Dale Saran (00:00):
My framework for judging the modern world. It’s kind of how the guy couldn’t be more correct. I don’t even know the name of the person who wrote it quite, I’m not entirely sure, but it’s a brilliant observation and it’s happened in our lifetime.
Sevan Matossian (00:18):
Do you think that the, and we’ll get into it, but my takeaway from the article was it was in a microcosm, it’s a perfect example of where we’re at as a country. Do you think that in the same way, the people, the delusion, that people actually think that January 6th was a coup, is a perfect example of the delusion. Half our country actually thinks that a bunch of people without bomb didn’t start a fire stormed the capitol. They never asked how they got in. Why wasn’t the capitol surrounded? Why didn’t they bring out the water cannons? Why didn’t the pepper spray these people? Yeah. And
Dale Saran (01:10):
Then you see the video, you find out
Sevan Matossian (01:12):
The US government was going to fall because a bunch of people in pajamas entered the US Capitol.
Dale Saran (01:18):
It’s idiocy. It’s part of the larger point. It’s a great example in there are a bunch of individual lessons that are really, really kind of pointed. For example, reification or what Greg now calls, he loves this, the mind projection fallacy of confusing the mental map you have of how reality works for reality itself. So we have people, right now, we’re living alternate realities in this country. And that factual schisms, there’s a famous quote by Tip O’Neill, I don’t know, should we get into this? Are we on? Yeah,
Sevan Matossian (01:56):
We’re on.
Dale Saran (01:57):
Oh, alright. Right on. So there’s a famous quote, I think it’s Tip O’Neill, who said, everyone’s entitled to their own opinions, but they’re not entitled to their own facts.
(02:07):
And everybody kind of throws that around. But for a while we’ve been a country headed for separate facts. And a big part of that is what we’re witnessing, and it runs through all of this, is the collapse of traditional media. And so you’ve got, everything is moving. Internet kids, those of us who grew up with the internet have become, our consumption of media is largely in front of a screen. Mine is, I don’t watch tv. Almost never. In fact, I don’t even, the only time the TV goes on is if there’s some kind of major sporting event that the Misses or I, she wants to have the Kansas City game on in the background. That’s the only time it goes on football. Football for a football game or a hockey game for me. But otherwise, news is a non-factor in my life. I don’t have it in the background.
(03:12):
I don’t have it at all. I don’t see the news. And so you start to notice, and it’s been coming for a while, this split, this kind of break in our sense of reality. It comes up in all kinds of ways. It’s why some people now, myself included, find Saturday Night Live unwatchable. It’s because Saturday Night Live has a set of facts. Part of humor is supposed to be revealing truth, but if your sense of irony is key to something and you’ve got it 180 degrees wrong, you look like you don’t sound clever, you look like a moron. It’s not funny. You’re like, that guy’s a douche bag.
Sevan Matossian (03:52):
What’s a perfect example of that? Tony Hinch Cliff’s joke about Puerto Rico being a floating island of trash. I didn’t get that joke. And I thought it was just a funny dig at Puerto Ricans and he attacked everyone. He attacked the Jews and the Palestine. He attacked everyone, which is cool. That’s what comedy’s supposed to be. But if you Google Puerto Ricans trash, there’s an NPR article. And per capita, Puerto Ricans make the most trash out of any people in the United States. And so the joke was from a national public radio article from 2019 about, Hey, why do those people produce so much trash? But I didn’t get the joke. And obviously most of the country didn’t get the joke because they didn’t realize that they actually do have a trash problem.
Dale Saran (04:40):
You have to have the same,
Sevan Matossian (04:41):
That’s what you’re referencing, right? If you don’t know, you don’t know,
Dale Saran (04:45):
Right? Well, that’s a case of where you don’t have the context. And so the joke, not only in this case does it miss now people are calling the guy a racist and everything else. And it’s like, no, you’re missing the joke because you’re not in on the set of facts that are necessary to get it. And there’s a lot of that now. A lot of it. And that’s why we have, and the other part of it is, it used to be that we could only consume media as a nation. In other words, there were three channels. I mean, you’re old. You and I are old enough.
Sevan Matossian (05:18):
There
Dale Saran (05:18):
Are only three TV channels. You got the same news. You just got it with Walter Cronkite’s voice as opposed to, or you got it with who? Harry Rieser’s voice. And somebody else got, that was the only difference.
Sevan Matossian (05:32):
A-B-C-N-B-C and CBS Bs. And then we had maybe one or two local stations. You had to adjust the, I mean they all, you had to adjust the ears, but yeah.
Dale Saran (05:41):
Yeah, you had a PBS channel. And then eventually we got a few more UHF channels. We got
Sevan Matossian (05:46):
Oh, yeah, yeah. With all the cartoons. Yeah, with cartoons. Brady Bunch. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In the Bay Area, we had sitcoms 44, which was channel 12. And then we had channel two.
Dale Saran (05:57):
We had about five or six Eventually
Sevan Matossian (06:01):
That was, God, do you remember that? And you had to get up and turn and the knob would go clunk. Hey,
Dale Saran (06:07):
My dad had a UHF antenna. He probably don’t, won’t want me to tell this, but Dad, I love you. This is funny. But my dad got a rotary antenna for the roof and he installed that thing, and that was my dad’s prize possession. And the kids were, and it was one of those ones where you went up and it had a knob on top of the tv and you would turn it seven click, it had 360 clicks kind of thing. You know what I mean? Or maybe 60 clicks. But so you’d go like, of course, as a kid, I just want to spin it to hear it click.
Sevan Matossian (06:35):
Hey. And it wasn’t electronic. Was it manual when you turn it, you had to force the antenna to turn?
Dale Saran (06:40):
No, you would turn it and it drove an electric motor and you could hear it. You could hear it turn a piece of metal. Wow. You could hear that thing go and you’d get better reception. It was up. My dad put it on the roof. And I just remember we were not allowed to touch that antenna. And so on the days, and this is before I had even started going to school. My sister was in school and I wasn’t. So I was like four or five, and I wanted to touch that. I had to memorize exactly where to put it back. God forbid he found out that we had turned his antenna.
Sevan Matossian (07:10):
And you know what else was crazy? We’ll get back to Afghanistan in a second. You could either buy a $500 antenna or you could just take a piece of wire and screw those screws or coat hanger and just screw ’em in. And you would just drag the wire across your living room and you’d be like, damn, this is some good reception.
Dale Saran (07:29):
I tell people that I have a permanent crick in my neck to the right from having to stand off to the right while holding the aluminum foil so that we could watch the Bruins. That was the only way for some reason, if I stood, do you ever have to do that? Depending on where your own electrical field would interfere with the tv, you’d get close. It would get staticky.
Sevan Matossian (07:49):
You used to be able to hit the TV and get better reception.
Dale Saran (07:53):
They hit the tv. That seemed to work well.
Sevan Matossian (07:56):
Smash
Dale Saran (07:57):
Electronics.
Sevan Matossian (07:58):
Yeah.
Dale Saran (07:58):
No one ever hits TVs anymore. I know it’s weak. I just want to go buy and punch the TV just so it doesn’t get cocky anymore.
Sevan Matossian (08:05):
Okay. So there’s living in different realities,
Dale Saran (08:10):
And this ties into what Greg’s doing, what I’m doing, our legal work. I mean, we are witnessing the collapse of government institutions, a bunch of institutions, government and non-government, although it’s become increasingly apparent that the media simply is a government institution. That’s just another government entity at this point. And so all of that’s collapsing in real time. The experts have turned out to be, and that’s really what that piece is about. The Afghanistan debacle was that withdrawal was fundamentally the perfect, the crystal bowl of examples of imagery of just how crappy government and experts generally have gotten. But you could take COD and the handling by the FDA and CDC, you could use that as an example. I mean, there’s almost too many to the media’s handling of the Russia hoax. I mean all of it, January 6th. I mean, pick some example of an institution that’s supposed to and pick your particular issue.
(09:28):
And even no matter which side of the issue you’re on. So for example, if you’re a Black Lives Matter person, tell me about how well media has handled that from your perspective. You know what I mean? No matter what side of an issue you’re on, you can’t help but arrive at the media is wrong, almost as a matter of course, you can assume the opposite. You probably get closer to what’s really going on. I mean, we’re living very much like what the Eastern Bloc countries lived in the late eighties, kind of bicameral reality. I mean, all kinds of crazy shit.
Sevan Matossian (10:03):
Thank God there’s the resources out there so that when the media is telling you that Derek Chauvin killed Rodney King, if you want, you can go pull up his autopsy report and you could see that he had three times the lethal dose of,
Dale Saran (10:19):
I
Sevan Matossian (10:19):
Think you mean George Floyd, what did I
Dale Saran (10:21):
Say? Rodney King. Nice to mix that nineties thing right in there. But I mean, it’s funny though, right? It’s linked in your mind. I mean, that’s a Freudian slip, but I wonder how many times
Sevan Matossian (10:35):
I’ve done that. Thank you for catching that. So at least people can go and be like, okay,
Dale Saran (10:42):
That doesn’t matter though. Don’t fall for that same fallacy, the thought that if I just corrected other people factually, that’ll solve the problem. You know what I mean? That doesn’t
Sevan Matossian (10:52):
Work. And why doesn’t that
Dale Saran (10:53):
Work? A bunch of people have said it a bunch of different ways. I think it was Mark Twain. You can’t reason a man out of an opinion that he didn’t arrive at with reason in the first place.
Sevan Matossian (11:07):
And that’s this whole Nazi, that’s fascinating to me because all these people keep telling, all my libtard friends are telling me now, it’s crazy. People who I didn’t even, I never thought in a million years. At some point, the accusations get so crazy. Hillary Clinton is really a lizard person. You know what I mean? I put the brakes on, I’m like, Hey, dude, I’m not doing that. But they’re trying to tell us that Hitler’s a Nazi when the entire premise of the left is based on fascism. It’s to take away individual rights and give them to groups based on race. And I’m like, Hey, dude, here’s the wiki. I send him the Wiki article. Yeah. I’m like,
Dale Saran (11:47):
It’s not going to change. Republicans do care. I used to fall for that too. It’s that funny picture of the guy. There’s a guy at his computer and he is looking really earnest, and he’s yelling over his shoulder. There’s a little comment bubble and it says, hold on a second, honey. There’s somebody talking shit on the internet. I got to correct them. Just imagine. You’re not going to convince anybody that way. And so all it’s led to is just people screeching more and more loudly.
Sevan Matossian (12:19):
Hey, the difference between is the difference, not the difference, but fascism is the ideology, and nazim is when the group that you’re trying to preserve is the Germans, but using the fascist ideology, is that what a Nazi is? It’s basically because basically in a nutshell, if we could agree, the definition of fascism is when you want to take away the rights of the groups and give them to an individual based on race or ethnicity or some category. So is Nazi basically like they’re just trying to get rid of everyone and keep the Germans, but it’s using the fascist ideology?
Dale Saran (12:54):
No, no. Here’s the thing. There’s people using these words all different kinds of ways now. And it’s like the word racist. It’s impossible to get your hand around. So you have to have some pretty good definitions. And the PolySci ones are now socialists don’t want to be associated with claim to be on the left, and they don’t want to be associated with
Sevan Matossian (13:21):
Socialism. And fascism are the same thing. When I look at the Wiki definitions,
Dale Saran (13:25):
Yeah, they’re both collectivist ideologies, and it’s just the degree to which the state controls things in communism. It’s the state controls everything, but then the state is supposed to wither away. And then we’re all going to have the wonderful utopia of proletariat. We’re all going to agree on everything. It’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever heard, but people can’t get past it. And then the lighter version of that is sort of the Marxist socialism is we’re going to vote our way into it so it’ll be so much better. Which of course is just the tyranny of the majority. That’s just, Hey, if 51% of us agree that we can beat the dog shit out of the other 49%, that that’s totally legit, and that’s not good.
Sevan Matossian (14:08):
That’s what the South wanted to do. They wanted to vote. They used their voting to keep blacks as slaves. And a matter of fact, they passed a law in Congress that you couldn’t use the word slave in Congress. Did you know that?
Dale Saran (14:19):
Which I didn’t hear the beginning part of that.
Sevan Matossian (14:21):
That’s what the south wanted to do. The South wanted to vote to keep blacks as slaves and be like, well, that’s democracy. We voted them in as slaves. And then when the north was like, Hey, you can’t do that according to the premise of the foundations of our liberty, but did you know that they even passed a law? You weren’t allowed to use the word slave for 50 years or something like that in Congress.
Dale Saran (14:41):
Yeah. I’m not surprised by that.
Sevan Matossian (14:42):
Yeah. They tried to censor what you could say in Congress so that people wouldn’t bring up the discussion. You had to use some phrase instead of slave.
Dale Saran (14:50):
Yeah, none of that surprises me that there’s nothing new under the sun. Yeah. So fascism, the difference between fascism and socialism, again, remember Hitler’s party was, the German words are national socialists, but the socialists hate being associated because there No, no, no. Those is the whole, no, no. He was a right wing. It’s a right wing thing. But fascism differs only in the fact that you, and it’s close to what we have now largely. And socialism always devolves into that because at some point the socialists realize that they have no idea. Government employees realize they have no idea what they’re doing. And so they need some companies. And so that’s why everything consolidates into these large monopolies. And that’s easier to control than a country filled with a million small businesses. It’s far, far easier to control a company where there’s only, basically, you’ve got a handful of mega corporations, and you just make sure that the owners and the people who run those corporations are good party members.
(15:58):
And that’s how that’s done. That’s how that’s always done. So in point of fact, there is no distinction between them. They always devolve into the same. And you could say that, well, it’s really oligarchy. And the problem is you get people arguing about whether the problem is the government or the corporations in that analogy. And the answer is, it’s both immoral. The fact that politicians can be bought is a big problem, but it should be surprising to no one. The whole system was supposed to be built on the premise that we know that people are generally politicians, particularly crooked. And so you try and design systems to systems to thwart that and protect the most important minority, the individual, the single citizen. I mean, that’s the whole premise of the constitution’s supposed to be built on that notion that the most important minority is the individual, not the group.
(17:00):
Not the group. And the only thing, the neo-Marxist, new, dehydrated, reconstituted version is now just taking that same, and it was done. You can see the intellectual history if you really care to look into it, but it’s just applying it to race. And now, rather than making it about class, which is what traditional Marxism does, it’s been used to the sort of original sin of the white man, the American experiment, the original sin of the American experiment is slavery. And therefore that wedge has now been used that was talked about openly as a Soviet technique back in the sixties and fifties. Lemme, it worked wonderfully.
Sevan Matossian (17:45):
Well, let me give you a couple examples and let me see what you think about it. So it’s kind of like the hierarchy of the protected class. I’ll give you two examples of how devious these protocols are. One of my friends works at a university, one of the biggest universities in the country. He works in the finance department. He said that if they’re going to do an event and they’re going to get porta-potties for the event, they have a policy in place that says you have to first get bids from, and then it’s this order of protected class, the order. So at first you have to ask, you find contractors who are women and lesbian, and then it’s like women and black, and then there’s like three or four, and then finally, they don’t say it. But the only thing left is white man. But you have to actually get bids in that order for
Dale Saran (18:37):
The closest surrogate for white man in that list is, and I don’t agree with any of these preferences, by the way, and that’s why don’t, my wife doesn’t understand why I don’t want the veterans discount. I don’t want any of that. I don’t want any special government privilege for belonging to any group. You know what I mean? Not veterans either. I don’t care. It’s not
Sevan Matossian (18:56):
Interesting.
Dale Saran (18:57):
Yeah, I don’t want the 10%, I don’t, all of it feels wrong to me. All of it in any attempt by the government to subdivided citizens and give away candy based on your participation in some organization, whatever, it’s, it’s
Sevan Matossian (19:21):
All raw. And then on the other hand, we have these schools, actually, instead of, let’s say we had a school and we had a program that was for advanced students. It used to be, okay, we’re going to save, if there’s 10 kids, we’re going to save four spots for black kids. Now what they’re doing is they’re like, we’re just going to get rid of the entire program because not enough blacks are in it. That kind of mal, you may not remember this across crazy. And I’m thinking, Greg said it to me, he goes, the only person who gets hurt are the two black kids who are in the program.
Dale Saran (19:57):
Well, of course, hey, we have this kind of insanity everywhere. You may not remember this from CrossFit, but we had a huge issue, legal issue with the Americans with Disabilities Act. And that thing has been used as a weapon, a cudgel. And I say this as a guy who’s got case pending, where I am filed under the A DA on behalf of a client. So I’m well aware of how it’s supposed to be used, what it’s supposed to be used for. But the concerns, I remember when it came out, I was in law school, the concern was always that, hey, these things, these requirements could be used as a weapon. And it did. If you didn’t have bathrooms for a CrossFit gym, you had to have an A compliant bathroom, right? You’re like, I’m a gym. Well, you got to have it for people in wheelchairs so they can come in, okay, well, what’s that going to add in costs and all that.
(20:45):
And so you’re importing all these infrastructure costs onto small business owners to make it like, this is how it has to be. Right? And then what happens? There were people known for this to go into places in New York City lawyers would get these sort of professional litigants who would go in and be like, oh, there’s no going with a wheelchair. This, I can’t do this. I can’t do that. Come out, Sue and get a settlement out of the owner, or make it so that the owner has to shut down. I mean, it’s ruined businesses. And we wound up with that same issue where we were providing, I forget what content and all our stuff was free, but there was an issue about, well, it’s not closed captioned. And so if it’s not closed captioned, then, and I remember the Khan Academy had to pull everything. So it’s like if you don’t make it for everybody, nobody can have it. And so if we can’t learn calculus because it’s not closed captioned for us on the internet, then fuck you. Nobody gets to, you know what I mean? There was the business, it’s the politics of spite.
Sevan Matossian (21:55):
When I was a kid, I remember there was, because my dad owned these two properties in Berkeley on the street, and there was a business that was closed down because they couldn’t afford to build a wheelchair ramp for access to this store. So the store was closed down. I remember thinking, holy shit, this is some crazy shit.
Dale Saran (22:14):
Yeah. One small group of people, you can’t find a work because they can’t get in there. And you’d think, well, geez, maybe we could find a workaround or something, especially with the internet, maybe we could have the stores things listed in like they did with Covid. We could have delivery. Hey, you just come up there and we’ll bring it out to you, whatever it is. You know what I mean? You’d think there’d be some kind of workaround or at least some acknowledgement that this is what it’s going to be. But instead, if you decided as a society, like, okay, no, we’re going to do it. We’re going to make it so that everything has that. You go, oh, okay. Well, isn’t that what our taxes should pay for?
(22:50):
Maybe we could just do that. The business wouldn’t have to do it. Instead of sending, I don’t know, instead of sending 40 billion to Ukraine, maybe instead we could have a compliance, and the government would be the one to do it. That way we’d know it was compliant. You’d be doing it, and it would be on the government to make those facilities available. And the businesses would just be like, Hey, you we’re just here and you’d make it easier, but try talking in terms of spending tax money reasonably on things for your citizenry. And you get people losing their mind, no, we got to be sending blood and treasure to Ukraine, and we’ve got to have 200 military bases around the world, and what will the Japanese do if we’re not there? And nato, it’s like, Hey, man, that shit costs money. I don’t know if you know, but bombs aren’t cheap.
Sevan Matossian (23:43):
What happened in Afghanistan?
Dale Saran (23:45):
Oh, hey, I told someone the, you didn’t have to be a general, I’ll give it to you in as easy as you can. Understand how
Sevan Matossian (23:52):
Bad. Lemme plug one thing on Friday. I have a guy coming in, he won’t be on the screen. It’ll be audio only. And he was there, and he has his job
Dale Saran (24:06):
At the evacuation.
Sevan Matossian (24:07):
Yes.
Dale Saran (24:07):
Okay.
Sevan Matossian (24:08):
And his job on the base was every morning to drive around the perimeter of the base and collect all the dead babies that had been thrown over the fence and put ’em in a bag. The night before,
Dale Saran (24:22):
I’m sorry to laugh,
Sevan Matossian (24:24):
Every morning there were dead babies. And some mornings there were live babies like half alive. And it’s crazy. It is going to be a crazy interview on Friday. Shit. He said he saw there. Okay, so what happened in Afghanistan?
Dale Saran (24:38):
So look, you don’t have to be, did not have to be an expert on military anything. You didn’t have to be any kind of trained on tactics to know that giving up. All you had to ever do was just fly into cobble once. And if you flew into Cobble and just looked out the windows as you were coming in, it would be immediately apparent to you that giving up Bagram, the military airfield, just by where it sits in that valley, all you would have to do is just look and be like, oh, oh, well, that’s icy. All you would’ve to do is look, the airfield, Bagram Airfield. That place was a bustling airport. I mean, when I was there, it was on a par with the Berlin Airlift. Somebody could probably pull the numbers. We probably brought in as much, there were flights into Afghanistan. I mean, you could get a civilian flight into Afghanistan, into Bagram. I did that once. I was defending a guy, an Air Force guy charged with idiot stuff. I got him acquitted, but I had to go out to Afghanistan to defend him. And so I had to fly into Bagram as they wouldn’t let me come on a military helicopter, even though I was a reservist at the time. But anyway, so you could fly into Bagram, it sits up the valley, up the slope from, oh, is that Bagram?
Sevan Matossian (26:08):
I think so. I just typed in Bagram and it came in.
Dale Saran (26:10):
Yeah, it was massive, massive. The amount of air coming in and out of there on a regular basis. And it sits, if you look at the wider geography, if you pull up an aerial view of cobble and then zoom out just on Google Maps, you can see where Bagram sits, and it sits up the valley above cobble. And so it’s got the high ground, and it was also a complete military base. So if you were going to do an evacuation, if you had any idea in your head, we’re leaving the idea that you would give away Bagram first and then flee down to the low ground and the unprotected. Yeah, there you go. Yep.
Sevan Matossian (26:55):
God, it’s huge.
Dale Saran (26:56):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah, Bagram is massive. And then as you scroll out, it sits northeast, I think, of the Yeah, yeah, yeah. Almost to north, more north than downtown Cobble. Scroll into Cobble. The joke used to be, if you flew in from the outlying areas, when we would fly into Cobble, the joke was that,
Sevan Matossian (27:23):
God, the airport’s almost as big as Kabul.
Dale Saran (27:25):
Yeah, it is massive. Massive. Yeah. Kale, the joke was that when you would fly into Kabul, they used to say right after Karzai got elected president, and he was the president of Afghanistan. Everybody used to, the outlying pastors said, we used to joke, they used to call ’em the mayor of Kabul, because Kabul is mountains all around you. You have to spiral down into Kabul. It’s surrounded by the Hindu Kush, massive mountains, 15, 17,000 foot mountains. And so he’s cut off, Kabul’s, cut off from the rest of the country. And so the idea that you would give up the airfield on the top of the thing. Yeah, yeah. There you go. Yep, yep. That’s a good look at it. Yep. That’s to the Looking East, I believe.
Sevan Matossian (28:14):
So we basically built, did we build that airfield?
Dale Saran (28:18):
The Russians left a lot, and then we obviously brought in the American capability to build and yeah, I mean, massive buildup at Bagram. So anyway, anybody who gave up that airfield, you wouldn’t look at that and think to yourself, if somebody, I don’t know who it was, ultimately it goes to the top. I mean, Biden has to take responsibility for it. But the generals who were involved in that, there’s no way anyone who could look at that decision and go, we gave up Bagram and then had to do an evacuation out of Cobble, you wouldn’t just say, oh, whoops, and make that kind of mistake. You know what I mean? That’s not a, oh my God, I left my keys. This is the kind of thing that you’re like, somebody needs to be dragged out and shot for that because resource, that’s the kind of decision.
(29:08):
If you can’t see that, you shouldn’t be leading drunks to happy hour, much less a multinational force. If that hasn’t, and any general, if Biden told them and overrode and told them, I’m ordering you to do it. I don’t give a shit, and that’s the way it’s going to be. Get ’em out now. Give up bog and blah, blah, blah. If it was made at that kind level, any general who was like, well, I’m just going to make the best of it, and you didn’t publicly resign and make a big snit about it, you don’t have a hair on your ass. You’re not worthy of the rank you hold. And so ultimately, no one took responsibility. And to bring it back to that article I sent you, that Farewell to Bourgeois Kings, just a brilliant article. The guy who wrote that. Yeah. So the biggest
Sevan Matossian (29:56):
Planes in the world could land there.
Dale Saran (29:58):
Yeah. Yeah. And did.
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