Chapo Trap House - BONUS: Smothered by Riches feat. Peter Coyote

Episode Date: May 5, 2026

Former character actor Peter Coyote joins Will to talk about his new book Smothered by Riches, a polemic on the collapse of the New Deal consensus and the legacy of the Powell memo. He and Will talk about the history of neoliberalism from the Chicago boys to Bill Clinton, Peter’s decades-long political life including time in an Anarchist theater troupe, and a bit of Zen Buddhism for good measure. Pick up a copy of Smothered by Riches wherever you can: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/smothered-by-riches-peter-coyote/1147458103

All right. Hello, everybody. It's Will here, and I've got some bonus chopo for you. Today, I will be talking to an actor whose work I have admired for many, many years. But on today's episode, he is appearing in a different guys, not as, you know, the star of films such as Bitter Moon and Southern Comfort, covered by yours truly on movie mindset. I'm talking to the actor Peter Coyote. But Peter, you're appearing here more in different guys as an activist and author to talk about a book. book you wrote called Smothered by Riches, How America Went From Democracy Rules to Money Rules. So, Peter, welcome to the show. Thank you very much. Can I say something about the word activist? Yeah, please. So I never use it. Oh, okay.

Because it was invented by my enemies. If you want to separate somebody from the broad mass of humanity, you add an IST after their name. You make them a communist, a socialist, an artist, an activist, and activist, and activist, and environmentalist. And the implication is that most of us don't care about what we believe. And there's a few radical individuals who are extreme and outside the pale. And we put an IST after their name. I turn it around and I say if you're not engaged with your life, you're a hypocrite. And so I just, I just don't like to be called an activist because most people are engaged with their lives.

well that is a very good point and i will see if i can make it through the rest of this interview without uh revealing my unconscious programming by the forces of uh neoliberal capitalism here peter that's why i'm here will i will i'll endeavor to do my best but uh peter when i was thinking about um how to how to open the interview how to introduce your book i have to say i my mind did return to uh another another one of your many roles in life which is i think i think people might know you also as the voice of the many Ken Burns documentaries. And I recently watched the newest one, The American Revolution. And I was thinking about the American Revolution as I was preparing for this interview and reading your book, there are obviously like the inherent contradictions in the

promise of American democracy in our founding. But like throughout our history, there have been revolutionary moments that like I would argue like expanded the horizons of that promise. I'm thinking of the Civil War, which a historian Matt Carp has referred to as the first real American revolution. And then, as discussed in your book, FDR's New Deal as sort of expanding an economic democracy as well as, you know, like other life, liberty in the pursuit of happiness.

However, Peter, would you say it's fair to describe what the subject of your book as sort of a 60 or 70 year long effort at a counter-revolution to roll back some of the promise of the full enfranchisement, both like economically and democratically, of an engaged American public.

Yeah, that's exactly right. Thanks. I should have put that on the cover. So there are other revolutions, too. Sometimes there are revolutions of the mind, like the American transcendentalists, like the 1930s, when writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway, and these guys were kind of opening up mental space and other ways of being. The 60s was a part of that rising of earth-based spirit worshiping cultures. But starting from the American Revolution, which was actually a civil war, as Ken shows it, there was always a vast conservative population that really didn't have a beef with the king. They had a beef with the parliament, and it was an economic beef. And then there were people who wanted to be independent and wanted to express American culture. So those guys have always been there, and politics or war has been the mediating mechanism by which we work things out. But what really made them crazy was Roosevelt

because it's not so well known, but one of the basic underpinnings of right-wing conservative thought is actually eugenics. And there's a guy named Pearson who began writing back in the early 19th, century, pointing out that they're afraid that when you take steps

to make the lives of people better, you're including a lot of the wrong sort, their quotes. And they didn't want that at all because these people feel that they are the best sort. And of course, their only metric is either race or wealth. So they've set up a ruler whereby their own judgment, they are the best of people. And so they blamed Roosevelt for overturning evolution. The job of evolution in their understanding was to cull the weak, you know, survival of the fittest. Well, they faulted, they faulted Roosevelt for supporting women, poor people, rural people, black people,

thinking they were the lesser sorts and that nature was being overthrown. So they came up with this idea, especially the Mount Pelloran people who started neoliberalism from Friedrich Hayek. They came up with this idea that you had to wean people from their historic instincts to care for each other. Because we grew up on the savannas of Africa. We have these built-in impulses to care and help one another. And Hayek said, we've got to get over that. We've got to institute the discipline of markets, which will call the week for us. And so the part that's missing is they never say that aloud.

Yeah. So when in 1971, when Lewis Powell sent his memorandum to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and Lewis Powell was a board member of Philip Morris, think Marlborough, and he was a guy that hated the left. I mean, really, you can look at this Powell memorandum online, and you'll see it's like a declaration of war. He said America's done all at can for the Negro. He hated the liberal professors.

who were instructing students, how to resist the Vietnam War. He hated white kids fighting for civil rights. And he laid out a 38-page blueprint for how to take power back from the corporate sector and how to weaken government from its ability to regulate the corporate sector, especially by adding expenses like health care, fair wages, environmental protections, anti-pollution, et cetera. and the importance of this was immediately recognized by America's wealthiest families. So what they did was this was immediately financed by the Koch brothers, by Richard Scaife, who was a melon, by Joseph Coors, people like the DeVos family, and they pulled it underground.

And they dedicated literally hundreds of millions of dollars. I can read you at some other time. how many, actually billions of dollars were put into play, starting think tanks. The Heritage Foundation, thank you Russell Vote and Project 2025, the Claremont Foundation, the Manhattan Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Foundation. And they started putting smart, overpaid guys to work, coming up with terminology and phrases that would fight back the Bill of Rights and the government's ability to regulate the corporate sector. And I'll give you some examples in which they were extremely successful.

And then I'll stop and breathe and let you ask me something else. But for instance, from 1929, until the Reagan Revolution, there was a law and place called the Fairness Doctrine. and it was based on the on the fact that the airwaves belong to the people and that what passes across the airwaves should be of benefit to the people. Well, the think tanks decided that that was an infraction on their civil liberty to lie, basically free speech, anti-free speech. And they leaned on Reagan, Reagan's FCC canceled it, and within a month, You had guys like Rush Limbaugh, Christian nationalists,

Sinclair Broadcasting, sweeping the country with right-wing single-issue radio. And there was now no stricter to tell the truth. Everything was opinion. Everything was my idea. So this was generating hundreds of millions of dollars. So jump forward to the Clinton administration, which turned a Democratic Party into a neoliberal. liberal party. What neoliberalism is the belief that markets are a natural entity that should never be regulated. Well, that's a philosophy that works for rich people, but markets are always

regulated. If you don't regulate poisons, you're going to kill your population. If you don't regulate pollution, you're going to kill your population. If you don't regulate worker safety, you're going to maim and wound your population. So by the time Clinton and Larry Summers and Robert Rubin realized that the Republicans were getting all the big money, and they changed the Democratic Party to go after that money, they passed the telecommunications bill, which ended the restrictions on how many radio stations, TV stations, and newspapers you could own. And within two years, 50 diverse media corporations had been gobbled up into three behemoths, which now control every news platform you see anywhere on the air. So what's the consequence of that? The consequence of that

is a corporation is a private business. It's not under any compunction to give a hearing to ideas it considers inimical. So the bandwidth of acceptable political discourse in the United States goes from center-left, let's say Rachel Maddow, Nicole Wallace, people I admire and respect. but center-left to far right. Well, if you compare that to what any Western European Parliament or Scandinavian Parliament has as a bandwidth, they have communism, they have socialism, they have democratic socialism,

they have Christian Democrats, they have health parties, they have green parties, and somehow out of that bandwidth of dispute, they've all agreed to take light, heat, power, health care, and higher education, out of the profit-making sector. So we don't even have the vocabulary to figure out how the Finns have successfully defeated homelessness

or how they've made a better education than we approach. So these are the consequences that what happened from this invisible research that nobody knows about but is publicly findable, it's like we've entered the World Series of poker and every country gets 52 cards in its deck and America's given cards with 40, 40 cards in a deck. And we're suffering for it.

All jokers. Peter, to begin with like the New Deal, I think like, I was born in 1983. So I've lived my entire life after this neoliberal turn in Western governments and American culture. But like, for a long time, the New Deal was the dominant paradigm of American politics. And there was a right and left wing to our government. There were Republicans and Democrats. But essentially everyone governed and led. under a kind of a framework that FDR had created of a big government that, you know,

departments to regulate things like, you know, Richard Nixon created the OSHA. And even he was still kind of governing within a New Deal framework, right? Exactly right. Then this moment comes in the 70s to like the sort of financialization of the economy. The neoliberal revolution, I think you summed up neoliberalism very nicely as like a market dominated society. I think it's so effective because there is a right and a left wing to neoliberalism as well. And it remains kind of vaporous, sort of hard to describe because it's just so ever present. But to return to Lewis Powell, you talk about Lewis Powell and the Powell memo. You mentioned it

earlier. But you just like talk a little bit about who Lewis Powell was and like what was actually in this 30 page memo that, you know, marks like is kind of the magnacarta of this sort of turn to a like away from a New Deal society to a market dominated society. Yeah, I will tell you. So Lewis Powell was a wealthy guy. Richard Nixon later appointed him to the Supreme Court. Here's what his manifesto did. His manifesto called on business to use its wealth as both an advertiser and a donor to

universities and charities to insist that more time be spent extolling the virtues of free trade and free enterprise. He singled out liberal faculty members at the great schools, much as Donald Trump is doing right now. They singled out the teach-ins. They singled out radio stations and television stations, and they went after them by having their sponsors demand more time and more attention being paid to free trade. Last night, I heard Jamie Raskin talking about something on the television, and free trade came out of his mouth. Every politician in my lifetime has said free trade, as if it exists anywhere. There is no such thing as free trade. Free trade means America can trade wherever it wants and do whatever it wants, but we regulate our markets.

We used environmental laws to stop foreign cars from coming in in the 60s and 70s when I was growing up. It happens all the time. So we've been kind of propagandized as a people into thinking that everything that happens in our country comes from freedom. And that's not the case at all. So there's a phrase budgets express values. The size of the ice budget indicates that the most pressing problem in the United States must be illegal immigration. The fact that most families in the U.S. can't withstand the shock of an unexpected $1,000 demand, or afford daycare or insurance premiums, or the interest rates on credit card, or living wage salaries, apparently pale next to the threats posed by stoop laborers in the lettuce fields.

Now, this is what these people, these illegal immigrants, pay into the United States for taxes for which they're uncompensated. In 2022, they paid $25 billion in Social Security taxes. They paid $6.4 billion in Medicare taxes. They paid $1.8 billion in unemployment insurance, programs they're barred from accessing. So that today as a nation operating under neoliberal guidelines, we spend $84 to $85 billion, creating employment opportunities for the president's loyalists and detention facilities to rid ourselves from people we've already extracted $34 billion from who receive no services. How else can you describe this but cruelty and extortion?

In reading your book and considering Lewis Powell and his memo, the thing I was struck by is that like, this goes beyond quite a bit like just the sort of prerogatives of business and the wealthy to retain as much of their wealth and profit as possible and maximize their advantage in a democratic system in which most people aren't incredibly wealthy. I was struck by more like the moral and ideological tone of Lewis Powell as someone who sort of seeking to create a kind of moral and spiritual. container for this market-based society and one in which that he was like, you mentioned how angry he was at the idea of sort of middle-class American white kids in the 1960s taking action on behalf of black people in apartheid conditions in the South in this country. But like, in a market society, human worth, the value of a human life, there's a real belief that that is sort of efficiently adjudicated by the market. So that like if you are poor or have no resources, that is a reflection on your moral worth. And not only that, a reflection of the

futility of the government or any other human being attempting to alleviate the burdens or like your materials or physical suffering. Exactly. So sorry that I drifted off. I do that. So Powell's declaration, if you read it, is a declaration of war. The tone is angry. It's like Trump talking about fairness. This poor billionaire who's being treated unfairly. So let's just look for a second at what the bullet points of neoliberalism is and the ways in which it creates cruelty as a kind of moral stricter on people it considers inferior. Is that okay?

Yeah. So we'll just run down a list. The privatization of state-owned enterprises and public services. So who benefits from changing public sector or nonprofit services into for-profit corporations? Certainly not the people who have to meet the demands of adding profit onto those services or who get what is in effect a tariff on every transaction. Deregulation of business and finance, loosening rules on corporations, banks, and capital flows, which is precisely how the entire economy was crashed in,

2008. All the regulating mechanisms were fraudulent. The companies that were telling us whether investments were safe or not were all in the bag, and they lied about these tranches of mortgages. The Federal Consumer Protection Agency, they just got rid of it. Vast efforts by business to rest unfair profits from consumers through fraud, usurious credit card interest, payday loans, fraudulent mortgages, and Elizabeth Warren actually put together a government agency that stopped it, and Trump got rid of it. Trade and capital liberalization. Free trade sounds plausible. You know, millions of think tank dollars have been dedicated to making it appear, oh, we should raise corn where corn is best, and we should make steel where steel is best.

But what's edited out of the sales pitch are the social, economic, and environmental costs of destroying local industries and watersheds, the fiscal and emotional costs of invalidating feelings of responsibility to place, the factored costs of destroying local culture, the dignity and security of sustainable employment.

None of that stuff has ever talked about. Austerity and smaller welfare states cutting public spending. Well, austerity is the constellation of policies we impose on debtor nations to qualify for World Bank loans or IMF loans or U.S. loans. These are nations that we've pillaged through imperialism. Austerity demands sacrifices of their populations to make life for them more difficult and expensive so they can pay our loans.

Austerity promotes growth and fiscal stability. This is the most self-refuting of neoliberal claim. and it was disproved by its own central institution. The Internal Monetary Fund report acknowledged that neoliberal growth, equality tradeoff does not exist in practice, and that redistribution does not hurt growth. Peter, the term neoliberalism, I think it trips a lot of people up because, like you said, free trade sounds great.

It's trade that's free. Who wouldn't want that? Neoliberalism, it's like, it's liberal. It's liberalism, but it's new. I mentioned that there is like a right and a left wing to neoliberalism, Lewis Powell being very much on the right side of that spectrum. But then like, okay, the Clinton administration, like the new Democrats, there is a kind of a left wing or, you know, a left wing only by context here,

to neoliberalism. And like there is liberal arguments that are used to bolster this market dominated society. Like for instance that like, you know, markets, they liberate people and they sort of validate our own individual identity. and like race or sex or, you know, sexuality, gender, things like that. How do you see some of the, like, liberal advocates for neoliberalism? How do you see those arguments, like, play out in our culture, like, outside of, like, the constellation of think tanks, like right-wing think tanks, like the Heritage Foundation,

American Enterprise Institute, et cetera? Well, the Heritage Foundation is not the liberal wing of neoliberalism. Yeah. So I'm with you that neoliberalism sounds like it might indicate a new version of something friendly and life-affirming. What the term originally meant was a doctrine centered on individual liberty, natural rights, and limited consent-based government, not the absolute minority, authority of a monarchy. And the reason I read you that list is because there's two lines of type, it doesn't appear particularly odious or dangerous. But what you get down into their shopping

list, what they want from government, you can see that in every case, the poor, the weak, the undefended are taking it in the shorts. And what's being protected are great fortunes. And unfortunately, that's as true of the Democratic Party, not equally true. The Democratic Party has voted against unions many times. It has voted against the living wage many times. it's voted against raising the minimum wage, which is still $7.15 an hour. That means if you work 40 hours a week, at the end of a year, you've made $15,400, which is less than the federal poverty guideline. That's legal in the United States. And the liberal wing of neoliberalism is the Democratic Party center right. And it all comes down to the way we

fund our elections. And the reason that's worth mentioning is because during the Civil War, I mean the Revolutionary War, the enemy was not the king. The enemy was the parliament. And so when we won the war, we never considered parliaments as a governing form. And we really took our basic form of bicameral government from the Haudenoshone Indians, the Iroquois, which is where we got by camera legislation. But if you look today at every Western European democracy and Scandinavian democracy, they all limit or prevent private contributions, corporate contributions to elections. They have full federal funding of elections.

They severely limit private and corporate stuff. They have full transparency of who gives how much to whom. And they're far advanced from where we are. So I don't care who you are as a legislator in the United States. If you come into office and you want to do goodwill, good work for the people, you have to ask yourself, how far can I go in helping the people without risking my money that's keeping me in office? And every compromise in our system is made with money. And yet money never compromises the other way.

So I've yet to see a single person except maybe Bernie Sanders. get up on the floor and say, we need full federal funding of elections. We need a prohibition against corporate donations. The job of a corporation is to create wealth for its shareholders. Why should they be allowed to skew public policy for their shareholders? Why should we not have universal voting? Why should we not have a week to vote or declare voting day a national holiday? So while the Democrats share more of what they steal, and while I think there are more people of conscience in the Democratic Party,

its indebtedness to great fortunes still inhibits it from doing its job to serve the people. And what I'm afraid of is that the Democrats will win this time. And if they don't roll back the tax cuts to billionaires, if they don't tax billionaires at appropriate means, if they don't pull the Department of Justice and DHS and Homeland Security out of the executive branch, if they don't really equalize some of the imbalances of wealth, two years will go by, the people will be upset, and they'll bring another charismatic sweet talker onto the gerbil wheel, and we'll pick it up again, because the taboo in this system is to discuss money in meaningful terms, which means something other than we got to.

to get the money out of politics. Amen, Peter. And to that point about it's never discussed, like money, profit, who it goes to and how that affects power. I mean, I think that's sort of a trick that's being played here. I think the fascinating thing to me about the neoliberal revolution is that it's not so much the idea that it is preferable that governments never intervene in markets because, like, they'll always fuck it up or their unintended consequences will be worse than the thing they're trying to ameliorate. I think neoliberalism is, a spiritual worldview that pretends to believe or is convinced enough people to believe that markets are a force outside of human intervention, that they are like God, that they are like gravity

or the tie going in and out. Yeah, it's just, it's like nature. But as you said, like, this is very anti-human nature. Like, how do you convince people so much that markets are anything other than decisions being made by people for their own maximum benefit? Well, you don't have to convince everybody, Will. What you have to do is convince the people that to get your money, this is what they have to say. And to keep your money, they have to make certain votes that follow this philosophy. It's not actually a spiritual principle. Who's the guy that was after Frederick Hayek came? Who was the Milton Friedman? Well, Milton Friedman was the financial advisor to Pinocheton. who killed the president of Chile and then took 4,000 people up in airplanes, sedated them, and threw them out over the ocean. And Milton Friedman was his advisor. These guys have no problem advising autocrats. So all of this stuff is camouflage, which is thought up by the think tanks. You know, whoever heard of Russell Vote? Well, Russell Vote is the most powerful man in the federal

government today. He's the guy who was telling Elon Musk who to fire, what to cut. He's in the Office of Management and Budget. It's the crotch of things. And he's from the Heritage Foundation. He's bought and sold Koch families, Richard Scaife Mellon, Joseph Coors, that money. And they are instituting their policy while they're in power. So the spiritual stuff is just to make, to give it an intellectual fig leaf and to make people feel that they're doing something. I think it's like a broader view. I guess I'm interested in what would let you to write this book and just like your entire career, not as an is, but as, you know, like a publicly and civically minded citizen of the

country. Like, do you remember in your life like a political awakening or did you have a political family? Like what's set you on this interest in history and politics? And were there any recent events in American history or civic life that? inspired you in particular to write this book? Well, I can tell you a couple of things. They might not seem pertinent immediately,

but when I was three years old, my mom had a crippling nervous breakdown. And my dad was off minting money. He couldn't be bothered. And my aunt sent her housekeeper, a 20-year-old young black woman from Henderson, North Carolina, into the house to work from my dad.

He could pay her three times what she was paying. him. And this woman came in and basically became my mom until I was 14. And while my mom was, you know, drinking scotch and playing solitaire in the living room, my kitchen was full of black people, discussing politics, discussing race, discussing all of this. And I got to see through whiteness at about eight years old, the difference between the way my biological mom was treated and my black mom. Then a few years later in the 50s, when the McCarthy period started, in my mom's family, we had socialists, we had communists, we had do-gooders, we had labor organizers.

But they'd been communists, you know, when they were 20, when they were 25. And now in the 30s and now in the 50s, they were in their 40s. And the government was claiming they were traitors, they were spies, they were lying, they were here undermining the government. and they threw the full federal weight of the government against these people, threatening them that if they didn't tell everybody that they had ever met, it was a communist or a socialist, they would be put out of work. And they would be put out of work.

So I saw that. And I knew that these guys were lying about my family. My family were labor organizers and teachers and supervisors. They couldn't overthrow a push cart. And I just saw what it meant when the first. full federal weight of the government turned against black people and turned against my own people, who were Jews. And when I was born in 1941, Jews were not white people. We didn't become white people until the 60s. So there were schools I couldn't go to. I couldn't join the country club

and go with my friends swimming a block from my house. So that was kind of a political await me. The biggest one that happened came during the, so I was involved in civil rights because of having this big black culture influence. But during the Cuban missile crisis, a group of about 14 of us at Grinnell College thought we were not going to live to grow up and exercise our adulthood. These adults were going to blow the world up. And we put together a protest. We went to, we raised the money, we bought two old cars. We drove to Washington. We did a three-day fast outside the White House, supporting Kennedy's peace race and calling for an end of nuclear testing. And Kennedy saw it and invited us in the White House. Never happened before.

He was on a plane going to Arizona. And Jamie Raskin's father came running into the boarding House where we were, Marcus Raskin, his name was, and he was McGeorge Bundy's chief of staff who later resigned over the Vietnam War. And he told us, this is enormous. We were on the front page of the New York Times, and we took that publicity and we wrote to hundreds of schools, no internet, no email, and we kept protests going for an entire year at the White House until February of 1963, when 25,000 students congregated in Washington. And Tom Hayden called the Grinnell 14 the beginning of the student peace movement. And what I learned from that was that concentrated, dedicated action when you knew what you were talking about really could make things happen, big things.

And I realized talking to McGeorge Bundy that he didn't care about us. he was just solving a problem for his president, and that if I wanted to get this guy's attention, I was going to have to come back with an army. And for a few years, I had hopes that the counterculture might be that army. That didn't turn out to be true. But from that experience, the rest of my life has been dedicated to political engagement. So you asked me why I wrote this book.

I wrote this book because the unexpressed, you know, elephant in the room is the way our elections are funded. And it's completely different from all of our Western allies. And it's never compared on television. It's never examined. There's no public debate. Neoliberalism is kind of the only accepted way to talk about economy in the United States. So they brand you a kook. And what that's doing is literally wrecking the planet on every continent, vast parts of the planet are being destroyed by unregulated capitalism, tearing up open pit gold mines, leaving noxious chemicals behind in the United States as well. That's a big article I'm writing now about the Tennessee Valley Authority, the largest industrial accident in the history of the United States. They were pumping a thousand gallons of waste from burning coal for 50 years into a spring.

And it made a pile eight acres in size, 60 feet high, and an earthen dam broke. And it wiped out hundreds of people that caused cancer. It mixed with radioactive waste already in the Clint River. And I started looking at all these things and saying, these guys have free rain. and they have free reign because they control who gets in office and who gets to speak. And we're all losing various parts of the nation as sacrifice zones. And if you think it's bad for us, imagine what's happening in South America or in Africa or in Indonesia. And finally, I just got such a wild hair up my ass.

I thought, well, I've got to take responsibility for putting these ideas out there and make sure, they're clear and make sure they're distributed. I mean, to return to the New Deal for a second, I think one of the big factors in the neoliberal revolution and kind of the financialization of the economy, the de-industrialization of the American economy, was to remove labor unions as a traditional source of political power in this country. You mentioned the no king's protests. Like, do you see anything like an evolution out of that, like working in conjunction

with what's left of organized labor in this country to, like, affect, you know, sort of strikes or boycotts at, like, critical points of, you know, of infrastructure in this country to, like, to add it, like, you know, as a sort of force multiplier. I'm wondering how you feel about the role of organized labor, such that it exists in American life today, and whether, like, that could muster an army of support for the kind of change that you're talking about. Well, you know, I'm a member of two. unions, and I'm living on a union pension, for which I worked 40 years and am now being supported by.

The unions are a great source, but you also need some kind of guidance, some kind of instruction to remind people of what they do. You're working eight hours a day because of unions. You're getting a fair wage because of unions. You're getting health benefits because of the power of labor. Before unions, the Rockefeller family was machine gunning strikers at the Ludlow mines in Colorado, intense cities. That's the way they dealt with the problem. So if people were to strike at Whole Foods, if people were to strike at the Amazon plants, you might get union, not only unions, but you'd get union help. The ILWU is a very, very, very savvy union. They closed down, all the West Coast ports about 15 years ago in support of Leonard Peltier, the Sue guy who was

falsely imprisoned for 40 years. So I see all those things as valuable. But it's kind of like in my business, when I was in the movies, at a certain point, the guys who were in the show friends, they had the same lawyers as the producers. And they knew how much money was coming in. And they demanded a million dollars a week each to perform. And what that meant is, when that show, after five years, if a show goes into, it gets dispersed. Syndication. Yeah, syndication. Thank you. The actors get 90% of their salary. That means the producers were committed to $900,000 a week for these guys went into syndication. And the producers got a meeting together and they said, screw that shit. And the next thing you knew, you were going, you used to get a

quote as an actor. You'd start working at $500 a week. The next film, you'd maybe get seven. You'd work your way up to getting serious money. Well, after that friend's debacle, you'd go up and all the producers had gotten together, they'd say, we only have this much for the role. There was no negotiating. And every actor knew there were 100,000 other actors out of work. And if you were too stringent in your resistance, they'd just go on. They just say next. And so that's how they, that's how they took control. And now if they can get you on AI, they'll buy your image and your voice and your everything and make, you know, pro-Trump propaganda films with you. But you'll have gotten a good payout. So I think, of course, any group endeavor,

the ACLU would be a good way to organize. School boards would be a good way to organize. Libraries would be a good way to organize. But somehow somebody who's savvy and has the ability needs to organize it because people don't think it up simultaneously. I mean, I bring this up because, like, you mentioned how things have changed in the entertainment industry. Talked a little bit about what being an actor is like.

Another aspect of your career that I was interested in, I was hoping you could talk a little about, was your role as one of the founding members of the diggers. I was wondering if, like, maybe our listeners aren't familiar with who the diggers were. Just enlighten us a little bit about what the diggers were and, like, how your involvement in that. Sure. So originally, the diggers was a 17th century group when the English king commanded the commons, where people used to go to the open fields and graze their animals.

The enclosure, yeah. Who grow their gardens. Yeah, it was called the enclosure movement. he did it because he wanted to run sheep for his new woolen mills. And the diggers, a guy named Gerard Wynne Stanley, were the first ones that said, Property is theft. And they went out to reclaim the land. And the king sent Cromwell against them.

And they were called the diggers because every morning they were seen burying their dead from those incursions with the soldiers. So we were a group of people. We took their name, we took their animating impulse, and we realized that the Hayd Ashbury was being advertised all over the United States, and kids were running away to San Francisco, and tourists were coming to see the Hayd Ashbury. They were running Greyhound tours down our streets, photographing us like we were orangutans. And kids were sleeping in doorways. They were hungry.

They had no place to be. and the city was completely deaf to any notions of help. So we decided that we would feed people every day. And we set our women holding little babies out to the farmer's market with the great Italian grocers who gave them tons of food that were ripe that day. And we cooked it in big steel milk cans. And we advertised on the street, five o'clock, bring a bowl and a spoon. and all I had to do to get the food was step through a six foot by six foot square rectangle that was painted yellow.

And it was called a free frame of reference. You stepped into that frame. You filled your food bowl and we hung a little one, a one inch by one inch one around your neck, inviting you to look at the world, everything you saw. Imagine if it were free. Imagine how your life would be different. So we did that for a long time. Then we opened a free store.

And the first free stores were just like, you know, communities of junk. But eventually, we had radios, TVs, we fixed everything up so it would work. We had really good displays and clothes hanging and stuff. And the whole point of a free store was to say, why do you want to become an employee to make the money to be a consumer? We'll give you the shit. Now, what do you want to do with your life? Because at this time, most of the leftist ideas were socialist or communist.

People were carrying, you know, Mao's little red book around everywhere and, you know, shaking their fists. But we had the insight that the American people were not going to throw themselves on the barricades to be the lumpen proletariots. However, if they built a life that they enjoyed and they wanted to protect. they would probably defend it. So the diggers set out to liberate the imaginations, first of all, and begin to think, what would you do if this stuff was free?

So, for instance, San Francisco was a big deparkation point for Vietnam. Well, we managed to get hold of a whole bunch of federal draft cards, blanks, and we got the rules for how to fill them out so that they would pass muster if somebody examined them. The year went in this box.

This box had a number which corresponded to the state it was in. So a lot of kids would come into the free store in uniform. And with a little, you know, judicial talking, they'd hang their uniforms up. We'd tell them to always keep the boots. They'd hang their uniforms up and put on used clothes. And Bobby from Chilli Kofi would leave his Billy from Chicago with ID that would keep him out of the draft. And those kids didn't kill anybody. They were not maimed or killed themselves.

They were not traumatized. So we did that for about three years. And then, you know, running a soup kitchen wasn't my highest aspiration. Most of us moved out, began recreating country communes and making friends with local Native American tribes to learn how to live in a sustainable way, to practice. just learning how 20 people could live, you know, with one stove and one refrigerator and making due. We were trying to develop sustainable models of living that were not going to wreck the economy. And we did that for a long time until our kids reached such an age that they needed schooling. We needed to be near schools. And in most cases, we didn't own the land. So eventually,

we would be evicted and then we would have to go and figure out some way of surviving. But we still have a link of 108 diggers today who are all kicking in money every month so that we're able to give about 200 bucks a month to 15 of our members who are old and really poor. So it's not like we sold out. We just did what we had to do. I mean, like, it's such an impressive career, so varied. And I guess like you've been. you've been at this a lot longer than I have. And I'm wondering, just in your lifetime, how have you seen the forces of reaction,

of exploitation, of oppression, whatever you want to call it, you know, the owners of this country and the forces, like be it the media or our government that buttresses them? Have you seen that, have you seen the politics change in any way?

Or like, what advice would you give to young people today who look at the world and despair? So I'll do that. I just want to read you a list of numbers first, okay? Please. So the Koch Network Foundations give $24 million a year.

Charles Koch Institute gave $56 million in 2017, and their assets are $317 million. The American Institute gives $68 million in annual grants, $348 million in assets. It's a conservative think tank focused on free enterprise. and limit of government. The Heritage Foundation, 101 to 103 million. The Atlas Network supports 495 associated think tanks in 96 countries that get 29 million annually from conservative foundations. The donor's capital fund is a dark money fund, which passed $400 million in anonymous grants to liberty-minded think tanks. The Hoover Institution, at Stanford has a $782 million endowment.

Nobody has any idea of this, and this money is controlling what you hear on the news. It's controlling the experts. When they have a guy on, they say he's from such and such a think tank. They never tell you the politics of the think tank. It's just an expert. And these guys are getting hundreds of millions of dollars to basically undermine the premises of the new deal. So I've only seen it going one way. So you could say in terms of civil liberties, we're more polite.

We don't use the N word anymore. And in most parts of the country, it's okay to be gay or trans or something like that. But really, those things are being mined as divisive issues, being mined to make conservative people in Iowa think your kid could go to school today and come back as a girl. So I've only seen it get worse because nothing has been done to protect our politics from the power of money. And that's just the bottom line. And all the money, remember, this money that I just read to you is tax deductible. That means it's not going into income taxes. It means it's going directly to fund these anti-democratic institutions.

So until we get at the crux of money, until we can bar these great fortunes from controlling our political system, we're all worker bees, and it's not going to get much better. It's not a question of putting a nice guy. Look at Eric Swalwell. Who the hell knew he was a jerk, right? He could have been the governor of California. Apparently most of the Democratic Party, but probably everyone who worked with him,

but I guess the broader public didn't know. No, you know, yeah, people who worked with him knew. But why was it kept a secret? You know, I worked when John Edwards was running for president. Bonnie Raid and Jackson Brown and I and a guy named Josh Friday, who's hopefully going to be the next lieutenant governor of California, we went all around the country with John Edwards, you know, supporting him because he was the only guy talking about poor people.

Well, imagine that this guy was dumb enough to think he could have an illegitimate baby with a woman while his wife was dying of cancer and no one would know. You know, so they got rid of him and they got rid of Gary. The monkey business. Gary, Gary Hart. Yeah, Gary Hart. Really smart, really good legislature. But human, you know what I mean?

So until we get rid of the money, until people own up and take responsibility for their behavior, our electoral system selects for ambitious people who are good, who are charismatic and good at raising money. We could be selecting for people who really want to serve. I've lived many, many years in London, in France, traveling around and working in Europe. When I'm in Paris, for 20 bucks, I can get a doctor to come to my house. For another 20 bucks, I can get a lab to draw blood in my house. I mean, these people have assets and services that we can't begin to imagine. The fact that we pay for our medical care is horrifying to them. Yeah, like, I mean, something like the NHS, like the New Deal, obviously, like, that was before World War II, but the New Deal era that, like,

dominated most of the 20th century, it came after World War II. That's right. And it was that sense of, like, a collective shared endeavor, both in Europe and the United States, of, like, defeating the access, defeating fascism. But like, I think for Europe, it was a more immediate experience because, like, you know, their cities were destroyed. Like, the war touched them and their lives in a way that it really did in the United States. But like, how do you, how do you cultivate that sense of shared responsibility, of shared sacrifice outside the context of like a total war that has, like, destroyed much of civilization? Well, let's look at it this way. 70 million people voted for a guy who was convicted of fraud, convicted of rape, billed 80 million dollars for speaking dishonestly about

the woman he raped, 80 million people somewhere must have been thinking it'll be better for me. Less regulation, better bonus, better profits, better something. Let's say the bottom 20% of the bell curve, they're just mouth-breaters. No matter in what occupation, there's 20% that's just stupid and you can't fix stupid. But for the 80% of the bell curve that goes, you know, over the excellence crest, if corporate executives had not supported him quietly, if they'd not given money, if they'd not given all this stuff, he wouldn't be president. And so to pretend that Trump himself is an individuated experience instead of a collective lapse of nearly half, the American people is fooling yourself. So what I think that we need to start thinking about

is interdependence, is that nobody stands alone in this country, much as our governing system would like it. We're connected to everything. We're connected to oxygen, to water, to the people who make our clothes, to the people who grow our food, to microbes in the soil that grow the food. and the idea that we're just independent existences, each with its own little purpose and little strategy, is a big mistake that's not talked. I'm a Buddhist priest because this kind of thinking strikes me as being a more accurate way of looking at the world.

So if you look at the world and say, well, yeah, maybe I can make a little more money with a guy like this, but do I really want a guy I wouldn't trust my grandchildren with representing my country? Do I really want a crude, vulgar guy, you know, setting policy for schools? So we are continually directed to self-organization and to self-centered thinking instead of like in Japan and Asian cultures thinking of the health of the group and we're paying for it. Well, you brought up that you're a Buddhist priest. I wasn't aware of that. But I did want to ask you about your practice of meditation.

This is not something that I have really ever had much experience with. I've never really had any exposure to Buddhism. I've never had any meditative practice in my own life. I'm just wondering, like, how does your meditative practice work? And how does that bolster or sort of inform your creative, intellectual, and political life? So I'm an ordained priest. I'm also what's called a transmitted teacher, which means my teacher stuck a meat thermometer in me. And he said, okay, you're done.

And he gives me his authority to ordain my own priests and ordain my own, transmit my own successors. So meditation is based on the fact that if you sit still for 20 minutes a day and you just get comfortable with whatever arises in your thoughts, in your feelings, you just discipline yourself to sit still no matter what. we only get in trouble when we run away from what we feel. If there are deep and dark and abiding fears and anxieties, if we try to kill them or suppress them, we wind up drinking, drugging, being in the wrong bed, shopping too much. One of the things that Buddha taught was that you can survive anything that arises with you if you just sit still and watch your breathing.

So in that breath practice, in that meditation, you kind of go down to ground zero. Your mind slows down. Your thoughts slow down. You get to be aware of the total environment that you're in. If you do it long enough and stringently enough, you may have an experience where yourself drops away for 10 or 15 minutes. And you get this feeling of being connected to the world. What a joy. What a choice that would be, yeah.

Well, but it's not necessary. It's something that sometimes happens. But you can get most of it just by meditating. And so I try to do that six days a week, and I've done it for 50 years. And I've sat a lot of what are called sessions, where you meditate for five or six days from 5.30 in the morning till 10 o'clock at night with, you know, breaks every so often. And you eat, you listen to lectures. your mind gets single pointed.

It comes down to like a sharp point and you can direct it. It's less diffuse. It's more focused and it's clearer. And so when you see one of the things that Buddha taught that's really helpful is that the thing you call yourself, me, I. We think of it as something like an organ that has a, that's like an organ. It's like in your body. It has a shape. it has certain kind of characteristics that we're just born with.

Well, that's not true. In fact, that thing we call the self is basically awareness. And the good news of it is, is that if there are aspects of yourself you don't like, they're basically just habits because yourself is as formless as nature is. It's just an admixture of positive and negative valances and energy that's just moving and churning. And the self is kind of the way we've been taught to think about ourselves, taught to think about our body, talk to think about our good points and our bad points, and the way people respond to us. But none of those narratives are actually true. And so one of the

things that you learn right away is that you're not a good guy. You're a human being. And as such, you have positive and negative aspects in you, and by knowing that, you realize you have to take responsibility for them. If I think I'm a good guy, it means I'm disowning my own envy, competition, violence, anger, jealousy, and I'm putting them on other people who I call the enemy. But if I realize that all those things are aspects of human nature, then I can be on guard when they arise. and I can take responsibility for not letting them out past my teeth, or not letting them into a trigger finger,

or not letting them flip the bird to somebody, which is very close to pulling a trigger. So Buddhism is not really a religion, because Buddha was an ordinary man who solved this problem of the apparent difference between you and me as two separate entities. It's not that we're the same, but it's not exactly that we're separate either,

because we're both plugged in to something bigger. And we've never been separate from it, from all of it for two seconds. So that changes the way you see other people. I may not like the fact that I'm made by the same thing that made Trump. But it means that I have to understand that he has full credence to be here. And if I'm going to take issue with him, I can't stand on a high horse. I have to figure another way to do it. that actually still acknowledges him as a product of the creative energy of the universe.

I mean, I think Mark said that nothing that is human can be truly alien to me. Well, that's a pretty enlightened, that's a pretty enlightened self-image. I mean, it's a tall order. Yeah, it is. But back to the thought about, like, you talked when we opened this conversation about the attention economy, how, you know, in my use of the word activist is sort of like I'm being subconsciously programmed in a way to differentiate someone's political interests or passions or convictions from being a normal human being. Do you think the practice of meditation or just simply learning the discipline to just be quiet with yourself and inside your own brain for 20 minutes?

You think that's like a useful way of gaining a perspective outside this sort of prison of the self, which is really what a market-based society depends on, that we are all individual. atomized competitors and sort of nodes of productivity in competition with everyone all the time. I think that's well said. The only exception I would take is that you're not in your brain. You're in your entire body. And your entire body is the brain. You know, the unconscious is where we store things that are too important to forget. And they're really stored in ligaments. I've had experiences where I've been meditating for a long time and some ligament will let go and you're flooded with memories of a particular event that you put away because it was too important to forget.

So yes, especially when you're sitting in a room and 50 people are sitting and their legs hurt and their knees hurt and they're making this effort to concentrate and look into themselves and get intimate with themselves, you feel incredibly bonded to physically. 50 people. And if you can feel incredibly bonded to 50 people, you can feel bonded to almost anyone you meet. Here's an image. Imagine you're standing on a cliff and you're overlooking an ocean. And instead of rolling waves, imagine little peaky waves coming up like little, you know, teepees rising and falling, millions of them. Well, any one of those little peaks could be a named thing in the universe. It could be a person, it could be a leopard, it could be a hummingbird,

it could be a mountain range, it could be a civilization, it could be a tribe or a nation. They rise up out of the formless energy of the ocean and they take shape for a while. And when they're in that shape, we call them living. And when they settle back into the ocean, we say, oh, they're dead or they're gone or they're back in emptiness. But what they forget and what we forget is that they've never not been part of the ocean for a minute. They've always been part of the ocean. So for Buddhists, the ocean itself is this unformed, formless energy, which presents the whole visible world, which is rising and falling. Things appear, they stay around 10 years, 20 years, two days for a may fly, and then they go back. But they've always been part of this formless emptiness.

And we call it emptiness because what we mean is empty of a fixed self. There is no fixed self. It's awareness. And although it may seem alien, it's actually a great liberating impulse to search after and find for yourself when you meditate. Peter Coyote, I think we should leave it there today. I think that's a great place to sum up this conversation. I really want to thank you for your time. I'd like to thank you for the book.

and on a personal level, I would like to thank you because I truly have been quite a fan of you as an actor for many, many years now. And like I said, just like a couple of things on the top of my head.

This is a bit random, but one of my favorite books as a kid that I read was Michael Crichton's sphere. So you better believe I saw that movie opening weekend when it came out. And if you'll just tell you one last thing,

I know you're only on the show for like one or two episodes, but everyone who took part in the TV series Deadwood isn't immortal to me because I think it's, It's like one of the great works of art of our time. So Peter Coyote, I really want to thank you for everything, this conversation, everything

you shared with us today and your whole career. It's been a privilege to talk to you. Will, let me just tell you, it may surprise you, but I became an actor so that I wouldn't have to write for money. And I've written six books. The written word and storytelling is where I live. I love being an actor. It was good for me.

But in some ways, it was not good for me. And when as soon as my kids were out of grad school, debt-free, I quit the movies. And I didn't enjoy being a celebrity. I didn't enjoy being the guy that everybody was looking at and talking about. And I much prefer living in the country and writing my book. So thank you for giving me an audience. Well, thank you once again. Peter Coyote, the book is Smothered by Riches, How America Went from Democracy Rules to Money Rules.

Once again, thank you so much. Bye-bye. Thank you.