This is the last commercial commercial episode of the week, and it's a good one. This week we're talking about the wonders of the internet, and how you can use it to your advantage, and why you should never, ever go to the post office drunk and naked. This episode is brought to you by Stamps, and if you use my promo code JRE for this special offer, you get a No-Risk Trial plus a $110 bonus offer which includes a digital scale which calculates exact postage for letters and packages and up to $55 of free postage. So do not wait, go to Stamps.com and before you do anything else, click on the microphone at the top of the homepage and type in JRE. That's Stamps' JRE to get your $110 Bonus Offer. Oh, and for special savings, be sure to enter the code ROGAN in the referral box at checkout. For special savings at checkout, enter JRE at checkout and you get $100 off your first bill plus a No Risk Trial and a $150 bonus offer. You can't ask for much more. You're not going to get more value than that, and you're not gonna get it any other way. We're also getting a lot more than you can get from LegalZoom, and they're not a law firm. They've been around a long time and have an A-plus with the BBB. They'll help you with all sorts of legal stuff, so you don't have to go to a fancy law firm to get legal help from a third party lawyer. You can do it online. They're not just a lawyer, they're a self-help service. And they'll even give you the tools you need to do it. on the internet to help you do it! on your computer and you can go to your local law firm, too. and you'll learn how to get a free copy of the law. you can practice it online and practice it in your own computer. This is the law firm that does it so you won't have access to all kinds of legal help you need and they'll be able to do all the legal stuff you want to do online. What's a lawyer can do for you? we'll tell you what you need, you'll get it you're gonna get your hands on the best of everything you need in the best way possible.
00:00:07.000This episode is brought to you by Stamps.com.
00:00:09.000Stamps.com is a way for you to cut out all the nonsense of having to go to the post office to send packages.
00:00:17.000It's a simple, easy way where you can use your PC or a Mac and turn it into your own personal post office that never closes.
00:00:26.000You can buy and print official U.S. postage for any letter or package using your computer and printer, then just hand your mail to the postman Or drop it in a mailbox, and you're done.
00:00:38.000You never have to go to the post office again.
00:00:41.000You can do the whole thing drunk and naked.
00:00:45.000This is one of the magical things about the wonders of the internet.
00:00:50.000I use stamps.com, Brian use stamps.com to send out all those Desquad t-shirts, those kitty cat t-shirts that he makes from Desquad.tv, all from stamps.com.
00:00:59.000Christina Pazitsky and Tom Segura, our pals use stamps.com, so does our pal Bert Kreischer.
00:01:07.000And right now, if you use my promo code JRE for this special offer, you get a no-risk trial plus a $110 bonus offer which includes a digital scale which calculates exact postage for letters and packages and up to $55 of free postage.
00:01:44.000We're also brought to you by LegalZoom.
00:01:47.000LegalZoom is another way where you can do things online that you would ordinarily have to go through the annoyance of leaving your domicile and traveling to a far-off land where you're going to have to talk to someone Pay them a shitload of money,
00:02:03.000make an appointment, do it, by the way, between the hours of 8 and 5, because that's when the office is open.
00:02:09.000Oh, the drag, the dreariness of it all.
00:02:13.000All of it can be avoided with LegalZoom.
00:02:15.000With LegalZoom, you can do all sorts of stuff, like form an LLC, form a corporation, trademarks, real estate documents, power of attorney.
00:02:25.000You can get personalized wills, all that stuff you can do online with LegalZoom.
00:03:33.000For special savings at checkout, be sure to enter the code word ROGAN in the referral box.
00:03:41.000LegalZoom has an A-plus with the Better Business Bureau, ladies and gentlemen.
00:03:45.000They've been around a long time, and they've helped a shit ton of Americans with all sorts of legal stuff that they would ordinarily have had to go to We're also brought to you by Onnit.com.
00:04:12.000Onnit is a human optimization website.
00:04:15.000What we sell is the very best strength and conditioning equipment we can get our hands on.
00:04:20.000We sell the best fitness DVDs we can get our hands on.
00:04:24.000We sell We even sell antibacterial natural soap, defense soap.
00:04:30.000One of the things you find out if you get into martial arts, especially jujitsu, is you get a lot of funky skin things going on, like ringworm, and there's staph infections and shit that people get.
00:04:40.000And one of the ways that your body becomes more susceptible to these things is an absence of healthy flora.
00:04:47.000And that comes from, you can get that from probiotics.
00:04:50.000If you are of the vegetarian inclination, you can actually get probiotics through sauerkraut.
00:04:57.000Raw sauerkraut is actually very healthy for you and probiotic.
00:05:01.000If you eat milk, acidophilus is an excellent source of probiotics.
00:05:12.000Some people don't like it, but I think it's delicious.
00:05:14.000It's like a soda that's not sweet, like a guilt-free soda that's healthy.
00:05:19.000It tastes good and takes care of your body.
00:05:21.000But one of the things that people make a mistake of is when they have any sort of a skin thing, they use antibacterial soap that contains chemicals.
00:05:29.000Well, all that does is it kills all the stuff that's on your skin, the good flora as well.
00:05:36.000Your body is in a constant state of balance.
00:05:38.000That's why if you ever take antibiotics, one of the most important things to do is also when you get done taking the antibiotics to sort of replenish your system, you're supposed to take probiotics.
00:05:49.000So you're reintroducing healthy bacteria to your gut.
00:05:53.000Well, that healthy bacteria is also on your skin.
00:05:55.000Defense soap is a way to maintain the healthy bacteria on your skin.
00:05:59.000And it does so with natural oils, tea tree oil, eucalyptus oil.
00:06:18.000We also sell the best kettlebells we can buy.
00:06:20.000We sell strength and conditioning equipment in the form of battle ropes, steel maces, steel clubs, ab wheels, medicine balls, all that kind of groovy shit.
00:06:30.000And the highest level supplements that we can get our hands on.
00:06:34.000As far as cognitive supplements, AlphaBrain, which is the premier nootropic supplement that I've ever used.
00:06:42.000It's also got a Double-blind clinical trial.
00:06:46.000The results are all printed and available online at Onnit.com.
00:06:50.000And another double-blind placebo-controlled clinical trial is ongoing right now, a much larger one, to prove the efficacy of AlphaBrain.
00:06:59.000But the individual ingredients have actually already been proven.
00:07:02.000All the research is available at Onnit.com.
00:07:04.000If you go there, you're curious about any of this stuff, one of the things to think about with Onnit is that we offer a 100% money-back guarantee on the first 30 pills.
00:07:16.000If you don't like it, you don't even have to return the bottle.
00:07:18.000Just say it doesn't work, you get your money back.
00:07:20.000What we're trying to do is introduce you to stuff that I use, that my friend Aubrey uses, that all my friends that have enjoyed AlphaBrain and all my friends that are into supplements and vitamins and understand the efficacy of these things and understand what's the benefits of supplementation along with the benefits of a healthy diet.
00:07:37.000It's one of the things that you keep hearing about in the news all the time.
00:07:39.000People say, all you need is a healthy diet.
00:08:42.000My guest today, C.J. Werleman, will definitely ruffle some feathers, ladies and gentlemen.
00:08:47.000If you are of the religious inclination, if you are ultra-sensitive, if you have a problem with seeing Uncle Sam crucified on the cover of a book, it says Crucifying America.
00:09:00.000And on top of it, he's not even a fucking American.
00:09:02.000When you hear him talk, you're going to go, Hey, pal, you're not even from here.
00:09:26.000You got Uncle Sam crucified on your book.
00:09:31.000I always tell people when they ask me where do you live, I always say Southern California and I never give the exact address because there is a fatwa put out on me.
00:09:40.000And no joke, the Westboro Baptist Church, which we all know very well, when my first book was released in 2009, the title is God Hates You, Hate Him Back.
00:09:49.000They saw the title without understanding what the content of the book was and thought that I must have been on their side.
00:09:54.000And they thought, hey, we've got somebody who's written a book in pro of our mission.
00:09:59.000Once they took a look at my book, they realized how off base that was and I was attacking them for some of their beliefs.
00:10:05.000Fred Phelps actually issued a public fatwa to have me killed.
00:10:09.000So I want to leave my address to Southern California because I do have kids.
00:10:48.000No, it's more about the poetry, which was written, you know, on a segment of Islam, and it wasn't actually taking scripture from the Koran itself.
00:10:56.000So, I mean, what he wrote would be very mild in, say, comparison to a South Park episode where the Prophet Muhammad is dressed up like a bear.
00:11:05.000Islam is a very fascinating religion to me in so many different ways, but it's also fascinating in that liberals have, for whatever reason, chosen that as being the one to defend in some weird sort of a way.
00:11:17.000Like, anytime someone criticizes Islam, they become Islamophobic.
00:11:22.000But you will never hear, like, certain segments of the progressive population shit on someone who is criticizing Christianity.
00:12:52.000The number one suicide bombers, the number one people, the things that they're doing to women in Islamic countries, the things that you're seeing in the news on a daily basis that are from predominantly Islamic countries, if you're going to be scared of a religion, that seems to be a good one.
00:13:08.000Yeah, but my point is that that's happening over there.
00:13:11.000If we're going to worry about what's happening here, you're far more likely to be called by a right-wing terrorist than you are by an Islamist terrorist.
00:13:17.000Since 1990, there's been 345 Americans killed by American Muslims, whereas there's only been 20 Americans killed by Muslim Americans.
00:13:28.000You can't count the 9-11 attackers as Muslim Americans because they're external.
00:13:32.000They were foreign fighters fighting for a foreign cause.
00:13:34.000So that's why I think the most dangerous threat to American democracy and our secular values is not Islamicism.
00:13:41.000It really is, you know, these Christian...
00:13:43.000Theological whack jobs that represent what is the Tea Party, which is really a proto-fascist movement.
00:13:51.000In this country, yes, you're definitely less likely to be attacked by an Islamic terrorist.
00:13:56.000And that's because America's doing its job and keeping us safe over here.
00:14:01.000We fight over there so we can keep you safe over here.
00:14:03.000I mean, I'm not exactly sure if that is a zero-sum game.
00:14:08.000I'm not sure how that is working, or if it's working, or if it's just some massive debt that we're going to have to come back and pay, sort of like the housing crisis.
00:14:50.000You know, it's got nothing to do really with religion.
00:14:53.000And if you actually look at all terrorist attacks over the world, 95% of all suicide bombing attacks have been committed against occupying forces rather than being a religiously motivated event.
00:15:05.000So religiously motivated in that they have inspired these people to attack and blow themselves up with religion?
00:15:15.000What it is, you've got the power structure, whether that's, you know, if you go all the way back to Osama bin Laden, say he's at the top of Al-Qaeda, they have very, very specific political objectives.
00:15:25.000Obviously, the fundamentalist Islamic lowest common denominator in society who's starving and doesn't have a job, has no future, they're the ones they recruit to carry out their deeds.
00:15:37.000But they're certainly rather politically motivated rather than religiously motivated.
00:15:42.000Yeah, I would assume that if you're living in a country and you have a giant, huge empire that has invaded not just your country, but a hundred different countries.
00:15:54.000We have military bases in more than a hundred different countries all over the world.
00:15:58.000I would feel like you would want to resist that.
00:16:00.000That would naturally be something that people would be resisting.
00:16:06.000Imagine if JFK Airport was a Saudi national airport and they're flying their fighter jets in and out there and doing loops of New York City all day long.
00:16:14.000You've got guys in the South in the Confederate States who'd love to blow up the Capitol because there's a black man in the White House.
00:16:33.000I don't know what the real number is, but it's more than 100. More than 100 military bases in more than 100 different countries all over the world.
00:17:01.000Look what's going on in Iraq right now.
00:17:03.000This void that is being filled now by these...
00:17:08.000These jihadists, once we're pulling out the American troops and the Iraqis are being inundated with these various terrorist groups, this ISIS organization.
00:17:19.000It's scary stuff when you see what happens when the predominant power, military power in the area pulls out and then it's left this vacuum and this power struggle.
00:17:31.000Well, I mean, you first have to look back at the root cause of it all, and the root cause was we drew up fictitious we, the West, not just the US, but we, the West.
00:17:42.000So we drew up fictitious borders, and we said here, basically said the three different people, you know, the Kurds, the Sunnis, the Shias, here's a country, we're going to draw the borders now, coexist and get along in Kumbaya.
00:17:57.000What happens, of course, it's those three, you know, three different, you know, sectarian sects can't get along, so you needed a hard man, a dictator, to keep the people suppressed and controlled, so it leaves internal strife out.
00:18:09.000Remove him, like we did, and then not replace it with a suitable alternative leaves this massive power vacuum, and that's why we have the situation where we're today, where we have all-out civil war.
00:18:19.000So is the solution, do you continue having a hardline dictator like Saddam Hussein, which was obviously a brutal, oppressive guy, or do you just withdraw?
00:18:32.000Obviously, there has to be a midpoint where there has to be a political solution, and that's the only way out of this.
00:18:37.000A political solution though, but how do you organize a political solution when you're faced with these overwhelming numbers of jihadists and people blowing themselves up and Sunnis versus the Shias is the whole place is just overrun with turmoil.
00:18:51.000I mean, how does that ever become a political solution?
00:18:55.000That seems like a just a phrase that you can use.
00:18:58.000We need a political solution, but what does that really mean?
00:19:38.000Did you see the recent interview with Dick Cheney where he said that his number one regret was that he didn't invade Iran at the same time as Iraq?
00:21:16.000And he says in the classical totalitarian state, something like Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia, you have a charismatic figure at the top.
00:21:23.000And it's where, in a classical totalitarian state, it's where politics trumps economics.
00:21:30.000In inverted totalitarianism, like we have in the United States, economics trumps politics.
00:21:35.000Now, everything has been sold to the highest bidder in this country.
00:21:39.000So, corporations run anything, and you've touched on such a good point with Halliburton.
00:21:44.000Jeremy Scahill, author of Dirty Wars and so forth, I'm a huge fan of, he's spoken at length how at the height of our occupation in Afghanistan, we had a total of 250,000 men on the ground in Afghanistan, only something like 45,000 Americans,
00:22:02.00045% of that footprint The rest of us was actual American military force.
00:22:07.000The rest are corporate contractors, whether it's for food delivery, whether it's for arms supplying, medical or whatever, or infrastructure rebuilding.
00:22:16.000So when you have corporations who profit from war, And you have a political class in Washington who only is totally 100% beholden to these corporations.
00:22:26.000We now live in a country where wars are for profit.
00:22:31.000And we'll make our decisions based on what's profitable and not in the interest of national security or the American population.
00:22:37.000The wars are for profit and also the wars become a business that you can't just end.
00:22:44.000You can't just end that business because then you take people out of work.
00:22:47.000I've heard that argued about the war on drugs.
00:22:49.000It's one of the best arguments about the reason why.
00:22:52.000There's so many lobbyists against legalizing marijuana.
00:22:55.000When you look at the actual health risks of marijuana being so minimal and the actual medical benefits that you have for people that have cancer and AIDS, there's so many different ways you can use it.
00:23:06.000The idea that this isn't something that someone's decided to like, hey, we can use this for people and people can benefit.
00:23:13.000Well, one of the big ones is because there's a whole business In arresting people, imprisoning people, making sure that prison guards stay working, making sure that prisons stay filled, making sure that sheriffs, they need a certain amount of sheriffs, need a certain amount of deputies.
00:23:28.000There's a whole business behind that, and people have to recognize that when you change a law, Sort of just like what's going on in Iraq right now where there's this giant void when we pulled out of Iraq.
00:23:37.000If you just cut the ties on all these laws and say, look, this is all legal now.
00:23:42.000All you guys that were arresting people for all this shit, you're going to have to find some new shit to do.
00:23:47.000There's going to be a mad scramble and they're going to have to figure out some new way to profit.
00:23:51.000Well, that's the situation that we're in right now with war.
00:23:54.000The amount of money that's coming in from war.
00:23:59.000The percentage of our economy that's dedicated just to war is substantial.
00:24:05.000It's far greater than many, many other things that would be very important.
00:24:08.000Inner city restoration, you know, education, public education.
00:24:13.000I mean, the amount of money that's being spent on tanks and missiles and fucking just feeding troops and sending people over there and then contractors like Halliburton that are fixed.
00:24:23.000This is just amazing amounts of money that's flowing back and forth.
00:24:27.000And to cut that off, it's like you've got so much momentum and entropy.
00:24:51.000But to put that poor black minority person into a prison, all of a sudden, these private prison organizations will make $50,000 per year out of taxpayer money for him being in prison for a non-violent crime.
00:25:04.000So when we're trying to dismantle and find solutions, that's the kind of headwinds that you're running against.
00:25:11.000There's too much influence to the corporations over the political structure.
00:25:14.000We can have these conversations all day, right?
00:25:16.000But what possible solutions can be offered?
00:25:19.000C.J. Werleman, if you were the president of the United States, you can't be and weren't born here.
00:26:07.000You know, Americans, you know, nowhere in the Western world is the socialism or the S-word more, you know, associated with demagoguery than here.
00:26:17.000I mean, you say socialism, an American thinks of Stalinist Russia or East Germany.
00:26:22.000When I hear the word socialism, I think of the country I'm from, Australia, I think of Canada to a lesser extent, and I think of all of Western Europe.
00:26:30.000Socialism doesn't mean the absence of capitalism.
00:26:33.000It means where, you know, basic human rights are catered for in a structure which is paid for by the rich and the corporations.
00:26:40.000What we have in America is, you know, you've got corporations paying the lowest tax contribution to the federal government in U.S. history.
00:26:49.000Republicans will defend and say, oh, but our corporate tax rate is 35%.
00:26:54.000The effective rate after all the loopholes, after all the deductions, all the loopholes have actually been written in Washington by these pro-corporate lobbyists.
00:27:01.000The effective rate is 12%, which makes it the lowest amongst all OECD countries.
00:27:05.000And that's the reason why America doesn't have nice things, like bridges.
00:27:45.000And it's because we've starved the federal government the revenue it needs to build a happy society.
00:27:51.000You go to Europe, and I'm always staggered by my hardcore conservative friends, debates I have online or in interviews on radio panels and so forth, and I hear conservatives come back from Europe and go, God, I had a lovely holiday.
00:28:05.000The public transport works like you can set your watch to it.
00:28:13.000And you go, well, you know, you wonder why?
00:28:14.000Because they have a state where corporations are paying their fair share.
00:28:17.000In Germany, which hit, you know, economic hard times at the same time we did in 08, their economy is booming because they have a good blend of social democracy and capitalism.
00:28:27.000They made a law in Germany where if you have a company of more than 50 employees, at least 50% of your board must be represented by the working force.
00:28:44.000So the folks that work in whatever you make, they have a vote.
00:28:50.000So half of them have to be elected by those people, so they have to represent the needs and wants of the people that work for that company.
00:29:05.000Kansas, which is basically a laboratory for Tea Party, hardcore conservative thinking, they put the most aggressive tax cuts on the rich that we've seen in the last 20 or 30 years.
00:29:15.000Total Reaganomics in 2010, now got a $338 million budget blowout.
00:29:23.000And now they can have to cut education and services to the poor and safety wealth net because they've got this budget hole that they can't explain.
00:29:29.000Now, I'll tell you how you fucking explain it.
00:29:31.000You just took a massive cut to the rich and corporations and nothing comes back for it.
00:29:35.000There is definitely a real problem in America when you were talking about the corporations paying a small amount of taxes and then you look at the infrastructure.
00:29:45.000There's some shaky spots in this country, especially New York City.
00:29:49.000The Brooklyn Bridge just had a giant collapse recently.
00:30:15.000And you've got to pay that every time you drive across a spot.
00:30:18.000And you and I have to pay for that, or the people in the middle class in New Jersey have to pay for that, and that's because the wealthy aren't paying their share of taxes in the United States.
00:30:25.000So the middle class are the ones who get lumped with the tax bill.
00:30:28.000Isn't it fascinating that when you start talking about this kind of stuff, you start talking about socialism, that the rich pay their share, The big resistance seems to come from a lot of poor conservative people.
00:30:39.000When the big resistance to socialism comes from these people that I don't know if it's like they have this idea in their head that one day they're going to be prosperous so they don't want you mucking it up for their chances.
00:30:51.000But I've found this quite fascinating, that one of the big resistances to the ideas of communism or the ideas of socialism, and these are just ideas, just bringing them up, but a knee-jerk reaction comes from the lower middle class or middle class conservative folks.
00:31:09.000Yeah, I mean, what John Steinbeck said at base, he said, you know, Americans are temporarily embarrassed millionaires in waiting.
00:31:31.000You've got the working class in these red belt states.
00:31:35.000Which are voting for a party which exclusively is only benefiting the top 1%.
00:31:41.000I mean, how does a poor person in, say, Mississippi or Alabama pull the lever for the Republican Party who has blocked the expansion of Medicaid, basically blocked the expansion of universal health care?
00:31:52.000One of the biggest predicators of poverty is your access to health care.
00:31:55.000If you don't have it, you're destined for poverty.
00:31:57.000And they vote against that, only because they say Jesus a few times before they go to the polls, and hallelujah, you just want yourself a vote.
00:32:04.000A lot of folks don't realize that that all started with Reagan.
00:32:07.000Reagan changed politics in America with his embracing of the religious right and using them as a political base, as a base of people you can guarantee are going to vote for you if you start talking Jesus.
00:32:19.000I mean, Reagan morally and financially banked up this country.
00:32:23.000Not only did he bank drop this country with trickle-down economics fiscally, but he also banked up this country because he taught Americans, a whole generation of Americans, how to hate the poor.
00:33:16.000The Ayn Rand one is a really interesting one because that's one that the libertarians seem to cling to and the pull them up by your bootstraps, pull themselves up by their bootstraps attitude.
00:33:28.000It's easy to think like Ayn Rand if you're born into a privileged white neighborhood area.
00:33:35.000Yeah, I love Canada, and any ideas that anybody has against what you're talking about, like socialized medicine, it's not the best in Canada.
00:33:44.000I have friends that live up there, and they say they've hurt their knee and had to wait 10 months to get a surgery, and that sucks.
00:33:56.000You get good universities all over the country that are pretty much commensurate.
00:34:00.000So you don't have this thing where you have to fly all the way to New York to go to NYU or go to Boulder.
00:34:06.000You can go to a neighborhood university and you're going to get an excellent education.
00:34:10.000It's a different sort of an environment up there.
00:34:13.000And that's a problem because we've capitalized.
00:34:16.000And privatize the education system to hear such a degree.
00:34:19.000I mean, if you get a degree in Australia, whether it's Macquarie University or Sydney University or University of New South Wales, an MBA at one of those schools is exactly the same as an MBA at any one of those schools.
00:34:30.000Here, you know, not only does an MBA matter, but also then it has to be from the right school.
00:34:36.000So an MBA from Harvard or an Ivy League school Is Trump's an MBA from University of San Diego or something like that?
00:34:44.000And in fact, what that does, it still keeps propelling that plutocracy because there was a study done that at least for every student at Harvard, each student at Harvard has at least one parent earning at least $400,000 per year.
00:34:57.000So we're still, you know, with the capitalization of everything, we're forming a system where we have, you know, the very wealthy at the top and we have everybody struggling at the bottom.
00:35:06.000The elitism involved in education is really fascinating to me today, especially because there's so much access to information.
00:35:14.000So many books, so much online, so much to read.
00:35:17.000You can get so much access to information that would, you know, a long time ago, the difference between going to Harvard and going to San Diego State was pretty gigantic.
00:35:26.000But with what you have access to today, the average person has access to the exact same information that they're teaching at any school, anywhere.
00:35:36.000But I had a conversation with a friend of mine, and he was wrong about something, and I brought up this woman who had, you know, she went to the University of Mississippi, but she went there and this was her major, like this thing that we were talking about.
00:35:52.000And he goes, well, this guy went to Yale.
00:35:54.000But he didn't even go to Yale for that!
00:36:17.000And also, not only is it the way we think, but, you know, these kids that are going to MIT or Harvard or Yale, well, it's the networks they take with them.
00:36:24.000So when the jobs are available, you know, the only growth area that we have in this country is the technology jobs, but that's such an insular job market where only the networks, the alumni from these prestigious schools get to really apply from it.
00:36:37.000All the kids working at Google, they all went to these, you know, fancy schools that could be afforded by their wealthy parents.
00:36:44.000The elitism amongst education, I think, is kind of creepy.
00:36:47.000And it's also creepy that you wind up having these, like, skull-and-bones type organizations where all these people inside these, you know...
00:36:57.000And John Kerry, you know, they get into these fraternistic groups, these, you know, very insulated groups, and they feed off of each other.
00:37:07.000And they, you know, they become very nepotistic, and they help each other in business, and they...
00:37:50.000Yeah, if you made your own business, you didn't build that.
00:37:52.000I thought it was a huge blunder because instead of celebrating someone who does innovate and create their own business and get out there and do it, instead of saying this is a great thing and more people can do this and more people can contribute, instead he kind of focused on the negative aspect of it.
00:38:09.000Instead of saying something along the lines of...
00:38:13.000Look, I couldn't imagine what the workload of a guy like Obama is.
00:38:17.000How much time does he have to actually consider every chess move that he makes, everything that he says, how it's going to be interpreted, how is it going to be twisted and turned?
00:38:31.000The you didn't build it was taken a little bit out of context because the full transcript of that, he muddled the punchline, basically.
00:38:40.000He was channeling Elizabeth Warren, who had given a speech earlier on that, and basically saying, you know, the universities which taught those kids, you didn't build that.
00:38:48.000The roads which you're taking the trucks on and using transport to deliver your goods to market, you didn't build that.
00:38:56.000And he messed up the execution of the point, and then it was caught on, basically it meant every entrepreneur in America, you didn't build your business.
00:39:36.000But you understand that, Joe, because you're literate on politics, but people like Libertarians and these crazy right-wing Republicans, they don't understand that.
00:39:45.000They think these bridges and roads and infrastructure come from thin air.
00:39:49.000Actually, Libertarian, they believe the tax rate should be almost zero, and the corporations will provide everything.
00:39:56.000My only problem with taxes is that I feel like most people that are in positions of government, I just feel like the system that we have currently set up is so inherently flawed that throwing more money at it is just going to make a larger bureaucracy,
00:40:13.000going to make more jobs, more regulations, more people, and that whole system that sort of feeds off of the money Like we were talking about with private prisons or we were talking about with prison guards and keeping drugs illegal in order to feed this machine.
00:40:27.000When you make the business of government larger and larger, I don't necessarily think that's the best way to fix the problems that we have.
00:40:35.000I don't necessarily think that I've had this argument with friends that are very liberal that, you know, we just need higher tax rates.
00:40:41.000And I'm like, no, then you're gonna have more government.
00:40:43.000And I don't think more government is the answer.
00:40:45.000I don't think more regulations, more people, more things, more forms you have to fill out, more people that are in some strange office somewhere that have to justify their existence.
00:40:54.000I don't necessarily think that's the answer.
00:40:56.000I think it has to be some sort of a top-down organization, reorganization of the very structure, That this society operates under.
00:41:05.000Because right now, it's this foundation of this unfixable bullshit.
00:41:09.000It's so flawed that throwing money at it is like putting gum on a breaking dam.
00:41:21.000Some sort of a comprehensive philosophy designed to reconstruct this whole situation from the bottom up, from the top down, the whole thing.
00:41:42.000And I'm not an economist, but I listen very intuitively to people like Robert Reich or Jared Bernstein or Paul Krugman.
00:41:48.000Guys who are Nobel laureate economists in their own right.
00:41:52.000And the reason the American economy isn't growing, despite the fact that we have record numbers on Wall Street, despite the fact that the official unemployment rate is falling, the unemployment rate is falling, but not with jobs that pay well.
00:42:04.000It's always these service-paid jobs and so forth.
00:42:07.000What's happening is we're not having shared prosperity.
00:42:09.000You know, we have the minimum wage level, which is below the 1969 level.
00:42:14.000The middle class income has stagnated and has fallen since 1979. So while you have corporations today sitting on record $3 trillion profit, that productivity isn't being shared with the American worker.
00:42:27.000And when it isn't being shared with the American worker...
00:42:33.000Our economy is basically financial services and military.
00:42:36.000So when it comes to financial services, instead of making products, we make stuff up.
00:42:40.000So if we have a consumer economy and we recognize that, then the middle class and the working class needs more to spend.
00:42:49.000And the only way you can do that is you lessen the tax burden at the bottom and you increase the tax burden at the top so consumers have more to spend.
00:42:55.000And the only reason these corporations, despite their record profits, aren't hiring is because there's no consumer demand.
00:43:01.000What do you say to the argument that corporations shouldn't have to pay profits because they're not people?
00:43:08.000The idea that they shouldn't have to pay taxes, that the people in the corporation pay taxes.
00:43:13.000So the corporations themselves should not have to pay taxes.
00:43:18.000I mean, these corporations benefit from our airports, our bridges, our roads, our transport, you name it, our rail networks, interstate highway systems, R&D technology, you name it.
00:43:29.000But the people that are in the corporation already do pay taxes.
00:43:32.000I'm going all Peter Schiff on you right now.
00:43:37.000The corporation is just a group of people.
00:43:41.000Now, if all the group of people all pay taxes, the idea that the corporation itself, this unit, has to pay taxes on top of that, isn't that sort of...
00:43:51.000Justifying this notion that a corporation is a person, that a corporation is like an individual, which is one of the things that they've used to justify corporations being able to contribute vast sums of money to political campaigns.
00:44:05.000That a corporation, like the Supreme Court has ruled this, that a corporation can sort of act as an individual in that regard.
00:44:12.000I mean, we need to move away from that whole line of thinking.
00:44:15.000I mean, this Supreme Court is, you know, basically radicals in robes.
00:44:19.000And, you know, since Reagan, I mean, you know, it's been a conservative-dominated court for the last three decades.
00:44:25.000I mean, we haven't had a liberal judge appointed to the bench since LBJ. Who is the guy that's in the Supreme Court that said that pedophilia, that, no, having sex with a man is just like having sex with a man, no different than having sex with an animal?
00:44:41.000Yeah, not Alito, the other guy, the big fat guy.
00:45:09.000I mean, I've got a lot of gay friends, and I know that sounds like, you know, one of those guys says I've got a lot of black friends, but...
00:45:14.000And they're right before a good black joke.
00:45:18.000I do have a lot of gay friends, and I've been to very gay parties, and I can tell you straight up that not one of my gay friends has said, man, I just pounded some ass, and I can't wait to pound your dog.
00:45:57.000The Supreme Court is the highest court in the land, but you've basically got five out of the nine representatives on that bench who appeal to a higher authority, which is the Vatican and the Pope.
00:46:07.000So, I mean, remember when JFK... I mean, you and I are probably too young for...
00:46:10.000Definitely too young when JFK was elected.
00:46:16.000The biggest issue against him was the fact he was a Catholic because Americans were worried that he would have to answer to somebody outside of the United States.
00:46:25.000Well, we have that situation today, but no one seems to want to talk about it.
00:46:28.000Yeah, that is a fascinating thing that at one point in time, that was a detriment, that him being a Catholic was thought to be like a knock.
00:46:34.000Meanwhile, we almost had a fucking Mormon in the present.
00:47:14.000Yeah, who found golden tablets at the age of 14, but they mysteriously disappeared because the angels took them away.
00:47:20.000Yeah, I would have been happy if Joseph Smith was convicted for having sex with an animal or stealing something, but he was convicted for fraud, the very thing that he's trying to defraud the American public with, so...
00:47:30.000And it's really funny that the Mormon church, the sect of the Mormon church that Romney was involved with was so radical that they moved to Mexico in the 1800s in order to keep having sex with multiple women.
00:49:10.000I actually wrote a piece for Salon on the new Pope, and it wasn't my headline, but the headline Salon put was, The Lesson Atheists Can Learn from Pope Francis.
00:50:03.000For folks who don't know, Pope Benedict, the guy who was before Pope Francis, was involved in a case where he moved a child molester who would actively target deaf kids.
00:50:14.000And then he moved them and the guy molested a hundred more deaf kids after he moved them.
00:50:22.000And Pope Benedict, they've kind of cooled down off of what charges people were rallying against him, but they wanted to charge him with crimes against humanity.
00:50:33.000The Vatican itself, the way the Vatican works is it's its own state, correct?
00:51:38.000There's another great picture, I don't know if you've ever seen it, of him.
00:51:42.000He's sitting there on his crazy throne, and they had these gymnastics guys do some sort of crazy gymnastics demonstration in front of him with their little tights on.
00:51:52.000And he's sitting there watching this, and I'm like, all the shit that this guy's accused with, you would think that he would want to be as far away from young men in tights as humanly possible.
00:52:04.000Oh, they're so lost and dark and creepy and trying to adjust for all the years and years of evil that the Catholic Church has committed.
00:52:12.000What I like about the Catholic Church and what you've got to say about this Pope Francis is the fact that it shows you exactly how man-made religion is.
00:52:19.000Because, I mean, Pope Francis is basically coming along.
00:52:21.000He's trying to adjust religion to modernity.
00:52:25.000So he's basically just making the rules up as he goes to adjust it.
00:52:56.000I mean, when they're trying to sell circumcision, the Jewish faith too, which was a, you know, Christianity was rebranded in from, you know, Hebrewism.
00:53:03.000They go to the Romans, hey, we've got this new religion for you.
00:53:05.000The catch is you've got to cut off the tip of your penis.
00:53:08.000And the Romans are like, hey, wait, wait, what are you talking about?
00:53:37.000It's hard to pay attention to that old shit in the first place because it's so difficult to decipher.
00:53:43.000You're going from language to language.
00:53:44.000And then on top of it, you got a bunch of people monkeying with the dates to try to bring in other people.
00:53:49.000You're messing up the whole thing, man!
00:53:51.000It just shows you how ridiculous it is, the idea that someone could have said something in stories and songs for a thousand years before they ever figured out how to write.
00:54:01.000And then they started writing things down, and then they translated it from one language to another, back and forth, back and forth, but it's still 100% correct and definitely the Word of God.
00:54:12.000And you mean, you know, America's the most Western Christian nation in the world.
00:54:17.000And, you know, something like 85% of Americans have no idea of that historical context of the Bible, how it came from Greek, and how it was translated by scribes, you know, and so forth.
00:54:28.000And these were stories told in the oral tradition, and where the Gospels came from and who they were, which we don't know.
00:54:34.000Americans just think that, you know, the Bible came down in perfect form from, you know, fell from the sky, and that was it.
00:54:41.000It came from Jesus, and it's a lot of it.
00:55:31.000There was a Barna group study which talked about biblical illiteracy in America, and 25% of Americans believed that Joan of Arc was Noah's wife, and 40% of Americans believed Sod and Gomorrah were a married couple.
00:56:59.000He studied the Dead Sea Scrolls for over 14 years, and it was his conclusion after 14 years of translations that the entire Bible was a huge misunderstanding.
00:57:10.000The Christian religion was a huge misunderstanding.
00:57:12.000And it was really all about religious ceremonies that were based on the consumption of psychedelic mushrooms and fertility rituals.
00:57:20.000And that all these ancient customs were hidden in parables to cover them up and hide them from the Romans.
00:57:28.000When they were captured and when they were imprisoned and killed, they would cover up their ancient traditions of these consumptions of psychedelic mushrooms and the religious ecstasy they would achieve from eating these mushrooms.
00:57:43.000It was a fascinating, fascinating book.
00:57:45.000Well, I guess that lends to, like I say, the book of Revelation is a cryptology book that's written in code to protect it from being interpreted by the Romans.
00:58:25.000There's also another book that he wrote that he wrote a second book because the first book got bought out.
00:58:30.000The second book was The Dead Sea Scrolls and The Christian Myth.
00:58:33.000And it was very, very controversial because of the fact that this guy was extremely educated and agnostic, very intelligent, very well respected, and rock-solid credentials.
00:58:45.000You couldn't deny the things that he was saying.
00:58:47.000The people that read his work, a lot of his strange conclusions were...
00:58:53.000Undeniably bizarre in the context of religion.
00:58:55.000Like, he traced back the word Christ to an ancient Sumerian word that meant a mushroom covered in God's semen.
00:59:04.000And that they believed that when it rained, this is, you know, you're talking six, ten thousand years ago, when it rained, that was God coming on the earth.
00:59:13.000And that these mushrooms that would appear out of nowhere underneath...
00:59:17.000It's really crazy because it's all based on...
00:59:41.000These mushrooms have a mycorrhizal relationship with carniferous trees, so you would find them underneath pine trees, which is where people always have pine trees as these Christmas trees, fir trees, whatever.
00:59:52.000And these red and white mushrooms look like Santa Claus.
00:59:56.000Have you ever seen the Amanita muscaria mushroom?
01:01:03.000But that is the same mushroom that's on the cover of the sacred mushroom and the cross.
01:01:07.000If you pull that up, Jamie, the book, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, the John Marco Allegro book, it's all about this psychedelic mushroom, the Amanita muscaria, which is a very confusing mushroom because it apparently varies geographically, it varies genetically.
01:01:23.000That's the book, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, same mushroom.
01:02:00.000There's very many translations for the word apple, but one of them is red, the color red, and the idea of the eating of the red, meaning the eating of this mushroom, this red mushroom.
01:02:12.000They were all tripping balls and trying to write things down.
01:02:16.000And then along the way, it got, keep my children away from the gays!
01:02:21.000And what is it that kept them from the original message?
01:02:25.000Well, most likely is the absence of these psychedelic experiences, these ego-dissolving experiences.
01:02:30.000Which are just forbidden from, you know, I mean, if you look at the modern Christians, I mean, what's the one thing that they keep the children away from the drugs, the drugs, the evil marijuana, and all the things that are ruining our youth?
01:02:43.000No, what's ruining your youth is ignorance as to what you're teaching in the very first place.
01:02:47.000Like, what are the roots of what you're actually saying?
01:02:58.000I mean, a guy like Allegro, a guy studying this book for 14 years, that's the big thing, is that's the oldest version of the Bible we know of.
01:03:06.000That's the oldest version of the Bible that's in Aramaic as well.
01:03:10.000So it's trying to add that to what people have just decided is the New Testament, which we all know was concocted by Constantine.
01:03:21.000They took a bunch of bishops and they threw some shit out and put some shit in.
01:04:07.000And normally when you read the New Testament, you'll read, you know, Matthew, you read Mark, and you read Matthew, and then you read Luke, and then you read John.
01:04:14.000And if you hear what each of the gospels has to write about each of the key moments in Jesus' life, whether it's his birth, His baptism, you know, his ministry, his trial, his execution, they kind of sound almost the same.
01:04:26.000But if you just focus on one story in Matthew, let's say it's his baptism, and then one story, and then on baptism in Luke, and then baptism in Mark, and so forth, you see how wildly these stories differ, you know, which almost have no resemblance at all when it comes to the facts and so forth.
01:04:44.000Not only that, that's a long fucking time ago.
01:04:48.000The idea that you're going to take anything from 2,000 years ago and it's going to make any sense whatsoever in 2014, just piecing it together, the idea that that's the foundation of the very...
01:05:04.000That's the foundation of your your ideology That's the foundation of your morals.
01:05:09.000It's all based on this 2,000 plus year old garbled shit and not based on what we know today the Experiences that we have today what we know today about values and ethics and communication and the blowback of negative behavior That we're not trying to formulate our own new guidelines for life that we're all basing this on Don't eat clams and don't get tattooed and don't fuck guys.
01:05:35.000Like all this crazy shit that's old as fuck and that was based on nonsense.
01:05:40.000You know, it's quite amazing the hold that it has today.
01:05:45.000And I think one of the best examples of...
01:05:48.000One of the major problems that we have as a culture, and that's our fear.
01:05:52.000Our fear of the unknown, our fear of death, our fear of, you know, that we're not living our lives the wrong way.
01:06:02.000So if we have one particular ideology that we follow, anybody that follows another ideology is immediately attacked.
01:06:10.000And that goes for the people that are religious.
01:06:13.000Also, it goes to the people that are on the left that attack.
01:06:17.000Without doubt, anything that's on the right.
01:06:19.000It goes for the people that are on the right that attack anything that's on the left.
01:06:22.000It goes for fucking Yankees fans that hate the Dodgers.
01:07:52.000Well, the immigration thing is one of the best examples of how this country is fucking crazy and insane is because it's a country that was founded by immigrants.
01:08:02.000So this idea that we're going to keep all the immigrants out of a country that was founded by immigrants is holy shit crazy.
01:09:48.000These are refugees fleeing intolerable violent circumstances inflicted upon by policies, not only our draconian drug wars, But also, you know, free trade.
01:10:01.000NAFTA, again, signed into law by Bill Clinton, displaced three to four million Mexican farmers alone by allowing American agribusiness to go down there, build up their monstrosity, you know, industrial farming complexes, able to oversupply the market because of economy scales with...
01:10:58.000We've got a population of 350 million.
01:11:01.000If we can't take 40,000 kids who bust their nut to get across this...
01:11:05.000In, you know, inhospitable terrain to make it in this country, well, give me them any day over, somebody, you know, somewhat Confederate in the Deep South.
01:11:13.000Yeah, you know, we're going to take America back.
01:11:22.000It's amazing, too, that they, you know, that Confederate flag thing, that's a fascinating one.
01:11:27.000The Confederate flag was representative of so many things to them, and, you know, his pride, Southern pride, and all these different things.
01:11:34.000Maybe you guys should come up with a new flag.
01:11:36.000Maybe come up with one that doesn't have a swastika on it.
01:11:40.000That's essentially what it's like for black people.
01:11:43.000Could you imagine driving around if somehow or another you find yourself in the Deep South and you're a black person.
01:11:50.000You're driving around and you see these rebel flags everywhere.
01:11:52.000You would think of that a lot like a Jew would look at a swastika.
01:11:56.000I understand that the swastika meant a lot more than that.
01:12:00.000And at one point in time it was actually like a symbol of prosperity and The swastika, at one point in time, it was like this ancient symbol.
01:12:10.000Maybe it was reversed, but it was used in certain types of martial arts.
01:12:19.000There's a Hindu temple that's near my house that I visited, and they have a big sign up explaining why there's swastikas everywhere.
01:12:29.000Well, we lived in Bali, Indonesia for a decade, and when you drive around Bali, you see all these Hindu temples everywhere with a swastika, but it's actually in reverse.
01:13:06.000If you look at the Republican Party today, because the Republican Party is so monolithic, such as a monolithic control of the South, That affords the Southern representation of the Republican Party of the most senior positions.
01:13:20.000You know, Eric Cantor is from Virginia.
01:13:22.000You know, Marco Rubio, you know, Mitch McConnell, you go down the line.
01:13:28.000And, you know, the whole policy of blocking Obama is built around obstruction, nullification, and, you know, and that drives, you know, the thrust and parry of who they are as far as a reactionary party.
01:13:43.000It's also something that unites them, you know, unites them in this group that they have, you know.
01:15:01.000This moment is the best moment human beings have ever achieved.
01:15:04.000I believe right now this is the greatest time to be alive the world has ever known.
01:15:08.000Yeah, it's fraught with peril and all fucked up and economically...
01:15:12.000Completely out of whack, but I still think this is the best time ever because information is being exchanged at a freer pace.
01:15:20.000It's being exchanged at a faster pace.
01:15:22.000It's being exchanged amongst people that have never been able to communicate before by translation software, by just the fact that you have this internet that's allowing people to send messages and exchange information and ideas and communicate back and forth and influence each other in a way that's never been available before.
01:16:00.000I think a lot of this resistance that you're getting from this conservative party is this battening down the hatches and trying to avoid this inevitable change.
01:16:08.000And I think this change, a lot of it comes from that, from this exchange of information, from understanding each other better.
01:16:16.000Well, I think we're seeing the death throes of that white minority politics in America.
01:16:20.000And what we're going to see more dangerously is America, you know, it's the browning of America by the year 2050. Browning?
01:16:27.000Yeah, by the year 2050. Fear of a black planet?
01:16:57.000The browning of America by 2050, the whites will be a minority in this country.
01:17:01.000In 2012, actually, that was the first year where white babies were outnumbered by black and brown babies.
01:17:10.000As we become browner, This white minority politic, this reactionary movement is going to become more aggressive, more frustrated because they don't feel like they have representation.
01:17:21.000And where terrorism starts, terrorism is a reactionary response to political weakness or political impotency.
01:17:31.000And we saw the shooters in Las Vegas, those two white extremists who shot those two police officers and the Walmart worker.
01:17:38.000If you read their manifesto, that's what the Tea Party manifesto...
01:18:22.000Yeah, we're going to take it out on cops and a Walmart worker and end up shooting themselves.
01:18:27.000But we're going to see more and more of this.
01:18:29.000And actually, the New York Times had a great piece on it, the rise of hate or the data of hate.
01:18:33.000And the explosion of right-wing militia groups in this country is threatening.
01:18:38.000And the more they feel that they're the minority, and the more they start losing national elections.
01:18:43.000Let's face it, the Republican Party is not going to win a presidential election for the next 20 years.
01:18:47.000In every demographic in America, the Democrats are gaining market share.
01:18:57.000In every demographic in America which is shrinking, the Republicans are gaining market share.
01:19:02.000So they're not going to win present elections, and that's why they focus on gerrymandering these districts, voter suppression, so trying to win at the state level.
01:19:09.000Is there a benefit other than socially?
01:19:12.000I do believe there's a social benefit to having liberals in office.
01:19:16.000One thing that I think that Obama has done, I think there's a social benefit to having a guy like that in office.
01:19:26.000Well, look, I'm critical of Obama because he's governed like a Clinton.
01:19:31.000He hasn't governed as a liberal at all.
01:19:33.000Name a liberal policy he's implemented.
01:19:35.000Obamacare, that was far from a liberal policy.
01:19:38.000A liberal policy, when they had unilateral control of the Senate and Congress, should have been universal health care.
01:19:44.000But he didn't even fight for universal health care, even though he campaigned for it.
01:19:47.000I would argue we haven't had a liberal president since Nixon.
01:19:51.000And Nixon didn't implement liberal policies because he was liberal or had a conscience or was moral.
01:19:59.000He was the last US president to be scared by liberals.
01:20:02.000And there's a great story with Nixon when he's at the height of the anti-war movement and he's in the Oval Office and he has Henry Kissinger standing next to him.
01:20:46.000In 2008, she ran on no platform other than she was Hillary Clinton.
01:20:50.000She's going to run on the same platform because they believe they're not going to be against a once-in-a-lifetime candidate like they had in Barack Obama.
01:20:57.000So she's not going to stand for progressive liberalism.
01:20:59.000Liberalism, there's no such thing in liberalism in America.
01:21:02.000There's no one fighting for universal health care.
01:21:04.000There's no one fighting for free education or anything like that or higher taxes on corporations than the rich.
01:21:10.000We live in an area where conservative politics trumps.
01:21:13.000Is there also a bottleneck in the two-party system, which is essentially what we have?
01:21:18.000You could say that there's a Green Party, you could say that there's a Libertarian Party, all you want, but the reality is they don't get included into the debates as soon as the debates get heavy.
01:21:27.000What they did to marginalize Ron Paul, who is a Republican, shows you what they do to anybody who doesn't play ball.
01:21:34.000I mean, what you saw, you would see him placing in polls like second and third and they would ignore him and concentrate on who was fourth and fifth.
01:21:42.000I mean, that was what they did in the media to marginalize that guy, effectively to do so.
01:22:28.000Politicians don't come out to visit you and I. They come and visit and do these $30,000 per plate dinners, and they listen to the 50-odd thousand lobbyists which are in Washington and are paying their campaign finance.
01:22:38.000You know, there was 32,000, only a mere 32,000 donors in the 2012 elections represented more than 99% of all political donations in that campaign cycle.
01:22:51.000So 0.01% of the population is donating 99% of the campaign finance studies to political parties.
01:22:59.000Until you get rid of that, you're going to have two political parties which represent the interests of corporations and not of the working or the middle class.
01:24:19.000She wants to dismantle these financial debt products which have wreaked havoc on the American population.
01:24:25.000And these laws and regulations haven't been changed since we had the crash in 08. We now stand on the precipice of repeating what happened on 08. Nothing has changed.
01:24:33.000And she wants to fight for these causes which will, you know, end the rigging of the game, so to speak.
01:24:40.000Bernie Sanders, I like him as well, but he has no chance in a national electorate.
01:24:43.000Elizabeth Warren could win the DNC nomination and also become president.
01:24:47.000Why does Bernie Sanders have no chance?
01:24:48.000And how do you think a woman's going to be president?
01:24:50.000Well, because, number one, Democrats yearn for a historic candidate, a woman.
01:25:15.000Yeah, and Sanders, well, Sanders is too much of an open-shirted socialist, identifies him as socialist, and so I think the media and the Republican Party will be too easy for them to slay him with the S-word, whereas Elizabeth Warren has never mentioned the S-word and is more of a populist Than a socialist.
01:25:40.000I mean, is it possible that what you were talking about before, that if you look at what's happening in Europe and you look at the benefits of socialism as far as Canada and some other countries, Australia, socialized medicine, socialized education, is it possible that that can be discussed in some sort of a way that's not going to knee-jerk turn people off in America?
01:26:02.000Well, the problem is that you have a failed media class because the media class won't report the facts.
01:26:08.000The media class, you know, a Republican gets on TV and says there's no such thing as gravity.
01:26:13.000Then CNN says, well, we need to get a Democrat to speak on it.
01:27:11.000Well, the World Happiness Index is measured on some metrics such as pollution, access to healthcare, access to education, gender equality, income inequality, pollution, crime rates, teen pregnancy, and so forth.
01:29:33.000This idea is based on the notion that someone is going to be groomed by Al-Qaeda to come over here and be one of them white-skinned terrorists.
01:29:43.000And me living in the world's most populous Muslim country for 10 years won't help my resume either when I run for office.
01:30:03.000Why is it that America produces so much, like, as far as creativity, so much innovation, so much technological innovation, so much creativity, so many good things come out of this place as well?
01:30:14.000Oh, well, you know, America's a great country.
01:30:16.000I think, you know, the U.S. has produced a litany of good things.
01:30:20.000Its contribution to the world culturally is, you know...
01:30:25.000But my point is that it benefits so few.
01:30:29.000And if you look at the new economy, inverted economy, as far as the technology, you know, these Facebook producers and these, you know, what was that?
01:30:40.000WhatsApp just sold for how many billions of dollars?
01:30:43.000They've got a workforce of like 25 people.
01:30:46.00025 people benefit out of the sale of that.
01:30:48.000So in the things that we're producing now, no longer have any social capital.
01:30:54.000We're not producing great products which can be exported to the world.
01:30:58.000Our technology has been bought out by the military industrial complex.
01:31:02.000Most of the R&D and technological research done in this country is to the benefit of figuring out how we can kill people better, you know, in other countries.
01:31:12.000How much of it is done on electric cars?
01:31:14.000How much of it is done on electronics and cell phones?
01:31:18.000Well, look at the electric car, and that's a great point.
01:31:20.000I mean, Tesla, you see plenty of them around in these rich white neighborhoods, and certainly where I'm from in Laguna Beach, you see a ton of them.
01:32:00.000I mean, if it wasn't for big oil, we'd have the electric car years ago.
01:32:04.000And Elon Musk has spoken at great length of the opposition he's faced in bringing the electric car to market.
01:32:12.000So, yeah, we're producing great things, but, you know, the corporate totalitarian state, big oil, and these kind of interests will always trump.
01:33:01.000Is that just the bridge thing, or is it other things as well?
01:33:04.000It's the bridge thing, but it's the whole culture of intimidation, that whole New Jersey Soprano-like atmosphere which turns off women and independent and minority voters, so...
01:33:34.000Well, I've got no problem with being morbidly obese if you're poor, because the poor in this country can't afford to be skinny.
01:33:38.000But if you're rich and white like Christy is, well, you've got no excuse of being a fatty.
01:33:42.000That is true to a certain extent, but still, it means overeating.
01:33:46.000That is a personal choice, even if you're poor.
01:33:48.000If you're getting bad food, that's one thing.
01:33:50.000Bad nutrition is another thing, but the overabundance of this bad nutrition is just simply gluttony.
01:33:56.000Man, look, if you're a family of four and you've got husband and wife on a minimum wage, let's call it, you're netting $400 a week, you've still got to pay rent, you've still got to pay the car, you can either go to Trader Joe's and buy a $15 pun of broccoli and some potatoes, or you go to Wendy's and you feed the whole family for four.
01:34:40.000It's just that there is a certain reality to being morbidly obese that I don't think you're helping people with this idea, this notion of fat acceptance.
01:34:48.000And I think this is the broad end of the spectrum when it comes to these New ideas that I think, where people are becoming more progressive and more sensitive and more open-minded, I think there's great things to that.
01:35:01.000But I think there's also things like fat acceptance, where it gets to a point where, like, listen, stop.
01:35:07.000I got in trouble on Twitter a couple of years ago for tweeting, I'm the Rosa Park of not giving up my seat on the bus for fat people.
01:35:30.000Listen, that feeling of shame, this idea of fat shaming, people don't like that, but that feeling of shame, the negative feeling, is a feeling of social failure.
01:35:39.000And that feeling of social failure, that ostracized feeling...
01:35:42.000The only benefit of that, it's not good to be cruel, but the only benefit of that to the person who receives it is that it will motivate them to lose weight.
01:37:43.000I'm trying to force out corn syrup, because they were trying to force them to use corn syrup in their production of Coca-Cola, and so they resisted it, and then they were sued.
01:37:54.000The whole thing is just, corn is a wacky fucking plant, man.
01:37:58.000Well, I mean, it's so pervasive, because it's no coincidence that Iowa is the first stop on the...
01:38:04.000Both parties' nomination process, that's where they spend all the time, you know, carpetbagging.
01:38:13.000But for anybody who wants, I mean, I'm not going to go into depth about it because we've talked about this before, but please watch the documentary King Corn if you get a chance.
01:38:27.000I've taken a lot of heat about this subject of minimum wage by a bunch of people that think that folks who work in fast food or folks who work in entry-level jobs should not get paid $15 an hour.
01:38:38.000That's the number that I always throw around.
01:38:40.000I'm like, you can't live off of less than $15 an hour, man.
01:39:04.000There's got to be some way that you can pay.
01:39:06.000If someone works for you all day and they get paid less than a survival wage, you essentially have slaves.
01:39:13.000Well, this is what the problem is, and I keep coming back to this point.
01:39:16.000In America, we have socialism for the corporations, but we have capitalism for the rest of us.
01:39:21.000So, you take Walmart or Bank of America, they pay their workers so little that we have to subsidize them with food assistance, housing assistance, and so forth.
01:39:30.000Every Walmart, the four Walmart heirs own more than the combined bottom 42% of Americans.
01:39:37.000Yet, are allowed to pay their workers so little that the average taxpayer, the average Walmart employee costs the average taxpayer in this country $1,300 per year in Texas.
01:39:47.000So you and I are funding the workforce for a ridiculously fucking wealthy bunch of individuals that can afford to pay their employees more.
01:40:48.000Melissa McCarthy, she fucking gets a mouthful of donuts, she gets a good sugar rush, and she runs out and kidnaps the wall, and she lets them see the errors of their ways.
01:40:56.000And they wind up working, and at the end of the movie, they're happy, and they're working in Costa Rica, fucking saving people from hurricanes or some shit.
01:42:00.000Because you're still working from the same number.
01:42:03.000So the combined wealth of the Koch brothers is more than the bottom, roughly 50% of the nation, but the combined wealth of the Walmart is, so you're working from a fixed number.
01:42:14.000If you add them both together, it's not like the six of them own 92%.
01:42:19.000Right, they don't own 92%, but they own double 42%.
01:42:29.000I think I told you at the beginning I'm not an economist.
01:42:31.000Well, I'm dumb as fuck, so we're screwed.
01:42:34.000Not only am I not an economist, I'm not good at counting shit.
01:42:37.000So, if you think about that though, just the fact that the four people from Walmart and the two Koch brothers, just those six people, what is the total money, the total amount of money that those guys have?
01:42:49.000Well, the Koch brothers are worth a combined about $55 billion.
01:42:55.000And most of their money is from speculation, not from hiring people or building stuff.
01:43:38.000Well, you'd have to end all speculation, but Robert Reich, who speaks about this extensively, is you have a trading tax.
01:43:47.000At the moment, these guys can trade minor pips, every pip of a screen, to the three decimal places, whether it's on currency, whether it's on gas.
01:43:55.000When you're moving tens and hundreds of millions of dollars, one pip is a ton of money.
01:44:00.000But there should be a trading tax on each one of these trades, because this volume of trade, this volume of money benefits society in no measurable mean.
01:44:09.000What a weird world we live in when that's real.
01:44:12.000These are the numbers that Jamie just threw up here.
01:44:14.000The collective wealth of the six richest Waltons rose from $73 billion to $90 billion while the wealth of the average American declined from $126,000 to $77,000.
01:44:25.00013 million Americans have negative net worth.
01:44:38.000I thought you were telling the truth for sure.
01:44:39.000There's a recent article that I brought up yesterday's podcast that Michael Shermer wrote in Scientific American that was torn apart about the myth of financial inequality.
01:44:50.000It's like one of the dumbest articles I've ever written.
01:44:52.000The way I know whether something's dumb is if I think it's dumb.
01:44:56.000I can see the logical fallacies in your argument about finance.
01:45:04.000This everything's fine thing where people want to sort of manipulate statistics and look at things from sort of a rose-colored glasses point of view.
01:45:50.000You know, despite, and you spoke with us before, despite the Dow at record highs and despite the unemployment number happening, we're not going to get these jobs back because we now have the Walmart business model is the model that the rest of the corporate world in this country emulates.
01:46:03.000In the 18th century, it was the Pennsylvania Railroad country.
01:46:08.000In the 20th century, it was IBM. Today, it's Walmart.
01:46:11.000So what Walmart does is it makes cities bid against each other to get tax breaks to move.
01:46:17.000So they can say, hey, we're going to put a store in your place.
01:46:19.000They get two cities that bid against it.
01:46:21.000So it becomes a race to the bottom as far as corporate subsidies and welfare.
01:46:25.000Every time a Walmart store opens, every time Walmart employs a new employee, 1.4 American workers is displaced.
01:46:33.000Now, their control of the American economy, the retail economy, is so dominant that they have such control over their suppliers.
01:46:40.000Procurement at Walmart, they demand a 5% reduction of their suppliers every year.
01:46:46.000If you can't reduce your costs to Walmart by 5% every year, then we'll fuck off goodbye.
01:46:52.000So after about five years of doing this, where you've cut 5%, 5%, eventually Walmart says to their suppliers, well, you need to move to China.
01:47:01.000And if you move to China, we'll help you set up.
01:47:03.000If you don't move to China, we do no business no longer.
01:47:06.000And that has happened with countless number of companies.
01:47:08.000Companies like Rubbermaid, a great American company, which had a workforce in the hundreds of thousands of people in the 70s and the 80s.
01:47:15.000You know, almost no longer exists in that form anymore because they couldn't, you know...
01:47:19.000Initially, they didn't move to China, but they have now.
01:47:22.000So there's globalization as free trade.
01:47:54.000And the mom-and-pop store, the death of the mom-and-pop store, has been really criticized, both by people that are against Walmart, but also people that they're saying, you know, why don't you...
01:48:16.000Do you understand how Walmart is making things so cheap?
01:48:19.000Do you understand that the people that work there, with the number that you threw around, that for every Walmart worker we pay, what was the amount of money that every person has to pay in tax dollars for $1,300?
01:48:31.000If those things were just made more clear and people voted with their dollar more, do you think it's possible that something like Walmart can slowly die away?
01:48:39.000That these monolithic corporations that have this massive control over economies...
01:48:44.000But Walmart destroys communities to such an extent that people in these communities can only afford to shop at Walmart.
01:48:55.000Unless you put in policies which regulate trade and protect the working class, protecting the class, you're not going to solve the problem.
01:49:05.000And another great sort of hypocrisy is how, for example, the Republican Party presents itself as the party of small business, because it's a nice nostalgic picture that's painted in people's mind.
01:49:17.000They picture a ma and pa, small business operation, you know, on Main Street in middle America.
01:49:23.000But name a single policy that the Republican Party have helped small businesses with.
01:49:28.000Has the Republican Party protected the mar and par operation from these monopolies, these oligopolies?
01:49:34.000Do they give the same tax breaks that they do, these corporate subsidies that they do to these big organizations to drown the business out?
01:49:49.000That's not like a big rallying cry of neither the Democrats nor the Republicans.
01:49:53.000This is not something that anybody's bringing up.
01:49:55.000No, and that comes to political ignorance, and political ignorance born from either our education system or the fact that the mainstream media only reports titillating issues.
01:50:07.000We're still talking about flight missing MH370 or Anna Nicole Smith's death.
01:50:12.000It's a focus on celebrity and trivia rather than on real issues.
01:50:16.000There's no Walter Cronkite in the news anymore.
01:50:21.000There's television programs that highlight, they're entertainment programs that highlight things they think people are going to be interested in.
01:50:27.000But they don't have a desire for journalism.
01:50:44.000Do you get chills down your spine when you see things like what's going on with Edward Snowden, when you see what's going on with Julian Assange, when people do expose...
01:50:54.000Some really horrific things that our government's involved with.
01:50:58.000The underpinnings of our society itself.
01:51:00.000The mechanism involved in what's turning the wheels of the military-industrial complex.
01:51:06.000When that gets exposed, and you see some court just upheld the arrest warrant against Julian Assange.
01:51:39.000Yeah, the circumstances which I've read are so fishy and dubious, as you've said, but...
01:51:45.000You know, one of the most frustrating things is we would be more, the American population certainly would be more angry about the NSA overreach if there was a Republican in office.
01:51:56.000The fact that it's Obama in office has placated, you know, Democrats and the liberal class.
01:52:03.000They just think, oh, well, if Obama's happy with it, it must mean it's okay.
01:52:07.000And also part of the problem is, you know, the millennial generation, you know, it's, hey, look at me, you know.
01:52:15.000So we've become such a, hey, look at me, you know, Instagram selfies, Facebook accounts, Twitter, and they think the more exposure, the better.
01:52:23.000So when they talk about, you know, being watched, well, they like being watched.
01:52:30.000There is that thing, though, that if it was a Republican that was in office and you were dealing with this NSA leak where you find out that they're downloading every fucking email you have, every phone call you make is being recorded, people would be up in arms.
01:52:45.000But because of the fact that it's a Democrat, the very same people who would be up in arms are sort of letting it slide in a way.
01:52:54.000And that's how, you know, coming back to what I said earlier, you know, we're living in the most polarised moment in American history and we only see things and issues through the lens of our political parties.
01:53:05.000You know, we're deeply entrenched in our own camps and we only listen to the talking heads who feed red meat to our respective camps.
01:55:57.000Well, and it's also, too, I like to say that, you know, the South, you travel down to the Southern states, and individually, they're the nicest people on the planet.
01:56:05.000You know, Southern hospitality is a real thing.
01:56:07.000But put them all in the room together, and you're talking about the biggest bunch of bigoted assholes, you know, you've ever met.
01:56:13.000Talk about taking their guns and black men fucking their daughters.
01:56:44.000And it's fed upon by this right-wing echo chamber, which constantly keeps them fear of the external enemy, whether that's liberals, whether that's Muslims, whether it's, you know...
01:57:06.000You do have an echo chamber on the left.
01:57:08.000But in the left, echo chamber facts aren't made up.
01:57:13.000Whereas in that right-wing echo chamber, there's a total disregard for facts.
01:57:17.000Even Romney's head pollster, Neil, and I can't remember his last name, and I guess it doesn't matter, but he even said on camera, you know, facts don't matter, you know, in his campaign.
01:57:32.000I think there's a big wing in the establishment wing of the Republican Party that wants him to run.
01:57:37.000I don't think he will, but the establishment is desperate for a candidate because at the moment, Rand Paul is going to be the nomination, and he scares the life out of establishment Republicans because he's not a neocon.
01:57:50.000That's why Dick Cheney's in the media at the moment, trying to water down this isolationist, libertarian wing of the Republican Party, because as it stands today, he would be the nominee.
02:00:26.000That means these states can ban abortion, deny black people the right to attend restaurants, coloreds only.
02:00:35.000It also means they can allow gay marriage, they can allow people to smoke marijuana, they can allow people to do a lot of things that the federal government does not allow.
02:00:46.000So it's not entirely a negative thing, like the idea of states' rights.
02:00:57.000I think Ron Paul had some very good ideas.
02:00:59.000He's definitely a wacky old dude, but who's not?
02:01:03.000You know, how many old dudes stay alive, and especially in the world of politics, get to be that old and just don't have utter disdain for the established system?
02:01:14.000Yeah, I mean, there's this whole thing that we've been doing from the beginning of time, of profiting off of sending young men to death for things that they don't understand, sending over them to fight in foreign lands for some cause that they don't know what they're doing.
02:01:39.000And that was one that Ron Paul stood very firmly against.
02:01:43.000And he was one of the few people that was doing it, right or left.
02:01:46.000Yeah, and I'm with Ron Paul and Rand Paul when it comes to military, and I'm with both of them when it comes to ending the drug war.
02:01:54.000But, you know, thinking that Ron Paul or Rand Paul is good for America because they're anti-drug and anti-war is like thinking a Big Mac is good for you because it has lettuce and a pickle.
02:02:04.000But what is good for America, though, at this point in time?
02:02:07.000We've clearly established that you've got massive amounts of money that are financing politics.
02:02:13.000What is good for America is what has already worked in the past, and what has worked in the past was FDR's New Deal, and that is socialism.
02:02:25.000We went into the biggest economic crisis America has ever seen.
02:02:28.000We implemented social reforms, economic reforms, political reforms, and from the end of World War II to 1980, we built the great American middle class, where we built the most prosperous middle class the world has ever seen.
02:02:42.000We put a man on the moon, we built the interstate highway systems, we had the GI Bill, we had free education, we had access to education, we established Medicaid with the Great Society.
02:02:51.000Happy days, Laverne and Shirley, how good shit happened.
02:02:56.000My dad lived in America for 10 years during the 60s.
02:02:59.000His generation during that time, just the husband, just your dad worked.
02:03:03.000And you still had enough to afford a mortgage and have two cars.
02:03:07.000Now, both husband and dad and mother have to work.
02:03:11.000They can barely keep their head above water.
02:03:17.000We have to go back to that area, and we have to put in social, economic, and political reforms, which redistribute the wealth from the top back to the middle.
02:03:27.000Say, if someone came to you, you have all these radical ideas, you've written books about it, if someone was running for president, be it Elizabeth Warren, or whoever it is that reads your stuff, What would you implement?
02:03:39.000I mean, how would you fix this in a reasonable way that makes sense?
02:04:18.000We have to build higher-speed railways.
02:04:20.000That creates jobs, and that creates markets in new economies.
02:04:23.000We have to then build up the middle class and the working class with better labour reforms.
02:04:30.000We've gone from, you know, from the moment Reagan destroyed the union's world that was sacked the air traffic controllers in 1981, we've gone from America protected by collective bargaining went from something like 35% to 7% today.
02:04:44.000In every social democratic country like Australia and Scandinavia and Western Europe, Upwards of 85% of their populations are covered by collective bargaining.
02:04:53.000So the workers have a say or a shared prosperity.
02:04:56.000From 1954 to 1979, their productivity gains were shared equally between corporations and the working class.
02:05:05.000Today, only 12% of the gains are shared to the working class and middle class.
02:05:10.000That comes through the tax code, it comes through labor reform, access to healthcare and education and so forth.
02:05:18.000Do you trust the federal government to do the appropriate thing with the new taxes?
02:05:24.000Like, say if we did reform the tax code and say if we did change the contributions that corporations are forced to make, do you really trust the government as it's in place right now with all of its glorious incompetence to redistribute that money and do a good job with it?
02:05:40.000Well, you know, people will say, well, you know, government always does a shitty job.
02:05:45.000Corporations, 90% of corporations fail in their first five years.
02:05:49.000So government is not a perfect solution or a perfect be-all to end-all, but there has to be a balance where, you know, and we have that in other countries, where there's capital investment but also public investment.
02:06:00.000Public investment or liberalism, liberalism was never meant to be a left-wing thing.
02:06:07.000Liberalism was always meant to be a countervailing power to capitalism.
02:06:11.000Where capitalism falls short, liberalism was supposed to pick up the slack and protect the downtrodden, the people that capitalism leaves behind.
02:06:21.000And you need public investment to fund those initiatives.
02:06:29.000For every Solyndra that you have, you're going to have Tesla.
02:06:33.000And people in the Republican wing like to bash government spending on the failure of Solyndra, but they also forget that government funding has made Tesla an enormous success.
02:06:41.000Do you think that a part of what's going on now with the internet, that this access to information would also deter at least a certain percentage of waste because people would be more responsible for it?
02:06:52.000Because it would be more transparent than ever before?
02:06:54.000Well, the stimulus was the greatest public stimulus program in US history since FDR's New Deal.
02:07:02.000But it was also the most transparent spending of public spending we've ever seen.
02:07:06.000I mean, the federal government put up a website We've every vendor and contractor and the details of that available for anyone to see.
02:07:13.000I mean, the waste of that stimulus, which wasn't enough, the size of the stimulus should have been double the $800 billion that it was.
02:08:21.000And it was Clinton who deregulated Wall Street with Glass-Steagall, and that led to the chain of events which collapsed the entire fucking universe in 2008. Dirty Clinton.
02:08:30.000And we haven't had one except for Dodd-Frank, which is a pissy effort to regulate Wall Street.
02:08:37.000We're back to the same place we were leading up to the days of the crash in 08. What do you think the people that thought that they should let the banks fail?
02:08:56.000Well, you know, in my uninformed opinion, there's this great book called The Confidence Men.
02:09:02.000And it's really an insider's account of the Obama White House in the first four years.
02:09:09.000And obviously, as he came into office, he was dealing with the biggest economic catastrophe America's seen since the Great Depression.
02:09:15.000And he was listening to all the ideas going forward.
02:09:18.000There was Team A and Team B. Team B was the likes of Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner and Paul Rubin, who was a Clintonite.
02:09:27.000And Team A was Paul Volcker and so forth.
02:09:30.000Paul Volcker and Team A believed in letting him fail, totally get rid of this debt leverage vehicles that have created this fictitious wealth and fictitious products.
02:09:41.000In the end, Obama went with Team B to Larry Summers, who were there to protect the status quo of Wall Street.
02:09:47.000And you have these Wall Street bankers like the CEO of Bank of America saying, thank God Team B was chosen.
02:11:55.000Freakonomics makes a, you know, correlation doesn't prove causation, but they make a very strong argument that the only reason that violent crime has fallen in this country is because of Roe v.
02:12:38.000What future is there in America where education becomes unaffordable, where those who graduate are saddled with debt that they can never get out of, and where housing becomes unaffordable, and where there's no well-paying jobs, where you have stagnant wages, where you have a country where income has been totally redistributed to the world,
02:13:25.000Well, I wish it didn't involve killing a fetus.
02:13:29.000The reality of what an abortion is is something that people don't want to discuss.
02:13:34.000I've had these conversations with people who are liberal, and just when you talk about it flat, objectively, no ideology attached, what is going on?
02:13:43.000Well, there's a person that's growing in a body and we snuff it out.
02:13:46.000And at what point in time is it okay to snuff it out?
02:14:40.000How dare you joke about something so important?
02:14:42.000I mean, it's a very emotionally contentious minefield riddled issue.
02:14:46.000Well, it's also one that women, rightly so, take umbrage with men being able to decide what they can and can't do with their body.
02:14:54.000I'm not trying to decide, and I most certainly am pro-choice as far as how I vote, but when I look at the reality of what an abortion is, It disturbs me that because of ideology and because of the stance that they take left or right, that people will argue against the reality of what an abortion is.
02:15:13.000And I think when you do that, you do a disservice to the topic.
02:15:36.000I wish there was a better way, you know?
02:15:39.000I wish there was a way that you could immediately, you know, there was really, I have a joke about this, that it should be a better way to make people than sex.
02:15:45.000I mean, at one point in time, maybe that's what the aliens are all about.
02:15:57.000They probably got to a certain point in time and they realized, listen, we're not going to evolve unless we get rid of these animal instincts to breed and conquer and dominate.
02:16:05.000And the only way we're going to move to this really utopian society concept that everybody has, you know, the gradations, the steps away from being an animal, from being a violent predator to being some enlightened being.
02:16:19.000Somewhere along the line, you're going to have to get rid of sex.
02:16:21.000Well, you can ejaculate into a beaker, but I mean, I don't mean to brag.
02:16:51.000There's a lot of good to that struggle.
02:16:54.000There's a lot of great things that come out of struggle.
02:16:56.000But there's also the reality that if you had to extrapolate from here forth, from where we are to what we used to be, if you believe in evolution, if you're one of them, if you want to go back to the times where we were fucking living in caves and fighting off T-Rex or whatever the hell was going on,
02:17:13.000and extrapolate that a thousand years in the future, ten thousand years in the future, at some point in time, the elimination of sexual urges might be imperative.
02:19:13.000According to estimates from Scandinavian research, 90% of all the data the human race has ever produced has been generated in the past two years.
02:21:05.000Where we have universal health care and pensions and social security.
02:21:09.000That's why you can't be president, son of a bitch.
02:21:13.000I'm pessimistic until the liberal class in this country becomes a force again, because there is no countervailing power to capital in this country at the moment.
02:21:28.000Until the liberal class becomes a force again.
02:21:31.000What are the detriments, though, of having liberals in control?
02:21:35.000A bunch of pussies, that's what the detriments are.
02:21:37.000The fucking Al-Qaeda's gonna come over here and kick our ass.
02:21:40.000Bunch of pantyweights running this land.
02:24:15.000That's like talking about a culture that's, you know, Aboriginal culture that had some sort of collective government and comparing it to ours.
02:25:01.000Bill Clinton raised taxes on the rich three times, created 23 million jobs.
02:25:07.000George Bush, you know, came into power, put in the biggest tax cuts on the wealthy since World War II, and had a net loss of one-man jobs, not including, even if taking out the years of the Great Recession and the Great Crash out of consideration.
02:26:27.000So, you know, Syria, you're not going to stop it unless, you know, these borders are redrawn.
02:26:33.000So if isolation is, you could argue, well, how's isolation going to hurt when there is no military solution to these geopolitical problems?
02:26:42.000Well, the idea of the military solution is the suppression.
02:26:45.000If we're not solving it, at least we're suppressing the power from gathering steam and forcing, you know, some situation where they could collectively form some large threatening group.
02:26:58.000We're dissipating that in some sense by our military presence in these countries.
02:27:03.000Our foot on their neck is what's keeping them from growing large.
02:27:08.000Fighting over there, so we don't have to fight over here, so we're going to have freedom over here.
02:27:11.000I mean, that's the logic behind it, right?
02:27:13.000But we couldn't do with 150,000 troops.
02:27:15.000So how many troops do you want to keep in these countries for how long?
02:27:19.000Does it become like an endless occupation in every hotspot around the world?
02:27:23.000Well, I mean, I don't think that's a good idea, but it seems to be what it is.
02:27:27.000I mean, that seems to be what we're doing.
02:27:32.000I mean, you look at all the geopolitical issues which have come up in the last few years, everything from Syria to Libya to Russia to now Iraq.
02:27:41.000The Republicans have pleaded Obama to get military involved in all four of his situations.
02:27:45.000Three of those situations aren't even in the news anymore, and we would have had a military force there.
02:27:51.000So, you know, I think the Obama doctrine, for lack of...
02:27:55.000I know he doesn't like calling Obama doctrine.
02:28:14.000The reason Russia is withdrawing from there The eastern borders of Ukraine is because these sanctions have crippled the oligarchs in Russia, and they're, in turn, putting pressure on Putin to withdraw.
02:28:27.000There's a lot of people that argue it hasn't, and that Obama's policies have been disastrous.
02:28:31.000I mean, there was an article in Politico recently, I don't know if you read it, it was the man who broke the Middle East.
02:28:36.000It was this figure, this picture of a pensive Obama, like, looking old as fuck.
02:28:41.000But if anybody's hit the wall, like, aged while they've been in office, that poor bastard, Who knows what kind of pressure and stress they must be under to be in that position?
02:28:51.000I mean, I can't even imagine why anybody would want that.
02:28:54.000But this guy, Elliott Abrams, wrote this article about the policies and what it's done to the Middle East and how fucked up things are now.
02:29:03.000A lot of people don't think that the policies work, and they think that they've created more problems than they've solved.
02:29:37.000Putting military intervention doesn't solve that.
02:29:39.000We have to either put pressure on the Iraqi government or Maliki to be more inclusive.
02:29:46.000I mean, we fucked the pooch when the day...
02:29:49.000You know, I got friends who worked as security contractors, friends who worked for Global Corp who were in charge of monitoring the green zone during the early days of the occupation in Iraq.
02:29:59.000And they said, after the sidearm statue fell in Baghdad, you could walk freely without a sidearm even anywhere in Baghdad in those early days.
02:30:12.000debathicised or, you know, sacked the bathers out of the police force and the military, that created a civil war from that point on.
02:30:17.000Now, we put Maliki in power, or we endorse Maliki in power, and he's just perpetuated that policy of, you know, she is only, and soon he's become the underclass.
02:30:26.000So, it doesn't matter how many people we put there, it's not going to solve the problem.
02:30:51.000And these intellectual conversations always end up circular like that.
02:30:54.000I mean, if you're going to ask me to be a prick for a minute, I would say the solution is we put in another heavy autocratic regime that suppresses large segments of the population.
02:31:07.000Now, Muslims are going to be sending me death threats now.
02:31:22.000It's the same reason that Yugoslavia blew up.
02:31:24.000Because we told the Bosnians and the Croatians and the Serbs here, Here's your country, pretend to like each other, get along in governance as a single country, but they're different people.
02:31:34.000Iraq is three different countries under one, but we're telling them with British borders to get along nicely and to treat each other equally under a democratic government, when in these countries I don't even know what democracy is.
02:32:06.000Well, I mean, if you want to end violence here, you just draw a big circle and say, that's Shia-stan, and you draw another big circle and you say, that's Sunni-stan now.
02:32:15.000Get in your corners and stay the fuck there, and that's the end of it.
02:32:18.000But then they're going to say, you know, I like it over there.
02:32:20.000Yeah, and then the Saudis are going to go, what?
02:32:22.000We've got so much money and wealth, we don't want to share it with anyone else.
02:32:25.000And the Iranians are going to go, well, we have so much money and wealth, we're not going to share it with these poor Shia populations like Syria and, you know, in the south of Iraq.
02:32:34.000I mean, isn't that going to be just another Israel-Palestine type situation?
02:32:38.000Living right next door to people you hate that look exactly like you?
02:32:58.000And the answer is almost always, there's no answer.
02:33:01.000Yeah, and the only answer is us to stay the fuck out of there and just put, you know, our ally there is one of the most oppressive autocratic regimes in the world, Saudi Arabia.
02:33:12.000You know, if we don't support them, the price of oil will have oil shock.
02:33:17.000The American economy will be doomed even more.
02:33:20.000I mean, we're sitting on such a precipice of potential disaster, it's ridiculous.
02:33:25.000If the price of oil skyrockets, Japan is fucked.
02:33:28.000Japan is so dependent on us, America, keeping the price of oil down, because they have no oil of their own.
02:33:34.000I mean, oil goes skirting through the roof.
02:33:36.000I mean, not only are we going to have problems in the Middle East, we're going to have a worldwide catastrophe.
02:33:51.000Do you get any hope at all when you see a situation like what happened with Syria, where the United States at a press conference, Obama got on television, military...
02:35:11.000What about the people that lived there and had to deal with those evil fucking serial killer sons?
02:35:15.000Yeah, yeah, well, I mean, you've got deaf squads, you know, going door to door again now, knocking on doors in the Sunni neighborhoods, dragging people on the street and executing them right now.
02:35:55.000We just instantaneously get enlightened.
02:35:58.000We don't have time for you to take a mushroom and be reasonable for an hour and 20 minutes and then get the facts and then sort of contain it.
02:36:35.000Like those Agent Orange airplanes over Vietnam.
02:36:38.000Just fill the skies with enlightenment.
02:36:42.000They did that in Laguna Beach, just finished writing a great book, The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, and how Laguna Beach was the, not that I live there, but that was the center point for all the best Afghan hash into America.
02:36:56.000Yeah, and they had this big concert, I think it was in 67, out in the canyon of Laguna Beach, I don't know where that is, but...
02:37:02.000They dropped this cargo plane, flew over this crowd, 20,000 people, you know, it's like a Grateful Dead concert, and dropped acid all over the crowd, and it became like a five-day concert.
02:37:12.000I never knew this history of the city I don't live in.
02:37:56.000I've got an 18-year-old son and, you know, obviously him growing up in Indonesia, which has the lowest tolerance of drug use probably anywhere in the world.
02:38:04.000He's got a friend, actually, who went to jail for, you know, six months.
02:38:07.000He was 16 at the time for just having one joint.
02:39:10.000And that made me, from a journalistic point of view, really wanted to delve into what's in these religious texts, which would make somebody strap C4 to themselves and blow themselves a smithereen in front of a crowded...
02:39:21.000Well, within a crowded restaurant, taking women and children with them.
02:39:32.000I mean, it really is all about the mechanisms of the human mind, right?
02:39:36.000That ideologies can allow people or give people the motivation to do some crazy shit.
02:39:43.000Including things of their own selves, and not just ideologies that are accepted, established ideologies like Islam or Christianity, but like those Heaven's Gate guys who cut their balls off and fucking wore purple Nikes and waited for the spaceship behind the comet.
02:39:58.000There's something about the human mind that is so easily influenced by An alpha, or an idea, or a message from a higher power, whatever it is.
02:40:10.000There's something about the human mind that's so easily influenced.
02:40:14.000It's truly a dangerous but malleable thing.
02:40:17.000We want to believe in something higher than ourselves.
02:40:23.000Is there something higher than ourselves that we just haven't accessed yet?
02:40:26.000Well, I think our highest sense of consciousness, as you said before, our ego can't let go of the fact that once we're dead, we're dead.
02:40:34.000I don't think our ego can accept the fact that we're really nothing more than a virus.
02:40:38.000We're a bacteria that occupies the planet.
02:40:43.000People who do believe, you know, I'm not an evangelical atheist by any means, and there's a lot of those guys, but I'm not.
02:40:51.000But I always like, if I'm going to give some sort of literature other than my own books to someone who's religious, it's Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Tot.
02:41:00.000I mean, that really puts into perspective, you know, the meaningless of the human existence.
02:42:19.000I think if we could see the stars on a daily basis, I think we would be a different attitude.
02:42:24.000Slowly but surely, I think people would establish a different attitude.
02:42:27.000Just the sheer humility that comes with looking at the stars, just gazing up at that thing.
02:42:32.000You know, and just, if you want to look for a greater power, you want to look for a greater thing than us, just the vastness of the infinity that you're looking at is enough.
02:42:42.000Because when it's just black, it's too easy to ignore.
02:42:45.000You look up, you see a couple dots, yeah, well the moon's out tonight.
02:42:48.000You know, you get back to your house and you watch fucking Cardiacians and fall asleep with your socks on like a fucking idiot.
02:43:39.000In the end he was, but remember when those Iran-Contra trials were going on and they asked him, yeah, like, did you really sell arms to Iran?
02:43:58.000Well, you know, his son, Ronald Reagan, same name, in his book about his dad, he said, yeah, in the last two years, he was in full mode dementia.
02:44:11.000Probably the CIA. The CIA dosed him up with some crazy shit to keep him stupid so he couldn't tell.
02:44:17.000He just started a new conspiracy website somewhere.
02:50:30.000Go to O-N-N-I-T. Use the code word ROGAN and save 10% off any and all supplements.
02:50:35.000We'll be back in a little bit with the Fight Companion podcast that will air live that coincides with the Fox Sports 1 broadcast which is at 7 o'clock tonight.