Dan Carlin and Joe Rogan dissect systemic brutality—from Spartacus’ crucifixion of 6,000 rebels to modern authoritarian overreach like the NSA’s unchecked surveillance, where high school dropouts monitor citizens while whistleblowers face exile. Bolelli exposes banks’ $20,000 bribes and contradictory loan denials, mirroring Carlin’s critique of financial insiders as rigged "house" players. They debate JFK’s assassination, questioning Oswald’s lone-actor narrative amid witness deaths and the "magic bullet" theory’s implausibility, while Rogan defends skepticism against government and corporate narratives, like marijuana’s Schedule I ban despite safer alternatives. Ultimately, the conversation reveals how power, competition, and short-term incentives distort justice, history, and even science—leaving systemic corruption unchecked despite widespread awareness. [Automatically generated summary]
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Daniele Bolelli and Dan Carlin are here, ladies and gentlemen.
Out of all the years of listening to podcasts and talking to you guys on the podcast, you are without a doubt the two men who have freaked me out the most.
You with that crazy story about the bodies on the stakes, was it in Persia?
You know, what is that, a blink in terms of actual time on this planet?
Just a blink ago.
Like, these same things that we go to school with and go to the supermarket with, these same humans are capable of that in their darkest of dark days.
From your podcast and from Daniele's, I think the understanding of how easy we got it is really cemented home.
Your stories, some of the stories, especially one of the ones that I really enjoyed recently is the Martin Luther tale, the tale of Lutheranism and the Anabaptists.
And the more extreme their devotion to that group is, sometimes the more rewarding the actual experience of being in the group is.
It means something special to be a part of this wacky group of crazy fucks that's willing to murder people.
Like, it's almost like this extra charge of being alive that's missing from a lot of people's lives.
I think that being involved in a cult or, you know...
Any sort of crazy, wild, rebellious group that's doing dangerous things.
It's almost to fill a void that's left in human beings that we've sort of like these echoes of our primal days that are still just lingering around in our DNA looking to be played upon with the right harp note.
I think there's almost, too, when you think about like a Hitler, there's some wonderful film you can see of Hitler with crowds on the street, and you can see the look in the people's eyes, and they look like they're seeing a movie star, and they just want to get a little touch.
Maybe my hand will touch his fingers, and you just think to yourself...
Hitler is a celebrity type figure, but there's that same thing about because you're famous, because...
I've never understood the celebrity thing where people just get dumb around, but it's the same sort of the look in the eyes.
Yeah, I think you're onto something there for sure, because there's something about the ultimate celebrity experience, like meeting a guy like Obama, or meeting a guy, you know, any world leader type character.
It would be so overwhelming, just the presence of that person.
Now think about this all happening at a time when, you know, it was fucking really hard to get a book.
You know, really hard to be properly educated and know alternative media sources that we face today.
You know, goof on alternative media all you want online, and some of it is much deserved.
But the one thing these guys do is they'll cover all kinds of fringe shit, and that'll be their headline news.
You know, like, I'll go to Salon, and people accuse Salon of being, like, too left-wing and too...
You know, but there's some smart people that are pushing it that way.
What I like what they're doing is that their front news is like, it's not like the front news that you're going to get on CNN. It's front news about, you know, like gay and lesbian rights and things in the workplace.
What politicians said about what race that was deplorable.
And all that stuff is front row shit.
Yeah, it's really, really lefty.
Very lefty.
But that's important too.
It's important to have a To balance out a super ultra-sensitive, to balance out the fucking savages of the 1500s that are still rolling around in our DNA. You know, you need someone out there on the fringes of super-sensitive progressive behavior just to try to, like, give us a better medium, give us a better baseline.
Well, let me bring it back to that Munster podcast we talked about.
One of the sub-themes in that was whether or not—you remember the whole question about whether or not regular people should be able to read the Bible for themselves.
Yes.
This goes to what you said about Salon or all these alternative media sites, because the Prime Minister in Great Britain, over all these Snowden leaks and what The Guardian has done, was talking about, you know, maybe we should dial this back.
Maybe it's time for some press restrictions.
In other words, maybe this is too darn dangerous that you're getting to read all this stuff, and we don't have a choke point to shut it down, because in the regular media, whether it was ABC, CBS, NBC, The Washington Post...
There are choke points where, you know, these people literally just pick up the red phone to the editor of the Washington Post and say, let's talk about this story you're thinking about running.
That's a great choke point.
When you have the media as diversified as it is now, all those choke points go away.
And the David Camerons and all these people miss the choke points.
I mean, I had a lot of people write when the story broke say, this is no big deal, nothing we haven't heard of, all this kind of stuff.
They're not saying that now.
Even John Kerry, the president, all these people have come out and said things that, oh, maybe we shouldn't be doing this, maybe we should be having this discussion.
It's really changed the world.
All this stuff we're talking about now with the NSA, that's all Edward Snowden stuff.
Yeah, it's amazing that one guy can have that kind of impact.
And in the future, when they look back on today, and I think historically, he's getting swept under the rug, and what he's done and the impact of it is just sort of getting ignored by the media.
And more and more, they paint him as this controversial figure.
More and more, they paint him as this guy on the run from the NSA. But there's no support of him in anything...
Mainstream.
There's no support of what he did or who he is.
There's no call to action for the government to release this guy that he's actually a patriot.
That he's actually looking out for the true American way and is exposing people to people.
Not America, but people in America that are making a huge mistake and they're doing it for the name of America.
And whether or not they think it's right or wrong, ultimately we don't think it's right.
And ultimately finding out about it pissed the entire world off.
That's the facts.
So if the government was really representing the people, they would look at it in terms of like, what do all the intelligent people who've reviewed this think?
Yeah, it's a travesty.
It's a fuck-up.
It's anti-American.
The idea of it is ridiculous.
And the idea that this is the only way you can control security is by spying on every fucking person?
Well, then the terrorists have won.
I mean, that's a victory because that's terror for everybody.
That's no privacy, that's weirdness, that's employees like Snowden, who they kept going on and on about how he failed high school.
High school dropout.
High school dropout that could read my email, man.
But think about how much that same attitude scares the government.
One of their many, many, many thousands of workers was able to do that.
That's scary on the whole opposite side.
You know what it is, too?
I think we're dealing with a bit of a...
And this kind of gets them a little off the hook.
I think you have a bubble mentality.
I mean, in life.
You have them in professions.
I mean, scientists get it.
Unions get it, bureaucracies get it, the army gets it, the police gets it.
Where people get promoted, these guys all get promoted to the top NSA positions because they're better at spying.
They figure out better ways to get around defenses.
They don't get promoted to that special room where there's five or six of them making policy because they did a better job of finding a Fourth Amendment that doesn't let them spy.
So when they're in the room, they all see the world the same way.
And this happens, like I said, in every profession.
They tend to push each other forward because there's no devil's advocate there saying, wait a minute, maybe we shouldn't use every power we have to spy as much as we can.
To those people, you see these NSA guys testifying in front of Congress, and they don't even hide how mad they are at us.
How mad they are that this is even known, how mad that they have to be there, how mad you're questioning them, and it's because there's nobody in the room saying, guys, we shouldn't do this.
And really, to be honest, there's no obvious line where you should call the dogs off, you know, where you should say, Hey, maybe this is okay, but that's not okay.
That does not happen.
They talk about the Fourth Amendment, but then the other guy goes, well, we're not really violating the Fourth Amendment.
If we just take everybody's trash at cans and we keep it in a storage locker with their name on it, we're only violating it if we actually, like, search through their trash, which we'll do later.
If we have to, and then everything's on the kosher up and up.
If J. Edgar Hoover wants to search Joe Rogan's trash for evidence of illegal activity, you're going to have to send a physical agent out there to do that.
Now we just collect the trash on Trash Day, bring it to the NSA headquarters, dump it in there, and we'll sift through it later if we have to.
Yeah, there's a book called The 1% Doctrine where they talk about how after the 9-11 attacks, the rule that they decided, and mainly because of Dick Cheney, to operate under was...
If there's even a 1% chance of another 9-11 happening, anything is fair.
You can do anything to justify it.
And I think what their attitude was, is on 9-12-2002, everybody would have said, oh yeah, okay, whatever it takes, man, don't let that happen again.
Yeah, there was a weird moment after 9-11 where I remember driving to school, or to work rather, and as I was driving to work, it was early in the morning and all the commuters were going, and everybody had a flag on the car.
Because I'm thinking, I just said 2002, and everybody's going to go, Dan, don't you know the 9-11 attacks happened in 2001?
But a year later, that was still an open wound.
And so how long, when do you think, if you had to guess, when did it start to wear off and we started to normalize?
I mean, New York City is exempt because I don't think they ever re-normalized, but for the rest of the country, how long do you think it took to get over that PTSD? I think it took a few years, two or three years, something like that.
I think somebody who was a political operative would say to you that it's one of the most American things of all time.
Because it's been going on.
I mean, you know, George Washington's giving hard cider to people, you know, when they come to his little parties to get...
I mean, this is...
The problem is, and we've talked about this before, I think there's a certain amount of this that a healthy society and a healthy political system can suck up and still be okay.
There's a certain tipping point where you're not that healthy anymore, and what was okay before is not suck-up-able anymore.
I know, but now if that story is true and the lawsuit claims witnesses and all this kind of stuff and the police officers think nothing was wrong there, that's what happens to you when you get rid of these protections that keep you from being searched willy-nilly or anything like that.
Well, it's fucked up that if you search someone's ass for 14 hours and there's nothing up there, that guy should be able to search yours for 28. That should be the rule.
They're talking about that with these podcast troll lawsuits and everything to change the law that they're working on in D.C. would do some of that, would put some of the onus on these people who say these things, and if you lose your case, all of a sudden you're the one responsible for the damage.
Obviously people get something for nothing, right?
I mean, I think we're going to have a real problem in this country no matter what, as long as our financial systems remain so vague and it fluctuates, goes up and down.
Today the Dow crashed, tomorrow the Dow rises.
As long as that's a possibility, how could you ever have anything stable ever when the entire foundation of your economy is by nature fluctuating daily?
By nature, up and down, so much so that you have to close business at a certain time.
Stop fucking trading!
You have to blow a whistle off and say, no more decisions!
No more, no, you gotta stop.
We have to control this economy.
We have to allow chaos only in eight-hour bursts.
And when those bursts are over, we have to literally shut it down.
And even if you're right, if you say, no, look, it seems like a gamble to you because you're uneducated, but I, in fact, am very educated on this, and it's more of a calculated risk, but the reward-to-risk ratio is very high.
What I love about that is when they show you, you go to the financial advisor's office, and they always show you the historical, the way these things are performed historically.
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And it's always, the graph starts right after the last terrible crash.
Right, and if that's not scary enough, then you get the collusion of government and the weird economy.
I mean, when you think about the fact that there are no laws against the fact that if you have work for some companies, you can pick up a government job.
Overseeing the workings of those very companies or vice versa.
You are in government first and the second you are done you can pick up your vice president position in one of the companies that you just finished benefiting.
You know, one of the ways that they've said our society could go down, though, and other societies have throughout history, is that sometimes they just get too complex to manage.
And you can ride that wave sometimes until something bad happens.
But a perfect example is, I mean, a lot of people said that the Great Depression happened because what was going on in the financial system overwhelmed people's ability to understand.
And react and compensate for things.
And I remember people saying, well, we'll never have another Great Depression because we're so on top of things now.
Yeah, but we have new variables that we don't understand that somebody in the future is going to say they were such idiots way back there in the early 21st century.
Well, me as a barely educated fool, when I look at exactly how everything has fluctuated in the crash in 2008 and all these things, It makes zero sense.
Because as a fool, I look at it and I go, look at this.
There's the same amount of people, there's the same amount of metal, there's the same amount of concrete, the same amount of plastic, same amount of material things.
No one has produced or taken away anything from the pile of humanity's creations.
And yet, all of a sudden everyone's broke.
Like, all of a sudden, everything fell apart, and people who were prospering just a week ago are no longer prospering.
When I look at something like that, I have to feel like, okay, these guys are obviously far smarter than I, and they're running this system.
So either it's rigged as fuck, and someone just extracted a shitload of money out of the system and did it under the guise of a crash, or...
People are way fucking dumber than I give them credit.
It's one of those two things.
And I feel like when a guy like that cat from New York that ripped everybody off in the Ponzi scheme, the old dude, what is his name?
Bernie Madoff.
When a cat like Bernie Madoff comes along and robs so many people, I have to go, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute.
Well, but I mean, look, it's not that hard to understand when people are playing with things that aren't real, but selling it for real money, and then you're counting that as something that you own.
For example, we take these toxic assets, right?
It's not as hard to understand as people suggest, because let's say I put you in a house you can't afford, and And all the evidence shows you can't afford it, and I wouldn't have given it to you 20 years ago.
And then I take a bunch of people like you, and I take all of your bad things that you're never going to be paying back, and I bundle it into something, and then I sell that to someone else based on the value that isn't really there because none of you can really pay it back.
And then you say, well, I'm worth this much money.
I own these assets, and they're worth this much money.
And then those assets collapse, and all of a sudden you look like you had $50 million in your asset tree of stuff, and all of a sudden you don't.
You bought something that was worth nothing, and so...
All that money that you had on paper just disappeared overnight because it wasn't real to begin with.
But just the idea that that could be legal, that you could be loaning people money, setting up loans, and also gambling on the fact that you'll profit if they default on those loans.
When I look at that system, I go, well, obviously they set it up so they can extract money.
That's the only way it makes sense.
If you have the same amount of people, you have the same amount of knowledge, you have the same amount of items, and yet all of a sudden everything fell apart.
I knew somebody who was hooked up with the people who owned the loan, so through somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody, we got to the president of the company like, hey man, can you do something?
Is it something that we can work with and stuff?
I kid you not, the guy sent back the word, give me $20,000 under the table and I can make it happen.
I always think, to me, it's like when you talk about them betting both sides of the fence, essentially.
How is that different, though, from a lot of us probably know some pretty darn serious gamblers, and a lot of them set their sports bets up that way, where, listen, if this happens, I win, and if that happens, I win, too, and either way, I'm covered.
And that's definitely how the house handles things.
So, essentially, when we talk about the financial insiders in the economic realm, that's the house.
Well, to get back to our risk management, I think there's a little bit of them going, I don't know how he's gaming the system, but I can judge from the results.
They don't know what the next scam is, and they can sometimes deduce that something's going on when those odds and averages that they've worked out to the nth degree don't seem to be working with you.
I mean, I think ultimately we have to learn from all these horrible examples that we see on TV and in the news, but every time some guy gets in a street fight and beats some guy to death and they're pulling him away, we should all learn from that.
We should all learn from that and go, hey, you know what?
The human body is a lot more fragile than we like to pretend it is.
Well, for me, it has an even deeper connection because I've competed, because I've fought a few kickboxing bouts and probably, I don't know how many taekwondo bouts, but it was over...
For a period of like six or seven years, it was all I did with my life.
It was my 100% waking life.
So I competed a lot in full contact tournaments and I got away with it.
I got lucky, but I've seen some guys get really hurt.
I've seen some guys get kicked in the head where they were just really never the same person again.
Doesn't this go to what you were saying, though, about you kind of have a right?
It's like if you talk to these boxers who are, like you said, every day they're training, you're going to tell this person they can't do that as long as they know the risks?
To this day, that was one of the most important things that I ever did as far as developing me as a human being because it was terrifying.
It was terrifying, and I got really good at it.
And I got really good at competing in a really dangerous, high-risk competition Quick happening situation, like the striking, especially like the weight class that I was kickboxing at 160. These light guys, everyone moves really fast, they all hit hard.
It's a scary weight class.
A lot of knockouts.
And when you're competing in that sort of an environment, you're training in that sort of environment on a regular basis, regular shit just doesn't scare you the same way.
Regular people, and they flare up and yell, or someone gets douchey with you, it doesn't have this overwhelming sense of fear that it has on a lot of people.
And I've seen people in confrontations where a guy and another guy are in a confrontation, Something happens mostly because one guy loses his ability to stay calm.
He's so confused and nervous that he can't react properly.
When I see that, I see that's a human with a deficit in the development of their character.
I don't think, unless you have been there, I don't think that physical violence is something that you're just born knowing how to deal with.
You know, it's like either you are used to it because you got beat up at home as a kid or you're used to it because you fought a lot or you're used to it because of something.
But you're not going to, you know, the first time it happens, it's fucking scary.
Well, you know, though, and this gets me back to not thinking about the pain in boxing.
I remember there was a...
Ryan O'Neill, I think it was, he was doing the remake of the Champ movie, and they had on site one of these actual boxers who was going to kind of, you know, teach him a little bit about how to do this or that.
And he tells the story, he says, at one point, he goes, the boxer who was working with him said, I want you to hit me.
And he said, okay, I'm not going to hit you in a long time.
Hit me, you've got to hit me.
So he finally hits him, he goes...
No, I mean, really hit me.
He says, I squared up and I hit him as hard as I could.
He goes, no, I mean, really hit me.
And you start to realize that guys who take lots of punches all the time in training and everything, that it doesn't do to them what it would do to you, well, not you, me.
But to them, The punches can do just as much damage to their brain, but in terms of shaking them or hurting them, it's not the same thing when you're used to it.
The natural way in an idiot's mind is I yell at you, you either back down and get scared and I kick your ass, or you yell back at me and we fucking puff chests until somebody fucks up and makes the wrong move.
But if a guy backs down, you know that you can press forward.
The natural instinct of the bully is to press forward.
It's almost unavoidable.
I think that's a...
People do themselves a huge disservice by not understanding at least some form of martial arts, at least having some experience in it.
One of his speeches, when there are these 10,000 Greek guys, like, way behind enemy lines in Persian territory, they have to make their way back home, he looks desperate, they have no chance, and one of...
In his sort of...
In this speech that he's trying to give them to rally them up, one of the things he says is exactly what you were saying about the psychologies.
If you guys are scared now, you're all going to die.
There's just no way.
Because if you're afraid of dying, that's exactly what's going to happen.
If you guys are willing to die because you know that your odds are desperate, but you're willing to just go for it because A, you don't have any other chance, B, you go for it with honor...
The odds are not only you're going to behave honorably, but your chances of surviving improve dramatically.
That shit drives me insane because the fact that we have moved beyond the stupid stereotype of the tough macho man and the prissy woman who stays back, that's nice.
But at the same time, so often has come at the price of people giving up the good sides of the stereotype.
If the stereotype of the man was you're strong and tough, but you're also emotionally deficient and not very sensitive, rather than working on the kindness aspect, as you put it, the idea has been, well, then strength is bad.
Well, people associate prejudicely anything male, masculine, anything unapologetically masculine with suppression of the feminine, with suppression like with anti-feminist ideas.
I have on more than one occasion gotten into it with people that call themselves feminists and their idea was that something that I had said Like, doesn't promote femininity or is anti-feminine.
The furthest couldn't be true.
I just expect a balance.
I expect people to just be people.
Exactly.
When you start looking at feminist or masculinist, that doesn't mean shit to me.
What means shit to me is, leave me alone, I'll leave you alone.
I'll give you the right to do anything you want to do, but you can't say I'm an ape because I like working out.
You can't say I'm an asshole because I've got some fucking guns.
That's nonsense.
If you're a man and you don't work out because it's not enjoyable for you, I totally understand.
But the idea that someone who does or someone who does participate in manly type shit is an asshole because of that.
Watch this one thing.
It was this horrible piece that someone wrote about the rape in Ohio.
With those high school kids.
One of the most disgusting aspects of male culture.
This ability to get someone fucked up and do that to them and treat them as a subhuman.
I mean, it is without a doubt one of the scariest, darkest aspects of men that they can do that.
But in this article, they were talking about how, let's just face the facts, all high school athletes are assholes.
Listen, I think we exist in a realm where it's going to be competitive no matter what you do.
So I think to pretend we're going to de-emphasize these things doesn't do anybody any good down the road.
Because then, once you drop them in life, they're not prepared.
Well, it is a little bit like what you were saying about the fighting, but like with my kids...
You don't want to over, you don't want to crush anybody early on.
You want to nurture them so that they can handle the competition.
But if you don't teach them about competition, you're not preparing them for life.
And that's when you're going to release them into a world where, I mean, if those people really don't want a competitive world, think about how much you would have to do to turn off the competitive world.
How much intrusion there would have to be on all of our lives.
There goes your stock market right away, right?
I mean, the economy.
Isn't that a little like what some of the really hardcore communist ideas were?
Yes.
Where different people have different capabilities, so forcing them to compete is inherently unequal because you and I are born different, so we'll compensate for that and blend it out.
Sounds great in theory, but the amount of work it takes to recreate a whole system where you don't have competition, you don't have differences, is worse than the disease.
Yeah, even because you are treating people like they are sick, as opposed to treating somebody like you are going to teach everyone, man, woman, doesn't matter, gender doesn't come into place.
Everybody should be strong.
Everybody should be kind.
Everybody should have both of the qualities that are normally attributed to only one gender or the other.
They are human qualities.
They are good qualities.
They are what you need to be a complete human being.
You encourage that stuff, and you make the most complete human being there can possibly be, and they will deal with whatever shit life throws at them, competitive or otherwise, because there are always going to be challenges.
And as you say, if there are no preparation for the challenges that are going to come your way, whether you like it or not, no matter how safe you make the world, Then you're dead meat already.
Then you're going to get squashed the first time the universe goes boo at you.
Like you said, you're going to have kids who get raised by parents who beat the hell out of them and who don't raise them the right way and who don't give them those qualities, Daniele, that you were talking about.
And then you're going to unleash those people in the world and say, go compete with this guy who went to Harvard and had a great education and was born with a lot of money.
The world's an unequal place.
You can't fix that, but you can build that into your thinking, I think.
But he's also the funniest human being I've ever met in my life.
You can't make a Joey Diaz if you get some guy who's doing fucking sit-ups every morning, a thousand sit-ups and chin-ups and jogging around the block and only eating kale.
It's not going to be that guy.
You need a guy who went to jail, did a lot of coke, kidnapped a guy.
You need all that in order to get a guy who's that wild and crazy and funny.
And I feel like...
The real problem that we have in raising children is all they teach in school is to try to filter you into a standard position in the economy.
Standard job.
Whether it's to filter you towards a career and one or more very definable things.
There's a lot of people out there with talents that never get nurtured.
They just can't figure out their way in that system because what's taught them is so small.
That's what schools are about, which if you are considerably below average because of your opportunities in life, great.
That's a step up.
But if you are not, and that goes for the other 50% of humanity, Then it's just designed to make you not nurture your talents, not do all those things, and try to make you fit in that little box.
And part of the reality is that not because the people who create schools are evil and they just want to fuck with your life, it's because they need to go with knowledge as something that can be objectively tested.
What is it that you can objectively test?
Can you test somebody's wisdom, how smart they are, how cool of a human being they are, objectively?
Not really.
What you can do is you can test how well they spit back information at you, which is a skill in itself that it's better than not knowing how.
You need to have the discipline.
You need to know some things.
It's cool.
It gives you those average qualities.
But it says nothing about what you're going to do with them, whether you're going to be brilliant, whether you're going to be able to use these ideas in an amazing way.
And the reality is That gets too...
Most people in charge of schools feel that's too subjective.
When you start talking about wisdom, what the fuck is wisdom?
Your wisdom is not my definition, so we can't really test it.
What we can test is...
And so you go back to the...
They don't want to get sued by the people who don't do well.
Like if I come into class and I say, I'll give you an A because you're really fucking smart and I can see it.
No, you really are not that good, so sorry, you gotta see.
The person you gotta see is gonna be, fuck you, you know, why are you giving me, show me why, you know, where is in the exactly that I deserve this.
And part of the game is the stuff that you can prove in that fashion It's not the kind of knowledge that makes a complete human being.
I think what you're trying to do, theoretically, in an education system is to prepare people to succeed in life.
And the problem that I think the education system has is that it's stuck in a design for an era where succeeding in life is very different than succeeding in life today.
You're not going to go onto the factory assembly line.
You're not going to do those kind of things, but the way our system has evolved is to create people who can succeed at that.
The problem is that what we have now is a creativity-based economy that we're moving towards.
And teaching creativity, one, is tremendously hard.
And we haven't worked to create that on a mass system where you've got schools that are...
I mean, obviously, schools work with creativity.
But it's a different thing entirely to sit there and go, we're going to start in the first grade.
And by the time you graduate high school, we are going to maximize your creative abilities that are unique to you.
You know, Danielle, you were saying this.
Part of the problem is you could talk about creativity, but Joe's creative gifts are going to be different than yours and mine, and you can't have a standard course, well, I haven't thought of one anyway, that can take your gifts and your gifts and bring them to maturity unless we all share those gifts, because...
You know, your gifts are in one area, your gifts are in another.
The problem is that in our system there are no assembly lines or few.
You can't educate the mass of people to take a bunch of jobs that don't exist anymore.
So I think the system has to redesign itself to push creativity.
There's also some utopian ideals in raising kids that are contrary to human nature, like this new thing that they're doing where they're not having kids win.
You know, when they're playing, like, ball games and no one wins, you know, when they're little.
I mean, I think that competition, we all hate losing, and therefore we connect competition with being a negative thing.
I don't think it's a negative thing at all.
I think competition is important.
I think it's important in art.
I think it's important in everything.
And you might say, oh, well, that's not the real spirit of art.
It's not competition.
You're right, it's not.
But that competition can motivate the accomplishment of work.
And the accomplishment of work, sometimes procrastination or what have you, can delay someone releasing their art.
So in that way, the competition inspires the creation of art.
It's not always, and most of the time you're better off with that competition being internal, or not even being a competition, but rather an embracement of the complexities of figuring out whatever thing you're working on.
But that's still, there's something going on.
There's a game going on.
Whether it's going on with you in your head, whether it's going on with the audience that's going to review whatever you're creating, like a podcast, or whether it's going on with you competing directly against your peers.
To me, I love something about competition because I love the media feedback it gives you.
It's like you go out there, you do what you want to do, and at the end of the day, you see the results.
You either pull it off or you didn't.
Losing to me As horrible as that feels, as it fucking sucks and you feel like you're so mad, it's the best thing that can happen to you because winning, you're going to keep doing the same thing you've always done.
You have no motivation to push harder because, look, I'm already doing great.
And then when you do lose, then it forces you to go back to the drawing board and figure out, okay, I ran into this stumbling block, how can I go around it?
And the fact is, this bullshit about no losers, no winners, not letting somebody experience what it is to do your best and still lose, you're not doing them any favor.
Because the fact is, in life, a million times, just because that's the design of life, shit is going to happen, whether you like it or not, whether it's fair or not, whether you deserve it or not, And how you respond to that, if you feel that, why did this happen to me?
You know, it's unfair.
I shouldn't be in this place.
I shouldn't feel like shit.
Well, you do.
Now what?
And that's that experience of losing.
In that case, you're losing at that game of life.
Not necessarily because of your fault.
Maybe it is, maybe it isn't.
Now, how the fuck are you going to respond to this?
If you have been there a million times, maybe you have developed the muscle to grow out of it.
If you have never been there...
The first time that lies slap you around, you freak out.
And isn't that sort of one of the reasons why our economy and society itself is so fucked up?
It's because we're so goddamn competitive and it's because it's so natural to do that when you start controlling some of the money, you want to control more of the money.
You know, when you start making some of the laws bend to help and benefit your business.
Dude, I watched a really disturbing documentary this past couple of days.
This is the wonderful example now You know, if somebody came to you and said, how much money would we have to give you to poison your country?
What is that worth?
Because look at the other side of this.
Fracking, as it's called, has taken the United States from an energy really insufficient position where, I mean, we're in the Middle East, we're in all these places because of the energy question.
And I mean, in a geologic sense, overnight turned us into an energy...
Exporter again, and we haven't been that way since, I mean, we've always exported energy, but I mean, the 1960s were like the last really high-water mark where we had lots of oil and we didn't have to worry.
All of a sudden, we're the natural gas kings and everything again, and there's a ton of money.
That amount of money, the amount we're talking about here, not just money for now, money for 10 years from now, 20, this is like long-term lots of money.
That money will buy anything.
It will buy poisoning your water supply.
It will buy earthquakes that destroy small Oklahoma towns.
It's an interesting thing to see what we're willing to sell for a ton of money.
Most people had no idea this was even happening until it was already too late.
And during the Bush administration, this...
The documentary, Gasland, highlights how this all came to be and how Dick Cheney signed over these new exemptions that you didn't have to follow the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act.
All those were exempt.
Fracturing was exempt.
So you could just fuck everything up in order to get to what's essentially like a small ocean of natural gas.
The amount that's under New York and big chunks of the country and Texas, it's huge.
Do you know what the best chance, and it's a sad thing, the best chance you have of combating that amount of money over something is when we have screwed up so much of the fresh water supply that the fresh water actually becomes worth more?
And you're already seeing this happening in some places where they're talking about, you know, do we sell water rights to California from the Colorado River or this or that?
And the amounts of money that they're talking about, I mean, they're already talking about, you know, why should water be considered a feature that's owned by everybody?
Can I buy the water in the Colorado River and then can I sell it back to you?
So, I mean, the old joke is that if you buy the bottled water, it's worth more than gasoline, you know, at that amount if you go to the store.
Well, what happens when it really is worth more than gasoline in large quantities?
Then all of a sudden, fracking sounds like you're destroying an even more important spot.
I can get more money for that water than I can get for that natural gas.
That's the only chance we have in a system driven by money, I think, to keep the water fresh.
And the amount of deception that's gone on to cover the amount of damage that's been done is staggering.
I mean, when these people tell their stories, it's incredibly hard to watch and listen to because people get sick because they were drinking the water.
Their kids get sick.
For the longest time, they wouldn't admit that there was anything wrong with the water.
And then they started giving people water.
They set up these giant tanks and pump in water to them every week so that they get their water from that instead of their wells that they've had for 100-plus years.
But this is where you see the corruption of our political system, which is what's destroying.
You would think that people who live in places where they can light their water on fire would have their representatives in Washington working to stop that.
But that's where your free speech rights and my free speech rights are not equal to the free speech rights of these other people.
And this is where I always argue with the courts that say that money is free speech, which I don't mind, except who said you get 50 or 100 times my free speech rights?
Well, not only that, the internet, I think, ultimately is going to be a place where people vote on things, and it's also ultimately going to be a place where people can donate to campaigns that promote values they believe in.
And I think that is going to be a special interest, along with all the other special interests in the world competing for influence.
And I think, ultimately, if people invest money in a party and a lobbyist and an idea that supports the things that they believe in, that money can influence people just as easily as the money that supports fracking or the money that supports – the idea is that it's just trading of commodities here.
I'm going to buy a few legislators and get them in my corner, and then I'm going to write that off, and U.S. taxpayers can pick up my buying, because that's how it's done at the best levels.
Well, I think that ultimately that would be a smart thing for them to pursue just by virtue of the fact that there's more money there than there is in all the corporations combined.
You're right, but the potential for extracting money off of a giant group like $300 million, even if you get 1%, that's still a huge amount of human beings that are donating money.
Yeah, because the guy, you know, the corporation, they're going to invest the money to buy off a vote to get what they want.
They are going to make that amount of money 50 times over in the next year.
The person who's going to donate to a campaign, they are doing that in order to avoid something to be taken from them, whether it's because of water or something.
They're not going to see that money back.
They're not going to make more money on it.
So there is a little bit of hesitance in a lot of people.
Fuck, really?
Do I have to pay for something that I still had until yesterday?
And, oh, man.
You know, there's not that payoff of, like, you're going to win big.
You're playing a defensive game where it's like you're just holding on to what's going on.
But the idea that these companies that have enforced fracking or encouraged fracking or spent money to make it happen, and this guy goes really clearly into detail about how it all took place, they're ruining a huge chunk of the country.
And they're doing it right in front of everybody's face, and no one can stop it.
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And the worst part is they won't be around when the bill comes due for cleaning it up either.
These people, one of the people that got incredibly sick, this woman got sick, because it turned out that these filters that they had set up don't work with the chemicals that they use for fracking.
The chemicals actually eat the membranes of the filter.
So, some of the chemicals were getting through to her and she was getting incredibly sick.
Neurological damage, all sorts of like, everyone's sick.
You remember here in California with that gasoline additive that sunk into the ground and made it into the water?
And it was a weird situation because the additive had been put in there To take some of the lead from the air pollution, and then it was seeping into the groundwater.
And so you're damned if you do, damned if you don't.
But that's the problem, is it doesn't take a whole lot to seep into the water supply, and then you're screwed.
You know what's funny, though, is every time you expose anything, you're going to have the next day 15 sites saying, no, you made it up, it's not real, it's not...
Yeah, I think that it's hard to know who the fuck is right in that situation, but somewhere in the country you can fucking, without a doubt, guarantee that these people have been poisoned.
Whether the lighting the water on fire, it always existed.
There's been lots of situations where you're living near something that might be bad for you.
And that's nothing new.
That's what's crazy, is that that's always taken a back seat to somebody's profit somewhere.
And that's a bit sad that we can't, as an entire population being poisoned, balance out the interests of those people who decide poisoning is okay, because they can go to Hawaii.
I gotta research this now because a bunch of people on my message board are putting up all these websites that say that they're debunking Gasland.
First of all, A, I would, without a doubt, I would imagine that if I was working for the fracking industry and someone put out a hit piece on fracking, that I would debunk the fucking shit out of it.
Even if it doesn't make any sense, the debunking doesn't make any sense.
When you hear about crazy super freaks that have gigantic orgies, how did that happen?
Did they just start off having orgies?
No.
They started out with regular sex, and they got a lot of regular sex, and they started getting bored, so they brought in extra girls, and before you know it, they're having these freaky sex parties.
It's a natural thing of progression.
People, if they can run five miles, they want to run ten.
If they got their brown belt, they want to get their black belt.
The idea of what makes a human exceptional, what makes a human create everything that exists, really.
I think from electronics to the wheel to houses and everything, there's this natural desire for humans to improve upon what they've already done.
And I think that extends to control.
I think it extends to evil as well.
It's one of my arguments when everyone would talk about problems with government and whether or not there's still corruption in government.
All you have to do is look back on the corruption that you can document for a fact that happened in the 1960s and know that there's no bodies.
There's no slew of people, lives ruined, careers destroyed, parties brought down.
No, there's actually very little.
If you think about exactly what they're absolutely positively guilty of doing, there's very little damage.
And you know that everything progresses.
So the amount of The utter and complete total corruption that exists today and the sophistication of it would naturally be above and beyond what existed documentable from the 1960s.
Let me take it to a different level because I think it's a different thing.
I think that we are incentivized as human beings, going back to primate times, to look at things through a short-term lens.
The carrots and sticks are all set up for the short-term approach.
You brought up wisdom a while ago, Daniel.
Wisdom is being able to look at things from a long-term perspective.
Now, a perfect example is investing.
In the old days, Ty Cobb would buy Coca-Cola shares, and when he died, he had all these Coca-Cola shares on his chest at the hospital that he'd had for...
Forever.
He was so afraid someone would take his...
So he's got all these shares he's owned forever because to him, he wasn't going to sell them in five minutes.
He was in it for the long term.
Our society is set up for the short term.
Making money is set up for the short term.
There's no interest in saying something like, well, let's protect clean water.
Who are you protecting it for?
I won't be around to enjoy that clean water.
By the time that happens, I'm dead.
Now, what can I make in the short term?
Politics is the same way.
It's like when people were talking about President Obama lying about the health care plan, about keeping your own doctor, right, and all that stuff.
He's incentivized to do that.
All he cared about was winning that next election.
You will worry about the fallout later.
None of this matters if you lose, right?
Deal with the fallout of the lie later.
There's no incentive to not lie.
The incentives are all on the...
And this is if you're an intelligent human being, weighing the pros and cons.
You are not incentivized to think long-term, and yet...
That may be the only solution for the planet.
You talk about long term.
If we can't somehow contradict where the incentives are and go against our natural primate instincts, we might not be able to make it work.
I think it's going to take a greater level of awareness culturally than exists today.
I think the great level of awareness, the really truly objective view of humanity and the potential possibilities of the future is something that's contemplated by few groups, small groups of people, people sitting in conversation, dinner parties and stuff.
But if you think of the greater whole of humanity, the amount of damage we're doing to the world on a daily basis, the amount of Like really ridiculous behavior that operates our financial and justice system and our political systems.
It's all like complete and total chaos and yet it still continues in the exact same way it always has before.
There's only small groups of people that speak out against it.
I think once The sphere of understanding of what a complete disaster this world is because of our actions and because of our inability to correct those actions, once that understanding is in place, then hopefully it's not too late.
There'll be some sort of way to turn back the tide.
But I feel like it's an ebb and a flow thing, much like everything in life.
I think it's almost like we have to fucking poison the ocean before we realize it's ridiculous and then stop doing it.
I think someone down the road, when clean water, for example, is worth a bazillion dollars to Halliburton and they buy the water, then the rules will be you can't piss in water anywhere.
Then all of the money going to Washington will be to preserve water, preserve Halliburton's water supply, otherwise their profits will be impacted when they sell it back to the public.
Joe, you want human nature to improve, and you think it's going to happen, and I don't disagree with you.
The problem is that so many people like Dick Cheney have to be improved too before this works that I don't see that happening.
I see it going the other way.
Their incentives have to become, they're still going to want money, they're still going to think short term, but the incentives have to change so that protecting the environment becomes the way to keep your millions intact, as opposed to, you know, polluting the environment becomes the way to keep your millions intact.
Maybe, but if you look at the dissolving of boundaries between people and information and how that trend is going to continue, I think that our idea of looking at the possibilities of the future based on how humans were able to run the world just 10 years ago are kind of ridiculous.
When you think about it from 100 years from now, the options won't be available because The amount of transparency that will be required to communicate with people is going to be completely different.
And I think even if they did, the young people that are coming up That are more in line with the ideas of an anonymous or the ideas of open source internet, the ideas of spreading information and what a massively important thing that is for society and human culture as a whole, I think they're overwhelming.
And I think they're going to continue that trend.
The people that know that the idea of anybody being able to control information, they're literally controlling, if they do that, they're controlling educational evolution.
Some of the stuff that you guys are saying, I actually think it goes hand in hand because what you're saying, Joe, about the fact that a certain level of transformation in terms of consciousness, in terms of priorities that happen at a mass level when enough people meet sort of a critical mass That feeds into Dan's argument that at that point, corporations are going to respond to it because there's money attached to it.
So I don't think it's just purely from an economic standpoint, and it's clearly not purely from a consciousness standpoint.
It's happening now, right?
It's like more and more people care about environmental issues.
So companies that market themselves as who are nice to the environment can hike their prices a little bit because they know that they are going to have some people who buy them Their products because of those values.
Yeah, could you imagine if you were buying some gas that cost 10 cents less per gallon, but it guaranteed comes from child labor in some shitty part of the world.
I think that it's going to be impossible in the future to hide any evil behavior.
I think right now it's still too muddy.
It's still too muddy.
I think as technology advances and improves, this connection with people and ideas and information is going to be cleaner and quicker.
I don't know what form that's going to take in, but all I'm doing is sort of objectively extrapolating what's happened in the past to what's happened recently to where I feel like it's going.
I just don't think you can hold this waterfall back.
I feel like there's too much going on.
There's too many people communicating too freely all over the world and improving upon the methods of communication.
And they're going to get to a point where you're not going to be able to hide a goddamn thing.
And you're not going to be able to make money off of...
You're not going to be able to profit off doing something that directly damages the earth because everyone's going to see it.
It's going to be something that your neighbors know about.
It's going to be something that I... We're going to know what each other are getting away with.
But don't you think you end up with a gas land kind of story where you can...
Push a story, and maybe you twist 15% of the data to make your point a little harder.
And somebody else, based on that 15 or 20% that you're making up, debunk the whole thing and say it's all crap.
And there's that part of the flow of information is that there's so much of it that for every single thing you hear that seems to prove things going one way, you have people who seem pretty credible, who give you good evidence to argue the exact opposite things, and it leaves a ton of human beings feeling like, What the fuck?
Well, I feel like we're either going to go one way or the other.
We're either going to go slide into complete total dictatorship brought out by a series of terrorist events, or we're going to slide into the next level of evolution.
I think it's a battle right now.
What is that quote from Orson Welles?
History is...
God damn it.
I forget the quote.
Amazing quote by Orson Welles, but essentially, to paraphrase it, what it was saying is that there's a race going on between people who are looking to improve the human race and people that are stuck in the old paradigm that are constantly battle between education and...
Damn it, I hate when I don't remember a great quote that I think I have at my fingertips.
I feel like the way things are going, when you hear people like the NSA folks say that, you know, the angry that a guy like Edward Snowden released all the data and he's a traitor and, you know, all this...
Craziness where you're trying to convince us that this guy is bad because he told us that you're bad.
But see, all I see happening is another 9-11 attack and then the people in the NSA going, guess what allowed that one?
That was the stuff Edward Snowden told you.
Now see?
Now don't you learn.
Trust us next time and you won't have another one of these.
I just, you know, I mean, I think things could break in the right way, but I think...
History shows that they're stacked up against us.
And so I think if you take this attitude that, hey, things could break the right way, you are not girding yourself up for the fight that you're facing.
And this gets back to what we talked about when you talked about fights.
If you think, oh, that George Foreman I'm about to fight, ah, he's got openings.
I watched him in tape.
His left is slow.
I'll get in on that.
And then you don't account for the right.
And you get in there and you go, oh, damn, I forgot about that.
I think you need to gird yourself and say, history shows that there's always a small group of people, you know, who have a little bit of the ear of the powerful or who have a little bit more money or what have you, and they're extremely formidable.
There's never going to be like, we all get this consciousness expansion and Dick Cheney's never getting anywhere near government again.
The truth is, we're playing Blackhawk down, and Dick Cheney's busy, you know, buying up corporations.
I think this is a monumental struggle that's going to require...
You know, what's missing, and I've always said this is, We don't have any leaders.
I mean, in other generations, you can name people.
You can Wikipedia and search people that were out in the forefront bringing groups of people into directions.
Just to play devil's advocate for what you said earlier, when you were talking earlier about you see it going in a bad direction, we were just talking at the beginning of this conversation about how fucked up things were just a few hundred years ago, like how much worse things were 500 years ago.
Is that really correct?
Were they really that much worse?
And if that's true, then isn't there some sort of a marked improvement in society and the safety in society that we can demonstrate today?
But I mean back then, you're dealing with like a whole society that was sort of structured on people that never got old enough or never had exposure to enough data.
To sort of go, I don't think we should have a Caesar.
I don't think we should have this Colosseum.
This whole Lions versus Christians thing, this is kind of fucked, man.
No, actually, most days that's exactly how I feel.
And even the days that I don't, I still feel that there's a lot of it that's true.
So the point to me is, how do you turn that awareness that you're stuck up against something, you know, you're an ant trying to attack a tank, you know, the odds of what you can do, not even as any single individual, but even at mass level.
I feel sometimes so limited.
And how do you wake up in the morning?
You know, how do you deal with the fact that you have kids?
I actually talk about this on our political show because when you feel the most upset about things and the most powerless, you start to wonder about the wisdom of caring about this stuff.
And you look at people who don't.
I mean, I think we all know people who don't pay any attention to politics, who don't watch the news, whose life is a very, you know, it's my kids, it's my wife, it's my job.
And there are times when I question the wisdom of caring about things you cannot change.
A lot of people believe that he was unstable, and a lot of people believe that he might have been doing drugs.
That's possible, too.
I mean, the kind of guy who is so risk-taking that he's willing to go after generals, that kind of guy might do a lot of wild shit.
I think it's possible, though, that they can do that to a car.
I think that's what I've gained from this.
What I've gained from this is by reading the experts, the technology experts, the people that have no vested interest in this politically one way or the other, weren't a Hastings fan or denier, The people that looked at the possibilities for what you can do with a remote-controlled system in a car now, and they can do it.
They can make your car do things.
People that were formerly in the CIA have come out about it and said that they believe that the technology exists.
And even before it existed, remember the guy who had done all the exposing of the CIA crack cocaine epidemic, like basically accusing the CIA of having help Latin American drug lords who happened to be their friends?
I just remember that he was, he owns the record for having, quote-unquote, killed himself by shooting himself with a shotgun, so far nothing strange, twice.
The most interesting thing about the Hastings thing to me now, because I'm with you, I don't know what you could figure out from Hastings based on what we know.
I was fascinated, and this gets to your new media thing, all the information out there, and it also gets to yours, Daniele, about...
False information or muddying the waters.
Do you realize how much of what circulated the globe about this Hastings thing came from that one source, that part-time contributor to that local news station in San Diego, that Kim Dvorak woman?
She's the one who said things like, well, there was no body in the coffin and everyone was upset with that.
Well, that turned out to be totally false, but oh my lord, did we all share that?
Did everybody hear that?
Most people not ever hear the retracted.
One person saying something that was not true created so much of the foundation for where we all started.
Because that's when I freaked out.
I said, wait a minute.
The coroner didn't give the body back and cremated it without permission.
If you've ever dealt with coroners, that's just not kosher.
But in the old days, they used to make us confirm sources twice.
She's in the position where she's supposed to be confirming sources twice.
She says that the San Diego news station runs it multiple times, and then we all retweet it and share it, and it becomes part of the urban legend almost.
But that a single strand, one person, was able to do that with the global sharing and everything, That to me is as fascinating as the Hastings thing.
And the element is an us-versus-them kind of thing.
I mean, we felt, people like yours truly, anyway, felt like Hastings was on our side of the fence, right?
He's reporting on stuff that we're going, thank goodness, finally somebody's doing this, right?
And then all of a sudden he's gone.
And in a weird situation, I mean, I think the tendency is to say, one of our guys got it in the neck, and he got it in the neck for doing something that we've been waiting for someone to do.
And what does this say to the other people out there we would hope would...
So, I mean, I don't want to say teams, but there's a part of me that says, to me, I don't know if I would have liked the guy on a personal level, but he was on my side.
And I feel like...
God, the powers that be have everybody on their side.
I mean, there was a feeling like, please tell me that somebody working for the good of all of us didn't get knocked off.
I don't think he did, but there's certainly that feeling where you just go, what sort of a message does this send to other would-be Michael Hastings?
There's a book called Poisoning the Press concerning a reporter who was the Michael Hastings of his day, but a thousand times bigger, named Jack Anderson from the early 70s.
And Anderson actually had the Nixon administration officials, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, those guys, talking about potentially killing him.
A guy whose show I was on several times, G. Gordon Liddy.
Liddy was volunteering to kill him.
They were going to run him over with a car.
Now, I always think to myself, okay, so the plot never happened, but they were discussing it at the highest levels of government, and that's what makes you go, maybe this Hastings thing isn't that far off the wall.
The thing that's weird is, though, when people are doing the exact opposite of what we're doing right now, which is, you know, it could have gone this way.
It could have also realistically gone this way.
I don't have the evidence either way.
And people bet their lives one way or another.
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They're like, I know that this is what happened and there's this conspiracy.
My point is that when I see people argue, I don't know if he acted alone.
He might have acted alone.
I leave that open.
But when you see that stupid bullet that supposedly went through both of their bodies and shattered bone and came out looking all pretty and beautiful, you're like, get the fuck out of here.
Well, that just showed up on Governor Connolly's gurney at the hospital.
It just magically was there.
In perfect shape and just happen to be from the same rifle that you're attributing to the guy who's dead now who got shot by a fucking mob man.
And you know what's funny is that I don't dispute any of those things.
What if the government had a really good reason that you would have approved of to cover it up?
And we're doing a podcast on the First World War right now.
And Kennedy was famous for having given The Guns of August, the book that's about the lead into World War I and how nations were kind of sucked into something they didn't want to do based on an assassination of a world leader sitting in an open car next to his wife, by the way.
And...
If you're Lyndon Johnson, and you're the people around Kennedy, and it's a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis, right?
You almost have World War III a year ago, and a guy kills a young, popular president in front of his wife, who's, you know, in there in the Chanel clothes with the blood and brains all on her, and his children are orphaned, and you're mad as hell.
And the guy's tied to communism like nothing.
I mean, he's fair play for Cuba Committee.
He's one of the few people who defected to the Soviet Union.
He's one of the very few that came back.
Would you maybe be worried that the American people would be so angry and so ready to somehow punish the communists who may have even been behind this attack?
I mean, you can create a scenario where it might have been a national security interest To, as much as you can, disassociate Cuba, communism, and the Soviet Union from the assassination of the president, because even if it didn't happen, can you see the Republicans and the administration back then going, we need to do it!
You can't let them get away with potentially shooting our president!
No, I think what most of us, when I was on the side saying that I think there was a conspiracy, is you point to all the obvious things the government hid.
And that, to me, is always a red herring, right?
You say, well, they hid the magic bullet, couldn't have been this and that.
And then you start to think...
Well, would there have been a good reason for a government cover-up?
Well, the first good reason is because they did it, right?
So you go, well, those bastards.
Could there be a reason where you would sit there and go, oh, no, I understand why you did that.
You did that to prevent a greater evil.
And I'm not saying that that's the case, but once you sit back and do that, you go, there could be multiple reasons.
No, I think they might try to obscure the idea that this was something involving communist Cubans.
And I think, can you imagine if Oswald had actually had to take the stand someday and testify about this?
This may have been the thing where the government said, listen, this is just one guy who did this, but it's going to open up a whole can of worms with the political opposition.
I mean, remember, there were posters of John F. Kennedy saying, wanted for treason in Dallas the day he was killed that the right-wingers down there had pushed.
What do you think they would say if Lee Harvey Oswald is tied to communism so closely a year after we just avoided World War III? That's a really stoned idea.
I agree with what you're saying, though, because I'm all for thinking from multiple directions, but I stick with Joe's theory about the bong on that day.
No, I agree.
What I don't understand is the...
What Joe was saying is an objection, the idea that if you're trying to avoid the communist connection, to avoid World War III, why in the world, then, would you want everybody to know that the guy responsible is a guy who has communist connection?
I mean, you know, if they capture Oswald and they arrest him, you're stuck.
The trial, if there's going to be a trial, is going to bring all this out.
And imagine, that trial would have taken a It would have been on TV. The people are just going to fume.
You know, the communist thing is going to be brought up by the prosecution.
You know, I guess what I'm trying to say is, I try to figure out, we always assume that when government covers up, it's to hide something from us we'll be angry about.
Are there ever occasions where they cover something up because we would want to if we were in the same position for the good of things?
Are there ever times when government covers stuff up for a good reason?
Well, if you just look at the progression of technology and you think, like, where is it eventually going to go 1,000 years from now, 10,000 years from now, it's inevitable.
If we don't blow ourselves up, we're going to be able to recreate reality and it will be completely...
I don't think that requires an extreme amount of intelligence.
I think the average person knows that if someone out there knows something that they shouldn't know, Or they can contribute to some sort of a case that you believe might be coming down and eventually put people that you know in jail, the people that are hiring you in jail.
If there's some way to stop that data from being shared, that's how you cut it off.
You cut it off by killing the people that were witnesses.
The only people that know are the people that were there that played a part in that murder or didn't.
Whether it's Lee Harvey Oswald and other conspirators or the other conspirators and Lee Harvey Oswald being the patsy that he claims he was.
Whatever the combination of things were, whatever number was correct, those are the people that know.
Everyone else, there's a giant amount of guessing.
And to pretend there's not a giant amount of guessing means you're an asshole.
If you're pretending that you've got it nailed, you're an asshole.
It's just a fact.
And so the people that are arguing it online, I mean, I'll argue it online as well, but the people that actually believe that they know for a fact one way or the other, it's not true.
And the magic bullet theory, there's a lot of problems with the way people describe it.
A lot of the trajectory, the angles of the bodies, wasn't nearly as magical, the path they were attributing to.
If you look at the fact that Kennedy was above him, that the seat was actually raised, and that Connolly was actually leaning and turning around, and the idea of their What's much more damning is Connelly's fucking testimony himself that he was not hit first and that when Kennedy was hit he turned around and he heard the gunshots and then he was hit afterwards.
His own testimony refutes the idea of the magic bullet far better than anything else.
When you see Connelly talk about the series of events and how it played out inside the limousine, he throws the magic bullet out the window.
The reason why they came up with the magic bullet theory in the first place is because there was a bullet that hit a curbstone underneath the overpass.
They had to attribute a bullet that Lee Harvey Oswald shot or someone from that direction of Lee Harvey Oswald shot to that bullet because that ricocheted and hit a man and the guy went to the hospital.
So because of that, then they had to come up with one bullet doing all this damage.
However, if you look at the possibilities, is it possible that a bullet hit these two bodies and smashed bone, did very little damage, actually left more fragments inside the bullet than were missing from the bullet?
Is that possible?
I don't know.
I mean, you could have a freak bullet that had extra shit on it, and maybe they're attributing certain things.
Maybe it's poor science, and they're attributing certain things to being pieces of the bullet that weren't actually pieces of the bullet.
But the odds are that that was not a bullet that smashed bone.
If you've ever seen what a bullet looks like when it hits bone, it doesn't look like that.
Can it look like that?
Man, it may be under some really freaky circumstance, but that's the aberration.
That's not the norm.
The norm is a bullet distorts wildly when it hits bone.
That's part of what they're designed to do.
They're designed to break up inside the body and do more damage.
You know what Bugliosi's and Posner's books, though, did that I thought was fantastic?
And it goes back to that Kim Dvorak-Michael Hastings thing we talked about a minute ago.
They showed what a lot of the conspiracy writers deliberately left out of their work because it messed up their theories.
Right.
One of the big pieces of evidence that really kind of changes a lot of minds is the idea that Oswald took a shot at a general in the weeks before he shot president, or maybe allegedly shot president.
And when you realize he's out there trying to kill people already, it makes him look a lot less like a patsy and a lot more like a guy who was, God, I missed the general.
Hey, guess what?
President Kennedy's coming into motorcade, and I work in a building along the route.
I don't...
I guess I remember myself being upset with some of these conspiracy authors whose work I liked because they left this out.
And I remember thinking, well, that bastard left this out.
He knew that this was there, but it makes his theory look bad, and he left it out.
That's where I started to get real angry at people whose work you're reading because you want to believe it and trust it.
Well, because here's the thing that I think Oliver Stone did a great job of distorting.
Was this idea that somehow President Kennedy had upset the military-industrial complex and all this, when in reality, the guy had just done the biggest peacetime military buildup in American history.
Remember, he campaigned on something called the Missile Gap.
So when he got the job, he increased military spending by a ton!
See, the idea the conspiracy theorists cite is this Executive Order 11110. And this was issued by Kennedy on June 4th of 1963. And this executive order delegated to the Secretary of the Treasury the President's authority to issue silver certificates under the Thomas Amendment of the Agricultural Adjustment Act as amended by the Gold Reserve Act.
And the order allowed the Secretary to issue silver certificates if any were needed during the transition period under President Kennedy's plan to eliminate silver certificates.
So the idea was that he was moving in on the institution known as the Federal Reserve, because the Federal Reserve, as most people realize, isn't really a federal kind of a thing at all.
It's not a part of the government.
Oh, look, it's the horn again.
Hopefully, the police are on their way to stop this dastardly person from stealing someone's pens and change...
You don't even have car radios you can steal anymore.
They're all integrated into the system.
If you're not going to steal a car, and if you do steal a car, good luck trying to fucking hide it.
Everybody's got a goddamn GPS in their car now.
You stupid fuck.
So the idea that they espouse is that this is the executive order that started at the beginning of the end.
I've also seen a lot of people say that they think Lyndon Johnson had something to do with having Kennedy killed.
And there was a couple of times where we had these sort of discussions about conspiracies.
And I'm like, they're all juicy and salacious, but the idea that if you look at too many things as being a conspiracy, you do a huge disservice to what might actually be a conspiracy.
Whether you realize it or not, I mean, to be like a crazy right-wing, radical, like the fire and brimstone sort of a guy, you play directly into the hands of the government.
We were talking about why more people don't get ahead and the competition thing.
I think that kind of criticism does shut some people down, where they just – they're not – they can't – I mean, obviously, we all can handle it because we all do something where we're criticized on a daily basis.
But, I mean, I think there's some people that just – they don't want – It's okay if my boss does it, but I don't want it in public.
I've been railing on about this lately, about the idea of people are going on about what they're calling fat shaming.
And fat shaming is making people feel bad for being overweight.
And I read this one article where this woman was talking about how She was being fat shamed because she went to a family function and everyone was gushing about her cousin, how her cousin lost 20 pounds.
And that they were making such a big deal out of it that it was clear to her that they were judging her for not losing the 20 pounds, so it made her feel awful.
And she didn't understand how they couldn't understand that what they were doing was fat shaming her.
By complimenting someone on losing weight, you're fat shaming the person who hasn't lost the weight.
Wow.
And that it made her feel awful and that it was incredibly insensitive of them.
I'm fascinated by that kind of thinking.
I really am.
I'm fascinated by that sort of reverse victimology sort of a thing where instead of you being the victim of your own handiwork, you become a persecuted person because they don't accept you for the flaws that you have.
Or even mention the possibility of those flaws existing by virtue of complimenting someone for having gotten over the same flaws that you possess.
We have this Dave Asprey guy who's an expert in a lot of aspects of nutrition.
He's a fascinating guy.
And one of the things he was talking about was he was giving overweight people a pass because he was saying the level of addiction that these people actually have for food to say that they don't have willpower is really unfair because they're so overweight, like a lot of these folks, are so far gone that they used up all of their willpower just to get up in the morning, just to walk.
To the bus stop, just to go to work, just to get their chores done during the day.
They don't have the same level of energy that a healthy person has.
So to tribute them to having this backlog of energy they're not tapping into because they're weak-willed, it's not that.
They're already so far in the hole, it's almost impossible for them to get motivation.
They have to get something incredibly extreme that has to happen to them.
I thought that was really unique in looking at it that way.
You can see with people that are ruining their life, too, whether it's through addictions.
You see that as well.
It's like, why can't they see it the way other people see it?
Well, it's almost like they can't.
They're so trapped up in the momentum of whatever it is, whether it's gambling or food.
I mean, I've seen people with food addictions.
You can watch the gears spinning in their mind when food is nearby.
They know they're supposed to lose weight.
They know they're not supposed to be eating it.
But the gears start spinning in their mind and it becomes the primary focus of their existence.
Get that fucking donut.
I need that donut.
That donut is huge.
It's critical for fueling whatever trouble is going on in their mind.
And it's a weird aspect of human beings.
And you don't do that any favors by pretending that encouraging someone who lost weight is a bad thing.
The idea that socially that's irresponsible because you're fat and you're near them.
No, it's actually responsible because that terrible feeling that you have, it's supposed to be the bump that pushes you towards eating a salad instead of a cheeseburger.
Should be the bump that makes you write down everything you eat that day and state some goals.
This is what I'm going to do.
I'm going to use my willpower to overcome this horrible obsession that I have with shitty food.
That's also possible.
It's also possible by you going home and blaming everybody in the blog that you've projected yourself away from any potential benefit from having these bad feelings.
It's not a fucking coincidence that I'm a stand-up comedian, and I'm also a cage-fighting commentator.
That's not a coincidence.
I'm a massive fan of chaotic events.
I'm a massive fan of these explosive things that throw the norm into question and completely change the paradigm of the existing reality that we operate under.
And when you listen to something like a podcast on the Mongols, it's like, Jesus, that was only the 1200s.
Did you read what that one comic said about being on Joe Rogan's podcast or having Joe Rogan endorse him?
Was it Bill Burr or someone like that said, you are the Oprah.
Of podcasting.
If we come on your show, all of a sudden, everything is rainbows and unicorns for us once we're on Joe's show, which is true, by the way, but otherwise, the favor you've done to all the rest of us, not to kiss anybody's ass here, but it really is.
I mean, you've made a lot of people aware of what we do.
Well, if you're honest, if you're an honest person, and I pride myself in being insanely honest, to the point where, you know, I'm like, one of the reasons why I'm really good at accepting criticism, because I'm insanely self-critical.
I'm also honored, and I feel like, without a doubt, I have an obligation.
But I also feel like all I'm doing is letting people know about amazing shit that already exists.
It's beautiful to be that sort of a conduit, to be sort of a funnel point where people can know they can, a portal, where they can go here and they can learn about all sorts of cool shit.
But if the cool shit didn't exist, I would have run out of things to talk about a long time ago.
You know what I thought the greatest thing they ever did for people like us was?
Was not separating the ESPNs and the professional content from the stuff that we do, because it allows us an equal playing field.
In a way that if they said, okay, here's your professional stuff, now here's your amateur stuff in this pile over here, in this grab bag of singles nobody wants.
I feel like in the same way that we just said, you know, I owe you, I owe iTunes, there's a lot of people that made something possible here.
I don't know what I'd be doing anymore without a podcast.
I'm no longer a news reporter kind of guy.
I'm no longer a radio talk show.
I'd be like janitor, and I would be really bad at that, too.
So, I mean, there's a lot of people we owe for where we are today.
I mean, even when I talk, like if I talk about something like the Magic Bullet Theater or somewhere along the way where I'll argue something, the bottom line always is I will tell you exactly what I actually do know.
And I don't know.
I don't know what happened.
You can't know.
And I think...
Finding out about cool things and being honest about the cool things and encouraging that sort of really objective discussion about things, that's a thing that we're missing.
That's a thing we're missing in our social circles.
It's a thing we're missing in life.
People get attached to ideologies.
Like you were saying, well, people will say one way or another and then just fucking argue it to death.
I know Michael Hastings was killed by the CIA. And then your credibility is on the line and everything.
Yeah, whether it's Bigfoot or fucking UFOs or being a Republican, there's people that get on a fucking team and those people are a problem.
They're a huge problem politically, too, because as I said, it doesn't hurt us that one party does something.
But then when we forgive it when our party, whatever party that might be, gets in power, there are Democrats who, if George W. Bush was doing what President Obama is doing, would be out in the streets with signs.
That's such a good point and one that I really get on progressives and left-wing people about.
Your acceptance of war crimes done under a Democratic administration, the idea of the same exact things being done in the Republican administration would be horrific war crimes.
Because I keep feeling like that's almost like part of the rigged thing, that if you have somebody who has some ideas, you go, finally, somebody's saying the right thing about this, and they also go, yes, but I'm also a secret Klan member, just so you know.
And you go, why do they always have to come with some baggage like that?
Like if you're Anthony Weiner and you know there's more pictures out there, but you run anyway knowing they're going to catch you again and you do it anyway?
Before they caught him the first time, being a freak, there was a great video of him speaking on the floor and just really passionate and screaming and yelling and very eloquent and very articulate and like, wow, this guy's fighting for the people.
Well, I think that most people, when they get to be a certain age, they have a family, and they have obligations, mortgages, and they have certain risks they're not willing to take.
And one of the big risks is you don't want to go against the entire government and say everyone's corrupt.
Like, Jesus Christ, they'll come after you.
They'll take your house.
You know, your kid's got to go to college.
So, like, for the guys, like...
The Ron Pauls of the world, it's like they get to be a certain age where they don't give a fuck.
What are you going to do?
Are you going to shoot him?
He's fucking 85 years old or whatever he is.
His last run for president is done.
Now it's up to his son.
And his son apparently has been using cheat sheets for...
That's what his father said the newsletters were that got his father in so much trouble.
But remember, Rand Paul, who I've said nice things about, also has as one of his main advisers, that guy who did the Southern Avenger, you know, oh yeah, the guy, one of his advisers was the Southern Avenger, and he wore a mask and had a Confederate flag behind him.
It's like a YouTube show or something.
And then when they said, are you gonna fire this guy, he goes something like, well, that's all in his past.
And you just go, what's up with this?
Why are these people all crazy?
If you talk about freedom in our constitution, you're crazy.
But to get back to the point, is how come whenever you get someone who's saying some important things in a halfway, you know, decent way, they have to come, you know, people say to me all the time, well, we vote all the time, Dan, the course the country's on is based on voters voting for people.
How come when we get somebody who would like to change course in a direction most of us would like to see, half of them is really fantastic and the other half of them is so crazy you'd never elect a person like that in a million years?
Why can't we have somebody who has some common sense and doesn't sound like that?
Yeah, they believe that it's all going to come crumbling down.
I think that there's a mentality, and the same kind of mentality that is...
The type of person that wants to get in this rebellious position of power, rebellious position of, you know, railing out against the government.
They're very similar to these people that are prepping.
It's very similar to their extreme folks.
Like those are the only people that make it to the front of that crazy line.
They have to be a bit nutty.
It's not that the ideas aren't interesting to you or I, when you look at a guy like Rand Paul, the things that he says that you agree with, or his dad, the things that he says that you agree with, but it's to get there.
He's facing so much opposition, there's so much bullshit along the way, so much pressure, so much...
Back and forth debate, so much frustration, so much suppression of information.
By the time he gets to a position where the world is listening to him, he's already broken.
He broke every bone in his fucking soul just to get to the front of the line.
Yeah, we can't have a Fourth Amendment person who's not...
I mean, I guess you do.
You got guys like Wyden and Udall and some of these people, but when you get somebody who's a real lightning rod for this stuff, and you think, finally, we've been waiting for a guy like this forever, they come with these poison pills that you just can't swallow.
Yeah, it's an unfortunate reality of the control that has been exerted on the political climate.
I mean, the fact that the two-party system exists just shows you how much power the people that are running things, how much they've actually been able to exert on our system.
They've locked it down to two parties that are both often supported by the exact same corporations.
This is what I don't understand, is that if we're going to work toward this awareness and if we're going to get better and more involved and enlightened, how do we not see through that scam?
That would be like the first scam you have to see through to get to anywhere, and we don't see through that one.
Well, smart people that are on the Democratic side are partially to blame.
I'm just as much as people on the conservative side, but on the Democratic side, I've heard so many people use the term we, like we need to get into office, or we need to get more of this, or we control the house.
I have had maddening conversations with people in Hollywood that use the term we to describe the Democratic Party.
And I'm like, they're not you, dude.
They're not you by a long stretch.
And you perpetrating this stupidity.
I understand that you work 12 hours a day and you don't have the time to investigate this thoroughly.
But you pretending to be a smart guy and going with this team, we need to do that.
How much of what they're doing are you really fucking paying attention to?
Because this Democratic Party that's in charge right now is as Republican as it gets when it comes to whistleblowers.
As Republican as it gets when it comes to...
Giving rights to corporations that are the same rights that used to be attributed to individuals.
All the things that we're afraid of during the Bush administration are all being done, the attacks on whistleblowers, to a much larger degree, the attacks on secrecy and privacy, much larger than has ever been exhibited before.
I had a famous political reporter here in LA, when I was learning about news, Explain it to me this way.
She goes, I'm going to give you the secret to what the difference between the two parties are.
And she kept it from me.
She kept it from me.
And then one day when we were going to interview Dan Quayle, of all people, believe it or not, when he was the vice president, she says, okay, the time has come to let you in on the big secret between the two parties.
So I lean forward.
I say, what is it?
She goes, at the Republican fundraisers, you get your wine in a glass.
At the Democratic fundraisers, it comes in a plastic cup.
That was it.
That was this big piece of knowledge I was waiting for.
The difference between the two parties is what they serve the wine in when you go to their get-togethers.
And when I'm saying that those are Democratic ideas or those are Republican ideas, I don't mean it as in they are actually Republican ideas.
I mean it as in the people that are on the Democratic side that believe in equality and freedom and left-wing values, they think that those ideas are only things that the Republicans support.
So when they're clearly being supported by the Democratic Party, Who's who?
In order to play politics, you have to appease certain groups, and you have to be very good socially at this sort of give-and-take system that they've put into place.
The cronyism system.
I mean, when you look at all these people that are lobbyists live in Virginia, that's right outside of D.C., and they come in, and there's all this money concentrated on making things happen there.
It's totally against the concept of we the people.
It's totally against the concept of the interests of the individual, the interests of the greater good of the society as a whole.
It's totally against that.
It's against it, and it's transparent, and it's right in everybody's face.
Well, and you know what the real—and this ties something else up in a bow.
We talked about earlier with the fracking and the environmental damage and everything else.
Part of the problem we have, too, is we have a system here in the United States that is designed to be moderate and not radical.
Which sounds fine most of the time.
But if you put off problems long enough, the solutions that are moderate to fix them are no longer useful.
I mean, if your house is slipping on its foundation and you get to it early, maybe a little bit of money and a little bit of work and you can fix that.
If you put that off 10, 15 years, the solution to that problem is a lot more radical.
We have put off a lot of huge problems in this country in solving them for so long that the solutions are so radical that That we have a system that is just geared to tampen down that sort of radicalism.
But what does that mean if that's what it takes to fix some of the problems?
We're going to make some GMO fish that eat plastic and send them bitches out there, and then we've got all our problems solved.
We're going to have the greatest population of fish in the history of the fucking ocean because we're going to have plastic-eating fish that we've made in the lab.
They've got a steel lining to their stomach, and they run on fossil fuels.
The idea of panspermia is a well-accepted idea in astronomy, and that idea is that the building blocks from life, water even, came from other planets.
Asteroid impacts on other planets sent large bodies into space.
They landed on Earth, many of them perhaps...
You know, billions and billions and billions of years ago and actually created the oceans, actually created a lot of life itself, the building blocks for life.
So in a sense, we are all of alien composition, period.
But other things are continuing to come this way, including spores, which can survive in a vacuum.
And when you have large doses of psilocybin mushrooms, one of the weird things is you feel like you're communicating with something.
And the whimsical amongst us believe that what you're actually doing is communicating with an alien life form that has come here and wants you to eat it in order to tune into it.
You know, I actually have some thoughts that I agree with some of that, and this is coming from someone who doesn't talk about this very much, but I've always been fascinated with how things like that have been used by humankind throughout history as a means to open up other, you know, to use Huxley's term, doors of perception.
It's fascinating to me when you think, if you think that none of this stuff is, you know, if you think about evolutionary things, right?
So this is all stuff that evolves.
Why the hell were hallucinogenic mushrooms, what's the evolutionary benefit to the mushroom itself?
Is it supposed to ward off birds from eating it because they get a bad trip if they do?
You know, we did a podcast once about the hidden side of intoxication in history.
Well, I think you could make a very good case that hallucinogenics of all kinds have probably played huge roles in history that we don't even know about.
Especially with tribal peoples who have played huge roles.
I mean, why did the Germans decide to migrate into Roman territory at just this time?
Well, they have sorcerers and witch doctors as part of their culture who use hallucinogenics.
Who knows that they didn't go to the chieftain there and say, you remember that thing I told you we have to do?
I was just told now is the right time.
Move into that Roman territory and all history is different.
I mean, that's the side of history we're never going to get.
It'd be interesting to find out how much of history has been determined by things like that.
Who, not only that, are funded initially by alcohol and tobacco companies, now mostly by pharmaceutical companies.
Which is so rich and so delicious.
The way I describe it, I go that having pharmaceutical companies and allowing them to do literally commercials against marijuana is like hookers making commercials against strippers.
I mean, that's also a perfect example of the difference between controlling information back then and today.
They were able to sell this idea that there's a new drug that was forcing Mexicans and blacks to rape white women, and they even named this drug marijuana, which is a name for a Mexican slang term for a wild tobacco.
I can understand you making the case that this has to be illegal, whatever we're talking.
This has to be illegal because it's so dangerous and we know it's so dangerous.
What I don't understand is that we basically have a policy in this country that there will be no new intoxicants.
If something is invented in a bathtub tomorrow that doesn't hurt anybody, that has no hangovers, that nobody gets in car, we're going to ban it the day after tomorrow on general principles.
Even if we think that there are, and I do think there are medical uses for this stuff, there's no question that it has been used as a back door to sort of open the door to what would not have been possible without it.
Also ingeniously getting people in government addicted to the money and the revenue that it brings in legally, which you don't get at all if it's illegal.
The money still goes into the economy, and that's been really documented in British Columbia.
That the economy is very dependent, even though it's illegal.
But the taxes that you would get from selling it, the government actually is what loses out on marijuana being illegal.
The government loses out because they're not getting any of the tax money from it being sold.
Yeah, the different variations, the cousins of the cannabis plant.
There's more than one different type of hemp.
But all of them, what they all have and share in common is the amount of THC in them is insanely small.
So what you're getting out of it is just a textile.
You're getting clothes, you're getting oil, you're getting food that you can eat.
And we can't even grow it in America.
We're buying it in bulk from Canada and then we sell it.
We try to buy the best stuff that we could possibly find, and it's really difficult.
Unless you can grow it yourself, it's hard to quality control.
You have to really search out these farms that are in another country that are growing this shit.
And it's so stupid!
So they're just starting to pass laws that are allowing farmers to grow it in America.
California has recently passed it.
They're trying to pass it in other states.
I believe they passed it in Colorado, and I believe they passed it in Washington state, because those are the two places where they've made it legal to consume for adults.
It showed what happened on Pine Ridge, which was one of the poorest reservations in the United States where prospects for economic growth are really dimmed.
And so what these guys did, they figure, you know, we are somewhat of a sovereign entity because that's how reservations are, right?
They are in this weird limbo.
And they figure, okay, we can plant industrial hemp, we'll cultivate it, we'll do this whole thing.
And you see the progression through the documentary of the The viciousness with which the DEA goes after them to just stamp it out.
And you see the facts that you are listing right now, the THC aspect, the fact that this is not a drug.
We're not talking about a drug.
You're not talking about marijuana.
Even marijuana is ridiculous, but that's a whole different story.
There are none of the THC that you find.
It's the same plant, but it's like marijuana without the stuff that gets you high.
And you use it for a million things that, as you say, it's legal to own the products in the United States, but it's not legal to grow it where we can actually make the product in the United States.
I've never understood why we don't have, you know, because I always thought one of the arguments that screwed up kids the most was to put marijuana on this list of terrible drugs because then when they try the marijuana, they think you're lying about the heroin.
I always thought that there ought to be a checklist that the government used to decide if something should be legal or illegal.
You know, a hundred questions.
How addictive is it likely to be?
How dangerous?
Blah, blah, blah.
And then if you pass or fail, you know, if you pass, it's legal.
That also would be used if you invent some new bathtub drug tomorrow.
Okay, well, let's run it down the checklist, right?
And then you could say to the people, well, look, I mean, here's how it's scored on the checklist.
And I think the damage to that would be because alcohol might not I don't think there's any way marijuana doesn't score better than most of the intoxicants that are out there today.
I guess what I'm saying is I think it would help me in raising my own children and keeping them off these harder drugs to be able to have a decent argument.
There's a good reason this heroin isn't in general use, kids.
It'll really hurt you, trust me.
It wouldn't be illegal if it wouldn't really hurt you.
You know, they found that cone snail venom, they can make a drug out of cone snail venom that is 100 times more potent than any existing pain medication and is completely non-addictive.
So it works a hundred times better than all of the Oxycontins and all that other shit, and it's not addictive.
Listen to this.
unidentified
The message this evening is not my message, but ours.
Despite our best efforts, shortages of marijuana are now being reported.
And we're just alone by ourselves somewhere, linked up to some computer, trying to pretend that this fucking simulated society we've pieced together makes any sense.
At a certain point in time, you're like, oh, this is just a broken idea.
This is a person with a...
They're chasing down thoughts that are bad, and they don't stop chasing them down.
And they're reasonably intelligent, so they can argue the way around these things when confronted.
And Michael Shermer had a quote about that, about really smart people who believe in really dumb things because they're smart enough to argue it.
And I think that's the case with a lot of these folks.
And the flaw in the thinking is so obvious.
So when I didn't believe in chemtrails, that every fucking airplane that you see a contrail that's persistent is the government spraying us with evil chemicals, all of a sudden people are like, you're a fucking mouthpiece for the New World War.
But yeah, because the fact is, like the reviews you get or the feedback that Joe is getting about this stuff, to me is not surprising because anytime you have a position that's not stereotypical, where you're not clearly in one camp, 150%, where he's the...
Oswald did it, or no, that's total bullshit.
How can you believe that?
Or, you know, about anything, right?
When you start asking questions that poke holes in one line of thinking, but then at the same time, when people start feeling reassured that, oh, then you are on this side, then you start saying, well, kind of, but wait a second, because also there's something here that's problematic here.
And you're just keeping an open mind, right?
It doesn't mean that you can't commit to an idea.
It doesn't mean that you are...
Flip-flopping.
You're just considering the pros and cons, and sometimes it's not that black and white.
And the media doesn't want you to do that either, because they used to tell me on the radio, a listener has to know where you stand on every issue within three minutes of turning you on.
And I said, that's a cartoon character.
That's not a real person.
And it's the same thing where I had just done a show recently where we were talking about...
Go ahead.
Wrap this up.
The point is that whole idea that nuance is a bad thing.
Somebody call me, I'm being called a moderate and a realist more and more today, which is coming from like tinfoil hat, crazy radical territory, and I haven't changed my views at all in 20 years.
Well, a couple things, but basically it means that society, like you said, has started to pick up on things and has moved in a direction.
I used to say to people, the NSA is spying on everyone, and they said, no, they're not.
You're crazy.
Get your tinfoil hat out.
Now I say the NSA is spying on everyone, and they go, I know.
You know, so society has just sort of moved in a different direction, and nuance, that's what society's missing today, gray areas.
Yeah, I've been called a conspiracy theorist with good reason for theorists for a long time about a lot of different subjects, but I've always found it really odd that the idea...
That people haven't conspired on things is so attractive to people.
People want to be able to debunk things just as willingly as other people want to find conspiracy in things.
And there's some things that are not debunkable.
There's some realities like the reality of the fucking central bank, the realities of the influence of the Bilderberg group, the realities of We're good to go.
Even if it's 50% correct.
That 50% is fucking terrifying.
And every one of those examples that they showed, if those were the only examples, and I don't think they are, we're doing something crazy.
And it's all being done because of money.
We're ruining this world forever.
Whether it's the ocean patch that's bigger than Texas that's all plastic that's floating out there and choking birds and whales.
A beached whale just died.
His stomach was filled with plastic.
I mean, what we are doing for real that we're doing bad is fucking insane.
So anybody who's not willing to look at the other possibilities, like, man, your rigid view of the world is fucking your head up.