Dan Carlin is a podcaster, writer, and podcaster. He is also the host of the History and Common Sense podcast, and hosts a political podcast called "Common Sense" as well. In this episode, we talk about the difference between podcasting and journalism, and what it takes to do both at the same time. He also talks about his new podcast, "The History Show," and why he thinks it's better than the other show he hosts, "Politics and the Facts." Dan is a great dude and I really enjoyed this conversation. I hope you enjoy listening to this episode and that it makes you think about how important it is to have a podcast of your own! Don't forget to subscribe on Apple Podcasts and leave us a rating and review on iTunes! If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE so we can keep bringing you quality, high quality episodes and interviews like this! Timestamps: 4:00 - Dan Carlin - Common Sense 5:30 - The difference between journalism and podcasting 6:00 7:20 - What is a podcast? 8:15 - What does it take to be a good podcaster 9:40 - Why is it better than a political show 11:00- What is it harder than a podcast 13:00s and 16:30s 15:40s and 17:20s - What are you can do better than someone else? 16:50sounds better than you can't do it better? 17: What do you want to do better 18:00: How do you know what you're going to do? 19:00 is better than other people are better than I don t have a better than that? 21:00 | How do I know you're gonna do it than I do it? 22:00 Is there a better way to do something better than they don t know you can I think you're not going to get more than you don't have enough of that I'm going to listen to more than that than you do it like that I don't think you'll do it more than I'm gonna do something like that you don t think I'm doing it more often than you're doing it better that you do more than this? 26:00 + 27:30 27:10 28:15
00:00:11.000You, to me, are like this guy that's working on this never-ending project that occasionally you release these chunks of these never-ending projects.
00:00:19.000But I look at your podcast as like this great work.
00:00:53.000A great work like you're doing like this thing that's evergreen that's going to be passed down forever and bit torrented the fuck out of.
00:01:02.000Daniele Bolelli had a great line to me because you know he does a history podcast now too and he started off by doing just a talk one like my common sense kind of is and he said the difference with the history one is you actually have to it actually has to make sense when you're done I mean the facts so That's a huge...
00:01:18.000I mean, I sit there like forever and I end up in my...
00:01:20.000My wife's never heard it, by the way, and my kids don't understand why anybody would want to hear me talk.
00:03:34.000So it makes sense that you're spending this much time on them.
00:03:37.000I think what happens is, I think, you know, originally, if you recall, If you go listen to the old shows, they don't sound like the newer ones.
00:03:43.000It's because I thought I was just going to talk about funky stuff in history.
00:03:47.000And then people wrote and go, I don't really know the story.
00:04:03.000I was, you know, I warn people when they go and buy the old shows.
00:04:05.000I say, you know, the old shows aren't going to sound quite the same because they were good by 2007 podcasting standards.
00:04:12.000But, you know, the standards of what we all do are so much higher than when we started doing them.
00:04:18.000You know, if you grade this on a curve, go to iTunes and look at the stuff that's up there with you and compare it to the stuff that was up there 10 years ago.
00:04:26.000I was competing with kids in dorm rooms 10 years ago.
00:04:28.000Now we're competing with NPR and, I mean, all the pro outfits.
00:04:32.000Yeah, it is the sound quality for sure.
00:04:38.000You get better at the flow of the conversation.
00:04:41.000You get better at being in tune with the person that you're talking to, or at least attempting to.
00:04:47.000That's something, for people that are listening, when you try to consider how a podcast is made, one of the things that we're doing is we're trying to express ourselves, but we're also trying to monitor ourselves at the same time.
00:04:58.000Make sure you're not too overbearing or you're not talking too much.
00:05:02.000Or sometimes you have a point and you just, oh my god, I gotta make this point.
00:05:05.000But the other person's talking, you don't know when to jump in, but you also have to listen to the person who's talking.
00:05:09.000So then you forget your point and you're like, fuck!
00:05:12.000It's a weird juggling act because we're both doing it sort of free-balling.
00:05:19.000You know what's happening to me now, I'm ashamed to say it, but I'm starting to get that thing, I'm 50 now, and I'm starting to get that, you forget the name, or you forget, you know, I compare it to a computer.
00:05:29.000I have more stuff in my computer, but the computer's slower than it used to be, and so I'll have this point where I'll be talking and everything will be going good, and then all of a sudden there'll be this really long pause, what I can't think of.
00:05:39.000And that's when we have to just, you know, if there is a Ben, he has to cut out and just, you know, sandwich the two pieces together while I try to remember the name of the person I wanted to say.
00:05:50.000So I'm getting to the point now where I'm not sure I could go live anymore without these really long pauses where I forget what I was going to say or I forget the point I was making or the tangent I was on.
00:05:59.000So 10 years from now, this is going to be a very interesting podcast.
00:06:02.000Well, it also deals with the amount of hard drive space you have.
00:06:05.000I think if you keep remembering things, like there's things that I used to know so well just 10, 15 years ago that I just have pushed aside because I haven't brought it up in a long time.
00:06:16.000I haven't gone into that folder in my mind in a long time.
00:06:53.000Do you like living up there in the Pacific Northwest?
00:06:55.000You know, I'm from here, and coming back home is weird, because I told my wife recently, my kids are Oregonians, and I haven't gotten used to that fact.
00:08:00.000And it wasn't like the school was so horrible.
00:08:02.000It was really like the uncertainty of the future and life and the insecurity and just the...
00:08:08.000The angst, the teen angst of, you know, slowly realizing that, or not even slowly realizing, but becoming an adult and knowing that it's just a few years away that I'm going to be completely responsible for myself, but I'm completely lost.
00:08:23.000You know, so there's like this unbelievable pressure that comes with going from being a teenager to an adult.
00:08:29.000I mean, to say unbelievable pressure is nothing compared to being like growing up a kid in Laos, you know, or living in fucking Somalia in the middle of You know, all sorts of different crises that are going on.
00:08:40.000So it's really, like, the most privileged angst possible.
00:08:44.000Is home reasonably the same when you go back to the old?
00:08:47.000So, see, because I come back here, I told my mom, I was reading this book written by, if you remember, William F. Buckley, the famous, you know, talk like this a little...
00:10:51.000I would have thought you'd have your kid born with like superhuman lungs.
00:10:54.000Be like one of those Sherpas, you know, in Tibet.
00:10:56.000Well, I think if you live there and you grow up there, probably.
00:11:00.000Like if you live there and grow up there, like I was talking to an endurance runner that lives there and he said it takes three years for your body to completely acclimate where you get all the benefits of training up there.
00:11:10.000They have all the Olympic guys who do the bicycling and everything up there too just because of the altitude.
00:11:14.000Well, yeah, that's a big thing with any sort of athletic competition training that involves endurance is training at altitude.
00:11:50.000But when you work out there, man, it's crazy, the impact.
00:11:57.000Like, if you're just standing around talking, it seems normal.
00:11:59.000Like, if you and I were having this conversation up there, it wouldn't be any different.
00:12:02.000But if you had to walk up a flight of stairs or climb a ladder or something like that, all of a sudden you're like, Jesus Christ, did I age 30 fucking years in 10 minutes?
00:12:10.000But anyway, going back to my high school, when I go to my neighborhood where I grew up in, it looks pretty much the same.
00:12:50.000As I get older, I never cared about L.A. history when I lived here.
00:12:53.000But now that I'm getting nostalgic and stuff, I buy all these old books with pictures of Magic Mountain when I was a kid and Disneyland when I was a kid and all those kind of things.
00:13:01.000Well, it's fascinating because this area used to be ranches.
00:13:21.000Yeah, the pictures at Jerry's Deli on Ventura up here, they have these pictures from the early 1900s, these big, giant, high-resolution photos.
00:13:31.000Just fields and stuff, rolling hills, yeah.
00:13:33.000If you could look at it on a time-lapse, just watch it all...
00:13:36.000Watch it all build, you'd be like, whoa, what the fuck?
00:13:39.000My mom's got this view of the entire valley and you look at it and it's full.
00:13:42.000And you see those pictures from Jerry's Deli and it's empty.
00:13:45.000And in basically whatever it is, 70 years or something, it's full.
00:13:49.000Yeah, well, the whole country, if you really stop and think about it, I've been talking to people about that a lot lately because we've been sort of discussing how bizarre this election has been.
00:13:59.000And how recent this country has existed, how recently this country was established.
00:14:06.000I mean, when you think about 1776 and you think about the rest of the world, like, this is an insanely new country.
00:14:12.000Oh, in the West, my wife's grandfather died recently, he was 94, and I said, do you realize that two of your grandfather's lifespans and there's no non-natives here on the West Coast?
00:14:50.000No, the Spanish were here a long time ago.
00:14:52.000But up in the Pacific Northwest, it wasn't like that.
00:14:55.000It's funny, you can tell where the tide of Spanish conquest sort of broke because you stopped getting those Hispanic names for all the communities.
00:15:04.000And all of a sudden, you're like, what happened to La Habra?
00:15:06.000What happened to all those wonderful Spanish names?
00:15:50.000If you've ever been there, the big draw is they have a live mermaid show that they try to get you to slow down for enough to eat at the local cafe or whatever.
00:16:13.000Although I realize the more I talk to young people, even being 50 sounds like a long time ago.
00:16:17.000But when you and I were kids, that was the tail end of the time when, if you were a black person in certain states in this country, you couldn't stay in a bunch of hotels.
00:16:30.000I had this cop from Baltimore, Michael Wood, and he was telling me about the laws that they had in Baltimore that they had a systematic, they really had racism that was so a part of the city that you couldn't sell houses in certain areas to black people.
00:16:50.000Oh, Frank Robinson tells a story about being with the Baltimore Orioles, and he says he got traded from the Cincinnati Reds to the Baltimore Orioles, and his wife was able to find a house really quickly until they realized it wasn't Brooks Robinson's wife, who's a white guy, it was Frank Robinson's wife, and then all of a sudden the house disappeared right off,
00:17:10.000You know, you don't know what to say about that, because there's two kinds of racism.
00:17:12.000There's the kind where the government is involved and the state's involved, like you said, system, you know, institutionalized.
00:17:17.000And then there's, I'm a white home buyer whose neighbors, you know, I remember there was an All in the Family episode where Archie Bunker or one of the neighbors was going to sell to a black family.
00:17:26.000And all the other white neighbors freaked out.
00:17:28.000So that's not really like government racism.
00:17:30.000That's like good old-fashioned one-to-one racism.
00:17:33.000Well, they used to do this thing called blockbusting.
00:18:06.000And then before my grandfather died, it had been like a weird mixture of ethnicities.
00:18:11.000Dominicans and different people from different environments.
00:18:14.000It was a really fascinating place to live because there was extreme, there was poverty and then there was a lot of crime and stuff like the next door neighbor when my grandfather lived there.
00:18:25.000Is a kid who was selling crack and they battering rammed his front door.
00:18:30.000He had it all reinforced and everything.
00:18:31.000He had an Audi in the driveway, like the whole deal.
00:18:39.000But the rest of it was like, when you look at like a bad neighborhood, it's not like you go down the street and it's like a war zone.
00:18:46.000Guns are going off and people are getting stabbed.
00:18:48.000For the most part, it's pretty friendly and lively.
00:18:51.000It's just when you're dealing with poor people in a crime-ridden neighborhood, It's just going to happen more often than it's going to happen in a place that's really nice.
00:19:00.000But most of the time when you go outside, it would be people playing music, and there was kids playing in the street, and there was people hanging out in their steps.
00:19:07.000It was really interesting to watch from the time I was a little kid.
00:19:14.000Remembering his neighborhood to what it was before he died.
00:19:17.000And it just kept shifting over and over again, where new sort of lower-income, disenfranchised groups would move into the area.
00:20:01.000I saw a whole article once on America's immigration story as told through boxing.
00:20:08.000And they would suggest that by the time the next generation came along, most of the time the parents had done well enough so that the kids didn't have to go into boxing.
00:20:46.000It's also that you're growing up in these really hard environments where fisticuffs are much more common and people seek to train themselves to learn how to fight because they're dealing with conflict all the time.
00:24:52.000No, but I go to a website sometimes when I'm bored and I have nothing better to do that is just, you know, stuff that people upload, you know, just to blow your mind or say, well, and half of them are from Brazil for some reason, you know, and they're always terrible.
00:25:06.000You just go, I know it's giving me an unusually wrong version of what Brazil is like, but when they said the Olympics were going to be there, I said, you know, half the videos on this site are from Rio, so...
00:25:16.000Well, it does have a history of violence, that's for sure.
00:25:19.000It's a strange place in that it's kind of the reverse of LA, in that LA, you essentially have the expensive homes in the hills, and then the people that have the less expensive homes are on the bottom.
00:27:58.000I didn't know you could do that in LA because, like in New York, they have to have a device that hooks up to the horse so it doesn't, you know, have manure on the streets.
00:29:52.000I mean, you know, there's a lot of cities in the United States and in Europe and stuff that have built giant open spaces, you know, whether it's a central park in New York or anything like that.
00:30:01.000It changes the whole feel of these urban centers, doesn't it?
00:30:38.000I look, in Oregon, I can park anywhere.
00:30:40.000I tell Angelinos that, and they're really the only people, New Yorkers and Angelinos understand when you say, I can park anywhere, dude, and they just go...
00:31:14.000Well, open space, I think, is a really smart thing because people left their own devices will really fuck up anything.
00:31:20.000They'll just build on top of shit and stack things up and stuff people in there, and next thing you know, the view's gone, everything's gone.
00:31:27.000You've got a chicken ranch next to your house.
00:31:42.000That was when that sagebrush rebellion type thing happened up in Oregon, you know, in the one area where they're still having trials about and everything.
00:31:51.000See, 20 years ago, I would have remembered their names right off the bat, but there's a wilderness thing up in Oregon.
00:31:56.000Well, I mean, their complaint was that the federal government doesn't have big tracts of land in the eastern part of the country where things started.
00:32:03.000They reverted that land back to the public, but they had these huge swaths of land in the West because it was kind of a different government by the time they were out here in the West.
00:32:12.000I truthfully am kind of thankful they do, because if they didn't, it wouldn't be here anymore.
00:32:19.000That whole land thing was really confusing for people.
00:32:23.000They were trying to figure out what the hell's going on.
00:32:25.000Because unless you really dive into the story and try to find out who's angry at who and why is the government moving in on these people and what's happening, because there was a few of these sort of rancher-type disputes with the government.
00:32:38.000Remember there was one in Nevada as well?
00:32:40.000I actually can speak to this a little bit, because when I was a talk radio host up there, Those people were actually a large part of any talk radio show audience, and they were a little different back in the day of, say, the Clinton administration in the mid-1990s, but the modern movement kind of grew out of that.
00:32:56.000And if you understand the position of those people in those small towns...
00:33:00.000Those people essentially made a living in resource extraction.
00:33:04.000So they didn't have the big factories that they had back east in Detroit and everything.
00:33:07.000They logged, or they mined, or they did those kind of things.
00:33:11.000And so when the government will decide, for example, we have a problem with the spotted owl, so we're going to cut back on the logging, The people in places like Portland, where everybody's got a software job, they're like, absolutely, that's a wonderful thing.
00:33:23.000But those devastated some of those communities.
00:33:26.000And it's everything from the schools in those areas not getting a lot of tax dollars anymore, or the problem they have in Oregon is a lot of those small communities, all the young people are gone.
00:33:55.000Really didn't look at that side of the story, which is, I'm not saying these people are right or wrong, but understand that this wasn't a question of, oh, the government's got to get off of our land.
00:34:03.000It was jobs, and I think we can all understand jobs.
00:34:06.000Well, what was going on in Oregon was cattle ranchers and public land, and they didn't want to pay.
00:34:12.000Yeah, they didn't want to pay for public land.
00:34:15.000Now, before I had ever, like, ventured into public land, I didn't understand the whole cattle grazing thing, but when I was in, the first time I was in Montana...
00:34:25.000We took a float down the Missouri River.
00:34:28.000We went down where the Missouri breaks are.
00:35:01.000They didn't want to pay their bill, at least as far as it's been explained to me.
00:35:06.000Well, no, and there's different parties involved.
00:35:07.000So you had these ranchers who didn't want to do that, and then you have a bunch of people in the community who were sympathetic not so much to that part, but the fact that the ranchers were mad at the same people that they were mad at.
00:35:18.000So that's why you would hear a lot of people speak in these things saying, I'm not really on their side, but we all generally have sympathy to the idea that we would like the federal government to stop telling us how many logs we can cut or those kind of things.
00:36:17.000Sometimes they'll just think, my kid needs to go to college, it's time to just level everything on this hill.
00:36:21.000Sometimes, though, their attitude is, okay, this is my view, right?
00:36:24.000I mean, I look out, I don't want to see a clear cut, so I'll take every third or fourth tree, and it becomes like an extra bank account for some of them, so...
00:36:32.000Well, if your whole business is the logging business, I can imagine.
00:36:36.000Like, we were up in the Redwood Forest recently, and as we were driving up there, you pass these lumberyards.
00:36:42.000There's just one lumberyard where it's just massive logs and massive amounts, and they're just stacked up.
00:36:49.000And you're looking at, like, in terms of the number of years...
00:36:53.000of growth you're looking at when you're looking at this huge lumber yard filled with trees like how many years of growth is that how do you sustain it right this is how much you need today how do you make sure you have that much 15 20 years you know what they're doing right now is is the Canadians are logging a lot and in Russia in the places like below the the They have a forest line in Siberia,
00:37:17.000I mean, it's kind of like gold that grows for those people.
00:37:20.000And so in one sense, you find it hard to tell them not to, because I'm doing just fine, but you can't log and make money.
00:37:26.000On the other hand, you know, we all do kind of share this, and so it's hard to figure out how to manage things, you know, for the greater good, as they say.
00:37:33.000That's the good point, is that it's really, I mean, it's no one's, you could call it property, but what it is, is like we're all sharing the resources of the earth, and What's going on in the Amazon right now and what happens when people move in and farm for cattle is one of the best arguments against factory farming and against supporting the meat industry.
00:37:54.000It pollutes rivers and all that kind of stuff.
00:37:56.000Devastating deforestation, too, at a ridiculously high rate.
00:37:59.000That's a big part of what's fueling the deforestation is they chop down all these trees so that they can make land for these cattle to graze on.
00:38:08.000And you can see, by the way, how much money is involved, because in some of those countries, the people that campaign, a lot of times they're indigenous people, it gets violent and people die, and, you know, that's how much money we're talking about.
00:38:20.000Yeah, they killed some nun that was protesting against the logging.
00:38:27.000And, you know, everybody kind of knows, this is, you know, you're taking, I mean, it's pretty brave when you think about what those people do, because they get the threatening letters long before anything happens to them, and then to keep doing it.
00:38:44.000You know, I mean, if you start making a mess and making a lot of noise and making it problematic for the people that are earning a shitload of money chopping those trees down, things can get real ugly.
00:38:55.000I was in Mount Rainier and that was the first time I ever saw like real clear-cut areas and that's an interesting place because it rains so much you would think like it's a real fertile environment like whatever trees that they do have but when I was talking to one of the guys was up there one of the cops that was um you know was like forest ranger type character he was saying that they do it but it takes like 20 years for these things become trees again Well,
00:39:21.000and they use different growth trees for different things.
00:39:24.000So you can grow the quick, you know, I always hear from the guys who want to grow hemp and say, well, if they would just grow hemp, it would make up, but it would make up for some uses.
00:39:31.000The old growth trees, like if you go into some of these, there are some Oregon hotels, for example, that are all built with old growth.
00:39:37.000And you go in there and you see what old growth can do and you say, okay, there are no other logs that you could do this with.
00:41:12.000Yeah, the different densities of trees and the different grains and patterns.
00:41:18.000And when you look at actual hardwood, it's such a fascinating, not invention, but creation of nature.
00:41:25.000The variety of the grain and the way they look, it's really like a work of art.
00:41:30.000And it's strange how it affects us visually.
00:41:33.000Like, if you look at a piece of redwood that's been polished and sanded and cut, it's like, you see the grain in it, it's like, wow, that is so pretty!
00:41:41.000You know, it's interesting how that affects us.
00:41:43.000I'm wondering who's winning the pool for what they thought we would talk about today.
00:43:00.000Yeah, it's interesting how it's become illegal.
00:43:03.000But that's another thing that's really fascinating about this time.
00:43:06.000It's like slowly in your state, Washington state, Colorado, you're starting to see so much money coming in from it being legal that it's going to trickle down into other states.
00:43:16.000It's kind of a great experiment, isn't it?
00:43:17.000And I've said before, and I might have even said on this show the very first time we got together, I think we may have talked about You know, what's going to happen, because we have this divergence between the states and the federal government, and as you probably know, only a couple of weeks ago, the federal government decided to leave marijuana classified as a Schedule I drug for the same reason they always did,
00:43:36.000which is they say that the research doesn't show anything, and then you find out, well, they're not really permitted to do the research, so it's this catch-22.
00:43:45.000Either the feds are going to have to move toward the states, or somebody's going to get into power that says, enough of this dichotomy, we're going to crack down.
00:43:52.000I have no idea what that would look like.
00:44:10.000I mean, it's really fascinating what's happened to Colorado.
00:44:12.000But look at what What the feds have already done in roundabout ways.
00:44:16.000For example, one of the things that they've said in some of these places is if you have a medical marijuana card, you can't get pain medication prescribed to you.
00:44:25.000If you have a medical marijuana card, a judge just upheld, didn't they, that you can be denied a gun.
00:44:34.000So the only reason that that works is because you have a disagreement between state and federal law, and they're siding with the higher law, which is the way the law is supposed to work.
00:44:42.000But at what point do we have such a division between the reality on the ground in these states and what federal law says that the rubber is going to meet the road somewhere?
00:44:54.000I don't know who wins, but there's going to be a moment where you have a rubber meets the road moment.
00:44:59.000Yeah, and it's an interesting case with the National Rifle Association, too, because the NRA, which is always, of course, pro-gun and really trying to stop any laws that infringe upon the rights of people to Uphold the Second Amendment, but when you get to this pot thing, they don't want to fuck with the pot thing.
00:45:16.000I may be wrong about this, but I do believe that they did come out and say that you shouldn't be denying people's rights.
00:45:24.000There's a lot of people in the NRA that smoke pot.
00:45:28.000Yeah, there's a lot of closet pot smokers out there.
00:45:30.000Because it's, obviously the stereotype has always been that it makes you lazy and it makes you dumb and it sort of gives you brain damage and you forget things.
00:45:39.000That's been shown time and time again to not be true.
00:45:41.000I mean, when you are high as fuck, you do forget things.
00:45:45.000Like, when you're in the throes of it.
00:45:47.000I remember reading a study once where they were studying population in Jamaica where a lot of these people who were 75 years old had been doing it their whole lives, and they didn't show anything that would make your eyes bulge out, your hair stand up.
00:46:12.000All the proponents of pharmaceutical drugs and all the people that are making money off of marijuana remaining in the Schedule I category, which are pretty significant.
00:46:20.000There's a lot of people that make money off of it.
00:46:22.000The Schedule I category is ridiculous.
00:47:08.000Just scroll down a little bit further, see if you can find it.
00:47:11.000But it's just bizarre that we allow that stuff, and it's so transparent today, as opposed to this stuff all went on behind the scenes 100 years ago, which, of course, is why marijuana got made illegal there.
00:47:23.000Fentanyl maker donates big to campaign opposing pot legalization.
00:47:37.000The fact that you guys would spend that much money to stop a drug that has nothing to do with what you do...
00:47:43.000But I would make the case, and this is pretty much what my political show has been about since the very beginning, is that that's a factor of the corruption in our system.
00:47:52.000When it's a pay-to-play system, well, I mean, then that's how this happens.
00:47:57.000If you're going to impact somebody else's business by legalizing something else, then the way you fight that is you go out there and you donate to the cause.
00:48:05.000I mean, in other words, instead of the people getting what they want, it's whomever donates the most.
00:48:10.000And I remember Justice Scalia, before he died, was part of a ruling where he basically said, that's not a bug, it's a feature.
00:48:17.000This is the way the system is supposed to work.
00:48:19.000You know, money is supposed to represent the views of people, and if it's poor people, they can bundle it all together.
00:48:26.000And then if there's no money, obviously there's not a lot of people who care, and that was the theory.
00:48:30.000But what it's really done is mean if you don't have money flowing into Washington, you don't count.
00:48:46.000And wasn't this sort of structure, the government structure that sort of enforces that or relies on that, it was kind of established before corporations were.
00:48:54.000And definitely established before corporations were allowed to act as an individual and donate insane amounts of money to campaigns.
00:49:03.000And you look at it and you can see how it happened.
00:49:06.000Because you can see that the people that gave a little money back in the days when you could only give this much money had a little influence.
00:49:14.000You want to influence them to let you give a little bit more.
00:49:17.000And slowly but surely you evolve into a system.
00:49:19.000I mean, I was talking to my wife about this the other day where we were talking about...
00:49:22.000How it was never a good system, but it was a fairer system back when I was a kid in the 1970s because some of the money came from entities that represented people who were blue-collar people.
00:49:34.000So, for example, when unions were big, private employee unions, not the public employee unions that are so popular now, so if you were a pipe fitter or a plumber or those people that had, you know, electricians had pretty powerful unions, Those people would bundle money and those unions would give money to candidates that sort of compensated for the fact that you had corporate money or whatever in other directions.
00:49:55.000In the 1980s, when the Democrats started getting waxed regularly and where, you know, due to Reagan changing tax policies and whatever else, we started to get some really wealthy people and the unions started getting less powerful.
00:50:08.000All of a sudden, you know, Willie Sutton, the bank robber, was famously asked, you know, why do you rob banks?
00:50:42.000Everybody's taken money from those same sources, and the people that are lower and middle class have no way to break into that game, right?
00:50:50.000So if, you know, Lawrence Lessig, the Harvard law professor, did a great book called Republic Lost, where he pointed out how he went and interviewed politicians who didn't even realize there was another side sometimes to the issue they were voting on because they hadn't heard from any money.
00:51:05.000So you almost felt like a lot of these people were almost blameless because in their minds, well, nobody cares about this or I would have had some money coming in for that.
00:51:29.000And also, you have to think about how many people feel disenfranchised by this system.
00:51:34.000And it doesn't seem like it's going to be fixed anytime soon.
00:51:37.000Because the amount of people that are contributing to these campaigns, when you look at the percentage of human beings on this landmass, is very small.
00:51:45.000So the amount of people that have influence, it's a very small amount of people that are affecting the lives of a vast majority of people.
00:51:52.000And it becomes a very weird sort of scenario when we continue with the same representative government structure that we had back when it was impossible to communicate with people on the other side of the country.
00:52:05.000You know, Morse code or a guy on a horse with a letter.
00:52:13.000Now that you can, it's like we really ultimately have to decide, I think, one day, is one person, one vote?
00:52:21.000Like, do we all, as a mass, as 300 million people, get to decide, like, if a 190 million people think one thing and the rest think another thing.
00:52:32.000Because right now, we have delegates, we have representatives, we have senators, we have all these different people that sort of buffer us from the actual decisions that are being made.
00:52:44.000As it becomes easier and easier to communicate and express your opinions and give your thoughts on things, the option of voting online and the option of voting directly for issues without representation seems more and more enticing to people.
00:52:58.000Yeah, but you'd have to change the Constitution.
00:53:05.000I'm reading a book right now that talks about our government actually operating sort of between the lines of the Constitution.
00:53:12.000So there's room to maneuver, and over time, for understandable reasons, like security and other things, I mean, the fact that nuclear bombs were invented changed everything, that within those lines, there's room to sort of expand what you can do.
00:53:25.000But you do that generation after generation, and then you look around and go, how did we get...
00:53:29.000You know, from where we were in 1940 to where we are now, it's almost inexplicable.
00:53:33.000And sometimes when I talk about reform, you try to figure out how you can dial things back, but we've come so far beyond any point you could dial it back to, it becomes really hard to imagine.
00:53:45.000It's like you have an old mainframe computer that you've patched and patched and patched, and the only way now to make any real reform is to throw the computer out and buy a new Mac and start from scratch.
00:54:57.000They'd have to get together and go, okay, are we going to go back to that thing that was written on hemp by people that wrote with feathers?
00:55:05.000Are we going to figure this out from a modern perspective?
00:55:08.000Knowing what we know now about our ability to communicate and knowing what we know now about all the things that the founding fathers of this country did an amazing job of trying to protect from corruption.
00:55:18.000You know, trying to make sure that their vision of what America could be, that this experiment and self-government, and they put all these safeguards in play.
00:55:30.000But there's no way they could have ever predicted how far technology would have taken us in the 200 plus years since they did that.
00:55:55.000Some things that people would agree with in regards to, like, what the NSA got caught with, you know, with the mass surveillance of the public.
00:56:03.000Let's talk about that for a bit, because I was just going to go there.
00:56:05.000You know, I was thinking not that long ago, if they forced you, because we all understand that history is an evolution.
00:56:11.000So all of this is the result of decades and decades and generations and generations of building stuff on top of other things.
00:56:17.000But if you had to pick the time that was most transformative for all those things you were talking about...
00:56:24.000You have to go back to the United States between 1947 and 1948. That's when Harry Truman and the government passed these rules that made everything we talk about today.
00:56:36.000The NSA, the CIA, all those things are developments from like national security.
00:56:43.000I mean, NSC 68 is one of those big ones.
00:56:45.000A bunch of these rules that created the modern United States We'll call it the secret government that we know about today.
00:56:53.000And, you know, if you go back in time, you can certainly understand what they were thinking.
00:56:58.000I mean, you have to remember how crazy it was after the Second World War and this feeling that the Soviet Union was this threat to the whole world.
00:58:10.000And the CIA is a perfect example, but even the NSA, I mean, did you see that this week they're once again trying to slip a bill in that would allow the government, without a warrant, to track every website you go to and all these things?
00:58:37.000So I don't always, you know, you have to cut them a little slack.
00:58:41.000But there's no weighing at all about the downside.
00:58:45.000I mean, it's almost like the only thing we pay attention to is the terror side of the ledger, not the fact that do you, John McCain or Lindsey Graham, do you really want the government knowing every website?
00:59:14.000What's really sad is I've always had this rose-colored view of us, and I acknowledge that it's a myth, but I always look at the myth of America, as I call it, the 1950s high school textbook view of America.
00:59:25.000That, to me, is what I want to move towards.
00:59:28.000So when they talk about creating a more perfect union, that, to me, is the goal.
00:59:32.000And anything that conflicts with that self-image, to me, is the problem.
00:59:36.000So when you see sometimes how we really operate, anything Dick Cheney does, and I don't use the word evil, so I'll use the word nefarious.
00:59:43.000Dick Cheney is, to me, when you say, what do you want to avoid in this country?
00:59:47.000I want to avoid where Dick Cheney wants us to go.
00:59:49.000Because nothing conflicts with my 1950s mythological American textbook idea than what Cheney wants us to be.
00:59:57.000And when you look at some of the things we've done, some of the things based on that 1947-1948 America idea, Which we thought, okay, we have to do everything to stop global communism.
01:00:05.000They're going to take over the country.
01:00:06.000Once you look at some of the things we did and you realize some of what we're dealing with today is blowback, you don't know how to undo that.
01:00:13.000I mean, you almost think it's like permanent damage.
01:00:14.000Look at the way some in the Middle East see us.
01:00:16.000I mean, I'll talk to people, like I remember talking to Sam Harris about this, and he was talking about, well, you have to see things this certain way.
01:00:23.000And I said, yes, but that's not going to help you solve the problem.
01:00:25.000How do you solve the problem if we've already...
01:00:28.000If we've already soiled our bed so much that you don't know how to fix that, you don't know how to go and say, listen, we're sorry about this, can we start from scratch?
01:00:34.000You can't do that in foreign affairs just like you can't do it with the mainframe computer that is the government, you know?
01:00:39.000I can't figure out how to reverse course to a point where we can once again fix stuff, right?
01:01:07.000I think we're trying to make a battleship move like a race car.
01:01:10.000I just think it takes a long time to shift course.
01:01:14.000And when we're looking at these people that are in the Middle East that are opposing the US right now and angry and want to attack the US right now, you're most likely never going to get to them.
01:03:24.000You're going to make a mistake, right?
01:03:25.000You shouldn't be allowed to make another one, though, right?
01:03:28.000At the highest levels of government, when you send people to war and we shouldn't have gone to war, I'll cut you some slack, but I don't want you then going on CNN and being the expert who tells us how to handle the next crisis, right?
01:03:49.000There's a heck of a lot of these guys who are consistently and regularly wrong.
01:03:54.000But we put them out there as though, oh, this is somebody you should listen to now.
01:03:57.000He's going to analyze how we should handle North Korea.
01:04:00.000Yeah, but he was wrong as heck about Iraq and all these other things, so we're going to listen to him on that next subject?
01:04:05.000We don't make people who are wrong in this country pay the price, which means, you know, if you're a doctor and you screw up a few surgeries and people who should not die, die, you're done.
01:06:22.000You know, so I think the domestic radical idea has been something the government's been worried about since the first Red Scare in the 1919 era and the anarchists and that whole era.
01:06:33.000Yeah, and I think whenever you have a government, whenever you have people that are in charge, there's going to be people that oppose those people, and they're going to try to go through—some people that are opposing them are going to go through legal channels, and they're going to protest legally, and they're going to organize and give speeches,
01:06:49.000and other people are going to say, look, that doesn't work.
01:06:52.000We're going to do this guerrilla style.
01:06:53.000We're going to do this— So now we come to the hacks, right?
01:06:56.000See, I argued in the last Common Sense program that the hacks are kind of a chickens coming home to roost thing.
01:07:03.000That when, you know, we deputize our representatives to keep some secrets from us, because we all understand that there's going to be some of those.
01:07:40.000And I said this in the last show, I talked to an intelligence operative once who wouldn't tell me anything except I asked him a question once about if you had to guess what percentage of stuff is the stuff that Americans would agree should be kept secret.
01:07:57.000He said, cover your own rear-end corporate deal that a senator doesn't want his constituents to know about for 40 years because he'll get voted.
01:08:05.000It becomes a point where when you're keeping that much stuff from the American people that they have a right to know, it seems to me inevitable that there will be literally leaks, like you're trying to cover too many.
01:08:32.000So when the system breaks down to the point where the whistleblowers go through the proper channels and they become the ones who get into trouble, then you're asking for leaks.
01:08:40.000And it's hard to say, I feel sorry for you that they leaked that vital information, but if you haven't been keeping non-vital information from us for so long, that might not have happened.
01:08:49.000And then you do get release of stuff that none of us thinks should be released.
01:09:03.000It seems like there's almost no way to keep stuff secret now.
01:09:07.000If you are an operative at the Democratic or Republican parties, how much would you want to bake it into the cake that you try to see that there'll be a leak against your opponents before the next election?
01:09:15.000How much does that now become a part of your strategizing?
01:09:46.000Yeah, I wonder what, if they checked the Republicans, if they checked, like, what kind of crazy shit was said when they realized that Donald Trump was running away with it.
01:09:55.000I heard something that there'd been a hack, and it was like new news, so I'm not up to speed, but that there'd been a hack of the RNC2. Did you see...
01:10:03.000Everybody's freaking out now over the fact, and again, we have to make the disclaimer that the Russian hackers or whomever, I have this Russian hackers who get mad at me when I say that, whomever it was that did this, that they've been known to alter stuff.
01:10:16.000So you have to take it on with a grain of salt.
01:10:17.000But what came out, I guess, was a list, and this is from the Democratic Party's main list of donors, their internal documents, which shows the top donors, how much they gave, and then what was given in return.
01:11:57.000So all we have to do is get some really rich marijuana grower to give enough money so that he becomes the Department of Homeland Security director and you can get that corruption thing working in your favor.
01:12:07.000That's actually possible with the amount of money they're making in Colorado.
01:12:41.000These are two people that, you know, here's the way I look at it.
01:12:44.000If you're Hillary Clinton, and they have been after you since before your husband was president, you know, in Arkansas, they were after them, right?
01:12:51.000So you know how on you they're going to be.
01:12:55.000Wouldn't you stay so far away from any lines that nobody could ever come close to saying you were—but they don't.
01:13:02.000They both walk and straddle, and that—you know, if you talk to people in Arkansas, they just say, that's the Clintons.
01:13:08.000They walk, they straddle the line, and a lot of times they go, you know, in too much of one direction.
01:13:23.000If you know you're the most watched man in the world, why on earth would you have an affair with a teenage intern who you know will not stay quiet about it?
01:13:32.000So if you're Hillary Clinton and you've got everyone trying to come up with dirt on you, Why would you do anything that was even suspicious?
01:13:43.000Well, don't you think that, first of all, their patterns and their behavior and their attitudes towards things were established in the 1980s when the world was a much simpler place?
01:13:51.000And you can get away with what happened in Mena, Arkansas.
01:13:55.000With all that craziness, with dropping drugs out of airplanes, which is all part of that Narco series.
01:15:06.000Yeah, they were making money by selling drugs in the ghetto and they were taking that money and it was directly affecting global politics.
01:15:13.000See, in a country that cared about reform, How many of those things have to happen before somebody would turn around and say, okay, we have a big problem, and we have to weed that problem out of the CIA or whichever agency you want to name so that it doesn't happen again?
01:15:30.000I remember looking into police departments that had problems, and in LA when I was growing up, you knew which ones to avoid.
01:15:36.000For example, there was one in Signal Hill, and we all knew you don't want to get pulled over there.
01:15:41.000So eventually they had to disband the whole police department and start from scratch, because every time they tried to reform it, there was a culture in that little police department that absorbed new members.
01:15:51.000And the people that wouldn't become part of the culture ended up transferring out, and the people that worked with the culture stayed.
01:15:58.000That's a microchasm of how all these giant agencies work, where how do you change the culture of something when you would have to get rid of The people who are there now who all bought in or they wouldn't still be there.
01:16:11.000It's like we were saying about the mainframe computer.
01:16:12.000If you wanted to start the CIA over today, would you use any of the people that are in it now?
01:16:17.000Hard to know because I think if you didn't, you'd end up with an agency that thought, listen, We're keeping America safe.
01:16:24.000And if we have to dose people with LSD, as happened in the late 50s, early 1960s, as a way to make sure that our people aren't dosed with LSD, we're going to do it, you know?
01:17:58.000If you go look at Bill Clinton in the primaries, When he was basically chosen to be the Democratic candidate to run against the elder George Bush.
01:18:06.000And you look at those stiffs he was up against.
01:18:11.000I mean, when you look and you go, okay, there's a bunch of people who I could never vote for in a million years, and there's one person who's got some charisma, right?
01:19:00.000Well, but that's why you said the founding – you talked about the founding fathers earlier, and I'm always blown away that Madison, who's the guy who's most responsible for writing the Constitution, was like 23. I was the most irresponsible goof-off in the world, I think, at 23. So you look at those guys and you realize how much they had a problem with what they called factions.
01:19:19.000Their version of factions is what we would call parties today, and they thought it was poisonous.
01:19:23.000And yet it was like a generation later, and what did they have cropping up?
01:19:45.000But to me, that's the root of so much of our evil in this country.
01:19:49.000We have two parties that control a corrupt system, and in order to fix the corrupt system, the two parties would have to be on board to do it.
01:19:57.000Well, okay, that's asking, what have we said, the fox to redesign the chicken coop?
01:20:03.000Well, it's also what we're talking about, whether it's the CIA or the NSA. If you're asking them to redesign this thing, you're asking them to relinquish some power.
01:20:15.000I mean, that's when it gets really wiggy.
01:20:16.000If you say, I don't want you spying on us anymore, and the next 9-11 attack we have happened because they couldn't spy on us, you better believe they'll point that out.
01:20:31.000So if somebody really audited it, you know, whether it's the CIA or the FBI or the NSA, I mean, 100% sure they're doing their best, but there's no way it's done really well.
01:21:14.000And I think the Founding Fathers were people who were aware.
01:21:17.000They used to talk about lifespans of countries.
01:21:19.000And so, you know, that computer analogy we use is a pretty good one.
01:21:22.000This is an old computer that we've patched many, many times and also tasked to do many, many more things than the Constitution ever envisioned because you have a Great Depression or you have a Second World War or you have nuclear weapons appear on the scene.
01:21:35.000So all of a sudden, we have a flexible Constitution to deal with unforeseeables, as you pointed out.
01:21:42.000I mean, at what point have you stretched it so far that it's become a fig leaf?
01:21:45.000I try to remind people, we did a whole series on the decline and fall of the Roman Republic, and what a lot of people don't know is that when the Roman Empire first appeared, and for a long time afterwards, they kept all the forms.
01:22:06.000They still had people giving money to senators to give them favors.
01:22:10.000But we had a system in Rome, as if I was there, but at that point, it was a total dictatorship.
01:22:18.000But we elected senators anyway because the forms had a long and noble tradition that was tied to the way Romans saw themselves, the same way we're tied to that 1950s high school textbook of who we are.
01:22:30.000If we had a dictator someday, they would never be able to get rid of senators because the forms are very important.
01:22:36.000Well, that's one of the biggest fears about the Patriot Act, right?
01:22:39.000And the Patriot Act II as well, is that if something did happen and martial law was declared, would we really have the same system that we think we have?
01:22:48.000Would we have that 1950s textbook version of America?
01:22:51.000Or would we really have a military dictatorship that's disguised?
01:23:33.000The government is absolutely petrified about all the threats out there to us, and in order to protect us, things like little writings on hemp paper from 240 years ago are not going to stand in the way of us protecting us from another 9-11 or a nuclear bomb going off in a harbor or something like that.
01:23:50.000Well, of course, the argument to that is, like, of course you're going to say you're protecting us.
01:23:54.000Of course that's the reason why you're violating the Constitution.
01:23:56.000And sometimes you are, and sometimes you're not.
01:23:57.000But how convenient it is that you are also controlling vast amounts of wealth, controlling so much of the ability of the United States citizens to do their jobs, to get through life, to do anything they want to do without being That's
01:24:29.000one of the weirder Aspects about real government corruption because the real corruption is the legal shit like you're talking about the ledger showing what people did what and what they received for those donations and how much they gave and how much they got out of it and how they became like that is how is that?
01:24:51.000How is that legal and Martha Quinn goes to jail, not Martha Quinn, she was a DJ. Martha Stewart, rather, goes to jail for a stock trade, you know, where she was not honest about the information that she knew about profiting off a stock trade.
01:25:15.000How much weird corruption is just entangled into the system that the only way to get rid of would have to be you would have to stop all those jobs that evolve around all that money coming in.
01:25:29.000You're dealing with untold millions of dollars that's being siphoned from the system by all these people, all the lobbyists and all the special interest groups that constantly work in the Washington Hive to extract the Those people at this point, it's almost impossible without a total reset of the system.
01:25:50.000So, for example, when the Founding Fathers set up war powers, which they understood to be the most important thing, they separated the part where we decide to go to war from the power of fighting the war.
01:26:02.000And they gave the power to fight the war to the president.
01:26:43.000They would love to have a support, a declaration of support by Congress.
01:26:46.000But once you do that, you break an important wall, the wall that says that the president has basically unlimited powers in wartime, and now he has the right to decide when wartime is.
01:26:57.000That's a firewall that had been built into the system, that once it's broken, you can never repair that.
01:27:04.000Congress has no way to repair that firewall.
01:27:06.000So now, somebody said to me, if Donald Trump's elected president...
01:27:10.000Can he use a nuclear bomb against a country?
01:27:12.000Or can he decide, I'm going to scare the heck out of North Korea, and I'm going to, you know, drop a bomb off their coast?
01:27:18.000Yes, and he can do it without asking anybody.
01:27:21.000And the only people that might tell him no are the military.
01:27:25.000And if the military starts telling the president no, that's almost as scary as a president that can drop a nuclear bomb whenever he wants to.
01:27:31.000So that's, in the founder's Construction of the country, in their mind, you would have had to have gone to Congress and say, can we drop a nuclear bomb on North Korea?
01:27:42.000And then Congress would have voted, decided, and then the president would have been empowered to take whatever measures were necessary.
01:27:49.000The president has extreme emergency authority and foreign policy now.
01:27:52.000He didn't have to ask Congress for anything.
01:27:55.000There's only one thing Congress can do.
01:27:56.000They have the power of the purse, so they can cut off the funds.
01:28:00.000But can you imagine our troops, say, in Iraq or Afghanistan, and the Congress doesn't want them there anymore, so the choice they have is to stop sending them meals and replacement bullets, and it's not going to happen.
01:28:11.000So those are the ways that the Constitution gets destroyed.
01:28:16.000And Truman, I mean, you look at what we mentioned earlier, the CIA, the NSA, that power.
01:28:21.000Truman did more damage to this country in one presidency than anyone I can think of.
01:28:26.000And yet, I cut him some slack because the world had never existed like it existed in his era.
01:28:33.000He had whole new challenges to deal with.
01:28:36.000It's like when Obama came into office and promised to undo the extremes of the previous administration.
01:28:42.000Had he done that, we could have said, okay, 9-11 happened, we freaked out, and then we fixed it.
01:28:54.000When both parties agree on something, it becomes the way we do things now.
01:28:57.000So if Truman had left office and Eisenhower had come in as a member of the other party and said, whoa, this CIA thing is more like an American Gestapo.
01:29:07.000But when he decides to embrace the CIA, now that's the way we do business.
01:29:12.000So, if the two parties don't sort of look out for each other and say, listen, 9-11 is a one-off strange experience, okay, we understand how somebody could overreact and freak out, we'll fix it, and instead say, no, we'll keep things the way they are, Then you've taken another step down,
01:29:29.000another firewall's been broken, and the Constitution's been stretched again to the point where there are big holes in it now.
01:29:34.000Is there a Fourth Amendment anymore, really?
01:29:36.000I mean, there's amendments to the Constitution.
01:29:38.000And people will say to me all the time, Dan, you say our freedom's going away.
01:29:42.000Tell me when we repealed an amendment.
01:30:14.000We're such a panicky people that we're not willing to suck up a lot of casualties if that's what's required to defend some of this stuff.
01:30:20.000If you're going to say you can't spy on Americans, just understand, some nasty Americans are going to get fertilizer bombs and blow up stuff sometimes because they slip through that protection for you and me and everyone else.
01:30:31.000Yeah, I wonder if over time, like going back to that battleship analogy, like that's going to be the only thing that clears this up, is that the people that start getting elected into office deal with the new level of transparency, and the people that are growing up now who eventually become politicians, they grow up in a different world.
01:30:48.000And so their view of what's possible and not possible is very different than, like we were talking about the Clintons, who...
01:30:54.000You know, just kind of had an open pass to kind of do a lot of shit that they wanted to do back in the 1980s and in the 90s.
01:31:58.000I mean, this is like a bias we all have.
01:31:59.000If you want to support that candidate anyway, you're inclined to believe what they say and disinclined to believe what the other guy says.
01:32:06.000This is part of the problem about the binary lesser of two evils thing we get into, because Hillary Clinton is one of the most unpopular candidates.
01:32:13.000I mean, I always tell, you know, I have two daughters.
01:32:15.000And they constantly ask me these really uncomfortable questions about why don't we have women presidents and all this kind of stuff.
01:32:41.000The entire Clinton administration was the Republicans trying to get them for something.
01:32:44.000So imagine she gets elected, imagine that they continue to hound her the way they do, and remembering that they tend to walk that line, right, being the Clintons.
01:32:52.000There's going to be 90% of nothing in there.
01:33:32.000But it seems like a scandal when people find out the numbers of innocent people killed by drones and also the real issues with him saying that he was going to support whistleblowers and what they've actually done with whistleblowers.
01:33:44.000And how hard they've been on the freedom of the press.
01:33:46.000It's been a very confusing time for a lot of people that were Obama supporters eight years ago and thought, like I did, that this was the answer.
01:33:55.000Like, finally we have this super articulate young guy who has a view of the world that's similar to us.
01:34:01.000He said all the right things when he ran for office.
01:34:27.000You know, a part of you can say, listen, they took him in the back room and said, here are the threats we stopped last month.
01:34:32.000Do you really want to do what you say?
01:34:33.000You know, you don't, but you would love the president to at least say, okay, I'm going to hold a televised press conference now, and I'm going to say, here's what I said when I ran for president.
01:34:46.000Yeah, but I was going to say, when they don't do that, you open up the door to what the hell's going on, right?
01:34:51.000He gave you this small promise and that small promise and maybe a health care reform, but he said he was going to essentially repair the Constitution, and he didn't.
01:35:32.000It's also hard to understand, like, when you've seen a guy like Trump, and I want to get back to the Clinton Foundation before I forget, but when you've seen a guy like Trump And you listen to the people that have actually interviewed him or talked to him and had conversations with him.
01:36:57.000What interests me, though, is you get these...
01:36:59.000It's funny because, you know, on Twitter, some of the Trump supporters, and I don't ever want to broad brush because I know a lot of people that are going to vote for Trump that are old people, that are fine people, that are...
01:37:08.000But there's certainly an edge on some of those people that support him that has certain racism, all kinds of things.
01:37:29.000No American who understands the United States well would want to vote for some strongman.
01:37:35.000That whole attitude of wanting some strongman figure is as un-American as I can think of.
01:37:40.000And if you go study your Roman Republic history, it was the strongman riding in on a white horse that really signaled the beginning of the end.
01:37:49.000Anyone who wants too much power and promises to use it, that's somebody to be afraid of.
01:38:26.000You know, he's got like these punchlines.
01:38:28.000Look at who he was up against on the primary stage with a bunch of stiff robotic people repeating talking points.
01:38:34.000It was a little like Clinton was in his primaries in the early 90s when it's a bunch of deadbeat, stiff, cardboard cutout pretend figures and one person that you don't know what they're going to say next and that becomes interesting.
01:38:46.000Well, what's interesting is the charismatic type people that we are so attracted to really are not what you want as a leader.
01:38:54.000You don't want that person that needs so much attention that they polish their persona to a point where they're incredibly influential.
01:39:00.000Because a lot of that when you're seeing, it's like they're entertainers.
01:39:13.000And then you've exercised that to the point where it's a well-honed muscle with incredible endurance and you have a great sensitivity to how people are perceiving you so you know how to come across as noble and patriotic and brilliant.
01:39:26.000We all know that some of the things that people say, like standard things that people say, there's some of them that you really shouldn't even be able to say anymore because it doesn't mean anything and you shouldn't be allowed to just hijack those words and just use it to gain merit like, God bless our troops.
01:39:44.000When people freak out over that, I always say, listen, it'd be nice if we freaked out a little bit about what these songs and flags and symbols represent, instead of freaking out over the symbol and ignoring the stuff.
01:39:54.000I mean, we're talking about a person who's in an incredible position of influence, and they're saying these things that are kind of not like a real sentence.
01:40:03.000You just knew that other people have said that.
01:40:06.000It's something you say, so you're saying it.
01:40:08.000But you're saying it about a very important thing.
01:40:10.000You're saying about the young people, the children of all the people that are here, the 18-year-old kids that are sent over there to shoot people they've never met.
01:40:19.000And you're saying, God bless those people.
01:41:16.000A poli-sci professor back in college who happened to be a German guy.
01:41:19.000So he was sort of viewing our system from outside our system.
01:41:23.000And he said, you know, this is how he said, the problem with you Americans is you have a president that combines two jobs.
01:41:30.000If you were a European country, that would be two jobs.
01:41:33.000One is the bean counter guy, the one you were mentioning, the guy you want to be president, the one that's, you know, he's maybe not so great at the big speeches and you don't want that guy going to the funerals and representing America.
01:41:43.000And he goes, and then we have in Europe chancellors or presidents that these people physically represent the soul.
01:42:15.000What I was getting at by the expressions is like saying things like God bless the troops or God bless America is that just the whole way of talking as a politician is so it's so false and so accepted that we know that they're gonna stand in front of all these people with this pre-planned out speech that is like this weird rally this weird Artificial strip club DJ voice that they put on.
01:43:49.000So in that sense, that was good for the system.
01:43:51.000Of course, now we've gone quite a bit farther down that road, and I don't think it is so good for the system anymore.
01:43:57.000I do think Anybody would beat Hillary Clinton almost.
01:44:00.000I mean, I think, you know, Democrats keep saying to me, if you don't vote for Hillary Clinton, you're going to put Trump in office and that'll be your fault.
01:44:06.000And I keep saying, it's not my fault you put Hillary Clinton up as your candidate.
01:44:10.000I mean, in 2008, we saw how unpopular she was.
01:44:13.000She shouldn't have lost to Barack Obama.
01:44:17.000Do you realize if she hadn't had a 70-something-year-old democratic socialist who, let's be honest, does not have a ton of charisma, and a guy nobody's ever heard from as her only two primary challengers up on that stage, she wouldn't be here.
01:44:29.000If Joe Biden, and this is the first time I can think of that, a vice president hasn't tried to run himself.
01:44:35.000If Joe Biden had run, he would be up against Trump now.
01:44:38.000And I don't think Trump would stand a chance, to be honest.
01:44:40.000And I don't like Joe Biden, but I just think he's a zero.
01:44:43.000And right now, Trump is a negative running against Hillary, who's a negative.
01:45:38.000I wouldn't be surprised, and someone brought this up, and it wasn't me, but someone suggested it, and I think they're probably right, that Trump...
01:45:46.000Did it on purpose and plagiarized Michelle Obama's speech so that people would talk about it, so it would give even more attention to his campaign.
01:45:56.000I mean, Michael Moore, of all people, came out with a piece about three weeks ago, and he started the piece off by saying something to the effect of, you don't have to believe what I'm about to tell you, but I will tell you that I have spoken to people who are in the know who tell me that Trump doesn't even want this gig,
01:46:12.000that this is something that has gotten out of control.
01:46:15.000That this was more of a, I'll get a TV series afterwards, and that he didn't expect he'd do this good.
01:46:20.000And I thought to myself, okay, I don't know that I believe that, but if that's true, this is the most unusual, funky, weird American political history story I've ever heard.
01:46:30.000I think it's the last gaps of a dying empire.
01:46:32.000I just don't think you can continue the way they've been doing it.
01:46:54.000Well, this was in Lawrence Lessig's book, Republic Lost, which, by the way, if anyone wants to go check out, he put it on the internet for free now.
01:47:05.000But one of the things he said in there that was so interesting is he showed how people who are getting started, you know, running for mayor, you know, the low-level things, how the parties begin the weeding out process.
01:47:16.000And the first thing that they want to know is, how good are you at raising money?
01:47:21.000And this determines whether or not the party lets this mayoral candidate put the R or D after their name, or that mayoral candidate.
01:47:27.000So in other words, from the very beginning, one of the main qualifications is how good are you at raising money?
01:47:32.000Okay, so fast forward to when that guy or woman is up on the stage running for president, and they have four other elected positions leading up to that, all of which require you to be a better fundraiser.
01:47:43.000When that's one of the number one qualifications required for the parties to let you progress, Then what do you end up with at the end of the line?
01:47:50.000I mean, what are the carrots and sticks that they're looking for?
01:47:53.000A little bit different than maybe what you and I as voters are looking for.
01:47:56.000That's why Trump is such a weird one, right?
01:47:57.000Because he's a guy who has so much money.
01:48:00.000He funded most of this shit by himself, allegedly.
01:48:38.000If you go watch those TV shows from like the 1950s and you see their portrayal of a 70 year old, it's sitting on the porch falling asleep and whittling.
01:48:45.000You know, I mean, that's what this is.
01:48:47.00070 may be the new 60, but 60 ain't great either.
01:48:50.000Well, it's definitely not the prime of your cognitive abilities.
01:48:54.000It's not the prime of your physical health.
01:48:55.000Your experience level may be good, but your bus speed is terrible.
01:49:00.000Trump doesn't even have experience, so it's even more bizarre.
01:49:03.000So it's not like you're dealing with this elderly statesman that has so much knowledge and so much invested in our system of government and really believes in it so much that he wants to lead this country and make America great again.
01:49:15.000Super rich guy who's famous for going, you're fired!
01:49:18.000And when Trump supporters say, well, he'll pick the best people, I always want to point out, you know, he's already shown some of the people that he likes, and there's the same old group of people you've had before.
01:49:28.000I mean, he's not going and picking other business people who've never...
01:49:58.000I always say, if CNN is going to put, to just name one, these experts to tell us what this latest North Korea nuclear missile thing means, would you please put up their track record the way you would put up the wins and loss record of a manager in baseball?
01:50:11.000Do you want that manager who's 4-72 explaining to you the World Series strategy, or are you going to say, this guy doesn't know Jack?
01:50:18.000Because if they put the records of these people they have on the programs, you'd look at it and go, I'm not listening to this guy.
01:51:36.000It seems like if CNN or any of these news networks decided to help support this independent idea and bring in independence and show that, that independents are the vast majority of the voters, or the majority, rather, the slight majority, of the voters in America, if they showed that and promoted that idea,
01:51:53.000people would go, wow, I didn't know that.
01:52:05.000The money is interviewing and getting on camera the people that are the most popular right now and most likely to win.
01:52:11.000That's why one of the most amazing things that Trump did was all that shit talking he did, talking about Mexicans being rapists and all this nuts about the wall and all the different crazy things that he said.
01:52:22.000When he did that, the news was forced to cover him.
01:53:49.000You know, you could conceivably come up with an election where Trump gets more actual votes, but Clinton wins the Electoral College and wins the key states.
01:53:57.000And that's how the Sharpies, who do this for a living, as consultants and as campaign strategists, that's how they win.
01:54:40.000I don't know what I'd do, but I mean, what we require those people to do with this permanent campaign that goes on forever, and these are 70-year-old people, as we said, I'm amazed they both haven't broken down.
01:54:51.000And if I'm Trump, I would look at this and go, do I really want this?
01:54:54.000If this is how hard the job will be, I could be in Hawaii.
01:55:19.000You know, there is a part of you that would love to just have a view of what it, you know, like a Gilligan's Island episode where you have a dream sequence where the coconut hits you on the head and you imagine what it's...
01:55:29.000I don't want to live through it, but I'd love to see it for a minute to see what it would look like.
01:55:33.000Hillary Clinton will just be more of the same.
01:55:35.000We're heading towards an iceberg here, and she's one of the people that set the course.
01:55:57.000And I've talked about this in a couple of shows.
01:55:59.000Another thing, I'm having a bad track record myself.
01:56:01.000Maybe you shouldn't listen to me at all.
01:56:02.000But on the racism thing, which I don't ever want to put a number on what percentage of the Trump supporters fall into that category that we see Twitter people trolling us on.
01:56:13.000But I thought that was going the way of the dodo.
01:56:16.000I am more surprised by that than anything else.
01:56:19.000The rise in overt, and I don't even want to say racism, but just people who look at the world with that viewpoint, that lens.
01:56:27.000I thought we were, you know, not evolving, but I thought those people were dying out.
01:56:31.000I thought they were like Archie Bunkers, and they were just going to be...
01:56:34.000And to see that recur is the biggest surprise I've had in my adult lifetime, I think, when analyzing politics.
01:57:45.000There's young kids like I would have done when I was 17. If you gave me a computer when I was 17 and I knew I could tweet to Al Gore, I'd probably make the meanest fucking tweet.
01:57:57.000I just think there's so many voices out there that when you see racism attached to the Donald Trump campaign, you can't really say what percentage of Donald Trump supporters are.
01:58:09.000Is it more of a problem in the Trump campaign than the Hillary campaign?
01:58:58.000And, you know, you had brought this up earlier, and I wanted to point out, we had talked about people growing up, young people today, and whether or not they're going to go back.
01:59:07.000In other words, say, oh, this is all so far, you know, beyond where we should go back.
01:59:11.000Or if they're going, this is the new normal to them.
01:59:13.000You know, to them, they don't even remember when Dan Carlin talks about the laws of the Fourth Amendment, they're going, what?
01:59:19.000I don't even remember what you're talking about.
01:59:21.000God, that'd be crazy to let people do that or whatever.
01:59:24.000I mean, you wonder if once you haven't had a freedom for a while, does it seem radical to go back to that?
01:59:30.000There was a great quote, I use it all the time, by a historian a long time ago named Charles Austin Beard.
01:59:35.000And he said, to be considered a dangerous radical today, all you have to do is go around spouting the phrases of the founding fathers.
01:59:43.000That'll get you on the NSA watch list today.
01:59:48.000You know, if you take that out, smack in the mic, but if you take that out and you try to analyze that, what does that say about how far we've come?
01:59:56.000You know, revolutionaries create your country, and then we very quickly lose that revolutionary ardor, and we become much more conservative, which is natural, I think.
02:00:05.000But, you know, we talked about life cycles of countries.
02:00:10.000I mean, could you make a case that the United States concept, which is really a utopian one, this we can all be free, we can all run the country, is that something that is past its prime, its sell-by date?
02:00:20.000Well, I think the corrupt amongst us have tried to whittle away at it, like you're talking about the Fourth Amendment or the Second Amendment or even the First Amendment, any of the amendments.
02:00:31.000Where you look at the freedoms that people are really worried about losing.
02:00:35.000And when something like the Patriot Act or the Patriot Act 2 gets passed, and you realize that they can just sort of detain you, and they don't have to charge you with anything, and they can detain you indefinitely if they just decide.
02:00:47.000They don't have to present you with any evidence.
02:00:50.000They don't have to give you a court date.
02:00:52.000Like, well, okay, well, what are we operating under then?
02:00:56.000If you can make an act like that, and that sort of dissolves the Constitution and the Bill of Rights for people who you decide are the bad guys, if you can just do that, then we don't really have...
02:01:10.000The protection of the Constitution or the Bill of Rights anymore.
02:01:30.000I mean, if you're going to create a group and get a lot of money to defend an amendment to the Constitution, even if Americans can argue what the Second Amendment means, but I love the idea of money coming to legislators, because that's what they pay attention to, to protect those rights.
02:01:47.000My problem is that the amendments that are getting so shafted are the ones that don't have a lot of money, and often have a lot of money on the other side.
02:01:54.000Well, it's just bizarre that you could get so much done with money and that this is our system of government, and it slowly but surely crept its way into the root system of it and just entangled it and choked it down.
02:02:07.000I mean, I think that basically this is the way it always is, and we would have had to have held it back with all of our force to keep it from doing – because money has a way, doesn't it?
02:03:11.000David Duke is a bad person who had disavowed numerous occasions over the years.
02:03:15.000Trump's had an MSNBC. No, this is not the first time, though.
02:03:17.000This is after he got slammed for not doing enough to disavow.
02:03:21.000So in other words, this is like the follow-up question.
02:03:24.000So the first time he said something like, I don't want to misquote it, but I recall him saying something like, I don't know anything about the KKK or something like that, and everybody lost their minds.
02:03:33.000But if you said to yourself, okay, 5% of my support is from people who would like a guy like David Duke...
02:03:39.000I'm not going to cut out 5% of my support.
02:04:09.000And he tried to make the case to me, and he very well might have been right, that a lot of those people in that area where they have historic problems with each other and always have, were getting along just fine while economic things were okay.
02:04:49.000It's hard to factor how much that plays a role versus how much the internet and the ability for these people to speak out when before they would have had to be Xeroxing things and leaving them on your car, you know, when you come out of the grocery store.
02:05:28.000I mean, you couldn't find that many like-minded groups if you lived in a neighborhood full of progressive people and you were like a really conservative person.
02:05:35.000It'd be really kind of difficult for you to...
02:05:54.000And they also, they're apologists and they're not honest about the faults of their candidates.
02:06:00.000Like there was this thing about Hillary about, like I said, people were talking about how it's sexist that people are commenting on her health and that if it was a man that was running for president who got...
02:06:12.000Weak during 9-11, during, you know, after some sort of a service for the fallen troops, that that would be totally acceptable.
02:06:20.000No, and history shows it because people forget that George McGovern had to drop his vice presidential candidate because the guy, it had been released that he had visited a psychiatrist for some depression problems.
02:09:20.000The DNC's going, well, listen, Russian hackers are known to alter this stuff.
02:09:23.000So the minute that came out, it was the greatest boon to all the politicians in the world because they could say, whatever that says is probably altered, you know?
02:09:31.000So it's the wonderful get-out-of-jail-free card on the hacking.
02:09:44.000I mean, I would actually probably support a hack if I was running for president in that sense, because you could say, look, you're not going to trust evidence that came from someone who got it through illegal means.
02:10:28.000I would rather not have to vote for her, although she is a friend I respect.
02:10:32.000A 70-year-old person with a long track record, unbridled ambition, greedy, not transformational, with a husband still dicking bimbos at home.
02:11:09.000How can a guy like Colin Powell or even Hillary Clinton have all of this stuff written in emails?
02:11:14.000Are they that out of touch that this stuff is being tracked?
02:11:17.000Or they should know that it's being tracked?
02:11:19.000I think they felt like they could get away with a lot more than they can get away with.
02:11:23.000And I think, again, we're talking about people who grew up and started behaving a certain way way before there was this level of transparency.
02:11:30.000Oh, see, you're thinking they should behave differently.
02:11:31.000That's not how these people, they're thinking, now, how can I not use that email problem again?
02:11:35.000They're not thinking of changing behavior.
02:11:37.000The behavior they want to change is using email.
02:11:40.000That's the behavior they want to change.
02:11:41.000I'm just thinking that they sort of adapted to the times.
02:11:43.000That was the political landscape back then.
02:11:45.000I think the political landscape today is just way different.
02:11:49.000You have to literally think everybody is watching everything you say.
02:11:53.000Well, case in point, we We talked about Clinton and women.
02:11:56.000The press knew that Kennedy was doing all that stuff, but there was an unwritten gentleman's agreement that you didn't talk about that kind of stuff.
02:12:03.000Never mind that he might have been having sex with Sam Giancana's girlfriend, Judith Exner, at the same time, and that there might be some problems with that.
02:12:11.000Nowadays, I mean, that's why, to me, people say Bill Clinton was just impeached over sex.
02:12:16.000In my mind, anybody who's either dumb enough or whatever you want to put in there that he thinks he can get away with that is somebody I don't want with a hand on the nuclear button.
02:13:18.000It was a conversation between this guy and fighter pilots about the high incidences of swingers.
02:13:23.000And one of the things that I think they were saying, I forget where I read this, but they were saying that...
02:13:28.000What was going on was that these guys were in such an intense job where there's a high likelihood of them dying.
02:13:35.000And one of the ways to ensure that their loved one would be looked after is if someone loved them as much as they loved them.
02:13:42.000So they would literally be in these fighter runs with these planes, flying into hostile territory, getting shot at, thinking any day could be my last day.
02:13:52.000So there's this desperation of like, you're leaving behind a wife and a family And one way they alleviated that, this was the idea, was that they would wife swap.
02:14:18.000Because when you're someone whose everyday world is life and death on a level that a fighter pilot is, I mean, that is...
02:14:26.000I can certainly see the risk taker thing where you said these are people who live on the edge because that's their...
02:14:31.000When you fly those planes, you're a risk taker.
02:14:34.000If you wanted to say, okay, a person who's willing to do risky behavior here, I'm not thinking the wife swapping as much as having a lot of girlfriends that aren't your wife.
02:14:42.000But at the same time, listen, like you said, some of those personality traits are probably what you want in those guys.
02:14:49.000Yeah, well, I think the way Chris was explaining it, too, was that their bond and their camaraderie between each other was so powerful that it's sort of...
02:14:59.000It sort of eclipsed jealousy in a way, you know, because they counted on each other so much and they were brothers in war and literally life or death struggle.
02:15:09.000So there's a bond and a camaraderie that sort of superseded everything and that the idea of like that they could swap wives and they just love each other more.
02:16:08.000You know, for those who have not seen all of the appearances I've had on this, Joe started off breaking me into being on the Joe Rogan podcast with some comments initially.
02:16:17.000So now I just flow with it and it's going to get me killed eventually.
02:16:31.000But what do you, like, when you see what the reports are about the Clinton Foundation, I don't totally understand what's legal and what's not legal, but I don't think I've seen anyone said that anything they've done is illegal, right?
02:17:37.000And then if you gave money to the foundation, does that mean you get special treatment?
02:17:40.000I can hear the Hillary Clinton supporters saying, well, that didn't happen.
02:17:43.000But it's the reason that people put stuff in a blind trust when they become president, so that you don't even know what your money's doing, so that you can't possibly be favoritism toward...
02:17:54.000And the Clintons have basically made it sound like they're not going to do that.
02:17:59.000And once again, as I said to you earlier, if you know they're after you like they're after the Clintons, wouldn't you just leave as much room between you and any potential whiff of scandal as you could?
02:18:16.000At this point, you know, how could they?
02:18:20.000They probably are so entangled with all those other people that have been a part of all that stuff for so long.
02:18:26.000Well, and you know, you've done this and I've done this.
02:18:28.000We've both been around some of these high rollers before where you realize how much they pick up the phone and talk to other high rollers and how interconnected that network is.
02:18:35.000And there's nothing wrong with that intrinsically, but you could easily see...
02:18:40.000That that networking can be used for nefarious purposes, good purposes or no purposes, but they all have each other on speed dial, right?
02:19:24.000In the era of hacks and all that, isn't that the smarter way to comport yourself, right?
02:19:30.000You know, Nixon, because he was a taper new, when he had to have an important discussion with somebody, he wanted to make sure it was safe.
02:20:03.000Colin Powell and everybody watching what's unfolding right now are determining that there are going to be new ways we communicate, and it's not going to be like that.
02:20:10.000Well, there's two different hacks, right?
02:20:12.000There's the DNC hack, and then there's the Hillary server hack, right?
02:21:13.000They have no real interest in addressing it.
02:21:15.000The only time they're interested in fighting corruption is if they can manage to fight the kind of corruption that helps the other side without impacting the ones that help them.
02:21:24.000So the Republicans always say that about Democratic campaign finance reform, that it goes after Republican funders, but not Democratic ones.
02:21:31.000In other words, they're not holier than thou.
02:21:33.000They're just trying to figure out another way to game the system, utilizing reform as the tool.
02:21:39.000I mean, they have to know in some way they're all complicit in similar sort of situations.
02:21:43.000But the thing that was so weird, I think I said not transparent at all, I meant completely transparent.
02:21:49.000The thing that was weird about how transparent it was is that there wasn't even a gap in time of this woman getting fired and then getting hired.
02:22:04.000That's just like what you said about Hillary Clinton and the fact that she had said that the FBI director said this about her when he had just said something kind of complete.
02:22:12.000But she knew that the 5% of people that would realize that didn't count.
02:22:23.000And there's another day, and more news stories, and a plane goes down to Singapore or something, and there's another news story, and some fucking nuclear test in North Korea, and everybody's gone.
02:22:33.000There's just so much going on that you can't really maintain any story like that in the news.
02:22:38.000That's why the Glenn Greenwald, Edward Snowden, the way that they approached that was structured the way it was to come out in chunks, because they had said, if you release it all at once, it'd be this huge story, but then it's done.
02:22:50.000If you understand how the news cycle works the way you just mentioned, you want to release a nice chunk and then wait until the headlines die down again and then release another chunk.
02:22:58.000And that's the way Wikileaks is doing that right now with these hacks they have.
02:23:02.000They're releasing it in chunks because as soon as the news cycle dies down, they want to take advantage of the next one.
02:23:08.000The WikiLeaks thing is one of the most bizarre scenarios where you have this guy that if you ask the United States, like just the United States, like what percentage of people support what Julian Assange did?
02:23:20.000What percentage of the people support letting people understand what is really going on behind the scenes?
02:24:38.000He's been in his house for four years.
02:24:41.000But here's what they have to do if they want to keep playing the straight and narrow.
02:24:44.000They have to get a hold of some leaked documents from the other side, because otherwise, it's like if you only get the leaked documents from one side, that does impact the election, and that calls into question the motives of the leaker.
02:24:57.000If you're saying, I release information, then you can be above the fray.
02:25:02.000If you say, like a lot of journalists understand how to do, what you omit and don't release has as much value as what you do.
02:25:09.000So if the only leaks you're getting are from the Democrats and the Republicans aren't being leaked, then that's influencing the election.
02:25:15.000Because you know as well as I do, the other side has crap that is just as shocking and upsetting and corrupt as the Democrats.
02:25:37.000But I read somebody online said the other day that there's people who are going to vote for him just for the entertainment value because they don't want to be bored for the next four years.
02:25:45.000And I thought to myself, that's when the country's really jumped the shark.
02:25:48.000When we're voting for candidates, I don't care what they'll do.
02:26:42.000Anybody who tells me that they support the troops again, but are willing to send them willy-nilly anywhere at any time, to me, supporting the troops means you value their lives and their families and the fact that many of these guys and women have had to go back and back and back and their lives have been on hold and they suffer.
02:26:58.000I mean, how many stories have we read about what these people deal with every day?
02:27:02.000Go to the VA, and let's say you want to support the troops, fix the VA, right?
02:27:07.000Do the things that matter to the troops, and then don't send them into harm's way unless it really, really matters.
02:27:43.000The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, there were parts of it, very important parts of it, that were not released until 2005. 2005, if you found out within a month that the Gulf of Tonkin, which for those who don't know, this is sort of the excuse for why we were able to ramp up the Vietnam War,
02:28:03.000If you had known within a month, in real time, basically, that that didn't happen the way that they said it happened, that's time enough to impact the decision making.
02:28:12.000They classified it so that by the time it comes out, everyone's dead and it's in a history book, you have no ability to impact the decision-making.
02:28:19.000That's where classification kills us, because if you, the electorate, say, to heck with this, we've got to go out in the streets or we have to have a protest online, you can't do that if you don't know what's going on.
02:28:29.000And that was one of the more ironic things about Kennedy's assassination, was that they locked the files up.
02:28:36.000When do the full files on the Kennedy assassination are allowed to be released?
02:28:41.000But they essentially made it so that no one could investigate it for far longer than anyone's going to be alive.
02:28:47.000I think it was like 2025 or something like that.
02:28:49.000And that prompts suspicion right there, whether or not it's deserved.
02:28:53.000Well, I did come up with reasons, because I felt the same with you, and I had to figure out a cause, right?
02:28:58.000What would explain it that was rational?
02:29:00.000And here's what I came up with, and I'm hardly the only person who realized this.
02:29:03.000You remember Oswald had ties to Cuba, and he defected to the Soviet Union and then come home.
02:29:10.000Okay, so if you're average Joe or Jane, and you don't know much about what's going on, but you find out a Cuban defector, a Cuban-supporting Soviet Union defector killed the president, and that maybe that might...
02:29:34.000And Serbians were behind that in the way that the people whose Archduke was killed.
02:29:39.000So, I mean, if Americans thought that the Soviet Union killed their young president that they all loved with his wife right there and the two little children, what would the...
02:29:53.000How much might that have impacted the president's ability to keep us out of a war or not?
02:29:58.000I mean, I can see if somebody said that you might have a very good reason for hiding the fact that Oswald had really close ties.
02:30:28.000But, I mean, they have leaked some stuff or released some stuff due to the Freedom of Information Act that people would consider incredibly offensive, and they found out about it.
02:30:39.000Like 1962, Northwoods, Operation Northwoods, where they designed attacks on Guantanamo Bay.
02:30:45.000They were going to arm Cuban friendlies and attack Guantanamo Bay, potentially killing who knows how many soldiers.
02:30:50.000They were going to blow up a drone jetliner and blame it on the Cubans.
02:30:54.000If you look at the stuff that the CIA was doing, and I think it's stupid to think that they don't do the similar things now.
02:31:40.000And about transparency being important?
02:31:42.000My favorite line from Kennedy was always the one where he says, those who make peaceful change impossible make violent change inevitable.
02:31:49.000I mean, those are the kind of things where you wonder about us now, where you say, listen, the ability to have our system evolve in ways that make it better are going to prevent really bad things from happening in the future.
02:31:59.000If we can't get it together now, just follow the current trends outward.
02:32:04.000If nothing changes, what is the 2020 election going to look like?
02:32:08.000Are you a Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone type of guy?
02:33:11.000And it was Posner and Bugliosi that both pointed that out.
02:33:14.000And when you turn around and go, okay, if the guy was really taking a shot at the U.S. General, now that changes my overall view of the guy.
02:33:23.000Oswald's earlier attempt to assassinate General Walker.
02:34:34.000And so, I mean, when you talk about a conspiracy and having motive, there were a lot of people that had motive.
02:34:39.000I always hate it when they, you know, the Oliver Stone movie drove me crazy because, in my opinion, the movie he did on JFK, he took every conspiracy theory out there and threw them all in.
02:35:30.000The Snowden movie he's got coming out this week.
02:35:32.000Oliver Stone didn't get funding for Snowden in the U.S. In Germany, he found both financial support and filming locations for his political thriller, but its release is low-key.
02:35:42.000Is the U.S. trying to keep it under wraps?
02:35:44.000Is it the U.S. operates as one giant machine?
02:36:42.000And he wrote a book where he did it like a prosecutor, right?
02:36:45.000So here's how I would have prosecuted Oswald.
02:36:49.000And when he lines it up the way he does, you sit there and go, okay, this is not...
02:36:53.000And I know Bugliosi, he was a guy that would have loved to have written that it wasn't.
02:36:57.000He would have loved to have said Kennedy was assassinated by a conspiracy, but he didn't.
02:37:01.000And he ran down the list and you sat there and go, okay, if I was at the trial...
02:37:05.000And I was on the jury, and they said, what was the preponderance of evidence?
02:37:08.000And did the prosecutor, you know, prove his case?
02:37:11.000I would have had to have said, after reading Boyosi's book, that unless I really had a vested interest in believing the conspiracy theory, that he had done a damn good job of making his case.
02:37:21.000Here's my problem with it, and this is one that, for whatever reason, I don't see brought up very often.
02:37:27.000I don't think they have to be mutually exclusive.
02:37:31.000I think Oswald very well might have shot at the president.
02:37:36.000But I think it's highly likely they set up more than one shooter.
02:37:39.000I think there's a possibility that gunfire echoing from that building could make people think that it was coming from the grassy knoll.
02:37:48.000But there's so many people that said that gunfire was coming from the grassy knoll that you have to wonder.
02:37:54.000And you look at the shots that hit Kennedy...
02:37:57.000Like, the one in his neck, that's one of the more interesting books that I read about it was Case Closed, not Case Closed, Best Evidence by David Lifton.
02:38:43.000If he was hit from the front and from the back, it's entirely possible that Oswald also was involved and that there was a bunch of people involved.
02:38:51.000It's entirely possible that if you're going to assassinate the president, if you're going to have a conspiracy to assassinate the president, you're going to use a bunch of people.
02:38:59.000Why wouldn't they use someone like Oswald?
02:39:01.000Why wouldn't they use some crazy fuck who emigrates to Russia and comes back with a Russian wife and he's involved in communist propaganda and all sorts of other crazy unsavory shit.
02:40:37.000I don't recall what John thought in terms of conspiracy or not conspiracy, but I remember that that was like a seminal moment in his career, because he was broadcasting live, he was on the radio while it was all going on, and he was there at the scene.
02:40:50.000He also had the most Awesome Manson stuff.
02:40:53.000Because the station I worked at, KABC, was big in the Manson investigation.
02:40:57.000They're the ones that actually found the bloody clothes a year later on the hillside while they were filming a recreation.
02:41:02.000And that's how the bloody clothes got found.
02:41:05.000And he would go and speak to Manson all the time when Manson was not convicted yet.
02:43:03.000That's an absolute false flag conspiracy that was perpetrated on the American public, resulting in us going to war, ramping up the war, killing who knows how many people.
02:43:12.000But everybody, the people in government...
02:43:44.000Okay, if you're all in an office and you're working with the president and the president gets shot, you think you're going to get more information than the average person in the street?
02:44:04.000Until you see the Zapruder film, until you're watching the Geraldo Rivera show and Dick Gregory brings on the Zapruder film, what was elected?
02:44:37.000If it's not the government, then the government has no reason at all to cover it up.
02:44:41.000Okay, if the mafia does it, Robert F. Kennedy's going after the mafia all the time anyway, it just gives him one more reason to go.
02:44:47.000So the only way this becomes a conspiracy that stays secret and involves the government not investigating it is if the government is in on it.
02:44:55.000So that's the only conspiracy theory that makes sense on why the government didn't pursue the conspiracy theory, okay?
02:45:01.000So if the government is in on it, Well, how many people have to be in on it?
02:45:15.000And, you know, unless you're some dude in a movie who wants to get to the bottom of it and you sneak into the building in the middle of the night with a flashlight.
02:45:21.000But then why is the Warren Commission report and the magic bullet, all that stuff is part of the cover-up if you buy that theory.
02:45:27.000Well, the Warren Commission report in and of itself is what Lifton uses as a reason to go in and start investigating the Kennedy assassination.
02:45:36.000Well, as I told you, there's a good reason to have covered it up if you believe that the American people would draw a natural conclusion that a Soviet agent killed our president.
02:45:45.000And remember, you know, Kennedy had been trying to assassinate Castro, too, so there were reasons for a Cuban group of people to take— I mean, there's a— Sure.
02:46:39.000So when you say those things, I kind of go, okay, yeah, I can see that.
02:46:43.000It's not what I believe lately, but I can see that.
02:46:45.000Yeah, I don't really believe anything when it comes to that, when it comes to the Kennedy assassination, other than some fuckery was afoot.
02:46:52.000Well, and like I said, I get angry when the conspiracy theorists who write these books, and it's an industry, as you well know, I get angry when they don't include things that might disprove what they say.
02:47:01.000You want me to believe you, I want you to lay it all out, right?
02:47:05.000And so I became suspicious once those books started coming forward saying, well, look what they left out here, and look what they left out here.
02:47:11.000And you go, okay, well now, you never told me that.
02:47:14.000Well, there's some tightly grooved paths when it comes to discussing that conspiracy.
02:47:18.000That's why I've always found it so weird that no one mentions, or very rarely is it mentioned, that Oswald might have been a part of it.
02:47:24.000The idea that he got off those three shots, because they determined that it was three shots based on people's reporting, and You know, if you believe that he got off those three shots in a short amount of time, and then you see Jesse Ventura trying to recreate it and say, it's impossible, no one can get that off.
02:48:30.000Although, let's be honest, that becomes a lot harder to hide later.
02:48:34.000So if you're worried about exposure, because exposure would show the tentacles, well, then you want to make it as cut and dried and simple as you can.
02:48:42.000You start triangulating on a president...
02:48:45.000You know, you don't know, as you well know, what those bullets are going to do, right?
02:48:49.000I think you open yourself up to massive problems if those bullets go.
02:48:53.000I mean, in other words, if something had gone another way and it would have been impossible to deny that there was another shooter, how does that change the whole investigation?
02:49:03.000Well, you know, that actually did happen.
02:49:04.000That was part of the investigation itself, leading to the magic bullet theory.
02:49:08.000The magic bullet theory was created because a guy was walking under the underpass and the curbstone got hit by a bullet.
02:49:19.000He was hit in the head with a ricochet.
02:49:21.000So because he was hit with a ricochet, they found the spot where the bullet had hit, and they had accounted for one bullet.
02:49:27.000So then they had the headshot that killed Kennedy, and then they had this neck thing, and then they had this other bullet, and then they started trying to figure out, well, how many bullets are involved here, and how does Connelly have a bullet lodged in his leg?
02:50:01.000And this is the part where it's kind of hard if you want there to be anything cut and dried.
02:50:07.000If you're the Warren Commission report, and you're doing this not that long after Kennedy's assassination, I think you have to allow for the idea that there are going to be unknowables.
02:51:17.000It shattered Connolly's wrist, that same bullet.
02:51:21.000And they apparently just found it on his gurney in the hospital.
02:51:25.000And we're supposed to think that that's a bullet that went through Kennedy and Connolly.
02:51:29.000I've never talked to a single actual ballistics expert or firearms enthusiast that believes that.
02:51:38.000Well, see, this is where, had I known I was coming here, I would have brought both those books, so we could have looked up how Bugliosi and Posner explained the magic bullet, because they...
02:52:22.000It points to people being full of shit.
02:52:24.000The fact that they conveniently found it on the gurney...
02:52:26.000Wait, wait, okay, so the government, you're saying...
02:52:29.000I guess what I'm saying is, Occam's razor, you're not going to have to convince me of that.
02:52:34.000Also, that the Warren Commission report might have had all sorts of domestic and foreign policy reasons for doing what it did.
02:52:40.000And just imagine if you're the CIA in 1962, and you're getting together with all your cronies, and you've been responsible for jacking people all over the world.
02:52:51.000And he's going to disband your entire organization.
02:52:54.000And then you're talking to some other people that are upset at him because of the Bay of Pigs.
02:52:58.000And you're talking about some other people that are upset about him because of this and of that and all the other things that he's trying to do that people don't agree with.
02:53:05.000And you go, look, there's a simple solution to this.
02:53:07.000And you bring in that Lee Harvey Oswald character and you get that ball rolling.
02:53:12.000You set up a bunch of different people that are really good at rifles.
02:53:25.000Here's one thing that always bugged me about the Supruder film.
02:53:28.000When you watch his head, his head does go back and to the left, but the spray from the bullet, in my eye, seems like it's going forward, like he was hit from behind.
02:53:42.000Well, it seems like a little bit of it, but then sometimes when you hit someone, like, you can hit things and just the impact of the bullet causes a reverberation.
02:53:51.000I was just going to say, and also, you know, if you watch, there's a lot of executions online, and I'm ashamed to say I've seen some of them.
02:54:45.000There's executions of Chinese nationalists killing Chinese communists, and you watch them and they'll do it over and over and over again, and most of the time things go the way you think they should, and sometimes they don't.
02:55:36.000And I'm also going to say that the reason that it would be interesting to know the answer, I mean, if somebody could come down from the extraterrestrials and tell you, you know, this is what really...
02:55:47.000In that sense, the problem with it, though, is if you buy into the conspiracy theory as it's normally told, then that basically takes you down this road that, okay, there was a coup, the president was killed by the government, and then that all subsequent history from that point on then takes a,
02:56:04.000you know, like, you know, they say with time travel, you change something and you go off on a totally different course.
02:56:08.000All history goes on a totally different course if that's what really happened.
02:56:12.000In other words, everything must be looked through a different lens.
02:56:15.000If I was to believe, as I used to, that that was done by the government, then my whole common sense show would be totally different.
02:56:21.000But doesn't, I mean, don't you have to look at everything from a different lens when you find something like Operation Northwoods?
02:56:26.000When you find the Northwoods documents, you see that it's signed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that this was a real plan they were thinking about implementing, and Kennedy put the boycott on it.
02:57:08.000The problem that all those people have is if they think I always try to get people the benefit of the doubt and say, if you came to me with secret information and says, blah, blah, blah, the country needs to do this now.
02:57:18.000And you say to yourself, but I could never get the American people to go along with that.
02:57:22.000So if they knew what I knew, they would, but they won't.
02:57:25.000So because of that, I'm going, you know, so you start to try to figure out instead of just automatically going the conspiracy, right?
02:57:31.000You go, okay, could there be a logical reason that I would accept and understand that would explain the same sequence of events?
02:57:41.000Now, I say that as somebody who clearly knows the CIA's record.
02:57:45.000I mean, that's been one of my interests forever.
02:57:47.000The stuff that they do, I can't think of any natural limitations on.
02:57:51.000I can't think of anything where the CIA would have said, no, I wouldn't do that if the president wanted us to.
02:57:57.000I don't think many people know this, but, you know, in the Nixon administration, there was talk about killing Jack Anderson, the investigative reporter.
02:58:05.000And it was G. Gordon Liddy who had offered to run him down with a car.
02:58:10.000So when you talk about that and there are people around the president who are willing to consider the option, well then I have to say, you know, Dan, you have to open up your mind to the possibility that these things can happen.
02:58:21.000And as I said, my opinion for years was that it did.
02:58:54.000As I said earlier, though, Cheney is really a nefarious character in terms of, you know, if you weigh him next to the 1950s, the idea of fair play in the American way, he didn't believe any of that stuff.
02:59:05.000It's a dog-eat-dog world, and whatever you and I consider to be American values is marketing, and you react, you know, I mean, it's all about, you know, it's realpolitik, as they call it, right?
02:59:18.000He's such a weird character, because he's almost biblical.
02:59:21.000Like, when he had that heart implant, and his body wasn't giving off a pulse anymore, and the heart was just, this artificial heart was just circling the blood, like, he literally was alive without a pulse.
02:59:32.000How do you listen to that guy anymore, though?