Joe Rogan is back with a brand new episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, and he's got a guest on the pod to talk about his love for the dark side of life. Joe also talks about a new drug he's been taking and how it's making him feel, and how he's going to get rid of it. Plus, he talks about the latest and greatest zombie bell series, and what it's like to be a zombie bell freak. And, of course, there's a new segment called "The Walking Dead" that's all about the walking dead, and we're here to break it all down! Logo by Courtney DeKorte. Theme by Mavus White. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. We'd like to learn a little bit more about you, the listeners. Please take a few minutes to fill out this brief survey. We'll see if we can figure it out and see if there's any useful info you can give us some insight into what you're looking for. Thanks to our sponsor, Carbonite. Carbonite is a backup option where you can backup all your data and information online, no matter how many computers you have or where they're located. With this promo code JRE, you'll never have to worry about losing your data no matter where you're located or where you re at or where it's located. Carbonite backs up your files to the cloud. You don't have to think too much about it, you can do it all at home, and you don t have to be without having to think about it anywhere else but it's always there! Thanks to Carbonite! We're also brought to you by Stamps, the company that makes it easy, safe, fast, reliable, and cheap! Stamps! Back your freak on the internet, y'all! JRE is a company that does it all, easy, fast and cheap, and they make it easy for you to do it right, no worries, no more work, no stress, no need to go to the post office, no extra shipping, and no more stress, just like you get it all in one place. . We also gives you a free trial and gets it all the same thing you need to be there and you get the same stuff you need it, it's just like that, right in your local post office and it's cheaper than anywhere else.
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00:03:33.000O-N-N-I-T. And we just started carrying these new zombie bells.
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00:06:22.000Out of all the years of listening to podcasts and talking to you guys on the podcast, you are without a doubt the two men who have freaked me out the most.
00:06:30.000You with that crazy story about the bodies on the stakes, was it in Persia?
00:07:21.000Like, these same things that we go to school with and go to the supermarket with, these same humans are capable of that in their darkest of dark days.
00:07:31.000From your podcast and from Daniele's, I think the understanding of how easy we got it is really cemented home.
00:07:39.000Your stories, some of the stories, especially one of the ones that I really enjoyed recently is the Martin Luther tale, the tale of Lutheranism and the Anabaptists.
00:08:52.000And the more extreme their devotion to that group is, sometimes the more rewarding the actual experience of being in the group is.
00:09:00.000It means something special to be a part of this wacky group of crazy fucks that's willing to murder people.
00:09:05.000Like, it's almost like this extra charge of being alive that's missing from a lot of people's lives.
00:09:11.000I think that being involved in a cult or, you know...
00:09:16.000Any sort of crazy, wild, rebellious group that's doing dangerous things.
00:09:20.000It's almost to fill a void that's left in human beings that we've sort of like these echoes of our primal days that are still just lingering around in our DNA looking to be played upon with the right harp note.
00:09:34.000I think there's almost, too, when you think about like a Hitler, there's some wonderful film you can see of Hitler with crowds on the street, and you can see the look in the people's eyes, and they look like they're seeing a movie star, and they just want to get a little touch.
00:09:49.000Maybe my hand will touch his fingers, and you just think to yourself...
00:09:54.000Hitler is a celebrity type figure, but there's that same thing about because you're famous, because...
00:10:00.000I've never understood the celebrity thing where people just get dumb around, but it's the same sort of the look in the eyes.
00:10:07.000It's like seeing Elvis, and instead it's Hitler.
00:10:09.000Yeah, I think you're onto something there for sure, because there's something about the ultimate celebrity experience, like meeting a guy like Obama, or meeting a guy, you know, any world leader type character.
00:10:22.000It would be so overwhelming, just the presence of that person.
00:10:26.000Now think about this all happening at a time when, you know, it was fucking really hard to get a book.
00:10:30.000You know, really hard to be properly educated and know alternative media sources that we face today.
00:10:37.000You know, goof on alternative media all you want online, and some of it is much deserved.
00:10:41.000But the one thing these guys do is they'll cover all kinds of fringe shit, and that'll be their headline news.
00:10:48.000You know, like, I'll go to Salon, and people accuse Salon of being, like, too left-wing and too...
00:10:55.000You know, but there's some smart people that are pushing it that way.
00:10:59.000What I like what they're doing is that their front news is like, it's not like the front news that you're going to get on CNN. It's front news about, you know, like gay and lesbian rights and things in the workplace.
00:11:13.000What politicians said about what race that was deplorable.
00:11:26.000It's important to have a To balance out a super ultra-sensitive, to balance out the fucking savages of the 1500s that are still rolling around in our DNA. You know, you need someone out there on the fringes of super-sensitive progressive behavior just to try to,
00:11:42.000like, give us a better medium, give us a better baseline.
00:11:46.000Well, let me bring it back to that Munster podcast we talked about.
00:11:49.000One of the sub-themes in that was whether or not—you remember the whole question about whether or not regular people should be able to read the Bible for themselves.
00:11:57.000This goes to what you said about Salon or all these alternative media sites, because the Prime Minister in Great Britain, over all these Snowden leaks and what The Guardian has done, was talking about, you know, maybe we should dial this back.
00:12:08.000Maybe it's time for some press restrictions.
00:12:10.000In other words, maybe this is too darn dangerous that you're getting to read all this stuff, and we don't have a choke point to shut it down, because in the regular media, whether it was ABC, CBS, NBC, The Washington Post...
00:12:20.000There are choke points where, you know, these people literally just pick up the red phone to the editor of the Washington Post and say, let's talk about this story you're thinking about running.
00:13:13.000Even John Kerry, the president, all these people have come out and said things that, oh, maybe we shouldn't be doing this, maybe we should be having this discussion.
00:13:22.000All this stuff we're talking about now with the NSA, that's all Edward Snowden stuff.
00:13:27.000Yeah, it's amazing that one guy can have that kind of impact.
00:13:31.000And in the future, when they look back on today, and I think historically, he's getting swept under the rug, and what he's done and the impact of it is just sort of getting ignored by the media.
00:13:42.000And more and more, they paint him as this controversial figure.
00:13:46.000More and more, they paint him as this guy on the run from the NSA. But there's no support of him in anything...
00:14:22.000So if the government was really representing the people, they would look at it in terms of like, what do all the intelligent people who've reviewed this think?
00:15:35.000Unions get it, bureaucracies get it, the army gets it, the police gets it.
00:15:39.000Where people get promoted, these guys all get promoted to the top NSA positions because they're better at spying.
00:15:45.000They figure out better ways to get around defenses.
00:15:48.000They don't get promoted to that special room where there's five or six of them making policy because they did a better job of finding a Fourth Amendment that doesn't let them spy.
00:15:57.000So when they're in the room, they all see the world the same way.
00:16:01.000And this happens, like I said, in every profession.
00:16:03.000They tend to push each other forward because there's no devil's advocate there saying, wait a minute, maybe we shouldn't use every power we have to spy as much as we can.
00:16:12.000To those people, you see these NSA guys testifying in front of Congress, and they don't even hide how mad they are at us.
00:16:19.000How mad they are that this is even known, how mad that they have to be there, how mad you're questioning them, and it's because there's nobody in the room saying, guys, we shouldn't do this.
00:16:28.000And really, to be honest, there's no obvious line where you should call the dogs off, you know, where you should say, Hey, maybe this is okay, but that's not okay.
00:16:40.000They talk about the Fourth Amendment, but then the other guy goes, well, we're not really violating the Fourth Amendment.
00:16:44.000If we just take everybody's trash at cans and we keep it in a storage locker with their name on it, we're only violating it if we actually, like, search through their trash, which we'll do later.
00:16:52.000If we have to, and then everything's on the kosher up and up.
00:16:55.000If J. Edgar Hoover wants to search Joe Rogan's trash for evidence of illegal activity, you're going to have to send a physical agent out there to do that.
00:17:03.000Now we just collect the trash on Trash Day, bring it to the NSA headquarters, dump it in there, and we'll sift through it later if we have to.
00:17:48.000So they were accessing everybody's emails as far back as...
00:17:51.000Yeah, there's a book called The 1% Doctrine where they talk about how after the 9-11 attacks, the rule that they decided, and mainly because of Dick Cheney, to operate under was...
00:18:01.000If there's even a 1% chance of another 9-11 happening, anything is fair.
00:18:08.000And I think what their attitude was, is on 9-12-2002, everybody would have said, oh yeah, okay, whatever it takes, man, don't let that happen again.
00:18:20.000Yeah, there was a weird moment after 9-11 where I remember driving to school, or to work rather, and as I was driving to work, it was early in the morning and all the commuters were going, and everybody had a flag on the car.
00:18:47.000Because I'm thinking, I just said 2002, and everybody's going to go, Dan, don't you know the 9-11 attacks happened in 2001?
00:18:52.000But a year later, that was still an open wound.
00:18:55.000And so how long, when do you think, if you had to guess, when did it start to wear off and we started to normalize?
00:19:02.000I mean, New York City is exempt because I don't think they ever re-normalized, but for the rest of the country, how long do you think it took to get over that PTSD? I think it took a few years, two or three years, something like that.
00:19:14.000Because, I mean, Bush being re-elected made no fucking sense under any point of view other than part of the 9-11 boost that he got for a while.
00:19:22.000Well, it was also the real problem with the voting machines.
00:19:25.000The real openly reported problem with those Diebold machines.
00:20:20.000The problem is, and we've talked about this before, I think there's a certain amount of this that a healthy society and a healthy political system can suck up and still be okay.
00:20:29.000There's a certain tipping point where you're not that healthy anymore, and what was okay before is not suck-up-able anymore.
00:21:16.000I want to go with what you said, if you have nothing to hide, because I was trying to get a show out before I came here, and I failed miserably.
00:21:21.000But one of the things I was going to talk about, did you see that story?
00:21:25.000The lawsuit filed from that incident in New Mexico with the driver who didn't do the full stop leaving Walmart.
00:22:34.000And not just that, what I love is the police department spokesman said, we didn't do anything wrong.
00:22:38.000This is policy and we had a judge sign off on it.
00:22:41.000So when you say, if you have nothing to hide, what do you care?
00:22:44.000This guy had nothing to hide and that happened to him.
00:22:47.000He clearly did because he was Clenching his butt in a weird way.
00:22:50.000I know, but now if that story is true and the lawsuit claims witnesses and all this kind of stuff and the police officers think nothing was wrong there, that's what happens to you when you get rid of these protections that keep you from being searched willy-nilly or anything like that.
00:23:04.000After a story like that, everyone in the world who's going to be stopped by the police is going to clench his butt in a weird way.
00:23:28.000Well, it's fucked up that if you search someone's ass for 14 hours and there's nothing up there, that guy should be able to search yours for 28. That should be the rule.
00:23:37.000He should be able to throw firecrackers in there.
00:23:45.000What bothers me about that is that there's no penalty that actually affects the people who did this.
00:23:49.000In other words, if this guy wins his big lawsuit against him, that's the taxpayers who are going to pay that.
00:23:54.000The people who did it don't suffer at all.
00:23:56.000Yeah, like someone falsely accusing someone of murder or theft or any crime like that.
00:24:02.000It almost should be worth just as much.
00:24:04.000If you set a guy up for murder and you know he didn't really do it, it should be worth almost as much as murdering somebody.
00:24:12.000They're talking about that with these podcast troll lawsuits and everything to change the law that they're working on in D.C. would do some of that, would put some of the onus on these people who say these things, and if you lose your case, all of a sudden you're the one responsible for the damage.
00:24:27.000For folks who don't know that story, I don't know the full extent of it.
00:24:31.000From what I understand, someone out there has a patent.
00:25:57.000Like, the idea that you could control that.
00:25:59.000But see, but it's not stupid if you're them and the lawyers and everything because that thing that they're working on in D.C. isn't there yet.
00:26:43.000Obviously people get something for nothing, right?
00:26:45.000I mean, I think we're going to have a real problem in this country no matter what, as long as our financial systems remain so vague and it fluctuates, goes up and down.
00:26:55.000Today the Dow crashed, tomorrow the Dow rises.
00:26:58.000As long as that's a possibility, how could you ever have anything stable ever when the entire foundation of your economy is by nature fluctuating daily?
00:27:09.000By nature, up and down, so much so that you have to close business at a certain time.
00:27:52.000The idea that you could only make transactions during a very...
00:27:56.000Yeah, especially in a global economy when the people in Japan are going, so we can only trade on American things when we're asleep at night?
00:28:53.000I don't think it's possible that it couldn't be when you're gambling.
00:28:58.000Essentially, the stock market is a lot of gambling.
00:29:01.000Especially the way some of these people play.
00:29:03.000It's one thing to say, I'm going to buy Coca-Cola and sell it in 25 years.
00:29:06.000It's another thing when you go, I'm going to buy Coca-Cola and sell it in 20 seconds.
00:29:09.000And even if you're right, if you say, no, look, it seems like a gamble to you because you're uneducated, but I, in fact, am very educated on this, and it's more of a calculated risk, but the reward-to-risk ratio is very high.
00:29:25.000That's what every gambler always says.
00:29:27.000But they can show you on paper, we've profited X amount of years in a row.
00:29:31.000This is not nearly as unstable as you like to think it is.
00:29:34.000But part of the charge is the fact that it is a little.
00:29:37.000So 2008 happens every now and then, where fucking everybody's scrambling and no one's got a chair, and the music just shut off.
00:29:44.000What I love about that is when they show you, you go to the financial advisor's office, and they always show you the historical, the way these things are performed historically.
00:29:51.000And it's always, the graph starts right after the last terrible crash.
00:29:56.000And you just go, well, what about the Depression?
00:29:58.000Well, the Depression was an unusual situation.
00:30:18.000I don't understand it at all, and the people that understand it have tried to comfort me and assure me that it does in fact make good sense.
00:30:25.000Right, and if that's not scary enough, then you get the collusion of government and the weird economy.
00:30:30.000I mean, when you think about the fact that there are no laws against the fact that if you have work for some companies, you can pick up a government job.
00:30:37.000Overseeing the workings of those very companies or vice versa.
00:30:41.000You are in government first and the second you are done you can pick up your vice president position in one of the companies that you just finished benefiting.
00:30:53.000You know, one of the ways that they've said our society could go down, though, and other societies have throughout history, is that sometimes they just get too complex to manage.
00:31:00.000And you can ride that wave sometimes until something bad happens.
00:31:04.000But a perfect example is, I mean, a lot of people said that the Great Depression happened because what was going on in the financial system overwhelmed people's ability to understand.
00:31:14.000And I remember people saying, well, we'll never have another Great Depression because we're so on top of things now.
00:31:19.000Yeah, but we have new variables that we don't understand that somebody in the future is going to say they were such idiots way back there in the early 21st century.
00:31:25.000Well, me as a barely educated fool, when I look at exactly how everything has fluctuated in the crash in 2008 and all these things, It makes zero sense.
00:31:37.000Because as a fool, I look at it and I go, look at this.
00:31:40.000There's the same amount of people, there's the same amount of metal, there's the same amount of concrete, the same amount of plastic, same amount of material things.
00:31:47.000No one has produced or taken away anything from the pile of humanity's creations.
00:31:52.000And yet, all of a sudden everyone's broke.
00:31:55.000Like, all of a sudden, everything fell apart, and people who were prospering just a week ago are no longer prospering.
00:32:01.000When I look at something like that, I have to feel like, okay, these guys are obviously far smarter than I, and they're running this system.
00:32:08.000So either it's rigged as fuck, and someone just extracted a shitload of money out of the system and did it under the guise of a crash, or...
00:32:18.000People are way fucking dumber than I give them credit.
00:32:32.000When a cat like Bernie Madoff comes along and robs so many people, I have to go, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute.
00:32:42.000Well, but I mean, look, it's not that hard to understand when people are playing with things that aren't real, but selling it for real money, and then you're counting that as something that you own.
00:32:50.000For example, we take these toxic assets, right?
00:32:52.000It's not as hard to understand as people suggest, because let's say I put you in a house you can't afford, and And all the evidence shows you can't afford it, and I wouldn't have given it to you 20 years ago.
00:33:01.000And then I take a bunch of people like you, and I take all of your bad things that you're never going to be paying back, and I bundle it into something, and then I sell that to someone else based on the value that isn't really there because none of you can really pay it back.
00:33:13.000And then you say, well, I'm worth this much money.
00:33:15.000I own these assets, and they're worth this much money.
00:33:17.000And then those assets collapse, and all of a sudden you look like you had $50 million in your asset tree of stuff, and all of a sudden you don't.
00:33:25.000You bought something that was worth nothing, and so...
00:33:27.000All that money that you had on paper just disappeared overnight because it wasn't real to begin with.
00:33:32.000Weren't there banks during this crisis that were actually banking on things falling apart?
00:34:51.000But just the idea that that could be legal, that you could be loaning people money, setting up loans, and also gambling on the fact that you'll profit if they default on those loans.
00:35:04.000Look, we know you can't afford this mortgage, but don't worry.
00:35:07.000If you can't pay it, you'll be taken out of your house, and we'll win on this other side over here.
00:35:11.000That's my point as an uneducated fool.
00:35:14.000When I look at that system, I go, well, obviously they set it up so they can extract money.
00:35:19.000If you have the same amount of people, you have the same amount of knowledge, you have the same amount of items, and yet all of a sudden everything fell apart.
00:36:19.000I knew somebody who was hooked up with the people who owned the loan, so through somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody, we got to the president of the company like, hey man, can you do something?
00:36:30.000Is it something that we can work with and stuff?
00:36:33.000I kid you not, the guy sent back the word, give me $20,000 under the table and I can make it happen.
00:37:07.000How is that different, though, from a lot of us probably know some pretty darn serious gamblers, and a lot of them set their sports bets up that way, where, listen, if this happens, I win, and if that happens, I win, too, and either way, I'm covered.
00:37:19.000And that's definitely how the house handles things.
00:37:22.000So, essentially, when we talk about the financial insiders in the economic realm, that's the house.
00:39:30.000You get numbers crunchers who don't understand human nature.
00:39:32.000And they just look at it as like a management tool thing.
00:39:36.000Well, to get back to our risk management, I think there's a little bit of them going, I don't know how he's gaming the system, but I can judge from the results.
00:39:51.000I mean, I guess he can, but in blackjack, can he count cards?
00:39:55.000They don't know what the next scam is, and they can sometimes deduce that something's going on when those odds and averages that they've worked out to the nth degree don't seem to be working with you.
00:41:52.000Yeah, but I think that exists for everything.
00:41:54.000I mean, I think ultimately we have to learn from all these horrible examples that we see on TV and in the news, but every time some guy gets in a street fight and beats some guy to death and they're pulling him away, we should all learn from that.
00:42:06.000We should all learn from that and go, hey, you know what?
00:42:08.000The human body is a lot more fragile than we like to pretend it is.
00:42:11.000Who's that boxer that just fell into a coma?
00:43:32.000Football's getting a little like this, where you start to wince.
00:43:37.000It's funny, I know this is stupid to say, but I would watch boxing and I never connected it with pain.
00:43:43.000You're watching tactics and you're watching different strategies, and you're watching foot movement and head movement.
00:43:48.000It never even occurred to me that you're watching...
00:43:51.000The pain and the suffering and then someone dies and you go, okay, how much enjoyment did I get out of this sport?
00:43:57.000And I still watch it, but this is the kind of thing that just reminds you of what's going on in there.
00:44:02.000Well, for me, it has an even deeper connection because I've competed, because I've fought a few kickboxing bouts and probably, I don't know how many taekwondo bouts, but it was over...
00:44:13.000For a period of like six or seven years, it was all I did with my life.
00:44:20.000So I competed a lot in full contact tournaments and I got away with it.
00:44:25.000I got lucky, but I've seen some guys get really hurt.
00:44:29.000I've seen some guys get kicked in the head where they were just really never the same person again.
00:44:34.000Doesn't this go to what you were saying, though, about you kind of have a right?
00:44:38.000It's like if you talk to these boxers who are, like you said, every day they're training, you're going to tell this person they can't do that as long as they know the risks?
00:44:45.000To this day, that was one of the most important things that I ever did as far as developing me as a human being because it was terrifying.
00:44:52.000It was terrifying, and I got really good at it.
00:44:55.000And I got really good at competing in a really dangerous, high-risk competition Quick happening situation, like the striking, especially like the weight class that I was kickboxing at 160. These light guys,
00:45:11.000everyone moves really fast, they all hit hard.
00:45:16.000And when you're competing in that sort of an environment, you're training in that sort of environment on a regular basis, regular shit just doesn't scare you the same way.
00:45:25.000Regular people, and they flare up and yell, or someone gets douchey with you, it doesn't have this overwhelming sense of fear that it has on a lot of people.
00:45:34.000And I've seen people in confrontations where a guy and another guy are in a confrontation, Something happens mostly because one guy loses his ability to stay calm.
00:45:45.000He's so confused and nervous that he can't react properly.
00:45:51.000When I see that, I see that's a human with a deficit in the development of their character.
00:45:56.000I don't think, unless you have been there, I don't think that physical violence is something that you're just born knowing how to deal with.
00:46:03.000You know, it's like either you are used to it because you got beat up at home as a kid or you're used to it because you fought a lot or you're used to it because of something.
00:46:10.000But you're not going to, you know, the first time it happens, it's fucking scary.
00:46:13.000That's why the scariest kids to fight are kids who got beat by their dad.
00:46:39.000Ryan O'Neill, I think it was, he was doing the remake of the Champ movie, and they had on site one of these actual boxers who was going to kind of, you know, teach him a little bit about how to do this or that.
00:46:51.000And he tells the story, he says, at one point, he goes, the boxer who was working with him said, I want you to hit me.
00:46:57.000And he said, okay, I'm not going to hit you in a long time.
00:47:09.000And you start to realize that guys who take lots of punches all the time in training and everything, that it doesn't do to them what it would do to you, well, not you, me.
00:47:21.000But to them, The punches can do just as much damage to their brain, but in terms of shaking them or hurting them, it's not the same thing when you're used to it.
00:47:30.000Well, one of the big things is the shock of being hit.
00:47:33.000The shock of being hit is how a lot of people, they literally go into a freeze mode, and they can't move correctly, and they get knocked out.
00:48:04.000Yeah, because then the more scared you are, the more you call for it.
00:48:07.000Because then you're encouraging the other.
00:48:08.000Because if you're not scared, it's like, damn, it makes the other person think twice.
00:48:12.000He's like, do I really want to get into it with this crazy motherfucker who's not scared of getting hurt?
00:48:16.000It also doesn't progress the correct way.
00:48:20.000The natural way in an idiot's mind is I yell at you, you either back down and get scared and I kick your ass, or you yell back at me and we fucking puff chests until somebody fucks up and makes the wrong move.
00:48:35.000But if a guy backs down, you know that you can press forward.
00:48:38.000The natural instinct of the bully is to press forward.
00:49:02.000One of his speeches, when there are these 10,000 Greek guys, like, way behind enemy lines in Persian territory, they have to make their way back home, he looks desperate, they have no chance, and one of...
00:49:15.000In this speech that he's trying to give them to rally them up, one of the things he says is exactly what you were saying about the psychologies.
00:49:23.000If you guys are scared now, you're all going to die.
00:49:27.000Because if you're afraid of dying, that's exactly what's going to happen.
00:49:30.000If you guys are willing to die because you know that your odds are desperate, but you're willing to just go for it because A, you don't have any other chance, B, you go for it with honor...
00:49:40.000The odds are not only you're going to behave honorably, but your chances of surviving improve dramatically.
00:50:23.000Just do something with your body other than sitting.
00:50:27.000That shit drives me insane because, you know, the fact that we have moved beyond the stupid stereotype of the tough macho man and the prissy woman who stay back, that's nice, but at the same time, so often has come at the price of people Yeah.
00:51:02.000Well, people associate prejudicely anything male, masculine, anything unapologetically masculine with suppression of the feminine, with suppression like with anti-feminist ideas.
00:51:15.000I have on more than one occasion gotten into it with people that call themselves feminists and their idea was that something that I had said Like, doesn't promote femininity or is anti-feminine.
00:53:18.000Listen, I think we exist in a realm where it's going to be competitive no matter what you do.
00:53:25.000So I think to pretend we're going to de-emphasize these things doesn't do anybody any good down the road.
00:53:31.000Because then, once you drop them in life, they're not prepared.
00:53:35.000Well, it is a little bit like what you were saying about the fighting, but like with my kids...
00:53:40.000You don't want to over, you don't want to crush anybody early on.
00:53:44.000You want to nurture them so that they can handle the competition.
00:53:47.000But if you don't teach them about competition, you're not preparing them for life.
00:53:51.000And that's when you're going to release them into a world where, I mean, if those people really don't want a competitive world, think about how much you would have to do to turn off the competitive world.
00:54:03.000How much intrusion there would have to be on all of our lives.
00:54:05.000There goes your stock market right away, right?
00:54:10.000Isn't that a little like what some of the really hardcore communist ideas were?
00:54:14.000Where different people have different capabilities, so forcing them to compete is inherently unequal because you and I are born different, so we'll compensate for that and blend it out.
00:54:23.000Sounds great in theory, but the amount of work it takes to recreate a whole system where you don't have competition, you don't have differences, is worse than the disease.
00:54:33.000Yeah, even because you are treating people like they are sick, as opposed to treating somebody like you are going to teach everyone, man, woman, doesn't matter, gender doesn't come into place.
00:54:54.000They are what you need to be a complete human being.
00:54:56.000You encourage that stuff, and you make the most complete human being there can possibly be, and they will deal with whatever shit life throws at them, competitive or otherwise, because there are always going to be challenges.
00:55:07.000And as you say, if there are no preparation for the challenges that are going to come your way, whether you like it or not, no matter how safe you make the world, Then you're dead meat already.
00:55:17.000Then you're going to get squashed the first time the universe goes boo at you.
00:56:25.000The ability to recognize that and deal with whatever comes in front of you is very important.
00:56:32.000Like you said, you're going to have kids who get raised by parents who beat the hell out of them and who don't raise them the right way and who don't give them those qualities, Daniele, that you were talking about.
00:56:40.000And then you're going to unleash those people in the world and say, go compete with this guy who went to Harvard and had a great education and was born with a lot of money.
00:57:22.000You can't make a Joey Diaz if you get some guy who's doing fucking sit-ups every morning, a thousand sit-ups and chin-ups and jogging around the block and only eating kale.
00:57:44.000The real problem that we have in raising children is all they teach in school is to try to filter you into a standard position in the economy.
00:58:23.000But if you are not, and that goes for the other 50% of humanity, Then it's just designed to make you not nurture your talents, not do all those things, and try to make you fit in that little box.
00:58:34.000And part of the reality is that not because the people who create schools are evil and they just want to fuck with your life, it's because they need to go with knowledge as something that can be objectively tested.
00:58:47.000What is it that you can objectively test?
00:58:49.000Can you test somebody's wisdom, how smart they are, how cool of a human being they are, objectively?
00:58:54.000What you can do is you can test how well they spit back information at you, which is a skill in itself that it's better than not knowing how.
00:59:07.000But it says nothing about what you're going to do with them, whether you're going to be brilliant, whether you're going to be able to use these ideas in an amazing way.
00:59:30.000They don't want to get sued by the people who don't do well.
00:59:33.000Like if I come into class and I say, I'll give you an A because you're really fucking smart and I can see it.
00:59:38.000No, you really are not that good, so sorry, you gotta see.
00:59:40.000The person you gotta see is gonna be, fuck you, you know, why are you giving me, show me why, you know, where is in the exactly that I deserve this.
00:59:49.000And part of the game is the stuff that you can prove in that fashion It's not the kind of knowledge that makes a complete human being.
00:59:56.000But the application of that knowledge in a capitalist society is what we try to define as proof that you've actually got some intelligence.
01:00:04.000That's why people who, you might not even think they're that smart, but if they're very successful financially, you go, well, he's smart at that.
01:00:15.000I think what you're trying to do, theoretically, in an education system is to prepare people to succeed in life.
01:00:22.000And the problem that I think the education system has is that it's stuck in a design for an era where succeeding in life is very different than succeeding in life today.
01:00:33.000You're not going to go onto the factory assembly line.
01:00:35.000You're not going to do those kind of things, but the way our system has evolved is to create people who can succeed at that.
01:00:41.000The problem is that what we have now is a creativity-based economy that we're moving towards.
01:00:47.000And teaching creativity, one, is tremendously hard.
01:00:50.000And we haven't worked to create that on a mass system where you've got schools that are...
01:00:55.000I mean, obviously, schools work with creativity.
01:00:57.000But it's a different thing entirely to sit there and go, we're going to start in the first grade.
01:01:02.000And by the time you graduate high school, we are going to maximize your creative abilities that are unique to you.
01:01:07.000You know, Danielle, you were saying this.
01:01:09.000Part of the problem is you could talk about creativity, but Joe's creative gifts are going to be different than yours and mine, and you can't have a standard course, well, I haven't thought of one anyway, that can take your gifts and your gifts and bring them to maturity unless we all share those gifts, because...
01:01:24.000You know, your gifts are in one area, your gifts are in another.
01:01:27.000The problem is that in our system there are no assembly lines or few.
01:01:30.000You can't educate the mass of people to take a bunch of jobs that don't exist anymore.
01:01:34.000So I think the system has to redesign itself to push creativity.
01:01:38.000There's also some utopian ideals in raising kids that are contrary to human nature, like this new thing that they're doing where they're not having kids win.
01:01:46.000You know, when they're playing, like, ball games and no one wins, you know, when they're little.
01:03:04.000But that competition can motivate the accomplishment of work.
01:03:09.000And the accomplishment of work, sometimes procrastination or what have you, can delay someone releasing their art.
01:03:16.000So in that way, the competition inspires the creation of art.
01:03:19.000It's not always, and most of the time you're better off with that competition being internal, or not even being a competition, but rather an embracement of the complexities of figuring out whatever thing you're working on.
01:03:31.000But that's still, there's something going on.
01:03:36.000Whether it's going on with you in your head, whether it's going on with the audience that's going to review whatever you're creating, like a podcast, or whether it's going on with you competing directly against your peers.
01:03:46.000To me, I love something about competition because I love the media feedback it gives you.
01:03:51.000It's like you go out there, you do what you want to do, and at the end of the day, you see the results.
01:03:59.000Losing to me As horrible as that feels, as it fucking sucks and you feel like you're so mad, it's the best thing that can happen to you because winning, you're going to keep doing the same thing you've always done.
01:04:10.000You have no motivation to push harder because, look, I'm already doing great.
01:04:17.000And then when you do lose, then it forces you to go back to the drawing board and figure out, okay, I ran into this stumbling block, how can I go around it?
01:04:25.000And the fact is, this bullshit about no losers, no winners, not letting somebody experience what it is to do your best and still lose, you're not doing them any favor.
01:04:36.000Because the fact is, in life, a million times, just because that's the design of life, shit is going to happen, whether you like it or not, whether it's fair or not, whether you deserve it or not, And how you respond to that, if you feel that, why did this happen to me?
01:05:14.000The first time that lies slap you around, you freak out.
01:05:17.000And isn't that sort of one of the reasons why our economy and society itself is so fucked up?
01:05:22.000It's because we're so goddamn competitive and it's because it's so natural to do that when you start controlling some of the money, you want to control more of the money.
01:05:29.000You know, when you start making some of the laws bend to help and benefit your business.
01:05:35.000Dude, I watched a really disturbing documentary this past couple of days.
01:06:10.000This is the wonderful example now You know, if somebody came to you and said, how much money would we have to give you to poison your country?
01:06:19.000Because look at the other side of this.
01:06:22.000Fracking, as it's called, has taken the United States from an energy really insufficient position where, I mean, we're in the Middle East, we're in all these places because of the energy question.
01:06:32.000And I mean, in a geologic sense, overnight turned us into an energy...
01:06:38.000Exporter again, and we haven't been that way since, I mean, we've always exported energy, but I mean, the 1960s were like the last really high-water mark where we had lots of oil and we didn't have to worry.
01:06:49.000All of a sudden, we're the natural gas kings and everything again, and there's a ton of money.
01:06:53.000That amount of money, the amount we're talking about here, not just money for now, money for 10 years from now, 20, this is like long-term lots of money.
01:07:19.000Most people had no idea this was even happening until it was already too late.
01:07:23.000And during the Bush administration, this...
01:07:25.000The documentary, Gasland, highlights how this all came to be and how Dick Cheney signed over these new exemptions that you didn't have to follow the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act.
01:08:05.000There's more than 500 different chemicals that they have to pump into the ground in order to break up this natural gas and then extract it.
01:08:13.000And when they do that, they basically, everything gets mixed up together.
01:08:17.000The well water gets mixed up with the chemicals, gets mixed up with the natural gas, and it's just toxic as fuck.
01:08:25.000It's coming out of holes in the ground.
01:08:27.000You can come up to it and light it on fire.
01:08:30.000Do you know what the best chance, and it's a sad thing, the best chance you have of combating that amount of money over something is when we have screwed up so much of the fresh water supply that the fresh water actually becomes worth more?
01:08:44.000And you're already seeing this happening in some places where they're talking about, you know, do we sell water rights to California from the Colorado River or this or that?
01:08:52.000And the amounts of money that they're talking about, I mean, they're already talking about, you know, why should water be considered a feature that's owned by everybody?
01:08:59.000Can I buy the water in the Colorado River and then can I sell it back to you?
01:09:04.000So, I mean, the old joke is that if you buy the bottled water, it's worth more than gasoline, you know, at that amount if you go to the store.
01:09:10.000Well, what happens when it really is worth more than gasoline in large quantities?
01:09:15.000Then all of a sudden, fracking sounds like you're destroying an even more important spot.
01:09:19.000I can get more money for that water than I can get for that natural gas.
01:09:21.000That's the only chance we have in a system driven by money, I think, to keep the water fresh.
01:09:28.000And the amount of deception that's gone on to cover the amount of damage that's been done is staggering.
01:09:34.000I mean, when these people tell their stories, it's incredibly hard to watch and listen to because people get sick because they were drinking the water.
01:09:41.000For the longest time, they wouldn't admit that there was anything wrong with the water.
01:09:45.000And then they started giving people water.
01:09:46.000They set up these giant tanks and pump in water to them every week so that they get their water from that instead of their wells that they've had for 100-plus years.
01:09:58.000But this is where you see the corruption of our political system, which is what's destroying.
01:10:02.000You would think that people who live in places where they can light their water on fire would have their representatives in Washington working to stop that.
01:10:09.000But that's where your free speech rights and my free speech rights are not equal to the free speech rights of these other people.
01:10:15.000And this is where I always argue with the courts that say that money is free speech, which I don't mind, except who said you get 50 or 100 times my free speech rights?
01:10:23.000Well, not only that, the internet, I think, ultimately is going to be a place where people vote on things, and it's also ultimately going to be a place where people can donate to campaigns that promote values they believe in.
01:10:35.000And I think that is going to be a special interest, along with all the other special interests in the world competing for influence.
01:10:41.000But what about that line, if voting really changed things, they'd make it illegal?
01:10:46.000And I think, ultimately, if people invest money in a party and a lobbyist and an idea that supports the things that they believe in, that money can influence people just as easily as the money that supports fracking or the money that supports – the idea is that it's just trading of commodities here.
01:12:02.000I'm going to buy a few legislators and get them in my corner, and then I'm going to write that off, and U.S. taxpayers can pick up my buying, because that's how it's done at the best levels.
01:12:10.000Well, I think that ultimately that would be a smart thing for them to pursue just by virtue of the fact that there's more money there than there is in all the corporations combined.
01:12:19.000I know, but it's a lot harder to please all of us than just that one guy.
01:12:22.000You're right, but the potential for extracting money off of a giant group like $300 million, even if you get 1%, that's still a huge amount of human beings that are donating money.
01:12:32.000Well, the audience is going to say that already exists.
01:12:34.000I mean, look at all the small contributions.
01:12:35.000But it's not the same as walking up to somebody and saying, listen, I went to all my friends and here's $5 million.
01:12:41.000Yeah, because the guy, you know, the corporation, they're going to invest the money to buy off a vote to get what they want.
01:12:48.000They are going to make that amount of money 50 times over in the next year.
01:12:53.000The person who's going to donate to a campaign, they are doing that in order to avoid something to be taken from them, whether it's because of water or something.
01:13:00.000They're not going to see that money back.
01:13:02.000They're not going to make more money on it.
01:13:04.000So there is a little bit of hesitance in a lot of people.
01:13:32.000But the idea that these companies that have enforced fracking or encouraged fracking or spent money to make it happen, and this guy goes really clearly into detail about how it all took place, they're ruining a huge chunk of the country.
01:13:49.000And they're doing it right in front of everybody's face, and no one can stop it.
01:13:53.000And the worst part is they won't be around when the bill comes due for cleaning it up either.
01:14:00.000These people, one of the people that got incredibly sick, this woman got sick, because it turned out that these filters that they had set up don't work with the chemicals that they use for fracking.
01:14:09.000The chemicals actually eat the membranes of the filter.
01:14:12.000So, some of the chemicals were getting through to her and she was getting incredibly sick.
01:14:18.000Neurological damage, all sorts of like, everyone's sick.
01:14:24.000It's very hard to protect the water supply.
01:14:26.000You remember here in California with that gasoline additive that sunk into the ground and made it into the water?
01:14:31.000And it was a weird situation because the additive had been put in there To take some of the lead from the air pollution, and then it was seeping into the groundwater.
01:14:40.000And so you're damned if you do, damned if you don't.
01:14:42.000But that's the problem, is it doesn't take a whole lot to seep into the water supply, and then you're screwed.
01:14:47.000Yeah, what was that that you just put up that said gas land producers?
01:15:16.000The water was flammable before fracking.
01:15:18.000You know what's funny, though, is every time you expose anything, you're going to have the next day 15 sites saying, no, you made it up, it's not real, it's not...
01:15:27.000That's what public relations firms are for.
01:15:31.000Yeah, I think that it's hard to know who the fuck is right in that situation, but somewhere in the country you can fucking, without a doubt, guarantee that these people have been poisoned.
01:15:41.000Whether the lighting the water on fire, it always existed.
01:15:57.000That's what's crazy, is that that's always taken a back seat to somebody's profit somewhere.
01:16:03.000And that's a bit sad that we can't, as an entire population being poisoned, balance out the interests of those people who decide poisoning is okay, because they can go to Hawaii.
01:16:13.000Because I mean, from their point of view, you're a corporation, you're in the business of making money.
01:16:17.000You're not in the business of being nice.
01:16:19.000You're not in the business of being mean.
01:16:20.000Whatever it takes to make money, you'll do it.
01:16:23.000If it takes screwing people over, oh well.
01:16:25.000Well, and even if you didn't want to make money, you may have a fiduciary responsibility to your shareholders to maximize that.
01:16:40.000The role of government in a beautiful, abstract world would be that they actually enforce laws to stop the stuff that's damaging to the public.
01:16:53.000And to me, that's the biggest thing that I think people don't understand, is that you can make all the laws in the world.
01:16:59.000If you let the loopholes happen, they don't mean it.
01:17:02.000It's like people say to me, Dan, why do you keep saying the Fourth Amendment's going away?
01:17:05.000The Fourth Amendment's there, courts rule it.
01:17:07.000Yeah, but you Swiss cheese that enough, and it doesn't matter anymore.
01:17:10.000This stuff is meaningless unless it acts as a barrier.
01:17:14.000I gotta research this now because a bunch of people on my message board are putting up all these websites that say that they're debunking Gasland.
01:17:22.000First of all, A, I would, without a doubt, I would imagine that if I was working for the fracking industry and someone put out a hit piece on fracking, that I would debunk the fucking shit out of it.
01:17:33.000Even if it doesn't make any sense, the debunking doesn't make any sense.
01:17:36.000And if you're a legislator who voted to allow it, you'd have the same interest.
01:17:40.000Yeah, but that said, I haven't read any of the debunking, so I'll read that and I'll get back to it later.
01:17:44.000But even if you don't focus on the specific example, you look at the general picture, it's fucking undeniable that we're poisoning our environment.
01:18:08.000I think that we do really, without a doubt, have an issue with the fact that people are super competitive and that people are progressive in nature.
01:18:17.000What I mean by progressive, they move forward.
01:18:54.000They started out with regular sex, and they got a lot of regular sex, and they started getting bored, so they brought in extra girls, and before you know it, they're having these freaky sex parties.
01:19:20.000The idea of what makes a human exceptional, what makes a human create everything that exists, really.
01:19:25.000I think from electronics to the wheel to houses and everything, there's this natural desire for humans to improve upon what they've already done.
01:19:38.000It's one of my arguments when everyone would talk about problems with government and whether or not there's still corruption in government.
01:19:47.000All you have to do is look back on the corruption that you can document for a fact that happened in the 1960s and know that there's no bodies.
01:19:55.000There's no slew of people, lives ruined, careers destroyed, parties brought down.
01:20:03.000If you think about exactly what they're absolutely positively guilty of doing, there's very little damage.
01:20:09.000And you know that everything progresses.
01:20:11.000So the amount of The utter and complete total corruption that exists today and the sophistication of it would naturally be above and beyond what existed documentable from the 1960s.
01:20:23.000Let me take it to a different level because I think it's a different thing.
01:20:26.000I think that we are incentivized as human beings, going back to primate times, to look at things through a short-term lens.
01:20:34.000The carrots and sticks are all set up for the short-term approach.
01:20:37.000You brought up wisdom a while ago, Daniel.
01:20:40.000Wisdom is being able to look at things from a long-term perspective.
01:20:48.000In the old days, Ty Cobb would buy Coca-Cola shares, and when he died, he had all these Coca-Cola shares on his chest at the hospital that he'd had for...
01:21:24.000It's like when people were talking about President Obama lying about the health care plan, about keeping your own doctor, right, and all that stuff.
01:21:55.000If we can't somehow contradict where the incentives are and go against our natural primate instincts, we might not be able to make it work.
01:22:03.000I think it's going to take a greater level of awareness culturally than exists today.
01:22:09.000I think the great level of awareness, the really truly objective view of humanity and the potential possibilities of the future is something that's contemplated by few groups, small groups of people, people sitting in conversation, dinner parties and stuff.
01:22:24.000But if you think of the greater whole of humanity, the amount of damage we're doing to the world on a daily basis, the amount of Like really ridiculous behavior that operates our financial and justice system and our political systems.
01:22:41.000It's all like complete and total chaos and yet it still continues in the exact same way it always has before.
01:22:48.000There's only small groups of people that speak out against it.
01:22:51.000I think once The sphere of understanding of what a complete disaster this world is because of our actions and because of our inability to correct those actions, once that understanding is in place,
01:23:23.000I think someone down the road, when clean water, for example, is worth a bazillion dollars to Halliburton and they buy the water, then the rules will be you can't piss in water anywhere.
01:23:35.000Then all of the money going to Washington will be to preserve water, preserve Halliburton's water supply, otherwise their profits will be impacted when they sell it back to the public.
01:23:45.000Joe, you want human nature to improve, and you think it's going to happen, and I don't disagree with you.
01:23:52.000The problem is that so many people like Dick Cheney have to be improved too before this works that I don't see that happening.
01:24:02.000Their incentives have to become, they're still going to want money, they're still going to think short term, but the incentives have to change so that protecting the environment becomes the way to keep your millions intact, as opposed to, you know, polluting the environment becomes the way to keep your millions intact.
01:24:15.000Maybe, but if you look at the dissolving of boundaries between people and information and how that trend is going to continue, I think that our idea of looking at the possibilities of the future based on how humans were able to run the world just 10 years ago are kind of ridiculous.
01:24:33.000When you think about it from 100 years from now, the options won't be available because The amount of transparency that will be required to communicate with people is going to be completely different.
01:24:41.000It's going to be very hard to hold back reality.
01:24:43.000You're assuming that there's not going to be some David Cameron crackdown between now and then.
01:24:50.000And I think even if they did, the young people that are coming up That are more in line with the ideas of an anonymous or the ideas of open source internet, the ideas of spreading information and what a massively important thing that is for society and human culture as a whole,
01:25:08.000And I think they're going to continue that trend.
01:25:10.000The people that know that the idea of anybody being able to control information, they're literally controlling, if they do that, they're controlling educational evolution.
01:25:21.000They're controlling the ability for...
01:25:23.000Are you suggesting they wouldn't want to?
01:25:34.000Some of the stuff that you guys are saying, I actually think it goes hand in hand because what you're saying, Joe, about the fact that a certain level of transformation in terms of consciousness, in terms of priorities that happen at a mass level when enough people meet sort of a critical mass That feeds into Dan's argument that at that point,
01:25:52.000corporations are going to respond to it because there's money attached to it.
01:25:55.000So I don't think it's just purely from an economic standpoint, and it's clearly not purely from a consciousness standpoint.
01:26:04.000It's like more and more people care about environmental issues.
01:26:08.000So companies that market themselves as who are nice to the environment can hike their prices a little bit because they know that they are going to have some people who buy them Their products because of those values.
01:26:20.000Yeah, could you imagine if you were buying some gas that cost 10 cents less per gallon, but it guaranteed comes from child labor in some shitty part of the world.
01:26:32.000It's the dolphin-safe tuna label thing.
01:26:43.000I think as technology advances and improves, this connection with people and ideas and information is going to be cleaner and quicker.
01:26:50.000I don't know what form that's going to take in, but all I'm doing is sort of objectively extrapolating what's happened in the past to what's happened recently to where I feel like it's going.
01:26:59.000I just don't think you can hold this waterfall back.
01:27:02.000I feel like there's too much going on.
01:27:04.000There's too many people communicating too freely all over the world and improving upon the methods of communication.
01:27:11.000And they're going to get to a point where you're not going to be able to hide a goddamn thing.
01:27:14.000And you're not going to be able to make money off of...
01:27:17.000You're not going to be able to profit off doing something that directly damages the earth because everyone's going to see it.
01:27:22.000It's going to be something that your neighbors know about.
01:27:25.000It's going to be something that I... We're going to know what each other are getting away with.
01:27:28.000But don't you think you end up with a gas land kind of story where you can...
01:27:32.000Push a story, and maybe you twist 15% of the data to make your point a little harder.
01:27:38.000And somebody else, based on that 15 or 20% that you're making up, debunk the whole thing and say it's all crap.
01:27:45.000And there's that part of the flow of information is that there's so much of it that for every single thing you hear that seems to prove things going one way, you have people who seem pretty credible, who give you good evidence to argue the exact opposite things, and it leaves a ton of human beings feeling like,
01:28:06.000Well, I feel like we're either going to go one way or the other.
01:28:09.000We're either going to go slide into complete total dictatorship brought out by a series of terrorist events, or we're going to slide into the next level of evolution.
01:28:28.000Amazing quote by Orson Welles, but essentially, to paraphrase it, what it was saying is that there's a race going on between people who are looking to improve the human race and people that are stuck in the old paradigm that are constantly battle between education and...
01:28:46.000Damn it, I hate when I don't remember a great quote that I think I have at my fingertips.
01:28:50.000You need a quote board here up on the walls.
01:29:01.000I mean, that's exactly what we're talking about.
01:29:02.000I feel like the way things are going, when you hear people like the NSA folks say that, you know, the angry that a guy like Edward Snowden released all the data and he's a traitor and, you know, all this...
01:29:16.000Craziness where you're trying to convince us that this guy is bad because he told us that you're bad.
01:29:21.000See, why can I always see the dark side?
01:29:24.000I want to come with you guys into the light.
01:29:36.000Trust us next time and you won't have another one of these.
01:29:39.000I just, you know, I mean, I think things could break in the right way, but I think...
01:29:45.000History shows that they're stacked up against us.
01:29:49.000And so I think if you take this attitude that, hey, things could break the right way, you are not girding yourself up for the fight that you're facing.
01:29:57.000And this gets back to what we talked about when you talked about fights.
01:29:59.000If you think, oh, that George Foreman I'm about to fight, ah, he's got openings.
01:30:06.000And then you don't account for the right.
01:30:09.000And you get in there and you go, oh, damn, I forgot about that.
01:30:11.000I think you need to gird yourself and say, history shows that there's always a small group of people, you know, who have a little bit of the ear of the powerful or who have a little bit more money or what have you, and they're extremely formidable.
01:30:25.000There's never going to be like, we all get this consciousness expansion and Dick Cheney's never getting anywhere near government again.
01:30:30.000The truth is, we're playing Blackhawk down, and Dick Cheney's busy, you know, buying up corporations.
01:30:36.000I think this is a monumental struggle that's going to require...
01:30:42.000You know, what's missing, and I've always said this is, We don't have any leaders.
01:30:46.000I mean, in other generations, you can name people.
01:30:49.000You can Wikipedia and search people that were out in the forefront bringing groups of people into directions.
01:30:54.000I feel like we're a very directionless group.
01:31:45.000Where's your awareness raising level and everything?
01:31:49.000Just to play devil's advocate for what you said earlier, when you were talking earlier about you see it going in a bad direction, we were just talking at the beginning of this conversation about how fucked up things were just a few hundred years ago, like how much worse things were 500 years ago.
01:32:34.000That's a very good point, that point that you had about people looking at it.
01:32:38.000And also, back in the day, up until recently, you didn't really live long enough to see the hustle.
01:32:45.000If you were lucky, you lived to be 30-ish.
01:32:48.000A good 50% of your friends were probably dead by then.
01:32:52.000And then, you know, the guys that would leave to be 60, those rare birds that would be hanging around philosophizing in square, they were so rare.
01:32:59.000We really didn't get that many of them.
01:33:00.000So when you got a guy like Socrates that dropped all this crazy knowledge, like, yeah, that guy had been around a long time.
01:33:06.000He made it through, wrote some shit down, he figured it out.
01:33:39.000But I mean back then, you're dealing with like a whole society that was sort of structured on people that never got old enough or never had exposure to enough data.
01:33:49.000To sort of go, I don't think we should have a Caesar.
01:33:53.000I don't think we should have this Colosseum.
01:33:55.000This whole Lions versus Christians thing, this is kind of fucked, man.
01:34:54.000No, actually, most days that's exactly how I feel.
01:34:57.000And even the days that I don't, I still feel that there's a lot of it that's true.
01:35:00.000So the point to me is, how do you turn that awareness that you're stuck up against something, you know, you're an ant trying to attack a tank, you know, the odds of what you can do, not even as any single individual, but even at mass level.
01:35:31.000I actually talk about this on our political show because when you feel the most upset about things and the most powerless, you start to wonder about the wisdom of caring about this stuff.
01:35:44.000I mean, I think we all know people who don't pay any attention to politics, who don't watch the news, whose life is a very, you know, it's my kids, it's my wife, it's my job.
01:35:53.000And there are times when I question the wisdom of caring about things you cannot change.
01:38:23.000Imagine if he had a new heart and then they put it in and he just started fucking feeling really regretful for everything and started writing books.
01:39:51.000I mean, the kind of guy who is so risk-taking that he's willing to go after generals, that kind of guy might do a lot of wild shit.
01:39:58.000I think it's possible, though, that they can do that to a car.
01:40:02.000I think that's what I've gained from this.
01:40:04.000What I've gained from this is by reading the experts, the technology experts, the people that have no vested interest in this politically one way or the other, weren't a Hastings fan or denier, The people that looked at the possibilities for what you can do with a remote-controlled system in a car now,
01:40:33.000And even before it existed, remember the guy who had done all the exposing of the CIA crack cocaine epidemic, like basically accusing the CIA of having help Latin American drug lords who happened to be their friends?
01:40:47.000You know, I can't fucking remember the name.
01:40:48.000I just remember that he was, he owns the record for having, quote-unquote, killed himself by shooting himself with a shotgun, so far nothing strange, twice.
01:40:58.000Which seems a bit complicated to pull off.
01:41:00.000The most interesting thing about the Hastings thing to me now, because I'm with you, I don't know what you could figure out from Hastings based on what we know.
01:41:08.000I was fascinated, and this gets to your new media thing, all the information out there, and it also gets to yours, Daniele, about...
01:41:16.000False information or muddying the waters.
01:41:18.000Do you realize how much of what circulated the globe about this Hastings thing came from that one source, that part-time contributor to that local news station in San Diego, that Kim Dvorak woman?
01:41:34.000She's the one who said things like, well, there was no body in the coffin and everyone was upset with that.
01:41:38.000Well, that turned out to be totally false, but oh my lord, did we all share that?
01:41:55.000The coroner didn't give the body back and cremated it without permission.
01:41:59.000If you've ever dealt with coroners, that's just not kosher.
01:42:02.000And that turned out to be not true at all.
01:42:04.000And I don't think she ever retracted it.
01:42:06.000But in the old days, they used to make us confirm sources twice.
01:42:10.000She's in the position where she's supposed to be confirming sources twice.
01:42:14.000She says that the San Diego news station runs it multiple times, and then we all retweet it and share it, and it becomes part of the urban legend almost.
01:42:24.000But that a single strand, one person, was able to do that with the global sharing and everything, That to me is as fascinating as the Hastings thing.
01:43:19.000And in a weird situation, I mean, I think the tendency is to say, one of our guys got it in the neck, and he got it in the neck for doing something that we've been waiting for someone to do.
01:43:27.000And what does this say to the other people out there we would hope would...
01:43:30.000So, I mean, I don't want to say teams, but there's a part of me that says, to me, I don't know if I would have liked the guy on a personal level, but he was on my side.
01:43:40.000God, the powers that be have everybody on their side.
01:43:42.000I mean, there was a feeling like, please tell me that somebody working for the good of all of us didn't get knocked off.
01:43:48.000I don't think he did, but there's certainly that feeling where you just go, what sort of a message does this send to other would-be Michael Hastings?
01:43:55.000You don't think he did, but would you be surprised if you found out he did?
01:44:01.000There's a book called Poisoning the Press concerning a reporter who was the Michael Hastings of his day, but a thousand times bigger, named Jack Anderson from the early 70s.
01:44:09.000And Anderson actually had the Nixon administration officials, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, those guys, talking about potentially killing him.
01:44:19.000A guy whose show I was on several times, G. Gordon Liddy.
01:44:25.000They were going to run him over with a car.
01:44:27.000Now, I always think to myself, okay, so the plot never happened, but they were discussing it at the highest levels of government, and that's what makes you go, maybe this Hastings thing isn't that far off the wall.
01:45:25.000The thing that's weird is, though, when people are doing the exact opposite of what we're doing right now, which is, you know, it could have gone this way.
01:45:32.000It could have also realistically gone this way.
01:46:15.000And the reality of the evidence is not that cut and dry.
01:46:21.000The Warren Commission itself was a massive contradiction.
01:46:24.000It was clearly designed to achieve a predetermined conclusion, and they ignored all evidence that went contrary to that predetermined conclusion.
01:46:34.000And that conclusion was there was a single shooter.
01:46:48.000But when you see that stupid bullet that supposedly went through both of their bodies and shattered bone and came out looking all pretty and beautiful, you're like, get the fuck out of here.
01:46:57.000Well, that just showed up on Governor Connolly's gurney at the hospital.
01:47:03.000In perfect shape and just happen to be from the same rifle that you're attributing to the guy who's dead now who got shot by a fucking mob man.
01:47:19.000And you know what's funny is that I don't dispute any of those things.
01:47:23.000What if the government had a really good reason that you would have approved of to cover it up?
01:47:30.000And we're doing a podcast on the First World War right now.
01:47:34.000And Kennedy was famous for having given The Guns of August, the book that's about the lead into World War I and how nations were kind of sucked into something they didn't want to do based on an assassination of a world leader sitting in an open car next to his wife, by the way.
01:47:48.000If you're Lyndon Johnson, and you're the people around Kennedy, and it's a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis, right?
01:47:55.000You almost have World War III a year ago, and a guy kills a young, popular president in front of his wife, who's, you know, in there in the Chanel clothes with the blood and brains all on her, and his children are orphaned, and you're mad as hell.
01:48:07.000And the guy's tied to communism like nothing.
01:48:11.000I mean, he's fair play for Cuba Committee.
01:48:13.000He's one of the few people who defected to the Soviet Union.
01:48:15.000He's one of the very few that came back.
01:48:17.000Would you maybe be worried that the American people would be so angry and so ready to somehow punish the communists who may have even been behind this attack?
01:48:28.000I mean, you can create a scenario where it might have been a national security interest To, as much as you can, disassociate Cuba, communism, and the Soviet Union from the assassination of the president, because even if it didn't happen, can you see the Republicans and the administration back then going,
01:48:49.000Are you implying that you think that they made it look like Lee Harvey Oswald didn't do it?
01:48:55.000Because if he did do it, then that's communism killing the president.
01:48:58.000No, I think what most of us, when I was on the side saying that I think there was a conspiracy, is you point to all the obvious things the government hid.
01:49:06.000And that, to me, is always a red herring, right?
01:49:08.000You say, well, they hid the magic bullet, couldn't have been this and that.
01:49:18.000Could there be a reason where you would sit there and go, oh, no, I understand why you did that.
01:49:23.000You did that to prevent a greater evil.
01:49:25.000And I'm not saying that that's the case, but once you sit back and do that, you go, there could be multiple reasons.
01:49:30.000So you're saying they would blame it on Lee Harvey Oswald instead of blaming it on the Cubans?
01:49:34.000No, I think they might try to obscure the idea that this was something involving communist Cubans.
01:49:41.000And I think, can you imagine if Oswald had actually had to take the stand someday and testify about this?
01:49:50.000This may have been the thing where the government said, listen, this is just one guy who did this, but it's going to open up a whole can of worms with the political opposition.
01:49:58.000I mean, remember, there were posters of John F. Kennedy saying, wanted for treason in Dallas the day he was killed that the right-wingers down there had pushed.
01:50:07.000What do you think they would say if Lee Harvey Oswald is tied to communism so closely a year after we just avoided World War III? That's a really stoned idea.
01:50:18.000I think you must have been hitting the bong hardcore and you decided that the real conspiracy...
01:50:23.000I look at things from multiple angles, baby!
01:51:40.000I agree with what you're saying, though, because I'm all for thinking from multiple directions, but I stick with Joe's theory about the bong on that day.
01:51:53.000What Joe was saying is an objection, the idea that if you're trying to avoid the communist connection, to avoid World War III, why in the world, then, would you want everybody to know that the guy responsible is a guy who has communist connection?
01:52:09.000I mean, you know, if they capture Oswald and they arrest him, you're stuck.
01:52:13.000The trial, if there's going to be a trial, is going to bring all this out.
01:52:17.000And imagine, that trial would have taken a It would have been on TV. The people are just going to fume.
01:52:24.000You know, the communist thing is going to be brought up by the prosecution.
01:52:26.000You know, I guess what I'm trying to say is, I try to figure out, we always assume that when government covers up, it's to hide something from us we'll be angry about.
01:52:35.000Are there ever occasions where they cover something up because we would want to if we were in the same position for the good of things?
01:52:42.000Are there ever times when government covers stuff up for a good reason?
01:52:45.000I don't think they're smart enough to do that.
01:52:50.000I think that this Lee Harvey Oswald case, what it may very well be, is one of the best examples possible that we're living in a simulation.
01:53:14.000Well, if you just look at the progression of technology and you think, like, where is it eventually going to go 1,000 years from now, 10,000 years from now, it's inevitable.
01:53:22.000If we don't blow ourselves up, we're going to be able to recreate reality and it will be completely...
01:54:47.000I don't think that requires an extreme amount of intelligence.
01:54:50.000I think the average person knows that if someone out there knows something that they shouldn't know, Or they can contribute to some sort of a case that you believe might be coming down and eventually put people that you know in jail, the people that are hiring you in jail.
01:55:02.000If there's some way to stop that data from being shared, that's how you cut it off.
01:55:06.000You cut it off by killing the people that were witnesses.
01:55:08.000There are a lot of people they should have still killed then that they didn't get.
01:56:57.000The only people that know are the people that were there that played a part in that murder or didn't.
01:57:01.000Whether it's Lee Harvey Oswald and other conspirators or the other conspirators and Lee Harvey Oswald being the patsy that he claims he was.
01:57:08.000Whatever the combination of things were, whatever number was correct, those are the people that know.
01:57:12.000Everyone else, there's a giant amount of guessing.
01:57:15.000And to pretend there's not a giant amount of guessing means you're an asshole.
01:57:18.000If you're pretending that you've got it nailed, you're an asshole.
01:57:23.000And so the people that are arguing it online, I mean, I'll argue it online as well, but the people that actually believe that they know for a fact one way or the other, it's not true.
01:57:31.000And the magic bullet theory, there's a lot of problems with the way people describe it.
01:57:35.000A lot of the trajectory, the angles of the bodies, wasn't nearly as magical, the path they were attributing to.
01:57:41.000If you look at the fact that Kennedy was above him, that the seat was actually raised, and that Connolly was actually leaning and turning around, and the idea of their What's much more damning is Connelly's fucking testimony himself that he was not hit first and that when Kennedy was hit he turned around and he heard the gunshots and then he was hit afterwards.
01:57:59.000His own testimony refutes the idea of the magic bullet far better than anything else.
01:58:04.000When you see Connelly talk about the series of events and how it played out inside the limousine, he throws the magic bullet out the window.
01:58:11.000The reason why they came up with the magic bullet theory in the first place is because there was a bullet that hit a curbstone underneath the overpass.
01:58:17.000They had to attribute a bullet that Lee Harvey Oswald shot or someone from that direction of Lee Harvey Oswald shot to that bullet because that ricocheted and hit a man and the guy went to the hospital.
01:58:27.000So because of that, then they had to come up with one bullet doing all this damage.
01:58:47.000However, if you look at the possibilities, is it possible that a bullet hit these two bodies and smashed bone, did very little damage, actually left more fragments inside the bullet than were missing from the bullet?
01:59:57.000One of the big pieces of evidence that really kind of changes a lot of minds is the idea that Oswald took a shot at a general in the weeks before he shot president, or maybe allegedly shot president.
02:00:07.000And when you realize he's out there trying to kill people already, it makes him look a lot less like a patsy and a lot more like a guy who was, God, I missed the general.
02:01:08.000Well, because here's the thing that I think Oliver Stone did a great job of distorting.
02:01:13.000Was this idea that somehow President Kennedy had upset the military-industrial complex and all this, when in reality, the guy had just done the biggest peacetime military buildup in American history.
02:01:25.000Remember, he campaigned on something called the Missile Gap.
02:01:28.000So when he got the job, he increased military spending by a ton!
02:01:33.000But he still wanted to get out of Vietnam.
02:01:35.000He didn't really want to get out of Vietnam.
02:01:36.000He was going to move assets to Laos and Cambodia.
02:01:39.000I guess my point is that he was not an enemy of those very forces that Oliver Stone had him being the enemy of.
02:02:15.000But I mean, that's the thing though, that when you...
02:02:17.000What's funny about these arguments is when you see people who are...
02:02:22.000Really good at pushing forward all the evidence, supporting their conclusion, and the stuff that doesn't fit with their conclusion, it's not there.
02:02:30.000It's like, poop, I just forgot about it.
02:02:32.000They do just the same thing that they accuse the government of doing, right?
02:02:35.000Hiding and omissions and all that stuff.
02:02:37.000And that's why you read one book and you're like, it looks really convincing and all the points they are making looks really good, and you're like...
02:02:42.000Wait, why the hell did you leave this stuff out?
02:02:44.000And when you find out they leave it out, you start to distrust them too.
02:02:48.000I don't trust the government or some of those conspiracy writers.
02:02:50.000See, the idea the conspiracy theorists cite is this Executive Order 11110. And this was issued by Kennedy on June 4th of 1963. And this executive order delegated to the Secretary of the Treasury the President's authority to issue silver certificates under the Thomas Amendment of the Agricultural Adjustment Act as amended by the Gold Reserve Act.
02:03:14.000And the order allowed the Secretary to issue silver certificates if any were needed during the transition period under President Kennedy's plan to eliminate silver certificates.
02:03:24.000So the idea was that he was moving in on the institution known as the Federal Reserve, because the Federal Reserve, as most people realize, isn't really a federal kind of a thing at all.
02:04:35.000I did a show with the people that did his show.
02:04:38.000And there was a couple of times where we had these sort of discussions about conspiracies.
02:04:45.000And I'm like, they're all juicy and salacious, but the idea that if you look at too many things as being a conspiracy, you do a huge disservice to what might actually be a conspiracy.
02:04:57.000Yeah, you're playing into the hands of the people.
02:04:59.000Whether you realize it or not, I mean, to be like a crazy right-wing, radical, like the fire and brimstone sort of a guy, you play directly into the hands of the government.
02:05:10.000I'm getting this slam like I'm an anti-conspiracy person, and they're all saying, Dan Carlin.
02:05:14.000Somebody even wrote a review on iTunes that said something like, he doesn't understand how the world works, and he's just giving you the pablum line.
02:05:20.000Yeah, but there are conspiracies out there, but like you said, you do yourself a disservice when you buy all of them.
02:05:25.000Dan Carlin, you've got to stop listening to critics.
02:06:48.000Well, and I do think it shuts people down.
02:06:51.000We were talking about why more people don't get ahead and the competition thing.
02:06:55.000I think that kind of criticism does shut some people down, where they just – they're not – they can't – I mean, obviously, we all can handle it because we all do something where we're criticized on a daily basis.
02:07:05.000But, I mean, I think there's some people that just – they don't want – It's okay if my boss does it, but I don't want it in public.
02:07:12.000I've been railing on about this lately, about the idea of people are going on about what they're calling fat shaming.
02:07:20.000And fat shaming is making people feel bad for being overweight.
02:07:24.000And I read this one article where this woman was talking about how She was being fat shamed because she went to a family function and everyone was gushing about her cousin, how her cousin lost 20 pounds.
02:07:37.000And that they were making such a big deal out of it that it was clear to her that they were judging her for not losing the 20 pounds, so it made her feel awful.
02:07:46.000And she didn't understand how they couldn't understand that what they were doing was fat shaming her.
02:08:07.000I'm fascinated by that sort of reverse victimology sort of a thing where instead of you being the victim of your own handiwork, you become a persecuted person because they don't accept you for the flaws that you have.
02:08:21.000Or even mention the possibility of those flaws existing by virtue of complimenting someone for having gotten over the same flaws that you possess.
02:08:30.000I think without even knowing the specifics on particular issues, anytime somebody's so willing to embrace the victim role, I smell trouble right away.
02:08:50.000And one of the things he was talking about was he was giving overweight people a pass because he was saying the level of addiction that these people actually have for food to say that they don't have willpower is really unfair because they're so overweight, like a lot of these folks, are so far gone that they used up all of their willpower just to get up in the morning,
02:10:17.000It's critical for fueling whatever trouble is going on in their mind.
02:10:22.000And it's a weird aspect of human beings.
02:10:24.000And you don't do that any favors by pretending that encouraging someone who lost weight is a bad thing.
02:10:32.000The idea that socially that's irresponsible because you're fat and you're near them.
02:10:37.000No, it's actually responsible because that terrible feeling that you have, it's supposed to be the bump that pushes you towards eating a salad instead of a cheeseburger.
02:10:46.000Should be the bump that makes you write down everything you eat that day and state some goals.
02:10:57.000It's also possible by you going home and blaming everybody in the blog that you've projected yourself away from any potential benefit from having these bad feelings.
02:11:06.000Again, it's the same as about the competition.
02:11:08.000It's somebody who never learned how to lose.
02:12:38.000I'm a massive fan of these explosive things that throw the norm into question and completely change the paradigm of the existing reality that we operate under.
02:12:48.000And when you listen to something like a podcast on the Mongols, it's like, Jesus, that was only the 1200s.
02:13:27.000If we come on your show, all of a sudden, everything is rainbows and unicorns for us once we're on Joe's show, which is true, by the way, but otherwise, the favor you've done to all the rest of us, not to kiss anybody's ass here, but it really is.
02:13:39.000I mean, you've made a lot of people aware of what we do.
02:13:42.000Well, I'm honored that I could do that, but from my perspective, all I've done is let people know things that I found that are awesome.
02:13:51.000Well, if you're honest, if you're an honest person, and I pride myself in being insanely honest, to the point where, you know, I'm like, one of the reasons why I'm really good at accepting criticism, because I'm insanely self-critical.
02:14:04.000I mean, I'm good at avoiding going nuts.
02:14:12.000But my recognition of the role, I'm aware of it.
02:14:18.000I'm also honored, and I feel like, without a doubt, I have an obligation.
02:14:23.000But I also feel like all I'm doing is letting people know about amazing shit that already exists.
02:14:28.000It's beautiful to be that sort of a conduit, to be sort of a funnel point where people can know they can, a portal, where they can go here and they can learn about all sorts of cool shit.
02:14:37.000But if the cool shit didn't exist, I would have run out of things to talk about a long time ago.
02:14:41.000No, that's true, but it's also true, the fact that what you have done for so many people is unreal.
02:14:47.000When I think about you and Duncan, for me, in my life, the impact that it has had coming onto your show and Duncan's show in particular.
02:15:57.000There are so many things out there with so much promotion that to reach 20th now is a bigger deal than reaching 7th or 8th, 5 or 6 years ago.
02:17:29.000I mean, sometimes I have questions for the guests.
02:17:31.000Sometimes it's kind of structured in that way where there's some things that I want to get to because I know that you have an expertise in that area.
02:17:36.000But a lot of it is just a bunch of people shooting the shit and just talking honestly about life.
02:17:41.000And I've always found that incredibly entertaining.
02:17:43.000And Anthony started doing this thing out of his basement.
02:17:46.000He set up this thing called Live from the Compound.
02:18:13.000Look what iTunes has done for the whole...
02:18:16.000You know what I thought the greatest thing they ever did for people like us was?
02:18:19.000Was not separating the ESPNs and the professional content from the stuff that we do, because it allows us an equal playing field.
02:18:29.000In a way that if they said, okay, here's your professional stuff, now here's your amateur stuff in this pile over here, in this grab bag of singles nobody wants.
02:18:36.000I feel like in the same way that we just said, you know, I owe you, I owe iTunes, there's a lot of people that made something possible here.
02:18:44.000I don't know what I'd be doing anymore without a podcast.
02:18:46.000I'm no longer a news reporter kind of guy.
02:18:57.000Yeah, and if there wasn't some sort of a form like iTunes, we could just upload it to them, and then people could download it from the RSS feed.
02:19:03.000And the hosting services and everything.
02:19:41.000I mean, even when I talk, like if I talk about something like the Magic Bullet Theater or somewhere along the way where I'll argue something, the bottom line always is I will tell you exactly what I actually do know.
02:19:56.000Finding out about cool things and being honest about the cool things and encouraging that sort of really objective discussion about things, that's a thing that we're missing.
02:20:05.000That's a thing we're missing in our social circles.
02:20:10.000Like you were saying, well, people will say one way or another and then just fucking argue it to death.
02:20:14.000I know Michael Hastings was killed by the CIA. And then your credibility is on the line and everything.
02:20:18.000Yeah, whether it's Bigfoot or fucking UFOs or being a Republican, there's people that get on a fucking team and those people are a problem.
02:20:29.000They're a huge problem politically, too, because as I said, it doesn't hurt us that one party does something.
02:20:35.000But then when we forgive it when our party, whatever party that might be, gets in power, there are Democrats who, if George W. Bush was doing what President Obama is doing, would be out in the streets with signs.
02:20:46.000But because it's their guy, they don't.
02:20:50.000That's such a good point and one that I really get on progressives and left-wing people about.
02:20:55.000Your acceptance of war crimes done under a Democratic administration, the idea of the same exact things being done in the Republican administration would be horrific war crimes.
02:21:07.000And the acceptance of them is so gross.
02:22:04.000Because I keep feeling like that's almost like part of the rigged thing, that if you have somebody who has some ideas, you go, finally, somebody's saying the right thing about this, and they also go, yes, but I'm also a secret Klan member, just so you know.
02:22:15.000And you go, why do they always have to come with some baggage like that?
02:22:33.000Like if you're Anthony Weiner and you know there's more pictures out there, but you run anyway knowing they're going to catch you again and you do it anyway?
02:22:59.000Before they caught him the first time, being a freak, there was a great video of him speaking on the floor and just really passionate and screaming and yelling and very eloquent and very articulate and like, wow, this guy's fighting for the people.
02:23:16.000Well, I think that most people, when they get to be a certain age, they have a family, and they have obligations, mortgages, and they have certain risks they're not willing to take.
02:23:24.000And one of the big risks is you don't want to go against the entire government and say everyone's corrupt.
02:23:28.000Like, Jesus Christ, they'll come after you.
02:24:12.000Is it possible that he has writers and he doesn't know?
02:24:14.000That's what his father said the newsletters were that got his father in so much trouble.
02:24:18.000But remember, Rand Paul, who I've said nice things about, also has as one of his main advisers, that guy who did the Southern Avenger, you know, oh yeah, the guy, one of his advisers was the Southern Avenger, and he wore a mask and had a Confederate flag behind him.
02:24:32.000It's like a YouTube show or something.
02:24:33.000And then when they said, are you gonna fire this guy, he goes something like, well, that's all in his past.
02:25:02.000So that to me right there, you go, great, thanks for taking my pet issue of the Fourth Amendment and trashing it with your Southern Avenger guy.
02:25:09.000What is the Southern Avenger's stance?
02:26:53.000The cover of the fucking, the roof of the general duke.
02:26:55.000But to get back to the point, is how come whenever you get someone who's saying some important things in a halfway, you know, decent way, they have to come, you know, people say to me all the time, well, we vote all the time, Dan, the course the country's on is based on voters voting for people.
02:27:08.000How come when we get somebody who would like to change course in a direction most of us would like to see, half of them is really fantastic and the other half of them is so crazy you'd never elect a person like that in a million years?
02:27:19.000Why can't we have somebody who has some common sense and doesn't sound like that?
02:27:49.000Stockpiling water and creating escape routes and...
02:27:53.000Battering rams, they're welding to the front of their pickup trucks.
02:27:55.000They're like the opposite of the hoarders, because they're the hoarders that are doing it for a good cause, right?
02:27:59.000Yeah, they believe that it's all going to come crumbling down.
02:28:02.000I think that there's a mentality, and the same kind of mentality that is...
02:28:08.000The type of person that wants to get in this rebellious position of power, rebellious position of, you know, railing out against the government.
02:28:16.000They're very similar to these people that are prepping.
02:28:19.000It's very similar to their extreme folks.
02:28:22.000Like those are the only people that make it to the front of that crazy line.
02:28:27.000It's not that the ideas aren't interesting to you or I, when you look at a guy like Rand Paul, the things that he says that you agree with, or his dad, the things that he says that you agree with, but it's to get there.
02:28:38.000He's facing so much opposition, there's so much bullshit along the way, so much pressure, so much...
02:28:46.000Back and forth debate, so much frustration, so much suppression of information.
02:28:50.000By the time he gets to a position where the world is listening to him, he's already broken.
02:28:55.000He broke every bone in his fucking soul just to get to the front of the line.
02:30:17.000I guess the hue and cry was a little too much for a sitting senator from Kentucky to have somebody named the Southern Avenger on his staff.
02:30:24.000Well, he was a co-author of the 2011 book with Rand Paul, The Tea Party Goes to Washington.
02:30:39.000You got guys like Wyden and Udall and some of these people, but when you get somebody who's a real lightning rod for this stuff, and you think, finally, we've been waiting for a guy like this forever, they come with these poison pills that you just can't swallow.
02:30:51.000Yeah, it's an unfortunate reality of the control that has been exerted on the political climate.
02:30:58.000I mean, the fact that the two-party system exists just shows you how much power the people that are running things, how much they've actually been able to exert on our system.
02:31:08.000They've locked it down to two parties that are both often supported by the exact same corporations.
02:31:14.000George Carlin said you know exactly how many people you have to bribe.
02:31:34.000This is what I don't understand, is that if we're going to work toward this awareness and if we're going to get better and more involved and enlightened, how do we not see through that scam?
02:31:44.000That would be like the first scam you have to see through to get to anywhere, and we don't see through that one.
02:31:48.000Well, smart people that are on the Democratic side are partially to blame.
02:31:52.000I'm just as much as people on the conservative side, but on the Democratic side, I've heard so many people use the term we, like we need to get into office, or we need to get more of this, or we control the house.
02:32:19.000I understand that you work 12 hours a day and you don't have the time to investigate this thoroughly.
02:32:23.000But you pretending to be a smart guy and going with this team, we need to do that.
02:32:28.000How much of what they're doing are you really fucking paying attention to?
02:32:32.000Because this Democratic Party that's in charge right now is as Republican as it gets when it comes to whistleblowers.
02:32:39.000As Republican as it gets when it comes to...
02:32:42.000Giving rights to corporations that are the same rights that used to be attributed to individuals.
02:32:48.000All the things that we're afraid of during the Bush administration are all being done, the attacks on whistleblowers, to a much larger degree, the attacks on secrecy and privacy, much larger than has ever been exhibited before.
02:33:17.000And then one day when we were going to interview Dan Quayle, of all people, believe it or not, when he was the vice president, she says, okay, the time has come to let you in on the big secret between the two parties.
02:33:37.000That was this big piece of knowledge I was waiting for.
02:33:40.000The difference between the two parties is what they serve the wine in when you go to their get-togethers.
02:33:43.000They're so deeply entrenched in money.
02:33:45.000And when I'm saying that those are Democratic ideas or those are Republican ideas, I don't mean it as in they are actually Republican ideas.
02:33:53.000I mean it as in the people that are on the Democratic side that believe in equality and freedom and left-wing values, they think that those ideas are only things that the Republicans support.
02:34:01.000So when they're clearly being supported by the Democratic Party, Who's who?
02:34:14.000I think we assume these people have ideas when really they're taking money.
02:34:17.00020% of them do, but I think 80% of them have the ideas you pay them to have.
02:34:21.000And also, it's a giant group of people.
02:34:23.000In order to play politics, you have to appease certain groups, and you have to be very good socially at this sort of give-and-take system that they've put into place.
02:34:34.000I mean, when you look at all these people that are lobbyists live in Virginia, that's right outside of D.C., and they come in, and there's all this money concentrated on making things happen there.
02:34:44.000It's totally against the concept of we the people.
02:34:47.000It's totally against the concept of the interests of the individual, the interests of the greater good of the society as a whole.
02:35:57.000But if you put off problems long enough, the solutions that are moderate to fix them are no longer useful.
02:36:03.000I mean, if your house is slipping on its foundation and you get to it early, maybe a little bit of money and a little bit of work and you can fix that.
02:36:10.000If you put that off 10, 15 years, the solution to that problem is a lot more radical.
02:36:15.000We have put off a lot of huge problems in this country in solving them for so long that the solutions are so radical that That we have a system that is just geared to tampen down that sort of radicalism.
02:36:26.000But what does that mean if that's what it takes to fix some of the problems?
02:36:50.000We're going to make some GMO fish that eat plastic and send them bitches out there, and then we've got all our problems solved.
02:36:55.000We're going to have the greatest population of fish in the history of the fucking ocean because we're going to have plastic-eating fish that we've made in the lab.
02:37:01.000They've got a steel lining to their stomach, and they run on fossil fuels.
02:37:28.000The things being in the phosphorus in the four positions, the only group of them in the entire world, so there's no immediate ancestors to psilocybin.
02:37:48.000The idea of panspermia is a well-accepted idea in astronomy, and that idea is that the building blocks from life, water even, came from other planets.
02:37:58.000Asteroid impacts on other planets sent large bodies into space.
02:38:01.000They landed on Earth, many of them perhaps...
02:38:04.000You know, billions and billions and billions of years ago and actually created the oceans, actually created a lot of life itself, the building blocks for life.
02:38:10.000So in a sense, we are all of alien composition, period.
02:38:14.000But other things are continuing to come this way, including spores, which can survive in a vacuum.
02:38:20.000And when you have large doses of psilocybin mushrooms, one of the weird things is you feel like you're communicating with something.
02:38:28.000And the whimsical amongst us believe that what you're actually doing is communicating with an alien life form that has come here and wants you to eat it in order to tune into it.
02:38:38.000You know, I actually have some thoughts that I agree with some of that, and this is coming from someone who doesn't talk about this very much, but I've always been fascinated with how things like that have been used by humankind throughout history as a means to open up other, you know, to use Huxley's term,
02:39:15.000I find it fascinating how much of a role...
02:39:18.000You know, we did a podcast once about the hidden side of intoxication in history.
02:39:24.000Well, I think you could make a very good case that hallucinogenics of all kinds have probably played huge roles in history that we don't even know about.
02:39:32.000Especially with tribal peoples who have played huge roles.
02:39:35.000I mean, why did the Germans decide to migrate into Roman territory at just this time?
02:39:40.000Well, they have sorcerers and witch doctors as part of their culture who use hallucinogenics.
02:39:45.000Who knows that they didn't go to the chieftain there and say, you remember that thing I told you we have to do?
02:39:49.000I was just told now is the right time.
02:39:51.000Move into that Roman territory and all history is different.
02:39:53.000I mean, that's the side of history we're never going to get.
02:39:56.000It'd be interesting to find out how much of history has been determined by things like that.
02:39:59.000That episode, by the way, was hilarious.
02:40:12.000You've got to use the little teeny pieces of the jigsaw puzzle you know about to construct a totally fictional narrative that might be true.
02:40:18.000Well, there's one thing that's undeniable.
02:40:20.000People love altering their consciousness.
02:40:40.000The way I describe it, I go that having pharmaceutical companies and allowing them to do literally commercials against marijuana is like hookers making commercials against strippers.
02:41:30.000Yeah, Henry Anslinger and William Randolph Hearst.
02:41:33.000They originally did it to try to suppress hemp as a commodity.
02:41:39.000Right, because you got so much more out of hemp than you got out of trees.
02:41:42.000And if you're in the business of making paper and you're in the business of the logging industry...
02:41:46.000I mean, that's also a perfect example of the difference between controlling information back then and today.
02:41:51.000They were able to sell this idea that there's a new drug that was forcing Mexicans and blacks to rape white women, and they even named this drug marijuana, which is a name for a Mexican slang term for a wild tobacco.
02:42:07.000I can understand you making the case that this has to be illegal, whatever we're talking.
02:42:11.000This has to be illegal because it's so dangerous and we know it's so dangerous.
02:42:14.000What I don't understand is that we basically have a policy in this country that there will be no new intoxicants.
02:42:20.000If something is invented in a bathtub tomorrow that doesn't hurt anybody, that has no hangovers, that nobody gets in car, we're going to ban it the day after tomorrow on general principles.
02:43:51.000Even if we think that there are, and I do think there are medical uses for this stuff, there's no question that it has been used as a back door to sort of open the door to what would not have been possible without it.
02:44:01.000Also ingeniously getting people in government addicted to the money and the revenue that it brings in legally, which you don't get at all if it's illegal.
02:44:11.000The money still goes into the economy, and that's been really documented in British Columbia.
02:44:16.000That the economy is very dependent, even though it's illegal.
02:44:19.000But the taxes that you would get from selling it, the government actually is what loses out on marijuana being illegal.
02:44:27.000The government loses out because they're not getting any of the tax money from it being sold.
02:44:33.000It's still one of the things we create and do well in this country, too.
02:44:36.000You'd think they'd be safeguarding the few things we do well in producing in Well, they're just starting to now pass laws.
02:44:42.000At Onnit, we sell hemp protein powder, but we have to buy our hemp protein powder in Canada.
02:44:47.000It's legal to possess, it's legal to sell, it's not legal to grow.
02:44:51.000That is so asinine, because you're not even talking about a psychoactive plant.
02:44:55.000You're talking about the male version of the cannabis plant.
02:45:44.000They're trying to pass it in other states.
02:45:45.000I believe they passed it in Colorado, and I believe they passed it in Washington state, because those are the two places where they've made it legal to consume for adults.
02:45:53.000I saw one of the best documentaries I've seen on this.
02:45:56.000There's this documentary called Standing Silent Nation, which is what happened a few years ago on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Africa.
02:46:02.000For those who are Italian accent impaired.
02:46:14.000It showed what happened on Pine Ridge, which was one of the poorest reservations in the United States where prospects for economic growth are really dimmed.
02:46:23.000And so what these guys did, they figure, you know, we are somewhat of a sovereign entity because that's how reservations are, right?
02:46:54.000Even marijuana is ridiculous, but that's a whole different story.
02:46:58.000There are none of the THC that you find.
02:47:00.000It's the same plant, but it's like marijuana without the stuff that gets you high.
02:47:04.000And you use it for a million things that, as you say, it's legal to own the products in the United States, but it's not legal to grow it where we can actually make the product in the United States.
02:47:26.000One that has massive amounts of medical benefits, documented for sure, for real, non-controversial medical benefits, and it's illegal.
02:47:34.000I've never understood why we don't have, you know, because I always thought one of the arguments that screwed up kids the most was to put marijuana on this list of terrible drugs because then when they try the marijuana, they think you're lying about the heroin.
02:47:47.000I always thought that there ought to be a checklist that the government used to decide if something should be legal or illegal.
02:47:58.000And then if you pass or fail, you know, if you pass, it's legal.
02:48:01.000That also would be used if you invent some new bathtub drug tomorrow.
02:48:05.000Okay, well, let's run it down the checklist, right?
02:48:07.000And then you could say to the people, well, look, I mean, here's how it's scored on the checklist.
02:48:10.000And I think the damage to that would be because alcohol might not I don't think there's any way marijuana doesn't score better than most of the intoxicants that are out there today.
02:48:24.000I guess what I'm saying is I think it would help me in raising my own children and keeping them off these harder drugs to be able to have a decent argument.
02:48:31.000There's a good reason this heroin isn't in general use, kids.
02:49:01.000You know, they found that cone snail venom, they can make a drug out of cone snail venom that is 100 times more potent than any existing pain medication and is completely non-addictive.
02:49:14.000So it works a hundred times better than all of the Oxycontins and all that other shit, and it's not addictive.
02:50:45.000And we're just alone by ourselves somewhere, linked up to some computer, trying to pretend that this fucking simulated society we've pieced together makes any sense.
02:50:54.000I'd be very interested to hear what they're writing on Rogan's message board about this wide variety of interesting topics.
02:51:41.000By the way, he also told me he saw a UFO, sees them on a regular basis, and went and found Bigfoot the very first time he went looking for it.
02:52:05.000They're chasing down thoughts that are bad, and they don't stop chasing them down.
02:52:10.000And they're reasonably intelligent, so they can argue the way around these things when confronted.
02:52:14.000And Michael Shermer had a quote about that, about really smart people who believe in really dumb things because they're smart enough to argue it.
02:52:20.000And I think that's the case with a lot of these folks.
02:52:22.000And the flaw in the thinking is so obvious.
02:52:26.000So when I didn't believe in chemtrails, that every fucking airplane that you see a contrail that's persistent is the government spraying us with evil chemicals, all of a sudden people are like, you're a fucking mouthpiece for the New World War.
02:52:37.000I told you, I got that too, though, for questioning the Hastings thing.
02:52:56.000But yeah, because the fact is, like the reviews you get or the feedback that Joe is getting about this stuff, to me is not surprising because anytime you have a position that's not stereotypical, where you're not clearly in one camp, 150%, where he's the...
02:53:11.000Oswald did it, or no, that's total bullshit.
02:53:16.000When you start asking questions that poke holes in one line of thinking, but then at the same time, when people start feeling reassured that, oh, then you are on this side, then you start saying, well, kind of, but wait a second, because also there's something here that's problematic here.
02:53:31.000And you're just keeping an open mind, right?
02:53:32.000It doesn't mean that you can't commit to an idea.
02:53:42.000And the media doesn't want you to do that either, because they used to tell me on the radio, a listener has to know where you stand on every issue within three minutes of turning you on.
02:53:52.000And I said, that's a cartoon character.
02:54:02.000The point is that whole idea that nuance is a bad thing.
02:54:06.000Somebody call me, I'm being called a moderate and a realist more and more today, which is coming from like tinfoil hat, crazy radical territory, and I haven't changed my views at all in 20 years.
02:54:16.000Well, a couple things, but basically it means that society, like you said, has started to pick up on things and has moved in a direction.
02:54:22.000I used to say to people, the NSA is spying on everyone, and they said, no, they're not.
02:54:27.000Now I say the NSA is spying on everyone, and they go, I know.
02:54:30.000You know, so society has just sort of moved in a different direction, and nuance, that's what society's missing today, gray areas.
02:54:37.000Yeah, I've been called a conspiracy theorist with good reason for theorists for a long time about a lot of different subjects, but I've always found it really odd that the idea...
02:54:47.000That people haven't conspired on things is so attractive to people.
02:54:51.000People want to be able to debunk things just as willingly as other people want to find conspiracy in things.
02:54:58.000And there's some things that are not debunkable.
02:55:00.000There's some realities like the reality of the fucking central bank, the realities of the influence of the Bilderberg group, the realities of We're good to go.
02:55:38.000And every one of those examples that they showed, if those were the only examples, and I don't think they are, we're doing something crazy.
02:55:46.000And it's all being done because of money.