Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 504: Abby Martin

Episode Date: April 23, 2022

Abby Martin, journalist, author, artist, and TRUTH-TELLER, re-joins the DTFH! LOS ANGELES AREA: JOHNNY PEMBERTON IS PERFORMING HIS NEW SHOW, MINNESOTA REGGAE COLOSTOMY BAG, TONIGHT! APRIL 22, 8PM AT THE ELYSIAN THEATER. GO GO GO! You can check out Abby on all major social platforms, including her show The Empire Files on youtube! Original music by Aaron Michael Goldberg. This episode is brought to you by: Lumi Labs - Visit MicroDose.com and use code DUNCAN at checkout for 30% Off and FREE Shipping on your first order! Babbel - Sign up for a 3-month subscription with promo code DUNCAN to get an extra 3 months FREE! ZipRecruiter - Try for FREE at ZipRecruiter.com/Duncan

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Followed by a hike. Followed by three dinners. Followed by a shopping trip. Followed by another hike. Followed by sucking his dick for three hours. That was sucking his dick for three hours. That was dedicated to Detective Frank Hamlin from the goat-faced killer. He says he has a special message for you and your partner.

And that he wants you two to know that... Draw this in room. That's what happens. When you take the moon and Saturn and say it backwards. This person's nipples and a live grenade were mailed to Alex Trembach's last maid. Answer is my name. If you're being forced to listen to the DTFH while on a long trip, you may be entitled to compensation.

My name is Leonard Hamlin, and I, along with my team of legal experts, have gotten victims of non-consensual DTFH exposure over $20 million in cash payouts. My boyfriend forced me to listen to the DTFH on our ride to Coachella. I called Leonard Hamlin and was awarded $2 million. Don't wait a second longer. Pick up your phone and dial 1-800-I-AM-HURT. Again, that's 1-800-I-M-H-U-R-T. You'll be put on with a legal expert who will remind you that you have to find a way to be here now. Because now is all we have. Just joking.

This isn't the DTFH. It's a real-life law firm that has gotten millions of dollars into the pockets of victims of non-consensual podcast exposure. Call us. We will get you paid. Don't call that number. It's not worth it. It doesn't even work. Not even worth seeing if that number works. All right, friends, I just was lucky enough to do a DTFH with one of my favorite guests, Abby Martin. And she let me ask her all the questions that I've been wondering about when it comes to what's happening in Ukraine.

Abby Martin is a journalist, an author, an artist, and a true truth teller. She's fiery and brilliant. And hopefully this episode will help clear up any confusion you might have over what's going on over there if you've been following it at all. We're going to jump right into it, but first this. I don't know if you've ever eaten too much cannabis, but I certainly have. Anytime I've done that, a lot of horrible things happen to me. My nipples start lactating and gooey streams of white, sour, milky stuff

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Please send me more jars. And we're back. Friends, you want to see a live DTFH? I haven't done one in over two years. But I'm going to do one with the great genius Dan Harmon. We're going to do that at the Avalon on the 28th for the Netflix is a joke festival. Also got some other shows coming up.

You can find them all at dunkitrustle.com. Check it out. I'm going to be in Phoenix May 13th. Then I'm going to be in Rosemont June 23rd. Then I'm going to be at the comedy works July 14th and many more dates coming around the band. All right, friends. Oh, yeah.

I want you to join my Patreon. It's patreon.com. You know what? I don't even know what remiss means. I'm going to be honest. I'm not going to look it up because I like saying it, but I would be remiss if I didn't let you know that Johnny Pemberton is putting on his one person show

Minnesota reggae colostomy bag. It's April 22nd, 8pm at the Elysian. I've seen this show and it is hilarious. And touching and super incredible. And I love Johnny. Won't you go see it? Again, that's April 22nd, 8pm at the Elysian Theater in Los Angeles.

1-9-4-4 Riverside Drive. You can find ticket links on Johnny's Twitter. All right, everybody. Abby has a new show called Doast with Abby Martin. I'm going to be on it next week. All the links you need to find out are in the description below. And I'm going to be on it next week.

All the links you need to find that are going to be at DuncanTrestle.com. Now, everybody, please welcome back to the DTFH. Abby Martin. It's the DuncanTrestle video. Abby, I'm so glad to see you again. Welcome back to the DTFH. Hi.

Dude, it's so great to be back. Duncan. How are you? Are you? Tell me how are you enjoying being a new mom? Dude, it's the craziest thing in the world. I remember hearing you talk about it because you obviously had your kid first.

And it was like, I think you described like, it's like going to the ocean as opposed to hearing it described for you your whole life and then actually being there for the first time. It is absolutely insane. I feel like every day that passes because he's so young still, I'm never actually like fully realizing what's happening because the changes are so rapid and it's so surreal

and it never stops becoming surreal. Like every night I just think like this is happening, this is real and just like seeing him transform and now form language is just like, holy shit. I mean, just every stage of it has been such an animalistic thing and just understanding your place in the world, I guess, like finally and just all the realizations and all the emotional weight of realizing

what your mother did for you, what your father did for you, what their parents did for them, like what it all means in the grand scheme of things. And it is intense. Yeah, it's intense. It's death. I mean, it's one of the like, it's like just moving into the blast radius of some kind of genetic atomic bomb

that you're part of and you just every day. I know what you're saying. It's just, it's so, they're evolving so quickly. They, you know, every week it's almost like another baby and then the baby's not there anymore. Then it's a toddler. The baby's gone. Where's the baby?

And then there's like a kid who will like, it's the best. I, it's the best, but it is what it's, to me, while all this other shit's going on in the world, all the complexity, all the strangeness, knowing that all around the planet, these beautiful creatures are sucking on boobs. Like, you know what I mean? Nothing's different from what's been going on like this forever.

You know, even though we seem so advanced, that primordial reality is happening in every second. And that's pretty cool to think how, how those two things are coexisting. Especially covering this kind of stuff and then like looking at my son's eyes and just the pure joy and innocence of him, like learning what a balloon is.

You know, it's like something just so basic and it's just like, how could you not just love with every fucking out, like every fiber of your being? How could you not just embrace this moment of like pure energy? But then there's this weird like thing that compounds everything, that like makes me constantly think about death.

And I guess the bringing a life into the world and knowing how relatively easy, of course, it is to create life and your place in... Certainly for dudes, it's easy. You guys fucking create millions of them every day. Just go off in a fucking oblivion, dude. But like how everything, it's like at this point, and I know that you, you know,

your mother and of course having cancer and stuff, it's like so many things happen that you realize that everything's just a march to death. And having a baby there is just immediately makes me all of a sudden care about my health. Like, oh shit, I'm a fallible human and I want to just live every day for this new creature and do everything for them.

You can't die anymore. You don't have a luxury of death. People like us, you know, we're like, ah, you know, so what, maybe there will be a nuclear war, I'll get evaporated, I bet it won't last long. Now it's like, fuck, we got to make this thing work now. We have to really make it work somehow and keep it going. And yeah, that's, I think all those things are really good.

That's, you know, those are all, it's not easy realizations, obviously it's not easy to have kids, but it definitely makes you more human. It makes you, God, like all the stuff going on. You know, like when Obama or whoever the president is, is dropping bombs on another country and you hear about babies getting blown up,

you know it's awful. Anyone with a brain knows it's awful. But when you have a kid and then you, you know, like this shit going on in Ukraine and you know, Putin's got kids, and you think, how do you do that? Knowing what it's like to be a parent, how do you conduct war?

How do you compartmentalize humanity so that it makes sense? I just don't get it. Like, how do they do it? What do you think the acrobatics they're doing mentally are to pull off not feeling like a demon when you're annihilating families? I mean, man, I've asked myself that about just like climate change and just every, I mean, every aspect aside from war,

it's like war is the most straightforward one, right? It's like you literally know that you're killing babies. Like every time you shell a civilian neighborhood, like you're killing fucking kids. But it's like just the, I mean, I guess it is so much more abstract when you can just be like, we're just going to perpetually drill and never, you know, the climate is in this apocalyptic state and we're on the precipice of like this catastrophic change

and it's like we're not going to change anything. Status quoism all the way because our survival depends on it, like kind of thing, like our power and status. But yeah, war is this whole other level where it's like you literally have to abandon humanity. You cannot see through the lens of like being a parent or being even a human being and having like looking at other humans in the same way.

I mean, that's what's so fucking amazing and stark about this war as opposed to all the parallel examples of all, you know, everything that we can go down the line is how the media is responding to this, right? Like all of these European journalists and shit being like, oh, this is different. They're like, this isn't Syria. This isn't Palestine.

Like we're used to those places being completely decimated and those people are barbaric and they're like, this is different because these are Europeans and these people have blonde hair and blue eyes. And it's like, I'm sorry, but I'm equally as revolted when a Palestinian child or a Syrian child or a Somali child is killed by our bombs. So it's hard to differentiate

and it's hard to make that distinction. And so that's why I guess I'm looking at this whole thing with my mouth agape, like where did this all come from? Like thank you for joining our outrage, our collective outrage at the sheer horror and hell that war is, but war did not start a month and a half ago. Like war is a permanent state. And the people who are perpetrating this are no better than Putin

and those people live here in this country, you know? And so it is, I don't know how they do it, Duncan. I ask myself that every day and I don't even know how people report on these kind of atrocities and crimes with like with a straight face because especially when you have a kid, it's like every child lost. It hurts in my heart because I think of the mother who grew that child,

who fucking made that child for nine goddamn months, birthed that child, raised that child and the child is just used as a fucking piece of cannon fodder for some political game. And their life is extinguished as if it was nothing. Yeah, and it's so weirdly normalized and I don't, yeah, I can't tell. I love having you on because you often set me straight.

I veer, I'm very susceptible to propaganda. It's just, I am, and I fully admit it. So like my compass needle, just depending on where I land, it can go any way, depending on how great the propaganda is. But being susceptible to propaganda also helps me at least know when it's, when I'm seeing propaganda. And what is so weird about what's happening right now is

everything's propaganda. Like we all, if you've lived in America long enough, you know what it's like when a war is about to start. You know how they get as prepped for it. You know, like when the drums are beating and every single time it happens, we think, no, no, no, no, no. We're not going to do it again.

We're not doing it again. Are we doing it again? We're not doing it again. And then all of a sudden, there it is. The like, the PSYOP starts happening and you know, and you look at what's going on to the Ukrainians and you get, you're supposed to get angry. You should get angry and that is happening.

You're supposed to get angry. You get mad. Now suddenly you're, I've gone through periods of just fantasizing, this is how fucked up I am. I've got, I've gone through periods of falling asleep, fantasizing, trying to convince Putin to stop launching missiles. I'm like, I'm a dad now. You seem cool.

I saw the, the interview you did with what, what's his face? That the crazy, the guy who did the JFK. Oliver Stone. I saw your Oliver Stone interview. You seem like you have a heart. Why are you blowing up people? I don't, I know you're kind of in the mob or something.

And anyway, this is how nuts I am. My wife is like, you got to just stop looking at the internet doctor or having imaginary conversations with someone in Russia. But, but, but, uh, so anyway, now we have vilified every Russian person. Me being an idiot with geography. I like started researching Russia and realizing how gigantic it is. It's giant. It's so huge.

And it's like so many people there. So now you're seeing like as part of the propaganda. Look, the Russians, they're making cupcakes that have the Z on it. They're celebrating the destruction and they're acting like there's some unified voice coming out of that place. Is there, is it true? Are the Russians unified in their general, uh, support of this war that Putin is waging in, uh, the Ukraine?

So I just did a podcast with my friends, Yasha Levine and Evgenia Kovtun. They're really vehemently anti-war, but they're also very critical of the U.S. role having lived here for quite a while. And they have a really good take because truthfully Duncan, there is such a fog of war surrounding the day to day operations and the war crime day sure that we're told by the featured moments tab and all the curation of these tech overlords that are basically curating our reality for us. And working on behalf of U.S., you know, foreign policy establishment to tow a

certain line as well as the blanket censorship of basically anything that can be construed as, as, uh, Russian talking points as well as, of course, Russian affiliated media. It's very hard to figure out what is going on on the ground. And it's also really hard to know what is and what is not hyperbolic in terms of like repression within Russia. What is really the state of affairs in terms of the political society. So that's why it was really instructive to hear from my two friends who have no skin.

I mean, they have skin in the game, but they're not tied to Russia and they're not tied to like U.S. corporate media. They're just independent journalists. Right. It is very true that there is very severe political repression. And so because of that, there's very little space and oxygen given to an anti-war movement that would be growing more and more within Russian society. When the war launched, there was thousands of arrests.

A lot of people rounded up. A lot of people visited by police for simply posting things on their social media. And, you know, I think that there is jail sentences that are looming for people who are just dissenting against the war. So yes, there's very fascist repression going on. And so it makes it really hard to, to actually determine what is like the public opinion, really. Do you remember what it was like taking a second language class in college or high

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Babbel, language for life. Yes, there's very fascist repression going on. It makes it really hard to actually determine what is the public opinion really within Russian society. Of course, you have this whole internal propaganda campaign from Putin talking about the denotification and using the death of 27 million Soviets in World War II. That's a lot of people compared to 40,000 US, United States residents or citizens dying in that war.

27 fucking million Soviets dying, defeating the Nazis. Putin is resurrecting this anti-Nazi propaganda and the glory of defeating the Nazis and using that in a grotesque way to gin up support for this regime change war that I think he thought was going to be really easy. I think it's really fucked up because look at what the US has done to Iraq, to Libya. You march in there thinking that these things are going to be easy and then you end up causing this massive amount of suffering, death and destabilization of an entire region. There's no going back.

Once you open Pandora's box of war, there's no closing that and war is hell, dude. It's hard to determine what's going on but there's a lot of legitimate things that up until this point that the US ignored and that there could have been more diplomacy and unfortunately that was abandoned every step of the way and here we are and it's horrifying. Okay. Yes, it is. Thank you for that. Your take on it.

Just trying to, again, it's such a bizarre time because if you just try to zoom out and say, all right, here's why they're doing it. It's not like they're, here's why they're doing it. Here's why Russia is attacking Ukraine. I don't think it's right. I'm a hippie. Don't attack. Don't bomb.

What the fuck? I know Russia is a super repressive country right now and we could talk about it in a little bit. How can this like, you know, have you heard of the Wudekyu pipeline, like New Agers who get into QAnon? It's called Wudekyu. But there's like a right wing to Putin pipeline where weirdly people who are hyper-conservative suddenly just fall in love with Putin.

Okay. All that aside, you're a journalist. I'm just a podcaster who gets, like, so like, like, help me figure this out. To me, it seems like Russia understands that NATO, the alliance, doesn't like Russia. You know, many good reasons for that. Russia's been doing the same thing that the CIA has been doing. I think it's picked up some tricks from the CIA, mixed it in with KGB stuff. They're into destabilization too.

And so this is the conflict and Russia is saying, listen, we know you don't like us. We know you don't want us to exist. How can we let you be right at our border? Like you were against us. And so they think that NATO is an enemy. It would be similar to like Russia going back to Cuba, right? It would be like if all of a sudden Russia started building bases on Cuba or in the Mexican border or something like that, right?

We would be like, no, fuck that. You can't do that. Is that the reason outside of the denoxification is the reason that Putin is freaked out by NATO encroaching on its territory? Yeah. I mean, let's let's briefly talk about what NATO is because NATO was founded as an anti-communist alliance to basically fight the Soviet Union. So you kind of have to ask yourself, like, why does NATO exist at all today?

And when you look at NATO's history in the last 30 or so years, I mean, it's basically been an aggressive war-mongering alliance destroying Yugoslavia, right? This is another former Soviet country. Hey, historic, can you educate me on that? That was because I don't know that. I mean, in 1999, the NATO alliance basically dropped like 30,000 bombs on Yugoslavia. I don't know much more about what precipitated all of this, but it is just really crazy because you hear a lot of Western pundits and stuff being like, this Ukraine war is the biggest

war since World War II in Europe. And it's like, actually, Yugoslavia was pretty destroyed by NATO, and it's kind of whitewashed and forgotten about by this entire political punditry. And then you have, of course, Afghanistan was in part a NATO operation. Where is this on the North Atlantic borders? This is completely outside of the periphery of what NATO was supposed to do, Afghanistan. Then Libya, dude, 2000, this is 11 years ago, under the Obama administration, NATO launched a full-scale, first the no-fly zone, and then fucking completely destroyed Libya.

This was one of the most prosperous countries in Africa, bombed into oblivion, where 11 years later, they have no central government still. So putting that aside, when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, NATO was a big point of contention. And there was an accord. There was several treaties and architecture installed and in place to basically prevent a war between these two nuclear powers. And in 1997, there was Russian officials that met with George H.W. Bush, and they promised

that NATO would not expand eastward one inch. And if you look at US national security documents, it literally does talk about, to your point, it talks about how countering Russia and China as business competitors is the main national security strategy for the US. And in order to do that, it needs to use lethal force and lethal armaments. That's a pretty hostile measure put into writing. And so all of this over the last couple of decades, all of these Cold War-era treaties, all of these guarantees, and all of the architecture of a framework to de-escalate tensions completely

dissolved or were abandoned or broken by the US because the US never wanted to engage in diplomacy. It always wanted to use NATO as an encroaching force to surround Russia, to pressure Russia. And so all of this is valid, right? And in 2019, Trump actually dissolved the last most important treaty, which was the Intermediate Nuclear Range Treaty, which basically said that the US could stage missiles that could reach cities in Russia within 10 minutes. And those were all very clear red lines that Russia said over and over again over the last

several decades, that they would not stand for, that they had several red lines, that you could not use Ukraine as a hostile, basically staging ground for advanced weaponry. And you could argue that Ukraine was, in fact, this de facto NATO member because they had opened the door for NATO membership after the 2014 US-backed coup that overthrew a more neutral leader that was supposed to basically... Is that true? Okay, wait. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

There was a US-backed coup. That's when Zelensky came into power? No, this is what's interesting too. So this is totally debunking the whole Russia thing too, about how, oh, Ukraine's a Nazi state and it's a Nazi regime, totally cartoonishly false. In fact, I mean, it is true that the US was involved in the coup in 2014. Of course, there was a lot of legitimate grievances. Ukraine is a very corrupt state.

And there were huge protests. But the problem is, just like a lot of legitimate protests that erupt around the world, the US has its hands to facilitate an outcome. And so Victoria Nuland, who was serving under Hillary Clinton in the Obama administration, she is one of the chief architects of basically the entire neo-conservative foreign policy with her husband. She was on the ground in Ukraine handing out cookies during the Euromaidan protests. She admitted that they invested $5 billion into Ukrainian civil society to try to basically

sway whatever the outcome was of these legitimate grievances that they had. And there's even a leaked phone call that Victoria Nuland is basically just pontificating about who they want to put in the government after Yanukovych was ousted. And, oh, do we want to put this guy? Oh, no, no, no. Do we want to put this guy? And someone was like, well, the EU wants him and she's like, fuck the EU. Like we're going to put this guy in power.

And it's like, what in the absolute fuck is going on? Like you guys are just wantonly, like randomly talking about, this is life and fucking death, this is an entire country, you know? And that's what kills me. It's like, but oh, so to your point, like so this, so basically the coup happened. It was horrific. A lot of neo-Nazi regiments were on the ground getting funding, backing, were leading forces in the coup, but that they waned in power after that.

And then there was another election where Zelensky, Zelensky, who we all know today, this Marvel fucking hero that's painted by the West, you know, he's kind of a tragic figure because he won with a huge mandate, almost 75% of the vote because he ran on peace with Russia because ever since the 2014 coup, there was basically a civil war going on on the border of Russia and Ukraine where 14,000 people died in those two breakaway regions where it was like these semi-autonomous zones. And so Zelensky was like, I'm going to fucking bring peace together. He spoke Russian during the campaign.

He basically got in on a huge mandate of peace with Russia. And that's what makes this so tragic is that instead we're in this full-fledged war and fuck Putin for not doing, like he didn't do anything about these two regions, the 14,000 people who had died. He could have gone to the international stage. He could have done a lot. And instead he chose to launch a full-scale criminal, a legal invasion of Ukraine and basically just plummeted into a pit of hell.

Okay, so that was a great thank you. I have goosebumps. I feel like closing my windows so it's dark in here. Put duct tape on your windows. Remember when John Ashcroft was like, he was like, put duct tape on your windows because they're going to launch a chemical attack. And it's like, I don't know if that's going to stop it, dude. I think duct tape is the answer.

Maybe that gorilla glue tape. Okay, so this is something that I wonder and I have nothing to back it up other than just being generally conspiratorial. But was Putin lured in? Was this a trap? How do you, I do buy that they bit off more than they can chew and that they thought they could do it easily. I don't think that's propaganda.

I know for a little bit people were pushing back against that. There was some, I think it was in an op-ed in the New York Times that appeared everywhere where the premise wasn't in a no. He knows exactly what he's doing. Remember when that was bubbling around? I just wonder, did somebody get into his inner circle or distort his inner circle's ability to collect information that did someone just poison the soup of statistics that made them think they could just go under Ukraine and that everyone would surrender?

Because it seems like, especially if what you're saying is true, which I think I've heard it multiple times. I don't mean like you wouldn't say it was true. I mean, I just don't know what's real. If I, and I remember looking, I'm sorry, I'm going on all too long here. I remember seeing what you're talking about, realizing there are all these weird western American think tanks that were appearing in Eastern Europe and in the Ukraine and stuff where that were encouraging these protests and obviously trying to push the needle.

But okay, so is this just another phase in a weird plan to break up Russia again? Because it seems like a trap, like Putin invades, all of a sudden western countries start pouring like the most advanced weapons on earth into Ukraine, annihilating a lot of the Russian tanks. There's pictures of Russian helmets that are from World War II. They're not capable of stopping bullets and the type of guns they're using now. Do you think it was a trap or was it just Putin went crazy or just didn't care? Or the people around him were yes men and were afraid to tell them, I don't think we have the ability to do this right now.

I mean, it's such a good question because it is so incomprehensible that he thought that any other outcome would happen, like other than this one, which is getting bogged down into a proxy war. And this is exactly what this is. And I'm not just saying this, look at Congressman Adam Schiff, who was just on the floor of the house basically saying, we are using Ukraine to quote, fight Russia over there so we don't have to fight them here, bragging about how they are using Ukrainians as cannon fodder, that they're not even trying to engage in diplomacy, that they are just literally using the Afghanistan model, as Hillary Clinton recently said, proudly proclaiming that they want to use the Afghanistan model.

Where did that leave us? Wait, what's that? 9-11 in a 20-fucking-year war. I mean, basically funding the Mujahideen to fight the Soviet Union and bog them down into Operation Cyclone. So here we are. And what did that lead us to? 9-11 in a 20-year fucking war that we lost. This episode of the DTFH has been supported by Zip Recruiter. According to the latest research, 90% of employers plan to make enhancing the employee experience a top priority in 2022. After all, a happy workplace is key to attracting and keeping great employees. Hopefully, that's not a news flash to you.

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free at this exclusive web address. It's ZipRecruiter.com slash Duncan. That's ZipRecruiter.com slash D-U-N-C-A-N. Zip Recruiter, the smartest way to hire. Thank you, Zip Recruiter. So here we are again using this country with civilians in the crossfire and sending javelin missiles that could shoot down low-flying planes, helicopters, billions of dollars in weaponry, long-range artillery, heavy shelling. I mean, all of this stuff is just mind-bending. But yes, what was Putin thinking? What the fuck? What on earth was he thinking? That he could waltz into Ukraine and basically install a Russian-friendly regime in the face of the entire West uniting to send everything and do basically everything aside from a no-fly zone, which they actually

left on the table if there is a quote, biological or chemical attack, which is very scary because that could mean a bad actor could either stage one or whatever. And so we're in a really bad way. But was the trap set? I think the stage was set by the West a long time ago because Russia, for the last year, was meeting with all these NATO negotiators over the course of several months where they said, we have no choice but to militarily invade if you do not respect the red lines that we've set. And that one of them was Ukraine never joining NATO. Not that Ukraine was on the doorstep of joining NATO, but the fact is that they refused to say that they couldn't. And of course, you could argue, why shouldn't they have the right to join NATO? That's not for

me to say. But the fact is that Russia very clearly said, we're going to do this. And I think that's why you saw this kind of pre-cog advertising campaign all over corporate media, like Russia's about to invade Ukraine, Russia's about to invade Ukraine. But all of these Russian officials and Ukrainian officials were like, this is hyperbole, they're not going to invade. Why are you guys saying this? And then something snapped where it just seemed like it was almost a unilateral decision Putin was like, we're not going to wait any longer, we're just going to do this. And it was like him not just walking into a trap, it was like walking into a sand, like quicksand. It was like, I mean, I don't know what they were thinking, but I think that they definitely did

not prepare for the sanctions that are going to exfix the economy. And a lot of people are saying it's going to be worse than the collapse of the Soviet Union, which was a really dire time for Russians. And it's also, they've incurred so many casualties already that there is no way that they could have anticipated how much resistance was going to be on the ground on the Ukrainian side, which is really amazing. Because as you mentioned, there's this notion that Putin is this genius, right? It kind of reminds me of Trump. People are like, oh, Trump 5D chess player. It's like, really? I feel like Trump is a complete fucking moron who's flying by the seat of his pants. And people always just impose this idea on Putin, like, no, he's gaming it out. Just wait. It's like,

no, dude, I'm pretty sure that invading Ukraine was like the dumbest decision ever. So how do you explain that away? But people will always do that. And I think that that will happen till the end of time. No one's going to ever face the fact that they were wrong, that Putin really is just as dumb as Donald Trump. That's scary. That's scary. Like, no one wants to admit, like, no, you don't understand. You see, these are just maniacs. Like, it's not like some brilliant, peace-loving world leader who's, yes, he understands there's going to have to be some loss now, because what would have come would have been horrific. It's just crazy. It's just crazy, dudes. You don't, that's the part that,

you know, really creeps me out, especially like, I think Putin has some, like, mystic whispering in his ear. I don't know if you knew about this, but there's some, like, Eastern European, like, Rasputin character, apparently, who's, like, telling him, no, God wants you to do this. So now it's like- Oh, so it's just like Bush. It's just like George Bush. Like, God, oh, great. Now we're involving God dictating the whims of these political maniacs. Yeah, it's pretty, pretty disconcerting, Duncan. And especially because Putin's a monster of America's own making, if we want to go back to, you know, the fact that Yeltsin, the shock therapy, neoliberalism, injected in the post-Soviet Union, and the collapse of the economy, the privatization,

and the fact that Putin was handpicked by the U.S. puppet that we helped install. Really? And here we are today, baby. It's amazing, isn't it, that all of this keeps going back. It's like, how far do we want to reset the clock? I don't know. I mean, that's the problem. It's a, it's, I don't know. Whenever I see things like this, I feel like, you know, it's like, I think I heard someone describe it. You know, you look down into the ocean and you see like a, the glint of like a fish down there, but you can't see the shape of the fish. You just know it's big. And whenever things like this are happening, don't you get this sense of like, this is part of a plant. Like, I'm not saying it's a part of Putin's plan. I'm not even saying it's

part of like Biden's plan. I don't know whose plan it is, but it appears to be, like you said, organized before it happened, you know, and like all of a sudden we're hearing about Zelensky and the Ukraine all of a sudden were interested. I'm interested. I'm on Reddit. I'm looking at it. I'm scared now. I'm like, what the fuck is this? Also, the part that's, I can't really wrap my head around is the, what are the odds? And I heard this on the podcast that you tweeted. What are the odds that someone in a sitcom about a normal dude becoming president of Ukraine becomes the president of Ukraine? It's, you know what I mean? It's, it's absurd. It's absurd that, that, that the TV show just turned into a reality show. And how are we, how,

I know that's what happened. I can't imagine there being an organized conspiracy to the level that we're like, listen, we've picked this guy out. He's perfect. He's going to be our man in the Ukraine to finally collapse the Soviet Union, but let's warm it up a little bit by putting him on a TV show and get everybody into it. And then we'll do the election. He'll get elected. And that's when we enact phase 19 or whatever it is. You know, it's just, I, I don't like the, I would, I, things like that make me feel nuts. Because if you say it out loud, like, does this seem real? That doesn't seem real. The actor, beautiful actor, dude, funny, charismatic iron TV becomes the leader of the, or they're calling the leader of the free world now.

And yeah, yeah, it's, it's, it is powerful. It is powerful. And there are times when I'm like, he's amazing. I love him. He's incredible. I can't believe it. He is cool. I really like him. But also there's times when I'm like, this just seems to, I don't know, clean or something. It seems to, I don't know, it just got that smell. You know, that smell. Well, it's the smell of propaganda, man. Like you said, it's coming at us from all sides, dude. Yeah, yeah, it is. Yeah, I mean, I guess we just have to go back to what you were saying initially. To me, and I think it's a really fucked up time in history, which is saying what you just said earlier on is controversial. The main thing is, look, we shouldn't, you know, blowing up children wherever they may be is not

good. Like it's a failure. Like it's an absolute complete failure of civilization. If we consider one way to have a conversation with someone is dropping bombs on them, and then they drop bombs on you. It's a failure, an absolute failure. And now worse than that, it's the kind of failure that can lead to the exact thing that some very smart people have been saying, that's going to happen. Nuclear proliferation is going to lead to a nuclear war. And a nuclear war, I think climate change is bad, wait until radiation is being blown up into the atmosphere and just drifting all around the planet and poisoning everything. We have no idea what that would be like. We can't even imagine what that would be like. And so to be a new parent and have to, like, on top of all the

shit that goes along with being a new parent, having on top of that, just have that in your mind after COVID. It is so fucked. It's so fucked. It's debilitating, dude. It's debilitating and it's all encompassing and it never ends. And it's like this low-level anxiety of just knowing that, I mean, imagine how our parents felt. You know, like our parents grew up. My mom tells me all the time, I feel like a lot of her anxiety comes from the conditioning of literally nuclear winter every day during the Cold War, doing the drills where they would go under their desk and what would you do in the wake of a nuclear bomb blast. It's like, what? Why are you even pretending like there was a chance of survival? What was the point? It's like you could have just ignored

it completely to school children every day. They're like, okay, all the five-year-olds, we're all going to wind up and do the mock nuclear blast exercise again, kids. It's like, what did that do to set the stage of our generation now? But no, it's frightening and it is a total breakdown of civilization. It's like the fact that here we are. I just listened to you and Danielli Battelli talking about Rome and that was what like, you know, here we are, dude. It's like, what's the difference? We just have more sophisticated technology and weaponry. You can blow people up in a more efficient fashion. That's the difference. But the mentality is still the same. By the way, I'm so sorry,

my computer's about to die. Can I just take the camera out and plug in my... Yeah, no problem. Yeah. So basically, things are still the same, Duncan. And that's not a very good thing to wrap your mind around because we have so much potential for so much beauty and we could carve out this utopian vision in a collective sense and we've abandoned it all for selfishness and greed and power despite the consciousness that's advanced, despite the access to everything on the planet. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's the... I mean, we got hyperconnected and then that connectivity was used against us by very smart people who know how to manipulate and how to propagandize everything so that the signal is always wrapped up in some slanted thing. It's always going one way or the

other. It does. And just trying to find some fundamental place where... No, this is the truth. It's controversial. And maybe it is. Maybe it's controversial to say, to imagine that there's a way to have a planetary society that doesn't have as an option war. You know, maybe that is naive. I don't know. Maybe that's just what people like us wish, but it can't be that way. There's too many people on the planet. There's too many different ways of thinking about the value of human life. And as long as that is happening, there's going to be war and you're going to have to push back against people who are deciding to do land grabs. That's why the biological weapon and chemical weapon thing, right?

People are saying, look, somehow they're trying to spin what Russia is doing as compassionate because they're not blowing up everything. They're just blowing up certain places, but they're like, look, if they wanted to, they could eradicate everything. But the reason they're not eradicating everything is because they want to own that stuff. It's like, you don't want to blow up the infrastructure. If you're intending to make that part of Russia, because you got to build it back. It's even more expensive. So if you use chemical weapons or God forbid biological weapons, then the job is just cleaning up bodies. And that's a lot easier than rebuilding skyscrapers. So I think that's why they keep saying they might do that. Because as a last resort,

what else is he going to do? I keep hoping maybe they'll just say, okay, we denotified, now we're done. And go on that propaganda train. Withdraw the troops and be like, we did what we meant to do. Don't notify again. That's one outcome I hope happens. Probably won't, but I keep praying for that. That's the only way out that I can think of for him other than going deeper and deeper into it and using the war technology that they haven't used yet to achieve that goal. I mean, don't you, isn't it a real, even though Russia is saying they won't do it, isn't it a real danger that at some point he might just decide to launch a nuclear missile at the entrenched forces in the Donbas, right? Aren't they all in

like bunkers and trenches and completely buried there? It is always a possibility for a nuclear war to erupt. And that's why this war is so volatile. And that is why anti-war activists, especially here in the West, need to be urging de-escalation, especially from our government, because there is no option other than diplomacy here, because having Zelensky at the Grammys and basically giving speeches to Congress, and it's like, look, I don't blame Zelensky. He wants to win, obviously. Calling for a no-fly zone, I understand that he is in the middle of a fucking war, and he wants to win that war. The problem with the no-fly zone is that that literally will escalate this to warring nuclear powers being embroiled in actual combat. And that is,

that will ensure what you're talking about inevitably. And that is a very, very slippery slope, very, very dangerous. And I think there's a lot of insidious disinformation about what that actually means. And you see the Beltway Press, for example, all of these journalists in DC clamoring for a no-fly zone. I mean, it really is like, who can up the ante of who's the most militaristic? And it's like, that is terrifying to me to hear all these journalists being like, why won't you give Zelensky what he wants? Like, give him the no-fly zone. Like, why aren't you doing this? And it's like, dude, what is going on here? Why can't you tell Americans what that will mean? Like, let's be honest, and then we can make up our minds about whether or not we want to risk

nuclear war for defending Ukraine. Because that's what this is. And here's what really kills me, Duncan. This censorship of, look, I was on RT. I was on RT for three years. I had a show. You got me on RT. You were on my show talking about psychedelics. It was incredible. And it shows you that it was a different show, you know, nearly 600 episodes of everything. Joe Rogan talking about DMT, you talking about psychedelics, like lucid dreaming. It was just such fascinating topics that I was able to explore. All of that was censored in this blanket ban, no discussion. It's completely memory hold from the internet, kind of the equivalent of like the modern burning of books, because it was associated with Russian TV. And the problem

with this is that when you are blanketly censoring all of Russian media, that leaves us privy or like susceptible to the narratives that we're told by the Western media. And what is the Western media saying about what's happening? They're saying Putin is doing this because he's an evil arch-villain, because we're living in a Disney movie, and there's the good, which is the West, the bad, which is the evil, not just bad, the evil. And when you're putting those kind of like superhero, super villain, like characteristics on someone, then it's hard to actually determine what is the real reason that this is happening. And that really bothers me, because then it's really hard to engage in diplomacy and to urge any sort of diplomatic solution, because then

you're just left with saying, well, there's no way that we can reason with this man, because he's an evil psychopath who just wants to kill kids. And look, we would never say that about Obama, right? Like there's always a reason why these things happen. And so to just kind of remove that ability for us to navigate that information on our own and to make up our own minds, it's infantilizing. And it makes us feel or treats us like children, basically, that we're not, we're not able to have the cognition to navigate these spaces and just, we just need to be told what to think and what to believe. Right. Yeah, right. Yeah, that's the, there, a new thing that has popped up in Western propaganda is don't do your own research.

Oh, really? You're going to do your own research? You know what I mean? Like that's become like, yo, really? You're one of those people who does their research? No, just trust what's coming out of like the three new networks. That's what's real. Don't do your own research. You're going to run into trouble if you do that. And it's true, actually, because I've done my own research and come to the conclusion that like a meteor was going to hit the earth. When COVID was happening, I did my own research, except where I was researching was like retic conspiracy. And I'm like, Oh my God, a meteor is about to impact. That's what this is. This is why I'm lucky to have my wife because she's like dunking a meteor is not going to hit. You're okay. We're okay. But still,

I know what you're saying. It's like, you should be allowed to, that was, I remember like, scrabbling around trying to like get any kind of like, I wanted to see the Russian propaganda. What are they saying? Like, it was very hard to find. And, you know, it was at least I couldn't find it. And then, you know, again, like, just to address some people, I know some people, I know you are probably haunted by this for being on RT. People think that you are a like secret, a funded mouthpiece for Russia. Or, but hearing what you just said about Putin, you can't say that shit. You can't say that and be one of like, working for the Kremlin. They, I know, you know, there's people who are afraid to like talk shit about him at all.

They're terrified of him. So, no, of course, when I was on RT, I spoke out against the Crimean invasion. And I was told like, I was able to keep my job because I really paved this editorial freedom there. But at the same time, a couple people and potentially my boss also wanted to ship me to Crimea. Like, I remember waking up the next day, the front page of the newspaper was Abbey's getting shipped to Crimea. And I was like, no, I'm not going there. Because you could have asked me, but now I'm being told like, you're just going to fucking ship me like a piece of equipment and just drop me in like a potential war zone because I spoke out and dissented on the network. So, yeah, I mean, no one can make that argument because I have constantly spoken out

about Putin. But this is the problem. Now this is conflated with just Putin apology. If you just talk about NATO or if you talk about the US role in this, because everything's been reduced to a cartoon binary. You know, this is complicated geopolitical stuff. And now it's just relegated to good and evil. Yep, that's it. And that's, to me, that's the part that's just so gross and so creepy. Like, you should be allowed to fearlessly explore truth without worrying that people like, this isn't the time for that. Right now, this isn't the time for you to like go into the details about why this is happening. And you're definitely not supposed to like, feel bad for the like Russian conscripts that were siphoned into this fucking thing and our cannon fodder are just being blown

up. You know, they didn't know that was gonna, they didn't know that was gonna happen. I don't think people, I didn't, I'd say I don't think people, I didn't realize how big Russia was, how undeveloped parts of it were. I didn't know about the draft that they had there, and that like just kids get suctioned up into the war machine. And so I think there's something really horrifying about the way there's a kind of celebration of a lot of these kids getting killed. Because they didn't, they didn't know that was gonna happen. And people are like, well, they shouldn't do it. They should like leave the military. But it's not that easy, right? Like, if they leave the military in Russia, they're going to go to jail or worse, right? You can't just

not do it. You kind of have a gun to your head. Oh, yeah, look at here in this country, you go to jail. You know, if you, if you're draft or same thing, if you're in the military and you abandon your post, you're going to jail. Like it's not easy, you know, and, and I can only imagine what would happen to you if you decided to abandon your post in Russia. And it's absolutely tragic that these young, like essentially just teenagers are just going and killing their brethren. Because that's really what this is, you know, a lot of Ukrainians speak Russian, a lot of Russian speak, or just are affiliated with Ukrainian nationality, and they have family on both sides. And it's a complete travesty through and through that it's essentially just killing your own people

for fucking nothing, man. And if you look at what Putin's saying, like exactly what you're saying, it's like, I want to know what the Russian propaganda is. I want to know what Putin is saying in his speeches. And if you look at like, what is, what does the West depict with all of these conflicts? It's like, I never heard like Bashar al-Assad, like give a speech. Like I never heard Gaddafi give, like I want to hear what these people say before we just both destroy their countries and kill these people. Like I want to know and understand who Putin is, what his ideology is, where he's coming from, and what he says about why he's doing this. And not only does he frequently talk about the NATO thing, but he also says some really crazy stuff that he basically

wants to go back to the Tsarism, like he has all this fondness for like, yeah, like the Russian Empire, how he basically he blames Lenin. He's very anti-communist. That's another thing that was really informative from my Russian friends. It's like, Putin is as anti-communist as our politicians are here. Because a lot of Americans wrongly think that the Soviet Union still exists, apparently, that Russia is still communist. And there's a lot of confusing iconography with like the anti-Russia stuff with the hammer and sickle. And no, he's as anti-communist as Trump. He hates communism. He blames Lenin for, I don't even know, for I guess helping pave the way for Ukraine to have sovereignty. And he basically just is disgusted with the fact that Ukraine's even an independent

country. So all of these things are important. I want to know these things. And I don't want it to be translated five times and be picked apart with sound bites to just be spoon fed to me by Joanne Reid about like what Putin said. Right. Yeah, I don't like that. It's sinister. It's sinister. It's sinister that, you know, in some alternate dimension, when things like this were happening, all the information channels would be opened up and there would be some way for just individuals in the countries that are like at war or proxy war to just talk to each other. Like what the fuck's, what are you guys hearing? What are, I'll tell you what we're hearing. And then from that sort of, I don't know, get out from under the shadow of whoever's trying to drive

the war machine so that everyone gets humanized or something like that. You know, that's, because I mean, that's the terrifying reality is if I had to roll the dice, Ukrainian teenagers, Russian teenagers, American teenagers, they're all probably similar. They're all probably confused and obnoxious. Right. Like I doubt, you know what I mean? I don't think any of them are evil or bad. And same with the adults and the parents. And I know, again, I know this is like not right now. You're supposed to be like, fuck them, fuck the Russians. They're all corrupt. Like how can you say, how do you, why do they even deserve any kind of anyone saying anything for them? Look at what they're doing. Look at what they've done. And I get it. It's fucked up as a parent. It's fucked up.

You know, you, you see, I can't get this out of my head. I know. Just some kid walking down the street. His parents nowhere to be seen. Just walking with all these refugees, just crying. And you know, that when you see things like that, that's when you're like, yeah, no flies on. All right, fuck it. Let's do, let's do it. Let's do it. Let's fucking do it. This can't happen because it's a, it's a gut instinct when that level of horror is happening. But then when you follow that three year old, I was like, oh shit, no, because that, that means something incomprehensible could happen. And, but then also it's like, well, what are we going to do? Abby? Is it just like Putin is like the, the, the bank robber and the bank surrounded. And instead of the gun to the

hostage's head, he's got like a nuclear missile pointed at lots of different places around the planet. Amy, is that what the world, the future of the world is going to look like? If you have nuclear weapons and you are not afraid to kill a bunch of people, then you can go back to the old ways, imperialism. You can go back to that because actually the West isn't going to do anything. You can actually take big chunks of land if your army can pull it off without worrying about any repercussions other than horrible sanctions, but you could still do it. Yeah. I mean, that's the, that's the question, right? Is what is going to make this stop? And I know it's really fucking hard to have humility, but like we need, at this point, it's like there needs to be some urgent,

urgent negotiations, an immediate ceasefire, and that has to mean giving Russia a concession. As horrible as that is to think that he could potentially take large swaths of Ukraine and, the sanctions are very, very bad, but at the same time, Russian oligarchs are not going to be hurt necessarily. It's really going to be the Russian people who are already very impoverished that are going to be felt abroad of these sanctions. And so that's what sanctions are intended to do. But yeah, I mean, are sanctions enough, right? And if they're not going to hurt Putin and his cabal, what are we really talking about here? But at the end of the day, and I just saw Noam Chomsky basically say the same thing, that like there needs to be a concession given to Putin

to make him stop. And that means sitting down at the table and immediately figuring that out. And whether it's promising neutral status for Ukraine moving forward, I don't even know how we can go back to what we were talking about before the war started, because it's gone so far. And now it's going to be retribution. Now it's what, now it's revenge and retribution for the victims lost. And talking about like this Ukrainian child and the fact that so many children are refugees because the parents are not the parents, but the fathers are forced to stay and the mothers and children are now being forced to flee. This is what I'm talking about. My blood boils when I see dead kids, when I see mass graves, and when I see these kids that have no family, right?

And Duncan, three kids every day, three babies have died every single day in 2022 in Afghanistan because of what Biden did. Biden stole billions of dollars from the regime that he knew would inevitably take over when they left. And he stole all the money. And because of this, all these babies are dying every day, 13,000 since the beginning of 2022. Oh, you mean, okay. We haven't seen one baby. I want to see these photos. It's like I'm just as outraged with the fact that my government is basically facilitating mass death of infants in Afghanistan as I am at Putin for allowing this to happen, for causing the deaths, the needless suffering of so many babies and kids and families. And like that's what I'm talking about. We need

to apply our moral consistency. We need to have moral consistency and we need to have this outrage everywhere, everywhere. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Like anytime anyone casually suggests escalating a war between nuclear powers is a viable solution for peace, they should be shamed. Like it should be put in a straight jacket, put in a straight jacket, or, or, yeah, it's, yeah, it's two, it's number one, it's really easy to say that when you're not living there. And number two, a lot of these people saying that, you explain this to me, I asked you this in a podcast, a long time, I don't know if you remember. But like in the news, like, I think I asked you why the fuck does like Raytheon advertise on CNN?

You know, like, what is that? Why, I'm not going to buy, what am I going to buy? A javelin or something? I don't understand. There's no Raytheon like shops around me though, where of, why are they advertising? Do you remember when we talked about that? And you told me it's like a display of power. It's like, we're here. But also, they're paying, seeing it, that means that the, you know, all the people working for CNN or Fox or whatever, they're getting paid by weapons manufacturers, meaning that it's not just like some random journalist who in their own mind is determined, well, the answer's a no fly zone. Right, it's like the conventional wisdom is an outgrowth of the subsidization of the

corporate media from the defense industry. And that's a really important distinction. It's not that this is coming out of just nothing. Our culture is centered around militarization, because that is exactly what the system necessitates in order to have constant expansion. And that's really, if you take a huge bird's eye view, war is a permanent state because of capitalism. And as long, I mean, I personally think that capitalism underpins so many of these problems, and we can't even think about a future that isn't full of war without talking about a different economic structure, because when you are forced to expand, right, and that means that you are forced to expand territorially, and in order to accumulate more resources and extract

more wealth, and that's imperialism. And that's imperialism. And we're talking about two competing capitalist countries. This has nothing to do with economic ideology in terms of communism versus capitalism. These are two competing capitalist countries that want more power. And that's where it gets really scary, because that's what happened before World War One. You know, World Wars can happen sometimes accidentally. It's when you have imperialist powers that are competing for more influence and control over the globe. And when those, like, when those butt heads, that's when it gets really dangerous. And that's where we are. That's where we are. Oh, God. Well, good night, everyone. Enjoy your night. Sleep tight.

Sleep tight. Good night. Oh, fuck, that's so spooky. You got a little bit longer, Abby. I wanted that. Of course. Are you kidding me? Did you? Let's talk about drugs. Just kidding. No, let's talk. I know. No, no, next time. I want to, have you ever read The Demon and the Freezer? No, this sounds like a really wild book. It's a book about smallpox, weaponized smallpox. Oh, Lord.

And how Russia was like, I mean, we are making it too. Like, this is before it became a war crime to use bio weapons. I don't, but, um, yeah, we were, we figured out a way to make smallpox even worse. And the Russians were doing it too. They were running it through, like, uh, I think pig livers that had somehow been inoculated or something against it so they could make like a Vax resistant smallpox, something like that. Been a while since I read the book, but it's a great book. The terrifying thing, the terrifying thing about it was not just the reality of how dangerous smallpox is because it's gone. We beat it. Right. We beat smallpox, but we don't, no one's vaccinate. Like, I don't think they vaccinate for it anymore.

I don't even know because it's gone, but I could be wrong about that. But the part I remember is, if you took aerosolized smallpox and just threw it in the wind in New York City, it would kill so many people. Yeah. And Russia apparently had vast stores of this stuff that just disappeared with the collapse of the Soviet Union. No one knows where it went. We don't know where it is. You know, and so, uh, that's that when, you know, when they're talking about bio weapons and stuff, that's part of what they're talking about is that they might still have some of that stuff floating around and it doesn't take much and you can, and it's kind of like, it's not like you can trace a missile. Satellites will show where a missile is gone. You can't trace

somebody blasting aerosolized smallpox, you know, downwind or in a western city or whatever, you know? So that's, I just, I wanted to add to, you know, I wanted to hear the Russia part on a happy note. You wanted to get like up the hysteria of one. Yeah, no, now I'm legitimately like, I just, yeah, I just pissed myself. No, I mean, my brother, Robbie Martin, did an incredible series on the smallpox lab, like theory of where all this material has gone. It's very trippy. Check it out on media roots radio if anyone wants to really do a deep dive on this, but it is, you're totally right. Like that material is still there and it's really creepy because and like a lot of bad actors can get their hands on it and it is largely untraceable. The fact that this material exists at all is

startling. Like why do we have this? Like, you know, when we talk about like nuclear proliferation treaties and stuff like that, shouldn't there be like a, a treaty to like erase this material that could be stolen and used for malicious reasons? Like it's very scary, you know? It is. And I only mentioned it just because for, you know, the people who are calling for the no fly zones and like, you know, wanting to escalate, just understand this isn't like the thing you're wanting to escalate. It's not what you're used to. It's not what anyone wants. And it's way more than like it really could come here. I've seen so many stink pieces on corporate media of being like a nuclear war actually won't be that bad. Like we could actually survive a little, a little mini nuclear war. Like,

oh, we actually have like really small nuclear weapons. It's like one hundredth of what we dropped on Hiroshima. Like that wouldn't be that bad. It's like, dude, yeah, I get that this is sponsored by Boeing, but like, who's writing this? Is this like an AI like churning out these like, like, is there a human being behind this? It's not a human being. It's a thing trapped in a, in a, in a fucking crystal. It's like some interdimensional being is like, look, we can do nukes. No, you can do little ones. They're cute. Selam is cute. Maybe like Mark in a child's toy. Baby nukes, you can put diaper, your baby nukes, get them used to the idea that these little ones are cute and the mushroom cloud is like kind of adorable. If you think about it, it's like, what the

fuck? No, no nuclear weapons. No, don't bring up the possibility that this is one of the viable options. And fortunately, I think Abby, when that bullshit, when they tried that, it was met with such fury from everybody that they shut up. Did you notice that? They were like, let's see what they say if we kind of push the small scale and everyone's like, fuck you. Yeah, like they're just keep putting out trial balloons. They're like, okay, what about this? And it's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, that, that shut them down. Thank God. We're, so we're not completely insane. All right, enough with the rush. I'm sorry. I just, you are an independent thinker, great journalist. And so, you know, I, I, it's nice to hear your

take on things that helps me sort of center myself. Tell me, how's your art doing? Are you, are you still painting? Are you still creating? Yeah, man. Well, I just started, again, it's been hard because of my son. But like, yeah, I mean, I've been trying to do more abstract painting. I think for a while, I went to more, I scaled down a lot and was doing like these really tiny, really fucking dense collage work with paint pen and stuff like that. And it was really amazing. But now I'm trying to scale up and do like huge abstract acrylic pieces that I haven't done for like 10, 15 years. And it's just so fun. It's so fun because it's just a way, it's a total psych, it not only is like incredible psychedelic art, if I may say so myself,

but it's a way to organize the chaos of my mind. And it's a way to channel all of my energy and depressive, you know, psychology into like something that I can make that's beautiful, like based on just the absolute insanity that I that I'm thinking all the time. So it's very meditative. And it's just a really important tool. And I really encourage everyone to explore art or music or something, because it's really necessary to tame your mind to be doing that kind of creative outlet. But check it out, abbeymartin.org. And that's why I'm super excited to do this new project, Duncan, because for the last ever since I left RT, like I feel like I'm just siloed off into like an information pit of despair, like really kind of dark energy.

And I feel like I'm less multi dimensional, like I don't really talk to people like you, like artists, musicians, philosophers, like just people about different interesting things about, you know, our world that make us more complex. And I've just kind of done a lot of empire file stuff, which is great. And it's public education to make people care about issues or have a deeper understanding of them. But at the same time, I'm really excited to do this new project called Doast. That's just meant to be a totally different thing, a lot more light, and it's more entertainment based, you know, talking just about ideas and concepts and philosophies that have completely dosed my reality and I hope can change other

people's understanding of the planet that we live on and the reality that we're experiencing day to day, because there's so many things that have like dosed the fuck out of me. I know it's a nod to psychedelics, but it could really mean anything. It's like learning that trees communicate through fungal networks, like that dosed me. I never have looked at forests the same way, you know, like just different things like that, that I'm really excited to explore and in this new project that I have that I'm actually having you on next week. I can't wait, you know, I love that idea too. And that to me, I think that is the hope. Like if you're if you're trying to find some kind of like realistic hope and all the stuff that's going on in the world, it isn't always bad

from time to time, things appear on the scene that just change things for the better radically and quickly. You know, it might be a new way of looking at the world, it might just be, you know, what's going on with those fusion reactors, you know, a way to safely generate infinite energy or God knows, you got to talk to somebody about that new telescope that's out there. Like apparently what we're going to be seeing with that could be could dose the planet. Let's do it, dude. Yeah, let's do it. Well, that's great. I'm glad you're doing that. I think you're going to run into trouble though, because people like me, go to you to understand what the fuck's happening in the world. We're all freaked out. So all the people you're having on to talk about the mushrooms

and this philosophy is everything like, Oh, is this World War three? I think you're going to have to set a rule. Like we can't talk about, we can't talk about it. Because the great thing about the dose thing is like it, I'm going back to like the coast to coast days where I really loved like live radio, you know, like that like now we're on the podcasting, which is great, but it's kind of a mix of both worlds because it allows viewers to call in the show and participate in a live discussion. But yeah, you're totally right. Like we're going to be talking about fucking like mushrooms and someone's going to be like, why won't you give Zelensky what he wants? Yeah, you're going to, yeah, you're really going to have to talk to tell us. No, like I can

tell you just have to say, listen, if you want to like talk about the shit after the show, I will, you can have 10 minutes and ask me what your geopolitical questions, but we're going to talk about this now. I can't wait to do the show. I that's great. I'm excited. I don't know what we're going to end up talking about. But the more coast to coast, the better for me. I mean, shit, let's get in there. Deep underground military base, man. Denver Colorado, bro. The airport, man. The horse. Okay. Abby, thank you so much. Will you just let everybody know where they can find you? Absolutely. AbbyMartin.org is my artwork. Check out YouTube. Check out YouTube.com sound like a total fucking boomer. Check out Empire Files on YouTube on SoundCloud, all the podcast platforms. Check out

Media Roots Radio on podcast stuff. And also our film, Gaza Fights for Freedom, is free to watch on our YouTube channel. And we're also working on a new film called Earth's Greatest Enemy. I should come on again and talk about that because that is crazy, man. It's about the US military's contribution to global pollution and climate change. Real fun stuff, but very important. And it's going to be a doozy. We've already traveled to Scotland. We went to Alaska. I confronted Nancy Pelosi about the issue at COP26. So there's going to be a lot of great footage, very important topic, and very important intervention in the environmental movement to push forward this consciousness of how US militarism contributes to this. Thank you so much, Duncan, for having on

fucking rock. Sorry that it got mired down in the war stuff, but I wanted it to get mired down. I needed to talk about that. Thank you so much, everybody. All the links you need to find. Abby will be at DuncanTrestle.com. Of course, this episode of the DDFH was brought to you by Halliburton and Raytheon, bringing a more peaceful world. Bring us more peaceful world. Seriously, thank you so much, Abby. You're the best. You are the best. Tell your boys hi, and I can't wait to meet them. Bye. Bye. That was Abby Martin, everybody. All the links you need to find Abby are going to be at DuncanTrestle.com. Much thanks to our wonderful sponsors, and much thanks to you for listening. We'll be back next week with a conversation with Wim Hof, the Iceman. I love

you all. Have a great weekend. Bye. A good time starts with a great wardrobe. Next stop, JCPenney. Family get-togethers to fancy occasions, wedding season two. We do it all in style. Dresses, suiting, and plenty of color to play with. Get fixed up with brands like Liz Claiborne, Worthington, Stafford, and Jay Farrar. Oh, and thereabouts for kids. Super cute and extra affordable. Check out the latest in store, and we're never short on options at JCP.com. All dressed up everywhere to go. JCPenney. A good time starts with a great wardrobe. Next stop, JCPenney. Family get-togethers to fancy occasions, wedding season two. We do it all in style. Dresses, suiting, and plenty of color to play with. Get fixed up with brands like Liz Claiborne, Worthington,

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