The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #847 - Dan Carlin

00:00:01.000 Three, two, one.

00:00:04.000 Yes, Dan Carlin, we're live!

00:00:07.000 What's up, buddy?

00:00:07.000 Back again.

00:00:08.000 Always a pleasure, my friend.

00:00:10.000 Pitch a deja vu all the time.

00:00:11.000 You, to me, are like this guy that's working on this never-ending project that occasionally you release these chunks of these never-ending projects.

00:00:19.000 But I look at your podcast as like this great work.

00:00:23.000 This long, never-ending, like...

00:00:27.000 A dramatic interpretation of history that's so exciting and interesting.

00:00:31.000 We were talking before the podcast about podcasting, but I don't think of what you do as anything remotely like what I do.

00:00:39.000 He was like, you do so many podcasts.

00:00:41.000 I'm like, yeah, but there's nothing to it.

00:00:43.000 You start talking, and that's it.

00:00:46.000 You have preparation and research.

00:00:50.000 When you're doing hardcore history, that's like...

00:00:53.000 A great work like you're doing like this thing that's evergreen that's going to be passed down forever and bit torrented the fuck out of.

00:01:02.000 Daniele Bolelli had a great line to me because you know he does a history podcast now too and he started off by doing just a talk one like my common sense kind of is and he said the difference with the history one is you actually have to it actually has to make sense when you're done I mean the facts so That's a huge...

00:01:18.000 I mean, I sit there like forever and I end up in my...

00:01:20.000 My wife's never heard it, by the way, and my kids don't understand why anybody would want to hear me talk.

00:01:25.000 Right.

00:01:25.000 And, you know, so...

00:01:26.000 But when I come out of the studio and, you know, it's like sweat pouring off me and I'm trying to...

00:01:30.000 And then we'll look at it and it doesn't...

00:01:32.000 You'll listen and you'll hear a mistake and you'll have to repair the mistake and...

00:01:37.000 When I'm talking on the political podcast and we make a mistake, I'll say afterwards on Twitter, oh, I got that wrong.

00:01:43.000 On the history one, like you said, it's forever.

00:01:45.000 And so you really have to dot your I's and cross your T's and all that kind of stuff.

00:01:49.000 It makes it a lot harder.

00:01:50.000 Yeah, when you're doing common sense, you're essentially just sort of ranting about your thoughts on what's going on.

00:01:57.000 I think that's a pretty good description, yeah. 0.99

00:01:58.000 Yeah, when you do those and you release them and you find out you made an error, that is a fucking pain in the ass, right? 0.99

00:02:03.000 I recently blamed one on concussions or brain damage or something like that. 1.00

00:02:09.000 In reference to Hillary Clinton?

00:02:11.000 No.

00:02:13.000 No, I said, I was talking about that stuff they throw out of airplanes to jam radars, and I called it Flash.

00:02:18.000 And of course, it's chaff.

00:02:19.000 And of course, 10,000 military people go, you know, it's chaff. 0.99

00:02:22.000 And I go, of course I know it's chaff.

00:02:23.000 I wouldn't have brought it up.

00:02:24.000 It's brain damage.

00:02:25.000 Don't make fun of people who are injured.

00:02:27.000 But on the history show, you have to go, okay, I've got to go recut that, refix it.

00:02:31.000 I do a lot more editing than I used to.

00:02:33.000 Yeah.

00:02:36.000 Like I said, you have a podcast, but then you also have this thing.

00:02:41.000 The two podcasts are killing me, by the way.

00:02:43.000 At some point, I'm going to have to just do one podcast a year.

00:02:47.000 I am the slowest podcaster in the world.

00:02:50.000 I have one claim to fame.

00:02:51.000 Number one in time it takes to get a new show out.

00:02:54.000 But it's not the same.

00:02:55.000 See, that's the problem with calling your thing a podcast.

00:02:58.000 It's an audio show.

00:02:59.000 It is at this point.

00:03:00.000 It evolved into that unintentionally.

00:03:02.000 But you have a podcast, too.

00:03:04.000 I do.

00:03:04.000 That's getting longer and longer between shows, too.

00:03:08.000 Well, it's got to be like...

00:03:09.000 When I listen to some of your podcasts, like the one on Martin Luther and...

00:03:13.000 What was the name of that one?

00:03:15.000 Prophets of Doom.

00:03:15.000 Prophets of Doom, yeah.

00:03:16.000 That one, I learned about Lutherism from you.

00:03:20.000 I didn't know the history.

00:03:22.000 Let's hope we got it right, Joe.

00:03:22.000 Let's...

00:03:23.000 But I think that's happening with a lot of people.

00:03:25.000 They're learning about certain aspects of history from you and from your stuff.

00:03:31.000 That's a lot of responsibility.

00:03:33.000 It is a lot of responsibility.

00:03:34.000 So it makes sense that you're spending this much time on them.

00:03:37.000 I think what happens is, I think, you know, originally, if you recall, If you go listen to the old shows, they don't sound like the newer ones.

00:03:43.000 It's because I thought I was just going to talk about funky stuff in history.

00:03:47.000 And then people wrote and go, I don't really know the story.

00:03:50.000 Can you tell more of the story?

00:03:51.000 And so you inadvertently start telling the story.

00:03:53.000 And then you go, wait a minute, I'm not qualified to tell the story.

00:03:56.000 And so it's an interesting way it's evolved.

00:04:01.000 And it's also interesting...

00:04:03.000 I was, you know, I warn people when they go and buy the old shows.

00:04:05.000 I say, you know, the old shows aren't going to sound quite the same because they were good by 2007 podcasting standards.

00:04:12.000 But, you know, the standards of what we all do are so much higher than when we started doing them.

00:04:18.000 You know, if you grade this on a curve, go to iTunes and look at the stuff that's up there with you and compare it to the stuff that was up there 10 years ago.

00:04:26.000 I was competing with kids in dorm rooms 10 years ago.

00:04:28.000 Now we're competing with NPR and, I mean, all the pro outfits.

00:04:32.000 Yeah, it is the sound quality for sure.

00:04:35.000 But also, you get better at doing it.

00:04:38.000 You get better at the flow of the conversation.

00:04:41.000 You get better at being in tune with the person that you're talking to, or at least attempting to.

00:04:47.000 That's something, for people that are listening, when you try to consider how a podcast is made, one of the things that we're doing is we're trying to express ourselves, but we're also trying to monitor ourselves at the same time.

00:04:58.000 Make sure you're not too overbearing or you're not talking too much.

00:05:02.000 Or sometimes you have a point and you just, oh my god, I gotta make this point.

00:05:05.000 But the other person's talking, you don't know when to jump in, but you also have to listen to the person who's talking. 1.00

00:05:09.000 So then you forget your point and you're like, fuck! 0.99

00:05:12.000 It's a weird juggling act because we're both doing it sort of free-balling. 1.00

00:05:17.000 We're both ad-libbing, doing it live.

00:05:19.000 You know what's happening to me now, I'm ashamed to say it, but I'm starting to get that thing, I'm 50 now, and I'm starting to get that, you forget the name, or you forget, you know, I compare it to a computer.

00:05:29.000 I have more stuff in my computer, but the computer's slower than it used to be, and so I'll have this point where I'll be talking and everything will be going good, and then all of a sudden there'll be this really long pause, what I can't think of.

00:05:39.000 And that's when we have to just, you know, if there is a Ben, he has to cut out and just, you know, sandwich the two pieces together while I try to remember the name of the person I wanted to say.

00:05:50.000 So I'm getting to the point now where I'm not sure I could go live anymore without these really long pauses where I forget what I was going to say or I forget the point I was making or the tangent I was on.

00:05:59.000 So 10 years from now, this is going to be a very interesting podcast.

00:06:02.000 Well, it also deals with the amount of hard drive space you have.

00:06:05.000 I think if you keep remembering things, like there's things that I used to know so well just 10, 15 years ago that I just have pushed aside because I haven't brought it up in a long time.

00:06:16.000 I haven't gone into that folder in my mind in a long time.

00:06:19.000 They're in the cobwebs now.

00:06:20.000 Yeah, and if I want to try to pull it out now, it's like, no, no, no.

00:06:23.000 Our space on the warehouse floor is filled, bro. 1.00

00:06:27.000 There's no room for that stupid shit. 1.00

00:06:28.000 And the bus speed isn't what it used to be. 1.00

00:06:30.000 Yeah, the bus speed is not what it used to be.

00:06:32.000 But I try to crank that up with this stuff.

00:06:34.000 I know, I don't rub it in.

00:06:36.000 You're so much healthier than I am.

00:06:38.000 Well, this is coffee.

00:06:39.000 I mean, it's kind of healthy, but it's really just speed.

00:06:41.000 Where I come from, coffee is health food.

00:06:44.000 What, Oregon? 1.00

00:06:45.000 Oregon's healthy as fuck, man. 0.99

00:06:47.000 Yeah, well, there's a couple people that aren't so healthy in Oregon. 0.99

00:06:49.000 You're in that mix.

00:06:50.000 I'm leading the charge.

00:06:53.000 Do you like living up there in the Pacific Northwest?

00:06:55.000 You know, I'm from here, and coming back home is weird, because I told my wife recently, my kids are Oregonians, and I haven't gotten used to that fact.

00:07:03.000 It just seems weird to me.

00:07:05.000 And I told her, I still feel like this Angeleno up in Oregon, but I've been there 20 years.

00:07:09.000 I don't know when you start feeling...

00:07:11.000 I mean, you're from the East Coast originally.

00:07:12.000 Do you feel like you're an Angeleno, or do you still think of yourself as a transplant?

00:07:16.000 Yeah.

00:07:16.000 I've been here for 22 years.

00:07:19.000 As long as I've been in Oregon.

00:07:20.000 So I've been here forever.

00:07:21.000 So you feel like this is home?

00:07:23.000 I've lived here more than I've lived anywhere in my life.

00:07:25.000 When you go home, when you go back to where you were from, does it feel like coming home or does it feel foreign?

00:07:31.000 It feels weird.

00:07:33.000 It used to make me insecure.

00:07:34.000 I used to go where my high school was, and it would bring back the feelings of being in high school again.

00:07:42.000 When I graduated from high school, I would have nightmares that I didn't graduate, and I'd have to go back.

00:07:48.000 I think that's pretty classic, the algebra class.

00:07:50.000 You forgot that you didn't drop or whatever?

00:07:51.000 Yeah, and I felt like I had to go back. 0.60

00:07:53.000 Like, oh no, I'm gonna fucking have to drop out or I'm gonna have to go back to school.

00:07:58.000 The dread of the... 0.90

00:08:00.000 And it wasn't like the school was so horrible.

00:08:02.000 It was really like the uncertainty of the future and life and the insecurity and just the...

00:08:08.000 The angst, the teen angst of, you know, slowly realizing that, or not even slowly realizing, but becoming an adult and knowing that it's just a few years away that I'm going to be completely responsible for myself, but I'm completely lost.

00:08:23.000 You know, so there's like this unbelievable pressure that comes with going from being a teenager to an adult.

00:08:29.000 I mean, to say unbelievable pressure is nothing compared to being like growing up a kid in Laos, you know, or living in fucking Somalia in the middle of You know, all sorts of different crises that are going on.

00:08:40.000 So it's really, like, the most privileged angst possible.

00:08:44.000 Is home reasonably the same when you go back to the old?

00:08:47.000 Yeah.

00:08:47.000 So, see, because I come back here, I told my mom, I was reading this book written by, if you remember, William F. Buckley, the famous, you know, talk like this a little...

00:09:00.000 Yeah.

00:09:17.000 Home isn't anything like home was.

00:09:19.000 I drive through the places I'm from, and it doesn't ring a bell anymore.

00:09:23.000 If I wanted to go home to die, I'd have to have a time machine, you know, because everything is so different.

00:09:28.000 For those who don't know, Los Angeles, like every 15 years, bulldozes itself and rebuilds itself.

00:09:34.000 And so I'm like three generations of L.A. bulldozing from where my time was.

00:09:40.000 And so I go up and down these streets.

00:09:41.000 It looks like a foreign city to me now.

00:09:43.000 Also, the mass exodus of people has never subsided.

00:09:46.000 A lot of them are in Oregon now.

00:09:48.000 We've got better restaurants and better theater and everything because of all the Californians that go up there. 1.00

00:09:52.000 Really?

00:09:52.000 Yeah, but when I first moved up there, if you had a California license plate, that was like an invitation to have your car get keyed.

00:09:59.000 Really?

00:09:59.000 Yeah.

00:09:59.000 Oh, the Californians were not popular.

00:10:01.000 In Colorado, either.

00:10:02.000 When I went to school there, the Californians were not popular.

00:10:04.000 Now, I think probably ex-Californians are like the majority.

00:10:08.000 Yeah, that's the case with Boulder.

00:10:10.000 I remember when I was living in Boulder, they said that a lot of people moved up right after the earthquake.

00:10:13.000 I lived in Boulder, too.

00:10:14.000 Four years.

00:10:15.000 Yeah, I went to school there.

00:10:15.000 People were like, check, please.

00:10:17.000 As soon as the ground started shaking.

00:10:17.000 When were you in Boulder?

00:10:20.000 Seven years ago.

00:10:21.000 Seven years ago I lived there.

00:10:23.000 Before the podcast.

00:10:24.000 Before the podcast started.

00:10:25.000 Did you like it?

00:10:26.000 I was only there for a few months.

00:10:28.000 I was there for four months.

00:10:29.000 We planned on living there for a year, then maybe permanently.

00:10:31.000 But along the way, my wife got pregnant and we were at 8,500 feet above sea level.

00:10:37.000 That's right!

00:10:38.000 Yeah, and it was just, it's brutal.

00:10:40.000 It is.

00:10:40.000 They say that Colorado in general, like around the Denver area, has a very high rate of premature births.

00:10:47.000 And low birth weight because of the lack of oxygen.

00:10:50.000 I would never have thought.

00:10:51.000 I would have thought you'd have your kid born with like superhuman lungs.

00:10:54.000 Be like one of those Sherpas, you know, in Tibet. 1.00

00:10:56.000 Well, I think if you live there and you grow up there, probably.

00:11:00.000 Like if you live there and grow up there, like I was talking to an endurance runner that lives there and he said it takes three years for your body to completely acclimate where you get all the benefits of training up there.

00:11:10.000 They have all the Olympic guys who do the bicycling and everything up there too just because of the altitude.

00:11:14.000 Well, yeah, that's a big thing with any sort of athletic competition training that involves endurance is training at altitude.

00:11:21.000 It makes a big difference.

00:11:22.000 But I think if you live there your whole life, your body's accustomed to it, you're adapted to it, it's probably fine for your kids.

00:11:28.000 Because obviously a lot of people have kids in Colorado.

00:11:30.000 But I think that if you're from sea level, like here, and then you go there, it's quite a shock to your system. 1.00

00:11:36.000 Like you try to go up a flight of stairs and you're like, whoa, I'm kind of light of it.

00:11:39.000 It does remind you, doesn't it?

00:11:40.000 Yeah, for sure.

00:11:41.000 And if you were at 80-something, I mean, that's higher than Boulder.

00:11:44.000 You must have been out in the mountains.

00:11:46.000 Yeah, we're in the mountains.

00:11:47.000 Yeah, 85, 8,500 feet above sea level.

00:11:50.000 But when you work out there, man, it's crazy, the impact.

00:11:57.000 Like, if you're just standing around talking, it seems normal.

00:11:59.000 Like, if you and I were having this conversation up there, it wouldn't be any different. 0.98

00:12:02.000 But if you had to walk up a flight of stairs or climb a ladder or something like that, all of a sudden you're like, Jesus Christ, did I age 30 fucking years in 10 minutes?

00:12:10.000 But anyway, going back to my high school, when I go to my neighborhood where I grew up in, it looks pretty much the same.

00:12:17.000 So it hasn't really blown up.

00:12:20.000 I grew up in Newton, Upper Falls, Massachusetts, which is a small suburb of Boston.

00:12:27.000 So it's a small place.

00:12:28.000 It's always been small.

00:12:30.000 You go back there, it's kind of similar.

00:12:32.000 I went back to the house where I grew up.

00:12:35.000 Like, about a year and a half ago.

00:12:36.000 It's pretty much the same.

00:12:37.000 Wow.

00:12:38.000 I'm jealous because I go to these websites that say, you know, the San Fernando Valley in the 1970s and look at pictures.

00:12:43.000 And it's nothing like it looks now.

00:12:45.000 You ever go to Jerry's Deli and look at those old pictures they have on the wall?

00:12:48.000 I do.

00:12:48.000 I have books, actually.

00:12:49.000 And this is funny.

00:12:50.000 As I get older, I never cared about L.A. history when I lived here.

00:12:53.000 But now that I'm getting nostalgic and stuff, I buy all these old books with pictures of Magic Mountain when I was a kid and Disneyland when I was a kid and all those kind of things.

00:13:01.000 Well, it's fascinating because this area used to be ranches.

00:13:03.000 Oh, yeah.

00:13:04.000 Oh, and horse country and everything.

00:13:06.000 Absolutely.

00:13:06.000 Well, I took my wife back to my high school recently.

00:13:08.000 And, you know, my high school's turned into, like, you know, the Beverly Hills High School is what it's like.

00:13:12.000 And so she looks at me, she goes, oh, I see how you were raised.

00:13:15.000 Honey, no, it smelled like manure.

00:13:16.000 It was all dirt roads.

00:13:17.000 It was really, it wasn't like that for me.

00:13:20.000 So...

00:13:20.000 She doesn't believe me.

00:13:21.000 Yeah, the pictures at Jerry's Deli on Ventura up here, they have these pictures from the early 1900s, these big, giant, high-resolution photos.

00:13:30.000 It's like, wow.

00:13:31.000 Just fields and stuff, rolling hills, yeah.

00:13:33.000 If you could look at it on a time-lapse, just watch it all... 0.99

00:13:36.000 Watch it all build, you'd be like, whoa, what the fuck? 0.98

00:13:39.000 My mom's got this view of the entire valley and you look at it and it's full. 0.99

00:13:42.000 And you see those pictures from Jerry's Deli and it's empty.

00:13:45.000 And in basically whatever it is, 70 years or something, it's full.

00:13:49.000 Yeah, well, the whole country, if you really stop and think about it, I've been talking to people about that a lot lately because we've been sort of discussing how bizarre this election has been.

00:13:59.000 And how recent this country has existed, how recently this country was established.

00:14:06.000 I mean, when you think about 1776 and you think about the rest of the world, like, this is an insanely new country.

00:14:12.000 Oh, in the West, my wife's grandfather died recently, he was 94, and I said, do you realize that two of your grandfather's lifespans and there's no non-natives here on the West Coast?

00:14:25.000 That's two long lifetimes.

00:14:26.000 Yeah.

00:14:27.000 It's bizarre.

00:14:29.000 It's really interesting when you think about it that way.

00:14:32.000 How quick this gigantic thing took over the world, essentially.

00:14:38.000 I should correct this.

00:14:38.000 See, I already heard a hardcore history error in that comment.

00:14:41.000 I should say in the Pacific Northwest, because they'll say, oh no, Dan, there were Spanish missions.

00:14:44.000 See, that's how you get in trouble.

00:14:46.000 Yeah.

00:14:47.000 Okay, we go three generations.

00:14:49.000 Three generations?

00:14:50.000 No, the Spanish were here a long time ago.

00:14:52.000 But up in the Pacific Northwest, it wasn't like that.

00:14:55.000 It's funny, you can tell where the tide of Spanish conquest sort of broke because you stopped getting those Hispanic names for all the communities.

00:15:04.000 And all of a sudden, you're like, what happened to La Habra?

00:15:06.000 What happened to all those wonderful Spanish names?

00:15:08.000 And you're no longer in that.

00:15:10.000 Now you're in...

00:15:10.000 I mean, Russia actually owned a little bit of that territory once upon a time.

00:15:14.000 But now everything's a Native American name or some name from some really early settler or pioneer or something like that.

00:15:21.000 We were talking about how recently slavery existed in this country.

00:15:24.000 Oh my god, yes.

00:15:26.000 1865. And you think about 1865 to 2016. It's nothing.

00:15:32.000 Well, and then let's remember that, you know, you still had the Jim Crow laws and the segregation up until you and I were kids.

00:15:37.000 My mom did a film in Florida in 1972, and I'm not talking about the, apologies to Floridians out there, but the civilized part of Florida.

00:15:46.000 We were in the swamp.

00:15:48.000 It was a place called Weeki Wachee.

00:15:50.000 If you've ever been there, the big draw is they have a live mermaid show that they try to get you to slow down for enough to eat at the local cafe or whatever.

00:15:58.000 And so we're in Wikiwachi, Florida.

00:16:00.000 We took a picture when we left, and the whole hotel staff was out there.

00:16:03.000 And it looks like something out of a time warp.

00:16:06.000 Because you realize, like, three or five years of, you know, segregation's been gone that long.

00:16:11.000 I mean, that's how recent this is.

00:16:13.000 Although I realize the more I talk to young people, even being 50 sounds like a long time ago.

00:16:17.000 But when you and I were kids, that was the tail end of the time when, if you were a black person in certain states in this country, you couldn't stay in a bunch of hotels.

00:16:25.000 Yeah.

00:16:26.000 I mean, that's really recent.

00:16:29.000 Yeah, it's really recent.

00:16:30.000 I had this cop from Baltimore, Michael Wood, and he was telling me about the laws that they had in Baltimore that they had a systematic, they really had racism that was so a part of the city that you couldn't sell houses in certain areas to black people.

00:16:50.000 Oh, Frank Robinson tells a story about being with the Baltimore Orioles, and he says he got traded from the Cincinnati Reds to the Baltimore Orioles, and his wife was able to find a house really quickly until they realized it wasn't Brooks Robinson's wife, who's a white guy, it was Frank Robinson's wife, and then all of a sudden the house disappeared right off,

00:17:07.000 you know, two seconds later.

00:17:08.000 So, but that's almost...

00:17:10.000 You know, you don't know what to say about that, because there's two kinds of racism.

00:17:12.000 There's the kind where the government is involved and the state's involved, like you said, system, you know, institutionalized.

00:17:17.000 And then there's, I'm a white home buyer whose neighbors, you know, I remember there was an All in the Family episode where Archie Bunker or one of the neighbors was going to sell to a black family. 0.86

00:17:26.000 And all the other white neighbors freaked out.

00:17:28.000 So that's not really like government racism.

00:17:30.000 That's like good old-fashioned one-to-one racism.

00:17:33.000 Well, they used to do this thing called blockbusting.

00:17:35.000 And it happened with my grandfather.

00:17:37.000 My grandfather lived in Newark, New Jersey.

00:17:39.000 And these realtors would go door-to-door and literally tell the homeowners, black people are moving into the neighborhood. 0.63

00:17:46.000 You have to sell your home. 0.92

00:17:48.000 The property value is going to crash.

00:17:49.000 Holy cow. 0.89

00:17:50.000 They just started selling like crazy.

00:17:51.000 My grandfather stayed. 0.72

00:17:53.000 My grandfather was like, I like black people. 1.00

00:17:55.000 Get the fuck off my lawn. 1.00

00:17:55.000 He was one of those guys. 1.00

00:17:58.000 So they left and the neighborhood changed.

00:18:02.000 First it became black. 0.97

00:18:04.000 Then it became Puerto Rican.

00:18:06.000 And then before my grandfather died, it had been like a weird mixture of ethnicities.

00:18:11.000 Dominicans and different people from different environments.

00:18:14.000 It was a really fascinating place to live because there was extreme, there was poverty and then there was a lot of crime and stuff like the next door neighbor when my grandfather lived there.

00:18:25.000 Is a kid who was selling crack and they battering rammed his front door.

00:18:30.000 He had it all reinforced and everything.

00:18:31.000 He had an Audi in the driveway, like the whole deal.

00:18:33.000 He was just selling drugs.

00:18:35.000 And they, you know, broke down his doorway and arrested him and everything.

00:18:38.000 It was a pretty dramatic moment.

00:18:39.000 But the rest of it was like, when you look at like a bad neighborhood, it's not like you go down the street and it's like a war zone.

00:18:46.000 Guns are going off and people are getting stabbed.

00:18:48.000 For the most part, it's pretty friendly and lively.

00:18:51.000 It's just when you're dealing with poor people in a crime-ridden neighborhood, It's just going to happen more often than it's going to happen in a place that's really nice.

00:19:00.000 But most of the time when you go outside, it would be people playing music, and there was kids playing in the street, and there was people hanging out in their steps.

00:19:07.000 It was really interesting to watch from the time I was a little kid.

00:19:14.000 Remembering his neighborhood to what it was before he died.

00:19:17.000 And it just kept shifting over and over again, where new sort of lower-income, disenfranchised groups would move into the area.

00:19:27.000 And you know this, I'm sure, already.

00:19:29.000 But for the listeners' sake, there's a whole theory on how, if you look at boxing, you can see...

00:19:36.000 Yeah.

00:19:55.000 And then you move to eras where, I mean, poor African Americans have always been in boxing for the same reason. 0.99

00:20:00.000 Hispanic boxers.

00:20:01.000 I saw a whole article once on America's immigration story as told through boxing.

00:20:08.000 And they would suggest that by the time the next generation came along, most of the time the parents had done well enough so that the kids didn't have to go into boxing.

00:20:16.000 But it was an interesting story.

00:20:18.000 I think the article was entitled something like, Why Don't You See Any Great Jewish Boxers Anymore?

00:20:23.000 And it went down the whole list.

00:20:24.000 I didn't know there were Jewish boxers when I first...

00:20:27.000 Oh, Benny Leonard.

00:20:27.000 There are a lot of Jewish boxers.

00:20:28.000 Maxi Rosenbaum.

00:20:29.000 Oh, a lot of them.

00:20:30.000 Yeah, there was a ton of them in the early days, but it's always that.

00:20:33.000 It's always the immigrants. 1.00

00:20:35.000 Yeah, first-generation people, right?

00:20:36.000 Yeah.

00:20:37.000 Well, what we've seen a lot now is Russians. 0.99

00:20:39.000 Same system, though, right?

00:20:41.000 You have newcomers who are trying to make their way into the system, and boxing is the best thing they bring to the table.

00:20:46.000 Yeah.

00:20:46.000 It's also that you're growing up in these really hard environments where fisticuffs are much more common and people seek to train themselves to learn how to fight because they're dealing with conflict all the time.

00:20:59.000 Absolutely right.

00:20:59.000 Whereas a lot of the kids in class, you see, you know, America, no bullying, you know, hey, diversity.

00:21:04.000 And these kids are growing up, and there's no desire for the average middle-class white kid to go into boxing.

00:21:11.000 It's just no desire.

00:21:13.000 Those of us who've tried it, I tried it once just for the fun of it, and that was enough to kick me out of the eye.

00:21:19.000 It didn't look so fun anymore after I came home with a black eye, and I thought, that's just one day of practice.

00:21:24.000 These people who do it for a living, that's every day of You tried it for one day?

00:21:28.000 Oh, well, you know, this is crazy to say now.

00:21:31.000 I've always been a huge fan of boxing because I grew up in an era where it was one of the great eras in boxing history.

00:21:36.000 And so, you know, you think long enough that you want to see what it's like.

00:21:40.000 And I had a buddy that I worked with.

00:21:41.000 He was the one who always showed up with the black eye after the weekend was over.

00:21:44.000 He said, I'll take you and we'll fool around.

00:21:46.000 The first thing I learned that I didn't know is how much some of these guys just love it.

00:21:50.000 Because you think, who would like getting hit?

00:21:51.000 And I met one of these guys, and he was like, you don't understand the sport.

00:21:54.000 You just don't understand it.

00:21:55.000 But he said, put some gloves on, we'll go in there.

00:21:57.000 Well, that's when you learn, you know.

00:21:59.000 Especially that I have a soft face. 1.00

00:22:01.000 That guy's an asshole. 1.00

00:22:02.000 That's not how you're supposed to teach somebody about boxing. 1.00

00:22:04.000 You're not supposed to even think about sparring for a long time.

00:22:07.000 Oh, I think he was going to show me a lesson.

00:22:09.000 He was going to beat on you.

00:22:10.000 That's right. 1.00

00:22:11.000 Yeah, I had a buddy of mine do the same thing, assholes. 1.00

00:22:14.000 They know how to fight already, and they put gloves on you, and you beat the shit out of you. 1.00

00:22:17.000 It was one punch, Joe. 0.98

00:22:18.000 Let's not make it more than one.

00:22:20.000 It was only one?

00:22:20.000 Yeah, I learned my lesson pretty fast.

00:22:22.000 I'm a smart guy, Joe.

00:22:23.000 Took one punch.

00:22:24.000 You're like, okay.

00:22:25.000 Got through my defense with the first one, and that was it.

00:22:28.000 Well, you need to learn stuff.

00:22:30.000 This is like boxing the way it really should be taught to someone if you really want someone to learn.

00:22:34.000 You should teach them the proper fundamentals on how to move their body, and then you slowly teach them how to slowly hit things.

00:22:41.000 How about protective headgear for the new guy?

00:22:43.000 What about that?

00:22:43.000 That protective headgear does less than you think it does.

00:22:46.000 I know.

00:22:46.000 I've read that, actually.

00:22:47.000 They're also removing it from Olympic competition now.

00:22:50.000 You ever see that?

00:22:51.000 You know, I had mentioned to my wife, didn't they used to have boxing in the Olympics?

00:22:54.000 Do they even show it anymore?

00:22:56.000 Yeah.

00:22:56.000 Do they show it?

00:22:57.000 Because I didn't see it.

00:22:58.000 You don't see it as much.

00:22:59.000 That was so big when I was a kid.

00:23:01.000 I wonder what they decide to put on and how they decide.

00:23:04.000 It's got to be based on ratings, right?

00:23:06.000 Because like archery, you see archery for like 30 seconds.

00:23:09.000 Look, the arrow flew through the air.

00:23:10.000 Next!

00:23:11.000 You know, and then gymnastics is always a big one.

00:23:13.000 People love watching people flip.

00:23:14.000 I told my wife there was this competition called a biathlon where you ski and shoot.

00:23:18.000 And she said, you're making that up.

00:23:20.000 I said, no, it's really an Olympic sport.

00:23:22.000 It is a weird sport, right?

00:23:23.000 What a strange combination. 0.99

00:23:25.000 That's where those Scandinavians just kick everybody's rear end. 1.00

00:23:28.000 Yeah, because they're all out there skiing and shooting shit all the time. 1.00

00:23:30.000 That's exactly right. 1.00

00:23:31.000 That's rude.

00:23:32.000 There's a lot of moose in that area.

00:23:34.000 That's a strange...

00:23:35.000 The Olympics are strange in what is a medal and what is not.

00:23:38.000 Like ballroom dancing is an Olympic sport.

00:23:42.000 What about synchronized swimming?

00:23:43.000 Yeah, that's an Olympic sport.

00:23:44.000 I'm not denigrating anybody if you're a professional synchronized swimmer out there.

00:23:48.000 I am.

00:23:48.000 I'll take the blame.

00:23:49.000 Please do.

00:23:50.000 Like curling.

00:23:51.000 Ever seen that one?

00:23:52.000 Yeah.

00:23:53.000 I always thought that was what they did on like cruises for old people, but apparently it's a little different.

00:23:58.000 That's shuffleboard.

00:23:59.000 It's very close.

00:24:00.000 There's no brooms involved in shuffleboard. 1.00

00:24:01.000 There's no brooms and I don't know what's curling.

00:24:05.000 You're trying to dink the other guy out of the way, right?

00:24:07.000 Trying to knock your little disc.

00:24:08.000 It's very complicated.

00:24:09.000 I never quite mastered the...

00:24:11.000 I was in Newfoundland.

00:24:12.000 I know how to say it now because people got mad at me.

00:24:15.000 We were calling it Newfoundland.

00:24:16.000 I guess it's Newfoundland.

00:24:18.000 They'll probably correct me again. 0.99

00:24:19.000 I'm probably fucking it up again. 0.97

00:24:20.000 I'm not even going to try. 0.94

00:24:21.000 But I was making fun of curling.

00:24:22.000 And they went crazy.

00:24:24.000 They were so upset at me.

00:24:25.000 I was like, come on, folks.

00:24:26.000 Those are not people that get mad at you either.

00:24:29.000 No.

00:24:29.000 They're hardy woods folk.

00:24:31.000 It's very cold.

00:24:32.000 Yeah, it's a different kind of life.

00:24:34.000 But I don't know, what do they do to decide what goes on the air?

00:24:39.000 It must just be based on popularity, right?

00:24:42.000 The Olympics?

00:24:42.000 I gotta tell you, if I'm the network executive deciding what goes on the air, that's what I'm gonna base it on.

00:24:47.000 Did you see all those videos of people getting robbed that were just walking down the street in Rio?

00:24:51.000 Is this in Rio?

00:24:52.000 Yeah.

00:24:52.000 No, but I go to a website sometimes when I'm bored and I have nothing better to do that is just, you know, stuff that people upload, you know, just to blow your mind or say, well, and half of them are from Brazil for some reason, you know, and they're always terrible.

00:25:06.000 You just go, I know it's giving me an unusually wrong version of what Brazil is like, but when they said the Olympics were going to be there, I said, you know, half the videos on this site are from Rio, so...

00:25:16.000 Well, it does have a history of violence, that's for sure.

00:25:19.000 It's a strange place in that it's kind of the reverse of LA, in that LA, you essentially have the expensive homes in the hills, and then the people that have the less expensive homes are on the bottom.

00:25:31.000 But in Rio, it's the opposite.

00:25:33.000 The people in the bottom, like near the ocean, is the really expensive homes.

00:25:37.000 I see.

00:25:38.000 And up in the hills with these amazing views are all the favelas.

00:25:41.000 So it's all these houses that don't have any windows.

00:25:43.000 Some of them have dirt floors.

00:25:45.000 And there's like extreme, extreme poverty.

00:25:48.000 I know.

00:25:48.000 Some of these communities, the police can't even go into, right?

00:25:51.000 Some of them are really hardcore.

00:25:53.000 Very.

00:25:53.000 Did you ever see City of God, the movie?

00:25:56.000 No, but I saw the preview.

00:25:57.000 Does that count?

00:25:58.000 It does not count.

00:25:59.000 But it makes Boys in the Hood look like Mary Poppins, and it's based on life in the favelas.

00:26:04.000 But really, really based on it.

00:26:08.000 These kind of actual scenarios actually do take place, where young kids with guns form gangs, and you're looking at 10-year-old kids.

00:26:16.000 Doesn't that almost seem to be like a law of nature, though?

00:26:19.000 Because you do see it everywhere in these...

00:26:22.000 I think?

00:26:48.000 Boy, everybody here is really trying.

00:26:50.000 I mean, they're really keeping up their homes and trying to make everything look nice.

00:26:53.000 And at nighttime, they're just victims a lot of the time.

00:26:56.000 They shut their doors and close their windows and try to stay out of what's going on outside.

00:27:01.000 It is weird that it's night.

00:27:03.000 Like, there's something happens to people when there's not as much sun out.

00:27:06.000 The people that sleep all day come out.

00:27:08.000 Is that what it is?

00:27:08.000 Yeah, I think so.

00:27:09.000 I used to be one of those people once upon a time. 0.96

00:27:12.000 But Compton, if you looked at a good neighborhood, how many people are getting by and how many people are fucking it up? 0.95

00:27:19.000 In a great neighborhood, maybe it's like 100 people are getting by and one guy's fucking it up. 0.66

00:27:23.000 You're like one issue out of 100. But in Compton, it might be three.

00:27:28.000 And that's enough.

00:27:29.000 That's enough to give the whole neighborhood a black eye. 0.79

00:27:32.000 You're right.

00:27:32.000 It doesn't take very many.

00:27:33.000 That's right.

00:27:34.000 Yeah, a friend of mine has a gym in Compton, and I was telling, we're headed there, and I was like, yeah, it's in Compton.

00:27:40.000 The guy I was going with was like, Jesus, we're going to Compton? 0.93

00:27:42.000 I was like, it's a fucking, it's a nice area. 0.98

00:27:45.000 Yeah, there's nothing wrong. 0.99

00:27:45.000 It's just a city. 0.99

00:27:46.000 That's right.

00:27:47.000 Just go there.

00:27:47.000 What is this?

00:27:48.000 Compton Cowboys?

00:27:49.000 I just Googled Compton, and this story just came up from yesterday. 1.00

00:27:52.000 What the fuck is this? 0.99

00:27:54.000 A bunch of guys that ride horses through Compton. 1.00

00:27:56.000 Is that even legal?

00:27:58.000 I didn't know you could do that in LA because, like in New York, they have to have a device that hooks up to the horse so it doesn't, you know, have manure on the streets.

00:28:05.000 How did they get around that there?

00:28:06.000 This is hilarious.

00:28:07.000 Cowboys roping and riding right in the heart of Compton have found their hobby can tame some of the most dangerous neighborhoods.

00:28:14.000 I have a regular nine-to-five job, but I'm a cowboy, Hosley said.

00:28:18.000 Good for him.

00:28:20.000 I'm in favor of that.

00:28:21.000 You're not a cowboy.

00:28:23.000 Where do you keep the horse?

00:28:24.000 First of all, there's no cows.

00:28:25.000 You're a horse boy. 0.86

00:28:27.000 You're in the horses.

00:28:28.000 Is that a backyard horse?

00:28:29.000 I mean, where do you keep that?

00:28:30.000 It must be.

00:28:31.000 Well, there's some, I mean, I know that, like, I've seen them in Burbank.

00:28:35.000 Like, Burbank, there's sections of, which is, you know, where NBC is, Jay Leno used to do his Tonight Show.

00:28:41.000 There's sections of that that are equestrian.

00:28:43.000 So you're allowed to have a stable in your yard and people just ride horses down the street.

00:28:48.000 You see it all the time down there.

00:28:50.000 They used to have a place called Pickwick Stables right outside of Burbank that was like that.

00:28:53.000 Yeah, they used to have an equestrian center down there.

00:28:55.000 When I was a kid, 50 years ago or whatever it was.

00:28:58.000 Yeah, horse riding makes you a cowboy.

00:29:00.000 You're not a cowboy unless cows are involved. 0.88

00:29:03.000 Is that the Rogan standard on that?

00:29:04.000 I just think that's a fact.

00:29:06.000 I just think that's a fact.

00:29:07.000 You're a horse boy?

00:29:08.000 Well, you call them cowboys because they would chase cows.

00:29:11.000 They would herd them.

00:29:13.000 You know?

00:29:14.000 Okay, I'll go with you.

00:29:16.000 I just don't have the expertise to compete on that subject.

00:29:18.000 They have the Compton Posse? 0.96

00:29:20.000 What is it?

00:29:20.000 They have an actual ranch?

00:29:21.000 Yeah, it's called Richland Farms.

00:29:22.000 I was just looking it up trying to find out more pictures or what it really looks like.

00:29:26.000 You know, I'll tell you how uneducated I was.

00:29:28.000 I didn't know they had enough open property out there to look at that.

00:29:31.000 Yeah.

00:29:32.000 Wow. 1.00

00:29:32.000 So they have chickens and shit? 1.00

00:29:34.000 I'm impressed. 1.00

00:29:35.000 These guys are doing little things with their horses where they're running them through routines.

00:29:40.000 Good for them.

00:29:41.000 Interesting.

00:29:42.000 Very interesting.

00:29:43.000 Yeah.

00:29:44.000 Well, you know what, man?

00:29:45.000 When people find open spaces and spaces that are vacant and they start reclaiming them and occasionally good things come out of that.

00:29:52.000 And you know what?

00:29:52.000 I mean, you know, there's a lot of cities in the United States and in Europe and stuff that have built giant open spaces, you know, whether it's a central park in New York or anything like that.

00:30:01.000 It changes the whole feel of these urban centers, doesn't it?

00:30:04.000 Oh, yeah.

00:30:04.000 To have big, open pieces of territory in the midst of the urban sprawl, I mean, if that's what they've done, more power to them.

00:30:11.000 L.A. needs more of that.

00:30:12.000 I think you're right, and it keeps it from growing.

00:30:14.000 One of the really smart things that Boulder's done is they buy up all the open space.

00:30:18.000 When lots are available all around Boulder, they just buy it up.

00:30:21.000 The city buys it up, and they just prevent people from building on it.

00:30:24.000 That's why it costs like $9,000 a month to have an apartment in Boulder.

00:30:28.000 Yeah, it's super expensive.

00:30:30.000 But, you know, I mean, ultimately, it's probably a good idea, right?

00:30:33.000 Oh, yeah.

00:30:33.000 Well, from your own living purposes, absolutely.

00:30:36.000 So, I mean, that's what I want.

00:30:38.000 I look, in Oregon, I can park anywhere.

00:30:40.000 I tell Angelinos that, and they're really the only people, New Yorkers and Angelinos understand when you say, I can park anywhere, dude, and they just go...

00:30:47.000 Oh, really?

00:30:48.000 Yeah, my buddy Steve moved from New York.

00:30:50.000 He was living in Brooklyn, and he moved to Seattle.

00:30:53.000 And he was like, I should have been here a long time ago.

00:30:55.000 This is amazing.

00:30:56.000 Totally, totally. 0.99

00:30:57.000 He's like, fucking traffic's nothing. 0.99

00:30:58.000 He's like, people are complaining about traffic. 0.99

00:31:00.000 They think it's bad, but they don't know.

00:31:01.000 Yeah.

00:31:01.000 Like, it takes ten minutes more to get where you're going.

00:31:04.000 That's it.

00:31:05.000 I know.

00:31:05.000 And you know, nowadays, I mean, in the old days, if you and I wanted to work, you had to live where the work was.

00:31:10.000 Yeah.

00:31:10.000 Now, I mean, even the actors don't live here much anymore, you know?

00:31:13.000 Yeah.

00:31:14.000 Well, open space, I think, is a really smart thing because people left their own devices will really fuck up anything. 0.62

00:31:20.000 They'll just build on top of shit and stack things up and stuff people in there, and next thing you know, the view's gone, everything's gone. 0.95

00:31:27.000 You've got a chicken ranch next to your house. 0.99

00:31:29.000 Yeah.

00:31:30.000 Well, one of the things that this country has that's really interesting is public land.

00:31:35.000 These gigantic national parks like Yellowstone and all these different places that you can go to.

00:31:40.000 They're mostly in the West, though.

00:31:42.000 That was when that sagebrush rebellion type thing happened up in Oregon, you know, in the one area where they're still having trials about and everything.

00:31:51.000 See, 20 years ago, I would have remembered their names right off the bat, but there's a wilderness thing up in Oregon.

00:31:55.000 We had that whole thing.

00:31:56.000 Well, I mean, their complaint was that the federal government doesn't have big tracts of land in the eastern part of the country where things started.

00:32:03.000 They reverted that land back to the public, but they had these huge swaths of land in the West because it was kind of a different government by the time they were out here in the West.

00:32:12.000 I truthfully am kind of thankful they do, because if they didn't, it wouldn't be here anymore.

00:32:16.000 I mean, that's the way I look at it.

00:32:17.000 It'd just be gone.

00:32:19.000 Yeah, most likely.

00:32:19.000 That whole land thing was really confusing for people.

00:32:23.000 They were trying to figure out what the hell's going on.

00:32:25.000 Because unless you really dive into the story and try to find out who's angry at who and why is the government moving in on these people and what's happening, because there was a few of these sort of rancher-type disputes with the government.

00:32:38.000 Remember there was one in Nevada as well?

00:32:40.000 I actually can speak to this a little bit, because when I was a talk radio host up there, Those people were actually a large part of any talk radio show audience, and they were a little different back in the day of, say, the Clinton administration in the mid-1990s, but the modern movement kind of grew out of that.

00:32:56.000 And if you understand the position of those people in those small towns...

00:33:00.000 Those people essentially made a living in resource extraction.

00:33:04.000 So they didn't have the big factories that they had back east in Detroit and everything.

00:33:07.000 They logged, or they mined, or they did those kind of things.

00:33:11.000 And so when the government will decide, for example, we have a problem with the spotted owl, so we're going to cut back on the logging, The people in places like Portland, where everybody's got a software job, they're like, absolutely, that's a wonderful thing.

00:33:23.000 But those devastated some of those communities.

00:33:26.000 And it's everything from the schools in those areas not getting a lot of tax dollars anymore, or the problem they have in Oregon is a lot of those small communities, all the young people are gone.

00:33:36.000 Mm-hmm.

00:33:55.000 Really didn't look at that side of the story, which is, I'm not saying these people are right or wrong, but understand that this wasn't a question of, oh, the government's got to get off of our land.

00:34:03.000 It was jobs, and I think we can all understand jobs.

00:34:06.000 Well, what was going on in Oregon was cattle ranchers and public land, and they didn't want to pay.

00:34:12.000 Yeah, they didn't want to pay for public land.

00:34:15.000 Now, before I had ever, like, ventured into public land, I didn't understand the whole cattle grazing thing, but when I was in, the first time I was in Montana...

00:34:25.000 We took a float down the Missouri River.

00:34:28.000 We went down where the Missouri breaks are.

00:34:31.000 And Montana's beautiful.

00:34:32.000 Oh, man, it's amazing.

00:34:33.000 But one of the things I was like, there's these cows everywhere.

00:34:35.000 This is public land, right?

00:34:38.000 And my friend Steve had to sort of explain to me how they kind of lease the land.

00:34:43.000 They let cows graze this land, and they do it at this ridiculously low rate.

00:34:49.000 They made a lot of these laws in the late 1800s.

00:34:51.000 The same thing with the mining ones and the claims to that.

00:34:53.000 So they haven't updated a lot of those things.

00:34:56.000 But the Nevada guys, or excuse me, the Oregon guys, they didn't want to pay.

00:35:00.000 That was part of what was going on.

00:35:01.000 They didn't want to pay their bill, at least as far as it's been explained to me.

00:35:06.000 Well, no, and there's different parties involved.

00:35:07.000 So you had these ranchers who didn't want to do that, and then you have a bunch of people in the community who were sympathetic not so much to that part, but the fact that the ranchers were mad at the same people that they were mad at.

00:35:18.000 Right.

00:35:18.000 So that's why you would hear a lot of people speak in these things saying, I'm not really on their side, but we all generally have sympathy to the idea that we would like the federal government to stop telling us how many logs we can cut or those kind of things.

00:35:32.000 Right, exactly.

00:35:32.000 And that's a traditional American thing.

00:35:34.000 Get the government off my back for whatever reason.

00:35:36.000 It is.

00:35:37.000 And there's points on both sides, though, unfortunately.

00:35:40.000 Oh, absolutely.

00:35:41.000 Because when you look at some place that's been clear-cut and you see how much...

00:35:48.000 It's devastating.

00:35:49.000 It's devastating.

00:35:50.000 When you see a giant swath of land that used to be filled with old growth trees.

00:35:54.000 And they replant it with a single monocrop instead.

00:35:57.000 They always call it like they want you to think it's like growing tomatoes.

00:36:02.000 They always say this is a renewable crop.

00:36:04.000 Yes and no.

00:36:06.000 And like you said, the clear cuts are awful because you do think to yourself, couldn't you take like every fifth tree?

00:36:11.000 Right.

00:36:14.000 Landowners will do a better job of it.

00:36:16.000 Not always.

00:36:17.000 Sometimes they'll just think, my kid needs to go to college, it's time to just level everything on this hill.

00:36:21.000 Sometimes, though, their attitude is, okay, this is my view, right?

00:36:24.000 I mean, I look out, I don't want to see a clear cut, so I'll take every third or fourth tree, and it becomes like an extra bank account for some of them, so...

00:36:32.000 Well, if your whole business is the logging business, I can imagine.

00:36:36.000 Like, we were up in the Redwood Forest recently, and as we were driving up there, you pass these lumberyards.

00:36:42.000 There's just one lumberyard where it's just massive logs and massive amounts, and they're just stacked up.

00:36:49.000 And you're looking at, like, in terms of the number of years...

00:36:53.000 of growth you're looking at when you're looking at this huge lumber yard filled with trees like how many years of growth is that how do you sustain it right this is how much you need today how do you make sure you have that much 15 20 years you know what they're doing right now is is the Canadians are logging a lot and in Russia in the places like below the the They have a forest line in Siberia,

00:37:16.000 and they're logging a lot there, too.

00:37:17.000 I mean, it's kind of like gold that grows for those people.

00:37:20.000 And so in one sense, you find it hard to tell them not to, because I'm doing just fine, but you can't log and make money.

00:37:26.000 On the other hand, you know, we all do kind of share this, and so it's hard to figure out how to manage things, you know, for the greater good, as they say.

00:37:33.000 That's the good point, is that it's really, I mean, it's no one's, you could call it property, but what it is, is like we're all sharing the resources of the earth, and What's going on in the Amazon right now and what happens when people move in and farm for cattle is one of the best arguments against factory farming and against supporting the meat industry.

00:37:54.000 It pollutes rivers and all that kind of stuff.

00:37:56.000 Devastating deforestation, too, at a ridiculously high rate.

00:37:59.000 That's a big part of what's fueling the deforestation is they chop down all these trees so that they can make land for these cattle to graze on.

00:38:08.000 And you can see, by the way, how much money is involved, because in some of those countries, the people that campaign, a lot of times they're indigenous people, it gets violent and people die, and, you know, that's how much money we're talking about. 0.95

00:38:20.000 Yeah, they killed some nun that was protesting against the logging.

00:38:24.000 She got murdered recently.

00:38:26.000 It's not that uncommon.

00:38:27.000 And, you know, everybody kind of knows, this is, you know, you're taking, I mean, it's pretty brave when you think about what those people do, because they get the threatening letters long before anything happens to them, and then to keep doing it.

00:38:37.000 I admire people like that.

00:38:38.000 Whether or not I agree with the specific cause.

00:38:40.000 Yeah, I mean, who knows if they're even getting letters.

00:38:42.000 They just might get bullets.

00:38:44.000 You know, I mean, if you start making a mess and making a lot of noise and making it problematic for the people that are earning a shitload of money chopping those trees down, things can get real ugly.

00:38:53.000 They get real nasty.

00:38:55.000 I was in Mount Rainier and that was the first time I ever saw like real clear-cut areas and that's an interesting place because it rains so much you would think like it's a real fertile environment like whatever trees that they do have but when I was talking to one of the guys was up there one of the cops that was um you know was like forest ranger type character he was saying that they do it but it takes like 20 years for these things become trees again Well,

00:39:21.000 and they use different growth trees for different things.

00:39:24.000 So you can grow the quick, you know, I always hear from the guys who want to grow hemp and say, well, if they would just grow hemp, it would make up, but it would make up for some uses.

00:39:31.000 The old growth trees, like if you go into some of these, there are some Oregon hotels, for example, that are all built with old growth.

00:39:37.000 And you go in there and you see what old growth can do and you say, okay, there are no other logs that you could do this with.

00:39:44.000 You know, it's just a...

00:39:45.000 And you see the band saws that they use to cut that stuff?

00:39:48.000 It's a whole different level of tree.

00:39:51.000 But the replacement time period is like 150 years or something for those kind of things. 0.94

00:39:55.000 Yeah, it's kind of fucking crazy when you really think about it. 0.53

00:39:58.000 It's totally unsustainable. 0.89

00:39:59.000 But you're right.

00:40:00.000 It looks amazing.

00:40:01.000 There's nothing like it.

00:40:01.000 There's a company called Urban Hardwoods, and they're in Seattle.

00:40:04.000 I've heard of them.

00:40:05.000 And they make like tables and desks and stuff out of the most incredible looking wood.

00:40:12.000 They take like real wood, like a real giant tree, and they'll turn that giant tree, they'll cut chunks out of it and turn it into a table.

00:40:20.000 But it's got like the outside edge is like the natural edge of the tree.

00:40:23.000 I used to know a guy who was a big investor.

00:40:26.000 He's dead now, but he would find investments to go to go buy.

00:40:29.000 And he went and somehow he was so proud of this.

00:40:32.000 He got himself a piece of a koa wood forest in Hawaii.

00:40:37.000 And he showed me the deed and the deed for me.

00:40:40.000 From the guy he bought it from had been signed by, like, King Kamehameha or something.

00:40:45.000 So he was bragging to me for years about this and then found out later Hawaii wouldn't let him cut any of it.

00:40:50.000 So he bought it all on the premise that I had this valuable wood, but for environmental and heritage reasons, Hawaii wouldn't let him cut. 0.97

00:40:57.000 He was totally screwed. 0.97

00:40:59.000 Wow. 0.99

00:40:59.000 Well, at least he got a cool forest. 0.99

00:41:01.000 Yeah, for a while.

00:41:02.000 Koa wood.

00:41:02.000 It's gorgeous.

00:41:03.000 Yeah, and hard and valuable and rare.

00:41:05.000 Yeah, don't they make, like, guitars out of it?

00:41:07.000 I know they make pool cues out of it.

00:41:08.000 They used to make shh.

00:41:12.000 Yeah, the different densities of trees and the different grains and patterns.

00:41:18.000 And when you look at actual hardwood, it's such a fascinating, not invention, but creation of nature.

00:41:25.000 The variety of the grain and the way they look, it's really like a work of art.

00:41:30.000 And it's strange how it affects us visually.

00:41:33.000 Like, if you look at a piece of redwood that's been polished and sanded and cut, it's like, you see the grain in it, it's like, wow, that is so pretty!

00:41:41.000 You know, it's interesting how that affects us.

00:41:43.000 I'm wondering who's winning the pool for what they thought we would talk about today.

00:41:49.000 How many people had hardwoods?

00:41:51.000 Nobody.

00:41:54.000 They're right about hemp, though, as far as, like, construction material.

00:41:56.000 They make that stuff called Hempcrete.

00:41:58.000 Have you ever seen that?

00:41:59.000 It's like a product that they make with hemp.

00:42:01.000 It has incredible insulation values.

00:42:04.000 It's really difficult to light on fire.

00:42:06.000 It's very strong.

00:42:07.000 Well, it used to be used a lot.

00:42:08.000 Up until about the 30s and 40s, it was a pretty big crop for a lot of industrial uses.

00:42:12.000 Everybody who looks into it for five minutes knows that.

00:42:15.000 Yeah, well, that's one of those things where stoners love to sit down and talk to you about it.

00:42:19.000 You know, man, Henry Ford made the first car.

00:42:21.000 George Washington, yeah.

00:42:23.000 Dude, George Washington grew pot, bro.

00:42:25.000 Ben Franklin smoked pot.

00:42:27.000 Yeah.

00:42:28.000 Yeah, they probably did.

00:42:29.000 It's good stuff.

00:42:30.000 Hard to prove.

00:42:30.000 Yeah.

00:42:31.000 Well, they definitely liked hemp.

00:42:33.000 They definitely were into hemp, and they were definitely into using it as a commodity and a textile.

00:42:38.000 And you can go back and forth about that.

00:42:40.000 Paper, things like that.

00:42:42.000 Yeah, the first drafts of the Declaration of Independence was written on hemp.

00:42:46.000 And parachutes, sails.

00:42:49.000 A lot of stuff we used in both World Wars for equipment was in fabric, a lot of stuff like that.

00:42:55.000 Even the term cannabis comes from the word cannabis, because that's what it was made out of.

00:42:59.000 I think I remembered that, actually.

00:43:00.000 Yeah, it's interesting how it's become illegal.

00:43:03.000 But that's another thing that's really fascinating about this time.

00:43:06.000 It's like slowly in your state, Washington state, Colorado, you're starting to see so much money coming in from it being legal that it's going to trickle down into other states.

00:43:15.000 It's almost inevitable.

00:43:16.000 It's kind of a great experiment, isn't it?

00:43:17.000 And I've said before, and I might have even said on this show the very first time we got together, I think we may have talked about You know, what's going to happen, because we have this divergence between the states and the federal government, and as you probably know, only a couple of weeks ago, the federal government decided to leave marijuana classified as a Schedule I drug for the same reason they always did,

00:43:36.000 which is they say that the research doesn't show anything, and then you find out, well, they're not really permitted to do the research, so it's this catch-22.

00:43:43.000 Right.

00:43:45.000 Either the feds are going to have to move toward the states, or somebody's going to get into power that says, enough of this dichotomy, we're going to crack down.

00:43:52.000 I have no idea what that would look like.

00:43:54.000 It would look ugly.

00:43:55.000 You can't crack down now.

00:43:57.000 The amount of money that Colorado is making has changed the quality of life for so many people there.

00:44:02.000 Their real estate values have gone up.

00:44:04.000 The drunk driving accidents have gone way down.

00:44:07.000 Drunk driving arrests, way down.

00:44:08.000 Violent crime, way down.

00:44:10.000 I mean, it's really fascinating what's happened to Colorado.

00:44:12.000 But look at what What the feds have already done in roundabout ways.

00:44:16.000 For example, one of the things that they've said in some of these places is if you have a medical marijuana card, you can't get pain medication prescribed to you.

00:44:25.000 If you have a medical marijuana card, a judge just upheld, didn't they, that you can be denied a gun.

00:44:30.000 Yeah.

00:44:31.000 They don't deny people guns for drinking.

00:44:33.000 Or pills.

00:44:34.000 Yes.

00:44:34.000 So the only reason that that works is because you have a disagreement between state and federal law, and they're siding with the higher law, which is the way the law is supposed to work.

00:44:42.000 But at what point do we have such a division between the reality on the ground in these states and what federal law says that the rubber is going to meet the road somewhere?

00:44:54.000 I don't know who wins, but there's going to be a moment where you have a rubber meets the road moment. 0.66

00:44:59.000 Yeah, and it's an interesting case with the National Rifle Association, too, because the NRA, which is always, of course, pro-gun and really trying to stop any laws that infringe upon the rights of people to Uphold the Second Amendment, but when you get to this pot thing, they don't want to fuck with the pot thing.

00:45:16.000 I may be wrong about this, but I do believe that they did come out and say that you shouldn't be denying people's rights.

00:45:23.000 Well, they're better.

00:45:24.000 There's a lot of people in the NRA that smoke pot.

00:45:28.000 Yeah, there's a lot of closet pot smokers out there. 1.00

00:45:30.000 Because it's, obviously the stereotype has always been that it makes you lazy and it makes you dumb and it sort of gives you brain damage and you forget things. 0.95

00:45:39.000 That's been shown time and time again to not be true. 1.00

00:45:41.000 I mean, when you are high as fuck, you do forget things. 0.99

00:45:45.000 Like, when you're in the throes of it. 0.99

00:45:46.000 But they have populations like that.

00:45:47.000 I remember reading a study once where they were studying population in Jamaica where a lot of these people who were 75 years old had been doing it their whole lives, and they didn't show anything that would make your eyes bulge out, your hair stand up.

00:46:02.000 I mean, nothing seemed that...

00:46:04.000 Out of the ordinary in terms of whether you're talking about cancer rates or any of these other things.

00:46:08.000 If there were something like that, God, it would be beaten into our head right now.

00:46:12.000 Absolutely, that's true.

00:46:12.000 All the proponents of pharmaceutical drugs and all the people that are making money off of marijuana remaining in the Schedule I category, which are pretty significant.

00:46:20.000 There's a lot of people that make money off of it. 0.53

00:46:22.000 The Schedule I category is ridiculous.

00:46:24.000 I mean, that's just crazy.

00:46:25.000 Do you see what's going on in Arizona?

00:46:27.000 I tweeted about it, I think, yesterday.

00:46:30.000 The people who...

00:46:33.000 We're protesting against marijuana being legalized in Arizona.

00:46:37.000 The people are spending the most money.

00:46:38.000 We're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars to try to keep marijuana illegal in Arizona are directly tied to pharmaceutical drugs.

00:46:46.000 That's interesting.

00:46:47.000 Directly tied to pain pills.

00:46:49.000 Specifically, the stuff that killed Prince.

00:46:52.000 What's that stuff called?

00:46:53.000 Fentanyl.

00:46:54.000 Yeah, fentanyl.

00:46:55.000 Well, Arizona's a weird state, too.

00:46:56.000 They have some very conservative people.

00:46:58.000 This is the alcohol industry.

00:46:59.000 Before that, there was one.

00:47:01.000 So it's the alcohol industry, and then there's also the fentanyl industry.

00:47:07.000 It might be a little bit earlier.

00:47:08.000 Just scroll down a little bit further, see if you can find it.

00:47:11.000 But it's just bizarre that we allow that stuff, and it's so transparent today, as opposed to this stuff all went on behind the scenes 100 years ago, which, of course, is why marijuana got made illegal there.

00:47:23.000 Fentanyl maker donates big to campaign opposing pot legalization.

00:47:27.000 That's fascinating.

00:47:27.000 Yeah, there you go.

00:47:28.000 $500,000 towards defeating a ballot initiative that would make recreational use of marijuana legal under Arizona law. 0.98

00:47:34.000 You're just criminals. 0.99

00:47:36.000 You're a bunch of crooks. 1.00

00:47:37.000 The fact that you guys would spend that much money to stop a drug that has nothing to do with what you do... 0.98

00:47:43.000 But I would make the case, and this is pretty much what my political show has been about since the very beginning, is that that's a factor of the corruption in our system.

00:47:52.000 When it's a pay-to-play system, well, I mean, then that's how this happens.

00:47:57.000 If you're going to impact somebody else's business by legalizing something else, then the way you fight that is you go out there and you donate to the cause.

00:48:05.000 I mean, in other words, instead of the people getting what they want, it's whomever donates the most.

00:48:10.000 And I remember Justice Scalia, before he died, was part of a ruling where he basically said, that's not a bug, it's a feature.

00:48:17.000 This is the way the system is supposed to work.

00:48:19.000 You know, money is supposed to represent the views of people, and if it's poor people, they can bundle it all together.

00:48:26.000 And then if there's no money, obviously there's not a lot of people who care, and that was the theory.

00:48:30.000 But what it's really done is mean if you don't have money flowing into Washington, you don't count.

00:48:36.000 You're not at the table.

00:48:37.000 Right?

00:48:37.000 So there's whole sectors of the American society that are essentially unrepresented because there's no money coming from them.

00:48:45.000 That's the real problem.

00:48:46.000 And wasn't this sort of structure, the government structure that sort of enforces that or relies on that, it was kind of established before corporations were.

00:48:54.000 And definitely established before corporations were allowed to act as an individual and donate insane amounts of money to campaigns.

00:49:03.000 And you look at it and you can see how it happened.

00:49:06.000 Because you can see that the people that gave a little money back in the days when you could only give this much money had a little influence.

00:49:13.000 So what do you want to do?

00:49:14.000 You want to influence them to let you give a little bit more.

00:49:17.000 And slowly but surely you evolve into a system.

00:49:19.000 I mean, I was talking to my wife about this the other day where we were talking about...

00:49:22.000 How it was never a good system, but it was a fairer system back when I was a kid in the 1970s because some of the money came from entities that represented people who were blue-collar people.

00:49:34.000 So, for example, when unions were big, private employee unions, not the public employee unions that are so popular now, so if you were a pipe fitter or a plumber or those people that had, you know, electricians had pretty powerful unions, Those people would bundle money and those unions would give money to candidates that sort of compensated for the fact that you had corporate money or whatever in other directions.

00:49:55.000 In the 1980s, when the Democrats started getting waxed regularly and where, you know, due to Reagan changing tax policies and whatever else, we started to get some really wealthy people and the unions started getting less powerful.

00:50:08.000 All of a sudden, you know, Willie Sutton, the bank robber, was famously asked, you know, why do you rob banks?

00:50:12.000 He says, that's where the money is.

00:50:14.000 I think?

00:50:37.000 We can go and get money from those same sources.

00:50:39.000 So they did.

00:50:40.000 Okay, so fast forward to now.

00:50:42.000 Everybody's taken money from those same sources, and the people that are lower and middle class have no way to break into that game, right?

00:50:50.000 So if, you know, Lawrence Lessig, the Harvard law professor, did a great book called Republic Lost, where he pointed out how he went and interviewed politicians who didn't even realize there was another side sometimes to the issue they were voting on because they hadn't heard from any money.

00:51:04.000 Right?

00:51:05.000 So you almost felt like a lot of these people were almost blameless because in their minds, well, nobody cares about this or I would have had some money coming in for that.

00:51:13.000 It's strange how the systems evolved.

00:51:15.000 But the one thing you can say for sure is you're not getting money from people who don't have money.

00:51:19.000 Right.

00:51:19.000 And so eventually we get to this dichotomy where there are a lot of people in this country right now.

00:51:24.000 What's that old line about taxation without representation?

00:51:26.000 A lot of people in this country are not represented.

00:51:28.000 100%.

00:51:29.000 And also, you have to think about how many people feel disenfranchised by this system.

00:51:34.000 And it doesn't seem like it's going to be fixed anytime soon.

00:51:37.000 Because the amount of people that are contributing to these campaigns, when you look at the percentage of human beings on this landmass, is very small.

00:51:45.000 So the amount of people that have influence, it's a very small amount of people that are affecting the lives of a vast majority of people.

00:51:52.000 And it becomes a very weird sort of scenario when we continue with the same representative government structure that we had back when it was impossible to communicate with people on the other side of the country.

00:52:05.000 You know, Morse code or a guy on a horse with a letter.

00:52:07.000 It was hard.

00:52:08.000 So this is why they decided to have representative government in the first place.

00:52:11.000 You couldn't communicate with people.

00:52:13.000 Now that you can, it's like we really ultimately have to decide, I think, one day, is one person, one vote?

00:52:21.000 Like, do we all, as a mass, as 300 million people, get to decide, like, if a 190 million people think one thing and the rest think another thing.

00:52:29.000 How does this all work out?

00:52:31.000 Like, how do we decide?

00:52:32.000 Because right now, we have delegates, we have representatives, we have senators, we have all these different people that sort of buffer us from the actual decisions that are being made.

00:52:41.000 And I think as we...

00:52:44.000 As it becomes easier and easier to communicate and express your opinions and give your thoughts on things, the option of voting online and the option of voting directly for issues without representation seems more and more enticing to people.

00:52:58.000 Yeah, but you'd have to change the Constitution.

00:53:01.000 Wouldn't that be a good idea? 1.00

00:53:03.000 It's old as fuck. 0.99

00:53:04.000 It depends. 0.99

00:53:05.000 I'm reading a book right now that talks about our government actually operating sort of between the lines of the Constitution.

00:53:12.000 So there's room to maneuver, and over time, for understandable reasons, like security and other things, I mean, the fact that nuclear bombs were invented changed everything, that within those lines, there's room to sort of expand what you can do.

00:53:25.000 But you do that generation after generation, and then you look around and go, how did we get...

00:53:29.000 You know, from where we were in 1940 to where we are now, it's almost inexplicable.

00:53:33.000 And sometimes when I talk about reform, you try to figure out how you can dial things back, but we've come so far beyond any point you could dial it back to, it becomes really hard to imagine.

00:53:45.000 It's like you have an old mainframe computer that you've patched and patched and patched, and the only way now to make any real reform is to throw the computer out and buy a new Mac and start from scratch.

00:53:54.000 And nobody can do that.

00:53:56.000 I mean, you can't even figure out how to get that done.

00:53:58.000 Yeah, it's almost like we need an asteroid to take out the grid.

00:54:02.000 Just come down and boom and wreck the whole thing.

00:54:05.000 Just a big earthquake or a tidal wave.

00:54:07.000 It would have to be a big thing.

00:54:09.000 A big, big thing that unfortunately kills a lot of people.

00:54:13.000 I know.

00:54:13.000 Then the government will step in and say, well, you know, we have to take care of all of you now.

00:54:16.000 Security, martial law, people on the street.

00:54:18.000 Or the government's dead.

00:54:19.000 Or it hits them.

00:54:21.000 Imagine how, like, symbolmatic it would be.

00:54:25.000 Symbolic it would be, rather.

00:54:26.000 Symbolmatic's not even a word.

00:54:28.000 Could be.

00:54:29.000 Imagine how amazing it would be, like, if that's the only place where an asteroid hit.

00:54:33.000 If it hit the Pentagon and the White House.

00:54:35.000 If, like, these two broken-up chunks of space rock, one slams into the Pentagon, kills everyone.

00:54:42.000 They blame terrorism. 0.93

00:54:43.000 Yeah, the god of terror. 0.79

00:54:45.000 The god of terror.

00:54:46.000 Yeah, I mean, that is...

00:54:48.000 That's really almost the only way.

00:54:50.000 Something has to be catastrophic in order for them to try to reset and rebuild a completely new system.

00:54:56.000 And then people would have to agree.

00:54:57.000 They'd have to get together and go, okay, are we going to go back to that thing that was written on hemp by people that wrote with feathers?

00:55:03.000 Or are we going to redo this?

00:55:05.000 Are we going to figure this out from a modern perspective?

00:55:08.000 Knowing what we know now about our ability to communicate and knowing what we know now about all the things that the founding fathers of this country did an amazing job of trying to protect from corruption.

00:55:18.000 You know, trying to make sure that their vision of what America could be, that this experiment and self-government, and they put all these safeguards in play.

00:55:30.000 But there's no way they could have ever predicted how far technology would have taken us in the 200 plus years since they did that.

00:55:37.000 There's just no way.

00:55:38.000 They couldn't have any idea.

00:55:55.000 Some things that people would agree with in regards to, like, what the NSA got caught with, you know, with the mass surveillance of the public.

00:56:03.000 Let's talk about that for a bit, because I was just going to go there.

00:56:05.000 You know, I was thinking not that long ago, if they forced you, because we all understand that history is an evolution.

00:56:11.000 So all of this is the result of decades and decades and generations and generations of building stuff on top of other things.

00:56:17.000 But if you had to pick the time that was most transformative for all those things you were talking about...

00:56:24.000 You have to go back to the United States between 1947 and 1948. That's when Harry Truman and the government passed these rules that made everything we talk about today.

00:56:36.000 The NSA, the CIA, all those things are developments from like national security.

00:56:43.000 I mean, NSC 68 is one of those big ones.

00:56:45.000 A bunch of these rules that created the modern United States We'll call it the secret government that we know about today.

00:56:53.000 And, you know, if you go back in time, you can certainly understand what they were thinking.

00:56:58.000 I mean, you have to remember how crazy it was after the Second World War and this feeling that the Soviet Union was this threat to the whole world.

00:57:05.000 And now you have nuclear weapons.

00:57:07.000 And can you really declare war if there's nuclear weapons that could be?

00:57:10.000 You know, there's a whole bunch of things where you go, hey, I kind of get what was going on.

00:57:14.000 But it didn't take Harry Truman long enough.

00:57:16.000 I think?

00:57:39.000 They miss all the big things, whether it's the fall of the Soviet Union, you name it, right?

00:57:43.000 The CIA's got major failures.

00:57:44.000 And then you said all the things that they've done that were nefarious, that they shouldn't have.

00:57:48.000 So if this were a private business, you'd turn around and go, well, listen, that's a lost thing right there.

00:57:53.000 Let's take that division, scrap it, start over...

00:57:56.000 You can't do that in a government for some reason.

00:57:58.000 It's almost impossible to decide, this whole area has been a failure, so let's start over.

00:58:03.000 And that's the problem, because I'm not sure you can reform things that are flawed at the seeds.

00:58:08.000 Do you know what I mean?

00:58:10.000 And the CIA is a perfect example, but even the NSA, I mean, did you see that this week they're once again trying to slip a bill in that would allow the government, without a warrant, to track every website you go to and all these things?

00:58:22.000 How does this stuff get that far?

00:58:25.000 They're going to attach it to a totally unrelated bill so that you don't know about it again.

00:58:29.000 How do they get away with this?

00:58:31.000 Most likely it's just justifying something they're already doing.

00:58:34.000 Well, and they're legitimately afraid.

00:58:36.000 There's stuff to be afraid of.

00:58:37.000 So I don't always, you know, you have to cut them a little slack.

00:58:41.000 But there's no weighing at all about the downside.

00:58:45.000 I mean, it's almost like the only thing we pay attention to is the terror side of the ledger, not the fact that do you, John McCain or Lindsey Graham, do you really want the government knowing every website?

00:58:53.000 Especially Lindsey Graham. 1.00

00:58:55.000 There's got to be some websites there that he really would not like the government to know about.

00:58:58.000 Come on, at least think about yourself, you know?

00:59:01.000 So I don't know how you stop this dynamic.

00:59:04.000 We're such a fearful people that that's what's going to kill us.

00:59:07.000 Well, we know what we've done to other people.

00:59:09.000 We know payback is probably likely.

00:59:12.000 That's a real thing to consider.

00:59:14.000 What's really sad is I've always had this rose-colored view of us, and I acknowledge that it's a myth, but I always look at the myth of America, as I call it, the 1950s high school textbook view of America.

00:59:25.000 That, to me, is what I want to move towards.

00:59:28.000 So when they talk about creating a more perfect union, that, to me, is the goal.

00:59:32.000 And anything that conflicts with that self-image, to me, is the problem.

00:59:36.000 So when you see sometimes how we really operate, anything Dick Cheney does, and I don't use the word evil, so I'll use the word nefarious.

00:59:43.000 Dick Cheney is, to me, when you say, what do you want to avoid in this country?

00:59:47.000 I want to avoid where Dick Cheney wants us to go.

00:59:49.000 Because nothing conflicts with my 1950s mythological American textbook idea than what Cheney wants us to be.

00:59:57.000 And when you look at some of the things we've done, some of the things based on that 1947-1948 America idea, Which we thought, okay, we have to do everything to stop global communism.

01:00:05.000 They're going to take over the country.

01:00:06.000 Once you look at some of the things we did and you realize some of what we're dealing with today is blowback, you don't know how to undo that.

01:00:13.000 I mean, you almost think it's like permanent damage.

01:00:14.000 Look at the way some in the Middle East see us.

01:00:16.000 I mean, I'll talk to people, like I remember talking to Sam Harris about this, and he was talking about, well, you have to see things this certain way.

01:00:23.000 And I said, yes, but that's not going to help you solve the problem.

01:00:25.000 How do you solve the problem if we've already...

01:00:28.000 If we've already soiled our bed so much that you don't know how to fix that, you don't know how to go and say, listen, we're sorry about this, can we start from scratch?

01:00:34.000 You can't do that in foreign affairs just like you can't do it with the mainframe computer that is the government, you know?

01:00:39.000 I can't figure out how to reverse course to a point where we can once again fix stuff, right?

01:00:45.000 It's too damaged.

01:00:46.000 I think it just has to dry out, slowly but surely.

01:00:49.000 Like, all the wounds of the past have to heal up and dry out, and it just takes time and several generations.

01:00:54.000 But how do you do it when they're still after you?

01:00:55.000 I mean, we've already made enough people mad at us so that they're after us.

01:00:58.000 Well, now we have to go protect ourselves by going and getting them, so we perpetuate the cycle.

01:01:02.000 Like, I can't figure out how to jump off the merry-go-round.

01:01:05.000 Do you know what I mean?

01:01:06.000 I don't think it moves that way.

01:01:07.000 I think we're trying to make a battleship move like a race car.

01:01:10.000 I just think it takes a long time to shift course.

01:01:14.000 And when we're looking at these people that are in the Middle East that are opposing the US right now and angry and want to attack the US right now, you're most likely never going to get to them. 0.80

01:01:23.000 You might get to their grandchildren.

01:01:25.000 And I think that might be the only way things slowly but surely settle down.

01:01:30.000 And that's the argument for the NSA and the CIA to continue to monitor things that are really kind of ridiculous and invasive level.

01:01:37.000 Because there's so many people out there that hate us.

01:01:40.000 Or hate the government, hate the military, and hate what's happened to them.

01:01:43.000 And so many martyrs are created every time a drone strike goes wrong.

01:01:46.000 That's where I was going to go.

01:01:47.000 How do you get that next generation to not hate us when we're busy killing their parents? 0.99

01:01:51.000 Because their parents want to kill us. 0.96

01:01:53.000 I mean, that's the cycle. 0.66

01:01:54.000 And I can't figure out how to break the cycle.

01:01:56.000 Nobody can.

01:01:57.000 How do you protect ourselves from their anti-American parents in a way that doesn't turn them against us, too?

01:02:02.000 Does that make sense?

01:02:03.000 It definitely makes sense.

01:02:04.000 And it's hard.

01:02:06.000 No one has a real...

01:02:18.000 But there are still people who want to kill us. 0.62

01:02:25.000 You know, in the Dick Cheney camp that are like, you're out of your mind.

01:02:28.000 You're living in a dream movie world. 0.95

01:02:31.000 The real world is dirty and nasty.

01:02:33.000 And we need all these people.

01:02:35.000 We need all these operatives.

01:02:36.000 We need people constantly monitoring these hot spots all around the world.

01:02:39.000 Because, like, look what's going on in North Korea. 0.99

01:02:42.000 They're Fucking testing nuclear bombs now. 0.99

01:02:45.000 And, you know, what are we doing? 0.99

01:02:46.000 We're flying by.

01:02:48.000 We're making these threatening gestures.

01:02:50.000 We're flying fighter jets around North Korea.

01:02:53.000 It's really spooky.

01:02:55.000 It's spooky because something can happen.

01:02:58.000 And we don't have anybody over there, you know, at least as far as I know.

01:03:02.000 I mean, I don't know.

01:03:03.000 Maybe we have some deep, deep, deep undercover CIA people working as North Korean soldiers.

01:03:08.000 I'll tell you what upsets me, though, because we were just talking about getting off the merry-go-round.

01:03:13.000 It means kind of not perpetuating the same mistakes we've made before.

01:03:17.000 But what drives me crazy about our system is that the people who make mistakes—and I've always said, you know, you've forgiven.

01:03:23.000 People make mistakes.

01:03:24.000 You're going to make a mistake, right?

01:03:25.000 You shouldn't be allowed to make another one, though, right?

01:03:28.000 At the highest levels of government, when you send people to war and we shouldn't have gone to war, I'll cut you some slack, but I don't want you then going on CNN and being the expert who tells us how to handle the next crisis, right? 0.99

01:03:38.000 Because your track record sucks. 0.96

01:03:40.000 Dick Cheney's got a terrible track record. 1.00

01:03:42.000 We still listen to him.

01:03:43.000 He still gets to be a person who moves the public debate.

01:03:46.000 And there's a lot of people like that.

01:03:48.000 You look at the John Boltons.

01:03:49.000 There's a heck of a lot of these guys who are consistently and regularly wrong.

01:03:54.000 But we put them out there as though, oh, this is somebody you should listen to now.

01:03:57.000 He's going to analyze how we should handle North Korea.

01:04:00.000 Yeah, but he was wrong as heck about Iraq and all these other things, so we're going to listen to him on that next subject?

01:04:05.000 We don't make people who are wrong in this country pay the price, which means, you know, if you're a doctor and you screw up a few surgeries and people who should not die, die, you're done.

01:04:15.000 You'll be out of business.

01:04:17.000 They will take your license.

01:04:18.000 You won't get to kill any more people.

01:04:19.000 In government, you can continue to make these errors and you'll be promoted.

01:04:24.000 You'll be in a position to make more.

01:04:26.000 Yeah.

01:04:27.000 That'll kill you over the long haul.

01:04:28.000 Do you wonder, like, what motivation does Dick Cheney have?

01:04:32.000 I mean, he doesn't even have a heart.

01:04:34.000 They took his heart out.

01:04:35.000 They stuck some cadaver heart in there. 1.00

01:04:37.000 Listen, it's a worldview, but it's not a 1950s U.S. high school textbook worldview.

01:04:42.000 Right, but I mean, why is he doing it?

01:04:44.000 Like, what is his motivation for continuing to keep his fingers...

01:04:47.000 Depends on who you ask.

01:04:48.000 Sometimes it's money, sometimes it's powerful friends.

01:04:50.000 I've talked to these people, and they'll give you the old, you don't know how the world works speech, right?

01:04:54.000 And at that point, you have to say to yourself, okay, listen...

01:04:57.000 I know the Constitution's just a piece of paper, but at some point there's a rubber meets the road.

01:05:03.000 That's going to be my word for today's Joe Rogan show.

01:05:05.000 It'll be my fly in the ointment for today's Joe Rogan show.

01:05:07.000 But there's got to be a point where somebody has to sit down and say, look, we have a Constitution that does this.

01:05:12.000 Here's the way the world really works.

01:05:15.000 Now, either we're going to go back to one or we're going to discard one and completely embrace the other.

01:05:19.000 At this point, we embrace the hypocrisy that we still live like this, but the world's a difficult, tough place, so we're acting like that.

01:05:26.000 Does that make sense?

01:05:27.000 Yeah, no, no, it does.

01:05:29.000 It definitely makes sense.

01:05:30.000 And that dichotomy is what makes so many Americans angry.

01:05:32.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:05:34.000 Well, it's amazing that we've limited the amount of attacks on American soil to 9-11 and Pearl Harbor.

01:05:42.000 Right.

01:05:42.000 Well, you know, you had the Orlando attack.

01:05:43.000 It depends on what you classify an attack. 1.00

01:05:45.000 Well, the Orlando attack was a crazy fuck that lived in America. 1.00

01:05:49.000 Lone wolf stuff. 1.00

01:05:50.000 Yeah. 0.68

01:05:50.000 Was that guy proven to be gay? 0.68

01:05:52.000 Or is that like, I don't know what that is. 0.98

01:05:55.000 I'm sure he's gay. 0.91

01:05:55.000 How about that? 0.91

01:05:56.000 But that's a perfect example, though, of why this is so tough to defend yourself against.

01:06:01.000 Yes.

01:06:19.000 Mm-hmm.

01:06:22.000 You know, so I think the domestic radical idea has been something the government's been worried about since the first Red Scare in the 1919 era and the anarchists and that whole era.

01:06:33.000 Yeah, and I think whenever you have a government, whenever you have people that are in charge, there's going to be people that oppose those people, and they're going to try to go through—some people that are opposing them are going to go through legal channels, and they're going to protest legally, and they're going to organize and give speeches,

01:06:49.000 and other people are going to say, look, that doesn't work.

01:06:52.000 We're going to do this guerrilla style.

01:06:53.000 We're going to do this— So now we come to the hacks, right?

01:06:56.000 See, I argued in the last Common Sense program that the hacks are kind of a chickens coming home to roost thing.

01:07:03.000 That when, you know, we deputize our representatives to keep some secrets from us, because we all understand that there's going to be some of those.

01:07:10.000 I don't know.

01:07:30.000 If I put top secret on this, the boss won't see it and we'll be great.

01:07:34.000 I mean, it's human nature that after a while you're going to start to classify stuff that really shouldn't be secret, right?

01:07:39.000 Yeah.

01:07:40.000 And I said this in the last show, I talked to an intelligence operative once who wouldn't tell me anything except I asked him a question once about if you had to guess what percentage of stuff is the stuff that Americans would agree should be kept secret.

01:07:52.000 He said about 10%.

01:07:53.000 I said, what's the rest?

01:07:55.000 He said, everything you can think of.

01:07:57.000 He said, cover your own rear-end corporate deal that a senator doesn't want his constituents to know about for 40 years because he'll get voted.

01:08:05.000 It becomes a point where when you're keeping that much stuff from the American people that they have a right to know, it seems to me inevitable that there will be literally leaks, like you're trying to cover too many.

01:08:19.000 We're good to go.

01:08:32.000 So when the system breaks down to the point where the whistleblowers go through the proper channels and they become the ones who get into trouble, then you're asking for leaks.

01:08:40.000 And it's hard to say, I feel sorry for you that they leaked that vital information, but if you haven't been keeping non-vital information from us for so long, that might not have happened.

01:08:49.000 And then you do get release of stuff that none of us thinks should be released.

01:08:52.000 That's the terrible problem.

01:08:54.000 And doesn't it seem like leaks are not just inevitable now?

01:09:00.000 Baked into the pie now.

01:09:02.000 Yeah.

01:09:02.000 Yeah, baked into it.

01:09:03.000 It seems like there's almost no way to keep stuff secret now.

01:09:07.000 If you are an operative at the Democratic or Republican parties, how much would you want to bake it into the cake that you try to see that there'll be a leak against your opponents before the next election?

01:09:15.000 How much does that now become a part of your strategizing?

01:09:18.000 Yeah.

01:09:19.000 Yeah.

01:09:20.000 For sure.

01:09:21.000 I'll put out a little stuff that I hacked on the DNC kind of attitude, you know, or whatever.

01:09:25.000 I mean, listen, and if the Russians are, you know, Vladimir Putin said that, what's the problem?

01:09:30.000 American people should know this stuff so we release this information, or somebody releases this information.

01:09:35.000 But if they only release information on one side, have they influenced the election?

01:09:40.000 So you have to be careful how that works, too.

01:09:43.000 They have the ability to sort of set the tone of the discussion.

01:09:46.000 Yeah. 0.99

01:09:46.000 Yeah, I wonder what, if they checked the Republicans, if they checked, like, what kind of crazy shit was said when they realized that Donald Trump was running away with it. 0.99

01:09:55.000 I heard something that there'd been a hack, and it was like new news, so I'm not up to speed, but that there'd been a hack of the RNC2. Did you see... 0.84

01:10:03.000 Everybody's freaking out now over the fact, and again, we have to make the disclaimer that the Russian hackers or whomever, I have this Russian hackers who get mad at me when I say that, whomever it was that did this, that they've been known to alter stuff.

01:10:16.000 So you have to take it on with a grain of salt.

01:10:17.000 But what came out, I guess, was a list, and this is from the Democratic Party's main list of donors, their internal documents, which shows the top donors, how much they gave, and then what was given in return.

01:10:39.000 Oh.

01:10:48.000 There have been acts, though, ever since then, the Hatch Act was one, where they tried to limit that.

01:10:53.000 And both parties act like they don't do it anymore.

01:10:57.000 So when it comes out that they still do, people freak out.

01:11:01.000 But here's the truth.

01:11:02.000 If the Democrats do it, I'm sure the Republicans do it, too.

01:11:05.000 I'd love to see a list from the last Republican administration who their top donors were.

01:11:09.000 And all you have to do is look at who the ambassadors were, and especially the ambassadors to good places, right?

01:11:15.000 Who's the ambassador to Bermuda?

01:11:17.000 Who's the ambassador to London?

01:11:19.000 The UK one is always a coveted position.

01:11:22.000 How much did that guy give?

01:11:24.000 And because it's always been the way it is, there's a part of me that goes, eh, what are you going to do?

01:11:29.000 But the other part of me goes, that's the corruption you wish more Americans knew.

01:11:48.000 It's a very important point.

01:11:50.000 And how many people are doing it for vanity positions? 0.89

01:11:52.000 Just so they can say they are that ambassador to London.

01:11:55.000 I just saw a way to reform, Joe.

01:11:57.000 So all we have to do is get some really rich marijuana grower to give enough money so that he becomes the Department of Homeland Security director and you can get that corruption thing working in your favor.

01:12:07.000 That's actually possible with the amount of money they're making in Colorado.

01:12:10.000 You never know.

01:12:11.000 Director of Homeland Security made all of his money growing weed. 0.91

01:12:14.000 That would be ridiculous.

01:12:16.000 And it comes full circle.

01:12:17.000 How much have you paid attention to all the controversy about the Clinton Foundation?

01:12:24.000 I have a special relationship with the Clintons.

01:12:27.000 You know, I was in talk radio during that whole administration.

01:12:29.000 And they're relatively unique people as a couple.

01:12:33.000 And they're very hard to describe.

01:12:36.000 And I always try to be fair.

01:12:37.000 You know, I'm very into fair and seeing context.

01:12:39.000 But let's be honest.

01:12:41.000 These are two people that, you know, here's the way I look at it.

01:12:44.000 If you're Hillary Clinton, and they have been after you since before your husband was president, you know, in Arkansas, they were after them, right?

01:12:51.000 So you know how on you they're going to be.

01:12:55.000 Wouldn't you stay so far away from any lines that nobody could ever come close to saying you were—but they don't. 0.97

01:13:02.000 They both walk and straddle, and that—you know, if you talk to people in Arkansas, they just say, that's the Clintons.

01:13:08.000 They walk, they straddle the line, and a lot of times they go, you know, in too much of one direction.

01:13:13.000 Why would you do that?

01:13:14.000 We talked about this with Anthony Weiner, you and I, a long time ago.

01:13:17.000 If you know that stuff's out there, why would you go and run for office again?

01:13:22.000 It's the same thing with Clinton.

01:13:23.000 If you know you're the most watched man in the world, why on earth would you have an affair with a teenage intern who you know will not stay quiet about it?

01:13:31.000 It boggles the mind.

01:13:32.000 So if you're Hillary Clinton and you've got everyone trying to come up with dirt on you, Why would you do anything that was even suspicious?

01:13:40.000 And yet they still walk that line.

01:13:42.000 I don't get it.

01:13:43.000 Well, don't you think that, first of all, their patterns and their behavior and their attitudes towards things were established in the 1980s when the world was a much simpler place?

01:13:51.000 And you can get away with what happened in Mena, Arkansas.

01:13:55.000 With all that craziness, with dropping drugs out of airplanes, which is all part of that Narco series.

01:14:04.000 It's in the Narco series.

01:14:06.000 I mean, somebody was in on it. 0.99

01:14:08.000 I mean, the guy who got shot and killed, who was about to testify for George Bush, what the fuck was his name? 0.98

01:14:16.000 You're not thinking Vince Foster, are you? 0.99

01:14:18.000 No, no, no.

01:14:19.000 The pilot.

01:14:20.000 The drug pilot.

01:14:21.000 I remember the story. 0.98

01:14:23.000 Goddammit, I can't remember his name. 0.96

01:14:23.000 I remember the story, though. 0.96

01:14:24.000 Yeah, so...

01:14:25.000 Flying a Cessna into the backwood.

01:14:29.000 Obviously, some people knew about this.

01:14:31.000 Obviously, the CIA was involved.

01:14:32.000 This guy was involved with some cowboys in the CIA. They were bringing drugs in from other countries.

01:14:37.000 Remember, they were doing that during the Iran-Contra thing in the 80s, so it's not old news, yeah.

01:14:41.000 No, so somehow or another, that was standard operational procedure, at least on some level.

01:14:49.000 Whether it's rogue agents in the CIA, or rogue people in the government, or whoever was profiting on it.

01:14:57.000 And that was also, of course, what was...

01:14:59.000 What was going on in South Central Los Angeles during the Contras versus the Sandinistas.

01:15:05.000 There was a relationship.

01:15:06.000 Yeah, they were making money by selling drugs in the ghetto and they were taking that money and it was directly affecting global politics.

01:15:13.000 See, in a country that cared about reform, How many of those things have to happen before somebody would turn around and say, okay, we have a big problem, and we have to weed that problem out of the CIA or whichever agency you want to name so that it doesn't happen again?

01:15:28.000 When that doesn't happen...

01:15:30.000 I remember looking into police departments that had problems, and in LA when I was growing up, you knew which ones to avoid.

01:15:36.000 For example, there was one in Signal Hill, and we all knew you don't want to get pulled over there.

01:15:41.000 So eventually they had to disband the whole police department and start from scratch, because every time they tried to reform it, there was a culture in that little police department that absorbed new members.

01:15:51.000 And the people that wouldn't become part of the culture ended up transferring out, and the people that worked with the culture stayed.

01:15:58.000 That's a microchasm of how all these giant agencies work, where how do you change the culture of something when you would have to get rid of The people who are there now who all bought in or they wouldn't still be there.

01:16:11.000 It's like we were saying about the mainframe computer.

01:16:12.000 If you wanted to start the CIA over today, would you use any of the people that are in it now?

01:16:17.000 Hard to know because I think if you didn't, you'd end up with an agency that thought, listen, We're keeping America safe.

01:16:24.000 And if we have to dose people with LSD, as happened in the late 50s, early 1960s, as a way to make sure that our people aren't dosed with LSD, we're going to do it, you know?

01:16:33.000 The pilot was Barry Seals.

01:16:35.000 I was trying to remember.

01:16:36.000 Well done.

01:16:37.000 See, you're having the same problem I have a little bit, though. 1.00

01:16:39.000 Too many goddamn people in this world. 0.99

01:16:40.000 That's too much stuff in our brains. 1.00

01:16:41.000 Too much data.

01:16:43.000 So the Clintons, in the 1980s, they pretty much were able to get away with Pretty much whatever they wanted.

01:16:52.000 I mean, they had so much immense power, right?

01:16:55.000 Well, this was Arkansas.

01:16:56.000 The governor of Arkansas.

01:16:57.000 Yeah, but he was a freak of freaks, right? 1.00

01:16:59.000 Dude was just whipping his dick out all over the place. 0.99

01:17:01.000 Well, what's funny is Arkansas is not exactly a pipeline to the White House either. 0.99

01:17:05.000 So in that sense, it was a little like getting somebody from, you know, Mississippi as your president.

01:17:10.000 It's just a little different.

01:17:12.000 Well, yeah, no doubt.

01:17:13.000 No doubt whatsoever.

01:17:14.000 But this time, like when all this stuff was going on, established their behavior patterns.

01:17:21.000 Maybe.

01:17:22.000 And then, well, Mena, Arkansas, of course, is where the CIA was dropped, or someone in the CIA, some rogue agent.

01:17:29.000 I don't think it was like a systemic thing inside the CIA, where the top of the CIA was aware of it and condoned it and sanctioned it.

01:17:35.000 But someone was bringing in drugs, and they were bringing in drugs to Arkansas. 0.98

01:17:39.000 I don't think it's a coincidence that the fucking governor of Arkansas gets fast-tracked to becoming the president. 0.99

01:17:45.000 It's probably in some way related, in some fiber. 0.98

01:17:50.000 I don't think it's the most important aspect of his governorship, but there's some connection there.

01:17:56.000 It has to be.

01:17:57.000 I'll tell you what, though.

01:17:58.000 If you go look at Bill Clinton in the primaries, When he was basically chosen to be the Democratic candidate to run against the elder George Bush.

01:18:06.000 And you look at those stiffs he was up against.

01:18:10.000 It's how it always is.

01:18:11.000 I mean, when you look and you go, okay, there's a bunch of people who I could never vote for in a million years, and there's one person who's got some charisma, right?

01:18:18.000 I don't know how it happens that way.

01:18:20.000 I mean, if somebody wanted to say, well, that's the part that's rigged.

01:18:23.000 Listen, the two parties here are private entities that can do whatever they want.

01:18:27.000 Someone said to me the other day, what happens if Hillary Clinton drops out for health reasons? 0.96

01:18:30.000 You know, who naturally does the job devolve to?

01:18:33.000 And I said, whoever the Democratic National Committee wants it to.

01:18:35.000 Which is really fascinating when those people are registered Democrats.

01:18:38.000 Yeah, they make themselves out to be like a constitutional pillar of ours.

01:18:43.000 They're not.

01:18:43.000 They're a private entity that can do what they want.

01:18:45.000 And they will do whatever they want if they have to, if that comes down to it.

01:18:49.000 So all the people that voted in the primaries for Hillary or for Bernie or for anybody, it doesn't mean anything anymore.

01:18:53.000 So now, who are you being represented by?

01:18:56.000 Does the king just choose someone?

01:18:58.000 I mean, this is what you're down to.

01:18:59.000 You're down to like a monarchy.

01:19:00.000 Well, but that's why you said the founding – you talked about the founding fathers earlier, and I'm always blown away that Madison, who's the guy who's most responsible for writing the Constitution, was like 23. I was the most irresponsible goof-off in the world, I think, at 23. So you look at those guys and you realize how much they had a problem with what they called factions.

01:19:19.000 Their version of factions is what we would call parties today, and they thought it was poisonous.

01:19:23.000 And yet it was like a generation later, and what did they have cropping up?

01:19:27.000 Factions.

01:19:28.000 So it would be a really difficult thing.

01:19:31.000 It must be an evolutionary, natural thing to normally develop in a society like ours.

01:19:36.000 But if you decided that that was the poison pill What could you write into the founding documents that prevented that?

01:19:44.000 I don't know.

01:19:45.000 But to me, that's the root of so much of our evil in this country.

01:19:49.000 We have two parties that control a corrupt system, and in order to fix the corrupt system, the two parties would have to be on board to do it.

01:19:57.000 Well, okay, that's asking, what have we said, the fox to redesign the chicken coop?

01:20:01.000 It's not in the fox's interest.

01:20:03.000 Well, it's also what we're talking about, whether it's the CIA or the NSA. If you're asking them to redesign this thing, you're asking them to relinquish some power.

01:20:10.000 That's right.

01:20:10.000 And to redesign it in a way where they can't get back into it, even if they had to do it to save us?

01:20:14.000 Right.

01:20:15.000 I mean, that's when it gets really wiggy.

01:20:16.000 If you say, I don't want you spying on us anymore, and the next 9-11 attack we have happened because they couldn't spy on us, you better believe they'll point that out.

01:20:24.000 Yeah.

01:20:24.000 And also, if you had to redesign it, you would have to eliminate some jobs.

01:20:28.000 I mean, there's no way this thing is operating on 100% efficiency.

01:20:31.000 Oh, God!

01:20:31.000 So if somebody really audited it, you know, whether it's the CIA or the FBI or the NSA, I mean, 100% sure they're doing their best, but there's no way it's done really well.

01:20:41.000 It's just the government.

01:20:42.000 The government fucks up almost everything, because most people don't want to work for the government.

01:20:46.000 So who do you get?

01:20:47.000 You get a bunch of people that, well, okay, I'll do that job.

01:20:50.000 It's like, is anybody clamoring to be the guy at the NSA that gets to read Dan Carlin's emails?

01:20:56.000 No, I think what it is, I mean, a better way to put it is, is the system's decline.

01:20:59.000 I mean, it just deteriorates over time.

01:21:01.000 And every system is remarkably hard to go back and fix.

01:21:05.000 And the government especially.

01:21:07.000 You know, we've got 240 years of dead wood, and you don't often go in there and have a spring cleaning session, you know?

01:21:13.000 Right.

01:21:14.000 And I think the Founding Fathers were people who were aware.

01:21:17.000 They used to talk about lifespans of countries.

01:21:19.000 And so, you know, that computer analogy we use is a pretty good one.

01:21:22.000 This is an old computer that we've patched many, many times and also tasked to do many, many more things than the Constitution ever envisioned because you have a Great Depression or you have a Second World War or you have nuclear weapons appear on the scene.

01:21:35.000 So all of a sudden, we have a flexible Constitution to deal with unforeseeables, as you pointed out.

01:21:41.000 Okay, but how flexible is it?

01:21:42.000 I mean, at what point have you stretched it so far that it's become a fig leaf?

01:21:45.000 I try to remind people, we did a whole series on the decline and fall of the Roman Republic, and what a lot of people don't know is that when the Roman Empire first appeared, and for a long time afterwards, they kept all the forms.

01:21:57.000 Senators were still elected.

01:21:59.000 I mean, you have an all-powerful emperor, but they still went through the process of electing senators as though nothing had changed.

01:22:05.000 They still held elections.

01:22:06.000 They still had people giving money to senators to give them favors. 1.00

01:22:10.000 But we had a system in Rome, as if I was there, but at that point, it was a total dictatorship.

01:22:18.000 But we elected senators anyway because the forms had a long and noble tradition that was tied to the way Romans saw themselves, the same way we're tied to that 1950s high school textbook of who we are.

01:22:30.000 If we had a dictator someday, they would never be able to get rid of senators because the forms are very important.

01:22:36.000 Well, that's one of the biggest fears about the Patriot Act, right?

01:22:39.000 And the Patriot Act II as well, is that if something did happen and martial law was declared, would we really have the same system that we think we have?

01:22:48.000 Would we have that 1950s textbook version of America?

01:22:51.000 Or would we really have a military dictatorship that's disguised?

01:22:55.000 I just read a book.

01:22:57.000 I think it was called American Coup.

01:22:58.000 You know, back 20 years ago, people who wrote those books were conspiracy people who had no real...

01:23:03.000 Now the people writing those books are all insiders and they have generals writing blurbs on the back.

01:23:08.000 And this guy, it's kind of a boring book because he talks so much about FEMA and Katrina and all these things.

01:23:13.000 But sometimes when you're diagramming how these things happen, it's not...

01:23:17.000 Spy thriller type stuff.

01:23:19.000 It's really sometimes run-of-the-mill.

01:23:22.000 We had this problem.

01:23:23.000 We had...

01:23:23.000 His point is that we've been living in a society that's operating between the lines in the Constitution for 50 years now.

01:23:31.000 And that...

01:23:33.000 The government is absolutely petrified about all the threats out there to us, and in order to protect us, things like little writings on hemp paper from 240 years ago are not going to stand in the way of us protecting us from another 9-11 or a nuclear bomb going off in a harbor or something like that.

01:23:50.000 Well, of course, the argument to that is, like, of course you're going to say you're protecting us.

01:23:54.000 Of course that's the reason why you're violating the Constitution.

01:23:56.000 And sometimes you are, and sometimes you're not.

01:23:57.000 But how convenient it is that you are also controlling vast amounts of wealth, controlling so much of the ability of the United States citizens to do their jobs, to get through life, to do anything they want to do without being That's

01:24:29.000 one of the weirder Aspects about real government corruption because the real corruption is the legal shit like you're talking about the ledger showing what people did what and what they received for those donations and how much they gave and how much they got out of it and how they became like that is how is that?

01:24:48.000 Legal and insider trading is illegal. 0.96

01:24:51.000 How is that legal and Martha Quinn goes to jail, not Martha Quinn, she was a DJ. Martha Stewart, rather, goes to jail for a stock trade, you know, where she was not honest about the information that she knew about profiting off a stock trade. 1.00

01:25:09.000 It's insane, like, the disparity.

01:25:12.000 It's insane how much...

01:25:15.000 How much weird corruption is just entangled into the system that the only way to get rid of would have to be you would have to stop all those jobs that evolve around all that money coming in.

01:25:29.000 You're dealing with untold millions of dollars that's being siphoned from the system by all these people, all the lobbyists and all the special interest groups that constantly work in the Washington Hive to extract the Those people at this point, it's almost impossible without a total reset of the system.

01:25:48.000 Well, and look at how things change.

01:25:50.000 So, for example, when the Founding Fathers set up war powers, which they understood to be the most important thing, they separated the part where we decide to go to war from the power of fighting the war.

01:26:02.000 And they gave the power to fight the war to the president.

01:26:04.000 He's the commander in chief.

01:26:05.000 But they did not give him the power to decide to go to war.

01:26:09.000 Right?

01:26:09.000 That's too much power for one guy.

01:26:11.000 They gave that to Congress.

01:26:12.000 So Congress has the power to declare war.

01:26:14.000 Once they do, the president has really extreme emergency authority to fight the war.

01:26:19.000 When Harry Truman took us into Korea in 1950, he He called it a police action.

01:26:26.000 And he called it a police action because you don't need to declare war to have a police action.

01:26:31.000 But he sent the United States.

01:26:32.000 We lost 50,000 guys or something in Korea.

01:26:35.000 And, you know, a lot more Koreans.

01:26:37.000 Once you do that, we've never declared war again.

01:26:40.000 As a matter of fact, no president even...

01:26:42.000 It throws that out there.

01:26:43.000 They would love to have a support, a declaration of support by Congress.

01:26:46.000 But once you do that, you break an important wall, the wall that says that the president has basically unlimited powers in wartime, and now he has the right to decide when wartime is.

01:26:57.000 That's a firewall that had been built into the system, that once it's broken, you can never repair that.

01:27:03.000 You can never go back.

01:27:04.000 Congress has no way to repair that firewall.

01:27:06.000 So now, somebody said to me, if Donald Trump's elected president...

01:27:10.000 Can he use a nuclear bomb against a country? 0.52

01:27:12.000 Or can he decide, I'm going to scare the heck out of North Korea, and I'm going to, you know, drop a bomb off their coast?

01:27:18.000 Yes, and he can do it without asking anybody.

01:27:21.000 And the only people that might tell him no are the military.

01:27:25.000 And if the military starts telling the president no, that's almost as scary as a president that can drop a nuclear bomb whenever he wants to.

01:27:31.000 So that's, in the founder's Construction of the country, in their mind, you would have had to have gone to Congress and say, can we drop a nuclear bomb on North Korea?

01:27:42.000 And then Congress would have voted, decided, and then the president would have been empowered to take whatever measures were necessary.

01:27:47.000 That firewall's gone.

01:27:49.000 The president has extreme emergency authority and foreign policy now.

01:27:52.000 He didn't have to ask Congress for anything.

01:27:55.000 There's only one thing Congress can do.

01:27:56.000 They have the power of the purse, so they can cut off the funds.

01:28:00.000 But can you imagine our troops, say, in Iraq or Afghanistan, and the Congress doesn't want them there anymore, so the choice they have is to stop sending them meals and replacement bullets, and it's not going to happen.

01:28:11.000 So those are the ways that the Constitution gets destroyed.

01:28:16.000 And Truman, I mean, you look at what we mentioned earlier, the CIA, the NSA, that power.

01:28:21.000 Truman did more damage to this country in one presidency than anyone I can think of.

01:28:26.000 And yet, I cut him some slack because the world had never existed like it existed in his era.

01:28:33.000 He had whole new challenges to deal with.

01:28:36.000 It's like when Obama came into office and promised to undo the extremes of the previous administration.

01:28:42.000 Had he done that, we could have said, okay, 9-11 happened, we freaked out, and then we fixed it.

01:28:47.000 We got our balance back.

01:28:49.000 By not doing that, he codified it.

01:28:52.000 Now that's the rule, right?

01:28:54.000 When both parties agree on something, it becomes the way we do things now.

01:28:57.000 So if Truman had left office and Eisenhower had come in as a member of the other party and said, whoa, this CIA thing is more like an American Gestapo.

01:29:05.000 We're going to get rid of it.

01:29:06.000 Boom! 0.99

01:29:06.000 Truman is a blip. 0.99

01:29:07.000 But when he decides to embrace the CIA, now that's the way we do business.

01:29:12.000 So, if the two parties don't sort of look out for each other and say, listen, 9-11 is a one-off strange experience, okay, we understand how somebody could overreact and freak out, we'll fix it, and instead say, no, we'll keep things the way they are, Then you've taken another step down,

01:29:29.000 another firewall's been broken, and the Constitution's been stretched again to the point where there are big holes in it now.

01:29:34.000 Is there a Fourth Amendment anymore, really?

01:29:36.000 I mean, there's amendments to the Constitution.

01:29:38.000 And people will say to me all the time, Dan, you say our freedom's going away.

01:29:42.000 Tell me when we repealed an amendment.

01:29:44.000 Doesn't work that way.

01:29:45.000 Rome didn't do that, right?

01:29:46.000 They kept the senators.

01:29:47.000 The forms stay.

01:29:49.000 But the reality can be changed mightily, right?

01:29:53.000 Yeah.

01:29:54.000 And it seems like once it's changed, you know, what is that old saying about power lost, never recovered?

01:30:01.000 It's exactly right.

01:30:02.000 And let's understand something.

01:30:03.000 Let's not take the American people off the blame list.

01:30:06.000 If another 9-11 happens, they're going to go and call for the heads of the people that voted against spying on it.

01:30:12.000 I mean, that's how we are.

01:30:14.000 We're such a panicky people that we're not willing to suck up a lot of casualties if that's what's required to defend some of this stuff.

01:30:20.000 If you're going to say you can't spy on Americans, just understand, some nasty Americans are going to get fertilizer bombs and blow up stuff sometimes because they slip through that protection for you and me and everyone else.

01:30:31.000 Yeah, I wonder if over time, like going back to that battleship analogy, like that's going to be the only thing that clears this up, is that the people that start getting elected into office deal with the new level of transparency, and the people that are growing up now who eventually become politicians, they grow up in a different world.

01:30:48.000 And so their view of what's possible and not possible is very different than, like we were talking about the Clintons, who...

01:30:54.000 You know, just kind of had an open pass to kind of do a lot of shit that they wanted to do back in the 1980s and in the 90s. 0.65

01:31:02.000 And they're still kind of operating. 0.96

01:31:04.000 Like when you're talking about Hillary Clinton and the Clintons just kind of doing their thing.

01:31:08.000 If you look at the difference between...

01:31:11.000 This is not a conspiracy theory.

01:31:13.000 If you look at the difference between what Hillary Clinton says the FBI found out about her emails...

01:31:20.000 Versus what the FBI says about what they found out about Hillary Clinton's emails. 0.57

01:31:26.000 Someone's lying, and I don't think it's the FBI. Someone's lying.

01:31:31.000 Her version of it is a lie.

01:31:33.000 It's just not real.

01:31:35.000 What she's saying What's the assumption built into that, though?

01:31:56.000 Yeah.

01:31:56.000 And here's the thing.

01:31:58.000 I mean, this is like a bias we all have.

01:31:59.000 If you want to support that candidate anyway, you're inclined to believe what they say and disinclined to believe what the other guy says.

01:32:06.000 This is part of the problem about the binary lesser of two evils thing we get into, because Hillary Clinton is one of the most unpopular candidates. 1.00

01:32:13.000 I mean, I always tell, you know, I have two daughters.

01:32:15.000 And they constantly ask me these really uncomfortable questions about why don't we have women presidents and all this kind of stuff.

01:32:20.000 So I'm all in favor of that.

01:32:21.000 And I have a lot of women who say Hillary Clinton's the most qualified candidate we've ever had for high office. 1.00

01:32:26.000 This is all just sexism.

01:32:27.000 And what I try to tell them is, is this really the person you want to be the poster child, though, as the first woman president?

01:32:34.000 Because I'll tell you what, if current trends continue, I don't imagine Republicans are going to lay up on her at all, right?

01:32:40.000 The whole...

01:32:41.000 The entire Clinton administration was the Republicans trying to get them for something.

01:32:44.000 So imagine she gets elected, imagine that they continue to hound her the way they do, and remembering that they tend to walk that line, right, being the Clintons.

01:32:52.000 There's going to be 90% of nothing in there.

01:32:55.000 Travel Gates and Rose Hill law firms.

01:32:57.000 But there's going to be something they find eventually, and they will impeach her for that.

01:33:00.000 And if she's the first woman president to be impeached, how does that help you?

01:33:05.000 If the first African-American president had been impeached, that wouldn't have looked very good, right? 0.81

01:33:10.000 And I've got to say, President Obama, I don't like a lot of stuff he's done, but from a scandal standpoint, he'd been pretty good.

01:33:16.000 If you grade these people on a curve, his scandal record's been pretty good.

01:33:21.000 If you don't count accidental deaths in drones...

01:33:24.000 That's not a scandal.

01:33:25.000 That's standard operating procedure.

01:33:27.000 That's how we do it.

01:33:28.000 That's foreign policy, baby.

01:33:29.000 That's not a bug.

01:33:31.000 That's a feature.

01:33:32.000 But it seems like a scandal when people find out the numbers of innocent people killed by drones and also the real issues with him saying that he was going to support whistleblowers and what they've actually done with whistleblowers.

01:33:44.000 And how hard they've been on the freedom of the press.

01:33:46.000 It's been a very confusing time for a lot of people that were Obama supporters eight years ago and thought, like I did, that this was the answer.

01:33:55.000 Like, finally we have this super articulate young guy who has a view of the world that's similar to us.

01:34:01.000 He said all the right things when he ran for office.

01:34:04.000 And said them well.

01:34:05.000 But again, what he had said was, we're going to go and overturn the mistakes of the previous administration.

01:34:10.000 Had he done that, he would have reestablished a few firewalls that we ripped apart.

01:34:15.000 It's always interesting to try to theorize why that didn't happen.

01:34:19.000 People love to tell you those stories.

01:34:21.000 Oh, they took him in the back room and they showed him the Kennedy assassination and said, any questions?

01:34:25.000 That's a Bill Hicks bit.

01:34:26.000 But you don't know!

01:34:27.000 You know, a part of you can say, listen, they took him in the back room and said, here are the threats we stopped last month.

01:34:32.000 Do you really want to do what you say?

01:34:33.000 You know, you don't, but you would love the president to at least say, okay, I'm going to hold a televised press conference now, and I'm going to say, here's what I said when I ran for president.

01:34:43.000 Here's why I can't do it.

01:34:45.000 Right.

01:34:45.000 You can't do that, though.

01:34:46.000 Yeah, but I was going to say, when they don't do that, you open up the door to what the hell's going on, right?

01:34:51.000 He gave you this small promise and that small promise and maybe a health care reform, but he said he was going to essentially repair the Constitution, and he didn't.

01:35:00.000 So what's the story why?

01:35:01.000 Yeah, it's just so hard to guess, and he's not going to tell you.

01:35:07.000 So it's one of those things that we're just going to all have to debate about to the end of time and then go home angry.

01:35:12.000 Well, as everyone says, though, what happens when you get the truly, truly, without limits candidate into office without those firewalls?

01:35:22.000 I mean, it's one thing to say, listen, the president can drop a nuclear bomb on anybody he wants to legally.

01:35:27.000 It's another thing to have a president who says, you know, I can drop a nuclear bomb.

01:35:31.000 I'll just, you know, we'll do that.

01:35:32.000 It's also hard to understand, like, when you've seen a guy like Trump, and I want to get back to the Clinton Foundation before I forget, but when you've seen a guy like Trump And you listen to the people that have actually interviewed him or talked to him and had conversations with him.

01:35:46.000 Like, one of them was...

01:35:47.000 I forget what head of military that he was discussing this with, but he was talking about the nuclear option.

01:35:53.000 Why can't we just use nuclear weapons?

01:35:54.000 That line, yeah.

01:35:55.000 Yeah, you heard about that, right?

01:35:57.000 Yeah, everybody knows about that.

01:35:58.000 You wonder, like, what was the tone of that discussion?

01:36:02.000 Was he just being curious versus... 0.97

01:36:04.000 Yeah, well, or was he being silly? 0.94

01:36:07.000 You know, I mean, maybe, look, he's Donald Trump, right? 0.99

01:36:09.000 He's a charmer.

01:36:10.000 So he's this public figure.

01:36:12.000 He meets people, he talks to them, he puts on this persona.

01:36:16.000 Obviously, a lot of the stuff he says, in a lot of ways, he's like a comedian, because he's saying many things for effect.

01:36:24.000 And whether or not he believes it or not is not the point.

01:36:26.000 The point is they're going to get a big impact. 0.99

01:36:28.000 He's going to kill. 0.87

01:36:29.000 You know, like... 0.95

01:36:29.000 So I told the president of Mexico, the wall just got 10 foot higher! 0.95

01:36:33.000 When he's doing stuff like that, he's doing lines.

01:36:36.000 Those are punch lines.

01:36:37.000 It might not be that funny, but it's a punch.

01:36:41.000 And he's saying those in weird places.

01:36:45.000 It's part of what makes him interesting, is that he's like this weird entertainer that's hijacked the system.

01:36:52.000 And I say interesting, it's like a very generous use of the word.

01:36:56.000 It's scary.

01:36:57.000 What interests me, though, is you get these...

01:36:59.000 It's funny because, you know, on Twitter, some of the Trump supporters, and I don't ever want to broad brush because I know a lot of people that are going to vote for Trump that are old people, that are fine people, that are...

01:37:08.000 But there's certainly an edge on some of those people that support him that has certain racism, all kinds of things.

01:37:15.000 We see them on Twitter.

01:37:16.000 And so...

01:37:18.000 When one of them was talking about how Donald Trump is this...

01:37:22.000 Cuck-servative is one of the words they like to use now.

01:37:27.000 But to me...

01:37:29.000 No American who understands the United States well would want to vote for some strongman.

01:37:35.000 That whole attitude of wanting some strongman figure is as un-American as I can think of.

01:37:40.000 And if you go study your Roman Republic history, it was the strongman riding in on a white horse that really signaled the beginning of the end.

01:37:49.000 Anyone who wants too much power and promises to use it, that's somebody to be afraid of.

01:37:55.000 Yeah.

01:37:55.000 In my book, anyway.

01:37:56.000 No, it's definitely not a measured person.

01:37:58.000 I do not want some strong man.

01:38:00.000 Well, there's things that he says that you know that he's just trying to get a reaction.

01:38:03.000 Like, what did he say about McCain?

01:38:06.000 Is that he likes people that didn't get caught?

01:38:10.000 I know.

01:38:10.000 Like...

01:38:11.000 What the fuck are you saying? 1.00

01:38:12.000 And when he was basically a guy who, you know, five deferments or whatever he had, that's a, you know, that's chutzpah. 1.00

01:38:18.000 That's chutzpah.

01:38:19.000 I mean, what else is that?

01:38:20.000 But wow.

01:38:21.000 It's also what he does.

01:38:22.000 He says those outrageous things.

01:38:24.000 He hits those punches. 1.00

01:38:25.000 Well, someone's raping him. 0.98

01:38:26.000 You know, he's got like these punchlines. 0.96

01:38:28.000 Look at who he was up against on the primary stage with a bunch of stiff robotic people repeating talking points.

01:38:34.000 It was a little like Clinton was in his primaries in the early 90s when it's a bunch of deadbeat, stiff, cardboard cutout pretend figures and one person that you don't know what they're going to say next and that becomes interesting.

01:38:46.000 Well, what's interesting is the charismatic type people that we are so attracted to really are not what you want as a leader.

01:38:54.000 You don't want that person that needs so much attention that they polish their persona to a point where they're incredibly influential.

01:39:00.000 Because a lot of that when you're seeing, it's like they're entertainers.

01:39:05.000 I mean, that's what it is.

01:39:06.000 When you're a really charismatic person, you figure out a way to speak in a way that...

01:39:12.000 People like you more.

01:39:13.000 And then you've exercised that to the point where it's a well-honed muscle with incredible endurance and you have a great sensitivity to how people are perceiving you so you know how to come across as noble and patriotic and brilliant.

01:39:26.000 We all know that some of the things that people say, like standard things that people say, there's some of them that you really shouldn't even be able to say anymore because it doesn't mean anything and you shouldn't be allowed to just hijack those words and just use it to gain merit like, God bless our troops.

01:39:41.000 I know. 0.99

01:39:41.000 What the What the fuck do you mean? 0.99

01:39:42.000 What do you mean by that? 0.99

01:39:44.000 It's like the national anthem.

01:39:44.000 When people freak out over that, I always say, listen, it'd be nice if we freaked out a little bit about what these songs and flags and symbols represent, instead of freaking out over the symbol and ignoring the stuff.

01:39:53.000 Exactly.

01:39:54.000 I mean, we're talking about a person who's in an incredible position of influence, and they're saying these things that are kind of not like a real sentence.

01:40:02.000 It's not really what you thought.

01:40:03.000 You just knew that other people have said that.

01:40:06.000 It's something you say, so you're saying it.

01:40:08.000 But you're saying it about a very important thing.

01:40:10.000 You're saying about the young people, the children of all the people that are here, the 18-year-old kids that are sent over there to shoot people they've never met.

01:40:19.000 And you're saying, God bless those people.

01:40:22.000 What is God?

01:40:23.000 Are you saying the invisible man in the sky with the harp?

01:40:26.000 Is that who you're saying? 0.99

01:40:27.000 You're saying, God bless our kids to go kill other people's kids? 0.97

01:40:31.000 Are you sure that that's how you want to say that?

01:40:34.000 Like you just wanted to have this open statement, God bless our troops?

01:40:38.000 Do I want our troops to be safe?

01:40:39.000 Of course.

01:40:40.000 Do I wish that we didn't have to use them?

01:40:42.000 We didn't have to have...

01:40:43.000 Absolutely.

01:40:44.000 It's not a negative in any way, shape, or form towards the military, but it's these expressions that leaders are just...

01:40:51.000 They're freely allowed to plug into.

01:40:54.000 It's like a happy birthday to you, or like a weird...

01:40:57.000 You're dealing with massive issues that are super...

01:41:01.000 Like, not just charged, but the consequences of being wrong or right or being unsuccessful are massive.

01:41:09.000 They're just gigantic.

01:41:10.000 You mentioned something I've always found very interesting, which is the charisma of the individual.

01:41:15.000 Yeah.

01:41:16.000 A poli-sci professor back in college who happened to be a German guy.

01:41:19.000 So he was sort of viewing our system from outside our system.

01:41:23.000 And he said, you know, this is how he said, the problem with you Americans is you have a president that combines two jobs.

01:41:30.000 If you were a European country, that would be two jobs.

01:41:33.000 One is the bean counter guy, the one you were mentioning, the guy you want to be president, the one that's, you know, he's maybe not so great at the big speeches and you don't want that guy going to the funerals and representing America.

01:41:43.000 And he goes, and then we have in Europe chancellors or presidents that these people physically represent the soul.

01:41:49.000 They go to the funerals.

01:41:50.000 So he said, you want John Wayne to be that guy.

01:41:53.000 And then you want some bean counter to be the other guy.

01:41:56.000 But in your country, you require both of those things in the same person.

01:42:00.000 He says, you know how often you get John Wayne, who's also a bean counter? 1.00

01:42:03.000 He goes, that's your problem.

01:42:05.000 He goes, you end up usually electing the John Wayne and wishing you'd had a bean counter.

01:42:10.000 So, I mean, in Europe, he said those are two separate jobs.

01:42:13.000 It's a good point.

01:42:14.000 It's a good point.

01:42:15.000 What I was getting at by the expressions is like saying things like God bless the troops or God bless America is that just the whole way of talking as a politician is so it's so false and so accepted that we know that they're gonna stand in front of all these people with this pre-planned out speech that is like this weird rally this weird Artificial strip club DJ voice that they put on.

01:42:40.000 You know what I mean?

01:42:41.000 But this is why Trump was so, even to me, attractive early on.

01:42:45.000 Because he exposed...

01:42:46.000 What happened to Rubio was a perfect example.

01:42:49.000 If you remember the primary debates with Trump and Rubio, Rubio kept repeating the talking points.

01:42:55.000 So then Christie, among other people, said, that's a talking point and you keep saying it.

01:42:59.000 And then he said it again two more times, almost proving that this is all scripted.

01:43:03.000 The fun part of Donald Trump earlier on was he exposed all that.

01:43:07.000 Because you sometimes got the feeling that he didn't prep at all, right?

01:43:10.000 I mean, you didn't know what he was going to say.

01:43:12.000 I love trying to imagine the dilemma.

01:43:15.000 You know, before these debates, they always have someone stand in for the other candidate.

01:43:19.000 Who do you get to stand in for Trump?

01:43:22.000 Like with Hillary Clinton practicing her debates, who sits there? 1.00

01:43:25.000 You have to get a comedian or something.

01:43:27.000 But the point is that...

01:43:30.000 That was the fun.

01:43:31.000 He exposed kind of the artificial kabuki theater sort of way this has developed.

01:43:37.000 And I liked that because I think it's good when more Americans see what it really is, right?

01:43:42.000 In other words, most of the time, you're right.

01:43:44.000 They either get fooled by that or they've heard it so many times they don't even pay attention.

01:43:47.000 Trump helped expose that.

01:43:49.000 So in that sense, that was good for the system.

01:43:51.000 Of course, now we've gone quite a bit farther down that road, and I don't think it is so good for the system anymore.

01:43:57.000 I do think Anybody would beat Hillary Clinton almost.

01:44:00.000 I mean, I think, you know, Democrats keep saying to me, if you don't vote for Hillary Clinton, you're going to put Trump in office and that'll be your fault.

01:44:06.000 And I keep saying, it's not my fault you put Hillary Clinton up as your candidate.

01:44:10.000 I mean, in 2008, we saw how unpopular she was. 0.63

01:44:13.000 She shouldn't have lost to Barack Obama.

01:44:15.000 She was going to be coronated then.

01:44:17.000 Do you realize if she hadn't had a 70-something-year-old democratic socialist who, let's be honest, does not have a ton of charisma, and a guy nobody's ever heard from as her only two primary challengers up on that stage, she wouldn't be here.

01:44:29.000 If Joe Biden, and this is the first time I can think of that, a vice president hasn't tried to run himself.

01:44:35.000 If Joe Biden had run, he would be up against Trump now.

01:44:38.000 And I don't think Trump would stand a chance, to be honest.

01:44:40.000 And I don't like Joe Biden, but I just think he's a zero.

01:44:43.000 And right now, Trump is a negative running against Hillary, who's a negative. 0.99

01:44:47.000 A zero kicks both their rear ends.

01:44:48.000 Yeah, and he's also a zero who's had no negative consequences of eight years in office. 0.83

01:44:54.000 Which is amazing, because he's known for gaffes. 0.98

01:44:56.000 Yeah, he's a goofy dude.

01:44:58.000 Well, we used to have this thing in Boston at Stitch's Comedy Club. 0.82

01:45:01.000 We'd call it Joe Biden Night.

01:45:03.000 This was in 1988. Malarkey.

01:45:04.000 He's an Irish guy.

01:45:05.000 We would steal other people's material.

01:45:07.000 That's what you would do.

01:45:08.000 Joe Biden.

01:45:09.000 Yeah, because people don't know, but Biden plagiarized Kennedy's speeches when he was running for president in 88. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:45:15.000 It was a big deal.

01:45:16.000 I recall.

01:45:16.000 Everybody's kind of forgot about that, but he literally just stole giant passages out of Kennedy.

01:45:20.000 I love that that's something we look back on now and go, ah, the good old days when that was the only thing we could slam somebody for.

01:45:26.000 Well, they're still doing it.

01:45:27.000 Like, didn't Melania, or how do you say her, she stole... 1.00

01:45:30.000 She claims she didn't, but it's a remarkable coincidence.

01:45:32.000 Well, it's Michelle Obama's exact words, isn't it?

01:45:34.000 I know.

01:45:35.000 What are the odds? 1.00

01:45:36.000 She didn't write that shit anyway. 0.99

01:45:38.000 I wouldn't be surprised, and someone brought this up, and it wasn't me, but someone suggested it, and I think they're probably right, that Trump... 0.99

01:45:46.000 Did it on purpose and plagiarized Michelle Obama's speech so that people would talk about it, so it would give even more attention to his campaign.

01:45:53.000 I love the Trump questions.

01:45:56.000 I mean, Michael Moore, of all people, came out with a piece about three weeks ago, and he started the piece off by saying something to the effect of, you don't have to believe what I'm about to tell you, but I will tell you that I have spoken to people who are in the know who tell me that Trump doesn't even want this gig,

01:46:12.000 that this is something that has gotten out of control.

01:46:15.000 That this was more of a, I'll get a TV series afterwards, and that he didn't expect he'd do this good.

01:46:20.000 And I thought to myself, okay, I don't know that I believe that, but if that's true, this is the most unusual, funky, weird American political history story I've ever heard.

01:46:30.000 I think it's the last gaps of a dying empire.

01:46:32.000 I just don't think you can continue the way they've been doing it.

01:46:36.000 I think this is showing us that.

01:46:38.000 There are no good representatives.

01:46:40.000 There's no good candidates.

01:46:43.000 There's no way we didn't know about them if they were there.

01:46:46.000 We would know about them.

01:46:47.000 I mean, maybe there's some young senators that are coming up and there's some young congresspeople that are coming up. 0.70

01:46:54.000 Maybe.

01:46:54.000 Well, this was in Lawrence Lessig's book, Republic Lost, which, by the way, if anyone wants to go check out, he put it on the internet for free now.

01:47:00.000 So you can read it.

01:47:01.000 Was he a commie?

01:47:03.000 Well, Harvard, maybe.

01:47:05.000 But one of the things he said in there that was so interesting is he showed how people who are getting started, you know, running for mayor, you know, the low-level things, how the parties begin the weeding out process.

01:47:16.000 And the first thing that they want to know is, how good are you at raising money?

01:47:21.000 And this determines whether or not the party lets this mayoral candidate put the R or D after their name, or that mayoral candidate.

01:47:27.000 So in other words, from the very beginning, one of the main qualifications is how good are you at raising money?

01:47:32.000 Okay, so fast forward to when that guy or woman is up on the stage running for president, and they have four other elected positions leading up to that, all of which require you to be a better fundraiser.

01:47:43.000 When that's one of the number one qualifications required for the parties to let you progress, Then what do you end up with at the end of the line?

01:47:50.000 I mean, what are the carrots and sticks that they're looking for?

01:47:53.000 A little bit different than maybe what you and I as voters are looking for.

01:47:56.000 That's why Trump is such a weird one, right?

01:47:57.000 Because he's a guy who has so much money. 1.00

01:48:00.000 He funded most of this shit by himself, allegedly. 1.00

01:48:02.000 Allegedly. 1.00

01:48:03.000 Yeah.

01:48:03.000 People like to...

01:48:04.000 He obviously has money.

01:48:06.000 Or credit.

01:48:06.000 He's got really good credit.

01:48:08.000 I mean, he could sell some of his shit and he would have money. 0.99

01:48:10.000 He owns some of that stuff. 0.99

01:48:11.000 It seems like he does have a lot of stuff, and maybe his money's wrapped up in a lot of that stuff, I guess.

01:48:16.000 I don't know.

01:48:17.000 I'd like to stop voting for 70-year-old people, and it's not an ageism kind of thing.

01:48:21.000 But as a person who just mentioned to you that at 50, I'm starting to forget things, I can only imagine what I'll be like in 20 years.

01:48:27.000 Well, I said that about Hillary Clinton, and people call me sexist.

01:48:30.000 They were like, that's sexist.

01:48:31.000 I'm like, she's an old lady. 1.00

01:48:32.000 Yeah.

01:48:33.000 And Donald Trump is older than her.

01:48:35.000 He's an old man, that's right. 0.95

01:48:36.000 You know what 70 was?

01:48:38.000 If you go watch those TV shows from like the 1950s and you see their portrayal of a 70 year old, it's sitting on the porch falling asleep and whittling.

01:48:45.000 You know, I mean, that's what this is.

01:48:47.000 70 may be the new 60, but 60 ain't great either.

01:48:50.000 Well, it's definitely not the prime of your cognitive abilities.

01:48:54.000 It's not the prime of your physical health.

01:48:55.000 Your experience level may be good, but your bus speed is terrible.

01:48:58.000 There you go again with the bus.

01:48:59.000 I love that.

01:49:00.000 Trump doesn't even have experience, so it's even more bizarre.

01:49:03.000 So it's not like you're dealing with this elderly statesman that has so much knowledge and so much invested in our system of government and really believes in it so much that he wants to lead this country and make America great again.

01:49:14.000 No, you gotta...

01:49:15.000 Super rich guy who's famous for going, you're fired!

01:49:18.000 And when Trump supporters say, well, he'll pick the best people, I always want to point out, you know, he's already shown some of the people that he likes, and there's the same old group of people you've had before.

01:49:28.000 I mean, he's not going and picking other business people who've never...

01:49:31.000 He goes and finds his four...

01:49:32.000 And you're going, okay, it's the same group.

01:49:34.000 I mean, so I get Donald Trump presiding over the same old group of people who've been wrong about everything so far.

01:49:41.000 I mean, that's the problem, is that how do you get away from the people who are consistently wrong?

01:49:46.000 In a merit-based system, the people that should be promoted are the ones who are right more often.

01:49:52.000 We don't get that.

01:49:53.000 We have the same faces forever.

01:49:56.000 Forever.

01:49:57.000 I mean, the same guys who are on...

01:49:58.000 I always say, if CNN is going to put, to just name one, these experts to tell us what this latest North Korea nuclear missile thing means, would you please put up their track record the way you would put up the wins and loss record of a manager in baseball?

01:50:11.000 Do you want that manager who's 4-72 explaining to you the World Series strategy, or are you going to say, this guy doesn't know Jack?

01:50:18.000 Because if they put the records of these people they have on the programs, you'd look at it and go, I'm not listening to this guy.

01:50:23.000 He's consistently wrong.

01:50:25.000 Yeah.

01:50:27.000 But once someone becomes someone that people recognize in that regard...

01:50:30.000 That's right.

01:50:31.000 You're an expert.

01:50:31.000 You're in the Rolodex.

01:50:33.000 I'll call you when I need a quote.

01:50:34.000 That's right.

01:50:35.000 It's a weird time.

01:50:37.000 I think it is the weirdest time ever in politics.

01:50:39.000 I don't think there's ever been anything weirder than this.

01:50:41.000 Well, let me show you what bothers an independent like yours truly.

01:50:44.000 If you look at the demographics of the United States, the independents are actually, the last poll I saw, we're a slight majority now.

01:50:51.000 So divide the pie into three, Democrats, Republicans, and everybody else, which is what the independents are. 0.84

01:50:57.000 We're not a party.

01:50:58.000 We don't have a candidate we could agree upon, but we're everyone else.

01:51:01.000 We're the kingmakers in this election, right?

01:51:03.000 Then you watch CNN or Fox, and they have 10,000 analysts talking about politics on there on election night and everything else.

01:51:10.000 And half of them are Democratic operatives and half are Republican operatives.

01:51:15.000 Where the heck is anybody who could speak for that giant slice of the pie?

01:51:20.000 And you would think that common sense would dictate you would grab some people, right?

01:51:25.000 What are independents thinking?

01:51:26.000 Instead, they ask Democrats and Republicans what independents are thinking.

01:51:30.000 And I'm not saying that because I have a point.

01:51:32.000 I'm saying that because it confounds me.

01:51:34.000 I don't get it.

01:51:35.000 It seems pretty straightforward.

01:51:36.000 It seems like if CNN or any of these news networks decided to help support this independent idea and bring in independence and show that, that independents are the vast majority of the voters, or the majority, rather, the slight majority, of the voters in America, if they showed that and promoted that idea,

01:51:53.000 people would go, wow, I didn't know that.

01:51:55.000 That kind of reporting could shift.

01:51:57.000 But are they in on a conspiracy like that?

01:51:59.000 No, I think they're complicit because they have relationships with the people that they're interviewing.

01:52:03.000 I think that's true.

01:52:04.000 Look, where's the money?

01:52:05.000 The money is interviewing and getting on camera the people that are the most popular right now and most likely to win. 1.00

01:52:11.000 That's why one of the most amazing things that Trump did was all that shit talking he did, talking about Mexicans being rapists and all this nuts about the wall and all the different crazy things that he said. 0.99

01:52:22.000 When he did that, the news was forced to cover him. 1.00

01:52:25.000 They were forced to.

01:52:26.000 I think they liked it as long as we were still in the primary stage.

01:52:29.000 Yeah, they thought, there's no way this guy's going to win.

01:52:31.000 Everybody said that.

01:52:32.000 There's no way this guy's going to win.

01:52:33.000 Right.

01:52:33.000 I said that.

01:52:34.000 I was one of the people who said that.

01:52:35.000 Well, he's now neck and neck with Hillary in the national polls.

01:52:38.000 I will say this.

01:52:40.000 And didn't I just say you shouldn't listen to people who have a bad track record?

01:52:44.000 Right.

01:52:44.000 So I was wrong about that.

01:52:45.000 So bear that in mind.

01:52:46.000 0-1 on my Trump analysis on how far he'll go.

01:52:48.000 So just be fair.

01:52:50.000 But...

01:52:51.000 You know, when you look at the American electoral system like an analyst does, they notice important states you have to win, right?

01:52:58.000 This state has to, you know, as Ohio goes or as Florida, there's certain places.

01:53:03.000 And then there are other places that are gimmies.

01:53:05.000 This state will always go blue.

01:53:06.000 This state will always go red.

01:53:08.000 So the battleground are the states that are the toss-ups.

01:53:12.000 In a bunch of those states, Hillary Clinton is leading. 1.00

01:53:15.000 And so the attitude that the Sharpies at least have is that it doesn't matter what the polls look like.

01:53:21.000 It matters how Ohio goes and it matters how Florida, you know, so in other words, those are the choke points.

01:53:30.000 I mean, when Hillary Clinton decides four years ago, I'm going to run for president, okay, get into Ohio now.

01:53:35.000 Start working those places now.

01:53:37.000 And so when people talk about Trump not having a robust establishment or organization on the ground, this is where he's going to get... 0.57

01:53:46.000 Killed. 0.99

01:53:47.000 They'll kill him in those states. 1.00

01:53:48.000 And then he may win.

01:53:49.000 You know, you could conceivably come up with an election where Trump gets more actual votes, but Clinton wins the Electoral College and wins the key states.

01:53:57.000 And that's how the Sharpies, who do this for a living, as consultants and as campaign strategists, that's how they win. 0.85

01:54:05.000 They find those places.

01:54:06.000 But I think when you see her fainting at that 9-11 thing, when they're trying to walk her to the car and she starts falling down.

01:54:11.000 Bad timing on that, huh?

01:54:13.000 It's terrible.

01:54:14.000 All of a sudden, Drudge looks like a Nostradamus in that, doesn't he?

01:54:16.000 Yeah, well, it's terrible to see.

01:54:19.000 It's terrible to see that she's in such poor health that she starts just falling down.

01:54:24.000 I've got to tell you, though, Joe, you could do it because you're in good shape.

01:54:27.000 If I had tried to do what either one of those two people had done in terms of what their schedule has been like, I would die.

01:54:34.000 100%.

01:54:35.000 I had a major drinking problem.

01:54:36.000 I'd be drinking too much caffeine.

01:54:37.000 I'd be drinking too much alcohol.

01:54:39.000 I'd take up smoking.

01:54:40.000 I don't know what I'd do, but I mean, what we require those people to do with this permanent campaign that goes on forever, and these are 70-year-old people, as we said, I'm amazed they both haven't broken down.

01:54:51.000 And if I'm Trump, I would look at this and go, do I really want this?

01:54:54.000 If this is how hard the job will be, I could be in Hawaii.

01:54:58.000 I could be vacated.

01:55:00.000 They all go gray.

01:55:01.000 What's going to happen?

01:55:02.000 Trump is gray, let's be honest.

01:55:04.000 Right.

01:55:04.000 But how much is a 70-year-old guy going to age when he looks at how old the president's getting those jobs?

01:55:09.000 I think Trump's going to sleep in.

01:55:11.000 He's going to hire people to do all the dirty work. 0.95

01:55:13.000 He's just going to get on the internet and go, you're fired!

01:55:16.000 Have a YouTube channel.

01:55:18.000 Who knows?

01:55:19.000 You know, there is a part of you that would love to just have a view of what it, you know, like a Gilligan's Island episode where you have a dream sequence where the coconut hits you on the head and you imagine what it's...

01:55:29.000 I don't want to live through it, but I'd love to see it for a minute to see what it would look like.

01:55:33.000 Hillary Clinton will just be more of the same. 1.00

01:55:35.000 We're heading towards an iceberg here, and she's one of the people that set the course.

01:55:39.000 So that's my problem with her.

01:55:41.000 She's doubling down on what we've always had, whereas Trump is the wild card.

01:55:46.000 I mean, you just don't know. 1.00

01:55:47.000 Well, like you said, there's a lot of intelligent people that support Trump, but man, there's a lot of assholes that support Trump. 1.00

01:55:53.000 Can you explain? 0.99

01:55:53.000 I want you to explain. 0.99

01:55:54.000 You see that 69-year-old lady that got punched in the face at a Trump rally? 1.00

01:55:56.000 Can you explain to me?

01:55:57.000 And I've talked about this in a couple of shows.

01:55:59.000 Another thing, I'm having a bad track record myself.

01:56:01.000 Maybe you shouldn't listen to me at all.

01:56:02.000 But on the racism thing, which I don't ever want to put a number on what percentage of the Trump supporters fall into that category that we see Twitter people trolling us on.

01:56:13.000 But I thought that was going the way of the dodo.

01:56:16.000 I am more surprised by that than anything else.

01:56:19.000 The rise in overt, and I don't even want to say racism, but just people who look at the world with that viewpoint, that lens.

01:56:27.000 I thought we were, you know, not evolving, but I thought those people were dying out.

01:56:31.000 I thought they were like Archie Bunkers, and they were just going to be...

01:56:34.000 And to see that recur is the biggest surprise I've had in my adult lifetime, I think, when analyzing politics.

01:56:40.000 Well, they absolutely still exist.

01:56:42.000 The question is, have they diminished in numbers?

01:56:44.000 I think they have.

01:56:45.000 But if you're just dealing with social media, there's so many voices.

01:56:49.000 So many people have a voice.

01:56:50.000 If you're dealing... 0.94

01:56:51.000 This is one of the ways that I've always tried to describe how many retarded people there are in this country. 1.00

01:56:56.000 And I don't mean people with Down Syndrome.

01:56:58.000 I'm not going to not stop using that word.

01:57:00.000 It's not a medical term.

01:57:01.000 It doesn't mean people with a disease.

01:57:03.000 I'm not holding it against you. 1.00

01:57:04.000 Fucking moron. 1.00

01:57:05.000 Okay. 1.00

01:57:05.000 Okay, if there's 300 million people in this country, one out of a hundred is gonna be a fucking idiot. 1.00

01:57:13.000 At least one out of a hundred. 1.00

01:57:14.000 One out of a hundred?

01:57:15.000 Really?

01:57:15.000 That's what you're going with?

01:57:16.000 We're being really nice.

01:57:16.000 Okay, being really nice.

01:57:18.000 Really nice. 1.00

01:57:18.000 That's three million fucking idiots. 1.00

01:57:21.000 Just in this country. 1.00

01:57:22.000 That is a fucking gigantic Minneapolis-sized city filled with morons. 1.00

01:57:28.000 And they tweet a lot. 1.00

01:57:29.000 Yeah, and they could just be racist and sexist.

01:57:32.000 Or just trying to get a rise out of us.

01:57:34.000 Or 13-year-old kids.

01:57:37.000 I mean, that's the other thing.

01:57:37.000 Some of these are kids who think, okay, the most shocking thing I can say is some racist term I'm not supposed to say.

01:57:43.000 Of course.

01:57:44.000 There's all the above.

01:57:45.000 Right.

01:57:45.000 There's young kids like I would have done when I was 17. If you gave me a computer when I was 17 and I knew I could tweet to Al Gore, I'd probably make the meanest fucking tweet.

01:57:55.000 I would try to be funny. 0.96

01:57:57.000 I just think there's so many voices out there that when you see racism attached to the Donald Trump campaign, you can't really say what percentage of Donald Trump supporters are.

01:58:09.000 Is it more of a problem in the Trump campaign than the Hillary campaign? 0.94

01:58:12.000 Yes.

01:58:13.000 Does the fact that he won't take it head on, you know, when they...

01:58:17.000 Oh, he can't.

01:58:17.000 I was going to say, you can see the reporters try to sort of frame the questions so that he has to either go left or go right on this.

01:58:24.000 You know, would you denounce the KKK and David Duke's support?

01:58:28.000 What did he say?

01:58:28.000 I don't know what the KKK is or something like that?

01:58:30.000 I mean, he came up with some answer.

01:58:32.000 Did he really say that?

01:58:33.000 Can you look that up?

01:58:34.000 Because I don't know.

01:58:34.000 I don't want to...

01:58:35.000 You know, I'm going to get 10,000 angry Donald Trump emails.

01:58:37.000 He should go with, like, really easy stuff, like slavery, good or bad.

01:58:40.000 Donald?

01:58:40.000 That's right.

01:58:42.000 Just real easy stuff.

01:58:43.000 Just give me your position on that.

01:58:44.000 Okay, let's work from there.

01:58:45.000 Civil War.

01:58:46.000 Good idea or bad idea?

01:58:48.000 You know?

01:58:50.000 Oh, God.

01:58:52.000 I just had this moment outside my body where I thought, we're really talking about this stuff.

01:58:56.000 I mean, you know, there is...

01:58:58.000 And, you know, you had brought this up earlier, and I wanted to point out, we had talked about people growing up, young people today, and whether or not they're going to go back.

01:59:07.000 In other words, say, oh, this is all so far, you know, beyond where we should go back.

01:59:11.000 Or if they're going, this is the new normal to them.

01:59:13.000 You know, to them, they don't even remember when Dan Carlin talks about the laws of the Fourth Amendment, they're going, what?

01:59:19.000 I don't even remember what you're talking about.

01:59:21.000 God, that'd be crazy to let people do that or whatever.

01:59:24.000 I mean, you wonder if once you haven't had a freedom for a while, does it seem radical to go back to that?

01:59:30.000 There was a great quote, I use it all the time, by a historian a long time ago named Charles Austin Beard.

01:59:35.000 And he said, to be considered a dangerous radical today, all you have to do is go around spouting the phrases of the founding fathers.

01:59:43.000 That'll get you on the NSA watch list today.

01:59:46.000 What does that mean?

01:59:48.000 You know, if you take that out, smack in the mic, but if you take that out and you try to analyze that, what does that say about how far we've come?

01:59:56.000 You know, revolutionaries create your country, and then we very quickly lose that revolutionary ardor, and we become much more conservative, which is natural, I think.

02:00:05.000 But, you know, we talked about life cycles of countries.

02:00:08.000 Are we over the hill?

02:00:10.000 I mean, could you make a case that the United States concept, which is really a utopian one, this we can all be free, we can all run the country, is that something that is past its prime, its sell-by date?

02:00:20.000 Well, I think the corrupt amongst us have tried to whittle away at it, like you're talking about the Fourth Amendment or the Second Amendment or even the First Amendment, any of the amendments.

02:00:31.000 Where you look at the freedoms that people are really worried about losing.

02:00:35.000 And when something like the Patriot Act or the Patriot Act 2 gets passed, and you realize that they can just sort of detain you, and they don't have to charge you with anything, and they can detain you indefinitely if they just decide.

02:00:47.000 They don't have to present you with any evidence.

02:00:49.000 They don't have to give you a trial.

02:00:50.000 They don't have to give you a court date.

02:00:52.000 Like, well, okay, well, what are we operating under then?

02:00:56.000 If you can make an act like that, and that sort of dissolves the Constitution and the Bill of Rights for people who you decide are the bad guys, if you can just do that, then we don't really have...

02:01:10.000 The protection of the Constitution or the Bill of Rights anymore.

02:01:13.000 It doesn't exist.

02:01:29.000 I'm okay with that.

02:01:30.000 I mean, if you're going to create a group and get a lot of money to defend an amendment to the Constitution, even if Americans can argue what the Second Amendment means, but I love the idea of money coming to legislators, because that's what they pay attention to, to protect those rights.

02:01:47.000 My problem is that the amendments that are getting so shafted are the ones that don't have a lot of money, and often have a lot of money on the other side.

02:01:53.000 Yeah.

02:01:54.000 Well, it's just bizarre that you could get so much done with money and that this is our system of government, and it slowly but surely crept its way into the root system of it and just entangled it and choked it down.

02:02:05.000 I think it's natural, though.

02:02:07.000 I mean, I think that basically this is the way it always is, and we would have had to have held it back with all of our force to keep it from doing – because money has a way, doesn't it?

02:02:17.000 Right.

02:02:19.000 We're good to go.

02:02:36.000 That becomes very difficult.

02:02:38.000 And with these legislators, the pity is that they all want to be re-elected so much that they can let the money sway them out.

02:02:44.000 If they didn't care that much about the jobs, the money might not mean that much.

02:02:47.000 Once you get elected, if you said, this is all I want, then you don't care what the money says.

02:02:51.000 You only care what the money says if you want to get re-elected, which argues for term limits and all that stuff, maybe.

02:02:56.000 Yeah, no, you're right.

02:02:57.000 You're right.

02:02:58.000 It's just, boy, it...

02:03:02.000 It's daunting when you sit down and talk about it like this.

02:03:05.000 I know.

02:03:05.000 I always come in here and bring you down.

02:03:06.000 I'm sorry.

02:03:07.000 You ought to have a guest after me to cleanse your palate. 0.99

02:03:10.000 This is what he said about David Duke.

02:03:11.000 What is it?

02:03:11.000 David Duke is a bad person who had disavowed numerous occasions over the years.

02:03:15.000 Trump's had an MSNBC. No, this is not the first time, though.

02:03:17.000 This is after he got slammed for not doing enough to disavow.

02:03:21.000 So in other words, this is like the follow-up question.

02:03:24.000 So the first time he said something like, I don't want to misquote it, but I recall him saying something like, I don't know anything about the KKK or something like that, and everybody lost their minds.

02:03:33.000 But if you said to yourself, okay, 5% of my support is from people who would like a guy like David Duke...

02:03:39.000 I'm not going to cut out 5% of my support.

02:03:42.000 I don't know.

02:03:42.000 The whole thing is surreal to me a little bit.

02:03:45.000 Once again, you know, if I've been caught off guard by anything, I've been caught off guard by this.

02:03:49.000 And I can't process it yet.

02:03:52.000 I don't know how to fit Donald Trump and that one segment of his supporters into my worldview, because I thought they were a dying breed.

02:04:01.000 I didn't think that could be resurrected.

02:04:03.000 I talked to a guy when I was a reporter during the Bosnian War.

02:04:07.000 And he was a Croat.

02:04:09.000 And he tried to make the case to me, and he very well might have been right, that a lot of those people in that area where they have historic problems with each other and always have, were getting along just fine while economic things were okay.

02:04:21.000 He said we were intermarrying.

02:04:24.000 Serbs could fall in love with Croats. 0.64

02:04:25.000 It was going okay.

02:04:27.000 But he goes, once everything hit the fan and times became tough and the economics came into play, all those old feelings came back.

02:04:35.000 And I thought to myself, is that something that is applicable on this racism thing?

02:04:40.000 I don't know, but one could make a case that we haven't been this unsettled in a very long time in this country.

02:04:46.000 Are we seeing...

02:04:48.000 I don't know.

02:04:49.000 It's hard to factor how much that plays a role versus how much the internet and the ability for these people to speak out when before they would have had to be Xeroxing things and leaving them on your car, you know, when you come out of the grocery store.

02:05:00.000 Did you ever get one of those things?

02:05:01.000 Yeah.

02:05:02.000 Come out of the grocery store, have some racist track on your car window or something?

02:05:05.000 I never got a racist one, but I've got ones for car washes. 0.97

02:05:07.000 What about the Tony Alamo?

02:05:08.000 You ever get the one of the Tony Alamo ones?

02:05:10.000 He was famous.

02:05:11.000 Tony Alamo?

02:05:11.000 He ran his own religious thing here or something.

02:05:13.000 He used to have people, twice a week I'd have that on my car.

02:05:16.000 But in the old days, that's how somebody had to do it.

02:05:19.000 Now, they have a broad class platform.

02:05:22.000 Are we just hearing from these people more because they can speak to more people?

02:05:25.000 Well, they also can find like-minded groups.

02:05:27.000 That's true.

02:05:28.000 I mean, you couldn't find that many like-minded groups if you lived in a neighborhood full of progressive people and you were like a really conservative person.

02:05:35.000 It'd be really kind of difficult for you to...

02:05:37.000 True.

02:05:37.000 You'd have to seek these people out.

02:05:39.000 And now it's with a couple clicks of the mouse and all of a sudden, boom, you're on some website where a bunch of people agree with you.

02:05:45.000 And wind each other up.

02:05:46.000 Everybody winds each other.

02:05:47.000 And it happens, by the way.

02:05:48.000 Let's not...

02:05:49.000 Pick size.

02:05:50.000 That happens on all sides.

02:05:50.000 Go to the Daly Coast and places like that.

02:05:53.000 They wind people up.

02:05:54.000 And they also, they're apologists and they're not honest about the faults of their candidates.

02:06:00.000 Like there was this thing about Hillary about, like I said, people were talking about how it's sexist that people are commenting on her health and that if it was a man that was running for president who got...

02:06:12.000 Weak during 9-11, during, you know, after some sort of a service for the fallen troops, that that would be totally acceptable. 0.90

02:06:19.000 Like, that's not true.

02:06:20.000 No, and history shows it because people forget that George McGovern had to drop his vice presidential candidate because the guy, it had been released that he had visited a psychiatrist for some depression problems.

02:06:31.000 He had shock therapy.

02:06:32.000 Shock therapy, that's right. 1.00

02:06:33.000 Yeah, he had, on more than one occasion, had electroshock therapy because he was a fucking loon. 1.00

02:06:39.000 He's not supposed to be the vice president. 0.99

02:06:41.000 Well, maybe he wasn't Joe Rogan, maybe you're just playing into the propaganda.

02:06:43.000 Yeah, can't get shocked to fix your brain and then a couple years later run the country.

02:06:48.000 There's only one way to find out.

02:06:50.000 That's true.

02:06:51.000 I mean, maybe getting shocked is awesome.

02:06:53.000 Maybe it does some great work.

02:06:54.000 Maybe if the shock collar was in the hands of voters, we could get something done in this country.

02:06:59.000 One more time the president makes a wrong move.

02:07:01.000 Dick Cheney, I'd love to have a shock button.

02:07:04.000 There's a couple people.

02:07:05.000 John Bolton, I'd love a shock button.

02:07:07.000 I think a lot of the people that are really excited about Hillary becoming president are excited because it would be a first.

02:07:13.000 First time a woman... 1.00

02:07:14.000 I would like that aspect of it myself.

02:07:16.000 Yeah, and it would make us feel like we're progressing, that we can find the best candidate regardless of sex.

02:07:23.000 The real question isn't that.

02:07:25.000 The real question is, is that the best we can do?

02:07:28.000 Because if that's the best woman we've got, that's crazy. 0.98

02:07:32.000 That doesn't make any sense.

02:07:33.000 She's the most qualified.

02:07:35.000 She's also under two criminal investigations simultaneously.

02:07:40.000 She's also... 0.99

02:07:41.000 I'm not a conspiracy theorist for the most part, but how many people have died that have crossed them?

02:07:47.000 I don't go there.

02:07:48.000 Have you ever seen it?

02:07:49.000 Yeah, I have.

02:07:49.000 What's the number?

02:07:50.000 I don't know.

02:07:51.000 But I'll tell you this.

02:07:52.000 Here's where I go.

02:07:53.000 I go to a much more concrete place, which is...

02:07:55.000 Look at who she's speaking to, and look at who she's raising money from, and look at what they want.

02:07:59.000 Release the transcripts in those bank talks.

02:08:01.000 Oh, see?

02:08:02.000 And to me, she shouldn't have a choice in that.

02:08:04.000 Right.

02:08:05.000 How is it possible she does?

02:08:06.000 But because she keeps it a secret, what does that encourage, Joe Rogan?

02:08:10.000 Leaks, right?

02:08:11.000 And hackings.

02:08:12.000 And so if you didn't keep that a secret, you could more legitimately say, listen, there are certain things that the public should know.

02:08:17.000 When you keep things from the public that they should know, a lot of the public goes, well, to heck with that.

02:08:22.000 That ought to be leaked.

02:08:23.000 Well, it's almost like they're trying to hold back as many leaks as possible before November.

02:08:29.000 Yeah, until it's too late.

02:08:30.000 Exactly.

02:08:31.000 Hold it back.

02:08:31.000 That's exactly right.

02:08:32.000 And then once she's in, she's in.

02:08:33.000 But there's so many leaks now.

02:08:37.000 It's getting so strange.

02:08:40.000 I quoted in the last program I did, I think it was a Dana Milbank column.

02:08:44.000 He had talked about one of the recent links that...

02:08:47.000 Okay, I get hassled by Russian hackers all the time, or people that are mad that I talk about Russian hackers or whatever.

02:08:53.000 Sorry, dudes.

02:08:54.000 I know.

02:08:54.000 But Milbank had said that these people had...

02:09:01.000 Yeah.

02:09:19.000 And you see it already.

02:09:20.000 The DNC's going, well, listen, Russian hackers are known to alter this stuff.

02:09:23.000 So the minute that came out, it was the greatest boon to all the politicians in the world because they could say, whatever that says is probably altered, you know?

02:09:31.000 So it's the wonderful get-out-of-jail-free card on the hacking.

02:09:35.000 Yeah.

02:09:35.000 Well, that is true.

02:09:37.000 But it's legitimate, too, because if they really did that, well, that is a get-out-of-jail-free card.

02:09:41.000 So now the hacking has just muddied the waters even more.

02:09:43.000 It certainly has.

02:09:44.000 I mean, I would actually probably support a hack if I was running for president in that sense, because you could say, look, you're not going to trust evidence that came from someone who got it through illegal means.

02:09:55.000 And they are doing that.

02:09:56.000 Yeah.

02:09:57.000 Why would we trust that the hackers would be the only ones who wouldn't distort the emails?

02:10:03.000 What do you got here?

02:10:04.000 Colin Powell confirms leaked emails are accurate.

02:10:07.000 Did you see what he said in his leaked emails?

02:10:10.000 He said Clinton's out dicking girls. 1.00

02:10:13.000 He also talked about Hillary Clinton and hubris and all those kind of things. 0.81

02:10:17.000 I think that's the impression she gives.

02:10:20.000 So it's interesting to hear that people who know and like her feel a little of that too.

02:10:23.000 She's also very suspicious.

02:10:24.000 Look at what he said.

02:10:25.000 Look at this.

02:10:26.000 Look at this phrase.

02:10:28.000 I would rather not have to vote for her, although she is a friend I respect.

02:10:32.000 A 70-year-old person with a long track record, unbridled ambition, greedy, not transformational, with a husband still dicking bimbos at home. 1.00

02:10:43.000 Holy shit. 1.00

02:10:45.000 Holy shit. 1.00

02:10:46.000 First of all, how dare he use the term bimbos? 1.00

02:10:49.000 I am triggered.

02:10:51.000 You're not supposed to use that term.

02:10:52.000 That's a derogatory term towards women. 1.00

02:10:54.000 He thought it would never come out, though, see? 0.96

02:10:55.000 This is coming for a guy who said retard 40 minutes ago. 0.97

02:10:57.000 Oh, boy. 0.88

02:10:58.000 But that's what I'm saying.

02:11:00.000 I'm going to get some blowback from this Joe Rogan.

02:11:02.000 You know that, right?

02:11:02.000 For real?

02:11:03.000 Yeah.

02:11:03.000 Yeah, stop hanging out with me.

02:11:04.000 I know!

02:11:05.000 It's probably bad for you.

02:11:05.000 I know.

02:11:06.000 It is bad for me.

02:11:07.000 Nah.

02:11:09.000 How can a guy like Colin Powell or even Hillary Clinton have all of this stuff written in emails?

02:11:14.000 Are they that out of touch that this stuff is being tracked?

02:11:17.000 Or they should know that it's being tracked?

02:11:19.000 I think they felt like they could get away with a lot more than they can get away with.

02:11:23.000 And I think, again, we're talking about people who grew up and started behaving a certain way way before there was this level of transparency.

02:11:30.000 Oh, see, you're thinking they should behave differently.

02:11:31.000 That's not how these people, they're thinking, now, how can I not use that email problem again?

02:11:35.000 They're not thinking of changing behavior.

02:11:37.000 No, no, no.

02:11:37.000 The behavior they want to change is using email.

02:11:40.000 That's the behavior they want to change.

02:11:41.000 I'm just thinking that they sort of adapted to the times.

02:11:43.000 That was the political landscape back then.

02:11:45.000 I think the political landscape today is just way different.

02:11:49.000 You have to literally think everybody is watching everything you say.

02:11:53.000 Well, case in point, we We talked about Clinton and women. 0.92

02:11:56.000 The press knew that Kennedy was doing all that stuff, but there was an unwritten gentleman's agreement that you didn't talk about that kind of stuff.

02:12:03.000 Never mind that he might have been having sex with Sam Giancana's girlfriend, Judith Exner, at the same time, and that there might be some problems with that.

02:12:11.000 Nowadays, I mean, that's why, to me, people say Bill Clinton was just impeached over sex. 0.97

02:12:16.000 In my mind, anybody who's either dumb enough or whatever you want to put in there that he thinks he can get away with that is somebody I don't want with a hand on the nuclear button. 0.97

02:12:24.000 I mean, come on. 0.98

02:12:25.000 Anybody with half a brain knows, I mean, Joe, if you wanted to get away with something, would you pull that one?

02:12:29.000 I mean, come on.

02:12:30.000 There's no way.

02:12:31.000 He was 100% going to get caught and did it anyway.

02:12:34.000 That's not good judgment. 0.99

02:12:36.000 Well, that kind of guy who becomes president is usually a dick slinger. 0.97

02:12:42.000 I don't think the elder George Bush falls into that category. 0.98

02:12:45.000 Maybe he didn't.

02:12:46.000 Not prudent.

02:12:46.000 Wouldn't do it.

02:12:47.000 Maybe he didn't dixling.

02:12:48.000 But maybe he did.

02:12:49.000 Maybe that explained his wife.

02:12:51.000 She's just hanging out and he was like, hey, I'm going to go dixling.

02:12:54.000 Well, he was a fighter pilot.

02:12:55.000 I never knew a fighter pilot who wasn't a little bit, you know, get around. 0.95

02:12:58.000 Yeah, they're savages. 0.98

02:12:59.000 They're savages. 0.99

02:13:00.000 You want them that way. 0.99

02:13:00.000 That's right. 0.99

02:13:01.000 Living on the edge.

02:13:02.000 But those men that want to be leaders.

02:13:03.000 Now I'm going to get all the fighter pilots right in me.

02:13:05.000 See, this is a terrible show for me.

02:13:06.000 They're good men, those fighter pilots.

02:13:07.000 They're great men.

02:13:08.000 There was high incidence of swinger behavior.

02:13:10.000 Did you know that?

02:13:12.000 Was that the 50s and 60s or was that the fighter pilot?

02:13:15.000 It's hard to know.

02:13:16.000 There was a study done.

02:13:17.000 No.

02:13:18.000 It was a conversation between this guy and fighter pilots about the high incidences of swingers.

02:13:23.000 And one of the things that I think they were saying, I forget where I read this, but they were saying that...

02:13:28.000 What was going on was that these guys were in such an intense job where there's a high likelihood of them dying.

02:13:35.000 And one of the ways to ensure that their loved one would be looked after is if someone loved them as much as they loved them.

02:13:42.000 So they would literally be in these fighter runs with these planes, flying into hostile territory, getting shot at, thinking any day could be my last day.

02:13:52.000 So there's this desperation of like, you're leaving behind a wife and a family And one way they alleviated that, this was the idea, was that they would wife swap.

02:14:03.000 And that it happened naturally.

02:14:05.000 You know who it was?

02:14:05.000 I think it was Chris Ryan.

02:14:06.000 I think it was Chris Ryan that was explaining this.

02:14:09.000 I like Chris Ryan.

02:14:09.000 Yeah.

02:14:10.000 I'm pretty sure it was him.

02:14:12.000 Now I'm reasonably sure.

02:14:16.000 That kind of makes sense.

02:14:18.000 Because when you're someone whose everyday world is life and death on a level that a fighter pilot is, I mean, that is...

02:14:26.000 I can certainly see the risk taker thing where you said these are people who live on the edge because that's their...

02:14:31.000 When you fly those planes, you're a risk taker.

02:14:34.000 If you wanted to say, okay, a person who's willing to do risky behavior here, I'm not thinking the wife swapping as much as having a lot of girlfriends that aren't your wife. 0.52

02:14:42.000 But at the same time, listen, like you said, some of those personality traits are probably what you want in those guys.

02:14:49.000 Yeah, well, I think the way Chris was explaining it, too, was that their bond and their camaraderie between each other was so powerful that it's sort of...

02:14:59.000 It sort of eclipsed jealousy in a way, you know, because they counted on each other so much and they were brothers in war and literally life or death struggle.

02:15:09.000 So there's a bond and a camaraderie that sort of superseded everything and that the idea of like that they could swap wives and they just love each other more.

02:15:20.000 It's kind of crazy.

02:15:21.000 See, I'd go with the Occam's Raiders that they're more like pro athletes and they're just... 0.97

02:15:25.000 Freaks.

02:15:26.000 Or just their swagger. 0.92

02:15:29.000 You'd mention the swagger, right?

02:15:30.000 It's all part of what kind of keeps them the kind of guys that can be fighter pilots, you know?

02:15:35.000 It may all come with the territory.

02:15:37.000 Maybe it's a bunch of those things.

02:15:39.000 And then, let's be honest, there are fighter pilots who never did anything like that.

02:15:42.000 Absolutely.

02:15:43.000 Give them the get-out-of-jail-free pass.

02:15:45.000 That's my Dan Carlin get-out-of-jail-free pass.

02:15:46.000 Their wife's in the car listening to this podcast. 1.00

02:15:48.000 These guys are assholes. 1.00

02:15:51.000 Assholes. 1.00

02:15:51.000 Why do you listen? 1.00

02:15:53.000 Fighter pilots are swingers, you piece of shit. 1.00

02:15:56.000 You know what just happened? 1.00

02:15:56.000 A bunch of wives turn to their ex-fighter pilot husbands and says, Honey, that didn't involve you, did it? 1.00

02:16:02.000 Wife swapping.

02:16:04.000 That's a new reality show.

02:16:05.000 Wife swapping fighter pilots.

02:16:08.000 You know, for those who have not seen all of the appearances I've had on this, Joe started off breaking me into being on the Joe Rogan podcast with some comments initially.

02:16:17.000 So now I just flow with it and it's going to get me killed eventually.

02:16:21.000 It's not going to do anything.

02:16:22.000 Man, it's a conversation.

02:16:24.000 It's a conversation.

02:16:24.000 This is just like if you and I went out to dinner in between bites of food, we would have probably the same conversations about stuff.

02:16:30.000 That's funny.

02:16:31.000 But what do you, like, when you see what the reports are about the Clinton Foundation, I don't totally understand what's legal and what's not legal, but I don't think I've seen anyone said that anything they've done is illegal, right?

02:16:47.000 Yeah.

02:16:50.000 Yeah, it falls into that category, the same category that maybe the giving of ambassadorships to people who give money fall into the...

02:16:58.000 For example, there's no question that the Clinton Foundation goes and does good work.

02:17:03.000 There's no question.

02:17:04.000 But how much does the fact that they do good work and that your name is attached to it end up being something that helps you for less...

02:17:11.000 Charitable reasons, right?

02:17:13.000 In other words, it makes you look good as a candidate to be somebody that, you know, helps vaccine people against polio, right?

02:17:22.000 Right.

02:17:30.000 You know, people can give money to the foundation, then the foundation can pay Bill Clinton to run the...

02:17:36.000 I mean, it becomes...

02:17:37.000 And then if you gave money to the foundation, does that mean you get special treatment?

02:17:40.000 I can hear the Hillary Clinton supporters saying, well, that didn't happen.

02:17:43.000 But it's the reason that people put stuff in a blind trust when they become president, so that you don't even know what your money's doing, so that you can't possibly be favoritism toward...

02:17:54.000 And the Clintons have basically made it sound like they're not going to do that.

02:17:59.000 And once again, as I said to you earlier, if you know they're after you like they're after the Clintons, wouldn't you just leave as much room between you and any potential whiff of scandal as you could?

02:18:10.000 But they don't.

02:18:11.000 I don't know why they don't, but they don't.

02:18:15.000 Maybe they can't.

02:18:16.000 At this point, you know, how could they?

02:18:20.000 They probably are so entangled with all those other people that have been a part of all that stuff for so long.

02:18:26.000 Well, and you know, you've done this and I've done this.

02:18:28.000 We've both been around some of these high rollers before where you realize how much they pick up the phone and talk to other high rollers and how interconnected that network is.

02:18:35.000 And there's nothing wrong with that intrinsically, but you could easily see...

02:18:40.000 That that networking can be used for nefarious purposes, good purposes or no purposes, but they all have each other on speed dial, right?

02:18:48.000 That's natural.

02:18:49.000 Yeah, it does seem natural.

02:18:50.000 I mean, podcasters kind of have that, right?

02:18:52.000 Oh, we do have that, actually.

02:18:53.000 It's a little known fact, isn't it?

02:18:55.000 You and I, two podcasters who learned about each other through the business.

02:18:59.000 You're not the only podcaster.

02:19:00.000 I moonlight on you sometimes, Joe.

02:19:01.000 Yes, I moonlight on you as well, sir.

02:19:05.000 Yeah, I mean, people in the same business talk to each other and become tight, and it affects the way they do business, for sure.

02:19:13.000 It doesn't even necessarily have to be some really carefully scripted agreement.

02:19:20.000 It's almost like a known thing.

02:19:22.000 Exactly right, I think.

02:19:23.000 And you know what?

02:19:24.000 In the era of hacks and all that, isn't that the smarter way to comport yourself, right?

02:19:30.000 You know, Nixon, because he was a taper new, when he had to have an important discussion with somebody, he wanted to make sure it was safe.

02:19:36.000 They went for a walk, right?

02:19:39.000 And they went for a walk past the White House.

02:19:41.000 They got in the weeds out there, and then they had the discussion.

02:19:45.000 And then they use the N-word.

02:19:46.000 That's right.

02:19:46.000 Whatever it might be.

02:19:48.000 Are we clear?

02:19:49.000 That's right.

02:19:50.000 Say it!

02:19:51.000 Well, but think about this.

02:19:53.000 In 10 years, how is this email hack scandal going to change protocol on how all these people do things?

02:20:01.000 Because it is.

02:20:02.000 You watch.

02:20:03.000 Colin Powell and everybody watching what's unfolding right now are determining that there are going to be new ways we communicate, and it's not going to be like that.

02:20:10.000 Well, there's two different hacks, right?

02:20:12.000 There's the DNC hack, and then there's the Hillary server hack, right?

02:20:16.000 Aren't they different hacks?

02:20:17.000 They are, and from what I heard, I told you, I heard there was a Republican National Committee hack, too.

02:20:23.000 I love the fact that they fired that woman. 1.00

02:20:26.000 Oh, did you found something?

02:20:27.000 That was not true.

02:20:28.000 The guy that said it said he misspoke.

02:20:30.000 That came out later today.

02:20:32.000 That makes me more suspicious than anything. 1.00

02:20:34.000 That's goddamn misspokers. 0.99

02:20:36.000 I just think it's hilarious that the woman who got outed in the DNC hacks as being this woman who was conspiring to, like... 1.00

02:20:47.000 Put down Bernie and help Hillary. 1.00

02:20:50.000 That woman, she had to step down and was immediately hired by the Clinton campaign. 1.00

02:20:55.000 I mean, there's zero transparency.

02:20:57.000 It's so obvious.

02:20:58.000 It's corruption.

02:20:59.000 And the corruption is both parties, and we have no options besides the both parties.

02:21:04.000 So this is where, you know, like we said on the Common Sense Show for 11 years now, this is your focal point of the problem.

02:21:09.000 We have a corruption problem.

02:21:11.000 Both parties benefit from it.

02:21:13.000 They have no real interest in addressing it.

02:21:15.000 The only time they're interested in fighting corruption is if they can manage to fight the kind of corruption that helps the other side without impacting the ones that help them.

02:21:24.000 So the Republicans always say that about Democratic campaign finance reform, that it goes after Republican funders, but not Democratic ones.

02:21:31.000 In other words, they're not holier than thou.

02:21:33.000 They're just trying to figure out another way to game the system, utilizing reform as the tool.

02:21:39.000 I mean, they have to know in some way they're all complicit in similar sort of situations.

02:21:43.000 But the thing that was so weird, I think I said not transparent at all, I meant completely transparent.

02:21:49.000 The thing that was weird about how transparent it was is that there wasn't even a gap in time of this woman getting fired and then getting hired.

02:21:56.000 For appearance purposes, right.

02:21:57.000 No, it was like instantaneous.

02:21:59.000 It's like, we don't care.

02:22:00.000 We're just going to do it.

02:22:01.000 Yeah, she helped me out.

02:22:02.000 She hooked me up.

02:22:03.000 She's my girl.

02:22:03.000 I'm going to bring her over here.

02:22:04.000 That's just like what you said about Hillary Clinton and the fact that she had said that the FBI director said this about her when he had just said something kind of complete.

02:22:12.000 But she knew that the 5% of people that would realize that didn't count.

02:22:17.000 Same thing.

02:22:18.000 The 5% of people who realized, wait a minute, you just hired that...

02:22:21.000 They don't count.

02:22:21.000 She's not after those people.

02:22:23.000 And there's another day, and more news stories, and a plane goes down to Singapore or something, and there's another news story, and some fucking nuclear test in North Korea, and everybody's gone. 0.97

02:22:31.000 It's gone. 0.97

02:22:32.000 Three weeks later, it's gone.

02:22:33.000 There's just so much going on that you can't really maintain any story like that in the news.

02:22:38.000 That's why the Glenn Greenwald, Edward Snowden, the way that they approached that was structured the way it was to come out in chunks, because they had said, if you release it all at once, it'd be this huge story, but then it's done.

02:22:49.000 Right.

02:22:50.000 If you understand how the news cycle works the way you just mentioned, you want to release a nice chunk and then wait until the headlines die down again and then release another chunk.

02:22:58.000 And that's the way Wikileaks is doing that right now with these hacks they have.

02:23:02.000 They're releasing it in chunks because as soon as the news cycle dies down, they want to take advantage of the next one.

02:23:08.000 The WikiLeaks thing is one of the most bizarre scenarios where you have this guy that if you ask the United States, like just the United States, like what percentage of people support what Julian Assange did?

02:23:20.000 What percentage of the people support letting people understand what is really going on behind the scenes?

02:23:27.000 It would be pretty overwhelming.

02:23:28.000 I would guarantee it would be in the high 70s.

02:23:30.000 Some people are blindly patriotic and they would just want their government to just have carte blanche. 0.99

02:23:35.000 There's a few of those, but I think most people would support the, yeah, I want to know what the fuck's going on. 0.93

02:23:39.000 Now this guy is trapped in an embassy in London. 0.96

02:23:45.000 He can't go anywhere.

02:23:46.000 Ecuadorian embassy?

02:23:47.000 Yeah, something like that, right?

02:23:49.000 Is it Ecuador?

02:23:50.000 He's trapped in this embassy.

02:23:53.000 He can't leave.

02:23:54.000 He's been in this house for years.

02:23:56.000 On a potential rape charge.

02:23:57.000 Well, it's not even a rape charge.

02:23:59.000 It's a surprise sex. 0.84

02:24:01.000 It's hanging over his head, I know.

02:24:03.000 And he can't leave to go answer the charges because they'll grab him.

02:24:07.000 Well, they'll grab him on completely unrelated purposes or unrelated charges.

02:24:11.000 It has nothing to do with that.

02:24:12.000 They just want to hold him.

02:24:14.000 I mean, you really think that they'd be chasing him for this long because he had sex without a condom while he was spooning? 0.90

02:24:20.000 No, we all know that.

02:24:21.000 Swedish court to rule on Julian Assange facing extradition of Sweden over sexual assault charges.

02:24:26.000 The WikiLeaks Foundation has been confirmed to confine to the Ecuadorian embassy in London for more than four years.

02:24:34.000 Kind of nice of the Ecuadorians to hold onto him for that long.

02:24:37.000 That's so crazy.

02:24:38.000 He's been in his house for four years.

02:24:41.000 But here's what they have to do if they want to keep playing the straight and narrow.

02:24:44.000 They have to get a hold of some leaked documents from the other side, because otherwise, it's like if you only get the leaked documents from one side, that does impact the election, and that calls into question the motives of the leaker.

02:24:57.000 If you're saying, I release information, then you can be above the fray.

02:25:02.000 If you say, like a lot of journalists understand how to do, what you omit and don't release has as much value as what you do.

02:25:09.000 So if the only leaks you're getting are from the Democrats and the Republicans aren't being leaked, then that's influencing the election. 0.98

02:25:15.000 Because you know as well as I do, the other side has crap that is just as shocking and upsetting and corrupt as the Democrats. 0.99

02:25:22.000 So let's see that too. 1.00

02:25:24.000 Yeah, let's see that too. 0.99

02:25:26.000 And let's see what Trump does when he finds out they've been all talking shit about him. 0.99

02:25:30.000 You know, I'm ashamed to say that there's a part of me that says, yeah, let's see that. 0.99

02:25:35.000 I don't want to be that way.

02:25:37.000 But I read somebody online said the other day that there's people who are going to vote for him just for the entertainment value because they don't want to be bored for the next four years.

02:25:45.000 And I thought to myself, that's when the country's really jumped the shark.

02:25:48.000 When we're voting for candidates, I don't care what they'll do.

02:25:50.000 They're both bad.

02:25:51.000 I just want the most entertaining.

02:25:52.000 Well, a lot of people feel that it doesn't matter.

02:25:54.000 They're also thinking that what you look at as a president is really just a figurehead and the military-industrial complex.

02:26:02.000 I'm reading that book right now, American Coup.

02:26:03.000 So...

02:26:05.000 Look, if you look at what Obama promised and you look at what he actually did, they're very different things.

02:26:11.000 Well, people forget that George W. Bush actually ran on a more humble foreign policy.

02:26:18.000 Do you remember that?

02:26:19.000 He was going to have...

02:26:21.000 He said, Americans want a more humble foreign policy.

02:26:24.000 Could there be any dichotomy worse than a more humble foreign policy?

02:26:29.000 And people will say, well, 9-11 happened.

02:26:30.000 Yes, so we attacked Iraq. 0.97

02:26:32.000 Okay.

02:26:32.000 Yeah.

02:26:33.000 Didn't make any sense. 0.99

02:26:35.000 And everybody was like, look, we're fucking kicking someone's ass, all right? 1.00

02:26:38.000 Enough to shut up and wave that flag. 1.00

02:26:41.000 I will tell you this.

02:26:42.000 Anybody who tells me that they support the troops again, but are willing to send them willy-nilly anywhere at any time, to me, supporting the troops means you value their lives and their families and the fact that many of these guys and women have had to go back and back and back and their lives have been on hold and they suffer.

02:26:58.000 I mean, how many stories have we read about what these people deal with every day?

02:27:02.000 Go to the VA, and let's say you want to support the troops, fix the VA, right?

02:27:07.000 Do the things that matter to the troops, and then don't send them into harm's way unless it really, really matters.

02:27:13.000 That's supporting the troops to me.

02:27:15.000 Yeah, the problem is we don't know what is going on when we hear that the troops need to invade some certain area.

02:27:24.000 We don't know if it's legit or not legit.

02:27:26.000 We don't know who the people are that are making the decisions, ultimately.

02:27:28.000 And they classify it.

02:27:29.000 And they classify it, and we also don't...

02:27:31.000 I mean, there's got to be some intel that they're not sharing that might sway our opinion one way or the other.

02:27:37.000 Or they think that...

02:27:38.000 See, like, we were talking about the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in the last Common Sense show.

02:27:42.000 Yeah.

02:27:43.000 The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, there were parts of it, very important parts of it, that were not released until 2005. 2005, if you found out within a month that the Gulf of Tonkin, which for those who don't know, this is sort of the excuse for why we were able to ramp up the Vietnam War,

02:28:00.000 which killed a ton of people, right?

02:28:03.000 If you had known within a month, in real time, basically, that that didn't happen the way that they said it happened, that's time enough to impact the decision making.

02:28:12.000 They classified it so that by the time it comes out, everyone's dead and it's in a history book, you have no ability to impact the decision-making.

02:28:19.000 That's where classification kills us, because if you, the electorate, say, to heck with this, we've got to go out in the streets or we have to have a protest online, you can't do that if you don't know what's going on.

02:28:29.000 And that was one of the more ironic things about Kennedy's assassination, was that they locked the files up.

02:28:36.000 When do the full files on the Kennedy assassination are allowed to be released?

02:28:41.000 But they essentially made it so that no one could investigate it for far longer than anyone's going to be alive.

02:28:47.000 I think it was like 2025 or something like that.

02:28:49.000 And that prompts suspicion right there, whether or not it's deserved.

02:28:52.000 Of course.

02:28:52.000 Why would they do that?

02:28:53.000 Well, I did come up with reasons, because I felt the same with you, and I had to figure out a cause, right?

02:28:58.000 What would explain it that was rational?

02:29:00.000 And here's what I came up with, and I'm hardly the only person who realized this.

02:29:03.000 You remember Oswald had ties to Cuba, and he defected to the Soviet Union and then come home.

02:29:10.000 Okay, so if you're average Joe or Jane, and you don't know much about what's going on, but you find out a Cuban defector, a Cuban-supporting Soviet Union defector killed the president, and that maybe that might...

02:29:22.000 Do you see how that...

02:29:24.000 If you were reading the Guns of August on how World War I started, and you thought it wouldn't have taken...

02:29:29.000 That was an assassination, too, right?

02:29:31.000 In an open-topped vehicle by somebody...

02:29:33.000 Yeah.

02:29:34.000 And Serbians were behind that in the way that the people whose Archduke was killed. 1.00

02:29:39.000 So, I mean, if Americans thought that the Soviet Union killed their young president that they all loved with his wife right there and the two little children, what would the...

02:29:53.000 How much might that have impacted the president's ability to keep us out of a war or not?

02:29:58.000 I mean, I can see if somebody said that you might have a very good reason for hiding the fact that Oswald had really close ties.

02:30:04.000 I don't know.

02:30:05.000 I was trying to find out a rationale that made sense to me.

02:30:08.000 And that would be a rationale that made sense to me.

02:30:11.000 I don't think you have to classify it for a lifetime, which they basically did.

02:30:15.000 Yeah, what is the year?

02:30:16.000 Next year, October 26, 2017. Oh, shit. 0.99

02:30:19.000 And you watch, when it comes out, redactions will be all over the place. 0.99

02:30:23.000 Oh, yeah, I'm sure.

02:30:24.000 You'll have if, and, but, or.

02:30:26.000 Yeah, I'm sure.

02:30:28.000 But, I mean, they have leaked some stuff or released some stuff due to the Freedom of Information Act that people would consider incredibly offensive, and they found out about it.

02:30:39.000 Like 1962, Northwoods, Operation Northwoods, where they designed attacks on Guantanamo Bay.

02:30:45.000 They were going to arm Cuban friendlies and attack Guantanamo Bay, potentially killing who knows how many soldiers.

02:30:50.000 They were going to blow up a drone jetliner and blame it on the Cubans. 0.95

02:30:54.000 If you look at the stuff that the CIA was doing, and I think it's stupid to think that they don't do the similar things now. 0.96

02:31:01.000 It's crazy stuff. 0.98

02:31:02.000 Yeah, crazy stuff that kills Americans.

02:31:05.000 And here's the thing.

02:31:06.000 Stuff that is so opposed to the 1950s high school mythology of America that it's hard to reconcile the two.

02:31:13.000 And those people will say, listen, it's the real world.

02:31:16.000 Welcome to, you know, we were trying to survive.

02:31:19.000 We had, you know, hydrogen bombs aimed at us.

02:31:21.000 I mean, all that stuff is true.

02:31:22.000 Right.

02:31:23.000 But how do you reconcile it?

02:31:25.000 Yeah, that was a giant issue with Kennedy, you know?

02:31:29.000 And secrecy itself was a giant issue with Kennedy, which is so ironic that they sealed his death up for 25 years.

02:31:35.000 You remember that very famous speech that he had about secrecy in government?

02:31:39.000 Oh, yeah.

02:31:40.000 And about transparency being important?

02:31:42.000 My favorite line from Kennedy was always the one where he says, those who make peaceful change impossible make violent change inevitable.

02:31:49.000 I mean, those are the kind of things where you wonder about us now, where you say, listen, the ability to have our system evolve in ways that make it better are going to prevent really bad things from happening in the future.

02:31:59.000 If we can't get it together now, just follow the current trends outward.

02:32:04.000 If nothing changes, what is the 2020 election going to look like?

02:32:08.000 Are you a Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone type of guy?

02:32:11.000 I am now.

02:32:12.000 I changed my mind on that.

02:32:14.000 They got you, huh?

02:32:15.000 Who got you?

02:32:16.000 Bill O'Reilly?

02:32:17.000 Here's the thing.

02:32:18.000 And this is what always upsets me about the conspiracy theorists.

02:32:21.000 I love them, but I wish they wouldn't leave stuff out of their stories that...

02:32:27.000 That look bad.

02:32:28.000 And everybody does that.

02:32:29.000 I don't blame them.

02:32:30.000 Everybody likes to say, okay, I'll show you the things that back up my theory.

02:32:34.000 But with Oswald, there were a couple of books that came out.

02:32:36.000 My friend Vince Bugliosi had one.

02:32:39.000 Gerald Posner had another.

02:32:40.000 Where they included stuff that was not in all the conspiracy books that I read.

02:32:44.000 And I've read a lot.

02:32:46.000 And you say, okay, one, why the hell didn't you put that in there?

02:32:49.000 Now I'm mad at you and I don't trust you as much.

02:32:51.000 What stuff?

02:32:51.000 Give me a specific...

02:32:52.000 Well, the fact that Oswald took a shot at a U.S. general before he took a shot at Kennedy, right?

02:32:57.000 If you figured out that...

02:32:58.000 When did he do that?

02:32:59.000 Oh, God, I want to say...

02:33:00.000 Who was the general, too?

02:33:02.000 Ten years ago, I would have remembered his name.

02:33:04.000 We have to look up Lee Harvey Oswald.

02:33:06.000 He took a shot at a general and missed...

02:33:09.000 And with the same rifle, I believe.

02:33:11.000 And it was Posner and Bugliosi that both pointed that out.

02:33:14.000 And when you turn around and go, okay, if the guy was really taking a shot at the U.S. General, now that changes my overall view of the guy.

02:33:23.000 Oswald's earlier attempt to assassinate General Walker.

02:33:26.000 Interesting.

02:33:28.000 And so when you hear that, and again, now that might not be anything, but why'd you leave some of that out on my conspiracy books?

02:33:33.000 That's important.

02:33:35.000 You know, another thing about the Oswald thing that always bugged me was that they said that the scope wasn't cited in properly.

02:33:42.000 The Manlaker Carcano rifle, the mail loader.

02:33:45.000 How could he get off that shot when the scope wasn't even sighted improperly?

02:33:49.000 I'm like, how do you know it's not sighted improperly?

02:33:51.000 You know it's not sighted improperly because right after they found it, they shot with it?

02:33:56.000 How long did it take before they shot with it?

02:33:58.000 Do you know anything about scopes?

02:34:00.000 Let me tell you something about scopes. 1.00

02:34:01.000 You fucking drop your rifle on the ground and that thing gets off. 0.99

02:34:05.000 It's decalification. 1.00

02:34:05.000 It's uncalibrated. 1.00

02:34:06.000 It happens easy.

02:34:07.000 You could bang your rifle against a log or a rock or something like that.

02:34:12.000 And I doubt he was putting it down carefully after shooting the president. 0.99

02:34:15.000 Not only that, who the fuck was handling it? 0.99

02:34:17.000 There was so much shenanigans involved in handling the right way. 0.98

02:34:19.000 So that argument I reject.

02:34:21.000 Because when they said that the gun wasn't sighted in properly, I'm like...

02:34:26.000 That doesn't make any sense.

02:34:27.000 You have no idea how it was sighted in when he pulled the trigger.

02:34:30.000 You don't know.

02:34:30.000 It's so easy to throw off.

02:34:31.000 And there's no question, Kennedy had pissed off a lot of people.

02:34:33.000 A lot of people.

02:34:34.000 And so, I mean, when you talk about a conspiracy and having motive, there were a lot of people that had motive.

02:34:39.000 I always hate it when they, you know, the Oliver Stone movie drove me crazy because, in my opinion, the movie he did on JFK, he took every conspiracy theory out there and threw them all in.

02:34:49.000 Mm-hmm.

02:34:49.000 Which discredited all of them to me.

02:34:51.000 Pick one and go with it.

02:34:52.000 Well, also he had that fake general who didn't really exist.

02:34:54.000 I know.

02:34:54.000 He's giving them all the information.

02:34:55.000 He does that with...

02:34:56.000 He does...

02:34:56.000 Can't do that in a doctor...

02:34:57.000 Don't get me started on him.

02:34:58.000 No, I'll get you started then.

02:35:00.000 John F. Kennedy...

02:35:01.000 Yeah, they do that in these movies that are supposed to be about real history.

02:35:07.000 Oh, he did it with The Doors.

02:35:08.000 And then when he was called on it, his answer was, this wasn't a movie about The Doors in reality.

02:35:13.000 It was a movie about what I thought about The Doors when I was fighting in Vietnam, listening to their music.

02:35:18.000 And you go, dude, say that at the beginning of the film.

02:35:21.000 This is a fictionalized version of what I thought when I was in the...

02:35:24.000 That's such a cop-out.

02:35:25.000 He did it with Alexander the Great, too.

02:35:26.000 Yeah.

02:35:27.000 Did it with the Alexander the Great film, too.

02:35:28.000 You're just going to stop.

02:35:29.000 What's he going to add in this movie?

02:35:30.000 The Snowden movie he's got coming out this week.

02:35:32.000 Oliver Stone didn't get funding for Snowden in the U.S. In Germany, he found both financial support and filming locations for his political thriller, but its release is low-key.

02:35:42.000 Is the U.S. trying to keep it under wraps?

02:35:44.000 Is it the U.S. operates as one giant machine?

02:35:48.000 That's exactly right, yeah.

02:35:50.000 The press is keeping it down because they don't want everybody to talk about the Snowden stuff.

02:35:54.000 Listen, if they thought it would make $150 million, the studios would be pushing it left, right, and center.

02:35:59.000 Right now, they'd love a hit of any kind, regardless of what it said.

02:36:03.000 What were we just talking about before you brought that up?

02:36:07.000 JFK, Oliver Stone adding stuff into those movies.

02:36:11.000 I wanted to know what other things led you to believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

02:36:18.000 Well, I mean, originally, you know, when you follow the story, see, it's not just the fact that it probably happened a certain way.

02:36:25.000 It's when you follow the conspiracy talk and you realize, you know, what they're bringing to the equation.

02:36:29.000 How much do I believe the David, you know, the Cuban idea? 0.57

02:36:33.000 How much do I believe?

02:36:34.000 And after going through it, you know, if you go read, like, Bo Yossi's book, he was the guy who wrote Helter Skelter.

02:36:39.000 He prosecuted Manson.

02:36:41.000 He was a guy I liked a lot.

02:36:42.000 And he wrote a book where he did it like a prosecutor, right?

02:36:45.000 So here's how I would have prosecuted Oswald.

02:36:49.000 And when he lines it up the way he does, you sit there and go, okay, this is not...

02:36:53.000 And I know Bugliosi, he was a guy that would have loved to have written that it wasn't.

02:36:57.000 He would have loved to have said Kennedy was assassinated by a conspiracy, but he didn't.

02:37:01.000 And he ran down the list and you sat there and go, okay, if I was at the trial...

02:37:05.000 And I was on the jury, and they said, what was the preponderance of evidence?

02:37:08.000 And did the prosecutor, you know, prove his case?

02:37:11.000 I would have had to have said, after reading Boyosi's book, that unless I really had a vested interest in believing the conspiracy theory, that he had done a damn good job of making his case.

02:37:21.000 Here's my problem with it, and this is one that, for whatever reason, I don't see brought up very often.

02:37:27.000 I don't think they have to be mutually exclusive.

02:37:29.000 I don't think Oswald was innocent.

02:37:31.000 I think Oswald very well might have shot at the president.

02:37:36.000 But I think it's highly likely they set up more than one shooter.

02:37:39.000 I think there's a possibility that gunfire echoing from that building could make people think that it was coming from the grassy knoll.

02:37:48.000 But there's so many people that said that gunfire was coming from the grassy knoll that you have to wonder.

02:37:54.000 And you look at the shots that hit Kennedy...

02:37:57.000 Like, the one in his neck, that's one of the more interesting books that I read about it was Case Closed, not Case Closed, Best Evidence by David Lifton.

02:38:06.000 Yeah.

02:38:06.000 Lifton was the one that, didn't he say that they put something in the autopsy in Kennedy's head, like a...

02:38:12.000 That to me, by the way, that was the part that blew me away because when we were kids, they didn't have the Kennedy autopsy photos.

02:38:18.000 And then to eventually release those, that was shocking.

02:38:21.000 And they put it in the book.

02:38:22.000 Yeah.

02:38:23.000 Yeah.

02:38:23.000 Well, they also changed between Bethesda, Maryland and Dallas.

02:38:27.000 In that flight from Dallas to Bethesda, they changed what the impact was.

02:38:33.000 They were calling it a bullet hole in his neck in Dallas.

02:38:36.000 And then when it got to Bethesda, they referred to it as a tracheotomy hole.

02:38:42.000 Here's my problem.

02:38:43.000 If he was hit from the front and from the back, it's entirely possible that Oswald also was involved and that there was a bunch of people involved.

02:38:51.000 It's entirely possible that if you're going to assassinate the president, if you're going to have a conspiracy to assassinate the president, you're going to use a bunch of people.

02:38:59.000 Why wouldn't they use someone like Oswald? 1.00

02:39:01.000 Why wouldn't they use some crazy fuck who emigrates to Russia and comes back with a Russian wife and he's involved in communist propaganda and all sorts of other crazy unsavory shit. 1.00

02:39:11.000 He shoots at generals. 1.00

02:39:13.000 Yeah, that's exactly a guy you would use.

02:39:15.000 And he might have been involved too.

02:39:17.000 It might have been, and I don't, it's somehow or another, it always, the debate is always a mutually exclusive thing. 0.97

02:39:23.000 Either Oswald acted alone, or the CIA killed Kennedy, or the NSA, or whoever the fuck, the Cubans, the mob, and they blamed it on Oswald. 0.74

02:39:31.000 Well, it could totally be he was a part of it all, and that there was more than one shooter. 0.97

02:39:36.000 That seems to me to be the most likely thing.

02:39:41.000 It's certainly possible.

02:39:42.000 When Jack Ruby runs up to him and shoots him in front of all those cops, those cops were walking him out there to his assassination.

02:39:48.000 They're holding onto his arm.

02:39:49.000 We've got him.

02:39:50.000 We've got the guy who shot the president out in the open in front of everybody.

02:39:53.000 Was that a guy with a gun?

02:39:54.000 Oh, no!

02:39:56.000 The guy who was my mentor when I first started in news was a local guy here that everybody in news knew, a guy named John Babcock.

02:40:04.000 And Babcock was a Texas guy originally.

02:40:07.000 And he was in the motorcade, in the very last car, because they had press writing.

02:40:12.000 But he was in the motorcade.

02:40:15.000 So he was at Parkland when it was announced that Kennedy was dead.

02:40:19.000 And then he told me the story.

02:40:21.000 He had good stories.

02:40:22.000 He had good Manson stories, too.

02:40:23.000 He was in...

02:40:37.000 I don't recall what John thought in terms of conspiracy or not conspiracy, but I remember that that was like a seminal moment in his career, because he was broadcasting live, he was on the radio while it was all going on, and he was there at the scene.

02:40:50.000 He also had the most Awesome Manson stuff.

02:40:53.000 Because the station I worked at, KABC, was big in the Manson investigation.

02:40:57.000 They're the ones that actually found the bloody clothes a year later on the hillside while they were filming a recreation.

02:41:02.000 And that's how the bloody clothes got found.

02:41:05.000 And he would go and speak to Manson all the time when Manson was not convicted yet.

02:41:10.000 So he's on trial and awaiting trial.

02:41:12.000 And he and Manson became friends, and up on his wall, he had a photo of Charles Manson with, in pencil, a note.

02:41:18.000 And I still remember what it said.

02:41:19.000 It said, to the trial, come early, stay late, it'll be quite a show.

02:41:24.000 And he said, look at that writing that Manson did.

02:41:27.000 And I looked at it, and it was weird.

02:41:29.000 You could see that the pencil was broken, like he would snap the point off the pencil every couple of words.

02:41:35.000 Yeah.

02:41:54.000 So Manson started sending him messages saying, why don't you come and visit me anymore?

02:41:58.000 And so finally John went and he said, Manson said, so why don't you come and visit me anymore?

02:42:03.000 And John said, well, you know, Charlie, you know, you're going to the...

02:42:05.000 And Manson says, so you don't think I can, you know, you don't think I'm...

02:42:08.000 And he goes, no, no.

02:42:09.000 So he said, come back in a week.

02:42:11.000 And so John says, so I come back in a week.

02:42:12.000 And all Manson did was slide under the table like a cocktail napkin type thing.

02:42:18.000 And on it was drawn the layout of John's house.

02:42:28.000 Jesus Christ.

02:42:32.000 Wow.

02:42:39.000 And then send him the cocktail napkin.

02:42:42.000 He had so many good stories.

02:42:43.000 He was an old-fashioned news guy.

02:42:46.000 But he was in the Kennedy thing, and we used to talk about that all the time.

02:42:49.000 And now I wish I could remember, 50-year-old brain, bus speed, what John had told me about his thinking on it.

02:42:54.000 I guess my attitude is I'm always disinclined to believe conspiracy theories unless the preponderance of evidence convinces me otherwise.

02:43:01.000 But we talked about one already.

02:43:02.000 We talked about the Gulf of Tonkin.

02:43:03.000 That's an absolute false flag conspiracy that was perpetrated on the American public, resulting in us going to war, ramping up the war, killing who knows how many people.

02:43:12.000 But everybody, the people in government...

02:43:15.000 I don't know how to explain.

02:43:17.000 All the people around Kennedy were Kennedy's people.

02:43:20.000 And so whether you're talking about the defense secretary or a lot of it, the whiz kids, they were called.

02:43:25.000 When Kennedy brought in these new people from private industry, they were his people.

02:43:28.000 And they stayed in the Johnson administration.

02:43:31.000 Those people would have had to...

02:43:33.000 I mean, if they had thought that their boss who brought them into government had been killed by Johnson or by the government...

02:43:39.000 I mean, it's hard to...

02:43:41.000 And then to believe that...

02:43:41.000 How did they know?

02:43:43.000 How would you know?

02:43:44.000 Okay, if you're all in an office and you're working with the president and the president gets shot, you think you're going to get more information than the average person in the street?

02:43:51.000 You're probably not.

02:43:52.000 You're probably going to have to read the news reports just like everybody else.

02:43:55.000 You're going to see Oswald paraded out there. 0.94

02:43:57.000 You're going to see Jack Ruby shoot him.

02:43:59.000 You're going to have people in your organization tell you that they shot the guy who shot the president. 0.80

02:44:03.000 And you're going to believe it.

02:44:04.000 Until you see the Zapruder film, until you're watching the Geraldo Rivera show and Dick Gregory brings on the Zapruder film, what was elected?

02:44:13.000 Ten years later?

02:44:14.000 I remember that.

02:44:14.000 Wasn't it like ten years later?

02:44:16.000 What year did it, was it like, they assassinated him in 63, and I don't think he made it on the Dick Gregory show until like the 1970s.

02:44:25.000 No, it was late 70s, too, I think.

02:44:27.000 Or the Geraldo Rivera show.

02:44:29.000 Well, so then here's the question.

02:44:30.000 If it wasn't the government, so look at all the different people that Oliver Stone could throw into a film, right?

02:44:36.000 Whether it's the mafia or whatever.

02:44:37.000 If it's not the government, then the government has no reason at all to cover it up.

02:44:41.000 Okay, if the mafia does it, Robert F. Kennedy's going after the mafia all the time anyway, it just gives him one more reason to go.

02:44:47.000 So the only way this becomes a conspiracy that stays secret and involves the government not investigating it is if the government is in on it.

02:44:55.000 So that's the only conspiracy theory that makes sense on why the government didn't pursue the conspiracy theory, okay?

02:45:01.000 So if the government is in on it, Well, how many people have to be in on it?

02:45:07.000 See, here's the thing.

02:45:08.000 If the narrative that they're reinforcing...

02:45:10.000 And they did compartmentalize.

02:45:11.000 That was standard operating procedure.

02:45:12.000 They do everything.

02:45:12.000 Everything is compartmentalized.

02:45:14.000 And there's a need-to-know basis.

02:45:15.000 And, you know, unless you're some dude in a movie who wants to get to the bottom of it and you sneak into the building in the middle of the night with a flashlight.

02:45:21.000 But then why is the Warren Commission report and the magic bullet, all that stuff is part of the cover-up if you buy that theory.

02:45:27.000 Well, the Warren Commission report in and of itself is what Lifton uses as a reason to go in and start investigating the Kennedy assassination.

02:45:36.000 Well, as I told you, there's a good reason to have covered it up if you believe that the American people would draw a natural conclusion that a Soviet agent killed our president.

02:45:45.000 And remember, you know, Kennedy had been trying to assassinate Castro, too, so there were reasons for a Cuban group of people to take— I mean, there's a— Sure. 0.74

02:45:53.000 He had a lot of enemies.

02:45:54.000 There's no question.

02:45:55.000 And he had a lot of enemies also in government.

02:45:57.000 He was trying to get rid of the CIA. He was trying to do a lot of stuff that people didn't like.

02:46:02.000 The speech that he gave about transparency, about secrets and secret societies being a damaging part of our culture.

02:46:10.000 I mean, that was all—that's all not good if you want to stay alive.

02:46:14.000 Well, and I want to make it clear.

02:46:16.000 When it comes to these kind of theories, I try to have an open mind, always.

02:46:19.000 And, you know, try to look at every angle.

02:46:22.000 And I'm not saying that these things are not possible.

02:46:23.000 You would ask me if I had a view, and I used to have one view, and now I have another view.

02:46:28.000 If evidence came out tomorrow that made it look like it was a conspiracy, I would be perfectly happy to switch again.

02:46:35.000 I mean, I try to be flexible on these things.

02:46:38.000 I don't have a vested interest.

02:46:39.000 So when you say those things, I kind of go, okay, yeah, I can see that.

02:46:43.000 It's not what I believe lately, but I can see that. 0.82

02:46:45.000 Yeah, I don't really believe anything when it comes to that, when it comes to the Kennedy assassination, other than some fuckery was afoot.

02:46:52.000 Well, and like I said, I get angry when the conspiracy theorists who write these books, and it's an industry, as you well know, I get angry when they don't include things that might disprove what they say.

02:47:01.000 You want me to believe you, I want you to lay it all out, right?

02:47:05.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:47:05.000 And so I became suspicious once those books started coming forward saying, well, look what they left out here, and look what they left out here.

02:47:11.000 And you go, okay, well now, you never told me that.

02:47:14.000 Well, there's some tightly grooved paths when it comes to discussing that conspiracy.

02:47:18.000 That's why I've always found it so weird that no one mentions, or very rarely is it mentioned, that Oswald might have been a part of it.

02:47:24.000 The idea that he got off those three shots, because they determined that it was three shots based on people's reporting, and You know, if you believe that he got off those three shots in a short amount of time, and then you see Jesse Ventura trying to recreate it and say, it's impossible, no one can get that off.

02:47:39.000 Well, someone can do that.

02:47:41.000 That's not true.

02:47:41.000 There's people that are capable of getting off three shots in six seconds or whatever it was.

02:47:46.000 And if I recall, Oswald was a marksman, wasn't he?

02:47:50.000 I mean, look, it's...

02:47:52.000 He probably was okay with a rifle, but if you're leaning, here's the reality, you're leaning on a windowsill and you've got a scope.

02:48:01.000 With a bolt-action ancient rifle.

02:48:04.000 I mean, if you really wanted to kill the president, a mail-order, Manlik, or Carcano rifle is not what you would have chosen.

02:48:10.000 But he's not shooting that far of a shot. 0.83

02:48:12.000 No.

02:48:13.000 I mean, how many yards was it?

02:48:14.000 And plus, after the first one, you just spray, kind of.

02:48:17.000 You just pull the trigger a couple times.

02:48:19.000 But if someone else was involved, that's where it gets even weirder.

02:48:22.000 Like, he's shooting down, someone's shooting from the front.

02:48:25.000 That seems like what they would do if they were trying to kill somebody, if it's a conspiracy.

02:48:29.000 Sure, triangulation.

02:48:30.000 Although, let's be honest, that becomes a lot harder to hide later.

02:48:34.000 So if you're worried about exposure, because exposure would show the tentacles, well, then you want to make it as cut and dried and simple as you can.

02:48:42.000 You start triangulating on a president...

02:48:45.000 You know, you don't know, as you well know, what those bullets are going to do, right?

02:48:49.000 I think you open yourself up to massive problems if those bullets go.

02:48:53.000 I mean, in other words, if something had gone another way and it would have been impossible to deny that there was another shooter, how does that change the whole investigation?

02:49:03.000 Well, you know, that actually did happen.

02:49:04.000 That was part of the investigation itself, leading to the magic bullet theory.

02:49:08.000 The magic bullet theory was created because a guy was walking under the underpass and the curbstone got hit by a bullet.

02:49:19.000 He was hit in the head with a ricochet.

02:49:21.000 So because he was hit with a ricochet, they found the spot where the bullet had hit, and they had accounted for one bullet.

02:49:27.000 So then they had the headshot that killed Kennedy, and then they had this neck thing, and then they had this other bullet, and then they started trying to figure out, well, how many bullets are involved here, and how does Connelly have a bullet lodged in his leg?

02:49:41.000 Like, how does this happen?

02:49:42.000 Or how did he get shot in a bullet that shattered his bone and went through his leg?

02:49:46.000 Also went through Kennedy?

02:49:48.000 Is that what we're saying?

02:49:49.000 Like, what are we saying?

02:49:49.000 So they had to come up with that one bullet doing all that damage specifically because somebody got hit with some spray.

02:49:57.000 I mean, that did happen.

02:49:59.000 That was a part of the investigation.

02:50:01.000 And this is the part where it's kind of hard if you want there to be anything cut and dried.

02:50:07.000 If you're the Warren Commission report, and you're doing this not that long after Kennedy's assassination, I think you have to allow for the idea that there are going to be unknowables.

02:50:15.000 Right?

02:50:16.000 And especially ballistics.

02:50:18.000 I mean, ballistics are crazy, right?

02:50:20.000 Bullets tumble.

02:50:21.000 And, you know, you fire 900 bullets at something, most of them are going to be deformed, but some of them might not be. 0.98

02:50:27.000 Yeah, but they're never going to look like that magic bullet. 1.00

02:50:30.000 That bullet is bullshit. 1.00

02:50:32.000 That's the most bullshit aspect of the entire investigation, is that silly bullet. 1.00

02:50:37.000 What is that, a t-shirt? 1.00

02:50:38.000 A Kennedy assassination?

02:50:40.000 It's like how it would have had to travel through his body, too.

02:50:43.000 Well, that doesn't surprise me.

02:50:44.000 Bullets can do that. 0.92

02:50:45.000 You hit bones and you ricochet and you tumble.

02:50:48.000 It's not totally accurate, too.

02:50:50.000 This gets exaggerated, like the entry point and the exit point.

02:50:54.000 But the point is, when bullets hit bone... 0.99

02:50:57.000 They fucking bend, and they change shape. 0.99

02:51:00.000 When bullets don't hit bone, when you shoot bullets into ballistic gel, or when you shoot them into water especially, they don't deform. 0.99

02:51:07.000 That bullet looked like a bullet that was shot through something soft.

02:51:10.000 Look at it there.

02:51:12.000 It doesn't look like what a bullet looks like when it hits bone.

02:51:16.000 And that hit bone.

02:51:17.000 It shattered Connolly's wrist, that same bullet.

02:51:21.000 And they apparently just found it on his gurney in the hospital.

02:51:25.000 And we're supposed to think that that's a bullet that went through Kennedy and Connolly.

02:51:29.000 I've never talked to a single actual ballistics expert or firearms enthusiast that believes that.

02:51:38.000 Well, see, this is where, had I known I was coming here, I would have brought both those books, so we could have looked up how Bugliosi and Posner explained the magic bullet, because they...

02:51:46.000 The path could be explained, I think.

02:51:49.000 Bullets hit things. 0.93

02:51:51.000 People have had bullets ricochet around inside someone's skull and come out their eye when you shoot them in the face. 0.81

02:51:57.000 Oh, yeah. 0.61

02:51:58.000 Oh, yeah.

02:51:59.000 Good things happen with bullets when they hit bones and they ricochet and they move around.

02:52:02.000 So that's, the path of the bullet seems crazy, but possible.

02:52:06.000 What's weird is that they think that is the bullet.

02:52:09.000 That doesn't make any sense at all.

02:52:11.000 If they just said that's a bullet that we found and maybe, you know, he had another one.

02:52:15.000 I mean, maybe something hit something else.

02:52:17.000 Maybe.

02:52:18.000 I don't know.

02:52:18.000 Does that naturally point to the conspiracy?

02:52:21.000 Yes, it does to me. 1.00

02:52:22.000 It points to people being full of shit. 1.00

02:52:24.000 The fact that they conveniently found it on the gurney... 1.00

02:52:26.000 Wait, wait, okay, so the government, you're saying...

02:52:29.000 I guess what I'm saying is, Occam's razor, you're not going to have to convince me of that.

02:52:34.000 Also, that the Warren Commission report might have had all sorts of domestic and foreign policy reasons for doing what it did.

02:52:40.000 And just imagine if you're the CIA in 1962, and you're getting together with all your cronies, and you've been responsible for jacking people all over the world.

02:52:50.000 And you've got this guy...

02:52:51.000 And he's going to disband your entire organization.

02:52:54.000 And then you're talking to some other people that are upset at him because of the Bay of Pigs.

02:52:58.000 And you're talking about some other people that are upset about him because of this and of that and all the other things that he's trying to do that people don't agree with.

02:53:05.000 And you go, look, there's a simple solution to this.

02:53:07.000 And you bring in that Lee Harvey Oswald character and you get that ball rolling.

02:53:12.000 You set up a bunch of different people that are really good at rifles.

02:53:16.000 I think it's totally possible.

02:53:18.000 It's one of the most possible conspiracies ever.

02:53:20.000 It's totally possible.

02:53:21.000 Yeah.

02:53:21.000 I don't bank on it.

02:53:22.000 I don't bank on it.

02:53:23.000 I mean, it's also possible.

02:53:25.000 Here's one thing that always bugged me about the Supruder film.

02:53:28.000 When you watch his head, his head does go back and to the left, but the spray from the bullet, in my eye, seems like it's going forward, like he was hit from behind.

02:53:41.000 It's an exit wound, yeah.

02:53:42.000 Well, it seems like a little bit of it, but then sometimes when you hit someone, like, you can hit things and just the impact of the bullet causes a reverberation.

02:53:51.000 I was just going to say, and also, you know, if you watch, there's a lot of executions online, and I'm ashamed to say I've seen some of them.

02:53:57.000 All of them.

02:53:57.000 Yeah.

02:53:58.000 All of them.

02:53:59.000 If there's a new one tomorrow.

02:54:01.000 No, but the one thing you notice is that there are probabilities.

02:54:06.000 But remember, I mean, the reason Kennedy's arms went up like this when he was shot is because it hit a kind of a nerve.

02:54:11.000 In other words, things happen when you start striking nerves that are unpredictable.

02:54:16.000 Or it could have hit him in the neck.

02:54:18.000 Well, it did hit him in the neck or behind the shoulder, but that caused the arms to jack up like that.

02:54:22.000 So watch this real quick.

02:54:23.000 See, when you see it...

02:54:26.000 That looks like an exit wound to me.

02:54:28.000 It kind of sprays forward.

02:54:30.000 His head goes back into the left, but that could easily have been because of just the nerve reaction.

02:54:39.000 That's what I'm saying.

02:54:40.000 I don't know, though, man.

02:54:41.000 It does go back into the left like it...

02:54:43.000 I know, but that's unpredictable.

02:54:45.000 There's executions of Chinese nationalists killing Chinese communists, and you watch them and they'll do it over and over and over again, and most of the time things go the way you think they should, and sometimes they don't.

02:54:57.000 Yeah.

02:54:58.000 You know, bodies are weird.

02:54:59.000 There's a delay when it goes back into the left.

02:55:02.000 There's a delay that almost seems to indicate that maybe it was...

02:55:07.000 A nerve reaction.

02:55:09.000 Well, see, that's what the arms going up was.

02:55:11.000 Because the bullet goes, but watch, the bullet hits.

02:55:13.000 I can't believe we'll watch this over again.

02:55:14.000 The bullet hits.

02:55:16.000 And then there's this back and to the left.

02:55:18.000 Eh, that could be from the impact of the gun, too.

02:55:21.000 Remember, the car is also moving, which is making you, you know...

02:55:25.000 It's so hard to tell.

02:55:27.000 And then here's another thing to take into consideration.

02:55:29.000 It's entirely possible that he was hit with two bullets in the head at the same time.

02:55:33.000 That is a possibility.

02:55:35.000 I'm not going to deny that.

02:55:36.000 And I'm also going to say that the reason that it would be interesting to know the answer, I mean, if somebody could come down from the extraterrestrials and tell you, you know, this is what really...

02:55:46.000 Yeah.

02:55:46.000 Right?

02:55:47.000 In that sense, the problem with it, though, is if you buy into the conspiracy theory as it's normally told, then that basically takes you down this road that, okay, there was a coup, the president was killed by the government, and then that all subsequent history from that point on then takes a,

02:56:04.000 you know, like, you know, they say with time travel, you change something and you go off on a totally different course.

02:56:08.000 All history goes on a totally different course if that's what really happened.

02:56:12.000 In other words, everything must be looked through a different lens.

02:56:14.000 Right.

02:56:15.000 If I was to believe, as I used to, that that was done by the government, then my whole common sense show would be totally different.

02:56:21.000 But doesn't, I mean, don't you have to look at everything from a different lens when you find something like Operation Northwoods?

02:56:26.000 When you find the Northwoods documents, you see that it's signed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that this was a real plan they were thinking about implementing, and Kennedy put the boycott on it.

02:56:35.000 Well, they did some of this.

02:56:38.000 I mean, Operation Northwoods is not that far from things they did in other places.

02:56:43.000 Right.

02:56:45.000 And wasn't Cheney, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but wasn't Cheney trying to do something about that with Iran?

02:56:49.000 Wasn't there a similar thing that was on the table for a false flag to try to get us into Iran before the end of the Bush administration?

02:56:57.000 Wasn't there something that was being reported?

02:56:58.000 Maybe it was on Infowars.com.

02:57:00.000 I don't remember that one.

02:57:01.000 See if you can find that.

02:57:03.000 False flag, Iran, Rumsfeld or Cheney.

02:57:07.000 I don't remember who it was.

02:57:08.000 The problem that all those people have is if they think I always try to get people the benefit of the doubt and say, if you came to me with secret information and says, blah, blah, blah, the country needs to do this now.

02:57:18.000 And you say to yourself, but I could never get the American people to go along with that.

02:57:22.000 So if they knew what I knew, they would, but they won't.

02:57:25.000 So because of that, I'm going, you know, so you start to try to figure out instead of just automatically going the conspiracy, right?

02:57:31.000 You go, okay, could there be a logical reason that I would accept and understand that would explain the same sequence of events?

02:57:39.000 I always try to do that.

02:57:41.000 Now, I say that as somebody who clearly knows the CIA's record.

02:57:45.000 I mean, that's been one of my interests forever.

02:57:47.000 The stuff that they do, I can't think of any natural limitations on.

02:57:51.000 I can't think of anything where the CIA would have said, no, I wouldn't do that if the president wanted us to.

02:57:57.000 I don't think many people know this, but, you know, in the Nixon administration, there was talk about killing Jack Anderson, the investigative reporter.

02:58:05.000 And it was G. Gordon Liddy who had offered to run him down with a car.

02:58:10.000 So when you talk about that and there are people around the president who are willing to consider the option, well then I have to say, you know, Dan, you have to open up your mind to the possibility that these things can happen.

02:58:21.000 And as I said, my opinion for years was that it did.

02:58:24.000 So I'm not open to the idea. 0.79

02:58:28.000 To provoke war, Cheney considered a proposal to dress up Navy SEALs as Iranians and shoot at them.

02:58:37.000 Is that real?

02:58:38.000 What's the source of this?

02:58:40.000 Seymour Hersh.

02:58:40.000 You've got to be careful.

02:58:41.000 What is it?

02:58:41.000 He knows.

02:58:42.000 Seymour Hersh.

02:58:43.000 He's, you know, Seymour's getting a little old.

02:58:45.000 Pulitzer Prize winning journalist for the New Yorker?

02:58:47.000 Yeah.

02:58:48.000 Seymour Hersh is the one who broke things like, I think he broke the My Lai Massacre and things like that.

02:58:53.000 Oh, okay.

02:58:54.000 As I said earlier, though, Cheney is really a nefarious character in terms of, you know, if you weigh him next to the 1950s, the idea of fair play in the American way, he didn't believe any of that stuff.

02:59:05.000 It's a dog-eat-dog world, and whatever you and I consider to be American values is marketing, and you react, you know, I mean, it's all about, you know, it's realpolitik, as they call it, right?

02:59:18.000 He's such a weird character, because he's almost biblical.

02:59:21.000 Like, when he had that heart implant, and his body wasn't giving off a pulse anymore, and the heart was just, this artificial heart was just circling the blood, like, he literally was alive without a pulse.

02:59:32.000 How do you listen to that guy anymore, though?

02:59:34.000 Who listens to him?

02:59:35.000 I don't know, it's Fox News people.

02:59:37.000 But it's weird why he wants to do it.

02:59:39.000 Like, why wouldn't he want to fade back?

02:59:41.000 He still wants to influence the process.

02:59:43.000 Oh, you talk about a guy with a Rolodex, right?

02:59:45.000 He must clearly enjoy it.

02:59:46.000 He shot some people in his Rolodex.

02:59:48.000 I bet.

02:59:50.000 Birdseed, wasn't it? 0.74

02:59:51.000 Accidentally shot some dude in the face.

02:59:52.000 I used to do a joke about it. 0.99

02:59:53.000 That's how you know you're a gangster. 0.94

02:59:55.000 You shoot your friend in the face and your friend apologizes. 0.98

02:59:57.000 That's right. 0.74

02:59:58.000 That guy got on TV. He's like, I look like a bird.

03:00:00.000 I'm so sorry.

03:00:01.000 I was drunk.

03:00:02.000 He was totally sober.

03:00:03.000 That's right.

03:00:04.000 Yeah. 0.99

03:00:05.000 So listen, Dan, we just did three fucking hours. 0.99

03:00:08.000 We did? 0.99

03:00:08.000 Yeah. 0.99

03:00:09.000 I thought we were just getting started.

03:00:10.000 No, we just did three hours.

03:00:11.000 This happens to us every time.

03:00:12.000 I know.

03:00:12.000 You know what you're going to hear afterwards, right?

03:00:14.000 We didn't talk about any history, unless the JFK assassination sounds like history.

03:00:17.000 That's history.

03:00:18.000 That's certainly history.

03:00:19.000 We talked about, I don't know. 1.00

03:00:21.000 A lot of good shit. 0.99

03:00:22.000 Another three hours of the books. 1.00

03:00:23.000 That was great.

03:00:24.000 Anytime you want to do it again, man, we'll do another three.

03:00:26.000 Thank you, buddy.

03:00:26.000 You're always so good to me.

03:00:27.000 I appreciate it, brother.

03:00:28.000 Your podcast is one of my favorite things in all of audio recorded history.

03:00:32.000 I just want to thank you for it.

03:00:34.000 Thank you for introducing me to the cons.

03:00:36.000 Because if it wasn't for that, I would never have been Mongol obsessed. 0.95

03:00:40.000 And thanks just for being awesome, man.

03:00:41.000 You're the best, man.

03:00:42.000 Thank you for having me.

03:00:43.000 Thanks, everybody.

03:00:44.000 We'll see you Saturday.

03:00:45.000 Fight Companion.

03:00:47.000 See you then.

03:00:49.000 Sorry, I know I'm gonna get ham.

The Joe Rogan Experience - September 15, 2016

Joe Rogan Experience #847 - Dan Carlin

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