On this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, the comedian and podcaster joins me to talk about his trip to Comedy Central's Saturday Night Live show "Saturday Night Live" with Amy Poehler and Ron White. We talk about how important it is to take your phone out of your hand and put it in your bag. We also talk about texting and how distracting it is these days and how we should all be doing our best to not be distracted by our phones. And we talk about our favorite movies and TV shows and the things we do to make sure we don't get distracted by them. It's a fun, lighthearted episode that's a lot of fun to listen to and I hope you enjoy it as much as we did making it. Enjoy! -Joe Rogan Logo by Courtney DeKorte. Theme by Mavus White. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE on Apple Podcasts and leave us a review and tell a friend about what you think of the podcast. We'll be looking out for the next episode and we'll send it to someone else! . Thank you so much for all the love, support, and support the show! Cheers! -Jon and Sarah! -Jon & Sarah. Jon and Sarah Jon & Sarah: Sarah: Thank you for all your support, love, care, support and support, thank you, and send us love, bye! Jon + Sarah:) Joe Rogans Podcast: and Sarah: @ & Jon: , Tom: . . Joe: & Sarah : , Sarah: ) @ , and Sarah :) - :) -Jon: - @ & (Sue: : ) - Jon: @ . & @ ( ) - , & , etc. - Thank you, ? | Thanks for listening to the show, - John: and + ! J. , Thank you! , John: Thank You, Sarah: . , J/S. & John: Thanks, J/RJ: Thank You! & P. & J/AJ & R.B. : & B.
00:00:31.000Her last name, Lardner, so Kyle Lardner is her name, and she does piano, music, sells vinyl, and she's up there, but she, I think her, I think she said her grandfather or somebody wrote MASH back in the day.
00:04:38.000I mean, I've done a few times, like if I have to go away on vacation or something like that, we have to bank about a bunch of episodes, I wind up doing five in a week.
00:04:46.000And then at the end of the week, I just, I don't want to lose enthusiasm.
00:05:15.000I feel it could be coming and then I don't allow it to come because I remind myself how fortunate I am and about how happy I would be to be able to do what I did if I couldn't do it.
00:08:28.000Yeah, their safety record's pretty awesome.
00:08:30.000Yeah, we did it right before we left and left California to go to Utah.
00:08:34.000And we thought, okay, we're going to do this one last kind of kid-centric thing with all these amusement parks because my wife and I are not really amusement park people.
00:08:41.000Just surrounded by real sweating and just eating everything, long lines, crying, whining.
00:08:47.000So, yeah, we did that, and then I think that's it for us.
00:08:50.000If you want to find the hazards of the American diet in full effect, go to Disneyland.
00:11:17.000I always have since I was a little kid anyway, but I really wanted to start down that path and explore a different terrorist event and We're good to go.
00:11:54.000I mean, it changed the course of U.S. foreign policy for sure.
00:11:57.000The shadow is still in its shadow today.
00:12:00.000But yeah, it killed 241 U.S. service members and 58 French paratroopers.
00:12:05.000And it was the biggest loss of life for the Marine Corps since Iwo Jima and World War II. So it's a seminal event in Marine Corps history and in our history as a nation.
00:12:14.000But there isn't really the seminal work on it yet.
00:12:16.000So I wanted to do that and did that with Pulitzer Prize finalist, military historian James Scott.
00:12:40.000He has five other books out there, four on World War II, one on the USS Liberty.
00:12:44.000And I didn't know him personally, and doesn't really have a social media presence, so I couldn't really get to know him that way, but I just knew his work.
00:12:53.000And I thought, oh man, it'd be amazing to collaborate with this guy on this project.
00:12:58.000And so I reached out, and luckily he wanted to do it.
00:13:29.000Yeah, so it was an amazing experience.
00:13:31.000And we're going to hopefully kick off another one here.
00:13:33.000The idea was to do one nonfiction every year.
00:13:36.000As soon as I started down that path of research, I realized it was going to be a two-year, every two-year type of a thing because it just so much more goes into it.
00:13:42.000You just don't create it out of your head, obviously.
00:13:44.000You have to interview all these people.
00:13:45.000You have to go and then follow up with everyone, and then you have to confirm things that people said or all these things.
00:13:51.000So there's a lot more to it than I thought at the outset.
00:14:15.000For this one, it took a lot longer than I thought, because usually these books are about, or in this genre, they're about 115,000 words, between 100 and 115. This one came in at 150. So I kept thinking, oh, it's going to be done December 1st, January 1st, February 1st.
00:14:29.000And it just kept pushing, which is why we're here in July instead of, or sorry, in June instead of May.
00:14:36.000So it took a little longer than I anticipated, but that's just because the story dictates how long, because people are trusting me with their time.
00:14:42.000They're never going to get that time back, so that's something I take extremely seriously.
00:14:45.000So all my heart and soul goes into every word, but I love it.
00:14:49.000When James Reese continues to get older, are you going to let him get older or are you going to go James Bond?
00:15:39.000So what they need to do for that one, what they need to do, if they asked me after what they did at the end, and I don't know if we can say spoiler alert if people haven't seen the last movie, but it ends.
00:16:18.000Ooh, that would be very expensive, though.
00:16:20.000But not really today with CGI, with AI, what they're able to do now.
00:16:25.000You know, Tyler Perry was building an $800 million studio, and he stopped production on it when he saw Sora, which is the new AI program that almost, I mean, really quickly can render spectacular scenes.
00:18:02.000I need to read the after the strike last year because there was an actor strike also as you know and then then writer strike as well So I don't know any I was a big part of that, but I don't know it was yeah Yeah, where did it end up?
00:18:12.000Do you know where I don't know but they don't have much to negotiate with unfortunately There's there's an inevitability with this kind of technology.
00:18:21.000It's like would you write books with a feather?
00:18:40.000Well, that's the thing with AI. Like, instead of having people act out movies and having, like, real scenes and everybody's on set at 6 a.m., that's the thing of the past.
00:19:32.000So video games now look almost indistinguishable from a movie.
00:19:36.000There's this tiny hint of what they call the uncanny valley, where you can kind of tell that it's not real, especially when you're looking at human faces.
00:20:05.000You know, when I find, like, as long as it's something physical, like jujitsu, you can only do jujitsu two hours a day, you know, at the most, maybe a little bit more.
00:20:13.000After that, your body just breaks down.
00:20:47.000This stuff is moving at an exponential pace to the point where...
00:20:51.000Five, six years from now, you're going to be experiencing this, but in VR. You'll have the meta headset on, and you'll be experiencing this probably on an omnidirectional floor.
00:21:44.000That's like the size of this table almost.
00:21:46.000And so you get on this thing and the game will take you down corridors and alleys and You know, you go cross fields and you'll be able to do this and I'm sure eventually what they'll be able to do is have different terrain.
00:22:02.000Like you'll have like a textured terrain or maybe even elevation.
00:22:07.000You'll be able to go up like a treadmill.
00:22:17.000Dance Dance Revolution is this game these kids started playing in an arcade and everybody started losing weight.
00:22:22.000Because, yeah, because it's a dance game where the floor lights up, like, blue, you're supposed to step on blue, and then, you know, there's, like, different things that you're supposed to do, and there's a pattern on the screen that you're supposed to follow.
00:22:34.000And you get a score based on how well you keep up with the steps.
00:22:38.000So all these people are, like, playing a video game, but they're burning an insane amount of calories.
00:22:43.000People lose, like, 50, 60 pounds playing this game, which I support.
00:22:47.000Like, if there's a game that can make you healthy, fuck yeah, that's awesome.
00:23:01.000Well, also, they just announced that the former chief of NSA is going to the board of OpenAI, which has freaked a bunch of people out, including Edward Snowden.
00:23:39.000Obviously he has a beef with the NSA. But if you were the, like, let's imagine National Security Agency is an important thing for this country to have, if you're having these fucking eggheads that are developing the next super being, which is essentially what they're doing.
00:23:55.000They're gonna develop, whether it exists in a physical form, it only exists on a computer, It's going to be far smarter than us within a matter of a few years.
00:24:04.000And so just for national security concerns, you probably would have to have someone go and be there and go, hey, what the fuck are you guys doing?
00:24:45.000Apparently, what we're at now is ChatGPT 4.0 or 4.0, and the next ChatGPT 5 is going to be exponentially more powerful, and that's in the pipeline.
00:24:57.000Well, it's the manipulation part that we're already just with social media.
00:25:00.000I mean, you can take it back 10 years.
00:25:02.000I mean, Twitter X is similar to when it started, essentially.
00:25:38.000So if there's a website, you know, like James Webb Telescope found some new galaxy, I'm like, I don't have time for this fucking gigantic article.
00:28:57.0003, 4 in the morning, sometimes 6, 7. God damn.
00:28:58.000If I'm just on a roll, I'm just going to keep going because deadline's looming, but I don't want to rush anything to hit that deadline, if that makes sense.
00:29:05.000I want to be the best story I possibly can.
00:29:08.000I don't want to get to a certain number of words or, oh, the deadline's coming.
00:29:20.000So that goes back to the phone, handing that off to somebody, having other people do some things so that I can focus on the writing, maybe in some hours that are a little more normal or healthy.
00:29:28.000But do you think you'll ever get to a point where you say, you know what, in order to do a book the right way, I have to do one every two and a half years?
00:30:40.000I think there's a couple guys who have done it.
00:30:42.000Well, I think when you get a little, maybe, when you get a little older, like John Grisham, so kids out of the house, that sort of a thing, and you don't do all of the other things.
00:30:55.000But I think you can get to that stage where you're not doing, if you're not doing a podcast, and you're not doing social media, and you're not writing a blog, and you're not updating your website.
00:31:04.000Zero of those things, but you love to write, and all the kids are out of the house, and you already have established a readership from the 80s, the 90s, early 2000s, when there were less distractions, when we didn't have all these video games, didn't have social platforms, didn't have YouTube, didn't have on-demand any movie ever made that you can have anytime.
00:31:21.000So that's essentially what you're competing with, with books.
00:32:33.000You know, some people get upset that there wasn't this scene or that scene or these characters get morphed together or that sort of a thing.
00:33:12.000I did a whole cigar lighting scene in this one, in this book.
00:33:15.000I have one of my favorite chapters in previous books was James Reese talking to Caroline Hastings, who's the matriarch of this Hastings family.
00:33:24.000It's just a conversation, so nothing's blowing up, no one's getting their head chopped off with a tomahawk and anything like that.
00:33:29.000It's just a conversation and passing on of wisdom.
00:33:32.000And I did that again this time with the Patriarch.
00:33:35.000And so it's Jonathan Hastings talking to James Reese, and he's rolling a cigarette like old school, the way he would have done it back in Africa, in Rhodesia back in the day.
00:33:43.000And then James is doing a cigar, but he's lighting it in the way that he learned from Jonathan Hastings' brother in what was then Mozambique.
00:33:51.000Yeah, people get real dorked out on how to light a cigar.
00:37:27.000So if I have an idea for a bit or something like that, I can say it in my notes, and then when I go on my computer and I just press the notes, it's there.
00:37:33.000I need to get better at that sort of thing.
00:37:35.000I have notepads everywhere, yellow stickies everywhere.
00:37:43.000The best thing about the phones today is that you can talk to it.
00:37:48.000On both, like the Apple one and this one, too.
00:37:50.000You just open up a note, and then when you open up a note, when you're writing a new note, you go down there and you press the microphone thing, and when you press the microphone thing, it just lets you talk.
00:41:16.000And so then if you store things in the cloud, like if you store your script in the crowd or your book in the cloud, you could access it from anything you want.
00:42:49.000Obviously, if you don't do the work, you're never going to get where you want to go.
00:42:52.000When I first read it, I felt like Pressfield was using the term the muse as just sort of Maybe it's not a real thing, but you treat it as if it's a real thing and it works that way.
00:43:05.000Because of the time and focus that you put, it will accumulate over time.
00:43:43.000Your mind pulls it out of a lot of things, like your life experiences, your current state of, you know, depression or happiness and all the things you've read your whole life.
00:43:54.000There's like so many things that you're pulling creativity out of.
00:43:57.000But there's a thing that enters into your mind sometimes when you come up with an idea where you're like, that is not from me.
00:44:06.000I know this is just popping up, and maybe it's just my ignorance of the way synapses fire, but I'm not sure.
00:44:13.000Because my thought is, everything that exists that human beings have created came from an idea.
00:44:22.000Like, all cameras, all houses, everything was an idea that we got and then we worked at it and manifested it into form.
00:44:34.000And if the universe has A driving force.
00:44:40.000When it comes to intelligent life, that driving force seems to be creating things.
00:44:45.000And I have a feeling that ideas themselves are almost like a life form that Injects itself into human consciousness and then encourages and guides people to do things,
00:47:00.000It's just we don't know how to tune into it.
00:47:02.000And I think that guiding force also exists creatively.
00:47:06.000I think there's a guiding force in terms of the things you do.
00:47:10.000If you're living your life right, and you're doing the things you're supposed to do, and you're good to your friends, you're disciplined, and you get to a certain point in your life, you're like, wow, it's almost like fate's real.
00:48:09.000Why were they on that bridge at that time when it collapsed?
00:48:13.000And it's just an interesting thing to think about.
00:48:15.000And I thought about it again in Iraq back in 2005, 2006 timeframe because anything could have been an IED. And you're going down the road, you're heading to a Target, you're doing a convoy, whatever you're doing.
00:48:25.000And anything, a dead donkey on the side of the road, trash, whatever, just a disrupted piece of dirt, whatever, anything could be an IED back then.
00:48:33.000So we got there and I thought, you know what, I can either be worried about that sort of thing or I can just accept the fate part of it and do my job at that time as an officer and do my job as the best leader and operator I can possibly be and focus on the mission and focus on the guys and crush this thing.
00:48:49.000And that's where my focus needs to be, not on whether that thing's an IED. I got somebody up in the turret as we're going.
00:49:25.000It is, and it's interesting hearing that from you because you're talking about it in the most extreme environment that exists, which is war.
00:49:33.000And that in order for you to be completely focused, you kind of had to give in to that.
00:49:38.000That's the only way you'll be able to do your job.
00:49:40.000And then also, if you're not completely focused, it could wind up costing you or your teammates lives.
00:49:48.000That's the same reason while I was in, all I focused on, and I had to talk to my wife about this, but she understood it, the pendulum's on the side of the team when you're in it.
00:49:57.000If you're bringing guys downrange, maybe you're in a staff job somewhere, maybe not, but if you're taking guys downrange, you do not want to be 10 years on from whatever's going to happen downrange in Iraq or Afghanistan or somewhere else around the world sitting on that couch after something goes sideways, wondering if you did everything you possibly could have done in preparation for that event to be the best Right.
00:50:36.000Because it was just something that I was very aware of, just reading histories of Vietnam and thinking about the guys when they came home from that and just how the enemy gets a vote.
00:50:45.000You can also do all those things I just talked about and things can still go sideways.
00:50:49.000But I wanted to know that I was as prepared as I could possibly be.
00:50:53.000And in the margins, in the far ends, those hard days that you put in in training could be the difference between your life or your teammates.
00:51:47.000And it's one of those things I also saw as I was getting out.
00:51:50.000So I went to the training command buds my last couple years in, which is when I started writing the first book.
00:51:55.000And that's when I wasn't taking guys downrange anymore.
00:51:57.000I knew I was getting out, so I didn't have to be solely focused on that.
00:52:01.000And I could start doing these other things and focus on that.
00:52:07.000I didn't know through my executive summary, through my outline, until I started to write those first words, how personal it was going to be.
00:52:15.000And it became a very personal writing experience.
00:52:17.000Initially, I thought, oh, I'll get the sniper stuff right.
00:52:19.000If I don't know something about an aircraft or a submarine, I can call somebody and at least I know people to reach out to who can connect me with someone who spent time in the submarine force or in an aircraft I need to write about or something like that.
00:52:31.000But I didn't know how personal it was going to be from a feeling and emotion standpoint.
00:52:35.000So if my character gets ambushed somewhere, I can remember what it was like in Baghdad 2006 to actually get ambushed.
00:52:41.000And then I can take those and apply them right here to this fictional narrative.
00:52:46.000James Reese in the first book gets ambushed on the streets of L.A. by this assassin guy.
00:52:50.000But I can remember what it felt like to be on the receiving end.
00:52:53.000And then those feelings and emotions go directly on the page.
00:52:56.000So I don't have to find a sniper from, let's say, Ramadi at the height of the war and interview him.
00:53:00.000And then have those answers get filtered through movies I've seen, other interviews I've done, documentaries, other books, whatever it might be, and then fictionalize it and put it on the page.
00:53:08.000It goes all heart and soul right in here.
00:53:10.000So it was very personal, much more personal.
00:53:39.000Fifth grade was when Hunt for Red October came out, which is why I have a submarine section in the beginning of this as a nod to the 40th anniversary of Of The Hunt for Red October for Tom Clancy and everything he did for the genre.
00:54:48.000I thought there was going to be a lot, because you're sending this to Simon& Schuster, it's a publisher of all these books that I've read growing up, and I thought, oh, they know what they're doing back there, so they're going to make all these changes.
00:54:58.000The questions that I got back are still the ones that I get, content edits today, which are like, hey, explain this for somebody who wasn't in the military.
00:55:06.000Or now, hey, explain this for someone who hasn't read the previous six books.
00:55:10.000Put another sentence in there or two just to explain who this person is and why they're here.
00:55:14.000So those are the kind of edits that I get, but no real big content edits at all.
00:55:19.000And I didn't know, because I'm stepping into this for the first time back then, and I didn't know if it was going to be like, Hey, you know what, you should lay off on the violence, or do you have to have so many guns in there, or do you have to describe them?
00:57:39.000Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, I think it has to come from you.
00:57:43.000I think that's what makes work of fiction and really good books, makes it so unique, is that you know it's coming from one person's mind.
00:57:51.000That this thought, these ideas that they had, they wrote it out, and they sat there, and they summoned the muse, and they put it all together, and then I know it's coming out of you.
00:58:46.000Writing those things is a team effort for sure.
00:58:50.000As you know from writing scripts, there are other constraints, budgetary constraints, the location constraints, there's a story arc within that episode, and then an overarching story arc for the whole, whether it's seven, eight, or whatever, how many episodes there are.
00:59:01.000So there's all those things to consider.
00:59:03.000And then there's notes from senior level executives all the way back down.
00:59:15.000Like everyone that I've ever talked to that ever sold a script or sold a book idea and they turned it into a movie and they didn't have anything to do with it, they fucking hated it.
00:59:24.000Yeah, I mean you have buy-in, and it's good and bad because it's not going to be a strict adaptation.
01:02:04.000A career is something, let's say you walk in and you're working your way up that ladder and you have a plan and profession is something that's a calling, it seems.
01:02:15.000There's a reason we call it a profession of arms, not the career of arms, although there are a lot of careers in the military that are working their way up that ladder.
01:02:22.000And you cover that in the book as well.
01:02:23.000I do cover that, and I get to take them out in all sorts of creative ways.
01:02:26.000So it's very therapeutic for me to write these things.
01:02:30.000That's what's really sad, is that you would think that the military would be like the most pure of all institutions, because it has to be, because you're literally...
01:02:38.000Taking the strongest amongst us and having them go and fight for our country and fight for our interests.
01:02:44.000And you would think that there's no room for bullshit, but apparently there's a lot of room for bullshit.
01:02:49.000Well, there's a lot of room for advancement, I guess.
01:02:52.000If you simply don't pop positive on a piss test, don't get too many DUIs, and don't get arrested for, let's say, domestic violence or something like that, you can stay in the military for a long time.
01:03:03.000So you don't need to excel when you hit a certain rank.
01:03:08.000And I think that when you, that's what we see it play out in Afghanistan, August of 2021, that's 20 years of being able to plan for that withdrawal.
01:03:17.000And that's the best that our military leaders could do.
01:03:23.000So somebody can look at that who never had any touch point with the military and apply common sense and logic to that problem set and have a much better plan to extract forces from Afghanistan.
01:04:17.000I mean, if you're going to execute something that's as complex as removing all the troops from a place that we've occupied for 20 years, It seems like that would involve a very thoroughly reviewed plan by many experts and come up with what's going to cause the least likelihood of casualties.
01:04:45.000So in 2003 in Afghanistan, and I thought it was catching the tail end of it then, because the flashpoints before that, we had Mogadishu, we had Panama, Grenada, Desert One.
01:04:55.000So after Vietnam, you had these flashpoints.
01:04:57.000And this was now we're moving into extended combat operations.
01:05:00.000But from the end of Vietnam up to then, our model is a flashpoint, essentially.
01:05:05.000So We all thought if we weren't there, essentially, right after 9-11, that we were going to miss it.
01:05:09.000And then we have essentially 20 years.
01:05:11.000But I remember being in the back of a Hilux pickup truck with an Afghan guy.
01:05:16.000And I'd always ask him if they were...
01:05:17.000Back then, I could ask him if they were Muj, if they fought the Soviets, because I was always interested in that history and their backstories and what that life was like in the late 70s through the 80s into the 90s.
01:05:26.000And so I was always essentially collecting information just because I was curious.
01:05:30.000But as I'm talking to this guy, I distinctly remember thinking, man, One day we're gonna leave this place, and this guy is helping us right now.
01:05:37.000What's gonna happen to his family when we leave this place?
01:06:51.000Ian Fleming, we talked about him earlier.
01:06:53.000You can go back and read those books from the 50s and that really is a portal back to post-World War II Great Britain and their changing place in the world.
01:07:00.000I mean, empire decline and that's Ian Fleming's way to keep that old empire alive is through James Bond and his creation.
01:07:06.000So they're time capsules back to the time in which they were written.
01:07:29.000So I like to weave pop culture and history into the pages of the novels as well, because they are their time capsules for the time in which they're written.
01:07:36.000It's also a constraint because now you have to think about Teslas and GPSs in cars and GPSs in phones and video cameras everywhere.
01:07:44.000So you have to think about that, especially when you're writing an espionage type of thriller.
01:07:48.000You have to think about all that stuff and weave it into every chapter.
01:08:33.000If you're running around in a city, they're going to have access to security cameras, they're going to have street cameras in some countries, and you could be tracked so easily.
01:09:13.000I saw the fucking craziest story about this guy who got a bunch of plastic surgery and changed his appearance and changed his name so that he could try to date his girlfriend who had a restraining order on him.
01:13:06.000That's why it looks like two-tone, because it's essentially getting a shadow, but then the shadow is also getting light from the upper light, from the upper cameras.
01:13:14.000So he looks fake right there, but that's just shadows.
01:13:17.000It's because he's being lit from below.
01:13:51.000So what you would have to do is you'd have to have the person in the mask, and they'd have to talk in their voice, and then what you could do with AI is change the voice to be exactly like Biden's voice.
01:15:39.000Robert De Niro, because, look, there's something about being a star where you think your opinion's more important than anybody else's, and you can go give a press conference, and he obviously has been very vocal from 2016 that he hates Trump for whatever reason.
01:16:03.000Like you've opened up this, instead of just being this cranky old liberal, which I know a lot of them, you know, instead of that, now you're this guy that is yelling at other people that are Trump supporters and they're yelling at you.
01:16:16.000Like you've opened yourself up to this nonsense.
01:16:22.000Now, every movie you go to, 50% of the population is going to not want to go see that movie.
01:16:27.000I think there's a certain thing involved in being an actor at a very high level, and I think that's one of the reasons why you never see Daniel Day-Lewis give conversations.
01:16:44.000He's very rarely talking about things that are in the news, and he's not doing one of those fucking Imagine There's No Heaven videos and everybody's Get COVID. Remember those?
01:16:54.000And there's a bunch of celebrities telling you how important it is to not vote for Trump.
01:17:00.000There was all these videos from 2016. You're not going to see Daniel Day-Lewis in those.
01:17:04.000Because for Daniel Day-Lewis, for the master of masters, to be able to embody these completely different human beings, you kind of don't want to know much about him as a person.
01:18:13.000I miss the feeling of watching those movies and getting just fired up and then going out and doing pull-ups and sprinting hills and all that stuff.
01:18:20.000It's just hard when you know something.
01:18:21.000When you know something, like if you were watching a movie about the military and they were doing shit that's just absolutely never going to happen and not real.
01:18:32.000And that's what was important to Antoine Fuqua, to Chris Pratt, David DeGilio, to me, was doing something that when somebody who served in the military or law enforcement, firefighter, intelligence officer, somebody that did these things for real can pop that beer and sit on their couch and watch the show.
01:19:11.000You have to take a moment to try to get these things right.
01:19:14.000It's easy, not easy, it's still hard to make any show.
01:19:18.000And that's why I appreciate all shows out there now because I know how much work goes into making even the bad ones and how easy it is for things to go off the rail.
01:19:25.000So it's a shocker that anything gets made or anything good gets made, certainly.
01:19:29.000But you do have to take that extra moment to think about, hey, how is this going to look to somebody who does this for real?
01:19:52.000And they do that in some karate movies, but there's a suspension of disbelief aspect of those movies where you jump up and kick two people at the same time.
01:20:00.000Yeah, there's the fun aspect, but if you're trying to make a serious film and try to do this, that's why Daniel Day-Lewis is so great, because he becomes that character.
01:20:07.000I think you have to talk to him on set like he's that character, is that right?
01:20:25.000That's why I write this one-page executive summary when I start these things and I ask myself, is this worth the next year, year and a half of my life?
01:20:33.000But I read it again and I say, is this worth, if someone was walking by Hudson News and grabs this off the shelf and reads the back of this paperback or whatever, Is it interesting enough for them to devote time?
01:20:40.000They're never going to get back to this story.
01:20:42.000I have a hard time with those movies about real people where you don't know what they said to their wife behind closed doors.
01:21:12.000You don't know what the fuck they're saying.
01:21:14.000Unfortunately, no recordings of Lincoln's voice exist since he died 12 years before Thomas Edison invented the phonograph.
01:21:20.000The first device to record and play back sound, if anyone had an educated guess as to how it sounded, though, it would be Holzer, who has written 40 books on Lincoln.
01:23:06.000It was, like, first season, I think, was 2000, at the end of 99 or something like that.
01:23:09.000And it lasted to 2009. Yeah, I kind of lost a lot of that during that time frame because 9-11, going downrange, focused on that, starting a family, all that stuff.
01:23:18.000So we kind of missed a little bit in there.
01:23:20.000So now I need to go back and watch these things.
01:24:10.000You're saying that you like these guys who happen to be criminals or doing bad things or whatever because of the way they're written, the way they come...
01:24:15.000You get to know them through these things.
01:24:37.000Or have you heard Danny Trejo talk about doing...
01:24:41.000There's a couple movies that came out about gangs and his affiliation there with those, but he's acting in these same things and having to go and actually get permission from the different gangs to do them.
01:26:01.000The first killing occurred 12 days after the film's premiere when one of the film's consultants, Charles Charlie Brown Manriquez, a member of La M.A., was killed in Ramona Gardens, L.A.'s oldest public housing project Another consultant in the film,
01:26:17.00049-year-old grandmother, Ana Lazarga, commonly known as the Gang Lady, was murdered when she was gunned down her East Los Angeles driveway while loading luggage into her car the day of her mother's funeral.
01:27:52.000I have Alice, this character I introduced two books ago for In the Blood, and an AI quantum computer, and people really liked this character, but I didn't want to sideline her for the next one, for the last book, because I didn't want to rely on her like, Michael Knight in the 80s calling Kitkar on his watch and having it jump in Trans Am and zip off.
01:28:09.000So I sidelined her last book, but I knew I couldn't introduce a character like that and just ignore her forever.
01:28:16.000And even since I did the research for the last book, and that's only two years, things have increased at such an exponential rate as far as AI, quantum computing.
01:28:24.000And then the military side of that, autonomous control of platforms.
01:28:27.000So all these new things that are coming out, whether it's submarines or it's aircraft or surface ships, whatever it might be, they're all being built so that they can be autonomously controlled.
01:28:38.000They may not be yet, but they have that ability.
01:28:41.000Have you seen that insane new ship that's autonomous?
01:29:44.000That's a real problem that people are terrified of when it comes to weapon systems.
01:29:48.000And if you're doing it, what is China doing?
01:29:50.000So we're doing it, and China's doing it, and you have to get inside your enemy's decision-making process, and they're making decisions so fast using AI to make...
01:29:58.000I mean, you can have missiles raining down Yeah.
01:30:12.000And not only that, but these supersonic ones can change directions, so you can't even picture where they're going.
01:30:22.000So I got to explore all that in the past.
01:30:24.000Probably why this book took so long is because I was...
01:30:26.000Doing that research and it's just new things coming to light every single day and then people you're talking to in that space giving you little hints about what's really out there.
01:30:34.000And then you talk to somebody else who gives you another little hint and you get to put this mosaic together like a reporter might.
01:30:39.000And I think what I describe in the book, I think we're way past it.
01:30:44.000We're already way past it as far as quantum computing, AI and what the ability of those platforms, what they have, what they can do.
01:30:54.000I think what we know is probably really the tip of the iceberg, and I think they're probably far more advanced than we think they are right now.
01:31:02.000I think that's what a lot of the UAP stuff is.
01:31:04.000I've been thinking that for a long time.
01:31:06.000I think it's very possible that we are visited.
01:31:10.000Tucker Carlson seems to think they're spiritual beings that they've always been here, like they're devils and angels.
01:33:19.000Because in UFO folklore, it's obviously the comedy mothership, and we have a UFO, you walk in the front doors of a UFO. It's fantastic.
01:33:26.000In UFO lore, they all started appearing shortly after the UFO, the bombs were dropped.
01:33:33.0001947, and that's when we'd reorganize the military and intelligence agencies.
01:33:37.000Right there, we changed the Department of War to the Department of Defense, and the Secretary of War to the Secretary of Defense, and everything gets reorganized, right?
01:33:48.000Kenneth Arnold's UFO sighting occurred on June 24, 1947, when private pilot Kenneth Arnold claimed that he saw a string of nine shiny, unidentified flying objects flying past Mount Rainier at speeds that Arnold estimated at a minimum of 1,200 miles an hour.
01:34:05.000So he saw these things flying at a rate, you know, in 47, there were propeller planes, and there's no way anything we had can move like that.
01:34:13.000And he's watching these things go at an insane rate of speed.
01:34:17.000And so he said they skipped across the sky like flying saucers on a lake.
01:35:17.000Senior Air Route Traffic Controller for the Civil Aeronautics Administration was in charge of the National Airport, Washington, D.C. ART Control Center on the night of July 19, 1952. Briefly, he states in a newspaper article, our job is to constantly monitor skies around the nation's capital with electronic eye of radar.
01:35:34.000Shortly after midnight on that day, seven pips appeared suddenly on the control center's scope.
01:35:39.000Ed Nugent, Jim Copeland, and Jim Ritchie all experienced radar controllers, checked the observations.
01:35:45.000The airport-controlled tower radar operator verified the same sightings.
01:35:49.000They were over the restricted areas of Washington, including the White House and the Capitol.
01:35:54.000So those kind of things, you gotta go, well, what is that?
01:35:58.000Look, the universe is big beyond our wildest imagination.
01:36:03.000There's no way we could even fathom how big it is.
01:36:42.000Planet out there that's in the Goldilocks zone, that's gone through what we're going through currently, but is 10,000 years ahead of us, and finds the signature of nuclear bombs on this planet, and they realize, oh, okay, these crazy fuckers have come into this new age where they could split the atom.
01:37:00.000And so we should probably take a visit.
01:37:11.000Diana Pasolka and Gary Nolan, who is a legitimate professor, I believe at Stanford, And they, Diana Posalk, who's also a professor, she's a professor of religion.
01:37:23.000And they have investigated a lot of these crash sites.
01:37:27.000And the way they describe them, the people that are investigating the crash sites, the actual scientists, they call them donations.
01:37:58.000They blindfolded them, took them out to this crash site, let them investigate it.
01:38:02.000And you can still find these pieces of this, some kind of metal that you can take and you can crumple it in your hand like tinfoil, and then it...
01:38:10.000It goes right back to the original shape.
01:38:40.000They have, you know, regular phones, but no cell phones, obviously.
01:38:44.000And what they're doing with all this stuff is they're all talking about it, and then a narrative gets established, and then people tend to repeat narratives that are established.
01:38:53.000It's hard, because you're talking about something that happened in 1947. Right.
01:38:58.000There's a lot of things that come almost right after Roswell.
01:39:01.000One of them is a transistor, and the other one is...
01:39:24.000It's very difficult to figure out what the fuck actually happened, but something seems to have happened because the Roswell Daily Record, I have a framed cover of the front page of the Roswell Daily Record from 1947, where it says that there's a crashed UFO, that the government flew to the base,
01:39:40.000and that, you know, it's like in the news.
01:39:53.000It could be something that the United States was working on.
01:39:56.000It seems like they were trying to cover it up so much so that they flew the wreckage in two separate planes to Wright-Pattison Air Force Base.
01:40:45.000So Nazis, I guess, when they were going through this rite of passage, when they were in whatever university they were going to, they would have duels.
01:40:54.000With real rapiers, like real swords, and they would slice their faces up.
01:41:03.000And these guys got their faces all cut to shit, and that was like part of the pride of being a Nazi, was you had these dueling scars on your face, that you had done this.
01:41:13.000And a lot of the guys we brought over from Operation Paperclip had these dueling scars on their face.
01:41:18.000And it's one of the ways that future historians identified them as clearly being Nazis.
01:42:38.000That there's something going on that's real.
01:42:40.000But I also like to think that if the donation thing is true and that's been going on since who knows how long, you know, Bob Lazar claimed in the late 1980s that he had been working back engineering one of these things.
01:42:55.000And the way he described it is exactly how they see them move today, exactly how there's a video of these things moving in bizarre ways.
01:43:09.000It's like the Terminator 2 hand, you know, going back in T2 and reverse engineering that technology from T2. It's interesting how movies and books eventually become reality.
01:43:19.000It would be good if you could travel back and forth through time and you realize that human beings are going to take X amount of steps to get somewhere, but if you can inject some technology into the equation, you could speed up the process considerably.
01:45:12.000The odds that he was completely innocent, very low.
01:45:15.000It seems like he was over here doing some shady shit.
01:45:19.000He had always been involved in some shady intelligence type shit.
01:45:22.000But I think there was a lot of people, and I think they wanted to really make sure that Kennedy got killed.
01:45:27.000And I think there was probably a lot of people involved, and I think Lee Harvey Oswald probably was a patsy, and I think that's probably why Jack Ruby shot him.
01:46:32.000You fire the guy, now he's in charge of investigating who assassinated you.
01:46:36.000And, you know, the best book that I ever read about it was David Lifton's book, Best Evidence.
01:46:41.000And David Lifton was an accountant, and they hired him to go over the Warren report.
01:46:46.000And so he goes over the Warren Commission report, and he read the entire thing, which is like insanely long.
01:46:52.000It finds all these inconsistencies and all these things don't make any sense.
01:46:56.000The difference between the way they viewed the body at Dallas versus the way they saw it at Bethesda, Maryland when they brought the body there.
01:47:05.000And then there's the magic bullet, which anybody who's ever shot anything with a gun knows that's horseshit.
01:48:04.000It was interesting because I listened to that show right before I went back to New York for the Simon& Schuster 100th anniversary celebration event, and I was speaking there, and so was Bob Woodward.
01:48:13.000I was sitting next to him in the green room.
01:50:19.000That's why it's amazing when you see Tulsi get sidelined.
01:50:24.000What's great about her is that she has changed positions on things.
01:50:31.000But because of that, she gets it from both sides now.
01:50:33.000So you get the people that say, oh, look, she once had this view of Second Amendment or whatever, And now it's changed, so I don't trust her type thing.
01:50:40.000Well, how are you going to ever convince someone or talk to someone or open somebody's aperture about how to think if you don't want them to change sides and don't bring them into the fold?
01:50:50.000Yeah, it seems silly to make people stick to their original idea on something.
01:50:58.000If you're a human being and you see things...
01:51:01.000Like, there's a lot of people that were pretty hardcore leftist liberal progressives that lived in California that were like, okay, these policies are insane.
01:51:11.000Like, I'm getting the fuck out of here.
01:51:19.000If I'm saying you're out of your fucking mind, maybe you're out of your fucking mind.
01:51:23.000So people change their perspective based on new information.
01:51:27.000The people that bury their head in the sand and pretend everything's amazing and we're eventually going to pull out of this and our philosophy is correct, you're not course correcting.
01:51:35.000If you're not course correcting, you're not learning.
01:51:37.000And if you're not changing your opinion in light of...
01:52:19.000Yeah, Times Square Cafe is not anywhere near Times Square.
01:52:22.000Put in the phone, I'm like, all the buildings are kind of sending you in circles, you know, I'm like, oh yeah.
01:52:27.000So I walk at night across New York, like a long, like 30 minutes, maybe even 40, and I'm like on E&E, you know, I'm like, I'm on edge, and I'm making my move here across, and it was sketchy.
01:53:52.000And there's not, you know, it's a lot safer here than L.A. I think there's just something happens when you have large populations.
01:53:58.000And then also, you know, New York is...
01:54:02.000They're doing this no-cash bail thing where they're just letting people out of jail, including people that assault police officers, including illegal immigrants that assault police officers on video.
01:54:14.000You come back, unfortunately, by going too far in the other direction until you want to bounce back and be liberal again.
01:54:21.000Unfortunately, this is what happens when people get unreasonable.
01:54:23.000When they go that far, then you usher in some totalitarian, hard-nosed, sort of right-wing person who also comes with a stripping of certain civil liberties, and also has a more cruel approach to certain social issues.
01:54:42.000And then people go, we need more kindness, we need more this.
01:54:46.000But generally, it's like, it used to be at least, that you would get the right wing that were pushing for war.
01:54:53.000The most bizarre thing about our time is that the left, Is calling for aid to Ukraine and that, you know, I think they just signed a commitment to help Ukraine for the next 10 years.
01:55:07.000I think there's just something that Biden just signed, and I think they're promising like $800 billion, or they're going to need $800 billion over the next 10 years.
01:55:37.000A series of pledges of military and financial aid made by Western allies this week, including a 10-year security agreement with the United States, and a $50 billion loan issued by Washington and the European Union.
01:56:10.000So I'm volunteering, helping them get in out of their wheelchairs, making sure they're taking their medicines, eating, getting them to the events, all that sort of thing.
01:56:16.000But totally inappropriate during the speech is, and even during the benediction or the The prayer at the beginning mentioned, not Ukraine by name, but the storm clouds are coming.
01:56:28.000So you have all these veterans of World War II, D-Day, on this stage at the American cemetery there overlooking Omaha Beach, and these politicians up there to give speeches can't help themselves.
01:56:39.000They have to mention storm clouds coming, mentioning it.
01:57:44.000Not appropriate for the 80th anniversary of D-Day for these guys that jumped out of planes, landed gliders, Back then, imagine landing a glider at night on June 6th in these fields where the Germans have put these poles up so that if you land,
01:58:00.000you can just get crushed in your glider.
01:58:01.000When a guy was talking to you, his glider came in.
01:58:03.000He went right between two of these poles.
01:58:46.000It's very disturbing that we don't learn, you know.
01:58:49.000Really is, you know, all the way back to Smedley Butler's War is a Racket.
01:58:54.000We don't learn, you know, and money always motivates everything.
01:58:59.000And there's always some way to make some sort of a moral argument why we need to do certain things, why we need to act, and why we need to fund this and fund that.
01:59:08.000But ultimately, there's a lot of money being moved around.
01:59:10.000And we know that once it gets over there, we really don't know where the fuck it's going.
01:59:16.000There's a lot of nice cars in Budapest and other places in Europe too.
01:59:19.000I've talked to people in the intelligence services.
01:59:23.000There's a lot of money rolling around over there and it's not easy to track and it's not really something that anybody's trying really hard to document.
01:59:32.000It seems also very dangerous to point out if you were an official person and you started pointing out the fact that this money is moving around.
02:00:03.000Yeah, I mean, this is a wild, wild time that the left is the one that, the left side, the Democrats, the progressives, are the ones that are calling for this crazy war.
02:00:18.000I know, because when we grew up back in the day, it was the exact opposite.
02:00:21.000They were trying to get us out of everything.
02:00:22.000Yeah, they didn't want to have anything to do with anything.
02:00:25.000And everybody's like, great, because this was after Vietnam.
02:00:28.000And if you wanted to be a Democrat and you wanted to win back then, you had to be anti-war.
02:00:32.000You know, you had to be anti anything remotely close to what's going on right now.
02:00:37.000Especially when you know the history of like NATO and moving arms closer to the Russia's border and saying that right like Kamala Harris saying that Russia's gonna or that Ukraine's gonna join NATO like what?
02:00:50.000That's a crazy thing to say openly in the world.
02:00:54.000You've got to put yourselves in the other person's shoes.
02:00:56.000There's something looking at things from their perspective, and that's what we do in the military, trying to put ourselves in the enemy's shoes, figuring out how they're going to adapt to what we're doing right now, and you have to do that at the strategic levels, too.
02:01:05.000But unfortunately, you get people at these levels who just stuck with it, and they've never created anything in their life, and they don't understand the history, but guess what they can do?
02:01:15.000They know how to manipulate a population.
02:01:17.000Through their words and through all these things, all these different verticals and institutions that support them to get them into these positions in office.
02:02:25.000The bad part of all this is that if you're the enemy, you almost just want to let us not do anything because we're doing such a good job at destroying ourselves.
02:03:01.000U.S. Navy submarines arrived in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba in a show of force as a fleet of Russian warships gather for planned military exercises in the Caribbean.
02:03:10.000U.S. Southern Command said that USS Helena A nuclear-powered fast-attack submarine pulled into the waters near the US base in Cuba on Thursday, just a day after a Russian frigate, a nuclear-powered submarine, an oil tanker, and a rescue tug crossed into Havana Bay after drills the Atlantic Ocean.
02:04:03.000And that's this book right here was all about that.
02:04:07.000But from the China-US perspective, those geopolitics, who's doing what?
02:04:11.000Taiwan, the Taiwan issue in there as well.
02:04:13.000So it's fascinating to have done that research now and see where China is compared to where they were a few years ago and then think about where we're going in the future.
02:04:23.000But It's tough to do all that research and remain hopeful.
02:04:30.000You talk to all these different people and you're interested in so many things, but yet you remain so hopeful in all these conversations that you have with people.
02:04:37.000Yeah, I'm hopeful, but I'm not sure if I'm right.
02:04:40.000You know, I started getting nervous about China when they banned the Huawei devices.
02:05:01.000It was a bunch of different routers and different technology that they had they believed China would be able to access information through.
02:05:12.000It's embedded in almost everything that we have, that we rely upon, not just on the civilian side, but on the military side, the intelligence side.
02:05:53.000You're gonna force them to go in now, and then when you're there, will you indoctrinate them with all this bullshit?
02:05:57.000So instead of getting people that want to serve, which is the people that you want, the people that are dedicated to it, that are driven towards this life, Instead of that, you're forcing people to do it, and then once you get them in there, you can kind of force your ideology on them.
02:06:13.000The type of people that sign up for the military, they would be way less likely to buy into that horseshit.
02:07:06.000But I remember when the Gulf, when Desert Storm broke out, I was living with a buddy of mine, and we were watching on TV, and I was like, what?
02:07:18.000I was alive during Vietnam in San Francisco.
02:07:22.000I was a kid, and when Vietnam ended, I remember thinking, as a kid, I guess I was like 10 or something, I remember thinking, whew, glad we got over that.
02:07:34.000And now it's even more complicated with all this artificial intelligence stuff and Mike Baker was in here and he was showing us these videos of these fighter jets that are using AI now, that are winning dogfights 100%.
02:07:46.000100% of the time over actual human pilots.
02:07:50.000So human pilots can't beat the AI system.
02:09:01.000So they're buying up properties next to these bases where they can essentially observe and put listening devices out and do all those sorts of things that you need a base of operations.
02:09:10.000And you don't even need a base of operations for a lot of this stuff anymore because it's all virtual.
02:10:46.000U.S. government said it's spending more than seven million a year to maintain a super yacht it sees from a sanctioned Russian oligarch and urged a judge to let it auction the vessel before a dispute over its ownership is resolved.
02:10:59.000Authorities in Fiji seized the 348 foot, 300 million dollar Ameda in May of 2022, pursuant to a U.S. warrant alleging it's owned by Suleiman Kermov, a multi-billionaire sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department in 2014 and 2018 in response to Russia's activities in Syria and Ukraine.
02:11:43.000So that's the one that we just talked about.
02:11:46.000This is the Tango, the Lady M, these fucking massive things.
02:11:50.000And so these Russian oligarchs, a lot of them, they rush to get their yachts to different countries that are more sympathetic, that let them get away with it.
02:15:02.000I mean, it was such an interesting time, end of the Cold War, that whole period of the 90s for those guys, where really those criminal enterprises really become like government.
02:16:59.000Putin does not use other people's dishes, doesn't go without an army of guards, does not go to the toilet in public places, she said on Monday, by publishing footage from inside his palace and floor plans who make it impossible to use the palace.
02:18:14.000And actually, someone had a bit about that last night.
02:18:17.000They did a bit on that last night and talked about how, from the Russian perspective, us trading, whoever we traded for her, what, the arms dealer or terrorist or whoever we exchanged this for?
02:18:26.000And he did a bit about them being like, wait, what?
02:18:29.000They're actually going to go for this?
02:20:44.000Breitling was worn by a lot of gray area operators, both good and bad, subjective terms.
02:20:48.000With strong roots in aviation, Breitling is a signal that the wearer is adventurous, but also appreciates fine craftsmanship and utilitarian tools.
02:22:42.000So I had the GPS on my rifle stock right here so I could check my point man just to make so I didn't have to ask and I always knew where we were.
02:22:47.000So I had that there and then I had another one on my belt and then another one right here and then one here for a call on air.
02:22:53.000So I could look right here and talk to aircraft and call air off that one.
02:24:57.000Yeah, I don't need another thing telling me that I need more sleep.
02:24:59.000But you definitely notice the difference between drinking and not drinking.
02:25:02.000So if I, even a couple of drinks, like if I go out to dinner with some friends and I have a couple glasses of wine, I would notice my recovery score would suck in the morning from just like two glasses of wine.
02:27:35.000Because in the military, you feel like, you know, you have people above you in the chain of command, and you're like, oh, this guy is fine.
02:27:39.000You express that very well in the book.
02:29:27.000The military didn't help out with the show.
02:29:29.000Which is great because sometimes they put constraints on what you can do or say if they help out with a ship or a plane or a base or something like that.
02:29:37.000So they did not help out with the first show.
02:30:06.000But could it also be that they just don't want to put themselves out there, that they don't want to be a personality, they just want to be the person relaying the information?
02:30:13.000Yeah, because if you do, like, sign off on someone's nonfiction who also writes fiction, you are somehow or another connecting yourself to them.
02:30:30.000But a ton of people, what made me very, I mean, super excited about this book is the nonfiction, is that the people who are there, the people who are digging their dead friends out of the rubble, That's who I really wanted to honor by writing this nonfiction, to keep those lessons learned and also tell their story,
02:30:48.000because it really hasn't been told yet.
02:30:50.000And you have people that are still alive, people who are alive who lost sons in that attack, so you want to do right by them.
02:30:56.000And I think every single person who has read it, who is there, has said thank you for writing it.
02:31:21.000I mean, I was in high school at the time.
02:31:23.000Yeah, so 83, and we had the embassy bombing in April of 83, and then you move into the spring, further into the spring, all through the summer, attack happens in October.
02:31:32.000But all through that time frame, these guys are in combat, and the administration is saying peacekeeper over and over again, calling them peacekeepers, peacekeepers.
02:31:39.000But you talk to these guys who were there, who were on patrol, they were in combat.
02:31:43.000And so I got to capture that and really put that into the book, because that part of the story People don't really understand how many guys had died between the Embassy bombing and the Marine Barracks bombing, how many people were wounded during that time frame, how many people were just engaged in combat during that time period.
02:32:01.000Because there wasn't social media back then and you're just relying on an administration and then there are talking points, that's what we never really got told.
02:32:10.000That's one of the things that does keep me hopeful, that there is so much information available today whenever anything happens.
02:32:16.000You don't have to just rely on mainstream media's depictions of things, everything that's been sanctioned down through the government, whatever narrative they're trying to push.
02:32:24.000Now you get just so many independent reporters and so many real journalists that are giving you the actual details of it in a very disturbing way and you get angry.
02:32:33.000And you go, why am I not hearing about this in the news?
02:32:36.000Like, why is this perspective not being shared everywhere?
02:32:40.000And then it, you know, unfortunately for the mainstream media, it just makes people distrust them more and more.
02:32:46.000The trust with mainstream media and with our senior level elected officials is, I don't know if it's an all-time low, but it feels like it is.
02:32:53.000It's about as low as I've ever experienced it.
02:32:56.000Obviously, I wasn't aware, at least, during the Vietnam War.
02:33:02.000But I would imagine back then, especially after Kent State, it was probably a lot like that back then, too.
02:33:11.000But there's also now there's the influence of foreign governments where they create bullshit stories and they create bullshit rabbit holes for people to go down and they suck people into these things and then reinforce it online with troll farms.
02:33:23.000And it's like there's so much nonsense.
02:33:26.000It's so hard to know what's real and what's not real.
02:33:28.000Yeah, that's the value of you doing this.
02:33:30.000That's why I appreciate what you do here with this podcast because it's one of the few places people can go and get these honest conversations.
02:33:38.000They're not a 30-second soundbite, a two-minute soundbite.
02:33:40.000Even if you have someone that knows what they're talking about on mainstream media but you only get two and a half minutes, two minutes.
02:33:46.000Half of that is the host talking or asking the question.
02:33:49.000You don't really get a deep understanding of what's going on.
02:33:52.000You don't really get to conceptualize what's really happening and make it a part of you so you can make informed decisions, whether it's in the voting, when you go to vote, or it's in a conversation with friends or your family.
02:34:02.000But you get to do that here, which is awesome.
02:34:03.000Not only that, they usually have someone arguing.
02:34:42.000When the fall of the Soviet Union happened, I remember this huge feeling of relief that swept through the entire country.
02:34:49.000Because when we were kids, we really thought that we were going to go to war with Russia and there was going to be a nuclear war and everyone was going to die.
02:34:56.000That was something that hung in the air all throughout the 1980s.
02:35:12.000I know we've talked about this before, and I've thought about it throughout the last year, but I haven't changed my position on it about going back in time.
02:35:20.000In fact, I double down on it when I think about it.
02:35:53.000I would like it, I think, if it wasn't attached to all these things that I have to plug in and they're trying to manipulate me.
02:35:58.000I know I keep going back to that, but it makes me a little bit crazy.
02:36:02.000It's also a thing that gives you this ability to recognize bullshit because it's coming at you from all these different angles.
02:36:08.000I think people are a little bit more reluctant to buy into official stories now than they ever have been before, especially after the whole COVID fiasco happened.
02:36:15.000I think people are a lot more interested in what the fuck is actually going on than ever before.
02:36:21.000Because it actually can affect their life, you know?
02:36:27.000And we all had touch points with it, and now, but just like Afghanistan, I don't really talk about that stuff anymore.
02:36:32.000We don't really talk about all these businesses that got shuttered, which is why I try to support independent bookstores as much as I possibly can, do things that are only for independent bookstores.
02:36:51.000Continued to do that today with Shot Through Pages.
02:36:53.000So I try to do that to help them out because I remember going to see you in LA and I packed up and I drove out there and there was no one on the road.
02:37:00.000And then I got to LA on the 405 freeway, driving up to where I was staying, and it was a ghost town.
02:37:36.000But I think the overall perception, if you looked at it, has shifted in a way that people are a little bit more aware of horseshit now than ever before.