The Joe Rogan Experience - #1041 - Dan Carlin

Episode Date: November 16, 2017

Dan Carlin is an amateur historian and former radio talk show host. He now hosts two popular podcasts available on Spotify: "Common Sense" and "Hardcore History".

Hold this. All the good stuff happens before we're on. It always does. Three... Two... One... Dan Carlin, ladies and gentlemen, and we're live. Hey, dude, first of all, thank you so much for this coin.

This coin from Constantine. You brought me, uh, a... What, how many years old is this? 1700. That's fucking crazy, man. It's fun to- I always say I like giving something that is the oldest man-made object in most people's homes. Maybe not yours, you'll have some aboriginal instrument or something that's like from the Stone Age, but most people, that'll be the oldest man-made thing in their home. My friend, Dr. Mark Gordon,

actually gave me a Roman coin as well, but I don't know whose coin is older. Yours looks older. I don't know. That's depressing though, because normally I'm the coin guy, so I hate that I've been beaten to the punch by anybody on that. Well, he's kind of a historical aficionado or a history aficionado as well. Not to the extent that you are, though. So this is from Constantine? Yeah, my wife would spend that by accident, just so you know. Where's that coin? Oh, I got a coffee.

I got a pair of shoes. That's right. No one would buy shoes. No. How much was that worth back then? Do you know what the unit? I think that's like their penny, probably. What kind of units Did they have...

What kind of units did they have? They probably had like some dead metal type thing and then some kind of bronze. And then you get into the silver and gold and how much is mixed into the rest. And they have those. Like you can go and it's actually really cool because they wear better. Like they'll clean the silver off and it looks like yesterday. So you always know it's the cheap stuff when they're all dirty and everything like that. Oh, right.

Because then it's not silver. That's like a penny. Well, our pennies get the same way, right? What do you think this is made out of? Oh, some alloy. I don't know. They had alloys back then? Oh, sure.

Electrum was the cool one where you mix gold and silver. Ooh. Yeah. I never heard of that. Yeah, Electrum. They still have it. Electrum. Yeah, they still have it.

What do they use it for? I hope I'm right about this. This is going to be one of these on Twitter. Dan Carlin doesn't know what he's talking about about Electrum. It's not that. Well, the beautiful thing about your podcast is you can research things in advance, so you know what the fuck you're talking about by the time you speak. Theoretically, yes.

Allegedly. Allegedly. Supposedly. I have a lot of wiggle room words. Defensive journalism. Yeah, but, dude, I don't have to tell you any again, but I will. Your podcast, for me, has been the most educational, historical thing in my entire life. I've never had anything in my life that's taught me more about history than hardcore history. I don't even know how to react when people say that.

It is the kindest thing that you hear. And I always say the same thing. I always hope everybody gets a chance in their lives to have people that they admire turning around and telling them something like that because it is the neatest feeling and when when you realize all the crap you put up with for decades and other jobs and other businesses to say okay I'm 51 or whatever and and they really like what you do you just everybody should feel this way so I appreciate that my pleasure and I appreciate you you you found your niche man you like Think about all the other stuff you did, all the broadcast work you did before. It really prepared you for this podcast because

obviously this medium is so incredibly new and this ability for you to just put something out. I mean, I see when you put out new podcasts, they're regularly at the top of the heap of all the podcasts in the world. That's incredible when you think about that, that it's just you and you have a guy who helps you with editing. Theoretically, yeah. Yeah. And that's fucking it.

I mean, that is amazing. Well, but I mean, how is that any different from this empire you've been, this place? Because I'm just talking. Yeah, but that's all I'm doing too. But you walk into this place, you go, this is, this is the, what Joe Rogan's talking has built. Yeah. Something, something along those lines.

And talking to people like you. But you're right. I mean, I keep trying to remind myself because, you know, you and I have both been doing this a long time, got into it pretty early on. And so for us, it doesn't feel new, but you keep trying to think about, okay, what's this going to be like in 30 years? Right. 40 years. I keep telling everybody that what you're seeing now, and my children know no other world. I mean, in their minds, I tell my oldest all the time, at the time you were born, we weren't even texting yet. That is all since you've come around. So I keep thinking,

we're still at the tip of the tip of the tip of the iceberg in this era that we're in now. What's podcasting going to be like when whole generations grow up and it's just a part of their world and podcasts are a part of it? And it won't even be podcasting. I mean, they'll be broadcasting into the matrix cord in the back of your neck or something. But I mean, we're still at the – it seems hard for long-term podcasters to understand that this is still the beginning. It's almost impossible for us to predict because when you really think about what we're doing now in terms of like – like you could put a YouTube video right now. You could make a video and it could go viral for whatever reason and a million people all over the world could be watching your video like almost instantly this was not not only unheard

of 10 years ago just go back 20 30 40 it's insanity you're talking insanity like people would be like what the fuck are you saying you have a phone in your pocket that would be insane you have a phone in your pocket that has a camera what you wait you have a phone in your pocket that's a video camera that takes high definition video with stereo sound and you can wait a minute you're uploading it through the sky just through the air what in real time like instantaneously that's insane now think, what could we be looking at in terms of augmented reality, in terms of virtual reality? I'm working

on something along those lines right now. Are you? It's crazy. What are you doing? I can't tell you what I'm doing. Dude, tell me off there. Kill the podcast. The point is that you're absolutely right about this stuff. I spent, before I got into podcasting, I was in the era where Mark Cuban made it big and everybody was just going to start a high-tech company and sell it for billions of dollars.

What did Cuban make it big with? Broadcast.com, I think, which if I recall, it was basically like a website with a bunch of links. And, you know, everybody was like, dang, if he can do it. So I was in one of these companies with a bunch of buddies and we were pushing what we called amateur content back then. So we're talking 95, 96. We were pushing what we called amateur content back then. So we're talking 95, 96. And one of my jobs was to go with the staff to all these venture capitalists and try to sell them on the idea of what amateur content was going to become. Joe, we went from like place to place to place with all these people who are supposedly the ones who can see the future.

And every one of them, and I mean every single one, said nobody's going to view amateur content because if anybody could make anything anybody wanted to see, they'd be paid for it. Right. And I kept talking about the quantity has a quality all its own idea, right? Where you say, listen, if only 1% of this stuff is worth watching, you're still going to have millions of pieces of content uploaded all the time. There's going to be good stuff in there. And they were like, so you thought this was coming in some ways? Well, yeah.

And it wasn't just because, you know, I was in with a bunch of tech people who understood this, too. But one of them had taken me off the radio and said, we're going to put you on the Internet. This was in 94. What? And I said, put me on the Internet. We're just learning how to use it. I said, what are we going to do? And he says, well, I'm going to invent the way to do this.

And you're going to be the test person, right, that shows everybody. Hey, so that fell through. But once that happened, I was, you know, it was in the back of my head going, okay, someday we might be able to do this on the Internet, that kind of thing. But the point was, is that these people at the venture capital meetings, all these, you know, hardcore guys who are inventing our future and funding it, none of them saw this amateur content thing coming. There was one thing that they were doing quite a long time ago. There was like some Internet radio channel. Yes channel that they had tried to put together. And, you know, they had funded it and spent a bunch of money on it and they hired a bunch of people to do it.

And Bobby Slayton was actually one of the online broadcasters. And I did his show and, you know, and he was talking about how they were having a hard time keeping it up and wasn't catching on the way they wanted to. They were just a little bit ahead of their time. Yeah, yeah, too far ahead. I read somewhere, too, because I was actually sort of researching the history of what we do and what the precursors were. And I guess there were audio blogs and stuff that some really high-tech types were pursuing in the 90s also,

maybe even the late 80s, where, you know, they're like sending full files to each other or something. But, you know, it's funny because somebody is going to write a book someday about the history of this and how it got started and all that kind of stuff. And it's crazy to think about that we're actually due to sort of a serendipity, good timing sense that here we are, like I said, in the first 10 years, 15 years of what's not just going to be a phenomenon, but it's going to be a huge part, I think, of the future world that people grow up in. Not our show specifically, but this world we're creating.

I mean, everyone's a broadcaster now. Yeah, and look, anyone could have been. I mean, there's been a lot of barriers to keep people that are really talented, interesting, funny people from getting their stuff out there. And that thing was always like, they didn't know how to start. How do I become a stand-up comedian? I've talked to so many funny guys, and they just go, well, how do I get started? I'm like, well, you've got to go sign up at an open mic night.

I'm like, it just seems too much, and the idea of it is too daunting. But if you just sit in front of a camera, that's all you have to do? Turn your cell phone on and start talking. Here's what I think about Donald Trump. This is what I think about Harvey Weinstein. All you have to do is have a unique take, be funny, be interesting, somehow engaging. And it doesn't even have to be visual. I mean, God, there's a hundred, maybe more, really funny, what I would call Twitter comedians that just say funny shit.

They write funny shit on Twitter and they have huge followings because of it. I always say, you know, you try to look at what the brick and mortar analog version of this was before this came around. Remember MC Hammer was selling, you know, cassette tapes of his music out of the, out of his hatchback at the Oakland A's games, or, or I think of like Eddie Murphy or Richard Pryor, these people who are just, they're so funny that you could put them on a crappily recorded cassette tape and it wouldn't make any difference. And, and I remember Eddie Murphy saying something about if he hadn't gotten on Saturday Night Live, he doesn't know how he would have exposed himself to the public.

Well, these days, if you're that funny and you put that on audio and you put it out there, you no longer need the facilitator, the gatekeeper to open the doors for you. You have a wide open mic. You know, you called it open mic night. This is open mic night for the world, right? Yeah. Every country. It's fucking crazy. There's some kid who's 20 years old

who bought a house in my neighborhood for $9 million or $7 million. $7 million. Some fucking YouTube kid. I was reading about it today. I went, what? He's 20. He bought a $7 million fucking house.

I was like, this is insane. Don't even pull it up. Enough of him. No, I was at YouTube about a month ago. I did a speaking engagement at Google, and across the street in New York, above the Camden Market, they own the whole building. So they take me up there. I get this six-hour tour, and at one point, they have a wall with all these YouTube stars

on it. And, you know, I'm old, so there's one or two. So I go, okay, that's Lady Gaga, I guess. But there's a bunch of, like, 20-year-olds, and they're going, oh, this guy has a bazillion followers. And I'm looking at him going, really? I mean, at his age, I don't know what the hell I was doing. I was taking a year off college or something.

But it's all these kids with multiple piercings and tattoos and face stuff. And the Google people were telling me, oh, these people are all huge. Giants. Yeah, come in with their entourages. and that's crazy. Yeah, some kid just died He was 21 and all the paper tattoos and was like who the fuck is this kid? We said giant YouTube star some YouTube rap star. You know did you know who he was? I've heard the name I didn't know see you're you're young Jamie, but you're actually old to all these young fuck. Oh, hey, hey calm down hold you You're young, Jamie, but you're actually old to all these young fucks.

Whoa, whoa, hey. Hey. Calm down. How old are you? 34. That's old to these young fucks. Never trust anybody over 30. Wasn't that the line? Yeah.

That was back in the day, right? But the 30s, 40's the new 30, so everything changes. So what the fuck am I? Dirt. Old like dirt. Still at the top of the iceberg, though, doing the head of the game, head of everybody. This whole thing, what we're experiencing now, I think, is the top of the iceberg. Because I think there's some shit that's coming down the pipe that is going to blow all this out of the water.

And the idea of just listening to things is going to be ridiculous. It's going to be so surface. I really believe what you were saying about some sort of a Matrix plug-in. My friend Duncan has one of those HTC Vibes. Have you ever seen those? You mean the virtual reality? Yeah. You put the helmet on? I have one. You have one of those HTC Vibes. Have you ever seen those? You mean the virtual reality? You put the helmet on. I have one.

You have one of those? Yeah, well, part of the gig I'm working on, yeah. Oh, you want to talk about it. They sent it to me. I'll tell you what's cool. I didn't want to interrupt your show. You go ahead, but I'll tell you what's cool. No, no, go ahead.

Well, Google Earth is on the virtual reality thing, right? And they just started it. They just put out a new, I think it's a new update. I'm old, so don't quote me on this, but the update allows you now to zoom in at the ground level. Now, it's not virtual reality at the ground level. It's more like you're in the photograph, but it's really cool.

It was just a week ago. I went to all the homes I grew up in as a kid and went back there. Well, look at this. Jamie's pulling it up. So this is how it always looked even like a year ago, but now you can zoom into the ground and there's people around you with all these. Oh my God. It's truly awesome, I have to say.

This is insane. Yeah, and it's only going to be better. They'll actually at some point have real virtual reality on the ground anywhere you want to go. This is insane. Well, that's what I think is going to come up next. I think we're going to have it set up where like this podcast, you'll be able to put on some goggles like this lady is wearing here. You're going to be able to put

up some goggles. You're going to be in this room with us. You'll be behind me. You'll be staring at my butt. You'll do whatever the fuck you want. You'll be in the room. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, you will. It'll be like a sim game, but you're in it. That's coming, man. This whole thing is going to feel so 2D and flat and archaic

in just a decade or so. Everybody's waiting, though, for the big C. It's funny how you wait for, you know, you know how technology is adopted, right? You don't buy the computer just to have the computer. Some new game or some new ability comes, you go, oh, I got to do that. Well, I guess I need a computer for that. Everybody's waiting for that in the virtual reality realm, too. What's the must-have thing that then next Christmas everybody's got to have

the virtual reality set up under the tree for, you know? Well, I think one of the things that's setting Android ahead of the curve in terms of like Android versus Apple is that these Android phones, they slide into these headsets now

and they act as virtual reality screens. Like a low-level one, yeah. Yeah, but not that bad, man. No. Not that bad anymore. I haven't seen it, but they told me, again, they, that— The overlords?

Yes, the overlords. I understand they're mushroom overlords. That's what I heard earlier. But no, they were telling me that the iPhones from Apple also are built for that capability. They just haven't introduced the add-ons that you would need. But in terms of the power that they've put in there, they built it for that so it can scale up eventually. Yeah, you just pull it up. I could be talking out of my rear right there.

No, you got it right there. Apple reportedly readying standalone AR, which is augmented reality, headset for 2019. Well, hey, fuckface, that's a year and a half away from now, you fucking assholes. When is this going to hit? See, that's what no one knows, and everybody's afraid to put money forward and be too early like you were just talking about. Hold on. Look at this. The device would run ROS, Apple's Reality Operating System.

See, that's the fucking matrix, man. This is what everybody was worried about with Google, that Google was Skynet. Google has your email. Some people were using Google Voice. People use Google Maps. I mean, there's so much now that you're connected to with this one company. If they come out with some crazy augmented reality thing, and then you tap into that as well. But everybody wants you in their environment, right? Everyone wants you in the closed environment. I mean, it's funny how the old AOL model is similar now to what they still... Facebook never wants you in the closed environment. I mean, it's funny how the old AOL model is similar now to what they still...

Facebook never wants you to have to leave Facebook. Google wants you to be Googled all the time. I mean, Apple, they keep you with the iMessage. I tried switching over to a Google Pixel about a year ago for two days. It was so bad, like trying to get people to message me. Like I would text people, did you get it? No. Did you get it?

No. Send me a text. I didn't get it. Fuck. And I'd be calling them back. Did you get it? No. Did you get it? No. Send me a text. I didn't get it. Fuck. And I'd be calling them back. Did you send it? Yeah. I didn't get it.

It says I sent it. Okay, hold on. I'm going to send you one. Tell me when you get it. You didn't get it? Did you get it? No. Fuck.

So what do you got to do? So then I go online. You have to go to the Apple iMessage servers and have your email removed. Okay. I go and do that. Nothing. I was like, fuck this and then i talked to people online like what's the best way to do this they go you got to change your number

i go what so if you want to try to use an android phone you have to change your phone number i'm like all right fuck it i went right back to apple i was like i don't have time for this this is like this is too much noodling around i know one problem with a password these days can occupy your whole day trying to figure out the problem so i mean i had, I had it with the email. See, I didn't know Yahoo Mail was down. So I'm thinking it's my problem. So I'm spending the whole day working on it. I'm changing passwords. Find out at the end of the day, no, Yahoo was just down. All those passwords, you didn't have to do any of that. And it screwed up everything that you had before. And I'm 51. That's what happens when you get old. Well, I got a MacBook and I got a phone call on my book

Yeah, me too. What is this bullshit? I Updated something and all sudden my laptop started ringing. I'm like no no no no no we're not doing this No, not doing this. I got my children. I'm at the point now where I'm literally asking my teenage children for help Yeah, and that to me is a sign right there It's the first sign that eventually leads you into that home that they put you in. You know what I mean? This is the first step towards my children going, oh my God, my father. You know what's bizarre, man?

My kids, they just figure shit out. Like if you give a kid, it's amazing how intuitive some of these app creators are. Absolutely. Because my nine-year-old, she started making these little movies. She's got this little editing thing on her iPad. My 12-year-old does it too. So she's filming little scenes. She splices them all together, and then she adds music and text to it.

And then she goes, Daddy, you want to see the movie I made? I went, what? What the fuck are you doing over here? And it's good. It's weird. You know what, though? I mean, from a creative standpoint, it's so easy um and i tend to have a personality that does this anyway to look at the negative dystopian you know things that can happen the big brother things which is totally the way i see the world but um but my kids when i look at the

creativity so in my family i come from a family of people who worked in film and so when i was a kid i had a super 8 camera i had the old editing setup damn splice it by i used to make little space videos and i figured out you scratch the film with a needle frame after frame and you can make laser beams. And so when I was a kid, I did that. So like you said, my daughter comes up, it was only two weeks ago, and she's taken all of her school plays that she's done. She's taken scenes out of them. She's backed it with music and she's turned it into like a movie promo that you see at the beginning of the theater. And I'm looking at this and I'm going, this is so dang creative.

And it's made, you know how hard it would have been for her to get a Super 8 camera and the editing device. I mean, this makes it available to all these people. And so theoretically, if it doesn't go the Dan Carlin dystopian Blade Runner way, it could easily be like this. And this is how I used to sell the amateur content to the venture capitalists in the 90s by saying, it's's gonna be a creativity revolution and Joe Rogan's nine-year-old is already taking part in it and you're not even sure how

she did it that's how we know we're have no idea I've watched her do I'm like how are you doing this who taught you to do this I figured it out I go you figured it out you just figured it out cuz yeah you just put this and you do that my bubba bubba bubba just like you want to do one let's do one like you do them fast and slow-mo and all those different little effects you could put on it. Do you remember the old days

when you have two VHS tapes? Yes. Two boxes and you would press one on record and the other one on play and you would record from each other? Yes, and it worked about 50% of the time. Sort of. It was like the cuts were so obvious.

The cuts of scenes. It was never seamless. There was always this this big fucking digital fuzz in between. But this gets back to something that you and I were talking about when we first started here. So it's it's what the technology can do. So like I'm sure if you're out there, you're going to hear me talk about this. Now, this may be a personal one to one conversation with someone in your audience. someone in your audience. But somebody did something that is both flattering and absolutely terrifying to me recently. They went and they said it took hundreds of hours and they called a ton of my shows and they made little clips of all the things I said and then rearranged them and created an absolutely new show about politics, unfortunately, with me. And you cannot tell that they've cut this thing 9000 different times. But it's my voice saying a whole show of political stuff that I never said made up.

The guy said it took him hundreds of hours. He's crazy. Yeah. But you turn around and you go, OK, somebody is going to take a little time. And he said at the beginning, this is not Dan Carlin really saying this, but some guy is going to take like some obscure, weird segment, put it on the Internet. I'm going to be chasing that group going, no, it's not me. That guy did it. Well, you don't even have to do that anymore if it's just audio. What they're doing now is you could take 40 hours of audio, which obviously you and I both have way more than that.

They take that 40 hours of audio, and they can essentially have you say anything. Anything. Anything ever. So is that going to get us out of, this is the conversation we had. So can you say to somebody when they say, I heard Dan Carlin say he's all for child molesting on this clip. Can you say, hey, hey, that's not me. And look, there's all this stuff out there. I mean, is it going to, is that going to get you out of trouble?

Or is CNN going to run that story and you'll never be able to whack a mole your way out of it? Once they understand that that technology is available, they're going to have to be at least questioning the source of it. But if they don't, you just sue the shit out of them. But I don't think they're going to jump on it. It's sort of like Photoshopping. It is like Photoshopping. Do you remember when Oscar De La Hoya got caught wearing fishnets and high-heeled shoes with boxing gloves on? He was coked up and he was hanging around with some crazy Russian strippers.

And he was having a good old time and just thought it was fun to dress up like a girl. And, you know, I thought it was funny, but he was very deeply embarrassed by it. Obviously, he's Mexican, so Latino boxing fans were not taken very kindly to that. So he just said, look, that shit's fake. It's been photoshopped. Perfect. Yeah, look at it. There he is.

Look. How do we know that's Oscar De La Hoya? He's having a good time. He's wearing a wig in one of them and a hat. He's drinking a Coke. All I ever think about is the left hook to the liver that Bernard Hopkins hit him with that put him down on the deck. I think about him beating up Julio Cesar Chavez where all the Mexicans were mad at him.

Past his prime. Is that the girl that he was with? Go above that. The two pictures with him and the girl. Yeah. Is that the girl that turned him in? Keep an eye on that bitch. If you're going to get a lap dance, she's going to tell people.

So I guess they, that's her right there. That looks Photoshopped, doesn't it? It looks sort of Photoshopped, but not really because it's his body. I mean, it's obviously an athlete's body, but he's wearing a skirt. Look, they were partying. He's having a good fucking time. He thought it was silly to play dress up. What the fuck? You mean, look at

the one in the upper right though when he's bending over. Look at that one. That one's rough. So wait a minute. See, it almost seems to me that it's the perfect cover because now you can do anything you wanted to. I mean, if it's the Clinton years in office and Bill Clinton's like, you can do anything you wanted to. It's Photoshopped. That's not me.

You kind of can, but they can tell. They can sort of tell. If you have an expert look at it, they can break it down sort of, yeah. But there's a lot of – the problem is all you have to do is have a few people say it's real and then a few people say it's fake. And the people that want it to be real – That's exactly right. Yeah. And how do you chase it down? I mean you would constantly be one step behind. Yeah. And how do you chase it down? I mean, you would constantly be one step behind.

Yeah. I mean, it's even this way, like I was talking about piracy earlier and trying, you know, I have these old line advisors who will say things like, you need to be charging for your new shows and more money. And I sit there and go, our competition is piracy, man. I mean, you got to make everything so cheap and guilt them out so that they don't want to go pirate your stuff. They feel bad.

everything so cheap and guilt them out so that they don't want to go pirate your stuff. But the idea of, I'm forgetting where, I told you this was going to happen, didn't I? Photoshopping. I'm having these senior moments now. Yeah, I mean. Well, we had it with Obama's birth certificate. Yeah, or something like that. But the Obama birth certificate was a real issue because there was people that were examining it and they were putting it through Photoshop.

They're going, look, this is clearly fake. Look, here's the filters. You can see how it's been added and edited. But then you had a bunch of people that were actually Photoshop experts. No, no, no dipshit.

This is how Photoshop breaks down images. It breaks them down into layers. This isn't fake. Like this is the actual image. And this is how Photoshop processes images. And so, but it didn't matter. image and this is how Photoshop processes images. But it didn't matter. All it took was enough people to show you the original Photoshopped image and say, look, here's why when we put it

in Photoshop, you see all these layers, clearly it's fake. And then they just fucking run with it. They just run with it on their online forums and on their, they got the little Twitter group of right-wing people that want to think that Obama's a Kenyan Muslim who's some sort of Manchurian candidate. There was a lot of that going on. But when I talked to people like Red Band, who actually understands Photoshop, he was like, no, this is what happens. When you put an image in Photoshop, it breaks it down into layers. It shows you how this is how you would edit something in Photoshop.

I think the point you made earlier when you started talking about that, though, is the key one, which is if you want to believe this, here's your evidence and you're going to ignore. And if you don't want to the opposite, I wrote a piece that never got published in the late 80s called The Death of Objective Truth. And I thought at the time that this was because you couldn't have arguments anymore because no one would accept your source. If you said, OK, the New York Times said this when I was a kid, that was a starting point. Right. OK. If the New York Times says this, OK, we both believe it. Now we can have a conversation about what the New York Times says. Nowadays, I can't have political discussions with people anymore because it never gets past ground zero.

Right. We start. I make a premise. You challenge the premise. I bring in a piece of evidence. You say, I don't believe that evidence at all, here's the other evidence, and boom. Jonah Goldberg, who's like a standard conservative columnist, wrote a piece a couple months ago where he said, I can't even have fun political discussions anymore, because you never get past the beginning of the talk. We disagree over the fact that isn't even what we're talking about. Here's reality, now let's talk about it. Wait a minute, that's your reality, that's not my reality. disagree over over the fact that isn't even what we're talking about right here's here's here's reality now let's talk about it wait a minute that's your reality that's not my reality and so you can't even have the kind of fun political discussions we had as kids or teenagers because there's a basic disagreement on what reality looks like to different people yeah well there's these

tribal agreements tribal's the perfect yeah we have a tribal agreement to support the left and you saw that with hillary clinton there was so many people that were defending Hillary Clinton, and people were calling me right wing. People that I know were like, what are you, a right winger now? I'm like, no, Hillary Clinton is a fucking liar. Like, it's really simple. Like, I'm not saying that I like Donald Trump. I don't. But I'm saying you can't, just because you don't like Donald Trump, ignore the fact that the Clinton Foundation is super fucking shady,

that Hillary Clinton is clearly a liar, that they definitely did something with the DNC to rig the primaries to keep Bernie Sanders out. And now you have Donna, what is her name? Donna Brazile. Donna Brazile coming out about all this stuff too. And she's showing how it was all done and how Clinton sort of hijacked the entire DNC during the campaign, made everybody dependent upon her campaign. The whole thing is tribal because people didn't, they wanted so badly to get Donald Trump and make sure he wasn't in office

that they were supporting someone who didn't even support gay marriage until 2013. I mean, she was a creepy person in so many different ways and still is, but she represents their team. So they had this blind allegiance and this tribal loyalty towards the left. I think that's a real problem. It's a real problem we have in this country where people just, I'm a fucking Dolphins fan. It's Dolphins to the death. And they get that way with the Cubs and they get that way with Democrats and they get that way with the Cubs, and they get that way with Democrats, and they get that way with Republicans. And you're seeing it right now. You're seeing it right now with people that have an inability to in any way say anything negative about Donald Trump because he's the president and because he's a Republican.

Well, you're not living in reality. There's certain things that we really need to be concerned about. Forget about politics. What about the Environmental Protection Agency standards? What about what they're doing in Alaska where they're trying to drill for minerals and they have this very important salmon river that they're going to drill right next to and they're passing this without any advice from scientists. They're just going straight to it to try to make money. And people are freaking the fuck out about this kind of stuff. And Republicans, there's so many of them don't want to say a peep. They don't want to say a word about it because he's their guy. He's on their team and people are super tribal about it. You know, this is part of the problem

I've been having with my political show is I feel and everybody thinks it's a Trump related thing, but I think it's what you said. I'm having an issue trying to figure out if my basic if my basic understanding of how a system like ours is supposed to work is fundamentally flawed. You know, I always I always like to say that wisdom requires a flexible mind, but I got to I got to live that, too. Right. So if I'm seeing stuff that doesn't back up my theory on how things are supposed to work, I feel like I have to sit back a little bit and go, OK, what are we seeing here? And you mentioned a bunch of fundamental societal changes we're going through. And we started talking, whether we're talking about amateur content or everybody being able to broadcast and all that. We didn't even mention the fact that our broadcasts are international now.

So you're not just talking to Americans anymore. And it makes me start to wonder about the basic idea of are we smart enough? And this goes against all my principles, so it's hard for me. But are we smart enough? And does our modern society require us all to be more intelligent or in touch or understanding of the facts than, for example, American voters 75 years ago had to be? I'm starting to again, this isn't about Trump. It's about what you were talking about, the fact that we're having discussions over stuff that either isn't real or you don't understand the issue, but you have a very strong opinion one way or the other about it, or some talk show host you trust told you this is the way it is. You're going to

believe it. Let's put it this way. Let's let's say we've always have had uninformed or tribal voters because we always have. Is there a tipping point where if you have, you know, if it's changing 10 percent every decade that you say, OK, we used to have 20 percent of people who really didn't know what was going on. Now we have 70 percent of people. I mean, I'm starting to look back and go, if you can't have basic discussions about reality, can you do your job as a voter in this society? And I don't know. I'm backing up going because I'm a Jeffersonian guy. So I believe, you know, in the old agricultural, old Republican, you know, there's a bunch of ideas that go to that. But part of it is a real trust in the people. Okay. Right. And I can't decide if the trust I've always had in the people was misplaced from the from the get go or if the challenges of this modern society that we have and an entire generation and generations behind them, let's be honest, growing up in a worlds, we could handle our voting responsibilities better than now because the challenges to human beings now are greater.

I don't know. And I don't have an answer, which is why I'm sort of backing off and kind of observing instead of yakking about it for a change. Well, I mean, I think it's important to talk about it just because we're all trying to figure it out together. I think so. And I think that's really what's going on here is that collectively, we've never really had a voice the way we have now. It's never been 320, whatever it is is million people that can just chime in it's not even that i mean we have foreigners and russian bots uh influence i mean this is crazy this has never happened you know in the old days do you remember they used to it used to be considered like what your cia would do or something to to broadcast radio free Europe over the Iron Curtain.

Radio free Europe is a joke. Now we all talk to each other all the time. And then you say to yourself, OK, if the Russians are doing this to us, aren't we doing this to the Russians? A hundred percent. In other words, the fake news that's going on there may be a bunch of governments and corporations and everything. You know, they used to say the best way to cover up your lie is to just flood the system

with more lies because then everything's up in the air right I mean yeah that makes sense yeah and just it's flooded and I feel like we're flooded now and so if you say to yourself are we more flooded than we were 75 years ago and if we are does that require more from the average voter than we required 75 years ago and let's be honest the dirty little secret of the American system is And if we are, does that require more from the average voter than we required 75 years ago? And let's be honest, the dirty little secret of the American system, as everyone who studies it knows, is that once upon a time, this voting franchise was actually in relatively few hands. Yes. And you had to, I mean, the old idea behind running a farm, I used to read this left-wing writer who said it was all part of, they hated poor people, so they didn't want to, I don't know. I think it was more of a voting requirement that said, hey, if you can run a farm,

you can't be too much of an idiot, so that'll be our requirement. You have to have this much land. I don't know, but you do feel like as democracy's taken over, because we're really a republic, but we've been moving more towards a democracy for 200 some years. If that happens and you turn around and go, okay, now we have no qualifications. Because how would you implement them? Somebody would say, this is racist or a classist or whatever. But without any requirements, are we doing a half? I mean, how many people who are voting really understand what's going on? Well, what are those requirements?

Like, think about it. If I'm telling you that the 20-year-old kid in my neighborhood just bought a $7 million house from YouTube. This kid is obviously very wealthy. But does he know what's going on? Do you have to be smart or do you have to be wealthy? Like, do you have know what's going on? Do you have to be smart or do you have to be wealthy? Do you have to be a land owner? Do you have to be a farmer? Do you have to be a business owner? He's essentially a business owner.

And if you're going to take a test, who designs the test? Who grades the test? Who decides what the questions of an informed voter would know would be? And are the right and the left going to agree on the parameters? Oh, it'll be like gerrymandering. We'll gerrymander the test. And these people, these 320 million people, this newfound responsibility of being able to chime in and communicate, they're used to just being able to talk shit at the gas station. They're not used to this being permanent.

They're not used to this being like text that stays up on— Political arguments on Twitter are crazy, dude. They're crazy. Crazy. I look at them all the time. They're crazy. They're fascinating, though, because I think this is one step. I think this is step one to this augmented reality situation that we're talking about.

I think what this represents is a deeper and deeper connection that we're going to have with each other. And I think we're going to get past language and we're going to get past culture in some sort of a weird way. language and we're going to get past culture in some sort of a weird way. And it might take 100 years to do this, but I really believe there's going to be some sort of a universal operating system that allows us to exchange thoughts in a way that everyone understands, some sort of a Rosetta Stone for the human mind. Oh, I love that. I love that idea. I really think it's possible. Rosetta Stone for the human mind. I think it's possible because I think, look, the new Google Pixel has earbuds and these earbuds translate languages in real time. Oh.

Yeah. So if you're in another country. That's fascinating. Fascinating. And someone's talking in Spanish, you will hear the translation in English in real time and you'll be able to understand what they're saying. So that's what Esperanto was supposed to be once upon a time, right? It was going to be the common language and we would all learn it. And because we would speak it, there would be no more wars and no more awful things they thought.

And this is the digital Esperanto. I forgot about that. What was that? Well, Esperanto has been around for longer than this. But, I mean, the big push came after the First World War was over and the League of Nations was formed. And they were trying to figure out how do we never have a world war again? We have to understand each other, first of all. And, you know, what if you could understand

all the speeches and all the demagogues in all these other countries, right? That's a giant issue. I mean, the Tower of Babel is based on that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. And that is a real issue. I can't read Korean. You know, I don't know what they're saying.

I look at Russian language and I'm like, these characters are crazy. It's all a problem because the lack of communication is one of the things that makes it easier for us to look at people as the other. Yes. And listen, that's the common problem because when people look at these regimes, we'll take the standard one. You talk about the Nazis, but there's a bazillion regimes like that. The first thing you do is you have to dehumanize the people you want to go after, because obviously, we have human feeling towards each other. But if you can say something, and I think this is what's been most depressing for me is that we seem to be backsliding on how

we see people. But I mean, this idea that, well, for example, one of the things I see all the time, all the time, and I don't know where it comes from on Twitter and everywhere else is this idea that the different races are inferior to white folks because white folks built all this. And therefore, we must. And you turn around and go, OK, one, how is that helpful? Two, is that even true? Three, so what? So what? I mean, the so what part is we just go, OK, are you doing anybody any good with this?

I mean, what are we at? And truthfully, I don't think most human beings think like this. We're trying to make a living. We're trying to get by. We're trying to get a date. We're trying to, you know, I mean, there's a bazillion things you have to do in this life. The idea that you have to be responsible for pushing back racism in America seems a heck of a lot of responsibility to put on an average Joe or Jane.

Well, I think that these conversations are very, very important. And I think we're having them more so than ever before. And these conversations show how ridiculous it is to have blind allegiance towards people that have the same amount of melanin as you do. It's so fucking stupid. All human beings essentially either came from – actually, there's some speculation that some of them might have come from Europe thousands of years ago as well. But we're talking about hundreds of thousands of years ago, the very first Homo sapiens, they believe, came from Africa. Everybody migrated out of there and moved around.

We essentially came from the same source. So all this idea of race is just based on a particular amount of time in a particular climate that forced people to adapt to that climate. In the colder, darker climates, you see paler skin. In the sunnier, hotter climates, you see more melanin. And the idea that these people that have more pale skin are superior than the people that have more melanin is just patently stupid.

It's a dumb idea. If you take into account all the socioeconomic factors that cause people to live certain ways, people that are isolated that live in certain tribal traditions, these things are all easily explained. And if you want to chalk it off to intelligence or the superiority of the white race, in 2017, you're a fucking moron. And it's a good thing that we can have these conversations so you can expose these. All these Charlottesville people that you see walking around with fucking swastika tattoos, like Jesus Christ, you fucking dummies. Those people that were involved in those riots and all that racial bullshit that just went on. These people, they need to see the reaction that the rest of the world has. And they are isolated and insulated in their weird little worlds. And when they go

global with that shit, and they march with those tiki torches down the street, and people mock them and talk shit about them openly online, they get to understand how the rest of the world sees this ridiculous ideology that they subscribe to. This is the power of free expression and communication that we're experiencing in 2017. And this is the power to nip a lot of this shit in the bud. If we can get past this tribal nonsense that we're all taking part of. There's tribal nonsense that's male versus female. There's tribal nonsense that's white versus black. There's tribal nonsense that's left versus female. There's tribal nonsense that's white versus black. There's tribal nonsense that's left versus right. There's nationalism. There's all this tribal

stupidity. And all of this stuff is being debated and exposed, and it's happening in real time. And to you and I, it can't happen quick enough. It's still too goddamn slow. It's still too frustrating. The idea that it's still around is still mind-boggling. This kind of racism, this open, blatant racism still exists in 2017. But it's way less prevalent than it was 1,000 years ago. It's way less accepted than it was 2,000 years ago. And I think that's a blip in time, as you know, but probably better than anybody that I know. That's a blip in time, as you know, but probably better than anybody that I know.

Yeah, but, you know, it's funny because there's a part of me that thinks that there must be something deeply embedded in the DNA or our code or whatever that – because it's either that or people run into this stuff and it appeals to them. So let's say, you know, the first time you ever hear a speaker and look, let me let me draw a distinction, because when we I'm one of those people that actually buys into the idea of, you know, I'd love to get to a place where we judge people by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. But let's not pretend that it's only the white supremacist types that do that. No, we are so hung up on race that if you could say something like in 15 years, we are going to be a society that doesn't even notice race. Well, in 1968, folks like Martin Luther King might have thought that that was a great thing. Today, a lot of people would be like, no, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. We should still be noticing race for all the, you know, these people need help. I guess what I'm saying

is that there's a pendulum, and I'm looking at this, I feel like we're right in the middle of this right now, so it's so hard to analyze it. So everybody take this with a grain of salt. But I wonder if there's not a pendulum involved. So, for example, I tend to buy into most of the theories, for example, about racism that have always been put out example. And I think they come from academia because I think this is sort of what academics do. And I think that's their job. But a lot of times they'll come up with theories. So one of the ones that drives me crazy is white privilege. Okay? White privilege is true in the sense that, like one African-American guy said to me, he said, I would love to forget about race, but white people won't let me. Right?

Which is another – he says every morning I wake up and am reminded, and you don't have to deal with that. I get that. And I approve and I understand it. But here's my problem. You have to be able to see how telling somebody that you were born with something that you didn't earn is going to be received on the other side. Right. There are some people that have become these white supremacist types or anti-racial group because they're so upset about their perceived position. Right. Like somehow you're blaming me for stuff that happened. Now, true or not, it doesn't matter. And I always tell people is it doesn't matter what's true or not. It matters how that person reacts.

And if if you're explaining to them that, listen, you're born with all these unearned privileges and their reaction is I'm starving here. I don't have a job. I'm living in a crappy apartment. How can you tell me that? Then it might prompt, and again, I'm analyzing from within the maelstrom that we're in now, but that might be a reaction counter reaction thing to say that we could have a society where you judge people on the content of their character, not the color of their skin. That might be as upsetting for an African-American activist as a white supremacist, because this society right now pays really close attention to your race for all kinds of reasons. I mean, I'm one of those people that believes we're all going to be a nice tan color someday,

you know, and so it's a moot point. But there are people out there who literally think it's life or death if we do become a tan people at one point, right? We have to preserve this race or this. Yeah, I don't get any of that. No, that's that seems foolish, but it's very It's consistent with The way human beings evolved. Yeah If we try to listen to the perfect for sure we lived in these small groups of people right? We looked like each other and when we saw these blonde haired dudes pull up in boats with battle axes you're like oh shit

they don't even look like us fuck we got to get out of here that's literally what you had to worry about I mean you had to worry about someone who was the other well and again we forget in this time and place that the other didn't happen to be a skin color thing I mean you could be the sure the Carolingian Empire that's being attacked by the vikings and to an outside observer you all look like a bunch of blonde haired blue-eyed guys but to them the vikings are the other and in a tribal sense there is inferior and awful and barbaric as anything you can think of so we make the distinction now based on this or that visual

thing yes but throughout history like you said i mean you could go to China and they have all sorts of different peoples in China that they recognize as the other. But if you're looking at them, they all look Chinese to you. Well, here's a perfect example where we have a blind spot of this was in Iraq when we took over and killed Saddam Hussein and overthrew him. And then the Sunnis and the Shias went into a full scale civil war. And the Kurds. And everybody's like

whoa whoa what the fuck is going on i thought you guys were all muslim so many people had no idea there was two competing sects of muslims that lived in that area they had no idea there was a power struggle we may be talking about the the population as a whole but but come on the people in the government understood this really well i mean this, this is why the first George Bush didn't want to go in and topple Saddam Hussein directly the way the second Gulf War did, because he didn't want to own that mess. And we knew that those groups were there because we were encouraging them and funding them to overthrow. I mean, there was a big Sunni, Shiite rebellion against Saddam at one point after the first Gulf War, which we were funding and hoping for.

The Kurds have been for a long time our friends, and we've been pushing for something there less than a state, but more than what they had under Saddam, because the Turks don't love them. Well, whenever you overthrow a dictator, you leave a power vacuum, and that power vacuum is never filled in a nice and calm and democratic way. I mean, look what's going on in Libya. Libya is now a failed state. It's a disaster, yeah. And it is like a breeding ground for ISIS.

And the reason why is because you had this tyrannical dictator and we had him killed. We had Gaddafi killed, which is another great piece of evidence I used to point to with people with Hillary Clinton. Like, watch the interview where she is about to be interviewed. She's still on camera, but they they're not, it's not, if any of you hasn't officially started and she's talking about the death of Gaddafi and she's laughing, she's like, we came, we saw he died. And she's laughing. This is not the kind of cavalier mindset you ever want to see in someone that possesses the power

to overthrow a government, and someone who possesses the power to wield nuclear weapons. This is a person who's a chicken hawk. You're completely shielded from the idea of actually engaging in actual visceral combat yourself. You're outside, flying around in jets, having catered food. You're in war rooms, making decisions while you're in air-conditioned buildings. It's all bullshit. And these decisions that you make have massive repercussions for decades, if not centuries.

If not centuries. Here's a thing that you talked about that I think is incredibly important in the wrath of the Khans. When Genghis Khan took over Baghdad, Baghdad essentially was knocked into the fucking Stone Age and might not have ever recovered. That's true. And the Mongols destroyed the irrigation system that had been around from time immemorial and would... And how complicated and advanced their civilization was at the time when the Mongols showed up and did all this. How few people knew this?

I think the question of asking about dictators is really important because I think sometimes you have to ask how much of the fact that the country is held together is only because there's a dictator. So we'll use the Yugoslavia example because it's pretty classic. For those who don't know, Yugoslavia was a country made up of a bunch of different independent countries now, and they didn't necessarily get along. As a matter of fact, it's some of the oldest ethnic hatreds in Europe when you talk about Serbs and Croats and Kosovars and Bosnian Muslims and Albanians and all the people in that area. They're historically at odds. But under certain governments, Tito, after the Second World War, formed a government where he essentially ruled with an iron fist. But that's how you kept all these people from killing each other.

So when you say Iraq is not even a real country, because if you didn't have an iron fisted dictator holding it together, it wouldn't be together. Right. So then when you take the one linchpin as awful, and Saddam Hussein was awful, awful. I'll give you a book to read that will just, you'll have to, it's the only book I've ever read that I had to read another book afterwards before I went to bed at night because it was so horrible. Wow. So he's evil. What's the book? It's called The Great War for Civilization by Robert Fisk. But he's a reporter on the scene. He would tell you what is scrawled on the walls

in the prisons at Saddam Hussein's prisons that the prisoners would write in their own blood. It's horrible stuff. But the point is, is that if there hadn't been a regime like that, would you have even had an Iraq? So if you say to yourself, okay, this guy is the only reason

this country is held together. What if you pull out that linchpin, right? And you say, he's horrible. Yes, but if you could look into the crystal ball and find out, yes, but we're going to lose a million people in warfare between all these people. If you pull the Saddam Hussein character out of there too quickly, it's like a giant Jenga game. And if you pull the wrong piece, and that's what happened, right?

And it's still happening. It's still happening. Listen, Iran is the next, I mean, they're really gunning, for lack of a better word, for Iran. And you can see it. If you know how to read the news and you connect this dot with that dot, it doesn't provide a clear picture. When you say they, do you mean the United States military? The United States government and our friends. And why are they gunning after Iran? Iran has been on our naughty boy list since 1979. They used to be our best friend in the region, even better than Israel early on, because the Israeli relationship really got tight after like 73, 74. But Iran, we overthrew a government there with the British.

Kermit Roosevelt was one of the people involved in that and overthrew a democratically elected regime under Dr. Mohammad Mosaddegh, put the Shah back in power, his son. And that became our little, you know, we had, if you look at geopolitics, it's all sort of like playing a risk game, you know, and you want to have a little territory on this side of the continent and then another one on this side and have places. So if you have Turkey as a friend and you have Israel as a friend, then on the other side, you have Iran as a friend. I mean, we had this whole area sussed for a while. And the 1979 revolution screwed everything up. And you could make a decent case that it's since 1979 that all this crap that we're dealing with today, including modern terrorism directed at us, stems from all that. I mean, that's the domino that begins tumbling.

That explains a lot of things, including the 82, 83 Lebanon involvement and all that i mean that's the domino that begins tumbling that explains a lot of things including the 8283 lebanon involvement and all that stuff yeah it just seems like such a global mess when you look at all the potential pieces that are in place that could cause chaos it's money though dude it's money i mean there's so much you know i went to it i've said this before and it's like a violation probably of my of what i said i would do but i mean i went to a centcom meeting i was invited to this weird um u.s central command i thought it's i'll tell you this story one time because it was i thought they were going to kill me i thought it was an assassination attempt and you know i'm not a conspiracy nut but the whole story was really funny but long story short i end up at this central command planning meeting with 11 guys it's me and 11 other guys and generals mean it was chaired by the guy who's the defense

secretary now, Mattis. So we sat there and they started talking about half of it was, well, what do you think we ought to do about this, that or the other thing? And the second half blew my mind because the whole second half of the meeting was about procurement. Now, procurement sounds boring. What it basically means is buying stuff, military stuff. And the meeting was kind of about how important it was that countries don't start shifting over from, say, our tanks to another country's tanks. And it wasn't because we wanted to sell them tanks. It was because we wanted to sell them spare parts

for the tanks. It's the old printer model, right? Oh, we'll give you the foreign aid. Sure, we'll give you a lot. We're going to defend you. We'll send all this stuff free. Yeah, but then who do you have to call for the spare parts right right if you're using u.s jets well who's making the parts for those and who's selling them so when you sit there and realize how much money

is involved you're doubling down in a place like the middle east right you're doubling down because one you want to get the oil or you want to have you want to you want to negate what's called um used to be called petro extortionortion, petro-blackmail, because in the 70s, and you and I are old enough to remember this when you had the long gas lines and all this, when OPEC punished countries like the United States for supporting Israel, the first thing you realize when somebody can do that to you is, oh my God, job number one has to be make sure no one can ever do that again. You can't control our foreign policy by saying you'll cut off the oil, because if you do that, we'll just come and take the oil, right? We'll make

sure you can't shut down the Western world because you don't like our policies. Okay, I understand that a bit. But then you say, okay, not only are we in there for the oil, but these countries that are our friends in the region who help keep open access to the oil, these are places that should be using U.S. equipment. And if they're using U.S. equipment, we can sell them U.S. spare parts. So you're not only keeping the oil access, which is important to us, but you're also keeping the one industry in this country we still make a ton of money in, which is we still sell great military equipment and great military parts.

And we send our advisors and our maintenance crews in every place all over the world to keep that stuff in running operation. That's doubling down. So you get the oil and you get the spare parts that you give away to them to protect the oil. So you're in this meeting with these people. How? How did you get? Okay, well, I'll tell the story because it's a fun story.

But it goes. So we get, you know how it is. We get an email one day and we get a letter to our mailbox. The letter looks like some. And what were you doing at the time? Just the podcast. Just, you know, what we do. So they just said, hey, come on down. We want to our mailbox. The letter looks like some- And what were you doing at the time? Just the podcast. Just, you know, what we do. So they just said, hey, come on down.

We want to kill you. No, no, it looked like- Want to tell you about some shit you shouldn't know about. Well, okay. It even goes deeper. I used to have a discussion board online and some dude came on the discussion board and was saying he was this giant hacker,

this famous hacker. You would all know me if I told you. And, you know, the discussion board said, you're an idiot. You know, you don't know. And the guy left the discussion board saying I'm gonna show you what I could do you won't believe you just keep your eyes open for a couple of days you'll see what I can do so three days later this letter three

days later this letter arrives in our mailbox the same day I get an email saying we'd love to have you come over to Central Command and blah blah blah it looked like my daughter did it on her printer there was no like you know government seals it didn't look official at all and it was in Florida I'm going'm going, okay, this is this hacker dude. This is what he was going to do. Right. So, so it says it's got a phone number to call. So I call the phone number and it doesn't even ring once. And the machine picks it up and just says, leave a message at the beep. I'm going, what the hell? I'm telling my wife, what the hell is this? So I leave a message at the beep. I hardly put the receiver down, boom, rings and somebody's on the other line. And it's a guy with a German accent. I'm going, what? It's like some weird bad movie,

right? And he goes, no, no, no, this is all legit. Don't worry. You just show up at the airport. There'll be a ticket waiting for you. You take it to Washington, DC. There'll be a car waiting for you. And I looked at my wife and I said, and I'm going, this hacker is just going to take a photo of me at the airport, standing there like an idiot and then put it on the website. She just go to the airport when there's no ticket we'll know it's a scam so i go to the airport that's so crazy oh dude i wish i was talking to you so there's a ticket right there's a ticket so now i've got my bag i guess i'm going to dc from eugene oregon so i get on the plane i get off the plane there's no car so i call my wife i said there's no car this is all a scam i don't know what this is a heck of a lot of trouble to go through to scam me right right okay so she gets a call from the

german dude in florida he's at the wrong gate go to this other gate so i go to this other gate a town car pulls up with a middle eastern driver oh jesus get in the car so i get in the car and then he starts driving through like side streets in the backwoods of virginia or something so i'm on the phone with my wife going if you never hear me again, I see a couple of landmarks here or whatever. So he drops me off at this hotel in D.C. I still have, I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know why I'm here. I walk up to the front desk and I go,

do you have a reservation? Oh yes, Mr. Carlin, hold on. And they come back with this packet. And they handed it to me. This is your homework for tomorrow morning. And I go, what? I go up to the room. I open up this, and it's all legit.

Long story short, it's all. And there's people at this meeting. You're not allowed to say, but there's people that if they sat next to you would know exactly who they are. And so I get to the meeting and it's, it's all like Pentagon military.

Everything's confiscated at the door. And you get this military guy who walks with you everywhere. So if you have to go to the bathroom, this dude has to walk to the bathroom with you. And so it's a table in this room and Mattis is at the head of the table. And then a bunch of soldiers standing in like a circle around the table, just sort of standing there. So you've got like a cordon of soldiers and I'm sitting down there with all these other people and I have no idea why I'm there. So I opened up the packet and it's everybody at the meeting

and everybody's got like three pages on their bio this the honorable and then i open it up and then there's this little teeny piece of paper that says dan carlin podcaster and they went to like wikipedia which is all wrong anyway and printed it and i thought oh yeah these august people at this meeting are so excited to be at this meeting with dan carlin podcaster right so the meeting goes on for a while and then it breaks up and all these people know each other so they go off in their little corners to start talking during the lunch break. I don't know anyone. I'm sitting at this table by myself. And this officer comes up and goes, I bet you wonder why you're here. I said, yeah, I really would love to know why he goes, that's my fault. He goes,

I'm the one he goes, we listened to the show. He goes, we're looking for out. This was all about getting outsider opinions on what you should do in the middle East. And he goes, it was my, okay, but here's the, here's the other thing. I was outsider opinions on what you should do in the Middle East. And he goes, it was my idea. Okay, but here's the other thing. Outsider opinions on what you should do in the Middle East. Let's contact that guy that does a history podcast. Right, but it's a little different. And fly him out to D.C. Yeah, but there's your tax dollars at work.

Okay, but it's a little bit more sneaky than that because I was there with a guy who knows how this all runs, another guest. And we took the taxi cab to this place together. And he's a real cynical. He goes, let me tell you why you're here. This is all a cover. I go, what do you mean it's a cover? He goes, it's a cover because these guys are required by law to solicit outside opinions

for some of this stuff. So that's what we're here for. We're going to give the and what they're going to say is they're going to do exactly what they were going to do anyway. But they'll be able to say we solicited the outside opinion from all these different people. So I think that's what it was was what law is it that requires them i don't know but apparently they were supposed to think outside the box and so they invited and i was like i was like mandated i don't know but i was the real outlier all these other people made sense i was the guy that was like okay

they're really getting crazy you're wearing a suit or were you dressing like that with a baseball wearing a suit you were there's the last time i baseball hat? I was wearing a suit. You were? It was the last time I wore one. It's funny because they take this commemorative photo of you at the end, and then they say, you can't show this photo to anybody. Why are you taking it? Yeah, that's what I said. So I can show my wife? Can you put it on the wall in your house?

I don't know. It's on the wall in my house now. So when you're standing there, do you have a badge on that says, hi, my name is Dan Carlin or anything? It just says Dan Carlin or anything? It just says Dan Carlin. And then there's the dude who stands behind you the whole time. What does it say? Dan Carlin, hardcore history?

What does it say? I don't know. I'll show you. It's on my phone. I'll show you later. Wow. But it was one of those get togethers where you just, I really wasn't as prepared as I should have been because I was pretty darn sure the whole thing was a hoax. Right.

You know? I mean, first of all, if you're going to send me a letter, can it look like a letter that the U.S. does it have to look like something where you printed the label on your, you know, brother label maker printer or something? Do they always want to leave? Maybe they have multiple filters to leave in the possibility of plausible deniability. And the German guy, by the way, what turned out to be like a West German general that was was cooperating with the U.S. government as part of an exchange program.

But I mean, the whole thing seemed like I just thought it was this hacker dude figuring out he's going to really embarrass me in front of the whole forum, you know. Oh, wow. Look at Dan Carlin at the airport thinking he's going to Washington, D.C. Yeah, exactly. That's what I thought it was. Some Operation Paperclip type shit. That's exactly.

They got some German guy and snuck him over there. Yeah, and dumped him into a Virginia swamp. Wow. That's fascinating, man. So did they solicit your opinions? Did they talk to you about things? All I can say is that both Mattis and his aide, which was Vice Admiral Harwood,

they are, generals these days, are so good at PR because you get this wonderful thank you note where they go, oh, it was so great to have you. Here's my, please contact us. And you're thinking, I mean, it's like a PR thing. Yeah. And I mean, I do think there's a little bit of the PR involved. There has to be.

Having the podcaster there might have been good for PR. Well, for sure. Maybe they thought it'd shut me up with my criticism, right? Bring you on in the inside. Yeah, you're one of our buddies. Yeah, now you have to be quiet. Remember when Dennis Miller became buddies with George Bush and he wouldn't make jokes about George Bush anymore?

He's my friend. I give him a pass. Like, what? Yeah, exactly. You're a fucking comic, pal. What are you doing? Yeah, that's a fascinating thing that they would bring you over there. So you got to meet Mattis? Mm-hmm. What's he like? Not only was he cool, but he

knows his history, which, you know, I have a soft spot in my heart, but he was talking about, you know, we're talking about the Middle East and he's talking about the history of this and the history of that and I'm sitting here going, and you know, I know talking about the Middle East and he's talking about the history of this and history of that. And I'm sitting here going, and, you know, I know that history pretty well. And I was sitting there going, don't they call him the warrior monk? I mean, he was I found him fascinating. And I thought he really understood what I always hope these people understand, which is the limits of power.

So you would say Mattis was very good about saying, listen, we can't keep doing this and we can't keep doing that. And I thought to myself, that's right. I don't know how much the president's listen. But I mean, I remember thinking Mattis is very good about saying, listen, we can't keep doing this and we can't keep doing that. And I thought to myself, that's right. I don't know how much the president's listened. But, I mean, I remember thinking Mattis is right about that stuff. Well, I think he is listening. My friends that are in the military, almost all of them universally were very pleased that Mattis was taking over. Yeah. He's popular especially.

Yeah, he's popular. Extremely popular because they feel like they finally have support now. They felt like they were handcuffed during the Obama administration and that there was this, you know, you had to go almost through a PR firm before any decisions were made. They had to, like, consult the ramifications publicly. Vietnam was like that, too. They said Lyndon Johnson was picking the specific bombing targets.

But here's the problem you have. If you realize, and if you don't, you're an idiot, that you will actually hurt your long-term goals if for example you hit a school and kill 200 little children you realize listen the whole policy is really held hostage by the potential for a disastrous mistake because if the goal is to win hearts and minds and listen you're not going to that's the only way to win this kind of thing um then you do damage to the goal with a mistake. And mistakes in war are inevitable.

So everybody, I think, is just trying to be really careful, but it's hard to fight a war really carefully. And this war is particularly weird when it comes to that because of the use of drones. The use of drones has changed the entire idea of what war is because if you look at what happened during the Obama administration, this is one of the things that people don't like to talk about that are supporters of Obama. I believe the number is higher than 80% of innocent civilians that were killed by drones. I think it's more than 80%. Imagine any sort of technique in war or anything else.

How about policing? Let's just go for policing. Imagine if there were some criminals that were holed up in a building and you had 100 people in the building and 20 of them were criminals and you killed everybody. So you killed 80 people that were just secretaries and plumbers and just folks doing their job, living their life, children, their families. You killed all those people to get to those 20 people. Everyone would freak the fuck out if you did it physically yourself. If you ran in with a machine gun and gunned everybody down. You just, I had to kill everybody.

That's the only way to get to the bad guys. Nobody would forgive you, and it would be front page news, and it would be a horrific crime. And it would be front page news and it would be a horrific crime. But it happens constantly when it comes to drone warfare in Yemen and parts of the world that we're not even supposed to be at war with. We're sending these flying robots. They shoot something called Hellfire missiles. Like Jesus Christ.

They're shooting Hellfire missiles at these targets that they're looking at on a screen. And they're often in like the Midwest. I mean, that's where some of these things are. You know what it is, though? It's all part of, listen, there's a term, and you military guys listening will all know it. It's called RMA, Revolution in Military Affairs. And RMA periods in time happen. So you imagine the period between no gunpowder and the mass use of gunpowder weapons,

that's an RMA period in history, right? But normally, what appears to be fast, like the transition from no gunpowder to gunpowder is really relatively slow by modern standards. So you have several generations to get used to the changes. But the speed of the pace of change now is so quickly that by the time you begin to say, okay, we've been using the current weapons systems and set up for five years now, we think we're starting to understand it. It's obsolete, right? What I said, and this is so long ago that we've been podcasting a long time, Joe, but I remember years and years ago when we first started using these drones, I said, we're going to screw this up because we're using them the same way the United States used atomic weapons,

which is as though no one else will ever get them. We are establishing the rules. And when other people get this stuff, those are going to be the rules they operate under, too. But our attitude and I've never understood this, but we have a very maybe it's the maybe it's how Democratic or Republicans work in the sense that we can only really think short term because the politicians are only rewarded short term But I mean if you say listen, these are the goals of our drone program for the next five years You're not incorporating what's gonna happen when China gets drones Yeah

And if and what I said at the time is do you know how mad we're gonna be if another major country uses drones the Way we're using them now exactly and it's the same thing with nuclear weapons once other other countries got nuclear weapons, we backed off and went, oh, well, we have to have some rules governing this now. Well, but when we were the only ones with them, we would threaten to use them all the time. Yeah. You know, you better not do that. We'll nuke you.

Easy to say when you're the only ones with it. So when you talk about the drone warfare, I would suggest that the problem of collateral damage, for lack of a better word um is one we've been dealing with for a long time now i mean once you talk about the strategic bombing of cities um first world war it started second world war uh it was massive um then you then anything is a walk back so if you say something like yes joe rogan sure we killed those 200 kids at that school and it's regrettable but that's an unusual thing it's not not like World War II where we carpet bombed whole cities. And they're right.

But is that the standard we can operate with? Well, I would suggest that the question is, is does it hurt or help what you're really after? If Joe Rogan's, God forbid, sorry for even going here, but if Joe Rogan's children were killed in a bombing raid that another country launched, there is nothing that they could do to stop Joe Rogan from hating them for the rest of his life. And if Joe Rogan hating them means Joe Rogan is going to find a way to make you feel his pain, you just created another enemy while you were trying to eliminate enemies. This is what's so scary about terrorism. And you just changed not just the people that were directly affected, but the people that saw that as well.

The ripples of pain. Giant. Yes. And, again, all I tell people, and people get offended, Joe. I've never understood. People get offended where I say, just put yourself in the other guy's moccasins for a minute. Right? Because what people say to me is, I had some guy get screaming mad at me saying, basically, he followed the dominoes and saying, are you saying we deserved 9-11?

And I said, if that's really where you took that if that's where your argument goes i said you totally misunderstood me i'm saying no one's saying deserved but saying that this is probably what caused it i i listen why are we a target it's not it's not wrong as a matter of fact i would suggest it is the only freedom what does they hate our freedom? What does that even mean? And I would suggest this. While there are some people who say, listen, look at the way you have women on billboards scantily clad. Yes, there are people that hate that and that they don't want that either. At the same time, in a lot of these countries, you were talking about Iran earlier. Let's talk about Iran. Iran's got two separate things going.

They've got the countryside and they've got the cities. And they've got a ton of the population that's under 30. And in the cities, they'd love to dance and they loved, you know, the Iranians are not like the, you know, you said they all seem like Muslims to us, but they're all very different from each other. And the Arabians, for example, are known to be kind of Spartan and Stoic, whereas the Persians, as they used to be called, are a fun loving, food loving, dance loving. I mean, they're very capital capitalistic so in a funny way there's an and that's why we were so close to them for so long there's a natural affinity between us and i always say it would be pretty darn easy if we treated them right the same way my stepdad said you know you can destroy the the soviet union by dumping elvis records porn

and blue jeans on them which kind of is what happened there There's a way, I think, to approach this Muslim world thing. And let's not pretend it won't be totally destabilizing, because if you drop porn, blue jeans and Elvis on those countries now, you're going to have a counter reaction with all these clerics and whatever that are freaking out. But at the end of the game, you won't end up looking like the bad guy. If you're bombing them, it's it is so hard to look like the good guy when you're bombing people, you know. And so if you could say to me's it is so hard to look like the good guy when you're bombing people you know and so if you could say to me listen dan these are killers who want to hurt us and we've got to take them out i totally get that but then i would say to you you have to take them out in a

way that doesn't screw up you know the main mission which is let's stop people from wanting to kill us right like the way they took out osama bin laden yeah that's a bad you know, what Osama, what that showed us too is that a lot of these people that are supposedly our friends in this war on terror aren't, and we knew this, the Pakistanis especially, but I mean, they're not really that close. They're being our friends because they want the spare parts for the tanks we gave them and all these kinds of things. So, I mean. Yeah, this global warfare thing, it's just, you got to wonder at what point in time is this ever going to level? Is it ever going to normalize? Is it ever going to calm down? And what does it get us?

What does it get us? What does it get us? That's a song. War. Well, look, I know what it gets some people. And this is the problem our whole country has, doesn't it? That some people are able to get government to respond to them because they give government money or what have you, and then they can get what they want. But does that correspond to what we need, right?

Do we need these wars? I don't know. I mean, when they say we need to protect the oil, well, you know, the whole oil climate has really changed since the 1970s. It's just to protect the oil. The idea is to keep these people at bay so that none of them could ever consolidate and become some gigantic huge War machine that could threaten us globally. You know what's again? This is a military history major talking so I think differently about this but in a sense That would be so much easier for us to beat I mean the funny thing is we know how to beat big countries

Yeah, but do we know it but if we're engaging in thermonuclear warfare nobody wins big countries in war. Yeah, but do we know it? But if we're engaging in thermonuclear warfare, nobody wins. If we can stop them from ever getting to that point, that's the success. The success is keeping them fragmented, keeping them beaten down, and that if we could do that, we could keep them- But they are showing that they can destroy, you know, it's funny, there's two kinds of destroy your country.

There's destroy your country and leave it in rubble, which they can't do. But there's destroy your country, you know, the old line is if they hate our freedoms well they did a pretty good job limiting them didn't they i mean because because we're you know limiting them to ourselves and i described it like fleas on a dog i mean they're like fleas on a dog and yet the dog can tear himself to pieces trying to get rid of those fleas and still not get rid of the fleas right um but it's it you really i mean terrorism is so effective because it requires people to act against human nature, which we can do as individuals. But it's very tough to get us all collectively to not act like human beings. It requires us to act against our nature, which is you punched me. I'm punching you.

Yeah. Right. And in a funny way, it requires us to be punched and to not punch back, I think. But how does that work? Right. There's a there's a book by Mark Kurlansky, who's a who's a leftist for sure. So just no going into it, what you're dealing with. But it's a book on nonviolence. And he's trying to to point out something which I've always tried to point out to nonviolence is a tactic. And against certain things, it's extremely effective, right? It's not effective against everything, but sometimes it's effective. I mean, if you could do to Martin Luther King what we could do to people now, his sitting, for example, one of the things you young people may not know is one of his effective protests was to go to these all-white counters in the South

where they wouldn't serve black folks and just sit at the counter and wait to be arrested. And then when he was arrested, Time magazine would be there to get. And there's a great photograph of him being handcuffed just for the audacity of sitting at a soda counter. Right. It was very powerful, but it was powerful because you saw violence initiated against somebody who was totally peaceful. Right. day you could go up to him and just tase him or do something that that that was not physically violent then he wouldn't get what he needed out of that which is he needed that photograph of him being physically manhandled for the simple or like not to change subjects it's the same subject but like the pictures that were coming out when i was a kid you can open up those giant life magazine books with the great photos of life and one of of them was famous. It was a black protester in the South of Alabama or Mississippi. And he's standing there with his arms at his side, not resisting at all. And the police officer has sicked a German shepherd on him who was biting

him. Right. And you look at yourself right there and you go, OK, that photograph right there motivated so much public opinion in a different direction. But what if they didn't need to use a dog or a water cannon? What if they could have just injected you from behind? The guy falls limp and you just carry him off silently. Well, you just diminished his power to make a deal. Oh, yeah, that's it. That's it right there.

And you look how powerful that is. But it's powerful because some guy is being violently attacked who appears to be doing nothing more than asking for his rights. Now, if you didn't have that violence, does that somehow change the message and make it less powerful? They could have just injected him, quietly taken him off to jail. This doesn't happen, and this made a big difference. Yeah. That's a very powerful photograph.

Well, it's people who aren't there get a chance to understand the barbaric nature of this. You get to see you're literally getting attacked by an animal that's on a leash for being black well i was gonna say you would say well what did that guy do if he just murdered somebody we're all going okay well that's what you get pal but if all he's doing is saying do i really have to sit at the back of the bus in 1965 or something it this this kind of thing motivated a lot of people but if you you know it's like 60 minutes did a great piece i want to say 1992 1993 where they were showing all of the new anti-protester weapons that were in development and what's funny is several of them

have arrived one of them is the sonic cannon which they deployed against uh anti new world order protester types isn't that what they used against people that were in cuba wasn't that something no there's a there's a rumor that there was something used in people that hasn't been figured out yet but this was this sonic cannon thing where you can target right but something got used against some people well some people said diplomats in cuba right yeah they well they said they lost their hearing or something and they assume it was the government that did yeah. Yeah, they were fucked up. They couldn't physically hear it?

Is that what it was? Yeah, something like that. It's not like a siren, but see if you can pull that up and figure out what the fuck that was. But imagine instead of that powerful photo that made a difference, imagine if you could have just aimed the sonic cannon and people leave because it's painful. Well, does that reduce the value then of that

non-violent protest that was so powerful? Well, this is what they're doing this right here. This is really weird. So a group of American diplomats in Havana, Cuba, have suffered severe and unexplained hearing loss over the past year, which U.S. officials believe was caused by a covert and advanced sonic device. So this is something that we're not even aware of. Yeah, but we have those devices.

That's why they might know. Well, but do they just not want to comment that we possess these things, you think? Oh, but we know we've deployed them. We've been deployed. This one. They don't know what this one is, right? So they should know. Anyway, the device emitted a sound that was not audible to human ears, they added.

It would indicate that it was most likely an infrasonic or ultrasonic weapon infrasonic weapons can cause physical pain without detection though they usually target the entire body than rather just the eardrums Wow how fucking bizarre that's like it's a different hydrogen bomb a different kind of crowd control though you know and if you know for example the famous Gandhi assault March, which which is considered one of the big moments in nonviolent history where he had all of his supporters walk into the clubs of the authorities and he told them, don't resist at all. You just go down and then let the next row get hit, too. And then because that was a powerful sign of, you know, who's right and who's wrong in this whole thing. But if you could just deploy that sonic cannon and all those people had so much pain in their

ears, they just had to leave and nobody got beaten. There was no blood. There was no dogs. There were no water cannons. Does that undercut the power of nonviolent protest to make change? It's fascinating that that might have been in the minds of the people who designed this thing, right? Well, it's so abstract.

The idea of this sonic weapon that you don't hear, but that affects your hearing and it causes injury to your body, but you don't hear it. That's not going to affect us because it's not a bat, right? A bat that hits a person, we understand it. Where you get a picture afterwards that you can circulate, look what they did to me. Well, remember the Chicago convention in 68 that everybody, you know, where the protesters were beaten so badly on television and all that stuff. If you didn't have to beat them, does it lose a lot of its power? If you just deploy the sonic cannon and everybody goes away because it hurts. It seems to me like you would have just defused one of the most important movements.

I would call that one of the big political things that happened in the United States in the past 50 years. And if you didn't, if there was no actual violence, it's not a thing. Isn't it fascinating that we have to see something where we go, oh, I know what that is. That's bad. And then everybody gets outraged and then change happens. Isn't that how the Arab Spring started? Well, that's the thing about drones, right? It's that we're not there.

Right. One of the reasons why you can justify this is it's not actually done by a human who's on the premises. There was talk during the big bombing campaigns of the Second World War when they were talking about the morality of this. And Churchill famously saw the movies showing some of these German cities just leveled. And he said, are we beasts? Now, this is the guy who ordered it, right? But when he actually saw what happened, well, the guy I grew up next door to was almost an astronaut, but he was a fighter pilot. But they conducted bombing runs in Korea and Vietnam and stuff.

And he said to me, if you actually had to see the people we killed, he goes, we wouldn't have done this. But you didn't have to see them. There was a distance. And there's a book called On Killing by a U.S. Army psychologist, David Gross Grossman's his name where he talks about killing in terms of distance everything is distance so there's intimacy range that's when you're killing somebody with a knife close up and then the farther away you get the easier it is to do the deed he says and the less you and the less damage you have later psychologically isn't there an analogy to social media here about people that can say horrible

evil cruel shit to people online? That's actually a good connection. And they can't do it in person. Or wouldn't do it in person. They wouldn't. It wouldn't even be in your character to do it in person. In other words, you almost have like a dual character that comes out when you know you don't have to see this person. And truthfully, all I really want from Joe Rogan is to answer me.

And the best way he can answer me is if I call him something, you know? Well, anybody who does anything negative where the public is aware of it, like say this Louis C case thing or something like that, where you can immediately find and target that. Now I have a reason to go after this person. There's a, it's a, it's an acceptable target. It's an agreed upon target. And then people from all over the world can just pour their vitriol and anger and bitterness and whatever it is because they have some sort of a righteous anger that they get. Well, there's a reason I can be angry at this person. Or I saw what Kathy Griffin did when she held up that head of Donald Trump. I have a reason now. I mean, I'm not standing up for Kathy Griffin

because I think what she did was stupid, but she was just devastated by that. I mean, they went after her like death threats and hate and anger. You know, Joe, you've taught me a lot about the whole social media thing, though, because I would come in here. The audience doesn't know this, but I would have questions about that stuff. And you've thought more about this than I have. And you were able on several of I quoted you quoted you where you know i mean because i try to make sense of this stuff and like i said you're farther along i think the road of thinking about some of this stuff and it gave me some shortcuts but i mean i do because i think it's a fascinating phenomenon because it's never been available i mean when do people ever have this kind of power

right your average guy locked in his basement never goes out, but he can still talk to the world? See, that's the problem. We have the stereotype of this loser in their basement. Which is not true. You're right. No, it could be a guy with a family who's at work. Yeah. Or his wife. Yeah. Or his wife. Or his kids. Anybody just saying horrible shit.

I mean, there's just so many options for people to be nasty to each other. And this absence of social cues, absence of like being in the physical presence of someone, this is an alien way of communicating. It's not normal. It's one of the reasons why I always hated letters. Because people could write some, like I'd get letters from an ex-girlfriend.

I'm like, what are you talking about? This is not, this is a bullshit depiction of our relationship. You've made this romanticized idea of what this is all about. Like, I don't like letters because someone can't be there to go, wait, what? That didn't happen. Yeah, it did. No, don't you remember? You said this.

Oh yeah. You know, there's a physical proximity question too. Like you're not going to go up to this guy and say this stuff to his face because he might knock you in the head. The good thing about a letter is maybe if someone is an honest person, they can express themselves in a letter in a way that they would have a difficult time doing it in person. Some people are less verbal, too. Yeah, they feel embarrassed or they have – when you're writing something, you have the opportunity to really think about your words. Edit.

And edit and go over it and then decide this actually represents my real thoughts and you know as Imperfect as it is send it but when you can do that any Moment of any day with your phone in the middle like someone's talking. Yeah, hold on a second. Hold on a second I'm fuck you fucking asshole. Just tweet the trouble these athletes or celebrities get in with what was obviously, I'm just about to board the plane. And boom, they get off the plane and there's a huge firestorm because something was taken wrong or not the way you meant it. Sure. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, it's a weird time. And I think this is, I think we're at an adolescent stage of communication. That's what I think. I think we went through all these rudimentary steps, right? We went through grunts, and then we had verbal language, and then we had written language, and then we had the printing press, and then we had the ability to broadcast, and then we had social media, the ability for anybody to broadcast. And I think as we move into augmented reality,

and what I've been thinking about more and more is this Rosetta Stone idea, this idea that we're going to come up with some sort of a way of communicating ideas that's not limited and restricted to language. if one country's average joes and janes on social media or whatever passes start really disagreeing in their thousands and tens of thousands and fifty thousands with people in another country i mean could could the russian people via social media anger the american people via social media to such a degree that countries get pulled into conflict i don. It's never been possible. So you can't know. But but but you turn around and go, that would be an interesting you you point out quite correctly that we're essentially guinea pigs here right now. Yes. Which is what I tried to explain to my daughter is that we are we are in an era where we are seeing what happens when you hand humanity these tools that they've never had before. And there's two ways of looking at it. The optimistic one with this is

going to free up, open up all or the pessimistic ones would say maybe something like, can our representative democracy handle this? And not because we can't handle communication, but maybe like you would say, the kind of communication that we have where these are little teeny chunk. We're not having deep, you know, philosophical coffeehouse, Ben Franklin kind of conversation. We're having 140 character discussions., coffeehouse, Ben Franklin kind of conversation. We're having 140-character discussions. What can you say in 140 characters other than you're an idiot, you're wrong, it's fake news, and then start swearing at them? Well, they moved it to 280 now.

I'm sure that will make all the difference in the world. I wonder if it does. It'll help me because I can't clear my throat in 140 characters, so it'll help me. I think it's going to cause a shift. I really do. I believe that the shift from 140 to 280 will make people, it'll give people the opportunity to be more clear with their ideas. I will say that it's disheartening for a person like myself who enjoys depth, because the history shows are so long because I enjoy the depth, to see people confronted with a page of text going, oh, too long to read.

Yeah. But you do go, OK, can you really be a useful citizen as a voting member of this informed citizenry and do your job? If you see a page of text, oh, I mean, the Constitution today would have to be 140 characters, you know, for for for most of the people today to go, OK, I'll sit down and read that. Well, one of the things that your podcast has done that's amazing is giving people information in a very entertaining form that they would never sit down and read a book about. There's a ton of people, probably me included, that have never read as much about Genghis Khan as I got from your podcast. But you went, see, and this is what I hope for, because we always say,

I like the idea of being an appetizer for people on history. If I introduced somebody to the Mongols and then they went, you can go to our website. We put all of the materials we use and we link directly to a place where you can get them. So if you actually went out and bought some books on the Mongols after that, or that created an intellectual relationship between you and the Mongols where for the rest of your life, oh, this is a Mongols. They found Genghis Khan's tomb or something. You're into it because you know about, well, I mean, that's awesome. I mean, in terms of, I mean, I heard, I got a great letter.

This is the highlight of my career, was this letter from the wife of a historian that we used in the World War I series. And she wrote me this letter saying, you have no, this is like very self-serving, but you have no idea what you're doing because history is something that not a lot of people were getting interested in. and now we have people showing up in the classrooms becoming

history majors because they got interested in what you were doing so if we're poking people with a stick and getting them interested in this subject do you know how cool it would be to have that you know when you're when you're all dead and gone and somebody says what did you do he said well he got a lot of people really interested in history i think that's the coolest thing in the world but it dovetails with what we were talking about this whole new media will it be good will it be bad and it's probably going to be both right but the idea that people could get interested in history again because some idiot in his garage was talking about it i think it's not going to be everybody but it's going to be a lot of people and for those people

it is going to have a profound effect, and me included. And I think that this new media, this thing where nobody is telling you, hey, Dan, it's time to do a podcast on blank. It's time to cut back this, edit that. You're doing it based on your interests, your knowledge of this. There wouldn't have been this show if we'd had yet there was anybody else involved. There wouldn't have been this show. I would have never been able to pull this off. Not in a hundred years.

It's what we have is this unique opportunity to express ourselves in like with a with a personal viewpoint. Like this is your personal interest. It's a purity. There's a purity. It's the difference between blended whiskey and like a single malt where where if like when I get these TV offers and you've had zillions of them where you go and you talk to these people and you realize instantly if I go do this with them, they're going to homogenize it, dumb it down. And you sit there and go, they're going to make something far inferior to what I'm able to do myself because they really don't understand why it works. Anyway, in other words, like you said, you couldn't have been able to do this show it's funny to me that the industry for example doesn't realize what it is that people like about what you do and figure out a way to you know they're

not open-minded enough to say listen joe come and do this tv show which is a lot like what you do i don't get it i don't understand how people like you and people like me and all the people that do what we do haven't created more of an understanding in the old media i think they're getting it do you think well eventually there's no way to avoid it they're getting it now because i i see like when i get offers for things i understand things like oh they're trying they're seeing what i'm doing and they're going hey we want a piece of this yeah how do we and then but if you do can they pull it off i mean but it would be the same thing this is the problem if. If they did this, it's like, say, hey, we want to put your podcast on blah, blah, blah

network. Okay, well, now I have a bunch of people that I'm talking to that I have to run things by. Exactly. Now I have a bunch of people that say, I just think that if you dress nicer. Yep. And then, oh, Jesus. Okay. Now it's not me.

I'll tell you a story. So finally, the TV people people they're always promising things you can do it any way you want so finally one of these companies did it so many times I said okay I'll go forward with you and we'll start with this project so I'm in a particular US city in the south and we're cutting this sizzle reel

and I said now this is going to be hardcore you got me you want hardcore history yes the history channel everybody wants it so I said here's what we're going to do so the the sizzle reel was on the bombings uh in the late 60s early 70s of like the the new left so the weather underground and all those people right so i'm going to do this and i said i said so the hardcore history way to do this though is to imagine that era with today's anti-terror laws and the way we treat terrorists today. So we were filming like recreations of like Abbie Hoffman in his American T-shirt being waterboarded by CIA agents, because if we applied to the modern anti-terror to the

way that the Americans and they flipped out, they said, listen, there's a lot of red southern states that would not go for that and all these guys you wanted hardcore that's that's no they didn't really want hardcore they wanted to get me through the doors and then we're going to make some group think thing you know the group yeah i have no effort in group think creativity well group think would be fine if you respected all the think in the group think they were all as good as you yeah well they don't have the sensibility. Most of these people. Most of them are kids

from my standpoint as an old man. And bean counters. They're bean counters that are trying to protect their own jobs. What they're worried about is the numbers. We got the dailies in. We got the numbers in. You're trending really well in 18 to 34, Dan Carlin. And it's not about building an audience over the long haul. Like you said, it's

literally about the next rating period. You've got to jump in out of the gate big time. And you have to have billboards and a big push. If you notice any time a show launches, you'll see billboard. Like there's this new show called White Famous, and it's on Showtime. And everywhere you go, there's these giant billboards for White Famous. They're not letting this thing build slowly. They want to push it out of the gate with gunpowder.

Boom! And they're hoping that with that momentum, the quality of the show will add to the momentum and then you're going to build up and a bunch of people will catch on and eventually it'll get rolling. But in order to do that, they want to take away all the jagged edges, smooth everything

down to make it aerodynamic, make everything super homogenized. I mean, that's what they do with every single sitcom. Oh, and what they'll do to your career. Like the last physical fight I almost had with another adult male was a radio program director. And the radio program director came into my town new, and you know, if you've ever been in radio,

when they come into town new, the first thing they're going to do is change everything because they've got to put their own stamp on it or why are they there? So this guy comes in and he goes, we're going to rebrand you. He goes, I want everyone to think of your name and instantly think of the brand. And I'm already, you know. The brand. Yeah, okay.

So here's what he said. So I hate to say this because this will become a meme online that I will have to live with the rest of my life. But it's an absolutely true story. So the guy says to me, he goes, listen, imagine a billboard that says Dan Carlin. He fucks chickens. And I said, excuse me? He goes, yeah, I mean, so that anytime anybody thought of you, they would think, okay, he's the chicken fucker.

And I'm going, wait a minute, really? He really said that? Yes. And I said to him, I said, I said two things, dude. I said, the first thing is I got to live in this town, right? So really, you want that to be the first thing people think? Okay. The second thing is I got to have a career after this stupid idea of yours fails

right and you're like no you don't understand we're building a mental image you'll be a household name i said yes i'll be the household name the guy who fucks chickens i said and and i and finally you know he was after me i finally said i said dude do you want to step outside right now i mean my wife laughed at me because i'm already an old man when i'm saying she goes that would have been great i said no this this guy was as old as I was. But I mean, I was so incensed and so angry that this guy would be so cavalier. With your future. Yeah, and as a human being and everything.

Family. Chicken fucker. How are they going to spell fucker on billboards? You know what? That's a really good question. They might have had a euphemism. But I mean, you think about that and you think, okay, as you said, this guy's career depends on him making a difference. I'm just a tool in his career.

Yeah. Right. So you start to realize that when you do the podcast and it's your podcast, the person that you're worried about here is you. And not just that. The ideas that are coming from you are not just yours alone, but you own them. Right. So when I say something that's stupid i own that it's not like some station said oh listen push you know i got into a fight over the oj simpson thing when

the oj simpson trial is going on and everybody it's all you hear anywhere so i didn't talk about it and so they got on me about not talking about it i had a big fight and i walked into the studio and i said fine i'll talk about it i said you know the whole topic was isn't there just too much damn oj simpson everywhere you go oh they were they were. I said, you know, the whole topic was, isn't there just too much damn OJ Simpson everywhere you go? Oh, they were at the, you know, there was a window. We were like zoo creatures. And they had this window they could bring all the sales clients to watch us perform. And I'm doing there.

And there's like five executives in the window just waiting until the next commercial break because we're going to be, we're going to. But I mean, that's why radio was so awful for me. And I didn't get fired. I must have done a good enough job to stay employed. But it was go home and pull your hair out. Constant tension. Constant tension. Imagine this is a good example for people.

Imagine if you were painting a picture. You had an idea to paint the Mona Lisa. Right. And you had a bunch of people standing over your shoulder like, hey, make her nose smaller. Exactly right. You know, her eyebrows are too bushy. She looks too Italian. There's a bunch of fucking people, if you're dealing with these things, that are just essentially trying to justify their jobs.

I mean, you're always having that whenever you're dealing with any sort of an executive position. And one of the things that you realize is how many people are unnecessary. I did Bill Simmons' show. Bill Simmons had a successful podcast, and that podcast led to an HBO show. And I had a great time on the show. No, I like him. He's a very nice guy. Very smart guy.

But when I did his show, I'm like, there's 100 people working here. There's fucking people everywhere. I get that you need cameramen. I get that you need sound men. But then who are all these other fuckers? You got all these executive-type people and office people and all these people running around. I'm like, you've made this way too complicated. Like the reason why his podcast is so successful is because it's him.

It's his singular vision, his idea. You're getting it from this person. And when you know that you're getting something from a person and you like how that guy thinks, then it becomes interesting. But when you're not really getting it from that person, you've got a bunch of people holding cue cards and standing behind them, and you're creating this bullshit thing. Well, my wife said today, we're in the hotel room, and she turns on the TV, and Ryan Seacrest is on, and he does 10,000 things a day on multiple shows.

And she says, I don't know how he does that. That's amazing that he can do all these kinds of things. But how much of it its really Ryan Seacrest I mean how you you basically have to have everything ready to go when you walk into a room and who did that you know I like listening to Ryan Seacrest why I like listening to him on the radio because it's almost like listening to an alien that tries to be like a woman who's a secretary because he does these contests like call call in right now and

like you know have someone to call in i like when i go to work and then i can go to the bathroom and look at my phone hey everybody likes that all right what's next and you're like hey you won two tickets to this all right congratulations all right monica nice talking to you it's like he's not even a fucking human on those things it's like he's figured out a way to hit this this droning sound that resonates with the people that live in that existence, with the people that are stuck in traffic and that are checking their phone every 15 minutes. Those are the people that are on Instagram 35 times a day.

You know that's the average amount of time a person looks at Instagram? 35 times a day. You know that's the average amount of time a person looks at Instagram? 35 times a day. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Ryan Seacrest fucks chickens, dude. Well, if he fucked chickens, he would be outrageous. That would be like the guy who said you're going to be the chicken fucker, he'd probably listen to Howard Stern. He's like,

this guy's outrageous. We need to get Dan Carlin to be outrageous. You're a chicken fucker. That is the other thing with the homogenization. It's always about imitating somebody who's found a good formula, right? Yeah, for sure. And I will say this about Limbaugh. Limbaugh's right when he says

that there will be a wing in the talk radio museum devoted to him one day. But what he always says, which I find interesting, is he tried to do what he does now multiple times and got fired because their attitude was,

what is it? And we're not taking any chances with this and then he says the minute I'm successful every consultant out there is telling everybody to be just like him yeah in other words if you really and if you're a podcaster out there or thinking about doing something in the new media understand that there is something so valuable about what you specifically are bringing to the table and the minute you ask these other people what to do they're going to they don't know what's specific about it. They're going to go and say, well, we can pull a little piece of what this person does. And eventually it's not even you. One of the great things I

always thought about hardcore history is that over time you self-select your audience. I think you do that with every podcast. So you say something like, okay, I'm only going to talk about the stuff I'm interested in. Well, what you know then a year later is whatever fans are listening to you, that's a pretty good gauge because they're there because they like what you're... So I don't have to sit there and go, gosh, this would be a popular topic. I just do what I want to do. And over time, you've developed an audience that likes that. I also think that there's something happening when you do have this... When you have a singular vision, like one person who's driving this thing, singular vision, like one person who's driving this thing, right?

And over time, I feel like people get a sense of you in a way deeper sense than just listening to your words. They're chunking data. Yeah. They're adding up all of the communication that you've had. They're analyzing how you see different scenarios. They're analyzing how you see different scenarios. They're analyzing how you navigate certain, and they're seeing you when you're tired, and they're seeing you when you're feeling in a great mood, and then maybe they're seeing you when something bad happened, and you don't feel so good.

And all this is like, so they get to know you, and there's an intimate understanding of you that is almost impossible to get when you're hosting The Tonight Show or you're acting in a television show. Or doing a five minute piece of content opposed to a three hour piece of content. Yeah. There's a weird thing. And I think that's one of the things, like if people know me, if you listen to this podcast long enough, you know me and you might not agree with me and you might think I'm wrong

or I'm a blowhard, but you know, I you might not agree with me and you might think i'm wrong or i'm a blowhard but you know i'm honest right i'm this i might be wrong but i'll tell you if i think i'm wrong if i think i'm wrong i'm the first person to go i think i'm wrong i'm i'm not i'm never going to cover that up and you shouldn't believe people that don't think they're wrong you can't it's not good for you either the person who pulls it off it's not good for you because you know you're wrong you're carrying that shit around your head all the time. No, I always say if you think if people and this is, again, why one of my current events podcast is not really happening right now, because I I feel like when you're in absolutely uncharted water, you can't know what's going on. So that's how you feel right now. Yeah.

I think we're in uncharted. And I think I think it's a combination. Everyone always thinks it's a Trump thing. But to me, Trump is a vector. To me, what you were talking about with the social media is as much a part interacting together has created an absolutely unprecedented situation so maybe i just organize my thinking differently but i organize it historically and there's no way to put this into any box that's ever existed before so when i watch these talk shows or or whatever with people who have no choice at 6 p.m i have to be on the air and i have to have something to say to rile the audience up. You know, they have no options.

Their gig is, I know what's going on and let me tell you. Whereas if they were honest with themselves, they either would have to say, I don't know what's going on and I'm watching too. Or if they really do believe they know what's going on, well, then you really shouldn't be listening to them at all. Yeah, right. Then they're crazy. There's no way they could. There's no way they could. No.

Yeah. I think we're dealing with the ramifications of a bunch of different pieces that are in play. Yes. And I think one of those pieces that's in play, and one of the reasons why you see so much bitterness and anger in social media, and we talked about this mechanism that social media allows people to communicate in this really cruel way without experiencing that person right in front of you, right? But I think one of the reasons why these people have this deep-seated anger and resentment is there's a bunch of people out there

that have these lives that are deeply unsatisfying because I think somehow or another through momentum and just through just things falling into place the way they are and people trying to fit their lives around the way these pieces

have fallen into place, there are so many people that are working all day long doing something that is deeply unsatisfying and almost painful to them. Yeah, soul killing. Soul killing. They're stuck in traffic all day, and then they're stuck in a cubicle after that. They relish the time to take a shit in the bathroom and look at their phone. I mean, they literally do that.

That's a highlight of someone's day. They get in traffic on the way home. They get home after that. They're watching television. And they're fucked. They have deep debt. This is not like, there's this soul-killing thing that's not giving them any freedom. The debt's huge.

And you know what? You sit there and go, and you look at what people make, and you sit there and go, you can make quite a lot of money by average Joe's standards and still not be in good shape. No. So I know people turn around, make good living good living and turn around go i'm just holding my head above water yeah and so you go okay if you're holding your head just barely what's a person making a third or a quarter of what you're making doing i mean this is really when you talk about revolutions happening and and and things going down in unpredictable, negative ways. And we've talked about this before.

You let enough of your society fall into the loser class, for lack of a better word, winners and losers in society. Every society can suck up a certain amount of people not able to make it. But if that number gets large enough, revolutions happen. I think so, too. But I think the revolution doesn't necessarily have to be violent. I think the revolution can be a revolution of action and ideas. And I think that there's a ton of people out there that are probably listening to this that would like to be able to do something else. Absolutely.

Whether it's make furniture. Well, they don making furniture feels good. If you can do that, you could cut those corners perfectly and sand everything down nice and stain it and then it's done and you get the satisfaction and you sell it to someone and that pays your bills, that is infinitely more satisfying

than being stuck in some fucking cubicle working for someone that you don't want to work for, having to have these stupid fucking office meetings, talking to people in human resources sitting down with your supervisor where they evaluate your job performance and you know you're not really you know you really need to be enthusiastic about this company this company is your future this kind of like you're like fuck kill me now you know there's a lot of people out there that would way rather do something else and i hope they understand that they can.

Let's talk about that because we're in there. We're in that. Because we've been talking about us and podcasting and new media and whatever. But really, and I tell I give I really like to give advice because, you know, you don't want to you don't be responsible for people acting on it and having it not turn out well. But what I tell people is two things right now, the United States of America, the way it's built, is built to help industry and corporations and companies. But that doesn't necessarily mean it has to be Microsoft. It can be you, right? Yeah, you can have your own thing. And let's talk about the furniture builder.

Once upon a time, there are huge things in your way, including needing to get loans and all these other things to just start a business. So you're behind the eight ball right away, and the pressure's on because if it doesn't work, you're in debt. Whereas, I mean, we started these podcasts, there's no brick or mortar. I mean, now you've got just the Rogan Tower. It's a little bit different. But once upon a time, it's like in the back of your bedroom

and you've got a company and it's got a show and people are listening. If you make your furniture and you don't have to have a brick and mortar store, but you can put a website up, make it with Squarespace or one of those other things, and all of a sudden you have a business out of your house. The freedom, the satisfaction, the ability to set your own hours, and here's the best part.

The fact that if you start making a lot of money somehow, you're not going to have your boss cut your commissions. I mean, I knew sales guys who made so much money that their bosses cut their commissions because you can't make more than your bosses. Well, listen, when you have your own small business, the sky's the limit. If you make $10 million, you make $10 million. So I always tell people that if you can, and it's not always something they can do, maybe you do it on the side when you've got your regular job, starting a small business now in this climate that we have right now is not only possible, it's not that much of a gamble because if worse comes to worse, you didn't invest $100,000 you didn't have starting it all the time, right?

Yeah. I mean, that website didn't cost you that much. The investment for the tools you may have had already. Podcasting is a perfect example. We make business, like my buddy says, we sell zeros and ones. Yeah. That's what we do. Well, it's never been easier to have a website either.

No. It's easier with companies like Squarespace. You could develop a website. You could literally build an amazing website in a fucking hour. And sell your furniture. And you have a free online store with it. And they have these drag and drop user interfaces. You use photos.

You drag them on there. Size it in place. Boom. Next thing you know, you've got a website. Sell your furniture. Sell whatever the fuck you make. Whether you make clothes or you're designing backpacks. There's a lot of people out there that have interests and they've never pursued those interests because they're fucking tired from doing some boring, soul-sucking job.

It's hard to go to work and put your effort into that and then come home and then work for yourself. It's very hard. But I'll tell you what. Like you said, there's a part of it that once you start making stuff for yourself, that's self-motivating, right? Like I told somebody to start a podcast. I said the first time you get some feedback email, that will kick you in the rear end to keep doing the podcast. It becomes, you know, life is a verb, I always say. And you have to actually act.

But by acting, you change everything in your future. Another guy said to me, it's a great line. He said with podcasts, it's not always how many people are listening. Sometimes it's who they are, right? So my grandmother's philosophy was always that you should keep walking and talking. But in her era, walking and talking meant going and shaking people's hands. And now you can network like through the internet and you never are really shaking people's hands, but you may have a podcast with only a hundred listeners. But if one of those listeners is some guy somewhere else who says, oh my God, this guy's furniture is great or whatever. I'm going to, I'm going to, but you may have a podcast with only 100 listeners. But if one of those listeners is some guy somewhere else who says, oh, my God, this guy's furniture is great or whatever.

I'm going to I'm going to maybe you can come and start giving a pottery barn. You know what? OK. I mean, things open up in ways that you can't predict because you started doing something and because you have legitimate passion for what you're doing. That resonates doesn't feel like experience that. Yeah. If they see.

I mean, I can't tell you how many artists that I've discovered online just through Instagram or through Twitter. Like someone will send me a- It's a creative revolution. Yes. Yeah. In an amazing way. And I hope, and I think there's way more creative people out there than we realize.

Oh, yes. Absolutely. And I think they would love to have some sort of an opportunity to do something like that. And especially like an artist. Someone who's an artist, man, there's never been a better time to be an artist because you could showcase your work. And look, if you send me something cool and, you know, you send it to me on Twitter, I'll fucking retweet it.

Yeah, totally. I retweet things all the time. And all that takes is someone else has to see that and say, wow, that's amazing. And then it just propagates to all these different people's Instagram feeds and all these people's Twitter feeds. The next thing you know, you've got a business and you're up and running and it's not going to be easy and people's Instagram feeds and all these people's Twitter feeds. And next thing you know, you've got a business. And you're up and running. And it's not going to be easy and it's not going to be quick.

But the job you're doing now ain't easier. The soul-killing one ain't easier or quick either. But people think like, oh, how long is that going to take? Oh, but when you start out doing a podcast, well, I only got 10 downloads. Well, that's how it works. We all were there once. Yeah, I was there once. Dude, when we first did it, when Brian and I were first doing this podcast and we were doing it on like

Ustream, we would have 200 viewers and I wasn't doing it for money. I was literally doing it because my wife had gotten pregnant. We had to move from Colorado back to LA and I was bummed out. I was like, fuck, I thought I escaped. I thought I got out of LA. I was living in the mountains. I was like, this is what I want. I want to be in nature. I was like, I don't want to be back in this fucking hell hole.

Like, all right, let's do something. And so we started doing podcasts just for a goof because I was doing standup. That was all well and good. Look at how it tied into your standup so nicely. But my point is it didn't start out, I didn't start out thinking, this is going to replace my income. This is going to be, I just did it as a passion project. And I think if people have a regular day job, if you could just find some one thing that

you do as a passion project and just keep building on it just keep at cheap watering it keep adding fertilizer keep giving it attention keep giving it focus and you can escape you can escape and you can be self-serving you could be okay you're gonna be okay I always ask people when they want to start it I like a podcast I'll say something like how many listeners would you have to have for you to care right what what's and that's a magic number that's different for everybody right but but what what's great about what we do that's a magic number that's different for everybody, right? But what's great about what we do that's different from broadcasting is that there is a giant pie of people. Let's pretend it's a billion.

And if you're going to do a podcast on science fiction comic books from the 1950s or something that has such a narrow audience, they'd never put it on television because it's too narrow. It has such a narrow audience, they'd never put it on television because it's too narrow. You will be able, if you even get.00001% of that billion pie, it's not only going to be a decent number of people in terms of what you would think is successful, but they are going to be so enthusiastic because this is an outlet that they don't have. It's like I always tell somebody, if you're into Harry Potter, what are the TV networks giving you? But there's multiple Harry Potter podcasts. Listen to this. You want to hear something crazy? Sure.

Time Magazine just had some top 50 podcast thing, and a buddy of mine who was angry that he wasn't on sent me some stuff about it. And one of the things he said, dude, there's a fucking podcast on there called The Gilmore Boys. That's guys, two guys sitting around talking about the Gilmore Girls television show. There's another one called something about Richard Simmons, where there's finding Richard Simmons, where they're trying to figure out why Richard Simmons went into hiding. What's so great about that idea, though, and again, and you at home can learn this, too.

What's so great about that idea is that they instantly tied their podcast to somebody who already had tons of fans. Yes. Right. So you sit there and go, I don't know who these guys are or what this, but I'm a huge Richard Simmons fan, so I'll listen. And that's like instant audience, isn't it? And there's another podcast called Guys We Fucked.

These girls came up with this podcast. And this is one that I always use in this example because these, who are the girls from Guys We Fucked? Find their names. These comedians from New York, they came, and they're actually going to be on the podcast Monday.

Ooh, that was a clever tie-in. I didn't mean to, but I used them as an example because we just booked this earlier today. Christina Hutchinson and Corinne, excuse me, Corinne Fisher. And they came up with this clever idea for the title,

and it became huge. I mean, it's always top 10. It's like one of the top 10 comedy podcasts. And people say, oh the title, and it became huge. I mean, it's always top ten. It's like one of the top ten comedy podcasts. And people say, oh, well, today it's saturated. No, it's not stupid. Just do something that's good. Stop saying it's saturated. If you're good, it'll stand out.

This idea that, oh, it's easy for you to say. Everybody's got these stupid barriers they put in their own head. You've got to resist those goddamn things because they don't do you any good, and they certainly define the potential for your future in a negative way that's not self-serving and it's not even real. You put this artificial ceiling on the potential for what you're doing.

If you hit a wall, okay, that just means you need to regroup and rethink. It doesn't mean that wall's there, especially when it comes to something like social media or like a podcast, something where you're just, you're putting out a piece of art, you're putting out something that you've created. walls there, especially when it comes to something like social media or like a podcast, something where you're just, you're putting out a piece of art, you're putting out something that you've created.

There's no wall as far as like how many people are going to enjoy it or how far it's going to go. It's just, it is what it is. And if people don't like it, make it better. If they like it less, fix that. Figure out a way to do it. You can do that. And this idea that there's no way to get past the starting block today is just ludicrous. It's crazy. And it's just this poor thinking. And people that are trapped in bad situations, one of the problems is you feel like this is your future. You feel like you're fucked and you can't get out of that. There's no hope. There's no light at the end of the tunnel. There's no rainbow.

You can't get out of that. There's no hope. There's no light at the end of the tunnel. There's no rainbow. And if you feel like that, that alone can be incredibly defining and limiting. But if you can look at yourself objectively and say, okay, I kind of am fucked here. I'm in credit card debt. I'm working in a shitty job.

I don't like what I'm doing. But I have some ideas. I need to feed those fucking ideas. I need to feed them and water them. And I need to set aside a certain amount of time every day to just try to make those things happen. You can do that. I like visual images. We use that in the hardcore history a lot. What's it like to fight an elephant with a spear?

Things like that. I like those. It's like to die. That's what it's like. The image I have, though, for what you're talking about, I've always thought it's a little like a running back in football who takes the ball and who goes forward and there's no hole. Right. All you run into is the back of your offensive lineman. But if you keep hitting, if a hole is going to open up, boom, you'll squirt through. Now, there's no guarantee in life the hole will be there.

But there is a guarantee that if you're not continually smacking at it, then when it opens up, you won't be ready. Yes. Right. And so I don't know about you, joe you've had a charmed life i think in how well you've done but i mean some of us have failed many times i've failed at a bunch of but i mean but i guess what i'm saying is i remember being a tv reporter at a small station uh and and i would get out of work at like midnight and the and the story that i just spent all day on aired and it was awful and i would get out and would literally, this is when I still had quite a bit of hair, I would sit there and like, you like pull your hair out. You go, what am I doing?

Right? This is horrible. And I look back on those now, and I think, you know, what if you had just given up then? Right? Or the podcast. I mean, do you know how my wife did a great thing for me? We'd had that company that I just told you about. We were trying to do the new media thing, and it just fell apart like everybody's companies were starting to do.

And I'd wasted a lot of time and a lot of money in my life doing that. And she would have been totally justified in saying, that's it. You're going to Indianapolis, get a talk radio show job wherever they'll hire you. But she didn't. She said, you know what? Try this next thing. You could do it. And here we are.

And I think if you hadn't tried, it's that weird thing. And folks do it. And here we are. And I think, you know, if you hadn't tried, it's that weird thing. And folks, I tried being a TV reporter. I tried being, you try all those things and either they're not successful or they're moderately successful or they're successful, but not enough for you. You got, life is a verb. You have to, you know, the thing that people, that makes people the most sad in life. And I already have a couple of friends, my own age, who are there is the regrets, right? They don don't they're not sorry they failed they're sorry they didn't try and the funny thing is they're some of them are only 50 and they think okay my my window to try is already gone and which is wrong too but folks you will be so happy there's

so many things that have happened in my life because i i mean i got my first talk radio show job i was i was a reporter i covered this story there was some big guy showing up at the local radio station as I was leaving I wrote a letter to the program director to say thanks for having us and I thought do I mail this do I not mail it do I mail it to it and just you know I closed my eyes and I mailed he called me two days later she won a job what if you didn't send that letter it's stupid the little things that your life can hinge on but if you don't do, you don't give fate an opportunity to intervene. I think here's an important thing, too.

Failure is important. It is important. I think failure teaches you things that you don't learn from success. I think failure gives you an opportunity for self-examination. It also gives you a feeling that is very uncomfortable. And that very uncomfortable feeling helps you grow. That when you feel like shit and you screw something up, like when I've had bad podcasts,

my podcast has always gotten better afterwards. When I've had bad stand-up sets, I've always gotten better after that because those bad sets motivate you. They give you a perspective like, hey, here's some clear examples of where you fucked up. Yeah, what not to do. Yeah, and don't look at these failures

as like proof that you suck. Look at them as opportunities for growth. Look at them as opportunities to be motivated to do better. Winston Churchill had a line about reading quotes, about how inspirational reading famous quotes were. And he says they motivate you from a number of different ways, including the idea that you think it's just you or you think that these people who did so well were so incredibly gifted or privileged from the get go. And when you realize,

no, no, no, they're more like me than I think that becomes inspirational, right? You telling your audience this is inspirational. You don't want to hear, go back to school, go do this work.

But if you hate your job, that is like nature telling you to try something different. And it's motivating because the motivation is you might not have to do that soul-killing job anymore. Well, if you look at someone who's doing really well, like say if you focus on like Kevin Hart or someone like that, some very famous and successful comedian, all you see is him now flying around in private jets, wearing a new pair of sneakers every day, driving around in Bentleys. You just see that. You don't see him being a young kid in Philadelphia, going to open mic nights, scratching and clawing,

writing jokes. MC Hammer selling the tapes out of the hatchback. All that stuff, man. There's a path. And we think of people like, you see an old person walking down the street. You go, oh, that person's always been an old person. No, that was a baby. That was a baby that became a 90-year-old man.

There's a progression that you're not witness to. You don't see it. And that takes place in everything. It takes place in authors. It takes place in comedians and musicians. There is a starting point. And then with time and focus and as long as you reevaluate and reassess and constantly, objectively look at what you're doing and then pursue it with passion and focus, you get better at things. And you know what, doing all those things ends up, you know, it's funny, but your life experiences create who you are. And all those things actually make you a more form. I know I'm speaking to the choir here, but, but all those things make you a more formidable person so that eventually that next endeavor is is you're more prepared for and you're more formidable and and so you know You turn around you say what was I like as a 23 year old intern? Compared to what I'm like now and I'm basically a different person and you're a different person because of all these life Experiences, I mean you go to a CENTCOM meeting with the big brat. Well, you're more formidable afterwards, right for sure

But if you don't put yourself in the position, you know, it's life is like coming up to the, to the plate and taking a swing. There are no guarantees you're going to get a hit, no guarantee. And you might even look foolish swinging, but there's no chance of it if you don't get in the battered box, right? A hundred percent. And one of the things that I've found over the last few years in particular, I've done it in the past, but I did it because they were just goals that I was pursuing on the side as well as doing standup and all the other things that I do in my life. But I've found that things that are completely unrelated to my career that are difficult enhance what I do.

Whether it's yoga or running hills or archery or all these things that I pursue. And you've managed to incorporate them into what you do. Sort of. But that's just because one of the things that I do is just talk about things that I pursue. And you've managed to incorporate them into what you do. Yeah, sort of. But that's just because one of the things that I do is just talk about things that I'm interested in. But they make my focus better because they're hard and because I'm not good at them. So like when I do yoga, I'm not good at yoga. So when I do it, it's hard.

It's a fucking struggle. And forcing myself to get through that 90-minute class and try 100% with every pose enhances my stamina for thinking and approaching other things. Let's macro it out a little bit because I'm very interested in what you're saying. So here you and I are talking to the listeners, many of whom are already accomplished and well into their goals. But if they're not, they're listening to this. And I'm thinking to myself, okay, if you're trying to design a society you know we had talked about revolution if too many people are the losers in the society of if you said to yourself what really matters in the society is making

more Americans who are happier with their lives more successful doing what they want to do in other words empowering them to create how different is that in terms of a setup from what our school system is designed to do now, which is a holdover to essentially make good factory workers, right? I mean, if you said to somebody, listen, this entire country is built for you to become a businessman with your own business, you start your own company. If you taught that in the schools from the get-go and you had workshops all, and everybody's going to say, damn, we already do that in the schools. I already know. But I mean, if that was the entire goal of your education to turn every student in that

class into a small business person doing their own dreams someday, how would you do it differently than what you do now? Because to me, the biggest crime isn't that we have the kind of system we have. It's that we're not training people on how to utilize it. I mean, we have all these opportunities there and it sounds like a cliche, but we're doing it. And as you go through it, you say to yourself, well, why can't more people do this? Well, who told them they could? And who said?

You know, I mean, this is a little bit of a hand-holding, but I'm teaching this to my kids right now, right? I'm telling them, listen, don't go do the soul-killing job. Work on this thing that you seem to be good at and that you love, and let's work on it now. I mean, I guess what I'm saying is, could we be doing a better job here? And if so, you know, would you have to fight teachers' unions to do it? What do you have to do to break apart a system that's 140 years old and not working all that well right now to more correspond to the reality that people are growing up in now? Well, I had a conversation with my daughter yesterday about this, my nine-year-old.

And she was saying, school is so boring. I don't want to go to school tomorrow. She was laughing about it. I was picking her up from this class that she goes to. And I said, well, what's the most boring? She goes, it's all boring. She's being funny, right? Right. And I go, well, you like reading, and you're really into reading. She goes, yeah, I do. I like it. But they make it boring. She goes, they make reading boring. And she goes, they make, I go, but you like writing, right?

You like writing? She goes, I like writing what I want to write about. Yeah, sure. They make writing boring. So she's creative. Yeah, but she was being silly. But the wisdom from a nine-year-old, we were just laughing and having fun talking about it, but the wisdom from a nine-year-old expressing how they make things that she likes boring.

It's like, I think there's a certain amount that you have to do that's boring, right? There's a certain amount of the hard work. Even in your business that you like. Sure, learning grammar, learning language, a certain amount of that stuff is fucking boring. Once you get past that boring shit and you have a base understanding of how to communicate, how to add, how to count, how to multiply, how government works, all these different things that you should have sort of a base understanding of, then it's like everyone has a different personality.

They have different interests, different things that they would be really satisfied pursuing. That's not encouraged. What's encouraged is go find a job. What's encouraged is go find some place that you can shove yourself into. Go find a square hole that you can stick your round peg and just fucking jam it in there and shave down the top and the bottom. So you slide in with all this extra space on the sides and feel like shit for the rest of your life. Because you need a job. Because you're in debt. Because you have credit cards.

Because you have student loans. Because that's what everybody does. And so you do it too. That's what's wrong. What's wrong is that we don't give... It's like we let them figure it out on their own, and it fucking takes forever. It took forever for me. The only thing that I had going for me was that I was crazy and that I had been spending most of my high school years fighting so that I was already so far outside of anybody that I – I was so weird.

I didn't fit in anywhere. I was weird too. Isn't that funny? I didn't feel like I had a – I was so weird. I didn't fit in anywhere. I was weird too. Isn't that funny? I didn't feel like I had a pot. I knew one thing. I couldn't work like a regular job. Like I had to figure out something else. Cause I mean, there's the idea of, it was literally the idea of being in an office was like torture. Okay. Can I just tell you, so that's the hinge point, the difference between you and this. So, so here's, if I was, if I was creating a fantasy educational system, the hinge point between what you just said is that you said, I couldn't stand this.

I couldn't work the real job. I couldn't fit into this. So I did something, had to find another way. A lot of people get stuck with the, so I had to find another way part. Yeah. You know, it's funny because, you know, your kids are young enough to see you went through this. But I mean, when my kids were really young before they were in the school they're in now, we put them in one of those Montessori schools.

How are those? So everybody goes together? No, it's different school to school, but the basic concept is that you don't force the children to learn anything specific. You have all these things around, and the children go to what they want to do. So the upside is obviously that from the get-go, they're only reading what they're into. The downside, of course, is that there's all this other stuff you're supposed to do. So the upside's obviously that from the get-go, they're only reading what they're into. The downside, of course, is that there's all this other stuff you're supposed to learn. It's the dichotomy between how do you, you know, you had talked about needing to have these skills, little math skills. You need some basic foundational stuff. But something is also

happening at that level, which is you're finding out which students are into math and would like to have a career in math. Other people are being touched by a foreign language in a way that they think, I'd like to learn more. I'd like to speak it fluently. I'd like to teach it. So in a way, you're already beginning to select what kids are into by exposing them to this stuff. Most of us find it boring, but there might be something, that's where I first found history as a discipline, right? If most kids say, oh God, the last thing I want to hear is some history, but I get turned on by it. Okay, well, then it's worth exposing you to all those things. I think the problem is, though, is that it would be great, for example, to have half your schooling, maybe at that young age, be sort of a Montessori model where you say, okay, we spent our time on reading, writing, and arithmetic. Now we want you to go around.

And it has to be – you can't be playing video games unless playing video games is what you want to do for a living and you're going to be able to to do some educational work on it but i mean i would love to see more of a fostering for the fact that listen we're trying to create entrepreneurs here rather than trying to create drone workers on the amazon assembly line now if you end up on the amazon assembly line anyway great good for you i'm glad you can bring some food home but the goal ought to be to let you start a business and maybe employ a bunch of other people, you know? Yeah. And the goal would be to have less unhappy, dissatisfied people.

Because it creates a more stable society. Well, also happier. Yeah. It creates more satisfaction. The people that I know that get to do what they want to do for a living, it's not like their lives are completely happy. Everybody's going to face problems, no matter who you are. Absolutely. It was a Kanye West who said, do rich people have problems or just different problems?

Everybody's got these challenges. But like you said, there's not a lot more stressful than having a ton of credit card debt, wondering if you're going to lose your house, wondering how you're going to pay for your kid's education. I mean, all those things are soul crushing. Not only that, because you're in debt, you get nervous. So it suppresses your ability to express yourself and take risks because you don't want to lose your gig. You don't want to, you know, it's like, man, there's no way to live.

You're tired. I mean, the one thing is as you get older, I mean, it's funny because getting older is one of those things that you can only understand when you get there. So all through your life, you're going through these, God, isn't this the interesting part of being in your 30s or being in your 40s? So as I go into my 50s now, I'm sitting here going, energy is so under-talked about. You know, the ability to, like my buddy who wrote me and said, you know, I feel like I screwed up my life. I didn't take enough chances. I played it safe and now I'm so unhappy. He says, and I just can't motivate myself at 50 years old anymore, energy wise, to start over.

Energy is underrepresented. It's hard. Well, tell that guy he's got to fix his health. I knew you were going to say that. That's what it is. Your health is your engine. Yeah, it is. Your health is your engine. Your health is literally the chassis, the tires, the brakes, the engine of your vehicle that you move through this life with. And too many people don't pay attention to it.

The lack of energy is killer. And as you get older, especially. It's not just that. It changes your ability to do things. If you don't have energy, not only will you not have the energy to pursue things But you won't you won't be able to do them the same way if you have energy and enthusiasm and say like you're healthy And you want to write a book you're gonna have thoughts that'll come into your mind That won't come into your mind if you're exhausted agreed, and that's fucking huge That's huge for anything you're trying to pursue whether we we're talking about furniture making, whether you're talking about being an author, whatever it is. Let's talk about ideas

for a minute, because I think that's another one. When we talk about small businesses or starting as an entrepreneur, you know, I'm one of those people that is not sure that we don't have a finite number of ideas to each of us. And all of them are valuable enough, even if they don't appear to be on the surface, to write down. Yeah. You know, as a matter of fact, I keep I went to a business meeting a couple years ago with one of these TV guys I was just talking about. And we go to this business meeting and, you know, we're all on our phones and whatever. And he pulls out an old fashioned journal that you write in and he just starts writing.

And I looked at that and I thought, in one sense, he looks like a dinosaur. But I went out and bought one and now It's crazy. How often you know, all I do is write ideas in it and a lot of them I look back on now and I go, okay, that's still stupid But other ones I look back on and go god, I didn't know what this idea meant at the time But five years later this idea is really you know I guess what I'm saying is that if you wanted to take almost like a religious view of it God only gives you somebody write down and cherish the ideas.

But there is something to that. Folks, what really is going to make you unique sometimes is the way your brain works differently than anyone's brain who's ever existed on the planet. That's valuable right there. Write down what comes out of the brain. Well, capture those things. Yes, capture them. Because if you don't capture them, they will slip away. And sometimes the idea isn't good until the second half arrives later, right?

So idea number one's in your book from five years ago. Idea number two that finally completes that idea arrives later. I mean, I had a friend who was so creative, and he said he gets the best ideas at night. So he just turns on the light at the side of the table, writes it down in the book, and by morning, there's another idea down there. there. And quantity has a quality all its own. And sometimes a book filled with interesting ideas out of your individual unique head will help you later on. So write them down. There's no downside. I have an app on my phone where I can just, you know, the notes app, you use that where it has a little microphone.

It's filled with stuff. I talk into that thing. I do too. And it dictates it really almost perfectly. So I'll have an idea and I'll just be driving down the road. I just press that button. I start talking into it and then I put it down. I got it.

Like I got that one. I captured it. Think about people who had one fantastic idea in their life and built their whole life on it. And you never know which idea that's going to be. And you know what? I was an improv. Again, you know more about this than I do, but I was a theater major for my first two years of college. And we did improv comedy. And the guy who taught us improv in high school, really, he had a great line. He said, that part of your brain, like every part of your brain is a muscle. And he said, the more you're thinking, okay, I got to show this

Friday that I have to come up with something funny for the better you get at it. And, and, and you start looking, your brain starts looking at things and finding things. So you're almost like training it to help you now in this new endeavor. It's a very plastic sort of an approach, but, but it's the same thing with the ideas. One idea in your little book that you wrote down could make your life, your child. I mean, if you're Henry Ford, I mean, how many people did you employ for decades afterwards because of a good idea? I mean, our world is built on those things. And also like the idea of having these ideas and the enthusiasm that comes from it, like it starts to escalate and you start to calculate like, oh, and I need more and I need this and maybe that.

And then the motivation and the momentum of these ideas can lead to enthusiasm. And you attract other people who can add. And I mean, this is what we said about like you start your website and you just do it because things once you push the verb of living manages to create ripples and get a little bit metaphysical here but ripples in time in front of you that open up possibilities and because someone may if you only have one podcast listener but that podcast listener is like wow that's great i'm gonna and gets a hold of you and your life goes off in another different direction but you have to try you have to try yeah well you don't have to you could just just drone on. But I would recommend not doing that. I would also suggest that you and I and everyone has an interest in not allowing people to drone on too much. Because for the same reason I talked about, we did a common sense show once called The Revenge of the Gangrenous Finger.

And the idea was that, you know, if you ignore people in your society that aren't doing well long enough, it's a little like saying, yes, my finger has gangrene, but it's the little one, so who the hell cares? But eventually, if you ignore it long enough, it'll poison your bloodstream and destroy the body itself. If you have enough people in soul-crushing situations who can't— You know, a guy called me once on the radio when I was preaching revolution in the middle 1990s and said, you're an idiot. He said, you're an idiot because no one's going to face the bayonets as long as they have enough food in their bellies and they're doing halfway okay but of course the implication there is if they don't have food in their bellies and they're not doing okay then all bets are off we all have a vested

interest in seeing that more of our countrymen do better because it's better for the society as a whole creates a better world for your kids happier i mean there's there's so many and the one thing about our system you know people talk about patriotism all the time uh but to me the real patriotism is saying we've created a system here it works this way it encourages people to go do these things so if the system is designed and set up for that you ought to give it a try you ought to just see yeah you know the suggestion that i always give to people is write down that, you ought to give it a try. You ought to just see. Yeah, and the suggestion that I always give to people is write down things that you want to try to accomplish. Just write them down.

A guy said to me, he said, write the way you want your obituary to appear now. Sit down, write your obituary. He says, because that'll show you how far off your goals you are. Well, here's a better one. Pretend there's a documentary crew filming your success

story and they're following you around right now. What would you do? What would you do if you knew that there was a crew following you around with cameras documenting your future incredible success and they want to catch you in the act of it all? You would do all the right things you would have to do. Think about that. Organize it. But we are saddled down by so many doubts and so much just mental horseshit that keeps people from action. But look at the thing that's, to me, maybe the number one thing that's the impediment and that makes society unequal. It's the luck of who your parents are. That's a big one. I mean, if you say, listen, this guy grew up and started his own business because his folks taught him those kinds of things and encouraged him when he or she with her creativity.

OK, that's a person that's got a huge advantage in life. We talked about white privilege giving you an advantage. Well, good parent privilege gives you an advantage. But then the question that if you're looking at it macro in a society sense that comes up is, OK, what what can society do if you say this is a real problem for the rest of us, not enough good parents because those people never learned it how do you compensate for that and that almost gets a little socialistic where you talk about the state teaching you creativity and it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense but there's got to be if we decide that this is a national security interest you know having more

americans live in the dream have less losers but what if your parents are losers yeah well you can get past that i know a lot of people that have had losers for parents. Could we increase the number of people? You know, if you say, okay, 500 out of 1,000 overcome that, how do you get to 600? How do you get to 700 out of 1,000? And if you say it's a national security concern that we do, I mean, I think ambition is a gene. I really do. And I think that some of us, you could be born into any circumstance, but you've've got this gene so you're going to be ambitious and you're going to overcome it then i think there's

people who have no ambition gene and there's nothing you can do to help them and then i think there's a huge number of people in the middle that could go either way and the question i have is you don't have to help the ones with the gene you can't do anything for the ones without the gene how do you increase the odds for the people who could go either way i think you give them a template you give them some some markers that they can follow who's we though i mean that they're you me yes it's yes okay anybody who's already gone anybody who's ahead you go hey come on come this way i mean that's there's a responsibility that we have for each other what about like incubating businesses i mean you look at some of these um in the little town we're at what little town eugene oregon where I live now.

I love Eugene, by the way. You know, it's great. If you're from Los Angeles like I am, it's green. I like Boulder where you live. I went to college there. But if you are living in a place like that, they have a venture capitalist angel investor thing for people who are starting small businesses. And it's not a government deal, although the county's in it, I think, a little bit.

But it's one of those things where you go, okay, if this is a good idea, could we be doing more of this? Where you say, Joe Blow wants to start a business. He needs $100,000 to do it. If you go to a bank, they're never going to approve it because you have too much credit card debt. Could we as a society say, hey, we have an interest in Joe Blow doing well with that furniture company. What can we do to help? It may be pie in the sky. I think even better, the better thing would be to not have a loan to try to figure out how to do it without a loan. One of the beautiful things about

Kickstarter and GoFundMe is that you could raise money now. You don't need a storefront? No, you don't need anything. I just feel like people need inspiration and they need guidelines. As long as you can just start moving, just get action.

Just movement. Get something going. That's what I said, verb. You got it. Yeah. And folks, listen, that's the one thing to really take out of this is that just try and see what happens. And my stepfather had a great line. He said, what's the worst that can happen?

Yeah. And, you know, sometimes you have to think about that to realize if you're scared about failure, don't be scared about the greatest in the world have failed. If you're worried about going into debt, I understand that. Don't be scared of failure. I think failure is awesome for you. And that's one of the reasons why, like I said, I like doing things that I suck at. You know, you could get real complacent if you're really good at something and you only do that thing all the time. I agree with that. And you're not growing anymore. Yeah, you're just not challenged. You're not like, you're not at the bottom of the heap.

You know, if you start jujitsu right now and you're a white belt, you're like, Oh God, what the fuck? How, how could I ever get good at this? And it's, it's humbling. But in that humbling thing, you learn about yourself, you learn about discipline and you build up that engine, that muscle that is trying to work things out and figure things out. Creating a more formidable you. Yeah. It's a good way to look at it.

Now, as a historian, you know- I'm not a historian. I know you like to say that, but you are, motherfucker. I want to get a t-shirt. I'm not a historian. You're probably one of the most important historians ever. How about that, fuckface? I don't know what-

I'm speechless. But as someone who is a fan of history, how about that fuck face don't know what I'm speechless but as someone who is a fan of history how about this I'll put it in a more palatable way for you um how do you look at what do you do you look at like what's going on with this administration and with this country and this the I mean our president is he he tweeted at the at Kim Jong-un saying that Kim Jong-un said that I'm old. I don't know why he said that because I never say that he's short and fat. And like maybe we could be friends someday. He's like Don Rickles as president. It's fucking hilarious.

But do you look at it in terms of like one day someone is going to do a hardcore history series about the Trump administration? Do you ever look at it that way? Do you look at it in terms of like establishing a narrative or like trying to describe it to people someday? I think we're too in the maelstrom, like we said earlier, for me to figure that out. I will say that I see certain side benefits. So for example, you know, one of the things that i've talked about for many many years and we did a whole six hour podcast on it too is the is the president's power to launch a nuclear war all by himself yeah or

herself that was a great series well and it's here's the thing is that that's an obvious flaw i mean that's and everybody understands it but nobody's done anything about it so now because everyone's so scared of trump they're talking about fixing a problem that has should have been fixed decades and decades ago. Not because he's a great president and they're looking for, but because they're so freaking scared of him and he's so outside. You know, I mean, it's funny because why these politicians and they'll trust people from the other parties. It doesn't matter. You didn't hear the Democrats saying we can't have George W. Bush with his finger on the nuclear button. You didn't hear George W. Bush. They're all fine with it as long as you're one of those insiders. The first time you get an outsider in there, now they're scared to death. But they should have been

scared to death decades and decades ago. So if you said that we have a Trump presidency and the only big thing that comes out of it is they finally fix that one person can't launch a nuclear war holocaust by themselves. That's a pretty big deal, right? You almost had to break a little aspect of the system for people to freak out enough to fix it. But when you think, look, worst case scenarios, you think worst case, look at World War One is a worst case scenario. have a person with the power to launch a nuclear war by themselves, if anybody can't see that that's an untenable, horrible situation, and you look at human history and go, okay, it's a ticking time bomb, literally, then you're not, you don't know very much history. And the fact that we've escaped decades and decades without anybody fixing this problem. It's crazy. Well, so if the Trump presidency alone caused us to fix that problem, you'd have to say that for no, I mean, this wasn't Trump's idea. He didn't want to fix that problem. But as a byproduct of him getting into office, if we could fix that problem,

depending on how history went in the future, you could be saving a hundred million lives. Yeah. If you could fix that problem. But if we get through the Trump administration and we move ourselves into 2020 and someone really acceptable. Into the Kardashian administration after that. Kanye West. Well, you do think, I mean, if a Q rating, the Q rating is how well your name is known, right? So if what Trump proved is that you do not need a ton of money if you walk in the door with a Q rating, because that's what the other politicians want it for, right? Well, he's uniquely good at ignoring his faults and projecting his strengths and being confident. All those things, I mean, he might be a sociopath, but all those things that allow him to do that

and completely ignore his faults and keep constantly droning on about his successes and how good he is at things, that resonates with people in a very weird way. We respect and admire the strong man, and people give in to him. There's a lot of half-ass beta men. I hate that. To me, that's so anti-American, though, the strong man. But it is what happened. It is what happened.

That's why I find it distasteful. But I will say this. There are certain things that he did that are part of his personality that worked really well because there are so many Americans so upset with the system. I mean, I remember one line from Trump at one of these debates that I thought was one of the great lines of all time. And when he turned to Rand Paul after Rand Paul slammed him and said, you're not having a very good night, are you? And I remember thinking, okay, there are a lot of Americans who just love anybody sticking it to these politicians now because everybody's so having a very good night are you and i remember thinking okay there are a lot of americans who just love anybody sticking it to these politicians now because everybody's so upset with all the politics so here's a guy who's sticking it to them but there's a there's a cutting off your nose to spite your face side of this because i've always wanted an outsider but not this outsider

yeah so so you say to yourself okay we could have had a normal human being because, look, if you want to say what Trump has, I don't know the guy. So I can't diagram what he but he's he's an extreme narcissist. Now, all these people have narcissistic complexes or you don't think I'm a good enough guy to be president. Right. Right there. It's almost like you don't get through the door without too much narcissism. I've never seen this much from from anybody. I mean, this is this is. too much narcissism i've never seen this much from from anybody i mean this is this is but um you know if if for a while that was working for him because he was so outside the norms there are certain like unspoken rules of things you do and behave and he violated all those and it was refreshing to have him violate them yes um now we have i well when he told hillary clinton because

you'd be in jail and everybody went nuts. It's like, yes. Cause a lot of people, it was a zinger. Cause people and people and people, you know, the real thing, I think a lot of people said, which is tragic, but I understand it is if we have to live with one of these people for four years and listen to them talk, I'd rather have somebody who's making funny jokes that make me laugh rather than, you know, somebody who's obviously reading another prepared speech that they didn't write. Or somebody where you really don't get a sense of who they really are like a hillary clinton who's a career politician

she's a chameleon she's just saying what she thinks the polls are going to favor so then if um if you know the part that drives me the craziest is 321 million people you said and the two people that we're voting on at the end of this thing are Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump's hilarious That's the problem Well, nobody wants that fucking magnifying glass turned on their life My stepdad said if you if you were a really august person and you're gonna sit there is that word August? It just means you're really powerful formidable human being how do you spell it like like August? Yeah

and so so you sit down there if you're if he said they those kind of people divide a piece of paper in half and they write pros on one side and cons on the other and they're running for president and they go down the pros and cons he goes he goes the cons outnumber the pros five to one it might be a hundred yeah i'm not going to have as much power as i have now i blah blah blah blah everyone's going to hate you and he's he's so so people who are really intelligent if they do that calculation the the calculation says, don't run for president. You'd be an idiot. Now, he says, people, though, who run anyway, it's because something on the pro side outweighs everything on the con side. Like, I want to be on TV all the time.

Or I want to be the most powerful person in the world. Or it's the natural extension. I've been a senator. Whatever it is. In other words, there's some ego question that's out, that's, that's drowning all the cons. And he said, that's why you have to be careful because that's so, so you either have somebody who's not intelligent enough to weigh the pros and cons or somebody who's so smart that the cons outweigh the pros and they choose to do it anyway. What a crazy system when you think that that is the way we develop a person who is going to be

in control of nuclear weapons. We have a popularity contest where to win the popularity contest, which is totally, you know, elective. You don't have to join. But to get into this contest and to win, you're going to your life's going to be torn apart. They're going to go over. People are going to lie about you. And look at your favorite person and say say you know You go look at some of these candidates from the past that we like to lionize would they have even made it through the process?

Today imagine what Kennedy would have had John John Kennedy would the kind of things that would he'd have all these women coming forward Can you imagine it? He would never made it. Well, the doctor feel-goods would show up. Yeah. Oh my god Yeah, they used to give him like amphetamines right?, right? He had, like, some serious disease, didn't he? Addison's disease, yeah. What is that? That's a problem with the glands where it's not providing adrenaline, I think. Don't quote me on that. Wow.

So they had him on some sort of amphetamines. Well, he was apparently on a lot of medication. I think he had the last rites given to him once before because he came so close to dying. Jesus. Well, and truthfully, I read that it impacted the way he kind of saw his life because he didn't expect it to be a long life and so it impacted on how but if you if somebody told you joe you're not going to have well you're not going to have a long life how much does that change the way you live the rest of your life you probably live crazy you probably go

maybe skiing every day maybe skydiving or maybe you try to try to get the things on your bucket list uh in terms of accomplishments done quick more. But you look at someone like that and say, could a guy like that have made it through the process? Could Lyndon Johnson have made it through the process? I mean who've been so careful, never taken a risk, lied like crazy. I mean, if you say those are the only people that can make it through the process, then maybe that explains why with 321 million people, this is the choice we end up with at the end of the day. Well, we also have this problem where we look at someone's entire life and we look at all the different things that they do and we decide whether or not we accept certain things like we're not talking about whether or not someone's honest with business whether you we want you to be honest with everything yeah you gotta be you gotta get c average on everything

you can't have an a in here and in it but i mean the truly great people as we know are often very flawed yes yeah very flawed and also like what percentage of people who want to be leaders like think about that thing right you want to be leaders, like think about that thing, right? You want to be the one on the podium telling everybody what's up. What percentage of those guys want to fuck other women? Is it 100? Right? I can't answer that.

But if you think about like nature, like the natural leader types, like throughout human history, what percentage of those have been monogamous? Like throughout human history, what percentage of those have been monogamous? Those ones who want to control the army, the ones who want to run the thing, the ones who want to be at the top getting everybody to do their bidding, the ones who want to have all the money and all the power and live in the castle. Those guys are almost all adulterers. You know, it does argue for the idea that it might be better to appoint somebody who doesn't want the job. It's like somebody I talked to once has talked about that with police officers, and they had said, listen, there are all kinds of police officers, but if you're the one who wants the job because you're going to chase bad guys and you want that adrenaline rush and

the whole thing, you're not the guy who should get the job. Right. Or a guy who wants respect. Yes. And you can see the funny thing is and somebody sent this to me a long time ago they showed there's all these different um like um recruitment videos that the different police agencies have right and some of them are more like you can get cats out of trees you can help old ladies and some of them are like you can drive a great car and you can and and the

funny thing is i would imagine that that influences the sort of people that answer your ad. Oh, for sure. I mean, they have billboards in L.A., where they used to at least, to try to hire new cops. And they did it based on the money. Like, this is how much money you can get. L.A. PD is paying this amount. And they'd show it, and you'd drive by, like, oh, I can make that amount. Okay.

Maybe I should try to do that job. So what if you appointed cops? You're like, oh, I can make that amount. Okay. Maybe I should try to do that job. So what if you appointed cops? What I mean, a billboard, what I'm saying is like when you're advertising, it's the same problem you have when you're advertising for drug companies. You get people thinking, oh, maybe I need that Abilify in my life.

Oh, Humerida. Ooh, I need that. That seems like I like the music they're playing. I like how everybody's dancing. Oh, I like how that cop looks up there. He looks formidable. He looks like a man who gets respect look He's got his hands on his hips and he's got a nice car behind him and look as a female squad leader with him I wonder if he fucks her, you know, like people start do you look at an ad and you start?

Imagining yourself in the position of that person in that ad and then next thing, you know, you know You're the one who's gonna go get the bad guys and you're the one who's going to go but if you talk to a real cop like a good cop is someone who respects community, someone who wants to help, someone who wants to establish some sort of a bond with the people that are in the community that he patrols

like that's why they're trying to do in some neighborhoods they're trying to have more people on foot that actually walk through the streets and become a part of the community like don't you're not an outsider that's patrolling it you're actually one of the people that's there it goes it goes to what we were saying about the politicians though to tie it all in why are you doing this yeah right are you doing this because you want to be the person at the podium that everybody's admiring you you want to be the person that everyone's talking about or are you sincerely interested in public service and helping things? I mean, what if you, I can think of 20 people that you would say,

God, it'd be interesting to see what that person would do in the presidency, right? But like you said, I can't imagine any of them wanting to do it. None of them are going to want to do it. Mark Cuban is going to be the president. Elon Musk's not going to want to be the president. I think we really need a council. I think the idea of one singular alpha chimpanzee. Well, Joe, that's what it's supposed to do. Remember, we're supposed to be, if everybody remembers their founding father, Federalist Papers and everything, the presidency was a much, much, much less powerful job. Right. This was a country that was run by the legislative branch, basically.

We're not that way anymore because of a whole bunch of things, including the nuclear weapons thing we talked about earlier. The atomic age changed the presidency because of the need to have one person. You couldn't declare war anymore because what if the missiles are on their way to you now, right? Can you really go to Congress and debate it and have the, no, you needed a person who within 10 minutes could launch a counter-strike okay well how much power does that take out of you know the hands of the legislature who was supposed to be running things for example why do we not declare war anymore we haven't declared war since the second world war we have a country that the

constitution says you can't go to war without a declaration certainly not you can get some barbary pirates cleared out of north africa but you can't like that's why congress by the way with the trump thing is they want to say that you can't launch nuclear weapons unless congress has declared war first which creates this wonderful thing about trying to figure out if we can sort of retro actively um replace a power that's been gone since 1942. You know, when we declared war on like Romania and something else, the subsidiary powers in the Second World War, and that's the last time it's been done. But according to the Constitution, we shouldn't have been able to fight a war since without that.

It's going to be very interesting to see what happens in 2020. It's going to be really interesting. And to remove some of the power that the president has is going to be a really big uphill battle, unless someone actually drops a nuke on somebody, unless Trump decides to bomb North Korea. Like Kim Jong-un says something about his wife, like, you piece of shit. He fucking launches a bomb at him. Unless it's something so egregious and ridiculous like that, it's going to be really hard to dial back the power without any real specific need. Because people are going to concentrate on all the other issues that the country faces economically, militarily, the need

for healthcare, the need for environmental standards, what are we going to do about global warming? There's so many issues that take the front stage. The idea of someone actually launching a nuclear attack seems so distant and ridiculous that that's not going to be on the forefront of everybody's like list of priorities of things to handle makes me think of eisenhower ordering the local german population at the end of the second world war to go tour the death camps themselves and actually have to walk past piles and piles and piles of human bodies because he wanted them to not forget you're gonna look at this and i you know i human bodies because he wanted them to not forget. Wow. You know, to look at this. And I didn't know he did that.

When you look at the end of the world wars, for example, in both of them, people were so shocked by what happened. You get this idea that we're never again, right? We're never going to let this happen again. But you get a generation later, two generations later. How long does it take for those lessons to fade away? So when I hear or read on Twitter, it's probably some 13-year-old boy in his basement, so you never know. But the racial stuff, I always think to myself, if you only, you know, maybe we need some dead bodies out there so you can go see.

This is what it looks like, right? We're not fooling around here. This kind of stuff leads to this. Stop fooling around with 140 characters and look at what real death tastes, smells like, and what the long-term ramifications of pushing these sorts of attitudes can lead to and has over and over and over again. Well, I think there's a real problem with the human condition when it comes to complacency and comfort. And I think that we get real comfortable and real complacent and we have

a very distorted idea of what life is without struggle and there's a great book by sebastian younger who was on last week oh yeah and uh it's called tribe yeah he did a perfect storm too it's wonderful yeah he's amazing but talking to him about what happens when people overcome significant tragedies whether it's war or whether it's natural disasters. Or, you know, I was in New York right after 9-11 and it was palpable, the sense of community and how friendly people were. And it was because people had had their world shaken up by an attack and it literally did good.

It really did good for the people that survived in a fucked up way. But it makes me think of that project for a new America document that before nine 11 had said that there's, you know, without some kind of Pearl Harbor style attack, the American system is designed right now in a way where people are going to pull apart more and more. And in other words,

just saying, you know, you could almost wish for something like that to happen to pull us together. I remember when I was horrible thought though, right? Yeah. And I was horrible thought though, right? Yeah, and I what maybe maybe it's the only way we learn and you need the refresher But that's what I think people need war in their own life, and I think they need struggle I need struggle they need something to do in their own life. That's incredibly difficult to keep them from being

Yeah But there's too many of us not a place it's mundane when I was when I was um trying to localize the story from the the Yugoslavian Civil War that we were just talking about earlier i interviewed a croatian man in eugene and we were talking about it and and i was bringing up these age-old hatreds and basically saying you know they've always hated each other he stopped he said now stop stop stop he goes we didn't he goes up until recently we were intermarrying with each other we got along it was all working out he goes you know what changed? I said, what? He goes, the economy tanked. He goes, and all of a sudden, he goes, the first thing that started to resurface when everybody was just hating everything, their lives and everything.

He goes, all of a sudden, all these old things that had been buried just came right back. And so that tribalism you're talking about with Junger, I think there are times, and you had mentioned it, right? Post-war eras, these times when they go away post-disaster yes but but then certain kinds of conditions for example terrible economic conditions for too many people it's funny how quickly the scapegoats come back and and things that i mean i truthfully i mean the biggest thing that i've missed politically in terms of just i just didn't see it was the resurgence of the racism bigotry prejudice thing i mean i thought know, we grew up in the era where our country was trying to figure out through things like broadcasting how we transition.

So you remember All in the Family when it started. It's a show that doesn't even run very much anymore because simply trying to address those issues is too hot button for most advertisers now. You could never have an Archie Bunker character today. But that whole show was part of society's attempt to transition from an era where it wasn't that long beforehand where you couldn't stay in a hotel that wasn't a black or a white person's hotel in the south to one where we got now and i always thought okay the message of archie bunker was they would try to you know teach him the young people would try to teach him how to be a more open human being and but it

didn't matter because the archie bunkers of the world were going to die off they were the dinosaurs from another era and eventually that would be a way of looking at things that was in the past and i didn't i thought that that was what it was going to be and i never i never saw the resurgence but like my croatian friend had said just maybe things had to get bad enough economically and whatever for all the tribal things to just come back because that's there's something deep in us that that's all embedded in. I think there's far less of those people now than there were before. They're louder. But that stunned me, too.

And it's so homogenized when you see them with their fucking Home Depot torches walking down the street. The tiki torches? You fucking dorks. The whole thing was so goofy. Well, did you hear Richard Spencer, the white supremacist, but he did an interview about two weeks ago where he was basically saying slavery was good and all these

kind of things. Oh, with that British man? Yes, yes. And the British guy at the end said something like, you're an idiot or whatever. But I mean, it was a ridiculous thing to say. And yet, normally, you remember 60 Minutes used to have the KKK white supremacist guys in the old days on like once a year. They'd interview like the Grand Dragon or whatever.

And they'd give them a lot of airtime and Mike Wallace would question him. And at the end of it, you just always thought the same thing. These people are idiots, right? It was the give them enough rope and they'll hang themselves type journalism. I just thought that journalist, like everybody was talking about the guy did the perfect interview with him. But I honestly think that's not the way to do the perfect interview with him. I think that guy's standing up. They're standing up

facing each other. I think they'd be far better off if they sat down and if they talked for a long period of time. And I think there's plenty more rope and that guy could have hung him way better. There's a book by a black gentleman who's a musician, a boogie woogie piano player. I don't remember his name. What is that a there's a book by a black gentleman who's a musician a boogie woogie piano player i don't remember his name what is that it was a book it was a book on boogie woogie yeah but it was a style it was a book on the clan um and and he was a guy a black man who i'm going

from memory here but he like set up an interview with one of the heads of the of the state clan or whatever didn't tell the guy who was coming that he was a black man and they so they had this interview and it's this interesting thing he says, but long story short, he started to make friends with these KKK members. And it wasn't like rank and file people. It was like the Grand Dragon, whatever. That's the guy, right? How one man convinced 200 Ku Klux Klan members to give up their robes.

Wow. We love that motherfucker. But long story short is, I mean, these were people. They didn't have any black people they knew, right? They had stereotypes and things. So he said, once you're, like you had said, when you're face to face with somebody and you have to interact with them on an eye to eye level, it's very intriguing what he did. Because you say to yourself, okay, you can never reach these Archie Bunker guys, but people have and do. because you say to yourself, okay, you can never reach these Archie Bunker guys, but people have and do. And I do want to say, listen, for all of the white supremacists out there that think I'm

being unfair, this racial tribal thing is all over the place because there are, you know, like you will meet black folks who are racist too. Now, what I always say to people though, is the one thing you have to understand as a white person that's different is we're the dominant culture. Okay. It does make things different. If you're a minority in any country, there's a tendency, I mean, you go to the place and they'll have neighborhoods, right? Remember the Italian neighborhoods in our country, the Jewish neighborhoods, the Irish neighborhoods.

Why did they do that? Were they racist? No, there's some strength in gathering with your own kind, reading your own newspapers and keeping your culture alive. Speaking your own language. That's right. But it's also a self-defense mechanism, right? So it's a very different thing to say, listen they're being racist too okay but we're the dominant

culture and it means that there's something a little different when we say what's wrong with saying you know white people should be proud of their heritage too theoretically nothing but historically speaking there are some issues yeah and you need to recognize that now can we ever get to a time when we can judge people by the content of their character i don't't know. But I think if I think even if white people said we're going to do that right now, there'd be people of other colors going, no, wait a minute. We don't want to give up, you know, some extra admissions into universities. And we don't. It becomes a very difficult thing to give up this racial identity. In the 60s, that was the goal. Now people on all sides would be what are you talking about? It's very, you know, the cultural appropriation thing drives me crazy.

Like, if you're going to have dreadlocks, you can't because that's a black hairstyle. What I always want to say is, don't black people want to try different hairstyles, too? They do. Look at Beyonce. Creativity is putting things together that never went together before. This is a good thing. Well, not only that, it's not even historically correct. You know as well as I do that dreadlocks have been around for a long fucking time with white people.

But think about how it just polarizes us even more. It's not real, though. It's people looking for things to be polarized. Yes. And again, I do think, and I love academia, and I could have got swept up. I enjoyed school at the college level so much I could still be there today. I mean, I've never gotten a job. I would just be one of those guys.

I'm a graduate student at 51 helping the professors but at the same time look we all understand that those people are incentivized to come up with new theories new ideas groundbreaking cutting edge you know this is what they're rewarded for with the carrots and sticks so i get it it's different when it spreads to the general culture a little bit though because now we're not in the ivory tower having a theoretical debate we're sitting there there going, should that person be shamed on Twitter because he's an Asian person with dreadlocks? Right. OK, folks, if you don't see that that might backfire on you down the road, I mean, we've

all got to cut each other some slack on all sides if we're going to make this work. Well, it's cultural appropriation is one of the things that makes America so fascinating. The melting pot of humans all together, exploring each other's food and all the various aspects of their communities. And the funny part is the cultural appropriators out there are sometimes the most sympathetic to that side. I mean, if you're willing to get a Rastafarian's hairstyle,

you're probably not an anti-black racist, right? So when you tell them that they shouldn't be doing that, aren't you going after the people most likely to see your side of things and help you and push and you see what i'm saying it's almost like we're eating our own on all sides exactly like that and on the left it is particularly about eating your own because you can't be progressive enough yeah there's always going to be someone who's more progressive but that's just how we you know when i was a punk back in the old days and I remember saying that we were killing the movement because the biggest thing was, was this idea of a poser, right? And the first thing everybody said to, we didn't welcome you

into the group. We said, when did you start wearing these clothes? When did you get that hairstyle? You pose or in other words, the entire thing was exclusive, right? So you try to build this movement. You have to be an OG. Yeah. It was ridiculous. How many years do you have to be a punk for before you're allowed to be a punk? That's right. Can you go in slowly? I mean, I remember they were going after like John Lydon, Johnny Rotten. You're a poser.

Okay, well, then what are we doing here? But I mean, in the same way, the one thing you have to do is cut people some slack. And the one thing we human beings seem to have such a problem with is cutting people slack. And it seems to be, if you say the social media, it seems to be if you say the social medium seems to be worse because you'll cut somebody's slack face to face more easily than you will you know when you can just throw 140 characters and you go to bed but that comedian on the other side of your 140 characters i mean let me just you've seen this and i've seen this but if you've never been on the receiving end of these things where people and i've been very lucky and people have been

very nice and kind to me but even i when, when you read these things, you go, who is this person? And why do they think that this is – did their lives get better because they texted me this? I mean, do you see what I'm saying? I don't get the motivation. They don't even know it. They're not thinking about it. They're just acting. It's a human instinct.

They hurt and they want to hurt others. That's what you told me years ago. You told me – that's what I'm saying. You've helped me a lot when I look at those things, and I think Joe's right. This is people that are angry with their situation. What did they say? It's like the crabs in a pot and one crab gets— Crabs in a bucket.

Yeah, crabs in a bucket, and you pull the crab down. And it's too bad because, you know what? A lot of those people are the very people who could be doing much better if we could figure out a way to help empower them to unleash their— Well, they get better. They do. I think they do, too. There's people that have been haters that aren't haters anymore and unfortunately a lot of people have already blocked them or just that's right or just dissatisfied people that are so upset with the way things are i mean i really i would love to see more effort made in that regard because i think the subsidiary down the road domino effects would help us all so much but

listen we're a country that can't even get the most basic things passed. How are we going to get something like that done? I think change is happening. I think it's happening incredibly rapidly, but I think we're stuck in the mix of it and we don't realize it. It's sort of like when you come over someone's house and you haven't been over their house in like five years and all of a sudden their kid is 10. You're like, holy shit, you're 10 now?

To them, it just happened gradually and slowly, and they barely have noticed it. But to you, when you take five years off and then you see that kid, you're like, holy shit. It's like the frog in the hot water thing, right? It's happening. It is happening. But is it positive?

See, this is where I can't, again, in the maelstrom trying to analyze, but is it positive or negative? It's both. I was going to say, you're an optimist, Joe. We've had this conversation before, and I'm a little bit more cynical and misanthropic maybe. But I worry about figuring it out. So if you say that human beings individually and as groups learn by mistakes, do you have to have a Holocaust-type mistake to come out of this before we go, wow, well, here's where we screwed up on that social media thing?

I mean, I wonder whether we're going to be allowed not i don't know how you would turn the genie put the genie back in the bottle but i mean at what point do terrorists or dangerous people or i mean look at the to go back to that weather underground new left bombing thing that i said that they didn't know the south they didn't like me uh waterboarding abby hoffman but i mean if you had a bunch of people back then with twitter saying i support the the abby hoffman but i mean if you had a bunch of people back then with twitter saying i support the the abby hoffman's i support okay at what point would the government first of all get you on a watch list then or now but at what point would somebody have said listen for our own good we can't have average americans because look how many terrorists are using this tool i mean it

we'll see what happens but you'd mention 9-11 and how you know so much of that there was there was a feeling of community and all that other stuff but there was other things too there were there was the government literally and i remember peter defazio the congressman up in oregon who said this to me he said dan he said there were bills that had been written and and put on a shelf because there was no way to pass them for the longest time and he goes when 9-11 happened they pulled all those bills down, cobbled them into one thing. And then he said, here's the real scandal. And most people don't know this. He says, do you know how many parts of that bill were blank that we signed to be filled in later? He said, that's not unusual. He goes, because we get a lot of bills that they haven't

figured out all the details because most bills aren't as important as that one. He goes, we signed off to a bunch of things with a bunch of blank categories to be filled in later. Okay, gets us back to leadership right there. What's wrong with the country, a bunch of people signing a bunch of stuff that have nothing in it yet. Like I said before, when you're talking about like, are you optimistic? Or are you pessimistic? Is it negative? Or is it positive? It's both. And I think the negative and the positive are both necessary. I don't think we're going to live in this utopian world where everybody's just friendly to each other. I think people are going to make mistakes. They're going to be shitty. They're going to realize that they're

shitty. And the understanding of that behavior and the ramifications of that behavior is becoming more and more apparent every day. And I think we're seeing that. And I think we're caught up in this storm and there's a fucking hurricane going on man, this cow's flying by, a bathtub's in the air, all this stuff is happening right now The hope is though that we can get to the good, because I might agree with you in the long term, right, if you're saying

optimistic real long term, but how many, I mean if you said in 1900 I'm optimistic long term that by the year 2000 things will be better yes, but you have two world wars to go through in the interim and a near missus on nuclear wars. So I can agree with you that long term we may have a positive outcome here. I don't know what our immediate short term with you and I have 20, 30, 40, you probably have 100 years left on your lifespan. But some of us are not in great shape. So if you said the next 20, 25, 30 years, are you going to see good or bad from this?

We may have to go through some learning experiences, and those tend to not be so fun to live through. Yeah, there's that. But also there's like, how about just disengage from that every now and then? I do. I agree with you. Don't have your life completely dependent upon the success and failures of other people's emotions and ideas. Like, just go off on your own more often. Spend more time by yourself more

time pursuing your own activity spend more time in nature with your phone off spend more time nature things are really good idea too it's giant and you know what because folks that's what connects you to all the other human beings who ever lived before us the the thing that makes our time period different here this vast human experiment is we've never had a generation growing up with mobile phones for example yeah what does that mean well one thing it does is it takes you away from the part that your answer i mean looking up at a night sky with nothing to do for hours just sitting there contemplating the silence or the rustling of the trees or whatever i don't know if you get anything out of that or not but that's something that human beings have

done since caveman times that you're sharing an experience that's innately human if that becomes less and less common because we're detached from that what does that mean and like i said we talked about an experiment earlier that we're in an experiment what does it mean when people detach from that part of the human existence to spend more time in this new part of human existence. I don't know. Well, I think that part of being a person, like being in nature, it's part of us. It's part of how we developed. It's attached to our human reward system. There's something that's deeply satisfying about lying down in a field and looking up at the stars.

There's a reason for all that. And the more we detach from that, the more you're going to get these disenfranchised, very unhappy people that feel like they're a prisoner or a slave to some system that doesn't give a fuck about them. Because it doesn't. It really doesn't. The people that give a fuck about you are your community. They're your friends, the community of like-minded humans that you've bonded with that share your occupation or share your interests. And that's how people develop satisfying relationships and satisfying lives.

The more you put yourself connected to something that doesn't even value you, some huge monolithic creation that there's no one even running it. It's not like some architect has figured out a great way to design civilization to satisfy all the humans that are a part of it. No, this is all experimental. It's all happening in the moment, and we're all a part of it. And what's it going to be like three generations from now? I'm scared that we're eliminating as much as possible boredom from our lives, because I think the boredom is important. when i was a kid we talked about being weird uh when i was a kid um had a lot of free time on my hands had to figure out ways to entertain myself yeah no video games and you you you end up doing things that like um

you know you had talked about your whole you know we found this niche for me in this history show thing because it's what i was born to do or whatever yes but but it goes back to me trying to figure out okay i've played with these toy plastic soldiers uh every single day how do i make something new so that i can be entertained with these same toy soldier you know yeah and i think that all you know if we think about building blocks in your brain the need to overcome boredom for example is a prime mover when you're young you're not motivated by money you're not motivated by money you're not motivated it's it's you're not even motivated by by the opposite sex you know when you're a kid you're like what am i going to do to fill this afternoon and you find ways to you know i remember

tearing up my mom's garden once to create a giant uh river system you know yeah yeah okay but but but would you do that today would you even bother it took hours i mean well i wouldn't but maybe a kid would maybe there's maybe there's an app where you can do it do the do the same thing on my point is is that there's these sorts of prime movers end up creating uh their needs that create the need for solutions if you get rid of that need do you need the solution anymore and did did the did the need for the solution create a different joe rogan dan carlin or joe blow out on the street than would have been otherwise we talked about creating a more formidable human being. Having to overcome my childhood boredom created a more formidable human being. It did. Dan Carlin, we just did three hours.

Again. Just went flying by, man. It always does. It always does. We got to do this more often. We always say this, but can we please? I may do a book soon. Would you like to have a stupid book tour interview? When are you going to do that? I don't know. Same time the virtual reality comes out. Well, let's please sit down and talk more often. I really enjoy it.

Can I just tell you, you're one of the most open-minded people, though, and I do quote you at times because you've taught me a lot. Well, thank you, brother, and you've taught me a lot, too. I appreciate it. Dan Carlin, ladies and gentlemen, Hardcore History. Go download, subscribe. Bye. Bye. Woo appreciate it. Dan Carlin, ladies and gentlemen, Hardcore History. Go download, subscribe. Bye.