#886 - Hank Shaw

Hank Shaw (0:01)

So, I've never been to Woodland Hills.

Joe Rogan (0:03)

It's a rare land, the land of wood.

Hank Shaw (0:06)

It smells like money.

Joe Rogan (0:07)

Does it? Yeah. Out here?

Really? It smells like white people, where white people come to breed. Hank Shaw, ladies and gentlemen, we're live.

Hank Shaw said Woodland Hills smells like money. You got to go to Beverly Hills, it smells like diamonds.

Hank Shaw (0:19)

They don't let people like me in Beverly Hills. No.

Joe Rogan (0:21)

Come on, man, you look respectable.

Hank Shaw (0:23)

Barely.

Joe Rogan (0:24)

You look fine. You're a chef.

How do you go from being a political blogger, you were a political blogger?

Hank Shaw (0:30)

Well, I was a political, I was a capital bureau chief in Sacramento and in other places in Covered Congress, so I was a bit more than a blogger.

Joe Rogan (0:36)

You were deep in.

Hank Shaw (0:37)

Oh, yeah. I was in the room several times.

Joe Rogan (0:39)

Watching this thing go down now, this atrocity of justice and voting and chaos and all everything that's going around, the Russians are attacking, all this stuff that's going on right now, what does this feel like to you?

Hank Shaw (0:52)

It feels so good to not be doing this job anymore, so good.

Joe Rogan (0:57)

I feel like anybody that has any sort of intelligence, that is a political blogger, that's involved in it for any length of time, or not just a political blogger, a columnist, an author, after a while, you got to realize, you're fucking writing about pro wrestling.

This is a rig system. You're writing about a rig system, and then occasionally something like this happens.

Hank Shaw (1:20)

It used to be what got me into it. I did it for 18 years.

I got into it because when I got into it, the essence of politics was people of different kinds of backgrounds and persuasions of different regions would all meet in a room, i.e. the Capitol, either it's a state capital or Congress, and solve a problem somehow. So it was all about compromise and debate and wheeling and dealing and that kind of stuff, which is inherently fascinating when you're a reporter. Like whose ox is going to get gored? Who's going to win this? And like, you know, Joe needs this and somebody else needs that.

I got to give him this thing, and then at the end of the day, you'd have this bill, this transportation. I mean, I could go on about some hilarious congressional stories and state government stories.

Joe Rogan (1:59)

Please do.

Hank Shaw (2:01)

So there was a transportation bill, it was a T-21 bill in Congress in 98 And one of my guys, a guy named Frank Wolf, he was a lawmaker from Northern Virginia. He's not there anymore. He's kind of a Dugger, you know, kind of a reformer Republican guy, you know, Dudley D. Wright kind of guy. And he hated pork and he wanted to get rid of all the earmarks in the transportation bill. But as you probably know, the transportation bill is what they call a Christmas tree. So everybody gets a little bit of an ornament on top of the tree so that they can go home to their district and say, look what I got. So Bud Schuster of Pennsylvania was the head of the transportation committee back then.

So Bud would shut the door, and anybody in the transportation committee was one of Bud's boys. You were a Republican, you weren't a Democrat, you were one of Bud's boys. And so they all played a game like this. And so, except for my guy, my guy would come out and hold press releases saying, oh, you know, this is terrible, you know, this is corruption, blah, blah, blah. Nah, it's not the game it's played. You know, everybody gets a little piece.

So it comes out, and the bill passes over Frank's dead body basically. And he holds a press release, or a press conference talking about how terrible it all was. And I'm coming out of this press conference, and one of Bud Schuster's aides comes and says, Hey, check out page, I can't remember, it was a page 123 of the bill. So I did, and in there was a line item that gave the residents of Bud Schuster's congressional district a free pass to drive the Pennsylvania Turnpike for the X number of years. So basically anybody who lived in Bud's district didn't have to pay tolls for, I think it was two years.

Awesome.

Joe Rogan (3:41)

That's ridiculous.

Hank Shaw (3:42)