Duncan Trussell Family Hour - ABBY MARTIN

Episode Date: August 7, 2013

Journalist from "Breaking The Set" and RT news joins the DTFH.

Ghost Towns, Dirty Angel, out now. You can get Dirty Angel anywhere you get your music. Ghost Towns, Dirty Angel, out now. New album and tour date coming this summer. Hello everyone. Welcome to the Duncan Tressel Family Hour podcast. Today's guest is an actual journalist, as opposed to many people who are currently on

some of the mainstream media outlets that seem to be spokespeople for the United States government. Here's one of the most glaring examples of these types of pundits. Check this out. It's from MSNBC. They actually put this on the air. An open letter to Snowden from MSNBC journalist,

Melissa Harris Perry. And straining US relationships with Russia and China. Really important relationships. And we're talking about how you praise countries like Russia and Venezuela for standing against human rights violations and refusing to compromise their principles. Seriously Ed, where do you even come up with that? What are you thinking?

Now, I understand you don't want to come aback. I mean, to do so would mean giving up your freedom. Definitely before trial and likely for several months or years thereafter. I get it. It's in prisons in the US that commit actual human rights violations. We just talked about it.

More than 80,000 prisons are held in solitary confinement, some for years, some indefinitely, despite the fact that solitary is cruel and psychological damaging. I know those aren't the human rights violations, though Ed, that you were complaining about. But you might have nothing to worry about anyway. Because unlike most of the people in solitary confinement,

including private Bradley Manning on trial for giving data to WikiLeaks, you've cultivated for yourself a level of celebrity. And that celebrity itself may just act as the protection, another kind of cloak. If you ever find yourself in a US prison, you have made quite a spectacle of yourself. And the Obama administration will be very careful

about how it treats you, unlike how states treat all those other prisoners. Come on, Ed. Then we could talk about something else. Sincerely, Melissa. That is real. That actually went on the air. It sounds like something you would hear a reporter saying

on North Korean news, that is state media there. That is as though the federal government wrote a script and sent it to the various news outlets, asking them to read the script. That's real. That's actually happening. But it gets even creepier when you head over to Fox News.

Listen to this. Let's talk about the NSA and the comprehensive program now with prison and everything being out there and being examined. We're discussing the breadth of the NSA program. You are a take-no-prisoners person when it comes to the war on terror. How do you feel about it?

Look, show me one American, one law-abiding American citizen who has been hurt by any of these NSA programs. None. None, exactly. They're keeping us safe. If the intel community backs off and doesn't do this stuff and there's a terrorist attack, then it's intelligence failure. If they do this stuff, well, it's big brother snooping.

And now you've got this 29-year-old high school dropout whistleblower making foreign policy for our country, our security policy. And the guy, look, I think it's sad, Brian. We've made treason cool. We train your country as kind of a fashion statement. He wants to be the national security Kim Kardashian. He cites Bradley Manning as a hero.

I mean, we need to get very, very serious about treason and, oh, by the way, for treason, as in the case of Bradley Manning or Edward Snowden, you bring back the death penalty. The death penalty. Fox News just gave a platform upon which some kind of fascist monster could call for the death penalty of a kid who had the balls to let all of us know

that we are constantly being monitored by our government. This type of surveillance goes against the Fourth Amendment, which says, the rights of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated and no warrants shall issue but upon probable cause supported by oath or affirmation and particularly describing the place to be searched

and the person or things to be seized. Isn't that nice? That's a great amendment. It basically says to power, fuck you. You can't go through my stuff. And Edward Snowden was a person who recognized that this was being violated and had the guts to let the reporter Glenn Greenwald know

that this was happening. And the result of it is that the entire country is now in a furious debate over whether or not the NSA can continue to monitor us. And that's a wonderful thing. And it wouldn't have happened without, A, people like Snowden who were willing to give up their entire life for their country.

To make the United States a better place, Snowden had to go live in Russia. That's a hero. And two, it requires somebody like Glenn Greenwald, a reporter whose life has been radically shifted because he's the one who got all this information out there in the first place. And there are actually congressmen

who are calling for Glenn Greenwald's arrest. That's right. There's elective representatives who would like to arrest journalists right now for telling us the truth. That congressman, Pete King of New York who joins me now. Now, congressman, thank you for being here. So you, all right.

So it's not particularly newsworthy that you're calling for Snowden to be prosecuted because we've seen that over the past few days. But to take it another step and say the journalists who published the information, that the guys who published what he leaked, that they should face prosecution, that is news. Do you believe that?

You stand by that, both Greenwald and the Washington Post reporter? I'm talking about Greenwald. Greenwald, not only did he disclose this information, he has said that he has the names of CIA agents and assets around the world. And they're threatening to disclose that. The last time that was done in this country,

we saw a CIA station chief murdered in Greece. No right is absolute. And even the press has certain restrictions. I think it should be very targeted, very selective, and certainly a very rare exception. But in this case, will you have someone who's disclosed secrets like this and threatens to release more than that?

To me, yes, there has to be legal action should be taken against them. Wow, think about that. An elected official, Peter King, wants a journalist arrested. Imagine that. Those are the times that we live in. Peter King would like it if men with guns went to Glenn Greenwald's house, put handcuffs on him,

and threw him into a dungeon for reporting information that was given to him by Edward Snowden that proved conclusively that the United States government, specifically the NSA, was violating the Fourth Amendment and monitoring all of us. So instead of wanting to arrest the people who started the program that violated the Fourth Amendment, some of the representatives in the United States government

would actually like to arrest the people that gave us that information. This is why people like Glenn Greenwald and Abby Martin are heroes, in my eyes, because they really put themselves on the line. Check out this promo from Abby Martin's show, Breaking the Set. F*** the media, f*** the candidates, f*** the corporatocracy.

I can't wait for this f***ing sh** to be over. Word. New York Times, welcome to the This Administration Has No Credibility Club. Remind me again, why does that people are worshiping kings and queens in the year 2013? So I have a novel idea. Instead of blaming the whistleblower

for trying to evade death by way of the Espionage Act, you actually talk about what the NSA revelations are. In a Constitutional Republic democracy, this is not informed consent by those who are governed. This is manufactured consent. And actually, it's court's consent in secret. Guys, this is not about safety. It's not about terrorism.

This is about chilling dissent and controlling society. Live, live, die, die, die. Isn't he dead already? You can't conduct these kinds of wars around the world, killing innocent people in the pursuit of a few bad guys, and pretend that it's not going to come back to hurt you. Didn't you find the logic flawed now looking back? Do you regret your vote to invade and occupy a country

to find one man? See, we ought to be critical of highly concentrated forms of power wherever we find it, because that kind of power is usually subject to chronic abuse. Hello, Abby. I'm Stephanie from Nestle. We saw the video you posted on YouTube criticizing Nestle over water.

So here's our response. Walmart's also been described as an economic death star, destroying everything in its path, leaving behind nothing more than homogenous wasteland. So the harmless activist is now the criminal, yet actual criminal banksters run free. Well, I'm glad this government has its priorities straight. So do you shackle down your mind and subscribe

to old school paradigms? Or do you liberate yourself by acknowledging reality? Sure, the world would lose its innocence. But wouldn't you rather know the truth? That's Abby Martin, and she's coming up. But first, some business. Hi, it's me again. I didn't even go anywhere.

The Duncan Tressel Family Hour is brought to you by Shore Design T-Shirts. Shore Design T-Shirts produces some damn soft, fine T-Shirts. You should go check them out at shoredesignt-shirts.com. Put my name Duncan in and you get 10% off. We are also brought to you by Amazon.com. Not really brought to you. I'm an Amazon affiliate, which means that if you go

through my Amazon portal, Wink Wink, which is located at DuncanTressel.com, the next time you're buying something from Amazon, they will give me a small percentage of whatever it is that you buy. It doesn't cost you anything. I get a cut of it and that helps support this podcast and helps me pay for these hyper-expensive microphones,

which I don't really understand how to use yet. So go to DuncanTressel.com and please go through our Amazon portal the next time you're refilling your lubricant, vitamins, or buying blankets for your kids. They actually have pentagram blankets there, tarot cards, computers, literally everything that you need. You don't have to leave your house anymore.

You can just order garbage bags from Amazon.com. I'm ashamed to admit that I've done that. They'll bring it to your door in a nice little box and for a split second, it feels like Christmas. You're opening up a boring present, no doubt, because inside of it will just be a garbage can liner, but it still is fun. I don't know why.

There's something nice about coming home to a nice brown box on your porch. Also, I challenge you the next time you get drunk or stoned to go to Amazon.com. It's really fun. You'll forget about your orders and they'll still come. Lots of weird stuff on your porch. It's great.

There's nothing more fun than getting home and not remembering what's in the box. Just go through our portal first, please. Also, if you wanna support the Duncan Tressel Family Hour podcast, you can go to our shop. We have new t-shirts, we have posters, we have stickers, which I challenge you to stick

on the closest monument to you or on your car, on your friends. And we also have a button where you can donate to the Duncan Tressel Family Hour podcast. If you like this podcast, why not support us with a donation? If all of you would just donate the amount that you pay for a cup of coffee, then I would be able to probably pay

for space tourism for myself. I could do the first podcast from space, something I dream of doing, and you could make that happen. But you don't have to donate. Really, I just want you to listen and enjoy the show. Or you can go to the forum at DuncanTressel.com, sign up and get in on the conversation. And finally, if you want to get into audiobooks,

which I highly recommend, you can go to audible trial, forward slash family hour, sign up for a trial membership. You will get a free audiobook. They give us 15 bucks. Audio books are the greatest thing ever if you have a long commute or if you drive a lot and you get sick of listening to podcasts

and you wanna listen to a cool story, Audible's the place to go. They've got a lot of great stories. I'm still listening to Stephen King's The Stand. Probably will be for the next several years because it's 60 something hours, but it's really good. Very scary, very fun book about the apocalypse. It's one of my favorite books.

You can get that book for free if you go to audibletrial.com, forward slash family hour, sign up for a trial membership. Okay, thank you so much for tuning in, my sweet darling friends. And now please welcome to the Duncan Tressel family hour the brilliant, fearless, journalist and activist, Abby Martin.

Welcome, welcome on you, that you are with us. Shake hands, no need to be blue. Welcome to you, wow, wow, wow. It's the Duncan Tressel family hour, the video, the video, the video, the video, the video. All right, I'm here with Abby Martin, welcome. Thank you, Duncan. What are you doing in LA?

I am here for the Zeitgeist media festival, talking about bridging art and activism. Zeitgeist is by the people who did that web video, the Zeitgeist movement. Yeah, it's the original three hour mind fuck movie and then he did two other ones after that and now he's kind of doing this whole worldwide movement. What do you think about the Zeitgeist movies?

It really opened my eyes to a lot of shit when I watched it years ago. The religion part really was a mind fuck for me but then I had already thought the stuff about 9-11 and then the economic system but the way that Peter Joseph lays it out is so amazing. I mean, it's so brilliant. It's like the most obvious of truths

that you just have never heard articulated so well. So I think he's really talented in that way. Yeah, I agree. I remember it really stirred a lot of people up, didn't it? That was sort of the beginning of the Occupy movement. Could that be connected? Was that in the same vein? I think it was a lot of awakening,

right, kind of the precipice for the whole Occupy shit. And the Occupy shit is basically the simple realization that we are being controlled by banks. Is that it? Does that oversimplify it? No, I think it's like 99 problems. I mean, it's hard to sum up the Occupy movement in one thing when there's so many fucking things

wrong with the planet. So that I think it was like an easy way for the corporate media to just dismiss it and be like, you guys don't have a message. But really, I mean, there's so many things wrong and it's really all the corporate talkercy that's kind of perpetuating all the shit on the planet. The corporate talkercy, right.

And the corporate talkercy is the lobbyists who've paid off the senators and the congressmen or women and so we don't have a representative democracy anymore. Yeah, I mean, we're run by a bunch of oligarchs and corporate figureheads who are not elected. And really, I mean, if you're just looking at the media in itself, 120 people sitting on the boards of six media corporations

and then they sit on the boards of like Monsanto and defense contractors. So really, when you look at who is running shit, it's really just these CEOs who are unelected and they just have this revolving door through government and perpetuate their own policies. Right, when did that start happening? I think it's been happening.

I mean, look at Eisenhower when he left office, he warned us against the military industrial complex decades ago, he just said, this is going to happen. There's a conglomerate of power pushing to overtake the government pretty much. I mean, in so many words, I'm obviously paraphrasing him, but look at what's happened. I mean, it's unbelievable the amount of power

that's been consolidated over the last 50 years in every industry. What do you mean by that? Monopolies. When people say, we don't live in a free market and we should open up the market more, I mean, I look at it as monopolies form because the market has been too free.

I mean, when you take away regulation, then you see Glass-Steagall being removed and these banks are consolidating and able to just like wild speculate. What is that? What's Glass-Steagall? You might have to talk to me a little bit like a fucker. Like you're a fucking child.

Yeah, seriously, because I understand the broad strokes of this thing, but I would like to know more about the details. Okay, so Glass-Steagall was a measure that was in place that Clinton actually deregulated that basically just said the banks can't wildly speculate with your money. And I don't actually know the details

because economics is my weak point, but I mean, really it's made the banks able to do what they've done. They've taken all of our money. They basically caused the economic crisis and then what do we do in response? We give them $12 trillion to just send off shore and all the CEOs got like millions of dollars

and we're like, we need to save the banks. Otherwise the economy will collapse, but really did we? I mean, are we better off now that these banks are just enormous and not able to fail? I mean, to me, if we had a free market system then the banks should fail if they get too big and they can't, you know, if they can't function anymore. But the banks failing, that means a depression.

That's, I mean, that means people's money. That means all the money that you have in the bank is just gone. And now everyone has to start over again or a lot of people have to start over again because the money got stolen, essentially. The thing is, it still is getting stolen. And look at what's happening, like what happened in Cyprus.

They had a bail-in model where the government literally just went into people's bank accounts and took money. Yes. If you had more than $100,000 in the bank, that's fucked. Well, that's fucked now. It's fucked according to the paradigm we're in now, but according to the paradigm that's existed

since the beginning of time, that's par for the course. Which is the king, if he wants your money, he takes your money. Exactly. So we haven't really changed since feudalism, I guess. Right. And that seems closer to reality. Or it seems as though there's a, you know,

maybe that the democracy that the founding fathers envisioned was an attempt at a mutation of the hive that goes against the way the hive normally forms, which is the primate hive, seems to always form with some patriarch running things through his ministers that allow his friends to get rich while everybody else has a little less,

it doesn't have a great life. Yeah, we've reverted back to that system, even though the foundation of this country was to try to stay away from the consolidation of power with the kings and queens, and now we've kind of reverted back to it. We're all kind of peons, but we're living under the guise of a democracy.

So that's what makes it even harder to convince people that we're not really in a democratic system. That's the beautiful evolution of the thing. It is. It is. It's beautiful. Yeah, it is, you know, as a king, if I were a king or an emperor, and I was evolving, then I would realize like, oh, look at history, man.

These kings and emperors, they sure don't have it good after a while. They end up getting killed or imprisoned. Let's make the people think they don't have a king. And then if we can really pull that off, we are not in any danger at all. It'll be the exact same system. Absolutely.

So that's brilliant. It is brilliant. And in the propaganda model, we've completely adopted the Nazi propaganda model, except we've perfected it. And that's what's different now in the era that we're living in. At least the Germans knew

that they were living under fascism. Right. Well, no, because we get to enjoy this wonderful delusion. And that's, I think that many people love delusion. And I think that it's a... It's what makes the world go around. It's the drug of choice.

And I think that there's something to be said for letting people, it's a funny thing. You know, there's a, let's take like, I was just talking with Joe the other day, and we were saying, what if we could run the country like Reddit? Like, you know what I mean? It was a true democracy.

Upvote the best leaders, upvote the best laws, upvote the best ideas, downvote all the bullshit. But what if that Reddit sprung up in a place where there was a high population of people who followed Sharia law, for example? If you look at Sharia law from a non-fundamentalist Islamic perspective, then there's a lot of problems

you're gonna have with that right away. Like, I don't think if someone shoplifts, they should get their hand chopped off, for example. But a cultural relativist would say, no, no, no, that's their belief. But what if their belief is based on a, something that doesn't exist at all? A phantasm, a delusion.

So this is the thing that I keep running into, is do you, is it better to wake people up and shake them awake and say, look, you're living in a delusion? There is no God the way you perceive God. There's no, Jesus didn't rise from the dead. He's not coming back at the end of time. The reason things are fucked up in Israel

has nothing to do with superstition. It has to do with a simple strategy, the strategic location of Israel. Clearly, there's no metaphysical anything involved here. It's just the center of the world in a lot of ways. And that's where, it's also a mix of a lot of different religions. Of course, there's gonna be problems there.

Do you wake people up or do you just step back and let people be however they wanna be? Let the kid believe in Santa Claus. It's a good point. It's something that I struggle with because I think religion is a main factor that's stunting humanity's collective consciousness, obviously.

But on the other hand, you look at something like Egypt, electing, democratically electing Mohamed Morsi, but he was so staunchly Muslim and really ostracizing a lot of women and minorities in the country. So when you look at something like that, do you support the military coup because he was suppressing so many people?

Or do you say that's what people voted for and it was the first democratically elected president there? I'm more in favor of shaking people out of their slumber and then letting them fucking let the chips fall. I know you are. I watch your show. I know you are. And I think that that's a good,

I do think that that's a good thing, but then, you know, what is the truth? What is the way people should be living? Do you think that you know the way that people should be living? Do you think that you understand a better system than the system that's happening right now? That's a hard question.

I don't, because I am very naive because I've only lived on this planet a certain amount of time. I don't think it's fair to say that I know the truth and I'm constantly learning every day and the more that I learn, the more that I know, I don't know shit. But I think truth is relative.

I think it's all about finding your own truth, but the problem is people only seek out very specific outlets of information and then they just get saturated in that and reinforce their own paradigms throughout the channels and they don't broaden their perspective and I think that's a big problem. If we could just push people

to start broadening their perspective and entertaining other philosophies, other ideologies and other world systems, then maybe we can progress and have this dialogue, but right now we're so stunted because, and that's another problem I think with the internet. Even though it's an amazing tool, it's a revolutionary tool that interconnects all of us

and that we have all the information at our fingertips, I just read this meme online, it was so true. It says, if you saw someone in the old days come, if someone from like the 1800s came to you and they said, what's the most amazing invention today? You'd say, I have a device in my pocket that contains all of the earth's knowledge, but I use it to argue with strangers

and look at cat photos. Right, yeah, sure, yeah. It's the window into everything, but again, you see how the human, how access has nothing to do with growth. It has nothing to do with growth. You could present to the world the greatest truth, the purest articulation of truth,

the distillation of the greatest aspects of all world religions. You could say it in three sentences in the most simple way, and still most people are like, are you fucking hippie, shut up. Well, I want an In-N-Out burger. It's so true, even if you confront someone with hard facts proving their worldview is a complete sham,

they will reject it because they've been conditioned so hard to grasp onto that because it's all they know. So I'm a mildly intelligent person. You're a very intelligent person. And we've both come to this. It's just that you've smoked weed and I haven't yet today. I don't think, I think if anything, we both should smoke more weed because I don't know,

I don't have that, that doesn't, that never seems to dilute my ability to articulate myself, but the point is we both realize this phenomena that exists in society, which is that people don't want the truth. They're not interested in the truth. It's not something that they gravitate towards. So if we're like just normal people

and we've come to this realization, then it makes sense to me that people throughout history have come to that conclusion. And at some point, what if people realize like, okay, every time we try to tell the truth to people, they burn us at the stake, they nail us to crosses, they don't like it, they don't listen to us, they imprison us.

And then they said, okay, well, why don't we start meeting in private and talking about the truth? And then when they started meeting in private, they said, you know, maybe we should have a revolutionary war and found a country based on the truth, only we'll do it so that people don't even realize that that's what's happening.

Something where they knew, this is the Freemason starting the revolutionary, starting the, funding the revolutionary war. And then, so now this is where you get into deep conspiracy land, which is this idea that maybe a secret society had the same realization we just had, which is that you're not gonna make the masses understand the truth.

They don't want it, they won't listen, it's impossible. So just make it so that you can control them in a way that they won't blow shit up for as long as possible and show little signs for the smart people to be lured in the direction of the truth so that they won't end up in the lower galleys. Is that why I see so much Masonic shit all over DC? Well, yeah, that is why, well, you know,

you've seen the street layouts of DC, of course, of the optic nerve and the, yeah, exactly. So that's a sign, that's a sign. You don't just leave something like that there accidentally. And if you're like building a city, that's a lot of work. You don't just do that for fun. You're not like, well, look, you know what? Let's make an all seeing eye with a pyramid

and put as many esoteric occult symbols in here, just for fun. Just for fun. You do that because maybe people will start looking at that stuff who are smart and think, wait a minute, something bigger is going on here than I'm aware of. There's something outside my current level of conditioning that I'm not quite aware of right now.

I like that you said that the Freemasons and the Founding Fathers, which most of them were Freemasons, actually conspired for the revolution, because it's true. And when you say the word conspiracy theory, it's become such a pejorative term to just shut down dialogue immediately. But conspiracies are real, like they're very real. I mean, there is a conspiracy in plain sight

to maintain a well-oiled corporatocracy and govern this country the way it's been governed. That's very like, it's blatant, and it's just a matter of looking at the fucking information. But again, you know, I know already, I'm probably gonna, I have like on my message board, sometimes people will accuse me of being a Freemason. And I already know that I'm going to be getting some of this

just from this conversation, but I do think about like run-ins with certain people who just seem stupid. They don't seem interested in anything but eating and taking long naps. And like, they don't wanna really try. They're enjoying their life, and they're having a great time. And this is like kind of like a,

I don't know, like a water park for them or something. You know, they're listening to, they're listening to shitty music and they're like going to their job and they're smoking cigarettes and just sort of, you know, letting it all go down. They're gonna get cancer, they're gonna get like some kind of weird sickness

and it'll be sad. The thing is, are they having a great time or is there some sort of empty void that they just don't know? I mean, is it just emptiness inside? Because really, how could you truly enjoy life to the full extent of what we've been given if you're not trying to seek out some sort of true will?

Like the Aleister Crowley shit where, you know, it's not to get too much into individualism and like it's all selfishness, but really we are here to pursue something outside of ourselves. And it's something greater than our lives, our mundane bullshit, sitting in traffic, eating fucking fast food and watching Fox News

and then dying. Yeah, yeah, well I would think so. I mean, I would think so. I think that, you know, if we, for example, if they could make Psilocybin a prescription medication or if they could make MDMA a prescription medication so that people could have access to psychedelic states. And they used to.

They used to prescribe MDMA in psychological sessions and it was really helpful with couples therapy. And then they also sold it in vending machines and gay clubs. I mean, this is what we used to have access to. Well, this is, see, this is the idea of the, you know, this is like Nietzsche's like kind of like dark idea of the hungry masses, the idiots of the world

and how you want them. You don't want them to go away. You want them there. I have a friend who's like, I love Ram Dass and I listened to a Ram Dass lecture and I learned how to be. Well, I have a friend who's like the opposite of Ram Dass and I watch him and learn how not to be.

Like everything he does, I try not to do. That's how I learn. Cause I look at him like, oh, you do everything wrong. You do everything wrong. And it's as much of a teacher to me as Ram Dass is. I see Ram Dass and I look at someone who meditates and opens his heart and tries to embrace the world. And he has this incredible loving glow.

I look at my friend and he's like this poisonous, dark, unhappy, miserable person who always has terrible things happen to him. And then you could see like, oh, cool. I just, all I have to do is like mark down what you do and don't do it and I'll be okay. So I need that. In the same way I need Ram Dass.

So this is where you get into a funny terrain when you start talking about, all right, let's fix the fucking machine. This time we're gonna get the gears right. We're gonna turn the gears right. We're gonna make it so that we are closer to a representative democracy and this time it's gonna work.

I think over the course of human civilization we've seen progress and change is extremely fucking slow. So they're always gonna be like you mentioned before, people getting burned at the stake. I mean, Galileo. People who have these revolutionary ideas that turn out to be very true, but they're always ridiculed.

They're always ostracized and they're always penalized and criminalized for this radical thought. And I think that you just need to realize that you're never gonna see the change that you are seeking in your lifetime. I mean, you can only just do what you can do and you hope that you'll influence some sort of small sphere that will in turn continue this wave of thought

and there's always gonna be the fucking idiots. That's a given. I mean, look at how many people are in the world that are idiots. So I think it's the yin and yang. It's like you're always gonna have this balance. But for me, when I'm searching for news every day I get into this state of depression.

It's almost like a PTSD where you're just inundated with so much horrible shit all the time. And I'm wondering, is it more horrible now than it was or is it just because I have more access to all the negative shit and I'm just inundated myself with this negativity? Or is there always a balance? I mean, so it's just hard to really sort through it all.

Yeah, it sure is, isn't it? It sure is. And do you know that Bill Hicks joke? Which one? Have you ever heard the one about? There's a lot of them. Yeah, he ever heard Bill Hicks one joke? That'd be amazing if he just told this one joke

and got, that was, he's a great at it. The Bill Hicks joke about the news, watching the news and the, you know, you see bombs go, can I play it for you? Yeah, okay. Stop me if you've heard it. Okay, hold on a second. Damn, you have it on your little mixer?

No, I'm gonna stop recording for two seconds. I don't know if you had like a sound effect. You're like, hold on, let me play it. Okay, hold on. Let me get, let me find this. Okay. I wanted to talk to you about the... Hold on a second.

I'm recording. What's the news these days, you know? It's unbelievable. You think you just walk out your door, you're immediately gonna be raped by some crap addicted, AIDS infected, pit bull, and you're just, horrible news story. Honey, I wanna check the mail.

Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh?

Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh? What do you say we stay inside tonight, babe? Let's let the pizza delivery guy deal with that shit out there.

Hello, pizza delivery. Could you send another car over, please? I know that's your third one. That last guy almost made it. He almost reached the pizza box with the broom handle. How come those pit bulls are eating your driver, but they're not touching that fucking pizza? But they know that we don't know.

Hello? We soon will all gonna be locked inside our homes, known on the streets, but pizza delivery guys and armored car drivers. Pizza delivery drones. Pizza, there's a mail slot to our front door. Every house will glow with American gladiators beamed in. We are free.

We are free. We are free. We are free. This is just apocalyptic. Didn't you think with the cold war being over, things should have gotten better? How many of y'all were as stupid as I am believing that? Wow, it's over.

40 years of gratitude for your new weapons. It's over, Eric. Yeah. No. Now, 12 different countries have nuclear weapons. It just got 12 times as bad. Fuck you. Life is harder now.

Work more. Job is scarce. Fuck you. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. By the way, if anyone here is in advertising or marketing, still you're selling them. Anyway, that's.

Most useless industry of all time, advertising. Well, look, this is the thing. It's your question is, I think, one of the great questions of the day. Are we in a better place than we were or are we in a worse place than we were? And is the news and the media responsible for creating a voodoo spell over humanity that's making us all feel paranoid and scared and hopeless when in fact we're existing in a golden age unlike any other period in human history with greater access to medical care, war fatalities are at a low compared to what they were.

Violent crime, death from guns and violent crime is dropped. If you look at the statistics and from one perspective, holy shit, for a lot of us, not all of us, watch VICE on HBO and you can see there's Corners of the World that aren't happening right now, but us, you and me, our lives are so good. The nutrition that we get every day is unlike any other time in history. People used to be five feet tall because they were eating roots and grubs. They were five feet tall.

They used to live to like 30. They used to live to 30, maybe. Maybe you'd lived to 30 and by the time you got to 30, you probably had your arm amputated because a cat scratched you. You watched your wife get burned at the stake. Your kids were beheaded. If we had news back then, can you imagine the horror that they would show compared to now? I think it's all relative, Duncan.

You just brought up a good point. I think that the reason why it's so infuriating now is because we know that we have the technology to basically have medical care for everyone. We have clean technology in terms of the environment and energy and it's so infuriating to see these horrendous, destructive, earth-shattering policies be perpetuated not only in this country but across the world and to have your own country, the country that you grew up in, to be at the forefront of it.

But yeah, I think it's all relative. I think that, yes, things are tremendously awesome compared to what they were 200 years ago, but still knowing that we can do so much better pisses me the fuck off. But then again, who do we blame? Do we blame the media or do we blame ourselves for being apathetic and not understanding that the media is a propaganda system? Not the media you're putting out though. You seem to be this new breed of journalist that isn't like Fox News.

You seem, one thing I love about the way that you report the news and the way you editorialize is you seem angry. You seem really pissed off and I like that a lot because I think that that is the way you should feel if you're looking at things from... If you really love this country and you allow yourself to really consider what's happening or if you voted for Obama, I think there's a place in you that should be angry because we're being monitored at all times.

All of our digital communication is being monitored. One of the greatest heroes of our generation just had to escape to Russia to be safe. Isn't that amazing? It's amazing. It's amazing. And so I think that there's an embarrassment in that and there's an... It comes from that and what's... But even more infuriating is when you turn on Fox News

or you turn on most mainstream media, but particularly Fox News and you see their horrific attempt to get hip now. Have you noticed this? They have these younger journalists trying to seem really cool and they play like 60s era music and really cool music at commercial breaks. But when they come back, it's these journalists who are pointing out like, oh, Snowden, hope you have fun in Russia. Hey, check this out, Snowden.

Look at this guy's in prison here for saying this about the Russian government and this guy is here. And the point is they're demonizing a hero. On the plane right over here, I was watching Fox News because I love watching it just because it's a joke. And I think a lot of people watch it just for entertainment value too. But I was seeing all these Olympians talking about how they're going to go to Russia and they're not going to be scared because they're these gay ice skating Olympians

and they're like, but aren't you... And so it's just like a total propaganda piece to try to demonize Russia. Yes, it's totally fucked up that Russia is penalizing gay propaganda. Whatever the hell that means, it's horrible. However, is that relevant to Snowden seeking asylum? Exactly. Why are we making this false equivalency? It's just fucking stupid.

It's scary because you're seeing state TV. You don't want to admit that there's state TV in this country. But when you turn on Fox News, you are seeing something that is no different than North Korean news. It's the same fucking thing, man. This is the party line. They're trying to make us think that this poor son of a bitch who gave up his life here to let us know that we're being monitored by the government is Frankenstein

or some kind of awful beast on the loose with no mention of the fact that we are being fucking monitored. Everything you do, every email you send, every cell phone call you make, God knows what else they say that they could turn on the microphones in your fucking droids. This is a nightmare. It's a nightmare. You're gonna hack your cell phone from the fucking iPhone charger. But it's all to keep us safe, Duncan. Don't you get it?

You fucking get it? No! I don't get it. I don't get it. And I don't like it. But on the other hand, I look at my life and I love my life. And I think that's why they got us exactly where they want us. Because many, many of us, even if we don't particularly enjoy our jobs,

if you look at Vice Magazine, you see somebody in, I don't know, Somalia taking a shit on the beach because they don't have like that. I mean, it's just, there's the extreme. Yeah. So at that point, you're like, well, all right, I guess you know what? I might be in the harem of the Illuminati, but it's a pretty nice hair. But that's how they get you. And that's the whole push, talking point narrative on the other side

where they're like, if you don't like this fucking country, leave. Like, you hate this country so much. You're like, no, I'm just seeing that we could go in a really dangerous direction and we're already kind of embracing this and allowing this to happen. So if we don't step up now, I'm scared for the future of this country. I don't want these luxuries to be gone. The thing is we're all sitting back just so complacent and apathetic. You're not.

Yes, but a lot of people are. You're not, though. You're not. And that's, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I do want to point that out. One reason I was very excited to talk to you is because while many of us are aware of this stuff and know that this thing's happening, we're not really doing much, but it seems like you are passionately working to get this information out into the world and you seem called to it almost.

Like, you couldn't stop doing this if you wanted to stop. I'll die doing it. Yeah, I will. And it's bigger than myself. But, I mean, you and Joe are doing awesome work, too, because I think that the new media, the reinventing the media apparatus, making the corporate media relevant is reinventing the wheel. And what you guys are doing, hopefully, what I'm doing,

David Seaman and other people like that who are pushing forward, like, not fear-mongering. And I know that I get really pissed off and angry, but the last thing I want to do is fear-monger people. I mean, we do have the ability to change things. It's just a matter of taking the initiative, even just entertaining thoughts and pushing forward different perspectives to your friends and family.

That's huge. But I wanted to mention something before when you were saying that the corporate media now is basically like a state-run media. How scary is that? That we have a corporate media apparatus that's essentially towing the exact line of the establishment, the political establishment. That's terrifying. So, basically, all these corporations, I mean, the definition of fashion

when the corporate state works in concert with the government. So, when you have these two entities pushing forward the same narrative to fucking fear-monger everyone into a non-existent threat, when you're more likely to die of furniture falling on you from a high-rise, walking down the street than you are of terrorism, yet they're issuing this worldwide terror alert. Everyone, fucking terror alert, color-level bullshit. Remember the terror-level chart?

Yeah, orange. I miss that kind of. I miss Bush and I miss all that shit. Don't become so much more sophisticated now. Yeah, well, you're right. You know, that is the... So, let's break it down as what it really is. Or let me...

I'll tell you about a country. Here's a country. There's a country that exists right now, that is monitoring. All of the digital communication of its citizens is recording it, holding it in some kind of massive storage facility, and has taken over the press, and no one in this country is doing anything about it, even though they have absolute freedom of speech.

No one's doing anything about it. Why? What is happening, Abby? Why is no one doing anything about it except for people like you and Glenn Greenwald and Seaman? And I don't know, you know, me and Joe, sure, we do talk about this stuff, but we also spend a lot of time talking about Bigfoot and Cox

and Aliens and Weed, you know? I think we are... I mean, we do take advantage of freedom of speech, but you guys see much more focus. So my question to you is why? Where's the anger? I think our agency has been completely taken away because of fear, and I think the only thing to fear is fear itself.

And I think that when you have people... when you have a government entity prosecuting and criminalizing whistleblowers for just speaking the truth and exposing war crimes, yet war criminals are literally going on book tours and running around and speaking on Fox News, we're living in a totally Orwellian warped society where people have been conditioned into not speaking out because they're fucking scared.

I can't even tell you how many people have told me, I want to support you. I totally believe in what you're doing. I just like, you know, I don't want to be put on a list. I don't want to be this and that, and this is before even the NSA revolutions. I'm like, too fucking late, dude. You're already in it.

The scariest thing about the surveillance state, though, is, you know, beyond just the chilling effect of everyone knowing that they're spied on and so inherently they're not going to speak out as much because they're fucking terrified that they're going to be datamined if they say certain words. On top of that, it's the retroactive prosecution that could happen with your entire lifespan

of digital and your digital life. They can retroactively prosecute you for something that happens later on. Let's say if you're wrongfully accused of something, they could take your entire life's digital data and retroactively prosecute you, selecting certain things that you might have said about Obama. Like, I mean, I joke around all the fucking time.

You know, I saw this really funny parody about, like, let's fuck with the NSA by only speaking like terrorists. Yes. And it's that kind of thing, if you just make a joke, they can honestly pull that up and be like, oh, you said this five years ago. I think it's a good time to announce the new website that I just bought that we're working on.

It's called summonthensa.com. And it's a button you press, and it immediately does, like, you know, 15 web searches on backpacks. Yeah, backpacks. Pressure cookers. Pressure cookers. Al Qaeda.

So I figure, you know, maybe if, like, everybody presses that button, or if enough people press that button, it'll make it irrelevant that they're monitoring us, you know? It's awesome. But also, it'll probably get me blown up or taken... Now, here's the funny thing. I like to joke with you.

Sometimes I'll tweet to you. I don't want to walk too close to you because of drones. Yeah, because... But can you tell... Are you aware of what happened? Of course you are aware of what happened to Hastings. Yes. Can you...

I want to take a break to get more beaters. Yes, that sounds great. And then, can you just tell the story of what happened to Hastings? Yeah, absolutely. Okay, cool. The story of Hastings. All right, so Hastings was an amazing revolutionary journalist who never ceased to call out the power elite,

totally cut through all the bullshit rhetoric every time he appeared on corporate media, brought down Stanley McChrystal, who was the commanding general of the Afghanistan War. I mean, this was a journalist who didn't fuck around. He knew what journalism was all about, even if it meant taking down an entire commanding general and getting a shitstorm because of it.

And when he was doing that, when that all went down, he had several death threats against him by people who said, you know, we're gonna fucking kill you. And so he expressed like, you know, I'm scared, I'm getting these threats. Months later, I mean, this was a while back,

but months later, you know, he dies in this fiery car crash going like 100 miles an hour down a residential street in LA. His car explodes. People have said that they saw sparks going off before the car hit the palm tree. And my question is, why would someone be driving 100 miles an hour

down a fucking residential street in LA? Right. It seems very crazy. Like, they haven't released a toxicology report. They haven't released any of the autopsy information. Everything's really tight-lipped right now. His wife isn't really speaking about it. He knows about his body.

They cremated his body against his family's wishes. Yeah, they, I haven't verified that. I heard that there was actually, that was misreported. But I did speak to this woman who's investigating it from San Diego, and she said that she's trying to get all these FOIA requests,

try to get the information about what really fucking happened and why the investigation's being so closed off. And then I spoke to his friend Joe Biggs, who was in Afghanistan when he was embedded there doing reporting, and he said, look, something's very suspicious here.

It's just very suspicious, because right before he died, he sent out this email to his friend saying, I'm getting surveilled by the FBI. The FBI's gonna come trying to interrogate you guys. I need to go off the radar now. And that was hours before he died in this crash. It's very, very fucked up,

and I have no doubt. And it's not so much that I'm thinking that it's some government conspiracy that they wanted to snuff out, you know, investigative reporters. I think, you know, if you're pissing off someone that's that high up in the military,

you know people, security contractors, whatever, that could fucking take you down. I mean, that's the shit that happens. This is fucking reality. It's not, it doesn't mean that it has to be some giant conspiracy, but when you look at the actual mechanics of his car, it makes no fucking sense.

To me, it seems like either the brakes were cut or something was hacked or something. And even Richard Clark, the former counter-terrorism, like, security expert for the United States, has come out and said, it looks exactly like a car hacking. And this is something that you can actually, like, overtake the command system of someone's car

and every new car that exists and do it and overtake it. Every new car. Mm-hmm. So, here you have an investigative journalist who was, I think, was assassinated. I think you'd be out of your fucking mind to think that was an accident.

Clearly, he was murdered. He was assassinated. Like, I was assassinated. He was, that was a hit. So, and now we've got Snowden who's fled to Russia. It's so ridiculous. It's so ridiculous.

It's insane. But when, in the history books, when they go back and they look at the history of America, if things go in the Alex Jones direction and they continue to lock down, people are going to think, why didn't they get the fuck out of there? They saw what was happening.

Like, how many more incidents like this have to happen before either people start leaving the country or people start doing more than just complaining about it on podcasts? I think that they don't, people are so complacent and so conditioned to be living in the system that we're living, that as long as they don't step outside of their comfort zone,

like, the government has everyone under their thumb. And I've said this many times, like, when you look back at FDR and, like, all of World War II and the whole internment of Japanese people that were American citizens, I mean, we're talking about over, like, 100,000 people who were swept up, round up and put in internment camps.

That is the most fucked up, scarred black mark on American history. But now, they don't need to do that because now they have us all in a fishbowl where we're all living in a grid where we are in 1884. We don't need a telescreen in our house because we have it on every single device

that we carry around like our fucking, like it's a heart monitor. I mean, we don't leave the house without our cell phone and they can tap into that. That is the modern-day telescreen. So they don't need to intern us, round us up, put us in fucking FEMA camps. We already kind of are in an open-air internment camp

in this country. Wow. But what a great open-air internment camp. It sure is great. It's so fun. We've got beer. You've got porn. You've got porn.

Cookies. Cookies, Starcraft, medicinal marijuana. It's not a bad internment camp. It's not bad. I want to ask you, if, just as a thought experiment, if you knew for sure that this surveillance that they're doing

is going to prevent some event in the future that's going to do another Boston marathon where kids get killed and athletes get their legs blown off, would you still say that we shouldn't do the surveillance? Absolutely not.

Or I'm sorry, absolutely. Well, I will always say that they should not be this type of surveillance and I'll tell you why, because even when it came out that the Sarnayev brother was on some sort of list and we were being warned by the Russian government that he was kind of this extreme radical

from going to Chechnya doing all this shit, even then I was like, oh my god, so we're ignoring real terrorist threats and then spying on all the Occupy Boston people at the same time and that was like this whole schism at the moment. And then I thought more about it and I was like, you know what,

even if someone is flagged as an extremist or a radical, I still don't condone surveilling them because in that generalization I would be flagged. Yes. You could be flagged. Anyone can be flagged. So at the time he wasn't like a terrorist, he just was pursuing radical thoughts.

He was looking into like the Muslim faith or this and that. So even then, I mean, if you use that like analogy and say like, oh, we should be focused on real terrorist threats, what's a real terrorist threat? It's really whatever the definition the government wants to implant on someone. So I don't agree with spying at all.

I don't ever think surveillance is going to prevent tragedy. All it can do is help you maybe like, you know, zero in on someone that did something fucked up. My question about the boss and bombing without getting too crazy into it is why have we never seen the surveillance camera of the brothers dropping the backpack when they told us that they had it?

That's how they link the brothers to the bombing. They never released the video. I'm just like, why the fuck didn't you release the video? I mean, it would just close the circle for everyone. Why? Makes no sense. I don't know. So that being said, I want to, let's imagine that something's happened.

There was a particle accelerator accident. You're now the president of the United States. I'm your vice president. You know that you are existing in a country. That is under, because we've been blowing kids up with drones in other parts of the world, we don't have a lot of fans right now. And so you know that we've been sticking our stick

in a lot of different ants' nests for a lot of years. So you know that people want to blow us up. I would. If I lived in Afghanistan and my kid got blown up by a drone and I knew people who got killed by drones and I didn't really have anything else to live for because I watched my family get transformed into hamburger, I would, if I had access to the United States,

there would be some part of me that thought, you know what, I think I want a little bit of payback. And I imagine that there is a real threat. I think the terrorist threat is real. Now it is. Yeah, now it is. Sure, the fuck is. It definitely is.

Ten years of fucking war, blowing up other countries. Absolutely. Okay, so there's a real threat. So now you're the president of the United States. You know that there's a real threat. You've been going around punching people in bars all over the planet. And so there's some people who want some payback.

What are you going to do? How are you going to keep this from happening? Aren't you going to want to use every single thing that you possibly can to keep your citizens from dying? And surveillance is definitely not a tool that you would use to keep your citizens from dying. But here's the thing. Even if 9-11 was not fishy,

even if, you know, there's nothing fishy about any of these terrorist things that have happened here, you have to look at the terrorism as it's existed on U.S. soil for the last decade plus, totally a non-existent threat, even if you were to take those events into account as real events that, and I'm not saying that they weren't real.

I'm just saying I have a lot of questions about 9-11. I think that the boss in bombing, I think the Sarnay brothers were guilty. However, I haven't seen the evidence that has proven it. However, even if you're taking those events into account, the threat of terrorism is still so non-existent, you're still more likely to get shot and dead by a police officer or slip in your bathtub and die,

or accidentally suffocate in bed. So when you look at it relatively, like the actual threat facing us, there is no threat. There literally is no threat of terrorism facing this country. Okay. Now, again, I'm going to play devil's advocate. Yeah, go for it.

Literal devil's advocate and say, okay, but you're the president. And I, you know, as part of this show I did with Joe, we went and visited this lab in Galveston that's working on vaccines for some of the worst diseases that exist to prepare for an attack from a bioterrorist, which is a real possibility. The technology out there right now

for fucking around with genomes and stuff and DNA, I don't understand it, but it's very accessible. And so they're really worried about somebody whipping up some version of the bird flu and bringing it over to the United States. So also, you know that with North Korea making nukes and with the fall of the Soviet Union and what happened to some of their nukes

and the nukes in Pakistan and that unstable regime over there, you know that there is a lot of money in selling nuclear weapons to people who know that if they detonated a nuclear bomb in downtown New York, it would crash the United States economy. Stop the war machine and probably, or at least probably wouldn't stop it,

but it would definitely fuck us up. It would fuck up our economy. Just a small little nuclear device went off in any part of the country. That's it. That's pretty much it. That's the one little nudge. That's the one little nudge, President Martin, that we need to push this fucking thing over into the sea.

So you know that. It's not just like, I know that getting hit by a, getting killed by a terrorist right now is a small threat, but we're talking about five years, 10 years, 15 years down the road. So you're speaking in just hypothetically if that were to happen, what would we do to prevent something like that from happening?

Wouldn't you do anything that you could do to keep that from happening? Absolutely. I think every life is precious. I don't want to see anyone dying at the fault of someone else's incompetence or negligence. However, nothing that we've implemented has actually been to prevent terrorism. So I mean, I think everything can be done

with just normal counterintelligence police work. And that's, I mean, we saw that before 9-11, the light was blinking red. There was like 20 different high intelligence briefings to the CIA and the president saying this is coming. They chose to ignore it. So I mean, that could have been easily prevented. There you go. There you go.

That's it, right? That's the answer. The answer is we knew about fucking bin Laden for so long before bin Laden did that shit, even if that is real. We're the ones who radicalized the Taliban in Afghanistan during the Soviet Union when the Soviets were there fighting. We're the ones who propped up the Islamic regime

because we funded bin Laden's army. Even the papers here published saying anti-Soviet hero with bin Laden's face on it. I mean, this is the fuckery that happens when we start messing with the planet. I think that the best way to prevent any future huge-scale terrorist attacks right now or blowback from all of our drone wars

is to apologize to everyone, remove most if not all of the 900 military bases on the planet, stop spending trillions of dollars maintaining our empire of bases, apologize to the Muslim world for what we've done, remove all drones, and also stop spying on everyone and just say, you know, we're really sorry,

we want to revert back to like an actual sane society where we can have like intelligent discourse and not just blow people up based on, you know, mathematical patterns of when they're running around in groups. I just had this image of you sitting tied to a chair in a government facility high on Sodium Penethal, and they're like, we want to play something for you. And they play what you just said.

That's going to happen. What do you think of that? What did you mean when you said we should apologize? Apologize. Apologize to the barbarians who brought those down. The barbarians? Well, you know, it is a, I think everything that you just said is exactly why you should be president

and is why you never will be. But I do think it's simple logic like that and I know that for some reason they've really got its condition to think that you're not supposed to apologize if you're the president. Which is really weird, like everyone apologized. People make mistakes, you know, and I think that would be an incredible moment in human history

to imagine the president coming out and saying, I fucked up. I fucked up. I fucked up. I got manipulated. I didn't know what to do. You guys don't know what it's like here. This sucks. What kind of frigging pressure I'm under.

Do you know the pills they give me? That's my daily injections. I realize there's a rooster-headed demigod that lives in the basement of the White House that has a hypnotic hum that comes out of its feathers and when you hear it, you just want to kill. You talk to a braxis. You try it.

You go breezing with a thing. It just wants to kill. It's in the basement. We've been trying to get it out for years. Dude, people still defend... Oh, I didn't vote for Obama. I realized that the two-party system was a sham when Kerry took a dive in 2004,

but I still have people who are such staunch Obama apologist and they tell me all the time, Obama really means well. He doesn't mean to do any of this. And yes, to an extent, of course, any president is an operator of the system. But at the same time, I can't help but think of this revelation that came out.

I was interviewing the chief prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay on the show and I was just like, you know, who's super anti-Gitmo, he says we should fucking close it. It's just a total scar on American legacy. And I was like, do you think that Obama's reverting to kill more people with the drones

because Gitmo's been such bad press and it was such bad press for Bush and he was like, you know, that's a really sad commentary if Obama's just now killing people because he doesn't want to deal with the bad press of Gitmo. A month later, the chief architect of the drone policy, John Bellinger, came out to some fucking think tank in DC

and he was like, you know, Obama's like using drones so much is because he doesn't want to deal with the bad press of Gitmo. So he's like using drones to just like as the counter-terrorism strategy to just like take out the terrorists instead of just holding them at Gitmo.

And I was like, wow, that's a fucking sad reality. What? The architect of the... What? John Bellinger, dude. Guardian. Yeah. Bellinger said that? Wow. That's where we're at. Let's talk about drones. Hey, wait, are you... Are you afraid that the FBI's going to come back to your house, Duncan?

Are you going to do a FEMA camp in a plastic coffin? Look, I have a fantasy about getting abducted. I think it's like... It's something kinky that I'm into. It's like a fetish. I like the idea of getting abducted, tied to a chair. I hope they feed me psychedelics. I'll tell them anything they want.

I'll tell them anything they want. They can do whatever they want. So I, you know, I kind of feel like it's a... It's a... Look, I don't believe that this is the only incarnation that people have. I think that we've been here eternally and

I think that one great way to exit this particular incarnation is by being assassinated by a repressive government. And so if you end up with that sacred death, then that means that you've been doing something really, really, really good

in the world. So what? How do you want to die? You want to die of a heart attack, watching Wheel of Fortune? Or do you want to get taken out like Hastings, you know? Getting into his car after a night out in the town. He looks over and there's some guy in a black mask. He's like, yeah, this happens. Right. You know, I think

that there's something to be said for dying like a hero and I don't think I'm really up for that because I imagine that when the government's going through its list of people to assassinate, bearded, weirdo, stoner, hipsters with mildly popular podcasts are probably way, way, way down on their list

of people to blow up. But I think that would be a cool moment because it's kind of like when the Mormons come over. It's like when the Mormons come over, you get to talk to them like, man, you know Joseph Smith was

just the white salamander, bro. What? That's Joseph Smith saw the white salamander who told him all this shit. It was basically like a psychedelic vision that he saw a white salamander. Wait. We got to stop the press Stop the press

I know I've been reading Under the Banner of Heaven by Krakauer and I have heard no mention of a white salamander. That's like one of the only things I know about the original story of Joseph Smith. Swear to God. Swear to the Book of Mormon.

But no, yes. Would I rather die of my brain melting away through Alzheimer's and slowly dying of cancer and fucking like withering away and having my mind not be able to remember yesterday? No, of course I'd rather die being fucking eaten by a shark or taken out by the feds.

And so I think that that moment of having people come to your house is an incredibly validating moment because it shows you that somehow you've managed to really rile up the dragon enough that it's coming to pay you a visit.

And I think that if you're if they're coming to pay you a visit for telling the truth I'm not coming to pay you a visit because you've been storing up fertilizer in your backyard. More collecting child porn. Yeah, yeah, exactly. If they're coming to pay you a visit for telling the truth and you're a true American and you're

that's one of the medals that you get for being a true American is because you believe in the country enough that you would die for it by exercising your freedom of speech to express what you think are violations

that the government is making. That's what's so amazing is people have said you know, I'm anti American, I'm unpatriotic, it's like actually I would die to save this country you just fucking like love of fascist whatever like you love a fucking surveillance police state

is that being American? I don't know if that's really the fundamental of like what this country should have been. I think there's a spectrum of people and on one side of the spectrum there's people who would die for the country and on the other side there's people who want to kill for the country. True.

Very true. They don't want to die so much but they sure want to kill. They just want to kill a bunch of rag tub Fox News man, you cannot go 10 minutes without one of their goddamn journalists saying we should execute somebody. No matter

who it is, Snowden the guy who tied the women and pretty much anybody who's done a crime, someone on Fox News will say this, we should execute them. Did you know that they just ran out of the execution drug in Texas because they've been killing so many people?

It's hilarious. Isn't that hilarious? That's so funny. That's such a funny problem. We're out, John. We're out, guys. Get in the load in, get in the shipment. God man, that's death drug. If you're on death row though that's a great thing

that have happened is they run out of the death drug. Man, I want to ask you what are some this is something that I wonder about all the time is what are some actions that

I can take to stop this surveillance program and to fight against what's happening with the drone war and to get people out of Afghanistan and just shut down, get mo. And all the things

that you were just talking about that you want to do as president what are some things that we can do to move us closer to that reality? I think that ideally, you know, I'd love to have some sort of representational democracy where we can all actually have a say in what happens

but given the system that is, you know, exists I think that the recent vote on the Amash amendment which was this guy representative Amash who tried to amend the NSA surveillance program where he said let's stop funding this blanket surveillance and the vote to

actually do that was so close. I mean we're talking about like 217 to 207 representatives that actually voted to withhold this program and it shows you how much the public perception is actually shifting against this sort of thing and I think we have a lot to think for

to Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden because of that but it really, more people right now in America care about civil liberties than they do terrorism which is huge. It's a huge shift in consciousness and I think that speaking out, I mean honestly just continuing this dialogue and continuing to be

resilient and honestly like what you were saying before this new website that you have an idea for I think just constantly saying shit without being scared don't let fear rule your life don't ever think about the fact oh the government's listening to me because the more people who just speak out and express themselves

the harder it's going to be to do this drag net like persecution or I'm sorry, surveillance and then persecution on people who are like the isolated individuals who are doing this kind of stuff and also just reinforcing like the fact that we have the ability to

fucking inspire and change people and also just being your personal responsibility you know my brother always says one person can't really do anything and he kind of like deflects the whole environmental movement by saying it should happen at the federal level before

we can really make a change but really we can't make a change I mean if you just kind of give up your agency and say well I'm not going to be able to do anything nothing's ever going to be able to get done I think all of us can be proactive individuals and at the same time realize that you can't become disempowered

if you can't fucking change the world you have to realize how much power you have but never like underestimate that power like that woman who got shot in the face by the Taliban for example, look at them changes that she's that's happening with her but give us something

give us an action aside from talking to our family not being afraid making ridiculous websites what are some actionable moves people listening to this can make right after they stop listening to this that can help in the direction of civil

liberties and the direction of stopping these ridiculous wars here's the most simple thing we can do is realize that every single thing that we do this is a vote fuck the entire two-party dictatorship that's not going to do shit what's running our country right now is a conglomerate of corporations

corporate America is run by a very small minority of people who have no like they have no elected positions so really all we can do is phase these giant corporations into a relevancy by stop supporting them like we cannot support Monsanto anymore

we cannot support BP we cannot fucking invest in Haliburton after these horrible um, criminal like admittances like BP fucking their stocks are up Haliburton's stocks are up after they admitted to destroying evidence in the wake of the BP oil spill why

why are there fucking stocks up these corporations should be forced into fucking irrelevancy and like we all have the ability to with purchasing power that's really like we are seen as just consumer horrors by the establishment so we should treat them back using our consumer purchasing power to like feed into whatever

don't go get gas at BP stations yeah exactly like this is like all of these small things that you just dismiss and deflect as like pointless and trivial stop buying your bombs from Haliburton and stop fucking purchasing Nestle bottled water I can't stress that enough

what is that you mean uh what's what is why okay so Nestle is a I didn't really know too much about Nestle until recently but pretty much every bottled water that exists is owned by Nestle Nestle is a corporation outside from the chocolate slave labor they they have a monopoly

on water and they are extracting water taking it away from local municipalities during droughts totally fucked up shit and the fact that they are extracting it and basically charging 53 million percent more than they would extract it from the ground and just surrounding it basically

it's tap water it's the same thing as you get in your faucet and they've been sued because it's literally they just sell tap water are you fucking kidding wait what are Nestle brands Nestle brand Arrowhead Poland Spring it's true dude Nestle is terrible

and when I called them out on I called them out on the show and I got a threatening we got like a letter from the company saying like you know basically threatening us saying what are you going to do about it Abby's making these hysterical unsubstantiated allegations against the company and I wrote

them back I said would you come on the show to talk to me so we can you know set the record straight and instead of sending someone on the show to talk to me they sent an android replicant like video of this woman she's like hello Abby my name is Stephanie from Nestle I saw the video you wrote about water and here's my response and she just like

I saw it that was their response and so I was just like I just kind of debunked it the former CEO of Nestle has said that water is a food stuff I mean he says it's basically should be treated like any other food that we should privatize water and really when you privatize something that

that every living creature on earth needs to survive it's like air I mean the privatization of something literally means taking people's like power out of that item and when you're talking about privatization of water it's a very dangerous slippery slope he who controls

the spice controls the universe if Nestle can control water they've taken over the planet yeah yeah Nestle's crazy ah man Abby you are so cool I think that is so cool when you get to you know getting visited by the FBI okay

maybe we don't get to look forward to that in this incarnation but even getting a cool video response from Nestle that was pretty sweet that's badass that means you're shaking things up and I'm so glad that we've got people like you out there thank you Duncan I'm happy to have you I'm happy to be here dude it's awesome

cool thanks for being on the show how can people find you find me on YouTube YouTube breaking the set and twitter at abbeymartin I also have the art website abbeymartin.org great and I'm gonna have all those links at DuncanTrussell.com so please go find out more

about Abby you can see that she is really um she's really stirring it up okay great okay pals that was Abby Martin please watch her show Breaking the Set on RT all links to Abby Martin

will be located in the comment section of this episode at DuncanTrussell.com what you are listening to now is a classic David Bowie song Oh You Pretty Things from his album Hunky Dory which is available on iTunes it's a

great album you gotta buy it Long Live Ziggy Stardust Long Live Abby Martin see you guys later and give us a nice rating on iTunes won't you bye wake up you sleepy head put on some clothes shake up your bed

put another lob on the far for me I made some breakfast and coffee look out my window what do I see cracking the sky and a hand reaching down to me all the nightmares came today

it looks as though they're here to stay what are we coming to no room for me no fun for you I think about a world to come where the books were found by the golden ones

written in pain written in awe by a puzzle man who questioned what we were here for all the strangers came today it looks as though they're here to stay oh

you pretty things don't you know you're driving your drive this drive this insane oh you pretty things don't you know

you're driving your drive this drive this insane let me make it plain gotta make way for the superior look out at your children see their faces in

golden rays don't kid yourself they belong to you they're the start of the calming race the others are bitch we finished our news homo sapiens have outgrown their use

all the strangers came today and it looks as though they're here to stay oh you pretty things don't you know you're driving your drive this

drive this insane oh you pretty things don't you know you're driving your drive this drive this insane let me make it plain

gotta make way for the you at Lowe's we know you can get the job done faster if you don't have to stop and come into the store all the time that's why we've updated our app with your business in mind with the app you can build quotes

easily reorder your supplies track orders and much more so you can get everything you need right away stay on the job finish it and get started on the next one download the app today because Lowe's knows time is money Lowe's knows pros