Hunter Biden

Welcome, welcome, welcome to armchair expert. I'm Dan Shepherd. I'm joined by Lily Padman. Hello. Today we have Hunter Bidenon, who is an author. He was a lawyer. He was a lobbyist. He is an artist and he's a recovery advocate. Obviously, he's the son of Joe Biden, the 46 president, and he has a book out now called Beautiful Things detailing his heroine journey through fucking hardcore addiction. And so this is a very addiction heavy episode. We try to minimize any political nature. I think this is the kind of story I love to hear about addiction. That's primarily what it is. So I hope everyone goes into it with an open mind because it's some incredibly honest, invulnerable, and powerful. I agree. Please enjoy Hunter Bidenon. [Music] Can you say seated? How are you, brother? Good. Me too. I'm really, really sorry. I'm late. You're bringing sugar? Yeah. Yeah. All right. Hey, Monica. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. Luckily, we had sugar in the raw. Otherwise, it was bringing out a bag of white powder. That's what a start for these two. Sugar in your coffee. I'm a little shocked. I'm going to be honest. I'm going to start with stereotypes. Yeah. I thought you were tougher than this. Oh, no. I got my few things. I got my nicotine a little bit. It's smoking. When I got clean, Melissa, my wife, she convinced me to go to this guy. What's his name? The hypnotist? Yeah. I don't know his name, but I know of him. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It was like bullshit. And it went to work. Yeah. And then like six months later, I don't know, it was like my first indictment or my second. I was like, I need some nicotine. He said he could get anybody off of anything. I was shocked. Have you seen this guy? He's out of a movie. He's got the worst two pay you've ever seen. He brings you into his garage that has all this brick-a-brack everywhere. You sit in a bark-a-launcher and he has a bottle of water. Lisa's I remember. Yeah. He's just talking to you about nicotine and cigarettes. And when you start and things like that, and all I remember, he just was doing this. There's never a moment where you're like you're under. At the very end, he comes and it's a three sessions. And at the last session, he said, that's it. You're done. Right. And I was done. That's crazy. How about the physical withdrawal? Not done. Do you didn't feel the craziness? No. Now he does it over three sessions. In like the first session, you're going to smoke half of what you smoke. Okay. Okay. Okay. Second session, you're only going to have two cigarettes a day. And then the third, you're done. And I was done. I mean, I was smoking since I was 17. I mean, like pack of marbles a day. When you were sober, probably a pack. Yeah. And when I wasn't. Yeah. Well, when I look back, I remember my epic hangovers. And at this point, it's hard to really know because I also would smoke like three packs of camel lights on nights that I partied. But if you're blowing lines, the cigarette never goes out. It's just one after another. And you wake up feeling horrendous. You're like, I don't I don't know how to unravel. Was it the alcohol? Was it the cocaine? Was it the insane amount of cigarettes? That's the whole problem. It's one way to combination of all. Yeah. That's kind of your position. I've heard you speak on this a bit. I think statistically, we would agree, right? I think the shocking number I heard you say is like you add up every single other known drug in the amount of deaths caused by alcohols, five backs, some total of every other drug, which I guess then you could try to parse out like what is the quantity aspect of the drug and then what's the qualitative aspect that's causing that destruction? Yeah. What do you think? I think it's both alcohol number one is so ubiquitous. But beyond it being ubiquitous, it's the only drug that impacts every organ of your body. And every pleasure center of your brain, if you're in stimulants, it's like the dopamine reactor. If you're into opiates, it's the opioid receptors. Exactly. Alcohol does all of them. And then you become truly physically dependent upon it, meaning that your body will shut down if you'd deny it the amount of alcohol that you've been putting in it and you'll go into seizures and die. And the only other drug is basically freeze dried alcohol is the pencils. And so from that perspective, and then you just look at the societal effect of it. And that part is the quantitative part. And the quantitative part being that it is so ubiquitous, the amount of deaths and destruction that alcohol causes in everything from car accidents to literally just people falling down the steps to people beating the hell out of their partners or the kids or the things like that. Yeah, man, you remind me of how insanely hard alcohol was to quit in that you're never more than a couple hundred feet from alcohol. If you're in LA or generally anywhere I went anywhere, you're always within a couple hundred feet of this thing you're trying your hardest to never consume again. It's sometimes your own home. Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah, if you have a partner who does it normally. Yeah, I kind of almost forget how insurmountable that first section was of just like how will I ever begin to ignore the amount of alcohol I just see all the time everywhere I go gracefully. I've not walked in in 23, 22 years. I haven't walked into a lot of rooms and saw bowls of cocaine. No, exactly. And if I saw bowls of cocaine every hundred feet crack either. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Or heroin or opias for that matter or other synthetic opias. Weed now. It'll be interesting to see what the kind of long term result of it'll all be. I'm generally in favor of it being legalized or fully in favor, but it is becoming ubiquitous now. Oh, me too. By the way, I'm not for provision. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It is what it is. Yeah, I would rather see legalization of everything before it's just a much more honest approach. And I don't know about it. Everything but I've fully thought it through. I used to think that when I was younger. Crack at your 7-11. Yeah, I tried their San Francisco and you can see it. But that's the thing. By the way, the reason I talk about crack the way that I talk about crack is because it comes with such a stigma and it's so shocking to people. And I don't say it to shock people. Joe, we're going to do this whole thing where, oh my god, you should hear him talk about crack. It's like a lost lover. Well, it's just honest. And I don't mean to talk about it that way. And I want to always make it clear, it is actually that dangerous. And the other thing about crack for me is this idea that there's this process and it's a whole different thing. And it's kind of like the secret. It's not. It had bad branding. I mean, crack sounds. Yeah, you're already it sounds fucking gross. Yeah. Crack exactly. If it were called taint cocaine. It's a Jason. It's a tape cocaine. Well, it's because there's also some racism in the Mexican show. Well, there's a huge amount of racism. That's some. Yeah. Yeah. The whole thing. When I was in law school, my senior political writing is like your thesis that you write. Yeah, that's what I wrote about. I wrote about the disparity in sentencing. It was related to crack, which the Obama administration changed and then the Biden administration kind of rid of all together. Yeah, this arbitrary distinction legally. The response to it was understandable in retrospect, and that it kind of came and it just tore apart communities and record speed and the level of violence. But the level of violence always is never necessarily associated with use. The level of violence is all around the trade. And I would say to people, just go watch the fucking wire. It had a astounding effect on so many communities. And the reason that I am so open about it, number one, is just because you've had probably the same experience. I don't know of anybody who hasn't been impacted by addiction in their lives. Yeah. One way or another. The thing is though, as much as we talk about it, people don't talk about it. And it's really hard for non-act to understand. I want to express an overarching goal I have for talking to you, which is I try my hardest to keep the show apolitical. I want Republicans to feel as welcome listening to this show as I do Democrats. I think the things I'm interested in talking about. I hope everyone would get to hear about addiction, about trauma, about all these things. So my goal is to keep it as apolitical. It's possible, but I'm going to break it right now to just say there's only been a single moment that I thought Trump potentially lost his momentum with his base. And it was the one moment he tried to come after your dad about your addiction. You could just feel in that audience. Everyone's like, oh no, you're talking about my son. You're talking about my brother-in-law. You're talking about my mom. That one didn't work. I just think it's so pervasive and everyone's had the heartbreak of it. I so few people are fully insulated from it that I just thought, wow, weirdly of all these things, that's the thing I think cut through the sharpest. Well, your intuition or insight into that is actually really spot on, which is interesting because that's what the whole attack on me initially was all about, was all of the salacious pictures that they stole and cobbled together from, I don't know, how many different devices. I did that there was like one laptop that somebody had. It's just bullshit. Your whole life was a fucking train wreck, right? There was evidence. It's all over the train wreckage. By the way, but like you, not my whole life, three years of extreme addiction is, you know, I mean, you look at those pictures and 90% of them are somebody taking a picture of me. But regardless, then what they did is they conflated two things. One that was completely untrue with one that was completely true. I was a crackhead. The thing that wasn't true was that I was taking bribes from like Ukrainians and Chinese and was involved. But if you can get somebody, you know, there's this thing called eliminationist rhetoric. Rachel Maddo has talked about it. And originally was perfected by the Nazis, but then Putin picked it up in the early 2000s in which if they can get just 5% of the people to believe that you're a pedophile or a crackhead, attach like the worst thing that you can say somebody. The ability to get 30% of the people to believe that you're taking bribes is that much easier. Well, and then we're circling back to the far-reaching tentacles of labeling crack, crack, the kind of racial connotations, the now new heights of shame reached by the addict. If you're cocaine addict, you're in great company. You're with Sigmund Freud for pizza. You're with luminaries and Nobel Peace Prize winners. When you're a crack addict, your group is totally different. And so you're already juggling the shame of an addiction. And then you add on this other factor, which is like, "Oh no, it's known. I'm full exclusion of my community." This is the one thing that, no, I am the bottom of the barrel. Even among addicts, I am the shittiest of the shitty. So yes, if we establish you as a crackhead, then really your reputation's gone. So all things are conceivable at that point because we've already designated crackheads as being zombies who are the worst of the worst. So it all works in concert beautifully, actually. To be clear, I handed it all to them on a silver platter because I was a crackhead. And so my thing now is, yeah. Yeah, so what? What are you going to say about me? What are you going to ask me? Like I just did "Kind of Sones." And she, this is to me for six years. The line that she used over and over again was degenerate crackheads for her son. You know, I've been sober for seven years on June 1st. Congratulations. And clean it sober on not that I find any distinction between the two, but she didn't know that. She did not know that. No, she just assumed that I was doing coke, or doing crack because what about the bag of cocaine that was found in the White House? And you realize that for six years, the New York Post ran a picture of me. I mean, I was on the cover of the New York Post more than anybody in the history of the newspaper. No kidding. In one year period of time, going back to like Alexander Hamilton. And I was there number one story. They were writing one and a half stories about me on average a day for like a year. And then it went to one story every two days for the next five. And each one of those stories was awful to begin with, but it always included a picture of me with a pipe in my mouth, or in a motel room with a woman, like a degenerate crack addict. And so why wouldn't people think? They'll use like, I'm shocked by how many people are shocked when I say seven years. Well, it depends on those people. It can count me in that category. Of course, you're permeating. I don't even follow a lot of that stuff. I don't follow the New York Post, but you're permeating all this during the election. I'm aware of the fact that you're an addict. There's not a press release that you got sober. There's no big headline that you got sober. I don't know till I think I see you on Channel Five. That was the first time I had seen you post all of that. Or I was like, oh wow, this dude's talking about it, this is rad. He's sober. And what a fucking story. And my kind of stories, the story, right? Exactly. So let's go through it. I guess let's start in Wilmington, Delaware. In 1970, you arrived. You arrived one year old brother on the scene, yeah? But how much older is he then? A year in a day. Oh, yeah. You guys really now buy a rich twin. Yeah, exactly, that's right. I guess technically we missed it by a day. Joe was not waiting. Yeah. We wanted a family. That my sister was born, we're 16 months apart, really soon after. Oh, your mother, man, three children under two and a half or something, that's bonkers. Yeah. I would imagine for you, it's really hard to know what to assume people know about you and what people don't because you're caught in the center of you. I think people vaguely know there was a tragedy. I think a lot of people don't know. I agree. Many vaguely just like, oh, yeah, Joe Biden went through hell when he first became a center. I know he lost some family members, basically, right? But yeah, December 18, 1972, what's happening? Go back. My dad was 29 and he decided that he was going to run for senate against this guy named Caleb Bugs, two term governor and I'd take it the time he was three term senator and this incredibly liked incumbent and my dad ran this campaign in Delaware, what you could do at the time in which he was able to reach almost every single voter by literally just key my aunt, my uncles, my grandparents, and my mom more than anybody. Canvas the whole state. Yeah, yeah. For real. How many people lived in Delaware at that point, you know? I bet you like 600,000. Oh, wow. You could conceivably go meet everyone. They put a piece of literature on everyone's doorstep, every home in the state of Delaware. What was his novel offering that people were like, yeah, remember 1970, you know, you had a Nixon landslide also and so he talked about civil rights and he talked about the environment and he talked about just new leadership and he won by a razor thin margin, but he won and it was a shock to everyone. I don't think it was a shock to my mom. Where did that put him historically as age, the youngest ever to win an election. So he couldn't take the oath of office until he turned 30. You can win, but you can't take the oath of office until you turn 30. President's 35. President's 35. And the House representative's 25. So anyway, he wins and he goes to DC for the day to interview potential staffers. And my mom was supposed to go down because they just bought a house with us and she decided to delay it a day because she wanted to buy a Christmas tree that was December 18th because we were celebrating Christmas in Delaware, I guess. And she was pulling on from an intersection of stop signs, this is a big hill in a tractor trailer slammed in the side. It was me, my brother and our dog and my sister and my mother and Bo and I survived, but just barely we were trapped in the car, but my sister and my mom were killed. Pretty instantly. Yeah, I imagine. I believe about to turn three, three months away from three exactly. I was almost three, but I was almost four. Do you have any, I mean, I can imagine you have any memory of the exact, of the accident yourself? No. I have memories. You probably know this. It's very rare. They say like 10 or 15% of people have memories before the age of seven or five or something like that. I believe I do. Yeah. But I don't know if it's because so many people have told me in photographs, but trauma might add a different element to it. Oh, I think so. Yeah. And so I choose to believe that I actually have the memories, like the memory of my mom carrying around. They used to carry this around like picnic baskets. And so do we have relevant, whether you remember, not like we had Gobermote on, right? It's like Gobermote was abandoned by his mother for a couple months. I love him. He's the greatest. He doesn't remember that, but all of his circuitry remembers that. It said his arousal setting at that moment. Exactly. And by the way, I used to deny myself the idea that the accident and the trauma of it and the loss of my mother and my sister being in the car, all of that had any impact on any thing in my life. I was so surrounded by love and the immediate aftermath of that and then going forward. Like my dad, I don't give a shit when anybody thinks about him politically. My dad is literally the best dad in the entire world. He's even better grandfather, which pisses me off, but he's the best dad in the world. Also, your aunt said uncles moved into the house, my aunt moved into the house, my Aunt Vowrie, and my uncle Jimmy converted the garage into an apartment. And my uncle Frankie was in and out and my grandparents on both sides. We spent every summer up in the figure lakes up in like a wasco with the hunters who I'm named after. I probably spent at least two nights a week at my grandparents, what we call mom and dad, a bydance every week until I graduated high school. Wow. And on top of that, because of the notoriety of the thing, an entire state, which is a small state. It was Paul Adolfo. Adolfo and you guys. And so everywhere we went, we had more aunts and uncles than anybody deserves and still do. And I kind of always denied the idea, you're like, I'm fine. Well, it probably would have felt in grateful exactly the amount of love. And then my mom came along. My mom now. Holdering on. Seven. Seven. Yeah. I think seven, seven, eight. It's also relevant. Sabot received a ton of broken bones, right? Yeah. He was in a, basically like a attraction of the body cast for a long time. But you had a fractured skull and brain damage. Yeah. Yeah. Oh my gosh. No. Like, how could it not impact me? That brain. But you nailed it. I felt guilty thinking that my life was anything but this bundle of love. Did you guys do a lot of debriefing about it or processing it? Not the accident itself. But we talked about my mother and still do, incessantly. Cheating pretend. Did not pretend in any way that she did not exist, including my mom. But my mom became honored the memory of my mother in a very real way. I mean, I talked to my aunts and uncles about it. To this day about how, by all accounts, and obviously, I'm biased, my mother was an extraordinary human being. Everyone will tell you that my dad got elected at the age of 29 for one reason. It was because of my mother. So you're right up until Georgetown, you're at a private school, a Catholic, maybe a Jesuit school? No, it's not Jesuit. It was Norbertine. But I started off. My aunt Val was a teacher at the Wilmington Front School. So a little Quaker School in Delaware. It was great. I went there until ninth grade and my dad had gone. to Archmir, which is a little Catholic school on the border of PA and Delaware. And I played football and I decided to go because my brother had gone there, which was probably a mistake. But I was just, I'm much more seated for the Quaker ethic than I am to the Norbertine Catholic school, but I have great friends there. How were you and Beau different? We were inseparable and we fought like brothers fight, but no one else could fight my brother without me or somebody do something to me without my brother standing in the right way. My brother would kick my ass, then go beat up the bully a minute later. But by the way, when I was more evenly matched, I know that I was much more prognosis than he was. But the difference between us is that Beau was the extrovert. And also he had a confidence that was just immediate. You can ask anybody. Beau was an extraordinary human being. And I mean, everybody called him the sheriff. He never drank. He was always the guy that drove the car. He was always the one that was, you know, cutting people off when they're about to do something stupid. Yeah, he was like that from the time he was eight years old. And I loved drawing and I loved poetry and I loved sports, but I also loved playing with my army man by myself in my room. You were sensitive. You were sensitive. I was much, much, much more sensitive. Attacks generally are. Yeah, that's part of our. Yeah, because we're not stupid. That's what I always say. But that was the difference between us. He was the constant presence in my life and only the most beautiful way that I can articulate you. Yeah. You go to Georgetown, you get a history degree where you always set on going to law school. Mm-hmm. How did you decide that? So when I was at Georgetown, the best part about Georgetown was is that I got to meet these really incredibly fascinating young Jesuit priests that were very much a part of campus life, at least back then. I met a guy named Ted Dziak who had started a thing called the Jesuit International Volunteer Corps. It's basically like a Peace Corps, but it is done under the auspices of the Jesuit community, but it's non-equipmentical. You don't go out and proselytize or anything. You're trying to convert people. No, and you go out if you're a Methodist, it's just public service. They had a beach head in Belize in Nepal and Micronesia at the time. We started a thing called the Jesuit International Volunteer Summer Program in Belize. Because of that, I was really involved also in a thing called the Center for Immigration Policy and RepuGee Assistance. There was another Jesuit there that ran that. He was one of the OG RepuGee and immigrant advocates in the country. I was involved in that. I decided that I was going to do the Peace Corps, and another guy named all these people, and nobody does. Father Watson, Bill Watson. He said, "Why are you going abroad?" Join JBC, which is a domestic version of the Peace Corps. One about Portland, exactly. Because he was from Portland, which, by the way, was the greatest thing ever, because this was 1992. It's just the coolest place in the world. Coffee cigarettes, grunts. Yeah, exactly. I sat in Powell's bookstore and read all the beat poets. You had an endless cup of coffee and three packs of cigarettes, and you live with other volunteers. You make 80 bucks a month. That's all you get. You pull your money together for groceries, but you're riding the bus, and you're working in the community, and you're living in the community that you work in, which was me and the basement of a church, figuring out how to get people food or get their lights turned back on, or get the heat turned back on in winter. It was the greatest thing ever. Then you met your first wife there? Yes, exactly. She was a volunteer also. Then we certainly after that had Naomi. We got married. I went to law school. I did my first year at Georgetown. You were married with a kid at 23, right? Exactly. I had Naomi on my last exam of my first semester of law school, and the professor let me out of the exam, so I took it after Christmas, and he gave me an A. I did really well, and I'd always wanted to go to Yale. I got rejected, and I didn't think I was necessarily going to get in, but I did really well and got into Yale as a transfer. They like, except like five to seven people a year. Sidebar, was it interesting to leave the bubble for the first time and go to Portland in that you grew up in Delaware, Dad's a senator. It's politics, politics, politics, and you go to Georgetown, which is in DC. Again, you must at that time think the entire country thinks about politics all the time and cares, and then you go to Portland and was it nice to get an outside perspective, and did you feel that happening? Yeah, not as much because I needed an outside perspective from the politics thing, but the difference with Boni was that we never grew up in that. We grew up in Delaware. My dad took the train back and forth every day, and so in the state of 600, which is like, I don't know, I take a million people or just 100 million people. Nobody knows my dad, and you guys kind of get this idea of Uncle Joe, they knew him as Joe. When I get pulled over by the cops, it wasn't, sorry, sir, it was like, I can't wait till I see your dad, he's going to kick your ass. You know what I mean? That was our existence. When I went to Georgetown, that was a little bit different, but still not overwhelming. It's not like anybody knew who I was by the way that people on the street know who I am now. So when I went to Portland, though, you're absolutely right. I don't know what you think about the addiction thing, but for me now in retrospect, particularly this time, this last seven years, in which I had to kind of make a choice, the ultimate choice to live or die, so many of the decisions that I made in my life that had really horrible consequences were all based in fear, fear of judgment, fear of sticking out, fear of being found out, fear of shown truly who you are. But when I was in Portland, I could be the guy that was sitting and reading Ginsburg and the Paris Review. Make it launch. Who counts exactly while I was making 80 bucks a month and not giving a shit. Can you think at this age, so if I do it, it's like, there's some really memorable moments with using one is the very first time I decided to drink some beers out of the fridge. My dad was a recovering addict, so I was never going to do it. Then one day I was like, no, I'm going to do it. I'm going to find out my own. And I do remember having like three beers out of the fridge and literally thinking, oh, fuck, this is the feeling I've been craving and couldn't articulate. I don't know. I can't compare it to non addicts, but just immediately I was like, this is a magic 100%. I know exactly where I was. I know exactly what happened. I was at a adult party with my brother. I picked up a champagne glass, went underneath a table with a tablecloth over it, dragged a glass and thought to myself, oh my God, this is the answer to everything. Oh, yeah, truly. Because then I left underneath the table and I danced with everybody and I was happy. And I didn't continue to drink all the trolls clipped this stuff. I wasn't drinking at the age of eight, but I remember that experience. You know, when people say, why did you do it? Because it worked. Well, yeah, it's a medicine that works. It works like that. And then you find something works even better. I played football. So, you know, during the football season, none of us would drink kind of. And it's what we did. It's what we did on the weekends. Yeah. What are you going to do? Be the one person not doing it? It's a hard thing to ask. You know, it's time. I really drank after I was eight. I remember what it was. Exactly. And talk about regulating emotion is a friend of mine had taken his parents' car with another friend of mine. They had a couple of beers or whatever. And it was speeding down one of these backroads in Delaware and ran into a tree and she died instantly. Talk about the wrong response to that. The wrong response to that was he was my best friend at the time is that we stole beers in the back of his house. And I remember the enormous guilt. I don't think I've ever told this story. I remember my dad picking me up from his house the morning after we'd between us drank a 12 pack, I guess, or whatever. You know, you're 15 years old and going to mass. We'd go to mass every Sunday. That St. Joe's on the brandy wine, little Catholic church, and having to leave and tell my dad, I think I had the flu and thrown up outside. And I think it was less a response to the alcohol than it was to the normity of the guilt that I had just like our friend, the consequences for him, for what happened were enormous. And the guilt of that. And as you know, guilt is appropriate, but the thing that is not is the shame. So then what's the only thing that you know your brain is telling you works so that you don't have to feel that shame and anxiety over that shame or the thing that you're not telling somebody, oh, I know. I have another drink. Yeah. So that was like a 15. And then it's a cycle. So when I get to Portland, I've made it through college. I actually did pretty well. Not without October fest in Berlin, 2010 for Mont got in a street fight and somebody curved me and broke every tooth out of my body. Oh my God. Dumped on my leg on the curb and broke my leg in three places. I was in a cast for six months. And you know, I mean, oh, it was awful. But that didn't stop me. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't stop it. So when I get to Portland, there's this whole new me, no expectations. Nobody that knows all of the small town or the small college kind of group and it's filled with purpose. Yeah. It was incredibly promising. And so I drank, and obviously to excess, I don't know what you're drinking was like, but I wasn't a blackout drunk. Unfortunately, I really wish I blacked out because I could go and go and go. Yeah. The bill never came do at that age. No. And the truth to the matter is, it's because I wasn't engaging in anything in which the bill came do. We were going to nickel beers at knob hill in Portland and play We didn't have any money on like a cheque, yeah. Stay tuned for more armchair expert if you dare. We are supported by all state. Checking all state first could save you hundreds on car insurance. Not checking that your keys are actually in your hand before you close the car door. Have you ever stood in a parking lot full of sun staring at your keys sitting right there on the seat four inches away and completely useless to you? It's a very specific kind of humbling. Yeah. Everything first is a good idea. So check all state first for an auto quote. It could save you hundreds and for fast reliable help when you need it, add an all state roadside plan today. You're in good hands with all state potential savings very insurance and roadside assistance plans are subject to terms conditions and availability insurance provided by all state North American insurance company Northbrook Illinois roadside assistance plans provided by all state motor club incorporated in all state affiliate. When's the first time it occurs to you? I think this is like for the lay person, there's these kind of stereotypes that are true and not true, which is first of all, this notion of like a bottom, which is like, well, there's not any bottom. I have like 30. I always say bottom is your dead, maybe in jail, if you're lucky. But just that moment, you go, oh, I should have died last night or I should have died over the last four days. This is life or death. That's a bottom. Yeah. And you go, are we going to keep going? And often you keep going, even though you're right. You find a new bottom. When do you start recognizing? I do this differently than people and probably I'll have to quit at some point. When I was 29, I start to realize my pattern of drinking was unlike anyone, not anyone, because you find your group, you know what I mean? But even among those heavy drinkers, I would still be going at 6 in the morning, then like what are you guys doing? And then when I was 33, my wife at the time said, like, you need to slow it down. Were you accumulating any records? Had you gotten DUIs? No. No. You were keeping it up pretty? Yeah. And I, you know, I built my own law firm. I graduated from Yale. It did really well from law school. And I was a senior executive vice president at a major bank when I got out of law school. And then I went to work for the Clinton administration. You're a lot more lean on. Yeah. You're doing well. You're getting gigs that other people aren't getting. You're able to shore up the plummeting self-esteem from the addiction with these external things. And I had three kids by the time. Well, right. But were you also thinking that maybe it's a part of your success? Like I could see you kind of at anyone being sort of like, well, this is part of the whole recipe. I do this and I'm successful and it's a whole identity. It becomes a part of your identity. Yeah. Definitely. And what I always say when people come to me and I love it because I said I don't have any answer for you other than getting clean and sober is easy. All you have to do is change everything. But it becomes a part of your identity and you think, what am I going to do? What am I going to do on a Thursday? What am I going to do on a vacation? What am I going to do on Tuesdays? Everything revolves around drinking. What am I going to do on vacation? When I celebrate. What am I going to do at five o'clock? Yeah. Yeah. At five o'clock. At five o'clock. At five o'clock. At five o'clock. At five o'clock. Yes. Yes. validation of being appropriately masculine was also some facet of it. I don't know what percentage, but it was in the mix. Was that happening for you to all of that fear of really being seen? You build up this persona of being tougher than anybody more capable than anybody because really, I'm just a sensitive dude who wants to entertain people and love my daughters. So it becomes a shield for everything and it becomes this identity. It is literally the polar opposite of your true self because I'm not that guy. I don't want to be that guy. And so doing a speech, doing anything public, I needed a drink to do it. I thought I needed a drink to do it. In the past life, if this was seven years ago for me, the idea that I wouldn't literally be a puddle on this couch, just if you put a microphone in front of my face and knowing that there's a camera in the room or that I had to get on a stage and do something. I'm so afraid of that. Now, unfortunately, for everyone, I don't. So I do it a lot more. But you're exactly right. So it becomes your persona and what happened with me is what I did was like, okay, I'm going to prove to everybody that this is not a problem. I'm not going to drink for January or I'm not going to do 30 days. And I'd get six and I'd break it and I'd say, oh, that was just one break. It was for the weekend. And then what ends up happening is is then you start hiding it. It becomes binge even more. And then I'd be like, hey, I got a trip that I got to do for business. And that business trip would be two days that would stretch into four that would stretch into five. And then it would come home. You're dead on arrival. I just laughing at how many times the game plan evolved so quickly. It's like, yeah, 30 days, and then just weekends, no, just Wednesdays and weekends. Just beard, not checked annuals. Well, not just a road so fucking quickly from the absences to like one day. We just hold on. It's also physical dependence. There is physical dependence that people take out of consideration. Yeah. It's like you can't actually just stop at any moment. You kind of have to like tide trade. And if you're an addict, you can't tide trade. Like it's this crazy. It's true. And nobody talks about it. Nobody talks about all of that in terms of the wellness piece of it and ways to be able to mitigate that. And how you should do it with somebody. You really do it. Understanding what you're doing. But regardless is that for me, it became so many promises made. So many promises broken around alcohol that Vogue is like, Hey, let's do something about this for real. Let's start to look. And I found crossroads in Antigua air Clapton's place. Oh, I sent my best friend Aaron there. It's great. By the way, it was for me at that time. And this is what is it 2003? So 22, 23 years ago. It's in Antigua, but it's not a resort. And you earn swimming privileges. Like Aaron would call me and be like, Oh, yeah, I did all by playing. I'm going to get the swim in the ocean today for two hours. Exactly. You get to go on the bus to go to the ocean to go swimming. It has a real community aspect. At least when I was there, they were really wonderful. And I get there with all of those preconceived notions of how my life is going to be so empty because I don't have alcohol in it anymore. And I was introduced to the program. All of a sudden, I was like, wait a second, this may work. And I got out. My brother picked me up from the airport and immediately drove to a meeting over at DuPont Circle Club. What a big brother. He went into an open meeting. He went to the meeting with me. That makes me fucking emotional. He goes up to this guy and says, Hey, do you sponsor people because he had spoken in the thing? And he goes, yeah, of course, he goes, I'm going to introduce you to my brother. And I got my sponsor. I stayed clean and sober. And again, I hate the distinction. What is the distinction? Well, you say you're sober if you're not drinking. And you say you clean in the other program, if you're not using drugs, but I see all drugs. But anyway, I was not on any mind altering substances whatsoever for about seven year period of time. And did you love the program? I love the program. You only know. I still love the program. Yeah, yeah. Those people that I met are still clean and sober. They want to see people like a handful that through everything have always been a lifeline for me. If I had my phone in front of me, you'd find like four texts every day from those same people that gave me a lifeline back. When you're looking at the landscape in front of you, yes, all you see is all the things you're not going to have, like the comradery with friends, the intimacy with men, the thing to do on vacation, the celebration, the sav for disappointment. You're very aware of all the things you're going to lose. But what you don't consider is you're also going to lose this impossible weight that has been on your shoulders, which is the shame and guilt and regret. Well, you don't even know that yet. You can't conceive of a moment where you won't be walking around feeling like the biggest piece of shit that ever lived. That's not even in your imagination yet. And I think the gift of it that's kind of hard to sell kids on or sell people that are new to it is like, you can't really even imagine what it's like to walk through life with maybe regrets, but not shame. And you've made amends in your walking free of all that. Because for most of us, it's been decades since we knew what that feeling was like. It's impossible to tell somebody the only thing that we can do is show them and hope that they get the chance to experience it. And by the way, that seven years, it wasn't like I was hanging on by the skin of my teeth in any way. But what I now know is that I had not fully done the work because there was that armor that still existed in which that shame still lived. And not even about specific things, just about truly being me. And so anyway, I relapsed. I'm on a plane. And it was 2010, I think, and I'm coming back from a business trip in Europe. Clean, sober. I have been upgraded to like this business class, but I was the only one in there. She comes by with a cart and it's a bloody Mary cart, like a full body Mary cart. And I swear to God, you know, I'm through my head. One of my counselors at Crossroads had told me a story about how he'd been sober for seven years. He had a drink on a plane on his way to Washington, D.C. from the West Coast. And he woke up in Indianapolis, Indiana. I don't know, I'm so full of thoughts. - Why that would be a, in any way, like-- - I like to do that. - Maybe I should try this. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - But I did, I had to. And of course, I didn't have one bloody Mary on that plane. And which I think I probably came and told people that in my group, I had six. And I got off the plane and I went to a corner store on the way home and picked up a fifth of Smirnoff in that plastic bottle and put it in my bag. So then, about a year later, Boe comes and says, "Back to Antigua, pal." - Are you like, "Oh my God, my brother has to keep." Do you have guilt about that? - No, no, I don't have any guilt about how much my brother adored me. He wasn't like, "Oh God, I gotta go get 100." He was like, "What the fuck? You've been trying so hard. Let's get you back, man, you're doing great. When we get back, I'll go to me." I think the meanings are great. I love it. I could use it too. - Yeah. - I think it was like, never any. Like, talk about unconditional love that he had between each other. But anyway, thanks, Monica. Now, I think I maybe should have been guilty of myself. - No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. - I just think I really did. - I really did. - I didn't part of the shame. - I know, I know. - I had guilt with my wife at the time. I had guilt with my kids who I adored and adored me. But then I cycled. Then it was like, I came back to Antigua that time. I got shingles three months later. Somebody prescribed me oxycodone. I started down that path and which led to a bottle of smirnoff. And I was in that cycle. And then Bo got diagnosed with glioblastoma in 2014. It's a death sentence. - If I were you carrying around, I'm a piece of shit. And I'm a scumbag. - Yeah. - And my sweet brother gets this diagnosis. I would think the amount of shame it would exponentially trigger in me that I should be the one dying. A why on earth would it be him? - 100%. - 100%. You already have this latent survivor's guilt. - Right. - That is just, and this is why I've opened up to the idea that I can talk about that trauma now. Because of course it had something to do with everything. And just forget about the drinking or addiction. Just in terms of my fear, you already have that latent survivor's guilt. The worst dream that I ever had in my life as a kid was my brother dying. I remember vividly. The only nightmares that I ever remembered was that. I remember losing both. And that became true, but playing in slow motion. Like you know, the end is near, coming. And it's gonna be awful. And it was awful. And I did things like I decided to join the Navy and relapsed the day before I went into the Navy reserves at the age of 42. - Pistot. - I get, yeah, a pistot. - Discharge from the Navy reserve. - And now, so I'm going through all of the treatments with Bo and all of the things that we're trying. And you get down to the end. They're doing experimental stuff. But anyway, he passed away, was the 30th of May, 11 years ago. And from there on out, just everything. Not because of him, regardless of that. I was just as easily completely screwed everything up. - Yeah, even if he had stayed healthy. - Yeah, even if he just stayed healthy. It accelerated. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. - And the biggest thing that accelerated is immediately after Bodai, my marriage fell apart. I mean, immediately after. We tempted to do things. I tempted to go back to rehab. I stayed in, I had a sober coach. Everybody was afraid that I was going to kill myself. And that all fell apart within a year. - Do you remember you must? It's a rhetorical question. But the first time you smoked crack. - From June of 2015 to the end of June of 2016, I had been in and out. I did like 45 days in an inpatient. Then I came out and I did this thing where I had this guy that three times a day, I'd have to blow into a breathalyzer and it takes a picture of you. And so I was doing that. And then I had a relapse over Christmas. They see on the zone. I relapse. I admit that I relapse. I go back into a outpatient program, which is like six hours a day in DC, but I'm living by myself for the first time in 46 years. And by the way, nobody's fault with my own. It's just to be clear. I'm not blaming my-- - It doesn't sound like you are. - I think it's even more important for me to say that over and over again. And I relapse. I use cocaine and I drink and I come back into the program down the Monday and I say, hey, I relapse. I drink and I use cocaine. And they say, you gotta go take the drug test. And I said, I'm not gonna take the drug test. It's not protected by HIPAA. You're in a rehab facility, not in a categorized medical facility. It's discoverable and I don't wanna do that. I'm telling you, what I did, I'm not keeping anything out. They said, well, unless you take the drug test, you're not coming back in. And so it was on K Street in DC and I walk out and I know Lincoln Park, which is literally two blocks away. And I knew the worst possible thing that I could do was go smoke crack. And that's what I decided was the answer. - Yeah. - And I did and it was a revelation. And again, Joe Rogan, I mean, this is a love letter, but I mean it is as it adds the ultimate warning from someone whose life was torn apart by it. It was staggeringly effective and immediate. And that began a cycle. - For people who don't know, so when you snort cocaine, it goes into your sinuses, it slowly dissolves, it slowly enters your blood stream. When you smoke it, your lungs converted immediately. They dump it all in your blood. The only thing's faster is shooting it nervously. It's a different experience because you're getting all of it right away. - And there's a piece about crack that also is this idea that crack is dirty. What really the truth of the matter is, the way that you manufacture a crack. I figured out how to do that pretty quickly. It got much better and better and better at it. Most of the impurities that you could find in it, when things were mixed, get burned out. And so it's a very, very pure form of the drug, which has a immediate effect. This is really crazy study that I heard out of University of Pennsylvania, in which crack addicts, they did these brain - If they're my brain images. - Yeah, but live with smoking. The highest that you get as a crack addict is the millisecond before you ever ingest a drug. - That's the dopamine dog. - And that's the power of the drug. It's not even the drug. It's literally. - How are the brain? - The power of the brain. It's crazy. And so it worked really effectively. - What you're looking for is like the micron before obliteration is the goal, which is so fucked up. - So fucked up. - God, it's so fucked up. - It's sad. I mean, that's why when you tell the stories about people saying degenerate crack addicts, I was like, who can't hear these things and not think one, thank God, I don't have that. - Two, this is sad, we need to help people to like shame, to add to the shame. I do not understand. - Yeah, as if the person's like thriving in life when you should be upset. - It's literally kicking some of our back. - We're pieces of shit in cars, smoking pipes. As you can see from the thousands of pictures, I was not thriving. (laughing) - Hey, do you want to try places with that person? - There are a few, I'm a pretty good, though. You went to Depth, I didn't. I became aware of your story because a woman net spent some time with you wrote some piece that happened to read and I quite enjoyed it for a few reasons. Hey, she liked you, this woman who wrote this thing. I don't even know specifically what I was like. Well, it says something. If you can hang out with an addict, who's fucking smoking rock all day long and you come out of that and you still kind of like the person, that's really kind of revealing 'cause you're at your darkest, shittiest, monstrous. You're just a bottomless pit, right? Of giving me more of everything. So the fact that that person still had kind of a kind of opinion of you, I phone passing, but also it was an interesting perspective to see the person orbiting someone in that zone and then just imagining people that orbited me when I was in that zone. I never really get to hear what that person's experience is like. - You gotta hurt from a lot of them. I overcompensated knowing what I was doing to myself with being as compassionate, empathetic and generous to a fault, you know, basically come beat me up. - Well, you're getting robbed all the time. - All the time. I mean, I don't know how many laptops and phones that were stolen from me. And I don't say this like, oh, I was such a victim. The way that I swaged my guilt was, I just would give it all away or know that it was gonna be taken all the way. And it didn't matter who it was. It didn't matter if it was bicycles who lived with me in my apartment, knowing that she was robbing me blind every day or whether it was a prostitute. By the way, which was all about drugs. That's the fastest way to be able to figure out if you wanna figure, I'm not gonna tell people. To figure out how to get drugs is that that's the easiest entryway, particularly for someone like me into that world. I mean, eventually I had to go down to like the fire district at four o'clock in the morning and score and know where to go. You have guns, you know, in my face. - You're not naive, you're a smart dude. You went to Yale Law. You also recognize like, I am desperate for this thing. The people around me are even more desperate 'cause they don't have any means. And so I'm not naive. Yeah, I'm gonna get taken for a ride and I'm willing to get taken for a ride 'cause I want access to the thing. It's all a terrible symbiosis of destruction. - Exactly. And by the way, and I consciously knew that I was killing myself. 100% doing it. And it would go up and even during that period of time, like I went for treatment and did abrogaine and 5MEO DMT therapy. - Were any of those effective? - No. - I hear about people claiming that-- - I think that they can't be very, very effective. My experience with 5MEO DMT was one of the most spiritually enlightening things that I've ever done, but that's because I did the Ivo game before it, which was not as effective for me, because I was smoking crack up until the three hours before I went and did it. Ivo game is, I think, one of the strongest, if not the strongest psychoactive, pollution engine on the planet. It's a plant from the Iboga plant in Africa that they've used for thousands of thousands of years. Studies have shown that it has a great impact, particularly with people with PTSD and opiate addictions. It's a very, very long-lasting 12, or at least my experience, was like over 12 hours. And then I went and tried do Ioska, and I did that frog toad venom, where they cut your arms and purge you. I went to this charlatin in Massachusetts and did ketamine infusion therapy, but all the time I'm still using, and I believe in those things, and I believe in those alternative things, not as an answer, but as additive to something. If you approach it with the respect that the plant medicine actually requires from you, I don't wanna ever do any of them again. - Yeah. - I'm afraid to do anything. - But also, yeah, the notion that you're gonna take one thing to break your desire to take another thing. - But it can be when you're really healthy, is it can be a mind-expanding experience? - It can break up neural networks that have existed since the first trauma, and it can rewire new pathways. - You see literally if anyone ever really, really stops to think about it as kind of the perennial philosophy, the connection of all things, that everything is love, and I don't mean love in terms of the more sense of it, but in terms of, there is no distinction between me, you, this table, this earth, the universe, and anything else. At least that's experiencing. - These are arbitrary boundaries. - Impossible to articulate. This is a beautiful thing to experience, but it's not the answer. The one thing is, you still come back from that, and if you're filled with shame and fear, it's still the same. - Just the wreckage is just piling up. - I have lost your family. - Yeah. - You have a relationship with your brother's widow. - I mean awful. What grief and addiction, loneliness, and every other thing that you can come up with to think why something like that would have been a good idea for anyone, while you know that you're tearing your family apart, we can talk about the shame. - Mm-hmm. - And the only thing that has, you know, is being able to talk about it, knowing that like I'm gonna talk about this now, and there's gonna be 400 people that are gonna come into your comments and say what has come back, you know what I mean? And by the way, let me say like, yeah. - I don't know. - By the way, I don't know. And I don't care, maybe put it this way. Is that when I was in the depths of my addiction, I did some really, really shameful things that I have no excuse for. And I don't think that drugs and alcohol and addiction are ever an excuse, but I do know this. Certainly part of an explanation. (laughs) - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. - No, I can observe you off of it, and I can observe you on it, and they're pretty distinct creatures. I think people have some fantasy of what the crack seems like, but again, when I've been with friends, it's like full vulnerability, full lack of any fear that you'd be judged, full expression of yourself. That's the joy of the thing. It's like, I'm telling you how much I love you, and that's so scary for me to do. Sober as a dude. It's just hard to find. (laughs) Many compatriots say that group becomes smaller and smaller and smaller until you're in a super-at-motel off of 95 in West Haven, Connecticut. - And of all of our stories is ultimately as isolation. So even if there's 20 people in the other room. - Exactly. - You're in a closet, smoking crack, and you really don't want to be interrupted. You just need that there to know you're not completely alone, even though you are. - I think it's maybe worth, we should have done this earlier, but to remind people of the difference between shame and guilt, 'cause those are very different. And correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel like shame is I'm bad, and guilt is I did something bad. - Yeah, exactly. So guilt to me, as a good Catholic boy, who doesn't really practice much anymore, but I learned some good things, is that yeah, guilt's an appropriate thing. - Yeah, we should have it. - We should feel bad about this, that, and the other thing. You know, go read my book, I feel bad for it all. - Yeah. - And what you should do about that is that you should tone and make it mens. And I don't mean tone, like go whip yourself with thistles on your back until you bleed. I mean, go and say, I'm fucking sorry. - Yeah. - I apologize, not expect the other person to say, "Oh, I forgive you." - It's okay. - But you make it clear that you know that you did wrong. Shame is, I will never, ever be good enough. - I'm unworthy of love. - You mean, I'm unworthy. I'm unworthy of love. - Yeah, I'm so implicit of love. - I'm worthy of my own self-love. I mean, that's the thing about the honesty, the biggest thing to get honest about, like I always talk about this thing, radical honesty, you gotta get honest with yourself. That's what you really, really, really do. And I never really knew what that mean, though. You hear all of these things in the room, even like the serenity pair. Well, what the fuck does it mean? No, the difference between, you know, like, I don't. - I don't know. - Yeah. - But there was a moment when I finally put it down almost seven years ago. It wasn't by any virtue of my own. I had that experience of like, it wasn't a white light, but it was like, the choice. - There's a tiny window open right now. - Yes. - And if you don't step through it, you're gonna be dead. - As clear as you two sitting across from me. - I wanna do two seconds on this because it just kinda came up. And again, I can forget. Now, look, I relapsed on opiates, but I haven't drank in 22 years, right? I'm pretty removed from, 'cause each of these addictions has their own specific personality. I talked to opiate addicts, and I had that experience, and that's one experience. It's much different from the hardcore alcoholic experience for me, but I was reminded of this because my best friend who I sent a treatment, and I were talking about a third friend who is hardcore going through it right now. And I was reminded, we were just talking about it. I called him to say how grateful I am. He's sober, seeing this other friend. I'm just so grateful. And we were talking and what we both agreed about that I think might be again enlightening to people is like, there's a point where there's a third rail in your mind. It's not necessarily you wanna die. You wanna die for a period of time. Long enough that when you wake up, all of the records will magically be gone. Like, there's this third desire. It is obliteration and death, but it's not, I remember not wanting permanent death, but I definitely wanted to die for like three or four years and then wake up with a clean slate. That was like a bit of a fantasy. Disappear. It was a literal fantasy with me. Think about it. I came out to California, told everybody I was going to rehab because I was gonna disappear. That was in my head is I'm gonna disappear for three years, and then either I'm dead, but more realistically, I'll come back a new man, you know what I mean? But I was disappearing for all intents and purposes if any rational person would look at me. - It's a little boy in you that's like, maybe if I run away long enough, they'll remember that they loved me and that they missed me and they'll forget about all this. - First time I ran away, what I did is I wrote a note and then I went and hit under my bed so that I could hear everybody tell me how much they missed me. - Yes, yes, yes, yes. - That's what it was, yeah. - And it doesn't go away, you're still acting like that. It's like a full grown, a full man. - Exactly. - For all this care. - Oh, yeah. - It's too beautiful. - If I disappear for three years, they'll be so glad when I walk back up the driveway, we could put all this behind us. - Yes, don't go away. - Stay tuned for more armchair expert, if you dare. (upbeat music) Not only did my fantasy not come true, the whole world, right when I got clean in June of 2019, it just fell on top of my head, outside my doorstep in every single crevice and nook and cranny of my life. - You were being accused of brokering deals with the Ukrainian oligarch to win favor. - Yeah. - Oh, miss, let me ask you. Certainly your behavior cut and have been above board for 15 years while your own desperation was raging, right? - Here's what I own. - Yeah, is there any validity to some of the-- - Here's the validity. The validity is, I should never have taken the board seat with Burisma. That's the validity of it. - That's the Ukrainian company. - Yes, the Ukrainian oil and gas company. It was not with Ukraine, it was not with a foreign government. It was not with an oligarch. It was public about going on the board. I served on 14 other boards before that. I was chairman of the board of the US World Food Program, the largest humanitarian organization in the world. I was vice chairman of the board of the largest railroad company in the world, which is the National Passive Rail System, which is Amtrak. I was chairman of the board of the Truman National Security Project. Chairman of the board of the Center for National Policy. I was a professor at Georgetown's Master's Program in the School of Foreign Service for four years. I had my own business in consulting and I had been in more places in the world than 99.9% of people. - Very high-functioning addicts. - Extremely, that makes it harder. - By the way, I was up counsel too, at the time, the most prestigious law firm, doing corporate governance at Boy Schildern Flexor and had my own business. And so, when they came to ask me on the board, I said, no, I would represent them as a lot. lawyer. And I represented the lawyer in the former president of Poland, the first democratically elected president of Poland, President Krasniewski, asked me after representing them for two or three months, because they were under an extreme anordinate amount of pressure from the invasion in Dombass, where their wells were from the Russians. And the entire purpose of that incursion into Eastern Ukraine was to extract and take over what they could not take over the single greatest resource in Ukraine, which is natural gas. And so he convinces me that we'll be public about it, you'll be transparent about it, and you come on the board. It obviously turns out to be a mistake, but not because of anything that I did, and not because of anything that my dad did. And the reason that we know this is this, is because you have 25 years of my entire digital footprint. You have every single email. I think I literally am probably the only person in the world. If this happened to anybody else, every photo that you every took, every selfie, every voicemail, every single text message, every email that you've took in 25 years, were dumped on the internet. And to this day remain there, whether it is your selfies, nudes, or whatever, we're out there. 90% of us are getting cancelled. Oh yeah, 100% people would get cancelled. There's not one single email text message. They have all of my voicemails. They have voicemails from my dad saying, sweetheart, please, where are you? You need to get help. I mean, they have everything. There's not a single thing in that in which I say, hey, dad, or hey, dad's chief of staff, or hey, dad's secretary, or hey, anybody's. I'm getting paid by these guys. We need to do this. Not a single one. There's a text message in which the board secretary of barisma says, it was nice meeting your dad. And I know we were at a restaurant together, and he sat down and there were 10 other people at the table. He was in from Ukraine. I introduced him to my dad. And that's it. Now, they had an impeachment hearing over that. And so I take responsibility for doing something that could ever cause the perception of that. Now, not to get political, but what these guys are doing now. And I hate even putting the comparison between the two. Because that was the standard by which we, as a family, had lived. And here's the point. I really don't care about rehashing that, but I'm more than willing to and welcome it. But what they did was, in 2018, there was a Ukrainian Russian oligarch who was offering for sale my laptop. Let's be for the laptop repair shop guy ever existed. He was offering it for sale. And Rudy Giuliani, along with Lev Parnas and the guy Igor Fruman, that he deputized, went to Ukraine, and then to Austria eventually, or on their way to Austria, to buy this hard drive. And they never made it because Lev Parnas gets arrested. Lev Parnas, he's one that got arrested. He was working for Rudy and he gets thrown to the wolves. And so he tells the whole story. Truth, Rachel Maddow made a whole documentary about it, called "From Russia with Lev." And Lev points out that what they did was, and what they eventually found, was a record of my addiction. And that was going to be the October surprise. But the problem was, is that in between that time, I had sat down with Adamentos of the New Yorker, and I had told my whole story. Nobody told me to. You went rogue for that one. 100% wrong. But intuitively, I knew, and this was the difference between any other time that I'd gotten clean, or sober, ever, which is, I get a call from this guy. He wants to talk about Ukraine. I say, where are you from? He's from the New Yorker. I had an obsession as a kid with the New Yorker, thought it was the greatest publication ever, to the point where I had the covers cut out, taped up to my wall. And then I read some of his work, and he's an incredible journalist, and I said, I talked to him. He just was really honest, and I told him my whole story as it related to addiction. And so I had out it myself. I think Adam said, one of the first calls that he got after he did that story was from Steve Bannon and said, "You M.E.R., you scooped us." And so they had it. They had a hard drive. They had the phones. They had the laptop and two phones that were stolen in Las Vegas. They had a laptop that I left in my psychologist office in Massachusetts that was there for a year and passed around. What a hunt for all this stuff. Exactly. And then a laptop repair shop owner, who happens to be blind, literally, legally blind, turns over not to anybody except surprise, surprise. My arch nemesis, Rudy Giuliani, and his lawyer, who cobbled it together and cobbled all of these sources together, and they presented to the world two weeks before the election. But remember what Rudy did is he went to the courthouse steps in Newcastle County, Delaware, with a laptop, which was no such thing, with Bernie Carrick of all people who's now God rest his soul dead, but he was the former police chief who was indicted for bribery and broad. And they go to the steps and they say, "This is a record of degenerate. There are inappropriate pictures of minors and they do exactly what is elimination rhetoric," which is an old Russian trick, accused them literally of the worst thing. What am I supposed to say in that two weeks when the world is coming down? And so 40 NSA former security officials come out and they say, "This has all the earmarks." We're not saying that it is, but it's all the earmarks of Russian propaganda. And then Twitter, which was Twitter, suppresses the story for 24-hour period of time, not because of the content of the story, but the content of the photographs, which were nude photographs of me, which violates their terms of service. That's the only reason is in your post put on the front page, me with my private parts blurted out naked, which by the way is against the law because of the Bill Maloney had just passed the Take It Down Act. But then that becomes a suppression story. And they would have won the election if anybody just had known what was in the laptop. Okay, well now you've had seven years. Everybody, all of you. And I include the two of you in me and everybody else. You've had my entire digital footprint, unlike anyone that I know of in human history available to you for 25-year period of time. What do you find? Literally nothing other than I was a degenerate crack addict. And I was in rooms I should not have been. And I was with people and prostitutes and dancers and drug dealers, smoking crack and doing other drugs and 90% of the text messages, but you do not find anything about foreign corruption or bribery, anything like that. Finally, after two years, they come back and they offer me a plea agreement because I failed to pay my taxes on time in that period of time, which I had subsequently paid with penalties and interest of over $800,000. After I got sober and found out that I had not filed my taxes, so I paid them with penalties and interest. And that during that period of time, I'd bought a gun and I checked the box to say that I was not currently an addict. And at the time, this is honest. And then when I walked into that store, I didn't think I was an addict. I was at least three days clean. Well, yeah, you're not going to say you're an addict, don't say you're an addict, don't say you're an addict. Even if you bought it, fuck up. Yeah, they're just not doing that. Here's the thing, every single person today in the United States of America based upon the law that I was prosecuted for, if you have ever smoked pot, or you smoke pot even remotely on a regular basis, which means more than once a month basically, and you own a gun, you're in violation of that same law, which means about 85 million Americans are pregnant, but they prosecute me for it. We can't find a single other case. What was me, oh no, I'm being held to a higher standard. Like, yeah. Well, let me see this though. This would be like if I sponsored you, right? Yeah, so I don't, and I don't claim to have any more knowledge than you do, but let's just say for one second, we're open. We'll see how the question goes. Yeah, she'd be my sponsor. Do you foresee a future where you could actually let all that go? Yeah, I'd let it all go. You think you have? No, I get it. If I had been accused of a lot of stuff I did do, it would be nearly impossible for me not to defend myself. So here's the thing. That is completely fair question. And I hope that this is as honest an answer as I think it is, which is I have let it go. Other people have not let it go. And so, for instance, only time I spend a lot of time thinking about it is when I come and I sit down with you. Yeah, because you're nervous, it's gonna spark up the holes. No, it's because I'm answering the question. And so when I leave here, I'm able to put it down. And I guess when you say let it go, am I angry? No. I think that the most dangerous emotion that any addict can have is uncontrolled anger. Let me come at it from a different way. God damn it. Is it possible? Is it possible? I'm never angry. That the most of all version of yourself, the most peaceful, the most serene version of yourself might come around to having gratitude. It's crazy as that sounds. No, for Giuliani, although you didn't do all those things, if you're dead sober, none of those things happen. 100%. So I'm not victim-shaming, but we also agree like, how did it bend even a little bit lighter on you? Maybe you're dead. Well, it really sucks to be another addict. He's not gonna let you off the hook. Maybe you don't have a wife, maybe you don't have a new son. So maybe all those guys almost everything everything the greatest lesson I learned in this go-round is exactly that is that when they tell you to make your gratitude list I always thought and it is a appropriate thing it doesn't have to be an addict to get up in the morning and benefit from making a gratitude list which is like every day in Southern California 7 out of 10 you're like I'm grateful for the weather yeah I'm grateful for my wife I'm grateful for my son the relationship that I've rebuilt with my daughters and for my painting and the coffee that tasted so good and like all the good things that are going on that's well and good what it really is is being grateful for every awful thing that ever happened to you that brought you to right there I've you ever read the Nostek Cosmos that they found a notch hominy I'm not a scripture guy but there's a great thing I listen to audio book of a famous book called the Nostek Hospital he says basically I'm paraphrasing is learn to suffer as I do and you will be able not to suffer and it was like yeah that's it be grateful for all of that suffering because there is no way that you are here sitting in the chair right now without all that with out all of that I would have never ended up here in Southern California I would have never met Melissa I would have never had Bo I would never have the depth of my relationship with people that I love now and particularly the depth of the relationship that I have with my daughters now I would never have had the wherewith all to understand that this was for me a question of life or death and each one of them I was a little bit perceptibly by self-perception able to get a little bit better about the gratitude in the moment and when I really hit me was when the verdict came in in Delaware so I decided not to testify because what they'd done is they put my family on the stand they were going to if I testified that they were going to bring as a kind of witnesses and ask and like it was just awful jury came back and when you put they pulled the jury they're like I hate it that we had to come to that because it's bullshit but the technically we believe that he violated the law and I remember and everybody was like oh I looked around and there were literally the entire prosecution people like a wedding prosecution people sat on that side my people sat on this side and I looked back and I literally saw every single person almost every single person that I cared about my mom and my sister my uncle my aunt's mouse the guy that grew up with my dad you know Reverend Bullock and all of these people from the community that had known me all those people that I said that were my aunts and uncles yeah yeah they were still there for me all the people that I thought that I had lost that I was ashamed because I had been the embarrassment they were all standing there proving to you despite what you're telling yourself that you're worthy of love and the closets open and here's all the skeletons are now convicted and yet you're still here I don't even think you'd be here if I was perfect and yet you're here and I'm at my worst yeah it's powerful really really powerful there's some players in this that don't have much social redeeming value but they gave me an incredible gift they gave me the gift of being able to be honest with myself if they'd never released out of that stuff I wouldn't admit it to anybody I'm not sitting here talking to you out of some insane courage that I got because I went to Rishi Ketch for five years and meditated I'm sitting here because you know what yeah that is a gift there's nothing to lose huge gift you name going your company's Senaka yeah yeah so you're into the Stoics or yeah there's a Stoic road forward exactly those people you're powerless over them right I mean you are as powerless over those people 100% as you are over crack it's none of your fucking business I would have an impossible time executing what I'm suggesting let me own that there you would know I know I have a thing where he would I had listen I had violent stepdads and I had decided when I'm 18 no one will ever get one over on me there will be no me being subjugated so I have a overly activated sense of like you're fucking with me I will go to the ends I'll die over it I know this would be like the hardest challenge for me but also it's not happening to me so I can kind of see from the outside that any piece of your heart taken by those people is a wasted piece I think potentially you actually could get there if it was just you but his family is oh yeah forgive that you would kill everyone yeah yeah so I understand you can look at it and tell him that I'm owning that it would be nearly impossible for me but I also know that's the truth if your mom was getting dragged on kill everybody I'd love country yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah people are talking shit about her and people have all these opinions about her that are wrong you'd go nuts uh-huh I would and so I have to give you some credit he can be your sponsor but I can be like your friend I give you credit it isn't out of any and I really mean this that I'm not just being like humble it was not out of any courage on my part it was so ubiquitous that I didn't have any other choice unless I wanted to die that's what I'm trying to point out but some people die some people do oh I'm proud number one I'm most proud of anything I'm proud of my sobriety over the last seven years in the heat of all that yeah I have an enormous amount of pride I have an enormous amount of pride that I've gotten to where I am but I really mean it it's more than just like a few people saying bad things about you or your dad or your kids it was at one point it felt like because it kind of was like half the world yeah sure sure and the machinery of the government exact me the machine government which no one can unless they've been subject to it it is staggering I mean like if people say well you know what you got a pardon and you've never faced any consequences probation officers coming into my bedroom and my wife is still in the bat naked because they could over the course of a three year period of time well I would even say they've got it wrong which is I would sit in a jail for six months in a heartbeat over deal with the emotional damage I cause you didn't get out of the consequences of your behavior that's your father hugging you at the end of his driveway crying saying you I just don't know what to do yeah that's exactly I would sit in jail before I'd have my dad say that to me I know God like that's not even the harshest punishment yeah you don't really get out of any of that and here's the other thing Melissa is still ready to knee cap a lot of people I got honey you can't see and I'm gonna get a visit from somebody like you gotta do you know me yeah and you then really become to realize is that when it's all directed you it's so much so much more overwhelming and hurtful to the people that truly love you so like your kids yes dad and that's when nobody others still with my dad too now my dad and I talk literally almost every day so I'm so sorry I'm like dad what are you sorry yeah it's going both directions you thinking if I weren't running this wouldn't happen you wouldn't have been a tool yeah it's all sadness that's my last question for you and again in the most apolitical way possible I can't even really imagine what it was like to be by your dad's side and watching him in public coming up short how protective you must have felt during that time how stressful that must have been what was the experience of watching your dad not at his best have to be at the height of the struggle or the first thing that you do is you get incredibly defensive but you're right what happened culminating in an incredibly obvious instance of the debate in which my dad didn't rise to the challenge that's just objectively true is it my dad did lose this step he didn't lose his marbles not one single person on the record in this entire time has ever said the Joe Biden was not available present and capable of executing on every single decision that this administration had to execute on not one now did he trip over a sandbag and fall and look like an 83 year old trying to get up at the Air Force Academy speech did he freeze on the base stage and look like he was 83 years old 100% did he lose his step literally where his gate got shorter 100% all of those things are true which by the way it's a whole nother discussion about how we are as a society going to start to treat and deal with people as they basically become more informed but still are all mentally there is everybody that's 83 years old that shuffles a little bit have dementia I don't think that that's true by the way and I don't I don't know any animosity and that's not a hard question for me but I'm more interested in emotional again the powerlessness and somebody who just endlessly had your back most beautiful way you have such an enviable father I mean truly from everything I've read about you guys what a beautiful father it would kill me to have America talking about my dad again not because I've figured out some meditative process by virtue of who I am you better figure out how to be able to stay in this country when no matter what president you are at any given point in time anywhere between 40 and 60% of the public Thinks you're akin to the devil. It is like a constant barometer of favorability unfavorability He's the worst president. He's the best president. He's the greatest person. He's a demented clone that did all of these things All I have to say is it my dad has his record He will have his legacy. I think that he was unique as a president in the United States in that I think that the job by definition Requires a level of narcissism that almost any other job in the world does not require and that he came to that office without that Narcissism I think that he had more empathy and compassion for normal people because he was the most normal person to ever occupy the office You know my favorite moment of his I know you've seen this. They did an incredible two-hour front line on Putin Yeah And there's a moment where they're sitting across the table from one another is before he's president I think he's vice president at the time and he looks directly at Putin and says I think your soulless Basically, I'm paraphrasing and then Putin says this is the first guy who's ever he's like I liked him You respected him probably George Bush had gone and said he goes you know I looked into his eyes and he saw a soul and so my dad sitting across from Putin and he looks at his eyes He goes I look into your eyes and I don't think you have a soul And Putin likes it whether he liked it or whether he's smarter enough to have pretended to like it in the moment because he thought it was tough I mean, there's a whole nother cat, but he's the only dude we've had thus far Whose look Putin in the eye and said your soulless. Yeah, he has a lot of integrity Everyone's had an opportunity and he's literally the one human being on our side who did that and that's what I mean about my dad I love McCain for the single moment and that's why they were best friends on the presidential campaign when His supporter calls Obama Muslim. He says hold on hold on. That's not true. These little moments of integrity Well, even worse is like the idea that that was a deal breaker But regardless my god in a four-year period of time coming out of a pandemic My dad created more jobs than any other president with two terms by double in the history of the United States He cut child poverty in half. He passed more Legislation than any president since Lyndon Bain Johnson. He had a better midterm even though we lost the house than any president said FDR in 1932 He expanded NATO he stood up to Putin he added two countries for the first time in NATO's history two NATO Finland and Sweden He re-established our connection and alliance with the Pacific rim countries and Japan and Australia I mean, I could go on and on and all of those things are lost in the mix of the insanity of what's now the chaos the fire Hose of falsehood in insanity a UFC fight on the lawn of the White House and we're painting a reflecting pull blue And he made 3700 stock trades in the month of February alone the first president in the history this made one let alone 3700 And we're building a tower in Abu Dhabi and we're putting Trump tower in Saudi Arabia and we're going to turn Gaza into a golf court. I mean, it's just like you got to stop you can't take it all in But if we get back which is pretty guy we do because I love this country And I'm not just saying that like ra ra I love this country. I'm fully aware of which this country's capable of and the horrible things that it is done in the name of our democracy I am fully aware of my history But at the same time, I truly still do believe that we are the greatest single hope for I'd like to put it. It's a Star Trek future and not a Star Wars future I don't know of any president that just as a human being This is good a man as my dad Love that well look I admire anyone who's gone to hell back and shares it deeply You and I will have a connection that's deeper than all these extraneous other things that are spectacular because we know what it's like to be Completely humbled and destroyed by something that's a unique Right, I think it's the kind of a bonding hundred percent. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, like you could have any political leaning you could have me No, it's really helpful My hope is I've had this experience a bunch of times in the meetings I go to where often People arrive in their big headlines kind of arrive people who need a lot of privacy come to some of the meetings I go to and I've had a couple moments where the people that walked in I hate it publicly It's one dude was like all this anti gay legislation then got caught in a bathroom. I was like this fucking hypocrite You know, I just hated him and this person started sharing I was like this person was completely Devastated and destroyed by this thing and they know the depths of hell and I have compassion for this person What a unique experience to have on earth if not for this condition I have I wouldn't have had that so again I'm so grateful that I could value something about somebody they're honesty we can cut through all the shit and I love it It's so fucking powerful. It's almost magic. It's incredible the Self-control do the next right thing And show compassion pass it down and that's what I learned from it And I often fail at the self-control But I don't fail in the way that I used to and I sometimes don't have the compassion for the people that I find so offensive but can't and I don't always do the right thing But I know at least that's what I think about every day What's about a delight meaning yeah, I hope you have fun. This has been great time. I watch you guys all the time For so long when you guys said that you'd like to have me on I was like all right Oh, good. I love what you guys do and if you want to hear the very harrowing tale of all this I encourage everyone to pick up beautiful things your memoir about this whole Life of yours, which is worthy of a book There's nothing else So great meeting you and thank you She's got a little half the facts Broken vintage shirt. I wish Looks like it. I would have to call mine unfortunately a retro I mean it's from an old old Pink Floyd thing, but it is a new shirt. Okay. We're really from the 80s Well, that's what I'm told see I could it could be a lie. How would one know? I wouldn't Well, the sweatshirt's definitely old. I can tell by like the tag and the stuff But they could have plopped that right on but yeah, they can fake Rembrandt's and stuff and have real Experts sign off on them Exactly. They could get up they could get one over on me. Yeah, yeah, sure I'm not that good. We're recovering. I guess you want to talk about? I mean Yeah, we were just recording. Yeah, armchair anonymous. Yes, and not only we're recording armchair anonymous It's a prompt that elicits some Emotions for sure and this person we were speaking to was at the apex of their emotional journey of the story I felt very very Inclined to be present for that. Yeah, of course, and I hear Rob's door open Yeah, my first thought is like why is Rob thinking he is time to go outside? I thought he was getting the food. Oh, okay. That's good I know better than all those things I know better than anyone exactly. I know you know better So I'm just like this is a strange move. Right, and it was a little it wasn't wasn't like if Rob was going to get the food He would have done that quietly. It was loud Yeah, and then I went to oh me and what my can I got to get my kids understanding they cannot interrupt me at work And then it was Kristen yeah, and immediately when I saw her face. Yeah, she was crying Yeah, she was like very panic panic and crying. Yeah And now I literally have my real life wife panic and crying and then we have a guess to of course I care about who's also crying And I'm like, oh my god, I'm gonna have to fucking tell this lady. I got a goal But I had to go yeah, I mean we didn't end the call, but I had to get up. Yeah, it was fine. Cuz I was just going on Come come home. You got to go right now. You got to put this bird out of its misery. I'm like What happened so back story and I think I've been reporting on this We've been having the sweetest two or three month Affair with these crows that have really come and taken to walking around our yard. Yeah, they walk around when we've named one of them Yeah, it was maybe We've been feeding putting out food and they've been taking it. I was just last night. I was in the sauna and because the screen was down I can see out of it, but obviously the crows they were just and we're directly in front of the sauna for 20 minutes I'm watching just like interact and I'm like I just I feel so lucky that there's these beautiful crows in the back here my favorite animal Yeah, and I'm just watching them. They're getting more and more comfortable I go outside and what has happened is a friend's dog has attacked one of the crows really bad The all the other crows are in a tree directly above the fallen crow and they're yelling Of course as they should yeah, I'm so bummed for them Of course For you in my families all ever Lincoln's bowling, she watched the whole thing. And then I got to find something. Yeah. - You didn't use your hands, we'll just say that. - I did not use, I mean. - I'm glad. - It was terrible. - I hated it. It was terrible. - And there's the little crow I've been watching who I like. And then I know that that's his mom up in the tree and his sibling. - Yeah. - Fuck. - I bet the mom obviously feels guilty. - And then I'm like, okay, that's done. I get the crow wrapped up and then I got to quickly try to nurture my family and check in as everyone's stable. And then come back here and then drop back in at that. - We zoom back in. - Yeah. - At least it was a kind of dark story we were hearing. - It wasn't like you had to just be happy again. - I'm so sorry, I gotta go blow up birthday candles. - Right, exactly. - There wasn't frivolous, although we didn't tell her what the emergency was. - No, we didn't. No, I'm saying, I'm saying, sorry, I'm saying, this armchair anonymous story was pretty dark. - So my dark energy. - It wasn't like you had to come in and put on this like very happy, it was like a funny, yeah. - You pooped, where? - Exactly, this is a one, okay, it's so remind me. The one time he didn't want an unauthorized EVA. - Yeah, yeah. - So. - Anywho. - Yeah, that was terrible. - That was terrible. - That was a terrible event. - I'm really sorry, I'm really sorry. - I feel like that was the universe making me pay for the pigeons somehow. - Now you are, you already paid for that. - I don't know if you paid. - It was a long time ago. - Yeah, of course. - Hopefully it toned for that. - I think, well, I'm really sorry that all of that happened. I'm very sorry you had to be the one to handle it. I get very anxious in those situations. - Yeah, where was that for you? - For everyone's moods, like everyone's, and my head I'm just like, oh my God, like everyone's so sad and so destroyed and like, they're not going to come back for this for a couple of from this one. - And you know how I feel about emotions. So yeah. - But I mean you, I'm like, oh no, like this isn't good. Like he's killed, he's murdered today. - My favorite. - He murdered his favorite. - Oh my God, and also like murder of crows. You know, there's something in there. - Yeah, let's save the word play for another. - Let's just hold off on the word play for today. - It was just right there, so you know. - I just went back inside and checked in. - This is what you guys get for calling yourselves a murder. - Oh no. - Oh no, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. - Oh my God, I'm so sorry. - Oh, it was a very cheap shot. So I went inside and now people are going up to the store to get materials for a grave. - Oh, that's good. - Yeah, I guess that's what. - That's nice. - No one knows what to do. You don't know what to do. But I, yeah, I was like, I don't think I should. We had ordered food. The food I thought Rob was running out desperately to get. - Yeah. - And so when we, we finished our armchair on this, we had a little break before the next one. So I was like, I'm gonna go the long way to go get the food. - But you didn't even want to deal with it. - I don't want to crawl. It wasn't dealing. I was like, they might be like, how insensitive is she to go get her food? Anyone hungry? I got extra chips. I don't think I'm gonna eat this third one. - I mean, that is something I would do in a nice way. Like, can I help with the things I have? - Yeah, when starving right now. Anyone feeling really hungry? Or is anyone distracted by other emotions? - Or should I just eat crows? (laughing) - I'm sorry, they're angry. - Sorry. - Yeah, that's too soon. - Okay, I really am sorry. - It's just a bit too soon. But this is how, this is how it is being friends with you. This is how it is being friends with you. - I bet. Okay, so maybe I am now getting-- - But I don't want you to have, I don't want you to have repercussions. - Okay. - So I take it back, okay. Anyhow, I still feel like fighter flighty. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - From that experience of running in and running out and I was like, thank God, obviously, of course, when Kristen runs in, I think it's something with the children. - Same, so there is a level of relief. - Yeah. - What, it's very partial. - I know, but yeah, but I heard something about Bert Crowe and I thought she said, "Lola, another dog." So I was like, "Oh, I'm like. " - Yeah, and then you went. - Yeah, and then you went. - The dynamic of everything was cool. - You know the dynamic of that it's someone else's dog. - I know, yeah. - So all of their stress of having brought their dog over and they killed our favorite members of our family. - Whoa! - I mean, sincerely. - No. - They shouldn't feel bad. - No, I'm in your favorite member. - The members of our animal family. - Oh, your animal? - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. - Well, yeah. - If the dog. - For me? - For you, yeah. But if the dog killed Frank, you might be happy, but that would be like, really. - Yeah, it feels weird to speculate, but I definitely think whiskey would have been a push for the family. - No, yeah. - You think they'd be out there right now, just laughing and doing work. If whiskey was dead right now, no. I really don't. You're probably right. - But it's okay, your favorite member, your favorite animal members, for sure. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - In the beginning of something that was quite fun and beautiful happening. - I know. - I think they're not coming back. There's no way. The crows have incredibly good memories. So the other thing, this is, and this is where it's probably selfish of me. I'm like, this dog did this, but these crows are watching me right now. They're staring and they're gonna watch me do that. - Why is that selfish? - 'Cause they're gonna remember, they remember, there's all these instances where crows remember for like 30 years. - No, I'm saying that's not selfish of you. - I'm like, I'm trying to be friends with these guys so hard and now they're gonna hate me for sure. - Well, did you tell 'em? - No, I don't know that they understand English. - Well, they're smart. - How did they could? - Yeah, also by the way, they saw what happened, so they know it wasn't you. - I hope, but maybe they thought I was going over to resuscitate this crow. - I think they knew it couldn't be resuscitated or they would have come down and grabbed it. - I'm glad that wasn't happening. That would have been fucking brutal for trying to like-- - But don't you think it's kind of better if they like, go down and grab it, bring it back up to their area? - No, 'cause they want to secede it at that. - And then I would have been having to shoot them away so that you can't have this thing suffering in the yard. That's off the table. - Yeah. - Oh, hmm, real life will find you. - Yeah. - You know, we've created this little cocoon and virtually nothing can happen, right? We're just sitting here chalking. - Yeah. - We can't fight, but whatever, we'll get through that. (laughing) And then life just, you know, it'll find you. - Yeah. - But I feel bad 'cause like, because you're so tough, and you had to be the one to do it, and it's like, oh yeah, he's like that. - That's why we have him, is basically. - Yeah. - We deal with everything for this moment. You better do the thing that you bring to the table. - But I do think I want them to know that it hurt your feelings pretty bad. - I think they know, you don't think so. (laughing) - I think it's my job to tell them, remind them. You know, that was really hard on DAX, okay? - Oh, yeah, you're gonna be a justice for me. - Sometimes I come in. - Wow, that's nice. - Yeah. - Yeah. - I did feel it was hard on you. - Yeah. - I didn't like that. - Well, thank you. - Anywho. - See, and then I tried to make jokes, like you do to make it better, it didn't work. Some, I get it. - Wow, yeah, it's just, it was very soon, yeah. - And puns already. - I just, you know, on a good day, puns are questionable. - I know, but they were both pretty good. - Okay, I'm probably not in a good position to judge. - Maybe later. - A few years, I'll hear this. - Oh, wow. - You know what, that was a really good joke. (laughing) - Oh no, well, that was a lot. I'm really sorry that happened. - Shaking off, what's up? Summers here, kids are getting out of school. I'm gonna go to a graduation tomorrow. - Oh yeah, we are. - We are going to a little baby's graduation. - Oh yeah. - Do you know what's so funny? - Makes me sad. - So the fifth grade dance was Friday night. - Oh, which one to go with her girlfriends? - Yeah, I mean, I told the whole story, yeah. - Yeah. - Well, that was Friday night and what was rad was, this just makes me so happy. She said, "Can we drive the Lincoln?" Like she wanted to show up at the dance. - Lookin' rad. - And we delivered. - Did you bring her friends or did you just you dropped her off? - Mom and Delta and I. - Oh. - And you're on a big grass field where everyone parks. And yeah, we pulled up in the Lincoln. It's already low, but in the grass, it's just like, right? And old boys ran up to the fans, they're asking what kind of car that is. So that was Primo. She's in a dress, yeah, it was great. - Did she do her hair and stuff? - Oh, of course she had ringlets. Yeah, she looked incredible. What's interesting is when Lincoln and her fifth grade dance because it is the end of elementary. It's the last thing they're really on you together. So when I picked up Lincoln, the entire class, well, all the girls. - Oh, we're crying. - They were ballin'. - Oh yeah, eight times. - They were hugging each other. It was so sweet. And then maybe people remember, the overall demeanor of Lincoln's class versus Delta has been night and day, as you know. Like, Delta's class is so naughty, they had to rearrange the recess structure 'cause they couldn't be trusted around the prequel. - Okay kids are really good. - Yeah. - There's a naughty class, naughty group, cops come in, no, this was for her classmates last year. - Oh right. - So we're all back up to pick her up and they're still raging and they're just like, I danced the whole three hours and I'm like, yes, that was 'cause I, you know, I love to school dance. I'm like favorite memories of junior higher those dances. - Oh my god. - So she did it, she danced so hard. So anyway, there's a photographer that would do these like 360 shots of. Yes, so she would get in a group with her friends and then the camera goes around them. - Yeah. - And this is embarrassing to admit, but I'm looking at this, first all I see of course, 'cause I'm the dad. - Yeah. - It's like, oh, she's the cutest girl that was ever born. - Yeah. - You know, when I'm looking at her and all of her friends, I'm like, oh, she's the cutest one. - Yeah. - But that was when I go, well, she's really quite short. (laughs) - Oh really? - I'm gonna show you the video and see if you have the same reaction. I was like, I don't think of her as short and she said it's like a little leader in her class and everything, but I just had this moment. I was like, oh, she really has had the Kristen experience. Where Kristen was like a tiny, tiny person. - Yeah, me too. - Yeah, you know. And I just didn't really realize Delta that. - I didn't realize that either. That she was necessarily, let's see. That's so cute. - Oh, oh wow. - Oh my God, she's so cute, it's crazy. There's another shorty. - Yeah, there's one other shorty. I won't say her name, but Delta is. - Yeah. - I was like, oh, she's the little girl in class. - She's even shorter than the Indian girl. - Sure. - I don't know if I'm allowed to say that. - Yeah, I think she's loving these, but. - No. (laughs) - Oh, okay, so she's always shorter. - Yeah, she's the time. - She's the time now. - I didn't know either. - Yeah, it was really, it was like I finally came out of the water and saw clearly for the first time. And then I said to her, I said, I noticed from these photos, you're a shorty, aren't you? And she goes, oh yeah, dad, I'm like the shortest girl in class, other than so and so. - Oh, wow. - Wow. Yeah, I mean, so she's just like, yeah, I'm the short girl. Like once you were the short girl, you just are her. You know, like you don't even think about it. - Yeah, and it does a little bit explain like, you know, she's in such a hurry to lose her teeth. You know, there's like an ongoing thing. - Yeah. - And then she got her X-ray that said they were still not coming out for a while. She was like devastated in the, and I never really, I'm like, why are you in a hurry to lose your teeth? But I think of you're the tiny one. She's like, let's get the fucking show on the road. Let's get ready to see, let's give me some puberty. Let's get a few inches. - Yeah. - It might be informed by the height. - It might be. - Yeah, yeah. - Well, it's great as I've never heard her complain about it. That's why it was not even on my radar. Like her best friend who I thought was really tall. - Right. - I know. - I think it's probably average, yeah, yeah. - Whoa, that is weird. - Yeah, I was like, oh, she's really tall. - Well, because one of her other friends is also not that tall. A little taller than her, maybe. - In the middle. - But like, yeah, interesting. Yeah, I mean, I didn't, I mean, I wanted to look completely different, but the short thing never bothered me. I don't know why for whatever. I had so many other things that were higher on this. - It is a lot easier for a girl to be the little girl than the big bird. - Yeah, of course. - That's a much harder road. - Of course. Well, maybe she should be a cheerleader. She could be a flyer. - Okay. - You know, short people have a lot of advantages in that way. - They don't have cheer where she, why, I don't know that for sure, but I don't think they have cheer where she's going. Because it's an all-girl school. - I know. They should sort of competition. - No, they should sort of do competition cheerleading. - Competition. - No, 'cause competition is nothing to do with it. - Okay. Doesn't it sound cheering for the boys? - No, it's not. - I knew feminism was going to ruin this country and here it is. - Shout out. (upbeat music) - Stay tuned for more armchair expert if you dare. (upbeat music) - All right, well. - Want to do some facts on Hunter Biden? - Sure. - Okay. - Let's do a few facts. - Yeah, I found this to be. - Wow. Yeah, this was a good one. - This was a good one. - It was. It was. - Did you have feelings about him before? - Mm-hmm. I didn't know much about him. - Same. I really just knew his name and I knew of all the crazy allegations and I knew about the computer. - Yep. - And I hadn't seen his face until that interview I watched, which made me interested in him. - Right. Yeah, I knew the same thing. Everybody else knew very, but very surface even. - And I didn't even really know he had such a legitimate career before all of the dust up. You know, he's a lawyer and he'd gone to the great schools and all that shit. - Well, and then obviously what we talked about the debate where Joe Biden is, what Trump references him and then Joe Biden is defending him and it's like very-- - I remember that moment, yeah. Upsetting that he has to defend his son. - Yeah. - Yeah. And he's like, he's working so hard. It's heartbreaking, honestly. But I also-- - I don't want to suggest that there's these are comparable levels of culpability, they're not. But it felt like he was making fun of him that his son had cancer. I mean, that's what it felt like. Like your kid has this life threatening you. - Yeah, exactly. - Illness and I'm gonna shame you over. - It was just like, fuck, there's no. - And then he really got himself into crazy because he said it and then Biden was like, said something about him dying. And he was like, no, your other son. And he's like, yeah, he's working really, and he was like, yeah, you're making him talk about like the absolute worst things that parents could possibly imagine. - Yeah. - It's horrible. But I also like, I don't think I knew the extent of the tragedy they had all dealt with. I didn't either. I kind of knew, right. I knew that Joe Biden had a real big tragedy. And I think I knew he lost his first wife, right? - Yeah. - I didn't know the extent of that. I didn't know he sworn into the Senate in the hospital. Oh, there's 29, all this stuff. Like, you imagine dealing with that at 29. - And your baby? - No. - I mean, no, no. - Like, absolutely not. It makes me, it makes me have so much respect for him honestly. - Yeah, yeah. I've told three or four different people post interview, I'll go like, do you know the whole story? And no one does, that I've talked to you. And the two different times that kids were present, what do you think their follow up question was? - When you said like, what happened then? - Like at the station wagon. Did the dog die? And I'm like, I didn't ask. - Wow. - But it goes, to show you know this rule in movies, you cannot kill a dog in a movie. - I know. - Reigns are crazy. - They are. I think it's because-- - The innocence? - Almost the opposite. It's like, we know humans come in every shade of good and bad. And so like, there's bad people, you know? You can imagine easily someone dying that wouldn't bother you at all. Like if Putin gets shot tomorrow, I won't care. In fact, I'll be happy. - Right. - There's no dog, I'm gonna be happy that was killed. And let's see eight people I guess. But oh shit, this just came full circle. Like I wouldn't be happy if the dog that killed the crow got hurt. - Killed. - No, 'cause I don't think the dog's capable of malice. - Right, right, right. - Anyways, there's something intrinsically more innocent about these animals. - Of course, of course, of course. - Yeah, but it is a funny prior sliding scale and I obviously, as a bad person, like don't get it. I mean, I get it. I do get it intellectually in that way. Like, oh yeah, there's an innocence, there's a ball. But I don't feel that ever. So I don't, I, of course, my question is like, the children. - Uh-huh. - I think why would never think about the animal. - Right, right, right, right. It's really telling and interesting and fascinating that we, because we're social primates, like we're built to think some people deserve certain things and punishment is built into the system. And like, it's just interesting how we view each other versus how we view almost everything else. - I know. - But again, I think there's anomalies. I don't know that you, I don't know. I mean, obviously you can speak for yourself, but I don't think you really believe that people should be punished. And I think I believe it less and less and less. - Right. - I think people should be removed to keep other people safe. - Yes, me too, but not in a punitive way necessarily. - Yeah, why, what are we doing it for? - Yeah, I think, you're not gonna be aiming better. - Yeah, my level of wanting someone to suffer, to feel bad because they did something wrong is pretty much gone. - Yeah, there's still a step that alive to my knowledge that I didn't like. - Yeah. - I don't want him to be suffering. - Yeah. - I don't really like this stuff. - Well, it does nothing. - No, that's the issue, or that's the issue. - Although, I mean, again, to be fair, I've never had a, - Love on murder. - Exactly. And in that case, maybe I would fully just be like, yep, want them to suffer for the rest of their life. 'Cause I have to suffer for the rest of my life. - And if you killed someone in my family. - Yeah. - So that is the paradox. - Yeah, I know. - We just have a lot of very fascinating hardware. - I know, we do. - That controls how we, it's this whole thing or it's like if these one million people died for this reason and these one million people died for this reason. We can put such different values on that. You know, like if we think someone deceived someone in the pursuit of that or if we think it was a natural cause or we think, it's like the deaths, the deaths, you don't have the person anymore. But it makes such a big difference to us how that happened. Which is a bit all in our mind. You know, it's like the objective tragedy is that someone you loved is gone. - Yeah, but prematurely feels or by the hand, by unnatural, unnatural causes. - But by cancer at 25 years old, is on natural is getting murdered by somebody, right? It's as unexpected, it's like. - It's as unexpected. But I do think it's like that's the way they're bought. It's that's, that was their body. Their body couldn't handle this life or whatever. There's like a lot of things you can set yourself up when it was really avoidable. That feels, yeah, that's, it's too maddening. Like it's very upsetting. I mean, just don't murder. You know, like let's just not do that. - But it's just like, we have all these sliding scales. But it's like, if there's just a legitimate accident in an intersection, if a lights out, that's one thing. - Yes. - There's not a light on someone who blew the stop light. Now we could ratchet up. That person's drunk. Like, I know. - The objective thing's all the same. Someone was killed operating a vehicle, you know? And then we've got like a huge range of how we feel about that. - Yeah, I think again, on the scale is about the level of which it could have been avoided. And if it's just someone making a decision in their mind, I hate this one, I'm gonna kill them. Or like, I'm just gonna shoot all these people. That is so far on the one end of the spectrum of avoidability. - It's harder to accept. - Yeah, but because it didn't have to happen. - It didn't have to happen. - I mean, I guess what I'm saying is the aliens might go, like, oh, this person had a partner. Now they don't have a partner. They're in lies, the heartbreak in the anguish. And then if you told the monkeys, well, no, there's a big sliding scale of heartbreak in anguish within that. That's where they would get fascinated. Oh, please tell us about why there's different versions of losing a partner. - I know. I bet even the aliens would get it. - You think so? - I kinda do. Well, I don't know what they're like, you know? I haven't met any. - Yeah. - But, yeah. - Okay. - Just for that whole thing. - No, you don't wanna knock on one 'cause you wanna meet aliens. - Oh, no, that was just for all the death and murder. - Okay, okay. - Yeah. - Yeah, I have no problem meeting aliens as long as they're nice. - Yeah. - They're gonna probe, yeah. But you might enjoy it. - They have to. - Yeah. That's standard. That's the only consistent thing across all alien content. - What are they trying to see? - They gotta figure out like what makes you tick. - That's not the way. - For them it is. They put that anal probe in, they get all the answers. - Oh God. - Yeah, we had a guest we recorded yesterday that was so fascinating about some murders. And we also just want answers so badly when something horrible happens. When a horrible tragedy happens, we want answers so badly that we're really willing to overlook a lot of things. - We feel better with the wrong answer. - I know. - That's what I'm trying to go up pro. - I'm like, no, no, no, no. - That's what I'm trying to approach. We have just all these weird built-in biases that don't actually make sense. - I know. - But if you gave someone that option, would you rather think the wrong thing versus not know, they would go, well, they would say not know, but then in the situation they want it. - They want to think the wrong, they want peace. Like I get it, you want peace. - But that's why we're getting somewhere. Because that's why Buddhism is a compelling thing. It's like, that shouldn't be what gives you peace. - But it also in these cases where it's like murders and stuff, it is like, well, are they gonna murder other people? You know, there's that element too, like if they're outstanding. - But that would even heighten the reason to not think it's the wrong person. - Well, I agree, I agree. - But we all would be susceptible to that. I think so, I think that is right. - Okay, who's the hypnotist who makes people stop smoking? Carrie Gainer, there are a few listed online, but this is only with a crazy, oh, with the toupee. - Oh, 'cause he had said there are a few things. - Yeah, okay, okay. DAX quotes. - Can you tell this is a toupee? It's looking more and more like one, right? - Well, no. - I'm having a wild Wolverine phase. - It is. - It is, it is. - It doesn't weigh a toupee, though. - Okay. - It's a mop. - No, it's just growing. - Yeah. - DAX quotes Hunter saying you add up all other drug deaths in the number of alcohol deaths is five times. Drinking deaths versus other drug deaths in the USA, alcohol-related deaths, 178,000. All other drug deaths, 70,000. - Not good. - And we have an inordinately high amount of drug deaths in the US and his was worldwide. Everyone's drinking, except for the Middle East. - Fair. Hunter says he was on the cover of the New York Post more than anyone else in a one-year period. Couldn't really find that. - You didn't go through every single. - To be fair, I'm into this. - Okay. - And she couldn't find it. - Well, then I trust that it can't be found. - Me too. - President Donald Trump holds a record for the most appearances on the New York Post covers. While Hunter Biden was prominently featured in the late 2020 and 2023 regarding his laptop and legal issues, figures like Trump sitting presidents and prominent New York politicians, such as Anthony Weiner or Mick Erick Adams have accumulated vastly more covers over the decades. So that's over a longer period of time. - For Weiner. - Yeah. Ding, ding, ding. Joe Biden had one of the funniest things with Anthony Weiner. - What did he say? - He like, I wonder if I can find it. - Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Vice President is that folks are gonna go to the polls or have already gone to the polls. And they don't know what to make of this. They're in the dark. - Well, I think it's important. I think Hillary, if she said what I'm told, she said, is correct. She released the emails from the whole world to see. The whole world to see. They continue their investigation. And the best of my knowledge you won't prejudice the investigations. And but that's sort of the still-to-language the agency always uses. And it doesn't mean anything. And so it's unfortunate. I'd be remiss if I didn't note that if she had released all the emails from the get-go, we wouldn't be having this conversation. Well, that's true. But I don't know where this email with his emails came from. What apparently added Weiner. - Well, oh God. - Ethie Weiner, oh God. - She's not coming to Ethie Weiner. I'm gonna get you in. - And I wasn't before he got in trouble. So I shouldn't come to Ethie Weiner. - So, oh God. - It's just a disaster. - It was just so real. - It was such a real moment. Oh, really, maybe that. How old was Hunter when Jill came into the picture. Hunter was seven. When Joe and Jill married. - When they married? - Yeah. So before. - She might have been in the picture, yeah, for her. - Yeah, I assume. Hunter claims eBugane or iBugane. - Oh, yeah, the drug. - Yeah. - Is the strongest or one of the strongest hallucinogens on the planet? That drug is not necessarily the strongest hallucinogen in terms of potency, but it is classified as one of the most uniquely powerful and intense psychoactive substances. It is highly potent with a deep, long-lasting dream like experience that fundamentally differs from classically, from classical psychedelics like LSD or psilocybin. And that's it. - That's it. Well, dude, I'm amazed he made it out of that hole. I mean, that is many years. This is the second person this year we've had that spent years smoking crack. I don't know how you come back from that. - Who's the other one? - Charlie. - Yeah, I know. I mean, that amazes me. - I know. - As someone that smoked it sporadically and I found it to be pretty devastating for the next week. He had, I just don't know. - How you ever come? - Oh my God. - God. - Love you. - All right, love you. (upbeat music) [BLANK_AUDIO]