In this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, the comedian and podcaster joins us to talk about the latest in the war on terror, the rise of ISIS, and whether or not there's any good reason why the United States should leave Syria and Iraq. We also talk about why it's a good idea to get out of the Middle East, and why it would be a terrible idea to stay there. Also, we discuss why we should have left Vietnam, and what it would have done to the world if we had left it a year earlier, and if it was better than what happened in the Vietnam War, which is not a good thing at all. Joe also talks about why he thinks we should've left Vietnam a year ago, and how that would have been a better thing for the world. And, of course, we talk about how much better we would have had it if we left the war in Vietnam, which was a bad thing. Thanks to Russell for coming on the pod, and for being on the show, and also for being kind enough to share some of his thoughts on the war. We really appreciate it, and we hope you enjoy it! Thank you, Russell! -Jon Sorrentino -Joe Rogan: Train by Day, Podcast by Night, All Day, All Night, By Night, by Day (featuring Russell Russell Russell: Train By Night) Jon and Samir: Train Train: All Day All Day by Night by Day: By Night: By Day, by Night - by Night: by Day and All Day - by Day & All Day By Day: by Night! by Night? by Night and Night by Night , by Day/By Day, By Day & By Night? by Night/By Night: , All Day/All Day by Day? , , By Day/Night? by Norm & Night? , by Night By Day by Morning, by Morning/By Evening, by Evening, By Morning, By Evening, by Day! by Evening/Late? - By Night/Late, by After Night, , Evening/Night, By Even Afternoon/Late Afterday, All Day & Evening? by Day Afternoon, By Late? (By Night? By Day? By Evening? By Late Afternoon? By Night! , What's Too Late? by Evening? ?
00:00:24.000We were saying right before the podcast got started, it's always a weird thing when people sit down.
00:00:29.000It's like you don't want to talk too much because there's so much to say on the air.
00:00:32.000You don't want to get it out before you get to air.
00:00:34.000But I was saying it's appropriate having you on today because we're just now going to war.
00:00:41.000with Syria and we were just talking about how bizarre this ISIS thing is and how it's just American people said you know we don't want to go to war with Syria it was this big thing and Obama was on television everybody just openly rejected it left and right it was pretty much the American public was like we're done with war like we want to get out of Afghanistan we don't want this Iraq thing anymore we don't want to go to Syria and so everything just sort of calmed down And then all of a sudden,
00:01:13.000And this ISIS thing, different names, ISIS, I've seen it, ISIL. And like I was saying, I don't like to get conspiracy-oriented because it's so easy to do.
00:01:26.000But if you wanted to, you would say, well, this is obviously...
00:01:32.000I mean, so there's two kinds of conspiracies.
00:01:34.000There's an open conspiracy, and then there's a closed conspiracy, right?
00:01:37.000So I think this is sort of an open conspiracy.
00:01:39.000A lot of people are saying, both left and right, by the way, that ISIS was really a creation of American foreign policy.
00:01:47.000There were a bunch of dudes sitting in a room in the White House with cigars and saying, hey, we need to create this monster in order to sort of impose American will abroad.
00:01:55.000But that through many, many conscious decisions over many years in the Middle East through direct interventions militarily and otherwise, they created the conditions for this bunch of psychopathic 20 year olds with RPGs and swords beheading people, right?
00:02:09.000So, you know, creating a vacuum in Iraq, right, by going to war there, by removing the dictator who was at least holding control over the people and over people like this, funding the rebels in Syria, and also, more importantly, a lot of people miss this, you know, one of the things that's been happening,
00:02:26.000if you look at it just from a material standpoint over the last 12 years at least, is that the United States has been flooding that area with weapons, right?
00:02:36.000So if you look at, there's a great piece, I think it was in The Guardian a few weeks ago, ISIS is using American-made weapons, right, that have been coming into that region, mostly into Iraq, but elsewhere for just decades, right?
00:02:49.000So it's just, it creates this, it creates a situation where it's sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy, sort of an open conspiracy, because you could certainly say that American foreign policymakers And all of them, really, and that's Bush, and that's Obama,
00:03:05.000and that's all of them, really want to have an American presence, a military strong, a military presence around the world, and in particular in the Middle East where all the oil is.
00:03:14.000So, you know, I'm not saying it was deliberate, it wasn't a deliberate choice to create this beast that's called ISIS, but it certainly serves their purposes.
00:03:48.000I mean, I think that was the answer in Vietnam, right?
00:03:50.000That's what the anti-Vietnam War called for for many, many years was out now.
00:03:54.000Not a gradual withdrawal, which is what the politicians called for because that's the, quote, responsible thing to do, but out now.
00:04:01.000And I think history proves that was the correct answer to that, right?
00:04:04.000I think that if the United States had left immediately in 1964, 65, name a year, name a time, it would have been a better thing for everyone.
00:04:23.000We would have had the same outcome, essentially, but with far fewer.
00:04:26.000And then also, and we've got to talk about blowback, right?
00:04:29.000So, you know, the carpet bombing of not just Vietnam, but several countries during that war caused untold numbers of people to hate our fucking guts, right?
00:05:04.000So it actually played into the hands of the communists.
00:05:06.000And the very same thing is happening and has been happening in the Middle East for many, many years.
00:05:10.000David Petraeus, of all people, said before the Senate about three years ago, he said, U.S. funding of Israel in particular, U.S. funding of all these corrupt regimes in the Middle East and our interventions is the number one recruiting tool for al-Qaeda, right?
00:05:25.000And it's the number one recruiting tool for ISIS. They say, look, here's these infidels who have been invading us and killing our people and taking control of our resources for decades, right?
00:05:37.000And so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy if you want to maintain a presence there, which they do, the United States does, you keep creating your own enemies to fight against.
00:06:05.000Pretty much no one thinks it's a good idea now.
00:06:07.000Today, in hindsight, everyone thinks it was a terrible idea.
00:06:10.000The only good that came out of it was getting Saddam Hussein out, getting rid of his psychopathic sons, but Now look at all the shit you have there, and you have a million people dead.
00:06:28.000So my position is let's do none, right?
00:06:30.000But when you have a guy like a Hitler or someone along those lines that's causing genocide and planning to take over the world and...
00:06:38.000So for Hitler, right, there's a large stream of thought among historians that...
00:06:44.000Very respectable stream of thought that the Nazis rose to power out of conditions created by the Allies after World War I. So that, you know, extracting all these resources through forced payments from the Germans as reparations after World War I really laid the groundwork for the rise of this totalitarian who said,
00:07:06.000hey, look what those Westerners did to us.
00:07:16.000We need to get rid of these foreign influences, like Jews, who were considered to be foreign, right?
00:07:21.000In essence, because they were a nationless people.
00:07:24.000And the communists who had allegiance to no state, right?
00:07:28.000And so many people have argued, not just wacko conspiracy theorists, that it was actually American and Western foreign policy in the early 20th century that really made the rise of Nazism possible.
00:07:40.000Like that's the greatest, possibly the greatest example of blowback in human history.
00:07:46.000It seems like it's a perpetual cycle then.
00:07:48.000It seems like everything we've ever done in the past has led us to do more things in the future to combat the blowback from the things we've done in the past.
00:07:56.000Yeah, so I mean if you look at – but if you look at the history of foreign policy – and by the way, that's the book I'm working on now.
00:08:01.000So this is a very appropriate topic for me.
00:08:04.000You know, you will see beginning really even in the early 18th century – Sorry, late 18th century with some of the founding fathers, but certainly through the 19th century and certainly through the 20th century, one continuous thread among policymakers,
00:08:21.000which is we must change the world in our image, right?
00:09:12.000Yeah, so good luck, motherfuckers, imposing Sharia law on the whole world, right?
00:09:18.000And so a lot of what my work is on now, and I'm not the only one who's done this, is to look at what's actually going on, you know, in places like Tehran, and in places like Riyadh, and in places like Cairo.
00:09:30.000What are sort of ordinary folks, Iranians and Egyptians and Saudis, actually doing all day long?
00:09:37.000And you can figure it out really quickly by simply looking at the skyline in those cities.
00:09:42.000And what you'll see is you'll see these big apartment buildings, these big cinder block apartment buildings.
00:09:46.000And on top of those apartment buildings are dozens, sometimes hundreds of satellite dishes, which are streaming in Fox, The Simpsons, porn like you wouldn't believe.
00:11:11.000Well, I mean, so I was trained at Columbia University, got my PhD there in American history, and sort of found that historians in general, but in particular the historians I was being trained by, You know, they consider themselves to be left-wing and radical,
00:11:27.000but there was a real limitation on that.
00:11:29.000And one of the limitations was that they had a real disdain for what normal people do all day long, like what they're doing in Riyadh and Tehran.
00:11:37.000They had a real disdain for sort of the normal activities of working class ordinary folks.
00:11:42.000Like they thought that what people watched on TV was retarded and should not be studied and they shouldn't be doing it.
00:11:52.000What you should be studying is the Senate and you should be studying sort of economics and you should be studying foreign policy.
00:11:58.000And what I found was, you know, first of all, that's what, of course, most Americans do is they consume that kind of stuff much more than they do political speeches, right?
00:12:06.000And more importantly, kind of in that popular culture, and in particular the stuff that we most look down on, what you'll find is stuff like sex and freedom and drugs and drinking and freedom and people doing what they want to do,
00:12:22.000sort of opposed to and against kind of our Puritan tradition, right?
00:12:27.000So that America has always been split together.
00:12:29.000Between its puritanism, which is really powerful still, in particular in our formal culture, like in politics and what they tell us in schools, right?
00:12:38.000And hedonism, which is what we get in popular culture, right?
00:12:42.000So it's this very weird schizophrenic culture, right?
00:12:45.000There's this conflict between the two.
00:12:47.000And what I found was that people who call themselves left-wing and radical are actually really wedded to the puritanical side.
00:12:54.000That they're really about people being disciplined and controlled and working hard and the work ethic and all that stuff.
00:13:00.000And I know you've talked about, I've heard you talk about the work ethic on here and elsewhere, but we can get into what that actually means because there's also confusion about what that means.
00:13:11.000I was like, first of all, yo, I'm walking the streets of New York City, went to Columbia, and nobody looks like these people in my history books, including Rosa Parks, who's on your wall here, and Martin Luther King, who wrote a lot, and we can talk about this.
00:14:03.000I started writing my lectures and my classes at Barnard College, which is the women's college affiliated with Columbia.
00:14:09.000I started looking at American history through that lens.
00:14:11.000I started looking at American history through the lens of this conflict, this eternal conflict, between discipline and order and community and nation on one hand and Puritanism.
00:14:21.000And on the other hand, popular culture and sex and freedom and desire.
00:14:25.000And I found this whole new way of telling the story.
00:14:28.000And I found all these people on one side sort of just behaving on their own, doing the things they wanted to do, that were violating these puritanical principles.
00:14:37.000People like prostitutes, people like drunks, people like criminals, people like gays, people like slaves who were dancing when you weren't supposed to dance.
00:14:46.000And on the other hand, all these guardians of the moral order who weren't just the founding fathers and the generals and the inventors, but it was people like abolitionists who were opposed to slavery, but they were opposed to slavery for funky reasons we can talk about, and suffragists who wanted women to be just as upstanding as men and to not drink and not have sex,
00:15:34.000Because I find that anytime when you get one person that gets to communicate to a large group of people and they have to listen to you, especially if parts of their future rely upon you, like your grades, your GPA, it's important to pass this class.
00:15:49.000And so this person has this position of power and influence that's very unusual.
00:15:54.000And because of that, a lot of times...
00:15:56.000People, they get into that position of being a professor, they push their ideology in a very rigid and inflexible way.
00:16:46.000And the second thing is, and this is the real problem, I think, in higher education, which makes me crazy every single day, is that right now, higher ed, in particular in the social sciences and humanities, is on lockdown by the academic left.
00:17:01.000And I come out of the left, and I'm left-wing in a lot of ways, and in some ways I'm not.
00:17:04.000But what I hate is that there's just almost no variety of discourse.
00:17:56.000No, I mean, so it's all historical, right?
00:17:58.000So if you look at the history of higher education, and a lot of people forget this, you know, higher education in this country is only about two centuries old, and as a major mass institution.
00:18:07.000I mean, the right-wing conservatives controlled the joint until the 1960s, right?
00:18:14.000So what was being taught at Harvard and Yale and Princeton and Cal and UCLA was...
00:18:19.000It was things like capitalism is awesome and black people are inferior and women should be in the home.
00:18:25.000I mean, conservatives had that whole place on lockdown.
00:18:29.000There was a monoculture on the campuses.
00:18:31.000Then what comes along is the 1960s and all those movements, all those social movements.
00:18:36.000So the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement, feminist movement, etc., etc.
00:18:39.000And what happened was those people, because their movements either sort of succeeded and they were considered to be done, or they were Couldn't succeed.
00:18:48.000They couldn't really create a revolution, the kind that they wanted.
00:18:52.000The only place they found that they could go and have a job was colleges as professors.
00:18:57.000So en masse, that generation, the new left of the 1960s, went into graduate school and they all became professors.
00:19:05.000And that's who's been basically teaching college for the last 50 years.
00:19:10.000So I'm of the generation that was trained by them.
00:19:13.000And so there's some changes going on, but And basically, even most people my age, I'm in my 40s, but in my generation, most of us are still sort of influenced by that generation.
00:19:23.000So it was this very concerted, not a conspiracy, but it was a pretty deliberate attempt, in some ways it was conscious, to take over the university.
00:19:31.000That was the only place we could have this radical discourse and get paid for it and have a career, right?
00:19:43.000Maybe parents that have a different ideology and send the kid off to school and the kid comes back with like some really, you know, white privilege, male privilege.
00:21:05.000So this sexual assault, either, depending on your point of view, epidemic or hysteria, the epicenter of it has been Occidental, where I've taught.
00:21:24.000So what happened was in 2010 or 2011, the United States Department of Education sent a letter to every university and college in the country that receives federal aid of some kind, which is basically all of them, right, because of student loans.
00:21:36.000Those are backed by the federal government.
00:21:38.000And said, if you want to continue receiving federal aid for your students, you must adjudicate every student.
00:21:47.000Every accusation of sexual assault on your campus among students.
00:21:53.000Which means you have to have basically a tribunal of staff and maybe students, but usually it's staff and faculty.
00:22:02.000So it's a panel of three or four English professors and the dean of students and the facilities guy or whoever, maybe some students.
00:22:11.000Asking, you know, adjudicating this case.
00:22:13.000So the woman says, well, we were both drunk and whatever.
00:22:19.000She tells her story and he tells his story and says, I absolutely did not rape him.
00:22:24.000She says he absolutely did rape me because there's no witnesses almost ever in these cases, right?
00:22:29.000What can they then do to decide who's responsible here?
00:22:32.000Or is there someone who's responsible?
00:22:34.000And what they do is, and I've talked to people who have been on these boards, the only thing you can do is ask about their sexual histories.
00:22:41.000So you have English professors asking 19-year-olds how many times they've had sex in the last year, what kinds of sex, with whom, how did they feel about it, and then asking the guy the same things, right?
00:22:53.000And then from that information, and usually it's only that, because that's all you got in most cases, right, with acquaintance rape.
00:22:59.000It's two people in a room, a dark room, and with the door closed, almost always.
00:23:36.000So one of the things that's been infuriating for a lot of people, and a lot of feminists, by the way, Is that, you know, in response to, and acquaintance rape definitely fucking happens.
00:24:06.000So one answer that's been proffered by many people, many feminists including, has been to say, hey, don't get blackout drunk at the frat house on Friday night to women, right?
00:24:18.000And that has been called victim-blaming.
00:24:22.000Now, if you were to leave it at that, right, say that is the sole answer to this problem, you know, tell women not to get drunk at the frat house on Friday night, maybe that is victim blaming, but that's not what any of us are saying, right?
00:24:35.000Well, that's like saying the Rutgers kid that got killed by a bear two days ago.
00:25:42.000Is moralize against the rapists and tell them they're bad.
00:25:45.000Now, many of those feminists have agreed that it's a very, very tiny percentage of men who are rapists and that most rapes are committed by something like 4% of men or something like that, or less than 4%.
00:27:16.000It's these really emo, feminist men who just look like they're just clamoring for female acceptance and love and appreciation, and they're just going way out of their way to talk about this.
00:27:29.000I can understand if this is a personal issue.
00:27:31.000I can understand that anybody would be concerned that a human being would take advantage of another human being.
00:27:37.000But to make it your primary concern, to make it like this thing that you focus and concentrate on on a regular basis all the time, it's almost like a rape fetish.
00:28:00.000But it was these, like, really fucked up, socially retarded men who made this video where they were apologizing for all the things that women had to endure for men.
00:28:10.000But these guys were just creepy fucking weirdos.
00:29:19.000There's a couple drinks where you're getting silly and you do, I mean, you might fuck somebody in a regretful way, like say, ah, I shouldn't have slept with that guy.
00:30:36.000So there's another thing that's very, you see, one of the things I do is I sort of try to expose how conservative a lot of the left is, because they don't even realize it.
00:31:12.000It's sort of set apart from everything else in the world.
00:31:15.000Well, especially then, if you say, even if it's consensual, and you're conscious, and you're awake, and you enjoy it, and you have fun, if you're intoxicated, it is rape.
00:32:17.000The fact that that's not an open and shut case, it exposes the lunacy of this ideology that, if exposed to the vast majority of intelligent adult Americans, they would put their foot down and go, wait, wait, what the fuck did you just say?
00:33:31.000And I understand that that's what people are kind of trying to struggle with and are trying to come up with these new devices to stop it from happening.
00:33:36.000I think the devices they're coming up with are terrible.
00:34:03.000She protested against the police force in the Bay Area, police forces in the Bay Area, to take rape seriously, which cops didn't do forever until then.
00:34:50.000Yeah, I mean, it's one of those weird subjects, too, where if you discuss it, you become a rape apologist, you become...
00:34:58.000I mean, you're not even allowed to deviate from the ideology.
00:35:02.000If you deviate from it in any way, shape, or form, It's a very strict dogma.
00:35:08.000I mean, this is non-consensual because she can't consent because she's had a drink.
00:35:15.000I've even seen it written that ladies, like a feminist, wrote this blog saying, women don't have sex with your man if he's drunk because he can't consent.
00:35:25.000Which is the most ridiculous shit ever.
00:35:27.000I mean, the whole idea being that sex is evil.
00:35:41.000We both decide, you know, if a guy and a girl take martial arts together and the guy and the girl are drinking and the girl wants to wrestle, is she not allowed to consent that she actually wants to wrestle because she's been drinking?
00:36:50.000That there's this belief that, you know, if I had sex that I didn't really feel good about with my boyfriend or not, and we were really drunk and I woke up and I was like, ugh, I don't like this dude and this was not okay...
00:37:01.000It's like, I think people are trained to think that they're damaged.
00:37:06.000That this is a really terrible thing that happened to them.
00:39:20.000Got to get up at 9 o'clock, and I go to the set, and I'm going to be there for three hours, and we're going to have lunch at noon, and they come home, right?
00:39:26.000I mean, every person in the porn industry I've ever known has said this about it.
00:39:38.000I definitely think you're on to something when it comes to the Puritan roots of this idea that sex is evil and that kids, you know, away from their houses for the first time at 18 years of age having sex in a dorm room.
00:39:52.000There's also the thing that happens, too, where the people that you communicate with after the fact can tell you what a horrible thing has happened to you.
00:40:01.000And they do it with, like, this rabid intention.
00:40:03.000And that was one of the parts of the story that I found quite fascinating.
00:40:08.000Like, the friends of the guy versus the friends of the girl.
00:40:31.000Well, yeah, it's even worse than that, and now I'm really going to get fired.
00:40:36.000One of the things that happens, and it happened in this case from what we can tell from the evidence, is that the average reporting time for sexual assault on campuses is close to a year after the alleged assault.
00:41:15.000Not only convinced her that it was rape, but also did a demographic profiling of the guy and said, well, he belongs to these particular demographic groups who are likely to be rapists.
00:42:04.000That you could be that boy who's become a valedictorian because you've struggled through high school and kicked ass and tried to get great grades and done your work and studied and under the supervision of your parents and tutors and what have you, and you're looking forward to having this great career,
00:42:20.000and someone has looked at that hard work and said, oh, he's most likely a rapist.
00:44:04.000I think that the men at Occidental who have been accused of sexual assault over the last few years, I think, I'm guessing, belong to those categories.
00:44:25.000Yeah, and also, you know, one of the most enraging things about it, and I've talked to people who are actually victims of rape about this, right?
00:46:05.000And I'm not trivializing traumatic incidences that really get etched into people's consciousness, but there is a reality that eyewitness accounts are very difficult to corroborate because people, their memories suck.
00:46:20.000Human memory, and I've said this on this podcast many times, my memory is dog shit.
00:46:57.000Well, there's also subjectivity, right, and interpretation.
00:46:59.000So you and I could watch the exact same thing happen right in front of us right now and have a different interpretation of what happened.
00:47:05.000And having someone who's an influential person talk to you about those events will shape your perception of them.
00:47:11.000So it's really egregious to convince someone that a terrible thing has happened to them when they're not sure that it's happened to them, right?
00:47:16.000What is the vested interest in making sure that this person decides a terrible thing has happened?
00:47:23.000Are you dealing with people that don't like men?
00:47:26.000Are you dealing with people that don't like young boys?
00:47:28.000Are you dealing with people that don't like masculine sexuality and they're trying to suppress it in any form possible to mute or neuter men in this way?
00:47:38.000To make it so they're terrified to have sex with someone unless they have written consent during various stages of the sexual act?
00:47:45.000I would like to record on record that we're about to have sex and you are sober.
00:48:27.000Well, there is this sort of phenomenon that some of us have identified, which we call the white savior complex, which, remember Coney 2012?
00:48:43.000But that's kind of like the greatest example of that.
00:48:46.000A really awesome writer named Teju Cole.
00:48:49.000I'm not sure how he pronounces his name that way, but it's T-E-J-U Cole, an amazing writer.
00:48:54.000He's actually a fiction writer, but he talked about the Coney 2012 and the white savior complex.
00:49:00.000Which, you know, and this is a lot of my work is on this.
00:49:02.000It's mostly white people, almost all elite people.
00:49:08.000It is almost entirely Western, European, and American people who take it upon themselves to save their social inferiors, right?
00:49:17.000And they want to go out and find them, first of all, find these poor, sad people in the world, wherever they may be, whether it's in the ghetto in Compton or Or whether it's in Rwanda, or wherever, and go save them and change their lives and uplift them and make them more like us.
00:49:33.000It's sort of the, it is the psychological and cultural core of imperialism.
00:49:39.000And to me, it has led to the deaths of millions of people.
00:49:42.000So, you know, what did Coney 12 result in?
00:49:45.000It literally resulted in, I think, 500 US servicemen being on the ground shooting people.
00:49:50.000Now, you could say that was necessary to save those kids from that guy.
00:49:54.000And just so happens, historically, it almost never ends at that, right?
00:49:58.000It almost always ends in something else.
00:50:00.000A bigger war, bigger shooting war erupts because of this.
00:50:02.000And now we need to conquer the whole country, as in Iraq, right?
00:50:06.000That was a humanitarian mission, remember?
00:51:15.000So because you need to have a victim, you need to have someone who's suffering, you need to have someone who's oppressed, right, to save them.
00:51:45.000I don't want to speak for what's going on in her mind, but I do think it does line up with Coney 2012. That you have to create an oppressor, you have to create a victim in order to save them, so that you become the knight, the white knight.
00:51:58.000Well, how do they justify the boy being responsible, but the girl not being responsible?
00:53:52.000Yeah, I thought it wasn't, I mean, you didn't say this, but I thought it's not a coincidence that a lot of white rock like that is very depressing.
00:55:16.000No, it's, yeah, it's, so much of American culture from the beginning has been defined in that way.
00:55:23.000So, like, you know, white people have sort of prided themselves on being, you know, very serious and upright and disciplined and controlled and And therefore they should be the president, right?
00:55:34.000Or the CEO or, you know, the professor, right?
00:55:38.000And they are the good Puritans, right?
00:55:40.000They invented the shit and they adhered to it more than others.
00:55:43.000Not perfectly, of course, but they adhered to it more than others.
00:55:45.000And they always took that as a source of pride, right?
00:56:19.000The Protestant or Puritan work ethic is, and this is what they said, work in itself is good, no matter what you get for it.
00:56:25.000If you don't get paid at all, if you don't make anything out of it, it's still you should work, right?
00:56:29.000That's what they've always said, right?
00:56:30.000So you get valorized for just working hard, even if you get nothing for it.
00:56:34.000So that's been kind of this, to me and a lot of historians, it's been kind of like the central cultural split in our country for 400, 500 years between those two.
00:56:44.000And you kind of nailed it in that bit, and I was kind of stunned.
00:56:46.000I was like, oh my God, he sort of gets it.
00:56:47.000Although you didn't connect it to race.
00:56:50.000But the roots of it, and this is in my book, this is what I do with it, you know, I try to find the roots of it.
00:56:56.000I'm like, how did this happen that black people created jazz and rock and roll?
00:58:28.000You know, saying things you're not supposed to say in polite company, you know, talking about fucking in the 1950s and 60s when you definitely weren't supposed to do it then.
00:59:00.000When I saw Live in Concert when I was 12 years old, I, first of all, fell out of my chair in the theater, and I was like, that changed my life.
01:00:02.000So, yeah, you got to understand, like, Puritanism and American culture from Plymouth Rock all the way through the 19th century first, okay, which was unbelievably repressive, okay?
01:00:15.000And this is, everyone agrees on this, right?
01:00:20.000This first surgeon general of the United States, Benjamin Rush, wrote these books about how masturbation caused blindness and death and epilepsy.
01:00:28.000There were just, like, medical journals were full of this shit about how sex was terrible and would kill you and cause paralysis and all this stuff.
01:00:37.000One of the fastest growing industries in the early 19th century, right after the United States was founded, was for devices to stop people from masturbating.
01:00:49.000And these hobbles that kept women's legs together, that had a lock and key, and then chastity belts, everybody knows about that.
01:00:56.000It was just this amazingly comically repressive culture around sex, and then also around work.
01:01:02.000So the Puritan work ethic, that work is good no matter what you get for it, and you're doing the devil's work if you're not working, was in five-year-old children's textbooks.
01:01:14.000Kindergarteners were taught that playing with their toys was the devil's work.
01:01:19.000And they were taught to be useful in their lives and then to find a profession and a vocation when they're in kindergarten, right?
01:01:25.000And it just suffused the whole society.
01:01:28.000So like every political leader, every business leader, and certainly all the religious leaders, everybody, and novels that were written, poetry, it's just all about work all the time to be godly and never have sex, even in marriage.
01:01:42.000There was even a lot of talk through the 19th century about even having sex with your wife.
01:02:14.000I mean, one thing, one of the more common, one of the most common explanations is industrial capitalism, right?
01:02:20.000So this is also the time of the first factories, you know, and this is the time when people are moving from the farms into cities and working in sort of industrial capitalist formats, right, where they're sitting at a table and there's a division of labor and you put together the machinery or the shoe piece by piece and da-da-da.
01:02:36.000So that required, you know, that requires a lot of discipline, right?
01:02:40.000It requires getting people to stop drinking and stop fornicating and to, you know, be committed to work is a good thing.
01:02:46.000I'm not sure that's, I mean, that's a decent explanation.
01:02:48.000I'm not sure if that really explains it entirely.
01:02:52.000First of all, because it kind of pre-exists it.
01:02:53.000You know, the Puritans were way before all that happened.
01:04:03.000They also believed in moving your body as a good thing.
01:04:05.000It was a beautiful thing to them, moving it in sensual ways, dancing and otherwise.
01:04:10.000They didn't believe that sex outside of marriage was wicked.
01:04:12.000It was going to destroy your life, especially for women.
01:04:15.000They thought that women who had sex outside of marriage were fine, that it was no problem.
01:04:20.000They come over here, and then, as slaves, they have zero, of course, incentive to internalize, to adopt this white person's culture, right?
01:04:32.000Not only that, they're sort of physically barred from it, right?
01:04:35.000So citizenship, they're not given citizenship, right?
01:04:38.000And that's not good, because you don't get to vote, and you don't get equal protection under the law, and all those good things that come with citizenship.
01:04:44.000What people miss about it is that, here and everywhere, citizenship is also a cultural thing, right?
01:04:50.000You're considered a good American if you do particular things.
01:04:53.000And in that case, it meant putting your body in a walking prison.
01:04:58.000That's what a good citizen did, a good white person.
01:07:22.000Yeah, so from the beginning, I called them America's original renegades.
01:07:27.000From the beginning, black working class culture has been the main, not the only, but the main counterpoint of To this Puritanism that's been with us ever since.
01:10:53.000When all three of those groups first got here, so the Irish was early 19th century, Italians and Jews was late 19th, early 20th century, when they came here in large numbers for the first time, they were not considered white immigrants.
01:11:04.000So people who look just like me, white as hell, and not only just not white, the Irish were considered to be Negroes.
01:11:14.000Yeah, because they came with this culture that was nowhere near white Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture that we've been talking about.
01:11:21.000So the Irish were known as the greatest dancers on earth, even better than blacks.
01:11:26.000They invented tap dancing with blacks in New York City.
01:11:29.000They could give a fuck about working, except how much it got them in terms of wages.
01:11:35.000They believed in drinking beginning at 8 a.m.
01:11:38.000and continuing all the way through the day during work.
01:11:42.000When they got here, they lived with and around blacks because they were poor.
01:11:48.000So in New York and Philadelphia, Boston, they lived in black neighborhoods.
01:11:52.000And often you see a lot of cohabitation and you see a lot of what's called miscegenation, blacks and whites having sex together, procreating.
01:12:03.000It was very common and a lot of discrimination against them because of that.
01:12:06.000And also there's very little evidence of racism among Irish Americans during that period, which is weird now because if you think about it, I mean, Irish Americans for the last hundred or so years have kind of been, unfortunately, the leaders in many ways of white American racism.
01:12:18.000But then there's very little evidence of it.
01:12:21.000And then what happened was they were like, wait, We'd like to get the vote.
01:12:26.000I mean, they were getting the vote, but not in mass.
01:12:42.000One of them was to distance themselves from blacks, so they moved out of the neighborhoods.
01:12:46.000To enter the army and serve in the Mexican-American War and the Civil War to prove that they were good white American civilians and soldiers.
01:13:14.000So there were these big anti-black riots called the New York City Draft Riots in 1863, which was just this huge pogrom lynching, mass lynching of blacks in the streets of New York City.
01:13:26.000And that was mostly Irish people doing that.
01:13:53.000So yeah, you could pay someone to go to war in your place, is what I'm trying to say.
01:13:57.000So it was resentment against that, but it actually sort of very quickly turned toward blacks because it was a good, wide belief that the war was on behalf of blacks, right, to free them.
01:14:06.000So the Irish were kind of pissed off at the rich people who were, you know, not going to war when they should have been.
01:14:13.000But then it very quickly turned to an anti-black mass lynching because they were blaming these guys for this war that a lot of these Irish guys were volunteering to go fight in.
01:14:24.000But anyway, so if you look at social scientists in the early 19th century when the Irish were coming in big numbers, they're like, they're Negroid, they're really from Africa, or they're chimpanzees.
01:14:36.000There was a lot of theory among social scientists and so-called scientists that the Irish were actually apes.
01:16:04.000So by the end of the 19th century, just like less than 100 years, all the social scientists, they're doing all these taxonomies of the world's races, right?
01:16:48.000Well, let me finish the Irish thing, and I'll get to the Jews because it's totally linked.
01:16:53.000Within less than 100 years, these social scientists and all these professors, etc., and political leaders, moved the Irish from Chimp to Nordic, which was the top of the chain.
01:17:06.000That was the Northern European that was called the white man par excellence.
01:17:11.000So they, because they were cops and firefighters and politicians and generals, and they hated blacks, and they were living apart from blacks, and they gave up dancing.
01:17:25.000If you look at priests, Irish priests, through the 19th century, that's one of the things they were very concerned about, was that Irish were dancing too much.
01:17:52.000There was a prominent social scientist named Arthur Abernathy who wrote a book which was very typical of the time in 1906, I believe, the title of which was, The Jew is a Negro.
01:18:04.000So the same thing was done with the Jews when they got here, and they got here a little later than the Irish, in large numbers, sort of late 19th century.
01:19:03.000And then basketball, they totally dominated basketball until the 1950s.
01:19:07.000That seems to be the boxing thing, though.
01:19:09.000In fighting, it seems to be an economic position thing.
01:19:13.000When people come over and they're immigrants and they're at the bottom of the economic food chain, right now you're seeing an influx of Russian champions.
01:20:07.000It's hilarious to look at sports writers in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s talk about Jewish basketball players and how they're naturally gifted and they can jump higher and they're faster and they're trickier.
01:20:40.000There may have been a tiny bit, but no.
01:20:42.000I would think that that's something you would want to do.
01:20:45.000If you had several generations of slaves, you would want to get the big ones to breed with the big ones.
01:20:49.000Well, so this is in my book, too, but many historians have said, well, if you're going to be selectively breeding people, meaning forcing them to have sex with people when they don't want to or whatever, right, they're not going to work very well for you.
01:21:09.000So it's a very tricky thing being a slave master, right?
01:21:11.000Because there's no incentive whatsoever to work.
01:21:14.000The only incentive to work as a slave is to avoid the lash, to avoid the whip.
01:21:19.000So what slaves did, typically, was they worked just enough to not get whipped, right?
01:22:49.000Yeah, but there's like a certain athleticism that's associated with the giant black people that's not associated with the giant white people who are more lumbering and never running backs.
01:22:59.000So yeah, you know Malcolm Gladwell, the writer?
01:23:02.000Yeah, so he's argued this and he's a black Canadian and he's actually said in the New Yorker, which was amazing, and he got in a lot of trouble for it.
01:23:09.000He's like, no, yeah, actually we are genetically better at sports.
01:23:21.000But when you look at all the African-American basketball players that are elite, all the African-American football players that are elite, all the African-American boxers.
01:23:33.000How much data do you need to say, I mean, you're going to say that it's all cultural?
01:23:38.000Well, yeah, I mean, because you could be 6'5", 280 and ripped and still suck at basketball, right?
01:23:45.000You can, but the guys that are really good at it all seem to be African-American, and they can do things like, show me a white guy that moves like Michael Jordan and I'll sit down.
01:25:05.000Yeah, well, but I mean, I'm saying, but they were considered to be—and they were awesome, supposedly naturally gifted athletes— Well, I mean, there's still, there were some great black fighters as well.
01:25:24.000I mean, I don't know how much of it is access, how much of it is, you know, access to good trainers.
01:25:29.000Yeah, so at one point, I think it was in the 1940s, something like six or seven out of the top ten scorers in the professional basketball league at the time were Jewish.
01:27:38.000You either can hit hard or you can't hit hard.
01:27:41.000You could take a guy and teach him till the cows come home, or you could find some guy who's working construction somewhere, and he could punch a bag and you just go, Jesus Christ!
01:28:22.000I don't know if they're completely connected.
01:28:26.000There's something about getting maximum torque.
01:28:29.000I mean, I just feel like it's similar.
01:28:32.000I would think so, but it is in some ways.
01:28:34.000There's a guy named Takanori Gomi who's a very good pitcher in Japan, and he became a knockout fighter as an MMA fighter, and he throws punches a lot like the way a guy throws a fastball.
01:28:48.000He throws everything behind his shots.
01:28:50.000Yeah, it's similar mechanics, I would say, in a lot of ways.
01:28:54.000But I think, well, you know, boxing, I think you can get away with having shorter arms, whereas pitchers seems to be, like, that's a big factor in the mechanical advantage of the longer frames.
01:29:04.000Yeah, Tyson had short arms, didn't he?
01:30:23.000Like, technique is virtually everything.
01:30:26.000But then there's technique amongst gifted athletes.
01:30:30.000But yeah, I guess, so getting that particular leverage and mastering that, having that mechanics is something that's not really always, you can't really teach it is what we're getting at, right?
01:31:00.000Yeah, the mechanical advantage of bone size and density and shape, the width of the shoulders as well, directly translates to punching power.
01:33:25.000Everybody thought that jiu-jitsu was gigantic in Brazil.
01:33:28.000Everybody in America thought that jiu-jitsu was gigantic in Brazil when it came over here.
01:33:33.000All the Brazilians know Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
01:33:35.000No, it was a small clan of bad motherfuckers that had figured it out.
01:33:40.000And yeah, they had world championships over there.
01:33:42.000And yes, the level of Jiu-Jitsu was much higher in Brazil than it was anywhere else in the world.
01:33:47.000But it was still a fairly small group in comparison to what it's become today.
01:33:52.000And that happened in 1993 when they came to America and started the Ultimate Fighting Championship, which was started by a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu family.
01:34:01.000Horace Gracie dominated it and his brother started it all off.
01:34:05.000If it wasn't for Horian Gracie, there would have been no Ultimate Fighting Championship.
01:34:09.000If it wasn't for Horian's father, Elio, there would have been no family of champions that could show the world this incredible new style.
01:34:16.000It all came from this one family, which is just amazing.
01:34:19.000If that guy wasn't alive, if there was no Elio Gracie, no Carlos Gracie, and no Maeda.
01:34:24.000Maeda was the guy who came to Brazil, the Japanese guy, who came and taught them judo and jujitsu.
01:34:29.000If it wasn't for those three people, There's no Ultimate Fighting Championship, and mixed martial arts is set back fucking a thousand years.
01:35:16.000Well, for martial arts, for mixed martial arts, it's pretty simple, because everybody wants to know who's the baddest motherfucker on the planet.
01:35:24.000We always thought it was a boxer, until we saw a boxer getting taken down and just strangled at will, and they were so helpless.
01:35:31.000And we saw, like, James Toney, who's this great fighter, who's, like, one of the best boxers, pound for pound.
01:36:51.000You know, it's like tracing it back to something in nature, and I think it's very tricky to do that.
01:36:56.000Well, also, we live in an incredibly war-like society, and we are running on the momentum of many, many wars and our dominance over these wars.
01:37:07.000I mean, our victories, World War I, World War II, not so much Vietnam, but all this other, the military-industrial complex, which has sort of infiltrated the entire world with military bases.
01:37:18.000I mean, that's our DNA. It's one of the reasons why Canadians are so much different than us.
01:37:52.000I mean, every time you turn around, there's some new movie about Americans going and kicking ass in war and fighting battles and killing the Nazis.
01:37:59.000I mean, we've probably made way more movies about Nazis, you know, about killing Nazis.
01:40:10.000I have no idea, but just Hiroshima alone.
01:40:13.000There's no way he killed that many people.
01:40:15.000They believe that during James Caan's lifetime, between the time he was born and the time his direct lineage died, between, depending on who you ask, 20 and 70 million people died.
01:40:40.000They had so many bodies stacked up that the Khwarezmian Shah had sent this scout team to go check out Jin China.
01:40:48.000They had gotten there after the Mongols had already invaded...
01:40:52.000And getting close, they had abandoned their mission because the roads were so covered in dead bodies and decay that people were getting sick and dying.
01:41:00.000The roads were filled with mud, and the mud was actually the decaying bodies and made the roads unstable.
01:41:06.000They saw a pile of bones in the distance that they thought was a snow-covered mountain.
01:41:12.000And as they got closer, they realized it was bones.
01:41:16.000Dan Carlin's Hardcore History does a five-part piece on the Wrath of the Khans.
01:41:22.000So much so that there was a recent study that showed that they did core samples that the carbon footprint of Earth changed during his lifetime because he killed so many people.
01:41:54.000Yeah, but the reason for bringing that up is I wish you had known more about Genghis Khan, because I would ask, well, how does a culture become that warlike?
01:42:03.000Because that was like some complete next-level shit.
01:42:06.000Yeah, but even experts in that field wouldn't be able to answer that.
01:42:46.000Well, they were saying in Carlin's work he was talking about how there's a great argument about Iraq and that Baghdad literally never recovered from Genghis Khan invading in the 1200s.
01:42:58.000Like, that was the Muslim people, the Islamic people were at the head, the front of the line when it came to science and philosophy and it was just a completely different idea of the Islamic culture than we look at today.
01:43:12.000But Genghis Khan, they sacked Baghdad and killed everyone.
01:43:52.000They wronged us, so we gotta go fucking avenge ourselves.
01:43:56.000I mean, I do think that's like, that's kind of like the base of the Republican Party.
01:43:59.000You know, I think that that's why they want to go abroad.
01:44:02.000They don't, it's not really even ideological.
01:44:03.000It's sort of this primal masculine urge to defend one's family and honor.
01:44:09.000That's one reason we've gone and killed people.
01:44:12.000Then the other is economic, right, which everyone knows about, you know, the war was for oil, right, or natural resources or, you know, strategic advantage against our enemies, right?
01:44:23.000And then the third, which is what I talk a lot about, is this humanitarian shit, right?
01:44:28.000Which is like, we need to go out and save the world.
01:44:30.000We need to go out and make people be like us.
01:44:33.000And I think that drives actually a lot more foreign policy than we give it credit for.
01:44:37.000Especially now, especially with the Obama administration.
01:44:40.000So if you look at people inside of his administration, like Samantha Power and Susan Rice, and even Obama himself, and even Joe Biden, they really come from that kind of thinking about You know, they're like community organizers.
01:44:50.000They're people who did go out into the ghettos to uplift these poor people, right?
01:45:07.000We've got to save—and they're big on Africa.
01:45:09.000Susan Rice and Samantha Power have been calling for basically invading Africa for a long, long time.
01:45:16.000To stop another Rwanda from happening, to stop another genocide from happening.
01:45:20.000It's this incredible thing that Americans and the British really kind of created and perfected over the last 120 or so years.
01:45:29.000The British were all about this, right?
01:45:31.000South Africa was all about, you know, it was about taking the goods down there, the diamonds and the minerals and all that shit, but it was also about uplifting the savages and all of Africa.
01:45:41.000So is it having this ulterior motive, like, justifies the invasion?
01:45:47.000Like, you know, having resources there justifies the invasion?
01:45:58.000And if you read his stuff, a lot of people don't know this, but, like, if you read his article in 2007 when he was just starting to run for president in Foreign Affairs Journal, he says, America needs to be the world's leader.
01:46:08.000And he says, for that, to do that, we need to increase the military dramatically.
01:46:12.000We need to have more Marines, more Army soldiers, the whole nine yards.
01:46:16.000He called for increasing the military budget.
01:46:18.000People don't realize this, in 2007. And he said, because we need to lead the world, we need to be everywhere in the world.
01:46:26.000Well, how do you reconcile the differences between what he said when he was running for office and what he did when he got into the office?
01:46:35.000You know, I think a lot of people both in Congress and sort of in the public generally have been less and less interested in war for a lot of good reasons.
01:46:44.000And one of the interesting things is it's been, as you said, it's been left and right.
01:46:47.000You know, it's been people on the left and the right have been less and less interested in the war.
01:46:51.000So for the first time in decades, we have He's a little wishy.
01:47:57.000Yeah, but she's certainly never said anything otherwise.
01:48:00.000And every time she's been out, and her voting record, if you look at her voting record, it's all for the war on drugs, top to bottom.
01:48:06.000And her fucking husband was like a leader of it.
01:48:09.000Rand, on the other hand, is not perfect on foreign policy, but he's way less interventionist than she is, right?
01:48:16.000Much more hesitant to go abroad with the 82nd Airborne, and he's awesome on drugs.
01:48:21.000You know, he's about legalizing weed tomorrow, and he's probably...
01:48:26.000The big fear that everyone has with the idea of a non-interventional foreign policy is that some big evil government will build up.
01:48:36.000Without us being there to smack them down, some ISIS-type scenario will get completely out of control and start killing Americans abroad and start launching attacks.
01:49:11.000Well, I mean, the point is that the US military historically has never been used defensively, really.
01:49:17.000It's never ever, even in World War II. I mean, it's hard to even argue that Pearl Harbor was, you know, it was first of all, a lot of people have said that the Japanese were forced to attack Pearl Harbor, but...
01:49:27.000But certainly apart from World War II, the U.S. military has never been used truly in defense of us.
01:49:33.000And that's what people need to come to grips with.
01:49:37.000So if you want to talk about changing that pattern and creating a military that is truly defensive and changing the culture so that we...
01:49:50.000Are interested in our military only as a defensive mechanism, means, right?
01:50:19.000Like, beefing up our positions in all these different parts of the world just to make sure that, like, an ISIS-type situation could never rise up?
01:51:00.000In that document, they call for a massive buildup of the US military.
01:51:04.000They called for a massive deployment of troops and bases and aircraft carriers all across the world.
01:51:13.000And they said that that is necessary to maintain world order, American dominance, and they said peace.
01:51:22.000And one of the scariest things about that document is that in it, and everyone should look at this, it says, this is in 2000. It says, we can't convince Congress or the American people to go for this program, to spend way more money on our defense,
01:51:38.000on our military, and build these bases all over the world and send aircraft carriers everywhere, unless, they said in the document, unless there is a precipitating event like Pearl Harbor.
01:52:32.000Man, just because somebody capitalized on something doesn't mean they planned it.
01:52:35.000It's much more likely they saw an opening to pass through.
01:52:39.000Like, that's also been the argument about Oklahoma City.
01:52:43.000When Oklahoma City, there's a radical sweep of legislation that went through, that couldn't go through, anti-terrorism type legislation post-Oklahoma City.
01:52:52.000And like, well, they planned Oklahoma City, they blew up that building, and they blamed it on Timothy McVeigh in order to push this, and no fertilizer.
01:53:00.000I mean, there's all these compelling arguments about it that are really confusing as fuck.
01:53:04.000Because you get trapped down that rabbit hole of...
01:53:12.000They got what they wanted in 9-11 and in Oklahoma City.
01:53:16.000They got the justification, the rationale for a massive ramping up of the U.S. military and the state surveillance apparatus and the rest of it.
01:53:25.000But what's your take on false flag events that have actually happened?
01:53:40.000Operation Northwoods was signed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1962, and it was a plan to get people enthusiastic about a war with Cuba.
01:53:49.000They were going to blow up a drone jetliner, blame it on the Cubans.
01:53:53.000They were going to arm Cuban friendlies and bomb Guantanamo Bay.
01:53:57.000And they were going to kill American civilians, and they were going to blame it on Cuba, and it was vetoed by Kennedy.
01:54:04.000Yeah, this was the Kennedy-era CIA, which was one of the crazier iterations of the CIA. Yeah, so they had a lot of that shit going on then.
01:54:13.000There was absolutely straight-up closed-door cigar-smoking conspiracies in that CIA, and in other CIAs too.
01:54:39.000Thank God they have never tried these things, but they had all kinds of plans like that that were utterly ridiculous to basically get Castro out.
01:55:16.000And on a scale of like 9-11, the amount of people that would have to be involved.
01:55:20.000Yeah, the point is, again, they don't need it, you know?
01:55:23.000Like, as you were saying, they've got their culture behind them.
01:55:25.000Well, it's also the idea about something like ISIS. Like, why would you call us a false flag when you could just leave a bunch of weapons lying around, let a bunch of assholes suit up and get crazy, and then shoot them down.
01:55:52.000And it's looking more and more like that.
01:55:54.000You as a student and a professor of history as a guy who's really studied it over and over again, do you see a solution to this sort of a quagmire?
01:56:04.000Do you see a potential road out of this?
01:56:27.000I think that, you know, until we started bombing ISIS, they had no reason to attack us.
01:56:31.000Now they have a good reason to fly planes into our buildings.
01:56:33.000It also seems to me that as technology improves and as our ability to kill people easier and quicker improves, it gets weirder and weirder when you're willing to engage in war.
01:56:44.000Like post-Hiroshima, it became this fact that nuclear power and nuclear arsenals existed.
01:56:53.000And it can be done, but it hasn't been done since.
01:56:56.000It's like it's so atrocious, and it kills so many civilians, and it's so non-surgical that we decide we're not going to do that anymore.
01:57:27.000Because even scarier, now you have drones, and now you have suitcase nukes, and now you have all this new technology, disbursement of toxins.
01:58:10.000Not only that, they instituted the idea of blowing yourself up.
01:58:14.000I mean, this holy war thing, this jihad as a holy war, it really, that wasn't a part of their culture until the CIA came along and taught them it.
01:59:31.000And also, on top of that, as I was saying earlier, good luck trying to impose Sharia on a whole population that's streaming the Simpsons through its satellite dishes.
01:59:44.000But when you see these guys getting their heads cut off on television, that, to me, the big production of taking people, especially taking people that don't deserve it, that's one of the weird ones to me.
01:59:59.000What could be gained out of cutting someone's head?
02:01:44.000I think I was probably 7, somewhere around then, when the Vietnam War ended, between 7 and 10, something like that.
02:01:50.000I was living in San Francisco, so it was between 7 and 10. And the war ended, and I remember thinking to myself as a young boy, they're done with war.
02:02:04.000People figured out that war is terrible, and we'll never go to war again.
02:02:08.000And then when we invaded Iraq, after Iraq invaded Kuwait, I think I was probably 21. And I remember thinking, I can't fucking believe we're at war again.
02:03:12.000Do you buy into the conspiracies like the Eisenhower conspiracy when he was leaving office, when he was saying, beware of the military and industrial complex.
02:03:20.000There's a machine that wants to go to war.
02:03:22.000Do you buy that they look at this perpetual war as a constant profit source?
02:03:30.000So defense contractors is what he was talking about.
02:03:33.000He was talking about also research universities who are working with the defense contractors.
02:03:52.000Yeah, now we know that if you look at Hillary Clinton's list of donors, it's like she's been called the senator from Lockheed Martin because she gets so many donations from him.
02:04:05.000They have all sorts of competing interests.
02:04:07.000I think the defense contractors have some power, just like the Israeli lobby has some power.
02:04:11.000But actually, at the end of the day, I think they're autonomous, and I think they have their own motives.
02:04:15.000And I think a lot of them are, especially with people like Hillary and Obama and others, and the neocons under Bush, had an ideological motivation, which was Pax Americana, which was a world order controlled by us, or controlled by them, I should say.
02:04:32.000When you see the difference between the way Obama was, like the Hope website, Hope and Change, whatever the fuck it was, when they had this whole section on whistleblowers about helping whistleblowers alert the American people to crime.
02:04:52.000And to things that are going on that are unconstitutional.
02:04:55.000And then it's all been removed from the website.
02:04:57.000And now you see how horrible he's been on not just whistleblowers, but on the press.
02:05:02.000And forcing people to divulge their sources.
02:06:04.000He's always been a nationalist first, an American nationalist first, and everything else is second.
02:06:12.000Yeah, I was sort of listening to these people talk about him being a peace candidate and someone who would eliminate the Patriot Act and someone who would, you know, never spy on Americans.
02:06:19.000And I'm like, no, look at who he was when he was running.
02:06:41.000Well, you know, one of the most disturbing moments of the debates, to me, was when him and McCain were going at it, and McCain corrected him about Afghanistan.
02:06:51.000And McCain, you know, we were talking about, like, just going into Afghanistan and sending in troops, and he's like, hold on, do you know what the fuck you're talking about?
02:06:58.000Essentially, McCain was like, have you been to Afghanistan?
02:07:53.000What do you think about, like, the WikiLeaks stuff and the Edward Snowden stuff and all this new, the digital age that we live in is very fascinating to me in that there is just a certain amount of...
02:08:08.000There's impossibility in controlling data when you get to a large organization like the United States military.
02:08:14.000No matter how well they put up their firewalls, no matter how good they guard their data, you're still dealing with human beings and young human beings, by the way.
02:09:04.000Yeah, and you know, so they're looking at us, and the FBI apparently has this thing where they're looking at us through our webcams on our computers.
02:10:08.000Full circle brings us back to what we were talking about when it came to colleges, and that's one reason why I want to play Dear Woman for you.
02:15:17.000And sex is not bad, and no one is trying to stop gay porn.
02:15:21.000Here's the thing, unless you're some sort of a fucking churchgoer, and you think that homosexuality is evil, there's no movement to stop gay guys from making gay porn.
02:15:29.000No men are out there going, we need to stop these gay men from abusing each other in gay porn.
02:16:08.000No, but if you think about, you know, people, I've heard pornographers say this, you know, what is the thing you hate about your body the most, right?
02:16:15.000You will find people paying for that in pornography.
02:17:29.000And he's like laughing at it, thinking that, I mean, the way Harris described it to me, he's like, this guy is saying something That he has so much confidence in it.
02:17:38.000He's like saying it almost like you would say, the best way to stop tooth decay is brushing your teeth.
02:18:47.000There's a moment in his book where it looks like he's advocating nuclear assault on people in the Middle East, and he has sort of backed away from that.
02:19:00.000Well, he says that, you know, if you have, you know, X million people who are committed to this fanatical, genocidal jihad, then the nuclear option might make sense.
02:19:12.000I mean, you have to read the book for yourself.
02:19:14.000And he has sort of backed down from that.
02:20:20.000And it's all fair game and on the table, but Islamophobia is interesting.
02:20:27.000Well, it's just that, I mean, I'm not a fan of that, but it is that Islamophobia has particular political applications right now, whereas the Mormons are safe in Utah.
02:20:35.000No one's talking about invading Utah and killing the Mormons, right?
02:20:40.000Yeah, I mean, look, if they ever came over here and tried to convert Los Angeles into Sharia regime, give me a fucking AK-47, you know, and I'll shoot him in the head myself.
02:20:55.000My point is going out there and stopping them from doing it to other people is simply going to create more of them.
02:21:01.000And more importantly, it's going to actually cause them to wish harm on me, to do harm to me.
02:22:01.000Do you go in, hey, let them be crazy over there?
02:22:04.000Or do you say, listen, that crazy over there is going to eventually come over here We've got to figure out a way to plan ahead or we're going to run into a bad situation that's going to be out of control.
02:22:21.000But they haven't aggressed against me.
02:22:23.000The few people that have been killed over there, the few reporters that have been snatched up and had their heads cut off on video, it's such a small amount.
02:24:29.000But, I mean, they didn't even fucking bother changing the words.
02:24:32.000They just plagiarized the shit out of Kennedy.
02:24:34.000And so we used to do Joe Biden Night at Stitch's Comedy Club.
02:24:38.000And what we'd do is, like, I would go up and do one of my friend's acts, and he would go up and do me, and we would do each other's act as a joke.
02:24:54.000No, because everyone knew that there was like, because I remember it, I guarantee you other folks that are in the know, especially politically in the parties, they know.
02:25:05.000Like, that's a big skeleton in this closet.
02:25:07.000Like, look, dude, you could be vice president.
02:26:05.000I mean, it's just the fact, you know, it's...
02:26:07.000I'm all about individual freedom, you know, and like, if you're smoking crack, I don't care, as long as you run the city correctly, you know?
02:26:14.000Yeah, why is it okay that he drinks whiskey, but it's not okay if he smokes crack?
02:26:48.000Even though marijuana is illegal, marijuana is something that I believe probably causes less rape than any other intoxicant you could ever take.
02:26:59.000It makes you paranoid and self-aware and sensitive and you're also more aware of other people's feelings and it's probably the least likely to rape drug voted ever.
02:27:34.000Because the states have adopted these new policies in Colorado and Washington State.
02:27:40.000And now other states are looking at it and wondering whether or not they should dive in because of the amount of profit that they're making tax-wise.
02:28:03.000Because if you read it, it was, and a lot of people were saying this, it was written by this guy in Oakland, who was going to be the new corporate chieftain of the weed industry.
02:28:13.000And it was written in a way that was going to make it very difficult for the mom and pops in Humboldt to exist, to survive.
02:28:51.000The guy who's going to run the Walmart of weed in that giant Oakland warehouse he was going to establish in the East Bay up there, oh, he's going to be fine because he's going to be super regulated.
02:29:03.000He'll be politically connected to all the right people.
02:29:05.000And, of course, politically connected.
02:29:06.000So a lot of the Humboldt growers were opposed to that proposition for that reason because they saw it forcing them out and handing the reins over to these big corporate entities and pharmaceuticals.
02:29:20.000So the prediction was, and I thought it was right, that the big pharmaceutical companies were going to move in and take over and make it into a big corporate industry.
02:29:28.000I think that's starting to happen in Colorado.
02:30:42.000But if you get caught with pottery, nobody gives a shit.
02:30:45.000But if you get caught with drugs in a decriminalized state, well, then you don't get in trouble.
02:30:50.000But if you're selling it, it's a different animal.
02:30:53.000Yeah, I want the state to have nothing to do with it at all.
02:30:56.000But anyway, in Portugal, a great study was done by Glenn Greenwald and the Cato Institute about three or four years ago.
02:31:03.000Looking at the 10 years of decriminalization in Portugal, and what they found was a decrease in the number of HIV cases, not surprising, a decrease in the addiction rate, which is amazing, and a decrease in usage.
02:31:30.000Yeah, that's such a bizarre thing that we have this attachment controlling people's access to consciousness enhancing or altering substances.
02:31:40.000We're completely committed to this idea and we will pitch it as if it's the only logical explanation or the only logical course of business.
02:31:50.000What, are you going to have the streets filled with a bunch of reefer heads?
02:31:54.000Well, you look at what's going on in Colorado, they have the lowest rate of drunk driving accidents ever.
02:31:59.000They have a lower rate of murder than they've ever had before.
02:32:02.000They have lower rates of violent crimes than they had in a decade.
02:32:07.000All these things are happening right in front of everybody's face.
02:34:30.000And then he's an international superstar.
02:34:33.000Yeah, I mean, in those movies, those shitty Arnold Schwarzenegger cop movies, there's always a scene where his breakfast is like he pours a fucking couple slices of pizza into a blender.
02:38:08.000Now, you're a grown adult with children and a college professor, and you're faced with all these contradictions and this ridiculous way we're living our life in this society.
02:38:21.000How frustrating is it for you to see things so clearly, but yet see this schizophrenic, bizarre society that you're forced to exist in?
02:39:00.000Yeah, I've been talking to some friends about this.
02:39:03.000It's like, you know, Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living, and actually, I'm beginning to think that it's too painful to live.
02:39:37.000Do you think there's a certain amount of paying attention to the world that may perhaps be detrimental to the individual?
02:39:44.000There's a certain gauntlet we all have to sort of run to live our lives, regulations that we have to follow as preposterous as they may be.
02:39:53.000But I've often wondered, there's like this struggle between trying to think about how much should I just concentrate on enjoying my time here There's your ludicrous bit.
02:41:05.000And I'm still, that was like, what, two months ago, I'm still bothered by that.
02:41:10.000And knowing that that's a fairly common thing for a lot of people in this society.
02:41:14.000And if you live in a particular neighborhood, that's like a normal thing to happen.
02:41:18.000Well, aren't those particular neighborhoods in some way sort of like a microcosm for the issues of the world that it's very difficult to overcome momentum?
02:41:26.000And the momentum of a terrible neighborhood, a crime-ridden neighborhood, it's Born into poverty and born into the momentum of all these unemployed people on welfare.
02:41:36.000Well, in that case, it's being born into a state of occupation.
02:41:39.000You know, I think that there are many of those...
02:42:18.000It's the worst aspects of human beings right in front of you, and it's not in your life.
02:42:22.000Your life, you're going where you're going, you're talking to students, you're doing your thing, and then you immerse yourself through the internet or whatever, the media, you're getting this vision of the worst parts of humans.