Transcript of Hunter Biden New

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert. I'm Dan Shepard. I'm joined by Lily Padman. Hello. Today we have Hunter Biden on. Yeah. Who is an author. Uh, he was a lawyer, he was a lobbyist, he, uh, is an artist, and he's a recovery advocate. Obviously, he's the son of Joe Biden, the 46th president, and he has a book out now called Beautiful Things, um, detailing his heroin journey through fucking hardcore addiction. Yeah. And so this is a very addiction-heavy episode. It's— we try to minimize any political nature. I think this is the kind of story I love to hear about addiction. That's primarily what it is. Yes. Um, so I hope everyone goes into it with an open mind because it's, um, incredibly honest and vulnerable and powerful.

I agree.

Please enjoy Hunter Biden. You can stay seated. How are you, brother? Good.

I'm really, really sorry I'm late. No, no problem. You're bringing sugar?

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right.

Hey, Monica. Nice to meet you.

Nice to meet you. Luckily we had sugar in the raw. Otherwise I was bringing out a white— Yeah, a bag of white powder. I was like, what a start for these two. That is hilarious. Sugar in your coffee. I'm a little shocked. I'm going to be honest. I'm going to start with stereotypes.

Yeah.

I thought you were tougher than this.

Oh no.

I'm sorry.

I got my few things. I got my nicotine a little bit. I quit smoking. When I got clean, Melissa, my wife, she convinced me to go to this guy. What's his name?

The hypnotist?

Yeah.

Uh-huh. I don't know his name, but I know of him.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, yeah.

And I was like, bullshit.

Uh-huh.

And it went and it worked. Yeah. And then like 6 months later, I don't know, it was like my first indictment or my second, I was like, I need some nicotine. Ah. He said he could get anybody off of anything. I was shocked. Have you seen this guy? Like, he is like out of a movie. He's got the worst toupee you've ever seen.

Oh, great.

He brings you into his garage that has all this bric-a-brac everywhere.

Yeah.

And you sit like in a Barcalounger. And he has a bottle of water, at least as I remember. And he's just talking to you about nicotine and cigarettes. And when did you start and things like that. And all I remember, he just was doing this. There's never a moment where you're like, you're under. The very end he comes and it's just 3 sessions. And at the last session he said, that's it, you're done. Wow. And I was done.

That's pretty—

how about the physical withdrawal?

Not done.

You didn't feel— no, the craziness?

No, no. He does it over 3 sessions. In like the first session, you're going to smoke half of what you smoke. Okay, okay. Second session, you're only going to have 2 cigarettes a day. And then the third, you're done. And I was done. I mean, I was smoking since I was 17.

I mean, like a pack of Marlboros a day when you were sober, probably a pack.

Yeah. And when I wasn't— yeah.

Well, when I look back, I remember my epic hangovers, and at this point it's hard to really know because I also would smoke like 3 packs of Camel Lights on nights that I partied. If you're blowing lines, the cigarette never goes out. It's just one after another, and you wake up feeling horrendous. You're like, I don't, I don't know how to unravel. Was it the alcohol? Was it the cocaine? Was it the insane amount of cigarettes?

Isn't that the whole problem?

It's one big combination.

Yeah, we can talk about it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's kind of your position. I've heard you speak on this a bit. I think statistically we would agree, right? I think the shocking number I heard you say is like you add up every single other known drug and the amount of deaths caused by alcohol is 5x some total of every other drug.

Yeah.

Which I guess then you could try to parse out like what is the quantity aspect of the drug and then what's the qualitative aspect that's causing that destruction?

Yeah.

What do you think?

I think it's both. Alcohol, number one, is so ubiquitous, but beyond it being ubiquitous, It's the only drug that impacts every organ of your body. Uh-huh. And every pleasure center of your brain. If you're into stimulants, it's like the dopamine reactor. If you're into opiates, it's the—

Opioid receptors.

Exactly. Alcohol does all of them. And then you become truly physically dependent upon it, meaning that your body will shut down if you deny it the amount of alcohol that you've been putting in it, and you'll go into seizures and die. And the only other drug is basically freeze-dried alcohol is the benzos. And so from that perspective, and then you just look at the societal effect of it, and that part is the quantitative part. Uh-huh. And the quantitative part being that it is so ubiquitous, the amount of deaths and destruction that alcohol causes in, you know, everything from car accidents to literally just people falling down the steps to people beating the, the hell out of their partners or the kids or things like that.

Yeah, man, you remind me of how insanely hard alcohol was to quit in that you're never more than a couple hundred feet from alcohol if you're in LA or generally anywhere I went. Anywhere. You're always within a couple hundred feet of this thing you're trying your hardest to never consume.

And sometimes your own home.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah. If you have a partner who does it normally. Yeah. I kind of almost forget how insurmountable that first section was of just like, how will I ever begin to ignore the amount of alcohol I just see all the time everywhere I go. Gracefully, I've not walked in— in 23, 22 years, I haven't walked into a lot of rooms and saw bowls of cocaine.

No, exactly.

And if I saw bowls of cocaine every 100 feet—

crack either. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Or heroin, or opiates for that matter, or other synthetic opiates.

Weed. Now it'll be interesting to see what the kind of long term result of it'll all be. I'm generally in favor of it being legalized, or fully in favor, but it is becoming ubiquitous now.

Oh, me too. By the way, I'm not for prohibition. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It is what it is. Yeah, I would rather see legalization of everything before. It's just a much more honest approach. And I don't know about everything, but I haven't fully thought it through.

I used to think that when I was younger. Crack at your 7-Eleven.

San Francisco, you can see.

That's the thing, by the way, the reason I talk about crack The way that I talk about crack is because it comes with such a stigma and it's so shocking to people. And I don't say it to shock people. Joe Rogan did this whole thing where, oh my God, you should hear him talk about crack. It's like a lost lover. Well, it's just honest. And I don't mean to talk about it that way. And I want to always make it clear it is actually that dangerous. And the other thing about crack for me is this idea that there's this process and it's a whole different thing and it's kind of like this secret. It's not.

It had bad branding. I mean, crack sounds like—

had really bad branding.

Yeah, it's like you're already— it sounds fucking gross. Crack.

Exactly.

If it were called taint cocaine, it's one— it's adjacent to taint cocaine.

Well, it's because there's also some racism in the mix.

Well, there's a huge amount of racism.

So, um, yeah, yeah, the whole thing.

When I was in law school, my senior analytical writing— it's like your thesis that you write at Yale— that's what I wrote about. I wrote about the disparity in sentencing as relates to crack, which the Obama administration changed, and then the Biden administration got rid of altogether.

Yeah, this arbitrary distinction legally.

The response to it was understandable in retrospect, in that it kind of came and it just tore apart communities at record speed. And the level of violence— but the level of violence always is never necessarily associated with use. The level of violence is all around the trade. And I would say to people, "Just go watch The fucking Wire." You know what I mean? It had an astounding effect on so many communities. And the reason that I am so open about it, number one, is just because you've had probably the same experience. I don't know of anybody who hasn't been impacted by addiction in their lives in one way or another. The thing is, though, as much as we talk about it, people don't talk about it.

And it's really hard for a non-addict to understand I want to express an overarching goal I have for talking to you, which is I try my hardest to keep the show apolitical. I want Republicans to feel as welcome listening to this show as I do Democrats. I think the things I'm interested in talking about, I'd hope everyone would get to hear about addiction, about trauma, about all these things. So my goal is to keep it as apolitical as possible, but I'm going to break it right now to just say there's only been a single moment that I thought Trump potentially lost his momentum with his bass. And it was the one moment he tried to come after your dad about your addiction. You could just feel in that audience everyone was like, oh no, you're talking about my son. You're talking about my brother-in-law. You're talking about my mom. That one didn't work. I just think it's so pervasive and everyone's had the heartbreak of it. So few people are fully insulated from it that I just thought, wow, weirdly, of all these things, That's the thing I think cut through the sharpest.

Well, your intuition or insight into that is actually really spot on, which is interesting because that's what the whole attack on me initially was all about, was all of the salacious pictures that they stole and cobbled together from I don't know how many different devices. Idea that there was like one laptop that somebody had. It's just bullshit.

Your whole life was a fucking train wreck, right? There was evidence all over of the train wreck.

But like you, not my whole life. 3 years of extreme addiction is, you know, I mean, you look at those pictures and 90% of them are somebody taking a picture of me. But regardless, then what they did is they conflated 2 things, one that was completely untrue with one that was completely true. I was a crackhead. The thing that wasn't true was that I was taking bribes from like Ukrainians and Chinese and was involved. But if you can get somebody, you know, there's this thing called eliminationist rhetoric. Rachel Maddow has talked about it. And originally it was perfected by the Nazis, but then Putin picked it up in the early 2000s, in which if they can get just 5% of the people to believe that you're a pedophile or a crackhead— attached, like, the worst thing that you can say to somebody— the ability to get 30% of the people to believe that you're taking bribes is that much easier.

Well, and then we're circling back to the far-reaching tentacles of labeling crack, crack, the kind of racial connotations, the now new heights of shame reached by the addict. If you're a cocaine addict, you're in great company. You're with Sigmund Freud, for Pete's sake. You're with luminaries and Nobel Peace Prize winners.

Yeah.

When you're a crack addict, your group is totally different. And so you're already juggling the shame of an addiction, and then you add on this other factor, which is like, oh no, it's known. I'm full exclusion of my community. This is the one thing that— no, I am the bottom of the barrel. Even among addicts, I am the shittiest of the shitty. So yes, if we establish you as a crackhead, then Really, your reputation's gone. So all things are conceivable at that point because we've already designated crackheads as being zombies who are the worst of the worst.

Yeah.

So it all works in concert beautifully, actually.

To be clear, I handed it all to them on a silver platter because I was a crackhead. And so my thing now is, yeah, yeah, so what? What are you gonna say about me? What are you gonna ask me? Like, I just did Candace Owens, and she It was vicious to me for 6 years. The line that she used over and over again was, "Degenerate crackhead," or, "Crackhead's first son." You know, I've been sober for 7 years on June 1st.

Congratulations.

And clean and sober on June 1st. Not that I find any distinction between the two, but she didn't know that.

She did not know that.

No. She just assumed that I was doing coke or doing crack because what about the bag of cocaine that was found in the White House? And you realize that For 6 years, the New York Post ran a picture of me. I mean, I was on the COVID of the New York Post more than anybody in the history of the newspaper.

No kidding.

In a 1-year period of time. Okay. Going back to like Alexander Hamilton. Wow. And I was their number 1 story. They were writing 1.5 stories about me on average a day for like a year. And then it went to 1 story every 2 days for the next 5. And each one of those Stories was awful to begin with, but it always included a picture of me with a pipe in my mouth or in a motel room with a woman like a degenerate crack addict. And so why wouldn't people think— still using? Yeah, I'm shocked by how many people are shocked when I say 7 years.

Well, in defense of those people, you count me in that category. Of course you're permeating. I don't even follow a lot of that stuff. I don't follow the New York Post, but you're permeating all this during the election. I'm aware of the fact that you're an addict. There's not a press release that you got sober. There's no big headline that you got sober. I don't know till I think I see you on Channel 5. That was the first time I had seen you post all of that where I was like, oh wow, this dude's talking about it. This is rad. He's sober and what a fucking story. And my kind of story.

It's a story, right?

Exactly.

So let's go through it. I guess let's start in Wilmington, Delaware in 1970. You arrive, you arrive, 1-year-old brother on the scene.

Yeah, yeah.

Bo, how old? Much older?

Is he a year and a day? Wow.

Yeah, you guys really nailed the Irish twins.

Yeah, exactly. I guess technically we missed it by a day.

Joe was not waiting. Yeah, wanted a family.

Then my sister was born. We're 16 months apart.

Really soon after.

Oh, your mother, man. 3 children under 2 and a half or something. That's Bonkers. Yeah. I would imagine for you it's really hard to know what to assume people know about you and what people don't because you're caught in the center of you. I think people vaguely know there was a tragedy.

I think a lot of people don't know.

I agree. I vaguely just like, oh yeah, Joe Biden went through hell when he first became a senator. I know he lost some family members basically, right? But yeah, December 18th, 1972. What's happening?

Go back. My dad was 29, and he decided that he was going to run for Senate against this guy named Caleb Boggs, two-term governor. And I think at the time he was three-term senator and this incredibly liked incumbent. And my dad ran this campaign in Delaware, what you could do at the time, in which he was able to reach almost every single voter by literally just— he, my aunt, my uncles, my grandparents, and my mom, more than anybody, canvassed the whole state. Yeah, for real.

How many people lived in Delaware at that point?

I What was it, like 600,000 or something like that? Oh, wow.

You could conceivably go meet everyone.

They put a piece of literature on everyone's doorstep. Wow. Every home in the state of Delaware.

And what was his novel offering that people were like, yeah.

Remember, 1970, you had a Nixon landslide also. And so he talked about civil rights and he talked about the environment and he talked about just new leadership. And he won by a razor-thin margin, but he won and it was a shock to everyone. I don't think it was a shock to my mom.

Where did that put him historically as age?

The youngest ever to win an election.

So—

Wow. He couldn't take the oath of office until he turned 30. You can win, but you can't take the oath of office until you turn 30.

President's 35.

President's 35. And the House of Representatives, 25. So anyway, he wins and he goes to D.C. for the day to interview potential staffers. And my mom was supposed to go down because they just bought a house with us. And she decided to delay it a day because she wanted to buy a Christmas tree. It was December 18th because we were celebrating Christmas in Delaware, I guess. And she was pulling out from an intersection at a stop sign. This is a big hill and a tractor trailer slammed in the side. It was me, my brother, and our dog, and my sister and my mother. And Beau and I survived, but just barely. We were trapped in the car, but my sister and my mom were killed pretty instantly.

You imagine, I believe, about to turn 3, 3 months away from 3.

Exactly. I was almost 3, but I was almost 4.

Do you have any— I mean, I can't imagine you have any memory of the exact—

of the accident itself. No, I have memories. You probably know this. It's very rare. They say like 10 or 15% of people have memories before the age of 7 or 5 or something like that. I believe I do. Yeah, but I don't know if it's because so many people have told me in photographs, but trauma might add a different element to it. And so I choose to believe that I actually have the memory, like the memory of my mom carrying me around. They used to carry us around like picnic baskets.

It's also irrelevant whether you remember or not. Like, we had Gabor Maté on, right? It's like Gabor Maté was abandoned by his mother for a couple months. I love him, he's the greatest. He doesn't remember that, but all of his circuitry remembers that. It set his arousal setting at that moment.

Exactly. And by the way, I used to deny myself the idea that the accident and the trauma of it and the loss of my mother and my sister being in the car, all of that had any impact on anything in my life. I was so surrounded by love in the immediate aftermath of that and then going forward. Like, my dad, I don't give a shit what anybody thinks about him politically. My dad is literally the best dad in the entire world. He's even better grandfather, which pisses me off, but he is the best dad in the world.

Oh, so your aunts and uncles moved into the house immediately?

My aunt moved into the house. My Aunt Valerie and my Uncle Jimmy converted the garage into an apartment. And my Uncle Frankie was in and out, and my grandparents on both sides. We spent every summer up in the Finger Lakes, up in Lake Wawasko with the Hunters, who I'm named after. I probably spent at least 2 nights a week at my grandparents', what we called Momma and Dada Biden's, every week until I graduated high school. Wow. And on top of that, because of the notoriety of the thing, an entire state, which is a small state, was pulling for all of you guys. And so everywhere we went, we had more aunts and uncles than anybody deserves, and still do. And so I kind of always denied the idea.

You're like, I'm fine.

Well, we probably would have felt ungrateful. That's exactly the amount of love.

And then my mom came along. My mom.

Now, how old were you and Jill?

7.

7?

Yeah, I think 7, 7, 8.

It's also relevant. So Beau received a ton of broken bones, right?

Yeah, he was in a— basically like in traction in a body cast for a long time.

But you had a fractured skull and brain damage.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Oh my God. No. Like, how could it not impact? Yeah.

I'm contesting that brain thing. But you nailed it. I felt guilty thinking that my life was anything but this bundle of love.

Did you guys do a lot of debriefing about it or processing it?

Not the accident itself. But we talked about my mother and still do incessantly.

She didn't pretend that she did not exist.

Did not pretend in any way that she did not exist, including my mom. When my mom became— she honored the memory of my mother in a very real way. I mean, I talk to my aunts and uncles about it to this day about how, by all accounts, and obviously I'm biased, my mother was an extraordinary human being. Everyone will tell you that my dad got elected at the age of 29 for one reason. It was because of my mother.

So your ride up until Georgetown, you're at a private school, Catholic, maybe a Jesuit school?

No, it's not Jesuit, it was Norbertine. But I started off, my Aunt Val was a teacher at the Wilmington Friends School, so a little Quaker school in Delaware. It was great. And I went there until 9th grade. And my dad had gone to Archmere, which is a little Catholic school on the border of PA and Delaware. And I played football and I decided to go because my brother had gone there, which was probably a mistake. Why? But I— well, just, I'm much more suited for the Quaker ethic than I am to the Norbertine Catholic school ethic. But I have great friends there.

How were you and Beau different?

We were inseparable, and we fought like brothers fight, but no one else could fight my brother without me, or somebody do something to me without my brother standing in the way.

My brother would kick my ass, then go beat up the bully a minute later.

Yeah, but by the way, Beau and I were more evenly matched. I know that I was much more pugnacious than he was. But the difference between us is that Bo is an extrovert. And also, he had a confidence that was just immediate. You can ask anybody. Bo was an extraordinary human being. And I mean, everybody called him the Sheriff. He never drank. He was always the guy that drove the car. He was always the one that was, you know, cutting people off when they're about to do something stupid. And he was like that from the time he was 8 years old. And I loved drawing, and I loved poetry, and I loved sports, but I also loved playing with my army men by myself in my room.

You were sensitive?

You were sensitive.

I was much, much, much more sensitive.

Addicts generally are. Yes.

That's part of our PR.

Yeah, they are.

They are.

Because we're not stupid.

We are too aware.

Exactly. That's what I always say. But that was the difference between us. He was the constant presence in my life in only the most beautiful way that I can articulate.

Yeah. You go to Georgetown, you get a history degree. Were you always set on going to law school?

Mm-mm.

How did you decide that?

So when I was at Georgetown, the best part about Georgetown was, is that I got to meet these really incredibly fascinating young Jesuit priests that were very much a part of campus life, at least back then. And I met a guy named Ted Dziak who had started a thing called the Jesuit International Volunteer Corps. It's basically like a Peace Corps, But it is done under the auspices of the Jesuit community. But it's non-ecumenical. You don't go out and proselytize or anything.

You're not trying to convert people.

No, you can go out if you're a Methodist. It's just public service. And they had a beachhead in Belize, in Nepal, and Micronesia at the time. And we started a thing called the Jesuit International Volunteer Summer Program in Belize. And because of that, I was really involved also in a thing called the Center for Immigration Policy and Refugee Assistance. And there was another Jesuit there that ran that. He was one of like the OG refugee and immigrant advocates in the country. And I was involved in that. And I decided that I was gonna do the Peace Corps. And another guy, guy named, I'm naming all these people that nobody knows. No, it's fine. Father Watson, Bill Watson. He said, why are you going abroad? Join JVC, which is a domestic version of the Peace Corps.

What about Portland?

Exactly. Because he was from Portland, which by the way, was the greatest thing ever because this was 1992. Too. It is just the coolest place in the world.

Coffee, cigarettes, grunge.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, like, I sat in Pal's Bookstore and read all the beat poets. You had an endless cup of coffee and 3 packs of cigarettes, and you live with other volunteers. You make $80 a month, that's all you get, and you pull your money together for groceries. But you're riding the bus and you're working in the community and living in the community that you work in, which was me in the basement of a church figuring out how to get people food or get their lights turned back on or, you know, get the heat turned back on in winter. It was the greatest thing ever.

And you met your first wife there?

Yes, exactly. And she was a volunteer also. And then we shortly after that had Naomi. We got married. I went to law school. I did my first year at Georgetown.

You were married with a kid at 23, right?

Exactly. Yeah. And I had Naomi on my last exam of my first semester of law school, and the professor let me out of the exam. So I took it after Christmas and he gave me an A and I did really well. And I'd always wanted to go to Yale. I'd got rejected and I didn't think I was necessarily gonna get in, but I did really well and got into Yale as a transfer. They like accept like 5 to 7 people a year.

Sidebar, was it interesting to leave the bubble for the first time and go to Portland in that you grew up in Delaware, dad's a senator, it's politics, politics, politics. Then you go to Georgetown, which is in DC. Again, you must at that time think the entire country thinks about politics all the time and cares.

Yeah.

And then you go to Portland, and was it nice to get an outside perspective? And did you feel that happening?

Yeah, not as much because I needed an outside perspective from the politics thing. But the difference with Beau and I was that we never grew up in that. We grew up in Delaware. My dad took the train back and forth every day. And so, in a state, of 600, which is like— I know, I think a million people, or just under a million people. Everybody knows my dad, and you guys kind of get this idea. I mean, Uncle Joe, they knew him as Joe. Like, when I get pulled over by the cops, it wasn't, "Sorry, sir." It was like, "I can't wait till I see your dad. He's gonna kick your ass." Yeah, you know what I mean? Like, that was our existence. When I went to Georgetown, that was a little bit different, but still not overwhelming. It's not like anybody knew who I was by the way that people on the street know who I am now. So when I went to Portland though, you're absolutely right. I don't know what you think about the addiction thing, but for me now in retrospect, particularly this time, this last 7 years in which I had to kind of make a choice, the ultimate choice to live or die.

So many of the decisions that I made in my life that had really horrible consequences were all based in fear. Fear of judgment, fear of sticking out, fear of being found out, fear of showing truly who you are. But when I was in Portland, I could be the guy that was sitting and reading Ginsberg and the Paris Review.

Naked Lunch and Bukowski.

Exactly. While I was making $80 a month and not giving a shit.

Can you think, at this age— So if I do it, it's like, there's some really memorable moments with using. One is the very first time I decided to drink some beers out of the fridge. My dad was a recovering addict, so I was never going to do it. Then one day I was like, "No, I'm going to do it. I'm going to find out on my own." And I do remember having like 3 beers out of the fridge and literally thinking, oh, fuck, this is the feeling I've been craving and couldn't articulate. I don't know. I can't compare it to non-addicts, but just immediately I was like, this is a magic.

100%. I know exactly where I was. I know exactly what happened. I was at an adult party with my brother. I picked up a champagne glass, went underneath a table with a tablecloth over it. Drank the glass, and thought to myself, "Oh my God, this is the answer to everything." Oh yeah, truly. Because then I left underneath the table, and I danced with everybody, and I was happy. And I didn't continue to drink. All the trolls clip this stuff. I wasn't drinking at the age of 8, but I remember that experience. You know, when people say, "Why did you do it?" Because it worked.

Well, yeah, it's a medicine that works for a period of time.

It works like that. And then you find something that works even better. I played football, so, you know, during the football season, none of us would drink. Kinda. And it's what we did. It's what we did on the weekends.

Yeah, what are you gonna do, be the one person not doing it? It's a hard thing to ask people.

Yeah. You know, it's just— The next time I really drank after I was 8, I remember what it was exactly. And talk about regulating emotions. Is a friend of mine had taken his parents' car with another friend of mine. They had a couple beers or whatever. And was speeding down one of these back roads in Delaware. And ran into a tree and she died instantly. Mm-hmm. Talk about the wrong response to that. The wrong response to that was, he was my best friend at the time, is that we stole beers in the back of his house. And I remember the enormous guilt. I don't think I've ever told this story. I remember my dad picking me up from his house the morning after we, between us, drank a 12-pack, I guess, or whatever. But you know, you're 15 years old and going to Mass. We'd go to Mass every Sunday at St. Joe's on the Brandywine, little Catholic church, and having to leave and tell my dad I think I had the flu and throwing up outside. And I think it was less a response to the alcohol than it was to the enormity of the guilt that I had just— like, our friend, the consequences for him for what happened were enormous.

Yeah. And the guilt of that— and as you know, guilt is appropriate, but The thing that is not is the shame. So then what's the only thing that you know your brain is telling you works so that you don't have to feel that shame and anxiety over that shame of the thing that you're not telling somebody? Oh, I know, have another drink.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So that was like at 15, and then it's a cycle. So when I get to Portland, I've made it through college. I actually did pretty well, not without Oktoberfest in Burlington, Vermont. Got in a street fight and somebody curbed me and broke took every tooth out of my—

oh my God—

stomped on my leg on the curb and broke my leg in 3 places. I was in a cast for 6 months. And, you know, I mean, oh, it was awful. But that didn't stop me. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that didn't stop me.

So when I get speed bump to Portland, there's this whole new me.

No expectations, nobody that knows all of the small town or the small college kind of group. And it's filled with purpose. Yeah, it was incredibly promising. And so I drank, and obviously to excess. I don't know what your drinking was like, but I wasn't a blackout drunk, unfortunately. I really wish I blacked out because I could go and go and go.

Yeah, the bill never came due at that age.

No, and the truth of the matter was, is because I wasn't engaging in anything in which the bill came due. We were going to Nickel Beers at Nob Hill in Portland and playing pool. We didn't have any money beyond like a keg. Yeah.

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. We are supported by Allstate. Checking Allstate first could save you hundreds on car insurance. Not checking that your keys are actually in your hand before you close the car door. Have you ever stood in a parking lot full of sun staring at your keys sitting right there on the seat, 4 inches away and completely useless to you? It's a very specific kind of humbling Yeah, checking first is a good idea. So check Allstate first for an auto quote. It could save you hundreds. And for fast, reliable help when you need it, add an Allstate Roadside Plan today. You're in good hands with Allstate. Potential savings vary. Insurance and roadside assistance plans are subject to terms, conditions, and availability. Insurance provided by Allstate North American Insurance Company, Northbrook, Illinois. Roadside assistance plans provided by Allstate Motor Club, Incorporated, and Allstate Affiliates. When's the first time it occurs to you? I think this is like, for the layperson, there's these kind of stereotypes that are true and not true, which is, first of all, this notion of like a bottom, which is like, well, there's not a bottom.

I had like 30.

I always say a bottom's you're dead. Yeah, maybe in jail if you're lucky.

But just that moment you go, oh, I should have died last night, or I should have died over the last 4 days.

This is life or death.

That's a bottom. Yeah. And you go, are we going to keep going? And often you keep going even though you—

right, you find a new bottom.

When do you start recognizing, I do this differently than people and probably I'll have to quit at some point?

When I was 29, I start to realize my pattern of drinking was unlike anyone— not anyone, because you find your group, you know what I mean? But even among those heavy drinkers, I would still be going at 6 in the morning.

Well, everyone's asleep.

What are you guys doing? And then when I was 33, my wife at the time said, like, you need to slow it down.

Were you accumulating any wreckage? Had you gotten DUIs?

No, no, no.

You were keeping it pretty.

Yeah. And I, you know, I built my own law firm. I graduated from Yale. It did really well from law school. And I was a senior executive vice president at a major bank when I got out of law school. And then I went to work for the Clinton administration.

You're right.

Yeah, you're doing well. You're getting gigs that other people aren't getting.

You're able to shore up the plummeting self-esteem from the addiction with these external things.

And I had 3 kids by that time.

Well, right. But were you also thinking that maybe it's a part of your success? Like, I could see you kind of— anyone being sort of like, well, this is part of the whole recipe. I do this and I'm successful.

And it becomes a part of your identity. Identity, yeah, definitely. And what I always say when people come to me, and I love it because I say to them, I don't have any answer for you other than getting clean and sober is Easy. All you have to do is change everything, right? But it becomes a part of your identity, and you think, what am I going to do? What am I going to do on a Thursday? Oh yeah, what am I going to do on a Friday? Vacation? What am I going to do on Tuesdays? Everything revolves around drinking. What am I going to do on vacation?

When I celebrate, what am I going to do at 5 o'clock? Yeah, yeah, 5 o'clock.

Yeah, try 11 AM. Yeah, exactly.

Can I sprinkle in another, I think, facet of this very complex system of addiction? I think for men at least for me, there's a big chunk of masculinity involved in this whole journey for me, which is, again, I was the dude who went harder than anyone, and I showed up and did my shit, and I had great pride in that. That was a real indicator of my alpha masculinity. It validated me. Just scratching and clawing for this validation of being appropriately masculine was also some facet of it. I don't know what percentage, but it was in the mix. Was that happening for you too?

All of that fear of really being seen, you build up this persona of being tougher than anybody, more capable than anybody.

Because really, I'm just a sensitive dude who wants to entertain people and love my daughter.

So it becomes a shield for everything, and it becomes this identity, and it's literally the polar opposite of your true self. Because I'm not that guy. I don't want to be that guy. And so doing a speech, doing anything public, I needed a drink to do it. I thought I needed a drink to do it. In the past life, If this was 7 years ago for me, the idea that I wouldn't literally be a puddle on this couch just if you put a microphone in front of my face and knowing that there's a camera in the room or that I had to get on a stage and do something, I was so afraid of that. Now, unfortunately for everyone, I don't. Exactly. So I do it.

I do it a lot more.

Yeah. But you're exactly right. So it becomes your persona. And what happened with me, is what I did was like, okay, I'm gonna prove to everybody that this is not a problem. I'm not gonna drink for January. I'm gonna do 30 days. And I'd get 6, and I'd break, and I'd say, oh, that was just one break, it was for the weekend. And then what ends up happening is, is then you start hiding it. It becomes binge even more. And then I'd be like, hey, I got a trip that I got to do for business. And that business trip would be 2 days, it would stretch into 4, that would stretch into 5, and then it would come home.

You're dead on arrival. I just laughing at how many times is the game plan evolves so quickly. It's like, yeah, 30 days and then just weekends. No, just Wednesdays and weekends.

Just beer, not Jack Daniels. Well, not—

and it just erodes so fucking quickly from the abstinence to the, like, one day a week to full-on.

It's comical dependence. There is physical dependence that people take out of consideration. Yeah, it's like you can't actually just stop at any moment. You kind of have to, like, titrate. And if you're an addict, you can't titrate. Like, it's this crazy—

yeah, nobody talks about it. Nobody talks about all of in terms of the wellness piece of it and ways to be able to mitigate that and how you should do it with somebody, really do it understanding what you're doing. But regardless is that for me, it became so many promises made, so many promises broken around alcohol that I was just like, hey, let's do something about this for real. Let's start to look. And I found Crossroads in Antigua, Eric Clapton's place.

Oh, I sent my best friend Aaron there.

It's great. By the way, it was for me, at that time, and this is, what is it, 2003? So 22, 23 years ago. It's in Antigua, but it's not a resort.

And you earn swimming privileges. Like Aaron would call me and be like, oh yeah, I did all my blank. I'm going to get to swim in the ocean today for 2 hours.

Exactly. You get to go on the bus to go to the ocean to go swimming. And it has a real community aspect. At least when I was there, they were really wonderful. And I get there with all of those preconceived notions of how my life is going to be so empty. Because I don't have alcohol in it anymore. And I was introduced to the program. All of a sudden I was like, wait a second, this may work. And I got out, my brother picked me up from the airport and immediately drove to a meeting over at Dupont Circle Club.

Oh, what a good big brother.

I know.

Yeah, he went into— it was an open meeting. He went to the meeting with me.

That makes me fucking emotional.

Yeah, he goes up to this guy and says, hey, Hey, do you sponsor people? Because he had spoken in the thing. And he goes, yeah, of course. He goes, I'm gonna introduce you to my brother. And I got my sponsor. I stayed clean and sober. And again, I hate the distinction.

What is the distinction?

Well, you say you're sober if you're not drinking, and you say you're clean in the other program if you're not using drugs.

Oh, I see.

But it's all drugs. But anyway, I was not on any mind-altering substances whatsoever for about a 7-year period of time.

And did you love the program? I love the program. Did it start yielding all those results? I still, I still love the program. Yeah, yeah, same.

Those people that I met are still clean and sober. And when I say people, like a handful that through everything have always been a lifeline for me. If I had my phone in front of me, you'd find like 4 texts every day from those same people that gave me a lifeline back.

When you're looking at the landscape in front of you, yes, all you see is all the things you're not gonna have, like the camaraderie with friends, the intimacy with men, the thing to do on vacation, the celebration, the salve for disappointment. You're very aware of all the things you're going to lose, but what you don't consider is you're also going to lose this impossible weight that has been on your shoulders, which is the shame and guilt and regret. You hope, but you don't even know that yet. You can't conceive of a moment where you won't be walking around feeling like the biggest piece of shit that ever lived. That's not even in your imagination yet. And I think the gift of it that's kind of hard to sell kids on, or sell people that are new to it, is like, you can't really even imagine what it's like to walk through life with maybe regrets but not shame, and you've made amends, and you're walking free of all that. Because for most of us, it's been decades since we knew what that feeling was like.

It's impossible to tell somebody. The only thing that we can do is, is show them and hope that they get the chance to experience Yeah. And by the way, that 7 years, it wasn't like I was hanging on by the skin of my teeth in any way. But what I now know is that I had not fully done the work because there was that armor that still existed in which that shame still lived. And not even about specific things, just about truly being me. And so anyway, I relapsed.

Yeah.

I'm on a plane and it was 2010, I think. And I'm coming back from a business trip in Europe. I woke up clean, sober. I had been upgraded to like this business class, but I was the only one in there. She comes by with a cart and it's a Bloody Mary cart, like a full Bloody Mary cart. And I swear to God, you know what went through my head? One of my counselors at Crossroads had told me a story about how he had been sober for 7 years and he had a drink on a plane on his way to Washington, D.C. from the West Coast. And he woke up in Indianapolis, Indiana, in a motel.

Oh my gosh.

Why that would be a— in any way, like, in my trap—

Oh, I should do that.

Maybe I should try this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I did.

I had a dream.

Yeah.

And of course, I didn't have one Bloody Mary on that plane, in which I think I probably came and told people that in my group, I had 6. And I got off the plane, and I went to a corner store on the way home, and picked up, you know, a fifth of Smirnoff in that plastic bottle and put it in my bag.

So then, about a year later, Beau comes and says, "Back to Antigua, pal." Are you like, "Oh my God, my brother has to keep—" Do you have guilt about that? No, no. You don't?

I don't have any guilt about how much my brother adored me. He wasn't like, "Oh God, I gotta go get Hunter." He was like, What the fuck? You've been trying so hard. Let's get you back, man. You're doing great. When we get back, I'll go to meetings. I think the meetings are great. I love it. I could use it too.

I bet you have triggers.

Like, never any— like, talk about unconditional love that they had between each other. But anyway, thanks, Monica. Now I think I maybe should have been guilty about something. I'm joking. I'm joking.

I really think letting people down is part of the shame. I know what you're saying.

Guilt with my wife at the time. I had guilt with my kids who I adored and adore me. But then I cycled. Then it was like I came back from Antigua that time. I got shingles 3 months later. Somebody prescribed me oxycodone. I started down that path and which led to a bottle of Smirnoff. And I was in that cycle. And then Bo got diagnosed with glioblastoma in 2014. It's a death sentence.

If I were you carrying around, I'm a piece of shit and I'm a scumbag. Yeah. And my sweet brother gets this diagnosis. I would think the amount of shame it would exponentially trigger in me that I should be the one dying.

Why on earth would it be him? 100%. You already have this latent survivor's guilt that exists. And this is why I opened up to the idea that I can talk about that trauma now, because of course it had something to do with everything. And just forget about the drinking or addiction, just in terms of of my fear. You already have that latent survivor's guilt. The worst dream that I ever had in my life as a kid was my brother dying. I remember vividly. The only nightmares that I ever remembered was that, was losing Beau. And that became true, but playing in slow motion. Like, you know the end is near, coming, and it's going to be awful. And it was awful. And I did things like I decided to join the Navy, and I relapsed the day before I went into the Navy Reserves at the age of 42. Pissed hot. I get— yeah, pissed hot. Discharged from the— Discharged from the Navy. Navy Reserve. I now am sober. I'm going through all of the treatments with Beau and all of the things that we're trying. And you get down to the end, they're doing experimental stuff.

But anyway, he passed away. May. It was the 30th of May, 11 years ago. And from there on out, just everything— not because of him, regardless of that, I just as easily could have completely screwed everything up.

Yeah, even if he had stayed healthy.

Yeah, even if he stayed healthy, it accelerated. Yeah, yeah, of course. And the biggest thing that accelerated is immediately after Beau died, my marriage fell apart. I mean, immediately after. We attempted to do things. I attempted to go back to rehab. I stayed in. I had sober coach. Everybody was afraid that I was going to kill myself, right? And that all fell apart within a year.

Do you remember— you must—

it's a rhetorical question, but the first time you smoke crack, from June of 2015 to the end of June of 2016, I had been in and out. I did like 45 days in inpatient, then I came out and I did this thing where I had this guy that 3 times a day I'd have to blow into breathalyzer and it takes a picture of you. And so I was doing that, and then I had a relapse over Christmas. Stacy, on its own— yeah, I relapsed. I admit that I relapsed. I go back into an outpatient program, which is like 6 hours a day in DC, but I'm living by myself for the first time in 46 years. And by the way, nobody's fault but my own, just to be clear. I'm not blaming my—

it doesn't sound like you are.

Yeah, yeah, I think it's even more important for me to say that over and over again. And I relapse, I use cocaine and I drink, and I come back into the program on the Monday and I say, hey, I relapsed, I drank and I used cocaine. And they say, you got to go take the drug test. And I said, I'm not going to take the drug test. It's not protected by HIPAA. You're in a rehab facility, not in a categorized medical facility. It's discoverable. And I don't want to do that. I'm telling you what I did. I'm not keeping anything out. They said, well, unless you take the drug test, you're not coming back in. And so it was on K Street in DC, and I walk out, and I know Lincoln Park, which is literally 2 blocks away, and I knew the worst possible thing that I could do was go smoke crack. And that's what I decided was the answer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I did, and it was a revelation. And again, Joe Rogan, I don't mean this as a love letter. What I mean it is, is it adds the ultimate warning from someone whose life was torn apart by it.

It was staggeringly effective and immediate, and that began a cycle.

For people who don't know, so when you snort cocaine, it goes into your sinuses, it slowly dissolves, it slowly enters your bloodstream. When you smoke it, your lungs convert it immediately. They dump it all in your blood. The only thing that's faster is shooting it intravenously. It's a different experience because you're getting all of it right away.

And there's a piece about crack that also is this idea that crack is dirty. What really the truth of the matter is, the way that you manufacture crack, I figured out how to do that pretty quickly and got much better and better and better at it. Most of the impurities that you could find in it when things were mixed get burned out. And so it's a very, very pure form of— of the drug, which has an immediate effect. There's a really crazy study that I heard out of University of Pennsylvania in which crack addicts, they did these brain— fMRI images. Yeah, but live with smoking. The highest that you get as a crack addict is the millisecond before. Yeah, you ever ingest a drug.

Yeah, that's the dopamine dump.

And that's the power of the drug. It's not even the drug. It's literally— Power of the brain. The power of the brain. It's crazy. And so, it worked really effectively.

What you're looking for is like, the micron before obliteration is the goal. Which is so fucked up. So fucked up.

God, it's so fucked up. It's sad. I mean, that's why when you tell the stories about people saying degenerate crack addict and stuff, it's like, who can hear these things and not think, One, thank God I don't have that. Two, this is sad. We need to help people. To like shame, to add to the shame. I do not understand.

As if the person's like thriving in life and we should be upset that they're winning. Like we're pieces of shit in cars smoking pipes.

As you can see from the thousands of pictures, I was not thriving.

Hey, it's like you want to trade places with that person.

There are a few I look pretty good in.

Good though. You went to depths I didn't. I became aware of your story because a woman that spent some time with you wrote some piece that I happened to read, and I quite enjoyed it for a few reasons. A, she like, liked you, this woman who wrote this thing. I don't even know specifically what it was like. Well, that says something. If you can hang out with an addict who's fucking smoking rock all day long and you come out of that, you still kind of like the person, there's— it's really kind of revealing because You're at your darkest, shittiest, monstrous— you're just a bottomless pit, right, of give me more of everything. So the fact that that person still had kind of a kind opinion of you, I found fascinating. But also it was an interesting perspective to see the person orbiting someone in that zone, and then just imagining people that orbited me when I was in that zone. I never really get to hear what that person's experience is like.

You kind of heard from a lot of them. I overcompensated knowing what I was doing to myself with being as compassionate, empathetic, and generous to a fault. You know, basically, "Come beat me up." Well, you were getting robbed all the time. All the time. I mean, I don't know how many laptops and phones that were stolen from me. And I don't say this like, "Oh, I was such a victim." The way that I assuaged my guilt was I just would give it all away, or know that it was gonna be taken all away. And it didn't matter who it was. It didn't matter if it was Bicycles, who lived with me in my apartment, knowing that she was robbing me blind every day. Or whether it was a prostitute, by the way, which was all about drugs. That's the fastest way to be able to figure out— if you want to figure— I'm not going to tell people— to figure out how to get drugs is that that's the easiest entryway, particularly for someone like me, into that world. I mean, eventually I had to go down to, like, the Flower District at 4 o'clock in the morning and score and know where to go.

You have guns, you know, in my face. You're not naive.

You're a smart dude. You went to Yale Law. You also recognize I am desperate for this thing. The people around me are even more desperate because they don't have any means. And so I'm not naive. Yeah, I'm going to get taken for a ride and I'm willing to get taken for a ride because I want access to the thing. It's all a terrible symbiosis of destruction.

And I consciously knew that I was killing myself. 100% knew it. And it would go up. And even during that period of time, I went for treatment and did ibogaine. And 5-MeO-DMT therapy.

Were any of those effective? I hear about people claiming—

I think that they can be very, very effective. My experience with 5-MeO-DMT was one of the most spiritually enlightening things that I've ever done, but that's because I did the ibogaine before it, which was not as effective for me because I was smoking crack up until the 3 hours before I went and did it. Ibogaine is, I think, one of the strongest, if not strongest, psychoactive hallucinogen on the planet. It's a from the iboga plant in Africa that they've used for thousands and thousands of years. Studies have shown that it has a great impact, particularly with people with PTSD and opiate addictions. It's a very, very long-lasting— 12, at least my experience was like over 12 hours, you know. And then I went and tried to do ayahuasca, and I did that frog toad venom where they cut your arms and purge you, you know. I went to this charlatan in Massachusetts and did ketamine infusion therapy. But all the time I'm still using— and I believe in those things, and I believe in those alternative of things, not as an answer, but as additive to something, if you approach it with the respect that the plant medicine actually requires from you.

I don't want to ever do any of them again. Yeah, I'm afraid to do anything.

But also, yeah, the notion that you're gonna take one thing to break your— to break your desire to take another thing.

But it can be— when you're really healthy, is it can be a mind-expanding experience.

It can break up neural networks that have existed since the first trauma, and it rewire new pathways.

You see, literally, if anyone ever really, really stops to think about it, is kind of the perennial philosophy of the connection of all things, that everything is love. And I don't mean love in terms of the more sense of it, but in terms of there is no distinction between me, you, this table, this earth, the universe, and anything else. At least that's the experience. These are arbitrary boundaries, impossible to articulate, which is a beautiful thing to experience, but it's not the answer. The one thing is you still come back from that. And if you're filled with shame and fear, it's also just—

the wreckage is just piling up. You have lost your family. Yeah. You have a relationship with your brother's widow.

I mean, awful. What grief and addiction, loneliness, and every other thing that you can come up with to think why something like that would have been a good idea for anyone while you know that you're tearing your family apart. I mean, talk about the shame. And the only thing that has, you know, is being able to talk about it, knowing that, like, I'm going to talk about this now and there's going to be 400 people that are going to come into your comments and say, "What a scumbag," you know what I mean? And by the way, and me say, like, yeah, I don't know. By the way, I don't know, and I don't care. Maybe put it this way, is that when I was in the depths of my addiction, I did some really really shameful things that I have no excuse for. And I don't think that drugs and alcohol and addiction are ever an excuse, but I do know this, certainly part of an explanation. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, I can observe you off of it, and I can observe you on it, and they're pretty distinct, uh, creatures. I think people have some fantasy of what the crack scene's like, but But again, when I've been with friends, it's like full vulnerability, full lack of any fear that you'd be judged, full expression of yourself. That's the joy of the thing is like, I'm— You got it. —telling you how much I love you. And that's so scary for me to do sober as a dude.

Yeah. It's just hard to find many— Compatriots. You got many compatriots. So that group becomes smaller and smaller and smaller until you're in a Super 8 motel off of 95 in West Haven, Connecticut.

And the end of all of our stories is ultimately is isolation. So even if there's 20 people in the other room, you're in a closet smoking crack and you really don't want to be interrupted and you just need that there to know you're not completely alone, even though you are.

I think it's maybe worth— we maybe should have done this earlier, but to remind people of the difference between shame and guilt, because those are very different. And correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel like shame is I'm bad. And guilt is, I did something bad.

It's exactly— so guilt to me, as a good Catholic boy who doesn't really practice much anymore, but I learned some good things, is that, yeah, guilt's an appropriate thing. Yeah, we should have— you should feel bad. Yeah, about this, that, and the other thing. You know, go read my book. I feel bad for it all. Yeah. And what you should do about that is that you should atone and make amends. And I don't mean atone like go, you know, whip yourself with thistles on your back until you bleed. I mean go and say, I'm fucking sorry. Yeah, I apologize. Not expect the other person to say, oh, I forgive you, it's okay. But you make it clear that you know that you did wrong. Shame is, I will never ever be good enough. You're— I'm unworthy of love. I'm unworthy. Yeah, I'm unworthy of trust. I'm unworthy of my own self-love. I mean, that's the thing about the honesty. The biggest thing to get honest about— like, I always talk about this thing, radical honesty. You got to get honest with yourself. That's what, like, you really, really, really do. And I never really knew what that mean, though.

You hear all of these things in the room, even like the Serenity Prayer. Well, what the fuck does it mean? Know the difference between— you know, like, I don't, I don't know. But there was a moment when I finally put it down almost 7 years ago. It wasn't by any virtue of my own. I had that experience of, like, it wasn't a white But it was like, you have a choice.

There's a tiny window open right now. Yes. And if you don't step through it, you're gonna be dead.

As clear as you two sitting across from me.

I want to do 2 seconds on this because it just kind of came up. And again, I can forget. Now look, I, I relapsed on opiates, but I haven't drank in 22 years, right? I'm pretty removed from— because each of these addictions has their own specific personality. I talked to opiate addicts and I had that experience, and that's one experience. It's much different from the hardcore alcoholic experience for me. But I was reminded of this because my best friend who I sent to treatment and I were talking about a third friend who is hardcore going through it right now. And I was reminded, we were just talking about— I called him to say how grateful I am he's sober. Seeing this other friend, I'm just so grateful. And we were talking, and what we both agreed about that I think might be again enlightening to people is like there's a point where there's a third rail in your mind. It's not necessarily you want to die. You want to die for a period of time long enough that when you wake up, all of the wreckage will magically be gone. Like there's this third desire.

It is obliteration and death, but it's not— I remember not wanting permanent death, but I definitely wanted to die for like 3 or 4 years. And then wake up with a clean slate. That was like a bit of a fantasy.

Disappear. It was a literal fantasy with me. Think about it. I came out to California, told everybody I was going to rehab because I was going to disappear. That was in my head is I'm going to disappear for 3 years and then either I'm dead, but more realistically, I'll come back a new man. Yeah. You know what I mean? But I was disappearing for all intents and purposes. As if any rational person would.

It's the little boy in you that's like, maybe if I run away long enough, they'll remember that they loved me and that they miss me. Yeah. And they'll forget about all this.

First time I ran away, what I did is I wrote a note and then I went and hid under my bed so that I could hear everybody tell me how much they missed me. Yes, yes, yes, yes. That's what it was.

Yeah. And it doesn't go away. You just, you're still acting like that as like a full-grown adult male. Exactly. We're all just kids. 50 years old. Like, if I, if I disappear for 3 years, they'll be so glad when I walk back up the driveway, we could put all this behind us.

Yeah, don't go away.

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

Not only did my fantasy not come true, the whole world— right when I got clean in June of 2019, It just fell on top of my head, outside my doorstep, in every single crevice and nook and cranny of my life.

You were being accused of everything— brokering deals with the Ukrainian oligarch to win favor. Yeah. On this, let me ask you, certainly your behavior couldn't have been above board for 15 years while your own desperation was raging, right?

Here's what I own. Yeah.

Is there any validity to some of the—

Here's the validity. The validity is I should never have taken the board seat with Burisma. That's the validity of it.

That's the Ukrainian company.

Yes, the Ukrainian oil and gas company. It was not with Ukraine, it was not with a foreign government, it was not with an oligarch. It was public about going on the board. I served 14 other boards before that. I was chairman of the board of the US World Food Program, the largest humanitarian organization in the world. I was vice chairman of the board of the largest railroad company in the world, which is the National Passenger Rail System, which is Amtrak. I was chairman of the board of the Truman National Security Project, chairman of the board of the Center for National Policy. I was a professor at Georgetown's master's program in the School of Foreign Service for 4 years. I had my own business in consulting, and I had been in more places in the world than 99.9% of people. Very high-functioning addicts. Yeah.

Extremely. That makes it harder.

And by the way, and I was of counsel to, at the time, the most prestigious law firm doing corporate governance at Boies Schiller Flexner and had my own business. And so when they came to ask me to be on the board, I said, no, I would represent them as a lawyer. And I represented the lawyer and the former president of Poland, the first democratically elected president of Poland, President Kwasniewski asked me after representing them for 2 or 3 months, because they were under an extreme inordinate amount of pressure from the invasion in Donbas where their wells were from the Russians. And the entire purpose of that incursion into Eastern Ukraine was to extract and take over what they could not take over, the single greatest resource in Ukraine, which is natural gas. And so he convinces me that we'll be public about it, you'll be transparent about it it, and you come on the board. It obviously turns out to be a mistake, but not because of anything that I did and not because of anything that my dad did. And the reason that we know this is this, is because you have 25 years of my entire digital footprint.

You have every single email. I think I literally am probably the only person in the world. If this happened to anybody else, every photo that you ever took, took every selfie, every voicemail, every single text message, every email that you've took in 25 years were dumped in the internet and to this day remain there. Whether it is your selfies, nudes, or whatever were out there.

90% of us are getting canceled.

Oh yeah, by the way, 100% people would get canceled. Yes. There's not one single email, text message, They have all of my voicemails. They have voicemails from my dad saying, "Sweetheart, please, where are you? You need to get help." I mean, they have everything. There's not a single thing in that in which I say, "Hey, Dad," or, "Hey, Dad's chief of staff," or, "Hey, Dad's secretary," or, "Hey, anybody, I'm getting paid by these guys. We need to do this." Not a single one. There's a text message in which the board secretary of Burisma says, "It was nice meeting your dad." And I know we were at a restaurant together and he sat down and there were 10 other people at the table. He was in from Ukraine. I introduced him to my dad, and that's it. Now, they had an impeachment hearing over that. And so I take responsibility for doing something that could ever cause the perception of that. Yeah. Now, not to get political, but what these guys are doing now, and I hate even putting the comparison between the two because that was the standard by which we as a family had lived.

And here's the point. I really don't care about rehashing that, but I'm more than willing to and welcome it. But what they did was in 2018, there was a Ukrainian-Russian oligarch who was offering for sale my laptop. This is before a laptop repair shop guy ever existed. He was offering it for sale and Rudy Giuliani, along with Lev Parnas and a guy named Igor Fruman that he deputized, went to Ukraine, and then to Austria eventually, or on their way to Austria to buy this hard drive. And they never made it because Lev Parnas gets arrested. Lev Parnas, he's one that got arrested. He was working for Rudy, and he gets thrown to the wolves. And so he tells the whole story. In truth, Rachel Maddow made a whole documentary about it called From Russia with Lev. And Lev points out that what they did was, and what they eventually found, was a record of my addiction, and that was going to be the October surprise. But the problem was, is that in between that time, I had sat down with Adam Entos of The New Yorker, and I had told my whole story. Nobody told me to.

You went rogue for that one. 100% rogue. But intuitively I knew, and this was the difference between any other time that I'd gotten clean or sober ever. Which is, I get a call from this guy. He wants to talk about Ukraine. I say, "Where are you from?" He's from The New Yorker. I had an obsession as a kid with The New Yorker. Thought it was the greatest publication ever, to the point where I had the covers cut out, taped up to my wall. And then I read some of his work, and he's an incredible journalist. And I said, "I'll talk to him." He just was really honest. And I told him my whole story as it related to addiction. And so I had outed myself. I think Adam said one of the first calls that he got after he did that story was from Steve Bannon, said, "You mf'er, you scooped us." And so they had it. They had the hard drive. They had the phones. They had the laptop and two phones that were stolen in Las Vegas. They had a laptop that I left in my psychologist's office in Massachusetts that was there for a year and passed around.

What a hunt for all this stuff. Oh, yeah, exactly. And then, a laptop repair shop owner who happens to be blind, literally legally blind, turns over, not to anybody except, surprise, surprise, my arch nemesis, Rudy Giuliani and his lawyer, who cobble it together and cobble all of these sources together. And they present it to the world 2 weeks before the election. And remember, what Rudy did is he went to the courthouse steps in New Castle County, Delaware, with a laptop, which was no such thing, with Bernie Kerik of all people, who's now, God rest his soul, dead, but he was the former police chief who was indicted for bribery and fraud. And they go to the steps and they say, "This is a record of degenerate— there are inappropriate pictures of minors." And they do exactly what is elimination rhetoric, which is an old Russian trick. Accuse them literally of the worst What am I supposed to say in that 2 weeks when the world is coming down? And so 40 NSA former security officials come out and they say, "This has all the earmarks. We're not saying that it is, but it's all the earmarks of Russian propaganda." And then Twitter, which was Twitter, suppresses the story for a 24-hour period of time, not because of the content of the story, but the content of the photographs, which were nude photographs of me, which violates their terms of service.

Yeah, yeah. That's the only reason is The New York Post put on their front page me with my private parts blurred out, naked, which by the way is against the law because of the bill Melania had just passed, the Take It Down Act. But then that becomes a suppression story. And they would've won the election if anybody just had known what was in the laptop. Okay, well now you've had 7 years, everybody, all of you, and I include the 2 of you and me and everybody else. Yeah. You have your entire digital footprint, unlike anyone that I know of in human history, available to you for a 25-year period of time. What do you find? Literally nothing other than I was a degenerate crack addict. Yeah. Uh-huh. Yeah. And I was in rooms I should not have been, and I was with people and prostitutes and dancers and drug dealers, smoking crack and doing other drugs. And 90% of the text messages But you do not find anything about foreign corruption or bribery or anything like that. Finally, after 2 years, they come back and they offer me a plea agreement because I failed to pay my taxes on time in that period of time, which I had subsequently paid with penalties and interest of over $800,000 after I got sober and found out that I had not filed my taxes.

So I paid them with penalties and of interest, and that during that period of time, I'd bought a gun, and I checked the box to say that I was not currently an addict. And at the time, this is honest, when I walked into that store, I didn't think I was an addict. I was at least 3 days clean.

Well, yeah, you're not going to say you're an addict.

Well, I ain't going to be bought it fucked up. Yeah, they're just not doing that.

Here's the thing. Every single person today in the United States of America, based upon the law that I was prosecuted for, If you have ever smoked pot or you smoke pot even remotely on a regular basis, which means more than once a month basically, and you own a gun, you're in violation of that same law, which means about 85 million Americans are breaking it. But they prosecuted me for it. We can't find a single other case. Woe is me. Oh no, I'm being held to a higher standard. Like, yeah.

Well, let me ask you this though. This would be like if I sponsored you, right? Yeah, which I don't, and I don't claim to have any more knowledge than you do. But let's just say for one second we're role-playing.

We'll see how the question goes, whether I ask you to be my sponsor.

Um, do you foresee a future where you could actually let all that go?

Yeah, I've let it all go. You think you have? No, 100%. I get it.

If I had been accused of a lot of stuff I didn't do, it would be nearly impossible for me not to defend myself.

So here's the thing that Completely fair question. And I hope that this is as honest an answer as I think it is, which is I have let it go. Other people have not let it go. And so, for instance, the only time I spend a lot of time thinking about it is when I come and I sit down with you guys.

Yeah, because you're nervous it's going to spark up the whole—

No, it's because I'm answering the question. And so when I leave here, I'm able to put it down. And I guess when you say let it go, am I angry? No. I think that the most dangerous emotion that any addict can have is uncontrolled anger.

Let me come at it from a different way.

Goddamn it, Zach.

Is it possible? Is it possible? I'm never angry. That the most evolved version of yourself, the most peaceful, the most serene version of yourself, yourself might come around to having gratitude. As crazy as that sounds— no, for Giuliani, although you didn't do all those things, if you're dead sober, none of those things happen. 100%. So I'm not victim shaming, but we also agree, like, had it been even a little bit lighter on you, maybe you're dead.

Well, it really sucks. Maybe we don't know why.

He's not gonna let you off Maybe you don't have a wife. Maybe you don't have a new son. So maybe you owe those guys almost everything. Everything.

The greatest lesson I learned in this go-round is exactly that, is that when they tell you to make your gratitude list, I always thought, and it is appropriate thing, and you doesn't have to be an addict to get up in the morning and benefit from making a gratitude list, which is like every day in Southern California, 7 out of 10, you're like, I'm grateful for the weather. Yes, literally. You know, I'm grateful for my wife. I'm grateful for my son and the relationship that I've rebuilt with my daughters and for my painting and the coffee that tasted so good and like all the good things that are going on. That's well and good. What it really is, is being grateful for every awful thing that ever happened to you that brought you to right there. Have you ever read the Gnostic Gospels that they found in Nag Hammadi? I'm not a scripture guy, but there's a great thing. I listened to the audiobook of a famous book called the Gnostic Gospel. He says, basically, I'm paraphrasing, is learn to suffer as I do and you will be able not to suffer. And it was like, yeah, that's it.

Be grateful for all of that suffering because there is no way that you are here sitting in this chair right now. Without all that? Without all of that, I would have never ended up here in Southern California. I would have never met Melissa. I would have never had Beau. I would never have the depth of my relationship with people that I love now, and particularly the depth of the relationship that I have with my daughters now. I would never have had the wherewithal to understand that this was, for me, a question of life or death. Left. And each one of them, I was a little bit perceptibly, by self-perception, able to get a little bit better about the gratitude in the moment. And when it really hit me was when the verdict came in, in Delaware. So I decided not to testify because what they'd done is they'd put my family on the stand. They were good. If I testified, that they were going to bring as counter-witnesses and ask, and like, it was just awful. And the jury came back, and when you— they pulled the jury, they were like, oh, I hated that we had to come to that because it's bullshit, but the law— technically, yeah, we believe that he violated the law.

And I remember, and everybody was like, oh. I looked around and there were literally the entire prosecution— it was like a wedding. Prosecution people sat on that side, my people sat on this side. And I look back and I literally saw every single person, almost every single person that I cared about. My mom and my sister and my uncle and my aunt, Mouse, the guy that grew up with my dad, you know, Reverend Bullock, and all of these people from the community that had known me. All those people that I said that were my aunts and uncles, yeah, yeah, they were still there for me. All the people that I thought that I had lost, that I was ashamed because I had been the embarrassment, they were all standing there proving to you, despite what you're telling yourself, that you're worthy of love.

And the closet's open, and here's all the skeletons, and now I'm convicted, and yet you're still here. I didn't even I think you'd be here if I was perfect, and yet you're here and I'm at my worst. Yeah. It's powerful.

Really, really powerful. There's some players in this that don't have much social redeeming value, but they gave me an incredible gift. They gave me the gift of being able to be honest with myself. If they had never released any of this stuff, I wouldn't have admitted to anybody. I'm not sitting here talking to you out of some insane courage that I got because I went to Rishikesh for 5 years and meditated. I'm sitting here because you know What are you gonna do?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That is a gift. There's nothing to lose.

Huge gift. You named one of your companies Seneca. Yeah, yeah. So you're into the Stoics, or— Yeah, there's a Stoic road forward. Exactly. Those people, you're powerless over them, right? I mean, you are as powerless over those people 100% as you are over crack. It's none of your fucking business. I would have an impossible time executing what I'm suggesting. Let me own that. No, you wouldn't. No, I know I have a thing where he would— I had— listen, I had violent stepdads, and I decided when I'm 18, no one will ever get one over on me. There will be no me being subjugated. So I have an overly activated sense of like, you're fucking with me, I will go to the end. I'll die. I'll die over it. I know this would be like the hardest challenge for me, but also it's not happening to me, so I can kind of see from the outside. That any piece of your heart taken by those people is a wasted piece.

I think potentially you actually could get there if it was just you, but his family is a—

oh yeah, forget it.

And that's— you would kill everyone. Yeah, yep. So I understand you can look at it and tell him that.

I, I'm owning that it would be nearly impossible for me, but I also know that's the truth. If your mom was getting dragging, kill everybody. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And people are talking shit about her.

No, no, no, no, no.

And people have all these opinions about her that are wrong. You'd go nuts. Uh-huh, I would. And so I have to give you some credit. He can be your sponsor, but I could be like your friend. I give you credit.

It isn't out of any— and I really mean this, and I'm not just being like humble— it was not out of any courage on my part. It was so ubiquitous that I didn't have any other choice unless I wanted to die. That's what I'm trying to point out.

But some people die.

Some people do. Oh, I'm proud. Number one, I'm most proud of anything. I'm proud of my sobriety over the last 7 years in the heat of all that. 100%. I have an enormous amount of pride. I have an enormous amount of pride that I've gotten to where I am. But I really mean it. It's more than just like a few people saying bad things about you or your dad or your kids. It was It was, at one point, it felt like, because it kind of was, like half the world.

Yeah. Sure, sure. And the machinery of the government.

Exactly. Exactly. And politics. The machinery of the government, which no one can, unless they've been subject to it, it is staggering. I mean, people say, "Well, you know what? You got a pardon and you've never faced any consequences." Probation officers coming into my bedroom when my wife was still in the bath naked because they could over the course of a 3-year period of time.

Well, I would even say they've got it wrong, which is I would sit in a jail for 6 months in a heartbeat over deal with the emotional damage I caused. You didn't get out of the consequences of your behavior. That's your father hugging you at the end of his driveway, crying, saying to you, "I just don't know what to do." Yeah, that's exactly it. I would sit in jail before I'd have my dad say that to me. I know. God. Like, that's not even the harshest punishment. Yeah, you don't really— get out of any of that.

And here's the other thing, Melissa is still ready to kneecap a lot of people. I go, honey, you can't say that. We're gonna get a visit from somebody, like, you gotta, you know what I mean? And you then really become to realize is that when it's all directed to you, it's so much, so much more overwhelming and hurtful to the people that truly love you. I love you. So like my kids. Yes. And that's what nobody understood with my dad too. Now my dad and I I talk literally almost every day, so long. It's like, honey, I'm so sorry. I'm like, Dad, what are you sorry about? Jesus, you know, like, yeah, well, yeah, it's going both directions.

He's thinking if I weren't running, this wouldn't have happened, you wouldn't have been a tool. Yeah, it's all sadness. That's my last question for you, and again, in the most apolitical way possible, I can't even really imagine what it was like to be by your dad's side and watching him him in public coming up short, how protective you must have felt during that time, how stressful that must have been. What was the experience of watching your dad not at his best have to be at the height of the struggle?

Well, the first thing that you do is you get incredibly defensive. But you're right. What happened, culminating in an incredibly obvious instance of the debate in which my dad didn't rise to the challenge, that's just objectively is that my dad did lose a step. He didn't lose his marbles. Not one single person on the record in this entire time has ever said that Joe Biden was not available, present, and capable of executing on every single decision that this administration had to execute on. Not one. Now, did he trip over a sandbag and fall and look like an 83-year-old trying to get up at the Air Force Academy speech? Did he freeze on the debate stage and look like he was 83 years old? 100%. Did he lose a step literally where his gait got shorter? 100%. All of those things are true, which by the way, it's a whole nother discussion about how we are as a society. Going to start to treat and deal with people as they physically become more infirm, but still are all mentally there? Is everybody that's 83 years old that shuffles a little bit have dementia? Mm-hmm. I don't think that that's true, by the way.

And I don't, I don't hold any animosity, and that's not a hard question for me.

But I'm more interested in the emotional, again, the powerlessness and somebody who just endlessly had your back in the most beautiful way. You have such an enviable father. I mean, truly, from everything I've read about you guys, what a beautiful father. It would kill me to have America talking about my dad.

Again, not because I've figured out some meditative process by virtue of who I am. You better figure out how to be able to stay in this country when no matter what president you are, at any given point in time, anywhere between 40 and 60% of the public thinks you're akin to the devil. It is like a constant barometer of favorability, unfavorability. He's the worst president. He's the best president. He's the greatest person. He's a demented clone that did all of these things. All I have to say is that my dad has his record. He will have his legacy. I think that he was unique as a president of the United States in that I think that the job, by definition, requires a level of narcissism that almost any other job in the world does not require. And that he came to that office without that narcissism. I think that he had more empathy and compassion for normal people because he was the most normal person to ever occupy the office.

You know my favorite moment of his? I know you've seen this. They did an incredible 2-hour Frontline on Putin. Yeah. And there's a moment where they're sitting across the table from one another. It's before he's president. I think he's vice president at the time. And he looks directly at Putin and says, "I think you're soulless," basically. I'm paraphrasing. And then Putin says, "This is the first guy who's ever—" He's like, liked him. Exactly.

He respected him, probably. George Bush had gone and said, he goes, "I looked into his eyes and I saw a soul." And so my dad's sitting across from Putin and he looks in his eyes, he goes, "I look into your eyes and I don't think you have a soul." There we go. Yeah.

There we go. Yeah. Yeah, and Putin likes it.

Whether he liked it or whether he's smart enough to have pretended to like it in the moment because he thought it was tough, I mean, there's a whole nother cat.

But he's the only dude we've had thus far who's looked Putin in the eye and said, 'You're soulless.' Yeah, he has a lot of integrity. Everyone's had an opportunity, and he's literally the one human being on our side who did that.

And that's what I mean about my dad.

I love McCain for the single moment—

and that's why they were best friends—

on the presidential campaign when his supporter calls Obama a Muslim and he goes, "Well, hold on, hold on. That's not true." These little moments of integrity.

Well, even worse is like the idea that that was a deal breaker. But regardless, my God, in a 4-year period of time coming out of a pandemic, my dad created more jobs than any other president with 2 terms by double in the history of the United States. He cut child poverty in half. He passed more legislation than any president since Lyndon Baines Johnson. He had a better midterm even though we lost the House. Than any president since FDR in 1932. He expanded NATO. He stood up to Putin. He added two countries for the first time in NATO's history to NATO, Finland and Sweden. He re-established our connection and alliance with the Pacific Rim countries and Japan and Australia. I mean, I could go on and on, and all of those things are lost in the mix of the insanity of what's now, the chaos, the fire, hose of falsehood and insanity. A UFC fight on the lawn of the White House, and we're painting the Reflecting Pool blue. And he made 3,700 stock trades in the month of February alone, the first president in history that's made one, let alone 3,700. And we're building a tower in Abu Dhabi, and we're putting Trump Tower in Saudi Arabia, and we're going to turn Gaza into a golf course.

I mean, it's just like, you got to stop. You can't take it all in. But if we get back, which I pray to God we do, because I love this country, and I'm not just saying that like, "Rah, rah, I love this country." I'm fully aware of what this country is capable of and the horrible things that it has done in the name of our democracy. I am fully aware of my history. But at the same time, I truly still do believe that we are the greatest single hope for, I'd like to put it, it's a Star Trek future. And not a Star Wars future. I don't know of any president that just as a human being is as good a man as my dad.

I love that. Well, look, I admire anyone who's gone to hell and back and shares it deeply. You and I will have a connection that's deeper than all these extraneous other things that are spectacular because we know what it's like to be completely humbled and destroyed by something. It's a unique ride. I think it's a kind of a bonding— 100%. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, you could have any political leaning.

You could— I feel bonded to you too. What are you talking about? I feel a much deeper connection.

I love that.

No, it's really helpful what you're much more gentle with me.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. My hope is I've had this experience a bunch of times in the meetings I go to where often people arrive in their big headlines, kind of arrive. People who need a lot of privacy come to some of the meetings I go to. And I've had a couple moments where the people that walked in, I hated publicly. This one dude was like, all this anti-gay legislation, then got caught in the bathroom. I was like, this fucking hypocrite, you know, I just hated him. And this person started sharing, I was like, I'm like, this person was completely devastated and destroyed by this thing, and they know the depths of hell. And I have compassion for this person. What a unique experience to have on Earth. If not for this condition I have, I wouldn't have had that. So again, I'm so grateful that I could value something about somebody. Their honesty can cut through all the shit, and I love it. It's so fucking powerful, it's almost magic. It's incredible.

The, uh, self-control, do the next right thing, and show compassion. Pass it down. And that's what I learned from it. And I often fail at the self-control, but I don't fail in the way that I used to. And I sometimes don't have the compassion for the people that I find so offensive, but can't. And I don't always do the right thing, but I know, at least, that's what I think about every day.

Mm-hmm. Well, this has been a delight meeting you. Yeah, thanks for having me. I hope you had fun. This has been great.

I had a great time. I watch you guys all the time. Oh, that's so nice. For so long. When you guys said that you'd like to have me on, I was like, "All right." Yeah. Oh, good. I love what you guys do.

And if you want to hear the very harrowing tale of all this, I encourage everyone to pick up Beautiful Things, your memoir about this whole life of yours, which is worthy of a book, if nothing else. Thanks, man. So great meeting you. Yeah, thanks for having me. And thanks so much for coming. Is an armchair expert, but he makes mistakes all the time. Thank God Monica's here, she's gonna let him have the facts.

We're both wearing vintage shirts. I wish. Looks like it.

I would have to call mine unfortunately a retro. I mean, it's from an old, old Pink Floyd thing, but it is a new shirt. Okay, yours is really from the '80s.

Well, that's what I'm told. See, I could— it could be a lie.

How would one know? I wouldn't.

Well, the sweatshirt's definitely old. I can tell by like the tag and the stuff, but they could have plopped that right on.

But yeah, they can fake Rembrandts and stuff and have real experts sign off on them. Exactly. I bet they could get up—

they could get one over on me for sure. Yeah, sure. I'm not that good. We're recovering, I guess. Do you want to talk about it?

I mean, yeah, we were just recording. Yeah. Armchair Anonymous. Yes. And not only we're recording Armchair Anonymous, it's a prompt that elicits some emotions for sure. So the person we were speaking to was at the apex of their emotional journey of the story. I felt very, very inclined to be present for that. Yeah, of course. And I hear Rob's door open. Yeah. My first thought is like, why is Rob thinking he is to go outside. I thought he was getting the food. Oh, okay, that's good. I know better than all those things. What's that? I know better than anyone. Well, exactly. I know you know better. So I'm just like, this is a strange move, right?

And it was a little— it wasn't— wasn't like if Rob was going to get the food, he would have done that quietly. It was loud.

Yeah. And then I went to— oh man, why my kid— I gotta get my kids understand they cannot interrupt me at work. And then it was Kristen. Yeah. And immediately when I saw her face, she was crying.

Yeah, she was like very panicked.

Panicked and crying. Yeah. And now I literally have my real-life wife panicked and crying, and then we have a guest who of course I care about who's also crying, and I'm like, oh my God, I'm gonna have to fucking tell this lady I gotta go. But I had to go. Yeah, I mean, we didn't end the call, but I had to get up.

Yeah, it was fine because I was chatting.

Come, come, come, you gotta go right now, you gotta put this bird out of its misery. I'm like, right, what happened? So backstory, and I think I've been reporting on this. We've been having the sweetest 2 or 3 month affair with these crows that have really come and taken to walking around our yard.

Yeah, they walk around and we've named one of them. Yeah, it was maybe—

and we've been feeding, putting out food, and they've been taking it. I was just last night, I was in the sauna, and because the screen was down, I can see out of it, but obviously the crows, they were just I'm directly in front of the sauna for 20 minutes. I'm watching them just like interact, and I'm like, I just, I feel so lucky that there's these beautiful crows in the back here, my favorite animal. Yeah. And I'm just watching them, they're getting more and more comfortable. I go outside and what has happened is a friend's dog has attacked one of the crows really bad. The, all the other crows are in a tree directly above the fallen crow., and they are yelling, of course, as they should. Yeah, I'm so bummed for them.

Of course, they just watched, and you're bummed for you, and my family is—

or everyone— Lincoln's bawling. She watched the whole thing, and then I gotta find something.

Yeah, you didn't use your hands. We'll just say that. I did not use—

I mean, I'm glad. It was terrible. I hate it. It was terrible.

Oh, I know.

There's the little crow I've been watching who I like, and then I know that that's his mom up in the tree and his sibling.

Yeah, fuck. I bet the mom obviously feels guilty.

And then I'm like, okay, that's done. I get the crow wrapped up, and then I gotta quickly try to nurture my family to check in. Is everyone stable? And then come back here and then drop back in.

That. Yeah, at least it was a kind of dark story we were hearing. So was it like you had to just like be happy again?

I'm so sorry, I got to go blow out birthday candles.

Right, exactly.

It wasn't frivolous, although we didn't tell her what the emergency was. No, we didn't.

No, I'm saying, I'm saying, sorry, I'm saying this Armchair Anonymous story was pretty dark.

So my dark energy—

it wasn't like you had to come in and put on this like very happy, funny— yeah, no, you You pooped where? Exactly. This is the one— okay, it's silver lining. The one time you didn't want an unauthorized evac. Yeah, yeah.

So, um, anywho, yeah, that was terrible. Terrible.

That was a terrible event. I'm really sorry. I'm really sorry.

I feel like that was the universe making me pay for the pigeons somehow.

You are— you already paid for that. That was a long time.

It was a long time ago. Yeah.

Course, hopefully atoned for that. I think, well, I'm really sorry that all of that happened. I'm very sorry you had to be the one to handle it. I get very anxious in those situations.

Yeah, what was that like for you?

Moods, like everyone's— in my head I'm just like, oh my God, like everyone's so sad and so destroyed, and like, it aren't— they're not going to come back for this for a couple couple from this.

And you know how I feel about emotions, so yeah.

But I even mean you. I'm like, oh no, like, this isn't good. Like, he's killed— he's murdered today. My favorite. He murdered his favorite. Oh my God. And also like murder of crows, you know, there's something in there.

Okay, well, let's save the wordplay for another day. Let's just hold off on the wordplay for today.

It was just right there, so, you know, I just went back inside.

I check in.

This is what you guys get for calling yourselves a murder. Oh no, no, sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

Oh, it was a very cheap shot. So I went inside and now people are going up to the store to get, uh, materials for a grave. Oh, that's good. Yeah, I guess that's— that's nice. Yeah, no one knows what to do. You don't know what to do.

No one knows what to do. But I, um, yeah, I was like, I don't think I we should— we, we had ordered food, the food I thought Rob was running out desperately to get. Yeah. And so, um, we, we finished our Om Trenamas. We had a little break before the next one, and so I was like, I'm gonna go the long way to go get the food, right? You didn't even want to deal. I don't want to cry. It wasn't dealing. I was like, they might be like, how insensitive is she to go get her food?

Anyone hungry? I got extra chips. I don't think I'm gonna eat this third one.

I mean, that is something I would do in a nice way. Like, yeah, can I help with the things I have? Yeah, anyone starving right now?

Anyone feeling really hungry? Or is anyone distracted by other emotions?

Or should I just eat Crow? Uh, I'm sorry, they're everywhere.

Sorry. Yeah, it's too soon.

Okay, I really am sorry. It's just a bit too soon. But this is how— this is how he's being friends with you. This is how That's how it is being friends with you.

I bet. Okay, so maybe I am now getting—

but I don't want you to have repercussions. Okay, so I take it back. Okay. Yeah. Um, anywho, I still feel like, like, um, fight or flighty.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

From that experience of running in and running out, and I was like, thank God. Obviously, of course, when Kristen runs in, I think it's something with the children. Same.

So there is a level of relief. Yeah, but it's very partial. I know.

But yeah, but I heard something about Crow, and I thought you said Lola, another dog. So I was like, oh, like, but yeah, dynamic of everything.

You have the dynamic of that it's someone else's dog. I know. So all of their stress— I know. I thought they were having brought their dog over and they killed our favorite members of our family. Well, I mean, sincerely, no, they shouldn't feel bad. No, no, I mean, your favorite members of our animal. Oh, your animals. Yeah, yeah, yeah. For me?

For you, yeah. But if the dog killed Frank, you might be happy, but that would be like, really?

Yeah, it feels weird to speculate, but I, I, I definitely think Whiskey would have been a push for the family. No.

Yeah, you think they'd be out there right now just laughing and doing work if Whiskey was dead right now?

No, I really don't. You're probably right, but it's okay.

Your favorite member, your favorite animal members, for sure.

Yeah, in the beginning of something that was quite fun and beautiful happening. I know, I think they're not coming back. There's no way. Crows have incredibly good memories. So the other thing, this is— and this is where it's probably selfish of me— I'm like, this dog did this, but I— these crows are watching me right now. They're staring, and they're gonna watch me do that. Why is that selfish? Because they're gonna remember They remember for— there's all these instances where crows remember for like 30 years.

No, I'm saying that's not selfish of you.

I'm trying to be friends with these guys so hard and now they're gonna hate me for sure.

Well, did you tell them?

No, I don't know that they understand English. Well, they're smart.

Although they could. Yeah. Also, by the way, they saw what happened, so they know it wasn't you.

I hope, but maybe they thought I was going over to resuscitate this crow.

I think they knew it couldn't be resuscitated or they would have come down and grabbed it.

I'm glad that wasn't happening. Happening. Well, that would have been fucking brutal. They're trying to like—

better if they like go down and grab it, bring it back up to their area.

No, because they want to succeed at that, and then I would have been having to shoo them away so that I could— you can't have this thing suffering in the yard. That's off the table. Yeah. Oh, real life will find you. Yeah. You know, you— we've, we've created this little cocoon that we like virtually nothing can happen, right? We're just sitting here talking. Yeah, we can get in a fight, but whatever, we'll get through that. Uh, and then life just, you know, find you. Yeah, yeah.

But I feel bad because like, because you're so tough and you had to be the one to do it, and it's like, oh yeah, he'll—

he's like, he's like, that's why we have him is basically— yeah, we deal with everything for this moment. You better do the thing. Yeah, that you bring to the table.

But I do think I want them to know that it hurt your feelings pretty bad. I think they know.

You don't think so?

I think it's my job to tell them, remind them, you know, that was really hard on Dax. Okay.

Oh, yay, you're gonna be a judge. Sometimes I come in. Wow, that's nice.

Yeah, yeah, I did feel it was hard on you. Yeah, I didn't like that.

Well, Well, thank you. Anywho, see, and I—

and then I tried to make jokes like you do to make it better. It didn't work. So I get it.

Oh yeah, it's just— it was very soon. Yeah. And puns already? I just— you know, on a good day, puns are questionable.

I know, but they were both pretty good.

Okay, I'm probably not in a good—

yeah, maybe later.

In a few years I'll hear this. Wow, you know what, that was a really good joke.

Oh no. Well, that was a lot. I'm really sorry that happened. Um, shake it off. What's up?

Summer's here, kids are getting out of school. I'm gonna go to a graduation tomorrow.

Oh yeah, we are going to a little baby's graduation.

You know what's so funny? It makes me sad. So the, the 5th grade dance was Friday night.

Oh, and she wanted to go with her girlfriends. Remember? Yeah, I think I'm gonna—

I told the whole story. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, um, that was Friday night, and what was rad was— this just makes me so happy— um, she said, can we drive the Lincoln? Like, she wanted to show up at the dance looking rad, and we delivered.

Did you bring her friends, or you just—

you dropped her off? Mom and Delta and I. Oh, and you're on a big grass field where everyone parks. And yeah, we pulled up in the Lincoln. It's already low, but in the grass it's just like, right? And all the boys ran up to the fence. They're asking what kind of car that is. So that was primo. She's in a dress. Oh yeah, it was great.

Did she do her hair and stuff?

Oh, of course, she had ringlets. Yeah, she looked incredible. What's interesting is when Lincoln had her fifth grade dance, because it is the end of elementary, it's the last thing they're really gonna do together. So when I picked up Lincoln, the entire class— well, all the girls were crying. They were bawling. They were hugging each other. It was so sweet. And then maybe people will remember the overall demeanor of Lincoln's class versus Delta has been night and day, as you know. Like, they were— Delta's class is so naughty they had to rearrange the recess structure because they couldn't be trusted around the pre-K kids or whatever. This is naughty class, naughty group. Cops coming. No, those were for her classmates last year. Oh, right. So roll back up to pick her up and, um, they're still raging. And Delta's like, I danced the whole 3 hours. And I'm like, yes! That was because I, you know, I loved school dance. Favorite memories of junior high are those dances. So she did it. She danced so hard. So anyway, there's a photographer that would do these like 360 shots of— cute. Yeah, so she would get in a group with her friends and then the camera goes around them.

And this is embarrassing to admit, but I'm looking at this— well, first of all, I see, of course, because I'm the dad, yeah, it's like, oh, she's the cutest girl that was ever born. Yeah, you know, when I'm looking at her and all her friends, I'm like, oh, she's the cutest one. Yeah. But then all of a sudden go, well, she's really quite short.

Oh really?

I'm going to show you the video and see if you have the same reaction. I was like, I don't think of her as short, and she's such like a little leader in her class and everything. Um, but I just had this moment, was like, oh, she really has had the Kristen experience where Kristen was like a tiny, tiny person. Yeah, me too. Yeah, you know And I just didn't really realize Delta.

I didn't realize that either, that she was necessarily— let's see. Oh my God, so cute. Oh, oh wow. Oh, I mean, she's a head shorter than all of her friends. Cute, it's crazy. There's another shorty.

Yeah, there's one other shorty, but I won't say her name.

But, but Delta is—

yeah, I was like, oh, she's the little little girl in class.

She's even shorter than the Indian girl. Sure. I don't know if I'm allowed to say that.

Yeah, I think she's Lebanese, but no.

Oh, okay, so she's on the shore. She's a tiny— I didn't know either. Yeah, it was really—

it was like I, um, I, I finally came out of the water and saw clearly for the first time. And then I said to her, I said, you know, I just, I noticed from these photos you're a shorty, aren't you? And she goes, oh yeah, Dad, I'm like the shortest girl in class other than so-and-so.

Oh wow, wow, wow. Yeah, I mean, once— so she's just like, yeah, I'm the short girl. Like, once you are the short girl, you just are her, you know? Like, you don't even think about it. Yeah.

And, um, it does a little bit explain, like, you know, she's in such a hurry to lose her teeth, you know? It's like an ongoing thing. And then she got her X-ray that said they were still not coming out for a while. She was like Devastated in the— and I never really am like, why are you in a hurry to lose your teeth? But I think if you're the tiny one, she's like, let's get the fucking show on the road. Let's get rid of these teeth. Let's give me some puberty. Let's, let's get a few inches. Yeah, it might be informed by the height. It might be.

Yeah.

What's great is I've never heard her complain about it. That's why it was not even on my radar. Like, her best friend, who I thought was really tall, right? I now think is probably average.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, whoa, that is weird. Yeah, I was like, oh, she's really tall, because one of her other friends is also not that tall, a little taller than her, maybe, but like, yeah, interesting. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I didn't, um, I mean, I wanted to look completely different, but the short thing never bothered me. Yeah, I don't know why, for whatever. I had so many other things that were higher.

It is a lot easier for the, for a girl to be the little girl in the club than the big bird. Yeah, of course, that's a much harder row to hoe.

Of course. Yeah, well, maybe she should be a cheerleader. She could be a flyer. Okay, you know, short, short people have a lot of advantages in that way.

They don't have cheer where she— why? I don't know that for sure, but I don't think they have cheer where she's going because it's an all-girls school.

I know, they should still do competition. No, they should still do competition cheerleading. No, because competition has nothing to do—

it's not cheering for the boys. No, it's not. I knew feminism was going to ruin this country, and here Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. All right, well, I'm gonna do some facts on Hunter Biden. Sure. Okay, let's do a few facts. Yeah, I found this to be—

wow. Um, yeah, this was—

this is a good one. It was, it was. Again, did you have feelings about him before? I didn't know much about him. Same. I really just knew his name, and I knew of all the crazy allegations. I knew about the computer. Yep. And I hadn't seen his face until that interview I watched, which made me interested in him, right?

Yeah. I mean, yeah, I knew the same thing everybody else knew. Very, but very surface even.

And I didn't even really know he had such a legitimate career before before all the dust-up, you know. I didn't know he's a lawyer and he'd gone to the great schools and yes, all that shit.

Well, and then obviously the— what we talked about, the, um, the debate where Joe Biden is— where Trump references him and then Joe Biden is defending him, and it's like very— I remember that moment. Yeah, it's upsetting that he has to defend his son. Yeah, yeah. And he's like, he's working so hard. It's heartbreaking, honestly.

But Um, I also don't want to suggest that there's— these are comparable levels of culpability. They're not. But it felt like he was making fun of him that his son had cancer. I mean, that's what it felt like. Like, your kid has this life-threatening— yeah, exactly— illness, and I'm gonna shame you over this. It was just like, fuck, there's no—

and then he really got himself into crazy because he said it Biden was like— said something about him dying. He was like, no, your other son. And he's like, yeah, he's working really— and it was like, yeah, you're making him talk about like the absolute worst things a parent could possibly imagine. Yeah, it's horrible. But I also like— I don't think I knew the extent of the tragedy they had all dealt with.

I didn't either. I kind of knew, right? I knew that Joe Biden had a real big tragedy, and I think I knew he lost his first wife, right? Like, I didn't know the extent of that. I didn't know he's sworn into the Senate in the hospital. Oh, he's 29. All this stuff. Like, you imagine dealing with that at 29, baby.

No, I mean, no, no, no, no, no. Like, absolutely not. It makes me— it makes me have so much respect for him, honestly.

Yeah, yeah. Um, I've I've told 3 or 4 different people post-interview. I'll go like, do you know the whole story? And no one does that I've talked to. And the 2 different times that kids were present, what do you think their follow-up question was?

When you said like, what happened?

Burned the station wagon. Ugh. Did the dog die? And I'm like, I didn't ask. Wow. But it goes to show, you know this rule in movies, you cannot kill a dog in a movie.

Brains are crazy. They are.

I think it's because the innocence— almost the opposite. It's like, we know humans come in every shade of good and bad, and, and so like, there's bad people, you know. You can imagine easily someone dying that wouldn't bother you at all. Like, if Putin gets shot tomorrow, I won't care. In fact, I'll be happy, right? There's no dog I'm gonna be happy that was killed unless he ate people, I guess. But oh shit, this just came full circle. Like, I wouldn't be happy if the dog that killed the crow got hurt. No, because I don't think the dog's capable of malice, right?

Right, right.

Anyways, there's something intrinsically more innocent about these animals, of course. Yeah, but it is a funny prior— or sliding scale of priority.

And I obviously, as a bad person, like don't get it. I mean, I get it, I do get it intellectually in that way, like, oh yeah, there's an innocence, there's a— but I don't feel that ever. So I don't— I'm— of course my question is like, the children. Uh-huh.

I would never think about the animal, right, right, right, right. It's really telling and interesting and fascinating that we because we're social primates, like, we're built to think some people deserve certain things, and punishment is built into the system. And like, I know it's just interesting how we view each other versus how we view almost everything else.

I know. Um, but again, I think there's anomalies. I don't know that— I don't know, I mean, obviously you can speak for yourself, but I don't think you really believe that people should be punished, and I think I believe it less and less and less, right?

Um, I think people should be removed to keep other people safe.

Yes, me too, but that— not in a punitive way necessarily.

Yeah, what, what are we doing it for? Yeah, you're not gonna make anything better.

Yeah, my level of wanting someone to suffer, suffer like feel bad because they did something wrong is, is pretty much gone.

Yeah, like there's still a stepdad alive, to my knowledge, that, you know, I didn't like. Yeah. Um, I don't want him to be suffering. Yeah. I don't, I don't really— well, it does nothing.

No, that's the thing. Issue. Although, I mean, I, again, to be fair, like I've never had a love one murder. Exactly. And in that case, maybe I would fully just be like, yep, want them to suffer for the rest of their life because I have to suffer for the rest.

If you killed someone in my family— yeah, yep. So that is the paradox.

Yeah, I know.

We just have a lot of very fascinating hardware. I know we do. That controls how we— it's this whole thing where it's like, if these 1 million people died for this reason and these 1 million people died for this reason, we can put such different values on that. You know, like if we think someone deceived someone in the pursuit of that, or if we think it was a natural cause, or we think— it's like the death's the death. You don't, you don't have the person anymore. But it makes such a big difference to us how that happened, which is a bit all in our mind. You know, it's like the objective tragedy is that someone you loved is gone.

Yeah, but prematurely feels, or by the hand, by unnatural unnatural causes.

Cancer at 25 years old is as unnatural as getting murdered by somebody, right? It's as unexpected.

It's as unexpected. But I do think it's like, that's the way their body— it's— that's— that was their body. Their body couldn't handle this life or whatever. There's like a lot of things you can say to yourself, but when it was really avoidable, um, That feels— yeah, that's— it's too maddening. Like, it's very upsetting. I mean, just don't murder, you know? Yeah, like, let's just not do that.

But it's just like, we have all these sliding scales. It's like, if there's a, a just a legitimate accident in an intersection, if a light's out, that's one thing. Yes, there's not a light on, someone blew a stoplight, now we can ratchet up. That person's drunk. Like, yeah, I know, the objective thing's all the same. Someone was killed operating a vehicle, you know, and then we've got like a huge range of how we feel about that.

Yeah, I think again, on, on the scale is about the level of which it could have been avoided. And if it's just someone making a decision in their mind, I hate this, but I'm gonna kill them, or like, I'm just gonna shoot all these people, like, that, that is so far on one end of the spectrum of avoidability. It's harder to accept. Yeah, but because it didn't have to happen. Yeah, it didn't have to happen.

I mean, I guess what I'm saying is the aliens might go like, oh, this person had a partner, now they don't have a partner. Therein lies the heartbreak and the anguish. And then if you told the monkeys, well, no, there's a, there's a big sliding scale of heartbreak and anguish within that, that's where they, they would get fascinated, like, oh, please tell us about why there's different versions of losing a partner. I know.

I bet even the aliens would get it. You think so? I kind of do. Yeah. Well, I don't know what they're like, you know. I haven't met any. Yeah, but yeah. Um, okay, just for that whole thing.

No, you don't want to knock on wood because you want to meet aliens.

Oh no, that was just for all the death and murder. Oh, okay. Okay, um, yeah, I have no problem meeting aliens as long as they're nice.

Yeah, you know, they're gonna probe you, but you might enjoy it.

Do they have to? Yeah, that's standard.

That's the only consistent thing across all alien— what are they trying to see? They got to figure out like what makes you tick. That's not the way. For them it is. They put that anal probe in, they get all the answers.

Oh God. Um, yeah, we had a guest we recorded yesterday that was so fascinating about some murders. And we also just want answers so badly when something horrible happens. When a horrible tragedy happens, we want answers so badly that we're really willing to overlook a lot of things.

And we feel better with the wrong answer. That's what I'm— that's what I'm trying to approach.

That I, I'm like, no, no, no, no, no.

That's what I'm trying to approach is like, we have just all these weird built-in biases that don't actually make sense. I know, like if you gave someone that option, would you rather think the wrong thing? Yeah, uh, versus not know, they would go, well, not— they would say not know, but then in the situation they want it.

They want to think they're— they want peace. Like, I get it, you want peace.

But that's why we're getting somewhere, because that's why like Buddhism is a compelling thing. It's like, that shouldn't be what gives you peace.

I know, but it also, in these cases where it's like murders and stuff, it is, it is like, well, are they gonna murder other people? Are the— you know, there's, there's that element too.

Like, if they're outstate outstanding, literally, that would even heighten the reason to not think it's the wrong— well, I agree.

Yeah, I agree.

But we all would be acceptable to that.

Yeah, I think so. I think that is right. Okay, who's the hypnotist who makes people stop smoking? Kerry Gaynor. There are a few listed online, but this is only with a crazy— oh, with, with the toupee.

Oh, because he had said there was— I think so.

Yeah. Okay, Dax quotes—

can you tell this is a toupee? It's looking more and more like one, right?

Well, no, I'm having like a—

I'm having a wild Wolverine phase.

It is, it is, it is. It doesn't look like a toupee though.

Um, it's a mop.

No, it's just growing. Yeah. Dax quotes Hunter saying, you add up all other drug deaths and the number of alcohol deaths is 5 times. Um, drinking deaths versus other drug deaths in the USA: alcohol-related deaths, 178,000. All other drug deaths, 70,000. Not good.

And we have an inordinately high amount of drug deaths in the U.S. Yeah, and his was worldwide. Everyone's drinking except for the Middle East. True.

Hunter says he was on the COVID of the New York Post more than anyone else in a 1-year period. Uh, couldn't really find that.

You didn't go through every single—

to be fair, Emma did this. Okay.

And she couldn't find it. Well, then I trust that it can't be found.

Yeah. President Donald Trump holds the record for the most appearances on the New York Post cover While Hunter Biden was prominently featured in the late 2020 and 2023 regarding his laptop and legal issues, figures like Trump, sitting presidents, and prominent New York politicians such as Anthony Weiner or Mayor Eric Adams have accumulated vastly more covers over the decades. Okay, so that's over a longer period. Remember Weiner? Yeah, yeah, ding ding ding. Joe Biden had one of the funniest things with Anthony Weiner. What did he say? He like— I wonder if I can find it.

What worries me, Mr. Vice President, is that folks are are getting ready to go to the polls or have already gone to the polls, and they don't know what to make of this. They're in the dark. What should happen now? I think it's important. I think Hillary, if she said what I'm told she said, is correct. They should release the emails for the whole world to see. The whole world to see. They can continue their investigation. It won't, to the best of my knowledge, it won't prejudice the investigation. But that's sort of the stilted language the agency always uses. It doesn't mean anything. And so it's unfortunate. I'd be remiss if I didn't note that if she had released all the emails from the get-go, we wouldn't be having this conversation. Well, that's true, but I don't know where this email with his emails came from. What apparently— Anthony Weiner. Well, oh God, Anthony Weiner. Oh God, should not comment on Anthony Weiner.

I'm not gonna.

Man, and I wasn't before he got in trouble, so I shouldn't come in.

Anthony Weaver. So— oh God, just so real. It's such a real moment. Oh, really made me laugh. Um, how old was Hunter when Jill came into the picture? Hunter was 7, um, when Joe and Jill married.

When they married. Yeah. So before that.

She might have been in the picture after. Yeah, I assume. Hunter claims ibogaine or ibogaine. Oh yeah, the drug. Yeah. Yeah. Is the strongest or one of the strongest hallucinogens on the planet. That drug is not necessarily the strongest hallucinogen in terms of potency, but it is classified as one of the most uniquely powerful and intense psychoactive substances. It is highly potent with a deep, long-lasting dreamlike experience that fundamentally differs from classically— from classical psychedelics like LSD or psilocybin.

And that's it. That's it. Well, dude, I'm amazed he made it out of that hole. I mean, that is many years. This is the second person this year we've had that spent years smoking crack. I don't know how you come back from that. Uh, Charlie. Yeah, I know. I mean, it— that amazes me. I know. As someone that smoked it sporadically and I found it to be pretty devastating for the next weak. Um, yeah, I just don't know how you ever come— Oh my God. God.

Uh, love you. All right, love you.