March 13, 2025 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:38:26
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unidentified
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Joe Rogan Podcast. | |
| Check it out. | ||
| The Joe Rogan Experience. | ||
| Train by day. | ||
| Joe Rogan Podcast by night. | ||
| All day. | ||
| The guys today, I think, are the highest level fighters of all time. | ||
| We running? | ||
| Hey, Daryl. | ||
| What's going on, man? | ||
| How's it going? | ||
| We were just talking UFC. Yeah. | ||
| I think we were talking about how exciting the Ankolaev and Pereira fight was, even though people didn't like it because it wasn't like some crazy result, a giant knockout like you get in most Pereira fights, but it was so technical. | ||
| And Ankolaev just did a fantastic job of shutting down the scariest guy in the division. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And the psychological aspect of it, he made him back up and second-guess himself. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And, you know, that's... | ||
| You can't just do that by being aggressive. | ||
| You really got to get in there, and you got to hurt him a little bit, and you just have to put that on him. | ||
| And it was amazing to watch. | ||
| I thought it was a great fight. | ||
| Well, it was so interesting because the consequences of exchanging with Pereira are so high, but also on Goliath. | ||
| On Goliath has knocked a lot of people out. | ||
| We always look at Pereira's knockouts, but... | ||
| Uncle I has knocked out some of the best guys in the division, and he only lost one time, and that was... | ||
| Paul Craig has the nastiest fucking triangle. | ||
| It's so sneaky and so quick, and you don't expect it. | ||
| He's so high level off his back, and he caught him, I think, with like one second to go in the third round, a fight that he was losing. | ||
| Yeah, he broke Jamal's arm, or dislocated his elbow, too. | ||
| He's one of those guys, like Ryan Hall. | ||
| It's like, you know... | ||
| They're on the feet, dancing around. | ||
| It's like, you know, what are we really watching here, kind of? | ||
| But, man, as soon as they hit the ground... | ||
| Yeah, there's a giant disparity between his stand-up, which is good. | ||
| His good stand-up. | ||
| You know, and the Bo Nickel fight was entirely stand-up. | ||
| It was a good fight. | ||
| You know, he looked good on the feet. | ||
| But you would never say... | ||
| You know, this is like an Israel Adesanya type character. | ||
| He doesn't have that level of proficiency with striking. | ||
| But God, when he gets on his back, you're in such danger. | ||
| Like, nobody else in the division. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| Because most guys, you're on their back and you're not really worried about it. | ||
| With Paul Craig, it's like, everything has to be tight. | ||
| Especially guys that size. | ||
| You don't really see it as often. | ||
| No, you don't. | ||
| Especially in an era when, you know, the off-your-back jiu-jitsu is kind of... | ||
| I don't want to say, like, you know, they figured out the game on that yet, but, you know, it's not quite to that level. | ||
| You still have your Craigs and Oliveras, people like that, who really are dangerous off their back. | ||
| But it's not as common anymore, you know? | ||
| Well, it's really hard to do. | ||
| And also, most people don't want to be on their back. | ||
| So they don't even practice off their back. | ||
| And the common... | ||
| The thought amongst coaches is when you're on your back, if there's two minutes to go, you're probably not going to pull a submission off. | ||
| You've got to concentrate on getting back up to your feet, minimizing whatever scoring your opponent has done by taking you down and whatever shots they've landed. | ||
| Mitigate those as much as possible and get to the feet as quickly as possible. | ||
| That's what everybody's trying to do now. | ||
| Especially in a three-round fight. | ||
| You let yourself get laid on for three minutes in the first round. | ||
| Nothing really happens, but you lost that round. | ||
| You better win the second one. | ||
| Well, look at the Armin Sarukian. | ||
| If you think about that fight with Charles Oliveira, Charles Oliveira caught him multiple times in deep submissions, which I think should count for a lot. | ||
| Which I thought, if I looked at who won that fight, I would say Oliveira won that fight. | ||
| Oliveira had him in deep trouble. | ||
| It was kind of a controversial opinion, but I think a tightly locked triangle or a Darce choke or anything along those lines should be considered winning. | ||
| You're doing something very difficult to do. | ||
| Your opponent doesn't want it to happen. | ||
| You've dominated a position to the point where you've secured a submission. | ||
| And then this guy sneaks out with sweat and technique and fucking grit. | ||
| But he was in fucking trouble. | ||
| Deep, deep trouble. | ||
| At the very end especially. | ||
| Oh, definitely. | ||
| I'm a little biased on this one because I'm an adopted member of the Armenian community. | ||
| But it was a great fight. | ||
| I'm a giant fan of Armenians. | ||
| You know what I love about them? | ||
| So many great fighters in the UFC. All the way back to Carl Parisian, been Armenian. | ||
| But I like the style of the people. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| The thing I love about them is Armenians love being Armenian. | ||
| Yes, they do. | ||
| It's great to be around. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| Very friendly people, too. | ||
| So this podcast, I never say who's coming on the podcast. | ||
| I just like... | ||
| Put it out there. | ||
| Everybody knew that Trump was coming on, and this has been a couple of times when people knew that I was interviewing people. | ||
| For the most part, I just like to do it, have the conversation, and then put it out. | ||
| But you put it on Twitter that you were coming on, and then... | ||
| I put it on my substack behind the paywall. | ||
| But apparently some of my enemies pay me five bucks a month to follow my substack. | ||
| I saw what happened with you on the Tucker Carlson thing and I spoke about it almost immediately on the podcast whenever I felt like it came up. | ||
| I don't remember how many days afterwards. | ||
| But I've been listening to your podcast for a long time. | ||
| And it's so charitable and comprehensive. | ||
| And so thorough and so you put so much weight on the real lives and suffering of human beings on all sides of any conflict. | ||
| The regular people that didn't want to be dragged into any war, that find themselves on the front line. | ||
| The stories that you tell and the way you tell them is so comprehensive and so, again, charitable. | ||
| The humanity of these people is so well expressed that your fans know you. | ||
| I'm a fan. | ||
| I know you. | ||
| I know how you view things. | ||
| I know how you portray things. | ||
| I know how honest you are about all aspects of conflict. | ||
| And again, as charitable as possible, the way you lay this out. | ||
| So when I saw these attacks on you and people were calling you an anti-Semite and a Nazi apologist, I was like, good Lord, this is not going to work on people who know him. | ||
| You know, I've been through that ringer before. | ||
| I know what that is. | ||
| But with you, I was like, all anyone needs to do, and I encourage you, if you're like, I can't believe you have this guy on, listen to Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem. | ||
| Listen to it. | ||
| You don't even have to listen to the whole thing. | ||
| Listen to the first hour of it. | ||
| And there's no fucking way the person who made that is anti-Semitic in any way, shape, or form. | ||
| And that's just one of the things that you've done that show that. | ||
| The problem is when someone says something and they're trying to be hyperbolic or they're trying to get a reaction or you're shit-talking or you post a meme online or something like that. | ||
| Bizarre culture we live in that wants to reduce people to the worst possible interpretations of what they said or who they are and to ignore everything else but for one small tweet or one statement made in trying to get a reaction, trying to be outrageous. | ||
| It's a stupid thing that we do. | ||
| And as someone who values your show and listens to your show all the time, it's not just stupid. | ||
| It's bizarre how many people fall for this kind of stupidity. | ||
| And I know how this whole thing works. | ||
| I guarantee you probably gained a bunch of fans and you probably gained a bunch of people who listened because most of the time when someone gets discredited in the media or someone gets shamed, A lot of people will immediately hop on board, but a lot of other people will go, well, what is this guy saying? | ||
| Like, what is this about? | ||
| Like, what's their content like? | ||
| And if they listen to your show, they will realize, like, it's one of the very best long-form history podcasts that's available online. | ||
| It's fantastic. | ||
| It's really good. | ||
| So it's so unfortunate that there is there's these attack vectors that they could use to try to change perception of who you are. | ||
| But the fortunate aspect is there's so much of your work out there that anyone could just comb through. | ||
| And, you know, you're not hearing that side of it from any of these people, any of these detractors. | ||
| No one's saying, you know, listen, I listened to some of his stuff and, you know... | ||
| Maybe he shouldn't have said what he said about Winston Churchill, but I think he was just being hyperbolic. | ||
| And if you just listen to actually what he says about the whole conflict, you kind of get an understanding of who this guy is. | ||
| And so there was a lot of resistance to having you on. | ||
| But I was like, fuck that resistance. | ||
| I know what you actually do. | ||
| And so that's why we're here. | ||
| Well, thank you. | ||
| I appreciate that. | ||
| And yeah, you know, I mean, the Tucker interview was I could have been clearer. | ||
| And what I was saying, I'm not going to, like, absolve myself. | ||
| Let's explain what you said, because you were talking about what you say to Jocko, right? | ||
| Yeah, that's how it originally came up. | ||
| Because Jocko's wife's English, right? | ||
| So Churchill's like a sacred figure in their pantheon. | ||
| And so I said that, you know, maybe I'm being a little provocative here. | ||
| I like to provoke Jocko with my Churchill takes or whatever. | ||
| But that's only part of it. | ||
| I mean, I'm very critical of Churchill's role, in my opinion, in turning... | ||
| The German invasion of Poland into the Second World War, basically. | ||
| As I get older, I posted something on X today that somebody had posted a video. | ||
| A drone is going toward a Ukrainian or a Russian truck or something, and it hits it, and it doesn't blow up. | ||
| And it's like, boom, boom, and it tries to, it doesn't blow up. | ||
| And as I was watching that thing, I felt like when it didn't blow up and the video ended, I felt like this really strong sense of relief that it didn't blow up, you know? | ||
| And I reposted it and I said, I think, you know, as I get older, like, I just don't have the stomach for this kind of stuff anymore. | ||
| And I see something like that and, like, I don't care who's in the truck. | ||
| I don't care if it's Russians. | ||
| I don't care if it's North Koreans or Ukrainians. | ||
|
unidentified
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Or human beings. | |
| I just, like... | ||
| I'm just glad that they're okay. | ||
| Like, that's what I actually felt at the time, you know? | ||
| And as I get older, like, that's just how I feel more and more about these things. | ||
| Like, whether any conflict is just, like, this is not like a young man's thought, I guess. | ||
| But, like, I'm just, I'm happy when they're over and they need, like... | ||
| I mean, the damage that they do to people, and not only to the people who are in it fighting, but that it does to the societies and cultures that are involved in these things. | ||
| It does real damage to our spirit, you know? | ||
| If you go back to 2004, when the Abu Ghraib expose came out, you know, Americans were horrified by that, and rightly so. | ||
| You know, they saw those pictures. | ||
| But the thing that was interesting is that they were horrified. | ||
| Yeah, partly because, like, look how awful this is that they're doing to these people or something. | ||
| But, you know, for all they knew, they knew these people were in prison. | ||
| They might have thought they were terrorists or something. | ||
| What people were really, like, feeling at the time was, what are we doing to our people? | ||
| Like, what is, you know, what are we putting them through that our people are being reduced to this, you know? | ||
| And, you know, kind of the sad thing now is, like, I don't know if we would have the same reaction today. | ||
| I think... | ||
| The war on terror has sort of desensitized us to a lot and hardened our hearts in ways that are not good for us. | ||
| And so when I do my podcasts, you know, whether I'm talking about the Israelis and Palestinians, I did a long one on Jonestown, seven episodes, like 35 hours long. | ||
| And whoever it is, like my rule is that I don't record anything until I feel like I can put myself in the shoes of the people. | ||
| That I'm going to talk about and really kind of understand how their actions made sense to them with the information they had and in the context of their time. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| And so when you do something like that with the My Lai Massacre, for example, I did that with that story, the Jonestown one. | ||
| I mean, Jonestown, you're talking about like this raving lunatic. | ||
| Who took a bunch of people out into the jungle and they all committed suicide. | ||
| It's very tempting and very easy to just write off any responsibility to understand what was happening there because you're like, well, we know what was happening. | ||
| These people were nuts. | ||
| But the thing is, if you really think about the consequences of taking the wrong lessons from things like that... | ||
| You know, the response that the federal government had to the Waco standoff in the early 90s was very much informed by the way people thought about Jonestown, which is that, you know, we let this go on too long. | ||
| The problem wasn't that, you know, that maybe we had this paranoid group of radicals out here that, you know, maybe we shouldn't have done so much to feed into that paranoia. | ||
| We needed to ease these people out of it and try to de-escalate. | ||
| Instead, we said we should have... | ||
| We could have prevented it if only we'd have gone in hard right at the beginning and taken this guy out. | ||
| And so then you get Waco, you know? | ||
| And so there are real-world consequences to taking the wrong lessons from these things and really just kind of forgetting that it doesn't – I mean, look, you may have like your Jeffrey Dahmers or something out there that are an exception to this rule, but they are the exception that proves the rule. | ||
| It doesn't matter who you're talking about. | ||
| You could be talking about Uday Hussein, you know, Saddam's son. | ||
| Sadistic monster of a human being. | ||
| But, you know, that kid was a three-year-old at one point, or that guy was a three-year-old kid at one point who did not, like, it's not like he was waiting in line in the spirit world before he was born, and they're like, who wants to be Saddam Hussein's son? | ||
| And he's like, I do, I do. | ||
| That's the world he was thrust into, you know? | ||
| And you see a guy like that, and then you, you know, you're horrified by the things that he does, but then you say, look, man. | ||
| You know, if the stories are true, at least, like Saddam Hussein used to take him and his brother when he was six years old to go watch torture sessions and executions because he needed to harden them for, you know, ruling the country one day. | ||
| And it's like, I don't want to pretend like I have the remotest idea of, you know, how a kid is supposed to respond to watching torture sessions when he's six years old and coming up in that world. | ||
| Like, what do I know about that? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| I try to stay humble as I'm reading about these people, not assume that I'm better than them or different than them, and really just try to understand them on human terms, you know? | ||
| And again, it doesn't... | ||
| When I did that in the Tucker interview with regard to the Germans and the Second World War and the series that I'm working on right now, which is the Second World War from the perspective of the Germans, you know, it's people who... | ||
| It's not just people who are purposely misinterpreting things or anything. | ||
| You know, a lot of people who are in good faith, they see something like that and they think you're trying to justify or rationalize what happened, you know? | ||
| Because there is this thing where, I mean, the Jonestown story, this really did kind of happen to me, where, you know, when you get past a certain threshold of understanding people, you're butting right up against. | ||
| Empathizing with them. | ||
| I mean, it's like, that's the very, you know, that's like the next step. | ||
| You've got to take one more step and you're empathizing with those people. | ||
| And so people see that, you know, and you're empathizing with evil people, you know, whoever it is. | ||
| But I really believe that it's really good for us, like, individually, you know, and as a society too. | ||
| I think it has a positive effect on us to, like, when we force ourselves to understand, you know, people we don't like. | ||
| As human beings and just understand that their motivations are really no different than ours. | ||
| Well, this is one of the reasons why your podcast is so important because you talk about things in this way and this is one of the reasons why I knew you were misconstrued or you would be misconstrued if something like that came up. | ||
| Doing that is fine with Jonestown. | ||
| With Jonestown, everybody's like, well, how could these people have convinced these people to drink the Kool-Aid? | ||
| Why would the people do it? | ||
| What kind of a monster turns into this genocidal maniac and brings people to the jungle and does this? | ||
| But when you do it with any other subject, you can kind of get away with that until it gets to Nazis, until it gets to World War II. These red flags that pop up that just completely block out any objectivity. | ||
| They remove all nuance. | ||
| You lose all objectivity. | ||
| Anything you're saying, imagine being a young man drafted into Hitler's army at 17 years old and not knowing what you're doing and then becoming this monster. | ||
| That's a Nazi apologist, right? | ||
| I had this reductionist perspective on anything that has to do with that horrific moment in history that if you even attempt to do this very comprehensive process that you do with all other subjects where you look at the human angle, you look at these people, the conflict, how did this get started? | ||
| It's not there's good people on one side and there's evil people on the other side. | ||
| No, there's genuinely Just human beings and there's horrible circumstances and then there's evil people who lead these people in horrible circumstances to do evil terrible things and People are tribal and they can buy into all kinds of crazy ideas and go forth and do horrific atrocities and believe that God is on their side This is a part of being a human being that has existed fucking forever But in our culture, | ||
| in our media environment, where everybody is rightly so, so terrified of anti-Semitism. | ||
| Because there's real anti-Semitism out there. | ||
| And real anti-Semitism is horrible, just like real racism is horrible. | ||
| The problem with calling everything racist and everything anti-Semitic, when it's clearly not, is that you diminish what that word means. | ||
| You're essentially crying wolf. | ||
| You're doing it in ways where... | ||
| Rational, logical people who know your work have a very good argument against it. | ||
| Like, this doesn't make any sense in the context of which it was said. | ||
| If you look at the body of his work, if you look at how he talks about things, this is how he approaches stuff. | ||
| This whole being provocative is part of what you do. | ||
| It's part of what makes the audio come to life in these podcasts when you're talking about these moments in history. | ||
| This this subject is just so sore with people and particularly right now after October 7th where, you know, I just I remember all the sudden going on X and seeing anti-Semitism just like white right out in the open blaming Jews for everything going Whoa! | ||
| Like, has this been hiding? | ||
| And then you start thinking the way your paranoid Jewish friends think, that everybody's anti-Semitic. | ||
| And you go, well, now I kind of understand why they think that way. | ||
| So I kind of understand the overreaction, but it is still an overreaction. | ||
| And I think what you do is very valuable. | ||
| It's very valuable to me, and it's very valuable to human beings that want to hear this nuanced, comprehensive... | ||
| perspective on these conflicts and from a person who obviously cares deeply about them and cares deeply about the human cost of these and one of the things you do so well and I was just talking to Dave Smith about this yesterday The gravity of war, | ||
| the toll it takes on the people that are engaged in it and the people that are just outside of it and what is left of their civilization, it's fucking horrific. | ||
| And it should be avoided at all costs. | ||
| But you don't avoid it by exaggerating. | ||
| You don't avoid it by distorting someone's perspective and turning everybody into a monster. | ||
| So that everyone's scared to talk at all. | ||
| Because this is the main objective. | ||
| Most overreactions like that that are public and hyper-aggressive and constant and continuous, it's not just you. | ||
| It's to stop anybody from ever doing anything like that in the future to let them know there's consequences. | ||
| There's going to be financial consequences. | ||
| There's going to be your status online, however you're viewed by people will be. | ||
| Now marred forever with this ugly stain of being not just an anti-Semite, but a Nazi apologist. | ||
| That's what I read. | ||
| Nazi apologist. | ||
| Like, you can't say that unless you listen to his stuff. | ||
| You can't. | ||
| Unless they listen to your work, they can't say that because they don't know what the fuck they're talking about. | ||
| It's like someone trying to opine upon a culture that they've never read about or never visited. | ||
| You don't know what you're saying. | ||
| Yeah, I've been told by people who... | ||
| I should know that there are a few European countries I shouldn't try to visit because they probably won't let me off the plane. | ||
| Yeah, I wouldn't go. | ||
| Because of that podcast. | ||
| Bro, I'd stay in Texas if I was you. | ||
| I'd hole up. | ||
| I'm up in North Idaho, so I'm far away. | ||
| You should have told people that! | ||
| They don't want to try North Idaho. | ||
| Yeah, it's a wild place. | ||
| You've got wolves and bears. | ||
| This is just part of what people do. | ||
| I was going to say, too, You know, that overreaction is really counterproductive, too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, because to go back to what I said a second ago, like, understanding brings you right up to the brink of empathy, you know, that, you know, more understanding to these issues. | ||
| And I've found this a hundred times, you know, because, like, look, anti-Semitism is a weird thing. | ||
| And we can talk about some of the history of that if you want. | ||
| But, you know, it's a it's this thing that people get obsessed with. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like, it's not like. | ||
| I've watched this happen to, like, good, clear-thinking, regular people. | ||
| They start listening to a few podcasts that, you know, they can't repost under their real name on Twitter because they're funny or interesting. | ||
| And then pretty soon you can't bring that dude to a party anymore because he just can't go 10 minutes without, in neutral company, like bringing up the Jews. | ||
| And it's like that happens. | ||
| You see that happen. | ||
| I mean, you know, what you see on social media a lot. | ||
| There's no doubt there's been a big explosion of that kind of rhetoric. | ||
| And I think a lot of it is online trolling and it's the fact that people are so sensitive about it that it's just the easiest way to get a huge reaction from people. | ||
| I think a lot of it has to do with that. | ||
| But I think a lot of it also has to do with the fact that so many of these questions have really been made It's not like they're off limits like they're illegal and you're going to go to jail if you talk about them. | ||
| I'm still sitting here. | ||
| I mean, I'm on your podcast. | ||
| So it's a big platform to talk about these things. | ||
| It's not like that. | ||
| But the attempt is to make it so that you can't be in any kind of respectable society. | ||
| Yeah, the attempt is to make you radioactive. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that, again, I think is just completely counterproductive because people look at something. | ||
| I think Theo was talking about this in one of his recent interviews. | ||
| He was saying, you know, somebody sees what's happening in Gaza right now, and they just see kids getting pulled out of rubble, and it's shocking and horrifying. | ||
| And they see that, and they find out that the U.S. is sending money and weapons. | ||
| And they're like, well, why is that happening? | ||
| And they start looking into it, and they go to the websites that are going to tell them the truth about it. | ||
| And pretty soon, one link leads to another. | ||
| And when they go ask one of their... | ||
| You know, history professors at school or something, like, hey, you know, Uncle Adolph 1488 in the comments section, like, told me XYZ. Like, you know, you go and ask about it. | ||
| He gets, like, shouted down and attacked for, like, asking the question. | ||
| And then, you know, that doesn't have the effect of him saying, wow, like, I guess that really is terrible and I should never ask that again. | ||
| They think, hmm, that's weird. | ||
| Like, why are people responding this way? | ||
| I was asking that question in good faith, you know? | ||
| And so it really has, like, the opposite effect of the one that is at least ostensibly intended, you know? | ||
| I think there's a bunch of things going on simultaneously. | ||
| I think some of this is coordinated. | ||
| And I think, because I think that with everything now online, I think there's public momentum opinions that aren't necessarily organically shaped. | ||
| There's groups that will mass tweet about something. | ||
| And now we know that there's AI programs that will devise various different tweets. | ||
| And people are running them through hundreds of computers, if not thousands of computers, all with multiple accounts. | ||
| And they're posting things constantly. | ||
| And they're doing this. | ||
| There was a call to make it illegal for any employee of the government to post on social media. | ||
| I was like, that sounds outrageous. | ||
| That sounds like something that would stifle political discourse. | ||
| I want congressional people to be able to be whistleblowers and to talk about what's really going on. | ||
| This is why this bill can't get passed. | ||
| This is why they added this to this. | ||
| This is bullshit. | ||
| But then someone explained to me. | ||
| That what they're trying to stop is astroturfing. | ||
| Is that if you're working for the government or for now, this is with USA, the concept of the non-government organization comes into play. | ||
| So people realize that NGOs are actually funded by taxes. | ||
| So it's a non-government organization doing the bidding of the government. | ||
| And some of that may or may not include social media campaigns about specific issues. | ||
| And I think... | ||
| This happens with everything. | ||
| I think this happens probably on the Free Palestine side. | ||
| I think they probably do it. | ||
| I think it happens on the Protect Israel side. | ||
| They do it. | ||
| I think everybody does it. | ||
| And it's confusing because you'd like to know how do normal human beings actually think, the actual world thinks, versus... | ||
| Massive amounts of people that are being financially incentivized to post these things. | ||
| They're being paid. | ||
| They're a part of an organization that gets paid. | ||
| They get funded. | ||
| They have a directive. | ||
| They go out and they pursue this campaign. | ||
| And they do it relentlessly. | ||
| And they do it through organic ways, like people who are... | ||
| Aligned with their cause, whether it's Free Palestine or Israel First or whatever it is, you get people to post about it. | ||
| They'll do it willingly because they want to show everybody they're on the right side and they also want to proclaim on Twitter that this is their political perspective and I'm aligned with you people. | ||
| I'm one of the good guys. | ||
| That happens too. | ||
| And this is this chaos of social media and people looking for likes and audience capture and all that stuff that goes on. | ||
| But at the end of the day... | ||
| We rely upon people that we trust. | ||
| We rely upon people that are supposedly objective and rational and reasonable and considerate and charitable. | ||
| People who look at things and go, okay, what's really going on here? | ||
| Before I cast judgment, maybe I should pay attention to some of the things this guy's done. | ||
| Maybe I should pay attention to his work. | ||
| Maybe I should look into this instead of just repeating Nazi apologists because someone wanted to take just An overall comprehensive look at what happened, which is – we should all want to know what happened from a bunch of different perspectives so we could prevent any of this shit from happening in the future. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I mean the interesting thing about the World War II question is something I found through talking to people who disagreed with my Tucker interview is if you put the question to him. | ||
| And maybe if you put it directly like this, they would give you a different answer, but you kind of get the, you know, you get to understand that this is how they feel about it, which is if there was two options, one of them is that the Second World War doesn't happen, at least in Europe. | ||
| 40 million people don't get killed. | ||
| But, you know, the National Socialists stay in power and, you know, maybe Hitler dies 10 years later. | ||
| It's like the Soviet Union, Stalin dies, and things move on. | ||
| People really kind of feel like, and maybe this is because they're not involved in it, like 40 million dead people, that was a cost worth paying. | ||
| And I think that is completely insane, man. | ||
| Like, if there was a sliver of an opportunity to de-escalate that situation and bring it back down, like, you know, if I'm the emperor of America or Britain or whatever, I'm taking that chance. | ||
| And if it turns out that... | ||
| Hitler's full of shit and, you know, he stabs us in the back first chance he gets. | ||
| All right, then we'll have our war. | ||
| But is this pre or post concentration camps? | ||
| Is this pre or post the beginnings of the Holocaust? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| This is where it gets into that. | ||
| Should we decide to stop something in its tracks at whatever cost of life because ultimately that is the right thing to do because we're witnessing the genocide of people and then we're also witnessing a group that will remain in power that is not just committed genocide but is committed to genocide. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So what we were talking about and all of the points I was bringing up on Tucker were all from before that. | ||
| In fact, they were... | ||
| From a full year before the German invasion of the Soviet Union. | ||
| That was June 1941. And that's where most of the Jews lived. | ||
| So if Hitler never invaded the Soviet Union, he never even would have had access to those people. | ||
| Now, Hitler didn't like the Soviet Union. | ||
| All the way back in Mein Kampf and everywhere else, I mean, it was central to his ideology that communism, socialism were the enemy and everything. | ||
| He may have invaded the Soviet Union someday and gone and... | ||
| the Jews when he did. | ||
| When did Hitler start going after the Jews? | ||
| You mean in terms of – in terms of – Rhetoric. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| So yeah. | ||
| Like if you take him at his word in Mein Kampf, which is – it's a piece of political propaganda that he wrote as a sort of a politician in Germany in 1924. | ||
| And so you have to take it with sort of a grain of salt. | ||
| But it's also one of the few sources we have. | ||
| Like given his audience at the time, he probably didn't have a lot of reason to make this part up. | ||
| is that He had been from small-town Germany, and he was from a middle-class family. | ||
| His father was a civil servant, respectable people, and nationalism back then was very much like a middle-class. | ||
| And the middle class people, nationalists would complain about the workers and the proletariat, how they don't want to be socialists and none of them have any national feeling and everything. | ||
| And Hitler really didn't grow up with any really even knowledge of the Jews. | ||
| He says his father, he never heard him say the word. | ||
| And if they had any in the small town that he lived in, like they were apparently well assimilated because he didn't know about them. | ||
| And so then he moves to Vienna when he's a young adult and there's a lot of Jews in Vienna. | ||
| And he starts to – he's at the bottom of society now. | ||
| He's literally living in shelters. | ||
| He's hungry all the time. | ||
| He's like down with the underclass after having grown up in the middle class. | ||
| And so he's starting to get a look at what the German people, the German masses, that he's like sort of as a child and a young man has like worked up this. | ||
| Deep sense of nationalistic fervor. | ||
| He's actually getting an up-close look at the underclass in Vienna. | ||
| And what he sees is not particularly impressive, which is often the case when you can have sympathy for and want to lift up the underclass in any society. | ||
| The reason you want to do that is because they're often living degraded lives and degraded circumstances. | ||
| And so he gets an up-close look at this and he doesn't like what he sees. | ||
| And he says in Mein Kampf that it really caused him like a moral crisis, you know, an ideological crisis. | ||
| He's like, are these the German people? | ||
| Like, really? | ||
| This is what we're talking about? | ||
| And then he says, and, you know, this is the way he relates it. | ||
| He says it was actually the key that unlocked everything else for him, is that... | ||
| He would say he realized. | ||
| We could say he came to believe that, yes, these German masses, they are in a sorry state right now. | ||
| But the reason for that is that they're being manipulated by the Jews, by the Jewish press, by the Jews who own the theaters and put out the films and whatever else. | ||
| They're being manipulated and corrupted by these people. | ||
| And so for him, it became – I think he has – He had a lot of the same explanations and reasons you would hear from any anti-Semite then or now, you know, banking and whatever. | ||
| All those things were like in there. | ||
| But I think the thing that gave it emotional valence for him is that his anti-Semitism was what allowed him to love. | ||
| The German people, you know, like it was like the only way for him that he could get around the revulsion he was feeling and actually being up close with the German underclasses, you know, he excused their faults by blaming by blaming Jews. | ||
| And so it his his sense of love for his people. | ||
| And I mean, look, Hitler is one of those guys. | ||
| I noticed this when I was reading all the Jim Jones books and stuff, which I think I read all probably all of. | ||
| They're not very good. | ||
| Some of them are interesting, like they're good reads, but you can't help but notice, especially after you've read several of the books, that the authors just cannot help but be cynical and turn it into a polemic on every page. | ||
| Even the thing Jim Jones or Hitler did as a child, they have negative editorializing to it and everything. | ||
| It really kind of... | ||
| It's a lot of them are still good books. | ||
| You know, you read like the most recent sort of great Hitler biography by Ian Kershaw is a great book. | ||
| He's a good historian, an excellent writer. | ||
| And, you know, you have to learn to kind of see through that polemic a little bit. | ||
| And then you have, you know, a good history on your hands. | ||
| It's almost like it's an obligation. | ||
| If you're going to cover a horrific figure, you have to look at things that way. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And, you know, it's a and so I think that people who knew Hitler. | ||
| Before World War I. And we have like memoirs and interviews with people who did know him pretty, pretty well. | ||
| They say pretty much unanimously like we never heard him mention the Jews back then. | ||
| And this is the period in Vienna when Hitler says his anti-Semitism was developing and he was figuring these things out. | ||
| And what I think was probably going on, like my read of it, at least up to this point, is that. | ||
| His anti-Semitism, just like a lot of people in Europe at the time, was – it was theoretical and abstract. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like the Jews had never – you got to remember like the Russian Revolution, all of the things that people like Hitler would associate with the Jews, like none of that stuff had happened yet. | ||
| Like he might not like them. | ||
| You know, he might think that – whatever, all the stereotypes that go along with him. | ||
| But it was just sort of an abstract thing that it wasn't dangerous, right? | ||
| But then the First World War happens, and, you know, it's really impossible for us today to understand the level of just trauma and devastation that that war had on, I mean, the European countries that were involved. | ||
| I mean, it was, you know, you're talking about a war where, you know, for several Olympics. | ||
| Olympic Games afterwards, there were whole sports that, like, France and Germany just didn't participate in anymore because they didn't have the people for it. | ||
| I mean, it was, you're talking about massive chunks of the young male population being killed out there, right? | ||
| And you take a guy like Hitler, who volunteered early, like, right away, and he survived the whole four years of the war. | ||
| And you think about him as just an example of this generation of people who spent, like, their most formative young adult years in the trenches. | ||
| I mean, in constant terror of doing things that, I mean, forget about just, like, the physical discomfort of living there. | ||
| I mean, you're in the mud. | ||
| You're covered with lice and fleas all the time. | ||
| So is everybody else. | ||
| Especially later in the war, you're, like, living off of starvation rations if you're a German or an Austrian. | ||
| And you're watching, I mean, you know, Dan Carlin's series on World War I is, like, probably my favorite piece of audio. | ||
| Incredible. | ||
| It's so good. | ||
| And, like, you know, one of the things he's so good at, way better than me at, is kind of capturing the scale of events, you know? | ||
| And so when he talks about, like, the Battle of Assam. | ||
| When the British lost 60,000 guys on the first day, you're like, I don't even know what that, like, what that even means. | ||
| Like, it's just so overwhelming, you know? | ||
| And so you have this generation that spent their formative years in all of these countries under those just circumstances that we really don't have any context for us to relate to. | ||
| I mean think about like – you see these stories of like people sleeping in trenches and over there in the corner is their dead friend who's been sitting there decomposing and being eaten by rats for three or four days because you can't go up top to bury them because you'll get shot. | ||
| And you can't bury him in the trench, in the dirt under the trench anymore because there's already bodies just completely wall to wall down there. | ||
| You've already taken up all the space, right? | ||
| Just that kind of... | ||
| I mean, if you think about somebody today, if you walk outside your door on the way to work... | ||
| Your average person today, and there's a dead body on your steps. | ||
| Your average person today is going to be in therapy for years over that. | ||
| I mean, that is a traumatic experience, very difficult. | ||
| And so you have these young men who go through this just unbelievable experience. | ||
| And from Germany eastward after, if you go back and think about what the map of Europe looked like in the year 1900. It didn't look anything like it looks now. | ||
| It was basically like just a few big chunks. | ||
| You had France, you had Germany, the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and then you had the Russian Empire. | ||
| And there were a few like Spain and the Balkans and stuff, little things going on. | ||
| But really it was just a few giant empires controlled everything from the Pacific Ocean in East Russia all the way over to the coast of France, right? | ||
| And everything east of Germany in 1917 and 1918, those governments... | ||
| Literally evaporated. | ||
| They went away. | ||
| And so, you know, you get to the immediate post-war period after these guys have just gone through this unbelievably harrowing experience. | ||
| You know, their lives have been defined by violence for years, you know, at this point. | ||
| And all of a sudden, there's just state collapse everywhere from Germany to Siberia. | ||
| And you literally have, you know, private militias. | ||
| Groups of veterans, communist militias, like they're running cities, they're running the streets, like having running gun battles in the streets of, you know, of Berlin and Munich. | ||
| And this goes on for a few years, you know, just total social and economic chaos. | ||
| And so you're talking about like the four-year war, but then a few more years after that. | ||
| So you're 18 when you get in and... | ||
| 1914. Now it's 1923 when things kind of start to stabilize and, you know, you've been at this for like the first nine years of your young adulthood, right? | ||
| This is the world that you live in. | ||
| And it's a – when you try to think of – you know, I talked about like Uday Hussain being brought to watch torture sessions or something. | ||
| I mean this is not exactly that. | ||
| But it's – It's an experience that, like, we really have no way to relate to. | ||
| And if you grow up in that world, especially when, you know, if you look at, like, what happened in Russia, 1917, the Russian Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, and they won. | ||
| You know, they actually took over the Russian state and created the Soviet Union. | ||
| You know, it lasted past the—long past the lives of anybody who had fought in World War I, for the most part. | ||
| And so people saw that and they took the lesson both from World War I itself but also from the aftermath and the revolutions that happened. | ||
| The lesson they took is that violence can accomplish our goals. | ||
| And whatever we do to accomplish those goals, as long as we survive, people accept it eventually. | ||
| You know, Roosevelt normalized relations with the Soviet Union in 1933 when... | ||
| Stalin was literally still clearing bodies from the millions of people he starved in the Ukrainian Holodomor and in Kazakhstan, another million people. | ||
| And like at that time is when – and we knew it was going on obviously. | ||
| And yet, you know, Roosevelt normalized relations with Stalin and people got over it. | ||
| It's like with Turkey. | ||
| Turkey does the Armenian genocide and it's condemned at the time. | ||
| You know, they were on the other side of the war and everything. | ||
| But a couple of years later, like, look, Turkey is an important – Strategically placed country like in the world and we kind of need them on our side. | ||
| And so, you know, sorry, Armenians, but, you know, get over it. | ||
| And so people took that lesson is that violence will accomplish our goals. | ||
| And as long as we accomplish them and survive, people will get over it. | ||
| You know? | ||
| But again, I think this is what's really important about your work is that you do take into consideration all these aspects. | ||
| Which, again, with Jim Jones, that's fine. | ||
| But even what you're saying, it's obviously very relevant to what we're trying to understand how World War II happened. | ||
| How did the Nazis rise to power? | ||
| What are we talking about? | ||
| That's what we're talking about. | ||
| We're talking about this horrific environment that's not considered. | ||
| That doesn't make you a Nazi apologist. | ||
| Yeah, and it's important to know, too, that... | ||
| You know, it's not like Hitler was going and giving big speeches at City Square in Berlin, going on and on and on about how we're going to kill the Jews. | ||
| And the German people said, right on, like, let's go do it. | ||
| That was like the speeches that are out there where he is talking about the Jewish question. | ||
| Like almost all of those are like internal Nazi party, like rally speeches. | ||
| You know, they're not him. | ||
| He had to be careful about that. | ||
| Like in 1938, which is pretty far down the line when. | ||
| Kristallnacht happened. | ||
| It was kind of a nationwide pogrom against the Jews in Germany that was launched primarily by Goebbels, the propaganda minister. | ||
| But there was outrage in the German cities. | ||
| People in Berlin, a lot of the places were outraged by what was going on. | ||
| And Hitler had to actually get on the phone with Goebbels and say, cut this shit out. | ||
| Like, this is not good. | ||
| Not because he loves the Jews all of a sudden, obviously, but because this is bad propaganda. | ||
| People are not going for this. | ||
| And that was the year before the war started, you know? | ||
| And so these are just nuances that, you know, that become pretty obvious when you just remind yourself that you're just talking about people. | ||
| They're just people. | ||
| I mean the Germans were a sophisticated, advanced political and cultural place. | ||
| They didn't suddenly turn into demons for 12 years and then go back to being the nice normal Germans that we know now. | ||
| Like these things happen the same way every other historical event ends up happening, which very often is not – what you find is it's not – it's not – so much is not really like the result of a plot or a plan or which very often is not – what you find is it's People are often just reacting. | ||
| And when you – you see this with the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. | ||
| You see it with the Israel-Palestine situation, right? | ||
| In those two situations, like the means that the Bolsheviks and the Zionists used to establish themselves and create their state and like sort of get their foothold, the means that they used were so violent and so over the top that it came to define in a lot of ways. | ||
| The subsequent history of those countries, you know, if you look at like Stalin's purges in the 30s and a lot of the stuff that was going on during his reign, it was really that like they had pissed so many people off and done so many terrible things to take power. | ||
| And that was really like that was Lenin's philosophy is, again, just, you know, take it up to 11 and go. | ||
| And as long as we win, people get over it. | ||
| But all of a sudden, when you've killed all these people and done all these terrible things, you look around the country and you see a lot of. | ||
| I mean, Israel, one of the things I really tried to get into in the early part of that series especially is that the Zionist Project, and the more I think about it, this is kind of a theme in so many of my podcasts. | ||
| You know, it started out as an idealistic venture. | ||
| You know, it started out as something, you know, you have these people who are in really, like, kind of a unique situation. | ||
| Maybe the, like, the Roma, the Gypsies are, like, the only other group of people you can really point to of, like, a widespread transnational group of people who do have a sort of cohesive identity, but they don't have a homeland. | ||
| They're just living in other people's countries. | ||
| And, you know, I think the lesson from World War II and much of the 20th century probably... | ||
| It's kind of the opposite of the one that people have taken from World War II, which is nationalism is bad and it's dangerous and bad things happen when people start to think that way. | ||
| I think the real lesson from World War II or from what happened to the Jews specifically is everybody needs a country. | ||
| You need to have a country that is looking after you and looking after your interests. | ||
| Because living in other people's countries, it can go well for a long time. | ||
| But it's not just the Jews. | ||
| Minorities in general. | ||
| Like, you know, bad things happen over time. | ||
| You know, minorities are just easily scapegoated. | ||
| You know, they're easily made the sort of the outlet for the frustration and resentment of people that are... | ||
| You know, upset over unrelated things. | ||
| And it's an uncomfortable position to be in. | ||
| There's also general suspicion when cultures move into areas and don't assimilate and then try to bring with them the rules of their land, which we, you know, we're particularly scared of in America. | ||
| We hear the concept of Sharia law. | ||
| You know, like people start to freak out. | ||
| Well, there's people that move here that want that, you know, and they don't want to assimilate and they don't want to be a... | ||
| You know, the fact that we have, like... | ||
| The frontier experience, which is just, you know, no Europeans can really relate to what was going on out there. | ||
| You've seen that new Netflix series, American Primeval? | ||
|
unidentified
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It's amazing. | |
| Dude. | ||
| I had Peter Berg on here. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, that's right. | |
| That's right. | ||
| And all I kept thinking as I'm watching this is like, man, this is not like the U.S. Army that's out there like on the frontier confronting these situations. | ||
| These are like... | ||
| The regular people who went out there and lived. | ||
| And this is an experience. | ||
| So you have those things. | ||
| It's very accurate, too. | ||
| Yeah, it was fascinating. | ||
| I love they had Jim Bridger in there. | ||
| I've always been a fan of his. | ||
| Yeah, that was amazing, too. | ||
| And how about the Mormon guy? | ||
| People don't realize today unless they really know the history. | ||
| The Mormons were off the hook. | ||
| They were gangsters. | ||
| They were fucking dangerous foes. | ||
| You couldn't fuck with the Mormons back then. | ||
| They had been fucked with. | ||
| They were ultra cohesive and they were serious about what they were doing. | ||
| These people were not playing games. | ||
| This was not like a thing to do for fun. | ||
| They were dead serious about it. | ||
| And they had already been ran out of several states. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I was going to say like the thing that's... | ||
| So different about America from a lot of the European countries. | ||
| And when we talk about nationalism, like this is something that really, you know, that you have to keep in mind all the time is that America, like we've been renegotiating our identity like generation by generation ever since America started, like from the very beginning. | ||
| I mean, if you go back to the American Revolution and, you know, the founding of the country in the late 1700s, before those guys were dead. | ||
| A bunch of the major cities and eventually all the major cities, like very quickly by the middle of the 1800s, they're not majority Anglo anymore. | ||
| It's not English people. | ||
| It's a lot of Irish, a lot of Germans, still a lot of Anglos. | ||
| But, you know, you have to... | ||
| The fact that different religion, you know, you've got Irish Catholics coming into this Protestant, very Protestant at the time country. | ||
| A lot of the Germans that were coming in were German Jews who, you know, were coming along. | ||
| You think of people like Aster, you know, the famous Aster family that was a German Jewish family that was in New York. | ||
| And so that happens. | ||
| And you're talking about, again, an influx large enough to... | ||
| To really swamp the Anglo population in many of the big cities. | ||
| Well, not another, you know, a generation later, barely 40 years after the, you know, the Irish migration really hits its peak, huge influx from southern Italy, from eastern Europe, a lot of Ashkenazi Jews coming in. | ||
| And pretty soon, it's not just, you know, Anglos, well-assimilated. | ||
| You know, Germans who are well-assimilated to the Anglo culture and then the Irish, which is what it was before. | ||
| Now you have just as many Jews, just as many Italian Catholics who are Catholics like the Irish, but they're still not quite, you know, they're still different communities. | ||
| And we've just had to do that all the time. | ||
| Even in 1924, when we kind of shut down immigration after the First World War, you know, we basically shut down immigration from 1924 to 1965. There was some, but very limited and very selective. | ||
| But as soon as that happened, as soon as the immigration pipeline from Europe was cut off, that's when the great migration of African Americans out of the South starts. | ||
| And in about 40 years, you get 6-7 million African Americans coming mostly from the country South into places like Detroit and all the places that you kind of associate with large African American communities now. | ||
| It's kind of crazy to think about, but if you go back to the First World War... | ||
| You know, Detroit's African-American population was like 2 percent, you know, and that was Philadelphia. | ||
| I think Baltimore had like eight or nine. | ||
| But like that was how it was. | ||
| Pretty much all African-Americans still live down in the south. | ||
| And so over the course of about 40 years, they all move out to all the big cities and you have to still like they're from America, obviously. | ||
| But like you've got to renegotiate like you're. | ||
| Your identity with these people and figure out like a new political compromise in these cities in the various places. | ||
| And when the great migration of African-Americans starts to peter out in 1965, we reopen the floodgates of immigration with the Hard Seller Act and that's the world we're kind of in now. | ||
| And so that's – and look, especially back in the day in the first like two big waves of migration into the US, the Ellis Island migrations. | ||
| Like those were – like America would not be here today if we didn't do that. | ||
| Like there were not enough out-of-work English people over in England to come over here and take over this whole continent. | ||
| It was just never going to happen. | ||
| The only way it was ever going to happen is if we were radically open and tolerant to people because you go back to – there's a naturalization law. | ||
| I think it was the first naturalization law on the books in the United States, 1798. And you see a lot of like racialist types point to this as if it kind of backs up their idea of what America's history is and what it should be because it says all white persons of good – all free white persons of good moral character, if you come to the United States, can become a citizen. | ||
| And people see that and they focus on the white part and they say, see, they wanted America to be a white country or whatever. | ||
| That is – Totally the wrong way to understand that law. | ||
| I mean, if you were to go to like France or Germany or England or whatever, for them to pass a law that said anybody in the continent, any European, you know, you guys can come over here and we will make you a citizen with the full legal rights and privileges of our richest citizen. | ||
| You know, you will be an equal citizen. | ||
| You can just come here radically open. | ||
| I mean, really like a revolutionarily. | ||
| You know, you got to remember, like, the Europeans still had another 150 years of just wantonly slaughtering each other, you know, left still ahead of them. | ||
| You know, you had like, today, I mean, if you have like a person on... | ||
| You know, who lives to the left of you and they're the Thatcher family and they're vaguely, you know, English. | ||
| And then you have the McCoy family on the other side and they're vaguely Irish. | ||
| They're just kind of white people to you now. | ||
| Like, it all kind of seems like what's the difference? | ||
| Dude. | ||
| Go tell an English and Irish person that they were the same thing back in 1798. They did not identify with each other at all. | ||
| There was a lot of bad blood, a lot of hostility. | ||
| And so to say, all of you people, with all your differences, you come over here and get with the program and you can be one of us, just radically open. | ||
| And again, we had to do that or else the country would not be here. | ||
| Or it would be an Anglo country sort of... | ||
| Clustered around the 13 colonies and maybe moved in a bit. | ||
| But, you know, we wouldn't have been able to hold this whole continent against the French and the Spanish and everybody else who was around unless we were that open. | ||
| And so that was like a prerequisite for America becoming what it is today. | ||
| In Europe, it's very different, man. | ||
| Like there's such thing as a Polish person. | ||
| Poland is the country where Polish people live. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Over here in America, we have a much more fluid identity. | ||
| We're constantly having to renegotiate it. | ||
| We think it's difficult today to integrate the immigrants that we've got and to try to renegotiate that. | ||
| It's always been difficult. | ||
| To try to transfer our way of thinking about social identity, our way of thinking about You know, what a nation is to the European countries. | ||
| It just it does not apply. | ||
| It really doesn't work. | ||
| It's also there's a thing when an all-white country wants to stay all white where people get very nervous of. | ||
| If you have, you know, let's say China. | ||
| Like China is Chinese people. | ||
| We all agree that it's like it's filled. | ||
| Primarily with Chinese people. | ||
| There's people that live there from all walks of life all over the world, but it's mostly Chinese people. | ||
| If China had decided that they wanted to remain Chinese and stay Chinese and that being Chinese is very important to what China is, no one would have a problem with that. | ||
| When a country like Poland does it, you're like, oh, those white people, they want to keep everybody out. | ||
| They want it to be all white. | ||
| Because we're, you know, that's... | ||
| Post-World War II. That's post-Aryan race talk. | ||
| That's post-Nazi stuff. | ||
| That's what people are legitimately freaked out about. | ||
| That's the most recent stain in our history where we look back and say, wow, that was close. | ||
| Evil almost won that one. | ||
| I think it also has to do with... | ||
| The interesting thing is... | ||
| You know, Poland, Hungary, a lot of these Eastern Bloc countries, even though communism was extremely hostile to national identity, you know, and really, I mean, took a lot of brutal measures to try to stamp it out because they wanted everybody to be a kind of new Soviet citizen, you know? | ||
| Those countries that are over there now are much more comfortable sort of saying, yeah, Hungary is a country where Hungarians live and this is a Christian country and we want to keep it that way. | ||
| All the countries that were on the other side of the Iron Curtain under the influence of the United States kind of had our traditional way of looking at these things kind of imposed on them. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Or they absorbed it through osmosis. | ||
| I don't know if it's like a program or something. | ||
| But we were the dominant sort of cultural and military force and everything else, political force. | ||
| And so they kind of absorbed the American openness and tolerance of all comers that we kind of had to have, as I said, in places where it really makes no sense at all. | ||
| I mean you have – you could at least say like with the British Empire or something. | ||
| They colonized all these places. | ||
| And so now like … Those people in the former colonies, like they're moving to Britain and, you know, you could – like I don't really think of it this way. | ||
| You could look at it that way though. | ||
| If you look at a place like Ireland, Ireland didn't colonize anybody. | ||
| You know, Ireland was a colony. | ||
| They suffered terribly under the British for a long time. | ||
| And yet it's very interesting that, you know, they were willing to be brutalized, be occupied, be starved, you know, all of these things for centuries. | ||
| To defend their little slice of the world where their people could work out their destiny among themselves, you know, endured so much for that. | ||
| And then, you know, you get up to about the 1960s, 1970s, and, you know, you can look it up. | ||
| This isn't like a conspiracy theory. | ||
| It's the first things that come up on Google, if you look it up, that, you know, Ireland is on track to be minority Irish by like 2070 or something like that. | ||
| I don't like that. | ||
| People think of diversity as like every place on the planet should look like Jackson Heights in New York and like then we're diverse. | ||
| But to me that's not diversity at all. | ||
| Diversity is I go to Ireland and it's Irish. | ||
| I go to China and it's Chinese. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Right. | ||
| And turning it all into sort of a homogenized like mixed soup. | ||
| I think when you put it in those terms nobody really wants that. | ||
| And, you know, people – but people get very uncomfortable, you know. | ||
| And in America with immigration specifically, it's really hard to like – you know, the fact that it's not like we're a Christian country in the sense of it being worked into our political culture so much or anything anymore. | ||
| But still like the values that most people, even atheists and everybody else kind of – that inform their moral outlook are derived from that legacy of Christianity, you know. | ||
| And it can be very hard for somebody who is working from that moral base to come up with a reason that – I mean look. | ||
| Imagine you're in a room and you're sitting at a table and across from the table is a man, his wife and their two kids and they're from some poor part of the world and they want to come – you know, they want to be a part of your country. | ||
|
unidentified
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history. | |
| You're not going to be able to come up with a reason that justifies keeping them out. | ||
| I mean, the only one that you could come up with is that when you open the door to that room, there's 65 million people standing in line outside, and you can't, you know, you can't do that. | ||
| But, like, on an individual level, like, people really have a lot of trouble, and I think this is a credit to Americans in a lot of ways, even if it causes us a lot of confusion, that, you know, it is hard for us to turn people away like that, you know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think to go back to what you were originally talking about, I think the World War II story is a huge part of that. | ||
| It's a huge part of why people – I think that some of the lessons we drew from that war were kind of maybe not the right ones to take and that … They have led us to the point where a culture like Ireland, who was not involved in the Second World War, never colonized anybody, feels like they don't have the moral right to say this is a little island where the Irish people get to live together and work out our destiny. | ||
| Well, here's the question. | ||
| Is it coordinated immigration? | ||
| Are they going there because there's job opportunities? | ||
| Are they going there for a better way of life? | ||
| Are they being told to go there? | ||
| What's causing the mass immigration to Ireland? | ||
| It depends on the country. | ||
| I mean it's like – But like to Ireland in specific. | ||
| Yeah, Ireland. | ||
| There's a lot of like Polish folks in Ireland, people from Eastern Europe who go there for work. | ||
| That's the primary like source of migrants. | ||
| But there's a lot of – there are a lot of third world migrants or global south migrants there now. | ||
| But a lot of Eastern Europeans come in there for work. | ||
| It kind of varies from country to country. | ||
| It's interesting because I do agree that it's cool that you go to places and they're uniquely, like, I love Scotland. | ||
| You go to Scotland, it's uniquely Scottish. | ||
| You know, you go to places, you get to take part in their way of life. | ||
| Like, to see the world through their culture and the way they view things, it's interesting. | ||
| But I also love the melting pot of America. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| And I come from immigrants. | ||
| My grandparents came here during the early parts of the 1900s. | ||
| And so I'm thankful that they were courageous enough or their parents were courageous enough to get on a fucking boat before YouTube. | ||
| No idea what was going on over here. | ||
| It was just promises and hopes and try to carve out a life. | ||
| And that's where I came from. | ||
| So it would be insanely hypocritical of me to deny someone who came from another country an opportunity to partake in this place. | ||
| I also think that it's coordinated and I think that they're doing it in America for a lot of bizarre reasons that you could attribute to trying to stack states and trying to overwhelm democratic voter registration in swing states and allow people to vote and give them a pathway to citizenship and allow them to vote and get them on the dole, get them on. | ||
| Whether it's Social Security, we've talked about this before, where people were encouraged to say that they had bad backs or headaches so that they could be permanently disabled on Social Security. | ||
| Then you have a customer. | ||
| You have a client. | ||
| And then that client is going to – you're going to call upon them to vote for you. | ||
| And if you only need 10,000 votes here or 20,000 votes there, and they're objectively shipping in 10 times that much to some of these swing states. | ||
| You've got to wonder. | ||
| This is kind of taking advantage of the charitable aspect of Americans, how we view people wanting to come here for opportunity, which most of them are just doing that. | ||
| Most of them are people that unfortunately were born in a place with no possibilities and a lot of crime and a lot of danger, and they have a family, and they want to do better, and they came here, and I love it. | ||
| I love that they do that. | ||
| I love that they make it. | ||
| I love that this is a place for that. | ||
| But that can be taken advantage of. | ||
| That can be taken advantage of in order to control the political parties, in order to tighten down on the laws, tighten down on the surveillance state, get everybody to use an app, put everybody on central bank digital currency because it's more stable, have a social credit score system to make sure that everything goes well. | ||
| And the next thing you know, everyone's self-centered. | ||
| Everyone is Twitter before Elon bought it. | ||
| It's a dangerous place for freedom. | ||
| And that's ultimately what America... | ||
| It has to say that we stand for above all. | ||
| This is the place. | ||
| If there's a place on earth where you can be free, this has got to be that place. | ||
| This is what we came here for. | ||
| It's where the founding fathers, this is what they were trying to do. | ||
| With all the flaws and all the terrible things that took place here, yes, absolutely. | ||
| Land acknowledgements, hallelujah. | ||
| But at the end of the day, this place is supposed to represent freedom. | ||
| But freedom can be manipulated. | ||
| And you can use your empathy and they can use it against you. | ||
| And unfortunately, you have to be aware that there's nefarious forces that are involved in all areas of society where enormous amounts of money can be transferred. | ||
| And that's how you have to look at it. | ||
| This is ultimately about money. | ||
| And whether it's about money, bringing in people for cheap labor, which I think is fucked. | ||
| Because I think if you're in America, if you're here, if you're here, we're going to call you an American. | ||
| You should get paid what a fucking American gets paid. | ||
| You should get health coverage. | ||
| You should get everything. | ||
| You shouldn't be able to get people just because they walked over here and you get them to work for slave wages. | ||
| That's ridiculous. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| That's anti-American. | ||
| I mean, I'll hold you up there. | ||
| It might be like anti-American ideals. | ||
| But that's the history of America right there. | ||
|
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It is. | |
| That's the whole history of America. | ||
| It's true. | ||
| It's true. | ||
| And that's the dirty little secret of construction sites. | ||
| You go back to the 1850s, 1860s, and Irish dock workers on the East Coast, immigrant Irish dock workers, their life expectancy was 14 years from the time they stepped off the boat. | ||
| And these weren't 60-year-olds coming over and working on the docks. | ||
| You're talking about young guys who came over to do that. | ||
| 14 years. | ||
| Horrible, brutal jobs. | ||
| I mean, completely expendable human resource. | ||
| We all remember the photos of people working on the Empire State Building, walking on the beams. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Just no safety, nothing, leather shoes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Fuck off. | ||
| There's a lot of, you know, they have those political tests online, kind of tells you what you are if you answer some questions. | ||
| What are you? | ||
| I always end up right in the center. | ||
| But I always have to tell people that... | ||
| I'm the last – the farthest thing from a centrist. | ||
| It's just I have a whole bunch of views that are very far right and a whole bunch that are very far left according to this thing at least. | ||
| And one of my far left views before this World War II series got kind of pushed to the front of the queue because of the Tucker controversy. | ||
| I was working through a series on the history of the American labor movement. | ||
| And people today think of teachers' unions and corrupt big labor organizations and so forth. | ||
| But I'm a – I mean, to me, the American labor movement, the first part of it, it's America's best story, in my opinion. | ||
| I mean, because, you know, you go back to the 1880s, 1890s, or I did one on the Battle of Blair Mountain in West Virginia when 10,000, 11,000 coal miners who were just being brutally exploited by the mining companies and their mercenaries, I mean, they took up arms and they were ready to... | ||
| They were marching on the county next door to go free some of their compatriots and to hang the sheriff. | ||
| And they only stopped because the U.S. Army finally showed up. | ||
| This is right after World War I. The U.S. Army showed up and a lot of the guys who the miners were World War I veterans and they weren't going to fight the army. | ||
| Not even because they were afraid or discouraged by their prospects. | ||
| They just weren't going to. | ||
| You know, their problem was with like the sheriff and the mine, you know, the mine operators and stuff, not with the army. | ||
| They don't want to fight them. | ||
| And so that diffused it. | ||
| But, you know, you go back to those early to those early decades of the labor struggles. | ||
| And I mean, people really have to like. | ||
| It was not some aberration when striking workers, you know. | ||
| Got a bunch of people killed, you know, like where a bunch of Pinkertons or other mercenaries or even government forces. | ||
| I mean, you go to like, you know, a mine, a coal mine in Colorado back in I think it was 1912. And the National Guard of the state, which was completely there was not a lot of people in Colorado at the time. | ||
| So the National Guard and the state government was completely run by. | ||
| The mining operators because they were the most important thing in the state. | ||
| And the National Guard took up positions with machine guns up on a hill overlooking the striking miners encampment. | ||
| And the miners were mostly all gone because, you know, there were authorities looking for them and stuff. | ||
| It was a lot of their wives and children and so forth. | ||
| And they just opened up on these people and killed like 22 women and children. | ||
| And like that kind of thing was like that's an extreme kind of. | ||
| That's an example, I guess, of the brutality, but smaller versions of that, that's how it was. | ||
| People didn't believe back then, or a lot of people, the capitalists didn't believe back then that you had a right to strike. | ||
| Today we're like... | ||
| Yeah, if you don't want to go to work, you don't have to go to work. | ||
| And if you all do it together, that's a strike. | ||
| Like, you know, of course people can do—that's not how they thought about it back then. | ||
| You know, they thought you were—they thought of a strike as like a form of sabotage. | ||
| And so the authorities would be brought in. | ||
| Mercenaries would be brought in to, like, deal with these people. | ||
| And you're talking about, like—people think of, like, socialists today or something. | ||
| When, like, right-wing people—I really try to get this across to them. | ||
| Like, today you think, like, a left-wing socialist or whatever. | ||
| And you think, like, a blue-haired college student who's screeching to you about— Back then, you know, you're talking about guys who, and women too, actually, in certain cases, but guys who spent 12 to 14 hours a day turning a wrench or swinging a hammer. | ||
| And then after that, then they go to their meetings. | ||
| And they get home to their family and they sleep for four or five hours in a basement, two-room apartment that's got mold growing on the walls. | ||
| And they have a bowl of cabbage soup with their four kids that live in this horrible place. | ||
| And then they go back and do it again the next day. | ||
| These were like working people who were – I firmly believe if it was not for their sacrifices, we would all still be working under those kind of conditions. | ||
| The capitalist class – and I'm not trying to sound like some kind of a Marxist or something. | ||
| I'm just – that's what they were. | ||
| Like they were not going to compromise with the people unless they were forced to. | ||
| And those people, they went out on the picket lines. | ||
| They fought. | ||
| They died. | ||
| In fact, if you go up to a little bit later in the early 1900s, Probably the thing labor unions are most famous for these days is like the corruption, the mob involvement and so forth, labor racketeering. | ||
| And that kind of got started in the early part of the 1900s. | ||
| But the interesting thing about it is the way it started was, you know, the owners of the businesses, they were hiring like... | ||
| Real thugs. | ||
| I mean, the Pinkertons, the different groups that they would hire, they would get people just out of prison, you know, violent people, war veterans, and they would send them against the striking workers, have them spy on the workers, have them kidnap like guys who are trying to kind of get people into the union and so forth and get rid of them. | ||
| You know, this kind of thing was happening. | ||
| And so the union started to say, well, we need some muscle, too. | ||
| And so who's the muscle? | ||
| Well, if you got a bunch of like Irish and Italian guys working on this dock, the toughest guys they know are the gangsters. | ||
| And so they'd be like, you know, we'll pay you. | ||
| We need you to defend us from, you know, make sure that we don't get our teeth kicked in by the Pinkertons. | ||
| And so they would do that. | ||
| You know, they ran into the trouble that, you know, it always presents itself in situations like that is, you know, the people you hire to come in as muscle start to look around and be like. | ||
| Why do we have to take orders from these people again? | ||
| Can't we run the show? | ||
| And that kind of started to happen. | ||
| You started to get these unions that were racketeering organizations. | ||
| And so these are things about history is extremely messy. | ||
| We have to always remember people are often making the crucial decisions that Turn history this way or that, you know, zig instead of zag, are often made under crisis conditions by people who sometimes they're great men and women, but a lot of times, you know, they're the person who happens to be there at the time and they're doing their best and they're taking advice from the people that are around them and they're, you know, they're making the decision that's going to determine if we head off in this direction or that direction, you know. | ||
| And you can't, you know, there was one time, right? | ||
| I can tell the story because it's probably back in the mid-2000s when I was still in the military. | ||
| I was over at my friend's house. | ||
| He was at the hospital picking up our other friend who had a bicycle accident and hurt his head. | ||
| And he was picking him up and coming back with him. | ||
| And so I was going to meet him there so we could hang out and welcome him back from the hospital and so forth. | ||
| I get there and I call him up because he's not home. | ||
| And I say, you know, Richard, I'm here. | ||
| Like, what's up? | ||
| He's like, ah, the doctors are being slow, whatever. | ||
| So I'm going to be a little while. | ||
| Well, I got a big 20-ounce Venti, you know, Starbucks black coffee. | ||
| And so I pound that thing in my car as I'm reading a book. | ||
| And pretty soon I start to feel that pressure in my gut. | ||
| Like, I got to take a shit. | ||
| Like, I have to take a shit. | ||
| It's like that caffeine shit, right? | ||
| And I call up my friend. | ||
| I'm like, where are you? | ||
| Like, I need you to... | ||
| Get home now. | ||
| He's like, the doctors haven't even brought him to me. | ||
| I don't know what's going on. | ||
| He's like, go see if a door or a window's open or something. | ||
| And so now I'm getting up and moving. | ||
| So that's making things worse, you know. | ||
| And I check all the doors. | ||
| I check all the windows. | ||
| Nothing's open. | ||
| And I'm in the backyard and I'm like this close to just digging a hole in this flower garden and taking a shit in this flower garden. | ||
| But then all of a sudden I look up and there's a balcony. | ||
| From the master bedroom with no stairs down to the backyard, but it's a balcony, you know, there's no access to it. | ||
| And I'm like, I'll bet they didn't lock that door. | ||
| And so I kick my shoes off so that I can, you know, they were loose on my feet so that I can more easily like climb up the pole and pull myself up there. | ||
| And so I'm just in my socks. | ||
| And at this point, just like the effort of, the effort of... | ||
| You know, the strain of, like, pulling myself up to this thing, like, it's coming right now, and that's just, that's what's happening. | ||
| And so I run into the, I run up, the door's open, thank God, and I run in and run into the master bathroom. | ||
| And for some reason, but again, like, this is a crisis moment, you know, I'm not, like, taking everything into account as I'm making decisions here. | ||
| I get in there, and as I run in there, I see that there's no toilet paper. | ||
| Now, the obvious answer there is... | ||
| Cross that bridge when you get to it. | ||
| You gotta go. | ||
| At the time, I was like, oh no! | ||
| And so I ran out of the bathroom. | ||
| I'm up on the second floor. | ||
| I run over to the stairs, and they have one of those stairs that kind of goes down halfway, and there's a little platform, and then right angle goes down the other way. | ||
| And I have to go so bad that I just jump down the first flight of stairs, and then I jump down the second flight of stairs. | ||
| My socks hit the tile floor, slide out. | ||
| I fall on my back, bang my head, and shit everywhere. | ||
| I mean, it's like going up my back. | ||
| It's horrible. | ||
| And my head is like ringing and I'm ashamed to say that like I laid there in my shit for like at least 10 seconds because I was sitting there thinking of like all of the opportunities that I had to like, you know, change course and avoid this that are so obvious in retrospect. | ||
| And you just sit there and think about like when you're in that situation, like you don't even stop there. | ||
| You think back on like your entire life and you're like. | ||
| How did I get here? | ||
| It's like that record scratch. | ||
| You're probably wondering how I got into this situation. | ||
| That's where I was. | ||
| This doesn't have anything to do with the overall point I was making, but the really shameful part of it is I cleaned it all up, and you could still kind of, like in the grout and the tiles, I couldn't get it all out, so it still kind of smelled shitty. | ||
| And when my friend got home, I didn't tell him this for years afterwards, when he got home, I blamed it on his dog. | ||
| And he yelled at the dog on my behalf. | ||
| I told him years later. | ||
| How old were you at the time? | ||
|
unidentified
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Too old to be doing shit like that. | |
| I mean, but that's a funny way of putting it, but that's history a lot of the times. | ||
| You know, you're making decisions on the fly that you're not necessarily having time to reflect upon. | ||
| And, you know, you get into a situation where you're like, how did we end up here? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, I'm glad you brought up the labor movement because I feel exactly the same way. | ||
| And knowing the history of the way people striking were treated and what could have happened had they not been successful. | ||
| You know, people want, you know, you think about unions, you think about corruption and waste and fraud. | ||
| That's, unfortunately, that happens a lot. | ||
| And greed. | ||
| People making too much money. | ||
| I mean, they blamed a lot of the unions on the collapse of the American automobile industry in Detroit. | ||
| You know, they wanted too much money, they were too greedy, and they sent everything overseas. | ||
| And then, you know, the whole Flint, Michigan thing, Michael Moore's documentary. | ||
| Roger and me. | ||
| It's one of those things where, unfortunately, we look at negative aspects of it and we don't have a full perspective of where we would be without that. | ||
| When the powerful... | ||
| And this is what everyone's afraid of on the left, and rightly so. | ||
| When the powerful... | ||
| They have so much and their resources are so vast that they can control everyone else and that they could stifle your ability to earn an income. | ||
| They could siphon off all your money. | ||
| They don't have to pay taxes. | ||
| They fuck everybody over and they just want more and more and more and it's a blight on society. | ||
| I think we both agree there's some sort of a comfortable middle ground. | ||
| I don't believe socialism is a way to run a country, but I do think there's socialism aspects of our country that we can't ignore are powerful and important. | ||
| One of them that I bring up all the time is the fire department. | ||
| The fire department is a totally socialist idea. | ||
| You don't have to pay them money. | ||
| If you live in a house that's worth a million dollars, if you live in a house that's worth $200,000, They put out fires. | ||
| If you can afford it or if you can't afford it, they put out fires. | ||
| We all agree, you got to put out fires. | ||
| We all kind of agree, you should have a good education. | ||
| But obviously, states are different in the resources and local districts are different in the resources and you see very nice neighborhoods that have really good schools and you see terrible neighborhoods that have terrible schools. | ||
| So we don't really completely treat that. | ||
| That should be a socialist thing that everybody should get along with. | ||
| That everybody should say, yeah, that's good for everybody. | ||
| Another thing is, and this is very controversial, but socialized medicine. | ||
| The idea that you should go broke because you broke your leg is fucking crazy. | ||
| If we're a community of people that are supposed to be supporting each other and helping each other, the best thing we could do is help one of the members of the community become active and... | ||
| Productive and contribute to society that makes everybody better and greater and we should be willing to contribute to that but I want my Orthopedic surgeon driving a fucking Mercedes. | ||
| I want that guy to be a bad motherfucker who gets compensated for because that's the type of guy who becomes an artist That's the type of guy who works on the Lakers knees. | ||
| That's the type of guy you want like oh, that's Mike He does the Cowboys whenever they have shoulder injuries That's the guy. | ||
| You want that guy. | ||
| You want the guy with a nice watch. | ||
| You want the guy who lives in a big house because that guy is fucking dialed in and focused. | ||
| You don't want a guy who doesn't feel like he's being compensated enough. | ||
| You don't want a guy who feels like he's expendable. | ||
| You want a guy who feels like he's a fucking rock star. | ||
| That's what you want if you want your mom getting brain surgery, right? | ||
| You want a rock star surgeon doing that. | ||
| So I believe in competition and I believe in merit and I think it's very, very important for our society as a whole. | ||
| But I also think there should be a much larger safety net for individuals so they don't go broke if they have a fucking knee surgery. | ||
| Or if you break your back, you shouldn't have to fucking go bankrupt. | ||
| That's kind of crazy. | ||
| And I think labor unions are very important. | ||
| It's very important to not allow a corporation that is entirely designed to make as much money as possible dictate how much money its workers get. | ||
| Because the poorer you are, the more desperate you are, the less likely you are to do anything about it. | ||
| When you get comfortable, and you want to be more comfortable, and you say, this isn't fair, we could sit out for six months, that's when you become dangerous. | ||
| When you have the ability to strike, when the writers' union in Los Angeles strikes, that's a fucking real problem, man. | ||
| That's a real problem. | ||
|
unidentified
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problem. | |
| That shuts everything down. | ||
| And they get recognized because of that. | ||
| And then they get hopefully fairly compensated because of that. | ||
| It's an important part of our society. | ||
| There's also, I think, due to our unique history of kind of having demographic turnover generation after generation, more or less since the beginning, that if you look at the development of things like the public school system, for example, or a lot of the social welfare programs and other social programs, a lot of those things emerged. | ||
| Because there was all of a sudden a huge influx of Irish in the 1830s and 40s. | ||
| And their parents are both working 14-hour days and the kids are just running the streets and everything else. | ||
| And there's no public schools. | ||
| They didn't have any at first. | ||
| And so it was like a response to this. | ||
| They're like, we got to do something about this. | ||
| We got to take these little hellions and turn them into Americans somehow. | ||
| And so you had philanthropists. | ||
| It was all private at first. | ||
| And then they were transferred to the city governments and stuff. | ||
| They were responses to like demographic crises, right? | ||
| They were emerging due to like the migrant influxes. | ||
| And I think that that being the case, it's kind of given Americans like a – because, you know, the native population who was already there when that happened, they didn't like it. | ||
| They were like, wait, so these people came over here and now I have to pay to like set up a school system for their kids? | ||
| Like what? | ||
| It created like that sort of resistance to, you know, the question of – Of what we owe each other as members of a society, you know? | ||
| Like, the idea of, like... | ||
| I feel like we've kind of taken... | ||
| Like, America's the best country in the world. | ||
| If you are smart, motivated, you got a great idea, and you want to make something of it, go to America. | ||
| Like, America's the place for you. | ||
| Throughout most of our history, if you were just, like, a person who, you know, you could turn a wrench or swing a hammer or something. | ||
| Mary was not... | ||
| You know, it was built to create opportunities and push competition for people to compete for the top of the mountain. | ||
| But the people at the bottom, like, throughout a lot of our history were just kind of forgotten. | ||
| You know, the real question is, in a country that is so geared toward competition at the top, whether that ever would have changed without a real push, you know? | ||
| And, I mean, one of the other things, too, is, like, when people think about... | ||
| If you go back to, like, in Europe where they were really worried about communism, we were never really justifiably too worried about it in terms of having a revolution here or anything. | ||
| Like, that was never really a danger. | ||
| But if you go over to, like, especially after the Soviet Union came around from basically Germany eastward, you know, communism, like, it was a very real possibility, like, in the 1920s that... | ||
| The German Communist Party, which was the largest political party in Germany, was taking its marching orders directly from Moscow, that they were going to win and they were going to take over and you were now going to be like, what's going on over in Russia and Ukraine? | ||
| That was a real thing that could have happened to them. | ||
| And when people hear that, they think that, again, they try to put it in the context of a modern left-wing person or something like that. | ||
| But it's like when people are working under these conditions, And the socialists, the communists are like literally the only political movement that's even vying for their support. | ||
| Nobody else is even really even courting them or asking for it, you know? | ||
| And when you add to that, like this whole idea of like the working class, like this isn't something that has existed forever. | ||
| Like this was something that was emerging in different times in different places. | ||
| But like really in that, like. | ||
| Most like in some developed countries, you started to see it in like the 18th century, but it's like a 19th century phenomenon where all of a sudden, so you think you go back to feudal times and you've got the aristocracy, you got the church and you got the peasantry. | ||
| And then you have like another group of people who kind of serves a unique function, but kind of a uniform function across Europe in the Jews. | ||
| You know, they would very often be like, they played a very kind of critical role in feudal Europe. | ||
| You know, because they were the only ones who had a network that kind of stretched across the whole place. | ||
| And so a lot of times like the rulers would have Jews working for them who, you know, they were basically like your diplomatic channels kind of. | ||
| You need to like talk to people over there or if you needed to raise money for something, they had large capital networks that could help you raise money for it, things like that. | ||
| But they weren't, you know, they weren't serfs or peasants. | ||
| They weren't the aristocracy. | ||
| They weren't. | ||
| The church obviously. | ||
| They were kind of their separate thing and most of the time they were allowed to sort of abide by their own laws, like run their own little societies like how they wanted. | ||
| But this was at a time when it was just taken for granted that different classes of people had different privileges and different rights. | ||
| It was just – everybody took that for granted. | ||
| It wasn't even something that was imposed. | ||
| was the peasant or a serf would have believed that as much as the king did. | ||
| It was only when you start to get up into the Industrial Revolution that all of a sudden you start to see these cities just teeming with people who have no land. | ||
| You know, they don't have any means of like immediate self-sufficiency. | ||
| What they have is their back and their shoulders and their hands. | ||
| And, you know, they trade that for the means to survive. | ||
| And, you know, this happened very rapidly in a lot of countries so that you have this whole new kind of politically awakening demographic, you know, because that's sort of kind of the key to it. | ||
| At first, you know, it took some time for them to sort of have a political awakening where they recognized that, wait, I'm not just a worker. | ||
| I'm a member of the working class. | ||
| And we have, you know, whatever our difference is, the working class has common interests that are in opposition to the interests of these other classes. | ||
| And we're going to start to, you know, organize and act politically. | ||
| To extend those interests and to achieve them. | ||
| That was something that was very new. | ||
| And so people were kind of figuring out, again, on the fly, like, how to deal with this. | ||
| Like, what – you know, the idea that just regular poor people who – you know, that they should have any say in, like, how the state is run, how the economy is – it was just a completely foreign idea, like, everywhere on the planet basically until, you know, 200 years ago or so. | ||
| Which is pretty bizarre that we've had to adjust to that so quickly. | ||
| You know, so many changes so rapidly. | ||
| Changes in transmit the ability to move people, transit, the ability to take people from Europe quickly, relatively, to America. | ||
| Trains, machines, the Industrial Revolution, all this happening, cities emerging, like enormous populations, and then the squalor in which those people are living in, which is... | ||
| I mean, that's really the dirty secret of the beginnings of all these cities. | ||
| These people were shitting in outhouses. | ||
| Public ones on the street. | ||
| Everybody lived in squalor. | ||
| Rats, disease, horrible nutrition. | ||
| In the winter, you don't get any fresh vegetables. | ||
| There's nothing there to get. | ||
| Everyone's malnourished. | ||
| Everyone's living terribly. | ||
| And everyone's terrified that they won't have enough money to put food on the table. | ||
| And they're all... | ||
| Under the oppressive thumb of whoever has the most money who could provide them with jobs. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And, you know, there's a world where, you know, the husband breaks his back. | ||
| You know, you better hope that you're... | ||
| A member in good standing of the nearby parish church because there's nothing else for you. | ||
| There might be some charity or something that some rich lady set up or whatever, but that was not going to save everybody. | ||
| There was nothing for those people. | ||
| It's a scary thought when you think about the history of the human race about people generally had sort of specific roles in society that you could gravitate towards and that would be your trade and that would be your way to... | ||
| You know, integrate with society. | ||
| You were a blacksmith. | ||
| You were, you know, you did this, you did that. | ||
| Everybody found a thing, did the thing, and it all sort of cohesively worked. | ||
| And then all of a sudden, you have jobs. | ||
| A bunch of people waiting in line. | ||
| Soup kitchens. | ||
| And then, you know, you have... | ||
| This oppressive factory environment where, first of all, everything's coal-powered. | ||
| They do a great job in Peaky Blinders of highlighting that. | ||
| The streets are gray. | ||
| Everything's a dull, dark gray. | ||
| So everybody's getting polluted. | ||
| Everyone's sick. | ||
| Period. | ||
| You're sick because there's shit in the streets. | ||
| Everyone's riding horses. | ||
| The horse is shit everywhere. | ||
| There's shit everywhere. | ||
| Your whole existence is hell. | ||
| And then you have massive organized crime. | ||
| Violent, horrific, gangs of New York style. | ||
| Organized crime all throughout your city. | ||
| Violence everywhere. | ||
| Yeah, the history of organized crime is actually for people who really want to understand America in the late 19th and... | ||
| Throughout the 20th century, reading a few books on the history of organized crime is a good window into that. | ||
| It's going to give you a perspective from the bottom up rather than from the top down. | ||
| When you read history, the further back you go, the more true this is. | ||
| It's something you really have to stay humble about. | ||
| You consider the fact that things that are happening today, we can't seem to agree on things that are... | ||
| Just extensively documented and there's like in newspapers and video, whatever else. | ||
| We can't agree about what's going on or what, you know, the president's motivations are, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| And you go back further in history and you're dealing with like scraps of information a lot of times. | ||
| And the further back you go, the worse it gets. | ||
| You know, the idea that you should really like be careful when you really feel like you start to understand people, you know, from a... | ||
| I mean, for one thing, I mean, even if you – I mentioned, I was like, look, first of all, you're dealing with sources, written sources, which automatically means you're getting your information from the very, very, very few people in that society who knew how to write, right? | ||
| Just like just that. | ||
| And even in more recent days when – If you go back just into more recent history, you have like diaries and stuff, right? | ||
| It's like even then, you're talking about like the kind of person who would keep a diary. | ||
| That's not everybody. | ||
| You're talking about a certain kind of people. | ||
| And, you know, this is still something that like really affects the way we like the news is reported about places around the world all the time, right? | ||
| You'll remember back during the Arab Spring when things were jumping off in Egypt and they were interviewing. | ||
| It was like CNN or one of them, I don't know, interviewing their correspondent who was like there in Cairo on the ground, like talking to the people or whatever. | ||
| And according to her, these are just – these are all a bunch of liberal people who want freedom and they want democracy and like da-da-da-da-da-da-da. | ||
| And, you know, people see stuff like that. | ||
| And maybe sometimes there is, like, an aspect of this to it. | ||
| But people see that and they're like, oh, this is propaganda. | ||
| This is bullshit. | ||
| And she knows it's not true. | ||
| And CNN knows it's not true. | ||
| But they're trying to sell this to us. | ||
| A lot of times it's like, no, man, look, you have this lady who works for CNN or New York Times or whatever it is who goes to Cairo. | ||
| Who do you think she's going to talk to? | ||
| Like, how would she even know how to find, like, your raggedy person, like, living in the slums or something, or how to communicate with that person in their own terms? | ||
| She's going to go to the people she knows there, who are all going to be educated people, middle class or higher, and say, hey, can you put me in touch with people I can talk to? | ||
| And who do they know? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| And that kind of—this same thing is true in Russia. | ||
| You know, with Russia, you know— There's a faction of people. | ||
| There's always been a faction of people in Russia who are not fans of Vladimir Putin. | ||
| And interestingly, it's sort of the same social class that really doesn't like Donald Trump in the United States. | ||
| You know, a lot of the civil servants and bureaucrats, a lot of the professional, like, urban people, those are the ones who don't like them. | ||
| Well, if you're a Russia correspondent... | ||
| For one of these major media organizations, these are just the people that are going to be around you and who are going to be influencing the way you think things are going. | ||
| And so a lot of times that makes it over into our news is like the people are ready for a revolution. | ||
| The people are ready to get Putin out of there. | ||
| He's actually hated and everything. | ||
| And it's just a distortion of reality based on the sourcing, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Like going on Blue Sky, talking about Trump. | ||
| And I mean, this is sort of postmodernism 101. The useful side of postmodernism, you know, the unpoliticized useful side is going back through and, you know, reading the text we have and looking at the information we have and sort of doing an archaeology on it, | ||
| you know, and understanding that, you know, like you could I would say like an early example of like that type of postmodernism is Euripides play in ancient Greece, the Trojan women, because like what he was doing is like. | ||
| Everybody knew the Iliad. | ||
| They knew the story of the conquest of Troy and all that. | ||
| But he wrote the story from the perspective of the women who actually lived in Troy and went through the conquest. | ||
| And it's like you have to remember that almost everything – and again, I sound like some hippie blue-haired college student when I say stuff like this. | ||
| But you really have to keep it in mind that when you're reading history that is written exclusively by men, exclusively by adults. | ||
| Exclusively by the upper class and the small cast of people who are actually literate and writing things down. | ||
| And for even leaving aside like the political circumstances, they were putting constraints on the way that they could describe and write about things. | ||
| Just the class bias is introduced. | ||
| You're getting a very, very narrow perspective. | ||
| It would be like coming over to the United States and Asking a random person on the street, hey, who's this Donald Trump guy? | ||
| What's he about? | ||
| You're an alien. | ||
| You don't know anything. | ||
| And they say he's a fascist dictator who is going to ruin the country and destroy the country. | ||
| And then going home and being like, yeah, the Americans hate this guy. | ||
| He's a fascist dictator and he's going to destroy the country. | ||
| And if you think about it like that and then imagine that... | ||
| Those people or people who are on the other side, whatever, but one side are the only ones that are writing anything down. | ||
| A lot of times our understanding of history is very much based on like that kind of a narrow view. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When you are putting together a piece like Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem, how do you account for that? | ||
| Like how do you? | ||
| How do you try to have this balanced, nuanced perspective when you're getting, in many cases, a biased perspective that you're researching from? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And the biased perspective is one that I can't avoid. | ||
| I mean, I guess I could with enough work, but is that I only speak and read English. | ||
| So just that by itself. | ||
| Like when I was doing that story specifically, like the early history of Zionism and that conflict. | ||
| I'm reading English sources, which, especially if you get back before, you know, the last couple decades, are almost always telling you the perspective of the Zionists to a large extent, just because, you know, there's not a lot of—there weren't a lot of Arabs in Britain and America and stuff writing books about what was happening. | ||
| And so you have that bias by itself. | ||
| And, you know, the thing that somebody asked me on X the other day—I was doing a Q&A and— They said, how do you—you know, how can we—what do we have to do? | ||
| What are some of the steps we have to take or whatever, things we have to take into account to make sure, like, we're getting an objective view of history? | ||
| And I told them, like, I don't think that's a viable goal when you're doing this stuff. | ||
| Like, you know, the goal should be understanding, you know, on a human level. | ||
| And just—you have to just maintain a sense of humility and a sense of the limitations of your own ability to really— To really understand what's going on and just constantly keep in the front of your mind that these are human beings making human decisions based on human motivations, you know? | ||
| And if you do that, you know, maybe you won't have like a perfect picture of the events that took place because, again, we're just limited, you know? | ||
| There's a lot of like huge historical figures, somebody like Alexander the Great or something. | ||
| Like what we know about them is based on an extremely small stack of papers, you know? | ||
| And so, yeah, that sort of humility, which was kind of imposed on me at the very beginning because the Israel-Palestine series was the first one I did. | ||
| And I was reading and after I had read maybe like six books or so, something like that, I was like, OK, I kind of get this. | ||
| I'm ready to start writing this first episode and plotting it out. | ||
| And so I do that and it takes me a while. | ||
| I'm still working my day job at the time. | ||
| So it takes me a few months to kind of get it. | ||
| To the end of it. | ||
| And by then, I've read 20 books or 30 books or something. | ||
| And I went back and went through, like, the notes and the plot and everything that I had laid out. | ||
| And it was embarrassingly bad. | ||
| I mean, it wasn't just, like, you got this wrong or that wrong. | ||
| It's just, like, whole sections of the story that I am so far off base that it's not even, you can't even call it wrong. | ||
| And I thought about that. | ||
| I was like... | ||
| And I had read six books about this topic. | ||
| You know how many topics there are that I've read one book on that I will just pontificate about for hours unless you stop me? | ||
| And so it kind of forced that sense of humility on me a little bit and made me realize that even if you're well-educated in a subject... | ||
| And this is one of the reasons, too. | ||
| I'm convinced, anyway, that one of the reasons my Tucker interview got as much of a response as it is. | ||
| Tucker, obviously, is very clever about courting controversy. | ||
| You know, he knows what he's doing. | ||
| And at the very beginning, he introduced me as like the... | ||
| The best and most important, you know, contemporary historian in America today or something like that, right? | ||
| And I know the guys like, you know, the historians that came after me afterwards were just inflamed by that. | ||
| And I'm sure that was Tucker's, you know, goal. | ||
| But I've always, you know, I say the same thing Dan Carlin always says. | ||
| I'm not a historian, you know. | ||
| Read the books and the papers and the other things that historians write, and then I tell a story about them, you know? | ||
| The historians are learning the languages, going into the archives, interviewing survivors, etc. | ||
| I'm not—that's a historian, you know? | ||
| I'm a storyteller who uses historical stories to try to, you know, to tell my stories. | ||
| But, like, yeah, it was funny, too, because the night before, he was kind of saying that. | ||
| Because we were having dinner the night before. | ||
| And I was telling him this spiel, you know, I'm not a historian. | ||
| Historians do important work. | ||
| And he's like, yeah, well, I'm going to say that on the show tomorrow, so don't fight it. | ||
| And I was like, okay. | ||
| I would have let you say it. | ||
| I think you're an educator, like an unconventional educator. | ||
| I mean, I think that's the best way to describe it. | ||
| If you're... | ||
| The way you describe, like say the Jim Jones, the Guyana tragedy, the way you describe that, if I was in high school, I'd be like, this fucking teacher rules. | ||
| I'd be so pumped to go to that class. | ||
| My favorite emails to get from listeners, right? | ||
| Or, well, my favorite email, my favorite two emails probably had to do with the Israeli-Palestinian thing. | ||
| You know, one of them was from an active duty IDF soldier who was serving in the West Bank who said that he listened to the podcast and that it actually altered the way he... | ||
| Deals with Palestinians on a daily basis in his job. | ||
| So that was pretty awesome. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| And then I got another one from this 20-year-old girl who lives in the West Bank, but she'd only been there for about two years. | ||
| She'd gotten permission to move there from the Israelis. | ||
| Her whole family was in Gaza. | ||
| And she wrote me about two or three months after the war kicked off, after October 7th. | ||
| And she heard the podcast and she said... | ||
| You could tell, I mean, for sure, like there was a lot of anger, like the way the Israelis were conducting the war and the way they treat Palestinians and all that, very justified anger. | ||
| But, you know, she said she listened to the podcast and it made her realize that the Jews are just like her and that the, you know, they say Jews over there and they mean Israelis, but like it's just they use the word Jews because that's what they are. | ||
| You know, that's how they understand it. | ||
| And she said, you know, there's probably a Jewish girl. | ||
| Who lives in Tel Aviv, who's just like me. | ||
| She loves Harry Styles and da-da-da. | ||
| Anyway, those were amazing emails to get. | ||
| But my other favorite, and this one I've gotten probably 100 times, is it'll be from somebody who will tell me their story a little bit. | ||
| They'll say, you know, I was always kind of... | ||
| The kid who sat in the back of class, like, I was not one of the smart kids, you know? | ||
| Maybe not one of the dumb kids, but I wasn't one of the smart kids. | ||
| And reading things like history books, that's what smart kids do. | ||
| And I'm not one of those people. | ||
| And so I just never even shifted into that gear or anything. | ||
| He's like, but I heard your podcast on Jim Jones or whatever because my friend sent it to me. | ||
| And now, you know, that was a year and a half ago. | ||
| Now check it out. | ||
| This is my bookshelf. | ||
| I've read all these books. | ||
| And the best part about it is you find that... | ||
| That that experience, like, changed the way they think about themselves. | ||
| It really, like, opened up their own, like, human possibilities in certain ways. | ||
| You know, and I don't want to take—I'm not taking credit for that. | ||
| They're doing it. | ||
| But I really feel like, you know, you can think of kids like—we all know a million of these people, like, back in school where, you know, that's the dumb kid, right? | ||
| He's just, like, gets C's if he's lucky and he's not any good at, you know, math, whatever. | ||
| But then you get him talking about cars. | ||
| You know? | ||
| And he's like, and he will break down, I mean, everything about a Honda Civic engine that you can possibly, I mean, and you realize really quick, like, oh, this is actually a really smart guy. | ||
| He's just, nobody's been able to engage him on these topics before. | ||
| And so he thinks that those aren't for him, and he's not engaged with them. | ||
| But you get him on something he's really engaged with, this dude's super smart. | ||
| If you could give him an IQ test that, like, purely drew from, like, him when he's talking about cars, he would be above average. | ||
| And that's, like, almost everybody. | ||
| You know, it's a matter of just, like, being able to get people engaged. | ||
| And that's my favorite thing to do with the podcast is, you know, when people who didn't think they were into this kind of stuff realize that, you know, you pull them in with a good story and a good presentation, but then they kind of take it from there themselves. | ||
| It's really great. | ||
| Well, it's engaging and it's fascinating to learn about human beings. | ||
| And we've been told that everybody has a 10-second attention span. | ||
| This is the TikTok generation. | ||
| And I think that's one of the things that I'm most happy about with the emergence of podcasting is that it's kind of thrown a monkey wrench into that. | ||
| People are curious. | ||
| We're still the same. | ||
| We're still interested in things. | ||
| We're just easily distracted. | ||
| And we're constantly being bombarded by... | ||
| Information and data, but you don't have to opt into that You can step out of that and you can actually be interested in things and it will enrich your perspective Which will help you as a human being it'll help you it'll help you navigate life It'll help you navigate relationships and friendships and careers The more you know the better the more you consider other people's perspectives the better the more you get a chance to listen to how an expert describes What they know about a specific thing and what's fascinating about | ||
| it and how it engages them and how it's enriching their life. | ||
| Like, that's good for everybody. | ||
| That's good for everybody who listens. | ||
| It's good for me to be able to sit here and talk to these people. | ||
| You know, it's good to be stimulated. | ||
| It's good to be curious. | ||
| It's good to expand your understanding of life, this life that we're all experiencing together. | ||
| You know, and I think that's where Podcasts and your podcast is very different than mine obviously because yours is actually really planned out It's almost like it should be a different category than just a podcast But that's where those things are like really important because they do engage people and they do get people that as you said Might not have thought that that was for them and all sudden they're like Jim Jones. | ||
| How did he do that? | ||
| Like and then you get into your series on it. | ||
| It's utterly fascinating like I am particularly fascinated like a lot of people with cults Because we all have this thing in the back of our head when we see something like the Jim Jones cult or Waco or anything. | ||
| What would I do? | ||
| Would I be one of those people? | ||
| Would I be in that group? | ||
| Would I be drinking the Kool-Aid? | ||
| Would I be with them? | ||
| Like, how does a person get sucked into cutting their balls off and putting the purple Nikes on and waiting for the spaceship? | ||
| How does that... | ||
| What causes that wild, wild country? | ||
| I'm sure you've seen that. | ||
| Incredible. | ||
| Dude, my grandmother, it's my uncle's mom, but she babysat me all the time as a kid. | ||
| We all call her grandma. | ||
| Sheila, Mana and Sheila, was her sister-in-law. | ||
| Oh, my God! | ||
| She was hiding out. | ||
| I didn't know this until after I saw Wild, Wild Country. | ||
| I was like, have you guys seen this? | ||
| Just casually dropping that. | ||
| They're like... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| You don't know about Sheila? | ||
| When she was hiding out before she fled the country, she was being hidden in my uncle's bedroom for a while. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| Yeah, so that's fun. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| That's crazy. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| But to answer your question, though, as far as how people get sucked into it, the thing that shines through again and again, no matter what you're talking about, whether it's... | ||
| Any of the stories I've talked about is that very often people get sucked into it because – not because of like some latent evil in their heart but because their virtues get hijacked. | ||
| Hitler is a good example. | ||
| That is somebody who can say whatever you want about him. | ||
| He loved the German people and he cared about the German people. | ||
| But that love, I mean, is very – I mean, it's like, you know, I was reading an article a while back about the neurochemical oxytocin. | ||
| And it's the chemical that basically makes sure that, you know, a mammal mother doesn't eat her baby when she gets hungry. | ||
| You know, in us, it takes the form of, like, increasing trust and empathy and so forth. | ||
| But they've also done research and found that it also, like, that it increases trust and empathy and all those things for your in-group. | ||
| But because you're more protective of them, like feeling that way, it actually increases distrust toward anybody considered like in the out group. | ||
| And so it's like makes you love your child more and makes you hate like the foreigner more or something like that, you know? | ||
| And a lot of things are like that where it's really your virtues that get hijacked. | ||
| I mean, if you think of... | ||
| I mean, yeah, you were talking about Jonestown. | ||
| I mean, that story sucked me in so much. | ||
| Part of the reason for that is because I just got obsessed with it. | ||
| But part of it is that the U.S. authorities found like a thousand hours of recordings at the Jonestown site after the massacre, and they're all available online. | ||
| And it's like sermons of his. | ||
| It's them just having meetings in the middle of the night. | ||
| It's just all kinds of different things. | ||
| Well, for like three or four months, I had that in my headphones for like... | ||
| At the time, I was working overseas when I worked for the Department of Defense, and I was working by myself overseas. | ||
| And so I'd be working, and I'd have my headphones on eight hours a day. | ||
| I'm listening to Jim Jones. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| I was dreaming about him, for real. | ||
| But through that experience, what I found is I, and even to this day, like I say, I will still say it, even after I'm separated from it, it's all over, is I really sympathize with those people. | ||
| The same way I sympathize with like, you know, and I get into this in the series too, like, you know, the radical movements that emerged out of the civil rights struggle, you know, the Black Panthers and whatnot, who, you know, they went down a dark road. | ||
| But when you put yourself in their shoes, you know, because say what you want about like if Jim Jones, just like for people out there who don't know, I mean, go listen to the podcast. | ||
| But, you know, Jim Jones was a guy who... | ||
| In, like, 1953 is when he started his first church in Indianapolis. | ||
| And it's a totally open, like, mixed-race church in Indianapolis. | ||
| And he and his congregation are going out and putting pressure on businesses to, like, start serving, you know, to desegregate and start serving African-American customers and stuff. | ||
| This is a couple of years before Martin Luther King and Birmingham or whatever. | ||
| He was, like, out front on this, right? | ||
| And he was – you know, his wife would – they adopted the first – they were the first white family to adopt an African-American child in the state of Indiana. | ||
| His wife would walk down the street with their adopted child and she'd get spit on, called an N-word lover, all these kind of things. | ||
| I mean he was getting death threats from like the American Nazi Party, from the KKK, which was very strong in Indiana back in the day. | ||
| And he was – But he was still doing all this. | ||
| And if Jim Jones would have gotten hit by a bus in 1962, he would 100% be remembered today as like an early hero of the Civil Rights Movement. | ||
| Like, he really would. | ||
| And when you say, like, how did people get sucked into it? | ||
| Like, you think of somebody—like, one of the first things you notice, if all you know about the Jonestown story is don't drink the Kool-Aid, you know, you've heard that. | ||
| The first thing that stands out to you when you pick up a book about it is that 75% of the people who died out there were black. | ||
| And, you know, as soon as—like, I had been doing another project about the great migration of African Americans out of the South around that time. | ||
| And so I thought about it and I was like, man, these are all, like, first-generation people out in San Francisco where the Jonestown cult was based. | ||
| Because, I mean, you didn't really have the big migration out to the West Coast until the Second World War and after the Second World War. | ||
| You know, you take just like as one example, there was one of the women that died out there. | ||
| She was like 70, 72 years old or something in 1978 when they all died. | ||
| So she was born in whatever, 1906 in Alabama. | ||
| And she's this black woman, right? | ||
| And so she goes through, lives the first 40 years of her life under Jim Crow in Alabama, going through that. | ||
| And then her and her husband decide to, you know, they get up the gumption to... | ||
| You know, get on a train or get in a car or whatever and go out to California. | ||
| And this is, again, back when, you know, the world was a lot bigger for people back then. | ||
| You were going off to California. | ||
| It was goodbye for the most part, you know. | ||
| And so they were going. | ||
| They didn't know what they were going to find out there, but they were going to go give it, you know, give it a try. | ||
| And so they get out there and her husband's working on the Oakland docks and they live kind of in that Oakland docks area that today is, you know, so run down. | ||
| He dies early just from overwork and, like, everything else. | ||
| And she's there now in her little stoop, you know, front porch house, street side house, living by herself in a neighborhood that is just completely falling apart. | ||
| You got drugs and you got gangs and, like, she gets, you know, harassed when she walks down the steps and all these kind of things. | ||
| And so this is her life now. | ||
| It's, like, arguably, I mean, I wouldn't even say arguably. | ||
| Like, other than just the... | ||
| The indignity of being told you can't drink out of that drinking fountain or something. | ||
| Her life was actually more comfortable in Alabama under Jim Crow than it's become in this Oakland ghetto. | ||
| She's safer. | ||
| At least over there, she lived in a place that was a community. | ||
| It was a group of people that knew her since she was a kid, and she lived among them. | ||
| Over here, she's completely alone. | ||
| She has nobody. | ||
| Her whole experience of her whole life with white Americans has been virtually... | ||
| Unanimously negative. | ||
| At the very least, like, you know, if not abusive or something, it's been, like, condescending, you know? | ||
| And somebody tells her, somebody that she knows from somewhere says, hey, you gotta come check out this new church that I'm going to. | ||
| It's called the People's Temple. | ||
| Come on down. | ||
| There's this guy, Jim Jones. | ||
| He's amazing. | ||
| And so she goes down there, and what she finds is a group of people, it was not, they're like... | ||
| Their sense of like real equality between people, not just racial but just across the board, that was not a game. | ||
| They were 100 percent serious about it. | ||
| So she shows up to this place and she's not treated like in a condescending sort of social justice way where it's like, oh, let us help you, you know, or anything like that. | ||
| They're like family. | ||
| These people were a family. | ||
| And like it's, you know, the first thing to understand about the Jonestown. | ||
| You know, incident is that these people loved each other. | ||
| They cared about each other. | ||
| And this woman comes in after her whole life experience, being alone now in Oakland and just everything else came before that. | ||
| And now she's like babysitting the white lady's kids and they're calling her grandma and sitting on her lap. | ||
| And she's not treated like she's a charity case. | ||
| She's treated like a member of the family. | ||
| And so you get those people who feel – who have had that experience, that side of things, right? | ||
| That's going to bind you together in really significant ways and they end up going down because of the – just the temper of the times. | ||
| This is a civil rights organization. | ||
| If you look at what happened with really like both – The threads of the protest movement in the 1960s, you see this thing happen where it starts to build up in the 1960s and you have like the campus anti-war kind of hippie type protest side and then you've got the civil rights side. | ||
| And both of those are kind of within – the energy is being channeled into outlets that are – They're not antisocial. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like you got Martin Luther King like leading a movement telling the people basically like it's an American civil rights movement. | ||
| It's not a – he's telling them we're not getting our – The rights we deserve as Americans and that's what we want. | ||
| You had guys like Malcolm X who didn't think of it that way. | ||
| They thought we're an African diaspora and we're a people and we need to like focus on that. | ||
| But as long as Martin Luther King was alive, he had the moral weight within the movement to sort of fend off the emerging black power elements and stuff that were coming in. | ||
| On the other side, like the campus and anti-war left, if you go up to like 1968, the year of – You know, the big riot at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. | ||
| Eugene McCarthy was senator running for president and he was like the only person in the political spectrum who's going to be available for the office of president who was – he wanted to end the Vietnam War. | ||
| And when you think about like this is a time – this is not like – Today we want to end the Iraq war or whatever. | ||
| It's like, no, this is a matter of life and death for these protesters. | ||
| It's a matter of, are they going to get drafted and sent over to this jungle to get killed for something that almost everybody at that point, even the president and the secretary of defense, we have their backroom dialogues and stuff. | ||
| Now, New was a lost war and it was pointless to continue other than for vague reasons of national honor and you're going to have to go do this. | ||
| Maybe die, definitely kill, you know, and go do—so this is important to these people. | ||
| It wasn't like a—just an ideological thing. | ||
| And then the Democratic Party just completely, openly, ridiculously, like, just steals the nomination from Eugene McCarthy. | ||
| You know, the Hubert Humphrey who they put in, he didn't win a single primary. | ||
| He wasn't even put into the process until way, way—he was just installed. | ||
| It was a Kamala Harris kind of thing, like in the last election, where they just decided it. | ||
| These people who were like they had the clean for gene movement, which is all these hippies, all these like, you know, college radicals and stuff who've been letting their freak flag fly all this time. | ||
| They all cut their hair and they shaved and got good and clean cuts so they could go door to door to like normie middle class people and talk to them about Eugene McCarthy. | ||
| In other words, they committed to like they got with the program. | ||
| They were like, OK, we're going to do it the right way. | ||
| We're going to do it, you know, through the right channels and institutions. | ||
| We're going to do that. | ||
| Civil rights movement was doing that under Martin Luther King. | ||
| Same year, you have McCarthy gets robbed of the nomination. | ||
| They try to protest it, and they get the living shit kicked out of him by the Chicago police. | ||
| On the other side, obviously, Martin Luther King gets killed. | ||
| And what you saw after that is all that energy that had previously been channeled into these productive and pro-social outlets, it just scattered to the winds. | ||
| You know, those things got delegitimized and all of a sudden it just goes in every direction. | ||
| And that's when like in the... | ||
| You know, starting really in like 1969, that's when the Weathermen came about, you know, like Weathermen came about like after, you know, most of the stuff we associate with the 60s. | ||
| But then into the early 70s, you just see this massive proliferation of cults and violent radical movements. | ||
| You know, you had like an offshoot of the Black Panthers out of New York called the Black Liberation Army, and they were just hunting down cops and killing them. | ||
| You know, dozens of cops across the country, they just hunted down and killed. | ||
| You had just truly insane groups like the Symbionese Liberation Army. | ||
| You know, they were like just led by a guy who was like legitimately mentally ill, had been in and out of institutions. | ||
| And he went to like, you know, one of the like, you know, bitter clinger, like last holdout sort of radical enclaves in Berkeley and found a bunch of lesbians there who were like radical feminist lesbians and got them to follow him. | ||
| They're the ones that kidnapped Patty Hearst and, you know, got her going and everything. | ||
| And Jonestown, like the reason there's such an interesting story to tell, like, and this is really like the angle I took on it, is they're a microcosm of the whole movement, you know. | ||
| In the mid-50s, they're idealistic. | ||
| They're in it for the right reasons. | ||
| They truly believe in what they're doing. | ||
| They encounter resistance from political resistance, social resistance, and as that resistance stiffens and then gets really serious when you've got people coming into the church. | ||
| Who worked for a Modesto TV station telling them that, hey, I'm coming to you because I was just approached by the FBI asking me to come spy on you. | ||
| So I don't know what's up there, but you must be doing something right. | ||
| So you join them, you know? | ||
| You got that kind of stuff going on. | ||
| And these people get radicalized and then they turn violent and, you know, out of paranoia and drugs was a big part of it. | ||
| They lose their shit, you know? | ||
| Trevor Burrus: What drugs are they doing? | ||
| Aaron Ross Powell: Well, the drugs were not – they were still done sometimes. | ||
| But like they weren't really technically allowed for like the members themselves. | ||
| But Jim Jones was on – he was basically for the last 10 years of his life, it was amphetamines when you get up, barbiturates to go to sleep. | ||
| And it was every day for 10 years. | ||
| Which is not the best for perspective. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| And it's like that's a thing with Adolf Hitler too. | ||
| You keep yourself going that way. | ||
| And somebody who I had read a little bit about the effects because of the Jonestown story, I read a fair amount about the effects of long-term amphetamine use, the paranoia and mania that it can result. | ||
| And so as I was getting up to the last episode, I asked one of my buddies. | ||
| He was a police officer in SoCal. | ||
| If he had any ways, if he could figure out, get me some police reports that were incidents where there was usually a husband and father who had taken his family hostage, and specifically if he was hopped up on methamphetamines that resulted in a murder-suicide. | ||
| And he got me a big stack of these things. | ||
| I don't know where he got them or if he was supposed to, but he got these for me and I was able to read through them. | ||
| And about half of them, they ended in... | ||
| A murder-suicide. | ||
| The other half, like, some of them, the guy got shot by the cops, some of them he gave up, but about half a minute of murder-suicide. | ||
| And as I just read through these, just again and again and again, I mean, it became very obvious. | ||
| Like, this is what happened, except at a larger scale in Jonestown. | ||
| You know, it's hard for people to kind of accept when you're talking about somebody like Jim Jones, who was like a raving lunatic by the end, but he loved his people. | ||
| Like, he actually did. | ||
| And people say, well, if he loved them, that's not possible. | ||
| How could he do that? | ||
| Those are people who have never been around domestic violence before. | ||
| It's very complicated. | ||
| You can have husbands who are absolute monsters to their children and their wife, but they still love them. | ||
| And it's weird. | ||
| And they have a serious emotional crisis if they leave or something. | ||
| And it's very complicated. | ||
| And Jim Jones was that way. | ||
| And actually, having gone through that process of reading about it... | ||
| And understanding it in this way, you know, it remains to be seen if I still think this when I finish all of my reading by the time I get up to the end of the World War II series. | ||
| But I see a lot of that in the Hitler story because, you know, Hitler was like – if people think of him as like a politician, they're missing a big part of what he was about. | ||
| Like if anything, he was more like a prophet figure. | ||
| He saw himself as like almost like a – Not a religious figure in the sense that he was sent by God and anything like that, but that he had this sacred mission to save the German people. | ||
| Political questions, you know, whatever. | ||
| It's why he just never compromised, even when it seemed insane not to compromise. | ||
| Like in 1923, when the French invaded Western Germany to take over a lot of their industrial area, all the parties, right, left and center, all came together to like oppose that in Germany. | ||
| And he stayed out of it. | ||
| He ordered all of his whole party to stay out of it because he was not going to accept the compromises that were going to come with working with the other groups. | ||
| You know, you read about, like, you read some of the reactions that people would have to him. | ||
| This is just like Jim Jones, where if his shtick works on you, man, like, you read some of, like, Joseph Goebbels' propaganda minister. | ||
| You read his diaries of, like, him describing meeting Hitler and, you know, going through it. | ||
| And it's, like, almost homoerotic. | ||
| He loves him, like, truly. | ||
| And he was not homosexual, but, like, he loved Adolf Hitler, truly loved him. | ||
| And that's the effect he had on his followers, like, across the board. | ||
| If his shtick didn't work on you, you were just like, ugh! | ||
| Like, how could anybody follow this? | ||
| This guy's crazy, he's, like, vulgar. | ||
| How is this possible? | ||
| Same thing with Jim Jones. | ||
| Well, same thing with all cults. | ||
| With all cults. | ||
| Like, if it doesn't work on you, you're revolted by it. | ||
| This is what's so fascinating about all cults in the beginning. | ||
| They seem great. | ||
| Like the Jim Jones thing in the beginning. | ||
| What a great idea. | ||
| Bring everybody together. | ||
| We're all family. | ||
| It's complete equals. | ||
| Let's all live together in harmony. | ||
| That's Wild Wild Country, too. | ||
| In the beginning, it looks great. | ||
| My friend Todd, we went out to dinner after the Wild Wild Country came on, and he goes, in the beginning, I was like, I want to join! | ||
| What can I join? | ||
| It seems like a way better way to live life. | ||
| Duncan was probably already buying his plane ticket to Oregon, yeah. | ||
| It's just, they all turn bad. | ||
| And they all go the same way. | ||
| It all goes to, like, sex and drugs. | ||
| I don't understand it. | ||
| It's so weird. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, they all sort of start off pretty fun. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| And they always have hot women, too. | ||
| Oh, that's a big part of the program. | ||
| I don't know how this works or maybe it's just because the cult leader type, like even if he's crazy, is still like an alpha male type. | ||
| So he attracts a stable, a good-looking young ladies or something. | ||
| But it's like as I was going through reading about all these cults, all of them. | ||
| There's hot women everywhere. | ||
| You have to have them or you can't get the men to stay. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| That was the cult out here. | ||
| Before we bought the Comedy Mothership on 6th Street, which was the old Ritz Theater, we were in contract with this place called the One World Theater that was owned by the people that were running the... | ||
| This cult called the Bodhi Tree that was the subject of the documentary, Holy Hell. | ||
| I didn't know about that until I was under contract. | ||
| My friend Adam was like, have you seen the documentary? | ||
| I'm like, oh no, this fucking documentary? | ||
| And then you watch the documentary and that's what it was. | ||
| It was a guy who was a gay porn star and a hypnotist who starts this cult. | ||
| And he gets all these yoga people. | ||
| He's teaching yoga classes, gets all these yoga people to live together. | ||
| And in the beginning, it looks amazing. | ||
| It looks like so much fun. | ||
| Everyone's doing yoga. | ||
| They're eating healthy food. | ||
| They've got a community together. | ||
| They live together. | ||
| They grow food. | ||
| And then, of course, it goes sideways. | ||
| You know, talking about the Symbionese Liberation Army, in 74... | ||
| There was a huge firefight in South Central Los Angeles where they were holed up in a house. | ||
| It was just 500 cops, thousands of bullets flying, and then the house burned down and they all died inside. | ||
| And I read this somewhere. | ||
| I don't... | ||
| I don't have, like, first-hand knowledge of this. | ||
| I don't know if you've ever heard it before, but that Big John McCarthy, his dad was an LAPD cop, too. | ||
| And he was, like, a major figure in that. | ||
| He, like, won a medal for valor, like, for, like, doing things during the shootout there. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| I didn't know that. | ||
| John can tell me if I'm wrong about that, but I read it somewhere. | ||
| Yeah, I'll ask him. | ||
| I didn't know that. | ||
| Shout-out to Big John. | ||
| The original. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it's... | ||
| It's just so strange that the pattern repeats itself over and over again of one person with the answers, one charismatic figure who believes they're right and gets a bunch of people to go with them and in the beginning makes a very attractive environment for these people, really does foster this sense of community and belonging. | ||
| And then eventually it all goes sideways and it almost always has to do with some sort of either amphetamines or something along those lines. | ||
| I mean that's something that really happened that derailed the protest movement like not just in the People's Temple cult but like in general. | ||
| Like if you read about – You lived in San Francisco for a while, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| When did you live there? | ||
| So I was seven. | ||
| So I was 71-ish. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| No, 74-ish. | ||
| 74-ish. | ||
| It's around this time. | ||
| You read about how everybody thinks about the summer of love and it was all chill or whatever. | ||
| But by the time you get up to 67, that's really kind of, in a lot of ways, the end of... | ||
| The flower power, like, era of the 60s. | ||
| It's not the beginning of it. | ||
| Like, a lot of people think, like, the Summer of Love in 67 kind of kicked the whole thing off. | ||
| It didn't. | ||
| Like, by that point, all the people who, you know, had been in – they were smoking herb and doing mushrooms and LSD and everything. | ||
| Things had started to switch over and people were doing speed like crazy. | ||
| Well, especially after 70, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| They passed the Sweeping Psychedelics Act. | ||
| It didn't cover prescription. | ||
| Amphetamines. | ||
| In the pool player community where I was playing pool all the time, guys would take amphetamines and play for 36 hours in a row. | ||
| And it was a war of attrition. | ||
| The whole thing was to see how long the other guy would be able to hold up and what kind of mixture he was on. | ||
| And it changed the culture, you know, of course, because, I mean, a culture that's based around LSD and weed and whatever is totally different than a culture based around speed, you know. | ||
| Yeah, but look at cocaine movies. | ||
| Look at the 1980s. | ||
| Everything's a cocaine movie. | ||
| They're terrible. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You go and watch like Le Mans, go watch like some of these like really interesting films from the 1970s or 1960s. | ||
| And then you go 20 years forward, you're like, what the fuck happened? | ||
| Cocaine happened. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Everybody started believing that everything they did was awesome. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's – One of the reasons, like, you know, I know people talk about the beginning of the war on drugs and, you know, that a big part of it was about having a way to, like, get in and prosecute, like, civil rights activists. | ||
| And that's all true. | ||
| At the same time, like, I look back on those people, you know, Richard Nixon, I don't know, maybe he was, like, what was he, like, 50 or 60 or something in 1970. So he was born in, this guy born in 1910. You know, we just closed the frontier like a few years before that. | ||
| And like he's born in 1910 and people are watching like the transformations that are taking place in society that already just culturally are so mind bending in terms of radical change. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And seeing like the increase in violence, the, you know, all of the things that are coming with the new drug culture, especially once it started to move away from psychedelics into, you know, street drugs and stuff. | ||
| And, you know, thinking that like. | ||
| I mean, I think that they had those motivations. | ||
| Like, they thought, you know, this is a way to get at these people we need to stop. | ||
| But I also think that they really believe, like, this is crazy. | ||
| This is a real problem. | ||
| We've got to do something about it. | ||
| I mean, you know, there's one of my episodes. | ||
| It's part of the Labor series, but it centers around this teachers' union strike that happened in New York City. | ||
| In Brooklyn in 1968. And it became like a—it turned into a big blow-up between—actually expanded even past the city, but especially within the city, between the black radicals and activists and the Jews in the city. | ||
| Because the teachers' union and the New York City public schools at the time, the teachers and administrators were like 75% Jewish. | ||
| And in this one particular school where— The parents, the kids, everybody are getting radicalized by like the black power ideas that are emerging in the latter half of the 60s, especially in New York because they got Harlem up there and Harlem was always kind of the fountainhead of that kind of thing. | ||
| They came into conflict over, you know, how the school was going to be run. | ||
| But part of it, you know, the way the conflict kind of really started off was the teachers were like going to their union and... | ||
| They were going on strike not because they wanted, like, more pay or anything like that. | ||
| It was because, like, teachers were getting raped. | ||
| They were getting beaten. | ||
| One of them got set on fire. | ||
| It was, like, crazy, like, what was going on. | ||
| And there was – in one of the books that I read about it, or was talking about it, it wasn't specifically just about that, but they quoted a – The head of the agency in New York City that dealt with, like, drug addiction services and stuff. | ||
| And they said in this one school there were more drug addicts among the students. | ||
| And they actually said more hardcore drug addicts among the student body than we have at our city agency the resources to deal with. | ||
| One school. | ||
| And so it's like those are crazy times. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| I think about, like, the 60s are so wild because, you know, there were... | ||
| There were pilots in Vietnam who got shot down and taken prisoner in like 1963. And they got released in 1973. And just imagining like, they were listening to Buddy Holly or whatever when they came out. | ||
| And, you know, before they went and they come back and, I mean, all the 60s has happened. | ||
| And they're like, what in the hell is going on? | ||
| Can you imagine? | ||
| Could you imagine? | ||
| Also, can you imagine being held in a Vietnamese prison for 10 years in a war that you, there's no way you can justify it. | ||
| There's still, like, no one has. | ||
| And they probably know the Gulf of Tonkin was bullshit. | ||
| Fuck, and you come back to America and you see Led Zeppelin, like, what happened? | ||
| What did I miss? | ||
| From Buddy Holly to Jimi Hendrix. | ||
| Jimi Hendrix is dead at this point. | ||
| So you have to go back and listen to recordings and go, what the fuck did I miss? | ||
| You know? | ||
| I mean, you can't even watch it on YouTube. | ||
| Like, how is this guy playing the Star Spangled Banner with his teeth? | ||
| Like, what happened? | ||
| What fucking happened? | ||
| You know, your wife, if she stuck around for those 10 years, it's like, you know, she used to be nice and obedient. | ||
| Now she wants to go out to work and she's not taking your shit, you know? | ||
| Like, things have just changed so rapidly. | ||
| And whenever a society goes through like that kind of a rapid transition, you know, there are always going to be just people who fall through the cracks. | ||
| There's always going to be people who spin off in wild directions. | ||
| Yeah, always. | ||
| Like and this happens like in microcosmic levels too. | ||
| You know, you think about like my father's side of my family. | ||
| They all came out from like Kentucky and Alabama during the Dust Bowl, right? | ||
| They're like crazy Scots-Irish like Appalachian folks who came out to California during the Dust Bowl. | ||
| And so I know a fair amount about like the Okie migrations and everything and the... | ||
| The Appalachian migrations up to the Midwest like a couple decades later. | ||
| And one of the things like people, I guess it's not a well-known history, is that a lot of the stuff you saw with when African-Americans started moving out of the South and facing resistance, like nobody wants them in their neighborhood and all these other kind of things. | ||
| The Okies and the Appalachian folks in the Midwest got the same thing. | ||
| Nobody liked them. | ||
| You know, there was an incident when... | ||
| A bunch of Okies were coming into Los Angeles County, and as they were approaching, the authorities found out about it. | ||
| The sheriffs went and blocked the road, and they're like, nope, you're not coming here. | ||
| Get out of here. | ||
| They were not liked. | ||
| And the thing is, part of the reason for that was... | ||
| It wasn't just like straight up bigotry or something. | ||
| These people were – they had habits and ways of life that were very different than the people – the settled people in California were used to. | ||
| These are crazy country people. | ||
| They drank a lot. | ||
| They fight a lot. | ||
| They're poor as shit. | ||
| So there's like a higher percentage of like the criminal class like among those people and things. | ||
| And so people really looked down on them and isolated them at least for that first generation. | ||
| You know, you see it when like you have these people who, you know, they were farmers. | ||
| That's why they came out here. | ||
| They were farmers. | ||
| The Dust Bowl came. | ||
| They can't farm anymore. | ||
| They at least farm workers. | ||
| So they're rural Southerners who are used to working in agriculture. | ||
| And now they've got to go move into like a big city and try to find a job. | ||
| You know, that's going to be a huge adjustment. | ||
| A lot of their like the community that they had. | ||
| In the place they're coming from. | ||
| A lot of times the marriages don't hold up under the strain of like the transition. | ||
| The communities, they kind of scatter and fall apart. | ||
| You lose that. | ||
| And people just start to fall through the cracks, you know. | ||
| And you saw that with the African-American Great Migration. | ||
| You saw with the Okies. | ||
| And you see at any time there's like a rapid transition that people have to go through that, you know, some people are going to make it, but some people are not going to make it. | ||
| And very often, you know, the unfortunate thing is the people who... | ||
| The people who don't make it through that transition in one piece very often form the reputation that the rest of society sort of attaches to those people. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And do you ever read Gladwell's take on the Appalachian folks, too? | ||
| That they emerged from herding populations. | ||
| And that herding populations had to be particularly violent because you had to defend your cows because someone could come along, your sheep, and steal all of them. | ||
| Whereas if you're a farmer, it's very difficult to steal all your corn. | ||
| It's very difficult to steal all your crops. | ||
| It takes time. | ||
| You have to pluck them. | ||
| You have to pick them, carry them. | ||
| These people had a very violent past because they were used to – like if they stole your sheep, they stole your food. | ||
| You starve to death. | ||
| Winter is coming. | ||
| You had to defend it and they were particularly violent. | ||
| This is why you get into some of the feuds that happen in those areas which are legendary. | ||
| They all came from – at least all the early settlers who kind of set the tone for Appalachian culture. | ||
| They were all Scots-Irish and like North English borderers who were basically like right on the other side of – The isle from Ireland there. | ||
| And these are people like this was like a lawless part of the country. | ||
| This is a place where the central government was far away and it was infinitely smaller than anything we think of a central government. | ||
| Now, those people were up there on their own. | ||
| And so you had you still had clan feuds. | ||
| You still had like all these things. | ||
| And then over in Northern Ireland, when the British settled the plantation there, you know, you've got conflict between Protestants and Catholics, between Irish and the Scots, Scots that they brought over there. | ||
| And so these people were from a hard core. | ||
| You know, and even little things like people would talk about they would complain when they came to America about how like these people don't take care of their houses. | ||
| And the reason for that is that over there, like your house can get burned down. | ||
| You got to build another one. | ||
| They just didn't think of these things as like permanent fixtures the same way like you here in Boston do or something. | ||
| So it filtered down to just like cultural ways that were very off-putting to the people who were already settled here, you know. | ||
| But those Appalachian folks are they're tough, man. | ||
| And they. | ||
| You know, I mean, you go all the way back to the Revolutionary War, and every war ever since then, they've basically been the core of the American, like, combat forces. | ||
| And that continues right up to this day. | ||
| And, you know, it's interesting to, like, it's another one of those things to, like, you just wrap your head around, like, who our ancestors are and what they went through, you know? | ||
| The Puritans, like, the part of East Anglia that a lot of the Puritans came from in England. | ||
| There was – this is in like – this is 100 years into like the settlement of America. | ||
| So you're talking like the early 1700s. | ||
| There were still a couple churches in that part of England that the doors had the human skins of Danish raiders who had come over to like plunder their shit, who they had killed, skinned and put them on their church doors just as a sign. | ||
| So it's like – Dude, these people are hard. | ||
| That's like another species. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's very difficult to take people out of the context of the world that they live in right now. | ||
| It's very difficult to even imagine living in a time like that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, I think that's one of the more... | ||
| Fascinating and important parts about history and long-form history podcasts in particular because they're so entertaining and engaging. | ||
| Like Dan Carlin's and yours and Daniele Bolelli, he's great at it too. | ||
| There's a bunch of people that do it now. | ||
| And it's a very difficult path mentally to try to even imagine yourself in a time like this. | ||
| I'm a giant fan of Dan's series on... | ||
| Genghis Khan and the Mongols. | ||
| Just try to imagine living in a time where there's a group of people that have formed a super army for the very first time and they've killed 10% of the population of Earth. | ||
| And they're sacking entire cities, burning them to the ground, piling up the bones in the middle of the city to where people walking up to it think it's a snow mound. | ||
| They don't even know what it is from the distance. | ||
| Yeah, and like... | ||
| You live in a world like before modern communications or anything. | ||
| So it's not like over the course of five years, like tensions with the Mongols are increasing. | ||
| We think there might be a war or anything. | ||
| It's now a horseman like speeds up to your city panicked and says, there's a huge army over there. | ||
| They'll be here in 36 hours. | ||
| And that's it. | ||
| You got to get your shit together and go deal with that. | ||
| Crazy. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| And this is the reality of people who are unfortunate enough to be born at that time. | ||
| And we are very fortunate to be born at the time that we're born, but still, we are going to be looked back upon. | ||
| By future, more enlightened civilizations, the same way we look back upon the Mongols. | ||
| We will look back upon what's going on in all the wars in the world, all the things that we've done, all the things that we continue to have done, the lies, the propaganda, the taking advantage of people for financial gain, all the things that we do right now. | ||
| Factory farming, that's my big one. | ||
| I'm 100% certain that... | ||
| Like, eventually down the line, they're going to look at us the way we look at slaveholders because of the way we do factory farming. | ||
| Oh, it's disgusting. | ||
| It's a horrific way to live. | ||
| And unfortunately, when you have enormous populations of people that constantly require food and don't grow anything, you have to come up with some way to feed those folks. | ||
| And I'm a giant fan of regenerative farming, but I'm very skeptical that that could scale out to where you could just go in and out and get a double-double. | ||
| Just like that from regenerative agriculture. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, maybe it can be done. | ||
| There's a lot of land that's not utilized in this country. | ||
| Maybe it can be done. | ||
| What do I know? | ||
| But what I do know is that factory farming is fucking disgusting. | ||
| And when you have ag-gag laws where a person working there who's horrified can't even alert the general public or they face consequences, legal consequences, you can go to fucking jail for telling people about something that's absolutely horrific that shouldn't be legal. | ||
| Yeah, that's crazy. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| That's just a crazy thing. | ||
| And that's just a byproduct of protecting corporations above our moral and ethical structure. | ||
| And then the reality of needing food for all these people. | ||
| And how do you mitigate that without upending the entire industry? | ||
| Like, instantaneously. | ||
| And how do you do that? | ||
| How does it even scale out? | ||
| How do you take... | ||
| You know, we've had... | ||
| People on Will Harris, particularly from White Oaks Pastures in Georgia, where his family owned an industrialized farm. | ||
| And they used industrial fertilizers and all that jazz. | ||
| It took him 20 years and who knows how many dollars to convert his farm to regenerative agriculture. | ||
| And the result's been... | ||
| Incredible. | ||
| I mean, just soil richness, the way they've been able to show that they can have these animals exist in what's basically confined nature. | ||
| You just sort of manipulate nature and let them do what they would naturally do if they were all living together on the plains. | ||
| And then that's how we're supposed to grow food. | ||
| And this is like the most ethical way, the healthiest way, the best way for the land. | ||
| It's zero carbon footprint. | ||
| It actually sequesters carbon this way. | ||
| It's the way the earth is supposed to exist with all these animals. | ||
| But we've sort of – we've bastardized that and I think you're right that in future generations they're going to look upon that and go, what the fuck were they thinking? | ||
| They knew. | ||
| They had the internet. | ||
| They knew. | ||
| They watched the videos. | ||
| They saw it. | ||
| They saw it and they just like put the blinders on and kept buying cheeseburgers. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's interesting like the shift to industrial agriculture when you look at the – Like the social changes that resulted from it. | ||
| It reminds me actually a lot of after Rome conquered Carthage and then the rest of the Mediterranean, you know, you really became like the Roman Empire that we think of, even though it was still a republic. | ||
| You had this influx of just hordes and hordes and hordes of slaves that were coming from these conquered places back into Italy. | ||
| And so you had before that, you had like a Roman Republic where each citizen was a soldier. | ||
| He was like an independent farmer, small farmer, and he was a soldier and a citizen, and those were the Roman people. | ||
| But all of a sudden you get this huge influx of slaves, and the guys with the larger farms start building out economies of scale. | ||
| So now you have these massive plantations, and they're putting the smaller people out of business, you know, because... | ||
| They don't care if you're off to war. | ||
| If that means you don't get a full crop this year and you can't pay for next year's crop, well, there's no welfare program for that. | ||
| You've got to sell it to the guy or take a loan from a guy that then becomes a whole thing. | ||
| And so all of these independent farmers that were scattered around the countryside got concentrated into a handful of gigantic Latifundia farms. | ||
| And all of those people who used to live in the countryside, they had to... | ||
| Going to Rome, looking for work, looking for something to do. | ||
| And that's how you got the Roman mob that led to the fall of the Republic and Caesar and all that. | ||
| And if you think about it in our modern day, we had something similar happen, only it wasn't with an influx of slaves. | ||
| It was the Industrial Revolution. | ||
| All of a sudden, like, you know... | ||
| Having a family farm that you could actually, like, run profitably and sustain yourself on became extraordinarily difficult because prices of things went so far, of all, like, agricultural commodities dropped so far down. | ||
| I mean, I'm talking, like, 95%, you know, prices took a hit because all of a sudden you're, you know, you've got combines and tractors and shit. | ||
| So you're putting out so much more food that it becomes just not viable to be a small farmer, like, making his way back then. | ||
| So all of the, it got... | ||
| You know, consolidated into gigantic industrial farms and all the people who used to live in the countryside, which is most people back in the day, they all got herded into the cities to go work in the factories and on the docks and everything. | ||
| And, you know, it's interesting because, you know, over here that process was like sort of ad hoc and semi-voluntary, you know. | ||
| I say that with qualification, you know, if you were a farmer who couldn't pay your debt. | ||
| And you were getting evicted. | ||
| I mean, a sheriff would show up with his gun and be like, get out of here. | ||
| So, I mean, there's a little bit of implied force there. | ||
| But the same thing was happening, like, if you look at what Stalin was doing in the late 20s and the early 30s, is over there, they were far behind, like, the level of industrial development in Britain and the United States and Germany. | ||
| And he wanted to change that. | ||
| You had all these small farmers. | ||
| These are the kulaks, as people call them, you know, that he targeted. | ||
| Small farmers who lived out in the countryside and had their communities, but he wanted these to be consolidated into efficient industrial farms, and he wanted all of those people to get in the cities and work in the factories. | ||
| And so over there, they did by, like, brutal violence in a very accelerated period of time. | ||
| Like something that we did over a longer period of time that was more or less voluntary. | ||
| But at the end of the day, the social effects were the same. | ||
| All of those people from the country had to move into the cities and work in industry. | ||
| And that was – I mean it was inevitable. | ||
| I mean if like Russia would be – I'm speaking German right now if they didn't industrialize and get into a place where they could actually fend off that invasion. | ||
| I mean you had to do it just to compete. | ||
| But it creates – I mean if you think about like – I mean just think about like the history of Europe, in feudal Europe where the aristocracy, virtually all the wealth that anybody had was in land. | ||
| Like you were rich because you were an aristocrat who collected rents from the peasants on your land. | ||
| That's where – That's where wealth came from. | ||
| So wealth was, like, distributed throughout the countryside. | ||
| And a lot of times you'd have guys who, you know, a lord who would go to court sometimes or whatever, but his power base was out here in the countryside and they were all spread around. | ||
| And as that started, as the Industrial Revolution, like, really kicked into gear. | ||
| All these guys whose wealth was derived from agriculture and the whole aristocracy, you had, like, by the time you get up to the mid to late 1800s, you've got guys who are lords, like aristocrats, who are completely penniless. | ||
| Like, they have no money. | ||
| They still walk around, like, strut around like aristocrats, but they don't have any money. | ||
| Meanwhile, you have a guy who owns a bunch of newspapers in London or whatever who's super rich and, you know, a guy who owns a factory who's super rich. | ||
| And it really changed the balance of power between... | ||
| You know, the aristocracy and this commercial class that really, like, didn't even exist, like, a couple hundred years before, but now is, like, ascendant and really, like, asserting itself politically. | ||
| And, I mean, that right there is—and what we talked about earlier, as that's happening, you're also getting, you know, the former peasants and former small farmers are coming into the cities and becoming the new working class. | ||
| And all three of these groups are getting politicized, you know? | ||
| You know, these are just these are it's why the question of, you know, Dan likes to talk about, you know, the debate between the great man theory of history and the trends and forces theory, you know, is it like just broad social forces and so forth that just you could get rid of Hitler? | ||
| It would have been a guy named Otto, you know, who would have started Second World War. | ||
| He's all just we're all pawns in the, you know, the grand scheme of history. | ||
| Or does it take like? | ||
| Is it based on personality, like somebody who really moves the chains himself? | ||
| And it's always a little bit both, but that's something that will never be really fully resolved because, you know, there are times like that where – like take like the emergence of slavery in the New World. | ||
| It's a perfect example, right? | ||
| If you're a European country and this is like when we started colonizing the New World, the Spanish and Portuguese started colonizing it at first. | ||
| This is – Like right on the tail of them finishing up the Reconquistas. | ||
| So they had spent the last 700 years in a state of constant war because, you know, this is crazy to think about, but Muslims actually controlled Spain and Portugal for a longer period of time than Spanish and Portuguese people have controlled it since then. | ||
| So it was hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years and they're in a constant state of war to push the Muslims back into North Africa. | ||
| So you have a very Spartan, war-like people because it's how you had to be. | ||
| Their whole society was geared toward this conflict that was centuries long. | ||
| And so you take those people and they're the first ones who show up in the New World, right? | ||
| So right there you've got a certain bias in the relations between these Europeans and the people in the New World. | ||
| Well, they come over there and this is pretty soon, just like, you know, 1492 and then just a few decades later, the Protestant Reformation happens. | ||
| So there's religious conflict and religious wars and things, you know, wars between different kingdoms now have a little bit higher stakes because you're not just talking about, you know, they're going to take this piece of territory from us or something. | ||
| It's like, no, they're going to change our religion, you know, really high stakes. | ||
| And this is still at a time when, you know, Europe politically, like geopolitically, was an anarchic place. | ||
| I mean, people were at war all the time and nobody even thought that war was immoral. | ||
| You know, it was actually like part of the natural order of things. | ||
| If you were a stronger neighbor and your weaker neighbor has something, you should have it, you know. | ||
| And there's nothing really like considered wrong about it, like, you know, in a moral sense, especially since back then wars were generally fought between. | ||
| You know, the aristocracy themselves, you know, the knights and people. | ||
| It wasn't like they were rounding up peasants and sending them off as cannon fodder. | ||
| And so given, like, the high stakes, once the Spanish and Portuguese came over to the New World and just started extracting so much wealth, you know, from there, almost immediately you get Charles V who takes over a huge chunk of Europe, you know, becomes the first Holy Roman Emperor and, you know, is just becoming overwhelmingly powerful. | ||
| And if you're any other country in Europe at that time, you're looking at it like, we've got to get in on this New World thing or else we're going to get swallowed up. | ||
| And so you start getting in on the New World thing. | ||
| And what you find out really quickly is, oh, we don't have enough people actually to go over there and do all the mining and all the agriculture and everything else. | ||
| We're going to have to find somebody else, another population to do that. | ||
| Well, you couldn't take any Europeans as slaves or anything because whoever the... | ||
| You needed your own people here and the kingdom next door was not going to let you do that, take their people. | ||
| And so they started resorting to West African slavery, which was sort of served up to the Spanish and Portuguese because the Muslims in Spain and Portugal had been engaged in that for centuries. | ||
| And so they had been sort of – like the Spanish and Portuguese already knew the trade networks. | ||
| They were very familiar with African slavery, which had existed in Spain really since like – The time of the Roman Empire or before. | ||
| They had a constant history with slavery going all the way back. | ||
| And so they get over there and they start using slaves to set up their colonies and extract the wealth from those colonies. | ||
| And the interesting thing to me about it is that if you were a ruler who said, yeah, well, I don't think slavery is right, so I'm not going to do that. | ||
| OK, then you will get swallowed up by somebody who has less scruples and is willing to do it. | ||
| They're going to get richer and more powerful and they're going to take what you've got. | ||
| And guess what? | ||
| There's slavery anyway. | ||
| It's just that you're not around anymore. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's it. | |
| And the same like with the West African kingdoms and the rulers and warlords down there who were selling the slaves to the Europeans. | ||
| You could be a guy who's like, you know, I really don't think we should be selling our fellow Africans to these Europeans to be, you know. | ||
| Taking his slaves. | ||
| That just seems wrong to me. | ||
| Well, OK, that's fine. | ||
| Your neighbor who is getting gold and guns from the Portuguese or whatever is going to conquer you and take you all as slaves and send you over. | ||
| And so it almost becomes like a game theory problem where there's no overarching authority to tell all the people, hey, we're not doing this. | ||
| And so each individual actor does it just really as a matter of expedient survival at the time. | ||
| And when you look at when slavery did... | ||
| When the slave trade was put to a halt, it only happened after the British Empire became like the real dominant power on the seas. | ||
| And they were the ones with the anti-slaver ships who were going around putting a stop to the trade. | ||
| And that never could have happened until there was like this big overarching authority who could actually make everybody else make this change that they didn't want to make. | ||
| It's a crazy history. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| And again, it's so hard to put yourself into perspective of those people that are living life back then, where you have completely different expectations, completely different norms. | ||
| And I think that's one of the reasons why your podcast is so valuable. | ||
| So listen, man, thank you very much for being here. | ||
| I really appreciate it. | ||
| I'm sorry that all that stuff happened to you, but I think ultimately it just made more people aware of your show, which is excellent. | ||
| Thanks, man. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Appreciate you. | ||
| It's Martyr Made. | ||
| It's available everywhere. | ||
| Audio only. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't want to make people stare at my ugly mug for a seven-hour episode. | ||
|
unidentified
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All right. | |
| Thank you, Daryl. |
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