The Joe Rogan Experience - #328 - Dan Carlin

Episode Date: February 25, 2013

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".

The Joe Rogan Experience. Old school. We went old school with the music, folks, because Dan Carlin's here of Hardcore History and DC Common Sense. You have two podcasts. Yes. And I'm telling you, man, there's very few people that have been requested as many times as you by the fans. I owe you for having me here. I had no idea we had such crossover on the audience. Apparently quite a bit, because people on my message board are super pumped about this. People online are super pumped about this.

I think now more than ever in this country, there's a learning – a yearning rather to understand how the hell we got here. When you look at like the financial crisis and you look at our ridiculous actions overseas and you look at like like wow there's a lot of kids that are growing up right now that are in their 20s and 30s and they they they look at this mess that we're in as a society as a culture as a race really as the whole human race how the hell did this all happen and because of that i think there's more of an interest in history today than at any time i remember like young people being like really interested in history and when i was younger but it seems like there's like a more of a clamoring for this knowledge now than i think i've ever heard before kind of helps when the history channel is doing monster quest and

ice road trucker kind of leaves a vacuum for some of us to sort of just shoot through, too. Yeah, does that drive you crazy when you're watching the History Channel? You know, I don't know if it does. Part of me starts to think that, yeah, it opens up. I mean, you know, we were doing some work a while back with some of these production companies in L.A. and New York and stuff. We'll get this guy from the History Podcast, and we'll develop a show around him. And I'm in these meetings with these guys, and it's like every question is, can we make this a little more broad? Can we make this a little – and eventually you're going to have Dan Carlin searching for monsters is what they were looking for I think after.

So we're sticking with the podcast I think. I don't think they think there's an audience for history and yet I think that gives us an audience for history. There's no place else for those people to go. They're stuck with me. that gives us an audience for history. There's no place else for those people to go. They're stuck with me. Yeah, it's kind of interesting what people think that people want to and don't want to see because there's obviously the internet where your podcast is very popular.

There's a lot of very popular podcasts where it's just people talking and you're getting hundreds of thousands of people to download these things with just people talking. And you look at the amount of people that are tuning into your average television show on a cable network and it's pretty commensurate isn't that shocking that's crazy it's not so much that we're all doing so good it's the television is really doing so bad well in trying to paint that broad thing they've lost any semblance of being exceptional there's just nothing that's a good way to that's a great way to put it by the way i'm loving this fungus-free coffee. Bulletproof coffee, yeah.

I'm liking that. We blend it up with grass-fed butter. It's tough to find that grass-fed butter. I've actually started ordering it online. I thought I would miss the fungus, but I'm finding I'm getting everything I want right now. The fungus is just giving you a headache apparently. There's a guy named Dave Asprey.

He runs BulletproofExec.com and he wrote The Bulletproof Executive and his idea about Bulletproof not being actual Bulletproof, just being that it's rock-solid nutrition, rock-solid management of your body, all this stuff. issue that so many people weren't aware of you're going to work and you just you know drinking that coffee from the the coffee machine the coffee maker that you know bob may hey bob when's how old is this coffee 20 minutes ago no one's really thinking about what the fuck is in that actual coffee but apparently there's quite a bit of coffee that has fungus on it and unhealthy mold and that shit can apparently be very poisonous well you know our industry functions on this so without this we're just dead in the water. I mean, comedy writing. I mean, there's so many different people that create things, use coffee. I thought about doing a show once on like the history of stimulants or whatever, and it was going to be like a nine-part series because there's so much.

I mean, like you said, the whole creative side of so many industries without the coffee and other stimulants. Saturday Night Live is not around. It doesn't exist without coffee. Or something like that. Something along those lines. It's funny when you think about the fact that the Boston Tea Party is actually – is that really what started people off drinking coffee in this country?

I don't think so. I think that's one of those kind of myth sort of things. I think first of all, if you're addicted to tea, you're not going to just switch because somebody has put a little tax on it. I mean, we can see how that works. A little tax on something, you just find a way around it. But how hard was it to get tea back then? You know, it was a hell of a commodity, but I don't think it was that hard to get it. I mean, smugglers, how hard is it to get something you're not supposed to have today? So tea was like a big commodity. Go to a big tea dealer and behind the scenes, you know, and just have some guy you know that can get the tea on the side smuggled in from French Canada or something.

Isn't that bizarre when you hear about like salt used to be worth a lot of money? It still is in the right places. You take away the salt and you watch the price go up, you know? Yeah. Yeah. But I mean the idea that people would go to war for it. Like could you imagine if we're headed to Africa right now to go get salt? Like that was a reality at one point.

I read a whole thing about how Afghanistan might be all about lithium deposits and stuff. And you're going, well, 50 years ago, nobody wanted lithium for anything. I mean now it's just one of those things where, God, we've got to get a hold of Afghanistan or those lithium things will dry right up. Afghanistan is so rich with other things as well, natural gas, not just the minerals. Tough place to mine though it's like mining out in apache country there's inherent risks well yeah that's a lot of folks who don't understand uh afghanistan like for conversations with people about it you can't really compare it to any other country because it's not really a country it's like a series of

warlords and they control various areas and it's through the whole country and there's only like a little bit of city life. There's like – what are they? It's Kabul. Is that the big city? Yeah, Kandahar, places like that. But these are all tribal peoples. And so it's like Indian country. I mean there's no other way to describe it.

You get in there and you can't make – there's no one to make deals with that controls all – you have a deal with this chief and all of a sudden you don't have a deal with the other chief. He doesn't like the first guy. Ten miles away, you're out of your district. Right, and they're all playing a little game. Hamid Karzai is winking to us in one hand and telling the domestic audience something on the other hand. It's like double blind, rear end. We just don't play those games as well as the people in Afghanistan. Yeah, well, that's a strange culture.

I remember when McCain was running for president and Obama was talking about going into Afghanistan. Yeah, well, that's a strange culture. I remember when McCain was running for president and Obama was talking about going into Afghanistan. It was one of the few times that I really respected McCain for the way he did it. He said, like, do you understand Afghanistan? He wasn't even being condescending.

He was like, this is like run by this, it's basically run the same way it was when Alexander the Great was alive. And look at the terrain. If you're a military guy, just look. It's nuts. Yeah, it's like Sonora over there but worse. It's one thing to decide you want to fight a war in some flat desert place where all of our air power is going to make a huge difference.

The terrain is like beyond Martian in Afghanistan. It's crazy terrain. And so you look around and you just go, look, the Russians in the 1970s and 80s, they may not have had the infrared stuff like we do. It's craziness. these difficult missions and the implications of using drones on people, it's a very strange sort of a conversation to start having because it's step one on a multi-step process where eventually these drones are going to be intelligent things that are controlling themselves. They're going to be searching out crime and shooting people from the mountains. I don't know how you stop that though. I mean it's like saying I don't want to have tanks because look where tanks are going to go.

The problem is that we treat them differently than live people. It's like if you said to yourself, well, if you wouldn't go in there with a human pilot and bomb the place because it will look like Nixon bombing Cambodia when you shouldn't, then don't do it with drones. But if you're going to use them for occasions, I mean if we're at war with somebody, you're going to want the drones. You're going to want to use everything. But you're not going to use them for occasions – I mean if we're at war with somebody, you're going to want the drones. You're going to want to use everything. But you're not going to want it – if you say, well, we couldn't bomb Yemen's tribal territories with a bomber and a human being, that would look bad.

But we can do it with a machine because, well, there's no Americans there. Yeah, you're absolutely right, and that's why it becomes a strange sort of a conversation to have. And it's going on in Pakistan, but we're not really at war with Pakistan. No, we're just going to start using them in Africa now. Yeah, they're flying them into Africa now. They were going to use them on Dormer. They were going to use – he was going to be the first target of a drone on American soil. That cop killer guy.

That is still to be – did they confirm that, that they were going to use a drone to go after that guy? I believe so. No, no, no. I absolutely know. I read it., no, no. It's OK. I absolutely know. I read it. But that's wild. How do you spell his name?

Dormer? D-O-R-M-E-R? Was that going to be a decision? At what level do they make that decision? It's a good question. Is that the L.A. sheriff's office decides that or you got to call the president? I can't imagine the White House would let that happen even if the sheriff's department wanted to because then all of a sudden you have to answer all those questions they're not answering now about is it OK to kill Americans with a drone on American soil? Well, then all of a sudden that becomes a moot point, doesn't it?

Yeah. Apparently this is on Gizmodo. Chief Sergio Diaz, joint leader of the task force assigned with Finding Dormer, has confirmed, and his quote is saying, we're using all the tools at our disposal in a third vague conference. That doesn't mean he's using drones. Well, wait a minute. If that's true, though, do you know what that makes me feel like? And this is perverse. I have a little bit of a perverse sense of humor. But if the guy was going to die anyway like he did, I almost wish that they'd done it with the drones at the local level so that this whole thing explodes into a national conversation.

Do you think it would? I think people would just accept it. I don't know. He was an evil – he was obviously an evil, deranged murderer. So what is – but look at the position it puts Obama in. All of a sudden this whole thing you're ducking now, you can't duck it anymore and you're not using it against terrorists – well, it depends on your definition of a terrorist. Right. But I mean any old murderer fleeing the scene of a murder now is open to uh you know no judge no jury no due process

yeah you know we knew you killed him so i mean that's a that that's going to happen too i mean we're going to hit that fine line at some point well they've already started assassinating american citizens that are in other countries that they believe the one thing that's illegal right yeah i mean the government won't confirm it but but everybody. It's an open secret. It gets real tricky when someone denies the rights of citizens, when someone who's in power denies their rights, because what are you then if you're in power and you're denying their rights? As soon as you step in and deny people due process, deny people lawyers, deny people, why would you

ever want to do that is the real question. So when things get passed like the National Defense Authorization Act allows the government to indefinitely detain American civilians and they don't have to do anything. They're not required to notify your family. They're not required to arrest you. They're not required to, you don't have to get a lawyer. They can just lock you up. When you see shit like that, does that drive you crazy?

Oh, yeah. And people always say to me, they say, well, why are you defending the terrorists? And what you try to explain to people is without the due process, there's no confirmation that this is a terrorist. The only way you know it's a terrorist is when some court somewhere determines upon looking at the evidence that this person is a terrorist. Once you can kill somebody on the suspicion of being a terrorist, well, we're all under suspicion of being a terrorist under the certain conditions that someone wants to deem a mistaken identity situation or anything.

I mean how many guys are named Omar or Mohammed or – I mean … Well, how about in this dormer case? The cops shot up two different cars that were the wrong cars. Yeah, perfect example. Perfect example. Yeah. The idea that the government should have special powers that regular human beings don't, that's crazy. Well, they have that now.

I mean I think … They already do because they're in government. Sure, sure. But to take it to the next level and decide that you're going to deny the rights of people that you feel are guilty. Well, who are you and how do I know that you're infallible and how do I know that this isn't corruption? How do I know this isn't a personal grudge? It's not like you're dealing with an organization that has a spotless record over the past 200 years where they're the most ethical human beings to ever exist. And people from other countries come to them. No, we've caught them lying about a million different things.

Oh, we had committee hearings, which you cannot even imagine today, which shows you how much things have changed. In the 1970s, we had the Church Committee hearings and the Pike Committee hearings where the government actually on television exposed everything the CIA had been doing since the end of the Second World War, the assassinations and all this kind of stuff. since the end of the Second World War, the assassinations and all this kind of stuff. The crown jewels are what the CIA used to call those secrets that were exposed on television by congressional and senatorial committees. It just shows you what happens when there's no oversight. And if stuff is too secret to have oversight over, you're asking for trouble. There's too many ways human beings can justify going beyond the rules. And there's always a good reason.

And you hear it today. I mean, the waterboarding thing is a perfect example. We prosecuted people at Nuremberg for having an attitude that we have now, which is, hey, if they're terrorists and you can save lives by torturing people, isn't that an ethical dilemma where it's worth torturing some guy you know is bad anyway in order to save lives? I mean, if you could have prevented the two towers from falling down by waterboarding a couple of bad guys, isn't that worth it? And those ethical dilemmas lead you off into the weeds really quickly and history shows that over and over again. It's very doubtful that it's helping either.

It's very doubtful that you're really getting that kind of key information from people by throwing water down their mouth. I just – I don't know if torturing people gets them to tell the truth. It gets them to tell you anything you want. There's an old line about would you – and I wish I could quote it at length. It's a wonderful line going back hundreds of years where somebody says, would you abrogate the laws in order to get the devil and the other guy says, no, I would stick to the laws because if you abrogate the laws to get to the devil, you take away the only thing that protects yourself eventually. And that's what this is. People say, well, it's okay to go after this to get to terrorists.

What makes you think, one, that it'll stay with terrorists and two, that what a terrorist is, that definition won't change. The Bush administration was calling these people that would light car dealerships on fire in the middle of the night when there was no one there eco-terrorists. You're gonna drone those people? Right, what are you gonna do? Exactly, where does the line get drawn and who gets to decide? Anti-fungal coffee proponents that might get a little hyped up. Those motherfuckers. Yeah, drone those people. Yeah, it's a strange time because the amount of ability to spy on people and to extract information from your email and your cell phone and they know your GPS at any point in time.

But yet we're still just human beings and human beings have to be protected from their own instincts. We have to set up a system of government that has fail-proof stops where you can't get past certain levels. You can't do certain things. You can't act with impunity. You can't be a king. There has to be a due process. There has to be representation. You have to be able to get a lawyer.

You have to have – you have to, as as an American citizen be able to state your case. Well, here's the fly in the ointment though and this is almost like the founding father's tragic flaw in the system. In wartime, the rules are thrown out the window, right? In wartime, the government is allowed to give the – the congress is supposed to decide when you go to war. Then once the war is going on, the president has – they say extreme constitutional say extreme constitutional authority as commander in chief to run the war any way they want. But this is all predicated on the idea that the war has an end, right? This is a temporary suspension of normality. What do you do in a war like, you know, war?

I'm using air quotes. What do you do in a war that has no end? Who's going to sign a peace treaty with us on some battleship to end this war on terror? This is like saying, you remember the Bush administration for a while was toying with the idea they thought the war on terror had gotten sort of a bad name so they were going to do a little marketing move and change the name for like five minutes they were calling it the war on violent extremism which i thought was a great line because that really showed how ridiculous it was when's violent extremism over who's going to sign sign the end of the war treaty and surrender to us in the violent extremism war so we can return to a normal American system with checks and balances and where the president didn't have extreme authority?

That's the problem is that we're in a situation where it's wartime and it's going to be wartime forever unless somebody declares it over. And if they declared it over, what stops the next guy after one bombing in some part of the world to start it up again? Yeah, essentially we've been at war in some function since the 1940s. But realistically, when we were in the 90s, at least we didn't feel like we were at war. We didn't feel like it until 2001. They didn't invoke the extreme authority either. I mean they didn't do that in Vietnam even. The government didn't say, OK, we're going to lock up every one of Vietnamese descent

in a cage for a while in case there's spies. This is like when Truman did the Korean War thing and he got around having to declare war by saying it's not a war. It's a police action. That was a marketing tool. But by doing that, he also essentially swore. He didn't officially, but kind of swore off that, and I'm going to have extreme constitutional authority. He didn't take that up.

It's when Bush did this war on terror thing and basically the neocon folks said – remember John Yoo, the advisor to the president, the Office of Legal Counsel said that if the president wanted to, he could torture a son to get the father to talk. There are no limits in wartime. No one had really invoked that since the Second World War. So if you want to have total power, just start war. Well, that's an age-old thing. You can go back to the Romans and the Greeks, and they were all – they understood that dynamic real well. And so did the founding fathers of our country who were classically trained. I mean the reason we're not a democracy in one respect is that they were fully aware of how that could go and they were fully aware of what

happened to Rome. So if you look at the checks and balances in our constitution, a lot of that stuff is designed to keep the same thing from happening to us. I think they understood that those things break down over time though and that in essentially you might have a lifespan to what they were creating. Matthew Feeney, Jr.: In that sense, it's very fascinating, the idea of a representative democracy and the idea that there's an electoral college and the idea that there's a few steps beyond actual democracy.

It's like it's sort of you get a vote, but you get a vote for a representative. You don't get to completely vote like one person, one vote. And the idea behind it initially was sort of to protect people from their own silliness, right? Well, the founding fathers didn't necessarily like the idea of average people running the show. If you looked at the state laws, most states wouldn't let average Joes vote. I mean, if you were working for a tinker in Virginia, you probably weren't allowed to

vote. You used to have to be a landowner in most of these states. And what that was designed to do was to limit the vote to stakeholders, right? They figured if you could run a farm without going out of business, you probably knew enough about what was going on to be an educated voter. Plus, they didn't like the idea. I mean, you'll probably know this, that after the revolution, it wasn't that long afterwards, we had things like the Whiskey Rebellion and the Shays' Rebellion. These are new revolutions, and they're revolutions coming from the lower classes. And our brand-new radical founding fathers shut those things down like nobody's business.

Yeah, it's weird when you think like that. You think that the founding fathers didn't necessarily want everybody to vote. You'd be like, wait a minute, what? didn't necessarily want everybody to vote. You'd be like, wait a minute, what? But the romantic version of it is that they were these beautiful people that had this idea of treating people the way they deserved to be treated and governed with respect and honesty. Well, but also look at the times.

I mean, when you realize that when they had the revolution, we became the first major country in the world that had anything like that, then you start to realize, okay, we're looking back at our standards now and not realizing how radical those guys were for their day. And it's worth pointing out that only a few years after our revolution, the French had theirs, which got wickedly out of hand very quickly. And our founding fathers were looking at what happened in France, and the French were saying that a lot of what they were doing was as sort of a respecting kind of thing from what – a reflection of ours.

They were going, don't blame that on us. We never would have gone that far. We wouldn't kill noblemen. So I think it was radical for the times. It looks very conservative and a little fascist now when we look back on it. Peter Robinson The one thing that concerns me now, I mean I think this country is, we sort of feel that we're immune to a revolution. I don't think that anybody has any, I think the average person,

I shouldn't say, don't think that anyone's going to overthrow the government. It's not really anything that anybody really believes or thinks of. It's like, oh God, the United States government is way too big for that. But there's a lot of people in this country that don't think that. There's a lot of people in this country that are stockpiling guns. There's a lot of people in this country that think that the government's ban on assault weapons and all these different magazine restrictions is just designed to squash the oppression or the rather resistance to their oppression. And that when the time comes, they're not going to give up their guns because And that when when the time comes, you know, they're not going to give up their guns because they know what's going to happen,

that the government's going to come again. Like, I've never heard this before in my life, this kind of thinking. I don't remember it in high school. I don't remember it in college. I don't know. But now I read about it on the Internet, like on a fairly regular basis. I read stories about people that are saying I read, there was, what was the task force where a police chief was developing a task force to protect them in case they're invaded by the United States government? Oh, that was in Texas. It was in Texas? One of those wacky places.

I thought it was Oklahoma, but it was one of those places where you're like, whoa, settle down, but hold on, keep talking. What the fuck are you thinking? Like, what do you think is going on? You think the government is going to come and take all the guns? And they're ready to put together a task force to like band together to protect the citizens and their guns from the oppressive government. I've never heard talk like that from an elected official in recent memory. You got two different things going on here and they're both really important.

The first one was when you talked about the revolution thing. I'm of a different mind. I try to look at what's the likelihood of us staying the way we are? I'm not sure. I mean, could a revolution happen? Sure. But could we go the other way, too, where there's just a cracking down on things to an even more extent? In other words, the government gets overthrown on one side of the spectrum. The government cracks down and says, okay, all this constitutional stuff we've paid attention to, we can't do that. If two more buildings fall down, I think everyone's just going to throw everything out the window. I mean, look at how far we've come since the 9-11 attacks. Now magnify that if it happened again from where we are now. So I think the real question is can we really see things staying in this middle ground where we are for another 10 or 20 or 30 years? I could see it going to either extreme.

It's hard for me to imagine us actually staying in this sort of stasis that we're in right now. I certainly think we're in a period of change. period of change. What I wonder is, is it possible that people could be organized enough to do it and get something going on without violence? I mean, is it possible to overhaul government from an elected official point of view? Can you just elect the right people and slowly but surely, they take care of things? I mean, is even possible at this point to do something like that? Well, I want to address your other point because I think that was very good too. The idea of this whole – we need the guns to stop the government from taking over or whatever. I first encountered this when I was on the radio in Oregon because once you get out into the

back country where you get – and this was in the era of the so-called militia movement and everything and you get these people calling you talking about that exact thing you know what happened in militias i think mainstreamed i think they're still out there i think they're just they're the people in the government the guy who you mentioned in texas probably an old militia member but but these guys and this is something that the um the nra is kind of pushed to the nra is a very different animal than it was 30 or 40 years ago and one of the things they talk about now that they didn't used to talk about was this idea that part of the reasons we have a Second Amendment is to overthrow the government if you need to. I'll leave that to a constitutional expert. I would

just point out that I think people who think like that are not paying a whole lot of attention to how much things have changed militarily. You and I were talking about drones a minute ago. Who thinks any government person is going to put themselves out as a target? They're just going to send a drone to your house and – I mean I think that ship has sailed. But there's a lot of people – you remember there was Randy Weaver up in Idaho that got into this conflict with federal agents because he – Is that the Ruby Reef?

Yes. He sawed a shotgun off a little too far and a government agent bought it from him and then all of a sudden they're surrounding his cabin and shooting his dog and shooting his wife and killing his son which really was a kind of a bad deal i mean it was it was he had a case this is what i guess i'm saying but he was a bad enough weird enough unabomber looking kind of dude that you could spin that into well he's a radical gun nut kind of thing and then you have the Waco situation happen. Same thing, a bunch of really weird dudes. So you want to kind of go, well, I mean, look at who you're dealing with

and child abuse and this or that. But you kind of lose how nasty a deal that was because it's like terrorists. You can do anything you want to terrorists. And if it's to terrorists, we don't care as much. I think when you talk about changing the elected officials and all that, we talk about this all the time. I mean let's call it as it really is. We have a corrupt government. When you have a representative system …

Undeniably, right? Undeniably. And they'll tell you that if you catch them off record. They know. And when you have a government that's a representative democracy like we have, you have a government by middlemen, right? We have a membrane. If Joe Rogan gets a bunch of people together to change the laws, you have to go through these representatives. If that membrane is corrupt, no matter what you do, when you end up with legislation on the other side of that membrane, it's going to have been tainted on the way through. And this is why when you talk about reform, reform has to get through those people.

They're the ones benefiting from the way things are. Right. Right. So in other words, if you say let's have some anti-corruption legislation, who's going to be the people most hurt by that, the people that benefit from the way things are? So this is sort of the fly in the ointment. How do you get corruption reform through the very people that are benefiting from corruption? So that's the problem. And what is the answer?

Well, this is another question entirely. I think this is when you pressure people. I think when you talk about, I mean, think about the 60s protests. People today make a big deal. If you can get 50,000 people out with signs for one afternoon, that's a huge protest in the world of the 21st century. You've got to think of 60s protests when you have 250,000, 300,000, 400,000 civil rights type protests that are putting real pressure on the government.

I think that's what it's going to take. It's going to take a real feeling like, okay, the jig is up. This whole, you know, we're in threatened, we're threatened with revolution. You talked about revolution. We're threatened with revolution if we don't buckle down. And you're going to have to have those people literally feel like, OK, we have no choice. I don't care what my contributor gave me to push this idea. We're going to have to at least throw something out there that's a fig leaf. And they don't feel that pressure now. Is it possible, and this was my question, is it possible to go and get new elected officials and change that? I mean, can you get people that aren't willing to be corrupt and aren't willing to capitalize on the system as it's written right now and profit off

of it? Remember that scene from the Kevin Costner version of The Untouchables? There's a scene in that movie, and I quote it all the time, where Al Capone has bought off the jury and he's sitting in court and he knows he has nothing to worry about because he's paid off the whole jury. And they've realized that he's paid off the jury. So at the last minute right before the verdict is read, the judge dismisses all the jury members and brings in all the alternates and screws up the whole thing because now all of a sudden instead of a corrupt jury, you have one that hasn't been bought off. The way our government is set up is designed to keep radical change from happening.

It doesn't turn over all at once. And there's a seniority system so that let's say you elected a third of the Congress as new people, not corrupt. They're part of an, you know, you have the Tea Party thing now. Imagine instead of the Tea Party, you had an anti-corruption movement that was able to bring in a whole bunch of new Congress people and their whole shtick is that we're non-corrupt. We're not going to vote for any of this corruption. The first thing that's going to happen is they're going to be told to sit in the back of the room and shut up until they have seniority. When you're here, two or three terms will maybe give you a committee position.

If you show that you're going to play ball, we'll let you run the committee. I mean, there's this whole system where you don't get to be influential until you've proven you're a good corrupt official for a long time, and you're not allowed to overthrow the entire government at once you have to go in there and then you're still going to have john kerry and john mccain and all those guys running the show while you're in the back if you're lucky getting a chance to give a speech on c-span in front of an empty congressional room because all of your compatriots are out fundraising do you know that they have phone banks

right off the congressional property because you're not allowed to fundraise on government property so they've built these phone banks like one foot off government property and they go in there and they cast their vote and then their aides take them right to the phone banks and they start the fundraising 80 of their time is spent fundraising and they don't want to do this i should say that some of these guys um you know peter defazio is a congressman from oregon he didn't run for senate because he said i'm already fundraising more than my conscience will allow and if i become a senator i have to do even more of that so there are some good people in there they're just i think outnumbered you know 85 to 15 or something like that so their fundraising is essentially just person-to-person phone calls?

Oh, yeah. And as a matter of fact, they will tell you. And you can almost see how they've compromised their own moral sense when you have a conversation with some of these guys. Because like one of them told me, he said, listen, this is democracy in action. And it's OK because anybody can play this game. He said if you have money – and I said what about poor people? He said poor people can get together in large organizations and groups. He said if you have money, and I said, what about poor people? He said, poor people could get together in large organizations and groups. He said, if you have money, you get to play. He said, it's totally fair. It's a totally level playing field. Anybody can take part,

but money is how you get our attention. And they've convinced themselves that this is fine. To be honest, it's been going on in one form or another for so long. And some of these guys have been on the Hill for 30 years. I mean, to them, this is just how it works. Lawrence Lessig wrote a book where he talked to some of these guys, and they're almost confused. He had one guy where he went in and the guy was voting on one side of an issue. And Lawrence Lessig said, well, what about this other side of the issue? And the guy was completely unaware that anybody disagreed with the issue at all, because he hadn't heard from the other side, because the other side hadn't given any money he was unaware

there was another side wow so so in a sense i mean i'm not trying to let these guys off the hook but they're in this bubble i mean i i remember we had i'll even name a name here i had senator mark hatfield on my radio show once and this is way back in the 1990s. And he comes on the show, and he's about 80 years old, and he's led by the hand by some 19-year-old girl who's his aide who's talking to him like he's an Alzheimer's patient. Okay, Senator Hatfield, you're going to sit down and you're going to talk to this guy for 15 minutes exactly, then we have to go to the car. And, I mean, he was like a robot.

I mean, he was, okay, okay, I'll talk to this guy, and then where are we going next? And, I mean, I thought an he was like a robot i mean he was okay okay i'll talk to this guy and then where are we going next and i mean i thought the guy was like you know a manchurian candidate they just hopped up on some guy they given him an injection and then they just lead him to wherever he has to go but in a sense i felt sorry for the guy because to go in and say what are you doing about corruption the first thing he's going to do is turn to his aid and go do we have a corruption problem is this on my schedule i mean he really didn't know so i don't want to cast these people as evil. I'm not sure how much they're aware of some of this stuff. Well, also the business has existed in this certain form, the form that it's in right now for quite a long time.

Yes. This is nothing new. It's an evolution. So when they come into this gig, everybody who works the gig, I mean as they're learning the business and learning how it works, it's just, this is how it is. Oh, man, you go to orientation. If you get elected, if Joe Rogan gets elected to Congress, your first week on the Hill, you go to orientation.

And they're going to tell you where the cafeteria is. They're going to tell you, you know, where the phone banks are and this and that and the other thing. I mean, you get essentially trained how to be an elected official. And then they sit you in the back and you get to watch how business is done for a term or two. You know, and that's how I mean, look at look at Ron Wyden. He's another Oregon senator.

He's the one making the big stink about not being able to get any of these secret documents on the drones and everything else. Wyden is on the Senate Intelligence Committee, which I believe is eight senators. And you have to be there like forever to get on the Intelligence Committee. And the committee is supposed to be the ones who actually get the secret stuff believe it or not we don't tell senators the secret stuff we only tell the people on the intelligence committee the secret stuff about intelligence and wyden says the eight guys on that can't get the information so you have to be a senator for years and years and years to be trusted enough to be on the intelligence committee

so when you say couldn't we get new people in here and couldn't that fix everything? No new person is going to even be given the secret intelligence stuff until they prove that they will play ball for many terms. And then you don't get to be the head of the intelligence committee until you prove that even more. So it's essentially if you looked at the government as a living organism, it's like it's trying to protect itself. It has an immunity system. Every bureaucracy is like that. Most companies, when they get large enough, are even like that. Now tell me about these phone banks. So they get off the floor and they go one foot past the government. Yeah, the property. Yeah. And they just call who? Who are these people?

How do they get their numbers? Generally, what happens is they have a staff and they're going to have somebody on their staff who helps them raise money and there's going to be fundraising targets. Lessig talks about this in his book. They will say you need to raise this much per day and if you fall short the next day, it just rolls over. You have to make that much more per day and they'll have targeting goals that are designed to be met by the next time you have to start campaigning. Now is that money to support their next campaign? Is that money? That's the best question of all, because this is the one empowering thing about the whole deal that goes right back to us as voters and how we can actually

change things. This money is mostly some of it's for campaign organization, right? You want your guys going door to door. You want to have a you want to have your campaign office opened up in Iowa if you're running for president right away, those kind of things. So there's some money that goes to that. But the majority of this money is designed for ads, right? And what are the ads designed to do? To change your mind. What if the ads didn't work anymore? All of a sudden, we already are from a generation that's a lot more cynical about advertising anyway. And you and I are both in a business where we realize how much of a tougher time advertisers have than they used to have.

In the old days, I mean, all you have to do is, you know, we have a new cereal and it's got some different colored marshmallows and boom, I mean, they're selling that like hotcakes. Now it's a much more cynical group. We have the DVRs and all these things that allow you to skip ads. What if they stopped working? What if the old people who still buy into advertising, the old way it happens, that generation goes away, and now all of a sudden everybody's like us?

Don't you devalue what that money buys? Haven't we changed the system simply by not paying attention to the ads that the entire system, the money is designed to change your mind? If it doesn't change your mind anymore, doesn't the whole thing kind of collapse? I mean I don't know because we haven't seen it happen. But that seems to be the whole fly in the ointment when it comes to campaign and money raising and everything else. If I can't change your mind with the money, why do I want to sell my soul and spend 80 percent of my time fundraising?

The whole point is to change your mind. Well, the one thing that always changes my mind is those negative ads, like the really obvious one. President Obama ordered – when they get like real super negative, you just can't trust him. Well, you know why those work though, Joe? They work because you don't have an alternative. I mean that's the whole Democratic and Republican thing. If you had five choices and one guy went negative against another guy, the average voter would say, well, I'm not voting for either. I've heard bad things about both those guys.

So I'm voting for this third party. The two-party thing gets you into the lesser of two evils nonsense or your waste your vote nonsense. And that's where – I mean that's why the negative ads work like they do. That's something that would go away if you had multiple choices. You can't do five negative ads very easily. Well, it became much more difficult for independents after Ron – not Ron Paul. Excuse me. After Ross Perot. Yeah, when Ross Perot came around and paid for his own television half hour to talk about his campaign and taxes and where your money is going and the Federal Reserve, a lot of people had never heard any of that stuff before. What if a not-so-goofy character had done it too?

I mean what if you had somebody who – what if Robert Redford? I had a political science professor. Yeah, he was from Germany, a real old guy when I was in college. And he said that one of the flaws in the American system was that they have – the job of president is actually two jobs in most foreign countries. Usually you'll have like a prime minister and a guy who's called the chancellor or the president. The prime minister is the bean counter guy, the guy who's really – you put in there to do the work. And then the chancellor or the president is the figurehead guy, the guy who goes to the state funerals, the one who embodies the soul of the nation. And this guy said, in your country,

those two things have to be in the same person. So when you elect a Ronald Reagan, what you're electing is a John Wayne. You want that guy. I mean, who do you think of as president? You don't want some wimpy bean counter accountant looking guy. You want some guy that looks like America, right? But how often do you get the skills you want in the bean counter? I say bean counter, but you know, it's a whole range of things. But how often are you get the skills you want in the bean counter? I say bean counter, but it's a whole range of things. But how often are you going to combine the Robert Redford look of a person with the guy who's going to have all those other qualities you want, especially if they've been an eraser clapper politician for 30 years or something? So we're kind of hamstrung by that. So if Ross – can you imagine Ross Perot as president?

Because I think most people are like, yeah, I like what he's saying, but I can't imagine that little, short, strange-talking, we're going to clean out the barn kind of guy being president. I think – I would have imagined he could have pulled it off. I think so. I wish. I wonder. Yeah, and you know what? To be honest, I don't know what kind of president he'd be. My standards are just so low now.

I mean if they're honest, I'm on board. I mean forget about specific policies. My take on it would be completely – I mean it really would be all just guesswork because I have no idea what the hell happens when you actually get into office. I guess but I really have no idea what the whole process must be like to say when I'm president, I'm going to do this. to say when i'm president i'm gonna do this when you actually get elected and then you have meetings and get access and get debriefed and they explain the world to you in a way that really no one has access to other than the president sure you're not bypassing that moment at the inauguration with a hit you up with the need to let me know if you had to return

to a canada go read about you don't look at obama speeches i tell everybody to go do this go watch candidate obama speeches when he's running for the first term in office and compare that to what we've had and then realize that that's pretty darn normal, the before and after thing. You do start to come to this conspiratorial idea that some – they go to you right before inauguration. We're going to kill your whole family if you don't do just what every other president does. Did you ever hear the Bill Hicks bit about it? No. Tell me about that. Bill Hicks, his take was, he goes,

I think that when you become president, they take you into a smoky room filled with industrialists. And he goes, are you ready? Right out of network. Roll the tape. And he goes, and then a projector drops down, and they show you an angle of the Kennedy assassination that's never been seen before.

Perfect. And they say, any questions? That's right. Exactly. And he's like, yeah, what's my agenda? Well, I mean, it's almost like an algebra problem. When you try to explain all the reasons that these people might morph so much after Election Day, yeah, they'll start to start looking not that far-fetched because it's hard to explain otherwise unless unless these people just think campaign promises are campaign promises and that's all and i and i and i've been i mean look obama was was the favorite of guys like goldman sachs and city bank when he was running for office it's hard to square his agenda while running that he talked to the people with the people that were providing the money and so i so I think maybe that has more to do with it than anything else.

I mean we're not getting grassroots. You don't have Abbie Hoffman running for president. And if he was and Goldman Sachs were backing him, I have a feeling he'd do the same thing. Yeah, his – the image that was being portrayed was like nothing we had ever seen before. It was like, OK, he actually is us. He is the misfit. He is America. He is half black, half white. He is raised by a single mom. He is, you know, not from a silver spoon background. He's a person that's going to understand the plight of America. Constitutional law scholar. Remember all those things he said? See, this is

where the Obama administration really angers me. It's not unusual to have some president go off half-cocked and do wild, crazy things like President Bush did after 9-11. In fact, I kind of forgive those people a little bit put legislation in right now mandating a cooling off period after the next 9-11 so we don't legislate while we're temporarily insane. I think the fact we don't do that shows you that they'd like to legislate when we're temporarily insane. But I think we were going to go crazy when that happened. It's the responsibility of the next guy, though, to get us back on track because if he doesn't, what was an anomaly becomes the new law of the land. When Obama, from the other party, running on a platform that he's going to fix the abuses of the previous administration, instead codifies them, that's the new reality. That's not an anomaly. That's not an administration before him that was just different. This is the new post-9-11 world with both parties on board. How much say do you believe he has in the day-to-day things? I mean how much say does he have in our foreign policy, where we go, what we do?

It's interesting because this gets back to a point we made earlier. More than normal because of that whole wartime authority that we talked about earlier. First of all, presidents have more authority in the realm of foreign policy anyway. That's always been considered the reason presidents like to dabble in foreign policy is because they have the most leeway there. If they want to get into budgetary things domestically, you start running into congressional roadblocks all the time. So presidents, even when they're not foreign policy guys, like to do foreign policy stuff because you can actually do stuff and the Congress can't say much about it. In wartime, this guy's got amazing authority. I mean, imagine using those same rationales that they use anytime they want to do something with the war on terror, but using them for something totally, okay, we're going to stop this budget impasse because we're in a war on terror and I have supreme authority and I'm just going to do what I want to do. What would anybody say? Nobody's talked about limiting extreme wartime authority at all.

I mean, if the Republicans are going to say, well, you know, you can't do that in wartime. Well, gosh, it's nice. There's a line. Somebody's designated a limit to the powers. They don't do that. Now, there's a book by a Yale constitutional law professor named Bruce Ackerman. I think it's called The Fall of the American Republic. And it's a little too wonky for most people. But what he's essentially done is target what he thinks is the fly in the ointment in terms of these laws. And it's the Presidential Office of Legal Counsel. It's essentially the president's lawyers. These were supposed to be people who could answer the president's question. Is this constitutional? Is it not constitutional? Instead, it's become the kind of people who explain answer the president's question is this constitutional is it not constitutional instead it's become the kind of people who explained to the president

how we can do something that's who John you was he was one of these people with president would say arm how do we do this and how do we justify constitutionally it was John use job to go find out how to do that right every president has these guys and what what a common was saying is by the time the Supreme Court gets around to ruling on these things, it's often two, three terms after that was first. It's been the law of the land for a long time now. Imagine the Supreme Court ruling on something from 1994 and saying everything we've done since 94 is wrong. You have to overturn it all.

That doesn't tend to happen. And so the Office of Legal Counsel can make these rulings and they're the law of the land until they're challenged and overturned by a court. By the time the court sees that, it's settled law. It seems to me that we're in like a system that it's like, I compared it the other day to an old car. It's like, you can have a Model T and keep changing the oil and keep fixing things, replacing the parts, and it will kind of keep working. It's going to require a lot of work, but it will sort of get you where you've got to go. Or you could buy a brand-new Cadillac, and you're not going to have any fucking problems at all. Why? Because it's improved. It's been redesigned.

They've got all the kinks out, fixed the flaws, and designed a completely new thing. We don't have that in government. We have like this old patchwork government. We have this old, wacky, imperfect sort of system. One of my listeners brought up a point that I thought of before, but I'd forgotten. And when you think about it, it's rather, it's a good point. He said, not just that, it's a government designed for a tiny country, you know, one with 13 colonies all on the East Coast, relatively homogenous and the whole thing, and you're expecting that same system to work now?

You had 13 million people then or something, you have 300 million now. Marc Thiessen With airplanes. David Kramer And totally, and the internet and globalization where we're dealing with all these other countries in ways. With airplanes. to adapt. Now, Thomas Jefferson said that that's why the Constitution was built to be amended. He said to expect a child to, he said to expect this Constitution to work as we wrote it forever would be to expect a child to continue to wear the same suit of clothes as they grow up. But there's a limit, right? I mean, at a certain point, you reach the stretching point, maybe. And again, if the legislators and all those people were really acting in our interests, maybe they could make it work.

But when you have them working at cross purposes from us on a lot of this stuff, that's asking too much. That's systemic failure. having the ability to spend as much money as they like on candidates where you you have no restriction in how much money they can spend to influence someone who gets into office it's it's so transparent it's like how does that ever get to be the way we run things because it seems like that's the most obvious method of bribery ever well there's another one because even if you got rid of that how do you stop this revolving door that we see where they say, listen, man, don't worry about it. When you get out of office, we've got a nice cushy job at this defense industry or whatever where you helped us out. We'll help you.

On the other side, you'll be a very rich person. We see that all the time. How do you stop that? Did you hear about the guy who was the head of Monsanto is now the head of the FDA? Well, it's like Obama just put another guy in the Treasury Department that works for like Citigroup or something. And you turn around and go, it bothers me less that he did it than he doesn't mind that we saw he did it. And everything that's gone on, I mean, you don't even that's when the gloves are off. We used to hide the corruption. Now it's so open. Nobody even cares. And that's when the gloves are off. We used to hide the corruption. Now it's so open nobody even cares. And that's when you've reached a tipping point I think.

Yeah, that's ridiculously open. That's just hoping that there's so much going on all over the world. Yeah, we just have to suck it up as people. We have nothing we can do. What are you going to do? Vote for Mitt Romney? I mean that's how it goes. Yeah.

Well, that was hilarious. It's like what do you got? You want a cult member or you want the same? I mean they came up with one of the weirdest candidates ever, a cult member billionaire with obvious disdain for the lower class and the working class. You know what? When was the last time, though? I think that's almost – I mean, you want to talk about conspiracy theories that Oliver Stone can do a movie about. How about how we end up with these kinds of elections where how often is it one guy that you'd like to replace and another guy who's worse?

Yeah. I mean, you look at Bill Clinton, Bob Dole. Yeah. You look at – I remember people forget this. We've lionized and romanticized Reagan so much. People forget that in 84, there's a lot of people that would have gotten rid of Reagan. Do you remember who he ran against though? Walter Mondale.

Yeah. Talk about people you can't imagine. President. I mean this happens all the time. How about Nixon-Humphrey? I mean my god. You look at these. These are not – this is like saying let's have a good game of a pay-per-view NFL and we'll put the Patriots up against some college team. I mean it's not even competitive.

Yeah, maybe a high school team. There you go. The Mitt Romneys. Yeah, it is funny. If you want to go crazy, Alex Jones conspiratorially sort of designed a road map how they've decided to keep certain presidents.

They believe that that's one of the problems with Ross Perot. Ross Perot is how Bill Clinton got into office. Yeah, the three-way split. Yeah, because Ross Perot took away from George Herbert Walker. Maybe. Maybe. I can see that. I voted for him. Sure.

But I remember a lot of people at the time thinking like, wow, what are they going to do about this? Well, they did the Commission on Presidential Debates up the bar. I always try to tell people, do you realize the debate used to be run by the League of Women Voters? They got out of the gig in the late 80s because the rules that the Democrats and Republicans wanted in terms of controlling the debate

and the questions and everything else, they said, we won't run a debate under those conditions. And they expected the other side to back down. And the other side, which were the two parties instead, said, great, we didn't want to deal with you guys anyway. We'll form our own commission. We'll make up four members on it. We'll be Democrats, four will be Republicans, and we'll set the standard for where non-Democrats or Republicans can play a role.

Perot exceeded their original rules. He was able to get enough of the population and involvement and rise enough in the polls because of his money, like you said, to get in the debates. Nobody wanted him in the debates. Nobody wanted him in the debates. Nobody liked, I mean, they sweated. Do you remember? Because he brings up things that are bipartisan failures. And this is the rule of the debates. Don't bring up, if the Democrats can't tell the Republicans, you know, or the Republicans can't tell the Democrats or blame them for something that they had nothing to do with, we don't talk about it.

The debt, for example, that was Perot's big issue, that's a bipartisan creation. So the two parties had no reason to bring that up. You throw the third guy in there, though, oh, he's going to make everybody sweat because nobody has a good answer for bipartisan failures. So after Perot crashed the debates, the Commission on Presidential Debates upped the rules for inclusion. And I went back and did the history of it. rules for inclusion and i went back and did the history of it do you realize that there's never been a candidate in american politics from any third party or independent that's ever come anywhere near

their current bar that they've said me teddy roosevelt ran as a third party candidate from the bull moose party after he'd already been president right a very popular president running against two people that nobody wanted he wouldn't have reached the benchmark to be included in the modern presidential – you're never going to have a third-party person in a game. It's 15 percent they're raising too, right? It's more than that.

You have to raise a certain amount of money. You have to reach certain poll standards in a number of different polls, and you have to – there's a name recognition thing. I mean it's a whole list of criteria. Isn't that hilarious? Name recognition. Yes, before the debates is where you get the name recognition. That's right.

Really quite cute. Gary Johnson never had a chance. Oh, among other people. I mean, you know, there's – listen. You're going to have to get a very rich, handsome, famous person to run, and they're going to still have to have all the brakes go their way. They're going to have to be running against Walter Mondale and Bob Dole. So essentially they've legally slapped it down to a two-party system. There really is no third parties.

What I like about it is I like how they both act as though it's in the Constitution somewhere. Well, we have a two-party system. No, we don't. Where did you find that? That's a little propaganda from the two parties. We don't have an any-party system. The founders hated parties. They called them factions, and they hated it, and it was like a generation later, there we are.

Well, when you have an issue like Bush to Obama where not only do you see very little change in how we operate. Same foreign policy almost exactly. Almost exactly. But what is it then? What are you? Where is the change? Where is the change and where is the hope? And if there's only two parties and you're both being funded by the same gigantic corporations and banks, whoa.

Like what really has happened here? The late Gore Vidal said we have one party in this country with two wings that represents 4 percent of the population. I mean that might be a little extreme but you start to see that way. I mean especially when you compare what we consider to be left and right to, say, Europe, for example. I mean, first of all, our Republicans are to the right of anything, you know, almost. There's a few fascist parties and real weirdos in Europe, but we're to the right of anything like that. And our Democrats are to the right of most of their parties, too. Well, you know, I have this conversation with a good buddy of mine, Brian Callen,

all the time where we talk about how crazy the world is today. But yet the greatest time to live ever, the safest time to live ever, the most prosperous time, the most technologically advanced time. When you look at today in comparison to a thousand years ago, how brutal life was or even a few hundred years ago. Yeah, where would you want to go back to? The dentistry alone would keep you in the modern day. Yeah, I mean, we have just this amazing potential as we stand today with our technological abilities, our internet connections, our ability to exchange information. We seem hobbled only by our representation.

It really does seem to be, if you look at how advanced medicine is today, if you look at how advanced science is, the incredible innovations that are coming out every day, the one place where we're disappointing is in our representation. You know, a thought occurs to me as you say that, you know, maybe you and I and the people who think like us are a weird sort of minority. Maybe you could come up with this idea. And, like, I'm fleshing this out as we talk. But, I mean, maybe there's a way to look at this outside our comfort zone where people might say, you know, if all you do is play video games every day, you go to your – who cares? Maybe they would say, well, listen, I mean, why do I care about the fact that the government is corrupt?

And why do I care that all these things are going on? And why do I care about drones? What does that matter to me? I have the best life anybody's ever had in all history what am i missing and i think that's where you get into these arguments that we make about slippery slopes well hey man just cuz you're happy today you know wait until uh... video game players who download games without

permission or struck by drones i mean so so i i guess maybe there's a way to look at it that there might be a lot of people. It's like, you know, brave new world territory that don't care. There certainly are. I have my medical marijuana. I have my video games. I, you know, I have my days off. I'm on my disability payments and who cares? That's, I think, what infuriates people about the whole hipster attitude. That's what infuriates people about the attitude, like, whatever,, I'm not –, when they developed cars. We didn't develop anything.

We just sort of stumbled along. It's our job to do the same thing, to continue innovating as those before us have innovated in every way, whether it's socially, technologically, or governmentally. We haven't governmentally. It's our one area where we've really stalled. We really have, in fact, slipped backwards into a goofier system because it's more transparent. People are more upset than ever, and still government operates the same way. When we saw the bailouts, and I remember there was a speech where Obama gave where he said he was limiting the bonuses of the CEOs to like – it was like a half a million dollars. And I was like this is the craziest – you're watching robbery take place right before your eyes and this guy who's the representative of the people, this Obama character, is letting

you know they're only going to rob a half a million dollars each. Like, oh yeah, yeah, their company failed but see, they have a contract and even though the bank didn't – they lost all their money, that guy gets money. Money is I think what we just – my little fly in the ointment of this idea I had. I think the fact that it's going to be very hard for a lot of Americans to make a decent living is the most likely thing to prompt change. I remember in the 1990s when I was doing my radio show, I was the worst radio show host in the world for the times because like I was on the station that had like these conservative stereotypical radio hosts all day long. And then right in the middle of the day part, it was me. And I didn't fit any of these things so i fought with the audience all day long because they were these

holdovers from the other conservative shows and so i'm screaming and yelling about you know when are you going to get out in the streets when are you going to do something some guy called me up and said something very prophetic i thought about it many times he goes people aren't going to go out and face the bayonets while they're able to pay their bills and they have the food they want and they can give their kids a halfway decent life. He said when that changes, everything else will too. And you sit there and think about what's happened to middle class jobs in this country, the so-called middle class jobs. It's a combination of changes in trade deals, which we all know about, but also automation, which has gotten rid of a lot of jobs that the – I always talk about them as the average Joes and Janes, people that don't have really high expectations but they want to work.

They'll go to work and they'll raise a family and maybe save up for college and just make it work, a little shell game here and there, but just a decent life. That's the American dream, right? way and maybe i mean when those video game medicinal marijuana smoking hipster people can't pay the bills and get evicted maybe that's the kind of wake-up call that changes their belief system and maybe that's where you say we live in the greatest time ever yeah unless you're a black person in prison because they caught you with a little cocaine or maybe unless you're some guy that just got evicted and your house is underwater i mean those are the things that all of a sudden make you – and you have enough of those people because nobody cares if it's 1 percent of the population. If 40 percent of the population dropped from what was the middle class into the lower class, I think agitation hits a level that you and I in our lifetimes haven't seen. Well, I think it's at a level now.

I think it's on the way. Yeah, where we have never seen before. And that's one of the things that I was alluding to when I was talking earlier about the desire to understand history. I think that more people today, and at least the conversations that I'm having based on my own personal experiences, more people are concerned with talking about the corruptions of the past and why shouldn't we be surprised or why should we be surprised there's so much fucked up shit going on in politics today like did you know this did you know that like it's like i think there's a lot of people that are trying to figure out how the hell we got so bad that's you know what i was gonna you just took the words out of my mouth the reason history is

important because it tells you how we got here yeah you know you might i had a teacher once that said look you join a soap opera and you watch the soap opera and you're going, who the hell is that? Why are they mad at her? Who screwed who? I mean that's what history teaches you. It gives you context so you can understand the now. I think the founding fathers obviously had some awesome ideas and they were brilliant men and they were very well-schooled. You can't possibly ask people from 1776 to figure out a way that's going to – you're going to govern people that exist in a time you couldn't even possibly imagine. Don't you think they would have been the first people to say that too?

Absolutely. What are you – come on, man. I gave it to you to take care of. Where are the wise men of today? It's not autopilot. Yeah, it's not autopilot. Where are the wise men of today that step forth and make sense of the situation without need for – without greed, without corruption? Where are they? Let me piggyback on that because I thought about that too.

Look at the 1960s, which whatever you may have thought about it was a period of change in whatever direction. Look at how many people you can still name, if you have any knowledge at all, that were leading their own segments of movements one way or the other. They had tons of people, whether you want to talk about civil rights and the Martin Luther Kings and the Malcolm Xs, whether you want to talk about the Yippies and all that, whether you want to talk about, everything had these people that stepped forward that are on your Wikipedia page. If you want to go look, who the hell does that today? Can you name two people who are out front as political, outside politics, but people who lead movements? I can't.

They've done an awesome job of marginalizing those people. Yeah, probably. The government's way better at preventing a Martin Luther King today. Yeah, I mean, today you have your obvious race baiters like Jesse Jackson. That goes back. I mean, is he still around? I mean, that's when I was in college. Yeah, constantly and

constantly getting called out for what he's doing with corporations and forcing them to pay enormous sums of money. And he goes in for racial education and teaches people whenever they say... I mean, essentially what he does is he finds someone who's done something either that could be racially distasteful or said something that's out of line even in a joke and they go in and they blackmail them but that's not a leader that's just somebody who's found their own little scam who else al sharpton even worse guy he started

his whole career off with a fake rape case you know thatana Brawley. Yeah, yeah. So that's what they allow. They allow the most preposterous to exist. But again, those don't represent any of those kind of people from the 60s who legitimately believed. Yeah. And that's what's missing. And maybe you think it's because we're cynical or is our generation – I mean, look, you and I are about the same age.

Remember, we were Generation X. We were a bunch of slackers and everybody was like, same age. We come – remember we were Generation X. We were a bunch of slackers and everybody was like, oh, look at what this generation is going to be. And the funny thing is I think compared to generations after us, we look good. So what does that mean? If we're the slacker generation, the people that came after us are even more – I mean are we reaping what we sow? Although I'm not so happy with what the baby boomers did, so who knows how that – Well, I think that this generation that's growing up today have this insane advantage of the internet from birth. Yes, they do.

Imagine what those 60s people would have done with the internet. Oh, yeah. I mean one of the things about the 60s, it's such a trip and so hard for people to wrap their head around, was that it was only 20 years after Hitler. And that's a – when you put that in your head, I mean 20 years ago was what? 90s. I do this all the time. It's funny you say that. I remember I'm born in 65. That's 20 years after the Second World War.

20 years ago, I was in ABC over here in town, ABC News. I mean, God, 20 years is nothing anymore That's Seinfeld Seinfeld was on the air in 93, right? So think about that, that's so recent that's the Holocaust That is amazing, yes So the people that lived in the 60s were dealing with

such a strange time First of all, the introduction of psychedelic drugs into the community that had never existed before, like LSD and the proliferation. Stuff that started in the late 50s with Huxley and those people and the Kerouacs and all that and then burst into mainstream. And unbeknownst to most folks, even though marijuana has been illegal in this country since the 1930s, LSD didn't become illegal until 1970. LSD didn't become illegal until 1970. They passed this sweeping Schedule I psychedelic act where they made everything from peyote to mushrooms, all these different sacramental entheogens.

They made them all illegal. Well, they made them illegal then because that was the first time law enforcement around the country was running into widespread problems with it. They didn't know. There's a great dragnet from the old dragnets that are so funny. I love those. The one with Blue Boy, the most famous one ever, those were all based on actual things. And this was the – they find out people are using this brand-new drug called LSD, and there's no law against it. So immediately the first thing they have to do is go find a new law that they can put into place.

It's like I say today. The problem with our drug policy is that we're not accounting for the fact that we might come up with some darn good drugs that don't do as much damage as the ones we have. Our policy will be to make whatever new drug we find illegal tomorrow. If it intoxicates you, it's illegal. I don't know how much longer that's going to work, but if I was the government trying to stamp out drugs, I think I'd just make better drugs that competed with the world. I mean, how do you get rid of bathtub gin? You get Bombay Sapphire and nobody wants any bathtub gin anymore.

Well, also you have to address what's being done with these drugs and what's the effect because they've made no effort whatsoever to stop things that turn you stupid. There's no effort whatsoever to slow down oxycodone, oxycodone, Vicodins. Well, meth, sort of. I mean,, Vicodin. Well, meth sort of. I mean they go after meth. Meth will make you go crazy. Oh, I see what you're saying. What I'm saying is the government is not trying to stop hydrocodone from producing. Oh, I think they are. You think they're starting to stop it?

They're passing laws now that say, oh, they're going after the hydrocodone. Tough now. Brand new stuff. You're not going to be able to call in a prescription refill for that you're going to have to have a physical prescription now every time they're going to crack down on that they're going to they are they are now well i was um i was in florida recently and uh speaking of hydrocodone yeah i don't know if you know the situation in florida they got a lot of the the the prescription doctors there yeah they have pain management centers. Yes.

And what a pain management center is, you go in and it's one building. And like this office, in that door is the doctor. You go, hey man, I fucked my back up. Hurts like hell. Can't sleep. Okay, here's some Oxycontin. I guarantee you, five years, that will not be around. Guaranteed. I bet you're right. But one of the reasons why is

because it's been exposed. Well, people are dying. Because they had so many documentaries on it. Yeah, people are dying. Yeah. Those guys from Current TV. I think it was Current TV. One of those fucking channels. Vanguard is the show.

They had a show called the OxyContin Express. And what they did was essentially they showed that there is a highway that connects Florida to the rest of the country, Ohio and Kentucky and all that. And these people are just getting busted with massive amounts of oxygen. I was just going to say, in places like Tennessee, they just sit on the side of the road and bust any – yeah. But here's the thing. I'm not convinced. I mean when you look at – if you look at modern society and you say where have we made the most technological advances, you would have to put pharmacology in the top three or four

areas, right? Oh yeah, sure. And when, for example, when the Nazis wanted stuff to keep their soldiers awake for things like unlimited blitzkrieg attacks and fighter pilots, they would simply go to the pharmacy companies and say, here's what we need, and they'd produce it. If we were intelligent about this, we would say, as Dr. Y also famously wrote 20 years ago, people want to change their consciousness. Can't we arrange for substances that do this in a more safe way than the ones we have that come with some pill that will sober you up when it's time to drive home that's better than what we have now and i guarantee you if you said the pharmacy companies and by the way we'll give you the patent to this for 20 years afterwards they will come up with something recreational better than anything we have but because of an almost i don't know if

it's a puritan ethic or if it's the companies that make the current products that are legal that don't want competition or whatever it is nobody even talks about this this is nothing drives me crazier about the way we conduct things in american life then we don't even bring up subjects i don't mind if we come up with the wrong answer in a national debate on something like this but can we have the national debate can you come up and defend to me why we shouldn't be working on safer healthier alternatives if you're going to make this drug illegal for recreational use, no problem, but give me something that people can use because they want to use it that will do something similar, will be less harmful to the individual using it,

and less harmful to society. I don't think the government has any plans whatsoever on either backing or supporting any pharmaceutical company that creates psychedelics. I think there's a big difference between creating hydrocodone or creating a safer amphetamine or creating safer drugs that allow us to continue society as structured. When you start getting into things like mushrooms and LSD and acid, the real problem is the boundary dissolving properties of these things, which make you want to absolve society, makes you want to get rid of all the laws, makes you want to sleep naked on each other's floors and do a lot of like culturally unsanctioned shit. And that creates chaos. And that created the chaos of the 60s. It was a paradigm shifting

sort of a way that people were looking at the world that was impossible for the 1950s minded cops to control i think it's more of a difference between medicinal and recreational and i don't think the authorities whoever that may be have ever acknowledged that besides alcohol there is any such thing as recreational um right unless you accept the idea in a free society that maybe people should be allowed to use recreational stuff? I used to say there ought to be a system, a test, right?

And it should be something like 100 questions. Question number one, how likely is it to be addicting? Question number two, how dangerous is it? And everything should pass this test. And if you get above or below, I don't know how it would work, a certain score, you're legal. If you don't, you're illegal. And you put the current drugs that are legal on there too.

You put alcohol on there, put caffeine on there, and let's see how it scores. Do you really think marijuana is going to fail that test and alcohol is going to pass? It's like I said to you before. If somebody invents the perfect drug tomorrow in some bathtub somewhere, our government is going to ban it the day after tomorrow with no testing, no questions asked, just on the grounds that it's recreational. You're not allowed to have any recreational drugs. after tomorrow with no testing, no questions asked, just on the grounds that it's recreational, you're not allowed to have any recreational drugs. Not only recreational, there's an issue with things being recreational. Is there anything performance enhancing?

You know, Provigil. Do you know what Provigil is? I don't know what Provigil is. Provigil is like the latest smart drug rage amongst the Silicon Valley set. And it's this very odd stimulant that I'm not qualified to describe the mechanics and the mechanism behind what it does. But what it does is it gives you this sort of stimulated, accelerated feeling without feeling like you're on speed.

Your heart rate doesn't go up. You don't get jittery. You don't get crazy. What's the action? What's it do? Is it an amphetamine type thing? No, it's a new thing. Like a B vitamin that just –

No, no, no. It's much more intense. Brian, you've experienced it. Yeah, I mean I was on zero sleep and I had to drive to San Diego. I mean I could barely keep my eyes open and I took it and just immediately I was like, oh, I'm awake. Okay. Wide awake, clear. What is it?

Do you know what it is or do you just take it sight unseen? Well, he got it from me. Yeah, I take it. I gave it to him because I didn't want to – You have to have a laboratory situation. Well, let me find the exact mechanism behind it. Is it legal? Yes, absolutely.

Is it legal because they just haven't gotten around to banning it yet? No, here's the question. Here's rather the issue. It was created essentially to enhance mental performance and clarity. However, to get it as a prescription drug, you can't have something that just makes you better. You have to have something wrong with you. So they had to say narcolepsy. People with narcolepsy. Is this the narcolepsy?

Absolutely. I'm not bullshitting. How do you prove you have narcolepsy? I don't know. You go to the doctor's office and just fall asleep. Shift work, sleep disorder, and excessive daytime sleepiness associated with obstructive sleep apnea, which by the way, I have sleep apnea. And it is not an amphetamine? No, it is not. Despite extensive research into the interaction of – it's called modafinil.

That's the actual chemical name. With a large number of neurotransmitter systems, the precise mechanism or mechanisms of action remain unclear. So it's going to be a dopamine serotonin kind of thing. But it doesn't crash. You don't crash afterward. It elevates hypothalamic histamine levels, leading some researchers to consider that modafinil is a wakefulness-promoting agent rather than a classic amphetamine-like stimulant. Are they using it on the street yet? Oh, yeah.

Well, for sure. People in school, people in startups, people that are forced to work long hours. Podcasters. Yeah, podcasters. If you were exhausted and you had to take – like if you had to do something to try to wake up, it's amazing. Well, if the fungus-free coffee doesn't work anymore. So let me ask you this. What's the penalty for being caught with this stuff without a prescription?

Well, being caught with any chemical, the prescription is a misdemeanor, right? Isn't it? Depending on how much you have. And what the prescription is, yeah. Yeah, you have to have a prescription, but you can get one. You can just say you're tired and you get one. But this is the problem I have. You have a little sleep apnea. How can we – I mean if you said – think about how you would change the country if you said, listen, there's – again, getting back to my Joe Friday dragnet thing because this is apparently how I learned about all this as a youth.

I remember the marijuana episode where the guy is the family man. I remember the one where his child dies in the bathtub later where he's trying to argue with Joe Friday about why there's nothing wrong with marijuana. He says, well, it's less effective than alcohol. It doesn't bother you. And Joe Friday says, but look at all the problem alcohol causes. Do we really need another drug that does that? I think that's how they think. I think they think that you're going to increase – and they might be right.

Traffic fatalities. I don't think they are. I think A, they're wrong, and B, they don't really think that way. Everything we've said here is about how they're wrong. Well, I don't believe they're right about traffic fatalities. I think people are safer drivers when they're high. I think they drive slower. They're more aware, especially if they smoke pot on a regular basis.

It might depend on how high. Oh, yeah. Oh, for sure. I mean obliterated. You can get obliterated to the point where it's reality dissolving. I think if you legalize marijuana, I think you would see more – I think it's almost unequivocal. You would see more – what would you call it? MUIs?

What would you even – You know what I think you'd see? More merging, more waving. People would allow you to merge. You might. Listen, there's no question that this stuff would come with a cost. The question is, is the cost that you would pay worse than what we have now? I don't agree that it would come with a cost.

I think it would be beneficial to society as far as a relaxing – I think if there's anything that society needs right now is a change of perspective, something to calm them down, and more creativity. Those are three things that are promoted by marijuana. I think you're speaking as a guy who's experienced with this. I think – remember what it's like when you get kids first starting out with this stuff. Look. Well, kids with this stuff. Look. Well, kids should be educated.

Everything – One of the problems with kids starting out with this stuff is that they're going into it in an ignorant way, experimenting on their own. No one knows what the effects are going to be. No one knows what to expect. But look at how every kid gets understanding about alcohol. I mean it's going to be a similar kind of a learning curve. Not my kids. I teach them. I speak to them about alcohol. How do, it's going to be a similar kind of a learning curve. No, not my kids. I teach them. I speak to them about alcohol.

How do you teach them how to drink? Well, I don't let them drink, but I speak, but I have a 16-year-old and I talk to her about alcohol very specifically. What do you say? Well, first of all, I tell her whenever we have conversations about anything, one of the most important things that I bring up is all the things that I fucked up. They don't care about that, do they? Yes, they do.

Oh, of course they do. Do you have kids? Yeah, two. Two? How old are they? 11 and 8. When I was a kid, one of the things that I remember more than anything was I have a really cool uncle, Uncle Vinny.

And one of the things that he would, it seems like Uncle Vinny, but he's actually an artist with long hair. He's a hippie. When he would talk to me about things, he would always talk to me like if I did anything wrong. It was always what he did, how he fucked up first. My father's famous line was, do as I say, not as I do. He was a filmmaker. That's funny.

I learned a lot listening to this guy tell and i remember thinking like that like he kept me from being on the defensive by explaining to me that it's just part of human nature to fuck up and to make mistakes and because he was so honest about that i would listen to all of his advice whether it's about alcohol whether it's about whatever and i think the most important thing you can give to a kid is information and love and the only way they're going to accept it is that they trust you and the only way they're going to trust you is if you're 100 honest with them all the time and you just you don't play any bullshit games with them and you explain to them and even not just not just honest but you got to explain to them all the

times you fucked up as well so what do you do if i saw something the other day where snoop dog is smoking weed with his kid? What about that? Well, how old is his kid, first of all? I don't know the answer to the question. I mean, if his kid's 18, I don't have an issue with it. I brought up Snoop Dogg, man. That is right there, the limit of my knowledge already.

So I'm off on the deep end here already. I think the younger, the better. I think stoned kids would be awesome. It's actually not good for your development. And I was just going to say, I'm living up in Oregon where there's a whole generation of kids that were on LSD from like five years old. So it turns you into Courtney Love without the creativity. Are you Portland?

Are you up there? Eugene. Eugene. Oh, OK. Makes Portland look conservative. It does. It does make Portland look conservative. That's Hippieville Central.

But gosh, it's a beautiful country up there. Yeah. And I'm from here. So I mean, coming back here is like, I was telling my mom just today, this town feels claustrophobic to me. You know, we have like nine buildings where they used to have one on a lot. And you just feel like, I mean, I need some outdoors areas. You've got to go to the beach. Yeah, you don't realize how smothered you are.

No, and this town used to be a great place to live. No offense, Angelenos. It's still great. It's just too big and crazy. I'd live a little bit further out, but I want to move even further out. I've actually been looking at Santa Barbara lately. The beach is cold in Santa Barbara, though. I'm not scared of the cold. I grew up in Boston.

This cold is for pussies. This is nothing. Boston's really bad now. That's brutality. You're right. Where were we at? We were talking about them making drugs legal. The idea is it's a personal freedom issue. And the personal freedom is you're a man. I should not be able to – if it was only two people on the planet, just you and me, and I said, well, I've made a law, and the law is no alcohol. You'd be like, what the fuck are you talking about?

There's only two of us, and I want to drink. Well, I'm going to lock you in a cage if you drink the alcohol. It sounds preposterous, but it's just as preposterous for 3,000 people to tell 300 million people that they can't have pot. Well, here's the difference to me. What's the difference between locking somebody up you find with a drug than locking somebody up who does something they shouldn't be doing when they're on the drug? I mean, hold them accountable and responsible. Then we're still going to have a ton of people in prison, but they're not going to be in prison for possession.

They're going to be in prison for doing something that, you know, you go back to the old West and one of the standard stump speeches that the person they were about to hang would give you, the guy, you know, who's about to hang would always feel, not always, but a lot of times feel like they needed to give some sort of lesson to the kids. And they'd say something like, well, you need to avoid alcohol and don't end up like I ended up and that was a, you know, that kind of thing. Look, that's going to happen.

And there's no question that I think whether it's alcohol or anything else, that's going to lead some people astray. They call it a gateway drug. You know, anything is a gateway. The first thing you use is a gateway drug. At the same time, we punish people now for the potential that they might do with the illegal drug. If you punish them for the actuality, I'm not sure it's any less effective than what we have now. And you increase the overall freedom level. You know, the idea that

the founders had that we ought to use the states as laboratories, this is where you get to the marijuana situation right now. I would love for states to be able to actually try this out. Instead of us having to have a national experiment where everybody sinks or swims together, let Colorado try this weed thing out and let's see how it goes. I don't think the feds are going to let this really happen. But to me, that's the intelligent way to do it. What do you think is going to happen with Seattle or or washington there's going to be a there's going to be a showdown point and they're first of all the feds already aren't letting this happen i mean

you know the the state and it puts the state lawmakers in a really weird position because they're supposed to listen to the will of the voters and yet state law is trumped by federal law and everybody knows that so how they're supposed to act is another world. The feds have never given one second of lip service to the idea that they're going to allow this. They always say, well, we're not going to concentrate on individual users, blah, blah. But they do. Nothing's changed. And the way they say that is really just to sort of relax people.

Like, OK. And then they move in. I don't even think they're trying to relax people. I think it made it clear that they're going to go. Saying not going after individual users at least makes people think. If they said we're going after everybody, everybody who smokes. And to be honest, when have the feds ever gone after individual users? The FBI doesn't come and arrest the guy smoking weed on the corner.

Yeah, you don't have five guys break into a house because he has a joint. No, no. But if he's selling joints. Yeah, and that's what's – and there's going to be a come up at some moment. And I don't know if that's going to be because one state goes one step farther than everybody else and that's when you get knocked back. Or if we get a new president in there and the first order – I don't understand the forces at work that keep this stuff illegal. If I understood that better, then you would know, OK, what's it going to take to piss off that group too far? Is it the alcohol lobby and when do you go so far?

I don't know who's keeping this stuff illegal, so it's hard for me to pin down what the moment of going too far is going to be. But as we talked about earlier, if they don't crack down at some point, this stuff is going to become legal by default. You know, it's going to grow into legality where we've got these fig leaf laws on the books that prohibit it, but nobody pays any attention to it. Well, you know, logically, there's no reason to stop it from being legal. And their idea that it's somehow going to harm the interests of the people that are profiting from its being illegal, I think is silly. It's not going to harm alcohol.

People are still going to drink. People enjoy drinking. It's fun for people. It may limit some prescription drugs because there's going to be natural remedies, especially like interocular pressure being cured by cannabis and people with wasting disease and AIDS that have issues with nausea. And it's one of the best things for nausea. that have issues with nausea, and it's one of the best things for nausea. What happens when the people who have a lot of money invested in pseudo-legal marijuana

start donating to the federal legislators? That's a good question. That's when you'll get the corruption working at cross-purposes to the way it's working right now. Well, the way they've stopped that is you're not supposed to be profiting from it in California. The only place where you're supposed to be profiting from it, ironically, is Colorado. Colorado allows medical merit. The way the law passed, the medical laws in Colorado were different than the medical laws in California. They allowed profit. Whereas in California, it's supposed to be like a non-profit. I wonder how much of this has to do with the fact, too, that it's the equivalent of being able to

distill your own alcohol in your backyard if you want to. I mean, you take all of the companies that you might be able to get on your bandwagon here. Philip Morris could make your marijuana cigarettes as opposed to what they have now where you'll just grow it in the backyard and nobody gets one. You'd grow it in a house. I mean, the crazy thing is it's such a durable plant. It's not like something like a tomato where you have to have good soil and you have to make sure that you tend to it.

And these things grow whether you want them to or not. Wild in all 50 states, I read something about. If you drive out the window and throw seeds out the window and come back in a month, you're going to see plants. They just – they find a way, those little fuckers. Well, then we get back to what we talked about earlier about trigger points. When do people rebel? When have they had enough? What if –

They get high. That's what happens. They get some LSD and then they rebel. Well would it be the government and i think i clamped down and me and you know like if they go into colorado or if they go into washington or one of these places with a vote the will of the people has been amply uh... read

enacted into law the whole thing and they overturn that that's going to be those are going to be to be interesting trigger points or benchmarks in wherever it is we're heading. So you know what they've been doing. The way the DEA has been handling it in California is very fascinating. They go in. They break down the door, do whatever they have to do. Guns in the air, pulled people on the ground. There's a video of them stepping on some kid's neck.

College kid just working there. Cop steps on his neck as he walks over him. For no reason. They smash the security cameras. They thought that the security cameras were on set. It was actually sent through the internet to a third-party location always. So they got video of this where they tried to destroy it. The cops tried to destroy it.

They steal all the drugs. They take all the marijuana, and they steal all the drugs they take all the marijuana and they steal all the money then they say we are holding uh your file until we decide what to do with it and they do nothing so they take thousands of dollars whatever the fuck you have on on the premises they take thousands of dollars of marijuana they take all of your you know all your cash on hand everything that they want to take from you, and then they say, we're holding your file. We'll tell you what we do when we decide.

And they can hold on to it for years and years and years. So essentially they put you out of business. They put you out of business without arresting you. So are they enforcing federal law? Sort of, but they don't. Are they enforcing state law? No. So it's not a state law.

It's just the federal law, but they don't actually do anything about this. Dan Baum wrote one called Smoke and Mirrors once. There are others where there used to be two kinds of forfeiture laws, a criminal one and a civil one without going too deeply into it in order to fight the drug war during this crazy time of the 80s they decided to combine the two taking the lower standard required for one kind and the higher penalties for the other kind putting them together and this is where you got the situations where if the police officers burst down your door and found drugs they could seize your corvette automatically without any sort of acknowledgement that the Corvette was bought with drug money on the grounds that you have to sue us to get it back you have to prove that there was no drug money here

and if you don't we get to keep this car and sell it at least some of that money some departments got it all others had to share with their agencies some of the money goes right back to the people who seized this was supposed to be a great incentive, right? Well, we're going to crack down on the drug users and we'll be able to afford the narcotics teams because it'll pay for itself. But as Radley Balko has written in a book that's due out any time now, I saw an earlier

version of it. This has exploded the number of cases where police do these things. And it comes at the expense of robberies and other crimes that don't actually benefit the department as much as these search and seizure drug crimes do and if you got rid of the drug crimes what happens to those departments that are making a bunch of money off of it now do you know about the scandal that's been going on in tennessee and you mean the eye the interstate yeah yeah i'm all on top of the cops for folks who don't know there's this thing they're doing. The police have this policy called policing for profit.

So they pull you over. Like say if you're a truck driver and you live in your truck and all your money in the world is in that truck. What if you have $50,000 and it's in your truck? They pull you over. They say, why the fuck do you have $50,000? They take your money, and that's theirs now you have to prove that you got that money through legal means and the way tennessee's doing it is apparently they've been doing this for a while they've been they've been seizing money and that money goes to their their their police force let me defend those people for

a second though because one of the things that Balco's book had that I found fascinating was, remember, a lot of these people are elected. A lot of these sheriffs, for example, are elected. And there was one county, I don't remember where it was, where the sheriff was not going to do this. And the guy who ran against him for sheriff said, do you know how much money we're missing out on? We're cutting officers left and right enforcement because we won't just go and do what other – look at what the county next door has. They've got all this equipment and all these officers because they're seizing assets and we're not.

In other words, because the feds do not come in and enforce the Constitution, because they allow this, because it's – remember before the war on terror made everything OK if it was part of the war on terror, the war on drugs allowed us to rip open parts of the Constitution on the grounds that this war was so important and there were so many lives at stake. And like the mafia, it was so resistant to normal law enforcement techniques that we needed special tools that the federal government not only allowed this stuff but encouraged people to do it.

And I would like to say proudly Los Angeles with Police Chief Darrell Gates in the old days was one of the leaders in this when he would – I mean we had the first tank. I remember we had the first tank to knock down the drug buildings and everything else and seize the property. Once that becomes standard fare, are you going to be the sheriff that says, I don't do that? When the guy running against you says, look at our idiot sheriff. He's missing out on all these federal dollars. Plus the feds actually match some of your cost. They will hand you down paramilitary stuff as part of like used war surplus and everything else. I mean, when you see these police officers in full camo gear carrying AR-15s and everything, a lot of that

stuff is hand-me-down right from the military. And if you don't want that, you're going to run around with a stupid Colt.44 revolver when you could have an AR-15 in a tank? What kind of bad sheriff are you, Joe Rogan? I'm – believe it or not, but what I'm saying or some of the things that I've said, I'm a big supporter of law enforcement. Me too. I think it's very important. I think it's – they're underappreciated. And it's not their gig. The actual officers on the street don't make these rules.

Exactly, exactly. And I think most of them are good guys. They have the hardest job in the world. It's really difficult. You're protecting people from bad people. And it's – if you're going to have bad people, you're going to need cops. The issue is when one bad one exists, it makes it – it's like – you know, is one out of ten people in New Jersey douchebag? Probably not even. It's probably like one out of twenty. But when you think about Jersey, you think about douchebags. It's just unfortunate. And what are the laws?

I mean the cops just enforce the laws. They don't write them. They don't make them. They don't decide what's constitutional and what's not. And it's also they're dealing with fucking bad people all day long every day. They're dealing with people that are committing crimes trying to get away with things lying to them constantly shooting at them yeah sure when i when i was a reporter we had a lot of um you know you develop relationships with these people

um and you do it at the weirdest times i would go out to these murder scenes be like four in the morning in the rain you're seeing the same guy you know the same watch guy you you see all the time in the field and or you call them when i was at abc here i mean i used to do the the beat checks they're called in news which is where you call all these police divisions and you're talking to the same poor guy it's midnight and i'm calling the same guy how you doing i you know i mean they're just working schleps like the rest of us and you know what how many of us would perform any better after five years on the job with guys shooting at you? Insane pressure.

It's insane pressure. Insane pressure. But again, to get back to it, the people who are really responsible for this are the people we elect. And also I think that as a society we have to put much more emphasis in our schools and much more in our police force. I think police, fire, EMTs and schools, there should be so much more money dedicated to these areas, so much more. And it's really a crime of society that we've allowed our politicians and the people in office to allocate so much resources to other parts of the country while ignoring our problems that we have here at home.

I don't think there's anything wrong with helping out less fortunate countries. But the way we do it under the guise of military invasion and the amount of money that goes to that and where that money goes, you look at how much Halliburton is made off this fucking war and weapons manufacturers are made off this war. That is really a criminal misallocation of funds i was recently and this is a weird story in and of itself my listeners know about it because i did a show on it i was invited to a centcom u.s central command planning session not that long ago they flew me to dc whoa yeah put me up in a hotel i thought i was sure that

they were going to kill me and throw my body into Potomac, and this was all an excuse to get me over there. Did you refrain from jerking off in the hotel room because you felt like there was a camera in there? I assumed there was a camera in there. Do you want a camera in there? I could put one in there. Probably more of a time problem I was dealing with there. I was very rushed. But you arrived there, and it was all these people with these amazing... i said they must have been thrilled to have me on the guest list because there were only 12 participants and they all had these massively doctor this and that from this institution and then dan carlin

podcaster and it's just they had to be thrilled i was there but the first question i asked these folks and it was the the general that was there was the head of u.s central command the vice admiral was there and i i said what do u. Central Command. The vice admiral was there. And I said, what do U.S. taxpayers get from all this? In other words, if we're going to go cost to benefit, and you talk about vital U.S. national security in this, that, or this other area, what does the average U.S. taxpayer who's paying for this get for all this? Now, there was no good answer, and it's not these guys' job to answer it. They don't make policy. They're like cops, too. They don't make policy they're like cops to they don't make policy

but you want to ask your representatives you know i mean i know you say we need to be here and there to protect our security but really what is the united states from what get from our involvement in the middle east it's the oil situations not like it was in the early seventies were not going to be there's not to be petro blackmail like there was in the old days it's one big giant oil market now why do we get to

be the people to pay for this? If it's for the entire world's sake, why isn't the entire world paying for it? Why aren't their soldiers dying in the field as much as ours are? I mean, these are the kind of questions we talked earlier about. Why can't we have a national debate about this? I don't care if the answer comes from the wrong side of what I consider to be right or wrong, but let's just talk about it. And I have this conspiracy theory that the reason we don't have these national debates is because some of this stuff is just indefensible. It's the same thing with President Obama trying to say it's okay to kill Americans with drones. You don't hear him talk about it because I don't think you can get up and make that case. And so just don't talk about it. If

you can't win an argument, don't have the argument. Yeah, that's the reason why you've never heard a politician bring up cigarettes. You'll hear politicians talk about it. If you can't win an argument, don't have the argument. Yeah, that's the reason why you've never heard a politician bring up cigarettes. You'll hear politicians talk about alcohol or drugs and even prescription medications being issues. You never hear them talk about cigarettes ever. Why? Because they spend billions of dollars to keep politicians from talking about cigarettes. Hundreds of thousands of people die every year from cigarettes. You would think that's a real health issue.

No, it's obesity. We've got problems. We've got problems with cancer. We've got problems with AIDS. We have problems with the fucking – some poison that they sell at every corner. But the people that sell that poison kick it back upstairs. But this is nothing new. Nothing new.

This is part of how – I mean listen. As I said to somebody else – and by the way, I should say I'm for cigarettes. If you want to smoke cigarettes, I think cigarettes should be illegal. Stop talking about cigarettes. Are you hungry for a cigarette? But listen – I'm not trying to stop people except my friends. Every country in the world is corrupt.

Don't think that there's any government – I mean Sweden, which always ranks in the top three or four as the least corrupt nations of the world, still has corruption. You know why? Why? Swiss chicks are hot. But we're talking about Sweden. Getting the two confused. Swedish. world, still has corruption. You know why? Why? Swiss chicks are hot. But we're talking about Sweden. Yeah, Sweden. Getting the two confused. Swedish.

But here's the thing. Every country has corruption. There's a tipping point. If Sweden's number one on your list of— How do I confuse those two? Well, if you go there, there won't be any confusion. If you have the number one least corrupt country, Sweden, and the country at the bottom of the list is Nigeria,

I guarantee you that governments can function well a certain distance down that list. There's a tipping point. I think if you say, well, the United States has always been corrupt. Look at how things were in the 1950s. Yes, but we were still able to function. The corruption was not so much – it's like if you have a physical impediment and you say, well, I limp around but I still get around OK. And your knee gets much worse and all of a sudden you can't walk. There's a tipping point.

Not walking is a whole different thing than limping around, right? Our government was always corrupt from the very beginning of the republic. We've just reached a point where it doesn't function any well that it's so corrupt. It's also that it's not just that it's so much more corrupt than ever before. It's so much more transparent that it's corrupt because of our access to information, which is unprecedented. And people are bewildered by it more than they ever have been before because of this. Because if you go looking, it's really simple. Just go looking real quick. Read any Matt Taibbi article from Rolling Stone on the financial crisis and you'll just you'll you'll you'll fucking pluck your eyebrows

out screaming in the mirror. You won't be able to feel – you won't be able to feel like it makes any sense. Let me tell you that this is the great wild card though. We alluded to this earlier when we talked about what if the 60s generation had the internet. When you read about how much just printing presses changed the world in terms of just being able to disseminate English language bibles changed everything. People forget. It's like you said 20. This, you know, people forget, you know, it's like you said, 20 years ago, like a blink of an eye when you've lived a while, this internet is still brand new. We haven't begun to see what it's going to do yet. And we haven't had these situations, like you were saying, these little tipping point moments where all of a sudden the internet makes all the difference in the world. If the stupid printing press changes the world to the

degree that did, what's this going to do? And how are the authorities going to react when it starts doing it? I mean, you know, we were talking about Anonymous before the whole show started. That's just the tip of the iceberg. What happens when this isn't some little teeny group on the fringes that's doing this? What happens when 40% of the population is so mad and maybe maybe 20% of them are the right-wing guys who think that they need the guns to stop the government, 20% of them are the left-wing guys that are so mad that they can't get something else that they... I mean, what happens when all these people are operating at cross-purposes, and the internet is this highway that lets them all talk in a way that during the 1960s, they would have been doing mimeographed letters on a copy machine, handing each other them by hand.

Meeting in the park and speaking in a soapbox. Yeah, and on the phone. I mean this is – we have not yet begun to see what this is going to do change. I agree, and I also think that this is just the beginning of what seems to be an ever-increasing access to each other, access to information, the ability to reach and connect with each other. And I think that's going to eventually lead to something that's going to allow people to read each other's minds. I think we're going to – our eventual connection is going to be through some sort of wireless

neural frequency connection where we're going to be able to exchange information without having to talk to each other. I'm sorry. See, you see the upside of that. I see the downside. I don't think it's an upside. What happens when the government reads your mind? We just bypassed.

This is just something that's too dangerous for an individual to have, but we'll be able to watch you on your computer's camera. Here's the issue. The government will become victims of it themselves, much like Petraeus has become a victim of this whole spy network and the ability to access information that's been unprecedented. I'm sorry. Was Petraeus an idiot? Can I just say this?

You're the head of the CIA. He's the fucking number one spook. And you think that they're not going to find out that you have – I mean this whole thing. You talk about something weird. There's something – there's some little X there that we don't know about. It's Benghazi. Yeah, Benghazi. No, for real.

I haven't figured out the Benghazi thing either. I haven't either, but there is connection, and that's pretty much been established that they're shielding by – one of the things they're doing with punishing Petraeus in this way and going after him is acknowledging his failures in Benghazi. And there's sort of an internal motivation to get rid of him outside of just the fact that the fbi busted him with an affair what i found most fascinating about this was first of all that the head spook got spooked on i mean yeah they they've and then that even when you're a general you're dealing with the kind of girl who's gonna fuck you when you're married is a crazy bitch okay and the kind of chick that's gonna to be your mistress when she writes a book about you, that's going to be a territorial crazy bitch.

That's a Greek tragedy thing, man. That goes back to – there are Greek plays that play off that. I love it. There's something that's so wonderfully – we all have these tragic flaws. It's like that guy was born with that. It was like fated. The Greeks would say it was like written into his fate that I'm going to have this wonderful military career, be respected by everybody, and then I'm going to be brought low by something so silly. Bring yourself to the world of O.J. Simpson.

I was just talking about that with my wife the other day. We're watching one of those top ten footballs, you know, greatest running backs of all time. And they're screwing poor O.J. Simpson, not that he's bad, but as a football player, if you remember how great he was. And you know, they're putting like Tim Tebow or something ahead of him. I'm going, you know, he's just getting rooked because of what he did

off the foot. It's like, you know, he's getting rooked. Yeah, you can get mad at Pete Rose for being, you know, a jerk off field. But don't take away what he did on the field. OJ Simpson was the most beautiful runner I ever saw. Barry Sanders was the most exciting but OJ Simpson was the most beautiful

runner I ever saw and he's a terrible person. We all know this now but God don't you know OJ Simpson was the best What a world changing moment for him. Yes. I mean what a bad decision That guy could was the best. What a world-changing moment for him. Yes. I mean, what to go from... What a bad decision, you know?

What a huge fuck-up. That guy could go back and take it back. I know, you think about that all the time. The one moment, if I could just have that day, it's a Groundhog Day thing, if I could just do that whole day differently. The betrayers thing,

even though it's bad, he still gets to bang that chick, and she's way over his head. Hey, he still gets the pension. That's all you care. Does he still get his pension? Oh, I'm sure. Well, maybe not the CIAia one but he gets the military i bet he had they have to give him a pension or he's gonna start talking what do you want you want general petraeus

to start writing books about how shit really works i think that's when you have your kennedy moment again general petraeus knocked off in a visit to guatemala yeah he's banging his mistress and her pussy explodes he's gonna put nitroglycerinin in there. Now you're off in the woods for me, Rogan. Going into territory I don't go into on the podcast. They've got to kill her too. We knew this was going to happen in this show today, didn't we?

Pillow talk terrorism. That's what that is. It's in the Patriot Act. The part you can't see. She was doing pillow talk terrorism. We had to take her out. It's unfortunate Patrice was there, but we cloned him. So don't worry about it. The poor guy.

And the whole thing is, what's really tragic is you see the wife and his wife is sort of, you let herself go over the years. And I believe she had some health problems. She's a rather large woman. Remember in the military, I think you can still be charged with adultery too. Which you can't be charged. There is no law against adultery in the California penal code for an average Joe. What's ironic about that is you're taking trained killers, putting them in unbelievably stressful situations for months at a time away from their wives, and you're saying that if you're an adulterer, we can court-martial you.

It goes back to the military code of honor, which of course there's a lot of other things you could do that would seem to violate the military code of honor but don't have you know don't have adulterous affairs i just thought it was beautiful that the head spook got spooked on i'm sorry no it's not it's not that to me that's a symptom of something else because is that he's not a dumb guy and yet what you're gonna when they arrived and they said guess what we found out do you think he was shot oh my god how did you find out about that no i. I'll tell you what it is. First of all, they were together for over a year while they wrote that book. And when – you can start off with a girl who's a temptress. I like how you've analyzed this.

I've analyzed this very carefully because that woman is much more attractive as a woman than he is as a man. But he's a man of power. Well, wait. That happens all the time. What's she doing with him? That's Susan Anton and Dudley Moore. I don't – Well, he's powerful. He's the head of the CIA.

Sure. And she obviously in writing a book about that is fascinated by that subject. But I think a woman like that, if she has access to a man like that, he's going to break. It's just a matter of time. It's a matter of time. He's going to decide that his relationship is not working out that well anymore. that he he's gonna break it's just a matter of time it's a matter of time he's gonna decide his relationship is not working out that well anymore he's gonna decide is something missing from his wife i mean i love her as a friend but it's just i don't know what to do what about the

power thing i mean these guys i think there's this this you get this sense and you see it with with celebrities all the time this sense get right back to oj simpson that i can get away with anything um i'm i'm not regular this that only applies to normal people Simpson, that I can get away with anything. I'm not regular. That only applies to normal people. I think that comes from a lot of people around you that are in a support position that are constantly catering to you and kissing your ass. Oh, as a podcaster, I get it all the time. Are you kidding, man?

Me too, man. As you can see by our vast staff here. The number of women you have circulating around here, yes. The number of women you have circulating around here, yes. The celebrity thing is probably tenfold when you're dealing with a military man who's a trained killer who's been responsible for leading armies to battle. And they live like Puff Daddy. I mean they have limousines and – I mean they have – the generals live very well. I don't mean to begrudge them anything.

But if you get to the level of general, it's quite a lifestyle. Yeah, you're doing well. Yes, and it's just as attractive a lifestyle to some outside entity as any other celebrity. You're not quite Elvis, but you know. Yeah, and again, you're dealing with a man who's revered, who publicly was a hero. Petraeus, I mean, that was the military guy that you heard of, General Petraeus. Petraeus is moving the troops. Petraeus is doing this. But how different is this from Clinton?

Because I always think with Clinton and Lewinsky, are you an idiot? Do you really think – first of all, do you really think that girl is going to keep her mouth shut? Nobody's going to find out. I mean, to me, these are flaws, like I said, like a Greek tragedy because the minute you fall for that, you're done. I mean, how can you be so smart in every other respect and yet not there? Well, Clinton is a freak, and I don't know if you know freaks. You know any freaks? You know any real freaks?

I suppose it depends on the definition. I have friends that are freaks. I have dudes that you could count on them doing something stupid if given the opportunity. But in every other way they can be gifted. They can be brilliant. But when it comes to chicks, some guys just are off the loop. I could see that. And I think Clinton is

a freak. I think Clinton is one of those dudes that would just pull his dick out. I think Clinton, I think he did many times. I mean, that was the state trooper. The police, what was her name? Was it Paula Jones? Paula Jones. Paula Jones.

How do you pull that – how do we just pull Paula Jones out? That's how big of a deal it was at the time. Well, she was fascinating to me too because she eventually went on to do Penthouse. It's like, oh, OK. What was the other one? Who was the blonde? Remember the blonde? Yes.

There was some blonde. Jessica Flowers? You're on top of it. Who's the chick that sent Gary Hart? Hold on. I got that one. That was... Gary Hart was... Jim Baker. I'm getting her confused.

Jessica Hahn. I'll come up with it. It was the monkey business was the name of the boat. That's another guy, though. That guy would have been president. The monkey business. That guy would have been president. Remember what he did, too?

He dared the media to catch him. He said, if you really think I'm having an extramarital affair, come and find out. And it was like, okay, you're an idiot. What a dope. And they're like, okay, what did he think? It was like the cameras only had look we are a hundred yards out in the water there's no way they could see us you're driving me crazy now it's like on the tip of my tongue who this girl was okay wasn't marla maples was it was some other

what was her name no marla maples was the chick that was married to uh what's his fucking face i love where the show's descended to now. Gone from heavy-duty constitutional... Donna Rice. Donna Rice. I wasn't there. I wasn't close. She is so hot, though. Again, she's so hot.

How is he going to say no to that? Gary Hart, he had the same problem Clinton had. I mean... Pussy! They're from the John F. Kennedy School of Government. Yeah, there's a picture of her sitting on his lap. On the boat, right? Yeah, and she's got no pants on.

She's got a long shirt that's over the pants, and she's got a drink in her hand boom party time that's why he became i'm i'm bulletproof they'll never catch me coming if you think i'm having an extramarital affair tail me and find out and he was running for president while this was happening not just running for president remember we had this conversation about how weak the competition was at the time gary hart was huge compared to the people he he would have been running against like george bush senior or something and it would have been like having a kennedy run against nixon i mean it would have been slam dunk you're in and he talked there's a man who blew the presidency it's amazing and probably correctly now in hindsight yeah well probably for all of

them i mean look again at kennedy who is like one of our most loved presidents yeah but you know what and this gets back to your thing about 20 years and all that do you realize how short a time kennedy was in office i mean it's like two and music he was in the middle of his first term. It would be like Barack Obama died three years ago or something. I mean it's crazy how much the guy gets lionized when you really didn't even know what you had there yet. Well, I mean it's James Dean. When people die, people love them. Oh, my mother even says today. I mean you were just entranced.

She was entranced by the guy. By James Dean? No, by Kennedy. says today i mean you were just entranced she was entranced by the guy by james dean no by kennedy well he was the first guy that seemed first of all to be a regular person he seemed oh come on he was also a movie star it was like nixon eisenhower and john f kennedy i mean he was certainly handsome guy but what i mean by a regular person was he didn't seem like a liar he didn't seem like a like n Nixon seemed like a piece of plastic. It's like you're looking at a guy with a two-dimensional mask in front of him that never gave you who he really was and was just a slippery –

Kennedy was funny too. I mean if you listen to him in like off-the-cuff discussion – He's a bright man. Well, and fall-down funny. I mean he had this witty, dry sense of – I mean people were putty in his hands. We haven't had a president that funny since. We really haven't. Nowhere near that high level.

I mean, the guy was the kind of – well, and Frank Sinatra and all those guys used to party with him because Kennedy was a fun guy on a bunch of different levels. And he loved himself some pussy. Loved himself some pussy. Robert was the more serious of the guys. And, you know, he had an older brother that was the guy they were really grooming for the presidency. Joe was his older brother's name. And died on a world war ii mission and the family was like crushed because they'd spent all the time grooming joe to be the presidential guy and now of course they're going to have to go to number two and number two was jack wow yeah he died on one of those missions where he was going to volunteer to take a bomber

into like some you know really hardcore clandestine. And the bomber takes off and it's like just in the sky and the whole thing just explodes. Oh, wow. Yeah. So that's how – and John was involved in that PT-109 thing with his bad back. And I mean all those guys – you think about what they did. As lightweight as John F. Kennedy was, can you imagine Clinton out there on the PT boat in World War II? I mean it just doesn't even register. It was almost a requirement back then to be president that you had to serve some active combat.

Yeah, it really was. It's amazing how that sort of changed when society accepted Bush. Well, when they accepted the whole draft, once you get to the baby boomers, you're ruling out a heck of a lot of people. And everybody went through that war, too. That's the other thing. How many people were you going to find that weren't in World War II? And if you weren't in World War II, you were a psycho or a flatfoot. I mean even flatfooted guys were making it into World War II.

When it got to Vietnam, it got to be – it's so much different because people were like, well, it was a stupid fucking war. It was a war we should have never been involved with in the first place. Who wants to be in Vietnam? If I was alive back then, I probably would have dodged a draft too. Well, but we still had people like that. Kerry was there. McCain was there. And you had guys like Gore who was writing in like the Stars and Stripes newspaper in

Vietnam. Is that what he was doing? He was a journalist. Yeah. Military journalist. Like the dude in – like Matthew Modine in Full Metal Jacket? I don't – I don't remember. I actually saw Full Metal Jacket and I don't remember.

So that's a bad night. Matthew Modine was the dude from Vision Quest, the guy with glasses. Oh, I know who he is. I just don't remember the role. Yeah, his role was a journalist. He was over there. He went through boot camp and everything like that. Well, and Gore's dad was a senator, and the whole thing was they were thinking about his future political.

You can't dodge the war. What about your politics? So he went and he got one of the cush jobs. Vietnam is famous for that. Well, Gore had his moment with a massage therapist claimed that he wanted to stick out. There was more than one, actually. There was more than one? Really?

So that's his move? These dudes that get massages. Travolta and Gore's moves, yes. You know, these dudes that get massages. I don't know. Just jerk off before you get your massage, pal. I have a better point. Again, and it gets to that being smart thing.

If you're in Gore's position, don't you want to have like a third party witness there because even if you did nothing aren't you opening your because it's just you know why why because he wants to get jerked off and there's a third party that you're not going to get jerked off just make it a close friend and uh but here's the thing he's getting jerked off on a regular that's what i bet i think you need to have him on the show that That's a poignant question you could ask him. Well, you know, since I brought it up like that in the podcast on the internet, I'm sure he'll respond. I'm sure. I mean, you know, he has a Twitter. He'll hear about this. I'm sure. It'll be an interesting conversation, won't it? And I'll say to him, first and foremost, everyone likes getting jerked off. It's nothing

to feel bad about. And if we were living in China, that would be a normal part of your massage. And once again, we're in the woods now, Rogan. This show's taking a left-hand turn. This is not the woods. This is where we live. I know, I know. I have ventured into the woods with you. We're 13 miles down a dirt road, and your car just broke down. With a tarp to keep the rain out, and we sleep under it.

Yeah, I don't think there's anything wrong with getting jerked off, and I don't think you should feel bad. I think if you're going to get a massage, you're basically getting jerked off, and I don't think you should feel bad. I think if you're going to get a massage, you're basically getting jerked off anyway. I mean, what is a massage? Did Neil deGrasse Tyson deal with this? Was any of this coming up with Tyson? I didn't see the show.

Yeah, we talked about my fart theory of aliens. We talked about some sketchy – And he went there with you. He's awesome. He's awesome. I'm pleased. I don't feel so bad anymore. No, you shouldn't feel bad.

It's the internet. We're grown men. We're fathers. We're taxpayers. We're law-abiding citizens. We are. We're grown men. We're fathers. We're taxpayers. We're law-abiding citizens. We are. We're allowed to talk about- As far as anybody knows.

Getting jerked off in a hotel room by a masseuse. In a country where that's legal. Yeah. He should be able to pay that. It's like, what is it? An extra hundred bucks? What's the difference between rubbing someone's dirty feet and rubbing their dick? Some people would probably be happier to rub your dick than your dirty feet.

I wouldn't know anything of your- You see, my wife's probably watching this right now. I don't know what you're talking about. I understand. Well, I'm not saying that you should do that, nor do I want it or need it. What I'm saying is – There's a disclaimer. If the man wants to get jerked off and he wants to go to a hotel and pay for that, poor, poor, poor Al Gore.

I was going to say, unless his name is Petraeus. Yeah, well, he wasn't just – he was getting his freak on 100%. He was in a relationship. He was in love. That's why what happened was, you know the whole story, that other woman who's also sketchy and sort of slutty on a dirty hot side. It's like Washington groupies. Yeah.

What was her name, the chick in Florida? Which one is this? The other Petraeus one. I'm not up to speed on that. Okay, that's the whole Petraeus situation. There's two girls. One girl who was in Florida who was getting emailed by the writer. Oh, no, no.

And she is – Jill Kelly. And she's in that groupie group that goes after all the generals. Exactly. Well, first of all, can I tell you this? If you're the general's wife, what do you do in letting him go to the groupie meetings? That's what I want to know. She probably doesn't know that they're groupie meetings.

Girls together for generals outrageously. I mean you don't want to let them anywhere near that. Together for generals outrageously. I mean you don't want to let them anywhere near that. Well, this girl was – this woman was married and her and the husband were both like really into like celebrity military functions and military parties. And they would both be into that socialite sort of military social world. So it wasn't that cut and dry. if the weirdness goes on more than you would think in those groups i happen to know some people that would have been astronauts had it not

been for uh going after the wives of people who were ranked higher than they were so i mean this this this stuff has been going on forever it's always going to go on you're talking about train killers you know i i have friends that you know were in various branches of the military would tell me the wild crazy fucking stories about wartime. Tailhook scandals. I mean, these are just parties stateside with guys who aren't even at war. I mean, it's a culture. And by the way, you don't know if you're

going to die. You're over there involved in the scariest thing you could ever be involved in. An actual war. Bombs and planes and rocket launchers and grenades. But these are also hard drinking, hard partying, hard exercising. Like I was just talking to one guy last night. He's like, we get up in the morning, you run 10 miles, you go work hard all day, you're done with the day, you go out and you drink as hard as you work. It's sort of a cultural thing. And you know what?

You want to let down after a hard day at work. My day at work is not as hard as those guys. I mean, if the letting down is in proportion to how hard the day was you know you're going to need a lot more beers than i would need yeah let al gore get jerked off that's what i'm saying that's exactly what i'm saying i love why you're hating on al gore and john travolta john travolta makes movies about war and i think he should get jerked off too i think it's absolutely commiserate that's right look it's not that it's commiserate but in order for him to play the role correctly i think he should get jerked off too. I think it's absolutely commiserate. That's right. Look, it's not that it's commiserate but in order for him to play the role correctly, I think he's got to

get jerked off. It's just research for a part. Absolutely. Yeah. What else? What do you want the guy to do? To just pretend and just sort of fill in the blanks with his lack of personal experience? I think that's what it must have been. Yeah. Lack of personal experience. I'm just researching again.

What do you think about – this is something that I really want to make sure that we touch on and bring it back to Al Gore, believe it or not, but in a serious way. The HBO documentary Hacking Democracy went over the issue with the Diebold electric voting machines. Essentially said, look, you could rig a vote. You could rig it. What do you think about all that? Again, when you mention that, all I can think about is how is this flying under the conversation, Raynar? It is, though, right? You want one of the – OK. If you want to get down on anybody, let's get down on the journalists who aren't doing their job. That used to be my profession. These wimpy, kiss-ass journalists who want to hang out afterwards behind the velvet rope with the

people they cover the question to ask the president and the other candidates is everything what do you think about this voting machines are you you know what can you tell ask them let's get their opinion make them come you know the old line was make them go on the record to these guys are able to say basically on the sly, if you ask me any questions beyond these five things I have on this list right here, you're never coming to another function again and I won't answer your question anyway. You won't even get the satisfaction of saying, well, I got an answer before I was kicked out of the room.

You don't get your question answered and you never get to come back and that works now. I mean in the Cold War, they used to cut some slack of the politicians on certain kinds of questions and there were certain manly rules like i mean everybody knew john f kennedy was having all these affairs and it was not considered to be proper to bring that up which is crazy when you consider the potential for blackmail but nonetheless um that sort of stuff was off the record but you get some damn tough questions on other things we don't have that today. And if you want to say how does the country get as bad as it does without anyone talking about it, that's because our so-called fourth estate, who plays a constitutional watchdog role in our system, isn't doing that.

Our fourth estate. There are three estates of government that are official. You have the executive branch, the judicial branch, and the legislative branch. Those are the three estates that work from inside the government, and they're officially constitutional branches. The fourth estate is a term used to describe a non-constitutional branch, a non-governmental branch, the watchdogs who watch the government from outside the government, and that's the media. Well, don't you think, though, that with this new access to information that we're enjoying because of the internet, what's also rising is shows like yours, The Young Turks, people who are openly, actively questioning every single aspect of our government?

Yes, but let me tell you the difference because you're absolutely right and thank goodness. Thank goodness you brought that up, Joe. But here's the difference. up, Joe. But here's the difference. We don't have access to the – see, when CNN officially cut their investigative reporting budget, which is a joke anyway because they weren't doing any investigative reporting worth a salt anyway, they got rid of the stuff that provides the basis of information. I don't mean at CNN. I mean everywhere. The investigative reporting is how we, whether you're talking about me or the Young Turks or anyone else, that's where we get our info that allows us to then comment on it.

I'm not out doing the investigative work. That is – there's a reason that the very first amendment to the constitution protects freedom of the press. And it's not because someone thinks you should have the right to tail some celebrity for TMZ because we just have to know who they're dating on the side. It's because this is considered to be of national import. The country goes to hell in a handbasket if you don't know what's going on and really what's going on. The 1970s are turning out to be the high watermark of American journalism. When you look at what was going on then, you turn around and go, you can't imagine that happening today. And that's totally the opposite of what you normally expect. Normally, you expect everything to get better. The 70s,

from a news standpoint, was so much better than what we have now in terms of exposés and people getting nailed. And that's pre-internet. If you took that level of dedication to investigative reporting, it's all the post-Watergate era stuff, when everybody was going in and the way you made your bones in journalism was to try to be Woodward and Bernstein. I'll tell you a story. When I got my first job in reporting, I went from here in LA where I was working on the assignment desk, you know, behind the scenes to work in in front of the camera. And the first thing that happens that that makes you upset as a reporter is they'll send you to like the dog show and the knife show and all these things where you're going, this is why got into news i want some meaty stories so i get my i get my hands on my first meaty story

members of the sheriff's department call me up on the sly and they start telling me what the sheriff is doing secretly right i jump on this story it takes weeks to flesh this thing out right it's totally non-cost effective i break the story it's this big deal everybody's on it and the news director gives me an award because he has to because it's this big deal but then he takes me in the office privately and tears me a new one and says don't you ever do that again I said what what am I supposed to be doing he said now the sheriff is never going to give us a story again they're never going to talk to us again you just burned our bridge with them well wait a minute the guy's involved in illegal activities yeah but there's 57 stories

we need to do down the road where we need their cooperation and now they're not going to help us. That's what's happened. And that's, you know, on the national scale, it's the same thing. They don't want to be Woodward and Bernstein because Woodward and Bernstein aren't getting another interview with the president. Yeah, that's a very, very good point about how this whole thing sort of gets more and more complex and more and more. So you can have the internet, but if anonymous doesn't tell us and release cables of what's going on, who did the investigative work to give us enough information for me to comment? How do you feel about WikiLeaks? I disagree with about, from what I can tell from the angry emails, 90% of my audience

on that. Um, cause I, I, I think he, look in a world of the 1970s, if we could have a media that used to do its job, we don't need a WikiLeaks. In a world where the media is not doing its job, you do need a WikiLeaks, and that's what's sad. I'd rather you could have a WikiLeaks that didn't give out information that none of us wants given out, but you get the good with the bad. I don't think anybody could have done that job except that one guy who got a hold of that information. I don't think it's a matter of – You don't think that it was inevitable at some point that some group of either hackers or – I mean that's – I don't know.

I think it was an inevitability. Maybe, but I mean to do it illegally. I mean when you're talking about the journalism, the journalists doing their job, what would really have been interesting is if bradley manning had gotten those documents in new york times i wonder how they would have handled it would they have done what wiki leaks did and if they did would they be considered criminals like he like julian assange it's funny you say that because i just had a listener download an article for me about five weeks ago because i heard about it it was in the wake of the whole um um watergate thing the the lead the head of the whole Watergate thing, the head of the Washington Post gave a speech to all these big corporate muckety-mucks a couple years after that trying to explain that don't worry. We're not going to get all expose-y now.

This isn't going to be a trend of ours to bring down presidents and everything. You don't have to worry. And you can go actually – if you have a JSTOR account or or whatever with these libraries you can actually download the speech from like 1976 and it was uh katherine graham the head of the washington post where it was this reassuring thing to the powers that be that don't worry the media is not going to get too investigative and we're going to make sure we protect your secrets enough so you don't have to worry that's what wiki leaks and groups like it don't do and the truth is is i think we can all agree that there are secrets that should not come out.

The government abuses this privilege over and over again but if it's really going to kill US service members for example, OK, I understand that. But when you say anything is going to kill US service members, I mean when you abuse it, you stop, you lose me. If the media and the government were doing their job, you don't need a WikiLeaks. When they're not, is it better to have no WikiLeaks at all or is it better to have a WikiLeaks with all its flaws? I'm sorry. If the government, if the stuff that we're already finding out opens up such a window of importance in terms of us understanding how the world really works behind the scenes, I'm sorry. To me, that's

pretty darn invaluable. But, you know, I'm sorry. To me, that's pretty darn invaluable. But I'm biased. As a journalistic guy, I believe in that kind of openness. Yeah, most certainly. And I do too. And I believe in it also for the people that are in power. But a lot of my listeners don't. I got to tell you, a lot of them are conditioned, I think, conditioned to think that you're going to release important secrets and get people killed. And I got a lot of flack when I said that I was in favor of WikiLeaks releasing some of this stuff. Well, yeah, you can correct me if I'm wrong, online people, but I don't believe they released any names of anyone whose security hadn't already been compromised.

Well, and to be honest, we may not know, but has the world fallen apart since they did? I mean, I think we can see here it hasn't exactly destroyed everything. We've got to look into the mentality of the people that are in the military in crisis situations like that collateral murder video. Well, it's bigger than that. It's the diplomatic stuff. And I mean, come on. The truth of the matter is you can only form a – when you analyze news, right? You said Dan Carlin's doing this, the Young Turks are doing it. We're doing news analysis. But that requires you to have enough facts to really analyze. If you don't, you can't give an analysis that has any sort of value at all.

And WikiLeaks was providing context that the media used to provide. Well, I think in their situation, I think their position was so extreme. Having this secret files, having this access to this one guy and having secret files down. I don't know how the media could have gotten that in any other way unless this Bradley Manning guy or someone like him offered that stuff up. That's how it would have been, though, and that's how it used to be. What would happen is that – well, how did it happen for Woodward and Bernstein? You had a guy who was in the cia one of the top people feet deep throat who was that um oh god he died just a few years ago but they know yeah they know

who he is now and he was disgruntled and mad at being uh not getting a promotion and all this and so he was feeding them this stuff that he wasn't allowed to feed them and it's like it's like um the guy who uh danielsberg, who was involved in that whole thing, the Pentagon Papers, he says today that Julian Assange is the modern day version of him, and that he could have been brought up on the exact same charges and almost was. I mean, to bring up the 1917 Espionage Act as a way to go after somebody in the modern 21st century world is to me an example of how desperate they are. I mean, here's all you have to know. This isn't really about this or that individual

losing their lives. This is about how much scandal you would have if we really knew what was going on behind the scenes and what our politicians gave the okay for. In the same way that Watergate was. Yeah. It's so strange to me watching him in the embassy. What is it, the Guatemalan embassy? Yeah, Ecuador maybe. And just hanging out on the balcony giving speeches. Well, I remember you said Ross Perot. I mean, I'm not sure.

Part of the problem here is that this guy is such a weirdo anyway. I mean, if you'd had the all-American boy, then it would be a lot harder. You'd still find weirder stories. But why is it always one of these guys where it's so easy yeah so you know why does why does he have to help so much you know have you ever seen the video of him dancing no I can only imagine you must see it pull it up pull it up oh you can do that the marvels of 21st this studio has capabilities mine doesn't have which is what you know yeah we have youtube I'm looking up you can

see me right I'm looking up at Joe's wonderful monitor here. Julian Assange dancing is one of the silliest things you've ever seen in your life because – Did it get leaked? Is that how we know about it? It must have. A rival anonymous firm gets put it out? Someone who wanted to put a stop to this nonsense. That's right.

Look who you're following. That's right. Look at this man's movement. This is your hero? Well, that's a funny thing because we will judge you by the way you move your body to music. Which is why I won't do that on video. Really? That's why? Because you want to be respected. No, I don't want to be embarrassed. There's a difference.

See, I am willing to dance at every possible opportunity to keep me from ever having to be in any sort of a political position. Let's see. Look at this. First of all, how much ecstasy do you have to be on before you want to dance like that? Do we lose it? We have the shittiest fucking internet here. It's getting fixed by the end of this month. We're almost out of the woods. When is this?

Does anybody know when this is taken? It doesn't matter if this was taken in a past life. He's guilty. And he's all by himself. He's like, oh my gosh. Look at him, by himself. Imagine Ross Perot dancing like that. He'd never be president.

Or Clinton. Yeah, well, Clinton's done that. Yeah. The club was a lot darker. This is what Clinton did before he shot his third load. He goes out there to get a little exercise. I'm sorry. This is part of the problem, though.

I mean, you know, Julian Assange lends. Well, look at it this way. Look at the way he moves. Yeah, that is pretty funny. It's not quite gay. It's not quite gay. It's not quite feminine. It's not masculine. It's pretty damn good.

You like it? Are you happy with it? Yeah, he's one of those crazy guys at the bar that dances. By himself. By himself. Yeah, you don't take those guys home. No. Who's taking those guys home?

Some poor girl. Scotch on the rocks. Well, his situation is hilarious if you know the story with what they're charging him with when everybody sees like oh julian assange you say well he must have been guilty of espionage he must have been guilty of leaking secrets he must be guilty of something bad that's not why they're after him they're after him they're after him because he had sex with a woman surprise, and this is what folks don't understand. The actual charges they've trumped up against Julian Assange are he had had sex with a woman with a condom.

They were lying in bed naked. He stuck it in without a condom. Here's the key. He said and his lawyers have said, as I understand it, that as long as he gets a written pledge from our government and the British government that they're not going to nab him. He'll go back and face the charges. pledge from our government and the British government that they're not going to nab him. He'll go back and face the charges. The key is everybody knows that those are the governments that want him.

The danger isn't that he's going to go to Sweden and face these charges. The danger is that somebody is going to disappear him. That's right. And the government would like to do that to set an example. The problem is, one, he's not an American citizen. So you can't charge him with the same things you could charge a Bradley Manning with. Would he become – do you think he'd become a martyr if something like that happened? Don't you think there's a danger in that? I think you're already getting some of that.

Yeah, for sure. I don't – you know what? I don't think the government cares too much about that. I think their attitude is they want you to see what happens to somebody who does what Julian Assange does so that you know if you do – I think the – who was the guy who just died, who just killed himself that the government was after for stealing files? Aaron – what was his last name? The guy who killed himself and was under pressure from the government for stealing some stuff from MIT, some digital files. I'm not aware of this guy. Oh, come on.

This is a big story. The guy killed himself, a big computer guy who helped create – Killed himself, Aaron. Aaron. Oh, I know who you're talking about. Oh, yeah. I'm sorry. How could I forget his last name? Yeah. He comes with an S. helped create uh killed himself aaron aaron oh i know who you're talking about sorry how could i

forget his last name um yeah the guy who's responsible for the creation of rss feeds yes exactly aaron schwartz yes exactly i should have known that and and but he's another example where the government wants to break that guy as as to set a precedent so that you know when you want to try to do something like that you're sacrificing your life in effect in effect you're you know when you want to try to do something like that, you're sacrificing your life in effect. In effect, you can do this but look at what happened to the last guy who did it. And that's I think what they want to do to Assange too, to say to all those hackers out there, hey, just so you know, you're playing with your future. They've done this to the so-called eco-terrorists too where they'll give you 35 years or something

for starting a fire where you can kill a guy and get out in 12. Yeah, they put you on no-fly lists. Yeah, you're done. They do everything they can to sort of stifle your life. And the fact that we accept that, though, the fact that this guy does not have the same access to representation, to rights that we do. Well, he's not an American. Start with that, though.

I mean, not that an American would either if you were accused of a crime of terrorism. I mean if you're accused of a crime of terrorism and you're in a place like Afghanistan, you have no rights at all if a guy in the executive branch of government decides that. murder and just so exposing the whether it's ineptitude or just a casual disdain or or or just a a lack of respect for human life and here's the thing you want to get into history and where history is important every time every is a sweeping word but many many times throughout history when someone wants to exempt people from the normal rules of conduct you call them terrorists it's a term believe it or not ad, Adolf Hitler used when he was explaining why you didn't have to treat captured prisoners in the Soviet Union with any sort of the laws of war. They're terrorists. Jews, commissars, anyone found behind the front lines is a terrorist, which exempts

you from treating them like prisoners of war. I mean, terrorist is a word that means anything you want it to mean. And it's been proven to be that over and over. Not that there aren't real terrorists, but the term is so remarkably flexible and allows you to essentially, who can you waterboard? You can only waterboard terrorists. Who's a terrorist? That's to be determined.

We don't know who tomorrow's terrorists are. We'll tell you when we get there. Well, terrorists are also defined as people who sell drugs. They've, because of, you know, all these different things that they passed, the Patriot Act, the Patriot Act II, the NDAA, one of the things that they've done in these sort of sweeping definitions is they've allowed the government to use things that were supposed to be there to protect you from terrorism or to enforce laws against terrorism, and now they use them for drugs, like, for instance, the Patriot Act. The Patriot Act has been used more than a thousand times for drugs. This goes way back, though.

It's the old American canard of the targeted extra-extraordinary law. Start with RICO. Most people have heard of the RICO Act. We use the RICO Act against everybody and their brother today, right? The RICO Act is an extra constitutional law. It was extra constitutional because when we passed it in the early 70s, we needed to go after the mafia, right? Organized crime. And the way this thing was sold is that organized crime, because of their power, was resistant to normal rules and approaches. So you had to have special laws, and it will only be used against organized crime and the mafia. It was really the mafia. We called it organized crime, but it was the mafia. And because they were so specially powerful and so

insulated, you couldn't get the top guys, we were going to have a special law that just applied to them. And just like all these other special laws laws eventually it becomes too nice and easy of a tool to start applying it to other things we use rico against two people in a room making a drug deal now yeah um all but this is a long history anytime they pass a special law that's extra constitutional because of the extremity of the threat, it always gets brought down to lower levels. But people don't understand. If you hear about the Patriot Act, you go, well, I guess that's so they can stop people from plotting crimes against America.

The Patriot Act is used way more for marijuana than it ever has been for terrorists. Rodney Balco wrote about this in his book, too. In 2011, the numbers were 1,618 drug cases, 15 terrorism cases. Well, there just isn't that much terrorism. I mean it's a waste of a good law otherwise. And that is a problem with having laws and then removing laws that people have to be aware of when they talk about, well, hey, they should just make drugs legal. What are you going to do with all those DEA agents? What are you going to do with all those people that don't have jobs?

Joe, let me get back to the media thing. How does the president not have to answer a question about that? It's true. How do you... The fact that this all goes on confounds us because nobody ever has to comment on it. The job of the journalist is to say to the president, 16,000... say exactly what you said and say, what's your opinion of that and what are you going to do about it? I mean, you know, you watch the British Parliament in action sometimes on C-SPAN, and every time I mention this, the British, you know, podcasting is wonderful, isn't it?

You have an international audience. The British always say, don't romanticize it. It sucks just as bad as your government. But to an American, when you watch Parliament in action, and the head of the government, the equivalent of our president, has to get up there and actually defend his policies to the hooting and hollering and borderline violence of the rest of the people in parliament, I'm done. Forget about real reform.

I just want him to get up there and have to face the questions and hear how they weasel out. If you throw that question, like if we'd had a real debate during this last presidential campaign and you ask Mitt Romney that question and you ask Barack Obama that question, and and it was asked by the way if you saw the third party debate where all of those interesting and sometimes freaky people actually talked about the issues they brought this up but barack obama and mit romney didn't have to talk about it because it wasn't agreed to by them in advance get to that commission on presidential debates thing where they agree on what they're going to talk about they don't want to talk about this and they never talk about this and they never get asked

this i mean how do you get away with two terms in office and you never have to answer a question on that at all the commission for presidential debates for folks who don't know is a privately owned company as well yeah four democrats and four republicans sit on the board um do you remember jeff gannon why does the name ring a bell? Jeff Gannon was the guy who was an embedded White House reporter during the Bush administration. And he would lob these really softball, partisan questions at Bush like, Mr. President, when are the Democrats going to wake up and come to reality? Who did he work for? Here's where it gets crazy. I don't remember.

But what happened was people started getting suspicious. They're like, who the fuck is this guy? Vaguely, he's coming back to me a little bit now. What's going on with these questions? These are ridiculous questions. I mean, these are over-the-top and obvious. Was he a plant? No, worse.

He was a gay prostitute, and he was a man who ran a gay prostitute website. I did not see that coming, by the way. And he was a man who ran a gay prostitute website. I did not see that coming, by the way. With him, he had dog tags on and a towel over his genitals. And he was like naked otherwise and famously outed for this. I just want to say I didn't know any journalists like this back in my day. No. Do you remember this story?

I remember the guy's name. But here's my question. What was the motive for softballing the president? The question. Ken Lay mostly. Probably. Yeah. So what was the motive for softballing the president the question? Ken Lay mostly, probably. Yeah, yeah. Or, you know, who else? Wait, wait, wait.

Somebody might say to take up one questioning position that wasn't used by a journalist who would have asked a tough question. That, yes. Also, I think there was probably some gay people that worked in the White House in high positions of power that wanted this guy around for various reasons. Again, no answer to that question. Yeah, no answer. What was the name of Bush's key strategist? What's that guy's name again? Which key strategist?

The controversial guy that wouldn't believe that Mitt Romney lost the last election. Oh, that was Karl Rove. Karl Rove. Yeah, he was a GOP strategist. Yes, GOP strategist. Famously probably gay. Famously probably? Yeah, right?

I know nothing about this for lawsuit purposes. Listen, for lawsuit purposes, I'm out of my fucking mind. And on narcotics, there's so much caffeine in my system. I was going to say, the fungus-free coffee is getting to you. I'm out of my head right now. So that's not slander. It's insanity. It's not.

Well, you know what? Listen, Jeff Gannon, I fucked them. Oh, I slandered myself, too. You can't take anything I say seriously. But this gentleman, Jeff Gannon, he was given credentials between 2003 and 2005 for two years. He was a White House reporter. He was eventually employed by the conservative website Talon News during the latter part of this period. So he was asking, they were worried that he was asking

questions so friendly, this is in quotes, that they might have been planted. And this is how people were trying to look into this guy. So they found out that he had some website let me let me find the name of the website because it's fucking ridiculous it's like uh the super gay super super gay military website i don't know if anybody can see me right now my mouth is wide open though because really i had not heard of the story and i'm just thinking about what it took for me to get a press pass not to see the president and this guy had to be fingerprinted background check and the whole thing and made it through all that yes yes because he was someone's boyfriend i'm almost positive yeah but you got to be a lot of people's boyfriends because there's a lot of people you got to get through to get to that gig well he ran a whole

website where he was had male escorts yeah so this is like the barney frank story where he's got the intern running the house of prostitution and that's funny. I mean, it's not funny, but you know what I mean. Check my history, he says. I'll find his website here because it was like a ridiculous... What's he do now? That's my

next question. What's he do now? I think he's a blogger. Congressman from Nebraska. Yeah. He came out in 2006 after it was all over. But he was a $200 an hour mail escort. That's cheap. Yeah, that's not a lot of money. But you're dealing with a long time ago.

That's not a lot of money. You're dealing with the 2000s. It's quite fascinating because this is also something that really kind of disappeared under the radar. I've got to be honest with you. Now that you've brought it all up, I don't remember this. That's crazy. And I'm pretty informed. I don't remember any of this.

Oh, that's crazy. How could you call yourself pretty informed when you don't know about this? I've been proven wrong, actually. I'm not following the right kind of news feeds obviously. Yeah, they caught him because they just looked into his press credentials because people couldn't believe the silly questions that he was asking. But you look into

the press credentials before you actually get the press credentials. That's how it goes. There's a law enforcement person's signature on the press credentials. I've done nothing really bad in my background and I remember sweating out me getting press credentials. I'm having a hard time finding the name of his website. This is interesting.

But he had naked pictures on a bunch of different gay escort sites. Well, I'm starting to have real doubts about the Secret Service and the ability of the background checks. This is what year? 2006. 2003 to 2005. So this is post-War on Terror. Oh, yeah, yeah background checks. This is what year? 2006. 2003 to 2005. So this is post-War on Terror. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is wild.

Yeah. Oh, it's fascinating stuff. I think he had a boyfriend. I mean, I think it's unquestionable. Do you remember when that madam in Washington, D.C. came out with a whole list of different senators? It wasn't the Heidi Fleiss thing, was it? No, no, no.

This was the D.C. madam. Then she turned out she committed suicide and all the names disappeared. Of course. different senators and she wasn't the heidi fleiss thing was it no no this was the dc madam then she turned out she committed suicide and all the all the all the uh the names disappeared of course did you i remember the story yeah that one i do remember that was on my rss feed yes i guess uh she wasn't as good at keeping her mouth shut as this jeff gannon dude or keeping his mouth open or having enough secrets somewhere where he goes i got i've got julian assange is going to release this with a secret code if anything happens to me automatically. Yeah, please. I don't want to ruin my great country by telling how many of you guys are fucking each other behind closed doors.

Yeah, this was one of my favorite stories though about how you can't trust the press because who put the press into that position, especially during – I mean that was one of the things that people had commented about, about the Bush administration, like, wow, this is the first time an administration has been so transparent about its corruption, so transparent about the influences that it has, the influences by Halliburton. Halliburton's CEO all of a sudden is now the vice president, and Halliburton's making billions of dollars in no-bid contracts. vice president and Hal Burton is making billions of dollars in no-bid contracts. It was so obvious and corrupt and then here's this guy in the White House, embedded White House reporter, lobbing these ridiculous questions and it turns out to be he's a gay escort. I really think it's the war on terror that makes you able to be so open about the corruption

because what are you going to do? I mean we have extreme wartime authority until the war is over now. And there will be no end to the war. Well, here's the thing. How can it end? That's what I always – one of the memes we had going on our show was how do you end a war on terror? There is no way to – there's nobody to surrender to you. And if you called off the war tomorrow, there's nothing that prevents the next president after some minor little terror attack in any part of the world from

calling it on again. I mean, if we really cared about the direction the country was going long term, you would realize, and a lot of good writers and constitutional law scholars have, that this is an open hole in things. I mean, you're allowed to basically suspend the Constitution until the war's over, and yet it's one of those wars that that – I mean you can't say once we take Berlin, everything goes back to normal. There is no end to this and there's no end to what you can – like you said, no end to what you can call terrorism. I mean just – it's like saying, OK, we're going to have a war on crime and as soon as it's over, we can get the constitution back. Couldn't we just change the definition of terror? Yeah, but we're not in control.

That's where we went. It tickles. It's a war on tickling. He's actually a blogger now for the National Press Club. Wait, for the National Press Club? Yep. That's not a group of – that's not a side – that's a pretty influential halfway normal group. You sure there's an L in that club?

Is he a really good writer? He's awesome at sucking dick, I bet. He can turn a phrase really well. He's the Hunter Thompson of gay media. Yeah. The Hunter Thompson of gay media. That's hilarious. He should sell shirts that say that.

I'll leave that to you. You have the better e-commerce. No, I'm not saying I should sell shirts. I don't want his money. He should sell shirts that say that. I'm the Hunter Thompson of gay media. Dan Carlin. Dan Carlin. Would should sell shirts that say that. I'm the Hunter Thompson of gay media. Dan Carlin.

Dan Carlin. Would you allow him to use that quote? It's making me out to be the Hunter Thompson of gay media. No, no, no. He should. My wife will be so surprised. That's confusing. No, that's not what I meant. I meant you calling Jeff Gannon the Hunter Thompson of gay media.

He could put it on a book jacket, a blurb. Dan Carlin calls him the Hunter Thompson of gay media. Well, he's out now, so I guess he could. Well, email him. You've got a staff here. You people can email him. My staff is virtually imaginary. Oh, this is even better.

His professional name in the homosexual escort service was Bulldog. His professional name was Bulldog. Wow. Oh, Jesus. God, help me. Is it Mike's bones? I don't know because it's sexy. No fucking bulldog.

This is a picture of him from his website. Wow. That was an embedded White House reporter. Well, and listen, just for the audience out there, it's not the homosexual thing. It's the stereotypical I was a government plant. I mean it is almost like a fiction thing. Well, it's also – it goes back to the secrecy in our government that for sure someone in there is gay. For sure someone in there has a boyfriend.

Can I harp on it again? Why was nobody asked about this? Can you please explain to me how he got the press credentials? We can know all about Petraeus' girlfriend, but we can't know how this guy got the press credentials? I don't understand that. Yeah, nobody wants to ask. Wait, the reason no one wants to ask is because everybody else in government who would ask this question, who gets access, is not gay like him, but it's just planted people. I mean, it's like watching Meet the Press now.

Am I the only person that thinks David Gregory is – I mean, he's a softball pitcher, literally. I mean, you watch this and you just go, how is this satisfying to no offense, boy, they are softballed down the middle, lobs. Everything is – there's no real controversy when it comes to dealing with any foreign issues. A real journalist would look at something like Wikipedia, and if they couldn't support it, they'd certainly have a soft spot in their heart for it. If I recall, mainstream journalism was horrified at Wikipedia. That doesn't ring true to me. Well, you can't just publish these secrets. Well, you have to do something, don't you? You mean WikiLeaks or Wikimedia?

I'm sorry, Wikimedia. Too many Wikis. Well, so did I. Thank you for clarifying that. I was baffled by what you... Yeah, I mean, I think access to information when it exposes crime is always good. If it exposes crime, it's a rational crime. I'm not talking about beating off something, smoking pot, something, victimless crime.

But when you're talking about real corruption, corruption being exposed by WikiLeaks or being exposed by the New York Times, what you should be upset about always is the corruption. And you should praise always whatever method of access to information has been utilized in order to get it out to the people, whether it's a website, whether it's The New York Times. It's like you should be happy that The New York Times exposes things. You should be happy that Woodward and Bernstein broke Watergate. I mean we should all be happy about it. I think there's a simpler rule, and the simpler rule is will we be worse or better off

with more information or less information i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i have let i have yet to find someone who can really explain to me that that trade-off argues in favor of keeping things secret on somebody was a will lose an agent in this or that city and that that that's a breach of trust and i understand that at the same time this country is dying from lack of investigative journalism and uncovering malfeasance and corruption and all these things you can't tell me that the protection of a source here or there outweighs what we're seeing all around us there's also this weird um thing that

happened after september 11th where uh and it was very scary to me where all of a sudden no one wanted to question the government. Everyone wanted to support the government, support the troops, support whatever hard decisions that had to be made, but no one wanted to have any of the healthy skepticism. That's the insanity. That's why we have to have a cooling off period after the next one, because here's the way it goes. If the experts say, and they do, that we're going to get hit again, that it's inevitable, that you can't stop it, it's going to happen. And if you know you are going to freak out when it happens again, we're not talking about like a little teeny attack. We're talking about another two buildings go down or there's a nuclear attack in a harbor or pick your worst case scenario. If you know that you're going to be crazy and ready to rip up the Constitution, we're going to legislate during a period of temporary insanity. If you really want

to save the country, write some rules about that now. Say we're going to be out of our minds. Let's make some, let's put some speed bumps. Let's say you can't legislate for 60 days. Or you can close loopholes that let the terror, you know, we found a loophole that let him in. You can close that. But let's not write any Patriot Act 3 until we've had enough time to calm down. What blows me away is the way that they sold the Patriot Act to us was by saying there's a sunset clause. It's got to be renewed, right? Don't be afraid. This isn't permanent. It's got to be renewed. It's been renewed every time. It's been renewed every time with no it's not even been close. Not only that, most people are not aware that it's legislation that was written

far before September 11th but couldn't get passed. Peter DeFazio told me – I'm not supposed to say this. He said, listen, a lot of this stuff, you can't write a giant Patriot Act like that in the time it took to actually write it. He goes, a lot of these were sitting on the shelf things. I mean you think about standalone laws and they just pick this stuff off the shelf, threw it in. standalone laws and they just pick this stuff off the shelf through it and what a lot of people don't know although this happens with a lot of laws is that there's a lot of blank spaces because people don't quite know how it's going to work out so when you sign these things you actually sign something with a lot of blank spaces because and this happens a lot of us because they don't

know the specifics yet it's not that it's part of a scheme or or they're trying to to slip something through a lot of times with these laws they don't know the mechanism yet. They know that they want to get from A to C and they're not quite sure how B works out yet. But you sign on to the concept that you support C and we'll figure out how to get there when we figure out how to get there. And so they sign a lot of these things that have a lot of blank spaces. And how few politicians read any of those things they sign.

One of the things they've gone over is like the amount of paperwork that these guys would have to read if they read everything they sign. Yeah. And it's impossible. And they've said that. They've openly admitted that there's no way anyone could have read all this stuff in the amount of time you're given. We have to be able to read each other's minds, Dan Carlin. That's where we're going to fix this whole thing.

We're going to be able to absolve lies. We're going to be able to stop all the nonsense as soon as everyone agrees to the neural chip. Are you going to agree? I think you're going to be able to stop all the nonsense as soon as everyone agrees to the neural chip. Are you going to agree? I think you're going to have a lot of government people right on your side on that, Joe Rogan. They're going to be, you know what? That's just what we were thinking. Joe, come and work at DARPA. We've been thinking about how to read people's minds for a long time. You go there and they've got robot dogs patrolling the perimeter with laser beam eyeballs.

I think the bigger danger is they're already reading your mind, and that's the problem. Yeah, I always said with clones, it's just a matter of time before they clone a human hybrid slash creature. Maybe that explains why the presidents always change on Inauguration Day. Maybe those aren't. Maybe. Can you imagine if that was a science fiction movie? They pull the president into another room, and it's like Invasion of the Body Sn that's right it's odd weight foaming and growing

in the corner yes i wonder um how we're going to keep this sort of uh very flawed system afloat over the next decade two decades isn't that what i said i mean it's harder to imagine you talk about revolution on one hand there's i don't want to call it fascism, but let's just call it a more repressive kind of state on the other hand. It's weirder for me to think of the stasis that we're in now continuing than it is to imagine it going far off into either – I don't know which direction it's going to go. I just can't imagine we stay in this weird netherworld for another ten years. Yeah, I feel that it's – the biggest resistance right now to governments right now is technological, the anonymous movement and the WikiLeaks movement. But look at how they're cracking down on that already. A lot of countries are – I mean we've got – I mean the only thing we tend to agree

upon with Iran and stuff is that you need a more controlled internet and those kind of things. A lot of these countries are starting to try to form their own regional internets that they can control. And everybody always tells me – and all these tech guys, well, I can't control the internet. It was designed to avert a nuclear war. You know what? I'm not so sure those guys are right.

They say that, but the governments of all the world are putting in so much effort to this. I'm not so sure that they're not just going to switch us over to another internet and then drown the other one in spam someday so that it becomes unusable. I mean … I don't think they're going to be able to. I think the real issue is who are the most intelligent people? What side are they on? The most intelligent people are on the side of the resistance. The most intelligent people are on the side of the coders, the hackers, the people that are writing software, the people that are the technological innovators.

They're not government agents. Those guys are dummies. That's why they can hack into the White House databases. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But think long term. Talk about a five-year-old growing up today. Are they going to grow up with this kind of mentality? This is the problem when you change the constitutional rights situation slowly the way we have, is

you begin to grow a new generation of people that never knew a pre-911 world, for example, that don't have the same feeling we have about loss of rights or any of these other things because they've never known any better. Are you going to get the next generation of people growing up with a hacker mentality or are they going to be every bit as good on computers as our best people are but come from a mentality that doesn't say, oh, what about our Fourth Amendment rights being gone? They've never known any other world. That's interesting.

I don't agree. I think that children, first of all, almost always look at old people like they're fucking stupid and they've ruined everything. And they might have a point. And they might have a point. And then you're growing up in this society that they created, that they've been running, and they've been running shittily. They've done a terrible job in running this government. I don't think anybody's going to be like a supercomputer expert and be all gung-ho to just follow protocol as written because this government is all-wise and all-knowing.

I don't think there's anybody like that. Okay, but so if you're the government, there's two choices in your scenario. In your scenario, one choice is the revolution, as you call it, the resistance wins. The other choice is that if the government wants to stay in power, they crack down more and they turn us into something that's more repressive than it is now. Well, then it gets really tricky because who is the government? I guess we find out then, don't we? Yeah, because one of the points of fascination that I had about this whole Betrayus thing was the fact that it was the government versus the government.

And that was something that I was not aware of before, that the FBI and the CIA don't like each other, which is hilarious. It's like when you get the corruption from the pro-marijuana people putting in money to campaigns. Now you see things start to even out a little, yeah. Well, also in the marijuana world, you see illegal growers who are against legalization because it would cut down their profits. There's people who are illegal growers who voted against medical marijuana, and that's cannibalism. Those kind of things are very interesting. Yeah, you're always going to have situations like that, I think. So it's – I think the factions of the government can't agree on what – who they're for and who they're not for.

The fact that the FBI was willing to go after the CIA and that's how this whole thing happened with Petraeus and he got smoked out like that. I think that you've got too many people and they're not a unified front. They're not going to get together and say this is what we need to do. I think they will believe that they can pass laws to try to stop things. But while they're doing this and passing laws, technology waits for no one. And these people don't understand technology. These people are old. or in positions of power, I do not think they truly appreciate – most of them at least – truly appreciate the power of the movement of free information on the internet. I don't think –

I think it's like we said though. I think the key is going to be how the average individual is impacted by the changes. It's one thing to say, hey, my life is pretty good. I'm going to still play video games. I'm fine with my – when they get thrown out of their house, when they can't make enough money to live, when the American dream is nowhere near within their reach and there's enough of those people, I think all of a sudden the motivation changes. I mean I had a friend who was a draft protester in the 1960s and he said the real sad part of the anti-war movement was how much of it was based on the fact that I was going to be drafted. And when Nixon got rid of the draft, he did it cynically believing that a lot of people would then say, oh, I don't care about the war anymore. If I'm not going to go, I don't care. And he was right.

And the membership, the people attending these anti-war rallies plummeted once those people weren't going to get drafted. If you talk about people being impacted by a worsening economy and worsening conditions and bad government decisions that pay no attention to what the average American's lifestyle is like, it's like drafting those people. All of a sudden, people who had no stake in this care because they can't afford food or they can't afford a TV or they can't afford cable or whatever it is they need. Well, as we wrap this thing up, how do you think, if you had a guess, I wouldn't want to ask anybody, you're one of the few people that I would ever ask this question, how do you think – if you had to guess, I wouldn't want to ask anybody. You're one of the few people that I would ever ask this question.

How do you think it's going to go down over the next 10 years? If you had to guess, what is – what's going to take place in this country? I told you already. My big fear is that we're going to have another terror attack because I don't see how we avoid that. And it's not just the terrorist fault. I mean we're out there poking hornets' nests all over the world. I mean that's how people respond in a lot of these places. And I think if we get hit again, I think we're going to go crazy. So you think it's going to be bad?

You think it's going to be like right after September 11th? I don't see enough positives. I just don't see enough positives. I mean I'm hoping. But I don't see enough variables that can break in the good direction and I see a lot of variables that can break in the bad direction. Do you think ultimately we're moving towards a one-world government? I think that's a weird statement, loaded statement. I don't know about one-world government.

I think we're moving towards a government that agrees with a lot of other governments about certain things, and one is I don't think most of the world governments are happy about the internet's ability to – I mean they're fine with us watching cat videos and having that keep us pacified. None of them are happy about information sharing. None of them are happy about that kind of stuff. But you look at it in a financial scale. In a historical context though, the fact that everyone was so isolated for so long and then over the last – less than 100 years, there's been this incredible interaction that's escalated. Yeah, look at how the podcast – you're heard then over the last less than a hundred years there's been this incredible interaction that's yeah look at how the podcast you're heard all over the world yeah escalated

and this is just people shooting the shit but just the uh the ability to translate each other's websites and exchange information and kind of understand that we're absolutely revolutionary no question we're not much different than anyone anywhere else other than the environment culture all that other stuff but people want the same thing. They want to be happy. They want to be healthy. And they want to know why the fuck they're in a war. Maybe.

Maybe. I'm not so sure. Some of them do. Better answer. A lot of them do. The ones who are going. Yeah. I'm a little bit more positive than you are, less cynical maybe.

I think technological innovation is our savior. That's what I really believe. Could be. Could be. I could see it. The variables are there. I just see so many more on one side of the ledger than the other. I do, but I also see culturally so much more on the technological side of the ledger.

The fact that the internet has provided this open platform that didn't exist before. platform that didn't exist before and much like uh printed type much like um the television radio there's this is the new burst this is the new i hope you're right listen i'm all on board i'd like to be more positive i really would sorry i'd like you to be more positive too you're scaring the shit out of me okay that's my that's kind of look at that with my job this was a fucking fascinating podcast we could do this for like 100 hours but i had a good i had a good time myself thank you for having me man please anytime if you ever want to come back please if you have anything you ever want to promote please let me know just to tour the studio was worth the price of admission man a beautiful conversation i really really appreciate it thanks very much and uh you

can follow dan on twitter it's dc common senseSense. And you all – is it DCHardcoreHistory as well? It's just Hardcore History. But you can just go to my website at DanCarlin.com, download the podcast, whatever. There's two podcasts, Common Sense and Hardcore History. Both of them really, really well received on the internet. The guys on my message board go crazy and the gals. Sorry, ladies. Love it.

They're big, big supporters of you. So I'm so glad we finally pulled no and my people like you too i just like i said i didn't know we had all the crossover it was really fun man i had a great time thank you i'm sorry about all the exploding pussy shit and i hope it doesn't hurt anybody's feelings uh i'm sure it'll be some interesting twitter posts after the show yeah hey what are you doing hanging out with that guy sorry folks i'm a comedian uh rogan.ting.com Go there. Save yourself $25 off either a cell phone

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Joe2 if you decide to use it and you will get 10% off your first purchase on new accounts, including monthly and annual plans. It's an awesome website. You got to check out Squarespace. It's really fucking badass. If you're thinking about putting together your own website, you can do it yourself. You really don't have to have a professional crew do it. Go and check it out. I guarantee you it's so intuitive and you can make beautiful websites. It's really badass. Go to DeathSquad.tv for any information on upcoming shows that Brian has got going on. He has one coming up in San Diego at the American Comedy Company. It's got Jason Teb, who's a fucking hilariousious dude It's got Tony Hinchcliffe Who's a really Funny Witty

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And the t-shirts Are all in stock right now at ShopSquad.tv. Beautiful. Go get yourself a Death Squad kitty cat shirt. And we are also, Brian and Duncan and I, will be in Cincinnati this Friday night at the Taft Theater. And then Columbus this Saturday night at the Palace Theater. We're on the road, you dirty bitches. And we're coming to Ohio, playing some honey, honey music, kicking ass and taking names. So we'll see you, folks.

And tomorrow is Duncan Trussell. Duncan Trussell joins us on the podcast tomorrow. And then Eddie Huang joins us on Wednesday. We're going to have some fun this week. And we love the shit out of you. Thank you for tuning in. We appreciate it very much. We appreciate all the positive love that you guys send out there on the Internet.

We'll send it right back at you, and we'll see you soon. Thank you. Thank you.