The Joe Rogan Experience
Hosted by Joe Rogan
Darryl Cooper is the host of the "Martyr Made" podcast. www.martyrmade.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
32,519 words · 2 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
The guys today, I think they're the highest level fighters of all time. We run.
Hey Darrell, what's going on man?
How's it going?
Yeah, we were just talking UFC.
Yeah.
I think this is the, we were talking about how exciting the Ankaliyev and Pereira fight was, even though people didn't, they didn't like it because it wasn't like some crazy result, a giant knockout like you get in most Pereira fights, but it was so technical. And Ankaliyev just did a fantastic job of shutting down the scariest guy in the division.
Yeah. I just, and the psychological aspect of it, of just, he made him back up and second guess himself.
And, you know, that's, you can't just do that by being aggressive. You can't, you know, you really gotta get in there and you gotta hurt him a little bit and you just have to put that on him. And it was, it was amazing to watch. I thought it was a great fight.
Well, it was so interesting because the consequences of exchanging with Pereira are so high, but also Ankaliyev. Ankaliyev's knocked a lot of people out. We always look at Pereira's knockouts, but Ankaliyev's knocked out some of the best guys in the division and he only lost one time. And that was, Paul Craig has the nastiest fucking triangle. It's so sneaky and so quick and you don't expect it. He's so high level off his back and he caught him, I think with like one second to go in the third round, a fight that he was losing.
Yeah, he broke Jamal's arm or dislocated his elbow too. He's one of those guys, it's like, that, you know, like Ryan Hall. It's like, you know, they're on the feet, dancing around. It's like, you know, what are we really watching here, kind of, but man, as soon as they hit the ground.
Yeah, he's, there's a giant disparity between his stand-up, which is good, his good stand-up. You know, and the Bo Nickel fight was entirely stand-up. It was a good fight, you know, he was, he looked good on the feet, but you would never say, you know, this is like an Israel Adesanya type character. He doesn't have that level of proficiency with striking, but God, when he gets on his back, you're in such danger, like nobody else in the division. It's weird. Because most guys, you're on their back, you're not really worried about it. With Paul Craig, it's like, everything has to be tight.
Especially guys that size, you don't really see it as often.
No, you don't.
Especially in an era when, you know, the off-your-back jiu-jitsu is kind of, I don't want to say like, you know, they figured out the game on that yet, but you know, it's not quite to that level. You still have your Craigs and Oliveras, people like that, who really are dangerous off their back, but it's, it's not as common anymore, you know?
Well, it's really hard to do. And also, most people don't want to be on their back, so they don't even practice off their back. And the common thought amongst coaches is, when you're on your back, if there's two minutes to go, you're probably not going to pull a submission off. You've got to concentrate on getting back up to your feet, minimizing whatever scoring your opponent has done, like taking you down, and whatever shots they've landed, mitigate those as much as possible, and get to the feet as quickly as possible.
That's what everybody's trying to do now.
Especially in a three-round fight, I mean, it's like,
You let yourself get laid on for three minutes in the first round, nothing really happens, but you lost that round, you better win the second one.
Well, look at like the Armin Sarukyan, um, fight. If, if you, if you think about that fight with, uh, Charles Olivera. Charles Olivera caught him multiple times in like, deep submissions, which I think should count for a lot. Which I thought, if I looked at who won that fight, I would say Olivera won that fight. Olivera had him in deep trouble, it was a very, it was kind of a controversial opinion, but I think a tightly locked triangle, or a Darce choke, or anything along those lines, should be considered winning. You're, you're doing something very difficult to do, your opponent doesn't want it to happen, you've dominated a position to the point where you're, you've secured a submission.
And then this guy sneaks out with sweat and technique and fucking grit.
But he was in fucking trouble.
Oh, at the very end especially. Oh, definitely. I'm a little biased on this one, because I'm an adopted member of the Armenian community, but, uh, yeah, but, but it was a great fight.
I'm a giant fan of Armenians.
Oh, you know what I love about them?
So many great fighters in the UFC, all the way back to Karl Parisian, been Armenian, but just, I like the style of the people.
Yeah, exactly. The thing I love about them is Armenians love being Armenian.
Yes, they do.
It's just, it's great to be around, I love it, yeah.
Yeah, very friendly people, too. So this podcast, like, there's podcast, I never say who's coming on the podcast. I just like, put it out there. Like, everybody knew that Trump was coming on. And there's been a couple of times where people knew that I was interviewing people. For the most part, I just like to do it, have the conversation, and then put it out. But you put it on Twitter that you were coming on, and then the campaign began.
I put it on my Substack, behind the paywall. But apparently, some of my enemies, you know, pay me five bucks a month to follow my Substack, so.
I saw what happened with you on the Tucker Carlson thing, and I spoke about it almost immediately on the podcast. Whenever I felt like it came up, I don't remember how many days afterwards, but... I've been listening to your podcast for a long time, and it's, it's so charitable and comprehensive, and so thorough, and so, you put so much weight on the real lives and suffering of human beings on all sides of any conflict. The regular people that didn't want to be dragged into any war, that find themselves on the front line.
The stories that you tell, and the way you tell them, is so comprehensive and so, again, charitable. Like, the humanity of these people is so well expressed. That, your fans know you. I'm a fan. I know you. I know how you view things. I know how you portray things. I know how honest you are about all aspects of conflict. And again, as charitable as possible, the way you lay this out. So when I saw these attacks on you, and when people were calling you an anti-Semite and a Nazi apologist, I was like, "Good lord, this is not going to work on people who know him."
You know, I've been through that ringer before, I know what that is. But with you, I was like, "All anyone needs to do," and I encourage you, if you're like, "I can't believe you had this guy on," "Listen to fear and loathing in the new Jerusalem." Listen to it. Just, you don't even have to listen to the whole thing. Listen to the first hour of it. And there's no fucking way the person who made that is anti-Semitic in any way, shape, or form. And that...
That's just one of the things that you've done that show that. It's like, the problem is, when someone says something, and they're trying to be hyperbolic, or they're trying to get a reaction, or you're shit talking, or you post a meme online, or something like that. Like, this bizarre culture we live in, that wants to reduce people to the worst possible interpretations of what they said, or who they are. And to ignore everything else, but for one small tweet, or one statement made, in, you know, trying to be, trying to get a reaction, trying to be outrageous.
Like, it's a stupid thing that we do. And, as someone who values your show, and listens to your show all the time, I don't find, it's not just stupid. It's bizarre how many people fall for this kind of stupidity. And I know how this whole thing works. I guarantee you, you probably gained a bunch of fans, and you probably gained a bunch of people who listened, because, most of the time, when someone gets discredited in the media, or someone gets shamed, a lot of people will immediately hop on board, but a lot of other people will go, "Well, what is this guy saying? Like, what is this about? Like, what's their content like?" And if they listen to your show,
they will realize, like, it's one of the very best long-form history podcasts that's available online. It's fantastic. It's really good. So, it's so unfortunate that there is, there's these attack vectors that they could use to try to change perception of who you are. But the fortunate aspect is, there's so much of your work out there, that anyone could just comb through. And, you know, you're not hearing that side of it from any of these people, any of these detractors. No one's saying, "Yeah, you know, listen, I listened to some of his stuff, and..." You know, maybe he shouldn't have said what he said about Winston Churchill, but I think he was just being hyperbolic. And if you just listen to actually what he says
about the whole conflict, you kind of get an understanding of who this guy is. And, um, so there was a lot of resistance to having you on, but I was like, fuck that resistance. I know what you actually do. And so that's why we're here.
Well, thank you.
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Appreciate that. Yeah, you know, I mean, the Tucker interview was, I could have been clearer in what I was saying. I'm not gonna like absolve myself.
Let's explain what you said, because you were talking about what you say to Jaco, right?
Yeah, that's how it originally came up. Because Jaco's wife's English, right? So Churchill's like a sacred figure in their pantheon. And so I said that, you know, maybe I'm being a little provocative here. I like to provoke Jaco with my Churchill takes or whatever. But that's only part of it. I mean, I'm very critical of Churchill's role, in my opinion, in turning...
The German invasion of Poland into the Second World War, basically, you know. That, you know, it's, as I get older, yeah, I posted something on X today that somebody had posted a video, a drone is going toward a Ukrainian or a Russian truck or something, and it hits it and it doesn't blow up, and it's like boom, boom, and it translates, it doesn't blow up, doesn't blow up. And as I was watching that thing, I felt like that when it didn't blow up and the video ended, I felt like this, this really strong sense of relief that it didn't blow up, you know. And I, what I posted, I reposted it and I said, I think, you know, as I get older, like, I just don't have the stomach for this kind of stuff anymore. And I see something like that, and like, I don't care
who's in the truck. I don't care if it's Russians, I don't care if it's North Koreans or Ukrainians. Or human beings. I just like, I'm just glad that they're okay. Like, that's what I actually felt at the time, you know. And as I get older, like, that's just how I feel more and more about these things. Like, whether, any, any conflict, is this like, it's not, this is not like a young man's thought, I guess, but, like, I'm just, I'm happy when they're over and they need, like, I mean, the damage that they do to people. And, and not only to the people who were in it fighting, but that it, that it does to the societies and cultures that are involved in these things. It does real damage to our spirit, you know. Like, you, you should go back to oh four, when the Abu Ghraib expose came out. You know,
Americans were horrified by that, and rightly so, you know. They saw those pictures. But the thing that was interesting is that they were horrified, yeah, partly because, like, look how awful this is, that they're doing to these people or something. But, you know, for all they knew, they, they knew these people were in prison, they might have thought they were terrorists or something. What people were really, like, feeling at the time was, what are we doing to our people? Like, what, what is, you know, what are, what are we putting them through that our people are being reduced to this? Right. You know. And, you know, kind of the sad thing now is, like, I don't know if we would have the same reaction today. I, I think the war on terror has sort of desensitized
us to a lot and hardened our hearts in ways that are not good for us. And so when I do my podcasts, you know, whether I'm talking about the Israelis and Palestinians, I did a long one on Jonestown, seven episodes, like thirty-five hours long, and
Whoever it is, like, my rule is that I don't record anything until I feel like I can put myself in the shoes of the people that I'm gonna talk about and really kind of understand how their actions made sense to them with the information they had and in the context of their time, you know what I mean? And so, when you do something like that with the Meleil massacre, for example, I did that with that story, the Jonestown one, I mean, Jonestown, you're talking about like this raving lunatic who took a bunch of people out into the jungle and they all committed suicide, so, you know, putting your, it's very tempting and very easy to just write off any responsibility to understand what was happening there, because you're like, "Well, we know what was happening, these people were nuts," you know?
But the thing is, like, if you really think about the consequences of taking the wrong lessons from things like that, you know, the response that we, that the federal government had to the Waco standoff in the early 90s was very much informed by the way people thought about Jonestown, which is that, you know, "We let this go on too long, the problem wasn't that, you know, that maybe we had this paranoid group of radicals out here that, you know, maybe we shouldn't have done so much to feed into that paranoia, we needed to ease these people out of it and try to de-escalate." Instead, we said, "We should have, we could have prevented it if only we'd have gone in hard right at the beginning and taken this guy out," and so, then you get Waco, you know?
And so, there are real-world consequences to taking the wrong lessons from these things, and really just kind of forgetting that it doesn't, I mean, look, you may have like your Jeffrey Dahmers or something out there that are an exception to this rule, but they are the exception that proves the rule, that it doesn't matter who you're talking about. You could be talking about Uday Hussain, you know, Saddam's son, just a sadistic monster of a human being. But, you know, that kid was a three-year-old at one point, or that guy was a three-year-old kid at one point, who did not like, it's not like he was waiting in line in the spirit world before he was born, and they're like, who wants to be Saddam Hussein's son? And he's like, I do, I do. That's the world he was thrust into, you know? And you see a
guy like that, and then you, you know, you're horrified by the things that he does, but then you say, look, man, you know, if the stories are true, at least, like Saddam Hussein used to take him and his brother when he was six years old to go watch torture sessions and executions, because he needed to harden them for, you know, ruling the country one day. And it's like, I don't, I don't want to pretend like I have the remotest idea of, you know, how a kid is supposed to respond to watching torture sessions when he's six years old and coming up in that world. Like, what do I know about that? You know what I mean? So I, like, I try to stay humble as I'm reading about these people, not assume that I'm better than them or different than them, and really just try to understand them
on human terms, you know? And again, it doesn't, when I did that in the, in the Tucker interview with regard to the Germans and the Second World War, and the series that I'm working on right now, which is the Second World War from the perspective of the Germans, you know, it's, people, people who, it's not just people who are purposely misinterpreting things or anything, you know, a lot of people who are in good faith, they see something like that, and they think you're trying to justify or rationalize what happened, you know? Because there is this, there is this thing where, I mean, the Jonestown story, this really did kind of happen to me, where, you know, when you get, when you get past a certain threshold of understanding people, it's, you're butting right up against empathizing
with them. I mean, it's like, that's the, you know, that's like the next step. You've got to take one more step, and you're empathizing with those people. And so, people see that, you know, and you're... Empathizing with evil people, you know, whoever it is. But I really believe that it's really good for us, like individually, you know, and as a society too, to, I think it has a positive effect on us to like, when we force ourselves to understand, you know, people we don't like as human beings, and just understand that their motivations are really no different than ours.
Well, this is one of the reasons why your podcast is so important, because you talk about things in this way, and this is one of the reasons why I knew you were misconstrued, or you would be misconstrued if something like that came up. That's, doing that is fine with Jonestown, you know, with Jonestown, everybody's like, well, how could these people have convinced these people to drink the Kool-Aid? Why would the people do it? What kind of a monster turns into this genocidal maniac and brings people to the jungle and does this? But when you do it with any other subject, you can kind of get away with that, until it gets to Nazis, until it gets to World War II.
And then, people have these red flags that pop up that just completely block out any objectivity. They remove all nuance, you lose all objectivity, you just, anything you're saying, imagine being a young man drafted into Hitler's army at 17 years old and not knowing what you're doing, and then becoming this monster. That's a Nazi apologist, right? This is, we've had this reductionist perspective on anything that has to do with that horrific moment in history, that if you even attempt to do this very comprehensive process that you do with all other subjects, where you look at the human angle, you look at these
people, the conflict, how did this get started? It's not there's good people on one side and there's evil people on the other side. No, there's genuinely just human beings. And there's horrible circumstances and then there's evil people who lead these people in horrible circumstances to do evil, terrible things. And people are tribal and they can buy into all kinds of crazy ideas and go forth and do horrific atrocities and believe that God is on their side. This is a part of being a human being that has existed fucking forever. But in our culture, in our media environment, where everybody is rightly so, so terrified of antisemitism, because there's real antisemitism out there.
And real antisemitism is horrible, just like real racism is horrible. The problem with calling everything racist and everything antisemitic, when it's clearly not, is that you diminish what that word means. You're essentially crying wolf. You're doing it in ways where rational, logical people who know your work have a very good argument against it. Like, this doesn't make any sense in the context of which it was said. If you look at the body of his work, if you look at how he talks about things, this is how he approaches stuff. This whole being provocative is part of what you do. It's part of what makes the audio come to life in these podcasts when you're talking about these moments in history.
This subject is just so sore with people, and particularly right now after October 7th, where, you know, I just, I remember all of a sudden going on X and seeing antisemitism just like white, right out in the open blaming Jews for everything going, whoa, like, has this been hiding? Like, and then you start thinking the way your paranoid Jewish friends think, that everybody's antisemitic, and you go, well, now I kind of understand why they think that way. So I kind of understand the overreaction, but it is still an overreaction. And I think what you do is very valuable. It's very valuable to me and it's very valuable to human beings that want to hear this nuanced...
Comprehensive perspective on these conflicts. And from a person who obviously cares deeply about them and cares deeply about the human cost of these. And one of the things you do so well, and I was just talking to Dave Smith about this yesterday, the gravity of war, the toll it takes on the people that are engaged in it and the people that are just outside of it and what is left of their civilization. It's fucking horrific and it should be avoided at all costs. But we don't, you don't avoid it by exaggerating.
You don't avoid it by distorting someone's perspective and turning everybody into a monster so that everyone's scared to talk at all. Cause this is the main objective. Most overreactions like that that are public and hyper aggressive and constant and continuous, it's not just you. It's to stop anybody from ever doing anything like that in the future to let them know there's consequences. There's gonna be financial consequences, there's gonna be your status online, your whatever you're, you know, however you're viewed by people will be now marred forever with this ugly stain of being not just an anti Semite, but a Nazi apologist. That's what I read. Nazi apologist.
Like you can't say that unless you listen to his stuff. You can't. Unless they listen to your work, they can't say that because they don't know what the fuck they're talking about. It's like someone trying to opine upon a culture that they've never read about or never visited. You don't know what you're saying.
Yeah, I've been told by people who should know that there are a few European countries I shouldn't try to visit because they probably won't let me off the plane.
Because of that podcast.
Bro, I'd stay in Texas if I was you. I'd hole up.
I'm up in, I'm up in North Idaho, so I'm far, far away.
They don't want to, they don't want to try North Idaho.
Yeah, it's a wild place. You got wolves and bears. It's just, uh, this is just part of what people do.
I was, I was gonna say too, um, you know, that overreaction is really counterproductive too.
You know, and cause to go back to what I said a second ago, like, understanding brings you right up to the brink of empathy, you know? That, you know, more understanding to these issues, and I've found this a hundred times, you know, cause like, look, anti-Semitism is a weird thing, and we can talk about some of the history of that if you want, but, you know, it's a, it's this thing that people get obsessed with, you know what I mean? Like, it's not like part of their ideology. I've watched this happen to like, good, clear-thinking, regular people. They start listening to a few podcasts that, you know, uh, they can't repost under their real name on Twitter because they're funny or interesting, and then pretty soon you can't bring that dude to a party anymore
because he just can't go ten minutes without, in neutral company, like, bringing up the Jews. And it's like, that happens. You see that happen. I mean, the, uh, you know, like, what you see on social media a lot, I mean, it's like, uh, there's no doubt there's been like a big explosion of that kind of rhetoric, you know?
And I think a lot of it is online trolling, and it's, uh, you know, the fact that people are so sensitive about it that like, it's just the easiest way to get a huge reaction, you know, from, from people. I think a lot of it has to do with that, but I think a lot of it also has to do with the fact that so many of these, of these questions have really been made, you know, it's not like they're off limits, like they're illegal, and you're gonna go to jail if you talk about them. I'm still sitting here, I mean, I'm on your podcast, and I've, so it's a big platform to talk about these things. It's not like that, but the attempt is to make it so that you can't be in any kind of respectable society.
Yeah, the attempt is to make you radioactive.
Yeah, and, and that, again, I think is just completely counterproductive because, you know, people look at something, I think Theo was talking about this in one of his recent interviews, he was saying, you know, you- Somebody sees what's happening in Gaza right now and they just see kids getting pulled out of rubble and it's shocking and horrifying and they see that and they find out that the US is sending money and weapons and like, why is that happening? And they start looking into it and they go to the websites that are gonna tell them the truth about it and pretty soon, one link leads to another. And when they go ask one of their, you know, history professors at school or something like, hey, you know, Uncle Adolf 1488 in the comments section like told me X, Y, Z, like,
you know, that he go and ask about it, he gets like shouted down and attacked for like asking the question and then, you know, what, that doesn't have the effect of him saying, wow, like, I guess that really is terrible and I should never ask that again. They think, hmm, that's weird, like, why are people responding this way? I was asking that question in good faith, you know? And so it really has like the opposite effect of, of the one that is at least ostensibly intended, you know?
I think there's a bunch of things going on simultaneously. I think some of this is coordinated and I think, um, because I think that with everything now online, I think there's, um, public momentum opinions that aren't necessarily organically shaped. And, um, there's, there's groups that will mass tweet about something. And now we know that there's AI programs that will devise, uh, various different tweets and people are running them through hundreds of computers, if not thousands of computers, all with multiple accounts and they're, they're posting things constantly and they're doing this.
There was a call to make it illegal for any employee of the government to post on social media. And this, I was like, that sounds outrageous. That sounds like something that would stifle political discourse. I want congressional people to be able to be, excuse me, to be whistleblowers and to talk about what's really going on and this is why this bill can't get passed, this is why they added this to this, this is bullshit. But then someone explained to me that what they're trying to stop is astroturfing. Is that if you're working for the government, or for now, this is with USAID, the concept of the non-government organization comes into play. So people realize that NGOs are actually funded by taxes. So it's a non-government organization doing the bidding of the government, and some of
that may or may not include social media campaigns about specific issues. And I think this happens with everything. I think this happens probably on the Free Palestine side. I think they probably do it. I think it happens on the Protect Israel side. They do it. I think everybody does it. And it's confusing, because you'd like to know, how do normal human beings actually think, the actual world thinks, versus massive amounts of people that are being financially incentivized to post these things. They're being paid, they're a part of an organization that gets paid, they get funded, they have
a directive, they go out and they pursue this campaign, and they do it relentlessly. And they do it through organic ways, like people who are aligned with their cause, whether it's Free Palestine, or Israel First, or whatever it is. You get people to post about it, they'll do it willingly, because they want to show everybody they're on the right side, and they also want to proclaim on Twitter that they are, you know, this is their political perspective, and I'm aligned with you people, I'm one of the good guys. And so, there's that, that happens too. And this is this chaos of social media, and people looking for likes, and audience capture, and all that stuff that goes on.
But, at the end of the day, we rely upon people that we trust. We rely upon people that are supposedly objective, and rational, and reasonable, and considerate, and charitable. People who look at things and go, okay, what is, what's really going on here? Like, what is, like, before I cast judgment, maybe I should pay attention to some of the things this guy's done. Maybe I should pay attention to his work. Maybe I should look into this, instead of just repeating Nazi apologists, because someone wanted to take... Just an overall comprehensive look at what happened. Which is, we should all want to know what happened from a bunch of different perspectives.
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Yes. I mean, the interesting thing about the World War II question is something I've found through talking to people who disagreed with my Tucker interview is...
Like if you put the question to them, and maybe if you put it directly like this, that would give you a different answer, but you kind of get the, you know, you, you, you get to understand that this is how they feel about it, which is if there was two options, one of them is that the Second World War doesn't happen, at least in Europe, forty million people don't get killed, but, you know, the National Socialists stay in power, and, you know, maybe Hitler dies ten years later, like the Soviet Union, Stalin dies, and things move on. People really kind of feel like, and maybe this is because they're not involved in it, like forty million dead people is, that was a, that was a cost worth paying. And I think that is completely insane, man. Like, it's, it's, like if there was
a sliver of a, of an opportunity to de-escalate that situation and bring it back down, like, you know, if I'm the emperor of America, or Britain, or whatever, I'm, I'm taking that chance. And if it turns out that Hitler's full of shit, and, you know, he stabs us in the back, first chance he gets, all right, then we'll have our war.
But is this pre or post-concentration camps? Is this pre or post the beginnings of the Holocaust?
This is where it gets into that. Like, should we decide to stop something in its tracks at whatever cost of life, because ultimately, that is the right thing to do, because we're witnessing the genocide of a people, and then we're also witnessing a group that will remain in power, that has not just committed genocide, but is committed to genocide?
Right. So, what we were talking about, and all of the points I was bringing up on Tucker, were all from before that. In fact, they were from a, a full year before this German invasion of the Soviet Union. That was June nineteen forty-one, and that's where most of the Jews lived. They were in, so if he, you know, if Hitler never invaded the Soviet Union, he never even would have had access to those people. Now Hitler didn't like the Soviet Union, you know, all the way back in Mein Kampf and everywhere else. I mean, it was central to his ideology that communism, socialism were the enemy and everything. He may have invaded the Soviet Union someday, and gone, and gone after all the Jews when he did.
When did Hitler start going after the Jews?
You mean in terms of, um, in terms of- Like rhetoric? Oh, uh, so, yeah, like, if you take him at his word in Mein Kampf, which is, you know, it's a piece of political propaganda, you know, that he wrote as a sort of a politician in Germany in 1924, and so you have to take it was sort of a grain of salt, but it's also one of the few sources we have, like, and given his audience at the time, he probably didn't have a lot of reason to make this part up, um, is that, you know, he had been from like, small-town Germany, right, and he was from a middle-class family, um, his father was a civil servant, respectable people, and nationalism back then was very much like
a middle-class ideology, and the, the, the middle-class people, nationalists would complain about the workers, and, you know, the proletariat, how they all want to be socialists, and none of them have any national feeling and everything, and Hitler really didn't grow up with any, really even, knowledge of the Jews. He says his father, he never heard him say the word, and, you know, if they had any in the small town that he lived in, like, they were apparently well-assimilated, because he didn't, he didn't know about them. And so then he moves to Vienna when he's a young adult, and there's a lot of Jews in Vienna, and he starts to, you know, he's, he's, he's at the bottom of society now, and he's literally living in shelters, he's, um, hungry all the time, he's like, down with the underclass, after
having grown up in the, in the middle class. And so he's starting to get a look at, uh, what the German people, the German masses, you know, that he's like, sort of, as a, as a, as a child and a young man, has like, worked up this deep sense of like, nationalistic fervor, he's actually getting an up-close look at the underclass in Vienna, and what he sees is not particularly impressive, you know, which is often the case, when, you know, you can, you can have sympathy for and, um, want to lift up, you know, the underclass in any society, but the, the reason you want to do that is because they're often living degraded lives and degraded circumstances. And so he gets an up-close look at this, and he doesn't like what he sees, and it, he says in Mein Kampf that it really caused him like, a moral crisis, you know, and an ideological crisis, where he's like, are
these the German people? Like, really? This is what we're talking about? And then he says, and you know, this is the way he relates it. He says it was actually the key that unlocked everything else for him is that, you know, he would say he realized, we could say he came to believe that yes, the, these German masses, they are in a sorry state right now, but the reason for that is that they're being manipulated by the Jews, by the Jewish press, by the, you know, the, the Jews who own the, the theaters and put out the, you know, the films and whatever else, all of that, they're being manipulated and corrupted by these people. And so for him, it became like, I, I think, you know, he has, he had a lot of the same
explanations and reasons you would hear from any anti Semite then or now, you know, banking and whatever, like all those things were like in there. But I think the thing that gave it emotional valence for him is that his antisemitism was what allowed him to love the German people, you know, like it was like the only way for him that he could get around the revulsion he was feeling and actually being up close with the German underclasses. He, you know, he excused their faults by blaming, by blaming Jews. And so it, his, his sense of love for his people, and I mean, look, Hitler's one of those guys, I, I noticed this when I was reading all the Jim Jones books and stuff, which I think I read all, probably all of, they're, they're not very good, you know?
Some of them are interesting, like they're good reads, but you can't help but, but notice, especially after you've read several of the books, that the authors just cannot help but be like cynical and turn it into a polemic on every page. Like even the thing Jim Jones or Hitler did as a child, they have like negative editorializing to it and everything. And it's like, you know, it, it really kind of, it's, a lot of them are still good books. You know, you read like the, the most recent sort of great Hitler biography by Ian Kershaw is a great book. He's a good historian and excellent writer. And, you know, you have to learn to kind of see through that polemic a little bit and then you have, you know, a good history on your hands.
It's almost like it's an obligation. If you're going to cover a horrific figure, you have to look at things that way.
Yeah, exactly.
And, um, you know, it's a, and so I think that like people who knew Hitler pre, before World War I. And we have like memoirs and interviews with people who did know him pretty, pretty well. They say pretty much unanimously, like, we never heard him mention the Jews back then. And this is the period in Vienna when Hitler says his antisemitism was developing and he was figuring these things out. And what I think was probably going on, like, my read of it, at least up to this point, is that his antisemitism, just like a lot of people in, in Europe at the time, was, it was theoretical and abstract, you know what I mean? Like, the Jews had never, you've got to remember, like, the Russian Revolution, all of the
things that people like Hitler would associate with, with the Jews, like, none of that stuff had happened yet. Like, he might not like them, you know, he might think that, whatever, all the stereotypes that go along with him, but it was just sort of an abstract thing that it wasn't dangerous, right? But then the First World War happens, and, you know, it's, it's really impossible for us today to understand the level of just trauma and devastation that, that war had on, I mean, the European countries that were in, or all the country, countries that were involved. I mean, it was, you're talking about a war where, you know, for, for several Olympics,
Olympic Games afterwards, there were whole sports that, like, France and Germany just didn't participate in anymore because they didn't have the people for it. I mean, it was, you're talking about massive chunks of the young male population being killed out there, right? And you take a guy like Hitler, who volunteered early, like, right away, and he survived the whole four years of the war, and you think about him as just an example of this generation of people who used, who spent, like, their most formative young adult years in the trenches, I mean, in constant terror of doing things that...
I mean, forget about just like the, the, the physical discomfort of living there. I mean, you're in the mud, you're covered with lice and fleas all the time. So is everybody else. You're especially later in the war, you're like living off of starvation rations if you're a German or an Austrian. And you're watching, I mean, you know, Dan, his, Dan Carlin's series on World War I is like probably my favorite piece of audio. Incredible. It's so good. And like, um, you know, one of the things he's so good at, way better than me at, is kind of capturing the scale of events, you know? And so when he talks about like the Battle of the Somme, when the British lost 60,000
guys on the first day, you're like, I don't even know what that, like what that even means. Like it's, it's just so overwhelming, you know? And so you have this generation that spent their formative years in all of these countries under those just circumstances that we really don't have any context for us to relate to, you know? I mean, think about like, you, you, you see these stories of like people sleeping in trenches and over there in the corner is their dead friend who's been sitting there decomposing and being eaten by rats for three or four days because you can't go up top to bury him because you'll get shot. And you can't bury him in the trench, uh, in the dirt under the trench anymore because
there's already bodies just completely wall to wall down there. You've already taken up all the space, right? Just that kind of, I mean, if you think about somebody today, if you walk outside your door on the way to work, your average person today, and there's a dead body on your, on your, you know, steps, the average person today is going to be in therapy for years over that, you know? I mean, that is a traumatic experience, very difficult. And so you have these young men who go through this, uh, who go through this just unbelievable experience. And from Germany eastward after, you know, if you go back and think about what the map of Europe looked like in the year 1900, it didn't, it didn't look anything like it looks now. It was basically like just a few big chunks. You know, you had France,
you had Germany, the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and then you had the Russian Empire. And there were a few like Spain, the Balkans and stuff, little things going on. But really, it was just a few giant empires controlled everything from the Pacific Ocean in East Russia, all the way over to the coast of France, right? And everything east of Germany in 1917, 1918, those governments literally evaporated. They, they went away. And so, you know, you get to the immediate post-war period after these guys have just gone through this unbelievably harrowing experience, you know, their, their lives have been defined by violence for years, you know, at this point. And all of a sudden,
there's just state collapse everywhere from Germany to Siberia. And you literally have, you know, private militias, groups of veterans, communist militias, like they're running cities, they're running the streets, like having running gun battles in the streets of, you know, of Berlin and Munich. And this is, this goes on for a few years, you know, just total social and economic chaos. And so, so you're talking about like the four year war, but then a few more years after that. So you're 18 when you get in in 1914. Now it's 1923 when things kind of start to stabilize and, you know, you've been, you've been at this for like the first nine years of your young adulthood, right? This is the
world that you live in. And it's, it's a, when you try to think of, you know, I talked about like Uday Hussein being brought to watch torture sessions or something. I mean, this is not, this is not exactly that. But it's, it's, it's an experience that like we really have no way to relate to. And if you grow up in that world, especially when, you know, if you look at like what happened in Russia, 1917, the Russian Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, and they won, you know, they actually took over the Russian state and created the Soviet Union, you know, it lasted past the, long past the lives of anybody who had fought in World War I, for the most part.
And so people saw that and they took the lesson, both from World War I itself, but also from the aftermath and the revolutions that happened. The lesson they took is that violence can accomplish our goals, you know? And whatever we do to accomplish those goals, as long as we survive, people accept it eventually. You know, Roosevelt normalized relations with the Soviet Union in 1933 when Stalin was literally still clearing bodies from the millions of people he starved in the Ukrainian Holodomor and in Kazakhstan, another million people. And like, at that time is when, and we knew, we knew what was going on, obviously.
And yet, you know, Roosevelt normalized relations with Stalin and people got over it, just like with Turkey. Turkey does the Armenian genocide and it's condemned at the time, you know? They were on the other side of the war and everything, but a couple of years later, like, look, Turkey's an important strategically placed country, like, in the world and we kind of need them on our side. And so, you know, sorry Armenians, but, you know, get over it. That's, and so people took that lesson, is that violence will accomplish our goals and as long as we accomplish them and survive, people will get over it, you know?
But again, I think this is what's really important about your work, is that you do take into consideration all these aspects, which, again, with Jim Jones, that's fine.
But you, even what you're saying is, it's obviously very relevant to what we're trying to, when we're trying to understand how World War II happened, how did the Nazis rise to power? Like, what, what are we talking about? That's what we're talking about. We're talking about this horrific environment that's not considered. It's not, this doesn't make you a Nazi apologist.
Yeah, and it's important to note, too, that
You know, it's not like Hitler was going and giving big speeches at City Square in Berlin, going on and on and on about how we're gonna kill the Jews. And the German people said, right on, like, let's go do it. That was, like, the speeches that are out there where he is talking about the Jewish question, like, almost all of those are, like, internal Nazi party, like, rally speeches, you know? They're not him. He had to be careful about that. Like, in 1938, which is pretty far down the line, when Kristallnacht happened, it was kind of a nationwide pogrom against the Jews in Germany that was launched by, primarily by Goebbels, the propaganda minister. But there was outrage in the German cities. People in Berlin, a lot of the places, were outraged by what was going on.
Hitler had to actually get on the phone with Goebbels and say, cut this shit out. Like, this is not, this is not good. Like, not because he loves the Jews all of a sudden, obviously, but because this is bad propaganda. People are not going for this. And that was the year before the war started, you know? And so, these are just nuances that, you know, that become pretty obvious when you just remind yourself that you're just talking about people. They're just people. I mean, the Germans were a sophisticated, advanced, political and cultural, you know, place. They didn't suddenly turn into demons for 12 years and then go back to being the nice, normal Germans that we know now. Like, these things happen the same way every other historical event, you know, ends up
happening, which, which very often is not, you know, what you find is it's not, it's not, so much is not really, like, the, the result of a, of a plot or a plan or anything. People are often just reacting. And when you, you know, you see this with the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, you see it with the Israel-Palestine situation, right? In those two situations, like, the means that...
The Bolsheviks and the Zionists used to establish themselves and create their state and like sort of get their foothold, the means that they used were so violent and so over the top that it came to define in a lot of ways the subsequent history of those countries, you know, if you look at like Stalin's purges in the 30s and a lot of the stuff that was going on during his reign, it was really that like, they had pissed so many people off and done so many terrible things to take power and that was really like, that was Lenin's philosophy is again, just, you know, take it up to 11 and go and as long as we win, people get over it. But all of a sudden, when you've killed all these people and done all these terrible things, you look around the country and you see a
lot of dangerous people who probably don't like you, even if they're not saying it right now, and you start to get a little paranoid and it becomes kind of the definition of how your state works, you know, I mean, Israel, one of the things I really tried to get into in the early part of that series especially, is that the Zionist project, and the more I think about it, this is kind of a theme in so many of my podcasts, you know, it started out as an idealistic venture, you know, it started out as something, you know, you have these people who are in really like kind of a unique situation, maybe the, like the Roma, the Gypsies are like the only other group of people you can really point to of like a widespread transnational group of people who do have a sort of cohesive
identity, but they don't have a homeland, they're just living in other people's countries. And, you know, I think the, the lesson from World War II and much of the 20th century probably, is kind of, it's kind of the opposite of the one that people have taken from World War II, which is nationalism is bad and it's dangerous and bad things happen when people start to think that way. I think the, the real lesson from World War II is, or from, you know, what happened to the Jews specifically, is everybody needs a country, you know, you need to have a country that is looking after you and looking after your interests, because living in other people's countries, it can go well for a long time, but, you know, it's not just the Jews, like minorities in general, like. You know, bad things happen over time.
You know, minorities are just easily scapegoated. You know, they're easily made the sort of the outlet for the frustration and resentment of people that are, you know, upset over unrelated things. And it's an uncomfortable position to be in.
There's also general suspicion when cultures move into areas and don't assimilate and then try to bring with them the rules of their land, which we, you know, we're particularly scared of in America. We hear the concept of Sharia law. You know, like, people will start to freak out. Well, there's people that move here that want that.
You know, and they don't want to assimilate and they don't want to be a part of this homogeneous culture. They want to change it. So that scares people, too.
And America is very, you know, this is one of the, you know, America's a very unique country in a lot of different ways, but one of the ways that we're so different from the European countries. I mean, you can, I guess you could point to a lot of things, you know, the, the lack of a feudal history that we were emerging out of. We kind of just started out as a liberal republic. Um, you know, the fact that we, we have like the frontier experience, which is just, you know, no Europeans can really relate to what was going on out there. I don't, you seen that new Netflix series, American Primeval?
It's amazing.
Dude.
I had Peter Berg on here this day.
That's right, that's right, yeah. And all I kept thinking as I'm watching this is like, man, this is not like the US Army that's out there like on the frontier confronting these situations. These are like the regular people who like went out there and lived and this is an experience. So you have those things, but...
It's very accurate, too.
Yeah, it was fascinating. I loved they had Jim Bridger in there. That was, I've always been a fan of his, so.
Yeah, that was amazing, too. And, and how about the Mormon guy?
Dude, people like...
Brigham Young.
Yeah, people don't realize today unless they really know the history. The Mormons were off the hook.
They were gangsters. They were fucking dangerous foes. You couldn't fuck with the Mormons back then.
Well, they were, they were...
They'd been fucked with.
They were...
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Ultra cohesive and they were serious about what they were doing. These people were not playing games. This was not like a thing to do for fun. They were dead serious about it.
And they had already been ran out of several states.
Yeah. So I was going to say like the thing that's so different about America from a lot of the European countries, and when we talk about nationalism, like this is something that really, you know, that you have to keep in mind all the time is that America, like we've been renegotiating our identity like generation by generation, ever since America started, like from the very beginning. I mean, if you go back to the American Revolution and the, you know, the founding of the country in the late 1700s, before those guys were dead, a bunch of the major cities and eventually all the major cities, like very quickly by the middle of the 1800s, they're not majority Anglo anymore. It's not English people. It's a lot of Irish, a lot of Germans, still a lot of Anglos, but you know, you have to,
and the fact that different religion, you know, you've got Irish Catholics coming into this Protestant, very Protestant at the time, country. A lot of the Germans that were coming in were German Jews who, you know, were coming along. You think of people like, like Aster, you know, the famous Aster family. That was a German Jewish family that, that was in New York. And so that, that happens and you're talking about, again, an influx large enough to, to really swamp the Anglo population in many of the big cities. Well, not another, you know, a generation later, barely 40 years after the, you know, the, the Irish migration really hits its peak, huge influx from Southern Italy, from Eastern Europe, a lot of Ashkenazi Jews coming in.
And pretty soon, it's not just, you know, Anglos, well assimilated, you know, Germans who are well assimilated to the Anglo culture and then the Irish, which is what it was before. Now you have just as many Jews, just as many Italian Catholics who are Catholics like the Irish, but they're still not quite, you know, they're still different communities. And we've just had to do that all the time. Even in 1924, when we kind of shut down immigration after the first world war, you know, we, we basically shut down immigration from 1924 to 1965. There were some, but very limited and very selective. But as soon as that happened, soon as the immigration pipeline was kind of from Europe was cut off, that's when the great migration of African Americans out of the South starts.
And in about 40 years, you get six, seven million African Americans coming mostly from the country south into places like Detroit and all the places that you know, you kind of associate with large African American communities now. It's kind of crazy to think about, but if you go back to like the First World War, you know Detroit's African American population was like 2%, you know, and that was Philadelphia, Baltimore, I think Baltimore had like eight or nine, but like that was how it was, pretty much all African Americans still lived down in the South. And so over the course of about 40 years, they all move out to all the big cities and you have to still, like they're from America, obviously, but like you've got to renegotiate like your, your, your identity with these people and figure out like a new political
compromise in these cities in the various places. And when the great migration of African Americans starts to peter out, 1965, we reopen the floodgates of immigration with the Hart-Seller Act, and that's the world we're kind of in now. And so that's, and look, you know, especially back in the day, in the first like two, two big waves of migration into the US, the Ellis Island, you know, migrations, like those were, like, America would not be here today if we didn't do that. Like there were not enough out of work English people, you know, over in England to come over here and take over this whole continent. It was just never going to happen. The only way it was ever going to happen is if we were radically open and tolerant to
people, you know, because you go back to, there's a, there's a naturalization law, I think it was the first naturalization law on the books in the United States, 1798. And you see a lot of like racialist types point to this as if it kind of backs up their, you know, their idea of what, you know, of what America's history is and what it should be, because it says, all person, all, all white persons of good care, all free white persons of good moral character, if you come to the United States can become a citizen. And people see that and they focus on the white part and they say, see, you know, they wanted America to be a white country or whatever. That is totally the wrong way to understand that law.
I mean, if you were to go to like France, or Germany, or England, or whatever, for them to pass a law that said, anybody in the continent, any European, you know, you guys can come over here and we will make you a citizen with the full legal rights and privileges of our richest citizen. You know, you will be an equal citizen. You can just come here. Radically open. I mean, really like a revolutionarily open kind of law, especially back then. You know, you gotta remember, like, the Europeans still had another 150 years of just wantonly slaughtering each other, you know, left, still ahead of them.
You know, you had like, today, I mean, if you have like a person on, you know, who lives to the left of you and they're the Thatcher family and they're vaguely, you know, English, and then you have the McCoy family on the other side and they're vaguely Irish. They're just kind of white people to you now. Like, it all kind of seems like, what's the difference? Dude, go tell an English and Irish person that they were the same thing back in 1798. Like, they didn't, they did not identify with each other at all. There was a lot of bad blood, a lot of hostility. And so to say, all of you people with all your differences, you come over here and get with the program and you can be one of us, just radically open. And again, we had to do that, or else the country would not be here.
Or it would be a, you know, an Anglo country sort of clustered around the 13 colonies and maybe moved in a bit. But, you know, we wouldn't have been able to, to hold this whole continent against the French and the Spanish and everybody else who was around unless we were that open. And so that was like a prerequisite for America becoming what it, what it is today. In Europe, it's very different, man. Like, there's, like, there's such thing as a Polish person. And Poland is the country where Polish people live. You know what I mean? And like, over here in America, like, we have, we have a much more fluid identity. We're constantly having to renegotiate it. And...
It's, you know, we think it's difficult today, you know, to integrate the immigrants that we've got and to try to renegotiate that. It's always been difficult. And to try to transfer our way of thinking about social identity, our way of thinking about, you know, what a nation is to the European countries, it just, it does not apply. It really doesn't work.
It's also, there's a thing when an all-white country wants to stay all-white, where people get very nervous of. If you have, you know, let's say China. Like, China is Chinese people. We all agree that it's like, it's filled primarily with Chinese people. There's people that live there from all walks of life, all over the world, but it's mostly Chinese people. If China had decided that they wanted to remain Chinese and stay Chinese, and that being Chinese is very important to what China is, no one would have a problem with that.
When a country like Poland does it, you're like, oh, those white people. They want to keep everybody out. They want it to be all-white.
Yeah, and...
Because we're, you know, that's post-World War II. That's post-Aryan race talk. That's post-Nazi stuff. That's what people are legitimately freaked out about. That's the most recent stain in our history, where we look back and say, wow, that was close. Evil almost won that one.
I think it also has to do with, you know, the interesting thing is, you know, Poland, Hungary, a lot of these Eastern Bloc countries, even though communism was extremely hostile to national identity, you know, and really, I mean, it took a lot of brutal measures to try to stamp it out because they wanted everybody to be a kind of new Soviet citizen, you know?
Those countries that are over there now are much more comfortable sort of saying, "Yeah, Hungary is a country where Hungarians live, and this is a Christian country, and we want to keep it that way." Whereas, all the countries that were on the other side of the Iron Curtain, under the influence of the United States, kind of had our traditional way of looking at these things kind of imposed on them, you know what I mean? Or they absorbed it through osmosis, I don't know if it was like a program or something, but they, you know, we were the dominant sort of cultural and military force and everything else, political force. And so they kind of, you know, absorbed the American openness and tolerance of all comers that we kind of had to have, as I said, in places where it really makes no sense at all.
I mean, you have, you could at least say, like, with the British Empire or something, you know, they colonized all these places, and so now, like, those people in the former colonies, like, they're moving to Britain, and, you know, you could, like, I don't, I don't, I don't really think of it this way, you could look at it that way, though. If you look at a place like Ireland, Ireland, they didn't colonize anybody, you know, Ireland was a colony, they suffered terribly under the British for a long time. And yet, it's very interesting that, you know, they were willing to be brutalized, be occupied, be starved, you know, all of these things for centuries, to defend their little slice of the world, where their people could work out their destiny among themselves,
you know, endured so much for that. And then, you know, you get up to about the 1960s, 1970s, and, you know, you can look it up, this is like a, this isn't like a conspiracy theory, it's the first things that come up on Google if you look it up, that, you know, Ireland is on track to be minority Irish by like 2070 or something like that. It's like, I don't like that. You know, people think of diversity as, like, every place on the planet should look like Jackson Heights in New York, and like, then we're diverse, but that's, to me, that's not diversity at all. Diversity is, I go to Ireland and it's Irish, I go to China and it's Chinese, I go, you know what I mean? Right.
And turning it all into sort of a homogenized, like, mixed, you know, soup, I think when you, when you put it in those terms, nobody really wants that. And, you know, people... But people get very uncomfortable, you know? And in America, with immigration specifically, it's really hard to like, you know, the fact that it's not like we're a Christian country in the sense of it being worked into our political culture so much or anything anymore, but still like the values that most people, even atheists and everybody else kind of that inform their moral outlook are derived from that legacy of Christianity, you know? And it could be very hard for somebody who is working from that moral base to come up
with a reason that, I mean, look, imagine you're in a room and you're sitting at a table and across from the table is a man, his wife, and their two kids, and they're from some poor part of the world and they want to come, you know, they want to be a part of your country. You're not going to be able to come up with a reason that justifies keeping them out. I mean, the only one that you could come up with is that when you open the door to that room, there's 65 million people standing in line outside and you can't, you know, you can't do that. But like, on an individual level, like, people really have a lot of trouble, and I think this is a credit to Americans in a lot of ways, even if it, if it causes us a lot of
confusion, that, you know, it is hard for us to, to turn people away like that, you know? And, um, yeah, it's, I think, to go back to like what you were originally talking about, I think the World War II story is a huge part of that, you know? It's a huge part of why people, I think that some of the lessons we drew from that war were kind of not the, maybe not the right ones to take, and that they have led us to the point where these, you know, a culture like Ireland, who was not involved in the Second World War, never colonized anybody, feels like they don't have the moral right to say, this is a country for the Irish, this is a little island where the Irish people get to live together and work out our destiny.
Well, here's the question, is it coordinated immigration? Are they going there because there's job opportunities? Are they going there for a better way of life? Are they being told to go there? Like, what, what's causing the mass immigration to Ireland?
It depends on the country. I mean, it's like, uh...
But like to Ireland in specific?
Yeah, Ireland, there's a lot of like Polish folks in Ireland, people from Eastern Europe who go there for work, you know? That's, that's the, the, the primary like source of migrants, but there's a lot of, um, you know, there are a lot of third world migrants or global south migrants there now, but a lot of Eastern Europeans coming there for work. Yeah, it kind of varies from country to country.
It's interesting because I do agree that it's cool that you go to places and they're uniquely like, I love Scotland. You go to Scotland, it's uniquely Scottish. You know, you, you go to places, you, you get to take part in their way of life, like to see the world in, through their culture and the way they view things. It's interesting. But I also love the melting pot of America. I, I love it. And I come from immigrants. My grandparents came here during the early parts of the 1900s. And so I'm thankful that they were courageous enough, or their parents were courageous enough to get on a fucking boat before YouTube, no idea what was going on over here. It was just promises and, and hopes and try to carve
out a life. And that's where I came from. So it would be insanely hypocritical of me to deny someone who came from another country, an opportunity to partake in this place. But I also think that there's, it's coordinated. And I think that, um, they're, they're doing it in America for a lot of bizarre reasons that you could attribute to trying to stack states and trying to overwhelm, um, democratic voter registration in swing states and allow people to vote and give them a pathway to citizenship and allow them to vote and, you
know, get them on the dole, get them on, whether it's social security, we've talked about this before, where people were encouraged to say that they had bad backs or headaches so that they could be permanently disabled on social, social security and just, then you have a customer, you have a client, and then that, that client is gonna, you're gonna call upon them to vote for you. And if you only need 10,000 votes here or 20,000 votes there, and they're objectively shipping in 10 times that much to some of these swing states, you gotta wonder, like, this is not just, this is kind of taking it Advantage of the charitable aspect of Americans, how we view people wanting to come here for opportunity, which most of them are just doing that. Most of them are people that unfortunately were born in a place with no possibilities
and a lot of crime and a lot of danger and they have a family and they want to do better and they came here and I love it. I love that they do that. I love that they make it. I love that this is a place for that.
But that can be taken advantage of. That can be taken advantage of in order to control the political parties, in order to tighten down on the laws, tighten down on the surveillance state, get everybody to use an app, put everybody on central bank digital currency because it's more stable, have a social credit score system to make sure that everything goes well. And then the next thing you know, everyone's self-centered. Everyone is Twitter before Elon bought it. It's just, it's a dangerous place for freedom. And that's ultimately what America has to say that we stand for above all. This is the place. If there's a place on earth, well, you can be free. This has got to be that place. This is what we came here for, or it's where the founding fathers, this is what they were trying to do.
With all the flaws and all the terrible things that took place here, yes, absolutely. Land acknowledgements, hallelujah. But at the end of the day, this place is supposed to represent freedom. But freedom can be manipulated. And you can, you can use your, your empathy. And they, they can use it against you. And unfortunately, you have to be aware that there's nefarious forces that are involved in all areas of society where enormous amounts of money can be transferred. And that's how you have to look at it. This is ultimately about money. And whether it's about money, bringing in people for cheap labor, which I think is fucked. Um, because I think if you're in America, if you're here, if you're here, we're going to call you an American.
You should get paid what a fucking American gets paid. You should get health coverage. You should get everything. Shouldn't be able to like get people just because they walked over here and you get them to work for slave wages. That's ridiculous. That's insane. That's anti-American. You know, but then there's giant-
I'll hold you up there. It might be like anti-American ideals, but that's the history of America right there.
It is.
That's a whole history of America.
It's true. It's true. And that's the dirty little secret of construction sites.
Yeah. You go back to like, um, you know, the 1850s, 1860s and, you know, Irish dock workers on the east coast, immigrant Irish dock workers, their life expectancy was 14 years from the time they stepped off the boat. And these weren't 60-year-olds coming over and working on the docks. You're talking about young guys who came over to do that 14 years, you know, and-
Horrible, brutal jobs.
With, I mean, completely expendable, uh, human resource.
We all remember the photos of people working on the Empire State Building, walking on the beams.
Just no safety, nothing, leather shoes.
Fuck off.
I'm a, like, there's a lot of, you know, they have those, um, those political tests online, kind of tells you like what you are if you answer some questions.
What are you?
I always end up right in the center, but I always have to tell people that I'm the last, the farthest thing from a centrist. It's just, I have a whole bunch of views that are very far right and a whole bunch that are very far left, according to this thing at least. And one of my far-left views, before this World War II series, um, got kind of pushed to the front of the queue because of the Tucker controversy. I was working through a series on the history of the American labor movement. And, you know, people today think of teachers' unions and corrupt big labor organizations and so forth, but I'm a, I mean, to me, the, the, the American labor movement, the first part of it, it's, it's, it's America's best story, in my opinion. I mean, cause, you know, you go back to the 1880s, 1890s,
or I did one on the Battle of Blair Mountain, uh, in West Virginia, when 10, 11,000 coal miners who were just being brutally exploited, uh, by the, by the mining companies and their, and their mercenaries. I mean, they took up arms and they were ready to, like, they were marching on, um, uh, the county next door to go, uh, free some of their compatriots and to hang the sheriff. I mean, and they only stopped because the US Army finally showed up. This is right after World War I. The US Army showed up and- A lot of the guys who the miners were World War I veterans and they, you know, they weren't going to fight the army like they were sort of, not even because they were afraid or discouraged by their prospects, they just weren't gonna, you know, their problem was with like this
sheriff and the mine, you know, the mine operators and stuff, not with the army, they didn't want to fight them. And so that diffused it. But, you know, you go back to those early, to those early decades of the labor struggles. And I mean, people really have to like, it was not some aberration when striking workers, you know, got a bunch of people killed, you know, like where a bunch of Pinkertons or other mercenaries or even government forces. I mean, you go to like, you know, a mine, a coal mine in Colorado back in, I think it was 1912. And the National Guard of the state, which was completely, there was not a lot of people in Colorado at the time. So the National Guard and the state government
was completely run by the mining operators because they were the most important thing in the state. And the National Guard took up positions with machine guns up on a hill overlooking the striking miners encampment. And the miners were mostly all gone because, you know, there were authorities looking for them and stuff. It was a lot of their wives and children and so forth. And they just opened up on these people and killed like 22 women and children. And like, that kind of thing was, like, that's an extreme kind of example, I guess, you know, of the brutality, but smaller versions of that, that's how it was. Like, people didn't believe back then, or a lot of people, the capitalists didn't believe back then that you had a right to strike. Today, we're like, yeah, if you don't want to go to work, you don't have to go to work. And if you all do it together, that's a strike. Like, of course, people can do, that's not how they thought about
it back then. You know, they thought you were, they thought of a strike as like a form of sabotage. And so the authorities would be brought in, mercenaries would be brought in to like, deal with these people. And you're talking about like, people think of like socialist today or something, when like, right wing people, I really try to get this across to them that like, today, you think like, a left wing socialist or whatever, and you think like a blue haired college student who's screeching to you about this, that or the other. Back then, you know, you're talking about guys who, and women too, actually, in certain cases, but guys who spent 12 to 14 hours a day turning a wrench or swinging a hammer. And then after that, Then they go to their meetings, you know, and they get home to their family and they
sleep for four or five hours that, you know, in a, in a basement, two-room apartment that's got mold growing on the walls and they have a bowl of cabbage soup with their four kids that live in this horrible place. And then they go back and do it again the next day. These were like, working people who were, I firmly believe, if it was not for their sacrifices, we would all still be working under those kind of conditions. Like the, you know, the, the capitalist class, and I, you know, I'm not trying to sound like some kind of a, you know, Marxist or something. I'm just, you know, that's what they were. Like, they were not going to compromise with the people unless they were forced to. And those people, you know, they went out on the picket lines, they,
they fought, they died, you know? In fact, you know, if you go up to a little bit later in the early 1900s, you know, probably the thing labor unions are most famous for these days is like, the corruption, the mob involvement and so forth, labor racketeering. And that kind of got started in the early part of the 1900s, but the interesting thing about it is, the, the way it started was, you know, the owners of, of the businesses, they were hiring like, real thugs. I mean, the Pinkerton's, you know, the, the different groups that they would hire, they would get people just out of prison, you know, violent people, war veterans, and they would send them against, against the striking workers, have them spy
on the workers, have them kidnap like guys who were trying to kind of get people into the union and so forth and get rid of them, you know, this kind of thing was happening. And so the unions started to say, well, we need some muscle too. And so, who's the muscle? Well, if you got a bunch of like, Irish and Italian guys working on this dock, the toughest guys they know are the gangsters. And so, they'd be like, you know, we'll pay you, we need you to defend us from, you know, make sure that we don't get our teeth kicked in by the Pinkerton's. And so, they would do that, and, you know, they ran into the trouble that, you know, that always presents itself in situations like that, is the, you know, the people you hire to come in as muscle, start to look around and be like, why do we have to take orders from these people again? Right.
Can't we run the show? And that kind of started to happen. You started to get these, you know, the unions that were racketeering organizations. And so, like, you know, these are things about...
You know, history is extremely messy, you know. We have to always remember, like, people are often making, like, the crucial decisions that, like, turn history this way or that, you know, zig instead of zag, are often made under crisis conditions by people who, sometimes, they're great men and women, but a lot of times, you know, they're the person who happens to be there at the time, and they're doing their best, and they're taking advice from the people that are around them, and they're, you know, they're making the decision that's gonna determine if we head off in this direction or that direction, you know. And, um, you can't, you know, there was one time, right? Like, um, this was probably, I can tell the story because it's probably, it's back in
the mid 2000s when I was still in the military. I was over at my friend's house. He was at the hospital picking up our other friend who had a bicycle accident and hurt his head, and he was picking him up and coming back with him, and so I was gonna meet him there so we could hang out and, like, welcome him back from the hospital and so forth. So, I get there and I call him up, cause he's not home, and I say, you know, "Richard, I'm here, like, what's up?" He's like, "Ah, the doctors are being slow, whatever, so, um, gonna be a little while." Well, I got a big 20-ounce venti, you know, Starbucks black coffee, and so I pound that thing in my car as I'm reading a book, and pretty soon I start to feel that pressure in my gut, like, I gotta take a shit, like, I have to take a shit. It's like that caffeine shit, right? And, um, I call up my friend, like, "Where are you?
Like, this, I need, I need you to get home now." He's like, "The doctors haven't even brought him to me, I don't know what's going on." He's like, "Um, go see if a door or a window's open or something." And so, now I'm getting up and moving, and so that's making things worse, you know? And I check all the doors, I check all the windows, nothing's open. And I'm in the backyard, and I'm like this close to just digging a hole in this flower garden and taking a shit in this flower garden, but then all of a sudden I look up and there's a balcony from the master bedroom with no stairs down to the backyard, but it's a balcony, you know, there's no access to it, and I'm like, "I'll bet they didn't lock that door." And so, I kick my shoes off so that I can, you know, they were loose on my feet, so that I can more easily, like, climb up the pole and pull myself up there. And so, I'm just in my socks.
And at this point, just like the effort of, the effort of- You know, the strain of like pulling myself up to this thing like it's like
You're ready to go.
It's coming right now and that's just, that's what's happening. And so I run into the, I run up, the door's open, thank God, and I run in and run into the master bathroom. And for some reason, but again, like this is a crisis moment, you know, I'm not like taking everything into account as I'm making decisions here. I get in there and as I run in there, I see that there's no toilet paper. Now, the obvious answer there is cross that bridge when you get to it.
You gotta go.
But at the time I was like, oh no. And so I ran out of the bathroom. I'm up on the second floor. I run over to the stairs and they have one of those stairs that, um, you know, kind of goes down halfway and there's a little platform and then right angle goes down the other way. And I have to go so bad that I just jumped down the first flight of stairs. And then I jumped down the second flight of stairs. My socks hit the tile floor, slide out, I fall on my back, bang my head and shit everywhere. I mean, it's like going up my back. It's horrible. And I, I
Oh my God.
My head is like ringing and I'm ashamed to say that like I laid there in my shit for like at least 10 seconds. Because I was sitting there thinking of like, all of the opportunities that I had to like, you know, change course and avoid this, that are so obvious in retrospect and you just sit there and think about like, when you're in that situation, like you don't even stop there. You think back on like your entire life and you're like, how did I, how did I get here? It's like that record scratch. Like you're probably wondering how I got into this situation. Like that's where I was. Uh, this doesn't have anything to do with like the overall point I was making, but the, um, you know, the really shameful part of it is, uh, I cleaned it all up and, um, you could still kind of like in the grout and the tiles, like I couldn't get it all out. So it was still kind of smelled shitty.
And when my friend got home, I didn't tell him this for years afterwards. When he got home, uh, I blamed it on his dog.
And he yelled at the dog that got by behalf. Yeah, I told him years later, but, um, so yeah, like, you know,
How old were you at the time?
Too old. To be doing shit like that.
I mean, but that's like, you know, that's a funny way of putting it, but like, that's history a lot of the times, you know, you're making decisions on the fly that you're not necessarily having time to reflect upon and, you know, you get into a situation where you're like, how did we end up here?
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Yeah. I'm glad you brought up the labor movement because I feel exactly the same way. And knowing the history of the way people striking were treated and what could have happened had they not been successful.
You know, people want, you know, you think about unions, you think about corruption and waste and fraud. That's unfortunately, that that happens a lot, and greed. People making too much money. I mean, they blamed a lot of the unions on the collapse of the American automobile industry in Detroit. You know, that they were, they wanted too much money, they were too greedy, and they sent everything overseas. And then, you know, the whole Flint, Michigan thing, Michael Moore's documentary, Roger and Me. It's, it's one of those things where unfortunately, we look at negative aspects of it and we don't have a, a full perspective of where we would be without that.
When the powerful, and this is what everyone's afraid of on the left, and rightly so. When the powerful have so much, and their resources are so vast, that they can control everyone else. And that they could stifle your ability to earn an income, they could siphon off all your money, they don't have to pay taxes, they fuck everybody over, and they just want more and more and more, and it's a, it's a blight on society. And I think there's like, I think we both agree, there's like some sort of a comfortable middle ground. I don't, I don't believe socialism is a way to run a country. But I do think there's socialism aspects of our country that we can't ignore, powerful and important. One of them that I bring up all the time is the fire department. Fire department is a totally socialist idea. Like, you don't have to pay them money.
Like, if you were, if you live in a house that's worth a million dollars, if you live in a house that's worth two hundred thousand dollars, they, they put out fires. If you can afford it, or if you can't afford it, they put out fires. We all agree, you gotta put out fires. We all kind of agree, you should have a good education. But obviously, states are different in their resources, and local districts are different in their resources, and you see very nice neighborhoods that have really good schools, and you see terrible neighborhoods that have terrible schools. So we don't really completely treat that the way we should. That should be a socialist thing that everybody should get along with. That everybody should say, "Yeah, that's good for everybody." Another thing is, and this is very controversial, but socialized medicine.
The idea that you should go broke because you broke your leg is fucking crazy. If we're a community of people that are supposed to be supporting each other and helping each other, the best thing we could do is help one of the members of the community become... Active and productive and contribute to society. That makes everybody better and greater and we should be willing to contribute to that. But I want my orthopedic surgeon driving a fucking Mercedes. I want that guy to be a bad motherfucker who gets compensated for it because that's the type of guy who becomes an artist. That's the type of guy who works on the Lakers knees. That's the type of guy you want, like, oh, that's Mike. He does the Cowboys whenever they have shoulder injuries. That's the guy.
You want that guy. You want the guy with the nice watch. You want the guy who lives in a big house because that guy is fucking dialed in and focused. You don't want a guy who doesn't feel like he's being compensated enough. You don't want a guy who feels like he's expendable. You don't want, you want a guy who feels like he's a fucking rock star. That's what you want if you want your mom getting brain surgery, right? You want a rock star surgeon doing that. So I believe in competition and I believe in merit and I think it's very, very important for our society as a whole. But I also think there should be a much larger safety net for individuals so they don't go broke if they have a fucking knee surgery. Or if you break your back, you shouldn't have to fucking go bankrupt. That's kind of crazy. And I think labor unions are very important.
It's very important to not allow a corporation that is entirely designed to make as much money as possible dictate how much money its workers get. Because the poorer you are, the more desperate you are, the less likely you are to do anything about it. Right? When you get comfortable and you want to be more comfortable and you say, this isn't fair. We could sit out for six months. That's when you become dangerous.
Right? When you have the ability to strike. When the Writers Union in Los Angeles strikes, like, that's a fucking real problem, man. That's a real problem. That shuts everything down. And they get recognized because of that and then they get hopefully fairly compensated because of that. It's an important part of our society.
Yeah, there's also, I think due to our unique history, you know, of kind of having demographic turnover, generation after generation, more or less since the beginning that, you know, if you look at the development of things like the public school system, for example, or a lot of the social welfare programs and other social programs, a lot of those things emerged. Because there was this, you know, all of a sudden, a huge influx of Irish in the 1830s and 40s, and their, you know, their parents are both working 14-hour days, and the kids are just running the streets and everything else, and there's no public schools. They didn't have any at first, you know. And so it was like a response to this. They're like, we gotta do something about this. We gotta take these like little hellions and turn them into Americans somehow, you know. And so you had philanthropists. It was all private
at first, and then like they were transferred to the city governments and stuff. But they were responses to like demographic crises, right? Due, that they were emerging due to like the migrant influxes. And I think that that being the case, it's kind of given Americans like a, because you know, the native population who was already there when that happened, they, a lot of, they didn't like it. They're like, wait, so these people came over here, and now I have to pay to like, set up a school system for their kids? Like, what? It created like that sort of resistance to, you know, the question of, of what we owe each other as members of a society, you know? Like, the idea of like, I feel like we've
kind of take, like, America's the best country in the world. If you are smart, motivated, you got a great idea, and you want to make something of it, go to America. Like, America's the place for you. Throughout most of our history, if you were just like, a person who, you know, you could turn a wrench, or swing a hammer, or something, America was not built for you. You know, it was built to create opportunities and push competition for people to compete for the top of the mountain. But the people at the bottom, like, throughout a lot of our history, were just kind of forgotten. You know, the, the real question is, in a country that is so, it is so geared toward competition at the top, whether that ever would have changed without a real push, you know? And, I mean, one of the other things, too, is like, when people think about
You go back to like in Europe where they were really worried about communism. We were never really justifiably too worried about it in terms of having a revolution here or anything like that was never really a danger. But if you go over to like, especially after the Soviet Union came around from basically Germany eastward, you know, communism, like it was a very real possibility, like in the 1920s, that the German Communist Party, which was the largest political party in Germany and was taking its marching orders directly from Moscow, that they were gonna win and they were gonna take over and you were now gonna be like, what's going on over in Russia and Ukraine? Like that was, that was a real thing that could have happened to them, you know?
And the, when, when people hear that, they think that, you know, again, they try to put it in the context of like a modern left wing person or something like that. But it's like, when people are working under these conditions and the socialists, the communists are like literally the only political movement that's even vying for their support. Nobody else was even really even courting them or asking for it, you know? And, and when you add to that, like this whole idea of like the working class, like this isn't something that has existed forever. Like this was something that was emerging in different times in different places, but like really in that like most like in some developed countries, you started to see it in like the 18th century, but it's like a 19th century phenomenon where all of a sudden,
so you think you go back to feudal times and you've got the aristocracy, you've got the church and you've got the peasantry. And then you have like another group of people who kind of serves a unique function, but a, but kind of a uniform function across Europe in, in the Jews. You know, they would very often be like, they played a very kind of critical role in the feudal, in feudal Europe, you know, because they were the only ones who had a, a network that kind of stretched across the whole place. And so a lot of times like the, the rulers would have Jews working for them who, you know, they were basically like your, your diplomatic channels, kind of, you need to like talk to people over there, or if you needed to raise money for something, they had large capital networks that could help you raise money for it, things like that.
But they weren't, you know, they weren't serfs or peasants, they weren't the aristocracy, they weren't the church, obviously, they were kind of their separate thing. And most, most of the time, they were, they were allowed to sort of abide by their own laws, like run their own little, little societies like how they wanted, you know? But this was at a time when It was just taken for granted that different, uh, different classes of people had different privileges and different rights, you know, it was just, no, everybody took that for granted. It wasn't even something that was imposed. A peasant or a serf would have believed that as much as the king did. Um, it was only when you start to get, uh, up into the industrial revolution that all of a sudden you start to see these cities just teeming with people
who have no land, you know, they don't have any means of like immediate self-sufficiency. What they have is their back and their shoulders and their hands and, you know, they trade that for the means to survive. And, you know, this happened very rapidly in a lot of countries so that, you know, you have this whole new kind of, uh, a politically awakening demographic, you know, cause that's sort of like kind of the key to it is at first, you know, they, it took some time for them to sort of have a political awakening where they recognize that, wait, I'm not just a worker, I'm a member of the working class and we have, you know, whatever our differences, the working class has common interests that are in opposition to the interests of these other classes that we're going to start to, you know, organize
and act politically, uh, to extend those interests and to achieve them. Um, that was something that was very new. And so people were kind of figuring out again on the fly, like how to deal with this, like what, uh, you know, the idea that just regular poor people, uh, who, you know, that they, that they should have any say in like how the state is run, how the economy is working. It was just completely foreign idea, like everywhere on the planet, basically until, you know, 200 years ago or so.
Which is pretty bizarre.
That we've had to adjust to that so quickly, you know, that so many changes so rapidly, changes in transmit, uh, the ability to move people transit, the ability to take people from Europe quickly, relatively to America, trains.
Machines, the Industrial Revolution, all this happening, cities emerging, like enormous populations, and then the squalor in which those people are living in, which is, I mean, that's really the dirty secret of the beginnings of all these cities, is these people were shitting in outhouses. Public ones on the street, everybody lived in squalor, rats, disease, horrible nutrition, in the winter you don't get any fresh vegetables, there's nothing there to get. Everyone's malnourished, everyone's living terribly, and everyone's terrified that they won't have enough money to put food on the table. And they're all under the oppressive thumb of whoever has the most money who could provide them with jobs.
Yeah, and, you know, it was a world where, you know, the husband breaks his back, you know, you better hope that you're a member in good standing of the nearby parish church, because there's nothing else for you. Like, there's no, I mean, there might be some charity or something that, you know, some rich lady set up or whatever, but like, that was not going to save everybody, I mean, there was nothing.
It's a scary thought, when you think about the history of the human race, about people generally had sort of specific roles in society that you could gravitate towards, and that would be your trade, and that would be your way to, you know, integrate with society, you were a blacksmith, you were, you know, you did this, you did that, everybody found a thing, did the thing, and it all sort of cohesively worked. And then all of a sudden, you have jobs, then there's a bunch of people waiting in line, and soup kitchens, and then, you know, you have this oppressive factory environment, where first of all, everything's coal-powered, so you're breathing, I mean, they do a great job in Peaky Blinders of highlighting that, like, the streets are gray, everything's
a dull, dark gray, so everybody's getting polluted, everyone's sick, period, you're sick because there's shit in the streets, everyone's riding horses, the horse is shit everywhere, there's shit everywhere, your whole existence is hell.
And then you have mass, massive organized crime, violent, horrific, gangs of New York style, organized crime, all throughout your city, violence everywhere.
Yeah, the history of organized crime is actually like for people who really want to understand America in the late 19th and throughout the 20th century, like, reading a few books on the history of organized crime is a good window into that. It's gonna give you a perspective like from the bottom up, rather than sort of from the top down, you know? Yeah. So when you read history, I mean, and the further back you go, the more true this is, and it's something you really have to stay humble about. You know, you consider the fact that like today, like things that are happening today, right, we can't seem to agree on things that are just extensively documented and there's like in newspapers and video, whatever else. We can't agree about what's going on, or what, you know, the president's motivations are, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you go back further
in history, and you're dealing with like scraps of information a lot of times. And the further back you go, the worse it gets. You know, the idea that it's, you should really like be careful when you really feel like you start to understand people, you know, from a, from a time long ago. Right. Because it's, I mean, for one thing, I mean, even if you, I, I mentioned, I was like, look, you're, first of all, you're dealing with sources, written sources, which automatically means you're, you're, you're getting your information from the, the very, very, very few people in that society who knew how to write, right? Just like, just that. And even in more, in more recent days, when, you know, if you go back just into more
recent history, you know, have like diaries and stuff, right? It's like, we had, even then, you're talking about like the kind of person who would keep a diary. That's not everybody. You're talking about a certain kind of people. And, you know, this is still something that like really affects the way we, like, the, the, the news is reported about places around the world all the time, right? You'll, I remember back during the, the Arab Spring, when things were jumping off in Egypt, and they were interviewing It was like CNN or one of them, I don't know, interviewing their correspondent, who was like there in Cairo on the ground, like talking to the people or whatever. And according to her, these are just, these are all a bunch of liberal people who want freedom and they want democracy and like da, da, da, da, da, da.
And, you know, people, people see stuff like that and maybe sometimes there is like an aspect of this to it, but people see that and they're like, oh, this is propaganda. This is bullshit and she knows it's not true and CNN knows it's not true, but they're trying to sell this to us. A lot of times it's like, no, man, look, you have this lady who works for CNN or New York Times or whatever it is, who goes to Cairo. Who do you think she's going to talk to? Like, how would she even know how to find like your raggedy person like living in the slums or something, or how to communicate with that person in their own terms? She's going to go to the people she knows there who are all going to be educated people, middle class or higher and say, hey, can you put me in touch with people I can talk to? And who do they know? You know what I mean?
And that kind of, this same thing is true in Russia, you know, with Russia, you know, there's, there's a faction of people, there's always been a faction of people in Russia who are not fans of Vladimir Putin. And interestingly, it's, it's sort of the same social class that really doesn't like Donald Trump and the United States, you know, a lot of the civil servants and bureaucrats, a lot of the professional, like urban people who, those are the ones who don't like them. Well, if you're a Russia correspondent for one of these major media organizations, these are just the people that are going to be around you and who are going to be influencing the way you think things are going. And so a lot of times that makes it over into our news is like, the people are ready for a revolution, the people are ready to get Putin out of there, he's actually hated and everything.
And it's just a distortion of reality based on the sourcing, you know?
Right. Like going on Blue Sky, talking about Trump.
And I mean, this is sort of postmodernism 101. Like, the useful side of postmodernism, you know, the un-politicized useful side is going back through and, you know, reading the text we have and looking at the information we have and sort of doing an archaeology on it, you know, and understanding that, you know, like, you could, I would say, like, an early example of, like, that type of postmodernism is Euripides' play in ancient Greece, The Trojan Women. Because, like, what he was doing is, like, you know, everybody knew the Iliad, they knew the story of the conquest of Troy and all that, but he wrote the story from the perspective of the women who actually lived in Troy and went through the, you know, the conquest.
And it's like, you know, you have to remember that, like, almost everything, and again, I sound like some hippie, blue-haired college student when I say stuff like this, but you really have to keep it in mind, that, you know, when you're reading history that is written exclusively by men, exclusively by adults, exclusively by the upper class and the small cast of people who are actually literate and writing things down, and for even, leaving aside, like, the political circumstances, they were putting constraints on the way that they could describe and write about things, just the, just the class bias that's introduced, you're getting a very, very narrow perspective. It would be like coming over to the United States and asking a random person on the street, "Hey, you know, who's this Donald Trump guy?
Like, what's he about?" "You're an alien, you don't know anything." And they say, "He's a fascist dictator who, you know, is gonna ruin the country and destroy the country." And then going home and being like, "Yeah, the Americans hate this guy, he's a fascist dictator and, like, he's gonna destroy the country." You know, and if you, if you think about it like that and then imagine that, you know, those people, or people who are on the other side, whatever, but one side, are the only ones that are writing anything down, a lot of times, our understanding of history is very much based on, like, that kind of a narrow view. You know what I mean?
Yeah. When you are putting together a piece like Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem, how do you account for that? Like, how do you? How do you try to have this balanced, nuanced perspective when you're getting, in the many cases, a biased perspective that you're researching from?
Yeah, and the biased perspective is one that I can't avoid. I mean, I guess I could with enough work, but is that I only speak and read English. So just that by itself. Like, when I was doing that story specifically, like, the early history of Zionism and that conflict, I'm reading English sources, which, especially if you get back before the last couple decades, are almost always telling you the perspective of the Zionists to a large extent, just because there weren't a lot of Arabs in Britain and America and stuff writing books about what was happening. And so you have that bias by itself. And the thing that somebody asked me on X the other day, I was doing a Q and A,
and they said, "How can we, what do we have to do, what are some of the steps we have to take, or whatever, things we have to take into account to make sure we're getting an objective view of history?" And I told them, "I don't think that's a viable goal when you're doing this stuff." Like, the goal should be understanding on a human level. And you have to just maintain a sense of humility and a sense of the limitations of your own ability to really understand what's going on, and just constantly keep in the front of your mind that these are human beings making human decisions based on human motivations. And if you do that, maybe you won't have a perfect picture of the events that took place, because, again, we're just limited.
There's a lot of huge historical figures, somebody like Alexander the Great or something. Like, what we know about them is based on extremely small stack of papers. And like... And so, yeah, that sort of humility, which was kind of imposed on me at the very beginning, because the Israel-Palestine series was the first one I did. And I, you know, I was reading, and after I had read maybe like six books or so, something like that, I was like, okay, I kind of get this. I'm ready to start writing this first episode and plotting it out. And so I do that, and it takes me a while. I was still working my day job at the time, so it takes me a few months to kind of get it to the end of it.
And by then, I've read 20 books or 30 books or something. And I went back and went through like the notes and the plot and everything that I had laid out, and it was embarrassingly bad. I mean, it wasn't just like you got this wrong or that wrong. It's just like whole sections of the story that I am so far off base that it's not even, you can't even call it wrong. And I thought about that. I was like, and I had read six books about this topic. You know how many topics there are that I've read one book on that I will just pontificate about for hours unless you stop me? And so like, it kind of forced that sense of humility on me a little bit, you know? It made me realize that, you know, even if you're well-educated in a subject, like there
is just, and this is one of the reasons too, one of the, I'm convinced anyway, that one of the reasons my Tucker interview got as much of a response as it did. Tucker, obviously, is very clever about courting controversy, you know? He knows what he's doing. And at the very beginning, he, you know, he introduced me as like the best and most important, you know, contemporary historian in America today, or something like that, right? And I know the guys like, you know, the historians that came after me afterwards were just inflamed by that, and I'm sure that was Tucker's, you know, goal. But I've always, you know, I say the same thing Dan Carlin always said. I'm not a historian, you know?
I read the books and the papers and the other things that historians write, and then I tell a story about them, you know? The historians are learning the languages, going into the archives, interviewing survivors, etc. I'm not, that's a historian, you know? I'm a storyteller who uses historical stories to try to, you know, to tell my stories. But like, Yeah, it was funny, too, because the night before, he was kind of saying that. And because we were having dinner the night before. And I was telling him this spiel, you know, I'm not a historian. Historians do important work, da, da, da, da, da. And he's like, yeah, well, I'm gonna say that on the show tomorrow, so don't fight it. And I was like, okay.
I would have let you say it. I think you're an educator, like an unconventional educator. I mean, I think that's the best way to describe it. If you're, the way you describe, like, say, the Jim Jones disaster, the Guyana tragedy. The way you describe that, if I was in high school, I'd be like, this fucking teacher rules.
Dude, my favorite-
I'd be so pumped to go to that class.
My favorite emails to get from listeners, right? Or, well, my favorite email, my favorite two emails probably had to do with the Israeli Palestinian thing. You know, one of them was from an active duty IDF soldier who was serving in the West Bank, who said that he listened to the podcast and that it actually altered the way he deals with Palestinians on a daily basis in his job. So that was pretty awesome.
That's amazing.
And then I got another one from, from this 20-year-old girl who lives in the West Bank, but she'd only been there for about two years. She'd gotten permission to move there from the Israelis. Her whole family was in Gaza. And she wrote me about two or three months after the war kicked off, after October 7th. And she heard the podcast and, you know, she said, you could tell, I mean, for sure, like, there was a lot of anger, like, the way the Israelis were conducting the war and the way they treat Palestinians and all that, very justified anger. But, you know, she said she listened to the podcast and it made her realize that the Jews are just like her and that the, you know, they say Jews over there and they mean Israelis, but like, it's just, they use the word Jews because that's what they are.
You know, that's how they understand it. And she said, you know, there's probably a Jewish girl who lives in Tel Aviv, who's just like me, you know? She loves Harry Styles and da, da, da, and like, you know, and that was, anyway, those were amazing emails to get, but, um- My other favorite, and this one I've gotten probably a hundred times, is it'll be from somebody who will tell me, kind of tell me their story a little bit. They'll say, you know, "I was always kind of the kid who sat in the back of class. Like, I was not one of the smart kids, you know? Maybe not one of the dumb kids, but I wasn't one of the smart kids. And reading things like history books, that's what smart kids do, and I'm not one of those people. And so I just never even, never even shifted into that gear or anything." He's like, "But I heard your podcast on Jim Jones," or whatever,
"'cause my friend sent it to me. And now, you know, that was a year and a half ago. Now, check it out. This is my bookshelf. I've read all these books." And what, you know, and, and the best part about it is you find that, that that experience like changed the way they think about themselves. They really like opened up their own, like, human possibilities in certain ways, you know? And I don't want to take, I'm not taking credit for that. They're doing it. But I really feel like, you know, we can think of kids like, we all know a million of these people, like, back in school, where, you know, that's the dumb kid, right? He's just like, gets, sees if he's lucky, and he's not any good at, you know, math, whatever. But then you get him talking about cars, you know? And he's like, and he will break down, I mean, everything about a Honda Civic
engine that you can possibly, I mean, and you realize really quick, like, "Oh, this is actually a really smart guy." He's just, nobody's been able to engage him on these topics before. And so he thinks that those aren't for him, and he's not engaged in them. But you get him on something he's really engaged with, this dude's super smart. If you could give him an IQ test that like purely drew from like, him when he's talking about cars, he would be above average. And that's like, almost everybody, you know? It's a matter of just like, being able to get people engaged. And that's my favorite thing to do with the, with the podcast, is get, you know, when people who didn't think they were into this kind of stuff, realize that, you know, you pull them in with a good story and a good presentation, but then they kind of take it from there themselves. It's, it's really great.
Well, it, it's engaging and it's fascinating to learn about human beings. And we've been told that everybody has a 10-second attention span. This is the TikTok generation. And I think that's one of the things that I'm most happy about with the...
Emergence of podcasting is that it's kind of thrown a monkey wrench into that. People are curious. We're still the same. We're still interested in things. We're just easily distracted. And we're constantly being bombarded by information and data, but you don't have to opt into that. You can step out of that and you can actually be interested in things and it will enrich your perspective, which will help you as a human being. It'll help you navigate life. It'll help you navigate relationships and friendships and careers. The more you know, the better. The more you consider other people's perspectives, the better. The more you get a chance to listen to how an expert describes what they know about a specific thing
and what's fascinating about it and how it engages them and how it's enriching their life. Like, that's good for everybody. That's good for everybody who listens. It's good for me to be able to sit here and talk to these people. You know, it's good to be stimulated. It's good to be curious. It's good to expand your understanding of life, this life that we're all experiencing together. You know, and I think that's where podcasts and your podcast is very different than mine, obviously, because yours is actually really planned out. It's almost like it should be a different category than just a podcast. But that's where those things are like really important, because they do engage people and they do get people that, as you said, might not have thought that that was for them. And all of a sudden, they're like,
Jim Jones, how did he do that? Like, and then you get into your series on it and it's utterly fascinating. Like, I am particularly fascinated, like a lot of people, with cults, because we all have this thing in the back of our head when we see something like the Jim Jones cult or Waco or anything. What would I do? Would I be one of those people? Would I be in that group? Would I be drinking the Kool-Aid? Would I be with them? Like, how does a person get sucked into cutting their balls off and putting the purple Nikes on and waiting for the spaceship? Yeah. How does that? Who, what, what causes that Wild Wild Country? I'm sure you've seen that. Incredible.
Dude, my, uh, my grandmother's, my uncle's mom, but she babysat me all the time as a kid. We all call her Grandma Sheila, Maana and Sheila in there. It was her sister-in-law.
Oh, my God.
She was hiding out. I didn't know this until after I saw Wild Wild Country. I was like, have you guys seen this? Just casually dropping that. They're like, oh, yeah, you don't know about Sheila? And they, like, she used to stay in, when she was hiding out before she fled the country, she was like, uh, being hidden in my uncle's bedroom.
Yeah, so that's fun.
Wow, that's crazy. That's crazy.
But, you know, to answer your question, though, as far as how people get sucked into it, the thing that, the thing that, you know, is, is shines through again and again, no matter what you're talking about, whether it's, it's any of the stories I've talked about, is that very often, people get sucked into it because, uh, not because of like some latent evil in their heart, but because their virtues get hijacked, you know? Hitler is a, is a good example. That is somebody who could say whatever you want about him. He loved the German people and he cared about the German people. And, but that love, I mean, is very, I mean, it's like the, you know, the, I was reading an article a while back about the, uh, the neurochemical oxytocin.
And it's the chemical that basically makes sure that, you know, a, um, a mammal mother doesn't eat her baby when she gets hungry, uh, you know, it gets that, and honestly, it takes the form of like increasing trust and empathy and, and so forth. But they've also done research and found that it also, like, that it, that it increases trust and empathy and all those things for your in-group. But because you're more protective of them, like feeling that way, it actually increases distrust toward anybody considered, like, in the out-group.
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And so it's like, makes you love your child more and makes you hate like the foreigner more, or something like that, you know? And a lot of things are like that, where it's really your virtues that get hijacked. I mean, if you think of a... Oh, I mean, yeah, you were talking about Jonestown. I mean, that story sucked me in so much, you know, and part of the reason for that is because I just got obsessed with it. But part of it is that, you know, the US authorities found like a thousand hours of recordings at the Jonestown site after the massacre, and they're all available online. And it's like sermons of his, it's them just having meetings in the middle of the night, it's just all kinds of different things. Well, for like three or four months, I had that in my headphones for like, at the time, I was working overseas when I worked for
the Department of Defense, and I was working by myself overseas. And so I'd be working, and I'd have my headphones on, eight hours a day, I'm listening to Jim Jones just ranting. Oh, my God. I was dreaming about him, for real. But through that experience, what I found is I, and even to this day, like I say, I will still say it, even after I'm separated from it's all over, is I really sympathize with those people. The same way I sympathize with, like, you know, and I get into this in the series too, like, you know, the radical movements that emerged out of the civil rights struggle, you know, the Black Panthers and whatnot, who, you know, they went down a dark road. But when you put yourself in their shoes, you know, because say what you want about, like, if Jim Jones, just like for people
out there who don't know, I mean, go listen to the podcast, but, you know, Jim Jones was a guy who, in like 19, I think, 53 is when he started his first church in Indianapolis. And it's a totally open, like, mixed-race church in Indianapolis, and he and his congregation are going out and getting, putting pressure on businesses to like start serving, you know, to desegregate and start serving African-American customers and stuff. This is a couple of years before Martin Luther King in Birmingham or whatever. He was like out front on this, right? And he was, he would, you know, his wife would, they adopted the first, they were the first white family to adopt an African-American child in the state of Indiana.
His wife would walk down, you know, the walk down the street with with their adopted child and she'd get spit on, called an N word lover, all these kind of things. I mean, he was getting death threats from like the American Nazi Party, from KKK, which was very strong in Indiana back in the day. And he was, but he was still doing all this. And if Jim Jones would have gotten hit by a bus in 1962, he would 100% be remembered today as like an early hero of the civil rights movement, like he really would. And when you say like, how did people get sucked into it? Like, you think of somebody, like one of the first things you notice, if you, if all you know about the Jonestown story is don't drink the Kool-Aid, you know, you've heard that. Mm hmm. The first thing stands out to you when you pick up a book about it is that 75%
of the people who died out there were black. And, you know, as soon as, like, I had been doing another project about the the great migration of African Americans out of the South around that time. And so I thought about it. I was like, man, these are all like first generation people out in San Francisco where the Jonestown cult was based. Because I mean, you didn't really have the the big migration out to the West Coast until the Second World War and after the Second World War. And so, you know, you take just like as one example, there was one of the women that died out there. She was like 70, 72 years old or something in 1978, when they all died. So she was born, you know, she
was born in whatever, 1906 in Alabama. And she's this black woman, right? And so her, she goes through, lives the first 40 years of her life under Jim Crow in Alabama, going through that. And then her and her husband decide to, you know, they get up the gumption to, you know, get on a train or get in a car or whatever and go out to California. And this is, again, back when, you know, the world was a lot bigger for people back then. You were going off to California. It was goodbye for the most part, you know? And so they were going, they didn't know what they were going to find out there, but they were going to go give it, you know, give it a try. And so they get out there and her husband's working on the Oakland docks and they live kind of in that Oakland
docks area that today is, is, you know, so rundown. He dies early just from overwork and like everything else. And she's there now in her.
In her little stoop, you know, front porch house, um, street side house, living by herself in a neighborhood that is just completely falling apart. You got drugs and you got gangs and like she gets, you know, harassed when she walks down the steps and all these kind of things. And so this is her life now. It's like arguably, I mean, not, not, I wouldn't even say arguably, like other than just the, the indignity of being told you can't drink out of that drinking fountain or something. Her life was actually more comfortable in Alabama under Jim Crow than it's become in this Oakland ghetto, you know, she's safer. Um, she's lives, at least over there, she lived in a place that was a community. It was, you know, a group of people that knew her since she was a kid and she lived among
them. Over here, she's completely alone. You know, she has nobody. Her whole experience of her whole life with white Americans has been virtually unanimously negative. Um, at the very least, like, you know, if not, if not abusive or something, it's been like condescending, you know? And somebody tells her, somebody that she knows from somewhere says, hey, you gotta come check out this new church that I, that I, that I'm going to. It's called the People's Temple. Come on down. There's this guy, Jim Jones. He's amazing. And so she goes down there and what she finds is a group of people. It was not, they're, they're like, uh, their sense of like real equality between people, not just
racial, but just across the board. That was not a game. They were 100% serious about it. They, and so she shows up to this place and she's not treated like in a condescending sort of social justice way where it's like, oh, let us help you, you know, or anything like that. They're like family. These people were a family. And like, it's, you know, the first thing to understand about the Jonestown, uh, you know, incident is that these people loved each other. They cared about each other. And this woman comes in after her whole life experience, being alone now in, you know, in Oakland and just everything else came before that. And now she's like babysitting the white lady's kids and they're calling her grandma and sitting on her lap and she's not treated like she's a charity case. She's treated like a member of the family.
And so you get those people who feel, who have had that, that experience, that side of things, right? That's going to bind you together in really significant ways. And they end up, you know, going down because of the, because of the, just the temper of the times, you know? This is a civil rights organization. If you look at what happened with really like both, both threads of the protest movement in the 1960s, you see this thing happen where it starts to build up in the 1960s and you have like the campus anti-war kind of hippie type protest side and then you've got the civil rights side. And both of those are kind of within, they're, they're, the energies being channeled into, you know, into, into outlets that are, they're not antisocial. You know what I mean?
Like you've got Martin Luther King, like, leading a movement, telling the people, basically like, it's an American civil rights movement. It's not a, he's telling them, we're not getting our, the rights we deserve as Americans and that's what we, you know, want. You've got guys like Malcolm X who didn't think of it that way. They thought, we're an African diaspora and we're a people and we need to like focus on that. But as long as Martin Luther King was alive, he had the moral weight within the movement to sort of fend off the emerging black power elements and stuff that were coming in. On the other side, like the campus, the anti-war left, if you go up to like 1968, the year of, you know, the, the big riot at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, Eugene McCarthy was,
was Senator running for president and he was like the only person in the political spectrum who was going to be available for the office of president, who was, he was, he wanted to end the Vietnam War. And when you think about like, this is a time, this is not like, today we want to end the Iraq War or whatever. It's like, no, like, this is a matter of life and death for these protesters. Like, you know, it's a matter of like, are they going to get drafted and sent over to this jungle to get killed for something that almost everybody at that point, even like the president and the secretary of defense, we have their like, backroom dialogues and stuff. Now, New was a lost war and a pointless, it was pointless to continue, other than for like vague reasons of national honor and you're going to have to go do this, maybe die. Definitely kill, you know, and go do. So this is important to these people.
It wasn't like a, just a ideological thing. And then the Democratic Party just completely openly ridiculously like just steals the nomination from Eugene McCarthy, you know, the Hubert Humphrey who they put in. He didn't win a single primary. He wasn't even put into the process until way, way late. He was just installed. It was a Kamala Harris kind of thing, like in the last election where they just decided it. And so you had all these, these people who were, like, they had the Clean for Gene movement, which was all these hippies, all these like, you know, college radicals and stuff who've been letting their freak flag fly all this time. They all cut their hair and they shaved and got good and clean cuts so they could go door to door to like normie, middle-class people and talk to them about Eugene McCarthy. In other words, they committed to like, they, they got with the program.
They were like, okay, we're gonna do it the right way. We're gonna do it, you know, through the right channels and institutions. We're gonna do that. Civil rights movement was doing that under Martin Luther King. Same year, you have, McCarthy gets, you know, robbed of the nomination. They try to protest it and they get the living shit kicked out of them by the Chicago police. On the other side, obviously, Martin Luther King gets killed. And what you saw after that is all that energy that had previously been channeled into these productive and pro-social outlets, it just scattered to the winds. You know, they, they, those things got delegitimized and all of a sudden, it just goes in every direction. And that's when like in the, um, you know, starting really in like 1969, that's
when the Weathermen came about, you know, like Weathermen came, came about like after, you know, most of the stuff we associate with the 60s. But then into the early 70s, you just see this massive proliferation of cults and violent radical movements. You know, you had like an offshoot of the Black Panthers out of New York called the Black Liberation Army and they were just hunting down cops and killing them, you know, dozens of cops across the country. They just hunted down and killed. You had just truly insane groups like the Symbionese Liberation Army. You know, they were like just led by a guy who was like legitimately mentally ill, had been in and out of institutions and he went to like, uh, you know, one of the like, you know,
Bitter clinger, like last holdout, sort of radical enclaves in Berkeley and found a bunch of lesbians there who were like radical feminist lesbians and got them to follow him. They're the ones that kidnapped Patty Hearst and, you know, got her going and everything. And Jonestown, like, the reason they're such an interesting story to tell, like, and this is really like the angle I took on it, is they're a microcosm of the whole movement, you know? In the mid 50s, they're idealistic, they're in it for the right reasons, they truly believe in what they're doing, they encounter resistance, you know, from political resistance, social resistance, and as that resistance stiffens and then gets really serious, you know, when you, you've got people coming into the church
who worked for a Modesto TV station, telling them that, hey, I'm coming to you because I was just approached by the FBI asking me to come spy on you, so I don't know what's up there, but you must be doing something right, so you join them, you know? You got that kind of stuff going on, and these people get radicalized, and then they turn violent and, you know, out of paranoia, and drugs was a big part of it, they lose their shit, you know?
What drugs are they doing?
Well, the, drugs were not, they were still done sometimes, but like, they weren't really technically allowed for like, the members themselves, but Jim Jones was on, he was basically, for the last 10 years of his life, it was amphetamines when you get up, barbiturates to go to sleep, and it was every day for 10 years.
Which is not the best for perspective.
No, no. And it's like, that's the thing, that's the thing with Adolf Hitler, too.
You know, you keep yourself going that way. And, you know, somebody who, I had read a little bit about the effects, because of the Jonestown story, I read a fair amount about the effects of long-term amphetamine use, the paranoia and mania that it can result. And so as I was getting up to the last episode... I asked one of my buddies, who, he was a police officer in SoCal, if he had any, like, ways, if he could figure out, get me some, like, police reports that were incidents where there was like, usually like, a husband and father who had taken his family hostage, and specifically if he was like, hopped up on methamphetamines, that resulted in a murder-suicide. And he got me a big stack of these things. I don't know where he got them, or if he was supposed to,
but like, he got these for me, and I was able to read through them. And about half of them, they ended in a murder-suicide. The other half, like, some of them, the guy got shot by the cops, some of them he gave up, but about half of them ended in murder-suicide. And as I just read through these, just again, and again, and again, I mean, it became very obvious, like, this is what happened, except at a larger scale in Jonestown. You know, it's hard for people to kind of accept, when you're talking about somebody like Jim Jones, who was like, a raving lunatic by the end, but he loved his people, like, he actually did. And people say, "Well, if he loved them, that's not possible. How could he do that?" That's, those are people who have never been around, like, domestic violence before. It's very complicated, you know? You can have husbands who are absolute monsters to their children and their wife,
but they still love them, and it's weird. And like, they, they have like, an emotion, like, a serious emotional crisis if they leave, or something, you know? And, like, it's just, it's very complicated. And, and Jim Jones was, like, that way. And actually, like, you know, having gone through that process of reading about it, and understanding it in this way, you know, it remains to be seen, if I still think this, when I finish all of my reading, by the time I get up to the end of the World War II series, but I see a lot of that in the Hitler story. Because, you know, Hitler was, like, if people think of him as like, a politician, they're missing a big part of what he was about. Like, if anything, he was more like, a prophet figure. He saw himself as like, almost like a, not a religious figure
in the sense that he was sent by God, and anything like that, but that he had this, like, sacred mission to save the German people. And this, these were not political questions, you know, whatever. It's why he would just, he never compromised, even when it seemed insane not to compromise. Like, in 1923, when the French invaded Western Germany to take over a lot of their industrial area, all the parties, right, left, and center, all came together to, like, oppose that in Germany, and he stayed out of it. He'd ordered all of his, you know, his whole party to stay out of it, because he was not gonna, you know, accept the compromises that were gonna come with working with the other groups. And so, you know, you read about like, you read some of the reactions that people would have to him. This is just like Jim Jones, where if his shtick works on you, man, like,
you read some of like, Joseph Goebbels is his propaganda minister, you read his diaries of like him describing, meeting Hitler and, you know, and going through, and it's like almost homoerotic. He loves him, like truly, and he was not homosexual, but like, he loved Adolf Hitler, truly loved him. And that's the effect he had on his followers like across the board. If his shtick didn't work on you, you were just like, ugh, how could anybody follow this? This guy's crazy, he's like vulgar, how is this possible? Same thing with Jim Jones. And
Well, same thing with all cults.
With all cults. Like, if it doesn't work on you, you're revolted by it.
This is what's so fascinating about all cults. In the beginning, they seemed great. Like, the Jim Jones thing, in the beginning, what a great idea. Bring everybody together, we're all family, you know, it's complete equals, let's all live together in harmony. That's Wild Wild Country too. In the beginning, it looks great. My friend Todd, we went out to dinner after the Wild Wild Country came on, and he goes, "In the beginning, I was like, I wanna join." What can I join? It seems like a way better way to live life.
Duncan was probably already buying his plane ticket to Oregon, yeah.
It's just, they all turned bad. And they all go the same way. It all goes to like sex and drugs. And I don't understand it. It's so weird. How they all sort of start off pretty fun.
Yep. And they always have hot women, too.
Oh, that's a big part of the program.
I don't know how this works, or what it, maybe it's just because the cult leader type, like, even if he's crazy, is still like an alpha male type, so he attracts, you know, stable, a good-looking, young ladies or something. But it's like, as I was going through, reading about all these cults, all of them, there's hot women everywhere.
You have to have them. Or you can't get the men to stay.
That was the cult out here. There's a cult, before we bought the Comedy Mothership on Sixth Street, which was the old Ritz Theater. Uh, we were in contract with this place called the One World Theater. That was owned by the people that were running the, the, this cult called the Bodhi Tree. That was the subject of the documentary, Holy Hell. I didn't know about that until I was under contract. My friend Adam was like, have you seen the documentary? I'm like, oh no, this fucking documentary? And then you watch the documentary and that's what it was. It was a guy who was a gay porn star and a hypnotist who starts this cult. And, uh, he gets all these yoga people, he's teaching yoga classes, gets all these yoga people to live together. And in the beginning, it looks amazing. It looks like so much fun.
Everyone's doing yoga, they're eating healthy food, they got a community together, they live together, they grow food. And then, of course, it goes sideways.
You know, talking about the, uh, the Symbionese Liberation Army, um, in 74, uh, they, you know, there was a huge firefight in South Central Los Angeles where they're, uh, they were holed up in a house. I mean, it was just a 500 cops, thousands of bullets flying, and then the house burned down and they all died inside. And, um, I read this somewhere, I don't, I don't have like firsthand knowledge of this, I don't know if you've ever heard it, heard it before, but that, uh, Big John McCarthy, his dad was an LAPD cop too. And then he was like a major figure in that, he like won a medal for valor, like for like, uh, doing things during the, during the shootout there.
Oh, wow.
Interesting, yeah. Big John can tell me if I'm wrong about that, but I've read it somewhere.
Yeah, I'll ask him. I didn't know that. Shout out to Big John, the original.
Um, yeah, it's, it, it's just so strange that the pattern repeats itself over and over again. Of, uh, one person with the answers, one charismatic figure who, uh, believes they're right. And gets a bunch of people to go with them. And in the beginning, makes a very, very attractive environment for these people. Really does foster this sense of community and belonging and, and then eventually it, it all goes sideways. And it almost always has to do with some sort of either amphetamines or something along those lines.
And I mean, that's something that really happened. That that derailed the protest movement like through like not just in, you know, the the people's temple cult, but like in general, like if you read about, uh, you you lived in San Francisco for a while.
When when did you live there?
Um, so I was seven, so there was, uh, seventy one ish.
Okay, so this is like.
No, seventy four ish, seventy four ish.
It's around this time. You read about how like, uh, everybody thinks about the summer of love and it was all chill or whatever. But like by the time you get up to sixty seven, you know, that's really kind of like in a lot of ways, like the end of the flower power like era of the sixties, not the beginning of it. Like a lot of people think like the summer of love in sixty seven kind of kicked the whole thing off. It didn't like by that point, all the people who, uh, you know, had been in, they were smoking herb and doing mushrooms and LSD and everything, things had started to switch over and people were doing speed like crazy.
Well, especially after seventy, right?
When they they passed the sweeping psychedelics act, it didn't cover prescription amphetamines.
You know, in the pool player community where, uh, you know, I I was I was playing pool all the time. Guys would take amphetamines and play for thirty six hours in a row. And it was a war of attrition. The whole thing was like to see how long the other guy would be able to hold up and what what kind of mixture he was on.
And it changed the culture, you know, of course, because I mean, a culture that's based around LSD and weed and whatever is totally different than a culture based around speed, you know?
Yeah, but look at cocaine movies. Look at the nineteen eighties. Everything's a cocaine movie. They're terrible.
You go and watch like Le Mans, go watch like some of these like really interesting films from the nineteen seventies or nineteen sixties. And then you go twenty years forward, you're like, what the fuck happened? Cocaine happened.
Everybody, everybody started believing that everything they did was awesome.
Yeah, and it's it's one of the reasons like, you know, I know people talk about the beginning of the war on drugs and, you know, that, uh, a big part of it was about having a way to like get in prosecute like a civil rights activist.
And that's all true.
At the same time, like I look back on those people, you know, Richard Nixon, I don't, maybe he was like, what was he, like 50 or 60 or something in 1970? So he was born in 19, this guy born in 1910, you know, we'd just closed the frontier like a few years before that and like, he's born in 1910. And people are watching like the transformations that are taking place in society that already just culturally are so mind bending in terms of like- Radical, radical change. Yeah, and seeing like the increase in violence, the, you know, all of the things that are coming with the new drug culture, especially once it started to move away from psychedelics into, you know, street drugs and stuff. And, you know, thinking that like, this is, I mean, I, I, I think that they had those motivations, like they thought, you know, this is a way to, to get at these people we need to stop.
But I also think that they really believe like, this is crazy, this is a real problem, we've got to do something about it. I mean, um, you know, there's a, uh, there's, um, one of my episodes, uh, I, I, it's, it's part of the labor series, but, um, it centers around, uh, this teachers' union strike that happened in New York City and, um, in Brooklyn in 1968. And, um, it became like a, it, it turned into a big blow up between, uh, it actually expanded even past the city, but especially within the city, between the black radicals and activists and, uh, the Jews in the city. Because the teachers' union and the New York City public schools at the time, the teachers and administrators were like 75% Jewish.
And in this one particular school where the parents, the kids, everybody are getting radicalized by like the black power ideas that are emerging in the latter half of the 60s, um, especially in New York, because they got Harlem up there and Harlem was always kind of the fountainhead of, of that kind of thing. They came into conflict over, you know, how the school was going to be run, but part of it, you know, the, the way the conflict kind of really started off was the teachers were like going to their union and they were going on strike, not because they wanted like more pay or anything like that, it was because like teachers were getting raped, they were getting beaten, one of them got set on fire, it was like crazy, like what was going on. And, uh, they, there was, um, it was in one of the books that I, that I, uh, read about it.
It was talking about, it wasn't specifically just about that, but they quoted a, the, the, the head of the agency in New York City that dealt with like drug addiction services and stuff. And they said in this one school, there were more drug addicts among the students, and they actually said more hardcore drug addicts among the student body than we have at our city agency, the resources to deal with, one school. And so it's like, that's, those are crazy times, you know what I mean?
Jesus.
I think about like, the 60s are so wild because, you know, there were, there were pilots in Vietnam who got shot down and taken prisoner in like 1963, and they got released in 1973. And just imagining like, they were listening to Buddy Holly or whatever when they came out, and, you know, before they went, and they come back, and I mean, all the 60s has happened, and they're like, what in the hell is going on? Can you imagine?
Could you imagine? Also, could you imagine being held in a Vietnamese prison for 10 years in a war that you, there's no way you can justify it. There's still like, no one has, and they probably know the Gulf of Tonkin was bullshit. Fuck, and you come back to America and you see Led Zeppelin, like, what happened?
What did I miss?
From Buddy Holly to Jimi Hendrix.
Yeah. Jimi Hendrix is dead at this point. So you have to like, go back and listen to recordings and go, what the fuck did I miss? You know? I mean, you can't even watch it on YouTube. Like, how is this guy playing the Star Spangled Banner with his teeth? Like, what happened? What fucking happened?
You know, your, your wife, if she stuck around for those 10 years, it's like, you know, she used to be nice and obedient, now she wants to go out to work and she's not taking your shit, you know? Like, things have just changed so rapidly. And whenever a society goes through like, that kind of a rapid transition, you know, there are always gonna be just people who fall through the cracks, there's always gonna be people who spin off in wild directions.
Yeah, always.
Like, and this happens like, in microcosmic levels too, you know? You think about like, um...
Like my father's side of my family, they all came out from like Kentucky and Alabama during the Dust Bowl, right? They're like crazy Scots-Irish, like Appalachian folks who came out to California during the Dust Bowl. And so I know a fair amount about like the Oki migrations and everything and the Appalachian migrations up to the Midwest like a couple decades later. And one of the things like people, I guess it's just not a well-known history, is that a lot of the stuff you saw with when African Americans started moving out of the South and facing resistance, like nobody wants them in their neighborhood and all these other kind of things. The Okis and the Appalachian folks in the Midwest got the same thing. Nobody liked them. You know, there was an incident when a bunch of Okis were coming into Los Angeles County and as they were approaching, the authorities
found out about it. The sheriffs went and blocked the road and they're like, nope, you're not coming here. Get out of here, you know? They were not liked. And the thing is like, you know, part of the, part of the reason for that was, you know, it wasn't just like straight up bigotry or something. These people were, they had, they had habits and ways of life that were very different than the people, you know, the settled people in California were used to. These are crazy country people. They drank a lot. They fight a lot. You know, they're poor as shit. So there's like a higher percentage of like the criminal class like among those people and things. And so people really looked down on them and, and isolated them, at least for that first generation. And, you know, you see it when like you have these people who, you know, they, they were farmers. That's
why they came out here. They were farmers. The Dust Bowl came. They can't farm anymore. They're at least farm workers. So they're rural Southerners who are used to working in agriculture. And now they're, they gotta go move into like a big city and try to find a job, you know? That's gonna be a huge adjustment. A lot of their, like the community that they had in the place they're coming from, a lot of times the marriages don't hold up under the strain of like the, the transition. The communities, they kind of scatter and fall apart. You lose that. And people just start to fall through the cracks, you know? And you saw that with- The African American Great Migration, you saw with the Okies, and you see at any time there's like a rapid transition that a people have to go through that, you know, some people are gonna make it, but some people are not gonna make it.
And, uh, and very often, you know, the unfortunate thing is the people who, the people who don't make it through that transition in one piece, very often like form the reputation that the rest of society sort of attaches to those people, you know what I mean?
Yeah, yeah. And, um, do you ever read Gladwell's take on the Appalachian folks too? That they, they emerged from herding populations? And that herding populations had to be particularly violent because you had to defend your cows because someone could come along your sheep and steal all of them. Whereas if you're a farmer, it's very difficult to steal all your corn. It's very difficult to steal all your crops. Like it takes time. You have to pluck them, you have to, you know, pick them, carry them. And that these people had a very violent past because they were used to defend, like if they stole your sheep, they stole your food. You starve to death, winter's coming. You had to defend it and they were particularly violent. This is why you get into some of the feuds that happen in, in those areas, which are legendary.
They all came from, or the, at least all the early settlers who kind of set the tone for Appalachian culture, they were all Scots-Irish and like North English borderers, um, who were basically like right on the other side of the, uh, the Isle from Ireland there. And these are people like, this was like a lawless part of the country. You know, this was a place where the central government was far away and it was infinitely smaller than anything we think of a central government. Now, those people were up there on their own. And so you had, you still had Klan feuds, you still had like all these things. And then over in Northern Ireland, when the British settled the plantation there, you know, you've got conflict between Protestants and Catholics, between Irish and the Scots, Scots that they brought over there. And so these people were from a hardcore culture, you know, and even little things,
like people would talk about, they would complain when they came to America about how like these people don't take care of their houses. And the reason for that is that over there, like your house could get burned down, you gotta build another one. Like they just didn't think of these things as like permanent fixtures, the same way like you here in Boston do or something. So it filtered down to just like cultural ways that were very off-putting to the people who were already settled here, you know? But those Appalachian folks are, they're tough, man. And they... You know, I mean, you go all the way back to the Revolutionary War and every war ever since then, they've basically been the core of the American like combat forces. And that continues right up to this day. And, you know, it's interesting to like, it's another one of those things to like, you
just wrap your head around like who our ancestors are and what they went through, you know? The Puritans, like the part of East Anglia that a lot of the Puritans came from in England, there was, this is in like, this is a hundred years into like the settlement of America. So you're talking like the early 1700s. There were still a couple churches in that part of England that the doors had the human skins of Danish raiders who had come over to like plunder their shit, who they had killed, skinned, and put them on their church doors just as a sign. So it's like, dude, these people are hard, that's like another species, you know?
Holy shit. Holy shit.
Yeah. It's, it's very difficult to take people out of the context of the world that they live in right now. It's, it's very difficult to even imagine living in a time like that.
You know, I think that's one of the more fascinating and important parts about history and long-form history podcasts in particular because they're so entertaining and engaging, like Dan Carlin's and yours and Daniele Bolelli, he's created it too. There's a bunch of people that do it now. And it's, it's, it's a very difficult path mentally to try to even imagine yourself in a time like this.
You know, I'm a giant fan of Dan's series on Genghis Khan and the Mongols. Just try to imagine living in a time where there's a group of people that have formed a super army for the very first time and they've killed 10% of the population of Earth. And they're sacking entire cities, burning them to the ground, piling up the bones in the middle of the city to where people walking- Up to it, think it's a, a snow mound. They don't even know what it is from the distance.
Yeah, and like, you live in a world like before modern communications or anything. So it's not like, over the course of five years, like tensions with the Mongols are increasing. We think there might be a war or anything. It's now a horseman like speeds up to your city panicked and says, there's a huge army over there. They'll be here in
Right.
Thirty-six hours, you know, and that's it. You gotta get your shit together and go deal with that. It's crazy.
It's crazy. And this is the reality of people who are unfortunate enough to be born at that time. And we are very fortunate to be born at the time that we're born, but still, we're, we are going to be looked back upon by future, more enlightened civilizations, the same way we look back upon the Mongols. We will look back upon what's going on in all the wars in the world, all the things that we've done. All the things that we continue to have done, the lies, the propaganda, the taking advantage of people for financial gain, all the things that we do right now.
Factory farming, that's my big one. I'm a hundred percent certain that, like, eventually down the line, they're gonna look at us the way we look at slaveholders because of the way we do factory farming.
Oh, it's disgusting. It's a, it's a horrific way to live. And unfortunately, when you have enormous populations of people that constantly require food and don't grow anything.
You, you have to come up with some way to feed those folks. And I'm a giant fan of regenerative farming, but I'm very skeptical that that could scale out.
To where you could just go to In-N-Out and get a double double, just like that from regenerative agriculture. I don't know. I don't, I mean, maybe it can be done. There's a lot of land that's not utilized in this country. Maybe it can be done. What do I know? But, uh, what I do know is that factory farming is fucking disgusting. And when you have ag gag laws, where a person working there who's horrified can't even alert the general public, or they face consequence, legal consequences, you can go to fucking jail for telling people about something that's absolutely horrific that shouldn't be legal.
Yeah, that's crazy.
That's crazy. That's just a crazy thing. And that's just as a byproduct of protecting corporations above our moral and ethical structure. And then the reality of needing food for all these people. And how do you, how do you mitigate that without upending the entire industry?
Like, instantaneously. And how do you do that? How does it even scale out? How do you take, you know, we've had, um, People on, Will Harris particularly, from White Oaks Pastures in Georgia where his family owned an industrialized farm and they used industrial fertilizers and all that jazz. It took him 20 years and who knows how many dollars to convert his farm to regenerative agriculture and the result's been incredible. I mean, just soil richness, the way they've been able to show that they can have these animals exist in what's basically confined nature. You just sort of manipulate nature and let them do what they would naturally do if they were all living together on the plains. And then that's how we're supposed
to grow food. And this is like the most ethical way, the healthiest way, the best way for the land. It's a zero-carbon footprint. It's, it actually sequesters carbon this way. It's the way the earth is supposed to exist with all these animals. But we've sort of, we've bastardized that. And I think you're right, that in future generations, they're gonna look upon that and go, what the fuck were they think? They knew, they had the internet. They knew, they watched the videos. They saw it. They saw it and they just like put the blinders on and kept buying cheeseburgers.
Yeah. And it's interesting, like the, you know, the shift to industrial agriculture when you look at the, like, the social changes that resulted from it. It reminds me actually a lot of after Rome conquered Carthage and then the rest of the Mediterranean, you know, you really became like the Roman Empire that we, that we think of, even though it was still a republic. You had this influx of just hordes and hordes and hordes of slaves that were coming from these conquered places back into Italy. And so you had, before that, you had like a Roman Republic where each citizen was a soldier. He was like an independent farmer, small farmer, and he was a soldier and a citizen, and those were the Roman, the Roman people. But all of a sudden, you get this huge influx of slaves and the guys with
the larger farms start building out industrial, building out economies of scale. So now you have these massive plantations and they're putting the smaller people out of business, you know, because... They don't care if, you know, if you're off to war, if that means you don't get a full crop this year and you can't pay for next year's crop. Well, there's no welfare program for that. You gotta sell it to the guy or take a loan from a guy that then, you know, becomes a whole thing. And so, all of these independent farmers that were scattered around the countryside got concentrated into a couple, just a few, like, you know, a handful of gigantic, a lot of fundia farms. And all of those people who used to live in the countryside, they had to go into Rome, like, looking for work, looking for something to do. And that's how you got, like, the Roman mob that led to the fall of the Republic and Caesar and all
that. And if you think about it in our modern day, we had something similar happen, only it wasn't with an influx of slaves, it was the Industrial Revolution. All of a sudden, like, you know, just having a family farm that you could actually, like, run profitably and sustain yourself on, became extraordinarily difficult because prices of things went so far, of all, like, agricultural commodities dropped so far down. I mean, I'm talking, like, ninety-five percent, you know, prices took a hit. Because all of a sudden, you're, you know, you've got combines and tractors and shit, so you're putting out so much more food, that it becomes just not viable to be a small farmer, like, making his way back then. So, all of the, it got, you know, consolidated into gigantic industrial farms. And all the people who used to live in the countryside, which is most people back in
the day, they all got herded into the cities to go work in the factories and on the docks and everything. And, you know, it's interesting, because, you know, over here, that process was, like, sort of ad hoc and semi-voluntary, you know? I say that with qualification, you know? If you were a farmer who couldn't pay your debt and you were getting evicted, I mean, a sheriff would show up with his gun and be like, "Get out of here." So, I mean, there was a little bit of implied force there. But, the same thing was happening, like, if you, if you look at what Stalin was doing in the late twenties and the early thirties, is, over there, they were far behind, like, the level of industrial development in Britain and the United States and Germany. And, he wanted to change that. And so, you had all
these small farmers, these are the kulaks, as people call them, you know, that he targeted. Small farmers who lived out in the countryside and had their communities, but he wanted these to be consolidated into efficient industrial farms. And he wanted all of those people to get in the cities and work in the, in the factories. And so, over there, they did by, like, brutal violence in a very accelerated period of time, like, something that we did over a longer period of time, that it was more, more or less voluntary. And but you know, at the end of the day, like the the the like, social effects were the same, you know, all of those people from the country had to move into the cities and work in industry. And and that was, I mean, it was inevitable, you know, I mean, if like, you know, Russia
would be speaking German right now, if they didn't industrialize and, you know, get into a place where they could actually fend off that invasion, I mean, you had to do it just to compete. But, um, you know, it it it creates, I mean, if you think about like, I mean, just think about like, the history of Europe, you know, in feudal Europe, where the aristocracy, virtually all the wealth that anybody had was in land, like, you were rich because you were an aristocrat who collected rents from the peasants on your land. That's where that's where wealth came from. So wealth was like, distributed throughout the countryside. And a lot of times, you'd have guys who, you know, a lord who, you know, he'd go to court sometimes or whatever, but his power base was out here in the countryside, and they were all spread around.
And as that started, as the Industrial Revolution, like, really kicked into gear, all these guys whose wealth was derived from agriculture and the whole aristocracy, you had like, by the time you get up to the mid to late 1800s, you've got guys who were lords, like aristocrats, who are completely penniless, like, they have no money. They still walk around, like, strut around like aristocrats, but they don't have any money. Meanwhile, you have a guy who owns a bunch of newspapers in London or whatever, who's super rich, and, you know, a guy who owns a factory who's super rich, and it really changed the balance of power between, you know, the aristocracy and this commercial class that really, like, didn't even exist, like, a couple hundred years before, but now is like, ascendant and really like asserting itself politically.
And I mean, that right there is, and what we talked about earlier, as that's happening, you're also getting, you know, the the former peasants and former small farmers are coming into the cities and becoming the new working class, and all three of these groups are getting politicized, you know? And, you know, these are just, these are, it's why the question of, you know, Dan likes to talk about, you know, the debate between the great man theory of history and the trends and forces theory, you know, is it like just broad social forces and so forth that just, you could get rid of Hitler, it would have been a guy named Otto, you know, who would have started the Second World, it was all just, we're all pawns in the, you know,
the grand scheme of history, or does it take like, is it based on personality, like somebody who really moves the chains himself, and it's always a little bit both, but that's something that'll never be really fully resolved, because, you know, there are times like that where, like, take like, the emergence of slavery in the New World, it's a perfect example, right? If you're a European country, and this is like, when we started colonizing the New World, the Spanish and Portuguese started colonizing it at first, this is like, right on the tail of them finishing up the reconquista, so they had spent the last 700 years in a state of constant war, because, you know, this is crazy to think about, but Muslims
actually controlled Spain and Portugal for a longer period of time than Spain, Spanish and Portuguese people have controlled it since then, right? So like, it was hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years, and they're at a constant state of war to push the Muslims back into North Africa. So you have a very like, Spartan, warlike people, because it's how you had to be, their whole society was geared toward like, this conflict that was centuries long. And so, you take those people, and they're the first ones who show up in the New World, right? So right there, you've got like, a certain bias in like, the relations between these Europeans and the people in the New World. Well, they come over there, and this is pretty soon, just like, you know, 1492, and then
just a few decades later, the Protestant Reformation happens, so there's religious conflict and religious wars, and things, you know, wars between different kingdoms now.
Have a little bit higher stakes because you're not just talking about, you know, they're going to take this piece of territory from us or something. It's like, no, they're going to change our religion, you know, really high stakes. And this is still at a time when, you know, Europe politically, like geopolitically, was an anarchic place. I mean, people were at war all the time and nobody even thought that war was immoral, you know, it was actually like part of the natural order of things. If you're a stronger neighbor and your weaker neighbor has something, you should have it, you know, and there's nothing really like considered wrong about it, like in a moral sense, especially since back then wars were generally fought between, you know, the aristocracy themselves, you know, the knights and people. It wasn't like they were rounding up peasants and sending them off as cannon fodder. And so, given like
the high stakes, once the Spanish and Portuguese came over to the New World and just started extracting so much wealth, you know, from there, almost immediately, you get Charles the Fifth, who takes over just a huge chunk of Europe, you know, becomes the Holy Roman, the first Holy Roman Emperor, and, you know, is just becoming overwhelmingly powerful. And if you're any other country in Europe at that time, you're looking at it like, we gotta get in on this New World thing, or else we're going to get swallowed up. And so you start getting in on the New World thing. And what you find out really quickly is, oh, we don't have enough people actually to go over there and like do all the mining and all the agriculture and everything else. We're gonna have to find somebody else, another population to do that.
Well, you couldn't take any Europeans as slaves or anything, because whoever the, you know, you needed your own people here, and the kingdom next door was not going to let you do that, take their people. And so they started resorting to West African slavery, which was sort of served up to the Spanish and Portuguese, because the Muslims in Spain and Portugal had been engaged in that for centuries. And so they had been sort of, you know, like the Spanish and Portuguese already knew the trade networks. They were very familiar with African slavery, you know, which had existed in Spain really since like the time of the Roman Empire or before, like, you know, they'd had a constant history with slavery going all the way back.
And so they get over there and they start using slaves to to set up their their colonies and extract the wealth from those colonies. And the interesting thing to me about it is that, you know, if you were a ruler who said, yeah, well, I don't think slavery is right, so I'm not going to do that. Okay, then you will get swallowed up by somebody who has less scruples and is willing to do it. They're going to get richer and more powerful and they're going to take what you've got. And then guess what? There's slavery anyway. It's just that you're not, you know, around anymore. That's it. And the same like with the West African kingdoms and the rulers and warlords down there who were selling the slaves to the Europeans. You could be a guy who's like, you know, I really don't think we should be selling our fellow Africans to these Europeans to be, you know, taken as slaves.
That just seems wrong to me. Well, okay, that's fine. Your neighbor who is getting gold and guns from the Portuguese or whatever is going to conquer you and take you all as slaves and send you over. And so it almost becomes like a game theory problem where, you know, there's no overarching authority to tell all the people, hey, we're not doing this. And so you, each individual actor does it just really as a matter of like expedient survival at the time. And when you look at when slavery did, when the slave trade was put to a halt, it only happened after the British Empire became like the real dominant power on the seas. And they were the ones, you know, they were the ones with the anti-slavery ships who were going around putting a stop to the trade. And that could never could have happened until there was like this big overarching
authority who could actually make everybody else make this change that they didn't want to make, you know?
It's a crazy history. It really is. And it's, again, it's so hard to put yourself into perspective of those people that are living life back then, where you have completely different expectations, completely different norms. And I think that's one of the reasons why your podcast is so valuable. So, listen, man, thank you very much for being here. I really appreciate it. I'm sorry that all that stuff happened to you, but I think ultimately it just made more people aware of your show, which is excellent. So.
Thanks, man.
Thank you very much. Appreciate you. It's Martyr Made. It's available everywhere. Audio only.
Yeah, I don't want to make people stare at my ugly mug for a seven hour episode.
Alright, thank you, Daryl. Bye, everybody.
Page updated November 3, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
