Transcript:

00:00 This is Melissa, Hale-Spencer, the editor of the Altamont Enterprise, and we have a very exciting guest today. His name is Victor Porlier, and the reason I know him and many of you know is because he's a frequent letter writer to the Altamont Enterprise. He lives in the Hilltowns, but in just waiting to kind of get tuned up here, he has been telling me some incredible stories. So I think we're going to start with November 20, second 1963. Yeah. Which victor says is the hinge on which this country turned. So tell us where you were on that day and your journey.

00:47 I will, but I should add. I defined the hinges between November the 22nd and I think February the seventh when the Beatles arrived. Sixty four. All that's the hinge show. It's a long. It's a here's this thing. Start to change as people start to think about what's been going on. And suddenly rock and roll hits this country. Okay. Sex, drugs and rock and roll. Now the sixties. Okay. Anyway, um, well to, to begin the story that we were talking about, um, in 1960 I got my MA from UC Berkeley in public administration and I went back eventually and 61 to join the Jay John F Kennedy's administration. I wound up in the State Department in the United States. Information Agency started. It's like United States Agency for International Development and in 61 and in 1962, by that time, from the time it was a Berkeley till then, I had been a devoted reader of all this. 

01:45 Actually all of his stuff, all of it literally except for a couple of essays and I decided, I told my wife we were living in Georgetown at the time. I'd like to retrace the steps of all this. Huxley. He went and visited from Great Britain through Central America up to Taos, New Mexico where he wanted to see his old buddy, a Dh lawrence and his wife freedom. And so she agreed, we thought we'd go. And so we flew down to Central America. Well, actually we've got flew down from DC to Miami on the 21st stayed overnight and the next day in the afternoon our plane took off to go to Latin America. That was the afternoon the JFK was assassinated in Dealey plaza. So we got down to Guatemala because I'm sorry, I'm getting ahead of myself. It's easier to talk when there's no microphone. We flew down to Columbia, Columbia and um, and then worked our way up through Central America. 

02:37 My Dad was a career army officer. I'm an rb Morat and so he had been stationed in Fort Google Lake, which was the army ranger training skill for jungle warfare at the time when I was a boy in the sixth and seventh grade. And we're taking a little side trip here because tell us about scouts when you were born. Well, uh, you know, every scout team has a, as a scout master, well you're on an army base, you're all army brats, which is a unique kind of way of growing up when we go and do that right at the moment. But uh, it's a heartier trip because every time you move from an army base to an army base for boys, at least you had to fight until it's found out where you were in the pecking order, who you could beat and who you couldn't. And then everything was okay. 

03:18 Road buddies again. So, and so the Scout Masters were jungle warriors. That's where the Training Center was in Fort Gulag for jungle warfare. So we are camping trips were in the jungle with sleeping, having stuff in the trees and watching out for snakes and all the rest. So it was an error. They were hardy man. These, these were good guys. Anyway, so we visited them, we worked our way up through, um, a Costa Rica where there'd been a huge volcanic eruption. Everything was gray. It was even the swans and the lake's beautiful. Swans were all gray because the ash had fallen on them. We got up to Guatemala and I'll stop there just to say a couple things about the before we left on the trip. So I following all this actually trip. I mean, his work, I had actually corresponded with him quite a bit and after his death I have corresponded with his wife, Laura. 

04:10 Tell us a little about that exchange, that correspondence. Um, well, you know, it's more, it's more the young, the young, the young boy, the young man talking to an older man who I had come to really appreciate what he's ready here to Chris. It was a brilliant man, crisp intellect, really sharp satirically writer and all the success he wrote, not simply brave new world, but a whole range of other books which are really quite interesting. But he was a thoroughgoing supernaturalist mystic and, and ultimately, and that was attractive to me at the time. And so he just suggest, suggested to like, thank you very much for your kind letter, blah blah, and would write to say, have you read this book? What not. One of my favorite anecdotes about all this was this, at one point, you know, they have fires in the northern cal, I mean, in California hills outside of Malibu and whatnot. 

05:06 And oftentimes they bring the homes down out there. You've probably seen those over the years. Well, one year his home was totally burned down and I mean all his books and all of his memoirs and treasuries, treasure little anecdotes. And so of course the press being the. Sorry, the jackals that they typically are, he gets up to the burn site and the, and the one of the young reporters, she thrust the microphone and Tuesday's Pelos, Aldous Huxley. Tell us, Mr Pasley, how do you feel about this? And he said, and this is back in the forties, I think at 30, 50 slash 50 as well, you know, the, the, the TV commercial for the first time in your life, feel really clean. That was his answer, his answer. So shedding all of his possessions. I mean, he was that centered. Gosh. Anyway, so, so anyway, at that, and we were in Guatemala and we heard every bit that he had died on the same day that all this hooks, I mean that jfk had been assassinated in Dallas. 

06:08 Well now bear in mind, you know, here I am following the overhead. Oh, I'm sorry, I forgot the footstep before we left. Uh, one of my friends who was not not religious in any sense had read a book by Cs Lewis called screwtape letters, and he said, you got to read this guy had real insight into human beings. He said, you know what to believe in Christianity or not. So I said, okay, I'll take it. I took it on the trip with me. It was a kind of a sidebar reading and I was in the State Department and Kennedy had come up with something called the Alianza Apparel Progresso. And that was the Atlanta progress, which was dealing with Latin America. And so my thought was if I had took some of his speeches and made sure that I stopped at the different embassies, Panama, Guatemala, Honduras, well, that I could then go back to Washington DC. 

06:59 Typical bureaucratic climber. Oh, when I was in the embassy in Costa Rica, you know, at that place. So I had the ISO, I had all the sexy strip I had. JFK is all kinds of stuff and I had cs Lewis's screwtape letters. So I learned then we get. So that's okay. So then we get to Guatemala and up in the highlands of Guatemala is that Gigi custom. Tango is a great market center for Northern Guatemala and the typical classic colonial Spanish Spanish colony where the big public square, the major church on this, on the end of the square, and then all the Mayan peasants because they're still practicing the Mayan religion there in the highlands would come in carrying all their goods to sell it. Market Day, the tents all over the squares like sunny day. And so then the morning from up to noon that the people would go from the little bit of sales places where they had to cancel that, go in and enjoy mass. 

08:00 Then father golden, another go, kids go and then at noon all the Catholic priests would leave and suddenly there was gum copel incense burners on the front of the of the cathedral with just huge smoke all over the place. And these were the mind. Sharman said, now come to take over the place of the church which had been built on an ancient Mayan worship center. So then the and will come back and they would go to the with the shamans inside the church between the rows where they had special kind of forage alters, have sand in them and bringing flowers and high, don't speak mine, but they were all doing their worship things and I come, I never forgotten as one of those of Romano Pagan moments. Yeah. You could literally see the layers of culture. Exactly. Exactly. And so when who finished the trip, I got back to DC and we were gone for two weeks and at that point I heard that not only had kennedy been killed on that day, the 22nd, but all this, Huxley had gone out under an LSD injection. 

09:03 That's where you get the doors of perception and the doors were based on an LSD. Well name is another story. And a CS Lewis had died all three now because in my mind, in those days I was not a naturalist or materialist philosophically it was a supernatural. I still am a, just shook me because here's the three guys and boom, they're all dead at the same day. Well, so that I'm marinating that stuff and I think at that time all this country was marinated and he says, gold. The fifties were an abnormal decade. They were just like, you know, the wars are over, the depressions over. We're going to do the best where our kids, it's going to be this golden era. I spent the fifties in southern California, which was really that, and suddenly all that normalcy Eisenhower's presidency was coming to an end and then in February the Beatles came for their first trip and rock and roll sex drugs and rock and roll came to the United States and then we launched into the sixties. 

10:07 In the sixties, really were a renewal of the twenties, the roaring twenties, which had gotten interrupted by the depression and the Second World War. So tell me how, how so this hinge, his turned it's turned back to is the roaring twenties where things were prosperous. Well, what I'm saying is that after World War One, there was no in this country, but in Europe a huge disillusionment set in and people were thrusting. There was a question about meanings in life. They have stressed themselves into alcohol, dance, all kinds of, you know, activity. So the became the roaring twenties for a certain segment of that, that that same kind of frustration. Well, when you, when you lose a sense of meaning in life with centering point for yourself, if you allow yourself to think that you've started to get bored, if you have no meanings, that no drive, so you seek stimulation and so you're looking at, I don't care whether it's your career or here become a sex addict or you have become a druggie or you pursue entertainment or spectator sport. 

11:16 Wherever you choose, you're trying to find meaning in your life and you split. You need stimulation. Well, the trouble is that as soon as you start following those things long enough, the stimulation levels no longer suffice. They have to be increased and so you're constantly upping the ante. It's like in the Roman, the Roman circus, they start off with, just got editorial combat, and then eventually they had mass slaughterers and dogs trained dogs trained to rape women. I mean, it was just a terrible evil period. Well, the same thing's happening in America today, you know, look at the movies. These every now we have an obligate dory sex scene and we have high body count. Lot of blood is really popular too. All that is because we need increased stimulation. Nine Neil Postman, professor data in what you wrote a book called amusing ourselves to death. Probably one the best books on contemporary America period. And that's what we're doing because you don't have meaning. 

12:13 So when this hinge turned to drugs and sex and rock and roll, that disillusionment, isn't there also kind of a movement towards idealisms? Yes. The idea of looking for it and. Yes, 

12:28 but let me say, first of all, you will also lost trust in the institutions because suddenly there's something really wrong here. And so people looking for answers looking for you. Have you got in twenties, you had peace movements. He had all kinds of the same thing you had. You had idealism at the same time, but you know what the beat started out thinking, you know, certain raising certain issues in the 50. So this stuff was already happening. And hippies essentially, we're just, they got, they just got lost in sex and drugs, but that doesn't mean there were people that were also very, very concerned about the corruption in government, the war, I mean, whereas now we're moving into the Vietnam war, which is a whole nother story. Uh, so yeah, you have both things going on. And I went to some things in the mid, well, even intellectually, late seventies, early seventies were people who were very much for peace, love and whatnot. We're also just in into random sexuality. I mean it was just, you know, there was. So it was a mixed bag. 

13:26 Well, the era of the Kinsey report where suddenly sexuality could be talked about and. 

13:31 Well, it started earlier with Freud, Freud and gotten this whole framework begun. So you had Kinsey and you had hugh Hefner, uh, you had. Well, if you're looking like out, maslow said self actualization as for some people self actualization with sexuality. I mean it depends on what you mean. 

13:48 Joe was trying to remember the Maslov's hierarchy is the hierarchy of needs 

13:53 as you move up from satisfying your most basic physical needs. Acceptance and you move up to eventually do what he called self actualization when you become that of course in his mind, sort of a cab, a mistake in the same way that all of this actually was. 

14:06 So let's get back to your own life and career after you returned from this trip to Washington DC. That must've been very, very different after Kennedy's staff. What, what happened with you personally as a. I know I have before me a very long resume of varied sorts of things, but just tell us how it unfolded starting from that point. Well, I came back, 

14:31 um, and uh, I was at that time, well when I started out it was a management intern and so they rotate you through different things within the department. So I had been in the opposite of management planning on the office of Congressional Liaison, the Office of public information. I used to go around speaking at colleges about foreign aid a. and um, finally I was on the Sudan desk and which led me to a lifelong study of Islam. I've been to the Islamic center in Washington dc back in the sixties. I probably have 180 more books on Islam in my library, and then I became a special assistant to the assistant administrator for African affairs. How's that for a bureaucratic title? And it was at that point, by the time we got into late 64, one of the things that I didn't know, this is not a story usually go on the talked about in public, but John F Kennedy decided that the why should the Federal Reserve System, I'll be allowed to create money and charge the American taxpayer interests for it when the US government could create the money. 

15:42 And so he was actually starting some silver certificate. So he alienated the Federal Reserve and the Federal Reserve, as people may know, is not fully public. It's a privately owned banking system with a kind of an overlay of government. His brother over injustice, uh, in contrast to the admonitions of their father, Joseph Kennedy said he said he would go after the mob and he did. And of course his father knew the all very well because he'd made his most of his fortune smuggling booze and drugs. And so, uh, so yeah, anyway, the mob and then after the, after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, which in which the air cover was withheld, and another story, uh, Kenny was furious with the ca was going to break it into bits and pieces. So jfk in his brother together had alienated the high finance community. They had alienated the mob and they hadn't alienated the CIA. 

16:41 And then he died by one person shooting him. I'll leave it at that. Um, so at that time, the CIA wanted the, all the foreign affairs community agencies, state aid, US Information Agency, arms control and disarmament to be building computer systems that were compatible because of the new IBM threesixty fifties tape decks rolling around and punch cards. But they wanted to have a compatible information wise and so who would see what and how it can be exchanged. And so the National Security Council, which is over in the old executive office building as well as what was then called the bureau of the budget now called office of management budget. We're jointly oversaw an inter agency task force in each of these agencies. Had to provide a team to work together on creating this new information system. Was called foreign affairs information management effort, f a I, m e fame. And so the man that was heading it I was at was just free regularly been station chief at Intel Aviv and the second fellow from Costa Rica. 

17:54 Um, and they were looking for a, um, kind of the key executive guy. Well, I went in those days, I was an up and comer and I was selected to be honest so far. I spent two years involved in that and that network of people. And uh, I came back to aid and was chief of information systems development to put this stuff into place. Well, while I was there, they were working on the agency thing. A book came out, um, published by one of the leading scholars at Georgetown University, a man by the name of Carroll Quigley, Carroll Quigley. I'm his is a name that some people might recognize. He had. Bill Clinton was going to Georgetown at the time and he learned from Carroll Quigley how the game is played because Garrett Kale crinkly wrote a book called tragedy and hope 1300 page tome came out in 1966 and it was designed for specialized libraries and people involved in those circles. 

18:56 He had been allowed into the archives of the center of cal. I'm sorry, the Council for foreign relations and it talks very much about how the game is played between the Anglo American establishment, which is the title of a book that he had published posthumously when he died in the seventies. Didn't come out until the eighties, which pretty much talks about how the linkages between the American elites in the Anglo elites had been working since the turn of the last century. And so my boss said, you got to read this book. So I read the book and in my idealistic democratic socialist illusions from Berkeley evaporated on that set of days. And then I read another book by Hyatt called the road to serfdom. And I began to realize that my ideal of how of helping people and going back and certainly could not good not function in the foreign affairs establishment, and it's to unpack that a little because what was it in this tone, as you call it, that caused you to completely reverse or change course. 

20:06 To do that, I have to go back in time. This is a complicated. This is why. This is how the world works. It really works. The and what I'm about to say is not something about quote Jewish bankers. It's about a small segment of people, some of whom were Jewish and some of whom are not. This is not a set of antisemitic remarks, but the Rothschild's in Great Britain who helped fund Cecil Rhodes, is that name registered with Cecil Rhodes scholar wrote, Cecil Rhodes is demand that is essentially orchestrated the capturing of the golden diamond mines of South Africa by butchering Dutch bores and taking it over as the colony for the Great Britain that was funded by Rothchild. I mean, I gave them the initial capital. So when that's done, Cecil Rhodes hugely and he's an Anglo imperialist. The two of them got together and they created something called the roundtable movement is all documented. 

21:07 You can find this in history. And the round table movement was the goal of expanding the, the British empire around the world, um, and particularly spelling the Commonwealth but beyond. And they would create institutions that would move them in that direction. So one of the pieces of that program was the creational Rhodes scholars because we bring bright young men from all over the Commonwealth plus us to Oxford once a year and they would get vetted, trained and go back out and hopefully they would come up with, you know, essentially global worldview orientation the same that the, that the Rochdale rock roads operation had had a man named milner who actually ran the operation, Albert Miller. So the Rhodes scholars, or a place where the elites evaluate certain people to see who's got the best possibilities for the future. So the other thing is that right after the second rule, first world war, they created what was called the Royal Institute of International Sears in London, which is Chatham House and the Council on foreign relations in this country, those are sister organizations for the, the process of pushing foreign policy on their different governments. 

22:22 Also be just before that in 19, I'm sorry, 18, 84, 18, 84, a group of people created the Fabian Society. Fabian Society fluted such people as Hg Wells, Bernard Shaw, the Webs, Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, and the rothschilds helped to fund it. Um, and then as you get into the twenties and thirties, by the way, George Orwell, who got to really know these people finally says, you, you're idealistic notion of a parliament. Man's going gonna work. It's gonna wind up being a totalitarian, awful dictatorship. And he wrote a book, as you may know, title 1984. Why did he choose that year was the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Fabian Society because that's what he foresaw all the success of who he trained and was a student of his also saw certain problem and he thought what's going to happen and we're going to figure out how the elites are going to figure out how to essentially drug the people and program them. 

23:23 So He created a brave new world both based on thoughts about what happened as the Fabian Society moves forward. So when you read this as the young man, this caused you to say, wait a minute, this is not civics 101. This is something very, very different. And what I'm doing here is not necessarily serving the American people, my country, my heritage. This is serving something else. So what path did you take? I left. I left the government in 1970. Um, I had to clear my head. I wound up with a divorce. My wife took our two sentence to Washington state and I went to Montana and punch cattle with my uncle's cattle ranch. Really cleared my head riding fence, you know, Baling Hay. I'm moving cows. I love riding horses. Uh, chinking log cabins of blowing beaver dams, riding horse, uh, under blue sky and just thinking about a lot of things, doing a lot of reading at night when I wasn't exhausted. 

24:31 Bucking Hay is one of the hardest job I've ever had. We spent two weeks getting the hey. And I was exhausted every night. So how long were you in Montana? I was just about a year and then I did some traveling and reading and I decided to move up to Washington state where my wife had ex wife had gone with our two sons. I can be closer to them. Got a job as a teaching assistant at Peninsula college and taught there and then had a contract with Antioch University in Seattle. I taught there. I couldn't stand that faculty lounge after a few years. Why? What was wrong with the faculty? That was the only person with a conservative leanings. And so how do you differ? Conservative at this point? Is that the ridiculous? It'd be no one. I don't. I don't want to conserve an awful lot of institutions and those are just bad labels. 

25:19 I think for me, I would. I am at this point wherever reactionary. I think in terms of either really, really believed the US Constitution has a lot of good things in it. I really do believe in the first amendment. I really do believe in the second amendment and these days those things are. It's threadbare. The constitution at this point is the threadbare document that we're a nation of men more than a nation of laws at this point, so I. I'm much more into DC, I believe. I believe in government. I'm not an anarchist, but I do believe more incentive, decentralized government, not in favor of a world government at all because I've seen how bad a single centralized government can do and how you know how difficult it is for somebody living in Ultima, for example, to influence what's actually happening in Washington DC. Imagine the entire world trying to influence wherever the world government headquarters is. 

26:14 Many different cultures and different levels and so penetrating, but so you are unhappy as a faculty member. And then tell us how the rest of your career unfolded. Well, I, uh, I'm, I'm pretty good economist. I was teaching economics and reasonably good with investments so that will become a registered investment advisor. And I did that and became, worked with a company called Laney advisors. I worked for a few years that I didn't like sales particularly to people when, if a product that you really thought through failed and then they will be hurt. And I had. That was hard for me. So one day I was working with a four on a pension plan with one of Microsoft's subcontractors. They had figured out how to repair Sun microsystem computers, which macros Microsoft uses, but the sun microsystems computer at the time. Well as with excellent computer, they didn't know how to repair stuff. 

27:09 They couldn't get turnaround time so that their users who have real problems. So these guys figured out how to do turnaround time and suddenly they had contracts all over the place to repair and replace. And I will not bill gates sign them up. And so you suddenly to get to really computer read guys, computer geeks said suddenly had a staff of 50 people and they know what, how to really manage them either when they talking to sterling, that president about, um, the, uh, the pension plan. And, and I noticed on his desk was like your table. He was like, aircraft carrier. That's what the glass top and little yellow post it notes all over the desk. I said, sterling, what's that? He said, those are my to do lists. And I said, well, why? And he said, well, I've got this problem that. And I saw, I said, well, but this problem, had you thought of this, had you thought of that? 

27:56 And he looked at me after a few times back and forth. He says, Dick, how do you know about that? You're, you're a financial guy. Said, well, I spent 10 years doing systems analysis and management studies in the, in the foreign affairs community. I said, that's how I do that. He said, could you come down and help me? I said, I lived in Port Angeles. And I was down over where Microsoft is. I said, no. I said, I. I said, you couldn't pay me enough. He said, how much would that be? And this is 1981, you know? I said, Oh, 125 an hour. Which I thought was pretty high. It's can you start next week? I said, plus 10 percent overhead. 

28:36 And so I, we did a, I think he was pleased. We did a lot of changes there. He was a member of the Ypo young president's organization and they go to meetings, they talk with each other and he, he said, you know, this guy vic, poorly is due to do so. It suddenly I had, I had an instant practice in, in the Seattle area. Say You consult referred Matt Making Management. Yeah, we're in corporate in corporate settings and then I had a couple of nonprofits and then one of the nonprofits and the just, I'm not going to talk the names, but one of the nonprofits had a director on. It was a multimillionaire and they were looking for a management consultant and they're looking for from Booz Allen Hamilton and someone will reply, but the, my name, they said, well, we'll fly him down. They can afford it. So I flew down from Seattle Southern California and we, we got to talking and it was a good conversation and they hired me. 

29:39 And for 10 years essentially I worked for. And uh, so we did their finances and I wouldn't say I was there, come see Elliot conciliary, but I was something like that because I'm a good problem solver. I don't say that pride and I just am. Um, and so whether it was finance or how they run their foundation or any number of different tasks, even helping them buy a newspaper or a hotel. I mean, I wasn't the kind of guy. And in that, in that environment, I got to know, um, the philanthropic community pretty well and the end, the various things that they were contributing granted to. And then um, so I, I, and that brought me back to Washington dc because you're holding these think tanks in DC on the conservative libertarian conservative side of things. So I probably worked with most all of them over the, over the years as well as people in the state policy network. 

30:36 So how, how is Washington different from when you were there as a young man? You were different, but that's about the. Well, I think that the things are much more rigid now. There's what we really have. Well you've always had this, but what you have now, have you heard the concept of iron triangles? Okay. It was a political science concept. It's a very useful thing for thinking about DC. And one of the reasons why it doesn't change very well for every policy area. I don't care whether it's health education, environment, defense, go down the list. Wherever there's a department or an agency, there is an iron triangle. What's an iron triangle? It's a three sided thing. The first side is the bureaucrats that run this or operate the programs. The other side of it is the congressional committees in House and Senate that oversee that particular bureaucracy. Some of them are more involved than others, but so that and the third, the bottom one, the most important are the people that are either benefit or hurt by that 

31:44 bureaucracy, the programs. So for example, in the environmental thing, you'll have people that say that want to have say, let's say you're manufacturing solar panels, so you want to make sure there's a lot of objections to carbon carbon dioxide because more the more that's put down, the more solar panels going to here, so that's one group or the Defense Department. They want to have wars so the more military purchases are made, the better. So each of them have these triangles so that you at the bottom and they're revolving doors because the people in the staffing of the bureaucracies move over to become staff committee staff members or go to work for one of the people that are lobbying and paying money, and it's all within this triangle. It's called an iron triangle because it doesn't. It doesn't. Well, it's protected from the outside. Oh, this, you'll find this an interesting story. 

32:32 So when I was working with the interest with the, uh, my client, there was a Japanese businessman, part of Mitsubishi wouldn't have to get them to invest in a lot of money and he took me out to a Japanese restaurant. We'd get to know each other. One night he says to me, Oh victor, are you explain me American politics when I thought, oh dear, am I going to do that? Well I'll, I'll, I'll talk to him about iron triangles. And so I did what I just said a little more elaborate and he says, he looks at me. Same thing in Japan except different. We don't look at it from outside, call it iron triangles, we'll look at it from inside, call it Golden Triangle's because that way make all the gold. 

33:18 That's an interesting perception. Yeah. So, so, so what you have then is on the every four years you have a national election and so on the, on the left or the Democratic Left, you have a number of groups that are, you know, are more ideological, he oriented and they have certain program policies that they want on the right you have more ideologically oriented programs they want to have, right? And so the people are accommodating to these, the spectrum of organizations who the party is not a monolith is, you know, each of them is a collection of different interest groups. So you have, they have to balance this stuff out and so, so whether you're a democrat trying to appease the far left or you're republican trying to repeat the far right and still not alienate the middle is a challenge. That's what they do. So that's what we have. 

34:07 It's a national election every four years, once that's done, the National Party is disappeared back down to the one party that runs this country. And that is the Democratic or Republican Party, which in fact so far as verbal stuff outside is pretty much the same thing. One of the things that Carroll Quigley pointed out that the abuse had guys run council on foreign relations and other things said it's, it's a good thing to have two parties, but that they should be essentially the same and then the people can throw in a party out, throw the rascals out every few years and they think they're getting changed. So you're very cynical. No, no, that's realistic. 

34:42 Okay. Because it seems doesn't. It seems to me like a European system where you have a whole series of parties when you vote, you can choose for someone that lines up with you, but you're not sure what you're getting in the end. We're in the American system where you got to two poles, you're compromising, you know, you're voting for the lesser of two evils, but when you, you wrote, you get a pretty. You're pretty sure of what it is. You're getting what you're saying really they're the same. Well, 

35:11 on the margins you get differences. I mean obviously there are differences, but when on certain key things, but you're saying Kennedy for instance, is the same as trump? No, no. Well, there are similarities, but what I'm saying is he went up against the establishment. Trump went up against the establishment in different ways, but they're very different. One is what is a is is a harvard man, a high level of prep school. The other one's a military academy, Wharton Queens boy. I mean they're very different personalities, but in terms of what they have promised the country and internationally do so much because we get back to the iron triangles. Once the election's over for all the rhetoric, the iron triangles, they're more concerned with the bureaucrat and the congressman got to raise money. They spend most of their time raising money. They follow what amounts to what the the staffers tell them and what the bureaucrats Dylan with the lobbyists tell him. 

36:05 So all of that's happening within a particular area and so the guy that's focused primarily say on education is not going to be that concerned about what's going on over here and health. And so the guys that are over here on health and the who are over in the education say, well, I'll cut you this deal. I'll vote for your bill. If you vote for mine and that's how it works. So on your return to Washington, did you personally, did you feel like you are accomplishing things that were here will in some respects? Um, but you were talking about taking a blow torch to an iceberg. 

36:40 And how long did you stay at that? Twenty years from essentially a early nineties till about 2007. So that's a long time to be holding a blow torch. Yeah, it should make you do what you can do, what you can. And where are you now in life? I mean, I know you're here in the hill towns. Well, I like, I like when I was living in Port Angeles teaching there, I lived in the country. I had 12 acres. I had my little farm in my garden. And then you had, you said you have a garden now? Well, yeah, I know we didn't this year my wife had a quadruple bypass and so this year we didn't do guard but she'd been growing organic gardening and um, we um, particularly a garlic. She has a lot of thirst highlights of very high quality medicinal things. And she's very much into alternative medicine is less as am I, and then that sense in many ways. 

37:34 I mean in terms of what seemed to be liberal, left views. I mean I'm very much opposed to gmos. I'm very much in favor of organic foods are very much opposed, allopathic medicine that the rockefellers created for this country and contrast to alternative medicine. And so there's a lot of things where I'm a much more to the left. I am to the right, but when it comes to centralizing government, I'm definitely on the right pull. This half an hour has gone way fast. But are there any closing thoughts that you have for people? I wanted to mention that you have a facebook page that has a large number of followers and you post regularly on a variety of issues. I should tell you what happened. I, um, I have a son, I went to sons, but I have a son in Atlanta. He's the chief information officer for a large or Libre wholesaling company, but he's also a young scholar. 

38:26 I mean, for better, for worse, I think of myself as a scholar. I probably got over 10,000 volumes in my library that I built up since the fifties that them going through a shedding process now looking at the books that I'll never read again. That's hard to do. We're doing that too because you've got so much invested in that. Oh, absolutely. So, so I've been through. I have three categories. Absolutely. Keep absolutely throw away. I'll delay my decision on. Um, so mark came up to visit us briefly last early December and he said, dad, you know, you're 80, you're about to be 80 next year. He says, you, you have had more experiences in more sectors of this country than anybody he's ever heard of or met. And he says, and you have a unique view. And, and, and he, he largely agrees with me, but he says, but you know, but there's some things I think you're wrong. 

39:23 That's fine. And he says, but you need to share that. And I said, oh, how do I get. No, I'm, I'm happily married. I loved the country. I'm learning to get to know the community, you know, and I'm reading and whatever. And he says, no, you should get on facebook. And I said, I pleased, I've seen I, I looked at that, I did just puppies kittens and where I ate the dinner last night. And I said, that's not where I am. He said, dad, for 2 billion people on and they're not all into puppies and kittens and there's some very serious people trying to really understand what's going on. Something you said earlier, people now we're looking at alternatives for, for information. He says, why don't you get on facebook and just start sharing? And I said, no. He says, listen, I'll take some pictures, I'll take a picture of your library and I'll take a picture of you and we'll put it on facebook and you can just start posting stuff. 

40:10 So I thought about it for a couple of months in February, last February. Yes. You're like, okay. So I started posting stuff and um, and I haven't got about close to 1700 people now and some of them are. And I, I try to make sure it's very civil of anybody that gets into, you know, really nasty stuff. I don't defend them, but then I'm very big into A. I'm more of a question asker than a than a blunt assertion maker, so I really believe in civil dialogue. I don't know if you've seen my essay that I had posted it to go with as a Islam and contemporary public discourse. No, I looked through some of them, but I didn't read that. Well, that's an older one. I should send you the link. It will give you. It will give you a very real sense of where I'm coming from. If you, if you're interested, we get a sense of that in your letters to. You have a lot of philosophy in your letters. I taught philosophy of typed comparative religion, taught of logic and semantics. I taught Middle Eastern politics, money in banking. Uh, I've had a lot. I, 

41:16 that's an interesting way to share things and it's, that's happening across the world. You know, we used to have conversations with the people that we saw face to face and now there's this reach that you're 

41:28 absolutely right. You know, that there of the interesting things in the number of people asked me to friend them that are living in India, Pakistan, I mean I have people now in virtually every continent and some of them, I mean they only posted in their language but they read English. So I mean, it's fascinating. And so suddenly it's easy to become a citizen of the world in one sense while you're still being living in a particular nation. So yeah. No, so I, I'm, I'm thrilled that I've got some wonderful people that follow me and some are, and some of them really challenge. That's fine. Or you want that just as long as you're not being nasty about it. I mean someone starts using, it's stupid. And I said, oh, okay. I know that's made you feel good to use that homonyms, but why don't you tell me why, you know, or that's ridiculous. Well, could you tell me why? Well, I know you're wrong. Well, on what presuppositions are you starting for? Well, I use logic. Well, what's your starting premise? And most people don't think they just emote their impulse driven. 

42:33 Oh, well thank you for making us think this morning. I appreciate it and we'll 

42:39 keep keep publishing those letters. So I really appreciate the fact that you have published and because some of my friends who said, how do you get a a liberally oriented newspaper did publish your letters of all people. I said, well, she's this woman. Is that a jury? Yes, I very much or openminded person than most. 

42:57 Well, we really believe here at the enterprise that one of the problems that the nation is the polarization and the more different voices we can get both in print and on our podcast, the better informed we all are. 

43:11 So thank you know. Thank you for having me.

 
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