The guys today are the highest level fighters of all time. They are the best in the UFC, and they are doing it in a way that no one else has ever done before. It's crazy how good they are, and it's even crazier that they are able to do it in the way they do it.
00:00:21.000I think we were talking about how exciting the Ankolaev and Pereira fight was, even though people didn't like it because it wasn't like some crazy result, a giant knockout like you get in most Pereira fights, but it was so technical.
00:00:35.000And Ankolaev just did a fantastic job of shutting down the scariest guy in the division.
00:02:40.000The thought amongst coaches is when you're on your back, if there's two minutes to go, you're probably not going to pull a submission off.
00:02:45.000You've got to concentrate on getting back up to your feet, minimizing whatever scoring your opponent has done by taking you down and whatever shots they've landed.
00:02:53.000Mitigate those as much as possible and get to the feet as quickly as possible.
00:02:56.000That's what everybody's trying to do now.
00:03:10.000If you think about that fight with Charles Oliveira, Charles Oliveira caught him multiple times in deep submissions, which I think should count for a lot.
00:03:21.000Which I thought, if I looked at who won that fight, I would say Oliveira won that fight.
00:03:28.000It was kind of a controversial opinion, but I think a tightly locked triangle or a Darce choke or anything along those lines should be considered winning.
00:03:37.000You're doing something very difficult to do.
00:03:40.000Your opponent doesn't want it to happen.
00:03:42.000You've dominated a position to the point where you've secured a submission.
00:03:45.000And then this guy sneaks out with sweat and technique and fucking grit.
00:04:31.000Everybody knew that Trump was coming on, and this has been a couple of times when people knew that I was interviewing people.
00:04:36.000For the most part, I just like to do it, have the conversation, and then put it out.
00:04:40.000But you put it on Twitter that you were coming on, and then...
00:04:43.000I put it on my substack behind the paywall.
00:04:48.000But apparently some of my enemies pay me five bucks a month to follow my substack.
00:04:53.000I saw what happened with you on the Tucker Carlson thing and I spoke about it almost immediately on the podcast whenever I felt like it came up.
00:05:02.000I don't remember how many days afterwards.
00:05:04.000But I've been listening to your podcast for a long time.
00:05:07.000And it's so charitable and comprehensive.
00:05:13.000And so thorough and so you put so much weight on the real lives and suffering of human beings on all sides of any conflict.
00:05:25.000The regular people that didn't want to be dragged into any war, that find themselves on the front line.
00:05:32.000The stories that you tell and the way you tell them is so comprehensive and so, again, charitable.
00:05:39.000The humanity of these people is so well expressed that your fans know you.
00:05:53.000I know how honest you are about all aspects of conflict.
00:05:59.000And again, as charitable as possible, the way you lay this out.
00:06:02.000So when I saw these attacks on you and people were calling you an anti-Semite and a Nazi apologist, I was like, good Lord, this is not going to work on people who know him.
00:06:15.000You know, I've been through that ringer before.
00:06:18.000But with you, I was like, all anyone needs to do, and I encourage you, if you're like, I can't believe you have this guy on, listen to Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem.
00:06:33.000And there's no fucking way the person who made that is anti-Semitic in any way, shape, or form.
00:06:39.000And that's just one of the things that you've done that show that.
00:06:45.000The problem is when someone says something and they're trying to be hyperbolic or they're trying to get a reaction or you're shit-talking or you post a meme online or something like that.
00:06:59.000Bizarre culture we live in that wants to reduce people to the worst possible interpretations of what they said or who they are and to ignore everything else but for one small tweet or one statement made in trying to get a reaction, trying to be outrageous.
00:07:28.000And as someone who values your show and listens to your show all the time, it's not just stupid.
00:07:39.000It's bizarre how many people fall for this kind of stupidity.
00:07:43.000And I know how this whole thing works.
00:07:46.000I guarantee you probably gained a bunch of fans and you probably gained a bunch of people who listened because most of the time when someone gets discredited in the media or someone gets shamed, A lot of people will immediately hop on board, but a lot of other people will go, well, what is this guy saying?
00:09:36.000I mean, I'm very critical of Churchill's role, in my opinion, in turning...
00:09:44.000The German invasion of Poland into the Second World War, basically.
00:09:51.000As I get older, I posted something on X today that somebody had posted a video.
00:10:00.000A drone is going toward a Ukrainian or a Russian truck or something, and it hits it, and it doesn't blow up.
00:10:05.000And it's like, boom, boom, and it tries to, it doesn't blow up.
00:10:08.000And as I was watching that thing, I felt like when it didn't blow up and the video ended, I felt like this really strong sense of relief that it didn't blow up, you know?
00:10:18.000And I reposted it and I said, I think, you know, as I get older, like, I just don't have the stomach for this kind of stuff anymore.
00:10:24.000And I see something like that and, like, I don't care who's in the truck.
00:10:34.000Like, that's what I actually felt at the time, you know?
00:10:36.000And as I get older, like, that's just how I feel more and more about these things.
00:10:40.000Like, whether any conflict is just, like, this is not like a young man's thought, I guess.
00:10:47.000But, like, I'm just, I'm happy when they're over and they need, like...
00:10:51.000I mean, the damage that they do to people, and not only to the people who are in it fighting, but that it does to the societies and cultures that are involved in these things.
00:11:01.000It does real damage to our spirit, you know?
00:11:04.000If you go back to 2004, when the Abu Ghraib expose came out, you know, Americans were horrified by that, and rightly so.
00:11:47.000The war on terror has sort of desensitized us to a lot and hardened our hearts in ways that are not good for us.
00:11:55.000And so when I do my podcasts, you know, whether I'm talking about the Israelis and Palestinians, I did a long one on Jonestown, seven episodes, like 35 hours long.
00:12:06.000And whoever it is, like my rule is that I don't record anything until I feel like I can put myself in the shoes of the people.
00:12:17.000That I'm going to talk about and really kind of understand how their actions made sense to them with the information they had and in the context of their time.
00:12:28.000And so when you do something like that with the My Lai Massacre, for example, I did that with that story, the Jonestown one.
00:12:35.000I mean, Jonestown, you're talking about like this raving lunatic.
00:12:38.000Who took a bunch of people out into the jungle and they all committed suicide.
00:12:43.000It's very tempting and very easy to just write off any responsibility to understand what was happening there because you're like, well, we know what was happening.
00:12:52.000But the thing is, if you really think about the consequences of taking the wrong lessons from things like that...
00:12:59.000You know, the response that the federal government had to the Waco standoff in the early 90s was very much informed by the way people thought about Jonestown, which is that, you know, we let this go on too long.
00:13:11.000The problem wasn't that, you know, that maybe we had this paranoid group of radicals out here that, you know, maybe we shouldn't have done so much to feed into that paranoia.
00:13:23.000We needed to ease these people out of it and try to de-escalate.
00:13:34.000And so there are real-world consequences to taking the wrong lessons from these things and really just kind of forgetting that it doesn't – I mean, look, you may have like your Jeffrey Dahmers or something out there that are an exception to this rule, but they are the exception that proves the rule.
00:13:49.000It doesn't matter who you're talking about.
00:13:50.000You could be talking about Uday Hussein, you know, Saddam's son.
00:14:00.000But, you know, that kid was a three-year-old at one point, or that guy was a three-year-old kid at one point who did not, like, it's not like he was waiting in line in the spirit world before he was born, and they're like, who wants to be Saddam Hussein's son?
00:14:13.000That's the world he was thrust into, you know?
00:14:15.000And you see a guy like that, and then you, you know, you're horrified by the things that he does, but then you say, look, man.
00:14:22.000You know, if the stories are true, at least, like Saddam Hussein used to take him and his brother when he was six years old to go watch torture sessions and executions because he needed to harden them for, you know, ruling the country one day.
00:14:34.000And it's like, I don't want to pretend like I have the remotest idea of, you know, how a kid is supposed to respond to watching torture sessions when he's six years old and coming up in that world.
00:14:52.000I try to stay humble as I'm reading about these people, not assume that I'm better than them or different than them, and really just try to understand them on human terms, you know?
00:15:02.000When I did that in the Tucker interview with regard to the Germans and the Second World War and the series that I'm working on right now, which is the Second World War from the perspective of the Germans, you know, it's people who...
00:15:16.000It's not just people who are purposely misinterpreting things or anything.
00:15:19.000You know, a lot of people who are in good faith, they see something like that and they think you're trying to justify or rationalize what happened, you know?
00:15:28.000Because there is this thing where, I mean, the Jonestown story, this really did kind of happen to me, where, you know, when you get past a certain threshold of understanding people, you're butting right up against.
00:15:45.000I mean, it's like, that's the very, you know, that's like the next step.
00:15:48.000You've got to take one more step and you're empathizing with those people.
00:15:51.000And so people see that, you know, and you're empathizing with evil people, you know, whoever it is.
00:15:57.000But I really believe that it's really good for us, like, individually, you know, and as a society too.
00:16:04.000I think it has a positive effect on us to, like, when we force ourselves to understand, you know, people we don't like.
00:16:13.000As human beings and just understand that their motivations are really no different than ours.
00:16:17.000Well, this is one of the reasons why your podcast is so important because you talk about things in this way and this is one of the reasons why I knew you were misconstrued or you would be misconstrued if something like that came up.
00:16:45.000What kind of a monster turns into this genocidal maniac and brings people to the jungle and does this?
00:16:52.000But when you do it with any other subject, you can kind of get away with that until it gets to Nazis, until it gets to World War II. These red flags that pop up that just completely block out any objectivity.
00:17:17.000Anything you're saying, imagine being a young man drafted into Hitler's army at 17 years old and not knowing what you're doing and then becoming this monster.
00:17:30.000I had this reductionist perspective on anything that has to do with that horrific moment in history that if you even attempt to do this very comprehensive process that you do with all other subjects where you look at the human angle, you look at these people, the conflict, how did this get started?
00:17:50.000It's not there's good people on one side and there's evil people on the other side.
00:17:54.000No, there's genuinely Just human beings and there's horrible circumstances and then there's evil people who lead these people in horrible circumstances to do evil terrible things and People are tribal and they can buy into all kinds of crazy ideas and go forth and do horrific atrocities and believe that God is on their side This is a part of being a human being that has existed fucking forever But in our culture,
00:18:23.000in our media environment, where everybody is rightly so, so terrified of anti-Semitism.
00:18:28.000Because there's real anti-Semitism out there.
00:18:30.000And real anti-Semitism is horrible, just like real racism is horrible.
00:18:35.000The problem with calling everything racist and everything anti-Semitic, when it's clearly not, is that you diminish what that word means.
00:18:47.000Rational, logical people who know your work have a very good argument against it.
00:18:52.000Like, this doesn't make any sense in the context of which it was said.
00:18:56.000If you look at the body of his work, if you look at how he talks about things, this is how he approaches stuff.
00:19:01.000This whole being provocative is part of what you do.
00:19:04.000It's part of what makes the audio come to life in these podcasts when you're talking about these moments in history.
00:19:12.000This this subject is just so sore with people and particularly right now after October 7th where, you know, I just I remember all the sudden going on X and seeing anti-Semitism just like white right out in the open blaming Jews for everything going Whoa!
00:19:33.000And then you start thinking the way your paranoid Jewish friends think, that everybody's anti-Semitic.
00:19:38.000And you go, well, now I kind of understand why they think that way.
00:19:41.000So I kind of understand the overreaction, but it is still an overreaction.
00:19:46.000And I think what you do is very valuable.
00:19:50.000It's very valuable to me, and it's very valuable to human beings that want to hear this nuanced, comprehensive...
00:19:59.000perspective on these conflicts and from a person who obviously cares deeply about them and cares deeply about the human cost of these and one of the things you do so well and I was just talking to Dave Smith about this yesterday The gravity of war,
00:20:19.000the toll it takes on the people that are engaged in it and the people that are just outside of it and what is left of their civilization, it's fucking horrific.
00:20:31.000And it should be avoided at all costs.
00:20:35.000But you don't avoid it by exaggerating.
00:20:39.000You don't avoid it by distorting someone's perspective and turning everybody into a monster.
00:20:45.000So that everyone's scared to talk at all.
00:22:15.000You know, because to go back to what I said a second ago, like, understanding brings you right up to the brink of empathy, you know, that, you know, more understanding to these issues.
00:22:25.000And I've found this a hundred times, you know, because, like, look, anti-Semitism is a weird thing.
00:22:29.000And we can talk about some of the history of that if you want.
00:22:31.000But, you know, it's a it's this thing that people get obsessed with.
00:22:40.000I've watched this happen to, like, good, clear-thinking, regular people.
00:22:45.000They start listening to a few podcasts that, you know, they can't repost under their real name on Twitter because they're funny or interesting.
00:22:53.000And then pretty soon you can't bring that dude to a party anymore because he just can't go 10 minutes without, in neutral company, like bringing up the Jews.
00:23:03.000I mean, you know, what you see on social media a lot.
00:23:09.000There's no doubt there's been a big explosion of that kind of rhetoric.
00:23:13.000And I think a lot of it is online trolling and it's the fact that people are so sensitive about it that it's just the easiest way to get a huge reaction from people.
00:23:27.000I think a lot of it has to do with that.
00:23:29.000But I think a lot of it also has to do with the fact that so many of these questions have really been made It's not like they're off limits like they're illegal and you're going to go to jail if you talk about them.
00:23:54.000And that, again, I think is just completely counterproductive because people look at something.
00:24:00.000I think Theo was talking about this in one of his recent interviews.
00:24:03.000He was saying, you know, somebody sees what's happening in Gaza right now, and they just see kids getting pulled out of rubble, and it's shocking and horrifying.
00:24:12.000And they see that, and they find out that the U.S. is sending money and weapons.
00:24:16.000And they're like, well, why is that happening?
00:24:18.000And they start looking into it, and they go to the websites that are going to tell them the truth about it.
00:24:22.000And pretty soon, one link leads to another.
00:24:27.000You know, history professors at school or something, like, hey, you know, Uncle Adolph 1488 in the comments section, like, told me XYZ. Like, you know, you go and ask about it.
00:24:39.000He gets, like, shouted down and attacked for, like, asking the question.
00:24:42.000And then, you know, that doesn't have the effect of him saying, wow, like, I guess that really is terrible and I should never ask that again.
00:25:09.000And I think, because I think that with everything now online, I think there's public momentum opinions that aren't necessarily organically shaped.
00:25:21.000There's groups that will mass tweet about something.
00:25:26.000And now we know that there's AI programs that will devise various different tweets.
00:25:34.000And people are running them through hundreds of computers, if not thousands of computers, all with multiple accounts.
00:25:40.000And they're posting things constantly.
00:27:14.000And they do it through organic ways, like people who are...
00:27:20.000Aligned with their cause, whether it's Free Palestine or Israel First or whatever it is, you get people to post about it.
00:27:27.000They'll do it willingly because they want to show everybody they're on the right side and they also want to proclaim on Twitter that this is their political perspective and I'm aligned with you people.
00:27:57.000We rely upon people that are supposedly objective and rational and reasonable and considerate and charitable.
00:28:06.000People who look at things and go, okay, what's really going on here?
00:28:10.000Before I cast judgment, maybe I should pay attention to some of the things this guy's done.
00:28:14.000Maybe I should pay attention to his work.
00:28:15.000Maybe I should look into this instead of just repeating Nazi apologists because someone wanted to take just An overall comprehensive look at what happened, which is – we should all want to know what happened from a bunch of different perspectives so we could prevent any of this shit from happening in the future.
00:28:39.000I mean the interesting thing about the World War II question is something I found through talking to people who disagreed with my Tucker interview is if you put the question to him.
00:28:51.000And maybe if you put it directly like this, they would give you a different answer, but you kind of get the, you know, you get to understand that this is how they feel about it, which is if there was two options, one of them is that the Second World War doesn't happen, at least in Europe.
00:29:09.000But, you know, the National Socialists stay in power and, you know, maybe Hitler dies 10 years later.
00:29:16.000It's like the Soviet Union, Stalin dies, and things move on.
00:29:20.000People really kind of feel like, and maybe this is because they're not involved in it, like 40 million dead people, that was a cost worth paying.
00:29:27.000And I think that is completely insane, man.
00:29:29.000Like, if there was a sliver of an opportunity to de-escalate that situation and bring it back down, like, you know, if I'm the emperor of America or Britain or whatever, I'm taking that chance.
00:30:01.000Should we decide to stop something in its tracks at whatever cost of life because ultimately that is the right thing to do because we're witnessing the genocide of people and then we're also witnessing a group that will remain in power that is not just committed genocide but is committed to genocide.
00:30:27.000From a full year before the German invasion of the Soviet Union.
00:30:32.000That was June 1941. And that's where most of the Jews lived.
00:30:36.000So if Hitler never invaded the Soviet Union, he never even would have had access to those people.
00:30:42.000Now, Hitler didn't like the Soviet Union.
00:30:44.000All the way back in Mein Kampf and everywhere else, I mean, it was central to his ideology that communism, socialism were the enemy and everything.
00:30:50.000He may have invaded the Soviet Union someday and gone and...
00:31:05.000Like if you take him at his word in Mein Kampf, which is – it's a piece of political propaganda that he wrote as a sort of a politician in Germany in 1924.
00:31:16.000And so you have to take it with sort of a grain of salt.
00:31:18.000But it's also one of the few sources we have.
00:31:21.000Like given his audience at the time, he probably didn't have a lot of reason to make this part up.
00:31:27.000is that He had been from small-town Germany, and he was from a middle-class family.
00:31:34.000His father was a civil servant, respectable people, and nationalism back then was very much like a middle-class.
00:31:41.000And the middle class people, nationalists would complain about the workers and the proletariat, how they don't want to be socialists and none of them have any national feeling and everything.
00:31:51.000And Hitler really didn't grow up with any really even knowledge of the Jews.
00:31:55.000He says his father, he never heard him say the word.
00:31:57.000And if they had any in the small town that he lived in, like they were apparently well assimilated because he didn't know about them.
00:32:05.000And so then he moves to Vienna when he's a young adult and there's a lot of Jews in Vienna.
00:32:10.000And he starts to – he's at the bottom of society now.
00:32:19.000He's like down with the underclass after having grown up in the middle class.
00:32:25.000And so he's starting to get a look at what the German people, the German masses, that he's like sort of as a child and a young man has like worked up this.
00:32:38.000He's actually getting an up-close look at the underclass in Vienna.
00:32:41.000And what he sees is not particularly impressive, which is often the case when you can have sympathy for and want to lift up the underclass in any society.
00:32:53.000The reason you want to do that is because they're often living degraded lives and degraded circumstances.
00:32:57.000And so he gets an up-close look at this and he doesn't like what he sees.
00:33:00.000And he says in Mein Kampf that it really caused him like a moral crisis, you know, an ideological crisis.
00:33:05.000He's like, are these the German people?
00:33:21.000We could say he came to believe that, yes, these German masses, they are in a sorry state right now.
00:33:28.000But the reason for that is that they're being manipulated by the Jews, by the Jewish press, by the Jews who own the theaters and put out the films and whatever else.
00:33:40.000They're being manipulated and corrupted by these people.
00:33:43.000And so for him, it became – I think he has – He had a lot of the same explanations and reasons you would hear from any anti-Semite then or now, you know, banking and whatever.
00:33:57.000But I think the thing that gave it emotional valence for him is that his anti-Semitism was what allowed him to love.
00:34:05.000The German people, you know, like it was like the only way for him that he could get around the revulsion he was feeling and actually being up close with the German underclasses, you know, he excused their faults by blaming by blaming Jews.
00:34:18.000And so it his his sense of love for his people.
00:34:21.000And I mean, look, Hitler is one of those guys.
00:34:25.000I noticed this when I was reading all the Jim Jones books and stuff, which I think I read all probably all of.
00:34:34.000Some of them are interesting, like they're good reads, but you can't help but notice, especially after you've read several of the books, that the authors just cannot help but be cynical and turn it into a polemic on every page.
00:34:49.000Even the thing Jim Jones or Hitler did as a child, they have negative editorializing to it and everything.
00:36:00.000Like the Jews had never – you got to remember like the Russian Revolution, all of the things that people like Hitler would associate with the Jews, like none of that stuff had happened yet.
00:36:13.000You know, he might think that – whatever, all the stereotypes that go along with him.
00:36:17.000But it was just sort of an abstract thing that it wasn't dangerous, right?
00:36:22.000But then the First World War happens, and, you know, it's really impossible for us today to understand the level of just trauma and devastation that that war had on, I mean, the European countries that were involved.
00:36:39.000I mean, it was, you know, you're talking about a war where, you know, for several Olympics.
00:36:49.000Olympic Games afterwards, there were whole sports that, like, France and Germany just didn't participate in anymore because they didn't have the people for it.
00:36:58.000I mean, it was, you're talking about massive chunks of the young male population being killed out there, right?
00:37:05.000And you take a guy like Hitler, who volunteered early, like, right away, and he survived the whole four years of the war.
00:37:13.000And you think about him as just an example of this generation of people who spent, like, their most formative young adult years in the trenches.
00:37:23.000I mean, in constant terror of doing things that, I mean, forget about just, like, the physical discomfort of living there.
00:37:57.000And, like, you know, one of the things he's so good at, way better than me at, is kind of capturing the scale of events, you know?
00:38:05.000And so when he talks about, like, the Battle of Assam.
00:38:08.000When the British lost 60,000 guys on the first day, you're like, I don't even know what that, like, what that even means.
00:38:16.000Like, it's just so overwhelming, you know?
00:38:19.000And so you have this generation that spent their formative years in all of these countries under those just circumstances that we really don't have any context for us to relate to.
00:38:31.000I mean think about like – you see these stories of like people sleeping in trenches and over there in the corner is their dead friend who's been sitting there decomposing and being eaten by rats for three or four days because you can't go up top to bury them because you'll get shot.
00:38:47.000And you can't bury him in the trench, in the dirt under the trench anymore because there's already bodies just completely wall to wall down there.
00:38:56.000You've already taken up all the space, right?
00:38:59.000I mean, if you think about somebody today, if you walk outside your door on the way to work...
00:39:05.000Your average person today, and there's a dead body on your steps.
00:39:10.000Your average person today is going to be in therapy for years over that.
00:39:14.000I mean, that is a traumatic experience, very difficult.
00:39:16.000And so you have these young men who go through this just unbelievable experience.
00:39:23.000And from Germany eastward after, if you go back and think about what the map of Europe looked like in the year 1900. It didn't look anything like it looks now.
00:39:33.000It was basically like just a few big chunks.
00:39:35.000You had France, you had Germany, the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and then you had the Russian Empire.
00:39:41.000And there were a few like Spain and the Balkans and stuff, little things going on.
00:39:44.000But really it was just a few giant empires controlled everything from the Pacific Ocean in East Russia all the way over to the coast of France, right?
00:39:53.000And everything east of Germany in 1917 and 1918, those governments...
00:40:02.000And so, you know, you get to the immediate post-war period after these guys have just gone through this unbelievably harrowing experience.
00:40:11.000You know, their lives have been defined by violence for years, you know, at this point.
00:40:16.000And all of a sudden, there's just state collapse everywhere from Germany to Siberia.
00:40:23.000And you literally have, you know, private militias.
00:40:28.000Groups of veterans, communist militias, like they're running cities, they're running the streets, like having running gun battles in the streets of, you know, of Berlin and Munich.
00:40:37.000And this goes on for a few years, you know, just total social and economic chaos.
00:40:44.000And so you're talking about like the four-year war, but then a few more years after that.
00:40:51.0001914. Now it's 1923 when things kind of start to stabilize and, you know, you've been at this for like the first nine years of your young adulthood, right?
00:41:19.000But it's – It's an experience that, like, we really have no way to relate to.
00:41:25.000And if you grow up in that world, especially when, you know, if you look at, like, what happened in Russia, 1917, the Russian Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, and they won.
00:41:35.000You know, they actually took over the Russian state and created the Soviet Union.
00:41:39.000You know, it lasted past the—long past the lives of anybody who had fought in World War I, for the most part.
00:41:46.000And so people saw that and they took the lesson both from World War I itself but also from the aftermath and the revolutions that happened.
00:41:54.000The lesson they took is that violence can accomplish our goals.
00:41:59.000And whatever we do to accomplish those goals, as long as we survive, people accept it eventually.
00:42:08.000You know, Roosevelt normalized relations with the Soviet Union in 1933 when...
00:42:14.000Stalin was literally still clearing bodies from the millions of people he starved in the Ukrainian Holodomor and in Kazakhstan, another million people.
00:42:22.000And like at that time is when – and we knew it was going on obviously.
00:42:27.000And yet, you know, Roosevelt normalized relations with Stalin and people got over it.
00:42:32.000Turkey does the Armenian genocide and it's condemned at the time.
00:42:37.000You know, they were on the other side of the war and everything.
00:42:39.000But a couple of years later, like, look, Turkey is an important – Strategically placed country like in the world and we kind of need them on our side.
00:42:48.000And so, you know, sorry, Armenians, but, you know, get over it.
00:42:52.000And so people took that lesson is that violence will accomplish our goals.
00:42:56.000And as long as we accomplish them and survive, people will get over it.
00:43:32.000We're talking about this horrific environment that's not considered.
00:43:35.000That doesn't make you a Nazi apologist.
00:43:37.000Yeah, and it's important to know, too, that...
00:43:41.000You know, it's not like Hitler was going and giving big speeches at City Square in Berlin, going on and on and on about how we're going to kill the Jews.
00:43:51.000And the German people said, right on, like, let's go do it.
00:43:53.000That was like the speeches that are out there where he is talking about the Jewish question.
00:43:58.000Like almost all of those are like internal Nazi party, like rally speeches.
00:44:36.000And that was the year before the war started, you know?
00:44:39.000And so these are just nuances that, you know, that become pretty obvious when you just remind yourself that you're just talking about people.
00:44:48.000I mean the Germans were a sophisticated, advanced political and cultural place.
00:44:56.000They didn't suddenly turn into demons for 12 years and then go back to being the nice normal Germans that we know now.
00:45:04.000Like these things happen the same way every other historical event ends up happening, which very often is not – what you find is it's not – it's not – so much is not really like the result of a plot or a plan or which very often is not – what you find is it's People are often just reacting.
00:45:25.000And when you – you see this with the Bolshevik revolution in Russia.
00:45:30.000You see it with the Israel-Palestine situation, right?
00:45:34.000In those two situations, like the means that the Bolsheviks and the Zionists used to establish themselves and create their state and like sort of get their foothold, the means that they used were so violent and so over the top that it came to define in a lot of ways.
00:45:54.000The subsequent history of those countries, you know, if you look at like Stalin's purges in the 30s and a lot of the stuff that was going on during his reign, it was really that like they had pissed so many people off and done so many terrible things to take power.
00:46:08.000And that was really like that was Lenin's philosophy is, again, just, you know, take it up to 11 and go.
00:46:13.000And as long as we win, people get over it.
00:46:16.000But all of a sudden, when you've killed all these people and done all these terrible things, you look around the country and you see a lot of.
00:46:26.000I mean, Israel, one of the things I really tried to get into in the early part of that series especially is that the Zionist Project, and the more I think about it, this is kind of a theme in so many of my podcasts.
00:46:46.000You know, it started out as an idealistic venture.
00:46:50.000You know, it started out as something, you know, you have these people who are in really, like, kind of a unique situation.
00:46:56.000Maybe the, like, the Roma, the Gypsies are, like, the only other group of people you can really point to of, like, a widespread transnational group of people who do have a sort of cohesive identity, but they don't have a homeland.
00:47:08.000They're just living in other people's countries.
00:47:10.000And, you know, I think the lesson from World War II and much of the 20th century probably...
00:47:17.000It's kind of the opposite of the one that people have taken from World War II, which is nationalism is bad and it's dangerous and bad things happen when people start to think that way.
00:47:26.000I think the real lesson from World War II or from what happened to the Jews specifically is everybody needs a country.
00:47:34.000You need to have a country that is looking after you and looking after your interests.
00:47:39.000Because living in other people's countries, it can go well for a long time.
00:47:47.000Like, you know, bad things happen over time.
00:47:51.000You know, minorities are just easily scapegoated.
00:47:53.000You know, they're easily made the sort of the outlet for the frustration and resentment of people that are...
00:47:59.000You know, upset over unrelated things.
00:48:02.000And it's an uncomfortable position to be in.
00:48:04.000There's also general suspicion when cultures move into areas and don't assimilate and then try to bring with them the rules of their land, which we, you know, we're particularly scared of in America.
00:49:07.000And all I kept thinking as I'm watching this is like, man, this is not like the U.S. Army that's out there like on the frontier confronting these situations.
00:50:00.000So I was going to say like the thing that's...
00:50:02.000So different about America from a lot of the European countries.
00:50:05.000And when we talk about nationalism, like this is something that really, you know, that you have to keep in mind all the time is that America, like we've been renegotiating our identity like generation by generation ever since America started, like from the very beginning.
00:50:19.000I mean, if you go back to the American Revolution and, you know, the founding of the country in the late 1700s, before those guys were dead.
00:50:29.000A bunch of the major cities and eventually all the major cities, like very quickly by the middle of the 1800s, they're not majority Anglo anymore.
00:51:03.000And you're talking about, again, an influx large enough to...
00:51:07.000To really swamp the Anglo population in many of the big cities.
00:51:10.000Well, not another, you know, a generation later, barely 40 years after the, you know, the Irish migration really hits its peak, huge influx from southern Italy, from eastern Europe, a lot of Ashkenazi Jews coming in.
00:51:26.000And pretty soon, it's not just, you know, Anglos, well-assimilated.
00:51:31.000You know, Germans who are well-assimilated to the Anglo culture and then the Irish, which is what it was before.
00:51:35.000Now you have just as many Jews, just as many Italian Catholics who are Catholics like the Irish, but they're still not quite, you know, they're still different communities.
00:51:44.000And we've just had to do that all the time.
00:51:46.000Even in 1924, when we kind of shut down immigration after the First World War, you know, we basically shut down immigration from 1924 to 1965. There was some, but very limited and very selective.
00:52:01.000But as soon as that happened, as soon as the immigration pipeline from Europe was cut off, that's when the great migration of African Americans out of the South starts.
00:52:10.000And in about 40 years, you get 6-7 million African Americans coming mostly from the country South into places like Detroit and all the places that you kind of associate with large African American communities now.
00:52:23.000It's kind of crazy to think about, but if you go back to the First World War...
00:52:28.000You know, Detroit's African-American population was like 2 percent, you know, and that was Philadelphia.
00:52:34.000I think Baltimore had like eight or nine.
00:52:37.000Pretty much all African-Americans still live down in the south.
00:52:40.000And so over the course of about 40 years, they all move out to all the big cities and you have to still like they're from America, obviously.
00:52:47.000But like you've got to renegotiate like you're.
00:52:51.000Your identity with these people and figure out like a new political compromise in these cities in the various places.
00:52:58.000And when the great migration of African-Americans starts to peter out in 1965, we reopen the floodgates of immigration with the Hard Seller Act and that's the world we're kind of in now.
00:53:09.000And so that's – and look, especially back in the day in the first like two big waves of migration into the US, the Ellis Island migrations.
00:53:21.000Like those were – like America would not be here today if we didn't do that.
00:53:25.000Like there were not enough out-of-work English people over in England to come over here and take over this whole continent.
00:53:33.000The only way it was ever going to happen is if we were radically open and tolerant to people because you go back to – there's a naturalization law.
00:53:44.000I think it was the first naturalization law on the books in the United States, 1798. And you see a lot of like racialist types point to this as if it kind of backs up their idea of what America's history is and what it should be because it says all white persons of good – all free white persons of good moral character, if you come to the United States, can become a citizen.
00:54:10.000And people see that and they focus on the white part and they say, see, they wanted America to be a white country or whatever.
00:54:17.000That is – Totally the wrong way to understand that law.
00:54:20.000I mean, if you were to go to like France or Germany or England or whatever, for them to pass a law that said anybody in the continent, any European, you know, you guys can come over here and we will make you a citizen with the full legal rights and privileges of our richest citizen.
00:54:39.000You know, you will be an equal citizen.
00:54:41.000You can just come here radically open.
00:54:44.000I mean, really like a revolutionarily.
00:54:47.000You know, you got to remember, like, the Europeans still had another 150 years of just wantonly slaughtering each other, you know, left still ahead of them.
00:54:58.000You know, you had like, today, I mean, if you have like a person on...
00:55:04.000You know, who lives to the left of you and they're the Thatcher family and they're vaguely, you know, English.
00:55:11.000And then you have the McCoy family on the other side and they're vaguely Irish.
00:55:15.000They're just kind of white people to you now.
00:55:17.000Like, it all kind of seems like what's the difference?
00:55:19.000Go tell an English and Irish person that they were the same thing back in 1798. They did not identify with each other at all.
00:55:26.000There was a lot of bad blood, a lot of hostility.
00:55:28.000And so to say, all of you people, with all your differences, you come over here and get with the program and you can be one of us, just radically open.
00:55:35.000And again, we had to do that or else the country would not be here.
00:55:39.000Or it would be an Anglo country sort of...
00:55:43.000Clustered around the 13 colonies and maybe moved in a bit.
00:55:46.000But, you know, we wouldn't have been able to hold this whole continent against the French and the Spanish and everybody else who was around unless we were that open.
00:55:54.000And so that was like a prerequisite for America becoming what it is today.
00:56:28.000To try to transfer our way of thinking about social identity, our way of thinking about You know, what a nation is to the European countries.
00:57:07.000There's people that live there from all walks of life all over the world, but it's mostly Chinese people.
00:57:12.000If China had decided that they wanted to remain Chinese and stay Chinese and that being Chinese is very important to what China is, no one would have a problem with that.
00:57:25.000When a country like Poland does it, you're like, oh, those white people, they want to keep everybody out.
00:57:52.000You know, Poland, Hungary, a lot of these Eastern Bloc countries, even though communism was extremely hostile to national identity, you know, and really, I mean, took a lot of brutal measures to try to stamp it out because they wanted everybody to be a kind of new Soviet citizen, you know?
00:58:09.000Those countries that are over there now are much more comfortable sort of saying, yeah, Hungary is a country where Hungarians live and this is a Christian country and we want to keep it that way.
00:58:22.000All the countries that were on the other side of the Iron Curtain under the influence of the United States kind of had our traditional way of looking at these things kind of imposed on them.
00:58:34.000I don't know if it's like a program or something.
00:58:35.000But we were the dominant sort of cultural and military force and everything else, political force.
00:58:40.000And so they kind of absorbed the American openness and tolerance of all comers that we kind of had to have, as I said, in places where it really makes no sense at all.
00:58:52.000I mean you have – you could at least say like with the British Empire or something.
00:58:58.000And so now like … Those people in the former colonies, like they're moving to Britain and, you know, you could – like I don't really think of it this way.
00:59:15.000They suffered terribly under the British for a long time.
00:59:19.000And yet it's very interesting that, you know, they were willing to be brutalized, be occupied, be starved, you know, all of these things for centuries.
00:59:29.000To defend their little slice of the world where their people could work out their destiny among themselves, you know, endured so much for that.
00:59:40.000And then, you know, you get up to about the 1960s, 1970s, and, you know, you can look it up.
00:59:49.000It's the first things that come up on Google, if you look it up, that, you know, Ireland is on track to be minority Irish by like 2070 or something like that.
01:00:16.000And turning it all into sort of a homogenized like mixed soup.
01:00:22.000I think when you put it in those terms nobody really wants that.
01:00:26.000And, you know, people – but people get very uncomfortable, you know.
01:00:30.000And in America with immigration specifically, it's really hard to like – you know, the fact that it's not like we're a Christian country in the sense of it being worked into our political culture so much or anything anymore.
01:00:42.000But still like the values that most people, even atheists and everybody else kind of – that inform their moral outlook are derived from that legacy of Christianity, you know.
01:00:53.000And it can be very hard for somebody who is working from that moral base to come up with a reason that – I mean look.
01:01:05.000Imagine you're in a room and you're sitting at a table and across from the table is a man, his wife and their two kids and they're from some poor part of the world and they want to come – you know, they want to be a part of your country.
01:01:18.000You're not going to be able to come up with a reason that justifies keeping them out.
01:01:24.000I mean, the only one that you could come up with is that when you open the door to that room, there's 65 million people standing in line outside, and you can't, you know, you can't do that.
01:01:34.000But, like, on an individual level, like, people really have a lot of trouble, and I think this is a credit to Americans in a lot of ways, even if it causes us a lot of confusion, that, you know, it is hard for us to turn people away like that, you know?
01:01:52.000I think to go back to what you were originally talking about, I think the World War II story is a huge part of that.
01:01:57.000It's a huge part of why people – I think that some of the lessons we drew from that war were kind of maybe not the right ones to take and that … They have led us to the point where a culture like Ireland, who was not involved in the Second World War, never colonized anybody, feels like they don't have the moral right to say this is a little island where the Irish people get to live together and work out our destiny.
01:03:51.000So it would be insanely hypocritical of me to deny someone who came from another country an opportunity to partake in this place.
01:04:02.000I also think that it's coordinated and I think that they're doing it in America for a lot of bizarre reasons that you could attribute to trying to stack states and trying to overwhelm democratic voter registration in swing states and allow people to vote and give them a pathway to citizenship and allow them to vote and get them on the dole, get them on.
01:04:31.000Whether it's Social Security, we've talked about this before, where people were encouraged to say that they had bad backs or headaches so that they could be permanently disabled on Social Security.
01:04:42.000And then that client is going to – you're going to call upon them to vote for you.
01:04:47.000And if you only need 10,000 votes here or 20,000 votes there, and they're objectively shipping in 10 times that much to some of these swing states.
01:04:57.000This is kind of taking advantage of the charitable aspect of Americans, how we view people wanting to come here for opportunity, which most of them are just doing that.
01:05:07.000Most of them are people that unfortunately were born in a place with no possibilities and a lot of crime and a lot of danger, and they have a family, and they want to do better, and they came here, and I love it.
01:05:25.000That can be taken advantage of in order to control the political parties, in order to tighten down on the laws, tighten down on the surveillance state, get everybody to use an app, put everybody on central bank digital currency because it's more stable, have a social credit score system to make sure that everything goes well.
01:05:41.000And the next thing you know, everyone's self-centered.
01:05:43.000Everyone is Twitter before Elon bought it.
01:06:20.000And you can use your empathy and they can use it against you.
01:06:27.000And unfortunately, you have to be aware that there's nefarious forces that are involved in all areas of society where enormous amounts of money can be transferred.
01:06:38.000And that's how you have to look at it.
01:07:15.000And that's the dirty little secret of construction sites.
01:07:17.000You go back to the 1850s, 1860s, and Irish dock workers on the East Coast, immigrant Irish dock workers, their life expectancy was 14 years from the time they stepped off the boat.
01:07:31.000And these weren't 60-year-olds coming over and working on the docks.
01:07:33.000You're talking about young guys who came over to do that.
01:08:04.000But I always have to tell people that...
01:08:06.000I'm the last – the farthest thing from a centrist.
01:08:08.000It's just I have a whole bunch of views that are very far right and a whole bunch that are very far left according to this thing at least.
01:08:14.000And one of my far left views before this World War II series got kind of pushed to the front of the queue because of the Tucker controversy.
01:08:22.000I was working through a series on the history of the American labor movement.
01:08:26.000And people today think of teachers' unions and corrupt big labor organizations and so forth.
01:08:32.000But I'm a – I mean, to me, the American labor movement, the first part of it, it's America's best story, in my opinion.
01:08:40.000I mean, because, you know, you go back to the 1880s, 1890s, or I did one on the Battle of Blair Mountain in West Virginia when 10,000, 11,000 coal miners who were just being brutally exploited by the mining companies and their mercenaries, I mean, they took up arms and they were ready to...
01:09:00.000They were marching on the county next door to go free some of their compatriots and to hang the sheriff.
01:09:07.000And they only stopped because the U.S. Army finally showed up.
01:09:11.000This is right after World War I. The U.S. Army showed up and a lot of the guys who the miners were World War I veterans and they weren't going to fight the army.
01:09:22.000Not even because they were afraid or discouraged by their prospects.
01:09:35.000But, you know, you go back to those early to those early decades of the labor struggles.
01:09:41.000And I mean, people really have to like.
01:09:44.000It was not some aberration when striking workers, you know.
01:09:50.000Got a bunch of people killed, you know, like where a bunch of Pinkertons or other mercenaries or even government forces.
01:09:56.000I mean, you go to like, you know, a mine, a coal mine in Colorado back in I think it was 1912. And the National Guard of the state, which was completely there was not a lot of people in Colorado at the time.
01:10:10.000So the National Guard and the state government was completely run by.
01:10:13.000The mining operators because they were the most important thing in the state.
01:10:17.000And the National Guard took up positions with machine guns up on a hill overlooking the striking miners encampment.
01:10:23.000And the miners were mostly all gone because, you know, there were authorities looking for them and stuff.
01:10:27.000It was a lot of their wives and children and so forth.
01:10:29.000And they just opened up on these people and killed like 22 women and children.
01:10:33.000And like that kind of thing was like that's an extreme kind of.
01:10:38.000That's an example, I guess, of the brutality, but smaller versions of that, that's how it was.
01:10:43.000People didn't believe back then, or a lot of people, the capitalists didn't believe back then that you had a right to strike.
01:11:09.000When, like, right-wing people—I really try to get this across to them.
01:11:13.000Like, today you think, like, a left-wing socialist or whatever.
01:11:16.000And you think, like, a blue-haired college student who's screeching to you about— Back then, you know, you're talking about guys who, and women too, actually, in certain cases, but guys who spent 12 to 14 hours a day turning a wrench or swinging a hammer.
01:11:33.000And then after that, then they go to their meetings.
01:11:37.000And they get home to their family and they sleep for four or five hours in a basement, two-room apartment that's got mold growing on the walls.
01:11:46.000And they have a bowl of cabbage soup with their four kids that live in this horrible place.
01:11:51.000And then they go back and do it again the next day.
01:11:53.000These were like working people who were – I firmly believe if it was not for their sacrifices, we would all still be working under those kind of conditions.
01:12:05.000The capitalist class – and I'm not trying to sound like some kind of a Marxist or something.
01:12:22.000In fact, if you go up to a little bit later in the early 1900s, Probably the thing labor unions are most famous for these days is like the corruption, the mob involvement and so forth, labor racketeering.
01:12:36.000And that kind of got started in the early part of the 1900s.
01:12:39.000But the interesting thing about it is the way it started was, you know, the owners of the businesses, they were hiring like...
01:12:48.000I mean, the Pinkertons, the different groups that they would hire, they would get people just out of prison, you know, violent people, war veterans, and they would send them against the striking workers, have them spy on the workers, have them kidnap like guys who are trying to kind of get people into the union and so forth and get rid of them.
01:13:08.000You know, this kind of thing was happening.
01:13:09.000And so the union started to say, well, we need some muscle, too.
01:13:31.000You know, they ran into the trouble that, you know, it always presents itself in situations like that is, you know, the people you hire to come in as muscle start to look around and be like.
01:13:41.000Why do we have to take orders from these people again?
01:13:47.000You started to get these unions that were racketeering organizations.
01:13:52.000And so these are things about history is extremely messy.
01:14:00.000We have to always remember people are often making the crucial decisions that Turn history this way or that, you know, zig instead of zag, are often made under crisis conditions by people who sometimes they're great men and women, but a lot of times, you know, they're the person who happens to be there at the time and they're doing their best and they're taking advice from the people that are around them and they're, you know, they're making the decision that's going to determine if we head off in this direction or that direction, you know.
01:14:31.000And you can't, you know, there was one time, right?
01:14:37.000I can tell the story because it's probably back in the mid-2000s when I was still in the military.
01:15:43.000And I'm in the backyard and I'm like this close to just digging a hole in this flower garden and taking a shit in this flower garden.
01:15:50.000But then all of a sudden I look up and there's a balcony.
01:15:54.000From the master bedroom with no stairs down to the backyard, but it's a balcony, you know, there's no access to it.
01:15:59.000And I'm like, I'll bet they didn't lock that door.
01:16:02.000And so I kick my shoes off so that I can, you know, they were loose on my feet so that I can more easily like climb up the pole and pull myself up there.
01:16:11.000And at this point, just like the effort of, the effort of...
01:16:15.000You know, the strain of, like, pulling myself up to this thing, like, it's coming right now, and that's just, that's what's happening.
01:16:23.000And so I run into the, I run up, the door's open, thank God, and I run in and run into the master bathroom.
01:16:29.000And for some reason, but again, like, this is a crisis moment, you know, I'm not, like, taking everything into account as I'm making decisions here.
01:16:37.000I get in there, and as I run in there, I see that there's no toilet paper.
01:16:50.000I run over to the stairs, and they have one of those stairs that kind of goes down halfway, and there's a little platform, and then right angle goes down the other way.
01:16:58.000And I have to go so bad that I just jump down the first flight of stairs, and then I jump down the second flight of stairs.
01:17:04.000My socks hit the tile floor, slide out.
01:17:06.000I fall on my back, bang my head, and shit everywhere.
01:17:16.000And my head is like ringing and I'm ashamed to say that like I laid there in my shit for like at least 10 seconds because I was sitting there thinking of like all of the opportunities that I had to like, you know, change course and avoid this that are so obvious in retrospect.
01:17:33.000And you just sit there and think about like when you're in that situation, like you don't even stop there.
01:17:38.000You think back on like your entire life and you're like.
01:17:49.000This doesn't have anything to do with the overall point I was making, but the really shameful part of it is I cleaned it all up, and you could still kind of, like in the grout and the tiles, I couldn't get it all out, so it still kind of smelled shitty.
01:18:03.000And when my friend got home, I didn't tell him this for years afterwards, when he got home, I blamed it on his dog.
01:18:11.000And he yelled at the dog on my behalf.
01:19:29.000It's one of those things where, unfortunately, we look at negative aspects of it and we don't have a full perspective of where we would be without that.
01:19:46.000They have so much and their resources are so vast that they can control everyone else and that they could stifle your ability to earn an income.
01:19:58.000They fuck everybody over and they just want more and more and more and it's a blight on society.
01:20:04.000I think we both agree there's some sort of a comfortable middle ground.
01:20:09.000I don't believe socialism is a way to run a country, but I do think there's socialism aspects of our country that we can't ignore are powerful and important.
01:20:16.000One of them that I bring up all the time is the fire department.
01:20:19.000The fire department is a totally socialist idea.
01:20:26.000If you live in a house that's worth a million dollars, if you live in a house that's worth $200,000, They put out fires.
01:20:34.000If you can afford it or if you can't afford it, they put out fires.
01:20:37.000We all agree, you got to put out fires.
01:20:39.000We all kind of agree, you should have a good education.
01:20:43.000But obviously, states are different in the resources and local districts are different in the resources and you see very nice neighborhoods that have really good schools and you see terrible neighborhoods that have terrible schools.
01:20:56.000So we don't really completely treat that.
01:21:01.000That should be a socialist thing that everybody should get along with.
01:21:04.000That everybody should say, yeah, that's good for everybody.
01:21:06.000Another thing is, and this is very controversial, but socialized medicine.
01:21:11.000The idea that you should go broke because you broke your leg is fucking crazy.
01:21:15.000If we're a community of people that are supposed to be supporting each other and helping each other, the best thing we could do is help one of the members of the community become active and...
01:21:26.000Productive and contribute to society that makes everybody better and greater and we should be willing to contribute to that but I want my Orthopedic surgeon driving a fucking Mercedes.
01:21:37.000I want that guy to be a bad motherfucker who gets compensated for because that's the type of guy who becomes an artist That's the type of guy who works on the Lakers knees.
01:21:45.000That's the type of guy you want like oh, that's Mike He does the Cowboys whenever they have shoulder injuries That's the guy.
01:22:30.000And I think labor unions are very important.
01:22:34.000It's very important to not allow a corporation that is entirely designed to make as much money as possible dictate how much money its workers get.
01:22:47.000Because the poorer you are, the more desperate you are, the less likely you are to do anything about it.
01:22:54.000When you get comfortable, and you want to be more comfortable, and you say, this isn't fair, we could sit out for six months, that's when you become dangerous.
01:23:03.000When you have the ability to strike, when the writers' union in Los Angeles strikes, that's a fucking real problem, man.
01:23:12.000And they get recognized because of that.
01:23:15.000And then they get hopefully fairly compensated because of that.
01:23:18.000It's an important part of our society.
01:23:19.000There's also, I think, due to our unique history of kind of having demographic turnover generation after generation, more or less since the beginning, that if you look at the development of things like the public school system, for example, or a lot of the social welfare programs and other social programs, a lot of those things emerged.
01:23:41.000Because there was all of a sudden a huge influx of Irish in the 1830s and 40s.
01:23:46.000And their parents are both working 14-hour days and the kids are just running the streets and everything else.
01:24:06.000And then they were transferred to the city governments and stuff.
01:24:10.000They were responses to like demographic crises, right?
01:24:13.000They were emerging due to like the migrant influxes.
01:24:16.000And I think that that being the case, it's kind of given Americans like a – because, you know, the native population who was already there when that happened, they didn't like it.
01:24:27.000They were like, wait, so these people came over here and now I have to pay to like set up a school system for their kids?
01:25:08.000You know, it was built to create opportunities and push competition for people to compete for the top of the mountain.
01:25:15.000But the people at the bottom, like, throughout a lot of our history were just kind of forgotten.
01:25:18.000You know, the real question is, in a country that is so geared toward competition at the top, whether that ever would have changed without a real push, you know?
01:25:29.000And, I mean, one of the other things, too, is, like, when people think about...
01:25:35.000If you go back to, like, in Europe where they were really worried about communism, we were never really justifiably too worried about it in terms of having a revolution here or anything.
01:25:46.000But if you go over to, like, especially after the Soviet Union came around from basically Germany eastward, you know, communism, like, it was a very real possibility, like, in the 1920s that...
01:25:58.000The German Communist Party, which was the largest political party in Germany, was taking its marching orders directly from Moscow, that they were going to win and they were going to take over and you were now going to be like, what's going on over in Russia and Ukraine?
01:26:10.000That was a real thing that could have happened to them.
01:26:15.000And when people hear that, they think that, again, they try to put it in the context of a modern left-wing person or something like that.
01:26:24.000But it's like when people are working under these conditions, And the socialists, the communists are like literally the only political movement that's even vying for their support.
01:26:34.000Nobody else is even really even courting them or asking for it, you know?
01:26:38.000And when you add to that, like this whole idea of like the working class, like this isn't something that has existed forever.
01:26:45.000Like this was something that was emerging in different times in different places.
01:26:50.000Most like in some developed countries, you started to see it in like the 18th century, but it's like a 19th century phenomenon where all of a sudden, so you think you go back to feudal times and you've got the aristocracy, you got the church and you got the peasantry.
01:27:03.000And then you have like another group of people who kind of serves a unique function, but kind of a uniform function across Europe in the Jews.
01:27:12.000You know, they would very often be like, they played a very kind of critical role in feudal Europe.
01:27:18.000You know, because they were the only ones who had a network that kind of stretched across the whole place.
01:27:24.000And so a lot of times like the rulers would have Jews working for them who, you know, they were basically like your diplomatic channels kind of.
01:27:34.000You need to like talk to people over there or if you needed to raise money for something, they had large capital networks that could help you raise money for it, things like that.
01:27:42.000But they weren't, you know, they weren't serfs or peasants.
01:27:48.000They were kind of their separate thing and most of the time they were allowed to sort of abide by their own laws, like run their own little societies like how they wanted.
01:28:00.000But this was at a time when it was just taken for granted that different classes of people had different privileges and different rights.
01:28:09.000It was just – everybody took that for granted.
01:28:12.000It wasn't even something that was imposed.
01:28:13.000was the peasant or a serf would have believed that as much as the king did.
01:28:16.000It was only when you start to get up into the Industrial Revolution that all of a sudden you start to see these cities just teeming with people who have no land.
01:28:27.000You know, they don't have any means of like immediate self-sufficiency.
01:28:31.000What they have is their back and their shoulders and their hands.
01:28:34.000And, you know, they trade that for the means to survive.
01:28:38.000And, you know, this happened very rapidly in a lot of countries so that you have this whole new kind of politically awakening demographic, you know, because that's sort of kind of the key to it.
01:28:51.000At first, you know, it took some time for them to sort of have a political awakening where they recognized that, wait, I'm not just a worker.
01:29:00.000And we have, you know, whatever our difference is, the working class has common interests that are in opposition to the interests of these other classes.
01:29:09.000And we're going to start to, you know, organize and act politically.
01:29:13.000To extend those interests and to achieve them.
01:29:17.000And so people were kind of figuring out, again, on the fly, like, how to deal with this.
01:29:20.000Like, what – you know, the idea that just regular poor people who – you know, that they should have any say in, like, how the state is run, how the economy is – it was just a completely foreign idea, like, everywhere on the planet basically until, you know, 200 years ago or so.
01:29:42.000Which is pretty bizarre that we've had to adjust to that so quickly.
01:29:49.000Changes in transmit the ability to move people, transit, the ability to take people from Europe quickly, relatively, to America.
01:29:57.000Trains, machines, the Industrial Revolution, all this happening, cities emerging, like enormous populations, and then the squalor in which those people are living in, which is...
01:30:09.000I mean, that's really the dirty secret of the beginnings of all these cities.
01:30:15.000These people were shitting in outhouses.
01:31:04.000It's a scary thought when you think about the history of the human race about people generally had sort of specific roles in society that you could gravitate towards and that would be your trade and that would be your way to...
01:32:14.000Yeah, the history of organized crime is actually for people who really want to understand America in the late 19th and...
01:32:23.000Throughout the 20th century, reading a few books on the history of organized crime is a good window into that.
01:32:28.000It's going to give you a perspective from the bottom up rather than from the top down.
01:32:33.000When you read history, the further back you go, the more true this is.
01:32:37.000It's something you really have to stay humble about.
01:32:41.000You consider the fact that things that are happening today, we can't seem to agree on things that are...
01:32:48.000Just extensively documented and there's like in newspapers and video, whatever else.
01:32:52.000We can't agree about what's going on or what, you know, the president's motivations are, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
01:32:58.000And you go back further in history and you're dealing with like scraps of information a lot of times.
01:33:03.000And the further back you go, the worse it gets.
01:33:05.000You know, the idea that you should really like be careful when you really feel like you start to understand people, you know, from a...
01:33:14.000I mean, for one thing, I mean, even if you – I mentioned, I was like, look, first of all, you're dealing with sources, written sources, which automatically means you're getting your information from the very, very, very few people in that society who knew how to write, right?
01:33:51.000You're talking about a certain kind of people.
01:33:53.000And, you know, this is still something that like really affects the way we like the news is reported about places around the world all the time, right?
01:34:00.000You'll remember back during the Arab Spring when things were jumping off in Egypt and they were interviewing.
01:34:07.000It was like CNN or one of them, I don't know, interviewing their correspondent who was like there in Cairo on the ground, like talking to the people or whatever.
01:34:15.000And according to her, these are just – these are all a bunch of liberal people who want freedom and they want democracy and like da-da-da-da-da-da-da.
01:34:25.000And, you know, people see stuff like that.
01:34:28.000And maybe sometimes there is, like, an aspect of this to it.
01:34:31.000But people see that and they're like, oh, this is propaganda.
01:34:37.000But they're trying to sell this to us.
01:34:39.000A lot of times it's like, no, man, look, you have this lady who works for CNN or New York Times or whatever it is who goes to Cairo.
01:34:46.000Who do you think she's going to talk to?
01:34:48.000Like, how would she even know how to find, like, your raggedy person, like, living in the slums or something, or how to communicate with that person in their own terms?
01:34:55.000She's going to go to the people she knows there, who are all going to be educated people, middle class or higher, and say, hey, can you put me in touch with people I can talk to?
01:35:04.000And that kind of—this same thing is true in Russia.
01:35:08.000You know, with Russia, you know— There's a faction of people.
01:35:13.000There's always been a faction of people in Russia who are not fans of Vladimir Putin.
01:35:17.000And interestingly, it's sort of the same social class that really doesn't like Donald Trump in the United States.
01:35:25.000You know, a lot of the civil servants and bureaucrats, a lot of the professional, like, urban people, those are the ones who don't like them.
01:35:32.000Well, if you're a Russia correspondent...
01:35:35.000For one of these major media organizations, these are just the people that are going to be around you and who are going to be influencing the way you think things are going.
01:35:43.000And so a lot of times that makes it over into our news is like the people are ready for a revolution.
01:35:47.000The people are ready to get Putin out of there.
01:35:55.000Like going on Blue Sky, talking about Trump.
01:35:58.000And I mean, this is sort of postmodernism 101. The useful side of postmodernism, you know, the unpoliticized useful side is going back through and, you know, reading the text we have and looking at the information we have and sort of doing an archaeology on it,
01:36:16.000you know, and understanding that, you know, like you could I would say like an early example of like that type of postmodernism is Euripides play in ancient Greece, the Trojan women, because like what he was doing is like.
01:36:32.000They knew the story of the conquest of Troy and all that.
01:36:35.000But he wrote the story from the perspective of the women who actually lived in Troy and went through the conquest.
01:36:41.000And it's like you have to remember that almost everything – and again, I sound like some hippie blue-haired college student when I say stuff like this.
01:36:49.000But you really have to keep it in mind that when you're reading history that is written exclusively by men, exclusively by adults.
01:36:59.000Exclusively by the upper class and the small cast of people who are actually literate and writing things down.
01:37:06.000And for even leaving aside like the political circumstances, they were putting constraints on the way that they could describe and write about things.
01:38:04.000How do you try to have this balanced, nuanced perspective when you're getting, in many cases, a biased perspective that you're researching from?
01:38:27.000Like when I was doing that story specifically, like the early history of Zionism and that conflict.
01:38:32.000I'm reading English sources, which, especially if you get back before, you know, the last couple decades, are almost always telling you the perspective of the Zionists to a large extent, just because, you know, there's not a lot of—there weren't a lot of Arabs in Britain and America and stuff writing books about what was happening.
01:38:54.000And, you know, the thing that somebody asked me on X the other day—I was doing a Q&A and— They said, how do you—you know, how can we—what do we have to do?
01:39:02.000What are some of the steps we have to take or whatever, things we have to take into account to make sure, like, we're getting an objective view of history?
01:39:08.000And I told them, like, I don't think that's a viable goal when you're doing this stuff.
01:39:13.000Like, you know, the goal should be understanding, you know, on a human level.
01:39:17.000And just—you have to just maintain a sense of humility and a sense of the limitations of your own ability to really— To really understand what's going on and just constantly keep in the front of your mind that these are human beings making human decisions based on human motivations, you know?
01:39:32.000And if you do that, you know, maybe you won't have like a perfect picture of the events that took place because, again, we're just limited, you know?
01:39:40.000There's a lot of like huge historical figures, somebody like Alexander the Great or something.
01:39:46.000Like what we know about them is based on an extremely small stack of papers, you know?
01:39:54.000And so, yeah, that sort of humility, which was kind of imposed on me at the very beginning because the Israel-Palestine series was the first one I did.
01:40:03.000And I was reading and after I had read maybe like six books or so, something like that, I was like, OK, I kind of get this.
01:40:14.000I'm ready to start writing this first episode and plotting it out.
01:40:17.000And so I do that and it takes me a while.
01:40:18.000I'm still working my day job at the time.
01:40:20.000So it takes me a few months to kind of get it.
01:42:42.000The way you describe, like say the Jim Jones, the Guyana tragedy, the way you describe that, if I was in high school, I'd be like, this fucking teacher rules.
01:42:54.000My favorite emails to get from listeners, right?
01:42:57.000Or, well, my favorite email, my favorite two emails probably had to do with the Israeli-Palestinian thing.
01:43:02.000You know, one of them was from an active duty IDF soldier who was serving in the West Bank who said that he listened to the podcast and that it actually altered the way he...
01:43:11.000Deals with Palestinians on a daily basis in his job.
01:43:29.000And she wrote me about two or three months after the war kicked off, after October 7th.
01:43:36.000And she heard the podcast and she said...
01:43:39.000You could tell, I mean, for sure, like there was a lot of anger, like the way the Israelis were conducting the war and the way they treat Palestinians and all that, very justified anger.
01:43:48.000But, you know, she said she listened to the podcast and it made her realize that the Jews are just like her and that the, you know, they say Jews over there and they mean Israelis, but like it's just they use the word Jews because that's what they are.
01:44:01.000You know, that's how they understand it.
01:44:04.000And she said, you know, there's probably a Jewish girl.
01:44:06.000Who lives in Tel Aviv, who's just like me.
01:45:06.000But I really feel like, you know, you can think of kids like—we all know a million of these people, like, back in school where, you know, that's the dumb kid, right?
01:45:15.000He's just, like, gets C's if he's lucky and he's not any good at, you know, math, whatever.
01:45:20.000But then you get him talking about cars.
01:45:24.000And he's like, and he will break down, I mean, everything about a Honda Civic engine that you can possibly, I mean, and you realize really quick, like, oh, this is actually a really smart guy.
01:45:34.000He's just, nobody's been able to engage him on these topics before.
01:45:38.000And so he thinks that those aren't for him, and he's not engaged with them.
01:45:41.000But you get him on something he's really engaged with, this dude's super smart.
01:45:44.000If you could give him an IQ test that, like, purely drew from, like, him when he's talking about cars, he would be above average.
01:45:52.000You know, it's a matter of just, like, being able to get people engaged.
01:45:56.000And that's my favorite thing to do with the podcast is, you know, when people who didn't think they were into this kind of stuff realize that, you know, you pull them in with a good story and a good presentation, but then they kind of take it from there themselves.
01:46:25.000And I think that's one of the things that I'm most happy about with the emergence of podcasting is that it's kind of thrown a monkey wrench into that.
01:46:42.000And we're constantly being bombarded by...
01:46:46.000Information and data, but you don't have to opt into that You can step out of that and you can actually be interested in things and it will enrich your perspective Which will help you as a human being it'll help you it'll help you navigate life It'll help you navigate relationships and friendships and careers The more you know the better the more you consider other people's perspectives the better the more you get a chance to listen to how an expert describes What they know about a specific thing and what's fascinating about
01:47:16.000it and how it engages them and how it's enriching their life.
01:47:30.000It's good to expand your understanding of life, this life that we're all experiencing together.
01:47:35.000You know, and I think that's where Podcasts and your podcast is very different than mine obviously because yours is actually really planned out It's almost like it should be a different category than just a podcast But that's where those things are like really important because they do engage people and they do get people that as you said Might not have thought that that was for them and all sudden they're like Jim Jones.
01:48:00.000Like and then you get into your series on it.
01:48:01.000It's utterly fascinating like I am particularly fascinated like a lot of people with cults Because we all have this thing in the back of our head when we see something like the Jim Jones cult or Waco or anything.
01:49:09.000But to answer your question, though, as far as how people get sucked into it, the thing that shines through again and again, no matter what you're talking about, whether it's...
01:49:22.000Any of the stories I've talked about is that very often people get sucked into it because – not because of like some latent evil in their heart but because their virtues get hijacked.
01:49:38.000That is somebody who can say whatever you want about him.
01:49:42.000He loved the German people and he cared about the German people.
01:49:45.000But that love, I mean, is very – I mean, it's like, you know, I was reading an article a while back about the neurochemical oxytocin.
01:49:54.000And it's the chemical that basically makes sure that, you know, a mammal mother doesn't eat her baby when she gets hungry.
01:50:03.000You know, in us, it takes the form of, like, increasing trust and empathy and so forth.
01:50:09.000But they've also done research and found that it also, like, that it increases trust and empathy and all those things for your in-group.
01:50:17.000But because you're more protective of them, like feeling that way, it actually increases distrust toward anybody considered like in the out group.
01:50:26.000And so it's like makes you love your child more and makes you hate like the foreigner more or something like that, you know?
01:50:33.000And a lot of things are like that where it's really your virtues that get hijacked.
01:50:39.000I mean, yeah, you were talking about Jonestown.
01:50:41.000I mean, that story sucked me in so much.
01:50:44.000Part of the reason for that is because I just got obsessed with it.
01:50:47.000But part of it is that the U.S. authorities found like a thousand hours of recordings at the Jonestown site after the massacre, and they're all available online.
01:51:19.000But through that experience, what I found is I, and even to this day, like I say, I will still say it, even after I'm separated from it, it's all over, is I really sympathize with those people.
01:51:32.000The same way I sympathize with like, you know, and I get into this in the series too, like, you know, the radical movements that emerged out of the civil rights struggle, you know, the Black Panthers and whatnot, who, you know, they went down a dark road.
01:51:46.000But when you put yourself in their shoes, you know, because say what you want about like if Jim Jones, just like for people out there who don't know, I mean, go listen to the podcast.
01:51:56.000But, you know, Jim Jones was a guy who...
01:51:59.000In, like, 1953 is when he started his first church in Indianapolis.
01:52:05.000And it's a totally open, like, mixed-race church in Indianapolis.
01:52:11.000And he and his congregation are going out and putting pressure on businesses to, like, start serving, you know, to desegregate and start serving African-American customers and stuff.
01:52:21.000This is a couple of years before Martin Luther King and Birmingham or whatever.
01:52:25.000He was, like, out front on this, right?
01:52:27.000And he was – you know, his wife would – they adopted the first – they were the first white family to adopt an African-American child in the state of Indiana.
01:52:39.000His wife would walk down the street with their adopted child and she'd get spit on, called an N-word lover, all these kind of things.
01:52:48.000I mean he was getting death threats from like the American Nazi Party, from the KKK, which was very strong in Indiana back in the day.
01:52:56.000And he was – But he was still doing all this.
01:52:59.000And if Jim Jones would have gotten hit by a bus in 1962, he would 100% be remembered today as like an early hero of the Civil Rights Movement.
01:53:10.000And when you say, like, how did people get sucked into it?
01:53:13.000Like, you think of somebody—like, one of the first things you notice, if all you know about the Jonestown story is don't drink the Kool-Aid, you know, you've heard that.
01:53:21.000The first thing that stands out to you when you pick up a book about it is that 75% of the people who died out there were black.
01:53:28.000And, you know, as soon as—like, I had been doing another project about the great migration of African Americans out of the South around that time.
01:53:35.000And so I thought about it and I was like, man, these are all, like, first-generation people out in San Francisco where the Jonestown cult was based.
01:53:43.000Because, I mean, you didn't really have the big migration out to the West Coast until the Second World War and after the Second World War.
01:53:52.000You know, you take just like as one example, there was one of the women that died out there.
01:53:56.000She was like 70, 72 years old or something in 1978 when they all died.
01:54:02.000So she was born in whatever, 1906 in Alabama.
01:54:34.000They didn't know what they were going to find out there, but they were going to go give it, you know, give it a try.
01:54:39.000And so they get out there and her husband's working on the Oakland docks and they live kind of in that Oakland docks area that today is, you know, so run down.
01:54:48.000He dies early just from overwork and, like, everything else.
01:54:51.000And she's there now in her little stoop, you know, front porch house, street side house, living by herself in a neighborhood that is just completely falling apart.
01:55:02.000You got drugs and you got gangs and, like, she gets, you know, harassed when she walks down the steps and all these kind of things.
01:56:04.000And so she goes down there, and what she finds is a group of people, it was not, they're like...
01:56:11.000Their sense of like real equality between people, not just racial but just across the board, that was not a game.
01:56:18.000They were 100 percent serious about it.
01:56:21.000So she shows up to this place and she's not treated like in a condescending sort of social justice way where it's like, oh, let us help you, you know, or anything like that.
01:57:15.000If you look at what happened with really like both – The threads of the protest movement in the 1960s, you see this thing happen where it starts to build up in the 1960s and you have like the campus anti-war kind of hippie type protest side and then you've got the civil rights side.
01:57:32.000And both of those are kind of within – the energy is being channeled into outlets that are – They're not antisocial.
01:57:43.000Like you got Martin Luther King like leading a movement telling the people basically like it's an American civil rights movement.
01:57:51.000It's not a – he's telling them we're not getting our – The rights we deserve as Americans and that's what we want.
01:57:58.000You had guys like Malcolm X who didn't think of it that way.
01:58:00.000They thought we're an African diaspora and we're a people and we need to like focus on that.
01:58:04.000But as long as Martin Luther King was alive, he had the moral weight within the movement to sort of fend off the emerging black power elements and stuff that were coming in.
01:58:13.000On the other side, like the campus and anti-war left, if you go up to like 1968, the year of – You know, the big riot at the Democratic Convention in Chicago.
01:58:26.000Eugene McCarthy was senator running for president and he was like the only person in the political spectrum who's going to be available for the office of president who was – he wanted to end the Vietnam War.
01:58:39.000And when you think about like this is a time – this is not like – Today we want to end the Iraq war or whatever.
01:58:45.000It's like, no, this is a matter of life and death for these protesters.
01:58:49.000It's a matter of, are they going to get drafted and sent over to this jungle to get killed for something that almost everybody at that point, even the president and the secretary of defense, we have their backroom dialogues and stuff.
01:59:01.000Now, New was a lost war and it was pointless to continue other than for vague reasons of national honor and you're going to have to go do this.
01:59:08.000Maybe die, definitely kill, you know, and go do—so this is important to these people.
01:59:13.000It wasn't like a—just an ideological thing.
01:59:15.000And then the Democratic Party just completely, openly, ridiculously, like, just steals the nomination from Eugene McCarthy.
01:59:24.000You know, the Hubert Humphrey who they put in, he didn't win a single primary.
01:59:28.000He wasn't even put into the process until way, way—he was just installed.
01:59:32.000It was a Kamala Harris kind of thing, like in the last election, where they just decided it.
01:59:38.000These people who were like they had the clean for gene movement, which is all these hippies, all these like, you know, college radicals and stuff who've been letting their freak flag fly all this time.
01:59:47.000They all cut their hair and they shaved and got good and clean cuts so they could go door to door to like normie middle class people and talk to them about Eugene McCarthy.
01:59:55.000In other words, they committed to like they got with the program.
01:59:58.000They were like, OK, we're going to do it the right way.
02:00:00.000We're going to do it, you know, through the right channels and institutions.
02:00:05.000Civil rights movement was doing that under Martin Luther King.
02:00:08.000Same year, you have McCarthy gets robbed of the nomination.
02:00:14.000They try to protest it, and they get the living shit kicked out of him by the Chicago police.
02:00:19.000On the other side, obviously, Martin Luther King gets killed.
02:00:22.000And what you saw after that is all that energy that had previously been channeled into these productive and pro-social outlets, it just scattered to the winds.
02:00:32.000You know, those things got delegitimized and all of a sudden it just goes in every direction.
02:00:40.000You know, starting really in like 1969, that's when the Weathermen came about, you know, like Weathermen came about like after, you know, most of the stuff we associate with the 60s.
02:00:49.000But then into the early 70s, you just see this massive proliferation of cults and violent radical movements.
02:00:56.000You know, you had like an offshoot of the Black Panthers out of New York called the Black Liberation Army, and they were just hunting down cops and killing them.
02:01:03.000You know, dozens of cops across the country, they just hunted down and killed.
02:01:07.000You had just truly insane groups like the Symbionese Liberation Army.
02:01:12.000You know, they were like just led by a guy who was like legitimately mentally ill, had been in and out of institutions.
02:01:20.000And he went to like, you know, one of the like, you know, bitter clinger, like last holdout sort of radical enclaves in Berkeley and found a bunch of lesbians there who were like radical feminist lesbians and got them to follow him.
02:01:34.000They're the ones that kidnapped Patty Hearst and, you know, got her going and everything.
02:01:37.000And Jonestown, like the reason there's such an interesting story to tell, like, and this is really like the angle I took on it, is they're a microcosm of the whole movement, you know.
02:01:54.000They truly believe in what they're doing.
02:01:56.000They encounter resistance from political resistance, social resistance, and as that resistance stiffens and then gets really serious when you've got people coming into the church.
02:02:08.000Who worked for a Modesto TV station telling them that, hey, I'm coming to you because I was just approached by the FBI asking me to come spy on you.
02:02:18.000So I don't know what's up there, but you must be doing something right.
02:02:32.000Trevor Burrus: What drugs are they doing?
02:02:34.000Aaron Ross Powell: Well, the drugs were not – they were still done sometimes.
02:02:40.000But like they weren't really technically allowed for like the members themselves.
02:02:44.000But Jim Jones was on – he was basically for the last 10 years of his life, it was amphetamines when you get up, barbiturates to go to sleep.
02:03:01.000And somebody who I had read a little bit about the effects because of the Jonestown story, I read a fair amount about the effects of long-term amphetamine use, the paranoia and mania that it can result.
02:03:13.000And so as I was getting up to the last episode, I asked one of my buddies.
02:03:22.000If he had any ways, if he could figure out, get me some police reports that were incidents where there was usually a husband and father who had taken his family hostage, and specifically if he was hopped up on methamphetamines that resulted in a murder-suicide.
02:03:39.000And he got me a big stack of these things.
02:03:41.000I don't know where he got them or if he was supposed to, but he got these for me and I was able to read through them.
02:03:46.000And about half of them, they ended in...
02:03:49.000The other half, like, some of them, the guy got shot by the cops, some of them he gave up, but about half a minute of murder-suicide.
02:03:55.000And as I just read through these, just again and again and again, I mean, it became very obvious.
02:04:00.000Like, this is what happened, except at a larger scale in Jonestown.
02:04:03.000You know, it's hard for people to kind of accept when you're talking about somebody like Jim Jones, who was like a raving lunatic by the end, but he loved his people.
02:04:42.000And actually, having gone through that process of reading about it...
02:04:46.000And understanding it in this way, you know, it remains to be seen if I still think this when I finish all of my reading by the time I get up to the end of the World War II series.
02:04:55.000But I see a lot of that in the Hitler story because, you know, Hitler was like – if people think of him as like a politician, they're missing a big part of what he was about.
02:05:06.000Like if anything, he was more like a prophet figure.
02:05:09.000He saw himself as like almost like a – Not a religious figure in the sense that he was sent by God and anything like that, but that he had this sacred mission to save the German people.
02:05:20.000Political questions, you know, whatever.
02:05:21.000It's why he just never compromised, even when it seemed insane not to compromise.
02:05:25.000Like in 1923, when the French invaded Western Germany to take over a lot of their industrial area, all the parties, right, left and center, all came together to like oppose that in Germany.
02:05:37.000He ordered all of his whole party to stay out of it because he was not going to accept the compromises that were going to come with working with the other groups.
02:05:47.000You know, you read about, like, you read some of the reactions that people would have to him.
02:05:51.000This is just like Jim Jones, where if his shtick works on you, man, like, you read some of, like, Joseph Goebbels' propaganda minister.
02:06:01.000You read his diaries of, like, him describing meeting Hitler and, you know, going through it.
02:07:51.000Before we bought the Comedy Mothership on 6th Street, which was the old Ritz Theater, we were in contract with this place called the One World Theater that was owned by the people that were running the...
02:08:05.000This cult called the Bodhi Tree that was the subject of the documentary, Holy Hell.
02:08:09.000I didn't know about that until I was under contract.
02:08:12.000My friend Adam was like, have you seen the documentary?
02:08:14.000I'm like, oh no, this fucking documentary?
02:08:16.000And then you watch the documentary and that's what it was.
02:08:19.000It was a guy who was a gay porn star and a hypnotist who starts this cult.
02:09:26.000It's just so strange that the pattern repeats itself over and over again of one person with the answers, one charismatic figure who believes they're right and gets a bunch of people to go with them and in the beginning makes a very attractive environment for these people, really does foster this sense of community and belonging.
02:09:52.000And then eventually it all goes sideways and it almost always has to do with some sort of either amphetamines or something along those lines.
02:10:02.000I mean that's something that really happened that derailed the protest movement like not just in the People's Temple cult but like in general.
02:10:12.000Like if you read about – You lived in San Francisco for a while, right?
02:11:19.000The whole thing was to see how long the other guy would be able to hold up and what kind of mixture he was on.
02:11:25.000And it changed the culture, you know, of course, because, I mean, a culture that's based around LSD and weed and whatever is totally different than a culture based around speed, you know.
02:11:57.000And it's – One of the reasons, like, you know, I know people talk about the beginning of the war on drugs and, you know, that a big part of it was about having a way to, like, get in and prosecute, like, civil rights activists.
02:12:15.000At the same time, like, I look back on those people, you know, Richard Nixon, I don't know, maybe he was, like, what was he, like, 50 or 60 or something in 1970. So he was born in, this guy born in 1910. You know, we just closed the frontier like a few years before that.
02:12:28.000And like he's born in 1910 and people are watching like the transformations that are taking place in society that already just culturally are so mind bending in terms of radical change.
02:12:41.000And seeing like the increase in violence, the, you know, all of the things that are coming with the new drug culture, especially once it started to move away from psychedelics into, you know, street drugs and stuff.
02:13:05.000I mean, you know, there's one of my episodes.
02:13:12.000It's part of the Labor series, but it centers around this teachers' union strike that happened in New York City.
02:13:21.000In Brooklyn in 1968. And it became like a—it turned into a big blow-up between—actually expanded even past the city, but especially within the city, between the black radicals and activists and the Jews in the city.
02:13:38.000Because the teachers' union and the New York City public schools at the time, the teachers and administrators were like 75% Jewish.
02:13:45.000And in this one particular school where— The parents, the kids, everybody are getting radicalized by like the black power ideas that are emerging in the latter half of the 60s, especially in New York because they got Harlem up there and Harlem was always kind of the fountainhead of that kind of thing.
02:14:01.000They came into conflict over, you know, how the school was going to be run.
02:14:05.000But part of it, you know, the way the conflict kind of really started off was the teachers were like going to their union and...
02:14:13.000They were going on strike not because they wanted, like, more pay or anything like that.
02:14:17.000It was because, like, teachers were getting raped.
02:14:21.000It was, like, crazy, like, what was going on.
02:14:24.000And there was – in one of the books that I read about it, or was talking about it, it wasn't specifically just about that, but they quoted a – The head of the agency in New York City that dealt with, like, drug addiction services and stuff.
02:14:41.000And they said in this one school there were more drug addicts among the students.
02:14:46.000And they actually said more hardcore drug addicts among the student body than we have at our city agency the resources to deal with.
02:15:00.000I think about, like, the 60s are so wild because, you know, there were...
02:15:05.000There were pilots in Vietnam who got shot down and taken prisoner in like 1963. And they got released in 1973. And just imagining like, they were listening to Buddy Holly or whatever when they came out.
02:15:21.000And, you know, before they went and they come back and, I mean, all the 60s has happened.
02:15:26.000And they're like, what in the hell is going on?
02:16:09.000You know, your wife, if she stuck around for those 10 years, it's like, you know, she used to be nice and obedient.
02:16:16.000Now she wants to go out to work and she's not taking your shit, you know?
02:16:19.000Like, things have just changed so rapidly.
02:16:21.000And whenever a society goes through like that kind of a rapid transition, you know, there are always going to be just people who fall through the cracks.
02:16:30.000There's always going to be people who spin off in wild directions.
02:16:35.000Like and this happens like in microcosmic levels too.
02:16:39.000You know, you think about like my father's side of my family.
02:16:44.000They all came out from like Kentucky and Alabama during the Dust Bowl, right?
02:16:48.000They're like crazy Scots-Irish like Appalachian folks who came out to California during the Dust Bowl.
02:16:54.000And so I know a fair amount about like the Okie migrations and everything and the...
02:16:59.000The Appalachian migrations up to the Midwest like a couple decades later.
02:17:03.000And one of the things like people, I guess it's not a well-known history, is that a lot of the stuff you saw with when African-Americans started moving out of the South and facing resistance, like nobody wants them in their neighborhood and all these other kind of things.
02:17:16.000The Okies and the Appalachian folks in the Midwest got the same thing.
02:17:33.000And the thing is, part of the reason for that was...
02:17:38.000It wasn't just like straight up bigotry or something.
02:17:41.000These people were – they had habits and ways of life that were very different than the people – the settled people in California were used to.
02:18:45.000And you see at any time there's like a rapid transition that people have to go through that, you know, some people are going to make it, but some people are not going to make it.
02:18:53.000And very often, you know, the unfortunate thing is the people who...
02:18:57.000The people who don't make it through that transition in one piece very often form the reputation that the rest of society sort of attaches to those people.
02:19:07.000And do you ever read Gladwell's take on the Appalachian folks, too?
02:19:11.000That they emerged from herding populations.
02:19:15.000And that herding populations had to be particularly violent because you had to defend your cows because someone could come along, your sheep, and steal all of them.
02:19:22.000Whereas if you're a farmer, it's very difficult to steal all your corn.
02:19:26.000It's very difficult to steal all your crops.
02:19:40.000You had to defend it and they were particularly violent.
02:19:43.000This is why you get into some of the feuds that happen in those areas which are legendary.
02:19:49.000They all came from – at least all the early settlers who kind of set the tone for Appalachian culture.
02:19:54.000They were all Scots-Irish and like North English borderers who were basically like right on the other side of – The isle from Ireland there.
02:20:02.000And these are people like this was like a lawless part of the country.
02:20:05.000This is a place where the central government was far away and it was infinitely smaller than anything we think of a central government.
02:20:11.000Now, those people were up there on their own.
02:20:13.000And so you had you still had clan feuds.
02:20:18.000And then over in Northern Ireland, when the British settled the plantation there, you know, you've got conflict between Protestants and Catholics, between Irish and the Scots, Scots that they brought over there.
02:20:27.000And so these people were from a hard core.
02:20:30.000You know, and even little things like people would talk about they would complain when they came to America about how like these people don't take care of their houses.
02:20:37.000And the reason for that is that over there, like your house can get burned down.
02:20:59.000You know, I mean, you go all the way back to the Revolutionary War, and every war ever since then, they've basically been the core of the American, like, combat forces.
02:21:07.000And that continues right up to this day.
02:21:10.000And, you know, it's interesting to, like, it's another one of those things to, like, you just wrap your head around, like, who our ancestors are and what they went through, you know?
02:21:20.000The Puritans, like, the part of East Anglia that a lot of the Puritans came from in England.
02:21:28.000There was – this is in like – this is 100 years into like the settlement of America.
02:21:35.000So you're talking like the early 1700s.
02:21:37.000There were still a couple churches in that part of England that the doors had the human skins of Danish raiders who had come over to like plunder their shit, who they had killed, skinned and put them on their church doors just as a sign.
02:21:52.000So it's like – Dude, these people are hard.
02:22:48.000Just try to imagine living in a time where there's a group of people that have formed a super army for the very first time and they've killed 10% of the population of Earth.
02:23:00.000And they're sacking entire cities, burning them to the ground, piling up the bones in the middle of the city to where people walking up to it think it's a snow mound.
02:23:11.000They don't even know what it is from the distance.
02:23:35.000And this is the reality of people who are unfortunate enough to be born at that time.
02:23:40.000And we are very fortunate to be born at the time that we're born, but still, we are going to be looked back upon.
02:23:49.000By future, more enlightened civilizations, the same way we look back upon the Mongols.
02:23:53.000We will look back upon what's going on in all the wars in the world, all the things that we've done, all the things that we continue to have done, the lies, the propaganda, the taking advantage of people for financial gain, all the things that we do right now.
02:24:22.000And unfortunately, when you have enormous populations of people that constantly require food and don't grow anything, you have to come up with some way to feed those folks.
02:24:32.000And I'm a giant fan of regenerative farming, but I'm very skeptical that that could scale out to where you could just go in and out and get a double-double.
02:24:39.000Just like that from regenerative agriculture.
02:24:48.000But what I do know is that factory farming is fucking disgusting.
02:24:53.000And when you have ag-gag laws where a person working there who's horrified can't even alert the general public or they face consequences, legal consequences, you can go to fucking jail for telling people about something that's absolutely horrific that shouldn't be legal.
02:26:18.000It actually sequesters carbon this way.
02:26:20.000It's the way the earth is supposed to exist with all these animals.
02:26:24.000But we've sort of – we've bastardized that and I think you're right that in future generations they're going to look upon that and go, what the fuck were they thinking?
02:26:40.000And it's interesting like the shift to industrial agriculture when you look at the – Like the social changes that resulted from it.
02:26:48.000It reminds me actually a lot of after Rome conquered Carthage and then the rest of the Mediterranean, you know, you really became like the Roman Empire that we think of, even though it was still a republic.
02:26:59.000You had this influx of just hordes and hordes and hordes of slaves that were coming from these conquered places back into Italy.
02:27:07.000And so you had before that, you had like a Roman Republic where each citizen was a soldier.
02:27:12.000He was like an independent farmer, small farmer, and he was a soldier and a citizen, and those were the Roman people.
02:27:18.000But all of a sudden you get this huge influx of slaves, and the guys with the larger farms start building out economies of scale.
02:27:26.000So now you have these massive plantations, and they're putting the smaller people out of business, you know, because...
02:27:35.000If that means you don't get a full crop this year and you can't pay for next year's crop, well, there's no welfare program for that.
02:27:42.000You've got to sell it to the guy or take a loan from a guy that then becomes a whole thing.
02:27:47.000And so all of these independent farmers that were scattered around the countryside got concentrated into a handful of gigantic Latifundia farms.
02:27:56.000And all of those people who used to live in the countryside, they had to...
02:28:00.000Going to Rome, looking for work, looking for something to do.
02:28:03.000And that's how you got the Roman mob that led to the fall of the Republic and Caesar and all that.
02:28:08.000And if you think about it in our modern day, we had something similar happen, only it wasn't with an influx of slaves.
02:28:16.000Having a family farm that you could actually, like, run profitably and sustain yourself on became extraordinarily difficult because prices of things went so far, of all, like, agricultural commodities dropped so far down.
02:28:29.000I mean, I'm talking, like, 95%, you know, prices took a hit because all of a sudden you're, you know, you've got combines and tractors and shit.
02:28:36.000So you're putting out so much more food that it becomes just not viable to be a small farmer, like, making his way back then.
02:28:44.000You know, consolidated into gigantic industrial farms and all the people who used to live in the countryside, which is most people back in the day, they all got herded into the cities to go work in the factories and on the docks and everything.
02:28:56.000And, you know, it's interesting because, you know, over here that process was like sort of ad hoc and semi-voluntary, you know.
02:29:06.000I say that with qualification, you know, if you were a farmer who couldn't pay your debt.
02:29:11.000I mean, a sheriff would show up with his gun and be like, get out of here.
02:29:14.000So, I mean, there's a little bit of implied force there.
02:29:17.000But the same thing was happening, like, if you look at what Stalin was doing in the late 20s and the early 30s, is over there, they were far behind, like, the level of industrial development in Britain and the United States and Germany.
02:29:34.000These are the kulaks, as people call them, you know, that he targeted.
02:29:38.000Small farmers who lived out in the countryside and had their communities, but he wanted these to be consolidated into efficient industrial farms, and he wanted all of those people to get in the cities and work in the factories.
02:29:50.000And so over there, they did by, like, brutal violence in a very accelerated period of time.
02:29:55.000Like something that we did over a longer period of time that was more or less voluntary.
02:30:02.000But at the end of the day, the social effects were the same.
02:30:08.000All of those people from the country had to move into the cities and work in industry.
02:30:13.000And that was – I mean it was inevitable.
02:30:16.000I mean if like Russia would be – I'm speaking German right now if they didn't industrialize and get into a place where they could actually fend off that invasion.
02:30:26.000I mean you had to do it just to compete.
02:30:28.000But it creates – I mean if you think about like – I mean just think about like the history of Europe, in feudal Europe where the aristocracy, virtually all the wealth that anybody had was in land.
02:30:43.000Like you were rich because you were an aristocrat who collected rents from the peasants on your land.
02:30:48.000That's where – That's where wealth came from.
02:30:51.000So wealth was, like, distributed throughout the countryside.
02:30:53.000And a lot of times you'd have guys who, you know, a lord who would go to court sometimes or whatever, but his power base was out here in the countryside and they were all spread around.
02:31:03.000And as that started, as the Industrial Revolution, like, really kicked into gear.
02:31:10.000All these guys whose wealth was derived from agriculture and the whole aristocracy, you had, like, by the time you get up to the mid to late 1800s, you've got guys who are lords, like aristocrats, who are completely penniless.
02:31:23.000They still walk around, like, strut around like aristocrats, but they don't have any money.
02:31:27.000Meanwhile, you have a guy who owns a bunch of newspapers in London or whatever who's super rich and, you know, a guy who owns a factory who's super rich.
02:31:36.000And it really changed the balance of power between...
02:31:39.000You know, the aristocracy and this commercial class that really, like, didn't even exist, like, a couple hundred years before, but now is, like, ascendant and really, like, asserting itself politically.
02:31:49.000And, I mean, that right there is—and what we talked about earlier, as that's happening, you're also getting, you know, the former peasants and former small farmers are coming into the cities and becoming the new working class.
02:32:02.000And all three of these groups are getting politicized, you know?
02:32:07.000You know, these are just these are it's why the question of, you know, Dan likes to talk about, you know, the debate between the great man theory of history and the trends and forces theory, you know, is it like just broad social forces and so forth that just you could get rid of Hitler?
02:32:25.000It would have been a guy named Otto, you know, who would have started Second World War.
02:32:29.000He's all just we're all pawns in the, you know, the grand scheme of history.
02:32:34.000Is it based on personality, like somebody who really moves the chains himself?
02:32:38.000And it's always a little bit both, but that's something that will never be really fully resolved because, you know, there are times like that where – like take like the emergence of slavery in the New World.
02:32:51.000If you're a European country and this is like when we started colonizing the New World, the Spanish and Portuguese started colonizing it at first.
02:32:58.000This is – Like right on the tail of them finishing up the Reconquistas.
02:33:04.000So they had spent the last 700 years in a state of constant war because, you know, this is crazy to think about, but Muslims actually controlled Spain and Portugal for a longer period of time than Spanish and Portuguese people have controlled it since then.
02:33:21.000So it was hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years and they're in a constant state of war to push the Muslims back into North Africa.
02:33:27.000So you have a very Spartan, war-like people because it's how you had to be.
02:33:33.000Their whole society was geared toward this conflict that was centuries long.
02:33:36.000And so you take those people and they're the first ones who show up in the New World, right?
02:33:41.000So right there you've got a certain bias in the relations between these Europeans and the people in the New World.
02:33:48.000Well, they come over there and this is pretty soon, just like, you know, 1492 and then just a few decades later, the Protestant Reformation happens.
02:33:56.000So there's religious conflict and religious wars and things, you know, wars between different kingdoms now have a little bit higher stakes because you're not just talking about, you know, they're going to take this piece of territory from us or something.
02:34:09.000It's like, no, they're going to change our religion, you know, really high stakes.
02:34:14.000And this is still at a time when, you know, Europe politically, like geopolitically, was an anarchic place.
02:34:19.000I mean, people were at war all the time and nobody even thought that war was immoral.
02:34:23.000You know, it was actually like part of the natural order of things.
02:34:26.000If you were a stronger neighbor and your weaker neighbor has something, you should have it, you know.
02:34:30.000And there's nothing really like considered wrong about it, like, you know, in a moral sense, especially since back then wars were generally fought between.
02:34:38.000You know, the aristocracy themselves, you know, the knights and people.
02:34:41.000It wasn't like they were rounding up peasants and sending them off as cannon fodder.
02:34:45.000And so given, like, the high stakes, once the Spanish and Portuguese came over to the New World and just started extracting so much wealth, you know, from there, almost immediately you get Charles V who takes over a huge chunk of Europe, you know, becomes the first Holy Roman Emperor and, you know, is just becoming overwhelmingly powerful.
02:35:08.000And if you're any other country in Europe at that time, you're looking at it like, we've got to get in on this New World thing or else we're going to get swallowed up.
02:35:17.000And so you start getting in on the New World thing.
02:35:20.000And what you find out really quickly is, oh, we don't have enough people actually to go over there and do all the mining and all the agriculture and everything else.
02:35:27.000We're going to have to find somebody else, another population to do that.
02:35:30.000Well, you couldn't take any Europeans as slaves or anything because whoever the...
02:35:35.000You needed your own people here and the kingdom next door was not going to let you do that, take their people.
02:35:41.000And so they started resorting to West African slavery, which was sort of served up to the Spanish and Portuguese because the Muslims in Spain and Portugal had been engaged in that for centuries.
02:35:51.000And so they had been sort of – like the Spanish and Portuguese already knew the trade networks.
02:35:58.000They were very familiar with African slavery, which had existed in Spain really since like – The time of the Roman Empire or before.
02:36:06.000They had a constant history with slavery going all the way back.
02:36:11.000And so they get over there and they start using slaves to set up their colonies and extract the wealth from those colonies.
02:36:21.000And the interesting thing to me about it is that if you were a ruler who said, yeah, well, I don't think slavery is right, so I'm not going to do that.
02:36:31.000OK, then you will get swallowed up by somebody who has less scruples and is willing to do it.
02:36:35.000They're going to get richer and more powerful and they're going to take what you've got.
02:36:59.000Your neighbor who is getting gold and guns from the Portuguese or whatever is going to conquer you and take you all as slaves and send you over.
02:37:06.000And so it almost becomes like a game theory problem where there's no overarching authority to tell all the people, hey, we're not doing this.
02:37:15.000And so each individual actor does it just really as a matter of expedient survival at the time.
02:37:21.000And when you look at when slavery did...
02:37:23.000When the slave trade was put to a halt, it only happened after the British Empire became like the real dominant power on the seas.
02:37:31.000And they were the ones with the anti-slaver ships who were going around putting a stop to the trade.
02:37:36.000And that never could have happened until there was like this big overarching authority who could actually make everybody else make this change that they didn't want to make.
02:37:49.000And again, it's so hard to put yourself into perspective of those people that are living life back then, where you have completely different expectations, completely different norms.
02:38:00.000And I think that's one of the reasons why your podcast is so valuable.
02:38:04.000So listen, man, thank you very much for being here.