The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #2289 - Darryl Cooper

00:00:01.000 Joe Rogan Podcast.

00:00:02.000 Check it out.

00:00:03.000 The Joe Rogan Experience.

00:00:06.000 Train by day.

00:00:07.000 Joe Rogan Podcast by night.

00:00:08.000 All day.

00:00:12.000 The guys today, I think, are the highest level fighters of all time.

00:00:16.000 We running?

00:00:16.000 Hey, Daryl.

00:00:17.000 What's going on, man?

00:00:18.000 How's it going?

00:00:19.000 We were just talking UFC. Yeah.

00:00:21.000 I 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.

00:00:35.000 And Ankolaev just did a fantastic job of shutting down the scariest guy in the division.

00:00:40.000 Yeah.

00:00:41.000 And the psychological aspect of it, he made him back up and second-guess himself.

00:00:46.000 Yeah.

00:00:46.000 And, you know, that's...

00:00:48.000 You can't just do that by being aggressive.

00:00:50.000 You really got to get in there, and you got to hurt him a little bit, and you just have to put that on him.

00:00:55.000 And it was amazing to watch.

00:00:56.000 I thought it was a great fight.

00:00:58.000 Well, it was so interesting because the consequences of exchanging with Pereira are so high, but also on Goliath.

00:01:05.000 On Goliath has knocked a lot of people out.

00:01:06.000 We always look at Pereira's knockouts, but...

00:01:08.000 Uncle I has knocked out some of the best guys in the division, and he only lost one time, and that was...

00:01:13.000 Paul Craig has the nastiest fucking triangle.

00:01:16.000 It's so sneaky and so quick, and you don't expect it.

00:01:19.000 He's so high level off his back, and he caught him, I think, with like one second to go in the third round, a fight that he was losing.

00:01:27.000 Yeah, he broke Jamal's arm, or dislocated his elbow, too.

00:01:31.000 He's one of those guys, like Ryan Hall.

00:01:34.000 It's like, you know...

00:01:36.000 They're on the feet, dancing around.

00:01:38.000 It's like, you know, what are we really watching here, kind of?

00:01:41.000 But, man, as soon as they hit the ground...

00:01:43.000 Yeah, there's a giant disparity between his stand-up, which is good.

00:01:46.000 His good stand-up.

00:01:48.000 You know, and the Bo Nickel fight was entirely stand-up.

00:01:51.000 It was a good fight.

00:01:52.000 You know, he looked good on the feet.

00:01:54.000 But you would never say...

00:01:56.000 You know, this is like an Israel Adesanya type character.

00:01:58.000 He doesn't have that level of proficiency with striking.

00:02:01.000 But God, when he gets on his back, you're in such danger.

00:02:05.000 Like, nobody else in the division.

00:02:06.000 It's weird.

00:02:07.000 Because most guys, you're on their back and you're not really worried about it.

00:02:10.000 With Paul Craig, it's like, everything has to be tight.

00:02:12.000 Especially guys that size.

00:02:13.000 You don't really see it as often.

00:02:15.000 No, you don't.

00:02:15.000 Especially in an era when, you know, the off-your-back jiu-jitsu is kind of...

00:02:20.000 I don't want to say, like, you know, they figured out the game on that yet, but, you know, it's not quite to that level.

00:02:25.000 You still have your Craigs and Oliveras, people like that, who really are dangerous off their back. 0.99

00:02:30.000 But it's not as common anymore, you know?

00:02:32.000 Well, it's really hard to do.

00:02:33.000 And also, most people don't want to be on their back.

00:02:36.000 So they don't even practice off their back.

00:02:39.000 And the common...

00:02:40.000 The 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.

00:02:45.000 You'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.

00:02:53.000 Mitigate those as much as possible and get to the feet as quickly as possible.

00:02:56.000 That's what everybody's trying to do now.

00:02:58.000 Especially in a three-round fight.

00:03:00.000 You let yourself get laid on for three minutes in the first round.

00:03:03.000 Nothing really happens, but you lost that round.

00:03:05.000 You better win the second one.

00:03:06.000 Well, look at the Armin Sarukian. 1.00

00:03:10.000 If 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.

00:03:21.000 Which I thought, if I looked at who won that fight, I would say Oliveira won that fight.

00:03:26.000 Oliveira had him in deep trouble.

00:03:28.000 It 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.

00:03:37.000 You're doing something very difficult to do.

00:03:40.000 Your opponent doesn't want it to happen.

00:03:42.000 You've dominated a position to the point where you've secured a submission.

00:03:45.000 And then this guy sneaks out with sweat and technique and fucking grit.

00:03:50.000 But he was in fucking trouble.

00:03:52.000 Deep, deep trouble.

00:03:53.000 At the very end especially.

00:03:54.000 Oh, definitely.

00:03:54.000 I'm a little biased on this one because I'm an adopted member of the Armenian community.

00:03:59.000 But it was a great fight.

00:04:02.000 I'm a giant fan of Armenians.

00:04:03.000 You know what I love about them?

00:04:04.000 So many great fighters in the UFC. All the way back to Carl Parisian, been Armenian.

00:04:09.000 But I like the style of the people.

00:04:11.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:04:12.000 The thing I love about them is Armenians love being Armenian.

00:04:16.000 Yes, they do.

00:04:16.000 It's great to be around.

00:04:18.000 I love it.

00:04:19.000 Very friendly people, too.

00:04:22.000 So this podcast, I never say who's coming on the podcast.

00:04:28.000 I just like...

00:04:30.000 Put it out there.

00:04:31.000 Everybody knew that Trump was coming on, and this has been a couple of times when people knew that I was interviewing people.

00:04:36.000 For the most part, I just like to do it, have the conversation, and then put it out.

00:04:40.000 But you put it on Twitter that you were coming on, and then...

00:04:43.000 I put it on my substack behind the paywall.

00:04:48.000 But apparently some of my enemies pay me five bucks a month to follow my substack.

00:04:53.000 I 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.

00:05:02.000 I don't remember how many days afterwards.

00:05:04.000 But I've been listening to your podcast for a long time.

00:05:07.000 And it's so charitable and comprehensive.

00:05:13.000 And so thorough and so you put so much weight on the real lives and suffering of human beings on all sides of any conflict.

00:05:25.000 The regular people that didn't want to be dragged into any war, that find themselves on the front line.

00:05:32.000 The stories that you tell and the way you tell them is so comprehensive and so, again, charitable.

00:05:39.000 The humanity of these people is so well expressed that your fans know you.

00:05:47.000 I'm a fan.

00:05:48.000 I know you.

00:05:48.000 I know how you view things.

00:05:51.000 I know how you portray things.

00:05:53.000 I know how honest you are about all aspects of conflict.

00:05:59.000 And again, as charitable as possible, the way you lay this out.

00:06:02.000 So 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.

00:06:15.000 You know, I've been through that ringer before.

00:06:17.000 I know what that is.

00:06:18.000 But 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.

00:06:29.000 Listen to it.

00:06:30.000 You don't even have to listen to the whole thing.

00:06:31.000 Listen to the first hour of it.

00:06:33.000 And there's no fucking way the person who made that is anti-Semitic in any way, shape, or form.

00:06:39.000 And that's just one of the things that you've done that show that.

00:06:45.000 The 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.

00:06:59.000 Bizarre 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.

00:07:25.000 It's a stupid thing that we do.

00:07:28.000 And as someone who values your show and listens to your show all the time, it's not just stupid.

00:07:39.000 It's bizarre how many people fall for this kind of stupidity.

00:07:43.000 And I know how this whole thing works.

00:07:46.000 I 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?

00:08:04.000 Like, what is this about?

00:08:05.000 Like, what's their content like?

00:08:08.000 And if they listen to your show, they will realize, like, it's one of the very best long-form history podcasts that's available online.

00:08:18.000 It's fantastic.

00:08:19.000 It's really good.

00:08:20.000 So it's so unfortunate that there is there's these attack vectors that they could use to try to change perception of who you are.

00:08:33.000 But the fortunate aspect is there's so much of your work out there that anyone could just comb through.

00:08:37.000 And, you know, you're not hearing that side of it from any of these people, any of these detractors.

00:08:43.000 No one's saying, you know, listen, I listened to some of his stuff and, you know...

00:08:49.000 Maybe he shouldn't have said what he said about Winston Churchill, but I think he was just being hyperbolic.

00:08:53.000 And if you just listen to actually what he says about the whole conflict, you kind of get an understanding of who this guy is.

00:08:59.000 And so there was a lot of resistance to having you on.

00:09:03.000 But I was like, fuck that resistance.

00:09:05.000 I know what you actually do.

00:09:07.000 And so that's why we're here.

00:09:09.000 Well, thank you.

00:09:10.000 I appreciate that.

00:09:11.000 And yeah, you know, I mean, the Tucker interview was I could have been clearer.

00:09:15.000 And what I was saying, I'm not going to, like, absolve myself.

00:09:18.000 Let's explain what you said, because you were talking about what you say to Jocko, right?

00:09:22.000 Yeah, that's how it originally came up.

00:09:24.000 Because Jocko's wife's English, right?

00:09:26.000 So Churchill's like a sacred figure in their pantheon.

00:09:29.000 And so I said that, you know, maybe I'm being a little provocative here.

00:09:32.000 I like to provoke Jocko with my Churchill takes or whatever.

00:09:35.000 But that's only part of it.

00:09:36.000 I mean, I'm very critical of Churchill's role, in my opinion, in turning...

00:09:44.000 The German invasion of Poland into the Second World War, basically.

00:09:51.000 As I get older, I posted something on X today that somebody had posted a video.

00:10:00.000 A drone is going toward a Ukrainian or a Russian truck or something, and it hits it, and it doesn't blow up.

00:10:05.000 And it's like, boom, boom, and it tries to, it doesn't blow up.

00:10:08.000 And 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?

00:10:18.000 And 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.

00:10:24.000 And I see something like that and, like, I don't care who's in the truck.

00:10:27.000 I don't care if it's Russians. 1.00

00:10:28.000 I don't care if it's North Koreans or Ukrainians. 0.78

00:10:31.000 Or human beings.

00:10:31.000 I just, like...

00:10:32.000 I'm just glad that they're okay.

00:10:34.000 Like, that's what I actually felt at the time, you know?

00:10:36.000 And as I get older, like, that's just how I feel more and more about these things.

00:10:40.000 Like, whether any conflict is just, like, this is not like a young man's thought, I guess.

00:10:47.000 But, like, I'm just, I'm happy when they're over and they need, like...

00:10:51.000 I 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.

00:11:01.000 It does real damage to our spirit, you know?

00:11:04.000 If you go back to 2004, when the Abu Ghraib expose came out, you know, Americans were horrified by that, and rightly so. 1.00

00:11:13.000 You know, they saw those pictures.

00:11:15.000 But the thing that was interesting is that they were horrified.

00:11:19.000 Yeah, partly because, like, look how awful this is that they're doing to these people or something.

00:11:24.000 But, you know, for all they knew, they knew these people were in prison.

00:11:27.000 They might have thought they were terrorists or something.

00:11:29.000 What people were really, like, feeling at the time was, what are we doing to our people?

00:11:34.000 Like, what is, you know, what are we putting them through that our people are being reduced to this, you know?

00:11:41.000 And, you know, kind of the sad thing now is, like, I don't know if we would have the same reaction today.

00:11:46.000 I think...

00:11:47.000 The war on terror has sort of desensitized us to a lot and hardened our hearts in ways that are not good for us.

00:11:55.000 And 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.

00:12:06.000 And 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.

00:12:17.000 That 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.

00:12:27.000 You know what I mean?

00:12:28.000 And so when you do something like that with the My Lai Massacre, for example, I did that with that story, the Jonestown one.

00:12:35.000 I mean, Jonestown, you're talking about like this raving lunatic.

00:12:38.000 Who took a bunch of people out into the jungle and they all committed suicide.

00:12:43.000 It'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.

00:12:50.000 These people were nuts.

00:12:52.000 But the thing is, if you really think about the consequences of taking the wrong lessons from things like that...

00:12:59.000 You 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.

00:13:11.000 The 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.

00:13:23.000 We needed to ease these people out of it and try to de-escalate.

00:13:26.000 Instead, we said we should have...

00:13:28.000 We could have prevented it if only we'd have gone in hard right at the beginning and taken this guy out.

00:13:32.000 And so then you get Waco, you know?

00:13:34.000 And 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. 0.63

00:13:49.000 It doesn't matter who you're talking about.

00:13:50.000 You could be talking about Uday Hussein, you know, Saddam's son.

00:13:56.000 Sadistic monster of a human being.

00:14:00.000 But, 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? 0.51

00:14:12.000 And he's like, I do, I do.

00:14:13.000 That's the world he was thrust into, you know?

00:14:15.000 And 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.

00:14:22.000 You 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. 0.54

00:14:34.000 And 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.

00:14:49.000 Like, what do I know about that?

00:14:50.000 You know what I mean?

00:14:52.000 I 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?

00:15:01.000 And again, it doesn't...

00:15:02.000 When 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...

00:15:16.000 It's not just people who are purposely misinterpreting things or anything.

00:15:19.000 You 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?

00:15:28.000 Because 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.

00:15:44.000 Empathizing with them.

00:15:45.000 I mean, it's like, that's the very, you know, that's like the next step.

00:15:48.000 You've got to take one more step and you're empathizing with those people.

00:15:51.000 And so people see that, you know, and you're empathizing with evil people, you know, whoever it is.

00:15:57.000 But I really believe that it's really good for us, like, individually, you know, and as a society too.

00:16:04.000 I think it has a positive effect on us to, like, when we force ourselves to understand, you know, people we don't like.

00:16:13.000 As human beings and just understand that their motivations are really no different than ours.

00:16:17.000 Well, 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.

00:16:33.000 Doing that is fine with Jonestown.

00:16:36.000 With Jonestown, everybody's like, well, how could these people have convinced these people to drink the Kool-Aid?

00:16:43.000 Why would the people do it?

00:16:45.000 What kind of a monster turns into this genocidal maniac and brings people to the jungle and does this?

00:16:52.000 But 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.

00:17:11.000 They remove all nuance.

00:17:14.000 You lose all objectivity.

00:17:17.000 Anything 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. 0.86

00:17:27.000 That's a Nazi apologist, right? 0.85

00:17:30.000 I 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?

00:17:50.000 It's not there's good people on one side and there's evil people on the other side.

00:17:54.000 No, 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,

00:18:23.000 in our media environment, where everybody is rightly so, so terrified of anti-Semitism.

00:18:28.000 Because there's real anti-Semitism out there.

00:18:30.000 And real anti-Semitism is horrible, just like real racism is horrible.

00:18:35.000 The problem with calling everything racist and everything anti-Semitic, when it's clearly not, is that you diminish what that word means.

00:18:42.000 You're essentially crying wolf.

00:18:45.000 You're doing it in ways where...

00:18:47.000 Rational, logical people who know your work have a very good argument against it.

00:18:52.000 Like, this doesn't make any sense in the context of which it was said.

00:18:56.000 If you look at the body of his work, if you look at how he talks about things, this is how he approaches stuff.

00:19:01.000 This whole being provocative is part of what you do.

00:19:04.000 It's part of what makes the audio come to life in these podcasts when you're talking about these moments in history.

00:19:12.000 This 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!

00:19:31.000 Like, has this been hiding?

00:19:33.000 And then you start thinking the way your paranoid Jewish friends think, that everybody's anti-Semitic.

00:19:38.000 And you go, well, now I kind of understand why they think that way.

00:19:41.000 So I kind of understand the overreaction, but it is still an overreaction.

00:19:46.000 And I think what you do is very valuable.

00:19:50.000 It's very valuable to me, and it's very valuable to human beings that want to hear this nuanced, comprehensive...

00:19:59.000 perspective 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,

00:20:19.000 the 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.

00:20:31.000 And it should be avoided at all costs.

00:20:35.000 But you don't avoid it by exaggerating.

00:20:39.000 You don't avoid it by distorting someone's perspective and turning everybody into a monster.

00:20:45.000 So that everyone's scared to talk at all.

00:20:47.000 Because this is the main objective.

00:20:50.000 Most overreactions like that that are public and hyper-aggressive and constant and continuous, it's not just you.

00:20:58.000 It's to stop anybody from ever doing anything like that in the future to let them know there's consequences.

00:21:04.000 There's going to be financial consequences.

00:21:06.000 There's going to be your status online, however you're viewed by people will be.

00:21:14.000 Now marred forever with this ugly stain of being not just an anti-Semite, but a Nazi apologist.

00:21:22.000 That's what I read.

00:21:23.000 Nazi apologist.

00:21:24.000 Like, you can't say that unless you listen to his stuff.

00:21:28.000 You can't.

00:21:29.000 Unless they listen to your work, they can't say that because they don't know what the fuck they're talking about.

00:21:34.000 It's like someone trying to opine upon a culture that they've never read about or never visited.

00:21:39.000 You don't know what you're saying.

00:21:40.000 Yeah, I've been told by people who...

00:21:43.000 I should know that there are a few European countries I shouldn't try to visit because they probably won't let me off the plane.

00:21:49.000 Yeah, I wouldn't go.

00:21:50.000 Because of that podcast.

00:21:51.000 Bro, I'd stay in Texas if I was you.

00:21:52.000 I'd hole up.

00:21:54.000 I'm up in North Idaho, so I'm far away.

00:21:56.000 You should have told people that!

00:21:59.000 They don't want to try North Idaho.

00:22:01.000 Yeah, it's a wild place.

00:22:03.000 You've got wolves and bears.

00:22:06.000 This is just part of what people do.

00:22:09.000 I was going to say, too, You know, that overreaction is really counterproductive, too.

00:22:15.000 Yeah.

00:22:15.000 You 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.

00:22:25.000 And I've found this a hundred times, you know, because, like, look, anti-Semitism is a weird thing.

00:22:29.000 And we can talk about some of the history of that if you want.

00:22:31.000 But, you know, it's a it's this thing that people get obsessed with.

00:22:37.000 You know what I mean?

00:22:38.000 Like, it's not like.

00:22:40.000 I've watched this happen to, like, good, clear-thinking, regular people.

00:22:45.000 They 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.

00:22:53.000 And 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. 0.96

00:23:02.000 And it's like that happens.

00:23:03.000 You see that happen.

00:23:03.000 I mean, you know, what you see on social media a lot.

00:23:09.000 There's no doubt there's been a big explosion of that kind of rhetoric.

00:23:13.000 And 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.

00:23:27.000 I think a lot of it has to do with that.

00:23:29.000 But 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.

00:23:40.000 I'm still sitting here.

00:23:41.000 I mean, I'm on your podcast.

00:23:43.000 So it's a big platform to talk about these things.

00:23:45.000 It's not like that.

00:23:47.000 But the attempt is to make it so that you can't be in any kind of respectable society.

00:23:52.000 Yeah, the attempt is to make you radioactive.

00:23:54.000 Yeah.

00:23:54.000 And that, again, I think is just completely counterproductive because people look at something.

00:24:00.000 I think Theo was talking about this in one of his recent interviews.

00:24:03.000 He 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.

00:24:12.000 And they see that, and they find out that the U.S. is sending money and weapons.

00:24:16.000 And they're like, well, why is that happening?

00:24:18.000 And they start looking into it, and they go to the websites that are going to tell them the truth about it.

00:24:22.000 And pretty soon, one link leads to another.

00:24:23.000 And when they go ask one of their...

00:24:27.000 You 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.

00:24:39.000 He gets, like, shouted down and attacked for, like, asking the question.

00:24:42.000 And 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.

00:24:49.000 They think, hmm, that's weird.

00:24:51.000 Like, why are people responding this way?

00:24:53.000 I was asking that question in good faith, you know?

00:24:55.000 And so it really has, like, the opposite effect of the one that is at least ostensibly intended, you know?

00:25:03.000 I think there's a bunch of things going on simultaneously.

00:25:06.000 I think some of this is coordinated.

00:25:09.000 And I think, because I think that with everything now online, I think there's public momentum opinions that aren't necessarily organically shaped.

00:25:21.000 There's groups that will mass tweet about something.

00:25:26.000 And now we know that there's AI programs that will devise various different tweets.

00:25:34.000 And people are running them through hundreds of computers, if not thousands of computers, all with multiple accounts.

00:25:40.000 And they're posting things constantly.

00:25:42.000 And they're doing this.

00:25:43.000 There was a call to make it illegal for any employee of the government to post on social media.

00:25:51.000 I was like, that sounds outrageous.

00:25:54.000 That sounds like something that would stifle political discourse.

00:25:57.000 I want congressional people to be able to be whistleblowers and to talk about what's really going on.

00:26:03.000 This is why this bill can't get passed.

00:26:05.000 This is why they added this to this.

00:26:06.000 This is bullshit.

00:26:07.000 But then someone explained to me.

00:26:10.000 That what they're trying to stop is astroturfing.

00:26:12.000 Is that if you're working for the government or for now, this is with USA, the concept of the non-government organization comes into play.

00:26:20.000 So people realize that NGOs are actually funded by taxes.

00:26:24.000 So it's a non-government organization doing the bidding of the government.

00:26:28.000 And some of that may or may not include social media campaigns about specific issues.

00:26:34.000 And I think...

00:26:36.000 This happens with everything.

00:26:38.000 I think this happens probably on the Free Palestine side.

00:26:41.000 I think they probably do it.

00:26:43.000 I think it happens on the Protect Israel side.

00:26:47.000 They do it.

00:26:48.000 I think everybody does it.

00:26:49.000 And it's confusing because you'd like to know how do normal human beings actually think, the actual world thinks, versus...

00:27:00.000 Massive amounts of people that are being financially incentivized to post these things.

00:27:05.000 They're being paid.

00:27:06.000 They're a part of an organization that gets paid.

00:27:08.000 They get funded.

00:27:09.000 They have a directive.

00:27:10.000 They go out and they pursue this campaign.

00:27:12.000 And they do it relentlessly.

00:27:14.000 And they do it through organic ways, like people who are...

00:27:20.000 Aligned with their cause, whether it's Free Palestine or Israel First or whatever it is, you get people to post about it.

00:27:27.000 They'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.

00:27:40.000 I'm one of the good guys.

00:27:42.000 That happens too.

00:27:43.000 And this is this chaos of social media and people looking for likes and audience capture and all that stuff that goes on.

00:27:50.000 But at the end of the day...

00:27:55.000 We rely upon people that we trust.

00:27:57.000 We rely upon people that are supposedly objective and rational and reasonable and considerate and charitable.

00:28:06.000 People who look at things and go, okay, what's really going on here?

00:28:10.000 Before I cast judgment, maybe I should pay attention to some of the things this guy's done.

00:28:14.000 Maybe I should pay attention to his work.

00:28:15.000 Maybe 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.

00:28:38.000 Yes.

00:28:39.000 I 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.

00:28:51.000 And 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.

00:29:07.000 40 million people don't get killed.

00:29:09.000 But, you know, the National Socialists stay in power and, you know, maybe Hitler dies 10 years later.

00:29:16.000 It's like the Soviet Union, Stalin dies, and things move on.

00:29:20.000 People 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.

00:29:27.000 And I think that is completely insane, man.

00:29:29.000 Like, 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.

00:29:45.000 And if it turns out that...

00:29:47.000 Hitler's full of shit and, you know, he stabs us in the back first chance he gets. 0.99

00:29:51.000 All right, then we'll have our war. 0.95

00:29:53.000 But is this pre or post concentration camps?

00:29:56.000 Is this pre or post the beginnings of the Holocaust? 0.58

00:29:59.000 Yeah.

00:29:59.000 This is where it gets into that.

00:30:01.000 Should 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.

00:30:20.000 Right.

00:30:20.000 So what we were talking about and all of the points I was bringing up on Tucker were all from before that.

00:30:25.000 In fact, they were...

00:30:27.000 From a full year before the German invasion of the Soviet Union.

00:30:32.000 That was June 1941. And that's where most of the Jews lived. 0.96

00:30:36.000 So if Hitler never invaded the Soviet Union, he never even would have had access to those people. 0.78

00:30:42.000 Now, Hitler didn't like the Soviet Union.

00:30:44.000 All 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.

00:30:50.000 He may have invaded the Soviet Union someday and gone and... 0.84

00:30:55.000 the Jews when he did. 0.87

00:30:56.000 When did Hitler start going after the Jews?

00:30:58.000 You mean in terms of – in terms of – Rhetoric.

00:31:03.000 Oh.

00:31:04.000 So yeah.

00:31:05.000 Like 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.

00:31:16.000 And so you have to take it with sort of a grain of salt.

00:31:18.000 But it's also one of the few sources we have.

00:31:21.000 Like given his audience at the time, he probably didn't have a lot of reason to make this part up.

00:31:27.000 is that He had been from small-town Germany, and he was from a middle-class family.

00:31:34.000 His father was a civil servant, respectable people, and nationalism back then was very much like a middle-class.

00:31:41.000 And 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.

00:31:51.000 And Hitler really didn't grow up with any really even knowledge of the Jews.

00:31:55.000 He says his father, he never heard him say the word.

00:31:57.000 And 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.

00:32:05.000 And so then he moves to Vienna when he's a young adult and there's a lot of Jews in Vienna. 0.96

00:32:10.000 And he starts to – he's at the bottom of society now.

00:32:15.000 He's literally living in shelters.

00:32:17.000 He's hungry all the time.

00:32:19.000 He's like down with the underclass after having grown up in the middle class.

00:32:25.000 And 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.

00:32:36.000 Deep sense of nationalistic fervor.

00:32:38.000 He's actually getting an up-close look at the underclass in Vienna. 0.52

00:32:41.000 And 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.

00:32:53.000 The reason you want to do that is because they're often living degraded lives and degraded circumstances.

00:32:57.000 And so he gets an up-close look at this and he doesn't like what he sees.

00:33:00.000 And he says in Mein Kampf that it really caused him like a moral crisis, you know, an ideological crisis.

00:33:05.000 He's like, are these the German people?

00:33:07.000 Like, really?

00:33:08.000 This is what we're talking about?

00:33:11.000 And then he says, and, you know, this is the way he relates it.

00:33:14.000 He says it was actually the key that unlocked everything else for him, is that...

00:33:19.000 He would say he realized.

00:33:21.000 We could say he came to believe that, yes, these German masses, they are in a sorry state right now.

00:33:28.000 But 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. 0.95

00:33:40.000 They're being manipulated and corrupted by these people.

00:33:43.000 And 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.

00:33:56.000 All those things were like in there.

00:33:57.000 But I think the thing that gave it emotional valence for him is that his anti-Semitism was what allowed him to love.

00:34:05.000 The 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.

00:34:18.000 And so it his his sense of love for his people.

00:34:21.000 And I mean, look, Hitler is one of those guys. 0.86

00:34:25.000 I noticed this when I was reading all the Jim Jones books and stuff, which I think I read all probably all of.

00:34:33.000 They're not very good.

00:34:34.000 Some 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.

00:34:49.000 Even the thing Jim Jones or Hitler did as a child, they have negative editorializing to it and everything.

00:34:58.000 It really kind of...

00:35:00.000 It's a lot of them are still good books.

00:35:02.000 You know, you read like the most recent sort of great Hitler biography by Ian Kershaw is a great book.

00:35:07.000 He's a good historian, an excellent writer.

00:35:09.000 And, you know, you have to learn to kind of see through that polemic a little bit.

00:35:14.000 And then you have, you know, a good history on your hands.

00:35:16.000 It's almost like it's an obligation.

00:35:17.000 If you're going to cover a horrific figure, you have to look at things that way.

00:35:21.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:35:22.000 Yeah.

00:35:22.000 And, you know, it's a and so I think that people who knew Hitler.

00:35:29.000 Before World War I. And we have like memoirs and interviews with people who did know him pretty, pretty well.

00:35:37.000 They say pretty much unanimously like we never heard him mention the Jews back then.

00:35:41.000 And this is the period in Vienna when Hitler says his anti-Semitism was developing and he was figuring these things out.

00:35:47.000 And what I think was probably going on, like my read of it, at least up to this point, is that.

00:35:53.000 His anti-Semitism, just like a lot of people in Europe at the time, was – it was theoretical and abstract.

00:35:59.000 You know what I mean?

00:36:00.000 Like 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.

00:36:11.000 Like he might not like them.

00:36:13.000 You know, he might think that – whatever, all the stereotypes that go along with him.

00:36:17.000 But it was just sort of an abstract thing that it wasn't dangerous, right?

00:36:22.000 But 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.

00:36:39.000 I mean, it was, you know, you're talking about a war where, you know, for several Olympics.

00:36:49.000 Olympic 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.

00:36:58.000 I mean, it was, you're talking about massive chunks of the young male population being killed out there, right?

00:37:05.000 And you take a guy like Hitler, who volunteered early, like, right away, and he survived the whole four years of the war. 0.73

00:37:13.000 And 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.

00:37:23.000 I mean, in constant terror of doing things that, I mean, forget about just, like, the physical discomfort of living there.

00:37:34.000 I mean, you're in the mud.

00:37:35.000 You're covered with lice and fleas all the time.

00:37:38.000 So is everybody else.

00:37:40.000 Especially later in the war, you're, like, living off of starvation rations if you're a German or an Austrian.

00:37:46.000 And you're watching, I mean, you know, Dan Carlin's series on World War I is, like, probably my favorite piece of audio.

00:37:55.000 Incredible.

00:37:56.000 It's so good.

00:37:57.000 And, 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?

00:38:05.000 And so when he talks about, like, the Battle of Assam.

00:38:08.000 When 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.

00:38:16.000 Like, it's just so overwhelming, you know?

00:38:19.000 And 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.

00:38:31.000 I 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.

00:38:47.000 And 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.

00:38:56.000 You've already taken up all the space, right?

00:38:58.000 Just that kind of...

00:38:59.000 I mean, if you think about somebody today, if you walk outside your door on the way to work...

00:39:05.000 Your average person today, and there's a dead body on your steps.

00:39:10.000 Your average person today is going to be in therapy for years over that.

00:39:14.000 I mean, that is a traumatic experience, very difficult.

00:39:16.000 And so you have these young men who go through this just unbelievable experience.

00:39:23.000 And 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.

00:39:33.000 It was basically like just a few big chunks.

00:39:35.000 You had France, you had Germany, the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and then you had the Russian Empire.

00:39:41.000 And there were a few like Spain and the Balkans and stuff, little things going on.

00:39:44.000 But 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?

00:39:53.000 And everything east of Germany in 1917 and 1918, those governments...

00:39:59.000 Literally evaporated.

00:40:01.000 They went away.

00:40:02.000 And so, you know, you get to the immediate post-war period after these guys have just gone through this unbelievably harrowing experience.

00:40:11.000 You know, their lives have been defined by violence for years, you know, at this point.

00:40:16.000 And all of a sudden, there's just state collapse everywhere from Germany to Siberia.

00:40:23.000 And you literally have, you know, private militias.

00:40:28.000 Groups 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.

00:40:37.000 And this goes on for a few years, you know, just total social and economic chaos.

00:40:44.000 And so you're talking about like the four-year war, but then a few more years after that.

00:40:49.000 So you're 18 when you get in and...

00:40:51.000 1914. 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?

00:41:02.000 This is the world that you live in.

00:41:05.000 And it's a – when you try to think of – you know, I talked about like Uday Hussain being brought to watch torture sessions or something.

00:41:17.000 I mean this is not exactly that.

00:41:19.000 But it's – It's an experience that, like, we really have no way to relate to.

00:41:25.000 And 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.

00:41:35.000 You know, they actually took over the Russian state and created the Soviet Union.

00:41:39.000 You know, it lasted past the—long past the lives of anybody who had fought in World War I, for the most part.

00:41:46.000 And 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.

00:41:54.000 The lesson they took is that violence can accomplish our goals.

00:41:59.000 And whatever we do to accomplish those goals, as long as we survive, people accept it eventually.

00:42:08.000 You know, Roosevelt normalized relations with the Soviet Union in 1933 when...

00:42:14.000 Stalin was literally still clearing bodies from the millions of people he starved in the Ukrainian Holodomor and in Kazakhstan, another million people.

00:42:22.000 And like at that time is when – and we knew it was going on obviously.

00:42:27.000 And yet, you know, Roosevelt normalized relations with Stalin and people got over it.

00:42:31.000 It's like with Turkey. 0.99

00:42:32.000 Turkey does the Armenian genocide and it's condemned at the time.

00:42:37.000 You know, they were on the other side of the war and everything.

00:42:39.000 But 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.

00:42:48.000 And so, you know, sorry, Armenians, but, you know, get over it. 1.00

00:42:52.000 And so people took that lesson is that violence will accomplish our goals.

00:42:56.000 And as long as we accomplish them and survive, people will get over it.

00:43:00.000 You know?

00:43:02.000 But again, I think this is what's really important about your work is that you do take into consideration all these aspects.

00:43:12.000 Which, again, with Jim Jones, that's fine.

00:43:15.000 But even what you're saying, it's obviously very relevant to what we're trying to understand how World War II happened.

00:43:26.000 How did the Nazis rise to power?

00:43:28.000 What are we talking about?

00:43:30.000 That's what we're talking about.

00:43:32.000 We're talking about this horrific environment that's not considered.

00:43:35.000 That doesn't make you a Nazi apologist.

00:43:37.000 Yeah, and it's important to know, too, that...

00:43:41.000 You 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.

00:43:51.000 And the German people said, right on, like, let's go do it. 0.95

00:43:53.000 That was like the speeches that are out there where he is talking about the Jewish question.

00:43:58.000 Like almost all of those are like internal Nazi party, like rally speeches.

00:44:02.000 You know, they're not him.

00:44:05.000 He had to be careful about that.

00:44:06.000 Like in 1938, which is pretty far down the line when.

00:44:10.000 Kristallnacht happened. 0.72

00:44:10.000 It was kind of a nationwide pogrom against the Jews in Germany that was launched primarily by Goebbels, the propaganda minister. 0.72

00:44:19.000 But there was outrage in the German cities.

00:44:21.000 People in Berlin, a lot of the places were outraged by what was going on.

00:44:24.000 And Hitler had to actually get on the phone with Goebbels and say, cut this shit out.

00:44:28.000 Like, this is not good.

00:44:30.000 Not because he loves the Jews all of a sudden, obviously, but because this is bad propaganda.

00:44:34.000 People are not going for this.

00:44:36.000 And that was the year before the war started, you know?

00:44:39.000 And so these are just nuances that, you know, that become pretty obvious when you just remind yourself that you're just talking about people.

00:44:47.000 They're just people.

00:44:48.000 I mean the Germans were a sophisticated, advanced political and cultural place.

00:44:56.000 They didn't suddenly turn into demons for 12 years and then go back to being the nice normal Germans that we know now.

00:45:04.000 Like 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.

00:45:25.000 And when you – you see this with the Bolshevik revolution in Russia.

00:45:30.000 You see it with the Israel-Palestine situation, right?

00:45:34.000 In 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. 0.88

00:45:54.000 The 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.

00:46:08.000 And that was really like that was Lenin's philosophy is, again, just, you know, take it up to 11 and go.

00:46:13.000 And as long as we win, people get over it.

00:46:16.000 But 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.

00:46:26.000 I 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.

00:46:46.000 You know, it started out as an idealistic venture.

00:46:50.000 You know, it started out as something, you know, you have these people who are in really, like, kind of a unique situation.

00:46:56.000 Maybe 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.

00:47:08.000 They're just living in other people's countries. 1.00

00:47:10.000 And, you know, I think the lesson from World War II and much of the 20th century probably...

00:47:17.000 It'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.

00:47:26.000 I think the real lesson from World War II or from what happened to the Jews specifically is everybody needs a country.

00:47:34.000 You need to have a country that is looking after you and looking after your interests.

00:47:39.000 Because living in other people's countries, it can go well for a long time. 1.00

00:47:43.000 But it's not just the Jews.

00:47:46.000 Minorities in general.

00:47:47.000 Like, you know, bad things happen over time.

00:47:51.000 You know, minorities are just easily scapegoated.

00:47:53.000 You know, they're easily made the sort of the outlet for the frustration and resentment of people that are...

00:47:59.000 You know, upset over unrelated things.

00:48:02.000 And it's an uncomfortable position to be in.

00:48:04.000 There'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.

00:48:17.000 We hear the concept of Sharia law.

00:48:19.000 You know, like people start to freak out.

00:48:21.000 Well, there's people that move here that want that, you know, and they don't want to assimilate and they don't want to be a...

00:48:27.000 You know, the fact that we have, like...

00:48:55.000 The frontier experience, which is just, you know, no Europeans can really relate to what was going on out there.

00:49:01.000 You've seen that new Netflix series, American Primeval?

00:49:04.000 It's amazing.

00:49:05.000 Dude.

00:49:05.000 I had Peter Berg on here.

00:49:06.000 Oh, that's right.

00:49:07.000 That's right.

00:49:07.000 And 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.

00:49:15.000 These are like...

00:49:17.000 The regular people who went out there and lived.

00:49:19.000 And this is an experience.

00:49:20.000 So you have those things.

00:49:22.000 It's very accurate, too.

00:49:24.000 Yeah, it was fascinating.

00:49:25.000 I love they had Jim Bridger in there.

00:49:27.000 I've always been a fan of his.

00:49:29.000 Yeah, that was amazing, too.

00:49:30.000 And how about the Mormon guy? 0.66

00:49:35.000 People don't realize today unless they really know the history.

00:49:37.000 The Mormons were off the hook. 0.53

00:49:38.000 They were gangsters.

00:49:40.000 They were fucking dangerous foes.

00:49:43.000 You couldn't fuck with the Mormons back then. 1.00

00:49:45.000 They had been fucked with.

00:49:46.000 They were ultra cohesive and they were serious about what they were doing.

00:49:52.000 These people were not playing games.

00:49:54.000 This was not like a thing to do for fun.

00:49:55.000 They were dead serious about it.

00:49:57.000 And they had already been ran out of several states.

00:49:59.000 Yeah.

00:50:00.000 So I was going to say like the thing that's...

00:50:02.000 So different about America from a lot of the European countries.

00:50:05.000 And 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.

00:50:19.000 I 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.

00:50:29.000 A 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.

00:50:36.000 It's not English people. 1.00

00:50:37.000 It's a lot of Irish, a lot of Germans, still a lot of Anglos.

00:50:41.000 But, you know, you have to...

00:50:42.000 The fact that different religion, you know, you've got Irish Catholics coming into this Protestant, very Protestant at the time country.

00:50:49.000 A lot of the Germans that were coming in were German Jews who, you know, were coming along.

00:50:54.000 You think of people like Aster, you know, the famous Aster family that was a German Jewish family that was in New York.

00:51:02.000 And so that happens.

00:51:03.000 And you're talking about, again, an influx large enough to... 0.76

00:51:07.000 To really swamp the Anglo population in many of the big cities. 1.00

00:51:10.000 Well, 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.

00:51:26.000 And pretty soon, it's not just, you know, Anglos, well-assimilated.

00:51:31.000 You know, Germans who are well-assimilated to the Anglo culture and then the Irish, which is what it was before. 0.94

00:51:35.000 Now 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.

00:51:44.000 And we've just had to do that all the time.

00:51:46.000 Even 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.

00:52:01.000 But 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.

00:52:10.000 And 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.

00:52:23.000 It's kind of crazy to think about, but if you go back to the First World War...

00:52:28.000 You know, Detroit's African-American population was like 2 percent, you know, and that was Philadelphia.

00:52:34.000 I think Baltimore had like eight or nine.

00:52:35.000 But like that was how it was.

00:52:37.000 Pretty much all African-Americans still live down in the south.

00:52:40.000 And 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. 0.87

00:52:47.000 But like you've got to renegotiate like you're.

00:52:51.000 Your identity with these people and figure out like a new political compromise in these cities in the various places.

00:52:58.000 And 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. 0.91

00:53:09.000 And 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.

00:53:21.000 Like those were – like America would not be here today if we didn't do that.

00:53:25.000 Like there were not enough out-of-work English people over in England to come over here and take over this whole continent. 0.98

00:53:32.000 It was just never going to happen.

00:53:33.000 The 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.

00:53:44.000 I 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.

00:54:10.000 And people see that and they focus on the white part and they say, see, they wanted America to be a white country or whatever.

00:54:17.000 That is – Totally the wrong way to understand that law.

00:54:20.000 I 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.

00:54:39.000 You know, you will be an equal citizen.

00:54:41.000 You can just come here radically open.

00:54:44.000 I mean, really like a revolutionarily.

00:54:47.000 You 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. 0.99

00:54:58.000 You know, you had like, today, I mean, if you have like a person on...

00:55:04.000 You know, who lives to the left of you and they're the Thatcher family and they're vaguely, you know, English.

00:55:11.000 And then you have the McCoy family on the other side and they're vaguely Irish.

00:55:15.000 They're just kind of white people to you now.

00:55:17.000 Like, it all kind of seems like what's the difference?

00:55:19.000 Dude.

00:55:19.000 Go tell an English and Irish person that they were the same thing back in 1798. They did not identify with each other at all.

00:55:26.000 There was a lot of bad blood, a lot of hostility.

00:55:28.000 And 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.

00:55:35.000 And again, we had to do that or else the country would not be here.

00:55:39.000 Or it would be an Anglo country sort of... 0.59

00:55:43.000 Clustered around the 13 colonies and maybe moved in a bit.

00:55:46.000 But, 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.

00:55:54.000 And so that was like a prerequisite for America becoming what it is today.

00:56:01.000 In Europe, it's very different, man.

00:56:03.000 Like there's such thing as a Polish person.

00:56:07.000 Poland is the country where Polish people live.

00:56:10.000 You know what I mean?

00:56:11.000 Over here in America, we have a much more fluid identity.

00:56:14.000 We're constantly having to renegotiate it.

00:56:19.000 We think it's difficult today to integrate the immigrants that we've got and to try to renegotiate that. 1.00

00:56:25.000 It's always been difficult.

00:56:28.000 To 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.

00:56:39.000 It just it does not apply.

00:56:41.000 It really doesn't work.

00:56:43.000 It's also there's a thing when an all-white country wants to stay all white where people get very nervous of.

00:56:52.000 If you have, you know, let's say China.

00:56:57.000 Like China is Chinese people. 1.00

00:57:00.000 We all agree that it's like it's filled.

00:57:05.000 Primarily with Chinese people.

00:57:07.000 There's people that live there from all walks of life all over the world, but it's mostly Chinese people.

00:57:12.000 If 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.

00:57:25.000 When a country like Poland does it, you're like, oh, those white people, they want to keep everybody out. 0.99

00:57:30.000 They want it to be all white.

00:57:32.000 Because we're, you know, that's...

00:57:34.000 Post-World War II. That's post-Aryan race talk. 1.00

00:57:37.000 That's post-Nazi stuff. 0.64

00:57:39.000 That's what people are legitimately freaked out about.

00:57:42.000 That's the most recent stain in our history where we look back and say, wow, that was close.

00:57:47.000 Evil almost won that one.

00:57:49.000 I think it also has to do with...

00:57:50.000 The interesting thing is...

00:57:52.000 You 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? 0.86

00:58:09.000 Those 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. 0.98

00:58:22.000 All 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.

00:58:32.000 You know what I mean?

00:58:32.000 Or they absorbed it through osmosis.

00:58:34.000 I don't know if it's like a program or something.

00:58:35.000 But we were the dominant sort of cultural and military force and everything else, political force.

00:58:40.000 And 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.

00:58:52.000 I mean you have – you could at least say like with the British Empire or something.

00:58:56.000 They colonized all these places.

00:58:58.000 And 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.

00:59:08.000 You could look at it that way though.

00:59:10.000 If you look at a place like Ireland, Ireland didn't colonize anybody.

00:59:14.000 You know, Ireland was a colony.

00:59:15.000 They suffered terribly under the British for a long time.

00:59:19.000 And 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.

00:59:29.000 To defend their little slice of the world where their people could work out their destiny among themselves, you know, endured so much for that.

00:59:40.000 And then, you know, you get up to about the 1960s, 1970s, and, you know, you can look it up.

00:59:47.000 This isn't like a conspiracy theory.

00:59:49.000 It'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.

00:59:59.000 I don't like that.

01:00:00.000 People think of diversity as like every place on the planet should look like Jackson Heights in New York and like then we're diverse.

01:00:09.000 But to me that's not diversity at all.

01:00:11.000 Diversity is I go to Ireland and it's Irish.

01:00:13.000 I go to China and it's Chinese.

01:00:15.000 You know what I mean?

01:00:15.000 Right.

01:00:16.000 And turning it all into sort of a homogenized like mixed soup. 0.94

01:00:22.000 I think when you put it in those terms nobody really wants that.

01:00:26.000 And, you know, people – but people get very uncomfortable, you know.

01:00:30.000 And 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.

01:00:42.000 But 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.

01:00:53.000 And it can be very hard for somebody who is working from that moral base to come up with a reason that – I mean look.

01:01:05.000 Imagine 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.

01:01:16.000 history.

01:01:18.000 You're not going to be able to come up with a reason that justifies keeping them out.

01:01:24.000 I 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.

01:01:34.000 But, 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?

01:01:51.000 Yeah.

01:01:52.000 I think to go back to what you were originally talking about, I think the World War II story is a huge part of that.

01:01:57.000 It'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.

01:02:24.000 Well, here's the question.

01:02:25.000 Is it coordinated immigration?

01:02:28.000 Are they going there because there's job opportunities?

01:02:30.000 Are they going there for a better way of life?

01:02:33.000 Are they being told to go there?

01:02:37.000 What's causing the mass immigration to Ireland?

01:02:39.000 It depends on the country.

01:02:40.000 I mean it's like – But like to Ireland in specific.

01:02:43.000 Yeah, Ireland.

01:02:44.000 There's a lot of like Polish folks in Ireland, people from Eastern Europe who go there for work.

01:02:50.000 That's the primary like source of migrants. 0.82

01:02:54.000 But there's a lot of – there are a lot of third world migrants or global south migrants there now.

01:02:59.000 But a lot of Eastern Europeans come in there for work.

01:03:02.000 It kind of varies from country to country.

01:03:05.000 It's interesting because I do agree that it's cool that you go to places and they're uniquely, like, I love Scotland.

01:03:11.000 You go to Scotland, it's uniquely Scottish.

01:03:13.000 You know, you go to places, you get to take part in their way of life.

01:03:18.000 Like, to see the world through their culture and the way they view things, it's interesting.

01:03:24.000 But I also love the melting pot of America.

01:03:27.000 I love it.

01:03:28.000 And I come from immigrants.

01:03:30.000 My grandparents came here during the early parts of the 1900s.

01:03:34.000 And so I'm thankful that they were courageous enough or their parents were courageous enough to get on a fucking boat before YouTube.

01:03:42.000 No idea what was going on over here.

01:03:44.000 It was just promises and hopes and try to carve out a life.

01:03:49.000 And that's where I came from.

01:03:51.000 So it would be insanely hypocritical of me to deny someone who came from another country an opportunity to partake in this place.

01:04:02.000 I 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.

01:04:31.000 Whether 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.

01:04:40.000 Then you have a customer.

01:04:41.000 You have a client.

01:04:42.000 And then that client is going to – you're going to call upon them to vote for you.

01:04:47.000 And 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.

01:04:56.000 You've got to wonder.

01:04:57.000 This 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.

01:05:07.000 Most 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.

01:05:18.000 I love that they do that.

01:05:19.000 I love that they make it.

01:05:21.000 I love that this is a place for that.

01:05:23.000 But that can be taken advantage of.

01:05:25.000 That 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.

01:05:41.000 And the next thing you know, everyone's self-centered.

01:05:43.000 Everyone is Twitter before Elon bought it.

01:05:46.000 It's a dangerous place for freedom.

01:05:49.000 And that's ultimately what America...

01:05:53.000 It has to say that we stand for above all.

01:05:56.000 This is the place.

01:05:57.000 If there's a place on earth where you can be free, this has got to be that place.

01:06:02.000 This is what we came here for.

01:06:04.000 It's where the founding fathers, this is what they were trying to do.

01:06:08.000 With all the flaws and all the terrible things that took place here, yes, absolutely.

01:06:12.000 Land acknowledgements, hallelujah.

01:06:14.000 But at the end of the day, this place is supposed to represent freedom.

01:06:18.000 But freedom can be manipulated.

01:06:20.000 And you can use your empathy and they can use it against you.

01:06:27.000 And 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.

01:06:38.000 And that's how you have to look at it.

01:06:39.000 This is ultimately about money.

01:06:42.000 And whether it's about money, bringing in people for cheap labor, which I think is fucked.

01:06:48.000 Because I think if you're in America, if you're here, if you're here, we're going to call you an American.

01:06:52.000 You should get paid what a fucking American gets paid. 1.00

01:06:53.000 You should get health coverage.

01:06:55.000 You should get everything.

01:06:55.000 You shouldn't be able to get people just because they walked over here and you get them to work for slave wages.

01:07:01.000 That's ridiculous.

01:07:02.000 That's insane.

01:07:02.000 That's anti-American.

01:07:05.000 I mean, I'll hold you up there.

01:07:07.000 It might be like anti-American ideals.

01:07:10.000 But that's the history of America right there.

01:07:13.000 It is.

01:07:13.000 That's the whole history of America.

01:07:14.000 It's true.

01:07:15.000 And that's the dirty little secret of construction sites.

01:07:17.000 You 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.

01:07:31.000 And these weren't 60-year-olds coming over and working on the docks.

01:07:33.000 You're talking about young guys who came over to do that.

01:07:35.000 14 years.

01:07:37.000 Horrible, brutal jobs.

01:07:39.000 I mean, completely expendable human resource.

01:07:44.000 We all remember the photos of people working on the Empire State Building, walking on the beams.

01:07:49.000 Yeah.

01:07:50.000 Just no safety, nothing, leather shoes.

01:07:53.000 Yeah.

01:07:54.000 Fuck off.

01:07:55.000 There's a lot of, you know, they have those political tests online, kind of tells you what you are if you answer some questions.

01:08:02.000 What are you?

01:08:02.000 I always end up right in the center.

01:08:04.000 But I always have to tell people that...

01:08:06.000 I'm the last – the farthest thing from a centrist.

01:08:08.000 It'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.

01:08:14.000 And 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.

01:08:22.000 I was working through a series on the history of the American labor movement.

01:08:26.000 And people today think of teachers' unions and corrupt big labor organizations and so forth.

01:08:32.000 But 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.

01:08:40.000 I 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...

01:09:00.000 They were marching on the county next door to go free some of their compatriots and to hang the sheriff.

01:09:07.000 And they only stopped because the U.S. Army finally showed up.

01:09:11.000 This 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.

01:09:22.000 Not even because they were afraid or discouraged by their prospects.

01:09:26.000 They just weren't going to.

01:09:27.000 You know, their problem was with like the sheriff and the mine, you know, the mine operators and stuff, not with the army.

01:09:33.000 They don't want to fight them.

01:09:34.000 And so that diffused it.

01:09:35.000 But, you know, you go back to those early to those early decades of the labor struggles.

01:09:41.000 And I mean, people really have to like.

01:09:44.000 It was not some aberration when striking workers, you know.

01:09:50.000 Got a bunch of people killed, you know, like where a bunch of Pinkertons or other mercenaries or even government forces. 0.96

01:09:56.000 I 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.

01:10:10.000 So the National Guard and the state government was completely run by.

01:10:13.000 The mining operators because they were the most important thing in the state.

01:10:17.000 And the National Guard took up positions with machine guns up on a hill overlooking the striking miners encampment.

01:10:23.000 And the miners were mostly all gone because, you know, there were authorities looking for them and stuff.

01:10:27.000 It was a lot of their wives and children and so forth.

01:10:29.000 And they just opened up on these people and killed like 22 women and children.

01:10:33.000 And like that kind of thing was like that's an extreme kind of.

01:10:38.000 That's an example, I guess, of the brutality, but smaller versions of that, that's how it was.

01:10:43.000 People didn't believe back then, or a lot of people, the capitalists didn't believe back then that you had a right to strike.

01:10:48.000 Today we're like...

01:10:50.000 Yeah, if you don't want to go to work, you don't have to go to work.

01:10:52.000 And if you all do it together, that's a strike.

01:10:54.000 Like, you know, of course people can do—that's not how they thought about it back then.

01:10:57.000 You know, they thought you were—they thought of a strike as like a form of sabotage.

01:11:01.000 And so the authorities would be brought in.

01:11:02.000 Mercenaries would be brought in to, like, deal with these people.

01:11:05.000 And you're talking about, like—people think of, like, socialists today or something.

01:11:09.000 When, like, right-wing people—I really try to get this across to them.

01:11:13.000 Like, today you think, like, a left-wing socialist or whatever.

01:11:16.000 And 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.

01:11:33.000 And then after that, then they go to their meetings.

01:11:37.000 And 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.

01:11:46.000 And they have a bowl of cabbage soup with their four kids that live in this horrible place.

01:11:51.000 And then they go back and do it again the next day.

01:11:53.000 These 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.

01:12:05.000 The capitalist class – and I'm not trying to sound like some kind of a Marxist or something.

01:12:11.000 I'm just – that's what they were.

01:12:12.000 Like they were not going to compromise with the people unless they were forced to.

01:12:16.000 And those people, they went out on the picket lines.

01:12:19.000 They fought.

01:12:21.000 They died.

01:12:22.000 In 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.

01:12:36.000 And that kind of got started in the early part of the 1900s.

01:12:39.000 But the interesting thing about it is the way it started was, you know, the owners of the businesses, they were hiring like...

01:12:47.000 Real thugs.

01:12:48.000 I 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. 0.79

01:13:08.000 You know, this kind of thing was happening.

01:13:09.000 And so the union started to say, well, we need some muscle, too.

01:13:13.000 And so who's the muscle?

01:13:15.000 Well, if you got a bunch of like Irish and Italian guys working on this dock, the toughest guys they know are the gangsters. 0.92

01:13:22.000 And so they'd be like, you know, we'll pay you.

01:13:24.000 We need you to defend us from, you know, make sure that we don't get our teeth kicked in by the Pinkertons. 1.00

01:13:29.000 And so they would do that.

01:13:31.000 You 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.

01:13:41.000 Why do we have to take orders from these people again?

01:13:44.000 Can't we run the show?

01:13:45.000 And that kind of started to happen.

01:13:47.000 You started to get these unions that were racketeering organizations.

01:13:52.000 And so these are things about history is extremely messy.

01:14:00.000 We 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.

01:14:31.000 And you can't, you know, there was one time, right?

01:14:37.000 I can tell the story because it's probably back in the mid-2000s when I was still in the military.

01:14:46.000 I was over at my friend's house.

01:14:48.000 He was at the hospital picking up our other friend who had a bicycle accident and hurt his head.

01:14:52.000 And he was picking him up and coming back with him.

01:14:54.000 And so I was going to meet him there so we could hang out and welcome him back from the hospital and so forth.

01:15:00.000 I get there and I call him up because he's not home.

01:15:02.000 And I say, you know, Richard, I'm here.

01:15:05.000 Like, what's up?

01:15:06.000 He's like, ah, the doctors are being slow, whatever.

01:15:09.000 So I'm going to be a little while.

01:15:10.000 Well, I got a big 20-ounce Venti, you know, Starbucks black coffee.

01:15:14.000 And so I pound that thing in my car as I'm reading a book.

01:15:16.000 And pretty soon I start to feel that pressure in my gut.

01:15:19.000 Like, I got to take a shit.

01:15:21.000 Like, I have to take a shit.

01:15:22.000 It's like that caffeine shit, right?

01:15:24.000 And I call up my friend.

01:15:26.000 I'm like, where are you?

01:15:27.000 Like, I need you to...

01:15:29.000 Get home now.

01:15:30.000 He's like, the doctors haven't even brought him to me.

01:15:31.000 I don't know what's going on.

01:15:32.000 He's like, go see if a door or a window's open or something.

01:15:35.000 And so now I'm getting up and moving.

01:15:37.000 So that's making things worse, you know.

01:15:39.000 And I check all the doors.

01:15:41.000 I check all the windows.

01:15:42.000 Nothing's open.

01:15:43.000 And 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.

01:15:50.000 But then all of a sudden I look up and there's a balcony.

01:15:54.000 From the master bedroom with no stairs down to the backyard, but it's a balcony, you know, there's no access to it.

01:15:59.000 And I'm like, I'll bet they didn't lock that door.

01:16:02.000 And 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.

01:16:09.000 And so I'm just in my socks.

01:16:11.000 And at this point, just like the effort of, the effort of...

01:16:15.000 You 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.

01:16:23.000 And so I run into the, I run up, the door's open, thank God, and I run in and run into the master bathroom.

01:16:29.000 And 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.

01:16:37.000 I get in there, and as I run in there, I see that there's no toilet paper.

01:16:40.000 Now, the obvious answer there is...

01:16:42.000 Cross that bridge when you get to it.

01:16:45.000 You gotta go.

01:16:46.000 At the time, I was like, oh no!

01:16:48.000 And so I ran out of the bathroom.

01:16:49.000 I'm up on the second floor.

01:16:50.000 I 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.

01:16:58.000 And 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.

01:17:04.000 My socks hit the tile floor, slide out.

01:17:06.000 I fall on my back, bang my head, and shit everywhere.

01:17:10.000 I mean, it's like going up my back.

01:17:13.000 It's horrible.

01:17:16.000 And 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.

01:17:33.000 And you just sit there and think about like when you're in that situation, like you don't even stop there.

01:17:38.000 You think back on like your entire life and you're like.

01:17:42.000 How did I get here?

01:17:44.000 It's like that record scratch.

01:17:45.000 You're probably wondering how I got into this situation.

01:17:47.000 That's where I was.

01:17:49.000 This 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.

01:18:03.000 And when my friend got home, I didn't tell him this for years afterwards, when he got home, I blamed it on his dog.

01:18:11.000 And he yelled at the dog on my behalf.

01:18:14.000 I told him years later.

01:18:18.000 How old were you at the time?

01:18:21.000 Too old to be doing shit like that.

01:18:27.000 I mean, but that's a funny way of putting it, but that's history a lot of the times.

01:18:33.000 You know, you're making decisions on the fly that you're not necessarily having time to reflect upon.

01:18:39.000 And, you know, you get into a situation where you're like, how did we end up here?

01:18:43.000 Yeah.

01:18:44.000 You know, I'm glad you brought up the labor movement because I feel exactly the same way.

01:18:48.000 And knowing the history of the way people striking were treated and what could have happened had they not been successful.

01:18:59.000 You know, people want, you know, you think about unions, you think about corruption and waste and fraud.

01:19:04.000 That's, unfortunately, that happens a lot.

01:19:07.000 And greed.

01:19:08.000 People making too much money.

01:19:10.000 I mean, they blamed a lot of the unions on the collapse of the American automobile industry in Detroit.

01:19:18.000 You know, they wanted too much money, they were too greedy, and they sent everything overseas.

01:19:22.000 And then, you know, the whole Flint, Michigan thing, Michael Moore's documentary.

01:19:28.000 Roger and me.

01:19:29.000 It'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.

01:19:40.000 When the powerful...

01:19:41.000 And this is what everyone's afraid of on the left, and rightly so.

01:19:44.000 When the powerful...

01:19:46.000 They 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.

01:19:55.000 They could siphon off all your money.

01:19:57.000 They don't have to pay taxes.

01:19:58.000 They fuck everybody over and they just want more and more and more and it's a blight on society.

01:20:04.000 I think we both agree there's some sort of a comfortable middle ground.

01:20:09.000 I 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.

01:20:16.000 One of them that I bring up all the time is the fire department.

01:20:19.000 The fire department is a totally socialist idea.

01:20:23.000 You don't have to pay them money.

01:20:26.000 If 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.

01:20:34.000 If you can afford it or if you can't afford it, they put out fires.

01:20:37.000 We all agree, you got to put out fires.

01:20:39.000 We all kind of agree, you should have a good education.

01:20:43.000 But 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.

01:20:56.000 So we don't really completely treat that.

01:21:01.000 That should be a socialist thing that everybody should get along with.

01:21:04.000 That everybody should say, yeah, that's good for everybody.

01:21:06.000 Another thing is, and this is very controversial, but socialized medicine.

01:21:11.000 The idea that you should go broke because you broke your leg is fucking crazy.

01:21:15.000 If 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...

01:21:26.000 Productive 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.

01:21:37.000 I 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.

01:21:45.000 That'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.

01:21:50.000 You want that guy.

01:21:51.000 You want the guy with a nice watch.

01:21:52.000 You want the guy who lives in a big house because that guy is fucking dialed in and focused.

01:21:57.000 You don't want a guy who doesn't feel like he's being compensated enough.

01:22:00.000 You don't want a guy who feels like he's expendable.

01:22:02.000 You want a guy who feels like he's a fucking rock star.

01:22:05.000 That's what you want if you want your mom getting brain surgery, right? 1.00

01:22:08.000 You want a rock star surgeon doing that. 0.98

01:22:11.000 So I believe in competition and I believe in merit and I think it's very, very important for our society as a whole.

01:22:18.000 But I also think there should be a much larger safety net for individuals so they don't go broke if they have a fucking knee surgery.

01:22:24.000 Or if you break your back, you shouldn't have to fucking go bankrupt.

01:22:28.000 That's kind of crazy.

01:22:30.000 And I think labor unions are very important.

01:22:34.000 It'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.

01:22:47.000 Because the poorer you are, the more desperate you are, the less likely you are to do anything about it.

01:22:54.000 When 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.

01:23:03.000 When you have the ability to strike, when the writers' union in Los Angeles strikes, that's a fucking real problem, man.

01:23:10.000 That's a real problem.

01:23:10.000 problem.

01:23:10.000 That shuts everything down.

01:23:12.000 And they get recognized because of that.

01:23:15.000 And then they get hopefully fairly compensated because of that.

01:23:18.000 It's an important part of our society.

01:23:19.000 There'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.

01:23:41.000 Because there was all of a sudden a huge influx of Irish in the 1830s and 40s.

01:23:46.000 And their parents are both working 14-hour days and the kids are just running the streets and everything else.

01:23:52.000 And there's no public schools.

01:23:53.000 They didn't have any at first.

01:23:55.000 And so it was like a response to this.

01:23:57.000 They're like, we got to do something about this.

01:23:59.000 We got to take these little hellions and turn them into Americans somehow. 1.00

01:24:03.000 And so you had philanthropists.

01:24:05.000 It was all private at first.

01:24:06.000 And then they were transferred to the city governments and stuff.

01:24:10.000 They were responses to like demographic crises, right?

01:24:13.000 They were emerging due to like the migrant influxes. 0.68

01:24:16.000 And 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.

01:24:27.000 They 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?

01:24:33.000 Like what?

01:24:34.000 It created like that sort of resistance to, you know, the question of – Of what we owe each other as members of a society, you know?

01:24:45.000 Like, the idea of, like...

01:24:47.000 I feel like we've kind of taken...

01:24:48.000 Like, America's the best country in the world.

01:24:50.000 If you are smart, motivated, you got a great idea, and you want to make something of it, go to America.

01:24:56.000 Like, America's the place for you.

01:24:58.000 Throughout most of our history, if you were just, like, a person who, you know, you could turn a wrench or swing a hammer or something.

01:25:07.000 Mary was not... 0.89

01:25:08.000 You know, it was built to create opportunities and push competition for people to compete for the top of the mountain.

01:25:15.000 But the people at the bottom, like, throughout a lot of our history were just kind of forgotten.

01:25:18.000 You 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?

01:25:29.000 And, I mean, one of the other things, too, is, like, when people think about...

01:25:35.000 If 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.

01:25:45.000 Like, that was never really a danger.

01:25:46.000 But 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...

01:25:58.000 The 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?

01:26:10.000 That was a real thing that could have happened to them.

01:26:15.000 And 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.

01:26:24.000 But 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.

01:26:34.000 Nobody else is even really even courting them or asking for it, you know?

01:26:38.000 And when you add to that, like this whole idea of like the working class, like this isn't something that has existed forever.

01:26:45.000 Like this was something that was emerging in different times in different places.

01:26:48.000 But like really in that, like.

01:26:50.000 Most 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.

01:27:03.000 And 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.

01:27:12.000 You know, they would very often be like, they played a very kind of critical role in feudal Europe.

01:27:18.000 You know, because they were the only ones who had a network that kind of stretched across the whole place.

01:27:24.000 And 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.

01:27:34.000 You 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.

01:27:42.000 But they weren't, you know, they weren't serfs or peasants.

01:27:45.000 They weren't the aristocracy.

01:27:46.000 They weren't.

01:27:47.000 The church obviously.

01:27:48.000 They 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.

01:28:00.000 But this was at a time when it was just taken for granted that different classes of people had different privileges and different rights.

01:28:09.000 It was just – everybody took that for granted.

01:28:12.000 It wasn't even something that was imposed.

01:28:13.000 was the peasant or a serf would have believed that as much as the king did.

01:28:16.000 It 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. 0.97

01:28:27.000 You know, they don't have any means of like immediate self-sufficiency.

01:28:31.000 What they have is their back and their shoulders and their hands.

01:28:34.000 And, you know, they trade that for the means to survive.

01:28:38.000 And, 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.

01:28:51.000 At 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.

01:28:58.000 I'm a member of the working class.

01:29:00.000 And 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. 0.82

01:29:09.000 And we're going to start to, you know, organize and act politically.

01:29:13.000 To extend those interests and to achieve them.

01:29:15.000 That was something that was very new.

01:29:17.000 And so people were kind of figuring out, again, on the fly, like, how to deal with this.

01:29:20.000 Like, 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.

01:29:42.000 Which is pretty bizarre that we've had to adjust to that so quickly.

01:29:46.000 You know, so many changes so rapidly.

01:29:49.000 Changes in transmit the ability to move people, transit, the ability to take people from Europe quickly, relatively, to America.

01:29:57.000 Trains, 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...

01:30:09.000 I mean, that's really the dirty secret of the beginnings of all these cities.

01:30:15.000 These people were shitting in outhouses.

01:30:17.000 Public ones on the street.

01:30:19.000 Everybody lived in squalor.

01:30:20.000 Rats, disease, horrible nutrition.

01:30:23.000 In the winter, you don't get any fresh vegetables.

01:30:26.000 There's nothing there to get.

01:30:29.000 Everyone's malnourished.

01:30:30.000 Everyone's living terribly.

01:30:32.000 And everyone's terrified that they won't have enough money to put food on the table.

01:30:36.000 And they're all...

01:30:37.000 Under the oppressive thumb of whoever has the most money who could provide them with jobs.

01:30:42.000 Yeah.

01:30:43.000 And, you know, there's a world where, you know, the husband breaks his back.

01:30:49.000 You know, you better hope that you're...

01:30:51.000 A member in good standing of the nearby parish church because there's nothing else for you.

01:30:56.000 There might be some charity or something that some rich lady set up or whatever, but that was not going to save everybody.

01:31:03.000 There was nothing for those people.

01:31:04.000 It'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...

01:31:18.000 You know, integrate with society.

01:31:20.000 You were a blacksmith.

01:31:21.000 You were, you know, you did this, you did that.

01:31:23.000 Everybody found a thing, did the thing, and it all sort of cohesively worked.

01:31:29.000 And then all of a sudden, you have jobs.

01:31:32.000 A bunch of people waiting in line.

01:31:34.000 Soup kitchens.

01:31:35.000 And then, you know, you have...

01:31:37.000 This oppressive factory environment where, first of all, everything's coal-powered.

01:31:42.000 They do a great job in Peaky Blinders of highlighting that.

01:31:47.000 The streets are gray.

01:31:48.000 Everything's a dull, dark gray.

01:31:50.000 So everybody's getting polluted.

01:31:52.000 Everyone's sick.

01:31:54.000 Period.

01:31:54.000 You're sick because there's shit in the streets.

01:31:56.000 Everyone's riding horses.

01:31:58.000 The horse is shit everywhere.

01:31:59.000 There's shit everywhere.

01:32:00.000 Your whole existence is hell.

01:32:02.000 And then you have massive organized crime.

01:32:07.000 Violent, horrific, gangs of New York style.

01:32:10.000 Organized crime all throughout your city.

01:32:12.000 Violence everywhere.

01:32:14.000 Yeah, the history of organized crime is actually for people who really want to understand America in the late 19th and...

01:32:23.000 Throughout the 20th century, reading a few books on the history of organized crime is a good window into that.

01:32:28.000 It's going to give you a perspective from the bottom up rather than from the top down.

01:32:33.000 When you read history, the further back you go, the more true this is.

01:32:37.000 It's something you really have to stay humble about.

01:32:41.000 You consider the fact that things that are happening today, we can't seem to agree on things that are...

01:32:48.000 Just extensively documented and there's like in newspapers and video, whatever else.

01:32:52.000 We can't agree about what's going on or what, you know, the president's motivations are, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

01:32:58.000 And you go back further in history and you're dealing with like scraps of information a lot of times.

01:33:03.000 And the further back you go, the worse it gets.

01:33:05.000 You know, the idea that you should really like be careful when you really feel like you start to understand people, you know, from a...

01:33:14.000 I 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?

01:33:36.000 Just like just that.

01:33:37.000 And even in more recent days when – If you go back just into more recent history, you have like diaries and stuff, right?

01:33:46.000 It's like even then, you're talking about like the kind of person who would keep a diary.

01:33:50.000 That's not everybody.

01:33:51.000 You're talking about a certain kind of people.

01:33:53.000 And, 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?

01:34:00.000 You'll remember back during the Arab Spring when things were jumping off in Egypt and they were interviewing.

01:34:07.000 It 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.

01:34:15.000 And 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.

01:34:25.000 And, you know, people see stuff like that.

01:34:28.000 And maybe sometimes there is, like, an aspect of this to it.

01:34:31.000 But people see that and they're like, oh, this is propaganda.

01:34:33.000 This is bullshit.

01:34:34.000 And she knows it's not true.

01:34:36.000 And CNN knows it's not true.

01:34:37.000 But they're trying to sell this to us.

01:34:39.000 A 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.

01:34:46.000 Who do you think she's going to talk to? 1.00

01:34:48.000 Like, 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?

01:34:55.000 She'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?

01:35:02.000 And who do they know?

01:35:03.000 You know what I mean?

01:35:04.000 And that kind of—this same thing is true in Russia.

01:35:08.000 You know, with Russia, you know— There's a faction of people.

01:35:13.000 There's always been a faction of people in Russia who are not fans of Vladimir Putin.

01:35:17.000 And interestingly, it's sort of the same social class that really doesn't like Donald Trump in the United States.

01:35:25.000 You 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.

01:35:32.000 Well, if you're a Russia correspondent...

01:35:35.000 For 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.

01:35:43.000 And so a lot of times that makes it over into our news is like the people are ready for a revolution.

01:35:47.000 The people are ready to get Putin out of there.

01:35:50.000 He's actually hated and everything.

01:35:51.000 And it's just a distortion of reality based on the sourcing, you know?

01:35:54.000 Right.

01:35:55.000 Like going on Blue Sky, talking about Trump.

01:35:58.000 And 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,

01:36:16.000 you 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.

01:36:31.000 Everybody knew the Iliad.

01:36:32.000 They knew the story of the conquest of Troy and all that.

01:36:35.000 But he wrote the story from the perspective of the women who actually lived in Troy and went through the conquest.

01:36:41.000 And 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.

01:36:49.000 But you really have to keep it in mind that when you're reading history that is written exclusively by men, exclusively by adults.

01:36:59.000 Exclusively by the upper class and the small cast of people who are actually literate and writing things down.

01:37:06.000 And for even leaving aside like the political circumstances, they were putting constraints on the way that they could describe and write about things.

01:37:14.000 Just the class bias is introduced.

01:37:17.000 You're getting a very, very narrow perspective.

01:37:19.000 It would be like coming over to the United States and Asking a random person on the street, hey, who's this Donald Trump guy?

01:37:27.000 What's he about?

01:37:27.000 You're an alien.

01:37:28.000 You don't know anything.

01:37:29.000 And they say he's a fascist dictator who is going to ruin the country and destroy the country.

01:37:34.000 And then going home and being like, yeah, the Americans hate this guy.

01:37:37.000 He's a fascist dictator and he's going to destroy the country.

01:37:40.000 And if you think about it like that and then imagine that...

01:37:45.000 Those people or people who are on the other side, whatever, but one side are the only ones that are writing anything down.

01:37:50.000 A lot of times our understanding of history is very much based on like that kind of a narrow view.

01:37:55.000 You know what I mean?

01:37:55.000 Yeah.

01:37:56.000 When you are putting together a piece like Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem, how do you account for that?

01:38:02.000 Like how do you?

01:38:04.000 How do you try to have this balanced, nuanced perspective when you're getting, in many cases, a biased perspective that you're researching from?

01:38:14.000 Yeah.

01:38:15.000 And the biased perspective is one that I can't avoid.

01:38:20.000 I mean, I guess I could with enough work, but is that I only speak and read English.

01:38:24.000 So just that by itself.

01:38:27.000 Like when I was doing that story specifically, like the early history of Zionism and that conflict.

01:38:32.000 I'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.

01:38:51.000 And so you have that bias by itself.

01:38:54.000 And, 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?

01:39:02.000 What 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?

01:39:08.000 And I told them, like, I don't think that's a viable goal when you're doing this stuff.

01:39:13.000 Like, you know, the goal should be understanding, you know, on a human level.

01:39:17.000 And 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?

01:39:32.000 And 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?

01:39:40.000 There's a lot of like huge historical figures, somebody like Alexander the Great or something.

01:39:46.000 Like what we know about them is based on an extremely small stack of papers, you know?

01:39:54.000 And 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.

01:40:03.000 And 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.

01:40:14.000 I'm ready to start writing this first episode and plotting it out.

01:40:17.000 And so I do that and it takes me a while.

01:40:18.000 I'm still working my day job at the time.

01:40:20.000 So it takes me a few months to kind of get it.

01:40:22.000 To the end of it.

01:40:23.000 And by then, I've read 20 books or 30 books or something.

01:40:27.000 And I went back and went through, like, the notes and the plot and everything that I had laid out.

01:40:33.000 And it was embarrassingly bad.

01:40:36.000 I mean, it wasn't just, like, you got this wrong or that wrong.

01:40:39.000 It's just, like, whole sections of the story that I am so far off base that it's not even, you can't even call it wrong.

01:40:46.000 And I thought about that.

01:40:47.000 I was like...

01:40:48.000 And I had read six books about this topic.

01:40:50.000 You know how many topics there are that I've read one book on that I will just pontificate about for hours unless you stop me?

01:40:57.000 And so it kind of forced that sense of humility on me a little bit and made me realize that even if you're well-educated in a subject...

01:41:08.000 And this is one of the reasons, too.

01:41:10.000 I'm convinced, anyway, that one of the reasons my Tucker interview got as much of a response as it is.

01:41:17.000 Tucker, obviously, is very clever about courting controversy.

01:41:20.000 You know, he knows what he's doing.

01:41:22.000 And at the very beginning, he introduced me as like the...

01:41:27.000 The best and most important, you know, contemporary historian in America today or something like that, right?

01:41:34.000 And I know the guys like, you know, the historians that came after me afterwards were just inflamed by that.

01:41:40.000 And I'm sure that was Tucker's, you know, goal.

01:41:42.000 But I've always, you know, I say the same thing Dan Carlin always says.

01:41:47.000 I'm not a historian, you know.

01:41:49.000 Read the books and the papers and the other things that historians write, and then I tell a story about them, you know?

01:41:55.000 The historians are learning the languages, going into the archives, interviewing survivors, etc.

01:42:01.000 I'm not—that's a historian, you know?

01:42:03.000 I'm a storyteller who uses historical stories to try to, you know, to tell my stories.

01:42:09.000 But, like, yeah, it was funny, too, because the night before, he was kind of saying that.

01:42:16.000 Because we were having dinner the night before.

01:42:18.000 And I was telling him this spiel, you know, I'm not a historian.

01:42:21.000 Historians do important work.

01:42:23.000 And he's like, yeah, well, I'm going to say that on the show tomorrow, so don't fight it.

01:42:27.000 And I was like, okay.

01:42:31.000 I would have let you say it.

01:42:32.000 I think you're an educator, like an unconventional educator.

01:42:36.000 I mean, I think that's the best way to describe it.

01:42:41.000 If you're...

01:42:42.000 The 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.

01:42:52.000 I'd be so pumped to go to that class.

01:42:54.000 My favorite emails to get from listeners, right?

01:42:57.000 Or, well, my favorite email, my favorite two emails probably had to do with the Israeli-Palestinian thing.

01:43:02.000 You 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...

01:43:11.000 Deals with Palestinians on a daily basis in his job. 0.62

01:43:14.000 So that was pretty awesome.

01:43:15.000 That's amazing.

01:43:16.000 And then I got another one from this 20-year-old girl who lives in the West Bank, but she'd only been there for about two years.

01:43:25.000 She'd gotten permission to move there from the Israelis.

01:43:27.000 Her whole family was in Gaza.

01:43:29.000 And she wrote me about two or three months after the war kicked off, after October 7th.

01:43:36.000 And she heard the podcast and she said...

01:43:39.000 You 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.

01:43:48.000 But, 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.

01:44:01.000 You know, that's how they understand it.

01:44:04.000 And she said, you know, there's probably a Jewish girl.

01:44:06.000 Who lives in Tel Aviv, who's just like me.

01:44:09.000 She loves Harry Styles and da-da-da.

01:44:13.000 Anyway, those were amazing emails to get.

01:44:16.000 But my other favorite, and this one I've gotten probably 100 times, is it'll be from somebody who will tell me their story a little bit.

01:44:26.000 They'll say, you know, I was always kind of...

01:44:27.000 The kid who sat in the back of class, like, I was not one of the smart kids, you know?

01:44:31.000 Maybe not one of the dumb kids, but I wasn't one of the smart kids.

01:44:34.000 And reading things like history books, that's what smart kids do.

01:44:37.000 And I'm not one of those people.

01:44:39.000 And so I just never even shifted into that gear or anything.

01:44:43.000 He's like, but I heard your podcast on Jim Jones or whatever because my friend sent it to me.

01:44:47.000 And now, you know, that was a year and a half ago.

01:44:49.000 Now check it out.

01:44:50.000 This is my bookshelf.

01:44:50.000 I've read all these books.

01:44:51.000 And the best part about it is you find that...

01:44:56.000 That that experience, like, changed the way they think about themselves.

01:44:59.000 It really, like, opened up their own, like, human possibilities in certain ways.

01:45:03.000 You know, and I don't want to take—I'm not taking credit for that.

01:45:05.000 They're doing it.

01:45:06.000 But 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?

01:45:15.000 He's just, like, gets C's if he's lucky and he's not any good at, you know, math, whatever.

01:45:20.000 But then you get him talking about cars.

01:45:24.000 You know?

01:45:24.000 And 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.

01:45:34.000 He's just, nobody's been able to engage him on these topics before.

01:45:38.000 And so he thinks that those aren't for him, and he's not engaged with them.

01:45:41.000 But you get him on something he's really engaged with, this dude's super smart.

01:45:44.000 If 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.

01:45:51.000 And that's, like, almost everybody.

01:45:52.000 You know, it's a matter of just, like, being able to get people engaged.

01:45:56.000 And 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.

01:46:09.000 It's really great.

01:46:11.000 Well, it's engaging and it's fascinating to learn about human beings.

01:46:17.000 And we've been told that everybody has a 10-second attention span.

01:46:22.000 This is the TikTok generation.

01:46:25.000 And 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.

01:46:36.000 People are curious.

01:46:37.000 We're still the same.

01:46:38.000 We're still interested in things.

01:46:40.000 We're just easily distracted.

01:46:42.000 And we're constantly being bombarded by...

01:46:46.000 Information 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

01:47:16.000 it and how it engages them and how it's enriching their life.

01:47:19.000 Like, that's good for everybody.

01:47:20.000 That's good for everybody who listens.

01:47:22.000 It's good for me to be able to sit here and talk to these people.

01:47:25.000 You know, it's good to be stimulated.

01:47:29.000 It's good to be curious.

01:47:30.000 It's good to expand your understanding of life, this life that we're all experiencing together.

01:47:35.000 You 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.

01:47:59.000 How did he do that?

01:48:00.000 Like and then you get into your series on it.

01:48:01.000 It'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.

01:48:16.000 What would I do?

01:48:17.000 Would I be one of those people?

01:48:18.000 Would I be in that group?

01:48:19.000 Would I be drinking the Kool-Aid?

01:48:22.000 Would I be with them?

01:48:23.000 Like, how does a person get sucked into cutting their balls off and putting the purple Nikes on and waiting for the spaceship?

01:48:30.000 How does that...

01:48:33.000 What causes that wild, wild country?

01:48:35.000 I'm sure you've seen that.

01:48:36.000 Incredible.

01:48:37.000 Dude, my grandmother, it's my uncle's mom, but she babysat me all the time as a kid.

01:48:42.000 We all call her grandma.

01:48:43.000 Sheila, Mana and Sheila, was her sister-in-law.

01:48:46.000 Oh, my God!

01:48:47.000 She was hiding out.

01:48:48.000 I didn't know this until after I saw Wild, Wild Country.

01:48:50.000 I was like, have you guys seen this?

01:48:52.000 Just casually dropping that.

01:48:53.000 They're like...

01:48:53.000 Oh, yeah.

01:48:54.000 You don't know about Sheila?

01:48:55.000 When she was hiding out before she fled the country, she was being hidden in my uncle's bedroom for a while.

01:49:02.000 Oh, my God.

01:49:03.000 Yeah, so that's fun.

01:49:04.000 Wow.

01:49:05.000 That's crazy.

01:49:08.000 That's crazy.

01:49:09.000 But 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...

01:49:22.000 Any 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.

01:49:36.000 Hitler is a good example. 0.99

01:49:38.000 That is somebody who can say whatever you want about him.

01:49:42.000 He loved the German people and he cared about the German people.

01:49:45.000 But 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.

01:49:54.000 And it's the chemical that basically makes sure that, you know, a mammal mother doesn't eat her baby when she gets hungry.

01:50:03.000 You know, in us, it takes the form of, like, increasing trust and empathy and so forth.

01:50:09.000 But 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.

01:50:17.000 But because you're more protective of them, like feeling that way, it actually increases distrust toward anybody considered like in the out group.

01:50:26.000 And so it's like makes you love your child more and makes you hate like the foreigner more or something like that, you know? 0.98

01:50:33.000 And a lot of things are like that where it's really your virtues that get hijacked.

01:50:37.000 I mean, if you think of...

01:50:39.000 I mean, yeah, you were talking about Jonestown.

01:50:41.000 I mean, that story sucked me in so much.

01:50:44.000 Part of the reason for that is because I just got obsessed with it.

01:50:47.000 But 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.

01:50:56.000 And it's like sermons of his.

01:50:58.000 It's them just having meetings in the middle of the night.

01:51:01.000 It's just all kinds of different things.

01:51:03.000 Well, for like three or four months, I had that in my headphones for like...

01:51:07.000 At the time, I was working overseas when I worked for the Department of Defense, and I was working by myself overseas.

01:51:12.000 And so I'd be working, and I'd have my headphones on eight hours a day.

01:51:15.000 I'm listening to Jim Jones.

01:51:16.000 Oh, my God.

01:51:17.000 I was dreaming about him, for real.

01:51:19.000 But 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.

01:51:32.000 The 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.

01:51:46.000 But 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.

01:51:56.000 But, you know, Jim Jones was a guy who...

01:51:59.000 In, like, 1953 is when he started his first church in Indianapolis.

01:52:05.000 And it's a totally open, like, mixed-race church in Indianapolis.

01:52:11.000 And 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.

01:52:21.000 This is a couple of years before Martin Luther King and Birmingham or whatever.

01:52:25.000 He was, like, out front on this, right?

01:52:27.000 And 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.

01:52:39.000 His 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.

01:52:48.000 I 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.

01:52:56.000 And he was – But he was still doing all this.

01:52:59.000 And 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.

01:53:09.000 Like, he really would.

01:53:10.000 And when you say, like, how did people get sucked into it?

01:53:13.000 Like, 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.

01:53:21.000 The 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.

01:53:28.000 And, 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.

01:53:35.000 And 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.

01:53:43.000 Because, 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.

01:53:52.000 You know, you take just like as one example, there was one of the women that died out there. 0.94

01:53:56.000 She was like 70, 72 years old or something in 1978 when they all died.

01:54:02.000 So she was born in whatever, 1906 in Alabama.

01:54:07.000 And she's this black woman, right?

01:54:09.000 And so she goes through, lives the first 40 years of her life under Jim Crow in Alabama, going through that.

01:54:17.000 And then her and her husband decide to, you know, they get up the gumption to...

01:54:22.000 You know, get on a train or get in a car or whatever and go out to California.

01:54:26.000 And this is, again, back when, you know, the world was a lot bigger for people back then.

01:54:30.000 You were going off to California.

01:54:32.000 It was goodbye for the most part, you know.

01:54:34.000 And so they were going.

01:54:34.000 They 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.

01:54:39.000 And 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.

01:54:48.000 He dies early just from overwork and, like, everything else.

01:54:51.000 And 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.

01:55:02.000 You 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.

01:55:08.000 And so this is her life now.

01:55:09.000 It's, like, arguably, I mean, I wouldn't even say arguably.

01:55:13.000 Like, other than just the...

01:55:15.000 The indignity of being told you can't drink out of that drinking fountain or something.

01:55:19.000 Her life was actually more comfortable in Alabama under Jim Crow than it's become in this Oakland ghetto.

01:55:26.000 She's safer.

01:55:28.000 At least over there, she lived in a place that was a community.

01:55:31.000 It was a group of people that knew her since she was a kid, and she lived among them.

01:55:35.000 Over here, she's completely alone.

01:55:37.000 She has nobody.

01:55:39.000 Her whole experience of her whole life with white Americans has been virtually... 0.63

01:55:44.000 Unanimously negative.

01:55:46.000 At the very least, like, you know, if not abusive or something, it's been, like, condescending, you know?

01:55:53.000 And somebody tells her, somebody that she knows from somewhere says, hey, you gotta come check out this new church that I'm going to.

01:56:00.000 It's called the People's Temple.

01:56:01.000 Come on down. 0.94

01:56:01.000 There's this guy, Jim Jones. 0.94

01:56:03.000 He's amazing.

01:56:04.000 And so she goes down there, and what she finds is a group of people, it was not, they're like...

01:56:11.000 Their sense of like real equality between people, not just racial but just across the board, that was not a game.

01:56:18.000 They were 100 percent serious about it.

01:56:21.000 So 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.

01:56:29.000 They're like family.

01:56:31.000 These people were a family.

01:56:32.000 And like it's, you know, the first thing to understand about the Jonestown.

01:56:37.000 You know, incident is that these people loved each other.

01:56:40.000 They cared about each other.

01:56:41.000 And this woman comes in after her whole life experience, being alone now in Oakland and just everything else came before that.

01:56:49.000 And now she's like babysitting the white lady's kids and they're calling her grandma and sitting on her lap. 0.99

01:56:54.000 And she's not treated like she's a charity case. 0.94

01:56:57.000 She's treated like a member of the family.

01:56:59.000 And so you get those people who feel – who have had that experience, that side of things, right?

01:57:04.000 That's going to bind you together in really significant ways and they end up going down because of the – just the temper of the times.

01:57:13.000 This is a civil rights organization.

01:57:15.000 If 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.

01:57:32.000 And both of those are kind of within – the energy is being channeled into outlets that are – They're not antisocial.

01:57:43.000 You know what I mean?

01:57:43.000 Like you got Martin Luther King like leading a movement telling the people basically like it's an American civil rights movement.

01:57:51.000 It's not a – he's telling them we're not getting our – The rights we deserve as Americans and that's what we want.

01:57:58.000 You had guys like Malcolm X who didn't think of it that way.

01:58:00.000 They thought we're an African diaspora and we're a people and we need to like focus on that.

01:58:04.000 But 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. 1.00

01:58:13.000 On 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.

01:58:26.000 Eugene 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.

01:58:39.000 And when you think about like this is a time – this is not like – Today we want to end the Iraq war or whatever.

01:58:45.000 It's like, no, this is a matter of life and death for these protesters.

01:58:49.000 It'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.

01:59:01.000 Now, 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.

01:59:08.000 Maybe die, definitely kill, you know, and go do—so this is important to these people.

01:59:13.000 It wasn't like a—just an ideological thing.

01:59:15.000 And then the Democratic Party just completely, openly, ridiculously, like, just steals the nomination from Eugene McCarthy.

01:59:24.000 You know, the Hubert Humphrey who they put in, he didn't win a single primary.

01:59:28.000 He wasn't even put into the process until way, way—he was just installed.

01:59:32.000 It was a Kamala Harris kind of thing, like in the last election, where they just decided it. 0.73

01:59:38.000 These 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.

01:59:47.000 They 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.

01:59:55.000 In other words, they committed to like they got with the program.

01:59:58.000 They were like, OK, we're going to do it the right way.

02:00:00.000 We're going to do it, you know, through the right channels and institutions.

02:00:04.000 We're going to do that.

02:00:05.000 Civil rights movement was doing that under Martin Luther King.

02:00:08.000 Same year, you have McCarthy gets robbed of the nomination.

02:00:14.000 They try to protest it, and they get the living shit kicked out of him by the Chicago police.

02:00:19.000 On the other side, obviously, Martin Luther King gets killed.

02:00:22.000 And 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.

02:00:32.000 You know, those things got delegitimized and all of a sudden it just goes in every direction.

02:00:37.000 And that's when like in the...

02:00:40.000 You 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.

02:00:49.000 But then into the early 70s, you just see this massive proliferation of cults and violent radical movements.

02:00:56.000 You 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.

02:01:03.000 You know, dozens of cops across the country, they just hunted down and killed.

02:01:07.000 You had just truly insane groups like the Symbionese Liberation Army.

02:01:12.000 You know, they were like just led by a guy who was like legitimately mentally ill, had been in and out of institutions.

02:01:20.000 And 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.

02:01:34.000 They're the ones that kidnapped Patty Hearst and, you know, got her going and everything. 0.95

02:01:37.000 And 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.

02:01:49.000 In the mid-50s, they're idealistic.

02:01:52.000 They're in it for the right reasons.

02:01:54.000 They truly believe in what they're doing.

02:01:56.000 They 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.

02:02:08.000 Who 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.

02:02:18.000 So I don't know what's up there, but you must be doing something right.

02:02:21.000 So you join them, you know?

02:02:23.000 You got that kind of stuff going on.

02:02:25.000 And these people get radicalized and then they turn violent and, you know, out of paranoia and drugs was a big part of it.

02:02:31.000 They lose their shit, you know?

02:02:32.000 Trevor Burrus: What drugs are they doing?

02:02:34.000 Aaron Ross Powell: Well, the drugs were not – they were still done sometimes.

02:02:40.000 But like they weren't really technically allowed for like the members themselves.

02:02:44.000 But 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.

02:02:50.000 And it was every day for 10 years.

02:02:53.000 Which is not the best for perspective.

02:02:55.000 No, no.

02:02:56.000 And it's like that's a thing with Adolf Hitler too. 0.55

02:02:59.000 You keep yourself going that way.

02:03:01.000 And 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.

02:03:13.000 And so as I was getting up to the last episode, I asked one of my buddies.

02:03:19.000 He was a police officer in SoCal.

02:03:22.000 If 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.

02:03:39.000 And he got me a big stack of these things.

02:03:41.000 I 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.

02:03:46.000 And about half of them, they ended in...

02:03:48.000 A murder-suicide.

02:03:49.000 The 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.

02:03:55.000 And as I just read through these, just again and again and again, I mean, it became very obvious.

02:04:00.000 Like, this is what happened, except at a larger scale in Jonestown.

02:04:03.000 You 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.

02:04:12.000 Like, he actually did.

02:04:13.000 And people say, well, if he loved them, that's not possible.

02:04:15.000 How could he do that?

02:04:17.000 Those are people who have never been around domestic violence before.

02:04:21.000 It's very complicated.

02:04:22.000 You can have husbands who are absolute monsters to their children and their wife, but they still love them.

02:04:29.000 And it's weird.

02:04:30.000 And they have a serious emotional crisis if they leave or something.

02:04:35.000 And it's very complicated.

02:04:38.000 And Jim Jones was that way.

02:04:42.000 And actually, having gone through that process of reading about it...

02:04:46.000 And 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.

02:04:55.000 But 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.

02:05:06.000 Like if anything, he was more like a prophet figure.

02:05:09.000 He 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.

02:05:20.000 Political questions, you know, whatever.

02:05:21.000 It's why he just never compromised, even when it seemed insane not to compromise.

02:05:25.000 Like 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.

02:05:36.000 And he stayed out of it.

02:05:37.000 He 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.

02:05:47.000 You know, you read about, like, you read some of the reactions that people would have to him.

02:05:51.000 This is just like Jim Jones, where if his shtick works on you, man, like, you read some of, like, Joseph Goebbels' propaganda minister.

02:06:01.000 You read his diaries of, like, him describing meeting Hitler and, you know, going through it.

02:06:06.000 And it's, like, almost homoerotic. 0.92

02:06:08.000 He loves him, like, truly.

02:06:09.000 And he was not homosexual, but, like, he loved Adolf Hitler, truly loved him.

02:06:13.000 And that's the effect he had on his followers, like, across the board.

02:06:17.000 If his shtick didn't work on you, you were just like, ugh!

02:06:21.000 Like, how could anybody follow this?

02:06:23.000 This guy's crazy, he's, like, vulgar.

02:06:25.000 How is this possible?

02:06:26.000 Same thing with Jim Jones.

02:06:28.000 Well, same thing with all cults.

02:06:31.000 With all cults.

02:06:32.000 Like, if it doesn't work on you, you're revolted by it.

02:06:34.000 This is what's so fascinating about all cults in the beginning.

02:06:37.000 They seem great.

02:06:39.000 Like the Jim Jones thing in the beginning.

02:06:41.000 What a great idea.

02:06:42.000 Bring everybody together.

02:06:43.000 We're all family.

02:06:45.000 It's complete equals.

02:06:47.000 Let's all live together in harmony.

02:06:49.000 That's Wild Wild Country, too.

02:06:51.000 In the beginning, it looks great.

02:06:52.000 My friend Todd, we went out to dinner after the Wild Wild Country came on, and he goes, in the beginning, I was like, I want to join!

02:07:02.000 What can I join?

02:07:02.000 It seems like a way better way to live life.

02:07:05.000 Duncan was probably already buying his plane ticket to Oregon, yeah.

02:07:09.000 It's just, they all turn bad.

02:07:12.000 And they all go the same way.

02:07:14.000 It all goes to, like, sex and drugs.

02:07:18.000 I don't understand it.

02:07:20.000 It's so weird.

02:07:21.000 Yeah.

02:07:22.000 Well, they all sort of start off pretty fun.

02:07:26.000 Yep.

02:07:26.000 And they always have hot women, too.

02:07:28.000 Oh, that's a big part of the program.

02:07:30.000 I don't know how this works or maybe it's just because the cult leader type, like even if he's crazy, is still like an alpha male type.

02:07:37.000 So he attracts a stable, a good-looking young ladies or something.

02:07:41.000 But it's like as I was going through reading about all these cults, all of them.

02:07:44.000 There's hot women everywhere. 1.00

02:07:46.000 You have to have them or you can't get the men to stay.

02:07:48.000 Yeah, exactly.

02:07:48.000 That was the cult out here.

02:07:51.000 Before 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...

02:08:05.000 This cult called the Bodhi Tree that was the subject of the documentary, Holy Hell.

02:08:09.000 I didn't know about that until I was under contract.

02:08:12.000 My friend Adam was like, have you seen the documentary?

02:08:14.000 I'm like, oh no, this fucking documentary?

02:08:16.000 And then you watch the documentary and that's what it was.

02:08:19.000 It was a guy who was a gay porn star and a hypnotist who starts this cult. 0.93

02:08:23.000 And he gets all these yoga people.

02:08:25.000 He's teaching yoga classes, gets all these yoga people to live together.

02:08:28.000 And in the beginning, it looks amazing.

02:08:30.000 It looks like so much fun.

02:08:32.000 Everyone's doing yoga.

02:08:33.000 They're eating healthy food.

02:08:34.000 They've got a community together.

02:08:35.000 They live together.

02:08:36.000 They grow food.

02:08:37.000 And then, of course, it goes sideways.

02:08:39.000 You know, talking about the Symbionese Liberation Army, in 74...

02:08:45.000 There was a huge firefight in South Central Los Angeles where they were holed up in a house.

02:08:51.000 It was just 500 cops, thousands of bullets flying, and then the house burned down and they all died inside.

02:08:57.000 And I read this somewhere.

02:08:59.000 I don't...

02:09:00.000 I don't have, like, first-hand knowledge of this.

02:09:02.000 I don't know if you've ever heard it before, but that Big John McCarthy, his dad was an LAPD cop, too.

02:09:07.000 And he was, like, a major figure in that.

02:09:09.000 He, like, won a medal for valor, like, for, like, doing things during the shootout there.

02:09:15.000 Oh, wow.

02:09:15.000 I didn't know that.

02:09:17.000 John can tell me if I'm wrong about that, but I read it somewhere.

02:09:19.000 Yeah, I'll ask him.

02:09:19.000 I didn't know that.

02:09:20.000 Shout-out to Big John.

02:09:22.000 The original.

02:09:23.000 Yeah.

02:09:25.000 Yeah, it's...

02:09:26.000 It'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.

02:09:52.000 And then eventually it all goes sideways and it almost always has to do with some sort of either amphetamines or something along those lines.

02:10:02.000 I 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.

02:10:12.000 Like if you read about – You lived in San Francisco for a while, right?

02:10:16.000 Yeah.

02:10:16.000 When did you live there?

02:10:18.000 So I was seven.

02:10:19.000 So I was 71-ish.

02:10:23.000 Okay.

02:10:24.000 No, 74-ish.

02:10:25.000 74-ish.

02:10:26.000 It's around this time.

02:10:27.000 You read about how everybody thinks about the summer of love and it was all chill or whatever.

02:10:32.000 But by the time you get up to 67, that's really kind of, in a lot of ways, the end of...

02:10:38.000 The flower power, like, era of the 60s.

02:10:41.000 It's not the beginning of it.

02:10:42.000 Like, a lot of people think, like, the Summer of Love in 67 kind of kicked the whole thing off.

02:10:45.000 It didn't.

02:10:46.000 Like, by that point, all the people who, you know, had been in – they were smoking herb and doing mushrooms and LSD and everything.

02:10:55.000 Things had started to switch over and people were doing speed like crazy.

02:10:59.000 Well, especially after 70, right?

02:11:01.000 Yeah.

02:11:01.000 They passed the Sweeping Psychedelics Act.

02:11:04.000 It didn't cover prescription.

02:11:07.000 Amphetamines.

02:11:08.000 In the pool player community where I was playing pool all the time, guys would take amphetamines and play for 36 hours in a row.

02:11:17.000 And it was a war of attrition.

02:11:19.000 The whole thing was to see how long the other guy would be able to hold up and what kind of mixture he was on.

02:11:25.000 And 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.

02:11:34.000 Yeah, but look at cocaine movies.

02:11:35.000 Look at the 1980s.

02:11:37.000 Everything's a cocaine movie.

02:11:38.000 They're terrible.

02:11:38.000 Yeah.

02:11:39.000 You go and watch like Le Mans, go watch like some of these like really interesting films from the 1970s or 1960s.

02:11:46.000 And then you go 20 years forward, you're like, what the fuck happened?

02:11:50.000 Cocaine happened.

02:11:51.000 Yeah.

02:11:52.000 Everybody started believing that everything they did was awesome.

02:11:56.000 Yeah.

02:11:57.000 And 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.

02:12:12.000 And that's all true.

02:12:15.000 At 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.

02:12:28.000 And 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.

02:12:40.000 Yeah.

02:12:41.000 And 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.

02:12:51.000 And, you know, thinking that like.

02:12:53.000 I mean, I think that they had those motivations.

02:12:57.000 Like, they thought, you know, this is a way to get at these people we need to stop.

02:13:00.000 But I also think that they really believe, like, this is crazy.

02:13:03.000 This is a real problem.

02:13:04.000 We've got to do something about it.

02:13:05.000 I mean, you know, there's one of my episodes.

02:13:12.000 It's part of the Labor series, but it centers around this teachers' union strike that happened in New York City.

02:13:21.000 In 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.

02:13:38.000 Because the teachers' union and the New York City public schools at the time, the teachers and administrators were like 75% Jewish.

02:13:45.000 And 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. 0.88

02:14:01.000 They came into conflict over, you know, how the school was going to be run.

02:14:05.000 But part of it, you know, the way the conflict kind of really started off was the teachers were like going to their union and...

02:14:13.000 They were going on strike not because they wanted, like, more pay or anything like that.

02:14:17.000 It was because, like, teachers were getting raped.

02:14:19.000 They were getting beaten.

02:14:20.000 One of them got set on fire.

02:14:21.000 It was, like, crazy, like, what was going on.

02:14:24.000 And 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.

02:14:41.000 And they said in this one school there were more drug addicts among the students.

02:14:46.000 And they actually said more hardcore drug addicts among the student body than we have at our city agency the resources to deal with.

02:14:53.000 One school.

02:14:55.000 And so it's like those are crazy times.

02:14:58.000 You know what I mean?

02:14:59.000 Jesus.

02:15:00.000 I think about, like, the 60s are so wild because, you know, there were...

02:15:05.000 There 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.

02:15:21.000 And, you know, before they went and they come back and, I mean, all the 60s has happened.

02:15:26.000 And they're like, what in the hell is going on?

02:15:28.000 Can you imagine?

02:15:29.000 Could you imagine?

02:15:31.000 Also, can you imagine being held in a Vietnamese prison for 10 years in a war that you, there's no way you can justify it. 0.73

02:15:39.000 There's still, like, no one has.

02:15:40.000 And they probably know the Gulf of Tonkin was bullshit.

02:15:47.000 Fuck, and you come back to America and you see Led Zeppelin, like, what happened?

02:15:51.000 What did I miss?

02:15:52.000 From Buddy Holly to Jimi Hendrix.

02:15:54.000 Jimi Hendrix is dead at this point.

02:15:56.000 So you have to go back and listen to recordings and go, what the fuck did I miss?

02:16:01.000 You know?

02:16:02.000 I mean, you can't even watch it on YouTube.

02:16:04.000 Like, how is this guy playing the Star Spangled Banner with his teeth?

02:16:06.000 Like, what happened?

02:16:08.000 What fucking happened?

02:16:09.000 You know, your wife, if she stuck around for those 10 years, it's like, you know, she used to be nice and obedient.

02:16:16.000 Now she wants to go out to work and she's not taking your shit, you know?

02:16:19.000 Like, things have just changed so rapidly.

02:16:21.000 And 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.

02:16:30.000 There's always going to be people who spin off in wild directions.

02:16:34.000 Yeah, always.

02:16:35.000 Like and this happens like in microcosmic levels too.

02:16:39.000 You know, you think about like my father's side of my family.

02:16:44.000 They all came out from like Kentucky and Alabama during the Dust Bowl, right? 0.97

02:16:48.000 They're like crazy Scots-Irish like Appalachian folks who came out to California during the Dust Bowl. 1.00

02:16:54.000 And so I know a fair amount about like the Okie migrations and everything and the... 0.99

02:16:59.000 The Appalachian migrations up to the Midwest like a couple decades later.

02:17:03.000 And 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.

02:17:16.000 The Okies and the Appalachian folks in the Midwest got the same thing.

02:17:19.000 Nobody liked them.

02:17:20.000 You know, there was an incident when...

02:17:22.000 A bunch of Okies were coming into Los Angeles County, and as they were approaching, the authorities found out about it. 1.00

02:17:28.000 The sheriffs went and blocked the road, and they're like, nope, you're not coming here.

02:17:31.000 Get out of here.

02:17:32.000 They were not liked.

02:17:33.000 And the thing is, part of the reason for that was...

02:17:38.000 It wasn't just like straight up bigotry or something.

02:17:41.000 These people were – they had habits and ways of life that were very different than the people – the settled people in California were used to. 0.66

02:17:48.000 These are crazy country people.

02:17:49.000 They drank a lot.

02:17:50.000 They fight a lot.

02:17:52.000 They're poor as shit.

02:17:53.000 So there's like a higher percentage of like the criminal class like among those people and things.

02:17:59.000 And so people really looked down on them and isolated them at least for that first generation.

02:18:06.000 You know, you see it when like you have these people who, you know, they were farmers.

02:18:10.000 That's why they came out here.

02:18:11.000 They were farmers.

02:18:12.000 The Dust Bowl came.

02:18:13.000 They can't farm anymore.

02:18:14.000 They at least farm workers.

02:18:15.000 So they're rural Southerners who are used to working in agriculture.

02:18:19.000 And now they've got to go move into like a big city and try to find a job.

02:18:23.000 You know, that's going to be a huge adjustment.

02:18:25.000 A lot of their like the community that they had.

02:18:28.000 In the place they're coming from.

02:18:30.000 A lot of times the marriages don't hold up under the strain of like the transition.

02:18:34.000 The communities, they kind of scatter and fall apart.

02:18:37.000 You lose that.

02:18:38.000 And people just start to fall through the cracks, you know.

02:18:40.000 And you saw that with the African-American Great Migration.

02:18:44.000 You saw with the Okies.

02:18:45.000 And 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.

02:18:53.000 And very often, you know, the unfortunate thing is the people who...

02:18:57.000 The 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.

02:19:05.000 You know what I mean?

02:19:06.000 Yeah.

02:19:07.000 Yeah.

02:19:07.000 And do you ever read Gladwell's take on the Appalachian folks, too?

02:19:11.000 That they emerged from herding populations.

02:19:15.000 And 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.

02:19:22.000 Whereas if you're a farmer, it's very difficult to steal all your corn.

02:19:26.000 It's very difficult to steal all your crops.

02:19:28.000 It takes time.

02:19:29.000 You have to pluck them.

02:19:30.000 You have to pick them, carry them.

02:19:32.000 These people had a very violent past because they were used to – like if they stole your sheep, they stole your food.

02:19:39.000 You starve to death.

02:19:39.000 Winter is coming.

02:19:40.000 You had to defend it and they were particularly violent.

02:19:43.000 This is why you get into some of the feuds that happen in those areas which are legendary.

02:19:49.000 They all came from – at least all the early settlers who kind of set the tone for Appalachian culture.

02:19:54.000 They were all Scots-Irish and like North English borderers who were basically like right on the other side of – The isle from Ireland there. 0.96

02:20:02.000 And these are people like this was like a lawless part of the country.

02:20:05.000 This is a place where the central government was far away and it was infinitely smaller than anything we think of a central government.

02:20:11.000 Now, those people were up there on their own.

02:20:13.000 And so you had you still had clan feuds.

02:20:16.000 You still had like all these things.

02:20:18.000 And 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.

02:20:27.000 And so these people were from a hard core.

02:20:30.000 You 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.

02:20:37.000 And the reason for that is that over there, like your house can get burned down.

02:20:42.000 You got to build another one.

02:20:43.000 They just didn't think of these things as like permanent fixtures the same way like you here in Boston do or something.

02:20:48.000 So it filtered down to just like cultural ways that were very off-putting to the people who were already settled here, you know.

02:20:54.000 But those Appalachian folks are they're tough, man.

02:20:57.000 And they.

02:20:59.000 You 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.

02:21:07.000 And that continues right up to this day.

02:21:10.000 And, 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?

02:21:20.000 The Puritans, like, the part of East Anglia that a lot of the Puritans came from in England.

02:21:28.000 There was – this is in like – this is 100 years into like the settlement of America.

02:21:35.000 So you're talking like the early 1700s.

02:21:37.000 There 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. 0.73

02:21:52.000 So it's like – Dude, these people are hard.

02:21:55.000 That's like another species.

02:21:57.000 Holy shit.

02:21:58.000 Holy shit.

02:22:00.000 Yeah.

02:22:01.000 Yeah.

02:22:01.000 It's very difficult to take people out of the context of the world that they live in right now.

02:22:08.000 It's very difficult to even imagine living in a time like that.

02:22:13.000 Yeah.

02:22:14.000 You know, I think that's one of the more...

02:22:17.000 Fascinating and important parts about history and long-form history podcasts in particular because they're so entertaining and engaging.

02:22:25.000 Like Dan Carlin's and yours and Daniele Bolelli, he's great at it too.

02:22:29.000 There's a bunch of people that do it now.

02:22:31.000 And it's a very difficult path mentally to try to even imagine yourself in a time like this.

02:22:43.000 I'm a giant fan of Dan's series on...

02:22:46.000 Genghis Khan and the Mongols. 0.87

02:22:48.000 Just 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.

02:23:00.000 And 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.

02:23:11.000 They don't even know what it is from the distance.

02:23:13.000 Yeah, and like...

02:23:14.000 You live in a world like before modern communications or anything.

02:23:17.000 So it's not like over the course of five years, like tensions with the Mongols are increasing.

02:23:22.000 We think there might be a war or anything.

02:23:24.000 It's now a horseman like speeds up to your city panicked and says, there's a huge army over there.

02:23:29.000 They'll be here in 36 hours.

02:23:31.000 And that's it.

02:23:32.000 You got to get your shit together and go deal with that.

02:23:34.000 Crazy.

02:23:35.000 It's crazy.

02:23:35.000 And this is the reality of people who are unfortunate enough to be born at that time.

02:23:40.000 And we are very fortunate to be born at the time that we're born, but still, we are going to be looked back upon.

02:23:49.000 By future, more enlightened civilizations, the same way we look back upon the Mongols. 1.00

02:23:53.000 We 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.

02:24:09.000 Factory farming, that's my big one.

02:24:11.000 I'm 100% certain that...

02:24:13.000 Like, eventually down the line, they're going to look at us the way we look at slaveholders because of the way we do factory farming.

02:24:19.000 Oh, it's disgusting.

02:24:20.000 It's a horrific way to live.

02:24:22.000 And 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.

02:24:32.000 And 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.

02:24:39.000 Just like that from regenerative agriculture.

02:24:42.000 I don't know.

02:24:42.000 I mean, maybe it can be done.

02:24:44.000 There's a lot of land that's not utilized in this country.

02:24:47.000 Maybe it can be done.

02:24:48.000 What do I know?

02:24:48.000 But what I do know is that factory farming is fucking disgusting.

02:24:53.000 And 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.

02:25:06.000 Yeah, that's crazy.

02:25:07.000 That's crazy.

02:25:08.000 That's just a crazy thing.

02:25:09.000 And that's just a byproduct of protecting corporations above our moral and ethical structure.

02:25:17.000 And then the reality of needing food for all these people.

02:25:20.000 And how do you mitigate that without upending the entire industry?

02:25:24.000 Like, instantaneously.

02:25:26.000 And how do you do that?

02:25:27.000 How does it even scale out?

02:25:28.000 How do you take...

02:25:29.000 You know, we've had...

02:25:31.000 People on Will Harris, particularly from White Oaks Pastures in Georgia, where his family owned an industrialized farm.

02:25:40.000 And they used industrial fertilizers and all that jazz.

02:25:43.000 It took him 20 years and who knows how many dollars to convert his farm to regenerative agriculture.

02:25:49.000 And the result's been...

02:25:51.000 Incredible.

02:25:52.000 I mean, just soil richness, the way they've been able to show that they can have these animals exist in what's basically confined nature.

02:26:01.000 You just sort of manipulate nature and let them do what they would naturally do if they were all living together on the plains.

02:26:06.000 And then that's how we're supposed to grow food.

02:26:09.000 And this is like the most ethical way, the healthiest way, the best way for the land.

02:26:14.000 It's zero carbon footprint.

02:26:18.000 It actually sequesters carbon this way.

02:26:20.000 It's the way the earth is supposed to exist with all these animals.

02:26:24.000 But 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?

02:26:31.000 They knew.

02:26:31.000 They had the internet.

02:26:32.000 They knew.

02:26:32.000 They watched the videos.

02:26:33.000 They saw it.

02:26:34.000 They saw it and they just like put the blinders on and kept buying cheeseburgers.

02:26:39.000 Yeah.

02:26:40.000 And it's interesting like the shift to industrial agriculture when you look at the – Like the social changes that resulted from it.

02:26:48.000 It 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.

02:26:59.000 You had this influx of just hordes and hordes and hordes of slaves that were coming from these conquered places back into Italy. 0.97

02:27:07.000 And so you had before that, you had like a Roman Republic where each citizen was a soldier.

02:27:12.000 He was like an independent farmer, small farmer, and he was a soldier and a citizen, and those were the Roman people.

02:27:18.000 But all of a sudden you get this huge influx of slaves, and the guys with the larger farms start building out economies of scale.

02:27:26.000 So now you have these massive plantations, and they're putting the smaller people out of business, you know, because...

02:27:32.000 They don't care if you're off to war.

02:27:35.000 If 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.

02:27:42.000 You've got to sell it to the guy or take a loan from a guy that then becomes a whole thing.

02:27:47.000 And so all of these independent farmers that were scattered around the countryside got concentrated into a handful of gigantic Latifundia farms.

02:27:56.000 And all of those people who used to live in the countryside, they had to...

02:28:00.000 Going to Rome, looking for work, looking for something to do.

02:28:03.000 And that's how you got the Roman mob that led to the fall of the Republic and Caesar and all that. 0.71

02:28:08.000 And if you think about it in our modern day, we had something similar happen, only it wasn't with an influx of slaves.

02:28:12.000 It was the Industrial Revolution.

02:28:14.000 All of a sudden, like, you know...

02:28:16.000 Having 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.

02:28:29.000 I 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.

02:28:36.000 So 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.

02:28:43.000 So all of the, it got...

02:28:44.000 You 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.

02:28:56.000 And, you know, it's interesting because, you know, over here that process was like sort of ad hoc and semi-voluntary, you know.

02:29:06.000 I say that with qualification, you know, if you were a farmer who couldn't pay your debt.

02:29:10.000 And you were getting evicted.

02:29:11.000 I mean, a sheriff would show up with his gun and be like, get out of here.

02:29:14.000 So, I mean, there's a little bit of implied force there.

02:29:17.000 But 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.

02:29:30.000 And he wanted to change that.

02:29:33.000 You had all these small farmers.

02:29:34.000 These are the kulaks, as people call them, you know, that he targeted. 0.99

02:29:38.000 Small 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.

02:29:50.000 And so over there, they did by, like, brutal violence in a very accelerated period of time.

02:29:55.000 Like something that we did over a longer period of time that was more or less voluntary.

02:30:02.000 But at the end of the day, the social effects were the same.

02:30:08.000 All of those people from the country had to move into the cities and work in industry.

02:30:13.000 And that was – I mean it was inevitable.

02:30:16.000 I 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. 0.88

02:30:26.000 I mean you had to do it just to compete.

02:30:28.000 But 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.

02:30:43.000 Like you were rich because you were an aristocrat who collected rents from the peasants on your land.

02:30:48.000 That's where – That's where wealth came from.

02:30:51.000 So wealth was, like, distributed throughout the countryside.

02:30:53.000 And 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.

02:31:03.000 And as that started, as the Industrial Revolution, like, really kicked into gear.

02:31:10.000 All 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.

02:31:22.000 Like, they have no money.

02:31:23.000 They still walk around, like, strut around like aristocrats, but they don't have any money.

02:31:27.000 Meanwhile, 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.

02:31:36.000 And it really changed the balance of power between...

02:31:39.000 You 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.

02:31:49.000 And, 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.

02:32:02.000 And all three of these groups are getting politicized, you know?

02:32:07.000 You 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?

02:32:25.000 It would have been a guy named Otto, you know, who would have started Second World War.

02:32:29.000 He's all just we're all pawns in the, you know, the grand scheme of history.

02:32:33.000 Or does it take like?

02:32:34.000 Is it based on personality, like somebody who really moves the chains himself?

02:32:38.000 And 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.

02:32:49.000 It's a perfect example, right?

02:32:51.000 If 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. 0.86

02:32:58.000 This is – Like right on the tail of them finishing up the Reconquistas. 0.79

02:33:04.000 So 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.

02:33:21.000 So 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. 0.92

02:33:27.000 So you have a very Spartan, war-like people because it's how you had to be.

02:33:33.000 Their whole society was geared toward this conflict that was centuries long.

02:33:36.000 And so you take those people and they're the first ones who show up in the New World, right?

02:33:41.000 So right there you've got a certain bias in the relations between these Europeans and the people in the New World.

02:33:48.000 Well, 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.

02:33:56.000 So 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.

02:34:09.000 It's like, no, they're going to change our religion, you know, really high stakes.

02:34:14.000 And this is still at a time when, you know, Europe politically, like geopolitically, was an anarchic place.

02:34:19.000 I mean, people were at war all the time and nobody even thought that war was immoral.

02:34:23.000 You know, it was actually like part of the natural order of things.

02:34:26.000 If you were a stronger neighbor and your weaker neighbor has something, you should have it, you know.

02:34:30.000 And 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.

02:34:38.000 You know, the aristocracy themselves, you know, the knights and people.

02:34:41.000 It wasn't like they were rounding up peasants and sending them off as cannon fodder.

02:34:45.000 And 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. 0.94

02:35:08.000 And 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.

02:35:17.000 And so you start getting in on the New World thing.

02:35:20.000 And 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.

02:35:27.000 We're going to have to find somebody else, another population to do that. 0.67

02:35:30.000 Well, you couldn't take any Europeans as slaves or anything because whoever the...

02:35:35.000 You needed your own people here and the kingdom next door was not going to let you do that, take their people. 0.99

02:35:41.000 And 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.

02:35:51.000 And so they had been sort of – like the Spanish and Portuguese already knew the trade networks.

02:35:58.000 They were very familiar with African slavery, which had existed in Spain really since like – The time of the Roman Empire or before.

02:36:06.000 They had a constant history with slavery going all the way back.

02:36:11.000 And so they get over there and they start using slaves to set up their colonies and extract the wealth from those colonies.

02:36:21.000 And 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.

02:36:31.000 OK, then you will get swallowed up by somebody who has less scruples and is willing to do it.

02:36:35.000 They're going to get richer and more powerful and they're going to take what you've got.

02:36:38.000 And guess what?

02:36:39.000 There's slavery anyway. 1.00

02:36:41.000 It's just that you're not around anymore.

02:36:44.000 That's it.

02:36:44.000 And the same like with the West African kingdoms and the rulers and warlords down there who were selling the slaves to the Europeans.

02:36:50.000 You could be a guy who's like, you know, I really don't think we should be selling our fellow Africans to these Europeans to be, you know. 0.99

02:36:56.000 Taking his slaves.

02:36:57.000 That just seems wrong to me.

02:36:58.000 Well, OK, that's fine.

02:36:59.000 Your 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. 1.00

02:37:06.000 And 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.

02:37:15.000 And so each individual actor does it just really as a matter of expedient survival at the time.

02:37:21.000 And when you look at when slavery did...

02:37:23.000 When the slave trade was put to a halt, it only happened after the British Empire became like the real dominant power on the seas.

02:37:31.000 And they were the ones with the anti-slaver ships who were going around putting a stop to the trade.

02:37:36.000 And 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.

02:37:46.000 It's a crazy history.

02:37:48.000 It really is.

02:37:49.000 And 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.

02:38:00.000 And I think that's one of the reasons why your podcast is so valuable.

02:38:04.000 So listen, man, thank you very much for being here.

02:38:06.000 I really appreciate it.

02:38:08.000 I'm sorry that all that stuff happened to you, but I think ultimately it just made more people aware of your show, which is excellent.

02:38:14.000 Thanks, man.

02:38:15.000 Thank you very much.

02:38:15.000 Appreciate you.

02:38:16.000 It's Martyr Made. 1.00

02:38:17.000 It's available everywhere.

02:38:19.000 Audio only.

02:38:21.000 Yeah.

02:38:22.000 I don't want to make people stare at my ugly mug for a seven-hour episode.

02:38:25.000 All right.

02:38:26.000 Thank you, Daryl.

The Joe Rogan Experience - March 13, 2025

Joe Rogan Experience #2289 - Darryl Cooper

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