And the What's up everybody? I am here in the Hidden Forces studio in New York City with my

engineer whose face I can hardly see behind the double Mac trading screens. I don't know if he's trading back there. I don't think he's doing that. But I'm sitting and in front of me is where my guest should be and my guest is missing in action. And that's because he canceled on me an hour before the episode.

We rescheduled it for later in January. I hope that it will work out then because I did spend many days, as you all know, many days researching and preparing for this conversation.

I read his memoir and watched a lot of political footage from when he ran for president and a number of other things.

I'm not going to tell you his name but he was a senator, he was a governor, and he was also

one of the 10 9-11 Commissioners and a Medal of Honor recipient.

So there was a lot to talk about.

My rundown starts with Vietnam, where he fought, and we kind of proceed through there both historically

70s and 80s I've been kind of really in this interesting zone head space

which I think was helped by taking a couple of weeks off, where I've been really

focused on the 70s. I haven't done much reading on them. It's just more that when I prepared,

for example, for Bill Jan Janeway and I was looking at that period or when I had

Howard Marks on and we discussed the junk bond market and the sort of bare market of the nifty

50 stocks that had been doing so well in the 1960s.

I just have been thinking about how little I've

appreciated the impact of that period and the reverberation of the darkness of

the 70s on the politics and policies of the 80s and 90s and also the contrast

Something that I've also been thinking about because we did the episode of course with Brian McCullough on the in 1992, the contrast between the 90s and the 70s, right?

The 70s were the decade of darkness.

It was a decade of stagflation.

It was a decade of

the political assassinations of 1968 were of course only two years

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