Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
And good luck, guys. Thank you, Jamal.
And real quick, just so that everybody knows, this is
Marianne Riley with Not About You podcast with my Co host.
Romeo Nash the the sexy. Cool.
Good looking one. Yeah, that's right, that's
(00:22):
right. Don't be jealous.
And our Co host Jamal is unfortunately under the weather
so he will not be joining us forthis recording.
Godspeed on your recovery, Jamal.
Yeah, feel better, my man. Yeah, that was me last time.
And then we have a very special guest tonight and I want to jump
right into this guest because I'm excited.
(00:44):
Tim Howard now. Tim.
Yeah, I heard a lot about Tim Howard.
Already. So Tim, I, Jamal messaged me
earlier and said that he wasn't going to be able to be on the
podcast. And I said, OK, we got a, a
guest. I said, give me, give me
something about him, tell me something about him.
And so he sent me. He said that you grew up in
Nebraska and went to Houston to intend Race U University and
(01:11):
stayed there and taught college and university political science
and history for 25 years. I am, that's why.
I yeah, I'm very fascinated withthat.
And then? You're owner and operator at a
burger joint in Phillipsburg, Montana.
Yeah. And you guys are in New York, is
that right? No, we are in Washington.
(01:32):
No, we're in Washington state, but I'm I'm not.
Washington state. So you're like, next door
Almost, Yes. Jamal's in New York.
Yes, Jamal's in New York and we're based.
On the toilet, but still. Yeah, yeah.
So, and just to kind of let you know, so Romeo and I are married
(01:53):
and we're also a stand up comedian.
I don't know her. But Tim, Tim, Tim, Tim, welcome
and thank you so much for for joining us.
I have a quick question for you.I'm going to have a lot of
questions. First of all, how did Jamal rope
you into doing our our podcast? Well, he didn't mention you guys
(02:15):
at all of. Course he didn't.
He just said, hey, would you be interested in doing a podcast
October 22nd? And I was like, sure, why not?
And then he sent me a message this morning that it'll be about
(02:36):
7:30 Eastern Standard Time. And then I asked PM right?
Yeah, right. You know, because you know, you
guys are stand ups and there's only one 7:30 PM for you guys.
And then so you're in Washingtonstate and he's in New York City
(02:56):
and he didn't use either mountain or Pacific Time.
So yeah, he must not be good at math is should we just dump on
him since he's not here to defend?
You know we do anyways, so you know, and that's so, you know.
Sure. But so he invited.
How did he? How does he know?
(03:16):
How do you and Jabal know each other?
Just through Facebook and and stuff.
What happens is the part that's I didn't tell him is I would
hang around at the Laugh Stop inHouston back in the 90s and
early 21st century and love to hang out.
(03:42):
I mean, yeah, I would go up on stage and, you know, do stuff as
well that my classes, we're a lot like Jon Stewart before Jon
Stewart hosted The Daily Show kind of thing.
And so a great mix of comedy andinformation.
And so it was real easy for me to go to the laugh stop.
(04:05):
And you know, I learned right away the best way to get a lot
of stage time is to host on openmic night.
And so you get to like move the folks up and down the line and
everything. And so I, I got really attached
to these folks. And unfortunately, after about
2005 or so, I had to teach on Monday nights most of the time.
(04:32):
So that was when the open mic was and stuff.
But I've, I've done some shows on my own here in Montana and
elsewhere. I've booked a couple of shows
for, of all places, my restaurant to deal with some
stand up. You know what, whatever it takes
kind of thing. So, so most of my friends are
(04:56):
actually comedians, professionalstand up comedians or were once
professional stand up comedians.And it's the, the sort of, you
know, 6° of separation thing is how I came across Jamal or he
came across me. And almost everything on post
(05:16):
online is and, and, and most of the stuff I, I do on stage on
occasion anymore is has a very short lifespan because it's very
current events issue that I evenI have stuff that's not just
(05:37):
current events. But you know, you can only joke
about, you know, certain things for a certain amount of time.
And then the joke you know ages get gets become irrelevant.
Especially now with so much shitgoing on everywhere all the
time. You.
Just have to keep cycling through everything.
(06:00):
This is like the golden age for comedy, unfortunately.
I guess, you know, if if you're a political comic, oh, Oh yeah,
there's like it's right in itself even if you don't do
political comedy and you just throw something in.
Right, absolutely. Or even just social comedy or
(06:23):
social comment and and stuff andpointing out the rather a
historical nature of of stuff. How people have very easily
forgotten some of the most basicstraightforward lessons that you
would have thought that we had learned.
That we have now in a Yoda like fashion, unlearned.
(06:47):
That you must unlearn what you have learned.
Got it done that. Yeah, it, it is definitely like
I, I'm really curious. So when we talk about political
science, what exactly does that entail?
What does it? What does that mean?
Political science is almost completely irrelevant to being
(07:12):
able to help us out as far as the current events or anything
that's going on right now, because political science is
well, well, science is a methodology, right?
And it, it really struck me how when I was in Graduate School, I
mean, when you're an undergraduate and you're taking
(07:33):
polysy classes, it's all about discussing, should Kennedy have
done something different at the Bay of Pigs or should this is,
it is a socialized medicine system, the best kind of thing.
It's all about issues. And you get to Graduate School
and it's completely about methodology.
(07:53):
It's completely about statisticsand how do we know that income
and voting turn out is positively correlated and what
is the best statistical technique to look at that And
and you learn how to do statistical analysis.
So it's very, very, very math heavy.
(08:13):
And it's also in the last 30 years become very theoretical
that the only place there is forpolitics and to bring current
events in isn't poli sci, it's history.
That when I started taking graduate classes in history,
that's where they talk about, you know, putting this into the
(08:37):
proper context, or I mean, I'll give you an example.
I was taking a history class, graduate class, history of
France because it fit my schedule.
Whatever. And they were talking about
something where people were given the option of either
(09:02):
joining the army or going to be killed, you know, join us or die
kind of a thing. And we had a, one of the
graduate students was like, yeah, like the Nazis did to the
Jews. And like, the whole class was
like, no, no, no, no, they didn't offer them a chance to
(09:22):
fight in the army, right? You know, and and this guy was
just so shocked to discover that.
And so that it, and so his wholelife, how did that affect his
view of the Holocaust? Wow, you know.
He thought that those people were there because they chose
(09:44):
not to fight. Wow.
He finds out, you know, in in the most kindest way possible,
with people with hands on their shoulders like, no, they didn't
do that. And so consequently, his whole
worldview, you know, got fucked up right there.
(10:06):
Yeah. Absolutely, Absolutely.
Because because now you realize,holy shit.
You mean those people were just taken off the streets to go die
and you didn't really have a chance to do anything else, and
then suddenly that that changes how you see something like that?
You you, you talk about like thethe Holocaust.
(10:29):
And I know that this is something I try not to get like
overly political, but. Well, that's that was actually
something that was on on a view where we had this discussion a
couple of weeks ago after that young man was, was unalived Mr.
(10:50):
Charlie Kirk. And a lot of people and a lot of
people were, they saw Charlie Kirk a total different way from
the way others saw Charlie Kirk.And a lot of people like, oh, he
said that. I never knew.
He said that. Oh my God, I never knew he said
(11:12):
that. I'm like, wait a minute, what
are you talking about? You.
But it's, it's the same thing. People, they take in information
and well, they don't get all theinformation.
They don't. Get all the information they.
Get get one side of the information they get the side
that they that that favors them or favor what they want to hear.
(11:35):
Oh, absolutely. And that's, I mean, that was the
the thing when the Internet first started showing up.
I remember I had a student who is a fairly conservative guy,
but he was talking about, you know, when people can just post
stuff without any fact checking or background information, that
(11:57):
this is going to cause all sortsof problems.
And that's really going to be the great irony of the age in
which we live is that here we have access to unlimited
information. And it made us Dumber.
Yeah. It actually made us stupider
than we were before. It really.
(12:18):
Did and but it but in any case, but but to get back to the
original question, how poli sci become so at the highest level
so so theoretical about, you know, like in a beautiful mind
where they talked about how do pigeons maximize their utility
(12:43):
by finding the best place to stand so they can grab seeds and
stuff. They do the same thing looking
at congressional committees and if we align everybody on a
committee on a line and assign them a number, then what is the
outcome likely to be based on the certain range of numbers?
Which is why I just stuck to teaching freshman and and soft
(13:09):
undergraduate poli sci Where so.So that's one of the reasons why
you never see a political scientist on CNN on Fox on on
PBS, NPR. They don't seek these people out
because their job is to publish papers about establishing a
(13:36):
stable, equal equilibrium in a dynamic invite institutional
environment. Wawa.
Yeah. That, you know, it's that's
great for its own. It'll get you tenure, it'll get
you moved up. But but it speaks to nothing
about how do we save democracy? How do we preserve democracy?
(14:01):
And I really thought comparativepolitics was even better than
constitutional law. I, I taught both of those
classes because with the comparative politics, you find
out, holy shit, there's other countries that are also
democracies where people live wonderful lives and they have a
completely different political system.
(14:24):
It's still democratic, but it's multiple party.
It's what what they call a consensual it's, it's a unitary
system and not a federal system.And, and you look at the
tendencies of the countries and the big countries tend to have
characteristics like the United States.
(14:44):
The small homogeneous countries tend to have characteristics
like Britain. And then and then everybody else
is kind of on a continuum kind of a thing.
So I thought comparative politics really was, it was kind
of the last bastion of actually,let's see what is the best way
(15:06):
to allocate healthcare dollars by comparing how they do it
across 71 nations, you know, and, and how many are covered
and what is the percent of GNP kind of thing.
So comparative politics is stillOK.
International relations is aboutwhy do war start, how to prevent
(15:28):
war, is war preventable kind of thing, and what approach you
should take to explain the greatest amount of observations
with the fewest amount of words possible.
Which in many ways is the opposite of of say, the
historical method Because you ask a historian what started the
(15:51):
American Civil War, An American historian, which I would
consider myself to be, would say, OK, there's like I can give
you 5 off the top of my head reasons why the Civil War
started, you know, but the ability to weigh which one was
the number one and #2 and #3 and#4 is hard to say.
(16:13):
A political scientist would lookat something like that, what
started the American Civil War, and they would want to know the
one thing that had the most impact.
But statistically, that data setdoesn't exist.
And if the data doesn't exist, well, you can't study it kind of
a thing. So history, you want to make
(16:35):
sure that, well, you also have to include the Kansas Nebraska
Act, and you have to include theSupreme Court in the Dred Scott
decision. And you have to include
Lincoln's election and the rise of the Republican Party and all
of the stuff you want to like. Throw everything in it like a
Christmas fruit cake to make sure you haven't left anything
(16:56):
out. And the social scientists and
political scientists just want to know the one or two things.
Slavery was an economics. You know, milkshake, Give me the
ingredients to the milkshake, yeah.
Yeah. And now there's actually kind of
a movement in in history to try to kind of pare it down a little
bit and say, OK, well, you know,yes.
(17:18):
Was slavery the driving factor? In my opinion, yeah, very
likely. But you know what other factors
counted, what didn't count? Comparative politics would look
at similar situations. Well, how did other countries
deal with getting rid of their slaves, or I should say, getting
rid of slavery kind of thing? So, so, so it's different
(17:45):
approaches. And I always, even in my poli
sci classes, I tried to incorporate quite a bit of
history into my lessons and lectures without turning it into
a history course. And in my history courses, I
talked about the political context, especially the the
(18:06):
comparative political context ofwhat else was going on in the
world when, you know, this empire shows up in China or when
the the shows up in Japan. Or how like Japan developed a
feudal system almost identical to the British and the two had
(18:27):
never met yet that nobody from Britain had ever visited Japan,
nobody from Japan had ever visited Britain.
But on their own, both societiesdevelop a feudal society with
almost identical laws, which is just interesting that that
happened. Well, then you got to, yeah, but
(18:49):
you got to throw in some quantumphysics on that end.
Then Oh yeah, absolutely. That's right.
Yeah. At the sub physical level,
there's like you. Know universal knowledge is what
it was, you know? Yeah.
That that's right. It's and it's, I just watched
the series on Nova and anthropology about the rise of
human beings, and everybody thinks of it as a linear rise.
(19:11):
It was not. Homo sapiens left Africa, got
their asses kicked, didn't work.They went into Europe to to live
with the Neanderthals. That didn't work the first time.
The first city that they they think they've ever found sitting
there in a SE Turkey was a failure.
That, that everything goes forward and then it comes back
(19:33):
and then it goes forward again. That lately I've become more
interested in in origins. I'm always interested in origins
of things and now anthropology is like, I'm looking at that
like that maybe should have beenwhere I went.
Yeah. You know how did.
Speaking of where you went, yeah.
(19:53):
OK, go ahead. You went from Texas as a
university professor. Right, you have they.
Montana to Montana as a businessowner of of a a.
Burger joint. A burger.
Burger joint and soda fountain. So what I found?
I could. There it is.
(20:17):
Wow. You know, we're closed, but.
Oh wow. There's most of it.
Oh wow. Yeah.
How does that transpire? How does that happen?
There was a group called ProjectVote Smart.
What happens is you may recall breaking history and Poly
(20:39):
sciences this again, John McCain.
Senator McCain was implicated inthe Keating 5 scandal way back
in the 80s and nobody thought hewas going to get re elected.
Certainly Richard Kimball, this Democrat friend of mine now
didn't think McCain was going toget re elected.
(21:01):
So I don't know how Richard got his money, but he had the money
to run for the United States Senate.
No background, political experience or anything.
Figured he was going to be a cakewalk against McCain.
And McCain beat him. It was close, but he beat him.
And so Richard's like looking atthe post election polls and he
(21:22):
found out to his horror, and this is pre Internet, of course,
mid 80s, eighty, 486, something like that.
He found out to his horror how ignorant voters are, that many
of the people that voted for John McCain had no idea that he
was one of the Keating Five, hadno idea he was involved in that
(21:45):
scandal. And and so consequently, he
formed this group or organization, a nonprofit called
Project Vote Smart. And he founded the the
headquarters of it was part of it was Arizona State University,
but he also had a summer internship program up here
outside of Phillipsburg. He got this ranch for pennies on
(22:09):
the dollar. And he would have interns from
all of these colleges and universities, but they were
mostly Eastern universities likePrinceton, Columbia, the Ivy
League ones that that he had this internship program and this
group called Project Votesmart. And his goal was to educate the
(22:30):
voters so they wouldn't be so dumb.
Yeah. Yeah.
Well, Project Vote Smart virtually doesn't exist anymore
because one of the problems was Richard was not big on
technology, that he set up a system where you could call
Project Vote Smart on a telephone and they had a 1800
(22:53):
line toll free. And you could ask somebody to
look up the voting record of their particular representative
or congressman. You could even tell the person
their address and they can look up, you know, who their
congressman is and how they voted on certain issues or how
they are rated by various groupsand and everything.
(23:13):
But then when somebody suggestedputting that all on the
Internet, Richard said that he thought the Internet was a fad.
What? He thought that the Internet,
the Internet not, not social media, not not Myspace.
Oh yeah. That wasn't even.
There, you know, not Tinder. Yeah, you know, not TikTok.
(23:36):
The. Internet.
Now I had been using the Internet since the mid 1980s in
my graduate studies to link up to computers at other colleges,
universities, to look up data sets for statistical analysis,
etcetera, etcetera. So I knew the Internet wasn't a
fad. It.
(23:58):
Wasn't. Gone nowhere.
So Project Vote Smart was very slow at going online and
consequently it just became irrelevant.
At one point CNN had approached them about being a fact checker
or for CNN, but when they saw how primitive the operations
(24:20):
really are and how he was like paying people $13,000 a year in
like the year 2008 to to run theplace and stuff.
I mean, yeah, OK, you had room and board.
But nonetheless, that's, you know, you got $1000 a month to
live on pre tax. Good luck with that.
(24:42):
So anyway, now how this relates to me is Project Vote Smarts got
a bus they're driving around thecountry trying to get interns to
come up here to Montana for if you come up here for like a
month or two as a college intern, that's great.
But they are also looking for member interns who would come
(25:05):
and work for them for two weeks for free.
And you get to stay in Montana for free for two weeks.
And one day that bus rolled intoU of H and I got that
information and I started comingup here to Project Vote Smart.
And Project Vote Smart is gone. But I'm still here that I just
thought in in Houston, I, I, I needed to change the pace.
(25:28):
My wife was working for TSA. She was tired of having to deal
with the traveling public and somehow thought dealing with,
you know, hungry rednecks and a backward ass.
The part of the country was stepup.
So you know. It probably was.
It probably was a step. In some ways, yes.
(25:50):
Absolutely. In some ways, yes.
So I mean she was really always good at cooking and interested
in that. And so I thought I could do both
could still like teach in Houston and the the school year
and be here for the summer because summers with 90% of the
business, yes that we are halfway, we are located halfway
(26:11):
between Yellowstone and Glacier National Park.
OK, I know where that is. And we're off of a scenic byway
or the scenic byway is the only way in or out of the town.
And it's not far off the Interstate 90.
So if you're going from Yellowstone to Glacier, you're
going from Glacier to Yellowstone.
If you're going from, you know, Butte to Missoula, if you're, if
(26:34):
you're going from, you know, Minneapolis to Seattle, it's
only a little ways out of the way.
And it's extremely scenic and undeveloped and beautiful and,
and I just gorgeous. And I thought that was a big
change from Houston that I wouldappreciate.
And, and so that's what we did. And, and really it saved my, my
(26:57):
son and his family came up here to join us.
And so we all work the store together.
They've got their own place and they're doing great.
And I get up every day to take the granddaughter to school
because my my son and his wife often work late because they
have other jobs besides working for us.
(27:19):
And so that way they don't have to get up early and take her to
school and stuff. And I substituted the school
time. Oh.
That's way nice. And and so it is, you know, it's
an almost idyllic kind of a a situation and it's a town of 850
(27:39):
residents in a county of 3000. And my subdivision back in
Houston had 900 homes. So, so it is about as radically
different of an environment. But that's how I got here is
from Project Votesmart coming out here and really appreciating
(28:00):
how wonderful it was. And I just love the area and I
love the two weeks that I was uphere.
And yeah, I tried to talk since into Richard as as well that by
2008 they were just starting to get online and but it was it was
too late. The damage was already done.
They have since sold the ranch to some other non political
(28:23):
concern kind of thing. And the ranch was beautiful
right next to this lake and you could go out and paddle board
and everything. It was just wonderful little
scenic thing. It was not unusual to have
critters roaming through the yard kind of a thing.
But you're in Washington, and Washington is gorgeous.
Yeah, where? Where are you in Washington?
(28:46):
We're we're near the Tacoma area, but I grew up in the
backwoods. I grew up in the deep backwoods
like I always tell everybody I'mI'm I grew up in the boondocks
and so I grew up 40 miles from the nearest town.
No running water, indoor plumbing or electricity.
Like backwards legit. You see, I grew up in Lincoln,
(29:06):
NE where I was unable to see a Nebraska football game until I
was a college student because they've sold out every home game
since 1964. And so you couldn't just go buy
a football ticket back when theywere still good.
And that was kind of a medium sized city.
And then I went from there to Houston, which is like third or
(29:27):
fourth largest city now, to a hamlet about the size of the
town that my mom grew up in in Nebraska.
But thank God it's not in Nebraska.
Yeah, you guys you get, you don't get a lot of snow, do you?
We have a ski hill just outside of town.
Oh. You get a bit.
Of snow. So we get a lot of snow.
(29:48):
Yeah, we do. See, I'm from Chicago and it's
always snow, no skiing, but alas.
God, I love Chicago. Chicago is, you know, my
favorite place in the world. The first time I went there and
drove them down and saw those Frank Lloyd Wright buildings and
everything and all of the architecture, it was like, this
(30:10):
is so much cooler than Houston is, you know?
And I love Houston, but boy, Chicago is just just
awesomeness. I think I've.
Been to Houston, just that the airport was transferring planes.
I've never. Even, well, Houston's one of
those cities that was built after the cars came around, you
know, and so it's all spread outmuch like Los Angeles.
In fact, it's it's been comparedto Los Angeles in in a lot of
(30:35):
ways, both favorably and unfavorably.
Except that. Except that in Houston, they
don't hide the oil wells like they hide them in Los Angeles,
where they put them in buildingsand pretend they're not there.
Really. That's the first time I've heard
that. Yeah, yeah, the LA Southern
(30:55):
California oil was, it wasn't, it still is a big part of that.
And and they, they do literally like put the stuff in buildings
so you don't see them and quite frankly smell them like you do
in Houston. That the big downside to Houston
was the air pollution. If the wind was blowing in from
(31:15):
Pasadena or Baytown where all the refineries were, it was not
a good day to be outside in in Houston.
Also anytime between May 1st andOctober 1st.
You really appreciate it, whoever it was that invented the
air conditioner. Oh yeah.
Oh, just, you know, 80 to 90%. It's like walking through hot
(31:37):
soup. Wow, high humidity.
Oh, very high all the time. But it has a remarkable effect
on your skin. I mean, when I first started
teaching at a Community College when I was still in grad school,
because they wouldn't initially pay me a stipend the first year.
(31:57):
And there are these women that Ithought were like in their 20s
or what have you, and they were in their 40s and their 50s.
But you know there is. You couldn't tell because
they've been living underwater. Right.
Right. And and so it's, you know, up
here in Montana or back in Nebraska, yeah, you can tell
(32:21):
somebody's lived there their whole life because.
It's windward. Look, look more like a Shar Pei.
Yeah, including myself. I'm not excluding myself from
that in any way, which is why the light's so.
See, Romeo and I are both very lucky that neither one of us
look our age. So we're we're very fortunate
for that. I mean, we're both.
(32:41):
There you go. 60 we're both pushing 60, so.
Oh wow, you're. Saying that, we push it.
We're pushing. 60 Yeah, we're pushing. 60 Yeah, I'm 67, but
well, actually I'm almost 67. Yeah.
And any case, so we're all in the same generation roughly.
Yeah, So we, yeah. And then that's, you know,
that's why I, I, I was so interested in talking to you
(33:04):
because so you, you also study constitutional law and wow, I, I
have to ask this question. I have to ask this question.
Sure. Only because I have an
opportunity to talk to somebody of knowledge.
So I have to ask this question. So it was asked to President
Trump if he had to follow the Constitution.
(33:28):
I know you have to have something to say about this, and
I know you've heard it. And his response was, I have
very good lawyers to look into that.
Yeah, well, they Article 2 requires the president of the
United States to take an oath ofoffice and an oath, it says that
(33:49):
he must uphold the Constitution.You know it that and, and he,
you know, Trump, he, he lies about so many things, even
things that aren't really all that important.
Like, you know why he's orange? You know, because he's got good
genes, you know, is. That what the reason was.
(34:10):
He's got good genes. He's oh, yeah.
He's got good genes. That's why he's orange, you
know, just not around the eyes and not, you know, into the
hairline. But sometimes he's, don't get me
wrong on this, OK? He's honest to a fault.
Like when he says, well, I'll have lawyers look into that.
(34:31):
He's telling you I'm going to try not to.
I'm going to do everything in mypower not to uphold the
Constitution if it is not in my own best personal or political
interest to do so. Yeah.
And, you know, you know, just. And so in that sense, and only
(34:52):
in that sense, is he, you know, he, he tells you.
Yeah, I'm going to try to do everything I can not to.
Exactly. And that's what.
I will let the lawyers argue later, you know, whether or not
I should it. Was one of those things that
absolutely, positively dumbfounded me when well.
And and what's so what's so bizarre to me is that the second
(35:14):
inauguration, he his hand, he held it above the Bible.
It didn't actually touch, it was.
It. Was hovering it was hovering
above it. He didn't like rest it where you
could see the hands like kind ofjust resting on there and put up
his hand. I think it was like he was
trying to do a contest to see how, you know, like when your
(35:37):
brother or sister told you don'ttouch me, don't touch me and you
get, you know, I'm not touching you, I'm not touching you.
That's kind of how he, he did the Bible thing there at the
inauguration kind of thing. Which again, was that a purpose?
Was it, was it not on purpose? I think the great question the
(35:59):
historians are going to look at in all of this because this is
going to be a very steady era. Somebody much more clever than I
said, 150 years from now, everybody is going to be
studying Trump for the exact opposite reason.
We still study Lincoln. You know, the 150 after Lincoln,
(36:21):
150 years after Lincoln's born, there's still books being
written about him. You would think everything that
could possibly be known or understood about Lincoln could
have been known or understood over 150 years, but apparently
not. And and apparently legitimately
so 150 years from now, Captain Kirk is going to be reading
(36:41):
about Donald Trump. They're going to be going.
And I think the big question is going to be, how much of this
shit did he really believe? Yes, you know.
And how much did he know he was conning us?
Oh, I think he knows a lot of that.
He's conning us. You know, because yeah, yeah,
it's of course it's a combination of the two.
(37:04):
Yeah, absolutely it is. It is absolutely a combination
of two. The question is, is it 60407030?
8020. Yeah, 8020.
Wait, which part of that was, I mean, I saw him being
interviewed where the interviewer, you know, when they
they were still doing the campaign and they're eating the
cats, they're eating the dogs right after that, right, right,
(37:28):
right after that debate. And the reporter said, but it
turns out they're not eating thecats or the dogs that the lady
that said that retracted this, the story is not true.
And you saw the shock in his face and he actually sat up in
his chair like this and said, well, what about the guy
carrying the goose? Because there was also a picture
(37:51):
of a guy carrying a goose from that area that people were
claiming he had gone down to thelake and killed a goose or
something at the local pond. You know, because that's what
immigrants do is they, they, they kill geese at the pond
when? Because it's cheaper than buying
it from the grocery store or what have you.
(38:13):
But, but he looked genuinely shocked, like, well, what about,
you know, because, I mean, he's one of these people who has such
a small base of knowledge that he's completely dependent upon
what people tell him. I mean, and, and, and yes, he
(38:33):
watches TV so the people on TV can tell him what it is he wants
to know or, or needs to know or,or, or kind of a thing that he,
you know, couldn't. He doesn't have it all, you
know, any kind of a background or, or intellectual capacity or,
(38:55):
or curiosity, even you, you don't have to be smart to be
intellectually curious, right? He already thinks he knows it
all. You know, and, and.
That's what's scary about. Him.
And that's just it. And that's the problem with with
people who believe they're infallible that that there was a
(39:17):
remarkable recording was unearthed not that long ago that
they found Hitler was talking to.
I don't know if the king of Sweden at the time, because
Sweden was neutral and he talkedabout how his intelligence folks
really fucked him with, with theRussian tanks.
(39:38):
We had no idea the Russian tankswere as good as they are, and
that if they had known that the Russian tanks were as good as
they actually are, he said. We might not find ourselves in
this difficulty that we find ourselves in at this point.
And it was after the Battle of Stalingrad where the tide had
turned and the Russian forces had started moving West and
(40:00):
would never stop. And it was that that point
Hitler meets with this guy and he admits like, we're in deep
shit now. He didn't take responsibility
for it. Of course.
He didn't sit there and go, maybe I should have thought
twice about starting a land war in Asia.
OK, technically it was Europe, but in any case.
(40:22):
But at least he there was a recognition that he's in some
serious shit and the country's in some serious shit kind of
thing. And, and I don't know if you see
that with Trump. I don't know if you see that
recognition that I mean, we're one thing that nobody talks
(40:43):
about is, is debt. And we ran up such a tremendous
debt necessarily during COVID, right?
Nobody's talking about how the fuck do we pay off $36 trillion
in in debt because that's getting added on to, you know,
(41:05):
pretty soon. Interest payments.
I mean, interest payments on thedebt are already about 1/4 of
the spending. I mean, it's, that means there's
going to be less money for othershit unless we can get this
under control. And personal debt.
Nobody talks about all the personal debt that was racked
up. It used to be until 89, you
(41:25):
could deduct your credit card interest off of your income
taxes. You could deduct the interest
you paid on car loans that any consumer loan you had as a
person, right? You could deduct that off of
your income. And then with the Tax
Simplification Act actually of 87 passed by Reagan, a lot of
(41:50):
that went away. And the number of American
bankruptcies skyrocketed over the next few years because we
were still in debt, but we weren't able to write it off
anymore as people, as as individuals, you know, and, and
then after the bankruptcies increased and Congress made it
(42:13):
harder, the Republican controlled Congress, quite
frankly, made it harder for people to declare bankruptcy.
That it used to be bankruptcy got you out of everything.
Now bankruptcy gets you out of practically nothing.
You know, it's like, wow, bankruptcies are going way up.
What should we do? Maybe help alleviate people of,
of their debt by letting them, you know, deduct the interest
(42:36):
off of their income. Or we could just make it harder
to declare bankruptcy without looking at the core issue of why
did bankruptcies skyrocket at a time when the economy was
actually doing pretty well. We had our little recession in
1990, Nothing like what happenedin 2020.
We had a little recession, but overall, the economy did really
(43:00):
pretty fucking well from like 19, you know, 82 to 2008, you
know, and people did relatively well.
But why did bankruptcy suddenly skyrocket?
And that was one of the reasons is, is personal debt.
The government was kind of helping us along because that
helps grow the economy. And when they quit letting
(43:21):
people, and I say this with somebody who has, you know, 0 on
credit cards and zero business debt right now, you know, I'm
not sitting here with $150,000 in debt saying please,
government, come bail me out. Right?
Exactly. But but just, oh, but, but there
are people that, you know, they got rid of of that and, and
(43:43):
personal debt since 2020 is still a huge, huge issue.
And, and they talk about studentloan debt.
But let's open up the discussion.
What about beyond student loan debt?
You know, and nobody, nobody, Republican, Democrat,
conservative, middle of the road, nobody wants to touch that
(44:04):
sucker. That is, you know, that's like
pissing on electric fence. Right.
Oh, good analogy. Actually, that's a really good
analogy. Like I don't have, I've never
had any student debt. Every like all of my education,
I either was self educated or I was able to put myself in a
(44:26):
position where the company I work for paid for my education
and it took me longer to get, you know, financially sound,
but. It took me 7 years to get my
bachelor's. Yeah, it took me significantly
longer to get. Well, I think it didn't take me
(44:47):
that long to get the education, but it took the the paths and
and the roads that I took to getwhere I was at.
Took me a long time to get there, mostly just to find out
what I really wanted to do. And so I don't have any student
debt. But I look at these people who
are drowning in in like outrageous student debts and
(45:08):
like, what are we going to do for our doctors or our future
doctors? Because if they can't do
anything with their student loan, they know that to become a
doctor, they're already what, 300,000 two $100,000 in debt?
I'll give you a personal example.
My grandson is at Montana State University and he graduated
(45:28):
first in his class here and got full right scholarship at the
University of Montana for his full first year.
I mean, everything OK, but it's only for the first year and then
after that you're on your own. And so, yeah, he's he's working,
but the cost of college has has skyrocketed ridiculous amounts.
(45:55):
And nobody ever looks at that either.
It's like, why is that? Well, that's because, you know,
it used to be, and I don't mean like an old guy, get off my lawn
kind of a thing. But it wasn't that long ago that
if you were a university president making $150,000 a year
in the 21st century, you were doing pretty good.
(46:17):
But now those guys are are making millions.
That colleges and university administration was the biggest
fight that we had as faculty wasthey just kept adding layers and
layers and layers of administration and, and these
people were paid tremendous amounts of money.
(46:40):
I mean, the guy that when I started it, this Community
College back in 1990, the head guy was making $90,000 a year.
Today the same job pays $600,000.
Now it's, it's, they've expandedcampuses and there's a lot more
students and, but also the layerof bureaucracy has just expanded
(47:04):
as as as well. And so the tuition keeps going
up and up, but the tuition only covers about 15 to 20% of the
cost. The rest of that cost is being
picked up somewhere. And one of the other reasons is,
is not only administration overhead has has expanded, but
you know, states primarily historically fund colleges and
(47:27):
universities and they just haven't, it hasn't kept pace
with inflation either that the amount of the number one expense
for the state of Nebraska was the University of Nebraska was
the number one expense. And so if you're going to cut
the budget and you want to find a really simple, easy target to
(47:51):
do it, you go right after the University of Nebraska is as
best you can. Now, those administrators aren't
going to cut their own salary and certainly they're not going
to cut the faculty salaries either, which are typically
110th of what they're making. So what are they going to do?
They're going to raise tuition, they're going to raise fees.
They're going to come up with brand new fees.
(48:11):
They're going to, you know, they're going to build new
condominiums for, for the richerstudents to go to and charge
them, you know, $50,000 per school year to stay in these
places that I mean, it's remarkable how beautiful some of
the college housing has become that most of downtown Lincoln
(48:34):
and I was there in August. Most it, that's now just condo,
condo, condo, condo, condo for university students and some
permanent residents, but primarily A transient population
kind of thing. So it's, you know, it, it, it's
like the old adage, the rich getricher, you know what everybody
(48:55):
else does not. And, and you see that at the
colleges and universities and, and that's why it cost so much.
And I mean, my grandson's going to have to borrow $25,000 this
year at Montana State, which is a much better school to get
through this year. And then he still got two years
after that. So, you know, and this is a guy
(49:19):
who, again, 4 O he had above a four O average because there
was, you know, stuff you can do honors, right.
Right on it. Yeah.
So here's a kid that's just outperforming, everybody's going
to probably become a great paleontologist, life sciences
kind of a guy, you know, that hecould tell you every single
dinosaur and when they live, during which period and whether
(49:43):
they were plant eater or whatever by the time he was 6,
you know. And so he's a life sciences
major. And I don't know, he may clone a
Mastodon before we're all done here, but but he's going to be
at least $100,000 in debt on theday of his graduation.
And that's if he's lucky. And he's also going to a
(50:04):
reasonably cheap school like Montana State.
Like how do we how do we expect to like when we have education
conflict that how do we expect? To educate our kids.
Yeah, to be able to, to, to stayabreast of and then when we have
that kind of debt. I don't know.
And, and I'm not a conspiracy guy, but you know, it's
(50:29):
sometimes been suggested that this isn't a boating accident.
Yeah, you know, that that, that I, I lived in a in a
neighborhood which wasn't a Country Club neighborhood, but
it was across the street from the Country Club neighborhood
there in Lincoln. And these rich kids who were
(50:49):
given cars when they were 16 years old, you know, not that
they, you know, I had to cut lawns and then buy the car
myself kind of a thing, but, youknow, to put myself on a
pedestal. But I mean, I saw in, in, in
these kids and how they were because they knew they didn't
have to do well in school. They didn't have to study.
(51:11):
They were all set. You know, there's this guy that,
you know, I was in class with that never really liked all that
much. Name we call him Big Ed Big Ed
never had to do crap in school because his dad was a dentist.
All they had to do is just get by and dad was going to set him
up, you know, or, or my dad's a doctor.
(51:32):
The kid across the street who should have been my best friend
never bothered doing well at school, but he was from this
athlete. The only reason he couldn't move
on is because he was such a bad student that he played a year of
college ball and couldn't get tothe next year because he
couldn't keep the grades up. But that was OK because his dad
was a big time salesman for Green Giant and that's what he
(51:56):
does. Or maybe he's retired by now.
That's what he has done for a living is that these guys knew
they had it made. And and, and so rich people kind
of understand that their kids really can't compete against the
likes of us. And so, you know, the less
(52:17):
challenging we are to them, the harder you make it for people to
go up the ladder, the less they the less challenged their
children are going to be kind ofa thing.
And I could be a conscious thing, it could be a
subconscious thing, or I could become completely full of shit
and applying a class analysis where it's completely
inappropriate. I don't think so, I think.
(52:38):
Pick one AB or C or all of the above.
You know what though? I think there's a lot to be said
for that. And and again, like, not
necessarily conspiracy theorists, but.
Yeah, yeah. No, not like there's a room of
smoking guys. OK?
What we got to do is we got to get fewer kids to go to college
because that's not working because more people go to
(52:58):
college than ever before. We know as if people who did not
grow up with that golden span orthat silver span, we.
Know all of my all of my politics, all of my history Is
really, really instructed by what happened to my dad because
he was born in 1932, right at the start of the Great
(53:20):
Depression. Family of 1311 girls, 2 boys and
when he was like 8 or 9 years old his dad fucking took off.
Never look back. And one of the last
conversations I had with him washow he remembered his mom going
to the local county extension agent and pleading and begging
(53:44):
for just some money or some foodor something to feed her.
You you know, 11 kids and peopleare.
I wish you shouldn't have had 11kids.
I was like, no woman wants 11 kids.
How much control over her sex life do you think she had?
Exactly. You know, and that's surviving
kids because one died of tuberculosis when she was
(54:06):
little. But in any case, so, and when
you look at like pictures of my dad and his sisters and stuff
from like the waist up, they're all normal, but from the waist
down, they've all got short legsand, and, and they were shorter
than the previous generation than my grandfather or great
grandfather was, because they actually suffered from
(54:29):
malnutrition. The 1930s was the last time in
this country where we have documented cases of people
starving to death just because they couldn't get the food that
they needed to stay alive, not because they were trapped in
some building being chained to the floor or some shit like
that. That that as bad as malnutrition
is as bad as people don't eat properly.
(54:51):
And there are people that go hungry, kids that go hungry.
I taught on a reservation here in Montana for here so and they
did school lunches on Saturday because many of those kids
didn't have parents on the weekend.
And, and the only time that theywere going to eat was if they
went to go have breakfast and lunch on Saturdays, then they
(55:13):
weren't eating again until Monday morning because there
wasn't an adult around who either cared or was able to take
care of them. And and so, you know, you want
to see real poverty out there today and stuff, you know, go
live on a reservation for a yearand, and you see, you know,
(55:34):
there are people struggling likethat, but none of them are
starving to death. You know, that, that there are
there is aid that didn't exist before.
And and like whenever I see people wanting to tear down the
system, so it's more like the system that my, you know, dad
suffered under and his family suffered under, you know, it,
(55:55):
it, it really pisses me off do. You see that, do you see that in
our current political environment that it's going that
way? To a certain extent, I mean,
there's some things they keep wanting to fuck with Social
Security. There's so many.
I mean, Social Security is self funding, but there's all that
(56:17):
money and, and, and they would just love to see all that money
go into Wall Street and suddenly, you know, they're,
they're four O 1 KS and everything and all the investors
are able to fuck with your Social Security money.
And, and, and George W Bush produced a bill that would
effectively have taken 2% of themoney that would normally go
(56:41):
into Social Security was going to go into an investment fund
that would be run by the likes of Goldman Sachs and some of
these other guys. And you, you still had to pay
that tax, by the way. You you couldn't not pay that
tax and you couldn't not just let it ride until you retire. 2%
of your Social Security taxes were going to go to investment
(57:03):
firms who would then take that to Wall Street and wherever else
in the bond markets and all of that other shit and invest it so
that you would have a nice steady income.
And Social Security, you know, when I first started teaching,
they told me Social Security is going to go bankrupt by 2012.
OK, not 2012, 2015, not 20/15/2019.
OK, not 2019-2020 six. No, not 20262032.
(57:27):
Well, not 20322048. Well, the problem is by 2048,
all the baby boomers are going to be dead, right?
And so you're actually going to see Social Security money
becoming a smaller and smaller part after the boomers like us,
you know, we're all gone becausewe're part of that demographic
bubble that's responsible for for a lot of that.
(57:51):
But I do see this callousness about it that, well, people
really don't need these programsand, or anything.
And so I don't think they're trying to take us back to pre
1932, but man, on the far right they sure are.
(58:11):
I mean, Ann Coulter's once said that in a debate with Al
Franken, if she could go back toto the 1930s, she would stop the
New Deal. And Al Franken said, see, if, if
it was me, I'd go back and kill Hitler.
But that's just the difference between.
The right? Exactly.
He didn't like, but yeah, on thefar right man, they, they hate
(58:33):
the New Deal, they hate Social Security, and of course they
really hate Medicare, Medicaid and all of these other programs
that have come since. And, and when you look at how
the United States handles this stuff versus other countries,
how they handle this stuff, these other countries don't have
the same arguments that we have.No, they don't.
Pass this many years ago, they were like, we're we're going to
(58:57):
do this. I mean, in Germany 1884, they
got National Health insurance inGermany from Bismarck, who was a
conservative politician. Why did he do it?
Because the Communist Party was a real threat in Germany and he
was afraid of we don't at least throw some bread out to these
(59:18):
guys every once in a while. You could actually see Germany
become communist. And that's exactly what Marx
predicted. He predicted industrialized
advanced economies like Germany would be the first in Britain
would be the first ones to move into the next socialist and then
eventually communist. Not a backward ass peasant ass
(59:40):
country like Russia or or China.We we remarkable for us to think
about where China is today as one of the most technologically
advanced nations with some of the highest income on Earth.
But when you and I were in elementary school, it was a
peasant country. Yeah.
Yeah, it was. Yeah, you know.
(01:00:02):
It didn't take long for that time to turn for them at all.
That that's, that's the biggest,I mean, and of course the whole
Asian economy, not just China, but Japan rebuilding itself the
way it did. And South Korea.
My dad served in the Korean War and, and he always wanted to go
back and it would be unrecognizable to what it was
(01:00:25):
like in 1953. But these countries have gotten
past that argument that there's like 62 democracies, depending
upon how you define it, 61 have some form of National Health
insurance. We're the only one that does
not. And then on the other side of
the argument, there's only one country where the government
(01:00:48):
runs the healthcare system and that's Britain, that there is
really only one country that hasa socialized medicine system
where most of the doctors, hospitals, practitioners,
whatever you want to call them, are government employees and the
hospitals are government owned. There are private.
(01:01:09):
It's not a monopoly, but that's the only one.
Everybody else does it by regulating medical fees, which
effectively regulates salaries, regulates insurance rates.
Government provides some form oflow cost insurance type of
things, some combination of that.
Sometimes it's a little ridiculous, like in Japan where,
(01:01:31):
you know, if you need a stitches, the doctor can't
charge you more than 3 or 4 bucks to stitch you up.
You know, I mean, literally 3 or$4.00 to do that.
And, and, and so, yeah, of course doctors want to come to
the United States because they're, it's like winning the
fucking lottery, you know, kind of a thing.
(01:01:52):
But these other countries have moved past this shit, you know,
and we're still struggling with it and and we keep coming back
on it, trying to unlearn everything in in.
And I think the most frustratingaspect of it is not necessarily
the food stamps thing, which, you know, they're trying to get
rid of and cut back on Medicaid,but that they've already done.
(01:02:15):
And that's about what the government shutdown is really
about kind of thing. But even in fucking science,
man, I mean RFK junior things, the shot heard around the world
started autism, not the Revolutionary War, right?
Right. You know, even in science we're
moving backwards and trying to defund.
(01:02:36):
The stuff Oh my God RFK just makes my head hurt.
I can't even believe that a grown adult believes this shit
that he believes. Thank yeah.
Thank God there are at least twodozen industrialized democracies
on the planet that still embracescience, that are still funding
(01:02:58):
science, and are still looking for cures and treatments for
diseases and shit, even if the largest one with the biggest
economy is going to take a giantstep backwards on this.
Do you like, do you have communication with the people
from other countries? You know, you know, like, do you
(01:03:19):
know how many friendships with people live in a?
Yeah, yeah, I I've had, I've hadmany friendships with, with
folks from oh, God, I could not that many, you know, not like 20
or 30 countries, but Oh yeah, absolutely.
My best, one of my best friends was from Britain.
He's teaching in Texas still. And his dad was the British
(01:03:45):
ambassador to Iraq. Oh wow, so I.
During, during the Saddam Hussein regime.
Oh, wow. And in the summer of 1990, we
were both in Graduate School at Rice.
We were going to go to Iraq. We were going to go visit.
And that was the summer that Saddam took everybody hostage.
Yeah. That we are going to get a
diplomatic thing. And it was going to be so cool
(01:04:07):
to go. But yeah, Poland got a good
friend who's a professor. She she's from Poland originally
and and she's like Hungary, Russia.
I know several Russians. I'm just kind of curious, if you
stay in touch with them, you talk to them, what like the
(01:04:29):
outside looking in at us, what are their perspectives that
people on the outside looking inhave?
I had a friend of mine from Texas who moved to Belgium about
7 years ago and I asked him thatvery question, what does it look
like from where you're at and how do the people there see it?
(01:04:50):
And he said, remember when NotreDame Cathedral was on fire and
there wasn't a God damn thing you could do about it but just
sit there and watch it burn? Right.
He said that's pretty much it, that after watching the United
States burn and there's not a lot they can do.
(01:05:13):
There's not a lot that we can do.
I mean, I don't even know if there's.
Anything we. Can do.
That I don't. Have the power, aren't doing
anything. Yeah, we just came.
We just came back from Australia.
Well, we were on a 23 day cruise, so we went to a few
different countries. So we just got back last week
(01:05:34):
and the entire cruise all the way from Seattle to Honolulu to
Tahiti to Moria to New Caldovia and then to Australia to Sydney,
Australia, the entire time the news boasted about Trump.
(01:05:59):
Every single day. Trump.
And all this crazy antics and. All this every single day.
I was like, we just can. Go to another country and stop
listening about this. Buffoon, I'm not thinking.
And you still can't get away from it.
Yeah, you couldn't. That was the one thing we
couldn't get away from and therewas chest.
And there we got, we got to Australia and the guy, the guy
(01:06:24):
we ran into this guy in Australia, we was at the hotel
and he was, we were standing outside and he and he goes, oh,
you got that American. We like, yeah, we're American.
He goes, so do you got he goes, are you Trumpsters?
And I'm like, I was like, we like, well, we, we had nothing
to do with that man. We did not do it, you know, but
(01:06:49):
it's a trip. I mean, the way the way the
world of Canada, yeah, Canada, yeah, we go to Canada a lot.
We had. We had a Canadian citizen like
just very matter of fact. It the the very matter of
factly, it was like, why doesn'tsomebody just assassinate him?
Oh. Yeah, that was not.
(01:07:11):
Quite. That easy?
It's not that quite that easy, you know, Because then we'd be
left with JD the the couch fucker.
Well, it's just just, I mean, you try and you fail and you see
what happens, you know, he becomes, he he, he monetizes it.
Yeah, you know, and, and, and The thing is too here.
And The thing is, you know, as much as I have always hated that
(01:07:33):
guy as a human being or alleged human being or sack of wind when
he would be on Letterman. And I watched Letterman
religiously, you know, and The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson
growing up. And he was from Nebraska.
I'm from Nebraska. How do I not?
And I'm Facebook friends with Dick Cavett. him and I went to
the same school years apart and we're on the same student
(01:07:56):
newspaper and, and everything. And we have kind of a little bit
of a similar background there. But but you know, when he goes,
he's going to leave this shit behind.
I mean, the everybody wants to pick up the mantle and be the
next Trump. I don't know if they can do it,
(01:08:17):
but I don't know that they can'tdo it.
You know, kind of thing that that JD Vance just where he was
six or seven years ago to where he is now is just fucking
remarkable that everything is like he fell asleep next to a
pod next to a maggot pod. And then he woke up and and the
maggot version of him came out of the pod.
(01:08:39):
For all of the invasion of the body snappers folks out there
kind of a thing. It it's just I, I mean, you can
see like people like Rubio, you can see the stress on his face.
You can see him in those cabinetmeetings going, you know, I made
a poor choice for a career. I'm here as damage control and
(01:09:04):
I'm going to set this fucking thing out and eat shit sandwich
after shit sandwich until it's my turn.
And, and he's got to be haunted by the fact that he might have
been able to knock Trump out back in 2016 at the debate when
they have a question about the nuclear triad.
(01:09:25):
And Trump didn't know the nuclear triad any more than one
of my daughter's dogs would knowthe the nuclear triad.
And he completely flubbed the question and it went to Rubio.
And Rubio just let him off the hook instead of going no, no,
no. I would like to give my time
back to Mr. Trump here to let him explain to the American
people what the nuclear triad actually is, you know, kind of
(01:09:50):
thing. And what do you do with these?
It's a great thing. It's a wonderful thing.
It's the best triad ever, you know.
He did that with the Constitution.
Well, you know, they asked him what did he.
Fucking Gettysburg. Yeah, that's what I said.
I'm like what the fuck? Gettysburg, lot of love.
(01:10:10):
There's a lot of people that died.
In the in the civil war for. I'm like bitch, that's 70 years
later what are you talking about?
But. Almost.
And did you see the? Look on the guy who answered the
question. He looked at him like what the.
Fuck. Yes, like he looks like the rest
of us felt right. The look on his face mirrored
(01:10:32):
everything that we all felt like.
What the fuck did he just say? He can't really be that stupid,
is he? Yeah, and, and you just there,
there's a a video I saw lately of when what was there's a show
on CNN where they had the two guys battle it out against each
(01:10:53):
other and they made fun of it inthe bird cage where they, you
know, Gene Hackman said it's themost intelligent show on TV.
And the the two sides were yelling at each other and they
were interviewing Donald Trump, asking him whether or not he had
read Bonfire of the Vanities. And he said no because I read
Art of the Deal and it's a greatbook and you everybody should
(01:11:16):
read Art of the Deal. And then 3 minutes later they
bring up Bonfire of the Vanitiesand Trump says he read it and
liked it. So within about. 10 years.
So within if you have 3 minute period of time, right, He went
from no, because I got a book here, you know, OK, you're fine.
You're promoting your book. I get that kind of thing too.
(01:11:37):
Yeah, I read it and enjoyed it. You know, 3 fucking minutes ago
you hadn't. But he, he kind of read the room
and saw that these other guys loved Bonfire, the Vanities or
whatever it was #1 New York Times bestseller.
So he must be part of it too. He must now be part of that
crowd kind of a thing. It just like I said,
psychiatrists are just going to have pH DS are going to be
(01:12:03):
written about this guy in almostevery field of endeavour that
you can think of. You know, from psychiatry to not
so much poli sci, but definitelyhistory God, just trying to
figure it out and and the. American population too.
Not just him but the American population of how the fuck were
(01:12:27):
these people all like drugged and and let this happen or what
were they all sleeping through? At least the first time, OK.
The first time, right? Right.
It was a fluke. OK.
Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by several million votes.
Yeah, she won it handily, Easily, But because of the way
(01:12:50):
the votes were district distributed is the food he got
in. OK, So he gets in.
But there's no January 6th yet. There's no.
Only 15 people have died of COVID.
It's no big deal yet. None of that.
All of that was still in the future.
So you just figure, well, he's going to like, just get tired of
being president and walk away. And I was thinking, no, no, no,
(01:13:12):
you get to be on the helicopter.You get to have, you know, Air
Force what you get to have everybody kissing your ass kind
of a thing. And so that by the time that
2020 came around, he did not want to go and did everything in
his power not to go and everything beyond his power not
(01:13:32):
to go after after he lost that. So it's just but but 2024, you
just it, it just goes to the depths of of which racism and
sexism is still very much alive.When I I taught for the Houston
(01:13:54):
Independent School District for a year back in 2015 to early
2016 and I had students, you know, Hispanic students asking
me who are really scared, you know, about Donald Trump.
And I said, do not worry about Donald Trump.
We're not the kind of a country that would elect somebody like
Donald Trump, president of the United States.
(01:14:16):
And in 2016, I was right. And by 2024, we were a country
that would elect Donald Trump. And Biden was just toast.
That I still think he did the right thing by pulling out
because if he'd stayed in, I think it would have been worse
than it was. And I think she did such a
(01:14:40):
yeoman's job there. A 90 day campaign for president
of the United States. I mean, that was pretty much
like when Hubert Humphrey ran in68.
He started his campaign in Apriland he came within a whisker of
saving us from Richard Nixon getting elected president.
She had 90 days and she was justas close as Humphrey was to
(01:15:01):
preventing Donald Trump presidency.
But you know, you have to just look at not mass psychosis, but
you know, echo chambers, you know, the social media, it's
made us Dumber, but it's also reinforced what we want to
believe and gives us an Ave. to disentangle from, from the
(01:15:29):
things that we find inconvenientto believe.
I also think that Elon Musk had a lot to do with that too.
His money, the money he was pumping into certain
demographics to try and get thatvoting and to try and get the
voting for Trump. That had a huge thing to do with
(01:15:50):
it. And it's, it's, I'm more
concerned now not so much about how we got in, but how the fuck
do we get him out? Because I don't think even
waiting four years is going to. There, there's if he's still
alive, I still don't see him leaving.
(01:16:13):
I, I said the first time in 2020, he's not going, people.
He's not leaving. That's what I said.
If if that's what I said. He's going to try to find a way.
He's a narcissist. Well, the the problem is, the
problem is he is, he's a child with the basketball.
(01:16:37):
He's a child with the basketball.
And if you piss him off, give memy ball, I'm going home.
OK, Now that he has access to our military, our weaponry, our
(01:16:59):
government, our he's got access to everything and now and now
and, and, and now every single judge and, and law, law abided
citizen that is speaking againsthim is being brought up on
charges. They're losing their jobs.
He's they're getting sued. It's like he's doing away with,
(01:17:23):
he's doing away with freedom of speech, he's doing away with
with due process, he's doing away with with anything and
everything. Freedom of association is also
First Amendment right. Your ability to join whatever
group you want to. As far as it's not.
Advocating a violent overthrow of, of the United States, your
freedom of association. I mean, they just charged today.
(01:17:47):
They brought charges up against another member of the Biden
administration. I forget who it was for
basically being a member of the Biden administration.
See, and that's what I don't get.
I mean this man is he is a 34 time, a 34 count felon, right?
And has never served a moment injail for anything.
(01:18:12):
And you know he's. Suing everybody because they,
they, they, the department. Of justice, he's going to the
Department of Justice to get he wants 200.
And $240 million suing. Suing for 240. $1,000,000 yeah,
he he announces I'm going to payfor the ballroom, which
approximate cost $250 million. Also, I'm going to just grab
(01:18:35):
$230 million out of the Justice Department to pay compensate me
for all of their investigations of me.
Yeah, you know, kind of kind of thing.
It's like, it's like, and it's very, you know, for a guy who
talked about making America great and, and being
(01:18:58):
isolationist and, you know, America standing on its own and
American exceptionalism a much way Pat Buchanan did in the 80s
and 90s, this is a very Europeanapproach.
I mean, I again, I watched a thing on Mussolini of all
things, which I think there's far more parallels between Trump
(01:19:19):
and Mussolini than there is withTrump and Hitler.
I mean, because if you really want to draw analogy, OK, you
really could draw analogy between Trump and Lenin, between
Abraham Lincoln and Edie Amin, if you really want to stretch
it, you know what I mean? But but, but Mussolini came to
power and almost the first thinghe talked about was expanding
(01:19:41):
Italian territory was Italy is now going to start.
We kind of missed out on the colonialization of the New
World. There.
There nobody in the New World wasn't there was no Italian
colonies in the Western Hemisphere, very few in the east
because, you know, they used to have the Roman Empire.
And then he's going to bring it back.
(01:20:02):
Territory expansion. We're going to go into fucking
Ethiopia. You know we're going to go into
northern Africa. You know that we're going to
bring back the Roman Empire, territorial expansion.
Trump gets in day, day fucking one.
Canada's our 51st state. Canada's going to join us, he
said. Americans alive today are going
(01:20:24):
to see the greatest territorial expansion of this country in
centuries. And we knew about Greenland from
the first term. That never came up before the
2016 election. He gets in there, suddenly sees
a map for the first time in his fucking life as I hate
Greenland. That's kind of way up there.
You could pretty much walk from the northern part of Greenland
(01:20:46):
to Russia. Maybe we should kind of just get
that to intimidate Putin. Well, we got a fucking military
base there with nuclear weapons.You don't think that's enough
intimidation? No, we should actually own that.
Do you think they would sell it to us?
Who does it belong to? And and that was just laughed at
and dismissed and then fucking second term man, right after
(01:21:07):
Canada. Oh, in Greenland too, by the
way. You know, territorial expansion,
just like Mussolini kind of thing of America in in Gulf of.
America, Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
I mean, I mean, Hitler talking about Laban's realm and the
whole bit and but he was also talking about recovering lands
(01:21:29):
where German speaking people arenow living under a Polish
government or an Austrian government or yeah, that that
historically they were German. And well, historically there was
no fucking Germany till the 1880s.
It was just a bunch of little fucking principalities.
And that's where my family came from was like Hanover kind of a
thing, was its own little fucking country.
(01:21:50):
There was no such fucking thing as Germany.
So who cares about the language?I mean, the British had similar
ideas that worked for a while. But but, but there's a lot more
Mussolini in, in Hitler, in Hitler.
There's a lot more Mussolini in Trump, even the way he just kind
of holds his chin out and and like is is taking in the scene
(01:22:13):
and stuff that there are some pictures of him and Mussolini
striking very similar poses. And you know why they they
compare him to Hitler instead ofMussolini.
The majority of people don't know who the fuck Mussolini is.
That's why that's. Why that's true?
That's right, there's not Indiana.
Indiana Jones never got an autograph of Mussolini You.
(01:22:38):
Know. Yeah, that he, you know, nobody
ever battled Italian submarines on the North Atlantic in
Hollywood movies, you know, kindof a thing, is that the
Hollywood folks have elevated the Nazis to to this mythic
level. And the Italians were just kind
of forgotten about. They were pretty nasty.
(01:22:58):
They were pretty bad. Mussolini himself, well, it was
really bad and in some ways Mussolini took power before
Hitler did. Mussolini sort of helped enable
and, and show Hitler the way to go to, to actually go from being
a crackpot on, on the fringe of society to being the guy, the
(01:23:19):
man in charge, large and in charge kind of thing.
And, and so, but you're right that that's why they don't do
it. And and again, the reason they
don't know Mussolini is because Hollywood hasn't done a lot of
Mussolini shit. Exactly.
And if you really wanted to be able to, like, really impact
(01:23:42):
kids today or younger voters, you need to be able to really
show Trump for how he is and whyit would be in their best
interest. What's in it for them to get out
and vote? Yeah, and see, but he's but he's
he, he's doing away with. Although, although South Park, I
(01:24:02):
don't know if you've seen South Park.
Religiously, yes. OK, you know the episode I'm
talking about the most recent one where they came out and they
had Hitler or they had the devilwith Trump and Oh my God, you
know, and I'm thinking that maybe now when they're they're
kind of showing a little bit of that and stuff that maybe, well,
(01:24:28):
you know, 'cause that's right around those ages too.
That'll watch it, you know, likethe 18 year olds that you know,
they're still looking at that humor.
Turn him into a punchline. Yes.
It is, is what you got to do. You got to turn him into a
punchline. And that primarily worked the
first term, but but this time hecame in with you.
(01:24:52):
You have this whole conservativecabal and don't get me wrong,
there's liberal cabals out thereas well and and and very few
middle of the road, but OK. Yeah.
And they like they we got this fucking blueprint, man.
This is shit that we've been wanting.
We wanted fluoride out of the water since 1948.
We've wanted to get rid of the Voting Rights Act at 65 from the
(01:25:15):
moment it came into to impact that they came in with a fucking
game plan, right? Right.
And the Democrats didn't have that, you know, their their only
game plan was to get the White House away from Trump, which
they did. But then once they did that,
yeah, I mean, Biden did some good stuff.
(01:25:36):
And the infrastructure bill is why we have high speed Internet
now in town that we didn't have four years ago kind of a thing.
And but there wasn't. I think they really thought he
was done after January 6th. I don't just mean in the days
and weeks following January 6th when everybody in the world
(01:25:59):
thought he was done and he and he was toast and that I think
they were. Don't know if it's overconfident
or that the books that are coming out about Biden show a
detached from reality guy who kept talking about NATO and the
European Union and shit like that, that at one point somebody
(01:26:22):
said, Mr. President, you're president of the United States,
not the president of NATO. You've got to remember, you know
that foreign policy doesn't win any fucking votes.
It's all about what can you do for me?
What can you put in my pocket? How can you make my life a
little bit easier here or there?Less.
(01:26:44):
Expensive kind of thing that andand and and and.
This is. It makes me so angry that Biden
sat on that for a year. They didn't go after Trump for a
solid year. For a solid year they just sat
on their ass instead of I mean, that should have been like, you
know, let's all put this behind us.
(01:27:07):
We all got to get together. And that's one of the reasons
why conservative columnist George Will, who is very anti
Trump conservative, said maybe we need a constitutional
amendment to prevent senators from becoming president because
senators all pretend to fight when it's on TV and when they're
(01:27:33):
on the floor, but behind closed doors, it's a big fucking club.
I mean, Ted Kennedy's best friend in the Senate, the guy he
hung around with was Orrin Hatchfrom Utah.
And vice versa. You know, Cash was just
devastated when Kennedy died because they were buds.
(01:27:55):
They were part of the same club.And you can see that with Biden
coming in. Like, we're, I'm going to be
president just like when I was in the Senate.
And we're all going to like, saymean things in front of the
camera. But then we're all going to go
behind the closed doors and we're going to put our arms
around each other and share drinks and, and, and be nice to
each other and try to put this ugliness behind us When he what
(01:28:18):
he should have done is day one hire, you know, gone at gotten
the special prosecutor or or whatever they they call it to go
after Trump for January 6th. Yeah.
Well, did you send these people in?
Did you know they were going in?Why did Steve Bannon say it's
going to be a crazy day tomorrow?
(01:28:38):
Why did Hannity make references to, you know, whatever the
president's thinking, he should rethink this.
The day before this all fucking happened that she'd have gone
after him from day fucking 1. You could have got an indictment
on on that. And, and, and same thing with
with the secrets. Now, maybe the problem with the
(01:28:58):
secrets was there were files in in Biden's home.
There was files in Mike Pence's home.
There was files in what's his name with the mustache.
He was just indicted. John Bolton's home, you know,
kind of shit. And I guess that's it was a
national security advisor for Biden that they just got
indicted probably for having shit they he wasn't supposed to
(01:29:21):
have. The difference is when it was
found, they all turned it over. Trump first said it wasn't there
and then secondly, when they tried to come get it, he tried
to hide it from them so they wouldn't come and get them kind
of thing. But so I I can see why maybe
Biden was thinking, well, you know, the first one who was
without Sid Make has the first time, but January 6th alone
(01:29:43):
should have done it. Yeah, that would have been
enough. Should.
Have put him behind the bars. And that's why, that's, that's
why Leticia James and went afterhim for fraud and all this other
shit is because the Biden administration and the Justice
Department dropped the fucking ball when it came to going after
(01:30:03):
Trump. The states took it upon
themselves. You know, Fannie Willis going
after him in, in Georgia. It wasn't Fannie Willis.
I'm sorry, but going after him in Georgia for for trying to
coerce the the vote there. I mean, all of that shit that we
know Trump did is far worse thanthe 34 felony convictions fraud.
Absolutely. But I have read that that does
(01:30:27):
upset him that he knows that that's going to be part of his
legacy and it's never ever goingto go away.
So that gives me a little bit ofsatisfaction.
But, but a lot of this really is, for whatever reason, Biden
just didn't go after Trump. And probably because, I mean,
when I was older and after I taught for 20 years, I went back
(01:30:48):
to Graduate School to pick up some additional classes and
additional hours. And I remember one of my
professors who had taught less than I had, Ironically, I was
taking her class. She was, oh, nobody believes
that I So yes, they fucking do. I've had hundreds of students
believe that shit. You know that.
Don't tell me that people don't believe that or it's
(01:31:10):
unreasonable to believe that. It may be unreasonable, but they
do fucking believe it. You know, kind of a thing that.
They don't believe that Trump was behind it.
Oh, oh, no, no, no. What?
This was on something else entirely.
This was, this was 2010. OK, 2008.
This is well before that. It was a different issue.
(01:31:30):
It was probably about weapons ofmass destruction in Iraq, about,
you know, Americans don't believe they found weapons of
mass destruction. In Iraq.
And the professor said, nobody believes that.
I said yes, they fucking do. They absolutely fucking believe
it. They tune into Fox News and they
hear that there really were weapons of mass destruction.
Then let's show us a picture of it.
(01:31:52):
Just like the whole these Antifaprotesters are being paid.
Really. 7 million people are on the payroll and not one of them
has come forward to say here's the check, you know, or here,
here's the bill. Or I posed as an Antifa
protester and, and had my cameraon and recorded a conversation
(01:32:13):
of me getting my paycheck for protesting.
Yeah. I know a lot of people that
actually protested and. You know, it's like, prove it.
All I know is about half of thisis Biden's fault and the other
half is Jamal's. There you go, I love.
(01:32:35):
It it is Jamal fault. I blame.
Jamal, God damn it. Speaking of Jamal.
It's Jamal's fault. So we are like kind of going in
here, I want to kind of change this is this has been such a, a
fascinating conversation and I've just like, I really have
appreciated your time so much. Well.
(01:32:56):
I'm I'm glad you. Think so.
Oh it to me it is because I think that it gives us a
different perspective. Like we talk about things on and
just kind of like when we're we're having conversations
amongst ourselves and we're speaking our opinions, but it's
different to have somebody that has educated.
Educated. Yes, a background that could
(01:33:17):
actually shed some different lights on this and and have us
looking at things in a little bit different way.
Mussolini. Yeah, exactly.
Mussolini is is definitely is definitely going to resonate
with me now. Yeah, well, I'm going to be
doing some research. Yeah, I got to.
I got to go over that. I need to go back.
And quite frankly, I mean, I mean, again, and so much of it
(01:33:38):
comes back to culturally in Hollywood.
And I love Nazi movies and I love movies about the Nazis.
And and just yesterday or the day before I had to run in
Missoula and I thought about going by myself and seeing a
movie. Now what am I going to go see?
Is it 1 battle after another? Or there's another one about
some guy resisting Hitler duringhis regime kind of a thing.
(01:34:02):
And that's out there, you know, and that's yeah, yeah.
And, and it's, it's of course I,I can't think of the name of it,
but it's about a guy who secretly was putting out anti
Nazi pamphlets and shit because he had a printing press and
everything. Oh I, oh I God damn I think I
(01:34:22):
watched that. But it's, it's so obvious, it's
so obvious a parallel to what's going on today.
And The thing is, the movie had to have been scripted a few
years ago and shot a couple of years ago.
And it's almost as if it was shot yesterday.
But again, it it's the Nazis, it's the Nazis.
And, and, and one of the problems with that is I'll
(01:34:45):
relate the story from from the Rez.
Native Americans have a very unique view of of this country
because, you know, they don't see them losing their land as a
great triumph, quite frankly. I mean, even even at the prom,
(01:35:08):
we have these, you know, white guys who work from the
reservation who are DJ ING the prom.
And they noticed that when the country music stuff came on the
Indian kids, and this was this, the school was 90% Native
American, they would just sat down.
They wouldn't dance. But if you brought in hip hop,
(01:35:31):
if you brought in rap, if you brought in Taylor Swift or some
shit like that, then they were good.
Then they were good, you know, and they're like, we don't get
it. You know, this is the only place
we've ever been where they don'tlike country music.
And and I said, well, that's probably because the people
glorified in country music songs, killed their grandparents
and took their land from them. And they were like, that's a
(01:35:57):
good point that the old, you know, John Wayne is a villain on
the reservation and so is the United States government.
And so this idea on the reservation that the government
can come in and provide decent healthcare and the government
can come in and, and, and, and help get folks out of debt and
(01:36:18):
do these other things, that's ananathema to them, you know, and,
and it's like the enemy of my enemy is my friend kind of a
thing. Keep that in mind as I tell you
this short bit. I'm doing a history class at the
high school in Poplar, Mt, because it was, you know, closer
(01:36:40):
to here. And I resigned my position at
University of Houston, came up here.
I was hoping to teach there for more than a year, but that
didn't work out. And I'm teaching the class on
World War 2 and and civil war. And just to keep it real simple
for these kids and everything aslike 5 reasons the South lost
the civil war, like 5 reasons civil war happens, 5 reasons the
(01:37:02):
South lost that kind of thing. Get to World War 25 reasons, you
know, Germany lost World War 2. And I go through them and then I
then I said, and the number one reason I wrote on the board,
Hitler and this one kid in classwent, oh, yeah, I mean it just
(01:37:22):
like I had just he just found out that his hero was a fucking
idiot. You know, that, that that there
is a Hitler cult that attributesall of this shit to Hitler that
Hitler never fucking did. He didn't invent the Volkswagen.
He didn't build the Autobahn. You know, he's not the one that
(01:37:44):
said, hey, let's try to build missiles to go to Germany to to
go to Britain from here. That will go into outer space.
That wasn't him, you know. But you know what he was?
He was the guy who said, yeah, nuclear weapons.
Don't think so. Don't want to put my money into
an atomic bomb. Yeah, we'll invade Russia.
It'll be good today, about 3 weeks.
(01:38:05):
We'll be taking over there. They're not going to need winter
coats. They're not going to need
reinforcements. And when shit goes to go bad, Oh
no, we are not going to retreat.There's no way they can beat us
on the Black Knight. I'm, you know, the Black Knight
is invincible. Kind of a shit that, you know,
whether or not he was crazy whenthe war started or whether he
(01:38:28):
was just evil and went crazy. Nonetheless, by the end of the
war, he was fucking crazy. But this kid had lived his
entire life up to that moment thinking Adolf Hitler was the
shit. And I sat there in that class.
I went over how Hitler was responsible for and La La.
And of course, the number one reason Germany lost the war
(01:38:48):
because of Hitler was because ofthe Holocaust.
They were taking resources away from the army to put as many
people in those camps and kill them as quickly as they possibly
could and cover up as much of itas they possibly could and burn
the documents. And when I first heard that as
an undergraduate, I thought, well, of course, this guy says
(01:39:11):
that he's an Auschwitz survivor.But then I started talking to
these other history professors, and they're like, absolutely
right. You'll look into it.
Hitler was far more concerned about killing Jews than winning
the war. And after Stalingrad, he knew he
couldn't win the war. And the United States is coming
and the British are coming and the the Allies are in Italy and
(01:39:33):
Mussolini's toast. So what are you going to do?
Number one goal, kill Jews faster, Faster, faster, faster,
faster. It's remarkable how long it took
them to actually start the mass executions that they did.
You know, you think it started in the 30s or the early 40s.
It wasn't really until the tide of the war had turned that they
(01:39:56):
started stepping that shit up because the original plan was
slave labor after the war. These people are going to be our
slaves and they are going to build the new Germany.
And we will feed them. You will treat them.
The same way you know that that we treat that Americans treated
(01:40:16):
Native Americans and took care of that problem and then took
care of others. Slave issue initially not gotten
rid of it, but reimposing it. So the original plan wasn't
necessarily annihilation, but once the tide had turned, that
became the plan. And they're taking trains that
could have gotten guys to the front lines to slow down the
(01:40:38):
rush in advance and didn't. And instead they loaded them up
with people and took them to Auschwitz and Buchenwald and all
these other places because that became his, his fall back
position, so to speak, that he one of the last.
He doesn't talk directly about the Holocaust very much at all.
But one thing he did allude to was that that even if we lose
(01:41:01):
the war, I'm going to have an established FAQ that established
fact, meaning he's killed practically all the Jews in
Europe, which he did, which he did.
And what is often overlooked. He didn't just kill Jews.
He also killed Russian soldiers were sent to concentration
camps, that homosexuals were sent to concentration camps.
(01:41:25):
The first people to go were the Jews.
They were socialists. They were communists, which was
seen as a very viable option in Germany in the 1920s, especially
with the Russian Revolution going on next door.
And Russia initially did pretty well under the revolution, quite
frankly, that they didn't have aGreat Depression in the 1930s.
(01:41:48):
And in the Soviet Union, of course it was because, you know,
it was a horrible, horrible, shitty place to be to begin
with. So there was no down slope to
go. It was only they could only go
up from from there. But that that that kids whole
world view, I don't know. And so you have to overcome
(01:42:14):
that. And when you see these texts
with these young Republicans, you know, crazy, and even if
some of it was satirical and thewhole bit, you know, it's like
that, that's where the educationcomes in.
And that's where you have to say, look, this guy was not
Superman. He was not a super intelligent
(01:42:37):
human being. And the people around him were
notoriously stupid people, very mediocre human beings, Goering
and all these other guys. There is, you know, maybe one or
two guys like Albert Speer, who was pretty much on the ball kind
(01:42:58):
of a thing 'cause he was, he wasthe industrial guy in charge of
the industry and stuff during the war.
And he his, his, he kept Germanyin the war far longer than they
should have been. It shouldn't have lasted as long
as it did because of Albert Speer.
But he got off pretty easily because he turned tail very
quickly and and he never did order anybody being killed.
(01:43:21):
Now, did he build the camps? Sure.
Did he design the camps? Yes.
Did he get the railroad tracks put together?
Sure. He did, you know, kind of a
thing. But but his main focus was the
war part, you know, getting tanks built, getting airplanes
built until there weren't no airplanes to be built anymore
and nobody to build them. That Germany lost so much of
their population. And in the war, they just had a
(01:43:43):
shortage of people to couldn't build anything.
Meanwhile, in the United States,we're just having the best years
of our fucking lives. Right, right.
Which is which Reagan romanticize boy, it's it's not
hard if if you were a kid growing up in America in the 40s
and that's when shit turned around for my my, my dad's
family and my dad, my grandfather abandoned him and,
(01:44:06):
and the kids they, they went from this small town in Neely.
They got the land because great grandpa fought in the Union Army
and was given a little plot of land in Nebraska.
But they weren't much of A farmers and they had like some
produce that they grew and that shit.
(01:44:26):
And the 30s was also known for drought and dust bowls and shit
like that. But they moved to Lincoln and
there was, you know, what becamea Goodyear factory and they
started, you know, arming in thelate 30s that FDR had the
foresight to know shit is going to hit the fan here pretty soon,
that we need to start getting ready for it, even if the
(01:44:48):
American public doesn't want to go and even if they, you know,
don't want to go. And so and, and so all of his
sisters, he was like one of the youngest kids in the family.
All the sisters got a job at this Goodyear factory.
And they worked there until the 80s.
I worked there several years in the 70s.
My first job out of high school was a factory job, and everyone
(01:45:10):
at the factory was like, you don't want to work here the rest
of your life. You don't know how terrible it
is to work at a factory which isn't air conditioned.
Then you have to do physical labor and it's 8 hours a day,
five days a week and stuff. It's like, yeah, but it was
union time and a half. I had eyeglass protection as a
summer, as a summer worker at Goodyear.
(01:45:33):
I had eyeglass protection in 1977 As a professor at the
University of Houston. In 2010, no.
Wow. You know, so, so he was, you
know, but that, but, but that's how different the economy was
and everything was. Oh, you don't want to be stuck
working in a factory making the equivalent of today.
(01:45:57):
It would be at the time I was making $6.00 an hour.
So whatever you want to figure out, the inflation thing, that's
probably about $30.00 an hour with full health, full benefits,
you know, paid overtime two weeks after your first year,
three weeks after 5-6 weeks, after 10.
(01:46:18):
You don't want that, You don't want that.
And now the whole country is just, yes, we do.
We want that. We want that back.
And we gave it away. And that's, that was where Trump
started. That's where Trump started, is
that I'm going to bring these jobs back.
(01:46:38):
I'm going to bring back those factory jobs.
I'm going to bring back those pay in those benefits.
Nobody talked about health care reform in the 1970s because they
had health insurance. You know, that that the number
of people who couldn't afford their medical bills so they have
to start charging $6 for an aspirin hadn't happened yet.
That's still in the future. And that's the other reason why
(01:47:01):
the healthcare skyrocketed in price is because the percentage
of people who could pay their bills kept going down and down
and down and down because they went from having full benefits
at Goodyear, Ted, having better than slightly better than
minimum wage jobs at the big boxstores like Home Depot and and
those places. And in a sense, thank God they
(01:47:23):
had those, you know, as a fall back position.
So at least, you know, you can still earn a living, but you're
not going to be able to have as nice a house as my folks have.
And my mom still lives in, you know, you're not going to have
six weeks of vacation. You're you're not going to
necessarily get time and a half unless the state mandates that.
And that varies from state to state.
(01:47:46):
So that's where he started. Was this absolute legitimate
frustration and how the country seems to have lost its way and
we had all these really great, you know, jobs where you could
literally walk in off the floor with a high school education and
you could end up having a a really decent income and and
(01:48:07):
life like my dad had and all of his sisters and had and the
whole bit and that and and in the 80s we just sent those
factories away. We just fucking and, and, and
the Reagan folks gave tax breaksto companies that did that,
that, that that was not a boating accident.
That was done on purpose. Well, we have to offshore to
(01:48:28):
remain competitive because, you know, if the companies aren't
competitive and their profits godown, the shareholders aren't
going to get as much dividend money every quarter.
You know, it became a, a investor centered economy in
that sense. And, and the Democrats went
along with it. Clinton did nothing to turn that
(01:48:48):
around. And so in the view of these
folks who can remember like I do, you know, going to a factory
job right out of high school, which would have easily taken
care of me. And in fact, at my 30th, no, it
had to been my 20th anniversary high school reunion.
We were sitting there talking about how much money I was
(01:49:09):
making as professor and, and howmuch money that this guy who
called me the, the, the, the rich bitch of, of the high
school class made from working at Goodyear for 30 years.
How we figured it out was like he actually made more money than
I had. He absolutely did.
I had, I had, don't get me wrong, my schedule was flexible.
(01:49:29):
I could teach you, you know, day, night, weekend, if I wanted
to or not, you know, and, and I did teach year round.
So I didn't take summers off kind of thing.
But even taking that into account, if I had actually
stayed at Goodyear, where all myaunts and my dad were, you know,
and stuff, financially I would have been further ahead.
(01:49:50):
But but you didn't want to do that because they're going to
send those jobs away. And it turns out the Goodyear
factory in Lincoln, NE is still fucking there.
But you. Never shut down you.
Don't know you don't know that you can't.
You don't know the future. You don't have that crystal.
Ball going to college and getting as many degrees as you
can so you can be insulated fromsending your job overseas.
(01:50:14):
And I would tell students, you know, they didn't know why they
were in college or what they should study.
I said told them get a job that they can't send overseas.
Yeah. You know, get a job, you know,
paramedic, you know, EMS nursing.
We had a lot of nursing studentsat the community colleges in, in
Houston, you know, kind of thing.
(01:50:37):
Teaching to a lesser extent. I never told anybody you should
be a teacher. See, with the way things are
reverting back, it's almost scary to ask the question, where
do you see yourself in five years?
Because this is this is still year 1.
(01:51:05):
Yeah. The senior psychopath.
Yeah. OK, so where do you see yourself
in five years? Is a question that I fear to
even imagine here in the United States of America right now
(01:51:26):
because I. Tell you one of the events.
He's bombed another country without the consent of Congress,
and if you should try to pull him away?
He's already set out 529 bombs. Which bomb are we talking?
About well, that and and we're not even bombing countries
anymore, we're bombing boats. Yeah, yeah, but without any due
(01:51:50):
problem. And, you know, it's interesting,
as we talked to some friends of ours that we met, and one of
them was a chief on a Coast Guard counter.
And one of the things that they did was his career was going
after drug runners. And he was like, no, that was
legitimate. Because you could tell by the
(01:52:10):
way that the drugs were, you know, the packages were on there
that those were definitely drugs.
OK. But that doesn't give you a
right to to murder somebody. You still have such a little
thing called due process where you.
Even even on the high seas, there are international laws.
Yeah, you know, regarding this stuff.
(01:52:33):
And, and in fact, there's this author named Lopez who wrote
about basically the rise of capitalism and how it actually,
and he and he really substantiated this very well in
his book. And I'll have to find the title
of it, but Lopez is the name of the author.
(01:52:55):
And really, it was trade that brought about that about, and
the first maritime laws were passed in order to help
facilitate trade between countries and minimize and
punish piracy. Right.
But then you still have this problem of, let's say a guy in
Turkey has a contract with a guyin Sicily and there's a dispute
(01:53:20):
as to whether or not the guy gotthe goods delivered that were
supposed to be delivered or whatever you got easily
foreseeable dispute, right? How do you educate that?
Adjudicate that, sorry, educate.How do you adjudicate that?
You know, do you do you go who has the jurisdiction?
Is it, is it Sicily? Is it Turkey?
What do you do? And so they set up like maritime
(01:53:42):
courts to deal with maritime laws.
So no one country would have exclusive jurisdiction.
My guy's cool. You're fucked, you know, because
you're not from my country, you know, kind of thing.
So, so the whole, the, the, the rise of, of, of capitalism as we
(01:54:02):
see it, really it, it but, but what happened was the state had
to become bigger and stronger inorder to establish protection
for trade and, and protection for the businessmen and
everything. And, and so that whereas
capitalism, capitalist, I'm sorry, business power and
(01:54:25):
government power is often seen as a seesaw.
The more powerful the governmentis, the less powerful businesses
and vice versa. In fact, it's symbiotic that
that that's how it that's how itgot built in the in the first
place. It is that you needed a larger,
more powerful government to be able to enforce laws regarding
(01:54:47):
trade. And then, you know, once people
were not just farming anymore tomake sure that the goods that
are being produced are being delivered and they're good
enough to actually work like they're supposed to be work.
And people aren't getting screwed over by that because
because even in a feudal system,you had courts set up to deal
(01:55:08):
with whether somebody's corn wasreally rotten when he delivered
it or not kind of a thing. But once you moved from
agriculture in the 1400s into the immediate pre industrial
revolution and industrial revolution, you needed a bigger
and bigger and bigger and biggergovernment in order to deal with
all of the business transactionsand stuff.
(01:55:30):
And so that the two are mutuallydependent.
And you see an example of that with, you know, somebody who
traditionally was not very sympathetic to big businesses
myself. You know, you would typically
like to see big companies like Pfizer and these other guys as
baddies, you know, kind of thingthat we need government
(01:55:51):
regulation on them, which we absolutely fucking do, right.
But at the same time, you don't want to make them the villains
and, and tell people you can't get a COVID shot from them.
They just want to take your money.
It doesn't really work anyway. Plus Covid's not really a thing.
You know, I had a, we had a guy from Texas come to the store
(01:56:14):
this summer and my wife is out front after we closed and she
was stuck having a conversation with him.
And he said and then that COVID that turned out to be no big
deal. I mean, this guy is alive today
and he thinks COVID was no big deal.
He would have been fucking shocked to find out that we lost
1.1 million people in a year to COVID.
(01:56:35):
You know, more than we lost in World War Two over several
years, you know, kind of a thing.
But he still believes that he believes COVID wasn't a big
deal. And so therefore all these
companies, and that's what givespeople like, you know, RFK
Junior, the political cover and,and in some ways I, I hate that
guy more than I hate Trump, you know, because he's such, such a
(01:56:59):
fucking he was, he would, he went to Harris and said, OK,
I'll work for you. You want me?
You want me, you got me. And she was like, get the fuck
out of my office kind of thing. Trump was like, yeah, whatever
the the little hippie libertarian folks out there,
maybe that'll bring in some kindof like new life, the kind of
(01:57:21):
thing, and you don't know, that wasn't the margin to victory for
him. That was close.
He made it click. He made it clear that he was
going to bring RFK Junior in, send a clear signal to all of
the anti vax folks out there. I am one of you.
Excuse me, I have to get a vaccine.
OK, Yeah, all you anti vax folks, I'm going to put RFK
(01:57:43):
Junior in charge. Let him go crazy for all the
shit and meanwhile I'm going to still get flu shots and COVID
shots myself, but you know, and then he's going to make.
But you guys don't need. You don't need to.
I do because I'm the friendly, But you guys don't need to.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.There's there's this group
called the Eagle Forum, started by Phyllis Shafley.
(01:58:05):
She was the one person most responsible for killing the
Equal Rights Amendment. We should still be talked about
as being added to the constitution because it's not
there. I remember people saying we
don't need an equal rights amendment because there are so
many decisions that have effectively made women equal
under the law that nobody's evergoing to roll that back.
(01:58:29):
Well, guess fucking what, man? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We need an equal rights amendment and, and in addition
to what I said about debt earlier, nobody talks about
that. I think that's a winning issue.
I think if you're a Democrat or even I don't know how a
Republican can fucking do that and pull it off.
But in any case, you run on a pro ERA platform right fucking
(01:58:53):
now and see what happens becauseI you will.
When fucking Kansas protects abortion laws, that tells you
there's something there that youcan tap into.
You know the old white guys thatlike my demographic?
You're they're fucking gone, OK,Fuck them.
You're never going to fucking get them.
They're busy polishing their guns or remembering the good old
(01:59:14):
days. Yeah.
But their their their girlfriends, their wives, their
daughters are still out there, and they have fewer rights today
than they had four years ago. And the court has rolled.
Back so many of those protections.
Oh my God. Tim And anyway, Phyllis, yes,
I'm sorry. I'll, I'll finish the story and
I'll show up for Phyllis Shapley, head of the Eagle
(01:59:36):
Forum. There was actually a political
science article written on her Eagle Forum.
Now she populated the Eagle Forum with women, almost all of
whom were married. OK, and the Eagle Forum kept
putting out articles and shit onhow women should not work
outside of the home. The old Charlie Kirk thing.
(01:59:57):
They should stay at home. The husband should be in charge.
They shouldn't get involved in politics.
Hell, they should stay home on Election Day even.
It's fine that they have the right to vote, but they really
shouldn't exercise it. They should let the men handle
this. Let the men do this.
And, and, and the person asked them.
You know every one of them, but you're involved in politics.
(02:00:19):
You're telling people how to vote, you're out here having a
good a professional life and you're also married with kids.
How do you justify that? And the answer to what you said,
We're the exception, OK? We can handle having a career
(02:00:40):
and politics and taking care of our family, but the average
woman is too fucking stupid to be able to pull that off.
And so we're really just trying to, you know, protect women from
themselves and from the feminists telling them how they
(02:01:00):
should feel and shit. But.
But. But we're the exception.
Yeah. The rules don't apply to us.
Yeah. And that's the.
That's what you like. Yeah.
Your comment triggered in me. It was like, Oh, yeah, yeah,
I'll take the shot. Oh, but if you want the COVID
shot, no, no, we're not going topay.
I mean, you want to pay for it maybe kind of a thing.
(02:01:22):
I mean, but that we're going to be able to do whatever the fuck
we want to do. And one of the things we want to
do is tell you what to fucking do.
I mean there, I mean, you know, there is a possibility we could
see gay marriage go away next year.
(02:01:45):
You know what's scary to me? Yeah.
And what's really scary to me is, is that interracial
marriages aren't too far behind that.
Well, that's just it. Interracial marriage, gay
marriage, abortion are all basedon the same case.
Griswold versus certificate 1963in in Connecticut.
It was against the law, get thisfor married people to use
(02:02:07):
contraceptives. It was against the law for
married people to be in possession of, purchase or wear
contraceptive devices. In a companion case in
Massachusetts, it was legal for married people to have
(02:02:28):
contraceptives, but it was against the law for single
people to have them. And so the two cases are brought
before the United States SupremeCourt and the US Supreme Court
said, no, you can't tell. And and they, they framed it
within the, the sanctity of marriage kind of a thing that,
(02:02:49):
that, that, that what the government telling what 2
consenting adults do in the privacy of their own bedroom is,
is of no concern to the government.
Exactly. That's And so that established
something called the right to privacy that that there is no
place where the word privacy appears in the Constitution.
(02:03:12):
But if you look at the 9th Amendment to the Constitution,
it says the enumeration of certain rights in the
Constitution should not be deemed to deny or disparage
other rights retained by the people.
And so the US Supreme Court saidone of those other rights we
think is a right to privacy. You think the founding fathers
would have been comfortable withthe law telling the married
(02:03:35):
couple whether they could use contraception or not or what
days of the week they could havesex kind of a thing?
I mean, maybe the Puritans are Massachusetts.
But yeah, yeah, it's, it's. And so you have the right to
privacy. And immediately the
contraceptives go out the door. But then within a year or two,
interracial marriage, you bans prohibitions, goes out.
(02:04:00):
And then 30 years later, you know, or so gay marriage
prohibitions go right out the window as well.
The absolutely right. So it's all based on that right
to privacy. It's scary how these are rights
that we've just gotten within mylifetime.
(02:04:22):
Yes. That's what's so scary.
My husband and I could not have been married the year he was
born because it was illegal for us and back then for us to be
married. Women's rights, like even I
remember the when abortion became legal in my lifetime.
And I, if you didn't ask me, youknow, if I ever saw that going
(02:04:45):
away, I would have been like, you're crazy.
We would never let that get taken away from us again.
And I told my students, if if that happened, it would
absolutely in the Republican Party as we know it.
Well, guess what? Not because of it.
But the Republican Party that you and I grew up with is dead.
It's fucking. Ghost it.
Was taken out to the woods, it was shot, it was buried.
(02:05:06):
And the shovel it was buried with was buried.
You know, that Republican Party is fucking gone.
These guys are are feasting uponthe skeleton kind of a thing.
Yeah. At best to mix metaphors.
Oh yeah, the people are age, andeven my folks age saw the
(02:05:26):
greatest expansion of individualrights in the history of the
United States. And it happened in the 1960s.
It didn't happen in 1776. It didn't happen in 1787 or
1791. It didn't happen in 1865,
although there's a great expansion in 1865, don't get me
wrong. But the biggest for the most
people and the most mundane things.
(02:05:48):
You couldn't have a checking account unless there was a male
cosigner until 1971. 19. 71 I was watching football in 1971,
the Nebraska, Oklahoma game specifically that the you know,
being from Nebraska, the greatest day of my life as a as
(02:06:08):
a kid, that you couldn't have a checking account in 1971, unless
a male cosigner you can get a credit card.
You know, men could get a creditcard and let their wives have it
kind of a thing. Contracts, business contracts
and, and, and the states had a hodgepodge of laws.
Some laws were cool. Some states were cool with it,
(02:06:30):
others were not. And and that all gets knocked
down, knocked down, knocked down, knocked down.
So, you know, now we are seeing a reversal how far it'll go.
I like you. Said five years from now, where
do you see yourself? Where do you see the country in
five years? Exactly my question.
(02:06:50):
That's scarier. That's what I was saying.
That's what. I is, is one thing, where do you
see the country in five years ornow?
I don't fucking know. But it's a question that nobody
in Canada is really all that worried about.
Nobody in Canada is wondering where the fuck is Canada going
to be in five years? Not, you know, they don't
realistically think we're going to invade Canada and we're we're
not, you know, but but you know,in Europe, you know, they're not
(02:07:15):
wondered about that fucking China.
They've got 30 year plans out there.
Nobody's wondering whether China's still going to be around
in five years, but in the UnitedStates, we're wondering we'll
still be around, but what form will we be?
Are we going to be able to? Hold it to be.
Are we going to come apart of the seams?
You know, whoever succeeds Trump, if it's anybody but JD
(02:07:39):
Vance, will they be allowed to take office?
Yeah, I don't know. You know, I mean, they're,
they're well. There's there's things that I
was looking at like, I mean, I don't know if this is going to
happen, but I it was, it was a thought of mine that should
(02:07:59):
Trump try to take and run the third term, right, right.
And I'm like, technically, Obamacould run against him.
Yeah, yeah. If Trump is going to say that he
can stick around, I see, I don'tthink and, and I think that the
people around Trump like StephenMiller, I, I mean, Stephen
(02:08:23):
Miller is the worm tongue to theking of Rohan here.
He's the guy who's the, the Trump whisperer that, that what
we see is not really Donald Trump's America as much as we
see Stephen Miller's America. Now, Trump is a wild card and he
and he does go off script and shit like that, But that's OK.
They're, they're always able to bring him in.
(02:08:45):
Look at how many times he's flip-flopped on the fucking
Ukraine war, you know? Yeah, You know, back and forth
back. And it looked like we were six
months and not six months ago, OK, Earlier this summer, early
this summer, it looked like, OK,maybe he's coming around.
Maybe he's finally figured out that Putin's a piece of shit and
he seems to be saying nice things about Zelensky.
(02:09:06):
That's all out the window now. That's all gone, you know, So I
just. I.
That was our I think. What he would do, and this was
in, in something I saw today, maybe it was the Atlantic, some
place like that where is where somebody said that he, the
(02:09:27):
president has the power in his view, which he does not have to
suspend the outcome of the 2028 election.
If he has a reasonable belief that there was some massive
fraud that took place and there needs to be an investigation to
see who really won. And again, this is a guy who
(02:09:48):
still thinks he won in 2020. He still thinks that three and a
half million votes in Californiain 2016 were somehow thrown into
the dump that he thinks and thisdoesn't come out enough.
He thinks he carried California in 2016.
He has said that. I know in my heart I carry
California. You carry California.
(02:10:11):
Really. You carry California.
You are you. Do you think you're Ronald
Reagan? Do you think you're Ronald
Reagan? California used to be reliably
Republican. It's like, no, no, no.
They're they're very, very, very, very, very, very, very,
very fucking far away from sending their electors,
(02:10:35):
Republican electors to their state capitol at any time in the
near fucking future kind of thing that is not going to
happen for for good or I'll bless plus California kind of
thing and Washington state, you know, chances are you're going
to be OK. You know, if they knock down, if
they knock down interracial marriage, they're not going to
suddenly banish them. They'll simply go back to each
(02:10:58):
state decides for itself whetheror not an interracial marriage
is OK or not. They're not going to start, at
least we don't think they will. But but that's where the law
was. I mean, the law was should
Virginia still be able to ban interracial marriage even though
40 other states say it's OK? And is the situation of the
(02:11:21):
United States Constitutions equal protection clause or not?
So, yeah, if it goes away and, and, and I don't know, I, I, I
even think it's, it's backward and racist as some of these
southern states are, I really don't see them, you know,
bringing it back. But boy, it'll make the racists
happy. It'll be a step in the right
(02:11:43):
direction as far as they're concerned kind of thing.
His main. Base that is his main.
Base God so so so where scary soso yeah 2028 is just you don't
know and and and a big part of it's going to be what happens in
the midterms next year and. I want to have you come back
(02:12:05):
before the midterms. Yeah, we want to talk to you
again. I.
Want you to come back on the? Show.
OK, no, no problem. Yeah.
Well, and and here's the thing. I mean, they're doing everything
they can to redistrict and make sure that the Republicans hold
on to as many seats illegitimately as they possibly
could. It reminds me back when I was in
grad school at Rice in the 80s and, and state and local
(02:12:27):
government was one of my areas. I wrote the, you know, PhD
thesis and everything on and everything.
And, and we openly speculated, you know, by the early 21st
century, America is going to become a majority minority
country, right? And states like Texas are going
to be there in California. You know, how will the country
(02:12:49):
react to that? You know, what are they going to
do? And you see how they reacting to
that? They're doing everything in
their fucking power to try to minimize that demographic, that
demographic shift that has been happening over the decades and
centuries. They're doing everything they
can to minimize that impact of it through gerrymandering.
(02:13:10):
But even if that works in the short run, it's not going to
work in the long run. That, that's the only hope I can
give is that the demographics are just going to overwhelm, you
know, right, that, that we're still at the tipping point.
Yeah, kind of a thing. But yeah, yeah, I just what's
(02:13:35):
going to happen? My big fear is, you know, that
that the Democrats and you and Iand everybody are doomsdaying
Trump and the tariffs are bad isgoing to cause a problem
authority. The ICE thing is bad and it's
kind of, you know, and all the stuff and it is and, and, and I
believe that. But the problem is it's not like
(02:13:56):
happening everywhere all at once.
You know, you don't like, it's not like yesterday I went to the
grocery store and the prices were X and now they're X * 4 or
yesterday the shelves were full on.
Today they're empty and they're empty all over the country.
You know, it's only happening ina few places on some items.
(02:14:20):
He keeps suspending the tariffs,bringing them back, suspending
them, bringing them back, you know, kind of a thing that that
you don't see the negative impact happening everywhere all
at once. And, and they they use the
analogy of the frog in the pan that's getting heated up slowly,
kind of a thing doesn't jump outkind of a thing.
(02:14:41):
Well, as it turns out, the frog does eventually jump out, but
not until it's really fucking hot kind of a thing.
But but are we going to jump outof the pan?
I mean, it's, it's got to be something.
I mean 911 it didn't happen everywhere, but everybody
thought it could happen anywhere, right?
And and, and, and COVID initially.
(02:15:03):
Well, it's just this guy up there.
You guys are out in Seattle and shit.
And then pretty soon it's fucking everywhere.
We had a couple of people in town here where our customers
died of COVID and everything andI got COVID or family got COVID
and, and the whole bit, you know, it's what's happening,
(02:15:26):
killing the the people on the boats on the high seas and all
this other shit. It's just so much is happening
in so many different places. You just can't keep track of it.
And like I said, it's not happening everyone all at once.
And until or unless it does, youkind of worry that they're still
going to be parts of the countrythat are still going to have a
(02:15:47):
good economy, if not a better economy in 2026 than they had in
2024. And they're going to go, yeah,
yeah, the sky is falling. Democrats, You know, Trump's
been in for a couple years. And, you know, that's still
fine. I mean, there's a story on NPR
this morning about the Montana Beef Growers Association cattle
ranch. Yes, I I read that.
(02:16:08):
They're not happy because Trump wants to bring in Argentina beef
because the price of beef has skyrocketed, while we pay for a
Patty of beef for our restauranthas increased 50% in three
months, a much higher than what you guys are seeing because they
want to make sure you guys are getting as much hamburger as you
(02:16:28):
possibly can. And they know that we'll pass
along those costs to the customers, but you end up
charging the customer $15.00 fora Wagyu burger.
You know, there's with fries, bythe way.
But you know, there's other things.
You can, you can do some pork, you know, you can do Turkey, you
can do other things. And the hamburger sales go down.
(02:16:50):
But we sell enough other sandwiches using other meats
that are still reasonably priced.
But anyway, Trump wants to bringin like, like all of this beef.
And the Montana beef growers arelike, no fucking way, don't do
that, that these are our glory days.
The price of beef is so high, we're getting more for our
cattle than ever. We can now, for the first time
in years, expand our herds and have more cows.
(02:17:13):
Now eventually, of course, that will bring the price of beef
down, but only after two or three years.
But in the meantime, we all haveto suffer from high beef prices.
That's one of those examples of it in and the, the spokes lady
said, well, we, we don't think bringing in Argentinian beef is,
is consistent with a free enterprise system.
(02:17:35):
And on a certain level it fucking is.
You know, what you guys are looking for is a fucking
monopoly on beef. You know that.
And and then when people hate interest groups, they hate
interest groups that seem to be for shit that's only good for
them and virtually nobody else. And the Montana Cattlemen's
(02:17:55):
Association or whatever they call themselves would be a prime
fucking example of that. They want high beef prices.
They want beef prices to stay high.
Yeah, they're doing. Long prolonged period of time.
And, and that's OK, they can eatless beef, but there's always
going to be a market for beef, you know, kind of thing.
But it's, it's the the best thing for the country would be
(02:18:17):
if beef prices came down, cost of living would actually come
down. But, and, and so in that sense
that, yeah, you bring in the competition, prices go down.
In that sense, that is perfectlyconsistent.
But on the other hand, the reason Trump wants to bring in
Argentinian beef is to shore up his buddy there in Argentina,
(02:18:40):
who's the Argentinian version ofTrump and has triggered all
these austerity programs and, and people are pissed that he is
in political hot water. That's, that's why Trump is
going to send them $20 billion for agriculture.
And at the same time in port, I forget how many millions of
(02:19:01):
dollars of Argentinian beef intothis country tariff free and
shit. And, and all, all you and all
the three of us could do is sit back and think.
And who do you suppose the Montana Cattlemen's Association
endorsed in the 2024 election, you know?
(02:19:23):
Montana is. You know it's it's.
Montana is a red state. You know, it's, it's, you know,
Montana is a red state with a couple of major blue dots.
And that's, that's been my wholelife.
You know, Nebraska, RedState, Lincoln University town, blue
dot that when I go visit my mom,who turns 90 next August, when I
(02:19:47):
was growing up there, we were the only Democrats on the block.
You know, everybody was a Republican.
When I go visit my mom, I love to because you know what signs I
see up and down her? It's a dead end St. that dead
ends to the elementary school I went to, which was 100 yards
from my house everywhere. You know Black Lives Matter, you
(02:20:14):
know. You know, love is love, you
know, you name it, whatever, every literally every house has
a yard sign on it that has some Democratic or liberal leaning
yard sign and and it's up all the time.
So when the kids come out of school and they're walking down
(02:20:36):
the street, they see all of thatkind of a thing.
And this was, this was the street and, and, and everybody
who I grew up with on that street is gone.
My mom is the, is the been theresince 1961.
And now they're all Democrats and not just Democrats, but
liberal left, AOC endorsing Bernie Sanders, Democrats, you
(02:21:01):
know, and that's happened all over the country.
And the Republicans see that andand they know that they're
fighting a losing battle at somepoint.
Maybe not 2026, maybe not 202820322036.
I, I don't know, I'm 67, God. It's coming, it's coming.
(02:21:22):
My kidneys only operate at 43% efficiency right now.
But hey, you know kidney pig transplants are a thing and they
seem to be successful, but you know it.
It's just how bad are things going to get before they get
better? Yeah.
And that that right there is definitely the.
Like you said that the scariest question is where are we going
(02:21:44):
to be in five years? How we will.
We have learned our fucking lesson.
And The thing is, whatever lesson we've learned, we'll
forget it at some point. I'm hoping there's that's all we
got right now is hope that is true.
I hope that somebody opens theirfucking eyes to what's going on
and say God damn, enough is enough.
(02:22:07):
I, I don't think that's going tohappen, but I want, I think it's
going to happen is they're goingto die.
Yeah. It's simply going to be a
generational turnover because you know that yeah, Trump has
made some inroads amongst the youth until the youth are
$150,000 in debt for student loans and can't find a decent
(02:22:28):
paying job. And when they do find a job,
it's it's not a union job. I mean, the guy who's
demolishing the White House are non union workers.
Oh wow, you know that that that the unions were shut out of that
process and how is. That even possible because
there's a well it's not federally funded because it's
(02:22:49):
privately funded. That's just it.
That's just it. And it's probably, and again,
it's probably a violation of thelaw.
There was no bidding going on, you know, that that hey, if you
wanted to build a giant ballroomnext to the White House, there
wasn't a whole lot we could do. But as it turns out, they're
actually taking down part of theWhite House.
(02:23:11):
And as a friend of mine who's a professional stand up comedian
said, you know, I have to expecthim to take credit for tearing
down something that was built byslaves.
Yeah. Wow.
Nice. Yeah.
Nice, yeah. Right.
I like it. So with that being said.
(02:23:34):
Mr. Tim. Mr. Tim Howard, we're going to
start winding things down and this the part, this is the part
of a little bit fun. We, we do.
We do this thing where we like to talk about what we've been
binge watching on TV, on TV. Oh, I'm glad.
I'm very glad to be asked that question.
(02:23:55):
So. So we're going to let him.
Go first. Yeah.
Well, do you want me to go first, kind of give you a, a, a
taste of it or do you want to jump in?
I'll, I'll jump ahead and let you guys talk it out for the
rest of of the show because it'syour show, all right.
What have you been binge watching?
All right, very impressed with Mob Land.
(02:24:19):
Oh, OK. That's one of his.
Mob Land if you if you haven't seen it.
Yep, one of the few shows I've seen where every and it's like
10 or 12 episodes. OK, but everyone is just fucking
there, man. It's it's very, very, very good.
I highly recommend mob that I'm not a big mobster movie kind of
(02:24:42):
a guy. So you know, yeah, The Godfather
was good. Goodfellas was better.
You know, I, I I haven't seen the Godfather 47 times.
Like some people like that. I haven't made it all the way
through The Sopranos yet, but mob land Pierce Brosnan in that
highly recommended. Yep, you'll be.
(02:25:03):
You'll be hooked after the firstepisode.
Yep. That that watch it someday in
the morning because that is how the rest of your fucking day is
going to go fucking every episode of roller coaster.
So mobland really excellent. I just got a free, I got a new
iPhone, so I got an Apple subscription.
(02:25:24):
I've never been big into Apple TV, but I did watch all of the
Ted Lasso stuff like last year and the year before and shit
like that. I usually watch stuff based on
what wins the Emmys. I started watching Bad Men after
it kept winning Emmys. Handmaid's Tale after it kept
winning Emmys. Oh God.
Handmaid's Tale. Oh Handmaid's Tale is so
(02:25:45):
awesome. Oh my God.
But but mobland, you have mobsters in Britain.
Yeah. It's just wonderful, the cinema.
The. Cinema is a.
Genius. Oh.
My gosh. If you haven't.
If you haven't checked out, holdon.
Oh go Land Man. Have you watched Land Man?
(02:26:06):
Yet I have not watched Land Man,but I've heard wonderful things
about it. Oh my God, you're going to love
that. Right.
Maudlin also did. Yellowstone he did.
Yellowstone where? He does the Yellowstone and.
Oh yeah, I'm well aware. Taylor Sheridan here in Montana.
Are you kidding me? Right.
Yellowstone was a Yellowstone was a religion here.
(02:26:29):
All right, I know. So I think Land Man was his best
one. Fan bar blows all the other ones
out of the water. All of them so good.
It is. Not only is it got the action
and a lot of that, it has crazy,insane humor.
(02:26:51):
Billy, it's so freaking funny. Oh my God, it's even parts that
aren't like they're not they're not like supposed they're not
like it's not supposed you're comedy.
It's not comedy is not lighthearted, but serious, dark
and it's comedy. Oh my God, it was it's it's.
(02:27:11):
Oh, that sounds great. It was so.
What else I could recommend? I've been watched.
I watched that one with Seth Rogen that won the Emmy for best
comedy series about where he's the producer in Hollywood.
It's on Apple TV. I've never had an Apple TV
(02:27:31):
subscription, but I I and I doubt in in a month or two I
will still have one. But while I have it, I've been
hitting that really hard. And so I can't remember the name
of that one, but that was very good.
Shrinking is with Harrison Ford is really good.
(02:27:53):
In case you didn't think Harrison Ford could act.
Harrison Ford is fantastic. And quite frankly, he got ripped
off when he didn't win best supporting actor.
Now, the gentleman who did win best supporting actor, the show
that he's in which I somebody somewhere is also very good.
(02:28:14):
I wouldn't put it as good as shrinking because shrinking is
fucking hilarious and I love hilarity.
And Harrison Ford is is fantastic in that to say that
that a couple of times, but somebody somewhere is you could
teach a class on what it's like to grow up in Kansas or Nebraska
(02:28:34):
by watching Somebody somewhere. And, and the gentleman who won
the best supporting actor there hate.
You know, he, he does great, buthe's always, whatever he's been,
and he's always played a gay, flamboyant gay man and he plays
a flamboyant gay man and he getsan Emmy for it.
(02:28:55):
And and that's fine. And, and, and he does a great
job, but I really don't think hedoes as good a job as Harrison
Ford does in shrinking the one I've just started.
And if my get my wife involved in in a show and she likes it as
well, that's really something because she's usually watching
Home Shopping Network. So it's like we're going to
(02:29:17):
spend $30 a pound on Langostino's right Slow Dogs
with Gary Oldman. Yeah, OK.
Spy thriller. There's a the premise without
giving away anything, and I haven't seen the end of it, so I
can't spoil it for you. Gary Oldman is an old drunk.
(02:29:38):
He's in charge of this group of misfit spies who have fucked up
somehow but are just barely clinging on to their careers.
And so you can see the comic possibilities with that.
And he's this old drunken guy incharge of all of these misfits,
(02:29:59):
and somehow these misfits are put into a situation where
they're the ones that are going to have to fucking solve it
because MI 5 is actually more fucked up than they are.
And Gary Oldman. We watched that.
We did watch that. Yeah, yeah.
And Gary Oldman's right. Yeah, Yeah.
And he's about to go off and potentially never be seen again.
(02:30:21):
And he turns to them and he says, I just want you to know
that you're the worst group of fuck ups that I have ever worked
with my entire life. And this is indeed the lowest
point in my career. And then he goes off and it's
like, did did he mean that or was he just trying to get us
motivated? I was like, Oh no, he means it.
(02:30:43):
He he means it. So, so far I've watched that and
I've really enjoyed it. Not as much as Shrinking and and
not as much as Mobland, Which doesn't have a little lot of
comedy in it. There are some light moments.
Yeah, see, we, well, we started watching Mob Land, started
watching Mob Land. It's going to be worth to see it
(02:31:06):
through. We've watched Land Man twice.
That oh wow. Yes, that and I'm going to watch
it again. OK.
It's supposed to have the new season starting up in next
month, Yeah. So I'm going to watch it all
again. I'm starting it tonight to watch
Land Man again, my other incredible series.
(02:31:27):
My other binge watching has beenTurner Classic Movies.
They were doing like ROM coms ofthe 1950s and so I watched
Indiscreet with Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman and that was OK.
But what I was really impressed with was Pillow Talk with Rock
Hudson and Doris Day. The copy and the writing in that
(02:31:50):
I heard that. Was I heard about Pillow?
Talk. It really is surprisingly funny
movie because you think it's 1950s.
How funny could it be? Well, they had to be funny
because they couldn't fucking swear, you know, they, they,
they, they couldn't, you know, have.
Yeah, yeah, a whole. Lot they to work with Pillow
(02:32:11):
Talk was really good, but what Ifound funny to the point of
almost being subversive is will success ruin Rock Hunter
starring Tony Randall and I knewI just her name just slipped
out. Mansfield Jane Mansfield, one of
the few movies she made and EmmaHardaday's dad is in it is a
(02:32:32):
Tarzan character and the comedy in that and and it that was made
in 57 at a time when the movies were suffering because people
were staying home and watching television and the movie goes
after fucking television. It makes television the vision,
the the villain. Oh, that's awesome.
But it's funny to the point of of almost being subversive.
(02:32:55):
And I'm almost surprised that the McCarthy folks weren't
investigating it because of the message that that is in there.
And poor Jane Mansfield, if you get to watch the documentary on
on her, what's really not on her?
Jane Mansfield. Yeah, it's her daughter.
Yeah. OK, who?
(02:33:16):
Who? You see whole movies and the
whole bit. This was a woman who was
accomplished musician. She was, you know, kind of Phi
Beta Kappa kind of a thing. But she had to play a Dumber
version of Marilyn Monroe is what she had to do, you know,
and and her you know, and and and her career just goes so far
(02:33:39):
South after this movie and a couple others.
It just she couldn't get any decent parts, nobody would take
her seriously. But.
But with that sad background, the movie itself is just.
So will success ruin Tony? Will will, will success ruin
(02:34:00):
Rock Hunter? Rock Hunter.
Right. Rock Hunter and Tony Randall
from, you know, Odd Couple TV Factor is the lead actor.
He was you. You, you know.
Tony Randall, OK. Yeah, Tony Randall and and Jane
Mansfield. I like Tony Randall.
Oh yeah, I always like Tony Randall as well.
(02:34:22):
Yeah, he plays this I because it's all about, you know, moving
up the system. It's like how to succeed in
business without really trying until the very end where they
just, you know, basically like Isaid, it's like I don't want to
give it away other than to say I'm I'm a little surprised it
wasn't investigated for being anti American.
(02:34:42):
That's. Awesome.
So these are definitely some movies like.
Oh yeah, we'll definitely be checking them out.
Yeah, I, I love watching the theTurner Classics I.
Do Oh yeah and and one you can 1you can skip which I was sorely
disappointed in was designing woman with.
Gregory Yeah, we'll skip that, that's for sure.
(02:35:04):
Yeah, Gregory Peck in a comedy role.
Are you kidding me? I want Gregory Peck to be
Atticus Finch. I want Gregory Peck to be the
the guy in 12:00 noon who's a little shell shocked, you know?
I want Gregory Peck to be the guy out there fighting for the
farmers or shit like that. I don't want Gregory Peck in a
(02:35:26):
comedy ROM com. And the pretty much the same
goes for oh God, I can't remember her name.
She was Bogart's wife. I can see her face.
Yeah, I know, right? I can see her face.
Oh. I mean, I guess I could do a a a
(02:35:49):
search, but in any case, that's his love.
That's actually his wife. They get married very early in
the movie. Kind of a thing.
But designing woman was extremely disappointing.
But it is instructive in that. Lauren McCall, thank you.
Yes, yes. Lauren McCall, who was just
(02:36:11):
smoking hot actress in those early movies with bogey and
stuff and and she was great in everything she did.
But this was just they they werelike 2 fish out of water and you
could tell. But that is an interesting movie
and that at the end of the movie, a gay man who's obviously
a gay man who they, you know, hehas a family, blah, blah, blah,
(02:36:32):
because it's the 50s and shit, right.
But anyway, a gay man takes out a whole bunch of mobsters that
it would be, it would be called woke today, you know, and they
make sure that this guy is kind of flamboyant and and the whole
bit and there's even a Gregory Peck just kind of makes a
reference to to that and stuff. And he towards Gregory Peck, you
(02:36:54):
know, Hey, you know, I'm much more of a man than you are.
And you just kind of like take that with a green assault kind
of thing. But by at the end of the movie,
yeah, he kicks the shit out of all these saves the day.
But but as cool as that is, it'sit's still not worth the hour
and a half investment of your time, I'm afraid.
(02:37:17):
Yeah, we watched. We binge watch Boots.
Oh my. Gosh, Boots was.
It's on Netflix. It's on Netflix.
It's called Boots. Yeah, I don't currently have
Netflix. It's.
I can get it. It's it's about I'm.
Going to cancel Apple and get Netflix at some point.
(02:37:37):
It's about the Marines, Marines boot camp and it's about a gay
kid goes into the Marines and. In the. 19 and the 19 seven.
It's 8686, yeah. OK, OK.
Yeah. So yeah.
(02:37:58):
And laws that were that were like still how the military was
back in 86 compared to how it istoday.
You know, we went through the iterations of don't ask, don't
tell right now they don't care. But back then it.
Was it was definitely. Yeah.
Yeah, it was, yeah. It was, yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
And so and just kind of like just everything that he was, he
(02:38:22):
went through was so real. It was real.
Yeah, the boot camp was freakingawesome.
I loved it. I loved it.
I. Oh man, OK, well I've got those
written down. It's called Netflix.
Netflix has my all time favoriteor one of my all time favorites
which is Dairy Girls. Oh yeah, dairy girls.
(02:38:45):
From Belfast, those girls growing up in Northern Ireland
during the civil war in the late80s and early 90s.
And just and part of it is because my brother is much like
their uncle who just talks very slowly.
He may have seen on and on and stuff.
(02:39:08):
And you know, when they're when they're trying to stall out Liam
Nielsen on an interrogation and they bring him in and he just
keeps talking and talking and talking and Liam Nielsen, like,
do you remember what the question was?
So, so dairy Girls is, is really, it's got just just a
(02:39:28):
couple of tiny little serious moments.
But boy, it really, you know, pokes an eye into the finger of
the Catholic Church. Oh my God, yes it does.
War, OH. Yes, it does.
And I have. I've seen dairy girls, I've had
the first season of it and it was very, you know.
How many seasons is it? I think they've got like 3 or 4.
(02:39:50):
I think it was three. I think it was three.
Yeah, yeah. But yeah.
And the and the girls just keep getting in worse and worse.
And it's so funny. Is this because they they have
these women who are clearly likein their 30s trying to be
teenagers? You know that they were acting
in teenagers. It was.
Very fun. But it just the accents alone,
(02:40:11):
just the accents alone are so fun.
Oh yeah. You know, the way they talk is I
guess I got. I have a friend of mine in
Ireland, regular Ireland, and wewere talking about that and she
says, yeah, that's the thing, those accents are genuine.
That's how people from Derry actually talk.
There's a particular dialect in in Derry, in Northern Ireland,
(02:40:34):
and they've got it down. Oh yeah.
So you know, my family is from Ireland and so when I went back
to Ireland, that was 1, you know, and I went to go and I was
visiting my family home and, andeverything.
That's one of the things that's so crazy is that when you listen
to the news, instead of saying, you know, the the assailant was
(02:40:58):
Hispanic, the assailant was a white male.
They're they're like the perpetrator had a a dairy
accent. The perpetrator had a Cork
accent. The because every county and and
every not even just county, but even like my cousins and my
family, we have a very, very mild accent.
(02:41:20):
But you go to Conry, which is a couple of, you know, like maybe
a couple miles up the road, and their accent is completely and
totally different. It is so distinguishable
between, you know, so it's something that's, you know, and
when I see that my family's accent is so mild.
When I took my cousin with me who was born and raised and we
(02:41:41):
went to like from Wicklow, County Wicklow down to County
Waterford and we stated Airbnb, the homeowner, she was like,
she, she thought my cousin was from America.
And and so she was like, my cousin was very offended.
(02:42:02):
She was like, because she's like, where do you, where, where
are you from? And she's like, I was, you know,
I'm from Avoca and Wicklow. And she was like, oh, I thought
you were American. She goes, oh, sure, I was born
and raised here my whole life. And so she got very offended.
But that's, I mean those accents, it's amazing how the
(02:42:23):
accents can change just within acouple of miles.
Yeah. And, and, and that they still
exist because you would think with a whole homogenization of,
of their exposure to be our exposure to be in the whole bit
that linguists have talked abouthow dialects are kind of going
out. And there there's far less of,
(02:42:45):
of regional dialects like in theUnited States than there used to
be. That you can still tell somebody
from Texas being different from somebody from the Carolinas or
or Deep South Alabama, where my brother met both, married both
of his wives and divorced both. Of.
Them you know that it's it's just it's becoming less of a
(02:43:06):
thing and and like my mom still refers to corn on my mom and
Nebraska refers to corn on the cob as roasting years.
Oh. Yeah.
And we're we're going to try to bring that back.
There you go, there you go. Oh, and with with your
restaurant, you can always put that on the menu, right?
I could. I could put that on the Sidewick
out front today. Chicken fried steak with a side
(02:43:29):
of mashed potatoes and roasting years and people go like I've
got to go inside to see what thehell a roasting ear is.
Exactly. You know, get pick, you know,
pique their interest. Like what the hell is it?
So I'm thinking, so I'm thinkingyou talked about you were
watching Mobland, right? Right.
Yeah. OK, so you like Mobland?
(02:43:52):
Have you watched the Tulsa King with Sylvester Stallone?
Tulsa King? Have you watched that one yet?
I have not watched that one yet,but I started to watch the other
one based in Tulsa where Ethan Hawke is in.
It Ethan Hawke, OK, that's a he's.
(02:44:13):
A journalist. That's that Kings of May, the
mayor of Kingstown. Yeah, wait, I forget what the
name of it is, but but yeah, I've heard good things about the
Stallone. Mayor Mayor of Kingstown is a
good one and Tulsa King great both of them great movies well.
(02:44:35):
Tulsa King there is. It's crazy because.
They they just, they just started Yeah, they just started
season 3 month is. Next month is land man.
Season, yes, so. We're very excited.
Yes, yes. That's interesting how Tulsa is
now the center of the universe with all these different series
of stuff. And, and I, I, I raised that
(02:44:57):
question today on Facebook and afriend of mine said tax breaks.
Yes, yes. You know, it's it's cheaper to
make a movie there than practically anywhere else.
You know, it used to be Seattle,used to be a real hot spot
because we. Were it was.
In California, and then they decided they got greedy and
jacked up all these taxes and made-up all these taxes and tax
(02:45:20):
them right out of doing businesshere.
And they just, they moved them away.
They moved them. We'll go we'll start writing
entire scripts about extended TVshows based on, I don't know,
Tulsa, OK, you know, because, you know, yes, there was some
interesting things that happenedin Tulsa at one point.
(02:45:40):
But I, you know, guarantee you 99% of the time, none of this
shit that's happening in these shows is happening there and
everything. That's why we everyone in
Montana, they enjoyed Yellowstone so it could be taken
apart peace by teams like how there is there was only one
scene with just a little bit of snow in it.
(02:46:01):
And it was through the window ofthe Indian casino that it's the
only time you ever saw snow in the original Yellowstone series
in a state where we have snow onthe ground nine months a year,
you know, including right now outside my door.
You never saw snow. Oh, and, and, and.
The governor's inauguration takes place outside on his ranch
(02:46:23):
in January. Yeah.
January where when we were redoing the ceiling, it was 34°
below outside and inside the building, it was 34 above.
We barely kept it above freezingin here.
It was that cold. Yeah, sure.
January in Montana is a great time for to have an outdoor
festival like an inauguration and shadow.
(02:46:44):
And. And here's the thing, the
governor of Montana eats here. Sometimes it's its favorite
burger spot. Oh, that's.
Awesome. That's awesome.
And so I actually know the governor of Montana and, and
they, he eats inside, you know, and not outside.
(02:47:08):
And it's like that. We're not friends or anything.
And politically. Cold out there to all the time.
But but but Yellowstone and and that was people from California
see that go, well, that's fucking beautiful.
Let's move to Montana. And then a year later, Nope.
We've in it. We got quite a few folks out
here from Seattle. And whenever somebody who's like
(02:47:31):
comes out to start up a little business or start something up
here and you'll have to Google Phillipsburg, Montana sometime
and learn all about it. And and they tell.
So where where you from? Well, we're, we're from
Minnesota. OK, then you know, you know
you're from the Dakotas. OK, then you know you're from
Nebraska. OK, then you know we're from
(02:47:53):
Seattle. We will see you in a year.
Then it'll be bye, bye. You'll be going back to Seattle
as fast as you fucking can because you think, oh, where you
know, how bad could it possibly be?
Well, again, we got a ski hill outside of town.
You could walk to the ski hill. So yeah, it's, it's, it's pretty
(02:48:14):
bad. I mean, 100 miles West of us
now, not so much, but we're juston that the other side of that
line. So we always made fun of it.
In fact, part of my stand up routine was about, you know,
Beth on Yellowstone, you know, and my bid is about how
everybody, Beth and Yellowstone,she's attractive scale of 1 to
(02:48:37):
10. Where are you to put her 10?
Right? No one.
You put Beth at a 1. You know why you put Beth at A1?
Because in the very first episode of Yellowstone she gets
some guy to start fucking her onsome desk and while he's fucking
her she complaints about how small his Dick is.
Mid coitus. Who wants that?
(02:49:01):
Who wants that? It's like, wow, I'm going to go
to bed with this fabulously beautiful woman.
And then halfway through she's going to start complaining about
my Dick size, you know, and you know, she's a one, she's a 1,
you know, And then then my otherlittle bit that I that I move on
to, you know, where's all our Second Amendment treasury?
(02:49:22):
It's fighting tyranny. Isn't this what all those school
children died for? So you could have an automatic
weapon. So you should fight can fight
tyranny. Where the fuck are you?
You know, it's we paid a pretty we paid a pretty high price for
you guys to be able to play withyour guns.
I did that here in town on an open mic and got moved off the
(02:49:45):
stage and I'm never going back to do another open mic here.
You know that the first time I did open mic, I did all the
little family stuff, you know, kind of thing and, and shit.
One time I, I went up for a FolkFestival and I had no material
at all. So I just went up there and used
the word folk instead of fuck and.
(02:50:08):
It it worked. It brought down the fucking
house. And like, yeah, that's my wife
and I used to listen to folk music all the time.
We used to folk when we first started dating, night and day,
man. I mean, we would folk in the in
the living room. We had a stereo in the bedroom.
It, it didn't matter. We folked as often as we could
(02:50:30):
and just and it was just a spontaneous kind of a thing.
But that's the kind of humor they were ready for.
And then I hit them with the Second Amendment shit.
And it was like, Tim, you're supposed to be doing comedy.
And it's like, really? Because when I do it in
Missoula, they fucking die laughing and they're rolling in
the chairs here in Phillipsburg,they feel offended.
You know. And they actually told me, OK,
(02:50:52):
you're done. And it's like, you're right.
And then I was told they're thinking about not letting you
come back. And it's like, what do you mean?
I'm not going back? I'm not going to go back.
And and supposedly they're upsetbecause I use four letter words
and there were kids. It's like, wait a minute, you
have people coming in to do stand up and you had kids in the
audience. I didn't see any fucking kids.
(02:51:13):
And yes, I did use the F word quite a bit, you know, but that
because that's, that's part of it.
But I hadn't done that before. I had just done clean comedy.
And I figured, you know, I'm going to just, you know, sever
this tie real fucking fast here.So.
So yeah. So I, I've actually been pulled
(02:51:34):
off the stage here in my hometown for doing shit like
that. I, I did the best thing and I
didn't use any bad words and that was OK, you know.
But as soon as I was bringing upthe Second Amendment and you
dropped the F bomb a couple of times, it was like, you need to
get off the stage. It's like, but this is leading
to something. You have to let me do the closer
(02:51:56):
kind of a thing. But no, I didn't get to do my
closer. So it's like, OK, fuck you.
I'm not going to do any more shows for you guys.
I'm not going to book anyone. I'm not going to go try to find
it. We have the oldest operating
Opera House in in Montana, or. And no, I'm not going to be part
of it anymore. Fuck you.
Wow. Comedy is such a brutal, brutal
(02:52:22):
endeavour. It really is.
I mean. Well, at the moment I felt like
I just can't sit by and let all this shit happen because I know
that 70% of the people in this county voted for Trump, that I
want to hold their fucking feet to the fire just a little bit.
Yeah. You know, kind of a thing.
(02:52:42):
And they don't want to. It's a lot of people, when they
fuck up, they don't want somebody else to hold the
mirror. They'll they'll fuck, yeah, they
will fucking die before they fucking admit that they.
Yeah, and there was, there was some talk about aren't you
afraid you're going to hurt yourbusiness?
And it's like, well, 90% of my business is tourists, 800 people
in town. There's literally 2000 that live
(02:53:03):
here in the summer because of all the summer houses and shit
like that. No, I'm not afraid of losing
business. Plus, we're still the best place
around, So what are you going tofucking do, you know?
Yeah. That the alternatives are are
are not great. Montana's not known for having
great cuisine and we have not found any place that's
(02:53:27):
especially in small town Montanathat's worth going to Small town
Louisiana, you betcha. All over Texas, Wonderful places
to eat everywhere. Montana.
If you're not in Missoula and you're not in Bozeman, just eat
when you get to Denver or Seattle.
Montana, Montana and Argentina hamburgers.
(02:53:49):
They everybody's into burgers. Everybody wants a burger.
You know, even the Mexican placeacross the street sells
hamburgers, you know, kind of thing.
But but you have to deal with the population.
Remember rural populations, theydidn't go to college.
They're the ones who stayed behind.
(02:54:10):
Sometimes perfectly legitimate reasons I'm going to take over
the business for dad. Or sometimes it's because they
don't have options. And then people fall into rural
areas because they've got a criminal record somewhere else.
Like several of the people we hired, you know, were criminals
elsewhere and came here because they could get a job kind of a
thing. And not just us, by the way, but
(02:54:32):
you know, so it's, it's, it's not a, a competent rich
environment. And then people come in and it's
like, what's a euro? What's malt?
You, you know, what is, what is,what is, what is, Yeah, yeah, we
sell EUR. What is, what is the soup?
What, what is soup du jour mean?So, so we really have to dummy
(02:54:56):
everything down because you're talking about, I mean, the
average American can only read at the 4th grade level.
That means half of them can't read at the 4th grade level.
So when I'm designing my menu, I've got to be like, I use
pictures and graphics so they don't have to read.
I don't say Pepsi. I have a Pepsi bottle cap on the
(02:55:18):
menu that that way they recognize it without having to
read it. I have a little graphic next to
the bison. Bison for the bison burger,
chicken for the chicken sandwich.
So they can see that, oh, this is the beef burger, this is the
bison, this is the chicken, you know, kind of a thing that I, I,
(02:55:39):
I incorporate graphics like thatbecause the, the literacy rate
is just, you know, not good, at least with the relatively local
population. But then we get people coming in
from other countries and the, the British were coming in and I
would tell them, OK, I would hand their ticket to them.
And I'd say now this is your bill, but the prices are pre
(02:55:59):
Brexit. And they thought that was
hilarious that, you know, because I, I usually ring them
up as well as I now your ticket represents the pre Brexit price.
And then they just, they got it.They understood that, that,
that, that they thought that waspretty funny.
(02:56:20):
But that's. Awesome.
It is refreshing to meet people from all over the world Come
here so. Oh yeah.
That's nice, yeah. I know that I was.
I was wearing my shirt that saysdo not pet the fluffy cows.
That I got is. Yellowstone so.
(02:56:42):
Don't pet fluffy cows. Yeah, absolutely.
One of the greatest reads in theworld is Death at Yellowstone
and about all the people over the decades who have either died
or from just sheer foolishness or, you know, I love dogs and
it's a sad story. But there's one woman in the
(02:57:04):
1920s, you know, she had her little dog with her, and it was
barking at a bear, so she thought she would take the dog
off the leash so it could play with the bear.
Oh my God, It lasted literally less than a minute and the woman
was so pissed. Why do you allow these animals
to roam around here like that? Yeah.
(02:57:27):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, it's so frustrating
driving through Yellowstone and people stop to take a picture of
a deer. You can, you can see deer off of
Hwy. 77 off of Riley, Kansas, ifyou want to.
You know, you can see deer any fucking where in this country.
You know, just outside of New York City, you can see deer.
You know that. I remember one time this woman,
(02:57:51):
she'd stopped traffic and gottenout of her car, which you're not
supposed to do, even in Yellowstone.
You're supposed to pull over. And she was like, taking a
picture. And it was just like, like it
was a white tailed deer. And I rolled down my window and
I said, it's a deer. Yeah.
And you're a bitch. Move your car.
You know, get off the road, it'sa deer.
(02:58:13):
You're blocking all of these people.
But for a deer? For a photo of a deer?
A moose? OK, A moose?
Cool. A bear?
Yeah. Bears.
Whenever there's a bear sighting, everything comes to a
fucking halt. And then of course, inevitably
somebody gets too close to the bear and the bear starts to move
(02:58:34):
in an aggressive manner. And that's why they try to get
the Forest People Service peoplethere whenever there's a bear
sighting, because they know the fucking tourists are going to
decide to pet the bear at some point.
Yeah, they all watched. What was it?
Grizzly Adams growing. That's right, yeah.
The Bears are on guns. We can go.
Back. Yeah, that's the thing about the
(02:58:54):
Grizzlies too. And, and and where we're at.
We're starting to get Grizzlies into the area that they're
moving S from Glacier and they're moving N from
Yellowstone. And the Grizzlies are especially
aggressive when it comes to bears.
At one time, I was in the car and surprised bears not far from
(02:59:16):
the Project Vote Smart Ranch. And I didn't mean to.
It's just that I saw a Mama bearwith three Cubs, and I was,
yeah, I was so shocked that I just hit the brakes.
But it was a gravel road, and itmade a lot of noise on the
gravel. And the Mama bear saw and heard
me and immediately had her Cubs all go up the tree.
(02:59:38):
And then she kind of stood there, like, I don't know if I
have to still go up the tree or not.
And so I just sat there for a solid half hour and finally she
decided I wasn't a threat and her Cubs could come back down
and, and, and stuff. And I felt so bad that I had
actually frightened them like that.
But grizzly, no, grizzly would have just chased her pups up
(03:00:04):
that tree. Grizzly would have been let me
go, eliminate the threat. You guys stay here as like a
forest Ranger once told us. How can you tell?
What kind of a bear you're beingchased by?
And it's like, well, if it's a black or a brown bear and you
run away from it and climb up a tree and it climbs up the tree
and eats you, that's a black bear or a brown bear.
(03:00:28):
If you're being chased by a grizzly and you climb up the
tree and the grizzly knocks the tree down and eats you, OK,
that's that. That's how you tell it's a
grizzly. Well, Grizzlies are a lot bigger
too though. And they're, they're bigger, oh,
bigger. And they know how big they are.
Oh, I know I was. I was up there.
(03:00:51):
And, you know, in the same, in the same way that the Dachshund
knows how small it is, yeah, grizzly bears know that they're
very, very big. And whatever they encounter,
they're likely going to win. Oh yeah.
So there is people, whether it'sa moose, sheep, cattle, whatever
it is that a a friend of mine actually is more of an
(03:01:13):
acquaintance on my trivia team here because the the local
brewery, we have a brewery here in town and they do trivia night
once a week. And we've won it.
I forget how many years in a rownow.
Well, three out of the last fouryears.
We lost by a couple points a couple years ago.
And anyway, and, and he the the wolves in the area are tracked
(03:01:37):
and he's a cattle rancher and heknows where all the wolves are
at any one point in time and wasshowing me on his phone the wolf
out app kind of a thing. And they're probably going to
have to start doing that with the Grizzlies is they're going
to have to start tagging them. So we know where the Grizzlies
are because it's bad news as thewolves are as far as just the
(03:01:59):
general population and especially for the ranchers, the
Grizzlies are another level of concern kind of a thing because
a pack of wolves will like take down a a cow, but they're good
for a while. You know, grizzly takes down a
cow. It's looking for more cows after
(03:02:21):
that kind of a thing. So we're starting to become
grizzly country. And they've even put signs up
along the road to, to beware of that, that the Grizzlies are
starting to move into the area. But I mean, chances are they're
not going to come by town. We did.
We do occasionally get bears in town and we do not yet have to
have bear proof trash cans or, or what have you.
(03:02:44):
But we did have a couple of bears in town a few years ago.
There was a brown bear and a, and a black bear.
And they were able to, they're able to capture the brown bear
and get it out of town. But they had, they shot and
killed the black bear. And it was like, well, of course
they killed the black bear. Yeah.
(03:03:04):
Right. Wow.
All right. Well, with that, with that,
we're going to close out with that.
The best closer, Yeah. What if they killed the black
bear? Well, we going to close out with
that one. We want to thank you again, Tim
Howard for for joining us today on insight on and giving us so
(03:03:27):
much insight with the knowledge that you have, being the teacher
that you are and having that insight on on so many different.
Yeah. Yes, Oh yes.
I love weeds, as it were. I have to close it the way Jamal
would try and close it. As Mary Ann would say, make
(03:03:50):
better choices. No, no, Jamal, it's supposed to
be make good choices. So I always get it wrong, OK,
make good choices. And as I always say, if you
don't like what we said here on this podcast, just remember,
it's not about you. Except about 25% of everything
(03:04:11):
wrong in the world is Jamal's fault.
That's right. That's right.
And I don't think I can actuallystop it.
I because he he has to stop it on his end.
So I will have to bounce out andjust say peace.
OK. And I'll, I'll bounce out.
Too. Thank you guys.
I really love this. This was great.
Nice meeting you. You're in Washington state.
You're not that far away. Maybe.
(03:04:32):
Maybe we'll hang someday. So if we come down there, we get
free burgers. We come down there to come grab
a burger. OK, yeah, yeah.
You Google Phillipsburg, Montanaand find out what it's all
about. And our restaurant is Doe's
restaurant or Doe Brothers restaurant that we we're on
Facebook and you can kind of find out a little bit about what
(03:04:55):
we're about. But we're definitely very
definitely in the you know what America once was business when
you have a 16 foot soda fountainfrom 1913, you know, it's wow.
You know, it's so it is kind of cool.
It is it is really different. My family runs the place.
So anyway, kind of a nice situation.
(03:05:17):
We cannot wait to probably afterthe the winter so we.
Don't understood? Come hang out with some of the
other tourists that come then. We'll and I, I just love
Washington State. I, I just went to, my wife
didn't feel up to it because shedoes the majority of the work
here. She's our cook.
But I got to Leavenworth finallyat last.
(03:05:39):
And I've been to, I've been to Chelan.
My full family went to Chelan back in 98.
And we didn't take the boat rideover to Stakin because we were
going all these different placesand the kids were just tired.
But we always regretted doing it.
While I finally got to do that, I finally got to take the boat
(03:06:00):
ride from Chelan to Stehegan or whatever it's called at the end
of Lake Chelan Points. The whole area there has just
exploded compared to 1998. And when you think how long ago
1998 was, you know, and it took me that long to do it, I'm yeah,
that's it's, it's a nice situation here, but I'm probably
(03:06:21):
never. It's also COVID has really drove
a lot of people out too, but that's a conversation for
another time. I understood.
And we'll, we'll definitely do this again, guys.
Thank you. Thank.
You so much, I'll try to. Find.
All right. Thanks a lot.
Eddie OS guys, nice to meet you.