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Oct. 29, 2021 - This Past Weekend - Theo Von
02:33:20
E364 Jesse Ventura

Jesse Ventura is the former governor of Minnesota, professional wrestler and political commentator. Theo talks with Jesse about his time with the military, being a security guard for the Rolling Stones, conspiracy theories, and his time as the Minnesota governor. We shot this episode last minute on the road in Minnesota at a lovely hotel. Big thank you to the staff at AmericInn Lodge & Suites: https://www.wyndhamhotels.com/americinn/white-bear-lake-minnesota/americinn-lodge-and-suites-white-bear-lake-st-paul/overview  New Merch: http://theovonstore.com  New Tour Dates! https://theovon.com/tour Podcastville mugs and digital prints available now at https://theovon.pixels.com Support our Sponsors: The Zebra: http://thezebra.com/THEO  Peloton: http://onepeloton.com  Betterhelp: https://betterhelp.com/theo  for 10% OFF your First Month Babbel: https://Babbel.com  use promo code THEO Upstart: https://upstart.com/Theo  for a fast and easy way to pay off debt Paint Your Life: http://paintyourlife.com text "WEEKEND" to 64-000 for 20% off Liquid Death: https://liquiddeath.com   Submit your funny videos, TikToks, questions and topics you'd like to hear on the podcast to tpwproducer@gmail.com. Hit the Hotline 985-664-9503 Video Hotline for Theo Upload here: http://bit.ly/TPW_VideoHotline Find Theo: Website: https://theovon.com Instagram: https://instagram.com/theovon Facebook: https://facebook.com/theovon Facebook Group: https://facebook.com/groups/thispastw... Twitter: https://twitter.com/theovon YouTube: https://youtube.com/theovon Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiEK... Producer: Spencer Liautaud https://instagram.com/adventuresofspe... Producer: Colin Reiner https://instagram.com/colin_reiner     See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Today's guest, Jeepers.
I've never had an interview where it was not a conversation, really.
So I think it's, you know, and I'm saying this now because it was hard to get a word in.
I am grateful for this man's time, but I was happy when it ended.
This man is a former governor of Minnesota.
He is a unique man, and he will tell you all about it.
I am very grateful for his time, and I mean that.
And I learned a lot that I can do a better job as an interviewer, I think, for sure.
I did learn that.
But he makes some really interesting points, and he does talk about some things that I'm really excited to that I was grateful to get to speak, to hear him speak on.
I'm not trying to rinse the dude, but I didn't get a chance to say anything.
So I felt like at the very least I deserved that.
I'm very happy to have today's guest, Mr. Jesse Ventura.
For me to set that parking brake and let myself unwind.
Shine that light on me.
I'll sit and tell you my stories.
Shine on me.
And I will find a song.
I'll be singing just a phone.
I'll be singing just a phone.
Have you ever seen these ads on TV now where they got the big lawsuit against 3M because the hearing devices for the military and combat apparently were defective?
I haven't seen them.
Well, they got ads on TV all the time.
It's a class action lawsuit.
Specific lawsuits.
That if you're deaf and you served in the military, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and you had 3M made these things you stick in your ears, I guess, that are supposed to save your hearing.
And what happened?
Well, no, and they didn't work function right.
So now there's a lawsuit on it, which is all fine and dandy.
But I sit back and go, well, gee, what about us Vietnam guys that nobody gave us nothing for our ears?
We're all deaf today.
And what it tells me is this, how different the combat was in the Middle East than Vietnam.
Because in Vietnam, you couldn't wear earplugs.
You relied on your ears.
Wow.
You're in the jungle.
You got to listen.
You got to hear.
You hear a twig snap.
It could be your life.
Yes.
And you have to hear it.
Right.
You know, but in this urban fighting, apparently you can put in earplugs and blast each other because you're in the city.
Right.
Or the desert.
So it's just interesting how like through bat as time.
But I mean, where's our compensation?
I'm deaf.
Right.
Yeah.
I can't.
Because I sat and shot stoner machine guns and all this shit and blew things up.
Yeah, you can't even listen to Pearl Jam enjoyably, you know.
Oh, no, but there's better than Pearl Jam now.
I found a new young rock band that has given me my youth again.
What is that?
It's a group.
I don't know if you guys know them, Greta Van Fleet.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, my God.
Yeah.
I was a huge Led Zeppelin fan.
And Bonham died and the rift between Plant and Paige, they're never going to get together.
They're never going to play again.
And my heart ached because I thought I'm going to go to my grave and never hear any more Led Zeppelin.
They're gone.
My son comes over the other day.
He says, hey, dad, he said, you liked Zap, didn't you?
I said, hell yeah.
Saw him in 72 and 75. And he said, listen to this.
And he put on a song.
And I sat listening to it.
And I looked at him.
I said, what, did Jimmy Page release shit from the archives?
I've never heard this Zeppelin song before.
Wow, that much.
He goes, that isn't Led Zeppelin.
I go, what?
And he said, that's a band called Greta Van Fleet out of Michigan.
Then he pulls up on his phone an interview with Robert Plant.
And Robert Plant talks about him.
Talks about the Greta Van Flint.
Greta Van Fleet.
And Robert Plant laughingly goes, somewhere I've heard that voice before.
And he goes, I'm jealous.
Wow.
Because he said they're young and I'm not.
Yeah.
Well, youth becomes that great.
I think youth.
This guy, he's not quite totally Robert Plant because he's a little rough on the edges with the little Getty Lee thrown in from Rush.
Yeah.
Yeah, I can see he's got a little, not a feminist side, but a little bit more of that.
But Plant had that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
plant very much had a feminine side to his voice.
He'd sing those slow, bluesy songs.
Drive my wife crazy.
Yeah.
And to me, I don't care what anybody says.
The best Zeppelin album is the first.
Yeah.
Is that when you went and saw him?
Was it around that time?
Oh, no.
I saw him in 72. Fourth had already been out because they did stay away that night.
Where'd you go see him?
San Diego.
Who'd you go with?
Do you remember?
Guys in the Navy.
Yeah.
I was in the Navy.
I was back from my first tour to Vietnam.
Wow.
And we went and saw Zeppelin.
And in fact, are we running?
Yes, sir.
Oh, we're on?
Can you hear us okay?
Yeah, we're rolling.
We can cut any of the South Carolina.
Oh, no, that's fine.
Then we're on and rolling.
Then let's talk.
We'll talk to rock and roll a little.
Yeah, let's talk about it.
No, I'm just curious.
No, where I was that weekend, that was the toughest rock and roll weekend of my life was Led Zeppelin.
It was 72, so I was about 21, I guess, 21 years old, maybe 20. And Zeppelin was Friday night.
And Led Zepp played with no warm-up band.
They would come out at 8 o'clock, and they would finish at 11.15, three hours and 15 minutes of Led Zeppelin.
And the only break they ever took was during Moby Dick when John Bonham would do about a 15-minute drum solo.
Then the other three would walk off, drink their water, whatever they were going to do, have a cigarette, or whatever they were going to do, and then come back out at the end of Bonham's drum solo, and then they'd finish up.
Well, I saw Zeppelin on Friday night, which was rugged.
And we had to come back Saturday and then face Jethro Tull.
Wow.
Because that was the weekend.
Zeppelin Friday, Jethro Tull Saturday.
And were you guys partying before?
Like, were people partying pretty hard for those people?
Well, no, no.
In those days, open seating was standing wherever.
Oh, no.
Oh, geez.
I used to bodyguard the bands when there was still open seating.
Craziness.
Open seating ended in Cleveland, I think, or somewhere at a WHO concert where the people trampled to death three or four people, died.
And that's when the authorities came in, like they always will.
As soon as people are dying, they're going to come in and say, wait a minute, you're having fun, but people are dying.
So, no, and then they put on that you had to have tickets just to be on the main floor.
And they started having security to where.
But in the early days, oh, you just packed in.
When I did the stones here, right?
They got the boards, the hockey boards.
We would line up in the pit before the stone, and the stones come out.
We're the security down in the pit down there.
And they would tell us over the walkie-talkies, okay, we're opening the doors.
You would literally feel the ground start shaking.
Wow.
Like running of the bulls.
And a slow roar would start.
And then you'd look up and the doors would open.
And these guys would be running and literally diving down the stairs to get to the floor to be first in the front row.
And did you feel like you're playing defense at that point?
No, no, no.
You've got the barricades up.
They can only come up to the barricade, the hockey boards.
Wow.
But they pack in there so tight.
This is before when they had open seating.
So tight that you'd see during a concert people raising their arms up down front, waving them.
Just to breathe, right?
Oh, no, no, no, no.
They can't bring them down.
Wow.
They raise them up to get space and air, and then the wedge wedges them in so much they can't bring their arms down.
So they have to stand the rest of the show with their arms in the air or setting them on somebody else's shoulders or whatever.
I had a little girl, and I was in peak wrestling because I had had some knee surgery, and I was at the prime of my wrestling when I was doing this.
And so I was 265 pounds.
You know, it could deadlift well in the 600.
I mean, I was a bruiser.
You could deadlift a skinny family.
265 pounds.
And had a little girl down front that wanted to get out.
She couldn't take it no more.
And what we do to people like that, we'd pull them out and then shuttle them down the line.
They didn't get kicked out.
We just let them in the back.
Now the people that caused trouble, different story.
But like this young girl, she was crying, claustrophobic, couldn't take it no more.
I had to stand on the boards, get under her armpits.
Now I can deadlift over 600 pounds.
It was like pulling a cork out of a bottle because of the compression.
I had everything I could do.
I broke into a sweat.
Wow.
And finally, I got her out and we got her down and she thanked me and we sent her down the line.
Then on the flip side, I had some bozo start punching somebody.
And his back was to me and he had long hair.
I got up on the boards, got a hold of his hair, wound it into my hands, and removed him by the hair.
Oh, damn.
You can imagine what that felt like.
Well, he hits the deck, jumps up, going to fight me, and I just looked at him and I said, think again.
And he opened his hands up and backed up, and I said, get the F out of here.
And we shuttle.
And he went out the door.
Yeah.
You know, he didn't get let back in.
He went out the back door.
Do you miss it?
I got to introduce the stones.
Did you really?
Yeah, because one night during this, it was 78 or 81. I think it was 81. You're a bouncer.
You're basically security.
Security.
But you're also wrestling at this point.
Oh, yeah.
But you wrestling professionally?
You wrestling like, okay.
No, I was promoting.
So people know who you are, too, sometimes?
Oh, yeah.
Gave me stuff to brag about on TV.
Yeah.
You know, gave me stuff for interviews.
Oh, I bet.
They came up.
Levy was the promoter, and he comes up to me, and I think it was 81, and he says to me, we done got no one to introduce the stones.
He goes, you want to do it?
I said, hell yeah, I'll do it.
but here's what's good: they tell you exactly what you're to say, and you can't vary from it.
You walk out under the spotlight, the whole 19,000 people or whatever at St. Paul Civic Center, and you simply walk up to the mic and you go, Ladies and gentlemen, the world's greatest rock and roll band, the Rolling Stones, and you walk off.
Damn.
Does it feel pretty good?
I did get a good payback because that night at the end of the show, as they left the stage, Ronnie Wood looked at me and said, hey, Jesse, how'd we do?
I said, good, Woody, good.
As you.
I got to tell you all sorts of rock and roll stories.
Really?
Oh, yeah.
One time I got a sign jagger where I just followed Mick around.
So you're just doing security for him?
Yeah.
No, no.
I did security.
The bands that would come to Minnesota.
Okay.
I didn't travel with them.
Okay.
We would get them here.
Okay.
And then we would provide security and ensure they got, once they were in the building, we had them and we ensured they got in their limos.
Then they're on their own.
So or other wrestler, other rep providers.
No, just this is you.
A friend of mine knew I'd had some knee surgery and he said, hey, you want to make 25 bucks a night and hear the best rock and roll in town?
And I loved rock and roll and you got the best seat in the house and they pay you 25 bucks or 50 bucks.
I forget what it was you got paid for doing it.
I said, sure, I'll do it.
So I just go over there and you just sit down in the pit and I did Springsteen, Foreigner, Marshall Tucker, Grateful Dead.
Damn.
Did all of them, all the greats from that era.
The Grateful Dead's the easiest.
Is it really?
Oh, they're so good.
The Deadheads.
Yeah.
They all know each other.
They travel.
There's a group of fans that travel to every dead concert.
Oh, yeah.
They're all doing grilled cheeses and they talk to each other.
Bob, we missed you in Omaha.
Well, I couldn't make Omaha, but I'll see you in East Lansing.
Okay.
They all know each other.
They don't even rush the stage.
The deadheads just dance around in the aisles.
They're like hippies, you know.
And the dead goes off on their tangents because no dead song's ever the same.
They take it any direction.
Oh, yeah.
They get real whimsical.
Oh, yeah.
And so that was the Grateful Dead.
They were the easiest.
Really?
Oh, we left the front.
So there ain't nothing worried.
These guys, they all know the Grateful Dead.
They're like friends.
It's like playing a concert in front of your friends.
Yeah, I bet if you're one of them, you're just seeing the same people every night.
I mean, well, they change a little bit like Bob Couldn't Make Omaha.
But I think I was on LSD just because I would see the same people in the crowd every night.
I'd be like, damn.
Maybe they thought that too.
I don't know.
I did all the bands back then, and it was a great experience.
Was there a point that you quit?
Did work just get too busy?
Oh, no, no.
I went back wrestling.
You went back wrestling?
Yeah, no, no, no.
That's right.
You ain't going to survive doing what I was doing.
Right.
Not in the lifestyle I preferred to live.
That was just busy work and fun.
And it paid off later because here's the story later.
1998, I became the governor of Minnesota.
I took office in 1999.
And 1999 was the Rolling Stones No Security Tour.
That's what it was called.
They came to Minnesota in February of 99. I'm the governor now.
And so as governor, and here's what I did.
I had never did a governor's proclamation, you know, where the governor proclaims something.
So being the outlaw I am and the governor of belonging to neither political party, which gave me great freedom in many ways.
My first thing as governor, I declared it the day that the Stones played here and the no-security tour in 99. I declared it Rolling Stones Day in Minnesota.
Now, it went to the Secretary of State because they have to sign off on it too, right?
And I won't say names, but we had this kind of tight-ass Republican woman from, you know, do I need to say more?
No, we can easily say that.
You can figure it out.
She wasn't going to sign it.
I picked up my phone in the governor's office.
I called her office.
I said, whatever her name was, first name.
I said, sign the proclamation.
Don't make me come down there.
And I set the phone down.
The proclamation was back in about five minutes.
Dude, that's awesome.
She signed off.
I said, give me a break.
What are we doing?
Well, the great payoff came that night because that night I was there when the stones were.
And they had been greeted at the airport by the press.
And they asked Mick Jagger, how do you feel?
The governor declared it Rolling Stones Day in Minnesota.
And Mick said, we were very honored.
He said, no one's ever did that for us before.
Wow.
You know, we've never come to a state and had the state declare it our day.
So they were very honored.
Did they remember you?
You did security?
Well, that's coming up.
And so we come there that night and I get my picture taken with them and up comes my favorite stone, Keith Richards.
And so Keith comes up to me that night and his hair is all arrayed.
Typical Keith Richards, a headband on.
He's got this hanging off here of the hair and that hanging off there of the hair.
And he looks up at me in typical Keith Richards style and he goes, so you used to bodyguard us back in 78 and 81, huh?
Somebody told him that, I'm sure.
And I go, yep.
And he goes, and now you're the governor.
And I go, yep.
And in the great Keith Richards cockney accent, I'll remember it the rest of my life.
He looks at me and goes, fucking great.
I'll never forget it.
Fucking great.
You know, and just smiled at me.
And I thought, well, if you get an effing great from Keith Richards, you've done something right, is how I view it.
Do you feel, oh, I agree.
I mean, do you feel that, so stuff like that, that's kind of feels like, do you feel like that's coincidence?
Do you feel like there's a, I find it interesting when you're able to live life long enough, how things intertwine a lot and how amazingly something comes back, like a helicopter you launched 20 years ago comes and lands on your palm like a butterfly now.
Boomerang.
Yes.
That's a perfect analogy.
Do you think that there's any God in that or do you just think that that's just nature?
That's nobody.
I believe like like Neil deGrasse Tyson says, it's chaos.
He said there's no one in control of space.
Yeah.
Neil said everything is flying around out there.
There ain't nothing in control of nothing.
It's chaos.
And my belief in life is this.
I didn't plan to be governor.
I didn't sit back when I was 18, 20 years old and say, you know, I'm going to take political science someday I'm going to run for governor.
Be mayor first.
I'm going to be a mayor first, then I'm going to be governor.
I didn't plan nothing like that.
I didn't even plan to wrestle.
Things just fell into place.
And I lived by a premise that I think I've mentioned it.
A quote from the great Yogi Berra, the baseball player.
I don't know how familiar we are with Yogi, but Yogi used to say some great one-liners.
And Yogi's one great one-liner was, if you come to a why in the road, take it.
Keep going.
No, think.
You come to a why in the road, take it.
Well, that means you've got to pick one way or the other.
That's what he's telling you.
So I've come to whys in the road, and I've taken them.
And once I've picked out which of the why I'm going on, I don't look back.
Right.
And I conquer whatever that why is taking me to.
Then when I achieve that, I look for the next why in the road.
Wow.
And then I do that.
I've had so many jobs now.
Oh, yeah, it's baffling.
I sit back and look at it and go, how?
You know, I guess when you look at it.
I get bored after about four years.
Really?
And then I need the why in the road.
Yeah.
I need to go out and,'cause I mean I And not to interrupt you, I just, you know, I'm curious.
It's a certain wanderlust that I think you're born with.
You think you inherited?
I've read two books on Che Guevara.
Right.
And one book was written by a South American, so you got a real good view of Che.
It wasn't written by a United States person with great bias.
Right.
You know, you got it from a South American, which is Argentina's where Che was from.
And Che had it.
Che couldn't stay somewhere.
I mean, he had it made in Cuba.
Right.
He was like God in Cuba.
Yeah, and he was handsomer than Fidel.
Well, and they put him up.
He's there.
I've been to Cuba.
Yes, ain't it?
He's on that building.
Oh, their libraries start with books on Che and Fidel.
There's no history before them.
They had.
They would stay, did he?
They were heroes.
Che didn't stay, did he?
Kind of heroes.
No.
No.
He needed something else.
It's almost like that.
He couldn't stay.
It's like Brad Fitting.
He couldn't stay.
And that's me.
There's a times come on certain jobs I do where I can't stay no more.
Yeah.
That I got to go on.
I got to move.
I got to keep going.
Maybe I'm giving up the day that I say, okay, this is it.
Right.
I'm on the final Y in the road.
But I ain't there yet, I don't think.
I'm 70 now.
Wow.
But that's why I moved to Mexico 15 years ago.
Oh, I didn't even know that.
Oh, yeah.
I've been living in Mexico for 15 years.
Every winter, I live an hour from pavement and an hour from electricity.
And has that been, do you feel like that's been beneficial?
I just live off the grid.
Wow.
Who do you take with you down there?
I take my pickup truck, my wife, and my dog.
And was there a reason you guys chose it down that area?
Was there?
No.
Yeah.
Just kind of.
Because like my life, a Y came in the road.
Yeah.
I took it.
No, what happened on that deal was I had just come out of office and I needed a break of being governor.
And I had just inked a huge contract with MSNBC, right?
You notice I was never on.
I was going to say I've never seen any clips of this.
No, because I was never on.
The reason we'll get back, but I'll cover this because I've covered it before.
And I like people to know.
By the way, I'm going to do a shameless plug here on your thing.
Please do.
I'm now on Clubhouse.
Okay.
Okay, so people are called the governor's office.
So anybody that wants to tune me in can go to Clubhouse and the governor's office.
Okay.
And I'm on Sunday night at 7 Central and Wednesday night at 7 Central.
I go on an hour each of those nights.
So anybody out there that does this and wants to hear more from me, that's where they can do it.
They can do it there.
Is there something interfering with your happiness?
Have you ever had happiness?
That's a question I've often asked myself.
Do I have ever had happiness?
And I don't know sometimes.
I have moments of it, flashes.
But have I ever had a real soup of it?
I don't know.
Is it possible for me?
That's a question I have oftentimes.
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Anyway, getting back to what were we talking about now?
Well, I guess.
I mean, there's different areas that I like.
No, no, no.
So when you got to the end of your governorship, were you exhausted?
No, yeah.
Well, I had signed with MSNBC.
Well, I got paid for three years and did nothing.
And I got paid a lot of money.
Why?
Because I opposed the invasion of Iraq.
They wouldn't put me on television.
Really?
Nobody was allowed on TV who opposed the invasion of Iraq.
I'll give you the example.
MSNBC at that, when I got out of office, Fox, MSNBC, and CNN got in a bidding war for me.
I was the voice of the independent.
Oh, 100%.
Voice of the independent.
Don't belong to either party.
MSNBC won.
I signed a three-year contract with them.
And I'll just state this.
It was a contract that a professional sports athlete would get.
Wow.
Not 100 million, but it was healthy.
It was very nice.
I'll say that.
And so I signed a three-year contract with them, and we insisted that they were going to do my show in Minnesota.
Because, number one, I didn't want to leave here.
Make it easy on yourself.
So you were living out.
And I had the power at that time.
So I said, no, I want to do the show in Minnesota.
And here's who I sold them on.
Because all you people do is cover the coasts.
Nobody gets a Midwestern perspective of nothing.
And we're the heart of America.
Amen.
We're the heart of America.
Amen.
You know, so they agreed.
So go over to Channel 2 here in the Twin Cities.
I provided 30 jobs or something because they had to hire all these people to work on the show.
So I provide all these jobs after I get out, right?
And one of the jobs was to my head of communication when I was governor.
He now stayed with me and was working on the show with me.
So do you go to one day of work at all?
No, wait.
Okay.
So, so, so, so, well, they send a producer out from the base, MSNBC.
So he's producing the show.
We're getting all set to go on the air.
Live audience now.
We're going to have a live audience because I play better in front of live, you know, and everything's ready to go.
And all of a sudden we get a phone call.
Here's the phone call.
Oh, let me add, MSNBC had just hired Phil Donahue, the king of daytime.
He was now on at night.
He was their highest-rated show.
Phil likewise opposed the invasion of Iraq and said it publicly.
So had I. We get a phone call.
John, my subordinate, took the call.
He got the call.
Here's the call.
Is it true Governor Ventura doesn't support the invasion of Iraq?
John, oh, no, he's vehemently opposed to it.
He's a Vietnam veteran.
He said, this is Vietnam all over again.
This is crap.
This is nation building.
They didn't attack us.
Iraq didn't attack us on 9-11.
Why are we invading Iraq?
Yeah, a lot of people.
And so then the next question, does Connecticut know about this?
Well, here's the tie-in.
MSNBC stood for Microsoft NBC at that time.
There was a partnership between Microsoft and NBC.
Who owned NBC at that time?
ESPN.
General Electric.
Oh, really?
General Electric is one of the biggest war profiteers in the world.
Damn.
They are the military-industrial complex and part of it.
Because they have all these contracts with them?
Wow.
Everything is built by GE to go to war.
Yeah.
A lot of it, right?
Oh, I'll probably have a government.
So do they want one of their announcers on TV opposing a war?
Not a chance.
Damn.
Exactly.
So that was the, does Connecticut know about this?
Was the second question.
John responded, I don't know.
Pause.
Here's the big question.
Is there any chance he'd change his mind?
Wow.
John said, I don't think so.
He said, I've seen the governor change his mind because he wasn't educated on something well enough.
And when he got educated, he took a different viewpoint.
But he said, this is war.
He's a veteran.
He's opposed to it.
He's a Vietnam veteran.
You ain't going to change his mind.
Guess what?
I didn't go on the air.
And guess what?
Phil Donahue got pulled.
Damn.
They pulled both of us.
Have you ever heard of a network pulling their highest-rated show?
No.
Never.
But they did because they wanted no negative to invading Iraq on the mainstream media.
So that's how powerful those tie-ins are between these companies and the corporations and the mainstream media.
And the government.
Yeah.
And the government.
So do you feel sometimes it used to feel like one thing that's tougher is I've learned more as I get older and just learn more.
Sometimes it almost.
You're going to find out you're going to learn even more.
Sometimes I don't want to.
How old are you?
I'm 40 years old, man.
Oh, you've got a lot of learning left.
You're just beginning to learn.
I don't want to, man.
You're just beginning to learn.
You crack the door open a little.
But do you ever think sometimes that it's this almost a more blissful value in not knowing?
Like, they say knowledge is power, and sometimes it just almost hurts me sometimes the more I learn stuff.
Sometimes it feels, it makes me feel debilitated sometimes.
But you have to know.
You can't live a life, in my opinion, you can't live a life without truth.
I finish every show I do.
I always say, and always remember, people, when the government lies, the truth becomes a traitor.
Now think of that quote.
That's an original from me.
I'm thinking about it right now.
When the government lies, the truth becomes a traitor.
In other words, they'll take the truth and put the truth in jail.
And make it the enemy.
Wow.
And they'll make the truth the enemy.
You see it all the time right now.
Well, I feel like that's never seen more prevalent than right now, right?
Yep.
Do you feel like...
There is good government.
Don't think for a moment that I'm not a Trumpy.
I want you to know that right now.
You know, I don't even want to get into my feelings on him.
As an ex-military man.
Right.
There's a lot to unpack there.
To me, January 6th was an attempted coup d'état.
Really?
Absolutely.
Look at what they're learning now.
They had the format all laid out.
Oh, yeah.
It almost seemed like one of his shady criminals.
He sits and tells us Hillary Clinton lock her up.
Yeah.
There's the guy that belongs in jail.
Right.
Donald Trump.
He tried to overthrow our country.
He defied the Constitution.
Do you think?
No, I live by the Constitution.
That's the document I live by.
If you don't like it, change it.
But you got to have a set of rules.
Those are the rules.
He broke them.
He broke the rules.
He should never be allowed to run again.
And as far as I'm concerned, he belongs in jail because people died that day on an insurrection to overturn our government.
It's that simple.
And I don't care how these Republicans want to butter the bread.
You're talking to the independent here.
And you know what part angered me the most?
What is it?
When I saw a Confederate flag carried through my Capitol.
Yeah.
Does that make you feel like that?
You know what I call the Republicans now?
The Taliban.
Really?
They're the American Taliban, baby.
And that's coming from Jesse the body, the American Taliban.
Well, look what they're doing in Texas.
Yeah.
What?
Oh, where's women's rights?
Yeah.
The Taliban have got them down there.
You know, they're taking away people's right to vote.
Did you know it's easier to buy a gun in Texas than vote?
Yeah, that's insane.
That's insanity.
You want the definition of insanity?
There's a good one.
Right there.
And now this latest thing.
What was the latest thing that crazy governor...
The governor is now overruling mask mandates.
In other words, no one in Texas can make you wear a mask.
Okay, well, what about this then?
Let me ask you this.
Do you feel like...
Right.
You know why?
I wrote an op-ed piece.
It gave me freedom.
I can go in the store now.
Nobody bothers me.
And if I keep my mouth shut, nobody does.
And I don't have to talk to people that I probably didn't want to talk to anyway.
You've seen little Jesse DeBoti's coming out.
Oh, yeah.
That's good.
You know, villain.
Look, I'm ready to get body slammed.
Well, you know why the villain's coming out?
I got people criticizing me now saying I've sold out because I got vaccinated.
What a crock of crap.
I sold out because I want to live.
And I look at the statistics, and when 99% of the vaccine people live and only 1% die, I'm going on the 99 side, people.
But Jesse, why do you think, do you want, is it able to, are you able to have an idea of why some people think, I feel like the news made things very confusing.
The news started becoming not information, and a lot of people got extremely scared and didn't know who to believe anymore.
Well, here you go.
You want the answer to the news?
Yeah.
Jesse has it.
Yeah.
I wouldn't mind a dose of it, man.
Because that's where I feel like a lot of bad information started.
The downfall of the news came with the show 60 Minutes.
Now, you guys are all going to sit and talk about it.
No, I. How could you say 60 Minutes?
That's an award-winning investigative reporting show, which it is, and it's a great show.
It was a great show.
Still is probably a great show.
But 60 Minutes was the downfall of the American media.
Why is that when they started editorializing it?
Uh-uh.
Uh-uh.
Prior to 60 Minutes, all the news lost money.
And they made up for it in the entertainment division.
And that was a standard rule.
The news is to educate.
The news is to do this.
The news don't make money.
It's to inform.
Along came the show 60 Minutes.
It shot to number one in the ratings.
The bean counter's eyes got big and they went, you mean we can make money off the news?
That's what 60 Minutes caused.
Making profit off the news.
Then it became about ratings rather than informing.
Now the news is nothing but entertainment.
And it's there to get ratings points.
It's there to make money for advertisers.
Where in the days of Walter Cronkite, back when I was younger than you, the news lost money.
You want the show that was so ahead of its time, the movie, that it's scary today for me to watch it?
Watch the show Network.
Yeah.
With Faye Dunaway, William Holden.
I've seen that.
It's good.
And Peter Finch won the Academy Award for playing Howard Beale.
Because he just got so real, and It changed everything.
No, that's where it became entertainment.
Remember, they brought Faye Dunaway in from entertainment to get the ratings.
He's the new producer.
And this was done before it ever happened to the news.
Yeah, they call up to her desk and she's like, no, no, no, no, no, let him go.
They knew 60 Minutes, it changed it.
Yeah.
So that movie, whoever wrote the script or whatever, was looking into the future and had their thumb right on the button.
Wow.
Because that's what our media or our news has turned into, the movie network.
But it's all about ratings points now, guys.
It ain't about making you smarter or giving you information.
It's about titillate.
Look at right now.
What's the big news out there right now?
Another missing white girl.
Yeah.
Now, if that girl was black, you think they'd be all at front page stories every night?
If it was a black girl.
Not a black girl don't go hiking, really, though.
But probably not.
Maybe not.
Maybe not.
Black girls disappear every day.
Yeah.
And you don't see, though, where they isolate.
All people disappear every day, probably.
But why is it that they pick out the cute little cute-looking little wings of distress, yeah?
Yeah, the cute little, and don't get me wrong, it's a tragedy.
It's horrifying whatever happened to her.
Don't get me wrong on that.
No, totally.
I feel like that's the thing.
The media's coverage of it, it's okay.
When I was going to do the show for MSNBC, everything comes down from on high.
They tell you what they're, like Hannity and these guys, they get told what to talk about.
Oh, totally, yeah.
You know, I fought them.
You know what they sent me every day?
Lacey Peterson.
What?
And I said, that's a tragedy, but there's 10,000 murders a year.
Why is this one exceptional?
And why should people in Minnesota or in the East Coast care about a murder that took place out in California?
Yeah.
Yes, we feel sad Lacey was murdered.
Like I feel sad that anybody else gets murdered.
But why would I on a national TV show give five minutes of the show's time covering a murder that affects that when you have 10,000 of them a year?
Yeah.
So, okay, with that said, that's where I feel like where do people go to get good information?
And that becomes the scary part.
That's how things, a lot of things become fragmented.
Remember when Larry King died?
Oh, yeah.
No, Larry King was an icon.
I got to go on his show one time, man.
It's pretty cool.
Oh, yeah.
Larry King an icon.
I did his show a number of times.
I feel fortunate.
Larry King talked to everyone.
Yeah.
Well, they did all these tributes to Larry, right?
Which they should.
Well deserved.
But they left out the last five years of Larry's life.
They stopped the tributes when he left CNN.
Do you know where he went?
To OAN, right?
Oh, he went to where I work, Russian Television America.
Oh, really?
RT America.
Larry King was there for Aura.
Was it branch of the world?
No, Aura was a podcast owned by Larry.
I worked for him.
Oh, interesting.
I did a podcast called Off the Grid on Aura, where I did it from Mexico.
Oh, wow.
I'd come into town once a week, and they'd put me up at the hotel.
I'd play two rounds of golf, and I'd do Aura and go back to my house.
It was great.
So they kept supporting him whenever he went and did his own thing.
Larry worked for RT, Russian television.
My Aura thing, I had a problem with them in negotiations.
Russian TV came in and said, we'll take you.
So I went with RT America, where Larry was.
For five years, Larry King worked at RT America.
That is Russian Television America.
And you know what he said?
He said, this is the most honest news people are going to get.
And this came from the icon Larry King, who our mainstream media didn't want that quote out there, so they didn't cover the last five years of Larry's life.
They made Larry retire after CNN.
Larry wasn't retired.
Larry was on every week like I am on RT America.
And before I signed with RT, they flew me and my wife to Moscow.
Yes, I went to their 10th anniversary of RT.
I met Gorbachev that night, and Putin was the keynote speaker.
Wow.
And at the end of the night, Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, walked over to me.
I didn't walk over to him.
He walked over to me.
Do you stand up or you stand up?
Absolutely.
He's the president.
I stood up.
He offered his hand.
I shook his hand.
Putin looked at me and said, thank you, governor.
And I said, you're welcome, Mr. President.
And then he said, I want you to know I will never interfere in your television show.
You have complete control and complete artistic freedom.
And I said, thank you, Mr. President.
I appreciate that.
And guess what?
I've been there four years now, and he's been a man of his word.
Have you?
He has never interfered in my show.
Nobody tells me what I can say or can't say.
They don't tell me what I can or can't talk about.
Now, isn't it strange?
I'm banned from TV in America.
Wow.
I'm banned.
And that's because of my court case.
They all came into my court case to have it overturned.
Oh, yeah.
The lie about me.
Yeah.
The Chris Kyle lie.
Yeah, I remember.
Yeah, what people don't know at the at the two judges at the Court of Appeals broke two of their own rules and sided with the media and overturned my case, breaking their rules to do it.
So how do we define that?
And in doing so, where can I go to work?
These people interfere.
I was, you know, they interfered in my court case.
And so I work for RT now, and they're the best.
Do you know what they did for me?
I start and they were sending me to a studio, right?
And Misha, my boss, he goes, you know, that's expensive and it's really out of the way for you.
He's a Russian.
He said, do you have room in your house?
I said, sure.
I said, I got a bedroom down in my basement.
I kind of call it my trophy room.
I keep all my trophy paraphernalia down there in the corner of the house and nobody can see it unless I take them down there.
He said, could we put a studio in there?
I said, sure.
All of a sudden, Amazon boxes start arriving at my house.
Technicians come.
They took out all the permits.
They wire me up.
Ba-boom, boom, boom.
The cameras, the lights.
I now do my show from my basement.
That's awesome.
I'm in Minneapolis.
They're in D.C. and my partner's in L.A. And they have the capability now that we can do a complete show and never even be in the same city with each other.
That's something.
It's amazing.
It's technology.
Well, it's amazing.
And so that's how I do my show.
I walk downstairs, and I'm happy to say my son is home.
Now he worked for R.T. for still working for them.
And he came home, and he now uses my studio to stay working with RT.
Oh, wow.
And he's back home, which makes his mom and me very happy.
You're always happy when the son comes back, even when he's 41 or 42 now.
Is that your only child?
No, I have a daughter.
Oh, yeah?
She lives here.
Oh, she does?
Yeah, she's married and lives here.
But my son's more of the dad.
Really?
Traveling or.
Oh, yeah.
He hasn't lived here for 20 years.
He graduated from high school and left.
Wow.
He was Sean Penn's assistant.
Oh, really?
He had that wander thing in him, huh?
Oh, yeah.
And he went, Sean Penn.
I remember the time he called me.
He says, hey, dad.
I said, yeah.
He says, guess where I'm going tonight?
I said, where?
He says, he's over at, I'm at the Khan Film Festival.
We're having a party with the Victoria Secret models.
And I said to him over the phone, I said, well, you ought to enjoy yourself.
Oh, I used to masturbate to their magazines.
Then when the magazine came in the mail, those are the good old people.
Well, he calls me, said, oh, yeah, we're going to a party tonight with the Victoria Secret models.
I go, oh, that ought to be fun.
Yeah, that'll be fun.
No, my son left at 20. Yeah.
You know, and he was Sean Penn's assistant for a while, and then he lived and worked in L.A. for 10 years.
And then an opportunity opened up for him at RT America.
He was on the ground floor.
He got into RT when they were a few rooms on a floor.
Now they're two complete floors of a building out in D.C. Does it feel, is it strange that it's a Russian company and that they're making, like, They're an American company.
I'm just wondering, is there any like...
I have to, because I work for them.
Well, you hear this?
Bullshit.
Because I work for them, I have to file as a foreign agent.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
Now, they don't make people on Al Jazeera do that.
They don't make people on any of these, the BBC don't have to do that.
So the IRS is making you do that?
No, the government.
Oh, the government's making you do that.
Not the IRS.
The IRS has nothing to do with it.
It's the government.
We have to file with the Department of Justice for agents.
Now, I take offense to that.
I'm born and raised here.
I'm a United States citizen.
I've been a mayor.
I've been a governor.
I'm an honorably discharged Vietnam veteran, and I have paid taxes to this country my entire adult life, unlike Donald Trump.
I pay my taxes.
I participate.
I don't cheat.
So, having said that, I'm now considered a foreign agent.
Right.
Damn.
Does that kind of stuff make it?
Well, at the start of the show, it says how our show has to be, it's cleared by the Department of Justice.
It has to go to them.
Does it really?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, they ain't done nothing.
I mean, I say what I want to say, but I'm sure I'm on some list, and I'm sure I'm under observation, you know, from these bozos.
And yet I stand up for him against the insurrection.
Does it make you feel like, I used to feel like when I was younger and stuff, when I was a kid that the We're having fun here.
How long?
About 45 minutes.
Oh, so we got 15 to go then.
Wow.
That's about the time I'll run out of voice, man.
Okay, no worries.
I used to feel like as a kid, like there was this American dream.
There was this red, white, and blue thing, and we're all part of this group.
And sometimes I feel like I don't feel that way anymore sometimes.
And it's not like I don't know if it's a choice I'm making not to feel that way.
You know what made me change way back during Vietnam when I saw the draft.
It was the draft because the rich kids didn't have to go.
Donald Trump got bought his way out of it.
He was going to get drafted, and his dad went and paid off, and he got bone spurs.
Really?
He's never missed a round of golf.
He probably got him in his penis, I bet.
Bone spurs in his feet.
And yet, I've never seen him miss a round of golf.
Could you imagine, though, with a website?
Those bone spurs would be painful.
How the hell could he play golf?
He'd bring a sandwich.
What a gutsy guy.
What a gutsy to withstand that pain and swing that golf club.
I mean, there's a true tough leader.
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Do you feel like the leadership that we have in now is?
No.
They're all as bad.
The Dems and Repubs.
I side with Ralph Nader, who called it correctly when he said we're under the rule of a two-party dictatorship.
And the reason I say that is because you notice there's no problem passing the defense bill.
Boy, they all jump on board for that, don't they?
Because they're all making money on it.
There's no argument about that.
How about the latest?
Did you hear the latest?
Where 31 of them, they passed a law in 2012.
They are not allowed to trade stocks on the stock market and invest, right?
31 of them just got caught for insider trading.
You know what the biggest penalty they're going to face?
A $200 fine.
After they probably made hundreds of thousands on the stock market, they'll pay a $200 fine.
Now, it seems to me Charlie Sheen went to jail in Wall Street for that.
Remember Oliver's movie, Oliver Stone's movie, Wall Street?
Oh, yes, I remember it.
Charlie Sheen went to jail for insider trading for, you know, and then he got a lighter sentence because he turned Gecko over to him.
Yeah.
You know, Gordon Gecko.
So he cooperated.
But that is against the law.
And the point is all 37 of these people should be made to resign right now.
Yeah, agree.
And I'll tell you why.
Because it is so basic that when you get elected, you do not make decisions and do not to profit yourself.
Right.
And when you're doing insider trading, trading that nobody else knows about but you, that's cheating and that's illegal and people go to prison for it.
And 37 of our illustrious elected officials, you notice how these guys go in there.
They're not millionaires, many of them, but they all come out millionaires.
Well, those jobs don't pay that much.
I'll tell you this.
That's the reason I didn't, one of the major reasons I didn't seek a second term as governor.
You know how much money I was making?
Probably $2,000 a week.
How much?
$25,000?
No, I'll tell you exactly.
Okay.
The governor got paid $120,000 a year.
Okay.
So about $2,000 a week.
Now they're going to take taxes out.
Right.
Okay.
Well, I also get deducted mileage for the official governor's car unless during the workday.
So to and from the Capitol, I have to pay for it till I get to the Capitol.
So, wait, so I went to them and said, well, okay, I'll drive my private car to the Capitol and then I'll get in the governor's car and I won't get docked money.
Public safety comes in, so catch 22. You can't do that.
Why?
Well, that's the car with all the protection and the radios and all this.
So they make you ride in the car and then charge you for it.
Oh, damn.
And it don't end there.
The governor's residence, every meal that me and my family ate there was deducted from my paycheck.
I had to turn in weekly things on how many meals were served to me and my family at the governor's residence unless it was official state business.
So that would get deducted.
It ended up, okay, get ready.
Now I'm in charge of a $16 billion budget, right?
I was clearing at best $60,000 a year.
Wow.
Now, Jesse Ventura has a lifestyle that if I'm making $60,000 a year, I'm sinking.
I'm not even treading water.
I'm sinking.
Yeah.
You know, and that was one of the major reasons, and I wouldn't corrupt.
I suppose I could have been corrupt and who knows what I might have made and what kind of job I would have gotten after I got out.
Because, you know, they always seem to land on their feet with some real great-paying job.
Oh, yeah.
Nobody can, you know, the greatest thing I got getting out of office, the thing I hold in the highest esteem, I got to be a fellowship professor at Harvard.
2004.
And how did that work?
How did that come to?
They sent me a letter.
Oh, yeah.
And they said, how would you like to teach in the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University?
And I turned to my wife, I said, is this for freaking real?
I said, I only went to high school.
I went in the Navy out of high school.
They're asking me to come and teach at Harvard.
They need teachers, I think, everywhere.
No, no, no, no.
This is 2000.
They ain't need no teachers.
This is Harvard.
They don't need teachers at Harvard.
No shortage there.
And so I took it for the whole year.
They paid me a stipend.
I paid Every month.
They moved me into an apartment on the business school right on campus.
Cool.
And I would walk across the Charles River every morning to an office I had.
I learned how to do the computer there, and I actually sent an email.
And then, as soon as I left Harvard, I forgot the computer and haven't sent an email since.
You know, Harvard taught me that, and I quickly forgot it.
Do you know I've never owned a cell phone?
Really?
And I've made it my life's mission now.
I will not own one.
I will do everything in my power not to get one.
Wow.
I want to be able to put on my gravestone, he never owned a cell phone.
And I figure if I last 10 more years, I may be the only person on the planet that can write that.
Damn.
Although I am running into some people that say their grandparents are holding out.
Yeah, they're holding out.
So I got to outlive them.
You also start a grandmother.
That's my key now.
I got to outlive the elderlies.
But no, I've never.
Never hit me.
And people have said to me, well, how could you be governor?
Simple, and it was even better.
I had two bodyguards, 24-7.
They had them.
So they screen calls.
Anybody wants to talk to me?
They call them.
That at it, that it.
They cover.
Governor so-and-so is calling.
Oh, tell him I'll call him back at 5 that I'm busy right now, but I will get back to him.
I'm sorry.
The governor is not available right now, but he is aware of your situation and said he'll get back to you at 5 o'clock today.
Okay, very good.
Thank you.
That way you've got a built-in call screener.
If you got your own cell phone, you ain't got a call screener.
You don't have a life anymore either.
I got to ask you this question.
Well, you know, it's interesting.
I've gone, I've said that to people, and people have looked at me, and they've actually looked at me sincerely and replied, you're lucky.
Wow.
Oh, yeah.
And I often think to myself, why are they saying that to me?
Why are they telling me I'm lucky not to have a cell phone?
And I think it's because it's beginning to dominate people's lives to where they have nothing else but the cell phone.
Yeah.
Boy, I'd hate that existence.
I went out to Sirius Radio once, and you know, they put you in the green room.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
I always hated the green room.
In New York?
Do you like the green room?
I hate it.
Do you like it that much?
No, you know why I hate the green room?
Why?
Because that's what they call the room at San Quentin where they put you to death.
Oh, really?
It's called the green room.
Oh, damn.
It's where they go before they pump you full of electricity in the old days.
Well, anyway, I'm at the green room at Sirius, right?
There's probably a dozen people there.
Every one of them is staring at their cell phone but me.
And I'm looking around the room, and I finally thought, screw this.
So I fucking did what I needed to do to command the room.
And I looked at him and said, have any of you noticed in this room that I'm the only person here not looking at a cell phone?
And they all look around at each other sheepishly.
And I just kind of shake my head.
I just wanted to bring it to their attention.
It's a freedom.
And I was the only person in this room of a dozen people who wasn't staring or doing, manipulating something on, you know.
Oh, yeah.
Thank God we sent Captain Kirk up to space now because now it's timely.
Everybody's got the communicators, right, that they had on Star Trek.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
The only thing you can't do now is send yourself places, but I'm sure that's coming.
That's going to be scary.
That's going to be real scary.
Do you know I interviewed him?
Captain Kirk?
Oh, yeah.
And he passed away, didn't he?
No, he just went to space.
Oh, thank God.
No, no, no.
He just went up.
William Shatner just went into space.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
William Shatner.
I forget about that.
I always think of I knew him from Rescue 911.
He's Captain James T. Kirk of the Starship Enterprise.
Mr. Spock is dead.
Yeah.
You know, but Captain Kirk of the, we grew up to that in the 60s.
That was the coolest show on TV was Star Trek.
James T. Kirk, my wife had a crush on him when she was a young girl.
She told me.
She said, I was in love with, and I, you know, Captain Kirk.
Yeah.
James T. Kirk of this.
And no, I thought, and it was kind of interesting because I saw a huge scientist interviewed, and they asked him how he felt about William Shatner going into space like that.
He looked and smiled, and he said something really cool.
He goes, William Shatner didn't go into space.
He said, James T. Kirk went into space.
Oh, that's cool.
A certain part of him.
I just thought that was so cool that this scientist said, William Shatner didn't go into space.
James T. Kirk went into space.
Yeah, I like that a little bit of the Mystique keeping it alive.
Yeah, he went into space.
It's hard to keep Mystique alive.
When you watch Star Trek, you know that man's been to space.
Yeah.
And he came, did you hear his message?
Uh-uh.
Take care of our planet.
Wow.
He came back so, he said, and you know what I've heard?
Everybody that goes up there comes back a total greenie.
Stop the destruction of our planet because they're seeing out there nothing but drab dead.
And they look back on this blue thing that shines with life.
When you're out there, there ain't no life.
Or at least we ain't found it yet.
Yeah.
There is, but we ain't found it yet.
Yeah.
You know, but they said when you look, of course.
Read Neil's book lately.
Read Neil's book.
Oh, look, I'm just saying from just a layman.
The universe is so large.
Yeah.
Oh, do you know what else is being?
Do you know what else is?
Here's what ticks me off now.
You got this whole thing in schools where they don't want to teach the truth.
Yeah.
They don't want to teach the truth now.
They want to gloss it over so the white people can feel good.
Yeah.
Right?
It's ridiculous.
Do you know what I learned now too?
Okay.
For years we celebrate Columbus Day.
He discovered America.
And I ding myself in the head and go, it took me how long to realize, how can you discover something if there's already somebody there?
Right.
You didn't discover nothing.
There was already people there.
Well, why did we used to have it that way then?
It was just an easy way to explain it.
It's all we know.
They didn't have a flag.
You got to have a flag, man.
Eddie Izzard will tell you that.
You know Eddie Izzard?
Yeah.
Watch Eddie.
Eddie will explain it.
You got to have a flag.
You got to have a flag, man.
You got to have a flag.
But no, getting back to it again, you know, where are we going now?
I'm getting old now.
Well, we're talking about...
No, we're talking about a lot of different things.
The last thing I wanted to make the point.
Oh, the space.
Is there people out there?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Okay.
You look at the situation now, and I read the other people out there.
Oh, I know Columbus.
So not only did Columbus not discover America, you know what else was total BS we got taught?
What was it?
That he went there believing the earth was flat.
Oh, that's a lie?
That's a complete lie.
Neil shows where they knew centuries before Columbus that the world wasn't flat.
Damn, bro.
But yet in all our school books, that's what we read.
Oh, Columbus discovered America and they sent him to find out because they were terrified he was going to fall off the end of the earth.
It was flat.
Oh, I remember our teacher's thing where he went up the side and then turned onto the corner.
Get Neal's book.
He lays it right out when we knew the world wasn't flat, and it happened literally probably 800 years before Columbus even sailed.
they knew that scholars knew the earth was not flat.
Yeah.
I think sometimes- Okay, that's a good question.
That's what I want to know.
To make it easier.
Here's what's got me in a roar about this and why I'm saying you teach it.
It took me 69 years to learn that we massacred black people in Tulsa.
Yeah.
I learned that last year.
I was 69 years old when I learned that.
That is the first I have known of that in 69 years on this planet.
Yeah.
I got angry.
Why wasn't I taught about that in school?
Right.
Why is that not written in a hit?
Well, here's one for you.
Did you know there was a coup d'etat attempt on President Roosevelt by Wall Street?
I believe it.
Because it's been eradicated, raced, set aside.
Major General Smedley Butler saved our country.
Damn.
The two-time Congressional Medal of Honor winner.
He was handpicked chosen to be the president.
Damn, young goat.
But you know what Smedley did?
Smedley went in front of Congress and ratted him.
He whistle blew him.
Smedley said, FDR's my president.
I'm a Republican.
He's a Democrat.
He's a two-time Congressional Medal of Honor Marine General.
Smedley goes, he's still my president.
Even though I'm in a different party, this is treason.
And he turned these guys over, the Rothschild, all these names, these big names on Wall Street.
They had handpicked Smedley Butler.
Why?
Because FDR was bringing in these socialist programs.
What does Wall Street fear?
Anything that's socialist.
And we here in the U.S. fear everything socialist, don't we?
Yet, here's one for you guys.
Time to learn from Jesse.
Our biggest part of our budget that you and I pay taxes on is for total socialism.
You know what that is?
The Department of Defense.
That's total socialism at its finest.
So you have socialism protecting the capitalism.
Damn, that's the dark arts.
And yet people are telling you, I'm scared.
They're turning the country socialist.
Well, what you need, if you have all capitalism, you're going to fail.
We saw that on Wall Street.
I think we're still seeing it on the cheat.
You have to have a balance.
You have to achieve a balance between capitalism and socialism that raises the most people up.
That's when you have a great society.
So all these people that fear socialism, you're very military.
I was a Navy SEAL.
Guess what?
Other than combat pay and special pay for things I did, my base pay for being a Navy SEAL was the same as the base pay of a cook.
Wow.
I don't get paid no more.
If he's the same rank as me, it doesn't matter that I'm on SEAL team and he's over frying hamburgers.
Now, I did make extra money because they give us hazardous duty pay for jump.
But get this, you only get two of the three.
I was qualified for all three hazardous duties.
You only get two of three?
They only let you have two.
And guess what?
Officers get paid twice as much.
Now, tell me that ain't socialism.
Why does an officer get paid twice as much as me?
Jumps out of the same plane.
Yeah.
You know, but he does.
No, I would get $55 extra a month for jumping, and I'd get $55 extra a month for demolition pay.
I got paid nothing for diving.
Wow.
And diving is supposed to be an extra $85 a month.
But they only allow us to get two of the three.
Why?
I don't know.
They make us do all three.
But one of them I have to do for good old Uncle Sam.
That's on the house.
That's a charity one.
I get all the diving I do under the water.
That was for charity.
I got a couple questions.
These are things that I think people need to hear and hearing it from you, I think, are very important.
You talk a lot about how like the two-party system, how it's one of the things that's definitely failing us.
And you've been an example of being an independent, right?
What don't people understand about even just voting for an independent, whether you even almost believe in them or not?
What can that do to change the current system that we have?
Well, really, truthfully, it's simplicity, I think, in voting.
And if everyone would just stick to the simplicity of it, vote your conscience.
Don't pick a winner.
Your job when you vote isn't to go there to vote for who you think is going to win.
Your job in voting is to go there and pick out the candidate whom you think would best represent your point of view.
Yeah.
And vote for that person.
If that person gets beat, you still did your civic duty.
Now, if you vote for someone else, you're selling out.
If you vote the two-part, like if you find some third person who thinks way more like you and has better ideas that you go with, but yet you still vote, well, he can't win.
Well, one thing I proved is, yeah, if you get the most votes, you can win.
And it just takes getting the most votes.
Well, it was like when I ran, they told me, this is back in 98, they told me, forget the young people.
They don't vote.
I told them, book me at every college in the state of Minnesota.
And they said, you're wasting your time, the guys with the, I said, no, I ain't.
And I'll tell you why.
They said, why?
I said, because the college kids have never had Jesse the body to vote for.
Are you kidding me?
So they booked me in all the colleges.
I'd go there packed to the hilt.
Kids hanging off the rafters.
You know when I knew I was going to win?
And they were your age because you're talking 20 years ago.
So this is your generation.
Here's when I knew I was going to win that day.
We got there the morning of the election and at the University of Minnesota, they said the lines to register were longer than the lines to vote because in Minnesota we have same-day registration.
Nice.
And the lines to register were longer than the lines to vote.
That's when I knew we're going to win because they ain't coming out to vote for a Democrat or Republican.
They're already registered.
These are new people.
And it ended up, I won by, I was polling 10%.
It was not a presidential, so they predicted a 50% voter turnout, non-presidential, which is pathetic.
But it still leads the nation.
Minnesota does every year.
Really?
Oh, yeah.
Us in Maine.
We battle it out for the most percentage to vote.
People here come out and vote.
Yeah.
Yep.
And what happened was they predicted a 50% voter turnout because it wasn't presidential, so a lot of people stay home.
It ended up 60. I was polling 27% the day before.
I ended up winning with 37 because remember, there's three people now.
So the percentages change.
I had 37. The Republican had 34. The Dem ended up with 28. But my 27 to 37 was the 10% they didn't expect to show up.
Yeah.
Because they predicted a 50% voter turn.
It turned out it was 60. And those 10 came voting for me.
Well, I'll never forget the headline in the Minneapolis paper, Ventura wins.
Sub-headline underneath, remember I told you about the colleges?
Throngs of young voters turn out.
Throngs.
That was the term they used.
It's like you sliding in the ring with a chair, dude.
It was like I went out and see, getting back to your original question, third party.
That's what you've got to tap into to beat them.
You're not going to beat their bases.
But most people are independent.
You know what angers me right now the most of anything?
Our country is being governed and stopped from doing anything by those 50 people in the Senate, the 50 Republicans, right?
I don't know.
Well, then they got to do that shit they call where you need 60 votes or whatever.
What do you mean you don't know?
You better start knowing.
I'm trying to.
Anyway, okay, 50 Republicans block everything, right?
Here's what pisses me off.
Because there's an equal amount of senators, two in each state.
Do you know those 50 Republicans, how much of the population they actually represent and they're stopping the rest of the country?
They represent 21% of the population.
Because you have states like North and South Dakota that have the same Senate, two people, as California, as New York.
So they have equal to them.
They can stop them.
That's insane.
Now, it was initially, I know why it was done.
So it was equality amongst the 13 original states.
But when California has a huge population and New York has a huge population, how can they be equal to South Dakota?
But then do you worry that we're going to be able to do that?
And by the way, I see more South Dakota license plates in Mexico than I see in South Dakota.
You know why that is?
Because South Dakota don't give a shit if you live there or not.
You can just license your car there.
So all these people from California that are supposed to bring them back for emission tests, because they still have them there, you'd have to drive the whole Baja to do that every year.
Well, they leave them down there and they just register them in South Dakota.
Wow.
So you see South Dakota plates all over the Baja.
Like I said, there's more South Dakotans in the Baja than there is in South Dakota.
You also, you talk a lot about.
South Dakota just wants the money.
They don't give a crap where you live.
They'll license you, and that's great.
Fine.
No problem from me.
Yeah.
A lot of places have different little loopholes like that.
Sure.
It's the way to make money.
What about you talk?
I've heard you speak about tax at the point of purchase, you know, which I've long been.
That that's the way we should do it.
It would keep all these loopholes and all this bullshit.
Everybody would pay their tax.
And you'd live within your means.
Right.
Can you explain that to people who don't understand what it is?
When I really got into it, it was, I think Representative Army from Texas, Dick Army was his name.
He brought it.
I learned it.
He brought it.
I learned it when he brought it up.
A national sales tax is like a state sales tax.
What it would do, you could throw away all the records you have to keep for seven years of income.
You wouldn't have to keep them.
You would never be audited again.
All of that would be gone.
The tax at that time would have been 12%.
Well, that would then keep our government on budget with the economy.
They'd have to ensure the economy stays good, Otherwise, they don't get their money, do they?
But when they have an income tax, they get their money whether the economy is good or not.
See, this way they would be directly correlated with the economy.
Now, it would be then, maybe it'd be a little more now, but 12% is a lot less than I'm paying now.
Yeah.
So you would pay that at the point of purchase.
Now, businesses are already doing that.
So you as an individual would never have to keep a tax return again.
You'd never have to file one.
Less stressed.
Everything you do would be done at the point of purchase buying.
Now, your car would cost, and it would make you more conscious of living in your means because you'd see a price on the car that you'd go, holy shit, it's up 12% because I have to pay a 12% sales tax to the federal government.
Well, guess who else would pay that?
Tourists.
Everybody.
Right now, tourists don't pay federal tax here.
They would if you had a national sales tax and bought something and there'd be a federal sales tax on everything.
And get this, you wouldn't have to put it on food and you wouldn't have to put it on clothing, say, under $100.
Now, if you buy a mink stole or buy dripping with diamonds, yeah, you're going to pay.
But you could buy your underwear, your blue jeans, and your t-shirts.
You ain't going to walk around naked and you wouldn't have to pay tax.
And I notice all of us are dressed that way today.
So we wouldn't have to pay no tax on none of the clothes any of us are wearing.
I love that, man.
How far away, is that ever a possibility?
They'll never do it.
They'll never do it because the rich people don't pay anyway.
They pay lawyers instead, so they don't have to pay.
And okay, then here's the other thing.
People said to me, okay, what would you do with IRS then?
They'd be gone, right?
No, you turn their job around.
Instead of the IRS watching us, the people, you make them watch the businesses and the government to ensure they're collecting and using our taxes correctly.
The IRS then becomes our watchdog of the government and business.
God, we need that.
Yes.
Why do you think it won't pass?
Because it's good.
It's common sense.
It makes sense.
And if I can quote Charles Manson, no sense makes sense.
And that's a quote from Charles Manson.
Did it really?
Yeah.
Yeah, dude.
He said that one time.
No sense makes sense.
It's misunderstood a little bit.
No sense.
Think about it.
No sense makes sense.
That's how they operate.
No sense makes sense.
But no, a national sales tax, you couldn't cheat on it.
Yeah.
Because everything you bought and sold would have to require roughly, let's just say 15%.
Let's say high.
15%.
Well, I'm paying way more than 15% right now.
Right.
So at least I love it.
You don't pay nothing 15%.
Yeah.
Now, and then they said, oh, it'll hurt poor people worse because it's regressive.
Yes, but you know, you can do with it what you want.
You could find out, say, what a person's at in poverty.
Right.
So a person in poverty, say, if their income, they don't make that much money, you could give them their first $20,000 of purchases, no tax.
You could give them a credit card.
But anything beyond that, if they start living beyond their means, then they get taxed.
But you could see the thing, you can make it anything you want it, and you can give breaks where you feel you need it to help poor people.
You know, you could give them their first $12,000 in purchase, no tax.
If you're under $25,000 in income, we'll give you your first half if you spend half of your money.
You don't have to pay tax on nothing.
You can survive.
But then the big people that buy yachts and buy Mercedes and buy all that, hit them up.
Thick boy shoes or whatever they're buying.
You're buying all that fancy crap.
Well, you pay for it.
You know, if that's your lifestyle, well, then live your lifestyle.
Enjoy it, yeah.
And it would force people to live within their budgets.
Force them to.
They couldn't buy something.
They'd have to say, Jesus, I'm going to have to make more money to go if I want this.
Yeah.
You know, I can't afford this.
I love that, man.
I feel like it's called.
It's called a national sales tax.
And you abolish the income tax.
Do any countries do it?
I don't know.
Yeah.
I don't know, but think how nice.
I was cleaning out shit.
I've got crap that goes back 25 years in my attic, papers, shredding it.
And I have to sit and spend entire afternoon shredding documents.
I feel like I'm in Watergate.
Oh, yeah.
It's like.
You know nothing with Nixon.
Shredding documents.
It's like Fargo, kind of.
It was just ridiculous on that.
So, yeah, the national sales tax, I've advocated for that since 1990.
No, people need to know.
I think a lot of people don't even know that it's a possibility.
Oh, well, it ain't a possibility because they're not going to do it.
Right.
You know, you would have to vote all them creeps out of office and get a whole bunch of new people in there, but the new generation could do that.
Do it.
It's up to you guys.
Come to us for the advice.
But it's going to be up to you guys to do it.
To the practicality.
Yeah.
Now you guys are going to carry the ball.
We're too old to carry the ball now.
We can be the coaches.
We can be up in the press box.
We can map the game out for you.
But it's you 40 and unders, 50s and unders that got to pick that ball up and run with it.
You've got to play the game now.
Do you believe that things can change?
I believe that they can, but I don't.
I'll tell you.
Because you're very optimistic for even somebody in your age of mind.
I shouldn't say that I am.
It's the first time in my life that I don't see the United States with a better future in the future.
That I don't see as much light as I used to.
I always would see light at the tunnel.
But right now, because there's so much lying and there's so much deceit and people don't know what to believe and what not to believe.
Yeah, that's the scariest part.
And our government causes it.
And they cause it by things that, like, how come John F. Kennedy they still have documents on that?
Right.
It's 60 years ago.
And that, and I'll even say 9-11.
Yeah.
Because I have questions on both of those events, and nobody seems to be able to answer them adequately for me.
And what troubles me about those, and maybe we'll finish with this to make people think on it, is if the stories they told us are true, right?
In the case of Kennedy and in the case of 9-11, if those are the truth, what we were told, then why would anything have to be withheld because of national security?
Yeah, the truth should be just the truth.
Okay, if Lee Oswald was a lone nut and did what they said he did, why would any documents have to be held for national security?
He was a little private in the Marines.
Yeah.
He wasn't a general who had sensitive...
Well, he was at a base where they U-2 flights and all that.
Oh, wife beaters, too, I remember.
But then you look to 9-11 and you go, okay, here's what they told us to accept.
Right.
Now listen to this.
This is what they told us.
That 19 Islamic radicals armed with box cutters defeated our multi-billion dollar air defense system all while conspiring with a bearded guy in a cave in Afghanistan.
And we accepted that.
Hook, line, and sinker.
Now, I have a hard time accepting that for a couple reasons.
First of all, we've then been screwed because if we've paid billions of dollars for security and you can defeat it with box cutters, we got screwed out of our money.
Second of all, when I was governor of Minnesota, if we would have had a disaster at a state level that would have been equivalent to that, and it could have been prevented, don't you think somebody should get fired?
And yet on 9-11, not one person lost their job.
Not one person was even demoted over this gross derelict of duty, protecting us, and the whole thing.
And in fact, nobody was demoted.
The opposite occurred.
People got promoted.
How does that work?
When I was in the Navy SEALs, we had a simple thing that failure was not an option.
And I would think air defense failure is not an option.
Whoever was in charge of our air defense and allowed 18 Islamic radicals with box cutters to defeat it should have lost their job, shouldn't they?
Well, you know why they don't lose their jobs?
That's how people start talking.
That's how whistleblowers start.
That's how information starts being developed.
If you lost your job and nobody else did, you're going to be pissed.
You're going to say, wait a minute, I did this, I did that, but so-and-so told me to do this.
And all of a sudden, you've got people turning over other people, and pretty soon it leads to higher places.
Well, if you don't want that to happen, don't fire no one.
And the day goes on as normal the next day.
Everyone's back to work.
Everybody thinks they did everything fine.
Yeah.
Not even knowing they might have been a pawn in something.
And they didn't get fired.
Don't you guys think somebody should have got fired?
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
A catastrophe like that that we invest billions of dollars in and they can go with box cutters and take three planes and smash them.
Well, I'll leave you with this.
Why am I switching to this one?
You all familiar with conspiracy theory?
Yeah.
My TV show?
Oh, did I get in trouble doing that?
Oh, I know Eddie Bravo, the guy.
Yeah.
You know, well, I spoke to a woman, Sergeant April Gallup, top secret crypto security clearance.
She was in the room that the alleged plane hit the Pentagon.
Right?
She looked me right in the eye and told me there was no plane.
What?
Well, did you ever see one?
No.
All you saw was a hole, and then they covered it up with a tarp.
There was no wings.
There was no debris on the lawn outside.
There was no place where the wings hit the building to sever them.
All you saw was this big hole that they covered up.
She looked at me.
She said, there was no plane.
She said there was no luggage.
There was no seats.
There were no bodies.
She staggered out the hole and was recovered on the lawn.
And the government immediately put her into 72-hour solitary confinement where she couldn't talk to nobody.
Yeah.
And she told me there was no plane.
She said she thought she did it because she said, I was at work.
I went in that day.
She said, I was working on my computer.
And she said, right when I'd hit this particular button, the whole room blew up.
And her initial thought was her computer was wired to a bomb.
Wow.
But she doesn't believe that now, you know, that it was.
Right.
But that's what happened.
And she said, through all, there was no plane.
What does she believe now?
She don't.
She will just tell you there was no plane.
Right.
Which is all she knows.
She doesn't know what did it.
She doesn't know how it was done.
She just is clear that there was not a plane.
And when you look at the thing, if they superimpose the plane with the hole, the engines would have dug big trenches through the dirt before it struck because the engines are lower than the hole.
And they would have been down in the dirt digging a trench.
There were no trenches out there.
Plus, those planes have components out of carbon-titanium steel, which is the hardest substance known to man.
When it hits cement, the cement breaks.
The carbon-titanium steel don't.
Where's the debris?
Yeah.
Yeah, you never even heard about it.
Well, who can we see?
These truths are the only planes.
Here's another one for you.
These are the only planes that have ever gone down where they never tried to put them, with the pieces back, resurrect them back together again.
Even though they should have had plenty of pieces.
Never was an attempt even done to put that, where they always do that in a plane crash.
Oh, it's the big thing they do.
That's the huge thing they do.
Lo and behold, in this day, 9-11, that wasn't done.
And I'll finish with the final one that I need an answer to.
Here's the final one.
Prior to 9-11, base commanders had the ability to scramble jets.
In other words, if they got a call from the FAA that something was wrong up in the air, a base commander could order and scramble jets.
Happened all the time.
And what does that mean when they scramble a jet?
Up go jets to find out what's going on.
Okay.
Fighters.
Okay, so they could send in jets.
Gang.
That'll put you in, okay, they're sending fighter jets up.
Tom Cruise is going airborne.
Goose daddy.
Just so you'll understand.
Anyway.
Anyway, base commanders had the ability to do that.
Okay.
Correct?
Yes.
Till June of 2001.
In June of 2001, there was an executive order that the only person that could scramble planes was Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense.
Had to come from Donnie.
That happened in June.
9-11 happens.
Interesting.
They couldn't find Rummy for hours.
Rummy was unavailable.
So no planes could go into the air.
9-11 happens.
One month later, guess what?
The policy's put back to the old of June 1st.
Now the base commanders can scramble planes again.
But for that three-month period in there, they weren't allowed to.
I'd like an answer to that question and why an executive order went out to did that.
And why was it reinstated after 9-11 took place?
And who can we trust then?
Who can we trust?
I don't know.
You got to trust yourself.
You got to do your own work.
Yeah.
You know?
And let me add this.
Everything I did on conspiracy theory, I didn't necessarily believe in all of it.
You got to remember, this is entertainment, this is a TV show.
Right.
You know, like everyone's getting on me now because my show predicted the pandemic.
Right.
Really?
Yeah.
This woman from South America, I had her on.
She was with that general, with the, all that crazy stuff.
What the heck?
Petraeus?
No, the people that talk to goats.
Oh, General, I forget his name.
Fau Young.
Fau Young, huh?
It's not the Vietnamese guy.
No, no, no, no.
He's got this real long name.
He's like a mystique person within the U.S. military.
Oh, dang.
I don't even know.
Well, he came up here with his wife, who's a doctor.
I interviewed them in a hangar on, I forget what subject it was, and she told me there's going to be a pandemic within the next six years.
And sure enough, there was.
And that's why everyone's yelling at me that I'm a turncoat now because I got vaccinated.
How does that make me a turncoat?
Yeah.
You know, I look at it from the odds.
And when it's 10 to 1, you're going to die unless you get a vaccination.
I'm going with the good odds.
I'm not going to test the bad ones.
I'm 70 years old now.
I want to go as long as I can.
Yeah, we need you here.
And, you know, I'm going to get my booster coming up here.
No problem.
And people said, that bothered me.
You know, the only thing that bothered me at getting the shots?
My deltoid got sore.
Yeah.
Well, guess what?
When they stick a piece of metal in rock-solid, ripped muscle, you know, it gets sore.
By the way, you know, it's been good for me in the pandemic?
Working out.
Yeah.
I'm 220.
I got a six-pack.
I'm 70 years old.
I got a six-pack.
How many people can say at 70 they got a six-pack, baby?
Not a lot, everybody.
Why?
Because there's nothing else to do.
Now, you know, I've been banned from The Price is Right.
Not really?
Oh, yeah, because I watch it while I work out every day.
I know the price of every car on there, baby.
I want to see you get away.
Oh, I watch Drew Carey.
He's one of my favorites.
Oh, he's great.
I train to The Price is Right.
That is on every morning that I train, whether I'm on the elliptic or doing my weights.
Drew Carey and The Price is Right, and then Andy and Mayberry.
Oh, yeah, he's good.
You know, I went to the home.
I'm buying my wife a t-shirt.
Are you?
Oh, she hates Barney Fife.
Oh, really?
Yeah, she hates him.
So I'm getting her a t-shirt.
I hate Barney Fife.
He's from North Carolina.
South Carolina.
Oh, he's from South Carolina?
Yeah, that's Mayberry, South Carolina.
They, North Carolina.
No, the guy is actually from whoever played Andy Griffith.
Oh, maybe he is, but Mayberry itself was supposedly in South Carolina.
Oh, yeah, there's a statue of.
Mayberry, South Carolina.
By the way, you heard that they took down Robert E. Lee's statue, right, in Virginia?
Oh, yeah.
Finally?
Yeah.
Yeah, did you hear what Trump said?
Uh-uh.
Donald, with his vast military knowledge and experience, you know, I give him a lot of credit and credibility.
Here's a Trump come out.
You didn't hear what he said?
Uh-uh.
Oh, he come out and said that Lee was a great general, and had we had him, we'd have won in Afghanistan.
He said this.
You guys are laughing.
He said this.
Now, my first question was...
We must really be getting bad history because if I recollect right, didn't Lee lose in the Civil War?
So shouldn't we have sent Ulysses Grant over to Afghanistan?
He's the guy that won.
You know, Robert E. Lee lost.
Yeah, sometimes we don't even think about that.
Why would Trump want to send the guy who lost?
I don't think that man thought a lot before he.
I don't think Trump was a big thinker.
Why do you think so many people gravitated towards Trump?
Because I know a lot of people love Trump, and they're not all dummies.
They're not all idiots.
A lot of them are good people.
I don't know.
I'm trying to figure out if it's fluoride in the water.
Because I've never had fluoride in my water.
Do you think he just sounded like water?
No, I think we had fluoride.
And they put fluoride in all water.
Uh-uh.
Sure they do.
For your teeth, so you don't get cavities.
Fluoride goes into all drinking water.
Oh, I got cavities.
Well, do you know what fluoride's the major ingredient of?
Uh-uh.
I've never, because all the homes, and it wasn't by design, but every house I've lived in, I've had my own well.
Yeah.
And you can send it to the University of Minnesota and the kids in chemistry will test your water free.
Wow.
Or at minimal price.
Because they got to have things to do.
They're in chemistry class.
So they'll break down your water.
You can do it at the university.
Send it over there and they'll give you a whole breakdown of what's in your well water.
Wow.
Well, the thing is, I've had well water my whole life.
I've never been hooked up to city water and none of the houses.
And city water, like the city of Brainerd, where Fargo was from, they got in a big fight years ago.
They didn't want to fluorinate their water.
The feds came in and made them.
Wow.
Didn't even get the option.
Well, here's the deal.
Do you know what fluoride's the major ingredient of?
Prozac.
Oh, damn.
So if you're drinking fluorinated water on a daily basis, you're getting a daily supply of Prozac.
Because that's the major ingredient in Prozac.
What's Prozac for?
To calm you down, right?
Yeah.
Take away anxiety, I guess.
I never used it.
Take away your ideas, I think.
Maybe that too.
To dumb you down.
Oh, it really sedates your brain after a while.
Yeah.
And if you're drinking fluoridated water every day, fluoride's the major ingredient in Prozac.
Fuck, Jeff.
Well, maybe it ain't what does Prozac do you?
I don't know that.
I'm not a chemist.
All I can tell you is it's the major ingredient of Prozac is fluoride.
I'm not shocked.
Everything's scary now.
Well, it was scary then, too.
Was it always scary?
Sure.
We had the draft.
You think it's just new scaries?
Oh, we had the draft.
I grew up in South Minneapolis, right?
If you grew up in South Minneapolis and you had to go to work for a living because your parents weren't rich, guess what?
You were going to Vietnam.
If you grew up out in Edina, Minnetonka, with the fat cats, where Al Franken grew up.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Well, then you went to Harvard.
Oh, you were fine.
You went to Blake School.
No, you went to Blake School here in Minneapolis.
That's an art money school.
Well, those kids didn't worry about Vietnam.
They went to college and got deferments and got out of it.
I remember Dick Cheney got like six deferments out of Vietnam.
And they asked him, and Dick's response was, well, I had other priorities.
I heard that and said, well, so did every other kid that got drafted.
Why do you think they got drafted for Christ's sake?
They had other priorities.
You know, me, I was a dummy.
I went and enlisted.
Did you know the Navy's never drafted?
Oh, really?
Nope.
So only the Army's drafted?
Army and the Marines and all them.
Wow.
A lot of people, when there was the draft, a lot of people would join the Navy.
Because with the Navy, you're at least guaranteed three hots and a cot.
Oh, yeah.
You know, you're going to get a bed and you're going to get three hot meals a day.
You're not going to be laying in the dirt.
Yeah.
But then you can do what I did and go into volunteer for what they call the Brownwater Navy.
And then you probably, well, we had it better than the Army, though, because all of our operations were one-nighters.
We don't go out.
But the Marines are those hitmen.
The Marines come in and they're the hitmen.
No, we are.
I mean, the Marines.
You got to understand something.
I don't.
The Marines claim they're first ashore, right?
They're not.
Want me to sing you?
I'll end you with a song that'll piss off all the Marines.
Because we used to piss them off anyway.
Let's keep it going.
They never liked us frogmen SEALs to begin with.
Let's keep it going.
Here's a song we used to sing in UDT SEAL training.
Okay.
And it's entitled Marines Drowning in the Waves.
Okay.
Now you know that UDT stands for Underwater Demolition Team.
Okay.
Okay.
And Buds is called Basic Underwater Demolition Slash SEAL.
Okay.
You know, because the SEALs came about in 62 when Kennedy took the frogmen out of the water and put them on land.
Wow.
And so they needed a name.
And they came up with Sierra Land.
Because we'll come from the sea, we'll come from the air, we'll come from the land.
Let's get it.
Sierra Land.
That's what SEAL stands for.
And this is a song we would sing in training called Marines Drowning in the Waves.
It goes, Marines drowning in the waves, it's UDT who always saves.
And when a job they cannot do, it's UDT who pulls it through.
Although they claim they're first ashore, UDT's been there before.
Oh, leathernecks on bended knees can kiss the ass of UDTs.
There you go.
Now, here's the tradition.
We came about because in World War II, you know those landing boats with the Marines that flop the front down and the Marines charge off on the beach?
Well, they did one of them and there was a sandbar.
And when the boats went down, they hit the sandbar when they dropped their front.
I forget hundreds of Marines ran off and drowned because they ran into deep water.
Nobody knew the sandbar was there.
So they needed to form the underwater demolition teams.
Now, the blowing up came from obstacles the enemy would put in the water to stop those.
We would blow them up.
But we also would recon the beach To show where the boats could go in so they wouldn't hit a sandbar and potentially kill these brave Marines that are charging the beach.
And don't get me wrong, I wouldn't do it.
They're brave as hell.
I'll go in before them any day.
I don't want to be charging with them.
You know, I'll go in in the dark like we did.
We're going in the dark.
But what became a tradition, especially in the Pacific, was that when the Marines were going to land, the UDT, watch the Frogmen, the movie with Richard Widmark.
When the UDT would do the reconnaissance, at some point during the reconnaissance, one or two frogmen with a pre-made sign they carried with them would skin up onto the beach to the high watermark.
They'd pound the sign in before they left in the dark.
In the morning, when the Marines would hit, there would be a sign on the beach, welcome U.S. Marine Corps, UDT, whatever team it was.
Wow.
So we would welcome the Marines to the beach.
Maybe we got there first.
That was where they knew we were welcoming them.
So when the Marines claim they're first ashore, we've been there before.
Now, granted, we don't stay.
We get out.
But we make sure it's okay for them to charge the next day.
I see.
So, and I have all the respect in the world for.
Oh, 100%.
It sounds like it.
In fact, I'll tell you this.
Some things I would do, we'd get either helicopters.
We did a lot of things with helos.
Yeah.
And we'd either get Navy pilots or Marine pilots.
I would always inquire who's flying us.
And when they'd say Marines, I'd always go good.
Because I knew that if anything went out of whack and you called that Marine, he's coming.
Wow.
He's a Marine.
He'd go come.
There's something special.
He's not going to think.
He's not going to have second thoughts.
He's going to charge the beach.
He's a Marine.
So I always felt better when I knew Marine pilots were flying us.
Yeah.
We got a couple of jarheads up there flying us today.
That's okay.
That's good stuff.
But no, it's a natural rival.
No, I love it.
We were at Camp Pendleton once, and what I used to hate about it was they used to send us up there when the Marines had practiced their landings.
So we'd have to sit up all day in these boats if any of them fell in the water to pull them out.
You know, we're lifeguards.
And we'd think, what the hell?
Where's Marine Recon?
How come they don't do this shit?
What do we got to come up here and do this all day out in the sun, bobbing around while they're landing on the beach, you know?
And, well, the one time we went up to Pendleton, we had Master Chief Corey came up with us, E9, our Command Master Chief.
Okay, that's the highest you can get E9?
Yeah, enlisted.
You had enlisted, right?
Well, Marines don't always know uniforms very good.
You know, charging the beach don't require you to know a lot of other stuff.
Right.
So an E9 in the Navy on his lapel carries an anchor with two stars on the anchor.
The anchor signifies a chief, and the two little stars indicate a senior chief or a master chief.
Okay.
E9.
Okay.
Well, Corey's walking on the beach with his master chief two stars, and all of a sudden these Marines are running on the beach and shit.
They're stopping.
Boy, and they're popping salutes to Corey going by, right?
Well, Corey's an enlisted man.
He's E9.
Well, then it hit us, they think Corey's a two-star admiral.
All they're doing is seeing the two stars up on the lapel, and the Marines don't know Navy insignias.
They think Corey's a, and word spread through the Marines.
Oh, boy, the frogmen got a two-star admiral with them.
Holy crap.
Right on the beach with him.
They got some two-star Navy Admiral with them.
You know, so we got anything we wanted.
Hey, we need some stuff.
Oh, yeah.
Let's get some.
I need a crab leg up here at the front.
Well, I'll say this, and I'll, you know, I was in the Naval Amphibious Base Coronado, and that one best chow hall in the Western Pacific for like nine or ten years in a row.
You know what we, you know, that shows you the superiority between the Navy and the rest of the services.
Every Friday at the Naval Amphib Base Coronado, do you know what we had for lunch?
Every Friday without fail.
Frog.
Steak and lobster, man.
Damn.
They'd cover your beautiful piece of steak with a lobster tail.
God.
And then you know what it used to cost me for that?
Because our job takes us away from the base.
So we have to pay to eat on the base.
We get what's called comrades in case we got to eat in town or somewhere.
Yeah.
So we get paid.
So I got to pay on the base.
You know what the steak and lobster would cost me like 85 cents.
Sam.
That's a deal, bro.
Yeah.
Breakfast was like 35 cents.
Everything you wanted to eat.
Damn.
Went to Army Jump School.
Oh, my God.
If they didn't have the pizza trucks that ran around at night, I'd have starved to death.
Really?
Oh, the Army's horrifying.
Army Jump School, they measure out and you get one scoop of everything.
You look at it and you go, we got out there to SEALs and we're complaining to the Army going, how are you supposed to fight if you're not being fed?
Cripe Almighty, we need food.
We work out.
We burn energy.
Feed us.
So they made us do KP one time.
And boy, we said, what is this bullshit?
We said if the Green Berets came to our base, we wouldn't make them do KP.
And you had to do it?
Well, we're an Army Airborne School.
Part of the school, you know, which is a joke.
I just completed 26 weeks of SEAL training, and I go out for three weeks at jump school.
We used to get up at 5 in the morning and do PT before they'd even get up on purpose to wake them all up.
Damn.
We'd be out there doing PT.
The SEALs are out at 5 a.m.
doing PT because they don't get enough from us.
Damn.
Oh, yeah.
That's all part of the mystique, baby.
The mystique.
Back then, they didn't know us at all.
Wow.
In fact, we sent tremors through the rest of the Navy.
It was all secretive, huh?
Well, final story.
I went to boot camp, and that's where you go to boot camp.
When you go to Navy boot camp, it's not difficult.
Right.
There's nothing hard there.
In fact, I used to work out and do push-ups at night because I was getting out of shape.
Damn.
So I'm at boot camp.
Damn.
One day, every day at boot camp, you get taught a different facet of the Navy: electronics, technician, storekeeper, boatswain's mate, sonar tech, whatever, all these different jobs in the Navy.
Well, the one day you get the UDT SEAL presentation.
They march three companies into a room.
So it's probably close to 100 guys in there.
Yeah, close to 100 guys in there.
You're giving the presentation, you're getting it?
No, that we're getting it.
They march in, you're in boot camp.
They march you into a room, and all of a sudden these guys come walking out wearing marine green, Spitshine Cochrane jump boots.
They don't look Navy, and they're all built.
Damn.
And the guy walks up, Chief Razchak, and goes, today, gentlemen, you're going to hear about the Brownwater Navy, the UDT SEAL.
We are the Navy Special Forces.
You volunteer to be one of us.
Damn.
You can't just be one of us.
You have to pass our test to be one of us.
So then they showed us a film called The Men with Green Faces.
And you watch this film, right?
And it tells you all about the SEALs, right?
And then when you're done with that, he comes back out and he says, okay, anybody that wants to volunteer for the UDT SEAL program, stay seated.
He goes, the rest of you, get the fuck out of here.
Damn.
There were guys running over each other getting to the doors.
Yeah.
Because, I mean, half of them joined the Navy.
They didn't want to be doing this shit.
You know, what they watched on a film.
Going behind enemy lines, six guys, all this stuff.
They didn't want that stuff.
There's no friendlies anywhere.
Wow.
That type of work.
I'd rather be on the ship.
But you wanted it.
Oh, you have to.
You volunteer.
Okay.
Probably I would say, let me think back.
30 guys maybe stayed, 25 to take what they call the screen test.
I would say a dozen of us were serious.
The other 12 or whatever were just doing it to break the monotony of boot camp.
And so they march you over to the swimming pool and you got to line up across the pool and you got to do a 300 meter swim long course, 50 meter pool, using only an underwater recovery stroke.
You can't swim crawl.
You can't swim butterfly or backstroke.
You have to swim either breaststroke or side stroke, something that doesn't bring your arms out of the water because you're going to be doing clandescent swimming.
So you can't breathe out of the water?
No, you can breathe.
You can't bring your arms out of the water.
Oh, you got to be.
You don't want to be splashing.
You want an underwater.
Breaststroke is an underwater recovery stroke.
All they see is your head.
If you're swimming the butterfly, you're splashing and you look like a butterfly coming in on the beach.
Yeah.
That brings intention.
So you can only do this swim using an underwater recovery stroke 300 meters.
Well, I was a competitive swimmer.
So this was a piece of cake for me.
And like a dummy, I do it like I'm in the Olympic trials and I win by like a pool length.
I'm in a showdown SEAL instructors.
Boom, I hit the I'm doing breaststroke like I'm in the turn, the pull underwater.
You know, and I'm down and back at the six.
I'm done.
The next guy's still got 50 yards, 50 meters to go, right?
But I was stupid.
I wore myself out.
I could have cruised.
Because when I later learned, because I used to give screen tests later, when I learned the time you had to beat, I could have cruised.
I didn't need to go that fast.
Then I would say half of them were gone.
At the end of the swim, it eliminated half.
We're now down to, I think, eight guys.
Wow.
They paired us up, and you had to do as many push-ups as you could in two minutes, only resting in the up position.
Then the other guy went and you counted for each other.
Then as many sit-ups as you could do in two minutes, and then as many forecount burpees as you could do in two minutes.
Then they took you over to the track and you then had to run a mile.
And again, they don't tell you what's passing.
They just say four times around the track, run the mile.
Do you remember how quick you went?
I don't know.
They didn't have a clock.
I don't know.
They didn't tell you.
I won the swim.
I did great on everything else.
I came in third on the run.
Brettlinger and Bueller.
I even know the two guys.
Brettlinger and Bueller beat me on the run.
So we finished the run.
They then line up the eight or ten guys, whoever was left up, and they walk down the line with a clipboard, and all he says to you is either pass or fail.
Damn.
You know how many passed?
Four.
So you had 100 guys and only four guys passed.
That was just to get to training.
Damn.
Then when you get to training, each class starts with about 100 guys roughly.
You will probably graduate 25. Wow.
It's got a 75 to 80 percent attrition rate.
And that's all for UDT?
SEALs.
Oh, that's for SEALs for both.
It's all.
You're all one.
Oh, wow.
There ain't no difference.
Oh, okay.
There's no difference.
There's no difference.
It's the same training.
Same training.
In my day, you then went to a UDT team or a SEAL team.
Wow.
And they generally sent the better swimmers went to a UDT team.
Damn.
Because you were going to do more water work than a SEAL would.
Wow.
So I got sent to a UDT team because I was a good swimmer.
And I think back, and all the guys from my class that went, they were all the best swimmers in the class.
And the instructor told me later, yeah, he said, oh, yeah, the best swimmers went to the UDT.
The others went to the SEALs.
The stronger swimmers always went to UDT.
But you still carried weapons.
You still did.
In fact, lots of times we were the demolition element with the SEALs.
They'd come and get one of us to go with to set up the explosives for them.
That's cool.
And all that.
No, it ain't cool.
None of it's cool.
Oh, it isn't?
Nope.
None of it.
Today, my view today is I'm so anti-war.
Really?
Yep.
But at the time, you had a different perception of it.
Had to.
Yeah.
Had to.
But today, it's all.
Tell me one war we've been in since World War II that accomplished something.
Tell me one.
Ain't any.
Tell me one that accomplished something.
None.
Why were they fought?
I don't know.
I'll finish with this.
My mother and father are both World War II veterans.
My mom was a nurse in North Africa.
That predated Normandy.
Wow.
Not many can say their mom.
And my mom was actually injured and sent back home in North Africa as a nurse.
And my dad was under Patton, had six bronze battle stars, North Africa, Normandy, Battle of the Bulge, Ramagan, Bridge, Anzio, and Berlin, and lived.
Jeepers.
Jesus.
Right?
Those are my parents.
Now you kind of understand, but they weren't warmongers.
They were nothing like that.
But now you kind of understand why I went in the service.
Everyone in my family went in the service.
It was kind of just what you did.
And my parents never pushed us.
In fact, my dad, I came home from high school and my dad was home.
World War II vets, six bronze battle stars.
And I come home and told my dad, dad, we got to fight in Vietnam.
My dad goes, why?
Why do you think that?
I said, we have to stop the domino effect of communism.
If we don't stop them there, the communism's going to go all over the world.
Yeah, that's what they thought.
You know what my dad did?
He looked at me and he said, is that what they're teaching you in school?
I said, yeah.
My dad looked at me and said, that's the biggest bunch of bullshit I've ever heard.
Wow.
Now imagine what I went through right there.
My father's telling me my teachers are bullshitting me.
I respected my teachers.
And here's my dad telling me they're giving me a line of bullshit.
My dad looked at me and said, we're not there to stop communism.
He said, we're there because somebody's making big money.
Well, I was fortunate to come home, and I was fortunate that my second deployment, they had pulled us out.
You know, I was at the very tail end, February 71 until November 71. And I was able to come home to my dad and say, guess what, dad, you were right.
And my dad looked at me and said, well, I always knew I was right.
I said, sometimes you just have to learn things a hard way.
I said, I tried to.
I did what I felt I had to do to tell you the truth.
The rest was up to you.
Wow.
But I mean, my dad was against the Vietnam War before the hippies.
Damn.
And here's a six, so you'll find that many veterans like myself are the most anti-war people because they know it doesn't accomplish nothing.
And my dad fought in the Popular War.
Jesus.
The one that was the Great War.
Yeah.
You know, the one that stopped Hitler.
Yeah.
I might add, too, anyone that studies Hitler in 30s Germany, take a look at Donald Trump.
Yeah.
Same playbook.
Same playbook as Hitler's Germany.
And he's doing it right now.
And this country's so stupid, they're falling for it.
The guy's a con man and a good one because he's got a lot of smart people that have bought, drank the Kool-Aid, for lack of a better.
He's Jim Jones.
So many politicians are con men, though, huh?
He's not a politician.
Right.
That's a good point.
That's a good point.
And also, too, you know how The Rock has said he might run and all this?
What people need to understand is this.
Yes, Jesse Ventura won.
But they need to understand Jesse Ventura has done 14 years of public service.
Donald Trump had done none.
The ROC, to my knowledge, I love The Rock, but he's done none.
I was in the military six years, so I understand that part.
Right?
That's public service.
Right, you were a mayor.
I was a mayor of the sixth largest city for four years, and I was a governor for four years.
So I've every branch of government, so I have experience in the public sector.
These guys don't.
And here's the big difference, and I'll end with this.
The difference is this.
The private sector is for profit.
The public sector is to provide services.
There's a big difference.
These guys that come from the private sector bring only expertise at making profit.
They don't bring the expertise at providing public service.
Government is public service.
It's to provide for the masses.
The good of the many, not the good of the few, and not the good of the elite or the rich.
It's to the masses.
These guys have no...
I would agree with that.
You know, and that's how come he came in and governed the same way.
And why people think he's the Messiah.
I've had people, you know, I'm agnostic atheist, right?
I've had people tell me Donald Trump is a good Christian.
You know what I responded with?
Well, if he's a good Christian, I'm glad I'm not.
You know, if that's what a good Christian is.
You don't want any part of it.
You don't want no part of it.
You don't want no part of it.
Because he'd sell his soul to rock and roll, baby.
He'll sell out.
Look at what he's done to all the people around him.
If you don't kowtow to him, he sells you out in the river, man.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think it's so many of those guys, it's the dark arts, man.
I just wonder, how do we get out of the system?
How do we break this system?
Don't vote for Democrats and Republicans.
Agree.
It's as simple as the nose on your face, but it's as difficult as climbing Mount Everest.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, and especially, let me throw this out, especially.
Here's one that goes beyond my belief.
When you have a state like, like I said, the Taliban's in Texas now.
I call Texas the home of the Taliban, the United States Taliban.
Because do you know right now it's easier to buy a gun in Texas than vote?
Man.
Now, isn't there something inherently wrong with that?
Yeah.
You can buy a gun in Texas easier than you can vote.
Jeepers.
Nobody's going to idea for the gun.
You can walk in anywhere in Texas and buy a gun.
But if you got to vote, oh, you got to register, jump through hoops.
They've closed voting places.
You maybe have to drive 30 miles.
Can't mail nothing in anymore.
You know, none of that.
And do you know there's no voter fraud?
I can tell you, I knew that.
When I got into office in Minnesota, we did a huge study, and it came back nothing significant.
And all the things they've caught now, the only votes they've caught have been votes for Trump that were illegal.
You know?
Who, here's the part that makes me laugh.
Who do they think is out organizing voter fraud?
And for what purpose?
You got local people that volunteer their good time to be independent and count these votes like great American citizens, and then you got the Trumpies telling them they're all a bunch of crooks.
Yeah.
How dare these Trumpies say that?
They have no proof.
There's none.
I think there's no way to determine if those people counting the votes, what their allegiances are.
Both are there.
Right.
Both are represented.
And not done behind closed doors.
Yeah, then that's totally, that makes sense.
And they had that phony recount in Arizona.
Biden won.
Even when they hired their hired guns to come in and hopefully switch it over so they'd have an argument.
Yeah, none of that amounted to anything.
Well, 60 court cases all thrown out.
Rudy Giuliani getting disbarred in some states now because he brought these lawsuits or brought things to court with no evidence, which they do have rules, you know.
As a lawyer, you can't just bring frivolous things forward.
You've got to have evidence.
They had no evidence of nothing.
And yet people have bought into it and said it happened.
That is interesting.
I don't know.
It's funny to know how involved people are, what people are trusting.
Have any of you ever met anyone that committed voter fraud?
You know, all your years on the planet?
Ever talked to anyone about doing it?
No, I never had.
No.
We've got four people in the room, and it's only come to light in the last year or two.
Voter fraud.
That's a good point.
Nobody cared.
Any other election.
And Trump gave us a preview because, remember, all leading up to the election, he was setting himself up if he lost.
Oh, if I lose, it's because it's rigged.
Remember, he started that early on out.
I'll tell you, the person that knows him, forward and backwards, is that niece of his.
Have you seen her?
Oh, is she a real dynamic?
Oh, no.
His niece.
She's a Trump.
She's a psychologist, legit.
Oh, is she?
She went to college.
She gets on TV and dissects his brain.
Everything she said about him is exactly what happens.
Interesting.
She said he will never admit losing the election, no matter what.
Yeah, that's a lot of his thing.
There's no admission of defeat.
And then he's got all these people out there that are buying the Kool-Aid.
Like, this guy's a hero.
Come on.
I don't know why.
I think different people like him for different reasons.
This guy ran from the draft.
He bought his way.
Now, I look up to Muhammad Ali, and Muhammad Ali ran from the draft.
You know what the difference is, though?
You know what the difference is?
Ali was willing to go to jail for his beliefs.
Trump wasn't.
Trump bought his way out.
Trump faced no charges.
Trump bucked, you know, rich people, man.
Rigged the system.
That's rich people.
But see, see, Ali and Ali to had it made.
They already told him, you're going to do nothing but what Joe Lewis did.
You'll go down, you'll do exhibitions.
Ali wasn't going to get, he knew they were going to use him to get black kids to volunteer to send to Vietnam, and he was going to have none of it.
Mohammed was not going to be the catalyst that sent his black kids.
You know, people have asked me if I've ever used the N-word.
Yeah.
And I have to admit I have.
No, I used it when I quote Ali.
Oh, wow.
I quote Muhammad Ali, and he used it.
So if he can use it, I can quote him.
And he said it about the Viet Cong.
Remember, he said, no Viet Cong never called me the N-word.
Oh, wow.
Hell, no.
I remember when Mohammed said that to the press, ain't no Viet Cong.
What do I want to fight these people for?
Ain't no Viet Cong ever called me the N-word.
The N-word.
You know?
And so Mohammed wouldn't get sucked in to bring in all the other blacks so they could kill them in Vietnam and send them.
Because blacks were very much disproportionately represented in Vietnam.
Really?
They didn't have a lot of them?
What was our black population then?
Maybe 10, 11%?
Was it even that high?
And what percent were in Vietnam?
Maymore.
Really?
Sure.
Because the people that serve like that are the poor people.
Oh, yeah.
Well, it's a lot of Latino.
It's a lot of Mexican and black.
It's a lot of poor white.
In my neighborhood in South Minneapolis, I grew up in South Minneapolis by the Lake Street Bridge.
Where What's his name died is my old neighborhood is all through there.
Yeah.
George Floyd.
Yeah.
Well, if you grew up there, you maybe had to go to work.
Right.
Well, then you went to Vietnam.
I have all sorts of friends that got drafted.
But again, if you lived out at Lake Minnetonka or Edina, you didn't see Vietnam.
You went to college.
You got deferments.
See, it was so unfair.
It's always been like that, though.
It's always the poorest people are always the ones that are going to be able to do it.
And you know what they're going to have to do if they bring it back?
They're going to have to draft women.
Wow.
They'll have to.
Some of these bitches need to go out.
Oh, they'll have to.
Yeah.
How can they not?
Look, it's time.
I want to see.
No, I don't want to see no draft at all.
I worked against the draft.
I came back and used to march against the draft.
Absolutely.
Wow.
Why should the rich get out of it?
Oh, I don't think the rich should get out of it, but I think you've got to find a way to get everybody to be drafted, make it fair.
That's why a lot of these things, it's like if it's not happening to the rich people, things are going to be.
If we weren't involved in all these wars, we wouldn't need all these people.
And besides, you kill people with pushing a button more than you do with boots on the ground.
These days, the actual people aren't having a chance in their own life even almost, in their own safety out there.
The whole war thing is sad because we spend all our money in preparation for war.
I mean, everyone's bitching about Biden's $3.5 trillion being too much.
It's too much to spend that on us.
They have no problem spending that in Afghanistan.
Had no problem spending it in Iraq.
But yet here they're going to spend it on people in the United States and there's an outrage.
It's too much.
Too much money for us.
It's our money, but it's too much for us.
Oh, God, don't give it to us.
Don't help out Americans.
Certainly we could ship it off to a war and build a nation somewhere.
You know, we could spend trillions like we did in Afghanistan and Iraq.
And what do we have to show for it?
Zilch.
Not a ton.
You know, but oh, God, no, don't, that's way big to price tag.
Us Republicans aren't going to stand for that.
That's a good point, man.
You know, you're spending the money on us?
Yeah.
On people of America?
Jobs programs and, you know, leave so women can work and for kids and babies.
Oh, God, we don't want to spend money on that when we can spend money on a new aircraft carrier.
Yeah, that's crazy, huh?
You know, Jesus, come on.
I hope everyone's getting my sarcasm.
I hope I'm being over the top with it.
It's a lot of a dirty funnel, man.
Good, good, good.
Because you never know today.
Somebody's going to, oh, you should have heard what Jesse said.
Well, fuck them, man.
People, look, I think you speak loud and clear, and I think it's obvious what you say.
And Jesse, you have quite a body of work, and I just appreciate you being here and spending time today.
There were some things.
You're a comedian.
I am, man.
I am.
Finish me with a freaking joke.
Sometimes.
I'm going to put you on the hot spot.
Give me a freaking joke, comedian.
Let me think of something good, man.
All right.
That's you.
Happened at Gulf years ago.
I was playing with the, and a guy from Wisconsin told it to me.
Uh-huh.
Did you hear about when Jeffrey Dahmer had his mom over for dinner?
You know who Jeffrey Dahmer is?
Oh, yeah, yeah, the dangerous man.
Yeah, you heard about when he had his mom over for dinner?
Uh-uh.
Yeah, well, he had his mom over for dinner, and his mom said, Jeffrey, you know, I just don't care for these friends of yours.
And Jeffrey said, that's okay, mom, try the vegetables.
Now, to remind you, Dahmer's the guy that was the cannibal.
Oh, yeah, no, I know him.
I almost ate a freaking Vietnamese guy one time at a damn best box.
I heard that joke played in golf.
I thought it was kind of funny.
Look, I think it's good, man.
You've got to remember the cheese heads over there.
They birth a lot of these.
You know about Ed Gein, right?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, he's a cheesehead right across the road.
He was a Packers fan?
Sure, he had.
Well, I don't know if he was a Packers fan, but he's a cheesehead.
Oh, yeah, yeah, he was.
That's somebody from Wisconsin.
He's from Illinois.
He was from Wisconsin?
Yes.
Oh, I thought he's from Illinois.
Well, no, he's from Wisconsin, about 800 miles over the border over there.
A lot of creeps out there.
Ed Geen.
That's who they did psycho.
Dude, you know, Lee Harvey Oswald went to school in my hometown.
Did he?
Yeah, in Louisiana.
Pretty cool, man.
Yeah.
You know who you would love to talk to, man?
It's Robert Kennedy Jr.
I've talked to him.
You have?
Yeah.
He's a really smart guy, man.
Both you guys just have so much information.
I've taken his son diving.
Wow, that's cool.
Oh, his sons are awesome.
Aren't they good kids?
Well, his son was down in Cabo, and we have a mutual friend, Dick Russell, who I've done books with.
And so Robert's son wanted to go diving with an authentic frog man.
Wow.
So I went over there and joined him, and I took Robert's son diving so he could dive with an authentic real frog man.
That's cool.
He was pretty excited over that.
I enjoyed it.
You know, kind of granting the kid's wish, you know.
Yeah.
He now would tell his friends, yeah, I've dove for the real frogman.
Yeah.
You know, so he's a special guy.
He's the best dive ever been, 212 feet under the water.
What was down there?
Nothing.
Yeah.
Blackered in hell.
Can't see a thing.
You can't see your hand in front of your face.
Do you get scared or no?
Yeah.
There's a bounce dive where you go down.
We did it off Point Loma.
It's a great story.
Bounce dive, probably 10 or 12 pairs of guys.
And what you do is you're going down 212 feet.
You're staying there for a minimum time so you don't have to decompress.
So your bottom's about 30 seconds.
Then you've got to start coming up, but you come up only where your slowest bubbles.
So you're on a rope?
Yeah.
The thing down.
You get down there and you'll see how deep they dropped it down 212 feet.
So we went down 212 feet and the good part was off Point Loma, we all got done, about 10 swim pairs.
We were pulling the rubber raft boat into the PL boat and one of my teammates is on the fan tail, the back.
He goes, hey guys, check it out.
And he points over here.
Here come a freaking great white.
Yeah.
Swimming right on the surface, dorsal fin about a foot and a half out of the water, cruised right by us, as big as jaws.
And we're all sitting in the PL boat watching this big boy go by.
We had detracted his attention.
Apparently us going up and down, the pairs.
He came over to see what's this?
Damn.
And we had just all happened to getting out of the water when he went cruising by.
See, I was happy that I was in the SEALs and was a frogman.
Jaws didn't come out till 75. I was discharged and out of the Navy by then.
Because if they'd have had Jaws, I'm sure they would have showed it to us one night in training.
We would have had to sat and watched Jaws and then go on a swim.
Oh, that would have been.
I mean, the instructors would do that just to get guys to quit.
Yeah.
Okay, you just watched Jaws.
Now we're going on a two-mile ocean swim.
I'd have quit.
I'd have quit, man.
The hardest swim I had to do, five miles.
Really?
Yep.
Straight or is it?
They just take you five miles from the beach in San Diego and they dump you off.
They're out there with a PL.
They got an M16 in case anything comes around.
You know, there's always a guy with an M16.
And you're out so far in the swells, you can't even see the skyscrapers of San Diego at water level.
And they just point and say that way.
And you start swimming.
And five miles takes you a good part of the day.
Damn.
You know, you spend, I was a good swimmer, so I got in early.
It is enjoyable.
Do you kick your legs when you swim or you just use your arms?
You got fins on.
Damn right, you know.
Cripe, you don't want to not use your fins.
Yeah, I mess up.
You do it with fins.
You got to qualify for them, though.
You got to swim a swim under a certain time.
Then you get your fins.
Oh, damn.
And then from that point on, you can do all your swims with fins.
And you're in the ocean.
You want fins.
Oh, yeah.
You're not in a pool.
You know, I did my share of swimming on the line.
Yeah.
You know, competitive swimming.
My claim to fame, I actually swam in the same pool with Mark Spitz once.
Oh, damn.
You know, didn't compete against him.
I just was in the same pool with him.
Could you have been a competitive swimmer, you think?
I was.
Just not at his level.
Yeah.
He's the seven Olympic gold medals.
He was even, when Phelps broke his record, it was remarkable.
I didn't think anyone ever would.
But Spitz's record was still better than Phelps' eight.
You know why?
Spitz's seven is better than Phelps' eight, in my opinion.
Because it was in more categories?
One reason.
Spitz's seven gold medals were also seven world records.
Oh, wow.
Phelps' eight gold medals were eight gold medals, but not every swim was a world record.
Damn.
Mark Spitz's seven golds were also seven world records.
I take.
I like that.
You know, seven gold medals, seven world records.
I can barely fucking swim.
And, oh, I could, I swam.
I spend more time in a pool than I did on land.
I would ride on your back, I bet.
I would probably ride on your back.
No, that's why I don't swim today.
Yeah.
I don't even, I live a place on the ocean.
I don't even go out in it.
Damn.
There's what's out there.
You've seen it all.
You've been through it.
I've seen it all.
What do I want to go out there for?
You got a big body of work, Jesse Ventura.
You got a big body of work.
You haven't given me a joke yet.
I can't leave.
I gave you a joke now.
I gave you the Dahmer joke.
You're right.
You're a comedian.
Find me a freaking joke.
All right.
I got this joke then.
This is one.
What do you call a fish with no eyes?
A fish with no eyes.
What do you call a fish with no eyes?
And it's got to be something.
Okay, what's in the water that's blind?
I don't know what.
A fssh.
A what?
A fssh.
My niece told me that one.
Thank God it was your niece.
I'll give it a pass now because your niece told you that one.
I'm learning something from your comedy routine.
Your little niece who comes up with the funny credit.
How old was she?
I think she's nine.
Yeah, well, that fits about a nine.
Nine-year-old, very good.
Okay, here's one.
Give me one from your routine.
Okay, my cousin just got busted for sucking really small dicks.
That's just a joke.
So either way, you lose here today.
I mean, they're all bad ones.
They're all bad ones.
Do I know where I'm not going?
I'm going to come see you.
You know what?
I got a special coming up.
Now you do stand-up?
Yeah.
You know, I've been told that I could do that.
Really?
Yeah, because I can hold, I can...
Yeah.
I could see you doing tours like Jocko Willing does.
He does a lot of speaking and tours.
Well, and what I do, I don't really do stand-up comedy, but I do a lot of make people laugh with the stupidity of things I tell them.
I'd like to...
Oh, I think the points you would make and bring insight into people, I think, would be...
Because like I said earlier, the thrill for me was being able to go to Harvard.
And I'll tell you this, too.
Maybe they've been broken now, but I had the largest classes in Harvard history.
Damn.
They had to move me into the commons because my classes were open to everybody.
And so, oh yeah, they had to move me in the commons because the place would just fill up.
Oh, dude, you're like, you remind me of like Christopher Lloyd if he had big fucking balls, you know?
Yeah, well, and it was fun.
It was fun for me to be able to go there and influence kids who I know are going to end up probably being important.
Right.
You know, because of where they go to school and everything like that.
And it's like when Muhammad Ali went and spoke at a Harvard graduation.
Wow.
You know, and I need to go back and listen to some of that stuff.
And you know, Muhammad, when he spoke at the Harvard graduation, he set the world's record for the shortest poem.
Damn.
He did.
What it was, you remember?
Yeah.
He was speaking at the graduates of Harvard.
I heard the story told.
And somebody in the crowd yelled out, give us a poem.
And Ali looked at the crowd, and it should be the shortest in history.
He went, me, we.
It's all right.
And that's the shortest poem in history.
Me, we.
Me, we.
And Ali did that off his top of his head.
Oh, that's interesting.
And the guy who talked about it was Plimpton, I think it was.
George Plimpton?
Yeah.
Oh, damn.
He was talking, or it was either him or another one of them famous writers.
And they said, they looked it up and they said that would qualify as because the one before had three syllables.
Damn.
Ali's had two.
And then the one that was listed as the record had three syllables.
He was a real master.
You know, I was lucky I got to spend a day with him.
Really?
Oh, yeah.
What did y'all do?
Do y'all go to dinner?
No.
Sat in his house in Barren Springs.
I didn't want to go to no freaking dinner.
Yeah.
I was in his house all day with just his people and me and my people.
And he, well, because the story is when I won, the governor, I got up and I talked that night about that I was a young kid when Muhammad Ali, then Cassius Clay, beat Sonny Liston for the world title.
I said, nobody believed that Cassius would win, now Ali.
And I said that night, he said he shocked the world.
Well, I said, tonight, we shocked the world.
Don't end there.
I'm in the governor-elect.
I'm in the bowels of the capital.
I haven't taken over yet.
And a business friend of mine, Harvey McKay, shows up on my schedule for 10 minutes.
And Harvey walks in.
He said, Harvey, what are you doing here?
He said, I brought you something, and you had a big box.
Better open it.
I opened the box up.
On the inside was a pair of Everlast boxing gloves.
Oh, wow.
I hate this part.
It makes you sad.
Oh, he's my hero.
Oh, yeah.
The boxing gloves said to Governor Ventura, you shock the world, Muhammad Ali.
He was watching that night.
Sorry.
He was watching that night.
And he took the time.
And that's what set up for me to come visit him.
Wow.
And when I went to visit him, he was, of course, stricken with the Parkinson's.
But his wife, Lonnie, said to me, she said, you know, Muhammad wouldn't take his medicine last night.
And I said, why?
She said, because it slows him down and he didn't want to be slow.
He was so excited you were coming today.
And I thought, Muhammad Ali is excited that I'm coming to see him.
Give me a break.
What made you so happy that he was proud of you?
Because he's my hero.
Yeah.
He's a guy who, if you read his biography, he developed his whole style from pro wrestling.
Oh, wow.
And he battled the system.
He was a man who stood up for what he believed in and was willing to pay the price for it.
And I don't think there's a better hero you can have in the world.
And so he's my hero.
He always was.
He always will be.
And I think it kind of shocked Mohammed.
Do you want to hear what I did for him that day?
Yeah, I would like to hear that.
And this will be the ending.
I don't know if your tape's still running.
We might be out of tape.
That's okay.
Here's what I looked at him and I said, I am the greatest by Cassius Clay.
This is the legend of Cassius Clay, the most beautiful fighter in the world today.
He talks a great deal and brags indeed of a muscular punch that's incredibly speedy.
The fistic world was dull and weary.
With a champ-like Liston, things had to be dreary.
Then someone with color, someone with dash, brought fight fans a running with cash.
This brass young boxer is something to see, and the heavyweight championship is his destiny.
This kid fights great.
He's got speed and endurance.
But if you suck him to fight him, increase your insurance.
This kid's got a left.
This kid's got a right.
If he hits you, once you're asleep for the night.
And as you lie on the floor while the ref counts 10, you pray that you won't have to fight me again.
For I am the man this story's about.
I'll be champ of the world, there isn't a doubt.
Here I predict Mr. Liston's dismemberment.
I'll hit him so hard, he'll wonder where October and November went.
Here I predict, and I know the score, I'll be champ of the world in 64. Now, that's off memory.
Yeah.
That's your hero.
Tell me he didn't.
And when I did that for him, he had tears in his eyes because I think he thought, what the hell would a little white boy in South Minneapolis?
And you know where that's from?
He did an album way back called I Am the Greatest disc where he's standing there with his foot up and holding a fist.
I Am the Greatest by Cassius Clay.
I used to listen to that album day in and day out as a young 10, 11-year-old kid who wanted to be a fighter and ended up a wrestler.
Yeah.
You ended up pretty close, though.
Well, Mohammed learned from Gorgeous George.
Wrestling.
No, it's interesting.
Yeah.
No, he said he went to an interview once and it was him and Gorgeous George.
And he sat and listened, and he was early in his career and he heard Gorgeous George bragging away and doing what wrestlers do.
Well, Mohammed said that night I was boxing in front of 20 people.
He said Gorgeous George was wrestling in front of 5,000.
Wow.
Light went off.
Mohammed said, you got to sell yourself here.
You got to do what these wrestlers do.
And that's when he started naming the round.
They all must fall in the round I call.
They all must lose in the round I choose.
You know, and he started predicting his knockouts and then he did it.
Speaking things into existence, too.
It's kind of wild.
That's what really got him going.
He then did it.
But no, Ali, Ali was bigger than life, really, for what he stood for.
And, you know, this kid from Louisville who rose up and learned and wouldn't be manipulated.
And he stood for what he believed, and he wouldn't compromise.
And I'd like to believe that everything I do is very much in that aspect for me too.
And then whatever I do, I'd make him proud.
And we ran into each other later out in L.A. I saw Lonnie at the hotel in Beverly Hills.
I looked over.
I said, Lonnie, what are you doing here?
Jesse, I said, is Muhammad here?
She goes, oh, yeah, he's up.
She told me the foot.
She said, Go up, he'd love to see you.
So I ran to the other, it's that hotel that's on both sides of the street.
I ran to the other one, got in the elevator, went up there.
She told me the door, rang the doorbell up there, and I'll never forget this young black kid opened the door.
He saw it was me, and his jaw dropped, and he was frozen.
And I looked at the black kid and I thought, and he could, I thought, you're frozen looking at me, and you're in a room with Muhammad Ali?
Something wrong with this picture.
Are you kidding me?
No, this kid was all Jesse Ventura.
So I came in and Muhammad and I hugged and talked and had a good little thing there.
And the car was coming for him.
He was doing something or other.
And, you know, and I was out there doing business or whatever.
And then later, you know, of course he died and all of that.
But he'll live forever.
Yeah.
You know, I think he'll live as long as I'm around.
He's living his story.
I mean, he lives through stories, lives through lore.
Even my dad, and my dad knew a lot about boxing.
He fought a little himself and all that, the World War II vet.
My dad gave in to me in the end.
You know what he said?
He said, that clay kid, he said, he's the best ever.
Wow.
And I said, why is that, dad?
Why'd you say that?
My dad died in 91. And I said, dad, how come now you say that Muhammad's the best ever?
He said, I'll tell you why.
He said, speed.
He said, no heavyweight has ever had the speed that guy had with his legs and his hands.
He said, he'd have beat them all.
And my dad grew up with Dempsey.
He grew up with all the weights.
But he said, Alida beat them all.
He said, there was no way they could have contended with his speed.
And he proved it.
Well, he proves the opposite to George Foreman.
He got George with Ropado.
Oh, he's remarkable to watch, man.
Changed his whole style and got George to punch himself out.
He's one of a kind.
And Big George did.
And George ended up being a hell of a guy after that.
George Foreman's, you know, he went into depression, I heard, for two years, but when he came out of it, George Foreman's one of the most likable guys in the world now.
Amen.
And today he just says, I just thank goodness I fought Ali.
Wow.
He made me, took me to elements I'd have never got to.
Well, you're doing that for us, Jesse.
We thank you so much for your time.
Jesse the Body Ventura, thank you so much for being here today, man.
Thank you.
My pleasure.
Have a good day.
Ladies and gentlemen, I'm Jonathan Kite, and welcome to Kite Club, a podcast where I'll be sharing thoughts on things like current events, stand-up stories, and seven ways to pleasure your partner.
The answer may shock you.
Sometimes I'll interview my friends.
Sometimes I won't.
And as always, I'll be joined by the voices in my head.
You have three new voice messages.
A lot of people are talking about Kite Club.
I've been talking about Kite Club for so long, longer than anybody else.
So great.
Aye, Sui.
Easy to you.
Anyone who doesn't listen to Kite Club is a dodgy bloody wanker.
Jamain.
Ha ha!
I'll take a quarter powder with cheese and a McFlurry.
Sorry, sir, but our ice cream machine is broken.
I think Tom Hanks just butt-dialed me.
Anyway, first rule of Kite Club is tell everyone about Kite Club.
Second rule of Kite Club is tell everyone about Kite Club.
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