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July 30, 2023 - Viva & Barnes

01:27:57

Live with Mark Groubert - From Politics To Addiction - Viva Frei

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Time	Text
	Oh, yes.
	Good evening, everybody.
	That's not going to be the new standard intro to the show, but I'm back in my studio.
	I'm back with decent lighting, air conditioning, and the corner of the office where...
	I'm going to get it out of the way right now, so everybody who comes in, where's Barnes?
	Okay, Barnes, we're doing it tomorrow night, unforeseen delays, and we're going to do it tomorrow night.
	Tonight, I call up Grobert and I say, look, we're not going to reschedule the Sunday show because people come.
	And although many people are going to come and be very angry that they don't see Barnes tonight, they should be satisfied that they're going to have an equally intelligent encyclopedia of a brain replacement.
	Only for tonight, Mark Grobert.
	And it's Mark Grobert and not Eric Conley together because this is an interview.
	Questions.
	This is a subject that I have wanted to discuss with Mark Robert for as long as I've known that he has been heavily involved in addiction, in recovery.
	And I don't remember when I discovered this for the first time, but I called Robert after I read or listened to Russell Brand's...
	I forget what the name of the book is.
	Is the book called Recovery?
	And yeah, he's got insights.
	And this is not going to be a discussion from a perspective of gossip.
	And yeah, I'm not interested in gossip.
	We're going to have an interesting discussion about this.
	We're going to talk about a number of other things.
	Trump, DeSantis, politics, some law.
	But if you don't know who Mark Robert is, you're going to know after tonight.
	He's amazing.
	Now, the thing is this.
	We're not also getting away without starting with something that's going to make your stomach turn.
	I'm going to do a little intro rant.
	Someone who might make you want to vomit as much as Trudeau, but it's not Trudeau.
	I'm going to thank my sponsor because many of you have seen now that the show contains a paid sponsorship, which it does.
	And then I'm going to bring in Mark Robert.
	So now hold on.
	We're going to start with something, someone who might make you want to give you a visceral reaction in the same way that Justin Trudeau does, but in a bit of a better way.
	I still think he might.
	He has his moments of funniness, but he's unhinged.
	He's unhinged.
	Permanently, irreparably damaged from this mental medical diagnosis, which I believe is an iteration of actual issues, called Trump derangement syndrome.
	Michael Rappaport, people, you may remember him from such classics.
	True Romance.
	He was Dick Ritchie in True Romance.
	He was in Copland.
	I forget who he was in Copland.
	That's all I can name right off the bat.
	To say he's been deranged by the Trump mind virus is an understatement.
	Listen to this.
	Who cares that more people come out to see pig dick?
	Donald Trump.
	By the way, just remember, this is not the first time he has referred to Donald Trump as pig whatever.
	When he refers to Marjorie Taylor Greene, horse mouth or something along those lines, he uses the same stupid insults with each and every one of his online rants.
	But wait until this is the end.
	Who cares that people come to his rallies?
	Who cares?
	I'm taking to Twitter to tell everybody.
	Who cares?
	Who cares?
	Who cares so much?
	That I'm making an unhinged rant on Twitter.
	We have better things to do!
	It's the middle of the fucking summer!
	Go to the beach!
	He's channeling an AOC vibe without the AOC elegance.
	That stupid camera shake like a TikTok camera shake.
	Get a tan!
	Get a tan!
	Go get a tan!
	It's in air conditioning!
	Sit in the air conditioning.
	Don't sit on the internet complaining about who cares because it's so worthless.
	Nobody should care.
	And here's how little they should care.
	Here's me unhinged for 35 seconds.
	Who gives a fuck that more people come out to hear this motherfucker say the same bullshit over and over and over and over again?
	Look at all the people that come to the rallies.
	Who gives a shit?
	Listen to somebody say the same thing over and over and over again.
	I once had a discussion with a brain scientist person, not my wife, who's a neuroscientist, if you don't know.
	And we were having a discussion, like, is there a brain difference between a right-wing brain and a left-wing brain?
	I now believe there is.
	Not in the shape, maybe in the size, bada-bing, bada-boom.
	Left-wing, progressive, Democrat, liberal brains lack self-awareness.
	And they lack humility.
	And they lack the ability.
	To have self-deprecating humor because they take themselves too seriously.
	That is the defining characteristic as far as I've seen.
	It's not true of everybody.
	It's just true, as far as I can tell, of a lot.
	Lack of self-awareness.
	No reflection, no insight, no say, hey, maybe is what I'm saying about, you know, is my critique of Donald Trump true of myself?
	Okay.
	Rant over.
	We're going to be live on YouTube and Rumble and vivabarneslaw.locals.com.
	We're going to end on YouTube.
	Go over to Rumble.
	And then we're going to end on Rumble and maybe have a little exclusive after-party with Grobert if he's got time on Locals.
	Before I even bring in Grobert, my goodness, I forgot to bring in the sponsor of the evening, people.
	Oh, yes.
	When I was driving, I drove from West Virginia, the Clarion Hotel at the intersection of Harper's Ferry.
	I drove from West Virginia to Florida, to just north of Miami, in one day.
	1,700 and some odd kilometers.
	I don't know how many freedoms per eagle that is.
	All day.
	Left at 6.45 in the morning.
	Drove all day.
	Got home at 11.15 at night with a kid in the car who was amazingly good, save a couple of meltdowns that we both had.
	And two dogs.
	Pudge only pooped once in the car.
	I couldn't get vegetables anywhere.
	I was on the road driving from Montreal down to Florida.
	Fresh vegetables?
	What's that?
	McDonald's doesn't serve salads anymore.
	Oh, I had to go to a Subway and just say, I don't want a sandwich.
	Just put the stuff you put in the sandwiches in a bowl.
	Don't put anything on it.
	Don't put onions in there.
	If there's onions in there, I'll destroy you.
	That's where I got my dose of vegetables.
	Oh my goodness.
	Many people don't know you're supposed to have five to seven servings of raw fruits and vegetables a day.
	And most people do not have that, especially if you're driving and you can't get fresh fruits and vegetables on the road.
	Field of Greens.
	It is desiccated greens, not defecated.
	And not an extract, not a supplement.
	It is pulverized, dried up fruits and vegetables, power fruits and vegetables.
	One spoonful equals one serving of fruits and vegetables.
	All the antioxidants, all the good stuff.
	It's a great company, made in America, USDA organic, certified because it's a food, not a supplement, not an extract, not that there's anything wrong with that.
	I prefer this.
	It tastes great.
	If you can believe it, it looks like swamp water, but...
	Swamp water is rich in nutrients.
	It tastes delicious.
	You have a spoonful of that twice a day.
	You've got two servings of fruits and vegetables.
	It's a healthy habit to have.
	And when you can't get raw fruits and vegetables, because fast food, it should be illegal for a fast food chain to not serve salads.
	I'm not a communist.
	That should be illegal.
	All right.
	Anyhow, so that's it.
	Thank you.
	As always, go to fieldofgreens.com.
	It'll, whatever, they'll push you to a Brickhouse Nutrition website.
	Promo code VIVA, you'll get 15% off your first order.
	I think it's organic.
	I'm not sure if that's a joke.
	I'm pretty sure it's organic.
	The field of greens.
	Anyway, it's good.
	It's great.
	The link, if it's not there, it will be in the pinned comment.
	No, it's in the description.
	So that's it.
	All right.
	Grobert has been waiting patiently.
	Last time, warning.
	Tonight, Barnes not here tonight.
	Tomorrow night, 5 o 'clock, will be the Sunday Night Show on a Monday.
	Tonight is Mark Grobert.
	Lord Buckley!
	America's Untold Stories with Eric Hundley, for those of you who don't know him.
	Grobert, you ready?
	Coming in, in three, two, one.
	Booyah, sir!
	Hold on, let me bring you out here.
	Bring you in.
	What's going on?
	There we go.
	Do we like this better?
	I think we like this better.
	Yep.
	So first of all, Mark, you look clean-shaven.
	You look 10 years younger than the last time I saw you.
	Well, you're putting me on the spot here.
	First of all, I'm not Barnes.
	I just want to make...
	Barnes is a rock star.
	I'm a piker.
	He's one of the great thinkers in America.
	I am just a guy who worships him.
	I've been asked to come in by Viva out of the bullpen in the first inning in a game where Barnes couldn't make it.
	I feel like I'm under a lot of pressure to try to make this work.
	There's a lot of hate in the room already.
	People are in their underwear.
	They're looking at how did this guy get in here?
	It's double-barreled Jew action today.
	This is not going to go well.
	The Nick Fuentes mob is already circling the building.
	I am not Barnes.
	I just want to say that.
	I am doing Viva a favor.
	See the show tomorrow.
	I've come in at the last minute.
	Please don't hate on me.
	I'm just trying to help out.
	Thank you.
	First of all, you sell yourself short, but I know...
	Look, maybe you don't appreciate what an encyclopedia you are.
	Like, Barnes is...
	He is the smartest person I've ever met in my life.
	And I'm not saying that to flatter Mark.
	I agree.
	No, no, no.
	I agree.
	It's intimidating.
	I am a big fan.
	He's one of my political heroes.
	He's put me on Alex Jones.
	I mean, he's done so much for me.
	I mean, this is the least I could do for him for not being here is filling in.
	First of all, I'm going to get to flattering you in a second.
	But when I say Barnes is truly smart, it's not just retaining knowledge.
	Contextualizing knowledge.
	And it's something that I'm incapable of doing.
	I cannot contextualize the information with the era.
	And he can do that by reading books, by appreciating the zeitgeist of the time in order to contextualize the information that he's able to retain.
	And it's amazing.
	That being said...
	I'm still going over his rant about Barbie and I'm a film school graduate and I'm still analyzing what he said about Barbie.
	Well, that being said, Grobert, you are, and I said this also, you're not to minimize and say you're like the brain of, I say Hollywood.
	You are the brain of also conspiracy theory history, because it is not to be minimized as conspiracy theory.
	You have a brain as well that when you recount stories, you retain information, you walk through the rooms of the house in order to relay that information that you've gathered.
	So, thank you.
	For coming on.
	What did you text me?
	You said it was Two Live Jude's.
	There was a Two Live crew.
	Remember that crew?
	When I was at National Lampoon as an editor, we were invited down in New Orleans to Tulane and Loyola to put on the world's largest toga party with Otis Day and the Knights and blah, blah, blah.
	It was a huge thing.
	It was a huge charity event at Tulane on a football field.
	That's a subject in one of our episodes on America's Untold Stories.
	Remember, I want to see that.
	But the night before, we put on possibly one of the worst show business performances in the history of show business.
	Myself and the group, dressed as Hasidic Jews with fur hats that we got in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, went down to the Deep South and put on a Yiddish rap group performance in front of a Southern crowd that had their mouths hanging open.
	I can only say like the...
	The producers segment of the producers where they put on springtime for Hitler, Viva.
	And they were just staring at us like we were from another planet.
	But we called it Two Alive Jews.
	So that's where I got the reference from.
	When I was growing up and my first grandmother, my mother's mother, Grandma Ruth, she was a very...
	Is the word crotchety?
	She was a cranky old lady.
	And we were in a car.
	It was in Florida, actually, when we were 13 years old.
	And we were blasting two live crew.
	And then she says, what is this music?
	Is this two screw?
	And we never forgot that.
	For those who don't know, I think everybody does know.
	And I jacked up your mic a little bit because apparently it's low.
	30,000 foot overdue.
	People know who you are, but just in case.
	Investigative reporter.
	I worked for Village Voice, LA Weekly, for about 15 years.
	Screenwriter in Hollywood.
	Book author, Rehab Nation, the inside story about addiction in Hollywood.
	I wrote scripts about the CIA.
	I've been involved in Hollywood as a writer, producer, and occasionally director since the early 90s, I want to say.
	Starting out in New York, coming out here in the mid-90s.
	I've been doing TV, produced a lot of stuff for HBO.
	I produced Theater in New York, Mambo Mouth with John Leguizamo.
	Produced Mo' Funny, Black Comedy in America, the 90-minute documentary for HBO, if anybody wants to still see that.
	The History of African American Comedy.
	Produced a bunch of stuff for HBO.
	And as a screenwriter, I've written screenplays like The Recruit with Colin Farrell and Al Pacino, which ended up in federal court with the CIA, which I got a settlement in that case regarding the CIA rewriting my script, which is part of the episodes on America's Untold Stories.
	An episode you can see on there involving me that I do with Eric Hundley twice a week, Tuesdays and Fridays.
	Now we've been doing it for almost two years, apparently, coming up in October.
	So it's been a quick two years, man.
	It's crazy that two years, and I don't know how long I've known Hunley for now.
	What you're writing about, I don't want to say anything that's not public, Mark.
	You are an aficionado of JFK conspiracy, correct?
	Okay, so, I don't know, aficionado.
	I mean, a couple years ago, I worked with Oliver Stone on a five-part miniseries called Oswald.
	Which was a 10-hour miniseries that I wrote with Oliver overseeing the writing as a director-writer with me.
	And we went around town trying to shop this project.
	And the shopping of the project alone is worth a documentary because of how many deep state operatives were in the room.
	We went to every single place in town.
	It became an event, just me and Oliver going around trying to sell this project, which was never sold.
	However, it bonded me with Oliver and I did a couple of other projects for him and with him.
	One on LBJ that we haven't made and one on RFK called RFK Must Die about the assassination of RFK in 1968 in Los Angeles.
	And we're going to start with that before getting into...
	I told Hunley before we went live, I said, don't be offended I didn't invite Eric as well.
	Because this is a subject that I've been wanting to talk to you about.
	When I first got to know you, I had no idea your experience, your authorship, and your involvement in addiction and recovery in Hollywood.
	And I don't want the gossip.
	I want to talk about the principles about all of this.
	We're going to get into that after we get into the RFK.
	But after we flesh this out, you wrote a how-many-part miniseries?
	The Oswald one is five two-hour scripts on Oswald, beginning with his childhood and going...
	To his death.
	So it's about 10 hours worth of material, 600 pages long, which we're going to try and do something with for this 60th anniversary.
	I'll just give you a teaser on that.
	It will involve these 10 hours of scripts that I've written, and we're going to try to do something really...
	Technologically advanced, let me just put it that way, for November 22nd of this year.
	The teaser is out there, but now let me ask you the obvious question.
	You were shopping it with Oliver Stone, who has credentials of his own, and people didn't want to buy it?
	How does that work?
	It works on multiple levels.
	It works on financial levels.
	It works on subject matter levels that are too hot to handle Viva.
	It works on, you know, people picking up the phone saying we don't want this to be made levels.
	I mean, there's a lot of levels.
	You know, for why a project doesn't get made.
	In fact, the bulk of America's untold stories, truth be told, are failed movie projects of mine.
	The stories that I put out there on that show, a lot of them are movie ideas that didn't come to fruition because of Hollywood's reluctance to do anything that regular people would find to be interesting.
	Let me just put it that way.
	Let me pick on the third one.
	You said people making calls and you pick up the phone and they say, we don't want this getting made.
	How does that, without, get into as much detail as you can.
	I'll give you an example.
	We went into a room one time at National Geographic and nobody was there.
	We went in to have a meeting.
	There was nobody in the meeting room.
	And one British kid came in and said, whatever his name was, I'm here to represent National Geographic television.
	And in the middle of the table was an advanced speakerphone, one of those starfish-looking things.
	And during the meeting, which went absolutely nowhere, we realized that there were people listening on the other end, and one of the stars of the movie picked up the speakerphone and started screaming into it, we know you're out there listening, why don't you have the courage to come into the room?
	And that was Thomas Jane, the Punisher, who was supposed to play General Edwin A. Walker in the Oswald miniseries.
	And Tom just lost his shit and picked up the speakerphone and started screaming into it.
	All right.
	Interesting.
	Okay.
	All right.
	There's a side little story.
	No, no.
	Well, what's amazing is that it's beyond politics.
	It's beyond economics.
	There's other things happening.
	Now, I was on Tim Pool Friday night, which is from the rough area where I drove in 1,700 kilometers yesterday.
	I'm not your buddy, Guy.
	We read two of your chats that night.
	So glad to see you on Tim Pool Friday.
	I brought up a subject on Friday night with Tim Pool.
	We talked about the RFK assassination when we were talking about the initial story of RFK Jr.
	Uh, being denied secret service protection.
	And I want to just make sure I didn't get any details wrong there.
	I think Hunley texted me and said some details, but I want to go over that a bit.
	And here's Eric Hunley in the house.
	Can we at least get one bushy head comment?
	Eric, it's too early.
	Come on.
	Give him some time.
	That's Eric Hunley, your partner in crime at America's Untold Stories.
	All right.
	So, Mark, we started talking about RFK Jr. being denied.
	Secret Service protection as his request.
	They said, we're not 120 days out from the election yet.
	You don't need it.
	And we're making a public announcement.
	RFK Jr.
	Hey, everybody!
	This mofo doesn't have Secret Service protection.
	I want to make a meme with that, actually.
	It should be the FBI pointing at RFK Jr. saying, this guy doesn't have a Secret Service protection.
	And I started talking about RFK Sr., his father's assassination, where Sirhan Sirhan came up.
	MKUltra came up.
	And the details where I think I made a mistake is I said that all of Sirhan Sirhan's bullets, which were being discharged as he was being thrown to the ground, all eight bullets were accounted for.
	And they did not include the fatal bullets, the fatal shots that struck RFK in the back of the head.
	And there's some suspicion, I forget the name of the guy, but you'll remember it now, that his newly appointed, I said Secret Service, but it might have just been regular security.
	The question is going to be...
	Who hired that security?
	Was it government security or RFK's private security?
	That there was gunpowder residue indicating a contact discharge of a firearm.
	So tell me what details I got wrong there and what the operating theory is on the RFK assassination.
	Well, first of all, the guy you're mentioning is Thane Eugene Caesar, who was part of the security guard force for the hotel.
	It was a private security force that was hired by the hotel.
	Let me just put it that way.
	LAPD stayed away that night.
	LAPD claiming the RFK team requested they stay away.
	That's not true.
	The security team that was hired...
	For the hotel involved a guy who was there for the first time, Thane Eugene Caesar.
	As soon as he says, as soon as RFK says, and now it's on to Chicago and let's win there, there's a movement to get through the crowd.
	They realize that they can't go through the crowd the front way.
	They go around the back into the kitchen where he is being led by Thane Eugene Caesar by the hand.
	On a stack of trays, a tray stacking, one of those big silver tray stacking devices, Viva, is Sirhan Sirhan who jumps out from behind the tray stacking and begins shooting wildly into the crowd.
	The first shot hits a man right in the head and the other shots, like you said, are shot wildly.
	While this is going on, apparently, Thane Eugene Caesar takes out almost the exact same gun that is owned by Sirhan Sirhan and puts a bullet to the head right behind the ear at touching or,
	I think, less than one inch, according to Thomas Noguchi's flawless The coroner's report, which he brought in members of each of the military services to oversee, claiming that he did not want to have another Dallas on his hands.
	This is Thomas Noguchi, the coroner of LA County.
	So in the coroner's report, which nobody read for years, including myself, everybody thought this was an open and shut case, Viva, because there were so many witnesses.
	So it turns out that the coup de grace was a bullet to the back of the head of RFK because of the stippling and because you're talking about gun residue evidence yesterday.
	I was trying to talk to you about this.
	The stippling and the charcoal effect of the gun blast on the back of the head indicated to Noguchi that it was with a half inch.
	Or actually touching the back ear of the head right here.
	There's also a shot under the armpit that goes up into the ceiling, also at the same angle as Thane Eugene sees her standing in back of him and shooting upward in an upward direction.
	He spins around RFK, and while he's spinning around, he pulls off the tie of Thane Eugene Caesar, clutching it in his hands, almost demonstrating that this is the man who shot me.
	And he goes down to the ground onto his back, falling onto Thane Eugene Caesar with the tie of Thane Eugene Caesar in his right hand.
	As he dies, he releases the tie onto the ground.
	Thane Eugene Caesar will later come back, two hours later, to get that tie.
	But there's photos by LAPD and UPI and Associated Press of the tie laying next to RFK's body.
	You know, as Sirhan is firing wildly, they're banging his hand against the steam table.
	And that's why the shots that are all accounted for go into various people in back of RFK.
	And one of them goes into the divider of the pantry double doors of the pantry.
	And that is accounted for.
	That's dug out by an FBI agent named Bailey, who sees the hole and will later write about it in his memoirs.
	So you've got bullets in the ceiling.
	The ceiling panel's removed by LAPD.
	You've got the body with the angles of a perfect, what many people call the perfect autopsy.
	Noguchi is then attacked by LAPD.
	He's smeared.
	He's fired.
	He lawyers up.
	He gets his job back.
	He goes to testify during the case of Sirhan.
	He's interrupted on the stand and told that he doesn't have to go any further into the details of his coronary.
	Coroner's report, and the cover-up begins at that point, you know, more deeply going up the ladder.
	And that's like just a thumbnail sketch of the event.
	All right, now I would not suspend the entire evening on this, just get some obvious questions out of the way.
	If all of Sirhan Sirhan's bullets are accounted for, that would mean, was it a revolver that Sirhan Sirhan had?
	Yeah, that's right.
	So would that not mean then that it is known or it's relatively easily demonstrable that there were 10 shots fired and not just 8?
	Well, there's also an audio recording which CNN itself said it was 13 shots, 12, 13 shots.
	And CNN played the recording of a Polish journalist who recorded the events.
	And you can clearly hear the shots being recorded on his tape recorder.
	Even CNN, I think in 1998 or 2002, tried to get the case reopened, but there was an attorney general in the state of California who refused to look into it, and she is now the vice president of the United States.
	Interesting.
	All right.
	And the other question that I had was Thane Eugene.
	What was his name?
	Thane Eugene Caesar.
	Fane Eugene Caesar.
	That's an interesting last name.
	What was his history?
	Is his history known?
	His history was that he worked for George Wallace's campaign in 1968.
	He was a Kennedy hater.
	He was a known racist, failed security guard.
	He worked at a defense clearance at Grumman and also at Burbank at Skunk Works.
	He was a defense contractor.
	They said he was a plumber, but he had a little bit more on his plate than just being a plumber at Skunk Works here in Burbank, where they built the U-2 spy plane.
	Okay, good.
	So I didn't get that.
	The only detail I got wrong is I said Secret Service, but he was private security hired by RFK's team.
	No, no, no.
	He was not hired by RFK's team.
	He was hired by the hotel.
	Okay.
	Good enough.
	Okay.
	Well, that's it.
	That's the detail that's been clarified, people.
	And everyone out there, everyone watching now, you and Eric have to get on Tim Pool because I know, first of all, they talk about a lot of these stories and it's a must.
	It's a must.
	So, everyone watching, tweet it out.
	Well, just to add a little bit more to it, the guy who was shot in his...
	The first shot that went into a person went into the skull, the temple of Paul Schrade, an old friend of ours.
	And Paul Schrade was a United Auto Workers executive who was a big Kennedy family supporter, was tied into the Kennedy family, very close friend of RFK Jr.
	And Paul Schrade and I kind of bonded on reopening the case.
	Paul Schrade passed away earlier this year in the mid-90s.
	And Paul Schrade, to his death, In fact, he went so far as to call for the release of Sirhan for almost 20 years.
	I represented Paul Schrade at Sirhan's parole hearing with RFK Jr. a little over a year ago, and that's how I know RFK Jr. is through the parole hearing, where both of us testified on Sirhan's behalf, and the parole board agreed with me that he should be released.
	And in fact, shockingly, they voted to grant him parole.
	The parole then went to Governor Newsom, who overrode his own parole board in refusing to release Sirhan Sirhan, claiming he was still a clear and present danger at the age of 75 to the general public, having served 58 years in prison, possibly longer than any other person in California save one.
	And the Kennedy sisters...
	came out and denounced RFK Jr.
	And the reason it's important is because it has nothing to do with vaccines.
	It has nothing to do with Democratic or any sort of things that he's been tarred by his own family.
	The two sisters came out and said that Sirhan could possibly Uber from Pasadena where he lived to Malibu and kill them.
	And Newsom said that this was a clear and present danger and refused the parole of Sirhan Sirhan.
	That is how I know RFK Jr.
	Maybe a question I'll ask Barnes tomorrow is, why even have another parole hearing if Newsom is indicated clear and present danger regardless of what the parole board says?
	He'll be there for the rest of his life.
	Well, again, he was found guilty and sentenced to the death penalty.
	The death penalty was overturned in 1970.
	He was given life with parole.
	I just want to emphasize that.
	It was not life without parole.
	He was resentenced to life with parole and has been turned down over a dozen times for the parole.
	All right, before we head over to Rumble exclusively, Rumble and Locals, I'm going to just read a few more of the chats that we have here.
	Pasha Moyer says, Lord Buckley, you are not Barnes, but remember, Barnes is also not you.
	I very much appreciate your long relief appearance.
	I got to do the middle innings.
	Go ahead.
	That's a baseball joke.
	Oh, Mark, I forgot to ask.
	How old are you?
	I know how old you are.
	You're not answering.
	Sorry, I lost contact.
	Sorry.
	All right, people.
	Let's go over to Rumble right now.
	Here's the link.
	There are 1,176 people watching on YouTube.
	Migrate over to Rumble, people.
	Or, if you don't want to go over to Rumble for whatever the crazy reason, come on over to Locals.
	VivaBarnesLaw.locals.com We're going to carry this on now.
	We're going to go to the second part of your life and your expertise.
	Addiction, recovery, and questions I've always wanted to ask you.
	All right.
	Ending on YouTube.
	3, 2, 1. Come on over to Rumble now.
	Okay, so other than being an aficionado, maybe that wasn't the right word.
	I mean an encyclopedia on the JFK assassination, the RFK assassination.
	And okay, everybody, we've corrected that detail.
	I was right enough.
	Mark, do you share my opinion that coming out and saying we're denying him Secret Service protection is if he would even necessarily want that?
	Is that a dog whistle?
	It's a dog whistle, but let me explain how we got here because it's a long story.
	Already, but I mean, just to sum it up really quickly, when RFK was assassinated at the Ambassador Hotel on June 4th, 1968, immediately LBJ, who may have been involved in the assassination, who said repeatedly, I am going to cut his throat if it's the last thing I do.
	LBJ said this to everyone around him among his aides for a number of years.
	His hatred for RFK knows no bounds, knew no bounds, and he repeatedly said to people, I am going to cut his throat.
	With his sign of cutting his throat if it's the last thing I do.
	In 1964, when LBJ was running for election, he had J. Edgar Hoover order 35 FBI agents to cover RFK every waking minute of his life.
	1964.
	He's still in mourning of the death of his brother from 1963.
	That's how much LBJ feared.
	RFK is a political entity in the Democratic Party.
	So it's not unlike today, Viva, with Biden and RFK seniors, the reason I'm mentioning this.
	Biden, by denying the protection of the Secret Service, is a dog whistle.
	But let me just explain the history of it.
	That night, LBJ ordered Secret Service protection for every candidate running in the election of 1968.
	He was told by his advisors, you don't have the right to do that.
	And he said, dag nabbit, I'm doing it anyway.
	And he ordered Secret Service to go and protect these other candidates.
	The Congress, later that year, passed legislation that all presidential candidates get Secret Service protection.
	I did not know that in 2017, this was changed to where it's now the Speaker of the House, the majority leader of the Senate, the minority leader of the Senate, and the minority leader of the House, and a committee votes on who should get Secret Service protection.
	I had no idea.
	I was operating under the auspices of knowing that for 50 years this was the law.
	This was changed, unbeknownst to me, in 2017, Viva.
	Well, okay.
	No further comments.
	It is what it is, and it looks like what it is, and it looks and smells like...
	I agree.
	I agree.
	Okay, now, maybe we'll get into some other political stuff later, but let's get into this.
	People might not know this.
	You have a very accomplished career in Hollywood stuff, but I don't know that many people know.
	You published a book on addiction, and I don't want to get into any details.
	I'm not even going to ask them those questions.
	It's called Rehab Nation, Inside the Secret World of Celebrity Rehab.
	So it's about the history.
	The science and the history of addiction, but it's also about the history of rehabs.
	As a reporter, and just to give you some background, as an investigative reporter for the Village Voice, my beat was covering corrupt rehabs in Malibu.
	It's a beat I created as a gonzo journalist out here in L.A., L.A. Weekly being the Village Voice of L.A. So I created this beat where I would go undercover.
	Viva, sometimes as a patient, other times as an idiot, and begin to explore these corrupt rehabs that they have out here, mostly luxury rehabs, but there's other ones that are not luxury rehabs that are just simply corrupt.
	So that became my journalistic beat as a writer, just to give you some background as to where this came from as a reporter.
	Okay, I'm sharing the affiliate link.
	I'm sharing the affiliate link.
	The book seems to be only on Kindle?
	It's on Amazon, and it's electronic.
	Yeah, okay, there you go.
	The hard copies are gone.
	Yeah, the hard copies, I think, are sold out.
	Okay, here, link to book.
	I know some of these stories because you've talked about them, and again, Mark, if I ever ask a question that you don't want to answer, just let me know.
	Explain the corruption of the rehab industry.
	Like some people say these rehab...
	Yeah.
	Okay, run with it.
	No, no, no.
	Let me just explain it.
	In the late 1990s, they passed Proposition 36. Proposition 36 was a California initiative to put people in rehab as opposed to incarceration.
	So because they did this, there was an overwhelming mass movement of people who needed rehabs.
	In the state of California, in their infinite wisdom, they said that any place that had a septic tank...
	And six beds, I swear to God, could be considered a rehab.
	And I've interviewed them at length about this because they simply wanted to create rehabs out of thin air where they could put former prisoners under Prop 36. One question to me on that.
	The septic tank, that means that you could put anything out in the wilderness.
	You have a septic tank and a shack.
	And it becomes a rehab.
	Absolutely.
	But what was explained to me was they wanted to take a family house.
	The six beds was the equivalent of a two or three bedroom house and the septic tank was the equivalent of the size of a nuclear family is what they wanted to use as a rehab.
	That's why they said that.
	So they were now converting, people were converting houses, family houses, one family house, Viva, into rehabs in L.A., intentionally.
	That's what the legislation demanded, because they were letting prisoners out who needed rehabs by this Prop 36, which passed in California.
	It was a liberal proposition.
	Rehab over jails was the motto, Viva.
	Let me say celebrities or wealthy did not want to go to rehab any longer with convicts.
	So that became the rise of the luxury rehabs, the big rehabs that became like five-star resorts.
	That was the Malibu rehab model.
	That came out of Prop 36 because Lindsay Lohan, and I use that generically with quotes, Lindsay Lohan did not want to go to a rehab with guys who just got out of prison.
	So they created these luxury rehabs here in Malibu, and that became what I call the rise of the luxury rehab industry, which is separate from the middle class or lower class rehab industry, which is separate.
	And you said the year was 2000, correct?
	I think so, yeah.
	I Googled it.
	So it's relatively modern that this...
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Okay, going back to, I want to say like 1887, there has always been a luxury rehab in New York, for instance.
	There was a place where people could go.
	After the Civil War, just to go back even further, in 1865, when the war was over...
	You had a massive addiction problem to morphine and to alcohol for the survivors of the Civil War because they gave out morphine tablets like M&Ms.
	So people came out of the Civil War addicted to morphine and addicted to alcohol.
	They had songs about it, jingles.
	So a massive rehab industry sprung up in the United States in 1865.
	And one of them was a guy named, who ran them, was a guy named Leslie Keeley, who claimed to have the cure for addiction.
	And he ran the Keeley Institute, which was the first chain of rehabs in the United States.
	And he claimed to have gold, gold, duh.
	And the reason I got involved in this was because I was into quack science, quack doctors, quack everything.
	And the rehab industry and addiction cure and quacks goes back to the 1860s.
	And I went down that rabbit hole.
	And it came out in my period here in Malibu that they were making millions upon millions and millions of dollars with cures for addiction, Viva.
	And that's where I would go in undercover and do reporting, Gonzo-style journalism, what I called immersion journalism, as a reporter by being a patient in these different rehabs.
	And that became a cause celeb for me as a writer here in L.A. with the L.A. Weekly, doing an entire issue one time of the L.A. Weekly, which they gave to me to be the writer of and editor of multiple articles and cover stories of one whole issue on rehabs.
	So that's where the book sprung out of.
	Right, and Gonzo journalism, for those who don't know, I'll just give the internet definition.
	The style of reporting that places the reporter at the center of the story in a highly personal and participatory manner.
	Who was it that founded Gonzo journalism?
	Was it Hunter Thompson?
	Hunter Thompson.
	All right, now, what was your life experience like with the subject matter?
	Well, I mean, look, I mean, it is what it is.
	I mean, I grew up in the 60s, and...
	You know, I was a drug dealer and a drug user and a drug taker, and then it stopped working, so I had to stop using it and became a drug counselor.
	I became a rehab.
	I had my own rehab in Malibu with a bunch of my friends.
	We put in a recording studio.
	We had a luxury rehab.
	We did it right.
	We were funneling people through the Grammy Foundation, musicians mostly, into this rehab.
	And this was before I discovered the corruption of these other rehabs.
	There was a guy named Felder who was a guitar player for the Eagles.
	And he got divorced and his wife ended up with the house.
	And I think she went to climb the Himalayas and she leased the house to us, which we turned into a rehab in Malibu on Canaan Dune Road, if I remember correctly.
	And that was also in the early 2000s.
	So not only did I...
	I know the drug business from being on the criminal side.
	I knew it on the recovery side, and I knew it on the rehab side, and I knew it as a licensed drug and alcohol tactician here in the state of California.
	So there's multiple levels that I knew this problem on, including so many friends and family members who had been addicted to drugs and alcohol.
	So I had operated in this world for a long period of time, knowing it personally and knowing it operationally and professionally.
	So it was a multi-level immersion into the field.
	When you say you did it and it stopped working, I presume you mean it became dysfunctional and not like the drugs stopped having an effect?
	No, I would say the drugs stopped having an effect.
	After a while, you have to take so much to break even in terms of drugs and alcohol that they really do stop having an effect.
	The tolerance level becomes so high.
	That there's not an amount that you could take that's going to get you.
	What you're doing chemically, just so you know, is it's kind of like the pleasure principle.
	There's a synapses of pleasure, and you're trying to recreate the original high.
	And that could be sex addiction, it could be food addiction, it could be any addiction.
	What you're chasing is that first magical feeling that you have from whatever substance you love.
	And that is always slightly diminished.
	From the first time you ever did it.
	But you keep chasing that original rush, that pleasure rush that you got when you first tried or did whatever your addiction was.
	I don't remember where you shared the story.
	I know it's public.
	When you got arrested, and it was, I think, the only time or the second time that you were arrested, you had some substance in a book and you gave it to people.
	Did you talk about that here or was that on your channel?
	I forget already where it is.
	I think it's on both.
	I think I talked to you and it's in there also.
	Yeah, I got arrested in...
	In Catskill, New York, ironically, with the same judge that I would later learn would deal with Mike Tyson.
	And Mike Tyson later became a friend of mine.
	But we had the same judge, Mike Tyson.
	It was Judge McDonald, this old cantankerous redneck in Catskill, New York.
	And I had an old traffic ticket or something, and I don't know what it was, but I had to go into the Greene County prison.
	And in my car, I had 150.
	It's a blotter acid, LSD, 150 micrograms in the back of a library book.
	And I didn't want to leave it in the car, Viva, because they were searching the car.
	So it was in the pocket of the library book.
	And I took the book into the prison.
	And they allowed me, they didn't search the book, they allowed me to take it into the jail.
	And I got a call from a deep voice to come down by the shower.
	And I thought, oh, this is it.
	This is where they get you.
	You know what I mean?
	And the guy slid a detective novel underneath the bars.
	And he goes, here, if you need something to read, I just saw his hand.
	So I took the detective novel and I took it back to my cell and I tore off about 30 hits of acid.
	Blotter acid is on paper, in case people don't know.
	It's drops of liquid acid on pieces of paper.
	And it's usually about 150 micrograms, roughly.
	So it's easily hideable.
	Let me just put it that way so it looks like a piece of paper.
	I tore off about 30 hits of that, and I put it back into the book.
	I went down to the shower, and I said, turn to page, you know, 420 in the book.
	And the hand disappeared, and an hour goes by, and all of a sudden I just hear complete bedlam on the other side of the jail.
	And they just all must have split up this acid.
	about six prisoners there, five, six prisoners who were waiting to go to Attica for murder.
	And it was like a holding area, a holding cell for them.
	They'd been there a couple of months and they just went batshit crazy on acid in that jail.
	I mean, I didn't take any because, you know, I was dealing it at the time and who takes acid in prison, right?
	I knew a kid in high school.
	He said this happened to him.
	I don't know if it's actually true, but that he had blood or acid in his pocket.
	It rained, and he purports that it got absorbed into his skin.
	Oh, yeah.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	And that he was high for days on end and was never the same after that.
	Yeah, that's true.
	That could happen.
	That could definitely happen.
	That's why I don't even pick up garbage on the street.
	I'm afraid that...
	I don't know what's in that garbage.
	Okay, now, Mark.
	I don't know if you qualify yourself as an addict, but you definitely took drugs.
	Was it a hard thing to stop?
	No, I was done.
	For me, I was done.
	It just ran out of gas for me, so it wasn't a hard thing for me to do.
	Like I said, it stopped working.
	I had been a drug dealer and a writer, and it was just part and parcel of my lifestyle that I was selling drugs.
	I'm lucky that I didn't get caught.
	You know, and I got out just in time.
	You know, other friends of mine had done jail time and things had happened to them.
	But, you know, the substances, it stopped working for me, and I had to go and deal with it on multiple levels and multiple programs for multiple years to sum it up.
	And so you get...
	I mean, is it an accreditation?
	Do you study?
	How does it go to be that...
	Oh, you mean for the drug counselor part?
	Yes, yes.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Oh, yeah.
	So you have to take a test and there's all different things to get the...
	You have to be renewed every year.
	And yeah, it's from the state of California.
	And we are going to circle back to the corruption in the rehab center.
	I'm just going to get some preliminary questions out of the way.
	In your...
	Does it need to be an expert opinion?
	This is a question that I've always had is...
	Where is the difference?
	What's the distinction?
	And how do you determine whether something is a bad habit, an obsession, or an addiction?
	Oh, I'll tell you the definition.
	A repetitive habit that makes your life unmanageable that you can't stop.
	Very simple.
	A repetitive habit that makes your life unmanageable that you cannot stop.
	And you want to stop.
	You can't leave out that...
	It makes your life unmanageable.
	That's the key of the three parts.
	It's a repetitive behavior that is making your life unmanageable.
	You want to stop it, and you can't.
	That's the definition of addiction.
	Very interesting.
	You can argue as to what part of your life is unmanageable, and therein lies the rub among many addicts, because how do you determine?
	There's guys I know who went to prison, said my life's not unmanageable.
	There's people I know who turn down rehab and stay in jail, not unmanageable.
	Lost their wife, lost their kids, been to 26 rehabs.
	Life is still not unmanageable.
	It's a self-diagnosed disease, so you have to determine when your life is unmanageable.
	And on the outside, it may appear easy for someone to say, bro, you've been to prison three times, your wife has left you, you're $150,000 in debt, you lost your house, lost everything.
	I think your life may be unmanageable.
	It doesn't matter what I say to you on the outside.
	You have to determine that your life is unmanageable.
	A repetitive behavior that makes your life unmanageable, that you want to stop, that you cannot stop.
	I was just listening to the Anthony Weiner interview with Patrick Bet-David, and I still can't get over the fact that his name is Anthony Weiner, or he pled guilty to sending Weiner pics to an underage girl.
	Where is the line between criminals, Passing off their criminality, their criminal behavior as an addiction.
	Anthony Weiner, when he's asked the question, it was on Fox News and he repeated the answer maybe mildly more eloquently on Patrick Beddavid where they say, have you changed?
	And Anthony Weiner says, we have a very, what do you say, a complicated relationship with the word change in the addiction community.
	And that to me, I'm sitting there saying that one red flag is going off.
	Pedophiles will always be pedophiles, and they cannot change it.
	He's basically saying as much, and people probably should applaud him for making that admission instead of making fun of him for basically stating that out loud.
	But where is the line in hiding a criminal behavior as an addiction?
	I don't know what the answer is to that, but usually the courts are involved, and judges are very hip to this.
	Judges have, for years, Sentenced people that they believe to be sentenced to 12-step programs for X amount of time, some of them up to two years in sentencing.
	The judges will determine whether you're going to go to rehab.
	There's also drug courts, Viva, all across the country where you give up your civil rights and throw yourself at the mercy of the court to avoid prison time, and you're sentenced to meetings and also to rehab.
	The courts seem to know.
	What to do with repeat drug offenders, criminally, socially, and medically.
	The courts have dealt with this, and that's what happened in the Sirhan case, because Sirhan shot his gun in a blackout from alcohol.
	Sirhan had about six to eight heavy, heavy...
	Drinks that night really quickly.
	And I said this to the parole board, that he was in a blackout.
	And you guys deal with blackout drunk drivers all the time.
	In fact, one of them was a Kennedy.
	One of them was married to Cuomo, the governor of New York.
	One of them drove her Lexus under the influence of Ambien underneath the bottom of a semi-tractor trailer at 80 miles an hour up in Connecticut and pleaded, had a jury trial.
	Where Ethel Kennedy rolled in a wheelchair and every Kennedy on earth came into that courtroom to get her out of jail time.
	So her situation was a blackout.
	Sirhan was in a blackout and that's why he was never able to apologize for something he couldn't remember.
	And I brought this up to the parole board saying, what would you do with a housewife in a blackout who you're asking to apologize to the dead family she crashed into, but she can't remember because she was in a blackout?
	And the judge in the case said that's a great analogy to me in the case.
	Actually, let me stop you because you actually did chop out there.
	You chopped out for a second just because of the connection.
	What was the housewife analogy?
	The housewife analogy, and this happens all the time with parole boards.
	A woman could be in a blackout drunk.
	She crashes into a car with a bunch of kids and another family and kills them, right?
	She can't really apologize for the behavior that she can't remember.
	Because she was in a blackout.
	That's in essence what the denial of parole for Sirhan has been for 50 years.
	The fact that they want him to admit he did this killing when he was in a blackout and doesn't remember doing it.
	Now, you can get into the argument as to why he was in a blackout, whether it was an MKUltra brainwashing, hypnotic state, or alcohol.
	It doesn't really matter.
	The fact of the matter is he can't admit to killing someone when he doesn't remember doing the crime, David.
	And this happens every day in every court in the United States when a judge says you can't apologize for something you don't remember.
	That's accepted.
	It doesn't affect your sentencing, but they don't sentence you to life imprisonment, or sometimes they do.
	But they can't expect you to apologize for a crime or a situation with vehicular manslaughter when you're in a blackout, David, which is in essence what they wanted Sirhan to do.
	That's the analogy I'm making.
	And it's the analogy I made to the parole board.
	Because Sirhan had gone...
	Sirhan, let me just finish.
	Sirhan went to AA in prison for 20 years.
	People don't know this.
	And he had unbelievable letters of recommendation from the guards, from every prison official.
	For over 20 years.
	He had no incidents in prison.
	He kept going to AA meetings, even through COVID.
	And I said, nobody goes to AA meetings who's not an alcoholic.
	You just don't go to meetings.
	And he did.
	He did.
	And he knew he was an alcoholic.
	And I offered to help him on the outside once he got out by taking him to recovery meetings and doing that.
	And the parole board agreed.
	We just debated the amount of times and how many meetings he needed for a week.
	And we agreed in the parole hearing that he would be released basically into my control to deal with his addiction.
	Okay, when you just said that, it actually allows me to flesh out the distinction between an addiction that leads to criminality and an addiction that is the criminality, where it's the automatism defense in law where somebody gets so drunk, and we had this case in Canada, blackout drunk, sexually assault someone.
	And then they say, well, you're not, we can't even convict you because you lacked the mens rea because you were in a blackout state.
	Whereas the culpability is getting into that state to commit the crime in the first place.
	And so you can understand the addiction leading to the criminality being one aspect.
	And the other side is when the addiction is the criminality.
	And that's when listening to Anthony Weiner saying, I'm addicted to...
	I don't know what the addiction is.
	Is it power?
	Is it adulation?
	Is it being adored?
	Yeah, I don't know about the Anthony Weiner case.
	I know a black dude who knocked out a guy in a blackout.
	He was in a blackout.
	The other guy was in a blackout.
	They got into a fight in a bar.
	The guy he hit fell down, hit the ground.
	And died.
	And died.
	He was sentenced to the electric chair.
	He was sentenced to the electric chair in Sing Sing.
	For a crime he can't remember having committed.
	He was eventually commuted.
	The sentence was commuted by the governor of New York.
	And he later became a big figure in the recovery movement, having been paroled and gone to AA and different meetings in prison.
	He later got out on a commutation for a crime he didn't remember.
	But he did murder somebody under the influence of drugs and alcohol.
	You know, I mean, he was sentenced to the electric chair.
	We had a case like that in Canada, but that case didn't involve automatism as a defense.
	It involved, I just wanted to punch him.
	I didn't want to kill him.
	This guy's in another state where I don't even remember wanting to punch him, but I certainly didn't want to kill him.
	And then you got both of them.
	Yeah, I've made the distinction now.
	Purporting that pedophilia, sexting your junk to an underage girl is the addiction.
	There's no addiction that leads...
	Let me just interrupt for a second before you go down the subway.
	There's sex addiction and there's pedophilia.
	It's two separate things.
	I don't know what you're talking about in terms of where you're going with this thing.
	Sex addiction is a separate thing.
	Go on.
	You've got to go watch Anthony Weiner's interview or the podcast with Patrick Beddavid.
	There's a section of it that's truly insightful in a bad way.
	Anthony Weiner was convicted or he pleaded guilty to...
	He's sending pictures of his junk to a 15-year-old kid.
	And then in his, you know, I was going to say schtick, in his justification, he says, well, you know, I'm going through, I'm going to, I suffer from addiction.
	What's that addiction?
	I don't know.
	Is it adoration?
	Is it attention?
	Is it whatever?
	You know, is it, I used to text people about plumbing.
	I used to text people about how plumbing works to a 15-year-old girl.
	And then he tried to bring in sex addiction.
	Sex addiction as a whole.
	Whereas in sex addiction, you're not committing a crime.
	You might be abusing of people in a spiritual, moral sense.
	Russell Brand in his book has an entire section on this.
	I can understand addiction to sex.
	You're not addicted to a crime.
	You're just addicted to something that ruins your life and that makes people hate you.
	I'm comfortable now with the distinction of the addiction that leads to the criminality versus the addiction to the criminality.
	One could have a healing process.
	The other one...
	Makes you a criminal.
	Okay.
	So now, how does someone know when they're an addict?
	They have to say, it makes my life unmanageable.
	That's right.
	That's right.
	It's a self-diagnosed disease.
	So you have to diagnose yourself as an addict, which leads us to the current problem of the homeless meth addicts that are on the streets of the United States.
	Any attempt to have them get off the streets, they just refuse any help from anybody or any industry that wants to help them.
	Tomorrow is going to be an interesting day in street addiction history because the city of San Diego tomorrow is beginning to enforce their no-camping law, essentially an anti-homeless street law that will go into effect tomorrow in San Diego.
	This is going to be very interesting to follow.
	How successful or unsuccessful this new law is or the enforcement of an old law in San Diego to see in terms of homelessness.
	Because as Dr. Drew and others have gone around the city in L.A., it's something like 90 to 96 percent of the people who are homeless on the streets here in this city, and I assume it's everywhere else, are meth addicts or addicted to heroin, but it's mostly crystal meth.
	Do you know of that stat?
	How many are addicted to crystal meth because they were addicted to prescription jugs and then lost that prescription and turned to street drugs?
	That's a hard stat to find, but it's not really relative because now nobody is giving out prescriptions to that particular situation.
	I mean, most of these kids that I know of in rehab all started with Adderall in lower grades.
	Let me just give you the arc of the covenant here.
	And I use it as a joke, but the arc of addiction for speed and meth starts with their parents listening to a doctor in preschool, telling them that their hyper kid needs Adderall, and they are given Adderall in third, fourth, and fifth grade.
	In fact, when I meet these kids, I simply say to them, as meth addicts, when did your parents get you onto Adderall?
	And they look at me like, how did you know?
	And every single one of them, eventually the prescription is cut off, Eva, and they have to go to the street.
	And that might be 10 years later, it might be 6 years later, but whatever it is, at some point no doctor is going to give you these extended prescriptions of these drugs, hence the direction towards the street to get these street drugs, which are now cut with fentanyl, which is another chapter in the story.
	And that, what you just said there, really pisses me off because the amount of people I know who take their kids for Behavioral disorders.
	Absolutely.
	First thing the doctor's going to say is, get the kid on Adderall, get him on...
	What's the other one for...
	Ritalin.
	Ritalin.
	They're going to say that.
	And then if you don't do it, it's going to be a liability because you're not listening to the doctor.
	You might be a defiant parent.
	Well, the first move should be...
	If you're the doctor, how much sugar intake is your child having?
	And then the parent doesn't want to alter the diet of the child.
	They'd rather take the easiest.
	I swear to God.
	I've talked to the parents about it.
	And they just said, no, that was too much.
	It was a bridge too far to take away the cornstruck of sugar-frosted flakes.
	I'd rather have my child on Ritalin.
	And I just look at them in astonishment.
	It's like there was a bit, I forget who it was, but it was about, I do anything to sleep better, doctor.
	Give me Ativan.
	Give me something.
	Don't look at your phone for an hour before going to bed.
	And everyone in the room is like, nope, not doing that.
	Five minutes.
	Give me five minutes.
	Nope, nope.
	I'll do surgery.
	Okay, so this is...
	It's depressing.
	It's depressing because the situation has become...
	It's so advanced right now where the pharmaceutical drugs that you used to be able to get pharmaceutical drugs...
	They now have phony pharmaceutical bottles to sell phony pharmaceutical drugs.
	I know it's hard for people to understand where this has gone to, but every single drug on the street is now made out of fentanyl.
	Xanax is made out of fentanyl.
	The phenobarbitals are made out of fentanyl.
	Cocaine is now fentanyl.
	And people are just, they can't believe what I'm saying.
	And yet all of the people I know who are dying are dying because they bought something else and died while taking it.
	This is what happened to Robert De Niro's grandson in New York.
	He was buying Xanax.
	The Xanax was really fentanyl.
	He OD'd on fentanyl.
	This is happening every single minute in every city in this country.
	Fentanyl is being controlled by the drug cartels out of Mexico.
	They're making entire pharmaceutical lines of drugs that look exactly like them, where the kids on the street are now demanding to see the bottle.
	They're demanding to see the prescription bottle.
	So they made phony prescription bottles, Viva.
	All right, Mark, I realize I've just fallen way behind on the rumble rants, but the top one is going to bring us to another question, or at least the next chapter of this.
	Let me just go.
	I'll start from the bottom up.
	Give me two minutes, Robert.
	Robert, Mark.
	Cup of Sooth says Barnes is still wrong about birthright citizenship.
	People are so mad about Robert about that.
	About what?
	About the birthright citizenship as to who can run for president and whether or not you have to be.
	It's a constitutional question.
	I didn't know it was such a divisive one.
	Mandatory carry says, keep fighting, but I have work to do.
	Sancho de Laxo says, thoughts on Chef Tafari Campbell's drowning?
	Love you guys.
	Can't wait for bombs away episode.
	We'll talk about that tomorrow.
	Although we might get into that tonight.
	Oh, yeah.
	All right.
	And we got Matt Rice says, I discovered America's Untold through Viva.
	Now I never miss an episode.
	Great stuff.
	Bull Gadari says, Mark is the best storyteller in America.
	I'd love to meet him.
	Cheryl Gage says, nice job on Timcast Friday.
	Just wondering, is Tim taller than you?
	I know that's a fairly low bar.
	He is much taller than me.
	Wow.
	My kid's almost taller than me.
	Crazy Guru One says, some of us really need rehab.
	We are not criminals, but really need help.
	Crazy Guru, I saw your one on the top there.
	We're going to get to it.
	Kitty.
	Wow, so great to hear this much of your history, Mark.
	I learned so much from America's Untold Stories in general.
	Love and respect you even more now.
	Just a fascinating life.
	Crazy Guru says, this man is correct.
	I am dying from alcohol as I can never reach the same high.
	Please pray for me.
	I want to stop, but it is so difficult.
	We're going to get to the top one, Crazy Guru.
	I get it, bro.
	I get it.
	I get it.
	Methos 300, 3000 BC says the salt must flow.
	And then Crazy Guru says, this is where we're going to get into makes life unmanageable.
	I'm an alcoholic, but I've never committed a crime, but I know I am killing myself, which is a crime.
	Really need help.
	Please pray for me.
	Thank you.
	This is the question, Mark.
	If it doesn't make your life unmanageable, but you know that it's doing something that might shorten your lifespan.
	And this is where like, I don't struggle with addiction full stop.
	I struggle with the idea of addiction.
	Like I have a...
	I might have an addictive personality.
	It's about substituting the unhealthy addictions for the healthy addictions.
	But if I find out that my coffee every morning is going to shorten my lifespan because it's got sugar and cream in it, am I going to stop it?
	No.
	Is that an addiction that's causing my life problems?
	Probably not.
	The Red Bull?
	Probably not.
	No, no.
	It's about unmanageability, Viva.
	It's about unmanageability.
	That's the key phrase here.
	Is it making your life unmanageable?
	Crazy guru.
	Who says, I know that I'm drinking an amount of alcohol that's going to hurt me.
	What is the first step that someone does when they say, I think that's the answer?
	All you got to do is go to a meeting.
	Just go to a meeting.
	Just look it up, go to a meeting, and see if it fits when you go to the rooms of AA or NA if you're narcotics, and see if you can get better and stop without.
	In other words, anybody could stop using.
	Anybody could stop using, for the most part, by going to detox.
	The question is, how do you stay stopped?
	How do you fill that black hole inside of you that says, I have to put food in there.
	I have to put sex in there.
	I have to put narcotics in there.
	I can't live without filling up that black hole.
	And what you learn in the rooms is you're going to have to fill it up with spirituality.
	And the people who are coming into the rooms are spiritually bankrupt.
	What you have to do is fill it up with a power greater than yourself.
	And that doesn't necessarily mean God or religion or any Christian belief.
	You just have to be able to find a power greater than yourself to fill that black hole inside of you with.
	Now the power greater than yourself could be the room itself, Eva.
	It could be a group of people who are clean and sober.
	That has more power than you.
	It could be the ocean.
	It could be the universe.
	It could be the galaxy.
	It's got to be something that...
	Takes your ego and puts it into a container that doesn't tell you that you're the greatest person on earth all the time.
	Because the ego has to be shrunk in order to get into recovery and start to recover on a long-term scale.
	And it's a day-by-day process.
	I mean, I'll give you an example.
	You can't take six shots of insulin if you're a diabetic and not go into a coma seven days later.
	It's a daily reprieve from insulin for the diabetic, to make a medical analogy to addiction, if that helps you understand it any better.
	NIH has compared bronchitis and addiction and kidney ailment and diabetes to be essentially the same disease.
	And I mean that not the same in terms of medical, in terms of being lifelong chronic illnesses that have no cure, that need daily treatment.
	That's what NIH's definition of those diseases are.
	That's alcoholism, and that's also diabetes and bronchitis, where you have to use the bronchial asthma device.
	NIH compares them all to be about the same.
	There's no cure for any of them.
	But what do you say to the person who says, I can't even bring myself to step foot in that room.
	It's going to be too embarrassing.
	Someone's going to recognize me.
	You're not done.
	You're not done.
	You've got to be done.
	When your life becomes unmanageable and your world crashes down around you and you have no choice, that door is open for you to walk through.
	Nobody's forcing you to go in there.
	There's nobody looking for increased membership.
	When you're done, desperate, and willing to surrender, willing to surrender your ego to go in that room, if you need help, they'll stick the handout of help for you and completely take you under their wing.
	And there's millions of people who've done that across the globe since 1935.
	I was listening a while back, Russell Brand on Joe Rogan, and they're talking about drugs and psychedelics.
	Some people accuse Joe Rogan of being a functional alcoholic, a functional drug addict, and that he does the stuff.
	It obviously is not making his life unmanageable that we know of.
	It might behind closed doors.
	Who knows?
	Yeah, I mean, unmanageability can also mean unmanageable to have a relationship with a woman, unmanageable to start a family, unmanageable on various levels.
	It doesn't necessarily mean you can't hold the job.
	It's unmanageability of what you determine is unmanageable, Viva.
	You know, I mean, it's not the surface things all the time.
	You may have a home in the suburbs that's worth a lot of money.
	You may have a family.
	I mean, I've seen...
	I just, you know, I've seen people who have everything and have an unmanageable life who can't stop using.
	I mean, Sam Kinison famously said, if you've got $50,000 left for rehab, you don't have a problem.
	And then he died of addiction on a highway 15 going to Vegas.
	First of all, how did he die?
	Was it an accident?
	It was a head-on collision.
	He died.
	I'm going to do an episode on Sam Kinison in a couple of weeks.
	But he died in a head-on collision with him being high.
	And the teenage driver being high, crashing into each other on the highway to Vegas.
	Sam had a chip in his pocket from Alcoholics Anonymous, a 30-day chip, and he had had a relapse.
	Is that saying both cars, both drivers died and both were on drugs?
	Yes.
	Yes.
	Okay, we're going to get into the relapse in a second.
	But, oh, actually, we're getting into it right now because Joe Rogan is talking to Russell Brand and Joe likes to, you know, he discusses expanding his intellectual psychic horizons with, what are they called, psychotropic drugs.
	I just want to interject.
	I just want to interject.
	Drugs work.
	I mean, I took a lot of LSD.
	It expanded my consciousness.
	There's a lot of artistic benefit for me from taking hallucinogens.
	I will not ever say that they don't work.
	They definitely work.
	It's just not sustainable over a lifetime for people who have addictive genetics.
	I mean, he may not have addictive genetics of two parents being addicts like mine were.
	Both my mother and father were addicts.
	And the genetics are involved and there's social stuff involved.
	There's no reason to denounce drugs for being drugs if they work for you.
	Keep in mind, only 10% of the population are addicts, even.
	90% are not.
	But you're talking about maybe 40 million people in the United States alone who are actively addicted.
	Well, 10% is a lot, but I wonder if the number is actually higher because of what people might be addicted to.
	Could potentially include those who are not included.
	But Rogan says to Russell Brand, he says, you're a different person now.
	You're responsible.
	You can handle these things.
	You know, why not?
	And I thought that that question itself sort of like ignores the essence of what addiction is, which I would imagine someone who has been clean for decades, like yourself, like Russell Brand, where it was getting clean from an addiction that was, in fact, destroying their lives.
	The biggest problem they could ever possibly say to themselves is, "I'm a different person now.
	I'm strong enough.
	I'm able to keep it under control now." Does that ever work with anybody?
	Or once someone has said, "I'm an addict and I have a problem, it's making my life miserable." There's a slogan that the disease is doing push-ups inside of you while you're even in recovery.
	It doesn't go away and it comes back much stronger if you do have a relapse.
	Many people reported that once relapsing, they had reached their pinnacle of drug use and abuse so quickly as to come crawling back into recovery shredded within weeks, you know, if they're lucky.
	The disease doesn't go away.
	It may trick you or deceive you into thinking that it's okay to use now.
	But that's a mind game that the disease is playing on your mind.
	And using another substance is another mind game because you could say to yourself, well, I never had a problem with weed.
	So now the...
	Coke addict does weed, and his defenses are now lowered.
	He's not happy with the weed high, and his drug of choice, which is cocaine, is now knocking on the door because the weed has lowered his defense shields of the Starship Enterprise, and he's now getting a beacon in his head saying, go back to your original drug.
	This weed is not cutting it, to give you just a rough example of how the crazy mind works.
	All right, now.
	I'll see if I have any more questions about that process.
	It's fascinating from an insight perspective.
	The corruption of the rehab industry in California.
	Bring it full circle back, and then we're going to go to local.
	It starts with a cure.
	Everything's the cure.
	If you have the cure for an incurable disease, think about what I just said.
	This is an incurable disease, according to the American Medical Association, according to NIH, according to every expert in the world.
	If we still believe these experts about this particular subject, this is an incurable disease.
	If you could pay X amount of money to go to a luxury facility and be cured, you would pay that.
	And these rehabs started to spring up in California.
	That claim to give you the cure after 28 days or 60 days of attendance in these places.
	And I remember calling the Federal Trade Commission at one point and saying, are you investigating these phony cure remedies for addiction?
	And they said, we don't have the manpower.
	We focus on phony cancer cures only because we don't have the money or the manpower to go after phony addiction cures.
	A fascinating interview with the Federal Trade Commission that I did.
	Explaining why they don't go after phony addiction cures.
	So the charlatans know there is no sheriff coming after them, Viva, to sum it up.
	Well, not that I've been blackpilled, but I might very well have been.
	Is there any idea about the FTC, not the FTC, whoever, whatever the body was, that says we don't have the manpower for this, and whoa, it's rife now for not just selling fake cures, but for blackmail and extortion within a community that...
	Is easily and potentially lucratively blackmailed and extorted.
	Do you think the reluctance to enforce anything has anything to do with some sort of broader plot to enable blackmail and extortion within the addiction community of those who have the money to be extorted?
	No.
	There's so much money to be made in these luxury rehabs, and I want to delineate that there are rehabs still in LA and other places that are $5,000 a month.
	What I'm talking about is rehabs that are $85,000 to $120,000 a month in cash, up front, no insurance, and you're put into a place like a five-star spa resort.
	They're telling you that you're going to have the cure for addiction once you come out of here.
	This has been an abject failure.
	They have attempted to sue with very little success in the courts.
	There's a lot of caveats involved.
	And now a lot of these luxury rehabs have gone away from a 12-step model and gone to a straight non-12-step model where people are...
	Coming there for an easier, softer way.
	The 12-step model being, just to explain the types of rehabs, there's the Betty Ford Hazleton model, which is a 12-step model rehab.
	Those are the mid-price model rehabs.
	They're non-profits, but they're about $50,000 to $35,000 to $50,000 a month.
	The lower-end working-class models are about $5,000 a month.
	They're a little rougher.
	And then there's the luxury model.
	So there's three tiers of rehabs in the country, three different tiers.
	And the ones that I covered, well, I covered them all.
	I went undercover one time in one called Impact, which is a low-end prison-like rehab in Pasadena that's legendary.
	It's been there since the 1950s.
	And a lot of prisoners in there.
	And it's very prison-like culture.
	And I went undercover in there to see what that was like.
	And I wrote an article about that.
	That was terrifying.
	Because I couldn't get out.
	And you can follow that story if you want on one of our episodes.
	That's like the psychopath test where people pretend to be mentally unwell to get out of prison, but then they can't get into the institutions.
	Yeah, that's kind of almost what happened to me at Impact.
	But then I also have written about other rehabs and gone undercover doing that.
	And I've actually worked with authorities on occasion, DEA and the district attorney's office, Shut down corrupt rehabs in LA.
	It's fascinating.
	Okay, we're gonna...
	What is the word?
	Bookmarker?
	I don't think there's anything I forgot to ask, but I'm gonna go to the chat to see if there's any questions.
	What...
	A little white pill or silver lining for people who have problems.
	What's the first step?
	And Russell Brand talks about the 12-step program as though...
	Not that it's the cure, but that it is the system.
	Everything is included in it to enable you to deal with your addiction.
	What should people do?
	It's not complicated.
	All you have to do is let go of your ego.
	There's a saying among the Latinos in LA, your ego is not your amigo in recovery.
	So it's kind of an interesting take.
	But all you have to do is walk into a 12-step room and just say, raise your hand and tell them your name and take it from there and just listen and sit in the back and shut up and see what they say.
	It's not complicated.
	And if it doesn't work for you, they'll refund your money, which is zero, of course.
	The 12-step rooms are the anathema to the recovery industry because they're free, Viva.
	There are psychologists and psychiatrists who refuse to send their patients, even though they know they're addicts to the 12-step recovery process, because they know one thing, they never come back.
	And the corrupt psychiatrist and the corrupt psychologist, and people have said this for years, who finally found a 12-step room and got rid of their psychiatrist and psychologist, they never told me about these rooms.
	And the honest ones will tell their patients about those rooms.
	The dishonest ones who don't want to lose them and lose the money will never mention it.
	And so many people have told me that they, you know, everybody lies to their therapist about the amount of drug use.
	They go in, it's a traditional joke.
	They go, yeah, I have a couple of drinks a week.
	It's a lie.
	You know, they're drinking around the clock.
	The therapist knows this.
	He never really calls them on it, never sends them to AA or any program because they don't want to lose the patient.
	They know that if they send you to those rooms, you're not coming back.
	And that is one of the dark secrets of addiction therapy.
	Put it that way.
	Private addiction therapy.
	Fascinating.
	Okay, let me read these chats here.
	There came four more came in.
	Crazy Guru One says, I went to AA and was severely judged and shunned when I relapsed.
	I am non-functional alcoholic from Scotland.
	Matt Reese says, I defiantly went to my first court-ordered AA meeting and it changed my life.
	The second person I saw was a guy I partied with 10 years prior.
	He became my sponsor and I am now 10 years...
	Bravo.
	That's a model.
	That's an exact model of how it should work.
	And that's from the court.
	That's from the court model.
	Crazy Guru says, I could not even 100 a month.
	And then we've got Chiang Love says, Off topic, but will you please look seriously into the Nova Scotia rampage involving Gabriel Wartman with Mark?
	Aren't you somewhat curious why it was reframed by the Nova Scotia Mass Casualty Commission?
	I've looked into it a little bit.
	I don't do the...
	Sorry, I just want to make sure I didn't take the wrong window up.
	I don't do the hush-hushes like Barnes only because...
	I'm never sure when I know enough about anything to do what Barnes...
	We only do American stories, by the way, so that's the answer for me.
	And for those who don't know, it's a wild conspiracy because it's this guy who went on a shooting rampage that lasted, if it wasn't 24 hours, it was well over 12 hours, in what is not known to have been either a fake RCMP car or a real RCMP car.
	Yeah, it's a weird story.
	What is the deal with that?
	And he had withdrawn $450,000 from a private banking bank prior to this event.
	Oh, he was wearing a RCMP uniform.
	Police didn't disclose until the next day that the murderer was still on the loose in an RCMP uniform.
	It's wild.
	I've talked about it.
	I have a specific episode on it, actually, because this all happened right at the beginning of COVID.
	And the government obviously jumped on this to enforce more gun restrictions in Canada.
	Okay, so we'll do a few more minutes here, then we're going to go over to...
	Do you have a few more minutes to come to Locals?
	Yeah, I don't care.
	Yeah, sure.
	We'll take some exclusive questions there.
	VivaBarnesLaw.locals.com A lot of our audiences overlap.
	I mean, I go over to your Locals, I see the same people that are online.
	Oh, for sure, I see the same people.
	Yeah, same people commenting, yeah.
	They're all going to know probably some of the answers to this question.
	Politically speaking these days, what's your take on what's going on?
	Oh, we'll get into the indictment after indictment and corruption after corruption.
	DeSantis-Trump battle.
	What's your take on that?
	I agree with Barnes.
	I've always agreed with Robert on this.
	I mean, his campaign's done.
	I mean, he's finished.
	And his career's finished.
	He got the book deal from Rupert Murdoch.
	I think that's why he began this insane campaign that's going nowhere.
	It's a phony campaign.
	He will remain governor of Florida as long as he can, and then the book deal will take care of his family probably the rest of his life.
	And I think he's completely melted down any chance of ever competing in this area again because of his attacks on Trump.
	And now speaking of the attacks on Trump...
	Mark, have you always been political or have you only gotten more political?
	Yeah, no.
	My grandfather was the campaign manager of the mayor of New York.
	He was a Brooklyn ward leader, Jack Bloom.
	He was a campaign manager for a reformed mayor in 1952 named Impeletiri.
	So we had politicians coming in and out of the house for years when I was growing up as a Democratic ward leader.
	He was involved in the Mead Esposito Democratic machine.
	In South Brooklyn.
	I was going to pull up.
	You had sent me a video, a TikTok of a man who spent $15,000 to look like a collie or to look like his dog.
	Where did you?
	You texted that to me.
	I can't pull it up so easily.
	Some Japanese guy spent his life savings to have designed and become a collie.
	I think in Japan.
	And he is wheeled around on a gurney by an assistant.
	Then other dogs come up and smell him.
	And he looks like...
	The work is impeccable.
	It looks like something that Hollywood would do.
	And he looks like Lassie.
	We'll end on that as we go over.
	I'm going to send this to myself so I can bring it up.
	It's...
	Yeah, it's just a weird story.
	Yeah, I mean, he's small enough, I guess, as a Japanese man to fit into the Kali suit.
	And he lays on a gurney.
	And, you know, there's some video of him playing with a ball and doing some other canine behavior.
	But apparently his dream, his whole life, was to be a dog.
	Life savings to become...
	It's not coming fast enough.
	Man from Japan.
	Here you go.
	All right, people.
	Stuff you didn't know that you needed to know, and then we're going to go over to vivabarneslaw.locals.com and take the chat questions there.
	Man from Japan.
	Here we go.
	Skip...
	Oh, Brickhouse Nutrition.
	Fieldofgreens.com, people.
	Promo code VIVA.
	All right, skip that.
	We'll just go real...
	Oh, there he is.
	The music off just in case there's a copy.
	Look at him.
	I was looking at it.
	The dogs are fooled by him.
	The dogs.
	Oh, all right.
	Well, that's on the lighter side of things.
	Mark, so what do you have on for this week?
	What do you have on for the 60th anniversary of the JFK assassination?
	Okay, I don't want to get into the 60th, but I do want to say we got Curtis LeMay on Tuesday.
	Curtis bombs away LeMay, who single-handedly ended World War II with a firebombing of Tokyo and 67 other cities in Japan, something he came up with.
	We're going to get into that.
	He runs with George Wallace as vice president in 1968.
	He invents the Strategic Air Command and supervises the atomic bomb operation in Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
	That's a separate story.
	But he single-handedly invents the United States Air Force.
	And we're going to get into Curtis LeMay on Tuesday of America's Untold Stories.
	And we also, I don't want to get into the...
	60th anniversary, because that is going to be a technological AI type of thing that's going to be, I think, first of its kind.
	But we are having a meetup Labor Day weekend in Montgomery, Alabama, which I did want to mention because we had gone to your meetup, Eric and I, in Vegas, and that was a blast.
	So we finally found a place in Montgomery, Alabama to do our first meetup, which is going to be Labor Day weekend.
	It's going to be in a hotel down there.
	It's a red state.
	We have a guy named Greg Boudel, who I do a live radio show with every Thursday out of Montgomery.
	So we're going to have a live radio simulcast of the event while we're doing a live episode of America's Untold Stories.
	With live music and raffles and games and drinking and food and everything else.
	Sunday, September 3rd down in Montgomery.
	We're going to have a VIP meetup on Saturday, September 2nd in the hotel for VIP hookups.
	And we're going to just do it up.
	Where can people find tickets and where can people find you?
	Through Eric Hundley, unstructured.locals.com, which is our locals page.
	You can buy tickets there.
	If you can't make it, we'll refund it.
	It's not a risk to you.
	Eric has various price points on how to do this at unstructured.locals.com, which is our locals page.
	And people from both locals are coming, so we're going to see some of the Viva Barnes crew.
	I met a bunch of you guys when I was in Vegas.
	I'm going to get to one of those chats.
	It's in our locals community because someone brought that up.
	And I'm going to do my best to make it there if I can.
	I've never been to Alabama before, so it'll be very cool.
	All right, Mark.
	So what we're going to do now, everybody.
	First of all, everyone, thank you for being here.
	Tomorrow, 5 o 'clock, we're going to have the Sunday Viva Barnes Law Show at 5 o 'clock on a Monday.
	It's Taco Tuesday on a Thursday.
	What were you going to say?
	Me?
	Oh, yeah.
	No, no.
	You're talking to me.
	You're throwing up gang signs up there.
	So everybody, come on over to vivabarneslaw.locals.com.
	Hold on.
	Who's this?
	Y 'all have the link.
	I'll put the link up one more time.
	We're going to go carry on the exclusive portion there.
	Take some questions because I see some from Mark.
	That's it.
	Everyone enjoy the weekend and I will see you all at least the rumble portion.
	I'll see you all tomorrow.
	Locals, hang around.
	We're coming over in 3, 2, 1, now.
	Okay, I think we're good.
	Matt, Mark, the amount of times I've ended the stream and it hasn't ended, and thank goodness I don't immediately rip off my clothes and do something embarrassing.
	Okay, so we're live.
	Are we good on locals?
	We're good on locals.
	All right, there are tips in the house that I'm going to get to right away because I think someone has some questions for you.
	Pete Tabase said a $50 tip.
	I hope that wasn't a typo.

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