The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Cameron Cowan Of The Cameron Journal

Episode Date: August 22, 2022

Cameron Cowan Of The Cameron Journal Cameronjournal.com

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks this is voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming here with another great podcast we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in thanks for being here be sure to refer the show to your friends families relatives go to youtube.com for just ch. Be sure to refer the show to your friends, families, relatives.

Go to YouTube.com, 4Chess Chris Voss. You can go to iTunes, give us five stars over there. You can also see us on Goodreads.com, 4Chess Chris Voss. Anywhere on the interwebs, you can find myself or the Chris Voss Show as well. Today, we have an amazing multi-book author on the show. Cameron Lee Cohen is on the show with us today. He's the author of Multitude of Bullets. Let's see, what the hell is going on? A Primer to Understanding Our World in the Age of Trump. He also has what he calls an unfinished coloring book,

just so you're aware that is published. And when I first thought, I was like, oh, he hasn't published it, but he has actually. And Cast Iron, a novel, a paperback that came out January 6, 2020, which is kind of an interesting irony there. We'll talk to him about that. So he's going to be on the show. He is a writer, thinker, and human being navigating the streets of Seattle. He has ran three magazines, worked in fashion, been a stand-up comedian, and writes about business, politics, and life among his many talents. Welcome to the show, Cameron. How are you? Hi, Chris. I'm doing very well, and yourself?

What a commodious welcome. I hope I can live up to that. Well, we'll see here. We've got time to do it. We still have time. So welcome to the show. Give us your dot-coms, wherever you want people to look you up on the interwebs. Yes. Well, please join us over at cameronjournal.com that's cameron like the actress journal.com and we have all sorts of stuff when it comes to business business trends politics i live stream election coverage every two years so i'll be doing a six-hour live stream of the midterms this fall. And yeah, so sign up for the email list. Check us out.

There's something new on the blog every single day. And then if you want to hear more random ramblings from me, the best place is Twitter, which is just my name, at Cameron Cowan. And then if you, for some reason, need visuals, Instagram is also at Cameron Cowan. So come along for the ride. I'm always posting news, interesting stuff, things that I find along the way. And we just kind of go on the journey together. Nice. And you talk about a lot of different things in the Cameron Journal. You

talk about politics, advice, life, essays, interviews you have, masculinity, money and economy, media writing. You cover quite the gambit. Well, yes. So I, as I jokingly kind of say, like, I am autistic, so I've literally created a brand so I can just write about my various and sundry hyper fixations. Fixations. And so, yeah, I mean, I find there are so many things that are sort of interconnected. So when I get a new interest and develop a new expertise and I'm kind of like,

oh, I'd really like to write more about that, we add yet another category to the Cameron Journal. So, yeah. And also, it's important to have slots for all sorts of things because I have all these ideas and things that I think are interesting or things that I want to share with people or also just sometimes sharing in struggles. Like I have a series of articles called, Hi, my name is Cameron and I'm dot, dot, dot. And I have one on, Hi, my name is Cameron and I have gynecomastia because I have my own tits. I made them at home. And then I have one on autism and I have one on being fat because I've been fat forever. Like forever, ever, ever.

If you're not watching this, I'm a giant 400 pound brown dude. I look like Troy Polamalu, that football player. And with my hair this length, I really look like him right now. And so, yeah, and it is something where, you know, all these different journeys. football player and with my hair this length i really look like him right now and and so yeah and it is something where you know all these different journeys there are so many things that just people don't necessarily write and talk about like there's a lot of men that suffer from gynecomastia which is breast tissue on your chest which is not supposed to be there if you're a man and i was kind of like, you know what?

Let's get rid of the shame. I'll write about it. I'll just come right out and talk about it. The struggles, the difficulties, all this type of thing. Because you go online and these guys are kind of like, oh, my God, my chest isn't flat as a board. No woman will ever want me. And I'm kind of like, dudes, I've had tits my whole life, and i used to take girls by appointment in college i had as my as my friend jenna says she's like cameron used to have his afternoon girl and then his late night girl i'm kind of like so it's like if your chest is a little bit flashy you can still

get laid like it's not a huge problem so i'm kind of like let me just write about this stuff so that's kind of what we do at the cameron journal is I come up with stuff I find stuff where things happen in my life and I write about it just to kind of dispel the shame the issues around it give people comfort make them feel better about it feel like there's a there's someone out there going through it the same as them and especially like in the manhood masculinity space it can be hard to have those conversations it can be hard to get guys to open up and talk so i kind of like to write about that stuff in a way where it's just kind of this open space where we can have those conversations be vulnerable say the things you might not necessarily say in front of other people and and go from there so yeah that's do you find you spend a lot out of all those things that i covered do you you find

that you spend a lot of majority time on men's issues or politics or i think the biggest category is politics because that's kind of my home wheelhouse so i have two degrees in political science got my master's when I was 23 from Norwich University, America's oldest military college. And so yeah, I think the biggest category is politics. Business is starting to catch up because I'm developing that side of the business. So business and politics is the most. The masculinity category is new. I just launched the masculinity category six months ago because I used to do my most of my writing about men for other people, like the Good Men Project and other and LGBT publications. So the masculinity category is actually kind of new.

So we're still we're still building that building that up, you know, at home on the Cameron Journal because I used to do it elsewhere. There you go. Now you have a podcast as well, I see. Yes, yes. The Cameron Journal podcast. Season two is out now. I recorded 11 produced episodes before I left in June. So this season we've covered How the West Was Won. We've

covered the death of two-door cars, the interstate system, the Transcontinental Railroad, high-speed rail, the death penalty, and a couple other fun topics, including the TV show Mr. Robot. And then we also do interviews with interesting people.

I just interviewed a guy yesterday who has designed a new type of commodity market that discourages speculation. In fact, it makes it almost impossible. Yes. It's really fascinating. Like he's a rec,

he's a recreational mathematician and he has designed this sort of commodities market that makes it basically impossible to speculate on commodities so yeah so in between the produced episodes where i take an hour and talk about something interesting we talk to really fascinating people so yeah yeah it looks like you have what 97 episodes that's about right yeah uh-huh and it says here you're an editor-in-chief of Rogues Magazine. Oh, I need to change that bio. I need to do an audit. Yes, I used, I start in 2019, I started

a publication called Rouge's Magazine and we had contributors from all over the world and had editors and all this type of thing. Unfortunately, the pandemic was not kind to us. Oh. So, yeah, so unfortunately, I shut down Rouge's at the end of

2020. So, yeah. We had a nice year and a half run. We had a lot of momentum, but the pandemic was just a lot. And I made the decision to pull the plug and move on. But

don't worry. All of the content from ruches magazine is archived on medium.com oh there you go medium.com that's a great place for stuff yes i oh i've been on medium since they first started i remember when they were like a couple dudes in a basement oh yeah i've been on medium forever but yeah so i i took all the content off the website archived it on my profile on medium and so um there's some great stuff in there we one of the essays and actually the update to what the hell is going on was first came out in rouges and it was about christian nationalism and the military religious freedom foundation and that was one of our more popular pieces and it's archived

on medium and it will appear in my next book because some the the the far right christian nationalist wing of the gop is genuinely frightening isn't it though we've had a lot of authors on the show who've written in detail about them i wasn't aware of what christian nationalism was or white nationalism was until the day after the election. I was like, what the fuck just happened? And how did this guy get elected? And my friends were being thrown out of taxis who actually weren't black. They were from, oh, what's the

country in Iraq we saved that Iraq invaded? One of my friends, she was in a taxi. Kuwait. Kuwait, yeah. She's a Kuwaiti. So she had darker skin. And the day after Trump won, I had gay friends that had their cars painted,

Jewish friends that were being attacked. I mean, it was just a wholesale attack on... Bedlam, yeah. Bedlam. And I was like, what the fuck is going on? Like, what the... Did this country just fucking lose its mind? Or Trump just gave it permission to be its true self.

That's a good point. Yeah, yeah. He said to go ahead and see what's in your heart and minds so let's as long as we're on that topic let's get to your your book i was going to go in order of release but let's let's move right on to what the hell is going on a private understanding our world in the age of trump you you published this in october 1, 2019. Give us an overview of that book. What motivated you to write it? Yes. Well, it was a compilation with some new material of some of my tentpole essays from the predecessor of the Cameron Journal, the Cameron Cowan Show. And I had written these kind of really big essays on genetically modified foods, capitalism, how we the people became we the corporation, 1977, the rise of discounters and deregulation,

all these kind of different topics. I wrote about bees, ecology, and then I wrote new essays on education and racism. And so it was basically kind of a one, my goal with it was to create this kind of one-stop shopping resource that was kind of a best of, but also this kind of guidebook to understanding different aspects of kind of what's going on in the world and how we got here. Because some people have different perspectives or they're,

they're just kind of catching up to things. So I kind of wanted to give them a, okay, if you've not been paying attention, here's everything you need to know. So is the book a, a compilation of essays that are all part of how did we get to the age of Trump or is it collection of essays and

that's kind of one of the main parts or themes as a teaser out to the actually i don't really address trump as such until the racism essay most of these essays are just addressing different aspects of our world for example uh circ circling back to our Christian nationalist idea, there's an essay in there I wrote back in 2015 called The Death of the White Christian Heteronormative Narrative. Yes. And in that essay, I argue that the principal problem with America is that our national story is changing

in terms of who gets to be an American, who gets to have a voice who gets to have power and really the challenge of our time the challenge of the 21st century for america is can we be a country with more than one voice at the table that is the challenge of our time you really nailed it on the head that really is the analogy of what's going on you know we've talked about the show we had people in the books about the show. Like, you know, I've seen alarmed GOP voters going, in 2050, we're no longer going to have power,

and we won't be the most dominant majority, and we'll be outvoted by minorities. And you're just like, my favorite line is that line from No Country for Old Men. You can't stop what's coming. That's vanity. Yeah. And with the way things are going, we can move that up to 2040 now.

Oh, really? Yes. Yes. Well, here's the problem. You're going to panic them more. Yes. Well, no, I mean, that's actually why they're panicking. The white birth rate is very low.

We've had an increase in immigration, modest increase in in immigration and the people who are usually having large families are brown people um already america's school system k through 12 school system is already majority non-white if you look at the national demographics it's already non-white so we're we're already on our way you know 18 years from now so we're already So we're already on our way, you know, 18 years from now. So we're already, yeah, we're already basically there. And that's why it's the principal question of our time. Every generation in this country gets to choose who is an American, who is a person, who has political power. The choice of our time is if we can be a country and have shared values and ideas while having different skin tones and different national and ethnic backgrounds and that's not an easy thing

to do yeah and let's clarify for people because i'm not even sure i know what this term means i have a guess at it white hetero heteronormative yes the death of the white heteronormative let's clarify what and define that term if you can for me because yes i don't even know what it is i went to public school yes davos's public school oh no heteronormative basically, so hetero comes from heterosexual, so relationships between opposite sex persons. And the normative is kind of the normal, what one might consider the normal or ordinary state of things. So when we squish these two terms together and create this portmanteau, we basically have the standard of, in the past, for most of America's history, the people who have mattered, the people who have had the power, the people who have set policy, have had a couple things in common. They've been white, straight, Christian, preferably Protestant, not Catholic, unless you're Joe Biden or Jack Kennedy, and male.

Women have only had the vote for 102 years. So we can't even really talk about white women like the 20th century so that so when when we founded this country our country was founded by straight white men in their late 20s primarily large land honed landowners a third of them owned other human beings and at that time you could only vote if you had property which means you had a certain modicum of wealth and ever since then we've ever so slowly expanded the vote and power and all this type of thing till the 20th century where at least straight white men had the vote they had the power they were in government they got the best jobs they had the power, they were in government, they got the best jobs, they had

the most educational opportunities. Everything was kind of one giant handout. And in the 1960s, we decided that really cuts out a lot of other people. White women, anyone of color, gay people, all this type of thing. And in the subsequent decades, we've tried to kind of add on to that and extend rights and power and employment opportunities and all this type of thing to an increasingly diverse group of individuals. where the narratives, the myths about our country, and humans live in story, the myths about our country are changing. Because now not only are people of color saying, not only do we want education and jobs and housing and opportunities like you have,

but we also need to talk about America's history. We need to open up some conversations like what the 1619 Project did at the New York Times. We need to have some truth and reconciliation, to borrow a term from South Africa. We need to have some truth and reconciliation about what has gone on. And so in my essay on racism, I talk about, you know, the losses, the theft, the, I mean, there was one town in Mississippi that burnt down the whole courthouse so they could destroy the property records to steal land from black people i mean you start reading these stories and it's like there is nothing these folks will not do to screw over someone if you saw january 6th so yes yes oh

if you want to hear me lose it go listen to the podcast i left i let out on january 9th 2021 where i'm kind of like i called my friend in russia and she said how do you not have dictator in russia coup happens we have dictator and i'm like that's because the coup was ran by incompetence but yes i mean so we're having this yes that it won't be next time so we're having this whole change of myth and of story and we're moving away from the standard of white straight christian men and so that is and it's it's it's really the seminal question of our time it's very difficult if you had told me in 2002 that out of the last between 2008 and 2022 out of the last what's that 15 years

we would have a person of color in the White House for 10 of those years. I would have laughed in your face. But thanks to Barack Obama and Kamala Harris, however you feel about her, the fact is that we've had a Black man as president and we have had a woman of color with a multi-ethnic background as vice president.

And the Democratic Party has twice in a row now delivered diversity to the highest echelons of government that's a change and if you if you really want to know why the trump world is kind of losing its marbles over there it's stuff like this because it's a potent symbol that people of color are on the march and it also means that just because you're white doesn't automatically mean you're gonna get any and everything anymore and people are frightened about that yeah it's a lot of i mean at the top for the oligarchs i think you've written about you know how we turn to corporations for the oligarchies at the top i mean they're they're definitely panicked.

It's money and power. That's what makes all entry go around. Let me ask you this. Nothing moves in this country without a dollar. Exactly. I have a joke there somewhere, but I don't think I want to use it on the show. Nothing moves without a dollar. There you go.

I like that. You should make sure to that. Nothing moves without a dollar in America. How did the bees, the bees are not all right. Did they have anything to do with Trump or was that the standalone essay? I'm curious. No, that was standalone. It was by reading request.

Someone asked me to write about bees. At the time I wrote that essay in 2014, we were just discovering the issues, some of the issues with neocontinoid pesticides. And these pesticides, what they do is they take the seed of a plant, corn, for example, and they coat the outside of it with pesticide so that as the plant grows, the pesticide becomes a part of the plant and kills anything that tries to eat it.

Oh, wow. Well, this is great for farmers because it reduces insects and all this type of thing it's very bad for bees because these pesticides get into the pollen and goes back to their beehive and causes bee colony collapse oh wow so that was what was causing it huh one of the many factors there's basically three factors one was pesticides two was a new breed of varroa mite that likes to live in beehives and then three was some beekeeping practices around flooding hives with sugar water in the winter to keep hives going wow however in europe they banned the eu banned

neocontinoid pesticides and bee populations increased 70 in one year holy crap it was a bee bonanza yes so the fact that you know we're still allowing the use of these pesticides in this country is actively damaging our ecology and it's not as big a story now as it once was, but there was a time four or five years ago when everybody was talking about falling bee populations, falling insect populations, all this type of thing. So I felt that essay was a great companion to my viral essay on genetically modified foods because I had just talked about the dangers of pesticides and how we needed to use GMOs not to increase pesticide use, but to decrease pesticide use. And then the bees are not all right is kind of like, and in case you want to know why we need less pesticides, let me let you know. It's not good for other things. Yeah, it's amazing how much kind of crap is in our world. Let's talk about your next book that you put out

this is on january 6 2020 uh cast iron and it was a novel i guess yeah let's talk about that tell us about that what made you want to write it what's inside of it oh this book has a very interesting story so if you read the epilogue in the back i actually write out the interaction of how i got this story when When I was 19 years old, I was working at a barbecue shop. And this guy who was one of my helpers told me, like, we ended up back at his place one night after work, and we were drinking and talking, and he was telling me kind of his life story. And his life story was the motivation for this book. So the book, very simply, is about a young man named Randy Carruth. He kills his stepfather with a cast iron frying pan

for molesting his sister and his life afterwards. Yes. And that was based upon this young man's life. And so it took me a very long time to write. I got that story in 2007 2007 i wrote the first 50 pages i think somewhere around 2010 and didn't release the book until two years ago so it was the first book when i started writing seriously in 2014 after a magazine that i was working at collapsed it was the project i kind

of returned to i always wanted to tell the story because i always thought it was fascinating how you know one day you're just going to high school and the next day you're in juvie and you're in a whole other world and then when you leave out of that place there's no transition there's no transition. There's no help. You're just kind of left to the world and what might happen. And I also found his attitudes on sex, sexuality, and race to be very interesting. He was extremely homophobic while having done homosexual things himself. So in the book, I play with that a lot, kind of that tension. And for me, that was really what I wanted to explore because I think it's a problem faced by many more men than would ever admit it.

And so I wanted to kind of explore that space. Interesting. I mean, it's quite the the road he goes down you know he kind of almost has that oh who is that who's that guy who killed somebody i'm thinking of the movie with a famous actor the but he he basically kills his stepfather then gets in that goes into prison and which is an interesting twist of of irony and and then he ends up living this life and and deals with it and reconciles it do you yeah do you see him being used in future novels or future books so is he a character that you're going to move forward with or is that just

a standalone novel no very standalone on that one very standalone i know everybody these days wants a series or all this type of thing but no his his story is quite concluded his story was really about dealing with himself his mother the choices she made the sacrifices she was willing to make for certain things all this sort of thing at the end of book, he joins a mobile harvester company and starts harvesting wheat and corn and other agricultural products and all that type of thing. And I envision him, you know, like, I would envision him living someplace in semi-rural America, you know, nice wife, nice kids, decent house, two cars, you know, and living his life, doing his thing, kind of

being a working class blue collar guy. And I think people don't, people don't understand how these, these moments, these one singular day can change the course of your whole life. That's very true. His life would have been very different if that day had never happened. Definitely. And, and, you know know evidently he acted thinking he was defending someone out of justice and ends up you know paying the price for it and and there's

some sort of i think irony in that yes yes well then the great thing about this is the novel's a page turner because i'm very brief i don't bore you with a lot of details the whole book is only 54,000 words it's about i think 217 pages so it's a quick fast read it can be a bit tough because we we go through all the vices i'm talking sex and hotel rooms passing bad checks drugs drug dealing getting jumped by guys on a road for drug i mean we really go into the very seedier side of life so if you're not ready for that journey cast i may not be for you go buy an unfinished coloring book that's nice but like if you're if you're ready for that kind of you know if you enjoyed the wire breaking bad stuff like that then this book is for you oh that really kind of go there

i love breaking bad because you just never knew like it would just every time you're like yeah these guys have really gotten worse are they you know it's gotten more crazy more hectic more dangerous yeah and they just go like next level and you're just like yes it and they just keep getting them better yeah i mean and that is i mean yeah that is exactly what happens in cast iron when just when you think things can't get any worse or more weird or more crazy or whatever have you we just lower the bar weird crazy turns and twists there you go yes so this other book that you put out March 15th, 2020, an unfinished coloring book. We don't have many authors. We have a lot of authors on the show. We never had one that does a coloring book, but this should release a coloring book version of the short

story collection and i'm like i don't i don't think anyone would be interested in that but that's a finished coloring book or something i don't know i don't know yes talk to us about what's in the unfinished coloring book but which is probably because it's published yes an unfinished coloring book so the title is inspired okay and a person i have enjoyed coloring since i was a child i do some adult coloring when i can as a relaxation thing i never finished coloring books i had no clue what to title this book so i decided to do some coloring about it and I was flipping through one of the big coloring books I have, and I'm kind of like, I am never, ever going to finish this thing. I said, I always have piles of unfinished coloring books. And I was kind of like, Eureka,

A Cry of Joy, A Moment of Discovery. And so I tried it out, and I got into Illustrator, and I was doing the graphics, different fonts. I'm kind of like oh i like that an unfinished coloring book that sounds really cool very erudite very literary and this was this was to really elevate me as a writer and to kind of you know take me to the next level as this collection came out i got published in 34th literary 34th parallel literary magazine very big publication in print for photo spread of myself all this type of thing um and everything would have gone perfectly if it hadn't been for the damn covid19 um and so you pick your dates to publish january 6th i had forgotten that i released cast iron on january 6th i had totally until you brought it up right now i had i knew it was january but i had forgotten that that was the day i let it out like my book release timing is

terrible can you let me know when your next book release is this date is because i'm going to hide under the bed i will be there with you like yes i know i'm i'm very frightened now i'm releasing two books in october and it's like whatever date I pick is going to be not good. That's when the aliens come, probably, I think. Yeah, we're going to have UFOs. Or I live in Seattle. We're going to have an earthquake, something. I mean, I think the aliens come, or the aliens, and we've had locusts. I'm not sure. I think we've covered all the plagues. Frogs. Frogs. We can still go through frogs and death of the firstborn so

hey I'm the firstborn that's not going to work out good for me oh well I'm not for babies I'm not for any of my parents I'm off the hook so I'll be I'll be here but yes it's rude

actually it's funny. My mom and my stepdad are both oldest of their family. So I would instantly have no, like no parents. So yes, yes. My mother's the oldest of four. My dad's the oldest of three. So really think about publishing those books. I know, I know it's, it's terrible, but that would suck if you're like, you know, remember

when you were a kid and there was that step on your crack, break your mom's back, and you'd avoid all the cracks? Yeah. Like, oh, man, I don't like my mom. I don't want to hurt my mom. I know. You publish that book and you're like, holy shit, that completely backfired. I know. I should just try to take the world by surprise and just not put any dates and just wake up one morning and press publish. And that way the world will not have had time to get

anything set up. I'll give you a title for your book. This title has no publishing date. Yes. Yes. That's very good. That sounds like a safe bet. Yeah. But if you want some fun, interesting short stories,

definitely go check out an unfinished coloring book because there's just some really fun and interesting stuff in there. We have a story about the California housing crisis, which was published in 34th Parallel Magazine called Beverly Gardens. There's a really fun story that takes place right here in seattle called the ticket about a man who wins the lottery but has to turn in the ticket before five o'clock and then there's also another fun one that people really like called america discount world it's set 20 25 years in the future and it is about a a man whose business is selling off American cultural artifacts.

Posters, iPods, technology, kitsch, all this type of thing to overseas buyers. And he spends an afternoon with a reporter from the Seattle Stranger Times. And then they end up, she talks about her divorce, she talks about his business,

they end up having sex. It's fun times. It's fun times. Hopefully you use it. Yeah, he lives in a house end up having sex. It's fun times. It's fun times. Hopefully, usually, yeah. Yeah, yeah, he lives in a house, but on top of it, it's fun times. Hopefully, sex is usually fun times. It's supposed to be. It's great. Yeah, the short stories are all easy to read and

you might put them down. I like some of the titles of these. The Kingdom of Nordstrom, America's Discount World, The Classy Drug Dealer. Let's see, what else do we have? Winswept Waste. That sounds like my bedroom. Let's see, The RKO Killer.

That's kind of interesting. So you have a whole mess of essays. These are kind of very different than your first book, What the Hell is Going On, where you're just writing great short stories that are interesting fiction sort of stuff short stories should have cameron back here here he is hello cameron i'm so sorry about that we have great internet in downtown seattle can't you tell yeah there you go you would think seattle's kind of a doesn't isn't that a technological hub microsoft is there i mean they're over in Bellevue on the other side of Lake Washington.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. The, we have CenturyLink is real big up here and they're not the best. They're not great. Yeah. So yeah. They have another thing.

So where were we? Oh, I was the thing like, yes, with the short story collection, the great thing about it is it's easy. Like, you can pick one up, read it, put it down, not touch the book for three months, pick up, read another one, all this type of thing. So it's easy. It's convenient. The stories are a lot easier, a lot more fun, not nearly as hot and heavy as cast iron. So it's sometimes a lot more accessible for people who want to get into my work. And yeah, so I would just, you know, they're all available on Barnes & Noble, Amazon, they're both available in paper and ebook. Overseas, if you're in the UK or Australia, check out your local bookstore,

your local major bookstores there online, because I'm there as well, Waterstones in the UK. So yeah, so it's just a great way to get into it. And I have a little bit of fiction on the Cameron Journal, and I am trying to finally get my Amazon sort of spoof serial soap opera called The Department Store launched sometime this fall. So we're going to bring more fiction and fun to the Cameron Journal in the future so yeah nice so yeah so let me ask you this you have two new books coming out do we want to plug those tease them out yeah yes absolutely so we're there's a new edition of what the hell is going on coming out including two new essays which the i'm going to look at them right now because i don't remember all the titles of them

we're going to have a couple new essays including hacker world cyber security in the 21st century autocracy american style and the christian nationalism day that was originally published in ruches so yeah and then all the old essays that are from the first book have been revised and updated for 2022 oh nice i mean there's all that all that stuff that you wrote about has definitely been changing and evolving and expanding or contracting or i don't know oh yes oh it's been a long seven eight years since i wrote some of those so so some of the older ones so yeah and you write about how a lot of this began about 40 years ago which a lot of people don't realize how the what the origins are white nationalisms everything else

yes i mean a lot of a lot of of the problems we're living in today really kind of came to the fore in the early 1980s and in my other book, America's Lost Generation, where I write about how our society has left millennials behind, really puts that in sharp focus. In the 1950s, after World War II, the American right was on its back heels after 15 years of democratic control of the White House, Congress, and the Senate. They hadn't been in power since before the Great Depression. And in the 1950s, because of all the reforms of the New Deal and how involved in society government had become, fearing communism, they wanted to kind of dismantle the reforms of the New Deal. So the Federalist Society, the John Birch Society, all this type of thing would

eventually go on to spawn Ronald Reagan, the Koch brothers. It would manifest itself politically in evangelicalism with Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson. All of this energy starts in the early to mid-1950s. Then the 60s happened, and the culture is moving in a completely other direction. And so much of what happened after the 60s was in reaction to all of those changes. That's where we get evangelicalism becoming political. That's where we get, you know, rejection of the Great Society reforms, all this type of thing, the election of Richard Nixon. And by the mid-70s, the Republican...

It's kind of interesting how after Watergate, Republicans really shouldn't have been in power for a generation. They were only out of power for six years. Because Nixon had done two very smart things. He had gotten all the Southern racists to vote GOP, causing a massive titanic political American shift out of the Democratic Party towards the Republican Party. And, very smart thing,

even though he agreed with Barry Goldwater, he did not reject the new evangelical politic. He kind of embraced it. Arms-length, but kind of embraced it. And that really set up the gop to take power six years later in 1980 yeah the great southern strategy yes and that yes and so you know honestly without richard nixon you would have never gotten to ronald bragan really nixon laid the foundation really without without embracing

evangelicalism which barry goldwater thought was nuts and without the southern strategy reagan probably would have never won in 1980 that's true and the world would be a very different place but that everything that's happened in the last 40 years kind of got all set up then. And we've just been living in the consequences of it from mental health issues, gun rights, no-fault divorce, education policy, mental health, lack of mental health institutions. There's nothing that's going on today that was not intentionally created. This is not by accident, folks. Yep. There's a lot of people who don't understand that. They just think, well, we're having a bad day.

And I don't think they understand the forces that were behind all that, you know, like the Betsy DeVos Center for National Policy, her organization's 250 umbrella organization, the NETHER. You know, people have no idea the insidious hands and fingers that are behind all this. And then, of course the scotus rulings which i think you've written as we go out anything more lejo yes i mean yeah i mean citizens united i mean yeah money and politics has made all of this worse and it has allowed our democracy to be bought and sold as a commodity first essay of what the hell is going on how we the people became we the corporation i talk about how corporations are the new aristocracy and the rest of us have been bought and sold and it's it's quite frightening yeah definitely definitely so as we go out

anything more we want to plug no no i'm out of things i'm out of things we plugged all the books i've written website podcast and no everything is great but thank you so much for having me on i really appreciate it i hope a couple of your listeners kind of float over to the wild world of the cameron journal and check us out we're having fun over here so there you go and you write about a lot of stuff give us the dot coms if you would so people can find those on the interwebs yes yes so for ever the master control for it all is CameronJournal.com. That's Cameron like the actress, Journal.com. And then on Twitter at Cameron Cowan.

And same thing for Instagram. And everything is posted there. But if you need links to any of my socials, CameronJournal.com. Podcast, same thing. And then, of course, all the wonderful content. There are, as of this morning, 773 individual pieces of content. Holy crap. That's quite a lot. No shortage of things to read.

There you go. There you go. It's funny how you start these things. How long did you start that, by the way? I started in 2014. Wow. Isn't it funny how you start these things and then you look back and you're just like, holy crap. No, no. Very true. And I left the business for two years in 2016 i was tired i was broke i was out of money

needed to kind of recover i shut everything down archived the website which was cameron cowan.net back then and the cameron cowan show and i thought i was done i thought i was out of this business i went back to work got a a couple jobs, made some money, paid off credit cards, all this type of when one of the businesses I was working for went under, someone was like, well, maybe you should get back into the content game because you know, all this type of thing. And so I did. But I said, this time, I want to make money at it. And so I kind of built the new platform from the ground up to make money. And so I focused on that and that gave me the chance to focus on books and building up the brand.

And now here we are. So there you go. There you go. Well, thank you very much. And I spoke like you. We've done well. Well, I mean, let's not push it. Nice folks like me.

We're making a grand assumption. It's been wonderful to be on the show and very insightful camera. Thank you for coming on. Of course. Thank you so much, Chris. Have a good afternoon. There you go.

And to my audience, go to YouTube.com, 4chesschrisfoss, hit the bell notification button, goodreads.com, 4chesschrisfoss, see everything we're reading over you. Reading and reviewing over there, it's Friday. Go to all of our groups, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, the big LinkedIn newsletter, subscribe to that, and the big LinkedIn group, 120,000 people there on LinkedIn. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe and we'll see you guys next time.