Jared Cohen

[0] Welcome, welcome, welcome to armchair expert.

[1] I'm Dak Shepard.

[2] I'm joined by Monica Padman.

[3] Monica Padman.

[4] Today we have a really fun guest.

[5] We really fell in love with this guy.

[6] He's kind of joining the ranks.

[7] You know, he's working his way into the Eric Graham, Adam Grant, Eric Topol.

[8] Category.

[9] The pillars, the pillars of A .E. Now, Jerry Cohen is an American businessman.

[10] He's currently serving as the CEO of Jigsaw and an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

[11] He served as a member of the Secretary of State's Policy Planning Staff and as an advisor to Condoleezza Rice and later Hillary Clinton.

[12] He has an amazing book called Accidental Presidents, Eight Men Who Changed America.

[13] We talk a bunch about that.

[14] He also has the books, The New Digital Age, Children of Jihad, and 100 Days of Silence.

[15] Also a reminder that Valentine's Day is approaching, which means Monica and Jess love boys.

[16] Boys.

[17] We love boys.

[18] Boys, boys, boys, boys.

[19] Boys, boys.

[20] I'm telling you if this, if your podcast is one -third as fascinating as all the round -up dinner table chat about the challenges and stuff you're going on, it's going to be a damn barn burner.

[21] Oh, thanks.

[22] Yeah, the challenges that we get at the end of each episode where their assignments for us to complete have been fascinating.

[23] Your dance card has been full.

[24] I'll just spoil that.

[25] It's changed my life.

[26] Yeah.

[27] It really has changed my life.

[28] Yeah, maybe you'll do monocloves everything and buy, like, in three years you'll be the Dalai Lama.

[29] Oh, God, it's the dream.

[30] Yeah, it's the dream.

[31] Well, please enjoy Jared Cohen.

[32] Wondry Plus subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and add free right now.

[33] Join Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts.

[34] Or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcasts.

[35] Where are you staying?

[36] Um, uh, the W, like five minutes from here.

[37] Oh, good.

[38] Um, I like that place.

[39] I think they tell you when you check in there, like be worn, this is an adult hotel.

[40] I got that vibe.

[41] Yeah, yeah.

[42] And I kind of dig that, especially if I'm traveling, like, I'm up for seeing some shit.

[43] I told Monica this story.

[44] I was at the Mandarin Oriental, which was lovely.

[45] And middle, middle of the afternoon, 2 p .m. I start hearing a fucking orgy, a bona fide orgy next to my room.

[46] At first, I'm like, oh, someone's watching pornography.

[47] really, really loud.

[48] But then it's going on and on and on.

[49] And then I'm like, I don't think that's a pornography.

[50] Walked out into my hallway could hear it clear as day under the thing.

[51] A lot of accents going out.

[52] And it became a whole investigation I had for the rest of the trip.

[53] And then I ended up meeting the two gals that were running that room at the elevator.

[54] And they said, oh, were we keeping you up?

[55] And I'm like, no, it's great.

[56] Carry on.

[57] Continue.

[58] Keep the pedal to the metal to the metal.

[59] I swear I wasn't listening.

[60] Jared, welcome to armchair expert.

[61] Thank you.

[62] I'm happy to be here.

[63] Yeah, we have mutual friends.

[64] We have a lot of mutual friends.

[65] Yeah, many.

[66] Ashton and Mila.

[67] Adam Grant.

[68] Adam Grant.

[69] Monica Lewinsky.

[70] Monica Lewinsky.

[71] Two of them are podcast friends that we've met.

[72] But Jared, what's interesting is we're going to talk to you about your book, Accidental Presidents, which I have read a good deal of.

[73] And I really, really, really like.

[74] And it's a super fascinating topic.

[75] But yet, we could definitely do four hours on your other life.

[76] Because I think it makes it that much more interesting that you've written this book.

[77] It wouldn't have been predicted, right?

[78] Yeah, I think anyone who knew me when I was a kid might have expected me to write this book, but there's not that many people that knew me when I was a kid because I grew up in a small town in Connecticut.

[79] Yeah.

[80] So it seemed very random to write a book about eight dead presidents to all the people I've worked with in tech and on foreign policy and in business.

[81] Yeah, so just a real quick primer on you is that you grew up in Connecticut, as you said.

[82] And then you went to Stanford, which gets Monica and I both engorged with our unifile obsession.

[83] In fact, we were just this morning before you got here trying to figure out, what is it that fascinates us so much?

[84] We still don't know.

[85] Anyways, you went to Stanford.

[86] And then when you got out of Stanford, you ended up working for the State Department as an intern under Condoleezza Rice.

[87] Is that?

[88] I did it while I was still at Stanford.

[89] Oh, still at Stanford.

[90] Okay.

[91] And then I'll just throw this in here.

[92] You took your own trip to Iran.

[93] You spent four months there.

[94] So when I was in grad school, so I went straight from Stanford to grad school.

[95] Road Scholar Monica Oxford.

[96] Wow.

[97] I'm loving this flatter.

[98] Oh, no, you are.

[99] Can't get enough.

[100] You're a veritable James Bond for us who is obsessed with schools.

[101] If you could have just squeezed a semester into Harvard, I think we would both be nude in front of you right now.

[102] You are a second road scholar, right?

[103] After Ronan.

[104] I think third.

[105] Oh, who else?

[106] We've had a third, but we won't chew up.

[107] up Jared's time.

[108] Well, on the fact check, we'll figure it out.

[109] I think we've had three now.

[110] Wow.

[111] Which I don't even think I would thought I was going to meet one in my life.

[112] Me either.

[113] Yeah, much less it with three of them.

[114] Okay, so while you were at Oxford, you went to Iran?

[115] When I was at Stanford, I was obsessed with traveling to sub -Saharan Africa.

[116] And one of my professors was worried that I was reckless and going to get myself killed.

[117] So he basically read me a sort of almost parental edict telling me to cool it down for a while.

[118] What was your attraction to sub -Saharan Africa?

[119] It was a trip that I took.

[120] took when I was younger to Tanzania and I had self -learns Wahili.

[121] And so sort of it started with a fascination with language.

[122] And then when you spoke the language, you'd want to travel there.

[123] And then it became an interest in conflict resolution and civil wars.

[124] And then I started traveling to civil war.

[125] So my professors just thought it was time to knock it off a little bit.

[126] So I looked at a map and said, where else would I find incredibly interesting where people don't go?

[127] And I wanted to go to the Iranian embassy in London to convince them to give me a visa and I got it literally 12 hours before I got on the plane.

[128] So it's hard to get a visa to go there?

[129] Even back then it was hard now obviously it would be...

[130] Well today it would probably not be however many trips I don't think they would grant that.

[131] If I could in a nutshell just because it really fascinates me and I have an armchair speculation which is Iran is a lot of things right?

[132] You both have like this theocracy on top of everything but then you also have kind of progressive youth and highly educated women in general there for the Middle East, right?

[133] So there's a, there's a lot of paradoxes there, aren't there?

[134] Yeah, it's a fascinating country just because our historic memory of the very revolutionary Islamic Republic is very different than the reality of the population today.

[135] And that became really evident to me when I went there.

[136] I went there to do a research project to interview opposition leaders, and I got in some trouble with the government.

[137] So they also told me to knock it off.

[138] You'll notice a pattern here.

[139] And so I didn't want to leave the country.

[140] So I started just hanging out with young people my own age, seeing what made them tick.

[141] And I got really captivated by this idea that country of 80 million people has 67 % of the population under the age of 30, that I sort of started to view them as the real opposition.

[142] Sure.

[143] And I was never interested in technology until I went to Iran.

[144] And then I watched the way that these young people were using technology to flirt and organize, to go to parties.

[145] And I realized the same tech that I used every single day, they were using in novel ways that I never could have imagined.

[146] And I sort of felt very strongly that one day that would take on a political dimension.

[147] Which ended up being the Arab Spring, yeah?

[148] The Green Revolution first in Iran and then subsequently the Arab Spring throughout the region.

[149] Is that 2009?

[150] 2009.

[151] Okay, so you were an intern while still at Stanford, but at some point you stay on under Hillary in the State Department, correct?

[152] That's correct.

[153] It's kind of a rare thing to happen, I would assume.

[154] Did they gut them or did they keep people?

[155] Most people don't stay on.

[156] it was very interesting going through a presidential transition compared to now it's probably less dramatic.

[157] But at the time, it seemed pretty dramatic.

[158] Yeah, Bush to Obama.

[159] There was a lot of baggage carried over.

[160] There were a lot of preconceived notions.

[161] And I like trying to survive.

[162] Right.

[163] So I tried to survive.

[164] Uh -huh.

[165] Help me understand, because obviously I've never worked with the government.

[166] I have very limited knowledge of how it even works.

[167] But there are categories within the government that, in theory, at least, are apolitical, right?

[168] Yeah.

[169] I mean, if you break it down, there's obviously career civil servants, there's career foreign service, and they're very apolitical.

[170] Although I will note that the bumper stickers in the basement on the cars change very dramatically, as do the photos with important people in various offices, which we call the me wall.

[171] Like the defense team for OJ where they went in there and put a bunch of pictures of him of black folks.

[172] But there's also, there's political appointments which are sort of more partisan in nature in the sense that you worked on the campaign, you donated to the campaign.

[173] And you're maybe trying to execute a part of the platform or something?

[174] Exactly.

[175] Yeah.

[176] And there's a smaller category of political appointments, which I was, which is you're brought in as a subject matter expert.

[177] And in my case, I was brought in because of an expertise on counterterrorism and on the Middle East.

[178] Right.

[179] And all under the veil of digital future, right?

[180] Social media and the power of Twitter and Facebook.

[181] And that wasn't really a thing at the State Department back then.

[182] I mean, it was kind of a side passion of mine because I'd seen it in Iran.

[183] I'd seen it in Lebanon.

[184] I'd seen it when I was living in Syria and Iraq.

[185] And especially, you know, as the Green Revolution happened, and then we got more evidence of how technology was infusing itself into the world, I really wanted to create a portfolio and an agenda that became part of foreign policies embrace of a lot of these new technologies.

[186] A much less global aspect of this story is you're Jewish.

[187] Yes, that's correct.

[188] Yeah, so I guess if I'm Jewish and I think of the many different countries that would love to host me, I'm not sure that some of the ones you just listed seem like the friendliest place.

[189] Was that your day -to -day experience or no?

[190] Do you find that, like, you know, we're being told a narrative and then once you got in there that people weren't really like, or not?

[191] I think I did what any normal Jewish kid from a small town in Connecticut would do, which is I went to Iran.

[192] Sure, sure, yeah, first up.

[193] So when you went there, he already said the statement we want to wipe Israel off the map.

[194] So when I was there, Mohammed Khautami was the president, but the real person in charge of the country is Ali.

[195] Khomeini, who's the supreme leader and had said many...

[196] He's an Ayatollah?

[197] He's a grand Ayatollah.

[198] Okay.

[199] Okay, so those statements had already been said.

[200] So you had a sense, at least what the government felt about the state of Israel and perhaps Jewish people at large?

[201] Yeah, but it was interesting.

[202] I went to Shabbat services in Iran.

[203] There are a lot of Jewish Iranians, yeah?

[204] When I was there, there were about 25 ,000 Jews in Iran.

[205] There were a number in Shiraz.

[206] There's even the Constitution mandates that there has to be a Jewish member of parliament, but I get a kick out of this because obviously the Jewish person who ends up in parliament doesn't think Israel has a right to exist.

[207] Not the most loyal of the tribe.

[208] Right, right, right.

[209] So one thing that's interesting, Monica, is he got into hot water while under Hillary because you called Twitter personally and urged them not to do some scheduled maintenance so that the service would be up and running as the 2009 Green Revolution was gaining, or at least protests.

[210] I don't know if it led to that.

[211] And Obama was made a statement.

[212] He was not pleased about that.

[213] But then am I getting this right?

[214] And then this is right.

[215] And then Hillary basically said, I stand with Obama and I'm kind of stoked he did this.

[216] I didn't think I did anything wrong.

[217] I knew Jack Dorsey because one of the things that I did when I worked at the State Department is I used to call up CEOs from Silicon Valley and say, hey, you want to come with me to like Iraq and Afghanistan and CODwaras, Mexico.

[218] And let me show you all the sort of crazy good that technology can do on the ground if we can just get you a little more engaged.

[219] So I was following the Iranian opposition on Twitter, and I saw one of them post that Twitter was scheduling maintenance, and it was going to be in the middle of the night, America time, which would be smack in the middle of the day, Iran time.

[220] And they were counting on Twitter to get the word out about what was happening inside the country.

[221] So I just reached out to Jack Dorsey, and I said, hey, this would be really much better if you could do it at a time that was inconvenient for Americans and highly convenient for Iranians because it might make all the difference.

[222] And then I went to bed.

[223] I don't see any problem with that.

[224] Thank you, Monica.

[225] I really don't.

[226] I'm just guessing.

[227] I don't know what the policy is.

[228] But I think that Obama's point was that the government doesn't lean on private business to execute their foreign policy.

[229] Is that roughly what you're?

[230] Well, the guidance was there'll be no meddling in the protests.

[231] I mean, I didn't think it was meddling.

[232] But some people did.

[233] So I woke up the next morning to not a pleasant barrage of.

[234] messages and long emails with lots of important people you see it on them and my name on the front page of the New York Times.

[235] I was going to say that makes your position quite public.

[236] And at any point did you get nervous about a fatwa or something crazy?

[237] Not a fatwa, just losing my job.

[238] Oh, okay.

[239] Much more immediate.

[240] Yeah.

[241] Okay.

[242] After all this government service, Jared then went to work for Google, which was then called Google Ideas.

[243] And then Google Ideas eventually spun and then you founded Jigsaw, and you are the current CEO, you're the founder and CEO of Jigsaw.

[244] And my understanding of Jigsaw, and I'm going to be quoting at times from, I think, Wire Magazine, which is the goal of Jigsaw isn't to help realize all the best possibilities of the internet, but rather to limit all the shitty parts of it.

[245] Yeah, I mean, I like to think about it as there's a bunch of problems that are destabilizing the internet that are inherently political in their nature, right?

[246] Disinformation, state -sponsored cyber attacks, organized harassment, systematic trolling, all the things that just give us tons of anxiety.

[247] And at Jigsaw, we try to look around the corner and figure out where all that's going.

[248] And then we're an engineering company.

[249] So we build products to try to address them.

[250] One of the things you guys, obviously, you guys are against indoctrinating extremists.

[251] Say that would be a topic that you're concerned about on the internet.

[252] That's right.

[253] Like, give me an example of a product that could help curb that.

[254] So with Jigsaw, we have a very sort of firm methodology of how we do things, which is we forward deploy our people to the most active places in the world where these problems are festering.

[255] So when we decided we wanted to do something with the emergence of ISIS to counter them online, we sent a number of people to Iraq to interview incarcerated ISIS fighters and ISIS defectors to try to understand from them, from the very people involved in extremism, how they use technology to recruit, how technology was used to recruit them, what worked, what didn't work.

[256] And from that, we came up with this concept that we call the redirect method, where we identified roughly 3 to 5 ,000 keywords and phrases that people who are already radicalized are actively searching for to try to take the violent next step.

[257] And then rather than tee up ads on display ads, ad words, and video ads that countered the narrative, we teed up ads that looked like answers to those questions.

[258] And then we built playlists in English and Arabic on YouTube that then redirected them to counter narratives.

[259] Uh -huh.

[260] Wow, that's fascinating.

[261] Yeah.

[262] Now, this is a total side note, but you're the perfect person.

[263] Have you watched Don't Fuck with Cats?

[264] No, but I guess I should.

[265] You should.

[266] You absolutely have to.

[267] It's on Netflix, but two -second version is a guy posts a video called One Boy Two Cats.

[268] He murders these two kittens.

[269] Maybe it's called One Boy Two Kittens.

[270] Regardless, it's horrific.

[271] He kills these two kittens in a vacuum -sealed bag.

[272] It's awful.

[273] It's awful.

[274] And then that mobilizes all these kind of Internet gum shoes that love cats and they go on this mission to find out who this guy is.

[275] And then this story evolves in a way you couldn't possibly imagine.

[276] But I'm watching this thing in a couple things I'm thinking of one of them is, I really can't believe that we don't know who posts a video.

[277] Like, how is that even possible?

[278] So that dude uploaded that video.

[279] We have license plates on our cars.

[280] How is it that you can exist in such anonymity?

[281] What are the pros and cons of correcting that?

[282] I mean, it's just sheer volume.

[283] And there's just so much content.

[284] I mean, even look at the Civil War in Syria, you have, by an order of magnitude, more content that's been uploaded to YouTube than there have been minutes in the entire conflict, which has been raging for, you know, nearly a decade.

[285] Wow.

[286] So just the sheer volume of all of this, it makes it very hard to do two things.

[287] One, pre -screen content and two, figure out origin of content.

[288] Do you think, is that, it was a Would that technology even be possible where when you buy a device, it has a license plate?

[289] And it doesn't matter how many times you beam it across the world and then it goes to this site and Russia and back here, that somehow some license plate would always exist?

[290] I mean, the Chinese do that.

[291] Oh, they do do that.

[292] Right.

[293] I mean, there's a tension between the notion of free expression and control against bad or illiberal uses of the Internet.

[294] And, you know, there's lots of things that when we look at the American context, of making ourselves safer and making things more stable and making us more civil sound good until you start to sort of see that some of those things would be the same tactics used by repressive.

[295] They be misused.

[296] So finding that balance.

[297] I mean, there's some things that are sort of irrefutably, you know, important for free expression, some things that are irrefutably important for sort of preventing a total free -for -all.

[298] It's that gray area in the middle that I think is not very well defined and where everybody kind of fumbles around.

[299] It is interesting because, yeah, you're right.

[300] It all depends on what my reaction of what story I saw that afternoon.

[301] So then there are other times where I am like a huge proponent of privacy.

[302] But then I'll watch the cat thing.

[303] And I'm like, no, if you kill two cats in a vacuum seal bag, we should be able to find you.

[304] So yeah, I guess it just, it all always circles back to the same debates we've been having about liberty in this country for 300 years that we will now have on the internet.

[305] So Jigsaw is very fascinating.

[306] And that is how you met Adam Grant, correct?

[307] Yes, I've known Adam now eight years.

[308] And I just find him to be one of the, he's like, he should be everybody's Yoda.

[309] Yeah.

[310] He's part executive coach.

[311] And when he's sort of giving me advice, I try to sneak in a little therapeutic as well as just, you know, please can you just like help me with my emotional state as well.

[312] And he helped me come up with, I'm a very anxious person.

[313] I've been an anxious person in my whole life.

[314] And I worry all the time.

[315] I just worry constantly.

[316] And do you think just biochemically or did you have a chaotic childhood?

[317] No, I had a very normal childhood, but the only thing I can think of is, you know, my dad's a psychologist, my grandfather was a psychiatrist, my aunt is a psychiatrist, my uncle's a psychiatrist.

[318] So I think, you know, maybe the painter's house has never painted.

[319] Yeah.

[320] I mean, I was always analyzed as a kid, but a very happy normal childhood, but I was very twitchy.

[321] I would twitch my eyes all the time and move my mouth.

[322] It basically when I went to college disappeared, and it never created social problems for me because I was good at sports growing up, but I should have been like a total outcast.

[323] I mean, this was the 80s.

[324] It's one of these things that my whole, you know, up until I was 18 years old and went to college, I thought it was going to be one of these things that would limit what I'd be able to do.

[325] And then I went to college.

[326] And for some reason, it went away.

[327] Was yours at all?

[328] Mine was very, very governed by making things even.

[329] Mine would move throughout my body.

[330] So it'd be, you know, I'd squint my eyes, you know, move my neck.

[331] And by the way, the thing that's interesting, and I'd be curious if you've encountered this also, the neurological urges haven't gone away.

[332] I'm still as twitchy as I've ever been.

[333] I just have moved it to non -visible places in my body.

[334] And right now, I try to work out, but I have a twitch in my lower back.

[335] So I'm running on the treadmill and I'm constantly twitching my lower back and I'm in excruciating pain.

[336] Uh -huh.

[337] But nobody can see it.

[338] Okay.

[339] So you just move the muscle groups to like ones covered by clothes.

[340] Yeah, exactly.

[341] Wow.

[342] Well, in Plague of ticks, he goes through this whole thing.

[343] He started smoking and they just, they all went away.

[344] And then I went back in my mind.

[345] I was like, oh my God, that's when mine went away as I started smoking.

[346] had this like outlet for all this weird you know anxiety or just yeah i don't know do you have to travel in pajamas also of course no no i don't do you travel in pajamas i can't i'm so uncomfortable when i have to travel in whether it's jeans or a suit i try to travel in pajama like clothes because of the twitchiness oh wow yeah and um you've never sought any kind of medication for this no and my sister actually asked me about this not too long ago she said i don't understand why i don't understand why It's not a bigger deal for you that you, like, moved this thing away from your face.

[347] Uh -huh.

[348] And I think that the not seeking sort of other remedies for it and just kind of managing it myself, in retrospect, I should view it as more of a source of pride.

[349] Yeah.

[350] Than anything else.

[351] But I think that would be self -indulgent, but I suppose I've just done that.

[352] Yeah.

[353] Is your sister older or younger?

[354] She's three years older, and she will tell you that she's about ten times smarter than me. Well, the thing about sisters is they will tell you the goddamn truth, won't they?

[355] Because I had all these weird OCD things.

[356] One of them was I had my fingertips had to be wet at all times or just not dry.

[357] I didn't want them to be dry.

[358] So it was always just kind of just dotting my tips of my fingers with my tongue.

[359] And one time I was in the car, it was in the front seat.

[360] And all of a sudden my sister from the back seat goes, oh my God, would you stop licking your fingers?

[361] It's so gross.

[362] And I was like, I thought for sure I was doing it completely.

[363] under the radar and she just totally blew me up and she was watching all of it she knew all those ticks yeah my sister's beef with me is more she just wants to make sure that when somebody compliments me that they know the delta between her and me it's more it's more about that okay all right now as a kid you had an obsession with presidents yeah i was completely obsessed with presidents as a kid so starting at eight my parents took me to a flea market and they bought me a bag of presidential campaign buttons.

[364] I looked them up and these were worth like thousands and thousands of dollars until I realized that it said reproduction on the back.

[365] And I was disappointed.

[366] But they did they did another thing, which is they bought me this book called The Buck Stops Here.

[367] It's one of these rhyming books, one page per president.

[368] And my parents, they wanted to turn me into a precocious kid.

[369] They didn't realize they would have to have eight conversations about death with me and four about murder.

[370] And I still remember some of the lines in that book, right?

[371] You know, 35 is young John F, another president shot to death.

[372] And it's like, I'm going to eat.

[373] It's intense.

[374] So I remember when the Oliver Stone movie came out in the early 90s, we had a room downstairs in our house, and I decided that I was going to try to solve the Kennedy assassination.

[375] So, you know, I had sort of thumb -tacked strings going from picture to picture.

[376] I wouldn't let anybody in.

[377] And spoiler, I never solved it.

[378] Well.

[379] Yeah.

[380] Did you have a theory that you thought you could stand behind?

[381] Like, was it pointing to one person?

[382] Or I had pretty wacky theories, you know, basically when you're that young, they bias towards whatever you read most recently.

[383] Right.

[384] It was a weird obsession as a kid to, you know, hyper -collect presidential buttons and presidential memorabilia and to obsess over these sort of eight moments in history where a president died in office and somebody, you know, random ended up as president.

[385] It's just a weird thing to spend my whole life fixating on.

[386] So even in your early interests in presidents, you were specifically interested in the vice presidents who assumed the command.

[387] Yeah, and I think it's because, again, I was sort of an obsessive, compulsive kid.

[388] And I just fixated on this book that had these eight drop dead pages.

[389] And, you know, maybe with my parents' reaction when reading it to me, I mean, there's a picture of, you know, McKinley keeled over on one of them.

[390] It's not exactly kid appropriate.

[391] Well, do you listen to Dan Carlin at all?

[392] No, I don't.

[393] Okay, do you know of his show?

[394] He's got a podcast called Hardcore History.

[395] It's probably the biggest history podcast, and I've listened to a few episodes.

[396] But he had this great breakdown in one episode, but he said, the reason people gravitate towards conspiracy theories is that it's too scary to think that one idiot or two idiots can shape the course of history.

[397] That's a very scary notion when there's seven billion people.

[398] So it's more comforting to think, well, it must have been a grand conspiracy with all these powerful elements involved.

[399] Somehow that makes the world less scary.

[400] Do you think there was any of that burbling around with the JFK thing?

[401] Like, you couldn't accept like, wait, one idiot changed history?

[402] I think there were a couple things going on with the JFK assassination.

[403] One, people were able to watch the assassination in motion because of the Zapruder footage.

[404] Two, they saw the alleged assassin shot on live TV.

[405] And this was the era of television.

[406] And what's interesting about the other seven presidents who died in office.

[407] Sometimes it took a pretty lengthy period of time for the vice president to even find out that the president was dead.

[408] So this was the first really kind of, you know, FDR a little bit because of radio, but also everyone knew FDR was going to die.

[409] With Kennedy, he was so young and vibrant.

[410] And nobody was expecting it.

[411] He was so polarizing.

[412] So we forget, as loved as Kennedy was, he was incredibly hated in parts of the country.

[413] So you have this highly polarizing figure.

[414] Who hated him?

[415] He was hated in Republican circles.

[416] he was deeply, deeply disliked in the Rust Belt.

[417] There was a perception that his father, Jack Kennedy, had bought him the election.

[418] Right.

[419] And in fact, there's an interesting anecdote that a lot of people don't know.

[420] When Kennedy was president -elect, there was a disgruntled postal worker named Richard Pavlik, who was so angry that Kennedy's father had purchased him the election, that he sold all of his belongings and used the money to buy a green Buick and dynamite and then stalked Kennedy all across the country and filled up his Buick with that dynamite and tried to kill him as a suicide bomber.

[421] He was parked right outside of his home in West Palm Beach and decided not to do it because he saw one of the Kennedy children.

[422] So we followed him to church, moved the dynamite in his pants, was standing four feet from the president elect with his hand in his pocket and his finger on the tricker ready to blow himself up the president elect and everybody in the church.

[423] And he again decided not to do it because he saw some children out of the corner of his eye.

[424] This guy was really hamstrung with his own conscience.

[425] His Achilles was he just only wanted to kill him.

[426] Oh, and how was he discovered?

[427] He had worked with a non -discrundled postal worker and was sending him cryptic postcards back to their...

[428] This is like text, cryptic postcards.

[429] Anyway, the guy figured it out and alerted the Secret Service and he was pulled over for a routine traffic stop in West Palm Beach.

[430] And he's like, I don't know how that dynamite got in my trunk.

[431] In my pants.

[432] This is a very creepy looking guy.

[433] What's interesting is, even though you have eight presidents who died in office, there were another 19 that almost died.

[434] And while we're on the theme of sort of attempted assassinations, you know, when FDR was president -elect, his very first speech as president -elect in Miami, he's sitting on the back of, again, a Buick.

[435] I don't know what the deal was with Buick.

[436] He was a very trusted vehicle.

[437] He gives a two -and -a -half -minute speech, and then an Italian immigrant named Giuseppe Zangara fires five shots in 15 seconds at him.

[438] And the bullets would have killed President -elect Roosevelt, but a hundred -pound woman named Lillian Cross saw him pull the revolver out and moved her purse from her left arm to her right arm and smacked the gun thwarting his aim saving FDR and saving the new deal.

[439] Wow.

[440] Let's just digest that.

[441] Let's slow down for once.

[442] So we love Lillian Cross.

[443] Yeah.

[444] Monica, do you think if you were in this situation that you would grab one of your handbag?

[445] It depends on what handbag I'm carrying that day.

[446] That's probably everything.

[447] It's a prana.

[448] Luckily she probably didn't have her favorite handbag with Stay tuned for more armchair expert, if you dare.

[449] We've all been there.

[450] Turning to the internet to self -diagnose our inexplicable pains, debilitating body aches, sudden fevers, and strange rashes.

[451] Though our minds tend to spiral to worst -case scenarios, it's usually nothing, but for an unlucky few, these unsuspecting symptoms can start the clock ticking on a terrifying medical mystery.

[452] Like the unexplainable death of a retic.

[453] tired firefighter, whose body was found at home by his son, except it looked like he had been cremated, or the time when an entire town started jumping from buildings and seeing tigers on their ceilings.

[454] Hey listeners, it's Mr. Ballin here, and I'm here to tell you about my podcast.

[455] It's called Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries.

[456] Each terrifying true story will be sure to keep you up at night.

[457] Follow Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries wherever you get your podcasts.

[458] Prime members can listen early and ad -free on Amazon Music.

[459] What's up, guys, it's your girl Kiki, and my podcast is back with a new season.

[460] And let me tell you, it's too good.

[461] And I'm diving into the brains of entertainment's best and brightest, okay?

[462] Every episode, I bring on a friend and have a real conversation.

[463] And I don't mean just friends.

[464] I mean the likes of Amy Polar, Kell Mitchell, Vivica Fox.

[465] The list goes on.

[466] So follow, watch, and listen to Baby.

[467] This is Kiki Palmer on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcast.

[468] So you run Jigsaw and your world is tech, yet you have this fascination with presidents and you have written this book accidental presidents and again it's about eight presidents who have died and then of course their vice president uh came in to fill their shoes and then there's there's all kinds of things to explore within that i love history and i did not know this until recently i garfield right he he went to a convention to make a speech for another candidate and then there was this crazy lockout where they couldn't decide and then because his speech was so good all of a sudden, he ends up walking out of there with the nomination.

[469] Is that right?

[470] That's right.

[471] So Garfield, to this date, is the only person ever to become president who wasn't actively seeking their party's nomination through the ballot box, at least.

[472] So Garfield went to the convention in 1880, which was supposed to be between James Blaine and Ulysses Grant for a non -consecutive third term.

[473] He was there as the campaign manager to the guy running third in the polls, the governor of Ohio.

[474] And on the 30 -something ballot, they're at a deadlock, and somebody shouts his name out.

[475] And next thing he knows, he's been given the nomination.

[476] And he runs up on stage and he says, I protest.

[477] A man who does not seek the nomination cannot be given the nomination.

[478] They basically say, screw you, we're giving it to you anyway.

[479] Oh, my God.

[480] Isn't it fucking insane?

[481] So through these different, I love biographies, I love historical biographies.

[482] And slowly I'm picking up some of this presidential stuff.

[483] I'm reading the Lyndon B. Johnson ones right now.

[484] And one of the things that I didn't know about, and I would love for you to tell us the history before we get into these vice presidents, is they were not throughout the majority of history picked by the candidate, and they were often assigned, right?

[485] And often it was from the opposing party, right?

[486] So how did the role of the vice president start?

[487] And how is it evolved?

[488] So the framers of the Constitution, they didn't want a vice president.

[489] They ended up as a last minute addition to the Constitution having a vice president mainly as an electoral mechanism.

[490] that the person who got the second number of votes would end up as vice president, which is what happened to John Adams and happened to Thomas Jefferson.

[491] And what was happening is frequently ties were taking place.

[492] So they then ratified the 12th Amendment, which had the electors cast ballots separately for the vice president and the president.

[493] But you're right, throughout history, the presidential candidate not only didn't choose their own VP, but it was seen as incredibly taboo to try to influence that decision.

[494] Well, even campaigning was seen as disgusting for quite a while, right?

[495] That was a paradigm shift.

[496] It was seen as uncouth to even try to campaign and gain support.

[497] That's right.

[498] It's really an early 20th century phenomenon for the presidential nominee to canvas and campaign for election.

[499] It was even the sort of back porch campaigning of standing out there and people coming to you was seen as highly out there and, you know, unbefitting of a president.

[500] The other thing that's interesting, back, you know, for most of the history of our republic, the president was completely consumed with office seekers.

[501] So anybody could walk in and out of the executive mansion, which was later called the White House.

[502] So, you know, these presidents would just sit and deal with people seeking offices all day, every single day.

[503] Right.

[504] And it would overwhelm them.

[505] And it became all -consuming.

[506] And it took three presidents being assassinated for, you know, the federal government to decide maybe presidential protection.

[507] is a good idea.

[508] William McKinley, who's assassinated in 1901, as recently as his assassination, presidential protection was basically seen as a way to dish out spoils to your friends.

[509] So like his buddies from Ohio are the ones protecting him.

[510] Sure, a bunch of guys out of shape and half in the bag, smoking cigarettes.

[511] Yeah.

[512] Well, okay, so step one in the vice president world was whoever was runner up basically became vice president.

[513] And then what was the next phase?

[514] So then the next phase is at the party convention, they would nominate presidential candidate, and then the party would basically decide who the VP nominee would be, typically without any consultation with the person they'd nominate to be president.

[515] So it was typically a marriage of political convenience to win a state, appease a constituency, but, you know, this is the pre -primary.

[516] Presidential primaries don't happen until, you know, the sort of middle part of the 20th century.

[517] So back then, the VP selection was typically a way to get the party to rally around the nominee who is more often than not polarizing to one flank of the party or another.

[518] And a lot of times, remember, you have a real sectional balance in the country between North and South because of the issue of slavery.

[519] So, you know, a lot of times the vice president was used to balance the ticket and bring certain elements of the party from one section or another along to the campaign.

[520] Yeah, they'd throw the Southerners a bone by picking someone from the South, right?

[521] Well, that's the case of Lincoln, right?

[522] Andrew Johnson was antithetical in all ways to Lincoln, wasn't he?

[523] So what's interesting about Andrew Johnson is historically we look back and we see him as the disaster that he was.

[524] In the election of 1864, one, Lincoln thought he was almost certainly going to lose the election.

[525] This is for the second term?

[526] For the second term.

[527] Okay.

[528] And they thought the only way to win the election was to pick a war Democrat from a border state and Andrew Johnson was basically the only one.

[529] But Andrew Johnson in 1864, his rhetoric on punishment for traders and his rhetoric on civil rights were more progressive than even Abraham Lincoln because he loved the union more than anything.

[530] And so long as the union was broken, he would do everything he could to put it back together.

[531] So Lincoln violates the rule and engages in a secret intrigue and conspiracy to get Andrew Johnson put on the ticket.

[532] And he then has the most disastrous debut of any vice president in history.

[533] Yeah, and I'm trying to think what book I read that kind of got into, oh, I guess it was probably Grant.

[534] A Chernow, have you read that book?

[535] That's great, yeah, because it dealt so much with Reconstruction.

[536] And at least Ron Charnot was not a big fan of Andrew Johnson.

[537] I left reading that book thinking, well, that's got to be the worst guy we've ever had.

[538] Could you crown someone as the very worst?

[539] So Andrew Johnson, to me, is by far the worst president in the history of the Republic, just because he became president at a time where he was presiding over a moment where mistakes would have 100 plus year consequences, right?

[540] So think about this.

[541] You know, Lincoln and Johnson are inaugurated on March 4, 1865.

[542] Andrew Johnson goes to take the oath of office, is completely hammered.

[543] And it's supposed to last literally 30 seconds and put his hand on the Bible.

[544] He ends up going on for 17 minutes insulting every single member of the cabinet and the chamber.

[545] He I can't remember the Secretary of Navy's name, so pauses to find out his name, and then he proceeds to slobber all over the Bible, and then he's too drunk to swear the new senators in, so he asks a poor clerk to do it for him.

[546] So then— Five weeks later, Lincoln's dead.

[547] And not only do you get the drunkard Andrew Johnson as president of the United States, but instead of Abraham Lincoln presiding over Reconstruction, you get the last president to own slaves, a man who was born a racist, and died a racist.

[548] who once the Civil War was over, went back to who he really was and let the states handle civil rights, gave amnesty to everybody, and we get, you know, a delay of civil rights by 100 plus years.

[549] Well, this is all stuff I had not learned in school, and I didn't realize it until reading Grant, which was the headline of the Civil War being, of course, emancipation proclamation and freeing the slaves.

[550] But really, the real gnarly stuff's all that reconstruction, right?

[551] That's where, like, you have all these new rights.

[552] If we folded the South back in, we're telling them that now you've got to let black folks vote.

[553] When black folks go to vote, you have squads of snipers killing them.

[554] And then you have people calling for the federal government to send troops down to protect them so they can vote.

[555] But you have Andrew Johnson in there and he's not doing it.

[556] Is that kind of how it went?

[557] Yeah, that's right.

[558] I think I spent the most amount of time.

[559] researching Andrew Johnson for this book.

[560] And I found it torturous.

[561] He's such a dark human being and such a disturbing human being.

[562] And you realize, you know, how a haphazard choice to put somebody on the ticket to win an election gave us the black codes, which were the precursor to the Jim Crow laws, which gave us 100 years of segregation.

[563] We're still dealing with the aftermaths of putting Andrew Johnson on the ticket in 1864.

[564] And since you love James Garfield, and we all love James Garfield, the fact that Garfield ends up as the nominee and president in 1880 without seeking it out was the best opportunity we had to reverse what Andrew Johnson had put in place.

[565] Did he immediately follow Andrew Johnson?

[566] So you had Andrew Johnson and then two terms of Ulysses Grant.

[567] Oh, right, right, right.

[568] And then the election of 1876 gave us Rutherford Hayes and the end of reconstruction, and then that's when the Jim Crow laws begin, because reconstruction ends.

[569] But Garfield, because he wasn't attached to any political party, you know, in terms of owing them a debt of loyalty, he was a Republican, but he got the nomination without seeking it.

[570] This was a man who as a teenager hid runaway slaves who espoused two principles that would define his presidency.

[571] He wanted universal suffrage, and he wanted universal education.

[572] And then the second is he wanted an end to the spoil system.

[573] What's the spoil system?

[574] The principle of you win the election and all your friends and supporters end up in positions of high power.

[575] Yeah.

[576] So if anybody could have reversed Jim Crow, it would have been James Garfield, but mentally ill office seeker put two bullets in his back four months after he became president.

[577] That's all he was president for is four months.

[578] Oh, my goodness.

[579] Well, also, I think it's relevant to point out we lose sense of just how frequently world leaders were just being assassinated.

[580] It was like every six years, some very prominent world leader was going down.

[581] It used to happen all the time.

[582] What's amazing is the two longest periods of American history without a president dying in office were George Washington to William Henry Harrison in 1841 and then JFK to the present.

[583] So in between, the president used to die in office like every 10 to 20 years.

[584] And that's before you even get into all the assassination attempt.

[585] So imagine this.

[586] We're in the longest period of time without a president dying in office.

[587] We have the oldest incumbent in the history of the Republic.

[588] And the two leading contenders on the Democratic side are both in their late 70s.

[589] Yeah.

[590] So, you know, we don't wish to ever go through this again, but we take for granted how frequently this used to happen.

[591] And the shock to the country's system from losing the man who was elected and ending up with somebody who in all eight of the cases, took the country in a completely different direction is mortifying to some and exhilarating to others.

[592] Yeah.

[593] Right.

[594] Yeah.

[595] So because of that, do you assume that this upcoming election cycle, that people will recognize that, that these are quite old candidates by history standards and that the backup plan should be one that's pretty well thought out and vetted?

[596] Do you think that'll be a topic that has more relevance than it has in the past?

[597] Or you think people just blow by that and go like, oh, they'll live forever?

[598] I think people will pay at lip service, but the way that things are done now where the candidate gets to choose their own running mate lends itself towards it's a particular moment in the election cycle.

[599] I'm up against the ropes and I need to bounce the polls 10 points and this is the best way to do it.

[600] And then they manufacture some answer that this person is fit to lead and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

[601] But it's a grossly irresponsible way to choose somebody who could one day become commander in chief.

[602] And it also lends itself towards another interesting phenomenon, which is if you're the candidate, you want to make sure you don't pick somebody who's more exciting and interesting than you.

[603] And you want to make sure that you don't pick somebody who's such a disaster that they embarrass you.

[604] So you basically end up netting out at picking the junior varsity version of yourself.

[605] And my problem with this is I don't want the junior varsity person as the commander in chief.

[606] I want the captain of the varsity team.

[607] Yeah.

[608] And presidential candidates are not incentivized to do that.

[609] Why wouldn't they want someone that could outshine them?

[610] I mean, ultimately, how would that cost them anything?

[611] In this election, it might be different because it's unprecedented to have candidates this age running on both sides.

[612] And so you could imagine this time around that there's going to be a real desire to pick the sort of future leader of the party on both sides.

[613] Now, there would be two ways, well, there's probably nine ways to look at it, but the two most obvious explanations for this seem to be one, people are living longer.

[614] So naturally as people live longer and longer and longer, we'll probably see people older and older that are able to have that position.

[615] So that's one explanation.

[616] Another one would seem to also be that, wow, on both sides seem to be saying they want something from a bygone error.

[617] Or they are romantic about some way of life that these two individuals live through and know how to return us to.

[618] Is that fair to guess?

[619] That's one way to look at it.

[620] I think that what you're really saying is both sides are espousing this view of kind of some sort of return to normalcy.

[621] The problem is if you look at, there's an irony a hundred years ago, Warren Harding, who also died in office, ran on a platform of a return to normalcy.

[622] You'd had World War I, you know, two terms of Wilson.

[623] Wilson spent his last year completely incapacitated with a stroke.

[624] People just wanted the economy to go back to normal.

[625] They wanted no foreign entanglements.

[626] And so, Harding's whole campaign was put America first, returned to normalcy.

[627] And then before his term ended up, he died in office.

[628] How did he die?

[629] He died of a brain hemorrhage.

[630] And he left behind an avalanche of scandal that landed on the lap of Calvin Coolidge two months after he took the oath of office.

[631] But the economy was doing so well.

[632] It was the roaring 20s that nobody cared.

[633] Nobody cared about kickbacks and oil scandals and, you know, kickbacks at the Veterans Bureau.

[634] They didn't care that the Attorney General was complicit in all sorts of stock manipulation and bootlegging and, you know, fight fixing.

[635] And you name it.

[636] They just cared that this was the Arab Eskimo Pies, consumer products.

[637] Everybody was doing well.

[638] And it all came crashing down with Herbert Hoover in 1929.

[639] So that brings up a great topic, which is, as I've read these biographies, I really, realize how ignorant I was to how this country really has worked for most of its history.

[640] You realize that whatever you think you're returning to, just know what you're asking to because in general, tons of corruption, tons of kickbacks.

[641] I mean, just I think it's tempting for people to think that they are observing the worst ever in our political history and just as in our history in general.

[642] And there is a tiny bit of arrogance to it that you would think you're witnessing the very worst thing.

[643] But just it's important to know, right, what we've come from and the little baby steps that have been bettering the process the whole time.

[644] And those really have been happening.

[645] If you take a, you know, 30 ,000 feet view of the whole history, how relevant is it that people understand our history so that they know where we're going?

[646] I mean, I think this is one of my biggest concerns is that we've lost an understanding of the importance of history.

[647] Don't be wrong.

[648] I love computer.

[649] computer science.

[650] I love technology.

[651] I think social media has its values, but it's increased the pace of things and trivialized the substance of things so much that we've forgotten to ask the question, have we seen this before?

[652] Or what does this look like before?

[653] Is it a quantity and bandwidth issue?

[654] Is that part of the problem?

[655] It's just so much info nonstop.

[656] I think it's a couple of things.

[657] I think some of it is sheer volume of content and bandwidth.

[658] I think some of it is we've disparaged the humanities, you know, in favor of the sciences.

[659] And I love the sciences, too, but not at the expense of the humanities.

[660] And what's interesting is when I started to write accidental presidents, you know, Donald Trump wasn't even on the scene.

[661] You know, people were pretty sure they knew what the outcome of the 2016 presidential election was going to be.

[662] And what ended up being most fascinating for me in the five and a half years that I wrote this book is it was a refresher in just how polarized, just how divided, just how corrupt, just how complicated the American Republic has been throughout history.

[663] And I find myself looking at everything that people are hysterical about today.

[664] And it has its roots in things that we've seen before, whether it's polarization, whether it's partisan politics, whether it's sort of foreign entanglements.

[665] Yeah.

[666] And the thing is, I never point this out to suggest you shouldn't care about what's going on today or you shouldn't be fighting for what needs to improve today.

[667] but just that this is the worst it's ever been in such a defeatist point of view, and it really doesn't bear much truth.

[668] But how do you think today ranks in that division?

[669] So I agree with you completely.

[670] This is far from the most divided and polarized this country has been.

[671] It's interesting, the two most partisan chapters of American history were the slavery era and the post -slavery era.

[672] The difference now is that the politics and the polarization is partisan by party lines, whereas the divided aspects of our country were north and south.

[673] They were more sectional.

[674] They reflected more fissures along sociological aspects of our society.

[675] So, you know, if you look at the partisan politics of today, it doesn't have a lot of depth to it.

[676] Right.

[677] It's about party loyalty in one direction or another.

[678] Yes, we've seen both sides wavering completely on what they were.

[679] even in the 80s when I grew up.

[680] Right.

[681] So you've got the Republicans spending untold amounts of money and growing government, which they were always against.

[682] You have, you know, the left embracing these war options they wouldn't have in the past.

[683] It doesn't seem like there's a bedrock of what the position of the parties is anymore.

[684] Yeah, the parties have flip -flopped a tremendous amount throughout history.

[685] Just look at the Democrats during the era of segregation in the South.

[686] Yes, this is one I wanted you to walk us through and explain because I just over Christmas with my brother.

[687] So my brother and I are not politically aligned, which is pretty common in families, I think.

[688] But he was like, well, the Republicans freed the slaves.

[689] And I said, well, yes, the word Republican could be used to say that.

[690] But I think we should be looking at the content, which was Abraham Lincoln was insanely progressive, right?

[691] We could all agree he was probably, was he the most progressive president we've ever had.

[692] I mean, what's interesting at Lincoln, Lincoln was at the time really more of kind of a centrist.

[693] It was the radical Republicans who he was concerned about wanting to accelerate things too quickly.

[694] So there's a whole flank of the Republican Party that was mostly based out of New England that wanted Lincoln to go even further.

[695] And so he was wrestling with a sort of far -right version of his party.

[696] And he at the time was much more of a centrist.

[697] We just think back on his tenure and what he did and we view him as progressive.

[698] I would say Teddy Roosevelt, more than any other president, ushered in a level of progressivism that we'd never seen before, but it's only because he was elevated to the presidency upon McKinley's assassination.

[699] And he has the greatest line of any president ascending upon the death of their predecessor, where he says, it's a terrible thing to come into the presidency this way, but it would be far worse to be morbid about it.

[700] That's Teddy Roosevelt said that.

[701] Yes.

[702] He was also a warmonger.

[703] I mean, that's the other thing.

[704] Theodore Roosevelt, in the context of today, would make the most hawkish presidents look like doves.

[705] I mean, this is a man who he just loved war.

[706] He spent his entire childhood upset that his father got himself recused from participating in the civil war and atoning for that and looking for a war.

[707] And the poor guy had no wars going on.

[708] Well, he also grew up very sickly, right, with asthma.

[709] And then he went to some dude ranch and found himself and became strong.

[710] and virile, and I think he was compensating for having been a weakling as a kid.

[711] He was told he wasn't going to survive, and he was told by his doctor and his father that he needed to make himself fit if he wanted to survive.

[712] So he was also extremely depressive.

[713] Well, a lot of these guys, right?

[714] Yeah, he was deeply, deeply disturbed.

[715] I think a lot of his hyperactivity and ambition came from this desire to outpace his own depression.

[716] So he raced through life and he rushed through life faster than anybody.

[717] He was a totally intoxicating character.

[718] He has this great moment.

[719] The biggest mistake of his life is when he wins election.

[720] He's the first accidental president to win election in his own right in 1904.

[721] So of all the people that assume the office as a vice president became president, none of them won re -election except for, is that everything?

[722] So the first four, the first four did not.

[723] And then the second four did.

[724] Okay.

[725] He kind of set a pattern.

[726] And so he immediately announces he's not going to see.

[727] re -election in 1908 comes to regret it tremendously comes back to try to run for president as a bull moose third party in 1912 and while giving a speech he gets shot and the bullet penetrates a 40 -page speech hits his glasses case he unbuttoned his shirt tells the crowd that he's an expert taxidermist and he's examined the wound and he can survive long enough to finish the speech and get to the hospital this shit does not feel real right not at all and did he win that one no He did not win.

[728] Oh, okay.

[729] But what were the progressive things he implemented at the time that would make him the most progressive president?

[730] So for Theodore Rosa, the trust busting was highly, highly radical at the time.

[731] The other thing is he was just big on government accountability.

[732] So when he was police commissioner in New York, he used to go around in the middle of the night with a pad and paper, you know, sort of almost shadowing police officers writing down their misbehavior and their misdeeds.

[733] He drove everybody nuts.

[734] Because he was a very thorough integrity, or that was the word I would use, he was dedicated to ending corruption and all those things.

[735] And he did, he was a virtuous man on some levels, right?

[736] He was virtuous.

[737] He was self -righteous.

[738] And he, again, he was more progressive than anyone else of his day at that time.

[739] Okay.

[740] So now back to this flip between the Republican Party and the Democrat Party.

[741] So yes, Lincoln was a Republican.

[742] We would agree probably Lincoln wouldn't be a Republican today, would he?

[743] or why even guess that?

[744] I think it's hard to say in this context.

[745] But the parties did flip, though, right?

[746] The name switched.

[747] Yeah, how did that?

[748] How did that?

[749] What were the steps to that?

[750] Yeah, I mean, the names were always switching.

[751] The Republican Party emerges because the Whig party essentially collapses.

[752] And the poor Whigs, they twice elected a hero war general, William Henry Harrison in 1840 and Zachary Taylor in 1848, and they both dropped dead.

[753] Harrison after 30 days in office, Zachary Taylor, after a...

[754] after a year in office.

[755] And so the party just fell apart and it gets replaced by the Republican Party.

[756] But when Lincoln runs for re -election in 1864, they rebrand the party as the national union party because it's a split ticket between Andrew Johnson as a war Democrat and Lincoln as a Republican.

[757] Do you think currently our candidates are at the most extreme in their party as it's ever been?

[758] as far as we have some very left candidates on the Democrat side and obviously a very extreme right candidate as well.

[759] I feel like this is the first election where we don't have very many moderate options.

[760] Yeah, I think that's a great insight, Monica.

[761] I think the uniqueness of the current moment, right, partisanship's been around forever, polarization's been around forever.

[762] What's happening now is it's taking place at a moment where we're seeing the complete evaporation of the center.

[763] This country used to be governed by the center, and it had to contain different flanks of both parties or, you know, sort of sectional partisans.

[764] And now what we're seeing is polarization and partisanship on the far flanks of both parties and a shrinking middle.

[765] And we've never been there before.

[766] Okay, great.

[767] So that leads to a question that you'd be uniquely skilled to answer, which is, this is my theory on social media.

[768] I'm not unique in this theory.

[769] But the fact that the more outrageous a statement you make on Twitter, the higher likelihood it becomes a headline in a click bait economy or a click economy, the most provocative thing is going to get the most amount of clicks.

[770] So is that what has led to this like extremism on both sides of the spectrum, do you think?

[771] Or is it part of it?

[772] I think it's a couple things.

[773] One, I think that technology has removed the intermediaries that used to be.

[774] the disseminators of information and now any individual can own, develop and disseminate their own content, right?

[775] So everybody's a publisher.

[776] Right.

[777] That's one thing at play.

[778] Two, I think that the accelerated pace of movement making that's come with technology has slowed down leadership development.

[779] So I think that we have an endowment of good leaders that's drying up and our society doesn't seem to be producing a lot of good, strong new leaders anymore.

[780] There's exceptions, but we're not building the pipeline of leaders in the U .S. and the democratic world that we used to, in part because, you know, people become flash in a pan, you know, public figures before they become seasoned leaders.

[781] If you look at the Nelson Mandela's, the de Gauls of the world, you know, it took them decades to become real leaders before they became public figures.

[782] And by then they'd really sort of refine their skills.

[783] So the erosion of leadership is the second thing.

[784] And then the third is I can't help but to look at social media sometimes and view it as a vortex of voyeurism in the sense that, you know, clickbait, you know, sensational comments only work if there's a lot of voyers and searching for it and gravitating towards it.

[785] And it's true.

[786] In a world of clicks and likes and so forth, you know, we are measuring ourselves based on how many followers we have, how much affirmation we have.

[787] it's clear that sort of sane, substantive, wonky insights don't get you there.

[788] So my theory is like, okay, so I would imagine 80 % of the country doesn't agree with the far left or the right.

[789] But you will never read a headline that says, I propose a great compromise between these two valid points.

[790] Like, that's just never going to be a headline on CNN or anything.

[791] So we're simply not even reading those ideas that seem like compromising or well thought out.

[792] So I don't know, like, what's the chicken and what?

[793] what's the egg?

[794] Where do you, especially someone that runs jigsaw?

[795] Like, what is the mechanism by which we could reamplify what I imagine is the majority of the country?

[796] Yeah, I mean, look, imagine if social media had existed during some of these seminal moments in history that I write about in the book, you wouldn't have had a compromise of 1850 that delayed the Civil War by 10 years.

[797] You wouldn't have had the backdoor dealings that happened in Congress that resolve some of the most important disputes in history.

[798] So in some respects, everything playing out on such a superficial level so much in public makes dealmaking much more difficult.

[799] And if dealmaking is more difficult, then the most contentious issues don't get resolved in private and instead they play out in public.

[800] And if they're playing out in public and you have an evaporating center, then it's impossible or difficult to imagine extremes on both sides.

[801] But do we have, I guess my question is, do we have an evaporating center?

[802] Is there statistics to support that?

[803] Or do we just have a silenced majority that's central?

[804] There's an evaporating center in the representation, but not necessarily in the people.

[805] I think the problem is we don't really know.

[806] Right.

[807] I can't imagine.

[808] I guess here's what happens.

[809] I go on Twitter and I read stuff and I'm like, oh my God, the far left is so fucking nuts.

[810] The far right is so fucking nuts.

[811] And then I talk to any human being in real life.

[812] And I find that almost nobody I know is on either sides of those tales.

[813] And yet I, you don't.

[814] You don't.

[815] get a sense that that's the case on Facebook or Twitter.

[816] But in real life, it seems very obvious to me that most of us are far more centrist than it seems to be represented on.

[817] Stay tuned for more armchair experts, if you dare.

[818] Yeah, and I think the problem is, you know, if you're connected to the internet, you're splitting your time between physical and digital worlds, right?

[819] And you kind of have multiple personalities, right?

[820] You've got your personality on Twitter and, you know, other social media outlets and so forth.

[821] And then you've got your persona from when you interact with people in real life.

[822] And they're not always the same.

[823] And oftentimes they're not.

[824] So the reason it's hard to evaluate what's happening to the center of this country is you have a perception that comes from what we see playing out in public where there's a lot of volume.

[825] Yeah.

[826] And then you have a reality that is the people you physically interact with.

[827] And that sample size just isn't large enough.

[828] Right.

[829] But I think you're making an important point here, which is the voices of reason are sort of the equivalent of the voices of stability.

[830] And it's much easier to be a loud destabilizing voice than it is to be a voice of reason and stability.

[831] So what happens is all of the commentary that is reasonable and practical, you know, ends up getting drowned out by loudest voices.

[832] If you were to walk into a parking lot and there were 100 people and you were a sort of, you know, a practical voice among, you know, 90 plus voices of extremism, you wouldn't get very far.

[833] That's right.

[834] And you just pointed out another thing.

[835] When you talk about the fact that deals used to happen with some level of anonymity or privacy, I also, I do empathize with the people in Congress and in the Senate in that any move they make will be public in two seconds.

[836] That's a huge difference, right?

[837] I think about this, the impeachment trial.

[838] And I think to myself, what are the merits of having it?

[839] be a public vote?

[840] Why is it that it's not a private vote?

[841] I wonder what the vote would be if people got to cast their ballots in private in the Senate.

[842] And I'm sure there's a great argument for why we should know how they're voting because we elected them and if they're not voting the way we want.

[843] So I'm sure I see the argument.

[844] But at the same time, I feel like a lot of these issues now has become so politicized and partisan that like, I don't even think you could get someone to vote with their heart because they would be immediately blasted and killed because we'd all know about it in 35 seconds.

[845] Yeah, I mean, what's interesting about impeachment, in some respects, I think the founders and the framers of the Constitution, they didn't quite get this right.

[846] They picked partisan bodies to play the role of judge and jury.

[847] And as long as the founders were alive, they never impeached a president.

[848] They never even attempted to impeach a president.

[849] And the last of the founders to die was James Madison in 1836.

[850] And then John Tyler in 1843 becomes the first president to have articles of impeachment brought against him.

[851] On what grounds?

[852] So he, it was completely politically motivated because Henry Clay and the Whig Party were upset that John Tyler wasn't pushing their agenda.

[853] And their view was he only became president because Harrison died after 30 days.

[854] And so he was particularly weak.

[855] So they tried to, they tried to impeach him.

[856] It didn't work.

[857] they ended up formally excommunicating him.

[858] So he's the only president to get kicked out of his own party.

[859] And then Andrew Johnson, who we all loathe, you know, it's interesting that everybody, when we talk about the stain of Andrew Johnson on our history, points to the fact that he was impeached.

[860] There's many reasons to criticize Andrew Johnson.

[861] It almost trivializes those many reasons to criticize him by pointing to impeachment because he was impeached by radical Republicans who had thought he was one of them, quickly realized he wasn't.

[862] and impeached him for a law that was later deemed unconstitutional, which was a law called the Tenure of Office Act that said that the president couldn't fire appointees that were approved by the Senate without approval from the Senate.

[863] Ah.

[864] So that's what they got him on.

[865] So he was the first president to be impeached.

[866] And then, you know, he's an accidental president.

[867] So there's no vice president, right?

[868] Until 1967 with the 25th Amendment, there's no constitutional provision for filling that vacancy.

[869] So at the time in the late 1860s, the next in line would have been the president pro tem.

[870] Now, the president pro tem was, you know, in the Senate.

[871] So the Senate is trying a president.

[872] Where in their, they could stand the game.

[873] Where one of their own would end up as president.

[874] And Johnson escapes conviction by a single vote.

[875] Oh, oh, oh, oh.

[876] So has anybody been convicted?

[877] So you need a simple majority of the House to impeach, which all that means is the House decides and votes to put the president on trial in the Senate.

[878] You then need two -thirds of the Senate to vote to convict the president, which would remove the president from office.

[879] And two -thirds vote is almost impossible to get, right?

[880] Although they came very close with Andrew Johnson.

[881] But it's never been gotten.

[882] It's never been gotten.

[883] And so almost every instance where there's been articles of impeachment brought against the president of the United States have been politically motivated.

[884] Everyone.

[885] All the way up to Nixon.

[886] Oh, because I was going to say, for me in my mind, at least I wasn't coherent during Nixon, but the way it was presented my whole childhood was that seemed to be one everyone agreed on.

[887] Is that accurate?

[888] Yeah, I think Nixon, in the case of Nixon, he resigns because there's bipartisan agreement that he's committed high crimes and misdemeanors.

[889] So Nixon, you know, the Republicans basically go to Nixon and they say, we have the two -thirds votes in the Senate, resign or you're going to be convicted.

[890] And be the only one in his case.

[891] So he resigned.

[892] And in some respects, that's kind of how it should work, right?

[893] Where you spare the country a long trial.

[894] You have sort of, you know, bipartisan, you know, consensus.

[895] You wonder if it would have played out the same way with Nixon had social media been around them.

[896] Yeah.

[897] I don't know.

[898] I mean, but it's, I mean, you can ask that about a lot of moments in history.

[899] Yeah.

[900] But there's only been three, four, four at this point, right?

[901] Well, so you have Andrew Johnson impeached.

[902] You have Bill Clinton impeached and then you have President Trump impeached.

[903] Right.

[904] But you've had another 10 or so that have, you know, had attempts at impeachment, meaning, you know, somebody, a member of, all it takes is one member of the House to bring articles of impeachment against the president.

[905] Just in a lot of cases, nobody voted for them.

[906] Right.

[907] And you say they were always politically motivated.

[908] Always.

[909] Yeah.

[910] That makes sense.

[911] Okay.

[912] Now, this one's just a juicy one in one that I've always kind of had an issue with.

[913] And this will be unpopular, but I will say it.

[914] And it probably stems from me coming of age and being a Democrat when Clinton was impeached.

[915] It's probably somehow motivated by that if I'm being dead honest with myself.

[916] But I have always thought, I don't give a fuck if someone is unfaithful.

[917] What does that have to do with the job I elected them to do?

[918] I don't care.

[919] By the way, I'm not a Trump supporter.

[920] The least interesting thing, other than when it's been predatory and potentially illegal, if he's just having an affair, I'm not really that interested in that.

[921] I don't think fidelity is one of the virtues that I need in a president.

[922] This, you know, regular support for this is always that, well, they put themselves in a position to be blackmail.

[923] This is how they got rid of Petraeus for his affair, right?

[924] Is that, well, if you have an affair, you're potentially to hide that, you could be vulnerable to some kind of outside state.

[925] Now, I've always thought that's kind of horseshit.

[926] I don't know that I buy that.

[927] But how many of the presidents were unfaithful that we know of?

[928] A lot of them.

[929] I mean, I, this is sort of, this is something that I wrestled with my editors on because I really, my mom calls accidental presidents very smutty.

[930] Oh, yeah, yeah.

[931] I get into a little bit of sex in the book.

[932] Yeah.

[933] So Washington fathered 29 illegitimate children.

[934] Oh, my goodness.

[935] Don't go too fast.

[936] Let's just think about that.

[937] Wow.

[938] So George Washington fathered 29 illegitently.

[939] Allegedly.

[940] Wow.

[941] Holy shit.

[942] I did not know that.

[943] First president.

[944] Can I shock you even more?

[945] Yes, please.

[946] Warren Harding impregnated a woman in a five -by -five hat closet in the White House while he was president.

[947] Oh, my goodness.

[948] Okay.

[949] Shall I keep going?

[950] Oh, my God.

[951] Never stop.

[952] This Monica's a nice favorite topic.

[953] Grover Cleveland fathered an illegitimate child as well, so much so that the campaign against him was, Ma, Ma, where's my paw?

[954] He's gone to the White House.

[955] Ha, ha, ha.

[956] Oh, my God.

[957] So everyone knew about it.

[958] These were out in the open.

[959] These were out in the open and people didn't care.

[960] Right.

[961] There was a paradigm shift, right?

[962] I can't remember on what president, but the media used to not cover that.

[963] Yeah.

[964] That was kind of some weird rule that they had where they didn't really do that.

[965] When did that change?

[966] So I think Cleveland was kind of the watershed moment, but then it picked up again with Warren Harding because there were rumors about race, right?

[967] So when it involved race, it ended up complete BS rumor.

[968] rumor, but when there's rumors involving race, they ended up getting...

[969] Except for it with Thomas Jefferson.

[970] Yeah, Sally Hemings wasn't talked about until much, much later.

[971] There's amazingly controversial love stories, right?

[972] You know, John Tyler becomes a widower president and ends up marrying a woman half his age while he's presidents, the first presidential wedding.

[973] Marriage, oh.

[974] So what was his age and what was her?

[975] He was in his 50s, and she was just barely 20.

[976] Oh, wow.

[977] Fun fact about Tyler, fathered 15.

[978] children and two of his grandsons are still alive.

[979] No way.

[980] This is a man born during the administration of George Washington who has two grandsons who are Oh my God, that's amazing.

[981] He fathered the last child while he was in his 70s, and that child fathered two children when he was in his 70s, and those two children are now in their 90s.

[982] Wow.

[983] I hope they fathered some children.

[984] Yeah, exactly right now.

[985] Yeah, keep it up.

[986] And FDR.

[987] FDR's mistress was one of the people by his bedside while he was dying.

[988] There's actually a fair amount of evidence that FDR was relatively asexual for much of his life.

[989] So maybe the mistress was just a companion?

[990] Exactly.

[991] I mean, I think FDR was prone to emotional affairs.

[992] Right.

[993] Because Eleanor was just so damn busy.

[994] She had a lot going on for herself.

[995] If no one who had committed infidelity could be a leader, we would have lost out on a bunch of our leaders.

[996] Let's just start there, right?

[997] And I think that, and this is less about fidelity and just the continued desire to, move the bar closer and closer towards perfection.

[998] If our standard is absolute perfection, we're going to end up being led by the leftovers.

[999] Yeah.

[1000] And the leftovers are, you know, not really who I necessarily, you know, people, people who are so perfect and so calculating that they never take any, I mean, that's, that's a level of roboticism that I don't really want in charge of the country.

[1001] Yeah.

[1002] I also believe, this is what I always argued about Clinton.

[1003] It's like people were shocked that he would have the audacity to have these affairs and I thought well if your whole life you learned a rule and then you discovered the rule didn't apply to you then of course why would that rule be any different like you've you've made a a life of being a super young governor and then a super you know you've broken all these rules or proven these rules not to apply to you then I think it's not a stretch to imagine well then these other rules don't apply to me either.

[1004] And I kind of need someone in that position that doesn't think the rules apply to them on some level, which is dicey.

[1005] There's some sweet spot.

[1006] I think once you're president, though, and I'm sensing from Monica's body language that maybe she agrees with it.

[1007] Once you're in the White House, once you occupy the office, there is a standard that we should be holding you to because you are supposed to kind of almost have an out -of -body experience and become the president.

[1008] You're almost supposed to put your human, your humanness aside, and for the next eight years, be the president, right?

[1009] People have complicated lives.

[1010] Yeah.

[1011] But I believe that when you're an elected official, you're put there by the voters, you're put there by the taxpayers.

[1012] The taxpayers are betting on you and you're supposed to represent the integrity of the country.

[1013] What you do before and you do after is between you and the law and you and your...

[1014] Yes, I agree.

[1015] But let me paint an analogy.

[1016] So you're about to go get a liver transplant, and you're presented with two options.

[1017] This surgeon is a five on the skill level, but he has never cheated on his wife.

[1018] This guy is a 10, he's the best surgeon in the world, and he fuck someone hourly.

[1019] Who are you going to have due year surgery?

[1020] 100 % of us are going to have the guy who's a piece of shit morally, but it's the best surgeon in the world do our liver transplant.

[1021] But morality does transfer more.

[1022] in politics, in governing, and leadership, than surgery does.

[1023] That's a good point.

[1024] That's a great counterpoint.

[1025] Thank you.

[1026] So you do have to consider a little bit how they behave because it will potentially transfer into how they behave in being the president.

[1027] I don't, I don't, and Monica, maybe you agree with me on this.

[1028] Tax is a pervert.

[1029] No, no, no, no, no. If somebody's cutting me open and doing surgery on me, I don't want them to be thinking about who's sexting me right now.

[1030] Hold on, though.

[1031] We already have the data.

[1032] We know that they're a 10.

[1033] They've taken an aptitude test in this hypothetical, and they are the best surgeon.

[1034] And sure, when they open up your body, you're like, ooh, that kidney looks like titties.

[1035] I love titties, blah, blah, blah.

[1036] But they move past that and then they get to the business at hand.

[1037] They go into a zone.

[1038] They get into a state of flow.

[1039] Yeah.

[1040] Yeah, anyone would pick that person.

[1041] You're right, though.

[1042] Those are different.

[1043] It's not the same thing.

[1044] Yeah, I just wonder if we need to be a little less delicate about, to your point.

[1045] If we're asking for, for someone to have been, to have lived 45 to 56 years flawlessly.

[1046] That's the only person that is qualified.

[1047] I just think we're in a very dangerous situation.

[1048] I want the guy that will take the big swing.

[1049] I want, you think Sully isn't good in a nightclub?

[1050] Think again, Monica.

[1051] You can take it.

[1052] You think the best rock stars are been the ones that were.

[1053] This is super juicy, by that.

[1054] Yeah, it is.

[1055] But wait, so I, this conversation makes me a little nervous.

[1056] Okay, good.

[1057] Because that's why you know you're having a good conversation.

[1058] That is what Trump supporters think.

[1059] That's what they think.

[1060] They think it doesn't matter that he's saying grabbing women by the pussy or those things are irrelevant to what he can do that he's going to make America a great.

[1061] He's going to do the economy.

[1062] And I hate that.

[1063] I know you hate that.

[1064] And I don't like it either.

[1065] But I force myself at all times.

[1066] Anytime one of these stories comes out, I literally force myself to imagine the exact same story came out about Obama.

[1067] because I loved Obama.

[1068] But that's not the point.

[1069] So you just have to force yourself to imagine it's Obama they're saying about this.

[1070] And Obama's with some dude on a bus and he says, oh, I grabbed him by the pussy.

[1071] First of all, because I love Obama, I'm like, I bet he doesn't even mean that.

[1072] I think he's trying to be funny to that guy.

[1073] I think he wants that guy to like him.

[1074] I can go to all these excuses because I love Obama.

[1075] And just I think it's worthwhile for people on both sides to just imagine their favorite person.

[1076] This is what just so you can at least understand how the.

[1077] other people feel.

[1078] I think it's incumbent upon us to try to at least understand how they feel.

[1079] And quite often when I run transgressions through the Obama test, I'm like, yeah, I understand how you feel.

[1080] If it's one thing, if it's all the things, Obama would no longer have been my favorite person.

[1081] Okay.

[1082] Would he have been yours?

[1083] If all of the things were transferred on to him?

[1084] I don't know, man. I like them so much.

[1085] He was fucking vocally against gay marriage.

[1086] So it's like, he could not have been more on the wrong side of that in my opinion yet i still like the guy and i was like well he does enough other stuff i agree with that i'm just going to stand by him so i know what it's like to compromise your own morals because there's another aspect to the person you're willing to go along with i think we all do it i mean look at you you work with me and i've got some wretched sides of me that's true um i want i don't want to leave you i jerry but you're probably smart to stay out of this.

[1087] I plead it in the fifth.

[1088] Okay, good.

[1089] Can I ask you, I'm confused by this?

[1090] So the rule, as we now know it, is you can only serve two terms as president, but two consecutive terms, correct?

[1091] So the rule is you can serve two terms.

[1092] They do not have to be consecutive.

[1093] Oh.

[1094] And you can serve two years of someone else's presidency if you inherit the president.

[1095] So you could do 10 if you took over.

[1096] But this doesn't come until after FDR serves four terms.

[1097] they amend the Constitution to basically say you're capped at two terms plus two of an inherited term.

[1098] Right.

[1099] Before that, there were no rules on this.

[1100] So is he the longest serving president?

[1101] FDR was the longest serving president.

[1102] He was elected four times, but then he dies just four months into his fourth term.

[1103] Okay.

[1104] And the man who takes over for him, Harry Truman, is probably less prepared to become president than any other man in history.

[1105] Really?

[1106] During Truman's 82 days as vice president, he only meets FDR twice.

[1107] He never steps foot in the map room where the war is being planned.

[1108] He's not briefed on the atomic bomb.

[1109] He doesn't meet a single foreign leader or get a single intelligence briefing.

[1110] He's basically just out socializing.

[1111] And he's got to come in and decide whether or not to drop two atomic bombs.

[1112] So April 12, 1945, he gets a call that he needs to come over to the White House.

[1113] And he thinks he's in trouble and about to get berated by the president.

[1114] So several hours later, he gets to the White House.

[1115] Eleanor Roosevelt puts her hand on his shoulder and says, Harry, the president, is dead.

[1116] and he says, is there anything I can do?

[1117] And she says, no, is there anything I can do for you, for you're the one in trouble now?

[1118] Oh, wow.

[1119] So what does Truman spend his first five days doing, going into the map room and figuring out what the hell is going on with the war?

[1120] And in his first nine months, he ends the war, shapes the post -war order, has to figure out Stalin, has to deal with Churchill, has to contemplate moving a million men from the European theater to the Asian Pacific Theater.

[1121] And he has one of the most remarkable presidencies in history.

[1122] yeah wow did he rise to the occasion huh he more than any other were there any universal qualities of the folks that did rise to the occasion and universal qualities that got people to do a shitty job so i think there were two things i think there were the circumstances of the moment and the personality of the man and in the case of harry truman both those things converged you had an incredibly important moment that meant the fDR men who you know were of a different breed than then Truman felt like the future and the fate of the world rested on Harry Truman's success and they were determined to make him success.

[1123] To help him.

[1124] So you compare and contrast that with Lyndon Johnson, who inherited Kennedy's foreign policy team, who didn't think the future of the world rested on Lyndon Johnson, thought he was basically a bumpkin from, you know, Texas, mocked him behind his back, antagonized him behind his back.

[1125] And in many respects, did a lot of things to undermine him and thwart him.

[1126] So without inherited men to advise him on how to shape the Cold War policy, he completely fumbled Vietnam.

[1127] But Johnson's at fault, too, because he wasn't able to demonstrate the same level of courage on Vietnam that he did on civil rights.

[1128] So I'm getting a very one -sided view of Lyndon B. Johnson, the Carroll version.

[1129] And from what I'm learning, I'm on book number four.

[1130] I mean, just a piece of shit, and a lot of ways, stole every election, he quote, won.

[1131] enriched himself beyond measure through his political ties, just a full -on con man in ways that did rise to the level of president.

[1132] Do I have a jaded sense of him, or is that a pretty accurate summation?

[1133] I think that's right, but I also think that the reasons that made Lyndon Johnson so despicable are the things that made him an asset to shepherd through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and 1965.

[1134] I remember interviewing George H .W. Bush before he died for the book.

[1135] And, you know, his view on Lyndon Johnson is, you know, had Kennedy not been assassinated, you wouldn't have had such sweeping civil rights legislation in the 1960s because you needed a, you know, southerner with that Texan twang who had a track record with the segregationist who kind of looked the part of the people who were on the wrong side of history to shepherd it through.

[1136] Well, that's how I explain Howard Stern and his help with the gay rights movement.

[1137] It's like, you didn't need another far -lefty liberal like me saying allow gay marriage.

[1138] You needed a dude who actually spoke to the dudes that might not have been in favor of that.

[1139] Okay.

[1140] What does when the week mean?

[1141] Oh, so this is another sort of, there's two things that I've talked to Adam Grant about.

[1142] One is helping me find worry time.

[1143] Okay.

[1144] So I mentioned to both of you, I worry about everything.

[1145] So he told me to schedule worry time.

[1146] So I have three ways that I deal with worry time where I, where I'm I stew on things and I'm incredibly unpleasant to be around.

[1147] I sit in the bathtub.

[1148] I go to the gym and I read history.

[1149] But the other thing is I found that I was having a really hard time letting things roll off my shoulder, right?

[1150] You know, I'd be worried about something or stressed about something and I would just stew on it and harp on it.

[1151] And so I'd have some conversations with Adam about this.

[1152] And he encouraged me to find a mechanism that worked for me. So I decided that I would treat the year, like 52 best of seven.

[1153] series.

[1154] You know, 52 weeks in a year, you know, seven days in a week.

[1155] And I won the week if I went to bed happier than I woke up four out of the seven days.

[1156] The reason I like this mechanism is I'm a competitive person.

[1157] I like sports.

[1158] The analogy worked for me. But the other reason I liked it is it allowed me to have some bad days.

[1159] And so, like, if the day was just complete shit, be like, okay, I'm down zero one.

[1160] And I'm going to come back and I'm going to win the next.

[1161] But my wife and I argue about this because she has very strong opinions about how I should define winning the day.

[1162] And I say, all I care about is what happens when the buzzer goes off, which means when I clock out.

[1163] So if I'm basically having a bad day all the way up until like 1150 and I can pull something off to make me happier than when I woke up, I win the day.

[1164] 12 feet behind the arc, hell Mary shot at the basket.

[1165] Yeah.

[1166] What's your handbag of tools that can turn your day around?

[1167] Do you have a few?

[1168] So I have a handful, you know, and it depends on what's causing me anxiety, sometimes physical rigor.

[1169] So if I'm angry, you know, the gym really helps.

[1170] You know, if I'm sad about something, turning my phone off and just spending time with my three daughters is like the easiest way to cheer myself up.

[1171] Sometimes binge eating jelly beans.

[1172] Like, it just makes me feel like I can eat my feelings.

[1173] Sure.

[1174] But if I'm upset that I'm gaining weight, it's counterproductive.

[1175] Well, and also your narrative self will be happy with those first two decisions and not so pleased with a third.

[1176] But you have three daughters.

[1177] Three daughters.

[1178] How old are they?

[1179] Five and a half, three and a half, three and half and six months.

[1180] Oh my God.

[1181] You're in the thick of it, huh?

[1182] You want to hear something wild about the middle one?

[1183] When I was writing accidental presidents, I got stuck on the James Garfield to Chester Arthur chapter, and we couldn't think of a middle name.

[1184] And I was sitting at our dining room table with a stack of outdated books from the 1800s.

[1185] And I said my wife, you know what, let's just call her Garfield.

[1186] So her middle name is after James Garfield.

[1187] Oh, I love it.

[1188] that that's fantastic so just you collect locks of presidential hair i'm so where does one procure it how many locks do you have uh when did it start so it's a small ecosystem of historic hair collectors um so what a convention that would be i'm sure they're actually i will say the people that i've encountered who collect presidential hair are shockingly normal i think they're more normal i don't believe that for a weird sentence i know first thing i'm calling bullshit i know no no you can deal This is the fact -checking.

[1189] We'll have to interview some.

[1190] So I have a lock of George Washington.

[1191] No. Yep.

[1192] I have two strands of William Henry Harrison's hair taken off his head while his body lay in rest in the East Room.

[1193] Okay.

[1194] I have six strands of Abraham Lincoln's hair from the of his assassination.

[1195] Ronald Reagan.

[1196] I have Dwight Eisenhower.

[1197] I have John Adams.

[1198] Wow.

[1199] And I'm in active negotiations for Andrew Jackson.

[1200] Oh, my God.

[1201] Active negotiations.

[1202] So where are these broke?

[1203] I have to mention it's only like 9.

[1204] nine people in this chat room that are trading these things.

[1205] But are there a hundred, there's thou?

[1206] This takes people in their mom's basement to another level.

[1207] Well, what's the most you've spent on a lock of hair?

[1208] So here's where it also gets complicated.

[1209] I have a rule with my wife where I'm not allowed to spend money on hair.

[1210] Oh.

[1211] With my dealer, I overpay for presidential autographs and get the hair as a kickback.

[1212] Okay, so what's the most you've spent for an autograph, wink, wink.

[1213] I would say that the most I hope this is I want this to knock me out of my chair You can run off a bill of like five grand on hair Okay because it's not it's not great I was gonna say a lock of George Washington's hair A hundred thousand dollars Because what you're sitting on Is cloning in your basement Becomes an option Interesting about the cloning If it's not a hair follicle Then you're limited in what you can do with it You can only bring back a portion of it I don't know who you can bring back His nose back Tested it.

[1214] Do you have any follicles?

[1215] I do.

[1216] The William Henry Harrison are follicles and one of the strands of Lincoln is a follicle.

[1217] Oh my.

[1218] You could bring back Abraham Lincoln.

[1219] Oh, my God.

[1220] You could find out if this, what's the disease he had, Lincoln?

[1221] Oh, oh.

[1222] Morphs.

[1223] Morphins.

[1224] Yeah, Marphins.

[1225] Marphins.

[1226] Do you know that he had this?

[1227] No. So they say Lincoln had this genetic disease.

[1228] Marphins, which I've self -diagnosed that I have.

[1229] And basically the telltale signs are like really gangly and tall.

[1230] and gaunt and your phalanjies are particular things.

[1231] And what it tends to do is your aorta blows up.

[1232] So they say he would have died very young even had he not been shot.

[1233] So what you could do is in your basement, you could bring one to full term.

[1234] You could grow in Abraham Lincoln for until like 80 years and see if his aorta would blow up to find out if this is true.

[1235] Well, but do they have a cure for orphans?

[1236] Because then we could apply the cure to the new Abraham Lincoln.

[1237] Once we talked about it on the podcast, I got sent a lot of stuff.

[1238] And I read about it.

[1239] One person was like, you definitely have it.

[1240] And I freaked the fuck out and went and had to look it up.

[1241] But there are treatments, yeah.

[1242] And there's levels of how bad you can have it.

[1243] So in any rate, can we publicly put out a request for Obama's hair in Georgia?

[1244] Do you want living president's hair?

[1245] So this is, I get asked this question a lot about President Trump just because of the famous hair.

[1246] And my standard bumper sticker answer is I don't collect the hair of the living.

[1247] Oh, that's smart.

[1248] But that's complicated question.

[1249] I don't collect that.

[1250] Who would have to say that?

[1251] You're one of the only people in history of who had to pronounce, proclaim rather.

[1252] I do not collect the hair of the living.

[1253] Just before you guys get all judging on the hair situation, if you were to come over to my apartment, the hair.

[1254] When we come over to you.

[1255] I didn't want to be presumptuous.

[1256] The hair would be the weirdest thing that you encountered, but you would remember it more than anything else.

[1257] Well, for sure.

[1258] How is it displayed?

[1259] So also an interesting question, Monica.

[1260] And the provenance of hair is very important.

[1261] So when you take it to get framed, they're attached to ribbons.

[1262] And you can authenticate them because for most of the 19th century, people didn't ask for autographs.

[1263] They asked for locks of hair.

[1264] So people would write letters to the president saying, can I have a lock of your hair?

[1265] The president would cut a lock, attach it with wax to the paper.

[1266] So you test the age of the residue of the wax with the age of the residue with the paper with what's on the hair.

[1267] That's part of how you authenticate it.

[1268] But you can never let the hair leave your sight.

[1269] So when it's on the ribbon, you take it to the frame store.

[1270] You have to sort of hang out there obsessively and compulsively.

[1271] And I typically will video the transfer of the hair as further documentation that the hair didn't lose its proven.

[1272] There's so many red flags here.

[1273] This is amazing.

[1274] If I worked at like a walk -in frame bridge.

[1275] And first, someone wanted a piece of hairframe.

[1276] I'm already like, I don't know that I want to deal with this person.

[1277] Second is, I'm sorry, you would like to film me the entire time I do this?

[1278] I mean, God bless the people that have gone along with this.

[1279] Really cool.

[1280] I kind of want to start getting into it.

[1281] But I want secondary auxiliary hair.

[1282] I wish people wanted some of my hair.

[1283] I have plenty of it.

[1284] Oh, yeah.

[1285] Maybe I'll offer that to the arms chairs.

[1286] I have a hunched some of those presidents were just grabbing a little tough to fur off of their dog and sending.

[1287] Because who wants to be pulling strands of hair out all day?

[1288] Maybe that's why many of these presidents were balding.

[1289] Maybe.

[1290] I get this question about Eisenhower.

[1291] People are like, how do you have Eisenhower's hair?

[1292] He was bald.

[1293] Right.

[1294] Pubic hair?

[1295] No, no. Oh, don't puke.

[1296] That's a hair.

[1297] He had a little hair around his ears.

[1298] Oh, my God.

[1299] Wait, oh, so ear hair?

[1300] That's extra exclusive on a bald guy.

[1301] This is how stupid humans are.

[1302] Like, head hair is great.

[1303] Let's do it.

[1304] Ear hair?

[1305] Oh, my God.

[1306] I know.

[1307] Pupic hair over my dead body.

[1308] Pudic hair is all the same.

[1309] No, it's not.

[1310] Yes, it is.

[1311] Let's end on that.

[1312] Jared, thank you so much for coming.

[1313] It was such a pleasure.

[1314] And everybody read accidental presidents.

[1315] It's fantastic.

[1316] and it's endlessly fascinating, these eight bozos that ended up sitting in the Oval Office.

[1317] Some of them turned out not to be bozos.

[1318] Thank you guys so much.

[1319] And now my favorite part of the show, the fact check with my soulmate, Monica Padman.

[1320] So I was just telling a story.

[1321] I knew someone who was a writer on Entourage, and he wrote an episode of the show, and then there was a table read, and then one of the higher -ups who had been a part creating the show who was very New York called him into his office and he goes he goes fucking Mike what the fuck you said a scene in fucking Jerry's deli they fucking eat at Cantus and you almost pute well be honest no I did not almost puke but um a couple things A BP always be puking A couple things one I think that joke only works for people who live in Los Angeles.

[1322] Well, it certainly does, because there's two different delis.

[1323] Let's just start there.

[1324] Jerry's Famous Deli, that's in the name.

[1325] I didn't add the word famous.

[1326] It's called Jerry's Famous Deli.

[1327] There's like four or five locations.

[1328] Beautiful place to get a sandwich.

[1329] Beauty.

[1330] And then there's Cantors in downtown Hollywood, which is more historic.

[1331] Yeah.

[1332] Yeah.

[1333] But the stakes of which, the difference in the scene to this person, were it said in Jerry's versus Cantor, was as if you said that Jesus...

[1334] was born in Tokyo.

[1335] You know, it was like, it just couldn't work.

[1336] Yeah, which is really funny.

[1337] What was I going to say?

[1338] Well, there was a tragedy yesterday.

[1339] I mean, it's just so tragic.

[1340] It's horrible.

[1341] Kobe Bryant.

[1342] Yes.

[1343] So five days ago.

[1344] Certain public deaths have this, like, massive resonance with people.

[1345] I agree.

[1346] And I think there's more than one variable at place.

[1347] So one is just, yes.

[1348] So how well known are they globally?

[1349] Yeah.

[1350] But then there's also in my lifetime like John Candy died.

[1351] And that was so heartbreaking because as a kid, he was just the number one, you know?

[1352] Yet at the same time, you were like, yeah, he, you know, he had a heart attack.

[1353] And you kind of, you feel like that seemed within the realm of possibility.

[1354] And even Belushi, it's like, yeah, well, he partied really hard.

[1355] But someone who's like a physical specimen.

[1356] Truly, yes.

[1357] eats perfectly and trains and all these things, you're like, well, that person should make it to a hundred.

[1358] So it feels more untimely, I think.

[1359] Yeah, I know.

[1360] I agree.

[1361] And I thought the same.

[1362] But then there's this third component, and this is what I was, I guess, complaining about today.

[1363] I got a little pushback from you, appropriately so.

[1364] But I started getting all these texts from people going like, no more helicopter rides.

[1365] And when I say all these people, like five people told me I can't right in a helicopter.

[1366] I think probably because of my Brad Pitt experience recently, it was on Ellen, and I wrote in a helicopter with Brad Pitt.

[1367] But some, so some people yelled at me. And I thought, okay, well, first I was just defensive.

[1368] Like, well, I want to ride in a helicopter when I want to.

[1369] Because this tragedy happened doesn't mean I can't ride in a helicopter.

[1370] So I thought, I had that thought, okay?

[1371] And then secondly, I was like, you know, this is the thing is it hurts.

[1372] It shouldn't happen.

[1373] It's tragic.

[1374] And it feels preventable.

[1375] It feels preventable.

[1376] Yeah.

[1377] Right.

[1378] But had he died in a car accident, you'd have gone like, well, no, people have to drive.

[1379] Yeah, that's what I said.

[1380] Yeah, that's your point.

[1381] That is exactly my point.

[1382] But I would argue, here's the guy who flew to every single L .A. basketball game in a helicopter.

[1383] There's nothing to say that had he been in a car driving in that heavy traffic, all those times that he wouldn't have been killed 10 years ago if he didn't fly in helicopters.

[1384] It's just hard to know.

[1385] And we just really want, we don't ever want to be hurt like that again or experience a tragedy like that again.

[1386] just want to remove anything that could lead to that.

[1387] But I don't think it's grounded in a ton of actual threat level to people's lives.

[1388] I think this is like me with the cheer.

[1389] It's exactly that.

[1390] Sure.

[1391] Well, no, it's a risk I'm willing to take.

[1392] Yeah.

[1393] And some people will be like, that's not a risk you should be willing to take.

[1394] Yeah.

[1395] But you just, you know what'll happen.

[1396] If I die on motorcycle, people will be like, you know, they'll be mad at me. Yeah, I will be mad at me for dying on a motorcycle.

[1397] I will be mad at you.

[1398] You didn't have to ride a motorcycle.

[1399] And I understand that.

[1400] Yeah.

[1401] I do.

[1402] But I have to ride a motorcycle.

[1403] Like I want my experience.

[1404] You have to be honest about that.

[1405] You don't have to.

[1406] You want to.

[1407] No, of course not.

[1408] Not to exist.

[1409] But yes, the experience I want to have on planet Earth.

[1410] And it's my experience I get to have and I get to pick.

[1411] And you do too is I want it to involve motorcycles.

[1412] I understand.

[1413] And do you want yours to do.

[1414] involve high flying without a helmet.

[1415] But high flying without a helmet is my choice and I was a teenager.

[1416] So I had no one and I still have no one.

[1417] So also this all leads to I stand corrected on a few fact checks ago.

[1418] We had a debate about how important a parent is versus a single person in the world.

[1419] Oh, you're about to do a 180.

[1420] Well, yesterday when I was reading, about all this.

[1421] Oh, my God.

[1422] It's just compounded by the fact that he is, children, right?

[1423] The fact that there are other people who are hitched on to his life who do depend on him emotionally in all of these ways, I mean, which is why I think this death, also, another reason why it affected people so much is a lot of people were emotionally tied to him.

[1424] Sports figures have this, this unnatural.

[1425] Well, you've been on emotional journeys with Kobe Bryant, whether you're Since he was a teenager.

[1426] Yeah, right out of high school.

[1427] Whether you're a fan of L .A. and you had the elation of his victories and shared in his victories, or you were a fan of any other sports team that he destroyed, which he did.

[1428] So he's a part of heartbreak you've had.

[1429] Yeah.

[1430] And sports really do bring people together and it builds a community and he's sort of at the helm of that.

[1431] I mean, it is so deep in the emotional roots he has to so many people.

[1432] but the children, it just feels like, oh, it's just so sad to think that they don't have him.

[1433] And I was like, oh, my God, if it was a single person in a helicopter, of course, it'd be sad, but it wouldn't be the sad.

[1434] I mean, also look, this is also so compounded by the fact that there were kids on that helicopter.

[1435] I mean, that's the, it's just unimaginable.

[1436] Well, I was trying to imagine that, too.

[1437] What is it like to have your family member on that helicopter?

[1438] And then one of the people on the helicopter is, like, sucking up all the focus of this.

[1439] Oh, if you're one of the other.

[1440] Yes.

[1441] I know.

[1442] And I don't know.

[1443] I don't know whether that makes it worse or less bad.

[1444] I don't know if you're like I lost someone and then also the world.

[1445] I don't know.

[1446] But I just kept thinking like, well, there were a lot of other people in the helicopter.

[1447] And I don't know who they are and I don't know.

[1448] You know what I'm saying?

[1449] They're not a headline.

[1450] It's very.

[1451] Oh, but what I was going to say is high flying without a helmet.

[1452] Yeah.

[1453] I did that when I was a teenager and I didn't have any attachments.

[1454] Me, my parents, of course, but no one depending on me. And so, you know, you have to ride a motorcycle in life, you say.

[1455] Uh -huh, yeah.

[1456] And I, and that's fine.

[1457] I think everyone in your life knows that about you.

[1458] But you do have to factor in when you have people who need you, you know.

[1459] Oh, by the way, it's changed everything, which is I used to ride, I'm not naive.

[1460] I recognize it has an exponential lethal factor to it than, say, fucking yoga, if that's your thing.

[1461] Sure.

[1462] And in the past, I would say because I personally don't subscribe to measuring a life by its longevity.

[1463] I think there are lots of people that died young that had much bigger lives than a bunch of people that made it a really long time, whatever.

[1464] So I've always thought like, okay, well, if I die in a motorcycle accident, I will have died doing something I would.

[1465] was loving doing in that moment.

[1466] And I'm not here no more, but I had the perfect experience while I was here.

[1467] Like to me, it's not tragic because, A, I'm not around to mourn my own death.

[1468] But knowing there are now people that would be around to mourn my death obviously makes it much more complicated.

[1469] Yeah.

[1470] It's so sad.

[1471] It is really sad.

[1472] I hope this isn't offensive to anyone.

[1473] But I'm, I just as my hobby as I'm, I play devil's advocate.

[1474] in my head as my hobby.

[1475] And so I'm like, I'm aware of the gravity of it.

[1476] And then another part of my brain goes, it's a little shocking more people of that caliber don't die more often.

[1477] Like, it just, it felt like a long time.

[1478] Does that make any sense?

[1479] Hey, Google, how many deaths are there in the United States of America?

[1480] Annually.

[1481] On the website, Medical News Today .com, they say, according to the centers for disease control and prevention, there were 2 ,813 ,000.

[1482] 50 ,503 registered deaths in the United States in 2017.

[1483] That, I guess what I'm saying is a couple million people die.

[1484] This all ties into my new obsession, Whitney Houston.

[1485] Oh, you're obsessed with Whitney.

[1486] Yeah, as of recently, I'm obsessed with Whitney Houston.

[1487] As is a couple days ago.

[1488] Like six days ago.

[1489] Kristen went to bed early and I sat in my iPad in bed and watched the Showtime documentary, which I loved.

[1490] Mm -hmm.

[1491] I loved, I was heartbroken.

[1492] I wanted to take a time machine.

[1493] Don't worry, I'm still going back to fuck your grandma.

[1494] But second stop is to rescue her.

[1495] You can't rescue her.

[1496] I know, but in my mind, I could.

[1497] It's so heartbreaking.

[1498] She was so talented.

[1499] And I could see this enormous duality she was juggling.

[1500] And it's so heartbreaking.

[1501] I think so many people are juggling a duality.

[1502] And anyways, so Kobe is in the realm of, of like Whitney Houston.

[1503] So I'm just saying there's it shouldn't feel as shocking as it does when it happens because two million people a year died in the country.

[1504] So naturally it's going to be some of the famous people.

[1505] Does that make more sense?

[1506] Yeah.

[1507] It's because it's because these people, Kobe, definitely kind of being like the shiny example of this, they feel otherworldly.

[1508] Invincible.

[1509] In a like real godlike way.

[1510] Like they've been given something very, very.

[1511] special that just most humans on earth, 99 % of humans can't achieve even if they worked, even if they did everything that he did.

[1512] He's just special and just like Whitney's special in the exact same way.

[1513] And it feels like, oh my God, if those people can perish.

[1514] Yeah, of course.

[1515] It makes you feel a little bit.

[1516] I have no chance.

[1517] That's a good point.

[1518] That's a good point.

[1519] Could this be a three part fact check?

[1520] Because I now want to explore another thing that was happening to me last night.

[1521] So then we decided to watch the, oh boy, Miramax, Jess was so excited that it was made by Miramax.

[1522] The Miramax documentary from 2018 about Whitney, there's so much footage of the mom saying that God gave her that ability and God gave her that and God gave her that documentary.

[1523] She's being reminded that God gave her that talent.

[1524] And I was getting so triggered knowing my baggage.

[1525] Sure.

[1526] I'm like, here this girl has worked her fucking ass off.

[1527] off for 16 years to do what she can do, endless practice, understands music, all these different factors.

[1528] And she's got to act like, no, someone touched her shoulder.

[1529] That's not the truth.

[1530] It is the truth a little bit because it, well, the genetic God.

[1531] Yeah, I'm not, I'm not saying what's God or not.

[1532] But if 45 people did exactly everything Whitney Houston did, she'd be the only one sounding like that still.

[1533] 45 million people, I'd say, to be honest.

[1534] She, there, there's some people who are, are given gifts.

[1535] Well, she, yeah, she has, she has some physiological aptitude to sound the way she did.

[1536] Yeah.

[1537] And I guess she can't take credit for her genetics.

[1538] Yeah.

[1539] But her mom was an amazing singer and she really grew up like singing nonstop, the 10 ,000 hours thing.

[1540] You know, at least if you believe that book at all, or at least find it persuasive.

[1541] I don't think it's binary.

[1542] It's either what he's saying.

[1543] in the book or not.

[1544] But he's a no of the world class symphony musicians.

[1545] It really can be traced immediately to how much they practice.

[1546] Yeah.

[1547] I think there's a combination.

[1548] I think 10 ,000 hours is massively important and working hard is everything.

[1549] And I think you can be brilliant by hard work.

[1550] But this is sort of circling back to our genius conversation.

[1551] there are certain people on earth who are above that it's genetics it's whatever you can call it you're going a scientific way by calling it genetics and people say god and whatever you want to believe but there's something extra and i do think when i think about those people i think of it a little more spiritually than science i mean i think she sings better than anyone that's ever sung personally.

[1552] I do.

[1553] Yeah.

[1554] That was being bandied about a lot and then even Kristen was saying it.

[1555] And again, I always kind of defer to her because I don't really know technically whether someone's great or not.

[1556] Yeah.

[1557] I think she's an incredible singer.

[1558] But I was thinking like, really like better than Aretha Franklin?

[1559] Like to me, Aretha Franklin, I'm like, oh my God.

[1560] It's like there's a fucking volcano.

[1561] This is news to me. I've never heard you talk about.

[1562] Oh, my God.

[1563] I love Aretha Franklin.

[1564] in blues brothers when she sings behind the register she is amazing of course i mean biance and i hear one plus one by biance i'm like that's as good as a human can sing one and one makes you and it's me and you that's always oh my god you did it oh boy i loved it okay all right anyway okay jared Jared Cohen.

[1565] Sweet Jared Cohen.

[1566] Oh, we loved him.

[1567] Really loved him.

[1568] Yeah.

[1569] And he was so informed and he's kind of like Ronan where he was there to talk about one thing.

[1570] But by God, could I have talked to him about like 11 different topics for a full episode?

[1571] Definitely.

[1572] Speaking of another genius, Adam Grant, a connector here, actually not a connector here, but he knows him.

[1573] And I want to have a public ceremony where we marry Dr. Eric Topal and Adam Grant to us.

[1574] We're getting a four -way weird thing.

[1575] I love it.

[1576] Three husbands?

[1577] Anyway, we love Adam.

[1578] We love Jared.

[1579] We love you guys.

[1580] Okay, so you said, because he was staying at the W hotel.

[1581] Right.

[1582] And you said that they tell people it's an adult hotel.

[1583] When I checked in, they did, yeah.

[1584] That's funny, because, I mean, to be honest, I didn't do my due diligence.

[1585] I was going to call them and see if they said it.

[1586] Right.

[1587] But they don't.

[1588] It's not on the website or anything.

[1589] It's not.

[1590] But it doesn't say it on the website, but the website has tons of pictures.

[1591] That if you were looking for family -friendly, you probably would know not to book there.

[1592] Well, I was going to say, if I were you imposing, I would call up and go like, Hi, I have six small children.

[1593] Is this a good hotel for us to stay at?

[1594] And just see what they say, like, no. That's true.

[1595] It's a bad hotel for you and your six kids.

[1596] That is true.

[1597] But it made it sound like they said that upon checking in, they are calling, making a reservation, they tell you up front.

[1598] Oh, they didn't tell me up front.

[1599] They said it's going to be loud tonight.

[1600] You need to know that Friday nights are.

[1601] allowed here.

[1602] I think, I mean, they have to warn you because I'm assuming they just deal with calls all night long to the front desk.

[1603] Like, what the fuck's going on down there?

[1604] And they're like, this is not a family hotel.

[1605] Get over it.

[1606] We told you.

[1607] Use the condoms in the mini bar.

[1608] The sex kit.

[1609] Okay, so I said that I thought that Jared was our second road scholar and you thought third.

[1610] I did.

[1611] And you're right.

[1612] Oh, good.

[1613] Who was the third?

[1614] Ronin was?

[1615] Uh -huh.

[1616] And Eric Arsetti.

[1617] Oh, fuck right.

[1618] Right, right, right.

[1619] Yeah.

[1620] And there might have been more, but I looked through the website and it was taking a long time.

[1621] So I did a glance.

[1622] And I think only those three.

[1623] Okay.

[1624] So the book that got him into presidents when he was young is called The Buck Stops Here.

[1625] It's by Alex Provenson or Provenson.

[1626] Okay.

[1627] And you can get that book if you search for it.

[1628] It is in print, but it's not, you know, everywhere.

[1629] You got to like get it.

[1630] Let me need a dish.

[1631] Oh.

[1632] Get you a signed copy.

[1633] I'd love one.

[1634] For your new home.

[1635] At one point, you said that you would imagine that 80 % of the country doesn't lean super far left or super far right.

[1636] Right.

[1637] So it's just like so hard to get an actual number on that.

[1638] Obviously, as you know.

[1639] But currently Trump's base, which is his guys, not like Republicans who voted for him, but people who are staunchly supportive of him.

[1640] around 30 to 35 % of the country.

[1641] That's a far right -leaning group.

[1642] We just talked about this the other day.

[1643] I was saying I kind of disagreed that I thought that there were a ton of people that are his base that were prior to him, probably apolitical.

[1644] That's just a difference of opinion you and I have.

[1645] No, you said people voted for him who were maybe apolitical.

[1646] But his base is way more than people who voted for him.

[1647] I mean, these are people that are doing the rallies that are like so invested.

[1648] Yeah, and I'm saying that I think my hunch is that many of those people don't have a political policy that they believe in.

[1649] They don't have a platform that they agree with.

[1650] They like that representative.

[1651] They like Donald Trump.

[1652] Yeah.

[1653] I mean, what he represents, though, is very far right.

[1654] His rhetoric is very far right.

[1655] Not necessarily what he does, but his rhetoric is.

[1656] So in ways he is very far right.

[1657] And then in other ways, he's not far right at all.

[1658] Like the fact that he wanted NAFTA to be redone has been conventionally a left position.

[1659] The tariff war is very not encouraged on the right.

[1660] So he does, he has some that are.

[1661] But it's all in opposition to what the Democrats have been doing.

[1662] Let's put it this way.

[1663] I think if he said he was pro choice, I don't think he loses any of his.

[1664] base, like the people who love him and wear his hats, I don't think him making a decision to be pro -choice that he loses any of those followers.

[1665] So what I'm saying is that I think a lot of them aren't necessarily so issue -minded as much as they identify with whatever message he's saying, they relate to him and they feel like he has their interests in mind, which could largely not even be political.

[1666] But if he said, I think we should be really inclusive, he'd lose people.

[1667] Yeah, I agree.

[1668] So.

[1669] But being.

[1670] xenophobic isn't really a political position.

[1671] It can have some down.

[1672] Yeah, it can have some downstream stuff.

[1673] But I'm just saying you look at the conventional tenants of the left and the right.

[1674] Yeah.

[1675] I mean, the conventional tenants are gone.

[1676] I mean, that is just the truth.

[1677] All of it's all muddled up now.

[1678] But if you look at the current state of what it means to be extremely left or extremely right.

[1679] Well, the example I'd give on our side of the street would be there were, a bunch of bunch of people, even gay and lesbian folks that loved Obama and voted for him.

[1680] And he was outwardly against gay marriage.

[1681] And so somehow his being was transcending his policy.

[1682] Mm -hmm.

[1683] On that.

[1684] On that.

[1685] Yeah.

[1686] And I just like, he represented something.

[1687] He represented hope and he represented equality and he represented all these things that were the real pillars.

[1688] And then there was others there was policy stuff but most people what they loved about Obama wasn't his centrist take on the economy or his this you know like they loved Obama for sure I mean I think Obama's a little different in a couple ways one it wasn't like gay marriage was already legal and then he was like I'm not really for it if that were the case I don't think he would have what he had the amount of followers and stuff if he was actively going against something that was already existing.

[1689] He was just, he was going with something that was already existing.

[1690] He wasn't like standing up for something new, which then he did do, of course.

[1691] And I, maybe I'm wrong about this, but I feel that since Obama, the country, like these extreme left and rights, I mean, there was some tiny percentage, of course, always, there always has been.

[1692] But it's grown so much since then we didn't have bernies then right i mean i think it's all i think it's well i think it goes back to the point i was making that you originally brought up which is i just think that because of social media the people that are saying the most outrageous things are now finding their voice and headlines of major publications but it is more than that we see it reflected in our candidates now and in their support their support like bernie has a lot of support Oh, more than anyone.

[1693] And Elizabeth Warren has a lot of support.

[1694] They're, as far as Democrats go, very left on the side of Democrats.

[1695] So, you know, I think these have grown.

[1696] I really do.

[1697] I think these extremes have grown.

[1698] I think they've grown too.

[1699] Yeah.

[1700] I still think, though, that it's misleading.

[1701] I think way more people are in the middle.

[1702] Yeah, in the middle.

[1703] Yeah.

[1704] Anyhow.

[1705] Okay, so I said there's been four impeachments.

[1706] and he said Andrew Johnson, Clinton, and Trump, but he didn't say Nixon, but I think because we had just talked about Nixon, so maybe he just complained.

[1707] I think because he resigned before there was a Senate hearing.

[1708] He resigned before he was removed, but he was still impeached.

[1709] He was impeached by the House, and then he resigned before the Senate then tried the case.

[1710] Right.

[1711] So I don't, doesn't it seem like a half impeachment or like?

[1712] Well, no. Trump is an impeached president.

[1713] Right.

[1714] forever and then if whether he's removed or not which I don't think he would yeah okay he wanted me to check to sort of stand by him on the fact that people who collect presidential hair are normal are cool but I couldn't really find any info on that you didn't join any chat rooms one picture of one man he looked semi normal okay but it's hard to know it is well look at dalmer he looked like a boy next door Or Ted Bundy That's probably who I mean Oh yeah He was a handsome Ted Bundy Yeah Yeah Oh man I would have walked right into his track Oh you would have probably Helped him out He'd have like He'd have crutches and shit He'd hang out by the beach I also though I think I probably wouldn't have Because one I can't be peer pressured Yeah You're also very afraid of strangers I'm skeptical Well I'm skeptical Like this person might be Trying to swindle me Yeah And in that case he would be Yeah So he can take his crutches and just...

[1715] God, fucking childhoods, it's also.

[1716] It's so funny, like I don't even want to get into it.

[1717] And I'm still going to say that which means we'll get into it is I look forward to those things.

[1718] So, like, I want them.

[1719] I mean, I used to want them so bad that I manifested them.

[1720] But yeah, someone who's trying to take advantage of someone, I pray that they cross my path.

[1721] I know.

[1722] I know.

[1723] Isn't that fucked up?

[1724] Why would I want to be a part of anything like that?

[1725] Because you felt taking advantage of at one point in your life.

[1726] It's so obvious.

[1727] I know.

[1728] It's embarrassingly obvious.

[1729] You were taking advantage of so you want to be on top of it.

[1730] The sheriff.

[1731] Yeah.

[1732] I mean, maybe under all of it is a kernel of niceness, which is I feel capable of defending myself against those people and I want to defeat them before they can do it to people that are vulnerable.

[1733] That's a nice twist.

[1734] I mean, I think it's true.

[1735] I think it's all about my mom.

[1736] I think it's all about protecting my mom, you know, not being able to intervene and protect my mom for life made me want to intervene and protect.

[1737] Yeah.

[1738] I think that's definitely a factor.

[1739] But I think the molesting is a big factor.

[1740] I think there's a lot of things that come from it.

[1741] Okay.

[1742] Did Lincoln have marfins?

[1743] I don't like that sentence because sounds like I'm talking about your child.

[1744] I know, I know.

[1745] The President Lincoln have marfins.

[1746] Did Abraham Lincoln?

[1747] Well, we know your, we know Lincoln Shepherd doesn't have marfins.

[1748] We don't.

[1749] I don't think she's too young to show the signs.

[1750] No. It's pretty gangly.

[1751] She is a dupus.

[1752] But her, she's very strong.

[1753] Oh, my God.

[1754] I don't think Marfan's people are strong.

[1755] I thought Abe was like kind of tough.

[1756] Well, listen.

[1757] Okay, here we go.

[1758] Based on Lincoln's unusual physical appearance, Dr. Abraham Gordon proposed in 19.

[1759] Oh, my God, Dr. Abraham.

[1760] We can't have an Abraham investigating Abraham Lincoln.

[1761] It's too confusing.

[1762] Dr. Abraham Lincoln.

[1763] Abraham Gordon.

[1764] Fine.

[1765] Dr. Gordon.

[1766] Okay.

[1767] Okay.

[1768] Thank you.

[1769] Dr. A. Gordon proposed in 1962 that Lincoln had Marfan syndrome.

[1770] Testing Lincoln's DNA for Marfan syndrome was completed in the 90s, but such a...

[1771] Oh, but such a test was not performed.

[1772] What?

[1773] I mean, that was so stupid.

[1774] Why would they write a sentence?

[1775] I know.

[1776] That's like the sign I once saw on the Detroit River.

[1777] It said, don't touch.

[1778] your boats to this sign.

[1779] I don't know if I imagine it.

[1780] I don't think I imagine it.

[1781] I think he even have a photograph.

[1782] There was a sign on the bank of the river that said don't tie off boats to this sign.

[1783] Maybe there was another sign on the other side that I couldn't read.

[1784] I want to say it was with Ken Kennedy.

[1785] We were both like, what on earth?

[1786] What kind of like appropriations bill was this?

[1787] But maybe the stick was doing something.

[1788] We wasn't.

[1789] Really?

[1790] At least from our side, the stick was only holding a sign that said, do not rope your boat off to this sign.

[1791] Wow.

[1792] So he may have had it is I guess what people are saying.

[1793] But yeah, all these say may have.

[1794] So no one knows for sure if he had it.

[1795] Well, let's get, let's get Jared's piece of hair into that.

[1796] I guess some of, they got to have the follicle sometimes.

[1797] Yeah.

[1798] But he has the follicle.

[1799] Oh, he's got the follicle.

[1800] Oh, then he could blow the lid off this case.

[1801] He's got the folly.

[1802] Yep, yep, yep.

[1803] Should we tell people real quick that I emailed Dr. Topal about a personal problem?

[1804] Well, everyone knows about the personal problem, the peeing.

[1805] That conversation came back up in my life, and I think that it may have been a seizure.

[1806] Mm -hmm.

[1807] And then I stop laughing.

[1808] I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

[1809] You really don't take it seriously.

[1810] It makes me feel like you don't love me. I love you.

[1811] I care about your safety.

[1812] Take me seriously.

[1813] Respect me. Respect my seizure.

[1814] I, listen.

[1815] I love you.

[1816] I respect you.

[1817] I care about you.

[1818] I want you to be safe.

[1819] You peed the bed.

[1820] It's not a big deal.

[1821] And it really scared you.

[1822] And I think it may, it just might, you just might have peed the bed.

[1823] Okay.

[1824] If I just peed, that would be one thing.

[1825] Okay.

[1826] But there were so many other factors that came with it.

[1827] Bump on your head.

[1828] I was in severe back.

[1829] back pain.

[1830] Right.

[1831] But this is what you don't like when I point this up, but you had been in severe back pain like three other times prior to the peeing your pants.

[1832] In life, I've had back pain.

[1833] It's very specific though.

[1834] It's great.

[1835] I just think that it might be coincidental that those things overlapped.

[1836] Okay.

[1837] Like you have a history of back pain.

[1838] You don't have a history of peeing the bed.

[1839] I've never peed the bed.

[1840] Right.

[1841] But you do have a history of back pain.

[1842] So something new happened, which is you squirted in the sheets.

[1843] And I was incredibly disoriented and then...

[1844] Wait, you were incredibly disoriented.

[1845] Yeah.

[1846] I don't remember that part.

[1847] Oh, I mean, I say it.

[1848] I say it every time I talk about it.

[1849] Rewind the tapes.

[1850] Yeah, rewind the tapes.

[1851] Yes, I was incredibly disoriented when I woke up and...

[1852] Oh, I guess I interpreted that as like, you woke up and you were confused because why was it wet in your bed?

[1853] Well, I was, but I was disoriented.

[1854] You think beyond, like, if I peed the bed tonight, woke up confused?

[1855] Oh, okay.

[1856] For sure.

[1857] Okay.

[1858] And then I had a little bump on my head, and then I had a really bad back pain.

[1859] And then, which this part I rode off, but now I'm coming back to, I went to the doctor.

[1860] They did a urinalysis, nothing.

[1861] They didn't do anything else.

[1862] And they didn't even do blood work, which was a little weird.

[1863] And then they gave me a steroid shot, which helped with the back pain.

[1864] But then the next day, my legs were so sore.

[1865] Like it felt like I had run a marathon or something.

[1866] They were really, really fatigued.

[1867] And I thought that was maybe because I got the steroid shot.

[1868] So my legs were like compensating for the back pain or something.

[1869] I just sort of wrote that part off.

[1870] Yeah.

[1871] But then I was on a date and this all came up.

[1872] Right.

[1873] And this person, your suitor.

[1874] My suitor, had recently had a seizure.

[1875] Uh -huh.

[1876] So then I was thinking about this peeing thing.

[1877] And I was kind of saying it in like, oh, I'm just hypochondriac and I have all these weird things and I had this and he was like, oh my God.

[1878] And he was like, oh my God.

[1879] He was like, that is really scary.

[1880] And I was like, yeah, I mean, I guess it could have been like a stroke or maybe even a seizure.

[1881] And he was like, well, I really don't want to scare you.

[1882] But the muscle pain, the fatigue.

[1883] He's like, is really common after seizures.

[1884] And I had that.

[1885] I had like really, really bad muscle.

[1886] Because your muscles are contracting and releasing so much.

[1887] Anywho, so then I emailed Dr. Eric Topal because I was panicked.

[1888] Yes.

[1889] And you thought that was insane that I did that.

[1890] Well, I thought you're flurring the lines a little bit of his generosity and kindness.

[1891] We're kind of asking him to treat you as a patient.

[1892] Well, that's okay.

[1893] He said he would do body scans on us.

[1894] What's wrong with that?

[1895] Wouldn't you ask your friend?

[1896] He's my friend.

[1897] I wouldn't, but that's my own hangups.

[1898] All I can really, I would feel like I was being an imposition.

[1899] by sending him that email me and i would seem like i'm a drag and like and so it's all me i don't really think that you were wrong for doing it i just gave me a little bit the like the chills that i would be nervous to do that yeah i don't regret it but that goes along with my like which is a character defect not asking for help so i'm not saying that you're wrong and that i'm right i'm saying i personally would have hard time doing that yeah I'm going to say something you're not going to like at all, but here it comes.

[1900] Really beautiful girls think the world's nicer than it is because when they go in places, the people are very excited to look at them and talk to them and give them their coffee.

[1901] And yeah, I bet Dr. Eric Topo loved getting an email from you.

[1902] You're very cute and fun.

[1903] And when I'm an older man, yeah, I'll probably love it if a 32 -year -old wants me to diagnose it with epilepsy.

[1904] So I'm just a big gangly dude So I hit him up And I'm like, Doc, I got a problem with my ass You know, there's just There's nothing about it that First of all, let's be realistic.

[1905] Okay, you're a famous person.

[1906] If you ask anybody, anyone would be so excited to tell you you have epilepsy.

[1907] That's true.

[1908] But I would like to think I would recognize that part of the reason they're willing to do it is because I'm famous, which is another reason I have to be ethical about it.

[1909] And you as a hot chick need to be a little more ethical, okay?

[1910] Okay.

[1911] First of all, thank you.

[1912] And fuck you.

[1913] That's not true.

[1914] Sure.

[1915] Like, I can see models having this problem, but I'm not that.

[1916] So I don't fall into that category.

[1917] You're a hot piece of ass chick, okay?

[1918] And dudes think that.

[1919] Monica doesn't, which is fine.

[1920] Monica doesn't have to ever think that.

[1921] But, I mean, every person we know in our life is currently in love with you.

[1922] That is a fact.

[1923] No, that's not true at all.

[1924] But that's fine.

[1925] Anywho, I feel glad that I email.

[1926] mailed him, we're even closer.

[1927] He told me not to worry.

[1928] By the way, he posted some pictures of him playing with his granddaughter.

[1929] I know.

[1930] I almost bald.

[1931] Oh, my God.

[1932] And he called her his girlfriend.

[1933] I love you.

[1934] Herdopal, please marry us.

[1935] We love you.

[1936] Marius, Adam Grant, marry us.

[1937] Although, I'm not even, if we all get married, I'm not going to see him at all.

[1938] You're going to be on the examination table.

[1939] Oh, my God.

[1940] I can't wait to marry.

[1941] Anywho.

[1942] All right.

[1943] What a fact.

[1944] That's a really good fact.

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