Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1759 - Oliver Stone
Uploaded: 2022-01-05T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1759 - Oliver Stone' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-01-05. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1759 - Oliver Stone' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-01-05. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1759 - Oliver Stone

So, thank you, Oliver. Thanks for being here, man. I really appreciate it. And
I really enjoyed your documentary. I, like you, well, not as much as you, but I
am a conspiracy freak when it comes to the JFK assassination.
And I've been fascinated by it for decades, but no one is, I don't think
anybody is as fascinated by it as you.
Well, I get the impression that you have the impression I'm a full-timer, but
no, I have a career.
Well, I know you do. Listen, I'm a huge fan of yours. But it's kind of
fascinating that your film, the JFK film, was approximately 30 years after the
assassination.
And then this is approximately 30 years after that. We're still going through
this. And they're still withholding documents. It's really kind of amazing, isn't
it?
No, it's not. It's, you know, everybody's dead from that era. But it's all the
more important that we understand our history because it's fading.
But the reason we're in this kind of disbalanced situation in the United States
where we have no less and less trust is because of the past.
And if we go to this particular incident in 63, it's a demarcation point. It's
a turning point for the country.
And that's what's fascinating to me because I have a historical interest.
I've written and made the untold history of the United States.
Yes.
And I'm very interested in history. And I just think we have to pay attention
because the roots of our problem are here.
And do you want me to talk about that or do you want me to talk about that?
Sure. Yeah, please.
I have to generalize because from the time he was killed in 63, that November,
we think about it.
Not one American president, not one, and you can name them all, have ever
challenged the military or the national security state or the intelligence
agencies.
Not one. They haven't been successful. They've cut the budgets occasionally,
but not by much.
But essentially, they keep going up.
The Defense Department has a record year. This year, 700 and some 60 billion
dollars.
Who says you can't to the military or to the intelligence agencies?
They seem to have an inordinate amount of power.
Kennedy was the last one who was trying to curb it.
And he meant a serious effort towards peace.
He was the last president to talk about peace very nobly.
And people have said, oh, he just talks.
But no, he was doing things.
And we can talk about that, too.
That's why it's important.
It's crucially important.
This country has gone the wrong way since the national security state has
gotten bigger, stronger, more money, more paranoid, less trust, in every which
way.
The cynical amongst us would say that that's inevitable, that whenever you have
these situations of power, especially when you have, you know, what people like
to call the deep state, but what's essentially this.
Group of people that never leave office.
And they have incredible amounts of power.
The people that are in the intelligence agencies, the people that are in the
Pentagon, the people that are in all of these positions of immense power.
But they don't get elected in and out.
They don't have four-year terms.
And these are the people that the president, when a newly elected president,
has to check in with.
It's a very dangerous situation because it's a frozen bureaucracy.
Yeah.
And they die off, but they're replaced by insiders.
And as a result, we're the biggest bully on the block around the world, no
question.
We have the most power militarily, supposedly, and nuclear in every which way.
Yeah.
We tell other countries we intervene.
We often tell our allies what to do, or we make them do it.
We declare ourselves to have enemies, and we keep insisting on it.
We talk about China.
We talk about Russia, Iran, Korea, North Vietnam.
I mean, North Korea.
Excuse me, Cuba.
Oh.
Yeah, yeah, North Korea, Cuba, and don't forget Venezuela.
Wow.
It's considered a major threat.
Although these threats are inflated, overinflated.
And we can talk about each one of these individually, but that's what I've done,
you know, in my spare time in documentaries.
I've done Ukraine.
I've done Russia with Putin.
And I'm very interested in what we call enemies.
And I keep seeing this overinflation of it because why?
Think about Orwell.
Remember the old George Orwell in 1984?
You know, the state exists to fight a perpetual war or prepare for war.
That's what we've been doing since 1945, six.
After World War II, we didn't stop.
World War II, we start moving into World War III.
We said that our allies in World War II, the Russians, were a great threat to
our country, although they were depleted.
Their energy was depleted.
Their money, they were broke, broke, broke.
We had promised the money.
We cut off the payment.
The moment Roosevelt died, Truman cut off the aid payment that we were sending
to them, some $10 billion.
And since that time, we just keep – we pushed the Cold War.
And we can discuss the old Cold War if you want.
But it was really – think about life before 1945.
Think about we were in a war with Hitler, right?
It was a war that was forced upon us.
We went in very late.
Think about it.
Think about the 1930s and the 20s.
The Roosevelt – Franklin Delano Roosevelt was recognized as Soviet Union.
He was one of the first.
He was the first.
He had a vision for post-World War II, which is beautiful.
You have to understand that it was a vision of a world dominated by the great
powers.
It would be United States, Britain, China, and USSR at that time.
That was the four powers he envisaged that would control.
And he believed in the United Nations.
He was – it's a shame he didn't see his vision come true.
He died in April of 1945.
Truman took over and it was a different – the moment Truman took over with
his group, the Soviets were seen as the enemy right away.
Right away.
There was no going back on it.
Speaking of this idea that the United States is the biggest bully, have you
seen this video that was recently released from China where a Chinese
representative is talking about Julian Assange?
And the Chinese representative is saying that the United States has no moral
high ground to stand on when they talk about what is going on in other
countries, particularly in China, when – what they're doing to prosecute and
to force Julian Assange to be extradited to the United States.
And the way they're going after him for what's essentially just being a
journalist and exposing what many people believe is war crimes.
Yes.
And that speaks to what you're saying is that, like, we have rules for the rest
of the world.
Yes.
And we don't follow them ourselves.
That's correct.
Yeah.
We – the Assange case is a very typical of what happens at the – when the
state becomes scared of its position.
It gets – its dissidents become enemies of the state.
And the same thing has happened to some degree in China, yes.
And they are paranoid about it.
And you could say – but to draw an equation between our power and their power
is wrong because, you know, a bully, he goes around, he scares the neighborhood,
right?
It works for a certain period of time.
But he's a hated individual.
There's fear because he's there, right?
Yeah.
I've seen your – I've seen your – you know, you talk about martial arts.
You think about it as a movie.
The guy is always kicking ass in the neighborhood.
And until the new hero comes along and deals with it.
And he – generally, he wins.
The new hero wins.
But the new hero wins by not enforcing that kind of fear on the rest of the
people.
You've got to have modification of behavior.
That's what's – there's nothing wrong with our power.
I think the United States has power to defend itself, no question.
But we have to modify our behavior to behave in a humane way with people and
recognize people's differences.
But that seems to be less the case as we become more disciplined, more ironed
about how we have to – how people have to behave.
We tell them in your country you can't do this.
You can't do that.
Now, some countries are different.
They have different customs, different cultures.
They don't have to agree with the way we run business.
We call it democracy, although a lot of people question the democracy inside
this country.
I mean, you know what the elections are like here.
It's become very suspect, elections itself.
And the money behind the elections, I mean, it takes a fortune to get elected.
You go to Washington.
I mean, I think it's hard to get an audience with a congressman.
I do think you have to pay money in order to get the ear of a congressman.
And so it's – you know, our democracy is not functioning in the way it was
meant to function.
And other countries – and we want other countries to restore their democracies.
But their democracies – it works better in Europe to a certain degree because
they don't have long election periods.
They have short election periods controlled.
And the money is very hard – is well controlled.
They don't allow private – the private sector to take over the elections as
we did here in this country with the United Supreme Court's decision allowing
corporations to exist as individuals.
Yeah, that was a tremendous mistake.
And if you go back and look at where this country took a bad turn, I would
agree with you that it seems like it was during this time period where JFK was
assassinated.
That JFK had these ideas getting rid of the CIA.
He wanted to pull us out of Vietnam.
He only wanted to – I mean, you talk about this really in detail in your
documentary, the new documentary that's available right now on Showtime.
Yes.
JFK Revisited.
Yes.
Which is – it's so thorough.
How long did it take you to make that?
A year and a half.
It's on Showtime now.
It's a limited – they have a 90-day hold on it.
End of February, it becomes available widely.
And we will get it out widely in the United States.
But it's available in foreign countries.
It's in about 15 foreign countries.
But still, the United States is – listen, we're lucky to have gotten Showtime
to do this because they're a good company.
They've given me a platform in the past with my Putin documentary as well as my
untold history of the United States.
Yeah, kudos to them because it's a controversial subject.
It's a very complex subject.
And for you to be able to cover it in such incredible detail the way you did,
from the beginning, you could tell from your documentary – you can tell from
the beginning there was a concerted effort to pin the blame on Lee Harvey Oswald
and to, without a doubt, remove any evidence to the contrary.
Yes.
Yes.
You're jumping around.
So, I mean, the – I was going to just finish the Kennedy thing.
Oh, yeah, please.
The Kennedy thing.
Remember that he resisted war.
Yes.
People get this confused because they say, oh, he went into Vietnam.
But no.
You have to look at the whole thing, the way it was – he avoided war twice in
Cuba.
And this is very important to remember.
The Bay of Pigs was a setup.
The CIA controlled that operation.
They went in.
They expected – they knew that operation would not work unless the United
States came in militarily to back up that invasion of Cuban exiles.
They expected it because Eisenhower would have done it in the past.
They got used to it in the 1950s that the United States went back to CIA.
Kennedy made it very clear that he would not put U.S. combat troops into Cuba.
Made that clear.
Or give it air support unless they were established a beachhead.
He was willing to meet them halfway.
He was saying, okay, we'll go if you succeed.
But it didn't succeed.
It was fucked from the beginning because Castro knew it was coming.
He knew about this seven days, eight days before, maybe more.
And they were stranded on the beach.
As a result, that started – that was a few days after he became president in
April, right?
He had very little experience.
But he was shocked at what happened.
And he took full responsibility for the debacle.
He said, I'm the responsible officer of government, which is a very good thing
to do.
He established a hierarchy.
But he 