Dan Carlin (0:00)

Today's show is sponsored by audible. Go to audible.comdancarlin and get a free audiobook with a 30 day trial membership. It's Common Sense with Dan Carlin. So I have this board that I made up with some notes on it from a couple of weeks ago. Because whether you know it or not, whether shows get released, we're actually working on things all the time. Whether or not they're good enough to release is another question. Especially we've been working on the history show a lot lately. And as I was looking at story after story after story after story that have just been coming out, these major things, boom, boom, boom, boom. And you think to yourself, oh my gosh, look at how many stories we're missing. And I'm looking at the board right now from a couple of weeks ago and it's shocking how much of those stories that looked so huge a couple of weeks ago, they've already passed and gone. But people got really worked up about all of them at the time. But here we are three weeks, a month later, and you can just see that they just sort of really weren't that important to begin with. And you know, it made me think for a second about something we really don't have much anymore, but that used to be a fixture of the way people got their news and information. The weekly news magazine, sometimes the monthly news magazine. Do you remember those things? Because I remember 15 years ago thinking, oh boy, you can see the writing on the wall for these things in the 24 hour news cycle. And now with the Internet, forget it, these things are dinosaurs. But it didn't occur that there might be times when there was an advantage to not coming out with the news in a timely fashion. Because I'm looking at this board right now going, you know, if the only place you got your news was from a monthly news magazine, you wouldn't have gotten worked up about any of this crap because most of it turned out to be meaningless. But it got people really fired up. Listen, the way my stepfather would have looked at it, he would have looked at it and goes, it made a lot of money for a lot of people. At the time, there were news outlets that have made a fortune off news. All of these stories I'm looking at right now were legitimately news. We can just see a month later that a lot of them really don't mean anything. So maybe there's a upside to me getting shows out so rarely now, at the risk of making it sound like whining, but it's really a Factor of me not remembering what I've said in previous shows and how could I look how long ago those were. I do want to point out I'm going through my own reevaluation of what my political goal should be based on the reality we find ourselves in now. Because my apple cart's been very upended and understand why. I mean, for those who've maybe not listened, I'm a guy who's been pushing a certain idea for about 20 years publicly. And when I started pushing it, it was crazy because that's what everybody told me, you're crazy. And then times just sort of went my direction the way I was suggesting maybe it might. And so as recently as a year ago, folks look at the way things were going at the election, we had two candidates who were basically independents running under the banners of the two parties, though, because as we've pointed out for years, those are the only people likely to win. And the country was focusing on corruption in government. I mean, all these things that people told me quite legitimately 20 years ago I had no right to ever expect were happening. And now a year later, less than a year later, we find ourselves here and. And a shiny object, maybe a gold object, has distracted us from everything that was important in that realm that I cared about all those years ago and managed to discredit it at the same time. How popular does electing an outsider sound now to a lot of people, right? This is going to look like we took our chance. You know, my wife had a great line, which is true, but it doesn't matter. She said you never said any independent was what we needed. You said an independent. I mean, you know, you can get a bad independent, too. But my point was that a Democrat or Republican wasn't going to fix this corruption problem we had. I guess my point is, if you've had your political position destabilized, like the foundations of mine have been destabilized by the current situation, what do you do? Well, don't I always tell you my motto is wisdom requires a flexible mind. So I'm trying to be flexible, but as I analyze what I see as the problem right now, I don't know how to fix it. Just being honest with you, folks. I mean, when I think I've got an answer, you hear it. But I'm bereft of ideas right now because let me tell you what I think the problem is, and maybe you could tell me what you think the solution is. The basis of my former ideas revolved around the idea that because A corrupt system is in no one's interest, whether you're on the right, the left, no matter where your political position is, unless you are a campaign contributor who personally benefits from the corruption and even you might think prices have gotten out of hand, you don't support a corrupt political system. And my idea was maybe if you could look beyond the political divides on all these questions that we argue about in the political realm and fix the system first, we could continue to have those other arguments later in a cleaner system. This was always a long shot. As we all understood, people working together is not the natural state of affairs. I assumed we stood a chance because it was still in each of their personal interests. It wasn't Kumbaya, it was, I have to work with my opponent in order to achieve a common goal that benefits both of us. I thought there was a reasonable chance of that. I do not think that anymore because by all appearances, a very large chunk of the American population detests another very large chunk of the American population. This, to me, appears to be the number one problem on the American triage list. I fear it's fatal long term, and I don't know what to do about it. This is why you haven't been getting any common sense shows recently. The problem isn't corruption anymore, at least as I see it. You may have said the whole time the problem was that Americans of some stripes are detesting and vice versa. Americans of another stripe. To me, I knew it was a long shot that they might work together to work on the corruption problem, get some corruption reform going. I knew it was a long shot, but I wasn't worried about them tearing each other apart the way I am now. And I mean physically, folks. I mean, we are so close and you can feel it, can't you? We are so close to something really bad happening at one of these Trump, anti Trump things, these demonstrations. I mean, it's amazing. It's a bloody miracle that we haven't had something terrible happen yet. I mean, remember, we are a heavily armed country where people get shot in this country every weekend for looking at someone the wrong way or, you know, shouting some bad word at them. We've had. What would you even call them, Ben? Street wars between, you know, opposing sides and anarchists. And I mean, go look at some of the videos. Bloody faces, people getting beaten with sticks. How have we avoided a horrible tragedy to this point? It's a bloody miracle. I would not push our luck, but the sheer fact that we're talking about this shows you that we're in territory that a couple years ago. Well, let's say I lived through that. I talked about that stuff on the air. I mean, this is farther than we've been in my lifetime. Maybe, maybe you could go back to the late 60s, but those who don't remember the late 60s and early 70s don't realize what going back to that would mean in terms of the division amongst the population. We had political groups with bombings and bomb threats virtually every day. Domestic terrorism, I guess I had said online to somebody who wrote me and I had said, what is the answer? Because we were talking about the same kind of thing about Americans hating each other. And he said, I'm paraphrasing here. I think he said ethnic enclaves. And then I realized I was dealing with one of these people who is racial in the way that they look at the world. I didn't realize that initially. And that's another whole segment we could get into too, about how I totally misjudged that. And I've said that before. I know, but ethnic enclaves. In other words, this person's point wasn't about where I'm going, which is how do I solve something like this? What do you push? What's your political agenda when you decide that fixing our feelings towards each other is what you need to do? And this guy's answer is, oh, you can't do that. We just have to separate and we should do so by color of your skin. I said a bunch of shows ago that after the Civil War, there was a well known period in American history that your high school history book would have called Reconstruction. Now, Reconstruction was not really all that cool to live through and the reality of it at all, but the name and the idea is exactly what we need. Now, I said that. I remember after that show, someone wrote and said, there can't be Reconstruction until after Civil War. You have to have a Civil War first, then we can have Reconstruction. Which did not exactly fill me with optimism, but the idea that you have to figure out if you were elected president tomorrow, obviously. By the way, folks, I've been working all morning on the history show and I had finished some audio and I thought, you know, I might be able to crank out a common sense show. So it's not well thought out. But I've been thinking about this for weeks. Right, right. And I thought if somebody gets elected president, a person who realizes that the number one problem Americans face if you actually want to keep this country together, is that we don't like each other enough to maybe Want to do that? You know, how do you heal that? What are the tools at your disposal to do that? Because there's a difference. If you determine, as I always had, that the number one problem on the country's triage list is the corruption issue. And we've always said every government in world history is corrupt. It's a question of how much. Right. If you're on the UN list of corruption, have you ever seen that? It literally goes from like 1 to 100 and something. And at the top of the list is some historically clean country, and at the bottom of the list is some kleptocracy. And every country is ranked on the list. And I've always said that the US Used to be somewhere near the top and we've been falling. There's some point, and the UN doesn't, you know, label where this is, but there's some point where a country that might have been running okay with the current level of corruption will dip below the running okay level, it's been my opinion for some time, we've dipped below that. So what do you do? Well, that's what reform is about, right? So you push reform. The two parties are the vectors for the corruption in our system right now. Right. They're the things that make it work and keep it working and lock everybody else out. So you got to address that too. Right? So this has always been my point of view. I don't feel that way anymore. I don't think that's the number one thing. But the advantage of something like that was that that's something you can get a piece of paper and you can start writing down solutions to that. It's an issue that can be fixed if the will is there through things like legislation. It's that kind of problem. It's a systemic one, but the kind of problem we face now, if you believe what I've suggested is the number one problem, the fact we don't like each other enough and that we hate each other, Some of us. If you decide that's the number one problem, what's the legislative solution to that? It's like saying, you know, racism is a problem in this country. Elect me president and I'll fix it. We'll start with the Anti racism Act of 2017 and we'll work from there. You see what I'm saying? Some problems are more emotional and tribal in nature. I remember 15 years ago I used to enjoy this was the early years of people being able to comment on news stories the way people do all the time. Now on the Internet. And it was always great because I always loved the letters to the editor in the newspaper. And I got a similar joy out of reading what people would write after these news stories. But you would notice that the way that they criticize, because it was always that way, people of other political stripes is by saying what their ideas were doing to the country, these liberal ideas are destroying the country. I mean, they would just, they would slam the worldview of the other side. But if you go and you read similar comments today, and we always insert the asterisk here, right, this could be 13 year old boy trolling behavior in large part. We don't know it's the Internet, but I think I've gotten enough emails to know better. We're not addressing the other side and by the way, I'm on neither side, so you know, everybody shoots me. But we're not addressing the other side in terms of the ideas that they possess being the danger anymore. For a long time now, I mean, years and years, I think it's been shifting much more toward. The problem isn't the ideas, it's the people. Go look at the names they call each other. Libtards and fascists and Nazis. I mean, I was reading some of the comments by one of those groups, the Antifada. Is that what they call themselves? They're supposedly named after the communists who fought the Nazis in the street in, in Weimar Germany. When you label people these things and then you label people like that, the enemy, it legitimizes anything you do. So once you've gone away from ideas, you've gone away from the idea that we convert people. Because when I watch, for example, some of these anarchists, for lack of a better word, there are very, very peaceful anarchists out there that get tarred and feathered by these kind of people. But when I watch these anarchists in some of these videos pounding on these Trump supporters, I'm thinking to myself, okay, what do you think you're doing to that guy? He's not changing his mind because you're pounding on him. You're also creating the wonderful Hatfield and McCoy cycle of violence that will legitimize in his mind what happens when you get pounded or someone like you get shot or I mean, he's gonna say they started it. You should have seen what they did to my nose at the last. I mean, you begin to start this cycle where everyone's got now a long memory of all the things you did to them and you started it. There's no good outcome for Your cause by doing that. And by the way, I see the meme everywhere. I punch Nazis, I punch Hitler, folks. This is what the Nazis did. This is their strategy. Somebody wrote me and said, dan, the Nazis weren't defeated by free speech. As though somehow this was a nice battle between 18th century Powdered wig wearing guys, you know, over in the free speech plazas of Weimar Germany. Come on. The Nazis were beating the hell out of people and intimidating people and closing down halls where people were going to speak. Come on. That's what this is. If you're going to fight fascism, I would not choose those tactics. There's just a little bit too much irony attached to them. And of course, the problem that would bother me even more is there's not just no connection, but a negative connection between your tactics and your goals. If people who are on the fence about what they believe look at you punching a Trump supporter and think, you know what? I've made up my mind. I want to be with the guys doing the punching. Those are not the people you want on your side. I guess my point is that you're not converting anybody by doing that. You're basically backing up with that guy who wants his white ethnic enclave wants, which is, we're not trying to convince other Americans anymore. We don't like them, we're going to punch them. They're the enemy. In which case the guy who wants the white ethnic enclaves is essentially right. Maybe not about the ethnic part, but about, you know, if you think you can't live together and don't want to, this little experiment of ours that's 200 some years old ain't gonna work anymore. There's a lot more people than there used to be who think maybe that's okay. And by the way, somebody else on Twitter suggested to me, and I get this more and more too, that this entire thing, this division amongst Americans, is part of a Russian plot. Which is interesting too, because there's a little truth to that, too. I mean, the idea that there is an attempt by outside countries to use their presence on the Internet to undermine perhaps the cohesiveness or solidness or harmony of the nation. Not only would that not surprise me, it wouldn't surprise me if we did it too. In other words, this may just be the great wild west of cyber history. And unlike the old days, you don't have to have Radio Free Europe or something to get the other side's point of view. It just comes through a modem. Countries freak out about that. But I think in the long Term the cure is worse than the disease. If the country wants to stop the Russians from being able to influence Americans with fake news and you shut off channels where that fake news can reach them, think about what you're shutting off. At the same time, this may be a fact of modern life and I wouldn't be surprised if it does play a little role in the divisiveness in America. But here's the thing, if we're gonna start going down that route, I think infinitely more damage is being done by our own domestic for profit hate machine. Because when I was imagining, and you know, I always do this, it's my delusions of grandeur kicking in, but I always say, when I give you those examples about, you know, if you elected a, what would they do? I always think about me, right? I think, what would I do? I get into the office, I say, americans have to stop hating each other. I will be the Great Uniter and I will bring us together. And then the first thing you start thinking of is that there's this huge imbalance in the country in terms of the pressure gradient, if you will. We have a lot of elements in society that are ratcheting up the pressure and they do so for totally understandable reasons. In the same way I said earlier that all those stories that turn out to be relatively meaningless over the last month but that were hot for a few minutes made a lot of people money. This heat that's generated by political controversy and conversation and all this stuff, well, that makes a fortune too. It's a money making machine. What's on the other side of society though, that releases the pressure that builds up from all that steam and all that heat and you come to the conclusion that there really isn't much. It's almost like you want to talk about the greenhouse effect in our own society emotionally. A lot of heat being generated, not a lot of ways for that heat to get out. The pressure is ratcheting up, maybe there's no surprise. But when you think about having absolute dictatorial power and what would you do to stop it, you instantly find yourself doing the most anti free speech things you can think of. And there's a weird irony that occurred to my mind, and I hope you'll pardon me. Like I said, this isn't a planned out show, but there's all these similarities that you can see, and it's pretty classic, between the Roman Republic as it spiraled out of control, and our society now. And there's a bazillion things that are different, but there are some fun little things. You can go, well, that's like us. But once the Republic ended, and remember, it ended in a way that never really totally always acknowledged that it ended, it kept enough of the forms so that the people didn't freak out too much. It looked pretty normal. But I mean, there was this attitude at the time that now you could stop worrying about politics, that it had been so horrific and so deadly and had gone on so long and seemed so unfixable, that one of the great benefits, at least the way the marketing was going to portray it, of not having that anymore is that, you know, government could kind of be on autopilot. And all this anger, for example, I mean, you could see it now, right? You could see in 50 years, if this continued, somebody saying, one of the great things about doing away with our representative system of government would be you could stop having these political fights. Wouldn't it just be better if we all got along because we never talked politics, because you had nothing to say about it? I'll take care of your politics, Dan Gustus Magnus. In other words, once I was thinking about what I would do to fix the problem, I started sounding like the Roman Empire, you know, you start taking away political rights because it's heating up the greenhouse too much. I didn't like that road either. So in other words, when I say to you I have nothing to say, look what I would say, we'd be off into Roman Emperor land real fast. I do have a few things I think we should update ourselves on, and I'm going to use two that tie together pretty well. Maybe you throw Syria in there too, because believe it or not, it's been that long since we spoke. The last time we talked, the cruise missile strike on Syria had not happened. Now we have the North Korean situation heating up, and we have. And this, you know, and it's symptomatic of the whole thing, I think has kind of flown under the radar. But a few people in Congress pointing out that none of this stuff is technically legal. Let's start with the Syrian situation, just for analysis a little bit here. Now, you know how long we've been talking about the fact that, you know, we've been out of whack with the Constitution on war powers for a long time. One of the common things you'll notice in any good constitutional design in the history of republics and democracies is that they don't put the whole war making power in a single person's hands. And our design doesn't do that either. But because of the way history has turned out, and we talked about some of this in the last history show, the advent of nuclear weapons, for example, and how that impacted things, the window of opportunity to make decisions before war could wipe you out. All these kinds of things contributed to a situation where by hook or by crook, the president now has the sole authority to take the country to war by themselves. And everybody's been okay with this as long as the president in charge has been a person from their party. And this has been our problem all along. You know, you'll say to people who have the party that doesn't have a president in office right now, you'll say, gosh, this is terrible, this war making authority in one person. And they'll go, yeah, it's terrible. George W. Bush has this power, he shouldn't have this power. But then Barack Obama gets that power and they're like, you know, I'm not so worried about it anymore. All of a sudden the Bush supporters are going, you know, Barack Obama could just do this if he wants. In other words, we're blind about half the time about this power which keeps us from ever doing anything about it. My oft used line was always the same, wasn't it? Imagine this power in the hands of somebody you hate. And here we are now, let's talk about that. Because it wasn't just imagine this power from 1992 in the hands of someone you hate. Because every president since at least Harry Truman, but I mean, going back to the beginning of the Republic in some ways has taken their war power, authority and scope of action and pushed it a little bit farther. And we're always okay with it because we figure it's our person doing it and it's only the opposition that's screaming about it at the time. And we never think of the most obvious point in the whole thing, which is that the person that we like and we trust with this power will move on, but the power will stay with the office to be inherited by somebody else. And again, here we are. The worry about the creeping precedents in war powers bothered the Obama administration enough so that when they were asking, they made a move during the Libya thing. I think it was where they went to Congress for the fig leaf, as I like to call it. Congress is supposed to declare war, but since we haven't been asking them to do that since I think 1942, I think we declared war against a minor Axis power. I think that's the last time it was done. And presidents have basically asserted quietly that they don't think they have to do that anymore. And Congress has asserted quietly the yeah, you do. And they've usually solved the dilemma by going and getting some sort of a fig leaf, a resolution of support, or sometimes even just he asked us and we thought about it, maybe we'll let him. I mean, the fig leaf has become very, very transparent. And in Obama's case, before he left office, he did one of these fig leaf requests where I believe in the very sentence where he asked for Congress to support our troops and jump on board, he said something like, and I'm quoting from memory here, but we don't have to ask you for this, but we don't have to ask you for permission. I mean, basically asserting the legal authority of the president in the 21st century, that I ask you because it's custom and we'd like your support, but it doesn't really affect what I'm going to do. And now you have President Trump taking it one step farther by launching these missiles at a sovereign nation. Folks, we forget this. And honestly, the part that bothered me the most was not that it was done by Trump or done at all, or the part that bothered me the most was Americans are comfortable with it shouldn't surprise any of us, by the way. I had to think about that a minute. But you know why they're comfortable with it, don't you? Americans have a bad case of missile strike fatigue and younger Americans. And I mean, I thought about this. Didn't we say in the last History show we used that analogy about if you were born with a gun pointed at your head, do you even notice it's pointed there or that you're under the threat. We have a large chunk of the American public now that has no conscious memory of living in a time where we didn't have missile strikes a couple times a week. So if you say to people like that, hey, we just struck Syria with 50 some cruise missiles, they're going to go, oh, really? Oh, well, how's that a whole lot different than what we always do? In other words, maybe not making the distinction that unlike maybe a place like parts of Afghanistan, maybe you have an area where a state authority is not really in charge anymore. I always call these terrorists the equivalent of land pirates. And the international unwritten rule is sort of that if the land pirates are operating, operating in a stateless area, they're fair game. It's open season on them. And then there's the other situation where we've been using these weapons and killing people from the Air and attacking with missiles. And that's these places where we have some sort of an arrangement with the government. So a legal rationale, if you will, with the supposed authority. So maybe it's a status of forces agreement in Afghanistan or Iraq. Right. Their government has said that they welcome and you're working with us, you're an ally. When we go do these strikes. The attack on Syria is one step farther because it's not that situation at all. The Syrian government is monstrous, but it's officially a government under the un. It signed all the paperwork, let's put it that way. It's official. So we use these weapons against a sovereign nation. So the next question you should ask if we're thinking about this at all is what would happen if somebody launched 50 cruise missiles at us? Do the weapons have to actually explode on our soil before we're at war with you? Or are we at war with the person who launches those upon launch? In fact, I know people that would say, truthfully, Dan, we're at war with that country as soon as we find out they're planning to do this. But we can launch 50 some cruise missiles at another sovereign country and we're not at war with them. You know why? Right? It's as though we're the big kid on the schoolyard and there's some little shrimpy kid who's a jerk and causing all kind of problems. So we go up to the kid and we smack him in the arm real hard and we say, don't do that anymore. And if you don't like it, what are you going to do? Want to start a fight? Well, that's the reason we're not at war. Because Syria can't start a fight against the United States. We're basically daring them to. They can't. Now we confuse this in this country and I've said this before, it comes back to bite us. This with winning, what are they gonna do? Start war against us? Right. We launched those missiles and we won. This absolutely ignores what should be right in our face right now in terms of historical lessons, because we live with it every day, folks. There's a lot of ways to strike people that don't involve openly getting into a fistfight with him on the schoolyard. I mean, if that kid, to keep our analogy going, were to go back into the classroom crying cause his arm hurts. But he couldn't do anything about it because the bully was three times his size and puts a tack on his chair. So he sits on it when he go, goes back into the room. The bully doesn't know that that kid did it. He can suspect it, but he can't go back and start a fight and legitimately say, you know, he put a tack on my chair. Because you don't know, but he made you feel a little pain, didn't he? Well, what does that analogy refer to? Folks, we're very vulnerable to terrorism by a bunch of ragtag groups. The last thing we need is nation states deciding that they're gonna make us feel a little pain in getting into that game any more than they already are. I guess my point is, is if you're gonna launch those missiles at a place like Syria, you really need to weigh the cost of benefit involved. And by the way, there are people out there pushing the Wag the Dog theory that this is how Trump got Russia off the national radar. I mean, you think I'm so tight with Russia? Well, look what I just did. I don't know about that. But I will say that I don't see enough good things from this in order to balance out the bad. Remember, the ostensible reason we did this is because of a chemical weapons attack on Syrian civilians that the government of the United States alleges was by the Syrian government. I think it probably was, but who the heck's gonna believe. Who the heck was gonna believe the US Government anymore on any of this stuff? The track record is horrible. And if WikiLeaks in three years does another document dump and we find out this is all made up, who's gonna be surprised? I don't think it is made up. But this is what that boy who cried wolf story is all about, isn't it? You can't believe him even when they're not lying to you. I had a conversation with a friend of mine. We were talking about how long it takes to reestablish credibility. You can never recreate virginity in terms of trusting the government. But how many years does it have to go being relatively truthful to the American people about this kind of stuff before you can start believing them again and say all those lies? They're from another era. That's all. From the J. Edgar Hoover era. I don't know. We didn't come up with a conclusion, but it sure isn't now. So I'm not one of those people that automatically buys this idea that the Syrian government did this. And I think we should be careful about saying that if a government does something like this based on the allegations of another government, that it's okay to strike them with missiles. Basically, without the UN without even any legislative authority. And the reason we should care is the other reason that striking Syria was probably not smart, and that's because of Russia. Now, disclaimer. There's a lot of people out there don't want to hear anything about anything about Russia. So if you say something like, well, we shouldn't anger Russia, they're going to say, what are you. Look what they're doing here and there. You're crazy. And I go with this from a pretty basic viewpoint, folks, and this is what it is. One, they're one of the few powers on the planet that could turn our country into glass in 30 minutes. Two, I always look at their situation and say, if the shoe were on the other foot, how would we feel? So that's how I base these things. Now, Russia's relationship with Syria goes back to the old Soviet Union days. They have a relationship with Syria that is similar to our relationship with many of our allies. In fact, it's not all that different from China's relationship with North Korea. Now, if there were a giant convention of nations where people sort of marketed their wares to other countries, the big states basically promised things to these littler states in their relationship. Russia gets a naval base that they can use in Syria. That's really good. What does Syria get from Russia? Well, basically, it gets a person on the playground who promises to sort of protect them. So to get back to our playground analogy, what Syria was supposed to have that kept the US from going over there and punching him in the arm was another big kid on the playground named Russia that said he'd take care of the little shrimp who was the jerk to everybody, and then the little jerk shrimp got punched. Anyway, how does that make Russia look on the rest of the playground? And here's the point. You may say, why should we care? Well, this is how I look at it. And you can disagree with me if you like. I don't understand why you would back a country into a corner if you don't have to. And you may say, why are you rolling over for Putin here, Dan? Well, let me propose a scenario that is not that hard to imagine happening. And let me ask you then, what you would have wished you'd done when you get there. One of the real awful things about what's going on in Syria in terms of potential pitfalls and things going in a really, really awful direction, is how many different military forces you have operating in a very small theater. You obviously have U.S. forces, or we're not having this conversation you have Syrian government forces, you have Russian forces, you have a bunch of different civil war factions fighting against each other. What are the odds something bad is going to happen accidentally? In fact, this kind of stuff has already kind of happened already, but not to the great degree it it would be happening if, for example, a Russian air asset got shot down. I mean, what if the US accidentally, and it could easily happen, accidentally, shot down a Russian jet and killed the pilot? All right, well, under normal circumstances, if tension levels are at a normal place, it's a bad thing. But the governments talk to each other. There's a lot of public statements made, there'll be discussions about we're implementing reforms to see that this doesn't happen again by working more closely with Russia, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? You can smooth these things over if you want to, and if there's no real downside into doing so. But what if you've already made Russia look bad? What if you backed them into a corner? What if you've launched cruise missiles at their ally right under their noses? And unless I'm mistaken, Ben, weren't there actual Russian troops in barracks sleeping on that airbase when we struck it? And unless I'm mistaken, we didn't kill any of them, which is almost like an extra slap in the face. Right? Our technology is so precise, we can strike an air base that you troops at and not hurt any of them. Okay, fine. You can crow about that if you want to. Maybe there's some value in that. There may be some political hay that Trump can make by doing this decision in another theater of operations. Right? Maybe if he believes Teddy Roosevelt walk softly and carry a big stick, he's reminding the rest of the world, maybe sending a message to others that the big stick is there and Trump's not afraid to use it. So maybe you say that the advantages gained from the Syrian strike won't even be in that part of the world. I get that. But the downside is you embarrass the Russians, and the reason it could matter is if we end up in a situation where they can't afford to get embarrassed again. In the same way that I see Trump, to me, he looks like he's got psychological problems. I mean, narcissism out the ears. I mean, Putin strikes me that way, too. I mean, the guy's got some psychological issues. It's different things than Trump, obviously, but he markets them in the same way. Trump. Trump almost markets the narcissism. Putin almost markets the. There's a mafia don sort of vibe to the guy, and I think he likes it that way. And what's funny is that there's a lot of people that have taken to calling Russia sort of like a mafia style government. It kills the journalist, blows people up. I mean, whatever it might be, poisons people with radiation. And I like that description. I think that's a good one. But part of the problem, though, is that if you do anything that hits at that image, the person loses enough face to use the old terminology, that if you do something again that cost them some face, they don't have as much wiggle room. So if we shot down a plane with their pilot and this has already happened and Putin's already been embarrassed and his facade and his image has taken a hit, he's not going to feel like maybe he can just forgive that, right? In other words, you start that problem at a higher level of tensions than you otherwise would have begun dealing with it at the temperature's hotter. And again, you may say, who cares about that, Dan? Well, follow the line of progression, four dominoes from now, and ask yourself and those of us who are old enough to remember will remember a situation that came closer to war than it should have. That's not saying it came very close, but closer than it should have in the 1980s when a civilian Korean jet airliner was shot down by Soviet aircraft. Now, if things had been more normal when that happened, it might not have gotten anywhere near that serious. But enough tensions and incidents had happened close to that event that when that civilian airliner was shot down and all the passengers killed, it was a much, much more heavy duty issue. The room for maneuver and compromise and forgiveness had shrunk to alarmingly low levels. When you do things like this in Syria, you shrink that future window of opportunity you're gonna have for concessions and understanding and wiggle room if you need it to keep the peace. Again, if you can say you gained more than you lost by doing that, fine. But was that even a consideration? I don't know. And by the way, one other thing about Putin while we're on the subject, because I thought about this the other day and it has to do with grading Russia on a curve, because I asked myself, if I don't like Putin and I don't, who do I want? What do I want for Russia? And I thought, what? I bet a lot of American planners thought too. I thought, well, you know, someone we can work with, someone like Boris Yeltsin. Remember Boris Yeltsin during the early years of the Russian Federation, that was our Guy. But here's the thing. I got a note from a Russian guy who said he hates Boris Yeltsin. And he knows a lot of people who hate Boris Yeltsin because to them, Boris Yeltsin was a stooge to the West. So we like him because we could work with him. They don't like him because they don't like what he did with us. I mean, he didn't. Anyway, here's the problem, though. If you're looking at the Russians, look at the last hundred years of Russian history. Who in that span of time would we have liked? I mean, look at who Putin's up against in terms of being graded on a curve. A hundred years ago they had the czar and the US government had huge problems with him, right? Autocratic. Shooting protesters, I mean, you name it. Didn't like the Tsar at all, of course. Liked him a lot more. Once the Soviet Union was formed and Russia formed the core of this new communist state led by Lenin, we didn't like that at all. Now just focusing on the major leaders here. Then we got Stalin, who we didn't like at all until right in the middle of the Second World War when that mass killer became Uncle Joe. And we worked with him for a little while. Then he became a mass killer, psychopath, sociopath again, and we didn't like him. We didn't like Khrushchev after that. We didn't like Brezhnev after that. Then you kind of get the, you know, you get those few guys who die like three weeks into office and then you get Gorbachev, who graded on a curve is not terrible. Then you get the Yeltsin era. Then you get Putin, basically. And here's my point. I think Putin's like a mafia leader of a mafia state, kind of, but he's not Stalin and he's not the czar. In other words, graded on a Russian curve, he's probably a B minus for us. And I think we have to think about that when we think about long term relations with Russia and what it's likely to expect them to be led by. Are they going to elect a guy we really like? Well, given the historical odds, I would call it unlikely. So maybe be careful what you wish for in Russia. Who knows what you could end up with long term. You're going to have to work with them though, because they have thousands of nuclear weapons. Sorry, didn't mean to make that little aside. Let me get now to North Korea for a minute and then let me get to the declaration of War question, which I think is the big issue we should be talking about today. First of all, North Korea. We've talked extensively about North Korea in the past. We've done whole shows where we broke down everything from the kind of tanks they're using. I mean, we talked about the strategic situation. So I'm not going to go into all that too deeply, except as a review to point out certain realities. One, as you probably know, the country's borders are not in the best place in terms of crafting a defense. They kind of closely follow where the battle lines were when the Korean War ended. What this does is place the most important city on the entire Korean peninsula in either country within artillery range of North Korea, Seoul, 25 million people. The North Koreans have more than 20,000 artillery pieces. Now, the North Korean stuff sucks, basically, but that doesn't matter because they can do enough damage before we could beat them back to make the whole thing a catastrophe. And of course, the nuclear weapons just add to that exponentially. I am not one of those people who believes that North Korea could successfully land a nuclear weapon on any country more than a few miles from its shores. I absolutely think they will be able to eventually, but I don't have any confidence in their ability to do that now. Now, of course, you know, who wants to play that game? Come on, shoot a nuclear weapon at me. I bet you can't do it. Okay, no one wants to play that. But it doesn't really matter because for the purposes of being not worth the cost, I think they could put one on Seoul, they could drive one to Seoul, and that's enough to make you go, hmm. When everybody else was freaking out a couple weeks ago that we were sending in supposedly an aircraft carrier group up there and it was going to be war and all this, I knew it wasn't going to be war. And I knew if it was going to be war, we were in deep trouble because it ain't enough stuff. And I thought to myself, you know, the number one thing that could go wrong in this entire thing, and which still can, by the way, is to get wrong footed in this scenario. I mean, if you're, you know, and I always do this and you always should, I mean, put yourself in the North Korean leadership shoes right now, and Trump should be doing this too. And I mean, Mattis, all those guys, I mean, Mattis is doing this certainly. But I mean, if you're Kim Jong Un, what does the United States and what does the west, what do we do in these situations when we decide we're going to start a war. We start an air war, don't we? And the air war goes on for a while and destabilizes and it shuts out all the communications and it destroys the logistics and it demoralizes the troops on the ground. And so if I'm Kim Jong Un and I become convinced that there's going to be a war, don't sit there and let the United States dictate how it goes. Attack. Now, understand something. This is a country that I do not believe could maintain logistically an attack at all. Right. I think that when the air power gets to them, the supply lines will get all. Shut up. I mean, don't get me wrong, I think it will be over for Kim Jong Un's military quickly in terms of nobody's winning any war on that peninsula or even getting very far past Seoul. But they don't have to to create unacceptable costs. If they just destroy Seoul, that's a bigger price than I think most people right now would be willing to pay. If the North Koreans started this conflict right now on us, how many days would it take before we had enough stuff there to turn the tide? So think of how dangerous this situation is right now. That's the problem with, again, ratcheting up war. It's the same thing in Syria. You just have this belief that they're never going to hit you back because you're so big. What are you going to do? Start a war if you're Kim Jong Un and you and your advisors decide there's going to be one anyway? Well, like I said, there's two things you can do. You can sit there and wait for it to start, or you can figure, listen, might as well start it with all of our communications stuff in place. Might as well do it before the US has more forces here. I'm not trying to give the other side any ideas. I'm trying to show how when you ratchet up the pressure here now, you create the conditions where, you know, it's like I always describe it as a gasoline soaked pile of wood. Okay, If a spark happens, what are you gonna do? And I think maybe I'm crazy. I think we are two to three weeks away from what it would take to get enough military assets on the ground ready to fight. And that may be quick. By the way, I may be wrong in terms of overestimating capabilities, but let's just say two to three weeks before we'd have enough assets there to beat back a North Korean attack. What does Seoul look like by then? So the stakes here are huge. I don't think it's any coincidence that a lot of this pressure ratcheting up started after Trump met with China's premier. I think China's in on this a little bit and is trying to defuse the situation, but they have their own reasons. China's walking a fine line. And we talked about this in the earlier show, too, right? You all know your geography, right? There's just a river border between China and North Korea. And China does not want, desperately does not want a bunch of refugees, a million and a half brainwashed North Korean refugees streaming over their border. Poor brainwashed North Korean, they don't want that. That's very disruptive and would be very difficult. But they don't want something else either. And it's kind of at odds with that. They don't want a united Korea. That reminds them in Asia of what a united Germany looks like to people like the Russians in Europe. And closer, you would have a US alliance just over the river from Chinese territory. They don't want that either. No country wants that. So they're walking a fine line, too. It's going to be very interesting to see how this goes in terms of military questions. Now, here's the issue as I see it, for what it's worth. The big uncertainty will determine and how things go if violence breaks out. The big uncertainty is morale. That wonderful Napoleon maxim that the moral is to the physical is three is to one is always worth remembering. Another person put it a different way. To me, he said, you can give the greatest guns in the world to people who don't want to fight and they'll simply throw them down while they surrender. Or you can give an old outdated rifle to somebody who really does want to fight and they can cause a lot of trouble with it. How much do the North Koreans want to fight? Or conversely, how brainwashed are they? How long would it take for the idea that maybe they don't want to be doing this fighting and maybe they want to be like a lot of Saddam Hussein's conscript units were and surrender, but you don't know until the shooting starts? And what's the old line from Nicole Williamson? I love it in Excalibur all those years ago when he was playing Merlin and he said something to the effect of, and then it's too late. The situation in North Korea right now with the ratcheting up of the pressure that we've seen lately, almost seems like a squeeze move to me. I mean, doesn't it ratcheting up the pressure and hoping that something inside North Korea breaks. It's a pretty classic move, by the way. We did this to Saddam Hussein for years with the no fly zone. But this is a tactic that goes back to ancient times in the United States case when we see a government that we think is a dictatorial style government, you know, with a pyramid, with one guy at the very tip, and it seems to be a little unstable. You know, we always thought Saddam Hussein's generals might overthrow him if the pressure got too hot. Kim Jong Un has been killing even family members in the leadership lately. So there's some evidence maybe that things aren't all rosy. So maybe if you ratchet up the pressure, something breaks. And if something breaks, maybe it breaks in a direction that's better for us than the way things are now. But the squeeze play move is a gamble because you're having it atop the gasoline soaked pile of wood while you do it. And the potential exists that while you're ratcheting things up, hoping it's only, you know, pressure, you could light the gasoline soaked wood on fire by accident. Or the opportunity always exists that the other guy whips out their Bic lighter and figures, I'm in better shape if I just light this wood on fire from my vantage point and don't give the other side the chance. So. So these gambles have a way of opening up the door to potential disaster. So how good of a gambler are you? And I can hear the people maybe in South Korea, whose military's pretty darn good itself and could do pretty well against the North Koreans given time. And in places like Japan, you know, whose lives are you gambling with? Whose prosperity are you gambling with? I mean, we need to be careful. If for no other reason than we may be way over here, but we have a lot of friends much closer at hand. Now, I should point out that I realize that this discussion we're having today does not focus on the elements of the story that would solve the problems in the individual cases. I'm looking at the larger picture of US war powers. For example, we're not answering the question of what should be done if chemical weapons are used by a country like Syria against its own people. We've addressed that in previous shows though. Nor are we addressing the question of nuclear proliferation or the advancement of the capabilities to deliver these weapons on the part of the north, although we've talked about those before too. As I've said many times, I think we have two major problems. If you're the United States or any one of several other countries that has nuclear weapons already. When we were talking about this entire debate, problem number one is this is becoming an increasingly ancient weapons system, 70 years old plus right now and aging, you know, every year. At what point does it become ridiculous to say to most countries in the world, I'm sorry, but you can't have the best weapons system from 70 years ago? And how hard is it to stay resolute? And for the message to resonate when it's people who have these weapons telling countries that don't have these weapons that you can't develop these weapons, you must stay in a permanent state of inferiority. And don't we double down on the problem when we create incentives and disincentives that encourage these countries to want and get them? I mean, I hate to say North Korea's got a good point about anything, but the other day they said, again, a very telling point, which is we need these nuclear weapons so we don't become the next Iraq, Syria, or Libya. It's true. Nuclear weapons insulate you from countries like us or Russia or any number of other countries from messing with you. It's a pity we've created the dynamic. But if you, as I've said many times, get the job as Iran's Defense Minister, tomorrow, a week later, you're going to be walking into the Supreme Leader's office with your recommendation that Iran get a nuclear weapon and as quickly as possible. And as we all know, the only way you get in the nuclear club is through stealth, deception, and secrecy. You have to mislead everybody in the entire world until the capability is, you know, useful. And there then you can either announce it with much fanfare, ha, ha ha, we're nuclear power now, or you can deny it forever, but sort of just let it be known that's how Israel's strategy works. They don't have it officially, but everybody knows they have it. The point is, this to me is a bigger issue than North Korea, because no matter how the North Korean thing goes, we're going to be dealing with the next country that wants a nuclear weapon and the next country that wants. I mean, this is the next 200 years, isn't it? Got to figure out some kind of policy here long term. And I doubt the one we currently use, which is if you have them, you keep them. If you don't have them, you don't get them, is going to fly. And I think in large part, this is where you miss having the United nations for moral support. I mean, that's when you can make something appear to be, whether it really is or not, a question of the globe's affairs rather than individual nations. Right. The world community can sort of come together and say something about the development of nuclear weapons in North Korea, which is a different story than the United States taking it upon itself to solve this long standing problem. That may appear more decisive to Americans in the short run, but in the long term, the plan is to make the outcome we want not just on North Korea, but on the next country that wants nuclear weapons and the next country that wants nuclear weapons and have some sort of authority that can both stick and appear to have some moral credentials above and beyond the interest of a single state or a single state willing to actually, you know, flex its muscles to achieve a goal like making North Korea give up their nuclear weapons. In any case, this is my long winded way of saying we won't be dealing with the solutions in both those areas right now because those are separate issues. They're complicated and we could do whole shows on them. Now here's the big issue, though, that I see overhanging the North Korea and the Syria question. It's what we talked about a little earlier. It's this idea of, of the president being able to make this decision by himself. Well, how many years did we say it's very precarious and you're going to be sorry you gave it to them. Folks, Donald Trump can take us to a Korean War by himself. Now, if you don't see a reform that has to be made there now, then there's something wrong with you because that's going to bite us badly. Maybe not here, but maybe here. But this should be the wake up call. So there are some in Congress who are bringing this issue up now. I should say that it is always a bad and disheartening sign to me when the few legislators who are actually quoting the law sound like lunatics. Rand Paul. A lot of positions I disagree with on Rand Paul, but I'll tell you what I like about him. He sticks to his guns. If he believes something, he fights his own party, he bucks his own whatever he needs to do. He's a man of principle on some of this stuff and on the war powers thing, he's been on it from minute one. He says that the President's actions in Syria were illegal. If he went to war with North Korea, that would be illegal too. He's 100% right. He sounds like a loon. You know why? Because the longer the actual way the law is Written is not adhered to, the less rational and realistic it seems like to go back to doing something a way we haven't done in a lifetime. I mean, if you said today we're not gonna go to war unless the Congress declares it, that that's the right thing to do legally, but it hasn't been done in so long it doesn't seem even like the right thing to do anymore. Like we said earlier about a generation growing up when they think that striking people with missiles a couple times a week is just the way it always is, always was, always shall be. If declaring war is something that the Constitution says we do, but we haven't done it in 70 years, do we do it anymore? And remember the executive, the White House, the president, his people claim this is not a power really that even exists anymore. So they're not prepared to listen to any pushback by Congress about this. In my opinion, for whatever that's worth, a legal fight on this could be the best thing that's happened to this country in years. Here's the problem, though, that always scares me about these legal fights because I have a story here from this one's from the Intercept about a couple of Democratic members, not just Rand Paul and the Senate, but a couple of Democratic members of Congress demanding that there be some sort of legal fig leaf. The problem always with these showdowns though, is you like them because you think, okay, finally we're gonna call the President on declaring war, make him do this. But what if you lose? What if you have this constitutional showdown that you want so badly because you finally want, you know, you want the government called to the, you're gonna live by the Constitution. What if, if instead what happens is a legal codification of the way things have actually been for the past 70 years. What if instead the Congress says, listen, you are out of control. The Constitution says you have to declare war. So let's change the Constitution so you don't have to do that anymore. So anytime we have one of these face offs, I'm always a little nervous. But I have a story here about a couple of Democratic congresspeople. Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, it says Representative Adam Schiff of California. They sent a stern letter. So I'm sure it's going to really make a big difference to the White House. Warning that Trump could be setting a dangerous precedent for conducting preemptive strikes and risking war with major powers while cutting Congress out of the picture, end quote. For what it's worth, this is Congress saying that you at least have to do the fig leaf thing, the transparent fig leaf. You have to ask for our approval. So they're not even asking for a declaration of war. They're mad that Trump didn't even go through the fig leaf part of the process. Well, we'll see how that turns out. But like I said, you know when you think the government is not following the Constitution, which I think you kind of look forward to these kinds of face offs, if only because what drives you the craziest is when no one talks about it at all. And once again, to remind you of why it's dangerous if you act in ways like striking the Syrians without anyone else's approval, Whether we're talking about the United nations or even your own legislative branch of government, if you do that, then you legitimize that as an excuse for other powers to use. When our government first started using drones in combat, we said years ago on the common sense show that we are going to be sorry we used these so liberally. Adjective meant to convey something totally different than the political because other powers will eventually have these things and they will look to how we used them for the rules on how it should be done. And that's exactly what happened. It's the same thing here. Because folks, I hear from people all the time in countries that border Russia now that were part of the Soviet Union unwillingly during the Cold War, they all assert to me that Russia is involved in cyber propaganda, maybe even cyber warfare, undercutting. Every day they're complaining that it's going on and we don't even know about it in their countries. And I believe them. If you tell the world community that the United States was justified in launching missiles at a sovereign country because we say that country used chemical weapons against their own people. All these people in these free countries now that are worried about Russia say they have large Russian minorities that are left over from the days when they were part of the Soviet Union. This is some of the excuses that Vladimir Putin used in the eastern Ukraine area, right, for his involvement. Folks, you could easily, and I don't mean to sound like Alex Jones here, but you could easily, if you are a mafia style state, release some toxic gases that could be detected by observers claim that the bad guys in Latvia who are oppressing my Russian brethren did it and say the US has established a precedent that says that we can get involved. We're just gonna come in there and enforce international law against those who would use chemical weapons. I guess what I'm saying, folks, is when you violate the rules and then assert some new reason why it's okay. Don't be surprised when somebody takes that reason and runs with it. And so, as I said before, I sure Hope that those 50 plus cruise missiles launched against a sovereign nation turn out to have been worth it, because it sure did a lot of things that could come back to haunt us down the road. Audible has been a sponsor of this program for years. And we don't sponsor very many people. I mean, we just, you know, we're very, very choosy and we like Audible and I like Audible for all kinds of reasons. And usually I focus on questions of convenience and all these features that they have because I truly believe that they do the whole audio book and accessories, shall we say, all the other things that they have besides audiobooks. I truly feel they do this the right way. And there are things that are better about textbooks and things that are better about audiobooks. And I find that Audible has figured out what is better about audiobooks and then maximized those features. We talk about those things a lot, right? The things I like, like the send this book feature or the share audio clips. I mean, if you're going to have something different than textbooks, maximize the difference, right? But I realize how you can get caught up in this question of convenience. Sometimes the 21st century version of these, I want to take it with me. I want to hear it everywhere. I want to listen while I mow the lawn. Yes, yes, yes. All great and wonderful, but not mandatory. My mom is a voracious reader. She's just about to turn 80 and she's so proud of the book she reads in terms of, you know, how she's still so informed and tuned in and everything. She'll call me up, book 167 since, you know, four months ago or whatever. Voracious reader. And all of a sudden she's run into some eye problems recently. Now look, she's almost 80. This happens, right? It's part of the aging process. We all understand that that's what's involved. But it stopped her dead in her tracks. All of a sudden she's not reading anymore. It's put her in a completely different place in terms of where she was in participating in the rest of society, right? Staying up to speed, staying up to date. I mean, she was really tuned in. And then all of a sudden she's on the couch not tuned in anymore. Audiobooks to the rescue. All of a sudden you get to see that what is a convenience for those of us who are temporarily able bodied becomes a Necessity if we want people who maybe have extra challenges to participate. In this case, people with visual challenges. A situation that could have been and would have been 30, 35 years ago. I mean, just look at how it would have been for my grandmother. Would have shut you down in your tracks, is a minor bump in the road, at least when it comes to my mom's reading material because of outlets like Audible. That's completely different than a question of convenience. And it takes something like this sometimes to wake some of us, like myself, up to that fact. It's a reminder that this isn't just a question of a new electronic distraction, but sometimes really a question of people's ability to participate in the world around them. One of the complaints my mom always had about the old fashioned version of audiobooks, shall we call it the brick and mortar or the analog audiobooks era, was the books on tape. And libraries would carry these things. And the complaint always was that you have this very narrow selection. If you want to read the best sellers, you can probably get those. But what if you want to read something about a very specific interest of yours or something that's a little bit older or something that's off the beaten path? In other words, you have to. You can't be plugged in the way the rest of us are. You only get this little narrow band of offerings. Not so with Audible. One of the great features about them is walking into a bookstore. And going onto Audible's website is pretty darn comparable, including the latest stuff on your bookstore shelves. The idea that you really don't have to wait a long period of time to get the audio version now of a textbook is crazy interesting. And it allows people like my mom to all of a sudden be engaged in, for example, the hot new book at the same time everyone else is. As I said, not a question of convenience, in her case, a question of making participation available as an option to her. Now, in addition, I'm not sure I would even be able to explain to her the idea that in a lot of situations like this, you don't actually own what you buy. You could buy an audiobook, for example, from someone and it's not really yours, you can display it or what have you. Audible doesn't do those kind of things. And I love that about them. You buy your content, it's yours, you own the book. There's chapter navigation, there's whisper. I mean, we talk about the convenience aspect all the time, but I'm blown away by the difference between what makes life a little bit easier for me and what makes life livable for people who need these things. By the way, if you're looking for something to read, mom, you might want to pick up Blitzed Drugs in Nazi Germany. The publisher sent me this not that long ago, probably knowing that I would be into this subject because maybe they heard the show we did. The very first blitz show we ever did for hardcore history. Called it History under the Influence, about the hidden impact that drugs and alcohol and intoxicants must have had on the past. Hard to know though, without the sources, right? Well, in this case, author Norman Oehler and I think this is an original German book, translated, he goes and dives deep into one specific place in time, Nazi Germany, to show how not just Hitler, not just the leadership, not just the Nazi party, but a lot of society in that narrow era of history was impacted and affected by intoxicants. It's fascinating. You'd love to see the same if the sources existed approach taken to all kinds of different eras and times in history. Well, we're lucky to have this at all. You can go to Audible, get a free audiobook with a 30 day trial membership right now. Go to audible.com dancarlin to do it and you could get your copy of Blitz by Norman Oehler. If you liked History under the Influence, I think you'll really like the book. And by the way, if you liked History under the Influence, just a little aside here, our wonderful artist Nick Ley, who does all of our stuff and is sort of the, he's become the Ralph Steadman to my Hunter Thompson in terms of associating art with, well, work. And he's going back and slowly but surely crafting new covers for all the old shows that didn't have covers. And one of the ones is History under the Influence. We should be able to share that on social media before too long. But why wait for that to get your fix when you can get a free audiobook with a 30 day trial membership? You can get Blitzed Drugs in Nazi Germany today and you can do so by going to audible.com dancarlin right now. Want to help the podcasts? Just buy your Amazon.com products through the Amazon search window on Dancarlin.com and Dan and Ben will get a percentage of what you spend and it won't cost you a penny more. 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