In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, I sit down with legendary rock and roll singer-songwriter, Bob Dylan. We talk about his life, his career, and the importance of psychedelics in the 60s and beyond. I think this is one of the most important interviews I've done in a while, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed getting to know Bob and his story. -Joe Rogan and Bob Dylan - The Rolling Stones - Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band - The White Album - Dylan's Life and Times - Bob Dylan's Dead Kennedys - and much more! Thank you so much to Bob Dylan for being a part of some wild changes in this country, and for inspiring so many of us to live our lives the way he lived them. You are an inspiration to so many people, and we are so lucky to have him as a friend. - Thank you, Bob, and thank you for being part of the journey with me! -JOE ROGAN PODCAST - by day, and by night, all day! - All day, Joe Rogans Podcast All Day, All Day! - By Night, All Night, by Day, by Night, By Night! - by Night - All Day - by Day! by Night! by Day - By Day, all Day! by Night!! by Day By Day by DAY! by DAY by ALL DAYS by DAY, by DAY by DAY - By DAY! By DAY, ALL DAY, By DAY - By ALL DAY! By DAY By DAYS BY DAY, All DAYS By DAY BY DAY , All DAY, EVERYTHING IS OLDER THAN DAY? (by DAY, OLDEST DAY, A GOOD MORNING, EVERY DAY, AND A SUNDAY, EVERY MONDAY, EVERY SUNDAY? - OLD DAYS? , AND EVERY MOST DAY, ? What's a Good Day? By EVENING? by THURSDAY? (A GOOD DAY, BOUGHT & A GOOD MOST SUNDAY A GOOD DEED AND A GOOD FRIENDS WEEKEND? BY DAY AND A BAD MONDY? & THE MOST BROWNS AND A GORGEOUS SUNDAY OF THE DECADE? I LOVE YOU?
00:00:17.000You've been a part of some wild changes in this country, my friend.
00:00:21.000Well, I think I start my life, my book out at a time in the 50s, in the Eisenhower era, where none of all of this, what we see today, was conceivable.
00:00:29.000I mean, let alone carrying around telephones in your pocket or being able to talk to people, you know, on your wristwatch.
00:00:37.000I came along in the 50s with the post-war baby boom and it was the largest population cohort in American history and it became the most educated, the best educated, and also the wealthiest because America was going through this great boom of financial boom after winning the war.
00:00:55.000And when we came of age, In the early 60s, I turned 21 in whatever it was, mid-60s.
00:01:08.000As we grow up, we kind of discovered that America wasn't what they told us it was going to be.
00:01:14.000That life, liberty, and a pursuit of happiness, which I believed in deeply, it wasn't that way.
00:01:21.000In fact, first off, we were running this segregation system, Jim Crow.
00:01:26.000Blacks, people, human beings, were kept in the most worst circumstances, and it was an outrage to see that.
00:01:32.000And then all these other things started to become apparent, the hypocrisy of the society we were in, and that's the stuff that Dylan was writing about.
00:01:40.000And boom, boom, boom, all of a sudden we're in a war.
00:01:43.000Our young, beautiful president is assassinated.
00:01:47.000The dreams we were told, the American dream, weren't quite true.
00:01:56.000Crucible, which made us a further, even more unusual generation.
00:02:00.000I mean, a generation raised, unfortunately, to not trust the government and to think the government's doing wrong in Vietnam and all these things.
00:02:08.000So that's how we grew up and it made us more rebellious than ever and more skeptical and in a certain way deeply committed to To human justice and human rights and to caring for people and the things I think became the dominant themes of my generation and music that desire to do good in the world,
00:02:32.000I think the change in culture in the 1960s was one of the greatest changes in human history and such a shift from the 50s to the 60s.
00:02:42.000I mean, you know, I always, I attribute it to a lot of things, the Vietnam era, the, for sure, the war, like, galvanized a lot of people to understand the dangers of not understanding really what's going on with the government and what the country's really all about.
00:03:00.000But also psychedelic drugs which is really a huge part of it.
00:03:19.000You know, the army started integrating America.
00:03:23.000More European fathers are coming home.
00:03:25.000My generation, our generation, grew up with the war in Vietnam, a war we were ashamed of.
00:03:32.000I mean, so we didn't have an entirely different experience.
00:03:35.000But your point that in this crucible, as we got old, I mean, as we started our young maturity and going to college, two giant things happened.
00:03:47.000The emergence of rock and roll and the emergence of drugs.
00:03:50.000And I've got a third, which is the emergence of technology, starts about then.
00:03:55.000So psychedelics were tremendously important in my life to me.
00:05:31.000Well, Rolling Stone magazine, particularly then, was such an important part Of the counterculture because there was no voice in mainstream media that was equal to it.
00:05:45.000There was no voice that, you know, spoke to the young people that were dissatisfied with the way things were going.
00:05:54.000If you take a time capsule back to 67, there was nothing about rock and roll in magazines, newspapers, television, Whatever the mass media was.
00:06:09.000And in fact, the thing with them, Time Magazine, they all looked down on rock and roll.
00:06:13.000It was all like raunchy or for teenage girls or nonsense or foolishness.
00:06:34.000I mean, I know, Joe, you don't get this analogy, but, I mean, can you imagine people didn't—you were discriminated because of your hairstyle?
00:06:44.000Let alone, at the time, you would go to jail if you were gay, you know, if you had caught having sex with a man, or that you could not drink out of the same water fountain as a white person if you were black.
00:06:55.000I mean, anyway, Farfield, what— So, music was the only medium that young people could speak to each other and could communicate with each other and share values and ideas.
00:07:09.000And we called it, Ralph, we called it the tribal telegraph.
00:07:14.000You know, the music was the glue that was going to hold the generation together.
00:07:18.000And we were the only place other than the jukebox.
00:07:21.000And Top 40 radio where you could hear anything of this music or hear about it or read about it or participate in it.
00:07:29.000And so we became one of the more powerful means of communication for the generation and certainly this great way in which rock artists could communicate with their audience, you know, and John Lennon or Dylan could stay what was on their mind or what their intentions or how they wrote a song or be taken seriously.
00:07:49.000And Rolling Stone was like a letter from, was this love letter from home for, or this letter from home for so many people that I meet today and that I've met all through on people saying, I lived in this small town and you were the lifeline or you were, you know, you meant everything to me in my life.
00:08:05.000Did you have this sense of what it was going to be when you first created it?
00:08:10.000Like what was the, what were the early days like?
00:08:14.000I had no sense of what it could become.
00:08:17.000I mean, I had these kind of grandiose ideas that it would be the best magazine in the world, of course.
00:08:22.000It would sell zillions of copies, of course.
00:08:23.000I mean, but I had no idea what success really was going to be, how you defined it, either financially or spiritually or emotionally or if it's in the world of magazines.
00:08:46.000I knew nothing about the business of it, but people liked it, and it just quickly started growing and growing and growing and growing because it was good, and it was about something we all loved.
00:08:57.000It was the only place you could read about something that was so passionate to me.
00:09:02.000I mean, I... That Berklee experience of taking LSD and going to all the shows every weekend with the Airplane and the Grateful Dead and Janus and all the groups that were then powerful for me.
00:09:24.000In a lot of ways, what the internet is today and this sort of new independent voice, that sort of Rolling Stone was like that for that culture in that era.
00:09:37.000There was no other message like that that was out there in mainstream media.
00:09:46.000And it was kind of like one of the biggest stories in American history and the mainstream media was missing it, which was the boom, the Cultural Revolution, in which we thought culture, consciousness could be the most powerful way of changing society.
00:10:04.000And while it's not the same as guns and gasoline, it's had a powerful, huge effect on what America is, what America stands for, and what America looks like.
00:10:15.000It's not that it's changed it entirely over, you know, in 50 years, it's entirely different.
00:10:19.000Change is always evolutionary, but it's made a huge change.
00:10:25.000And it was one of the most important periods in our history.
00:10:53.000You know, they think about when you guys covered his run for sheriff.
00:10:58.000I mean, that was a giant moment in culture, too, that this...
00:11:04.000Fucking madman was running for sheriff and the panic, the moral panic that people had about, oh my god, what if this guy actually becomes a sheriff and takes up all the streets and locks up all the drug dealers who are actually selling drugs?
00:11:17.000No, he wasn't going to lock up bad drug dealers.
00:11:22.000All the drug dealers that were selling drugs.
00:11:24.000If they were selling bad drugs, he was going to put up stocks in the main square and you'd have to be in a stock like in old Williamstown, Massachusetts or something.
00:11:33.000He wanted to that big sod the streets and rip up all the asphalt and make anything grass, which was a good idea.
00:11:40.000Rename the city from Aspen to Fat City.
00:11:42.000On the theory, Hunter came over that it would be more difficult for land developers to sell something called Fat City Estates than Aspen Estates, you know?
00:11:51.000And then you couldn't – the police had to be unarmed and then there would be a giant parking lot out of town that you could park at and nobody – other than residents, residents could not – non-residents couldn't hunt or fish.
00:13:33.000And he was always overseeing What we were doing at the magazine, with ideas, stories, and writers, and he felt very committed to making the magazine a success.
00:14:04.000Yeah, the documentary, the Gonzo documentary, that was the first time I ever really got to see you talk about him.
00:14:11.000And, you know, you're kind of the glue that holds that documentary together because you're sort of the rational observer that was there during all the wildest and most mad times.
00:14:25.000He had, I mean, everybody loved to be with Hunter.
00:14:28.000I mean, you couldn't get enough of being with Hunter, you know, and including me after having Hunter for so much.
00:14:35.000When you're with Hunter, when you were with Hunter, you were, like, felt you were going to have more fun and become close to the edge of craziness and danger than you were ever working in your life.
00:14:44.000You know, just getting in the car with Hunter.
00:14:46.000You know, he would always have to do something that would scare the piss out of you.
00:14:52.000You know, U-turns in the middle of a snowbound highway and one night we were driving from Cambridge to New Hampshire to visit Norman Mailer for some strange reason.
00:15:04.000We had spent the night in Cambridge and we had taken some acid.
00:15:08.000And we got on the road, head full of acid, driving up in the middle of the night to Maine, and it's all mountain roads.
00:15:14.000And so we go along, and then all of a sudden, like Hunter would turn the headlights off.
00:15:19.000And I mean, you have mixed feelings at this point.
00:15:25.000By this time, I developed this sense that I'm safe with Hunter, no matter how crazy he is, he knows what he's doing all the time, which he did.
00:15:33.000So, on the other hand, he liked the idea of freaking people out.
00:15:36.000So I would go, ah, oh, Hunter, stop it, stop it!
00:15:38.000And it would just make him happier to know that I was freaking out.
00:15:43.000So it was partly just to keep him going.
00:15:46.000But then I realized what he was doing is he was looking ahead to Ben's and memorizing the curves ahead so they could turn off the lights.
00:16:19.000in the morning and set the tape deck in the kitchen of the house, punch it so it starts with the screaming at the top volume, and run out the door, and don't come back.
00:18:03.000When he was writing, he started writing it in my basement in San Francisco when he was staying with us.
00:18:09.000He was on assignment to do something else, some serious thing about the Chicano uprising in East Los Angeles.
00:18:19.000In the middle of that summer, he had to go to Vegas to cover a motorcycle race for Sports Illustrated, and they wanted like a 200-word caption, but he never turned that in.
00:18:29.000Instead, I started writing this piece about going to Vegas saying, it begins, we were somewhere on the edge of Barstow when the drugs took hold.
00:18:37.000And then the image of this red Cadillac in a trunk full of animals, uppers, downers, guns, you know, just madness.
00:18:46.000But that piece was so strong in two parts.
00:18:52.000It was a novel, you know, a short novel.
00:18:56.000Clearly, it became regarded as a classic of American literature today, up with kind of like Huck Finn or Catcher in the Rye, stuff like that.
00:19:04.000You know, interesting, another story about the kind of adolescent spirit in all of us, of men who just can't give up being little boys and cherish that wonderful freedom and A sense of fun that none of us ever like to give up,
00:19:31.000It ignited this appetite for chaos in people that were dissatisfied.
00:19:39.000With the narrative that they had been told about the life that you were supposed to live and the way you're supposed to go about things and You know and then the 70s was just such a pivotal moment too because they had legalized They had made all psychedelic drugs illegal and there was this water that was being thrown on this movement and so quickly It sort of evaporated so quickly that the shift between the 50s and the 60s was kind of paralleled between the shift of the
00:21:00.000In the 70s, we had either a full-scale rebellion going on against Nixon, you know, which was an exciting time to be alive and seeing the Watergate hearings and just sort of triumph and all that stuff.
00:21:11.000And then Carter, as the end of the 70s, you know, the first real rock and roll president.
00:21:17.000And who Hunter had a great love of and who Carter loved him.
00:21:24.000And Carter loved Dylan and was of that spirit.
00:21:28.000There's a great moment in the documentary where it talks about Hunter being at Carter's speech and going back to get his tape recorder and recognizing that this is a very unusual moment.
00:21:44.000He was going up there and Carter was talking about the quality of justice and talking about his spiritual ideas that he got from Reinhold Niebuhr, if I pronounce that correctly, and quoting Dillon.
00:22:24.000And we kind of got aboard the The Carter campaign wrote about it.
00:22:32.000Hunter almost, you know, kind of became a part of it in a way.
00:22:37.000And between Hunter's coverage of the McGovern campaign and the Carter campaign, particularly McGovern, it put Rolling Stone on the map in a way, although we'd done big stories and broken things before.
00:22:51.000The idea that the rock and roll magazine was covering national politics.
00:22:55.000And furthermore, the guy doing it was best known for covering motorcycle gangs.
00:23:00.000Plus, sweating all the time because he's boozing.
00:24:46.000You know, Ibogaine being a drug from the pineal gland of some exotic South African animal that enables you to stand still without making a movement, but your functions of breathing still for 24 hours, and Muskie was having a problem with this drug?
00:25:02.000I mean, if people ask me, or Hunter would give away his credentials to some wild-ass hippie, didn't bribe them on the campaign chase, it was a prankster.
00:25:11.000I mean, you just couldn't have asked for anything better.
00:25:15.000As I say, that year of the campaign coverage, I just had the best time.
00:25:19.000Occasionally I'd go out and meet him on the campaign trail.
00:25:43.000I mean, you know, in the end, he began to...
00:25:46.000But it became so important to everybody.
00:25:50.000Because then it was also as it was writing the most accurate stuff about where the campaign stood and the mood inside the campaign.
00:25:57.000So he was the leitmotif for the candidate himself, McGovern, who called him the sheriff all the time.
00:26:03.000And everybody working on that came, some campaign who became friends over the years.
00:26:10.000I mean, it's really the music kind of that went along with that very special campaign because McGovern was a very special man, a very really human, good man.
00:27:27.000I mean, I don't think he could have overcome the Nixon juggernaut and the opinion juggernaut.
00:27:32.000Well, one of the fascinating things about Hunter's coverage was the fact that he would mix in fiction, like the Ibogaine thing, but he would mix in fiction with reality without a wink.
00:27:45.000Like it was very hard for some people to understand, you know?
00:27:55.000We were writing about the Watergate trials or hearings or something at that, and he was saying, at midnight, a vampire jumps, you know, a vampire with wart strings coming from the nose, leaps from the west balcony.
00:28:13.000Leaps from the west balcony of the White House, you know, roaming the grounds looking for chows to eat, you know, and it's the spirit of Nixon then is peering outside Martha Mitchell's van.
00:29:07.000The last several years, she saw a portrait of the Queen of England a couple of times as her official royal portrait.
00:29:12.000So Annie goes from our loft in San Francisco and the Rolling Stones tours and so forth, running around the Allman Brothers or Hunter or whatever, to being the official photographer.
00:29:25.000But again, she brought to the magazine an identity that...
00:29:29.000Along with Hunters and a bunch of kind of hard-charging newspaper guys that I had hired from three different newspapers were kind of the backbone.
00:29:42.000Tom Wolfe, Annie, Hunter, this newspaper, and a couple of college kids I hired as editors.
00:29:49.000And we had a Rock'em Sock'em ten years there in San Francisco before moving to New York and did things like the Patty Hearst kidnapping, the John Lennon interviews, the Silkwood case, caused the demolition of the Northern California narcotics squads,
00:30:09.000investigated them, and a bunch of other stuff.
00:30:31.000But to be as good a writer, to be as good as a reporter, to do meaningful, important stuff like Hunter, that That was the foundational spirit of Rolling Stone, was that stuff.
00:30:45.000How hard was it for you to watch the wheels come off on him?
00:32:00.000I'd always see him in Aspen, but it just became frustrating.
00:32:05.000We'd sit down and talk and have a big, long session all night about what we'll do next and this and plan and come up with our ideas and laugh our heads about them.
00:32:16.000I'd go back and he just couldn't follow up.
00:32:18.000But finally, I think in the 90s, He did two of the best pieces he ever did for us out of the blue.
00:32:27.000One was called Fear and Loathing in Elko, which he started to write because there's a snowstorm in Aspen, which shut down Aspen for about 10 or 12 days, during which time he couldn't get his hands on the cocaine.
00:32:45.000And he started to write this really beautiful piece, you know?
00:34:42.000When we were covering the 72 campaign, he was a little bit of a celebrity on that campaign among the other reporters on the campaign.
00:34:50.000I mean, you know, all the establishment, you know, major, Washington, White House correspondence and campaign, right, the Times and everything.
00:34:59.000And they were going, oh, there's Hunter.
00:37:15.000I think he felt if he was the guy who ordered Gary to cease and desist, he would be really disliked for having stepped in and squished a really popular cartoon character.
00:37:28.000I think also it was Hunter, to another extent, enchanted by the idea of Hunter himself as a cartoon character.
00:37:35.000I mean, Gary used to put me in that cartoon strip in relationship to Hunter and not in relationship to Hunter for doing different things.
00:37:42.000And while there's always a little bit of put-down involved in it, you know, nonetheless it's, like, totally enjoyable and fun to pick up the Sunday papers.
00:37:58.000Well, Doonesbury was also the sort of counterculture comic strip.
00:38:03.000It was a very original comic strip in that regard.
00:38:07.000Gary is a friend of mine and I liked his comic strip.
00:38:12.000I thought he's great at that and did an important service in a certain sense for that era by bringing the so-called counterculture or beatnik culture, whatever you want to call it then.
00:38:23.000To a more serious audience and explained it in a way that was kind of wholesome and funny without being dangerous.
00:38:32.000Gary was a divinity major at Yale and kind of square.
00:41:44.000I was coming to – John used to come out, fly out to stay with me in San Francisco every weekend after Saturday Night Live, come out, decompress for a few days, go back to San Francisco.
00:41:54.000So when I go back to New York – Is it Johnny?
00:42:27.000And I thought cocaine, in the end, and I again say so in this book, was a real waste of time and real destructive.
00:42:35.000I mean, I embrace LSD. Rolling Stones was on a crusade for the legalization, decriminalization of pot for virtually the beginning, going after narcotic squads and drug laws and on army just with so much space to this hideous Laws that locked up innocent young people,
00:42:54.000particularly black people, for the crime of smoking pot, a victimless crime of smoking pot, which was so much less dangerous than just drinking.
00:43:32.000I also quote Jimmy Buffett in the book, who's another good friend, who I thought had the best line about saying, there is nothing worth talking about after 2 o'clock in the morning.
00:44:14.000Mm-hmm Kinnison, I mean so many of them they were they were into coke, but I was very fortunate that when I was in high school a good friend of mine his cousin was selling coke and I watched him deteriorate rapidly.
00:44:28.000He was doing coke every day and he was selling it and him and his girlfriend just they had an attic apartment and they would hide in this apartment and I went to visit him once and it was like I I'd known him before.
00:44:38.000He did coke, and then I knew him afterwards, and it was like a person who had been bit by a vampire.
00:44:57.000They become physically addictive, unlike marijuana, which, I mean, I guess could be psychologically addictive, but there's the physical addiction part of it.
00:45:44.000You don't want to reinforce that and feed that demon, which is one of the things that I think is...
00:45:50.000Very powerful about psychedelics and about marijuana because it erodes all of these cultural expectations and all these thoughts of who you are and what you are and all these egocentric ideas and it leaves you with this like sense of like just vulnerability and that's what marijuana does.
00:46:09.000It gives you this vulnerability and connection and just it gives you what you need.
00:47:56.000And also, again, no real blueprint as to how to do it correctly, especially when you do, you know, people kind of, I mean, people certainly get out of control with drinking, but there's sort of a blueprint for how to handle drinking.
00:48:10.000The entire structure around the country, AA, devoted to that with thousands of people enrolled.
00:48:16.000But alcohol is, I mean, like, I know what the number is, but I thought it was in the millions of people who die of cirrhosis of the liver every year.
00:48:36.000I mean, there might be some rare person that has an allergy to it.
00:48:40.000I don't want to eliminate possibility.
00:48:42.000And there's also a real risk of schizophrenic breaks.
00:48:47.000Alex Berenson, who wrote for the New York Times, wrote a book called Tell Your Children.
00:48:51.000And it's basically about the risks that people have that have a tendency towards schizophrenia where marijuana can push them over the edge.
00:49:14.000I just thought in my book that to be honest about drugs, that The tendency of people who write about this era, young people in general, is to kind of leave the drugs part out of it or maybe acknowledge it slightly or acknowledge inhaling or something.
00:49:32.000But it would be dishonest to tell the story of this generation without telling the story of drugs and that amount of use that took place.
00:49:40.000In the 20s, with the jazz age, it was bootleg gin all the time.
00:52:04.000You're cooking eggs for people that famously have the munchies?
00:52:09.000It was so stupid and it was also there was so many of those did you ever see the ones that were done?
00:52:14.000I think it was in the 80s or the 90s There was a man and a like kind of a young sort of curious not knowing what's going on guy Talking to this old no-nonsense guy and they're they're eating dinner at a restaurant And he's saying if you buy drugs you support terrorism.
00:52:32.000It's just it's a fact You buy drugs, you support terrorism.
00:52:35.000And that's the whole commercial, is this guy just saying this one thing with no fact.
00:52:40.000I mean, it's a clear thing that you could get away with sort of before the internet.
00:52:43.000You know, it was like a narrative they were trying to push.
00:52:45.000But it was one of the dumbest things, because it's this guy who's like, they're eating a steak restaurant, he's like eating salad or something like that.
00:52:51.000It's like, this is, you support terrorism.
00:52:57.000We did a story in Rolling Stone once more in the 2000s, I think.
00:53:03.000We had passed a bill called Plan Columbia, and it was under Clinton, which we allocated, I don't know, $700 million to fight the drug war in Columbia.
00:53:14.000Of the $700 million, we gave $60 million To Columbia for an alternate crops program.
00:53:22.000So they give money to reseed and grow potatoes or coffee or whatever.
00:53:26.000The balance of it, $620 million went to a defense industry contractor in Connecticut to build helicopters.
00:53:39.000I mean, that's what the drug warrant might—and so, by the way, the sponsor of the bill was Chris Dodd, you know, who was a senator from Connecticut.
00:53:48.000And, I mean, what do you do with this?
00:53:53.000What do you do with this system that really is an excuse to lock up black people?
00:53:57.000But it came down to, finally, because if you're a middle class, you might finally figure a way to get out.
00:54:03.000Well, that was one thing that Rolling Stone did cover, too, is the difference in the discrepancy of the laws.
00:54:09.000Between crack cocaine and regular cocaine about how if you got arrested for crack, you would have far steeper penalties, far longer sentences.
00:54:22.000And one of the things that Dr. Carl Hart, who's a guy out of Columbia who's famously discussed, is like, it's the exact same drug.
00:54:31.000The only thing you've done with this is criminalize black people, criminalize poor people, people of color, and people that would be more likely to use cocaine so you could arrest them and lock them up for much longer sentences.
00:55:34.000And I tried to make that point in my book, not by, you know, a lot of political lecturing and something like that, but just showing what we covered and what we wrote about and how we went about those things, what we advocated for and the way it all...
00:55:48.000I thought if you took Rolling Stone, the history of Rolling Stone, and looked at America through the eyes of Rolling Stone, the prism of Rolling Stone, kind of a cultural history of...
00:55:58.000Our times in rock and roll and all the great characters and the people we met, the scientists and the environmental scientists and the writers and the presidents and particularly the rock and roll people, you get a real true understanding of What happened during this whole period?
00:57:41.000A yippie was a thing formed by two revolutionaries, Abbie Hoffman and a friend of his, which tried to promote a demonstration at the Chicago Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968, which turned into the riots.
00:59:40.000You captured all of the chaos and you did it in an honest way.
00:59:43.000And you did it in a way where I don't think the writers that wrote in Rolling Stone would have ever had the kind of freedom to capture things the way you allowed them to be captured.
00:59:54.000You know, you guys were the only voice.
01:00:00.000There was a couple other publications that, you know...
01:00:03.000But not with the circulation, the impact, and also the incredible amount of talent of writing skill and photographs that we brought to the occasion.
01:00:14.000I mean, you go through Rolling Stone or the covers of Rolling Stone, it's the story of your life.
01:00:55.000Yeah, well, there's always a dismissal of the previous generations, because the new generations are moving in a different direction, or at least expanding.
01:01:04.000They're learning from the lessons of the past and what they didn't like about their parents' generations, and they're expanding.
01:01:11.000You know, it's just today it's hard to track because there's so many voices and there's so much going on.
01:01:18.000And there's also this fear that things are actually rolling back in the wrong direction, like this overturning of Roe v.
01:01:24.000That scares the shit out of a lot of people.
01:01:26.000And the talk of overturning same-sex marriages, that scares the shit out of a lot of people, too, because they really are worried that some of these people that Don't like this progress and don't like the freedom that people are enjoying today.
01:01:41.000And they want to pull things back and they want to control people more.
01:01:48.000And what the Republican National Republican Party says is so retrograde, is so out of step with America, is so cruel.
01:01:58.000In every one of those policies you cite, there's cruelty at the basis of it.
01:02:06.000Every economic policy they advocate comes at the expense of the poor people, whether it's abortion, Welfare, medical care, these big expenses like tax policies,
01:02:22.000it's never the expense of the rich, it's the expense of the poor.
01:02:26.000And these people are supposed to espouse Christian values.
01:02:28.000I find that the most un-Christian party in the United States is this Mean spirit.
01:02:41.000And that spirit has always existed in America in various forms and places over the years.
01:02:47.000We've had the Ku Klux Klan and we had the Civil War and we've had Father Coughlin and McCarthyism and stuff like that.
01:02:54.000But never has it been so mainstreamed as Trump has been able to act as a champion.
01:03:02.000I just didn't see how people can live with themselves.
01:03:04.000And I think everything we're worried about in the future of America, including anti-environmentalism, including your fuels to face the facts of science, they were ruining the planet.
01:03:19.000Well, I think the fear is that we're going to deteriorate the country economically while trying to fix it environmentally and that there's got to be like a more sensible approach to it.
01:04:14.000That can be replicated and the government is trying to replicate it with tax breaks for companies that do all this kind of stuff, batteries.
01:05:49.000They're less frequent and more destructive because they contain more water in them, more wind in them, due to the heating of the Caribbean.
01:05:55.000In fact, the Caribbean is about two degrees, three degrees warmer this summer than it was last summer.
01:07:11.000But we can no longer burn up the Earth itself, the stuff we pull out of the Earth, the coal, the gas, all this fossilized stuff that's been here for a couple of million years as the Earth became what it is now.
01:07:24.000We're burning it up and putting it back where it came from, in the atmosphere.
01:07:30.000You know, I mean, one of, you know, we could end up with about 500 million people left on Earth living either pole.
01:09:05.000And whereas France, which has like 50% or something, or maybe more of its power come from nuclear, they never have had a nuclear accident, and they've had nuclear for 50 years or more.
01:09:16.000They've never had an accident because they got one reactor in shape, and they decided to replicate that reactor all throughout the country.
01:09:23.000Every new reactor was in a newly built design that cost twice as much because you had to redesign the entire thing.
01:09:29.000Do you think that the general public has a distorted perception of the safety of nuclear though?
01:09:45.000I think that we'd be – I don't think it's the solution but I think it's part of the solution now and that should be one of the things we go after.
01:10:17.000The money that's being allocated for the environment or for any of these things, they're passed with only Democrats voting for them and Republicans voting unanimously against them, whether it's voting rights, whether it's women's rights, whether it's abortion.
01:10:32.000The entire congressional Republican Party will vote against abortion.
01:10:41.000Do you think that's just a political issue?
01:10:44.000Like they think that that's what their constituents want?
01:10:46.000Do you think that there's some sort of more nefarious agenda?
01:10:49.000I think that they want to keep their jobs as senators or congressmen.
01:10:53.000And they live in fear that the people of the majority Of the minority of the Republican Party that controls and goes to primary elections, because it's always on both ends, the activists who are really ideologically driven,
01:11:09.000whether Republicans or Democrats, can control the primary.
01:11:12.000And they're afraid they'll lose their jobs, because if you say, I'm for abortion, they'll turn out this huge thing.
01:11:19.000And Trump will come down the road and start screaming at you, too.
01:11:23.000And they've been blackmailed by Trump, by this.
01:14:53.000The theory that all parties are the same and that it's not going to make any difference to our lives and Democrats are as bad as Republicans, I think that's nuts.
01:15:03.000So you think – well, I think socially, Democrats, at least in spirit, what they're trying to do, at least on paper, what they're trying to say – Is more in line of like this idea that you're talking about with the original Rolling Stone,
01:15:19.000the hippie movement, more in line of expanding rights and giving people more opportunity and giving people more freedom.
01:15:28.000I think that's – when you talk to like a liberal or a progressive ideologically, that's what they're hoping for.
01:15:35.000Like that's whether they're captured by money at the highest levels, which I think they kind of all are.
01:15:42.000Until you remove money from politics, we're always going to have a problem with special interest groups that are financing both sides.
01:15:54.000And I think there's a long record of Democrats accepting just – I just mentioned Joe Dodd and the $620 million siphoned off for the drug war into the defense industry.
01:16:06.000But if you look at what – and money will always be – there's ways to reduce money in policy.
01:16:11.000But the Republicans bought you the Supreme Court decision to let corporate financing back in, which is why now elections are so expensive.
01:16:18.000I think it's always going to be—but let's look at fundamental fairness.
01:16:24.000Is it right for billionaires to pay no taxes or effectively very little taxes, some of them, and the working man gets tax bills?
01:16:38.000I mean, the inequitable—the distribution of wealth is so inequitable.
01:16:42.000And then on top of it, we ask the poor, the middle class, to pay enormous medical costs.
01:16:48.000That they can't afford without giving any really much meaningful aid to them, you know?
01:16:53.000We ask that the carbon industry continue to pollute.
01:17:01.000And their pollution, by the way, located always in the poorest area of a town.
01:17:05.000It's where the refinery is, all this stuff.
01:17:22.000Because one of the things that they talked about during the campaign was decriminalizing marijuana and exonerating people that were in jail for nonviolent drug offenses.
01:18:32.000Well, the thing I go on about, because it's a political season, is the Republican Party.
01:18:39.000I know you're not supposed to talk politics or whatever, but as a party, they're a roadblock to the kind of America I believe in, which is a progressive America, a liberal America, a compassionate America.
01:18:52.000That says to its poor people, you know, we'll help you.
01:18:58.000We guarantee you the right to life, which includes health care, liberty, your own personal life, and happiness, you know?
01:19:09.000And I think those should be the founding principles of America, and I think they should be offered to everybody, not just to the super wealthy or the mid-wealthy or people like myself.
01:19:30.000No, I don't see that from enough people in general, period, especially people that are already doing well.
01:19:36.000I think particularly those things you talked about, I mean, my thought is education, the fact that people are so bored, just burdened with debt when they get out of college.
01:19:51.000That's a fucking – that's a crime against humanity, the fact that they've decided to make that one debt – the one debt that you kind of have to take on.
01:20:02.000Most people think when you get out of high school, you have to go to college, and it's going to cost you some money, especially if you don't have a scholarship.
01:21:14.000It's on the, okay, the video, the site, the source your site in.
01:21:17.000Biden's fear legal action, excluding these borrowers, might make it harder for anyone successfully sued to stop it, but that's practically an admission.
01:21:27.000Thursday, Department of Education said borrowers with privately held federal student loans will no longer qualify for President Biden's one-time loan write-off program.
01:21:37.000So this is borrowers with privately held federal student loans will no longer qualify.
01:21:43.000Indeed, just a year ago, the Education Department admitted it lacked the statutory authority to forgive student loans en masse.
01:21:53.000Yet then, Team Biden, under pressure from progressives and hoping to boost Dem's hopes in the midterms, suddenly announced a huge forgiveness program, claiming it had the authority after all under post-9-11 HEROES Act.
01:22:07.000First of all, I'm not going to accept the factual accuracy or...
01:22:12.000The general theory of anything that, as I read, imposed the poster or the Fox, both Murdoch, super Republican, totally prejudiced, totally discredited.
01:22:36.000This is a remarkable reversal that will affect the fortunes of many student loan borrowers.
01:22:40.000The U.S. Department of Education has quietly changed its guidance around who qualifies for President Biden's sweeping student debt relief plan.
01:22:49.000At the center of the change are borrowers who took out the federal student loans many years ago Both Perkins loans and federal family education loans, FFEL loans issued and managed by private banks but guaranteed by the federal government,
01:23:04.000were once the mainstay of the federal loan program until the FFEL program ended in 2010. Today, according to federal data, more than 4 million borrowers still have commercially held We're good to go.
01:23:45.000And is discussing with private lenders.
01:23:47.000In the meantime, borrowers with privately held federal loans can receive this relief by consolidating these loans in a direct loan program.
01:23:55.000All eligible borrowers will have until December 31st, 2023 to submit an application for debt relief.
01:24:07.000Thursday, though, the department quietly changed that language.
01:24:10.000The guidance says now As of September 29th, 2022, borrowers with federal student loans not held by ED cannot obtain one-time debt relief by consolidating these loans into direct loans.
01:24:30.000To survive the challenge by Republicans in courts, as to whether the law is constitutional or not, whether it can be done under the authority that you presided precedently, they've pulled back on some.
01:24:44.000Meantime, the other half is still eligible.
01:24:47.000So while they haven't gotten everything, they've gotten at least half or 30 percent or 40 percent, 20 or 70 percent are still eligible for loan relief.
01:24:56.000It's been challenged by the Republicans, and the reason it's been pulled back is to make that challenge go away or be less potent in court by those things that they thought might be questionable constitutionally.
01:25:14.000Betsy DeVos was the head of the Secretary of Education.
01:25:17.000They refused to do anything about student loan relief.
01:25:19.000In fact, she owned one of the biggest scam private college systems that was around.
01:25:25.000And all the scam – and she refused – and she – what did she do with the scam?
01:25:32.000She didn't bail – She wouldn't reimburse for all the scam stuff that the private education business of what she was one of the biggest factors in.
01:25:54.000But my larger point is this and the larger point is that The money for education, which, as you said, is a ticket to society, to productive society, and for lower education in a public school system, we will not spend that money on education.
01:26:12.000Instead, you've got people worth $100 billion.
01:26:15.000You've got dozens of people worth $100 billion.
01:26:17.000That money would be better spent On the purposes of society that we want, which is we want an educated and employed and productive population.
01:26:27.000How would you go about allocating that money though?
01:27:06.000Whereas people who are making income of $100 million a year, let alone $10 million a year, should pay – start paying at a rate of 50 percent and escalate up.
01:27:17.000So if you're making a billion dollars – Escalate up?
01:28:02.000Isn't that what people are terrified of?
01:28:05.000What people are terrified of is these laws getting enacted and then watching this same sort of scam play out now under the guise of it being progressive and...
01:28:15.000How much money had been pilfered out of the funds for COVID relief?
01:28:29.000I would see, you know, concert promoters who are super wealthy ask for relief because they didn't need relief.
01:28:39.000But anyway, I think that you're going to have to, in all big spending, whether it's government or corporate, accept a certain amount of fraud or leakage or shoplifting.
01:28:48.000I mean, that just comes with the territory.
01:28:50.000People may need to shoplift and there's evil people and scam artists and you try and do your best.
01:28:57.000But in a system this big, you can't be perfect.
01:28:59.000Even though you can't be perfect, you can do a lot of good.
01:29:03.000And is it better to not help people who are starving or living on food stamps or can't get education for their kids to help them and accept a certain level of fraud?
01:29:16.000And you can also pass laws that call for inspector generals and effective prosecution of people.
01:29:22.000I mean, again, the Trump departments looked over every – they didn't care about it.
01:29:54.000Matt Tybee, I got this idea reading his stuff he wrote at Rolling Stone at the time.
01:29:59.000He said, this vast private wealth that's being held in investment banks and Switzerland and corporations and billionaires, it is the least productive use of capital in the world.
01:30:13.000This is money being held privately, not being used to serve any useful purpose.
01:30:18.000Improve health, an educational system, Good, decent lives for our workers, starving people in foreign countries.
01:30:27.000This capital is the least productive use of our human wealth.
01:30:33.000Do you think it's just that when people get money, they want more money, and then they get into a position of power and they want to do whatever they can to keep that money going and keep it rolling?
01:30:44.000And the idea of being altruistic or being generous and trying to – for the greater good of the country gets lost.
01:30:56.000And I think about it a lot but I can't figure it out and then I think in my own personal situation and say, well, do I – even though I'm not up in those levels at all – Well, would I give up the money?
01:31:13.000What people are terrified of is the reallocation of wealth by people who are not good at managing anything.
01:31:20.000They're worried about the idea that you're going to do this, but then it's just going to penalize the people that are out there hustling and doing their best and trying to get ahead.
01:31:29.000And it's going to incentivize people that have already become accustomed to this system of pilfering money.
01:31:38.000Well, I would maintain on that front the number of people who have this much money have already been pilfering the system.
01:32:03.000The government is the instrument we have, and we can choose our government, and we can expect that it's going to do a pretty good job, because our government, by and large, now does a pretty good job, whether it's fire departments, police, the Pentagon, a health system.
01:32:17.000We run an enormously amount of complicated things, some of them well, some of them bad, because every bureaucracy can get What else do you have besides democratically elected government to choose from?
01:32:32.000Autocracy, as in China, which distributes money fairly well.
01:32:37.000But I don't trust a billionaire to be that person to judge what they're going to endow, what wing of what hospital, what their name on it.
01:32:46.000Because when you get to be a billionaire, That wealthy, something changes, I think, in most people.
01:32:53.000I mean, in 99% of people, you think you're smarter than everybody.
01:32:56.000You think you've got the world figured out.
01:33:00.000I'm surprised how many wealthy, wealthy, super wealthy people I've met who don't understand politics and political power because they have no sensitivity for the people or other things.
01:33:13.000I mean, everybody who gets that wealthy thinks they're really smart.
01:34:23.000What do you do with a hundred billion dollars?
01:34:25.000Even if you say you're going to give fifty billion dollars away, it's to the things you like or the museums you like or the particular causes.
01:35:34.000And then we were taught to share it, that there was an American dream.
01:35:37.000And we were taught the principles that found this country were justice and liberty.
01:35:43.000I think where people get confused and scared is that they don't see a clear path.
01:35:49.000They don't see a path that makes sense.
01:35:50.000They don't see a leader that speaks in a way that resonates, that really seems like a person really just does want better for people.
01:36:00.000They see people that are speaking to their special interests and they're just saying all the right things and then when they get into office they do the same shit that everybody's helped done and, you know, fund the military-industrial complex and get us involved in interventionalist foreign policy and make it more and more dangerous in the world.
01:36:24.000And I think what I've learned growing up and getting an older person, what I've learned from watching politics and watching all these movements is that change is gradual.
01:37:23.000And we have to look for the balance of good.
01:37:25.000I think, for instance, Joe Biden is a more populist-oriented president for people, for Ma.
01:37:32.000I mean, his heart and sympathy runs to helping people, you know, versus, you know, that he has been a part of voting for the Defense Department every time.
01:37:44.000I just can't expect perfection, is what I'm saying.
01:38:10.000And one of the things that's always frustrated me the most in this country is that we have all these places that are economically disenfranchised and filled with drugs and crime and we've done very little to fix that.
01:39:38.000I just think that the fear that many people have is how is this going to be accomplished and how is it going to be allocated and how do we keep people from profiting off of this philanthropic notion?
01:39:51.000I don't think you can keep people from profiting and I don't think maybe – Stealing, you can try, but still – but even profiting, I mean I think what we need is a much better regulated capitalist economy.
01:40:06.000I think that capital is a wonderful way to harness the human spirit for ambition and accomplishment and even – and for personal wealth and gain, which are all legitimate human feelings.
01:40:18.000It's just that it's gotten out of control.
01:40:44.000I think the legalization of psychedelics would go a long way to changing the way people view just community, just the way we interact with each other.
01:40:55.000The fact that we are supposed to be – the United States of America is supposed to be a community.
01:41:00.000I don't think that you could take acid and be taken out onto the streets where poor people live or into the ghettos and say, ever say, this is right.
01:41:11.000I can go home and not think about, not have this image in my mind.
01:41:35.000But I think having it available to people to understand that there is a different way to look at the world and that you're on this ride for a short amount of time.
01:41:44.000You know, you say you're 76, I'm 55. We, you know, we don't have much time left.
01:41:59.000It's not what this thing is supposed to be all about, and it doesn't enhance your experience on the ride, which is really what it's supposed to be about.
01:42:07.000Do our best to enhance the experience for ourselves and for others.
01:42:11.000And when you're just trying to enhance it for yourself, and you're around other people that are doing that as well, and that's all they concentrate and think about, then that becomes the mentality that you operate under.
01:42:23.000I don't think drugs are the only solution, but I think there's a real pathway through psychedelics that allow people to understand that you're just a part of a pattern and that this pattern is not mutually beneficial and it's definitely not beneficial to people that are disenfranchised.
01:42:41.000It's not beneficial to people that are stuck in a bad situation.
01:42:45.000And that the best way forward for everybody, including the wealthy, is to make the world a safer, happier, healthier place.
01:44:33.000You're doing it—the way you're approaching it is from a peaceful, kind way.
01:44:39.000Or can't you look at Trump and say, Donald or Mr. President, whatever you call him, just do the right thing for these poor people who are suffering down there.
01:44:49.000You could let all these people out of jail, by the way.
01:44:51.000You don't have to just let your political conspirators or— How do I express it?
01:46:08.000I wanted to say that in the book because the book in part does look like a recitation of these fantastic places and people I've met and vacations with people I've met and great concerts I've seen.
01:46:48.000No one would think of you as a person that would fear missing out on anything.
01:46:53.000I mean hearing you talk about these times and talk about what you've been through and talk about what you've experienced and starting Rolling Stone.
01:47:04.000Being a part of them, being at the helm of one of the biggest engines for cultural change this country's seen in the last 30, 40 years.
01:47:14.000Well, I mean, it was a hell of a ride.
01:47:18.000And to see these places that hang with the most talented rock artists of our time and go to the White House and sit in the Oval Office and interview the president and try and grill them as best you can and just feel your...
01:47:31.000A part of that, but you don't know that when it's happening.
01:47:36.000It's only when you look back at the end and put it all together do you realize, Jesus, I was at that place and that place and how it looks and it seems sort of, you know.
01:47:45.000You didn't realize at the time how crazy it was for you to be where you were and do what you were doing?
01:48:10.000It either came so easy or there was so much of it that I never thought, oh, I mean, I think, oh, man, having that time of my life, I'd sit there, I can't believe it.
01:48:21.000I'd be places, listening to music would make me cry.
01:49:14.000And I still go out of my mind when I see the Blue Show, but I get to see a lot of them.
01:49:19.000So, I don't know, I still thought, like, am I like Zelig, you know, showing up at all these places, like the Invisible Man or like in Forrest Gump and he's always right next to Johnson or something like that?
01:50:18.000I get them to sign the cigar thing and go, wow, how can I be at that?
01:50:25.000Or on the other side, like one year after the Academy Awards, that party afterwards, a small party, Michael Jackson comes in and sits next to me and sits down.
01:50:35.000We start chatting because I had some other business with him.
01:52:18.000And I didn't particularly want to, but he insisted on me doing it.
01:52:22.000Not because he probably think I knew anything more than anybody, but since I was the editor and the owner, then it would make him more special.
01:52:29.000It would be more reflective of his glory.
01:56:26.000Yeah, but even that alone would be fascinating.
01:56:29.000Just to try to get into the mindset of a person that's living this very, very unusual life.
01:56:36.000I mean, to say that he didn't have anything to say, he's a human being that's experiencing something that no one will ever understand because this is pre-internet.
01:56:45.000He was one of the biggest stars the world had ever seen.
01:56:50.000If I said to him, the really legitimate question is, what was it like to be a child star and at age seven have your father manage you and tell you what to do?
01:58:14.000In fact, you know, I mean, I tried to look him up a couple of years ago and I went to the ranch to see him and I had to sit around for two hours and finally just left.
01:58:52.000Did you read any of the stuff that the doctor who went to jail for anesthetizing him when he died, that the doctor said that he was chemically castrated by his father?
01:59:07.000Do you know about these young boys that were taken into the opera and turned into castratos?
01:59:20.000That that was how Michael preserved his voice, that he was chemically castrated when he was younger, and that's why he had that very high-pitched voice and no muscle mass, and essentially he was a eunuch.
02:00:19.000I don't, I've not really, I think I've heard that before.
02:00:23.000How would a guy in Jackson, Indiana, Jackson, no, Gary, Indiana, Michael's father, Joe Jackson, get his hands on the materials and know-how to castrate?
02:00:51.000Especially to an incredibly wealthy person that had a lot to gain by enacting that.
02:00:56.000If you have the financial mechanism, like, if you think about what is powering the Jackson 5, what's powering Michael Jackson's career, it's his voice.
02:01:05.000And the voice that was developed when he was very young.
02:01:08.000You know, you go listen to ABC or listen to some of the, you know...
02:02:04.000At the very least, personally, you would get an experience with a very, very unusual human being that is going through a life that no one will ever understand.
02:02:13.000Because it's like Elvis, the Beatles, there's a few people in human history that have achieved that level of fame and notoriety and popularity.
02:02:25.000And, you know, we're talking about being captured by fame.
02:02:29.000I mean, who the fuck was captured by fame more than Michael Jackson?
02:02:34.000What human beings will ever experience what that guy has experienced?
02:02:39.000Well, you're of course right about that.
02:04:33.000And That was a wholly different experience, you know?
02:04:39.000So, I don't think Michael, he wanted to, he knew, if he revealed himself as he did, like, posing naked on the, and for the two versions on which we ran in Rolling Stone, him and the old co-ed naked, It was a way of getting out of this trap of fame.
02:04:57.000Saying, oh, well, we're the most famous couple in the world and the biggest pop star in the world.
02:05:10.000How did John feel trapped like when you were talking to him about it?
02:05:12.000Because he couldn't do what he wanted to do.
02:05:14.000He was a man of lots of opinions and ideas and politics and – Ideas about peace and art, and he had to be a Beatle for all those times.
02:05:24.000And so he's, for five years, taking drugs, taking acids, smoking pot, going to India, Maharishi, meditating, and he can't say anything about it.
02:05:37.000He can't tell the world, I've got other vision of things.
02:05:56.000People use the Rolling Stone access sometimes to do those kind of things.
02:06:04.000Like David Cassidy, who had the popular television show, the Partridge family, to get out of that, he posed without his clothes on for the cover of Rolling Stone.
02:06:20.000To get out of it, because he was a genuine musician who wanted to be a musician and in a rock band.
02:06:24.000Instead, Opportunity knocked and made him a teenage TV star in his Goody Two Shoes show, you know, the Nelson family or whatever.
02:06:37.000As soon as he came out, as soon as he looked like he had been naked, he didn't really show him naked, but the sponsors all deserted, ABC wanted him off the air, and he was free.
02:06:48.000There was no other way he could get out of it.
02:06:50.000Otherwise, he was contractually bound for five more years of being a teen idol.
02:06:55.000So they kicked him off the show for posing naked on the cover?
02:09:46.000But, I mean, this parallels to what we're talking about with Hunter and many people that become extraordinarily famous that I find really fascinating because they became famous because of this uniqueness and then they get captured by that and then the public demands...
02:10:59.000You know, you have a very passionate audience that go to you and believe in you and respect you and all the things that could make you feel pretty swell-headed.
02:11:14.000Well, fortunately I'm famous for just being me, which is kind of a different thing.
02:11:38.000And the pressures of it, I mitigate with physical exercise and making the things that I do on purpose far more difficult because it makes the rest of life easier.
02:12:20.000I mean, and that's probably where the contradiction starts and the thing you always have to deal with and fight with yourself, and suddenly you realize the mask is more attractive than you, maybe?
02:13:41.000But I think psychedelics have helped me tremendously in not having a mask.
02:13:47.000And the way to connect with people is also to not have a mask.
02:13:51.000I think if you did this over – I mean I've done thousands of these, hours and hours of conversations.
02:13:56.000If I had a mask, it would have come off.
02:14:00.000That's what my point was about talking to Michael Jackson.
02:14:03.000I think if you did sit down with him for long enough, you would at least get an understanding of just the way he communicates, the way he answers questions, the way he deals with situations, the way you just talk to him about the world itself.
02:14:16.000Talk to him about things outside of himself, how he views things.
02:14:20.000You'd get a sense of how bizarre the journey he's on is.
02:14:24.000Because he's in some bizarre rocket ship and some uncharted part of the universe.
02:14:30.000But what do you think when somebody says to you, Or if I came in here and said, Joe, I really want to do your show and all that stuff, but do you mind if we turn all the lights off and you can't see me and there'll be some candles on the side?
02:14:44.000Does that make me, I mean, doesn't it sound to you like this man doesn't want to be seen?
02:14:51.000I would imagine that he's very uncomfortable and he's just terrified.
02:14:54.000I don't even see my facial expressions.
02:14:56.000Well, you know, it was before he was already having some plastic surgery, right?
02:15:01.000Because he probably had some distorted perception of his appearance.
02:15:06.000And, you know, I mean, just the whole world watching you in that way has got to be very fucking strange to be this young boy who grew up in a completely abnormal way.
02:15:18.000Like, he never—I had a normal life growing up.
02:15:26.000And for him, everything's extraordinary from the beginning.
02:15:30.000I know, you know, through this, I met all kinds of performers and artists and singers.
02:15:35.000Some are good friends, some I know casually.
02:15:39.000I've seen a lot of performances, and they're all involved with Their image and how they present themselves to the public versus who they really are.
02:15:55.000You've seen all kinds of combinations.
02:15:58.000People are just dying to kind of expose themselves and talk a lot and think a lot and be valuable.
02:16:07.000For instance, Mono is just nonstop talking and open about everything.
02:16:14.000His love, his wife, his kid, everything there is.
02:16:18.000And then you meet others like say like Bruce or Mick, who don't like talking about...
02:16:28.000Well, Mick doesn't like talking about himself.
02:18:55.000And also, you know, maybe there's a sense of uncertainty about his thoughts and opinions and the way he sort of solidifies them is by the music and is through his heart.
02:19:06.000You know, there's something to be said for that.
02:19:26.000And it's Bruce doing covers, not his own material, but doing covers of soul music from about the 70s, the Commodores and the Childs, Motown stuff.
02:19:37.000And in modern arrangements, the same arrangements, he recognized the song immediately, but he's singing it so powerfully.
02:19:45.000There's so much fun in that record and so much passion in that record and he's never pushed his voice before beyond his own lyrics and what he's trying to say about things to these more simple songs that are beautiful songs but express the deep universal things about love and losing love and my girl doesn't love me anymore and my girl does love me and you know,
02:22:39.000The presidency, his presidency was historic, transformational in so many ways, you know, and it was another part of the baby boom, you know, moving up, although he wasn't a boomer, but that sensibility,
02:23:22.000And I think if you're going to be the president, you've got to play politics.
02:23:27.000He wouldn't engage too much with his contributors, with the party people, the people who run the party locally in various places.
02:23:37.000And he left behind a party that was in weak shape for the next election, the Hillary election.
02:23:43.000And a lot of kind of pissed off people who felt they weren't treated right, our friends, the billionaires or less, he didn't want to deal with them.
02:23:52.000He didn't want to deal with this ugly business.
02:23:54.000But these are the people who give you the money for the campaign.
02:24:10.000When he was elected, the senator, the pro tem of the Senate, Pat Leahy, and also Nancy Pelosi and the congressman from Detroit, whose name I forget from him, Wanted to have investigations conducted by the Senate of the Iraq War.
02:24:41.000I want my administration to get out to a great start and peace and harmony and we're going to be bipartisan and all this stuff, which was a horrible mistake because there was no such thing as that in this lifetime right now.
02:24:53.000I think Obama thought somehow he could magically change politics and this kumbaya, not exactly kumbaya, but achieve better president because he himself thought, I am such an excellent Conciliator.
02:25:08.000That I have been a community organizer for most of my life.
02:25:19.000It's a great notion, but it's completely not in this world.
02:25:23.000Let's look back at the history of the modern Republican Party.
02:25:26.000Look at the investigations that they've been conducting of Clinton.
02:25:31.000I mean, Clinton barely got into office, and all of a sudden they start right after him.
02:25:36.000Obama gets into office, and the first thing that happens to him is that Senator McConnell says, my main objective for the next four years is to make sure this is a one-term president.
02:25:50.000But the hostility and the danger of the Republicans' studies was so apparent.
02:25:55.000I mean, look at how well the Republicans have used these investigations throughout years.
02:26:00.000So here was the opportunity for Obama to say, go ahead, investigate the war.
02:26:04.000First off, morally, it should have been done, no matter what.
02:26:07.000Because, I mean, this was a war under false pre-census, which was put together on the basis of bad evidence, either deliberate or undeliberate.
02:26:53.000It's a power game, top to bottom virtually.
02:26:57.000And he had the opportunity there to wield it.
02:27:00.000How could he know what it was like until he got in there, though?
02:27:03.000I mean, how could he not have these...
02:27:05.000I mean, if he is that guy that we wanted in there in the first place, he was this idealistic visionary.
02:27:12.000Of course, he would try to carry that on.
02:27:14.000Well, I think you also have to be realistic, too.
02:27:17.000If you want to get things done, you're going to have to play politics.
02:27:21.000I mean, he had people around him who are skilled professionals, including Joe Biden, and he had Nancy Pelosi with him, and Chuck Schumer, a lot of people.
02:27:29.000Did you get a chance to talk to him about that?
02:27:33.000I've had three long interviews with him over the course of his presidency, and I never did bring that up with him.
02:28:41.000And if you would go back and do it again, would you do it differently?
02:28:45.000And what do you think could have been done to bring people together, to be bipartisan, but also To expose some of these things that were critical issues, like why did we get involved in the Iraq War?
02:29:07.000Politicians, all of them, except when they're out of office, the presidential candidates I've interviewed, which have been Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, and Obama.
02:29:33.000If a candidate makes a spontaneous comment and says, I should have investigated it because, you know, Bush was really – he's a war criminal.
02:29:44.000One false remark and you've got – you've blown up the world all of a sudden and the newspapers are all in the media and it's a week of your time wasted because you said some harmless kind of thing.
02:29:56.000They're not, especially in the middle of the campaign, going to say anything that they haven't really thought through or hasn't been pre-tested or vetted somehow.
02:30:05.000They're not going to piss off this industry or that industry.
02:30:07.000You know, when they're talking about energy uses, they're not going to piss off the agriculture interests by saying this thing about it.
02:30:13.000And the minute they say, oh, it's a transitional fuel, then, you know, those states are up.
02:30:18.000I mean, you can't really speak the truth anymore.
02:30:53.000I go in to try and figure out who the person is and kind of take a measure of their thinking and their sensitivity and how they're feeling about things.
02:31:02.000Because everything else a president says is vetted or formalized.
02:31:12.000I love talking to Clinton because he's always talked like some kind of corn poem from the South.
02:31:16.000You know, he's talking about the NATO allies and something.
02:31:19.000They were madder than three chickens in a hen house, you know, and he talks Southern about NATO. I mean, what are you, you know.
02:31:26.000And Obama, the most honest, I was scheduled to interview Obama for the exit interview and was scheduled to take place the day after the election.
02:32:05.000So I had prepared, you know, for three days for the interview all kinds of questions, you know, like what do you think the world should be and what advice would you give Hillary, your successor?
02:32:17.000What are the big problems you're concerned about?
02:33:41.000Well, look, Jan, if you want me to get on my knees, get down on the floor and curl up in a ball and start crying about this, I'll do that for you.
02:35:35.000I know what he's going to do when he gets in there.
02:35:38.000He's going to start moving towards legalization and decriminalization as fast as he can and constrained only by public opinion and other things lifted.
02:36:41.000Well, that's the beauty of having a conversation with a person like that.
02:36:44.000And I think your approach is very similar to my approach.
02:36:47.000You're just trying to get the person to express themselves.
02:36:50.000And it's very difficult for someone to express themselves when they're in a job that literally prohibits them from expressing themselves and could inhibit progress, could change the way they view the world and the world views them.
02:37:27.000Keep people – reveal a little of yourself but don't reveal – as an artist, if you reveal too much and – Destroy that sense of mystery, then you've lost a little there.
02:37:36.000The thing is about a president, you don't think of him as an artist.
02:37:39.000So you don't think of that as an option.
02:37:42.000But you want them to express themselves.
02:37:46.000But they don't want to do that because they have a narrative and they have a thing that they're trying to push.
02:38:44.000That resonates with people, especially people that aren't doing a deep dive into what is actually going on.
02:38:51.000I wish we'd have people who would be almost in office to be more open about debating the stakes and tell the truth about what they think is going on and let that out.
02:39:02.000But it's not in the nature of our society.
02:39:07.000I mean, we punish people who show vulnerability.
02:39:12.000Well, that's what people liked about McGovern, right?
02:39:14.000I think he was, yeah, he was a sincere, deep man.
02:39:20.000He came from a religious background, a small state.
02:39:23.000He seemed sincere when he was talking as well.
02:40:05.000I mean, the media is so nutty, it's always been nutty, that you get punished so hard by the opposition party, the mainstream press, and the internet press, internet people, for speaking out on anything.
02:40:53.000People want to talk about Russian troll farms.
02:40:56.000If you don't think that that shit is going on through American, without doubt, there's interest in this country that are orchestrating narratives.
02:41:46.000The internet is totally unregulated, and yet it is a public utility, just like television and radio waves and stations, that has been financed, particularly by the government.
02:42:07.000It should be regulated as a public utility and by the same rules that govern radio and television.
02:42:14.000You know, the internet should not be this free, do anything place.
02:42:18.000There are rules and regulations about laws, about fairness, about libel, about reckless disregard for the truth, about publishing something with miscellaneous malicious intent, about deliberate lying.
02:42:31.000And if it were just governed by the basic rules, By which we regulate the rest of the press.
02:42:38.000The rules of free speech, which means that you can't yell fire in a theater, and you can't publish stuff knowingly false, and you can't publish stuff you're doing out of malice.
02:42:51.000But don't you think there's also some real benefit to it in that it allows real investigative reporting that's not popular, that's not popular with corporate entities, it's not popular with banks, it's not popular with the military industrial complex or politicians,
02:43:07.000and you get opinions that resonate with people that would not be expressed in any other way?
02:43:13.000I think that's totally important and totally worth doing.
02:43:15.000But we're not looking at opinions now.
02:43:29.000The internet, on the other hand, is brilliant at democratization of communication and expressing opinions and making the cost of investigative journalism lower because you have to have somebody with all these high overheads.
02:43:42.000The internet's great and I love social media.
02:43:46.000But like every other industry in the United States, it has to be regulated.
02:44:17.000But if they're going to be in power and they're regulating the Internet, they're going to regulate the Internet in a way that suits their best interests, the same way they do with the banking industry, the same way they do with the environment, the same way they do with energy, the same way they do with everything.
02:44:33.000You're talking about so much money involved in disseminating information in a very particular way.
02:44:40.000Right now, the Internet companies are rich beyond belief.
02:44:43.000Yeah, but it's a disruptive thing that has never existed before.
02:44:48.000I think it exists, and I think where we're at is where we're at.
02:44:53.000I think we need to move forward collectively as a country with an ethic that respects truth, And that it appreciates opinions and reality and an understanding of things that's not necessarily possible with corporate interests involved in dissemination of information.
02:45:13.000But there's no way to do that except through the government.
02:45:16.000There's no way you can do that except through the government.
02:47:01.000When you look at the internet, which is this incredibly disruptive technology, and you see the expansion of Technology in general, that technological innovation just seems to be a part of our culture inexorably.
02:47:46.000What scares me is the future that's kind of predicted in Star Wars.
02:47:52.000Or I recently read 1984, which is – we're at 1984 now.
02:47:57.000I mean if you think about the internet and you think – you have in your pocket a device every day The phone, which tracks you, which can be now turned on to listen to you without you acknowledging, which knows everything you shop, your health history, everything about you,
02:48:13.000who you hang out with, everything that's possible that you do.
02:48:16.000And you cannot live in a connected America without having an iPhone.
02:48:21.000And eventually it's going to be in your body.
02:48:23.000Well, it eventually will be in your body.
02:48:25.000And in 1984, they had this device on your wall.
02:48:29.000You know, it's a TV set, a two-way interaction.
02:49:18.000The regulation in there now and the last people who are going to regulate these people's property are wealthy people or the internet themselves.
02:49:25.000These guys have no interest whatsoever despite the fact they've already got $236 billion in the bank in Ireland like Apple does or something like that.
02:49:34.000Those are the inexact facts but that's good.
02:49:37.000So government is what we've got and government has done wonderful things and it's done blundering things and we've got a system of checks and balances there, however imperfect, of the three branches so that nothing gets too out of control.