Actor and singer Chris Christopherson joins Jemele to discuss his life, his career, and his new album Fallen, which is out this month. He also discusses how he got his start in the entertainment industry, and why he decided to go all-in on his dream of becoming a Christian singer-songwriter. He also shares the story of how he became a Christian rock star, and how he ended up in Hollywood. And, of course, he tells us about the time he almost died in a car crash on the side of the road while on a road trip with the devil. It's a great episode, and one you don't want to miss. Check it out! The Joe Rogan Experience is a show where Jemele and I talk about music, movies, and other things related to pop culture. If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE on Apple Podcasts and leave us a review and tell a friend about the show! Music: Fallen - Fallen - On My Way to Heaven (feat. Brandi Carlisle) - On The Way To Heaven (Chris Christopherson) - Fallen (Brandi Carlisle, Brandi) - On The Road To Heaven - On the Hill (On The Hill To Heaven) Thank you so much for being on the show, Jemele! and thanks for being here! Cheers, Jeromy! - Joe and Jemele and God bless you! XOXO - Thank you for listening and supporting the show. - Your support is so much more than you could ask for us to have the chance to be featured on the next episode of the show and the rest of the podcast, we really appreciate it. Thank you, we appreciate it! -Jemele and the support we get it. xoxo, Jerolee. XO, - The Joe Rogan Experience. JOE ROGAN PODCAST - The J.R. Experience - The Jerolees & the J. Rogans Experience - Jemele & the rest will be back in the next EPISODCAST - Cheers! - Thankyou, JOE JAYE - JOE CRYTONTONGS - JOSH MILLER, JORDY WELCOME, JACOB RODAN AND THE CHEROS (CHEESE) - JAMES KELLY
00:00:43.000How long have you been singing gospel?
00:00:45.000Well, you know, basically I grew up in the Baptist Church, and so it's five songs that I grew up with, and it's five songs that I wrote before and during the making of the record.
00:00:56.000It's kind of like my spiritual journey, I guess.
00:00:58.000That's the way it turned out in the end.
00:01:00.000My wife, she put the order together, and that's what it seems to be, kind of my journey in life.
00:01:09.000Was this something that you had thought about for a while, or did it just kind of...
00:01:15.000Yeah, I wrote this song called On My Way to Heaven, and I wrote it for my mom to let her know that I was okay after I got out of rehab for cocaine in 1990. Then I wrote Fallen,
00:01:35.000which is kind of like taken from, remember that movie Thunder Road with Robert Mitchum?
00:01:41.000It's kind of like in that vein or that kind of feel to it.
00:01:45.000And there's this highway called the Devil's Backbone up near Bandera.
00:02:18.000You know, I realized I was never going to shred a guitar, so a songwriting became like a defense, you know, something you could bring to a band.
00:04:32.000I was a vet's assistant up in East Texas.
00:04:35.000I'd spent summers up in East Texas, Jacksonville, Frankston.
00:04:42.000I worked for a vet when I was 14, 15, and that's what I was going to do until one day we did like a house call out to this guy's farm to castrate his horse.
00:04:56.000And the farmer didn't want to sit out there in the field and wait for him to wake up from a full anesthetic.
00:05:02.000So they only gave him half of it and cinched his legs up like this.
00:05:09.000And that horse stood up on two legs and it was just – man, it was horrific.
00:05:14.000And that kind of – I think that's what changed my mind.
00:06:03.000Yeah, but the French New Wave is what they called it, kind of more handheld, grittier, and it was the return of the anti-hero and the rebel hero, because Hollywood had lost touch with their audience.
00:06:20.000They were making movies like Toby Tyler and these bloated musicals, which...
00:06:26.000And so it became like the inmates had taken over the asylum.
00:06:32.000There was really new, exciting stuff getting done, like Badlands and The Conversation, which led to The Godfather.
00:06:43.000And that was, I think, the golden age of filmmaking.
00:06:48.000Well, certainly some amazing films came out of that era.
00:07:29.000Like I said, the inmates had taken over the asylum and it was a feeling like you could do just about anything.
00:07:35.000And music too was really happening in Los Angeles as well.
00:07:40.000Record deals were getting signed left and right.
00:07:48.000It's kind of turned upside down now because of all that rebellious attitude of the 70s and everybody who did it sort of became the establishment, I think.
00:08:52.000Well, it's also one ideology dominates, especially in Hollywood, dominates the entire business.
00:08:59.000You know, one of the things that I said that drove me crazy about Hollywood was there's people that had differing opinions about things, but they would never speak out because it could damage their career.
00:10:06.000Well, how did the rebels become – like, what the fuck happened?
00:10:10.000How did the rebels become the establishment?
00:10:12.000That is – we went through an era where – remember, tolerance?
00:10:20.000That was what we were trying to do, like, back in the teens, I think, in the tens, where you tolerate other groups and all that.
00:10:28.000And that didn't last very long, and it seems like one had it over the other.
00:10:34.000But if you ask me where this great divide really started politically, I think...
00:10:40.000Of course, there was Watergate, but you come up to, like, when the Republicans had their contract with America, I think it was, like, 94 in the year that...
00:10:54.000Clinton was going to be a lame duck president.
00:10:59.000And then it started to become just along party lines where there was no – you were a traitor if you went to the other side because we had conservative – We had conservative Democrats.
00:11:14.000We had liberal Republicans up until that point.
00:13:50.000And I think some of that was certainly they were emboldened by the fact they're essentially running the country without a president for the last three years.
00:14:58.000Did you see the thing where Trump came out and said that he was going to stop taxes for tips of hospitality workers, and you wouldn't tax them on tips anymore?
00:15:08.000Yeah, that was like a month and a half ago.
00:15:10.000Yeah, and then she came out and said, she's going to do it, and she's going to stop tips, and everybody cheered as if it was her idea.
00:16:32.000He had that meeting that he had with the Taliban leadership, and we're going to leave, but if one soldier's head is touched, we're going to be back.
00:16:48.000And just to show you how we can do it...
00:17:36.000People are pretending that if he gets into office, he's going to become a dictator, as if he wasn't in office for four years and was never a dictator.
00:18:11.000Have you ever seen the difference between Democrat donors versus Republican donors?
00:18:16.000There was a chart that someone made about the amount of people that donate to the Democratic Party versus the amount of people that donate to the Republican Party.
00:18:28.000That's where it's completely turned upside down.
00:18:31.000Because it used to be Republicans who were known as the fat cats and big oil and big business and all that would be the...
00:18:41.000Big supporters and donors of the Republicans, and it was like those $5 and $10 donations of the Democratic Party because they're really a coalition of groups.
00:18:51.000But then I think starting with Obama especially, it started with social media.
00:18:57.000It really started to get into more of a corporate type of Yeah, tech oligarchy.
00:19:12.000The tech thing's nuts because nobody anticipated that these corporations were going to have this insane amount of influence and power over people.
00:19:20.000I've had this guy Robert Epstein on my podcast before him.
00:19:24.000I don't know if you've ever seen his work, but he basically does statistical analysis of Google search results and what Google does to change people's opinions and how much of an effect it can have on swaying an election.
00:19:37.000Because if you go look for Trump rally, you'll see a bunch of Kamala Harris things.
00:19:42.000If you go and try to find something negative about Kamala, you'll find all these positive things about Kamala.
00:19:47.000So these Quick searches, which most people do.
00:19:51.000Most people aren't doing deep dives for hours where they're going and reading and finding other alternative sources of information.
00:19:58.000They get their information from a Google search.
00:20:00.000And that Google search, if you can curate it and make sure that all the positive stuff about the people that you want is up front and all the negative stuff about the people that you don't want is up front, you could shift people's opinions by 20, 30 percent.
00:21:58.000Is that what the idea is that's bothering them?
00:22:01.000I see it as a biopic, is really what it is.
00:22:05.000It follows him from when he was a boy in Dixon all the way through when he said goodbye to the American people when he was diagnosed for Alzheimer's after he was president.
00:22:16.000And it's a fight against communism, which he fought all of his life.
00:22:23.000But the reason being was that the content in it was an attempt to sway an election.
00:22:34.000I mean, the last time I heard, you know, Reagan was on the ballot 40 years ago was the last time.
00:22:41.000Do you think if you made a positive Obama movie, it would be to sway an election?
00:22:45.000Well, there was an Obama movie that came out during an election year in 2020. And, you know, nothing about that.
00:22:53.000And to me, just the act of banning or censoring that material, as you were talking about, is an attempt to sway an election.
00:23:03.000And Reagan was a Democrat before he was a Republican, by the way.
00:24:23.000He'll go after, make fun of you personally, or whatever.
00:24:28.000Yeah, but he didn't prosecute Hillary.
00:24:35.000He's, you know, with all the things they did to Trump, I do believe that when he, as far as revenge and all that stuff, that the success in the election would be his revenge.
00:24:50.000And I really believe that if it was Biden who was You know, impeach or going to jail or whatever.
00:25:01.000To tell you the truth, I don't think he wants anybody to see a president in jail, because that really changes our country.
00:25:09.000Well, he has said that openly about Hillary.
00:25:11.000Like, when he got into office, there was a lot of people that were pressing him to prosecute her, to go after her, for the email thing, for a lot of different things.
00:25:19.000And he said, no, that'd be a terrible look.
00:25:27.000So all these things that people think he's going to do, well, he had the opportunity to do those things four years ago.
00:25:32.000And they're thinking now they've done so many egregious things to him now with all the prosecutions and then the years and years of Russiagate.
00:26:07.000But then when they went after him with the judicial system, these like stupid charges – That's when things change for me, because then you're messing with the Constitution.
00:26:23.000And we can't go back from that after something like that happens.
00:26:35.000And the other thing is, people need to understand that even if you hate Trump, if you normalize weaponizing the judicial system against a political candidate, that can be used against your party too.
00:26:49.000And if someone gets in, like Vivek Ramaswamy gets in, or if Ron DeSantis gets in, and he starts doing the same things that they did to Trump, then we have chaos.
00:28:07.000And the fact that these people are so ideologically captured, they can't recognize the danger of doing the things that they're doing in order to win, and that you can't fix that stuff once you put it in motion.
00:28:22.000I don't know how this is going to turn out, but if this was a show, I'd be like, holy shit, what a great show.
00:28:28.000The writing on this show is fucking incredible.
00:30:11.000Yeah, but the whole thing is very strange.
00:30:14.000It's like, how is this not like a deep investigation that's on the front page of every newspaper where people are trying to figure out, was this a government conspiracy to kill the presidential candidate?
00:30:50.000All the talk shows, everyone's with her.
00:30:53.000A person who just a month prior was being hidden because she would say so many dumb things and every time she had a talk openly with no script, she would blunder and fuck things up.
00:31:05.000Now all of a sudden she's the perfect candidate.
00:31:40.000And the fact that no one's freaking out about the dangers of this, and the fact that this is the first time ever that someone who nobody voted for, nobody voted for in the primaries, had zero delegates, is now being the person who is at the front.
00:32:05.000The people that have the least amount to do, the people that are willing to answer polls, the people that when you call them up, say, do you have a few minutes of my time?
00:35:26.000I think there's a certain percentage of the American people that are living in a movie.
00:35:35.000They have no real understanding of all the mechanisms that are involved that make this world work and why it's working in the way it's working and what the dangers are of it.
00:35:46.000There's so many people that are only fed by the mainstream media, which is completely corporate controlled.
00:37:27.000That was all the things he saw on television.
00:37:28.000And then when Trump started winning on television, You could see it in the look of the faces of the pundits, the people that were on TV that were calling the election.
00:39:24.000And when he came out like that, I was really happy for him, to tell you the truth, because to have to carry that around, what you feel inside, that's really important.
00:39:37.000But that doesn't mean that the entire nation has to...
00:39:41.000Flip over and change to accommodate that.
00:41:59.000But if you want to compete athletically, we're going to pretend that the shape of the hips, the density of the bones, size of the lungs, size of the heart, the ability to react quicker, all these different advantages that we know exist.
00:42:14.000And now you're putting ideology ahead of facts and ahead of science and ahead of the biological reality we know about the advantages that men have.
00:43:04.000You look at the biological facts of this stuff, it outweighs the ideology.
00:43:08.000And then you look at the transitioning children.
00:43:11.000I mean, have you ever seen these interviews where people go up to people and they say, do you think that a child of 12 years old is old enough to get a tattoo?
00:43:47.000Do know their gender when they're young.
00:43:50.000In a way, maybe later they look back and realize that they were that way when, you know, they were either gay or from, you know, a place of hindsight in a way.
00:44:36.000Is it just the openness that's always been there?
00:44:38.000Or is it that this is some sort of a fucking mind virus and these people are being influenced by the positive reaction they get from saying that they're LBGTQ2 plus AI, whatever the fuck it is now.
00:44:51.000It's like there's a social contagion going on and there's an aspect of that that's real.
00:45:01.000But educated people that are not paying attention to this thing called gender dysphoria that has always existed.
00:45:08.000How do you think we get back to being able to have an exchange of ideas and not just try to put the other one in jail or try to dismiss them from society?
00:45:22.000It sounds ridiculous, but I think the only way is to do what we're doing right now and to continue talking about it as reasonable people and have people listen to it and it shapes people's opinions and things.
00:45:34.000And to pretend that these psychological conditions, there's a psychological condition called autogonophilia, where men get sexually aroused dressing up as women.
00:45:44.000But they're usually attracted to women.
00:45:47.000So now these men are pretending that they're lesbians.
00:46:17.000It's very strange and it's not good and it's not sustainable.
00:46:20.000And I don't know when people are going to fully recognize the harm that they've done to all these children that they've had mastectomies and forced...
00:46:38.000There's no fucking reversing, damaging someone's puberty.
00:47:25.000I mean, I look back at the 60s and, you know, we've always been kind of a nation, at least in this century, of experiments that go on as a society as a whole.
00:47:37.000You know, you had the flower children back then and that whole counterculture relationship.
00:47:42.000Sure, the weather underground, all that shit.
00:48:50.000First to control the bottom line of the money, but then the more people that you get have kind of acquiesced control over, the more your bottom line is going to go on, and then it's about power.
00:49:09.000And, you know, I think we've been shown in this, getting back to what we were talking about before, that that really is what is going on.
00:49:20.000And what was going on in 2020, if you ask me, with the tech companies deciding to, you know, what we were going to see and what we were going to hear.
00:49:31.000And it's pretty much exposed and dangerous.
00:49:37.000And we're not prepared for that influence.
00:49:40.000We didn't know it was going to exist before.
00:49:43.000There's no laws in place to keep it in check, which is why Google is allowed to curate the search results and why they're allowed to censor conservative voices on social media.
00:49:53.000One of the things we found out, like, thank God for Elon Musk, because if Elon Musk had not bought Twitter, we would not have known the extent of the government's meddling into information distribution.
00:50:03.000They were literally trying to get them to ban legitimate news stories, and they were successful with the Hunter Byron laptop story.
00:50:12.000But other legitimate conservative perspectives and points of view and people that were legitimate doctors and scientists that had questions about the way we're handling the pandemic.
00:50:23.000Yeah, which also 100% turned out to be true.
00:50:25.000And then when it – there is no kind of, okay, we were wrong about this and this – they just kind of dismiss it.
00:50:33.000I got in a conversation with a guy who was like, well, you know, what about you?
00:50:36.000These are not ideological issues that you're talking about when it comes to medicine, especially, but everything gets turned into a political.
00:50:44.000That's what's crazy, that vaccines and pharmaceutical drug companies became a democratic, liberal perspective in supporting that, like these corporations that have the biggest criminal fines in the history of medicine.
00:50:58.000It's all these companies, these pharmaceutical drug companies for doing things that were illegal.
00:51:07.000And people still wholesale bought everything they said and if you disagreed, you were some sort of a fringe conspiracy theorist who was a danger to everyone around you.
00:51:47.000But it was the drug company also which was kind of liable in that the The 10-milligram unit, the 10-unit bottle that the kids were supposed to get was light blue, and the adult was dark blue, and that was 10,000.
00:52:24.000It's very difficult to get them to change anything.
00:52:28.000They're all located, for the most part, in Illinois, and they have that system wrapped up.
00:52:35.000But everybody at the FDA, I won't say everybody, but there are so many people at the FDA in positions that are either former employees of drug companies or Future employees of drug companies.
00:53:12.000So, what happened, you know, during COVID was, you know, there's still these boys that are, you know, dropping dead, you know, at 17 of heart attacks.
00:53:24.000And it's, people don't trust their government anymore.
00:53:30.000And that's the same it was back in the late 70s before that election.
00:53:34.000People didn't, since Watergate, hadn't trusted their government.
00:53:38.000What's bizarre to me is that even with all the evidence of these people dropping dead, the people that are around the people dropping dead are in denial about it.
00:53:48.000Because they all advocated for a very specific thing, and when that very specific thing may be causing a bunch of deaths, they don't want to take credit for it.
00:53:59.000They don't want to be in trouble for it.
00:54:00.000They don't want to be beholden to their To this idea that they had the pharmaceutical drug companies are telling you the truth, and that this is the only way out of this, and if you didn't do it, we're all gonna die, and everybody went into this with this terrible fear, and because they stated that early,
00:54:16.000now they're committed to it, and they're defending it because it's a part of themselves.
00:54:22.000If you look at what insurance companies are dealing with now, with excess deaths, That's some of the best data that we have, is excess mortality.
00:54:34.000And the excess mortality is extraordinary.
00:54:37.000At any other time in history, if there was a thing that was rolled out where all of a sudden everybody's taking it and all of a sudden you have this amazing increase in excess deaths.
00:54:48.000And cancers that are what they're calling turbo cancer.
00:54:52.000And if you listen to Peter McCullough, he explains how this could be causing that, that the mRNA vaccines could be causing these turbo cancers.
00:55:02.000Yeah, because it actually changes our molecular structure down to, you know, the chromosomes in the DNA. It's a man-made thing, which is affecting our body in a bad way.
00:55:17.000Yeah, and it's killing people that took it, that were advocating for it, that were tech people.
00:55:22.000There's tech people that are dropping dead left and right, and they're still on this bandwagon, and they're still letting the CDC saying, you should vaccinate anyone under 12. Like, what the fuck are you talking about?
00:56:46.000We talk about it and the same thing is going on.
00:56:52.000Coming from China and all that, what could have happened is it could have been an exchange, a real exchange of how It had really happened and what the process was of how it happened to make sure that it doesn't happen again or during the research of the vaccine to put that out where it could have helped there as well.
00:57:21.000It just winds up being, you know, everybody lines up on the side of ideology.
00:57:54.000That's one of the things that's so interesting because we have more access to information now than we've ever had in all of human history, and yet people are more divided by ideology than they are by facts than any other time in history.
00:58:07.000A lot of it has to do, I think, with cable news, too.
00:58:10.000People have, you know, separated themselves.
00:58:15.000You know, on DirecTV, there's Channel 200 where you got like six boxes up there and you could watch all the news and it flipped back and forth.
00:58:25.000And it's like watching a different story, a completely different story depending on where you're going.
00:58:30.000Somewhere in the middle there is the real thing.
00:58:33.000One of my favorite moments was when Joy Reid was comparing Biden getting COVID to Trump getting shot.
01:00:14.000Yeah, I've been reading this unspoken – I've forgotten the author's name – but it was endorsed by RFK Jr. about the assassination of his uncle, the president, John Kennedy.
01:00:30.000And it takes every piece of information that is known and Puts it in a book and tells a story from it.
01:00:40.000And it was our government, I think, that killed Kennedy.
01:00:49.000And through the CIA, the dark forces within our government.
01:00:57.000If that can happen, then how about today?
01:01:55.000This guy, Norman Ohler, he wrote about drugs during the Third Reich and about how they experimented with LSD on concentration camp prisoners and all the stuff that they were giving Hitler while he was in the middle and all the stuff they were giving the Nazis.
01:03:31.000We have not heard a single press conference.
01:03:33.000The first thing that I would have done, but besides like try to figure out how the fuck this kid was on the roof for 30 minutes without anybody doing anything, How he got a rifle there, how he got a ladder there, how the snipers didn't shoot him, how they didn't go up there and take him out before this happened.
01:03:49.000Secret Service was supposed to be in those windows.
01:03:51.000I mean, they had a fantastic look at him, but they were downstairs drinking coffee or whatever the hell they were doing.
01:03:59.000Well, not only that, a lot of those people were Department of Homeland Security.
01:04:02.000They weren't even Secret Service agents.
01:04:22.000I do not think, if you're going to, let's assume that someone trained him, told him how to do this.
01:04:28.000Let's assume this wasn't a young 20-year-old kid with very sophisticated detonators and remote controls and all these different things that we know that he possessed.
01:04:37.000Had this rifle, brought the rifle onto the roof.
01:06:46.000It would have no idea what happened and they probably would have memory hold it all the exact same way they did it now and then they would have said the country has to heal and move on.
01:07:37.000So rifles either have a scope, which is a magnification scope, which is extremely accurate, but you have to adjust it, or they can have iron sights.
01:07:45.000And iron sights are like, oh, you have a pistol.
01:08:22.000You could do it, and then you would need to go to a range and sight it in.
01:08:25.000The problem with a scope would be that if things were getting jostled around and knocked around, if you bang the scope on something, it can get moved just a fraction of a millimeter to the left or to the right, and then your zero point at whatever he's got it zeroed at,
01:08:43.000if it's 100 yards or 150 yards, it's going to be off.
01:14:41.000I think he was quite adept at getting that info.
01:14:45.000Well, wouldn't we know that this kid had Google search how to use explosive devices and figured out how to get the detonators, figured out how to wire it, how he learned?
01:17:32.000I'm not even talking about having everything go the way I want it to go.
01:17:41.000To get back to a time when whoever was in the White House and at least we were a people that could at least agree 70% of the time And I think we are a people that agree 70% of the time as a whole.
01:18:11.000And most people are just not savvy enough to understand the effect of this manipulation, which is – I think that's a big factor we're experiencing.
01:18:20.000There's just a lot of people that aren't even aware of all the things that we're talking about.
01:18:24.000There's a lot of people out there that think, oh, Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.
01:18:33.000After about 12, 15 years, it started to sound like conspiracy theories to me and stuff.
01:18:41.000And then I completely switched over again because of evidence, really, that's coming out.
01:18:50.000I really want to see the rest of the files.
01:18:53.000And why are they not releasing the files?
01:18:55.000I know Trump released a bunch of them, but I guess there's people living that.
01:19:02.000Well, there's also the complete erosion of faith in the intelligence agencies.
01:19:06.000If it turns out that the CIA did kill JFK, or that they were involved in the killing of JFK, and it could be proven, which is what Tucker Carlson's been saying.
01:19:15.000If that is the truth, that would be...
01:19:18.000I mean it would throw the whole country into a tailspin.
01:19:21.000We wouldn't know what the fuck to do because if you really found out that in 1963 they organized an assassination on the president, pulled it off, killed him, lied to the public, published this bullshit Warren Commission report.
01:19:34.000Tried to pass off this nonsense of the magic bullet.
01:19:39.000John Foster Dulles, who ran the CIA, you know, they had been – they just pulled off one a month before with Diem in South Vietnam where he was assassinated.
01:19:53.000And Kennedy was shot, and then the Warren Report...
01:19:57.000The head of the CIA was the head of the...
01:20:07.000Alan Dulles was the head of the Warren Commission.
01:20:10.000Which is nuts, because Kennedy had fired him.
01:20:12.000Yeah, had fired him because he was doing things behind his back.
01:20:17.000And so then that guy becomes the head of the Warren Commission Report, and then Gerald Ford...
01:20:22.000Also on the Warren Commission Report, then takes over when Nixon gets kicked out of office.
01:20:27.000And then you find out through – I mean, Tucker Carlson explained it to us that the whole Nixon thing was essentially an FBI-CIA op to get Nixon out of office.
01:20:37.000And Nixon was apparently, like, very interested in finding out who had shot JFK. Yeah.
01:20:42.000And also the Vietnam War that was going on.
01:20:45.000The CIA was very – in fact, that's kind of where it started, along with the Bay of Pigs.
01:21:06.000But they were making great progress in that.
01:21:09.000But Vietnam – he had gotten the Russians to agree to make Laos a neutral country in that – And we had American GIs even before it was an actual war,
01:21:26.000which it never was, but getting killed over there.
01:21:28.000And Kennedy was wanting to do the same thing with Vietnam, have it be a neutral country, and was making progress with Khrushchev.
01:21:39.000In a way towards that, but the CIA's involvement over there, they, you know, they openly and were the Joint Chiefs in meetings.
01:21:55.000Kennedy had lost control of the Joint Chiefs and decisions that were being made there.
01:22:04.000They were totally going against him and I believe too that it was the CIA that took him out because of their agenda and the mood that was in the country.
01:22:21.000It's crazy to look back on it and think about it.
01:22:23.000And even the fact that we know now for a fact that the Gulf of Tonkin incident was a false flag, which is what got us into Vietnam in the first place, and that no one went to jail for that.
01:22:34.000When Johnson came in, I don't think Johnson had Was involved in the assassination of Kennedy.
01:22:40.000But when Johnson did come in, you know, he had a different kind of bend on that and said, you guys will get your war right after, you know, the election, is what he told the Joint Chiefs, because they really wanted it.
01:22:56.000And, you know, lo and behold, after he was elected, the Gulf of Tonkin incident happens.
01:23:33.000It was created by Truman, and they were supposed to act as foreign agents in other countries.
01:23:40.000And they were basically given, you know, like James Bond, license to kill and also the license to lie before Congress.
01:23:50.000They were given to keep things secret as they could.
01:23:53.000And Truman came to, like, not even a year after he had created it, He came to regret it that he'd even created that office because it turns into a government within a government that has its fingers in every pie,
01:24:52.000Go to what we were told about with Iraq before we went in there and the weapons of mass destruction and the like, which everybody believed, no matter what side you were on.
01:25:42.000A speech at the American University, which was about peace and about the Soviet Union and the United States, you know, learning to live together.
01:25:53.000In fact, the test ban treaty came out of that, which was hardly covered in the news actually back then.
01:27:07.000There was about a 90% chance that it was going to happen, especially during the 60s, and then again with the Carter administration and to Reagan,
01:27:48.000Yeah, like Curtis LeMay, you know, one of the Joint Chiefs, you know, who was a big admiral during World War II and ran the Pacific campaign, basically.
01:27:59.000But, you know, he was saying, well, you know, we could survive this.
01:28:02.000You know, 50 million people, yes, would be killed, but we will survive.
01:30:05.000You know, one of the great speeches he gave in front of the UN, it really got all the crazy UFO conspiracy theories.
01:30:13.000Those guys went nuts because he said how quickly we would put aside our differences if we were faced from an alien threat from outside this world.
01:30:21.000It's a great perspective because it's so true.
01:30:25.000And we should be a community on a planet.
01:30:28.000And it is possible in an alternative universe with different circumstances that we could have evolved into a community.
01:30:37.000And it's possible, I think, in the future.
01:30:39.000If big tech and these ideologies don't get a hold of us, we can communicate as individuals and realize that Most of our differences are bullshit, and most of what's going on is the battle of control over resources.
01:30:53.000And if, instead, human beings had the ability to communicate with each other and have real, true access to information and know exactly what's going on, and be able to relay what their concerns and needs are, most people just want to be happy.
01:31:16.000He was – he wanted to – for the Russians to – the Soviets – To join our space program and do a joint venture to send a man to the moon.
01:31:55.000But once you start doing that and having that shared technology without keeping secrets from each other, that's where people and nations do come together.
01:32:10.000Because we don't mistrust each other because we're armed.
01:32:18.000We're armed because we mistrust each other.
01:32:33.000Well, now there's the same conversation that's going on right now with AI. Because AI weaponry and the ability to have weapons that don't rely at all on human interaction.
01:32:45.000No people making decisions or pressing buttons.
01:32:48.000Completely powered by AI. If that happens, this is a very, very dangerous situation.
01:33:00.000This is the height of tech right because you have tech people that are Communicating about things to Congress where the people that are asking the questions really have no understanding of what these guys are doing or what what's really possible and what's capable and yeah,
01:33:15.000there's There's problems because they lose information, like information gets stolen, and they're dealing with that right now.
01:33:23.000They think that China has access to the top-level AI that we're producing right now.
01:34:03.000They had kind of a running start with...
01:34:08.000Nuclear bombs, you know, and that because it took a while to develop over time and now things come along so quickly and, you know, the more we know, the more we can know.
01:34:29.000So is the reluctance that people have to allow, like, the resistance against this Reagan film, do you think it's resistance about conservatism in general, or is it the idea that you're going to change people's perceptions about history?
01:34:47.000Because there's a lot of people, again, that have this very peripheral, low-information view of who Reagan was, and so they want to have this negative spin on Reagan in history because he's a conservative.
01:34:58.000I think, you know, Reagan was a great president and I think it gets perceived and compared to Trump, you know, because there are comparisons to Trump and the things that you get down to policy.
01:35:14.000There's a really good comparison to Trump, and maybe they see this as influencing an election by that comparison or whatever.
01:35:33.000It's about ideas we're able to express and we're able to, like, make up your own mind about it rather than deciding for people about what it was.
01:35:43.000And the Reagan movie is not about ideology at all.
01:35:48.000I mean, Reagan was a Democrat for 40 years, until the last 40 years of his life, or 35, he was a Republican.
01:35:58.000And it's about the Cold War and about his fight against communism and you know we won the Cold War under Reagan and it was before that appeasement had been practiced in this Jimmy Carter,
01:36:15.000God bless him, he did really well with the Egyptians and Israel in making peace in the Middle East.
01:36:37.000But with the Soviets, he had appeased it like You know, gave away the B-1 bomber.
01:36:44.000He gave away a lot of things without getting anything in return from the Soviets as far as reducing the threat of war.
01:36:53.000And they took that, of course, as weakness and started to really build up their military and their missile strength to an unprecedented level.
01:37:07.000Americans were There's a lot about America that it's kind of sweet in a way that, you know, the kumbaya thing, you know, why can't we be friends and just, you know, humanity.
01:37:23.000That's the good-hearted, fantastic thing about America.
01:37:28.000But that's not the way the world works.
01:37:31.000We're all a product of the way that we grew up.
01:37:35.000Basically growing up in this country with relative safety and we have, you know, a nation that has had laws that, you know, form of law and you do things the right way and the wrong way of what you consider.
01:37:49.000But, you know, can you imagine what it was like for Saddam to grow up in Iraq?
01:37:55.000Or Chi, or Putin, and the way they grew up, that makes them the way they are, and the Russian people had grown up the same way.
01:38:04.000So you start to get a sense of how the rest of the world doesn't operate on the same rules that we are.
01:38:14.000They actually have a more realistic way of looking at things the way man has actually been from the tribal stage on.
01:38:24.000You know, you got the water, and we want the water.
01:39:03.000But he made the Russians think at least 10% that it might be real.
01:39:09.000Reagan even offered to share it with them in exchange for, let's take our missiles down to zero.
01:39:19.000You know, I got mad at him in Iceland when I thought he was acting like an old codger because they came up and said, we're offering you this, you know, half the missiles or this or that.
01:39:32.000And he said, no, because they wanted us to get rid of Star Wars, which didn't exist.
01:39:38.000I said, well, you know, you have to get rid of Star Wars.
01:39:42.000And if we'd done that, the Soviets would have just gone on their merry way and been doing what they would have had been doing.
01:43:04.000And then, you know, in the research, he was an actor and we both have sunny dispositions too, I think, naturally.
01:43:15.000But I don't think...one of the things about Reagan is I don't think he ever got to where he wanted to get as an actor.
01:43:23.000I think was one of the disappointments for him.
01:43:27.000And, you know, his career was going towards at the end when he married Jane Wyman.
01:43:34.000You know, who won an Academy Award, like, the next year.
01:43:39.000And I think his self-esteem was actually pretty low at that point because he was looking for a purpose in his life that he never found until he got the...
01:43:53.000Ran for and was elected vice president of the Screen Actors Guild, and then president of the Screen Actors Guild.
01:44:00.000And that's not a job that anybody as an actor you aspire to be, right?
01:46:17.000I was – gosh, it was – what is the name of that – the boy band thing that's a dirty – It's a documentary about the guy, Peterson, I think, that started the boy bands, NSYNC,
01:47:00.000Well, anyway, this documentary, they take this guy and they take old footage of him and they put other words in his mouth talking to the camera.
01:47:45.000You know, I think, of course, it takes away extras, you know, ability to earn a living, but it also means that you can make like a $4 billion movie instead of a $40 billion movie, you know, and get smaller movies and more people have access to making movies.
01:48:11.000Well, that wouldn't be such a bad idea.
01:48:14.000As long as I can play golf and somebody else comes to the set digitally, okay.
01:48:22.000Do you think that expressing your conservative viewpoints and doing this film on Reagan, do you think this ultimately has the potential to hurt your career?
01:48:37.000There was a time that I was kind of concerned to kind of like speak my mind or speak up.
01:48:44.000But in this – really in the last couple of years that I feel it's really important that we do – all of us speak up.
01:48:56.000In this election, everybody has got to choose a side and we have to – In order to have this exchange of ideas and dialogue, we have to speak up.
01:49:09.000And so, like I said, what I was doing, Reagan, there was a story that came out that I was taking money from the CDC,
01:49:27.000The Trump administration had arranged so I could do a commercial for the vaccine that was coming out, none of which was true.
01:49:38.000But, you know, it's like my son even called me like freaking out, you know, because it was like I was going to get canceled over this stuff because I was taking, I guess, taxpayer money from the CDC, you know, making money off this.
01:50:08.000But that and I remember when Trump – when COVID first started, I think it was Politico that I did a phone conversation with because I was involved with this podcast company that we were – That we were promoting.
01:50:26.000And it just happened to be COVID. And the guy asked me what I thought about the way Trump was handling the COVID. And I said, well, at least he's there every day.
01:50:42.000He's there every day trying to do something.
01:50:45.000And I think when it comes to things like this, we need to get behind our president as a whole to come together to fight this thing, just like Franklin Roosevelt getting behind during World War – at the start of World War II in order to – well,
01:51:05.000anyway, that became that I was a right-wing Trumpster and that supposedly in danger of getting canceled over that.
01:51:16.000And then I also gave a speech about Reagan to the group in Florida after we'd made the movie, and I think there were two people that were January 6th.
01:53:48.000Well, we don't have the best choices today.
01:53:52.000You know, it's interesting that we put so much weight on famous people.
01:53:57.000We put so much weight on their opinion and perspectives on things.
01:54:00.000We want a guy like George Clooney to be out there endorsing Kamala Harris and talking about the threat to democracy that is Donald Trump and all that.
01:54:58.000Trump swears, you know, it's okay, you know, over time to say shit, fuck, piss, whatever you want on TV, you know, before that with cable news.
01:55:11.000You know, now you can say it, but it took somebody like Trump to actually say it.
01:55:15.000Yeah, he was really the first one that opened up that door.
01:56:26.000I do cringe sometimes at stuff, but I know where he is at the bottom of it, that he really does care about the American people, and he really...
01:56:34.000He loves this country and he's really smart, really smart.
01:56:39.000And he knows how to deal with foreign policy-wise, which is a huge thing with me because it could It has an effect on everything else in our culture, our economy, just the way we feel inside.
01:57:39.000Because he made a post about how the crowds that were at the airport to meet her were fake.
01:57:47.000That it was CGI. And a lot of people thought that they were CGI. And there was a lot of people tweeting about it that it was CGI. And I was looking at it, and I was like, this is interesting because it's so obvious.
01:58:00.000Well, one of the ways they would do that is to put out fake images or put out the idea that there were fake images so that he makes this post.
01:58:20.000Because they're so used to, like, Biden doing a rally, and you never see the size of the crowd, and you can feel that there's nobody there, and there's tepid applause, and you hear individual hands clapping.
01:58:32.000Also, you can hire people to go to those things.
02:00:11.000And she started with – Kamala now is taking over the whole no tax on tips, trying to take that over, trying to say that she's Never was the border czar.
02:00:26.000From day one, she's going to do something about it.
02:00:29.000I think there's like, what, four or five months left in the administration right now?
02:00:35.000Why don't you do something about it now?
02:00:37.000Also, denying she was the border czar when there's Hundreds of people talking on television calling her the border czar.
02:01:25.000I mean, it seems the obvious thing would be for the old idea that that's for voters, that people coming into this country are naturally Democrats, but that's not really true.
02:01:37.000You know, I have so many Latino friends, and the people that came here the right way, I think?
02:05:24.000And then if you want to come here from Europe, like say if you're a mathematician or something like that, or even a friend of mine from Estonia, he's a comedian.
02:05:31.000He's trying very hard to get his green card.
02:05:59.000And then the court dates are years ahead.
02:06:02.000So you get to live in this country illegally subsidized for years, and you would assume that those people are going to vote for the people that did that for them.
02:07:51.000I mean, there should be a path and that's one of the things that made America so interesting because it's a melting pot of all these ambitious people that came here from a place that sucked and they carved out a life.
02:08:59.000Because Colorado is incredibly liberal and that area is incredibly liberal.
02:09:03.000So see if you can find that story on the Venezuelan gangs taking over the apartment building in Colorado.
02:09:09.000I was watching a news piece on it today where they were expressing this real confusion and frustration that there was nothing that they could be doing about this.
02:09:21.000And that they have different doors have X's on them.
02:09:25.000The red X's are when people have been evacuated from the apartment.
02:09:58.000Special Task Force investigating Venezuelan gangs alleged ties to Aurora.
02:10:02.000Aurora City Council officials say that apartment complex on Gnome Street is closing to decode violations, but some council members allege there's more to the story.
02:10:40.000In partnership with the Raven Task Force, has assigned four detectives to a special task force that includes additional local, state, and federal partners to investigate the violent crime impacting our migrant community, said Aurora PD spokesperson late Thursday.
02:11:19.000And if they're all flooding in through the border and these are the type of people that are flooding in, those guys aren't coming over legally, the Venezuelan gang members.