Разговор с «@buckleycarlson»: семейные истории и культурная ностальгия

i hope so uncle buck i'm glad you're here so you're on i didn't even know you were on twitter and then the ghouls decided to you know destroy my son who's got the same name as you and because in our family there are only like four names and everyone's required to use one and uh and i think they mistook your twitter feed for his i don't even know if he has a twitter feed and um and all of a sudden you became really famous and a couple of your nieces called me uncle bucks on twitter i had no idea i was like i didn't know that how long have you been on twitter not very long since 2010 but mostly as a reader yeah and now that there's nowhere else you can get news except for uns review we're allowed to talk about uns review on this uh other than uns review uh the only or revolver news the only other place you can get information these days is on x so if you're not on it you're not getting information i had never actually rendered many opinions on x yeah but i started doing that recently oh did that change yeah it did it did and it's been so fun actually you meet some interesting people on x there's a lot of creativity on x i agree with that there is a lot like i wouldn't know how to make a meme if my life depended on it but i sure appreciate them other than that there are some seriously well-researched smart people who've got a lot of interesting stuff to say so and it's addictive i try not to spend a huge amount of time on it i actually have work to do so but it will suck me in but which you beat alcohol you beat cigarettes but twitter's hard as much thankfully i've got a lot of nicotine with me good that's um are you armed by the way i always i always assume you normally have a gun right on the table but i don't see it sadly i had to fly through i had to be groped by tsa this morning at dawn it was awesome they uh yeah what's your strategy for that my strategy used to be hey say please and thank you um because you work for us right they love that message yeah they do i've seen you try to enforce manners anglo manners at the tsa station doesn't work no and actually recently since they've instituted the uh real id and they have you stand and take your picture i know they have their your picture everywhere else and they have your biometrics um i took a principled stand a few times and said oh no i don't think i want a picture well every time that's happened they managed to discover that i have a duplicate ticket or no tsa badge and i have to go back to the front of the line so i don't do that i'm captain compliant i go through i'm super courteous when i walk through uh so they broke you're like winston smith at the end of 1984 they just broken you're like two plus two i think that's five is it five you just have to surrender at some point exactly if you want to fly anywhere these days so no i'm not armed sadly but uh i'm in the great state of florida i don't think i've ever seen you unarmed but you're this is a safe place um normally you have this little thing on the table and uncle buck what's that backup planner but so you've actually been broken by tsa i don't really think there's any other solution to it i'm still angry about it right oh for sure legitimately i find it to be one of the most humiliating experiences in american life and i do still say to everyone around me after i've gone through the groping i say do you feel safer you do say that every day you offer every comment in the line it's amazing how few people actually will take the bait they can smell the non-compliance get away quick big time like he should be deplatformed boy there's a lot of that on x i had heard that you could say whatever you want it turns out that's not true it's not true no and people have no sense of humor oh they don't they don't like jokes anymore no yeah can i just give you my strategy for tsa when i get groped please a little the left yeah no totally yeah like um i'm gonna touch you uh around the belt area sir i'm like bring it on baby you know and then just act like you love it and it's so creepy that it'll abbreviate the experience do you go through the x-ray machine so they can keep the file i try not to i'm so paranoid about all of that stuff i'm getting crazy and i'm like oh i'm gonna get some weird you know lymphoma from the from the magnetometer or something i just don't i can't be healthy right no it can't although i figure once you've surrendered and you can't do anything in american life without surrendering to some extent even emailing or texting you know that other people have it so at some point you should just adopt an attitude no i i think you're absolutely right i mean we've we've both been tamed by the women in our lives and just like stop making a fuss but i always think these are the people who ran the burn pits at camp lejeune yes where our father was stationed and uh in the marine corps and never joined the class action never just he never joined the class action that's right not a litigious man not a litigious man i was saying something today i'm 56 i've never sued anybody someone said people are slandering you gotta sue and i was like i'm committed to a higher principle that in my culture we're not into lawsuits at all and i'm never gonna i want to make it to death and i hope it's you know a while from now without ever suing anybody that'll be a personal victory for me and my family and really only our family will appreciate it because the culture we grew up in is just gone doesn't like it never existed but i'm honest yes oh you've noticed yeah i have noticed has it been a net win or loss for the country would you say after we won world war ii and we got to luxuriate in our freedoms and and all the economic prosperity that has led us to be freer and able to speak our mind no no it's actually tragic and if you have young children as you do i guess they're no longer young but you really see it with the way our children have grown up and the restrictions they've had on thought and speech especially i mean we grew up at a time as you know where i don't think anybody's ever heard this question before in a in a school setting one ask any question you want in fact you're encouraged to ask a question i was always taught and ask any question you'll never get in trouble and then that silly little ditty you know sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me that was real and none of our children were taught that no no american child goes through life thinking that they can deviate from the script that they can offer some opinion that's counter to the authorities that are in front of them and that's tragic and it obviously has a huge effect it stifles imagination and creativity um which are why they've died i think actually that slogan which if you're under 50 you may not be familiar with but it was a staple of well england by the way and then the united states it's child sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me it's actually been inverted where we've endorsed sticks and stones violence is no big deal we're totally for violence just blow up the drug boats whatever are they drug runners who cares kill them and by the way charlie kirk got shot well yeah because he used bad words like he deserved it people believe that so sticks and stones are fine but words are the threat like what is that it's terrifying actually it's not a western orientation no no it's not um but it is prevalent here now in the west it's everywhere so you've it looks like you've decided not to play along i am not playing along and i'm fortunate because i've grown up in an in an atmosphere where actually i was encouraged to say what i believe i don't have a lot of governors in my life especially now that my child is old enough not to be embarrassed by me daily and i don't have i don't have to fight with his various academic institutions that charged me a lot of money and tried to wipe out the boy and wipe out the creativity and from my son uh and that was a you know 12 14 year battle that i had to fight and also i so i don't really care there are very few people whose opinion matters to me in the end of the day i have a constituency basically of one and that's the woman i love and live with and my son and then the flately expanding circle of you and other family members beyond that and every one of those people is perfectly apprised of my deep flaws and my history so and and your amazing virtues and as one of my children said to me well in fact all of my many children said to me and my nephews when you made your public immersions on twitter the legend of uncle buck is this it's now out there for the public to appreciate and by the way they loved it that's so nice i guess the key is just not thinking about it i don't think about that's actually i was thinking i thought you might ask me about this only because it's a new thing in my life um i likened it to shooting rabbits on a sporting clay course the most accurate you'll ever be is if you're just instinctive you just pull your gun up and you shoot that's totally right and so i don't have a lot of time to think about what i write i've managed not to write anything too embarrassing i don't write things that are intentionally provocative but i also have no trouble expressing myself and there's so much absurdity out there that needs to be addressed i think so and i think that the most important act of defiance is not violence i have come to believe in my age that violence actually doesn't doesn't seem to solve i don't really know when the last time violence solved a problem it's also prohibited to us as christians so like there's that but you can't kill innocent sorry but i do think they're right to worry about words yes actually words do change the world the new testament changed the world period the old testament changed the world i mean truth changes everything and you may not live to see it come to fruition but it still is the most profound thing you can do to fight tyranny is to tell the truth about tyranny yes do you feel that very much so and i think and there's a huge amount of people in this country and across the world who do and it seems like they'll aside from podcasts like yours and they're very few there are few opportunities for people to express themselves honestly unfiltered well 2026 is likely to be the year that some companies will find patriotism they'll discover it during the biden years corporate america thought hating our country was the thing to do so they did it now that we're in a new era they are coming back to reality it's not real though it's a trick they don't mean it at all black rifle means it and they've been doing it since day one not just discovering patriotism they were founded on the premise as this country celebrates 250 years of existence black rifle is brewing bold american roasted beans built for people who believe in the values that made america great so kick off 2026 with roast made for patriots not spectators and for the new year black rifle is launching cold brew coffee cans in just black and vanilla powerful smooth and made in america want something even more explosive try grape x or tiger strike their new zero sugar energy drinks with 200 milligrams of caffeine that's about half the output of a nuclear power plant but it's clean energy for americans who mean business visit black rifle dot com slash tucker use the code tucker for 30 off or find black rifle at walmart target kroger wherever great products are sold black rifle coffee veteran founded america roasted it's america's coffee you you talked about growing up obviously we grew up together we're the only children in our family we had the world's smallest family it's like three of us for a while and uh and then we've lived next to each other our whole lives until pretty recently and you talked about telling the truth that your kids school i should just say this because it's one of the things i admire so much about you we sent our children to the same school obviously lived i forgive you well my wife convinced you to send yours to the school that our kids went to and of course it turned out to be a sub awesome school very liberal crazy school but you know it's our neighborhood school whatever we did it let's not regret it but um you were the only person in this rich person school that we sent our kids to to confront you know with politeness but firmness the administration of the school about what they were telling your child which was like totally bonkers like men can become women and hate yourself if you're white and all this stuff and boys are bad testosterone's bad masculinity is bad and everyone else was like okay well it's a prestigious school we'll just go along with it you were like i know and i remember all the moms kind of hated you but were also sort of attracted to you just to be honest about it and they were like oh i can't believe your brother's always making a fuss and you were like yeah i don't care why did you do that you're the only person my son is the greatest blessing in my life and it's the sole purpose it was my sole purpose for a long time it seemed it's the only thing that that could be important it's the only enduring thing when people ask me when i was a kid probably because we had such a happy thoroughly fucked up childhood but really happy thanks to our father that's right so extraordinary in every way and made it very clear that we were the number one priority in his life i mean and it's like the busiest guy i've ever known involved in so many things and yet we were without a doubt his only focus and or his primary focus and he would do anything would do absolutely anything so literally there are no boundaries and and so that seems normal to me that was my reflexive attitude about my son well i think the first thing i encountered when i took him to that school that pretended to be a nice episcopalian school with its own chapel i notice um they were anything but christian in their attitudes and it was it was the middle of the obama administration when everybody got super empowered about you know indoctrinating children on a level that i don't think i'd ever seen i don't think that america had ever seen it no and you pay all this money because there's really no chance that you would send your children to a public school in washington i thought didn't um there's actually an argument probably for sending your children to something other than what we sent ours to anyway i remember showing up it was right after the election and i'm not a big bumper sticker guy but i had a bumper sticker probably the only other only bumper sticker i've ever owned and it was a series of four memes and it was pro-god pro-life pro-gun and then it had the obama horizon with a cross through with a slash through it yeah it was in the back of my chevy tow and i pulled up and dropped my son off at school and the visceral reaction from the entire teacher platoon that was outside was obvious and so actually i made a commitment right then and there again i was kind of embarrassed to have a bumper sticker on my car like who does that but uh i kept it on there religiously for the next like eight years until the car died uh yeah until one of our friends actually took that car that i had tried to flip and destroy many times and unsuccessfully was unsuccessful and he flipped it and broke his neck yes he did he's okay he's he is okay but he was yeah it was sober too yes he is he in his defense uh he he was dead sober he was going hunting and it was in the morning it was in maine and he hit black ice yes yes even having grown up in rural maine he somehow was an expert at dealing with the top of a pine tree off with the vehicle i know it's i drive by it all the time i say a quick prayer every time i get by um he's unbeatable on every way so he's gonna outlive us both for sure what a wonderful man so that set the tone and then the other and then the fact that they have your child captive you pay all this money they should have a classical education that in this case was billed as something that was rooted in the christian church and yet immediately they adopted and started all these clubs that were race-based they my son went there in fifth grade so he was 10 and they immediately started not only indoctrinating all the kids there but making them feel horrible about themselves segregating kids by race there's a school where you know all the entire it's in the middle of the swamp so it's like the the richest zip code in all of dc and so the diverse richest in the united states yes and the diversity that they had they talked endlessly about diversity and the diversity they had there was color only everybody was in the same industry everybody was working everybody was driving a fucking range rover i wasn't but you know they were um and yet anyway so it was stifling and confusing for children and i just wasn't going to sit back and allow them to do that and i tried to be reasonable i was just persistent and they boy they didn't like it they actually despised me in fact i guess i've encountered that a few times in my life but boy they they heartily dislike me yes and these are the kind of people who probably do have voodoo dolls back home oh 100 they're all wiccans no they were my back pains were not from being overweight or from not having a tough core it was someone sitting some booger eater sitting at home you know stabbing me with a fucking dagger and excuse my language sorry no it's fine no you're right it just it was so interesting because i saw it obviously you know i'm your brother my wife is your biggest fan so it's like of course we supported you but i just and but i was not as brave as you not even close and i felt exposed because i had a public job like i didn't want to get you know whatever i felt a little bit constrained but you're just you were braver than i that's just a fact and but the reaction from the other parents all of whom liked you because everyone likes you but they were they didn't want you even the ones who agreed with you to keep saying stuff like this because i think they wanted to ignore it they wanted to fit in more than they cared about their own children's moral and intellectual development i mean that's just a fact that and also i think um cowardice breeds self-loathing and which turns into hostility like extreme hostility i saw this during covid in the in the same place that cowardice cowardice breeds self-loathing i think people who are cowardly hate being cowardly they know they're being cowardly and they hate themselves for it especially men or people who claim to be men and then that manifests itself in extreme hostility i mean i saw everybody's had their experiences during covid but i encountered the most extreme hostility when it was if i'm i never wore a mask i mean i was compelled to wear a mask on an airplane other than that i never wore a mask i just wouldn't i refused and i would travel a lot so i would go through like chicago airport and be the only person that i ever encountered with no mask and it wasn't the authorities who wanted to tackle me it was the other people like going past me on the people mover on the escalator who looked like they wanted to fucking stab me in the face right and then and then when i would i i write for a living and i need to get out in in the world and nature and you know it's a tough business it's a solitary business so um i'd take my dogs twice a day and and run them in nature oh you have dogs oh yes i have a few dogs i have five dogs which is i i think actually about the ideal number yeah is that right it's about the ideal number yes of course i said that every time three four five is the ideal yes it's the best but i would encounter people outside on a windy day in the sun walking and i would of course didn't have a mask on and they would all have their dutiful masks on and it would inspire the fact that i didn't have a mask would inspire in them this kind of hostility that i've never encountered anywhere else and yeah it was obvious um i think something like that was going on at the school very little episcopal day school because the other parents knew that this was bad and when their kids started to become trans or get into drugs or whatever they sort of know like it's not all your fault you know you can't blame parents for everything but it is partly your fault and they sort of you can kind of blame parents i try not to judge people but i do definitely judge them about their parenthood that's about the one thing i judge people all right although trying to be nice i know i mean you don't actually have total control there are people who have aberrant children that they're i believe are not responsible for it but i think the majority of the weird child behavior stems from shitty parents or parents who were occupied with other people's problems rather than their children's problems yeah what you're saying is true yeah we've got a new partner it's a company called cowboy colostrum it's a brand that is serious about actual health and the product is designed to work with your body not against your body it is a pure and simple product all natural unlike other brands cowboy colostrum is never diluted it always comes directly from american grass-fed cows there's no filler there's no junk it's all good it tastes good believe it or not so before you reach for more pills for every problem that pills can't solve we recommend you give this product cowboy colostrum a try it's got everything your body needs to heal and thrive it's like the original superfood loaded with nutrients antibodies proteins help build a strong immune system stronger hair skin and nails i threw my wig away and right back to my natural hair after using this product you just take a scoop of it every morning in your beverage coffee or a smoothie and you will feel the difference every time for a limited time people listen to our show get 25 off the entire order so go to cowboycolostrum.com use the code tucker at checkout 25 off when you use that code tucker at cowboycolostrum.com remember you mentioned you heard it here first so you i should just say for the record that um you were scoffed at for having the pro-life pro-god pro-gun anti-obama bumper sticker at a christian school at a christian school right no pro-god no pro-life at christian school but um then you decided to take your defiance another click up the ladder by driving your son to school on a big twin harley in carpool line which i personally saw and he was like a little kid and there'd be all these range rivers and vulva you look over be like there's uncle buck with the ape hangers i had him strapped to my chest with a bungee cord it was safe no it was it was i mean safe is a relative term and our families we know there's no such thing as safety there's only destiny yes and i we both believe that but safe okay but it wasn't even a safe safety violation it was like a cultural violation yes and all the moms would be you could you could tell they were a little bit turned on but also very kind of like oh what is this why did she i saw that with my own eyes many times what was the thinking there pure celebration of joy and freedom that's it that's how i try to live my life you're called to be joyful in fact you're you're commanded to be joyful totally agree you are you are what is that susie has that thing all over our house first thessalonians rejoice always never stop praying yes it's my favorite right no you're absolutely right and and philippians 4 4 which is always be full of joy in the lord i say again rejoice yeah yeah i that's just such a wonder it's funny that that's triggering to people whatever it was you were triggering people and i felt like it was such an act of bravery because it's one thing to like you know stand up in the congress and say something unpopular or even like go into battle but to stand apart from your neighbors at the 50 000 a year episcopal school in northwest washington where there's just so much conformity yes that ticks balls well i appreciate it i don't think i really thought of it that way i'm so used i don't know i've lived my life we were as you said we grew up that way and what do you mean because i did say okay so i haven't looked at a lot of your i don't i'm not on twitter that much because it's it's too upsetting to me but um i did go and check your twitter feed which i i thought was amazing and uh but some of the responses are like oh of course you feel this way because you had such a horrible childhood it's like wait a second what do you people are very personal that way on that attacking your childhood what did you think of your without getting you know too specific but like you described it as happy i actually had the best childhood i'm really sorry for our children that didn't have the childhood that we had i agree with that had because it was a just a lesson an adventure all the time you could define your own boundaries as long as you were as you went to school you were respectful to your parents and you showed up for dinner uh there were really no other boundaries nope nothing that was it so and i loved you and i loved our father and i loved our mother so um we had a happy home life and it was creative and interesting it was in a beautiful part of the world that was at that time very well run in california in fact i think it was the cleanest most efficient state uh in all 50 and it was obviously the the center of creativity in in the country and in the world and it was fantastically beautiful everywhere i mean it has every single climate we lived near the beach and we got to go swimming in the ocean and we had a bunch of dogs and we got to explore we got to explore with our friends and experiment and we also went i'm sure you recall it was a much different time we could actually walk across the border into tijuana mexico and uh engage in all sorts of interesting it wasn't the most wholesome place no it really wasn't i was suddenly thinking yeah is revolution avenue still around is it still accessible to american kids i think the whole thing is so different now you know and not in tijuana a lot but i think it's like a huge i think it's like bigger than san diego it's controlled the drug cartels i don't know i shouldn't say that i've never been against mexico i've always liked mexico obviously mexico has done more harm to the united states than any other country not even close but i still like mexicans and i still just have happy memories from mexico i'm like we'll never be against it just for i don't know reasons of memory but uh i wouldn't go there to tijuana no and i wouldn't send my 12 year old child there either uh no but we were that's right we were allowed to do basically whatever we wanted as long as we you know were polite and family loyalty was at the center of everything of course yes yes um and it was interesting our father was involved in so many interesting pursuits he had interesting friends yes our friends were interesting he included us he treated us like adults where it was appropriate i guess all the time he taught us invaluable things that no one teaches their children that's for sure i mean yeah and you you've used the word creativity a couple times it felt to me looking back i never have thought about it until recently as i see the decline in creativity and the awards given to people who are totally non-creative which is almost everyone in our professional class like zero creativity and the creative people are penalized and that's made me think that maybe the saddest change is the disappearance of creativity and the abundance of it in our childhood like that was wait i never heard anybody certainly not our father ever talk about how rich someone was who gives a shit ever plus no one noticed everybody was pretty much in the same boat we lived in an expensive area we had a nice house but it was not absurd no one had five million dollar houses no one had 50 million dollar houses either there wasn't such a thing no there was literally not such a thing so the measure was and there was much less economic anxiety obviously it was a different economy but still the values were different in creativity the the ability to create something out of nothing that was like really prized yes especially if your father gave you the what was the the james bond cookbook oh what was the other one oh yeah i'm sorry i guess they're yeah they're illegal now sorry well he had a library he had first of all he had a real library like almost a public library in our house and he'd read every book in it and he was very serious about it and it was talk about catholic tastes i mean broad tastes universal interests he's just like nothing he wasn't interested in and there was a book about every possible thing and there was a ton of extremist literature on all sides he didn't buy any he wasn't like he was an extremist he was not an extremist at all but he was like really interested in knowing what people thought and why and this revolution happened and he hated the soviets but he had tons of soviet propaganda literature which was interesting yes he had tons of left-wing and right-wing mostly left-wing actually and he was not left-wing but that was back when they were creative when people on the left actually right were artists and and thinkers and they were open-minded he would always defend people whose politics he hated if they were creative he would say this guy's an asshole i think these ideas are horrible but man look at the songs he wrote or the novels he produced or do you remember that yes very well clearly yes like that counted in your favor yes huh and that's that's kind of gone it seems like it so i i didn't even know this until you i can't believe we're actually doing this interview i'm so glad but um i'm so glad to thank you could we could i ask you an alb question by the way of course best nicotine product in the universe why thank you buck i'm glad you noticed and uh yes i did and i'm generally this is the problem i have when i'm talking i'm generally double barreling or sometimes triple barreling those are nines yes i'm looking forward to the 12s so on the question of nicotine would you say and i know it's hard to assess yourself but would you say you dick around if i like it i like it yeah i really like this a lot although it's so this is the question i have where does one tuck it i know where people tuck this in yeah i get that they stuff it yes they stuff it by the way they should be more up front on the labeling on the zen i know they should actually tell you that that's why it tastes like that's why it's like dehydrated they forgot to tell you it needs mucosa but a particular type of mucosa to activate yeah they got it wrong i think they're expecting the bangladeshi guy in the convenience store to tell you to hand you the ky and the surgical glove and just be like i think you know how this works it's like when they have those little crack pipes at the counter with the flour in them and like no it's not a crack pipe i think they're it's an incense burner it's a whistle so i think they're expecting like if you're using zin you know how this works yes you know what i mean that's a good point so that's so i actually feel like a bit of a an amateur asking this but i talk to people and all of a sudden i feel like my biden my upper palate is like coming out your biden my biden you know like the fake teeth i have up here anyway sorry i try to rotate them around because there are parts of my gums that get neglected and yes i believe in kind of sharing the wealth yes plus there are different taste buds throughout the entire topography of your tongue and cheek well it wasn't that long ago that many americans thought they were inherently safe from the kinds of disasters you hear about all the the time in third world countries a total power loss for example or people freezing to death in their own homes that could never happen here obviously it's america people are recalculating unfortunately because they have no choice the last few years have taught us that remember when the power grid in texas failed in the dead of winter yeah it happened and it could happen again so the government is not actually as reliable as you hoped they would be and the truth is the future is unforeseeable and things do seem to be getting a little squirrely so if the grid does go down you need power you can trust last country supplies newest product is designed for exactly that the grid doctor is a 3300 watt battery backup system that will power full-size appliances medical devices and tools with clean reliable power it's even emp protected that means it's shielded from lightning solar flares or an actual electromagnetic pulse event there's no gasoline no noise no emissions you just plug it in charge it from the wall from your vehicle or from the included 200 watt solar panel and keep going day after day taking care of yourself and the people you love is solely up to you and the amazing thing is with these new batteries we use one at home by the way is they're super easy to use there's no inverter you need to figure out on the front of it or anything like that there's like three buttons it's very easy and totally reliable highly recommended we literally use one as i said visit last country supply.com to shop the grid doctor for power you can trust this winter last country supply.com are you surprised since we're only really a year apart um so we grew up and our father always treated us the same there was never like listen to your brother it was it was a fully egalitarian household like in a way that also doesn't exist anymore i'm sure that was frustrating as the oldest i'm sure i never even questioned it it it was like we had the same bedtime same rules there were never any difference at all in the way that he treated us same buddies which is one of the reasons we've always gotten along our whole lives because he treated us fairly yes by the way if you want to make people hate each other treat them unfairly oh i've noticed like institute affirmative action or dei and you will have like serious race problems but we never had anything like that it was a pure meritocracy in our house with a quality at the center of it but the most intuitive accidental father there has ever been i mean this was a man who did not strive to be a dad no and he ended up being pretty much the best father ever the details of my conception have always been a little bit hazy but i did get the i don't think they were legal i don't want to know and i'm sure they were creative everyone's dead so it doesn't matter i know i can't let's sorry oh i can't even think about it but my strong impression just from like comments picked up over the years is that was not intentional at all like the whole thing was not intentional that sentence it was intentional by god yeah it was god's plan i totally agree with that the closest i ever got to asking pop about it was he obviously married like a complete lunatic and he was such a smart person and he really understood women and loved women and really paid close attention to women like why did they love him they loved him he loved them not just in carnal ways but like he thought they were really interesting and listened to them all the time and he had such deep wisdom about women and so i once boy isn't that he was the deepest on women and it was out of love like true love he thought they were amazing but uh and he also loved them in other ways but but whatever but anyway i once said to him like given your deep knowledge of women how could you have married a really crazy one like how did you do that and he goes they're upsides that's all he said i was like i don't want to hear anymore it was just clearly never boring right no i guess that was it you know i'd go with yeah well they're never boring once you engage with them they're like amazing and but she had a lot to say yeah especially in public settings yeah i can't yeah i can't imagine yeah i can't even get it i'm sorry i don't even know where we were so one thing i want to ask you was when we were kids and like everyone in our family i know this is like so forbidden this is more forbidden than israel but like everyone in our family smoked cigarettes like everybody and everyone they knew smoked cigarettes and like the question was filter or non-filter and of course our family was strongly on the non-filter side because like gay or straight yeah yeah i mean come on you used to call them straights yes i remember camel straights are the best cigarette ever made yeah that's literally true and pop would always say it's important not to have a filter in your cigarette because when you're behind enemy lines you can field strip it you can field strip it yeah you can field strip it you break the the butt done it many times roll up the paper flick it away then the enemy will never know you were smoking american cigarettes they might they'd only know you're american if you died and they saw your dental work it didn't make a lot of sense but anyway but the in our family they were you know people were very strongly in favor of of cigarettes and tobacco it sounds so forbidden now but and then we were all convinced this is like so bad because america's killing itself and if we can only get people off this everyone's going to live forever is it a little weird and i'm not you don't smoke i'm not endorsing smoking that strongly but i'm considering going back i am too actually but but whatever and for this for this i reached yesterday i literally stepped over a dog i was talking to my girl stepped over a dog to join her in a booth in a restaurant and i reached in my pocket to grab my zippo it's been 12 years since i've had a zippo in my pocket seriously i was about to light a smoke we'd had a pizza it was fantastic and i was like i know what's going to cap this off a camel straight can you even buy them anymore even in south i'm lying i actually know even in tobacco states do you know how much it costs oh my gosh for a deck of cigarettes how much it's 12 bucks in south carolina it's 21 in the district of columbia yeah 21 bucks for a deck of smokes i i walked into a circle k the other day my girl still smokes god bless her and uh i walked in and i bought her some cigarettes and the guy said id and i laughed i pulled out my wallet and i said it's funny what's funny and i said that's what the guy said i said well i've been buying cigarettes since i was 11 and they cost a dollar do you think it's funny to make fun of people in the retail business so dude i'm not making fun of you i'm making fun of the stupid but you had no sense of humor but you can buy benzodiazepines cheap you can buy weed in any store you can buy it online you're encouraged to smoke pod you're encouraged to do mushrooms you're encouraged to do mezcal or any other stuff but you're the greatest pariah in america you're probably encouraged well you are encouraged to like have touchy-feely love with the people in your gender but if you're a cigarette smoker you're they literally the dirtiest pariah in in america actually that attitude is is overwhelming now but it was still around 12 years ago when i quit smoking and if it hadn't been i would have quit smoking probably 15 years ago i would have him and i got i mean the obvious so you smoked in defiance i did i smoked aggressively with joy i did i loved smoking and it made me smarter it made me nicer yeah made me a lot happier uh not only your constant companion but also like a self-defense weapon or an aggressive weapon if you you know you've got a lit cigarette on you you're a force to be reckoned with i would say plus are you ever alone when you have a cigarette no you sound so much like our father because he of course he did once wield a cigarette uh in self-defense i had to do that too you did it too i most certainly did maybe not on someone's cheek but on their wrist i held their hand because he was holding my hand i remember it's like my second job and he was a guy who had a married guy christian self-avowed loudly christian and he had cute kids and a nice wife and he like put his hand on my knee and i said can you move your hand please and he didn't oh he's hitting on you yeah at a company picnic like the first week i was on the job and i said please remove your hand from my knee and he didn't so i grabbed his hand grabbed his wrist and put my cigarette out on his hand it was a saturday afternoon and i had had some cocktails but i also felt completely justified in doing that i did and he pulled his hand away and i remember sorry to go down this rabbit hole but i uh the net i thought about it soberly on sunday and monday morning as i was going into the office and that there could be real repercussions for doing this he was like the chief of staff of the organization it was a political organization and he wielded a lot of power and i went in and i remember i was doing some copying some document and i was standing in the break room next to the xerox machine and he came up to me and he said i can't believe you put a cigarette out of my hand i said i can't believe you touched me and you wouldn't let go that was it and we had like a staring contest and then he like you know his lip girl and he looked down and walked out i never heard anything about it he never told anyone right so i think it is fair i think that's called gay bashing no i think you are um recklessly or yeah you're you're yeah you're without proper defense when you don't have a cigarette you should have a cigarette with you at all times even if you don't smoke that's my attitude seriously i want to bring back smoking because actually smoking without the filter is probably pretty flipping good for you i i have a lot of views on this i don't want to articulate because i don't want to seem crazy but i tend to i'm sorry i mean we were certainly raised thinking that and our father considered filters like a really bad thing and uh and you know smoking does you know whatever our real mother died of lung cancer you know you can and she smoked unfiltered pell-mells uh she engaged in some other activities that may have been responsible for her cancer i think when you're in the dark side and you get cancer it makes sense what do you mean i think if you lead a life of extreme narcissism yes and you are completely self-focused and one it's unhealthy two it's it's unhealthy outlook and the people around you suffer yes but i can't imagine you as an individual don't suffer and now that i'm 54 and i'm old enough to actually witness people who've lived their lives this way and i mean self-focused all the time not one of them is healthy physically yes mentally it's stifled it kills something in someone it's like it's like i'm not to attack people who aren't able to have children but people who've chose men who've chosen not to have children they reach a certain age and they are intractable in ways that are damaging to them and those around them she was not a man but she had that same problem and i think i think she like was drowning in like me yeah drowning in like me exactly totally asphyxiated on herself so you've made reference to dogs you've conceded that you have five you think five is the perfect number you were describing your childhood and you pointed out the presence the omnipresence of dogs and uh as a highlight why are dogs important well dogs i think i've thought a lot about this aspect raising children with dogs i think it's important because your children are the center of your universe as they should be right but the last thing you want to do is convey that to your children so i mean that's a good way to fuck up your children so having dogs around and instills in them they have their first my first loving relationships were with my very small family of which you're half and dogs we had a lot of dogs around all the time all the time and there are other people i mean have written endlessly and talked endlessly about how wonderful dogs are but i don't think they talk enough about how wise dogs are and how dogs are clued into like a communications channel that most people are not picking up um my dogs know what i'm going to do long before i do it they know exactly my intentions it's weird if i if i'm working in my office and i've got five four dog beds in my office underneath the bed underneath the desk and if i get up to go where does the fifth dog go uh three of them are shamefully small so two two of them two of them anybody else's brood i'd say those are pseudo dogs but actually one of my small dogs is an incredible relentless actually you know her she's a gift from you yes she is um a hunting dog that's my defense she's a hunting dog she's got autism yep bad bad she is the most well-meaning yes she is she means well 100 good-natured yep pretty good in the quail field i will say yep she also has unerring uh aim she will hit you right in center mass every time she sees you i have more scars from that dog on my face in fact in the morning when i wake up i now have started putting lightning collars on three of the five before i even let them into the backyard which is actually kind of impressive because it's dark i've had no coffee i'm usually naked and i'm affixing lightning collars to three dogs one of whom continually bounces up and slams me in the face with her snout yeah it's amazing anyway dogs are an endless endless source of joy and affection well actually even today i was telling because it's christmas or everyone's at the house or a lot of people at the house your relatives are at the house and uh uncle buck's coming oh is he bringing and because i've never seen you travel i don't think a single time ever in life without at least one dog you always bring at least one dog but you're dogless today she's kind of vocal and she's not very respectful to expensive camera equipment or genitals yeah no so if i was a smoker it'd be great because then keep her at bay but um all she'd need is about six thousand cigarette burns and then no i know exactly i don't think that would work no i don't think it would either but you are surrounded by dogs you work with dogs you as i just said you travel with dogs you're you are inseparable in the minds of everyone who knows you from dogs they have great insight you said that's one of the main reasons they improve our lives i think so i mean i i talk to my dogs and they understand me my dogs have actually a very a better understanding of the english language than i think most people i deal with outside of this room um they're so much smarter than people give them credit for and wise and kind and of course it does remind me of the the great little joke lock your dog and your wife in the trunk of the car come back after three days and see who's grateful the answer to that that is always not your wife um so they're forgiving they are they are actually the essence of purity i think they're even though they're capable they're not capable of artifice a dog will never pretend to be happy when it's not and they have no um no sense of vanity they're they're perfectly willing to display their immediate and current emotion at all times and their emotions are almost exclusively loving uh now i have a predator i have a three-legged predator what a wonderful a wonderful description boy i couldn't have matched that well it's true don't you oh it's so true i mean what i have five dogs at my house right now too i'll just admit um so you're winning that you're winning the grand dog competition i would say i'm not about to render an opinion about which is best but and can i just say not to make this into a cultural thing but that and i know that there are other i'm sure that there are other cultures that feel the same way i don't know what they might be but the culture that we grew up in which was a culture was i mean none of these were even questioned like dogs yes and and other things politeness bravery loyalty but dogs were in that lit like the the that was just unquestioned yes dogs were at the center of the culture not just the family but the culture we grew up in very much so oh very much so i never saw our father cry except when our dogs died and i that's correct got a little more emotional as i've gotten older so i've occasionally shed a tear about something other than a dog dying but i've never been as affected by death as my various dogs death and i'm also convinced convinced 100 that my capacity for joy is less than it was before my last dog died but i'm also convinced 100 that we will see them all again i am we will be reunited um i have a particular dog that you know who was what's the phrase you use a lifetime dog or the the special dog and you know now you agree that everyone has one of those if you have enough dogs there's always a dog where you're like oh i'm never gonna have a dog like this again yes and boy do i love my dogs and and unlike raising children where you could never indicate which one of your children is your favorite not that that ever exists no um with dogs i think it's completely the opposite my strategy is to convey to each and every one of my dogs privately that they that they are my favorite so every one of my dogs is going around being like i'm dad's favorite i know you engage in a little bit of that you've got to anyway i do that with my children by the way they all i think they all have that impression i hope so they are but yeah you had a dog you had that lifetime dog i have many pictures of that dog on my phone because i were not my dog but i did i felt real love for that dog and my favorite picture of that dog was called bella uh was in the dog park in the rich rich lady dog park directly across the street from our house in washington that we both used every day and there are always a million ladies in the park you know they're all nice i don't i'm not i don't mean attack anybody but they're all a little little bit uptight yes went to hbs but now they're staying home to raise their kids very methodically that kind of thing let me look it up let me look it up and your dogs have never kind of been with that program at all they're off-leash dogs they are off-leash dogs and you're that one dog was an amazing hunter finished spits yes and this dog had killed a squirrel and has in her mouth the squirrel was like you know quite was a black squirrel black squirrel and she was this deep beautiful red and just the contact and the contrast from a photographic perspective was powerful i had i had that on my screensaver for for years until my son got old enough to notice that his picture wasn't on there right can i tell my one dog park story which is like family lore which is like my favorite story which i've told at many dinner parties about you which one it's not a bad one no so you were at so in dc of course our parks it's a federal zone so our parks are policed by park police actual park police oh yes they are yes sometimes on horseback yes and this specific dog park was i mean when i say it was across street from my house like i could see it from my bed it was right there it was no but it was extensive it went miles actually we've an amazing park system in washington and this is called this was called battery kimball yes it was a civil war battery beautiful park beautiful part of the city and you would walk your dogs in there every day and you had a million dogs as always and you never leashed them because you're a free man and this is america and they're well behaved and they don't bother other people well generally pretty responsive dogs yeah they call the wildlife a little bit oh that's for sure well that's i don't know that's sort of your responsibility when you're walking it is the food chain isn't it like i'm sorry if you can't handle it get out of the park dude i'm with you and i remember when this happened but like every woman in the neighborhood is probably still talking about it um oh this isn't a city rife with all sorts of other crime so every time i know it's not this story but every time i was accosted by someone and the next door that's silly uh next door online thing right pre-covid in a city that has overwhelming physical and property crimes uh the number of the most prevalent complaint on that listserv oh i saw someone walking without a leash and this is a terrible thing and literally that would garner the most commentary from any next door post we need better rich people in this country yes that's the number one thing we need yes yes well they need some hardship because complaining about a like that it's not only picayune but like repulsive it is repulsive i totally agree and they have no self-awareness at all and they're all like that but anyway my universal response i'm sorry to interrupt you my universal response to them and to authorities who would occasionally cost me would be i'm so relieved you've solved all the other problems in in dc all the other crimes there are no rapes there no armed robberies cvs isn't being ransacked on a daily basis like thank you i really appreciate i'm so glad you solved that problem now we can deal with lesser crimes like leashes my god they did not appreciate the lecture no they did and after many such lectures from you they decided to arrest you and they told you that that if we catch you again without a leash you're going to jail sir sir and then you get approached by a couple of these officers i think on horseback i was walking through a beautiful meadow at about 10 30 in the morning absolutely deserted and i had four dogs with me and we got all the way to the end of the meadow and i heard someone say hey hey someone clearly yelling not in not like they needed help but like they were trying to get my attention i'm sorry i don't respond to that and so i turned and i saw it was on a slope this meadow and i could see these blue helmets coming up the meadow so they were the horses weren't even visible helmet helmet so i kept walking and then i was you and peacekeepers exactly so i kept walking and then i was in the middle of the forest on a on a small beautiful path and i kept hearing this female male voice hard to determine was rather masculine but but also flipping hysterical so it could only have been a soy boy with a gun or a very masculine chick and it was it turned out to be three cops three park policemen on beautiful very expensive horses with tidy helmets on and they yelled at me for a good half mile they finally caught up to me and when she when they were about when this trio was about you made them just like yell at you and chase completely ignored them i'm sorry it's my park i'm a federal taxpayer i also live in dc this is right don't we fund that park we fund their salaries i'm sorry i have a bit of a sense of entitlement about two things nicotine and dogs yeah and that's it and this was so i was minding my own business in our park and so they were persistent and yelling and when they got to be about 75 yards away she lost her cool completely and she yelled and said stop or i'll tase your dog i'll tase your dog so i'm sorry that's just too much for me so i said yelled because they were still far away i said you're not gonna fucking tase my dog you do that you know the real problem and so they were taken aback by it a little bit and they finally came they hadn't met a man in a while in dc is that i guess not i mean too busy solving all the other crimes so they got they finally got up to me and it was a very authoritative squat muscular woman who was the authority figure and then two men men and who were embarrassed and i made them further embarrassed because i said this first of all don't speak to me like that don't ever speak to me like that don't threaten my child and um she didn't like that but she backed down a little bit i actually had the i had the moral authority i was in the right and they were absolutely in the wrong and i did what you're supposed to do in a situation like that is i met and exceeded their aggression significantly and to the point where i asked their badge numbers as their full names give it to me now pulled out my phone i was totally obnoxious but also in the right and i said to those men how can you tolerate this well she's your boss she's telling you oh and these guys literally at the end of it this is probably a three or four minute exchange and they ended up they gave up and they walked away and i was on this beautiful uh ledge that had railroad ties every three or four feet going down into the stream into this valley you'd have no idea you're in the middle of dc it was such an incredible park sanctuary it's incredible and they went ahead of me she in the front steamed literally coming off her and then these two extremely embarrassed men and they started going down well their horses decided this would be a great opportunity to leave some indelible artwork on the path and a horse when a horse goes to the bathroom it's not a subtle thing no especially when they're walking down a hill so they deposited i don't know 26 27 pounds of artwork right there on the path so the and they had to go slow because it was one of these winding paths with with railroad ties and they were stuck so they were like slowly trying to go down and i was yelling at them the whole time hey pick that up what's wrong with you i can't believe you're leaving that behind who's going to clean up after you oh i am so surprised actually they did not shoot me i was expecting it actually i really was worth it it was so worth it and actually i was enraged i was still enraged to the point where excuse me mad biden is coming out again um i uh by the time i got back to my car and that was probably 15 minutes later i remember this clearly i had gone to one of the best uh sandwich stops i had a meeting downtown and i was running my dogs first and it was i had stopped and i'd gotten some clam chowder from uh beau blair's place i can't think from jetties and i had a container of of clam chowder yeah they had good chowder so agitated by the time i got even by the time i got back to my car which is like 15 or 20 minutes later i opened up the top of the clam chowder and promptly launched it into the air where it came and landed on my dashboard directly in the air conditioning unit in fact that chevy tahoe smelled like clam chowder for literally the next three years it was disgusting until patrick flipped it until patrick flipped it and broke his neck but i uh was i don't normally hold on to anger for very long i've got like a reasonably quick wick and i can get pretty hot but it it dissipates fast this didn't i was still mad 20 25 minutes later and i drove i think i pushed my meeting back i had to drive downtown i think i texted them it was like i had a bit of an emergency i'm gonna be a half an hour late and i drove around the entire perimeter at least that western perimeter of that park looking for the telltale sign of the the horse carriage because i actually really did want to record their names and make a formal complaint not that it would have gone anywhere but or write a piece about it i don't know but it would have made me happier i didn't find them i looked for them so everyone i should say for the fifth time in our tiny little very cohesive neighborhood where we spent most of our lives um and know every single person almost everybody disapproved of this kind of behavior from you because it was disruptive and like it wasn't you weren't getting in line with everybody i never of course felt that way because we grew up together with the same attitudes but now i think that if like eight more people in our neighborhood and 800 000 more people in our country had taken that attitude we'd be in much better shape than we are now amen amen i three more people would have been able to dominate that town without dominate that neighborhood you're totally right because people are low i'm not some great student of human behavior but i do observe it and i think that people again as we talked about earlier i think people who are cowardly hate themselves for it yes and are hostile towards those who express themselves or embrace their freedom in america land of the free home of the brave like i mean not anymore clearly and but i think there are people are waiting to be galvanized by someone who's willing to say i'm not saying i'm that person but they need someone to rally around someone trump was obviously that guy that's obviously part of trump's appeal that he was that you know hey fuck you this is what i believe and i'm not going to back down kind of guy and i think our country used to be full of people like that yes it did and and they were they were real heroes in this country uh this country didn't have an easy an easy time of it for the first couple hundred years and the only people who exercised real power and authority were men who were courageous and willing to speak their mind and willing to follow through also and kind to other people and but whatever leadership qualities that you just don't see in america that often i don't i mean i couldn't agree more and one of the hallmarks of that kind of society is decency one of the things you notice about brave men our father being the bravest person i think either of us ever met it was totally 84 years old never saw him one time express fear in any situation in any situation physically intellectually nothing i saw a few where you know he could have and he did including when he died totally unafraid totally uncomplaining totally unmedicated totally undiminished totally undiminished both of us were there yeah so yes no i agree with that but that was the twin to that was a flip side of his decency and kindness he didn't hate himself he had no reason to and if he made a mistake or did something wrong which he did he'd be like wow i did something wrong i'm really sorry and he was genuine genuinely inquisitive with other people and kind and interested always thoughtful and interested oh his favorite thing was talking to i mean he loved to talk and he told the best stories around but he loved people and oh he get back from dinner parties when we were kids i'll never forget always it was always a woman of course because you as a man you sit next to a woman at a dinner party thank god i met the most amazing woman she would grew up in some weird country and did this and her dad was in the oss and you know it was all that was a theme it was always some intrigue always always but um but he was so interested in other people like and so passionate about it like their stories were like as exciting to him as his story yes always paid attention to the details very close attention very he was an amazing listener because he was really interested anyway i think his decency his love of children animals his family his wife people he sat next to dinner parties like that was all related to his total fearlessness yes in a way yes do you know i can't quite articulate it but i think you did but you know no but he was so self-confident because he used all the talents that god gave gave him to the extent that he was able i mean he never passed up an opportunity ever anywhere to do anything interesting or adventurous that is literally true and that was like his law and it's so attractive and it's that was his law yeah that was his law have an interesting life that's like the only instruction i got me too yeah and he constantly i mean i remember when you got thrown out of boarding school and the only family drama i ever remember remember was would pop be able to force you to join the french foreign legion and he was dead set on forcing you to do that in case you don't remember i do remember and i don't remember being resistant to it it wasn't you no i'm aware yeah no someone else who was very resistant to it you can't do that to him man you weren't against it but like you were seven when you got tossed held were you 17 maybe i was 17 yep and he checked at the head office in marseille i'll never forget this and 17 was old enough to join the french foreign legion and i'll never forget coming home for christmas or easter or some vacation where we were all home in georgetown and he was like well your brother could enjoy the french foreign legion and i was like is this is this real you're like yep he fucked up at school he got thrown on a boarding school he's going to the french foreign legion and it's a six-year commitment but by the time he gets he'll only be 23 and imagine he'll be able to see all his friends i spent six years in the french foreign legion i've got a fake name and a new passport and i served in jibouti like i was in these wars and isn't that great and i was like yeah that sounds great and you're like yeah i'm totally thank god for female wisdom and strength actually i think i think it would have been great i probably wouldn't have survived it but no thank god he was so all in i'll never forget he knew people who who had done it oh yes speaking of without even getting into it but i think both of us have taken an awful lot of shit about whatever he did for a living and it's not even totally clear but um let me just ask a general question not about him but about sort of the world that you grew up in you were what like 14 when we moved to georgetown maybe ish 13 13 so you spent your entire life in northwest dc like you never left except to go to maine obviously but but like full-time you right you're living there and um in a world i mean you literally lived in a house that our father purchased from cia officer in cash yes right and everybody in our world was involved in that kind of stuff and and then you have had jobs where you rubbed up against people in the intel world yes a lot of jobs though common probably in dc but yeah that's the point actually that i'm making yeah everybody i wouldn't be bringing this up if i thought you were well by this point in the conversation i think everyone knows you're not working for the cia you're not compliant enough have you seen my tax returns yeah no but who has who has right exactly but um i guess my my question is did you know until relatively recently what a huge role intel agencies foreign and domestic played in the life of our country not just the political life but the civic life the cultural life did you know that no and it and it reminds me what you said a little earlier in this conversation about not being aware of what's going on around you yes you're steeped in it of course and and i worked for some i worked for a corporate intelligence firm that was founded by all former spooks and i knew personally yes good guys great guys excellent shots too we hunted with them holy smokes were they yeah yeah and also one of them died like the best death ever had grandchildren his children were married walked out of his on k street walked out of his accountant's office having received good news and had a massive heart like life-ending heart attack right there on k street crossed in the prime rib yeah like 76 yeah i mean he was a great man he was a great man but intel guy intel guy sorry i think it's also important to mention i my attitude has changed like so many because of covid but even a little bit before that i just had taken it on faith that we had a good government that was well-meaning that makes mistakes but that was answerable to the people i actually always thought that growing up i generally didn't think what i heard from the government was a lie i didn't think it was a manipulative lie um i remember i mean the the most important thing that went on in our lives as we were growing up the most important enduring conflict was the iron curtain and communism and i remember talking with you and others all the time about those poor people who live in the soviet union who have no access to real news they have tasks and they have zvestia was zvestia zvestia pravda and they don't have the freedom to go to church and they obviously their economy sucks because it's managed by a government and that never works but really they didn't have access to accurate information right they had no access to any real news and further they had been taught as a society terrible things about america and americans and specifically we used to also talk after the iron curtain came down had the same attitude about north korea like here are these poor emaciated captives who can't leave their own country who don't who think these terrible and untrue things about americans and it was only a couple of years ago that i suddenly realized i had this epiphany we're fucking north korea we are north koreans and so much of what the government has told us throughout our lives about big events and small events are simply not true not just massaged but like 180 degrees from truth and reality once you have that realization it's very unsettling and dispiriting i think and scary um and obviously the election of 2020 brought it into focus all of the suppression of twitter and the new york post piece from miranda divine on hunter biden and that's and all the false news about masks and the vax and everything else i mean the list is endless and could go on and on but no to answer your question i was not aware of it i didn't pay attention to it i didn't suspect it and i really had no reason to suspect it actually because life was different even a decade that they had no way to go in america and certainly in washington and now they've just it seems a certain air of desperation or something that they're they're clamping down to such an aggressive degree even with trump in the white house which i wish someone would explain to me i have my theories but anyway um and the fact that they used to be good liars this is the thing i find the scariest is they used to tell compelling thought out well-fashioned plausible lies and they no longer do that now it's just hey this is it and you either accept it or shut the fuck up and we'll put you in prison or we'll take all your liberties away and i do think it's akin to finding you know the great debate are you going to look under the bed and or are you going to jump across the room and leave the door it's like once you look under the bed you might actually find the monster and now it's clear that our government is the monster and the intelligence agencies are the monster and once you've seen it you can't really not unsee it yes and that's really unsettling so nicely put um that's so nicely put yeah that has been i try to talk about it too much because it's obviously way too personal but that but the realization about the intel agencies has been one of the really big things for me i just i can hardly even believe it i can hardly believe i know it sounds stupid but it doesn't but it grows out of a totally different understanding of the u.s government yes and i always thought it was inefficient and the problem with u.s government was there you know were a lot of lazy people with guaranteed jobs and like big bureaucracies don't function very well they're just they just don't work but the spirit that animates them which is a spirit to protect and improve the country is kind of unquestioned they're not trying to subvert the country that's what i would think maybe at at worst they don't care right and occasionally have a soviet or cuban spy but that's like really far out you know what i mean or some drunk fbi agent with having an affair who sells secrets because he needs the money but like human flaws human flaw thank you human flaws but never that this whole that there'd be huge parts of this whole enterprise that are working to destroy the society like i'd never even occurred to me no no me either and but it's clear that that's what's going on it's clear yeah it couldn't be clearer and it's accelerating it's not decelerating no no so um yeah and it's demonic it is and i actually don't even understand why that obvious observation that obvious conclusion makes people i guess it's a religious question i don't know why it makes people not just uncomfortable it makes people super hostile if you mention that certain motivations are demonic and that there are demons among us i think that's i've always known that i've just known that it's just obvious i've known it my whole life it is obvious you don't have to be around it's like being always as our father always said trust your dog sense everybody and you talk about it everybody has it all you have to do is pay attention to it it's it doesn't even need to be that finely calibrated i mean if you have a weird feeling about a situation or about a person you know you're probably right yes trust it yeah trust it it's not random no not at all and every human has also had weird out of the blue impulses to do things that go against their nature and all the time this happens to me thank god it happens to me a lot especially when i'm out in nature with my dogs it's where i can clear my head it's where i can relax and think yes away from my phone i get all sorts of unbidden unsolicited thoughts impulses that i follow good things call this person write this do this we agree and if i didn't have that in my life i would be a mess i would be more of a man whatever i'd be it would so it's not just so i think it's not just demonic and it's not just dark stuff that acts on us yes very much so so i boy if i had the same experience i guess my whole life but i didn't recognize it for what it was until pretty recently yeah and i certainly would never you know as a wasp i would never mention it because you're not like that's one thing you're not not supposed to talk about your spiritual views period in fact in fact it's such a rarity i remember exactly where i was when i first had this conversation and it was with you and it was in the state of maine which is obviously wonderful but also something about the state of maine is very close to whatever's going on around us that we can't see it's happening in maine a lot more than anywhere else the membrane is thinner in maine between this world and the next there's no question about that it's not very much it's not a light state no it's it's a heavy state there's a reason stephen king when he at one point had talent and one point had a god given talent yes you can't read his early stuff you can't read the stand without saying this guy is using god given talent oh there's a reason why all those books actually take place in maine oh and it's not just because he's from maine it's because something going on in maine all right and that's been i think recognized for a long time yeah and um and it exceeds my understanding i can't even guess i do know that the first transatlantic television signal was broadcast from maine oh yeah you know you know in a town very close she's still there she's still there i hunted next to it i flew over it yeah patrick but but the point is it's like there's something about its geographic locations geography as well that i don't know there's something about it yes but yeah we grew up in a world and in a culture that did not welcome conversations about spiritual matters the transcendent no yeah no that was a huge week didn't talk about death no didn't talk about illness there were no support groups for illness i remember in the 80s there was this black because georgetown had been black or partly black like a hundred years ago or something and so there were there was a black church on our street do you remember that well yeah like four blocks down on n street in georgetown and of course i didn't even know it was there but our father knew it was there it's actually the end of dumbarton it was the end of dumbarton sorry one block up and um he was like he just loved black church do you remember getting dragged to black church with it i loved it actually i was never resistant to it you'll never find nicer people with better music great food and a super welcoming attitude i couldn't agree more as i think church is supposed to be it's such a departure from the i won't mention the name of the church because i know family members of ours still go there but i was baptized there and it was just too right it was beautiful architecturally and that's about what it had to recommend it yeah the pews had a nice patina from you know hundreds of years for the frozen chosen yeah no there's no question but he would drag us to the black church at least once or twice here let's go let's go to easter at the black church they were always a little confused by what we were doing there but he was so into it they're on board though they were no they were totally no to give them credit they were they couldn't have been nicer and they were like old-fashioned washington black people like the definition of like respectable middle-class people and um but he liked it because they were just like all in like they weren't beating around the bush like they're for they're for jesus yes and i think that's just unabashed yeah and i think those were the that was the only contact i ever had in my young life with jesus at all were people talking about jesus yes do you feel it 100 no no no i mean i've had i've had a lot of reasons to have an awakening in my life and was forced upon me and in so many ways god has come into my life and changed things that needed to be changed yes excised certain patterns and behaviors that needed to be that i never could have done on my own yeah and yeah i know we both i mean i so yes no i didn't think about it enough i always had a reflexive faith i always knew god existed i never questioned but i didn't know a lot about i still don't necessarily know a lot about the history of religion or the intricacies of certain scripture but i read the bible i commune with other people i celebrate god i celebrate fellowship and i celebrate jesus unabashedly i mean yeah other yeah so how um i would say the other thing the feature of the world that we grew up in was you know just alcohol is part of it yes it's just cocktail culture absolutely my favorite food growing up was tonic water and cam and bear we had so many cocktail parties at our house tonic water and cam and bear that's true that's where that you remember that i remember well tonic water that's when you know your parents are going to a few too many cocktail parties not many six-year-olds drink tonic water i wonder if any six-year-olds drink tonic water i don't think people even drink gin and tonics anymore but they did in our house growing up anyway boy we come from a long line of gin and tonic drinkers but yeah uh so we both got caught up in it and i would see you a little more enthusiastically than me you were epic i think is the term people use now but uh and then you know you know as anyone who drinks overly enthusiastically the people who love them start to worry and then you just like quit didn't go to rehab no i admire people who do i think it's helpful oh i'm not criticizing it no no no i didn't think you were i just actually i've had heard some fascinating stories at those a meetings it's been years since i've been to one but i did have some concerned friends who'd gone through this journey themselves and who pulled me in and i was receptive to listening um not necessarily receptive to stopping but receptive to learning more and um and i was flirting with it flirting was stopping because you take those tests that they have and like answer 10 of these questions and if you answer even three of them then you've got a drinking problem and it was always like i've answered yes on all 10 i could probably give you six more questions to ask um so and i'd been i'd had a few run-ins with you with authorities quite a few actually it had affected my life anybody asks you oh do you think alcohol is affecting your life oh gosh i don't know let me contemplate that oh so and i'd also reach but principally what happened was my son was born and that was a tough pregnancy an early birth and um the moment i saw that child be born i'd had a lot of preparation from you because you'd already had a couple of children and from others but i and it was an aspiration for me for the entirety of my life to be a father but the moment i saw that child be born and they're purple and unattractive my son urinated all over the doctors it was great i'm still very proud of him but i remember unbidden speaking of unbidden thoughts and emotions the first thing that i thought when that child was born was i'd fucking kill for this child yes and i would do it with relish like if someone ever someone ever threatened this child i would i mean there's nothing i wouldn't do so um anyway so he was born and he was young as a baby my son has never seen me intoxicated i'm happy to say he's 24 i had my last cocktail 23 years ago in march coming up incredible and talked about it and thought about it and had concerned people discuss it with me um and had dialed back but then had really an amazing an epic weekend with my son's godfather a great friend of both of ours who came in from new orleans the and had like three-day bucknellia and in georgetown and got like physically ill and so did my wife and she had a full-on divine intervention where god like spoke to her out loud and said enough and and she that was it removed it from her completely incredible completely and then i was sympathetic on board with it because not only was i trying to convince myself that i should lay off it for a while i was trying to convince her and like most she was resistant and um so that day i made the commitment you know i'm going to join her but then one of my great friends was having a bachelor party like in two days so i said okay well let's just get through this weekend and then i'm committed yeah and i did i had my last cocktail actually engagement party of a great guy i'm spacing his name i'll think of a second oh you know him he's a wonderful guy his marriage didn't last but he's around um and he had a great party and i had a couple cocktails didn't get hammered and then i said that's it not doing it again and but it was divine intervention for me too because he removed not only the desire to drink but he implanted like a revulsion for alcohol yes i feel that physical revulsion where i could to this day 22 and a half years later summon the taste of a great goose martini or summon the taste of like a three-inch glass of maker's mark and i could make myself vomit in like 15 seconds um and also for that first year no one ever talks about this at least i've never heard anybody talk about this that for that first year i couldn't sleep sweating constantly had horrible nightmares every night yeah and the enduring nightmare that i still have occasionally i would say once a month i'll be somewhere socially in my dream and i'll be talking to someone and i'll just reach and have a cocktail and i'll as soon as it hits my mouth like start sobbing in my dream and wake up really agitated and really upset with myself um but anyway i've it god removed the desire completely for me and and i've had a much better life since and i've never run interestingly i've never run i could give you hours of stories about stupid and dangerous and destructive things i did as a drunk person but i never have hooked up with an old friend that i haven't seen in like two decades have a meal and they like order a drink and oh do you want a drink and i'll say no actually i quit drinking i've never had someone say what the fuck did you do that for like really you quit drinking like you yeah no no one's ever had that that emotion you're the only person i know who's crashed an airplane a speedboat a motorcycle and multiple cars and that's literally true that's just a fact and you're here i think we differ on the the definition of crashing i did not crash the plane it was uh well it was a forced landing they call it okay okay well forced no i bear some responsibility for sure but the plane survived completely unscathed well okay in a clearing in a national forest i'm just saying and by the way i'm not blaming you for whatever mechanical error forced your plane but again we could just take the plane out of it and we still have the motorcycle the boat and the cars yes yes i also once fell asleep while flying an airplane from drinking yeah passed out in in uh in a really trafficked area and i was aware that i was you know when you're really really really tired you can't hide it from yourself you can slap yourself in the face you can pinch yourself i was a smoker at the time and i you know it was chain smoking while flying ah and i was in a traffic pattern and i just couldn't keep my eyes open could not in an international airport in someone else's airplane yeah and i kept nodding off was anyone else in the plane no i was by myself it was really terrifying i wrote a piece about it actually for a friend of mine who also subsequently quit drinking and started like a webzine when those things were around and um yeah it was pretty hilarious you fell asleep while flying an airplane what multiple times multiple times i i was going on a local trip and i took off i was tired i was sleep deprived i had a friend you know those friends who come and visit you oh yes and they never leave and they're great company amazing especially after like 5 p.m yeah yeah and well he stayed for like two weeks and so we developed this this great um strategy where we'd go out we'd like drink all day on the beach and then go out to wildly hedonistic meal and then we'd get back to my apartment at like two in the morning and then he would stay up smoking and reading so he could make sure that i got up at 4 30 to go make it to the flight line i was in flight school at the time and so i did that for two weeks he subsequently got food uh alcohol poisoning i think i did too but uh i was just exhausted and but i love flying and it was actually the only academic experience i've ever had that i was really passionate about i love flying and i was in a great flight school i took it seriously uh not too seriously not seriously enough to quit drinking but or to sleep or to sleep but yeah i showed up at dawn flew you know places prone to massive fog banks everywhere it's flat it's actually in this state on the atlantic ocean and it the flight school itself shares an internet international airport with uh like six carriers big carriers so it's got like a 10 500 foot runway it's got north and south and east and west it's got a lot of traffic and so i was wary i'm feeling you know tired or exhausted but it wasn't until i took off that i thought this is bad like this is dangerous like i really can't focus and i'm falling asleep and so i went about 10 miles north and came back because i didn't want it to be super suspicious just take off you have to basically declare an emergency to get back in the pattern in an international airport like that so i went north for like 10 12 miles and then called approach and said i was coming back and have to identify why and it was in the approach with like 737s flying around and other it was a very high traffic airport and i was on like a five mile downwind or crosswind i'm trying to think whatever i was on a long approach to this airport and communicating with the tower on the radio and i would fall asleep in between communication you know cessna november 678 echo are you there oh yeah it was and i said a lot of prayers and as i said i smoked some cigarettes in that plane and i pinched myself and uh i landed safely excellent landing and got to the flight line and and turned the engine off and promptly took a nap in the plane for like an hour it was bad and then i got i had a motorcycle at that time too and i hopped on my motorcycle and i went home and i was like you got to go back to your real life man it's like one of my oldest friends um you got to leave i can't can't sustain this so then you wind up you're a blackjack dealer on a riverboat in mississippi you work for a couple different political candidates a presidential campaign and all nice guys i don't you know can i say one thing like if you name i'm not gonna name them you can if you want but like people you thought were impressive 30 years ago in politics they're also discredited now i know it's sad it is sad i don't want to be mean not only discredited but actually there was a much better stable of real candidates real people for one one example i briefly was a communications director at the maryland republican party for like six months you were communications director yes imagine a maryland republican party it's like a different country there were like 16 republicans even then but they could still raise some money and they could make some noise because there were no other republicans and actually was great for me because i was the communications director which really means i was writing nasty press releases and trying to generate lots of news and you know it's a fully corrupt state and so there's a lot to talk about and no one's looking over your shoulder because it's maryland like really right so i'd write the most incendiary stuff and occasionally generate some news on it but i had license to do that and it was actually a really good it was a really good launch pad it was a was a nice brief experience i had with some really good people they did they didn't have you know big aspirations i don't think i don't think you could stay at the maryland republican party it's kind of interesting quickly i've i've i started then and i've written for now in 25 years i love writing speeches and i write speeches for i've written speeches political candidates and aspiring political candidates and and corporate heads i love it i think it's so fun and interesting and i'm sure no one will do it anymore with the ai but i hope that's not true but anyway whatever i could write good speeches and one of the guys who actually was impressive in maryland in the mid-90s was michael steel do you remember michael steel i knew mike steel yeah his sister married mike tyson i did know that i totally forgotten he's such a chameleon he's such an unimpressive person now it's hard to believe that i once thought he was impressive he was articulate he was as you know i wasn't going to use biden's was he clean too yeah he was clean didn't smell bad and he was articulate i think that was to quote joe biden yes yes and he was he's impressive he's a tall man and he's got a lot of a lot of energy and yes like in your face looks you in the eye no that's totally right a good handshaker and he was going to be like the face of republican success and he had a failed senate campaign whatever 10 12 years go by and in a much different iteration in my life i was uh writing still but like doing more interesting and more lucrative things than the maryland republican party and an old friend of mine named lance copsey who's no longer around i don't know if you remember him he's a very well great guy he's been gone like 15 years he called me and said hey i'm running michael steel's campaign for the rnc will you write some speeches for him i was like hell yeah love to do that i got paid to do it and i also believed in michael steel and i so i wrote michael steel's acceptance speech and when he became the rnc chair not a huge deal but like kind of fun it was bigger than it was bigger than and and then he immediately like became reverted to type and by which i mean corrupt politician and immediately blew like eight hundred thousand dollars on you know redecorating his personal office demanded a private jet because he claimed that obama was president he claimed that he was obama's counterpart on the republican side and obama had air force one and he needed to fly private the the incredible nuts on that guy i mean he had balls yeah but no interesting opinions and no you know principles no no foundation and then he figured out he figured out the white guilt lever yeah and he's like i don't get a plane is that because i'm black are you saying that i'm lesser in his defense wasn't um terry mcauliffe the dnc guy at the time probably so he was probably looking at terry mcauliffe's like right pretty good deal terry mcauliffe hadn't yet imported you know chinese cars for for visas yet but he was living large man i didn't even understand how corrupt that world was when we lived in it so then speaking of you wind up working at you know basically the number two for uh a guy called frank luntz frank luntz for those who haven't heard of frank luntz he's still around oh very much yeah it was the the biggest pollster in the republican party and more than just a pollster he was like the message guy like how do we communicate that you know cutting capital gains taxes for donors is part of the american dream or whatever it's in the constitution um how do we soften all the environmental lunacy and make it palatable oh let's call it climate change you mean the fucking weather no climate change did he come up with that came up with climate change what up with death tax he came up with climate change well i say he his team i was part of his team for like six years and yes i helped run that show with a couple of other very competent people he as you know he's very complicated he's he's like a walking dichotomy he is occasionally brilliant he's very smart naturally he's lazy he's dirty he's dishonest dirty what do you mean dirty like his favorite food group is thousand island dressing come on and you just can't eat thousand island dressing without getting it all over yourself and the biologicals which are supposed to be unmentionable but with frank are ever evident everywhere i was disgusting no no no no no the personal hygiene is like non-existent i get much more graphic i can't even tell you what his nickname around the office was this is a guy who's walking around with literally a dead raccoon in his head yeah yeah i know i'm sorry so many people don't skimp on the hairpiece that's like rule one i know i know but he was brilliant in his business because at least the business preposition that he had which was he understood i'm not sure if you remember there was a time yeah you really have to actually think back there was a time in america where there was something called uh cable news yeah i heard that yeah people took it seriously yeah and no one took it more seriously than frank lintz so frank lintz aspired not only to hang out with famous people like in really close proximity but to be on tv and he's very articulate and he's very aggressive like people say people occasionally say oh that guy's shameless no no no you've never seen shameless until you've met frank lintz because he literally has no shame gene like there's nothing you could do to frank lintz in public to shame him he's unshameable but then again part of the dichotomy is like also super socially awkward and socially aspirant like he wants to hang around people but he he's autistic in his eruptions which are usually pretty funny so he's very verbal he's energetic he's got limitless aspiration to make dough and be on tv and he recognizes actually that's a pretty common thing in corporate america and on the hill so he's very close with newt gimrich in 94 and he got a lot of credit for coming up with the contract with america i think he was maybe a little bit he was definitely very much involved i don't think it was his entire baby i think it was more newts and the people around newt but whatever frank weaseled in there got a lot of credit for being part of the contract with america and then of course the republicans come in and they're in power for the first time in my lifetime and first time in like i don't know 32 years or something maybe 36 years the first i can't remember the 94 election when republicans got back into the house it was the first time in three decades at least and so frank was there and his business model was i will come up with language and words and speeches for members on the republican caucus i'll do it for free then i'll promote those messages in corporate world and make a ton of money with people who also want to be on television corporate heads excuse me fortune 500 fortune 100 fortune 50 companies and i'll go pitch them on some research product project that will allow them to understand their customers better and i'll incorporate the language that i'll incorporate the language that i'm devising and using for the benefit of republicans so he ingratiated himself with republicans at the same time he's ingratiating himself with corporate america all around this old antiquated now defunct medium cable news and it was brilliant so he made it and he had no overhead because his entire business model relied upon getting people even though he was incredibly label label conscious like he went to upenn he went to oxford he had an honorific doctorate that he insisted people call him doctor people call him doctor oh dr frank luntz yes dr luntz i didn't call him dr luntz i called him i won't tell you what i call him called him frank mostly but this is so frank was rolling in the dough and didn't know what to do with it and he's indefatigable in his entire life i will and there are things about him that i hugely admire for sure his relentless nature his shamelessness you've never seen a pitch ever seen a pitch people talk about oh he's such a great pitch man and he knows how to go and speak to these prospective clients no one does it like frank luntz and with literally no preparation because his entire his entire strategy i would call humiliate the executive what yeah humiliate the executive generally in front of his underlings or a sub like not a ceo but like the guys who are angling for the ceo spot the various vice presidents and stuff who are sycophantic towards the ceo he would gather all the all the executives in one room either a conference room or sometimes bigger like a like a an auditorium inside a coca-cola's headquarters or dow's headquarters and he would go and he would give a presentation and like five minutes into the presentation he would identify one of the sub executives by name and he would do everything he could to humiliate that person in front of all of his peers and his boss come on yeah so this is a guy who actually understands the worst part of human nature because that does actually excite the sadist in certain people right and so who gravitates to those jobs except people who a lot of them not all of them but some of them have that gene like oh public humiliation love to publicly humiliate you and every single person like if you could see that if you could see the thought bubble above everybody's head they're all saying holy fuck i'm so glad that's not me right so everybody so at the end of his how would he humiliate when he find oh the most personal stuff their clothing their the asymmetry of their face you know big earlobes no no i mean like i know he was predatory relentless ruthless ruthless and entertaining as hell like he's really facile with the english language he's like fast he's super fast i'll give him that he's and very articulate and man he would go after them and so at the end he'd like softened up the entire i mean he would humiliate you actually at coke headquarters yes yes i saw him do it at pfizer i saw him do it at coke i saw him do it i mean we were he did work for some impressive people uh some huge companies he worked for the sacklers at purdue pharma i i'm ashamed to say that i was involved in that and that's actually something i think about often actually i bought into the whole line it's like you're telling me before did you did you know that the intelligence agencies played such an aggressive role in american life and elections no i didn't i also really didn't know it turns out i should have listened to a lot of the blue hair vagina hat wearing i know crazy women because a lot of the shit they said about the iraq war obviously true about bush administration obviously true only in hindsight for me at least and i dismissed them and i dismissed in a lot of the jobs i had because i did end up in a position defending some of the worst corporate interests in america and i believed that when people attack big pharma for instance or the sacklers or they're really just against you know corporate world they're really against capitalism they're really they're just communists they're against america right they're against america so i i grew up thinking that and it dovetailed well with my job because i ended up i mean they're not all evil of course and a lot of them employ tons of people and do good things and we couldn't survive without them so i'm not attacking all of them gladly attack the sacklers and purdue pharma though because that not only you know more about this topic than most but you know it also dovetailed with an entire societal effort that they had which i was very much a part of to convince americans that there is no such thing as acceptable pain as acceptable pain you cannot be in pain you shouldn't be in pain someone needs to be responsible for your pain and you need to eradicate your pain that was that was what they were talking about in 2000 in 1999 2001 two and three they engaged in a society-wide campaign to convince americans that pain was unacceptable not just for chronic cancer sufferers or people who'd been injured in war or people who'd had you know back injury 20 years ago you should not be feeling in pain ever at all and there's a solution for that and they obviously had this solution further they're the ones as you know who pine or maybe didn't pioneer it but they took it to the next level uh attacking the people that they'd hooked on oxycontin when they said and i said engaged in a ton of research projects and jury uh messaging with that company where we'd go in and test messages and arguments but really sort of like a push-pull designed to not just gauge public opinion but to very much influence public opinion and then we to implant messages yes very much so and then of course because of his business model he would use those messages and it would be incorporated and thought leaders and elected officials around the country they would use that same language and that that was in its essence you're not responsible for your pain you shouldn't have pain but further you this is a non-addict is not an addictive product and if you are addicted to it it's because you've been abusing it it's because you have some latent some long dormant addictive thing within you that's now been released and you also probably have been abusing the product like have you been hitting it with a hammer and smashing it into dust and snorting it well that's on you so that's evil it is evil and i never you're thinking about it much more broadly than i ever have so i have always been focused on the addiction you know the physical addiction the societal destruction you know you and i both spend a lot of the year in a place that's been really really followed out followed out by it and we know people a very good friend of ours is now in prison because of drug addiction so anyway whatever we have seen it both of us but i have never really thought about what you just said which is they were making a broader pitch about pain and how pain is always bad and i think if you any any man especially in middle age looking back has to recognize that the the painful moments are the are the best some of the best moments the most the most important necessary absolutely necessary yeah failures necessary pain is necessary including physical pain sometimes very much so to say that our goal is to eliminate all pain that's evil yes i agree and i wish i had recognized it as such i totally i don't think i was i think i was probably smarter back then because i was still smoking cigarettes so um um and i was younger but anyway i was i still didn't recognize it lacking wisdom at that yes right yeah lacking wisdom men in their 30s don't have the perspective that a man in his 50s has yes very much assuming he makes it can i say one more thing about the lintz thing it was it was actually the bull the business model was amazing in terms of it was very profitable it was effective he came up with some effective language so it's a it's a quasi it's a dual track research thing where you do quantitative research you know actual polling calling polling was long before online polling and then qualitative research with people in a group a focus group but he expanded it to like six times the normal size so your normal focus group has like eight to ten or twelve people in it and obviously it depends who you recruit to be in that focus group um but then he expanded that to like 60 people and then he had an electronic dial which was actually a dial but he called it dial testing where you could gauge individual words and sentences in real time so every single person in the audience is reacting to a speech a speech which is littered with messages that you're testing and they could react in real time to each word and phrase they could you know it's a visceral reaction right do you like it or are you repelled by it and it's pretty effective actually and i i think a lot of the language that he came up with was great but because of his total inability because of his manic behavior and his his dishonesty and his penchant for yelling and screaming and treating people horribly didn't actually treat me horribly he lied to me a number of times and i got into some big arguments with him and i was too young and unwise to understand you're not supposed to confront your boss and right the way you would confront anybody else right he's not a park ranger he's not a park ranger i was more respectful to the park rangers probably the two men i felt bad for um but anyway no but sorry i was trying to compliment him which is all he cared about was the product and which was the written word and he he never gave you enough time there was no schedule he was deluged with clients with high-paying clients and he was disorganized and so he would rely upon there was a period where we were handling like 12 huge clients and it was like three writers or two writers and client hand holders you know interfacing with the client because frank wasn't good at that he was very good at humiliating them and coming and coming to the crux understanding human nature to the extent that he could get someone to say yes i'm gonna pay you a ridiculous amount of money for a research project that will take six weeks and then allow me to understand my customer better that he was great at he was not great at allocating he was not great at planning and so the end result was a total beautiful meritocracy like you could only survive in that situation unless you produced and it was like a camp campaigns are like that too i'm sure you know of course it's like doesn't matter where you came from doesn't matter what you did yesterday or tomorrow it matters that you fucking produce now on time you can't it's like in that old medium cable news so you didn't have an opportunity to be like i'm not done with my script it's seven o'clock and you're going on the air regardless it's great it's the greatest part about it it's the greatest part that was that's what i'm saying it was the greatest part about it because of that job because you just had no room for failure and every day was an opportunity to prove that you were up to the challenge and then further silly cliche but true that you know oh he's got an inch wide mile long knowledge i feel like that a little bit because i was compelled as were the other guys i worked with to absorb the details of something that's very complex a particular business that i had never been involved in or a policy or some capability of a a future product or you know something initiative and you had to be able to speak about it write about it articulately and compellingly on no notice at all so i think that sounds like the best training i am that's exactly how i think about it and despite the weird and i wasn't trying to gratuitously attack no i wrote him a letter actually like six years ago and and just contemplative letter saying despite all of our differences despite the various tensions we've had despite the fact you fired me three times and then hired me back the next day and paid me more money still not fairly but uh despite all of those things um i thank you because it was the best most satisfying job i've ever had no no of course no well he i had a stroke and it changed oh well that's no no it actually he had his own admission he had a stroke that he survived like all of us at certain age you know he has a terrible diet and leads a unhealthy life and had a stroke and it changed him it actually made him more compassionate from good yes no he had that attitude so franklin's i remember and i don't want to be i mean i feel sorry for frank and i love the fact that he's improved after his stroke both that he's okay and that he's that it's made him a better person i do think that's common i mean as we were saying about pain it actually can it certainly improved me and he was aware of it by the way can i tell you how i knew no i called him uh five or six years ago about some common interest that we had and uh i shot him a text and said do you have two minutes i just want to tell you something interesting maybe let me tell you something interesting so he texted me back said yeah call me so i called him first words hey how are you i was like i'm doing great man uh let me tell you and he goes no how are you i was like no i said i have to put a cigarette out on his wrist no i said i beg your pardon frank he said no i i just i'm genuinely interested like how are you how is your wife how is your son do you still have dogs i was like someone take over your body like are you fucking serious i've known you for like 26 30 maybe 28 years at that point you've never once asked me a personal question and that's just fine but you're asking me how i'm doing are you okay and that's when he told me he said actually i had a stroke and i said oh i'm so sorry i was genuinely sorry to hear that but yes it had a good effect on him and i as i said i am eternally grateful as i have expressed to him of course no i feel that way about all my bosses some of whom you know regularly denounced me but i'm always grateful for every experience and especially when you're young and you're learning a lot i mean it's amazing i know of course i know frank also he's a fixture in republican world in dc he's at the center of republican world in dc yes i always feel like he had weird he kind of hated the wasps did you get that from him ever i did it was uh it was uh i've encountered it before but with him it was very pronounced a lot yeah i mean to say it but not just to hate but uh an attraction also yeah it was a yeah it was like let me sidle up next to you and then let me stick a fucking dagger in your kidney that that was the attitude but there was something about that the fact that you were a wasp triggered him right he would talk about it oh actually are you joking oh he would talk about it all the time well you'd make you know derogatory comments or or derogatory complimentary comments some thing it was it was an attraction and a revulsion or something i don't know it was bizarre what did he say oh that's well he would just say nothing nothing hugely creative but he would say oh that's what the wasps oh you do that or you've got such attack my name occasionally or my dress yeah that's a big one yeah i didn't wear a dress in the office very often but only on only when you were going out with frank yeah exactly but he was fixated on that very no evidently yes unquestionably yeah bill crystal was the same way with me i remember when bill crystal if we may take a moment yeah bill crystal was a smart guy oh yeah not that smart but clever that's right he came across as a smart guy yeah a thoughtful guy a compelling guy it was weird i used to respect him yeah yeah he's like a puddle yeah but you know it is i've i've learned so much um like yes he he's clever um he did a fair amount of reading back in the 70s you know in school yes he went to collegiate in new york which you know was a really good school a rigorous school and they went to harvard got his phd forced to do a ton of reading so he had read you know aeschylus and you know he had read um a lot and rousseau and and he could kind of remember parts of it and sort of half quote it sort of but what you realize which was impressive and i'm not against that um he had like three lines of poetry he could probably do but you realized over time that that was more a party trick than a reflection of his like actual erudition and that on the wisdom scale like there was none and he was really mission driven yes and um parent now and apparent now but he was it was not obvious to me because i was an idiot and uh he was smart for sure but he was not that smart at all and um and the mission was you know hated christianity yes and uh and really really hated it and um the mask is off now oh the mask is off now but if i look back on this you know he was opposed to american sovereignty he was opposed basically to the population of america he's really was hostile a lot very hostile and um there were glimpses of it but i just wasn't i wasn't wise enough to to understand what was going on plus i was like you know young and he was employing me and so there were lots of incentives not to notice but he was very fixated on the wasp thing with me and it would bubble up sometimes i'm like what the hell was that you know it wouldn't occur to me to be like well i never really thought about him being jewish to be honest i really didn't he is jewish but i didn't think about it that much he thought a lot about me being a wasp though there's no question and it would come out anyway it's just interesting interesting i never have heard anybody mention that dynamic before but um but i noticed that in once too because he would say stuff to me too very much wasps it's like well there's no like a meeting probably should be probably wouldn't have disappeared if there was but things would have turned out a little differently right right get off the golf course yeah get off the golf course get some self-awareness get a defense mechanism but you know none of those are visible respect yourself exactly hate yourself well your ancestors built a hundred percent and i do think that one i mean i don't deal with many wasps anymore because they really really hate me um and i'm sure you probably have the same experience but don't you think it's the same dynamic yes self-loathing from cowardice cowardice leads to self-loathing which leads to hatred of others i totally agree if someone will hate himself he's probably not going to treat me well yeah exactly i think and they have a lot to be ashamed of in the cowardice department i mean these are the bravest people in the world who went over the top of the trenches the wasps yes and um there's a lot of lying about that but their numbers are there in the first world war was all wasps including our our ancestors so um a lot of them so yeah they had a lot of bravery they seem to have lost that probably through comfort and booze and booze and booze sorry yeah and booze and they kind of know that and and they're shrinking little islands well now they've almost shrunk to nothing but um and they're mad do you take any shit from them when you run into them it's funny i i took some shit actually from neil bush who was oh in an unimpressive family probably the least impressive of that family right because the rest of them are charming mostly there are a couple of them i i like a lot i'm not going to shame them by naming them but i know them me too well i don't mind shaming neil bush because neil bush this is george w's brother yes attacked me in the most passive aggressive way at a fraternity party that my son's fraternity put on which was like a formal cocktail and i accidentally bumped into him and i backwards and i turned around i said oh my gosh forgive me i'm so sorry and then i said oh neil bush hi buckley carlson nice to see you met you in washington years ago and then he did something he had this he has this affectation about he's not very smart first of all he has this affectation about him that you that you that you encounter occasionally and it's he said something really nasty about you and the content of your show you were on that i forgot what it's called one of those channels one of those channels it was named after a animal that i really admire but back when that medium actually mattered um and he made some offhand comment and i said i beg your pardon and it this went back and forth a couple times and i was trying to be a gentleman i had my son next to me and neil bush's son who was a fraternity brother of my son and so we're at a cocktail party i'm not going to get in some argument with this guy uh but i wasn't going to back down either and so i said here's something about the content of your show and what you'd said but he wouldn't be specific about it and i said and he said oh no i'm not judging i just call it like it is he must have said that six times i'm not judging i just call it like it is and i said well neil bush really call it like it is huh uh so what exactly specifically did my brother say that you don't agree with well i haven't actually seen his show i read about it in the new york times he said that this who's part of a family that i mean i actually exactly specific people in the family are quality and nice and deserve kindness but the policies and the administration of george bush was disastrous and we're still feeling the effects of it today i think about it often and um i lived in texas for a while and i can tell you the people in texas think about it all the time they feel completely betrayed by that family and george bush specifically every reason to feel that yes they do and so i share that revulsion um but anyway i'm sympathetic to the fact that he is a sibling a non uh public person and a sibling of people and the son of a man who was attacked relentlessly by people who didn't have specificity in their attacks didn't even know what they were talking about and had no trouble attacking family members to him personally and yet he's going to engage in the same thing with me exactly i mean i thought this is exactly that's actually when it really came home to me that the that the wasps have not just lost but that they've lost a will and they've surrendered they're unwilling to make a stand and the fact that he had adopted that leftist attitude without being smart well it's part you know one of the things that there are a lot of good things about the wasps obviously there's some bad things about the wasps um but one of the good things was they were totally committed to uh fairness and at the heart of fairness is the understanding that we're born and will die and will be judged as individuals not as groups and therefore we do not believe in collective punishment the country was founded on that premise by wasps and uh you know to abandon that is to abandon everything especially when it's the last country on earth that still believes that yeah that's exactly yeah it's important to attack a man for one of his relatives i mean everyone in our family has been attacked for some other member of the family so we're all very familiar with that but um you know i'm proud to say one thing i'm proud about our family is that no one would ever do that no not a chance no i'd be happy to have dinner with yeah means brother and never you know attack him for cannibalism because he's not the one who committed it yes that i know of well uncle buck um i just gotta ask you one final question you've spent your life i haven't even i'm not i'm not going to violate your privacy by explaining some of the things you've done or places you've been or people you've worked with or whatever because it's nobody's business and you'll divulge it if you want to but you've had a really interesting life but it's been very interesting life but it's been like our father but it's all been very private haven't been in public at all no right by design oh i know oh i'm aware so yeah i'm aware and um but now all of a sudden you've like just entered full blown into the public debate online after you know 54 years of avoiding it and you certainly have seen stuff you could have added to the public conversation but you didn't and you've reserved it for christmas dinner at our house so thank you for that but now that you're in the you know public what's that like i hadn't anticipated it shock shockingly calling neil bush dumb i feel pretty dumb that i didn't anticipate that but it's because i haven't had a governor i've had the freedom to say what i want to say in the venues that i operate um i must say i've had a lot of fortune in my life a lot of blessings but principally in the business world i've been able to work with some people i have some long-time clients who've who are aligned um who are christian who are very smart and very loyal and they've allowed me to operate in my job doesn't demand i write primarily i come up with strategic strategic stuff but uh strategy uh but i've been allowed to lead an independent and private life and i've enjoyed it um i don't have any young children who i can embarrass or under my wing at the moment so that's great uh but again i didn't anticipate it and but the other thing i would say is i'm not a coward i love this country and i really don't appreciate what's happening to it what's been happening to it and it feels like there's a lot of foot there's a lot going on that i don't necessarily understand but i feel like they're yeah there's a battle oh there's a massive battle and it does remind me um simple thing ever someone said the other day i don't mind saying who it was he was great rick warren who wrote purpose-driven life started listening to his podcasts and boy is he wise and boy is he using the tools that god gave him to communicate sometimes complicated things in a very simple way and he said at the end you know we're gonna have a final exam and there are exactly two questions on that exam and you can't avoid it and it's what did you do with my son jesus and what did you do with the purpose god gave you wow that's a pretty sobering thought yes it is and once you have it's true and so i've so i'm not i guess i'm middle middle young middle-aged something like that um a little weathered but our father was more weathered than both of us put together he made it a long time yes he did uh but i don't know every man has an obligation to defend what he loves and to practice that so i love this country and i and there's something going on and i want to play a role i want to i want to do battle i want to do battle that's that clear seriously seriously there's no one better well if i could just end with one vignette that's been in our family all this time but it's i don't know almost 10 years ago i was at work because my job at the time i was at work was public so when i was at work uh antifa came to our house and of course as i've said we've always lived next to each other our whole lives so uh my wife was home alone and all these people came and tried to bang through the front door and spray painted her house and you know up to an antifa mob came to our house whatever i was not even aware this was happening so my wife is in the pantry of the house like people are trying to bart you know break down the door dogs are barking she does not call the police she calls you first because everyone in our family would always call you first if there's a problem and and then she calls the cops well the cops for some reason got there before you and then you showed up as the cops were just pulling up which meant that you couldn't shoot anybody and that you were mad for weeks after i'll never forget the next day when i saw you for lunch like i just feel bad i couldn't shoot anybody and they were terrifying suzy and i but the police were right there so i couldn't shoot them and i'm just i just feel bad about it i was like it's okay it was it was a justifiable sanctioned culling it would have been society would have been much improved i would have declared a tax credit that year don't you think oh i can't talk about this but that was so good it was so it was so good and everyone in our family was like yeah uncle buck got there after the police antifa was lucky it was hilarious i don't think i've ever experienced such frustration actually oh i know mandated restraint oh uncle buck thank you thank you so much that was awesome