Julian Dorey Podcast - 😔 #95 - The Forgotten War in Kosovo | Bek Lover

Episode Date: April 14, 2022

(***TIMESTAMPS in description below) ~ Bek Lover is a New York City nightlife legend, podcaster, and proud Albanian. Both his mother and father immigrated to America from the oppressive regimes in Albania and Kosovo, respectively. Unfortunately, other members of Bek’s family were not so lucky. In the Kosovo War of 1999, many of his relatives were victims of the Serbian Army’s Genocide against Albanian Kosovars. ***TIMESTAMPS*** 0:00 - Intro; The current state of New York City; Bek tells stories about the corporate world; Why Bek is a New York City nightlife legend 24:02 - Beck’s Albanian background and ties to the 1999 Kosovo War; Albanians aren’t Slavic; The Ancient Illyrians & their ties to Albanians; Why Albanians are spread out among countries; Albania’s political system and language 38:26 - Americans have a different relationship with the land inside our borders; Bek talks about racism; Bek tells a story about a Muslim woman and a Jewish woman in a park; Bek’s encounter with a Serbian 1:03:08 - Background of the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s; Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic; Comparing Slavic and Albanian origins and languages; Kosovo’s first leader, Ibrahim Rugova; Albanian desire to unite in one country; The Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA); The Serbian Police state rule of Kosovo in the 1990s; The current Russia Ukraine crisis 1:27:27 - America and Venezuela?; We don’t make anything in America; The related problems of political extremes; The family unit in America; Many people somehow deny climate change 1:44:11 - The story behind Bek’s parent’s decision to leave Kosovo; Bek recalls summers in Kosovo growing up; Why Bek values America 1:59:17 - Bek lays out the genocide of his family members in the 1999 Kosovo War; KLA Leader Adem Jashari and the massacre that laid the foundation of War with Serbia; The Serbian and Albanian arguments over Kosovo’s history; The religion vs language conflict in the Serbian / Albanian argument; Bek recalls having the register at the police station in Kosovo as a kid and paying of police; What Bek’s parents think of the US today 2:17:57 - Bek was present at the twin towers in Sept. ‘01; The “Death Cloud” of smoke; Afghanistan’s recent fall to the Taliban ~ YouTube EPISODES & CLIPS: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0A-v_DL-h76F75xik8h03Q ~ Get $150 Off The Eight Sleep Pod Pro Mattress / Mattress Cover (USING CODE: “TRENDIFIER”): https://eight-sleep.ioym.net/trendifier   PRIVADO VPN FOR $4.99/Month: https://privadovpn.com/trendifier/#a_aid=Julian Julian's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey ~ Beat... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

At 9 o'clock, every Albanian had to be home. So imagine at 9 o'clock, if you're not home, there was curfew. Serbians were allowed out. Serbians were allowed out. They partied. They danced in fucking hotels. I used to hear their music all night blasting. But if you were in Albania, you went home by 9 o'clock,

and God forbid those cops got their hand on you. Even if you were an American citizen. I had cousins that were beaten. They didn't give a fuck you had an American passport. I remember they slapped one of my, they threw his fucking passport. You're not an American, motherfucker. What's cooking, everybody? If you are on YouTube right now, please hit that subscribe button.

Hit that like button on the video. And as always, if you have a second, would love to see you drop a comment down in the video comment section as well to everyone who has been leaving likes and comments on these videos thank you that is a huge huge help to the algorithm and to everyone who has been sharing the links to these episodes with friends thank you so much for that as well because that is word-of-mouth marketing and it's the best thing we can get and I appreciate all of you who have been helping grow the show to everyone who is listening listening on Apple and Spotify right now, thank you for checking out the show there. If you haven't already, be sure to hit the follow button on either one of those platforms and leave a five-star

review if you have a second and I look forward to seeing you guys again for future episodes. Now, I am joined in the bunker today by the very entertaining Mr. Beck Lover. Beck was connected to me through our mutual friend Tyler, and it was pretty fortuitous as well, because about maybe a month ago, something like that, I think I read an article or saw a video, I don't remember what it was, but I started doing a deep dive on the wars in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the Balkan Wars, and to me, this is a very forgotten period of history as far as like in America, we don't teach this definitely didn't teach it in my school. And I don't know a lot of people when I bring it up who know about it. And it's it should be covered a lot more because there were some awful, awful things that happened. A lot of I mean,

human rights doesn't begin to describe it. And so Beck happened to be a guy who hails from – his family hails from Albania and Kosovo. And so obviously people who know of the country Albania know Albanians live there. But what a lot of people don't know is that Albanians live in a bunch of countries in the Balkans there and Kosovo is a country that's basically all Albanian and has had a very difficult history period but especially in what happened in the wars in the 90s and so you'll hear about that today but Beck was directly affected via his family through those wars and the ethnic cleansing and genocide that culminated in 1999 and it's just it's good to talk about this kind of stuff because it gives you a lens into human history and some of the bad things that humans are capable of

doing and and helps us learn so that stuff like that doesn't happen again and you know we say that and then it does but this is the kind of history that i I want to be able to cover in here. And it was great to have someone in here who has a firsthand experience of it. And he's also entertaining as all hell. This guy called me up, or I called him up, excuse me, after Tyler was like, you got to talk to him. And he's like, I'm going on the road. When do you want to do it? And I said, well, we can do it after. He's like, it's going to have to be Tuesday.

He showed up right away on Tuesday. Guy rolled in here on no sleep. It was entertaining as all hell. So I really, really appreciate him getting it in before he headed out of town. But hope you guys enjoy. Think it was a good conversation. Worked in a bunch of other stuff as well besides the war in Kosovo in the 90s, Yugoslav wars. But that said, you know what it is.

I'm Julian Dory and and this is Dreadfire. understands this, but few seem to do it. If you don't like the status quo, start asking questions. That clever. What's going on, man? It's nice to find you, Julian. This is like a long little trek down here for you, huh? Might as well be in Florida. Shot down the turnpike, you know, another 14 hours i've been in miami pretty much a little better down there though nice and warm we just missed the world music conference and i'm kind of sad that i wasn't there the world music conference was down there you never been to miami for the world music conference not for the i've been to miami i love miami but not for the world there's miami and then there's Miami during the World Music Conference.

And it's insane. Now, who shows up to that? Is that just all the big artists go? All the big artists, the biggest DJs in the world. House music had its ups and downs in our country. In the 90s, it kind of came out. In the New York scene, you had infamous clubs like The Tunnel and Limelight and Roxy and Club USA and The Tunnel and Sound Factory. And then in the early 2000s, it just disappeared.

Why? I don't know. It just disappeared from the New York scene. And there was little pockets that still played house music but it was not the mainstream wait you're not talking about ultra are you well there was a time when ultra and the world music conference were at the same time right if i know that one yeah if i'm not mistaken the last year they were combined was in 2009 i was actually there for that and because of the chaos of having both of those

things going at the same time they miami said they can't do them together no more so they actually they actually split them hilarious but i was there in 2009 and it was insane yeah and miami is like the the center of the universe right now as far as like people just going down there like crazy the pandemic obviously pushed them but they're staying you've seen silicon valley have a lot of relocation there you've seen wall street and new york have a lot of relocation there and you know people are even they're hanging out for the whole year even when it gets hot half my network is down there permanently now wow gone and they're not coming back do you think they'll come back in

like two years they'll get sick of it what i'm seeing right now in the city you know yeah there's a little bit more people out now compared to a year ago and two years ago but my opinion and i'm there every day and if i'm not there i can see it from where i live right i live on the water facing manhattan i can tell just by the traffic on the West Side Highway what kind of day the city's having. Oh, yeah, sure. And for the longest time, these last two years, from about 125th Street all the way down to 25th Street, it was just dark. Yeah. Which was insane to see visually.

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Nerve-wracking. You're like, what the hell is going on? Do I think it's going to take two years? Brother, there's a good chance we may never see the New York we knew. I don't say that. And to come to grips with that, to come to terms with that, is pretty depressing, really that is pretty it's pretty depressing really is what yeah you know being in the city post 9-11 which people want to talk about you know we got through that

and there's no correlation you can't even compare the two events that brought nine post 9-11 brought people together as as obviously crazy as that was and depressing as it was for a long time because it's literally in front of you. You got to walk, people had to walk past it every day. The difference of having people who are at least out there on the street

sharing a collective experience versus telling people like, no, you can't even be out here like we did for God knows how fucking long. You can't compare. You can't compare. You cannot compare the two You know being present during 9-11

Going through all of that Witnessing it firsthand seeing the destruction in real life. Yeah, and then the aftermath of it You know the aftermath there was this spirit of we're gonna get through this, you know, fuck the enemy You know, we're all brothers and sisters and this is our fucking city and no one can stop us. And, you know, there was like this I'm proud to be from New York where this has had the opposite effect where a lot of people are like, I can't believe what's happened.

I can't believe the way they've, you know, governed it. I don't agree with the rules, the regulations. They've hampered that sense of freedom that new york gave us where we felt like in new york city everyone's accepted anything can be anything can happen you know it's a magical place where amazing things you know take place every moment literally a new york minute right that's what they say new york minute two i feel like i'm living in a totalitarian state i'm still i'm not allowed to walk well not now because they've lifted all of the mandates miraculously overnight funny how they

did that right and you know i wasn't one of those who who bended the knee right and now for what you compromise what you truly believe in to get freedom back that should never have been taken away from you and the fact that you gave that up so easily you should be ashamed of yourself i think the biggest the biggest thing of all though but the boroughs what about the boroughs to my knowledge a lot of them kind of like were like fuck manhattan they stayed in the boroughs they kind of just did their thing a lot of them were a lot looser in really and like enforcing that bullshit that's you know so so the boroughs were kind of a little bit more rugged more raw and those are the real new yorkers right manhattan was never real new yorkers manhattan was disney world for the for

the rich and famous of the world most of those apartments were empty even before the pandemic. They were just piggy banks where people were parking their money and a lot of foreign money. Those high-rises, those ain't New Yorkers. Those buildings are $1 million, $2 million, $3 million for an apartment. They were just parking their money from all over the world. And when the pandemic happened, they had no reason to come to New York, so they didn't care. And that's why the city was dark. Yeah, I mean, New York does rely on people coming from far and wide to create the bustling business center it is.

But that is interesting you say that because a lot of people, I think, now are more aware of the whole like, oh, this was a lot of real estate investing going on in that city just because the pandemic happened, because people have been bringing it up. But, yeah, I mean, for years and years and years, it was like, I mean, shit, a lot of people just laundered money through real estate in Manhattan. I mean, that was, it still is a thing, but it was a very heavy thing. You're missing, you know, 90 million tourists. The year before this whole thing started, we were projected to hit over 100 million tourists. For the year. The busiest place in all of America. Yeah.

Right? If not one of the most visited places on earth. If I'm not mistaken, the most visited city on the earth. And to be now in the opposite of that, so many businesses are down. So many blocks are literally empty because all the storefronts are empty. All you see is for rent signs. Now, if I was a gambler and I believed in this resurrection of the city and it going back to its glory days, this is a great time to get in. I'm not so optimistic.

I think a lot's changed. I think the corporate structure, people want to stay home now. They don't care that they, you know, they don't want to go to an office. I know a lot of people have been called to go back into the city and they just quit their jobs. They're like, you know what? Fuck you. I don't, if I can't work remote, I don't want to come in. So what they've created is people have gotten used to this culture of never going back to the office, which I'm not necessarily against.

Like, why the hell do I need to commute an hour and a half sometimes to get to a little box when I can do the, if it's not affecting productivity, I don't see why you need to force people to come into an office and be with people they really can't fucking stand anyway. Let's be real. In the corporate world, we're all acting.

You know, I hate that world. I was in that world for a long time. It's very fake. It's all bullshit. It doesn't matter how honorable you are. And I've worked for a ton of companies, right? So I speak from a lot of experiences. It doesn't matter how hard you work.

Logic, a lot of times, and these mega conglomerates, right, doesn't really control, right? It doesn't matter how. There was a job. I'm not going to mention which company. I worked sometimes 14 days in a row without a day off which is illegal by the way I worked overtime I crushed it I crushed my numbers I broke records and the people that were in charge who couldn't close a door when it comes to sales couldn't close their mouths let alone close a deal, just destroyed the entire culture of that office, put people in that were horrible. And to me at that point, and I was making a lot of money at

that point, I was making half a million dollars a year. I was running the floor with 40 sales reps. I hired most of them, trained them. And to get to that point and to build something like that for someone else, and then to just be thrown away like a sack of potatoes. And not that they fired me. I resigned. But to work that hard and to get to that level. And if you would have told me when I was younger, because I used to dream when I first got out of college, if I could make $100,000, if I could just make $100,000, that seemed like dream money money to me i started in banking when i got out of college i was making 38 000. what kind of banking retail you know open your checking account a lot of people don't want to hire guys like me

because we have these weird names you know people look at my name on a resume like what the is this they just probably throw it to the back but to get to the point where i was making that kind of money and if you would have told my younger self you'd walk away from a job making half a million dollars a year, I would have laughed at you. And how old were you? 28. When I started making that money? Yeah.

No, no, that was about six, seven years ago. I walked away from that. Wow, so more recently. It was the best thing I ever did. It was the best fucking thing I ever did. I couldn't see a guy like you in corporate culture. As someone who fled corporate culture myself because it was like best thing I ever did it was the best fucking thing I ever did I couldn't see a guy like you in corporate culture as someone who fled

corporate culture myself because it was like fuck that I just can't do it I could never see a guy like you I was never I was never for the corporate world not because I couldn't work hard

not because I couldn't be a team player no no not because of that I don't fuck with fake man I don't like fake I don't like bullshit you know

let's be real and all of that okay huh it's like literally when you watch that movie if i'm not mistaken office space yes that's exactly like it's pretty much in my opinion that's exactly what it's like it's all nonsense it's all bullshit and i'm not saying every company's like that but a lot of them especially the big ones they're so big that the ceo doesn't know what's happening in your branch or your division it's different parts of the companies too it can be you can have a company that has some decent has some not decent it really depends

where you are you get these fucking narcissist psychos that run an office who most of the time the only talent they had was they could kiss so much ass yeah and suck so much dick yep i don't know if we're allowed to curse on your shoulder. No, you can say whatever the fuck you want. Okay, they suck so much dick to get where they are, right? That's the only reason they're there. And it's no talent. Literally, they just take orders and suck dick. And that's who's your manager.

And you could run circles around them. Yeah. When I left that office, they never made their budget again. They were the number one office out of a hundred when i was in control they never made their numbers ever again not only did i exceed the but i exceeded the budget by over 25 so imagine hitting your goal and exceeding it by 25 but they never even made the fucking budget a guy like you though like you're such a you are such a new yorker in every sense of the word you are let's get shit done yesterday like this is what it is let's go it's black and white this that's it right guys like that especially in the modern day hr corporate

culture and i say hr very specifically there it's like they don't care they don't give a shit people are hired to report to someone else who reports to someone else who reports to someone else by the time something gets all the way the chain where there's actually dollars and cents involved they're more concerned with what's my fucking liability. You know, and they look at a guy like you and they're like, oh, well, what could this guy be telling our employees? What could he be telling the people who works for him? What is our potential risk there?

You know, HR, if you're out there and you're listening to this, you're watching this. If you think that HR is there for you to file a grievance and for you to be protected i got a news flash for you it is not hr is not there to protect you if you're being harassed or the hr is a way for them to gather information to make the best move to limit their exactly like you said their liability they lost they do not give a flying fuck about you. It's the cover your ass manager. They don't give a shit about you. So if you think going to HR is going to help you, so my advice to you is if you're in a really bad situation, walk.

Now, I've never left peacefully, by the way. You? Not leaving peacefully? I can never see that. If I gave you my heart, I bust my ass, I did everything right, I never left quietly. I always made sure they fucking knew I was leaving. And I won't get into any of those stories, but let's just say, man, I don't regret any of it. You don't look like a guy who has a ton of regrets. Oh, when I left, I mean, I told one boss to go fuck herself in front go herself in front of the whole office like 60 people i called her every name under the sun

if you're watching this you again witch that's a nicer name yeah definitely a cleaned up name right there you're also you're also known as like the king of the new york nightlife though which by the way not to be toopical, but it shouldn't be that surprising because I feel like Albanians run nightlife in New York. So to be respectful, because I wouldn't say I'm the king, right? I'm a nightlife legend is what they call me, right? And there's many nightlife legends, right?

The nightlife is, you know, it's really a close family. We all know each other, right? There's so many of us that have been in the scene. There's a lot of people that have come and gone. There's a lot of people have come and gone there's a lot of people didn't make it out of the scene right they just died like they partied to death literally but you know i've been involved in new york city nightlife since i was 17 years old i'm 39 years old now i've always been in the background you know my brother used to own one of the largest nightclubs in new york city what club it was called club touch it was on 52nd street between 8th and broadway right next to the russian samovar across the street from what used to be roseland ballroom

they knocked that down it's not there anymore uh it is now some big bar i forgot the name of it it's three floors it was 30 000 square feet and it used to be known as float before we took over and uh if you watch the music video with puff daddy and naz you can hate me now as the song they filmed that in the club before we took over oh no but then we changed the whole inside i mean the place was beautiful it was called touch because when you walked in you would touch the bar and anywhere you touched your hand it would glow the walls were all led and it was a beautiful place there's videos of it online and your brother owned that my brother with his partner i was very involved in uh promoting ops it just you know it was just one

big party man for a long time has there even been anything to to really get anywhere near that level over, let's say, even the past year maybe in New York. If you're not using an 8 Sleep Pod Pro cover at this point, what are you doing? What are you doing? You're like the guy on the Blackberry in 2019 saying, oh, no, the hard keypad is going to come back. No, it's not. It's gone. It's over. It's over.

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and add hours to your life because you're going to have way more energy. So use that link. Use that code TRENDIFIRE at checkout. Get $150 off and welcome to the 21st century. It's come back now. Those that know what's going on in your nightlife, most of it moved to Brooklyn. No one ever thought, right?

You got the Brooklyn Mirage, the Avant Gardener. These places are holding 5,000 to 20,000 people in one venue. These guys had no idea what the fuck they were doing, but no one doesn't. And then they look back, people go, oh, it was genius. These guys moved into Brooklyn, bought all these warehouses, combined them and turned it into a mega club, ranked number one and number two in the whole world now. So it all went brooklyn in the world yeah it all went to brooklyn bro in new york in

manhattan you have more of like lounges rooftops love them it's more commercial commercial cookie cutter tau group dominates you know the scene in new york city so it's kind of the same experience everywhere you go regardless of how the venue looks it's the same bottles promoters you know that organic organic nightlife experience you know it hasn't existed in new york in a long time there's little pockets of it you know somewhere nowhere beautiful place that opened up uh last Amazing. It's a rooftop nightclub. Organic. They have some of the best house music in the world. They have some of the best artists in such a venue that's not even that big.

Where you would say, how the hell are they even affording them? That's a place I would definitely check out if you're into nightlife. And what's nice is that if you don't want the crazy house music, you go up to the rooftop. And it's this beautiful view of the city. It's nothing like that. There's a pool. Yeah, it's the complete opposite. You could go there after work for drinks with your girl or your friend.

Did I see a video of that? I might have seen a video of you. It might have been on your TikTok or something where you took the one guy up there. Is that the podcast you were on? I took Bradley up there. He's a good friend of mine. Yeah, that place is sick. Bradley is no joke. Shout out to Bradley. You's a good friend of mine. Yeah, that place is sick. Bradley is no joke. Shout out to Bradley.

You want real motivation, no bullshit, none of that fake cookie-cutter bullshit that you get from these motivational speakers? That's your guy, Bradley. And his background is like sales. He's fucking amazing. The guy's sales. He launched a company that creates all the training software. So it's like turnkey, he sets it all up for you.

I went to his office out in Vegas, his office is sick. It's ridiculous. How'd you meet him? I actually met him on Clubhouse, an audio app. No shit, yeah. We were just shooting this shit, and we hit it off, and I told him I was gonna, you know, I drove across the country to film a documentary

over the summer, and ended up meeting him in real life, and we just hit it off, and then I told him I was going to, you know, I drove across the country to film a documentary over the summer and ended up meeting him in real life. And we just hit it off. And then I told him, you know, I told him on the show, you come to New York. And if you pay for a drink, I'll put my head in the toilet in front of your whole audience. And he came out. I took care of him. He tried to pay one time. But I remembered my bet.

And an Albanian always keeps their word. So I was like, if you fucking pay for that drink, I'm going to put you in the river. I made sure he left while he was in my presence. He didn't pay for nothing. But he's a good, good dude, man. Really rock solid. And I love his shit, man. Love it.

Yeah, I really, after we finish, I actually want to listen to that podcast. I like to hear how people go about it. But what's really interesting about you getting connected with me and i was telling you this just before we got on is that you are your entire roots are albanian and you have ties directly to albania and kosovo and about i don't know this was like a few weeks ago even i forget what it was it was before madeline albright died but something came up about the whole yugoslavia breakup and i saw some picture i i think it was like the cover of time magazine or something with the nato bombings and i was like what the

fuck is that and it's one of these things where then you start you go to google you take a look at like type in yugoslav war or like that, and you start seeing like what this was and what happened and how long it was. To say nothing of how far back it stretched. And suddenly you're like, why have I never heard of this? So like I went down the rabbit hole with the whole Kosovo War and what happened there, and we'll get into the full background and everything today. But to see you as somebody who I believe it was your mom was Albanian. Your father was also Albanian but lived in Kosovo. And they both escaped, I guess, before this happened, right? They met in New York, yeah.

So, yeah, I'm first generation Albanian American. I was actually born in Texas. Grew up in the New York City area my entire life. Albania has a very ancient history and a very tragic history. Now, you mentioned the word Yugoslavia, right? Slav. Slav is a part of that nation, right? The name of that nation was Yugoslavia. And who's considered a Slav? So Albanians, we're not Slavic. Right. So we never belonged in Yugoslavia, just from an ethnic perspective, right? We're not Slavic. We don't speak Slavic.

We speak Albanian, which is the, you can look it up, you can research it all you want, the oldest original Indo-European language in existence. Really? We are considered by many archaeologists the oldest people in all of Europe. Albanians? As old, or if not, even older than the greeks themselves okay well let's start from the beginning and then where do you guys stretch back to because the greeks i guess we're like like maybe i'm fucked we're before time brother before time and we're some of some some historians trace us back to the original aryans and you know from the you know

iran today and we migrated north. We're talking about 10,000 BC, 5,000 BC. To keep it simple, the word Albanian comes from the word Albanoi. Albanoi was the largest tribe of the Illyrians. So there was many tribes. The largest tribe was the Illyrians. I'm sorry, the largest tribe of the Illyrians was the Albanoi tribe. How do you spell Illyrians right I'm sorry the largest tribe of the Illyrians was the Albano tribe so how do you spell Illyrians I L L Y R I A N S and the ancestors of the Illyrians were

the ancient Pelagians and this is where the Albanians claim and trace their lineage to we don't call ourselves Albanian the The world calls us that. It's like the largest tribe of the Israelites or the one that the world had the most contact with was the Judeans. That's where the word Jew comes from. To me, it's fascinating how a religion like Judaism is only named after one tribe, Judea. What about the other tribes of Israel? Right, because they were all over. The Israelites had more than one tribe, but yet we we call them jews so it's the same thing with the albanians we don't call ourselves albanian we're the illyrians we're the we're the children of the eagle right yeah because

the other thing that's like amazing about albanians is that people think of it and if they remember that albania is a country some people in America, they're not good with geography. But then they're like, oh, they're all from Albania. But you guys to this day, first of all, like Kosovo is 85, 90 percent Albanian. And then you look at countries that aren't considered like Albanian as far as what they're standing is for how they view themselves in the world. You look at North Macedonia. You look at Herzegovina. You look at a few of the other ones like in the world. You look at North Macedonia, you look at Herzegovina, you look at a few of the other ones like in old Yugoslavia, and it's like you guys have significant populations within each of those.

Your people are very spread out. So what's amazing about our history, and now there was a big DNA study done also, which traces like our DNA is like the oldest in that region and like everyone else got our DNA. I don't have the exact quotes, but this just came out not even a couple of weeks ago. Getting back to the point, you know, under the Roman Empire, right, before Christ, that area was known as Illyricium, right? So it was a province in the roman empire yeah and some of the popes even you know and you know can trace their lineage to the illyrians i'm going to stick a map in the corner

for people to see by the way and if you look at these older maps of europe you'll see it says illericium illyria so again the word albanian is a modern word for our very ancient people. Who came up with that? Like I said, the world, right? They came into contact. They, you know, Alban, Alban. You know, what's important to understand is that we were always in a state of war and always in a state of occupation. And the fact that we still exist and our language is mostly intact is a testament to how stubborn we are and that we never forget. So, first the Romans, then we were under the Ottoman Empire for 500, 600 years.

1389 on. 1389 was the Battle of Kosovo, right? That's correct. But it wasn't just the Serbs that fought there. And I find it ironic. There was a unified force that tried to resist the Turks. Our national hero, which a lot of our neighbors seem to try to claim, his name is George Castriotti. He's a saint in the Catholic Church. If you look him up, his statue stands in the heart of Rome in Piazza di Albanese. It's near the pyramid.

It's like a man-made pyramid in Rome. And I discovered that statue when I was actually on vacation. After the buildings fell on 9-11, I was depressed. Oh, this is Skanderberg? Also known as Skanderbeg. I did read about this guy.

Basically means the second Alexander. Because this guy was a military genius. He was trained and knew a lot of the turks right he was a part of them and then he broke off and went back and declared independence from the most powerful empire in the world yeah he was the guy now it's coming back to me he was the guy that kind of like the argument was oh he played both ends but really he just kind of like came back home after like surviving some consider him the creator of guerrilla warfare because how he was able to win certain battles you know or just by time is considered genius this guy the fact is

not a there is a movie about him it's a very old movie that if i'm not mistaken the russians made about him i think in the 50s or 60s but the fact that there's not another movie and that mel gibson who loves to make these movies that are like show, right? I'm surprised he hasn't made a movie about him. And he'd actually play a phenomenal St. George. So this guy was able to hold off the Ottoman horde for about 25 years. And people, by the way, people forget. I don't know why. We forget in history when we look at the empires of Europe.

Ottoman is the one that no one ever really brings up, but they were around forever. They were based out of Turkey, as you said, and they were fucking huge. Powerful. They had control for a long time. So a lot of historians say that if it was not for the resistance of our national hero, they would have made it all the way west. How far west did they get?

I don't even know that. They didn't go further than us, but they would have conquered the rest of europe but they had like all the middle east they had basically from from the balkans from greece and albania on they went towards the russian territories you know but getting back to the term yugoslavia we're not slavic so what happened was after the ottoman empire eventually collapsed right in uh 1912 albania declared its independence then you had the balkan wars and if it wasn't for woodrow wilson the american president at that time

albania would have been wiped off the face of the earth why we were attacked by all of our neighbors okay like serbia we lost land to greece macedonia what some would call fake maced Macedonia or northern Macedonia or whatever you want to call it. I don't care to get it. It is what it is. The borders are where they are now. I think keeping on these conflicts with each other is not benefiting them or us or anybody. We need to move forward. I think these wars have left all of our countries poor.

It's not benefiting any of us at the end of the day the average albanian serbian croat bosnian montenegrin the average person just wants to move on with their life the only people that get caught up in this shit are falling for what i believe is a tactic to divide the people of these regions and keep them all suppressed and poor like shadow states basically yeah is what they are and i hope that people of the balkans can wake up get a little more educated and realize that this shit doesn't benefit any of us these old conflicts i'm not saying we got to be buddy buddy but we don't need to be so hostile it is amazing how tied to historical archetypes people can get when it's impressed upon them so much which comes back in

a second for you to say that comes back in a second so after the you know the balkan wars we lost about 70 of our territory in albania albania proper or what we call ethnic albania and kosovo was broken off they'll claim it it was theirs. They were nowhere to be seen in the Balkans until the 6th and 7th century. I'm going to put a map in the corner so that people can see this because I put the Illyrian map in there. 6th and 7th century, you had a migration of a certain population of Slavs, again, originating from much more east. They were Slavic, Slavic-speaking people like Polish, Hungarian, Bulgarian. They're all cousins, and they all came from that region the albanians have always been there where do where if where the fuck did we come from yeah a lot of them make these theories all

they're turks and this and how the fuck are we turks we look nothing like them we sound nothing like them we have some turkish words in our language as do they because they were under the empire for if you're under someone for five six hundred years you're gonna have to use some of their fucking words just like how latin branched off in all these all these different languages exactly so for them to to make those claims it's not even backed and now the dna tests are coming out you gotta understand we've been under occupation for over 2 000 years we're finally free and after we became you know liberated from those empires then albanian 12 albania goes into communism the worst communism ever okay a

totalitarian state where no one was allowed in and no one was allowed out so kosovo goes into yugoslavia divided in that aspect and albania goes into darkness. So Yugoslavia was made, because these countries all switched up their names a bunch to what they were within Yugoslavia. It was like their own republics, but it was made up of Serbia, Croatia. Bosnia, Slovenia, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Kosovo. But they didn't give Kosovo the same, unless I have this wrong.

So what happened, and I'll explain that in a second. So what's important to understand explain that in a second so what's important to understand is that you know our history never had a chance to come out because we were so isolated and under occupation this is the first time in 2 000 years that the albanian history can actually be studied by outsiders myths can be challenged okay oh because you're saying communism shut this off yeah we never well there was no one coming out there's no one allowed out so how the fuck is anybody kosovo is under yugoslavia they're going to control any information that comes out of there albania is just closed off it's not that they're trying to put it out but it's just closed

there was no way to access any of this stuff now they have access to ancient ruins ancient burial sites dna tests are being done language studies are being done so now we're going to see what's what and what's what right and like they said if you can control someone's history right you control the narrative right and to conquer a people you conquer their history right that's how you shut them down the truth is finally starting to come out about who we are where we come from i'm sorry to conquer their people you conquer their history. I never heard that before. I don't know if that's the exact quote, but I just said it.

That's fucking phenomenal. Go ahead. Well, you know, like they say, history is controlled by the winner, right? Yes. The winner controls history. Heard that one. But if you conquer someone's history, you in essence conquer them, right? If you didn't know that you were the original or that you're the best or that you had this power, this gift, and someone told you, no, no, you didn't know that you were the the original or that you're the best

or that you had this power this gift and someone told you no no you can't do that and you never know that you have this power or this ability it's the same kind of thing right yeah you're suppressing someone's identity their respect their self-esteem right i think something crazy happened to our people when we study some of the our ancient history like queen teuta right what a gangster she was whatever she was during the illyrian times we were like a pirate type people we would fucking harass the ships off the adriatic sea in the roman empire and she we had a queen ruler she was fucking gangster like so it was just a fascinating history but we did so much for the world, and no one knows nothing about our history. Nothing.

You know, there's some scholars coming out right now saying that our language may have literally impacted most of Europe. Really? Like, for example, religion, the word. Albanian, if I break that down,-le-ion New law of ours Whoa New law of ours Re means new Le-law-ion

Ours Ionian Is the sea We call in Albanian So for example the word for God in Albanian is Zut Z-U-T? Which one sounds more like Zeus? Zut or God? Holtheos? Theos? Close, related. So, I don't poke at the

Greeks. There's a lot of, I think, overlapping there. I think with time, maybe we could figure some of this shit out, but we've been there just as long as them, man think, overlapping there. I think with time, maybe we could figure some of this shit out. But we've been there just as long as them, man. Just as long. You know, in America, one thing that most people here, including people, which is all of us technically, who are, let's say, like second or third generation immigrants. Like, you know, the family hasn't been here since the Revolutionary War or anything. One thing that I don't think we have any true concept of is our land and the legacy – and I want to choose my words carefully here. But like the legacy that our people living among it have built for like our DNA. And so to clarify that a little bit one of the things that strikes me as amazing when I look across all these different countries that

entered a power vacuum in the 1990s we'll get there you know when Yugoslavia broke up and everything is that you have these groups of people who are say anywhere from 2 million to 7 8 million in size in each of these republics and they all trace themselves back to some sort of race ethnicity that has existed within somewhere within this region for thousands of years and so when their when their borders start getting redrawn and when the tribes actually have to put up what become the walls of around them there's this primal urge to say no no wait no this is how it's supposed to be or this is where our border really is this is where our people really come from this is where our history was created and it creates this battle among them that you are you're you're not just fighting for yourself and your kids. You're fighting for the history of where you came from.

You know what I mean? It's a very wild, wild concept that you have an understanding of because your parents were there. Because it's so ingrained in you and you have the understanding of both these cultures. But in America, this has always just been the island across the sea. The big place where everyone went. You know, you have Mexico, you have Canada above us and separate. But we're all so big and we're all so different that it's like no one really thinks of it that way. Our country definitely has a crazy history, right?

There's no doubt about it the way we got here you know when we look back every country has some darkness in it um what is now in my opinion becoming our greatest weakness was our greatest strength and it was all the differences culture ethnicities races religion you know does racism exist probably yes it does it definitely does is it as bad as it used to be i don't think so but i think with everything that's going on it's going to be made like that there's like lines being drawn and people are you know even people that support you when you alienate them now you like it's the same thing in a war like imagine you're in ukraine and you don't want russia to fight right and you don't hate russians but now they come into your you know they come in

by force now you're going to be forced to probably pick up a rifle even though you don't believe in violence right so it's like when bad things happen and hatred spreads people that you know people that would never get involved in that type of stuff are forced to or their lives are threatened or they're put into danger so in in our country and over the last couple of years there's just been this big like this is what's going on there's only racism and all this other stuff and i don't think that is the case across the board right i understand what i definitely say that there's some double standards 100 some of these cops are fucking scumbags, pieces of shit.

But I'm with you on that, right? But when you attack me, then how the fuck can I be with you, right? So it's like my ancestors had nothing to do with slavery. Zero. Albanians have nothing. Yeah, we come from here. We had nothing.

We were fighting our own fucking wars. We were fucking being oppressed. I lost family fucking 20 years ago. They were lined up against a wall and executed. So I know what hatred feels like. But I do believe what happened to the African Americans in this country is probably the greatest crime against the people ever. Because they don't even know where the fuck they came from. They don't even know what their real names are.

They have ancestors on the other side of the water. And they don't even know which part of Africa they come come from right i mean maybe dna helps a little bit but how are you going to find your bloodlines you can't it's taken from so what was taken from them is something that can never be given back to them and that's fucked up you see yeah when i look at it that way i feel their fucking pain i understand because that's something that can no matter how much money you give them you can't put a price on that. There's no reparation for that. There's no way to ever heal that.

It just comes down to us as a country doing better by them and hoping that there's this forgiveness, basically. But not every white person had anything. So you can't group everyone it's when we group people into boxes that we have bigger problems well that's actually so it's it's a perfect parallel to when you look at like conflicts like what we've seen in the balkans over the years for so long it's like you're albanian right you guys have albania as a country the serbs are serbian they have serbia as a country it's all mostly obviously they have small pockets of people different ethnicities in those countries but it's mostly populated by the main ethnicity there so

in each one each respective race in america where you have them all together and everyone's from all these different places and it's all from across the pond there's no i don't want to say there's no because there there is but it is not this powerful survival instinct we've also never i guess outside of like the war of 1812 and fighting the literal revolution we've never been attacked in a prolonged war here. You know what I mean? We had one-off events, Pearl Harbor, 9-11, stuff like that. We've never had to fight to where, like, get off your land, you're gone. And you got to get it back.

I was at the park the other day, right? I see a woman of Middle Eastern descent. She's covered, right, with the hijab or the Muslim covering that women wear. You know, definitely Middle Eastern. And then I see the Orthodox Jewish woman with her kids, and I'm sitting there watching their kids play together. And I'm like, across the ocean, they'd be killing each other. That would never happen.

You see, that's what I want to focus on in our country. You know, if I sat back and looked at the horrible things that happened to me in my life, I wouldn't be doing anything me in my life I wouldn't be doing anything productive in my life right now it's very easy to be depressed and to stay in the negative zone nothing's perfect in this world nothing's perfect in this life you know if I think about my brother every day and I do but if I stayed there where the pain is nothing productive would ever come of my life

what happened your brother he passed away in a car accident, right? Unexpectedly. Sorry to hear that. At the age of 42. But I think it also comes when we're talking about people. If we stay only where that pain is, we never forget the pain because you can't even if you wanted to.

There's always something there to remind you of it. But if that's all you operate with, how can anything positive come from it if you let it consume you and destroy you right and i'm no one to tell any anybody what to do with their lives or what they should think or what they should feel because you know when i lost my family in the war you know there wasn't much you could say to me i was full of hatred sure if you mentioned the word serbian i want to smash your fucking face like i was full of hatred and i had every

reason to because i lost 30 people that i loved like that gone right yeah so who was going to tell me anything but i went through this evolution and i realized even if I look online on my own podcast, I get death threats from Serbians. I get hatred from them. My people will comment back on their comments. And I'm like, well, that's not my objective. I'm not saying we got to be brother-brother. But I think the educated Albanian, the educated Serbian that can see that in the end we've all been played. That these fucking leaders of our countries, if you really look at who's behind them, there's a common person behind all of them.

I'm not going to call them out by name. Starts with an S, rhymes with Rojos. This motherfucker's behind all of them. No, he is. He really is. And while me and you are busy hating and killing each other these motherfuckers are controlling all of us and it took me going through this whole evolution first dealing with the pain of losing that type of family right losing you know going through the trauma right when you go through a trauma it takes time man so if you're out there and you're in a hard place

right now you're going through a hard time it's okay because that's a part of the process. You go through something that just devastates you, right? War, losing a family member. Horrible things will happen to you. It's pretty much guaranteed no matter what. And what I mean by that is just losing a family member. That's horrible. It doesn't matter even if they're old. Your mom could be 200 years old no matter what.

Mom is mom. Yeah, mom dies. It doesn't matter if she was 250 yeah it's great she had a long life but that was your mom that's still devastating it's devastating right so it's only a matter of time before something bad happens to everybody and what i've learned is you know first you go through the trauma you gotta breathe take a step back you do some self-analysis don't stay in isolation too much it's not healthy it is healthy for some periods to detach from the world sure you kind of go into a cocoon but a lot of people go

into that cocoon never come back out right that's where dark depression comes from suicide so staying isolated for too long is not healthy but it's okay in the beginning just for a little bit just until you kind of recover but too much is not good and you know assessing everything that happened and then you know i never would have back then i would never want to have a serbian friend ever talk to a serbian because of the way the nationalism the war everything that happened then losing my family but as life went on as things evolved and the power of living in america and the power of living in america and the power of living in new york city where you got no choice but to deal with people sometimes from places you don't

like but because of that you're forced to deal with these people that on the other side of the water you'd fucking they'd kill you or you'd kill them there's something so powerful so you're forced to deal with them and i was forced to deal with Serbians here and there. And I ended up being introduced to one. And I was like, I did everything in me to not like this guy. Everything in me to fucking hate him, to look for the evil, to fucking paint him with one brush stroke, which is what everybody's doing right now. Which is why this country's in trouble right now. Oh, saying because everyone's being pushed into boxes this is the first step before war the division put people in boxes make the people in those two boxes those two groups

hate each other and then you like the match and that's exactly how yugoslavia went down but i i end up coming across this the serbian guy he owned like a lounge in the city it was called the van demons and i'm trying so much not to fucking like this guy right but my friends I ended up coming across this Serbian guy. He owned a lounge in the city. It was called the Van Diemen's. And I'm trying so much not to fucking like this guy, right? But my friends hang out at this bar a lot. And I'd go a couple of times. And I would not even acknowledge his presence. Just like, hey, and that's it.

When is this? This is fucking over 10 years ago. And then one day we end up having a conversation and kosovo comes up and the war and all this other shit and he's like listen what happened to your people first of all it has to be acknowledged what happened there was wrong period killing civilians this and that what happened in bosnia was wrong as far as people dying whether he agreed with the politics or not he acknowledged first that what happened in bosnia was wrong as far as people dying whether he agreed with the politics or not he acknowledged first that what happened there was a crime crime against humanity

crime against humanity fucking genocide in that aspect do you think so i want to ask you this because this is a great this is like the ultimate example right here where where you get to the core of it coming from the two different types of people but do you think a lot of people really at the end of the day are humans first and so what i mean by that is something like this i guess it's like 10 15 years after some of these events happen which we'll talk about but genocide events where you had serb on albanian crime in kosovo someone like that and again the basians had a way worse than us like like as bad as i feel for our people and whatever we dealt with right the basians lost way more than us man and it was fucking brutal you had concentration camps in the heart of fucking europe you had

8 000 men and boys massacred in a fucking united nations camp which was supposed to be a fucking safe zone so you're gonna tell me the world's army allows a fucking massacre to happen for a week in a un protected site this is online go look on youtube and that's what i'm saying though a guy like this he didn't do that no he didn't support that it happened and he came right out and told you that so for me and then for him to acknowledge that and then also say like part of the reason i left over there's they wanted me to go into army and i didn't agree with it so this guy didn't want to fight in the war he acknowledged what happened was wrong so how can i put them all in one box that's like when 9 11 happened right islam is one of the almost the biggest religion in the world right it's it's pace i think it's second yeah it's it's almost

par with christianity and it's almost outpacing because of birth rates it's over it's having a lot more kids. You're going to take 1.8 billion people and put them in one box for a couple motherfuckers in a cave? And then the media fueled it. That's why when people say, like, what are you? Are you a Republican, Democrat? I'm neither, bro. I'm neither because both have blood in their hands

in very different ways. If I had to classify myself as anything, I'd say I'm a libertarian who leans to the right like a motherfucker, but I also have a lot of liberal stuff like I believe every, you do whatever you want with your life. Just don't push your shit on me.

You want to fuck dudes, girls, I don't care. Do you? Like, I don't care. Just don't push your shit down my throat. That's the beauty of America. Live and let live. That hasn't always been the case,

but that's what we're striving towards. And what I people is this country is not perfect yes i i know to say it is is to lie but go outside man i've been around the world yeah you ain't gonna find anything better that gave you a better chance as bad as it was for certain groups so rather than burn the whole house down let's repair it but let's not go to like extremes that can completely rip the fabric of our society we've come a long way man we've come a long way as a country the point you make though about division preceding any war though is so spot on and it's you know it gets it gets nerve-wracking when you throw around words like war but i would be remiss if i didn't say that when you see the vitriol levels that have

increased so heavily i would say this country's on the brink in my opinion it's you know my opinion that's my opinion this country's in trouble and that's fair i don't know if i'm quite at the word brink but yeah are the are the steps there for i don't know certain people in this country who are just so upset about shit the extremists we do see online as far as like the extreme opinions that get the most noise are the foundations there for some sort of conflict that could get nasty yeah Yeah, it's hard. It is hard to ignore that. And when you look at history, when you look at how things brew, it is a groupthink psychosis that happens where usually two main parties, no pun intended, find enormous differences between a solution that they want. And then guess what happens?

You tell the other side, shut the fuck up. Yes. And you don't let them talk. Yes. So now if I can't talk, which is the first step to diffuse anything, the next step is violence. Yeah. Always.

Because when one side can't be heard, how the fuck are we going to resolve anything? You don't. The only shot is to, in that case, uprise. You know, I don't care who you are. You're listening to this. You're a Republican, a Democrat. Are you going to really sit here and tell me

that the people that are seeking these offices are really running because they give a fuck about us? Are you that fucking naive? Are you that fucking stupid? Because for me to see how people hold these people up, like poster people, okay? And I understand the power and the impact of media.

You explain to me how they have hundreds of millions of dollars in their bank's accounts. If you want to fix the problem, it's real simple. These people can't accept funds from outside, lobbying, right? Good luck with that. They don't get any of this money. You're only going to have people that work in those positions

because they're not making a lot of money. About term limits. That too, but that actually care about the country. Yeah. That are willing to sacrifice

their personal gain for the benefit of the entire society. Them making hundreds of millions of dollars, Nancy Pelosi's one of them. Look at her, man. How does she have

all that fucking money? So, and that's not just her the other side too why Republicans they do it too we had a chart of it I'm not going to pull it up again now but we pulled it up on a few episodes it's all of them so if you sit here and you think these people really give a fuck about you and us like you're a fucking clown

you're a fucking moron is what you are I'm defending either side right now and that's where the power of us having conversation is saying listen the only shot we have here and i drove the whole country this summer it's polarized man people are people are talking about it man well it looks like we're heading to a war man fuck it like people are ready to die okay i drove across 40 40 states this summer the only shot we have is no sense like people not being shut off and people like us in the middle trying to pull

two sides back together other than that i really i don't i don't know like it doesn't look good man well i try to have an optimistic long-term view and sometimes look with things that come out when we have these conversations certainly for me as well they have a very negative outlook and when we talk about brewing conflict like yes you know i just said that myself and that's a that's a negative the most negative type of of outlook you could have but i do have some hope that we have enough people who are realizing that public squares are where ideas are supposed to be challenged and public squares allow for bad ideas to come in that can therefore be very easily defeated by let's say the sober people in society and in this case i mean the majority of society so the danger to me and you would understand this with having the deep understanding of like communism and totalitarianism

that you do through your own people in your own family leaving it but the the danger of taking away the ability for people to speak just because their ideas may be bad, in which case some of them absolutely are, the danger of that versus the danger of not letting them speak, there is no comparison. Because once you start with, oh, we're not going to let this guy talk because we don't like what he says, and I may be able to say, well, yeah, he does have a lot of extreme beliefs. The next guy has less extreme beliefs, and the next girl has less extreme beliefs and then it gets to a point where it's like here's the one way that people are allowed to speak about issue x and that's it you're done and if you don't speak that way you're out the fact that people can't see that's a potential problem at this point

does concern me the fact that america's doctor the one that controlled our lives for two fucking years is not allowed to be challenged now you had a couple senators i'll give them kudos but like when people really want to challenge them like how come we can't have a debate with this motherfucker how come he doesn't go on joe rogan for example that's what i want to know so like to me like don't sit here and like try to virtue signal and act like you're fucking smarter when all you're doing is taking whatever a stupid TV is telling you to do or to think. And coming from those parts of the world, for me, I grew up as a very proud American.

We're great. The president's an amazing human being because Hollywood and Independence Day, the films. And then you start traveling the world and you start seeing what our policies do and the impact they've had on the world. And you start you start realizing well maybe we haven't really been the fucking good guy maybe we've been oppressors and we have been in many places man we've started wars that should have never started that's true and to look in the mirror and say fuck my blood my hands even though

i never pulled the trigger have blood on them because the tax money i gave went to fucking blow some poor guy up in the middle of nowhere that had nothing to do with me. And to look in the mirror as an American and admit that, it wasn't easy for me at first because I grew up with this whole we're fucking amazing and, you know, you maybe don't look so far back into our past and like, right? So it takes courage to self-assess, to look in the mirror, to say, shit, you know what? We fucked up, and maybe we can make it right. Maybe we can do something better. It's just sad to see. I voted for Obama the first time.

I was like, this is fucking great. This guy, Barack Hussein, if this fucking guy can get elected, we've come a long way. Right. And in a way, you're still right about that but i feel like we took 30 steps back the other way so it's like but it was also we got to remember too it's everybody to use your words from a few minutes ago like we put these symbols on and and i do it i'm guilty of this too so i'm one to talk but like we put these symbols on like trump we put these symbols on obama i do it i'm guilty of this too so i'm one to talk but like we put these symbols on like trump we put these symbols on obama we put them on biden now all that like these are these are the heads they're figuratively very very important because they're literally like

the president united states but this stuff goes back to the systems and it goes back years and decades and and to your point as well like yeah we've done some stuff around the world it's not great you know and and what does that lead to what is it what is that what does that create not just over there for those people right and i'm talking about the middle east right now more than anything and i think that's fair to say but like doesn't just create power vacuums and problems for them that they didn't ask for it also creates on our end when we when some of our people begin to recognize it and then don't want to do it that way don't want to have our tax dollars going towards things like that we got no saying where this money goes yeah and you come and take my

shit i work hard for my money you're taking about a third to a fourth to sometimes even half of what the fuck i make to do what? To create destruction? You know, I went to Detroit this summer and I went up to Flint, Michigan. And to see Americans living in that situation where we can spend billions on fucking wars and all this other shit, I don't care what side of the aisle you're on. How do you not have a problem with that? How does that help us?

So it's just there's so many moving pieces to this. It's just crazy. Like I truly believe unless we change course, we are in the final days of this country. Final days of this country. Final days of this nation. To think and to be arrogant. Because I love when people go, well, we're America, man. To think as someone that comes from a people who saw three empires fall,

empires that lasted for thousands of fucking years. The Albanians were under the Romans. They were around for how long? The Ottomans were around for 600, almost 600 to 700 years. 600. Somewhere in that neighborhood. Either way.

Okay. What? You don't think we can fall? Are you that fucking naive? Are you that stupid? Have you never done your history? You don't think the Romans were sitting in Rome before the German barbarians were coming and saying, Ah, we're fucking Rome, man.

We'll never fall. You don't think they had those same conversations? I bet you they did. Ah, we're fucking Rome. We always find a way. We'll get through. Bring me another maiden. Let me bang bang her out off to the bathhouses these are the same cycles people say history repeats itself yeah it's the mind of the human being that repeats itself the same conditions and the sicknesses that have existed since the beginning of time in my opinion

the same arrogance when history repeats itself ah yeah we're america we can never fall of course we could fall of course you could collapse you know yugoslavia regardless what people want to say there was a point where it seemed like it was like a decent fucking place to live yeah like the late 60s people had jobs their pass worked, their currency was pretty decent. And because everyone was prospering in that system, even though I don't agree with socialism at all, or communism, I believe we have social responsibilities. I don't think a human being should be limited to that, but I think if you're doing well, you should help. There's got to be that. Not everyone can make it.

So there is a social responsibility yes when it collapsed a lot of people will say you know what it was it was pretty decent they admit it regardless of all the ethnic turmoil it wasn't bad under under that system for a brief period of time but once the war erupted right that was it they all felt like dominoes now the reason the kosovo war occurred was we tried civil disobedience 1981 we declared independence from yugoslavia but we didn't go to war we tried civil disobedience and that's going way back to what you're talking about 90 you know 90 1990 if i'm not mistaken but you're talking about maybe i misunderstood but that also goes back to like the beginning of when yugoslavia was formed in the 40s because kosovo said well we're a republic too and they at least like they gave them like some sort of we had a we had a fake seats we had autonomy okay so there was so under yugoslavia, Kosovo, that region.

So here's my point. If it was always a part of Serbia, then why did under Yugoslavia? Why under Yugoslavia was Kosovo given a special status? If it was always a part of Serbia, it would have been treated no different than the rest of Serbia. So why under Yugoslavia was Kosovo given a special status? There's your argument. They can't answer that. They can't.

Because it always was heavily dominated by Albanians. Period. Period. When I was there, I witnessed, they were trying to colonize it. Right? So they were building these villages. One of them is in an area called Babalac. Those houses are still there because people live in them after the war.

Their houses were destroyed by the Serbs. Those Serbs that were being colonized, they left. Right? So our interactions with them obviously go back to the 6th and 7th century, back and forth. We had battles, this and that. There was a few times where we fought with them against the Turks. And eventually once the Turks came, that was it. It didn't matter if you're Serbian or Albanian.

Shut the fuck up. We're calling the shots now for you know the next 600 years but when yugoslavia broke up we tried a peaceful route we tried you know and there's plenty of documentation on this footage you know the first thing that happened was milosevic comes into power he's also known as the butcher of the balkans bosnia, Slovenia, Croatia go to war. Slovenia wasn't too bad. They got lucky. Bosnia and Croatia all hell broke loose.

We're on the sidelines. Eventually the bloody war comes to an end. They have the Dayton Accords in Dayton, Ohio. Okay. They have those peace accords, but they leave Kosovo out of the negotiations. So now we're under Serbia.

That's it. Okay. We started our civil disobedience in 91, before then we Kosovo the Albanians of Kosovo there's no such thing as a Kosovar we're Albanians we tried to peacefully bring attention to our condition there because what happened was when Milosevic came in he fired all the Albanians from their jobs we We literally had to create parallel institutions. They're treated as second-class citizens, and then you had a mass exodus, people leaving because of the brutality. They had checkpoints everywhere.

You were under occupation the entire time, just overnight. So they tried doing protests and strikes and all this shit. None of it worked. They beat the fuck out of us. It looks very similar to the civil rights movement here in america water cannons fucking beating us killing us throwing us in fucking jail once you went to jail you were arrested you know all right real fast just before we get all the way deep into this because i like that we're finally here like going through exactly what happened in 1999 specifically but you just went through milosevic

and everything right there i think you introduced him a minute or two ago can you explain how first of all he was a serbian but can you explain when he came to power because it was before yugoslavia technically like he started to get his power in the final years of yugoslavia so it was even before like it broke up and then we can get into like how these countries then all started to say well, now we're all independent. There was always a little bit of ethnic tension

between the Albanians and the rest. And again, remember, we're not Slavic. But after Tito died they had a couple more leaders and then basically Milosevic rose to power. And once he rose to power, that was it. He stayed there. And Tito was the leader of all of Yugoslavia until like 1980 or something like that exactly so he passed away and um he treated you know the albanians fairly they had their own autonomy right and like i said

why did they have their own autonomy because he knew that they would be a force that could lead to the disintegration of y Yugoslavia right they're the only community that's not Slavic they're very proud of who they are where they come from and they're known as a warrior people they've never not fought right so where the slavs supposed to be descended from caucuses you know Eastern Europe Russia that area it's the largest right Russia's the largest Slavic speaking country and that's also why Russia and Serbia have such a strong tie Eastern Europe, Russia, that area, it's the largest. Russia is the largest Slavic-speaking country. And that's also why Russia and Serbia have such a strong tie.

Their flags are almost the same. Different colors, it's a different order. So it's like we call them like the children of Russia, basically. Because that's where they, I'm pretty sure if they trace their lineage, that's where they all came from. So it's like any language. Once you learn a slavic language you can learn the other ones very easily yeah how close is like albanian and and those languages nothing like nothing zero wow not even close again it's the only original indo-european language in

existence so like when the serbs and and the albanians were living amongst each other at least to some respect albanians spoke serbian, and some Serbians spoke Albanian. Got it. So they could understand each other. Yeah. And during Yugoslavia, Albanians that lived in Kosovo had to go to the military. They had a mandatory, if I'm not mistaken, two years for every citizen in Yugoslavia. Got it.

Every man that I know of. I don't think women were forced to. So again, we tried civil disobedience anyone that denies This is flat-out line. It's documented very well documented the civil disobedience was led by Dr. Ibrahim Ragova first president of Kosovo who declared independence from Serbia and He used to wear a scarf around his neck and basically the scarf symbolized until we're free He's gonna wear the scarf around his neck basically and what year did he did they declare independence from if i'm not mistaken look it up uh 90 or 91 okay so right after yugoslavia goes so i think the bosnian war

erupted right after that if i'm not mistaken we might have even been the first even though we didn't want war we were the i think we were the first ones if i'm not mistaken otherwise it was like slovenia croatia bosnia but all within a very you know same same amount of time like it wasn't too much longer the rest of them all said you know what if this is how you know you're going to run shit we don't want to be we don't want to be in this union anymore but they didn't immediately try to say we want to become a part of Albania. They said they wanted to be their own thing. First, you know, we just wanted our autonomy restored, right? We're like, this worked up until now. Why are you fucking with this?

And I believe if they would have restored autonomy and left them alone in that aspect, like they were participating in the bigger country, but they had special, you know, they were allowed to govern themselves in a way, right? Like we don't like being told by outsiders what to do because we've been dealing with this shit for 2 000 years and they give people an idea it's like yugoslavia was roughly like 23 24 million people in 91 and kosovo was called like 1.7 1.8 million so when they took away that autonomy you know and then a brutal now you took away our right to self-govern and now you're fucking coming down with a hammer now i traveled many times to kosovo during that time

period and it but i hated going there bro i was a kid being born and raised in america and going back and seeing the conditions my family and my people were living under that regime was horrible so it's like what what i'm saying now and what do you do you know the serbian that lived up in serbia and belgrade you think they really knew what was happening down there that's why like you can't hate them all because they didn't know they didn't know what their government was doing to us they didn't know that they were oppressing us they didn't know that they were firing us from our jobs, beating us, imprisoning us, and treating us like fucking animals. Because if they really saw what was happening, if they had any compassion, if they had a heart, they wouldn't be as mad at us. They would say, fuck. And if they fully understood that we tried,

our first step wasn't to just leave. We tried to give them a chance to allow us to have the rights that we had under Tito. Make the story short. We tried the peaceful route. It didn't work. When you treat people like animals, you put them into poverty. There's only one thing left to do. When you've tried everything else, unfortunately, violence is what breaks out. And is this when, in the 1990s, this is where, like, what later then became the Army of Kosovo, like the KLA formed?

The Kosovo Liberation Army. And that was... It's a bunch of fucking farmers, man. Yeah. Defending their homes. You know, they started retaliating. Here or there, you know, guerrilla warfare. They started retaliating against certain soldiers, right? Like if they saw Serbian police or government, you know, they started, you know, retaliating. Again, this is after many years of trying to peacefully resolve the situation. This is a fact.

Yeah. And then the armed conflict started, and he had set the precedent of Serbs within Kosovo asserting their dominance before Yugoslavia had fallen. But then the part I don't really understand is like let's say he comes into power, whatever it was, 91, 92. Did they then at that point send in occupying serbian soldiers so they were just there throughout the 90s they were everywhere so you know during those time periods when i went to visit kosovo at nine o'clock every albanian had to be home so imagine nine o'clock if you're not home it was curfew serbians were allowed out serbians were allowed out they partied they danced in fucking hotels i used to hear their music all night blasting but if you were in albany you went home by nine o'clock and god forbid those cops got their hand

on you even if you're an american citizen i had cousins that were beaten they didn't give a fuck you had an american passport i remember they slapped on my they threw his fucking passport you're not an america motherfucker right so there was a curfew in the cities they could come into your house whenever you want all the reasons reasons we fought the Revolutionary War in America. Okay? I was at my family's houses in the villages. They would just storm into our fucking house. And what village was your family from?

It's a small village called Dubrava. Got it. They fucking came in the middle of the night, woke us all up, terrified the shit out of us. Right? Searching the house for guns. There was no fucking guns. They're looking all over the house. You don't know. was bro it was horrible man so as an american if you are looking to search

the web privately and not have all these websites track you when you leave check out my friends over at privado vpn privado is the vpn company that gives you full privacy while not losing you any speed. And you can use it on up to 10 different devices at the same time. I use it on two. That's all I need. But if I had 10, I could use it on 10. We love that. So if you use the link in my description, you will see my landing page with Privato. You go there and you'll see a plan for $4.99 a month. That is the plan I use. It's a terrific product. know you're gonna love it so check it out and i understand what happened for example in civil rights right how many african-americans went through that right so i understand what it feels like to be fucking hated because i've been

there i was hated i was treated like a fucking piece of shit i was scared to fucking see a cop right when we're you know the opposite for me in America is when I see a police officer, I was like, okay, cool. You know, they got my back if I'm in trouble. There, I'm like trying to avoid the police by any means necessary. I'm fucking terrified of them. They're going to fucking kill me, beat me,

fucking throw me in jail. And the police was hand in hand with the Serbian military. Yeah, they were basically military police. Yeah. Okay, they had armored personnel carries. They were very militarized. So I get the grievances on that aspect as African Americans of what they had to go through with the police here back then in the 50s and the 40s and the 20s. I fucking feel for them, bro.

Trust me when I tell you because that's what the fuck they were dealing with. You got pulled over by a cop. You don't know if they're going to fucking blow your brains out and just say oh he was acting up and no one was gonna do to them and that's exactly what went on in this country i can't believe they had a curfew for all you guys but if we stay where the pain is where the anger is you see i've always tried to approach this from a spiritual perspective i truly believe that we all came from a creator. That this creator made us different colors and races and ethnicities speaking different languages to see how fucking stupid we're going to be. Like, am I going to let that be the reason why I hate you?

Right. When really we're brothers and sisters. Now we know from a DNA perspective that all human beings had one common ancestor. This is now a fact. So you can rule out Adam and Eve all you want, but you can't rule it out completely. science says we all came from one common ancestor so as a human as a part of the human family right for me to have that type of hatred towards another human being means that there's something spiritually devoid of me there's something sick something wrong with me now people can be conditioned and hatred is taught i agree they can also be untaught and if someone doesn't unteach you you can unteach yourself so getting back to that story when i met that that that

that serbian kid as much as i wanted to hate him and as much as i wanted to like ignore and you know once we had that conversation and there was an understanding i didn't hate him anymore and i realized i couldn't put every serbian into one box the same way we can't put 1.8 billion Muslims one out of five people is a fucking is Muslim we're gonna fucking they're all terrorists now right

if they were all terrorists we'd have some serious fucking problems right now I'd say so the amount of stupidity and that's when I first noticed propaganda in our country was after 9-11 oh yeah seeing them quoting

quoting verses of the quran completely out of context and kill the infidels and first of all the quran doesn't refer to christians and jews as infidels but meanwhile the media makes you believe that muslims believe that christians are infidels no they're not infidels and the quranic understanding was the pagan Arabs at the time of the Prophet Muhammad. I didn't even know that. Peace be upon him. So, when you'd watch Fox News, they made it sound like the agenda of the Quran was to kill Christians, and that's the complete opposite. Actually, the Quran is quoted as stating, speak softly to Christians for they are the closest to you in faith

they didn't say that on fox news no they never well why would they ever show anything and this is when i really started noticing like wait fuck there's propaganda i'm like this is something i expected from a regime right where i would watch them talk bad about my entire people and put us in a box you know like on the-92 Serbian news during the war. And I'm like, fuck, we have propaganda here. Shit in America, which I never thought because I was, like I said, brought up to believe we're fucking amazing. We're the heroes.

Our president's the good guy. And then you start realizing that this is all Hollywood, man. This is not the case. There is propaganda. there are agendas there's people who pay for certain agendas to be pushed whether it's family-wise spiritually racially there's people behind the scenes dumping millions and millions of dollars to push certain messages and agendas in our country and 9 11 was-11 was a big eye-opener for me when I saw how we were systematically

putting 1.8 billion people into a box. I think that 9-11 is very much, because we're over 20 years out, we're at a point where America is pre and and post i mean that's really look you can point to the civil war you can point to world war ii you can point to vietnam you can point to different things in our history and say that for sure i'm not discounting that but the categorical generational shift that occurred in how we communicate with one another that happened at the combination of an event like 9-11 and the mass media communication innovation that was

burgeoning right then that then fully burgeoned i don't know if that's a word but fully came to be over the next say like decade or so that all put together was a giant no pun intended nuclear bomb and it was something that you know when you talk to different people be it younger people who grew up with technology in their hand all the way up to older people who had to get used to it as it came along it has completely we have completely changed the way we approach information because there is so much of it around us that we can decide what information we want to listen to and what we don't and we also don't have a very good understanding of what's real and what's not so like you know to be honest when you say like oh

it's a giant propaganda campaign you kind of have to lean towards assuming it is on everything so that you're operating from a place of well let me be skeptical on what i hear and see if i can get enough information that can hopefully put a full story together i wish more people would do it that way i what i don't want is i think the danger becomes you don't believe a single thing that's ever said that's not what you want but that's what you're saying something explodes we know it exploded. The question is why. And that's where you need to be a detective. After 9-11 happened, you had fucking poor Sikhs who are not even Muslim. That's how ignorant people were, fucking killing them because they were in a turban.

And for me, it's like, are you that much of a fucking asshole? Are you that fucking stupid that you don't realize that most people are in this country because they did not agree with the way of life of where they came from they didn't agree with the politicians that were in power so that even if we were hit by iran for example that doesn't mean an iranian american like i never understood that look at world war ii with the japanese right now we have russia ukraine right my friend owns a russian samovar my cousin's family owns a russian tea room they my cousin's family owns a russian tea room they're not even russian and traditionally albanians and russians don't get along okay

because of their alliance to serbia militarily a russian doesn't own the russian tea room no but that's the whole point but people are like bad like not going there you know because they think now let's fucking crucify anything that's Russian. Just because someone's a Russian-American doesn't mean they agree with what's going on over there right now. Of course not. Okay. Including if they're Russian-Russian over there. That's what I'm saying. You had plenty of them that came forward and protested, right?

Yeah. So, again, putting everyone in a box. This is what I mean by putting everybody in a box, especially another American. They're in America because they did not want to live where they come from they can go back there's nothing stopping them some of them can't because of political reasons they get killed but the majority of people left where they came from because they didn't like what that country stood for that's why they're in america now right not their people the system yeah whatever the system

yeah no one's against the russian culture it's their maybe political move right now right and again i don't think we know everything about that either and i don't want to get into it but i really don't think we know the whole story there's a lot there's a lot of bullshit going on over there let's go let's get one thing straight situations are very very complex no one ever knows the full story there's all kinds of things to it they're gonna pump their propaganda to their people they're gonna pump it to us and a lot of things can be true at the same time and and there can be a very dark and nasty gray area right where you know both have a little bit of a reason to so yeah and and people can look at it and i think

with everyone i talk to regardless of their takes or whatever on the matter it's like but let me ask you there's certain things if canada wanted to put weapons pointed towards us on the canadian border do you think we'd allow them no so to me and some of these things are pretty simple you know did we allow cuba to have missiles we almost went to nuclear war because of that and that's 90 miles off our coast no i i think a key difference though is that with with russia putin's always wanted this he's also taken these actions in the past i mean what he did in 2014 was gross and so the precedents were already all there and look when we look at it what we can

all agree is that whenever you see civilians dying anywhere regardless of what the situation it's awful it's awful so like i tell people i'm like all these things can be true at the same time you cannot know the full story and and not be you might not be being told some very pertinent things that but i think there's a difference like i don't you know and again i'm not sitting here being pro-russian because again my people traditionally have never been right right but to sit here and say that he's only taught like targeting he's not targeting like in my opinion like willfully targeting civilians are there collateral damage are there like innocent ukrainians being blown up absolutely do i think that they're systematically fucking trying to

wipe wipe out the civilian population no this is this do i think that they're systematically fucking trying to wipe wipe out the civilian population no this is this is there's a difference between they're not ethnic cleansing ukraine yeah and actually that's the proper word i'm glad you brought this where when serbia went into certain areas during the war i mean it's clear-cut you know they were literally you're okay you're basi and get the fuck out of here you're albanian they we had two million people pushed out now you have 2 million refugees in Ukraine, but it's not because Russia wants to wipe out Ukrainians from Ukraine. Obviously, they want to take control,

but I don't think the objective is because of ethnicity. There is a huge difference. Maybe it's because of resources, strategic military stuff and all that, but I don't think that's their predominant reason. There is a huge difference. this does have to be said all death is bad we can agree on that so i don't want to be misheard but there is a difference between missiles hitting places in the middle of what at least one country is trying to deem as war zone which could be completely incorrect in this case i think it is for the russians but there's a difference between that and going into a village of a people

of a certain ethnicity, lining them up against the wall, men, women, and children and shooting them in the face. That is, these are two different things. One is ugliness of war, where war crimes are probably being committed and innocent people are dying. Another is where war crimes are the worst types of personal ethnic war crimes are happening. And I think that distinction is something that people are forgetting a little bit right now. Not that you should in any way condone what's going on in Ukraine, but... Absolutely not. There's some bad shit out there that's happening.

What's going on there is absolutely horrible. And, you know, living through a war myself and, you know, not knowing where my family is and, you know, scared that you're going to get a phone call that you find out someone died. And then actually that happens, right? So my heart goes out to anyone that's affected by that conflict. You know, especially Ukrainians where you don't know where your family is and just watching your beautiful city being blown the fuck up, it's just fucking crazy. So I don't justify war at all. And when I look back, even at the Kosovo war, it's just like, who really won?

Serbia didn't win. We, in some ways, yes, we're living a little bit better. Much better, actually. What am I talking about? You know, there's no more military fucking checkpoints and all that other shit. But, you know, what did we gain? We both kept our countries behind. We kept our people behind.

We kept our nations behind. You know, Kosovo and Serbia and Albania, these are some of the poorest countries in the world. Well, what's Albania, just on them real fast, what's their political situation now? So they're ruled by a socialist, heavily backed by George Soros. They even named fucking schools after him in Albania. So yeah, socialist, I guess liberal socialist, if that makes any sense it kind of doesn't but that is what they but that's literally themselves yeah that's i mean well the prime minister they're you know artists and all this other shit they've you know i don't know but there's not a lot of progress

in such a small country that's so beautiful it could be easily i think brought up to speed with the right people doing the right things and i think we we witnessed there we're finally witnessing here in america which is when you see corruption right in front of your fucking face and it's undeniable like why does it take 20 years to fix a road in manhattan right or highway it's because all their buddies are the ones doing the construction jobs and the envelopes are being like why does it take 20 years to fix a road in Manhattan, right? Or a highway. It's because all their buddies are the ones doing the construction jobs and the envelopes are being kicked back. So they leave the job open because they're both making money. Right.

And they're not doing what's best. It's like where the fuck does all the money from the tolls and the bridges go? You're paying all this money, yet the lights have been off on the George Washington Bridge. Half the lights have been off since before the pandemic started. Where the fuck's all the money so when we have entrusted these people to do what's best for our nation we've left like on the back burner like oh they're going to take care of it all they did was run it into the ground and do what's best for them and now we're sitting here we're seeing

the rotting stench of corruption and its final phases like if we don't change course we will not be here i promise you this country will not be here if something drastic is not done when you smell that stench and you can see it the rotting carcass of corruption it is only a matter of time before a nation perishes either we change course, or we are the next Venezuela. I think a difference that should be pointed out is that you're dealing with very, and this can be worse, by the way, this could break the wrong way, but you are dealing with not only as we highlighted an ethnically different type of country where we have everything here but you're also dealing with a significantly larger country you know these countries that i don't remember venezuela's population offhand but it's not that many you look at like albania it's got three four or five

million people in it you look at kosovo it's got roughly two million people in it you look at even serbia it's i think it's like seven or eight or something like that. So these are all smaller places that are also ethnically very, very unitary, if that makes sense, right? Like they're fine, we'll come back. Or the last day of the Ottoman, we're going to be fine, it's no problem, we're the Ottomans. I think you're right about that. I think that psychological of like, no, we'll just get through it can be problematic. So I think there needs to be a balance and I try to strike that here. How are you going to get through when you don't make nothing in this fucking country anymore? There's nothing in this room right here, right now, that's not made outside. We were a fucking superpower 50, 60 years ago.

We sent our soldiers to fight in Vietnam and North Korea, and then we opened the back door to a fucking communist superpower. We made them a fucking superpower. How the fuck does that make sense? How can you look a Vietnam veteran in the face and say, thank you for your service, sir? Meanwhile, you open up the door. We don't make nothing, my friend.

If they turn off the bomb, what are we going to do do we don't have the infrastructure anymore my friend we are weaker than we've ever been in my opinion yeah the vietnam vietnam veterans i got a special place for them because they didn't they didn't ask for that and you look at you i understood what they fought against you look at the cultural impacts to say nothing of what you're pointing out right now the economic impacts of taking actions like that how do you allow slave labor into the to the fucking bill clinton opened the door i loved him my country he's a fucking superhero right but when i did a little homework i'm like i can't as an american forget as an albanian as an american what he did to our country is horrible how so as an albanian i love him thank you oh to our country is horrible. How so? As an Albanian, I love him.

Thank you. Oh, to this country. As an American, you allowed China into the World Trade Organization. You allowed slave labor to come into the world labor market. How the fuck was the American worker going to compete? Then you wonder why you have ghettos in Detroit and all over the country. Because all the industry went overseas, everyone became poor. poor that impact you want to talk about fucking racism that's fucking racism when you took away all the blue collar jobs factories closed lower and middle

class got destroyed devastated everything went overseas we can't lift people out of poverty like we used to and that affects the hood more than anywhere. And so on and so forth. I can go on and on and on. And it wasn't just him. It was all of them. From Nixon on. How the fuck did you open up that door?

Go ahead. What in this room is made here? It's easy to see. Here's the thing. It's very easy to see after the fact where things were always going to go. When they're happening though, and I believe this. When you look at Nixon, when you look at Reagan, when you look at Clinton, I mean I'd probably stop before 9-11, right? So you look at those presidents and Bush 1, I guess, who was in there.

I'm not saying that they shouldn't have seen some clear signs just strictly based on demographics let's be honest here numbers and things like that but i could see that there was a hope in them perhaps totally misguided that if you brought china what was what was nixon's policy was like the – not de-escalation, but like the cooling off, whatever it was. If you brought them into the system, it was the first time that American leaders were trying to say, you know, maybe we can change communism from by leading by example and teamwork rather than by trying to destroy it. And frankly, that has not worked. Let's call it what it is. And so you brought – as you said, you bring in the introduction of slave labor. The one thing about communism that I think a lot of people forget is that communism is communism for everyone except the leaders and the people who are in with them so if

you don't think that like the leaders of china are going to do things to economically advantage them at the expense of their own people you're mistaken so they get to operate off of not just from their country by the way from other places you know the the fruits of slave labor they don't give a fuck about those people so they'll just guess what economically viable. Oh, we're paying no dollars where we'd be paying 750 or something like that. We win. And people ignore that. And I would, if I could give some criticism of those presidents prior to that, they were far too optimistic about corrupt leadership ignoring bottom line numbers like that. People want to talk about being woke and caring about the world. If you're rocking a pair of Nikes right now, shut the fuck up.

Seriously, just shut the fuck up. Because those Nikes were sewn. And I'm not saying the ones right now because supposedly they pulled their shit back. But you know what my point is. if you have a phone in your hand if you have anything that was made over there until you learn how to like really assess the whole situation you have the right to talk well that's the thing we we are as humans we are what we can see and what we can feel and it's it's a it's a strength but it's a huge flaw because what just like i told you that this was this was a war i was never even taught about this whole thing you know

so i never felt anything for it because i didn't even know it existed right even if i had if i didn't take the time to study it i kind of be like oh that sounds awful and i go about my day you know so like when we're holding the phone in our hands i'll admit it like when i hold the iphone i'm not thinking about the slave labor that went into that but if it were think of it this way if that factory were right here across the street would i feel the same way probably not because guess what my family would probably be in there i'd probably be in there i'd feel a lot differently you know it's you know nothing's black or white nothing is as simple as that and really the way things are going the way things are being shut down and and you're not allowed

to talk you know these are the warning signs and these are the dangers and if people don't understand that i mean i don't know what to tell you because if you don't even if you don't like what someone's saying if you don't protect their right to say it even if you hate that side you fucking hate them i'm sure which they clearly do the left and right fucking hate each other like crazy if you don't protect that side i promise you the one truth of history is that it'll only be a matter of time before your side can't talk either. That's a fucking fact. Yes.

That is a fact. They'll use you to shut the other side up and then they'll shut you the fuck up. And if you don't shut the fuck up, they'll put a bullet right in the back of your fucking head. Guaranteed. Only a matter of time. So to see these things happening in this country, how does shutting people up up and i'm not using the c word because i don't want you to be seat you know rhymes with mentor mentorship right so when we have to think about that and we have to

you know it if you're not concerned about that it's going to affect everyone regardless of race creed religion sexual orientation if you do not stand up for the people that you can't even stand that's the irony of it you literally have a duty to protect your own freedom because that's how it works you have an obligation to stand up for even the people you can't stand yes and i i try to draw this distinction for people i've said this on the show before i've had guests in here who do a great job laying it out but like there's a difference between criminal words and free speech and unfortunately sometimes a lot of times there's free speech that is absolutely not criminal that you wish was, but it's not.

Like if someone comes up and calls for the murder of another person or something like that, well, now that's not free speech. That's actively calling for violence on somebody. But if someone comes up and says like, oh, I don't like someone of this race because they suck and fuck them, that's a very ugly thing to say. I want nothing to do with that person unfortunately the the penalty of telling them that they can't do that is this slippery slope thing that happens where suddenly someone says something perfectly reasonable that has nothing to do with that right the totally different subject matter and it'll get to a point where the people who who choose to be able to say what goes and what doesn't says you know we don't like that we're gonna pull that. We're going to pull that.

And we kind of brought this up like a half hour ago or something like that. But this is full circle of where it is. And it's like if you're not paying attention to that now, I mean, that's a problem at this point. I think it concerns me or concerned me for a while that the free speech movement became like this right-wing thing. What I have seen over the past two years is that now it's this – there are a lot of people who recognize this, people on the left wing and obviously people on the right. It is a select group of the loudest people who don't want it, who by the way exist from both ends. I see it all the time because I see comment sections on different videos videos i have people from both ends of the spectrum depending on the video come in and attack it and what what i will always come back to is that the world is is a reactive

place for every action there's an equal but opposite reaction and you are now seeing to where you know whoever comes into power they're gonna want to stop what the other side and that's why – and this has been talked about a bunch on here. You look at communism. You look at fascism. They're the same solutions with just a little bit of a different language around how they do it. extremes can win and that starts with where extremes can convince us that speech is not something that is a god-given right you know we're going to have some huge problems it's a very volatile time it just really is a very volatile time and everyone is starting to become tribal very much the boxes yes i talked about so where we go from here, I don't know. Is there a lot of volatility? Are we sitting on maybe the biggest powder keg in the history of the world?

I think so. I hope not. I think we're seeing a lot of rage in the youth. I think we're seeing what I call the generation of bastards. Generation of bastards. We are seeing the impact of a high divorce rate first time we've never had divorce rates like this throughout history ever you're approaching almost what 50 60 percent divorced at least once right or 40 it's very high i don't know what it

is but you can maybe flash it up on the thing but you know so you're seeing the aftermath 20 years later of all these children born out of wedlock outside the traditional family unit and i think it's where a lot of the rage comes from a lot of the suicide a lot of the depression um the family unit this is broken down what it's been over the last 2 000 years 5 000 years 10 000 years and there's something to be said for that there there is something to be said for cohesion and like one thing you see in cultures where even like negativity can happen where peoples are fighting among each other they do at least come from places where they form such that passion and that pride and in some cases like that nationalism because they are a cohesive unit they

have the cohesive families who come from the same lineage as far as like where ethnicities come from and things like that and so even though it can go on towards negative things the the idea of of cultural unity does come through a stronger overall household it's not to say that like people shouldn't be able to get divorced i i think it's a very very important thing that we have that because certain things change and compatibility changes but when it becomes so rampant and you don't look at you don't look at any traditional structures is like who it's more like who the fuck cares yeah you can run into problems i could see that yeah and i agree i agree with that we're living in a in a crazy time and i guess we're gonna, and I guess we have some of the greatest seats in history right now.

We're at a very critical point, notosedly global warming, which I do believe. I do believe there's something wrong with the environment. I think we excessively waste. Right. For sure. I don't know if I believe their narrative 100 percent, but look, I don't think Manhattan is going to be underwater tomorrow, but I, yeah, I think we have some problems. I mean, we're definitely not managing resources the right way. No. I can agree with that. So there's definitely some truth to that. I think anyone that denies that's a fucking asshole, really. Yeah. Is there plastic in the ocean?

There's islands. A fuck ton. Yeah. Yeah. There's a fuck ton. You can see it everywhere you go. So, I mean, that part's common sense, right? Absolutely. there's a you can see it everywhere you go so i mean that part's common sense right absolutely and and that's the thing like some things that should be just total like

common sense issues like easy okay everyone can get behind this we find a way to have subsets of people who don't get behind it and it exists on every spectrum but i digress i i did want to talk about though because like we've come back and forth from it and and laid out some of the ground work but the whole kosovo war and all that i think at the very beginning when we were first sitting down i might have mentioned your whole thing like your father was from kosovo your mother was from albania but when they came here before you were born so like what years are we talking? They left those places. So my grandfather and his father fought against the communists as they were taking control of Albania. Okay.

My grandfather escaped. He was told by his father to leave. The rest of his family got trapped inside, thrown into gulags, internment camps. A lot of my cousins grew up in like, you know, anyone that had family that was a resistance, right? They were kept in a certain area for a while. So my mom's father got over the mountains into Kosovo and then from there made it to Italy and then from Italy to the Bronx.

Your mom's father did that? Yeah yeah so they came in like the 60s got it so they were here a little bit yeah and my pops came in the late 70s um and at that time you know it wasn't horrible in kosovo it was still pretty decent what made him want to come but it quickly i guess just more more opportunity man he my dad grew up in a very poor village. He had no father, 10 siblings. He would have been the fucking shepherd, basically. He would have been a goat herder from Albania, like Arnold Schwarzenegger in the movie Twins.

Danny DeVito looks at, if you've ever seen that movie, he's like, you look like a goat herder from Albania. It's a very famous line that the Albanians love. So, you know, leaving both came for a better opportunity, a better life. Both came legally,

right? Both applied for one applied for asylum. One just applied. I don't know how my dad got his papers, but he came, I actually think his brother did the visa for him. So, you know, came legally, right? And I know those people that just had no choice, right? So I'm not like a hundred percent of all the people that jumped the border, but there's got to be some

Screening man You're too exposed there to just you gotta remember There's some people that they just have to fucking escape right like they're gonna kill They just jump over the fuck and that's like to deny that right to someone else is like to deny your own ancestors motherfucker yeah let's be real we all didn't just come here because we filled out a visa application on boats and fucking right so it's hypocritical to not understand the plight of those people and to say fuck we should let in. But there needs to be a screening. Yeah.

There needs to be like, are you a murderer? Are you a rapist? Like, why the fuck are you here? Yes. Like, we need to, like, you know, we shouldn't just, like, take you from the border and fly you all over the country like the current administration is doing and just say, here, go ahead.

Here's some gas money on the debit card. There's a lot of things we haven't seen, too. The administrations say they do one thing and do another. And it's sad. I agree with you. I think it's just such a broken system but we deny our history as a country if we if we deny the ability for people to be a process and let's be real like this country runs on immigrants yes I hate to say like they're like the fuel source like not hate to say it like most

of you listening to me right now like you don't want to make McDonald's motherfucker let's be real like you as much as you want to me right now, you don't want to make McDonald's, motherfucker. Let's be real. As much as you want to deny them their rights, you fucking live off them. Right. These are the people that are doing small businesses, working for people at affordable rates, in some ways even being taken advantage of. Let's just call it what it is. They're being paid off the books. Yes. They're taking less because they have no other options.

So many of you have benefited from these people crossing that border and continue to every single day of your life so but at the same time that hurts right people all it hurts the American well no Americans working those jobs like they don't want to write it's these people these poor people that are coming from like Salvador and I'll be like all over right that are waiting your tables washing your fucking dishes. It's like, take a step back and be a human man. Just feel for everyone.

If we have compassion, we're lacking compassion. Understanding why people come and where they've been and what they've been through. It's when we lose compassion that we're heading towards what we're heading towards. We don't want to listen to each other. We don't want to hear it. I don't care. Fuck you.

Fuck you. You guys are all wrong. No one is all wrong and no one is all right and that's the problem very much agree that's the biggest one and both sides think that they're 100 right and that's where conflict comes from yeah so your parents your parents both come here they have you but you were as you have mentioned you were visiting there a lot. You were going back. Were you going over to both Albania and Kosovo? No, Albania, first time I went was probably 95, 96.

And remember, this is a country that was still the poorest in Europe and under a dictator. And it was just, I couldn't wait to get the fuck out of there. When I first went, the food was horrible back then. The roads were extremely dangerous. Like, one wrong move off the side of a fucking mountain. You've probably seen videos like that on YouTube of, like, other countries. Scary shit, though. But now it's fucking great.

Really? I mean, it's such a beautiful place, man. There's such a diverse landscape there. What changed? Well, they built some infrastructure. the food got a lot better a lot of the albanians outside went back and invested and made nice foods and brought back their traits and their skills and it's chill i mean even under a dictatorship though no it's not under a dictatorship well democratically elected okay so it's better than it was. But, yeah, there's no, you know, it's not like under that.

Right. Under that, no one was allowed in, no one was allowed out. You know, one of my cousins had found a Coca-Cola bottle during communism. If they would have found one without, they would have shot him in the back of his fucking head. You know? An empty Coke bottle. Yeah.

He washed up on the beach, he found it. My uncle was like, where the fuck did you get this? If they find this we're dead and imagine an empty coke bottle could get you murked killed so it's such a beautiful place very pro-american very pro-west they named their their statues their highways after american presidents bush has a statue. Clinton has a statue. Hillary Clinton has a statue. Fucking Joe Biden's son has a highway named after him.

So these people don't understand the American politics. They don't understand even what a Republican or Democrat really is. They don't understand what liberal and conservative is. Why is Albania? I would understand Kosovo because the U.S. was one of the first to recognize them. Because Woodrow Wilson saved Albania from extermination. Yes, that's right. Because if Woodrow Wilson didn't go to the League of Nations, Albania would have never been recognized as a sovereign nation. And we would have been like the Kurds.

We would have been a people with no homeland. Where are the Kurds these days? They're like Iraq and Iran and fucking turkey like i feel bad for those people like there's like 40 or 50 million of them if i'm not mistaken they have no homeland damn so you guys still have that because everyone treats them like so we got kosovo back after the kosovo war so we've gotten back about but you were going back throughout you said albania was only 95. you were going back to kosovo a bunch in the 90s. I went back every year before the war.

Now, how long would you go for? The whole fucking summer, and I hated it. Really? I loved seeing my family, but I hate seeing the conditions they were living in. Scared of police, soldiers, fucking the food sucked. There was no power most of the day. No running water most of the day. So, you know, to come as an American, and at that time, we weren't even middle class. We were like lower

middle class. I felt so rich. I felt so blessed to have this opportunity. I sat there and I'm like, my God, if you don't take advantage of this, you're a fucking piece of shit. Meaning you, as someone that has the privilege to live in America, when your family is living in this shithole, under this type of occupation, where they have no future, they can't even go to work, and they live in poverty. Because in the 90s, they took away, didn't the Serbs come in and say, no Albanians can be in charge of any public? It was dismissed from the factories, everything else. Wow.

So what did they do? They survived off people like us. Everyone had family outside. And everyone sent money back home. Yes, sent money back home. And even to this day, that hasn't changed much. They can't survive without us so coming back every summer i would just be so happy man to like get back i mean i loved my family and and i'm blessed that

i got to know them before they died right before they were killed but i remember when I'd land at JFK and the customs agents would be like, welcome home. And I'd be so fucking happy, man, to be back in America. I'd have this big fucking smile on my face. Like I'm going to fucking pound a cheeseburger. Fucking Big Mac. Just happy, man. Just to see that.

You got to understand understand this is what people understand like you know you from your place of place of privilege because there are people that are privileged you're privileged if you got to see the world you're privileged if you got to finish school you're privileged if you don't have to worry about where your next meal is coming from it doesn't matter about your race there's there's such a thing as being privileged right your environment spoon in your mouth as they say right so for me to see that type of poverty and to have family living in that type of situation and then to come back to america and say okay this place is not that up compared to what i just saw right but that doesn't mean I understood how

someone in Flint Michigan felt or in the ghettos of Newark or you know wherever they are in this country down south and impoverished part of the country you know they see America very different right so a lot of times we become prisoners in our minds and we can't see past the bars right so you know when we grew up we were poor my house the son of two immigrants we slept in a one-bedroom five people my brother's feet were in my fucking face and my dad made it man and he had no else to make it you know he made it what did he do he opened the bar first he opened a pizzeria didn't work then he made it into a bar in new

york in jersey and then he bought a lot of built properties and that was it but he worked like an animal he worked all day and all night because that's what it takes my mom worked too so what i'm saying is they would have not really had that chance anywhere else and as bad as some people have it here they need to understand based on what i've seen out there there is nowhere else you got a shot here as horrible as where you live might be in the circumstances you grew up in, you can get out. The odds are against you, yes. To say that they're not, you'd be lying. But you have a shot.

You really do if you somehow find the energy and focus and get yourself out of the environment that you're in. It's not easy. But it can be done. It just depends what you want to do with your life i do believe we are a product of our environment and violence begets violence and when you grow up with that there's people that live in this country that all they've known is war why do they call it chiraq right chicago parts of chicago to them they're living in war right right they're seeing violence every. Someone's dying that they know.

Someone's being killed. They've seen people get shot. They've been shot. This is fucking trauma that occurs on a daily basis here within the walls of this country. So I would have to say that to some of us that we don't understand, well, why do they hate it so much? Well, you haven't walked in their shoes. You haven't experienced police brutality i'm pretty sure the police in that area are traumatized also i have friends that have been on my show that

are police officers who worked in very violent areas and they said man we all had ptsd right so just like a war zone you're gonna tell me that these police are not affected where they just say fuck it anyone that's from this area acts like this i'm just gonna beat him with my club fucking shoot and ask questions i'm pretty sure a lot of that happened so there's a lot of trauma that occurs that affects everybody in different ways and someone that's been through violence you know it's like having your heart ripped out of your chest you feel nothing no more you become cold They got no problem pulling the trigger on you, robbing you. But this has to be compassion in a very weird way. People say, well, how?

You got to go back to where that kid started because he wasn't born like that. She wasn't born like that. She was placed into wherever she was placed in or he was placed into. They saw what they saw maybe they were abused you know one thing leads to another you can't just you can't just write everyone off and that's what so many of us do it's powerful stuff man and it's you made a few points in there the the environment thing we've talked about. But I would not trade for the world my own not having to experience war-torn countries that are literally my own people, my own family, things like that. Like I'm very, I don't want to use the word envious, but we should really appreciate the fact that someone like you understands what that looks like and has seen it and knows the difference between what is good and what is a sick reality.

And so you talk about like when you come back and fly into jfk and you're like i'm so fucking happy i'm back here i'm so grateful to live here and everything sometimes i feel like a lot of us maybe certainly myself included can completely take that for granted and the things that we've been afforded that even a lot of people among us who come from immigrant backgrounds from places that had bad totalitarian rule or whatever it was they they have that understanding of that that we don't and and to me there needs to be more ability for people to be forced to hear that you know hear you on a podcast listen to what you say about that and like you know you're going over there throughout the 90s during like your formative years.

And by the way, who was, as far as your family is concerned, like was it your dad's brothers or what was, what kind of family? It was my aunt. You know, she survived, but her family pretty much got wiped out. Jesus Christ. In a village called Her Rich. And most of those guys were a little bit older than me and they treated me like a little brother man so like every summer i couldn't wait to go hang out with them they were the only fun that i had yeah when i was there because i would walk from my dad's village

to where my aunt was married to and i would you know it was like a one and a half mile walk dirt road and i'd get there and then it was all these young guys, and we'd hang out and joke and play chess and hide-and-go-seek. It was a great time. I always stayed there. And then the war started, and that village was very hard hit early on. They were wiped out. My aunt's husband, I was very close to him.

He also died in the war so how many people from your family about 28 jesus christ so these are all like obviously cousins second cousins they're cousins but very very close now the war breaking out it was burgeoning it was building up throughout the 90s. You had the KLA form as like a literal defense against the Serbs, but then Milosevic, who's now in charge of Serbia, very wild totalitarian nationalistic Serbian communist dictator. He's, as you said, had soldiers stationed in there throughout the 90s. What precipitated the 1999 happening was that the ethnic cleansing that the serbians just decided to start or was there also like some battles that were going on so the thing i think erupted in the one flash point is when the yashari family was massacred. That's really what most historians consider the flashpoint that led to the armed conflict.

And who was he again? He's basically the national hero of Kosovo. The airport's named after him. He was considered the founder of the KLA and guerrilla commander. He was just a family man, really. And he decided he was surrounded by serbian forces decided not to surrender basically the alamo men women and children they fought to the end i think they lasted a couple of days and then they they wiped them all out men women and children but they

once people saw them that like his village no his entire family oh you're just talking his family in his village which basically was his family right so they were willing to die then they kind of like gave courage to everyone else like fuck it he gave everything there's no way out of this fucking we tried peacefully that didn't work he just gave everything he has fuck it right so that's kind of what sparked the resistance and then you had people from all over the you know world sending back weapons and money but again we were really no match for serbia militarily um you didn't see america giving to us like they gave to ukraine i find it funny they weren't flying

our flags even though america was stepping in to help us i find it really funny the correlations between this and what's going on in Ukraine. You know, we're some of the most pro-American people on the face of the planet, if not the most pro-American, period. Yet to this day, we still haven't been armed. We're, you know, Albania's in NATO, but Kosovo's not. And really, we haven't been given that much militarily, even though we're willing to fight and die for america literally we are willing to fight and die for this country period because we know if america goes down we're finished so we can't have america go down but the fact that this administration could leave behind all that weaponry it's a terrorist basically at least that's what they want us to believe in afghanistan oh right if they would have gave to us what they gave to the taliban we'd be a lot more secure as a people

today america would have another strong ally in the balkans but that's how you balance power like like we don't want to really do that at all though listen we don't have it to invade serbia we don't want to invade them they still want to fucking come back a lot of them i don't want to invade them. They still want to fucking come back, a lot of them. I don't know why. You know, they got, they claimed some historical sites. Nobody's stopping them from going there. Like, I think if we just could put this fucking thing behind us and focus on business and work and life, we'd all be doing a lot better. You know what I mean?

Well, they also have no, I mean, it's this unspoken, like like oh shit that would that was a bad part of our history and so you know people leave that behind because they did i mean in 1999 there were multiple cities i know listen their their claims you know are historical ones that you know it's led to the birth of their nation and all this other stuff. Well, not Kosovo. Yeah, but okay, so 1389, that's your starting point. We've been there since before Christ. And they try to argue that. They try to use the demographics argument. The other thing here, though, that's very interesting is that when— The demographics is why was it only not even 10%.

They say 10%. Even by their own census. No, I'm talking about way back then. Yeah, but even by their own census. Under Yug about way back then yeah even by their own census under yugoslavia when they had no beef there was no problem all these ethnicities got along for the most part why was their population less than 10 percent that what their claim is that back pre-1389 it was way higher which there's no way number one so basically with that argument texas shouldn't exist it should be back to mexico exactly exact prime point right there which is why i didn't get

this but the the other weird part about this whole thing is that when you see different land grabs over time and disagreements between people it comes back to the same inherent let's say disagreement in culture but the the odd thing about this one is that the serbians and you could say like if you want to bring the croats in over time and stuff like that the croatians they had clear religions right you had the serbians i believe were like orthodox christian and then the Croatians were Catholic. And we're all of them. Right. You guys are all of them.

All of the above. But in particularly, let's say that like the majority of the Albanian population descends from a Muslim population of Albanians, which it does. Most Albanians were Christian. During the Ottoman Empire, they became Muslim. Right. But they're secular. Yes. That's what I mean the vast majority don't practice they drink they gamble like gangsters it's like very it's it's it's an

odd culture in that way because well that's what communism and socialism did right they didn't allow too much theology so you have two other people right the serbians and the croatians in this case who any disagreements they've had to fight for land they have so much more in common man like they speak basically the same language the only real real true true difference right at least today currently right is religion yeah other than that so to see them wipe each other out like that was insane but they're fighting over you see what i'm saying here they're we're we we are ethnically different right we had nothing in common with any of them so with us okay it made sense but for me i couldn't believe how much they they fucking

killed each other so they they were close over religion and we can argue that but exactly they were fighting over religion but with you guys that's it's like they were fighting on the wrong field it's like you guys were trying to play basketball, and they're standing on a football field. They're trying to fight over, well, Orthodox, Christian Serbia in this case, and that's what we're bringing to you. When you guys are like, we're not even worried about religion. All they had to do is give Kosovo its autonomy at that time, and they would have never lost Kosovo. It's literally that simple. They would have made it a republic within serbia that had autonomy yeah just had special rights that govern themselves

but that's not in their nature a guy like melissa and not treat them and not treat them like animals and they wouldn't have lost it it's literally that simple so how can you i just to me it's like what argument are you standing on you already did this shit to the bosnians right all out fucking massacre pure ethnic cleansing there's no doubt there's no denying it so it's like what we're gonna wait and see what you do there and i think you know they could have gone a lot harder in kosovo like i don't think they killed as much as they really could have if they wanted to if i'm being fair that's we lost 20 to 30 000 right in two years they could have fucking annihilated us if they wanted to that's the truth they allowed us to leave they pushed us out i guess they knew the

world was watching this time and you're not going to get away with it but they still did like you read about there was a book um i think they could have done a lot more if they wanted to try to think i think his name's eli bay or elliot bay. He was a war tribunal prosecutor from Canada, and he prosecuted the war crimes that some of them that occurred in Kosovo. And like you read about and have some evidence of this on literal video as well. You read about like what these people did. The Serbian soldiers. They emptied out their prisons. They allowed criminals to say, hey, you want to go fight? Go they didn't do whatever the fuck you want that's where some of these sick

fucks came from but they also were clearly taking orders on pure genocide yeah from from generals yeah and it's great like you read about this and you're like this was in 1999 like that's not in in i mean never again was a lie we watch all these holocaust movies is all bullshit never again never again happened a million times since that was a lie that's just so it it i understand how ideologies get out of control i understand how people are witnessing it now these last two years now i understand how communism rose how the nazis could rise where people just okay that's what it is, and just like, let me cover my face forever.

My own fucking face. So now I'm like, oh shit, because I always wonder like, how the fuck did they come to power? It's like this psychosis, man. These are the red flags, man. What we've witnessed in the last two years

is terrifying, if you understand history. If you don't understand history, it's just a coincidence. It's nothing. Just cover your face. Just shut the fuck up. Stay home. You think that's normal?

Me and you, we got nothing. We're not the same. Yeah. I mean, look, it's like you give them an inch, they'll take a mile. Yeah, let's just cover our faces forever and stay home forever because that's going to fix things what's worse though is when you start to have discussions about data as data becomes available and then it's not allowed you know that that's where it it becomes it's brain damaging because it goes against any empirical evidence-based argument ever to be able to not – or to say that like, oh, we're not going to talk about this just because we think it's the right thing to do and if you don't, fuck you. So I understand what you're saying where you're seeing the groundwork of something like that. I try not to get hysterical about things, but the way that they made this last so long and how they wouldn't allow people to ask questions, that should have you asking questions. years after Yugoslavia fell and now you had as you've pointed out the whole 90s where there was

there was conflict and you guys couldn't live normally in Kosovo and things like that but then that's all it took that was the only amount of time it took to where stipulations like that in a curfew and telling you what to do were in place to where suddenly it's like we're going to line you up in the middle of the field and shoot you or we're going to take you into this building and we're going to shoot you and then we're going to burn it down and destroy the evidence didn't it didn't take long you know when i used to go visit back then we had as outsiders we had 24 hours to register at a police station what does that mean so we would land you know we'd get to kosovo and then i had 24 hours from the time i got into the country to go to a police station, register and let them know where I was staying, how long I was staying, why I was staying.

And a lot of times they didn't interrogate me, even as a child. Why are you here? Why do you come here? Why do you like coming here? All Serbian police. Military police, yeah. There was one officer, Slobodan. I remember his saying he was the president that was in charge.

And I'd see him all the time. And my dad would make me, you know, bring cigarettes with me, Marble Reds, originals, and give it to these soldiers so they would take it easy. They were just taking bribes left and right. So you knew, like, from the time you left the airport to get back to your village, you were going to go through a couple of cartons of cigarettes,

a couple of, like, chocolates, Kit Kats, whatever the fuck. You'd put it all together, a couple bucks here and there and just this way every time they pulled you like here and like they'd go go so they got used to that they were they were you know you'd grease their palms just so you can get the back to your village with no headaches because every time they'd stop you they'd want to search the whole car every couple of miles so the thing to do was you'd hit them off. He hit the bike, go. You're good, you're good. Don't worry, you're good.

So I'm fucking peddling marble reds as like a 12-year-old, you know, with soldiers with machine guns pointed at me. It's traumatizing to say the least. It was crazy, bro. So to come from America to that, you got to understand why. Like I say, people, like if you...

Most people have never left their own neighborhood man so many of these people that want to burn this place to the ground they have no idea there's nothing else out there that even comes close to this place meaning yes there's a lot of it that's up and we need to figure out a way to fix it and the first step is fixing these and power in our own country who spend billions of dollars destroying other countries instead of rebuilding our own and that's where a lot of these problems come from because we got to create a situation where people can live like human beings and they're in these fucking ghettos and they're killing each other and they're being treated like shit and the police are treating them like shit

and this is where a lot of these fucking problems are coming from the inner cities right and now to see new york heading back in that direction after seeing its renaissance is another tragedy that i never thought i'd see in my lifetime did you what are your parents still alive yeah what do they think of everything there's some denial seeing new york the way it is you know they're trying it's going to get better i'm like yeah when when's it going to get better. I'm like, yeah, when? When's it going to get better? You know, it's fucking crazy. It's gone the other way.

You know, people are getting shot on the streets. It's dangerous. Again, got to watch your back out there. You know? And this was the place, I mean, coming to America, I can understand, like, you know,

they were coming here for the hope and they got to experience that, you know, in the American dream and everything and so you don't want to believe that certain things are going in and to an extent you know neither do I try to keep it I try to keep it real with it I try to look at the hope in it but you know you do it to recognize almost a six dollars or patterns almost a six dollars a gallon bro never overnight never that's not normal no we shouldn't be in that position this country i don't want to hear about sip like i love people going what's supply and demand said but why is america in this position where's our allies we're saudi arabia they can pump our barrels tomorrow we made these countries we put them in power

we should literally be able to make one phone phone call and say hey asshole yeah pump some more barrels out we need them it's leveraged all that controls it yeah it's leveraged but who put these motherfuckers in power who gave them the power who gave them the money we did yeah i i wonder but that's the thing like you could say that there's different places that were the reason they're in power and stuff like that you're not wrong but also what what what do they have what what do they know like the people that we have in power are only as good as the fact that they're flawed fucking humans who've probably done definitely have done dumb shit and who's got a picture of them doing dumb shit and what can those people say in a time like this where those elected leaders are supposed

to represent america but they're going to look out for their own ass too you know and and that's like that's a real tinfoil hat way of looking at it but it's not because that that stuff does exist you know why do you think a guy like jeffrey epstein existed existed because somewhere with some form of intelligence somewhere around the world like people wanted leverage and they got it so like when i see saudi arabia not even taking our calls during this kind of thing tells me something tells me uh they don't need to it tells the american powers in decline my friend it's the only thing it should be telling you it's been going it's been going on a while i mean look we look what we let him do to kashogi a few years ago because I guess we had to. I don't know.

How gross is that? You had a foreign leader assassinating a journalist who at this point is an American journalist on an embassy in another country. We knew they did it. We all knew they did it. They got away with it. Think about that. Think about if that were and and imagine it wasn't someone who was born in saudi arabia which shouldn't matter shouldn't matter

at all but like but you know you get it because you have to care about and again not because i don't feel for the ukrainian people but where was all these fucking righteous people when 24 million people were starving in yemen where the fuck they i did i agree where were you where were you clowns bro you are if you didn't even raise your voice once for yemen and now you all you're worried about is ukraine you are the person i'm talking about look in the mirror and just say whatever the tv tells me i will do whatever the tv tells me i will feel whatever the tv tells me i will think and it tv tells me i will feel whatever the tv tells me i will think and it goes right back to the initial point too like i know all the stuff about ukraine

obviously like i'm following it because it's happening every day but like i i didn't know about the war in kosovo i didn't know what they did but what about you they didn't tell us that what about this place what about what about every what about all these places in the middle east every day where brown kids are getting about the ro What about the Rohingya, the Burmese Muslims fucking massacred, bro? Two million motherfuckers in concentration camps in China. Where the fuck are you, man? Where are you? This is not what the TV tells them, like you said.

That's who the fuck I'm talking about. You're the one. This is Beck Lover. One other thing I did want to ask you about. It's a little bit different topic, but you had mentioned it quickly on the phone. And I haven't heard the story or anything, but I think you mentioned it today quickly as well. But you were down at ground zero when 9-11 was happening in New York. Were you in the towers?

I was under them on the E train, last stop, World World Trade Center I was coming out as a second plane hit I used to go to Pace University witnessed everything that happened that day walked all the way to Howard Beach Queens from lower Manhattan Jesus Christ didn't get home to a couple of days later because all the roads were shut down the highways and where we were we living at the roads were shut down and the highways. And where were you living at the time? I was living on the other side of the Hudson, the Jersey side. I was between Fort Lee and Hoboken.

Okay. And I remember, and I knew, I knew the world would never be the same again. And I really thought it was the start of World War III, which maybe in some ways it was. Who the fuck knows? I mean, but it was the start of World War III, which maybe in some ways it was. Who the fuck knows? It was crazy, man. So you saw the second plane hit? No, I didn't. I was coming up as the second plane hit.

So I heard everyone scream because of the second plane because they were witnessing it about to be hit, but I didn't see it. I didn't know what was going on until I got up above ground, and even much later than that, I had no idea what had happened until I ran into my friends who told me, yeah, they were hit by buildings, you know, by planes. What did it look like to you? Initially, I thought they were hit by, like, some kind of rocket or some shit. Or some kind of terrorist that had bombed me inside of them or something. I didn't know.

I couldn't even imagine that plane. What are the fucking odds that two planes hit at the same time? No, no. If you didn't know you're below the ground, you would never have thought two planes hit. To me, it looked like they were hit by missiles or someone exploded them right from the inside out. And how close were you?

It was fucking underneath them. I literally came out from under them right so it's snowing but it's not snow it's papers and it was crazy dude and did you did you start walking right away the other way or did you stay there for a while rose for a second in shock i don't to this day i was wondering how long did i actually stand there i don't know i froze bro and i just looked. And the shadow of the building's on me, right? Like, because I'm literally underneath. And I'm just like.

And there's just people running fucking every direction around me. And I'm just there like, what the fuck? Just, I don't know how long I stood there. It could have been a couple seconds. Could have been a couple minutes. But then I ran. I ran to the front of my school. Tried to find someone that I was involved with at the time,

and phones weren't working. To make the story short, we ended up meeting up. Got over the bridge. Brooklyn Bridge is right there. Halfway over the bridge, the buildings came down. The rest is history, bro. I had this bad feeling. I didn't know the buildings were going to come down,

but my instincts were like, get the fuck off the island. So that cloud, which I call the death cloud, because anyone that breathed that shit in, if you're alive right now, you definitely have fucking problems. That cloud missed me, thank God, because of my action and my instinct to tell me to get the fuck off the island. I made it over the Brooklyn Bridge before the death cloud could hit me. That cloud of debris and garbage and asbestos and fucking cancer dust, bro. That's what the fuck it was anyone that inhaled that shit good luck they probably did it right now every time i see some of the footage of right when it fell and they have you know some of the people were on the ground and everything

and you see that cloud coming towards you even on camera where you know you're separated from and it's a historical footage it's not happening right now even on camera every time you see that coming it's out of it's it's out of a bad cartoon i mean it's like this air was it's you know what it's like it's like watching a wave a giant runaway tidal wave crash and you can't do anything you are literally sitting there in the ocean and it's like well i'm not moving here it is and just and then the sound you hear on camera even and you can even see like the brown dust with like metallic sprinkles imagine breathing that shit in oh it's the worst and what did they tell us government agency don't worry the air is safe after the buildings fell the air was never safe they lied to us they said don't worry the air is safe. After the buildings fell, the air was never safe. They lied to us. They said, don't worry, the air is fine.

Return to work, return to school. 20 years later, here we are now with a multi-billion dollar fund. All the people that were affected by trusting the EPA, Christine Todd Whitman, former governor of New Jersey, that the air was safe, the air was toxic. And then they go to me, well, why don't you trust them on all this other stuff? Because they've already lied to me once in my life. I trusted them with my health. How soon did you return to that area? Two and a half weeks later.

I remember the smell. I'd let her walk out of my college because I was concerned about the air quality. They sat me down with the EPA. Everything's fine. We're doing tests. The filters are running. Meanwhile, that was not the case meanwhile now we know that the air was toxic after 9 11. half my school like dropped out at

that time not half but a lot of them left because they wouldn't even want to be there but there was this defiance in me like you i'm like i'll have to change my life you know but it felt like the end of the world man for a moment it really did two and a half weeks later I mean this is a lot of fucking shit come down like that bro was did it still when you went back there though two and a half weeks later did it still feel that way or was it kind of like I mean it felt like not like you know it was just trauma man we just witnessed trauma you know it was crazy yeah it's it's such a i've talked about it a bunch on the show before but that day that's one of my earliest memories i was like seven years old or something in third grade or second grade and and it's like one of the first times where

something happened in the world where i could somewhat grasp it. I couldn't all the way grasp it. I was too young, but you see that and something in you changes. You're like, that's not supposed to happen, obviously. But then you see like, you know, I remember my teachers, they're calling their brother, sister, parents who live in lower Manhattan and just seeing the look on their faces out in the hallway. You know, they were never on the phone during the day at this time. And they'd be out there. There's tears coming down their face. And you just realize like all these people went into these what from far away look like tiny buildings, but they're big buildings. But there are two buildings right there.

We're the Pentagon, which is one big building in DC, but they come from so many different backgrounds and places that in a way, when you hit those, you are hitting, you're hitting all these different tribes that exist within our great tribe. And the symbolism in that is something that I, I will never wrap my head around, but it's, it's also doubly sad to me all the poor decisions that were made after that day that – and we've insinuated some of this today talking about it – but that then America didn't look to remember and certainly shouldn't brag about. But it all comes from this shock of something that's not supposed to happen happening. And then what happens? This inner human urge occurs to where you just want vengeance. You want to fix it. But there's no fixing it once that happens.

There's no, it happened. And it's indescribable. And a lot of people died because of that. Yeah. Not as many of us as them, but a lot. Who maybe had nothing to do with it. So it's like, who really was right in the end, and who was wrong?

Right? So we all know where it went, right? Here we are 20 years later, how many wars, most of the Middle East was on fire after that. And we got nowhere. We gave back the country to the same people we supposedly started the fucking war for. We're going to take out the Taliban.

That was George. But we're going to take them out. They're fucking in power again 20 years later. How about the symbolism there? Trillions of dollars. Weapons that my people could have used, for example. And I can go on and on and on. And that's not just the current administration's fault.

Let's just be real here. That was a Republican. Oh, yeah. So to not call this shit out you're an asshole regardless of what side you're on like i said i can't stand both of them for many reasons i believe in the constitution freedom bill of rights free speech no matter what as long as you're not making a threat to someone and they can make it they have the right to make that threat, and then we have the right to assess if they really meant it or not or lock them the fuck up. But as far as free speech, it needs to be protected by any means necessary.

Too many people died for us to have that right. And too many people struggled, the African-American community, to have that right, to give it up now. And that's why if they're listening to this, you can't, under any circumstance, silence anyone because it will only undermine all the work that you did and what you went through to get to where you are today, where you had an African-American in the White House, right? Yeah.

One on the Supreme Court, you know, and so on and so forth. That would have never existed 200 years ago. So like I said, we had a lot of bad things. There's a lot of good, too. And if we focus only on the bad, we're going nowhere anytime soon. It's well said, man. Well, listen, this was a really heavy conversation in a lot of ways, but a lot of important tidbits, too.

And as I told you, I think I told you on here as well, like to get the perspective of Americans who have that more recent history with their own family and their own kind in that way from a different land. And to understand the value that you have living here, it's always incredible to hear and I'm glad we got to do it. And it's like one last thing, like what did i always love about new york i may never go to afghanistan because i'll never feel safe enough to go to afghanistan maybe me as me personally but i can go to the afghani restaurant in manhattan and i can meet abdul and i can learn about his life story and how he left when the soviets invaded and hear it from the horse's mouth and i get to sit down in that restaurant and experience an authentic Afghani meal and drink a cup of tea with them and play some chess and really experience that culture without physically having to go to that country. And that is what has always made New York so magical that I can literally walk into any type of establishment, experience any type of food, any type of culture,

and it's just this magical place where everyone is living and coexisting together. I get to see it when they have Pride Parade and everyone's having fun and so on and so forth. Everyone experiencing everyone else's culture and what they do and their way of life is what's always made me happy to be a New Yorker and a part of New York society. It's when we start trying to shut that down for certain groups where New York is no longer New York and America is no longer America yeah and that's a big

problem too huge it goes right to a free speech point but listen back thank you for coming down here brother really really enjoyed it love love talking to New York guys someone you through and through New Yorker and I really appreciate you sharing your full story today no problem my brother and for those of you friends that you know listeners that want to hear some of my interviews they can check me out at thecomebackteam.com and literally if you type in beck lover b-e-k-l-o-v-e-r two words into youtube they'll all come up his channel's right there you have a lot of interesting people in there as well a lot of big names carol baskin was on havoc former Sopranos members and crazy bunch of people.

But the show is basically about inspiring people to never give up by telling people's life stories who have been through things that some of us can never even imagine and are worse nightmares. Just to inspire people to never give up. That's why it's called the Comeback Team. No matter what you've been through, you can always make a comeback. I love that. I'm a huge comeback guy. So I love that. Beck, thank you, brother.

Thank you. Much appreciated. See you soon. Everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace. you