Dan Carlin joins Joe Rogan to dissect America’s political decay, from the CIA’s Petraeus scandal—where personal failures overshadowed Benghazi—to the erosion of investigative journalism, like Jeff Gannon’s fraudulent White House credentials. They expose how laws like the Patriot Act (pre-9/11 origins) and RICO were weaponized for drug enforcement, not terrorism, while Julian Assange’s prosecution reveals deeper fears of whistleblowing. The two-party system’s corporate grip, fundraising obsession (80% of Congress’s time), and lack of debate on drone strikes or wars—funded by interests like Halliburton—create a "bubble" of unchecked power. Carlin warns of potential constitutional collapse under crises, while Rogan bets on tech-driven transparency, though both fear repression or revolution if societal tolerance for dysfunction vanishes. [Automatically generated summary]
I don't know why he would even be interested in trying that, but that's his move.
So go check it out.
We're also brought to you by Squarespace.
Squarespace is one of our newest sponsors.
And what Squarespace is, if you go to squarespace.com forward slash Joe, you can check out what they have to offer.
What it is is a website that's set up so the layperson can design and build a website.
The way it's set up, all the templates are very intuitive, and they have a bunch of different examples that you can see of what your website could look like if you tried this way or that way.
And it allows you to do what wasn't really possible just a few years ago.
A few years ago, you had to hire a guy who knew HTML. You had to learn how to use different software packages.
Yeah, but it was when – like I took the first class at my college, the first class they ever had on internet.
It was called Multimedia Production and Design.
It was the first time they were like, well, this new internet shit is catching on, so we better start having some classes about the internet, designing for the internet.
And I took the first class of the first year.
It was so stupid.
They had no idea.
The teachers didn't know how to do anything.
They were like, we just learned about this too, this internet stuff.
I wish, I wish, I enjoy it because I actually hate doing websites now.
It's just because, like, for other people, it's the worst thing ever to do because, like, you'll design this whole website and they're like, you know, I don't like the purple.
And then so that means you have to, like, change every single little table and stuff.
So the cool thing about, like, Squarespace is that you could just put a template.
Like, if you just have, if you want a website that's just like, hey, I have a, You know, a store that I want to advertise, a small company.
You could just pretty much get a template, put all the information down so you at least have some presence on the internet.
Apparently quite a bit because people on my message board are super pumped about this.
People online are super pumped about this.
I think now more than ever in this country there's a learning, a yearning rather, to understand how the hell we got here.
When you look at like the financial crisis and you look at our ridiculous actions overseas and you look at like, wow, there's a lot of kids that are growing up right now that are in their 20s and 30s and they look at this mess that we're in as a society, as a culture, as a race really, the whole human race.
How the hell did this all happen?
And because of that, I think there's more of an interest in history today than at any time I remember young people being really interested in history when I was younger.
But it seems like there's more of a clamoring for this knowledge now than I think I've ever heard before.
Yeah, it's kind of interesting what people think that people want to and don't want to see because there's obviously the internet where your podcast is very popular.
There's a lot of very popular podcasts where it's just people talking.
And you're getting hundreds of thousands of people to download these things with just people talking.
And you look at the amount of people that are tuning in to your average television show on a cable network and...
The fungus is just giving you a headache, apparently.
There's a guy named Dave Asprey who runs BulletproofExec.com.
And he wrote the Bulletproof Executive.
And his idea about Bulletproof not being actual Bulletproof, just being that it's rock-solid nutrition, rock-solid management of your body, all this stuff.
And one of the things that he found out was the mycotoxin in coffee issue that so many people weren't aware of.
You go to work and you just...
You know, drinking that coffee from the coffee machine, the coffee maker that, you know, Bob made.
Hey, Bob, how old is this coffee?
20 minutes ago.
No one's really thinking about what the fuck is in that actual coffee, but apparently there's quite a bit of coffee that has fungus on it and unhealthy mold.
It's funny when you think about the fact that the Boston Tea Party is actually – is that really what started people off drinking coffee in this country?
Go to a big tea dealer and behind the scenes, you know, and just have some guy you know that can get the tea on the side smuggled in from French Canada or something.
I read a whole thing about how Afghanistan might be all about lithium deposits and stuff, and you're going, well, 50 years ago nobody wanted lithium for anything.
I mean now it's just one of those things where – I've got to get a hold of Afghanistan or those lithium things will dry right up.
You get in there and you can't make-- there's no one to make deals with that controls all-- you have a deal with this chief, and all of a sudden, you don't have a deal with the other chief.
And so you look around and you just go, look, the Russians in the 1970s and 80s, they may not have had the infrared stuff like we do, but they were pretty dang sophisticated and willing to kill a hell of a lot more people, and they couldn't manage it, so...
It's really scary now that they've turned in so many parts of the world to drones for these difficult missions and the implications of using drones on people.
It's a very strange sort of a conversation to start having because it's step one on a multi-step process where eventually these drones are going to be intelligent things that are controlling themselves.
I mean, it's like saying, I don't want to have tanks because look where tanks are going to go.
The problem is that we treat them differently than live people.
It's like if you said to yourself, well, if you wouldn't go in there with a human pilot and bomb the place because it'll look like Nixon bombing Cambodia when you shouldn't, then don't do it with drones.
But if you're going to use them for occasions, if we're at war with somebody, you're going to want the drones.
You're going to want to use everything.
Yeah, but you're not going to want it.
If you say, well, we couldn't bomb Yemen's tribal territories with a bomber and a human being, that would look bad.
But we can do it with a machine because, well, there's no Americans there.
Is that the L.A. Sheriff's Office decides that, or you've got to call the president?
I can't imagine the White House would let that happen, even if the Sheriff's Department wanted to, because then all of a sudden you have to answer all those questions they're not answering now about, is it okay to kill Americans with a drone on American soil?
Well, then all of a sudden that becomes a moot point, doesn't it?
Ex-cop Christopher Dormer, now a target for drones.
Riverside Police Chief Sergio Diaz, joint leader of the task force assigned with Finding Dormer, has confirmed, and his quote is saying, we're using all the tools at our disposal in a third vague...
All of a sudden this whole thing you're ducking now, you can't duck it anymore and you're not using it against terrorists.
Depends on your definition of a terrorist, but, you know, I mean, any old murderer fleeing the scene of a murder now is open to, you know, no judge, no jury, no due process.
You know, we knew you killed him, so, I mean, that's going to happen, too.
I mean, we're going to hit that fine line at some point.
It gets real tricky when someone denies the rights of citizens, when someone who's in power denies their rights, because what are you then if you're in power and you're denying their rights?
As soon as you step in, And deny people due process, deny people lawyers, deny people...
Why would you ever want to do that is the real question.
So when things get passed like the National Defense Authorization Act that allows the government to indefinitely detain American civilians, and they don't have to do anything.
They're not required to notify your family.
They're not required to arrest you.
They're not required to...
You don't have to get a lawyer.
They can just lock you up.
When you see shit like that, does that drive you crazy?
And people always say to me, they say, well, you know, why are you defending the terrorists?
And what you try to explain to people is, without the due process, there's no confirmation that this is a terrorist.
The only way you know it's a terrorist is when some court somewhere determines upon looking at the evidence that this person is a terrorist.
Once you can kill somebody on the suspicion of being a terrorist, Well, we're all under suspicion of being a terrorist under the certain conditions that someone wants to deem a mistaken identity situation, you know, or anything.
I mean, how many guys are named Omar or Mohammed or, you know, I mean...
They already do because they're a government, but to take it to the next level and decide that you're going to deny the rights of people that you feel are guilty.
Well, who are you, and how do I know that you're infallible, and how do I know that this isn't corruption?
How do I know this isn't a personal grudge?
It's not like you're dealing with an organization that has a spotless record of Over the past, you know, 200 years where they're the most ethical human beings to ever exist and people from other countries come to them.
No, we've caught them lying about a million different days.
Oh, we had committee hearings, which you cannot even imagine today, which shows you how much things have changed.
In the 1970s, we had the Church Committee hearings and the Pike Committee hearings, where the government actually on television exposed everything the CIA had been doing since the end of the Second World War, the assassinations and all this kind of stuff.
The crown jewels are what the CIA used to call those secrets that were exposed on television by congressional and senatorial committees.
It just shows you what happens when there's no oversight.
And if stuff is too secret to have oversight over, you're asking for trouble.
There's too many ways human beings can justify Going beyond the rules.
And there's always a good reason.
And you hear it today.
I mean, the waterboarding thing is a perfect example.
We prosecuted people at Nuremberg for having an attitude that we have now, which is, hey, if they're terrorists and you can save lives by torturing people, isn't that an ethical dilemma where it's worth torturing some guy you know is bad anyway?
In order to save lives, I mean, if you could have prevented the two towers from falling down by waterboarding a couple of bad guys, isn't that worth it?
And those ethical dilemmas lead you off into the weeds really quickly, and history shows that over and over again.
It's a wonderful line going back hundreds of years where somebody says, would you abrogate the laws in order to get the devil?
And the other guy says – No, I would stick to the laws because if you abrogate the laws to get to the devil, you take away the only thing that protects yourself eventually.
And that's what this is.
People say, well, it's okay to go after this to get to terrorists.
What makes you think, one, that it'll stay with terrorists, and two, that what a terrorist is, that definition won't change.
The Bush administration was calling these people that would light car dealerships on fire in the middle of the night when there was no one there, eco-terrorists.
Yeah, it's a strange time because the amount of ability to spy on people and to extract information from your email and your cell phone and, you know, they know your GPS at any point in time, but yet we're still just human beings.
And human beings have to be protected from their own instincts.
We have to set up a system of government that has fail-proof stops where you can't get past certain levels.
You can't do certain things.
You can't act with impunity.
You can't be a king.
There has to be a due process.
There has to be representation.
You have to be able to get a lawyer.
You have to, as an American citizen, be able to state your case.
Well, here's the fly in the ointment, though, and this is almost like the Founding Fathers' tragic flaw in the system.
In wartime, the rules are thrown out the window, right?
In wartime, the government is allowed to give the – the Congress is supposed to decide when you go to war.
Then once the war is going on, the president has – You know, they say extreme constitutional authority as commander-in-chief to run the war any way they want.
But this is all predicated on the idea that the war has an end, right?
This is a temporary suspension of normality.
What do you do in a war like, you know, war, I'm using air quotes, what do you do In a war that has no end, who's going to sign a peace treaty with us on some battleship to end this war on terror?
This is like saying, you remember the Bush administration for a while was toying with the idea.
They thought the war on terror had gotten sort of a bad name, so they were going to do a little marketing move and change the name, and for like five minutes they were calling it the war on violent extremism, which I thought was a great line because that really showed how ridiculous it was.
When's violent extremism over?
Who's going to sign the end of the war treaty and surrender to us in the violent extremism war so we can return to a Normal American system with checks and balances and where the president didn't have extreme authority.
That's the problem is that we're in a situation where it's wartime and it's going to be wartime forever unless somebody declares it over.
And if they declared it over, what stops the next guy after one bombing in some part of the world to start it up again?
Yeah, essentially we've been at war in some function since the 1940s, but realistically when we were in the 90s, at least we didn't feel like we were at war.
We didn't feel like it until 2001. They didn't invoke the extreme authority either.
The government didn't say – Okay, we're going to lock up every one of Vietnamese descent in a cage for a while in case there's spies.
This is like when Truman did the Korean War thing and he got around having to declare war by saying, it's not a war, it's a police action.
That was a marketing tool.
But by doing that, he also essentially swore – he didn't officially – he kind of swore off that, and I'm going to have extreme constitutional authority.
He didn't take that up.
It's when Bush did this war on terror thing and basically the neocon folks said – Remember John Yoo, the advisor to the president, the Office of Legal Counsel said that if the president wanted to, he could torture a son to get the father to talk.
There are no limits in wartime.
No one had really invoked that since the Second World War.
You can go back to the Romans and the Greeks, and they understood that dynamic real well, and so did the founding fathers of our country, who were classically trained.
I mean, the reason we're not a democracy in one respect is that they were fully aware of how that could go, and they were fully aware of what happened to Rome.
So if you look at the checks and balances in our Constitution, a lot of that stuff is designed to keep the same thing from happening to us.
I think they understood that those things break down over time, though, and that essentially you might have a lifespan In that sense, it's very fascinating, the idea of a representative democracy and the idea that there's an electoral college and the idea that there's a few steps beyond actual democracy.
It's sort of you get a vote, but you get a vote for a representative.
You don't get to completely vote like one person, one vote.
And the idea behind it initially was sort of to protect people from their own silliness, right?
Well, the founding fathers didn't necessarily like the idea of average people running the show.
If you looked at the state laws, most states wouldn't let average Joes vote.
I mean, if you were working for a tinker...
In Virginia, you probably weren't allowed to vote.
You used to have to be a landowner in most of these states, and what that was designed to do was to limit the vote to stakeholders.
They figured if you could run a farm without going out of business, you probably knew enough about what was going on to be an educated voter.
Plus, they didn't like the idea.
I mean, you'll probably know this, that after the revolution, it wasn't that long afterwards, we had things like the Whiskey Rebellion and the Shays Rebellion.
These are new revolutions, and they're revolutions coming from the lower classes.
And our brand new, you know, radical founding fathers shut those things down like nobody's business.
You think that the Founding Fathers didn't necessarily want everybody to vote.
You'd be like, wait a minute, what?
But the romantic version of it is that they were these beautiful people that had this idea of treating people the way they deserved to be treated and governed with respect and honesty.
I mean, when you realize that when they had the revolution, we became the first major country in the world that had anything like that.
Then you start to realize, okay, we're looking back at our standards now and not realizing how radical those guys were for their day.
And it's worth pointing out that only a few years after our revolution, the French had theirs, which got wickedly out of hand very quickly.
And our founding fathers were looking at what happened in France, and the French were saying that a lot of what they were doing was sort of a respecting kind of thing from a reflection of ours.
And they were going, don't blame that on us.
We never would have gone that far.
We wouldn't kill noblemen.
So I think it was radical for the times.
It looks very conservative and a little fascist now when we look back on it.
The one thing that concerns me now, I mean, I think this country is...
We sort of feel that we're immune to a revolution.
I don't think that anybody has any...
I think the average person, I shouldn't say, don't think that anyone's going to overthrow the government.
It's not really anything that anybody really believes or thinks of.
It's like, oh, God, the United States government is way too big for that.
But there's a lot of people in this country that don't think that.
There's a lot of people in this country that are stockpiling guns.
There's a lot of people in this country that think that the government's ban on assault weapons and all these different magazine restrictions is just designed to squash the the oppression or the rather resistance to their oppression and that when when the time comes You know, they're not going to give up their guns because they know what's going to happen, that the government's going to come again.
Like, I've never heard this before in my life, this kind of thinking.
I don't remember it in high school.
I don't remember it in college.
I don't remember...
But now I read about it on the internet, like, on a fairly regular basis.
I read stories about people that are saying...
I read...
There was...
What was the task force where a police chief was developing a task force to protect them in case they're invaded by the United States government?
Well, I want to address your other point because I think that was very good too.
The idea of this whole – we need the guns to stop the government from taking over or whatever.
I first encountered this when I was on the radio in Oregon because once you get out into the back country where you get – This was in the era of the so-called militia movement and everything.
And you get these people calling you talking about that exact thing.
I think they're just – they're the people in the government.
The guy who you mentioned in Texas is probably an old militia member.
But these guys – And this is something that the NRA has kind of pushed to.
The NRA is a very different animal than it was 30 or 40 years ago.
And one of the things they talk about now that they didn't used to talk about was this idea that part of the reasons we have a Second Amendment is to overthrow the government if you need to.
I'll leave that to a constitutional expert.
I would just point out that I think people who think like that are not paying a whole lot of attention to how much things have changed militarily.
You and I were talking about drones a minute ago.
Who thinks any government person is going to put themselves out as a target?
They're just going to send a drone to your house.
I mean I think that ship has sailed.
But there's a lot of people – you remember there was Randy Weaver up in Idaho that got – You know, into this conflict with federal agents because he's...
Yes, he'd sought a shotgun off a little too far and a government agent bought it from him and then all of a sudden they're surrounding his cabin and shooting his dog and shooting his wife and killing his son, which really was kind of a bad deal.
I mean, it was...
He had a case.
This is what I guess I'm saying.
But he was a bad enough, weird enough, unabomber-looking kind of dude that you could spin that into, well, he's a radical gun nut kind of thing.
And then you have the Waco situation happen.
Same thing.
A bunch of really weird dudes.
So you want to kind of go, well, I mean, look at who you're dealing with and child abuse and this or that.
But you kind of lose how nasty a deal that was because it's like terrorists.
You can do anything you want to terrorists.
And if it's to terrorists, we don't care as much.
I think when you talk about changing the elected officials and all that, we talk about this all the time.
And they'll tell you that if you catch them off record.
They know.
And when you have a government that's a representative democracy like we have, you have a government by middlemen, right?
We have a membrane.
If Joe Rogan gets a bunch of people together to change the laws, you have to go through these representatives.
If that membrane is corrupt, no matter what you do, when you end up with legislation on the other side of that membrane, it's going to have been tainted on the way through.
And this is why, when you talk about reform, reform has to get through those people.
They're the ones benefiting from the way things are.
So in other words, if you say let's have some anti-corruption legislation, who's going to be the people most hurt by that, the people that benefit from the way things are?
So this is sort of the fly in the ointment.
How do you get corruption reform through the very people that are benefiting from corruption?
I think when you talk about – I mean, think about the 60s protests.
People today make a big deal.
If you can get 50,000 people out with signs for one afternoon, that's a huge protest in the world of the 21st century.
You've got to think of 60s protests.
When you have 250,000, 300,000, 400,000 civil rights type protests that are putting real pressure on the government, I think that's what it's going to take.
It's going to take a real feeling like, okay, the jig is up.
We're threatened with revolution.
You talked about revolution.
We're threatened with revolution if we don't buckle down.
And you're going to have to have those people literally feel like, okay, we have no choice.
I don't care what my contributor gave me to push this idea.
We're going to have to...
At least throw something out there that's a fig leaf.
Is it possible, and this was my question, is it possible to go and get new elected officials and change that?
I mean, can you get people that aren't willing to be corrupt and aren't willing to capitalize on the system as it's written right now and profit off of it?
Remember that scene from the Kevin Costner version of The Untouchables?
There's a scene in that movie, and I quote it all the time, where Al Capone has bought off the jury.
And he's sitting in court, and he knows he has nothing to worry about because he's paid off the whole jury.
And they've realized that he's paid off the jury.
So at the last minute, right before the verdict is read, the judge dismisses all the jury members and brings in all the alternates and screws up the whole thing because now all of a sudden, instead of a corrupt jury, you have one that hasn't been bought off.
The way our government is set up is designed to keep radical change from happening.
It doesn't turn over all at once.
And there's a seniority system so that – let's say you elected a third of the Congress as new people, not corrupt.
They're part of – you have the Tea Party thing now.
Imagine instead of the Tea Party, you had an anti-corruption movement that was able to bring in a whole bunch of new Congress people.
And their whole shtick is that we're non-corrupt, we're not going to vote for any of this corruption.
The first thing that's going to happen is they're going to be told to sit in the back of the room and shut up until they have seniority.
When you're here, two or three terms will maybe give you a committee position.
If you show that you're going to play ball, we'll let you run the committee.
I mean, there's this whole system where you don't get to be influential.
until you've proven you're a good corrupt official for a long time and you're not allowed to overthrow the entire government at once you have to go in there and then you're still gonna have John Kerry and John McCain and all those guys running the show while you're in the back if you're lucky getting a chance to give a speech on C-SPAN in front of an empty congressional room because all of your compatriots are out fundraising do you know that they have phone banks right off the congressional property because you're not allowed to fundraise on government property so they've built these phone banks Like one
foot off government property and they go in there and they cast their vote and then their aides take them right to the phone banks and they start the fundraising.
Eighty percent of their time is spent fundraising.
And they don't want to do this.
I should say that some of these guys, you know, Peter DeFazio is a congressman from Oregon.
He didn't run for Senate because he said, I'm already fundraising more than my conscience will allow.
And if I become a senator, I have to do even more of that.
So there are some good people in there.
They're just, I think, outnumbered, you know, 85 percent to 15 or something like that.
And you can almost see how they've compromised their own moral sense when you have a conversation with some of these guys.
Because like one of them told me, he said, listen, this is democracy in action.
And it's okay because anybody can play this game.
He said, if you have money, and I said, what about poor people?
He said, poor people could get together in large organizations and groups.
He said, if you have money, you get to play.
He said, it's totally fair.
It's a totally level playing field.
Anybody can take part, but money is how you get our attention.
And they've convinced themselves that this is fine.
To be honest, it's been going on in one form or another for so long And some of these guys have been on the Hill for 30 years.
I mean, to them, this is just how it works.
Lawrence Lessig wrote a book where he talked to some of these guys, and they're almost confused.
He had one guy where he went in and the guy was voting on one side of an issue.
And Lawrence Lessig said, well, what about this other side of the issue?
And the guy was completely unaware that anybody disagreed with the issue at all because he hadn't heard from the other side because the other side hadn't given any money.
So in a sense, I mean, I'm not trying to let these guys off the hook, but they're in this bubble.
I mean, I remember we had – I'll even name a name here.
I had Senator Mark Hatfield on my radio show once, and this is way back in the 1990s.
And he comes on the show, and he's about 80 years old, and he's led by the hand by some 19-year-old girl who's his aide who's talking to him like he's an Alzheimer's patient.
Okay, Senator Hatfield, you're going to sit down and you're going to talk to this guy for 15 minutes exactly, then we have to go to the company.
And I mean, he was like a robot.
I mean, he was, okay, okay, I'll talk to this guy, and then where are we going next?
I mean, I thought the guy was like a Manchurian candidate.
They just hopped up on somebody.
They give him an injection and then they just lead him to wherever he has to go.
But in a sense, I felt sorry for the guy because to go in and say, what are you doing about corruption?
The first thing he's going to do is turn to his aide and go, do we have a corruption problem?
Is this on my schedule?
I mean, he really didn't know.
So I don't want to cast these people as evil.
I'm not sure how much they're aware of some of this stuff.
So when they come into this gig, everybody who works the gig, I mean, as they're learning the business and learning how it works, it's just, this is how it is.
Generally what happens is they have a staff and they're going to have somebody on their staff who helps them raise money and there's going to be fundraising targets.
Lessig talks about this in his book.
They will say you need to raise this much per day and if you fall short the next day, it just – it rolls over.
You have to make that much more per day.
And they'll have targeting goals that are designed to be met by the next time you have to start campaigning.
That's the best question of all because this is the one empowering thing about the whole deal that goes right back to us as voters and how we can actually change things.
This money is mostly, some of it's for campaign organization, right?
You want to have your campaign office opened up in Iowa if you're running for president right away, you know, those kind of things.
So there's some money that goes to that.
But the majority of this money is designed for ads, right?
And what are the ads designed to do to change your mind?
What if the ads didn't work anymore?
You know, all of a sudden, you know, we already are from a generation that's a lot more cynical about advertising anyway.
And you and I are both in a business where we realize how much of a tougher time advertisers have than they used to have.
And In the old days, I mean, all you have to do is, you know, we have a new cereal and it's got some different colored marshmallows and boom, I mean, they're selling that like hotcakes.
Now it's a much more cynical group.
We have the DVRs and all these things that allow you to skip ads.
What if they stopped working?
What if the old people who still buy into advertising, the old way it happens, that generation goes away and now all of a sudden everybody's like us.
Don't you devalue what that money buys?
Haven't we changed the system simply by not paying attention to the ads that the entire system, the money is designed to change your mind?
It doesn't change your mind anymore.
Doesn't the whole thing kind of collapse?
I mean, I don't know because we haven't seen it happen, but that seems to be the whole fly in the ointment when it comes to campaign and money raising and everything else.
If I can't change your mind with the money, why do I want to sell my soul and spend 80% of my time fundraising?
Yeah, when Ross Perot came around and paid for his own television half hour to talk about his campaign and taxes and where your money's going and the Federal Reserve, a lot of people had never heard any of that stuff before.
What if a not-so-goofy character had done it, too?
I mean, what if you'd had somebody who...
What if Robert Redford?
I had a political science professor.
Yeah, he was from Germany, a real old guy when I was in college.
And he said that one of the flaws in the American system was that they have – the job of president is actually two jobs in most foreign countries.
Usually you'll have like a prime minister and a guy who's called the chancellor or the president.
the prime minister is the bean counter guy, the guy who's really, you know, you put in there to do the work, and then the chancellor or the president is the figurehead guy, the guy who goes to the state funerals, the one who embodies the soul of the nation.
And this guy said, "In your country, those two things have to be in the same person." So when you elect a Ronald Reagan, what you're electing is a John Wayne.
You want that guy, I mean, who do you think of as president?
You don't want some wimpy bean counter accountant looking guy, you want some guy that looks like America, right?
But how often do you get the skills you want in the bean counter?
I say bean counter, but you know, it's a whole range of things.
But how often are you going to combine the Robert Redford look of a person with the guy who's going to have all those other qualities you want, especially if they've been in a racer-clapper politician for 30 years or something.
So we're kind of hamstrung by that.
So if Ross, can you imagine Ross Perot as president?
Because I think most people are like, Yeah, I like what he's saying, but I can't imagine that little, short, strange talking, we're going to clean out the barn kind of guy being president.
My take on it would be completely – I mean it really would be all just guesswork because Because I have no idea what the hell happens when you actually get into office.
I guess, but I really have no idea what the whole process must be like to say, when I'm president, I'm going to do this.
And when you actually get elected and then you have meetings and get access and get debriefed and they explain the world to you in a way that really no one has access to other than the president.
I'm sure you're not bypassing that moment at the inauguration where they hit you up with the needle and turn you into the… The mandatory candidate needle.
But I mean if you go read – look at Obama's speeches.
I tell everybody to go do this.
Go watch candidate Obama's speeches when he's running for the first term in office and compare that to what we've had.
And then realize that that's pretty darn normal, the before and after thing.
You do start to come to this conspiratorial idea that some – they go to you right before inauguration.
unidentified
We're going to kill your whole family if you don't do just what every other president is doing.
Well, I mean, it's almost like an algebra problem.
When you try to explain all the reasons that these people might morph so much after Election Day, yeah, those start to start looking not that far-fetched, because it's hard to explain otherwise, unless these people just think campaign promises are campaign promises, and that's all.
And I've been...
I mean, look, Obama was the favorite of guys like Goldman Sachs and Citibank when he was running for office.
It's hard to square his agenda while running that he talked to the people with the people that were providing the money.
And so I think maybe that has more to do with it than anything else.
I mean, we're not getting grassroots.
You don't have Abbie Hoffman running for president.
And if he was and Goldman Sachs were backing him, I have a feeling he'd do the same thing.
See, this is where the Obama administration really angers me.
It's not unusual to have some president go off half-cocked and do wild, crazy things like President Bush did after 9-11.
In fact, I kind of forgive those people a little bit because I think it's unrealistic to expect us to have acted sane after 9-11.
As a matter of fact, I've often said if we were smart people, we would put legislation in right now mandating a cooling off period after the next 9-11 so we don't legislate while we're temporarily insane.
I think the fact we don't do that shows you that they'd like to legislate when we're temporarily insane.
But I think we were going to go crazy when that happened.
It's the responsibility of the next guy, though, to get us back on track because if he doesn't, what was an anomaly becomes the new law of the land.
When Obama from the other party running on a platform that he's going to fix the abuses of the previous administration instead codifies them, that's the new reality now.
That's not an anomaly.
That's not an administration before him that was just different.
This is the new post 9-11 world with both parties on board.
It's interesting because this gets back to a point we made earlier.
More than normal because of that whole wartime authority that we talked about earlier.
First of all, presidents have more authority in the realm of foreign policy anyway.
That's always been considered.
The reason presidents like to dabble in foreign policy is because they have the most leeway there.
If they want to get into budgetary things domestically, you start running into congressional roadblocks all the time.
So presidents, even when they're not foreign policy guys, like to do foreign policy stuff because you can actually do stuff and the Congress can't say much about it.
In wartime, this guy's got amazing authority.
I mean, imagine using those same rationales that they use any time they want to do something with the war on terror, but using them for something totally, okay, we're going to stop this budget impasse because we're in a war on terror and I have supreme authority and I'm just going to do what I want to do.
What would anybody say?
Nobody's talked about limiting extreme wartime authority at all.
I mean, if the Republicans are going to say, well, you know, you can't do that in wartime.
Well, gosh, it's nice.
There's a line.
Somebody's designated a limit to the powers.
They don't do that.
Now, there's a book by a Yale constitutional law professor named Bruce Ackerman.
I think it's called The Fall of the American Republic, and it's a little too wonky for most people, but what he's essentially done is target what he thinks is the fly in the ointment in terms of these laws, and it's the Presidential Office of Legal Counsel.
It's essentially the president's lawyers.
These were supposed to be people who could answer the president's question.
Is this constitutional?
Is it not constitutional?
Instead, it's become the kind of people who explain to the president how we can do something.
That's who John Yoo was.
He was one of these people where the president would say, how do we do this and how do we justify it constitutionally?
And it was John Yoo's job to go find out how to do that, right?
Every president has these guys.
And what Ackerman was saying is, by the time the Supreme Court gets around to ruling on these things, it's often two, three terms after that was first.
It's been the law of the land for a long time now.
Imagine the Supreme Court ruling on something from 1994 and saying, everything we've done since 1994 is wrong.
You have to overturn it all.
That doesn't tend to happen.
And so the Office of Legal Counsel can make these rulings and they're the law of the land until they're challenged and overturned by a court.
By the time the court sees that, it's settled law.
One of my listeners brought up a point that I thought of before, but I'd forgotten.
And when you think about it, it's a good point.
He said, not just that, it's a government designed for a tiny country, you know, one with 13 colonies all on the East Coast, you know, relatively homogenous and the whole thing.
And you're expecting that same system to work now?
So things – I mean, in that sense, you're expecting a system designed in a completely different set of circumstances to adapt.
Now, Thomas Jefferson said that that's why the Constitution was built to be amended.
He said to expect a child – he said to expect this Constitution to work as we wrote it forever would be to expect a child to continue to wear the same suit of clothes as they grow up.
But there's a limit, right?
I mean, at a certain point, you reach the stretching point maybe.
And again, if the legislators and all those people were really acting in our interests, maybe they could make it work.
But when you have them working at cross-purposes from us on a lot of this stuff, that's asking too much.
Corporations having the ability to spend as much money as they like on candidates, where you have no restriction in how much money they can spend to influence someone who gets into office.
It's so transparent.
It's like, how does that ever get to be the way we run things?
Because it seems like that's the most obvious method of bribery ever.
Well, there's another one, because even if you got rid of that, how do you stop this revolving door that we see where they say, listen, man, don't worry about it.
When you get out of office, we've got a nice, cushy job at this defense industry or whatever, where you helped us out.
Did you hear about the guy who was the head of Monsanto, who's now the head of the FDA? Well, it's like Obama just put another guy in the Treasury Department that works for Citigroup or something.
If you want to go crazy, Alex Jones conspiratorially sort of design a road map how they've decided to keep certain presidents, they believe that that was one of the problems with Ross Perot.
It's that Ross Perot is how Bill Clinton got into office.
I always try to tell people, do you realize the debates used to be run by the League of Women Voters?
They got out of the gig in the late 80s because the rules that the democrats and republicans wanted in terms of controlling the debate and the questions and everything else, they said we won't run a debate under those conditions and they expected the other side to back down and the other side, which were the two parties, instead said, great!
We didn't want to deal with you guys anyway!
We'll form our own commission, we'll make up four members on it, it will be democrats, four will be republicans, and we'll set the standard for where non-democrats and republicans can play a role.
But Perot exceeded their original rules and he was able to get enough of the population and involvement and rise enough in the polls because of his money, like you said, to get in the debates.
Nobody wanted him in the debates.
Nobody – I mean, they sweated.
Do you remember?
Because he brings up things that are bipartisan failures, and this is the rule of the debates.
Don't bring up – if the Democrats can't tell the Republicans – You know, or the Republicans can't tell the Democrats or blame them for something that they had nothing to do with.
We don't talk about it.
The debt, for example, that was Perot's big issue, that's a bipartisan creation.
So the two parties had no reason to bring that up.
You throw the third guy in there, though, oh, he's going to make everybody sweat because nobody has a good answer for bipartisan failures.
So after Perot crashed the debates, the Commission on Presidential Debates upped the rules for inclusion.
And I went back and did the history of it.
Do you realize that there's never been a candidate in American politics from any third party or independent that's ever come anywhere near their current bar that they've set?
I mean, Teddy Roosevelt ran as a third party candidate from the Bull Moose Party after he'd already been president, right?
A very popular president running against two people that nobody wanted.
He wouldn't have reached the benchmark to be included in the modern presidential third.
You're never going to have a third-party person in again.
The late Gore Vidal said we have one party in this country with two wings that represents 4% of the population.
I mean that might be a little extreme but you start to see that way.
I mean especially when you compare what we consider to be left and right.
To say Europe, for example.
I mean, first of all, our Republicans are to the right of anything, you know, almost, there's a few fascist parties and real weirdos in Europe, but we're to the right of anything like that, and our Democrats are to the right of most of their parties, too.
Well, you know, I have this conversation with a good buddy of mine, Brian Callan, all the time, where we talk about how crazy the world is today, but yet the greatest time to live ever, the safest time to live ever, the most prosperous time, the most We're most technologically advanced time.
When you look at today in comparison to a thousand years ago, how brutal life was, or even a few hundred years ago.
Yeah, I mean, we have just this amazing potential.
As we stand today with our technological abilities, our internet connections, our ability to exchange information, we seem hobbled only by our representation.
It really does seem to be, if you look at how advanced medicine is today, if you look at how advanced science is, the incredible innovations that are coming out every day, the one place where we're disappointing is in our representation.
Maybe you and I and the people who think like us are a weird sort of minority.
Maybe you could come up with this idea, and I'm fleshing this out as we talk, but maybe there's a way to look at this outside our comfort zone where people might say, if all you do is play video games every day, you go to your...
Who cares?
Maybe they would say, well, listen, I mean, why do I care about the fact that the government's corrupt?
And why do I care that all these things are going on?
And why do I care about drones?
What does that matter to me?
I have the best life anybody's ever had in all history.
What am I missing?
And I think that's where you get into these arguments that we make about slippery slopes.
Well, hey, man, just because you're happy today, you know, wait until video game players who download games without permission are struck by drones.
That's, I think, what infuriates people about the whole hipster attitude.
That's what infuriates people about the attitude.
Like, whatever.
Who cares?
I'm here for me.
I don't care about what's going on.
Whatever.
Am I going to fix China?
Am I going to fix Afghanistan?
I have my own problems to worry with.
I wasn't born into a society that I created myself.
It already existed.
I'll just move forward.
But I think as human beings, we all...
Ultimately realized that we're in this together and that a lot of people had to exist before us that had the better good of mankind in mind when they developed computer chips, when they developed TVs, when they developed cars.
We didn't develop anything.
We just sort of stumbled along.
It's our job to do the same thing, to continue innovating as those before us have innovated in every way, whether it's socially, technologically, or governmentally.
We haven't, governmentally.
It's our one area where we've really stalled.
We really have, in fact, slipped backwards into a goofier system because it's more transparent, people are more upset than ever, and still government operates the same way.
When we saw the bailouts, and I remember there was a speech where Obama gave where he said he was limiting the bonuses of the CEOs to like, it was like a half a million dollars.
And I was like, this is the craziest – you're watching robbery take place right before your eyes and this guy who's the representative of the people, this Obama character, is letting you know they're only going to rob a half a million dollars each.
Like, oh yeah, yeah, their company failed, but see, they have a contract and even though the bank didn't – they lost all their money, that guy gets money.
Money is I think what we just – my little fly in the ointment of this idea I had.
I think the fact that it's going to be very hard for a lot of Americans to make a decent living is the most likely thing to prompt change.
I remember in the 1990s when I was doing my radio show, I was the worst radio show host in the world for The Times because I was on this station that had these conservative, stereotypical radio hosts all day long, and then right in the middle of the day part, it was me.
And I didn't fit any of these things.
So I fought with the audience all day long because they were these holdovers from the other conservative shows.
And so I'm screaming and yelling about, you know, when are you going to get out on the streets?
When are you going to do something?
Some guy called me up and said something very prophetic.
I've thought about it many times.
He goes, people aren't going to go out and face the bayonets while they're able to pay their bills and they have the food they want and they can give their kids a halfway decent life.
He said, when that changes, everything else will too.
And you sit there and think about what's happened to middle-class jobs in this country, the so-called middle-class jobs.
It's a combination of changes in trade deals, which we all know about, but also automation, which has gotten rid of a lot of jobs.
I always talk about them as the average Joes and Janes, people that don't have really high expectations, But they want to work, they'll go to work and they'll raise a family and maybe save up for college and just make it work, a little shell game here and there, but just a decent life.
That's the American dream, right?
You take that away, And maybe, I mean, when those video game medicinal marijuana-smoking hipster people can't pay the bills and get evicted, maybe that's the kind of wake-up call that changes their belief system.
And maybe that's where you say, we live in the greatest time ever.
Yeah, unless you're a black person in prison because they caught you with a little cocaine.
Or maybe unless you're some guy that just got evicted and your house is underwater.
I mean, those are the things that all of a sudden make you, and you have enough of those people, because nobody cares if it's 1% of the population.
If 40% of the population dropped from what was the middle class into the lower class, I think agitation hits a level that you and I in our lifetimes haven't seen.
Yeah, where we have never seen before, and that's one of the things that I was alluding to when I was talking earlier about the desire to understand history.
I think that more people today, and at least the conversations that I'm having based on my own personal experiences, More people are concerned with talking about the corruptions of the past and why shouldn't we be surprised?
Or why should we be surprised that there's so much fucked up shit going on in politics today?
Like, did you know this?
Did you know that?
I think there's a lot of people that are trying to figure out how the hell we got so bad.
You know, I think the Founding Fathers obviously had some awesome ideas, and they were brilliant men, and they were very well-schooled.
You can't possibly ask people from 1776 to figure out a way that you're going to govern people that exist in a time you couldn't even possibly imagine.
Look at the 1960s, which whatever you may have thought about it was a period of change in whatever direction.
Look at how many people you can still name, if you have any knowledge at all, that were leading their own segments of movements one way or the other.
Tons of people, whether you want to talk about civil rights and the Martin Luther Kings and the Malcolm Xs, whether you want to talk about the yippies and all that, whether you want to talk about...
Everything had these people that stepped forward that are on your Wikipedia page.
If you want to go look...
Who the hell does that today?
Can you name two people who are out front as political, outside politics, but people who lead movements?
Yeah, constantly and constantly getting called out for what he's doing with corporations and forcing them to pay Enormous sums of money, and he goes in for racial education and teaches people.
Whenever they say, I mean, essentially what he does is he finds someone who's done something either that could be racially distasteful or said something that's out of line, even in a joke, and they go in and they blackmail him.
And unbeknownst to most folks, even though marijuana has been illegal in its country since the 1930s, LSD didn't become illegal until 1970. They passed this sweeping Schedule I psychedelic act where they made everything from peyote to mushrooms, all these different sacramental entheogens.
Well, they made them illegal then because that was the first time law enforcement around the country was running into widespread problems with it.
They didn't know.
There's a great dragnet from the old dragnets that are so funny to watch.
The one with Blue Boy, the most famous one ever.
I love those!
Those were all based on actual things.
They find out people are using this brand new drug called LSD and there's no law against it.
So immediately the first thing they have to do is go find a new law that they can put into place.
It's like I say today, the problem with our drug policy is that we're not accounting for the fact that we might come up with some darn good drugs that don't do as much damage as the ones we have.
Our policy will be to make whatever new drug we find illegal tomorrow.
If it intoxicates you, it's illegal.
I don't know how much longer that's going to work, but if I was the government trying to stamp out drugs, I think I'd just make better drugs that competed with...
I mean, how do you get rid of bathtub gin?
You get Bombay Sapphire and nobody wants any bathtub gin anymore.
Well, also, you have to address what's being done with these drugs and what's the effect, because they've made no effort whatsoever to stop things that turn you stupid.
There's no effort whatsoever to slow down Oxycodone, Oxycontin, Vicodins.
Those guys from Current TV, I think it was Current TV, True TV, one of those fucking channels, Vanguard is the show.
They had a show called the Oxycontin Express.
And what they did was essentially they showed that there is a highway that connects Florida to the rest of the country, Ohio and Kentucky and all that.
And these people are just getting busted with massive amounts of oxycund.
I was just going to say, in places like Tennessee, they just sit on the side of the road and bust any – yeah, yeah.
But here's the thing.
I'm not convinced.
I mean when you look at – if you look at modern society and you say, where have we made – The most technological advances, you would have to put pharmacology in the top three or four areas, right?
Oh yeah, sure.
And when, for example, when the Nazis wanted stuff to keep their soldiers awake for things like, you know, unlimited blitzkrieg attacks and fighter pilots, they would simply go to the pharmacy companies and say, here's what we need, and they'd produce it.
If we were intelligent about this, we would say, as Dr. Weil so famously wrote 20 years ago, people want to change their consciousness.
Can't we arrange for substances that do this in a more safe way than the ones we have, that come with some pill that will sober you up when it's time to drive home, that's better than what we have now?
And I guarantee you, if you sit at the pharmacy companies, and by the way, we'll give you the patent to this for 20 years afterwards, they will come up with something recreational better than anything we have, but because of an almost...
I don't know if it's a Puritan ethic or if it's the companies that make the current products that are legal that don't want competition or whatever it is.
Nobody even talks about this.
Nothing drives me crazier about the way we conduct things in American life than we don't even bring up subjects.
I don't mind if we come up with the wrong answer in a national debate on something like this.
But can we have the national debate?
Can you come up and defend to me why we shouldn't be working on Safer, healthier alternatives.
If you're going to make this drug illegal for recreational use, no problem, but give me something that people can use, because they want to use it, that will do something similar, will be less harmful to the individual using it, and less harmful to society.
I don't think the government has any plans whatsoever on either backing or supporting any pharmaceutical company that creates psychedelics.
I think there's a big difference between creating hydrocodone or creating a safer amphetamine or creating safer drugs that allow us to continue society As structured.
When you start getting into things like mushrooms and LSD and acid, the real problem is the boundary dissolving properties of these things which make you want to absolve society, makes you want to get rid of all the laws, makes you want to sleep naked on each other's floors and do a lot of like culturally unsanctioned shit.
And that creates chaos and that created the chaos of the 60s.
It was a paradigm shifting sort of a way that people were looking at the world that was impossible for the 1950s minded cops Right.
Unless you accept the idea in a free society that maybe people should be allowed to use recreational stuff.
I used to say there ought to be a system, a test, right?
And it should be something like a hundred questions.
Question number one, how likely is it to be addicting?
Question number two, how dangerous is it?
And everything should pass this test.
And if you get above or below, I don't know how it would work, a certain score, you're legal.
If you don't, you're illegal.
And you put the current drugs that are legal on there, too.
You put alcohol on there, put caffeine on there.
And let's see how it scores.
Do you really think marijuana is going to fail that test and alcohol is going to pass?
It's like I said to you before, if somebody invents the perfect drug tomorrow in some bathtub somewhere, our government's going to ban it the day after tomorrow with no testing, no questions asked, just on the grounds that it's recreational, you're not allowed to have any recreational drugs.
Think about how you would change the country if you said, listen...
Again, getting back to my Joe Friday dragnet thing, because this is apparently how I learned about all this as a youth.
I remember the marijuana episode where the guy, the family man, remember the one where his child dies in the bathtub later, where he's trying to argue with Joe Friday about why there's nothing wrong with marijuana.
He says, well, it's less effective than alcohol.
It doesn't bother you.
And Joe Friday says, but look at all the problem alcohol causes.
Do we really need another drug that does that?
I think that's how they think.
I think they think that you're going to increase, and they might be right, traffic fatalities.
I think it would be beneficial to society as far as a relaxant – I think if there's anything that society needs right now is a change of perspective, something to calm them down.
And more creativity.
Those are three things that are promoted by marijuana.
One of the problems with kids starting out with this stuff is that they're going into it in an ignorant way, experimenting on their own, and no one knows what the – What the effects are going to be.
Well, first of all, I tell her, whenever we have conversations about anything, one of the most important things that I bring up is all the things that I've fucked up.
What's the difference between locking somebody up, you find with a drug, than locking somebody up who does something they shouldn't be doing when they're on the drug?
I mean, hold them accountable and responsible.
Then we're still going to have a ton of people in prison, but they're not going to be in prison for possession.
They're going to be in prison for doing something that, you know, you go back to the Old West and one of the standard stump speeches that the person they were about to hang...
Would give you.
The guy who was about to hang would always feel, not always, but a lot of times feel like they needed to give some sort of lesson to the kids.
And they'd say something like, well, you need to avoid alcohol and don't end up like I ended up.
And that was it.
You know, that kind of thing.
Look, that's going to happen.
And there's no question that I think, whether it's alcohol or anything else, that's going to lead some people astray.
They call it a gateway drug.
Anything is a gateway.
The first thing you use is a gateway drug.
At the same time, we punish people now for the potential that they might do with the illegal drug.
If you punish them for the actuality, I'm not sure it's any less effective than what we have now, and you increase the overall freedom level.
You know, the idea that the founders had that we ought to use the states as laboratories, this is where you get to the marijuana situation right now.
I would love for states to be able to actually try this out.
Instead of us having to have a national experiment, you know, where everybody sinks or swims together, let Colorado try this weed thing out and let's see how it goes.
I don't think the feds are going to let this really happen.
First of all, the feds already aren't letting this happen.
I mean the state – And it puts the state lawmakers in a really weird position because they're supposed to listen to the will of the voters, and yet state law is trumped by federal law, and everybody knows that.
So how they're supposed to act is a netherworld.
The feds have never given one second of lip service to the idea that they're going to allow this.
They always say, well, we're not going to concentrate on individual users, blah, blah.
I wonder how much of this has to do with the fact, too, that it's the equivalent of being able to distill your own alcohol in your backyard if you want to.
I mean, you take all of the companies that you might be able to get on your bandwagon here if Philip Morris could make your marijuana cigarettes as opposed to what they have now where you'll just grow it in the backyard and nobody makes money.
Well, when the government decides they're going to clamp down and...
You know, like if they go into Colorado or if they go into Washington or one of these places where the will of the people has been amply read, enacted into law and the whole thing, and they overturn that.
Those are going to be interesting trigger points or benchmarks in wherever it is we're heading.
So you know what they've been doing, the way the DEA's been handling it in California is very fascinating.
They go in, they break down the door, do whatever they have to do, guns in the air, hold people on the ground.
There's a video of them stepping on some kid's neck.
College kid just working there.
The cop steps on his neck as he walks over him.
For no reason.
They smash the security cameras.
They thought that the security cameras were...
On set, it was actually sent through the internet to a third-party location, always.
So they got video of this where they tried to destroy it.
The cops tried to destroy it.
They steal all the drugs, they take all the marijuana, and they steal all the money.
Then they say, we're holding your file until we decide what to do with it.
And they do nothing.
So they take thousands of dollars, whatever the fuck you have on the premises, they take thousands of dollars of marijuana, they take all your cash on hand, everything that they want to take from you, and then they say, we're holding your file, we'll tell you what we do when we decide.
And they can hold onto it for years and years and years.
So essentially they put you out of business.
They put you out of business without arresting you.
So are they enforcing federal law?
Sort of, but they don't.
Are they enforcing state law?
No.
So it's not a state law, it's just the federal law, but they don't actually do anything about it.
Very few people are actually getting brought to trial.
If you look at, too, what the excuse for the militarization of police forces over the last 30 years has been, this drug war has been the greatest thing that ever happened in terms of I mean, the idea that someone thought up, hey, wouldn't it be a great incentive to tell officers that they could get...
Well, there's actually some great books about this.
Dan Baum wrote one called Smoke and Mirrors once.
There are others where there used to be two kinds of forfeiture laws, a criminal one and a civil one.
And without going too deeply into it, in order to fight the drug war during this crazy time of the 80s, they decided to combine the two.
Taking the lower standard required for one kind and the higher penalties for the other kind, putting them together.
And this is where you got the situations where if the police officers burst down your door and found drugs, they could seize your Corvette automatically without any sort of acknowledgement that the Corvette was bought with drug money on the grounds that you have to sue us to get it back.
You have to prove that there was no drug money here.
And if you don't, if we get to keep this car and sell it, at least some of that money, some departments got it all, others had to share it with other agencies, some of that money goes right back to the people who seized it.
Now, this was supposed to be a great incentive, right, well, we're going to crack it on the drug users and we'll be able to afford the narcotics teams because they don't pay for itself.
But as Radley Balco has written in a book that's due out any time now, I saw an earlier version of it, This has exploded the number of cases where police do these things, and it comes at the expense of robberies and other crimes that don't actually benefit the department as much as these search and seizure drug crimes do.
And if you got rid of the drug crimes, what happens to those departments that are making a bunch of money off of it now?
The cops, for folks who don't know, there's this thing they're doing.
they the police have this policy called policing for profit so they pull you over like say if you're a truck driver and you live in your truck and all your money in the world is in that truck what if you have fifty thousand dollars and it's in your truck you know they pull you over they say why the fuck do you have fifty thousand dollars they take your money and that's theirs now you have to prove that you got that money through legal means and
And the way Tennessee's doing it is, apparently, they've been doing this for a while.
They've been seizing money, and that money goes to their police force.
Let me defend those people for a second, though, because one of the things that Balco's book had that I found fascinating was, remember, a lot of these people are elected.
A lot of these sheriffs, for example, are elected.
And there was one county, I don't remember where it was, where the sheriff was not going to do this.
And the guy who ran against him for sheriff said, do you know how much money we're missing out on?
We're cutting officers left and right enforcement because we won't just go and do what other – look at what the county next door has.
They've got all this equipment and all these officers because they're seizing assets and we're not.
In other words, because the feds do not come in and enforce the constitution, because they allow this, because it's – Remember, before the war on terror made everything okay if it was part of the war on terror, the war on drugs allowed us to rip open parts of the Constitution on the grounds that this war was so important and there were so many lives at stake.
And like the mafia, it was so resistant to normal law enforcement techniques that we needed special tools.
That the federal government not only allowed this stuff, but encouraged people to do it.
And I would like to say proudly, Los Angeles, with police chief Darrell Gates in the old days, was one of the leaders in this.
We had the first tank.
I remember we had the first tank to knock down the drug buildings and everything else and seize the property.
Once that becomes standard fare, Are you going to be the sheriff that says, I don't do that, when the guy running against you says, look at our idiot sheriff, he's missing out on all these federal dollars, plus the feds actually match some of your costs.
They will hand you down paramilitary stuff as part of, like, used war surplus and everything else.
I mean, when you see these police officers in full camo gear carrying AR-15s and everything, a lot of that stuff is hand-me-down right from the military.
And if you don't want that, you're going to run around with a stupid Colt.44 revolver when you could have an AR-15 in a tank?
When I was a reporter, we had a lot of, you know, you develop relationships with these people.
And you do it at the weirdest times.
I would go out to these murder scenes, be like four in the morning, in the rain, you're seeing the same guy, you know, the same watch guy you see all the time in the field.
Or you call them, when I was at ABC here, I mean, I used to do the beat checks, they're called in news, which is where you call all these police divisions, and you're talking to the same poor guy, it's midnight and I'm calling the same guy, how you doing?
You know, I mean, they're just working schleps like the rest of us.
And you know what, how many of us would perform any better after five years on the job with guys shooting at you?
That and also I think that as a society we have to put much more emphasis in our schools and much more in our police force.
I think police, fire, EMTs and schools, there should be so much more money dedicated to these areas.
So much more!
And it's really a crime of society that we've allowed our politicians and the people in office to allocate so much resources to other parts of the country While ignoring our problems that we have here at home.
I don't think there's anything wrong with helping out less fortunate countries.
But the way we do it under the guise of military invasion and the amount of money that goes to that and where that money goes, you look at how much Halliburton is made off this fucking war and weapons manufacturers are made off this war.
Probably more of a time problem I was dealing with there.
I was very rushed.
But you arrive there and it was all these people with these amazing...
I said they must have been thrilled to have me on the guest list because there were only 12 participants and they all had these massively doctor this and that from this institution and then Dan Carlin, podcaster.
They had to be thrilled I was there.
But, the first question I asked these folks, I mean, it was the general that was there, was the head of US Central Command, the vice admiral was there, and I said, what do US taxpayers get from all this?
In other words, if we're going to go cost to benefit, and you talk about vital US national security and this, that, or this other area, what is the average US taxpayer who's paying for this?
get for all this.
Now there was no good answer and it's not these guys job to answer it.
They don't make policy.
They're like cops too.
They don't make policy.
But you want to ask your representatives, you know, I mean, I know you say we need to be here and there to protect our security, but really what does the United States get from our involvement in the Middle East?
The oil situation is not like it was in the early seventies.
We're not going to be, there's not going to be petro blackmail like there was in the old days.
It's one big giant oil market now.
Why do we get to be the people that pay for this?
If it's for the entire world's sake, why isn't the entire world paying for it?
Why aren't their soldiers dying in the field as much as ours are?
I mean, these are the kind of questions we talked earlier about.
Why can't we have a national debate about this?
I don't care if the answer comes from the wrong side of what I consider to be right or wrong, but let's just talk about it.
And I have this conspiracy theory that the reason we don't have these national debates is because some of this stuff is just indefensible.
It's the same thing with President Obama trying to say it's okay to kill Americans with drones.
You don't hear him talk about it because I don't think you can get up and make that case.
And so just don't talk about it.
If you can't win an argument, don't have the argument.
Yeah, that's the reason why you've never heard a politician bring up cigarettes.
You'll hear politicians talk about alcohol or drugs and even prescription medications being issues.
You never hear them talk about cigarettes ever.
Why?
Because they spend billions of dollars to keep politicians from talking about cigarettes.
Hundreds of thousands of people die every year from cigarettes.
You would think that's a real health issue.
No, it's obesity.
We've got problems.
We've got problems with cancer.
We've got problems with AIDS. We have problems with the fucking – some poison that they sell at every corner, but the people that sell that poison kick it back upstairs.
Well, if you go there, there won't be any confusion.
If you have the number one least corrupt country, Sweden, and the country at the bottom of the list is Nigeria, I guarantee you that governments can function well a certain distance down that list.
There's a tipping point.
I think if you say, well, the United States has always been corrupt.
Look at how things were in the 1950s.
Yes, but we were still able to function.
The corruption was not so much – it's like if you have a physical impediment and you say, well, I limp around but I still get around okay, and your knee gets much worse and all of a sudden you can't walk.
There's a tipping point.
Not walking is a whole different thing than limping around, right?
Our government was always corrupt from the very beginning of the republic.
We've just reached a point where it doesn't function any well, that it's so corrupt.
It's also that it's not just that it's so much more corrupt than ever before.
It's so much more transparent that it's corrupt.
Because of our access to information, which is unprecedented, and people are bewildered by it more than they ever have been before because of this.
Because if you go looking, it's really simple.
Just go looking real quick, read any Matt Taibbi article from Rolling Stone on the financial crisis, and you'll fucking pluck your eyebrows out screaming in the mirror.
You won't be able to feel like it makes any sense.
Let me tell you that this is the great wild card, though.
We alluded to this earlier when we talked about what if the 60s generation had the internet You know, when you read about how much just printing presses changed the world in terms of just being able to disseminate English-language Bibles changed everything, this, you know, people forget, you know, it's like you said 20 years ago, like a blink of an eye when you've lived a while, this Internet is still brand new.
We haven't begun to see what it's going to do yet, and we haven't had these situations, like you were saying, these little tipping point moments where all of a sudden the Internet makes all the difference in the world.
If the stupid printing press changes the world to the degree that did, what's this going to do?
And how are the authorities going to react when it starts doing it?
I mean, you know, we were talking about Anonymous before the whole show started.
That's just the tip of the iceberg.
What happens when this isn't some little teeny group on the fringes that's doing this?
What happens when 40% of the population is so mad and maybe...
20% of them are the right-wing guys who think that they need the guns to stop the government.
20% of them are the left-wing guys that are so mad that they can't get something else.
I mean what happens when all these people are operating at cross-purposes and the internet is this highway that lets them all talk in a way that during the 1960s they would have been doing mimeographed letters on a copy machine handing each other them by hand.
And I also think that this is just the beginning of what seems to be an ever-increasing access to each other, access to information, the ability to reach and connect with each other.
And I think that's going to eventually lead to something that's going to allow people...
I think we're going to, our eventual connection is going to be through some sort of wireless, neural frequency connection where we're going to be able to exchange information without having to talk to each other.
I haven't either, but there is connection, and that's pretty much been established.
One of the things they're doing with punishing Petraeus in this way and going after him is acknowledging his failures in Benghazi, and there's sort of an internal motivation to get rid of him outside of just the fact that the FBI busted him with an affair.
What I found most fascinating about this was, first of all, that the head spook got spooked on.
I mean, and then that even when you're a general, you're dealing with the kind of girl who's going to fuck you when you're married is a crazy bitch, okay?
And the kind of chick that's going to be your mistress when she writes a book about you...
There's something that's so wonderfully, you know, we all have these tragic flaws, and it's like, that guy was born with that.
It was like faded.
The Greeks would say it was like written into his fate that I'm going to have this wonderful military career, be respected by everybody, and then I'm going to be brought low by something so silly.
And it's unfortunate Petraeus was there, but we cloned him, so don't worry about it.
The poor guy.
And the whole thing is, what's really tragic is you see the wife, and his wife is sort of, you let herself go over the years, and I believe she's had some health problems.
What's ironic about that is you're taking trained killers, putting them in unbelievably stressful situations for months at a time away from their wives, and you're saying that if you're an adulterer, we can court-martial you.
Goes back to the military code of honor, which, of course, there's a lot of other things you could do that would seem to violate the military code of honor, but don't have adulterous affairs.
The celebrity thing is probably tenfold when you're dealing with a military man who's a trained killer who's been responsible for leading armies to battle.
Yeah, he died on one of those missions where he was going to volunteer to take a bomber into some really hardcore clandestine thing, and the bomber takes off, and it's just in the sky, and the whole thing just explodes.
And John was involved in that PT-109 I mean, all those guys, you think about what they did, as lightweight as John F. Kennedy was, can you imagine Clinton out there on the PT boat in World War II? I mean, it just doesn't even register.
I mean even flat-footed guys were making it into World War II. When it got to Vietnam, it got to be – it's so much different because people were like, well, it was a stupid fucking war.
It was a war we should have never been involved with in the first place.
Who wants to be in Vietnam?
You know, if I was alive back then, I probably would have dodged a draft, too.
The weirdness goes on more than you would think in those groups.
I happen to know some people that would have been astronauts had it not been for going after the wives of people who were ranked higher than they were.
But these are also hard drinking, hard partying, hard exercising.
Like I was just talking to one guy last night.
He's like, we get up in the morning, you run 10 miles, you go work hard all day, you're done with the day, you go out and you drink as hard as you work.
Yeah, yeah.
It's sort of a cultural thing.
And you know what?
You want to let down after a hard day at work.
My day at work is not as hard as those guys.
If the letting down is in proportion to how hard the day was, you're going to need a lot more beers than I would need.
What do you think about – this is something that I really want to make sure that we touch on and bringing it back to Al Gore, believe it or not, but in a serious way.
The HBO documentary Hacking Democracy went over the issue with the Diebold electric voting machines and how they could be influenced by third party and third party information.
Besides the person counting the vote, the person making the vote, there was room for a third party.
And they talked about how disturbing that was and how it had been engineered.
For that.
And they essentially said, look, you could rig a vote.
Again, when you mention that, all I can think about is, how is this flying under the conversation, Raynar?
It is, though, right?
If you want to get down on anybody, let's get down on the journalists who aren't doing their job.
That used to be my profession.
These wimpy...
Kiss-ass journalists who want to hang out afterwards behind the velvet rope with the people they cover.
The question to ask the president and the other candidates is everything.
What do you think about this voting machine?
Ask them.
Let's get their opinion.
Make them go on the record.
These guys are able to say, basically, on the sly, if you ask me any questions beyond these five things I have on this list right here, you're never coming to another function again.
And I won't answer your question anyway.
You won't even get the satisfaction of saying, well, I got an answer before I was kicked out of the room.
You don't get your question answered, and you never get to come back, and that works now.
I mean, in the Cold War, they used to cut some slack of the politicians on certain kinds of questions, and there were certain manly rules.
Like, I mean, everybody knew John F. Kennedy was having all these affairs, and it was not considered to be proper to bring that up, which is crazy when you consider the potential for blackmail.
But nonetheless, that sort of stuff was off the record.
But you get some damn tough questions on other things.
We don't have that today.
And if you want to say, how does the country get as bad as it does without anyone talking about it, that's because our so-called fourth estate, who plays a constitutional watchdog role in our system, isn't doing that.
There are three estates of government that are official.
You have the executive branch, the judicial branch, and the legislative branch.
Those are the three estates that work from inside the government, and they're officially constitutional branches.
The fourth estate is a term used to describe a non-constitutional branch, a non-governmental branch, the watchdogs who watch the government from outside the government.
Well, don't you think, though, that with this new access to information that we're enjoying because of the Internet, what's also rising is shows like yours, The Young Turks, people who are openly, actively questioning every single aspect of our government.
Because you're absolutely right, and thank goodness.
And thank goodness you brought that up, Joe.
But here's the difference.
When CNN officially cut their investigative reporting budget, which is a joke anyway because they weren't doing any investigative reporting worth of salt anyway, they got rid of the stuff that provides the basis of information.
I don't mean at CNN, I mean everywhere.
The investigative reporting is how we, whether you're talking about me or the Young Turks or anyone else, that's where we get our info that allows us to then comment on it.
I'm not out doing the investigative work.
That is, you know, there's a reason that the very First Amendment to the Constitution protects freedom of the press.
And it's not because someone thinks you should have the right to tail some celebrity for TMZ because we just have to know who they're dating on the side.
It's because this is considered to be of national import.
The country goes to hell in a handbasket if you don't know what's going on and really what's going on.
The 1970s are turning out to be the high-water mark of American journalism.
When you look at what was going on then, you turn around and go, you can't imagine that happening today.
And that's totally the opposite of what you normally expect.
Normally you expect everything to get better The seventies from a news standpoint was so much better than what we have now in terms of exposes and people getting nailed and that's pre-internet.
If you took that level of dedication to investigative reporting, it's all the post-Watergate era stuff when everybody was going in and the way you made your bones in journalism was to try to be Woodward and Bernstein.
I'll tell you a story.
When I got my first job in reporting, I went from here in L.A., where I was working on the assignment desk, you know, behind the scenes, to working in front of the camera.
And the first thing that happens that makes you upset as a reporter is they'll send you to, like, the dog show and the knife show and all these things where you're going, this is why I got in the news.
I want some meaty stories.
So I get my hands on my first meaty story.
Members of the sheriff's department call me up on the sly and they start telling me what the sheriff is doing secretly, right?
I jump on this story.
It takes weeks to flesh this thing out, right?
It's totally non-cost effective.
I break the story.
It's this big deal.
Everybody's on it.
And the news director gives me an award because he has to because it's this big deal.
But then he takes me in the office privately and tears me a new one and says, don't you ever do that again.
I said, what?
What am I supposed to be doing?
He said, now the sheriff is never going to give us a story again.
They're never going to talk to us again.
You just burned our bridge with them.
Well, wait a minute, the guy's involved in illegal activities.
Yeah, but there's 57 stories we need to do down the road where we need their cooperation, and now they're not going to help us.
That's what's happened.
And that's, you know, on the national scale, it's the same thing.
They don't want to be Woodward and Bernstein because Woodward and Bernstein aren't getting another interview with the president.
Yeah, so you can have the internet, but if Anonymous doesn't tell us and release cables of what's going on, who did the investigative work to give us enough information for me to comment on?
I mean when you're talking about the journalism, the journalists doing their job, what would really have been interesting is if Bradley Manning had gotten those documents to the New York Times.
I wonder how they would have handled it.
Would they have done what WikiLeaks did?
And if they did, would they be considered criminals like – It's funny you say that because I just had a listener download an article for me about five weeks ago because I heard about it.
The head of the Washington Post gave a speech to all these big corporate muckety-mucks a couple years after that trying to explain that Don't worry.
We're not going to get all expose-y now.
This isn't going to be a trend of ours to bring down presidents and everything.
You don't have to worry.
And you can go actually – if you have a JSTOR account or whatever with these libraries, you can actually download the speech from 1976. And it was Catherine Graham, the head of the Washington Post, where it was this reassuring thing to the powers that be that, don't worry, the media is not going to get too investigative, and we're going to make sure we protect your secrets enough so you don't have to worry.
That's what WikiLeaks and groups like it don't do.
And the truth is, is I think we can all agree that there are secrets that should not come out.
The government abuses this privilege over and over again, but if it's really going to kill U.S. service members, for example, okay, I understand that.
But when you say anything is going to kill U.S. service members, when you abuse it, you lose me.
If the media and the government were doing their job, you don't need a WikiLeaks.
When they're not, is it better to have no WikiLeaks at all, or is it better to have a WikiLeaks with all its flaws?
I'm sorry.
The stuff that we're already finding out...
Opens up such a window of importance in terms of us understanding how the world really works behind the scenes.
I'm sorry, to me, that's pretty darn invaluable.
But, you know, I'm biased.
As a journalistic guy, I believe in that kind of openness.
I've got to tell you, a lot of them are conditioned, I think, conditioned to think that you're going to release important secrets and get people killed.
And I got a lot of flack when I said that I was in favor of WikiLeaks releasing some of this stuff.
Well, yeah, you can correct me if I'm wrong, online people, but I don't believe they released any names of anyone whose security hadn't already been compromised.
Well, I think in their situation, I think their position was so extreme, having this secret files, having this access to this one guy and having secret files down on him.
I don't know how the media could have gotten that in any other way, unless this Bradley Manning guy or someone like him offered that stuff up.
But they know who he is now, and he was disgruntled and mad at not getting a promotion and all this.
And so he was feeding them this stuff that he wasn't allowed to feed them.
And it's like the guy, Daniel Ellsberg, who was involved in that whole thing, the Pentagon Papers, he says today that Julian Assange is the modern-day version of him.
And that he could have been brought up on the exact same charges and almost was.
I mean, to bring up the 1917 Espionage Act as a way to go after somebody in the modern 21st century world is to me an example of how desperate they are.
I mean, here's all you have to know.
This isn't really about this or that individual losing their lives.
This is about how much scandal you would have if we really knew what was going on behind the scenes and what our politicians gave the okay for.
He's said, and his lawyers have said, as I understand it, that as long as he gets a written pledge from our government and the British government that they're not going to nab him, he'll go back and face the charges.
The key is, is everybody knows that those are the governments that want him.
The danger isn't that he's going to go to Sweden and face these charges.
The danger is that somebody's going to...
Disappear him, that's right.
And the government would like to do that to set an example.
The problem is, one, he's not an American citizen, so you can't charge him with the same things you could charge a Bradley Manning with.
I don't think the government cares too much about that.
I think their attitude is they want you to see what happens to somebody who does what Julian Assange does so that you know if you do – I think that – who was the guy who just died who just killed himself that the government was after for stealing files?
Aaron – what was his last name?
The guy who killed himself and was under pressure from the government for stealing some stuff from MIT, some digital files.
But he's another example where the government wants to break that guy As to set a precedent so that you know when you want to try to do something like that, you're sacrificing your life in effect.
In effect, you can do this, but look at what happened to the last guy who did it.
And that's, I think, what they want to do to Assange too, to say to all those hackers out there, hey, just so you know, you're playing with your future.
They've done this to the so-called eco-terrorists too, where they'll give you 35 years or something for starting a fire where you can kill a guy and get out.
Not that an American would, either, if you were accused of a crime of terrorism.
I mean, if you're accused of a crime of terrorism and you're in a place like Afghanistan, You have no rights at all if a guy in the executive branch of government decides that.
But what a creepy, sweeping term terrorism is if it applies to you exposing murder, you exposing whether it's ineptitude or just a casual disdain or just a lack of respect for human life.
You want to get into history and where history is important.
Every time, every is a sweeping word, but many, many times throughout history, when someone wants to exempt people from the normal rules of conduct, you call them terrorists.
It's a term, believe it or not, Adolf Hitler used when he was explaining why you didn't have to treat captured prisoners in the Soviet Union.
With any sort of the laws of war.
They're terrorists.
Jews, commissars, anyone found behind the front lines is a terrorist, which exempts you from treating them like prisoners of war.
Terrorist is a word that means anything you want it to mean.
And it's been proven to be that over and over.
Not that there aren't real terrorists, but the term is so remarkably flexible and allows you to essentially...
Well, terrorists are also defined as people who sell drugs.
Because of all these different things that they've passed, The Patriot Act, Patriot Act II, the NDAA. One of the things that they've done in these sort of sweeping definitions is they've allowed the government to use things that were supposed to be there to protect you from terrorism or to enforce laws against terrorism.
And now they use them for drugs, like, for instance, the Patriot Act.
The Patriot Act has been used more than a thousand times for drugs.
But people don't understand, if you hear about the Patriot Act, you go, well, I guess that's so they can stop people from plotting crimes against America.
The Patriot Act is used way more for marijuana than it ever has been for terrorists.
And that is a problem with having laws and then removing laws that people have to be aware of when they talk about, well, hey, they should just make drugs legal.
What are you going to do with all those DEA agents?
What are you going to do with all those people that don't have jobs?
But again, Joe, let me get back to the media thing.
How does the president not have to answer a question about that?
It's true.
The fact that this all goes on confounds us because nobody ever has to comment on it.
The job of the journalist is to say to the president, Sixteen thousand, da-da-da, say exactly what you said and say, what's your opinion of that and what are you going to do about it?
I mean, you know, you watch the British Parliament in action sometimes on C-SPAN, and every time I mention this, the British, you know, podcasting is wonderful, isn't it?
You have an international audience.
The British always say, don't romanticize it.
It sucks just as bad as your government.
But to an American, when you watch Parliament in action, and the head of the government, the equivalent of our president, has to get up there and actually defend his policies to the hooting and hollering and borderline violence of the rest of the people in Parliament, Forget about real reform.
I just wanted to get up there and have to face the questions and hear how they weasel out.
If you throw that question, like if we had a real debate during this last presidential campaign, and you asked Mitt Romney that question, and you asked Barack Obama that question, and it was asked, by the way, if you saw the third party debate where all of those Interesting and sometimes freaky people actually talked about the issues.
They brought this up.
But Barack Obama and Mitt Romney didn't have to talk about it because it wasn't agreed to by them in advance.
Get to that Commission on Presidential Debates thing where they agree on what they're going to talk about.
They don't want to talk about this.
And they never talk about this.
And they never get asked this.
I mean, how do you get away with two terms in office and you never have to answer a question on that at all?
Jeff Gannon was the guy who was an embedded White House reporter during the Bush administration, and he would lob these really softball partisan questions at Bush like, Mr. President, when are the Democrats going to wake up and come to reality?
Who did he work for?
Here's where it gets crazy.
I don't remember, but what happened was people started getting suspicious.
Also, I think there was probably some gay people that worked in the White House in high positions of power that wanted this guy around for various reasons.
Or having enough secrets somewhere where he goes I've got Julian Assange is going to release this with a secret code if anything happens to me automatically.
I don't want to ruin my great country by telling How many of you guys are fucking each other behind closed doors?
Yeah.
This was one of my favorite stories, though, about how you can't trust the press.
Because who put the press into that position?
Especially during...
I mean, that was one of the things that people had commented about, about the Bush administration.
Like, wow, this is the first time...
An administration has been so transparent about its corruption, so transparent about the influences that it has, the influences by Halliburton.
Halliburton's CEO all of a sudden is now the vice president, and Halliburton's making billions of dollars in no-bid contracts.
It was so obvious and corrupt and then here's this guy in the White House, embedded White House reporter, lobbing these ridiculous questions and it turns out to be he's a gay escort.
One of the memes we had going on our show was, how do you end a war on terror?
There's nobody to surrender to you.
And if you called off the war tomorrow, there's nothing that prevents the next president after some minor little terror attack in any part of the world.
From calling it on again.
I mean, if we really cared about the direction the country was going long-term, you would realize, and a lot of good writers and constitutional law scholars have, that this is an open hole in things.
I mean, you're allowed to basically suspend the Constitution until the war's over, and yet it's one of those wars that, I mean, you can't say, once we take Berlin, everything goes back to normal.
There is no end to this, and there's no end to what you can, like you said, no end to what you can call terrorism.
I mean, it's like saying, okay, we're going to have a war on crime.
And as soon as it's over, we can get the Constitution back.
The reason no one wants to ask is because everybody else in government who would ask this question, who gets access, is innocent, not gay like him, but it's just planted people.
I mean, it's like watching Meet the Press now.
Am I the only person that thinks David Gregory is...
I mean, he's a softball pitcher, literally.
I mean, you watch this and you just go, how is this satisfying?
Yeah, the mainstream media's approach in these sort of – those conversation shows about serious issues, it's like, boy, they are softballed down the middle, lobs, everything is – there's no real controversy when it comes to dealing with any foreign issues.
Yeah, I mean, I think access to information when it exposes crime is always good.
If it exposes crime, that's a rational crime.
I'm not talking about like beating off something, smoking pot, something, victimless crime.
But when you're talking about real corruption, corruption being exposed by WikiLeaks or being exposed by the New York Times, which you should be upset about always is the corruption.
And you should praise always whatever method of access to information has been utilized in order to get it out to the people, whether it's a website, whether it's the New York Times.
It's like you should be happy that the New York Times exposes things.
You should be happy that Woodward and Bernstein broke Watergate.
There's also this weird thing that happened after September 11th where it was very scary to me where all of a sudden no one wanted to question the government.
Everyone wanted to support the government, support the troops, support Whatever hard decisions that had to be made, but no one wanted to have any of the healthy skepticism or questioning.
That's why we have to have a cooling off period after the next one.
Because here's the way it goes.
If the experts say, and they do, that we're going to get hit again, that it's inevitable, that you can't stop it, it's going to happen.
And if you know you are going to freak out...
Out when it happens again.
We're not talking about like a little teeny attack.
We're talking about another two buildings go down, or there's a nuclear attack in a harbor, or pick your worst case scenario.
If you know that you're going to be crazy and ready to rip up the Constitution, and we're going to legislate during a period of temporary insanity, if you really want to save the country, write some rules about that now.
Say, we're going to be out of our minds.
Let's make some – let's put some speed bumps.
Let's say you can't legislate for 60 days.
You can close loopholes that let the – we found a loophole that let him in.
You can close that.
But let's not write any Patriot Act 3 until we've had enough time to calm down.
What blows me away is the way that they sold the Patriot Act to us was by saying there's a sunset clause.
It's got to be renewed, right?
Don't be afraid.
This isn't permanent.
It's got to be renewed.
It's been renewed every time.
It's been renewed every time with no—it's not even been close.
Well, Peter DeFazio told me—I'm not supposed to say this, maybe—he said, listen, a lot of this stuff, you can't write a giant Patriot Act like that.
In the time it took to actually write it.
He goes, a lot of these were sitting on the shelf things.
I mean, you think about stand-alone laws, and they just pick this stuff off the shelf, threw it in.
And what a lot of people don't know, although this happens with a lot of laws, is that there's a lot of blank spaces.
Because people don't quite know how it's going to work out.
So when you sign these things, you actually sign something with a lot of blank spaces.
Because, and this happens with a lot of us, because they don't know the specifics yet.
It's not that it's part of a scheme or they're trying to slip something through.
A lot of times with these laws, they don't know the mechanism yet.
They know that they want to get from A to C, and they're not quite sure how B works out yet, but you sign on to the concept that you support C, and we'll figure out how to get there when we figure out how to get there.
And so they sign a lot of these things that have a lot of blank spaces.
Yeah, I feel that it's – the biggest resistance right now to governments right now is technological, the anonymous movement and the WikiLeaks movement.
But look at how they're cracking down on that already.
A lot of countries are – I mean we've got – I mean the only thing we tend to agree upon with Iran and stuff is that you need a more controlled internet and those kind of things.
And a lot of these countries are starting to try to form their own regional internets that they can control.
And shut off.
And all these tech guys, well, I can't control the internet.
It was designed to avert a nuclear war.
You know what?
I'm not so sure those guys are right.
They say that, but the governments of all the world are putting in so much effort to this.
I'm not so sure that they're not just going to switch us over to another internet and then drown the other one in spam someday so that it becomes unusable.
I think the real issue is who are the most intelligent people?
What side are they on?
The most intelligent people are on the side of the resistance.
The most intelligent people are on the side of the coders, the hackers, the people that are Our writing software, the people that are the technological innovators, they're not government agents.
Are they going to grow up with this kind of mentality we have?
This is the problem when you change the constitutional rights situation slowly the way we have.
Is you begin to grow a new generation of people that never knew a pre-911 world, for example, that don't have the same feeling we have about loss of rights or any of these other things, because they've never known any better.
Are you going to get the next generation of people growing up with a hacker mentality, or are they going to be every bit as good on computers as our best people are, but come from a mentality that doesn't say, Oh, what about our Fourth Amendment rights being gone?
And then you're growing up in this society that they created, that they've been running, and they've been running shittily.
They've done a terrible job in running this government.
I don't think anybody's going to be like a supercomputer expert and be all gung-ho to just follow protocol as written because this government is all-wise and all-knowing.
I don't think there's anybody like that coming out.
Okay, but now, so if you're the government, there's two choices in your scenario.
In your scenario, one choice is the revolution, as you call it, the resistance wins.
The other choice is that if the government wants to stay in power, they crack down more and they turn us into something that's more repressive than it is now.
Well, then it gets really tricky because who is the government?
I guess we find out then, don't we?
Yeah, because one of the points of fascination that I had about this whole Betraya's thing was the fact that it was the government versus the government.
And that was something that I was not aware of before, that the FBI and the CIA don't like each other, which is hilarious.
Yeah, you're always going to have situations like that, I think.
I think the factions of the government can't agree on who they're for and who they're not for.
The fact that the FBI was willing to go after the CIA and that's how this whole thing happened with Petraeus and he got smoked out like that.
You've got too many people, and they're not a unified front.
They're not going to get together and say this is what we need to do.
I think they will believe that they can pass laws to try to stop things, but while they're doing this and passing laws, Technology waits for no one, and these people don't understand technology.
These people are old.
These people that are in their 60s and 70s that are in positions of power, I do not think they truly appreciate – most of them at least – truly appreciate the power of the movement of free information on the internet.
I don't think – How the average individual is impacted by the changes.
It's one thing to say, hey, my life's pretty good.
I'm going to still play video games.
I'm fine with my job.
When they get thrown out of their house, when they can't make enough money to live, when the American dream is nowhere near within their reach and there's enough of those people, I think all of a sudden the motivation changes.
I mean, I had a friend who was a A draft protester in the 1960s, and he said the real sad part of the anti-war movement was how much of it was based on the fact that I was going to be drafted.
And when Nixon got rid of the draft, he did it cynically believing that a lot of people would then say, oh, I don't care about the war anymore.
If I'm not going to go, I don't care.
And he was right, and the membership, the people attending these anti-war rallies plummeted once those people weren't going to get drafted.
If you talk about people being impacted by a worsening economy and worsening conditions and bad government decisions that pay no attention to what the average American's lifestyle is like, it's like drafting those people.
All of a sudden people who had no stake in this care because they can't afford food or they can't afford a TV or they can't afford cable or whatever it is they need.
Well, as we wrap this thing up, how do you think – if you had a guess, I wouldn't want to ask anybody – you're one of the few people that I would ever ask this question.
How do you think it's going to go down over the next 10 years?
If you had to guess, what's going to take place in this country?
I think that's a weird statement, a loaded statement.
I don't know about one world government.
I think we're moving towards a government that agrees with a lot of other governments about certain things.
And one is I don't think most of the world governments are happy about the Internet's ability to – I mean they're fine with us watching cat videos and having that keep us pacified.
Historical context, though, the fact that everyone was so isolated for so long, and then over the last less than 100 years, there's been this incredible interaction that's escalated.
I do, but I also see culturally so much more on the technological side of the ledger, the fact that the internet has provided this open platform that didn't exist before.
And much like printed type, much like television and radio, this is the new burst.