The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1041- Dan Carlin

00:00:00.000 Hold this.

00:00:00.000 All the good stuff happens before we're on.

00:00:01.000 It always does.

00:00:03.000 3...

00:00:03.000 2...

00:00:04.000 1...

00:00:08.000 Dan Carlin, ladies and gentlemen, and we're live.

00:00:10.000 Hey, dude, first of all, thank you so much for this coin.

00:00:12.000 This coin from Constantine.

00:00:14.000 You brought me a...

00:00:15.000 How many years old is this?

00:00:16.000 1,700. 1.00

00:00:17.000 That's fucking crazy, man. 0.99

00:00:19.000 It's fun to... 0.99

00:00:19.000 I always say I like giving something that is the oldest man-made object in most people's homes. 0.99

00:00:23.000 Maybe not yours.

00:00:24.000 You'll have some aboriginal instrument or something, like from the Stone Age.

00:00:27.000 But most people, that'll be the oldest man-made thing in their home.

00:00:30.000 My friend, Dr. Mark Gordon, actually gave me a Roman coin as well.

00:00:34.000 But I don't know whose coin is old.

00:00:35.000 Yours looks older.

00:00:36.000 I don't know.

00:00:37.000 That's depressing, though, because normally I'm the coin guy, so I hate that I've been beaten to the punch by anybody on that.

00:00:42.000 Well, he's kind of a historical aficionado, or a history aficionado as well.

00:00:47.000 Not the extent that you are, though.

00:00:49.000 So this is from Constantine?

00:00:50.000 Yeah, my wife would spend that by accident, just so you know. 1.00

00:00:53.000 Where's that coin?

00:00:54.000 Oh, I got a coffee.

00:00:55.000 I got a pair of shoes.

00:00:57.000 That's right.

00:00:57.000 No one wouldn't buy shoes.

00:00:58.000 No.

00:00:59.000 How much was that worth back then?

00:01:01.000 I think that's like their penny probably.

00:01:05.000 What kind of units did they have?

00:01:06.000 They probably had some dead metal type thing and then some kind of bronze and then you get into the silver and gold and how much is mixed into the rest.

00:01:14.000 And they have those.

00:01:15.000 Like, you can go, and it's actually really cool because they wear better.

00:01:17.000 Like, they'll clean the silver off, and it looks like yesterday.

00:01:22.000 So you always know it's the cheap stuff when they're all dirty and everything like that.

00:01:25.000 Oh, right, because then it's not silver.

00:01:27.000 That's like a penny.

00:01:27.000 Well, our pennies get the same way, right?

00:01:29.000 What do you think this is made out of?

00:01:30.000 Oh, some alloy.

00:01:31.000 I don't know.

00:01:32.000 They had alloys back then?

00:01:33.000 Oh, sure.

00:01:34.000 Electrum was the cool one where you mix gold and silver.

00:01:36.000 Ooh.

00:01:37.000 Yeah.

00:01:37.000 I've never heard of that.

00:01:38.000 Yeah, Electrum.

00:01:39.000 They still have it.

00:01:39.000 Electrum.

00:01:40.000 Yeah, they still have it.

00:01:40.000 What do they use it for?

00:01:41.000 I hope I'm right about this.

00:01:42.000 This is going to be one of these on Twitter.

00:01:43.000 Dan Carlin doesn't know what he's talking about about Electrum.

00:01:45.000 It's not that. 0.99

00:01:45.000 Well, the beautiful thing about your podcast is you can research things in advance so you know what the fuck you're talking about by the time you speak. 0.99

00:01:53.000 Theoretically, yes. 0.99

00:01:54.000 Allegedly.

00:01:55.000 Allegedly.

00:01:56.000 Supposedly.

00:01:56.000 I have a lot of wiggle room words.

00:01:59.000 Defensive journalism.

00:02:00.000 Yeah, but dude, I don't have to tell you any again, but I will.

00:02:04.000 Your podcast is, for me, has been the most educational, historical thing in my entire life.

00:02:11.000 I've never had anything in my life that's taught me more about history than hardcore history.

00:02:16.000 I don't even know how to react when people say that.

00:02:18.000 It is the kindest things that you hear.

00:02:20.000 And I always say the same thing.

00:02:21.000 I always hope everybody gets a chance in their lives to have people that they admire turning around and telling them something like that because it is the neatest feeling.

00:02:28.000 And when you realize all the crap you put up with for decades in other jobs and other businesses to say, okay, I'm 51 or whatever, and they really like what you do, you just...

00:02:37.000 Everybody should feel this way, so I appreciate that.

00:02:39.000 My pleasure, and I appreciate you.

00:02:42.000 You found your niche, man.

00:02:44.000 Think about all the other stuff you did, all the broadcast work you did before.

00:02:47.000 It really prepared you for this podcast, because obviously this medium is so incredibly new, and this ability for you to just put something out.

00:02:56.000 I mean, I see when you put out new podcasts, they're regularly at the top of the heap of all the podcasts in the world.

00:03:03.000 That's incredible when you think about that, that it's just you and you have a guy who helps you with editing.

00:03:08.000 Theoretically, yeah. 0.99

00:03:09.000 And that's fucking it. 0.99

00:03:11.000 I mean, that is amazing. 0.99

00:03:12.000 Well, but I mean, how is that any different from this empire?

00:03:14.000 Because I'm just talking.

00:03:15.000 Yeah, but that's all I'm doing, too.

00:03:17.000 But you walk into this place, you go, this is what Joe Rogan's talking has built.

00:03:21.000 Yeah, something.

00:03:22.000 Something along those lines.

00:03:23.000 And talking to people like you.

00:03:24.000 But you're right.

00:03:25.000 I mean, I keep trying to remind myself, because, you know, you and I have both been doing this a long time.

00:03:28.000 Got into it pretty early on.

00:03:30.000 And so for us, it doesn't feel new, but you keep trying to think about, okay, what's this going to be like in 30 years?

00:03:36.000 Right.

00:03:36.000 40 years.

00:03:37.000 I keep telling everybody that what you're seeing now, and my children know no other world.

00:03:41.000 I mean, in their minds, I tell my oldest all the time, at the time you were born, we weren't even texting yet.

00:03:46.000 That is all since you've come around.

00:03:48.000 So I keep thinking, we're still at the tip of the tip of the tip of the iceberg in this era that we're in now.

00:03:54.000 What's podcasting going to be like when whole generations grow up and it's just a part of their world and podcasts are a part of it?

00:04:00.000 And it won't even be podcasting.

00:04:01.000 I mean, they'll be broadcasting into the matrix cord in the back of your neck or something.

00:04:05.000 But I mean, we're still at the...

00:04:07.000 It seems hard for long-term podcasters to understand that this is still the beginning.

00:04:11.000 It's almost impossible for us to predict because when you really think about what we're doing now, In terms of, like, you could put a YouTube video right now, you could make a video, and it could go viral for whatever reason, and a million people all over the world could be watching your video,

00:04:26.000 like, almost instantly.

00:04:28.000 This was not only unheard of 10 years ago.

00:04:32.000 Just go back 20, 30, 40, it's insanity.

00:04:35.000 You're talking insanity. 1.00

00:04:37.000 Like, people would be like, what the fuck are you saying? 1.00

00:04:39.000 You have a phone in your pocket? 1.00

00:04:41.000 That would be insane.

00:04:42.000 You have a phone in your pocket that has a camera?

00:04:44.000 What?

00:04:45.000 Wait a minute, you have a phone in your pocket that's a video camera that takes high-definition video with stereo sound, and you can...

00:04:54.000 Wait a minute, you're uploading it through the sky?

00:04:56.000 Just through the air?

00:04:57.000 What?

00:04:58.000 In real time?

00:05:00.000 Instantaneously?

00:05:01.000 That's insane.

00:05:02.000 So now think...

00:05:03.000 What could we be looking at in terms of augmented reality, in terms of virtual reality?

00:05:09.000 I'm working on something along those lines right now.

00:05:11.000 Are you?

00:05:12.000 It's crazy.

00:05:13.000 What are you doing?

00:05:13.000 I can't tell you what I'm doing.

00:05:14.000 Dude, tell me off air. 0.99

00:05:16.000 Kill the podcast.

00:05:16.000 The point is that you're absolutely right about this stuff.

00:05:20.000 Before I got into podcasting, I was in the era where Mark Cuban made it big, and everybody was just going to start a high-tech company and sell it for billions of dollars.

00:05:28.000 What did Cuban make it big with? 1.00

00:05:30.000 Broadcast.com, I think, which...

00:05:31.000 If I recall, it was basically like a website with a bunch of links.

00:05:35.000 And everybody was like, dang.

00:05:37.000 So I was in one of these companies with a bunch of buddies, and we were pushing what we called amateur content back then.

00:05:42.000 So we're talking 95, 96. And one of my jobs was to go with the staff to all these venture capitalists and try to sell them on the idea of what amateur content was going to become.

00:05:53.000 Joe, we went from place to place to place with all these people who are supposedly the ones who can see the future.

00:05:58.000 And every one of them, and I mean every single one, said, Nobody's gonna view amateur content because if anybody could make anything anybody wanted to see, they'd be paid for it.

00:06:07.000 Right.

00:06:07.000 And I kept talking about the quantity has a quality all its own idea, right?

00:06:11.000 Where you say, listen, if only 1% of this stuff is worth watching, you're still gonna have millions of pieces of content uploaded all the time.

00:06:18.000 There's gonna be good stuff in there.

00:06:19.000 And they were like...

00:06:20.000 So you thought this was coming in some ways.

00:06:23.000 Well, yeah.

00:06:24.000 And it wasn't just because, you know, I was in with a bunch of tech people who understood this, too, but one of them had taken me off the radio and said, we're going to put you on the Internet.

00:06:32.000 This was in 94. What?

00:06:34.000 And I said, put me on the Internet.

00:06:37.000 We're just learning how to use it.

00:06:38.000 I said, what are we going to do?

00:06:39.000 And he says, well, I'm going to invent the way to do this, and you're going to be the test person, right, that shows everybody.

00:06:45.000 So that fell through.

00:06:47.000 But once that happened, it was in the back of my head going, okay, someday we might be able to do this on the Internet, that kind of thing.

00:06:53.000 Yeah.

00:06:53.000 But the point was that these people at the Venture Capital meetings, all these hardcore guys who are inventing our future and funding it, none of them saw this amateur content thing coming.

00:07:01.000 There was one thing that they were doing quite a long time ago.

00:07:04.000 There was some internet radio channel that they had tried to put together.

00:07:09.000 And they had funded it and spent a bunch of money on it, and they hired a bunch of people to do it.

00:07:13.000 And Bobby Slayton was actually one of the online broadcasters.

00:07:17.000 And I did his show, and he was talking about how they were having a hard time Yeah, too far ahead.

00:07:41.000 Where, you know, they're like sending full files to each other or something.

00:07:44.000 But, you know, it's funny because somebody's going to write a book someday about the history of this and how it got started and all that kind of stuff.

00:07:49.000 And it's crazy to think about that we're actually due to sort of a serendipity, good timing sense that here we are, like I said, in the first 10 years, 15 years of what's not just going to be a phenomenon, but it's going to be a huge part, I think, of the future world that people grow up in.

00:08:05.000 Not our show specifically, but this world we're creating.

00:08:08.000 I mean, everyone's a broadcaster now.

00:08:10.000 Yeah, and look, anyone could have been.

00:08:12.000 I mean, there's been a lot of barriers to keep people that are really talented, interesting, funny people from getting their stuff out there.

00:08:18.000 And that thing was always like, they didn't know how to start.

00:08:21.000 How do I become a stand-up comedian?

00:08:23.000 I've talked to so many funny guys, and they just go, well, how do I get started?

00:08:28.000 I'm like, well, you've got to go sign up at an open mic night.

00:08:30.000 It just seems too much, and the idea of it is too daunting.

00:08:34.000 But if you just sit in front of a camera, That's all you have to do?

00:08:38.000 Turn your cell phone on and start talking.

00:08:40.000 Here's what I think about Donald Trump.

00:08:42.000 This is what I think about Harvey Weinstein.

00:08:44.000 All you have to do is have a unique take, be funny, be interesting, somehow engaging, and it doesn't even have to be visual. 0.97

00:08:50.000 I mean, God, there's a hundred, maybe more, really funny, what I would call Twitter comedians that just say funny shit, they write funny shit on Twitter, and they have huge followings because of it. 0.95

00:09:02.000 Yeah. 0.96

00:09:25.000 And I remember Eddie Murphy saying something about if he hadn't gotten on Saturday Night Live, he doesn't know how he would have exposed himself to the public.

00:09:32.000 Well, these days, if you're that funny, and you put that on audio, and you put it out there, you no longer need the facilitator, the gatekeeper, to open the doors for you.

00:09:42.000 You have a wide-open mic.

00:09:44.000 You know, you called it open mic night.

00:09:45.000 This is open mic night for the world, right?

00:09:48.000 Every country. 0.99

00:09:49.000 It's fucking crazy. 0.99

00:09:50.000 There's some kid who's 20 years old who bought a house in my neighborhood for $9 million or $7 million. 0.99

00:09:55.000 $7 million. 1.00

00:09:56.000 Some fucking YouTube kid. 1.00

00:09:57.000 I was reading about it today. 1.00

00:09:59.000 I went, what?

00:09:59.000 He's 20. He bought a $7 million fucking house.

00:10:03.000 I was like, this is insane. 1.00

00:10:05.000 Don't even pull it up.

00:10:06.000 Enough of him.

00:10:07.000 No, I was at YouTube about a month ago.

00:10:10.000 I did a speaking engagement at Google, and across the street in New York, above the Camden Market, they own the whole building.

00:10:15.000 So they take me up there.

00:10:16.000 I get this six-hour tour, and at one point, they have a wall with all these YouTube stars on it.

00:10:22.000 And, you know, I'm old, so there's one or two.

00:10:24.000 So I go, okay, that's Lady Gaga, I guess. 0.97

00:10:26.000 But there's a bunch of, like, 20-year-olds, and they're going, oh, this guy has a bazillion followers.

00:10:30.000 And I'm looking at him going...

00:10:32.000 Really?

00:10:32.000 I mean, at his age, I don't know what the hell I was doing.

00:10:34.000 I was taking a year off college or something.

00:10:36.000 But it's all these kids with multiple piercings and tattoos and face stuff.

00:10:40.000 And the Google people were telling me, oh, these people are all huge.

00:10:43.000 Giants!

00:10:44.000 Yeah, come in with their entourages.

00:10:46.000 That's crazy!

00:10:47.000 Some kid just died.

00:10:48.000 He was 21. I saw it in the paper today.

00:10:50.000 Face tattoos. 1.00

00:10:51.000 And I was like, who the fuck is this kid? 1.00

00:10:52.000 Well, he's a giant YouTube star. 1.00

00:10:54.000 Some YouTube rap star?

00:10:55.000 He's a rapper.

00:10:56.000 Did you know who he was?

00:10:57.000 I've heard the name.

00:10:58.000 I didn't know who he was. 0.99

00:10:59.000 See, you're young Jamie, but you're actually old to all these young fucks. 0.99

00:11:02.000 Whoa, whoa, hey. 1.00

00:11:03.000 Calm down.

00:11:03.000 Hey, how old are you?

00:11:04.000 Uh, 34. That's old to these young fucks. 1.00

00:11:06.000 Never trust anybody over 30. Wasn't that the line? 1.00

00:11:08.000 Yeah, that was back in the day, right?

00:11:10.000 But the 30s, 40's the new 30s, so everything changes. 0.99

00:11:13.000 I'm 50, so what the fuck am I? Dirt. 0.99

00:11:15.000 Old like dirt.

00:11:16.000 Still at the top of the iceberg, though, doing the head of the game, head of everybody.

00:11:21.000 This whole thing, what we're experiencing now, I think, is the top of the iceberg. 0.98

00:11:26.000 Because I think there's some shit that's coming down the pipe that is going to blow all this out of the water. 0.99

00:11:32.000 And the idea of just listening to things is going to be ridiculous. 0.99

00:11:34.000 It's going to be so surface.

00:11:36.000 I really believe what you were saying about some sort of a matrix plug-in.

00:11:40.000 My friend Duncan has one of those HTC Vibes.

00:11:43.000 Have you ever seen those?

00:11:45.000 You put the helmet on?

00:11:47.000 I have one.

00:11:48.000 You have one of those?

00:11:49.000 Yeah, well, part of the gig I'm working on, yeah.

00:11:51.000 Oh, you want to talk about it, huh?

00:11:52.000 They sent it to me.

00:11:54.000 I'll tell you what's cool.

00:11:55.000 I didn't want to interrupt your story.

00:11:56.000 You go ahead.

00:11:56.000 No, no, go ahead.

00:11:57.000 Well, Google Earth is on the virtual reality thing, right?

00:12:01.000 And they just started it.

00:12:02.000 They just put out a new...

00:12:04.000 I think it's a new update.

00:12:05.000 I'm old, so don't quote me on this.

00:12:06.000 But the update allows you now to zoom in at the ground level...

00:12:09.000 Yeah.

00:12:10.000 Now, it's not virtual reality at the ground level.

00:12:12.000 It's more like you're in the photograph.

00:12:14.000 But it's really cool.

00:12:15.000 It was just a week ago.

00:12:17.000 I went to all the homes I grew up in as a kid and went back there.

00:12:20.000 Jamie's pulling it up.

00:12:21.000 So this is how it always looked, even like a year ago.

00:12:23.000 But now you can zoom into the ground and there's people around you at all these.

00:12:28.000 Oh, my God.

00:12:29.000 It's truly awesome, I have to say.

00:12:30.000 This is insane.

00:12:31.000 Yeah.

00:12:31.000 And it's only going to be better.

00:12:32.000 They'll actually at some point have real virtual reality on the ground anywhere you want to go.

00:12:37.000 This is insane.

00:12:38.000 Well, that's what I think is going to come up next.

00:12:40.000 I think we're going to have it set up where, like this podcast, you'll be able to put on some goggles like this lady is wearing here. 1.00

00:12:47.000 You're going to be able to put up some goggles.

00:12:48.000 You're going to be in this room with us.

00:12:49.000 You'll be behind me. 0.99

00:12:50.000 You'll be staring at my butt. 1.00

00:12:52.000 You'll do whatever the fuck you want. 1.00

00:12:53.000 You'll be in the room. 0.99

00:12:54.000 You know what I'm saying?

00:12:55.000 Yeah, you will.

00:12:55.000 You will.

00:12:56.000 It'll be like a sim game, but you're in it.

00:12:58.000 That's coming, man.

00:12:59.000 This whole thing is going to feel so 2D and flat and archaic in just a decade or so.

00:13:06.000 Everybody's waiting, though, for the big...

00:13:07.000 See, it's funny how you wait for...

00:13:09.000 You know how technology is adopted, right?

00:13:12.000 You don't buy the computer just to have the computer.

00:13:14.000 Some new game or some new ability comes in.

00:13:16.000 Oh, I've got to do that.

00:13:17.000 Well, I guess I need a computer for that.

00:13:19.000 Everybody's waiting for that in the virtual reality realm, too.

00:13:21.000 What's the must-have thing that then next Christmas everybody's got to have the virtual reality set up under the tree for, you know?

00:13:27.000 Well, I think one of the things that's setting Android ahead of the curve, in terms of Android versus Apple, is that these Android phones, they slide into these headsets now, and they act as virtual reality screens.

00:13:38.000 Like a low-level one, yeah.

00:13:40.000 Yeah, but not that bad, man!

00:13:41.000 Not that bad anymore!

00:13:42.000 I haven't seen it, but they told me, again, they, that...

00:13:47.000 The overlords?

00:13:48.000 Yes, the overlords.

00:13:49.000 I understand they're mushroom overlords, that's what I heard earlier. 1.00

00:13:53.000 But no, they were telling me that the iPhones from Apple also are built for that capability.

00:13:59.000 They just haven't introduced the add-ons that you would need.

00:14:01.000 But in terms of the power that they've put in there, they've built it for that so it can scale up eventually.

00:14:06.000 Yeah, you just pull it up.

00:14:07.000 I could be talking out of my rear right there.

00:14:08.000 No, you got it right there.

00:14:09.000 Apple reportedly readying standalone AR, which is augmented reality.

00:14:14.000 Augmented reality, yeah.

00:14:15.000 Headset for 2019. Well, hey, fuckface, that's a year and a half away from now, you fucking assholes. 1.00

00:14:21.000 When is this going to hit? 1.00

00:14:22.000 See, that's what no one knows, and everybody's afraid to put money forward and be too early, like you were just talking about.

00:14:28.000 Hold on, look at this.

00:14:29.000 The device would run ROS, Apple's Reality Operating System.

00:14:35.000 See? 0.99

00:14:35.000 That's the fucking matrix, man. 0.99

00:14:37.000 This is what everybody was worried about with Google, that Google was Skynet. 1.00

00:14:41.000 Google has your email.

00:14:42.000 Some people were using Google Voice.

00:14:45.000 People use Google Maps.

00:14:47.000 I mean, there's so much now that you're connected to with this one company.

00:14:52.000 If they come out with some crazy augmented reality thing, and then you tap into that as well...

00:14:58.000 But everybody wants you in their environment, right?

00:15:00.000 Everyone wants you in the closed environment.

00:15:01.000 I mean, it's funny how the old AOL model is similar now to what they still...

00:15:07.000 Facebook never wants you to have to leave Facebook.

00:15:09.000 Google wants you to be Googled all the time.

00:15:11.000 Apple, they keep you with the iMessage.

00:15:14.000 I tried switching over to a Google Pixel about a year ago for two days.

00:15:18.000 It was so bad, like, trying to get people to message me.

00:15:22.000 Like, I would text people.

00:15:23.000 Did you get it?

00:15:23.000 No.

00:15:24.000 Did you get it?

00:15:24.000 No.

00:15:24.000 Send me a text.

00:15:25.000 I didn't get it. 1.00

00:15:26.000 Fuck! 1.00

00:15:26.000 And I'd be calling them back. 1.00

00:15:27.000 Did you send it?

00:15:28.000 Yeah.

00:15:28.000 I didn't get it.

00:15:29.000 It says I sent it.

00:15:30.000 Okay, hold on.

00:15:30.000 I'm gonna send you one.

00:15:31.000 Tell me when you get it.

00:15:32.000 You didn't get it?

00:15:33.000 Did you get it?

00:15:33.000 No.

00:15:34.000 Fuck! 1.00

00:15:35.000 So what do you got to do? 1.00

00:15:35.000 So then I go online. 1.00

00:15:36.000 You have to go to the Apple iMessage servers and have your email removed.

00:15:42.000 Okay, I'll go and do that.

00:15:43.000 Nothing. 1.00

00:15:44.000 I was like, fuck this. 0.99

00:15:45.000 And then I talked to people online. 0.99

00:15:47.000 I'm like, what's the best way to do this?

00:15:48.000 They go, you got to change your number.

00:15:49.000 I go, what?

00:15:50.000 So if you want to try to use an Android phone, you have to change your phone number. 1.00

00:15:53.000 I'm like, all right, fuck it. 1.00

00:15:54.000 I went right back to Apple. 1.00

00:15:56.000 I was like, I don't have time for this.

00:15:57.000 This is too much noodling around.

00:16:00.000 I know.

00:16:01.000 One problem with a password these days can occupy your whole day trying to figure out the problem.

00:16:06.000 So, I mean, I had it with the email.

00:16:07.000 See, I didn't know Yahoo Mail was down.

00:16:09.000 So I'm thinking it's my problem, so I'm spending the whole day working on it.

00:16:12.000 I'm changing passwords.

00:16:14.000 Find out at the end of the day, no, Yahoo was just down.

00:16:15.000 All those passwords, you didn't have to do any of that.

00:16:17.000 And it screwed up everything that you had before.

00:16:20.000 I'm 51. That's what happens when you get old.

00:16:22.000 Well, I got a MacBook and I got a phone call on my book.

00:16:25.000 Yeah, me too. 1.00

00:16:26.000 I was like, what is this bullshit? 0.99

00:16:27.000 I updated something and all of a sudden my laptop started ringing. 0.99

00:16:31.000 I'm like, no, no, no, no, no.

00:16:33.000 We're not doing this.

00:16:34.000 No, no.

00:16:34.000 We're not doing this.

00:16:35.000 I gotta work.

00:16:36.000 I'm at the point now where I'm literally asking my teenage children for help.

00:16:40.000 And that, to me, is a sign right there.

00:16:42.000 It's the first sign that eventually leads you into that home that they put you in.

00:16:46.000 This is the first step towards my children going, oh my god, my father.

00:16:50.000 You know what's bizarre, man? 0.99

00:16:51.000 My kids, they just figure shit out. 0.92

00:16:54.000 Like, if you give a kid, it's amazing how intuitive some of these app creators are. 0.98

00:16:58.000 Absolutely.

00:16:59.000 Because my nine-year-old, she started making these little movies.

00:17:03.000 She's got this little editing thing on her iPad.

00:17:06.000 My 12-year-old does it, too.

00:17:07.000 So she's filming little scenes.

00:17:09.000 She splices them all together, and then she adds music and text to it.

00:17:13.000 And then she goes, Daddy, you want to see the movie I made?

00:17:14.000 I went, what?

00:17:15.000 What are you... 1.00

00:17:16.000 What the fuck are you doing over here? 1.00

00:17:17.000 And it's good. 1.00

00:17:18.000 It's weird.

00:17:19.000 You know what, though?

00:17:20.000 I mean, from a creative standpoint, it's so easy, and I tend to have a personality that does this anyway, to look at the negative, dystopian, you know, things that can happen, the big brother things, which is totally the way I see the world.

00:17:30.000 But my kids, when I look at the creativity...

00:17:34.000 So in my family, I come from a family of people who worked in film.

00:17:37.000 So when I was a kid, I had a Super 8 camera.

00:17:39.000 I had the old editing setup. 0.99

00:17:40.000 Damn! 0.99

00:17:40.000 He used to splice it by... 0.99

00:17:41.000 I used to make little space videos, and I figured out you scratch the film with a needle, frame after frame, and you can make laser beams.

00:17:47.000 And so when I was a kid, I did that.

00:17:48.000 So like you said, my daughter comes up, it was only two weeks ago, and she's taken all of her school plays that she's done.

00:17:55.000 She's taken scenes out of them, she's backed it with music, and she's turned it into like a movie promo that you see at the beginning of the theater.

00:18:02.000 And I'm looking at this and I'm going, this is so dang creative.

00:18:05.000 And it's made, you know how hard it would have been for her to get a Super 8 camera and the editing device.

00:18:10.000 I mean, this makes it available to all these people.

00:18:14.000 And so theoretically, if it doesn't go the Dan Carlin dystopian Blade Runner way, it could easily be like this.

00:18:20.000 And this is how I used to sell the amateur content to the venture capitalists in the 90s by saying, it's going to be a creativity revolution.

00:18:26.000 And Joe Rogan's nine-year-old is already taking part in it.

00:18:29.000 And you're not even sure how she did it.

00:18:30.000 That's how we know.

00:18:31.000 I have no idea.

00:18:32.000 I watched her do it.

00:18:33.000 I'm like, how are you doing this?

00:18:34.000 Who taught you how to do this?

00:18:35.000 She goes, I figured it out.

00:18:36.000 I go, you figured it out?

00:18:38.000 You just figured it out?

00:18:39.000 She goes, yeah.

00:18:39.000 You just put this and you do that.

00:18:41.000 You want to do one?

00:18:42.000 Let's do one!

00:18:44.000 You could do them fast and slow-mo and all those different little effects you could put on it.

00:18:48.000 Do you remember the old days when you have two VHS tapes?

00:18:52.000 Two boxes and you would press one on record and the other one on play and you would record from each other.

00:18:58.000 Yes, and it worked about 50% of the time.

00:19:00.000 Sort of.

00:19:00.000 It was like the cuts were so obvious.

00:19:03.000 The cuts of scenes.

00:19:04.000 It was never seamless. 0.96

00:19:05.000 There was always like this big fucking digital fuzz in between the scenes. 0.73

00:19:09.000 But this gets back to something that you and I were talking about when we first started here.

00:19:12.000 So it's what the technology can do.

00:19:14.000 If you're out there, you're going to hear me talk about this.

00:19:17.000 Now, this may be a personal one-to-one conversation with someone in your audience, but somebody did something that is both flattering and absolutely terrifying to me recently.

00:19:26.000 They went, and they said it took hundreds of hours, and they culled a ton of my shows, and they made little clips of all the things I said, and then rearranged them and created an Absolutely new show about politics, unfortunately, with me,

00:19:42.000 and you cannot tell that they've cut this thing 9,000 different times, but it's my voice saying a whole show of political stuff that I never said.

00:19:51.000 The guy said it took him hundreds of hours. 0.97

00:19:53.000 He's crazy. 0.60

00:19:55.000 Yeah, but you turn around and you go... 0.93

00:19:56.000 Okay, somebody's gonna take a little time.

00:19:58.000 He said at the beginning, this is not Dan Carlin really saying this, but some guy's gonna take like some obscure weird segment, put it on the internet, and I'm gonna be chasing, you know, that group going, no, it's not me, that guy did it.

00:20:07.000 Well, you don't even have to do that anymore if it's just audio.

00:20:09.000 What they're doing now is you could take 40 hours of audio, which obviously you and I both have way more than that.

00:20:15.000 They take that 40 hours of audio, and they can essentially have you say anything.

00:20:20.000 Anything.

00:20:21.000 Ever.

00:20:22.000 So is that going to get us out of...

00:20:23.000 This is the conversation we had.

00:20:24.000 So can you say to somebody when they say, I heard Dan Carlin say he's all for child molesting on this clip.

00:20:29.000 Can you say, hey, that's not me.

00:20:31.000 And look, there's all this stuff out there.

00:20:33.000 I mean, is that going to get you out of trouble?

00:20:35.000 Or is CNN going to run that story and you'll never be able to whack them all your way out of it?

00:20:39.000 Once they understand that that technology is available, they're going to have to be at least questioning the source of it. 0.98

00:20:44.000 But if they don't, you just sue the shit out of them.

00:20:46.000 But I don't think they're going to jump on it. 0.73

00:20:48.000 It's sort of like Photoshopping.

00:20:50.000 It is like photoshopping.

00:20:51.000 Do you remember when Oscar De La Hoya got caught wearing fishnets and high-heeled shoes with boxing gloves on?

00:20:57.000 He was coked up and he was hanging around with some crazy Russian strippers and he was having a good old time and he just thought it was fun to dress up like a girl. 0.87

00:21:05.000 You know, I thought it's funny, but he was very deeply embarrassed by it. 0.86

00:21:09.000 Obviously, he's Mexican, so Latino boxing fans were not taken very kindly to that. 1.00

00:21:15.000 So he just said, look, that shit's fake. 0.99

00:21:17.000 It's been photoshopped. 1.00

00:21:18.000 Perfect!

00:21:19.000 Yeah, look at it.

00:21:19.000 There he is.

00:21:21.000 Look.

00:21:21.000 How do we know that's Oscar De La Hoya?

00:21:23.000 He's having a good time.

00:21:24.000 He's wearing a wig in one of them and a hat.

00:21:26.000 All I ever think about is the left hook to the liver that Bernard Hopkins hit him with and put him down on the deck and...

00:21:33.000 I think about him beating up Julio Cesar Chavez where all the Mexicans were mad at him.

00:21:37.000 Past his crime.

00:21:38.000 Is that the girl that he was with?

00:21:40.000 Go above that.

00:21:41.000 The two pictures with him and the girl.

00:21:43.000 Yeah.

00:21:43.000 Is that the girl that turned him in?

00:21:45.000 Keep an eye on that bitch. 1.00

00:21:46.000 If you're gonna get a lap dance, she's gonna tell people. 1.00

00:21:50.000 So I guess they...

00:21:52.000 That's her right there. 0.98

00:21:54.000 That looks Photoshopped, doesn't it?

00:21:56.000 It looks sort of Photoshopped, but not really, because it's his body.

00:21:59.000 I mean, it's obviously an athlete's body, but he's wearing a skirt.

00:22:02.000 Look, they were partying. 1.00

00:22:04.000 He's having a good fucking time. 1.00

00:22:05.000 We thought it was silly to play dress-up. 1.00

00:22:08.000 What the fuck? 0.99

00:22:09.000 You mean, look at the one in the upper right, though, when he's bending over. 1.00

00:22:12.000 Look at that one.

00:22:13.000 That one's rough.

00:22:14.000 So wait a minute.

00:22:14.000 So could you...

00:22:15.000 See, it almost seems to me that it's the perfect cover, because now you could do anything you wanted to.

00:22:19.000 I mean, if it's the Clinton years in office and Bill Clinton's...

00:22:22.000 You could do anything you wanted to, just it's Photoshop.

00:22:24.000 That's not me.

00:22:25.000 You kind of can, but they can tell.

00:22:27.000 They can sort of tell.

00:22:28.000 If you have an expert look at it, they can break it down, sort of, yeah.

00:22:31.000 But there's a lot of...

00:22:32.000 The problem is, all you have to do is have a few people say it's real, and then a few people say it's fake, and the people that want it to be real...

00:22:39.000 That's exactly right.

00:22:40.000 Yeah.

00:22:40.000 And how do you chase it down?

00:22:43.000 I mean, you would constantly be one step behind.

00:22:45.000 Yeah.

00:22:46.000 I mean, it's even this way, like, I was talking about piracy earlier and trying, you know, I have these old line advisors who will say things like, you need to be charging for your new shows and more money.

00:22:56.000 And I sit there and go, our competition is piracy, man.

00:22:59.000 Yeah.

00:22:59.000 I mean, you've got to make everything so cheap and guilt them out so that they don't want to go pirate your stuff.

00:23:03.000 But the idea of...

00:23:07.000 I'm forgetting where...

00:23:08.000 I told you this was going to happen, didn't I? I'm having these senior moments now.

00:23:13.000 Yeah, I mean...

00:23:14.000 Well, we had it with Obama's birth certificate.

00:23:16.000 Yeah, or something like that.

00:23:17.000 But the Obama birth certificate was a real issue because there was people that were examining it and they were putting it through Photoshop.

00:23:23.000 They're going, look, this is clearly fake.

00:23:26.000 Look, here's the filters.

00:23:27.000 You can see how it's been added and edited.

00:23:29.000 But then you had a bunch of people that were actually Photoshop. 0.99

00:23:32.000 No, no, no, dipshit. 0.85

00:23:33.000 This is how Photoshop breaks down images. 0.99

00:23:35.000 It breaks them down into layers.

00:23:37.000 This isn't fake.

00:23:39.000 This is the actual image, and this is how Photoshop processes images.

00:23:43.000 But it didn't matter.

00:23:45.000 All it took was enough people to show you the original image. 0.81

00:23:49.000 Photoshopped image and say, look, here's why when we put it in Photoshop, you see all these layers, clearly it's fake, and then they just fucking run with it.

00:23:56.000 They just run with it on their online forums and on their... 0.86

00:23:59.000 They got the little Twitter group of right-wing people that want to think that Obama's a Kenyan Muslim who's some sort of Manchurian candidate.

00:24:06.000 There was a lot of that going on.

00:24:08.000 But when I talk to people like Red Band, Who actually understands Photoshop.

00:24:13.000 He's like, no, this is what happens.

00:24:14.000 When you put an image in Photoshop, it breaks it down into layers.

00:24:18.000 Like it shows you how this is how you would edit something in Photoshop.

00:24:22.000 I think the point you made earlier when you started talking about that though is the key one, which is If you want to believe this, here's your evidence, and you're going to ignore, and if you don't want to, the opposite.

00:24:32.000 I wrote a piece that never got published in the late 80s called The Death of Objective Truth, and I thought at the time that this was because you couldn't have arguments anymore, because no one would accept your source.

00:24:43.000 If you said, okay, the New York Times said this when I was a kid, that was a starting point, right?

00:24:47.000 Okay, if the New York Times says this, okay, we both believe it, now we can have a conversation about what the New York Times says.

00:24:53.000 Nowadays, I can't have political discussions with people anymore, because it never gets past ground zero, right?

00:25:00.000 We start, I make a premise, you challenge the premise, I bring in a piece of evidence, you say, I don't believe that evidence at all, here's the other evidence, and boom, Jonah Goldberg, who's like a standard conservative columnist, wrote a piece a couple months ago where he said, I can't even have fun political discussions anymore,

00:25:16.000 because you never get past the beginning of the talk.

00:25:19.000 We disagree over the fact that That isn't even what we're talking about.

00:25:24.000 Here's reality, now let's talk about it.

00:25:26.000 Wait a minute, that's your reality, that's not my reality.

00:25:28.000 And so you can't even have the kind of fun political discussions we had as kids or teenagers, because there's a basic disagreement on what reality looks like to different people.

00:25:37.000 Yeah, well there's these tribal agreements.

00:25:39.000 Tribal's the perfect word. 1.00

00:25:40.000 Yeah, we have a tribal agreement to support the left, and you saw that with Hillary Clinton.

00:25:44.000 There were so many people that were defending Hillary Clinton, and people were calling me right-wing.

00:25:48.000 People that I know were like, what are you, a right-winger now?

00:25:51.000 No. 1.00

00:25:51.000 Hillary Clinton is a fucking liar. 1.00

00:25:53.000 Like, it's really simple. 1.00

00:25:55.000 Like, I'm not saying that I like Donald Trump.

00:25:57.000 I don't. 0.95

00:25:57.000 But I'm saying, you can't, just because you don't like Donald Trump, ignore the fact that the Clinton Foundation is super fucking shady, that Hillary Clinton is clearly a liar, that they definitely did something with the DNC to rig the primaries, to keep Bernie Sanders out. 0.95

00:26:13.000 And now you have Donna... 0.98

00:26:14.000 What is her name?

00:26:15.000 Donna Brazile.

00:26:15.000 Donna Brazile coming out about all this stuff too and she's showing how it was all done and how Clinton sort of hijacked the entire DNC during the campaign, made everybody dependent upon her campaign.

00:26:26.000 The whole thing is tribal because people didn't, they wanted so badly to get Donald Trump and make sure he wasn't in office.

00:26:36.000 That they were supporting someone who didn't even support gay marriage until 2013. I mean, she was a creepy person in so many different ways and still is.

00:26:45.000 But she represents their team.

00:26:47.000 So they had this blind allegiance and this tribal loyalty towards the left.

00:26:52.000 I think that's a real problem.

00:26:54.000 It's a real problem we have in this country where people just... 1.00

00:26:57.000 I'm a fucking Dolphins fan. 1.00

00:26:59.000 It's Dolphins to the death. 1.00

00:27:01.000 And they get that way with the Cubs, and they get that way with Democrats, and they get that way with Republicans.

00:27:05.000 And you're seeing it right now.

00:27:07.000 You're seeing it right now with people that have an inability to, in any way, say anything negative about Donald Trump, because he's the president and because he's a Republican.

00:27:18.000 Well, you're not living in reality.

00:27:21.000 There's certain things that we really need to be concerned about.

00:27:25.000 Forget about politics.

00:27:26.000 What about the Environmental Protection Agency standards?

00:27:28.000 What about what they're doing in Alaska where they're trying to drill for minerals and they have this very important salmon river?

00:27:37.000 That they're going to drill right next to, and they're passing this without any advice from scientists.

00:27:42.000 They're just going straight to it to try to make money.

00:27:44.000 And people are freaking the fuck out about this kind of stuff.

00:27:48.000 And Republicans, there's so many of them that don't want to say a peep.

00:27:51.000 They don't want to say a word about it because he's their guy, he's on their team, and people are super tribal about it.

00:27:57.000 You know, this is part of the problem I've been having with my political show.

00:28:00.000 And everybody thinks it's a Trump-related thing, but I think it's what you said.

00:28:04.000 I'm having an issue trying to figure out if my basic understanding of how a system like ours is supposed to work is fundamentally flawed.

00:28:14.000 You know, I always like to say that wisdom requires a flexible mind.

00:28:18.000 But I gotta live that too, right?

00:28:20.000 So if I'm seeing stuff that doesn't back up my theory on how things are supposed to work, I feel like I have to sit back a little bit and go, okay, what are we seeing here?

00:28:28.000 And you mentioned a bunch of fundamental societal changes we're going through when we started talking, whether we're talking about amateur content or everybody being able to broadcast and all that.

00:28:36.000 We didn't even mention the fact that our broadcasts are international now, so you're not just talking to Americans anymore.

00:28:41.000 And it makes me start to wonder about the basic idea of, are we smart enough?

00:28:46.000 And this goes against all my principles, so it's hard for me.

00:28:49.000 But are we smart enough?

00:28:51.000 And does our modern society require us all to be more intelligent or in touch or understanding of the facts than, for example, American voters 75 years ago had to be?

00:29:03.000 I'm starting to...

00:29:04.000 Again, this isn't about Trump.

00:29:05.000 It's about what you were talking about.

00:29:07.000 The fact that we're having discussions over stuff that either isn't real, or you don't understand the issue, but you have a very strong opinion one way or the other about it, or some talk show host you trust told you this is the way it is, so you're going to believe it.

00:29:21.000 Let's put it this way.

00:29:21.000 Let's say we've always had uninformed or tribal voters, because we always have.

00:29:26.000 Is there a tipping point where if you have, if it's changing 10% every decade, that you say, okay, we used to have 20% of people who really didn't know what was going on.

00:29:35.000 Now we have 70% of people.

00:29:37.000 I mean, I'm starting to look back and go, if you can't have basic discussions about reality, Mm-hmm.

00:30:00.000 And I can't decide if the trust I've always had in the people was misplaced from the get-go, or if the challenges of this modern society that we have, and an entire generation and generations behind them, let's be honest, growing up in a world of 140 character conversations and all these different things,

00:30:17.000 if that doesn't fundamentally change us in a way that you might say, listen, in the 50s we could handle our voting responsibilities better than now, because the challenges to human beings now are greater.

00:30:27.000 I don't know, and I don't have an answer, which is why I'm sort of backing off and kind of observing instead of yakking about it for a change.

00:30:33.000 Well, I mean, I think it's important to talk about it just because we're all trying to figure it out together.

00:30:37.000 I think so.

00:30:38.000 And I think that's really what's going on here, is that collectively we've never really had a voice the way we have now.

00:30:44.000 Right.

00:30:44.000 It's never been 320, whatever it is, million people that can just chime in.

00:30:49.000 The world.

00:30:49.000 It's not even that.

00:30:50.000 I mean, we have foreigners and Russian bots.

00:30:54.000 This has never happened in the old days.

00:30:57.000 Do you remember?

00:30:57.000 It used to be considered like what your CIA would do or something to broadcast radio-free Europe over the Iron Curtain.

00:31:05.000 Radio-free Europe is a joke now.

00:31:07.000 We all talk to each other all the time.

00:31:10.000 And then you say to yourself, okay, if the Russians are doing this to us, Aren't we doing this to the Russians? 0.57

00:31:16.000 In other words, the fake news that's going on there may be a bunch of governments and corporations and everything.

00:31:24.000 They used to say the best way to cover up your lie is to just flood the system with more lies, because then everything's up in the air.

00:31:32.000 Yeah, that makes sense.

00:31:34.000 Yeah, and just, it's flooded.

00:31:35.000 And I feel like we're flooded now.

00:31:37.000 And so if you say to yourself, are we more flooded than we were 75 years ago?

00:31:40.000 And if we are, does that require more from the average voter than we required 75 years ago?

00:31:45.000 And let's be honest, the dirty little secret of the American system, as everyone who studies it knows, is that once upon a time, this voting franchise was actually in relatively few hands.

00:31:55.000 Yes.

00:31:55.000 And you had to, I mean, the old idea behind running a farm, I used to read this left-wing writer who said it was all part I don't know.

00:32:04.000 I think it was more of a voting requirement that said, hey, if you can run a farm, you can't be too much of an idiot, so that'll be our requirement. 0.98

00:32:10.000 You have to have this much land. 0.98

00:32:11.000 I don't know, but you do feel like as democracy's taken over, because we're really a republic, but we've been moving more towards a democracy for 200-some years...

00:32:19.000 If that happens and you turn around and go, okay, now we have no qualifications.

00:32:23.000 Because how would you implement them?

00:32:25.000 Somebody would say, this is racist or classist or whatever.

00:32:28.000 But without any requirements, are we doing a half?

00:32:31.000 I mean, how many people who are voting really understand what's going on?

00:32:35.000 Well, what are those requirements?

00:32:36.000 Think about it.

00:32:36.000 If I'm telling you that the 20-year-old kid in my neighborhood just bought a $7 million house from YouTube, this kid is obviously very wealthy.

00:32:43.000 But does he know what's going on?

00:32:44.000 Do you have to be smart or do you have to be wealthy?

00:32:47.000 Do you have to be a landowner?

00:32:48.000 Do you have to be a farmer?

00:32:49.000 Do you have to be a business owner?

00:32:50.000 He's essentially a business owner.

00:32:52.000 And if you're going to take a test, who designs the test?

00:32:53.000 Who grades the test?

00:32:54.000 Who decides what the questions of an informed voter would know would be?

00:32:58.000 And are the right and the left going to agree on the parameters?

00:33:00.000 Oh, it'll be like gerrymandering.

00:33:01.000 We'll gerrymander the test. 0.99

00:33:03.000 And, you know, these people, these 320 million people, this newfound responsibility of being able to chime in and communicate, they're used to just being able to talk shit at the gas station. 0.82

00:33:13.000 They're not used to this being permanent. 0.98

00:33:17.000 Political arguments on Twitter are crazy, dude. 0.96

00:33:20.000 They're crazy.

00:33:20.000 I look at them all the time.

00:33:22.000 They're crazy.

00:33:22.000 They're fascinating, though, because I think this is one step.

00:33:25.000 I think this is step one to this augmented reality situation that we're talking about.

00:33:31.000 I think what this represents...

00:33:33.000 Is a deeper and deeper connection that we're going to have with each other.

00:33:37.000 And I think we're going to get past language and we're going to get past culture in some sort of a weird way.

00:33:44.000 And it might take a hundred years to do this, but I really believe there's going to be some sort of a universal operating system that allows us to exchange thoughts in a way that everyone understands.

00:33:54.000 Some sort of a Rosetta Stone for the human mind.

00:33:57.000 Ooh, I love that.

00:33:58.000 I love that idea.

00:33:58.000 I really think it's possible.

00:34:00.000 The Rosetta Stone for the human mind.

00:34:00.000 I think it's possible, because I think, look, the new Google Pixel has earbuds, and these earbuds translate languages in real time.

00:34:11.000 Oh! 0.60

00:34:11.000 Yeah. 0.60

00:34:12.000 So if you're in another country...

00:34:14.000 That's fascinating.

00:34:15.000 Fascinating.

00:34:15.000 And someone's talking in Spanish, you will hear the translation in English in real time, and you'll be able to understand what they're saying.

00:34:21.000 So that's what Esperanto was supposed to be once upon a time, right?

00:34:25.000 It was going to be the common language, and we would all learn it, and because we would speak it, there would be no more wars and no more awful things, they thought.

00:34:31.000 And this is the digital Esperanto.

00:34:33.000 I forgot about that.

00:34:34.000 What was that?

00:34:35.000 That was...

00:34:36.000 Well, Esperanto's been around for longer than this, but, I mean, the big push came after the First World War was over, and the League of Nations was formed, and they were trying to figure out, how do we never have a world war again?

00:34:46.000 Well, we have to understand each other, first of all, and, you know, what if you could understand all the speeches and all the demagogues in all these other countries, right?

00:34:53.000 That's a giant issue.

00:34:54.000 I mean, the Tower of Babel's based on that.

00:34:56.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally.

00:34:57.000 And that is a real issue.

00:34:58.000 I can't read Korean.

00:35:00.000 You know, I don't know what they're saying. 0.62

00:35:01.000 I look at Russian language, and I'm like, these characters are crazy.

00:35:04.000 The Cyrillic writing, yeah.

00:35:05.000 It's all a problem because the lack of communication is one of the things that makes it easier for us to look at people as the other.

00:35:14.000 Yes.

00:35:15.000 And listen, that's the common problem because when people look at these regimes – We'll take the standard one that you talk about the Nazis, but there's a bazillion regimes like that.

00:35:24.000 The first thing you do is you have to dehumanize the people you want to go after, because obviously we have human feeling towards each other.

00:35:30.000 But if you can say something, and I think this is what's been most depressing for me, is that we seem to be backsliding on how we see people.

00:35:38.000 But I mean, this idea that Well, for example, one of the things I see all the time, all the time, and I don't know where it comes from on Twitter and everywhere else, is this idea that different races are inferior to white folks because white folks built all this, and therefore we must.

00:35:51.000 And you turn around and go, okay, one, how is that helpful?

00:35:54.000 Two, is that even true?

00:35:55.000 Three, so what?

00:35:57.000 So what?

00:35:57.000 I mean, the so what part is we just go, okay, are you doing anybody any good with this?

00:36:03.000 I mean, what are we at?

00:36:04.000 And truthfully, I don't think most human beings think like this.

00:36:07.000 We're trying to make a living.

00:36:08.000 We're trying to get by.

00:36:09.000 We're trying to get a date.

00:36:10.000 I mean, there's a bazillion things you have to do in this life.

00:36:12.000 The idea that you have to be responsible for pushing back racism in America seems a heck of a lot of responsibility to put on an average Joe or Well, I think that these conversations are very, very important, and I think we're having them more so than ever before.

00:36:25.000 And these conversations show how ridiculous it is to have blind allegiance towards people that have the same amount of melanin as you do. 1.00

00:36:33.000 It's so fucking stupid. 1.00

00:36:35.000 All human beings essentially either came from—actually, there's some speculation that some of them might have come from Europe thousands of years ago as well—but we're talking about hundreds of thousands of years ago, the very first Homo sapiens, they believe, came from Africa. 1.00

00:36:49.000 Everybody migrated out of there and moved wrong. 0.99

00:36:51.000 We essentially came from the same source.

00:36:53.000 So all this idea of race is just based on a particular amount of time in a particular climate that forced people to adapt to that climate.

00:37:03.000 In the colder, darker climates, you see paler skin.

00:37:06.000 In the sunnier, hotter climates, you see more melanin.

00:37:10.000 And the idea that these people that live with...

00:37:13.000 The people that have more pale skin are superior than the people that have more melanin. 1.00

00:37:17.000 It's just patently stupid. 1.00

00:37:19.000 It's a dumb idea. 1.00

00:37:21.000 If you take into account all the socio-economic factors that cause people to live certain ways, people that are isolated that live in certain tribal traditions, these things are all easily explained. 1.00

00:37:35.000 And if you want to chalk it off to intelligence or the superiority of the white race, in 2017, you're a fucking moron. 1.00

00:37:43.000 And this is a it's a good thing that we can have these conversations so you can expose these all these Charlottesville people that you see walking around with fucking swastika tattoos like Jesus Christ you fucking dummies those people that were involved in that those riots and all that racial bullshit that just went on These people, 1.00

00:38:02.000 they need to see the reaction that the rest of the world has. 0.99

00:38:06.000 And they are isolated and insulated in their weird little worlds. 1.00

00:38:09.000 And when they go global with that shit, and they march with those tiki torches down the street, and people mock them and talk shit about them openly online, they get to understand how the rest of the world sees this ridiculous ideology that they subscribe to. 0.99

00:38:23.000 This is the power of Free expression and communication that we're experiencing in 2017. And this is the power to nip a lot of this shit in the bud. 1.00

00:38:32.000 If we can get past this tribal nonsense that we're all taking part of. 1.00

00:38:39.000 There's tribal nonsense that's male versus female. 0.98

00:38:42.000 There's tribal nonsense that's white versus black. 1.00

00:38:45.000 There's tribal nonsense that's left versus right. 0.97

00:38:48.000 There's nationalism. 1.00

00:38:49.000 There's all this tribal stupidity. 0.99

00:38:51.000 And all of this stuff is being debated and exposed, and it's happening in real time, and to you and I, it can't happen quick enough. 1.00

00:38:59.000 It's still too goddamn slow.

00:39:02.000 It's still too frustrating. 0.96

00:39:03.000 The idea that it's still around is still mind-boggling.

00:39:06.000 This kind of racism, this open, blatant racism, still exists in 2017. It's way less prevalent than it was 1,000 years ago.

00:39:15.000 It's way less accepted than it was 2,000 years ago.

00:39:19.000 And I think that's a blip in time, as you know, but probably better than anybody that I know.

00:39:24.000 Yeah, but you know, it's funny because I... There's a part of me that thinks that there must be something deeply embedded in the DNA or our code or whatever that...

00:39:36.000 Because it's either that or people run into this stuff and it appeals to them.

00:39:41.000 So let's say, you know, the first time you ever hear a speaker...

00:39:44.000 And look, let me draw a distinction because I'm one of those people that actually buys into the idea of, you know, I'd love to get to a place where we judge people by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.

00:40:04.000 I think?

00:40:11.000 It would be like, no, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

00:40:13.000 We should still be noticing race for all the, you know, these people need help.

00:40:17.000 I guess what I'm saying is that there's a pendulum, and I'm looking at this, I feel like we're right in the middle of this right now, so it's so hard to analyze it.

00:40:25.000 So everybody take this with a grain of salt.

00:40:27.000 But I wonder if there's not a pendulum involved.

00:40:30.000 So, for example, I tend to buy into most of the theories, for example, about racism that have always been put out there.

00:40:36.000 But I think some are less helpful than others.

00:40:39.000 And I think they...

00:40:39.000 What theories are you talking about?

00:40:41.000 I'll give you an example.

00:40:41.000 And I think they come from academia because I think this is sort of what academics do, and I think that's their job.

00:40:47.000 But a lot of times they'll come up with theories.

00:40:48.000 So one of the ones that drives me crazy is white privilege, okay? 0.77

00:40:53.000 White privilege is true in the sense that, like one African-American guy said to me, he said, I would love to forget about race, but white people won't let me. 0.90

00:41:00.000 He says, every morning I wake up and am reminded and you don't have to deal with that.

00:41:05.000 I get that.

00:41:06.000 And I approve and I understand it.

00:41:08.000 But here's my problem.

00:41:10.000 You have to be able to see how telling somebody that you were born with something that you didn't earn is going to be received on the other side.

00:41:19.000 Right?

00:41:19.000 There are some people that have become these white supremacist types or anti-racial group because they're so upset about their perceived position.

00:41:28.000 Right?

00:41:28.000 Like somehow you're blaming me for stuff that happened Now, true or not, it doesn't matter.

00:41:33.000 What I always tell people is it doesn't matter what's true or not.

00:41:35.000 It matters how that person reacts.

00:41:38.000 And if you're explaining to them that, listen, you're born with all these unearned privileges, and their reaction is, I'm starving here.

00:41:44.000 I don't have a job.

00:41:45.000 I'm living in a crappy apartment.

00:41:47.000 How can you tell me that?

00:41:49.000 And again, I'm analyzing from within the maelstrom that we're in now, but that might be a reaction-counter-reaction thing.

00:41:55.000 To say that we could have a society where you judge people on the content of their character, not the color of their skin, that might be as upsetting for an African-American activist as a white supremacist, because this society right now pays really close attention to your race for all kinds of reasons.

00:42:12.000 I mean, I'm one of those people that believes we're all going to be a nice...

00:42:16.000 We're good to go.

00:42:34.000 The way human beings evolved.

00:42:36.000 Yeah, I think tribalism is the perfect term. 0.99

00:42:39.000 For sure.

00:42:39.000 We lived in these small groups of people.

00:42:41.000 We looked like each other. 0.98

00:42:42.000 And when we saw these blonde-haired dudes pull up in boats with battle axes, you're like, oh shit, they don't even look like us. 1.00

00:42:49.000 Fuck, we gotta get out of here. 1.00

00:42:51.000 That's literally what you had to worry about. 1.00

00:42:53.000 I mean, you had to worry about someone who was the other.

00:42:55.000 Well, and again, we forget in this time and place that the other didn't happen to be a skin color thing.

00:43:01.000 I mean, you could be the Carolingian Empire that's being attacked by the Vikings.

00:43:06.000 And to an outside observer, you all look like a bunch of blonde-haired, blue-eyed guys.

00:43:10.000 But to them, the Vikings are the other. 0.65

00:43:12.000 And in a tribal sense, they're as inferior and awful and barbaric as anything you can think of. 0.98

00:43:17.000 So we make the distinction now based on this or that thing.

00:43:30.000 Well, here's a perfect example where we have a blind spot of this was in Iraq. 0.99

00:43:36.000 When we took over and killed Saddam Hussein and overthrew him, and then the Sunnis and the Shias went into a full-scale civil war, and everybody's like, whoa, whoa, what the fuck is going on? 0.98

00:43:47.000 I thought you guys were all Muslim. 0.95

00:43:49.000 So many people had no idea there was two competing sects of Muslims that lived in that area.

00:43:56.000 They had no idea there was a power struggle.

00:43:58.000 We may be talking about The population as a whole, but come on, the people in the government understood this really well.

00:44:04.000 I mean, this is why the first George Bush didn't want to go in and topple Saddam Hussein directly the way the second Gulf War did, because he didn't want to own that mess. 0.81

00:44:12.000 And we knew that those groups were there because we were encouraging them and funding them to overthrow.

00:44:17.000 I mean, there was a big Shiite rebellion against Saddam at one point after the first Gulf War, which we were funding and hoping for. 0.94

00:44:25.000 The Kurds have been for a long time our friends, and we've been pushing for something there less than a state, but more than what they had under Saddam, because the Turks don't love them.

00:44:34.000 Well, whenever you overthrow a dictator, you leave a power vacuum.

00:44:38.000 And that power vacuum is never filled in a nice and calm and democratic way.

00:44:43.000 I mean, look what's going on in Libya.

00:44:45.000 Libya is now a failed state.

00:44:46.000 It's a disaster, yeah. 0.97

00:44:47.000 And it is like a breeding ground for ISIS. And the reason why is because you had this tyrannical dictator and we had him killed. 1.00

00:44:57.000 We had Qaddafi killed, which is another great piece of evidence I used to point to with Hillary Clinton.

00:45:03.000 Watch the interview where she is about to be interviewed.

00:45:07.000 She's still on camera, but the interview hasn't officially started.

00:45:11.000 And she's talking about the death of Qaddafi and she's laughing.

00:45:13.000 She's like, we came, we saw he died.

00:45:16.000 Yeah, that's right.

00:45:17.000 That's right.

00:45:18.000 And she's laughing.

00:45:19.000 This is not the kind of cavalier mindset you ever want to see in someone that possesses the power to overthrow a government, and someone who possesses the power to wield nuclear weapons.

00:45:30.000 This is a person who's a chicken hawk.

00:45:33.000 You're completely shielded from the idea of actually engaging in actual visceral combat yourself.

00:45:40.000 You're outside in flying around in jets, having catered food.

00:45:45.000 You're in war rooms making decisions while you're in air-conditioned buildings. 1.00

00:45:49.000 It's all bullshit. 0.98

00:45:50.000 And these decisions that you make have massive repercussions for decades, if not centuries. 0.99

00:45:59.000 Here's the thing that you talked about that I think is incredibly important in the wrath of the Khans. 1.00

00:46:03.000 When Genghis Khan took over Baghdad, Baghdad essentially was knocked into the fucking Stone Age and might not have ever recovered. 0.88

00:46:11.000 That's true. 0.96

00:46:13.000 And the Mongols destroyed the irrigation system that had been around from time immemorial and would... 1.00

00:46:20.000 And how complicated and advanced their civilization was at the time when the Mongols showed up and did all this. 0.99

00:46:27.000 How few people knew this?

00:46:28.000 I think the question of asking about dictators is really important because I think sometimes you have to ask how much of the fact that the country is held together is only because there's a dictator.

00:46:40.000 So we'll use the Yugoslavia example because it's pretty classic. 0.95

00:46:43.000 For those who don't know, Yugoslavia was a country made up of a bunch of different independent countries now.

00:46:49.000 I think?

00:47:14.000 Iraq is not even a real country because if you didn't have an iron-fisted dictator holding it together, it wouldn't be together, right? 0.61

00:47:22.000 So then when you take the one linchpin as awful, and Saddam Hussein was awful, awful. 0.83

00:47:28.000 I'll give you a book to read that will just, you have to, it's the only book I've ever read that I had to read another book afterwards before I went to bed at night because it was so horrible.

00:47:35.000 Wow.

00:47:35.000 So he's evil.

00:47:37.000 It's called The Great War for Civilization by Robert Fisk.

00:47:41.000 But he's a reporter on the scene.

00:47:43.000 He would tell you what is scrawled on the walls in the prisons at Saddam Hussein's prisons that the prisoners would write in their own blood.

00:47:51.000 It's horrible stuff.

00:47:51.000 But the point is, is that if there hadn't been a regime like that, would you have even had an Iraq So, if you say to yourself, okay, this guy is the only reason this country is held together, what if you pull out that linchpin, right?

00:48:02.000 And you say, he's horrible.

00:48:04.000 Yes, but if you could look into the crystal ball and find out, yes, but we're going to lose a million people in warfare between all these people if you pull the Saddam Hussein character out of there too quickly. 0.77

00:48:12.000 It's like a giant Jenga game.

00:48:14.000 And if you pull the wrong piece, and that's what happened, right?

00:48:17.000 Yeah.

00:48:17.000 And it's still happening.

00:48:19.000 It's still happening.

00:48:20.000 Listen, Iran is the next... 0.99

00:48:21.000 I mean, they're really gunning, for lack of a better word, for Iran.

00:48:25.000 And you can see it.

00:48:26.000 If you know how to read the news and you connect this dot with that dot, it doesn't provide a clear picture.

00:48:32.000 When you say they, do you mean the United States military?

00:48:35.000 The United States government and our friends.

00:48:37.000 And why are they gunning after Iran?

00:48:39.000 Well, Iran has been on our naughty boy list since 1979. They used to be our best friend in the region, even better than Israel early on, because the Israeli relationship really got tight after, like, 73, 74. But Iran, 0.99

00:48:54.000 we overthrew a government there with the British.

00:48:57.000 Kermit Roosevelt was one of the people involved in that.

00:49:00.000 We're good to go.

00:49:21.000 Then on the other side, you have Iran as a friend.

00:49:24.000 I mean, we had this whole area sussed for a while, and the 1979 revolution screwed everything up.

00:49:29.000 And you could make a decent case that it's since 1979 that all this crap that we're dealing with today, including modern terrorism directed at us, stems from all that.

00:49:40.000 I mean, that's the domino that begins tumbling that explains a lot of things, including the 82-83 Lebanon involvement and all that stuff.

00:49:47.000 Yeah, it just seems like such a global mess.

00:49:50.000 When you look at all the potential pieces that are in place that could cause chaos.

00:49:54.000 It's money, though, dude.

00:49:56.000 It's money.

00:49:56.000 I mean, there's so much.

00:49:58.000 You know, I went to it.

00:49:59.000 I've said this before, and it's like a violation, probably, of what I said I would do.

00:50:03.000 But I went to a CENTCOM meeting.

00:50:05.000 I was invited to this weird CENTCOM. What is that?

00:50:06.000 U.S. Central Command.

00:50:08.000 I'll tell you this story one time because I thought they were going to kill me.

00:50:11.000 I thought it was an assassination attempt.

00:50:12.000 And you know, I'm not a conspiracy nut, but the whole story was really funny.

00:50:15.000 But long story short, I end up at this central command planning meeting with 11 guys.

00:50:20.000 It's me and 11 other guys and generals.

00:50:23.000 I mean, it was chaired by the guy who's the defense secretary now, Mattis.

00:50:27.000 So we sat there and they started talking.

00:50:28.000 About half of it was, well, what do you think we ought to do about this, that, or the other thing?

00:50:32.000 And the second half blew my mind because the whole second half of the meeting was about procurement.

00:50:37.000 Now, procurement sounds boring.

00:50:39.000 What it basically means is buying stuff, military stuff.

00:50:42.000 And the meeting was kind of about how important it was that countries don't start shifting over from, say, our tanks to another country's tanks.

00:50:51.000 And it wasn't because we wanted to sell them tanks.

00:50:54.000 It was because we wanted to sell them spare parts for the tanks.

00:50:57.000 It's the old printer model, right?

00:50:59.000 Oh, we'll give you the foreign aid.

00:51:00.000 Sure, we'll give you a lot.

00:51:01.000 We're going to defend you.

00:51:02.000 We'll send all this stuff free.

00:51:03.000 Yeah, but then who do you have to call for the spare parts?

00:51:05.000 Right?

00:51:06.000 If you're using U.S. jets, well, who's making the parts for those?

00:51:10.000 And who's selling them?

00:51:11.000 So when you sit there and realize how much money's involved, you're doubling down in a place like the Middle East, right? 0.64

00:51:16.000 You're doubling down because, one, you want to get the oil, or you want to have...

00:51:20.000 You want to negate what's called...

00:51:24.000 It used to be called petro-extortion, petro-blackmail, because in the 70s, and you and I are old enough to remember this when you had the long gas lines and all this, when OPEC punished countries like the United States for supporting Israel, the first thing you realize when somebody can do that to you is, oh my god, job number one has to be make sure no one can ever do that again.

00:51:41.000 You can't control our foreign policy by saying you'll cut off the oil.

00:51:45.000 Because if you do that, we'll just come and take the oil.

00:51:47.000 We'll make sure you can't shut down the Western world because you don't like our policies.

00:51:52.000 Okay, I understand that a bit.

00:51:53.000 But then you say, okay, not only are we in there for the oil, but these countries that are our friends in the region who help Who help keep open access to the oil.

00:52:03.000 These are places that should be using US equipment.

00:52:05.000 And if they're using US equipment, we can sell them US spare parts.

00:52:08.000 So you're not only keeping the oil access, which is important to us, but you're also keeping the one industry in this country we still make a ton of money in.

00:52:15.000 Which is we still sell great military equipment and great military parts, and we send our advisors and our maintenance crews in every place all over the world to keep that stuff in running operation.

00:52:25.000 That's doubling down.

00:52:26.000 So you get the oil and you get the spare parts that you give away to them to protect the oil.

00:52:30.000 So you're in this meeting with these people how?

00:52:33.000 How'd you get...

00:52:34.000 Okay, well, I'll tell the story because it's a fun story.

00:52:36.000 So we get, you know how it is, we get an email one day and we get a letter to our mailbox.

00:52:42.000 The letter looks like some...

00:52:43.000 And what were you doing at the time?

00:52:44.000 Just the podcast, just, you know, what we do. 0.99

00:52:46.000 So they just said, hey, come on down, we want to kill you? 0.88

00:52:48.000 No, no, it looked like... 1.00

00:52:49.000 Want to tell you about some shit you shouldn't know about? 0.99

00:52:51.000 Well, okay, it even goes deeper. 0.99

00:52:52.000 I used to have a discussion board online, and some dude came on the discussion board and was saying he was this giant hacker, this famous hacker.

00:52:59.000 You would all know me if I told you. 1.00

00:53:01.000 And, you know, the discussion board said, you're an idiot. 1.00

00:53:03.000 You know, you don't know. 1.00

00:53:03.000 And the guy left the discussion board saying, I'm going to show you what I can do. 1.00

00:53:06.000 You won't believe.

00:53:07.000 You just keep your eyes open for a couple of days.

00:53:08.000 You'll see what I can do.

00:53:10.000 So three days later, this letter arrives in our mailbox the same day I get an email saying, we'd love to have you come over to Central Command and blah, blah, blah.

00:53:18.000 It looked like my daughter did it on her printer.

00:53:20.000 There was no, like, you know, government seals.

00:53:22.000 It didn't look official at all.

00:53:24.000 And it was in Florida.

00:53:25.000 I'm going, okay, this is this hacker dude.

00:53:27.000 This is what he was going to do.

00:53:29.000 So it says it's got a phone number to call.

00:53:31.000 So I call the phone number, and it doesn't even ring once.

00:53:33.000 And the machine picks it up and just says, leave a message at the beep.

00:53:36.000 I'm going, what the hell?

00:53:37.000 I'm telling my wife, what the hell is this? 0.80

00:53:39.000 So I leave a message at the beep.

00:53:40.000 I hardly put the receiver down.

00:53:42.000 Boom, rings, and somebody's on the other line.

00:53:44.000 And it's a guy with a German accent.

00:53:46.000 I'm going, what?

00:53:47.000 It's like some weird bad movie, right?

00:53:50.000 And he goes, no, no, no.

00:53:50.000 This is all legit.

00:53:51.000 Don't worry.

00:53:52.000 You just show up at the airport.

00:53:53.000 There'll be a ticket waiting for you.

00:53:54.000 You take it to Washington, D.C. There'll be a car waiting for you.

00:53:57.000 And I looked at my wife and I said, this hacker is just going to take a photo of me at the airport standing there like an idiot and then put it on the website. 0.99

00:54:05.000 She says, just go to the airport. 0.99

00:54:06.000 When there's no ticket, we'll know it's a scam.

00:54:08.000 So I go to the airport.

00:54:09.000 That's so crazy.

00:54:10.000 I wish I was talking to you.

00:54:12.000 So there's a ticket.

00:54:13.000 So now I've got my bag.

00:54:14.000 I guess I'm going to D.C. from Eugene, Oregon.

00:54:16.000 So I get on the plane.

00:54:18.000 I get off the plane.

00:54:19.000 There's no car.

00:54:20.000 So I call my wife.

00:54:21.000 I said, there's no car.

00:54:22.000 This is all a scam.

00:54:23.000 This is a heck of a lot of trouble to go through to scam me, right?

00:54:26.000 So she gets a call from the German dude in Florida.

00:54:29.000 He's at the wrong gate.

00:54:30.000 Go to this other gate.

00:54:31.000 So I go to this other gate.

00:54:31.000 A town car pulls up with a Middle Eastern driver.

00:54:34.000 Oh, Jesus.

00:54:35.000 Yes, get in the car.

00:54:36.000 So I get in the car, and then he starts driving through, like, side streets in the backwoods of Virginia or something.

00:54:41.000 So I'm on the phone with my wife going, if you never hear from me again, I see a couple of landmarks here or whatever.

00:54:46.000 So he drops me off at this hotel in D.C. I still have...

00:54:49.000 I don't know what I'm doing.

00:54:50.000 I don't know why I'm here.

00:54:51.000 I walk up to the front desk, and I go, do you have a reservation?

00:54:55.000 Oh, yes, Mr. Carlin.

00:54:56.000 Hold on.

00:54:56.000 And they come back with this packet.

00:54:58.000 And they hand it to me.

00:54:59.000 This is your homework for tomorrow morning.

00:55:01.000 And I... I go, what?

00:55:03.000 I go up to the room, I open up this, and it's all legit.

00:55:06.000 Long story short, it's all, and there's people at this meeting, you're not allowed to say, but there's people that if they sat next to you would know exactly who they are.

00:55:12.000 And so I get to the meeting, and it's all like Pentagon, everything's confiscated at the door, and you get this military guy who walks with you everywhere.

00:55:20.000 So if you have to go to the bathroom, this dude has to walk to the bathroom with you.

00:55:23.000 And so it's a table in this room, and Mattis is at the head of the table, and then a bunch of soldiers standing in like a circle around the table, just sort of standing there.

00:55:33.000 So you've got like a cordon of soldiers.

00:55:35.000 And I'm sitting down there with all these other people, and I have no idea why I'm there.

00:55:38.000 So I open up the packet, and it's everybody at the meeting.

00:55:40.000 And everybody's got like three pages on their bio.

00:55:43.000 This, the Honorable, da-da-da-da-da.

00:55:44.000 And then I open it up, and then there's this little teeny piece of paper that says, Dan Carlin, podcaster.

00:55:49.000 And they went to, like, Wikipedia, which is all wrong anyway, and printed it, and I thought, oh yeah, these august people at this meeting are so excited to be at this meeting with Dan Carlin, podcaster, right?

00:55:59.000 So the meeting goes on for a while, and then it breaks up, and all these people know each other, so they go off in their little corners and start talking during the lunch break.

00:56:06.000 I don't know anyone.

00:56:07.000 I'm sitting at this table by myself, and this officer comes up and goes, I bet you wonder why you're here.

00:56:12.000 I said, yeah, I really would love to know why I'm here.

00:56:14.000 He goes...

00:56:14.000 That's my fault.

00:56:15.000 He goes, I'm the one.

00:56:16.000 He goes, we listen to the show.

00:56:17.000 He goes, we're looking for out...

00:56:19.000 This was all about getting outsider opinions on what you should do in the Middle East.

00:56:22.000 And he goes, it was my...

00:56:24.000 Okay, but here's the other thing.

00:56:26.000 Outsider opinions on what you should do in the Middle East.

00:56:28.000 Let's contact that guy that does a history podcast.

00:56:30.000 Right, but it's a little...

00:56:31.000 And fly him out to D.C. Yeah, but here's your tax dollars at work.

00:56:35.000 Okay, but it's a little bit more sneaky than that because I was there with a guy who knows how this all runs, another guest.

00:56:42.000 And we took the taxi cab to this place together.

00:56:44.000 And he's a real cynical...

00:56:46.000 He goes, let me tell you why you're here.

00:56:47.000 This is all a cover.

00:56:48.000 I go, what do you mean it's a cover?

00:56:49.000 He goes, it's a cover because these guys are required by law to solicit outside opinions for some of this stuff.

00:56:55.000 So that's what we're here for.

00:56:56.000 We're going to give the...

00:56:57.000 And what they're going to say is they're going to do exactly what they were going to do anyway, but they'll be able to say, we solicited the outside opinion from all these different people.

00:57:04.000 So I think that's what it was.

00:57:07.000 What law is it that requires them to solicit the outside opinion?

00:57:09.000 I don't know, but apparently they were supposed to think outside the box.

00:57:14.000 That's mandated?

00:57:15.000 I don't know, but I was the real outlier.

00:57:16.000 All these other people made sense.

00:57:17.000 I was the guy that was like, okay, they're really getting crazy.

00:57:20.000 Were you wearing a suit or were you dressing like that with a baseball hat?

00:57:22.000 I was wearing a suit.

00:57:23.000 You were?

00:57:24.000 It was the last time I wore one.

00:57:27.000 It's funny because they take this commemorative photo of you at the end, and then they say, you can't show this photo to anybody.

00:57:33.000 Why are you taking it?

00:57:33.000 Yeah, that's what I said!

00:57:34.000 So I can show my wife? 0.90

00:57:35.000 Can you put it on the wall in your house?

00:57:37.000 I don't know.

00:57:37.000 It's on the wall in my house now.

00:57:40.000 So when you're standing there, do you have like a badge on that says, Hi, my name is Dan Carlin or anything?

00:57:45.000 It just says Dan Carlin and then there's the dude who stands behind you the whole time.

00:57:48.000 What does it say?

00:57:49.000 Dan Carlin Hardcore History?

00:57:51.000 What does it say?

00:57:52.000 I don't know.

00:57:52.000 I'll show you.

00:57:52.000 It's on my phone.

00:57:53.000 I'll show you later.

00:57:54.000 Wow.

00:57:54.000 But it was one of those get-togethers where you just...

00:57:57.000 I really wasn't as prepared as I should have been because I was pretty darn sure the whole thing was a hoax.

00:58:02.000 I mean, first of all, if you're going to send me a letter, can it look like a letter that the U.S.? Does it have to look like something where you printed the label on your brother label maker printer or something?

00:58:12.000 Maybe they have multiple filters to leave in the possibility of plausible deniability.

00:58:17.000 And the German guy, by the way, turned out to be like a West German general that was cooperating with the U.S. government as part of an exchange program.

00:58:24.000 But the whole thing seemed like, I just thought it was this hacker dude figuring out he's going to really embarrass me in front of the whole forum, you know.

00:58:30.000 Oh, wow.

00:58:31.000 Look at Dan Carlin at the airport thinking he's going to Washington, D.C. Yeah, exactly.

00:58:35.000 That's what I thought it was. 0.99

00:58:35.000 Some Operation Paperclip type shit. 0.99

00:58:37.000 They got some German guy and snuck him over there. 1.00

00:58:39.000 Yeah, and dumped him into a Virginia swamp.

00:58:42.000 Wow.

00:58:43.000 That's fascinating, man.

00:58:45.000 So, did they solicit your opinions?

00:58:47.000 Did they talk to you about things?

00:58:48.000 All I can say is that both Mattis and his aide, which was Vice Admiral Harwood, they are, generals these days are so good at PR, because you get this wonderful thank you note where they go, oh, it was so great to have you.

00:59:00.000 Here's my, please contact us if you, and you're thinking to...

00:59:04.000 I mean, it's like a PR thing.

00:59:06.000 Yeah.

00:59:06.000 And I mean, I do think there's a little bit of the PR involved, and I think, you know, having the podcaster there might have been good for PR. Well, for sure.

00:59:13.000 Maybe they thought it'd shut me up with my criticism, right?

00:59:16.000 Bring you on in the inside.

00:59:17.000 Yeah, you're one of our buddies.

00:59:18.000 Yeah, now you have to be quiet.

00:59:19.000 Remember when Dennis Miller became buddies with George Bush, and he wouldn't make jokes about George Bush anymore?

00:59:23.000 He's my friend, and I give him a pass.

00:59:25.000 Like, what?

00:59:26.000 Yeah, exactly. 1.00

00:59:27.000 You're a fucking comic, pal. 1.00

00:59:28.000 What are you doing? 1.00

00:59:29.000 Yeah, that's a fascinating thing that they would bring you over there.

00:59:32.000 So you got to meet Mattis?

00:59:34.000 What's he like?

00:59:35.000 Not only was he cool, but he knows his history, which, you know, I have a soft spot in my heart, but he was talking about, you know, we're talking about the Middle East, and he's talking about the history of this and the history of that, and I'm sitting here going, and, you know, I know that history pretty well, and I was sitting there going...

00:59:49.000 Don't they call him the warrior monk?

00:59:52.000 I found him fascinating.

00:59:54.000 And I thought he really understood what I always hope these people understand, which is the limits of power.

00:59:59.000 Mattis was very good about saying, listen, we can't keep doing this, and we can't keep doing that.

01:00:03.000 And I thought to myself, that's right.

01:00:05.000 I don't know how much the presidents listen, but I remember thinking, Mattis is right about that stuff.

01:00:09.000 Well, I think he is listening.

01:00:11.000 My friends that are in the military, almost all of them universally were very pleased that Mattis was taking over.

01:00:17.000 Yeah, he's popular especially.

01:00:18.000 Yeah, he's popular.

01:00:19.000 Extremely popular because they feel like they finally have support now.

01:00:22.000 They felt like they were handcuffed during the Obama administration.

01:00:26.000 And that there was this, you know, you had to go almost through a PR firm before any decisions were made.

01:00:31.000 They had to, like, consult the ramifications publicly.

01:00:34.000 Vietnam was like that, too.

01:00:35.000 They said Lyndon Johnson was picking the specific bombing targets.

01:00:38.000 But here's the problem you have. 1.00

01:00:40.000 If you realize, and if you don't, you're an idiot. 1.00

01:00:43.000 That you will actually hurt your long-term goals. 1.00

01:00:47.000 If, for example, you hit a school and kill 200 little children, you realize, listen, the whole policy is really held hostage by the potential for a disastrous mistake.

01:00:57.000 Because if the goal is to win hearts and minds, and listen, that's the only way to win this kind of thing, then you do damage to the goal with a mistake.

01:01:06.000 And mistakes in war are inevitable.

01:01:08.000 So everybody, I think, is just trying to be really careful, but it's hard to fight a war really carefully.

01:01:12.000 Right.

01:01:13.000 And this war is particularly weird when it comes to that because of the use of drones.

01:01:18.000 The use of drones has changed the entire idea of what war is because if you look at what happened during the Obama administration, this is one of the things that people don't like to talk about that are supporters of Obama.

01:01:31.000 I believe the number is higher than 80% of innocent civilians that were killed by drones.

01:01:38.000 I think it's more than 80%.

01:01:40.000 Imagine any sort of technique in war or anything else.

01:01:44.000 How about policing?

01:01:45.000 Let's just go for policing.

01:01:47.000 Imagine if there were some criminals that were holed up in a building and you had 100 people in the building and 20 of them were criminals and you killed everybody.

01:01:55.000 So you killed 80 people that were just secretaries and plumbers and just folks doing their job, living their life, children, their families.

01:02:04.000 You killed all those people to get to those 20 people. 0.98

01:02:07.000 Everyone would freak the fuck out if you did it physically yourself. 1.00

01:02:11.000 If you ran in with a machine gun and gunned everybody down. 1.00

01:02:14.000 You just, I had to kill everybody, that's the only way to get to the bad guys. 1.00

01:02:17.000 Nobody would forgive you, and it would be front-page news, and it would be a horrific crime. 0.95

01:02:24.000 But it happens constantly when it comes to drone warfare in Yemen and parts of the world that we're not even supposed to be at war with.

01:02:32.000 We're sending these flying robots...

01:02:35.000 They shoot something called Hellfire missiles.

01:02:38.000 Like, Jesus Christ, they're shooting Hellfire missiles at these targets that they're looking at on a screen.

01:02:44.000 And they're often in, like, the Midwest.

01:02:46.000 I mean, that's where some of these things...

01:02:47.000 You know what it is, though?

01:02:48.000 It's all part of...

01:02:49.000 Listen, there's a term, and you military guys listening will all know it.

01:02:52.000 It's called RMA. Revolution in military affairs.

01:02:57.000 And RMA periods in time happen.

01:03:00.000 So you imagine the period between no gunpowder and the mass use of gunpowder weapons.

01:03:05.000 That's an RMA period in history, right?

01:03:08.000 But normally, what appears to be fast, like the transition from no gunpowder to gunpowder, is really relatively slow by modern standards.

01:03:16.000 So you have several generations to get used to the changes.

01:03:21.000 But the speed of the pace of change now is so quickly that by the time you begin to say, okay, we've been using the current weapons systems and setup for five years now, we think we're starting to understand it, it's obsolete, right?

01:03:32.000 What I said, and this is so long ago that we've been podcasting a long time, Joe, but I remember years and years ago when we first started using these drones, I said, we're going to screw this up because we're using them the same way the United States used atomic weapons, which is as though no one else will ever get them.

01:03:48.000 We are establishing the rules.

01:03:50.000 And when other people get this stuff, those are going to be the rules they operate under too.

01:03:55.000 But our attitude, and I've never understood this, but we have a very, maybe it's the, maybe it's how democratic republics work in the sense that we can only really think short term because the politicians are only rewarded short term.

01:04:07.000 But I mean, if you say, listen, these are the goals of our drone program for the next five years, you're not incorporating what's going to happen when China gets drones. 0.67

01:04:15.000 Yeah.

01:04:15.000 And what I said at the time is, do you know how mad we're going to be if another major country uses drones the way we're using them now?

01:04:22.000 Exactly.

01:04:23.000 And it's the same thing with nuclear weapons.

01:04:24.000 Once other countries got nuclear weapons, we backed off and went, oh, well, we have to have some rules governing this now.

01:04:29.000 Well, but when we were the only ones with them, we would threaten to use them all the time.

01:04:33.000 Yeah.

01:04:33.000 You know, you better not do that.

01:04:34.000 We'll nuke you. 1.00

01:04:35.000 Easy to say when you're the only ones with it.

01:04:36.000 So when you talk about the drone warfare, I would suggest that the problem of collateral damage, for lack of a better word, is one we've been dealing with for a long time now.

01:04:50.000 First World War, it started.

01:04:52.000 Second World War, it was massive.

01:04:55.000 Then anything is a walk back.

01:04:57.000 So if you say something like, yes, Joe Rogan, sure, we killed those 200 kids at that school and it's regrettable, but that's an unusual thing.

01:05:04.000 It's not like World War II where we carpet bombed whole cities.

01:05:07.000 And they're right.

01:05:08.000 But is that the standard we can operate with?

01:05:10.000 Well, I would suggest that the question is, does it hurt or help what you're really after?

01:05:15.000 If Joe Rogan's children were killed in a bombing raid that another country launched, there is nothing that they could do to stop Joe Rogan from hating them for the rest of his life.

01:05:28.000 And if Joe Rogan hating them means Joe Rogan's going to find a way to make you feel his pain, you just created another enemy while you were trying to eliminate enemies.

01:05:37.000 This is what's so scary about terrorism.

01:05:39.000 And you just changed not just the people that were directly affected, but the people that saw that as well.

01:05:44.000 The ripples of pain.

01:05:45.000 Giant.

01:05:46.000 Yes.

01:05:46.000 And, again, all I tell people, and people get offended, Joe, I've never understood, people get offended where I say, just put yourself in the other guy's moccasins for a minute.

01:05:57.000 Because what people say to me, I had some guy get screaming mad at me saying, basically, he followed the dominoes saying, are you saying we deserved 9-11?

01:06:05.000 And I said, if that's really where you took that, if that's where your argument goes, I said, then you totally misunderstood me.

01:06:11.000 I'm saying...

01:06:11.000 No one's saying deserved, but saying that this is probably what caused it.

01:06:16.000 Listen, why are we a target?

01:06:18.000 It's not wrong. 0.84

01:06:20.000 As a matter of fact, I would suggest it is the only...

01:06:22.000 Because they hate our freedom?

01:06:23.000 What does that even mean?

01:06:24.000 And I would suggest this.

01:06:26.000 While there are some people who say, listen, look at the way you have women on billboards, scantily clad. 1.00

01:06:30.000 Yes, there are people that hate that and that they don't want that either.

01:06:33.000 At the same time, in a lot of these countries, you were talking about Iran earlier.

01:06:36.000 Let's talk about Iran.

01:06:38.000 Iran's got two separate things going.

01:06:40.000 They've got the countryside and they've got the cities.

01:06:42.000 And they've got a ton of the population that's under 30. And in the cities, they'd love to dance.

01:06:47.000 And they'd love to, you know, the Iranians are not like the, you know, You said they all seem like Muslims to us, but they're all very different from each other. 1.00

01:06:53.000 And the Arabians, for example, are known to be kind of Spartan and Stoic, whereas the Persians, as they used to be called, are a fun-loving, food-loving, dance-loving.

01:07:03.000 I mean, they're very capitalistic.

01:07:05.000 So in a funny way, and that's why we were so close to them for so long, there's a natural affinity between us.

01:07:10.000 And I always say...

01:07:11.000 It would be pretty darn easy if we treated them right, the same way my stepdad said, you know, you can destroy the Soviet Union by dumping Elvis records, porn, and blue jeans on them, which kind of is what happened. 0.90

01:07:23.000 There's a way, I think, to approach this Muslim world thing, and let's not pretend it won't be totally destabilizing, because if you drop porn, blue jeans, and Elvis on those countries now, you're going to have a counter reaction with all these clerics and whatever that are freaking out. 0.99

01:07:36.000 But at the end of the game, You won't end up looking like the bad guy. 0.83

01:07:40.000 If you're bombing them, it is so hard to look like the good guy when you're bombing people.

01:07:46.000 And so if you could say to me, listen, Dan, these are killers who want to hurt us, and we've got to take them out.

01:07:51.000 I totally get that.

01:07:52.000 But then I would say to you, you have to take them out in a way that doesn't screw up the main mission, which is, let's stop people from wanting to kill us.

01:08:00.000 Right, like the way they took out Osama bin Laden.

01:08:04.000 Yeah, that's a bad...

01:08:05.000 And listen, what that showed us, too, is that a lot of these people that are supposedly our friends in this war on terror aren't...

01:08:10.000 And we knew this, the Pakistanis especially. 0.98

01:08:12.000 But, I mean, they're not really that close.

01:08:14.000 They're being our friends because they want the spare parts for the tanks we gave them and all these kinds of things.

01:08:20.000 So, I mean...

01:08:21.000 Yeah, this global warfare thing, it's just...

01:08:25.000 You've got to wonder, at what point in time is this ever going to level?

01:08:28.000 Is it ever going to normalize?

01:08:29.000 Is it ever going to calm down?

01:08:31.000 What does it get us?

01:08:32.000 What does it get us?

01:08:34.000 That's a song.

01:08:35.000 War.

01:08:35.000 Well, look, I know what it gets some people.

01:08:37.000 And this is the problem our whole country has, doesn't it?

01:08:39.000 That some people are able to get government to respond to them because...

01:08:44.000 They give government money or what have you, and then they can get what they want.

01:08:47.000 But does that correspond to what we need, right?

01:08:51.000 Do we need these wars?

01:08:53.000 I don't know.

01:08:53.000 I mean, when they say we need to protect the oil, well, you know, the whole oil climate has really changed since the 1970s.

01:08:59.000 It's just to protect the oil.

01:09:00.000 The idea is to keep these people at bay so that none of them can ever consolidate and become some gigantic, huge...

01:09:07.000 War machine that could threaten us globally.

01:09:10.000 You know what?

01:09:11.000 Again, this is a military history major talking, so I think differently about this, but in a sense, that would be so much easier for us to beat.

01:09:17.000 I mean, the funny thing is we know how to beat big countries in war.

01:09:21.000 Yeah, but if we're engaging in thermonuclear warfare, nobody wins.

01:09:26.000 If we can stop them from ever getting to that point, that's the success.

01:09:29.000 The success is keeping them fragmented, keeping them beaten down, and that if we could do that, we could keep them...

01:09:35.000 But they are showing that they can destroy...

01:09:38.000 You know, it's funny.

01:09:39.000 There's two kinds of destroy your country.

01:09:40.000 There's destroy your country and leave it in rubble, which they can't do.

01:09:43.000 But there's destroy your country...

01:09:45.000 You know, the old line is, if they hate our freedoms, well, they did a pretty good job limiting them.

01:09:49.000 Right.

01:09:51.000 We're limiting them to ourselves to protect ourselves.

01:10:16.000 Against our nature, which is you punched me, I'm punching you, right?

01:10:20.000 And in a funny way, it requires us to be punched and to not punch back, I think.

01:10:25.000 But how does that work, right?

01:10:26.000 There's a book by Mark Kurlansky, who's a leftist for sure, so just know going into it what you're dealing with.

01:10:32.000 But it's a book on nonviolence.

01:10:34.000 And he's trying to point out something, which I've always tried to point out too.

01:10:38.000 Nonviolence is a tactic. 0.89

01:10:40.000 And against certain things, it's extremely effective, right?

01:10:44.000 It's not effective against everything, but sometimes it's...

01:10:47.000 I mean, if you could do to Martin Luther King what we could do to people now, his sitting...

01:10:53.000 For example, one of the things you young people may not know is one of his effective protests was to go to these all-white... 0.99

01:10:59.000 Counters in the south where they wouldn't serve black folks and just sit at the counter and wait to be arrested and then when he was arrested Time magazine would be there to get and there's a great photograph of him you know being handcuffed just for the audacity of sitting at a soda counter right it was very powerful but it was powerful because you saw violence initiated against somebody who was totally peaceful right if today you could go up to him And just tase him, 0.61

01:11:22.000 or do something that was not physically violent, then he wouldn't get what he needed out of that, which is he needed that photograph of him being physically manhandled for the simple, or like, not to change subjects, it's the same subject, but like the pictures that were coming out when I was a kid,

01:11:38.000 you can open up those giant Life magazine books with the great photos of Life magazine, and one of them was famous.

01:11:43.000 It was a black protester in the South.

01:11:45.000 Alabama or Mississippi, and he's standing there with his arms at his side, not resisting at all, and the police officer has sicked a German shepherd on him who is biting him, right?

01:11:55.000 And you look at yourself right there and you go, okay, that photograph right there motivated so much public opinion in a different direction, but what if they didn't need to use a dog or a water cannon?

01:12:05.000 What if they could have just injected you from behind, the guy falls limp and you just carry him off silently?

01:12:10.000 Well, you just diminished his power to make a difference.

01:12:13.000 Oh yeah, that's it.

01:12:14.000 That's it right there. 1.00

01:12:15.000 It's fucked up. 0.99

01:12:16.000 Look how powerful that is. 0.99

01:12:17.000 But it's powerful because some guy is being violently attacked who appears to be doing nothing more than asking for his rights.

01:12:24.000 Now, if you didn't have that violence, does that somehow change the message and make it less powerful?

01:12:29.000 They could have just injected him, quietly taken him off to jail.

01:12:32.000 This doesn't happen, and this made a big difference.

01:12:35.000 Yeah.

01:12:36.000 That's a very powerful photograph.

01:12:38.000 Well, it's people who aren't there get a chance to understand the barbaric nature of this. 0.87

01:12:43.000 You get to see you're literally getting attacked by an animal that's on a leash for being black.

01:12:51.000 Well, I was going to say, you would say, well, what did that guy do? 0.96

01:12:53.000 If he just murdered somebody, we're all going, okay, well, that's what you get, pal.

01:12:56.000 Right.

01:12:56.000 If all he's doing is saying, do I really have to sit at the back of the bus in 1965 or something?

01:13:03.000 This kind of thing motivated a lot of people.

01:13:06.000 But if you, you know, it's like 60 Minutes did a great piece, I want to say 1992, 1993, where they were showing all of the new anti-protester weapons that were in development.

01:13:16.000 And what's funny is several of them have arrived.

01:13:18.000 One of them is the sonic cannon, which they deployed against anti-New World Order protester types.

01:13:24.000 Isn't that what they used against people that were in Cuba?

01:13:28.000 Wasn't that something?

01:13:29.000 No, there's a rumor that there was something used in people.

01:13:32.000 That hasn't been figured out yet.

01:13:33.000 But this was, this sonic cannon thing where you can target...

01:13:36.000 Right, but something got used against U.S. diplomats in Cuba, right?

01:13:40.000 Yeah, well, they said they lost their hearing or something, and they assume it was the government that did it. 0.99

01:13:44.000 Yeah, they were fucked up. 0.99

01:13:45.000 They couldn't physically hear it? 1.00

01:13:48.000 Is that what it was?

01:13:49.000 Yeah, something like that.

01:13:49.000 It's not like a siren.

01:13:52.000 See if you can pull that up and figure out what the fuck that was. 0.90

01:13:54.000 Imagine instead of that powerful photo that made a difference, imagine if you could have just aimed the sonic cannon and people leave because it's painful. 0.95

01:14:01.000 Well, does that reduce the value then of that non-violent protest that was so powerful?

01:14:06.000 Well, they're doing this right here.

01:14:08.000 This is really weird.

01:14:12.000 So, a group of American diplomats in Havana, Cuba, have suffered severe and unexplained hearing loss over the past year, which U.S. officials believe was caused by a covert and advanced sonic device.

01:14:23.000 So this is something that we're not even aware of.

01:14:26.000 Yeah, but we have those devices.

01:14:27.000 That's why they might know.

01:14:28.000 But do they just not want to comment that we possess these things, you think?

01:14:32.000 Oh, but we know we've deployed them.

01:14:33.000 They've been deployed.

01:14:34.000 They don't know what this one is, right?

01:14:36.000 So they should know.

01:14:38.000 Anyway, the device admitted a sound that was not audible to human ears, they added.

01:14:42.000 It would indicate that it was most likely an infrasonic or ultrasonic weapon.

01:14:46.000 Infrasonic weapons can cause physical pain without detection, though they usually target the entire body than rather just the eardrums. 0.96

01:14:53.000 Wow, how fucking bizarre. 0.94

01:14:55.000 That's like a hydrogen bomb in a way. 1.00

01:15:14.000 You just go down and then let the next row get hit too.

01:15:18.000 Because that was a powerful sign of who's right and who's wrong in this whole thing.

01:15:23.000 But if you could just deploy that sonic cannon and all those people had so much pain in their ears, they just had to leave and nobody got beaten.

01:15:28.000 There was no blood.

01:15:29.000 There was no dogs.

01:15:30.000 There were no water cannons.

01:15:31.000 Does that undercut the power of nonviolent protest to make change?

01:15:35.000 It's fascinating that that might have been in the minds of the people who designed this thing.

01:15:39.000 Well, it's so abstract, the idea of this sonic weapon that you don't hear, but that affects your hearing and it causes injury to your body, but you don't hear it.

01:15:51.000 That's not going to affect us because it's not a bat, right?

01:15:54.000 A bat that hits a person, we understand it.

01:15:57.000 Where you get a picture afterwards that you can circulate.

01:15:59.000 Look what they did to me.

01:16:00.000 Well, remember the Chicago convention in 68 that everybody, you know, where the protesters were beaten so badly on television and all that stuff.

01:16:08.000 If you didn't have to beat them, does it lose a lot of its power if you just deploy the sonic cannon and everybody goes away because it hurts?

01:16:15.000 It seems to me like you would have just defused one of the most important movements.

01:16:19.000 I would call that one of the big political things that happened in the United States in the past 50 years.

01:16:24.000 And if there was no actual violence, it's not a thing.

01:16:28.000 Isn't it fascinating that we have to see something where we go, oh, I know what that is.

01:16:34.000 That's bad.

01:16:35.000 And then everybody gets outraged and then change happens.

01:16:38.000 Isn't that how the Arab Spring started?

01:16:40.000 Well, that's the thing about drones, right?

01:16:41.000 Is that we're not there.

01:16:43.000 Right.

01:16:43.000 One of the reasons why you can justify this is that it's not actually done by a human who's on the premises.

01:16:48.000 There was talk during the big bombing campaigns of the Second World War, when they were talking about the morality of this.

01:16:53.000 And Churchill famously saw the movies showing some of these German cities just leveled, and he said, are we beasts?

01:17:00.000 Now, this is the guy who ordered it, right?

01:17:01.000 But when he actually saw what happened...

01:17:03.000 Well, the guy I grew up next door to was almost an astronaut, but he was a fighter pilot.

01:17:08.000 But they conducted bombing runs in Korea and Vietnam and stuff.

01:17:12.000 And he said to me, if you actually had to see the people we killed, he goes, we wouldn't have done this.

01:17:17.000 But you didn't have to see them.

01:17:18.000 There was a distance.

01:17:20.000 And there's a book called On Killing by a U.S. Army psychologist, David Grossman's his name, where he talks about killing in terms of distance.

01:17:28.000 Everything is distance.

01:17:29.000 So there's intimacy range.

01:17:31.000 That's when you're killing somebody with a knife close up.

01:17:33.000 And then the farther away you get, the easier it is to do the deed, he says.

01:17:37.000 Well, And the less damage you have later, psychologically. 0.99

01:17:40.000 Isn't there an analogy to social media here about people that can say horrible, evil, cruel shit to people online? 0.98

01:17:46.000 That's actually a good connection. 0.98

01:17:47.000 And they can't do it in person.

01:17:49.000 Or wouldn't do it in person.

01:17:50.000 They wouldn't.

01:17:51.000 It wouldn't even be in your character to do it in person.

01:17:53.000 Not even in your...

01:17:54.000 In other words, you almost have like a dual character that comes out when you know you don't have to see this person.

01:18:00.000 And truthfully, all I really want from Joe Rogan is to answer me.

01:18:03.000 And the best way he can answer me is if I call him something.

01:18:05.000 Well, anybody who does anything negative where the public is aware of it, like, say, this Louis C. Case thing or something like that, where you can immediately find and target.

01:18:15.000 Now I have a reason to go after this person.

01:18:19.000 It's an acceptable target.

01:18:22.000 It's an agreed-upon target.

01:18:23.000 And then people from all over the world can just pour their vitriol and anger and bitterness and whatever it is because they have some sort of a righteous anger.

01:18:33.000 Well, there's a reason I can be angry at this person.

01:18:36.000 Or I saw what Kathy Griffin did when she held up that head of Donald Trump. 0.90

01:18:41.000 I have a reason now. 1.00

01:18:43.000 I'm not standing up for Kathy Griffin, because I think what she did was stupid. 0.99

01:18:46.000 But she was just devastated by that. 0.99

01:18:50.000 I mean, they went after her.

01:18:53.000 Like, death threats and hate and anger.

01:18:55.000 You know, Joe, you've taught me a lot about the whole social media thing, though, because I would come in here, the audience doesn't know this, but I would have questions about that stuff, and you've thought more about this than I have, and you were able on several, I quoted you, where, you know, I mean, because I try to make sense of this stuff, and like I said, you're farther along, I think, the road of thinking about some of this stuff,

01:19:12.000 and it gave me some shortcuts, but I mean, I do, because I think it's a fascinating phenomenon, because it's never been available.

01:19:18.000 I mean, when do people ever have this kind of power?

01:19:20.000 Right.

01:19:20.000 Your average...

01:19:22.000 This guy locked in his basement, you know, never goes out, but he can still talk to the world?

01:19:27.000 See, that's the problem. 0.98

01:19:28.000 We have the stereotype of this loser in their basement. 0.96

01:19:31.000 Which is not true. 0.97

01:19:31.000 You're right. 0.97

01:19:32.000 Good call.

01:19:32.000 No, it could be a guy with a family who's at work.

01:19:34.000 Yeah.

01:19:35.000 Or his wife.

01:19:36.000 Yeah.

01:19:36.000 Or his wife.

01:19:37.000 Or his kids! 1.00

01:19:38.000 Anybody just saying horrible shit. 1.00

01:19:40.000 I mean, there's so many options for people to be nasty to each other. 0.99

01:19:46.000 And this absence of social cues, absence of being in the physical presence of someone, this is an alien way of communicating.

01:19:55.000 It's not normal.

01:19:56.000 It's one of the reasons why I always hated letters.

01:19:58.000 Because people could write some, like, I'd get letters from an ex-girlfriend.

01:20:01.000 I'm like, what are you talking about? 0.98

01:20:03.000 This is not, this is a bullshit depiction of our relationship. 0.98

01:20:07.000 You've made this romanticized idea of what this is all about. 0.92

01:20:11.000 Like, I don't like letters because someone can't be there to go, wait, what?

01:20:16.000 That didn't happen.

01:20:17.000 Yeah, it did.

01:20:17.000 No, don't you remember?

01:20:18.000 You said this.

01:20:19.000 Oh, yeah.

01:20:20.000 There's a physical proximity question, too.

01:20:22.000 You're not going to go up to this guy and say this stuff to his face because he might knock you in the head.

01:20:26.000 The good thing about a letter is maybe if someone is an honest person, they can express themselves in a letter in a way that they would have a difficult time doing it in person.

01:20:34.000 Some people are less verbal, too.

01:20:35.000 Yeah, they feel embarrassed or they have...

01:20:37.000 When you're writing something, you have the opportunity to really think about your words, and edit, and go over it, and then decide, this actually represents my real thoughts, and, you know, as imperfect as it is, send it. 1.00

01:20:51.000 But when you can do that any moment of any day, with your phone, in the middle, like someone's talking, yeah, hold on a second, hold on a second, fuck you, fucking asshole. 1.00

01:21:01.000 Just tweet that. 1.00

01:21:02.000 Look at the trouble these athletes or celebrities get in with what was obviously, I'm just about to board the plane, and boom, they get off the plane and there's a huge firestorm because something was taken wrong or not the way you meant it.

01:21:13.000 Sure.

01:21:13.000 Yeah.

01:21:14.000 Yeah.

01:21:14.000 I mean, it's a weird time.

01:21:16.000 And I think this is, I think we're at an adolescent stage of communication.

01:21:22.000 That's what I think.

01:21:23.000 I think we went through all these rudimentary steps, right?

01:21:25.000 We went through grunts, and then we had verbal language, and then we had written language, and then we had the printing press, and then we had the ability to broadcast, and then we had social media, the ability for anybody to broadcast.

01:21:37.000 And I think as we move into augmented reality, and what I've been thinking about more and more is this Rosetta Stone idea, this idea that we're going to come up with some sort of a way of communicating ideas that's not limited and restricted to language.

01:21:52.000 As a military history fanatic, do you know what I instantly think of?

01:21:56.000 I instantly think of the fact that could you start a war if one country's average Joes and Janes on social media or whatever passes? 1.00

01:22:16.000 We're good to go.

01:22:26.000 That would be interesting.

01:22:28.000 You point out quite correctly that we're essentially guinea pigs here right now.

01:22:32.000 Yes.

01:22:32.000 Which is what I tried to explain to my daughter, is that we are in an era where we are seeing what happens when you hand humanity these tools that they've never had before.

01:22:41.000 And there's two ways of looking at it.

01:22:43.000 The optimistic one, which is going to free up, open up, or the pessimistic ones, which say maybe something like, can our representative democracy handle this?

01:22:52.000 And not because we can't handle communication, but maybe like you would say, the kind of communication that we have where these are little teeny chunks.

01:23:00.000 We're not having deep, you know, philosophical, coffeehouse, Ben Franklin kind of conversation.

01:23:04.000 We're having 140 character discussions. 1.00

01:23:07.000 What can you say in 140 characters other than you're an idiot, you're wrong, it's fake news, you know, and then start swearing at them. 1.00

01:23:13.000 Well, they moved it to 280 now. 1.00

01:23:15.000 I'm sure that will make all the difference in the world.

01:23:17.000 I wonder if it does.

01:23:17.000 Well, it'll help me, because I can't clear my throat in 140 characters, so it'll help me.

01:23:22.000 I think it's going to cause a shift.

01:23:24.000 I really do.

01:23:25.000 I believe that the shift from 140 to 280 will make people, it'll give people the opportunity to be more clear with their ideas.

01:23:33.000 I will say that it's disheartening for a person like myself who enjoys depth, because, you know, the history shows are so long because I enjoy the depth.

01:23:40.000 To see people confronted with, like, a page of text going, oh, too long to read.

01:23:45.000 But you do go, okay, can you really be a useful citizen as a voting member of this informed citizenry and do your job if you see a page of text?

01:23:54.000 I mean, the Constitution today would have to be 140 characters, you know, for most of the people today to go, okay, I'll sit down and read.

01:24:00.000 Well, one of the things that your podcast has done that's amazing is giving people information in a very entertaining form that they would never sit down and read a book about.

01:24:08.000 There's a ton of people, probably me included, that have never read as much about Genghis Khan as I got from your podcast.

01:24:16.000 But you went...

01:24:17.000 See, and this is what I hope for, because we always say...

01:24:19.000 I like the idea of being an appetizer for people on history.

01:24:23.000 If I introduced somebody to the Mongols, and then they went... 1.00

01:24:27.000 You can go to our website.

01:24:28.000 We put all of the materials we use, and we link directly to a place where you can get them.

01:24:31.000 So if you actually went out and bought some books on the Mongols after that, or that created an intellectual relationship between you and the Mongols, where for the rest of your life, ooh, this is a Mongol... 0.52

01:24:42.000 They found Genghis Khan's tomb or something, and you're into it because you know about...

01:24:45.000 Well, I mean, that's awesome.

01:24:48.000 I mean, in terms of, I mean, I heard, I got a great letter.

01:24:51.000 This is the highlight of my career, was this letter from the wife of a historian that we used in the World War I series.

01:24:57.000 And she wrote me this letter saying, you have no, this is like very self-serving, but you You have no idea what you're doing because history is something that not a lot of people were getting interested in.

01:25:05.000 And now we have people showing up in the classrooms becoming history majors because they got interested in what you were doing.

01:25:11.000 So if we're poking people with a stick and getting them interested in this subject, do you know how cool it would be to have that, you know, when you're all dead and gone and somebody says, what did you do?

01:25:20.000 He said, well, he got a lot of people really interested in history.

01:25:25.000 I think that's the coolest thing in the world.

01:25:26.000 I think you've done that.

01:25:27.000 But it dovetails with what we were talking about, this whole new media, will it be good, will it be bad, and it's probably going to be both, right? 0.98

01:25:33.000 But the idea that people could get interested in history again because some idiot in his garage was talking about it, I think that's... 0.95

01:25:40.000 It's not going to be everybody, but it's going to be a lot of people. 0.96

01:25:42.000 And for those people, it is going to have a profound effect, and me included.

01:25:46.000 And I think that this new media, this thing where nobody is telling you, hey, Dan, it's time to do a podcast on blank.

01:25:54.000 It's time to cut back this, edit that.

01:25:57.000 You're doing it based on your interests, your knowledge of this.

01:26:00.000 There wouldn't have been this show if there was anybody else.

01:26:02.000 There wouldn't have been this show.

01:26:03.000 I would have never been able to pull this off.

01:26:05.000 Never.

01:26:05.000 Not in a hundred years.

01:26:06.000 What we have is this unique opportunity to express ourselves with a personal viewpoint.

01:26:16.000 This is your personal interest.

01:26:19.000 It's a purity.

01:26:20.000 There's a purity.

01:26:21.000 It's the difference between blended whiskey and a single malt.

01:26:25.000 When I get these TV offers, and you've had...

01:26:28.000 Zillions of them where you go and you talk to these people and you realize instantly if I go do this with them, they're going to homogenize it, dumb it down.

01:26:35.000 And you sit there and go, they're going to make something far inferior to what I'm able to do myself because they really don't understand why it works anyway.

01:26:43.000 In other words, like you said, you couldn't have been able to do this show.

01:26:45.000 It's funny to me that the industry, for example, doesn't realize what it is that people like about what you do and figure out a way to...

01:26:53.000 They're not open-minded enough to say, listen, Joe, come and do this TV show, which is a lot like what you do.

01:26:58.000 I don't get it.

01:26:59.000 I don't understand how people like you and people like me and all the people that do what we do haven't created more of an understanding in the old media.

01:27:07.000 I think they're getting it.

01:27:08.000 Do you think?

01:27:09.000 Well, eventually there's no way to avoid it.

01:27:10.000 They're getting it now.

01:27:12.000 I see, like, when I get offers for things, I understand things.

01:27:16.000 Like, oh, they're seeing what I'm doing, and they're going, hey, we want a piece of this.

01:27:19.000 Yeah.

01:27:20.000 But can they pull it off?

01:27:22.000 But it would be the same thing.

01:27:24.000 This is the problem.

01:27:24.000 If they did this, it's like, say, hey, we want to put your podcast on blah, blah, blah network.

01:27:29.000 Okay, well, now I have a bunch of people that I'm talking to that I have to run things by.

01:27:34.000 Exactly.

01:27:35.000 Now I have a bunch of people that say, I just think that if you dress nicer, and then, oh, Jesus, okay, now it's not me.

01:27:41.000 I'll tell you a story.

01:27:42.000 So finally, the TV people, they're always promising things, right?

01:27:46.000 Oh, you can do it anyway.

01:27:47.000 So finally, one of these companies did it so many times, I said, okay, I'll go forward with you and we'll start this project.

01:27:53.000 Great.

01:27:53.000 So I'm in a particular U.S. city in the South, and we're cutting this sizzle reel.

01:27:59.000 And I said, now, this is going to be hardcore, right?

01:28:01.000 You got me.

01:28:02.000 You want hardcore history.

01:28:03.000 Yes!

01:28:03.000 The History Channel, everybody wants it.

01:28:05.000 Okay.

01:28:05.000 So I said, so here's what we're going to do.

01:28:07.000 So the sizzle reel was on the bombings in the late 60s, early 70s of, like, the New Left.

01:28:14.000 So the weather underground and all those people, right?

01:28:16.000 So I'm going to do this.

01:28:17.000 And I said, the hardcore history way to do this, though, is to imagine that era with today's anti-terror laws and the way we treat terrorists today.

01:28:27.000 So we were filming, like, recreations of, like, Abbie Hoffman.

01:28:31.000 In his American t-shirt being waterboarded by CIA agents, because if we applied to the modern anti-terror to the way that the Americans...

01:28:39.000 And they flipped out.

01:28:41.000 They said, listen, there's a lot of red southern states that would not go for that. 0.98

01:28:46.000 And all these guys...

01:28:46.000 You want it hardcore.

01:28:48.000 That's...

01:28:48.000 No, they didn't really want hardcore.

01:28:50.000 They wanted to get me through the doors, and then we're going to make some groupthink thing, you know?

01:28:54.000 Yeah, I have no effort in groupthink creativity.

01:28:57.000 Well, groupthink would be fine if you respected all the think in the groupthink.

01:29:01.000 If they were all as good as you.

01:29:03.000 Yeah, well, they don't have the sensibility.

01:29:06.000 Most of these people...

01:29:07.000 Most of them are kids, from my standpoint as an old man.

01:29:09.000 And bean counters.

01:29:10.000 There are bean counters that are trying to protect their own jobs.

01:29:13.000 What they're worried about is the numbers.

01:29:14.000 We got the dailies in.

01:29:16.000 We got the numbers in.

01:29:17.000 You're trending really well in 18 to 34, Dan Carlin.

01:29:20.000 And it's not about building an audience over the long haul.

01:29:23.000 Like you said, it's literally about the next rating period.

01:29:26.000 Out of the gate, big time.

01:29:28.000 And you have to have billboards and a big push.

01:29:30.000 If you notice any time a show launches, you'll see billboard.

01:29:34.000 Like, there's this new show called White Famous, and it's on Showtime.

01:29:37.000 And everywhere you go, there's these giant billboards for White Famous. 0.80

01:29:40.000 They're not letting this thing build slowly.

01:29:43.000 They want to push it out of the gate with gunpowder.

01:29:46.000 Boom! 0.99

01:29:47.000 And they're hoping that with that momentum, the quality of the show will add to the momentum, and then you're going to build up, and a bunch of people will catch on, and eventually it'll get rolling.

01:29:57.000 But in order to do that, they want to take away all the jagged edges, smooth everything down to make it aerodynamic, make everything super homogenized.

01:30:06.000 I mean, that's what they do with every single sitcom.

01:30:07.000 Oh, and what they'll do to your career.

01:30:09.000 Like, the last physical fight I almost had with another adult male was a radio program director.

01:30:15.000 And the radio program director came into my town new, and you know, if you've ever been in radio, when they come into town new, the first thing they're going to do is change everything, because they've got to put their own stamp on it, or why are they there?

01:30:23.000 So this guy comes in and he goes, we're going to rebrand you.

01:30:26.000 He goes, I want everyone to think of your name and instantly think of the brand, and I'm already, you know...

01:30:31.000 The brand.

01:30:31.000 Yeah, okay, so here's what he said.

01:30:33.000 So I hate to say this, because this will become a meme online that I will have to live with the rest of my life, but it's an absolutely true story. 0.99

01:30:38.000 So the guy says to me, he goes, listen, imagine a billboard that says, Dan Carlin, he fucks chickens. 0.98

01:30:44.000 And I said, excuse me? 1.00

01:30:45.000 He goes, yeah, I mean, so that anytime anybody thought of you, they would think, okay, he's the chicken fucker. 0.99

01:30:49.000 And I'm going, wait a minute, really? 1.00

01:30:51.000 He really said that?

01:30:52.000 Yes.

01:30:52.000 And I said to him, I said, I said two things, dude.

01:30:55.000 I said, the first thing is, I got to live in this town, right?

01:30:58.000 So really, you want that to be the first thing people think?

01:31:00.000 Okay. 1.00

01:31:00.000 The second thing is, I got to have a career after this stupid idea of yours fails, right? 1.00

01:31:05.000 And he's like, no, you don't understand. 1.00

01:31:07.000 We're building a mental image.

01:31:09.000 You'll be a household name. 0.99

01:31:10.000 I said, yes, I'll be the household name, the guy who fucks chickens. 0.99

01:31:12.000 I said... 0.99

01:31:14.000 And finally, he was after me.

01:31:15.000 I said, dude, do you want to step outside right now?

01:31:19.000 My wife laughed at me because I'm already an old man.

01:31:22.000 She goes, that would have been great.

01:31:23.000 I said, no, this guy was as old as I was.

01:31:25.000 But I was so incensed and so angry that this guy would be so cavalier.

01:31:31.000 With your future.

01:31:32.000 And as a human being and everything.

01:31:34.000 Family. 1.00

01:31:35.000 Chicken fucker. 1.00

01:31:36.000 How are they going to spell fucker on billboards? 1.00

01:31:38.000 You know what? 0.99

01:31:39.000 That's a really good question.

01:31:40.000 They might have had a euphemism.

01:31:41.000 But I mean, you think about that and you think, okay, I'm just a tool in his career.

01:32:13.000 Talk about it.

01:32:14.000 And so they got on me about not talking about it.

01:32:16.000 I had a big fight.

01:32:17.000 And I walked into the studio.

01:32:19.000 And I said, fine, I'll talk about it. 0.95

01:32:20.000 I said, you know, the whole topic was, isn't there just too much damn O.J. Simpson everywhere you go? 0.95

01:32:25.000 Oh, they were at the, you know, there was a window.

01:32:28.000 We were like zoo creatures.

01:32:29.000 And they had this window they could bring all the sales clients to watch us perform.

01:32:32.000 And I'm doing there.

01:32:33.000 And there's like five executives in the window just waiting until the next commercial break.

01:32:37.000 Oh, God.

01:32:38.000 But I mean, that's why radio was so awful for me.

01:32:40.000 And I didn't get fired.

01:32:41.000 I must have done a good enough job to stay employed.

01:32:44.000 But it was go home and pull your hair out.

01:32:47.000 Constant tension.

01:32:48.000 Imagine this is a good example for people.

01:32:50.000 Imagine if you were painting a picture.

01:32:52.000 You had an idea to paint the Mona Lisa.

01:32:54.000 Right.

01:32:54.000 And you had a bunch of people standing over your shoulder like, hey, make her nose smaller.

01:32:57.000 Exactly right.

01:32:58.000 Right.

01:32:58.000 Her eyebrows are too bushy.

01:33:00.000 She looks too Italian. 1.00

01:33:02.000 There's a bunch of fucking people, if you're dealing with these things, that are just essentially trying to justify their jobs. 0.99

01:33:09.000 You're always having that whenever you're dealing with any sort of an executive position. 0.99

01:33:13.000 And one of the things that you realize is how many people are unnecessary.

01:33:17.000 I did Bill Simmons' show.

01:33:19.000 Bill Simmons had a successful podcast, and that podcast led to an HBO show.

01:33:24.000 And I had a great time on the show.

01:33:26.000 No, I like him.

01:33:27.000 He's a very nice guy.

01:33:28.000 Very smart guy.

01:33:29.000 But when I did his show, I'm like, there's a hundred people working here. 0.99

01:33:33.000 There's fucking people everywhere. 0.98

01:33:35.000 I get that you need cameramen. 1.00

01:33:37.000 I get that you need soundmen. 0.99

01:33:38.000 But then who are all these other fuckers? 0.98

01:33:40.000 You got all these executive-type people and office people and all these people running around. 0.99

01:33:45.000 I'm like...

01:33:46.000 You've made this way too complicated.

01:33:48.000 Like the reason why his podcast is so successful is because it's him.

01:33:52.000 It's his singular vision, his idea.

01:33:55.000 You're getting it from this person.

01:33:57.000 And when you know that you're getting something from a person and you like how that guy thinks, then it becomes interesting.

01:34:03.000 But when you're not really getting it from that person, you've got a bunch of people holding cue cards and standing behind them and you're creating this Well, my wife said today, we're in the hotel room and she turns on the TV and Ryan Seacrest is on and he like does 10,000 things a day,

01:34:19.000 you know, on multiple shows.

01:34:20.000 And she says, I don't know how he does that.

01:34:22.000 That's amazing that he can do all these kinds of things.

01:34:23.000 And I said, but how much of it's really Ryan Seacrest?

01:34:25.000 I mean, you basically have to have everything ready to go when you walk into a room.

01:34:29.000 And who did that?

01:34:30.000 You know what I like listening to Ryan Seacrest?

01:34:32.000 Why?

01:34:32.000 I like listening to him on the radio, because it's almost like listening to an alien that tries to be like a woman who's a secretary.

01:34:42.000 Because he does these contests, like, call in right now!

01:34:47.000 And like, you know, have someone to call in.

01:34:49.000 I like when I go to work and then I can go to the bathroom and look at my phone.

01:34:54.000 Hey, everybody likes that.

01:34:55.000 Alright, what's next?

01:34:56.000 And you're like, hey, you won two tickets to this.

01:34:58.000 Alright, congratulations.

01:34:59.000 Alright, Monica.

01:35:00.000 Nice talking to you. 0.99

01:35:01.000 It's like he's not even a fucking human on those things. 0.99

01:35:03.000 It's like he's figured out a way to hit this... 0.98

01:35:09.000 This droning sound that resonates with the people that live in that existence, with the people that are stuck in traffic and that are checking their phone every 15 minutes.

01:35:18.000 Those are the people that are on Instagram 35 times a day.

01:35:21.000 You know that's the average amount of time a person looks at Instagram?

01:35:24.000 35 times a day. 0.99

01:35:28.000 Ryan Seacrest fucks chickens, dude. 1.00

01:35:30.000 Well, if he fucked chickens, he would be outrageous. 1.00

01:35:33.000 The guy who said you're going to be the chicken fucker, he'd probably listen to Howard Stern. 1.00

01:35:38.000 He's like, this guy's outrageous. 0.99

01:35:39.000 We need to get Dan Carlin to be outrageous. 1.00

01:35:41.000 You're a chicken fucker! 1.00

01:35:42.000 And that is the other thing with the homogenization you talked about. 1.00

01:35:45.000 It's always about imitating somebody who's found a good formula, right?

01:35:49.000 For sure.

01:35:49.000 And I will say this about Limbaugh.

01:35:50.000 Limbaugh's right when he says that there will be a wing in the talk radio museum devoted to him one day.

01:35:55.000 But what he always says, which I find interesting, is he tried to do what he does now multiple times and got fired.

01:36:01.000 Because their attitude was, we're not taking any chances with this.

01:36:05.000 And then he says, the minute I'm successful, every consultant out there is telling everybody to be just like him.

01:36:10.000 In other words, if you're a podcaster out there or thinking about doing something in the new media, understand that there is something so valuable about what you specifically are bringing to the table.

01:36:21.000 And the minute you ask these other people what to do, they don't know what's specific about it.

01:36:25.000 They're going to go and say, well, we can pull a little piece of what this person does, and eventually it's not even you.

01:36:30.000 One of the great things I always thought about Hardcore History is that over time you self-select your audience.

01:36:35.000 I think you do that with every podcast.

01:36:37.000 So you say something like, okay, I'm only going to talk about the stuff I'm interested in.

01:36:40.000 Well, what you know then a year later is whatever fans are listening to you, that's a pretty good gauge because they're there because they like what you're...

01:36:47.000 So I don't have to sit there and go, gosh, this would be a popular topic.

01:36:49.000 I just do what I want to do.

01:36:51.000 And over time, you've developed an audience that likes that.

01:36:54.000 I also think that there's something happening when you have a singular vision, like one person who's driving this thing, right?

01:37:04.000 And over time, I feel like people get a sense of you in a way deeper sense than just listening to your words.

01:37:13.000 They're chunking data.

01:37:15.000 They're adding up all of the communication that you've had.

01:37:19.000 They're analyzing how you see different scenarios.

01:37:23.000 They're analyzing how you navigate, and they're seeing you when you're tired, and they're seeing you when you're feeling in a great mood, and then maybe they're seeing you when something bad happens and you don't feel so good.

01:37:37.000 So they get to know you and there's an intimate understanding of you that is almost impossible to get when you're hosting The Tonight Show or you're acting in a television show.

01:37:49.000 Or doing a five-minute piece of content opposed to a three-hour piece of content.

01:37:53.000 Yeah, there's a weird thing.

01:37:55.000 And I think that's one of the things, like if people know me, if you listen to this podcast long enough, you know me.

01:38:00.000 And you might not agree with me and you might think I'm wrong or I'm a blowhard.

01:38:05.000 But you know I'm honest.

01:38:06.000 Right.

01:38:07.000 I might be wrong, but I'll tell you if I think I'm wrong.

01:38:11.000 If I think I'm wrong, I'm the first person to go, I think I'm wrong.

01:38:14.000 I'm never going to cover that up.

01:38:16.000 And you shouldn't believe people that don't think they're wrong.

01:38:18.000 You can't.

01:38:19.000 It's not good for you either.

01:38:21.000 The person who pulls it off, it's not good for you because you know you're wrong. 1.00

01:38:24.000 You're carrying that shit around in your head all the time. 0.97

01:38:26.000 No, I always say, if you think, if people, and this is again why one of my current events podcasts is not really happening right now, because I I feel like when you're in absolutely uncharted water, you can't know what's going on. 0.99

01:38:38.000 So that's how you feel right now.

01:38:39.000 You feel like we're in uncharted water?

01:38:40.000 I think we're in uncharted water, and I think it's a combination.

01:38:42.000 Everyone always thinks it's a Trump thing, but to me, Trump is a vector.

01:38:46.000 To me, what you were talking about with the social media is as much a part of what makes this an absolutely unprecedented time, and a bunch of other things.

01:38:55.000 Yeah.

01:38:55.000 The globalization of the earth, like you're saying, we're doing shows and hearing from people from other countries.

01:39:00.000 I mean, all this stuff interacting together has created an absolutely unprecedented situation.

01:39:05.000 So maybe I just organize my thinking differently, but I organize it historically, and there's no way to put this into any box that's ever existed before.

01:39:14.000 So when I watch these talk shows or whatever with people who have no choice, it's 6 p.m., I have to be on the air, and I have to have something to say to rile the audience up.

01:39:22.000 Right.

01:39:22.000 You know, they have no options.

01:39:25.000 Their gig is, I know what's going on, and let me tell you.

01:39:27.000 Whereas if they were honest with themselves, they either would have to say, I don't know what's going on, and I'm watching too.

01:39:32.000 Or if they really do believe they know what's going on, well, then you really shouldn't be listening to them at all.

01:39:37.000 Yeah, right. 0.92

01:39:38.000 Then they're crazy. 0.85

01:39:39.000 There's no way they could. 0.99

01:39:40.000 There's no way they could.

01:39:41.000 No.

01:39:41.000 Yeah, I think we're dealing with the ramifications of a bunch of different pieces that are in play.

01:39:46.000 Yes.

01:39:46.000 And I think one of those pieces that's in play, and one of the reasons why you see so much bitterness and anger in social media, and we talked about this mechanism that social media allows people to communicate in this really cruel way without experiencing that person right in front of you, right?

01:40:01.000 But I think one of the reasons why these people have this deep-seated anger and resentment is there's a bunch of people out there that have these lives that are deeply unsatisfying.

01:40:26.000 Yeah, soul killing.

01:40:31.000 Soul-killing.

01:40:32.000 They're stuck in traffic all day, and then they're stuck in a cubicle after that. 0.99

01:40:36.000 They relish the time to take a shit in the bathroom and look at their phone. 0.99

01:40:41.000 I mean, they literally do that. 0.99

01:40:42.000 That's a highlight of someone's day.

01:40:44.000 They get in traffic on the way home.

01:40:46.000 They get home after that, they're watching television. 1.00

01:40:48.000 And they're fucked. 1.00

01:40:50.000 They have deep debt. 1.00

01:40:51.000 This is not, like, this soul-killing thing is not giving them any freedom.

01:40:54.000 The debt's huge.

01:40:55.000 And you know what?

01:40:55.000 You sit there and go, and you look at what people make, and you sit there and go, you can make Quite a lot of money by average Joe standards and still not be in good shape.

01:41:04.000 So I know people turn around, make good living, really good living, and turn around and go, I'm just holding my head above water.

01:41:10.000 And so you go, okay, if you're holding your head just barely, what's a person making a third or a I mean, this is really, when you talk about revolutions happening and things going down in weird, unpredictable, negative ways, you, and we've talked about this before,

01:41:26.000 you let enough of your society fall into the loser class, for lack of a better word, winners and losers in society.

01:41:32.000 If you, every society can suck up a certain amount of people not able to make it.

01:41:36.000 But if that number gets large enough, revolutions happen.

01:41:40.000 I think so, too.

01:41:40.000 But I think that revolution doesn't necessarily have to be violent.

01:41:43.000 I think the revolution can be a revolution of action and ideas.

01:41:46.000 And I think that there's a ton of people out there that are probably listening to this that would like to be able to do something else.

01:41:52.000 Absolutely.

01:41:53.000 Whether it's make furniture.

01:41:54.000 Well, they don't want a revolution.

01:41:55.000 They want to do something that's not soul-kill.

01:41:57.000 If you make furniture, you make furniture for a living and you feel a great satisfaction out of that and you sell that furniture, look man, making furniture feels good.

01:42:06.000 If you can do that, you could cut those corners perfectly and sand everything down nice and stain it and then it's done and you get the satisfaction and you sell it to someone and that pays your bills. 0.99

01:42:16.000 That is infinitely more satisfying than being stuck in some fucking cubicle working for someone that you don't want to work for, having to have these stupid fucking office meetings, talking to people in human resources, sitting down with your supervisor where they evaluate your job performance. 0.98

01:42:31.000 You really need to be enthusiastic about this company. 1.00

01:42:36.000 This company is your future. 1.00

01:42:37.000 You're like, fuck, kill me now. 1.00

01:42:40.000 There's a lot of people out there that would way rather do something else, and I hope they understand that they can. 0.99

01:42:46.000 Let's talk about that, because we've been talking about us and podcasting and new media and whatever, but really, and I rarely like to give advice, because you don't want to be responsible for people acting on it and having it not turn out well, but what I tell people is two things.

01:43:00.000 Right now, the United States of America, the way it's built...

01:43:04.000 I think?

01:43:25.000 I mean, we started these podcasts.

01:43:27.000 There's no brick or mortar.

01:43:28.000 I mean, now you've got just the Rogan Tower.

01:43:31.000 It's a little bit different.

01:43:31.000 But once upon a time, it's like in the back of your bedroom and you've got a company and it's got a show and people are listening.

01:43:36.000 If you make your furniture and you don't have to have a brick and mortar store, but you can put a website up, make it with Squarespace or one of those other things, and all of a sudden you have a business out of your house...

01:43:47.000 The freedom, the satisfaction, the ability to set your own hours.

01:43:51.000 And here's the best part.

01:43:52.000 The fact that if you start making a lot of money somehow, you're not going to have your boss cut your commissions.

01:43:57.000 I mean, I knew sales guys who made so much money that their bosses cut their commissions because you can't make more than your bosses.

01:44:03.000 Well, listen, when you have your own small business, the sky's the limit.

01:44:06.000 If you make $10 million, you make $10 million.

01:44:09.000 Yeah.

01:44:09.000 So I always tell people that if you can, and it's not always something they can do, maybe you do it on the side when you've got your regular job.

01:44:15.000 Starting a small business now, in this climate that we have right now, is not only possible, it's not that much of a gamble, because if worse comes to worse, you didn't invest $100,000 you didn't have starting it all the time, right?

01:44:29.000 Yeah.

01:44:29.000 I mean, that website didn't cost you that much, you know, the investment for the tools you may have had already.

01:44:34.000 Podcasting's a perfect example.

01:44:35.000 We make business, like my buddy says, we sell zeros and ones.

01:44:39.000 Yeah.

01:44:39.000 That's what we do.

01:44:40.000 Well, it's never been easier to have a website either.

01:44:42.000 No.

01:44:43.000 With companies like Squarespace, you could develop a website. 0.99

01:44:45.000 You could literally build an amazing website in a fucking hour. 0.99

01:44:47.000 And sell your furniture. 0.98

01:44:48.000 And you have a free online store with it, and they have these drag-and-drop user interfaces.

01:44:53.000 You use photos, you drag them on there, size it in place, boom.

01:44:57.000 Next thing you know, you've got a website. 0.99

01:44:58.000 Sell your furniture, sell whatever the fuck you make. 0.97

01:45:01.000 Whether you make clothes, or you're designing backpacks, or there's... 0.99

01:45:05.000 A lot of people out there that have interests and they've never pursued those interests because they're fucking tired from doing some boring, soul-sucking job. 0.90

01:45:13.000 It's hard to go to work and put your effort into that and then come home and then work for yourself. 0.90

01:45:18.000 It's very hard.

01:45:18.000 But I'll tell you what.

01:45:20.000 Like you said, there's a part of it that once you start making stuff for yourself that's self-motivating, right?

01:45:27.000 Like, I told somebody to start a podcast.

01:45:28.000 I said, the first time you get some feedback email, that will kick you in the rear end to keep doing the podcast.

01:45:33.000 It becomes, you know, life is a verb, I always say.

01:45:37.000 And you have to actually act.

01:45:39.000 But by acting, you change everything in your future.

01:45:42.000 Another guy said to me, it's a great line.

01:45:44.000 He said, with podcasts, it's not always how many people are listening.

01:45:46.000 Sometimes it's who they are.

01:45:50.000 Mm-hmm.

01:46:08.000 Maybe you can come and start giving a Pottery Barn.

01:46:11.000 I mean, things open up in ways that you can't predict because you started doing something.

01:46:16.000 And because you have legitimate passion for what you're doing.

01:46:18.000 That resonates with people that experience that.

01:46:21.000 I mean, I can't tell you how many artists that I've discovered online just through Instagram or through Twitter.

01:46:28.000 It's a creative revolution.

01:46:30.000 Yes, in an amazing way.

01:46:32.000 And I think there's way more creative people out there than we realize.

01:46:36.000 Oh yes, absolutely.

01:46:37.000 And I think they would love to have some sort of an opportunity to do something like that.

01:46:41.000 And especially like an artist.

01:46:42.000 Someone who's an artist.

01:46:43.000 Man, there's never been a better time to be an artist.

01:46:45.000 Because you could showcase your work. 0.97

01:46:48.000 Look, if you send me something cool and send it to me on Twitter, I'll fucking retweet it. 0.81

01:46:53.000 Yeah, totally.

01:46:53.000 We treat things all the time.

01:46:55.000 And all that takes is someone else has to see that and say, wow, that's amazing.

01:46:59.000 And then it just propagates to all these different people's Instagram feeds and all these people's Twitter feeds.

01:47:05.000 The next thing you know, you've got a business and you're up and running.

01:47:07.000 And it's not going to be easy and it's not going to be quick.

01:47:10.000 But the job you're doing now ain't easier.

01:47:12.000 The soul-killing one ain't easier quick either.

01:47:14.000 But people think like, oh, how long is that going to take?

01:47:16.000 Oh, but when you start out doing a podcast, well, I only got 10 downloads.

01:47:20.000 Well, that's how it works.

01:47:22.000 We all were there once.

01:47:23.000 Yeah, I was there once.

01:47:24.000 Dude, when we first did it, when Brian and I were first doing this podcast, and we were doing it on Ustream, we would have 200 viewers.

01:47:33.000 And I wasn't doing it for money.

01:47:35.000 I was literally doing it because my wife had gotten pregnant, we had to move from Colorado back to LA, and I was bummed out. 0.98

01:47:45.000 I was like, fuck, I thought I escaped. 0.98

01:47:48.000 I thought I got out of LA. I was living in the mountains. 0.99

01:47:51.000 I was like, this is what I want.

01:47:51.000 I want to be in nature.

01:47:52.000 I was like, I don't want to be back in this fucking hellhole. 0.99

01:47:55.000 I'm like, alright, let's do something. 0.98

01:47:56.000 And so we started doing podcasts, just for a goof, because I was doing stand-up.

01:48:00.000 That was all well and good.

01:48:01.000 But look at how it tied into your stand-up so nicely.

01:48:04.000 Yeah, well, but...

01:48:05.000 My point is, I didn't start out thinking, this is going to replace my income.

01:48:11.000 This is going to be, I just did it as a passion project.

01:48:14.000 And I think if people have a regular day job, if you could just find some one thing that you do as a passion project and just keep building on it, just keep watering it, keep adding fertilizer, keep giving it attention, keep giving it focus, and you can escape.

01:48:29.000 You can escape and you can be self-serving.

01:48:31.000 You could be okay.

01:48:32.000 I always ask people when they want to start it, like a podcast, I'll say something like, how many listeners would you have to have for you to care?

01:48:39.000 And that's a magic number that's different for everybody, right?

01:48:43.000 But what's great about what we do that's different from broadcasting is that there is a giant pie of people.

01:48:50.000 Let's pretend it's a billion.

01:48:53.000 And if you're going to do a podcast on science fiction comic books from the 1950s or something that has such a narrow audience, they'd never put it on television because it's too narrow.

01:49:03.000 You will be able, if you even get.00001% of that billion pie, it's not only going to be a decent number of people in terms of what you would think is successful, but they are going to be so enthusiastic because this is an outlet that they don't have.

01:49:18.000 It's like I always tell somebody, if you're into Harry Potter, what are the TV networks giving you?

01:49:22.000 But there's multiple Harry Potter podcasts.

01:49:24.000 Listen to this.

01:49:25.000 You want to hear something crazy?

01:49:26.000 Time Magazine just had some Top 50 podcast thing.

01:49:29.000 And a buddy of mine who was angry that he wasn't on sent me some stuff about it. 0.96

01:49:33.000 And one of the things he said, dude, there's a fucking podcast on there called The Gilmore Boys. 0.59

01:49:38.000 That's guys, two guys sitting around talking about the Gilmore Girls television show. 0.98

01:49:43.000 There's another one called, something about Richard Simmons, where there's...

01:49:48.000 Finding Richard Simmons.

01:49:49.000 Finding Richard Simmons, where they're trying to figure out why Richard Simmons went into hiding.

01:49:53.000 What's so great about that idea, though, and you at home can learn this, too.

01:49:56.000 What's so great about that idea is that they instantly tied their podcast to somebody who already had tons of fans.

01:50:04.000 So you sit there and go, I don't know who these guys are or what this podcast is, but I'm a huge Richard Simmons fan, so I'll listen.

01:50:09.000 And that's like instant audience.

01:50:10.000 And there's another podcast called Guys We Fucked.

01:50:13.000 These girls came up with this podcast. 1.00

01:50:16.000 And this is one that I always use as an example because these...

01:50:19.000 Who are the girls from Guys We Fucked? 1.00

01:50:21.000 Find their names.

01:50:23.000 These comedians from New York, they came and they're actually going to be on the podcast Monday.

01:50:27.000 Ooh, that was a clever tie-in.

01:50:29.000 I didn't mean to, but I used them as an example because we just booked this earlier today.

01:50:36.000 Christina Hutchinson and Corinne Fisher.

01:50:39.000 And they came up with this clever idea for the title, and it became huge.

01:50:44.000 I mean, it's always top ten.

01:50:46.000 It's like one of the top ten comedy podcasts.

01:50:48.000 And people say, oh, well, today it's saturated. 0.99

01:50:50.000 No, it's not stupid. 0.96

01:50:51.000 Just do something that's good. 0.98

01:50:52.000 Stop saying it's saturated.

01:50:53.000 If you're good, it'll stand out.

01:50:55.000 This idea that like, oh, it's easy for you to say. 1.00

01:50:58.000 Everybody's got these stupid barriers they put in their own head. 0.99

01:51:01.000 You got to resist those goddamn things because they don't do you any good and they certainly define the potential for your future in a negative way that's not self-serving and it's not even real. 0.99

01:51:10.000 You know, you put this artificial ceiling on the potential for what you're doing. 0.99

01:51:15.000 If you hit a wall, Okay?

01:51:17.000 That just means you need to regroup and rethink.

01:51:19.000 It doesn't mean that wall's there, especially when it comes to something like social media or like a podcast.

01:51:24.000 Something where you're just putting out a piece of art.

01:51:27.000 You're putting out something that you've created.

01:51:28.000 There's no wall as far as like how many people are going to enjoy it or how far it's going to go.

01:51:33.000 It's just it is what it is.

01:51:35.000 And if people don't like it, make it better.

01:51:37.000 If they like it less, fix that.

01:51:40.000 Figure out a way to do it.

01:51:41.000 You can do that.

01:51:42.000 And this idea that there's no way to get past the starting block today is just ludicrous.

01:51:48.000 It's crazy.

01:51:48.000 And it's just this poor thinking.

01:51:52.000 That are trapped in bad situations.

01:51:55.000 One of the problems is you feel like this is your future. 0.98

01:51:58.000 You feel like you're fucked and you can't get out of that. 0.99

01:52:00.000 There's no hope. 1.00

01:52:01.000 There's no light at the end of the tunnel.

01:52:03.000 There's no rainbow.

01:52:04.000 And if you feel like that, that alone can be incredibly defining and limiting. 0.97

01:52:09.000 But if you can look at yourself objectively and say, okay, I kind of am fucked here. 0.94

01:52:14.000 I'm in credit card debt. 0.99

01:52:16.000 I'm working in a shitty job. 0.54

01:52:18.000 I don't like what I'm doing, but I have some ideas. 0.99

01:52:22.000 I need to feed those fucking ideas. 0.97

01:52:23.000 I need to feed them and water them and I need to set aside a certain amount of time every day to just try to make those things happen. 1.00

01:52:31.000 You can do that!

01:52:34.000 I like visual images.

01:52:35.000 We use that in the Hardcore History a lot.

01:52:36.000 What's it like to fight an elephant with a spear?

01:52:38.000 Things like that.

01:52:40.000 It's like to die.

01:52:41.000 That's what it's like.

01:52:42.000 The image I have, though, for what you're talking about, I've always thought it's a little like a running back in football who takes the ball and who goes forward and there's no hole.

01:52:50.000 All you run into is the back of your offensive lineman.

01:52:53.000 But if you keep hitting, if a hole is going to open up, boom, you'll squirt through.

01:52:57.000 Now, there's no guarantee in life the hole will be there, but there is a guarantee that if you're not continually smacking at it, then when it opens up, you won't be wrecked, right?

01:53:04.000 And so, I don't know about you, Joe.

01:53:06.000 You've had a charmed life, I think, in how well you've done.

01:53:08.000 But, I mean, some of us have failed many times. 1.00

01:53:10.000 I've failed at a bunch of shit. 0.99

01:53:12.000 I'm teasing you. 1.00

01:53:12.000 I really have. 1.00

01:53:13.000 But I guess what I'm saying is I remember being a TV reporter at a small station, and I would get out of work at midnight, and the story that I just spent all day on aired, and it was awful.

01:53:23.000 And I would get out, and I would literally—this is when I still had quite a bit of hair—I would sit there, and you pull your hair out.

01:53:29.000 You go, what am I doing?

01:53:30.000 This is horrible.

01:53:32.000 And I look back on those now, and I think, you know, what if you had just— Given up then, right?

01:53:38.000 Or the podcast.

01:53:39.000 I mean, do you know how...

01:53:40.000 My wife did a great thing for me.

01:53:42.000 We'd had that company that I just told you about.

01:53:44.000 We were trying to do the new media thing, and it just fell apart like everybody's companies were starting to do.

01:53:48.000 And I'd wasted a lot of time and a lot of money in my life doing that.

01:53:51.000 And she would have been totally justified in saying, that's it.

01:53:54.000 You know, you're going to Indianapolis, get a talk radio show job, wherever they're hired.

01:53:57.000 But she didn't.

01:53:58.000 She said, you know what?

01:53:59.000 Try this next thing.

01:54:00.000 You could do it.

01:54:01.000 And here we are.

01:54:03.000 And I think, you know, if you hadn't tried...

01:54:05.000 It's that weird thing.

01:54:06.000 And folks, I tried being a TV reporter.

01:54:08.000 You try all those things and either they're not successful or they're moderately successful or they're successful but not enough for you.

01:54:15.000 Life is a verb.

01:54:17.000 You have to...

01:54:19.000 The thing that makes people the most sad in life, and I already have a couple of friends my own age who are there, is the regrets, right?

01:54:26.000 They're not sorry they failed, they're sorry they didn't try.

01:54:30.000 And the funny thing is, some of them are only 50 and they think, okay, my window to try is already gone, which is wrong too.

01:54:37.000 But folks, you will be so happy.

01:54:38.000 There's so many things that have happened in my life because I... I mean, I got my first talk radio show job.

01:54:42.000 I was a reporter.

01:54:43.000 I covered this story.

01:54:44.000 There was some big guy showing up at the local radio station.

01:54:47.000 And as I was leaving, I wrote a letter to the program director to say, thanks for having us.

01:54:51.000 And I thought, do I mail this?

01:54:52.000 Do I not mail it?

01:54:53.000 Do I mail it?

01:54:54.000 And just, you know, I closed my eyes and I mailed it.

01:54:57.000 He called me two days later.

01:54:58.000 So you want a job?

01:54:59.000 What if you didn't send that letter? 1.00

01:55:01.000 It's so stupid, the little things that your life can hinge on. 1.00

01:55:04.000 But if you don't do them, you don't give fate an opportunity to intervene. 1.00

01:55:08.000 I think here's an important thing, too.

01:55:10.000 Failure is important.

01:55:11.000 It is important.

01:55:12.000 I think failure teaches you things that you don't learn from success.

01:55:15.000 I think failure gives you an opportunity for self-examination and also gives you a feeling that is very uncomfortable.

01:55:21.000 And that very uncomfortable feeling helps you grow. 0.70

01:55:24.000 That when you feel like shit and you screw something up, like when I've had bad podcasts, my podcast has always gotten better afterwards. 0.94

01:55:30.000 When I've had bad stand-up sets, I've always gotten better after that. 0.95

01:55:33.000 Because those bad sets motivate you. 0.99

01:55:35.000 They give you a perspective like, hey, here's some clear examples of where you fucked up. 0.96

01:55:40.000 Yeah, what not to do. 1.00

01:55:41.000 And don't look at these failures as like proof that you suck. 0.98

01:55:46.000 Look at them as opportunities for growth. 0.97

01:55:49.000 Look at them as opportunities to be motivated to do better.

01:55:52.000 Winston Churchill had a line about reading quotes, about how inspirational reading famous quotes were.

01:55:58.000 And he says they motivate you from a number of different ways, including the idea that, you know, you think it's just you or you think that these people who did so well were so incredibly gifted or privileged from the get-go.

01:56:08.000 And when you realize, no, no, no, they're more like me than I think, that becomes inspirational, right?

01:56:12.000 You telling your audience this is inspirational.

01:56:15.000 You don't want to hear, go back to school, go do this work.

01:56:18.000 But if you hate your job, that is like nature telling you to try something different.

01:56:22.000 And it's motivating because the motivation is you might not have to do that soul-killing job anymore.

01:56:27.000 Well, if you look at someone who's doing really well, like say if you focus on like Kevin Hart or someone like that, some very famous and successful comedian, all you see is him now flying around in private jets, wearing a new pair of sneakers every day, driving around in Bentleys.

01:56:42.000 You just see that.

01:56:43.000 You don't see him being a young kid in Philadelphia, going to open mic nights, scratching and clawing.

01:56:49.000 MC Hammer selling the tapes out of the hatchback.

01:56:52.000 All that stuff, man, there's a path.

01:56:54.000 And we think of people like, you see an old person walking down the street, you go, oh, that person's always been an old person. 0.98

01:57:00.000 No, that was a baby.

01:57:01.000 That was a baby that became a 90-year-old man.

01:57:04.000 There's a progression that you're not witness to.

01:57:07.000 You don't see it.

01:57:08.000 And that takes place in everything.

01:57:10.000 It takes place in authors.

01:57:11.000 It takes place in comedians and musicians.

01:57:14.000 There is a starting point and then with time and focus and as long as you reevaluate and reassess and constantly objectively look at what you're doing and then pursue it with passion and focus, you get better at things.

01:57:27.000 And you know what?

01:57:28.000 Doing all those things ends up, you know, it's funny, but your life experiences create who you are and all those things actually make you a more form...

01:57:36.000 I know I'm speaking to the choir here, but all those things make you a more formidable person.

01:57:41.000 So that eventually that next endeavor is you're more prepared for and you're more formidable.

01:57:47.000 And so, you know, you turn around and you say, what was I like as a 23-year-old intern compared to what I'm like now?

01:57:53.000 And I'm basically a different person.

01:57:55.000 And you're a different person because of all these life experiences.

01:57:58.000 I mean, you go to a CENTCOM meeting with the big brat.

01:58:01.000 Well, you're more formidable afterwards, right?

01:58:03.000 Yeah, for sure.

01:58:04.000 I think?

01:58:09.000 I think?

01:58:22.000 I've done it in the past, but I did it because they were just goals that I was pursuing on the side as well as doing stand-up and all the other things that I do in my life.

01:58:28.000 But I've found that things that are completely unrelated to my career that are difficult enhance what I do.

01:58:34.000 Whether it's yoga, or running hills, or archery, or all these things that I pursue.

01:58:42.000 And you've managed to incorporate?

01:58:43.000 Yeah, sort of.

01:58:45.000 But that's just because one of the things that I do is just talk about things that I'm interested in.

01:58:50.000 But they make my focus better because they're hard and because I'm not good at them.

01:58:55.000 So when I do yoga, I'm not good at yoga.

01:58:58.000 So when I do it, it's hard. 0.99

01:59:00.000 It's a fucking struggle. 0.97

01:59:02.000 And forcing myself to get through that 90-minute class and try 100% with every pose enhances my stamina for thinking and approaching other things. 0.98

01:59:13.000 Let's macro it out a little bit, because I'm very interested in what you're saying.

01:59:16.000 So here you and I are talking to the listeners, many of whom are already accomplished and well into their goals, but if they're not, they're listening to this.

01:59:23.000 I'm thinking to myself, okay, if you're trying to design a society, you know, we had talked about revolution, if too many people are the losers in the society.

01:59:31.000 If you said to yourself, what really matters in the society is making more Americans who are happier with their lives, more successful, doing what they want to do, in other words, empowering them to create...

01:59:42.000 How different is that in terms of a setup from what our school system is designed to do now, which is a holdover to essentially make good factory workers, right?

01:59:50.000 I mean, if you said to somebody, listen, this entire country is built for you to become a businessman with your own business, you start your own company.

01:59:57.000 If you taught that in the schools. 0.98

01:59:59.000 From the get-go, and you had workshops, and everybody's going to say, damn, we already do that in the schools. 0.97

02:00:04.000 I already know.

02:00:04.000 But I mean, if that was the entire goal of your education, to turn every student in that class into a small business person doing their own dreams someday, how would you do it differently than what you do now?

02:00:16.000 Because to me, the biggest crime isn't that we have the kind of system we have.

02:00:19.000 It's that we're not training people on how to utilize it.

02:00:23.000 I mean, we have all these opportunities there, and it sounds like a cliché, but...

02:00:27.000 But we're doing it.

02:00:28.000 And as you go through it, you say to yourself, well, why can't more people do this?

02:00:32.000 Well, who told them they could?

02:00:33.000 And who said?

02:00:34.000 You know, I mean, this is a little bit of a hand-holding, but I'm teaching this to my kids right now, right?

02:00:39.000 I'm telling them, listen, don't go do the soul-killing job.

02:00:43.000 Work on this thing that you seem to be good at and that you love, and let's work on it now.

02:00:47.000 I mean, I guess what I'm saying is, could we be doing a better job here?

02:00:51.000 And if so, you know, would you have to fight teachers unions to do it?

02:00:55.000 What do you have to do to break apart a system that's 140 years old and not working all that well right now to more correspond to the reality that people are growing up in now?

02:01:04.000 Well, I had a conversation with my daughter yesterday about this, my nine-year-old.

02:01:09.000 Good age to do it, by the way.

02:01:10.000 She was saying, school is so boring.

02:01:13.000 I don't want to go to school tomorrow.

02:01:14.000 She was laughing about it.

02:01:15.000 I was picking her up from this class that she goes to.

02:01:18.000 And I said, well, what's the most boring?

02:01:21.000 She goes, it's all boring.

02:01:22.000 She's being funny, right?

02:01:24.000 And I go, well, you like reading and you're really into reading.

02:01:27.000 She goes, yeah, I do.

02:01:28.000 I like it.

02:01:29.000 But they make it boring.

02:01:31.000 She goes, they make reading boring.

02:01:33.000 And she goes, they make... 0.97

02:01:33.000 I go, but you like writing, right? 0.97

02:01:35.000 You like writing?

02:01:35.000 She goes, I like writing what I want to write about.

02:01:38.000 They make writing boring.

02:01:39.000 So she's creative. 0.99

02:01:40.000 Yeah, but she was being silly. 0.97

02:01:42.000 But the wisdom from a nine-year-old... 0.93

02:01:44.000 We were just laughing and having fun talking about it.

02:01:46.000 But the wisdom from a nine-year-old expressing how they make things that she likes boring.

02:01:52.000 It's like...

02:01:53.000 I think there's a certain amount that you have to do that's boring, right?

02:01:57.000 There's a certain amount of the hard work.

02:01:58.000 Even in your business that you like.

02:02:00.000 Sure.

02:02:01.000 Learning grammar, learning language. 0.99

02:02:03.000 A certain amount of that stuff is fucking boring. 0.98

02:02:05.000 Once you get past that boring shit and you have a base understanding of how to communicate, how to add, how to count, how to multiply, how government works, all these different things that you should have sort of a base understanding of, then it's like everyone has a different personality. 0.99

02:02:20.000 They have different Different interests, different things that they would be really satisfied pursuing. 0.98

02:02:27.000 That's not encouraged.

02:02:28.000 What's encouraged is go find a job.

02:02:31.000 What's encouraged is go find some place that you can shove yourself into. 0.99

02:02:36.000 Go find a square hole that you can stick your round peg and just fucking jam it in there and We're good to go. 0.99

02:03:03.000 We let them figure it out on their own. 1.00

02:03:05.000 And it fucking takes forever. 0.99

02:03:07.000 It took forever for me. 0.99

02:03:09.000 The only thing that I had going for me was that I was crazy.

02:03:12.000 And that I had been spending most of my high school years fighting.

02:03:16.000 So that I was already so far outside of anybody that I... I was so weird.

02:03:21.000 I didn't fit in anywhere.

02:03:23.000 I was weird too.

02:03:24.000 Isn't that funny?

02:03:24.000 I didn't feel like I had a pot...

02:03:26.000 I knew one thing.

02:03:27.000 I couldn't work.

02:03:28.000 Like a regular job.

02:03:30.000 Like I had to figure out something else.

02:03:32.000 It was literally the idea of being in an office was like torture.

02:03:36.000 Can I just tell you, so that's the hinge point.

02:03:38.000 The difference between you and this.

02:03:40.000 So if I was creating a fantasy educational system, the hinge point between what you just said is that you said, I couldn't stand this, I couldn't work the real job, I couldn't fit into this, so I had to find another way.

02:03:54.000 A lot of people get stuck with the, so I had to find another way part.

02:03:59.000 It's funny, because your kids are young enough too, so you went through this, but when my kids were really young, before they were in the school they're in now, we put them in one of those Montessori schools.

02:04:07.000 How are those?

02:04:08.000 So everybody goes together?

02:04:09.000 No, it's different school to school, but the basic concept is that you don't force the children to learn anything specific.

02:04:16.000 You have all these things around, and the children go to what they want to do.

02:04:21.000 So the upsides, obviously, that from the get-go, they're only reading what they're into.

02:04:25.000 The downside, of course, is that there's all this other stuff you're supposed to learn.

02:04:29.000 It's the dichotomy between, you know, you had talked about needing to have these skills, little math skills.

02:04:34.000 You need some basic foundational stuff.

02:04:36.000 But something is also happening at that level, which is you're finding out which students are into math and would like to have a career in math.

02:04:42.000 Other people are being touched by a foreign language in a way that they think, I'd like to learn more, I'd like to speak it fluently, I'd like to teach it.

02:04:48.000 So in a way, you're already beginning to select what kids are into by exposing them to this stuff.

02:04:52.000 Most of us find it boring, but there might be something, that's where I first found history as a discipline, right?

02:04:59.000 If most kids say, oh God, the last thing I want to hear is some history, but I get turned on by it, okay, well then it's It's worth exposing you to all those things.

02:05:08.000 I think the problem is, though, is that it would be great, for example, to have half your schooling, maybe, at that young age, be sort of a Montessori model where you say, okay, we spent our time on reading, writing, and arithmetic.

02:05:19.000 Now we want you to go around You can't be playing video games unless playing video games is what you want to do for a living and you're going to be able to do some educational work on it.

02:05:27.000 But I mean, I would love to see more of a fostering for the fact that, listen, we're trying to create entrepreneurs here rather than trying to create drone workers on the Amazon assembly line.

02:05:37.000 Now, if you end up on the Amazon assembly line anyway, great, good for you.

02:05:41.000 I'm glad you can bring some food home.

02:05:43.000 But the goal ought to be to let you start a business and maybe employ a bunch of other people, you know?

02:05:49.000 Yeah, and the goal would be to have less unhappy, dissatisfied people.

02:05:54.000 Because it creates a more stable society.

02:05:56.000 Well, also happier.

02:05:57.000 Yeah.

02:05:58.000 It creates more satisfaction.

02:06:01.000 The people that I know that get to do what they want to do for a living, it's not like their lives are completely happy.

02:06:06.000 Everybody's going to face problems, no matter who you are.

02:06:09.000 Absolutely.

02:06:10.000 It was a Kanye West who said, do rich people have problems or just different problems?

02:06:14.000 I mean, everybody's got these challenges, but like you said, there's not a lot more stressful than having a ton of credit card debt, wondering if you're going to lose your house, wondering how you're going to pay for your kids' education.

02:06:25.000 I mean, all those things are soul-crushing.

02:06:27.000 Not only that, because you're in debt, you get nervous, so it suppresses your ability to express yourself and take risks.

02:06:34.000 It's a cycle.

02:06:35.000 You don't want to lose your gig.

02:06:37.000 It's like...

02:06:38.000 Man, there's no way to live.

02:06:40.000 You're tired.

02:06:41.000 I mean, the one thing is as you get older, I mean, it's funny because getting older is one of those things that you can only understand when you get there.

02:06:48.000 So all through your life, you're going through these, God, isn't this the interesting part of being in your 30s or being in your 40s?

02:06:54.000 So as I go into my 50s now, I'm sitting here going, energy is so under-talked about.

02:06:59.000 You know, the ability to, like my buddy who wrote me and said, you know, I feel like I've screwed up my life.

02:07:05.000 I didn't take enough chances.

02:07:06.000 I played it safe and now I'm so unhappy.

02:07:08.000 He says, and I just can't motivate myself at 50 years old anymore, energy-wise, to start over.

02:07:15.000 Energy is underrepresented.

02:07:16.000 It's hard.

02:07:17.000 Well, tell that guy he's got to fix his health.

02:07:19.000 I knew you were going to say that.

02:07:21.000 That's what it is.

02:07:21.000 Your health is your engine.

02:07:22.000 Your health is literally the chassis, the tires, the brakes, the engine of your vehicle that you move through this life with.

02:07:31.000 And too many people don't pay attention to it.

02:07:33.000 The lack of energy is killer.

02:07:35.000 And as you get older especially.

02:07:36.000 It's not just that.

02:07:37.000 It changes your ability to do things.

02:07:40.000 If you don't have energy, not only will you not have the energy to pursue things, but you won't be able to do them the same way.

02:07:47.000 If you have energy and enthusiasm and say, like, you're healthy and you want to write a book, you're going to have thoughts that'll come into your mind that won't come into your mind if you're exhausted.

02:07:58.000 Agreed. 0.98

02:07:59.000 That's fucking huge. 0.99

02:08:01.000 That's huge for anything you're trying to pursue, whether we're talking about furniture making, whether you're talking about being an author, whatever it is. 0.99

02:08:08.000 Let's talk about ideas for a minute, because I think that's another one.

02:08:10.000 When we talk about small businesses or starting as an entrepreneur, you know, I'm one of those people that is not sure that we don't have a finite number of ideas to each of us, and all of them are valuable enough, even if they don't appear to be on the surface, to write down.

02:08:26.000 As a matter of fact, I went to a business meeting a couple years ago with one of these TV guys I was just talking about, and we go to this business meeting, and we're all on our phones and whatever, and he pulls out an old-fashioned journal that you write in, and he just starts writing.

02:08:40.000 And I looked at that and I thought, in one sense he looks like a dinosaur, but I went out and bought one.

02:08:45.000 And now it's crazy how often, you know, all I do is write ideas in it. 0.99

02:08:50.000 And a lot of them I look back on now and I go, okay, that's still stupid.

02:08:53.000 But other ones I look back on and go, God, I didn't know what this idea meant at the time, but five years later, this idea is really, you know, I guess what I'm saying is that if you wanted to take almost like a religious view of it, God only gives you so many ideas. 0.71

02:09:05.000 Write down and cherish the ideas.

02:09:07.000 But there is something to that.

02:09:09.000 Folks, what really is going to make you unique sometimes is the way your brain works differently than anyone's brain who's ever existed on the planet.

02:09:17.000 That's valuable right there.

02:09:19.000 Write down what comes out of the brain.

02:09:21.000 Well, capture those things.

02:09:22.000 Yes, capture them.

02:09:23.000 Because if you don't capture them, they will slip away.

02:09:25.000 And sometimes the idea isn't good until the second half arrives later.

02:09:31.000 Right?

02:09:31.000 So idea number one's in your book from five years ago.

02:09:34.000 Idea number two that finally completes that idea arrives later.

02:09:37.000 I mean, I had a friend who was so creative and he said he gets the best ideas at night.

02:09:40.000 So he just turns on the light at the side of the table, writes it down in the book, and by morning there's another idea down there.

02:09:46.000 And quantity has a quality all its own.

02:09:49.000 And sometimes a book filled with interesting ideas out of your individual unique head will help you later on.

02:09:57.000 So write them down.

02:09:58.000 Yeah, you have to.

02:09:59.000 There's no downside.

02:09:59.000 I have an app on my phone where I can just, you know, the Notes app.

02:10:03.000 Yeah, sure, sure.

02:10:04.000 Where it has a little microphone.

02:10:05.000 It's filled with stuff.

02:10:06.000 I talk into that thing.

02:10:07.000 I do too.

02:10:07.000 And it dictates it really almost perfectly.

02:10:10.000 So I'll have an idea and I'll just be driving down the road.

02:10:12.000 I just press that button.

02:10:13.000 I start talking into it and then I put it down.

02:10:15.000 I got it.

02:10:16.000 Like, I got that one.

02:10:16.000 I captured it.

02:10:17.000 Think about people who had one fantastic idea in their life and built their whole life on it.

02:10:23.000 And you never know which idea that's going to be.

02:10:25.000 And you know what?

02:10:25.000 I was in improv.

02:10:27.000 Again, you know more about this than I do, but I was a theater major for my first two years of college, and we did improv comedy.

02:10:33.000 And the guy who taught us improv in high school, really, he had a great line.

02:10:37.000 He said, that part of your brain, like every part of your brain, is a muscle.

02:10:40.000 And he said, the more you're thinking, okay, I've got a show this Friday that I have to come up with something funny for, the better you get at it.

02:10:47.000 Yeah.

02:10:48.000 And you start looking.

02:10:50.000 Your brain starts looking at things and finding things.

02:10:52.000 So you're almost like training it to help you now in this new endeavor.

02:10:56.000 It's a very plastic sort of an approach, but it's the same thing with the ideas.

02:11:00.000 One idea in your little book that you wrote down could make your life, your child.

02:11:04.000 I mean, if you're Henry Ford, I mean, how many people did you employ for decades afterwards because of a good idea?

02:11:11.000 I mean, our world is built on those things.

02:11:13.000 And also, like, the idea of having these ideas and the enthusiasm that comes from it, like, it starts to escalate, and you start to calculate, like, oh, and I need more, and I need this, and maybe that, and then the motivation and the momentum of these ideas can lead to enthusiasm.

02:11:30.000 And you attract We're good to go.

02:11:58.000 You have to try.

02:11:59.000 Yeah, well, you don't have to.

02:12:00.000 You could just drone on.

02:12:02.000 But I would recommend not doing that.

02:12:04.000 I would also suggest that you and I and everyone has an interest in not allowing people to drone on too much because for the same reason I talked about instability.

02:12:13.000 We did a common sense show once called The Revenge of the Gangrenous Finger.

02:12:17.000 And the idea was that if you ignore If you have enough people in your society that aren't doing well long enough, it's a little like saying, yes, my finger has gangrene, but it's the little one, so who the hell cares?

02:12:29.000 But eventually, if you ignore it long enough, it'll poison your bloodstream and destroy the body itself. 1.00

02:12:40.000 Preaching revolution in the middle 1990s and said, you're an idiot. 1.00

02:12:44.000 He said, you're an idiot because no one's going to face the bayonets as long as they have enough food in their bellies and they're doing halfway okay. 1.00

02:12:50.000 But of course, the implication there is if they don't have food in their bellies and they're not doing okay, then all bets are off. 1.00

02:12:58.000 We all have a vested interest in seeing that more of our countrymen do better, because it's better for the society as a whole.

02:13:03.000 It creates a better world for your kids, happier...

02:13:06.000 I mean, there's so many...

02:13:07.000 And the one thing about our system, you know, people talk about patriotism all the time.

02:13:11.000 But to me, the real patriotism is saying, we've created a system here.

02:13:14.000 It works this way.

02:13:15.000 It encourages people to go do these things.

02:13:18.000 So, if the system's designed and set up for that, you ought to give it a try.

02:13:22.000 You ought to just see.

02:13:23.000 Yeah.

02:13:24.000 And the suggestion that I always give to people is write down things that you want to try to accomplish.

02:13:29.000 Just write them down.

02:13:30.000 A guy said to me, he said, write the way you want your obituary to appear now.

02:13:36.000 Sit down, write your obituary.

02:13:37.000 He says, because that'll show you how far off your goals you are.

02:13:40.000 Well, here's a better one.

02:13:42.000 Pretend there's a documentary crew filming your success story and they're following you around right now.

02:13:47.000 What would you do?

02:13:48.000 What would you do if you knew that there was a crew following you around with cameras documenting your future incredible success and they want to catch you in the act of it all?

02:13:57.000 You would do all the right things you would have to do.

02:13:59.000 Think about that.

02:14:00.000 Organize it.

02:14:00.000 But we are saddled down by so many doubts and so much Just mental horseshit that keeps people from action.

02:14:10.000 But look at the thing that's, to me, maybe the number one thing that's the impediment in the make society unequal.

02:14:15.000 It's the luck of who your parents are.

02:14:17.000 That's a big one.

02:14:18.000 I mean, if you say, listen, this guy grew up and started his own business because his folks taught him those kinds of things and encouraged him or she with her creativity.

02:14:26.000 Okay, that's a person that's got a huge advantage in life.

02:14:29.000 We talked about white privilege giving you an advantage.

02:14:31.000 Well, good parent privilege gives you an advantage. 0.78

02:14:33.000 Giant.

02:14:33.000 But then the question that, if you're looking at it macro in a society sense that comes up is, okay, what can society do if you say this is a real problem for the rest of us, not enough good parents, because those people never learned it?

02:14:45.000 How do you compensate for that?

02:14:47.000 And that almost gets a little socialistic, where you talk about the state teaching you creativity, and it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense, but there's got to be, if we decide that this is a national security interest, you know, having more Americans live in the dream, have less losers.

02:15:00.000 Yeah. 0.89

02:15:00.000 But what if your parents are losers? 0.89

02:15:02.000 Yeah, well, you can get past that. 0.99

02:15:03.000 I know a lot of people that have had losers for parents.

02:15:06.000 But could we increase the number of people?

02:15:08.000 You know, if you say, okay, 500 out of 1,000 overcome that, how do you get to 600?

02:15:12.000 How do you get to 700 out of 1,000?

02:15:14.000 And if you say it's a national security concern that we do, I mean, I think ambition is a gene.

02:15:19.000 I really do.

02:15:20.000 And I think that some of us, you could be born into any circumstance, but you've got this gene, so you're going to be ambitious, and you're going to overcome it.

02:15:27.000 Then I think there's people who have no ambition gene, and there's nothing you can do to help them.

02:15:31.000 And then I think there's a huge number of people in the middle that could go either way.

02:15:34.000 And the question I have is, you don't have to help the ones with the gene.

02:15:37.000 You can't do anything for the ones without the gene. 0.99

02:15:40.000 How do you increase the odds for the people who could go either way?

02:15:43.000 I think you give them a template.

02:15:44.000 You give them some markers that they can follow.

02:15:48.000 Who's we, though?

02:15:49.000 You! 0.99

02:15:50.000 Me!

02:15:51.000 Yes, it's me.

02:15:52.000 Anybody who's already gone.

02:15:53.000 Anybody who's ahead.

02:15:54.000 You go, hey, come on.

02:15:56.000 Come this way.

02:15:56.000 I mean, there's a responsibility that we have for each other as a community.

02:15:59.000 Well, what about incubating businesses?

02:16:01.000 I mean, you look at some of these...

02:16:05.000 I love Eugene, by the way.

02:16:19.000 For people who are starting small businesses.

02:16:21.000 And it's not a government deal, although the county's in, I think, a little bit.

02:16:24.000 But it's one of those things where you go, okay, if this is a good idea, could we be doing more of this?

02:16:28.000 Where you say, Joe Blow wants to start a business.

02:16:31.000 He needs $100,000 to do it.

02:16:33.000 If you go to a bank, they're never going to approve it because you have too much credit card debt.

02:16:36.000 Could we as a society say, hey, we have an interest in Joe Blow doing well with that furniture company.

02:16:40.000 What can we do to help?

02:16:42.000 I think even better, the better thing would be to not have a loan.

02:16:46.000 To try to figure out how to do it without a loan.

02:16:48.000 I agree with that.

02:16:49.000 One of the beautiful things about Kickstarter and GoFundMe is that, you know, you can raise money now with things.

02:16:55.000 And you don't need a storefront?

02:16:56.000 No, you don't need anything.

02:16:57.000 No.

02:16:57.000 You know, I just feel like people need inspiration and they need guidelines.

02:17:03.000 And as long as you could just start moving, just get action.

02:17:08.000 Like, just getting movement.

02:17:10.000 Get something going.

02:17:12.000 And folks, listen, that's the one thing to really take out of this is that just try and see what happens.

02:17:17.000 And my stepfather had a great line.

02:17:19.000 He said, what's the worst that can happen?

02:17:21.000 And you know, sometimes you have to think about that to realize if you're scared about failure, don't be scared.

02:17:26.000 The greatest in the world have failed.

02:17:28.000 If you're worried about going into debt, I understand that.

02:17:30.000 Don't be scared of failure.

02:17:32.000 I think failure is awesome for you.

02:17:33.000 And that's one of the reasons why, like I said, I like doing things that I suck at.

02:17:37.000 You know, you could get real complacent if you're really good at something and you only do that thing all the time.

02:17:42.000 I agree with that.

02:17:42.000 And you're not growing anymore.

02:17:43.000 Yeah, you're just not challenged.

02:17:45.000 You're not at the bottom of the heap. 1.00

02:17:47.000 You know, if you start jujitsu right now and you're a white belt, you're like, oh, God, what the fuck? 0.98

02:17:52.000 How could I ever get good at this? 0.98

02:17:53.000 And it's humbling.

02:17:55.000 But in that humbling thing, you learn about yourself, you learn about discipline, and you build up that engine, that muscle, that...

02:18:04.000 Is trying to work things out and figure things out.

02:18:07.000 Creating a more formidable you.

02:18:09.000 Yeah.

02:18:09.000 It's a good way to look at it.

02:18:10.000 Now, as a historian, you know...

02:18:12.000 I'm not a historian. 1.00

02:18:13.000 I know you like to say that, but you are a motherfucker. 1.00

02:18:16.000 I'm gonna get a t-shirt. 1.00

02:18:17.000 I'm not a historian.

02:18:18.000 You're probably one of the most important historians ever. 0.99

02:18:20.000 How about that, fuckface? 1.00

02:18:24.000 I don't know what... 1.00

02:18:24.000 I'm speechless. 1.00

02:18:26.000 But as someone who is a fan of history, how about this?

02:18:29.000 There you go.

02:18:30.000 I'll put it in a more palatable way for you.

02:18:32.000 How do you look at what...

02:18:34.000 Do you look at what's going on with this administration and with this country and this...

02:18:39.000 I mean, our president is...

02:18:40.000 He tweeted at Kim Jong-un saying that Kim Jong-un said that I'm old.

02:18:48.000 I don't know why he said that because I never say that he's short and fat.

02:18:51.000 And like, maybe we could be friends sometime.

02:18:53.000 He's like Don Rickles as president. 0.75

02:18:55.000 It's fucking hilarious, but do you look at it in terms of like one day someone is going to do a hardcore history series about the Trump administration? 0.73

02:19:06.000 Do you ever look at it that way? 0.95

02:19:08.000 Do you look at it in terms of like establishing a narrative or like trying to describe it to people someday?

02:19:18.000 I think we're too in the maelstrom, like we said earlier, for me to figure that out.

02:19:21.000 I will say that I see certain side benefits.

02:19:25.000 So, for example, you know, one of the things that I've talked about for many, many years, and we did a whole six-hour podcast on it, too, is the president's power to launch a nuclear war all by himself or herself.

02:19:35.000 That was a great series.

02:19:36.000 Well, and here's the thing, is that that's an obvious flaw.

02:19:40.000 I mean, everybody understands it, but nobody's done anything about it.

02:19:43.000 So now, because everyone's so scared of Trump, they're talking about fixing a problem that should have been fixed decades and decades ago.

02:19:51.000 Not because he's a great president and they're looking for, but because they're so freaking scared of him and he's so outside.

02:19:56.000 You know, I mean, it's funny because...

02:19:58.000 Why these politicians...

02:20:00.000 And they'll trust people from the other parties.

02:20:02.000 It doesn't matter.

02:20:02.000 You didn't hear the Democrats saying we can't have George W. Bush with his finger on the nuclear button.

02:20:06.000 You didn't hear George W. Bush...

02:20:07.000 They're all fine with it as long as you're one of those insiders.

02:20:10.000 The first time you get an outsider in there, now they're scared to death.

02:20:15.000 But they should have been scared to death decades and decades ago.

02:20:17.000 So if you said that we have a Trump presidency and the only big thing that comes out of it is they finally fixed that one person can't launch a nuclear war and holocaust by themselves...

02:20:27.000 That's a pretty big deal, right?

02:20:29.000 You almost had to break a little aspect of the system for people to freak out enough to fix it.

02:20:33.000 But when you think...

02:20:34.000 Look, worst case scenarios.

02:20:36.000 You think worst case...

02:20:36.000 Look at World War I as a worst case scenario.

02:20:39.000 If you have a person with the power to launch a nuclear war by themselves...

02:20:47.000 If anybody can't see that that's an untenable, horrible situation, and you look at human history and go, okay, it's a ticking time bomb, literally, then you don't know very much history.

02:20:56.000 And the fact that we've escaped decades and decades without anybody fixing this problem...

02:21:00.000 It's crazy.

02:21:00.000 Well, so if the Trump presidency alone caused us to fix that problem, you'd have to say that for no...

02:21:06.000 I mean, this wasn't Trump's idea.

02:21:08.000 He didn't want to fix that problem.

02:21:09.000 But as a byproduct of him getting into office, if we could fix that problem...

02:21:14.000 Depending on how history went in the future, you could be saving 100 million lives.

02:21:17.000 Yeah, if you could fix that problem.

02:21:19.000 But if we get through the Trump administration and we move ourselves into 2020 and someone really acceptable...

02:21:25.000 Into the Kardashian administration after that.

02:21:28.000 Kanye was...

02:21:29.000 Well, you do think...

02:21:30.000 I mean, if a Q rating...

02:21:31.000 The Q rating is how well your name is known, right?

02:21:35.000 Mm-hmm.

02:21:35.000 So if what Trump proved is that you do not need a ton of money if you walk in the door with a Q rating, because that's what the other politicians want it for, right?

02:21:43.000 Well, he's uniquely good at ignoring his faults and projecting his strengths and being confident.

02:21:50.000 All those things. 0.93

02:21:51.000 I mean, he might be a sociopath.

02:21:53.000 But all those things that allow him to do that and completely ignore his faults and keep constantly droning on about his successes and how good he is at things, that resonates with people in a very weird way.

02:22:06.000 We respect and admire the strong man.

02:22:09.000 And people give in to him.

02:22:11.000 There's a lot of half-ass beta men. 0.98

02:22:13.000 I hate that. 0.98

02:22:14.000 I mean, that's so anti-American, the strong man.

02:22:16.000 But it is what happened.

02:22:18.000 That is what happened.

02:22:19.000 That's why I find it distasteful.

02:22:20.000 But I will say this.

02:22:22.000 There are certain things that he did that are part of his personality that worked really well because there are so many Americans so upset with the system.

02:22:30.000 I mean, I remember one line from Trump at one of these debates that I thought was one of the great lines of all time.

02:22:35.000 And when he turned to Rand Paul after Rand Paul slammed him and said, you're not having a very good night, are you?

02:22:41.000 And I remember thinking, okay, there are a lot of Americans who just love anybody sticking it to these politicians now because everybody's so upset with all the politics.

02:22:50.000 So here's a guy who's sticking it to them.

02:22:52.000 But there's a cutting off your nose to spite your face side of this because I've always wanted an outsider. 0.65

02:22:58.000 But not this outsider.

02:22:59.000 Yeah.

02:22:59.000 So you say to yourself, okay, we could have had a normal human being, because look, if you want to say what Trump has, I don't know the guy, so I can't diagram what he...

02:23:08.000 But he's an extreme narcissist.

02:23:11.000 Now, all these people have narcissistic complexes, or you don't think I'm a good enough guy to be president, right?

02:23:17.000 Right there, it's almost like you don't get through the door without too much narcissism.

02:23:21.000 I've never seen this much from anybody.

02:23:23.000 I mean, this is...

02:23:24.000 But...

02:23:26.000 You know, if for a while that was working for him, because he was so outside the norms, there are certain unspoken rules of things you do and behave, and he violated all those, and it was refreshing to have him violate those.

02:23:41.000 Well, when he told Hillary Clinton because you'd be in jail and everybody went nuts, it's like, yes!

02:23:45.000 It was a zinger!

02:23:47.000 The real thing, I think a lot of people said, which is tragic, but I understand it, is if we have to live with one of these people for four years and listen to them talk, I'd rather have somebody who's making funny jokes that make me laugh rather than...

02:23:59.000 Somebody who's obviously reading another prepared speech that they didn't write.

02:24:02.000 Or somebody where you really don't get a sense of who they really are.

02:24:06.000 Like a Hillary Clinton, who's a career politician. 1.00

02:24:08.000 She's a chameleon. 0.99

02:24:09.000 She's just saying what she thinks the polls are going to favor.

02:24:13.000 So then if...

02:24:16.000 The part that drives me the craziest is 321 million people, you said, and the two people that we're voting on at the end of this thing are Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

02:24:25.000 It's hilarious.

02:24:25.000 That's the problem.

02:24:26.000 Well, nobody wants that fucking magnifying glass turned on their life. 0.99

02:24:30.000 My stepdad said, if you were a really august person, and you're going to sit there... 0.99

02:24:35.000 What is that word?

02:24:35.000 August just means you're a really powerful, formidable human being.

02:24:39.000 How do you spell it?

02:24:40.000 Like August?

02:24:40.000 Like August, yeah.

02:24:41.000 And so you sit down there.

02:24:42.000 He said, those kind of people divide a piece of paper in half.

02:24:46.000 And they write pros on one side and cons on the other.

02:24:49.000 And they're running for president.

02:24:50.000 And they go down the pros and cons.

02:24:51.000 He goes, the cons outnumber the pros five to one.

02:24:56.000 It might be a hundred to one.

02:24:57.000 Yeah, I'm not going to have as much power as I have now.

02:24:59.000 Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

02:25:00.000 Everyone's going to hate you. 1.00

02:25:01.000 And he said, so people who are really intelligent, if they do that calculation, the calculation says, don't run for president, you'd be an idiot. 1.00

02:25:07.000 Now, he says, people, though, who run anyway... 1.00

02:25:21.000 Yes.

02:25:22.000 Yes.

02:25:26.000 And he said that's why you have to be careful because that's...

02:25:29.000 So you either have somebody who's not intelligent enough to weigh the pros and cons or somebody who's so smart that the cons outweigh the pros and they choose to do it anyway.

02:25:37.000 What a crazy system when you think that that is the way we develop a person who is going to be in control of nuclear weapons.

02:25:45.000 We have a popularity contest where to win the popularity contest, which is totally, you know, elective, you don't have to join.

02:25:53.000 But to get into this contest and to win, your life's going to be torn apart.

02:26:01.000 People are going to lie about you.

02:26:03.000 And look at your favorite person and say, you go look at some of these candidates from the past that we like to lionize.

02:26:08.000 Would they have even made it through the process today?

02:26:09.000 Imagine what Kennedy would have had to do.

02:26:11.000 Imagine what John Kennedy would have had to do.

02:26:13.000 The kind of things that would...

02:26:14.000 He'd have all these women coming forward.

02:26:15.000 Can you imagine?

02:26:16.000 He would never made it.

02:26:17.000 The Dr. Feelgoods would show up.

02:26:19.000 Oh, my God.

02:26:20.000 Yeah, they used to give him amphetamines, right?

02:26:23.000 He had some serious disease, didn't he?

02:26:25.000 Addison's disease, yeah.

02:26:26.000 What is that?

02:26:27.000 That's a problem with the glands where it's not providing adrenaline, I think.

02:26:31.000 Don't quote me on that.

02:26:32.000 Wow.

02:26:32.000 So they had him on some sort of amphetamines.

02:26:34.000 He was apparently on a lot of medication.

02:26:37.000 I think he had the last rites given to him once before because he came so close to dying.

02:26:41.000 Jesus.

02:26:41.000 Well, and truthfully, I read that it impacted the way he kind of saw his life because he didn't expect it to be a long life.

02:26:49.000 But if somebody told you, Joe, you're not going to have a long life, how much does that change the way you live the rest of your life?

02:26:57.000 You'd probably live crazy.

02:26:58.000 You'd probably go jet skiing every day and skydiving.

02:27:01.000 Or maybe you'd try to get the things on your bucket list in terms of accomplishments done more quickly.

02:27:08.000 But you look at someone like that and say, could a guy like that have made it through the process?

02:27:11.000 Could Lyndon Johnson have made it through the process?

02:27:13.000 I mean, all those people...

02:27:26.000 I mean, if you say those are the only people that can make it through the process, then maybe that explains why with 321 million people, this is the choice we end up with at the end of the day.

02:27:35.000 Well, we also have this problem where we look at someone's entire life, and we look at all the different things that they do, and we decide whether or not we accept certain things.

02:27:45.000 Like, we're not talking about whether or not someone's honest with business.

02:27:48.000 We want you to be honest with everything.

02:27:51.000 Yeah, you've got to get C average on everything.

02:27:53.000 You can't have an A in here.

02:27:55.000 But I mean, the truly great people, as we know, are often very flawed.

02:27:58.000 Yeah, very flawed.

02:27:59.000 And also...

02:28:01.000 What percentage of people who want to be leaders?

02:28:03.000 Think about that thing, right?

02:28:05.000 You want to be the one on the podium telling everybody what's up. 1.00

02:28:08.000 What percentage of those guys want to fuck other women? 1.00

02:28:11.000 Is it a hundred? 1.00

02:28:14.000 I can't answer that.

02:28:15.000 But if you think about nature, the natural leader types throughout human history, what percentage of those have been monogamous?

02:28:24.000 Those ones who want to control the army, the ones who want to run the thing, the ones who want to be at the top getting everybody to do their bidding, the ones who want to have all the money and all the power and live in the castle.

02:28:38.000 Those guys are almost all adulterers.

02:28:41.000 You know, it does argue for the idea that it might be better to appoint somebody who doesn't want the job.

02:28:49.000 Somebody I talked to once has talked about that with police officers, and they had said, listen, there are all kinds of police officers, but if you're the one who wants the job because you're going to chase bad guys and you want that adrenaline rush and the whole thing, you're not the guy who should get the job.

02:29:02.000 Right, or a guy wants respect.

02:29:04.000 Yes, and you can see, the funny thing is, and somebody sent this to me a long time ago, there's all these different recruitment videos that the different police agencies have, right?

02:29:13.000 And some of them are more like, you can get cats out of trees, you can help old ladies, and some of them are like, you can drive a great car! 0.94

02:29:20.000 And the funny thing is, I would imagine that that influences the sort of people that answer your ad.

02:29:26.000 Oh, for sure.

02:29:27.000 I mean, they have billboards in L.A., where they used to at least, to try to hire new cops, and they did it based on the money.

02:29:34.000 Like, this is how much money you can get.

02:29:36.000 L.A. PD is paying this amount, and they'd show it, and you'd drive by, like, oh, I can make that amount.

02:29:41.000 Okay, maybe I should try to do that job.

02:29:43.000 So what if you appointed cops?

02:29:45.000 A billboard, what I'm saying is like...

02:29:47.000 When you're advertising, it's the same problem you have when you're advertising for drug companies.

02:29:51.000 You get people thinking, like, oh, maybe I need that Abilify in my life.

02:29:55.000 Oh, Humerida.

02:29:56.000 Ooh, I need that.

02:29:58.000 That seems like I like the music they're playing.

02:30:00.000 I like how everybody's dancing.

02:30:01.000 Oh, I like how that cop looks up there.

02:30:03.000 He looks formidable.

02:30:05.000 He looks like a man who gets respect.

02:30:06.000 Look, he's got his hands on his hips, and he's got a nice car behind him.

02:30:09.000 And look, he's a female squad leader with him. 1.00

02:30:12.000 I wonder if he fucks her. 1.00

02:30:14.000 You know, like, people start... 1.00

02:30:14.000 You look at an ad, and you start... 1.00

02:30:17.000 Imagining yourself in the position of that person in that ad, and then next thing you know, you're the one who's going to go get the bad guys, and you're the one who's going to go...

02:30:25.000 But if you talk to a real cop, a good cop is someone who respects community, someone who wants to help, someone who wants to establish some sort of a bond with the people that are in the community that he patrols.

02:30:39.000 That's why they're trying to do in some neighborhoods, they're trying to have more people on foot that actually walk through the streets and become a part of the community.

02:30:46.000 You're not an outsider that's patrolling it.

02:30:49.000 You're actually one of the people that's there.

02:30:51.000 It goes to what we were saying about the politicians, though, to tie it all in.

02:30:54.000 Why are you doing this?

02:30:55.000 Yeah.

02:30:55.000 Right?

02:30:55.000 Are you doing this because you want to be the person at the podium that everybody's admiring?

02:30:59.000 You want to be the person that everyone's talking about?

02:31:01.000 Or are you sincerely interested in public service and helping things?

02:31:05.000 I mean, what if you...

02:31:07.000 I can think of 20 people that you would say, God, it'd be interesting to see what that person would do in the presidency, right?

02:31:15.000 But like you said, I can't imagine any of them wanting to do it.

02:31:19.000 None of them are going to want to do it.

02:31:20.000 Mark Cuban is going to want to be the president.

02:31:21.000 Elon Musk's not going to want to be the president.

02:31:23.000 I think we really need a council.

02:31:26.000 I think the idea of one singular alpha chimpanzee.

02:31:29.000 Well, Joe, that's what it's supposed to do, remember?

02:31:30.000 Remember, we're supposed to be, if everybody remembers their founding father, Federalist Papers and everything.

02:31:35.000 The presidency was a much, much, much less powerful job.

02:31:38.000 This was a country that was run by the legislative branch, basically.

02:31:43.000 We're not that way anymore because of a whole bunch of things, including the nuclear weapons thing we talked about earlier.

02:31:48.000 The atomic age changed the presidency because of the need to have one person.

02:31:55.000 You couldn't declare war anymore because what if the missiles are on their way to you now, right?

02:32:00.000 Can you really go to Congress and debate it?

02:32:02.000 No, you needed a person who within 10 minutes could launch a counter-strike.

02:32:07.000 Okay, well, how much power does that take out of, you know, the hands of the legislature who was supposed to be running things?

02:32:13.000 For example, why do we not declare war anymore?

02:32:16.000 We haven't declared war since the Second World War.

02:32:18.000 We have a country that the Constitution says you can't go to war without a declaration.

02:32:22.000 Certainly, you can get some Barbary pirates cleared out of North Africa, but you can't, like... 0.93

02:32:27.000 That's why Congress, by the way, with the Trump thing, is they want to say that you can't launch nuclear weapons unless Congress has declared war first, which creates this wonderful thing about trying to figure out if we can sort of retroactively replace a power that's been gone since 1942. We declared war on, 0.74

02:32:46.000 like, Romania and something else, the subsidiary powers in the Second World War, and that's the last time it's been done.

02:32:52.000 But according to the Constitution, we shouldn't have been able to fight a war since without that.

02:32:56.000 It's going to be very interesting to see what happens in 2020. It's going to be really interesting.

02:33:01.000 To remove some of the power that the president has is going to be a really big uphill battle.

02:33:06.000 Unless someone actually drops a nuke on somebody.

02:33:08.000 Unless Trump decides to bomb North Korea. 1.00

02:33:11.000 Like Kim Jong-un says something about his wife, like, you piece of shit. 1.00

02:33:14.000 He fucking launches a bomb at him. 1.00

02:33:16.000 Unless it's something so egregious and ridiculous like that, it's going to be really hard to dial back the power without any real specific need. 0.99

02:33:24.000 Because people are going to concentrate on all the other issues that the country faces economically, militarily, the need for Health care, the need for environmental standards, what are we going to do about global warming?

02:33:34.000 There's so many issues that take the front stage.

02:33:37.000 The idea of someone actually launching a nuclear attack seems so distant and ridiculous that that's not going to be on the forefront of everybody's list of priorities and things to handle.

02:33:47.000 Makes me think of Eisenhower ordering the local German population at the end of the Second World War to go tour the death camps themselves and actually have to walk past piles and piles and piles of human bodies because he wanted them to not forget.

02:34:04.000 Wow.

02:34:06.000 I didn't know he did that.

02:34:07.000 When you look at the end of the World Wars, for example, in both of them, people were so shocked by what happened.

02:34:14.000 You get this idea that we're never again, right?

02:34:16.000 We're never going to let this happen again.

02:34:18.000 But you get a generation later, two generations later.

02:34:21.000 How long does it take for those lessons to fade away?

02:34:24.000 So when I hear or read on Twitter, it's probably some 13-year-old boy in his basement, so you never know.

02:34:29.000 But the racial stuff, I always think to myself...

02:34:32.000 If you only, you know, maybe we need some dead bodies out there so you can go see, this is what it looks like, right?

02:34:37.000 We're not fooling around here.

02:34:39.000 This kind of stuff leads to this.

02:34:41.000 Stop fooling around with 140 characters and look at what real death taste smells like and what the long-term ramifications of pushing these sorts of attitudes can lead to and has over and over and over again.

02:34:53.000 Well, I think there's a real problem with the human condition when it comes to complacency and comfort.

02:34:59.000 And I think that we get real comfortable and real complacent, and we have a very distorted idea of what life is without struggle.

02:35:05.000 And there's a great book by Sebastian Junger who was on last week.

02:35:09.000 Oh, yeah.

02:35:09.000 And it's called Tribe.

02:35:11.000 Yeah.

02:35:11.000 He did a perfect storm, too.

02:35:13.000 It was wonderful.

02:35:13.000 Yeah, he's amazing.

02:35:14.000 But talking to him about what...

02:35:18.000 Happens when people overcome significant tragedies whether it's war or whether it's natural disasters or you know I was in I was in New York right after 9-11 and it was palpable the sense of community and how friendly people were and it was because people had had their world shaken up by an attack and it literally did good it really did good for the people that survived in a fucked up way and But it makes me think of that project for a New America document that before 9

02:35:49.000 -11 had said that there's, you know, without some kind of Pearl Harbor-style attack, the American system is designed right now in a way where people are going to pull apart more and more.

02:35:57.000 And in other words, just saying, you know, you could almost wish for something like that to happen to pull us together.

02:36:02.000 I remember when I was trying...

02:36:05.000 Maybe it's the only way we learn and you need the refresher.

02:36:08.000 But that's what I think people need war in their own life.

02:36:11.000 And I think they need struggle.

02:36:13.000 They need something to do in their own life that's incredibly difficult to keep them from being...

02:36:20.000 Complacent and mundane.

02:36:21.000 When I was trying to localize the story from the Yugoslavian Civil War that we were just talking about earlier, I interviewed a Croatian man in Eugene, and we were talking about it, and I was bringing up these age-old hatreds and basically saying, you know, they've always hated each other, and he stopped me.

02:36:35.000 He said, no, stop, stop, stop.

02:36:37.000 He goes, we didn't.

02:36:38.000 He goes, up until recently, we were intermarrying with each other.

02:36:41.000 We got along.

02:36:42.000 It was all working out.

02:36:43.000 He goes, you know what changed?

02:36:44.000 I said, what?

02:36:45.000 He goes, the economy tanked.

02:36:46.000 He goes, and all of a sudden, he goes, the first thing that started to resurface when everybody was just hating everything, their lives and everything, he goes, all of a sudden, all these old things that had been buried just came right back.

02:36:59.000 And so that tribalism you're talking about with Younger, I think there are times, and you had mentioned it, right?

02:37:04.000 Post-war eras, these times when they go away.

02:37:06.000 Post-disaster.

02:37:07.000 Yes, but then certain kinds of conditions, for example, terrible economic conditions for too many people, it's funny how quickly the scapegoats come back, and things that, I mean, truthfully, the biggest thing that I've missed politically in terms of just I just didn't see it.

02:37:21.000 It was the resurgence of the racism, bigotry, prejudice thing.

02:37:24.000 I mean, I thought, you know, we grew up in the era where our country was trying to figure out through things like broadcasting how we transition.

02:37:31.000 So you remember All in the Family when it started.

02:37:33.000 It's a show that doesn't even run very much anymore because simply trying to address those issues is too hot button for most advertisers now.

02:37:40.000 You could never have an Archie Bunker character.

02:37:42.000 No, but that whole show was part of society's attempt to transition from an era where it wasn't that long beforehand, where you couldn't stay in a hotel that wasn't a black or a white person's hotel in the South, to one where we got now.

02:37:55.000 And I always thought, okay, the message of Archie Bunker was they would try to teach him, the young people would try to teach him how to be a more open human being.

02:38:03.000 But it didn't matter because the Archie Bunkers of the world were going to die off.

02:38:06.000 They were the dinosaurs from another era, and eventually that would be a way of looking at things that was in the past.

02:38:12.000 And I thought that that was what it was going to be.

02:38:14.000 And I never saw the resurgence, but like my Croatian friend had said, just maybe things had to get bad enough economically and whatever for all the tribal things to just come back because there's something deep in us that that's all embedded in.

02:38:27.000 I think there's far less of those people now than have ever existed before.

02:38:32.000 But that stunned me too. 0.99

02:38:34.000 And it's so homogenized when you see them with their fucking Home Depot torches walking down the street. 0.99

02:38:38.000 The Tiki torches? 1.00

02:38:40.000 You fucking dorks. 1.00

02:38:41.000 The whole thing was so good. 1.00

02:38:42.000 Did you hear Richard Spencer, the white supremacist?

02:38:46.000 But he did an interview about two weeks ago where he was basically saying slavery was good and all these kind of things.

02:38:52.000 Oh, with that British man? 1.00

02:38:53.000 Yes, yes. 1.00

02:38:54.000 And the British guy at the end said something like, you're an idiot or whatever. 1.00

02:38:56.000 But I mean, it wasn't. 1.00

02:38:57.000 It was. 0.93

02:38:57.000 It was a ridiculous thing to say. 0.93

02:39:00.000 And yet, normally, you know, you remember 60 Minutes used to have the KKK white supremacist guys in the old days on like once a year. 0.91

02:39:07.000 They'd interview like the Grand Dragon or whatever.

02:39:10.000 And they'd give them a lot of airtime and Mike Wallace would question him.

02:39:13.000 And at the end of it, you just always thought the same thing. 1.00

02:39:15.000 These people are idiots. 1.00

02:39:17.000 It was the give them enough rope and they'll hang themselves type journalism? 1.00

02:39:21.000 I thought that that journalist, like everybody was talking about, the guy did the perfect interview with him.

02:39:26.000 But I honestly think that's not the way to do the perfect interview with him.

02:39:29.000 I think that guy's standing up.

02:39:31.000 They're standing up facing each other.

02:39:32.000 I think they'd be far better off if they sat down and if they talked for a long period of time.

02:39:36.000 And I think there's plenty more rope and that guy could have hung him way better.

02:39:40.000 There's a book by a black gentleman who's a musician, a boogie-woogie piano player.

02:39:45.000 I don't remember his name.

02:39:46.000 What is that?

02:39:47.000 Boogie Woogie?

02:39:48.000 It's a style?

02:39:49.000 It was a book on the Klan.

02:39:51.000 And he was a guy, a black man, who, I'm going from memory here, but he set up an interview with one of the heads of the state Klan or whatever.

02:39:59.000 Didn't tell the guy who was coming that he was a black man.

02:40:02.000 So they had this interview, and it's this interesting thing he says.

02:40:06.000 But long story short, he started to make friends with these KKK members. 0.56

02:40:10.000 It wasn't like rank-and-file people.

02:40:11.000 It was like the Grand Dragon, whatever.

02:40:14.000 That's the guy, right?

02:40:15.000 How one man convinced 200 Ku Klux Klan members to give up their robes.

02:40:19.000 Wow. 1.00

02:40:20.000 Look at that motherfucker. 1.00

02:40:21.000 But long story short is, I mean, these were people, they didn't have any black people they knew, right? 1.00

02:40:27.000 They had stereotypes and things.

02:40:29.000 So he said, once you're, like you had said, when you're face to face with somebody and you have to interact with them on an eye to eye level, it's...

02:40:37.000 It's very intriguing what he did, because you say to yourself, okay, you can never reach these Archie Bunker guys, but people have and do. 0.84

02:40:44.000 And I do want to say, listen, for all of the white supremacists out there that think I'm being unfair, this racial tribal thing is all over the place, because there are, you know, like, you will meet black folks who are racist, too.

02:40:56.000 Now, what I always say to people, though, is the one thing you have to understand as a white person that's different is we're the dominant culture.

02:41:03.000 Okay?

02:41:03.000 It does make things different.

02:41:05.000 If you're a minority in any country, there's a tendency, I mean, you go to the place and they'll have neighborhoods, right?

02:41:10.000 Remember the Italian neighborhoods in our country, the Jewish neighborhoods, the Irish neighborhoods.

02:41:13.000 Why did they do that?

02:41:14.000 Were they racist?

02:41:15.000 No, there's some strength in gathering with your own kind, reading your own newspapers and keeping your culture alive.

02:41:20.000 Speaking your own language.

02:41:21.000 That's right.

02:41:21.000 But it's also a self-defense mechanism.

02:41:24.000 Right?

02:41:24.000 So it's a very different thing to say, well, listen, they're being racist too.

02:41:28.000 Okay, but we're the dominant culture, and it means that there's something a little different when we say, what's wrong with saying, you know, white people should be proud of their heritage too?

02:41:36.000 Theoretically, nothing.

02:41:37.000 But historically speaking, there are some issues, and you need to recognize that.

02:41:40.000 Now, can we ever get to a time when we can judge people by the content of their character?

02:41:44.000 I don't know, but I think even if white people said, we're going to do that right now, there'd be people of other colors going, no, wait a minute, we don't want to give up some extra admissions into universities.

02:41:54.000 It becomes a very difficult thing to give up this racial identity.

02:41:59.000 In the 60s, that was the goal.

02:42:01.000 Now, people on all sides would be, what are you talking about?

02:42:04.000 The cultural appropriation thing drives me crazy.

02:42:07.000 Like, if you're going to have dreadlocks, you can't because that's a black hairstyle. 1.00

02:42:11.000 What I always want to say is, don't black people want to try different hairstyles, too? 0.69

02:42:14.000 They do.

02:42:15.000 Look at Beyonce. 0.97

02:42:16.000 Creativity is putting things together that never went together before.

02:42:19.000 This is a good thing.

02:42:20.000 Well, not only that, it's not even historically correct. 0.99

02:42:22.000 You know as well as I do that dreadlocks have been around for a long fucking time with white people. 0.96

02:42:26.000 But think about how it just polarizes us even more. 0.98

02:42:29.000 It's not real, though.

02:42:31.000 It's people looking for things to be polarized.

02:42:34.000 Yes.

02:42:34.000 And again, I do think, and I love academia, and I could have got swept up.

02:42:38.000 I enjoyed school at the college level so much, I could still be there today.

02:42:41.000 I mean, I've never gotten a job.

02:42:43.000 I would just be one of those guys.

02:42:44.000 I'm a graduate student at 51 helping the professors.

02:42:47.000 But at the same time, look, we all understand that those people are incentivized.

02:42:58.000 It's different when it spreads to the general culture a little bit, though, because now we're not in the ivory tower having a theoretical debate.

02:43:04.000 We're sitting there going, should that person be shamed on Twitter because he's an Asian person with dreadlocks?

02:43:08.000 Right.

02:43:09.000 Okay, folks, if you don't see that that might backfire on you down the road, I mean, we've all got to cut each other some slack on all sides if we're going to make this work.

02:43:17.000 Well, it's cultural appropriation is one of the things that makes America so fascinating.

02:43:22.000 Totally!

02:43:22.000 The melting pot of humans all together exploring each other's food and all the various aspects of their communities.

02:43:30.000 And the funny part is the cultural appropriators out there are sometimes the most sympathetic to that side.

02:43:35.000 I mean, if you're willing to get a Rastafarian's hairstyle, you're probably not an anti-black racist, right?

02:43:41.000 So when you tell them that they shouldn't be doing that, aren't you going after the people most...

02:43:49.000 We're good to go.

02:44:11.000 We didn't welcome you into the group.

02:44:12.000 We said, when did you start wearing these clothes?

02:44:14.000 When did you get that hairstyle, you poser?

02:44:15.000 In other words, the entire thing was exclusive, right?

02:44:18.000 So you try to build this movement.

02:44:20.000 You have to be an OG. Yeah, it was ridiculous. 0.97

02:44:22.000 How many years do you have to be a punk for before you're allowed to be a punk? 0.94

02:44:25.000 That's right.

02:44:25.000 Can you go in slowly?

02:44:27.000 Yes.

02:44:27.000 I mean, I remember they were going after, like, John Lydon, Johnny Rotten.

02:44:30.000 You're a poser.

02:44:31.000 Okay, well, then what are we doing here?

02:44:33.000 But I mean in the same way the one thing you have to do is cut people some slack and the one thing we human beings seem to have such a problem with is cutting people slack and it seems to be if you say the social media seems to be worse because you'll cut somebody slack face to face more easily than you will you know when you can just throw 140 characters and you go to bed but that comedian on the other side of your 140 characters I mean let me just you've seen this and I've seen this but if you've never been on the receiving end of Of these things where people...

02:45:00.000 And I've been very lucky and people have been very nice and kind to me.

02:45:02.000 But even I, when you read these things, you go, who is this person?

02:45:06.000 And why do they think that this is...

02:45:08.000 Did their lives get better because they texted me this?

02:45:10.000 I mean, do you see what I'm saying?

02:45:11.000 I don't get the motivation.

02:45:13.000 They don't even know it.

02:45:14.000 They're not thinking about it.

02:45:15.000 They're just acting.

02:45:16.000 It's a human instinct.

02:45:17.000 They hurt and they want to hurt others.

02:45:19.000 That's what you told me years ago.

02:45:22.000 You've helped me a lot when I look at those things, and I think, Joe's right.

02:45:26.000 This is people that are angry with their situation.

02:45:30.000 What did they say?

02:45:31.000 It's like the crabs in a pot, and one crab gets...

02:45:33.000 Crabs in a bucket.

02:45:34.000 Yeah, crabs in a bucket, and you pull the crab down. 0.69

02:45:36.000 And it's too bad, because you know what?

02:45:38.000 A lot of those people are the very people who could be doing much better if we could figure out a way to help empower them.

02:45:43.000 Well, they get better.

02:45:44.000 There's these people that have been haters that aren't haters anymore, and unfortunately, a lot of people have already blocked them.

02:45:50.000 Or just...

02:45:50.000 Or just dissatisfied people that are so upset with the way things are.

02:45:54.000 I mean, I really, I would love to see more effort made in that regard, because I think the subsidiary down-the-road domino effects would help us all so much.

02:46:02.000 But listen, we're a country that can't even get the most basic things passed.

02:46:05.000 How are we going to get something like that done?

02:46:07.000 I think change is happening.

02:46:09.000 I think it's happening incredibly rapidly, but I think we're stuck in the mix of it and we don't realize it.

02:46:13.000 It's sort of like when you come over to someone's house and you haven't been over their house in like five years and all of a sudden their kid is 10, you're like, holy shit, you're 10 now?

02:46:21.000 To them, it just happened gradually and slowly and they barely have noticed it. 0.99

02:46:27.000 But to you, when you take five years off and then you see that kid, you're like, holy shit! 0.99

02:46:31.000 The frog in the hot water thing, right? 0.99

02:46:33.000 Yeah.

02:46:34.000 Happening.

02:46:35.000 It is happening.

02:46:36.000 But is it positive?

02:46:37.000 See, this is where I can't, again, in the maelstrom trying to analyze, but is it positive or negative?

02:46:42.000 It's both.

02:46:43.000 I was going to say, you're an optimist, Joe.

02:46:44.000 We've had this conversation before, and I'm a little bit more cynical and misanthropic, maybe.

02:46:48.000 But I worry about figuring it out.

02:46:52.000 So if you say that human beings individually and as groups learn by mistakes, Yes.

02:46:56.000 Do you have to have a Holocaust-type mistake to come out of this before we go, wow, well, here's where we screwed up on that social media thing?

02:47:03.000 I mean, I wonder whether we're going to be allowed—I don't know how you would turn the genie, put the genie back in the bottle.

02:47:09.000 But, I mean, at what point do terrorists or dangerous people—I mean, look at the—to go back to that Weather Underground New Left bombing thing that I said that they didn't— They didn't like me waterboarding Abbie Hoffman.

02:47:22.000 But I mean, if you'd have had a bunch of people back then with Twitter saying, I support the Abbie Hoffmans, I support...

02:47:28.000 Okay, at what point would the government...

02:47:31.000 First of all, get you on a watch list then or now, but at what point would somebody have said, listen, for our own good, we can't have average Americans, because look how many terrorists are using this tool.

02:47:40.000 I mean...

02:47:41.000 We'll see what happens, but you had mentioned 9-11 and how, you know, so much of that, there was a feeling of community and all that other stuff, but there was other things, too.

02:47:48.000 There was the government literally, and I remember Peter DeFazio, the congressman up in Oregon, who said this to me.

02:47:53.000 He said, Dan, he said, there were bills that had been written and put on a shelf because there was no way to pass them for the longest time.

02:48:01.000 And he goes, when 9-11 happened, they pulled all those bills down, cobbled them into one thing.

02:48:07.000 Called it the Patriot Act.

02:48:08.000 Yeah.

02:48:08.000 And then he said, here's the real scandal, and most people don't know this.

02:48:11.000 He says, do you know how many parts of that bill were blank that we signed to be filled in later?

02:48:16.000 He said, that's not unusual.

02:48:17.000 He goes, because we get a lot of bills that they haven't figured out all the details, because most bills aren't as important as that.

02:48:22.000 When he goes, we signed off to a bunch of things with a bunch of blank categories to be filled in later.

02:48:28.000 Okay, gets us back to leadership right there.

02:48:30.000 What's wrong with the country?

02:48:31.000 A bunch of people signing a bunch of stuff that have nothing in it yet.

02:48:34.000 Like I said before, when you're talking about, like, are you optimistic or are you pessimistic?

02:48:39.000 Is it negative or is it positive?

02:48:40.000 It's both.

02:48:41.000 And I think the negative and the positive are both necessary.

02:48:45.000 I don't think we're gonna live in this utopian world where everybody's just friendly to each other.

02:48:49.000 I think people are gonna make mistakes, they're gonna be shitty, they're gonna realize that they're shitty, and the understanding of that behavior and the ramifications of that behavior is becoming more and more apparent every day.

02:49:00.000 And I think we're seeing that. 0.60

02:49:01.000 And I think we're caught up in this storm. 1.00

02:49:04.000 And there's a fucking hurricane going on, man. 1.00

02:49:06.000 This cow's flying by. 1.00

02:49:07.000 Bathtubs in the air.

02:49:08.000 All this stuff is happening right now.

02:49:11.000 The hope is, though, that we can get to the good...

02:49:13.000 Because I might agree with you in the long term, right?

02:49:15.000 If you're saying optimistic real long term.

02:49:17.000 Yeah.

02:49:18.000 But how many...

02:49:18.000 I mean, if you said in 1900, I'm optimistic long term that by the year 2000, things will be better.

02:49:24.000 Yes, but you have two world wars to go through in the interim and near misses on nuclear wars.

02:49:28.000 So...

02:49:29.000 I can agree with you that long-term we may have a positive outcome here.

02:49:32.000 I don't know what our immediate short-term, you and I have 20, 30, 40, you probably have 100 years left on your lifespan, but some of us are not in great shape.

02:49:40.000 So if you said the next 20, 25, 30 years, are you going to see good or bad from this?

02:49:45.000 We may have to go through some learning experiences, and those tend to not be so fun to live through.

02:49:50.000 Yeah, there's that, but also there's like, how about just disengage from that every now and then?

02:49:54.000 I do.

02:49:55.000 I agree with you.

02:49:56.000 Don't have your life completely dependent upon the success and failures of other people's emotions and ideas.

02:50:01.000 Like, just go off on your own more often.

02:50:04.000 Spend more time by yourself, more time pursuing your own activities.

02:50:08.000 Spend more time in nature with your phone off.

02:50:10.000 Spend more time doing things.

02:50:11.000 The nature thing's a really good idea, too.

02:50:13.000 And you know what?

02:50:14.000 Because, folks, that's what connects you to all the other human beings who ever lived before us.

02:50:18.000 The thing that makes our time period different here, this vast human experiment, is we've never had a generation growing up with mobile phones, for example.

02:50:25.000 What does that mean?

02:50:26.000 Well, one thing it does is it takes you away from the part that you're...

02:50:29.000 I mean, looking up at a night sky...

02:50:32.000 With nothing to do for hours, just sitting there contemplating the silence or the rustling of the trees or whatever, I don't know if you get anything out of that or not, but that's something that human beings have done since caveman times that you're sharing an experience that's innately human.

02:50:47.000 If that becomes less and less common because we're detached from that, What does that mean?

02:50:52.000 Like I said, we talked about an experiment earlier, that we're in an experiment.

02:50:56.000 What does it mean when people detach from that part of the human existence to spend more time in this new part of human existence?

02:51:02.000 I don't know.

02:51:03.000 Well, I think that part of being a person, like being in nature, it's part of us.

02:51:09.000 It's part of how we developed.

02:51:11.000 It's attached to our human reward system.

02:51:14.000 There's something that's deeply satisfying about lying down in a field and looking up at the stars.

02:51:18.000 There's a reason for all that. 0.96

02:51:19.000 And the more we detach from that, the more you're going to get these disenfranchised, very unhappy people that feel like they're a prisoner or a slave to some system that doesn't give a fuck about them. 0.96

02:51:30.000 Because it doesn't. 0.95

02:51:31.000 It really doesn't. 0.97

02:51:33.000 The people that give a fuck about you are your community. 0.85

02:51:35.000 They're your friends, the community of like-minded humans that you've bonded with that share your occupation or share your interests. 0.59

02:51:46.000 And that's how people develop satisfying relationships and satisfying lives.

02:51:50.000 The more you put yourself connected to something that doesn't even value you, some huge monolithic creation There's no one even running it.

02:52:02.000 It's not like some architect has figured out a great way to design civilization to satisfy all the humans that are a part of it.

02:52:08.000 No.

02:52:09.000 You're feeding this machine in some sort of a weird way that nobody really understands the ramifications of because we haven't done it before.

02:52:16.000 There hasn't been this Global connection of cell phones for thousands of years.

02:52:21.000 We know how to manage it.

02:52:23.000 We know how to manage your time and all your emotions on social media.

02:52:27.000 No, this is all experimental.

02:52:30.000 It's all happening in the moment and we're all a part of it.

02:52:33.000 And what's it going to be like three generations from now?

02:52:36.000 I'm scared that we're eliminating as much as possible boredom from our lives because I think the boredom is important.

02:52:44.000 When I was a kid, we talked about being weird.

02:52:46.000 When I was a kid, I had a lot of free time on my hands.

02:52:49.000 I had to figure out ways to entertain myself.

02:52:51.000 No video games.

02:52:53.000 And you end up doing things that, like, you know, you had talked about your whole, you know, we found this niche for me in this history show thing, because it's what I was born to do or whatever.

02:53:02.000 Yes, but it goes back to me trying to figure out, okay, I've played with these toy plastic soldiers every single day.

02:53:09.000 How do I make something new so that I can be entertained with these same toy soldiers, you know?

02:53:13.000 And I think that all, you know, if we think about building blocks in your brain, the need to overcome boredom, for example, is a prime mover when you're young.

02:53:23.000 You're not motivated by money.

02:53:26.000 You're not even motivated by the opposite sex.

02:53:29.000 You know, when you're a kid, you're like, what am I going to do to fill this afternoon?

02:53:32.000 And you find ways to, you know, I remember tearing up my mom's garden once to create a giant river system, you know?

02:53:38.000 Yeah.

02:53:39.000 But would you do that today?

02:53:40.000 Would you even bother?

02:53:41.000 It took hours.

02:53:42.000 Well, I wouldn't, but maybe a kid would.

02:53:44.000 Maybe there's an app where you can do the same thing.

02:53:47.000 My point is that these sorts of prime movers end up creating their needs that create the need for solutions.

02:53:54.000 If you get rid of that need, do you need the solution anymore?

02:53:57.000 And did the need for the solution create a different Joe Rogan, Dan Carlin, or Joe Blowout on the street than would have been otherwise?

02:54:04.000 We talked about creating a more formidable human being.

02:54:06.000 Having to overcome my childhood boredom created a more formidable human being.

02:54:11.000 It did.

02:54:12.000 Dan Carlin, we just did three hours.

02:54:14.000 Again.

02:54:15.000 Just went flying by, man.

02:54:16.000 It always does.

02:54:17.000 We got to do this more often.

02:54:18.000 We always say this, but can we please?

02:54:21.000 I may do a book soon. 0.99

02:54:22.000 Would you like to have a stupid book tour interview? 0.99

02:54:25.000 When are you going to do that? 1.00

02:54:26.000 I don't know.

02:54:27.000 Same time the virtual reality comes out.

02:54:29.000 Well, let's please sit down and talk more often.

02:54:32.000 I really enjoy it.

02:54:33.000 Can I just tell you, look, you're one of the most open-minded people, though, and I do quote you at times because you've taught me a lot.

02:54:38.000 Well, thank you, brother, and you've taught me a lot, too.

02:54:40.000 I appreciate it.

02:54:41.000 Dan Carlin, ladies and gentlemen, Hardcore History.

02:54:43.000 Go download, subscribe.

02:54:45.000 Bye.

02:54:58.000 We're good to go.

The Joe Rogan Experience - November 16, 2017

Joe Rogan Experience #1041- Dan Carlin

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