We're having 140 character discussions.
01:23:07.000What can you say in 140 characters other than you're an idiot, you're wrong, it's fake news, you know, and then start swearing at them.
01:23:25.000I believe that the shift from 140 to 280 will make people, it'll give people the opportunity to be more clear with their ideas.
01:23:33.000I will say that it's disheartening for a person like myself who enjoys depth, because, you know, the history shows are so long because I enjoy the depth.
01:23:40.000To see people confronted with, like, a page of text going, oh, too long to read.
01:23:45.000But you do go, okay, can you really be a useful citizen as a voting member of this informed citizenry and do your job if you see a page of text?
01:23:54.000I mean, the Constitution today would have to be 140 characters, you know, for most of the people today to go, okay, I'll sit down and read.
01:24:00.000Well, one of the things that your podcast has done that's amazing is giving people information in a very entertaining form that they would never sit down and read a book about.
01:24:08.000There's a ton of people, probably me included, that have never read as much about Genghis Khan as I got from your podcast.
01:24:28.000We put all of the materials we use, and we link directly to a place where you can get them.
01:24:31.000So if you actually went out and bought some books on the Mongols after that, or that created an intellectual relationship between you and the Mongols, where for the rest of your life, ooh, this is a Mongol...
01:24:42.000They found Genghis Khan's tomb or something, and you're into it because you know about...
01:24:48.000I mean, in terms of, I mean, I heard, I got a great letter.
01:24:51.000This is the highlight of my career, was this letter from the wife of a historian that we used in the World War I series.
01:24:57.000And she wrote me this letter saying, you have no, this is like very self-serving, but you You have no idea what you're doing because history is something that not a lot of people were getting interested in.
01:25:05.000And now we have people showing up in the classrooms becoming history majors because they got interested in what you were doing.
01:25:11.000So if we're poking people with a stick and getting them interested in this subject, do you know how cool it would be to have that, you know, when you're all dead and gone and somebody says, what did you do?
01:25:20.000He said, well, he got a lot of people really interested in history.
01:25:25.000I think that's the coolest thing in the world.
01:25:27.000But it dovetails with what we were talking about, this whole new media, will it be good, will it be bad, and it's probably going to be both, right?
01:25:33.000But the idea that people could get interested in history again because some idiot in his garage was talking about it, I think that's...
01:25:40.000It's not going to be everybody, but it's going to be a lot of people.
01:25:42.000And for those people, it is going to have a profound effect, and me included.
01:25:46.000And I think that this new media, this thing where nobody is telling you, hey, Dan, it's time to do a podcast on blank.
01:25:54.000It's time to cut back this, edit that.
01:25:57.000You're doing it based on your interests, your knowledge of this.
01:26:00.000There wouldn't have been this show if there was anybody else.
01:26:21.000It's the difference between blended whiskey and a single malt.
01:26:25.000When I get these TV offers, and you've had...
01:26:28.000Zillions of them where you go and you talk to these people and you realize instantly if I go do this with them, they're going to homogenize it, dumb it down.
01:26:35.000And you sit there and go, they're going to make something far inferior to what I'm able to do myself because they really don't understand why it works anyway.
01:26:43.000In other words, like you said, you couldn't have been able to do this show.
01:26:45.000It's funny to me that the industry, for example, doesn't realize what it is that people like about what you do and figure out a way to...
01:26:53.000They're not open-minded enough to say, listen, Joe, come and do this TV show, which is a lot like what you do.
01:26:59.000I don't understand how people like you and people like me and all the people that do what we do haven't created more of an understanding in the old media.
01:28:17.000And I said, the hardcore history way to do this, though, is to imagine that era with today's anti-terror laws and the way we treat terrorists today.
01:28:27.000So we were filming, like, recreations of, like, Abbie Hoffman.
01:28:31.000In his American t-shirt being waterboarded by CIA agents, because if we applied to the modern anti-terror to the way that the Americans...
01:29:47.000And they're hoping that with that momentum, the quality of the show will add to the momentum, and then you're going to build up, and a bunch of people will catch on, and eventually it'll get rolling.
01:29:57.000But in order to do that, they want to take away all the jagged edges, smooth everything down to make it aerodynamic, make everything super homogenized.
01:30:06.000I mean, that's what they do with every single sitcom.
01:30:07.000Oh, and what they'll do to your career.
01:30:09.000Like, the last physical fight I almost had with another adult male was a radio program director.
01:30:15.000And the radio program director came into my town new, and you know, if you've ever been in radio, when they come into town new, the first thing they're going to do is change everything, because they've got to put their own stamp on it, or why are they there?
01:30:23.000So this guy comes in and he goes, we're going to rebrand you.
01:30:26.000He goes, I want everyone to think of your name and instantly think of the brand, and I'm already, you know...
01:30:33.000So I hate to say this, because this will become a meme online that I will have to live with the rest of my life, but it's an absolutely true story.
01:30:38.000So the guy says to me, he goes, listen, imagine a billboard that says, Dan Carlin, he fucks chickens.
01:33:57.000And when you know that you're getting something from a person and you like how that guy thinks, then it becomes interesting.
01:34:03.000But when you're not really getting it from that person, you've got a bunch of people holding cue cards and standing behind them and you're creating this Well, my wife said today, we're in the hotel room and she turns on the TV and Ryan Seacrest is on and he like does 10,000 things a day,
01:35:01.000It's like he's not even a fucking human on those things.
01:35:03.000It's like he's figured out a way to hit this...
01:35:09.000This droning sound that resonates with the people that live in that existence, with the people that are stuck in traffic and that are checking their phone every 15 minutes.
01:35:18.000Those are the people that are on Instagram 35 times a day.
01:35:21.000You know that's the average amount of time a person looks at Instagram?
01:35:50.000Limbaugh's right when he says that there will be a wing in the talk radio museum devoted to him one day.
01:35:55.000But what he always says, which I find interesting, is he tried to do what he does now multiple times and got fired.
01:36:01.000Because their attitude was, we're not taking any chances with this.
01:36:05.000And then he says, the minute I'm successful, every consultant out there is telling everybody to be just like him.
01:36:10.000In other words, if you're a podcaster out there or thinking about doing something in the new media, understand that there is something so valuable about what you specifically are bringing to the table.
01:36:21.000And the minute you ask these other people what to do, they don't know what's specific about it.
01:36:25.000They're going to go and say, well, we can pull a little piece of what this person does, and eventually it's not even you.
01:36:30.000One of the great things I always thought about Hardcore History is that over time you self-select your audience.
01:36:35.000I think you do that with every podcast.
01:36:37.000So you say something like, okay, I'm only going to talk about the stuff I'm interested in.
01:36:40.000Well, what you know then a year later is whatever fans are listening to you, that's a pretty good gauge because they're there because they like what you're...
01:36:47.000So I don't have to sit there and go, gosh, this would be a popular topic.
01:37:15.000They're adding up all of the communication that you've had.
01:37:19.000They're analyzing how you see different scenarios.
01:37:23.000They're analyzing how you navigate, and they're seeing you when you're tired, and they're seeing you when you're feeling in a great mood, and then maybe they're seeing you when something bad happens and you don't feel so good.
01:37:37.000So they get to know you and there's an intimate understanding of you that is almost impossible to get when you're hosting The Tonight Show or you're acting in a television show.
01:37:49.000Or doing a five-minute piece of content opposed to a three-hour piece of content.
01:38:21.000The person who pulls it off, it's not good for you because you know you're wrong.
01:38:24.000You're carrying that shit around in your head all the time.
01:38:26.000No, I always say, if you think, if people, and this is again why one of my current events podcasts is not really happening right now, because I I feel like when you're in absolutely uncharted water, you can't know what's going on.
01:38:39.000You feel like we're in uncharted water?
01:38:40.000I think we're in uncharted water, and I think it's a combination.
01:38:42.000Everyone always thinks it's a Trump thing, but to me, Trump is a vector.
01:38:46.000To me, what you were talking about with the social media is as much a part of what makes this an absolutely unprecedented time, and a bunch of other things.
01:38:55.000The globalization of the earth, like you're saying, we're doing shows and hearing from people from other countries.
01:39:00.000I mean, all this stuff interacting together has created an absolutely unprecedented situation.
01:39:05.000So maybe I just organize my thinking differently, but I organize it historically, and there's no way to put this into any box that's ever existed before.
01:39:14.000So when I watch these talk shows or whatever with people who have no choice, it's 6 p.m., I have to be on the air, and I have to have something to say to rile the audience up.
01:39:46.000And I think one of those pieces that's in play, and one of the reasons why you see so much bitterness and anger in social media, and we talked about this mechanism that social media allows people to communicate in this really cruel way without experiencing that person right in front of you, right?
01:40:01.000But I think one of the reasons why these people have this deep-seated anger and resentment is there's a bunch of people out there that have these lives that are deeply unsatisfying.
01:40:55.000You sit there and go, and you look at what people make, and you sit there and go, you can make Quite a lot of money by average Joe standards and still not be in good shape.
01:41:04.000So I know people turn around, make good living, really good living, and turn around and go, I'm just holding my head above water.
01:41:10.000And so you go, okay, if you're holding your head just barely, what's a person making a third or a I mean, this is really, when you talk about revolutions happening and things going down in weird, unpredictable, negative ways, you, and we've talked about this before,
01:41:26.000you let enough of your society fall into the loser class, for lack of a better word, winners and losers in society.
01:41:32.000If you, every society can suck up a certain amount of people not able to make it.
01:41:36.000But if that number gets large enough, revolutions happen.
01:41:55.000They want to do something that's not soul-kill.
01:41:57.000If you make furniture, you make furniture for a living and you feel a great satisfaction out of that and you sell that furniture, look man, making furniture feels good.
01:42:06.000If you can do that, you could cut those corners perfectly and sand everything down nice and stain it and then it's done and you get the satisfaction and you sell it to someone and that pays your bills.
01:42:16.000That is infinitely more satisfying than being stuck in some fucking cubicle working for someone that you don't want to work for, having to have these stupid fucking office meetings, talking to people in human resources, sitting down with your supervisor where they evaluate your job performance.
01:42:31.000You really need to be enthusiastic about this company.
01:42:40.000There's a lot of people out there that would way rather do something else, and I hope they understand that they can.
01:42:46.000Let's talk about that, because we've been talking about us and podcasting and new media and whatever, but really, and I rarely like to give advice, because you don't want to be responsible for people acting on it and having it not turn out well, but what I tell people is two things.
01:43:00.000Right now, the United States of America, the way it's built...
01:43:31.000But once upon a time, it's like in the back of your bedroom and you've got a company and it's got a show and people are listening.
01:43:36.000If you make your furniture and you don't have to have a brick and mortar store, but you can put a website up, make it with Squarespace or one of those other things, and all of a sudden you have a business out of your house...
01:43:47.000The freedom, the satisfaction, the ability to set your own hours.
01:44:09.000So I always tell people that if you can, and it's not always something they can do, maybe you do it on the side when you've got your regular job.
01:44:15.000Starting a small business now, in this climate that we have right now, is not only possible, it's not that much of a gamble, because if worse comes to worse, you didn't invest $100,000 you didn't have starting it all the time, right?
01:44:48.000And you have a free online store with it, and they have these drag-and-drop user interfaces.
01:44:53.000You use photos, you drag them on there, size it in place, boom.
01:44:57.000Next thing you know, you've got a website.
01:44:58.000Sell your furniture, sell whatever the fuck you make.
01:45:01.000Whether you make clothes, or you're designing backpacks, or there's...
01:45:05.000A lot of people out there that have interests and they've never pursued those interests because they're fucking tired from doing some boring, soul-sucking job.
01:45:13.000It's hard to go to work and put your effort into that and then come home and then work for yourself.
01:48:05.000My point is, I didn't start out thinking, this is going to replace my income.
01:48:11.000This is going to be, I just did it as a passion project.
01:48:14.000And I think if people have a regular day job, if you could just find some one thing that you do as a passion project and just keep building on it, just keep watering it, keep adding fertilizer, keep giving it attention, keep giving it focus, and you can escape.
01:48:29.000You can escape and you can be self-serving.
01:48:32.000I always ask people when they want to start it, like a podcast, I'll say something like, how many listeners would you have to have for you to care?
01:48:39.000And that's a magic number that's different for everybody, right?
01:48:43.000But what's great about what we do that's different from broadcasting is that there is a giant pie of people.
01:48:53.000And if you're going to do a podcast on science fiction comic books from the 1950s or something that has such a narrow audience, they'd never put it on television because it's too narrow.
01:49:03.000You will be able, if you even get.00001% of that billion pie, it's not only going to be a decent number of people in terms of what you would think is successful, but they are going to be so enthusiastic because this is an outlet that they don't have.
01:49:18.000It's like I always tell somebody, if you're into Harry Potter, what are the TV networks giving you?
01:49:22.000But there's multiple Harry Potter podcasts.
01:50:55.000This idea that like, oh, it's easy for you to say.
01:50:58.000Everybody's got these stupid barriers they put in their own head.
01:51:01.000You got to resist those goddamn things because they don't do you any good and they certainly define the potential for your future in a negative way that's not self-serving and it's not even real.
01:51:10.000You know, you put this artificial ceiling on the potential for what you're doing.
01:52:42.000The image I have, though, for what you're talking about, I've always thought it's a little like a running back in football who takes the ball and who goes forward and there's no hole.
01:52:50.000All you run into is the back of your offensive lineman.
01:52:53.000But if you keep hitting, if a hole is going to open up, boom, you'll squirt through.
01:52:57.000Now, there's no guarantee in life the hole will be there, but there is a guarantee that if you're not continually smacking at it, then when it opens up, you won't be wrecked, right?
01:53:13.000But I guess what I'm saying is I remember being a TV reporter at a small station, and I would get out of work at midnight, and the story that I just spent all day on aired, and it was awful.
01:53:23.000And I would get out, and I would literally—this is when I still had quite a bit of hair—I would sit there, and you pull your hair out.
01:55:41.000And don't look at these failures as like proof that you suck.
01:55:46.000Look at them as opportunities for growth.
01:55:49.000Look at them as opportunities to be motivated to do better.
01:55:52.000Winston Churchill had a line about reading quotes, about how inspirational reading famous quotes were.
01:55:58.000And he says they motivate you from a number of different ways, including the idea that, you know, you think it's just you or you think that these people who did so well were so incredibly gifted or privileged from the get-go.
01:56:08.000And when you realize, no, no, no, they're more like me than I think, that becomes inspirational, right?
01:56:12.000You telling your audience this is inspirational.
01:56:15.000You don't want to hear, go back to school, go do this work.
01:56:18.000But if you hate your job, that is like nature telling you to try something different.
01:56:22.000And it's motivating because the motivation is you might not have to do that soul-killing job anymore.
01:56:27.000Well, if you look at someone who's doing really well, like say if you focus on like Kevin Hart or someone like that, some very famous and successful comedian, all you see is him now flying around in private jets, wearing a new pair of sneakers every day, driving around in Bentleys.
01:57:11.000It takes place in comedians and musicians.
01:57:14.000There is a starting point and then with time and focus and as long as you reevaluate and reassess and constantly objectively look at what you're doing and then pursue it with passion and focus, you get better at things.
01:57:28.000Doing all those things ends up, you know, it's funny, but your life experiences create who you are and all those things actually make you a more form...
01:57:36.000I know I'm speaking to the choir here, but all those things make you a more formidable person.
01:57:41.000So that eventually that next endeavor is you're more prepared for and you're more formidable.
01:57:47.000And so, you know, you turn around and you say, what was I like as a 23-year-old intern compared to what I'm like now?
01:58:22.000I've done it in the past, but I did it because they were just goals that I was pursuing on the side as well as doing stand-up and all the other things that I do in my life.
01:58:28.000But I've found that things that are completely unrelated to my career that are difficult enhance what I do.
01:58:34.000Whether it's yoga, or running hills, or archery, or all these things that I pursue.
01:59:02.000And forcing myself to get through that 90-minute class and try 100% with every pose enhances my stamina for thinking and approaching other things.
01:59:13.000Let's macro it out a little bit, because I'm very interested in what you're saying.
01:59:16.000So here you and I are talking to the listeners, many of whom are already accomplished and well into their goals, but if they're not, they're listening to this.
01:59:23.000I'm thinking to myself, okay, if you're trying to design a society, you know, we had talked about revolution, if too many people are the losers in the society.
01:59:31.000If you said to yourself, what really matters in the society is making more Americans who are happier with their lives, more successful, doing what they want to do, in other words, empowering them to create...
01:59:42.000How different is that in terms of a setup from what our school system is designed to do now, which is a holdover to essentially make good factory workers, right?
01:59:50.000I mean, if you said to somebody, listen, this entire country is built for you to become a businessman with your own business, you start your own company.
02:00:04.000But I mean, if that was the entire goal of your education, to turn every student in that class into a small business person doing their own dreams someday, how would you do it differently than what you do now?
02:00:16.000Because to me, the biggest crime isn't that we have the kind of system we have.
02:00:19.000It's that we're not training people on how to utilize it.
02:00:34.000You know, I mean, this is a little bit of a hand-holding, but I'm teaching this to my kids right now, right?
02:00:39.000I'm telling them, listen, don't go do the soul-killing job.
02:00:43.000Work on this thing that you seem to be good at and that you love, and let's work on it now.
02:00:47.000I mean, I guess what I'm saying is, could we be doing a better job here?
02:00:51.000And if so, you know, would you have to fight teachers unions to do it?
02:00:55.000What do you have to do to break apart a system that's 140 years old and not working all that well right now to more correspond to the reality that people are growing up in now?
02:01:04.000Well, I had a conversation with my daughter yesterday about this, my nine-year-old.
02:02:03.000A certain amount of that stuff is fucking boring.
02:02:05.000Once you get past that boring shit and you have a base understanding of how to communicate, how to add, how to count, how to multiply, how government works, all these different things that you should have sort of a base understanding of, then it's like everyone has a different personality.
02:02:20.000They have different Different interests, different things that they would be really satisfied pursuing.
02:03:40.000So if I was creating a fantasy educational system, the hinge point between what you just said is that you said, I couldn't stand this, I couldn't work the real job, I couldn't fit into this, so I had to find another way.
02:03:54.000A lot of people get stuck with the, so I had to find another way part.
02:03:59.000It's funny, because your kids are young enough too, so you went through this, but when my kids were really young, before they were in the school they're in now, we put them in one of those Montessori schools.
02:04:09.000No, it's different school to school, but the basic concept is that you don't force the children to learn anything specific.
02:04:16.000You have all these things around, and the children go to what they want to do.
02:04:21.000So the upsides, obviously, that from the get-go, they're only reading what they're into.
02:04:25.000The downside, of course, is that there's all this other stuff you're supposed to learn.
02:04:29.000It's the dichotomy between, you know, you had talked about needing to have these skills, little math skills.
02:04:34.000You need some basic foundational stuff.
02:04:36.000But something is also happening at that level, which is you're finding out which students are into math and would like to have a career in math.
02:04:42.000Other people are being touched by a foreign language in a way that they think, I'd like to learn more, I'd like to speak it fluently, I'd like to teach it.
02:04:48.000So in a way, you're already beginning to select what kids are into by exposing them to this stuff.
02:04:52.000Most of us find it boring, but there might be something, that's where I first found history as a discipline, right?
02:04:59.000If most kids say, oh God, the last thing I want to hear is some history, but I get turned on by it, okay, well then it's It's worth exposing you to all those things.
02:05:08.000I think the problem is, though, is that it would be great, for example, to have half your schooling, maybe, at that young age, be sort of a Montessori model where you say, okay, we spent our time on reading, writing, and arithmetic.
02:05:19.000Now we want you to go around You can't be playing video games unless playing video games is what you want to do for a living and you're going to be able to do some educational work on it.
02:05:27.000But I mean, I would love to see more of a fostering for the fact that, listen, we're trying to create entrepreneurs here rather than trying to create drone workers on the Amazon assembly line.
02:05:37.000Now, if you end up on the Amazon assembly line anyway, great, good for you.
02:05:41.000I'm glad you can bring some food home.
02:05:43.000But the goal ought to be to let you start a business and maybe employ a bunch of other people, you know?
02:05:49.000Yeah, and the goal would be to have less unhappy, dissatisfied people.
02:05:54.000Because it creates a more stable society.
02:06:10.000It was a Kanye West who said, do rich people have problems or just different problems?
02:06:14.000I mean, everybody's got these challenges, but like you said, there's not a lot more stressful than having a ton of credit card debt, wondering if you're going to lose your house, wondering how you're going to pay for your kids' education.
02:06:25.000I mean, all those things are soul-crushing.
02:06:27.000Not only that, because you're in debt, you get nervous, so it suppresses your ability to express yourself and take risks.
02:06:41.000I mean, the one thing is as you get older, I mean, it's funny because getting older is one of those things that you can only understand when you get there.
02:06:48.000So all through your life, you're going through these, God, isn't this the interesting part of being in your 30s or being in your 40s?
02:06:54.000So as I go into my 50s now, I'm sitting here going, energy is so under-talked about.
02:06:59.000You know, the ability to, like my buddy who wrote me and said, you know, I feel like I've screwed up my life.
02:07:40.000If you don't have energy, not only will you not have the energy to pursue things, but you won't be able to do them the same way.
02:07:47.000If you have energy and enthusiasm and say, like, you're healthy and you want to write a book, you're going to have thoughts that'll come into your mind that won't come into your mind if you're exhausted.
02:08:01.000That's huge for anything you're trying to pursue, whether we're talking about furniture making, whether you're talking about being an author, whatever it is.
02:08:08.000Let's talk about ideas for a minute, because I think that's another one.
02:08:10.000When we talk about small businesses or starting as an entrepreneur, you know, I'm one of those people that is not sure that we don't have a finite number of ideas to each of us, and all of them are valuable enough, even if they don't appear to be on the surface, to write down.
02:08:26.000As a matter of fact, I went to a business meeting a couple years ago with one of these TV guys I was just talking about, and we go to this business meeting, and we're all on our phones and whatever, and he pulls out an old-fashioned journal that you write in, and he just starts writing.
02:08:40.000And I looked at that and I thought, in one sense he looks like a dinosaur, but I went out and bought one.
02:08:45.000And now it's crazy how often, you know, all I do is write ideas in it.
02:08:50.000And a lot of them I look back on now and I go, okay, that's still stupid.
02:08:53.000But other ones I look back on and go, God, I didn't know what this idea meant at the time, but five years later, this idea is really, you know, I guess what I'm saying is that if you wanted to take almost like a religious view of it, God only gives you so many ideas.
02:09:09.000Folks, what really is going to make you unique sometimes is the way your brain works differently than anyone's brain who's ever existed on the planet.
02:10:27.000Again, you know more about this than I do, but I was a theater major for my first two years of college, and we did improv comedy.
02:10:33.000And the guy who taught us improv in high school, really, he had a great line.
02:10:37.000He said, that part of your brain, like every part of your brain, is a muscle.
02:10:40.000And he said, the more you're thinking, okay, I've got a show this Friday that I have to come up with something funny for, the better you get at it.
02:10:50.000Your brain starts looking at things and finding things.
02:10:52.000So you're almost like training it to help you now in this new endeavor.
02:10:56.000It's a very plastic sort of an approach, but it's the same thing with the ideas.
02:11:00.000One idea in your little book that you wrote down could make your life, your child.
02:11:04.000I mean, if you're Henry Ford, I mean, how many people did you employ for decades afterwards because of a good idea?
02:11:11.000I mean, our world is built on those things.
02:11:13.000And also, like, the idea of having these ideas and the enthusiasm that comes from it, like, it starts to escalate, and you start to calculate, like, oh, and I need more, and I need this, and maybe that, and then the motivation and the momentum of these ideas can lead to enthusiasm.
02:12:04.000I would also suggest that you and I and everyone has an interest in not allowing people to drone on too much because for the same reason I talked about instability.
02:12:13.000We did a common sense show once called The Revenge of the Gangrenous Finger.
02:12:17.000And the idea was that if you ignore If you have enough people in your society that aren't doing well long enough, it's a little like saying, yes, my finger has gangrene, but it's the little one, so who the hell cares?
02:12:29.000But eventually, if you ignore it long enough, it'll poison your bloodstream and destroy the body itself.
02:12:40.000Preaching revolution in the middle 1990s and said, you're an idiot.
02:12:44.000He said, you're an idiot because no one's going to face the bayonets as long as they have enough food in their bellies and they're doing halfway okay.
02:12:50.000But of course, the implication there is if they don't have food in their bellies and they're not doing okay, then all bets are off.
02:12:58.000We all have a vested interest in seeing that more of our countrymen do better, because it's better for the society as a whole.
02:13:03.000It creates a better world for your kids, happier...
02:13:48.000What would you do if you knew that there was a crew following you around with cameras documenting your future incredible success and they want to catch you in the act of it all?
02:13:57.000You would do all the right things you would have to do.
02:14:18.000I mean, if you say, listen, this guy grew up and started his own business because his folks taught him those kinds of things and encouraged him or she with her creativity.
02:14:26.000Okay, that's a person that's got a huge advantage in life.
02:14:29.000We talked about white privilege giving you an advantage.
02:14:31.000Well, good parent privilege gives you an advantage.
02:14:33.000But then the question that, if you're looking at it macro in a society sense that comes up is, okay, what can society do if you say this is a real problem for the rest of us, not enough good parents, because those people never learned it?
02:14:47.000And that almost gets a little socialistic, where you talk about the state teaching you creativity, and it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense, but there's got to be, if we decide that this is a national security interest, you know, having more Americans live in the dream, have less losers.
02:15:20.000And I think that some of us, you could be born into any circumstance, but you've got this gene, so you're going to be ambitious, and you're going to overcome it.
02:15:27.000Then I think there's people who have no ambition gene, and there's nothing you can do to help them.
02:15:31.000And then I think there's a huge number of people in the middle that could go either way.
02:15:34.000And the question I have is, you don't have to help the ones with the gene.
02:15:37.000You can't do anything for the ones without the gene.
02:15:40.000How do you increase the odds for the people who could go either way?
02:18:55.000It's fucking hilarious, but do you look at it in terms of like one day someone is going to do a hardcore history series about the Trump administration?
02:19:08.000Do you look at it in terms of like establishing a narrative or like trying to describe it to people someday?
02:19:18.000I think we're too in the maelstrom, like we said earlier, for me to figure that out.
02:19:21.000I will say that I see certain side benefits.
02:19:25.000So, for example, you know, one of the things that I've talked about for many, many years, and we did a whole six-hour podcast on it, too, is the president's power to launch a nuclear war all by himself or herself.
02:20:07.000They're all fine with it as long as you're one of those insiders.
02:20:10.000The first time you get an outsider in there, now they're scared to death.
02:20:15.000But they should have been scared to death decades and decades ago.
02:20:17.000So if you said that we have a Trump presidency and the only big thing that comes out of it is they finally fixed that one person can't launch a nuclear war and holocaust by themselves...
02:20:36.000Look at World War I as a worst case scenario.
02:20:39.000If you have a person with the power to launch a nuclear war by themselves...
02:20:47.000If anybody can't see that that's an untenable, horrible situation, and you look at human history and go, okay, it's a ticking time bomb, literally, then you don't know very much history.
02:20:56.000And the fact that we've escaped decades and decades without anybody fixing this problem...
02:21:35.000So if what Trump proved is that you do not need a ton of money if you walk in the door with a Q rating, because that's what the other politicians want it for, right?
02:21:43.000Well, he's uniquely good at ignoring his faults and projecting his strengths and being confident.
02:21:53.000But all those things that allow him to do that and completely ignore his faults and keep constantly droning on about his successes and how good he is at things, that resonates with people in a very weird way.
02:22:22.000There are certain things that he did that are part of his personality that worked really well because there are so many Americans so upset with the system.
02:22:30.000I mean, I remember one line from Trump at one of these debates that I thought was one of the great lines of all time.
02:22:35.000And when he turned to Rand Paul after Rand Paul slammed him and said, you're not having a very good night, are you?
02:22:41.000And I remember thinking, okay, there are a lot of Americans who just love anybody sticking it to these politicians now because everybody's so upset with all the politics.
02:22:50.000So here's a guy who's sticking it to them.
02:22:52.000But there's a cutting off your nose to spite your face side of this because I've always wanted an outsider.
02:22:59.000So you say to yourself, okay, we could have had a normal human being, because look, if you want to say what Trump has, I don't know the guy, so I can't diagram what he...
02:23:26.000You know, if for a while that was working for him, because he was so outside the norms, there are certain unspoken rules of things you do and behave, and he violated all those, and it was refreshing to have him violate those.
02:23:41.000Well, when he told Hillary Clinton because you'd be in jail and everybody went nuts, it's like, yes!
02:23:47.000The real thing, I think a lot of people said, which is tragic, but I understand it, is if we have to live with one of these people for four years and listen to them talk, I'd rather have somebody who's making funny jokes that make me laugh rather than...
02:23:59.000Somebody who's obviously reading another prepared speech that they didn't write.
02:24:02.000Or somebody where you really don't get a sense of who they really are.
02:24:06.000Like a Hillary Clinton, who's a career politician.
02:24:16.000The part that drives me the craziest is 321 million people, you said, and the two people that we're voting on at the end of this thing are Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
02:25:01.000And he said, so people who are really intelligent, if they do that calculation, the calculation says, don't run for president, you'd be an idiot.
02:25:07.000Now, he says, people, though, who run anyway...
02:25:26.000And he said that's why you have to be careful because that's...
02:25:29.000So you either have somebody who's not intelligent enough to weigh the pros and cons or somebody who's so smart that the cons outweigh the pros and they choose to do it anyway.
02:25:37.000What a crazy system when you think that that is the way we develop a person who is going to be in control of nuclear weapons.
02:25:45.000We have a popularity contest where to win the popularity contest, which is totally, you know, elective, you don't have to join.
02:25:53.000But to get into this contest and to win, your life's going to be torn apart.
02:27:26.000I mean, if you say those are the only people that can make it through the process, then maybe that explains why with 321 million people, this is the choice we end up with at the end of the day.
02:27:35.000Well, we also have this problem where we look at someone's entire life, and we look at all the different things that they do, and we decide whether or not we accept certain things.
02:27:45.000Like, we're not talking about whether or not someone's honest with business.
02:27:48.000We want you to be honest with everything.
02:27:51.000Yeah, you've got to get C average on everything.
02:28:15.000But if you think about nature, the natural leader types throughout human history, what percentage of those have been monogamous?
02:28:24.000Those ones who want to control the army, the ones who want to run the thing, the ones who want to be at the top getting everybody to do their bidding, the ones who want to have all the money and all the power and live in the castle.
02:28:41.000You know, it does argue for the idea that it might be better to appoint somebody who doesn't want the job.
02:28:49.000Somebody I talked to once has talked about that with police officers, and they had said, listen, there are all kinds of police officers, but if you're the one who wants the job because you're going to chase bad guys and you want that adrenaline rush and the whole thing, you're not the guy who should get the job.
02:29:04.000Yes, and you can see, the funny thing is, and somebody sent this to me a long time ago, there's all these different recruitment videos that the different police agencies have, right?
02:29:13.000And some of them are more like, you can get cats out of trees, you can help old ladies, and some of them are like, you can drive a great car!
02:29:20.000And the funny thing is, I would imagine that that influences the sort of people that answer your ad.
02:30:17.000Imagining yourself in the position of that person in that ad, and then next thing you know, you're the one who's going to go get the bad guys, and you're the one who's going to go...
02:30:25.000But if you talk to a real cop, a good cop is someone who respects community, someone who wants to help, someone who wants to establish some sort of a bond with the people that are in the community that he patrols.
02:30:39.000That's why they're trying to do in some neighborhoods, they're trying to have more people on foot that actually walk through the streets and become a part of the community.
02:30:46.000You're not an outsider that's patrolling it.
02:30:49.000You're actually one of the people that's there.
02:30:51.000It goes to what we were saying about the politicians, though, to tie it all in.
02:31:26.000I think the idea of one singular alpha chimpanzee.
02:31:29.000Well, Joe, that's what it's supposed to do, remember?
02:31:30.000Remember, we're supposed to be, if everybody remembers their founding father, Federalist Papers and everything.
02:31:35.000The presidency was a much, much, much less powerful job.
02:31:38.000This was a country that was run by the legislative branch, basically.
02:31:43.000We're not that way anymore because of a whole bunch of things, including the nuclear weapons thing we talked about earlier.
02:31:48.000The atomic age changed the presidency because of the need to have one person.
02:31:55.000You couldn't declare war anymore because what if the missiles are on their way to you now, right?
02:32:00.000Can you really go to Congress and debate it?
02:32:02.000No, you needed a person who within 10 minutes could launch a counter-strike.
02:32:07.000Okay, well, how much power does that take out of, you know, the hands of the legislature who was supposed to be running things?
02:32:13.000For example, why do we not declare war anymore?
02:32:16.000We haven't declared war since the Second World War.
02:32:18.000We have a country that the Constitution says you can't go to war without a declaration.
02:32:22.000Certainly, you can get some Barbary pirates cleared out of North Africa, but you can't, like...
02:32:27.000That's why Congress, by the way, with the Trump thing, is they want to say that you can't launch nuclear weapons unless Congress has declared war first, which creates this wonderful thing about trying to figure out if we can sort of retroactively replace a power that's been gone since 1942. We declared war on,
02:32:46.000like, Romania and something else, the subsidiary powers in the Second World War, and that's the last time it's been done.
02:32:52.000But according to the Constitution, we shouldn't have been able to fight a war since without that.
02:32:56.000It's going to be very interesting to see what happens in 2020. It's going to be really interesting.
02:33:01.000To remove some of the power that the president has is going to be a really big uphill battle.
02:33:06.000Unless someone actually drops a nuke on somebody.
02:33:08.000Unless Trump decides to bomb North Korea.
02:33:11.000Like Kim Jong-un says something about his wife, like, you piece of shit.
02:33:16.000Unless it's something so egregious and ridiculous like that, it's going to be really hard to dial back the power without any real specific need.
02:33:24.000Because people are going to concentrate on all the other issues that the country faces economically, militarily, the need for Health care, the need for environmental standards, what are we going to do about global warming?
02:33:34.000There's so many issues that take the front stage.
02:33:37.000The idea of someone actually launching a nuclear attack seems so distant and ridiculous that that's not going to be on the forefront of everybody's list of priorities and things to handle.
02:33:47.000Makes me think of Eisenhower ordering the local German population at the end of the Second World War to go tour the death camps themselves and actually have to walk past piles and piles and piles of human bodies because he wanted them to not forget.
02:34:41.000Stop fooling around with 140 characters and look at what real death taste smells like and what the long-term ramifications of pushing these sorts of attitudes can lead to and has over and over and over again.
02:34:53.000Well, I think there's a real problem with the human condition when it comes to complacency and comfort.
02:34:59.000And I think that we get real comfortable and real complacent, and we have a very distorted idea of what life is without struggle.
02:35:05.000And there's a great book by Sebastian Junger who was on last week.
02:35:18.000Happens when people overcome significant tragedies whether it's war or whether it's natural disasters or you know I was in I was in New York right after 9-11 and it was palpable the sense of community and how friendly people were and it was because people had had their world shaken up by an attack and it literally did good it really did good for the people that survived in a fucked up way and But it makes me think of that project for a New America document that before 9
02:35:49.000-11 had said that there's, you know, without some kind of Pearl Harbor-style attack, the American system is designed right now in a way where people are going to pull apart more and more.
02:35:57.000And in other words, just saying, you know, you could almost wish for something like that to happen to pull us together.
02:36:21.000When I was trying to localize the story from the Yugoslavian Civil War that we were just talking about earlier, I interviewed a Croatian man in Eugene, and we were talking about it, and I was bringing up these age-old hatreds and basically saying, you know, they've always hated each other, and he stopped me.
02:36:46.000He goes, and all of a sudden, he goes, the first thing that started to resurface when everybody was just hating everything, their lives and everything, he goes, all of a sudden, all these old things that had been buried just came right back.
02:36:59.000And so that tribalism you're talking about with Younger, I think there are times, and you had mentioned it, right?
02:37:04.000Post-war eras, these times when they go away.
02:37:07.000Yes, but then certain kinds of conditions, for example, terrible economic conditions for too many people, it's funny how quickly the scapegoats come back, and things that, I mean, truthfully, the biggest thing that I've missed politically in terms of just I just didn't see it.
02:37:21.000It was the resurgence of the racism, bigotry, prejudice thing.
02:37:24.000I mean, I thought, you know, we grew up in the era where our country was trying to figure out through things like broadcasting how we transition.
02:37:31.000So you remember All in the Family when it started.
02:37:33.000It's a show that doesn't even run very much anymore because simply trying to address those issues is too hot button for most advertisers now.
02:37:40.000You could never have an Archie Bunker character.
02:37:42.000No, but that whole show was part of society's attempt to transition from an era where it wasn't that long beforehand, where you couldn't stay in a hotel that wasn't a black or a white person's hotel in the South, to one where we got now.
02:37:55.000And I always thought, okay, the message of Archie Bunker was they would try to teach him, the young people would try to teach him how to be a more open human being.
02:38:03.000But it didn't matter because the Archie Bunkers of the world were going to die off.
02:38:06.000They were the dinosaurs from another era, and eventually that would be a way of looking at things that was in the past.
02:38:12.000And I thought that that was what it was going to be.
02:38:14.000And I never saw the resurgence, but like my Croatian friend had said, just maybe things had to get bad enough economically and whatever for all the tribal things to just come back because there's something deep in us that that's all embedded in.
02:38:27.000I think there's far less of those people now than have ever existed before.
02:39:51.000And he was a guy, a black man, who, I'm going from memory here, but he set up an interview with one of the heads of the state Klan or whatever.
02:39:59.000Didn't tell the guy who was coming that he was a black man.
02:40:02.000So they had this interview, and it's this interesting thing he says.
02:40:06.000But long story short, he started to make friends with these KKK members.
02:40:29.000So he said, once you're, like you had said, when you're face to face with somebody and you have to interact with them on an eye to eye level, it's...
02:40:37.000It's very intriguing what he did, because you say to yourself, okay, you can never reach these Archie Bunker guys, but people have and do.
02:40:44.000And I do want to say, listen, for all of the white supremacists out there that think I'm being unfair, this racial tribal thing is all over the place, because there are, you know, like, you will meet black folks who are racist, too.
02:40:56.000Now, what I always say to people, though, is the one thing you have to understand as a white person that's different is we're the dominant culture.
02:41:24.000So it's a very different thing to say, well, listen, they're being racist too.
02:41:28.000Okay, but we're the dominant culture, and it means that there's something a little different when we say, what's wrong with saying, you know, white people should be proud of their heritage too?
02:41:37.000But historically speaking, there are some issues, and you need to recognize that.
02:41:40.000Now, can we ever get to a time when we can judge people by the content of their character?
02:41:44.000I don't know, but I think even if white people said, we're going to do that right now, there'd be people of other colors going, no, wait a minute, we don't want to give up some extra admissions into universities.
02:41:54.000It becomes a very difficult thing to give up this racial identity.
02:42:44.000I'm a graduate student at 51 helping the professors.
02:42:47.000But at the same time, look, we all understand that those people are incentivized.
02:42:58.000It's different when it spreads to the general culture a little bit, though, because now we're not in the ivory tower having a theoretical debate.
02:43:04.000We're sitting there going, should that person be shamed on Twitter because he's an Asian person with dreadlocks?
02:43:09.000Okay, folks, if you don't see that that might backfire on you down the road, I mean, we've all got to cut each other some slack on all sides if we're going to make this work.
02:43:17.000Well, it's cultural appropriation is one of the things that makes America so fascinating.
02:44:31.000Okay, well, then what are we doing here?
02:44:33.000But I mean in the same way the one thing you have to do is cut people some slack and the one thing we human beings seem to have such a problem with is cutting people slack and it seems to be if you say the social media seems to be worse because you'll cut somebody slack face to face more easily than you will you know when you can just throw 140 characters and you go to bed but that comedian on the other side of your 140 characters I mean let me just you've seen this and I've seen this but if you've never been on the receiving end of Of these things where people...
02:45:00.000And I've been very lucky and people have been very nice and kind to me.
02:45:02.000But even I, when you read these things, you go, who is this person?
02:45:50.000Or just dissatisfied people that are so upset with the way things are.
02:45:54.000I mean, I really, I would love to see more effort made in that regard, because I think the subsidiary down-the-road domino effects would help us all so much.
02:46:02.000But listen, we're a country that can't even get the most basic things passed.
02:46:05.000How are we going to get something like that done?
02:46:09.000I think it's happening incredibly rapidly, but I think we're stuck in the mix of it and we don't realize it.
02:46:13.000It's sort of like when you come over to someone's house and you haven't been over their house in like five years and all of a sudden their kid is 10, you're like, holy shit, you're 10 now?
02:46:21.000To them, it just happened gradually and slowly and they barely have noticed it.
02:46:27.000But to you, when you take five years off and then you see that kid, you're like, holy shit!
02:46:31.000The frog in the hot water thing, right?
02:46:52.000So if you say that human beings individually and as groups learn by mistakes, Yes.
02:46:56.000Do you have to have a Holocaust-type mistake to come out of this before we go, wow, well, here's where we screwed up on that social media thing?
02:47:03.000I mean, I wonder whether we're going to be allowed—I don't know how you would turn the genie, put the genie back in the bottle.
02:47:09.000But, I mean, at what point do terrorists or dangerous people—I mean, look at the—to go back to that Weather Underground New Left bombing thing that I said that they didn't— They didn't like me waterboarding Abbie Hoffman.
02:47:22.000But I mean, if you'd have had a bunch of people back then with Twitter saying, I support the Abbie Hoffmans, I support...
02:47:28.000Okay, at what point would the government...
02:47:31.000First of all, get you on a watch list then or now, but at what point would somebody have said, listen, for our own good, we can't have average Americans, because look how many terrorists are using this tool.
02:47:41.000We'll see what happens, but you had mentioned 9-11 and how, you know, so much of that, there was a feeling of community and all that other stuff, but there was other things, too.
02:47:48.000There was the government literally, and I remember Peter DeFazio, the congressman up in Oregon, who said this to me.
02:47:53.000He said, Dan, he said, there were bills that had been written and put on a shelf because there was no way to pass them for the longest time.
02:48:01.000And he goes, when 9-11 happened, they pulled all those bills down, cobbled them into one thing.
02:48:41.000And I think the negative and the positive are both necessary.
02:48:45.000I don't think we're gonna live in this utopian world where everybody's just friendly to each other.
02:48:49.000I think people are gonna make mistakes, they're gonna be shitty, they're gonna realize that they're shitty, and the understanding of that behavior and the ramifications of that behavior is becoming more and more apparent every day.
02:49:29.000I can agree with you that long-term we may have a positive outcome here.
02:49:32.000I don't know what our immediate short-term, you and I have 20, 30, 40, you probably have 100 years left on your lifespan, but some of us are not in great shape.
02:49:40.000So if you said the next 20, 25, 30 years, are you going to see good or bad from this?
02:49:45.000We may have to go through some learning experiences, and those tend to not be so fun to live through.
02:49:50.000Yeah, there's that, but also there's like, how about just disengage from that every now and then?
02:50:14.000Because, folks, that's what connects you to all the other human beings who ever lived before us.
02:50:18.000The thing that makes our time period different here, this vast human experiment, is we've never had a generation growing up with mobile phones, for example.
02:50:32.000With nothing to do for hours, just sitting there contemplating the silence or the rustling of the trees or whatever, I don't know if you get anything out of that or not, but that's something that human beings have done since caveman times that you're sharing an experience that's innately human.
02:50:47.000If that becomes less and less common because we're detached from that, What does that mean?
02:50:52.000Like I said, we talked about an experiment earlier, that we're in an experiment.
02:50:56.000What does it mean when people detach from that part of the human existence to spend more time in this new part of human existence?
02:51:19.000And the more we detach from that, the more you're going to get these disenfranchised, very unhappy people that feel like they're a prisoner or a slave to some system that doesn't give a fuck about them.
02:51:33.000The people that give a fuck about you are your community.
02:51:35.000They're your friends, the community of like-minded humans that you've bonded with that share your occupation or share your interests.
02:51:46.000And that's how people develop satisfying relationships and satisfying lives.
02:51:50.000The more you put yourself connected to something that doesn't even value you, some huge monolithic creation There's no one even running it.
02:52:02.000It's not like some architect has figured out a great way to design civilization to satisfy all the humans that are a part of it.
02:52:09.000You're feeding this machine in some sort of a weird way that nobody really understands the ramifications of because we haven't done it before.
02:52:16.000There hasn't been this Global connection of cell phones for thousands of years.
02:52:53.000And you end up doing things that, like, you know, you had talked about your whole, you know, we found this niche for me in this history show thing, because it's what I was born to do or whatever.
02:53:02.000Yes, but it goes back to me trying to figure out, okay, I've played with these toy plastic soldiers every single day.
02:53:09.000How do I make something new so that I can be entertained with these same toy soldiers, you know?
02:53:13.000And I think that all, you know, if we think about building blocks in your brain, the need to overcome boredom, for example, is a prime mover when you're young.