#2289 - Darryl Cooper

27:24You 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, OK, what is what's really going on here?

28:09Like 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 apologist because someone wanted to take just an overall comprehensive look at what happened, which is we should all want to know what happened from a bunch of different perspectives. So we could prevent any of this shit from happening in the future. Yes, I mean, the interesting thing about the World War II question is something I found through talking to people who, you know, disagreed with my with my Tucker interview is if you put the question to him.

28:51And maybe if you put it directly like this, they would give you a different answer, but you kind of get the, you know, you get to understand that this is how they feel about it, which is if there was two options. One of them is that the Second World War doesn't happen, at least in Europe, 40 million people don't get killed. But, you know, the national socialist stay in power and, you know, maybe Hitler dies 10 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 40 million dead people is that was a, that was a cost worth paying.

29:27And I think that is completely insane, man. Like it's, it's like if there was a sliver of a, of an opportunity to deescalate that situation and bring it back down, like, you know, if I'm the emperor of America or Britain or whatever, I'm taking that chance. And if it turns out that Hitler was 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?

30:06Because ultimately that is the right thing to do because we're witnessing the genocide of people. And then we're also witnessing a group that will remain in power that is not just committed genocide, but is committed to genocide. Right. So what we were talking about and all of the points I was bringing up on Tucker were all from before that. In fact, they were from a full year before the German invasion of the Soviet Union. That was June 1941. And that's where most of the Jews lived here. And so if he, you know, if Hitler never invaded the Soviet Union, he never even would have access to those people.

30:41Now, Hitler didn't like the Soviet Union, you know, all the way back in Mein Kampf and everywhere else. I mean, the 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 in terms of rhetoric? Oh, 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, given his audience at the time, he probably didn't have a lot of reason to make this part up.

31:27Is that, you know, he had been from like small town Germany, right, and he was from a middle class family. His father was a civil servant, respectable people, and nationalism back then was very much like a middle class ideology and the middle class people, nationalist would complain about the workers and, you know, the proletariat, how they want to be socialist 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.

32:05And 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 at the bottom of society now, you know, he's literally living in shelters. He's hungry all the time. He's like down with the underclass after having grown up in them in the middle class. And so he's starting to get a look at what the German people, the German masses, you know, that he's like sort of as a child and the young man is 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 want to lift up, you know, the underclass in any society.

32:52But 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 in it. And he says in my comp that it really caused him like a moral crisis, you know, an ideological crisis. He's like, are these the German people like really this is what we're talking about. And then he says, and you know, this is the way he relates it. He says it was actually the key that unlocked everything else form is that, you know, he would say he realized we could say he came to believe that yes, these German masses, they are in a sorry state right now.

33:28But the reason for that is that they're being manipulated by the Jews by the Jewish press by the, you know, the Jews who own the theaters and put out the, you know, the films and whatever else, all that they're being manipulated and corrupted by these people. And so for him, it became like 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 anti -Semitism was what allowed him to love the German people, you know, like it was like the only way for him that he could get around the revolution.

34:11And he was feeling it actually being up close with the German underclass is he, you know, he excused their faults by blaming, by blaming Jews. And so his, his sense of love for his people. And I mean, look, Hitler's one of those guys, I noticed this when I was reading all the Jim Jones books and stuff, which I think I read all probably all of them, 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.

34:49Like 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 really kind of, it's a lot of them are still good books, you know. You read like the most recent sort of great Hitler biography by Ian Kershaw is a great book. He's a good historian, an excellent writer. And, you know, you have to learn to kind of see through that polemic a little bit. And then you have, you know, a good history on your hands. It's almost like it's an obligation. If you're going to cover a horrific figure, you have to look at things that way.

35:21Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And, you know, it's a, and so I think that like people who knew Hitler pre before World War One, and we have like memoirs and interviews with people who didn't know him pretty, pretty well. They say pretty much unanimously, like we never heard him mention the Jews back then. And this is the period in Vienna when Hitler says his anti -Semitism was developing and he was figuring these things out. And what I think was probably going on, like my read of it, at least up to this point, is that his anti -Semitism, just like a lot of people in Europe at the time, was, it was theoretical and abstract.

36:00You know what I mean? Like, the Jews had never, you got to remember, like the Russian revolution, all of the things that people like Hitler would associate with the Jews. Like, none of that stuff had happened yet. Like, he might not like them, you know, he might think that. Whatever, all the stereotypes that go along with him, but it was just sort of an abstract thing that it wasn't dangerous, right? But then the first World War happens. And, you know, it's, 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 all the countries that were involved.

36:39I 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 any, 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.

37:23I mean, in constant terror of doing things that, I mean, forget about just like the physical discomfort of living there. I mean, you're in the mud, you're covered with ice and fleas all the time. So as 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 One is like probably my favorite piece of voting. Incredible. It's so good. And like, you know, one of the things he's so good at way better than me at is kind of capturing. And so when he talks about like the Battle of Assam with the British law, 60 ,000 guys on the first day, you're like, I don't even know what that, like what that even means.

38:17It'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 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 barium because you get shot. And you can't barium in the trench in the dirt under the trench anymore because there's already bodies just completely wall the wall down there.

38:56You'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, 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.

39:31It 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, they're 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 and 1918, those governments literally evaporated, they went away. And so, you know, you get to the immediate post -war period after these guys have just gone through this unbelievably harrowing experience, you know, their lives have been defined by violence for years, you know, at this point.

40:17And 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 Berlin and Munich. And 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 and 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.

41:02This is the world that you live in. And it's a, when you try to think of, you know, I talked about like Ude Hussein being brought to watch torture sessions or something. I mean, this is not, this is not exactly that, but 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 One for the most part.

41:46And so people saw that and they took the lesson both from World War One itself, but also from the aftermath and the revolutions that happen. And 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 accepted 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 holiday more. And in Kazakhstan, another million people. And like at that time is when, and we knew, we knew it was going on, obviously.

42:27And yet, you know, Roosevelt normalized relations with Stalin and people got over it. It's like with Turkey. Turkey does the Armenian genocide and it's condemned at the time. You know, they were on the other side of the war and everything, but a couple of years later, like look, Turkey is an important strategically placed country like in the world. And we kind of need them on our side. And so, you know, sorry Armenians, but you know, get over it. 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.

43:00You know.

43:06But 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 fun. Yeah. But you, even what you're saying is, it's obviously very relevant to what we're trying to, more trying to understand how world war to happen, how do 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 just a make you a Nazi apologist. Yeah, and it's important to know too that, you know, it's not like Hitler was going and giving big speeches at city square in Berlin, going on and on and on about how we're going to kill the Jews and the German people said right on, like let's go do it.

43:53That 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 was kind of a nationwide pogrom against the Jews in Germany that was launched by primarily by Goebbels, the propaganda minister. But there was there was outrage in the German cities. People in Berlin, a lot of the places were outraged by what was going on and Hitler had to actually get on the phone with Goebbels and say, cut this shit out.

44:28Like 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 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 very often is not, you know, what you find is it's not.

45:16It's not so much is not really like the the result 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 was really that like they had pissed so many people off and done so many terrible things to take power.

46:08And 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. 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.

46:41And the more I think about it, this is kind of a theme in so many of my podcasts. You know, it started out as an idealistic venture, you know, it started out as something, you know, you have these people who are in really like kind of a unique situation. Maybe the like the Roma, the gypsies are like the only other group of people you can really point to of like a widespread transnational group of people who do have a sort of cohesive identity, but they don't have a homeland. They're just living in other people's countries and, you know, I think the lesson from World War II and much of the 20th century probably 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.

47:26I think the real lesson from World War II is it were 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.

48:04There's also general suspicion when cultures move into areas and don't assimilate and then try to bring with them the rules of their land, which we, you know, we're particularly scared of in America. We hear the concept of Sharia law, you know, like people start to freak out whether 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, it's one of the, you know, America is a very unique country in a lot of different ways, but one of the ways that were so different from the European countries.

48:43I 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. You know, the fact that we, we have like the frontier experience, which is just, you know, no Europeans can really relate what was going on out there. You see that new Netflix series, American Prime Evil. It's amazing. Dude, and Peter Berg on here. That's right. That's right. And all I kept thinking is 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.

49:15These are like the regular people who 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 love they had Jim Bridger in there. That was, I've always been a fan of his. Yeah, that was amazing too. And, and how about the Mormon guy? Dude, people are young. Yeah, people don't realize today unless they really know the history. The Mormons were off the hook. There were gangsters. They were fucking dangerous foes. You couldn't fuck with the Mormons back then. Well, they were, they were, they had been fucked with. They were ultra cohesive, and they were serious about what they were doing.

49:52These 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, 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, the shaft keep in mind all the time, is that America, like we've been renegotiating our identity, like generation by generation, ever since America started, like from the very beginning. I mean, if you go back to the American Revolution and, you know, the founding of the country in the late 1700s, before those guys were dead, a bunch of the major cities, and eventually all the major cities, like very quickly by the middle of the 1800s, they're not majority Anglo anymore.

50:36It'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 in to this Protestant, very Protestant 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 Astor, you know, the famous Astor family. That was a German Jewish family that was in New York. And so that happens. And you're talking about, again, an influx large enough to really swamp the Anglo population in many of the big cities.

51:11Well, not another, you know, a generation later, barely 40 years after the, you know, the Irish migration really hits its peak. Huge influx from Southern Italy, from Eastern Europe, a lot of Ashkenazi Jews coming in and pretty soon. It's not just, you know, Anglos well assimilated, you know, Germans who were 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, there's still different communities. And we've just had to do that all the time, even in 1924 when we kind of shut down immigration.

51:49After the First World War, you know, we basically shut down immigration from 1924 to 1965. There was some, but very limited and very selective. But as soon as that happened, as soon as the immigration pipeline 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%.

52:31You know, and that was Philadelphia. I think Baltimore had like eight or nine, but like that was how it was. Pretty much all African Americans still 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 got to renegotiate. Like 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 American starts to peter out, 1965, we reopen the floodgates of immigration with the Heart Cellar Act, and that's the world we're kind of in now.

53:09And 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.

53:49And 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 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.

54:40You know, you will be an equal citizen. You can just come here radically open. I mean, really like a revolutionary open kind of law, especially back then. You know, you got to remember like the Europeans still had another 150 years of just wantonly slaughtering each other, you know, left still ahead of them. You know, you had like today, I mean, if you have like a person on, you know, who lives to the left to you and they're the Fatcher family and they're vaguely, you know, English. And then you have the McCoy family on the other side and they're vaguely iris. They're just kind of white people to you now.

55:17Like 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's 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 hold this whole continent against the French and the Spanish and everybody else who was around unless we were that open.

55:55And so that was like a prerequisite for America becoming what it is today. In Europe, it's very different, man. Like there's such thing as a Polish person. And Poland is the country where Polish people live, you know what I mean? And like over here in America, we have a much more fluid identity. We're constantly having to renegotiate it. And we think it's difficult today to integrate the immigrants that we've gotten 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.

56:41It 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 ever problem with that. Yeah. When a country like Poland does it, you're like, oh, those white people, you want to keep everybody out.

57:30They want it to be all white. Yeah. And because we're, you know, that's post World War II. That's 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 block countries, even though communism was extremely hostile to national identity, you know, and really, I mean, took a lot of brutal measures to try to stamp it out, because they wanted everybody to be a kind of new Soviet citizen, you know.

58:10That's 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's like a program or something, but they, you know, we were the dominant sort of cultural and military force and everything else, political force.

58:40And 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 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.

59:15They suffered terribly under the British for a long time. And yet, it's very interesting that, you know, they were willing to be brutalized, be occupied, be starved, you know, all of these things for centuries to defend their little slice of the world where their people could work out their destiny among themselves, you know, endured so much for that. And then, you know, you get up to about the 1960s, 1970s, and, you know, you can look it up. This isn't like a conspiracy theory. It's the first thing 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.

59:58And 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 like, go to Ireland and it's Irish. Like, go to China and it's Chinese. Like, you know what I mean? Right. And turning it all into sort of a homogenized, like, mixed, you know, soup. I think when you put it in those terms, nobody really wants that. And, you know, people, but people get very uncomfortable, you know. And in America, with immigration specifically, it's really hard to like, you know, the fact that it's not like we're a Christian country in the sense of it being worked into our political culture so much or anything anymore, but still like the values that most people, even atheists and everybody else, kind of, that inform their moral outlook are derived from that legacy of Christianity, you know.

1:00:54And 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.

1:01:34But like on an individual level, people really have a lot of trouble. And I think this is a credit to Americans in a lot of ways, even if it causes us a lot of confusion, that, you know, it is hard for us to turn people away like that, you know. And yeah, it's a, I think to go back to like what you 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, 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.

1:02:24Well, 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's causing the mass immigration to Ireland? It depends on the country. I mean, it's like it's to Ireland in specific. Yeah, Ireland is a lot of like Polish folks in Ireland, people from Eastern Europe who go there for work, you know. That's the primary source of migrants, but there's a lot of, you know, there are a lot of Third World migrants or Global South migrants there now, but a lot of Eastern Europeans come in there for work.

1:03:01Yeah, it kind of varies from country to country. It's interesting because I do agree that it's cool that you go to places and they're uniquely, like I love Scotland, you go to Scotland, it's uniquely Scottish. You know, you go to places, you get to take part in their way of life, like to see the world through their culture and the way they view things. It's interesting, but I also love the melting pot of America. I love it. And I come from immigrants. My grandparents came here during the early parts of the 1900s. And so I'm thankful that they were courageous enough, or their parents were courageous enough to get on a fucking boat before YouTube.

1:03:42No idea what was going on over here. It was just promises and hopes and try to carve out a life. And that's where I came from. So it would be insanely hypocritical of me to deny someone who came from another country. An opportunity to partake in this place. But I also think that it's coordinated. And I think that they're doing it in America for a lot of bizarre reasons that you could attribute to trying to stack states and trying to overwhelm democratic voter registration in swing states and allow people to vote and give them a pathway to citizenship and allow them to vote and get them on the dole, get them on whether it's Social Security.

1:04:32We've talked about this before where people were encouraged to say that they had bad backs or headaches so that they could be permanently disabled on Social Security and just then you have a customer. You have a client. And then that client is going to call upon them to vote for you. And if you only need 10 ,000 votes here or 20 ,000 votes there and they're objectively shipping in 10 times that much to some of these swing states, you got to wonder like this is not just this is kind of taking advantage of the charitable aspect of Americans, how we view people wanting to come here for opportunity, which most of them are just doing that.

1:05:07Most 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.

1:05:42And 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 what they were trying to do with all the flaws and all the terrible things that took place here. Yes, absolutely. Land acknowledgments, hallelujah. But at the end of the day, this place is supposed to represent freedom.

1:06:18But freedom can be manipulated and you can use your empathy and they can use it against you. And unfortunately you have to be aware that there's nefarious forces that are involved in all areas of society where enormous amounts of money can be transferred. And that's how you have to look at it. This is ultimately about money. And whether it's about money bringing in people for cheap labor which I think is fucked because I think if you're in America, if you're here, if you're here we're going to call you an American. You should get paid what a fucking American gets paid. You should get health coverage, you should get everything.

1:06:56You shouldn't be able to like get people just because they walked over here and you get them to work us for slave wages. That's ridiculous. That's insane. That's anti -American. 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 the whole history of America. It's true. And that's the dirty little secret of construction sites. You go back to the 1850s, 1860s and Irish dock workers on the East Coast, immigrant Irish dock workers. Their life expectancy was 14 years from the time they stepped off the boat. And these weren't 60 -year -olds coming over and working on the docks.

1:07:33You're talking about young guys who came over to do that. 14 years, you know? We have horrible brutal jobs. Completely expendable 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. There's a lot of, you know, they have 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.

1:08:14And one of my far left views before this World War II series got kind of pushed to the front of the queue because of the Tucker controversy. I was working through a series on the history of the American labor movement. And, 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 American labor movement, the first part of it, it's America's best story, in my opinion. I mean, because, you know, you go back to the 1880s, 1890s, or I did one on the Battle of Blair Mountain in West Virginia when 10, 11 ,000 coal miners who were just being brutally exploited by the mining companies in their mercenaries.

1:08:57I mean, they took up arms and they were ready to, like they were marching on the county next door to go, free some of their compatriots and to hang the sheriff. I mean, they only stopped because the U .S. Army finally showed up. And this is right after World War I. And the U .S. 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 going to, you know, their, their problem was with like this sheriff and the mine, you know, the mine operators and stuff, not with the army.

1:09:33They don't want to fight them. And so that diffused it. But, you know, you go back to those early, to those early decades of the labor struggles. And I mean, people I 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 Pinkerton's 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.

1:10:17And 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. There 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 capitalist didn't believe back then that you had a right to strike.

1:10:49Today we're like, yeah, if you don't want to go to work, you don't have to go to work. And if you all do it together, that's a strike. Like, you know, of course people can do, that's not how they thought about it back then. You know, they thought you were, they thought of a strike as like a form of sabotage. And so the authorities would be brought in, mercenaries would be brought in to like deal with these people. And you're talking about like people think of like 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 side of the other.

1:11:21Back 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 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.

1:12:03Like the capitalist class, and I'm not trying to sound like some kind of a Marxist or something, that's what they were, they were not going to compromise with people unless they were forced to. And those people, they went out on the picket lines, they fought, they died. In fact, if you go up to a little bit later in the early 1900s, 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 way it started was, you know, the owners of the businesses, they were hiring like real thugs.

1:12:48I mean, the Pinkerton, 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 are trying to kind of get people into the union and so forth and get rid of them. You know, it was 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.

1:13:22And so they'd be like, you know, we'll pay you. We need you to defend us from, you know, make sure that we don't get our teeth kicked in by the Pinkertons. And so they would do that. You know, they ran into the trouble that, you know, they always presents itself in situations like that is the people you hire to come in as muscle, start to look around and be like, why do we have to take orders from these people again? Can't we run the show? And that kind of started to happen. You started to get these, you know, the unions that were racketeering organizations. And so like, you know, these are things about, you know, history is extremely messy.

1:14:00You know, we have to always remember like people are often making the crucial decisions that like turn history this way or that, you know, Zigg instead of Zag are often made under crisis conditions by people who sometimes they're great men and women, but a lot of times, you know, they're the person who happens to be there at the time and they're doing their best and they're taking advice from the people that are around them and they're, you know, they're making the decision that's going to determine if we head off in this direction or that direction, you know. And you can't, you know, there was one time, right?

1:14:37Like, this is 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 going to 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 because he's not home and I say, you know, Richard, I'm here, like, what's up? He's like, ah, the doctors are being slow, whatever. So I'm going to be a little while.

1:15:11Well, I got a big 20 ounce venty, you know, Starbucks black coffee. And so I pound that thing in my car as I'm reading a book and pretty soon I start to feel that pressure in my gut. Like, I got to take a shit. And I call up my friend, like, where are you? Like this, I need you to get home now. He's like, I, the doctor is having you and brought him to me. I don't know what's going on. He's like, go see if a door or a window is open or something. And so now I'm getting up and moving. So that's making things worse, you know, and I check all the doors. I check all the windows, nothing's open. And I'm in the backyard and I'm like, this close to just digging a hole in this flower garden and taking a shit in this flower garden.

1:15:50But 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 balcony, you know, there's no access to it. And I'm like, I bet they didn't lock that door. And so I kicked my shoes off so that I can, you know, they were loose on my feet so that I can more easily 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 ready to go. It's coming right now. And that's just, that's what's happening.

1:16:23And so I run into the, I run up the doors 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, you know, kind of goes down halfway and there's a little platform and then right angle goes down the other way.

1:16:58And I have to go so bad that I just jump 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 follow my back, bang my head and shit every. I mean, it's like going up my back. It's horrible. And my head is like ringing. And I'm ashamed to say that like I laid there in my ship 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.

1:17:38You think back on like your entire life. And you're like, how do 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. This doesn't have anything to do with like the overall point I was making. But the, you know, the really shameful part of it is I cleaned it all up. And you could still kind of like in the grout in the tiles. I couldn't get a lot. So I still kind of smelled shitty. And when my friend got home, I didn't tell him this for years afterwards. When he got home, I blamed it on his dog. And he yelled at the dog that got by the after I told him years later.

1:18:16But. So yeah, like, you know, how old we at the time? Too old. To be doing shit like that. I mean, but that's like, you know, that's like that's a funny way of putting it, but like that's history a lot of times. You know, you're making decisions on the fly that you're not necessarily having time to reflect upon. And you know, you get into a situation where you're like, how did we end up here? Yeah, you know, I'm glad you brought up the labor movement because I feel exactly the same way. And knowing the history of the way people striking were treated and what could have happened. Have they not been successful?

1:18:59You 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 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 one of those things where unfortunately we look at negative aspects of it and we don't have a full perspective of where we would be without that.

1:19:40When the powerful, this is what everyone's afraid of on the left and rightly so. When the powerful have so much and the 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 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.

1:20:16One 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 the 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 200 ,000 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 got to put out fires. We all kind of agree. You should have a good education. But obviously, states are different in the resources and local districts are different in the resources. And you see very nice neighborhoods that have really good schools and you see terrible neighborhoods that have terrible schools.

1:20:56So 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 community become active and productive. And contribute to society. That makes everybody better and greater and we should be willing to contribute to that.

1:21:32But 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 needs. That's the type of guy you want. Oh, that's Mike. He does the cowboys whenever they have shoulder injuries. That's the guy. You want that guy. You want the guy with a nice watch. You want the guy who lives in a big house because that guy is fucking dialed in and focused. You don't want a guy who doesn't feel like he's being compensated enough. You don't want a guy who feels like he's expendable.

1:22:03You 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. 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.

1:22:47Because the poorer you are, the more desperate you are, the less likely you are to do anything about it. When you get comfortable and you want to be more comfortable and you say this is unfair, we could sit out for six months. That's when you become dangerous. When you have the ability to strike, when the right is union and Los Angeles strikes, that's a fucking real problem. 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. If there's also, I think, due to our unique history of having demographic turnover generation after generation, more or less since the beginning.

1:23:31If you look at the development of things like the public school system, for example, or a lot of the social welfare programs and other social programs, a lot of those things emerged because there was all of a sudden a huge influx of Irish in the 1830s and 40s. 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. It was a response to this. We got to do something about this. We got to take these little hellions and turn them into Americans somehow. You had philanthropists. It was all private at first and then they were transferred to the city governments and stuff.

1:24:09They were responses to demographic crises. They were emerging due to the migrant influx. I think that being the case, it's given Americans, because the native population who was already there when that happened, they didn't like it. They're like, wait, so these people came over here and now I have to pay to set up a school system for their kids. It's like what? It created that sort of resistance to the question of what we owe each other as members of a society. The idea of, I feel like America is 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.

1:24:56America is the place for you. Throughout most of our history, if you were just like a person who, you know, you could turn a wrench or swing a hammer or something, Mary was not built for you. 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, throughout a lot of our history, were just kind of forgotten. The real question is, in a country that is so geared toward competition at the top, whether that ever would have changed without a real push, you know? And, I mean, one of the other things, too, is like when people think about, you go back to, like in Europe, where they were really worried about communism.

1:25:39We were never really justifiably too worried about it in terms of having a revolution here or anything. That was never really a danger, but if you go over to, like, especially after the Soviet Union came around, from basically Germany eastward, you know, communism, like it was a very real possibility, like in the 1920s, that the German Communist Party, which was the largest political party in Germany, was taking its marching orders directly from Moscow, that they were going to win and they were going to take over, and you were now going to be like, what's going on over in Russian, Ukraine? That was a real thing that could have happened to them, you know?

1:26:17And 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 is even really even courting them or asking for it, you know? And when you add to that, like, this whole idea of like the working class, like this isn't something that has existed forever, like this was something that was emerging in different times in different places, but like really in that, like, most like in some developed countries, you started to see it in like the 18th century, but it's like a 19th century phenomenon where all of a sudden, so you think you go back to feudal times, and you've got the aristocracy, you've got the church, and you've got the peasantry.

1:27:03And then you have like another group of people who kind of serves a unique function, but kind of a uniform function across Europe in the Jews. You know, they would very often be like, they played a very kind of critical role in the feudal Europe, you know, because they were the only ones who had a network that kind of stretched across the whole place. And so a lot of times like the rulers would have Jews working for them who, you know, they were basically like your diplomatic channels kind of. You need to like talk to people over there, or if you needed to raise money for something, they had large capital networks that could help you raise money for things like that.

1:27:42But they weren't, you know, they weren't serfs or peasants, they weren't the aristocracy, they weren't the church obviously. They were kind of their separate thing, and most of the time they were allowed to sort of abide by their own laws, like run their own little societies like how they wanted, you know. But this was at a time when it was just taken for granted that 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 surf would have believed that as much as the king did.

1:28:18It was only when you start to get up into the industrial revolution that all of a sudden you start to see these cities just teeming with people who have no land, you know, they don't have any means of like immediate self -sufficiency. What they have is their back and their shoulders and their hands, and you know, they trade that for the means to survive. And, you know, this happened very rapidly in a lot of countries so that you have this whole new kind of politically awakening demographic, you know. Because that's sort of kind of the key to it. At first, you know, it took some time for them to sort of have a political awakening where they recognized that, wait, I'm not just a worker.

1:28:58I'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. And we're going to start to, you know, organize and act politically to extend those interests and to achieve them. That was something that was very new. And so people were kind of figuring out, again, on the fly, like how to deal with this, like what? But, you know, the idea that just regular poor people who, you know, that they should have any say in like how the state is run, how the economy is working. It was just completely foreign idea, like everywhere on the planet, basically until, you know, 200 years ago or so.

1:29:42Which is pretty bizarre that we've had to adjust to that so quickly, you know, so many changes so rapidly, changes in transmit the ability to move people, transit, the ability to take people from Europe quickly, relatively to America, trains, machines, industrial revolution, all this happening, cities emerging, like enormous populations, and then the squalor in which those people are living it. Which is, I mean, that's really the dirty secret of the beginnings of all these cities. These people are shitting in houses, outhouses, public ones on the street. Everybody lived in squalor, rats, disease, horrible nutrition.

1:30:24In 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, there's a world where, you know, the husband breaks his back. You know, you better hope that you're a member in good standing of the nearby Paris church, because there's nothing else for you. Right. 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.

1:31:03I 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. And it was a bunch of people waiting in line and soup kitchens. And then, you know, you have this oppressive factory environment, or first of all, everything's cold powered.

1:31:42So you're breathing. I mean, they do a great job in picky 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, your whole existence is hell. And then you have math, 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.

1:32:24Like reading a few books on the history of organized crime is a good window into that. It's going to give you a perspective like from the bottom up rather than sort of from the top down. So when you read history, I mean, in the further back you go, the more true this is, 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. And we can't agree about what's going on or what, you know, the president's motivations are blah, blah, blah, blah.

1:32:58And 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. Because I mean, for one thing, I mean, even if you, I, I mentioned as like, look, you're first of all, you're dealing with sources, written sources, which automatically means you're, you're getting your information from the very, very, very few people in that society who knew how to write, right?

1:33:35Just 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 a 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. You know, this is still something that like really affects the way we, like the news is reported about places around the world all the time, right? You'll remember back during the, the Arab Spring when things were jumping off in Egypt and they were interviewing. I was like CNN or one of them, I don't know, interviewing their correspondent who is like there in Cairo on the ground, like talking to the people or whatever.

1:34:15And going 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. A lot of times it's like, no, man, look, you have this lady who works for CNN and New York Times or whatever it is who goes to Cairo. So who do you think she's going to talk to?

1:34:48Like, 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? Yeah. 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 sort of the same social class that really doesn't like Donald Trump in the United States.

1:35:25You know, a lot of the civil servants in 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.

1:35:54Right. 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 unpoliticized useful side is going back through and you know, reading the text we have and looking at the information we have and sort of doing an archaeology on it. You know, and understanding that, you know, like you could I would say like an early example of like that type of postmodernism is a Euripides play an 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.

1:36:35But 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 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.

1:37:14Just the, just the class bias that's introduced, you're getting a very, very narrow perspective. We'd 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 going to ruin the country and destroy the country and then going home and being like, yeah, the Americans hate this guy. He's a fascist dictator and like he's going to destroy the country, you know, and if you think about it like that and then imagine that, you know, those people or people who are on the other side, whatever.

1:37:47But 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 nuance perspective when you're getting in the many cases of bias perspective that you're researching from? Yeah. And the bias perspective is there's one that I can't avoid. I mean, I guess I could with, you know, enough work, but is that I only speak and read English.

1:38:24So just that by itself, like when I was doing that story specifically, like the early history of Zionism and that conflict, I'm reading English sources, which especially if you get back before, you know, the last couple of decades are almost always telling you the perspective of the Zionism. Zionism is too large extent just because, you know, there's not a lot of, there weren't a lot of Arabs in Britain and American stuff writing books about what was happening. And so you have that bias by itself. And which, you know, the thing that somebody asked me on X the other day, I was doing a Q &A and they said, how do you, you know, how can we, what do we have to do with some of the steps we have to take or whatever, things we have taken to account to make sure like we're getting an objective view of history.

1:39:08And I told them like, I don't think that's a viable goal when you're doing this stuff. Like, you know, the goal should be understanding, you know, on a human level and just you have to just maintain a sense of humility and a sense of the limitations of your own ability to really, to really understand what's going on. And just constantly keep in the front of your mind that these are human beings making human decisions based on human motivations, you know, and if you do that, you know, maybe you won't have like a perfect picture of the events that took place. Because again, we're just limited, you know, it's a lot of like, there's a lot of history, like huge historical figures, somebody like Alexander the Great or something like what we know about them is based on extremely small stack of papers, you know.

1:39:52And like, and so yeah, that, that, 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 get kind of get this. I'm ready to start writing this first episode and plotting it out. And so I do that and it takes me a while. I'm still working my day job at the time. So it takes me a few months to kind of get it to the end of it. And by then I've read 20 books or 30 books or something and I went back and went through like the notes and the plot and everything that I laid out and it was embarrassingly bad.

1:40:36I 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 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, it kind of forced that, that, that sense of humility on me a little bit, you know, and 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.

1:41:15Another response as it is Tucker obviously is very clever about courting controversy. You know, he knows what he's doing. And at the very beginning, he, 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.

1:41:54And then I tell a story about them, you know, the historians are learning the languages going into the archives, interviewing survivors, it said, I'm not, that's, that's a historian, you know, I'm a, 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. And he's like, yeah, well, I'm going to say that on the show tomorrow. So don't fight it.

1:42:27And I was like, okay. I would 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, does that, 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 while 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.

1:43:14So 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 they used the word Jews because that's what they are, you know, they that's how they understand it.

1:44:04And she said, you know, there's probably a Jewish girl who lives in Tel Aviv who's just like me, you know, she loves hairy styles and tada da and like, you know, and that was in anyway, those were amazing emails to get. But my other favorite and this one I've gotten probably a hundred times is it will be from somebody who will tell me it 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.

1:44:37And I'm not one of those people. And so I just never even never even shifted into that gear and he's like, but I heard your podcast on Jim Jones, whatever, because my friends 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 the best part about it is you find that. That that experience like changed the way they think about themselves that 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.

1:45:06But 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 and you go to, 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.

1:45:40And he's not engaged with them. But you get him on something he's really engaged with. This dude's super smart. If you could give him an IQ test that like purely drew from like him when he's talking about cars, he would be above average. And that's like almost everybody. You know, it's a matter of just like being able to get people engaged. And that's my favorite thing to do with the, with the podcast is get, you know, when people who didn't think they were into this kind of stuff, realized 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.

1:46:09It's really great. Well, it's engaging and it's fascinating to learn about human beings. And we've been told that everybody has a 10 second attention span. This is the TikTok generation. And I think that's one of the things that I'm most happy about with the emergence of podcasting is that it's kind of thrown a monkey wrench into that. People are curious. We're still the same. We're still interested in things. We're just easily distracted. And we're constantly being bombarded by information and data. But you don't have to opt into that. You can step out of that. And you can actually be interested in things.

1:46:54And it will enrich your perspective, which will help you as a human being. It'll help you. It'll help you navigate life. It'll help you navigate relationships and friendships and careers. The more you know the better. The more you consider other people's perspectives, the better. The more you get a chance to listen to how an expert describes what they know about a specific thing and what's fascinating about it and how it engages them and how it's enriching their life. 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.

1:47:26It'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 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?

1:47:59And then you get into your series on it. It's utterly fascinating. Like I am particularly fascinated like a lot of people with cults. Because we all have this thing in the back of our head when we see something like the Jim Jones cult or Waco or anything. What would I do? Would I be one of those people? Would I be in that group? Would I be drinking the Kool -Aid? Would I be with them? Like, how does a person get sucked into cutting their balls off and putting the purple Nike's on and waiting for the spaceship? Yeah. How does that? What causes that wild wild country? I'm sure you've seen that. Incredible.

1:48:38My grandmother's, my uncle's mom, but she babysat me all the time as a kid. We all call her grandma Sheila. Mon on Sheila and there was her sister. She was hiding out. I didn't know this until after I saw wild wild country. I was like, if you guys seen this, just casually dropping that. They're like, oh yeah, you don't know about Sheila. And she used to stay in, when she was hiding out before she fled the country, she was like being hidden in my uncle's bedroom. Oh my God. Yeah, so that's fun. Wow. That's crazy. That's crazy. But to answer your question, though, as far as how people get sucked into it, the thing that...

1:49:15The thing that is shines through again and again, no matter what you're talking about, whether it's any of the stories I've talked about, is that very often people get sucked into it because not because of some latent evil in their heart, but because their virtues get hijacked. Hitler is a good example. That is somebody who say whatever you want about him. He loved the German people and he cared about the German people. But that love, I mean, it's like reading an article while back about the neurochemical oxytocin. And it's the chemical that basically makes sure that a mammal mother doesn't eat her baby when she gets hungry.

1:50:03It takes the form of increasing trust and empathy and so forth. But they've also done research and found that it increases trust and empathy and all those things for your in -group. But because you're more protective of them, feeling that way, it actually increases distrust toward anybody considered in the out -group. And so it's like, it makes you love your child more and makes you hate the foreign or more or something like that. And a lot of things are like that where it's really your virtues that get hijacked. I mean, if you think of... Yeah, you were talking about Jonestown. I mean, that story sucked me in so much.

1:50:44Part of the reason for that is because I just got obsessed with it. But part of it is that 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.

1:51:14And eight hours a day. I'm listening to Jim Jonestown. Oh my god. I was dreaming about him for real. But through that experience, what I found is... And even to this day, like I said, I will still say, even after I'm separated from it, it's all over, is... I really sympathize with those people. The same way I sympathize with like... And I get into this in the series too. You know, the radical movements that emerged out of the civil rights struggle. You know, the Black Panthers and whatnot. 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...

1:51:52Just 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 pressure on businesses to like start serving, you know, to desegregate and start serving African American customers and stuff. This is a couple of years before Martin Luther King and Birmingham or whatever. He was like out front on this, right? And he was, you know, his wife would...

1:52:31They 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 their adopted child. And she'd get spit on called n -word -lover, all these kind of things. I mean, he was getting death threats from like the American Nazi party from KKK, which is 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.

1:53:10And when you say like, how did people get sucked into it? Like you think of somebody... Like one of the first things you noticed, if you... All you know about the Jones town story is don't drink the cool aid, you know, you've heard that. 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 I had been doing another project about the Great Migration of African Americans out of the South around that time. And so I thought about it. I was like, man, these are all like first generation people out in San Francisco where the Jones town cult was based.

1:53:43Because I mean, you didn't really have the big migration out to the West Coast until the Second World War and after the Second World War. And so, you know, you take just like as one example. It was one of the women that died out there. She was like 72 years old or something in 1978 when they all died. So she was born in, 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.

1:54:26And this is, again, back when, you know, the world was a lot bigger for people back then. You were going off California. It was goodbye for the most part, you know. And so they were going... They didn't know what they were going to find out there, but they were going to go give it, you know, give it a try. And so they get out there and her husband's working on the Oakland Docks and they live kind of in that Oakland Docks area that today is... You know, so run down. He dies early just from overwork and like everything else. And she's there now in her... In her little stoop, you know, front porch house, street side house, living by herself in a neighborhood that is just completely falling apart.

1:55:02You 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... I wouldn't even say arguably. Like other than just 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. She 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.

1:55:35Over 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. At the very least, like, you know, if not abusive or something, it's been like condescending, you know. And somebody tells her, somebody that she knows from somewhere says, Hey, you got to come check out this new church that I'm going to. It's called the People's Temple. Come on down. There's this guy at Jim Jones. He's amazing. And so she goes down there and what she finds is a group of people... It was not... They're like... They're sense of like real equality between people, not just racial, but just across the board.

1:56:18That was not a game. They were 100 % serious about it. I mean, 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 Jones town, 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, baby, sitting on 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.

1:56:57She'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.

1:57:32And both of those are kind of within their energies being channeled into, you know, into outlets that are, they're not anti -social, you know what I mean? Like, you got Martin Luther King, like, leading a movement, telling the people, basically like, it's an American civil rights movement. It's not a, you know, he's telling them we're not getting our, the rights we deserve as Americans. And that's what we, you know, want you 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.

1:58:13On the other side, like the campus anti -war left, if you go up to like 1968, the year of, you know, the big riot at the Democratic convention in Chicago, Eugene McCarthy was, was Senator running for president. And he was like the only person in the political spectrum who's going to be available for the office of president, who was, he 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 of the Secretary of Defense.

1:58:58We have their like, backroom dialogues and stuff. Now knew was a lost war and appointing 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, way, he was just installed.

1:59:32It 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 cut so they could go door to door to like normy middle class people and talk to him about Eugene McCarthy. In other words, they committed to like, they got with the program. They were like, okay, we're going to do it the right way.

2:00:00We're going to do it, you know, through the right channels and institutions. We're going to do that. Civil rights movement was doing that under Martin Luther King. Same year, you have McCarthy gets, you know, robbed of the nomination. They tried 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, those things got delegitimized and all of a sudden, it just goes in every direction.

2:00:37And that's when like in the, you know, starting really in like 1969. That's when the weatherman came about, you know, like, weatherman 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 at a 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 Symbianese Liberation Army.

2:01:13You know, they were like just led by a guy was like legitimately mentally ill had been in and out of institutions. And he went to like, you know, one of the like, you know, bitter clinger like last hold out sort of radical enclaves in Berkeley and found a bunch of lesbians there who were like radical feminist lesbians and got them to follow them. They're the ones that kidnapped Patty Hearst and, you know, gone or gone 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 there a microcosm of the whole movement, you know, in the mid 50s, they're idealistic, they're in it for the right reasons.

2:01:55They truly believe in what they're doing. They encounter resistance, you know, from political resistance, social resistance. And is that resistance stiffens and then gets really serious, you know, when you've got people coming into the church who worked for a Modesto TV station telling them that, hey, I'm coming to you because I was just approached by the FBI asking me to come spy on you. So I don't know what's up there, but you must be doing something right. So he joined 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.

2:02:31They 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, barbituous to go to sleep. And it was every day for 10 years. And not the best for perspective. No, no. And it's like that's the thing, that's the thing with Adolf Hitler too. Yeah. 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 Jones town story, I read a fair amount about the effects of long term amphetamine use, the paranoia and maybe it can result.

2:03:13And 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.

2:03:49The other half like some of them, the guy got shot by the cops, some of them he gave up, but about half a minute 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 Jones town. You know, it's hard for people to kind of accept when you're talking about somebody like Jim Jones who goes like a raving lunatic by the end. But he loved his people like he actually didn't 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.

2:04:21It'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 in 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.

2:04:54But 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 profit 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 just never compromised even when it seemed insane not to compromise like in 1923 when the French invaded Western Germany to take over a lot of their industrial area.

2:05:32All the parties right left and center all came together to like oppose that in Germany and he stayed out of it. He ordered all of his you know his whole party to stay out of it because he was not going to come you know accept the compromises that were going to 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 this is just like Jim Jones where if his stick works on you. Man like you read some of like like Joseph Gerbos is his propaganda minister you read his diaries of like him describing meeting Hitler and you know going through and it's like almost homo erotic.

2:06:07He loves him like truly and he was not almost sexual but like he loved it off Hitler truly loved him and that's the effect he had on his followers like across the board. If his stick didn't work on you you were just like how could anybody follows this guy crazy is like vulgar how is this possible same thing with Jim Jones. And the same thing with all cults with all cults like if it doesn't work on you revolted by this is what's so fascinating about all cults in the beginning they seem great. Like the Jim Jones thing in the beginning what a great idea bring everybody together we're all family. You know the it's complete equals let's all live together in harmony that's while while country to in the beginning it looks great yeah my friend Todd we went out dinner after the while while country came on and he goes in the beginning I was like I want to join.

2:07:01What can I do it seems like a way better way to live life is probably already buying his plane ticket to Oregon yeah it's just they all turn bad and they all go the same way it all goes to like sex and drugs and I don't understand it it's so weird yeah well they all sort of start off pretty fun. Yep and they always have hot women too. Oh that is 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 well you can't get the men to stay exactly that was the cult out here there's a cult before we bought the comedy mother ship on six tree which was the the old rich theater.

2:07:57We were in contract with this place called the one world theater that was owned by the people that were running that this cult called the Bodhi tree that was the subject of the documentary holy hell. I didn't know about that until under contract my friend Adam was like have you seen the documentary I'm like oh no this fucking documentary and then you watched the documentary and that's what it was it was a guy who was a gay porn star and a hypnotist who starts this cult and he gets all these yoga people he's teaching yoga classes gets all these yoga people to live together 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.

2:08:39You know talking about the the Symbianese Liberation Army in 74 they you know there's a huge firefight in South Central Los Angeles where they're they were hold up in a house it was just a 500 cops thousands of bullets flying in the house. Burnt down and they all died inside and I read this somewhere I don't I don't have like firsthand knowledge of some I don't you've ever heard heard it before but that big John McCarthy his dad was an LAPD cop too and he was like a major figure in that he like want a medal for Valor like for like doing things during the during the shoot out there. Oh wow. It's interesting yeah.

2:09:16I didn't know that can tell me if I'm wrong about that but I read. Yeah I'll ask him I didn't know that shout out to big John the original. Yeah. Yeah it's it's just so strange that the pattern repeats itself over and over again of one person with the answers one charismatic figure who believes they're right and gets a bunch of people to go with them. And in the beginning makes a very very attractive environment for these people really does foster the sense of community and belonging and and then eventually it all goes sideways and it almost always has to do with some sort of either and fedamines or something along those lines.

2:10:01No 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. You lived in San Francisco for a while. Yeah. When when when did you live there? Um so I was seven so there was uh 71 -ish. Okay so this is like around 74. So yeah. It's around this time. I mean you read about how like everybody thinks about the summer of love and it was all chill or whatever but like by the time you get up to 67. You know that's really kind of like in a lot of ways like the end of the flower power like error the 60s not the beginning of it like a lot of people think like the summer of love in 67 kind of kick the whole thing off.

2:10:45It didn't like by that point all the people who uh you know had been in they were they were smoking herb and doing mushrooms and LSD and everything things it started to switch over and people were doing speed like crazy. Well especially after 70 right yeah when they they pass the sweeping psychedelics act. What it didn't cover prescription and fedamines yeah you know in the pool player community where you know I was I was playing pool all the time. Guys would take amphetamines and play for 36 hours in a row and it was a war of attrition the whole thing was like to see how long the other guy would be able to hold up and what kind of mixture he was on.

2:11:25And it changed the culture you know of course because I mean a culture that's based around LSD and we know whatever is totally different than culture based around speed you know. Yeah but look at cocaine movies look at the 1980s everything's a cocaine movie they're terrible yeah. You go and watch like Le Mans go watch like some of these like really interesting films from the 1970s or the 1960s and then you go 20 years forward like what the fuck happened cocaine happened yeah. 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.

2:12:06A big part of it was about having a way to like get in prosecute like a civil rights activist yeah that's all true. At the same time like I look back on those people you know Richard next time maybe it was like 50 or 60 or something in 1970. So he's born in 90 sky born in 1910 you know we just closed the frontier like a few years before that and like he's born in 1910. And people are watching like the transformations that are taking place in society that already just culturally are so mind bending in terms of radical. 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 street drugs and stuff.

2:12:51And you know thinking that like this is I mean I think that they had those motivations like they thought you know this is a way to get at these people we need to stop. But I also think that they really believe like this is crazy this is a real problem we've got to do something about it. I mean you know there's a there's one of my episodes I it's part of the labor series but it centers around this teachers union strike that happened in New York city and. In Brooklyn in 1968 and it became like a it turned into a big blow up between actually expanded even past the city but especially within the city between the black radicals and activists and the Jews in the city.

2:13:38Because the teachers union in the New York city public schools at the time the teachers and administrators like 75 % Jewish. And in this one particular school where the parents the kids everybody are getting radicalized by like the black power ideas that are emerging in the latter half of the 60s especially in New York because they got Harlem up there and Harlem was always kind of the fountain head of that kind of thing. They came into conflict over you know how the school was going to be run but part of it you know the way the conflict kind of really started off was the teachers were like going to their union and they were going on strike not because they wanted like more pay or anything like that it was because like teachers were getting raped they were getting beaten one of them got set on fire it was like crazy like what was going on.

2:14:24And they there was one of the books that I read about it it was talking about wasn't specifically just about that but they quoted a 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 heart and they actually said more hardcore drug addicts among the student body then 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 like 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 19.

2:15:1163 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. You imagine could you imagine also 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 Tonka was bullshit.

2:15:47Fuck and you come back to America and you see leds up and like what happened. Yeah what did I miss from buddy Holly to Jimmy Hendrix. Yeah you know what you man's because it's dead at this point. So you have to like go back and listen to recordings and you know what the fuck did I miss. You know I mean you can't even watch it on YouTube like how's this guy playing the star -spangled banner with his teeth like what happened. You know your wife if she stuck around for those 10 years is 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 had just changed so rapidly.

2:16:21And whenever a society goes through like that kind of a rapid transition you know they're always going to be just people who fall through the cracks. There's always going to be people who spin off in wild directions. Yeah always. Like and this happens like in microcosmic levels too you know you think about like my father's side of my family they all came out from like Kentucky in Alabama during the Dust Bowl right there like crazy Scots Irish like Appalachian folks who came out to California during the Dust Bowl. And so I know a fair amount about like the Okie migrations and everything and the Appalachian migrations up to the Midwest like a couple decades later.

2:17:03And one of the things like people against just not well known history is that a lot of the stuff you saw with when African Americans started moving out of the South and facing resistance like nobody wants them in their neighborhood and all these other kind of things. The Okies and the Appalachian folks in the Midwest got the same thing nobody liked them. You know there was an incident when a bunch of Okies were coming into Los Angeles County and as they were approaching the authorities found out about it. The sheriff's went and blocked the road and they're like no 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.

2:17:41These people were they had they had habits and in a ways of life they 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 look 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 were farmers it's why they came out here they were farmers the Dust Bowl came they can't farm anymore they at least farm workers so there were all southerners who were used to working in agriculture and now they're they got to go move into like a big city and try to find a job you know that's going to be a huge adjustment a lot of their like the community that they had in the place they're coming from.

2:18:30A 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 Okis and you see it anytime there's like a rapid transition that a people have to go through that you know some people are going to make it but some people are not going to make it and very often you know the unfortunate thing is the people who the people who don't make it through that transition in one piece very often like form the reputation that the rest of society sort of attaches to those people you know what I mean.

2:19:06Yeah yeah and do you ever read Gladwell's take on the Appalachian folks too that the the emerge 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 so 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 start to death winter's coming yeah you had to defend it and they were particularly violent this is why you get into some of the feuds that happen in those areas which are legendary.

2:19:49Yeah they all came from 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 who were basically right on the other side of the the aisle from Ireland there and these are people like this was like a lawless part of the country. You know this is a place where the central government was far away and it was infinitely smaller than anything we think of a central government now these people were up there on their own and so you had you still had clan feuds you still had like all these and over in Northern Ireland when the British settled the plantation there you know you've got conflict between Protestants and Catholics between Irish and the Scots Scots that they brought over there and so these people were from a hard core culture you know and even little things like people would talk about it would complain when they came to America about it.

2:20:35I like these people don't take care of their houses and the reason for that is that over there like your house you have burned down you got to 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 are 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 America.

2:21:05American 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 are 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 isn't like this is 100 years into like the settlement of America so you're talking like the early 1700s there were still a couple churches in that part of England that the doors had the human skins of Danish raiders who had come over to like plunder their shit who they had killed skin and put them on their church doors just as a sign so it's like to these people are hard that's like another species you know 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 yeah you know I think that's one of the more fascinating and important parts about history and long form history podcasts in particular because they're so entertaining and engaging like Dan Carlin's and yours and Danielle Bollelli and he's created it too there's a bunch of people to do it now and it's it's a very difficult path mentally to try to even imagine yourself in a time like this yeah you know I'm a giant fan of Dan's series on jangus con the Mongols just try to imagine living in a time where there's a group of people that have formed a super army for the very first time and they've killed 10 % of the population of earth and they're sacking entire cities burning them to the ground piling up the bones in the middle of the city to where people walking up to it think it's a snow mound they don't even know what it is from the distance yeah and like you live in a world like before modern communications or anything so it's not like over the course of five years like tensions with the Mongols are increasing we think there might be a war or anything it's now a horseman like speeds up to your city panic and says there's a huge army over there they'll be here and right 36 hours and that's it you got to get your shit together and go deal with that crazy it's crazy and this is the reality of people who are unfortunate enough to be born at that time and we are very fortunate to be born at the time that we're born but still we'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 done the lies, the propaganda, the taking advantage of people for financial gain and all the things that we do right now they're going to look back on that's my big one yep I'm 100 % certain that like eventually down the line they're going to look at us the way we look at slaveholders because of the way we do factory farming oh it's disgusting it's a 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 yeah 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 in and out and get a double double just like that from regenerative agriculture I don't know I don't mean maybe it can be done there's a lot of land that's not utilized in this country maybe it can be done what do I know but what I do know is that factory farming is fucking disgusting and when you have ag gag laws where a person working there who's horrified can't even alert the general public or they face 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 yeah 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 people on Will Harris particularly from White Oaks pastors in Georgia where his family owned a 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 results been incredible I mean just soil richness the way they've been able to show that they can have these animals exist and what's basically confined nature you just sort of manipulate nature and let them do what they would naturally do if they were all living together on the plains and then that's how we're supposed to grow food and this is like the most ethical way the healthiest way the best way for the land it's zero carbon footprint it's it actually sequesters carbon this way so the way the earth is supposed to exist with all these animals but we've sort of we've bastardized that and I think you're right that in future generations they're going to look upon that and go what the fuck were they think they knew they had the internet they knew they watched the videos they saw it and they just like put the blinders on and kept buying cheeseburgers 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 you 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 in a citizen and those were the Roman the Roman people but all of a sudden you get these 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 got to 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 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 95 % you know prices took a hit because all of a sudden you're you know you 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 used to live in the countryside which is most people back in the day they all got hurt into the cities to go work in the factories and on the docks and everything and you know it's interesting because you know over here that process was like sort of ad hoc and semi voluntary you know I say that with qualification you know if you were a farmer who couldn't pay your debt and you were getting evicted I mean a sheriff would show up with his gun and be like get out of here so I mean there's a little bit of implied force there but the same thing was happening like if you if you look at what Stalin was doing in the late 20s in the early 30s is over there they were far behind like the level of industrial development in Britain and the United States and Germany and he wanted to change that 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 country side and had their communities but he wanted these to be consolidated into efficient industrial farms and he wanted all of those people to get in the cities and work in the factories and so over there they did by like brutal violence in a very accelerated period of time like something that we did over a longer period of time that it was more or less voluntary and but you know at the end of the day like 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 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 you know 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 in 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 could go to court sometimes whatever but his power base was out here in the countryside and we're all spread around and as that started as the industrial revolution like really kicked into gear all these guys whose wealth was derived from agriculture and the whole aristocracy you had like by the time you get up to the mid to late 1800s you've got guys who are lords like aristocrats who are completely penniless like they have no money they still walk around like spread 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 also getting you know the former peasants and former small farmers are coming into the cities and becoming the new working class and all three of these groups are getting politicized you know and you know these are just these are it's why the the question of you know Dan likes to talk about you know the the debate between the great man theory of history and the trends and forces theory you know is it like just broad social forces and so forth that just you could get rid of Hitler it would have been a guy named Otto you know who would have started second 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 reconquesto 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 in Portugal for a longer period of time than 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 in North Africa so you have a very like Spartan war like people because you said you had to be their whole society was geared toward like this conflict it was centuries long and so you take those people and they're the first ones who show up in the new world 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 peace of territory from us or something it's like no they're going to change our religion they're 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 V who takes over a huge chunk of Europe you know becomes the Holy Roman Empire the first Holy Roman Emperor and you know it's just becoming overwhelmingly powerful and if you're any other country in Europe at that time you're looking at it like we got to get in on this new world thing or else we're going to get swallowed up and so you start getting in on the new world thing and what you find out really quickly is oh we don't have enough people actually to go over there and like do all the mining and all the agriculture and everything else we're going to have to find somebody else another population to do that well you couldn't take any Europeans as slaves or anything because whoever the you know you needed your own people here and the kingdom next door was not going to let you do that take 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 before like you know they had a constant history with slavery going all the way back and so they get over there and they start using slaves to set up their colonies and extract the wealth from those colonies and the interesting thing to me about it is that 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 guys like you know I really don't think we should be selling our fellow Africans to these Europeans to be you know taking his slaves that just seems wrong to me well 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 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 -slaverships who were going around putting a stop to the trade and that never could have happened until there was like this big overarching authority who could actually make everybody else make this change that they didn't want to make you know it's a crazy history it really is and it's again it's so hard to put yourself in the 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 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 so yeah I don't want to make people stare at my ugly mug for a seven hour episode all right thank you very much everybody