The Joe Rogan Experience - #847 - Dan Carlin

Episode Date: September 15, 2016

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".

three two one yes Dan Carlin we're live what's up buddy always a pleasure my friend deja vu all the time you to me are like this guy that's working on this never-ending project that occasionally you release these chunks of these never-ending projects but I look at your podcast as like this great work this long never-ending like dramatic interpretation of history that's so exciting and interesting but when you you like we were talking before the podcast about podcasting but i don't think of what you do as anything remotely like what i do like he was like you do so many podcasts i'm'm like, yeah, but there's nothing to it. You start it, you start talking, and that's it. You have preparation and research.

When you're doing hardcore history, that's a great work. You're doing this thing that's evergreen, that's going to be passed down forever and bit torrented the fuck out of. Daniele Bolelli had a great line to me because, you know, he does a history podcast now too. And he started off by doing just a talk one like my common sense kind of is. And he said, the difference with the history one is you actually have to, it has to make sense when you're done.

I mean, the facts. So that's a huge, I mean, I sit there like forever and I end up in my, my wife's never heard it by the way. And my kids don't understand why anybody would want to hear me talk. And, you know, so, but when I come out of the studio My wife's never heard it, by the way, and my kids don't understand why anybody would want to hear me talk. Right. But when I come out of the studio, and it's like sweat pouring off me, and then we'll look at it, and you'll listen, and you'll hear a mistake, and you'll have to repair the mistake. And when I'm talking on the political podcast and we make a mistake, I'll say afterwards on Twitter, oh, I got that wrong.

On the history one, like you said, it's forever. And so you really have to dot your I's and cross your T's and all that kind of stuff. It makes it a lot harder. Yeah. When you do in common sense, you're essentially just sort of ranting about your thoughts on what's going on. That's a pretty good description. Yeah. Yeah. When you do those and you release them and you find out you made an error, that is a fucking pain in the ass, right? I recently blamed one on concussions or brain damage or something like that so yeah in reference to hillary clinton no i no i said uh i was talking about that stuff they throw out of airplanes to jam radars and i called it flash and of course it's chaff and all of course 10 000 military people go you know it's chaff and i go of course i know it's chaff i wouldn't have brought it up it's

brain damage don't make fun of people who are, you know, it's chaff. And I go, of course I know it's chaff. I wouldn't have brought it up. It's brain damage. Don't make fun of people who are injured. But on the history show, you have to go, okay, I've got to go recut that, refix it. I do a lot more editing than I used to. Yeah. That's, yeah, it's, you're, like I said, like you have a podcast, but then you also have this thing, the hardcore history. The two podcasts are killing me, by the way. I'm going to, at some point, I'm'm gonna have to just do like one podcast a year you know i just i am the slowest podcaster in the

world i have one claim to fame number one in time it takes to get a new show out it's not the same see that's the problem with calling your thing a podcast it's an audio show it is at this point yeah evolved into that unintentionally but you have a podcast too. I do. Yeah. That's getting longer and longer between shows too. Well, it's got to be like, when I listened to some of your podcasts, like the one on Martin Luther and what was the name of that one? The- Prophets of Doom.

Prophets of Doom. Yeah. That one, you're like, I learned about Lutheranism from you. Like I didn't know the history. Let's hope we got it right, Joe. But I think that's happening with a lot of people. They're learning about certain aspects of history from you and from your stuff. That's a lot of responsibility. It is a lot of responsibility. So it makes sense that you're spending this much

time on them. I think what happens is, I think, you know, originally if you recall, the shows, if you go listen to the old shows, they don't sound like the newer ones. It's because I thought I was just going to talk about funky stuff in history right and then people wrote and go i don't really know the story can you tell more of the story and so you inadvertently start telling the story and then you go wait i'm not qualified to tell the story and so it's just yeah it's it's an interesting um it's an interesting the way it's evolved and it's also interesting i was you know i warn people when they go and buy the old shows. I say, you know, the old shows aren't going to sound quite the same because they were good by 2007 podcasting standards.

But, you know, the standards of what we all do are so much higher than when we started doing them. You know, if you grade this on a curve, go to iTunes and look at the stuff that's up there with you and compare it to the stuff that was up there 10 years ago. I was competing with kids in dorm rooms 10 years ago. Now we're competing with MPR and I mean all the pro outfits. Yeah, it is the sound quality for sure. But also like podcast, you get better at doing it. You know, you get better at the flow of the conversation. You get better at like being in tune with the person that you're talking to or at least attempting to like that. That's something for people that are listening. When you try to consider like how a podcast is made.

One of the things that we're doing is we're trying to express ourselves, but we're also trying to monitor ourselves at the same time. Make sure you're not too overbearing or you're not talking too much. Or sometimes you have a point and you just, oh, my God, I point but the other person is talking you don't know when to jump in but you also have to listen to the person who's talking so then you forget your point and you're like fuck you know it's it's a weird juggling act because we're both doing it sort of free balling we're both ad-libbing doing it live you know what's happening to me now i'm ashamed to say it but i'm starting to get that that thing i'm 50 now i turned to and i'm starting to get that you forget the name or you forget you know i compare it to a computer i

have more stuff in my computer but the computer is slower than it used to be and so i'll have this point where i'll be talking and everything will be going good and then all of a sudden there'll be this really long pause when i can't think of what and that's when we have to just you know if there is a ben he has to cut out and just, you know, sandwich the two pieces together while I try to remember the name of the person I wanted to say. So I'm getting to the point now where I'm not sure I could go live anymore without these really long pauses where I forget what I was going to say or I forget the point I was making or the tangent I was on. So 10 years from now, this is going to be a very interesting podcast. Well, it's also deals with the amount of hard drive space you have. I think if you keep remembering things,

like there's things that I used to know so well just 10, 15 years ago that I just have pushed aside because I haven't brought it up in a long time. I haven't gone into that folder in my mind in a long time. You're in the cobwebs now. Yeah, and if I went to try to pull it out now, it's like, no, no, no. Our space on the warehouse floor is filled, bro. There's no room for that stupid shit. And the bus speed isn't what it used to be.

Yeah, the bus speed is not what it used to be. But I try to crank that up with this stuff. I know. I don't rub it in. You're so much healthier than I am. Well, this is coffee. This is not health. I mean, it's kind of healthy, but it's really just speed.

Where I come from, coffee is health food. What, Oregon? Yeah, Oregon. Oregon's healthy as fuck, man. Yeah, well, there's a couple people that aren't so healthy in Oregon. it's kind of healthy but it's really just speed where i come from coffee is health food what oregon yeah oregon's healthy as fuck yeah well there's a couple people that aren't so healthy in oregon just you're in that i'm leading the charge do you like living up there in the pacific northwest you know i'm from here and and and coming back home is weird because i told my my wife recently i said my kids are oregonians and i haven't gotten used to that fact it just seems weird to me. And I told her I still feel like this Angeleno

up in Oregon, but I've been there 20 years. I don't know when you start feeling... I mean, you're from the East Coast originally. Do you feel like you're an Angeleno or do you still think of yourself as a transplant? I've been here for 22 years. As long as I've been in Oregon. So I've been here forever. So you feel like this is home? I've lived here more

than I've lived anywhere in my life. When you go home, when you go back to where you were from, does it feel like coming home or does it feel foreign? It feels weird. It used to make me insecure. Like I used to go like where my high school was and I would it would bring back the feelings of being in high school again. Like when I was when I graduated from high school, I would have nightmares that I didn't graduate and I'd have to go back. I think that's pretty classic. The algebra class, you forgot that you didn't drop or whatever.

Yeah. And I felt like I had to go back. Like, oh no, I'm going to, I'm going to fucking have to drop out or I'm going to have to go back to school. Like the dread of the, and it wasn't like the school was so horrible. It was really like the uncertainty of the future and life and the insecurity and just the angst, the teen angst of, you know, slowly realizing that we're not even slowly realizing, but becoming an adult and knowing that it's just a few years away that I'm going to be completely responsible for myself, but I'm completely lost. responsible for myself but i'm completely lost you know so there's like this unbelievable pressure that comes with going from being a teenager to and it's really i mean say unbelievable pressure is nothing to compare to be like growing up a kid in laos you know or you're living in fucking

somalia in the middle of you know all sorts of different crises that are going on so it's really like the most privileged angst possible is home reasonably the same when you go back to the old? See, because I come back here, I told my mom, I was reading this book written by, if you remember, William F. Buckley, the famous, you know, talk like this little. His son wrote a book about his dad getting old and getting ready to pass away and whatever. And at one point, his dad, who was in Florida, said he wanted to go home to die, which I guess was Connecticut. And he said dying in Florida was like contrary to nature.

So he wanted to go home where everything was the same. And I thought to myself, if I went home, you know, to die, home isn't anything like home was. I drive through the places I'm from and it doesn't even, you know, it doesn't ring a bell anymore. The places, if I wanted to go home to die, I'd have to have a time machine you know because everything is so different if

every for those who don't know Los Angeles like every 15 years bulldozes itself and rebuilds itself and so I'm like three generations of LA bulldozing from where my time was and so I go on up and down these streets it looks like a foreign city to me Also, the mass exodus of people has never subsided. A lot of them are in Oregon now. We've got better restaurants and better theater and everything because of all the Californians that go up there. Yeah, but when I first moved up there, if you had a California license plate, that was like an invitation to have your car get keyed. Really? Yeah, oh, the Californians were not popular.

In Colorado, either. When I went to school there, the Californians were not popular. Now, I think probably ex-Californians are like the majority. Yeah, that's the case with Boulder. I remember when I was living in Boulder, they said that a lot of people moved up right after the earthquake. I lived in Boulder too, four years. Yeah, I went to school there. People were like, check, please.

As soon as the ground started shaking. When were you in Boulder? Seven years ago. Seven years ago I lived there. Before the podcast. Before the podcast started. Did you like it? I was only there for a few months.

I was there for four months. We planned on living there for a year, then maybe permanently. But along the way, my wife got pregnant and we were at 8,500 feet above sea level. That's right. Yeah. And it was just, it's brutal. It is. They say that Colorado in general, like around the Denver area, has a very high rate of premature births and low birth weight because of the lack of oxygen.

I would never have thought. I would have thought you'd have your kid born with like superhuman lungs, be like one of those Sherpas, you know, in Tibet. Well, I think if you live there and you grow up there, probably. Like if you live there and grow up there, like I was talking to an endurance runner that lives there and he said it takes three years for your body to completely acclimate where you get all the benefits of training up there. They have all the Olympic guys who do the bicycling and everything up there too just because of the altitude. Well, yeah, that's a big thing with any sort of athletic competition training that involves endurance is training at altitude. It makes a big difference. But I think if you live there your whole life, your body's to it you're adapted to it it's probably fine for your kids

because obviously a lot of people have kids in colorado but i think that if you're from sea level like here and then you go there it's quite a shock to your system like you try to go up a flight of stairs and you're like whoa i'm kind of it does remind you doesn't it yeah for sure and if you were at 80 something i mean that's that's tired than Boulder. You must have been out in the mountains. Yeah, we were in the mountains. Yeah, 85, 8,500 feet above sea level. Wow. But when you work out there, man, it's crazy the impact.

Like, if you're just standing around talking, it seems normal. Like, if you and I were having this conversation up there, it wouldn't be any different. But if you had to walk up a flight of stairs or climb a ladder or something like that, all of a sudden you're like, Jesus Christ, did I age 30 fucking years in 10 minutes? But anyway, going back to my high school, when I go to my neighborhood where I grew up in, it looks pretty much the same. So it hasn't really blown up. I grew up in Newton, Upper Falls, Massachusetts, which is a small suburb of

Boston. So it's a small place. It's always been small. You go back there, it's kind of similar. I went back to the house where I grew up about a year and a half ago, and it's pretty much the same. Wow. I'm jealous because I go to these websites that say the San Fernando Valley in the 1970s and look at pictures, and it's nothing like it looks now You ever go to Jerry's Deli and look at those old pictures. I do I have books actually and this is funny as I get older I never cared about LA history when I lived here But now that I'm getting nostalgic and stuff

I buy all these old books with pictures of Magic Mountain when I was a kid and Disneyland when I was a kid and all those kind of things. Well, it's fascinating because this area used to be ranches Oh, yeah. Oh and horse country and everything. Absolutely. Well, I took my wife back to my high school recently. And, you know, my high school's turned into like, you know, the Beverly Hills High School is what it's like. And so she looks at me, she goes, oh, I see how you were raised.

Honey, no, it smelled like manure. It was all dirt roads. It was really, it wasn't like that for me. So she doesn't believe me. Yeah, the pictures of Jerry's Deli on Ventura up here, they have these pictures from like the early 1900s, these big, giant, high-resolution photos. It's like, wow.

Just fields and stuff, rolling hills. If you could look at it in a time lapse, just watch it all build, you'd be like, whoa, what the fuck? My mom's got this view of the entire valley, and you look at it, and it's full. And you see those pictures from Jerry's Deli, and it's empty. And in basically whatever it is, 70 years at it and it's full. And you see those pictures from Jerry's Deli and it's empty. And in basically whatever it is, 70 years or something, it's full. Yeah, well, the whole country, if you really stop and think about it, I've been talking to people about that a lot lately because we've been sort of discussing how bizarre this election has been

and how recent this country has existed, how recently this country was established. I mean, when you think about 1776 and you think about the rest of the world, like this is an insanely new country. Oh, in the West, my wife's grandfather died recently. He was 94. And I said, do you realize that two of your grandfather's lifespans and there's no non-natives here on the West Coast? That's two long lifetimes. Yeah.

It's bizarre. It's really interesting when you think about it that way, how quick this gigantic thing took over the world, essentially. I should correct this. See, I already heard a hardcore history error in that comment. I should say in the Pacific Northwest, because they'll say, oh, no, Dan, there were Spanish missions. And see, that's how you get in trouble yeah okay we go three generations three

generations no the spanish were here a long time ago but but up in the pacific northwest it wasn't like that there were you know because it's funny you can tell where the tide of of spanish conquest sort of broke because you you you stop getting those hispanic names for all the communities and all of a sudden you're like what happened to la habra what happened to all those wonderful spanish names and you're no longer in that now you're in i mean russia actually owned a little bit of that territory once upon a time but now you're everything's a native american name or or some name from some really early settler or pioneer or something like that. We were talking about how recently slavery existed in this country. Oh my God. Yes. 1865. And you think about 1865 to 2016 is nothing. Well, and then let's remember that, you know, you still had the Jim Crow laws and the segregation up until you and I were kids.

Yeah. My mom did a film in Florida in 1972. And I'm not talking about the apologies to Floridians out there, but the civilized part of Florida, we were in the swamp. It was a place called Weeki Wachee. If you've ever been there, the big draw is they have a live mermaid show that they try to get you to slow down for enough to eat at the local cafe or whatever. And we took a picture when we left and the whole hotel staff was out there. And it looks like something out of a time warp because you realize you're like three or five years of, you know, it's segregation has been gone that long. I mean, that's how recent this is. Although I realize the more I talk to young people, even being 50 sounds like a long time ago. But when you and I were kids, that was the tail end of the time when if you were a black person in certain states in this country, you couldn stay in in a bunch of hotels yeah i mean that's that's that's really recent yeah it's really recent um i had this cop on my from baltimore michael wood and he was telling me about the laws that they had in baltimore that they had a systematic they really had racism that was so a part of the city that you couldn't sell houses in certain areas to black people.

Frank Robinson tells a story about being with the Baltimore Orioles. And he says he got traded from the Cincinnati Reds to the Baltimore Orioles. And his wife was able to find a house really quickly until they realized it wasn't Brooks Robinson's wife, who's a white guy. It was Frank Robinson's wife. And then all guy it was frank robinson's wife and then all of a sudden the house disappeared right off you know two seconds later so but that's almost you know you don't know what to say about that because there's two kinds of racism there's a kind where the government is involved in the states involved like you said system you know institutionalized and then there's i'm a white home buyer whose neighbors you know i remember

um there was an all in the family episode where archie bunker or one of the neighbors was going neighbors, was going to sell to a black family, and all the other white neighbors freaked out. So, I mean, that's not really like government racism. That's like good old-fashioned one-to-one racism, you know? Well, they used to do this thing called blockbusting, and it happened with my grandfather. My grandfather lived in Newark, New Jersey, and these realtors would go door-to-door and literally tell the homeowners, black people are moving into the neighborhood. You have to sell your home. The property value is going to crash.

Holy cow. They just started selling like crazy. My grandfather stayed. My grandfather was like, I like black people. Get the fuck off my lawn. He was one of those guys. So they left and the neighborhood changed. First it became black.

Then it became Puerto Rican. And then before changed. First, it became black. Then it became Puerto Rican. And then before my grandfather died, it had been like a weird mixture of ethnicities, Dominicans and different people from different environments. But it was a really fascinating place to live because there was extreme, there was poverty. And then there was a lot of crime and stuff like the next door neighbor when my grandfather lived there is a kid who was selling crack like the next door neighbor when my grandfather lived there is a kid who was selling crack and they battering rammed his front door he had it all reinforced and everything had an audi in the driveway like the whole deal he was just selling drugs and they

you know broke down his doorway and arrested him and everything it was a pretty dramatic moment but the rest of it was like when you look at like a bad neighborhood it's not like you go down the street and it's like a war zone. Guns are going off and people getting stabbed. For the most part, it's pretty friendly and lively. It's just when you're dealing with poor people in a crime ridden neighborhood, you know, it's just going to happen more often than it's going to happen in a place that's really nice. But most of the time when you go outside, it would be people playing music and there was kids playing in the street and it was people hanging out in their steps. It was really interesting to watch from the time I was a little kid, remembering his neighborhood to what it was

before he died. And it just kept shifting over and over again where new sort of lower income, disenfranchised groups would move into the area. And you know this, I'm sure, already, but for the listener's sake, there's a whole theory on how, if you look at boxing, you can see, you know, who the wave of immigrants most recent was, because boxing became a way for people to get out of the ghetto. Yeah. And so if you look at, say, early 1900s up into the middle 1920s and 30s, there were a lot of Jewish boxers because their parents had come over on the boat and they were first generation. Italian boxers during the same period, Irish boxers. And then you move to

eras where, I mean, poor African-Americans have always been in boxing because for the same reason, Hispanic boxers. I mean, I saw a whole article once on america's immigration story as told through boxing and they would suggest that by the time the next generation came along most of the time the parents had done well enough so that you know the kids didn't have to go into boxing but but it was an interesting story that you know and i think it was i think the article was entitled something like why don't you see any great jewish boxers anymore and it went down the whole listen i didn't know there were Jewish boxers. Sure.

Oh, Benny Leonard. There are a lot of Jewish boxers. Maxi Rosenberg. Oh, a lot of them. Yeah, there was a ton of them in the early days. But it's always that. It's always the immigrants. Yeah, first generation people, right?

Well, what we've seen a lot now is Russians. Same system, though, right? You have newcomers who are trying to make their way into the system, and boxing is the best thing they bring to the table. It's also that you're growing up in these really hard environments where fisticuffs are much more common, and people seek to train themselves to learn how to fight because they're dealing with conflict all the time. Absolutely right. There's a lot of kids in class, you see, you know, America, no bullying, you know, hey, diversity. And these kids are growing up and, you know, there's no desire for the average middle class white kid to go into boxing. It's just no desire. Those of us who've tried it, I tried it once just for the fun of it.

And that was enough to kick me out of the idea. Didn't look so fun anymore after I came home with a black eye. And I thought, that's just one day of practice. You know, these people who do it for a living, that's every day of practice. But you only tried it for one day? Oh, well, you know, I was—this is crazy to say now. I've always been a huge fan of boxing because I grew up in an era where it was one of the great eras in boxing history. And so, you know, you think long enough that you want to see what it's like.

And I had a buddy that I worked with. He was the one who always showed up with the black eye after the weekend was over. He said, I'll take you take him we'll fool around the first thing i learned that i didn't know is how much some of these guys just love it because you think who would like getting hit and i met one of these guys and he was like you don't understand the sport you just don't understand it but he's put some gloves on we'll go in there well that's when you learn you know especially that i have a soft face that's that guy's an asshole that's not how you're supposed to teach somebody about boxing you're not supposed to even think about sparring for a long time. Oh, I think he was going to show me a lesson.

He was going to beat on you. That's right. Yeah, I had a buddy of mine do the same thing. Assholes. They know how to fight already, and they put gloves on you, and you beat the shit out of you. It was one punch, Joe. Let's not make it more than one. It was only one?

Yeah, I learned my lesson pretty fast. I'm a smart guy, Joe. Took one punch. You're like, okay. Got through my defense with the first first one and that was it. Well, you need to learn stuff This is like boxing the way it really should be taught to someone if you really want someone to learn You should teach them the proper fundamentals on how to move their body and then you slowly teach them how to slowly hit things How about protective headgear for the new guy? What about that? That protective headgear does less than you think it does. Does it?

I know. I've read that, actually. They're also removing it from Olympic competition now. You ever see that? You know, I had mentioned to my wife, didn't they used to have boxing in the Olympics? Do they even show it anymore? Yeah. Did they show it?

Because I didn't see it. You don't see it as much. That was so big when I was a kid. I wonder what they decide to put on and how they decide. It's got to be based on ratings, right? Because like archery, you see archery for like 30 seconds. Look, the arrow flew through the air. Next.

And then gymnastics is always a big one. People love watching people flip. I told my wife there was this competition called a biathlon where you ski and shoot. And she said, you're making that up. I said, no, it's really an Olympic sport. It is a weird sport, right? What a strange combination. That's where those Scandinavians just kick everybody's rear end.

Yeah, because they're all out there skiing and shooting shit all the time. That's exactly right. That's rude. There's a lot of moose in that area. That's a strange, the Olympics are strange in what is a medal and what is not. Like ballroom dancing is an Olympic sport. What about synchronized swimming? Yeah, that's an Olympic sport. I'm not denigrating anybody if you're a professional synchronized swimmer out there.

I am. I'll take the blame. Please do. Like curling. Ever seen that one? Yeah. It's another one. I always thought that was what they did on cruises for old people, but apparently it's

a little different. That's shuffleboard. It's very close. It's very close. There's no brooms involved in shuffleboard. There's no brooms. I don't know. Curling, you're trying to dink the other guy out of the way right

Trying to knock your little disc It's very complicated I never quite mastered I was in Newfoundland I know how to say it now because people got mad at me We were calling it Newfoundland I guess it's Newfoundland Correct me again I'm probably fucking it up again I'm not even going to try

But I was making fun of curling And they went crazy they were so upset at me I was like come on folks those are not people to get get mad at you either no they're Hardy woods folk it's very cold yeah it's a different kind of different kind of life but what I don't know what what do they do to decide like what goes on the air it must just be based on popularity right the Olympics I gotta tell you if I'm the if I'm the network executive deciding what goes on the air you, if I'm the network executive deciding what goes on the air,

that's what I'm going to base it on. Did you see all those videos of people getting robbed that were just walking down the street in Rio? Is this in Rio? Yeah. No, but I go to a website sometimes when I'm bored and I have nothing better to do that is just stuff that people upload

just to blow your mind or say, wow, and half of them are from Brazil for some reason. And they're always terrible you just go i know it's giving me a um an unusually wrong version of what brazil is like but when they said the olympics were going to be there i said you know half the videos on this site are from rio so well it's it does have a history of violence that's for sure it's a strange place and that's kind of the reverse of LA in that LA, you essentially have the expensive homes in the hills and then the people that have the less expensive homes are on the bottom. But in Rio, it's the opposite. The people in the bottom, like near the ocean, it's the really

expensive homes. And up in the hills with these amazing views are all the favelas. So it's all these houses that don't have any windows. Some of them have dirt floors and there's like extreme, extreme poverty. I know some of these communities, the police can't even go into, right? Some of them are really hardcore. Very. Did you ever see City of God, the movie? No, but I saw the preview. Does that count? It does not count, but it makes boys in the hood look like Mary Poppins and it's based on life in the favelas. But really, really based on it, like these kind of actual scenarios actually do take place where young kids with guns form gangs.

And, you know, you're looking at like 10-year-old kids. Doesn't that almost seem to be like a law of nature, though? Because you do see it everywhere in these when you go to the poor countries or poor parts of the U.S. Like you said, you were talking about how the poor communities are pretty much like the nicer communities. In some ways, I used to have to go down to Compton all the time when I worked in news down here. And Compton in the daytime looks just fine. People are trying to keep their lawns mowed. They're out there working on their homes. I mean, everything. It's when darkness falls that things can get a little weird on certain street corners and whatnot. But you know i remember going down there just thinking boy everybody here is really trying you know i mean they're really keeping up their homes and trying

to make everything look nice and and at nighttime they're just victims a lot of the time you know they shut their doors and close their windows and try to stay out of what's going on outside it is weird that it's night. Like there's something happens to people when there's not as much sun out. The people that sleep all day come out. Yeah, I think so. I used to be one of those people once upon a time. But Compton, like if you looked at a good neighborhood,

like how many people are getting by and how many people are fucking it up, you know, in a great neighborhood, maybe it's like a hundred people are getting by and one guy's fucking it up. You're like one issue out of 100. But in Compton, it might be three. And that's enough.

Like that's enough to give the whole neighborhood a black eye. Yeah, you're right. It doesn't take very many. That's right. Yeah. A friend of mine has a gym in Compton. And I was telling, we're headed there. And I was like, yeah, it's in Compton.

And the guy I was going with was like, Jesus, we're going to Compton? I was like, it's a fucking, it's a nice area. There's nothing wrong. It's just a city. That's right. Just go Jesus, we're going to Compton? I was like, it's a fucking nice area. There's nothing wrong. It's just a city. That's right. Just go there. What is this? Compton Cowboys?

I just Googled Compton, and this story just came up from yesterday. What the fuck is this? A bunch of guys that ride horses through Compton. Is that even legal? I didn't know you could do that in L.A. Because, like in New York, they have to have a device that hooks up to the horse so it doesn't have manure on the streets. How did they get around that there? This is hilarious.

Cowboys roping and riding right in the heart of Compton have found their hobby can tame some of the most dangerous neighborhoods. I have a regular nine to five job, but I'm a cowboy, Hosley said. Good for him. I'm in favor of that. You're not a cowboy. Where do you keep the horse? First of all, there's no cows. You're a horse boy. Where do you keep the horse? first of all there's no cows you're a horse boy

where do you keep that? you're into horses is that a backyard horse? I mean where do you keep that? it must be well there's some I mean I know that like I've seen them in Burbank

like Burbank there's sections of which is you know where NBC is Jay Leno used to do his Tonight Show there's sections of that that are equestrian

so you're allowed to have a stable in your yard and people just ride horses down the street. You see it all the time down there. They used to have a place called Pickwick Stables right outside of Burbank that was like that. Yeah, they used to have an equestrian center down there when I was a kid 50 years ago or whatever it was. Yeah, horse riding makes you a cowboy. You're not a cowboy unless cows are involved. Is that the Rogan standard on that?

I just think that's a fact. I just think that's a fact. You're not a cowboy unless cows are involved. Is that the Rogan standard on that? I just think that's a fact. I just think that's a fact. You're a horse boy? Well, you call them cowboys because they would chase cows. They would herd them. You know? Okay, I'll go with you. I just don't have the expertise to compete on that subject. They have the Compton Posse?

What is it? They have an actual ranch? It's called Richland Farms. I was just looking it up, trying to find out more pictures of what it really looks like. I'll tell you how uneducated I was. I didn't know they had enough open property out there to look at that. Yeah. Wow. So they have chickens and shit?

I'm impressed. And these guys are doing little things with their horses? Yeah. Running them through routines? Good for them. Interesting. Very interesting. Yeah.

Well, you know what, man? When people find open spaces and spaces that are vacant and they start reclaiming them and occasionally good things come out of that. And you know what? I mean, you know, there's a lot of cities in the United States and in Europe and stuff that that have built giant open spaces, you know, whether it's a central park in New York or anything like that. It changes the whole feel of these urban centers to have to have big open pieces of territory in the midst of the urban sprawl. I mean, if that's what they've done, good, more power to them. LA needs more of that. I think you're right. And it keeps it from growing. Like one of the really smart things that Boulder's done is they buy up all the open space when

lots are available all around Boulder. They just buy it up. The city buys it up and they just prevent people from building on it. That's why it costs like $9,000 a month to have an apartment in Boulder. Yeah. It's super expensive, but you know, I mean, ultimately it's probably a good idea, right? Oh yeah. Well, from your own living purposes, absolutely. So, I mean, that's what I want. I look in Oregon, I can park anywhere. I tell Angeleno's that, and they're really the only people, New Yorkers and Angeleno's understand when you say, I can park anywhere, dude.

And they just go, oh, really? Yeah, my buddy Steve moved from New York. He was living in Brooklyn, and he moved to Seattle. And he was like, I should have been here a long time ago. This is amazing. Totally. He's like, fucking traffic's nothing. He's like, people are complaining about traffic.

They think it's bad, but they don't know. Yeah. Like, it takes 10 minutes more to get where you're going. That's it. I know. And you know, nowadays, I mean, in the. Like, it takes 10 minutes more to get where you're going. That's it. I know. And, you know, nowadays, I mean, in the old days, if you and I wanted to work, you had to live where the work was. Yeah.

Now, I mean, even the actors don't live here much anymore, you know? Yeah. Well, open space, I think, is a really smart thing because people left their own devices will really fuck up anything. They'll just build on top of shit and stack things up and stuff people in there. And next thing you know, views gone everything's gone chicken ranch next to your house yeah it's well this one of the things that this country has it's really interesting is public land these gigantic national parks like

Yellowstone all these different places that you can go there mostly in the west though you know and yeah that was up when that sagebrush rebellion type thing happened up in Oregon, in the one area where they're still having trials about and everything. See, 20 years ago, I would have remembered their names right off the bat, but there's a wilderness thing up in Oregon. We had that whole thing. doesn't have big tracts of land in the eastern part of the country where things started they reverted that land back to the public but they had these huge swaths of land in the west because it was kind of a different government by the time they were out here in the west yeah i truthfully am kind of thankful they do because if they didn't it wouldn't be here anymore i mean that's the way i look at it just be gone yeah most likely that that whole land thing was really confusing for people they were trying to figure out what the hell is going on. Because unless you really dive into the story and try to find out who's angry at who and why is the government moving in on these people and what's happening.

Because there was a few of these sort of rancher type disputes with the government. Remember there was one in Nevada as well? I actually can speak to this a little bit. Because when I was a talk radio host up there, those people were actually a large part of any talk radio show audience and and they were a little different back in the day of say the clinton administration in the mid-1990s but but the modern movement kind of grew out of that and if you understand the position of those people in those small towns those people essentially made a living in resource extraction so they didn't have the big factories that they had back east in Detroit and everything.

They logged or they mined or they did those kind of things. And so when the government will decide, for example, we have a problem with the spotted owl, so we're going to cut back on the logging, the people in places like Portland where everybody's got a software job or something, they're like, absolutely, that's a wonderful thing. But those devastated some of those communities and you know it's everything from the schools in those areas not getting a lot of tax dollars anymore or the problem they have in oregon is a lot of those small communities all the young people are gone because there's no jobs so the

old people who have homes stay there's no jobs because everybody was in logging and they get very resentful so when they wanted the public land turned over to private people because they were hoping the private people would start off the mills again and people could work. So in that sense, I felt like the media really didn't look at that side of the story, which is, I'm not saying these people are right or wrong, but understand that this wasn't a question of, oh, the government's got to get off of our land. It was jobs. And I think we can all understand jobs. Well, what was going on in Oregon was cattle ranchers and public

land, and they didn't want to pay. Yeah, they didn't want to pay for public land. Now, before I had ever ventured into public land, I didn't understand the whole cattle grazing thing. But when I was in, the first time I was in Montana, we went, we took a float down the Missouri River. We went down the, where the Missouri breaks are. Montana's beautiful. Oh man,

it's amazing. But one of the things I was like, there's these cows everywhere. Like, is it, this is public land, right? And my friend Steve had to sort of explain to me

how they kind of leased the land. They let cows graze this land and they they do it at this, like, ridiculously low rate. Because they made a lot of these laws in the late 1800s, the same thing with the mining ones and the claims to that. So they have updated a lot of those things. But the Nevada guys, or excuse me, the Oregon guys, they didn't want to pay. That was part of what was going on. They didn't want to pay their bill to at least as far as it's been explained. Well, no, and there's different parties involved.

So you had these ranchers who didn't want to do that. And then you have a bunch of people in the community who were sympathetic, not so much to that part, but the fact that the ranchers were mad at the same people that they were mad at. Right. would hear a lot of people speak in these things saying i'm not really you know on their side but we all generally have sympathy to the idea that we would like the federal government to stop telling us how many logs we can cut or those kind of things right and that's a traditional american thing get the government off my back for whatever reason it is and there's points on both sides though unfortunately oh absolutely because when you look at like when you look at some place that's been clear cut, and you see how much... It's devastating. It's devastating. When you see a giant swath of land

that used to be filled with old growth trees. And they replant it with a single monocrop instead. They always call it... They want you to think it's like growing tomatoes. They always say this is a renewable crop. Yes and no. And like you said, the clear cuts are awful because you do think to yourself, couldn't you take like every fifth tree? Or, you know, a lot of times private landowners will do a better job of it. Not always. Sometimes they'll just think my kid needs to go to college.

It's time to just level everything on this hill. Sometimes, though, their attitude is, OK, this is my view, right? I mean, I look out, I don't want to see a clear cut. So I'll take every third or fourth tree and it becomes like an extra bank account for some of them. Well, if your whole business is the logging business, I can imagine, like we were up in the Redwood Forest recently. And as we were driving up there, you pass these lumber yards. There's this one lumber yard where it's just massive logs and massive amounts. And they're just stacked up. And you're looking at, like, in terms of the number of years of growth you're looking at,

when you're looking at this huge lumber yard filled with trees, like, how many years of growth is that? And how do you sustain it, right? I mean, if this is how much you need today, how do you make sure you have that much 15, 20 years? You know, what they're doing right now is the Canadians are logging a lot. And in Russia, in the places like below the, they have a forest line in Siberia, and they're logging a lot there too. I mean, it's kind of like gold that grows for those people. And so in one sense, you find it hard to tell them not to because I'm doing just fine, but you can't log and make money. On the other hand, you know, we all do kind of share this. And so it's hard to figure out how to manage things, you know, for the greater good, as they say. That's the good point is that it's really, I mean, it's no one's, you can call it property,

but what it is, is like, we're all sharing the resources of the earth. And what's going on in the Amazon right now and what happens when people move in and farm for cattle is one of the best arguments against factory farming and against supporting the meat industry. It pollutes rivers and all that kind of stuff. Devastating deforestation, too, at a ridiculously high rate. That's a big part of what's fueling the deforestation is they chop down all these trees so that they can make land for these cattle to graze on. And you can see, by the way, how much money is involved because in some of those countries, the people that campaign a lot of times are indigenous people.

It gets violent and people die. And, you know, that's how much money we're talking about. Yeah, they killed some nun that was protesting against the logging. She got murdered recently. It's not that uncommon. And, you know, everybody kind of knows. This is, you know, you're taking—I mean, it's pretty brave when you think about what those people do, because they get the threatening letters long before anything happens to them.

And then to keep doing it, I admire people like that. Whether or not I agree with the specific cause. Yeah, I mean, who knows if they're even getting letters. They just might get bullets. specific cause. Yeah. I mean, who knows if they're even getting letters, you know, they just might get bullets, you know? I mean, if you start making a mess and making a lot of noise and making it problematic for the people that are earning a shitload of money, chopping those trees down, things can get real ugly. They get real nasty. I was in Mount Rainier and that was the first time I ever saw like real clear cut areas. And that's an interesting place because it rains so much.

You would think like it's a real fertile environment, like whatever trees that they do have. But when I was talking to one of the guys that was up there, one of the cops that was, you know, was like Forest Ranger type character. He was saying that they do it, but it takes like 20 years for these things to become trees again. Well, and they use different growth trees for different things. So you can grow the quick you know i always hear from the guys who want to grow hemp and say well if they would just grow hemp it would make up but it would make up for some uses the old growth trees like if you go into some of these there are some oregon hotels for example that are all built with old growth

yeah and you go in there and you see what old growth can do and you say okay there are no other logs that you could do this with right you know it's just a it's and you see the band saws that they use to cut that stuff it's it's a whole different level of tree but the replacement time periods like a hundred and fifty years or something for those kind of things yeah it's kind of fucking crazy we really think about it's totally unsustainable but you're right it looks amazing nothing like it there's a company called urban hardwoods and they're in Seattle. I've heard of them. And they make like tables and desks and stuff out of the most incredible looking wood.

They take like real wood, like a real giant tree, and they'll turn that giant tree, they'll cut chunks out of it and turn it into a table. But it's got like the outside edge is like the natural edge of the tree. I used to know a guy who was a big investor. He's dead now, but he would find investments to go, to go by. And he went and somehow he was so proud of this. He got himself a piece of a Koa wood forest in Hawaii and he showed me the deed. And the deed from the guy he bought it from had been signed by like King Kamehameha or something. So he was bragging to me for years about this and then found out later Hawaii wouldn't let him cut any of it.

So he bought it all on the premise that I had this valuable wood. But for environmental and heritage reasons, Hawaii wouldn't let him cut. He was totally screwed. Wow. Well, at least he got a cool forest. Yeah, Koa woods. It's gorgeous. Yeah, and hard and valuable and rare.

Yeah, don't they make like guitars out of it? I know they make pool cues out of it. They used to make ships out of it, you know, like those old wooden ships. Beautiful. Yeah, the different densities of trees and the different grains and patterns. And when you look at actual like hardwood, it's such a fascinating, not invention, but creation of nature. Like the variety of the grain and the way they look, it's really like a work of art. And it's strange how it affects us visually. Like if you look at a piece of redwood that's been polished and sanded and cut, it's like

you see the grain and it's like, wow, that is so pretty. You know, it's interesting how that affects us. I'm wondering who's winning the pool for what they thought we would talk about today. How many people had hardwoods? Nobody. They're right about hemp, though, as far as construction material. They make that stuff called hempcrete.

Have you ever seen that? It's like a product they make with hemp. It has incredible insulation values. It's really difficult to light on fire. It's very strong. Well, it used to be used a lot. Up until about the 30s and 40s, it was a pretty big crop for a lot of industrial uses.

Everybody who looks into it for five minutes knows that. Yeah, well, that's one of those things where stoners love to sit down and talk to you about it. You know, man, Henry Ford made the first car. George Washington, yeah. Dude, George Washington grew pot, bro. Ben Franklin smoked pot. Yeah.

Yeah, they probably did. It's good stuff. Hard to prove. Yeah. Well, they definitely liked hemp. You know, they definitely were into hemp, and they were definitely into using it as a commodity and a textile. You know, and you can go back and forth about that.

Like the paper, things like that. Yeah, the first decoration. One of the first drafts of the decoration of independence was written on hemp and uh parachutes uh sails sails with it a lot of stuff we used in both world wars um for equipment was was in fabric a lot of stuff like that even the term canvas comes from the word cannabis because that's what it was made out of that actually yeah yeah it's interesting how it's becoming legal but that's another thing that's really fascinating about this time it It's like slowly in your state, Washington State, Colorado, you're starting to see so much money coming talked about, you know, what's going to happen because we have this divergence between the states and the federal government. And as you probably know, only a couple of weeks ago, the federal government decided to

leave marijuana classified as a Schedule I drug for the same reason they always did, which is they say that the research doesn't show anything. And then you find out, well, they're not really permitted to do the research. So it's this catch-. Right. So at some point, either the feds are going to have to move toward the states or somebody is going to get into power that says enough of this dichotomy. We're going to crack down. I have no idea what that would look like. It would look ugly. You can't crack down now. The amount of money that Colorado is making has changed the quality of life for so many people there. Their real estate values have gone up. The drunk driving accidents have gone way down. Drunk driving arrests way down. Violent crime way down. I mean, it's really fascinating what's happened to Colorado. But look at what the feds

have already done in roundabout ways. For example, one of the things that they've said in some of these places is if you have a medical marijuana card, you can't get pain medication prescribed to you. If you have a medical marijuana card, a judge just upheld, didn't they, that you can't get pain medication prescribed to you. If you have a medical marijuana card, a judge just upheld, didn't they, that you can be denied a gun. They don't deny people guns for drinking. Or pills. Yes. So the only reason that that works is because you have a disagreement between state and federal law, and they're siding with the higher law, which is the way the law is supposed to work. But at what point do we have such a division between the reality on the ground in these states and what federal law says that the

rubber is going to meet the road somewhere? I don't know who wins, but there's going to be a moment where you have a rubber meets the road moment. Yeah. And it's an interesting case with the National Rifle Association, too, because the NRA, which is always a car's pro-gun and really trying to stop any laws that infringe upon the rights of people to uphold the Second Amendment. But when you get to this pot thing, they don't want to fuck with the pot thing. I may be wrong about this, but I do believe that they did come out and say that you shouldn't be denying people's rights. Well, they better. There's a lot of people in the NRA that they're better. I think that, well, listen. There's a lot of people in the NRA that smoke pot.

Yeah, it's in their interest to do that. There's a lot of closet pot smokers out there. Because it's, obviously the stereotype has always been that it makes you lazy and it makes you dumb and sort of gives you brain damage and you forget things. That's been shown time and time again to not be true. I mean, when you are high as fuck you do forget things like when you're in the throes of populations like that i remember reading a study once where they

were studying population in jamaica where a lot of these people who were 75 years old had been doing it their whole lives and they didn't show any anything that would make you your your eyes bulge out your hair stand up i mean nothing seemed that out of the ordinary in terms of whether you're talking about cancer rates or any of these other things. If there were something like that, God, it would be beaten into our head right now. All the proponents of pharmaceutical drugs and all the people that are making money off of marijuana remaining in this Schedule 1 category, which are pretty significant. There's a lot of people that make money off of it. The Schedule 1 category is ridiculous. I mean, that's just crazy.

Do you see what's going on in Arizona? I tweeted about it, I think, yesterday. The people who were protesting against marijuana being legalized in Arizona, the people who were spending the most money, we're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars to try to keep marijuana illegal in Arizona Arizona are directly tied to pharmaceutical drugs, directly tied to pain pills, specifically the stuff that killed Prince. What's that stuff called? Fentanyl.

Yeah, fentanyl. Well, Arizona's a weird state, too. They have some very conservative people. This is the alcohol industry. Before that, there was one. So it's the alcohol industry, and then there's also the fentanyl industry. It might be a little bit earlier. Just scroll down a little bit further, see if you can find it.

But it's just bizarre that we allow that stuff, and it's so transparent today, as opposed to this stuff all went on behind the scenes 100 years ago, which of course is why marijuana got made illegal. There, fentanyl maker donates big to campaign opposing pot legalization that's fast yeah there you go five hundred thousand dollars towards defeating a ballot initiative that would make recreational use of marijuana legal under arizona law you're just criminals you're a bunch of crooks the the fact that you guys would spend that much money to stop a drug that has nothing to do with what you do but i would make the case and this is

pretty much what my political show has been about since the very beginning, is that that's a factor of the corruption in our system. When it's a pay-to-play system, well, I mean, then that's how this happens. If you're going to impact somebody else's business by legalizing something else, then the way you fight that is you go out there and you donate to the cause. I mean, in other words, instead of the people getting what they want, it's whomever donates the most. And I remember Justice Scalia, before he died, was part of a ruling where he basically said, that's not a bug, it's a feature. This is the way the system is supposed to work. You know, money is supposed to represent the views of people. And if it's poor people,

they can bundle it all together. And then if there's no money, obviously, there's not a lot of people who care. And that was the theory. But what it's really done is mean if you don't have money flowing into Washington, you don't count. You're not at the table. Right. So there's whole sectors of the American society that are essentially unrepresented because there's no money coming from them. That's the real problem.

And wasn't this sort of structure, the government structure that sort of enforces that or relies on that? It was kind of established before corporations were. And definitely established before corporations were allowed to act as an individual and donate insane amounts of money to campaigns. The problem, you know, and you look at it and you just, you can see how it happened because you could see that the people that gave a little money back in the days when you could only give this much money had a little influence. So what do you want to do? You want to influence them to let you give a little bit more. And slowly but surely you evolve into a system. I mean, I was talking to my wife about this the other day where we were talking about how it was never a good system. But it was a fairer system back when I was a kid in the 1970s, because some of the money came from entities that represented people who were blue-collar people.

now. So if you were a pipe fitter or a plumber or those people that had, you know, electricians had pretty powerful unions, those people would bundle money and those unions would give money to candidates that sort of compensated for the fact that you had corporate money or whatever in other directions. In the 1980s, when the Democrats started getting waxed regularly and where, you know, due to Reagan changing tax policies and whatever else, we started to get some really wealthy people and the unions started getting less powerful. All of a sudden, you know, due to Reagan changing tax policies and whatever else, we started to get some really wealthy people and the unions started getting less powerful. All of a sudden, you know, there's Willie Sutton, the bank robber, was famously asked, you know, why do you rob banks? He says, that's where the money is. Well, in the 80s, you know, after 84, especially after Mondale got waxed by Reagan, that's when superdelegates started, too. They went and they looked and they

said, OK, what do we need to compete? Because if you look at the long term trends, the people that Republicans tend to get money from, they're just getting more money. The people that we tend to get money from are getting weaker. And that's when that's the role Bill Clinton played in the Democratic Leadership Council, where they basically said we can go and get money from those same sources. So they did. OK, so fast forward to now, everybody's taking money from those same sources. So they did. OK, so fast forward to now, everybody's taken money from those same sources and the people that are lower and middle class have no way to break into that game. Right. So if, you know, Lawrence Lessig, the Harvard law professor, did a great book called Republic Lost, where he pointed out how he went and interviewed politicians who didn't even realize there was another side sometimes to the issue they were voting on because they hadn't heard from any money. there was another side sometimes to the issue they were voting on because they hadn't heard from any money, right? So you almost felt like a lot of these people were almost blameless because in their minds, well, nobody cares about this or I would have had some money coming in for that.

It's strange how the systems evolve. But the one thing you can say for sure is you're not getting money from people who don't have money. And so eventually we get to this dichotomy where there are a lot of people in this country right now. What's that old line about taxation without representation? A lot of people in this country are not represented. A hundred percent. And also you have to think about how many people feel disenfranchised by this system. And it doesn't seem like it's going to be fixed anytime soon because the amount of people that are contributing to these campaigns, when you look at the percentage of human beings on this landmass, is very small. So the amount of people that have influence, it's a very small amount of people that are affecting

the lives of a vast majority of people. And it becomes a very weird sort of scenario when we continue with the same representative government structure that we had back when it was impossible to communicate with people on the other side of the country. Like you had to send a Morse code or a guy on a horse with a letter. It was hard. So this is why they decided to have representative government in the first place. You couldn't communicate with people. Now that you can, it's like we really ultimately have to decide, I think, one day, is one person one vote? Like do we all as a mass, as 300 million people get to decide, like if 190

million people think one thing and the rest think another thing? How does this all work out? Like, how do how do we decide? Because right now, we have delegates, we have representatives, we have senators, we have all these different people that sort of buffer us from the actual decisions that are being made. And I think as we as it becomes easier and easier to communicate and express your opinions and give your thoughts on things, the option of voting online and the option of voting directly for issues without representation seems more and more enticing to people. Yeah, but you'd have to change the Constitution. Yeah. Wouldn't that be a good idea? It's old as fuck it depends i'm reading

a book right now that talks about our government actually operating sort of between the lines of the of the constitution so there's room to maneuver and over time for understandable reasons like security and other things i mean the fact that nuclear bombs were invented changed everything that within those lines there's room to sort of expand what you can do. But you do that generation after generation. And then you look around and go, how did we get, you know, from where we were in 1940 to where we are now? It's almost inexplicable. And sometimes when I talk about reform, you try to figure out how you can dial things back. But we've come so far beyond any point you could dial it back to, it becomes really hard to imagine.

It's like you have an old mainframe computer that you've patched and patched and patched. And the only way now to make any real reform is to throw the computer out and buy a new Mac and start from scratch. And nobody can do that. I mean, you can't even figure out how to get that done. Yeah, it's almost like we need an asteroid to take out the grid. Just come down and boom and wreck the whole thing. Just a big earthquake or tidal wave. It would have to be a big thing.

A big thing that unfortunately kills a lot of people. I know. Then the government will step in and say, well, we have to take care of all of you now. Security, martial law, people on the street corners. Or the government's dead. Or it hits them. Imagine how like symbolmatic it would be. Symbolic it would be, rather.

Symbolic is an inordinate word. Imagine how amazing it would be if that's the only place where an asteroid hit. If it hit the Pentagon and the White House. If, like, there's two broken up chunks of space rock.

One slams into the Pentagon, kills everyone. They blame terrorism. Yeah, the god of terror. The god of terror. Yeah, I mean, that's really almost the only way. Something has to be catastrophic in order for them to try to reset and rebuild a completely new system. And then people would have to agree.

They'd have to get together and go, okay, are we going to go back to that thing that was written on hemp by people that wrote with feathers? Or are we going to like redo this we're going to figure this out from a modern perspective knowing what we know now about our ability to communicate and knowing what we know now about all the things that are fought the founding fathers this country did an amazing job of trying to protect from corruption you know trying to make sure that their their vision of what America could be, that this experiment in self-government, and they put all these safeguards in play. But there's no way they could have ever predicted how far technology would have taken us in the 200 plus years since they did that. There's just no way. They couldn't have any idea. So now that we know where we are now, and we can sort of kind of extrapolate where it's going

to be in the next 50, 100 years, and maybe plan for the future, the digital future that we're dealing with now. And then we, you know, if that was the case, we would have put in some, some things that people would agree with in regards to like what the NSA got caught with, you know, with the mass surveillance of the public. Let's talk about that for a bit, because I was just going to go there. You know, I was thinking not that long ago, if you could, if they forced you, because we all understand that history is an evolution. So all of this is the result of decades and decades and generations of generations of building stuff on top of other things. But if you had to pick the time that was most transformative

for all those things you were talking about you have to go back to the united states between 1947 and 1948 that's when harry truman and the government um passed these rules that made everything we talk about today the nsa the cia all those things are developments from like national security i mean nC 68 is one of those big ones. A bunch of these rules that created the modern United States, we'll call it the secret government that we know about today.

And, you know, if you go back in time, you can certainly understand what they were thinking. I mean, you have to remember how crazy it was after the Second World War and this feeling that the Soviet Union was this threat to the whole world. And now you have nuclear weapons. And can you really declare war if there's nuclear weapons that could be, you know, there's a whole bunch of things where you go, okay, I kind of get what was going on. But it didn't take Harry Truman long, you know, after he left office to say,

I made a few mistakes, including things like the CIA and whatnot. But once you start those programs, there's an autopilot that happens, and they develop a momentum of their own. So if you said today, because I would make this case, if you wanted to look at this the way my stepfather would, he was a total profit and loss guy, and you would look at something like the CIA, you would say the CIA is a terrible failure. They miss all the big things, whether it's the fall of the Soviet Union, you name it, right? The CIA has got major failures. And then you said, you know, all the things that they've done that were nefarious that they shouldn't have. So if this were a private business, you'd turn around and go,

well, listen, that's a lost thing right there. You know, let's take that division, scrap it, start over. You can't do that in a government for some reason. It's almost impossible to decide this whole area has been a failure. So's start over and that's the problem because i'm not sure you can reform things that are that are flawed at the seeds do you know what i mean yeah um and and the cia is a perfect example but even the nsa i mean did you see that this week they're once again trying to slip a bill in that would allow the government without a warrant to track you know every website you go to and all these things. How does this stuff get that far? They're going to attach it to a totally unrelated bill so that you don't know about it again.

How do they get away with this? Most likely, it's just justifying something they're already doing. Well, and they're legitimately afraid. There's stuff to be afraid of. So I don't always, you know, you have to cut them a little slack. But there's no weighing at all about the downside. I mean, it's almost like the only thing we pay attention to is the terror side of the ledger, not the fact that do you, John McCain or Lindsey Graham,

do you really want the government knowing every website, especially Lindsey Graham? There's got to be some websites there that he really would not like the government to know about. Come on, at least think about yourself, you know. So I don't know how you stop this dynamic. We're such a fearful people that that's what's going to kill us. Well, we know what we I don't know how you stop this dynamic. We're such a fearful people that that's what's going to kill us. Well, we know what we've done to other people. We know payback is probably likely. That's a real thing to consider. What's really sad is I've always had this rose-colored view of us, and I acknowledge that it's a myth, but I always look at the myth

of America, as I call it, the 1950s high school textbook view of America. That, to me, is what I want to move towards. So when they talk about creating a more perfect union, that, to me, is the goal. And anything that conflicts with that self-image, to me, is the problem. So when you see sometimes how we really operate, anything Dick Cheney does, and I don't use the word evil, so I'll use the word nefarious. Dick Cheney is, to me, when you say, what do you want to avoid I'll use the word nefarious. Dick Cheney is to me, when you say, what do you want to avoid in this country? I want to avoid where Dick Cheney wants us to go, because nothing conflicts with my 1950s mythological American textbook idea than what Cheney wants us to be. And when you look at some of the things we've done, some of the things based on that 1947, 1948 America, which we thought, OK, we have to do everything to stop global communism

they're going to take over the country once you look at some of the things we did and you realize some of what we're dealing with today is blowback you don't know how to undo that i mean you almost think it's like permanent damage look at the way some in the middle east see us i mean uh i'll talk to people like i remember talking to sam harris about this and he was talking about well you have to see things this certain way and i said yes but that's not going to help you solve the problem. How do you solve the problem? If we've already, if we've already soiled our bed so much that you don't know how to fix that, you don't know how to go and say, listen, we're sorry about this. Can we start from scratch? You can't do that in foreign affairs, just like you can't do it with the mainframe computer that

is the government. You know, I can't figure out how to, how to reverse course to a point where we can once again fix stuff, right? It's too damaged. I think it just has to dry out slowly but surely. Like all the wounds of the past have to heal up and dry out. And it just takes time and several generations. But how do you do it when they're still after you? I mean, we've already made enough people mad at us so that they're after us. Well, now we have to go protect ourselves by going and getting them so we perpetuate the cycle.

Like I can't figure out how to jump off the merry-go-round. Do you know what I mean? I don't think it moves that way. I think we're trying to make a battleship move like a race car. And I just think it takes a long time to shift course. And when we're looking at these people that are in the Middle East that are opposing the U.S. right now and angry and want to attack the U.S. right now, you're most likely never going to get to them. You might get to their grandchildren. And I think that might be the only way things slowly but surely settle down. And that's the argument for the NSA and the CIA to continue to monitor things that are really kind of ridiculous and invasive level.

Because there's so many people out there that hate us or hate the government and hate the military and hate what's happened to them. And so many martyrs are created every time a drone strike goes wrong. That's where I was going to go. How do you get that next generation to not hate us when we're busy killing their parents because their parents want to kill us? I mean, that's the cycle. And I can't figure out how to break the cycle, right?

Nobody can. How do you protect ourselves from their anti-American parents in a way that doesn't turn them against us, too? Does that make sense? It definitely makes sense. And it's hard. No one has a real logical answer to that. I mean, you talk to the Ron Paul supporters, and they think we should just separate and don't police the world and take care of our own and just stay out of these countries.

But there are still people who want to kill us. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then you talk to the people that are in the Dick Cheney camp that are like, you're out of your mind. You're living in a dream movie world. The real world is dirty and nasty. And we need all these people. We need all these operatives. We need people constantly monitoring these hot spots all around the world.

Because, like, look what's going on in North Korea. They're fucking testing nuclear bombs now. And, you know, what are we doing? We're flying by. We're making these threatening gestures. We're flying fighter jets around North Korea. It's really spooky. It's spooky because something can happen.

And we don't have anybody over there, you know, at least as far as I know. I mean, I don't know. Maybe we have some deep, deep, deep undercover CIA people working as North Korean soldiers, but... I'll tell you what upsets me, though, because we were just talking about getting off the merry-go-round. It means kind of not perpetuating the same mistakes we've made before. But what drives me crazy about our system is that the people who make mistakes, and I've always said, you know, you've forgiven. People make mistakes. You're going to make a mistake right you shouldn't be allowed to make another one though right at the highest levels of government when you send people to war and we shouldn't have

gone to war i'll cut you some slack but i don't want you then going on cnn and being the expert who tells us how to handle the next crisis right because your track record sucks dick cheney's got a terrible track record we still listen to him he He still gets to be a person who moves the public debate. And there's a lot of people like that. You look at the John Boltons. There's a heck of a lot of these guys who are consistently and regularly wrong. Yeah, but he was wrong as heck about Iraq and all these other things. So we're going to listen to him on that next subject. We don't make people who are wrong in this country pay the price, which means, you know, if you're in a private if you're a doctor and you screw up a few surgeries and people who should not die, die, you're done. You'll be out of business. They will take your license.

You won't get to kill any more people in government. You can continue to make these errors and you you be promoted. You'll be in a position to make more. That'll kill you over the long haul. Do you wonder what motivation does Dick Cheney have? I mean, he doesn't even have a heart. They took his heart out. They stuck some cadaver heart in there. Listen, it's a worldview, but it's not a 1950s US high school textbook worldview. Right. But I mean, why is he doing it? Like, what is his motivation for continuing to keep his fingers? Depends on who you ask. Sometimes it's money.

Sometimes it's powerful friends. I've talked to these people and they'll give you the old, you don't know how the world works speech. Right. Right. And at that point, you have to say to yourself, okay, listen, I know the Constitution is just a piece of paper, but at some point there's a rubber meets the road. That's going to be my word for today's Joe Rogan show. It'll be my fly in the ointment for today's Joe Rogan show. But there's

got to be a point where somebody has to sit down and say, look, we have a constitution that does this. Here's the way the world really works. Now, either we're going to go back to one or we're going to discard one and completely embrace the other. At this point, we embrace the hypocrisy that we still live like this, but the world's a difficult, tough place, so we're acting like that. Does that make sense? Yeah, no, no, it does. It definitely makes sense. And that dichotomy is what makes so many Americans angry.

Yeah, yeah. Well, it's amazing that we've limited the amount of attacks on American soil to 9-11 and Pearl Harbor. Well, you know, you had the Orlando attack. It depends on what you classify an attack. The Orlando attack was a crazy fuck that lived in America. I mean, that was a guy. Lone wolf stuff. Yeah.

Was that guy proven to be gay? Or is that like, I don't know what that is. I'm sure he's gay. How about that? But that's a perfect example, though, of why this is so tough to defend yourself against. And this is the same thing, by the way. The country has been worried about American radicals for decades. I mean, you go look at how we treated the 1960s leftist radicals

that were putting bombs in the Pentagon and stuff like that. I mean, it always blows my mind to realize that if those guys were doing that today, we might waterboard them at Guantanamo. So I think the domestic radical idea has been something the government's been worried about since the first Red Scare in the 1919 era and the anarchists and that whole era. Yeah, and I think whenever you have a government, whenever you have people that are in charge, it's going to be people that oppose those people. And they're going to try to go through – some people that are opposing them are going to go through legal channels and they're going to protest legally and they're going to organize and, you know, give speeches and other people are going to say, look, that doesn't work. We're going to do this guerrilla understand that there's going to be some of those. But if you did that in a private business, Joe, if you work for a boss, you're delivering pizzas at the pizza company and the boss says to you, listen, sometimes I have to have a little plausible deniability.

So if you have to stamp something top secret on your on your order form, I won't look at it and we'll all be cool. Okay, so one day you're out with prostitutes and drinking beer and you don't deliver your pizzas and you think, if I put top secret on this, the boss won't see it. It will be great. I mean, it's human nature that after a while you're going to start to classify stuff that really shouldn't be secret, right? Yeah. And I said this in the last show. And I said this in the last show. I talked to an intelligence operative once who wouldn't tell me anything except I asked him a question once about if you had to guess what percentage of stuff is the stuff that Americans would agree should be kept secret.

He said about 10 percent. I said, what's the rest? He said, everything you can think of. He said, cover your own rear end corporate deal that a senator doesn't want his constituents to know about for 40 years because he'll get voted. deal that a senator doesn't want his constituents to know about for 40 years because he'll get voted you know all the and it's it becomes a point where when you're keeping that much stuff from the american people that they have a right to know it seems to me inevitable that there will be literally leaks like you're trying to cover too much dam with with too little concrete it's natural i think and some of these guys like william binney's the the one that everybody knows he said i went through every channel I

was supposed to go to, and I ended up with officers pointing, federal agents pointing machine guns at me as I came out of the shower. So when the system breaks down to the point where the whistleblowers go through the proper channels and they become the ones who get into trouble, then you're asking for leaks. And it's hard to say, I feel sorry for you that they leaked that vital information. But if you haven't been keeping non-vital information from us for so long, that might not have happened. And then you do get releases of stuff that none of us thinks should be released. That's the pie now. Yeah. Yeah, baked into it. It seems like there's almost no way to keep stuff secret now. If you are an operative at the Democratic or Republican parties, how much would you want to bake it into the cake that you try to see that there'll be a leak against your opponents before the next election? How much does that now become a part of your strategizing? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. For sure. I'll put out a little stuff that I hacked on the DNC kind of attitude, you know, or whatever. I mean, listen, and if the Russians are, you know, Vladimir Putin said that, what's the problem? Shouldn't we just look, American people should know this stuff, so we release this information, or somebody releases this information. But if they only release information on one side, have they influenced the election? Right, so you have to be careful how that works, too.

They have the ability to sort of set the tone of the discussion. Yeah, I wonder what if they check the Republicans, if they checked like what kind of crazy shit was said when they realized that Donald Trump was running away with it. I heard something that there'd been a hack and it was like new news, so I'm not up to speed, but that there'd been a hack of the RNC, too. Did you see everybody's freaking out now over the fact, and again, we have to make the disclaimer, that the Russian hackers or whomever, I have these Russian hackers who get mad at me when I say that, whomever it was that did this, that they've been known to alter stuff. So you have to take it all with a grain of salt.

But what came out, I guess, was a list, and this is from the Democratic Party's main list of donors right their internal documents which shows the top donors how much they gave and then what was given in return ambassadorships director of homeland security all that kind of stuff now here's the funky part that's as old almost as the republic it was called the spoil system in the early 1800s right i win elections so all my buddies get jobs right everybody who supported me so there have been acts though ever since then the hatch act was one where they tried to limit that and both parties act like they don't do it anymore so when it comes out that they still do people freak out but here's the truth if the democrats do it i'm sure the republicans do it too i'd love to see a list from the last republican administration who their top donors were and you

know all you have to do is look at who the ambassadors were and especially the ambassadors to good places right who's the ambassador to bermuda who's the ambassador to london the the uk one is always a coveted position. How much did that guy give? And because it's always been the way it is, there's a part of me that goes, eh, what are you going to do? But the other part of me goes, that's the corruption you wish more Americans knew was built into the system. If you found out that the guy who's in charge of making sure this country's safe in the Homeland Security Department got the job because he gave money to get the job, how much less safe are we than if you gave it to the most qualified candidate? It's a very important point. And how many people are doing it for vanity positions, just so they can say they are that ambassador to London? I just saw a way to reform, Joe. So all we have to do is get some really rich marijuana grower

to give enough money so that he becomes the Department of Homeland Security director, and you can get that corruption thing working in your favor. That's actually possible with the amount of money they're making in Colorado. You never know. Director of Homeland Security made all of his money growing weed. That would be ridiculous. And it comes full circle. How much have you paid attention to all the controversy about the Clinton Foundation?

I have a special relationship with the Clintons. You know, I was in talk radio during that whole administration. And they're relatively unique people as a couple. And they're very hard to describe. And I always try to be fair. You know, I'm very into fair and seeing context. But let's be honest. These are two people that, you know, here's the way I look at it.

If you're Hillary Clinton, and they have been after you since before your husband was president, you know, in Arkansas, they were after them. Right. So, you know how on you they're going to be. Wouldn't you stay so far away from any lines that nobody could ever come close to saying you were? But they don't. They both walk and straddle. And that, you know, if you talk to people in Arkansas, they just say, that's the Clintons. They walk the straddle the line. And a lot of times they go, you know, in too much of wonder. And why would you do that? We talked about this with Anthony Weiner, you and I a long time ago. If you know that stuff's out there, why would you go and run for office again? It's the same thing with Clinton. If you know you're the most watched man in the world, why on earth would you have an affair with a teenage intern who you know will not stay quiet about it? It boggles the mind. So if you're Hillary Clinton and you've got everyone trying to come up with dirt on you, why would you do anything that was even suspicious?

And yet they still walk that line. I don't get't get it well don't you think that first of all their patterns and their behavior and their attitudes towards things were established in the 1980s when the world was a much simpler place and you can get away with what happened in mina arkansas with all that craziness with you know the the dropping drugs out of airplanes and uh when when you know which is all part of that narco series it's in in the narco series I mean somebody was in on it I mean the the guy who got shot and killed who was about to testify for George Bush what the fuck was his name um you're not thinking Vince Foster no they no no no the the pilot that was the drug pilot I remember the story damn it I. I remember the story. God damn it, I can't remember his name. I remember the story, though. Yeah, so...

Flying a Cessna into the backwoods. Obviously, some people knew about this. Obviously, the CIA was involved. This guy was involved with some cowboys in the CIA. They were bringing drugs in from other countries. Remember, they were doing that during the Iran-Contra thing in the 80s. So it's not old news, yeah. No, so somehow or another, that was standard operational procedure, at least on some level,

whether it's rogue agents in the CIA or rogue people in the government or whoever was profiting on it. And that was also, of course, what was going on in South Central Los Angeles during the Contras versus the Sandinistas. There was a relationship. Yeah, they were making money by selling drugs in the ghetto, and they were taking that money, and it was directly affecting global politics. See, in a country that cared about reform, how many of those things have to happen before

somebody would turn around and say, okay, we have a big problem, and we have to weed that problem out of the CIA or whichever agency you want to name so that it doesn't happen again. When that doesn't happen, I remember looking into police departments that had problems and in LA when I was growing up, you knew which ones to avoid. For example, there was one in Signal Hill and we all knew you don't want to get pulled over there. So eventually they had to disband the whole police department and start from scratch

because every time they tried to reform it, there was a culture in that little police department that absorbed new members. And the people that wouldn't become part of the culture ended up transferring out and the people that worked with the culture stayed. That's a microchasm of how all these giant agencies work, where how do you change the culture of something when you would have to get rid of the people who are there now who all bought in or they wouldn't still be there it's like we were saying about the mainframe computer if you wanted to start the cia over today would you use any of the people that are in it now hard to know because i think if you didn't you'd end up with an agency that thought listen listen, we're keeping America safe. And if we have to dose people with LSD, as happened in the late 50s, early 1960s,

as a way to make sure that our people aren't dosed with LSD, we're going to do it. The pilot was Barry Seals. I was trying to remember. Well done. See, you're having the same problem I am a little bit, though. Too many goddamn people in this world. That's too much stuff in our brains. Too much data. We just had too much stuff in our brains. Too much data.

But the, so the Clintons in the 1980s, they pretty much were able to get away with pretty much whatever they wanted. I mean, they had so much immense power, right? Well, this is Arkansas stuff. The governor of Arkansas. Yeah, but he was a freak of freaks, right? Dude was just whipping his dick out all over the place. Well, what's funny is Arkansas is not exactly a pipeline to the white house either so in that sense it was it was a little like getting somebody from you know mississippi as your president it's just a little different well yeah no no doubt no doubt whatsoever

but this time like when all this stuff was going on established their behavior patterns maybe and then well mean arkansas of course, is where the CIA was dropped or someone in the CIA, some rogue agent. I don't think it was like a systemic thing inside the CIA where the top of the CIA was aware of it

and condoned it and sanctioned it. But someone was bringing in drugs and they were bringing in drugs to Arkansas. I don't think it's a coincidence that the fucking governor of Arkansas

gets fast-tracked to becoming the president. It's probably in some way related in some some fiber whether it's i don't think it's the most important aspect of his governorship but there's some connection there it has to be i'll tell you what though if you go look at at bill clinton in the primaries when he was basically chosen to be the democratic candidate to run against the elder george bush and you look at those stiffs he was up against oh yeah it's how it always is i mean when you look and you go okay there's a bunch of people who i could never vote for a million years and there's one person who's got some charisma right i don't know how it happens that way i mean if somebody wanted to say well that's the part that's rigged listen the two

parties here are private entities that can do whatever they want. Someone said to me the other day, what happens if Hillary Clinton drops out for health reasons? You know, who naturally does the job devolve to? And I said, whoever the Democratic National Committee wants it to. Which is really fascinating when those people are registered Democrats. Yeah, they make themselves out to be like a constitutional pillar of ours. They're not. They're a private entity that can do what they want. And they will do whatever they want if they have to if that comes down to it so all the people that voted in the primaries for hillary that's right bernie or for anybody it doesn't mean anything anymore so now who are you being represented by does the king just choose

someone i mean this is what you're down to you're down to like a monarchy well but that's why you said the founding you talked about the founding fathers earlier and i'm always blown away that madison who's the guy who's most responsible for writing the constitution was like 23 i was the most irresponsible you know goof off in the world i think at 23 so you look at those guys and you realize how much they had a problem with what they called factions their version of factions is what we would call parties today and they thought it was poisonous and yet it was like a generation later and what do they have cropping up factions so it's it would be a really difficult thing it must be an evolutionary natural thing to normally develop in a society like ours but if you decided that that was the poison pill what could you write into the founding documents

that prevented that i I don't know. But to me, that's the root of so much of our evil in this country is we have two parties that control a corrupt system. And in order to fix the corrupt system, the two parties would have to be on board to do it. Well, okay, that's asking, what have we said, the fox to redesign the chicken coop? It's not in the fox's interest. Well, it's also what we're talking about, whether it's the CIA or the NSA. If you're asking them to redesign this thing, you're asking them to relinquish some power. That's right. And to redesign it in a way where they can't get back into it, even if they had to do it to save us. Right. I mean, that's when it gets really wiggy. If you say, I don't want you spying on us anymore. And the next 9-11 attack

we have happened because they couldn't spy on us. You better believe they'll point that out. Yeah. And also, if you had to redesign it, you would have to eliminate some jobs. I mean, there's no way this thing is operating at 100% efficiency. Oh, God. So if somebody really audited it, you know, whether it's the CIA or the FBI or the NSA, I mean, 100% sure they're doing their best. But there's no way it's done really well. It's just the government.

The government fucks up almost everything because most people don't want to work for the government so who do you get you get a bunch of people that well okay i'll do that job it's like is anybody clamoring to be the guy at the nsa that gets to read dan carlin's emails i think i i think what it is i mean a better way to put it is the systems decline i mean it just deteriorates over time and it's it And every system is remarkably hard to go back and fix. And the government especially. We've got 240 years of dead wood, and you don't often go in there and have a spring cleaning session. So I think it's now – and I think the founding fathers were people who were aware. They used to talk about lifespans of countries.

And so that computer analogy we use is a pretty good one. This is an old computer that we've patched many, many times and also tasked to do many, many more things than the Constitution ever envisioned. Because you have a Great Depression or you have a Second World War or you have nuclear weapons appear on the scene. So all of a sudden we have a flexible Constitution to deal with unforeseeables, as you pointed out. OK, but how flexible is it? I mean, at what point have you stretched it so far that it's become a fig leaf? I try to remind people, we did a whole series on the decline and fall of the Roman Republic. And what a lot of people don't know is that when the Roman Empire first appeared, and for a long time afterwards, they kept all the forms. Senators were still elected. I mean,

you have an all-powerful emperor, but they still went through the process of electing senators as though nothing had changed. They still held held elections they still had people giving money to senators to give them favors but we had a system in rome you know as if i was there but at that point it was a total dictatorship but we elected senators anyway because the forms had a long and noble tradition that was tied to the way Romans saw themselves, the same way we're tied to that 1950s high school textbook of who we are. If we had a dictator someday, they would never be able to get rid of senators and— because the forms are very important.

Well, that's one of the biggest fears about the Patriot Act, right, and the Patriot Act II as well, is that if something did happen and martial law was declared, would we really have the same system that we think we have? Would we have that 1950s textbook version of America, or would we really have a military dictatorship that's disguised? I just read a book. I think it was called American Coup. Back 20 years ago, people who wrote those books were conspiracy people who had no real... Now the people writing those books are all insiders and they have generals writing blurbs on the back and this guy it's kind of a boring book because he talks so much about fema and katrina and all these things

but sometimes when you're diagramming how these things happen it's not spy thriller type stuff it's really sometimes run-of-the-mill we had this problem we had his point is that we've been living in a society that's operating between the lines in the constitution for 50 years now and that the government is absolutely petrified about all the threats out there to us and in order to protect us things like little writings on hemp paper from 240 years ago are not going to stand in the way of us protecting us from another 9-11 or a nuclear bomb going off in a harbor or something like that. And of course, the argument that is like, of course, you're going to say you're protecting us. Of course, that's sometimes you are. Sometimes you're not.

controlling vast amounts of wealth, controlling so much of the ability of the United States citizens to do their jobs, to get through life, to do anything they want to do without being infringed on by this group of people that sort of got elected, you know, got elected in some sort of a weird, strange way in an antiquated system that doesn't really make any sense anymore and is only really held accountable up to a certain extent. That's one of the weirder aspects about real government corruption, because the real corruption is the legal shit. Like you're talking about the ledger showing what people did, what and what they received for those donations and how much they gave and how much they got out of it and how they became. Like that is, how is that legal and insider trading is illegal? How is that legal and Martha Quinn goes to jail, not Martha Quinn, she was a DJ. Yeah, the MTV girl.

She's a DJ from MTV. Martha Stewart, rather, goes to jail for a stock trade, you know, where she was not honest about the information that she knew about profiting off a stock trade. It's insane, like the disparity. It's insane how much weird corruption is just entangled into the system that the only way to get rid of would have to be, you would have to stop all those jobs that evolve around all that money coming in. You're dealing with untold millions of dollars that's being siphoned from the system by all

these people, all the lobbyists and all the special interest groups that constantly work in the Washington hive to extract those people at this point. It's almost impossible without a total reset of the system. Well, and look at how things change. So for example, when the Founding Fathers set up war powers, which they understood to be the most important thing, they separated the part where we decide to go to war from the power of fighting the war.

And they gave the power to fight the war to the President. He's the Commander-in-Chief. But they did not give him the power to decide to go to war, right? That's too much power for one guy. They gave that to Congress. So Congress has the power to declare war. Once they do, the president has really extreme emergency authority to fight the war. When Harry Truman took us into Korea in 1950, he called it a police action. And he called it a police action because you don't need to declare war to have a police action. But he sent the United – I mean, we lost 50,000 guys or something in Korea and a lot more Koreans. Once you do that, we've never declared war again.

As a matter of fact, no president even throws that out there. They would love to have a support, a declaration of support by Congress. But once you do that, you break an important wall, the wall that says that the Congress has no way to repair that firewall. So now somebody said to me, if Donald Trump's elected president, can he use a nuclear bomb against a country or can he decide I'm going to scare the heck out of North Korea and I'm going to drop a bomb off their coast? Yes. And he can do it without asking anybody. And the only people that might tell him no are the military. And if the military starts telling the president no, that's almost as scary as a president that can drop a nuclear bomb whenever he wants to. So that's in the in the founders construction of the country. In their mind, you would have had to have gone to Congress and say, can we drop a nuclear bomb

on North Korea? And then Congress would have voted, decided, and then the president would have been empowered to take whatever measures were necessary, right? That firewall's gone. The president has extreme emergency authority in foreign policy now. He didn't have to ask Congress for anything. There's only one thing Congress can do. They have the power of the purse, so they can cut off the funds. But can you imagine our troops, say, in Iraq or Afghanistan, and the Congress doesn't want them there anymore. So the choice they have is to stop sending them meals and replacement bullets. And it's not going to happen.

So those are the ways that the Constitution gets destroyed. And Truman, I mean, you look at what we mentioned earlier, the CIA, the NSA, that power. Truman did more damage to this country in one presidency than anyone I can think of. And yet I cut him some slack because the world had never existed like it existed in his era. He had whole new challenges to deal with. It's like when Obama came into office and promised to undo the extremes of the previous administration. Had he done that, we could have said, okay, extremes of the previous administration. Had he done that, we could have said, okay, 9-11 happened, we freaked out, and then we fixed it, right? We got our balance back. By not doing that,

he codified it. Now that's the rule, right? When both parties agree on something, it becomes the way we do things now. So if Truman had left office, and Eisenhower had come in as a member of the other party, and said, whoa, this CIA thing is more like an American Gestapo. We're going to get rid of it. Boom. Truman is a blip. But when he decides to embrace the CIA, now that's the way we do business. So if the two parties don't sort of look out for each other and say, listen, 9-11 is a one-off strange experience, OK, we understand how somebody could overreact and freak out.

We'll fix it. And instead say, no, we'll keep things the way they are. Then you've taken another step down, another firewall's been broken, and the Constitution's been stretched again to the point where there are big holes in it now. Is there a Fourth Amendment anymore, really? I mean, there's amendments to the Constitution. And people will say to me all the time, Dan, you say our freedom's going away. Tell me when we repealed an amendment. Doesn't work that way. Rome didn't do that, right?

They kept the senators. The forms stay. But the reality can be changed mightily, right? Yeah. And it seems like once it's changed, you know, what is that old saying about power loss never recovered? It's exactly right. And let's understand something. Let's not take the American people off the blame list if another 9-11 happens they're going to go and call for the heads

of the people that voted against spying on you know i mean that's how we are we're such a panicky people that we're not willing to suck up a lot of casualties if that's what's required to defend some of this stuff if you're going to say you can't spy on americans just understand some nasty americans are going to get fertilizer bombs and blow up stuff sometimes because they slip through that protection for you and me and everyone else. Yeah, I wonder if over time, like going back to that battleship analogy, like that's going to be the only thing that clears this up is that the people that start getting elected into office deal with the new level of transparency and the people that are growing up now who eventually become politicians they grow up in a different world and so their view of what's possible and not possible is very different than like we were talking about the Clintons who you know just kind of had an open pass to kind of do a lot of shit that they wanted to do back in the 1980s and in

the 90s and they're still kind of operating Like when you're talking about Hillary Clinton and the Clintons just kind of doing their thing. And if you look at the difference between, this is not a conspiracy theory. If you look at the difference between what Hillary Clinton says the FBI found out about her emails versus what the FBI says about what they found out about Hillary Clinton's emails. Someone's lying. And I don't think it's the FBI. Someone's lying. Like her version of it is a lie. It's just not real. Like what she's saying is not what they're saying. What's the assumption built into that, though? The assumption is that I know that that's not

the real spin that the fbi director put on it and the five percent of americans who read newspapers know that that's not the spin but the majority of people that i'm trying to reach will simply hear what i say yeah and if they want you know and here's the thing i mean this is like a bias we all have if you want to support that candidate anyway you're inclined to believe what they say and disinclined to believe what the other guy says. This is part of the problem about the binary lesser of two evils thing we get into, because Hillary Clinton is one of the most unpopular candidates. I mean, I always tell, you know, I have two daughters, and they constantly ask me these really uncomfortable questions about why don't we have women presidents and all this kind of stuff. So I'm all in favor

of that. And I have a lot of women who say, you know, Hillary Clinton's the most qualified candidate we've ever had for high office. This is all just sexism. And what I try to tell them is, is this really the person you want to be the poster child, though, as the first woman president? Because I'll tell you what, if current trends continue, I don't imagine Republicans are going to lay up on her at all, right? The entire Clinton administration was the Republicans trying to get them for something. So imagine she gets elected. Imagine that they continue to hound her the way they do, and remembering that they tend to walk that line, right, being the Clintons. There's going to be 90% of nothing in there, travel gates and Rose Hill law firms, but there's going to be something they find eventually, and they will impeach her for that.

And if she's the first woman president to be impeached how does that help you as the first you know if the first african-american president had been impeached that wouldn't look very good right and i gotta say president obama you know i don't like a lot of stuff he's done but from a scandal standpoint he'd been pretty good you know by if you grade these people on a curve his scandal record has been pretty good if you don't count accidental deaths and drones that's not a scandal that's standard operating procedure that's how we do that's foreign policy baby that's that's not a bug that's a feature but it seems god it seems like a scandal when people find out the numbers

of innocent people killed by drones and how many of and also the the the real issues with him saying that he was going to support whistleblowers oh yeah and what they've actually done with whistleblowers and how hard they've been on the freedom of the press. It's been a very, very confusing time for a lot of people that were Obama supporters eight years ago and thought, like I did, that this was the answer. Like, finally, we have this super articulate young guy who has a view of the world that's similar to us. He said all the right things when he ran for office. And said them well. But again, what he had said was,

we're going to go and overturn the mistakes of the previous administration. Had he done that, he would have reestablished a few firewalls that we ripped apart. It's always interesting to try to theorize why that didn't happen. People love to tell you those stories. Oh, they took him in the back room

and they showed him the Kennedy assassination and said, any questions? That's a Bill Hicks bit. But you don't know. You don't know. A party, you can say, listen, they took him in the back room and said, here are the threats we stopped last month. Do you really want to do what you say? You don't, but you would love the president to at least say, okay, I'm going to hold a televised press conference now.

And I'm going to say, here's what I said when I ran for president. Here's why I can't do it. Right. You can't do it. Right. You can't do that, though. Yeah, but what I was going to say, when they don't do that, you open up the door to what the hell's going on. He gave you this small promise and that small promise and maybe a health care reform. But he said he was going to essentially repair the Constitution.

And he didn't. So what's the story? Why? Yeah, it's just so hard to guess, and he's not going to tell you. So it's one of those things that we're just going to all have to debate about to the end of time and then go home angry. Well, as everyone says, though, what happens when you get the truly, truly without limits candidate into office without those firewalls? Yeah. I mean, it's one thing to say, listen, the president can drop a nuclear bomb on anybody he wants to legally.

It's another thing to have a president who says, you know, I can drop a nuclear bomb. I'll just, you know, we'll do that. It's also hard to understand, like when you've seen a guy like Trump, and I want to get back to the Clinton Foundation before I forget. But while you've seen a guy like Trump and you listen to the people that have actually interviewed him or talked to him and had conversations with him, like one of them was, I forget what head of military that he was discussing this with, but he was talking about the nuclear option. You know?

Why can't we just use nuclear weapons? Yeah. That line? Yeah. Yeah. You heard about that, right? Yeah. I read a lot about that.

You wonder, like, what was the tone of that discussion? You know, like, we could have- Was he just being curious versus- Yeah. Well, or was he being silly? You know what I look he's donald trump right he's a charmer so he's this public figure he meets people he talks to them he puts on this persona obviously a lot of the stuff he says in a lot of ways he's like a comedian because he's saying many things for effect and whether or not he believes it or not is not the point the point is they're going to get a big impact he's saying many things for effect and whether or not he believes it or not

is not the point the point is they're going to get a big impact he's going to kill you know like so i told the president of mexico the wall just got 10 foot higher right like when he's doing stuff like that he's doing lines those are punch lines right it might not be that funny but it's got it's it's a punch and he's saying those in weird places like Like he's saying, like it's part of what makes him interesting is that he's like this weird entertainer that's hijacked the system. And I say interesting. It's like a very generous use of the word. It's scary. What interests me, though, is you get these.

It's funny because, you know, on Twitter, some of the Trump supporters and I don't ever want to broad brush because I know a lot of people that are going to vote for Trump that are old people that are fine people that are, you know, but there's certainly an edge on some of those people that support him that has certain racism, all kinds of things. We see them on Twitter. And so, you know, when when one of them was talking about, you know, how Donald Trump is this, you know, they cuckservative is one of the words they like to use now you know all those kind of so so this but but to me no american who understands the united states well would want to vote for some strong man that whole attitude of wanting some strong man figure is as un-american as i can think of and if you go study your your roman republic history it was the strong men riding in on a white horse that really signaled the beginning of the end. Anyone who wants too much power

and promises to use it, that's somebody to be afraid of. In my book anyway. No, it's definitely not a measured person. I do not want some strong man. Well, there's things that he says that you know that he's just trying to get a reaction. What did he say about McCain is that he likes people that didn't get caught? I know.

Like, what the fuck are you saying? And when he was basically a guy who, you know, five deferments or whatever he had, that's a, you know, that's chutzpah. He'll spur us and shit. That's chutzpah. I mean, what else is that? But wow. It's also what he does. He says those outrageous things.

He hits those punch. Well, someone's raping him. You know, he's got like these punchlines. And look at who he was up against on the primary stage with a bunch of stiff robotic people repeating talking points. It was a little like Clinton was in his primaries in the early 90s when it's a bunch of deadbeat, stiff, cardboard cutout pretend figures and one person that you don't know what they're going to say next and that becomes interesting well what's interesting is the charismatic type people that we are so attracted to really are not what you want as a leader you don't want that person that needs so much attention that they polish their persona to a point where they're incredibly influential because a lot of that persona a lot of that when you're seeing is it's like they're

entertainers i mean that's what it is when you're seeing, it's like they're entertainers. I mean, that's what it is. When you're a really charismatic person, you figure out a way to speak in a way that people like you more. And then you've exercised that to the point where it's a well-honed muscle with incredible endurance. And you have a great sensitivity to how people are perceiving you. So you know how to come across as noble and patriotic and brilliant and you know we all know that some of the things that people say like standard things that people say there's some of them that you really shouldn't even be able to say anymore

because it doesn't mean anything and shouldn't be allowed to just hijack those words and just use it to gain merit like god bless our troops i know what the fuck do you mean what do you mean by the national anthem when people freak out over that say, listen, it'd be nice if we freaked out a little bit about what these songs and flags and symbols represent instead of freaking out over the symbol and ignoring the stuff. Exactly. Well, I'll tell you what. I mean, we're talking about a person who's in an incredible position of influence, and

they're saying these things that are kind of not like a real sentence. It's not really what you thought. You just knew that other people have said that. It's something you say, so you're saying it. But you're saying it about a very important thing. You're saying about the young people, the children of all the people that are here, the 18-year-old kids that are sent over there to shoot people they've never met. And you're saying, God bless those people.

Well, who's, what is God? Are you saying the invisible man in the sky with the harp? Is that who you're saying? Are you saying God bless our kids to go kill other people's kids? Are you sure that that's how you want to say that? Like you just wanted to have this open statement, God bless our troops.

Do I want our troops to be safe? Of course. Do I wish that we didn't have to use them? We didn't have to have... Absolutely. It's not a negative in any way, shape or form towards the military, but it's these expressions that leaders are just, they're freely allowed to plug into. that are super, like, not just charged, but the consequences of being wrong or right or being unsuccessful are massive. They're just gigantic. You mentioned something I've always found very interesting,

which is the charisma of the individual. I had a poli-sci professor back in college who happened to be a German guy. So he was sort of viewing our system from outside our system. And he said, you know, this is how he used to say, he says, the problem with you Americans is you have a president that combines two jobs. If you were a European country, that would be two jobs. One is the bean counter guy, the one you were mentioned, the guy you want to be president, the one that's, you know, he's maybe not so great at the big speeches.

And you don't want that guy going to the funerals and representing America. And he goes, and then we have in Europe chancellors or presidents that these people physically represent the soul. They go to the funerals. So he said, you want John Wayne to be that guy, and then you want some bean counter to be the other guy. But in your country, you require both of those things in the same person. He says, do you know how often you get John Wayne, who's also a bean counter? He goes, that's your problem. He goes, you end up usually electing the John Wayne and wishing you'd had a bean counter.

So, I mean, in Europe, he said those are two separate jobs. It's a good point. It's a good point. What I was getting at by the expressions is like saying things like God bless the troops or God bless America is that just the whole way of talking as a politician is so, it's so false and so accepted that we know that they're going to stand in front of all these people with this pre-planned out speech that is like this weird rally, this weird artificial strip club DJ voice that they put on. You know what I mean?

It's like- But this is why Trump was so, even to me, attractive early because he exposed what what happened to rubio was a perfect example if you remember the primary debates with trump and rubio rubio kept repeating the talking points so then christy among other people said that's a talking point you keep saying it and then he said it again two more times almost proving that this is all scripted. The fun part of Donald Trump earlier on was he exposed all that, because you sometimes got the feeling that he didn't prep at all, right? I mean, you didn't know what he was going to say. I loved trying to imagine the dilemma. You know, before these debates, they always have someone stand in for the other candidate. Who do

you get to stand in for Trump? Like with Hillary Clinton practicing her debates, who sits there? You have to get a comedian or something. But the point is that that was the fun. He exposed kind of the artificial kabuki theater sort of way this has developed. And I liked that because I think it's good when more Americans see what it really is. In other words, most of the time, you're right. They either get fooled by that or they've heard it so many times they don't even pay attention. Trump helped expose that. So

in that sense, that was good for the system. Of course, now we've gone quite a bit farther down that road. And I don't think it is so good for the system anymore. I do think anybody would beat Hillary Clinton almost. I mean, I think, you know, Democrats keep saying to me, if you don't vote for Hillary Clinton, you're going to put Trump in office and that'll be your fault. And I keep saying, it's not my fault you put Hillary Clinton up as your candidate. I mean, in 2008, we saw how unpopular she was. She shouldn't have lost to Barack Obama. She was going to be coronated then. year old democratic socialist who let's be honest does not have a ton of charisma and a guy nobody's ever heard from as her only two primary challengers up on that stage she wouldn't be here if joe biden and this is the first time i can think of that a vice president hasn't tried to run him if joe biden had run he would be up against trump now and i don't think trump would stand a chance to be honest and i don't like joe biden but i just think he's a zero. And right now, Trump is a negative running against Hillary, who's a negative. A zero kicks both their rear ends.

Yeah. And he's also a zero who's had no negative consequences of eight years in office. Which is amazing because he's known for gaffes. Yeah, he's a goofy dude. Well, we used to have this thing in Boston at Stitch's Comedy Club, we'd call it Joe Biden night. This is 1988. Malarkey. He's an Irish guy. We would steal other people's material. That's what you would do. Joe Biden. Yeah, because people don't know, but Biden plagiarized

Kennedy's speeches when he was running for president in 88. It was a big deal. I recall. Everybody's kind of forgot about that, but he literally just stole giant passages out of Kennedy's. I love that that's something we look back on now and go, ah, the good old days when that was the only thing we could slam somebody for. Well, they're still doing it.

Like, didn't Melania or how do you say her? She stole. She claims she didn't, but it's a remarkable coincidence. Well, it's Michelle Obama's exact words, isn't it? I know. What are the odds? She didn't write that shit anyway. I wouldn't be surprised, and someone brought this up, and it wasn't me, but someone suggested it, and I think they're probably right that Trump did it on purpose and plagiarized Michelle Obama's speech so that people would talk about it.

So it would give even more attention to his campaign. I love the Trump questions. Like, I mean, Michael Moore, of all people, came out with a piece about three weeks ago and he started the piece off by saying something to the effect of you don't have to believe what I'm about to tell you. But I will tell you that I have spoken to people who are in the know who tell me that Trump doesn't even want this gig, that this is something that has gotten out of control, that this was more of a I'll get a TV series afterwards. And that he didn't expect to do this? Good. And I thought to myself, OK, I don't know that I believe that. But if that's true, this is the most unusual, funky, weird American political history story I've ever heard. I think it's the last gaps of a dying empire. I just don't think you can continue the way they've been doing it. I think this is showing us that there are no good representatives.

There's there's no good candidates. There's no way we didn't know about them if they were there. We would know about them. I mean, maybe there's some young senators that are coming up and there's some young congresspeople that are coming up. Maybe. Well, this was in Lawrence Lessig's book, Republic Lost, which, by the way, if anyone wants to go check out, he put it on the internet for free now. So you can read it. And one of the lines... Was he a commie?

Well, Harvard, maybe. But one of the things well harvard maybe um so so but one of the things he said in there that was so interesting is he showed how people who are getting started you know running for mayor you know the low level things how the parties begin the weeding out process and the first thing that they want to know is how good are you at raising money and this determines whether or not the party lets this mayoral candidate put the R or D after their name or that mayoral candidate. So in other words, from the very beginning, one of the main qualifications is how good are you at raising money? Okay, so fast forward to when that guy or woman is up on the stage running for president, and they have four other elected positions leading up to that, all of which require you to be a better fundraiser.

When that's one of the number one qualifications required for the parties to let you progress, then what do you end up with at the end of the line? I mean, what are the carrots and sticks that they're looking for? A little bit different than maybe what you and I as voters are looking for. That's why Trump is such a weird one, right? Because he's a guy who has so much money. He funded most of this shit by himself, allegedly. Allegedly.

Yeah. People like to... He obviously has money. Or credit. He's got really good credit. I mean, he could sell some of his shit and he would have money. He owns some of that stuff. It seems like he does have a lot of stuff and maybe his money's wrapped up in a lot

of that stuff, I guess. I don't know. I'd like to stop voting for 70-year-old people and it's not an ageism kind of thing. But as a person who just mentioned to you that at 50 I'm starting to forget things, I can only imagine what I'll be like in 20 years well i said that about hillary clinton and people call me sexist they were like that sex i'm like she's an old lady he's an old man that's right you know what 70 was if you go watch those tv shows from like the 1950s and you see their portrayal of a 70 year old, it's sitting on the porch, falling asleep

and whittling. You know, I mean, that's what this is. 70 may be the new 60, but 60 ain't great either. Well, it's definitely not the prime of your cognitive abilities. It's not the prime. Your experience level may be good, but your bus speed is terrible. There you go again with the bus. I love that. Trump, I mean, doesn't even have experience. So it's even more bizarre. So it's not like you're dealing with this elderly statesman that has so much knowledge and so much invested in our system of government and really believes in it so much that he wants to lead this country and make America great again. No, you get a super rich guy who's famous for going, you're fired. And when Trump supporters say, well, he'll pick the best people, I always want to point out, you know, he's already shown some of the people that he likes.

And there's the same old group of people you've had before. I mean, he's not going and picking other business people who've never, he goes and finds his four, and you're going, okay, it's the same group. I mean, so I get Donald Trump presiding over the same old group of people who've been wrong about everything so far. I mean, that's the problem is that how do you get away from the people who are consistently wrong? In a merit-based system, the people that should be promoted are the ones who are right more often. We don't get that.

We have the same faces forever. Forever. I mean, the same guys who are, I always say, if CNN is going to put, to just name one, these experts to tell us what this latest

North Korea nuclear missile thing means, would you please put up their track record the way you would put up the wins and loss record of a manager in baseball do you want that manager who's who's four and 72 explaining to you the world series strategy or are you going to say this guy doesn't know jack because if they put the records of these people they have on the programs you'd look at it and go I'm not listening to this guy. He's consistently wrong. Yeah But once someone becomes someone that people recognize like in that regard you're an expert. Yeah, you're in the Rolodex I'll call you what I need a quote. That's right. It's just It's a weird time. I think it is the weirdest time ever in politics

I don't think there's ever been anything weirder than this well Let me show you what bothers an independent like yours truly. If you look at the demographics of the United States, the independents are actually, the last poll I saw, we're a slight majority now. So divide the pie into three, Democrats, Republicans, and everybody else, which is what the independents are. We're not a party. We don't have a candidate we could agree upon, but we're everyone else. We're the kingmakers in this election, right? but we're everyone else. We're the kingmakers in this election, right? Then you watch a TV,

you watch CNN or Fox, and they have 10,000 analysts talking about politics on there, on election night and everything else. And half of them are Democratic operatives, and half are Republican operatives. Where the heck is anybody who could speak for that giant slice of the pie? And you would think that common sense would dictate you would grab some people, right? What are independents thinking? Instead, they ask Democrats and Republicans what independents are thinking. And I'm not saying that because I have a point. I'm saying that because it confounds me. I don't get it.

It seems pretty straightforward. It seems like if CNN or any of these news networks decided to help support this independent idea and bring in independents and show that, that independents are the vast majority of the voters or the majority rather. Slight majority. Slight majority of the voters in America. If they showed that and promoted that idea and people would go, wow, I didn't know that. That kind of reporting could shift. But are they in on a conspiracy like that?

No, I think they're complicit because they have relationships with the people that they're interviewing. I think that's true. And they know that, look, where's the money? The money is interviewing and getting on camera the people that are the most popular right now and most likely to win. That's why one of the most amazing things that Trump did was all that shit talking he did, talking about Mexicans being rapists and all this nuts about the wall and all the different crazy things that he said. When he did that, the news was forced to cover him. They were forced to. I think they liked it as long as we were still in the primary stage.

Yeah, they thought there's no way this guy's going to win. Everybody said that. There's no way this guy's going to win. Right. I said that. Yeah. I was one of the people who said that. Well, he's now neck and neck with Hillary in the national polls.

I will say this. And didn't I just say you shouldn't listen to people who have a bad track record? Right. So I was wrong about that. So bear that in mind. 0 and 1 on my Trump analysis on how far he'll go. So just be fair. But, you know, when you look at the American electoral system like an analyst does, they notice important states you have to win, right?

This state has to, you know, as Ohio goes or as Florida, there's certain places. And then there are other places that are gimmies. This state will always go blue. This state will always go red. So the battleground are the are the states that are the toss ups in a bunch of those states. Hillary Clinton is leading. And so the attitude that the Sharpies at least have is that it doesn't matter what the polls look like. It matters how Ohio goes and it matters how Florida, you know. So in other words, those are the choke points that the real sharpies work from for you. I mean, when Hillary Clinton decides four years ago, I'm going to run for president. OK, get into Ohio now, start working those places now. And so when people talk about Trump not having a robust

establishment or organization on the ground, this is where he's going to get killed they'll kill him in those states and then he may win you know you could conceivably come up with an election where trump gets more actual votes but clinton wins the electoral college and wins the key states and that's how the sharpies who do this for a living as as consultants and as campaign strategists that's how they win. They find those places. But I think when you see her fainting at that 9-11 thing, when they're trying to walk her to the car and she starts falling down.

Bad timing on that, huh? It's terrible. All of a sudden, Drudge looks like a Nostradamus in that, doesn't he? Yeah, well, it's terrible to see. It's terrible to see that she's in such poor health that she starts just falling down and blacking out. I mean, you know, you could do it because you're in good shape. If I had tried to do what either one of those two people had done in terms of what their schedule has been like, I would die.

A hundred percent. I had a major drinking problem. I'd be drinking too much caffeine. I'd be drinking too much alcohol. I'd take up smoking. I don't know what I'd do. But I mean, what we require those people to do with this permanent campaign that goes on forever and these are 70 year old people as we said i'm amazed they both

haven't broken down and if i'm trump i would look at this and go do i really want this if this is how hard the job will be i could be in hawaii i could be i could be they all go gray what's going to happen trump is gray let's be honest but how much is a 70 year What's going to happen? Trump is gray, let's be honest. But how much is a 70-year-old guy going to age when he looks at how old the president's getting those jobs? I think Trump's going to sleep in. He's going to hire people to do all the dirty work. He's just going to get on the Internet and go, you're fired. Have a YouTube channel. Who knows?

I don't think he's really going to do it. There's a part of you that would love to just have a view of what it, you know, like a Gilligan's Island episode where you have a dream sequence where the coconut hits you on the head and you imagine what it's, I would, you know, I don't want to live through it, but I'd love to see it for a minute to see what it would look like. Hillary Clinton will just be more of the same. That's the, we're heading towards an iceberg here and she's one of the people that set the course. So that's my problem with her. She's, she's doubling down on what we've always had. Whereas Trump is the wild card. I mean, you just don't know.

Well, like you said, there's a lot of intelligent people that support Trump. But, man, there's a lot of assholes that support Trump. Can you explain? I want you to explain. That 69-year-old lady that got punched in the face at a Trump rally? Can you explain to me? And I've talked about this in a couple of shows. Another thing, I'm having a bad track record myself.

Maybe you shouldn't listen to me at all. But on the racism thing, which I don't ever want to put a number on what percentage of the trump supporters fall into that category that we see twitter people you know trolling us on but but i thought that was going the way of the dodo i am more surprised by that than anything else the the rise in overt and i don't want to say racism but just people who look at the world with that viewpoint, that lens. I thought we were, you know, not evolving, but I thought those people were dying out. I thought they were like Archie Bunkers, and they were just going to be, and to see that recur is the biggest surprise I've had in my adult lifetime, I think, when analyzing

politics. Well, they absolutely still exist. The question is, have they diminished in numbers? I think they have. But if you're just dealing with social media, there's so many voices. politics well they absolutely still exist the question is have they diminished in numbers i think they have but if you're just dealing with social media there's so many voices so many people have a voice if you're dealing this is one of the ways that i've always tried to describe how many retarded people there are in this country and i don't mean people with down syndrome i'm not i'm not gonna not stop using that word it's not a medical term it doesn't mean people with a disease

i'm not holding it against fucking. You're a fucking moron. Okay. Okay, if there's 300 million people in this country, one out of 100 is going to be a fucking idiot. At least one out of 100. One out of 100? Really? That's what you're going with?

Okay, really nice. Really nice. That's 3 million fucking idiots just in this country. That is a fucking gigantic minneapolis-sized city and they're on twitter morons and tweet a lot and they could just be racist and sexist or just trying to get a rise out of us or 13 year old kids i mean that's the other thing some of these are kids who think okay the most shocking thing i can say is some racist term i'm not supposed to say of course right there's all the above.

Right. There's young kids like I would have done when I was 17. If you gave me a computer when I was 17 and I knew I could tweet to Al Gore, I'd probably make the meanest fucking tweet. I would try to be funny. Yeah. You know, I just think there's so many voices out there that when you see racism attached to the Donald Trump campaign and and you know like you can't really say what percentage of donald trump supporters or is it more of a problem the trump campaign than the hillary campaign yes does the fact that he won't does the fact that he won't take it head on you know when they i was gonna say you can see the reporters

try to sort of frame the questions so that he has to either go left or go right on this you know would you uh would you denounce the KKK and David Duke's support? What did he say? I don't know what the KKK is or something like that? I mean, he came up with some answer. Did you really say that? Can you look that up? Because I don't know.

I don't want to. I don't, you know, I'm going to get 10,000 angry Donald Trump emails. He should go with, like, really easy stuff. Like, slavery, good or bad. Donald? That's right. Just real easy stuff. Just give me your position on that.

Okay, let's work from there. Civil War. Good idea or bad idea? You know, what? Oh, God. You know, I just had this moment outside my body where I thought, we're really talking about this stuff. I mean, you know, there is, and you know, you had brought this up earlier, and I wanted to point out, we had talked about people growing up, young people today. earlier and i wanted to point out we had talked about uh people growing up young people today and whether or not they're going to go back in other words say oh this is all so far you know

beyond where anything we should go back or if they're going this is the new normal to them yeah you know that to them they don't even remember when dan carlin talks about the laws of the fourth amendment they're going what you know i don't even remember what you're talking you know god that'd be crazy to let people do that or whatever. I mean, you wonder if once you haven't had a freedom for a while, does it seem radical to go back to that? There was a great quote. I use it all the time by a historian a long time ago named Charles Austin Beard. And he said, to be considered a dangerous radical today, all you have to do is go around spouting the phrases of the founding fathers. That'll get you on the NSA watch list today. What does that mean? If you take that out, smack in the mic, but

if you take that out and you try to analyze that, what does that say about how far we've come? Revolutionaries create your country, and then we very quickly lose that revolutionary ardor and we become much more conservative, which is natural, I think. But, you know, we talked about life cycles of countries. Are we over the hill? I mean, could you make a case that the United States concept, which is really a utopian one, this we can all be free, we can all run the country. Is that something that is past its prime, its sell by date? Well, I think the corrupt amongst us have tried to whittle away at it, Like you're talking about the Fourth Amendment or the Second Amendment or even the First Amendment, any of the amendments where you look at the freedoms that people are really worried about losing. realize that they can just sort of detain you and they don't have to charge you with anything and they can detain you indefinitely if they just decide they don't have to present you with any evidence they don't have to give you a trial they don't have to give you a court date like well okay

well well what are we operating under then if you have an if you can make an act like that and that sort of dissolves the constitution and the Bill of Rights for people who you decide are the bad guys. If you can just do that, then we don't really have the protection of the Constitution or the Bill of Rights anymore. It doesn't exist. It gets back to what we were talking about earlier, the corruption, where you'd mentioned the Second Amendment. Why isn't the Second Amendment in as much trouble as the Fourth, for example? Because there's money, money right there's some money on what there's not a lot of money industry that's right that's right and so and listen i'm okay

with that i mean if you're gonna if you're going to to to create a group and get a lot of money to defend an amendment to the constitution even if you know americans can argue what the second amendment means but i love the idea of money coming to legislators because that's what they pay attention to to protect those rights my problem is that the amendments that are getting so shafted are the ones that don't have a lot of money and often have a lot of money on the other side yeah well it's just bizarre that you could get so much done with money and that this is our system of government and it slowly but surely crept its way into the root system of it and just entangled it and choked it down.

I think it's natural, though. I mean, I think that basically this is the way it always is. And we would have had to have held it back with all of our force to keep it from doing exactly. Because money has a way, doesn't it? I mean, we all are vulnerable. Once you have enough money so that you don't have to be vulnerable, it's different. all are vulnerable once you have enough money so that you don't have to be vulnerable it's different but i mean if you are just a person struggling to get by and somebody you offer somebody offers you a lot of money to do something it is a heck of a challenge to have okay here are

my philosophical beliefs here's food for my children or whatever that becomes very difficult and with these legislators the pity is that they all want to be re-elected so much that they can let the money sway them out if they didn't care that much about the jobs, the money might not mean that much. Once you get elected, if you said, this is all I want, then you don't care what the money says. You only care what the money says if you want to get reelected, which argues for term limits and all that stuff, maybe. Yeah, no, you're right. You're right. It's just, boy, it's daunting when you sit down and talk about it like this I know I always come in here and bring you down I'm sorry

you ought to have a guest after me to cleanse your palate this is what he said about David Duke David Duke is a bad person who I disavowed numerous occasions over the years Trump said on MSNBC this is not the first time though this is after he got slammed for not doing enough to disavow so in other words this is like the

follow up question so the first time he said something like I don't want to misquote it, but I recall him saying something like, I don't know anything about the KKK or something like that, and everybody lost their minds. But if you said to yourself, okay, 5% of my support is from people who would like a guy like David Duke, I'm not going to cut out 5% of my support. I don't know. The whole thing is surreal to me a little bit. Once again, if I've been caught off guard by anything, I've been caught off guard by this. And I can't process it yet.

I don't know how to fit Donald Trump and that one segment of his supporters into my worldview because I thought they were a dying breed. I didn't think that could be resurrected. I talked to a guy when i was a reporter during the bosnian war and he was a croat and he tried to make the case to me and he very well might have been right that a lot of those people in that area where they have historic problems with each other and always have we're getting along just fine while economic things were okay what you know he said we were inter, you know, Serbs could fall in love with Croats, it was going okay. But he goes, once everything hit the fan, and times became tough, and the

economics came into play, all those old feelings came back. And I thought to myself, is that something that is applicable on this racism thing? I don't know, but one could make a case that we haven't been this unsettled in a very long time in this country. Are we seeing, i don't know but one could make a case that we haven't been this unsettled in a very long time in this country are we seeing it i don't know it's hard to factor how much that plays a role versus how much the internet and the ability for these people to speak out when before they would have had to be xeroxing things and leaving them on your car you know when you come out of the grocery store did you ever get one of those things yeah come out of the grocery store you have some racist track on your car window or something? I never got a racist one,

but I've got ones for car washes. What about the Tony Alamo? You ever get the one, the Tony Alamo ones? He was famous. Tony Alamo? He was like, he ran his own religious thing here or something. He used to have people, twice a week I'd have that on my car. But in the old days, that's how somebody had to do it. Now, they have a broad class platform.

Are we just hearing from these people more? Because they can speak to more people? Well, they also can find like-minded groups. That's true. I mean, you couldn't find that many like-minded groups if you lived in a neighborhood full of progressive people and you were like a really conservative person. It'd be really kind of difficult for you to – You'd have to seek these people out. And now it's with a couple clicks of the mouse and all of a sudden, boom, you're on some website where a bunch of people agree with you.

And wind each other up. Everybody winds each other up. And that happens, by the way. Let's not pick sides. That happens on all sides. Oh, for sure. Go to the Daily Kos and places like that. They wind people up.

And they also, they're apologists and they're not honest about the faults of their candidates. That's right. Like there was this thing about Hillary about, like I said, people were talking about how it's sexist that people are commenting on her health and that if it was a man that was running for president who got weak during 9-11, after some sort of a service for the fallen troops, that that would be totally acceptable. Like, that's not true. No, and history shows it because people forget that George McGovern had to drop his vice presidential candidate because the guy had been released that he had visited a psychiatrist for some depression problems. Well, he had shock therapy. Shock therapy, that's right. Yeah, he had on more than one occasion had electroshock therapy because he was a fucking loon. He's not supposed to be the vice president.

Well, maybe he wasn't Joe Rogan. Maybe you're just playing into the propaganda. You can't get shocked to fix your brain and then a couple years later run the country. There's only one way to find out. That's true. I mean, maybe getting shocked is awesome. You know what? Maybe if the shock collar was in the hands of voters, we could get something done in this country.

You know, one more time the president makes a wrong move. Dick Cheney, I'd love to have a shock button. You know, just, there's a couple people. Johny i'd love to have a shock button you know just there's a couple people john bolton i'd love a shock but i think a lot of the people that are really excited about hillary becoming president are excited because it would be a first first time a woman i would like that aspect of it myself yeah and it would make uh is make us feel like we're progressing that we we can find the best candidate and that that regardless of sex the real question isn't that the real question is, is that the best we can do? Because if that's the best woman we've got, that's crazy.

That doesn't make any sense. She's the most qualified. She's also under two criminal investigations simultaneously. She's also like, I'm not a conspiracy theorist for the most part. But how many people have died that have crossed them? I don't go there. Have you ever seen it? Yeah, I have.

What's the number? I don't know. But I'll tell you this. Here's where I go. I go to a much more concrete place, which is look at who she's speaking to and look at who she's raising money from and look at what they want. Release the transcripts in those bank talks. Oh, see? And to me, she shouldn't have a choice in that.

Right. How is it possible she does? but because she keeps it a secret what does that encourage joe rogan leaks right and hackings and so if you didn't keep that a secret you could more legitimately say listen there are certain things that the public should know when you keep things from the public that they should know a lot of the public goes well the heck with that that ought to be leaked you know it's almost like they're trying to hold back as many leaks as possible before november just yeah until it's too late exactly hold it back and then once she's in she's in but there's so many leaks now it's just it's getting so strange when i i quoted in the last program i did, I think it was a Dana Milbank column, he had talked about one of the recent links that, okay, I get hassled by Russian hackers all the time or people that are mad that I talk about Russian hackers or whatever. Sorry, dudes.

I know. But Milbank had said that these people had hacked the records and then released them, but they also had altered something and then released that version too and so they tripped themselves up so that you could compare these are the documents they hacked then these are the ones they they released to the public and they had altered something and i said everyone when they found that story out breathed a sigh of relief because now you have an out and you see it already the dnc is going well listen russian hackers are known to alter this stuff so the minute that came out it was the greatest boon to all the politicians in the world because they could say whatever that says is probably altered. So it's the wonderful get out of jail free card on the hacking.

Yeah. Well, that is true. But it's legitimate, too, because if they really did that, well, that is a get out of jail free card. So now the hacking has just muddied the waters even more. It certainly has. I mean, I would actually probably support a hack if I was running for president in that sense, because you could say, look, you're not going to trust

evidence that came from someone who got it through illegal means. And they are doing that. Yeah. I mean, it's just, why would we trust that the hackers would be the only ones who wouldn't distort the emails? What do you got here? Colin Powell confirms leaked emails are accurate. Did you see what he said in his leaked emails?

Did you see? Oh, my God. He said Clinton's out dicking girls. He also talked about Hillary Clinton and hubris and all those kind of things, which, you know, I mean, I think that's the impression she gives. So it's interesting to hear that people who know and like her feel a little of that, too. She's also very suspicious. Look at what he said.

I know. Look at this phrase. I would rather not have to vote for her, although she is a friend I respect. A 70-year-old person with a long track record, unbridled ambition, greedy, not transformational, with a husband still dicking bimbos at home. Holy shit. Holy shit. First of all, how dare he use the term bimbos at home. Holy shit. Holy shit. First of all, how dare he use the term bimbos? I am triggered.

You're not supposed to use that term. That's a derogatory term towards women. He thought it would never come out, though, see? This is coming from a guy who said retard 40 minutes ago. Oh, boy. But that's what I'm saying. I'm going to get some blowback from this, Joe Rogan. You know that, right?

For real? Yeah. Stop hanging out with me. I know. It's probably bad for you. I know it is bad for me. Nah How can a guy like Colin Powell or even Hillary Clinton to have all of this stuff written in emails like are they that out of Touch that this stuff is being tracked or like they should know that it's being tracked I think they felt like they could get away with a lot more than they can get away with and I think again we're talking About people who grew up and started behaving a certain way way before there was this level of transparency.

Oh, see, you're thinking they should behave differently. That's not how these people are thinking. Now, how can I not use that email problem again? They're not thinking of changing behavior. No, no, no. The behavior they want to change is using email. That's the behavior they want to change. I'm just thinking that they sort of adapted to the times.

That was the political landscape back then. I think the political landscape today is just way different. You have to literally think everybody is watching everything you say. Well, case in point, we talked about Clinton and women. Yeah. Kennedy, the press knew that Kennedy was doing all that stuff, but there was an unwritten gentleman's agreement that you didn't talk about that kind of stuff. Never mind that he might have been having sex with with sam giancana's girlfriend judith exner at the same time and that

there might be some problems with that yeah um nowadays i mean that's why to me you know people say bill clinton was just impeached over sex in my mind anybody who's either dumb enough or whatever you maybe you want to put in there that he thinks he can get away with that is somebody i don't want with a hand on the nuclear button i mean come on come on. Anybody with half a brain knows. I mean, Joe, if you wanted to get away with something, would you pull that one? I mean, come on. There's no way. He was 100% going to get caught and did it anyway. That's not good judgment. Well, that kind of guy who becomes president is usually a dick slinger. You know, I don't think George, I don't think the elder George Bush falls into that category.

Maybe he didn't. Not prudent. Wouldn't do it. Maybe he didn't dick sling, but maybe he did. Maybe that explained his wife. She's just hanging out and he was like,

hey, I'm going to go dick sling. Well, he was a fighter pilot. I never knew a fighter pilot who wasn't a little bit, you know, get around. Yeah, they're savages. They're savages. You want them that way.

That's right. Living on the edge. But those men that want to be leaders. Now I'm going to get all the fighter pilots right in me. See, this is a terrible show for me. They're good men, those fighter pilots. They're great men. There's right. Living on the edge. But those men that want to be leaders. Now I'm going to get all the fighter pilots right in me. See, this is a terrible show for me, Joe. They're good men, those fighter pilots. They're great men.

There was a high incidence of swinger behavior. Did you know that? Was that the 50s and 60s or was that the fighter pilot? It was a, there was a study done. No, it was a conversation between this guy and fighter pilots about the high incidences of swingers. And one of the things that I think they were saying, I forget where I read this, but they were saying that what was going on was that these guys were in such an intense job where

there's a high likelihood of them dying. And one of the ways to ensure that their loved one would be looked after is if someone loved them as much as they loved them. So they would literally be in these fighter runs with these planes flying into Hostile territory getting shot at thinking any day could be my last day. So this is desperation of like you're leaving behind a wife and a family and They one way they alleviated that this was the the idea was that they would wife swap and that it happened naturally You know who it was. I think it was Chris Ryan. I think it was Chris Ryan that was that they would wife swap and that it happened naturally, you know who it was

I think it was Chris Ryan. I think it was Chris Ryan that was explaining this like Chris Ryan. Yeah, I Pretty sure it was him. I'm now now like reasonably sure but that kind of makes sense because when you're someone who's Everyday world is life and death on a level that a fighter pilot is. I mean, that is that life and death. I can certainly see the risk taker thing where you said these are people who live on the edge because that's their. When you fly those planes, you're a risk taker.

If you wanted to say, OK, a person who's willing to do risky behavior here. I'm not thinking the wife swapping as much as having a lot of girlfriends that aren't your wife. But at the same time, listen, like you said, some of those personality traits are probably what you want in those guys. Yeah, well, I think the way Chris was explaining it, too, was that their bond and their camaraderie between each other was so powerful that it sort of eclipsed jealousy, in a way. Because they counted on each other so much and they

were brothers in war and literally life or death struggle. So there's a bond and a camaraderie that sort of superseded everything. And that the idea of like that they could swap wives and they just love each other more. It's kind of crazy. See, I go with the Occam's Rated that they're more like pro athletes and they're just – Freaks. Or just they're the swagger. You'd mention the swagger, right?

It's all part of what kind of keeps them the kind of guys that can be fighter pilots, you know? Yeah. It may all come with the territory. Maybe it's a bunch of those things to – you know. And then let's be honest. There are fighter pilots who never did anything like that. Absolutely. Give them the get out of jail free pass.

That's my Dan Carlin get out of-of-jail-free pass. Their wife's in the car listening to this podcast. These guys are assholes. Assholes. Why do you listen? Fighter pilots are swingers. You piece of shit. You know what just happened?

A bunch of wives turned to their ex-fighter pilot husbands and says, honey, that didn't involve you, did it? Wife swapping. That's a new reality show. Wife swapping fighter pilots. You know, for those who have not seen all of the appearances I've had on this, Joe started off breaking me into being on the Joe Rogan podcast with some comments initially. So now I just flow with it, and it's going to get me killed eventually.

It's not going to do anything. Man, it's a conversation. It's a conversation. This is just like if you and I went out to dinner in between bites of food we would have probably the same conversations about stuff funny but what what do you like when you see what the reports are about the clinton foundation i don't totally understand what's legal and what's not legal but i don't think i've seen anyone said that anything they've done is illegal right it skirts yeah it falls into that category the same category that uh um maybe the giving of

ambassadorships to people who give money fall into the for for example the clint there's no question that the clinton foundation goes and does good work there's no question but how much does the fact that they do good work and that your name is attached to it end up being something that helps you for less charitable reasons? Right. In other words, it makes you look good as a candidate to be somebody that, you know, helps vaccine people against polio. Right. So all of that right there has a subsidiary effect that you could if you wanted to say oh you're you're benefiting from this well now add the fact that you know people can give money to the foundation then the foundation can pay bill clinton to run the i mean it becomes and then if you gave money to the foundation does that mean you get special treatment i can hear the hillary clinton supporters saying well that didn't happen

but it's the reason that people put stuff in a blind trust when they become president so that you don't even know what your money's doing so that you can't possibly be favoritism toward one and and the clintons have basically made it sound like they're not going to do that and once again as i said to you earlier if you know they're after you like they're after the Clintons, wouldn't you just leave as much room between you and any potential whiff of scandal as you could? But they don't. I don't know why they don't, but they don't. I don't think they can. Maybe they can't.

At this point, you know, how could they? They probably are so entangled with all those other people that have been a part of all that stuff for so long well and you know you've done this and i've done this we've both been around some of these high rollers before where you realize how much they pick up the phone and talk to other high rollers and how interconnected that network is and there's nothing wrong with that intrinsically but you could easily see that that networking can be used for nefarious purposes good purposes or no purposes, but they all have each other on speed dial, right?

That's natural. Yeah, it does seem natural. I mean, podcasters kind of have that. Oh, we do have that, actually. It's a little known fact, isn't it? You and I, two podcasters who learned about each other through the business. You're not the only podcaster. I moonlight on you sometimes, Jim.

Yes, I moonlight on you as well, sir. Yeah, I mean, people in the same business talk to each other and become tight. And it affects the way they do business, for sure. It doesn't even necessarily have to be some really carefully scripted agreement. It's almost like a known thing. Exactly right, I think. And you know what? Agreement is almost like a known thing.

Exactly right, I think. And you know what? In the era of hacks and all that, isn't that the smarter way to comport yourself, right? Oh, yeah. You know, Nixon, because he was a taper, knew when he had to have an important discussion with somebody, he wanted to make sure it was safe. They went for a walk, right? And they went for a walk past the White House. They got in the weeds out there, and then they had the discussion. And then they used the N-word.

That's right. Whatever it might be. Are we clear? That's right. Say it! Well, but think about this. In 10 years, in 10 years, how is this email hack scandal going to change protocol and how all these people do things?

Because it is. You watch. Colin Powell and everybody watching what's unfolding right now are determining that there are going to be new ways we communicate. And it's not going to be like that. Well, there's two different hacks, right? There's the DNC hack. And then there's the Hillary server hack.

Right? Aren't they different hacks? Because the DNC hack... They are. And from what I heard, I told you, I heard there was a Republican National Committee hack, too. I love the fact that they fired that woman. Oh, did you find something?

That was not true. The guy that said it said he misspoke. Oh. That came out later today. Uh-huh, misspoke. That makes me more suspicious than anything. That's goddamn misspokers. I just think it's hilarious that the woman who got outed in the DNC hacks as being this woman who was conspiring to like put down Bernie

and help Hillary like that woman she had to step down and was immediately hired by the Clinton campaign I mean there's zero transparency I mean it's so obvious it's corruption let's call it and the corruption is both parties and we have no options besides the both part so this is where you, like we said on the Common Sense Show for 11 years now, this is your focal point of the problem. We have a corruption problem. Both parties benefit from it. They have no real interest in addressing it. The only time they're interested in fighting corruption is if they can manage to fight the kind of corruption that helps the other side without impacting the ones that help them. So the Republicans always say that about Democratic campaign finance reform, that it goes after Republican funders, but not Democratic ones.

In other words, they're not holier than thou. They're just trying to figure out another way to game the system, utilizing reform as the tool. I mean, they have to know in some way that they're all complicit in similar sort of situations. But the thing that was so weird i think i said not transparent at all i meant completely transparent the thing that was weird about how transparent it was is that there wasn't even a gap in time of this woman getting fired and then getting for appearance purposes right no it was like instantaneous it's like we don't care we're just gonna do it uh yeah she helped me out she hooked me up she's my girl

that's just like what you said about hillary clinton uh um and and the fact that she had said that the fbi director said this about her when he had just said something kind of complete but she knew that the five percent of people that would realize that didn't count same thing the five percent of people who realize wait a minute you just hired that they don't count she's not after those people and there's another day and more news stories and a plane goes down in Singapore or something. And then there's another news story and some fucking nuclear test in North Korea. And everybody's gone. It's gone.

Three weeks later, it's gone. There's just so much going on that you can't really maintain any story like that in the news. That's why the Glenn Greenwald, Edward Snowden, the way that they approached that was structured the way it was to come out in chunks because they had said if you release it all at once, it'd be this huge story, but then it's done. If you understand how the news cycle works the way you just mentioned, you want to release a nice chunk and then wait till the headlines die down again and we start moving and then release another chunk. And that's the way these WikiLeaks is doing that right now with these hacks they have. They're releasing it in chunks because as soon as the news cycle dies down, they want to take advantage of the next one. The WikiLeaks thing is one of the most bizarre scenarios

where you have this guy that if you ask the United States, just the United States, what percentage of people support what Julian Assange did? What percentage of the people support letting people understand what is really going on behind the scenes? They're pretty overwhelming. I would guarantee you'd be in the high 70s.

Some people are blindly patriotic and they just want their government to just have carte blanche. There's a few of those. But I think most people would support, yeah, I want to know what the fuck's going on. Now, this guy is trapped in an embassy in London. He can't go anywhere. Ecuadorian embassy? Yeah, something like that, right? Is it Ecuador?

He's trapped in this embassy. He can't leave. He's been in this house for years. On a potential rape charge. Well, it's not even a rape charge. It's a surprise sex. It's hanging over his head, I know. And he can't leave to go answer the charges because they'll grab him.

Well, they'll grab him on completely unrelated purposes or unrelated charges. It has nothing to do with that. They just want to hold him. I mean, you really think that they'd be chasing him for this long because he had sex without a condom while we're spooning? No, we all know that. What is it? Swedish court to rule on Julian Assange facing extradition of Sweden over sexual assault charges. The WikiLeaks Foundation has been confirmed to confine to the Ecuadorian embassy in London for more than four years.

Huh. Kind of nice of the Ecuadorians to hold on to him for that long. That's so crazy. He's been in his house for four years. But here's what they have to do if they want to keep playing the straight and narrow. They have to get a hold of some leaked documents from the other side, because otherwise, it's like if you only get the leaked documents from one side, that does impact the election, and that calls into question the motives of the leaker, right? If you're saying, I release information, right? Then you can be above the fray. If you say, like a lot of

journalists understand how to do, what you omit and don't release has as much value as what you do. So if the only leaks you're getting are from the Democrats and the Republicans aren't being leaked, then that's influencing the election. Because you know as well as I do, the other side has crap that is just as shocking and upsetting and corrupt as the Democrats. So let's see that too. shocking and upsetting and corrupt as the Democrats. So let's see that, too. Yeah, let's see that, too. And let's see what Trump does when he finds out they've been all talking shit about him. You know, I'm ashamed to say that there's a part of me that says, yeah, let's see that. I don't want to be that way. But I read somebody online said the other day that there's people who are going to vote for him just for the entertainment value because they don't want to be bored for the next four years. And I thought to myself, that's when the country's really jumped the shark. When we're voting for candidates, I don't care what they'll do.

They're both bad. I just want the most entertaining. Well, a lot of people feel that it doesn't matter. They're also thinking that what you look at as a president is really just a figurehead and the military industrial complex. I'm reading that book right now, American Coup. Look, if you look at what Obama promised, and you look at what he actually did, they're very different things. Well, people forget that George W. Bush actually ran on a more humble foreign policy.

Do you remember that? He was going to have people, he said, Americans want a more humble foreign policy. Could there be any dichotomy worse than a more humble foreign policy? And people will say, well, 9-11 happened. Yes. So we attacked Iraq. Yeah. Didn't make any sense.

And everybody was like, look, we're fucking kicking someone's ass. All right. Enough to shut up and wave that flag. I will tell you this. Anybody who tells me that they support the troops again, but are willing to send them willy nilly anywhere at any time, to me, supporting the troops means you value their lives and their families. And the fact that many of these guys and women have had to go back and back and back and their lives have been on hold and all, and they suffer. I mean, how many stories have we read about what these people deal with every day? Go to the VA and let's say you want to support the troops.

Fix the VA. Right. Do the things that matter to the troops and then don't send them into harm's way unless it really, really matters. That's supporting the troops to me. Yeah. The problem is we don't know what is going on when we hear that the troops need to invade some certain area. We don't know if it's legit or not legit we don't know who the people are that are making the decisions ultimately and they

classify it and they classify it and we we also don't i mean there's there's there's got to be some intel that they're not sharing that might sway our opinion one way or they think that see like i we're talking about the um the gulf of tonkin resolution the last common sense show the the gulf of tonkin resolution there were common sense show the the gulf of tonkin resolution there were parts of it very important parts of it that were not released until 2005 2005 if if you found out within a month that the gulf of tonkin that which for those who don't know this is sort of the the excuse for why we were able to ramp up the vietnam war which killed a ton of people right um if you had known within a month, in real

time, basically, that that didn't happen the way that they said it happened, that's time enough to impact the decision-making. They classified it so that by the time it comes out, everyone's dead, and it's in a history book. You have no ability to impact the decision-making. That's where classification kills us, because if you, the electorate, say, to heck with this, we've got to go out in the streets, or we have to have a protest online, you can't do that if you don't know what's going on. And that was one of the more ironic things about Kennedy's assassination was that they locked the files up. When do the full files on the Kennedy assassination are allowed to be released? But they essentially made it so that no one could investigate it for

far longer than anyone's going to be alive like i think it was like 2025 and that prompts suspicion right there whether or not it's deserved i did of course why would they do that i did well i did come up with reasons because i i felt the same with you and i had to figure out a cause right what would explain it that was rational and here's what i came up with and i'm hardly the only person who realized this you remember oswald had ties to cuba and he defected to the soviet union and then come home okay so if you're average joe or jane and you don't know much about what's going on but you find out a cuban defector cuban supporting soviet union defector killed the president and that maybe that i mean do you see how that, you know, if you were reading the Guns of August on how World War I started, and you thought it wouldn't have taken, you know, that was an assassination too, right, in an open-top vehicle by somebody.

Yeah. And Serbians were behind that in the way that the Soviet Union killed their young president that they all loved with his wife right there and the two little children, what would the and you know, this is not even a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis. How much might that have impacted the president's ability to keep us out of a war or not? I mean, I can see if somebody said that you might have a very good reason for hiding the fact that Oswald had really close ties. I don't know i was trying to find out a rationale that made sense to me and that would be a rationale that made sense to me i don't think you have to classify it for a lifetime which they basically did yeah what is the year next year october 26 2017 oh shit and you watch when it comes out

redactions will be all over the place oh yeah i'm, I'm sure. You'll have if, and, but, or. Yeah, I'm sure. But, I mean, they have leaked some stuff or released some stuff due to the Freedom of Information Act that people would consider incredibly offensive. And they found out about it. Like, 1962, Northwoods, Operation Northwoods, where they designed attacks on Guantanamo Bay they were going to arm Cuban friendlies and attack Guantanamo Bay potentially killing who knows how many soldiers

they're going to blow up a drone jetliner and blame it on the Cubans all designed if you look at the stuff that the CIA was doing and I think it's stupid to think that they don't do the similar things now it's it's crazy stuff yeah crazy stuff that kills americans stuff that is so and here's the thing stuff that is so opposed to the 1950s high school mythology of america that it's hard to reconcile the two and those people will say listen it's the real world welcome to you know we were trying to survive we had you know hydrogen bombs aimed at us i mean all that stuff is true but but how do you reconcile it? Yeah, that was a giant issue with Kennedy. And secrecy itself was a giant issue with

Kennedy, which is so ironic that they sealed his death up for 25 years. You remember that very famous speech that he had about secrecy in government? Oh, yeah. And about transparency being important? Oh, and my favorite line from Kennedy was always the one where he says those who make peaceful change impossible make violent change inevitable. I mean, those are the kind of things where you wonder about us now, where you say, listen, the ability to have our system evolve in ways that make it better are going to prevent really bad things from happening in the future. If you can't if we can't get it together now, just follow the current trends outward. If nothing changes, what is the 2020 election going to look like?

Are you a Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone type of guy? I am now. I changed my mind on that. I used to be. They got you, huh? Who got you? Well, no. Bill O'Reilly?

Here's the thing. And this is what always upsets me about the conspiracy theorists. I love them, but I wish they wouldn't leave stuff out of their out of their stories that disprove you know that look bad in other words and everybody does that i don't blame them everybody likes to say okay i'll show you the things that back up my theory but with oswald there were a couple of books that came out uh my friend vince bolliosi had one gerald posner had another where they included stuff that was not in all the conspiracy books that i read and i've read

a lot and you say okay one why the hell didn't you put that in there now i'm mad at you and i don't trust you as much stuff give me a specific well the fact that oswald took a shot at a u.s general before he took a shot at kennedy right if you figured out that when did he do that oh god i want to say who was the general too 10 years, I would have remembered his name. We have to look up Lee Harvey Oswald. He took a shot at the general and missed with the same rifle, I believe. And it was Posner and Bugliosi that both pointed that out. And when you turn around and go, okay, if the guy was really taking a shot at the U.S. general, now that changes my overall view of the guy. Oswald's earlier attempt to assassinate General Walker.

Interesting. And so when you hear that, and again, now that might not be anything, but why'd you leave some of that out of my conspiracy books? That's important.

You know, another thing about the Oswald thing that always bugged me was that they said that the scope wasn't sighted in properly. The Mannlicher Carcano

rifle, the mail order. How could he get off that shot when the scope wasn't even sighted in properly. The Mannlicher Carcano rifle, the mail loader. How could he get off that shot when the scope wasn't even sighted in properly? I'm like, how do you know it's not sighted in properly? You know it's not sighted in properly because right after they found it, they shot with it? How long did it take before they shot with it?

Do you know anything about scopes? Let me tell you something about scopes. You fucking drop your rifle on the ground and that thing gets off. It's uncalibrated. It happens easy. You could bang your rifle against a log or a rock or something like that. And I doubt he was putting it down carefully after shooting the president.

Not only that, who the fuck was handling it? There's so much shenanigans involved in handling the rifle. So that argument I reject. Because when they said that the gun wasn't sighted in properly, I'm like, that doesn't make any sense. You have no idea how it was sighted in when he pulled the trigger. You don't know. It's so easy to throw off. And there's no question.

Kennedy had pissed off a lot of people. A lot of people. And so, I mean, when you talk about a conspiracy and having motive, there were a lot of people that had motives. I always hate it when they, you know, the Oliver Stone movie drove me crazy because in my opinion, the movie he did on jfk he took every conspiracy theory out there and threw them all in which discredited all of them to me also he had that fake general who didn't really exist i know him all the information he does can't do that don't get me started on him no i'll get you started john f kennedy yeah they they do that in these movies that are supposed to be about real history. Oh, he did it with The Doors.

And then when he was called on it, his answer was, this wasn't a movie about The Doors in reality. It was a movie about what I thought about The Doors when I was fighting in Vietnam listening to their music. And he goes, dude, say that at the beginning of the film. This is a fictionalized version of what I thought when I was in the... That's such a cop out. He did it with Alexander the Great, too. Yeah. He did it with the Alexander the Great film, too. You a fictionalized version of what i thought when i was in the you know such a cop out he did it with alexander the great too yeah did it with the alexander the great film too you're just what alexander the great is he gonna add in this movie the snowden movies got coming out this week oliver stone didn't get funding for snowden in the u.s in germany he found both financial support and filming locations for his political thriller

but its release is low-key is the u.s trying. trying to keep it under wraps? Is the U.S. It operates as one giant machine. That's exactly right. The press is keeping it down because they don't want everybody to talk about Snowden. Listen, if they thought it would make $150 million, the studios would be pushing it left, right, and center. Right now, they'd love

a hit of any kind, regardless of what it said. What were we just talking about before you brought that up uh jfk um oliver stone adding stuff into those movies okay so no the those uh i wanted to know what other things led you to believe that uh lee harvey oswald acted alone well i mean originally you know when you follow the story so you see it's not just the fact that that it probably happened a certain way it's when you follow the conspiracy talk and you realize you know what they're bringing into the equation how much do i believe the david for you know the cuban idea how much do i believe and and after going through it you know if you go read like bull yosi's book he

was the guy who wrote helter skelter he prosecuted manson um he was a guy i liked a lot and and he he wrote a book where he did it like a prosecutor. So here's how I would have prosecuted Oswald. And when he lines it up the way he does, you sit there and go, OK, this is not. And I know, Boo, you'll see he was a he was a guy that would have loved to have written that it wasn't. He would have loved to have said Kennedy was assassinated by a conspiracy, but he didn't. And he ran down the list and he sat there and go, okay, if I was at the trial and I was on the jury and they said, what was the preponderance of evidence? And did the prosecutor, you know, prove his case? I would have had to have said after reading Bojose's book that unless I really had a vested interest in believing the conspiracy theory, that he had done a damn good job of making his case. Here's my problem with it. And this is one that for whatever reason, I don't see brought up very often. I don't think they have to be mutually exclusive.

I don't think Oswald was innocent. I think Oswald very well might have shot at the president, but I think it's highly likely they set up more than one shooter. I think there's a possibility that gunfire echoing from that building could make people think that it was coming from the grassy knoll. But there's so many people that said that gunfire was coming from the grassy knoll that you have to wonder.

And you look at the shots that hit Kennedy, like the one in his neck. One of the more interesting books that I read about it was Best Evidence by David Lifton. Lifton was the one that, didn't he say that they put something in the autopsy in Kennedy's head? That to me, by the way, that was the part that blew me away. Because when we were kids, they didn't have the Kennedy autopsy photos. And then to eventually release those, that was shocking. And they put it in the book. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, they also changed between bethesda maryland and dallas in that flight from dallas to bethesda they changed the like what the impact was they were calling it a bullet hole in his neck in dallas and then when it got to bethesda they referred to it as a tracheotomy hole here's's my problem. If he was hit from the front and from the back, like it's entirely possible that Oswald also was involved and that there was a bunch of people involved. It's entirely possible that if you're going to assassinate the president, if you're going to like have a conspiracy to assassinate the president, you're going to use a bunch of people.

Why wouldn't they use someone like Oswald? Why wouldn't they use some crazy fuck who emigrates to Russia and comes back with a Russian wife and he's involved in communist propaganda and all sorts of other crazy unsavory shit. He shoots at generals. Yeah, that's a guy, exactly a guy you would use. And he might've been involved too. It might've been, and I don't, it's somehow or another, it always, the debate is always a mutually exclusive thing. Either Oswald acted alone, or the CIA killed Kennedy, or the NSA, or whoever the fuck, the Cubans, the mob, and they blamed it on Oswald. Well, it could totally be he was a part of it all, and that there was more than one shooter. That seems to me to be the most likely thing.

It's certainly possible. When Jack Ruby runs up to him and shoots him in front of all those cops, those cops were walking him out there to his assassination. They're holding onto his arm. We've got him. We've got the guy who shot the president out in the open in front of everybody. Was that a guy with a gun? Oh, no.

The guy who was my mentor when I first started in news was a local guy here that everybody in news knew, a guy named John Babcock. And Babcock was a local uh guy here that everybody in news knew a guy named john babcock and babcock was a texas guy originally and he was in the motorcade in the very last car because they had press writing in the so he's far but he was in the motorcade so they went he was at parkland when when it was announced that kennedy was dead and then he was he told me the story he had good stories he had good manson stories too um he was was in the room with Ruby before they brought Oswald out, before Ruby killed him. And he said, what are you doing here today, Jack? And Jack and he had a conversation beforehand. in terms of conspiracy or not conspiracy, but I remember that that was like a seminal moment in his career because he was broadcasting live, he was on the radio while it was all going on,

and he was there at the scene. He also had the most awesome Manson stuff because the station I worked at, KABC, was big in the Manson investigation. They're the ones that actually found the bloody clothes a year later on the hillside while they were filming a recreation, and that's how the bloody clothes got found. Wow. And he would go and speak to manson all the time through the when manson was not convicted yet so he's on trial and awaiting trial and he and manson became friends and up on his wall he had a photo of charles manson within pencil a note and i still remember what it said said to the trial come early stay late it'll be quite a show. And he said, look at that writing

that Manson did. And I looked at it. And it was weird, you could see that the pencil was broken, like he would snap the point off the pencil every couple of words. He said, Do you know why the point on the pencil snapped? I go, No, he goes, because the guy had no education. But he was pretty smart. And he used to get so frustrated at his inability to express himself that he'd break the pencil. So then once he was convicted, and remember he was sent to death row, John said, I stopped paying attention to him because, you know, he's on death row. I'm moving on. So Manson started sending him messages saying, why don't you come and visit me anymore? And so finally John went and he said, Manson said, so why don't you come and visit me anymore?

And John said, well, you know, Charlie, you know, you're going to the. And Manson says, so you don't think I can, you know, you don't think. And he goes, no, no. So he said, come back in a week. And so John says, so I come back in a week. And all Manson did was slide under the table like a cocktail napkin type thing. And on it was drawn the layout of John's house. And he said, I went home and I bought three shotguns

and I put them loaded in various parts of my house. He says, they're still there to this day. But basically, wouldn't that scare the hell out of you to have somebody draw? In other words, he'd send somebody to John's house to go look around and then tell him what it looked like. And then send him the cocktail napkin.

He had so many good stories. He was an old-fashioned news guy. But he was in the Kennedy thing. And we used to talk about that all the time. And now I wish I could remember, 50-year-old brain, bus speed, what John had told me about his thinking on it. I guess my attitude is I'm always disinclined to believe conspiracy theories unless the preponderance of evidence convinces me otherwise. But we talked about, when I read it, we talked about the Gulf of Tonkin. That's an absolute false flag conspiracy

that was perpetrated on the American public, resulting in us going to war, ramping up the war, killing who knows how many people. But everybody, the people in government, I don't know how to explain it. All the people around Kennedy were Kennedy's people. And so whether you're talking about the defense secretary or a lot of the whiz kids, they were called.

When Kennedy brought in these new people from private industry, they were his people. And they stayed in the Johnson administration. Those people would have had to, I mean, if they had thought that their boss who brought them into government had been killed by Johnson or by the government. I mean, it's hard. How would they know? How would you know? It's hard to believe. How would they know? How would you know?

Okay, if you're all in an office and you're working with the president, the president gets shot, you think you're going to get more information than the average person in the street? You're probably not. You're probably going to have to read the news reports just like everybody else. You're going to see Oswald paraded out there. You're going to see Jack Ruby shoot him. You're going to have people in your organization tell you that they shot the guy who shot the president. And you're going to believe it until you see the Zapruder film until you're watching the Geraldo Rivera

show and Dick Gregory brings on the Zapruder film what was it like 10 years later I remember this wasn't it like 10 years later what year did it was it like they assassinated him in 63 and I don't think he made it on the Dick Gregory show until like the 1970s. No, it was late 70s too, I think. Or the Geraldo Rivera show. Well, so then here's the question. Either, if it wasn't the government, so look at all the different people that Oliver Stone could throw into a film, right?

Whether it's the mafia or whatever. If it's not the government, then the government has no reason at all to cover it up. Right. If the mafia does it, Robert F. Kennedy is going after the mafia all the time anyway. It just gives him one more reason to go. So the only way this becomes a conspiracy that stays secret and involves the government not investigating it is if the government

is in on it. So that's the only conspiracy theory that makes sense on why the government didn't pursue the conspiracy theory. So if the government is in on it... Well, how many people have to be in on it see here's the thing if if the narrative they did compartmentalize that was standard everything everything is compartmentalized and there's a need to know basis and you know unless

you're some dude in a movie who wants to get to the bottom of it and you sneak into the building in the middle of the night with a flashlight commission report and the magic bullet all that stuff is is part of the cover cover up if you buy that theory? Well, the Warren Commission report in and of itself is what Lifton uses as a reason to go in and start investigating the Kennedy assassination. Well, as I told you, there's a good reason to have covered it up if you believe that the American people would draw a natural conclusion that a Soviet agent killed our president. And remember, you know, Kennedy had been trying to assassinate Castro, too. So there were reasons for a Cuban group of people to take. I mean, there's a lot of enemies.

There's a lot of enemies also in government. He was trying to get rid of the CIA. He was trying to do a lot of stuff that people didn't like. The speech that he gave about transparency, about secrets and secret societies being a damaging part of our culture. I mean, that's all not good if you want to stay alive. Well, and I want to make it clear. When it comes to these kind of theories, I try to have an open mind always. And, you know, try to look at every angle.

And I'm not saying that these things are not possible. You would ask me if I had a view, and I used to have one view, and now I have another view. If evidence came out tomorrow that said, that made it look like it was a conspiracy, I would be perfectly happy to switch again. I mean, I try to be flexible on these things. I don't have a vested interest. So when you say those things, I kind of go, okay, yeah, I can see that. It's not what I believe lately, but I can see that. Yeah, I don't really believe anything when it comes to that.

It becomes the Kennedy assassination, other than some fuckery was afoot. Well, and like I said, I get angry when the conspiracy theorists who write these books, and it's an industry, as you well know. I get angry when they don't include things that might disprove what they say. You want me to believe you, I want you to lay it all out. And so I became suspicious once those books started coming forward saying, well, look what they left out here, and look what they left out here. And you go, okay, well now, you never told me that. Well, there's some tightly grooved paths when it comes to discussing that conspiracy.

That's why I've always found it so weird that no one mentions, or very rarely is it mentioned, that Oswald might have been a part of it. The idea that he got off those three shots, because they determined that it was three shots based on people's reporting. And, you know, if you believe that he got off those three shots in a short amount of time, and then you see Jesse Ventura trying to recreate it and say, it's impossible. No one can get that off. Well, someone can do that. That's not true. Like, there's people that are capable of getting off three shots in six seconds or whatever it was.

And if I recall, Oswald was a marksman. I mean, look, he probably was okay with a rifle, but if you're leaning, here's the reality, you're leaning on a windowsill and you've got a scope. With a

bolt action ancient rifle. I mean, if you really wanted to kill the president, a mail order Mannlicher Carcano rifle is not what you would have chosen.

But he's not that shooting that far of a shot. No. I mean, how many yards was it? And plus, after the first one, you just spray,

kind of. You just pull the trigger a couple times. But if someone else was involved, that's where it gets even weirder. Like,

he's shooting down, someone's shooting from the front that seems like what they would do if they were trying to kill somebody if it's a conspiracy triangulation although let's be honest that becomes a lot harder to hide later right so if you're worried about exposure because exposure would would show the tentacles and well then you want to make it as cut and dried and simple as you can you start triangulating on a president Then you want to make it as cut and dried and simple as you can.

You start triangulating on a president that, you know, you don't know, as you well know, what those bullets are going to do. Right. I think you open yourself up to massive problems if those bullets go. I mean, of course, if in other words, if something had gone another way and it would have been impossible to deny that there was another shooter, how does that change the whole investigation? Well, you know, that actually did happen. That was part of the investigation itself leading to the magic bullet theory. The magic bullet theory was created because a guy was walking under the underpass and the curb stone got hit by a bullet. He was hit in the head with a ricochet. So because he was hit with a ricochet, they found the spot where the bullet had hit and they had accounted for one bullet. So then they in the head with a ricochet. So because he was hit with a ricochet, they found the spot where the bullet had hit, and they had accounted for one bullet.

So then they had the headshot that killed Kennedy, and then they had this neck thing, and then they had this other bullet, and then they started trying to figure out, well, how many bullets are involved here, and how does Connolly have a bullet lodged in his leg? How does this happen? Or how did he get shot in a bullet that shattered his bone and went through his leg also went through kennedy is that what we're saying like what are we saying so they had to come up with that one bullet doing all that damage specifically because somebody got hit with some spray that's mean that that did happen that was a part of the investigation and there's a part see and this is the part where it's kind of hard if if you want there to be anything cut and dried if you're the warren commission report and you're doing this not that long after kennedy's assassination i think you have to allow for

the idea that there are going to be unknowables right and and especially ballistics i mean ballistics are crazy right bullets tumble bullets and you know you fire 900 bullets at something most of them are going to be deformed, but some of them might not be. Yeah, but they're never going to look like that magic bullet. That bullet is bullshit. That's the most bullshit aspect of the entire investigation, is that

silly bullet. What is that, a t-shirt? A Kennedy assassination? It's like how it would have had to travel through his body to... Well, that doesn't surprise me. Bullets can do that. You hit bones and you ricochet and you tumble. It's not totally accurate, too. This gets exaggerated, like the

entry point and the exit point. But the point is, when bullets hit bone, they fucking bend and they change shape. When bullets don't hit bone, when you shoot bullets into ballistic gel or when you shoot them into water, especially, they don't hit bone, when you shoot bullets into ballistic gel, or when you shoot them into water, especially, they don't deform. That bullet looked like a bullet that was shot through

something soft. Look at it there. It just doesn't look like what a bullet looks like when it hits bone. And that hit bone. It shattered Connolly's wrist, that same bullet. And they apparently just found it on his gurney in the hospital. And we're supposed to think that that's a bullet that went through Kennedy and Connolly. And I've never talked to a single actual ballistics expert or firearms enthusiast that believes that. Well, see, this is where, had I known I was coming here, I would have brought both those books, so we could have looked up how Bugliosi and Posner explained the magic bullet because they— The path could be explained, I think.

Bullets hit things. People have had bullets ricochet around inside someone's skull and come out their eye when you shoot them in the face. Oh, yeah. Weird things happen with bullets when they hit bones and they ricochet and they move around. So the path of the bullet seems crazy, but possible. What's weird is that they think that is the bullet. That doesn't make any sense at all. If they just said that's a bullet that we found and maybe he had another one, I mean,

maybe something hit something else, maybe. I don't know. But saying that that went through bones- Does that naturally point to the conspiracy? Yes, it does to me. Okay. It points to people being full of shit. The fact that they conveniently found it on the gurney.

Wait, wait, wait. Okay, so the government, you're saying that, okay, I guess what I'm saying is Occam's razor, you're not going to have to convince me of that. Right. Also that the Warren Commission report might have had all sorts of domestic and foreign policy reasons for doing what it did. And just imagine if you're the CIA in 1962, and you're getting together with all your cronies, and you've been responsible for jacking people all over the world.

And you've got this guy, and he's going to disband your entire organization. And then you're talking to some other people that are upset at him because of the Bay of Pigs, and you're talking about some other people that are upset about him because of this and of that and all the other things that he's trying to do that people don't agree with. And they go, look, there's a simple solution to this. And you bring in that Lee Harvey Oswald character and you get that ball rolling. You set up a bunch of different people

that are really good at rifles. I think it's totally possible. It's one of the most possible conspiracies ever. It's totally possible. I don't bank on it. I don't bank on it. I mean, it's also possible. Here's one thing that bank on it. I don't bank on it. I mean, it's also possible. Here's one thing that always bugged me about the Zapruder film.

When you watch his head, his head does go back and to the left, but the spray from the bullet, in my eyes, seems like it's going forward, like he was hit from behind. It's an exit wound, yeah. Well, it seems like a little bit of it, but then sometimes when you hit someone, like, you can hit things and just the impact of the bullet causes a reverberation. I was just going to say, and also, you know, if you watch,

there's a lot of executions online, and I'm ashamed to say I've seen some of them. All of them. I'm ashamed to say I've seen them all. If there's a new one tomorrow, no, but the one thing you notice is that there are probabilities. But remember, I mean, the reason Kennedy's arms went up like this when he was shot is because it hit a kind of a nerve. In other words, things happen when you start striking nerves that are unpredictable.

Or it could have hit him in the neck. Well, it did hit him in the neck or behind the shoulder. But that caused the arms to jack up like that. So watch this real quick. Here's a... See, when you see it, it... That looks like an exit wound to me. It kind of sprays forward.

Yeah. His head goes back into the left. But that could easily have been because of the, you know, just the nerve reaction. That's what I'm saying is that it's... I don't know, though, man. It does go back into the left like it... I know, but that's unpredictable no man it does go back into the left like it i know but that's unpredictable there's there's um there's executions of uh chinese nationalists killing chinese communists and you watch them and they'll do it over and over and over again and most of the time

things go the way you think they should and sometimes they don't yeah you know bodies are weird there's a delay when it goes back into left, there's a delay that almost seems to indicate that maybe it was a nerve reaction. Well, see, that's what the arm's going up was. Because the bullet goes, but watch, the bullet hits. I can't believe we're watching this over again. The bullet hits, and then there's this back and to the left. That could be from the impact of the gun, too. Remember, the car is also moving which is making you you know

it's so hard to tell and then here's another thing to take into consideration it's entirely possible that he was hit with two bullets in the head at the same time that is a possibility. I'm not going to deny that and I'm also going to say that the reason that it would be interesting to know the answer I mean if somebody could come down from the extraterrestrials

and tell you know this is what really is that it would tell you a lot about subsequent history. Yeah. Right. In that sense. The problem with it, though, is if you buy into the conspiracy theory as it's normally told, then that basically takes you down this road that, OK, there was a coup. The president was killed by the government. And then that all subsequent history from that point on then takes a you know like you know they say with time travel you change something and you go off on a totally different course all history goes on a totally different course if that's what really happened in other words everything must be looked through a different lens um if i was to believe as i used to that

that was done by the government then my whole common sense show would be totally different but doesn't i mean don't you have to look at everything from a different lens when you find something like Operation Northwoods? When you find the Northwoods documents, you see that it's signed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that this was a real plan they were thinking about implementing, and Kennedy put the boycott on it. Well, they did some of this. I mean, Operation Northwoods is not that far from things they did in other places.

And wasn't Cheney, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but wasn't Cheney trying to do something about that with Iran? Wasn't there a similar thing that was on the table for a false flag to try to get us into Iran before the end of the Bush administration? Wasn't there something that was being reported? Maybe that was on Infowars.com. I don't remember that one. See if you can find that.

False flag, Iran, Rumsfeld or Cheney. I don't remember that one. See if you can find that. False flag, Iran, Rumsfeld or Cheney. I don't remember who it was. The problem that all those people have is if they think – I always try to give people the benefit of the doubt and say if you came to me with secret information and says blah, blah, blah, the country needs to do this now. And you say to yourself, but I could never get the American people to go along with that. So if they knew what I knew, they would, but they won't. So because of that, I'm going – so you start to go along with that. So if they knew what I knew they would, but they won't. So because of that, I'm going, you know, so you start to try to figure out instead of just automatically going to conspiracy, right? You go, okay, could there be a logical reason that I would accept and understand that would explain the same sequence of events? I always try to do that. Now,

I say that as somebody who clearly knows the CIA's record. I mean, that's been one of my interests forever. The stuff that they do, I can't think of any natural limitations on. I can't think of anything where the CIA would have said, no, I wouldn't do that if the president wanted us to. I don't think many people know this, but in the Nixon administration, there was talk about killing Jack Anderson, the investigative reporter. in the nixon administration there was talk about killing jack anderson the investigative reporter uh... and and it was g gordon liddy who would offer to run him down with a car

so when you talk about that and and there are people around the president who are willing to consider the option well then i have to say he did and you have to open up your mind the possibility that these things can happen and as i said my opinion for years was that it did right so on so i'm not not open to the idea to provoke look at this to provoke war cheney considered proposal to dress up navy seals as iranians and shoot at them it's that real well

but it's what's the source of this you gotta be careful what is it he knows yeah seymour hirsch he's you know seymour's getting a little old pulitzer prize winning journalist for the new york yeah new york seymour seymour hirsch is the one who broke things like i think he broke me the myli massacre and things like that as i said earlier though cheney is really a nefarious character in terms of you know if you weigh him next to the 1950s the the idea of fair play in the american way he didn't believe any of that stuff it's a dog-eat-dog world and whatever you and i consider to be american values is marketing and you react you know i mean it's all about you know it's a it's realpolitik as they yeah right

it's he's such a weird character because he's almost biblical like when he had that heart implant and his body wasn't giving off a pulse anymore and the heart was just this artificial heart was just circling the blood like he literally was alive without a pulse how do you listen to that guy anymore though who listens to him i mean i don't understand his people oh but it's weird why he wants to do it like why wouldn't he want to fade back he still wants wants to influence the process. You talk about a guy with a Rolodex, right? He must clearly enjoy it. He shot some people in his Rolodex. I bet.

Birdseed, wasn't it? Accidentally. Shot some dude in the face. I used to do a joke about it. That's how you know you're a gangster. You shoot your friend in the face, and your friend apologizes. That's right. That guy got on TV. He's like, I look like a bird. I'm so sorry. I was drunk. He was totally sober. That's right. Yeah.

So listen, Dan, We just did three fucking hours We did? Yeah I thought we were just getting started No We just did three hours This happens to us every time I know

You know what you're gonna hear Afterwards right We didn't talk about any history Unless the JF Kennedy assassination Sounds like history That's history That's certainly history We talked about

I don't know A lot of good shit Another three hours of the books That was great Anytime you want to do it again man we'll do another three thank you buddy you're always so good to me

I appreciate you brother your podcast is one of my favorite things in all of audio recorded history I just want to thank you for it thank you for introducing me to the cons

because if it wasn't for that I would never have been Mongo obsessed and thanks just for being awesome man you're the best man thank you for having me thanks everybody

we'll see you Saturday. Fight companion. Woo! See you then. All right. I know I'm going to get hammered.