Show 319 - A Recipe for Caesar

Common Sense Liner dated July 2006, written by Dan Carlin, voiced by Bill Barrett. There's a disease that affects fully 60% of Americans.
It's dividing families, poisoning minds, and stealing our children's future.

It's partisanism, and it's completely preventable. You just need a little injection of common sense.
Stop partisanism before it stops you. I struggle expressing myself politically these days.
And it's heartwarming and a bit worrying to hear so many people out there think that it would be good to hear from me at this time. I hear on social media, we really need to hear a common sense show.
And I think to myself that it's wonderful people have such a high um opinion of maybe what you could bring to the table my wife and children would beg to differ um but i think i'm i think i'm benefiting from the well-known backup quarterback syndrome right the starting quarterbacks who are in there um are are stinking the place up and i've got to be better right? Until I get out there and fumble five times and throw a couple of picks

and get out injured in the first quarter.

We have no way of knowing.

You can project your hopes on me.

But that, along with like five or six other things,

has weighed down my ability to actually do this show.

And we've done shows.

This is a weird thing to say. We've done common sense shows ever since the last common sense shows we've just thrown them all away because they didn't meet my minimum standards i'm having a problem talking to all of you about these things and then the longer it's been since the last show the more things that that pile up that are huge, right, and should be talked about.
Anybody remember impeachment? We're going through a global coronavirus pandemic now. Impeachment looks like the good old days, doesn't it? But how do you not talk about something that large? Well, you got a bunch of those things if you go back to the last time we did a show, and then you got to try to figure out kind of what's going on and give some perspective and provide something to pay people back for their hope that you've got something to give them that's worth not just their time, but if you're finally going to break your silence after all this time, certainly you have something worth sharing, not a bunch of crap.
So I started writing stuff down and I had a few notes. I don't do much in the way of notes.
It screws up the improvisational nature of what I do. But over time, 30, 35 shows, whatever, it's been a few notes develop.
And so I start writing stuff down on this big whiteboard, which I never, ever do. But, you know, there's a lot of stuff.
And then I start using different colored pens to differentiate one idea from the next. Then I use a highlighter pen because my whiteboard is not an old chalkboard kind.
I use big, heavy paper, the old-fashioned kinds. I'm highlighting things with different colors.
And then I'll notice some thoughts are connected to other thoughts. I'll have big arrows, you know, crooked arrows, drawn from, like, the top left corner to the bottom right-hand corner.
And at this point, it's positively Glenn Beckian. It's like some, you know, five feet away without my glasses, it's like some Acadian cuneiform fingerprinting thing by some second grader um it's oppressive especially for somebody that really doesn't work with notes right i'm looking at this going how do i even begin to deal with all these things all these things i should take a picture of it it's it's all things that if you and i were to walk up to it together we would probably the vast majority of us i would think would at this and go, every one of these things has something to do with the way things are now, right? They're all part of the zeitgeist.
Now, we might have different conceptions on how much, you know, this is 40% of the zeitgeist and this has 30%. I mean, we're gonna differ on that.
We may differ on where I drew arrows. You may say, I don't see the connection between that thing and this thing.
But all of these elements are pinging off one another as part of our current reality.

I think anybody who thinks that this boils down to something simplistic is a fool. Calling somebody a fool has been something that's been oppressive to me.
I have a conflict between my emotional parental side and my logical strategic and tactically oriented military goal oriented side. And they're in conflict with each other.
Because like many of you, I have pretty strong feelings about the way things are. The Captain Kirk side of my personality Wants to get out there Ham up the screen

Take up time with an emotional monologue, angry or repealing to your better natures, you're all better than this, you know, something like that. Think about what you might do.
But the intelligent, logical side of me, if there is an intelligent side of me, but certainly a more logical side of me says uh you will get no closer to your goals if you do that and probably farther away when i wake up on one side of the bed in the morning i see that the approach i should take in this conversation is a if you'll pardon the two dimension two-dimensional and also sacrilegious stereotypes here for adjectives meaning the gandhi martin luther king j Jesus approach. But other times I wake up on the other side of the bed and at best I'm Mike Brady from the Brady Bunch and I just want to tell everybody, you know, you're all grounded, go up to your room.
Sorry, waving my hands here in the studio, which is a good sign for me. So the way I want to approach this sometimes emotionally is at odds with me achieving my goals here I was speaking to my wife yesterday um the you know the business problem associated with this whole thing by the way is obviously I could be doing hardcore history audio with all these attempts and times I put into the common sense that I'm just throwing away so I'm trying to balance this out and the element that's not making the cut for me in terms of being releasable is I have this standard in the times we live in.
And the standard is to do no harm, right? I used to think it was part of the Hippocratic Oath. It's not.
First, do no harm, though, appeals to my character for some reason. And so so i said because of the way i currently see the problem in air quotes i'm not going to do anything that doubles down on it right that makes it worse that contributes to it so what is it here's the place where all of this stuff breaks down normally trying to connect some of these thoughts that are important.
As I said, we're in the middle of a coronavirus pandemic right now, 3 billion people on lockup. So hopefully we understand that there are some bigger issues involved now.
And I think that maybe that's something we could examine in a minute. But in order to get there, I need to explain, if I can, you know, hold back the Kirkinian side of me and keep the Spock side of me in play here, we need to approach this a certain way because, folks, I believe in a political sense, we're in an almost Newtonian situation right now.
It is something that we discussed in other forums on earlier Common Sense shows.

We're not the only country, by the way, dealing with this. Great Britain can probably feel our pain and a bunch of other countries too.
But we are in a Newtonian sort of situation. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction kind of situation.
It's a political tit-for-tat retribution cycle. It's something that gets amplified with every generation, and it's generations long.
Of the 10 million things that are so different about the early Roman Republic or the later Roman Republic that make them incomparable apples and oranges to now, there's one or two things that stand out where you go okay well that's kind of similar and it might just be something that's representative of all societies based on a similar kind of system but they had a tit-for-tat retribution cycle going too remember Marius and Sulla and all that well that was somewhere in the middle stages, I guess, or latter middle stages.

They were heavily into the violence

and retribution by then.

But if you follow the generations long,

and I mean, Mike Duncan's got a great book,

The Storm Before the Storm.

Mike Duncan's got a great historical podcast series on this.

We did a show on it.

I think Daniele Bellelli did a show on it.

There's lots of fun stuff out there

to sort of follow this tit-for-tat retribution cycle. The the Gracchi brothers all those people all part of it right well we've been in it for generations now I think I can't tell you where we are in the cycle or how far from Marius and Sulla we are but if you look at that cycle you'll notice that that there are times when it gets amplified it gets progress you know it'll get slowly worse then boom, it'll take a big earthquake-like drop, and then it'll start again.
I think the current president is one of those moments. He's an amplifier, but like I was saying in the last Common Sense shows, when he goes away, your problems, if you're an anti-Trump person, do not disappear with him.
He's a symptom. He's something that came to power because of all the things going on he didn't cause all the things that are going on he is an amplifier like a marius like a sulla like any of those big big people right someone that takes things and pushes them i think there's a uh and i don't want to get lost in the weeds here but as you know when times are good i can sound a bit like a doomcaster and when times are bad the devil's advocate side of me sort of finds the silver lining.
But if you do look at your history books, it is funny how often periods of, well, like what we're going through now, often end up with reform periods coming afterwards. It's almost like they're a slap in the face that highlights an obvious problem we should have noticed before.
And after that situation passes, efforts are made to remedy the situation. So and I think I said this, tried to say it on Bill Maher's show where I was talking about the powers of the presidency and how they've grown for many presidents now to a point where the three co-equal branches of government are unbalanced with each other, right? That's not healthy.
But presidents up till now have been so careful and cautious about how they expanded their powers and did so in a way where the other side had clearly done something similar or you had an extreme situation like 9-11 or a near collapse of the economy i mean all kinds of little ways where they followed protocol and approach and if you're looking at it from the frog in the hot water standpoint they never turn the temperature up radically at any given time at least not when they couldn't support it somehow with public support this guy does do that and if you're looking at it from a devil's advocate side of things,

you could go, finally, we're going to notice this frog in the hot water

because somebody just turned the water up real hot, right?

Somebody just got a hold of the nuclear buttons and made us go,

wait a minute, one man's got all that power?

I forgot about that when Obama and Bush and Clinton and Bush

and Reagan and Carter and Nixon and Johnson and Kennedy and Eisenhower and Truman had that power. I'm sorry, I missed Gerald Ford in there, didn't I? The point being, though, is sometimes you get reform out of those situations.
I feel the same way, and this is certainly the devil's advocate side of me talking, too. I feel the same way about this coronavirus situation we're in right now.
I feel the same way, and this is certainly the devil's advocate side of me talking too, feel the same way about this coronavirus situation we're in right now. I feel, you know, listen, I'm not downplaying how bad this is at all, but a couple years ago, if you recall, we were worried about a hemorrhagic fever problem, Ebola.
That one, to me, scared me like nothing else disease-wise in my adult life. And I thought, God forbid that do to us what the coronavirus is doing now.
I feel that this is a wake-up call that allows us to dodge a potential bullet maybe in the future to take some of the fragility of the healthcare system when we talk about about it in a global sense because after all we know now the health care system in some other country matters to us in this country because if they can't handle disease over there it's going to find its way here right we're all interconnected the revenge of the gangrenous finger for those of you who recall that show is a globalized thing now as i said to my, I think there's going to be changes in our own

health care system where we start to reclassify things that we would have formally considered to

be waste, you know, like excess bed capacity and excess ventilator stocks or whatever it might be,

right? All stuff you don't need. What did you pay all that money for you? You could have saved money.

Let's cut the waste into something more akin instead of waste to using a term like insurance because now the money you would have spent on that excess capacity you didn't need back then would have perhaps prevented the need to shut things down to the degree that we have shut things down now because a lot of that's concerned with flattening a curve because we don't have the capacity, have to spread out the cases and lighten the load on the capacity. One of the countries that seems to so far, you know, fingers crossed, have done the best on all this.
South Korea is one of the countries with the most bed capacity, I think, per 100,000 residents. I mean, this is something that, that looking back on it now, gosh, if we had spent more money on excess capacity earlier, we might be avoiding this economic meltdown we're having right now.
I don't know. But the point is, is that this is the kind of reform one could plausibly see as the pendulum swinging backwards, a natural human response to this sort of thing.
I mean, if if you have a stream in the back of your yard, historically speaking, and all of a sudden horses heads and and oil and all sorts of contaminants start appearing. And that's when people start petitioning the government to clean up and put regulations on that plant up.
It's a natural thing, right? Cause and effect. We haven't had an outbreak of disease like this in a long time.
It's going to become a wonderful reminder of things that we have to hedge against because it's credible. Remember, it's not just this coronavirus that didn't strike us out of the blue like a lightning bolt.
We had the H1N1. We have avian flu mutations.
We had the Ebola, the hemorrhagic fever stuff, like we said earlier. I mean, we're dodging bullets in terms of disease all the time.

Sometimes you're not going to be able to dodge them.

And that's when you have to turn around and say,

okay, this is going to take everything we have as a 21st century society, global society,

to deal with this.

This is the kind of thing

that would have absolutely ravaged our ancestors.

We're going to see if the tools we have today

put us in a better position.

Certainly it's going to put us in a better position. How much better? Well, we do have some downsides, right? Not to play the devil's advocate to my devil's advocate, but they weren't spreading the Black Death in the Middle Ages, you know, via airline travel, right? So it's a double-edged sword, this modern society, when it comes to disease transmission.
I do think that it's, like wartime, a huge test of leadership, though, at multiple levels in any society. And this is where I have to, you know, once again, start watching myself.
I've been trying to figure out how to factor out a known element, a known variable here that I think could be relevant. And it's my age.
I'm 54 now. As I always say about every age I've ever been, I've never been 54.
So far this coronavirus not a whole lot different than 53 and i hope not a whole lot different than 55 will be but as i think any of you who've lived any period of time knows you know every few years i mean let's just put a random number every five years a new layer gets layer gets put over your vision, your lens, the way you view reality. Just another layer based on experience and accrued wisdom and emotional trauma and everything that is life.
Nostalgia is a big lens that gets put over your eyes as another layer at a certain point. But by the time you're 54, you have a bunch of those layers over your eyes.
And it's a known issue if you look at the past. I mean, older folks romanticize the past.
They get nostalgic. They talk about the good old days, you know, before you kids with your fancy phones and your texting and your social media.
I mean, we had to actually go talk to a girl face-to-face in my day. Made us tough.
Rake the leaves without a leaf blower. Use an actual piece of money to make a phone call.
And that made us strong and you weakling. I call it get the hell off of my lawnitis.
Known variable here. So I keep trying to ask myself if the same data were coming through my vision here and the 34-year-old version of me was absorbing it and trying to figure out what to say or do, would I be coming to the same conclusions? And on one level, I hope not, because I hope I'm wiser and smarter and a little bit than I was then.
At the same time, I hope I'm not corrupted, if you will. You can't see this the right way.
But I'm trying to step, be a little self-aware. I hope that's a sign that senility is not yet setting in too badly.
Let me start off with my problem, though, with this tit-for-tat retribution cycle and my idea that I don't want to do any harm. I don't want to make anything worse.
If you're in one of your angry moods, and I get in those sometimes, you know, one whole side of my family is very emotional, and that's a big part of me. I keep it under wraps because it's volatile, to be honest.
My musical choices obviously give things away, but I realize that, and I've spent a lot of time in my youth making sure that, you know, you get a handle on this, and the Spock side of you takes over from the kirk side of you but i want to get up and i want to get some days and just and scold everybody or scold one side and not the other which i used to do a lot but here's the thing if you see this tit-for-tat retribution cycle as the problem the most important thing is that we throw a monkey wrench in it. If you do what has got us to this point already, gotten us, what has gotten us to this point already, you will just intensify the cycle.
That's how it happens. You play into it.
What's it feed off of? Feeds off of how angry we are at each other, how we won't listen to each other, how we become people that don't think the other side's ideas are wrong. We think that intrinsically the other side's people are dangerous to our country,

our way of life, our values, all the, you know, fill in the blank.

And remember, you run out of things to do when the other people are the problem, right?

When their ideas are the problem, we can talk about changing minds and education and all.

You know, when the people themselves are the problem,

the best you're going to hope for is some long-term re-education camps. It gets darker from there.
So there is no good path there. So on my angry days, I want to chastise people for not seeing things like that, but it's very important that you do this the right way, or otherwise I'm just going to turn them off.
They're not going to listen to me. And we deepen the tit-for-tat retribution cycle by doubling down on you know i just become one person that the other side hates whatever that might be and then i lose the ability to talk to you and talking to you is in my game the whole thing and and one again to get back to the getting angry part i get angry with people that make it out to be some sort of negative thing that you talk to people.
And I've heard from people on both sides that basically say, when you talk to these people or whatever, you are amplifying their voice, you're legitimizing them. We need to cut off all the oxygen to these people.
And I say, what people are we talking about? Because folks, I have a feeling, just my inner gut here, right?

Once again, this is not the logical side of me talking.

This is my mother's side of the family.

That there's a giant silent majority of people

that don't fall into the category

of the people that are really angry with each other.

And I think this coronavirus pandemic

we're going through here

is reminding us that our neighbor

with the different political beliefs really is a pretty good guy when you need one another's help. And it also starts looking pretty pathetic, what we fight over.
There are some weird elements in our society. If you try to break it down, if you try to sit down, because I've done this, right? I tried to sit down and figure out where does the heat come from where are the points where i mean if this is a giant forest fire we all live in now our current reality our political realm and it's much more than just the physical space it's the global digital space with the message boards and the comments after the news stories and everything where and why does the heat happen when we're the centers of of of ignition, maybe you could say? And folks, a lot of this stuff is money.
A lot of this getting us mad at one another is part of a business strategy. And I know this because I used to be in that business.
I hate to repeat myself, but I guess it's only fair when it's been years Since the last common sense program to point it out But back in my days in radio The last physical fight I almost got into With an adult human being Was with a program director over this question of heat Artificial heat I don't know what they call it today But it's not hard to to understand. Politicians do the same thing.
It's going for the cheap and predictable emotional response, right? The knee-jerk emotional response. Phones aren't lighting up.
Get a story on some politician's going to push a gun control act. Boom.
You can get people going easily. It's not because the radio station is all big on the Second Amendment.
They don't care about the Second Amendment at all. The radio station's the most heat-seeking operation you'll ever see.
How's the Arbitron book looking? How are the ratings? How many people are listening today? How many followed over to the next hour? How many followed over to the next day part much is the local media talking about us it's all very heat-seeking missile-oriented and if next week the consultant came in and said whoops everything's gone liberal in talk radio uh not only would the station shift over quickly bunch of those same hosts would too judging from my own personal anecdotal evidence.

Some of them, the ones I'd really respect,

were the ones who'd do it and not even change their name.

I knew a couple of guys would change over

whatever the station was hiring

and had the guts to not even change their name.

That's actually kind of cool.

Cool when you think about it.

Johnny Caravella.

Johnny Sunshine.

It's not nefarious. It's something that is sort of dictated by the format of AM talk radio.
I mean, go look at a time clock of it. Top of the hour news, little place, white space after that where the host can play, caller, traffic report, back to the host, back to a caller, bottom of the hour.
I mean, if you look at it, there's the white space with which a host can operate and maneuver around and be creative is short. Eight minutes, if you're lucky, from the top of the hour to the first break.
After that, it shrinks. Callers take you off topic.
And here's the killer. You can't assume anyone is sticking around at all.
Like you're having a conversation in a big old lecture hall and people are just walking in and out all the time. Everybody's getting in and out of their car on the other end of the radio.
So you can't take the ideas any deeper than the first level. And if you only have a tiny little bit of time and you can't make anything very complicated, well, what do you have left to work with if you're going to be successful in that medium? Have a story here.
They're going to take your guns away. And we're going to, I mean, there's a whole bunch of things.
And you can do the same thing with liberals. It's something that works with people.
It's not a left or or right thing but this is sort of connected to why i consider this to be one of the greatest blessings in my career ever to be have been able to do this because doing this taught me a lot about people and helped give me more empathy than i had i mean look i was a kid from los angeles california family the film business. So you can imagine that things were pretty liberal.
You go to school in Colorado and Boulder where things are pretty liberal. Come up here, be a reporter to Western Oregon

where things are thought to be pretty liberal. And in a lot of ways are, as every West coaster

knows, from the mountains to the sea can be pretty liberal. From the mountains, the other direction,

east, ranchers, farmers, much, much much much more conservative area resource extraction more of the salt of the earth traditional salt of the earth type people the people that like am conservative talk radio i spent 12 years on and off talking to them enjoying them learning what was important to them and exactly how important, having them convince me that they were right in a bunch of cases, having me convince them sometimes that I was right, but more importantly, in a lot of ways, understanding what was important to them. And sometimes it was even more important to understand how important it was to them, because you might not care about something where you live.
You might say that, oh, these people who think like that, they're wackos. But if it's really, really important to them, you better care about it.
That was that whole concept we said once upon a time. When you live in a country like this, you want to write off a bunch of people, something that's very, very important to a bunch of people? Well, that's not going to go over easily, right? If you're going to sell people something, you're going to negotiate with people, you better know what's really, really important to them.
I came out of talk radio, changed individual in terms of the way I saw. I mean, I think I was probably pretty self-righteous.
A bunch of things that changed about me, including having a real understanding of how many of the people who are conservative in the country are people who are being displaced by many of the very things I want to talk about in this discussion today. They are real world examples of people whose existence, as they've always known it in many ways, is threatened.
That's the easiest thing for a person to find common ground over in the world, right? My world might not be threatened like their world and your world might not be threatened like mine or their world, but we can all understand how serious we might take it if we felt our world was threatened. And if there was somebody out there who could say, hey, man, if you don't know, your world is threatened.
Let me tell you, hey, we got to take a break. Back in a second.
But hey, stick around. Your world is threatened.
I'm not kidding. Once upon a time, and this is how we used to explain it, because I was there during the big rise of talk radio.
We used to look at it as a kind of an art form. There was a there was a way to do it.
If you remember, if you're a talk radio show nut or anything like that, because talk radio today is always associated with radio because talk radio. But but there was a television version of it in the 60s.
A guy named Joe Pine started. I think it was Joe Pine who started this whole approach that is pretty much the way it's done today.
It's a combination of like shock jock and political analyst. And Joe Pine was the first guy I remember like that.
He was a Marine Corps guy, a chain smoker. I think he'd lost a leg.
And he'd have a show where he'd smoke on the show and you'd have chairs and he'd invite some wacko who would get on the other side. And eventually they'd call each other names and all.
And it was it was theater. Right.
It was a kind of a that's what I'm saying. There was an art form to it.
It was it was a kind of strange entertainment. And it was novel also.
So fast forward, though, like anything, there are imitators. Now, when I was a kid, you also had the legit what I'll call the legitimate version of this.
You had guys like William F. Buckley who would do Firing Line.
I love Firing Line. Firing Line is a perfect example to me of when you say, we're going to have a televised show where we talk about issues.
I mean, that would be, and that's from a conservative viewpoint, Firing Line. They were open about that.
But the conversations, no matter where you were on the political spectrum, made you more intelligent, more informed, understand better arguments, and forced you to up your game because it was at a high level, right? They weren't calling each other names. And they most certainly were not talking about the other side as though you need to hold up some kind of a cross and keep them at bay.
This is key because in a country like ours, heck, in most countries that are representative systems, it's all about convincing a decent number of the people who aren't like you to join with you over something if you want to get anything done, right? So when we alienate everybody on the other side of the political fence, we are making it harder to achieve our own goals. Now, what you might say to me is, Dan, are you talking about compromising with Nazis? Are you talking about compromising with Stalinists and Maoists? No, but I think we've made a mistake here.
And it has to do with straw manning the other side. Are thereis amongst these trump supporters yeah we saw them at these rallies right jews will not replace us there sure are and are there maoist stalinist communist types in the in the anti-fif people sure yeah there is how much of the of the great mass the silent majority right does that represent i'm gonna go with not that many And I think the coronavirus and the pandemic is reminding us how silly some of these arguments we have with each other and how much of a luxury it is in softer, more peaceful times to have those kinds of conversations where we can afford to alienate our neighbor because we don't need to share toilet paper and canned goods with them at the moment.
Getting back to the idea of the heat, the ignition points. Somewhere along the line, the art form that was the Joe Pine, Morton Downey, Wally George, I mean, that whole tradition.
At some point, it goes away from something that is obviously clownishish where you laugh at it for its clownishness but nobody takes it seriously to blending the shock jock with the william f buckley firing line character and that blended into something where we went and and I don't know when it exactly happened,

and I will say that the people that were best at the art form

usually still, and I could listen with a very, very trained ear,

could still, and they knew what they were doing

because they could still walk that line,

but the people who were much more, much less deft at the art

and the craft would blunder right over the line

and not even see it, where you're not saying

that other people's beliefs are the problem. You're saying that they are.
That's something that once upon a time could be part of a conversation where minds could be changed or commonalities can be found to something where the other side's dangerous for the country, not because of what they think, which is changeable, but because of who they are, which is not. And if you think who they are is a Nazi, or if you think who they are is some Maoist who wants to start lining up people against the wall and shooting them and putting them in gulags, well, then I see what you're saying about the no compromise thing.
But, you know, I know people that would have happily voted for Bernie Sanders, and I know people who did vote for Donald Trump, and I don't know any Nazis. And I don't know any Stalinists.
I do know grandmothers out there who voted for Donald Trump. I know one who specifically didn't want to vote for Hillary Clinton.
Does that make her a Nazi? If you vote for Bernie Sanders because you don't like Trump, does that make you a Maoist or something? And Bernie Sanders isn't a Maoist anyway. These are straw men.
We've picked a fight with moral absolutes here that you can't compromise with because they're evil and then pretended that everybody in the other camp is one of those people. And they're not.
And in fact, by lumping them all in together, you make it harder for us to isolate the truly, you know, the people on the true fringes that need to be isolated, right?

You give them cover by throwing all the good grandmothers who didn't want Hillary Clinton, for example,

in around the miscover like a giant herd surrounding the Nazis in the herd.

Same thing on the other side.

But what this has done is set the terms, conditions, protocols, and all these sorts of things

for how we deal with each other politically and when we talk about current events and issues. And it's been done with an emphasis towards emotional upheaval, drama, anything that would make a reality show a hit.
That's what the people that are framing our public debate want. And if you think it's some sort of right-wing conservative phenomenon you're not looking very hard i mean who can forget and if you haven't seen it go look at it on youtube when the daily show host john stewart the comedian went on crossfire the venerable you know uh many years old show where the two sides got together and this was in front of a live audience and destroyed the franchise.
It never recovered. It didn't, it fell apart.
I think it was like in like two weeks. They can't, I mean, it was the most brutal example of the emperor has no clothes exposure of a, if an entertainment format disguised as political discussion I've ever seen.
And once that artifice was exposed, it couldn't go forward because it became apparent that what you had here and this is what stewart was alluding to if i can avoid putting words into his mouth um but we had said for many years on common sense these are professional political dividers they are people that divide their countrymen for money for profit and now if you say no the you know if you firmly believe this day and that's just free speech i understand that but i've known too many of these people uh and and this is what stewart was alluding to too in this industry who don't give a rat's rear end about any of that this is all about ratings and again there's nothing wrong with that that's a business this is how one makes a living this is how one succeeds at their chosen crap blah blah blah but there is a subsidiary effect on all the rest of us that i would suggest one can look at now as not being good for all of us i mean when you for example refer to everyone within half the electorate as racists because they may have voted for a guy who racist also may have voted for, I don't think that helps anyone. I heard one of the right-wing talk show hosts once, and I believe we talked about this back on the old Common Sense show.
He, and this was not a joke, because, you know, I've got trained ears for this, was referring to the followers of another one of the mainstream Democratic candidates as vermin. Not one of them, all vermin over and over and over again vermin i kept thinking how ironic it was because i believe the host is jewish and he knows that vermin is a term that the nazis used in their propaganda for jews and untervention and everything else so it was particularly upsetting haven't forgotten that because if you're worried about your country's unity and us being able to talk to one another again how do you walk your way back from where we are now if we're already calling each other vermin how do you walk your way back from vermin does your neighbor that you're helping right now during this pandemic or that you're ready to or that's ready to help you? Do they look much like vermin regardless of their political point of view? Why would somebody

use a term like that and still be on, you know, the airwaves? I mean, back in the, I mean,

because they're successful at it. They know how to push those buttons.
And vermin is where that

professional felt they needed to go that day to get what they needed that day. But it's a long

time ago now and it's still out there because I'm still talking about it it moved me emotionally so the energy that's put out there to sound like some hippies but the energy that's put out there has never stopped generating an effect some program director or consultant would say bam baby that's what talking about. But folks, how do you walk your way back from this as a society? And if you don't walk your way back and you keep heading where we're going, where do we end up? There's a great letter, and you've heard me quote it before if you listen to the history show we did on the early era of the nuclear weapons development time.
the famous letter at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis from Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to John F. Kennedy, where he was basically saying, we're at the point where if this goes any farther, we can't turn it back.
We can't get back from this point, right? There's a no reverse situation. It's like when you go past that point in the parking lot where you pass over those spikes, And says, if you back up now, it's a famous note though.
It's called the nod of war speech by some. So Khrushchev says something like, well, if you want war, then nothing left to do but have war.
But then he says, quote, if however you have not lost your self-control and sensibly conceive what this might lead to, then Mr. President, we and you ought not now to pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied the knot of war, because the more the two of us pull, the tighter that knot will be tied, and a moment may come when that knot will be tied so tight that even he who tied it will not have the strength to untie it.
And then it will be necessary to cut that knot. And what that would mean is not for me to explain to you.
End quote. Remember what followed Marius and Sulla? Yeah, you get a Caesar down the road if you don't break that cycle now i should point out there's a whole bunch of caesar supporters since about caesar's time to now that make the case that in his own way caesar was making things better and restoring some level of liberty and autonomy to these people because the constant political warfare that the republic had descended into well you you could scream all day long that one side or the other was fighting for this or that liberty or people but the reality on the ground is lots of killing destabilization lists of people to be executed i mean that was no life so in effect i mean there are people who argue that caesar destroyed the village in order to save it basically things get bad, somebody could do that again very easily and come out looking like a peacemaker.
Come out looking like Mike Brady from the Brady Bunch. Tell the kids, you don't get to play with your little republic anymore because you can't do it without fighting, so you're all grounded, go to your room.
So when I think about trying to dial back the hatred for each other, I keep trying to figure out how you counterbalance the fact that there's a financial interest in people keeping the heat level at a certain point, right? To keep callers, keep people angry, energized, tuning in tomorrow. When I think about the tit-for-tat retribution cycle going on in the later Roman Republic, that's one variable they didn't have to deal with, right? The confrontational social media that if you trace back its lines of evolution, you know, I like to say it's the combination of professional wrestling and political commentary, the Joe Pine style.
And what's funny is I'm a free speech nut and i look at joe pine as something a fantastic interesting uh a one-off i mean he's a fan i said earlier that everybody liked him but that's not true a lot of people at the time treated him the way they treat right-wing talk radio show host today but he was an original and in that sense you turn around and you go, that's an artistic creation. That's something that in the vast pantheon

of stuff that's available, he's an interesting...

It's the imitators that kill you.

It's the line of development that goes off in directions.

Any society can find one Joe Pine interesting and different

and, you know, he's interesting to listen to.

It's a mirror, it's funny, whatever it might be.

But what happens when you got joe pine clones everywhere

pine clones it sounds like something that falls from a tree maybe it did i mean if if society can suck up one of these people as as an interesting outlier i think they introduced him you know the the lovable but opinionated joe pine what if everybody's telling everybody else to go gargle with razor blades.

Sometimes things that are fine in one number

become a problem when you, if you have one bee around you, that's just pollinating your flower out on your porch. If you have a thousand of them, it's a different situation.
You go inside and you shut the door, don't you? I think you could make a case, and this very well may be the same thing going on with a former talk show host that happens when you talk to a surgeon and you say, what do you think we need to do for this problem? And the old joke is a surgeon's gonna say, well, I think you need surgery for that. So maybe I just see this media development in everything.
But I feel like our entire culture is impossible to explain unless you tie it to the growth of modern media, radio, then television, then the internet, and the whole thing. I mean, how do you explain any of the, how do you explain the Kardashians, right? How do you explain the president in the same way that they had said that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the first made-for-radio president and John F.
Kennedy the first made-for-television president? Donald Trump is, without a doubt, the first made-for-21st-century social media reality TV president.'s he's well, he's a reflection of the times, isn't he? He's he's the equivalent of what two time Democratic presidential candidate. Adelaide Stevenson said in a democracy, people usually get the kind of government they deserve.
Well, in a reality TV era, you can have a reality TV president who knows how to push the buttons amongst a population that's a reality TV era population. I am not a fan of this president, but then good luck finding the president I was a fan of.
I just like this one less. And for those of you who might wonder why, it's always so funny to have people go, why would you not? Folks, look, I'm a supporter of the old republic, which sounds like speaking Shakespearean English in this political climate right now when everybody else is speaking urban slang.
I said to my wife, I said, that makes me like an old Jedi, doesn't it? Nowadays, a remnant from the old republic. And she looked at me and scoffed and said, if anybody's a Jedi in this household, it's me.
Which I had to meekly agree with her, which probably proves I'm not a Jedi. But you know what I'm saying.
I mean, I have these weird ideas that it probably, they were probably destroyed forever with the 9-11 attacks. They were already sort of, you know, people would hum and go, okay, Carlin's talking about, you know, dialing back the military again or losing our rights back in the 1990s.
All that seems so quaint now,

doesn't it? But there's a long tradition in the United States of not being particularly well disposed to anybody who acts anything like a king or acts like they would like to act like a king. I mean, we just don't.
Strong men leave a weird taste in our mouths. Anybody that would be, I mean, so President Trump's attitude toward the office is repellent to me.
I don't want any, I mean, he's my, no, again, I don't, I'm not a leader guy. To me, he's my, he works for me.
Get me a glass of water. How many years ago did we do that show, right? You're not my leader, you're my employee.
And at the moment, I'd like to fire your ass. For those who wonder about impeachment, well, hell yes, I would have been for impeachment, but that's a weird question, because I would have been for impeaching a lot of presidents in the past, and I feel like had you impeached a bunch of presidents in the past, they would have known you can't go past a certain line, and we wouldn't have this happening.
We wouldn't be talking about it now. But, you know, that's an old-fashioned criminal justice sort of an idea anyway, isn't it? If you actually enforce the rules, they stop violating them, maybe.
Or at least we're very aware of where the line is, right? You'll fudge it as much anymore when you had an impeachment four years ago over this issue. And for those who were making the argument during impeachment that this is all political, that drove me nuts, too.
Made me feel like I couldn't discuss things with people without having a long conversation to just sort of get to a foundational level where we could have the discussion because I wanted to say, when is it not political? What impeachment or near impeachment has there ever been in the United States that wasn't political? how could you even have one that wasn't political if you're waiting for the non-political impeachment

to have presidential oversight, you're never going to get it. I would make a case that there's a decent argument to be made.
Is that enough disclaimers? That the mechanism itself in holding presidents accountable relies on his political opponents or her political opponents to keep him honest that that the politics of it is part of why it's supposed to work because you have a political vested interest in not letting the other guy go over the line right you'll nab him you'll make you'll make the case to the people you'll you'll beat him in the next election you have a vested interest in seeing that the other guy doesn't do anything you could make political hay for, right? He's crossed the boundary. I don't know.
That seems like a mechanism that you could argue needs to be there and would be impossible to remove anyway. So when you call an impeachment political, I always want to go, yeah? I mean, what's the alternative to that? And I should point out, folks, impeachment, as we all know now, doesn't mean removal from office.
It means a trial in the Senate. If you don't think there was enough smoke to warrant a trial in the Senate, just ask yourself how you would have felt if you had that much smoke around the last guy in office, right? If it was Obama in office and you had that much smoke, are you telling me as a Trump supporter, you wouldn't have said that you would have said, oh yeah, I don't like this guy, but you know what? I don't see anything there.
Forget it. You would have had all the Sean Hannity's out there talking what a travesty this is.
Blah, blah, blah. The heat, heat, heat, heat.
Money, money, money, money. Ads, ads, ads, ads, ratings, ratings, ratings, ratings.
You you know what i'm saying here where part of the reason we're where we are now is because of all of our political hypocrisy we don't hold our own people to the same standard we hold the other guy to and it has led to a diminishment of the standards overall we got us here how does Dan Carlin say anything to fix that 15 years ago i'm talking about systemic reform in a system that is beset by corruption and controlled by a duopoly that are beneficiaries of that corruption that's a systemic problem it's a systemic problem that's hard to fix but you got working in your favor the fact that it's neither a conservative or liberal issue to have a clean government, right? It's something that theoretically

the vast majority of people on both sides of the spectrum want. So you got something to work with

there, don't you? Get up in the morning, get excited about something. I bought a lottery ticket.

Something might happen, right? Like I said, 9-11. Now I look back on it.
Looks much more like a

stake in the heart for my kind of an idea. But you know get the hell off on my lawn right besides the political hypocrisy though this is the way i look at it folks this is the most powerful person the president of the united states is the most powerful person in the history of the world i want that person on a short leash no matter who they are don't you i mean what's the opposite of the world.
I want that person on a short leash,

no matter who they are.

Don't you?

I mean, what's the opposite of not wanting that person on a short leash?

Give that person some room.

I mean, folks, if you want oversight,

I can't think of a more important person to have close

and maybe oppressive oversight on

than a person who can order a nuclear strike.

Sorry, I mean, that's just me. Again, I feel like I want to yell and say, don't be dumb.
Don't. We're children arguing about this stuff now.
Coronavirus, thermonuclear war. It's a reminder of how large the stakes actually are.
This isn't a game. It is, however, a profit thing.
So, I mean, we have to be, we have to understand that there are people out there who no matter what the situation is going to be, and this is not a left or right, I mean, you know, we think of talk radio as a right-wing thing, but this whole format has spread to the television and to TV outlets that have branded themselves the other way. I mean, MSNBC, I don't know if they do it anymore, but they were, they're branding and their stuff was lean left.
Rachel Maddow,

all that sort of stuff. I mean, that's the other side.
CNN, without ever saying that they were

going there, are completely in the tank. And what the problem with that is, is that now how can you

trust them at all? I used to say, give me CNN and I'll fix them. Now forget about it.
It's a

brownfield because, I mean, how do you fix that? If the president did something good, would CNN

tell me? I don't think they would, in which case, why am I? I mean, then they're not the news anymore. So see how this is sort of this, starting with Joe Pine and Father Coughlin, but I mean, we've started this whole long road to where we are now.
And it's interesting how it's gotten in the international bloodstream, right? This is all part of something larger though. And this is what was tripping me up in the 35 or however many attempts I've done this show already was trying to tie this into what I see is the larger issue.
It's one of those things that's, that's so obvious. It's almost not worth bringing up, but it's, it's, it's, it's sheer obviousness that allows it to sort of hide in plain sight.
It's like talking about gravity or the spinning of the earth. You know, you don't feel the spinning of the earth.
I do have a couple of friends who swear they can see the spinning of the earth. But, you know, it's one of those things that we just all know is going on.
We don't even think about it. But I think all of these things on my Glenn Beckian whiteboard here, my Acadian finger painting uniform thing um all of them sort of factor upwards

towards what i think is the greater cause and i think we all understand it i think it's helpful

sometimes to remind us though we're living in one of those time periods that future history books

are going to going to have in the same sort of vein as the industrial revolution or the age of

discovery or the agricultural revolution you know we're living in the information revolution

Thank you. your history books are going to going to have in the same sort of vein as the industrial revolution or the age of discovery or the agricultural revolution you know we're living in the information revolution it is so internalized that we don't think about it but we all understand intrinsically that these kinds of things are noted by historians because they're times of rapid transition right often destabilization sometimes the words creative destruction may apply we did a whole series didn't we wasn't that one of the spines in the mongol wrath of the khans thing right the idea of um of of time periods that come around and have to pay the bill historically speaking for future generations progress or prosperity or whatever and i think asked many times, how would you like to be the generation that had to pick up the tab, right, for somebody else's future wonderfulness? Well, maybe one could make the case that it's one thing to say, you know, 15 years ago, we live in the information revolution, get in on the dot-com thing, buy yourself a PC and all that when you're at the moment where it all seems wonderful and brand new and wonderful.
But we may be entering into the phase now, folks, where we see how destabilizing 21st century technology tears apart 20th century frameworks and systems and governments. I mean, look at the canary in a coal mine states right now.
North Korea doesn't even apply. But any place that is trying to sort of invent or work on their own version of a censored internet, that's a canary in a coal mine state because it's a place that's culturally controlled enough to feel the destabilization stronger and earlier than a place that's more open like the U.S.
or Britain or Western Europe. You see the Irans, for example, or China or Russia, right? But make no mistake about it.
They may be the canary in a coal mine, but whatever they're feeling, we're feeling too, and we'll feel more of it over time. This whole question of elections and bots and Russian this, All all of this is connected to this we don't always necessarily draw the straight line though to the information revolution that all this sort of stuff is a subplot of if you look at your history books in the future um it'll be interesting to see when they decide to say this information revolution begins.

And I think we all tend to think, you know, computer era,

although I tell my 18-year-old daughter all the time,

this whole world that looks totally solid and concrete to you with the texting and the phones and all this stuff

is younger than you are, right?

But to me, I think if I'm writing the history books,

you know, I'm going back to Cleopatra

to talk about the information age starting,

but no, in reality, I think radio.

I was talking about Roosevelt's fireside chats

the other day where the president was able

to speak to the American people on the radio

and a huge, I mean, a third of the country

would tune in or more.

It's almost as wild as the president

having his own social media account

where he can talk directly to everybody

through something like Twitter.

Part of the information revolution. And I think when history gets compressed in the future and you have, you know, something like 400 years in 25 pages, I think you're going to see, it's going to look like the information revolution starting with radio happened very quickly.
So radio, boom, then television right after, boom, then the cable stuff, boom,

then the internet, boom,

then everybody has a PC and then phones.

And I mean, I think it's gonna all look like it was bam,

you know, really quickly.

That's bound to exert a pressure that,

like gravity is hard to feel on a day-to-day basis in the same way if you went to somebody back in the time machine to interview them and say, how does it feel to live in the middle of the Industrial Revolution? They may have a concept that, wow, we live in wonderful, amazing times and look at all these new buildings or whatever, but you still can't put yourself accurately in time. I mean, perspective's impossible when you're in it like that.
But see, here's the difference that makes the current information revolution thing maybe a little different than these earlier things like the Age of Discovery or the Industrial Revolution. All of those eras had a crazy period where transition and change took off and accelerated, destabilizing the worlds around them.
But eventually that pace of change and disruption leveled off. And it gave the

structures of society a chance to regrow like Ivy around the new reality, you know, built for that new reality. And you got the creative part of the creative destruction tradeoff.
But the information revolution has at its core you, one of the pillars of it is perpetual innovation at not just the current speed, but a perpetually accelerating pace of innovation. is it possible to even imagine change leveling off in terms of its speed much less declining

to a point where okay uh that whole information revolution's petering out now the structures of

the societies around the world leveling off in terms of its speed, much less declining to a point where, okay, that whole information revolution's petering out now,

the structures of the societies around the world

can now reform like the ivy around the new structure.

I mean, when does that happen?

And if it does, well, I mean, in a funny way,

and maybe this is hyperbole,

but I mean, you get the feeling

that if that wasn't a very, very, very gradual slowdown,

society would collapse, wouldn't it? That's science fiction right there, isn't it? But the reason I bring up the information revolution is a lot of what we're going through now, we may be just along for the ride on. You know, hold on tight, it's going to be disruptive and there's nothing we can do.
And when you say, well, what does disruptive mean? Well, that's when you say, how about our ability to hate ourselves on social media and tear apart your country and your countrymen and to take the intellectual level of the discussion to something a fourth grade playground bully would recognize and excel in. I mean, that's the part.
This is where I get angry again. And this is where the waking up on the wrong side of the bed, I go way beyond Kirk, way beyond Mr.
Brady into, you know, spitting anger land. And both sides do this.
I can't have a conversation with people anymore because everybody is so everybody. That's a, you know, folks, I hope you'll excuse the dumb comment when I'm about to call everybody dumb.
but Hunter Thompson 25 years ago talked about something he called the new dumb and I've thought long afterwards

was he seeing something that was the new dumb

or was he just seeing the old dumb or what the hell is the dumb? I can't decide. And I've spent a lot of time thinking about this, whether or not, you know, get the hell off of my lawn, kids, whether or not young people today are not living up to the minimum standards in terms of what it would take to be playing their role in the utopian informed citizenry role.
The reason I don't think that's viable is because I see too many adults and people my own age who seem like idiots. But the other possibility is that there used to be a level of informedness or involvedness or paying attention and understanding current eventsness that was OK in a less complicated time.
And as we proceed in this information revolution and as things become more complex all the time, maybe the average Joe or Jane level in society is not on top of it enough to play that role maybe they're fall falling behind and the society is sort of showing the strain of that certainly we are getting into that situation where where people are becoming obsolete very quickly i mean already i've got an older daughter who can't keep up with my younger daughter's discoveries online

and what she's...

I mean, you start to see how quickly somebody could be outmoded.

And then people like...

You'll hear people like Elon Musk talk about automation and everything.

That's not only not far away, it's happening now.

That's part of the destabilization we're going to have all over the place.

What does that do to how we treat each other? What kind of country we have? You know, how you make ends meet and who you vote for. It's all interconnected.
See, you should see my board here. It's all part of the plan.
And when you factor it all down to ground level, somehow, miraculously, it says George Soros. I don't know how that happened.
The point is, is that, you know, when you try to have a political conversation with someone right left up down doesn't matter where they come from i feel like so few people know anything real or any of the facts involved that i've lost the ability to have a discussion with them you feel like you have to teach them things before you can then discuss and i guess what i'm saying is is that i didn't want to say say that I had no interest in that, but it puts me in a position of talking down to people, you know, of being patronizing. And I can't stand that.
I feel like it makes me uncomfortable. I'd rather not have the discussion than to have a discussion where I'm treating you like a child.
And in your defense, if you are one of those people, how the hell would you figure out what's going on? I think this was something we were talking about the last time we did Common Sense shows, is how often I was being asked by young people, can you please tell me what you read and what I can read to get the truth, right? Get some real facts that I could trust. Everybody's trying to get a clear view of reality in an era where we've never had so much chaff being thrown around to obscure the wheat kernels amongst us, right? It's a, and this is what I was talking about, about maybe we all have to be smarter than voters had to be 50 years ago, because how the hell do you negotiate your way through all the fake news? Trump may have the phrase but there's some truth to fake news all right i think we all understand that i think that's the reason it took off not because it was all fake but because there was some fake news and somebody called it out and the problem with calling something fake news is now there's nobody trusts anything i think this is a legitimate problem though you can't really say well the population is

completely uninformed those idiots when it's become almost impossible to be informed i'm

about as savvy a news consumer as you'll find because i used to really i mean five papers a

day was but it doesn't matter right i'm having a hard time if i'm having a hard time how some 18

year old just waking up to the news and trying to become informed and and waking up to everything

that's going on that's the age of discovery for kids when they become adults and they begin to play their role as informed voters in our society? What the hell are they supposed to do? Who the hell are they supposed to listen to? God forbid they turn on the TV or the radio and start listening to those people because they'll start calling the other side a bunch of, you know, unprintable stuff. Libt libtards nazis i mean great another political awakening right how do you break that tit-for-tat retribution cycle folks how do you walk over that bridge and grasp the hands of the people on the other side because you need them when you turn them into that kind of i mean the natural human reaction is to get defensive ladies and gentlemen and we are encouraging people on the other side of the fence from us to get defensive when we need them and as i said earlier when it would be wonderful to really isolate the fringe people that none of us really want as a person who believes in the build a better mousetrap capitalism 101 idea that the market abhors a vacuum, I do have some hope that someone out there will realize the incredible gold mine that it would be to own a news station that actually had as it's, you know, connected to its viability and its profit margin, reliability and quick corrections of stuff that was wrong.
In other words, if everything out there is graded on the clickbait era curve, because I'll hear from people from like NBC News and said, Dan, we resent you throwing us in with all those other crappy outlets. We're legitimate news.
I would say graded on the on the curve, the clickbait curve, I would trust NBC News a lot

more than a lot of those other sites out there. But you know what? I grade on the old curve, the one I grew up in, where you couldn't name, for example, any other source but you.
We'd never say back in my day, reliable sources say, or NBC News' competitor is, I mean, if it wasn't a person from our network that reliably has, in other words, by those standards, there's nobody out there working like that anymore. First of all, it's too expensive.
But what if that's what paid the bills? The ability to say, guess what? You know, if you were reading market vacuum news, you knew ahead of time what the reality on the ground was before all those other outlets were forced to follow us, you know, and correct their lies when reality proved them wrong. I guess what I'm saying is, is I do have some hope that somewhere something like that could arrive and make all the other outlets instantly obsolete.
And of course, that's dangerous to have one news outlet. So in an industry that is known for copying, right, the same way my program directors used to want heat in my market because it was working in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, an obvious market vacuum like that filled by, well, one outlet is simply crying for a competitor.
So maybe wouldn't it be fun to have market forces working in the favor somehow? You need to twist the coin a little bit here. Twist the coin is an is an interesting analogy but you know you kind of flip things around and have the profit motive encouraging reliable information confirmable information truthful information and honest analysis otherwise we lose our shirts right otherwise the stock price drops i mean it's the same way where i try to think of as as I said, the sources of heat and ignition in our system.
And you have all these outlets who depend on making people angry and playing up the outrage du jour and all this stuff for ratings, money, commercials, you know, people tuning in again. What if you had, and this isn't a solution, this is an attempt to throw sort of a mirror on the current problem.
But I mean, imagine if there were high profile public peacemakers out there, right, in society, on the radio, on the television, on the, you know, people who were people who found the commonalities and in a rainbow and unicorns, because I'm a cynical guy, but I'm saying, what if what if there were public peacemakers out there who brought people together? and because they did this, they made millions and garnered millions upon millions of listeners? Because you get that same thing I just talked about with the copying of the truthful news station outlet, dynamic work in there, too. All of a sudden, you'd have every program director going, listen, that shock jock, name-calling thing, yeah, that's out.
Let me tell you what's working in all the big cities. It's this peacemaker stuff you know you want to make any money you want to get good in this business you want to be a star work on your gandhi martin luther king jesus approach a little bit better polish that up so you're really good at it the people are eating that up right now making the talk radio days you always have these callers, and I never knew their last names.

The last name was always from somewhere.

And for years, I had this old codger

who is certainly in his grave somewhere now.

Roy from Crow.

Crow's a little town in Oregon.

Roy from Crow.

And about 90% of the time,

go to Roy from Crow,

and the first things you'd hear out of his mouth

would he be yelling,

Dean, we're all a bunch of propagandized saps. Sometimes I feel we are, folks, and I don't know how if you decide us being a bunch of propagandized saps is the problem.
How we fix that. Corruption, duopoly, systemic problems in the U.S.
government system, that all seems like child's play by comparison now, doesn't it? And now with the coronavirus, even the problems of us hating each other seems a little like child play, although I will say this. My mother, who, as you longtime listeners knows, carries a very strong version of the chicken little gene.
I carry the recessive version of it. She thinks all this is going to turn out a whip around into a positive thing.
We're in the storm, and on the other side of the storm will be the better times. That's what the chicken little gene is.
It's connected to a human personality type, I'd say. Going back to maybe the Noah's Ark story, these people who think we're going to have a terrible time in the future, but it's going to sweep out all the deadwood, going to take out the corruption, the sin, remind everybody how much we need each other and love each other.
We're going to put each other's roofs back together on our houses, and it'll be a better world afterwards because everything will be in perspective again, right? One could paint the Mongol conquests in a similar light, and oh, wait a minute, some people have. Here's what it boils down to, people.
And this is the Spock side of me and the Kirk side of me together. We are in this together.
There is no place for idiocy long-term. And we have to, I mean, look at the need for experts now, right? Look how ridiculous the lambasting and the denigration of expertise is and how bad that looks now as we have people on the front lines all over the place now and you're thankful as hell for their level of expertise.
They toil in anonymity most of the time,

paid a ton and worked a ton for an education

so they could be working in the front lines

and at this moment shine when society needs them.

Doesn't it seem a little silly now

to constantly lump them into political conspiracies

and people who were indoctrinated in

college blah blah blah blah blah you know go to your room mike brady stop being a child the problem with wanting the adults to take over is twofold one it's a sure sign that you've got a bad case of get the hell off of my lawn itis but also you start sounding like you want caesar right? Bring me the adults!

Now, as I've said, I haven't liked the last bunch of presidents. I think the current occupant in the office is worse than they were.
I think you have to be able to take off your partisan blinders and admit that. Otherwise, we're not going to get anywhere.
You have to be able to judge the occupant in the White House from a neutral standpoint. Otherwise, you're going to be a political hypocrite, which is going to get you exactly where we are right now, the tit-for-tat retribution cycle, where my person can do no wrong and your person can do no right, and even if they do, I'm not going to admit it.
Well, that's a recipe for Caesar. I think the challenge of our times right now is going to be finding an option for the silent majority to invest in.
You get the feeling we're a little like Weimar Germany right now where the actual government, the legitimate parliamentary state that's operating is discredited amongst many of the general population right they they have no faith in it they have little allegiance to it sometimes many of them feel like it's something foisted upon them by the victors in the first world war but the alternative once you get outside of the parameters of the discredited parliamentary state are the people on the fringes of both sides, the people fighting in the street, the Nazis and the communists. So you're essentially telling the average German person your choices are this discredited government you have no faith in, that got to the point that so many people are communists and Nazis now, or the communists and Nazis.
What's your choice? That's not a choice between the devil and the deep blue sea that's a much you know you have more options and fewer choices in that deal don't you like i said um either we find a way out of the tit-for-tat retribution cycle or we follow it to its logical conclusion over the last couple of years i've begun to wonder if maybe this isn't one of the great challenges of our time and it's weird it's hidden like camouflage because of its banality if you want to talk about a challenge like the challenge in the early 1950s of trying to live with the early atomic years and you had those physicists that would say things like humanity has to grow into a higher level of greatness if they're going to survive this challenge. Well, that's something that's easier for us to make sense of, right? It's an enormous threat.
It's an enormous question. I mean, that's a human challenge that appears to be the kind of thing that we could all get our mind around pretty easily.
But if somebody said something like, if we're going to avoid some terrible conclusion in the future, we're going to have to grow into a higher level of human greatness when it comes to the way we treat each other online in social media, for example. It kind of sounds ridiculous, doesn't it? Because you go, okay, it's not that big of a deal.
But if you look at it as one of a thousand pinpricks that are altogether a part of the destabilization caused by living in this information revolution, the magnitude of what it might do to us becomes clear, right? It's part of the mechanism. It is in and of itself not a mortal threat but all taken together um we end up at a place where we are incapable of making good decisions and good responses and sometimes the the history and the current events that you live in affords you that luxury.
And sometimes current events and history has a way of catching up with you, reminding you how serious things could be and forcing the adults in the room to the fore. And the problem like that is, you may find in that reality that you get delegated along with most of us to the role of child.
So either I guess we grow up and act like adults, or the majority, the silent majority of adults out there does, or we're going to get to a point where we're going to beg for somebody to come and take over and run the show like an adult because the children have just destroyed the playground. Common Sense with Dan Carlin Audio Liner, June 2005.
Written by Dan Carlin, voiced by Bill Barrett. These days you can hardly turn on the TV or the radio without getting so mad you want to break something.
All these simplistic solutions and worse than useless rhetoric that give no context to what's going on. I mean, all the partisan voices.
Rush Limbaugh, Al Franken, Sean Hannity, Bill Frist, Ted Kennedy, Tom DeLay, Nancy Pelosi. Does it make any sense? No.
Hey, where's the common sense? I have mixed feelings about what you just heard. My choice was to not release it, to put it out with all the others in the ash heap and just say, we're going to try this again.
There's a better way to do it. There are things that I wanted to get in there that I didn't get in there.
It's too utopian sounding, too pie in the sky for me. And it depends on what side of the bed I wake up on.
So I can record it one day and then I'm listening to it another day and trying to evaluate it. But I'm in a totally different mood.
I'm going, what the hell was I thinking that day? Must have woken up on the optimistic side of the bed or the pessimistic side of the bed or what have you.

The squish head side of the bed.

But from a moral standpoint,

it was pointed out to me

that even a potentially imaginary colleague

should be allowed to win one out of every 35 or 36 disagreements. And if there is a Ben, he liked every one of these versions we've done.
Now, I have pointed out to him, the way Elwood Dowd would to Harvey the White Rabbit, that it's not his ass on the line.

He's a potentially imaginary persona, right?

He could just be in my head like a part of my personality.

I'm the one on the line, right?

I have to defend these ideas or lack of them, right?

You didn't say anything about this, Dan.

What about the Chicago Black Sox of 1919?

You conveniently left that out, right?

I'm going to write that up on my blog. It will be featured prominently.
You shall be shunned. I mean, it might have been smart, don't you think? Looking back on it, I'm listening to it going, you know, a smarter person would have realized you should just tie in that whole idea of how valuable information from a profit standpoint, reliability is where we make our money, would be at a time of a pandemic? I mean, how badly do you want market vacuum news when you're getting conflicting information from outlets that are both supposed to be giving you reliable information? They can't both be right, right? I totally left out an example that I'd used in other versions that I thought was relevant, so maybe I'll throw it in here.
This is a common sense addendum. Now I've become addicted to the addendum idea, try to shore up the weak points in the show you just heard.
But when the Yugoslavian state, nation state, was breaking up in the early 1990s, and I was in TV news, we did a lot of localized stories. And what that basically means is taking an international story and putting a local twist on it.
So you use the footage that the network people would send you of what's going on in Bosnia, for example. And then you would find people in your community who were like expatriates from Bosnia, or who were professors who focused on that region.
I remember we had when we called all the time. I had a Rolodex.
It was the old days. I had all these experts on the Balkans, the former Yugoslavia, and all these people who used to live there.
And we would reliably get them together for stories and localize that affair. But as a history nut, and you know, a lot of the history I love has the Balkans as one of the prominent prominent regions and that's one of the famous feuding areas of all time you know if if spike tv was

doing top 10 most famous feuding regions in the world you know the balkans would be right there

famous feuds um and yet before the yugoslavian state fell apart uh from what everybody told me

both in those stories and what i've talked to yugos formerians, Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, Albanians, not to start a war here or anything, but I mean, all these people had had an opinion that people got along pretty darn well before things went really south and that it had been the best of times in Balkan affairs in a long time. I mean, there was intermarriage going on between groups, all kinds of things.
And when the economy went south and when people's livelihoods were threatened and when anxiety arose, politicians who could play on those fears rose up too. And you got a dynamic going, right? We talk about a tit-for-tat retribution cycle.
In some of these states, you could have a grievance and then a play on the grievance.

I mean, it's the point being that if you wanted to tie in all of the people, you know, we used to do common sense shows.

There was one called Jobs for Average Joes.

There was another one called Boot Camps for Buttheads. And they were both about, you know, oh, we did another one called What About the Losers? Revenge of the Gangrenous Finger.
It was always about what do you do who society leaves behind? What do you do about those people? And you can't not care about them because they'll rise up and pull you right back down if they're left too far behind. And a lot of these people are being displaced because of massive historic changes in the way things are, right? The destabilization we were talking about.
Well, those people vote a certain way. I mean, talk about in this country winning the rust belt.
Well, why do you have a rust belt? Because there's a whole bunch of industries that used to be shiny, new, gleaming and empowering the economy that are rusting now and towns that are disappearing what about the people who live in those areas we talked about what if you thought your whole way of life was going away what if your town is going away what if your kids are moving away what if your life is drying up and what if a lot of it has to do with stuff that's um well you could say that's out of our hands due to historical trends, or you could say that is a massive challenge for really high quality leadership to try to adjust to and ride like a wave, maybe, right? A soft landing from the information revolution, maybe, if you will. But I would suggest, as we said with that Weimar Republic or the other two choices ideas, at the moment, we don't have something, a system that will allow us to choose and elect someone.
Marcus Aurelius couldn't get elected today, right? Especially if he were bald. That famous professor who said, you know how much the American presidency relies upon image? Because you will never have a bald president again.
And the question was, who was the last bald president? And it's a trick question because the answer, of course, is Eisenhower. But the professor would then say, aha, but he ran against Adlai Stevenson, a man who was balder than he was twice.
Then you have John F. Kennedy.
I mean, folks, this is all part of the same continuum. It seems like a lifetime ago, because for most of us, this is before our life, but that's how long it takes trends to play out.
And that's why you don't feel the gravity. And that's why you don't feel the earth spinning.
It takes too long. We're in a cycle that's been going on for a long time now.
It's why when I say this is a recipe for Caesar and you go, oh God, that's hyperbole. It's hyperbole if we're talking about it tomorrow.
Look at where we are today versus where we were 20 years ago and now project maybe 20 years in the future or maybe now that things are speeding up, we could make 20 years of the reverse of progress in 10. All right.
If we're going to ride this wave, I would like a better surfer than the one we have now. But to be honest, you know, I don't see any Laird Hamiltons out there at the moment.
And if we had a Laird Hamilton, if he was bald, we wouldn't elect him. So, you know, what are you going to do? As I've said many times before, before trump is a symptom he's a symptom of what ails the country and you could have the counter trump the pendulum swinging in the other direction and that person could also be a symptom of what ails the country just from the other political side of the ledger but the people voting for essentially if you boil it down essentially the same disaffected dissatisfied reasons i mean if weimar germany's governments running just fine everything going okay with the system as it works right nazis and communists in the streets have no traction with the silent majority in fact let's be honest they honest, they never were the majority.
But you don't have to be the majority. You just have to be disaffected and determined enough.
Reach a critical mass, right? But that's sort of... I mean, it's funny.
I remember on the talk radio show, Ed from Cheshire was his name. And he'd call every day and I'd be preaching, about this sorry don't mean to do but i mean we did someday but because i'm way ahead of my time and he's kind of laughing at me he's going dan nobody's gonna be ready to face the bayonets symbolically speaking risk all they have while they still have stuff he goes you got to be a hell of a lot worse off than we are today.
He probably told me this in 1994. You got to be a hell of a lot worse off than we are today before you're going to be ready to destabilize things to that point and risk what you have, right? Well, of course, what's implied there is there will come a time when enough people don't have enough to think it's much of a risk at all.
I feel like there's a lot of legitimate things that I could slam both sides for right now. When I get angry, like I said, when I get spitting mad, I just, I want to, I want to hurl invectives myself, right? I'm no better than any of those people on the end of the news stories and the message boards labeling trollish comments at each other.
get it i try to lean back though and realize look sort of a golden rule thing this whole freedom and uh and national unity deal i mean we got a lot of people in this country that are really different from each other really different and uh and while i think we can all agree that there are some extremes of which none of us are fond of and most of us revile uh there's going to be people who have very different opinions that we do very different but aren't in those extremes and we're going to have to learn that we have no choice but to live with each other over that and even if you wanted to split into separate countries a generation later your kids are to grow up probably about, probably going to have it in two generations. You can be right back where you were, right? Now you have two Americas and it's the exact same thing.
The pen is mightier than the sword. You can't kill ideas that way.
So we're going to have to live together, not just with the two sides of the spectrum that we talk about all the time, but all of the multipolar sides of the spectrum we never talk about. and you start with the bigger ones like the libertarians and the greens and then eventually you're into like micro parties but they're all out there we're all part of this we're all in this together we're all operating in in this environment we're all in this pool some people pee in the pool and it's only four of you the rest of us are all affected too right i was gonna go out on some you know really deep comment but the pee in the pool comment seems more for how my mood is today but i said i lost the um i lost the argument with the mythical figure so we're releasing this show but bottom line folks and this is what i think it boils down to because there's going to be a million critiques in everybody's mind about you didn't deal with this or this is a big problem.

You can't just whitewash that.

They're all out there, right? We could go have beer and soda pop together and we could have this conversation. It would be a wonderful night.
It would be just like the old days. We could have a good political discussion, go home, disagree, friendly, whatever it might be.
but if we can't figure out a way to do it that way then folks we will if not

you know hanging together on this deal, we will surely hang separately. Be careful.
It's partisanism. How the hell do you say that?

Partisanism.

And it's completely preventable.

You just need a small injection of common sense.

Stop partisanism before it stops you.