In this week's episode, we're joined by a friend of the show, Joe, to talk about how he got his start in the world of tech and how he's come a long way in the past 20 years. We also talk about what it's like to work for a big company like Sprint, and why it's a good idea to have a no-fee cell phone service. And, of course, Joe talks about how to get started in web development and why he doesn't regret it at all. This episode was produced by Alex Blumberg and edited by Annie-Rose Strasser. Our theme song is Come Alone by Suneaters, courtesy of Lotus Music. Our ad music is by Build Buildings Records. We're edited by Haley Shaw. The show was mixed by Matthew Boll. Music by Jeff Kaale. Art: Mackenzie Moore Music: Hayden Coplen Editor: Will Witwer Editing: Matthew Boll Our theme music was made by Ian Dorsch The music for this episode was written and performed by Mark Phillips Additional music was done by Bobby Lord, Matthew Boll, with additional mixing and mastering by David Fincher, and additional mixing by Kevin McLeod, and Alex Blanchard, and Bobby Lord We've been working on this episode for over a year and a half, and we hope you enjoy it! Thank you so much for all the support we've gotten so far! We'll be looking out for your support, we really hard on this project! - we really appreciate all the feedback we've got a lot of support and love you, so much more than we can't thank you for all of your support and support you, we appreciate you, thank you, you, etc., etc., and we're looking forward to all of the support you're amazing, so we really, really appreciate it, we'll get back to you, too, etc. - Thank you, bye bye, bye, good vibes, bye. Joe, bye - Joe, Sarah, bye! Sarah, Kristy, Caitlyn and Joe, Caitie Sarah , and the crew, Joe . Caitie, Sarah , Joe, and the gang & the gang, , & the rest. , , Rachel ( ) John
00:00:41.000They're selling you the very best mobile devices on the Android platform.
00:00:46.000They have the Samsung Galaxy S2. They have the Galaxy Note 2, the Galaxy S3. They have all of the high-end Android phones, which are pretty badass.
00:00:57.000I have that Samsung Galaxy S3. It's a magnificent piece of equipment.
00:01:02.000So you're not going to be starved for technology dealing with cheaper prices and dealing with a no-contract situation.
00:01:09.000Instead, what they do is provide you cell phone service on the Sprint backbone.
00:01:16.000So you're not dealing with some mom-and-pop cell phone distributor.
00:01:21.000It's an excellent cell phone network, the Sprint network, one of the biggest ones in the country.
00:01:25.000No contracts, no ETFs, no bundling, ride-along services, no overage charges.
00:01:31.000If you use more than you thought you would, you just pay for whatever you used.
00:01:35.000You also get credits on unused service, which is, I love this.
00:01:39.000If you use less than you thought you would, Ting drops you down to the level you hit.
00:01:43.000And credits you the difference on your next bill.
00:01:46.000I mean, that's like as sweet as you can get with a big corporation.
00:02:27.000We're also brought to you by Squarespace.
00:02:29.000Squarespace is one of our newest sponsors.
00:02:31.000And what Squarespace is, if you go to squarespace.com forward slash Joe, you can check out what they have to offer.
00:02:38.000What it is is a website that's set up so the layperson can design and build a website.
00:02:48.000The way it's set up, all the templates are very intuitive, and they have a bunch of different examples that you can see of what your website could look like if you tried this way or that way.
00:02:57.000And it allows you to do what wasn't really possible just a few years ago.
00:03:02.000A few years ago, you had to hire a guy who knew HTML. You had to learn how to use different software packages.
00:03:43.000Yeah, but you went to school for that.
00:03:45.000Yeah, but it was when – like I took the first class at my college, the first class they ever had on internet.
00:03:52.000It was called Multimedia Production and Design.
00:03:55.000It was the first time they were like, well, this new internet shit is catching on, so we better start having some classes about the internet, designing for the internet.
00:04:03.000And I took the first class of the first year.
00:04:32.000I wish, I wish, I enjoy it because I actually hate doing websites now.
00:04:36.000It's just because, like, for other people, it's the worst thing ever to do because, like, you'll design this whole website and they're like, you know, I don't like the purple.
00:04:44.000And then so that means you have to, like, change every single little table and stuff.
00:04:48.000So the cool thing about, like, Squarespace is that you could just put a template.
00:04:53.000Like, if you just have, if you want a website that's just like, hey, I have a, You know, a store that I want to advertise, a small company.
00:04:59.000You could just pretty much get a template, put all the information down so you at least have some presence on the internet.
00:08:23.000I had no idea we had such crossover on the audience.
00:08:25.000Apparently quite a bit because people on my message board are super pumped about this.
00:08:29.000People online are super pumped about this.
00:08:31.000I think now more than ever in this country there's a learning, a yearning rather, to understand how the hell we got here.
00:08:42.000When you look at like the financial crisis and you look at our ridiculous actions overseas and you look at like, wow, there's a lot of kids that are growing up right now that are in their 20s and 30s and they look at this mess that we're in as a society,
00:08:58.000as a culture, as a race really, the whole human race.
00:09:02.000And because of that, I think there's more of an interest in history today than at any time I remember young people being really interested in history when I was younger.
00:09:14.000But it seems like there's more of a clamoring for this knowledge now than I think I've ever heard before.
00:09:21.000It kind of helps when the History Channel is doing Monster Quest and Ice Road Trucker.
00:09:25.000It kind of leaves a vacuum for some of us to sort of just shoot through.
00:09:29.000Does that drive you crazy when you're watching the History Channel?
00:09:33.000Part of me starts to think that, yeah, it opens up.
00:09:36.000I mean, you know, we were doing some work a while back with some of these production companies in L.A. and New York and stuff.
00:09:41.000We'll get this guy from the History Podcast.
00:09:44.000We'll develop a show around him, and I'm in these meetings with these guys, and it's like every question is, can we make this a little more broad?
00:09:51.000And eventually, you're going to have Dan Carlin searching for monsters, is what they were looking for, I think.
00:09:56.000So we're sticking with the podcast, I think.
00:09:58.000I don't think they think there's an audience for history, and yet I think that gives us an audience for history.
00:10:03.000There's no place else for those people to go.
00:10:05.000Yeah, it's kind of interesting what people think that people want to and don't want to see because there's obviously the internet where your podcast is very popular.
00:10:14.000There's a lot of very popular podcasts where it's just people talking.
00:10:18.000And you're getting hundreds of thousands of people to download these things with just people talking.
00:10:23.000And you look at the amount of people that are tuning in to your average television show on a cable network and...
00:10:52.000It's tough to find that grass-fed butter.
00:10:53.000I've actually started ordering it online.
00:10:55.000I thought I would miss the fungus, but I'm finding I'm getting everything I want.
00:10:59.000The fungus is just giving you a headache, apparently.
00:11:01.000There's a guy named Dave Asprey who runs BulletproofExec.com.
00:11:05.000And he wrote the Bulletproof Executive.
00:11:07.000And his idea about Bulletproof not being actual Bulletproof, just being that it's rock-solid nutrition, rock-solid management of your body, all this stuff.
00:11:17.000And one of the things that he found out was the mycotoxin in coffee issue that so many people weren't aware of.
00:11:31.000No one's really thinking about what the fuck is in that actual coffee, but apparently there's quite a bit of coffee that has fungus on it and unhealthy mold.
00:11:40.000And that shit can apparently be very poisonous.
00:11:42.000Well, you know, our industry functions on this.
00:11:44.000So without this, we're just dead in the water.
00:12:10.000It's funny when you think about the fact that the Boston Tea Party is actually – is that really what started people off drinking coffee in this country?
00:12:42.000Go to a big tea dealer and behind the scenes, you know, and just have some guy you know that can get the tea on the side smuggled in from French Canada or something.
00:12:50.000Isn't that bizarre when you hear about, like, salt used to be worth a lot of money?
00:12:55.000You take away the salt and you watch the price go up, you know?
00:12:58.000Yeah, but I mean the idea that people would go to war for it.
00:13:01.000Could you imagine if we're headed to Africa right now to go get salt?
00:13:04.000That was a reality at one point in time.
00:13:07.000I read a whole thing about how Afghanistan might be all about lithium deposits and stuff, and you're going, well, 50 years ago nobody wanted lithium for anything.
00:13:15.000I mean now it's just one of those things where – I've got to get a hold of Afghanistan or those lithium things will dry right up.
00:13:20.000Well, Afghanistan is so rich with other things as well.
00:13:22.000Natural gas, not just the minerals, natural heroin.
00:13:30.000A lot of folks who don't understand Afghanistan, like conversations with people about it, you can't really compare it to any other country.
00:14:50.000Yeah, it's like Sonora over there, but worse.
00:14:53.000And it's one thing to decide you want to fight a war in some flat desert place where all of our air power is going to make a huge difference.
00:14:59.000The terrain is like beyond Martian in Afghanistan.
00:15:03.000And so you look around and you just go, look, the Russians in the 1970s and 80s, they may not have had the infrared stuff like we do, but they were pretty dang sophisticated and willing to kill a hell of a lot more people, and they couldn't manage it, so...
00:15:14.000It's really scary now that they've turned in so many parts of the world to drones for these difficult missions and the implications of using drones on people.
00:15:28.000It's a very strange sort of a conversation to start having because it's step one on a multi-step process where eventually these drones are going to be intelligent things that are controlling themselves.
00:15:40.000They're going to be searching out crime.
00:15:41.000And shooting people from the mountains.
00:15:44.000I don't know how you stop that, though.
00:15:45.000I mean, it's like saying, I don't want to have tanks because look where tanks are going to go.
00:15:48.000The problem is that we treat them differently than live people.
00:15:52.000It's like if you said to yourself, well, if you wouldn't go in there with a human pilot and bomb the place because it'll look like Nixon bombing Cambodia when you shouldn't, then don't do it with drones.
00:16:01.000But if you're going to use them for occasions, if we're at war with somebody, you're going to want the drones.
00:16:06.000You're going to want to use everything.
00:16:07.000Yeah, but you're not going to want it.
00:16:08.000If you say, well, we couldn't bomb Yemen's tribal territories with a bomber and a human being, that would look bad.
00:16:14.000But we can do it with a machine because, well, there's no Americans there.
00:16:50.000D-O-R-M-E-R? Was that going to be a decision?
00:16:52.000At what level do they make that decision?
00:16:54.000Is that the L.A. Sheriff's Office decides that, or you've got to call the president?
00:16:58.000I can't imagine the White House would let that happen, even if the Sheriff's Department wanted to, because then all of a sudden you have to answer all those questions they're not answering now about, is it okay to kill Americans with a drone on American soil?
00:17:10.000Well, then all of a sudden that becomes a moot point, doesn't it?
00:17:16.000Ex-cop Christopher Dormer, now a target for drones.
00:17:19.000Riverside Police Chief Sergio Diaz, joint leader of the task force assigned with Finding Dormer, has confirmed, and his quote is saying, we're using all the tools at our disposal in a third vague...
00:17:33.000Oh, that doesn't mean he's using drones.
00:17:51.000He was obviously an evil, deranged murderer.
00:17:54.000But look at the position it puts Obama in.
00:17:56.000All of a sudden this whole thing you're ducking now, you can't duck it anymore and you're not using it against terrorists.
00:18:02.000Depends on your definition of a terrorist, but, you know, I mean, any old murderer fleeing the scene of a murder now is open to, you know, no judge, no jury, no due process.
00:18:12.000You know, we knew you killed him, so, I mean, that's going to happen, too.
00:18:16.000I mean, we're going to hit that fine line at some point.
00:18:18.000Well, they've already started assassinating American citizens that are in other countries that they believe one thing is illegal, right?
00:18:24.000Yeah, the government won't confirm it, but everybody, it's an open secret.
00:18:28.000It gets real tricky when someone denies the rights of citizens, when someone who's in power denies their rights, because what are you then if you're in power and you're denying their rights?
00:18:40.000As soon as you step in, And deny people due process, deny people lawyers, deny people...
00:18:46.000Why would you ever want to do that is the real question.
00:18:49.000So when things get passed like the National Defense Authorization Act that allows the government to indefinitely detain American civilians, and they don't have to do anything.
00:18:59.000They're not required to notify your family.
00:19:11.000And people always say to me, they say, well, you know, why are you defending the terrorists?
00:19:15.000And what you try to explain to people is, without the due process, there's no confirmation that this is a terrorist.
00:19:20.000The only way you know it's a terrorist is when some court somewhere determines upon looking at the evidence that this person is a terrorist.
00:19:28.000Once you can kill somebody on the suspicion of being a terrorist, Well, we're all under suspicion of being a terrorist under the certain conditions that someone wants to deem a mistaken identity situation, you know, or anything.
00:19:39.000I mean, how many guys are named Omar or Mohammed or, you know, I mean...
00:19:59.000They already do because they're a government, but to take it to the next level and decide that you're going to deny the rights of people that you feel are guilty.
00:20:06.000Well, who are you, and how do I know that you're infallible, and how do I know that this isn't corruption?
00:20:11.000How do I know this isn't a personal grudge?
00:20:13.000It's not like you're dealing with an organization that has a spotless record of Over the past, you know, 200 years where they're the most ethical human beings to ever exist and people from other countries come to them.
00:20:26.000No, we've caught them lying about a million different days.
00:20:28.000Oh, we had committee hearings, which you cannot even imagine today, which shows you how much things have changed.
00:20:33.000In the 1970s, we had the Church Committee hearings and the Pike Committee hearings, where the government actually on television exposed everything the CIA had been doing since the end of the Second World War, the assassinations and all this kind of stuff.
00:20:45.000The crown jewels are what the CIA used to call those secrets that were exposed on television by congressional and senatorial committees.
00:20:53.000It just shows you what happens when there's no oversight.
00:20:56.000And if stuff is too secret to have oversight over, you're asking for trouble.
00:21:00.000There's too many ways human beings can justify Going beyond the rules.
00:21:07.000I mean, the waterboarding thing is a perfect example.
00:21:10.000We prosecuted people at Nuremberg for having an attitude that we have now, which is, hey, if they're terrorists and you can save lives by torturing people, isn't that an ethical dilemma where it's worth torturing some guy you know is bad anyway?
00:21:24.000In order to save lives, I mean, if you could have prevented the two towers from falling down by waterboarding a couple of bad guys, isn't that worth it?
00:21:32.000And those ethical dilemmas lead you off into the weeds really quickly, and history shows that over and over again.
00:21:38.000It's very doubtful that it's helping either.
00:21:41.000It's very doubtful that you're really getting that kind of key information from people by throwing water down their mouth.
00:21:47.000I don't know if torturing people gets them to tell the truth.
00:21:52.000Gets them to tell you anything you want.
00:21:53.000There's an old line about would you – and I wish I could quote it at length.
00:21:57.000It's a wonderful line going back hundreds of years where somebody says, would you abrogate the laws in order to get the devil?
00:22:03.000And the other guy says – No, I would stick to the laws because if you abrogate the laws to get to the devil, you take away the only thing that protects yourself eventually.
00:22:13.000People say, well, it's okay to go after this to get to terrorists.
00:22:15.000What makes you think, one, that it'll stay with terrorists, and two, that what a terrorist is, that definition won't change.
00:22:22.000The Bush administration was calling these people that would light car dealerships on fire in the middle of the night when there was no one there, eco-terrorists.
00:22:40.000Yeah, it's a strange time because the amount of ability to spy on people and to extract information from your email and your cell phone and, you know, they know your GPS at any point in time,
00:22:55.000but yet we're still just human beings.
00:22:58.000And human beings have to be protected from their own instincts.
00:23:01.000We have to set up a system of government that has fail-proof stops where you can't get past certain levels.
00:23:22.000You have to, as an American citizen, be able to state your case.
00:23:26.000Well, here's the fly in the ointment, though, and this is almost like the Founding Fathers' tragic flaw in the system.
00:23:31.000In wartime, the rules are thrown out the window, right?
00:23:35.000In wartime, the government is allowed to give the – the Congress is supposed to decide when you go to war.
00:23:41.000Then once the war is going on, the president has – You know, they say extreme constitutional authority as commander-in-chief to run the war any way they want.
00:23:48.000But this is all predicated on the idea that the war has an end, right?
00:23:53.000This is a temporary suspension of normality.
00:23:56.000What do you do in a war like, you know, war, I'm using air quotes, what do you do In a war that has no end, who's going to sign a peace treaty with us on some battleship to end this war on terror?
00:24:05.000This is like saying, you remember the Bush administration for a while was toying with the idea.
00:24:08.000They thought the war on terror had gotten sort of a bad name, so they were going to do a little marketing move and change the name, and for like five minutes they were calling it the war on violent extremism, which I thought was a great line because that really showed how ridiculous it was.
00:24:23.000Who's going to sign the end of the war treaty and surrender to us in the violent extremism war so we can return to a Normal American system with checks and balances and where the president didn't have extreme authority.
00:24:34.000That's the problem is that we're in a situation where it's wartime and it's going to be wartime forever unless somebody declares it over.
00:24:44.000And if they declared it over, what stops the next guy after one bombing in some part of the world to start it up again?
00:24:49.000Yeah, essentially we've been at war in some function since the 1940s, but realistically when we were in the 90s, at least we didn't feel like we were at war.
00:25:00.000We didn't feel like it until 2001. They didn't invoke the extreme authority either.
00:25:04.000I mean they didn't do that in Vietnam even.
00:25:06.000The government didn't say – Okay, we're going to lock up every one of Vietnamese descent in a cage for a while in case there's spies.
00:25:13.000This is like when Truman did the Korean War thing and he got around having to declare war by saying, it's not a war, it's a police action.
00:25:21.000But by doing that, he also essentially swore – he didn't officially – he kind of swore off that, and I'm going to have extreme constitutional authority.
00:25:32.000It's when Bush did this war on terror thing and basically the neocon folks said – Remember John Yoo, the advisor to the president, the Office of Legal Counsel said that if the president wanted to, he could torture a son to get the father to talk.
00:25:55.000You can go back to the Romans and the Greeks, and they understood that dynamic real well, and so did the founding fathers of our country, who were classically trained.
00:26:02.000I mean, the reason we're not a democracy in one respect is that they were fully aware of how that could go, and they were fully aware of what happened to Rome.
00:26:09.000So if you look at the checks and balances in our Constitution, a lot of that stuff is designed to keep the same thing from happening to us.
00:26:16.000I think they understood that those things break down over time, though, and that essentially you might have a lifespan In that sense, it's very fascinating, the idea of a representative democracy and the idea that there's an electoral college and the idea that there's a few steps beyond actual democracy.
00:26:36.000It's sort of you get a vote, but you get a vote for a representative.
00:26:40.000You don't get to completely vote like one person, one vote.
00:26:45.000And the idea behind it initially was sort of to protect people from their own silliness, right?
00:26:51.000Well, the founding fathers didn't necessarily like the idea of average people running the show.
00:26:56.000If you looked at the state laws, most states wouldn't let average Joes vote.
00:27:00.000I mean, if you were working for a tinker...
00:27:02.000In Virginia, you probably weren't allowed to vote.
00:27:05.000You used to have to be a landowner in most of these states, and what that was designed to do was to limit the vote to stakeholders.
00:27:11.000They figured if you could run a farm without going out of business, you probably knew enough about what was going on to be an educated voter.
00:27:19.000I mean, you'll probably know this, that after the revolution, it wasn't that long afterwards, we had things like the Whiskey Rebellion and the Shays Rebellion.
00:27:27.000These are new revolutions, and they're revolutions coming from the lower classes.
00:27:31.000And our brand new, you know, radical founding fathers shut those things down like nobody's business.
00:27:36.000Yeah, it's weird when you think like that.
00:27:39.000You think that the Founding Fathers didn't necessarily want everybody to vote.
00:27:45.000But the romantic version of it is that they were these beautiful people that had this idea of treating people the way they deserved to be treated and governed with respect and honesty.
00:27:58.000I mean, when you realize that when they had the revolution, we became the first major country in the world that had anything like that.
00:28:06.000Then you start to realize, okay, we're looking back at our standards now and not realizing how radical those guys were for their day.
00:28:13.000And it's worth pointing out that only a few years after our revolution, the French had theirs, which got wickedly out of hand very quickly.
00:28:19.000And our founding fathers were looking at what happened in France, and the French were saying that a lot of what they were doing was sort of a respecting kind of thing from a reflection of ours.
00:28:30.000And they were going, don't blame that on us.
00:28:53.000I think the average person, I shouldn't say, don't think that anyone's going to overthrow the government.
00:28:58.000It's not really anything that anybody really believes or thinks of.
00:29:01.000It's like, oh, God, the United States government is way too big for that.
00:29:04.000But there's a lot of people in this country that don't think that.
00:29:08.000There's a lot of people in this country that are stockpiling guns.
00:29:11.000There's a lot of people in this country that think that the government's ban on assault weapons and all these different magazine restrictions is just designed to squash the the oppression or the rather resistance to their oppression and that when when the time comes You know,
00:29:27.000they're not going to give up their guns because they know what's going to happen, that the government's going to come again.
00:29:30.000Like, I've never heard this before in my life, this kind of thinking.
00:29:45.000What was the task force where a police chief was developing a task force to protect them in case they're invaded by the United States government?
00:30:07.000You think the government's going to come and take all the guns?
00:30:09.000And they're ready to put together a task force to, like, Band together to protect the citizens and their guns from the oppressive government.
00:30:18.000I've never heard talk like that from an elected official in recent memory.
00:30:22.000You got two different things going on here, and they're both really important.
00:30:25.000The first one was when you talked about the revolution thing.
00:31:13.000I could see it going to either extreme.
00:31:15.000It's hard for me to imagine us actually staying in this sort of stasis that we're in right now.
00:31:20.000I certainly think we're in a period of change.
00:31:23.000What I wonder is, is it possible that people could be organized enough to do it and get Something going on without violence.
00:31:34.000I mean is it possible to overhaul government from an elected official point of view?
00:31:42.000Can you just elect the right people and slowly but surely they take care of things?
00:31:46.000I mean is it even possible at this point?
00:31:48.000Well, I want to address your other point because I think that was very good too.
00:31:50.000The idea of this whole – we need the guns to stop the government from taking over or whatever.
00:31:55.000I first encountered this when I was on the radio in Oregon because once you get out into the back country where you get – This was in the era of the so-called militia movement and everything.
00:32:04.000And you get these people calling you talking about that exact thing.
00:32:12.000I think they're just – they're the people in the government.
00:32:13.000The guy who you mentioned in Texas is probably an old militia member.
00:32:16.000But these guys – And this is something that the NRA has kind of pushed to.
00:32:20.000The NRA is a very different animal than it was 30 or 40 years ago.
00:32:24.000And one of the things they talk about now that they didn't used to talk about was this idea that part of the reasons we have a Second Amendment is to overthrow the government if you need to.
00:32:34.000I'll leave that to a constitutional expert.
00:32:36.000I would just point out that I think people who think like that are not paying a whole lot of attention to how much things have changed militarily.
00:32:44.000You and I were talking about drones a minute ago.
00:32:47.000Who thinks any government person is going to put themselves out as a target?
00:32:51.000They're just going to send a drone to your house.
00:32:56.000But there's a lot of people – you remember there was Randy Weaver up in Idaho that got – You know, into this conflict with federal agents because he's...
00:33:04.000Yes, he'd sought a shotgun off a little too far and a government agent bought it from him and then all of a sudden they're surrounding his cabin and shooting his dog and shooting his wife and killing his son, which really was kind of a bad deal.
00:33:17.000But he was a bad enough, weird enough, unabomber-looking kind of dude that you could spin that into, well, he's a radical gun nut kind of thing.
00:33:25.000And then you have the Waco situation happen.
00:34:06.000If Joe Rogan gets a bunch of people together to change the laws, you have to go through these representatives.
00:34:11.000If that membrane is corrupt, no matter what you do, when you end up with legislation on the other side of that membrane, it's going to have been tainted on the way through.
00:34:21.000And this is why, when you talk about reform, reform has to get through those people.
00:34:25.000They're the ones benefiting from the way things are.
00:34:29.000So in other words, if you say let's have some anti-corruption legislation, who's going to be the people most hurt by that, the people that benefit from the way things are?
00:34:37.000So this is sort of the fly in the ointment.
00:34:39.000How do you get corruption reform through the very people that are benefiting from corruption?
00:35:05.000When you have 250,000, 300,000, 400,000 civil rights type protests that are putting real pressure on the government, I think that's what it's going to take.
00:35:14.000It's going to take a real feeling like, okay, the jig is up.
00:35:32.000At least throw something out there that's a fig leaf.
00:35:34.000And they don't feel that pressure now.
00:35:36.000Is it possible, and this was my question, is it possible to go and get new elected officials and change that?
00:35:44.000I mean, can you get people that aren't willing to be corrupt and aren't willing to capitalize on the system as it's written right now and profit off of it?
00:35:53.000Remember that scene from the Kevin Costner version of The Untouchables?
00:35:57.000There's a scene in that movie, and I quote it all the time, where Al Capone has bought off the jury.
00:36:02.000And he's sitting in court, and he knows he has nothing to worry about because he's paid off the whole jury.
00:36:05.000And they've realized that he's paid off the jury.
00:36:07.000So at the last minute, right before the verdict is read, the judge dismisses all the jury members and brings in all the alternates and screws up the whole thing because now all of a sudden, instead of a corrupt jury, you have one that hasn't been bought off.
00:36:18.000The way our government is set up is designed to keep radical change from happening.
00:36:26.000And there's a seniority system so that – let's say you elected a third of the Congress as new people, not corrupt.
00:36:33.000They're part of – you have the Tea Party thing now.
00:36:35.000Imagine instead of the Tea Party, you had an anti-corruption movement that was able to bring in a whole bunch of new Congress people.
00:36:41.000And their whole shtick is that we're non-corrupt, we're not going to vote for any of this corruption.
00:36:46.000The first thing that's going to happen is they're going to be told to sit in the back of the room and shut up until they have seniority.
00:36:52.000When you're here, two or three terms will maybe give you a committee position.
00:36:56.000If you show that you're going to play ball, we'll let you run the committee.
00:36:59.000I mean, there's this whole system where you don't get to be influential.
00:37:02.000until you've proven you're a good corrupt official for a long time and you're not allowed to overthrow the entire government at once you have to go in there and then you're still gonna have John Kerry and John McCain and all those guys running the show while you're in the back if you're lucky getting a chance to give a speech on C-SPAN in front of an empty congressional room because all of your compatriots are out fundraising do you know that they have phone banks right off the congressional property because you're not allowed to fundraise on government property so they've built these phone banks Like one
00:37:32.000foot off government property and they go in there and they cast their vote and then their aides take them right to the phone banks and they start the fundraising.
00:37:39.000Eighty percent of their time is spent fundraising.
00:38:33.000Anybody can take part, but money is how you get our attention.
00:38:37.000And they've convinced themselves that this is fine.
00:38:39.000To be honest, it's been going on in one form or another for so long And some of these guys have been on the Hill for 30 years.
00:38:46.000I mean, to them, this is just how it works.
00:38:49.000Lawrence Lessig wrote a book where he talked to some of these guys, and they're almost confused.
00:38:55.000He had one guy where he went in and the guy was voting on one side of an issue.
00:38:59.000And Lawrence Lessig said, well, what about this other side of the issue?
00:39:02.000And the guy was completely unaware that anybody disagreed with the issue at all because he hadn't heard from the other side because the other side hadn't given any money.
00:39:08.000He was unaware there was another side.
00:39:12.000So in a sense, I mean, I'm not trying to let these guys off the hook, but they're in this bubble.
00:39:17.000I mean, I remember we had – I'll even name a name here.
00:39:20.000I had Senator Mark Hatfield on my radio show once, and this is way back in the 1990s.
00:39:24.000And he comes on the show, and he's about 80 years old, and he's led by the hand by some 19-year-old girl who's his aide who's talking to him like he's an Alzheimer's patient.
00:39:36.000Okay, Senator Hatfield, you're going to sit down and you're going to talk to this guy for 15 minutes exactly, then we have to go to the company.
00:40:18.000So when they come into this gig, everybody who works the gig, I mean, as they're learning the business and learning how it works, it's just, this is how it is.
00:42:02.000Generally what happens is they have a staff and they're going to have somebody on their staff who helps them raise money and there's going to be fundraising targets.
00:42:29.000That's the best question of all because this is the one empowering thing about the whole deal that goes right back to us as voters and how we can actually change things.
00:42:38.000This money is mostly, some of it's for campaign organization, right?
00:42:42.000You want your guys going door to door.
00:43:06.000We realize how much of a tougher time advertisers have than they used to have.
00:43:10.000In the old days, I mean, all you have to do is, you know, we have a new cereal and it's got some different colored marshmallows and boom, I mean, they're selling that like hotcakes.
00:43:25.000What if the old people who still buy into advertising, the old way it happens, that generation goes away and now all of a sudden everybody's like us.
00:43:32.000Don't you devalue what that money buys?
00:43:35.000Haven't we changed the system simply by not paying attention to the ads that the entire system, the money is designed to change your mind?
00:43:45.000Doesn't the whole thing kind of collapse?
00:43:47.000I mean, I don't know because we haven't seen it happen, but that seems to be the whole fly in the ointment when it comes to campaign and money raising and everything else.
00:43:54.000If I can't change your mind with the money, why do I want to sell my soul and spend 80% of my time fundraising?
00:44:00.000The whole point is to change your mind.
00:44:02.000Well, the one thing that always changes my mind is those negative ads, like the really obvious one.
00:44:07.000President Obama ordered – when they get like real super negative, you just can't trust him.
00:44:13.000Well, you know why those work though, Joe?
00:44:14.000They work because you don't have an alternative.
00:44:16.000I mean that's the whole Democratic and Republican thing.
00:44:19.000If you had five choices and one guy went negative against another guy, the average voter would say, well, I'm not voting for either.
00:44:25.000I've heard bad things about both those guys, so I'm voting for this third party.
00:44:28.000The two-party thing gets you into the lesser of two evils nonsense or your waste your vote nonsense.
00:44:33.000And that's where – I mean that's why the negative ads work like they do.
00:44:36.000That's something that would go away if you had multiple choices.
00:44:39.000You can't do five negative ads very easily.
00:44:41.000Well, it became much more difficult for independents after Ron – not Ron Paul.
00:44:50.000Yeah, when Ross Perot came around and paid for his own television half hour to talk about his campaign and taxes and where your money's going and the Federal Reserve, a lot of people had never heard any of that stuff before.
00:45:05.000What if a not-so-goofy character had done it, too?
00:45:07.000I mean, what if you'd had somebody who...
00:45:14.000Yeah, he was from Germany, a real old guy when I was in college.
00:45:17.000And he said that one of the flaws in the American system was that they have – the job of president is actually two jobs in most foreign countries.
00:45:27.000Usually you'll have like a prime minister and a guy who's called the chancellor or the president.
00:45:32.000The prime minister is the bean counter guy.
00:45:56.000Some wimpy bean counter accountant looking guy, you want some guy that looks like America, right?
00:46:00.000But how often do you get the skills you want in the bean counter?
00:46:04.000I say bean counter, but you know, it's a whole range of things.
00:46:06.000But how often are you going to combine the Robert Redford look of a person with the guy who's going to have all those other qualities you want, especially if they've been in a racer-clapper politician for 30 years or something.
00:46:19.000So if Ross, can you imagine Ross Perot as president?
00:46:21.000Because I think most people are like, Yeah, I like what he's saying, but I can't imagine that little, short, strange talking, we're going to clean out the barn kind of guy being president.
00:46:30.000I think – I would have imagined he could have pulled it off.
00:46:41.000I mean if they're honest, I'm on board.
00:46:44.000I mean forget about specific policies.
00:46:46.000My take on it would be completely – I mean it really would be all just guesswork because Because I have no idea what the hell happens when you actually get into office.
00:46:56.000I guess, but I really have no idea what the whole process must be like to say, when I'm president, I'm going to do this.
00:47:04.000And when you actually get elected and then you have meetings and get access and get debriefed and they explain the world to you in a way that really no one has access to other than the president.
00:47:15.000I'm not sure you're not bypassing that moment at the inauguration where they hit you up with the needle and turn you into the mandatory candidate needle.
00:47:35.000You do start to come to this conspiratorial idea that some, you know, they go to you right before inauguration, we're going to kill your whole family if you don't do just what, you know, what every other president is doing.
00:47:43.000Did you ever hear the Bill Hicks bit about it?
00:48:12.000Well, I mean, it's almost like an algebra problem.
00:48:15.000When you try to explain all the reasons that these people might morph so much after Election Day, yeah, those start to start looking not that far-fetched, because it's hard to explain otherwise, unless these people just think campaign promises are campaign promises, and that's all.
00:49:21.000See, this is where the Obama administration really angers me.
00:49:24.000It's not unusual to have some president go off half-cocked and do wild, crazy things like President Bush did after 9-11.
00:49:32.000In fact, I kind of forgive those people a little bit because I think it's unrealistic to expect us to have acted Sane.
00:49:52.000I think we were going to go crazy when that happened.
00:50:10.000When Obama from the other party running on a platform that he's going to fix the abuses of the previous administration instead codifies them, that's the new reality now.
00:50:52.000The reason presidents like to dabble in foreign policy is because they have the most leeway there.
00:50:57.000If they want to get into budgetary things domestically, you start running into congressional roadblocks all the time.
00:51:01.000So presidents, even when they're not foreign policy guys, like to do foreign policy stuff because you can actually do stuff and the Congress can't say much about it.
00:51:08.000In wartime, this guy's got amazing authority.
00:51:11.000I mean, imagine using those same rationales that they use any time they want to do something with the war on terror, but using them for something totally, okay, we're going to stop this budget impasse because we're in a war on terror and I have supreme authority and I'm just going to do what I want to do.
00:51:40.000Now, there's a book by a Yale constitutional law professor named Bruce Ackerman.
00:51:44.000I think it's called The Fall of the American Republic, and it's a little too wonky for most people, but what he's essentially done is target what he thinks is the fly in the ointment in terms of these laws, and it's the Presidential Office of Legal Counsel.
00:51:57.000It's essentially the president's lawyers.
00:51:59.000These were supposed to be people who could answer the president's question.
00:52:23.000And what Ackerman was saying is, by the time the Supreme Court gets around to ruling on these things, it's often two, three terms after that was first.
00:52:33.000It's been the law of the land for a long time now.
00:52:35.000Imagine the Supreme Court ruling on something from 1994 and saying, everything we've done since 1994 is wrong.
00:52:43.000And so the Office of Legal Counsel can make these rulings and they're the law of the land until they're challenged and overturned by a court.
00:52:50.000By the time the court sees that, it's settled law.
00:52:53.000It seems to me that we're in like a system that it's like...
00:52:58.000I compared it the other day to an old car.
00:53:01.000It's like you can have a Model T and keep changing the oil and keep fixing things, replacing the parts, and it'll kind of keep working.
00:53:09.000It's going to require a lot of work, but it'll sort of get you where you've got to go.
00:53:12.000Or you could buy a brand new Cadillac, and you're not going to have any fucking problems at all.
00:53:26.000We have like this old patchwork government.
00:53:29.000We have this old, wacky, imperfect sort of system.
00:53:34.000One of my listeners brought up a point that I thought of before, but I'd forgotten.
00:53:38.000And when you think about it, it's a good point.
00:53:41.000He said, not just that, it's a government designed for a tiny country, you know, one with 13 colonies all on the East Coast, you know, relatively homogenous and the whole thing.
00:53:53.000And you're expecting that same system to work now?
00:54:16.000So things – I mean, in that sense, you're expecting a system designed in a completely different set of circumstances to adapt.
00:54:22.000Now, Thomas Jefferson said that that's why the Constitution was built to be amended.
00:54:26.000He said to expect a child – he said to expect this Constitution to work as we wrote it forever would be to expect a child to continue to wear the same suit of clothes as they grow up.
00:55:01.000Corporations having the ability to spend as much money as they like on candidates, where you have no restriction in how much money they can spend to influence someone who gets into office.
00:55:17.000It's like, how does that ever get to be the way we run things?
00:55:21.000Because it seems like that's the most obvious method of bribery ever.
00:55:25.000Well, there's another one, because even if you got rid of that, how do you stop this revolving door that we see where they say, listen, man, don't worry about it.
00:55:31.000When you get out of office, we've got a nice, cushy job at this defense industry or whatever, where you helped us out.
00:55:42.000Did you hear about the guy who was the head of Monsanto, who's now the head of the FDA? Well, it's like Obama just put another guy in the Treasury Department that works for Citigroup or something.
00:55:52.000And you turn around and go, it bothers me less that he did it than he doesn't mind that we saw he did it.
00:55:59.000And everything that's gone on, I mean, you don't even...
00:56:38.000I think that's almost – I mean you want to talk about conspiracy theories that Oliver Stone can do a movie about.
00:56:42.000How about how we end up with these kinds of elections where how often is it one guy that you'd like to replace and another guy who's worse?
00:56:51.000I mean you look at Bill Clinton, Bob Dole.
00:57:29.000If you want to go crazy, Alex Jones conspiratorially sort of design a road map how they've decided to keep certain presidents, they believe that that was one of the problems with Ross Perot.
00:57:42.000It's that Ross Perot is how Bill Clinton got into office.
00:57:53.000But I remember a lot of people at the time thinking like, wow, what are they going to do about this?
00:58:00.000Well, they did the Commission on Presidential Debates up the bar.
00:58:03.000I always try to tell people, do you realize the debates used to be run by the League of Women Voters?
00:58:08.000They got out of the gig in the late 80s because the rules that the democrats and republicans wanted in terms of controlling the debate and the questions and everything else, they said we won't run a debate under those conditions and they expected the other side to back down and the other side, which were the two parties, instead said, great!
00:58:23.000We didn't want to deal with you guys anyway!
00:58:25.000We'll form our own commission, we'll make up four members on it, it will be democrats, four will be republicans, and we'll set the standard for where non-democrats and republicans can play a role.
00:58:34.000But Perot exceeded their original rules and he was able to get enough of the population and involvement and rise enough in the polls because of his money, like you said, to get in the debates.
00:58:48.000Because he brings up things that are bipartisan failures, and this is the rule of the debates.
00:58:53.000Don't bring up – if the Democrats can't tell the Republicans – You know, or the Republicans can't tell the Democrats or blame them for something that they had nothing to do with.
00:59:02.000The debt, for example, that was Perot's big issue, that's a bipartisan creation.
00:59:07.000So the two parties had no reason to bring that up.
00:59:09.000You throw the third guy in there, though, oh, he's going to make everybody sweat because nobody has a good answer for bipartisan failures.
00:59:16.000So after Perot crashed the debates, the Commission on Presidential Debates upped the rules for inclusion.
00:59:22.000And I went back and did the history of it.
00:59:25.000Do you realize that there's never been a candidate in American politics from any third party or independent that's ever come anywhere near their current bar that they've set?
00:59:34.000I mean, Teddy Roosevelt ran as a third party candidate from the Bull Moose Party after he'd already been president, right?
00:59:40.000A very popular president running against two people that nobody wanted.
00:59:44.000He wouldn't have reached the benchmark to be included in the modern presidential third.
00:59:49.000You're never going to have a third-party person in again.
01:00:13.000Listen, you're going to have to get a very rich, handsome, famous person to run, and they're going to still have to have all the breaks go their way.
01:00:21.000They're going to have to be running against Walter Mondale and Bob Dole.
01:00:23.000So essentially they've legally slapped it down to a two-party system.
01:01:27.000I mean, first of all, our Republicans are to the right of anything, you know, almost, there's a few fascist parties and real weirdos in Europe, but we're to the right of anything like that, and our Democrats are to the right of most of their parties, too.
01:01:39.000Well, you know, I have this conversation with a good buddy of mine, Brian Callan, all the time, where we talk about how crazy the world is today, but yet the greatest time to live ever, the safest time to live ever, the most prosperous time, the most We're most technologically advanced time.
01:01:58.000When you look at today in comparison to a thousand years ago, how brutal life was, or even a few hundred years ago.
01:02:04.000Yeah, where would you want to go back to?
01:02:05.000The dentistry alone would keep you in the modern day.
01:02:08.000Yeah, I mean, we have just this amazing potential.
01:02:13.000As we stand today with our technological abilities, our internet connections, our ability to exchange information, we seem hobbled only by our representation.
01:02:23.000It really does seem to be, if you look at how advanced medicine is today, if you look at how advanced science is, the incredible innovations that are coming out every day, the one place where we're disappointing is in our representation.
01:02:37.000You know, a thought occurs to me as you say that.
01:02:40.000Maybe you and I and the people who think like us are a weird sort of minority.
01:02:45.000Maybe you could come up with this idea, and I'm fleshing this out as we talk, but maybe there's a way to look at this outside our comfort zone where people might say, if all you do is play video games every day, you go to your...
01:03:11.000And I think that's where you get into these arguments that we make about slippery slopes.
01:03:15.000Well, hey, man, just because you're happy today, you know, wait until video game players who download games without permission are struck by drones.
01:03:22.000So I guess maybe there's a way to look at it that there might be a lot of people – it's like Brave New World territory – that don't care.
01:04:00.000But I think as human beings, we all...
01:04:04.000Ultimately realized that we're in this together and that a lot of people had to exist before us that had the better good of mankind in mind when they developed computer chips, when they developed TVs, when they developed cars.
01:04:20.000It's our job to do the same thing, to continue innovating as those before us have innovated in every way, whether it's socially, technologically, or governmentally.
01:04:31.000It's our one area where we've really stalled.
01:04:34.000We really have, in fact, slipped backwards into a goofier system because it's more transparent, people are more upset than ever, and still government operates the same way.
01:04:45.000When we saw the bailouts, and I remember there was a speech where Obama gave where he said he was limiting the bonuses of the CEOs to like, it was like a half a million dollars.
01:04:55.000And I was like, this is the craziest – you're watching robbery take place right before your eyes and this guy who's the representative of the people, this Obama character, is letting you know they're only going to rob a half a million dollars each.
01:05:10.000Like, oh yeah, yeah, their company failed, but see, they have a contract and even though the bank didn't – they lost all their money, that guy gets money.
01:05:19.000Money is I think what we just – my little fly in the ointment of this idea I had.
01:05:24.000I think the fact that it's going to be very hard for a lot of Americans to make a decent living is the most likely thing to prompt change.
01:05:32.000I remember in the 1990s when I was doing my radio show, I was the worst radio show host in the world for The Times because I was on this station that had these conservative, stereotypical radio hosts all day long, and then right in the middle of the day part, it was me.
01:05:58.000He goes, people aren't going to go out and face the bayonets while they're able to pay their bills and they have the food they want and they can give their kids a halfway decent life.
01:06:07.000He said, when that changes, everything else will too.
01:06:11.000And you sit there and think about what's happened to middle-class jobs in this country, the so-called middle-class jobs.
01:06:18.000It's a combination of changes in trade deals, which we all know about, but also automation, which has gotten rid of a lot of jobs.
01:06:24.000I always talk about them as the average Joes and Janes, people that don't have really high expectations, But they want to work, they'll go to work and they'll raise a family and maybe save up for college and just make it work, a little shell game here and there, but just a decent life.
01:06:40.000You take that away, And maybe, I mean, when those video game medicinal marijuana-smoking hipster people can't pay the bills and get evicted, maybe that's the kind of wake-up call that changes their belief system.
01:06:54.000And maybe that's where you say, we live in the greatest time ever.
01:06:57.000Yeah, unless you're a black person in prison because they caught you with a little cocaine.
01:07:01.000Or maybe unless you're some guy that just got evicted and your house is underwater.
01:07:05.000I mean, those are the things that all of a sudden make you, and you have enough of those people, because nobody cares if it's 1% of the population.
01:07:12.000If 40% of the population dropped from what was the middle class into the lower class, I think agitation hits a level that you and I in our lifetimes haven't seen.
01:07:24.000Yeah, where we have never seen before, and that's one of the things that I was alluding to when I was talking earlier about the desire to understand history.
01:07:32.000I think that more people today, and at least the conversations that I'm having based on my own personal experiences, More people are concerned with talking about the corruptions of the past and why shouldn't we be surprised?
01:07:45.000Or why should we be surprised that there's so much fucked up shit going on in politics today?
01:08:09.000I mean, that's what history teaches you.
01:08:11.000It gives you context so you can understand the now.
01:08:13.000You know, I think the Founding Fathers obviously had some awesome ideas, and they were brilliant men, and they were very well-schooled.
01:08:21.000You can't possibly ask people from 1776 to figure out a way that you're going to govern people that exist in a time you couldn't even possibly imagine.
01:08:34.000Don't you think they would have been the first people to say that, too?
01:08:43.000Where are the wise men of today that step forth and make sense of the situation without Let me piggyback on that because I thought about that too.
01:08:57.000Look at the 1960s, which whatever you may have thought about it was a period of change in whatever direction.
01:09:02.000Look at how many people you can still name, if you have any knowledge at all, that were leading their own segments of movements one way or the other.
01:09:11.000Tons of people, whether you want to talk about civil rights and the Martin Luther Kings and the Malcolm Xs, whether you want to talk about the yippies and all that, whether you want to talk about...
01:09:18.000Everything had these people that stepped forward that are on your Wikipedia page.
01:09:53.000Yeah, constantly and constantly getting called out for what he's doing with corporations and forcing them to pay Enormous sums of money, and he goes in for racial education and teaches people.
01:10:04.000Whenever they say, I mean, essentially what he does is he finds someone who's done something either that could be racially distasteful or said something that's out of line, even in a joke, and they go in and they blackmail him.
01:11:56.000So the people that lived in the 60s were dealing with such a strange time.
01:12:02.000First of all, the introduction of psychedelic drugs into the community that had never existed before, like LSD and the proliferation.
01:12:09.000Stuff that started in the late 50s with Huxley and those people and the Kerouacs and all that, and then burst into mainstream.
01:12:16.000And unbeknownst to most folks, even though marijuana has been illegal in its country since the 1930s, LSD didn't become illegal until 1970. They passed this sweeping Schedule I psychedelic act where they made everything from peyote to mushrooms,
01:12:32.000all these different sacramental entheogens.
01:12:38.000Well, they made them illegal then because that was the first time law enforcement around the country was running into widespread problems with it.
01:12:49.000The one with Blue Boy, the most famous one ever.
01:12:53.000Those were all based on actual things.
01:12:55.000They find out people are using this brand new drug called LSD and there's no law against it.
01:13:00.000So immediately the first thing they have to do is go find a new law that they can put into place.
01:13:04.000It's like I say today, the problem with our drug policy is that we're not accounting for the fact that we might come up with some darn good drugs that don't do as much damage as the ones we have.
01:13:13.000Our policy will be to make whatever new drug we find illegal tomorrow.
01:13:18.000I don't know how much longer that's going to work, but if I was the government trying to stamp out drugs, I think I'd just make better drugs that competed with...
01:13:26.000I mean, how do you get rid of bathtub gin?
01:13:28.000You get Bombay Sapphire and nobody wants any bathtub gin anymore.
01:13:32.000Well, also, you have to address what's being done with these drugs and what's the effect, because they've made no effort whatsoever to stop things that turn you stupid.
01:13:41.000There's no effort whatsoever to slow down Oxycodone, Oxycontin, Vicodins.
01:15:16.000I mean when you look at – if you look at modern society and you say, where have we made – The most technological advances, you would have to put pharmacology in the top three or four areas, right?
01:15:28.000And when, for example, when the Nazis wanted stuff to keep their soldiers awake for things like, you know, unlimited blitzkrieg attacks and fighter pilots, they would simply go to the pharmacy companies and say, here's what we need, and they'd produce it.
01:15:40.000If we were intelligent about this, we would say, as Dr. Weil so famously wrote 20 years ago, people want to change their consciousness.
01:15:50.000Can't we arrange for substances that do this in a more safe way than the ones we have, that come with some pill that will sober you up when it's time to drive home, that's better than what we have now?
01:16:04.000And I guarantee you, if you sit at the pharmacy companies, and by the way, we'll give you the patent to this for 20 years afterwards, they will come up with something recreational better than anything we have, but because of an almost...
01:16:16.000I don't know if it's a Puritan ethic or if it's the companies that make the current products that are legal that don't want competition or whatever it is.
01:16:38.000Can you come up and defend to me why we shouldn't be working on Safer, healthier alternatives.
01:16:43.000If you're going to make this drug illegal for recreational use, no problem, but give me something that people can use, because they want to use it, that will do something similar, will be less harmful to the individual using it, and less harmful to society.
01:16:56.000I don't think the government has any plans whatsoever on either backing or supporting any pharmaceutical company that creates psychedelics.
01:17:07.000I think there's a big difference between creating hydrocodone or creating a safer amphetamine or creating safer drugs that allow us to continue society As structured.
01:17:18.000When you start getting into things like mushrooms and LSD and acid, the real problem is the boundary dissolving properties of these things which make you want to absolve society, makes you want to get rid of all the laws, makes you want to sleep naked on each other's floors and do a lot of like culturally unsanctioned shit.
01:17:35.000And that creates chaos and that created the chaos of the 60s.
01:17:38.000It was a paradigm shifting sort of a way that people were looking at the world that was impossible for the 1950s minded cops Right.
01:18:29.000Do you really think marijuana is going to fail that test and alcohol is going to pass?
01:18:34.000It's like I said to you before, if somebody invents the perfect drug tomorrow in some bathtub somewhere, our government's going to ban it the day after tomorrow with no testing, no questions asked, just on the grounds that it's recreational, you're not allowed to have any recreational drugs.
01:18:48.000Not only recreational, there's an issue with things being recreational.
01:18:52.000Anything performance enhancing You know, Provigil.
01:21:48.000Think about how you would change the country if you said, listen...
01:21:51.000Again, getting back to my Joe Friday dragnet thing, because this is apparently how I learned about all this as a youth.
01:21:56.000I remember the marijuana episode where the guy, the family man, remember the one where his child dies in the bathtub later, where he's trying to argue with Joe Friday about why there's nothing wrong with marijuana.
01:22:06.000He says, well, it's less effective than alcohol.
01:22:57.000Listen, there's no question that this stuff would come with a cost.
01:23:01.000The question is, is the cost that you would pay worse than what we have now?
01:23:05.000I don't agree that it would come with a cost.
01:23:07.000I think it would be beneficial to society as far as a relaxant – I think if there's anything that society needs right now is a change of perspective, something to calm them down.
01:23:17.000Those are three things that are promoted by marijuana.
01:23:19.000I think you're speaking as a guy who's experienced with this.
01:23:22.000I think – remember what it's like when you get kids first starting out with this stuff.
01:23:27.000Look – Well, kids should be educated.
01:23:29.000One of the problems with kids starting out with this stuff is that they're going into it in an ignorant way, experimenting on their own, and no one knows what the – What the effects are going to be.
01:23:57.000Well, first of all, I tell her, whenever we have conversations about anything, one of the most important things that I bring up is all the things that I've fucked up.
01:24:44.000He kept me from being on the defensive by explaining to me that it's just part of human nature to fuck up and to make mistakes.
01:24:52.000And because he was so honest about that...
01:24:55.000I would listen to all of his advice, whether it's about alcohol, whether it's about whatever.
01:24:58.000And I think the most important thing you can give to a kid is information and love.
01:25:06.000And the only way they're going to accept it is that they trust you.
01:25:09.000And the only way they're going to trust you is if you're 100% honest with them all the time and you don't play any bullshit games with them.
01:25:58.000It does make Portland look conservative.
01:26:00.000That's Hippieville Central, but gosh, it's a beautiful country up there.
01:26:03.000Yeah, and I'm from here, so, I mean, coming back here is like, you know, I was telling my mom just today, this town feels claustrophobic to me.
01:26:45.000Oh, we were talking about them making drugs legal.
01:26:49.000The idea is that it's a personal freedom issue.
01:26:51.000And the personal freedom is you're a man.
01:26:53.000I should not be able to, if it was only two people on the planet, just you and me, and I said, well, I've made a law and the law is no alcohol.
01:27:00.000You know, you'd be like, what the fuck are you talking about?
01:27:02.000There's only two of us and I want to drink.
01:27:03.000You know, I'm going to lock you in a cage if you drink the alcohol.
01:27:06.000It sounds preposterous, but it's just as preposterous.
01:27:09.000For 3,000 people to tell 300 million people that they can't have pot.
01:27:15.000What's the difference between locking somebody up, you find with a drug, than locking somebody up who does something they shouldn't be doing when they're on the drug?
01:27:24.000I mean, hold them accountable and responsible.
01:27:26.000Then we're still going to have a ton of people in prison, but they're not going to be in prison for possession.
01:27:30.000They're going to be in prison for doing something that, you know, you go back to the Old West and one of the standard stump speeches that the person they were about to hang...
01:27:39.000The guy who was about to hang would always feel, not always, but a lot of times feel like they needed to give some sort of lesson to the kids.
01:27:45.000And they'd say something like, well, you need to avoid alcohol and don't end up like I ended up.
01:28:00.000The first thing you use is a gateway drug.
01:28:02.000At the same time, we punish people now for the potential that they might do with the illegal drug.
01:28:09.000If you punish them for the actuality, I'm not sure it's any less effective than what we have now, and you increase the overall freedom level.
01:28:18.000You know, the idea that the founders had that we ought to use the states as laboratories, this is where you get to the marijuana situation right now.
01:28:26.000I would love for states to be able to actually try this out.
01:28:30.000Instead of us having to have a national experiment, you know, where everybody sinks or swims together, let Colorado try this weed thing out and let's see how it goes.
01:28:40.000I don't think the feds are going to let this really happen.
01:28:43.000But to me, that's the intelligent way to do it.
01:28:46.000What do you think is going to happen with Seattle or Washington State?
01:28:51.000First of all, the feds already aren't letting this happen.
01:28:54.000I mean the state – And it puts the state lawmakers in a really weird position because they're supposed to listen to the will of the voters, and yet state law is trumped by federal law, and everybody knows that.
01:29:05.000So how they're supposed to act is a netherworld.
01:29:08.000The feds have never given one second of lip service to the idea that they're going to allow this.
01:29:15.000They always say, well, we're not going to concentrate on individual users, blah, blah.
01:31:36.000Whereas in California, it's supposed to be like a non-profit.
01:31:38.000I wonder how much of this has to do with the fact, too, that it's the equivalent of being able to distill your own alcohol in your backyard if you want to.
01:31:46.000I mean, you take all of the companies that you might be able to get on your bandwagon here if Philip Morris could make your marijuana cigarettes as opposed to what they have now where you'll just grow it in the backyard and nobody makes money.
01:32:25.000They get some LSD and then they rebel.
01:32:27.000Well, when the government decides they're going to clamp down and...
01:32:30.000You know, like if they go into Colorado or if they go into Washington or one of these places where the will of the people has been amply read, enacted into law and the whole thing, and they overturn that.
01:32:43.000Those are going to be interesting trigger points or benchmarks in wherever it is we're heading.
01:32:50.000So you know what they've been doing, the way the DEA's been handling it in California is very fascinating.
01:32:55.000They go in, they break down the door, do whatever they have to do, guns in the air, hold people on the ground.
01:33:01.000There's a video of them stepping on some kid's neck.
01:33:34.000So they take thousands of dollars, whatever the fuck you have on the premises, they take thousands of dollars of marijuana, they take all your cash on hand, everything that they want to take from you, and then they say, we're holding your file, we'll tell you what we do when we decide.
01:33:51.000And they can hold onto it for years and years and years.
01:33:54.000So essentially they put you out of business.
01:33:56.000They put you out of business without arresting you.
01:34:11.000If you look at, too, what the excuse for the militarization of police forces over the last 30 years has been, this drug war has been the greatest thing that ever happened in terms of I mean, the idea that someone thought up, hey, wouldn't it be a great incentive to tell officers that they could get...
01:34:31.000Well, there's actually some great books about this.
01:34:34.000Dan Baum wrote one called Smoke and Mirrors once.
01:34:36.000There are others where there used to be two kinds of forfeiture laws, a criminal one and a civil one.
01:34:43.000And without going too deeply into it, in order to fight the drug war during this crazy time of the 80s, they decided to combine the two.
01:34:50.000Taking the lower standard required for one kind and the higher penalties for the other kind, putting them together.
01:34:56.000And this is where you got the situations where if the police officers burst down your door and found drugs, they could seize your Corvette automatically without any sort of acknowledgement that the Corvette was bought with drug money on the grounds that you have to sue us to get it back.
01:35:11.000You have to prove that there was no drug money here.
01:35:14.000And if you don't, if we get to keep this car and sell it, at least some of that money, some departments got it all, others had to share it with other agencies, some of that money goes right back to the people who seized it.
01:35:25.000Now, this was supposed to be a great incentive, right, well, we're going to crack it on the drug users and we'll be able to afford the narcotics teams because they don't pay for itself.
01:35:33.000But as Radley Balco has written in a book that's due out any time now, I saw an earlier version of it, This has exploded the number of cases where police do these things, and it comes at the expense of robberies and other crimes that don't actually benefit the department as much as these search and seizure drug crimes do.
01:35:52.000And if you got rid of the drug crimes, what happens to those departments that are making a bunch of money off of it now?
01:35:56.000Do you know about the scandal that's been going on in Tennessee in regards to this?
01:36:28.000You have to prove that you got that money through legal means.
01:36:32.000And the way Tennessee's doing it is, apparently, they've been doing this for a while.
01:36:37.000They've been seizing money, and that money goes to their police force.
01:36:43.000Let me defend those people for a second, though, because one of the things that Balco's book had that I found fascinating was, remember, a lot of these people are elected.
01:36:52.000A lot of these sheriffs, for example, are elected.
01:36:53.000And there was one county, I don't remember where it was, where the sheriff was not going to do this.
01:36:58.000And the guy who ran against him for sheriff said, do you know how much money we're missing out on?
01:37:03.000We're cutting officers left and right enforcement because we won't just go and do what other – look at what the county next door has.
01:37:09.000They've got all this equipment and all these officers because they're seizing assets and we're not.
01:37:13.000In other words, because the feds do not come in and enforce the constitution, because they allow this, because it's – Remember, before the war on terror made everything okay if it was part of the war on terror, the war on drugs allowed us to rip open parts of the Constitution on the grounds that this war was so important and there were so many lives at stake.
01:37:31.000And like the mafia, it was so resistant to normal law enforcement techniques that we needed special tools.
01:37:37.000That the federal government not only allowed this stuff, but encouraged people to do it.
01:37:42.000And I would like to say proudly, Los Angeles, with police chief Darrell Gates in the old days, was one of the leaders in this.
01:37:49.000I remember we had the first tank to knock down the drug buildings and everything else and seize the property.
01:37:56.000Once that becomes standard fare, Are you going to be the sheriff that says, I don't do that, when the guy running against you says, look at our idiot sheriff, he's missing out on all these federal dollars, plus the feds actually match some of your costs.
01:38:11.000They will hand you down paramilitary stuff as part of, like, used war surplus and everything else.
01:38:16.000I mean, when you see these police officers in full camo gear carrying AR-15s and everything, a lot of that stuff is hand-me-down right from the military.
01:38:25.000And if you don't want that, you're going to run around with a stupid Colt.44 revolver when you could have an AR-15 in a tank?
01:38:32.000What kind of bad sheriff are you, Joe Rogan?
01:38:36.000Believe it or not, by what I'm saying, or some of the things that I've said, I'm a big supporter of law enforcement.
01:39:37.000I would go out to these murder scenes, be like four in the morning, in the rain, you're seeing the same guy, you know, the same watch guy you see all the time in the field.
01:39:46.000Or you call them, when I was at ABC here, I mean, I used to do the beat checks, they're called in news, which is where you call all these police divisions, and you're talking to the same poor guy, it's midnight and I'm calling the same guy, how you doing?
01:39:57.000You know, I mean, they're just working schleps like the rest of us.
01:40:01.000And you know what, how many of us would perform any better after five years on the job with guys shooting at you?
01:40:34.000And it's really a crime of society that we've allowed our politicians and the people in office to allocate so much resources to other parts of the country While ignoring our problems that we have here at home.
01:40:47.000I don't think there's anything wrong with helping out less fortunate countries.
01:40:51.000But the way we do it under the guise of military invasion and the amount of money that goes to that and where that money goes, you look at how much Halliburton is made off this fucking war and weapons manufacturers are made off this war.
01:41:04.000That is really a criminal misallocation of funds.
01:41:09.000I was recently – and this is a weird story in and of itself.
01:41:12.000My listeners know about it because I did a show on it.
01:41:14.000I was invited to a CENTCOM, U.S. Central Command planning session not that long ago.
01:41:20.000They flew me to D.C. Yeah, put me up in a hotel.
01:41:23.000I was sure that they were going to kill me and throw my body into Potomac, and this was all an excuse to get me over there.
01:41:29.000Did you refrain from jerking off in the hotel room because you felt like there was a camera in there?
01:41:32.000I assumed there was a camera in there.
01:41:42.000But you arrive there and it was all these people with these amazing...
01:41:46.000I said they must have been thrilled to have me on the guest list because there were only 12 participants and they all had these massively doctor this and that from this institution and then Dan Carlin, podcaster.
01:41:58.000But, the first question I asked these folks, I mean, it was the general that was there, was the head of US Central Command, the vice admiral was there, and I said, what do US taxpayers get from all this?
01:42:09.000In other words, if we're going to go cost to benefit, and you talk about vital US national security and this, that, or this other area, what is the average US taxpayer who's paying for this?
01:42:27.000But you want to ask your representatives, you know, I mean, I know you say we need to be here and there to protect our security, but really what does the United States get from our involvement in the Middle East?
01:42:37.000The oil situation is not like it was in the early seventies.
01:42:39.000We're not going to be, there's not going to be petro blackmail like there was in the old days.
01:43:49.000We've got problems with AIDS. We have problems with the fucking – some poison that they sell at every corner, but the people that sell that poison kick it back upstairs.
01:44:36.000Well, if you go there, there won't be any confusion.
01:44:38.000If you have the number one least corrupt country, Sweden, and the country at the bottom of the list is Nigeria, I guarantee you that governments can function well a certain distance down that list.
01:44:55.000Yes, but we were still able to function.
01:44:58.000The corruption was not so much – it's like if you have a physical impediment and you say, well, I limp around but I still get around okay, and your knee gets much worse and all of a sudden you can't walk.
01:45:08.000Not walking is a whole different thing than limping around, right?
01:45:11.000Our government was always corrupt from the very beginning of the republic.
01:45:15.000We've just reached a point where it doesn't function any well, that it's so corrupt.
01:45:18.000It's also that it's not just that it's so much more corrupt than ever before.
01:45:23.000It's so much more transparent that it's corrupt.
01:45:25.000Because of our access to information, which is unprecedented, and people are bewildered by it more than they ever have been before because of this.
01:45:33.000Because if you go looking, it's really simple.
01:45:35.000Just go looking real quick, read any Matt Taibbi article from Rolling Stone on the financial crisis, and you'll fucking pluck your eyebrows out screaming in the mirror.
01:45:44.000You won't be able to feel like it makes any sense.
01:45:48.000Let me tell you that this is the great wild card, though.
01:45:49.000We alluded to this earlier when we talked about what if the 60s generation had the internet You know, when you read about how much just printing presses changed the world in terms of just being able to disseminate English-language Bibles changed everything,
01:46:06.000this, you know, people forget, you know, it's like you said 20 years ago, like a blink of an eye when you've lived a while, this Internet is still brand new.
01:46:13.000We haven't begun to see what it's going to do yet, and we haven't had these situations, like you were saying, these little tipping point moments where all of a sudden the Internet makes all the difference in the world.
01:46:23.000If the stupid printing press changes the world to the degree that did, what's this going to do?
01:46:29.000And how are the authorities going to react when it starts doing it?
01:46:33.000I mean, you know, we were talking about Anonymous before the whole show started.
01:46:38.000What happens when this isn't some little teeny group on the fringes that's doing this?
01:46:43.000What happens when 40% of the population is so mad and maybe...
01:46:46.00020% of them are the right-wing guys who think that they need the guns to stop the government.
01:46:50.00020% of them are the left-wing guys that are so mad that they can't get something else.
01:46:54.000I mean what happens when all these people are operating at cross-purposes and the internet is this highway that lets them all talk in a way that during the 1960s they would have been doing mimeographed letters on a copy machine handing each other them by hand.
01:47:07.000Meeting in the park and speaking in a soapbox.
01:47:15.000And I also think that this is just the beginning of what seems to be an ever-increasing access to each other, access to information, the ability to reach and connect with each other.
01:47:27.000And I think that's going to eventually lead to something that's going to allow people...
01:47:32.000I think we're going to, our eventual connection is going to be through some sort of wireless, neural frequency connection where we're going to be able to exchange information without having to talk to each other.
01:48:25.000I haven't figured out the Benghazi thing either.
01:48:28.000I haven't either, but there is connection, and that's pretty much been established.
01:48:34.000One of the things they're doing with punishing Petraeus in this way and going after him is acknowledging his failures in Benghazi, and there's sort of an internal motivation to get rid of him outside of just the fact that the FBI busted him with an affair.
01:48:49.000What I found most fascinating about this was, first of all, that the head spook got spooked on.
01:48:55.000I mean, and then that even when you're a general, you're dealing with the kind of girl who's going to fuck you when you're married is a crazy bitch, okay?
01:49:06.000And the kind of chick that's going to be your mistress when she writes a book about you...
01:49:12.000That's going to be a territorial crazy bitch.
01:49:27.000The Greeks would say it was like written into his fate that I'm going to have this wonderful military career, be respected by everybody, and then I'm going to be brought low by something so silly.
01:49:36.000Bring yourself to the world of O.J. Simpson.
01:49:39.000Oh, I was just talking about that with my wife the other day.
01:49:42.000We're watching one of those top ten footballs, you know, greatest running backs of all time.
01:51:31.000And the whole thing is, what's really tragic is you see the wife, and his wife is sort of, you let herself go over the years, and I believe she's had some health problems.
01:51:40.000Remember, in the military, I think you can still be charged with adultery, too, which you can't be charged with.
01:51:44.000There is no law against adultery in the California Penal Code for an average Joe.
01:51:49.000What's ironic about that is you're taking trained killers, putting them in unbelievably stressful situations for months at a time away from their wives, and you're saying that if you're an adulterer, we can court-martial you.
01:51:59.000Goes back to the military code of honor, which, of course, there's a lot of other things you could do that would seem to violate the military code of honor, but don't have adulterous affairs.
01:52:08.000I just thought it was beautiful that the head spook got spooked on.
01:53:29.000I think that comes from a lot of people around you that are in a support position, that are constantly catering to you and kissing your ass.
01:53:36.000Oh, as a podcaster, I get it all the time.
01:53:39.000As you can see by our vast staff here.
01:53:42.000The number of women you have circulating around here, yes.
01:53:46.000The celebrity thing is probably tenfold when you're dealing with a military man who's a trained killer who's been responsible for leading armies to battle.
01:59:39.000Yeah, he died on one of those missions where he was going to volunteer to take a bomber into some really hardcore clandestine thing, and the bomber takes off, and it's just in the sky, and the whole thing just explodes.
01:59:51.000And John was involved in that PT-109 I mean, all those guys, you think about what they did, as lightweight as John F. Kennedy was, can you imagine Clinton out there on the PT boat in World War II? I mean, it just doesn't even register.
02:00:05.000It was almost a requirement back then to be president, that you had to serve some active combat.
02:00:21.000How many people were you going to find that weren't in World War II? And if you weren't in World War II, you were a psycho or a flat-foot.
02:00:27.000I mean even flat-footed guys were making it into World War II. When it got to Vietnam, it got to be – it's so much different because people were like, well, it was a stupid fucking war.
02:00:36.000It was a war we should have never been involved with in the first place.
02:04:24.000You don't want to let him anywhere near that.
02:04:26.000Well this girl was, this woman was married and her and the husband were both like really into like celebrity military functions and military parties.
02:04:37.000And they would both be into that socialite sort of military social world.
02:04:45.000The weirdness goes on more than you would think in those groups.
02:04:47.000I happen to know some people that would have been astronauts had it not been for going after the wives of people who were ranked higher than they were.
02:04:54.000So, I mean, this stuff has been going on forever.
02:05:14.000And, by the way, you don't know if you're gonna die.
02:05:16.000You know, you're over there involved in the scariest thing you could ever be involved in, an actual war.
02:05:23.000Bombs and planes and rocket launchers and grenades.
02:05:26.000But these are also hard drinking, hard partying, hard exercising.
02:05:30.000Like I was just talking to one guy last night.
02:05:31.000He's like, we get up in the morning, you run 10 miles, you go work hard all day, you're done with the day, you go out and you drink as hard as you work.
02:06:27.000What do you think about – this is something that I really want to make sure that we touch on and bringing it back to Al Gore, believe it or not, but in a serious way.
02:06:35.000The HBO documentary Hacking Democracy went over the issue with the Diebold electric voting machines and how they could be influenced by third party and third party information.
02:06:48.000Besides the person counting the vote, the person making the vote, there was room for a third party.
02:06:53.000And they talked about how disturbing that was and how it had been engineered.
02:07:43.000These guys are able to say, basically, on the sly, if you ask me any questions beyond these five things I have on this list right here, you're never coming to another function again.
02:07:52.000And I won't answer your question anyway.
02:07:54.000You won't even get the satisfaction of saying, well, I got an answer before I was kicked out of the room.
02:07:58.000You don't get your question answered, and you never get to come back, and that works now.
02:08:03.000I mean, in the Cold War, they used to cut some slack of the politicians on certain kinds of questions, and there were certain manly rules.
02:08:11.000Like, I mean, everybody knew John F. Kennedy was having all these affairs, and it was not considered to be proper to bring that up, which is crazy when you consider the potential for blackmail.
02:08:20.000But nonetheless, that sort of stuff was off the record.
02:08:22.000But you get some damn tough questions on other things.
02:08:26.000And if you want to say, how does the country get as bad as it does without anyone talking about it, that's because our so-called fourth estate, who plays a constitutional watchdog role in our system, isn't doing that.
02:08:38.000There are three estates of government that are official.
02:08:42.000You have the executive branch, the judicial branch, and the legislative branch.
02:08:45.000Those are the three estates that work from inside the government, and they're officially constitutional branches.
02:08:50.000The fourth estate is a term used to describe a non-constitutional branch, a non-governmental branch, the watchdogs who watch the government from outside the government.
02:09:01.000Well, don't you think, though, that with this new access to information that we're enjoying because of the Internet, what's also rising is shows like yours, The Young Turks, people who are openly, actively questioning every single aspect of our government.
02:09:17.000Yes, but let me tell you the difference.
02:09:18.000Because you're absolutely right, and thank goodness.
02:09:20.000And thank goodness you brought that up, Joe.
02:09:25.000When CNN officially cut their investigative reporting budget, which is a joke anyway because they weren't doing any investigative reporting worth of salt anyway, they got rid of the stuff that provides the basis of information.
02:09:38.000I don't mean at CNN, I mean everywhere.
02:09:39.000The investigative reporting is how we, whether you're talking about me or the Young Turks or anyone else, that's where we get our info that allows us to then comment on it.
02:09:48.000I'm not out doing the investigative work.
02:09:51.000That is, you know, there's a reason that the very First Amendment to the Constitution protects freedom of the press.
02:09:57.000And it's not because someone thinks you should have the right to tail some celebrity for TMZ because we just have to know who they're dating on the side.
02:10:05.000It's because this is considered to be of national import.
02:10:09.000The country goes to hell in a handbasket if you don't know what's going on and really what's going on.
02:10:15.000The 1970s are turning out to be the high-water mark of American journalism.
02:10:19.000When you look at what was going on then, you turn around and go, you can't imagine that happening today.
02:10:24.000And that's totally the opposite of what you normally expect.
02:10:26.000Normally you expect everything to get better The seventies from a news standpoint was so much better than what we have now in terms of exposes and people getting nailed and that's pre-internet.
02:10:37.000If you took that level of dedication to investigative reporting, it's all the post-Watergate era stuff when everybody was going in and the way you made your bones in journalism was to try to be Woodward and Bernstein.
02:10:50.000When I got my first job in reporting, I went from here in L.A., where I was working on the assignment desk, you know, behind the scenes, to working in front of the camera.
02:10:58.000And the first thing that happens that makes you upset as a reporter is they'll send you to, like, the dog show and the knife show and all these things where you're going, this is why I got in the news.
02:11:52.000And that's, you know, on the national scale, it's the same thing.
02:11:54.000They don't want to be Woodward and Bernstein because Woodward and Bernstein aren't getting another interview with the president.
02:11:58.000Yeah, that's a very, very good point about how this whole thing sort of gets more and more complex and more and more saturated with corruption.
02:12:05.000Yeah, so you can have the internet, but if Anonymous doesn't tell us and release cables of what's going on, who did the investigative work to give us enough information for me to comment on?
02:12:58.000I mean when you're talking about the journalism, the journalists doing their job, what would really have been interesting is if Bradley Manning had gotten those documents to the New York Times.
02:13:07.000I wonder how they would have handled it.
02:13:09.000Would they have done what WikiLeaks did?
02:13:11.000And if they did, would they be considered criminals like – It's funny you say that because I just had a listener download an article for me about five weeks ago because I heard about it.
02:13:20.000It was in the wake of the whole Watergate thing.
02:13:25.000The head of the Washington Post gave a speech to all these big corporate muckety-mucks a couple years after that trying to explain that Don't worry.
02:13:35.000We're not going to get all expose-y now.
02:13:37.000This isn't going to be a trend of ours to bring down presidents and everything.
02:13:42.000And you can go actually – if you have a JSTOR account or whatever with these libraries, you can actually download the speech from 1976. And it was Catherine Graham, the head of the Washington Post, where it was this reassuring thing to the powers that be that, don't worry, the media is not going to get too investigative,
02:13:57.000and we're going to make sure we protect your secrets enough so you don't have to worry.
02:14:01.000That's what WikiLeaks and groups like it don't do.
02:14:04.000And the truth is, is I think we can all agree that there are secrets that should not come out.
02:14:09.000The government abuses this privilege over and over again, but if it's really going to kill U.S. service members, for example, okay, I understand that.
02:14:17.000But when you say anything is going to kill U.S. service members, when you abuse it, you lose me.
02:14:23.000If the media and the government were doing their job, you don't need a WikiLeaks.
02:14:27.000When they're not, is it better to have no WikiLeaks at all, or is it better to have a WikiLeaks with all its flaws?
02:14:58.000I've got to tell you, a lot of them are conditioned, I think, conditioned to think that you're going to release important secrets and get people killed.
02:15:04.000And I got a lot of flack when I said that I was in favor of WikiLeaks releasing some of this stuff.
02:15:08.000Well, yeah, you can correct me if I'm wrong, online people, but I don't believe they released any names of anyone whose security hadn't already been compromised.
02:15:17.000Well, and to be honest, we may not know, but...
02:15:19.000Has the world fallen apart since they did?
02:15:22.000I mean, I think we can see here it hasn't exactly destroyed everything.
02:15:25.000We've got to look into the mentality of the people that are in the military in crisis situations like that Collateral Myrtle video.
02:15:47.000But that requires you to have enough facts to really analyze.
02:15:51.000If you don't, you can't give an analysis that has any sort of value at all.
02:15:55.000And WikiLeaks was providing context that the media used to provide.
02:15:59.000Well, I think in their situation, I think their position was so extreme, having this secret files, having this access to this one guy and having secret files down on him.
02:16:10.000I don't know how the media could have gotten that in any other way, unless this Bradley Manning guy or someone like him offered that stuff up.
02:16:17.000That's how it would have been, though, and that's how it used to be.
02:16:29.000Oh, God, he died just a few years ago.
02:16:32.000But they know who he is now, and he was disgruntled and mad at not getting a promotion and all this.
02:16:38.000And so he was feeding them this stuff that he wasn't allowed to feed them.
02:16:42.000And it's like the guy, Daniel Ellsberg, who was involved in that whole thing, the Pentagon Papers, he says today that Julian Assange is the modern-day version of him.
02:16:52.000And that he could have been brought up on the exact same charges and almost was.
02:16:56.000I mean, to bring up the 1917 Espionage Act as a way to go after somebody in the modern 21st century world is to me an example of how desperate they are.
02:17:09.000This isn't really about this or that individual losing their lives.
02:17:13.000This is about how much scandal you would have if we really knew what was going on behind the scenes and what our politicians gave the okay for.
02:20:17.000He's said, and his lawyers have said, as I understand it, that as long as he gets a written pledge from our government and the British government that they're not going to nab him, he'll go back and face the charges.
02:20:26.000The key is, is everybody knows that those are the governments that want him.
02:20:30.000The danger isn't that he's going to go to Sweden and face these charges.
02:20:33.000The danger is that somebody's going to...
02:20:56.000I don't think the government cares too much about that.
02:20:58.000I think their attitude is they want you to see what happens to somebody who does what Julian Assange does so that you know if you do – I think that – who was the guy who just died who just killed himself that the government was after for stealing files?
02:21:34.000But he's another example where the government wants to break that guy As to set a precedent so that you know when you want to try to do something like that, you're sacrificing your life in effect.
02:21:47.000In effect, you can do this, but look at what happened to the last guy who did it.
02:21:51.000And that's, I think, what they want to do to Assange too, to say to all those hackers out there, hey, just so you know, you're playing with your future.
02:21:57.000They've done this to the so-called eco-terrorists too, where they'll give you 35 years or something for starting a fire where you can kill a guy and get out.
02:22:24.000Not that an American would, either, if you were accused of a crime of terrorism.
02:22:28.000I mean, if you're accused of a crime of terrorism and you're in a place like Afghanistan, You have no rights at all if a guy in the executive branch of government decides that.
02:22:37.000But what a creepy, sweeping term terrorism is if it applies to you exposing murder, you exposing whether it's ineptitude or just a casual disdain or just a lack of respect for human life.
02:22:54.000You want to get into history and where history is important.
02:22:57.000Every time, every is a sweeping word, but many, many times throughout history, when someone wants to exempt people from the normal rules of conduct, you call them terrorists.
02:23:06.000It's a term, believe it or not, Adolf Hitler used when he was explaining why you didn't have to treat captured prisoners in the Soviet Union.
02:23:47.000Well, terrorists are also defined as people who sell drugs.
02:23:51.000Because of all these different things that they've passed, The Patriot Act, Patriot Act II, the NDAA. One of the things that they've done in these sort of sweeping definitions is they've allowed the government to use things that were supposed to be there to protect you from terrorism or to enforce laws against terrorism.
02:24:10.000And now they use them for drugs, like, for instance, the Patriot Act.
02:24:13.000The Patriot Act has been used more than a thousand times for drugs.
02:25:20.000That's extra constitutional because of the extremity of the threat, it always gets brought down to lower levels.
02:25:26.000But people don't understand, if you hear about the Patriot Act, you go, well, I guess that's so they can stop people from plotting crimes against America.
02:25:34.000The Patriot Act is used way more for marijuana than it ever has been for terrorists.
02:25:39.000Rodley Balca wrote about this in his book, too.
02:25:40.000In 2011, the numbers were 1,618 drug cases, 15 terrorism cases.
02:25:49.000Well, you know, there just isn't that much terrorism.
02:25:52.000It's a waste of a good law, otherwise.
02:25:54.000And that is a problem with having laws and then removing laws that people have to be aware of when they talk about, well, hey, they should just make drugs legal.
02:26:01.000What are you going to do with all those DEA agents?
02:26:03.000What are you going to do with all those people that don't have jobs?
02:26:05.000But again, Joe, let me get back to the media thing.
02:26:07.000How does the president not have to answer a question about that?
02:26:10.000The fact that this all goes on confounds us because nobody ever has to comment on it.
02:26:16.000The job of the journalist is to say to the president, Sixteen thousand, da-da-da, say exactly what you said and say, what's your opinion of that and what are you going to do about it?
02:26:24.000I mean, you know, you watch the British Parliament in action sometimes on C-SPAN, and every time I mention this, the British, you know, podcasting is wonderful, isn't it?
02:26:34.000The British always say, don't romanticize it.
02:26:36.000It sucks just as bad as your government.
02:26:38.000But to an American, when you watch Parliament in action, and the head of the government, the equivalent of our president, has to get up there and actually defend his policies to the hooting and hollering and borderline violence of the rest of the people in Parliament, Forget about real reform.
02:26:53.000I just wanted to get up there and have to face the questions and hear how they weasel out.
02:26:57.000If you throw that question, like if we had a real debate during this last presidential campaign, and you asked Mitt Romney that question, and you asked Barack Obama that question, and it was asked, by the way, if you saw the third party debate where all of those Interesting and sometimes freaky people actually talked about the issues.
02:27:45.000Jeff Gannon was the guy who was an embedded White House reporter during the Bush administration, and he would lob these really softball partisan questions at Bush like, Mr. President, when are the Democrats going to wake up and come to reality?
02:29:01.000Also, I think there was probably some gay people that worked in the White House in high positions of power that wanted this guy around for various reasons.
02:32:01.000I'm not following the right kind of news feeds, obviously.
02:32:04.000Yeah, they caught him because they just looked into his press credentials because people couldn't believe the silly questions that he was asking.
02:32:14.000But you look into the press credentials before you actually get the press credentials.
02:33:21.000Or having enough secrets somewhere where he goes I've got Julian Assange is going to release this with a secret code if anything happens to me automatically.
02:33:50.000An administration has been so transparent about its corruption, so transparent about the influences that it has, the influences by Halliburton.
02:33:59.000Halliburton's CEO all of a sudden is now the vice president, and Halliburton's making billions of dollars in no-bid contracts.
02:34:06.000It was so obvious and corrupt and then here's this guy in the White House, embedded White House reporter, lobbing these ridiculous questions and it turns out to be he's a gay escort.
02:34:16.000I really think it's the war on terror that makes you able to be so open about the corruption because what are you going to do?
02:34:25.000We have extreme wartime authority until the war is over now.
02:34:42.000And if you called off the war tomorrow, there's nothing that prevents the next president after some minor little terror attack in any part of the world.
02:34:50.000I mean, if we really cared about the direction the country was going long-term, you would realize, and a lot of good writers and constitutional law scholars have, that this is an open hole in things.
02:35:01.000I mean, you're allowed to basically suspend the Constitution until the war's over, and yet it's one of those wars that, I mean, you can't say, once we take Berlin, everything goes back to normal.
02:35:10.000There is no end to this, and there's no end to what you can, like you said, no end to what you can call terrorism.
02:35:15.000I mean, it's like saying, okay, we're going to have a war on crime.
02:35:19.000And as soon as it's over, we can get the Constitution back.
02:35:21.000Couldn't we just change the definition of terror?
02:37:34.000The reason no one wants to ask is because everybody else in government who would ask this question, who gets access, is innocent, not gay like him, but it's just planted people.
02:37:42.000I mean, it's like watching Meet the Press now.
02:37:45.000Am I the only person that thinks David Gregory is...
02:37:47.000I mean, he's a softball pitcher, literally.
02:37:49.000I mean, you watch this and you just go, how is this satisfying?
02:37:52.000No offense, NBC, but how is this satisfying?
02:37:59.000Yeah, the mainstream media's approach in these sort of – those conversation shows about serious issues, it's like, boy, they are softballed down the middle, lobs, everything is – there's no real controversy when it comes to dealing with any foreign issues.
02:38:18.000And if they couldn't support it, they'd certainly have a soft spot in their heart for it.
02:38:23.000If I recall, mainstream journalism was horrified at Wikipedia.
02:38:39.000Yeah, I mean, I think access to information when it exposes crime is always good.
02:38:45.000If it exposes crime, that's a rational crime.
02:38:47.000I'm not talking about like beating off something, smoking pot, something, victimless crime.
02:38:54.000But when you're talking about real corruption, corruption being exposed by WikiLeaks or being exposed by the New York Times, which you should be upset about always is the corruption.
02:39:04.000And you should praise always whatever method of access to information has been utilized in order to get it out to the people, whether it's a website, whether it's the New York Times.
02:39:14.000It's like you should be happy that the New York Times exposes things.
02:39:17.000You should be happy that Woodward and Bernstein broke Watergate.
02:39:22.000I mean we should all be happy about it.
02:39:32.000I have yet to find someone who can really explain to me that that trade-off argues in favor of keeping things secret.
02:39:40.000Somebody will say, well, we'll lose an agent in this or that city, and that's a breach of trust, and I understand that.
02:39:46.000At the same time, this country is dying from lack of investigative journalism and uncovering malfeasance and corruption and all these things.
02:39:53.000You can't tell me that the protection of a source here or there outweighs What we're seeing all around us.
02:39:59.000There's also this weird thing that happened after September 11th where it was very scary to me where all of a sudden no one wanted to question the government.
02:40:10.000Everyone wanted to support the government, support the troops, support Whatever hard decisions that had to be made, but no one wanted to have any of the healthy skepticism or questioning.
02:40:35.000We're not talking about like a little teeny attack.
02:40:37.000We're talking about another two buildings go down, or there's a nuclear attack in a harbor, or pick your worst case scenario.
02:40:42.000If you know that you're going to be crazy and ready to rip up the Constitution, and we're going to legislate during a period of temporary insanity, if you really want to save the country, write some rules about that now.
02:40:53.000Say, we're going to be out of our minds.
02:40:54.000Let's make some – let's put some speed bumps.
02:40:56.000Let's say you can't legislate for 60 days.
02:40:59.000You can close loopholes that let the – we found a loophole that let him in.
02:41:18.000It's been renewed every time with no—it's not even been close.
02:41:22.000Not only that, most people are not aware that it's legislation that was written far before September 11th but couldn't get passed.
02:41:27.000Well, Peter DeFazio told me—I'm not supposed to say this, maybe—he said, listen, a lot of this stuff, you can't write a giant Patriot Act like that.
02:41:34.000In the time it took to actually write it.
02:41:37.000He goes, a lot of these were sitting on the shelf things.
02:41:40.000I mean, you think about stand-alone laws, and they just pick this stuff off the shelf, threw it in.
02:41:44.000And what a lot of people don't know, although this happens with a lot of laws, is that there's a lot of blank spaces.
02:41:50.000Because people don't quite know how it's going to work out.
02:41:53.000So when you sign these things, you actually sign something with a lot of blank spaces.
02:41:57.000Because, and this happens with a lot of us, because they don't know the specifics yet.
02:42:00.000It's not that it's part of a scheme or they're trying to slip something through.
02:42:04.000A lot of times with these laws, they don't know the mechanism yet.
02:42:07.000They know that they want to get from A to C, and they're not quite sure how B works out yet, but you sign on to the concept that you support C, and we'll figure out how to get there when we figure out how to get there.
02:42:17.000And so they sign a lot of these things that have a lot of blank spaces.
02:42:20.000And how few politicians read any of those things they sign.
02:42:23.000One of the things they've gone over is like the amount of paperwork that these guys would have to read if they read everything they signed.
02:43:43.000You talk about revolution on one hand.
02:43:46.000I don't want to call it fascism, but let's just call it a more repressive kind of state.
02:43:49.000On the other hand, it's weirder for me to think of the stasis that we're in now continuing than it is to imagine it going far off into either.
02:43:57.000I don't know which direction it's going to go.
02:43:58.000I just can't imagine we stay in this weird netherworld for another 10 years.
02:44:02.000Yeah, I feel that it's – the biggest resistance right now to governments right now is technological, the anonymous movement and the WikiLeaks movement.
02:44:10.000But look at how they're cracking down on that already.
02:44:12.000A lot of countries are – I mean we've got – I mean the only thing we tend to agree upon with Iran and stuff is that you need a more controlled internet and those kind of things.
02:44:20.000And a lot of these countries are starting to try to form their own regional internets that they can control.
02:44:34.000They say that, but the governments of all the world are putting in so much effort to this.
02:44:39.000I'm not so sure that they're not just going to switch us over to another internet and then drown the other one in spam someday so that it becomes unusable.
02:44:48.000I don't think they're going to be able to.
02:44:49.000I think the real issue is who are the most intelligent people?
02:44:55.000The most intelligent people are on the side of the resistance.
02:44:57.000The most intelligent people are on the side of the coders, the hackers, the people that are Our writing software, the people that are the technological innovators, they're not government agents.
02:45:11.000Talk about a five-year-old growing up today.
02:45:13.000Are they going to grow up with this kind of mentality we have?
02:45:16.000This is the problem when you change the constitutional rights situation slowly the way we have.
02:45:21.000Is you begin to grow a new generation of people that never knew a pre-911 world, for example, that don't have the same feeling we have about loss of rights or any of these other things, because they've never known any better.
02:45:33.000Are you going to get the next generation of people growing up with a hacker mentality, or are they going to be every bit as good on computers as our best people are, but come from a mentality that doesn't say, Oh, what about our Fourth Amendment rights being gone?
02:45:59.000And then you're growing up in this society that they created, that they've been running, and they've been running shittily.
02:46:06.000They've done a terrible job in running this government.
02:46:09.000I don't think anybody's going to be like a supercomputer expert and be all gung-ho to just follow protocol as written because this government is all-wise and all-knowing.
02:46:17.000I don't think there's anybody like that coming out.
02:46:19.000Okay, but now, so if you're the government, there's two choices in your scenario.
02:46:22.000In your scenario, one choice is the revolution, as you call it, the resistance wins.
02:46:26.000The other choice is that if the government wants to stay in power, they crack down more and they turn us into something that's more repressive than it is now.
02:46:34.000Well, then it gets really tricky because who is I guess we find out then, don't we?
02:46:51.000That the FBI and the CIA don't like each other, which is hilarious.
02:46:54.000It's like when you get the corruption from the pro-marijuana people putting in money to campaigns.
02:46:58.000Now you see things start to even out a little, yeah.
02:47:01.000Well, also in the marijuana world, you see illegal growers who are against legalization because it would cut down their profits.
02:47:08.000There's people who are illegal growers who voted against medical marijuana, and that's cannibalism in its purest form.
02:47:14.000Yeah, those kind of things are very interesting.
02:47:16.000Yeah, you're always going to have situations like that, I think.
02:47:20.000I think the factions of the government can't agree on who they're for and who they're not for.
02:47:29.000The fact that the FBI was willing to go after the CIA and that's how this whole thing happened with Petraeus and he got smoked out like that.
02:47:39.000You've got too many people, and they're not a unified front.
02:47:42.000They're not going to get together and say this is what we need to do.
02:47:45.000I think they will believe that they can pass laws to try to stop things, but while they're doing this and passing laws, Technology waits for no one, and these people don't understand technology.
02:47:58.000These people that are in their 60s and 70s that are in positions of power, I do not think they truly appreciate – most of them at least – truly appreciate the power of the movement of free information on the internet.
02:48:12.000I don't think – How the average individual is impacted by the changes.
02:48:19.000It's one thing to say, hey, my life's pretty good.
02:48:23.000When they get thrown out of their house, when they can't make enough money to live, when the American dream is nowhere near within their reach and there's enough of those people, I think all of a sudden the motivation changes.
02:48:34.000I mean, I had a friend who was a A draft protester in the 1960s, and he said the real sad part of the anti-war movement was how much of it was based on the fact that I was going to be drafted.
02:48:44.000And when Nixon got rid of the draft, he did it cynically believing that a lot of people would then say, oh, I don't care about the war anymore.
02:48:53.000And he was right, and the membership, the people attending these anti-war rallies plummeted once those people weren't going to get drafted.
02:49:01.000If you talk about people being impacted by a worsening economy and worsening conditions and bad government decisions that pay no attention to what the average American's lifestyle is like, it's like drafting those people.
02:49:12.000All of a sudden people who had no stake in this care because they can't afford food or they can't afford a TV or they can't afford cable or whatever it is they need.
02:49:19.000Well, as we wrap this thing up, how do you think – if you had a guess, I wouldn't want to ask anybody – you're one of the few people that I would ever ask this question.
02:49:29.000How do you think it's going to go down over the next 10 years?
02:49:32.000If you had to guess, what's going to take place in this country?
02:50:02.000But I don't see enough variables that can break in the good direction and I see a lot of variables that can break in the bad direction.
02:50:09.000Do you think ultimately we're moving towards a one-world government?
02:50:14.000I think that's a weird statement, a loaded statement.
02:50:16.000I don't know about one world government.
02:50:18.000I think we're moving towards a government that agrees with a lot of other governments about certain things.
02:50:24.000And one is I don't think most of the world governments are happy about the Internet's ability to – I mean they're fine with us watching cat videos and having that keep us pacified.
02:50:33.000None of them are happy about information sharing.
02:50:35.000None of them are happy about that kind of stuff.
02:50:37.000But you look at it in a financial scale.
02:50:38.000Historical context, though, the fact that everyone was so isolated for so long, and then over the last less than 100 years, there's been this incredible interaction that's escalated.
02:50:47.000Yeah, look at how the podcast, you're heard all over the world.
02:51:28.000I just see so many more on one side of the ledger than the other.
02:51:31.000I do, but I also see culturally so much more on the technological side of the ledger, the fact that the internet has provided this open platform that didn't exist before.
02:51:44.000And much like printed type, much like television and radio, this is the new burst.
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