Broadsheet

In the very same post, Butterick sings the praises of the Apple Extended Keyboard II, and notes that he has several spares in reserve. I do keenly intend to take Butterick up on his standing offer to dine when next I’m in Los Angeles, but I worry that if we meet, we’ll trigger some sort of calamitous singularity of aligned taste. ↩︎

This is the fifth and last part of our series (I, II, III, IV, V) looking at how Carthaginian armies were raised and constituted. Over the last four parts, we’ve looked at the larger components of Carthaginian armies: the relatively small role of Carthaginian citizens, the more prominent role of North African conscripts, of Numidian and Iberian vassals, and of mercenaries and allies from Italy and Gaul. As we’ve noted, the place of many of these troops within Carthage’s armies changed over time, particularly in the third century as Carthage exercised a more direct presence in Spain, Gaul and Italy, thereby transforming mercenaries into vassals and allies.

To close off this week, I want to briefly discuss some of the ‘odds and ends’ of Carthaginian military forces that we haven’t gotten to yet, most notably the role of light infantry slingers from the Balearic islands and of war elephants. But I want to spend most of the time here discussing how these composite armies fight.

Now that, in and of itself, is a tricky proposition. For one, the composition of these armies quite evidently changed over time. Worse yet, for most of Carthaginian history, our sources provide us few battle accounts in which the dispositions and tactics are both detailed and reliable. We have a few early battle descriptions (mostly in Diodorus), but to put this effort at analysis on somewhat firmer ground, I propose to focus on the third century in particular.

But first, as always, raising large armies of mercenaries, subject conscripts, vassal warlords and allies is expensive! If you too want to help me invade Italy with a multi-ethnic army of diverse origins in a doomed effort to stop the Roman Republic, you can help by supporting this project over at Patreon. If you want updates whenever a new post appears or want to hear my more bite-sized musings on history, security affairs and current events, you can follow me on Bluesky (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social). I am also active on Threads (bretdevereaux) and maintain a de minimis presence on Twitter (@bretdevereaux).

Slings and Elephants

Before we get into the battles themselves though, we have a few more odds and ends to add to our armies, most notably Balearic slingers and war elephants. In both cases our sources don’t give us a ton of information to go on, but these were both regular parts of Carthaginian armies.

The residents of the Balearic islands had a well-earned reputation as exceptional slingers in antiquity; Phoenician settlement on the island of Ibiza in the seventh century steadily led the islands to drift into Carthaginian influence, making Balearic slingers available for Carthaginian armies, though as far as I know it remains very unclear how much actual governance Carthage exerted on the islands.

That said, while Balearic slingers are a recurring ‘specialist’ unit in Carthaginian armies, their numbers remain few. When we hear about their detachments, they’re really quite small. Hannibal, for instance, when disposing his forces in 218 sends 870 of his slingers to Africa and leaves 500 in Spain (Polyb. 3.33.8-16). While he is also taking some with him (so that is not a total count of his Balearic slingers) I think it is worth contrasting the scale of other troop movements in the dispositions: the force left in Spain is fifty-two warships, 450 African cavalry, 300 Spanish cavalry (Ilergetes), 1,800 Numidian cavalry, 11,850 Libyan infantry, and 21 elephants. 500 slingers seems a small detachment, in comparison. Likewise, the force heading to Africa was composed overall of 1,200 cavalry and 13,850 infantry alongside the 870 slingers. These are thus quite small detachments: small units of specialists rather than major contingents of an army.

From the excellent https://www.trajans-column.org/, a detail of scene 66 on Trajan’s Column showing a slinger, likely Balearian, with his sling and a set of slingstones; he wields a small shield as well, but is otherwise unarmored.

That said our sources (Polybius, mainly) often keeps track of them, so they’re a distinctive unit. In addition to the 1,370 slingers left behind, Hannibal took some number with him when crossing the Alps, but we can’t really track how many because in Hannibal’s army they always appear brigaded together with his lonchophoroi (who as you will recall, are also light infantry skirmishers, using javelins), in a combined unit of 8,000. I suspect that, at least by the time Hannibal is in Italy, the Balearians represent a distinct minority in that formation too. In that 218 disposition above, Hannibal (advancing into Spain reportedly with 90,000 infantry and 12,000 cavalry (Polyb. 3.35.1), a figure I suspect is inflated, but it is what we have), has essentially advanced on Italy with three-quarters of his force, splitting the remaining quarter to act as the core of armies to be formed up (if necessary) in Spain and Africa. That might imply something like 5,500 total Balearian slingers, of whom about 4,000 are with Hannibal. The problem, of course, is accounting for casualties: Hannibal loses half of his cavalry and three-quarters of his infantry getting to Italy (he drops into the Po River Valley with 20,000 infantry and 6,000 cavalry, Polyb. 3.56.4).

Even assuming a specialist unit like his slingers might have been spared the worst of the casualties, we might reasonably expect their numbers to at least be reduced by half, meaning that light infantry ‘brigade’ we see at Trebia might only have 2,000 (or even just 1,000) Balearians in it, with the rest made up of North African – and also perhaps Spanish or Gallic – javelin troops. Of course Hannibal’s army would subsequently expand back upwards with a fresh infusion of Gauls, such that by Cannae he had 50,000 troops (40,000 infantry, 10,000 cavalry), of which as noted above, at most we might expect a couple thousand to have been Balearian slingers.

In terms of equipment and fighting style, Balearic slingers fought unarmored, using slings and carrying small round shields, with spears for close-combat – though given their lack of armor, that must have been something of a weapon of last resort.¹ So these were very light troops: very mobile, but not able to really stand up to anything. Hannibal never puts this mixed brigade into his battle line (that we’re told) – instead it is deployed as a screening force (Polyb. 3.72) or in rough ground (Polyb. 3.83) and withdrawing them before the main clash of infantry lines. Slings are really effective weapons in skilled hands – sling bullets can arrive with a lot of punch and be quite accurate at relatively long range – so even a small force of slingers mixed into a larger force of skirmishers would certainly make their presence known.

As for Carthage’s war elephants, we actually discussed war elephants at length way back in 2019. We may add a few notes here on Carthage’s elephants in particular. First, Carthage used war elephants, fairly regularly. The size of Carthage’s elephant corps seems to have been primarily limited by logistics: elephants were hard to move overseas (though it could clearly be done and the Carthaginians do it) and hard to keep supplied. Carthage had “nearly a hundred” elephants at Bagradas (255), supposedly 200 in Spain in 228 under Hasdrubal the Fair (Diod. Sic. 25.12; I suspect this number is quite inflated), but Hannibal marches out of Spain with just 37 elephants (Polyb. 3.42), leaving – as noted above – only 21 elephants behind, suggesting he only had 58 to start with.

Still my favorite Etruscan elephant plate (c. 275-270 BCE), from the National Etruscan Museum at the Villa Giulia in Rome. Given the Etruscan context of this famous plate, the elephant here might be Carthaginian, rather than Hellenistic. Interestingly, it is depicted with its calf in tow, which would make the grown elephant female, though generally only bulls were used as war elephants.

Carthaginian elephants, like Ptolemaic elephants, were drawn from the now-extinct North African elephant (Loxodonta africana pharaohensis), likely a relative of the smaller African forest elephant (Loxodonta cyclotis), not the bigger African Bush elephant (Loxodonta africana) you are likely more familiar with but which has never been domesticated. These North African elephants were smaller than the Asian elephant (Elephas maximus), which was a problem for the Ptolemies (who regularly faced Indian elephants in Seleucid service) but not really for Carthage. It is possible Carthage may have at times obtained Indian elephants in small numbers: Hannibal’s personal elephant was named Surus, ‘the Syrian;’ if he was from Syria, that would mean he was an Indian elephant imported by the Seleucids, although it seems equally likely to me that someone might name an uncommonly big North African elephant ‘Syrian’ because in its large size it resembled the larger Asian elephant (which a Carthaginian might associate with Syria – where the Seleucid elephant program was – rather than with India, where the elephants were actually from).

Of course ‘smaller’ doesn’t mean ‘small:’ male African forest elephants ‘only’ get to be about 7ft tall at the shoulders (compared to 9ft for Asian elephants and 10ft for African bush elephants), which is still a mighty big animal. As we discussed back in the original series on war elephants, the logistics demands of keeping elephants were substantial: they cannot be effectively bred in captivity so they must be captured and tamed and once domesticated, you have to feed them and they eat a lot. Nevertheless, they could be a clear military asset.

Alas, we know very little about how the Carthaginian elephant corps was organized: it’s unclear who the mahouts (the skilled elephant drivers) would have been or how they fit into Carthage’s mobilization system. It was clearly an important component of Carthaginian power – Carthage mints coins with elephants on them, likely as a symbol and expression of Carthaginian power (especially in places where elephants were not native, so the only elephants around would be Carthaginian war elephants).

Via Wikimedia Commons, a Carthaginian quarter-shekel from Spain, showing on elephant on the reverse.
It’s striking to me that Punic coins with elephants on them seem more common in Spain and Sicily – where the elephants would have to have been imported – than in Africa itself, where they were native.

How a Carthaginian Army Fights

Unlike Roman, Macedonian or Greek armies, we don’t have any discussions of Carthaginian tactics from the Carthaginian point of view, or even artwork from Carthaginian contexts showing things like battles. The closest the sources come are some general comments by Polybius, which I think have to be treated with a great deal of caution. We’ve already seen that Polybius’ depiction of Carthage’s armies as wholly mercenary is at best deceptive. Likewise, his comment that Carthage “entirely neglects its infantry” and merely “pays some slight attention” to its cavalry (Polyb. 6.52.3) doesn’t stack up against the performance of Carthaginian arms in the third century: Carthaginian infantry appears, if less capable than the Romans, more capable than Greek or Macedonians, while Carthaginian cavalry appears flatly superior. So we have to be careful simply taking Polybius’ word for things when it comes to Carthage’s military ability.

That leaves us reliant on Carthage’s battles to understand how Carthaginian armies tend to fight. There are a few things to note here. First, in the third century, Carthage loses battles with Rome somewhat more often that it wins them – never nearly so lopsided as the Hellenistic record against Rome, mind you – even with Hannibal considered in the record. I want to note that out front because our sources tend to focus more on the occasions where Carthage wins against Rome (because it is to some degree surprising) and so that is when we tend to get something like a complete order of battle that lets us assess Carthaginian tactics. But I don’t want to give a distorted impression of effectiveness here: Carthaginian armies are a real threat that can beat Roman armies in the field, but the Romans win more than they lose.

All that said, I think there are some things we can say about how Carthaginian armies fight. These armies tend to be somewhat more cavalry heavy than Hellenistic or Roman armies, although they maintain a strong infantry ‘backbone.’ Tactically, because Carthaginian armies are so varied in composition (given the variable numbers of mercenaries, allies and vassals they may have), they tend to have much more varied dispositions than Roman or Macedonian armies (which both have a fairly ‘standard’ battle plan), but there is a preference towards envelopment using cavalry (as distinct, I’d argue, from Macedonian ‘breakthrough’ using cavalry). Finally, there is also a clear preference in placing mercenaries and auxiliaries in high-casualty positions that is remarkable, especially compared to Roman or Macedonian armies which tend to place their most reliably troops – who tend to be the highest status (citizen or Macedonian) troops in the center.

So let’s look at a few Carthaginian armies in action to see how this plays out.

The pitched battle from the First Punic War (264-241) we get the most details for is the Battle of Bagradas River (255), which is where Marcus Atilius Regulus’ (cos 267, 256) expedition to North Africa – which had been making gains – falls apart, necessitating a naval rescue mission to extract what is left of his army later that year. Polybius (1.33-34) is our best account of this battle and he doesn’t give us a ton of detail, but what he does give us, I think, is indicative of how Carthage expects to fight.²

The Carthaginian army, led in part by the Greek mercenary general Xanthippus, arrives with 12,000 infantry, 4,000 cavalry and nearly 100 elephants, which is a very cavalry (and elephant) heavy force, though it seems like nearly all of the infantry here is heavy African infantry (Libyans and perhaps also Carthaginian citizens). The Carthaginians draw up with the ‘phalanx of the Carthaginians’ in the center, with the elephants strung in a single line in front of them. Xanthippus puts his own mercenaries on the right wing – right where a Macedonian commander would have put his elite infantry in an Alexander-Battle formation – a but splits the remaining cavalry across both wings. The Romans seem to respond to the threat of the elephants by forming up unusually deep and thus also narrow (Polyb. 1.33.9-10), which turns out to have been the catastrophic mistake of the battle.

What ends up happening is that in the center, the Romans are able to push past the elephants, but have their lines disordered by it and as a result are thrown back by the Carthaginian heavy infantry. Meanwhile on the flanks, the numerically superior and more capable Carthaginian cavalry quickly routs the Roman cavalry and begins what we’ll see is a standard Carthaginian tactic – double-envelopment – wrapping around the Romans on the flanks. The one spot where the Romans perform well is, ironically, against Xanthippus’ mercenaries on his right (the Roman left), where the Romans are able to get around the elephants (and presumably inside the cavalry) to engage the Carthaginian right-wing and send it reeling back to camp (Polyb. 1.34.4). The envelopment proves fatal: no army can fight effectively if beset on all sides and the Romans are no exception (unless Julius Caesar is leading): repulsed in the center and then encircled, the Roman army falls apart, with the Carthaginians able to inflict heavy losses – all but 2,000 out of a force of 15,500 – in the rout.

What I think is most striking is that here already we see the Carthaginians doing what is going to become a standard approach in Hannibal’s battles, double-envelopment with cavalry. This is, I think, quite distinct from the Macedonian practice of ‘Alexander-battle’; somewhat ironically the Carthaginians essentially are doing the ‘Total War tactic’ that I spent some much time insisting the Macedonians do not do. Whereas the Macedonian approach is generally to try to ‘breakthrough’ with their cavalry often at the point where an army’s center joins one of its wings – and generally only on one flank, with the other flank merely buying time – the Carthaginians really are looking to ‘flank.’ Put another way, Macedonian cavalry goes through one side, but Carthaginian cavalry goes around both sides, aiming to disperse the enemy cavalry screen at the flanks and then loop around the flanks and rear of the enemy force rather than smashing through.

Vassals and Allies on the Battlefield

Moving forward chronologically, we can look at some of the dispositions of the Second Punic War to see some of the same patterns as at Bagradas, but also – because our sources (mostly Polybius, now with some Livy) provide more detail – some additional details.

After a major skirmish at Ticinus, Hannibal’s first major pitched battle in Italy is the Battle of the Trebia (218; Polyb. 3.71-4; Livy 21.54-56). Hannibal’s plan here is clearly another envelopment battle, similar in conception to Bagradas. Hannibal sets up a single line of ‘line infantry’ (both his African ‘heavies’ and his Spanish and Gallic ‘mediums’) in the center and his cavalry on the flanks. But he then does two things to reinforce his flanks: he deploys his elephants there, rather than along the center, and he has his skirmishers – initially deployed in front of his army as a screening force – retreat to the flanks once they had bested the Roman velites. The result is that Hannibal ends up stacking up his cavalry and elephants and skirmishers against the Roman cavalry on the flanks. That must have left his main infantry line somewhat thin: he has less ‘line infantry’ than the Roman force (probably around 25,000 Roman and socii heavies against c. 21,000 Carthaginian heavies and mediums, when you subtract out the velites and Carthaginian ‘lights’ (Balearians and lonchophoroi) and what he has is meaningfully lighter, but he has to match the same width.

Via Wikipedia, a decent map of the Battle of the Trebia after the Carthaginian lights had fallen back behind their main force and the Roman *velites* had been driven back. Livy and Polybius actually disagree slightly about where the elphants went: Polybius puts them in front of the cavalry, Livy out on the wings outside the cavalry (for some reason this map does neither).

But we get another interesting note here that, as we’ll see, is a trend. Polybius reports of Hannibal’s losses, “for they all were very glad about the battle, [thinking it] as a great accomplishment, for it happened that the losses of the Iberians and Libyans were few, most of the losses being of the Celts” (Polyb. 3.74.10). Now given what Polybius has told us – that the Gauls, Iberians and Africans are all in one line – it’s not quite clear how that outcome happens (the Iberians, at least, are no more heavily armored than the Gauls!), but as we’re going to see, it is something of a pattern.

Hannibal’s next major battle is at Lake Trasimene (217) but this is something of a rarity: an actual ambush at battle-scale rather than a pitched battle. While ambushes are common in small actions, it is actually quite rare for one field army to ambush another: field armies are so big they are quite hard to hide and tend to have a lot of scouting. That makes this kind of ‘true’ large-scale ambush quite rare, but it also means the dispositions and tactics aren’t really applicable to the more common pitched battles. There is, however, one detail that is worth noting, which were the casualties among the Carthaginians, of which Polybius says (Polyb. 3.85.5), “He [Hannibal] now rested his own [troops] and honored the dead of the highest ranks, thirty in number; the overall losses were fifteen hundred, of which most were Celts.”

Which gets us to Cannae (216), which I have analyzed elsewhere and so needn’t do in detail here. The plan is once again double-envelopment using cavalry deployed on the flanks and a relatively weak center, with Hannibal’s innovation here coming in two parts: first the center is arced forward to invite the Romans to attack it and second Hannibal pulls his North African troops – his heaviest and most reliable – into two formations that sit on the flanks of the combined Spanish and Gallic ‘medium’ infantry main line. The result, famously, is that the Romans, when they push back the Gallic-and-Iberian center, will put the Africans around their flanks, while Hannibal’s cavalry first disperses the Roman cavalry and then completes the encirclement by striking the advancing Roman infantry force in the rear.

Via Wikipedia, a decent enough diagram of the Battle of Cannae’s opening positions, although the map on my WotR article is somewhat better.

Now there are solid tactical reasons to arrange the army this way – Hannibal does, after all, win the battle – but it is hard not to see another consideration at work: almost all of the heavy losses are guaranteed to be sustained by the Iberian and Gallic troops. By contrast, the North African troops, who are by this point every bit as heavy as Roman troops (Polyb. 3.114.1; Livy 22.46.4) are not placed into the thick of things but held off onto the side, where they mostly avoid the brunt of the Roman assault. The Numidian cavalry seems to have been given orders to skirmish, to ‘tie up’ Rome’s socii cavalry, while it is the Iberian and Gallic cavalry that has to punch through and attack to create the encirclement.

There is a consistent pattern here of risking Iberian and Gallic troops in order to preserve Carthaginian, African and Numidian troops. And the result is predictable. Polybius (3.117.6) gives Hannibal’s losses at Cannae as, “of Hannibal, the Celts lost 4,000, the Iberians and Africans 1,500 and the cavalry 200.” One wonders, given that division of losses, if – when Polybius says that the Gauls and Iberians are in the center – Hannibal has in fact put the Gauls in the absolute center (furthest forward), with the Iberians on their wings and the Africans on the Iberian’s wings, essentially creating a ‘spectrum of peril,’ with the Gauls in the most dangerous spot and the North Africans in the safest.

Hannibal’s deployment at Zama (Polyb. 15.11; Livy 30.33) echoes this concern: he puts the elephants out in front (like Xanthippus at Bagradas fifty years prior) and then in his first line he puts Ligurians, Gauls, Balearians and Mauritanians: his skirmish specialists (the Balearians) and then all of his expendable auxiliaries. He may have intended these fellows to retreat to the flanks like at Trebia, but in any case he made no preparations for them to withdraw down the center – when they did so they were cut down by the next line (Polyb. 15.13.3-10). Then behind that line he places his North African and Carthaginian citizen troops – fresh levies from North Africa; the Romans would have put these greenest troops in the front, but Hannibal shelters them in his second line. Finally, perhaps having learned something from the value of the Roman triarii, Hannibal puts his own veterans in a third, final line in the rear.

Had Hannibal won at Zama, rather than lost, we’d presumably have had another line of Polybius about how the great majority of his losses were taken by the Gauls and Ligurians (and Mauritanians) that he threw forward at the outset of the battle.

That said, we get quite a different approach at the Battle of Metaurus (207). The sources for this battle are, I should note, something of a mess (with Polyb. 11.1-3 and Livy 27.48 not quite agreeing), but a mess that is untangled quite capably by J.F. Lazenby, Hannibal’s War: A Military History (1998), 189-90. Hasdrubal’s army is a mix of Iberians, Gauls and Ligurians, with thirty elephants. Hasdrubal’s problem is that his army is quite outmatched and he knows it, fighting the battle because he has no other choice, having not yet had time to fortify a camp. The battlefield had hilly terrain on Hasdrubal’s left, so he seems to have settled on a gambit of trying to concentrate all of his combat power on the right so as to smash the Roman left.

What is striking then is that Hasdrubal stacks his right – the ‘hammer’ arm – with his elephants and his Iberians, places his Ligurians in the center (where they need to hold) and then puts his Gallic troops up on the hill on his left. It suggests that he doesn’t have a whole lot of faith in those Gauls, because in the event the hill is sufficiently steep that the Romans can’t even really approach their position (Polyb. 11.1.5). In the event, the Romans win when C. Claudius Nero, commanding the Roman right (making no headway up that hill and realizing it), detaches part of his force to extend the Roman left (while leaving a pinning force), wrapping around the flank of Hasdrubal’s right-flank-hammer. But what I think is notable is that where Hannibal – confident and expecting victory – exposes his Gallic troops to let them take the brunt of the losses, Hasdrubal – panicked and merely trying to avoid defeat – puts his Gauls where they can do the least harm.

Both sentiments seem to suggest that the Barcids, at least, held their Gallic allies in relatively low esteem: expending them when convenient but avoiding relying on them whenever possible.

Conclusions

Carthaginian armies were complex creatures – far more so than something like a typical polis army. What I find perhaps most interesting is that for the most part, expansive Carthaginian recruiting was more about broadening Carthage’s base of military resources than it was about acquiring specific capabilities. Carthaginian generals do not seem to use Gallic, Ligurian, Iberian, Greek or Italian troops in dramatically different roles than their own North African troops. Indeed, Gallic and Iberian ‘mediums’ are deployed as line infantry the same as Carthaginian citizen or North African ‘heavies.’ We do not get, for instance, the fairly clear contrast in positioning and usage between ‘heavies’ and ‘mediums’ that we see in Hellenistic armies, though of course they have a pike-phalanx to consider. Instead, when Carthage recruits in Gaul and Spain, they seem to want more troops rather than different troops. After all, they already have capable javelin light-infantry (North African lonchophoroi) and heavy line infantry, they just want more of those roles.

The exceptions are clear: Balearic slingers and Numidian cavalry. These are specialist troops that supply new capabilities – longer-range skirmishing (a factor, for instance, at Trebia, where they outrange and outshoot the Roman velites) from the slingers and highly capable, fast-moving skirmish cavalry from the Numidians. Carthage’s heavy cavalry in turn, is a mix of Carthaginian citizen cavalry, North African cavalry, and Iberian or Gallic cavalry – depending on what is available given the time period and location.

The result was not necessarily a more tactically complex army – Carthaginian armies seem to have had fewer moving parts than Roman ones – but the challenge of leading such a polyglot, multicultural army must have been considerable, as Polybius himself alludes to (Polyb. 1.67.4-9), especially when the very recruiting principles of these troops were different: some citizens, some conscripts, some mercenaries raised with money, some allies raised with promises, some vassals raised through very particular personal relationships with the generals themselves. That complexity may serve to explain to some degree why Carthage preferred long-serving generals over a regular rotation: the relationships generals established and their personal knowledge of their armies would have been difficult to pass on. By contrast, Roman armies, while more tactically complex, where organizationally much more ‘plug-and-play,’ each army working more or less like the next.

There is a frustrating tendency in the scholarship to denigrate Carthaginian war-making and I suspect the rather ‘motley’ nature of these armies – which do not look very much like the western ‘ideal’ of an army (uniform and almost mechanical in its function, a ‘war machine’) – contributes quite a lot to this. But Carthage was a military over-performer, especially in the third century: Carthage withstood Pyrrhus and was able to go two full rounds (and one more) with Rome, albeit losing in the end.

I’ve mentioned this before, but the contrast with the Hellenistic kingdoms of the East is so striking: Carthage spends a combined forty-years at war with Rome in the third century, peaking at more than 160,000 men in the field, matching Rome on land and at sea,³ matching the Roman capability of fighting in multiple theaters simultaneously and not-infrequently defeating Roman armies. By contrast, in the second century, the Seleucids and Antigonids manage to fight Rome for just fourteen years combined (including the Fourth Macedonian War, which isn’t even an Antigonid war!), lose every major battle and never manage to put more than 80,000 soldiers or so in the field at any one time (the Antigonids don’t even get close to that).

In short, if we understand the complex Carthaginian mobilization system as an effort to reach more broadly for military resources, we ought to understand it as a success. Carthage, from 254 to 201, deploys massively more military resources than comparable large (larger in the case of the Seleucids) Hellenistic states.

That said, the system was not without flaws. The largest was that it was quite obviously more fragile than its Roman equivalent. Hannibal, despite stunning victories, struggles to get a critical mass of Rome’s socii to revolt. By contrast, Carthaginian control in both North Africa and Spain was relatively more easily disrupted, as shown by the Mercenary War (241-237), the collapse of the Barcid system in Spain after the Fall of Carthago Nova (209) – although Carthage continued to maintain large armies in the area for another five years – and the ability of Rome to draw the Numidians away from Roman service through Masinissa’s defection in 203.

Via Wikipedia, a Numidian coin showing a Numidian king, possibly Masinissa (r.203-148) or perhaps Mcipsa (r. 148-118). Interestingly, that Numidian king is represented in Hellenistic style, complete with a Hellenistic diadem, an intentional employment of Greek symbols of kingship in a very non-Greek context.

It is also worth noting that while Carthage’s strategy of recruiting non-state warriors from Spain and Gaul enabled it to field a lot of raw manpower, the warriors they got in the bargain were not as heavily or expensively equipped as either the Romans or Carthage’s own North African troops. The Carthaginian system was thus one that, by the Second Punic War, if not earlier, was forced to seek quantity over quality in order to match the staggering effectiveness with which the Romans had turned Italy into a machine for the generation of military power.

I also suspect, had the Carthaginians not been defeated by Rome, that their system of long-serving generals setting up veritable fiefdoms abroad would have eventually spelled disaster for the Carthaginian Republic. In a sense, we watch this same development play out in the Late Roman Republic, but the Barcid private empire in Spain was if anything even more of a private fiefdom than anything enjoyed by the Late Republic’s ‘rogue generals.’ One imagines, had Carthage continued with an empire that other Carthaginian figures would feel compelled (as rival Roman dynasts felt so compelled in the first century) to establish their own bases of power, leading to predictable results.

All of that said, Carthage’s military system deserves better than to simply be treated as a failure or – even more inaccurately – as the product of an ‘unwarlike’ people. Certainly, the Carthaginians were not able to overcome the Roman Republic – but no one else, not the ‘warlike’ Gauls or the ostensibly more ‘western’ (despite being more eastern) Hellenistic kingdoms – no one else was able to either.

Carthage got the closest, by far, for which the Romans would never forgive them. Ironically, had the Carthaginians been worse at war, Carthage might well have lasted longer.⁴

So about two weeks ago I received an e-mail from someone identifying herself as Hunter Biden’s publicist. She said the son of the 46th president enjoys my work, and would like to appear on my podcast, Two Writers Slinging Yang.

“Bullshit,” I thought—then told the “publicist” I was good.

A few days later, I received another e-mail, this one from Hunter Biden.

The Hunter Biden.

He said he was cool with not meeting, but that he enjoyed my work and wanted to let me know he liked what I was putting forth into the world.

We wound up having lunch last week. :)

It was on the pier in Malibu. Hunter arrived casually dressed, by himself, and greeted me with a warm hug and handshake. He knew I attended Delaware (his dad’s alma mater), knew I covered sports, was warm and gracious and engaging.

The audio version of this interview can be heard here—though the sound quality is a bit meh (damn wind).

Otherwise, here’s the full transcript from our time together. Hunter is a refreshingly transparent dude who seems liberated having experienced 800 different lows …

JEFF PEARLMAN: All right. Hunter Biden, I have an amazing... I’m going to tell you something, true story. I get a text from maybe your publicist or something and she’s like, “Hey, Hunter Biden is a fan of yours and he wants to talk and do your podcast.” And I was like, “Bullshit. This is bullshit.” I said to my wife, '“This is garbage.” So I wrote back and I was like, “No, it’s okay.” And then you emailed me and I was like, oh, and then you said you follow me on TikTok, which is like … we’re both in our 50s.

HUNTER BIDEN: Yeah. Don’t tell anybody.

JEFF PEARLMAN: I won’t.

HUNTER BIDEN: Really, don’t tell anybody.

JEFF PEARLMAN: You don’t even use... Because you don’t use your name.

HUNTER BIDEN: Yeah, no, I don’t use my name.

JEFF PEARLMAN: I’m actually being serious. Myself, not a factor. Why are you on TikTok?

HUNTER BIDEN: Yeah. You know why? Because my daughter, Maisie, kept sending me like, “Dad, you got to look at this.” And I didn’t have TikTok.

JEFF PEARLMAN: So you couldn’t look.

HUNTER BIDEN: And then I got it. So I blame her for... I’m off all drugs. I’ve been off for seven years. I don’t drink. I don’t do anything.

JEFF PEARLMAN: TikTok.

HUNTER BIDEN: But TikTok is, I have to admit, my wife is like, “You got to stop, you’re addicted.” Which it’s a whole nother issue we can talk about later.

JEFF PEARLMAN: Are you a screen scroller? Will you sit there and scroll and wake up and it’s a half hour later and you’re like, “What I just do in my life?”

HUNTER BIDEN: 100%. 100%. And you have wasted a lot of that time.

JEFF PEARLMAN: Sorry, man.

HUNTER BIDEN: I’m working to start a foundation for recovery, for aftercare thing. And so there’s a ... Can we order?

The waiter has approached. His name is Jade.

JEFF PEARLMAN: Yeah. Go ahead.

HUNTER BIDEN: I’ll get that chorizo burrito with more chorizo than egg. Can they do that?

JADE: Yeah.

HUNTER BIDEN: Thanks, man.

JEFF PEARLMAN: I’ll get the open face omelet.

HUNTER BIDEN: And I’ll get some hot sauce with that too. Hot sauce and stuff. Okay, cool.

Pause.

HUNTER BIDEN: And what’s your name, man?

JADE: Jade.

HUNTER BIDEN: Jade, nice to meet you. I’m Hunter. That’s Jeff. How are you?

JADE: Yeah. I’m good.

Jade leaves.

JEFF PEARLMAN: So you want to start a foundation?

HUNTER BIDEN: Yeah. So the idea, I think there’s this huge gap in recovery, which has to do with people that when you get out of rehab, you get that 30 days and it’s a great thing. And particularly the first rehab, maybe the 12th I had to go to becomes the diminishing returns, but you get out and you go right back into the same situation that you’re in if you have anywhere to go. A lot of people don’t even have anywhere to go.

And so there’s this gap in the aftercare system and I’m hoping to do something. So those are the people that I was working with because I also decided this is that nobody in my family’s running for anything now or maybe my kids will one day, but I don’t have anybody... I don’t have to consider anybody else’s aspirations or job in being able to go out and talk about things that I care about. One of the things I care deeply about is addiction recovery, the radical honesty. I’ve been given this... They created this platform for me and now I’m going to dive off.

JEFF PEARLMAN: I was thinking about something with you. I was thinking one thing that I find frustrating, my mother was a substance abuse counselor. We’ve had many years of talking about substance abuse … [I hate how] people saw in you an amazing pinata and they beat the living shit out of you, took advantage of a guy who was going through some serious shit and they just didn’t care. There was zero level of compassion at all.

If this was whoever’s kid, if this was, I don’t know, Mike Pence’s kid or JD Vance’s kid, they’d be like, “Oh, give him sympathy. Give him...” But everyone just took a fucking baseball bat to you. And it just seems offensive. The lack of compassion and empathy for someone who’s had struggles. And I wonder, as it’s going on, are you disappointed in humanity at all when you’re going through it?

HUNTER BIDEN: When you’re going through it, I think when I was going through it, I can’t speak for anybody else.

JEFF PEARLMAN: Sure.

HUNTER BIDEN: And when I was going through it, of course I was angry and it was hard to understand the level of cruelty, but the public humiliation was so ubiquitous, so complete. As I was saying to somebody, I think we used it before, they had me on the cover of the New York Post more times, I think, in a one-year period than anyone in the history of the newspaper, going back to Alexander Hamilton.

JEFF PEARLMAN: I feel like I shouldn’t congratulate you for that.

HUNTER BIDEN: Yeah, no, definitely not. Because by the way, none of it was for anything good. And what they did was they was an operation. It was truly an organized operation in which what they had to do, none of it was about me. It was about the presidency and it could have been my dad or it could have been somebody else, but it was about the presidency and it was about that power. When you have power that enormous, the lengths that people will go to, I’ve learned, are just beyond your comprehension.

And so in the moment, there was real anger, real confusion, despondency at points of like, how could it be so awful? But I woke up one day and I really had to make a choice of whether I wanted to live or die. Truly, because the worst nightmare of many people happened to me, which was not only did you have to live through the hell of your own addiction, but then it had to play in technicolor over and over and over again, not just for your friends and neighbors to see, but literally the entire world from Kyoto, Japan to Kansas City.

And I decided that I wanted to live. And it wasn’t like a lightning bolt moment and I woke up and I saw this white light and my life changed, but it almost felt that way in the sense of I was given the courage to live without fear. And I realized then too, is that every poor decision that I made in my life was made out of fear.

JEFF PEARLMAN: Fear of what?

HUNTER BIDEN: Fear of being judged, fear for being less than, fear of being found out, fear of-

A stranger approaches with a gaggle of people.

ETHAN: Hunter Biden?

HUNTER BIDEN: Yeah. Hey. Hey, what’s your name?

ETHAN: Ethan.

HUNTER BIDEN: Ethan, nice to meet you. Where are you from?

ETHAN: I’m from Florida.

HUNTER BIDEN: Oh, yeah?

ETHAN: Yeah.

HUNTER BIDEN: Oh, cool. Are you going to Pepperdine or are you at Pepperdine?

ETHAN: No, I was at USC.

HUNTER BIDEN: Cool.

ETHAN: I was going to say, I saw your Andrew Callaghan interview.

HUNTER BIDEN: Oh, cool. Andrew’s the best. Yeah. Yeah. I’m actually talking to him later today. He’s become a really good friend. Hey, nice to meet you. What’s your name?

RIZA THOMAS: Hi, I’m Riza Thomas.

HUNTER BIDEN: Hey, Riza. Nice to meet you.

RIZA THOMAS: Nice to meet you.

ETHAN: This is my girlfriend, Jessy.

HUNTER BIDEN: Hey, Jessy. Thanks for saying hi. I really appreciate it.

JESSY: He saw you and he’s like, “It’s him.”

HUNTER BIDEN: Yeah. Well, I appreciate you saying hi.

JESSY: We love your dad.

HUNTER BIDEN: Thank you. I love my dad too very much. Thank you. He is. He is. He’s tough. I wish he would complain more, but he doesn’t. But yeah, thank you guys.

JESSY: Nice to meet you.

HUNTER BIDEN: Nice to meet you.

JEFF PEARLMAN: Wait, how often does that happen?

HUNTER BIDEN: All the time.

JEFF PEARLMAN: Average per day, what would you say, for real?

HUNTER BIDEN: Well, it depends upon where I am, but if I’m out … everywhere. And perfect example, literally. So you live in the fear that what’s going to happen when you go out is that people are going to throw rocks at you because of what they’ve been told to think about you. It’s the exact opposite. And the exact opposite because of this is because the whole world has literally seen me naked with the crackpipe in my mouth.

So this thing that we’re always dying to do, connect with other people, there’s always a barrier between people because I’m kind of afraid that you may judge me for my shit and I may judge you for your shit and who knows how it’s going to react. No one gives a shit with me. There’s nothing that they’ve done that’s remotely as bad and it opens up this dialogue. It’s truly amazing.

Joe and Neilia Biden with their three children.

JEFF PEARLMAN: Wait, I have a question for real. I just had this conversation about this with someone.

HUNTER BIDEN: Yeah.

JEFF PEARLMAN: So I recently finished a memoir I’m writing about my early journalism career and I was a young music writer in Nashville, Tennessee. And I write this whole thing about being a kid, being horny and jerking off to Tanya Tucker photos. And people are like, “How can you write that?” And I was like, “Because we’ve all jerked off to someone.” We’ve all had moments. All of us have moments that we are embarrassed by, moments that we feel vulnerable, moments with so-and-so. And it seems like you somehow have been able to say, “Yeah, I’ve been fully exposed. There’s nothing left you can hinder with.”

HUNTER BIDEN: What are you going to say? And not only that, but we realize is that yeah, everybody’s jerked off to Tanya Tucker. You know what I mean?

JEFF PEARLMAN: You’ve also jerked off to Tanya Tucker? :)

HUNTER BIDEN: Not Tanya Tucker. But it’s the exact point. That’s one of the things I would love to do. I’d love to create a, I don’t know, Substack or something and basically make it a repository for everybody to tell their thing. And the realization is that it ain’t that bad.

JEFF PEARLMAN: No.

HUNTER BIDEN: And it’s not to be embarrassed about because there’s two things that you learn. One is that guilt is an appropriate emotion.

When you do something wrong, you should feel guilty about it and you should do everything in your power to make up for whatever you did if you can. Part of that is number one, beginning by asking for forgiveness, particularly the people that you hurt and you love. But shame is a whole different thing. Shame is all internal. Shame is you telling yourself that you’ll never be worthy again because of that thing.

There’s a guy, have you ever seen him, Chris? He’s a former CIA guy or something. Anyway, he talks about this thing. He said, “If you really want to change your life, then you have to become almost delusional in the way in which you forgive yourself.”

JEFF PEARLMAN: What does that mean?

HUNTER BIDEN: It means you have to rid yourself of the shame piece of it. You have to move on. When you’ve done something that you know is wrong and you tried to do everything that you can in order to make up for it, make amends for it, is it, let go of the shame, let go of those things. And I didn’t have any choice.

I could have either gone to Rishikesh and meditated for 10 years, shaved my head, then maybe I would come out and have what I believe I have now. And I have it now, but not out of some courage or some Buddha-like quality. It purely came out of pure survival. I had to make a choice. How could I walk out in the world if I was still feeling shame about what everybody was looking at on their phone six times a day for a period of time?

JEFF PEARLMAN: Wait. Was there an actual moment or was it a gradual sort of, or did you have a moment of revelation?

HUNTER BIDEN: No, I can’t point to the exact moment, but I pretend I do like apocryphally. It was when Rudy Giuliani, when they did the October surprise and they walked up to the courthouse steps in New Castle County to hand over a quote laptop, which never was a laptop. There’s a hard drive and they hacked materials and …

And he said that this laptop contained [stuff] and he went through a whole list of degenerate things including child exploitation, which was a complete and utter lie. And I can 100% say this a lie because everyone has seen the entirety of my cloud for 25 years. And in that moment, when someone accuses you, particularly America’s mayor, standing there with Bernie Kerrick going into the state police in Delaware and handing over your digital life that they’ve stolen from you and accusing you of the worst thing that you could ever, in my opinion, accuse someone.

JEFF PEARLMAN: 100%. You’re watching this?

HUNTER BIDEN: I’m watching. And first, you’re in shock and then you start to question yourself and then you’re up all night long going through your newsfeed, killing yourself. It was in the morning and I turned over and I was in bed and there sleeping between us was Beau, who was about seven months old and this amazingly beautiful woman that saved my life and I had to make a choice. Was I going to get out of bed that day and do life on life’s terms? And these were life’s terms now. And so that’s my apocryphal bullshit.

JEFF PEARLMAN: That’s good though.

HUNTER BIDEN: But real. I remember that night.

JEFF PEARLMAN: I just want to add …

HUNTER BIDEN: Yeah.

JEFF PEARLMAN: I’m from New York.

HUNTER BIDEN: Yeah.

JEFF PEARLMAN: Fuck Rudy Giuliani.

HUNTER BIDEN: I know.

JEFF PEARLMAN: Fuck Rudy. Guy could have been in the Hall of Fame if he just stopped everything after being mayor. Could have been in the Hall of Fame.

HUNTER BIDEN: Exactly.

JEFF PEARLMAN: He’s like the Pete Rose of mayors.

HUNTER BIDEN: Oh my God, he’s a horrible human being.

JEFF PEARLMAN: I was thinking about this walking over here actually. This is kind of unrelated, but kind of related. There’s a video from years ago and it was Lindsey Graham speaking about your dad and it gets very emotional and he basically says, “There’s no better person than Joe Biden. If anyone tells you anything bad about Joe Biden, they’re just not telling you the truth. He’s one of the best people ever.”

And I remember loving that video. And I’m not joking—loving that video because as a University of Delaware grad, I was always a fan of your dad just because I remember him at Delaware. And Lindsey Graham turning into this just freaking heel, it kind of broke my heart because I was like, if this can happen here, there’s no decency anywhere. And I do wonder from what you’ve experienced, do you have faith in humanity or are you just like, “We’re a bunch of assholes and there are a couple of good people who keep us afloat.”

HUNTER BIDEN: No, I haven’t even remotely lost faith in humanity because the flip side of that coin, for all the disappointments of the people like Lindsey Graham and so many others that have just sold their souls, whether it’s for self-protection or whether it’s for greed or whether it’s for power, there are so many decent people. Literally, that’s why I wanted to get in touch with you is because I love your sports reporting, but I’m not a huge sports guy. I follow football and I’ll go to some baseball games. I love the human interest stuff …

JEFF PEARLMAN: Thanks.

HUNTER BIDEN: Yeah. Anyway, in my experience through what I went through, as many people that have disappointed me from afar, so many people up close have been just incredibly gracious and shared in the humanity and connected me with in a way that I never would’ve had the opportunity to do unless I went through all this shit. There’s this thing in recovery where you’re...

And by the way, not just recovery, but people recovering from grief, people recovering from loss, people recovering from a traumatic situation that they find themselves in which you’re supposed to take, you do it like a gratitude list every morning.

JEFF PEARLMAN: What’s a good example of someone being kind to you? Someone serendipitous kindness, not like your dad or whatever.

HUNTER BIDEN: The kid that just woke up to me saying thank you so much for doing that Andrew Callaghan interview. Knowing everything that he knows about or that you would think that they would think about me is that he just wants to say, “Thank you for being so honest.” You know what I mean? “Thanks for doing that interview. And that interview was just me laying it all out there.”

JEFF PEARLMAN: Right.

HUNTER BIDEN: But I think I’ll give you the... I was going through one of the hardest times and it was 2022. I didn’t have any money. I don’t have any money. Hopefully that changes. And we had moved up to Big Rock, Malibu over here. It’s the first neighborhood in Malibu.

And we moved to the top because there was a guy, this filmmaker that literally had parked one of those digital billboards in front of our house in Venice, on South Venice Boulevard, our house faced the street and there was only one entrance, a digital billboard. And he just played over and over again for like three days, the images from the laptop for everybody.

JEFF PEARLMAN: Someone parking out in front of your house?

HUNTER BIDEN: Parked right in front of the house. And then he sat in the canal, which was right next to our house and he had a bullhorn and he just was screaming, “Come out, Hunter, come out.”

JEFF PEARLMAN: Did you ever go out?

HUNTER BIDEN: So we moved. No.

JEFF PEARLMAN: Wait, I want to ask you a question.

HUNTER BIDEN: Yeah.

JEFF PEARLMAN: How do you explain that?

HUNTER BIDEN: People are crazy, man.

JEFF PEARLMAN: Is that what it is? Does it come down to this, sanity?

HUNTER BIDEN: Oh, by the way, he’s part crazy, but you know what else he is? Making a lot of money off him, streaming him, making a movie. He made a full length feature film that supposedly about my life. Had a whole set in Romania. They spent $10 million on it.

JEFF PEARLMAN: And if you had gone out and you were like, “Hey man, can we just talk for a minute totally off the record?” You wouldn’t, right? It’s like there’s a certain viciousness, it seems, to over... I feel like I used to be very like, “Hey man, can we just talk off the record for a minute?” And people kind of respected that. I feel like people don’t respect that like they used to. Let’s just be human for a minute. We just talk about this.

HUNTER BIDEN: Not even remotely. So anyway, the story was about the kindness part.

JEFF PEARLMAN: Yeah.

HUNTER BIDEN: So I moved to this other house. A friend of mine helped me get there, rented it and the lease was up and I had nowhere to go and I just thought that they were going to renew the lease. But the house was owned by some guy in Singapore or something like that and it was modest house, but still more than I could tell. Raised the rent by double and said, “And if you can’t pay it, I need you out of the house at the end of the lease, which is in a week. And if you’re not out, I’m sending the sheriffs.” Crazy.

And I was in the midst of so much shit that I was like, “Oh my God, I got nowhere to go. I literally have like, how am I going to do this? I have a one-year-old. I have Melissa. How am I even going to arrange? So the guy that owned the house next door, a Lebanese Armenian guy that I had gotten to know because he had bought the house next door and he was fixing it up. It was a fixer up and it was just an investment property for him, but he was doing all the work himself. And I would paint the garage and over the course of the last six months, almost every other day, George would lean over the fence and I’d bring him a cup of coffee and we’d have a discussion.

He had the most interesting story about how he got here. And that morning, he’s like, “What’s wrong?” And I said, “Well,” and I told him everything that was going on and he said, “Take this house.” I said, “What?” I said, “I can’t do that, George.” He goes, “You’re going to take this house.” I said, “George, I really can’t.” The next day, he came with his son, he cut a hole in the fence and moved all the furniture in my house and gave me his house to use.

JEFF PEARLMAN: Wow.

HUNTER BIDEN: And he said, “Don’t worry about it. We’ll figure it out.”

JEFF PEARLMAN: That must be an amazing-

HUNTER BIDEN: Dude, the moment I needed, an angel, it appeared in the form of a 68-year-old Lebanese Armenian guy whose literal life should be made into a movie. He came to North America with $25 in his pocket when he was 19-years old after his dad’s whole business was taken over during the Communist Revolution in Syria and he had been imprisoned and tortured and he got on a plane, swept the floors of a huge factory and in two years, became the manager of the entire factory and then started his own business, came to Malibu 25 years ago and said, “What the hell am I living in Toronto for?” Sold everything and now lives here to end up in my life at that moment. He’s one of my best friends in the world right now now.

JEFF PEARLMAN: Amazing.

HUNTER BIDEN: And so many times over the course of the last six years, the perception that everybody has is that my life must be really hard because of just the public humiliation and the constant barrage. The fact is some of the greatest moments of my life, undeniably greatest moments of my life were over that period of time. I’m happier now than I’ve ever been in my entire life.

JEFF PEARLMAN: Whole life?

HUNTER BIDEN: My whole life. More certain of who I am, more assured, not constantly doubting, am I good enough? I still got lawsuits, I still got bills, but you know what? I really mean it and it’s not some kind of throwaway line. It’s really amazing. And that whole part about gratitude that I started off with, which is this, is that you’re supposed to do your list and the idea that I always had was you’re supposed to say, “I’m grateful for the beautiful day. I’m grateful for the love of my wife. I’m grateful for whatever.”

And those are all well and good, but until you can become grateful for all of it … I’m grateful for having been a crack addict. I’m grateful for those motel rooms I found myself in. I’m grateful for that public humiliation and I really, really mean it. I don’t want to sound like I’m just crazy trying to promote some whack-a-doodle self-help thing. But I really am grateful, because I’ve never felt more liberated in my life to be me, just to fully, fully be me.

JEFF PEARLMAN: No public pressure. No, you have to live up to a standard. You have to pretend this, blah, blah, blah.

HUNTER BIDEN: I always say this. I benefit more than anybody living today from low expectations . If I showed up... As long as I didn’t show up with a crackpipe in my mouth, shirtless with a stripper, you’re like, “Oh my God.”

JEFF PEARLMAN: [When we were scheduled to meet] I was looking for the shirtless crack addict, wearing a shirt.

HUNTER BIDEN: The benefit of low expectations.

JEFF PEARLMAN: I have a random, random question. Are you at all bothered by mortality; by the idea of you live X number of years and then you’re dead? And how does going through what you’ve gone through impact that one way or another?

HUNTER BIDEN: No, the only thing is that I want to be around to see my six-year-old when he’s 50. And my three older girls and I have a grandson now and-

JEFF PEARLMAN: That feels weird, right? Is that weird, that you’re a grandpa?

HUNTER BIDEN: Yeah, it does, but in it, it doesn’t. Well, when I say it, it does. But my whole... I guess what I’m saying is that no, I don’t fear death for the reason that I’m afraid of dying. I am so happy living right now. I feel like this is a second chance or third, whatever it is.

I’m in the midst of a whole new life and I want to live everything of it and I want to be able to be healthy and living it. Someone told me yesterday, he said, “Yeah, you look good.” And I said, “I’m 56.” And they said, “Oh my God, you’re 60?” I said, “No, I’m not 60. I’m 56.” She said, “Well, almost 60.” I’m like, “No!”

JEFF PEARLMAN: Wait, one thing I always say, I just want to say in regards to that … my kid is a sophomore at Northeastern and two years has flown by. I do not understand how my kid’s college education goes like this, but it does feel like Trump has been present for 753,000 years. I do not understand what is going on.

HUNTER BIDEN: They’re both concurrent. What the hell?

JEFF PEARLMAN: I was wondering about something, since you seem to be an open book. I read a lot. I know your family history. My wife and I talk a lot, a lot, a lot. My great-grandmother died in a concentration camp. And we were talking about how even though I didn’t know my great-grandmother who died in the concentration camp, I can still carry the trauma. There’s generational trauma that is actually inherited generation to generation and you carry that.

And you have had a shitload of trauma in your life beginning when you were 2-years old and your mother died and your sister died. I guess maybe via therapy or whatever, can you tie anything connective or what can you tie connective from that experience and that moment to who you are as a person?

HUNTER BIDEN: That’s a great question. It’s a great question because I’ve struggled with it for a long time. The first time I got sober or made a professional attempt at getting sober was in 2003. I stayed sober for seven years and I always rejected the idea that there was any cause for me being an addict. And I always really, really railed against the idea internally. And when I would talk to people like, my mom’s death didn’t have anything to do with the fact that I liked a bottle of Jack Daniels. You know what I mean?

JEFF PEARLMAN: Were you saying that because you felt like you had to say it because how can I blame someone else, or …

HUNTER BIDEN: Partly. And partly because it seemed like, well, that would mean that it’s something outside of my control. There’s something that I have to fix that I don’t know is broken, necessarily. And a fear of revisiting that in any way. I’ve moved on and had an incredible childhood and my loving parents and loving aunts and uncles and the whole community. But this time is the first time I ever really went there. And what I mean went there is, yeah, of course it does. Of course. I was trapped in the back of a crushed car with my brother and my deceased mother and sister for a whole hour. I spent a month in the hospital with a traumatic brain injury.

JEFF PEARLMAN: Do you remember this?

HUNTER BIDEN: I think I do, but I truly don’t know whether it’s because of the stories I’ve been told.

JEFF PEARLMAN: Right. What do I remember as a two-year-old versus …

HUNTER BIDEN: Yeah. Anyway, so yeah, of course it does. And then I heard this guy … you ever listened to Gabor Maté?

JEFF PEARLMAN: No.

HUNTER BIDEN: You should. It’s really amazing. He’s a psychologist, doctor, MD and psychologist from Toronto. And he’s a Holocaust survivor. He’s Hungarian. He was a baby during the Holocaust. And he and his family, I think his parents got out and came to Canada and he did an enormous amount of work on his own study over the course of, I think, almost two decades in working with addicts on the streets of Toronto, real what everybody would call hardcore addicts.

And he said the single unifying piece of every single addict is they’ve all experienced significant trauma, significant childhood trauma. And he talks about it in the context of what your wife picked up on. You guys were talking about this idea of ancestral trauma and literally passing it down through generations. And he talks about it as being very real and he tells a story of when his mother had him in Hungary.

And this was when they were rounding up all the Jews of Eastern Europe and she called the doctor because he wouldn’t stop crying. And the doctor came and said, “Don’t worry.” He said, “You’re not alone.” He said, “Every single Jewish baby in the entire city is crying.” And you realize how, whether it’s from that bond, from mother to child, the anxiety of your traumas is passed along or whether it’s in a community.

I don’t want to be hyperbolic about it, but I really feel that’s part of what’s going on right now is that we are all experiencing a trauma in this country right now. It’s just so mean and it is so cruel and there’s no sense of truth. So what’s the answer? How do we change this? It all seems so dark. And you open up your, as I was saying before, it was like we all carry around a pocket of heroin in our back pocket and it’s called a phone.

JEFF PEARLMAN: Would you actually say the phone is as addictive as-

HUNTER BIDEN: No. Well, yeah. In terms of the obsessive compulsive behavior that it causes that you know is not good for you, yeah. But does it have the same immediate dilatory effect on your life?

JEFF PEARLMAN: Right.

HUNTER BIDEN: Not as much.

JEFF PEARLMAN: It’s not crack.

HUNTER BIDEN: Watching Jeff Pearlman’s 30-second takes on TikTok … you could argue is a good thing, but in terms of that obsessive compulsive behavior that it causes in people and then some people truly warps their brains, particularly if you’re a kid.

Hunter, right, with his late brother, Beau.

JEFF PEARLMAN: Oh, yeah. You go to a restaurant, you see every kid with a phone in front of, him. I was actually thinking about something again, kind of unrelated, but I remember when Trump was shot in Pennsylvania and your dad called him …

HUNTER BIDEN: Well, was he?

JEFF PEARLMAN: I know. I don’t even know. I don’t disagree.

HUNTER BIDEN: The miraculous ear. Anyway …

JEFF PEARLMAN: Whatever the case, your dad called him. And when he held a press conference, he said, “I’m praying for ...” Blah, blah, blah. And you would think the number of times Trump just shits all over your dad, finds a reason to insult him, finds a reason to make fun of him. I don’t even understand the cruelty and I don’t understand the appeal of the cruelty. I always say to people, he literally called him after the shooting just to be a decent human being. I’m like, can we blame all this American cruelty on Trump or is he just-

HUNTER BIDEN: Yes. 100%. He’s given people license to be their worst selves. I think that those people are the vast minority. Okay, here’s an example. When he posted that fucking awful thing about Rob Reiner, literally hours after he was killed, I’m positive 85% of the people that came in contact with that, which is probably like 85% of the population said, “Ugh, that’s horrible.” But 15% of the population went, “Hmm, that’s my license to do bad things to people that I think are bad.” It’s the people that are trying to desperately find all of their problems in you rather than in themselves.

JEFF PEARLMAN: I actually think one of the reasons people shit all over you is just there’s a great desire in this country to bring people down a peg. “I don’t like my life that much. I’m not that happy with my life. Look at this guy, his dad’s the president, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” I think there’s a real joy in bringing people down a peg. It’s gross, but I think it is …

HUNTER BIDEN: I think that’s part of it. I think that the part of it was such an incredibly salacious story. You put presidential politics alongside of crack cocaine and a nude picture of me and a woman in a motel room. It’s like ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. You’re hitting all the dopamine right there. And then again though, the people that hate me the most on that have no idea of what it is.

JEFF PEARLMAN: Do they even hate you, though?

HUNTER BIDEN: It’s about themselves.

JEFF PEARLMAN: They don’t hate you.

HUNTER BIDEN: No, they don’t.

JEFF PEARLMAN: They don’t even know you.

HUNTER BIDEN: But the ones that express the most vitriol, I think it’s because ... I’ll give you an example. There’s one of these lawyers that has been harassing me for years now and it just came out that he’s about to get a divorce or his wife filed for a divorce.

JEFF PEARLMAN: His wife?

HUNTER BIDEN: Yeah. Saying that he’s abusive, he’s been addicted to opioids. He has left drugs and alcohol for his minor children and that he was committed involuntarily to a psychiatric center in Wisconsin and this whole thing paints this awful picture. I was like, “Ah. So this is why this motherfucker has been literally just awful.” I mean, the things that he says and the press and the things that he files are awful. And I said, “Ah, he hates himself.” That’s what this is. He hates himself. And you know what, it allowed me to do and kind of go, “Oh, okay.”

JEFF PEARLMAN: Can you actually muster empathy for him or can you not go that far? You don’t have to. I’m just curious.

HUNTER BIDEN: I’m not my dad.

JEFF PEARLMAN: All right. Percentage of men—male public figures who are crusaders against gay rights, gay marriage, who have secret feelings that they’re trying to suppress, I’d say 80 percent ...

HUNTER BIDEN: I mean, 100.

JEFF PEARLMAN: Maybe.

HUNTER BIDEN: I’m telling you. You want to know what the real... I call it the closetocracy, which is all these ideas in the closet. I mean, and I’ll name names. You can take them out later. And I don’t know if they’re gay or not. I have no idea. But you tell me if I had to make a bet whether Josh Hawley’s gay or not or Ted Cruz or Lindsey Graham or just go down the list, or Scott Jennings or all of these guys that are just so mean.

JEFF PEARLMAN: Mean combined with bias.

HUNTER BIDEN: Yeah, exactly. It’s just like, oh my God, I have a pretty good gaydar. And by the way, it’s open secret in DC. I lived there for 20 years. It’s a 100% open secret. And you know what it is though? And this is the part that I do have empathy for, they are tortured souls.

JEFF PEARLMAN: I agree.

HUNTER BIDEN: So they have decided that the only way to survive is to torture other people.

JEFF PEARLMAN: 100% agree.

HUNTER BIDEN: Yeah.

JEFF PEARLMAN: I think if Lindsey Graham came out tomorrow, he’d be celebrated. People would be like, “You know what? Good for you for being your true self.”

Do you hate politics?

HUNTER BIDEN: No. I think politics is, in the greatest sense of the word, is just a necessary thing for a democracy … that you have to have two competing visions in order to come up with the best ideas that almost always are the results of some compromise. And politics in and of itself can be this very, very noble thing and if you look through history it’s not merely a necessary evil. It’s literally a necessary thing to a thriving democracy to have debate, to have a conversation and a discussion in which one side eventually is the victor for the moment.

What I hate is the bastardization of what is the politics that they call politics. This isn’t politics. This is a zero-sum game. This is complete destruction. This is winner takes all. This is the other side are all treasonous. This is, they’re all a bunch of traitors, if you don’t agree with me, you should be executed. That’s literally what they’re saying. And what I’m saying is that, what the fuck are you talking about? What are you talking about? Because I believe in the Green New Deal, because I believe in transgender rights? Because we used to be able to disagree on shit like that and still share a burrito. Here’s one. Immigration. What are these guys talking about? We had a bill … there’s a solution. Fix the immigration system. Have more judges streamline the thing because we desperately need immigration. It is literally the lifeblood of this country. There’s always been a lifeblood in this country. And we sit here and they live in this kind of fantasy land and watch and they’re literally murdering people on the street. And to intimidate and to advance an agenda that no one agrees with. No one agrees with.

JEFF PEARLMAN: Well, I always find it amazing. I think abortion rights is an interesting issue. I’m very pro-choice. But I do understand why people are pro-life. I can sit across from someone and be like, “You think abortion is murder. I get it. I actually get it. I understand why you feel that way.” And I’ve had this discussion with many people. I just disagree, but I do get it. I feel like people aren’t willing to be like, “I get why you feel that way. I just don’t agree with you.” But that’s okay. It’s not wrong to disagree with someone. It’s healthy to disagree with someone. People don’t have the dialogues, I don’t think.

HUNTER BIDEN: That’s exactly right. It’s exactly good. But when I went to Georgetown, some of my greatest friends are Jesuit priests and we disagreed on [abortion], but it didn’t mean that either one of us thought that we weren’t probably the greatest, most decent group of people that I’ve ever met. I’m sure we had disagreements also on the Catholic Church itself, but I still love them.

And now we’re just told that if he makes people choose a side ... I mean, Jesus Christ, he builds golden statues of himself. What are you going to say? He posts pictures of himself with a crown on his head and tells us he’s a king over and over and over again.

JEFF PEARLMAN: Picture on the passport.

HUNTER BIDEN: He’s taking $10 billion from the IRS to settle a lawsuit that is a bullshit lawsuit. You want to talk about the leak of tax documents? Come talk to me, motherfucker. Oops, sorry about the curse …

JEFF PEARLMAN: No, it’s all good.

HUNTER BIDEN: Yeah. And my dad told me I’ve got to stop cursing.

JEFF PEARLMAN: Did your dad literally say, ‘Stop cursing’?

HUNTER BIDEN: He said it occasionally once in a while. I said, “Oh, that’s rich coming from you.”

JEFF PEARLMAN: Does he have a go to curse?

HUNTER BIDEN: What?

JEFF PEARLMAN: Did he have a go to curse when you were growing up?

HUNTER BIDEN: No, no, never in front of us. Never in front of us.

JEFF PEARLMAN: Mine is motherfucker.

HUNTER BIDEN: Mine too. By the way, it’s got to be appropriate.

JEFF PEARLMAN: I use it too often.

HUNTER BIDEN: Can’t be forced.

JEFF PEARLMAN: Yeah. Oh, so douchebag. It’s not really a curse but I love it.

HUNTER BIDEN: Agreed.

JEFF PEARLMAN: I have a question and you’re going to disagree with me. That’s cool. I didn’t love that your dad ran again. I kind of was thinking he shouldn’t. Tell me why I’m wrong. I’m actually being serious.

HUNTER BIDEN: Look, I don’t want this to be clipped in a way where I go, oh, I agree with you.

JEFF PEARLMAN: No, no, no, no.

HUNTER BIDEN: So without being defensive. If you just look at what happened, what happened was is that we beat Trump. We had two years of accomplishing what no president since FDR had accomplished. Got more legislation passed, bipartisan legislation. And by the way, all because of my dad and not his staff, not anybody else. And I really mean this because it always, always came down to one of two people in which he personally had to convince in order to be able to get it done at a 51-49 Senate and at that time, the slimmest majority in the House of Representatives.

And he somehow passed more legislation than any president since LBJ. He reduced the child poverty rate by half. Lowest Black unemployment in history of the United States, highest job creation of any president in eight years and on and on and on. And so what ends up happening is you go into the midterms and unlike the conventional wisdom about the midterms is that he ended up having a better midterms than any president since FDR in 1932. Lost fewer seats in both the House and the Senate than any other president, gained more governorships than any incumbent president ever and turned more House state legislatures than any other common president ever.

So that would’ve been the time to say, okay, who’s coming next? But the problem was is that Trump never left the stage. He never left the stage. He should have been imprisoned by then or actually excommunicated by the Republican Party and you look out there and you say, “Okay, if we go through a brutal primary process right now, who’s going to do that? Kamala? Who’s going to beat Trump? Gavin? I love Gavin. I think he would make an incredible president.

But who’s going to do that right now? You have the team, you have the single most important factor of any of being reelected as President of the United States, over 46 other presidents, incumbency. And so you just go. And as you’re going, taking shots from everywhere, trying to get the shit done that you need to get done, the process starts. And anybody can run …

And so ultimately at the end of the day, you end up at this position. And here’s the thing, I promise you, my dad is 100% mentally capable of making the decisions. Did he have the energy that he had before? Absolutely not. He’s 83-years old. He got old in front of us and the New York Times... Donald Trump has fallen asleep in the Oval Office sitting behind the resolute desk with people talking behind him over and over again. He’s got bruises on both arms. He disappeared for a four-day period of time when you know that he had a mini stroke. You have all of this bullshit.

And I don’t know, literally the New York Times between 2022 and 2023, I think wrote 86 article on Joe Biden’s age. And so you have all of this feeding into it and then he has this disastrous, disastrous debate. Now one of the reasons people elected Joe Biden to begin with is because here’s the thing about Joe Biden, you got more votes-

JEFF PEARLMAN: You call your dad Joe Biden?

HUNTER BIDEN: Yeah, no, I definitely don’t. That sound like an insult. But here’s the thing about my dad.

JEFF PEARLMAN: Joe Biden.

HUNTER BIDEN: Whose name is Joe Biden, by the way.

JEFF PEARLMAN: You call him Joe.

HUNTER BIDEN: He got 81 million votes. He got more votes than any president in the history of the United States of America. And now the Pod Save America guys will tell you, well, that’s because it was a vote against Trump. But where were they this time? Why did people become more comfortable with Trump because of COVID and his reaction to that; the 41 felony convictions and the rape charge? What are you telling me? Where’s the missing eight million votes this time around? And I would tell you where the votes are.

The truck driver in Scranton, the teamster in Cleveland, the Irish Catholic mom, the grandmother that is a waitress in Minnesota and in St. Paul, Minnesota, those people that came out from my dad, because you know what? They’re not sure about abortion. They may be staunchly Catholic, but they look at my dad and they go, “He’s not going to do anything crazy.” Or you sit there and you have this whole trans thing and they’ve spent $300 billion telling people that trans athletes and the country’s being taken over by... Which is by the way, we can talk about that a lot …

JEFF PEARLMAN: Wait, serious question. Is the whole country not being taken over by trans athletes?

HUNTER BIDEN: No, strangely, it’s not.

JEFF PEARLMAN: They’re not? Okay. I was worried.

HUNTER BIDEN: But my point is that I think the people looked at my dad and thought, “You know what? He’s confused by the whole thing as I am, but Joe Biden’s not going to force this, something I don’t understand down my throat. He’s going to be compassionate to anybody.” And that’s where we found ourselves in that situation. And I tell you this, I think that if my dad had stayed in, I do believe that he had a better chance of beating him than anybody else for that reason alone and for the historical reasons of incumbency.

JEFF PEARLMAN: You think he would’ve won?

HUNTER BIDEN: Yeah, I think he would’ve won.

JEFF PEARLMAN: Yeah.

HUNTER BIDEN: I do think he would’ve won. And I think he would’ve won and he would’ve gotten diagnosed with prostate cancer and metastatic bone cancer and said, “I’m ready to go.” But we never got to that point. One of the reasons we never got to that point is because the, and this is why I have no love loss for the “Democratic Party,” is because the money people, that was all because of the money people because all the people that are the billionaires, they stepped into the Democratic Party and they said, “It’s the same people that go to Lake Como with George Clooney that think that they are running the show and that’s what happened.

And so because I’ll tell you what, the people that knew him, the Black Caucus, the Hispanic Caucus, the Progressive Caucus, all of those interest groups, not the money interest groups, all those interest groups stuck with my dad until the moment he said he wasn’t going to run again. The people that went against him, so all the insider DC Beltway elite that are all, by the way, in league and one of the reasons why we’re in the shit that we are in now when I started at the beginning, why did we do nothing about the algorithms of Meta or Instagram or Twitter or anything like that is because they’re paying the Chuck Schumers off just as much as they’re paying off the Republican Party and protecting those interests. They’re the corporate party.

JEFF PEARLMAN: What are we going to do about AI? I fear we’re not going to do anything about AI because the amount of money coming into politics and also—you have a president who’s posting AI video, we’re not going to do anything about it because they don’t even care about it …

HUNTER BIDEN: No. And by the way, there’s another thing I could talk endlessly about it. Dude, we’re all sitting here worried about this, the reflecting pool. We’re on the cusp of the greatest, in my opinion, if you listen to the people on the single greatest leap in human history and the evolution of mankind …

JEFF PEARLMAN: Do you consider more good, bad, or terrifying?

HUNTER BIDEN: All three. I mean, really all three. And I don’t know. And so much is going to be dependent upon leadership. Look, the idea that we’re not going to come... Here’s one, here’s an idea. Every single thing that allows for these LLMs to eventually get to AGI has all been stolen from us without any remuneration whatsoever from the beginning of the moment someone carved their name into a rock, every poem, every book, every utterance, every digital-

JEFF PEARLMAN: I’m part of a class action lawsuit right now.

HUNTER BIDEN: Oh, you are?

JEFF PEARLMAN: Yeah, because I’ve written 11 books and they’ve all been gobbled up by AI.

HUNTER BIDEN: Yeah. And by the way, all of that is going to take every single job that has ever existed, and it’s going to throw humanity potentially into complete and utter chaos. And there’s going to be about five, six literal individuals that are going to become trillionaires. You know what I say? Fuck you. You’re giving us, I don’t know, 20%, 50%? It should be for humanity. It should be for every American.

Every American should be born with a digital birth rate in which they receive their payment, just like the Alaska Fund. It is no different than any other commodity or what’s coming out of the ground. It’s ours. It belongs to us. You’re stealing it from us every day.

JEFF PEARLMAN: Very nice. Sometimes I find myself rooting for the asteroid. I just do. Sometimes I’m just like-

HUNTER BIDEN: I know.

JEFF PEARLMAN: I do. I swear to God. Sometimes I’m just like-

HUNTER BIDEN: Yeah, man. But then I look, I’m sitting here and I say, “Please give me one more day.”

JEFF PEARLMAN: I know your dad’s super religious. Are you religious?

HUNTER BIDEN: Not at all.

JEFF PEARLMAN: Does that bother your dad? Well, your wife is Jewish, right?

HUNTER BIDEN: No. Yeah, my wife is Jewish.

And I went to mass every Sunday. And it’s not that I’m a religious. I’ve come to the believe that the only thing really worth it in any religion is if you sweep away all of the dogma and all of the rules and all of the rituals. And you get down to what the actual prophet or savior or Buddha or anyone said. And it literally is exactly the same thing for every single one of them. It’s love thy neighbor. It’s literally, that’s it. It’s love. Love yourself. Love your neighbor. Compassion.

JEFF PEARLMAN: My way I tell if people are decent people, I swear to God, I have two tests. How do you treat the waiter? And do you put your shopping cart back or do you leave it in the parking lot? And I feel like-

HUNTER BIDEN: Those are two good tests.

JEFF PEARLMAN: Just a little like... I used to be a baseball writer and Barry Bonds, famous Giant, treated every single person like trash. People he didn’t need to be nice to him. And I always thought, that’s a good judge of character. How do you treat the people you don’t have to be nice to? I just think that’s my number one way of judging people.

HUNTER BIDEN: Yeah. And it’s funny. My grandfather is-

JEFF PEARLMAN: Your dad’s side or your mom’s?

HUNTER BIDEN: It’s my mom’s side. Who I’m named after, Robert Neil Hunter.

JEFF PEARLMAN: Hunter. Yeah. I know this. And he owned a restaurant?

HUNTER BIDEN: Hunter Diner. Yeah.

JEFF PEARLMAN: In Auburn.

HUNTER BIDEN: In Auburn, New York. Let’s go. Exactly right. Still there.

JEFF PEARLMAN: What was the name of it?

HUNTER BIDEN: Hunter Diner.

JEFF PEARLMAN: And it’s still there?

HUNTER BIDEN: Yeah. I think it’s just closed down. But my grandfather would always ask the waiter’s name. That’s why I asked the waiter’s name. And what you realize is, he taught me this and my dad’s the same way. But my dad, he would alway say, “You know how it changes a person’s whole day when someone sees them?”

JEFF PEARLMAN: 100%.

HUNTER BIDEN: Just the simple act of asking somebody what their name is.

JEFF PEARLMAN: I’m also like—this kid who you talked to for five minutes at beginning this interview, he’s telling his friend right now, “Oh my God, I met Hunter Biden. He was so nice to me. He asked my girlfriend’s name,” blah, blah, blah. That’s all it took. That was 30 seconds out of your day. Why wouldn’t you?

HUNTER BIDEN: Yeah. I was on a plane the other day coming back and this guy sits down next to me and it’s kind of crazy. Hair purple and a bigger guy. And he took out a big bag of candy and he passed them out to everybody around him. And then they had a meal and one of the meals was gone. He was like, “Oh, you can have mine, man.”

And I was like, “No, no, no, no, no, no, no.” And they were airplane enchiladas, so it wasn’t like getting any real thing. But he was like, “No, no, really. I’ve had Mexican twice. I don’t want it.” And because he had pre-ordered or something and he’s like, “You can have it.” And I told him when I got off the plane …

JEFF PEARLMAN: Did he know who you was?

HUNTER BIDEN: No, he had no idea. And I told him when I got off the plane, “I just want to let you know that you can’t imagine the ripple effect of being so kind has.” It made my day. Really, it made-

JEFF PEARLMAN: And now you’re telling me about it. You literally told me about it.

HUNTER BIDEN: Yeah. Made my day. And by the way, for real, that’s what I said to you before, I think I wrote to you, it’s like those stories that you tell on TikTok about those little acts of kindness, because I totally agree with you. You can always tell the real character of a person by the way in which they treat the guy who’s sweeping the sidewalk.

JEFF PEARLMAN: My new thing is last few years is I go to... I like Dunkin’ Donuts. I’m going to go in the drive-thru to Dunkin’ Donuts. I will always buy the person behind me on the drive-through line their coffee. And someone said to me, “What if it’s a huge MAGA guy?” I said that was even better in a lot of ways, because it shows someone that there’s kindness in the world. You just can’t go wrong being nice to people. I just don’t think you can go wrong. I just don’t think you can.

HUNTER BIDEN: That’s one of the best moves ever. There’s little things that aren’t little at all. Huge. It’s huge, but he infects it. So that all comes back to the original thing that we were talking about. Do you think it’s just [Trump]? And I think that there’s plenty of people that have been able now and plenty of people that have amplified it. But I think that without him, there’s no way that this exists right now. He’s singularly …

There was a psychologist. Do you ever see that guy that back in 2015 when Trump was running and he diagnosed him with malignant narcissism, which he said is a very rare diagnosis actually. It’s worse than the sociopath and it’s worse than the psychopath. And he said if he’s ever elected President of the United States, it would be like an atomic bomb in America.

And I saw him interview him four months ago and they showed that clip of him saying that. And my question is, I don’t know of any more accurate prediction in the history of politics. Totally.

JEFF PEARLMAN: Do you think we survive this?

HUNTER BIDEN: Oh yeah, we survive. The opportunity is this. You know what else he’s done? He has exposed some of the... He’s exposed all of our weak points. He’s like a human... I don’t even know.

JEFF PEARLMAN: He’s like ink in water. He finds the crevices.

HUNTER BIDEN: Exactly. And now we’re all like, holy fuck, we sure better fix that. The Supreme Court, this is crazy. The electoral college. What the fuck? You sit there and you actually now can have the discussion without people saying like, “Well, is it really worth it? Is it really worth the constitutional Congress? Is it worth the hassle of the constitutional amendment to do that?” Oh, yeah. I think that you have at least 60% of the country right now going, “Oh yeah, I’m ready for that.” And the question is, does it play out without it turning into something really violent in some way? I really believe that.

JEFF PEARLMAN: Let’s hope so.

HUNTER BIDEN: Yeah.

Top 10 U.S. States Where Truck Driver Opportunities Improved the Most (2023–2024)
U.S. State	Truck Driver Opportunity Score (100)	Rank
Kentucky	94	1
Virginia	80	2
West Virginia	68	3
Oklahoma	66	4
Washington	65.8	5
Arizona	62	6
Iowa	55	7
Nevada	52	8
Utah	50	9
Ohio	49	10

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