The Joe Rogan Experience - #378 - Dan Carlin

Episode Date: July 29, 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".

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! The Joe Rogan Experience Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night! All day! Powerful Dan Carlin We couldn't start this podcast quick enough Because we were podcasting before the podcast We were talking before it happened

It's good to be back in the house of Rogan It's good to have you back, sir Appreciate it very much Yeah, we literally had to say Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. There was so much that we were talking about from Anthony Weiner to Neanderthals. I was going to say, I don't know how much of it needs to be in the podcast. Yeah, it's a good point. The folly of man, you know.

From Anthony Weiner to the folly of man. Well, it is the folly of man. Anthony Weiner is the folly of man. The reason why we all recognize him is we all know that could have been us. If you were that guy living that life, thinking that way for that long, making the decisions he made, that guy got on a path

and became that guy. Can I just tell you the part the media doesn't focus on that drives me crazy? Sure. As an old reporter, the reporter should ask the question this way. Forget about the specific salacious thing that we're having so much fun with, which is all they focus on, and ask this. Here is a guy that knows what's out there, right?

Decides I'm going to run again, knowing that what's out there is out there and that what's out there will be discovered again and that he will be in the position he's in now, right? Yeah. there will be discovered again and that he will be in the position he's in now right yeah okay so the guy who does it anyway i'm now going this is the guy who's working on nuclear nonproliferation this is the guy who's with i mean this is a judgment question where you go if a guy knows i'm going to put myself in the position one hundred percent absolutely

where i'm going to get whacked again i mean mean, I just, I suffered through all that. I went to marriage counseling. I'm going to get to do it all again. 100% chance of that. And I'm going to run again anyway. I don't care about the issue he got zapped with. I don't care about all the other issues that that same judgment is being applied to. Yeah.

He's obviously crazy. Except that he's not the only one. This is what I thought about with Clinton, where you go, okay, I don't mind the Lewinsky thing. I mind that a guy smart as that man is has to know it's going to come out and has to still go through with it. That's the part I can't fathom. Well, I think the type of person that wants to be mayor in the first place, the type of person that— Yes, okay, I'm with you on that. There's this insane belief in yourself.

There's something weird already. There's this insane belief in yourself. There's something weird already. What's the old line? If you want to be a politician, you should be disqualified for that desire. Yeah, I've echoed that sentiment without even knowing it was a quote. I always said no one should be president that wants to be president. I had somebody tell me the same thing about police officers, and he was a police officer. He said, if you decide, you know what I want to do?

I want to go tackle people, and I want to point the gun at people. If you want to get cats out of trees, you should be a police officer. You know, these other things, the adrenaline pumping things sound good to you. I want you to take a lot of big battery of tests first and make sure everything's cool. That's such an important point, man. I mean, isn't that where we wound up with that Christopher Dormer guy? That crazy guy that got fired as a cop and went on a rampage and started killing cops in L.A.? Oh, that's right.

Well, I had a buddy who, and he was a wild man. I mean, he was just not the kind of guy you wanted to even turn your back on when you went out at night with each other. And he went to the police academy, graduated second in his class, and then left and said, those people are crazy.

Oh, Jesus Christ. But, you know, I know a lot of police officers. They're wonderful guys. My point is that it's an interesting line of work. Have you ever seen the different police videos that they show around the country? And in some of these towns, you know, the way that they sell being a police officer, it looks like Andy Griffith. And you're like, that's exactly the kind of guy I want to apply for the job. And in other ones, they're showing you in the armored vehicles pulling up with the arm. And you're going, no, no, no, no. Someone that likes that ad and responds to that ad should be instantly disqualified from wanting to be one. Well, you know, you're a professional conflict person. That's right. That becomes the real issue because most of us try very hard to avoid conflict because the stress of conflict is really unhealthy. Yes, and dangerous.

Dangerous. It's freaky. You make bad choices. You know, people don't realize, like, how stressful life or death situations can be. And someone who does that professionally is constantly in life or death situations. That's a professional conflict person. It's an incredibly difficult job. And they're part psychiatrist and psychologist.

And they deal with crazy people all the time. I mean, let's realize how tough that job is. But if you're sitting at home going, what am I going to do for a job? And you see a guy in armor and he's rolling on the ground and that looks good to you? Join the army. There's other places for you. Yeah, it's almost like it's applying or attaching to a mindset. The idea of getting someone who would be willing to do the job in a very enlightened way is almost impossible to find.

Because even if they were like this, you know, Deepak Chopra-type cat with a gun that was just trying to calm everyone down. Doing yoga between outings in the police vehicle. We are experiencing this objectively. Sergeant Gandhi. I think after a while, your own self-preservation instincts would kick in

if you were in a suitably bad neighborhood. Well, and you get this gallows humor. I mean, we reporters used to be able to joke with the cops well because, you know, at two in the morning it's a murder scene and there's some twisted weird... I mean, I remember going to a murder scene that was really horrible, but there were a few twisted aspects that are kind of funny in a Quentin Tarantino dark way. Right. And they know they can joke with you about it even though it's a tragedy and they're upset about it

well it's almost a coping mechanism you know the old line is and there's no question that most police officers are just fine and we never hear about this sergeant gandhi on youtube or right now i mean so but they're very careful about who enters their ranks for a reason so why would you put out of the showing all the adrenaline-pumping things when you're trying to recruit these people who aren't going to go crazy when you have a police shooting situation?

Well, recruiting in and of itself is very strange. It is. It's very strange that you're allowed to make this romantic depiction, essentially manipulating someone's ideas of what it would be like to be a police officer. That's what you're doing. Show them dealing with homeless people on the street.

Yeah, exactly, because that's most of your job. Or an Army commercial where your truck runs over an IED and, you know, it gets launched in the air and most of your friends die. We don't even show that on the news. Exactly. Forget the recruiting videos. Well, it's very strange that it's come to that. It's very strange that we're in this weird situation where we've somehow or another agreed that it's okay to withhold and not share information, especially information about really pertinent news. Like the war is a very important subject, but all you ever get is you occasionally get a few numbers with letters behind them. And that's what represents the dead.

You get that in the news, you get that on newspapers. It's very rare there's stories on CNN or anything about the toll, who's dying, who their families are, how they're coping with it, what are their thoughts on it. You have to know, though, that that is all by design. That's not accidental. But here's the – I had this conversation with somebody just the other day where I said, look, the stuff is out there. I mean, this is the internet age. There are camera phones. If you want to go see what the war is really like, go online and start searching and you will see it. The problem is, is if you are the one looking for it, you are not the one who has to see it. Right? The old, the old three network thing was, you know, you're eating dinner in the Vietnam war intrudes in your living room with death and violence and gore. And all of a sudden you're like, wow, look at what war really looks like. The guys who are looking at war

to see what it really looks like, one might be liking it. And two, they, wow, look at what war really looks like. The guys who are looking at war to see what it really looks like, one, might be liking it. And two, they're not the ones you have to educate. It's middle America and Mr. and Mrs. Jones who need to see it and don't want to look at it. Yeah. And want to be fed a Sandra Bullock movie. They want to be spoon fed. Yeah. They got other things.

Life is happening, man. Life is very involving. That's right. And who has time? Yeah. It's just a weird admission, you know, that that's where we're at. When the world, we want to look at it one way, but it's like really clearly not the way we want to look at it. And when you see these sort of romantic depictions, like you ever seen the one for the Marines? Those videos where they're showing you like a recruitment video and the guy's got a sword

and it sparkles when he pulls it out. And they're doing mixed martial arts with each other and he's flying over this obstacle course like a badass. And you're like, what does any of that have to do with war? You didn't shoot anybody there. No one piloted a drone in that commercial. You pulled out a sword. Are you guys really?

Here's the scary thing, man. To take it to the police video we had, imagine showing a Marine recruitment video where you're showing pumping 20 bullets into a body that's exploding. And the guy goes, yeah, that's what I've been waiting to do. So you have the same problem. I mean, not sure you want those guys joining the Marines either. Well, they're going to probably join anyway, but you're absolutely right. Yeah, what's the solution there?

Because you want really good killers. If you want really good killers, you've got to make sure they're trained correctly. I'll tell you, I think we have them, man. I don't think we have to do any better. They're really good. Let's not minimize how really good they are. Well, I'm saying if you're trying to recruit them, though, what is the way you would go about doing it? They go to E3, man.

They have their own video game. The Army has one really cool first-person shooter, and they go there with these huge tanks. Yeah, they do, and they did that on purpose. Of course they did. Yeah, and the kids are like, wow, this is a cool video game. Is this what it's really like? You know what they used to do, though, back in my day? I remember them at the high school that's about three miles from here, which is where I went to high

school, them landing the brand new, never-before-seen Apache helicopter when it was brand new, right on our high school football field, and the whole school gets to go out there and i remember watching the guy in the apache showing us how the guns were attached to his helmet and if he turned his head to the left the guns in front of the apache would and all that was how they did it back look how cool this is i move my head to the left of these two machine guns go to the movie look i can point

him at your teacher you know i mean it was just it was that the 1982 version way better than the atari 7200 you know think about that yeah it is pretty crazy if you think think about the idea that they're recruiting by using video games and that eventually those are skills that are going to translate throughout the look let's make no mistake about it whoever's the first to get a robot army of bulletproof titanium We're on the way there right now, man. We got Cylons. Yeah, I mean, for real. We're real close to being able to do that. We already have flying ones, and they're

developing walking ones. Have you seen these walking robots they're developing? Holy shit. Wait till it's our drones taking out their drones. Wait till you get to that point where the first thing you do is establish drone supremacy before you send troops on the ground. We'll have a war in the sky with robots. That's crazy. North Korea already has human robots in some ways.

They would pretty much do anything a robot, but they feel and they can blow if they have to. Finally, our video game trained youth will save the country. We'll save the country. North Korea is like the last country left that is rocking like a full-on military dictatorship with nuclear weapons right in front of the world. But you know what's funny is that they're like an egg. Look at this thing. They appear to be strong on the outside, but North Korea would go down as quickly as Iraq did. Yeah, they have no money. And plus, they just don't – I mean it's high-tech versus low-tech a lot of you know I look at sometimes the North

Korea and they'll publish how many tanks they have any but you look at the details of it in the tanks 1950s vintage I mean they were they'd move one foot and they'd be gone I mean that's what people don't understand that the patches would shoot them over the skyline they wouldn't even see anything the night vision would destroy everything I mean it would be like third world I mean it's nothing. Yeah, they have these fucking ships now, these battleships.

They launch these fighter jets off of and they're like cities. It's a goddamn city that's made of metal that floats outside of your town. And when you fuck up, they can see everything. Those night vision things, when they see people moving and crawling.

Yeah, it's incredible. The North, what you can see with the satellites. It's incredible. The North Korea thing is a little weird because they're within artillery range of a very large city, Seoul, which changes everything because they say, okay, yes, you can beat us in one second, but how many people in Seoul? How many buildings can we knock down before you destroy us? Right. But I think they have all those sites targeted from years of observation. But I think they have all those sites targeted from years of observation. Could you imagine if that had happened to the United States during the Civil War?

If we became a North and South America like that? Or North and South United States, rather? Where we had, literally, people that looked just like us, were from our lineage. Well, the North would be like Canada now. And the South would be like the South. You wouldn't have slavery anymore, I don't think. I mean, I think you would have eased out of that, and you would have two similar countries that maybe played in a football Super Bowl. I mean, you'd have the Union versus the Confederate team.

It'd be interesting. I've always loved to have this idea. Do you remember Back to the Future, the movies? I always loved this idea. I'd love to be able to program in an alternative reality and just see what happened if Hitler wins the Second World War, the North and South. And you watch the different development go off into the distance and how many things change. Right.

Yeah. It's fascinating when you think of what could have – I mean people – the common phrase. Hey, we would all be speaking German. What would have happened if they discovered the nuclear bomb before us? What could have happened if Japan dropped it on us before we could drop it on them? Those moments in history are very strange, aren't they? These pivotal moments where everything changes. Well, and you know, we talk about that. I mean, for us, and I don't think we quite formulated how different this is, but 9-11 is that kind of moment. We live through a moment that 200 years from now they will study as a pivotal moment in world history,

one of these things where it took less than 24 hours to happen. And somebody wrote me a letter saying, I don't buy your theory that the world changed with 9-11 really all that much. I've got to disagree with that. I think we've never been the same. I think we may have had some trends that were leading to where we are now, but they're the kind of things that wouldn't have happened without that. It's almost like, you know, yeah, we're on a precipice or something, but somebody has to shove.

And 9-11 is like a Pearl Harbor or the explosion of the battleship Maine. It's – or the – you know, the First World War starts with maybe the most significant terrorist attack in human history. One guy shoots a guy and his wife and the whole world explodes. Well, the world was poised to explode and he lit the powder keg. But does the powder keg ever get lit if he doesn't do that? So I mean, that's what we're talking about. We were in an era where maybe there was a terrorist powder keg and a bunch of things ready to happen. But unless you have two buildings fall down or some guy said, Dan, more than two buildings fell down in New York. Don't you know that?

Unless you have a number of buildings fall down in New York on 9-11, does it ever have that push that sends you over the edge? Yeah, the idea of a historical moment has always been fascinating to me because when they happen you're like whoa is this really happening is this this is that weird feeling didn't 9-11 feel surreal when you watched it surreal every well i remember very clearly on 9-11 i was hanging out with joey diaz ralphie may mike favorman and uh we were we were all like we were hanging out first me and joey were having a burrito we're outside of baja fresh on sunset and we're looking up at the sky and we're like dude there's no planes like there haven't been any planes did you really yeah there was no planes very observant to notice that i would that would never hit me i would never notice that

well i think i'd heard about it that they were going to cancel the flights and then I realized it once we were out there because it just sort of sunk in. The whole moment was, from the moment the planes hit the towers to watching the replays on TV, it was almost like a bubble had popped, like a door had opened, like a new chapter had started. Yes, that's what we're talking about here. But you know what's rare, and we said this in the latest podcast, so sorry to anybody who's already heard this, but these events happen all the time but most of the time you don't realize it it's subtle it's you know we're living a day-to-day existence and historians 500 years from now will go they didn't even realize what an important moment of change but there are those

moments that happen sometimes where the people who are living through them they're so momentous that you can tell you can just go wow and you know we were like, I mean, I remember the whole day I'm getting like 200 phone calls from people going, oh, what does this mean? I mean, everybody knew something was going on. Yeah. Yeah. Those weird moments, those weird breakthrough moments

where things change completely. We love them and we're terrified of them. You know, I mean, they're really exciting sometimes, but we're also absolutely terrified of a big event happening. And that's one of the things they use to justify spying on people, like all this NSA thing. Like Bill Maher, I saw Bill Maher justifying NSA spying. It was really fascinating. And it's not that he has a bad point either. His point was there's something that we have now that didn't exist when they were writing the Constitution.

It's nuclear weapons. That's a good point. I mean, if you really did find out that there was a possibility of a nuclear attack on a certain area of the world and you could stop it because of these strategies, these technological strategies. But here's where I would go with that, because this has always happened. We just finished a show on the Spanish-American War era, and Teddy Roosevelt is trying to tell people in the U.S. Congress who keep bringing up the Constitution that that might have been fine in the age of sail. But we live in the age of steam now, and all of a sudden Europe isn't that far away, and these oceans aren't protecting us as much as they used to. You know, we've been dealing with that pretty much since minute one. So, I mean, I think you can make that argument.

And we're in the age of drones now. Either they're timeless and they're human rights and you're born with them, or as soon as things get dangerous enough, they're gone. I mean, I think we have to sit down and have the conversation because I don't think the guy, and this is funny because, you know, you talk about the Founding Fathers like they're gods, and then we realize that they have slaves and that they're blah, blah, blah. They fuck those slaves a lot, too. It's one of those things where you can't

romanticize it too much, but at the same time, they were talking about these things as human rights, not you get them now and we'll see what happens when they develop steam power. Right. So we have to decide what our commitment is to them. And if it's a real commitment, then it doesn't matter what the next weapon system is because it's more important to have the human rights than it is to be protected from nuclear weapons.

If you want to be protected from nuclear weapons, you might have to jettison some human rights. Right. But at least frame it that way. Yeah, it's a fascinating thing that every point in human history, every single point, if you could stop on that number, that will have been the most advanced humans had ever been up until then. You know, and that's hard for us to wrap our heads around, that the same sort of scenarios keep playing themselves out over and over and over again.

And even though we're pretty convinced that, you know, we learned something from the Greek and the Russian history and the history of Rome, we've learned something from all the lessons of how things went wrong, what was good about things, what was good about the government, what was good about the philosophies that they had created and the ideas that they shared. But it's basically the same thing as what's going on now. I'll tell you what we bring up a lot. I hope I haven't overdone it in the shows, but I'm fascinated by this idea that we're never going to go backwards again. Yes.

You know, when you talk about this modern world and you look around and you think, okay, basically since the Renaissance, it's been all – this is the stock market. We've been going up ever since the Renaissance. And the idea idea that everybody has is that and we're never going to go backwards we're never going to go look at a thousand years from now and see people who don't know about dna sequencing anymore it's planet of the apes right where you've gone backwards and oh the statue of liberty is partly buried in the sand and i mean we we but every other culture of the western yeah but every other country in the civilization history the world has thought that i mean you don't think the romans were thinking god's great now pity it can't last and we learn from them we know but maybe we had and not

just that maybe the whole globalization the fact that everybody's connected will change that dynamic but i think if you're good if you're trying to learn from history one thing history shows is the stock market upticks in the civilization stock market don't last. So what does that mean? Well, we like to think we're more special than all the other animals, first and foremost. So we like to think that, even me, I'm guilty absolutely as charged. We like to think that we are eventually going to achieve the highest levels of understanding and that that's the trend that things are going

and eventually going to work everything out and we won't have war someday in the future. And that somehow or another, we are basically, human beings are basically good and we're going to work this out and the universe is going to reward that. But I got one word, one word that refutes that. Dinosaurs. Okay?

The whole world was fucking run by cunty heartless lizards cold-blooded monsters without a fucking speck of emotion that never wrote a fucking thing down didn't give a shit about culture would eat their babies would eat anything that stood still that's what dominated this Earth for the longest time. And if it wasn't for an asteroid impact, very likely would still be a version of that animal still running shit. I'll tell you what blew my mind. I read this book by a guy named Nick Bostrom, who's a physicist,

and whose expertise is the science of catastrophe. He studies catastrophic events and he's written whole books with with a lot of other physicists who do this about the various ways we could end and one of the ways involves something called the Fermi paradox which you may have heard about which is you know you they do these mathematical studies and they figure out how many planets in the universe should be like ours and should be able to support life. And then they do the calculation down, down, down, and try to figure out how many thousands or tens of thousands or millions of planets should have human life or something intelligent.

And then they say, so where are they? So the Fermi paradox is the, if the numbers add up the way they do, where are they? And guys like Bostrom have figured out that every intelligent civilization reaches a point where it could very easily destroy itself or collapse like a house of cards or what and it's like this dangerous membrane and maybe he says it's after you involve nuclear weapons and so the question is is most civilizations do not make it through this danger zone from the time they develop nuclear weapons to the time they become like a Gandhi civilization or whatever.

And most die somewhere in that area that we're now in right now. And so the idea is that maybe this is where we go back to dinosaur times. Well, it's an interesting paradox that the survival of the fittest mentality, this inner desire to conquer and survive and stay alive, is also the exact same thing that leads to innovation, which is the exact same thing that leads to the highest levels of consciousness and technological innovation when they figure out how to bypass the human body. But yet they're still trapped in these like trends of behavior that are based on just teeth and claw survival. You know, those instincts that drove us to get to the point where we're this evolved being.

You talk about a giant bunch of them in your podcast and some of them just as recently as six, 700 years ago. More recent than that. Yeah. 700 years ago. More recent than that. Yeah, well, the craziest thing ever is listening to, you know, you talk about history that was only a few hundred years ago. Only a few, you think 12, 13, 14, 15 generations.

That's nothing. And they were living like insane people. Well, and the truth is, the way that they were living was a lot more like they were living in the time of ancient egypt than we're living like any of them now i mean we're really living an unreal lifestyle in terms of what's normal for human beings whereas through most of human history they lived something much closer to the reality that the entire history of the species understood yeah no i i completely agree and you know we're talking about big great historical events one the one that doesn't really get as much credit as i think it deserves is the internet oh yeah the internet it didn't it didn't happen that quick it happened like a

it's a slowly hit a critical vines and got deep into our dna and then what year do you think if you had to put a year or a year or two or three, when do you think it hit critical mass and just broke? It seemed to me to be the early 2000s. The internet became really popular. Couldn't live without it. Everybody had to Winona Ryder's the only person not on the internet now. Yeah, it was, it seemed like, and that was the years where it started to escalate as far as like the interesting articles that you could get. The bandwidth situation had kind of gotten a lot better with people.

Every commercial had a web address at the bottom of it. You could get a really quick internet connection pretty much everywhere in the early 2000s by the time that rolled around. That made the experience so much more interesting, I think. Maybe I'm not dating it that well. rolled around. That made the experience so much more interesting, I think. Maybe I'm not dating it that well. But I remember when the first web browser that average idiots could use, when the Netscape browser came out, it was all of a sudden like, oh, I don't have to be a computer whiz to figure out how to click on this thing and click on this thing and see something, read

some news. And remember, ladies and gentlemen, we're going to be able to talk about, those of us as old as Joe Rogan and yours truly, we your history and be able to tell our children about the wild west of the internet yeah when you would just click around and look as there was some seriously weird stuff out there and you didn't there used to be the button is still there was just take a chance or and was it but now it did not take a chance in your best buy but then it was like a bit of a chance it was all my god where that's a little and i think i'm but there's some could say no internet.

Remember when there was no internet? That's like our walking up the hill both ways. My children look at me and I talk about pre-smartphones, and they just roll their eyes. Oh, Dad. How old are your kids? 11 and 8. What a fascinating life it's going to be for a child growing up. It's over.

They don't even have it. They sit there and just look down at things all the time i mean my brother was talking to me today about ads and he runs a business and i said you ever take out advertising he goes why nobody ever looks up he goes you could get a billboard nobody's gonna see it they walk around looking down are they gonna have neck problems when they get older well they are having neck problems in korea where there are a high incident of neck bulges bulging discs so when people evolve in in a hundred years, we're going to have like this curvature

where we're like a microphone or one of those heat lamps bent over? I don't think so. I think the days of holding things in your hand are few. It's going to be the glasses and stuff, isn't it? It's going to be those and something new in eyes, something in your eyes. So if Wiener thought he had trouble before,

wait till the Google Glass. Or if Wiener thought he was having fun before. We'll have the actual videos now. He's only in trouble when he's getting caught. It seems like he's having a really grand time when no one's bothering him. I say let the guy send his dick pics. There's obviously people that want to receive them. He's played a little game.

Everyone's dancing. Who cares? No, he can't be mayor. I was just going to say, go into private practice. Charge money. Have a website. Do a podcast. There you go. You can't be mayor, but I was just gonna say forget why you're going to private charge money Yeah, have a website podcast. Yeah, you can yeah, but the type of person that wants a run today's pick of the day brought to you by wieners wiener Who would sponsor? I mean the sponsorship ideas become quite interesting if he had a podcast

I think it would be quite popular castle superstore Take all of his freak instincts aside, the guy's very charismatic. Have you ever heard Wiener talk? He's huge, too. Somebody told me he's like 6'5". Brian, what are you doing? This is the Wiener chick.

Oh, I don't want to see her. Don't give her any attention. The whole thing is sad. I thought I heard he was like 6'5". He's like this huge dude. Somebody told me he's an enormous human being. Oh, is he really? Well, I can't confirm that.

Maybe that's why he's got that giant hog. That's why you just can't wait to... You know, God gives you I can't confirm that. Maybe that's why he's got that giant hog. That's why he just can't wait to... Somebody said to me, would you be tweeting it out if it... No, you wouldn't be, but if your name was Wiener and you had a giant hog and you were crazy, you might. There's nothing wrong with it.

This is what I say. I say, yeah, the guy's a fucking mess and I wouldn't want to be married to him. No, he can't be mayor, but the fact that in the middle of a fucking war... He could be mayor some places. Yeah, like Yugoslavia or somewhere. Well, no, I was thinking what U.S. cities would be working. There's places where that would work. The fact that we're concentrating on that

in the middle of this NSA thing, in the middle of this Michael Hastings... I've got conspiracy theorists that say that's why we're getting fed up with stories. It's amazing. It's amazing. Imagine we find out this chick's a CIA agent and she was hired to lure Anthony Weiner because he's too charismatic.

Well, remember, the British government got brought down in a scandal with KGB chicks. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, it's happened. Yeah, it has happened. Those Russian chicks will get you. And what's really fascinating is before this guy got busted, he was a really charismatic guy. He was a really good speaker And he was really dynamic and he made a lot of good points And it's kind of fascinating that those like really charismatic guys. They're also the ones who really love pussy Well, you know but listen I mean I think you would be we want things to exist in like this really unrealistic way Those JFK dudes those guys are gonna be to be president, they all were like crazy. Even Gandhi had some girlfriends, you know.

Gandhi had a gang of bitches just waiting for him at the house with incense and a double lotus. So let's ask the more interesting question. If you are concerned, as we often point out on our political podcast, about the low level of leadership, I mean, if countries rise or fall based on the sustained level of leadership and good, well-led countries do better. I mean, if companies well-led do better than poor-led companies, what about countries? And if the really good leaders come with these known flaws, and we know that if you really want a good leader, he's going to come with all these personal foibles. And would you rather have the guy who's gifted at government with all his faults or the mediocre guy but you know he's

he doesn't ever do it there's no drugs in his background there's no sex he's never done it he's been an accountant and clapped erasers but he's he's mediocre at leadership what do you take well i'm certainly not delusional and i know that i forgot who i was clinton had all of his food by a peer loaded question wasn't it um No, Clinton appears, by all accounts, to be a very intelligent man and a very good leader. But if you listen to some of the people that would talk about the atrocities that were committed during his regimes,

he was involved. There were some military actions that were very questionable. They all have something connecting to him. This whole Democrat, Republican, Clinton, none of these people are liberal. None of these people, I mean, it's what

Noam Chomsky, not Noam Chomsky, what did Gore Vidal said? We have one party in this country with two wings. Yeah. And the wings are called

Democrats and Republicans. I can't get into that. Bill Hicks had a great joke about it. Which one was it? I remember some of them. He was like, he goes,

this is politics in this country. He goes, I like the puppet on the left. Yes. Well like the puppet on the left. Yes. Well, the puppet on the right seems to make more sense to me. George Carlin had some good ones, too.

And you just go, look, if we could get over that, we might actually make some progress. But if you go, the most depressing thing for me in the entire world, but I also think it's one of the coolest things that happened on the Internet, are those comment sections underneath all the news stories where people can sort of weigh in. Bullshit. Yeah, yeah. Well, in one sense, I think that's the greatest thing ever invented because the media hates where people can sort of weigh in. Bullshit. Yeah, yeah. Well, in one sense, I think that's the greatest thing ever invented because the media hates that. I mean, to have – Sure. But on the other hand, when you read it, it's like I could pretend that racism is almost a thing of the past.

And you go on some of these sites and you read what some of these people write and you go, oh, my God, I hope this isn't representative. And then you read the left and the right just eviscerating. I'll cut the throat of a liberal. These conservatives need to be exiled off the planet. You're like, oh, we are totally screwed if this is really representative of what's out there. Yeah. You know what I saw? You want to stop gun control? Or do you want to stop the gun issue? Kill everyone with a gun. Seriously. They're not us.

Somebody actually wrote that. They're not us but you like actually somebody actually wrote that they're not us please tell me there's one percent of the people who post an inordinate amount on these news stories and that that's what that is it's not on just news stories on everything see the ability to express yourself freely like everyone can have it yes anyone can say what you're always going to have a giant percentage of the people that are like really unbalanced spending a lot of time doing that like one of the things i really enjoy doing in whether it has anything to do with me or not but anytime i read someone criticizing someone i like to go and see like what other posts they make like where where else do they make posts

and it's almost always like you read someone's Twitter and they say something mean, you go to it and it's just all mean shit to random people all day. They're just spewing out to celebrities, to entertainers, to athletes, to politicians, to whatever. To random cam girls, random girls who have websites. I'm telling you, man. I see some of these people. It's just like you go to their website. It's like you're watching madness. You're watching.

That's their expression of who they are. And think about that. I mean, there's mad, crazy people out there who didn't have an internet to play with 30 years ago and who do now. Absolutely. Charles Manson in the 60s would have had the internet to play with. Imagine how the recruitment would have gone for Manson with the internet. Yeah. Well, he probably would have been exposed quicker too.

They would have been like, he's a hoaxer. Well, first of all, he would have released all his songs on iTunes and he would have been a big star and never would have gone this way. And he wouldn't have tried to kill that Beach Boy, Doris Day daughter guy, Terry Melcher, and it never would have happened. Maybe. Or it would have happened bigger way. And he wouldn't have tried to kill that beach boy, Doris Day daughter guy, you know, Terry Melcher, and it never would have happened. Maybe. Or it would have happened bigger, right? Yeah. I think the

internet has certainly probably encouraged a lot of people to be assholes, exposed a lot of people for being assholes, but what concerns me is that we have no precedent in this ability to communicate with people without a physical reaction from them, without being in front of them. Like, one of the reasons, like, we recognize humanity in each other.

If you say something mean to someone and you see them react to it, you feel bad. You know, like, there's, like, a give and take and energy, like, exchange between two people when they're communicating with each other. But the fact that someone with no previous interaction with you could just snipe at you your song fucking sucks i hope you die in a fire your whole band should get aids like you you read these things it's like no one's ever been able to do that before you've never been able to yeah in a fit like i can write you an email and in the exact same way they can contact you you're looking at something they wrote on a screen so it can be someone who you know, who's a friend, or it can be some

fucking crazy person. But it gets to you the exact same way. It gets to you as words on a screen, and that's unprecedented. You're better about this than I am, because I am really, and this is like asking for it, isn't it? I'm a little too thin-skinned for some of this stuff, too, because you know, you're right.

You get this stuff, and they send you these um you're right you get this stuff and they send you these notes or or emails or reviews or whatever and they say stuff and you sit there and go okay this isn't constructive criticism and why i don't want to whine about this right you kind of look and go what motivated you to do that because but like you said i mean it's a cross-section of human beings you don't know what mood they were in what they've been drinking or anything else. But at the same time, you do. You kind of question, you go, is this what you do every day? But it is, you know, it is what it is. With some it is, and with some, they just all of a sudden decide

that Dan Carlin needs a talking to. And they get online, and they start fucking getting crazy and, you know, it's a weird way of communicating. We're also talking to kids more. We're also talking to mental health people more. We're also talking to mental health people more. We're talking to people that are in homes that have that internet that should not be talking about you.

Oh, I don't know about that. It's everybody. How about that guy that got fired? Remember that guy? He was in Houston. And he was a Reddit poster and actually got fired from his job when they found out who he was on Reddit because apparently he would post dead bodies and crazy shit. Oh dead bodies and crazy shit yeah like really really freaky shit and 10,000 likes too mean things he would say like really vicious mean shit and it turned out he was like a guy with like a family

but you know you were talking about this internet and how it's changing things and really I always try to point out how early we are in this whole thing development think about though how it does empower people like that who never I mean it's I mean we always talk about how great it is that we can do podcasts and that we can talk to a huge audience through a microphone out of out of a room or whatever but it does the same thing for everyone out there and it's interesting when you think about people who I mean they used to talk about the voiceless you'll read these histories about these people locked up in these dark buildings and never got there they're voiceless not anymore there's no voiceless it's not like the old days where someone could just you know be a famous person like elvis or something like that and

no one ever could say anything about him like you know you know, Elvis came over to my hotel room. He ate 15 pills and shit in my mouth. And, you know, these days, like, if something like that happens, like, someone's going to take pictures. They're going to put it up on TMZ. Back in the day, you know, there was people that had no voice. They couldn't talk about anything. They couldn't say this movie is pandering, it's stupid, it's treating you like you're an idiot.

They couldn't say, like, my new show, like, a lot of the criticisms i've read about my new show i i agree with and i think they're really valid and i think that people having the ability to do that is important i don't like the fast editing i don't like some of the cheesy music i don't like the suspense the thrill that's the way they think they have to make TV shows though. But as the show gets more and more popular, hopefully we can show that that's not the case. But it's like this constant battle of compromise. But what's important to me is that people are looking at it sort of in a lot of ways the same way I'm looking at it.

The things that they don't like about it, I don't like about it. So it's validating in a way. Even though they're saying I suck, it's like I know it kind of sucks in this way. And I think there's a lot of great stuff about it, but we can fix the suck part. The suck part is just like, everyone assumes that you have to do it this certain way because they've done it that way forever and they're scared. But when you look at these comments and you read things online, everyone, bad, crazy, but also good and poignant in people who have good points of view.

They'll point stuff out and you go, this is undeniable. Yes, this is cheesy. Yes, this is a dumb way to do that. Yes, this is demeaning to people's intelligence. Yeah, he's right. I'll give you an example, though, of what I mean. And I'm thinking about people in the pre-Internet age that were both geniuses and dangerous as all get out and were dangerous before the internet perfect example and only you punk rockers out there will know who i'm talking

about here but darby crash from the germs who was from here how dare you yeah the fuck knows what you're talking about crash and darby crash was a genius a weirdo genius and i remember he went on rodney bingenheimer's show here in town in like 1979 and started giving out the satellite code so you could make free telephone calls. And he's on the radio announcing, OK, now if you dial this number, you could call Pakistan and you won't have to pay a dime. And then this number and you dial this first and make sure you dial a one. I mean, imagine him on the Internet. And every week it's like, OK, subversversive uh podcast 101 i mean he'd be gone in like five minutes but you think about what those guys could achieve without an internet now you

give you a darby crash of the germs and internet and it's crazy yeah i mean we're calling the internet uh a thing like as if it's a you know but what it was it was a next if you look at it like really cleanly it's instead of like labeling the internet it's almost just like the next level of technology it's like it's just the ability to exchange information and then from there it's all that information just taking off and growing don't you think they're going to do that internet though okay and every time i say anything like this the real technophobes jump people actually know. People actually know what you're talking about. The rumor has always been that they're going to

create a commercially oriented internet and the one where ESPN can deliver their content and everything and it'll be super rapid and no spam and no ads and then they'll have the other one where all the spam and all the ads and it goes really slow and everything and that's where the Dan Carlin podcast will be and it'll take 17 days to download

my latest show with all the spam and stuff that comes with it. How can they make it slower than it is now? They're not going to. No, they won't. They'll speed up the other one and just let the other one degrade. That's okay. I would way rather have what we have right now uncensored than anything that's fast, and I think everybody, and fast and stupid and

Until I get it, and then you go, hey, check this out. This is the internet. Yeah, but you would still want to be able to do what you're doing now is my point. You wouldn't want to switch over and become censored so you can move faster. I don't think that's – I think the other one would just slow down. Slowly but surely overwhelmed with junk and spam. It violates the laws of technological progression. I think the fast –

So I didn't even need a technophobe to tell me that. You can tell me that. I don't see how there could ever be any rational reason for a slowing in speeds of Internet. Where's your conspiratorial mind? If you're the government, you're tired of these idiots on these podcasts. They don't have, but the government doesn't have that. Exposing everything. Wouldn't you want to show?

Well, but listen, I know that the old TV networks and stuff, they're not happy with the fact they've lost the monopoly over being the middle man for content. If you told them, listen, I have a plan that could put you back in the driver's seat, you don't think they'd say, oh, I have a slot open up at 2 p.m., let's have a meeting. I'd like to hear what you have to say. I would like to think no for a bunch of reasons, because I would like to think that individually they realize that would be a terrible thing for the human race, but also- Yes, you've met all those guys and you know that that's all they think about. I don't think it translates enough to them individually to be caught up in something so dangerous.

When you start talking about something like a conspiracy that would involve who knows how many thousands of people to slow down the Internet, it would be an insanely transparent venture. There would be no way you could hide that. Let me pretend I'm coming in the meeting, and I say, in 1990, the average Golden Girls episode that nobody cared about at all had 43 million people watching it. Yeah, but you've got to blame that on DirecTV as much as you have to blame it on anything else or cable or instant on-demand television programming. Without that, what about Netflix? You can get any fucking show you want anytime you want. With the kind of speed that we have

now, I mean, I don't have the fastest internet at home, but I stream from Netflix and HD like it's nothing. It's super easy So essentially I don't need a network anymore They're just as much to blame for this whole thing as the internet certainly not more fragmentation, but there's no blame Well, there is it's it is it's progression you offer a shit product You stuff fucking commercials inside that shit product, and you wonder why people are looking elsewhere when all of a sudden they have this completely uncensored... Oh, I agree with that. Yeah, radio's that way.

Yes, of course. But I'm not talking about... Radio's the best example. I'm not talking about blame. I'm talking about somebody saying, listen, I know you think the genie's out of the bottle, but with my new plan, I can help put the genie back in the bottle so that... I don't want to say any names.

Right. But major media company number one, two, three, and four, five, you guys are, I mean, look, if you're talking about movies and stuff like that or entertainment companies, it's already just like three or four companies now. I mean, it's not the Joe Rogan or the Dan Carlin show, but if you're talking about major media companies out there, there used to be a ton and we're down to like three or four. Isn't that fascinating? Because it's sort of like banks as well.

Yes. They start eating each other up. But it's almost like three or four. Isn't that fascinating? Because it's sort of like banks as well. They start eating each other up. But it's almost like a survival mechanism. You realize they had almost recognized they were too big. And then as the landscape changed, they were forced to coalesce. It's really kind of fascinating as a biologist.

But if you're a blockbuster movie maker and you're going to get $200 million, you can't scrape that together very easily. Well, not only that, you have to make sure that all your fucking T's are crossed and all your I's are dotted and everything is really clean and appealing. That's why a movie like Avatar, I've loved Avatar. I thought it was a really fun movie, but it's a perfect blockbuster moneymaker movie because there's no sex.

The violence is like most of it is like either bad guys get jacked or you know these alien things which you don't even really identify with though the story is like pocahontas it's a million other stories it's dances with wolves it's a million other stories that have been done a thousand times before but it's done perfect yeah that's a fucking 250 million dollar movie that's a movie that they can well you got to get a james cameron type motherfucker that's knows how to do those things. Perfect. And can pull one of those off.

But yeah, in this day and age, those are dying off slowly, but surely it's harder and harder to make one of those motherfuckers. You don't know if you have an avatar or an ishtar until it comes out. People don't even remember that. That's a hell of a risk. Dan Carlin and I,

we're old folks. That's right. That fuck. Do you remember that? Oh yeah. That used to be the butt of every single joke. How about Waterworld? It's the same.

Waterworld is another one. Ishtar on the waves. But there was one other one, too. What was the other one? There was one other gigantic movie that was actually previous to that. There was a... God, it wasn't a Warren Beatty movie. Reds was pretty...

Reds was pretty bad, but there was another one that they talked about as being as much of a colossal failure as Ishtar. It was one of those movies, Robert Redford or something, some shit I would never watch. He falls in love, the girl gets cancer or something. I don't remember. I don't remember. Those movies, those types of movies where the music would play, Robert Redford would look at these girls with his steely glance. I know they're good, but I'm not watching that shit. My dad made movies, and he made movies that cost like $200,000 to make.

He spent like a million dollars on promotion. He released them in like a fazillion theaters all at once, and by the time you realized that no one should have gone to that movie, he made all his money back and then sold it overseas. That was the move back then. And that was the playbook. Well, Sharknado, did they make that for sci-fi?

They made it specifically. It's a brilliant move, man. Just go over the top. Make something completely retarded. Did you see Ian Zaring flying through the air inside the shark's mouth? The shark's flying through the air. Make something completely retarded. Did you see Ian Zaring flying through the air inside the shark's mouth? The shark's flying through the air. Ian jumps up with a chainsaw, goes inside the shark and cuts his way out with a chainsaw.

I did not see it. It's fantastic. It's on my to-do list. They're already making a sequel. Of course they are. It's fun as shit. And Ian's the only one that's going to be back in it. You're not going to have Tara Reid in that. She should get back. She's crazy. Get back in there. Have your agent. Kiss their ass. Send a gift basket. Shark ate her ass. The idea of making your own really terrible movies on purpose, it's a great idea.

Yeah. Do it. I absolutely think so. Especially in this day and age with all the weed. Everybody having access to weed. Those movies became infinitely more popular. Sharknado Sober is not the best movie to watch. But if you're high as fuck, when you have

two or more friends over, you're gonna have a great time. That's a party. I'm advocating marijuana and Sharknado together. People are like, what are you doing? Are you advocating marijuana use? Not only that, I'm advocating marijuana use while watching Sharknado. I think that's an important statement.

Don't be scared, bitches. Those terrible television shows they're fun there's a reason when they make them up bad on purpose but then there's like subtle ones like i've argued with people about um werner herzog's uh grizzly man duncan thinks that werner absolutely knew that he was making a comedy as he was making it and just used his narration and you know tried to like make it dramatic and legitimate but knew while he was doing it that he was making a comedy. There's a part

of me that wonders if Jack Webb didn't know those dragnets that he was making in the late 60s were that way. Those were fucking awesome. They're still hilarious. They're still hilarious. Yeah the kind of statements that he would say. Yeah, and the way he talked

and you just go, oh, come on. See if you can pull some of those up because those are awesome. Those are hilarious. Dragnet 68. Joe, if you show

Grizzly Man, though, to normal people that aren't comics and you don't give them any kind of precursor to... They don't laugh? No, they don't come back thinking, oh my God,

that guy was gay. That's so fake. What? I know a few people that said it. When I said that, they're always like, oh, yeah yeah i guess you're right yeah he was kind of kind of oh come on man everybody watched that you knew i think we just hang out with people that that are in the entertainment industry more so that we're all kind of thinking shit like this that everybody's

maybe i don't know maybe but i i feel like when i watch grizzly man i mean the guy's holding a camera and he's walking around talking to the camera. And one of the things he's saying is, I wish I was gay because if I was gay, I could just go to a truck stop. I could just hook up with a guy, but I'm not gay. So what do I do? And me personally, I've always felt like anybody who's walking in the woods talking to a camera saying I'm not gay is 99% gay. You have this psychological formula you can follow. But it's not something that a heterosexual person says.

Unless you get called gay a lot in your whole life. Dude, he's by himself in the woods, man. He's by himself in the woods walking with a camera talking about why he can't meet a woman. And the motherfucker's sleeping in a cloth house. Because he's in the woods, first of all. Exactly. Sleeping in a cloth house, following monsters.

Brian, I think we just found out how you got that mixed breed with the Sasquatch and the, you know. How did you get the mixed breed? Well, we finally found a guy in the forest who couldn't meet a girl. And he fucked a bear? Just some female Sasquatch. It was basically suicide by bear is what it was. Suicide by bear. But, you know, I guess we're getting off the point here.

We haven't talked much history. But we are sort of because we're kind of setting it up. Okay. Even though this is like in a roundabout sort of way. I don't care. We talk about whatever you want, Barry. No, no, no. Look, I love talking about anything,

but we've got to talk about some history of people. They're going to be mad at us. That's right. Yeah, but I think that in a sense we're kind of setting it up because with all this madness, whether it's Anthony Weiner or whether it's the NSA spying on us and justifying it, all this madness, the human animal has only really been aware of how crazy we are for the last few hundred years. We've only been paying attention and writing things down for the last few thousand years.

And over the last few hundred years, we've slowly but surely been like oh my god like we're fucking crazy but i think today is a really unique time for all the reasons what we were talking about before especially with the internet and having this access to information having things like your podcast today is like the most unique time ever to like look at all this information about the past and sort of sum it up in this, oh, people are just nuts. There's never been a point in time ever in human history where there was peace on the whole earth for a week or a month or a year. Even though we like to think of ourselves as being inherently good and noble, and there's a few bad apples out there,

there's never been a time ever where people were nice to each other just universally like a per like here if it was just us i always use this example but it was just the four of us and we had we had our own civilization and we lived on an island or we lived somewhere where there was no fighting over resources i'm pretty sure we'd get along great you know i mean we're a special foursome though really you really. You might try to fuck Brian after a while. I've seen that. You mean something might happen sexually, but most likely not, and most likely we would all be very friendly and coexist for a long time on that island with no issues. But why is that not the case when it comes to 4 million people

or 4 billion people or 4 trillion people, whatever the number eventually becomes? four billion people or four trillion people, whatever the number eventually becomes, we can never hold large groups together without some really senseless shit happening and some regrettable stuff happening. And when you look at history, when you talk about the Roman Empire or you talk about Martin Luther or you talk about these people that existed just a few hundred years ago, just not that long ago, but they're living like they're in a mad world that's in a movie. That thing, I didn't, first of all, I knew nothing about Lutheranism. I didn't, I never had heard of,

I mean, I knew it, I saw it on churches, but I had no idea what the philosophy was, and that it's based on Martin Luther, it's based on this guy who had the balls to actually post notes complaining about the church and print them and hand them out. At a time where they weren't that cool about doing complaints. They were killing people, killing people who were doing that. Not that cool about it. No complaint department. But what is the name of that podcast? Oh, God, you can't do that to me.

That one is called... I'll find it on my computer. Brian, look at it. Prophets of Doom. Prophets of Doom. You can't do that. I never go backwards. I on my computer. Brian, look at it. Prophets of Doom. Prophets of Doom. You can't do that. I never go backwards. I never look back.

Listen, I understand totally. And for a guy who works as much as you do, people might think that's an excuse, but I know about the human memory. You're one of the few, man, who knows. Well, no. Listen, what Brian and I do with this podcast, we show up five minutes before we smoke a joint, we talk a little shit, and then we roll. What you do shouldn't even be called a podcast.

It's a completely different experience. I think people think I wait until the last, because they're like writing, come on, get on with it. And they think I'm just sitting around, and then all of a sudden I'm like, let me make them wait another week. Let me explain it to people. If you're a podcast fan, and you enjoy this podcast, first of all, thank you. We enjoy you too.

But second of all like what he does is not a podcast it's like an audio presentation and they're long well the history ones anyway yes what one of them the most recent one i'm into let me i'll pull up the name of it because you started off by talking about this isn't really a podcast yeah not anymore this is an audio book this is essentially an audio book do you know which one that was? I'll tell you. The last five, probably. It is... No, it's not Wrath of the Khans.

Man, I play that so much. You like Mongols, though. You like Mongols, though, man. Of course I do. I just hit you with a nerve because you're a Mongophile. Dude, I got a problem. Yeah. I got a real problem with Mongols.

You should have been in a motorcycle gang. No, no, no, no, no. I listen to your Mongol podcast at least four or five times all the way over. And you know what? I heard complaints that Joe Rogan, stop telling Joe Rogan to talk about your Mongol podcast on his show. I heard you talk to this poor comedic woman about it, and you said something, and we went back to her.

There was this long, dead silence where she tried to absorb what you just told her. Who was that? Who do you think that would have been? Female comedian? She's got a show on. Amy Schumer. Oh, yeah, that's most likely. You talked about it, and there's this long pause, like, what do I say after that?

Yeah, I hit Amy Schumer with some fucking crazy talk. Yeah, you hit her with some Mongol stuff. I love you, sweetie. She's harsh, man. She's awesome. She's awesome Well you know One of the images that you painted That's to me

When people talk about the Mongols And I've had conversations with people Where it's been brought up about the Genghis Khan DNA thing That Genghis Khan's DNA Is in some insane percentage of people in Asia Maybe that's been challenged Oh has it been? Well and not his specifically

But his family Because his sons had Just more and more and more wives. And they had a lot of wives anyway. And, you know, it's possible in certain areas, like they can go into places like Afghanistan. And there are whole populations there where there's just a huge amount of people you can trace to his family. They would leave these garrisons to keep these places pacified. And it's like what I always tell those people, well, the Mongols were so tolerant and they had these, any religion.

And they told me, I said, yeah, they were tolerant if you gave in. And giving in kind of meant, okay, you have a beautiful daughter. She's mine now. Well, they're tolerant. I mean, Hitler was tolerant if you gave in. Yeah, what they didn't enforce is an ideology because they didn't give a fuck. The Romans didn't either. Hey, pay your taxes.

I don't care what weird religion you're a part of. And if you don't worship the emperor, you're in big trouble. But the idea that that is what's important, not the fact that they were the most murderous motherfuckers the world has ever known.

When you said, and I couldn't believe this, I had to pause my fucking computer and I had to go online and find verification. When you were saying that they might have killed between 50 and 80 million people during the period of Genghis Khan's life. By fucking horseback.

Probably not his life, but up to his grandchildren. Up to his grandchildren. Oh, okay. I want to tell the audience, I get this phone call one night and I can hear the wind through his ears, and it's Joe Rogan going, did you just use a Bill Cosby skit in the middle of talking about Genghis Khan? No, not a skit. No, you had a brilliant analogy. I go, how awesome are you? He talked about Bill Cosby raising his children and how Bill Cosby grew up poor in Philadelphia, but his children grew up the children of one of the most loved men ever.

And rich. Rich beyond recognition. I mean, Bill Cosby's got a fucking billion dollars. And then you compared that to Genghis Khan's kids, where Genghis Khan grew up. That's what I do, man. That's what I do. Beautiful.

Depictions of people wearing mouse skin clothes. Like, they were so poor poor they had field mice that they would skin and turn them into clothes so you'd have like this crazy person coming at you with and walk uphill in the snow to school both ways i mean it was that but you know that comparing that to bill cosby was brilliant it was so funny latest one i talk about uh theodore roosevelt and how the uh every little american kid's favorite president is Theodore Roosevelt because Theodore Roosevelt is like a kid. And one guy said when he was president, he said, you must always remember, the president is about six. And so I compared him as always wanting to go on these adventures as being like – and by the standards of our time now, he was a racist.

When they say about six, they would say that about him? Yes, like he was about six years young. Really? That's hilarious. Well, but so I didn't want to say he was racist because by the time he was considered a progressive on race. But by today's standards, he'd make Archie Bunker look like a liberal. So I always said he's like a heavily armed, imperialistic, racist version of Peter Pan. That's hilarious. And you have this image of Teddy Roosevelt

with the little glasses and the buck teeth and the mustache and bully, bully, and Peter Pan leading you off to war on a great adventure in Spain. Yeah, he would get in fist fights and shit, right? Oh, for the fun of it. He used to box. I mean, the guy was blind in one eye

later in his life because he would box in the White House because that's a manly thing to do to box, you know, and went and lived on a dude ranch because he thought that, you know, you need to hang out with cowboys and mountain men and stuff. You know, he had one of the first depictions of Sasquatch in one of his books. You know that? One of his books, someone got killed by a wild man, quote unquote.

I'm sure he would like to hunt Sasquatches. Oh, yeah. Have a head on the wall. That's like when the Sasquatch nutters, when they use information, when they start talking about stories that people have told, that's one of them that they tell with great glee. The Teddy Roosevelt Sasquatch story? You know, Teddy Roosevelt ran about Sasquatch. That's funny. One of his camps, his hunting camps, one of the men that was with him was killed by a wild man.

Well, I'm sure a story from the 1940s Holds up like a motherfucker 1940s, nothing, 1905 Whatever it was I'm sure it holds up like a mother Wow, I was off Holds up like a motherfucker in 2013 You couldn't tell me a Sasquatch story from a month ago And I believe you got it right

You're telling me about a guy who got killed by a wild monkey man In the early 19th century or 20th century the um the story that we were talking about before the podcast i said you gotta stop you gotta stop gotta stop it was about the michael crichton movie that may be based on a real life encounter with humans and neanderthals a buddy of mine gave me that book it's called eaters of the dead a a long time ago. And what the author, Michael Crichton, didn't he write Jurassic Park and stuff? Yes. Okay. So he had found, and it's something the historians know about, a manuscript written by a Muslim guy in like the 10th century. The Caliph sends this guy out to explore lands in a specific direction, and he writes about all the peoples that he meets so you know he goes a little north he writes about the people in southern russia he keeps going he keeps going eventually he gets you know at one point he writes about whales but he doesn't know what a whale is so he's in this book

trying to describe a whale and crichton takes this guy's original manuscript and sort of adds to it and writes little connecting pieces but at one point in the story this um guy who will get his head cut off by the Caliph if he lies. So the general understanding is that there wasn't a lot of exaggeration going on here because this guy was kind of, tell the truth or I'll kill you. He makes it to Sweden during the Viking era and gives us really the only good written description of like the Swedish Vikings known as the Rus. And I don't know where Crichton begins and the story leaves off, so don't quote me on this, but the Swedes are having some kind of war that Michael Crichton has it interpreted that it's like the Swedish Vikings against the last tribe of Ne last bastion is up here in the frozen north and the Swedish Vikings are constantly at war with them and that's what the 13th warrior movie is about and all that but the actual

text is fascinating to read and it's a true historical text I mean the guy's name is like Ibram Fadlin or something my Muslim pronunciations are always off but it's fascinating stuff and Crichton found this and just said this is better than anything anybody could write I mean it's wonderful stuff, and Crichton found this and just said, this is better than anything anybody could write. I mean, it's wonderful stuff. But I think they butchered it for the movie, right? Oh, yeah. Didn't they change the story? Yeah, even the book is, Crichton, you know, plays around the margins.

But, yeah, I didn't even see the movie. Antonio Banderas and I knew. Antonio Banderas is a bad motherfucker for a long period of time. But not with a sword and armor. After Melanie Griffin cries on your shoulder for the thousandth time, you're like, okay, I can't make this zombie movie. He plays a good cat. He's a bad motherfucker.

Another spy kid's movie. The movie was like they were wearing outfits, and they were like cannibals. They fucked the whole thing up. Because the movie looked like they were monsters. It looked like when you watched it, like the previews, and they showed you the clips, it looked like these guys were going up against these cannibal monsters that would eat people. And that's what you thought it was. Well I remember Crichton even saying, you know, that he would write in the

italics, so the regular thing would be all print, the original report, then you could see the word where Crichton would say, what the heck is he talking about here? Are these Neanderthals? And that's kind of how they came about. And you kind of, if you're going to make a movie like they did a movie that I hated on the Greek and Persian wars that won 300 with the Spartans you know yes okay I hated 300 I hated it how dare you game over man but here's the thing I had a guy another history guy who was so mad at all the inaccuracies of the Persians right making them Making them look like the monsters. And I said, but you know what? I mean, I can see how the director,

if you were trying to make it look as weird to you, the viewer, as it must have looked to the Greeks at the time, then you would have to exaggerate. Because if you showed the Persians as they really are to R, you're going, okay, what's the big deal? They look like... But if you want, to the Greeks, these were really exotic, freaky things.

So if you want to make it look as freaky to you, the viewing audience, as it looked to the Spartans, you would have to make it more monstrous and more wicked and wild. And so that, I tried to explain to my buddy, for us, to me, the reason I hate it is because the story itself is so mind-blowing. Don't screw it up with all that other stuff. Right. That's a really interesting perspective that i hadn't considered if you want to make it as weird to you as it was to them you have to make it yeah well when the yeah i guess if you you have very limited access to the reality of the world as far as information goes and you see these guys coming

over in elephants with it you would really think that there's oh and they thought all that stuff from persia was exotic and decadent and weird and, you know. It's a fucking beautiful movie. I love that movie. It was so much fun. It's a visual comic book. Yes, exactly.

See, that's what I like those movies. Like, people will, like, poke holes in Avatar. I think Avatar is also a visual comic book. But there's a difference and I don't have any problem

with a story like that. Right, because it's not historically based. Yeah, because, like, when Oliver Stone does a movie like The Doors, or the JFK, I want to just... I can't say I want to kill Oliver Stone, but it makes you angry. Or when he did Alexander the Great. Oh my God. And then you find out that Martin Scorsese had wanted to do Alexander the Great, and

then stopped because Oliver Stone was doing it. And you go, oh my God. You fuckhead. And you know why? Because Alexander's whole life is like a mafia crime family. You think, what better director than Martin Scorsese? And you put Joe Pesci in it, and you know, it'd be fantastic. And no, he has to stop because, you know.

What is this, Brian? It's the sequel to 300 that's coming out. Oh, it is? Yeah. When is it coming out? I think next year. Oh, I'm so happy now. I love the idea of these times man and obviously this is a lot

of fuckery and fun and you know fantasy and monsters but they are wild there was a wild period i love that era too it's my favorite era it's so just the idea of these movies is so fun we're way past the time on the podcast and unfortunately i'm gonna do i think telling you all here for the first time i I think we're going to do another big modern series. But then I'm going back to the ancient world. It's my first love, and we've been away from there. I mean, to me, Mongols are later history. I mean, I love that BC stuff.

Do you really? Yeah, I love it. Wow. That's another world. The Martin Luther story, which we sort of touched upon, but we didn't really go any further. We got sort of sidetracked. That's Waco in Germany. Yes. upon but we we didn't really go any further we got sort of sidetracked what is Waco in Germany yes that's the math that that's what Waco could have been

had it been a huge bigger story what was fascinating about it to me was that Martin Luther has his ideas he's this legitimate guy and he also takes the Bible and translates it so people can read it he takes the Bible and translates it phonetically for the longest time and I wasn't aware of this, people couldn't read the Bible. They had to go to church and the priests had to tell them what was in the Bible. Well, people got mad at me too when I said that. A couple of, you know, you had a lot of biblical scholars out there and they gave me the whole thing about, well, you had this, the Vulgate Bible, blah, blah, blah. Basically though, it's a true statement, which is that most people, especially in places like Germany,

are not reading Latin during this time period because they're not reading anything, basically. And of course, Latin itself is just, that's translated in ancient Hebrew. It's not even a live language at that time. We'd say it's a dead language now. There weren't a lot of people outside the church

walking around speaking Latin on the streets. And it's translated another dead language in ancient Hebrew. So there's ancient hebrew and then there's greek they weren't ancient hebrew to greek greek to latin and not always yeah yeah it's crazy i'm not going there with you because there's people that study this stuff all day but the idea is first first and foremost that martin luther was one of the very first people to distribute this information dangerous information yeah and make it so that people would know what's actually in the Bible. And there was a big controversy about whether the people could handle it without a middleman to interpret it for them, because think about

this is hard for modern people, because even when you truly believe the Bible is the Word of God, you're still living in this modern civilization where you know doubt is out there, and you you know it still influences you even on a subconscious level whereas these people if you really believe 100 no ifs ands and everybody around you did too you live in a culture where everybody believes that this is exact the exact word of god and now these scholars whom you trust are telling you to interpret it for yourself that idiot who wrote the negative reviews on the internet from the insane asylum is told hey you too can interpret this for yourself and then what's and and the catholic church was in a moment of we have to say real sanity here going that could be a little dangerous don't you think well they knew it was a quantum leap it was a historical moment you know it was almost like i mean not a catastrophe like a 9-11 but a historical moment you know it was almost like i mean not a catastrophe like a 9-11 but a historical

moment of that significance where all of a sudden it's hard for us to believe and understand exactly but people having the opportunity to read the bible was a huge burst of change that spread through these communities and when you think that you've been lied to which all of a sudden a bunch of people are like wait a minute why didn't they tell me you know you're keeping the what do we compare it to in that episode we said if if aliens came down, and they had the real word of God, and they said, we have the real word of God, and you're like, oh my lord, oh fantastic, and they said, but you can't read it because it's an alien. We'll tell you what it says. I mean, that's kind of weird. It's one of the things I secretly love about

your podcast. You bring up that alien scenario. I'm sorry, you know why? Because it's so great. It's one of my favorites. And everybody says it's a drinking game once Dan mentions aliens. Take a shot. You brought that up. And you know what I was supposed to bring with me today? Some ointment with a fly in it. Because apparently

the last time I was here, I used the term fly in the ointment about 700 times. And I go back to home and my buddy goes, I've never heard you use that phrase ever and i go and he said look at look at rogan's discussion board fly in the ointment flight what's it with the fly in the ointment the fly in the bloody ointment you know and i thought that's gonna be my catchphrase now i'm just gonna adopt it embrace it you know yeah

i haven't said it once have i have i brian no no fly in the ointment this time i'm gonna know who you got on the show that's hilarious that that's what they got out of that discussion. Well, you know, they're deep. You know, the Martin Luther thing, what's fascinating to me is Martin Luther had some ideas, but then these really radical people took his ideas and went way further with it. Sure. They went full on, no one has private property, you know, like some sort of communism, socialism agenda, and I'm going to fuck all the women. They went, that is what happens whenever a crazy guy gets in control.

A plus B equals I'm the messiah and I can have all your wives. It's almost an algebraic expression. I know you're all starving to death and I have plenty of food, but seriously, I'm supposed to be that way? Well, you know what's really funny is if you look at history, that exact thing has happened over and over. And what I love about it is it's always, we have to get back to the way it really was with Jesus. Was Jesus doing that? I don't remember Jesus saying, and all your wives are mine. They throw that in.

It's just like Jesus, and all your wives are mine. It always happens. Like the Waco guy? But it's just like Jesus and all your wives are mine. It always happens. Like the Waco guy. But it's happened like 500 times. Yeah. I mean. Yeah. Jeffrey's guy.

They all do it. And there was a bunch of the. Don't go here. The one thing I mentioned something I'm going to get 10,000 people. But even before this period in Hungary there was a bunch of these free love movements, and they based it all on all this stuff. Does the guy in Siberia that says he's Jesus, does he bang everybody? I don't know the guy in Siberia. You don't know this guy?

Oh, my God. Vice did an incredible documentary on him. He's got a village up there. I mean, a large village where there's many, many, many people, hundreds and hundreds of people. I don't know how many. It might be more than 1, thousand that are in his community. And they all have these homes set up.

And they all show up in these meetings and churches. And this guy, like, lives on a hill. He's like Jesus. The Jesus from Siberia. And he comes down. He blesses him. He goes back up to his house. And they all, like, sing songs and eat dinner together and grow food.

You know, I believe this. I don't know. I truly believe that this predates Jesus, that this is a human thing, that there are either people born with this genetic makeup or somebody figured out a really great scam a long time ago that said, you know, I could just be either God or the prophet of God, and this would really work out well for me. What am I going to do for a living?

Ah, it all looks terrible and hard. I could be a prophet. And like I said, I think you could go long before Christianity and see these people running around saying, I'm not a witch doctor, I'm the son of God. It goes right back to, to bring it up again, the alpha male primate instincts that have sort of flavored the very progress, the need to conquer sort of flavored the very progress. It all goes back to the same thing. It's like one crazy thing that wants to run the whole group of other people. It's always the same.

Well, and you look at how freaky things get when people start questioning. I mean, like the whole story of his real name is Amenhotep IV, but Akhenaten is the way he's known in history. Supposedly the first monotheist, an Egyptian pharaoh, that decided that there's only one god in an era where Egypt had an extremely powerful priestly class in pharaonic times who ran everything. They were like the civil servants, the bureaucracy, the whole thing, the people who could read. And he comes in there as the pharaoh, right, a living god, and says,

guess what, this whole religion that we've, bazillions of years, only one god i've changed it and it's the sun and this thing that happened they think he may have been assassinated after he dies the priests get back into power and cross off all of the pictures of him in the hieroglyphics with his name yeah his face is scratched out and and and and that's the kind of revolution that's bigger than any, the kind that Luther did. Because you're not just saying the government's wrong or the society's wrong. You're saying reality as you have known it is a lie, and we're going to change it. And we in the modern world have never lived through anything like that. That is a questioning of—I mean, we have things that you could say is a little bit like that,

because we don't believe in a single truth as a society. Right. So you can't have somebody say, that single truth that every one of you have taken for granted is wrong. I mean, that's a wicked 180-degree shift in perceptions, and you have to know something's going to go wrong. It's also really important that everybody doesn't agree on things. That's a very modern concept, though. Because the only way anything gets done. Very modern concept. The only way infrastructure is

gonna get laid out and fucking pipes for fast internet connections are gonna be put in place is if someone other than you and I are doing it. But you need you know you know you need someone who can figure that out you need someone who who you know like certain bands and people don't like other bands. But you don't need that and the reason you know that is we've had two very large totalitarian regimes in your parents' lifetime or your grandparents' lifetime that dictated that there was only going to be one mode of thought and one reality. And if you thought different, they might kill you.

Right. Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, the Communists, Red China too, where there was a very narrow band of free thought you could have. And the attempt was to get everybody on the same page. And I think, probably misquoting Hitler here, the idea was to have one brain running the society instead of all these brains. And if you had an entire people who could then be the muscle force for one will then you were going to be more efficient and he thought Hitler thought they were much more efficient than we were because you have one guy saying okay we're going to all do this and then everybody does it as

opposed to us we're all this chaotic stuff and you know doing everybody of moving in their own direction ending the theory of capitalism that's a good thing but in all these totalitarian regimes that is a lot of wasted energy and a lot of wasted effort, and who made you qualified to decide what you wanted to do? Yeah, what I was saying by saying the only way to have, what I mean is the only way to have a society that works well, that you have a bunch of things happening, is you have to have disagreements. You have to have a broad variety of people. If you want freedom. If you want freedom. But there should be freedom. I mean, obviously, right? I want a t-shirt that says that.

And I think one of the problems that we have, really, first and foremost, is that no one is qualified to be president. The idea of being a president is a joke. The idea of being a mayor is a joke. The idea of being a governor is a joke. It's too big. It's too big a task for any one person. So to have one person just be a figurehead, one person to be a spokesperson, that's ridiculous. It shouldn't be that anymore. The one person, the one mind, the internet. Okay, I was just going to say, what's the alternative? The internet's the alternative. And then, okay, what about all

these crazy people? What about all this fucking nonsense? What about all these nuts that post shit on the internet? Then we have to deal with the real issue that humanity faces. The infrastructure of humanity itself is incredibly flawed because we ignore a bunch of crazy people. We ignore impoverished people. We ignore the weakest link in our community and we pretend it's not our community. If we become a global community, we're going to have to address that.

You're going to have to address what shitty human beings are making shitty human beings that grow up to become YouTube posters? Those YouTube commenters that are crazy assholes that tell this girl to die because she sings this song. You've got me thinking about something. There's two basic philosophies you could have in our kind of political system. One is the superior human being. In other words, a society of 300 million people, in the same way you would produce some great Olympic athletes who are superior at this or that physically, you will produce some people who are superior in terms of governing, in terms of education, whatever it is, so that they

can be our representative and do a better job than we could do ourselves. Or you could go back to a concept that is from ancient Greece, although it didn't run like this in ancient Greece, and say that the internet can be the facilitator for this, and say, let's vote on every individual decision. Forget senators, forget congressmen. We have an internet. It could be like American Idol. You could say, hey, should we go invade Afghanistan? Get on your internet right now and vote,

and we'll tell you what the tallies are later, although it might be like that show that you said you were on that one time where the votes didn't really count. Last comic standing. It might be a great way to say, hey, everybody wanted to invade Afghanistan, 99.9%. Wow. Thanks, guys. But you know what I mean is that the two philosophies are really polar opposites.

One is that would you actually trust the United States as you know it today to make those decisions any better than they're made now? Or would you say, listen, that and fill in the blank X, we might pick different people, but I would let that guy be president because he'd do a better job than the current crop of people if I could appoint him. No, for me, it wouldn't even be a politician. I'd find some guy who's...

You can't have the system we have. It doesn't work. This is my point. If you want to try to keep patching it up and keep pretending that there's any logical reason why, if you started from scratch today and were trying to design a political infrastructure based on the ability to exchange information that we enjoy today, you would never have one person. I agree with that. Well, I don't know about that, and I think the idea of people who are wise and older and maybe perhaps have information, but without any ulterior motive, like people that really genuinely want their community to grow, to be a safer place.

People who want to figure out how we can fix our economic situation. Well, like we were talking about earlier, the people who don't want to be a police officer. Do you want to be president? Absolutely not. Okay, you have a job. Here's the thing. But see, the thing is, president, no one is qualified. It shouldn't be a job. It shouldn't exist anymore. Talk about decentralization.

Because that's... The problem might be that we have a government built for 13 states and a much shorter population. What if we said, listen, that's the problem. And I talked to James Burke of Connections, and he said that the internet is going to make... In the old days, it's almost like building monopolies. We talked about entertainment companies conglomerating because they needed to. In the old days, you needed to. It made you a stronger, safer country. But now with the internet and the ideas, and maybe decentralization becomes the answer to some of, I mean, you could make... Well, there's also the

idea that people are trying to organize to avoid tyranny. The reason why a state will pass a law that the federal government doesn't agree with is because the state disagrees with how the federal government is dictating their freedoms. So those people, like in Colorado, that vote on marijuana being legal, they band together and say, hey, man, look, this is our land, this is where we live, and we think it's cool to do here. If there's a bigger argument, if you guys want to come in and prove to us that you could sell Oxycontins every fucking CVS,

but this shit is illegal, you're going to have to make a point because we now have state law. This is an age-old question, though. Remember that before we had the government we had, we had something under the Articles of Confederation. And the Articles of Confederation, the earlier system, the argument against it was that the federal government didn't have enough power and that the states could get away with too much, including things like maybe Connecticut should be able to print their own money.

And so you get to this thing where that wasn't working, so they went the other direction. And then there was a time, Joe, where we weren't called – when people would say the United States of America – now they say the United States of America is doing something. It was considered to be such an agreement between a bunch of states that until about, I want to say, 1900 or 1890, they would say the United States of America are doing something. In other words, talk about the states as though they really – it's not a country. It's a confederation of states that agree to be together because it's working for them. The Civil War screwed that whole thing up, and that's when you always get these guys like Rand Paul who always has like five guys working for him. I think we ought to still have a confederacy if they want to. He's got some secret white people working for him, huh?

You know what's scary though? What's scary though is that if you're like me, and I don't agree with any of those kind of things, I understand their point of what they're saying, though, which is that the racism and the slavery and the Jim Crow has totally screwed up states' rights because it's like a child who you say, you can stay out as late as you want because I trust you. And then they stay out until 5 in the morning and they come home all drunk and you go, that's it for you. You don't get to be staying out. And that's what the states did. They abused the states' rights things. you you don't get to be staying out and that's what the states did they abused the states rights things and and the federal government now gets to run wild where you could go god maybe we maybe we could trust the states to be okay again but what you'll have happen is the states that are like us

will totally use their things responsibly and the states we don't like will be you know no voting rights and they'll be doing all the you know geo we're putting people to death for marijuana use in south carolina because that's that's the way we like it. That's how we rock in Texas. I know. So you wonder if it would work. But at the same time, you go, a little decentralization is starting to sound kind of good, if only for the complexity reason. Yeah, very good point.

And what I meant by it's good to have states to fight against tyranny, ultimately it would be really nice if there was no tyranny. And if it was really nice, it would be no tyranny. Then we should really stop looking at anything regionally. And that extends to states, it extends to countries, it extends to nations. James, we're saying virtual communities. Why do we even have to have, because you may have people that are like you, 500 of them are in Tennessee.

Why should Tennessee be Tennessee? Why can't it be the Joe Rogan nation, which includes 500 people from Tennessee? See, that's a real problem. You name it after a dude, and he's going to fuck everybody. Well, and then when you're gone, it's the Brian Redman nation, and it might be run totally differently. And he's going to fuck everybody. That's right.

Trust me. It's not a good idea. He's the son of God, and everybody's wife is his. You can't rock that. You can't rock that. We can't have that kind of power. People do. They fuck it up.

But the problem is that the decisions still have to be made, so someone's got to have the— Right. Unless we're all voting like American Idol. Okay, but if you were going to—and we'll, after this, swear, folks, we're going to get into history. There will be no history, ladies and gentlemen. Stop it. If you were going to design a new civilization, if you could stop everything that we're doing and just look at it in terms of, okay, here's the resources, here's the humans that need to be fed, here's the things that need to get done to make our life a better place um what's our conflicts you'd find out the conflict so it's almost the same conflicts that

have always existed control over resources if one person has an oil well that person is just sucking billions of dollars out of the ground and then there's the hippies are like man who says that oil's his man that oil's the earth why should you be able to prop it off that and then the right-wing people would say well he's the one who built the infrastructure. He built the machines. He designed them. You fucking dirty hippie. Of course he could steal all the oil.

And it gets to be a weird situation where you go, okay, how do you manage those conflicts? Everything else is bullshit. Lobbyists are bullshit. Okay, but look at the way. Now, there's two ways to look at it. One is the ways they've done in the past, which we talked about direct democracy. You know, you could do with it. Let's vote on who gets to own the oil well or whatever.

Then there's representative governments where you say Joe Schmo can be my guy and be the one who votes for me either as I tell him to, which some people believe our government's supposed to do, or because I trust his intellect and his judgment. And so he'll go do that. Or some idea we haven't invented yet. And I keep trying to tell people this all the time. The attitude they have is that every kind of government that's ever going to be invented has been invented, and our choices are the ones we've had.

I'm truly of the belief system that there are going to be kinds of governments we haven't thought of yet. Yes. And the internet might be a perfect example of something that can facilitate that. I don't know what they would be, and they might be an evolution of something we've already seen, or they might be something totally wicked and weird, but I think that that might happen too. I think it already is in a lot of ways. I think the internet is judging. They're passing judgment and a sentence on George Zimmerman in a lot of ways. This Trayvon Martin

thing, and I don't mean everybody, but there's a percentage of people that have decided that that guy murdered that kid and he got away with it. And they're writing articles and making videos and attacking, attacking, attacking all day. And that is, in a large sense, a punishment. And in a huge sense, it's not even being thought of. Because everybody thinks, well, the guy's out there wandering free. The fuck he is. Could you imagine how terrifying it is?

And I'm in no way supporting this man. In no way. I am not casting any judgment. I'm saying imagine how much hate that guy feels everywhere he goes. Every time he sees a black face, he knows it's very likely that that person is very mad at him or might even want to assault him or even possibly kill him. There are some people out there that hate that guy, and that's all based on the judgment of the internet.

That's all based on the judgment of the people that have access to the information. They've collectively agreed that they hate that guy. There's a judgment passed. I'm not comparing that. You have to have all these disclaimers we have to have. I'm not comparing this case to this case. But it's important to do. But the O.J. Simpson thing seems very similar to me.

It is. And that was basically pre-internet. It is, but it's distribution ofet. The media did the job. It was just distributed differently, but it was just as effective in terms of the public consciousness absorbing it. I think so, but now I think Zimmerman

gets it more readily. Yes, he hears the opinions directly from the people who want to have him run into a disaster. I think OJ could put blinders on and go to a restaurant and pretend, listen, I was acquitted. I'm looking for the killer. Or he could lie to himself about how many people wanted something bad to happen to him.

You can't really lie to yourself when you read the comment boards. Yeah. And even though that sucks, it's good. I hate Zimmerman, Rogan, and Carlin. I hate them all. People hate. There's a lot of people that hate. And that's something that we're going to have to address.

If the human organism really is a super organism, the human race, it's just like a person who has a cavity that's trying to ignore it. If you've got a bunch of crazy people in this world, you've got a bunch of mindless people that are doing horrible crimes, you have to address that. Somehow or another, collectively, we have to stop trying to get a Tesla S and address the whole underlying behavior.

Here's the line. This is the Joe Rogan, Dan Carlin line where I don't follow you. But you're in my mom's camp, though, so you've got some good company. Oh, snap. I think I just got told. Did he just tell me?

No. Did I get told think i just got told it is it is tell me no i get told you just forgot it is the camp that says we humans must evolve past all this stuff well we will and then there's the camp that says no what you see now and what you have seen since the beginning is what we are right you have to build systems with an understanding that this is what we are and you know this is what we are. And this is the old history thing. The only reason you learn from history is because the one thing that's not changing in those history books is us. It's humans. Everything else changes. But those guys in the Roman play, there were togas on, but they were us.

So like when you read about the stories of Jan van Blyden or I listen to you talk about it actually yeah i go that's david koresh that's right it's the same guy and so my point is that i'm not willing to try to build a society based on the okay as long as we evolve this will work because i don't think that's happening um i see your pessimism and i totally understand i live the pessimism just so you know i think if you look at human beings from the time of Neanderthal wars with the fucking Vikings and the you know The chrismian shah showing up and seeing a pile of bones It looks like a snow-capped mountain in the distance because the Mongols got there first That's where they had abandoned roads because there were so many decaying bodies the fat was blocking the road Locking the roads and everyone was dying of diseases

I mean that that all happened just a few let me was it 900 years ago let me just say you haven't heard the ost front podcast we did yet no i haven't heard it yet okay let me tell you the way it starts the ost front podcast that we did which is on the war in the eastern front which not enough i have it loaded up there you the most of the people in the west don't know about this we learn about d-day and all these things we did but we were on the periphery of that war. That war really happened between the Germans and the Soviet Union in the East. And there's a book called Aftermath by Donovan Webster, which is a fascinating book, where he goes to these battlefields today and sees what's there.

It's like a Joe Rogan questions everything. And he goes to this one. How dare you. It's not as good as that, obviously. How dare you? It's not as good as that, obviously. How dare you again? He goes to this field in the middle of the steppe. So it's where the Mongols were. So it's this wide open expanse with no hills, no mountains, and everything. And a Russian guide takes him here and it's covered in snow. And the Russian guide tells him to put

his eye down on the ground so he's viewing it at eye level. And he says, as soon as I do and as soon as my eyes adjust to the sun and the snow I see things sticking out of the ground all the way miles off into the horizon and then he realizes they're bones all as far as the eye

can see and then he goes and they start walking and they're bones with boots on them and belts and everything and it's because so many people this is where Stalingrad was in the last standoff. And it's miles and miles. And the Soviets just didn't bury anything. They just cordoned the whole area off after the war and let everything stay where it was. And since he wrote that book and the Soviet Union has fallen, the treasure hunters have been going through these areas because they

can sell daggers and boots and medals and all these things they find, and they have been. You can go online and see where they've picked these places clean. But I mean, it's unbelievable. And this is now. I mean, this is, they're there, and the farmers are- The shit's still there? Yeah, and the farmers, and there's no pictures.

The Soviet Union wouldn't let them take pictures. How many miles? And not just here. You go to this one valley, and it's all there, and then you drive to another valley, and there's another one. Because what they would do is they would... Is it on Google Maps? No, good question. But what they would do is they would close these rings, right?

They would surround the Germans. Where would he look for it if he was going to look for it? Well, call it Soviet Bonefields. Soviet Bonefields of the soviet bonefields what happens is as their as their surrounding these germans they're closing the ring tighter and tighter and then they use artillery and just destroyed these packed germans were packing you know a pocket of baby fifteen miles by five miles and they just and the soviet just left and they left their own troops that. And so when you hear this story of the Ostfront, this is recent. And those people there, the farmers, used to have to take the tractors and pile up the bones in the corner of their farm so they could plow the fields.

You know, so this is—and you go to France. What time period is this? What year? 1945, 44, 43. And if you go to France today, this is also in Webster's book, which is a fabulous book, Aftermath. You should go get it. He talks about the First World War, where you go to France today, and they have giant parts of the most fertile parts of France that are still cordoned off. go near because there's 30,000 or something artillery shells per square 20 feet or something that come to the surface because the weather brings them up.

Some of them have poison gas in them. They're all rusty and destabilized. And the French have squads of people who collect these as best as they can all the time. And then like every month, take them off the coast at low tide and blow them up and they lose like 50 or 100 of these guys every year who do nothing but dig up this artillery that's made huge swaths of french 1914 to 1918 uninhabitable and it's still there and so when you talk about how long ago some of this stuff happened a lot of this stuff didn't even happen that long ago but people don't even know it's out there so your thoughts on seeing horrific things that have happened like that are

that look it's just a matter of the shit hitting the fan here something going wrong us getting into some sort of global conflict that's happening at your doorstep and we would revert right back here's my theory i almost feel like pressure builds up like you know you know know, in California we used to call it earthquake weather, right? You get this thing where you just felt like, okay, there hasn't been an earthquake in a long time. You can almost feel the ground getting ready and like something's got to break. And the first world war was that way. Everybody kind of saw it and something's going to happen. Something's going to boom, it happens.

I think that's what happens. I think the tensions build up, things get frayed, the systems begin to degenerate, people start getting rousty, and then something happens and everybody goes berserk for a while. And in Europe, it used to happen like every hundred years. After they beat the hell out of Napoleon, they sign this Congress of Vienna and they get this great system going. The system goes for a hundred years until it frays, and then once it frays, it all explodes again in an even bigger war. And then the First World War leads to the Second World War. And it's just the tension and the stress get to be such a degree that things just collapse and explode.

But when you have an earthquake, it takes the tension away for a while. It's like whatever the seismic pressure that was building up is depressurized for a while. Everybody can exhale and then it slowly starts ratcheting up again. I think that that's what happens we get these periods where earthquakes just happen do you think this is a that society today is a safer place though than in nineteen forties and certainly than twelve hundreds I don't know

you don't know I literally I don't want to pretend that I do I I think that perhaps we're in one of those period there's an argument about no cuz you know I'm an anti global i don't think the united states should be in 147 countries i'm against all that but the people that argue with me about that so to give fair due to them will say that the reason we don't have that kind of stuff happening is because in the periods of history where you've had great powers it was great britain before us there have been other powers before that the roman empire whatever you want to say, that they keep the lid on these things, that they provide the stability that when they're not there,

or when they choose to not do their job sometimes, everything finally goes to heck in a handbasket. So you're going to have these earthquakes sometimes, but if you have an overarching power that can sort of nip the earthquakes in the bud, it doesn't get as bad. I don't know, but that's what they always argue with me against. I don't know that you can prevent them, because I don't exactly know what causes them. I think it's a different... Don't you think it's just human nature? Yes! And that's what we get about earlier. I don't think you can change human nature. I think you can. You can change your own nature.

If... You know what? Here's... Okay, if I want to think like Joe Rogan, or my mom, if I want to talk about evolving... Oh, my mom! You've got to meet my mom. She's a crazy woman. If you want to talk about evolving evolving just like oh my mom you got to meet my mom she's a crazy woman to me um if you want to talk about evolving um past this then maybe you could talk about dna changing and some of the scientists who are taught it's funny because you get right back to nazi eugenics when you get to this but there is there's there's an opposite thought when instead

of creating the master race in terms of the strongest and the biggest and the maybe creating a master race means getting rid of those human qualities that if we had a choice people wouldn't have you talked about madness well what if some madness is connected to things in the dna string or violence or uh you know whatever you want to say these people that are you know what what if you're born to be a rapist and you could get rid of that from somebody's DNA? Someone just got a new tattoo, Dan Carlin. But you see my point is that if you want to talk about changing human nature, it might have to be at the DNA level as opposed to hoping that people will just... The reason why I disagree with that, the reason why I disagree with that is because I know that people have changed.

I know that some human beings have evolved. I know that some human beings can manage their craziness. Have societies. No, but cannot what happens to one person happen to two. Cannot it happen to a group? Cannot it happen to a society? I think the real issue is we're not making the best use of the information that we've been provided. We have unlimited access to all the answers as far as human behavior. So if you just had good enough arguments, some of these weirdos could be talked out of their weirdness?

No. Management. I think there's a management of your own personal energy that needs to take place. I sentence you to 20 yoga classes and some Shotokan karate. It should be a part of your life. I've always said that for boys, I think that something difficult, whether it's rock climbing or whether it's jiu-jitsu or whether it's a sport or a musical pursuit, something difficult is important. Because you have this overwhelming desire to spread your seed, not just sexually. It's also spread your ideas and spread your influence. So what if your parents don't do that for you? Should the overarching state mandate that it happen?

No, that doesn't ever work. I think there should just be positive examples around. I think the idea of government, to me, is not as effective in cleaning up a neighborhood as a really well-funded community center. You've got a little hippie side. I've got a lot of hippie in me. I'm telling you. I'm a hybrid. I've got a lot of hippie in me. The hippie jiu-jitsu guy.

I'm the bridge. Well, I see it hippie in me. The hippie jiu-jitsu guy. I'm the bridge. Yeah, okay. Well, I see it. I see the hippies in the right ways. My mother thinks bad earthquakes are going to happen and we're going to be forced to pull together afterwards and that that will bring society together. A lot of people believe that that could happen. And I remember after 9-11, that big historical moment where people were really fucking nice in New York. It was one of the weirdest things ever.

I remember going back to New York. York. It was one of the weirdest things ever. I remember going back to New York. We were there in 2000 and just maybe December of 2001, just a few months after 9-11, and people were nicer than I can ever remember. Nicer, more engaged, more tuned into each other,

more appreciative of each other. It was a completely different vibe. How long would it last? It lasted for a couple years, then people turned cunty again. But it's like... So they reverted back to human nature. I had a kickboxing instructor. His name is Shuki. Shuki's from Israel.

Cool motherfucker. I think he's back in Israel now. But he trained in Holland and lived in Israel. And he lived in a fucking war zone, man. And this guy, I went over to his house for dinner once. Him and his wife wife they start dancing they bring out the bongos their kids are dancing and uh i mean he's just like so festive you know they're having a couple of cocktails they're not even drunk they're just like having a good time

and so i said to him i said well i go so many israelis i meet are like like so happy and fun loving and like he goes because over there he goes, because over there, he goes, you could just fucking die. He goes, you could just fucking die. People die all the time. So when you're alive, party, party, party. And that was his attitude. It was like... I had friends like that growing up, and they weren't that... And I don't think it had anything to do with it. Not a universal response

for those types of situations, but I think one of the possibilities is that you can appreciate life when it becomes fleeting. I think the problem with your philosophy, and I'm not denigrating it here, is I absolutely believe you are right. And I think we all, I mean, if you had grabbed me at 18 and compared the 18-year-old me to now, you would say, wow, that Dan Carlin guy has evolved. And he's a better person in so many ways than he was then. But I'm not human beings in the aggregate. And when you think about all those people out there and you say, for things to change,

we all have to get better or it won't work. And I'm thinking to myself, okay, I know which way I'm betting on this in Vegas. I'm going to Vegas and betting against the human race because I've seen it operate. Yeah, no, I see what you're saying. You need almost complete adoption. And now you're back into Nazi land where they say the only way to get complete adoption is to mandate complete adoption. If you give people freedom, you're giving people the freedom to not evolve, and there's a lot of people that are going to choose the not evolve option. I absolutely think you're correct. Those bastards. If you want to look at it in terms of what you've seen so far, like these patterns repeating

themselves over and over again. Judging from experience, one would lead to believe. But my answer to the big difference in the ingredient is the internet. And I think that didn't exist before. And I think the ability to exchange information the way we enjoy it now, you can't factor in the influence that that's going to have on how people understand the impact of decisions how people understand how behavior affects people how people understand the good in people as well like the the ability to spread that and to realize that you know we think people a lot

of people like to think that people in iran are somehow another our enemy but then you watch all these videos of like kids in iran and people of kids in Iran and people talking about America and people talking about the problems with the world. And you go, oh, wait a minute. They're just like us. They're just people. They're just young people that have a different noise that they make for their mouth that equals their words. But other than that, they're just people. And that's slowly but surely sinking in.

It's this idea of enemies and groups and states and territories and countries. of enemies and groups and states and territories and countries, it seems more and more ridiculous when the global communications connection that we have really brings us all together in a way that's never happened before, not just in countries, but in states and in communities. And slowly but surely, we're going to realize that our conflicts that we have are all because of cavities that we're avoiding. It's all because of behavior that we're not checking at an early age. It's all because there's zero emphasis put on managing psychology for children. Nobody ever taught me how to think. Nobody ever taught me how to think positive and move forward and how to treat people and be kind and that it is actually beneficial to me. Let me seize on the one part of that that I really can grab and hold

that you said that I like about the children thing. We did a show called Suffer the Children once where I examined something called psychohistory, which is a line of history that a lot of people don't buy into. And we did the show that way. It was like Dan Carlin examines everything. I mean, I was over there basically talking to these guys and thinking about psychohistory. There's only a few people who do it.

But their contention was, if you look at the child-rearing practices that people used to do in the good old days, I mean, 100, 200, 500, 7,000 years ago, almost all of it would be classified if you did it today as abuse. And the attitude on the part, I mean, the assumptions that these people make is if you could actually raise better children, knowing what we know now, understanding what we know, you might actually change the human race. Because if child abuse, massive child abuse on a society-wide level helps explain why the past is what it is, with all the violence and carnage and horrificness, then could you change that outcome by raising better children?

And that might have something to do with what you're talking about here and not be utopian, where you say, listen, the children that were raised well in the past were fine. It's all these crazy people whose parents beat them with a chain that screwed up the past. What if you got rid of parents beating their children with a chain, for the most part? Wouldn't society as a whole be better? I could see that. Shitty people make shitty people. And that's what it is. No one stops that chain. So again, though, how do you fix it?

And at what point, once again, we get... The problem is that you and I are non-coercive people. But you get to a point where in order for our ideals to work, somebody has to tell somebody, you can't hit your child with a chain, dude. And that's coercive. So, I mean, so at some level, we're still talking about forcing people to do something that they don't want to do. And where's the line? Well, not necessarily forcing people but inspiring them to do better i'm inspiring you not to hit your child with the chain figuring out a way to raise people that but first of all making it much more voluntary when you have a child making it something

that you you know you you engineer whether it's through better birth control or through better better education or through something there's got to be a way to make it a little bit more difficult for an asshole to be raising a person and fucking that person up. But the problem is those people don't really realize that they're not the people who should be having kids. But will they in 20 years? That's my thought.

The way we've changed in 20 years... I'm sure the internet and Google will change that. That guy will go online and go, I shouldn't be a one-on-one kid. Well, I don't think it'll be as simple as going online. That's what my point is. My point is that it'll become a part of us. The Internet is not going to be something that you plug into. It's going to be something that you experience all the time.

That's just a matter of time. They're already doing that with these Google Glasses thing. You might be right. You might be right about that. And I think it's going to eventually work its way into some sort of a contact lens or maybe even an implant. There's going to be, whether it's 100 years from now or whether it's 1,000 years from now. Let the pessimist play with your idea because I think you're probably right. I mean, I can go there that you can't possibly imagine what it's going to be.

Matrix-like, practically. Plug it into the back of your head and go. But don't you see the possibility for the opposite? Remember, there was a great monkeys, okay, an age thing. Remember the monkeys episode? There was a great monkeys episode in age thing remember the monkeys at the top of the great people that are telling us to go be in 147 countries all the time and go, these people in Iran, they don't just speak differently, they're all a bunch of terrorists. I mean, what if the person delivering the stuff in the Google Glass or Matrix thing

in the plug-in in the back of your head isn't benign? No, that's a good point, but I don't think it holds up, because I think accountability and responsibility... Eventually, there's going to be a trail from every action to the reaction, and we're going to be able to follow those trails, and the people will be held accountable. The transparency that you see in your own life, where the NSA is able to get into your

email... I was just going to say, we're talking Edward Snowden stuff right now. Well, how about talking about, what's his face? The fucking CIA guy, the head spook, the general betrayer, who got busted because of an email exchange with a mistress. Can I just say, this backs up my theory, though, about if you're the head of the CIA and you know that you're cheating and you know what will happen if that gets out, but you're the head of the CIA and you know what the CIA knows and can find out, How did that guy get it? She's so good, though. She's so pretty. She's smart and young. This is bringing it around full circle, because I remember having this conversation the last

time I was in the house of Rogan. It's impossible to avoid that conversation, because it's one of the most fascinating things. The head spook. Didn't we get into Gary Hart? Yes, we did. It's the type of human being that wants to run things. And I think that the idea of running things is preposterous. I don't think anybody should be able to run things. I think people. So the coercive government will tell all these people who want to run things,

how dare you? You're not, we, the coercive don't want to run things. Government are telling you who want to run things, sit back on your rear end. Cause you're not allowed to run things. Even running scholarly things can be problematic. and we were talking about that earlier that sometimes you know professors who have tenure can like they can dominate over ideas and not want to bend because they've been teaching human nature right yeah because it's ego they've been teaching one way for so long some new information comes up and they want to fight that fucking shit tooth and nail even if it doesn't make any sense and it's not all the time but it's it happens it's just a weird thing that people do you know you're part me the funny thing is you're like at war with yourself because half the time

you're like these people are so terrible none of the other half of the time but i think we can evolve well i think it's human nature i personally believe that it's human nature whenever any one person has ultimate power they abuse it it. And they're into sex and violence and dominance and all. And these are human qualities, dude. This is what makes

the drama of history that, you know, I always say to people, I don't know how you can't be into history because it's sex and violence and backstabbing and it's all the stuff

we love in drama, but it's real. And it's real because this is who we are. Yes, but let's go back to our scenario where it's four of us living in a village somewhere. Just the four of us, the only people on the planet. If all of a sudden Jamie decided that he was the king

and Jamie was going to cast rules and regulations and we would kill that motherfucker, that's where shit goes wrong. Where shit goes wrong is where one person's in charge. The secret to no shit going wrong is no person in charge. But his human nature is screwed up, man. There's nothing he can do about that. Is it screwed up or is it natural? There's only one way to get the pussy.

You've got to control it. But here's the funny part. We actually glorify that and would say he's got leadership skills. Yes, we do. He's a natural born leader and the rest of us should look up to that and allow him to make the decisions. Yeah, he's a pimp, and we're pussies. And we're shocked when that same behavior repeats itself over and over again.

Exactly, Dan Carlin. Isn't that what you've been saying, Dan Carlin? What I'm saying is it doesn't have to stay that way, and I really don't believe it does. I think that there's going to come a time, whether it's 1,000 years from now or 100 years from now or 10, where there's a complete total accountability and an evolutionary jump in the way we look at things and the way we look at behavior and information to the way the people in the future are going to. It's going to be just as big of a leap as the way we look at the Internet

to the people that lived in Martin Luther's time look at the idea of translating the Bible into something that you can actually read. I hope you are right. I'm on board with the idea. I mean, it sounds great to me. It could all go wrong. Don't get me wrong. And, you know, the proof is, as you said,

it's wrong right now in several parts of the world. You can go look in the Congo. It's wrong right there. I'm not so sure it's right here. It's not right here. Good point. Very good point. I think we're on a precipice here

where things could go either way. We talked about this last time, too, where I'm not convinced that we're not in an era where we're going to look back on it and go, oh, my God, what did we do? Well, when you start looking at the way Obama is aging. They all do. They all do. They all do. But when you see it again, over and over again, and he was one of the younger guys to get into office and just fucking looked youthful and vital and

now he's just like like he's just dried out it's weird it's weird to see it sucks him down like prunes the amount of information that must come on that guy's desk every day you know listen i always people always people always if you talk about politics and you do talk radio or whatever you're always going to get these couple of people, you know, you should run for president, you should... Shut your mouth. And you think to yourself, you go, and kill people? Because there's not a president that's ever been that hasn't had to order something that requires... And this, but here again, you get to the point where you go,

but I'd love to have a president that said, I'm not going to go in there and kill anybody. I mean, because you think about a guy like President Obama or any of these guys, and they know they want to be president, and they know that they're going to have a lot of history i got some in the jury duty wants a normally i get out of jury duty in a very george carlin like fashion where basically go uh... i don't believe in convicting people in a look somehow once i made it through it was a drunk driving case and put me in there

and they ask all these questions like does anybody know uh how the alcohol blood level content and somebody's guy can be changed and nobody raised their hand i'm going well you know you could eat and all these things okay next question does anybody and i raised my hand again by the fourth time i'm the only guy he's looking at me like are you gonna have a problem convicting this person and i go i really can't have that on my conscience. I go, you know, society runs because people are willing to do this. And I said, yeah, but not me. I really understand that, but I can't have

that on my head, even for a drunk driving conviction. And so you go, Dan Carlin for president, yeah, but nobody can get hurt. It all breaks down and it's done. You can't have a president. I don't think there can be one. I think in the future they're going to laugh at us.

But somebody's got to work jury duty, right? I mean, the point is that somebody's got to do that. I think eventually we're going to know who did what. It's going to be in your head. It's going to be unavoidable. I think the way we record information right now is archaic. We have these shitty fucking biological hard drives, and we record data. We record memories.

We record ideas. And sometimes people don't even remember what the fuck they did i bet if you went to oj right now and got got inside of oj's head and got a memory of the actual event where his wife and her boyfriend was were killed i bet it would be chaos i would bet it was better i was with some people yesterday that i grew up with and they start telling me stories of my own life. And I'm going, what? What? And then certain things I kind of vaguely remembered and you're like, wow, that was a memory

that was long gone. One of the recent discoveries that they've been able to show is they've actually got proof that they can implant memories into a mouse. There's a new study that they've done where they've actually shown that they can artificially implement a memory into a mouse's brain. See, Joe, now you just went back into my pessimism land.

That's how they're going to convict anybody who's dangerous in the future. They're going to implant... Did you know you actually photoshopped your junk and sent it out to women? Well, it's in your brain, isn't it? If it isn't, it'll be five minutes from now. Who would think that Dan Carlin would be the conspiratorial one of the group of us? I think that's just knowledge. I think you're going to be able to go back to this point right now and get the truth and everything from this room. If you're Martin Luther King in the future, they're going to email child porn onto your computer. They're going to bust you and you're gone, baby.

Well, I think it's going to be one. I think it's going one further than that. I think we are going to have an artificial way of recording things that's indisputable. And I think that you're going to have a hard drive. It's going to be the NSA who decides. I think you're going to have a hard drive for your life. You're going to have a hard drive for your life where your experiences are translated into some sort of a digital form that's indeniable. And then when you're 30 years old, you go to resurrection and they shoot you down.

That's your life playing out before your eyes. That's what it literally is. But, you know, what's funny is we both see the same thing. And you just see the good outcome. And I'm thinking, oh, my God. But do you know why? Because you're a better person than me. No.

Because I experienced that and I know about my own battles with my chimpanzee DNA and my own ideas about becoming a more enlightened person or a more empathetic and kind and loving person. But don't you have a bunch of friends who are still chimpanzees and will always be chimpanzees? Less than ever my whole life. Well, they die. They run into – I've had a bunch of those guys just pass away. No, they evolve too, man. They evolve too. If you surround yourself with a bunch of people that are trying to achieve similar goals, you can support each

other and help each other. And I think the community that I've been able to be a part of just with my friends shows me that there's hope for the idea of a community of society. So you're not hanging out with chimps anymore, but the chimps are hanging out together, reinforcing each other. I have plenty of chimp friends who know how to manage their chimpanzee, like my friend Tate. He's a perfect example of a chimp who know how to manage their chimpanzee like my friend Tate He's a perfect example of a chimp who knows how to manage being a chimp He just trains a lot does a lot of jiu-jitsu does a lot of reading thinks a lot is very thoughtful Yeah, but he's got his idea. He's got his come on Brian. He's got his idea of what you know

What what what constitutes being a good person what constitutes being noble, you know? And he pursues that. And it's infectious and it's kind of contagious when you're around people that are trying to do things along the same lines. When they're trying to improve, you want to improve yourself. The problem is people imitate their atmosphere. And if your atmosphere is living with the fucking Mongols, if your atmosphere is you're hanging out with these savages that are wearing mice skin jackets and chopping babies' heads off for a goof.

Like, that's your world then. This is where you live. Try stopping that because human beings operate so much on momentum. It's very difficult and you also have to have a time of ultimate resources where you can actually stop and rest and reconsider how things are being done

because otherwise you're basically pushing forward for survival every day which allows you almost zero time for introspection when you're inside of a city and there's a hundred thousand fucking savages on horsebacks with bows and arrows that take a hundred and how many pounds to pull 140 some people jesus christ ted nuget uses a 45-pound compound bow. You should see what those people who can do that over and over look like. Oh, they must be like chimps. Sinewy, just monsters. And then hold on to the horses with just their legs.

Insane. And shoot from underneath the belly. While holding on with your legs. Oh, yeah. Their legs are like a jujitsu guard. Oh, no, they're insane. It's like they developed the inside. And have been doing it since they were two or three.

I mean, these are like old muscles. Oh, no, they're insane. And they've been doing it since they were two or three. I mean, these are like old muscles. Yeah. Yeah, they're crazy. Well, it becomes a part of who you are as a human. The Apaches were like that, though, too. They talked about how these people were just, I mean, because it's so in their culture that it's been going on since they were so. Because, you know, you know this. I mean, muscles are different after you reach puberty than before.

But if you are using those same muscles from the time you're two or three it gets i mean they don't get large and bulky they just get like iron and sinewy and it's a whole different strength well there's also a neurological strength from doing a movement over and over and over it's a muscle memory but it's also a path like you know when you tie your shoes you know like that and you just tie your shoes but you don't think about it you just tie your shoes that happens in jujitsu okay in-jitsu when you choke guys out enough before you even realize that you're choking somebody out you're like literally sinking up the choke before you even know what you did someone spins you counter it all happens completely outside of

of conscious thought and it's it's happening with extreme strength i think about that with the mongols a lot but you just mentioned yeah no mentioned. And that is the kind of thing where it was, you know, I remember you trying to sum up what we said where you talked about their viciousness. And I remember thinking, I don't really think of it that way. I think it's more like what you just mentioned where it's more of a they don't even think about it thing. That's their life. That's their reality. It's not vicious. It's just, okay.

You know, it's just, okay. That's the reality. It's not vicious. It's just, okay. You know, it's just, okay. Even when it's so ingrained in you, you don't have to be vicious to do those things. That's just, okay. You know, choke him out.

Right. Done. You know, I mean, it's just done. Yeah. It's a part of your everyday life. You don't know any. And no one's saying, hey, man, wouldn't it be nice if we weren't like this? No, cut that person's head off. Okay.

I did it yesterday. I'll do it again tomorrow. It's like taking out the trash. Well, when you're dealing with like Jin China, the story of, how many did they kill there? A million? Nobody knows. Nobody knows. Nobody knows.

They killed everyone. This is a place that's at 40 foot high. A lot of times, if you didn't surrender or if you didn't give in, they often killed everyone. And the attitude was, if we kill everyone here, the next place will give in more easily. And there's a thing that we do today that people have been really criticizing. That's these double-tap drones. And the idea is that they shoot these missiles in. And then when the people come to collect the bodies and the sick, they shoot in another round.

The Mongols did that too. Yeah, the Mongols did that. And the stories were horrific, man. And your fucking style of doing a podcast is so dramatic and so intense that you feel like you're there. Well, sometimes. These poor motherfuckers are trapped. I'll tell you the truth. We didn't do that with the last one. And people say, well, it didn't sound like one of your regular shows.

But you think if you want to do this, like, I would love to do this into the future. And if you make the same movie every time and it begins the same way because I love the way it begins and eventually it loses its ability. Nah, it's an ACDC song. It is. But I'm keeping making

the same fucking song. So the point is that when we go back to that style you like, it will be a little fresh again and you will go, oh yeah. But the last one

is a little bit more straight up, a little bit less drama. We take the same ingredients and we mix them in different amounts. Right. So if you go to like Kahn or Ostfraun, you'll go, oh, that's the traditional formula. But then we switch it up with other ones so you don't get tired of it. Well, you sort of have to do Kahn the way you've done it now that you've done it. If there's anything like that, it's so dynamic the way you did it.

There's only one way to tell that fucking story you got to tell that story the way you told it because nobody ever ever told it before where i gave a shit i mean i was i was interested enough to pick up a few books and look at some pictures and wow they hunt fucking wolves with eagles how crazy these motherfuckers really crazy to this day they hunt wolves with eagles they have trained eagles they send them out and they kill wolves i, they're the most gangster, these are all the same. You know, if you think about, like, the way the Native Americans lived on the plains, right? It's a culture that works because it's so meshed with the geography and the climate and the ecology that once you find a system that works, you stick with it because, you know, nature's harsh. Exactly.

So the Mongols were that culture, and those cultures were very influenced by whoever was nearby. For example, if you're trading or raiding the culture and it's Chinese, you begin to look a little Chinese. The clothes you raided were Chinese. And the Mongol types that were in the West looked a lot like Russians or wherever you were raiding and trading with, right? So the Mongols infused some of that Chinese culture into that steppe tradition. So they're like Sioux Indians that have some Chinese in them now, as opposed to Sioux Indians that have some Russian in them. And then they take that Chinese little tint on them

and go into a place like Russia that's really backward when they invaded. And oh my God, it's like the Chinese are like the first world during this time period the russians are like living in in grass huts and it must have been just devastating just devastating the the mongols went into russia in the winter and the only people who do that deliberately that is the craziest and they came from the east the russians are really nasty if you try to invade from the west, talk to the Swedes, talk to the Germans, talk to the Poles. It's a nightmare. You lose everybody in those winters. The Mongols come in from the other direction, and it's like a tidal wave.

And they came in with all these sophisticated artillery devices from China. And the Russians have these little, it looks like Fort Apache. They have these forts that have big logs. And the Mongols come in with these stone-throwing things and they're shooting human fat that they've lit on fire onto these wood-fetched buildings. And it's like napalm. That idea of human fat on fire flying through the air.

They'd send your prince. They'd capture your prince and then he'd be flying over the walls at you. The Mongols understood psychological warfare as well as anyone. Someone needs to do that movie. Fuck 300. Someone needs to do a real... Because I saw Mongol,

the Genghis Khan movie. I know. That's how I feel too. It's just like, come on. It's like a PBS family. It's like... It was an ABC after school special. He was in love with the girl. you know, choose me as your wife.

And listen, if you read some of the current, I mean, there are some books out there that have been on the New York bestseller list where they make him sound like George Washington. And I always say, yes, if George Washington were responsible for 50 to 70 million deaths or however many it was. I mean, look, yes, the guy, I mean, they always say, well, look, he started the Renaissance. He brought culture from East to West. That's what they say about Alexander, too. But if you're on the receiving end of Alexander the Great, you don't care where he brought Hellenism to your society. You weren't there to see it. Or your daughter got taken.

It's a weird justification. Well, it's like we said in that show, though. Historians always say, well, look at how much our modern society has benefited from what the Mongols did. Yeah, but we didn't pay the bill. We ate the food, but the people that paid the bill and who lived through it, you know, had to do those accounts that we read. And then I always say, they always say, well, you know, those are very biased accounts because, you know, they were Mongols' enemies. I said, that's like saying you can't listen to the Jews explain the Holocaust because they're a little too vested in it, you know? They're really biased about that Holocaust thing.

Well, you also made really good comparisons between Nazi Germany and the Mongols because of this very fact of history. Is that history, yes, there is a fact that it opened up trade routes and it changed things for the Mongols. Good things did happen, but you can only say that

because it was from 1200. And we don't know any of those people that died to make it. Listen, Hitler and the Volkswagen. We wouldn't have Volkswagens today, man. And someday, that'll be a bigger deal. And it was really the way you were talking about that. It was like, you had to really choose your words carefully. Yes, and you

still do. I just threw that out there a little. Brian, can we edit that? That might get me into some trouble later. Yeah, you have to, like, but the reality is, a hundred years from now, when people talk about the concentration camps and people talk about it, it will be just like we talk about the Inquisition today. I think the fact that you had to choose your words carefully shows what we're talking about here. There were places, can you imagine going to the people who literally watched, I mean, it was like a bomb going off when the Mongols hit eastern Persia. who literally watched, I mean, it was like a bomb going off when the Mongols hit eastern Persia.

Imagine going to those people and saying, somebody's going to write a book someday, comparing the guy who did this to George Washington, who they wouldn't know either. But just, I mean, he's going to be a great hero, and you're going to go, what, the guy who just destroyed everything I can see for, you know, everything. Men, women, children. Everything. Everybody got chopped up. Everybody I knew died. But to be fair to the Mongols, that's a lot bigger part of human history.

They just were better at it. They just did it on a higher scale. There's a bazillion Mongol conquests in world history. The Mongols are just the champions. They just took it to the highest level. They're the Muhammad Ali of the destroying the civilizations around them people. There have been a lot of Floyd Pattersons. Yeah, that's a funny way of putting it.

If you compare the cruelties of society, there's always been great trends of cruelty. There's always been horrible things that people have done to ensure that there was no dissent. It's just been a part of human history. It's just the Mongols said, okay, let's ramp this bitch up to 10. Let's see what's the craziest shit we can do.

There are some historians who say that some of it was timing, too, because there were guys like Genghis Khan that arose in those same peoples before. The Byzantines, who were the successor state to the Romans, were so good at – like they had intelligence services that were other tribes who would say, listen, you need to watch this guy. He's amassing a lot of power. And the Byzantines would say, okay, here's 50,000 you know drachmas or whatever make sure that guy doesn't see the morning and they would they would they would strangle these leaders on the rise in the cradle some people have said that the reason Genghis Khan got to be Genghis Khan is because the Chinese and the business and all these people were kind of at a low ebb otherwise they'd

had that guy assassinated or taken out long before because the major societies around them, to them, those are national security threats. When you get these guys who are taking these tribes who normally fight each other and pulling them together to become dangerous, that's the scariest thing in the world to China and to the Byzantines and to the Persians. And they worked really hard to make sure that didn't happen. They would pay off one tribe. The Russians were very good at this later on.

Pay off one tribe to destroy another tribe. And the reason the Russians dealt with the Mongol successors that way, exactly, they would go to one and go, I know you love our stuff. I got a fantastic suit of armor for you and 500 muskets if you'll go attack this other tribe right now and and that's how they kept him apart the only danger was when they would come together and some people think that the genghis khan thing happened because the people that normally you know

and this goes back to the people that say to me dan the reason we don't have world war three is because america keeps everything down well in those days it was china byzantium and the eastern persian to keep the the mongols and all those people from coalescing and they were at a weak ebb and the Mongols coalesced and look what happened because of your isolationist policies, Dan. Yeah, because you're a fucking communist and you're not pro-America. Because you wouldn't go into the steppe and deal with that. We all got Genghis Khan. Thank you

very much, Carlin. It's really hard for people to even put themselves in the state of mind that those people must have experienced back when you didn't know what groups were around the corner. Like when people met the Germans for the first time and they literally didn't know that they existed.

And they were scary. I mean, like we talked about with 300, you know, if you were going to make that movie today, you have to make the Germans monsters. So like one of the beautiful things about your story was what we talked about of them the charismian shaw sending these people out to go check out china and see what's going on there if there's anything good for them is it's worth invading because he's never been to china yeah and as as they're going like they don't even know what the fuck is there they come to this fantastic beautiful city bigger than anything they've ever seen never seen anything like it. And someone fucked

them up and killed all of them. That's right. So they're like, oh shit. Like they didn't even know what the fuck was over the hill. They got over the hill and they're like, oh Jesus, will you look at this? It's like we find an alien civilization on a planet that's amazing and somebody beat the hell out of them. Yeah. And you just go, I was scared of this civilization that got the

heck beat out of it. What the heck can do that? Yeah, they have nuclear bombs and lightsabers, and someone came and just decided to use them for gasoline and stuffed them into their spaceships. All of a sudden, I'm really afraid. Yeah. I mean, it's that those times when things like, when they first discovered the Germans, when historians...

That's happened a million times in history, too. Yeah, when one civilization finds another. Listen, I always wonder if the New World hadn't been discovered what it was by Christopher Columbus and all that discovered, in air quotes always, I do that. What would the people in the northern part of the United States have thought when the Aztecs or whoever was going to have a giant civilization in Mexico or whatever showed up on their doorstep? That would have been the nightmare of all time for those poor tribal people, you know? It was interesting how the way you described, it was like the depictions of those early cultures, too, is like these people had all this cattle and all this milk,

and they got really big and strong because of that, but they also did whatever the fuck they wanted. So when it comes to, like, real discipline and hard work and, like, endurance, they didn't really have it. It's like people always have, like, a certain amount of strength because of their uniqueness but there's also a vulnerability to it like gingus khan he had all this money and all this riches and then he had some kids and the kids grew up rich and they were all fucked up and eventually falls apart well they used to say about the germans when they were fighting the romans and the germans were

young people young people to the romans anyway and these germans were being an egg kelts to earlier even even than that the kelts were like the earlier germans to the romans uh... they're big they're strong therefore rocious but they lack endurance they lack discipline although the germans could be very disciplined and they used to say if you could just get five hundred roman soldiers working together you could be two thousand of these tribesman acting as individuals and and and that's and you know there are whole historians who who basically

said that it was civilizations organization that would compensate for the lack of ferocity because civilization kind of weakens man and you know everybody's not killing each other in the cities you have laws and grow up nice and and these people are killing each other while they grow up and dr and you know the whole thing. And to compensate for that, it's organization. We form into units and we act under a disciplined commander and that compensates for the fact

that they're much more ferocious than we are. Yeah, what was the Genghis Khan quote about an army of donkeys led by a man? Alexander the Great's got one of those too where it's an army of donkeys led by a lion will beat an army of lions led by a man. Alexander the Great's got one of those too, where it's an army of donkeys led by a lion will beat an army of lions led by a donkey. That's a fucking... Is that an Alexander the Great's quote? Both. They've got similar lines.

How much of those quotes do they attribute to great people? Just people making up shit about what they said? Half, at least. We don't know. Is that a weird thing about being a historian? But they used to say that... I actually asked a great historian. I don't know is that a weird thing about being a historian but they used to say that uh i actually asked a great historian i don't remember which one i asked that question about how much of this because they used to say history is a bunch of lies agreed upon and you say to

yourself okay how much of this stuff is real and archaeology has helped a lot with confirming this or confirming that but it's not very good for statements here's the part i love i still love the fact that there is a whole lot of written material that hasn't been discovered yet uh... we're gonna find and we do find uh... periodically these these you know you break into some basement somewhere and find ten thousand scrolls or something there and all boy all of a sudden we can fill in because history is like a jigsaw puzzle and and historians are put nothing

i'm not a historian by the way that we have but i always emphasize that. What separates you? You don't have a PhD? I have a degree, but yes, you need a PhD. That makes you a historian? Well, yeah. And basically what happens when you become a historian is, one, you really specialize. So I don't think I would be able to talk about all these different things and how they interact as much. So you're a history enthusiast? I always say I'm a fan, yes. But I do have a degree in it uh... the the the historian also studies a lot about what's called historiography which i find fascinating and which is what we're talking about here which is

how does this stuff make it into history books and then how do we filter out joe schmoe's bias when he wrote when that guy wrote this horrible thing about the mongols or conversely which happened a lot when they write this really glowing thing about the mongols how do i filter that because a lot of these guys who wrote great things about the mongols were living under the mongols and had to show their stuff to the mongols before it could be published as history so how yeah here i got this stuff i wrote about genghis khan where i said he killed a bazillion people i'll cut your head off now for writing that so you the historians, when they learn

historiography, are trying to learn how to compare this source with that source and then filter out their biases as well as they can. And this can get crazy, though, later on when sometimes they say, we can't trust anybody. Okay, then why are we doing history at all? It gets silly at a certain point. It's almost like every piece of information has to be disseminated with a caveat. You have to kind of say, well, here's what we do. And you've always had to do that. Yeah. And in the last show we did, I had to say, you know, in the show there's a lot of famous quotes connected to the Spanish-American War period.

And almost everything I read that was new said, yeah, we don't think they said that anymore. So I had to say, ooh, I love this quote, but I have to say people don't think they said it anymore. Well, I love the fact that you include that, though. think they said it anymore you know yeah well i love the fact that you include that though that's a really enlightening part of the podcast because it sort of paints this really accurate picture of what information is available to us like when you're talking about gingus khan they don't know what fucking color his hair was no some people say he had red hair well a lot of the step people did and so they had red hair oh well you know not to get on the point here louis ck style i love i love love love when you do the history of China.

The Chinese were fascinated by it, and it was a national security thing. They had to know about these tribes on their border just in case they all got together and combined. And they would divide these tribes based on what they look like. Because otherwise, how do you know one? If you have a whole bunch of Native Americans on your border, how do you say, these are the Cheyenne and they look like these, but these are Comanche and they look like that. So they're trying to help you understand, you know, this is the, and a lot of these tribes on the borders of modern day China have green eyes, red hair, blonde hair, and

then you get these weird mixes because they would combine and mate with each other, for lack of a better word, and they will find these tombs where the husband is of Mongol type, you know, full of tattoos and everything, but the wife looks Swedish because these tribes all had so many different ethnicities in it. So by the time you get, you know, the early Turks are blonde hair and green eyed, but maybe have Turkish sort of olive colored skin, right? So that after a lot of mixing, they start to get a little bit more formed. Like most of the Mongols either looked Asian or Turkish,

but you still have these DNA genes where every now and then you get your blonde hair or your green eyes or your red hair mixed with Asian features. And it's one of the things I love about them is that you have these types that you don't expect to see. Mixing blonde hair with Asian features and just some of the most wild... There's a famous picture, and you've probably seen it,

on the cover of a National Geographic. It has an Afghan girl who's got the brightest, greenest eyes you've ever seen. But that's one of those, but Afghan features, you know, dark hair, dark skin. But that's one of those wonderful mixes you'd get with the steppe people where you go, I never thought those kind of people mixed together in large groups where you would see all these different types in one tribe. But you did. Most of the Mongols were probably Turkish. That's fascinating. Wasn't there recently a discovery of Europeans that they couldn't

explain in China? And the Chinese hate this. It's a mummy in China, a woman that's been around since I think the 40s or whatever. But she's a white girl, basically. I mean, we would say today it's a white girl found in a tomb on the borders of China. But that's these tribes we're talking about. I mean, they had some called the Wu Sun and some called the Yu Qi. And these are tribes of people that the Chinese described in the B.C. era as being white-skinned. Because to the Chinese, that was just one more sign they were weird as hell they have this

skin and round eyes it freaked the hell out of the Chinese because if if regular people look like Chinese people What the hell are these and they have yellow hair and they described it as cat's eyes I mean to them this was wickedly alien stuff and today we would look at it and go wow that guy looks kind of like He's from you know,, Norway. Hamburg! Hamburg! Did you see this girl frozen in the ice? Yeah, they found this really incredibly intact Incan mummy of a woman who froze to death while she was sleeping, and I think it's 500 years old, is that what they said it was? Well, but I'll go one up on this. That's rare, but the way that they built

these tombs on the steppe, they were built so that the first frost would freeze everything in the tomb. And then they're found by archaeologists. Lots of them. Totally frozen solid. And they will take and boil water and slowly pour the boil. And they will find fabric, which deteriorates. They will find wood. And they will find skin.

And that's how we know. And there are photographs of what these guys did with tattoos they were the original tattooed people and we have their skin to prove it and so when you find these frozen tombs they're all over the place and you can see them there in what called Kurgans which are hills that they build on the step because they bury these guys and then they pile mounds of dirt just like little mountains on top of them so you can't steal the stuff in the tomb and they're everywhere and they've only i mean there's tons of them unescavated still and are the people that live in that region now i mean have they recovered

one of the things that you you brought up that was really fascinating was baghdad and about how they genghis khan essentially killed everybody in Baghdad. They wiped out Baghdad. They threw all their writing into the river and that people don't know that the Islamic empires back then were some of the most sophisticated.

Baghdad was maybe, I mean, other than China and it's hard to compare and contrast but I mean the Chinese were very sophisticated but this is a golden age in Islam's history and it's hard to compare and contrast, but I mean, the Chinese were very sophisticated, but this is a golden age in Islam's history, and it was centered around Baghdad. And when Heligu, one of the grandsons of Genghis Khan, takes Baghdad, he shoots, I love this image, and you know, you've already heard it, but I mean, they don't have a lot of stuff around, like big rocks to shoot, so they build the siege engines and they just stuff palm trees in them and shoot the palm trees over the wall.

And they're just taking out people on the streets of Baghdad with these palm trees coming over the wall. I mean, the Mongols were intense. How insane is that? They just fucking fought them with trees. Anything. They hurled trees at them.

They killed everyone in Baghdad or took everyone as slaves or did whatever the fuck they wanted to do with them. They literally, they were saying that, you were saying that the river was black with ink. The original sources said either red with blood sometimes or black with the ink of hundreds and hundreds of years of Islamic civilized writing and everything. And to the people who wrote about this, the Muslim chronic chroniclers this is the tragedy of tragedies and and they absolutely exaggerate the number of dead i mean you'll read numbers where they say the mongols killed two million people all that's a joke but they killed enough so

that it was astounding and and to the people there e listen that's a nuclear bomb going off by muscle power i mean uh... uh... when dire wrote a great book once and did a PBS series to go with it called War, where he talked about the Assyrians doing this. And he said they destroyed Babylon as fully as had it been done with an atomic bomb. They just did it with muscle power and lots of people. And that's what the Mongols did to Baghdad in Hiliguz reign.

And believe me, it sent a message to all the other cities because had Baghdad simply surrendered, none of that would have happened. And so the other cities were going, I think I'll surrender. You know what I mean? That's kind of how that goes. And that was the most advanced city in that area. In that area, absolutely. To this day. Much more advanced than any place in Europe at that time. Could it be argued that they never really recovered?

Yes, it could be argued. That's crazy. 1,200. Yeah. 1,220, Yeah. 1240. Yeah, right around there. And it still hasn't recovered. No, and certainly the population levels, I was told, only came back during the time of Saddam Hussein. And so when people say things like, well, the Mongols spread civilization, they absolutely did. But let's remember the bill that was paid for the benefits that we got. Think of that 700 years. 700 years of just trying to recover from something. Let's be fair, because there's people out there probably saying, let's be fair, part of

the damage was that the Mongols, to live in that part of the world, you have to have incredible irrigation systems. And some of these irrigation systems were a thousand years old, right? And they just kept, you know, ancient times, they just rebuilt these things. The Mongols either killed and destroyed all the people that kept that stuff up or depopulated the whole area so that they fell apart so that if the Mongols didn't kill those people themselves by destroying the systems that kept those people alive, they often get credited with depopulating those areas because all of a sudden there's no water anymore. The Mongols allowed the water

systems to dry up to a point where now no one can live there. So I mean, that's part of how these numbers get so huge too. It's just insane to think of how many people were killed by the most manual methods. No. Muscle power. Muscle. The injection of metal into the human body. There's a whole book called From Sumer to Rome where these military historians are basically writing books

about the amount of muscle power that it took to kill people on individual levels and then doing math to multiply. The numbers and the figures are incredible, but the sophistication of early armies is something that's always fascinated me because we consistently downplay it. When you think about this today, without computers, without iPads, without even sophisticated calculators, trying to put together 30,000 men organized as an army and feed them and water them across deserts and all this without any of our modern stuff.

We wouldn't even know how to do it today if you said do it, but you can't use your computers. And it was amazing how they would set up these points where, like, they would funnel armies into areas, and then they'd have, like, burning pots that would obscure their vision so that people would run into this area where they were being funneled into a kill zone. And then when they got there, there's fucking smoking pots and arrows are flying from the mountains. Well, they'd send guys.

They'd send guys to go to these towns and scream and yell, The Mongols are coming! Oh my God! And you don't even know what they did! And these are Mongols working for Genghis Khan who did that. You can't believe what they did to this other city and spreading the rumors so that by the time the Mongols got there, these people were shivering in their boots. You know, they were just scared to death. And so when you say something like, listen, I'm very tolerant of all religions. I won't, you know, just surrender and become part of them. It'll be great. A lot of these places, I mean, truthfully, you can argue, and I bet Genghis Khan, were he here today, would argue

that he saved a lot of lives. This is the same attitude with the atomic bomb. Yes, I destroyed Baghdad, but it kept me from having to destroy 500 other cities. What would the body count be then? See, Genghis Khan was a George Washington. It's such a fascinating glimpse at our recent past. Human nature, right? We're back to human nature again. Would Genghis Khan evolve today if he just had the internet and some Google Glass? He'd be playing Starcraft. He'd never get out of his room. He and Darby crash.

You wouldn't be able to live like that ideally today. Someone would get you before you ever got that far. The Byzantines. It's also like a new army emerging. The United States is trying to lock down as much of that as is humanly possible. That's one thing that you have to... Remember, I've been to the CENTCOM meetings with them. I've heard them talk about this a little bit.

Oh, have you? Yeah, General Mattis and CENTCOM meetings. And they invited me. Remember, I think I told you this. I thought I was going to get dumped in the Potomac. I thought it was an organized assassination hit on me. And the funniest thing about this, Joe, you'll be able to relate to this, is that they invited me because of the podcast, right this secret meet we're not secret but i'm not

supposed to talk about who was there and everything but they had a list of the invitees and i remember saying to the guy on the phone because i've been to these things as journalists where there's like 200 people and we drink wine out of plastic cups and you hear some general speak at a podium and i said listen man i don't have time for that it better not be that he goes no it's you and 11 other guys and he goes you'll recognize the names of most of them and i was like okay so i get there and everybody gets a printed handout at the sent com secret meeting of who of who who else is at the meeting and all these do you want to talk with the ship

to stop right now i can't i'll show you a picture later uh... but but i can't but i couldn't i can tell you who's there but i'm looking at the list of people everybody's got doctor this from this institute but what and all these massive and then mister dan carlin podcaster and i thought all these other people have to be so pleased to be in a room with me you know and and but i was listening to what they're saying and talk about and look i already understood a lot of this stuff but to have it confirmed by being in the room with these people talking about okay how do we handle this situation if this area strategic interest is shut down and you're sitting here going okay these guys consider it their job

to run the world they're tasked with running the world they're tasked if there's any choke points that oil goes through that's our job to prevent anywhere in the world and you just sit there and go how do you dial this back how do you tell these people listen guess what we're not going to police this pers Gulf chokepoint. The Strait of Hormuz is no longer our responsibility. They would look at you like you were from Mars. Yeah, they would. Like you're from Mars.

Like you're an idiot, you don't know what you're talking about, and you're from Mars. You silly liberal. You hippie. Silly hippie. You think everybody's going to be all sweet. And everybody's going to evolve from the internet, right, Carlin? I see. There's a certain amount of pessimistic reality that they have to embrace in being in the military at all. Because, you know, you've seen it.

You've been to war. Well, and you really, you know, like anything else, you're in your own bubble where everyone is talking like you are. Right. And you're not hearing a lot of, you know, hippie talk. And so, really, I mean, when you hear something like that, who is this? You know, if you had been at any of the meetings, Carlin, you would know the threats we're really facing. I can't tell you what they are. You just trust me.

Well, this is a bit of a stretch as a comparison. But what Brian was talking about earlier about friends that watch Grizzly Man and don't know that he's gay. Like comedians, all of us. You know, we're tying this show together like this network, aren't we? The comedians, the people that we hang out with like look at this motherfucker like this is immediately going after it those people and laughing about it and thinking it's funny whereas if we're a group of mormons we wouldn't have the same what's funny is that we always i've they used to do this and then this is it's a strategy they used to do with the simpsons really early on when they were they pretended like they were writing a show for kids and if

you were a kid and watching you got it but it. But on another level, the adults were going, whoa, I just got that joke. You're doing a show that's tiered, and the same show will work for several different audiences, but the one audience that doesn't understand maybe, I don't know the show, so just I'm playing along with you here, but he's gay, he's gay, oh, how funny is this? But the other audience is going, oh, no, I love it. He's gay. What do you mean he's gay? So it's working on a number of different levels for different

audiences that only get what's geared toward their level. Amongst these folks to tie it together, the military people that are running various branches of the military, the idea that it's not going to be in a war, what the fuck are you even talking about? What world do you live on?

We're out there getting shot at every day. We're dealing with IDD. How many attacks were in Kandahar this week? You don't even know, dude. You want me on that wall. You need me on that wall. You can't handle the truth. What's the worst thing that's going to happen? You lose a little dick pics on the internet.

That's right. That's the type of shit we're dealing with. Or the NSA is spying on you. What do you got to hide? Yeah, what do you hide, bitch? Okay, do you realize how protective you are for the United States? You're selling vitamins to people or something? Jesus Christ.

Got some gorilla balls you're selling? You can't have a little spying? Grass-fed. This is a grass-fed show at this point. You want a Genghis Khan coming out? We're keeping that. Yeah, I mean, there is that argument, right, that this is the best of all the possible evils,

that if you look at all the North Korean regime, you look at Putin. But let me tell you how weird I am. I hope this is what people like about the political show. I can see that. I can understand that. I'm not so... You know, I think part of

what's wrong with talk radio is that every host has to say, this is how it really is and everybody else is wrong. I can see that and I can be wrong. And I think if you factor that into your thinking,

it's important that, look, there's a possibility that that's all right, that's all true. Yeah. And factor that into your thinking when you come up with your own political ideas. Put in fail-safe ideas. Say, listen, I believe it's A pretty strongly, but it might be B.

And if it's B, here's my backup plan. Well, I've had a chance to see a lot of conspiracy theories that I know have no basis in fact. I bet you have. When it comes to not just the show, but mixed martial arts. Yeah. Because I do the commentary for the UFC. I have seen so many elaborate schemes that people think are in play

to make results happen the way the UFC wants them to. So it's like boxing. Don King's in it. Well, I mean, I'm sure that stuff has happened before. But what I know to be an absolute undeniable fact and then seeing all these elaborate conspiracies attributed to these events I so I'm aware as an insider yes so people who are outside and this is obviously a very small nuanced world the world of mixed martial arts but I think

that's a trend that's a trend for human beings I think that probably indicative to of a lot of other situation and I think that the big picture is probably infinitely complicated It's not as simple as the government doesn't want you to know the government's trying to control you. That's right There's so much shit going on that it is just trying and they're all Each other and yeah, absolutely Caraming off each other and they're also dealing with this new reality this technological reality Yes, and that is shaking things up. Did you see the Michael Hastings video that was released today?

I did not, but tell me about it. The whole Michael Hastings thing is important to me because I believe there's this small group of journalists really doing the job of journalism, and Hastings was one of them. So what did I miss? The video of the car. They got a video of the car from a security camera accelerating down the street and then blowing up before it impacts. An explosion before the impact. And then a big explosion. It looks like the car is driving and then there's a boom

and then a boom. Like a half a second. If you're at Mercedes-Benz right now, you just have a reason all of a sudden to find out what really happened to Michael Hastings so it's not your fault. It's hard to tell what it is because it's not the clearest video in the world, and it's black and white. It's black and white.

It's a security camera. But it's the things hurling down the street, and you see this impact, and on impact, there's a boom, and then there's a giant, huge explosion. Let me point this out because this is truly the way I believe. As much as I might go there to some degree, I literally can't believe that this guy was killed by the government or anything like that. And if he was, then I don't even know what to do. Let me put it to you this way, though. When I try to tell myself how ridiculous... Check out the video.

Look up. Here's a video. We're playing it right now for you. He's going to fly down the street and slam into a pole. And there's no brakes. Watch this. Boom, boom. See that? You see there's a boom, and then there's a boom. And there's a giant explosion.

And they're a distance from each other. So it's almost like the car blows up as it's moving. You know, here's the part that drives me crazy about this. I saw a couple cones in there, too. I used to. Cones? You know, those little UFO things that fly? What are they called? Oh God, he's

helping the case now. Come on Brian. But you know what, when I was here in LA in news I worked for one of the best newsmen, old dinosaur of a guy when I worked for him, a guy named John Babcock won a bunch of Peabody Awards, famous news guy here, he taught me how to do news and his

general principle was if the l a p d doesn't talk about something boom we open investigation that's all it did we have to know anything more that they say they said no comment we were on it as a news person the question i have is why aren't they look if you're a kardashian if you're some minor celebrity we shouldn't care but we're gonna find out every little thing you know who's that who was that blonde chick that died in Bermuda or whatever?

The blonde chick that died in Natalie Holloway? No, no, no. The one who was the stripper who married the rich guy. What was her name? Who? Oh, come on. Stripper that married a rich guy. I'll come up with it in a second.

But my point was if you're some minor celebrity, the media is going to uncover every last hour of your life and the whole thing. If you're Michael Hastings, where has the reporter been who says here was Michael Hastings' last 12 hours? Where was he two hours before the crash? I mean, from what I've heard, the guy hadn't had a drink in five years, didn't do drugs or anything like that anymore. But if you... Oh, God, that girl's name is on the tip of my tongue. I'll come up with it in a second. But the point is that normally you would expect the media

to now go run past that guy's last 12 hours because that's going to tell you a lot about the situation, right? No one's done that. And it's crazy that no one's done that. Independent internet media has. I think there's been many stories written on the fact that he was responsible for, in his articles, getting generals fired. Yeah, no question. And he was working on a big story, supposedly. Supposedly on the CIA and on Petraeus. And it had something to do with Jill Kelly and had something

to do with the whole reason why he was fired in the first place, allegedly. I don't know the details behind the story story he was regularly had life threatened as as many good investigative reporters do this could have been anybody could be a decent guy who hated the other thing to remember that i was starting to get to though is that every time i tell myself something like that's impossible from the government standpoint there's a book called poisoning the press out there that's very good and it's about

uh... you remember jack anderson the investigative reporter used to be a good morning america always had some scooping uh... brit hume from uh... fox news used to be his assistant jack anderson was the the deepest in pain to him and he definitely would take these investigative stories and i'm jack anderson who is a good but he uncovered stuff that's that messed with people

so i don't know uh... he uncovered stuff that's that messed with people sold on brand apparently there was a plan in the nixon white house and this is on the record documents me nobody even debated where they talked about killing jack anderson okay yes releasing sensitive information and one of the ideas floated was to do something to his car including putting lsd on the steering wheel so that it is or by his hands and two guys including g gordon liddy

were up for this idea and ready to go was president to the canceled it but i mean that idea dot well past the early planning stages and you see yourself a case in nineteen seventy two the president of the united states is even having people discuss this i mean that blows my mind forget about talking about michael hastings see sit there and go what's

possible like i'm not the kind of guy they can go there i just can't believe that the government were off this guy but there are so many questions and as a reporter you're not supposed to go in there say i know what happened to the government to be supposed to say all right let's see what his last twelve hours look like let's get some toxicology let's start to piece together things well we have no toxicology right now we have no statement from the l a p d on some reporter in san diego said that that his body was returned in urn without the family's

permission to cremate them i've heard that's not true uh... actually direct message that woman on twitter that reporter she didn't answer me back so i don't know what's true about that, but the point is... She probably thought you were trying to get something. Anyway, the point of the matter is that something's going on here, and as a reporter, you're supposed to go out there and begin to look into it. What bothers me is that no one is. I don't understand that, because you know why?

Because it's a salacious, juicy story about a famous person. It has all of the things that, even if this wasn't a conspiratorial type story, you would expect the media to be on just because it's a conspiratorial story. Wouldn't you think that these people would be terrified? Two journalists, fellow journalists, just today, about five hours ago, are now suing the FBI because the FBI, I think, had like 20 days to release the information that they have on Michael Hastings and they didn't, so they went over the time period. So now these two independent reporters,

or the two guys next to be shot and murdered. What are their names? Jason Leopold and Ryan Shapiro. I don't know those guys. And these guys are suing for the Freedom of Information Act. Yeah, yes. They put in a pre- Oh, wow.

for the Freedom of Information Act. Yeah, yes. They put it in a pre... Oh, wow. Supposedly, Hastings' lawyer has all this information from what he was working on. How'd you like to be

Hastings' lawyer right now? Well, supposedly his girlfriend or his wife, whichever the case, is working on completing the book. Completing whatever he's working on. Well, again, I don't like to be

Mr. Conspiracy Theory. What bothers me is that when reporters don't do their job like look into this guy's last 12 hours a day and it opens the door up and he are naturally now gonna speculate and you're gonna get these wild theories about you know Michael Hastings in the grassy knoll which you don't have to have if the reporters can begin to debunk this the second thing that happens though is did you see wolf blitzer was hosting something the other day with with you know the generals generals, and he looked like he was working for the

government, and you just turn around and go, okay, the next question is, do I trust journalists, in air quotes, like that, to be investigating something? So once they lose their credibility, I've got to get some Matt Taibbi or some other guy who's a lot like Hastings to investigate him, or I'm not going to buy it. I don't believe that you can consider Wolf Blitzer to be a journalist anymore. He never was a journalist. He's a talking head. That CNN keeps employing Wolf Blitzer.

Forget the journalist part. How about he's just awful? Yeah. And there's nothing you can do. Did you see the video, the really awkward video of the woman? Yes. And when he asked her about God saving her from the hurricane, she said she was an atheist. the woman and when he asked her about god saving her from the hurricane she said she was an atheist and so doug stanhope would organize just i mean a bunch of donations for her because she said she

was an atheist listen i've said before and i'll say it again and this is not an arrogant thing to say and i'll explain why in a second i could double cnn's ratings i could just give me cnn i will double their ratings in like 48 hours but the only reason i can do that is because they are so awful that you know the bar is so low that i could fire a few people there and their ratings would double you know just oh well butcher's fired i think i'll turn cnn on again and see what's going on i think it's very important though um for cnn to have people that are willing to follow their agenda whatever the news apparently you're absolutely i don't think they're interested in getting these hard-hitting

no no you know how you know because they've cut their investigative budget down to nothing. Well, we had Amber Lyon in who used to work for CNN and talked about her coverage of Bahrain. That's how she says it. She did the special that they were in there. Yeah, exactly. On CNN International. And it was because they wanted to be able to park their military there

in case some shit went down with Iran. So they wanted to sort of squash all this dissent. So they essentially put together what was like a tourism piece but this is how and this takes us right to Snowden because this is where the government has managed and they and this has been going on a lot longer than we think because they used to say in the 50s and 60s that the CIA has a person in every newsroom in America so this has been something that's been going on for a while but in the 70s they were breaking lots of stories that the intelligence agencies did not like and as a news person

that's how you know news is working when the government and the intelligence agencies and all these people to classify stuff are mad as hell at the news media the news media is doing its job when the news media is defending those agencies and not releasing the information that's when you throw up your hands ago and and going after me when listen there are people that don't like Glenn Greenwald's personality. They don't like a lot about him.

They think he's a grandstander, all these kind of things. But what Glenn Greenwald did is what reporters are supposed to do. And when you watch reporters slam Glenn Greenwald or Michael Hastings, he took such crap from other reporters because he reported stuff that they wouldn't report because they didn't want to burn a source, that's when you go, wait a minute, your priorities are totally screwed up if you're worried about telling the American people important things because your source might not talk to you anymore. Well, you know the Breitbart story. I do.

I don't like getting conspiratorial. Speaking of guys who aren't reporters, I mean, that drives me nuts. He wasn't a reporter. I know, it drives me nuts. But what's weird about the story is that the guy has a heart attack, and then his coroner gets poisoned. The guy's coroner dies. Was the coroner poisoned, or did he die? I'm pretty sure it was poisoned.

That sounds a little conspiratorial to me right there. It does. But listen right away to your reaction, which is fascinating. We're talking about a guy who's maybe releasing very sensitive information about very powerful people, and you're like, well, that sounds very powerful. Well, it does. But it's a natural inclination. I'm not saying you're incorrect.

I think a good reporter, not that I am, but I can see one when I see him. A good reporter is supposed to be a little skeptical, but still follow the lead. You don't want a reporter that says, I bet John F. Kennedy wasn't killed by Oswald. Let's go look in there. You want a guy who says, okay, there are some questions. I'm going to follow the trail of evidence and see where it leads me. And a good, healthy skepticism is good for a reporter on both sides. You don't want to take anybody's word for anything.

At the same time, you don't want to be a nut. You don't want to go off into fantasy land. He's dead from arsenic. His coroner was killed from arsenic. Okay, well, that is a little weird. What the fuck, man? Two months after Breitbart's passing, the coroner that investigated from arsenic. Okay, well, that is a little weird. What the fuck, man? Two months after Breitbart's passing, the coroner that investigated the cause of death

may have succumbed to arsenic. Are you on Breitbart's website, though? No, this is RT.com. Okay, well, are they bullshit? No, they're just not totally. I mean, RT will play some stories that are good and real, but they'll also play some stuff where you go, oh, God, don't do that.

You're ruining little credibility. Yeah, RT. Are they sketch? No, a little'll also play some stuff where you go, oh God, don't do that. You're ruining what little credibility. Are they sketch? No, a little bit sketch. Don't lie to me. A little bit sketch. We have Abby Martin on August 5th. They have some good, and you know what? I feel like they're in the process, just like Al Jazeera was, of moving from

sketch to not so sketch anymore. It's an evolution. So it depends. I see what you're saying. Yeah, it's interesting that some of the hard-hitting stories are coming from Russian times. Well, again, though, because the stupid American media is leaving the door

wide open. If they were doing real journalistic, it's a little like saying, you know when the football players went on strike and the NFL goes on strike and all of a sudden you're watching guys who couldn't play in the NFL, were working at Resnick, but that's all you have? That's the analogy, is that all of a sudden the NFL goes on strike and all of a sudden you're watching guys who couldn't play in the NFL and were working at Reservoir. But that's all you have? That's the analogy. All of a sudden the NFL's on strike or not. So we're watching football players go,

hey, he's a pretty good running back. That's because he's not up against Eric Dickerson. You don't have anything to compare it to. So our media's not doing its job. So when anybody looks like they're even kind of doing the job of real journalism, it looks great by comparison. That's a very interesting analogy and that's a mixed martial arts analogy as well as lower organizations when fighters look spectacular and they fight in the UFC and get crushed. Or boxing was that way.

You know, this guy looks great, but who's he fought? Yeah, exactly. I think that's a really good point. It's a really interesting point. The whole thing, it's very strange, man. We live in one of the weirdest times to be alive, but I guess that's always been the case. People have always lived in the whole thing, it's very strange, man. We live in one of the weirdest times to be alive, but I guess that's always been the case. People have always lived in the weird times to be alive. Yes, that's a good, and you know what, that's what I try to remember, is that

the way we, in general, on a cellular level, feel is the way it's always been, where you kind of go, God, this is really strange. What's that old Chinese proverb, may you live in interesting times, right? And it's a double-edged sword exactly and that's always been the case and you know some roman was going those germans are so weird and there's a man we god it's a strange time to be alive and when you see um things like this hastings thing and with your deep knowledge of history and all the crazy shit that people have done from didn't the cons didn't didn't uh one of the fucking sons get poisoned one of gingis sons gingis khan's son who might not have really been his son. Didn't they kill him?

Yeah, they think so. They don't know. They don't know. The Mongols weren't exactly keeping scrupulous records about these things. But what's really shocking to us is that in this day and age, I mean, let's just go on a big fucking crazy tinfoil hat limb. If they did kill Michael michael hastings it's amazing that they can still do that like they get busted for cheating like they get busted for

having an affair with some chick who's threatening some other chick you know and then the fbi is actually going after the cia there's all this exchange of information to me someone can still do that the most interesting you know when you talk about history and what could be the weirdest thing that happened if that information became confirmed and we knew for a fact, let's pretend 100%, somehow it comes out and we know, the government killed Michael Hastings, the reality changes like in a 9-11, 180, all of a sudden, all bets are off. Absolutely. And everything weird starts happening. And here's the problem with that statement. In quotes, the government.

Is it the government or is it a small group of people inside the military that stand to really be damaged by one of his stories? That's the door that gets opened. If this happens, then you go, okay, the president has to comment, the Congress has to comment, the investigation,

and then the big war starts between information versus no information versus we kept national security act michael you if you knew what we knew about what michael hastings was about to report you to kill them yourself i mean it's going to get to be you know what i had a thing it but i again i'm not the last rick i just can't see that but but if it happened to change everything yeah it would be would be like finding out that john of kennedy was killed here's the gunman's name he was he was hired by the johnson administration or

whatever the world changed and that's why the conspiracy nuts on the kennedy thing they can't give that up because like oliver stone his whole a lot of his worldviews based on the idea that that is what happened therefore this government is the government that did that you know a whole bunch of dominoes start falling if you find out something in the government with official sanction kill michael hastings the world is different and we and everybody would have to respect people would have to start answering questions we would have to start discussing it wolf blitzer might have to mention it on the news is not a match i know he's not

going to make his good answer one way or another don't you think we should have killed a list of michael hastings thing a boon for society don't you think jenny have been killed in the Michael Hastings thing a boon for society? Don't you think... Shouldn't he have been killed? Shouldn't he have been killed sooner? We'll take a poll. CNN poll says he should have been killed two years ago before... Well, listen to... Very interesting.

CNN poll. Geraldo Rivera said... I feel very sorry for Michael Hastings' family, but let's not forget he took down our greatest fighting general. Did he really say that? Oh, my God. He repeated it. Did he really say that? Yes.

While we're talking about people who aren't really journalists. Well, he used to be. No. Remember that he was the reason why the... No. I never went there. Never. Do you know that he was the reason why the Zapruder film was released?

Maybe. The Zapruder film was released on the Geraldo Rivera show with Dick Greger in the 1970s. I think it was 73. I think that was a new version of it. I don't know. Because I don't think Geraldo Rivera had a show in the 1970s. He did. He did.

He did. Absolutely. I'll take your word for it. I was watching the monkeys. I've watched the video. I've watched the video of the show. It's fascinating. I thought they just had a different angle.

No, no. They showed it for the first time on television. People got a chance to see what really happened. You got to see the shot. I will not debate what I don't know. He was a conspiracy theorist. We'll play it. We'll play it and we'll see the shot. I will not debate what I don't know. He was a conspiracy theorist. We'll play it. We'll play and we'll end with this.

I believe you. We'll end with Geraldo with Dick Gregory on his show showing the Zapruder film because it's fascinating because it's also a time machine into the past. But before we end with this hardcore history, if you don't have this on your iPod or your phone or your Android, go get that shit. The latest show

is not really representative. We did some different things, but just listen to a couple if you can't stand the one you listen to. Dan Carlin's a bad motherfucker and he made history interesting to me. You just are a Mongol fan. I'm a Mongol fan, but I'm also a Martin Luther fan. I'm a fan of that episode. I'm a fan of, is it Thor's

Angels? That's Angels. That's Christianity and violence. Yeah, dude, you got some amazing shit. Go listen to the Oscar. People like that shit. I'm going to listen to it. They really are like audio books. They're just fantastic.

Really great stuff. So folks, go subscribe to that shit. Follow him on Twitter. By the way, thank you, man. You've made a huge difference in our numbers too and your audience has been so cool and I mean I can't thank you enough and I don't thank you enough but and guys you

thank me plenty hold on a second before we play that the you but I found out I should thank my audience because I found your audience contacted me saying listen it was a Jewish it was a it was a Yiddish hookup wasn't it like a shit up we have each other for sure you've made You've enlightened me about history. It's entertained me.

And the reason why people are enjoying it so much is not just because I'm talking about it. It's because it's awesome. But you mention it all the time, so we're grateful. It's fucking great shit, man. Keep it up. Please do. And support him. Please subscribe.

And you can get all the first 50 of them are free. And if you want to get all the back ones. 50? Yeah, the first 50. 10? 20 or 12 or something. I'm thinking of Marc Maron. Marc Maron does 50. Sorry. So it's 12, whatever it is.

It's worth paying for. They literally are audiobooks. They're like an iTunes song is what we charge for them and they're like four hours long. And you can get it on iTunes. Yeah, you can get it on iTunes now or our website's even cheaper. You can't go there then.

What's the website? DanCarlin.com Go there. Thank you very much, my brother. Always a pleasure. I love it. We've got to do this more often because people are fucking screaming,

you barely talked about history! Fucking Mongols! Fuck Michael Huston! Wait, wait, wait. That's my plan to come back. I won't talk about history. Hey, listen, man. It's an open invitation.

Anytime you're in town, you can come back. All right, all right. I'll take you up on that. I'll fucking fly up there. I'll hang out at your house. Wouldn't that be fun? Yeah, for sure.

Sasquatch is up there. Yes, he is. Dude, that's where I want to live. I live in Scottsdale's country. Fuck yeah. He goes to the University of Oregon. That motherfucker fly up there. I'll hang out at your house. Wouldn't that be fun? Yeah, for sure. Sasquatch is up there. Yes, he is. Dude, that's where I want to live. I live in Scottsdale's country. Fuck yeah. He goes to the University of Oregon. That motherfucker's out there. He's out there.

He plays tight end. We're going to leave with this, with this Geraldo Rivera thing. Thank you to Squarespace.com. Use the code word JOE8 and you can save yourself some cash, 10% off new subscriptions and learn how to make a website, you fucking savage. Thanks to Onnit.com. Go to O-N-N-I-T, use the code name Rogan

and save 10% off the number one sex toy for men. What? I'm getting confusing. Just kidding. It's a joke. It's a joke. It's an inside joke.

That used to be the flashlight thing. No, I'm not even stoned. No, I didn't, stupid. It was a joke. That's why I looked at you. That's so funny. Okay, this is Dick Gregory on the Geraldo Rivera show from 1973. Is that what it is?

75. 75, 1975. Oh, that might be true. We'll see you tomorrow with Matt Farah. Matt Farah from thesmokingtire.com, auto journalist, cool cat. We're going to talk gearhead shit. And then we're going to try to do Tony Hinchcliffe this week, too, if he's around. I know Tony's got a new show that he's doing with you, right?

Yeah, I'm doing it tonight. We'll do that. This is from Warble Nix's film. Okay, here, turn this up. Good night, you fucks. See you tomorrow. This is originally 8mm footage. And they're heading now toward Elm Street.

They're on Houston Street now. They're going to make a left-hand turn. It's on the corner where they're going to make the turn there that the book depository was. Now this is the Zapruder film. Okay, so the cars are coming along now into Dealey Plaza? Yes, these are the lead motorcycles of the motorcade. All right, now with the president and Mrs. Kennedy is also Governor Connolly. Right. Now before he goes behind the sign, the president is waving to the crowd. When

he comes out from behind the sign, he is shot. Then Governor Connolly is shot. He's already been hit. He's already been hit. And now? At the bottom of the screen, the head shot. That's the shot that blew off his head. It's the most horrifying thing I've ever seen in the movies. Now, the Warren Commission said that all of the shots were fired from behind by Lee Harvey Oswald, a lone assassin, firing at the president. And as you can see, clearly the head is thrown violently backwards,

completely consistent with the shot from the front right. Now this is an extreme blow-up of just the president from the film. All right. Coming out behind the sign, he's shot. He's hit from the front too. From the front., Jackie doesn't realize what's happened yet. She goes to his aide. And now? He's hit from the front. Again, the violent backward motion, totally consistent with 80% of the witnesses,

which said the shot came from the grassy knoll in front and to the right. It's interesting to note how many people is running towards where most folks thought the shots came from the grassy knoll in front and to the right it's interesting to note how many people is running towards where most folks thought the shots came from the head goes backwards listen to heraldo what he has from the other side of the street oh god that's awful that's the most upsetting thing i've ever seen we'll talk about it in a minute i came back and talked about it Thank you.