Dan Carlin and Joe Rogan dissect U.S. Middle East policy, revealing economic motives like oil control and military spare parts sales, while Carlin shares a bizarre classified meeting with General Mattis—arranged via an unsolicited letter—highlighting Pentagon PR tactics and drone warfare’s unintended enemy creation. They critique modern media’s sensationalism, social media’s detached cruelty, and systemic barriers trapping people in unfulfilling jobs, calling for passion-driven entrepreneurship and education reforms to empower ambition. Despite progress, Carlin warns of rising racial tribalism fueled by economic stress, while Rogan advocates reconnecting with nature over digital polarization, questioning whether today’s instant gratification stifles resilience. Their debate underscores how uncharted societal waters demand deeper analysis beyond superficial outrage. [Automatically generated summary]
They probably had some dead metal type thing and then some kind of bronze and then you get into the silver and gold and how much is mixed into the rest.
And they have those.
Like, you can go, and it's actually really cool because they wear better.
Like, they'll clean the silver off, and it looks like yesterday.
So you always know it's the cheap stuff when they're all dirty and everything like that.
Well, the beautiful thing about your podcast is you can research things in advance so you know what the fuck you're talking about by the time you speak.
I don't even know how to react when people say that.
It is the kindest things that you hear.
And I always say the same thing.
I always hope everybody gets a chance in their lives to have people that they admire turning around and telling them something like that because it is the neatest feeling.
And when you realize all the crap you put up with for decades in other jobs and other businesses to say, okay, I'm 51 or whatever, and they really like what you do, you just...
Everybody should feel this way, so I appreciate that.
It's almost impossible for us to predict because when you really think about what we're doing now, In terms of, like, you could put a YouTube video right now, you could make a video, and it could go viral for whatever reason, and a million people all over the world could be watching your video, like, almost instantly.
This was not only unheard of 10 years ago.
Just go back 20, 30, 40, it's insanity.
You're talking insanity.
Like, people would be like, what the fuck are you saying?
You have a phone in your pocket?
That would be insane.
You have a phone in your pocket that has a camera?
What?
Wait a minute, you have a phone in your pocket that's a video camera that takes high-definition video with stereo sound, and you can...
Wait a minute, you're uploading it through the sky?
Just through the air?
What?
In real time?
Instantaneously?
That's insane.
So now think...
What could we be looking at in terms of augmented reality, in terms of virtual reality?
The point is that you're absolutely right about this stuff.
Before I got into podcasting, I was in the era where Mark Cuban made it big, and everybody was just going to start a high-tech company and sell it for billions of dollars.
If I recall, it was basically like a website with a bunch of links.
And everybody was like, dang.
So I was in one of these companies with a bunch of buddies, and we were pushing what we called amateur content back then.
So we're talking 95, 96. And one of my jobs was to go with the staff to all these venture capitalists and try to sell them on the idea of what amateur content was going to become.
Joe, we went from place to place to place with all these people who are supposedly the ones who can see the future.
And every one of them, and I mean every single one, said, Nobody's gonna view amateur content because if anybody could make anything anybody wanted to see, they'd be paid for it.
And it wasn't just because, you know, I was in with a bunch of tech people who understood this, too, but one of them had taken me off the radio and said, we're going to put you on the Internet.
This was in 94. What?
And I said, put me on the Internet.
We're just learning how to use it.
I said, what are we going to do?
And he says, well, I'm going to invent the way to do this, and you're going to be the test person, right, that shows everybody.
So that fell through.
But once that happened, it was in the back of my head going, okay, someday we might be able to do this on the Internet, that kind of thing.
Yeah.
But the point was that these people at the Venture Capital meetings, all these hardcore guys who are inventing our future and funding it, none of them saw this amateur content thing coming.
And I did his show, and he was talking about how they were having a hard time Yeah, too far ahead.
Where, you know, they're like sending full files to each other or something.
But, you know, it's funny because somebody's going to write a book someday about the history of this and how it got started and all that kind of stuff.
And it's crazy to think about that we're actually due to sort of a serendipity, good timing sense that here we are, like I said, in the first 10 years, 15 years of what's not just going to be a phenomenon, but it's going to be a huge part, I think, of the future world that people grow up in.
Not our show specifically, but this world we're creating.
I mean, there's been a lot of barriers to keep people that are really talented, interesting, funny people from getting their stuff out there.
And that thing was always like, they didn't know how to start.
How do I become a stand-up comedian?
I've talked to so many funny guys, and they just go, well, how do I get started?
I'm like, well, you've got to go sign up at an open mic night.
It just seems too much, and the idea of it is too daunting.
But if you just sit in front of a camera, That's all you have to do?
Turn your cell phone on and start talking.
Here's what I think about Donald Trump.
This is what I think about Harvey Weinstein.
All you have to do is have a unique take, be funny, be interesting, somehow engaging, and it doesn't even have to be visual.
I mean, God, there's a hundred, maybe more, really funny, what I would call Twitter comedians that just say funny shit, they write funny shit on Twitter, and they have huge followings because of it.
I always say, you know, you try to look at what the brick and mortar analog version of this was before this came around.
Remember, MC Hammer was selling, you know, cassette tapes of his music out of the out of his hatchback at the Oakland A's games.
Or or I think of like Eddie Murphy or Richard Pryor, these people who are just they're so funny that you could put them on a crappily recorded cassette tape and it wouldn't make any difference.
And I remember Eddie Murphy saying something about if he hadn't gotten on Saturday Night Live, he doesn't know how he would have how he would have exposed himself to the public.
Well, these days, if you're that funny, and you put that on audio, and you put it out there, you no longer need the facilitator, the gatekeeper, to open the doors for you.
Well, I think one of the things that's setting Android ahead of the curve, in terms of Android versus Apple, is that these Android phones, they slide into these headsets now, and they act as virtual reality screens.
I mean, from a creative standpoint, it's so easy, and I tend to have a personality that does this anyway, to look at the negative, dystopian, you know, things that can happen, the big brother things, which is totally the way I see the world.
But my kids, when I look at the creativity...
So in my family, I come from a family of people who worked in film.
But this gets back to something that you and I were talking about when we first started here.
So it's what the technology can do.
If you're out there, you're going to hear me talk about this.
Now, this may be a personal one-to-one conversation with someone in your audience, but somebody did something that is both flattering and absolutely terrifying to me recently.
They went, and they said it took hundreds of hours, and they culled a ton of my shows, and they made little clips of all the things I said, and then rearranged them and created an Absolutely new show about politics, unfortunately, with me, and you cannot tell that they've cut this thing 9,000 different times, but it's my voice saying a whole show of political stuff that I never said.
He said at the beginning, this is not Dan Carlin really saying this, but some guy's gonna take like some obscure weird segment, put it on the internet, and I'm gonna be chasing, you know, that group going, no, it's not me, that guy did it.
Do you remember when Oscar De La Hoya got caught wearing fishnets and high-heeled shoes with boxing gloves on?
He was coked up and he was hanging around with some crazy Russian strippers and he was having a good old time and he just thought it was fun to dress up like a girl.
You know, I thought it's funny, but he was very deeply embarrassed by it.
Obviously, he's Mexican, so Latino boxing fans were not taken very kindly to that.
I mean, it's even this way, like, I was talking about piracy earlier and trying, you know, I have these old line advisors who will say things like, you need to be charging for your new shows and more money.
And I sit there and go, our competition is piracy, man.
But the Obama birth certificate was a real issue because there was people that were examining it and they were putting it through Photoshop.
They're going, look, this is clearly fake.
Look, here's the filters.
You can see how it's been added and edited.
But then you had a bunch of people that were actually Photoshop.
No, no, no, dipshit.
This is how Photoshop breaks down images.
It breaks them down into layers.
This isn't fake.
This is the actual image, and this is how Photoshop processes images.
But it didn't matter.
All it took was enough people to show you the original image.
Photoshopped image and say, look, here's why when we put it in Photoshop, you see all these layers, clearly it's fake, and then they just fucking run with it.
They just run with it on their online forums and on their...
They got the little Twitter group of right-wing people that want to think that Obama's a Kenyan Muslim who's some sort of Manchurian candidate.
There was a lot of that going on.
But when I talk to people like Red Band, Who actually understands Photoshop.
He's like, no, this is what happens.
When you put an image in Photoshop, it breaks it down into layers.
Like it shows you how this is how you would edit something in Photoshop.
I think the point you made earlier when you started talking about that though is the key one, which is If you want to believe this, here's your evidence, and you're going to ignore, and if you don't want to, the opposite.
I wrote a piece that never got published in the late 80s called The Death of Objective Truth, and I thought at the time that this was because you couldn't have arguments anymore, because no one would accept your source.
If you said, okay, the New York Times said this when I was a kid, that was a starting point, right?
Okay, if the New York Times says this, okay, we both believe it, now we can have a conversation about what the New York Times says.
Nowadays, I can't have political discussions with people anymore, because it never gets past ground zero, right?
We start, I make a premise, you challenge the premise, I bring in a piece of evidence, you say, I don't believe that evidence at all, here's the other evidence, and boom, Jonah Goldberg, who's like a standard conservative columnist, wrote a piece a couple months ago where he said, I can't even have fun political discussions anymore, because you never get past the beginning of the talk.
We disagree over the fact that That isn't even what we're talking about.
Here's reality, now let's talk about it.
Wait a minute, that's your reality, that's not my reality.
And so you can't even have the kind of fun political discussions we had as kids or teenagers, because there's a basic disagreement on what reality looks like to different people.
Yeah, we have a tribal agreement to support the left, and you saw that with Hillary Clinton.
There were so many people that were defending Hillary Clinton, and people were calling me right-wing.
People that I know were like, what are you, a right-winger now?
No.
Hillary Clinton is a fucking liar.
Like, it's really simple.
Like, I'm not saying that I like Donald Trump.
I don't.
But I'm saying, you can't, just because you don't like Donald Trump, ignore the fact that the Clinton Foundation is super fucking shady, that Hillary Clinton is clearly a liar, that they definitely did something with the DNC to rig the primaries, to keep Bernie Sanders out.
And now you have Donna...
What is her name?
Donna Brazile.
Donna Brazile coming out about all this stuff too and she's showing how it was all done and how Clinton sort of hijacked the entire DNC during the campaign, made everybody dependent upon her campaign.
The whole thing is tribal because people didn't, they wanted so badly to get Donald Trump and make sure he wasn't in office.
That they were supporting someone who didn't even support gay marriage until 2013. I mean, she was a creepy person in so many different ways and still is.
But she represents their team.
So they had this blind allegiance and this tribal loyalty towards the left.
I think that's a real problem.
It's a real problem we have in this country where people just...
I'm a fucking Dolphins fan.
It's Dolphins to the death.
And they get that way with the Cubs, and they get that way with Democrats, and they get that way with Republicans.
And you're seeing it right now.
You're seeing it right now with people that have an inability to, in any way, say anything negative about Donald Trump, because he's the president and because he's a Republican.
Well, you're not living in reality.
There's certain things that we really need to be concerned about.
Forget about politics.
What about the Environmental Protection Agency standards?
What about what they're doing in Alaska where they're trying to drill for minerals and they have this very important salmon river?
That they're going to drill right next to, and they're passing this without any advice from scientists.
They're just going straight to it to try to make money.
And people are freaking the fuck out about this kind of stuff.
And Republicans, there's so many of them that don't want to say a peep.
They don't want to say a word about it because he's their guy, he's on their team, and people are super tribal about it.
You know, this is part of the problem I've been having with my political show.
And everybody thinks it's a Trump-related thing, but I think it's what you said.
I'm having an issue trying to figure out if my basic understanding of how a system like ours is supposed to work is fundamentally flawed.
You know, I always like to say that wisdom requires a flexible mind.
But I gotta live that too, right?
So if I'm seeing stuff that doesn't back up my theory on how things are supposed to work, I feel like I have to sit back a little bit and go, okay, what are we seeing here?
And you mentioned a bunch of fundamental societal changes we're going through when we started talking, whether we're talking about amateur content or everybody being able to broadcast and all that.
We didn't even mention the fact that our broadcasts are international now, so you're not just talking to Americans anymore.
And it makes me start to wonder about the basic idea of, are we smart enough?
And this goes against all my principles, so it's hard for me.
But are we smart enough?
And does our modern society require us all to be more intelligent or in touch or understanding of the facts than, for example, American voters 75 years ago had to be?
I'm starting to...
Again, this isn't about Trump.
It's about what you were talking about.
The fact that we're having discussions over stuff that either isn't real, or you don't understand the issue, but you have a very strong opinion one way or the other about it, or some talk show host you trust told you this is the way it is, so you're going to believe it.
Let's put it this way.
Let's say we've always had uninformed or tribal voters, because we always have.
Is there a tipping point where if you have, if it's changing 10% every decade, that you say, okay, we used to have 20% of people who really didn't know what was going on.
Now we have 70% of people.
I mean, I'm starting to look back and go, if you can't have basic discussions about reality, can you do your job as a voter in this society?
And I don't know.
I'm backing up going because I'm a Jeffersonian guy.
So I believe, you know, in the old agricultural, old republic.
And, you know, there's a bunch of ideas that go to that.
But part of it is a real trust in the people.
Okay.
Right.
And I can't decide if the trust I've always had in the people was misplaced from the get-go or if the challenges of this modern society that we have and an entire generation and generations behind them, let's be honest, growing up in a world of 140-character conversations and all these different things.
if that doesn't fundamentally change us in a way that you might say, listen, in the 50s we could handle our voting responsibilities better than now, because the challenges to human beings now are greater.
I don't know, and I don't have an answer, which is why I'm sort of backing off and kind of observing instead of yakking about it for a change.
And so if you say to yourself, are we more flooded than we were 75 years ago?
And if we are, does that require more from the average voter than we required 75 years ago?
And let's be honest, the dirty little secret of the American system, as everyone who studies it knows, is that once upon a time, this voting franchise was actually in relatively few hands.
And you had to, I mean, the old idea behind running a farm, I used to read this left-wing writer who said it was all part I don't know.
I think it was more of a voting requirement that said, hey, if you can run a farm, you can't be too much of an idiot, so that'll be our requirement.
You have to have this much land.
I don't know, but you do feel like as democracy's taken over, because we're really a republic, but we've been moving more towards a democracy for 200-some years...
If that happens and you turn around and go, okay, now we have no qualifications.
Because how would you implement them?
Somebody would say, this is racist or classist or whatever.
But without any requirements, are we doing a half?
I mean, how many people who are voting really understand what's going on?
And, you know, these people, these 320 million people, this newfound responsibility of being able to chime in and communicate, they're used to just being able to talk shit at the gas station.
They're fascinating, though, because I think this is one step.
I think this is step one to this augmented reality situation that we're talking about.
I think what this represents...
Is a deeper and deeper connection that we're going to have with each other.
And I think we're going to get past language and we're going to get past culture in some sort of a weird way.
And it might take a hundred years to do this, but I really believe there's going to be some sort of a universal operating system that allows us to exchange thoughts in a way that everyone understands.
So that's what Esperanto was supposed to be once upon a time, right?
It was going to be the common language, and we would all learn it, and because we would speak it, there would be no more wars and no more awful things, they thought.
Well, Esperanto's been around for longer than this, but, I mean, the big push came after the First World War was over, and the League of Nations was formed, and they were trying to figure out, how do we never have a world war again?
Well, we have to understand each other, first of all, and, you know, what if you could understand all the speeches and all the demagogues in all these other countries, right?
And listen, that's the common problem because when people look at these regimes – We'll take the standard one that you talk about the Nazis, but there's a bazillion regimes like that.
The first thing you do is you have to dehumanize the people you want to go after, because obviously we have human feeling towards each other.
But if you can say something, and I think this is what's been most depressing for me, is that we seem to be backsliding on how we see people.
But I mean, this idea that Well, for example, one of the things I see all the time, all the time, and I don't know where it comes from on Twitter and everywhere else, is this idea that different races are inferior to white folks because white folks built all this, and therefore we must.
And you turn around and go, okay, one, how is that helpful?
The idea that you have to be responsible for pushing back racism in America seems a heck of a lot of responsibility to put on an average Joe or Well, I think that these conversations are very, very important, and I think we're having them more so than ever before.
And these conversations show how ridiculous it is to have blind allegiance towards people that have the same amount of melanin as you do.
It's so fucking stupid.
All human beings essentially either came from—actually, there's some speculation that some of them might have come from Europe thousands of years ago as well—but we're talking about hundreds of thousands of years ago, the very first Homo sapiens, they believe, came from Africa.
Everybody migrated out of there and moved wrong.
We essentially came from the same source.
So all this idea of race is just based on a particular amount of time in a particular climate that forced people to adapt to that climate.
In the colder, darker climates, you see paler skin.
In the sunnier, hotter climates, you see more melanin.
And the idea that these people that live with...
The people that have more pale skin are superior than the people that have more melanin.
It's just patently stupid.
It's a dumb idea.
If you take into account all the socio-economic factors that cause people to live certain ways, people that are isolated that live in certain tribal traditions, these things are all easily explained.
And if you want to chalk it off to intelligence or the superiority of the white race, in 2017, you're a fucking moron.
And this is a it's a good thing that we can have these conversations so you can expose these all these Charlottesville people that you see walking around with fucking swastika tattoos like Jesus Christ you fucking dummies those people that were involved in that those riots and all that racial bullshit that just went on These people, they need to see the reaction that the rest of the world has.
And they are isolated and insulated in their weird little worlds.
And when they go global with that shit, and they march with those tiki torches down the street, and people mock them and talk shit about them openly online, they get to understand how the rest of the world sees this ridiculous ideology that they subscribe to.
This is the power of Free expression and communication that we're experiencing in 2017. And this is the power to nip a lot of this shit in the bud.
If we can get past this tribal nonsense that we're all taking part of.
There's tribal nonsense that's male versus female.
There's tribal nonsense that's white versus black.
There's tribal nonsense that's left versus right.
There's nationalism.
There's all this tribal stupidity.
And all of this stuff is being debated and exposed, and it's happening in real time, and to you and I, it can't happen quick enough.
It's still too goddamn slow.
It's still too frustrating.
The idea that it's still around is still mind-boggling.
This kind of racism, this open, blatant racism, still exists in 2017. It's way less prevalent than it was 1,000 years ago.
It's way less accepted than it was 2,000 years ago.
And I think that's a blip in time, as you know, but probably better than anybody that I know.
Yeah, but you know, it's funny because I... There's a part of me that thinks that there must be something deeply embedded in the DNA or our code or whatever that...
Because it's either that or people run into this stuff and it appeals to them.
So let's say, you know, the first time you ever hear a speaker...
And look, let me draw a distinction because I'm one of those people that actually buys into the idea of, you know, I'd love to get to a place where we judge people by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.
But let's not pretend that it's only the white supremacist types that do that.
We are so hung up on race that if you could say something like, in 15 years, we are going to be a society that doesn't even notice race.
Well, in 1968, folks like Martin Luther King might have thought that that was a great thing.
Today, a lot of people would be like, no, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
We should still be noticing race for all the, you know, these people need help.
I guess what I'm saying is that there's a pendulum, and I'm looking at this, I feel like we're right in the middle of this right now, so it's so hard to analyze it.
So everybody take this with a grain of salt.
But I wonder if there's not a pendulum involved.
So, for example, I tend to buy into most of the theories, for example, about racism that have always been put out there.
And I think they come from academia because I think this is sort of what academics do, and I think that's their job.
But a lot of times they'll come up with theories.
So one of the ones that drives me crazy is white privilege, okay?
White privilege is true in the sense that, like one African-American guy said to me, he said, I would love to forget about race, but white people won't let me.
He says, every morning I wake up and am reminded and you don't have to deal with that.
I get that.
And I approve and I understand it.
But here's my problem.
You have to be able to see how telling somebody that you were born with something that you didn't earn is going to be received on the other side.
Right?
There are some people that have become these white supremacist types or anti-racial group because they're so upset about their perceived position.
Like somehow you're blaming me for stuff that happened Now, true or not, it doesn't matter.
What I always tell people is it doesn't matter what's true or not.
It matters how that person reacts.
And if you're explaining to them that, listen, you're born with all these unearned privileges, and their reaction is, I'm starving here.
I don't have a job.
I'm living in a crappy apartment.
How can you tell me that?
And again, I'm analyzing from within the maelstrom that we're in now, but that might be a reaction-counter-reaction thing.
To say that we could have a society where you judge people on the content of their character, not the color of their skin, that might be as upsetting for an African-American activist as a white supremacist, because this society right now pays really close attention to your race for all kinds of reasons.
I mean, I'm one of those people that believes we're all going to be a nice tan color someday, you know, and so it's a moot point.
But there are people out there who literally think it's life or death if we do become a tan people at one point, right?
of so we make the distinction now based on this or that visual thing yes but throughout history like you said I mean you could go to China and they have all sorts of different peoples in China that they recognize as the other but if you look at them they all look Chinese to you well here's a perfect example where we have a blind spot of this was in Iraq when When we took over and killed Saddam Hussein and overthrew him, and then the Sunnis and the Shias went into a full-scale civil war, and everybody's like, whoa, whoa, what the fuck is going on?
I thought you guys were all Muslim.
So many people had no idea there was two competing sects of Muslims that lived in that area.
We may be talking about The population as a whole, but come on, the people in the government understood this really well.
I mean, this is why the first George Bush didn't want to go in and topple Saddam Hussein directly the way the second Gulf War did, because he didn't want to own that mess.
And we knew that those groups were there because we were encouraging them and funding them to overthrow.
I mean, there was a big Shiite rebellion against Saddam at one point after the first Gulf War, which we were funding and hoping for.
The Kurds have been for a long time our friends, and we've been pushing for something there less than a state, but more than what they had under Saddam, because the Turks don't love them.
This is not the kind of cavalier mindset you ever want to see in someone that possesses the power to overthrow a government, and someone who possesses the power to wield nuclear weapons.
This is a person who's a chicken hawk.
You're completely shielded from the idea of actually engaging in actual visceral combat yourself.
You're outside in flying around in jets, having catered food.
You're in war rooms making decisions while you're in air-conditioned buildings.
It's all bullshit.
And these decisions that you make have massive repercussions for decades, if not centuries.
Here's the thing that you talked about that I think is incredibly important in the wrath of the Khans.
When Genghis Khan took over Baghdad, Baghdad essentially was knocked into the fucking Stone Age and might not have ever recovered.
I think the question of asking about dictators is really important because I think sometimes you have to ask how much of the fact that the country is held together is only because there's a dictator.
So we'll use the Yugoslavia example because it's pretty classic.
For those who don't know, Yugoslavia was a country made up of a bunch of different independent countries now.
And they didn't necessarily get along.
As a matter of fact, it's some of the oldest ethnic hatreds in Europe when you talk about Serbs and Croats and Kosovars and Bosnian Muslims and Albanians and all the people in that area.
They're historically at odds.
But under certain governments, Tito, after the Second World War, formed a government where he essentially ruled with an iron fist.
But that's how you kept all these people from killing each other.
So when you say Iraq is not even a real country, because if you didn't have an iron fisted dictator holding it together, it wouldn't be together.
So then when you take the one linchpin as awful, and Saddam Hussein was awful, awful.
I'll give you a book to read that will just, you have to, it's the only book I've ever read that I had to read another book afterwards before I went to bed at night because it was so horrible.
It's called The Great War for Civilization by Robert Fisk.
But he's a reporter on the scene.
He would tell you what is scrawled on the walls in the prisons at Saddam Hussein's prisons that the prisoners would write in their own blood.
It's horrible stuff.
But the point is, is that if there hadn't been a regime like that, would you have even had an Iraq So, if you say to yourself, okay, this guy is the only reason this country is held together, what if you pull out that linchpin, right?
And you say, he's horrible.
Yes, but if you could look into the crystal ball and find out, yes, but we're going to lose a million people in warfare between all these people if you pull the Saddam Hussein character out of there too quickly.
It's like a giant Jenga game.
And if you pull the wrong piece, and that's what happened, right?
Well, Iran has been on our naughty boy list since 1979. They used to be our best friend in the region, even better than Israel early on, because the Israeli relationship really got tight after, like, 73, 74. But Iran, we overthrew a government there with the British.
Kermit Roosevelt was one of the people involved in that and overthrew a democratically elected regime under Dr. Mohammed Mozadek, put the Shah back in power, his son.
And that became our little, you know, we had, if you look at geopolitics, it's all sort of like playing a risk game, you know, and you want to have a little territory on this side of the continent and then another one on this side and have places.
So if you have Turkey as a friend and you have Israel as a friend, then on the other side, you have Iran as a friend.
I mean, we had this whole area sussed for a while, and the 1979 revolution screwed everything up.
And you could make a decent case that it's since 1979 that all this crap that we're dealing with today, including modern terrorism directed at us, stems from all that.
I mean, that's the domino that begins tumbling that explains a lot of things, including the 82-83 Lebanon involvement and all that stuff.
I've said this before, and it's like a violation, probably, of what I said I would do.
But I went to a CENTCOM meeting.
I was invited to this weird CENTCOM. What is that?
U.S. Central Command.
I'll tell you this story one time because I thought they were going to kill me.
I thought it was an assassination attempt.
And you know, I'm not a conspiracy nut, but the whole story was really funny.
But long story short, I end up at this central command planning meeting with 11 guys.
It's me and 11 other guys and generals.
I mean, it was chaired by the guy who's the defense secretary now, Mattis.
So we sat there and they started talking.
About half of it was, well, what do you think we ought to do about this, that, or the other thing?
And the second half blew my mind because the whole second half of the meeting was about procurement.
Now, procurement sounds boring.
What it basically means is buying stuff, military stuff.
And the meeting was kind of about how important it was that countries don't start shifting over from, say, our tanks to another country's tanks.
And it wasn't because we wanted to sell them tanks.
It was because we wanted to sell them spare parts for the tanks.
It's the old printer model, right?
Oh, we'll give you the foreign aid.
Sure, we'll give you a lot.
We're going to defend you.
We'll send all this stuff free.
Yeah, but then who do you have to call for the spare parts?
Right?
If you're using U.S. jets, well, who's making the parts for those?
And who's selling them?
So when you sit there and realize how much money's involved, you're doubling down in a place like the Middle East, right?
You're doubling down because, one, you want to get the oil, or you want to have...
You want to negate what's called...
It used to be called petro-extortion, petro-blackmail, because in the 70s, and you and I are old enough to remember this when you had the long gas lines and all this, when OPEC punished countries like the United States for supporting Israel, the first thing you realize when somebody can do that to you is, oh my god, job number one has to be make sure no one can ever do that again.
You can't control our foreign policy by saying you'll cut off the oil.
Because if you do that, we'll just come and take the oil.
We'll make sure you can't shut down the Western world because you don't like our policies.
Okay, I understand that a bit.
But then you say, okay, not only are we in there for the oil, but these countries that are our friends in the region who help Who help keep open access to the oil.
These are places that should be using US equipment.
And if they're using US equipment, we can sell them US spare parts.
So you're not only keeping the oil access, which is important to us, but you're also keeping the one industry in this country we still make a ton of money in.
Which is we still sell great military equipment and great military parts, and we send our advisors and our maintenance crews in every place all over the world to keep that stuff in running operation.
That's doubling down.
So you get the oil and you get the spare parts that you give away to them to protect the oil.
I used to have a discussion board online, and some dude came on the discussion board and was saying he was this giant hacker, this famous hacker.
You would all know me if I told you.
And, you know, the discussion board said, you're an idiot.
You know, you don't know.
And the guy left the discussion board saying, I'm going to show you what I can do.
You won't believe.
You just keep your eyes open for a couple of days.
You'll see what I can do.
So three days later, this letter arrives in our mailbox the same day I get an email saying, we'd love to have you come over to Central Command and blah, blah, blah.
It looked like my daughter did it on her printer.
There was no, like, you know, government seals.
It didn't look official at all.
And it was in Florida.
I'm going, okay, this is this hacker dude.
This is what he was going to do.
So it says it's got a phone number to call.
So I call the phone number, and it doesn't even ring once.
And the machine picks it up and just says, leave a message at the beep.
I'm going, what the hell?
I'm telling my wife, what the hell is this?
So I leave a message at the beep.
I hardly put the receiver down.
Boom, rings, and somebody's on the other line.
And it's a guy with a German accent.
I'm going, what?
It's like some weird bad movie, right?
And he goes, no, no, no.
This is all legit.
Don't worry.
You just show up at the airport.
There'll be a ticket waiting for you.
You take it to Washington, D.C. There'll be a car waiting for you.
And I looked at my wife and I said, this hacker is just going to take a photo of me at the airport standing there like an idiot and then put it on the website.
This is a heck of a lot of trouble to go through to scam me, right?
So she gets a call from the German dude in Florida.
He's at the wrong gate.
Go to this other gate.
So I go to this other gate.
A town car pulls up with a Middle Eastern driver.
Oh, Jesus.
Yes, get in the car.
So I get in the car, and then he starts driving through, like, side streets in the backwoods of Virginia or something.
So I'm on the phone with my wife going, if you never hear from me again, I see a couple of landmarks here or whatever.
So he drops me off at this hotel in D.C. I still have...
I don't know what I'm doing.
I don't know why I'm here.
I walk up to the front desk, and I go, do you have a reservation?
Oh, yes, Mr. Carlin.
Hold on.
And they come back with this packet.
And they hand it to me.
This is your homework for tomorrow morning.
And I... I go, what?
I go up to the room, I open up this, and it's all legit.
Long story short, it's all, and there's people at this meeting, you're not allowed to say, but there's people that if they sat next to you would know exactly who they are.
And so I get to the meeting, and it's all like Pentagon, everything's confiscated at the door, and you get this military guy who walks with you everywhere.
So if you have to go to the bathroom, this dude has to walk to the bathroom with you.
And so it's a table in this room, and Mattis is at the head of the table, and then a bunch of soldiers standing in like a circle around the table, just sort of standing there.
So you've got like a cordon of soldiers.
And I'm sitting down there with all these other people, and I have no idea why I'm there.
So I open up the packet, and it's everybody at the meeting.
And everybody's got like three pages on their bio.
This, the Honorable, da-da-da-da-da.
And then I open it up, and then there's this little teeny piece of paper that says, Dan Carlin, podcaster.
And they went to, like, Wikipedia, which is all wrong anyway, and printed it, and I thought, oh yeah, these august people at this meeting are so excited to be at this meeting with Dan Carlin, podcaster, right?
So the meeting goes on for a while, and then it breaks up, and all these people know each other, so they go off in their little corners and start talking during the lunch break.
I don't know anyone.
I'm sitting at this table by myself, and this officer comes up and goes, I bet you wonder why you're here.
I said, yeah, I really would love to know why I'm here.
He goes...
That's my fault.
He goes, I'm the one.
He goes, we listen to the show.
He goes, we're looking for out...
This was all about getting outsider opinions on what you should do in the Middle East.
Okay, but it's a little bit more sneaky than that because I was there with a guy who knows how this all runs, another guest.
And we took the taxi cab to this place together.
And he's a real cynical...
He goes, let me tell you why you're here.
This is all a cover.
I go, what do you mean it's a cover?
He goes, it's a cover because these guys are required by law to solicit outside opinions for some of this stuff.
So that's what we're here for.
We're going to give the...
And what they're going to say is they're going to do exactly what they were going to do anyway, but they'll be able to say, we solicited the outside opinion from all these different people.
But it was one of those get-togethers where you just...
I really wasn't as prepared as I should have been because I was pretty darn sure the whole thing was a hoax.
I mean, first of all, if you're going to send me a letter, can it look like a letter that the U.S.? Does it have to look like something where you printed the label on your brother label maker printer or something?
And the German guy, by the way, turned out to be like a West German general that was cooperating with the U.S. government as part of an exchange program.
But the whole thing seemed like, I just thought it was this hacker dude figuring out he's going to really embarrass me in front of the whole forum, you know.
All I can say is that both Mattis and his aide, which was Vice Admiral Harwood, they are, generals these days are so good at PR, because you get this wonderful thank you note where they go, oh, it was so great to have you.
Here's my, please contact us if you, and you're thinking to...
And I mean, I do think there's a little bit of the PR involved, and I think, you know, having the podcaster there might have been good for PR. Well, for sure.
Maybe they thought it'd shut me up with my criticism, right?
Not only was he cool, but he knows his history, which, you know, I have a soft spot in my heart, but he was talking about, you know, we're talking about the Middle East, and he's talking about the history of this and the history of that, and I'm sitting here going, and, you know, I know that history pretty well, and I was sitting there going...
Don't they call him the warrior monk?
I found him fascinating.
And I thought he really understood what I always hope these people understand, which is the limits of power.
Mattis was very good about saying, listen, we can't keep doing this, and we can't keep doing that.
And I thought to myself, that's right.
I don't know how much the presidents listen, but I remember thinking, Mattis is right about that stuff.
They said Lyndon Johnson was picking the specific bombing targets.
But here's the problem you have.
If you realize, and if you don't, you're an idiot.
That you will actually hurt your long-term goals.
If, for example, you hit a school and kill 200 little children, you realize, listen, the whole policy is really held hostage by the potential for a disastrous mistake.
Because if the goal is to win hearts and minds, and listen, that's the only way to win this kind of thing, then you do damage to the goal with a mistake.
And mistakes in war are inevitable.
So everybody, I think, is just trying to be really careful, but it's hard to fight a war really carefully.
And this war is particularly weird when it comes to that because of the use of drones.
The use of drones has changed the entire idea of what war is because if you look at what happened during the Obama administration, this is one of the things that people don't like to talk about that are supporters of Obama.
I believe the number is higher than 80% of innocent civilians that were killed by drones.
I think it's more than 80%.
Imagine any sort of technique in war or anything else.
How about policing?
Let's just go for policing.
Imagine if there were some criminals that were holed up in a building and you had 100 people in the building and 20 of them were criminals and you killed everybody.
So you killed 80 people that were just secretaries and plumbers and just folks doing their job, living their life, children, their families.
You killed all those people to get to those 20 people.
Everyone would freak the fuck out if you did it physically yourself.
If you ran in with a machine gun and gunned everybody down.
You just, I had to kill everybody, that's the only way to get to the bad guys.
Nobody would forgive you, and it would be front-page news, and it would be a horrific crime.
But it happens constantly when it comes to drone warfare in Yemen and parts of the world that we're not even supposed to be at war with.
We're sending these flying robots...
They shoot something called Hellfire missiles.
Like, Jesus Christ, they're shooting Hellfire missiles at these targets that they're looking at on a screen.
Listen, there's a term, and you military guys listening will all know it.
It's called RMA. Revolution in military affairs.
And RMA periods in time happen.
So you imagine the period between no gunpowder and the mass use of gunpowder weapons.
That's an RMA period in history, right?
But normally, what appears to be fast, like the transition from no gunpowder to gunpowder, is really relatively slow by modern standards.
So you have several generations to get used to the changes.
But the speed of the pace of change now is so quickly that by the time you begin to say, okay, we've been using the current weapons systems and setup for five years now, we think we're starting to understand it, it's obsolete, right?
What I said, and this is so long ago that we've been podcasting a long time, Joe, but I remember years and years ago when we first started using these drones, I said, we're going to screw this up because we're using them the same way the United States used atomic weapons, which is as though no one else will ever get them.
We are establishing the rules.
And when other people get this stuff, those are going to be the rules they operate under too.
But our attitude, and I've never understood this, but we have a very, maybe it's the, maybe it's how democratic republics work in the sense that we can only really think short term because the politicians are only rewarded short term.
But I mean, if you say, listen, these are the goals of our drone program for the next five years, you're not incorporating what's going to happen when China gets drones.
So when you talk about the drone warfare, I would suggest that the problem of collateral damage, for lack of a better word, is one we've been dealing with for a long time now.
First World War, it started.
Second World War, it was massive.
Then anything is a walk back.
So if you say something like, yes, Joe Rogan, sure, we killed those 200 kids at that school and it's regrettable, but that's an unusual thing.
It's not like World War II where we carpet bombed whole cities.
And they're right.
But is that the standard we can operate with?
Well, I would suggest that the question is, does it hurt or help what you're really after?
If Joe Rogan's children were killed in a bombing raid that another country launched, there is nothing that they could do to stop Joe Rogan from hating them for the rest of his life.
And if Joe Rogan hating them means Joe Rogan's going to find a way to make you feel his pain, you just created another enemy while you were trying to eliminate enemies.
And, again, all I tell people, and people get offended, Joe, I've never understood, people get offended where I say, just put yourself in the other guy's moccasins for a minute.
Because what people say to me, I had some guy get screaming mad at me saying, basically, he followed the dominoes saying, are you saying we deserved 9-11?
And I said, if that's really where you took that, if that's where your argument goes, I said, then you totally misunderstood me.
While there are some people who say, listen, look at the way you have women on billboards, scantily clad.
Yes, there are people that hate that and that they don't want that either.
At the same time, in a lot of these countries, you were talking about Iran earlier.
Let's talk about Iran.
Iran's got two separate things going.
They've got the countryside and they've got the cities.
And they've got a ton of the population that's under 30. And in the cities, they'd love to dance.
And they'd love to, you know, the Iranians are not like the, you know, You said they all seem like Muslims to us, but they're all very different from each other.
And the Arabians, for example, are known to be kind of Spartan and Stoic, whereas the Persians, as they used to be called, are a fun-loving, food-loving, dance-loving.
I mean, they're very capitalistic.
So in a funny way, and that's why we were so close to them for so long, there's a natural affinity between us.
And I always say...
It would be pretty darn easy if we treated them right, the same way my stepdad said, you know, you can destroy the Soviet Union by dumping Elvis records, porn, and blue jeans on them, which kind of is what happened.
There's a way, I think, to approach this Muslim world thing, and let's not pretend it won't be totally destabilizing, because if you drop porn, blue jeans, and Elvis on those countries now, you're going to have a counter reaction with all these clerics and whatever that are freaking out.
But at the end of the game, You won't end up looking like the bad guy.
If you're bombing them, it is so hard to look like the good guy when you're bombing people.
And so if you could say to me, listen, Dan, these are killers who want to hurt us, and we've got to take them out.
I totally get that.
But then I would say to you, you have to take them out in a way that doesn't screw up the main mission, which is, let's stop people from wanting to kill us.
There's destroy your country and leave it in rubble, which they can't do.
But there's destroy your country...
You know, the old line is, if they hate our freedoms, well, they did a pretty good job limiting them.
Right.
We're, you know, I described it like fleas on a dog.
I mean, they're like fleas on a dog.
And yet the dog can tear himself to pieces trying to get rid of those fleas and still not get rid of the fleas.
Right.
But it's you really I mean, terrorism is so effective because it requires people to act against human nature, which we can do as individuals.
But it's very tough to get us all collectively to not act like human beings.
It requires us to act against our nature, which is you punched me.
I'm punching you.
Yeah.
And in a funny way, it requires us to be punched and to not punch back, I think.
But how does that work, right?
There's a book by Mark Kurlansky, who's a leftist for sure, so just know going into it what you're dealing with.
But it's a book on nonviolence.
And he's trying to point out something, which I've always tried to point out too.
Nonviolence is a tactic.
And against certain things, it's extremely effective, right?
It's not effective against everything, but sometimes it's...
I mean, if you could do to Martin Luther King what we could do to people now, his sitting...
For example, one of the things you young people may not know is one of his effective protests was to go to these all-white...
Counters in the south where they wouldn't serve black folks and just sit at the counter and wait to be arrested and then when he was arrested Time magazine would be there to get and there's a great photograph of him you know being handcuffed just for the audacity of sitting at a soda counter right it was very powerful but it was powerful because you saw violence initiated against somebody who was totally peaceful right if today you could go up to him And just tase him,
or do something that was not physically violent, then he wouldn't get what he needed out of that, which is he needed that photograph of him being physically manhandled for the simple, or like, not to change subjects, it's the same subject, but like the pictures that were coming out when I was a kid, you can open up those giant Life magazine books with the great photos of Life magazine, and one of them was famous.
It was a black protester in the South.
Alabama or Mississippi, and he's standing there with his arms at his side, not resisting at all, and the police officer has sicked a German shepherd on him who is biting him, right?
And you look at yourself right there and you go, okay, that photograph right there motivated so much public opinion in a different direction, but what if they didn't need to use a dog or a water cannon?
What if they could have just injected you from behind, the guy falls limp and you just carry him off silently?
Well, you just diminished his power to make a difference.
Oh yeah, that's it.
That's it right there.
It's fucked up.
Look how powerful that is.
But it's powerful because some guy is being violently attacked who appears to be doing nothing more than asking for his rights.
Now, if you didn't have that violence, does that somehow change the message and make it less powerful?
They could have just injected him, quietly taken him off to jail.
This doesn't happen, and this made a big difference.
If all he's doing is saying, do I really have to sit at the back of the bus in 1965 or something?
This kind of thing motivated a lot of people.
But if you, you know, it's like 60 Minutes did a great piece, I want to say 1992, 1993, where they were showing all of the new anti-protester weapons that were in development.
And what's funny is several of them have arrived.
One of them is the sonic cannon, which they deployed against anti-New World Order protester types.
Imagine instead of that powerful photo that made a difference, imagine if you could have just aimed the sonic cannon and people leave because it's painful.
Well, does that reduce the value then of that non-violent protest that was so powerful?
So, a group of American diplomats in Havana, Cuba, have suffered severe and unexplained hearing loss over the past year, which U.S. officials believe was caused by a covert and advanced sonic device.
So this is something that we're not even aware of.
And a different kind of crowd control, though, you know?
And if, you know, for example, the famous Gandhi Salt March, which is considered one of the big moments in nonviolent history, where he had all of his supporters walk into the clubs of the authorities.
And he told them, don't resist at all.
You just go down and then let the next row get hit, too.
Because that was a powerful sign of who's right and who's wrong in this whole thing.
But if you could just deploy that sonic cannon and all those people had so much pain in their ears, they just had to leave and nobody got beaten.
There was no blood.
There was no dogs.
There were no water cannons.
Does that undercut the power of nonviolent protest to make change?
It's fascinating that that might have been in the minds of the people who designed this thing.
Well, it's so abstract, the idea of this sonic weapon that you don't hear, but that affects your hearing and it causes injury to your body, but you don't hear it.
That's not going to affect us because it's not a bat, right?
Well, anybody who does anything negative where the public is aware of it, like, say, this Louis C. Case thing or something like that, where you can immediately find and target.
Now I have a reason to go after this person.
It's an acceptable target.
It's an agreed-upon target.
And then people from all over the world can just pour their vitriol and anger and bitterness and whatever it is because they have some sort of a righteous anger.
Well, there's a reason I can be angry at this person.
Or I saw what Kathy Griffin did when she held up that head of Donald Trump.
I have a reason now.
I'm not standing up for Kathy Griffin, because I think what she did was stupid.
You know, Joe, you've taught me a lot about the whole social media thing, though, because I would come in here, the audience doesn't know this, but I would have questions about that stuff, and you've thought more about this than I have, and you were able on several, I quoted you, where, you know, I mean, because I try to make sense of this stuff, and like I said, you're farther along, I think, the road of thinking about some of this stuff, and it gave me some shortcuts, but I mean, I do, because I think it's a fascinating phenomenon, because it's never been available.
I mean, when do people ever have this kind of power?
The good thing about a letter is maybe if someone is an honest person, they can express themselves in a letter in a way that they would have a difficult time doing it in person.
When you're writing something, you have the opportunity to really think about your words, and edit, and go over it, and then decide, this actually represents my real thoughts, and, you know, as imperfect as it is, send it.
But when you can do that any moment of any day, with your phone, in the middle, like someone's talking, yeah, hold on a second, hold on a second, fuck you, fucking asshole.
Look at the trouble these athletes or celebrities get in with what was obviously, I'm just about to board the plane, and boom, they get off the plane and there's a huge firestorm because something was taken wrong or not the way you meant it.
And I think this is, I think we're at an adolescent stage of communication.
That's what I think.
I think we went through all these rudimentary steps, right?
We went through grunts, and then we had verbal language, and then we had written language, and then we had the printing press, and then we had the ability to broadcast, and then we had social media, the ability for anybody to broadcast.
And I think as we move into augmented reality, and what I've been thinking about more and more is this Rosetta Stone idea, this idea that we're going to come up with some sort of a way of communicating ideas that's not limited and restricted to language.
As a military history fanatic, do you know what I instantly think of?
I instantly think of the fact that could you start a war if one country's average Joes and Janes on social media or whatever passes?
Start really disagreeing in their thousands and tens of thousands and 50 thousands with people in another country.
I mean, could could the Russian people via social media anger the American people via social media to such a degree that countries get pulled into conflict?
I don't it's never been possible.
So you can't know.
But you turn around and go, that would be an interesting...
You point out quite correctly that we're essentially guinea pigs here right now.
Which is what I tried to explain to my daughter, is that we are in an era where we are seeing what happens when you hand humanity these tools that they've never had before.
And there's two ways of looking at it.
The optimistic one, which is going to free up, open up, or the pessimistic ones, which say maybe something like, can our representative democracy handle this?
And not because we can't handle communication, but maybe like you would say, the kind of communication that we have where these are little teeny chunks.
We're not having deep, you know, philosophical, coffeehouse, Ben Franklin kind of conversation.
We're having 140 character discussions.
What can you say in 140 characters other than you're an idiot, you're wrong, it's fake news, you know, and then start swearing at them.
I will say that it's disheartening for a person like myself who enjoys depth, because, you know, the history shows are so long because I enjoy the depth.
To see people confronted with, like, a page of text going, oh, too long to read.
But you do go, okay, can you really be a useful citizen as a voting member of this informed citizenry and do your job if you see a page of text?
I mean, the Constitution today would have to be 140 characters, you know, for most of the people today to go, okay, I'll sit down and read.
Well, one of the things that your podcast has done that's amazing is giving people information in a very entertaining form that they would never sit down and read a book about.
There's a ton of people, probably me included, that have never read as much about Genghis Khan as I got from your podcast.
See, and this is what I hope for, because we always say...
I like the idea of being an appetizer for people on history.
If I introduced somebody to the Mongols, and then they went...
You can go to our website.
We put all of the materials we use, and we link directly to a place where you can get them.
So if you actually went out and bought some books on the Mongols after that, or that created an intellectual relationship between you and the Mongols, where for the rest of your life, ooh, this is a Mongol...
They found Genghis Khan's tomb or something, and you're into it because you know about...
Well, I mean, that's awesome.
I mean, in terms of, I mean, I heard, I got a great letter.
This is the highlight of my career, was this letter from the wife of a historian that we used in the World War I series.
And she wrote me this letter saying, you have no, this is like very self-serving, but you You have no idea what you're doing because history is something that not a lot of people were getting interested in.
And now we have people showing up in the classrooms becoming history majors because they got interested in what you were doing.
So if we're poking people with a stick and getting them interested in this subject, do you know how cool it would be to have that, you know, when you're all dead and gone and somebody says, what did you do?
He said, well, he got a lot of people really interested in history.
It's the difference between blended whiskey and a single malt.
When I get these TV offers, and you've had...
Zillions of them where you go and you talk to these people and you realize instantly if I go do this with them, they're going to homogenize it, dumb it down.
And you sit there and go, they're going to make something far inferior to what I'm able to do myself because they really don't understand why it works anyway.
In other words, like you said, you couldn't have been able to do this show.
It's funny to me that the industry, for example, doesn't realize what it is that people like about what you do and figure out a way to...
They're not open-minded enough to say, listen, Joe, come and do this TV show, which is a lot like what you do.
I don't get it.
I don't understand how people like you and people like me and all the people that do what we do haven't created more of an understanding in the old media.
And they're hoping that with that momentum, the quality of the show will add to the momentum, and then you're going to build up, and a bunch of people will catch on, and eventually it'll get rolling.
But in order to do that, they want to take away all the jagged edges, smooth everything down to make it aerodynamic, make everything super homogenized.
I mean, that's what they do with every single sitcom.
Like, the last physical fight I almost had with another adult male was a radio program director.
And the radio program director came into my town new, and you know, if you've ever been in radio, when they come into town new, the first thing they're going to do is change everything, because they've got to put their own stamp on it, or why are they there?
So this guy comes in and he goes, we're going to rebrand you.
He goes, I want everyone to think of your name and instantly think of the brand, and I'm already, you know...
The brand.
Yeah, okay, so here's what he said.
So I hate to say this, because this will become a meme online that I will have to live with the rest of my life, but it's an absolutely true story.
So the guy says to me, he goes, listen, imagine a billboard that says, Dan Carlin, he fucks chickens.
And I said, excuse me?
He goes, yeah, I mean, so that anytime anybody thought of you, they would think, okay, he's the chicken fucker.
There's a bunch of fucking people, if you're dealing with these things, that are just essentially trying to justify their jobs.
You're always having that whenever you're dealing with any sort of an executive position.
And one of the things that you realize is how many people are unnecessary.
I did Bill Simmons' show.
Bill Simmons had a successful podcast, and that podcast led to an HBO show.
And I had a great time on the show.
No, I like him.
He's a very nice guy.
Very smart guy.
But when I did his show, I'm like, there's a hundred people working here.
There's fucking people everywhere.
I get that you need cameramen.
I get that you need soundmen.
But then who are all these other fuckers?
You got all these executive-type people and office people and all these people running around.
I'm like...
You've made this way too complicated.
Like the reason why his podcast is so successful is because it's him.
It's his singular vision, his idea.
You're getting it from this person.
And when you know that you're getting something from a person and you like how that guy thinks, then it becomes interesting.
But when you're not really getting it from that person, you've got a bunch of people holding cue cards and standing behind them and you're creating this Well, my wife said today, we're in the hotel room and she turns on the TV and Ryan Seacrest is on and he like does 10,000 things a day, you know, on multiple shows.
I like listening to him on the radio, because it's almost like listening to an alien that tries to be like a woman who's a secretary.
Because he does these contests, like, call in right now!
And like, you know, have someone to call in.
I like when I go to work and then I can go to the bathroom and look at my phone.
Hey, everybody likes that.
Alright, what's next?
And you're like, hey, you won two tickets to this.
Alright, congratulations.
Alright, Monica.
Nice talking to you.
It's like he's not even a fucking human on those things.
It's like he's figured out a way to hit this...
This droning sound that resonates with the people that live in that existence, with the people that are stuck in traffic and that are checking their phone every 15 minutes.
Those are the people that are on Instagram 35 times a day.
You know that's the average amount of time a person looks at Instagram?
And that is the other thing with the homogenization you talked about.
It's always about imitating somebody who's found a good formula, right?
For sure.
And I will say this about Limbaugh.
Limbaugh's right when he says that there will be a wing in the talk radio museum devoted to him one day.
But what he always says, which I find interesting, is he tried to do what he does now multiple times and got fired.
Because their attitude was, we're not taking any chances with this.
And then he says, the minute I'm successful, every consultant out there is telling everybody to be just like him.
In other words, if you're a podcaster out there or thinking about doing something in the new media, understand that there is something so valuable about what you specifically are bringing to the table.
And the minute you ask these other people what to do, they don't know what's specific about it.
They're going to go and say, well, we can pull a little piece of what this person does, and eventually it's not even you.
One of the great things I always thought about Hardcore History is that over time you self-select your audience.
I think you do that with every podcast.
So you say something like, okay, I'm only going to talk about the stuff I'm interested in.
Well, what you know then a year later is whatever fans are listening to you, that's a pretty good gauge because they're there because they like what you're...
So I don't have to sit there and go, gosh, this would be a popular topic.
I just do what I want to do.
And over time, you've developed an audience that likes that.
I also think that there's something happening when you have a singular vision, like one person who's driving this thing, right?
And over time, I feel like people get a sense of you in a way deeper sense than just listening to your words.
They're chunking data.
They're adding up all of the communication that you've had.
They're analyzing how you see different scenarios.
They're analyzing how you navigate, and they're seeing you when you're tired, and they're seeing you when you're feeling in a great mood, and then maybe they're seeing you when something bad happens and you don't feel so good.
So they get to know you and there's an intimate understanding of you that is almost impossible to get when you're hosting The Tonight Show or you're acting in a television show.
No, I always say, if you think, if people, and this is again why one of my current events podcasts is not really happening right now, because I I feel like when you're in absolutely uncharted water, you can't know what's going on.
I think we're in uncharted water, and I think it's a combination.
Everyone always thinks it's a Trump thing, but to me, Trump is a vector.
To me, what you were talking about with the social media is as much a part of what makes this an absolutely unprecedented time, and a bunch of other things.
The globalization of the earth, like you're saying, we're doing shows and hearing from people from other countries.
I mean, all this stuff interacting together has created an absolutely unprecedented situation.
So maybe I just organize my thinking differently, but I organize it historically, and there's no way to put this into any box that's ever existed before.
So when I watch these talk shows or whatever with people who have no choice, it's 6 p.m., I have to be on the air, and I have to have something to say to rile the audience up.
Right.
You know, they have no options.
Their gig is, I know what's going on, and let me tell you.
Whereas if they were honest with themselves, they either would have to say, I don't know what's going on, and I'm watching too.
Or if they really do believe they know what's going on, well, then you really shouldn't be listening to them at all.
Yeah, I think we're dealing with the ramifications of a bunch of different pieces that are in play.
Yes.
And I think one of those pieces that's in play, and one of the reasons why you see so much bitterness and anger in social media, and we talked about this mechanism that social media allows people to communicate in this really cruel way without experiencing that person right in front of you, right?
But I think one of the reasons why these people have this deep-seated anger and resentment is there's a bunch of people out there that have these lives that are deeply unsatisfying.
Because I think somehow or another through momentum and just through just things falling into place the way they are and people trying to fit their lives around the way these pieces have fallen into place, there are so many people that are working all day long doing something that is deeply unsatisfying and there are so many people that are working all day long doing something that Soul-killing.
They're stuck in traffic all day, and then they're stuck in a cubicle after that.
They relish the time to take a shit in the bathroom and look at their phone.
I mean, they literally do that.
That's a highlight of someone's day.
They get in traffic on the way home.
They get home after that, they're watching television.
And they're fucked.
They have deep debt.
This is not, like, this soul-killing thing is not giving them any freedom.
You sit there and go, and you look at what people make, and you sit there and go, you can make Quite a lot of money by average Joe standards and still not be in good shape.
So I know people turn around, make good living, really good living, and turn around and go, I'm just holding my head above water.
And so you go, okay, if you're holding your head just barely, what's a person making a third or a I mean, this is really, when you talk about revolutions happening and things going down in weird, unpredictable, negative ways, you, and we've talked about this before, you let enough of your society fall into the loser class, for lack of a better word, winners and losers in society.
If you, every society can suck up a certain amount of people not able to make it.
But if that number gets large enough, revolutions happen.
If you make furniture, you make furniture for a living and you feel a great satisfaction out of that and you sell that furniture, look man, making furniture feels good.
If you can do that, you could cut those corners perfectly and sand everything down nice and stain it and then it's done and you get the satisfaction and you sell it to someone and that pays your bills.
That is infinitely more satisfying than being stuck in some fucking cubicle working for someone that you don't want to work for, having to have these stupid fucking office meetings, talking to people in human resources, sitting down with your supervisor where they evaluate your job performance.
You really need to be enthusiastic about this company.
This company is your future.
You're like, fuck, kill me now.
There's a lot of people out there that would way rather do something else, and I hope they understand that they can.
Let's talk about that, because we've been talking about us and podcasting and new media and whatever, but really, and I rarely like to give advice, because you don't want to be responsible for people acting on it and having it not turn out well, but what I tell people is two things.
Right now, the United States of America, the way it's built, is built to help industry and corporations and companies.
But that doesn't necessarily mean it has to be Microsoft.
It can be you, right?
Yeah, you can have your own thing.
Let's talk about the furniture builder.
Once upon a time, there are huge things in your way, including needing to get loans and all these other things to just start a business.
So you're behind the eight ball right away and the pressure's on because if it doesn't work, you're in debt.
Whereas, I mean, we started these podcasts.
There's no brick or mortar.
I mean, now you've got just the Rogan Tower.
It's a little bit different.
But once upon a time, it's like in the back of your bedroom and you've got a company and it's got a show and people are listening.
If you make your furniture and you don't have to have a brick and mortar store, but you can put a website up, make it with Squarespace or one of those other things, and all of a sudden you have a business out of your house...
The freedom, the satisfaction, the ability to set your own hours.
And here's the best part.
The fact that if you start making a lot of money somehow, you're not going to have your boss cut your commissions.
I mean, I knew sales guys who made so much money that their bosses cut their commissions because you can't make more than your bosses.
Well, listen, when you have your own small business, the sky's the limit.
So I always tell people that if you can, and it's not always something they can do, maybe you do it on the side when you've got your regular job.
Starting a small business now, in this climate that we have right now, is not only possible, it's not that much of a gamble, because if worse comes to worse, you didn't invest $100,000 you didn't have starting it all the time, right?
And you have a free online store with it, and they have these drag-and-drop user interfaces.
You use photos, you drag them on there, size it in place, boom.
Next thing you know, you've got a website.
Sell your furniture, sell whatever the fuck you make.
Whether you make clothes, or you're designing backpacks, or there's...
A lot of people out there that have interests and they've never pursued those interests because they're fucking tired from doing some boring, soul-sucking job.
It's hard to go to work and put your effort into that and then come home and then work for yourself.
It's very hard.
But I'll tell you what.
Like you said, there's a part of it that once you start making stuff for yourself that's self-motivating, right?
Like, I told somebody to start a podcast.
I said, the first time you get some feedback email, that will kick you in the rear end to keep doing the podcast.
It becomes, you know, life is a verb, I always say.
And you have to actually act.
But by acting, you change everything in your future.
Another guy said to me, it's a great line.
He said, with podcasts, it's not always how many people are listening.
Sometimes it's who they are.
was always that you should keep walking and talking but in her era walking and talking meant going and shaking people's hands and now you can network like through the internet and you never really shaking people's hands but you may have a podcast with only a hundred listeners but if one of those listeners is some guy somewhere else who says oh my god this guy's furniture is great or whatever I'm gonna I'm good maybe you can come and start giving a pottery barn you know I mean, things open up in ways that you can't predict because you started doing something.
My point is, I didn't start out thinking, this is going to replace my income.
This is going to be, I just did it as a passion project.
And I think if people have a regular day job, if you could just find some one thing that you do as a passion project and just keep building on it, just keep watering it, keep adding fertilizer, keep giving it attention, keep giving it focus, and you can escape.
I always ask people when they want to start it, like a podcast, I'll say something like, how many listeners would you have to have for you to care?
And that's a magic number that's different for everybody, right?
But what's great about what we do that's different from broadcasting is that there is a giant pie of people.
Let's pretend it's a billion.
And if you're going to do a podcast on science fiction comic books from the 1950s or something that has such a narrow audience, they'd never put it on television because it's too narrow.
You will be able, if you even get.00001% of that billion pie, it's not only going to be a decent number of people in terms of what you would think is successful, but they are going to be so enthusiastic because this is an outlet that they don't have.
It's like I always tell somebody, if you're into Harry Potter, what are the TV networks giving you?
And they came up with this clever idea for the title, and it became huge.
I mean, it's always top ten.
It's like one of the top ten comedy podcasts.
And people say, oh, well, today it's saturated.
No, it's not stupid.
Just do something that's good.
Stop saying it's saturated.
If you're good, it'll stand out.
This idea that like, oh, it's easy for you to say.
Everybody's got these stupid barriers they put in their own head.
You got to resist those goddamn things because they don't do you any good and they certainly define the potential for your future in a negative way that's not self-serving and it's not even real.
You know, you put this artificial ceiling on the potential for what you're doing.
If you hit a wall, Okay?
That just means you need to regroup and rethink.
It doesn't mean that wall's there, especially when it comes to something like social media or like a podcast.
Something where you're just putting out a piece of art.
You're putting out something that you've created.
There's no wall as far as like how many people are going to enjoy it or how far it's going to go.
It's just it is what it is.
And if people don't like it, make it better.
If they like it less, fix that.
Figure out a way to do it.
You can do that.
And this idea that there's no way to get past the starting block today is just ludicrous.
It's crazy.
And it's just this poor thinking.
That are trapped in bad situations.
One of the problems is you feel like this is your future.
You feel like you're fucked and you can't get out of that.
There's no hope.
There's no light at the end of the tunnel.
There's no rainbow.
And if you feel like that, that alone can be incredibly defining and limiting.
But if you can look at yourself objectively and say, okay, I kind of am fucked here.
I'm in credit card debt.
I'm working in a shitty job.
I don't like what I'm doing, but I have some ideas.
I need to feed those fucking ideas.
I need to feed them and water them and I need to set aside a certain amount of time every day to just try to make those things happen.
The image I have, though, for what you're talking about, I've always thought it's a little like a running back in football who takes the ball and who goes forward and there's no hole.
All you run into is the back of your offensive lineman.
But if you keep hitting, if a hole is going to open up, boom, you'll squirt through.
Now, there's no guarantee in life the hole will be there, but there is a guarantee that if you're not continually smacking at it, then when it opens up, you won't be wrecked, right?
And so, I don't know about you, Joe.
You've had a charmed life, I think, in how well you've done.
But I guess what I'm saying is I remember being a TV reporter at a small station, and I would get out of work at midnight, and the story that I just spent all day on aired, and it was awful.
And I would get out, and I would literally—this is when I still had quite a bit of hair—I would sit there, and you pull your hair out.
You go, what am I doing?
This is horrible.
And I look back on those now, and I think, you know, what if you had just— Given up then, right?
Or the podcast.
I mean, do you know how...
My wife did a great thing for me.
We'd had that company that I just told you about.
We were trying to do the new media thing, and it just fell apart like everybody's companies were starting to do.
And I'd wasted a lot of time and a lot of money in my life doing that.
And she would have been totally justified in saying, that's it.
You know, you're going to Indianapolis, get a talk radio show job, wherever they're hired.
But she didn't.
She said, you know what?
Try this next thing.
You could do it.
And here we are.
And I think, you know, if you hadn't tried...
It's that weird thing.
And folks, I tried being a TV reporter.
You try all those things and either they're not successful or they're moderately successful or they're successful but not enough for you.
Life is a verb.
You have to...
The thing that makes people the most sad in life, and I already have a couple of friends my own age who are there, is the regrets, right?
They're not sorry they failed, they're sorry they didn't try.
And the funny thing is, some of them are only 50 and they think, okay, my window to try is already gone, which is wrong too.
But folks, you will be so happy.
There's so many things that have happened in my life because I... I mean, I got my first talk radio show job.
I was a reporter.
I covered this story.
There was some big guy showing up at the local radio station.
And as I was leaving, I wrote a letter to the program director to say, thanks for having us.
And I thought, do I mail this?
Do I not mail it?
Do I mail it?
And just, you know, I closed my eyes and I mailed it.
He called me two days later.
So you want a job?
What if you didn't send that letter?
It's so stupid, the little things that your life can hinge on.
But if you don't do them, you don't give fate an opportunity to intervene.
Winston Churchill had a line about reading quotes, about how inspirational reading famous quotes were.
And he says they motivate you from a number of different ways, including the idea that, you know, you think it's just you or you think that these people who did so well were so incredibly gifted or privileged from the get-go.
And when you realize, no, no, no, they're more like me than I think, that becomes inspirational, right?
You telling your audience this is inspirational.
You don't want to hear, go back to school, go do this work.
But if you hate your job, that is like nature telling you to try something different.
And it's motivating because the motivation is you might not have to do that soul-killing job anymore.
Well, if you look at someone who's doing really well, like say if you focus on like Kevin Hart or someone like that, some very famous and successful comedian, all you see is him now flying around in private jets, wearing a new pair of sneakers every day, driving around in Bentleys.
You just see that.
You don't see him being a young kid in Philadelphia, going to open mic nights, scratching and clawing.
And we think of people like, you see an old person walking down the street, you go, oh, that person's always been an old person.
No, that was a baby.
That was a baby that became a 90-year-old man.
There's a progression that you're not witness to.
You don't see it.
And that takes place in everything.
It takes place in authors.
It takes place in comedians and musicians.
There is a starting point and then with time and focus and as long as you reevaluate and reassess and constantly objectively look at what you're doing and then pursue it with passion and focus, you get better at things.
Doing all those things ends up, you know, it's funny, but your life experiences create who you are and all those things actually make you a more form...
I know I'm speaking to the choir here, but all those things make you a more formidable person.
So that eventually that next endeavor is you're more prepared for and you're more formidable.
And so, you know, you turn around and you say, what was I like as a 23-year-old intern compared to what I'm like now?
And I'm basically a different person.
And you're a different person because of all these life experiences.
I mean, you go to a CENTCOM meeting with the big brat.
And one of the things that I've found over the last few years in particular, I've done it in the past, but I did it because they were just goals that I was pursuing on the side as well as doing stand-up and all the other things that I do in my life.
But I've found that things that are completely unrelated to my career that are difficult enhance what I do.
Whether it's yoga, or running hills, or archery, or all these things that I pursue.
Let's macro it out a little bit, because I'm very interested in what you're saying.
So here you and I are talking to the listeners, many of whom are already accomplished and well into their goals, but if they're not, they're listening to this.
I'm thinking to myself, okay, if you're trying to design a society, you know, we had talked about revolution, if too many people are the losers in the society.
If you said to yourself, what really matters in the society is making more Americans who are happier with their lives, more successful, doing what they want to do, in other words, empowering them to create...
How different is that in terms of a setup from what our school system is designed to do now, which is a holdover to essentially make good factory workers, right?
I mean, if you said to somebody, listen, this entire country is built for you to become a businessman with your own business, you start your own company.
If you taught that in the schools.
From the get-go, and you had workshops, and everybody's going to say, damn, we already do that in the schools.
I already know.
But I mean, if that was the entire goal of your education, to turn every student in that class into a small business person doing their own dreams someday, how would you do it differently than what you do now?
Because to me, the biggest crime isn't that we have the kind of system we have.
It's that we're not training people on how to utilize it.
I mean, we have all these opportunities there, and it sounds like a cliché, but...
But we're doing it.
And as you go through it, you say to yourself, well, why can't more people do this?
Well, who told them they could?
And who said?
You know, I mean, this is a little bit of a hand-holding, but I'm teaching this to my kids right now, right?
I'm telling them, listen, don't go do the soul-killing job.
Work on this thing that you seem to be good at and that you love, and let's work on it now.
I mean, I guess what I'm saying is, could we be doing a better job here?
And if so, you know, would you have to fight teachers unions to do it?
What do you have to do to break apart a system that's 140 years old and not working all that well right now to more correspond to the reality that people are growing up in now?
Once you get past that boring shit and you have a base understanding of how to communicate, how to add, how to count, how to multiply, how government works, all these different things that you should have sort of a base understanding of, then it's like everyone has a different personality.
They have different Different interests, different things that they would be really satisfied pursuing.
That's not encouraged.
What's encouraged is go find a job.
What's encouraged is go find some place that you can shove yourself into.
Go find a square hole that you can stick your round peg and just fucking jamming in there and shave down the top and the bottom So you slide in with all this extra space on the sides and feel like shit for the rest of your life Because you need a job because you're in debt because you have credit cards because you have student loans because that's what everybody does And so you do it too.
That's what's wrong.
What's wrong is that we don't like we don't give it's like We met let them figure it out on their own and And it fucking takes forever.
It took forever for me.
The only thing that I had going for me was that I was crazy.
And that I had been spending most of my high school years fighting.
So that I was already so far outside of anybody that I... I was so weird.
So if I was creating a fantasy educational system, the hinge point between what you just said is that you said, I couldn't stand this, I couldn't work the real job, I couldn't fit into this, so I had to find another way.
A lot of people get stuck with the, so I had to find another way part.
It's funny, because your kids are young enough too, so you went through this, but when my kids were really young, before they were in the school they're in now, we put them in one of those Montessori schools.
No, it's different school to school, but the basic concept is that you don't force the children to learn anything specific.
You have all these things around, and the children go to what they want to do.
So the upsides, obviously, that from the get-go, they're only reading what they're into.
The downside, of course, is that there's all this other stuff you're supposed to learn.
It's the dichotomy between, you know, you had talked about needing to have these skills, little math skills.
You need some basic foundational stuff.
But something is also happening at that level, which is you're finding out which students are into math and would like to have a career in math.
Other people are being touched by a foreign language in a way that they think, I'd like to learn more, I'd like to speak it fluently, I'd like to teach it.
So in a way, you're already beginning to select what kids are into by exposing them to this stuff.
Most of us find it boring, but there might be something, that's where I first found history as a discipline, right?
If most kids say, oh God, the last thing I want to hear is some history, but I get turned on by it, okay, well then it's It's worth exposing you to all those things.
I think the problem is, though, is that it would be great, for example, to have half your schooling, maybe, at that young age, be sort of a Montessori model where you say, okay, we spent our time on reading, writing, and arithmetic.
Now we want you to go around You can't be playing video games unless playing video games is what you want to do for a living and you're going to be able to do some educational work on it.
But I mean, I would love to see more of a fostering for the fact that, listen, we're trying to create entrepreneurs here rather than trying to create drone workers on the Amazon assembly line.
Now, if you end up on the Amazon assembly line anyway, great, good for you.
I'm glad you can bring some food home.
But the goal ought to be to let you start a business and maybe employ a bunch of other people, you know?
It was a Kanye West who said, do rich people have problems or just different problems?
I mean, everybody's got these challenges, but like you said, there's not a lot more stressful than having a ton of credit card debt, wondering if you're going to lose your house, wondering how you're going to pay for your kids' education.
I mean, the one thing is as you get older, I mean, it's funny because getting older is one of those things that you can only understand when you get there.
So all through your life, you're going through these, God, isn't this the interesting part of being in your 30s or being in your 40s?
So as I go into my 50s now, I'm sitting here going, energy is so under-talked about.
You know, the ability to, like my buddy who wrote me and said, you know, I feel like I've screwed up my life.
I didn't take enough chances.
I played it safe and now I'm so unhappy.
He says, and I just can't motivate myself at 50 years old anymore, energy-wise, to start over.
If you don't have energy, not only will you not have the energy to pursue things, but you won't be able to do them the same way.
If you have energy and enthusiasm and say, like, you're healthy and you want to write a book, you're going to have thoughts that'll come into your mind that won't come into your mind if you're exhausted.
Agreed.
That's fucking huge.
That's huge for anything you're trying to pursue, whether we're talking about furniture making, whether you're talking about being an author, whatever it is.
Let's talk about ideas for a minute, because I think that's another one.
When we talk about small businesses or starting as an entrepreneur, you know, I'm one of those people that is not sure that we don't have a finite number of ideas to each of us, and all of them are valuable enough, even if they don't appear to be on the surface, to write down.
As a matter of fact, I went to a business meeting a couple years ago with one of these TV guys I was just talking about, and we go to this business meeting, and we're all on our phones and whatever, and he pulls out an old-fashioned journal that you write in, and he just starts writing.
And I looked at that and I thought, in one sense he looks like a dinosaur, but I went out and bought one.
And now it's crazy how often, you know, all I do is write ideas in it.
And a lot of them I look back on now and I go, okay, that's still stupid.
But other ones I look back on and go, God, I didn't know what this idea meant at the time, but five years later, this idea is really, you know, I guess what I'm saying is that if you wanted to take almost like a religious view of it, God only gives you so many ideas.
Write down and cherish the ideas.
But there is something to that.
Folks, what really is going to make you unique sometimes is the way your brain works differently than anyone's brain who's ever existed on the planet.
And also, like, the idea of having these ideas and the enthusiasm that comes from it, like, it starts to escalate, and you start to calculate, like, oh, and I need more, and I need this, and maybe that, and then the motivation and the momentum of these ideas can lead to enthusiasm.
I would also suggest that you and I and everyone has an interest in not allowing people to drone on too much because for the same reason I talked about instability.
We did a common sense show once called The Revenge of the Gangrenous Finger.
And the idea was that if you ignore If you have enough people in your society that aren't doing well long enough, it's a little like saying, yes, my finger has gangrene, but it's the little one, so who the hell cares?
But eventually, if you ignore it long enough, it'll poison your bloodstream and destroy the body itself.
If you have enough people in soul crushing situations who can't, you know, a guy called me once on the radio when I was preaching revolution in the middle 1990s and said, you're an idiot.
He said, you're an idiot because no one's going to face the bayonets as long as they have enough food in their bellies and they're doing halfway okay.
But of course, the implication there is if they don't have food in their bellies and they're not doing okay, then all bets are off.
We all have a vested interest in seeing that more of our countrymen do better, because it's better for the society as a whole.
It creates a better world for your kids, happier...
I mean, there's so many...
And the one thing about our system, you know, people talk about patriotism all the time.
But to me, the real patriotism is saying, we've created a system here.
It works this way.
It encourages people to go do these things.
So, if the system's designed and set up for that, you ought to give it a try.
Pretend there's a documentary crew filming your success story and they're following you around right now.
What would you do?
What would you do if you knew that there was a crew following you around with cameras documenting your future incredible success and they want to catch you in the act of it all?
You would do all the right things you would have to do.
Think about that.
Organize it.
But we are saddled down by so many doubts and so much Just mental horseshit that keeps people from action.
I mean, if you say, listen, this guy grew up and started his own business because his folks taught him those kinds of things and encouraged him or she with her creativity.
Okay, that's a person that's got a huge advantage in life.
We talked about white privilege giving you an advantage.
Well, good parent privilege gives you an advantage.
But then the question that, if you're looking at it macro in a society sense that comes up is, okay, what can society do if you say this is a real problem for the rest of us, not enough good parents, because those people never learned it?
How do you compensate for that?
And that almost gets a little socialistic, where you talk about the state teaching you creativity, and it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense, but there's got to be, if we decide that this is a national security interest, you know, having more Americans live in the dream, have less losers.
You know, if you say, okay, 500 out of 1,000 overcome that, how do you get to 600?
How do you get to 700 out of 1,000?
And if you say it's a national security concern that we do, I mean, I think ambition is a gene.
I really do.
And I think that some of us, you could be born into any circumstance, but you've got this gene, so you're going to be ambitious, and you're going to overcome it.
Then I think there's people who have no ambition gene, and there's nothing you can do to help them.
And then I think there's a huge number of people in the middle that could go either way.
And the question I have is, you don't have to help the ones with the gene.
You can't do anything for the ones without the gene.
How do you increase the odds for the people who could go either way?
It's fucking hilarious, but do you look at it in terms of like one day someone is going to do a hardcore history series about the Trump administration?
Do you ever look at it that way?
Do you look at it in terms of like establishing a narrative or like trying to describe it to people someday?
I think we're too in the maelstrom, like we said earlier, for me to figure that out.
I will say that I see certain side benefits.
So, for example, you know, one of the things that I've talked about for many, many years, and we did a whole six-hour podcast on it, too, is the president's power to launch a nuclear war all by himself or herself.
Well, and here's the thing, is that that's an obvious flaw.
I mean, everybody understands it, but nobody's done anything about it.
So now, because everyone's so scared of Trump, they're talking about fixing a problem that should have been fixed decades and decades ago.
Not because he's a great president and they're looking for, but because they're so freaking scared of him and he's so outside.
You know, I mean, it's funny because...
Why these politicians...
And they'll trust people from the other parties.
It doesn't matter.
You didn't hear the Democrats saying we can't have George W. Bush with his finger on the nuclear button.
You didn't hear George W. Bush...
They're all fine with it as long as you're one of those insiders.
The first time you get an outsider in there, now they're scared to death.
But they should have been scared to death decades and decades ago.
So if you said that we have a Trump presidency and the only big thing that comes out of it is they finally fixed that one person can't launch a nuclear war and holocaust by themselves...
That's a pretty big deal, right?
You almost had to break a little aspect of the system for people to freak out enough to fix it.
But when you think...
Look, worst case scenarios.
You think worst case...
Look at World War I as a worst case scenario.
If you have a person with the power to launch a nuclear war by themselves...
If anybody can't see that that's an untenable, horrible situation, and you look at human history and go, okay, it's a ticking time bomb, literally, then you don't know very much history.
And the fact that we've escaped decades and decades without anybody fixing this problem...
So if what Trump proved is that you do not need a ton of money if you walk in the door with a Q rating, because that's what the other politicians want it for, right?
Well, he's uniquely good at ignoring his faults and projecting his strengths and being confident.
All those things.
I mean, he might be a sociopath.
But all those things that allow him to do that and completely ignore his faults and keep constantly droning on about his successes and how good he is at things, that resonates with people in a very weird way.
There are certain things that he did that are part of his personality that worked really well because there are so many Americans so upset with the system.
I mean, I remember one line from Trump at one of these debates that I thought was one of the great lines of all time.
And when he turned to Rand Paul after Rand Paul slammed him and said, you're not having a very good night, are you?
And I remember thinking, okay, there are a lot of Americans who just love anybody sticking it to these politicians now because everybody's so upset with all the politics.
So here's a guy who's sticking it to them.
But there's a cutting off your nose to spite your face side of this because I've always wanted an outsider.
So you say to yourself, okay, we could have had a normal human being, because look, if you want to say what Trump has, I don't know the guy, so I can't diagram what he...
But he's an extreme narcissist.
Now, all these people have narcissistic complexes, or you don't think I'm a good enough guy to be president, right?
Right there, it's almost like you don't get through the door without too much narcissism.
I've never seen this much from anybody.
I mean, this is...
But...
You know, if for a while that was working for him, because he was so outside the norms, there are certain unspoken rules of things you do and behave, and he violated all those, and it was refreshing to have him violate those.
The real thing, I think a lot of people said, which is tragic, but I understand it, is if we have to live with one of these people for four years and listen to them talk, I'd rather have somebody who's making funny jokes that make me laugh rather than...
Somebody who's obviously reading another prepared speech that they didn't write.
The part that drives me the craziest is 321 million people, you said, and the two people that we're voting on at the end of this thing are Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
And he said, so people who are really intelligent, if they do that calculation, the calculation says, don't run for president, you'd be an idiot.
it now.
He says people, though, who run anyway, it's because something on the pro side outweighs everything on the con side.
Like I want to be on TV all the time or I want to be the most powerful person in the world or it's the natural extension.
I've been a senator, you know, whatever it is.
In other words, there's some ego question.
Yes.
And he said that's why you have to be careful because that's...
So you either have somebody who's not intelligent enough to weigh the pros and cons or somebody who's so smart that the cons outweigh the pros and they choose to do it anyway.
Or maybe you'd try to get the things on your bucket list in terms of accomplishments done more quickly.
But you look at someone like that and say, could a guy like that have made it through the process?
Could Lyndon Johnson have made it through the process?
I mean, all those people lived in a time period that was a lot less of a fishbowl than today.
And if you say that these great leaders can't make it through the process and the only people that make it through the process are the ones who've been so careful, never taken a risk, lied like crazy.
I mean, if you say those are the only people that can make it through the process, then maybe that explains why with 321 million people, this is the choice we end up with at the end of the day.
Well, we also have this problem where we look at someone's entire life, and we look at all the different things that they do, and we decide whether or not we accept certain things.
Like, we're not talking about whether or not someone's honest with business.
But if you think about nature, the natural leader types throughout human history, what percentage of those have been monogamous?
Those ones who want to control the army, the ones who want to run the thing, the ones who want to be at the top getting everybody to do their bidding, the ones who want to have all the money and all the power and live in the castle.
You know, it does argue for the idea that it might be better to appoint somebody who doesn't want the job.
Somebody I talked to once has talked about that with police officers, and they had said, listen, there are all kinds of police officers, but if you're the one who wants the job because you're going to chase bad guys and you want that adrenaline rush and the whole thing, you're not the guy who should get the job.
Yes, and you can see, the funny thing is, and somebody sent this to me a long time ago, there's all these different recruitment videos that the different police agencies have, right?
And some of them are more like, you can get cats out of trees, you can help old ladies, and some of them are like, you can drive a great car!
And the funny thing is, I would imagine that that influences the sort of people that answer your ad.
When you're advertising, it's the same problem you have when you're advertising for drug companies.
You get people thinking, like, oh, maybe I need that Abilify in my life.
Oh, Humerida.
Ooh, I need that.
That seems like I like the music they're playing.
I like how everybody's dancing.
Oh, I like how that cop looks up there.
He looks formidable.
He looks like a man who gets respect.
Look, he's got his hands on his hips, and he's got a nice car behind him.
And look, he's a female squad leader with him.
I wonder if he fucks her.
You know, like, people start...
You look at an ad, and you start...
Imagining yourself in the position of that person in that ad, and then next thing you know, you're the one who's going to go get the bad guys, and you're the one who's going to go...
But if you talk to a real cop, a good cop is someone who respects community, someone who wants to help, someone who wants to establish some sort of a bond with the people that are in the community that he patrols.
That's why they're trying to do in some neighborhoods, they're trying to have more people on foot that actually walk through the streets and become a part of the community.
Well, Joe, that's what it's supposed to do, remember?
Remember, we're supposed to be, if everybody remembers their founding father, Federalist Papers and everything.
The presidency was a much, much, much less powerful job.
This was a country that was run by the legislative branch, basically.
We're not that way anymore because of a whole bunch of things, including the nuclear weapons thing we talked about earlier.
The atomic age changed the presidency because of the need to have one person.
You couldn't declare war anymore because what if the missiles are on their way to you now, right?
Can you really go to Congress and debate it?
No, you needed a person who within 10 minutes could launch a counter-strike.
Okay, well, how much power does that take out of, you know, the hands of the legislature who was supposed to be running things?
For example, why do we not declare war anymore?
We haven't declared war since the Second World War.
We have a country that the Constitution says you can't go to war without a declaration.
Certainly, you can get some Barbary pirates cleared out of North Africa, but you can't, like...
That's why Congress, by the way, with the Trump thing, is they want to say that you can't launch nuclear weapons unless Congress has declared war first, which creates this wonderful thing about trying to figure out if we can sort of retroactively replace a power that's been gone since 1942. We declared war on, like, Romania and something else, the subsidiary powers in the Second World War, and that's the last time it's been done.
But according to the Constitution, we shouldn't have been able to fight a war since without that.
It's going to be very interesting to see what happens in 2020. It's going to be really interesting.
To remove some of the power that the president has is going to be a really big uphill battle.
Unless someone actually drops a nuke on somebody.
Unless Trump decides to bomb North Korea.
Like Kim Jong-un says something about his wife, like, you piece of shit.
He fucking launches a bomb at him.
Unless it's something so egregious and ridiculous like that, it's going to be really hard to dial back the power without any real specific need.
Because people are going to concentrate on all the other issues that the country faces economically, militarily, the need for Health care, the need for environmental standards, what are we going to do about global warming?
There's so many issues that take the front stage.
The idea of someone actually launching a nuclear attack seems so distant and ridiculous that that's not going to be on the forefront of everybody's list of priorities and things to handle.
Makes me think of Eisenhower ordering the local German population at the end of the Second World War to go tour the death camps themselves and actually have to walk past piles and piles and piles of human bodies because he wanted them to not forget.
Wow.
I didn't know he did that.
When you look at the end of the World Wars, for example, in both of them, people were so shocked by what happened.
You get this idea that we're never again, right?
We're never going to let this happen again.
But you get a generation later, two generations later.
How long does it take for those lessons to fade away?
So when I hear or read on Twitter, it's probably some 13-year-old boy in his basement, so you never know.
But the racial stuff, I always think to myself...
If you only, you know, maybe we need some dead bodies out there so you can go see, this is what it looks like, right?
We're not fooling around here.
This kind of stuff leads to this.
Stop fooling around with 140 characters and look at what real death taste smells like and what the long-term ramifications of pushing these sorts of attitudes can lead to and has over and over and over again.
Happens when people overcome significant tragedies whether it's war or whether it's natural disasters or you know I was in I was in New York right after 9-11 and it was palpable the sense of community and how friendly people were and it was because people had had their world shaken up by an attack and it literally did good it really did good for the people that survived in a fucked up way and But it makes me think of that project for a New America document that before 9
-11 had said that there's, you know, without some kind of Pearl Harbor-style attack, the American system is designed right now in a way where people are going to pull apart more and more.
And in other words, just saying, you know, you could almost wish for something like that to happen to pull us together.
When I was trying to localize the story from the Yugoslavian Civil War that we were just talking about earlier, I interviewed a Croatian man in Eugene, and we were talking about it, and I was bringing up these age-old hatreds and basically saying, you know, they've always hated each other, and he stopped me.
He said, no, stop, stop, stop.
He goes, we didn't.
He goes, up until recently, we were intermarrying with each other.
We got along.
It was all working out.
He goes, you know what changed?
I said, what?
He goes, the economy tanked.
He goes, and all of a sudden, he goes, the first thing that started to resurface when everybody was just hating everything, their lives and everything, he goes, all of a sudden, all these old things that had been buried just came right back.
And so that tribalism you're talking about with Younger, I think there are times, and you had mentioned it, right?
Yes, but then certain kinds of conditions, for example, terrible economic conditions for too many people, it's funny how quickly the scapegoats come back, and things that, I mean, truthfully, the biggest thing that I've missed politically in terms of just I just didn't see it.
It was the resurgence of the racism, bigotry, prejudice thing.
I mean, I thought, you know, we grew up in the era where our country was trying to figure out through things like broadcasting how we transition.
So you remember All in the Family when it started.
It's a show that doesn't even run very much anymore because simply trying to address those issues is too hot button for most advertisers now.
No, but that whole show was part of society's attempt to transition from an era where it wasn't that long beforehand, where you couldn't stay in a hotel that wasn't a black or a white person's hotel in the South, to one where we got now.
And I always thought, okay, the message of Archie Bunker was they would try to teach him, the young people would try to teach him how to be a more open human being.
But it didn't matter because the Archie Bunkers of the world were going to die off.
They were the dinosaurs from another era, and eventually that would be a way of looking at things that was in the past.
And I thought that that was what it was going to be.
And I never saw the resurgence, but like my Croatian friend had said, just maybe things had to get bad enough economically and whatever for all the tribal things to just come back because there's something deep in us that that's all embedded in.
But long story short is, I mean, these were people, they didn't have any black people they knew, right?
They had stereotypes and things.
So he said, once you're, like you had said, when you're face to face with somebody and you have to interact with them on an eye to eye level, it's...
It's very intriguing what he did, because you say to yourself, okay, you can never reach these Archie Bunker guys, but people have and do.
And I do want to say, listen, for all of the white supremacists out there that think I'm being unfair, this racial tribal thing is all over the place, because there are, you know, like, you will meet black folks who are racist, too.
Now, what I always say to people, though, is the one thing you have to understand as a white person that's different is we're the dominant culture.
Okay?
It does make things different.
If you're a minority in any country, there's a tendency, I mean, you go to the place and they'll have neighborhoods, right?
Remember the Italian neighborhoods in our country, the Jewish neighborhoods, the Irish neighborhoods.
Why did they do that?
Were they racist?
No, there's some strength in gathering with your own kind, reading your own newspapers and keeping your culture alive.
So it's a very different thing to say, well, listen, they're being racist too.
Okay, but we're the dominant culture, and it means that there's something a little different when we say, what's wrong with saying, you know, white people should be proud of their heritage too?
Theoretically, nothing.
But historically speaking, there are some issues, and you need to recognize that.
Now, can we ever get to a time when we can judge people by the content of their character?
I don't know, but I think even if white people said, we're going to do that right now, there'd be people of other colors going, no, wait a minute, we don't want to give up some extra admissions into universities.
It becomes a very difficult thing to give up this racial identity.
In the 60s, that was the goal.
Now, people on all sides would be, what are you talking about?
The cultural appropriation thing drives me crazy.
Like, if you're going to have dreadlocks, you can't because that's a black hairstyle.
What I always want to say is, don't black people want to try different hairstyles, too?
And again, I do think, and I love academia, and I could have got swept up.
I enjoyed school at the college level so much, I could still be there today.
I mean, I've never gotten a job.
I would just be one of those guys.
I'm a graduate student at 51 helping the professors.
But at the same time, look, we all understand that those people are incentivized to come up with new theories, new ideas, groundbreaking, cutting edge.
You know, this is what they're rewarded for with the carrots and sticks.
So I get it.
It's different when it spreads to the general culture a little bit, though, because now we're not in the ivory tower having a theoretical debate about...
We're sitting there going, should that person be shamed on Twitter because he's an Asian person with dreadlocks?
Okay, folks, if you don't see that that might backfire on you down the road, I mean, we've all got to cut each other some slack on all sides if we're going to make this work.
And the funny part is the cultural appropriators out there are sometimes the most sympathetic to that side.
I mean, if you're willing to get a Rastafarian's hairstyle, you're probably not an anti-black racist, right?
So when you tell them that they shouldn't be doing that, aren't you going after the people most likely to see your side of things and help you and push?
See what I'm saying?
It's almost like we're eating our own on all sides.
But that's just how we – you know, when I was a punk back in the old days, and I remember saying that we were killing the movement because the biggest thing was this idea of a poser, right?
And the first thing everybody said to me, we didn't welcome you into the group.
We said, when did you start wearing these clothes?
When did you get that hairstyle, you poser?
In other words, the entire thing was exclusive, right?
I mean, I remember they were going after, like, John Lydon, Johnny Rotten.
You're a poser.
Okay, well, then what are we doing here?
But I mean in the same way the one thing you have to do is cut people some slack and the one thing we human beings seem to have such a problem with is cutting people slack and it seems to be if you say the social media seems to be worse because you'll cut somebody slack face to face more easily than you will you know when you can just throw 140 characters and you go to bed but that comedian on the other side of your 140 characters I mean let me just you've seen this and I've seen this but if you've never been on the receiving end of Of these things where people...
And I've been very lucky and people have been very nice and kind to me.
But even I, when you read these things, you go, who is this person?
And why do they think that this is...
Did their lives get better because they texted me this?
Or just dissatisfied people that are so upset with the way things are.
I mean, I really, I would love to see more effort made in that regard, because I think the subsidiary down-the-road domino effects would help us all so much.
But listen, we're a country that can't even get the most basic things passed.
I think it's happening incredibly rapidly, but I think we're stuck in the mix of it and we don't realize it.
It's sort of like when you come over to someone's house and you haven't been over their house in like five years and all of a sudden their kid is 10, you're like, holy shit, you're 10 now?
To them, it just happened gradually and slowly and they barely have noticed it.
But to you, when you take five years off and then you see that kid, you're like, holy shit!
See, this is where I can't, again, in the maelstrom trying to analyze, but is it positive or negative?
It's both.
I was going to say, you're an optimist, Joe.
We've had this conversation before, and I'm a little bit more cynical and misanthropic, maybe.
But I worry about figuring it out.
So if you say that human beings individually and as groups learn by mistakes, Yes.
Do you have to have a Holocaust-type mistake to come out of this before we go, wow, well, here's where we screwed up on that social media thing?
I mean, I wonder whether we're going to be allowed—I don't know how you would turn the genie, put the genie back in the bottle.
But, I mean, at what point do terrorists or dangerous people—I mean, look at the—to go back to that Weather Underground New Left bombing thing that I said that they didn't— They didn't like me waterboarding Abbie Hoffman.
But I mean, if you'd have had a bunch of people back then with Twitter saying, I support the Abbie Hoffmans, I support...
Okay, at what point would the government...
First of all, get you on a watch list then or now, but at what point would somebody have said, listen, for our own good, we can't have average Americans, because look how many terrorists are using this tool.
I mean...
We'll see what happens, but you had mentioned 9-11 and how, you know, so much of that, there was a feeling of community and all that other stuff, but there was other things, too.
There was the government literally, and I remember Peter DeFazio, the congressman up in Oregon, who said this to me.
He said, Dan, he said, there were bills that had been written and put on a shelf because there was no way to pass them for the longest time.
And he goes, when 9-11 happened, they pulled all those bills down, cobbled them into one thing.
Like I said before, when you're talking about, like, are you optimistic or are you pessimistic?
Is it negative or is it positive?
It's both.
And I think the negative and the positive are both necessary.
I don't think we're gonna live in this utopian world where everybody's just friendly to each other.
I think people are gonna make mistakes, they're gonna be shitty, they're gonna realize that they're shitty, and the understanding of that behavior and the ramifications of that behavior is becoming more and more apparent every day.
I mean, if you said in 1900, I'm optimistic long term that by the year 2000, things will be better.
Yes, but you have two world wars to go through in the interim and near misses on nuclear wars.
So...
I can agree with you that long-term we may have a positive outcome here.
I don't know what our immediate short-term, you and I have 20, 30, 40, you probably have 100 years left on your lifespan, but some of us are not in great shape.
So if you said the next 20, 25, 30 years, are you going to see good or bad from this?
We may have to go through some learning experiences, and those tend to not be so fun to live through.
Because, folks, that's what connects you to all the other human beings who ever lived before us.
The thing that makes our time period different here, this vast human experiment, is we've never had a generation growing up with mobile phones, for example.
What does that mean?
Well, one thing it does is it takes you away from the part that you're...
I mean, looking up at a night sky...
With nothing to do for hours, just sitting there contemplating the silence or the rustling of the trees or whatever, I don't know if you get anything out of that or not, but that's something that human beings have done since caveman times that you're sharing an experience that's innately human.
If that becomes less and less common because we're detached from that, What does that mean?
Like I said, we talked about an experiment earlier, that we're in an experiment.
What does it mean when people detach from that part of the human existence to spend more time in this new part of human existence?
Well, I think that part of being a person, like being in nature, it's part of us.
It's part of how we developed.
It's attached to our human reward system.
There's something that's deeply satisfying about lying down in a field and looking up at the stars.
There's a reason for all that.
And the more we detach from that, the more you're going to get these disenfranchised, very unhappy people that feel like they're a prisoner or a slave to some system that doesn't give a fuck about them.
Because it doesn't.
It really doesn't.
The people that give a fuck about you are your community.
They're your friends, the community of like-minded humans that you've bonded with that share your occupation or share your interests.
And that's how people develop satisfying relationships and satisfying lives.
The more you put yourself connected to something that doesn't even value you, some huge monolithic creation There's no one even running it.
It's not like some architect has figured out a great way to design civilization to satisfy all the humans that are a part of it.
No.
You're feeding this machine in some sort of a weird way that nobody really understands the ramifications of because we haven't done it before.
There hasn't been this Global connection of cell phones for thousands of years.
We know how to manage it.
We know how to manage your time and all your emotions on social media.
No, this is all experimental.
It's all happening in the moment and we're all a part of it.
And what's it going to be like three generations from now?
I'm scared that we're eliminating as much as possible boredom from our lives because I think the boredom is important.
When I was a kid, we talked about being weird.
When I was a kid, I had a lot of free time on my hands.
I had to figure out ways to entertain myself.
No video games.
And you end up doing things that, like, you know, you had talked about your whole, you know, we found this niche for me in this history show thing, because it's what I was born to do or whatever.
Yes, but it goes back to me trying to figure out, okay, I've played with these toy plastic soldiers every single day.
How do I make something new so that I can be entertained with these same toy soldiers, you know?
And I think that all, you know, if we think about building blocks in your brain, the need to overcome boredom, for example, is a prime mover when you're young.
You're not motivated by money.
You're not even motivated by the opposite sex.
You know, when you're a kid, you're like, what am I going to do to fill this afternoon?
And you find ways to, you know, I remember tearing up my mom's garden once to create a giant river system, you know?