The Joe Rogan Experience - #1878 - Roger Waters

Episode Date: October 6, 2022

Roger Waters is a Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, co-founder of the legendary rock band Pink Floyd, and successful solo artist. Catch him live on the worldwide "This is Not a Drill" concert tour. www.rogerwaters.com

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day! Thank you very much for doing this, I really appreciate it. I'm a gigantic fan, so it's a real honor. And it's very nice to know that you could actually play pool. Well, we've only played two rikes. Yeah, but I could see. I could see how you move the ball around.

You've got to get a little warmed up. You know, we just started. Yeah, well, it is true that if you start playing pool against somebody you don't know and you discover that they do understand that control of the cue ball is everything. Yeah. And that's something you think,

oh, well, maybe we could have a game. Well, as soon as you looked at the table and said, these are very unforgiving pockets, I was like, oh, you know. A little bit, yeah. Yeah. Well, first of all, it's an honor to have you in here. I'm very excited. But second of all, you're in the middle of a lot of things.

You've got your tour. You've got a lot of controversy going on. your tour you've got a lot of controversy going on it's uh i really enjoyed that conversation that you had with cnn because that kind of conversation is is rare to see on air and see someone as informed as you are to have uh these opinions and express them so honestly and uh bravely yeah it was a very interesting conversation well i've i'd known Michael a bit for a year or two. And actually, my last kind of engagement with him, with Michael Smirconish I'm talking about, right, the interviewer, was when I shouldn't be allowed to use local school children to sing another Brick in the Wall Part II. Because all during the war tours that I did, I always used local children, preferably from undernourished communities, to come and sing with me, between eight and 12 of them every night.

And they would come in, having listened to the song a bit, and I would rehearse them at five o'clock in the afternoon. And then, boom, at about eight, they're on stage singing. And they get very excited, obviously. But it's a wonderful thing for them, but also for me and also for the band. Have these children come and perform with us on stage. And the mayor of North Miami Beach or wherever it was came under some pressure from the local community.

And they weren't allowed to play. So I got some other kids. What was the objection? That I'm an anti-semite obviously i'm not an anti-semitic let's get that clear straight away if you don't mind um because i'm obviously not you can study my record going back as far as you want um so that, yeah, but that's always the objection because I support BDS and because I have for the last 16 years or so.

BDS? You know what BDS is. Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. Okay. It's a movement that was started in 2005 in Palestinian civil society and it stands for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions.

And so it's a movement to try and shine a light on the predicament of the Palestinian people, particularly in the occupied territories, but also, I guess, in Israel itself. Israel itself, using those, using boycott and divestment from companies like Caterpillar or Hewlett-Packard, people like that, who deal in the illegal settlements in the occupied territory. And sanctions, well, there's not many people out there who are powerful enough to impose sanctions on other people. And most of those with that much power are allies of the Israeli government and so wouldn't do so. But anyway, that's what it is by and large.

And since then, we have made great strides in that movement. And it's a much bigger movement than it was and in consequence the sort of battle lines have been drawn but it's got more intense and it's slightly less gentlemanly sport than it was 16 years ago in my experience anyway. So 16 years ago you were allowed to have different opinions about conflicts. Well, no, but nobody knew about the conflict. It was largely unknown that there was a problem at all in the Holy Land, certainly by most of the public in this country and where I'm from in the UK as well and in me. I'm from in the UK as well and in me I mean I I had accepted back in 2005 or 6 one of those years to do to do a gig in Tel Aviv I was asked in the middle of a European tour hey Raj they want you

to go and do a gig in Tel Aviv is that and I went yeah right I didn't I didn't think twice about it so that's where I was then so I'm not blaming people for not having known about the Zionist project since 1948 and everything that had happened. Although I was vaguely aware of the Yom Kippur War, the 67 War and the 75 War and so on and so forth, I knew a little bit about the history, but I wasn't really au fait. And that's how I learned, because as soon as I said I would do that gig, I started to receive emails from supporters of BDS, although it was only five or six months old at the time, mainly from North Africa to start with. But then I got an email from Omabu Guti, who was one of the sort of founding forces behind the beginnings of BDS. And he tried to persuade me to cancel the gig,

which had sold out, of course, in a few minutes, you know. And eventually I was persuaded to cancel that gig. But as an act of compromise, as I thought, I feel as if I'm repeating a speech that I've made already, which I am. I've said this often before. Anyway, so I moved the gig to an ecumenical agricultural community called Wahat As-Salam in Arabic and translated into Hebrew. It's Neve Shalom.

So something about peace. Where Muslims and Christians and Druze and atheists all live together in a community and all their children all go to the same school and they all mix together and they live peacefully and grow chickpeas mainly. As an example to the rest of us, if you like. So we did a gig there in the open air. And it was huge. 60,000 Israelis came. What I didn't realize at the time, of course, was of course they were all Israelis

because Palestinians aren't allowed to travel. So there couldn't be any Palestinians there. They would need special permission, you know, to cross through checkpoints and things, which they wouldn't get. So we did this gig. And at the end of it, and it was lovely. They were extremely enthusiastic,

they knew the work very well and it was very, ah, pink fly, and all of that and lovely food backstage and it was a warm summer evening. At the end of it, I thought, I'm going to say something.

It was euphoric at the end of the gig and I said, so I made a little speech and I went, you are the generation of young Israelis who need to make peace with your neighbors, start talking to the Palestinian Authority and the blah, blah, blah, and whatever. And they went from Pink Floyd to nothing. Nothing.

It was like steel shutters had come down behind the eyeballs of every one of those 60,000 young array. They were gone. And I was staggered by that. And I was really shocked, really, really, really shocked. I couldn't believe it. And I was really shocked, really, really, really shocked. I couldn't believe it. And I saw it. I went back the next year and traveled extensively in the occupied territories. And until you go there and you see it, you cannot believe what a shock it is.

You know, things that you wouldn't believe possible anywhere on the world, like different roads for people with different religion. Can you imagine? Really? Yeah, really. Can you imagine you're going from Austin to, you know, to Dallas, and you can only go on the road if you're Christian. If you're not a Christian, you can't go on the road. So if you're an atheist or some other thing, you're not allowed to drive on the road.

You have to go on back roads. And they're all filled up with boulders and there are checkpoints everywhere. So the local indigenous people are not allowed to use the roads. And you see that. And when you see it, you think, I don't believe this. But you get to believe it as you drive around. And all the checkpoints and they have to go this way. Only people with yellow license plates can go through here,

which means that they're Jewish Israelis. And it's mind-numbingly fills you with despair when you see it. You think, how can this possibly be happening? You know, it's 2007 or whenever it was. How can this be happening in the world? And nobody where I live knows about it. Or if they do, they don't care. How can they not care? And I say, you might bring it up here and say, how would you feel if you weren't a Christian and that meant you couldn't use the road? say, how would you feel if you weren't a Christian and that meant you couldn't use the road?

I mean, it's so weird that it's hard to get your mind around believing that that is the case, but it is. And that is what is called apartheid. And in those days, you couldn't use the word apartheid in relation to Israel. It was completely verboten in 2006. You could not use the word. You would have been strung up in the press and everywhere else and accused of being a Holocaust denier and this and that and Hitler and whatever. Now, it's very difficult for anyone to have a conversation about Israel and Palestine without using the word apartheid, because it is in the lexicon. And the problem is far more in the light, and we are looking at it more, and there's more information for all of us about it than there was then.

That is the work that BDS has done. And so it has made progress, and I'm glad it has, because what I desperately hope to live to see is a holy land. I don't care what it's called. From the River Jordan to the sea, where the people all have equal religious and political and social rights. All of them equal. And so that's what I work for in the movement.

And maybe we should talk about something else because I'm – if you wind me up, I might go on for hours. Peter Robinson Well, I'd be happy to wind you up. I mean the definition of apartheid is – yes, it is. It's segregation. I mean that is segregation clearly. Peter Robinson Yeah. Peter Robinson What is this –

Peter Robinson It's the oppression of one ethnic group by another ethnic group. Yes. For those reasons, for the fact that they're different ethnic groups. So the South African model clearly applies, except that the South Africans who survived the South African model all say that the Israeli model is far worse than the white South African model was. The white South Africans at least tried to build, well, they've poured money in for a start, trying to keep the black population quiet, which they failed to do. But both Desmond Tutu, before he sadly died, and Mandela, obviously, as well, both came out completely and said, this is a lot worse than our conditions were in South Africa before apartheid. So just discussing this and having

compassion for the plight of the Palestinian people that made them categorize you as anti-Semitic? Yeah. Did anyone have, and I'm sure someone must have talked to you about this segregation, And I'm sure someone must have talked to you about this segregation. Did anyone have any kind of argument that they wanted to bring to you for any justification of that? You mean from the Israelis? Yes. No. That's why they call me anti-Semitic. That's why they label anyone who criticizes the apartheid policies of the state of Israel without criticizing the Jewish religion or any Jewish person. I mean the fact that a lot of the people who are in

the government are of the Jewish faith means that they can somehow feel they can conflate criticism of the apartheid policies with the general criticism of an anti-semitic criticism of the Jewish people or people who, well, nice try, fellas, but it won't wash. That's not what it is. And most of us who get labeled as anti-Semites are not. And like Jeremy Corbyn, for instance, the guy who was removed from the Labour Party in England on the grounds that he was accused of being, he's not anti-Semitic, he's left-wing and he's pro-Palestinian, pro the idea that they should have human rights, the Palestinian people, who after all were the huge majority of the indigenous people in the Holy Land back in the start of the 20th century

before the start of the Zionist enterprise, which didn't really get going until 1920, although the idea was happening in the late 19th century, in the 1880s and 1890s. I can't remember the late 19th century, in the 1880s and 1890s. Can't remember the guy's name now, but he was a Russian who thought up the idea of a return to the promised land, as it's called. travel and are as prominent as you are, you're probably one of the most outspoken and informed when it comes to issues on foreign policy and human rights. And when did this become a big part of your life? And when did discussing this publicly become a big part of your life?

Well, it became a big part of my life the day my father died, I think. I mean, I wouldn't know because I was only five months old. My father, as you might or may not know, died at Anzio on the 18th of February 1944. And I was born September 43, so I was only a few months old. But when I started to understand some of this was when he didn't come home and start picking me up from school when I was a little kid. And then all through my childhood, I was brought up by my mother, my brother, and my big brother John and I were brought up single-handed by my mom, who was a schoolteacher, but she was also very left-wing. She's an interesting woman because she came from a very kind of middle-class family in London. Funnily enough, they lived in Golders Green, which was sort of well known for being a Jewish community in North London.

Her father ran a business that was sort of middleman in fancy goods, toys and things like that. So there was a big warehouse in London. But my mother and she went off to a boarding school, girls school. So she was very brought up in a very fairly straight-laced English, Christian, middle-class way. She then trained as a teacher, and her first teacher training was in a town called Bradford, which is in the north of London. Not north of London, north of England, far north of England, in Yorkshire.

And it was a huge eye-opener to her. There she was. First winter comes along. It's really cold. There's a foot of snow on the floor. And she suddenly notices that half the kids in her class are walking to school with no shoes. And something went bing.

This would have been in 1935, 36, something like that, and she suddenly went, what? And she started to look into social conditions there in the industrial north, and even then in the mid to late 30s, she understood that there were inequalities in the context of the society that she lived in that she felt a personal need to do something about. And she became extremely left wing. Anyway, cut to later on. So our front room was always a Labour Party committee room and she was always off in the evenings canvassing elections or and dragging me and my brother when we come back from a meeting interestingly enough at the friends meeting house which is the place the Quakers meet

you know in it wherever it is in the world it's always called the friends meeting house and we've been watching films of k-pop clad Chinese you know soldiers fighting against Chiang Kai-shek and the nationalist puppet government and blah blah blah blah blah and she said you know where we've been tonight don't you Roger and I said no and she said we've been at the friends meeting house that is where the Quakers meet she said well as you know I'm an atheist so I can't subscribe to their religious beliefs but I will say this they are very very, very good people. That's stuck with me. I can still recount that story now because it's so important.

You don't have to subscribe to people's beliefs. I can be a radical atheist and you can be a Hindu. The important thing is that we're good people, that we have hearts and that we care about our brothers and sisters. And my mum did. I'm going to tell you one more mum story and then I'll stop about mum because this is the most important bit. I was 13 years old. I had just gone through a phase where I suddenly realized I was going to die.

I'd just gone through a phase where I suddenly realized I was going to die. I don't know if all adolescents have this existential crisis in their early puberty, but I did. And I thought, F me. I'm going to die. This is scary as shit. Oh, my God. And it might have been that or it might have been something else but anyway something was worrying me and it was probably more some kind of political thing that i'd latched on to maybe through her and she's and she's looked at me and she said all right i'm

going to give you some advice now go on then mom all through your life you're going to be faced with difficult questions and you're going to be faced with difficult questions, and you're going to have to figure things out. This is my advice. When anything crops up, so it could be Israel-Palestine. It could be anything. It doesn't matter what it is. You must read, read, read, read, read.

That's what Smokonish was telling me. He hadn't. He'd only read one side. That's the difference between Michael Smirconish and me. I've tried to look at all sides of these things, so I know a bit more what I'm talking about. Anyway, she said, read, read, read. And, very important,

learn everything you can about the subject that's troubling you. And, importantly, look at it from both sides. If there's another opinion, make sure you study that as well. It'll take some time. It'll be hard work.

But when you've done that, the work is over. You have done all the heavy lifting. The rest of it is easy. And I went, what is the rest of it, ma'am? And she looked at me and she said, the rest of it? Well, that's simple. You do the right thing. Sounds like you're an amazing mom. Amazing, amazing.

Imagine giving, every young adolescent should be given that advice by a parent or someone they respect, you know. Because it's, I've, that's been jangling around in my head ever since. Not every day, but very often I remember it. And I tell it to anybody who cares to listen as well. Because it was so important. It's incredibly important and not said nearly enough. It's rare. That's what's amazing.

Like it sounds, it resonates. It sounds so powerful and true and yet rare. Yeah. But what happens then if we're sitting down the pub and I tell you that story and we've got all night, one of us will have another drink and then we might start talking about the philosophical implications of how you decide what's the right thing to do. Right. Because some bloke listening to this, wherever, it doesn't matter where they are, who's Zionist and who believes in the Zionist enterprise in Israel and in the Occupied Territory, in fact, in the whole of the promised land.

Let's call it the promised land. It's dangerous to call it the promised land because then you start getting biblical. Promised? Who was it promised to? Well, it was promised to the Israelis. You know, whoa, whoa, whoa, sorry, I didn't mean the promised land.

I meant the Middle East. What do you mean the Middle East? That was made up by Sykes and Pico after the First World War, you know. So, but you do get into the thing of, wow, now this really is a fascinating conversation. The right thing to do, should we start talking about now and what's going on in the world now

and what the right thing to do might be? I mean, you said a few minutes ago that I've been a bit controversial, particularly recently. And part of the controversy is about the Ukraine and what's the right thing to do. All I've done about the Ukraine is to try to lend what little weight I have to put that tiny bit of power I have in my shoulder to the wheel of encouraging anybody I can get to listen to stop the war, including Putin. I've written to Putin. I wrote to Putin four or five days ago because people were saying, why don't you tell Putin? Well, just hold on a minute. If you want to join join this conversation you have to do a bit of research

you know well you don't have to obviously you can believe but you should you should it would be wise if you took my mother's advice you would

before you expressed an opinion about what's the right thing to do and also when you're thinking about it, if you want my advice, you will constantly put yourselves in the position of that young Ukrainian man or woman on the front line and that young Russian man or woman in the front line and their parents and their uncles and aunts

and their brothers and sisters and the misery and pain and the lack of anything good at the end. And the more it escalates, the more we send arms, the more Putin, the less, the only thing that they can do is start to talk to one another, just like JFK and Nikita Khrushchev did in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was kept secret for years and years afterwards because JFK didn't want to look like a wimp. He didn't want to look aschev spoke on the telephone often. And at the end of it, they did a quid pro quo deal where JFK said, I'll take all our medium range missiles out of Turkey and wherever else it was. Turkey was the main one. If you take your missiles out of Cuba. So they put their hands across the ocean and shook hands.

And that was the end of it. And they did it. And they kept their word. They kept their word to that bargain. And that led on to the later conversations between Reagan and Gorbachev and the non-proliferation treaties and all the other things that made our planet a little bit safer from the possibility of nuclear catastrophe. Not safe, but a little bit, until now. And

now, by the second, it gets more and more and more and more dangerous, as this thing is allowed to escalate. So I'm making my position entirely, all I'm interested in is a ceasefire and for talks to begin. That's all, nothing else. What did you say to Putin when you wrote to him? I said that friends of mine think that, I said, I need to pull the letter up if you want to really hear it. Sure.

Okay. I'll tell you one thing I said before I pull it up because it'll take a minute, was that I said some friends of mine, because I have a guitar playing friend in England who wrote to me. Why are you trying to suggest peace and a ceasefire? This man has to be. He's a monster.

He's going to invade Poland and then he'll invade the rest of Europe. And then and unless we stand up to him now, we're blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And all of that. So one of the things I said to Putin, a friend of mine thinks that you're going to invite Poland and the other Baltic states and that you're then going to influence on Europe and blah blah blah. If that's true, please tell us now so we can all just say all right and blow ourselves to smithereens because that's what's going to happen if you do that, for sure, for absolutely sure.

You cannot, if you do that, you will start World War III. We know that the Ukraine situation is complicated, and it's been 20 years in the making, and it's, well, I won't go into the American end of it. I mean, I will, if you've got a minute. Yeah, I've got plenty of time. All right. Yeah, I had Tulsi Gabbard on the other end of it. I mean, I will. If you've got a minute, I will find... Yeah, I've got plenty of time. All right. Yeah, I had Tulsi Gabbard on the other day.

Yeah, how is she? She's great. Good. And we discussed this very thing and we discussed the United States when they orchestrated a coup in Ukraine and how NATO has been moving their weapons closer and closer to the Russian line.

Yeah. And that this is instigating. And they've been saying all along, you're breaking the agreement that was made between Baker, who was Secretary of State in 1990, and Gorbachev, where Gorbachev said, OK, I will agree to the reunification of Germany so long as NATO doesn't move one inch closer to the Russian border than the eastern borders of Germany. And they went, fine, agreed. And they've reneged on it completely. I think what was very important in the conversation that you had with CNN is not that Russia is good and that, you know, we should support Russia.

There was none of that. What you were essentially saying was that we have to be honest about what the United States has done. And that narrative is never discussed. When he was talking about the dangers of China, and you brought up the fact that China hasn't invaded anyone in over 100 years. Like, how can you say that when you know about all the interventionist foreign policy decisions that the United States has made overseas? And then you look at what China's done. Well, they have actually. They invaded Tibet in 1959.

That's true. Which is a huge thing. And it's something that I'm going to bring up because it's something I've only learned about recently. Funnily enough, I learned about it from my friend Eric Ruppert, who's a very well-known chef in New York. And he's a Buddhist. And so he travels to Bhutan at least once a year. And he was recently in India having meetings with people who were... And we were talking about it, about the predicament of the Tibetan people.

What I never understood was that Tibet is one third of the land area of China. Really? You didn't know either? Apparently yeah and I haven't, whoops, I haven't yet kind of, look this was a few days ago I haven't checked it all out and looked on the map but yes. I would have never imagined. I know but and you think why the hell did But, yes. I would have never imagined. I know. But, and you think, well, why the hell did they, who wants, you know, hundreds of square miles of mountains and things? Well, the Chinese, because it's not just mountains, it's water, which is hugely important.

The Himalayas, all the glacial streams, they feed water, just to India and Pakistan but also to the northeast of the whole of China as well. Plus, apparently and not surprisingly, it's packed with everything that you make chips out of. Of course. It's packed and packed with this absolute... I nearly said it's a gold mine. Well, it's not a gold mine. It's a mineral mine. It's a mineral mine. It's everything that everybody who cares about making money in the

world desperately needs and wants. So it's a fascinating subject. Well, particularly China, right? Because China's so involved in the Congo and extracting these minerals. Well, yeah. I mean, Because China is so involved in the Congo and extracting these minerals. Well, yeah. I mean, yeah, but to their credit, they didn't invade and kill everybody like the Europeans did back in the, you know, 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th century.

They actually went, you know, would you like to borrow some money? Which is more of an American ploy. Yeah. It's more of a kind of modern way. Which is more of an American ploy. Yeah, it's more of a kind of modern way. And who knows what they do if the people say, nope, no thank you, we're good. But they said thank you.

They said thank you, yeah. Sure. And, you know, should they be? Yeah, of course they should. They should be allowed to do business with whoever they want. I believe in the idea of what's called free trade up to that point. But there has to be a fair crack of the whip of everybody. And by and large, when multinational corporations

want to invest in underdeveloped countries, they want to do it on their terms. And they don't want the people who live there to get anything out of it. I mean, I've been involved in a court battle for at least 10 years now with Chevron because of the pollution that they caused in the Amazon, in Northeast Ecuador with a friend of mine called Steve Donz, who was sent to prison for acting on behalf of these people. I know I'm digressing. Well, the Donsiger case is atrocious.

It's a terrifying case because there's no reason why they had that man in prison. And there's no reason why they keep him under house arrest. Well, there is a reason. Yeah, right. But no righteous. No legal reason. No legal reason. No, there is a reason. Yeah, right. But no righteous, no legal reason, no legal reason. Yeah. Righteous. That's interesting because that comes back to my mother and doing the right thing. Yeah. Obviously the right thing to do if you were the law in the

United States would be to look at, look at the facts of the matter and come to the conclusion that Chevron should give the $9.5 billion to the people whose lives they've destroyed making money, or Texaco was the company who actually did it. But things being what they are, that's not the way the law works. The law operates to support whoever can afford it, actually, which in this case is Chevron. They still haven't paid a penny, and they're still fighting, and they will go on fighting. And speaking of somebody who's supporting the other side

who doesn't have bottomless pockets, it's hard. It's hard to find that. The amount of money that they spend on it is because they're worried of a domino effect that if they lose this case when they're going to lose the case in Nigeria and they're going to lose the case in Australia and they lose and they suddenly they can see the whole pack of cards beginning to collapse well it should collapse pay up you've been you've made enough profits out of the indigenous people all over the

world which is a scary precedent that they were able to arrest Dossinger like that, that they were able to keep him in jail, the way they did it. Yeah, and it was completely corrupt. Back in 2014, they produced a RICO trial, which is organized crime. It's regulations or something against organized crime. So they pretended he was a gangster on a fraudulent mission. And they brought this case in the Southern District of New York. Incredible that they could do it.

Incredible that the media is ignoring it, too. This isn't something that people are absolutely outraged about. Well, what isn't the media ignoring? On the media, with the possible exception of you, and some others who have great podcasts as well, but are independent of the mainstream media, the media only has one message, which is support the status quo.

Right. All of us work for whoever it may be, and we don't need to get all conspiracy theory about secret societies we know it's very very wealthy half of 1% who tell everybody

they're called the ruling class because they are the ruling class and we all do what we're told by the media who by and large repeat the same mantra over and over again so it's a bit tricky yeah well the media, who by and large repeat the same mantra over and over again. So it's a bit tricky. Yeah, well, the media has failed in their objective dissemination of information.

That doesn't exist anymore. They're bought and paid by the advertisers. And the advertisers are enormously powerful. And so things like that that are inconvenient realities, like the Dosinger trial, that just swept under the rug. Yeah. Which it should be outrageous. It should be something that's on.

Well, it is outrageous, of course. But I did a gig a few weeks ago in D.C. and played to, I don't know, 16,000 people or something. And the next day I dragged myself out of bed and bushed over to the steps of the DOG, knowing full well what I would find, which is my friend Randy Craiglico and a van with a sign on it and about 40 of the same activists I've seen at every gathering

in support of Steven Donziger and his freedom for the last 10 years. It's like, and I was, I actually made a little speech that day and was saying, you know, I would be happy if there were 4 million of us here. And there should be, standing under that memorial, the Washington Memorial in front of the Capitol and saying, what happened to democracy? Where is the rule of law that we all pretend we care about? Where are the freedoms and liberties and this and that and the other? They've sort of disappeared under a roller coaster of consumerism, you know, as we know. So while we're having our little meetings, people are wandering by like they don't even know we're there.

And they have no idea what we're there for or what we're talking about. So, yeah, it's extremely frustrating. But luckily, there are those 40 or 50 people. And they have hearts of gold, all right? And they will not shut up, however few of them there are. And luckily, you're here as well, and I can come on here and talk about these things without being dismissed as a crank or a conspiracy theorist.

I don't know if you saw, but I did an interview with Rolling Stone because I remember Rolling Stone when it was a magazine that was sort of about rock and roll but it also had a kind of semi-progressive liberal stance to it. Well not anymore. It's changed hands

and well it doesn't matter. I had Jan on yesterday. Oh. Did you? Yeah. I miss Jan. Yeah. He you? Yeah. I miss Jan. Yeah. He was the heart and soul of that place. He was the heart and soul of Rolling Stone. And he still is a progressive hippie at heart.

Yeah, of course he is. I mean, talking to him yesterday, it's just, he bleeds it. And his daughter is called India, as is mine. Mine's a bit older, because I remember him coming to me one day. He said, is your daughter called India? I said, yeah. He said, oh. Yeah, the first girl I think of is called India, too.

Anyway. Your Putin letter. Oh. I'm not avoiding you. No, I know you're not. You just pulled it up. I just wanted to keep it on track. I just want to see where I can find it.

I may have to search. I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to go into Word and search for it. Do you know if he received this? Well, it was open. Oh. I'm sure somebody will have told him about it. Sure.

I'm absolutely certain. But obviously, he hasn't responded to it. I mean, he is, you know, he hasn't responded to it. I mean he is you know he's the president of Russia and there's no reason why he would. So it's not in there. Right. Let me do a search letter.

I'll just say letter and see what comes. Open letter to Vladimir Putin. Okay. Here we go. There it is. Jamie actually pulled it up on the screen. Jamie actually pulled it up here. Well Here we go. There it is. Jamie actually pulled it up on the screen. Jamie actually pulled it up. Oh, did you? Yeah. Well, there you go.

So, dear President Putin, since the Russian Federation invaded Ukraine on February the 24th this year, I've tried to use my small influence to encourage a ceasefire and a diplomatic settlement that addresses the security needs of both Ukraine and the Russian Federation. In that endeavor, I've written two open letters to Mrs. Elena Zelenska, the wife of the Ukrainian president. I can give you those letters as well. These letters are readily available on the Internet. I'm increasingly asked to write to you, too. So here goes. First, would you like to see an end to this war?

If you were to reply and say yes please that would immediately make things a lot easier he has by the way yesterday he said yes please really yes he made a long speech with the accession speech of uh donetsk and lugansk and kishan and and the otheran and the other bit of Ukraine that had the referendum and the people said, can we be part of Russia, please? Anyway, that's what that's about. out and say, also, the Russian Federation has no further territorial interest beyond the security of the Russian speaking populations of the Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk. That would help too. I say this because I know some people who think you want to overrun the whole of Europe, starting with Poland and the rest of the Baltic states. If you do, fuck you. And we might as well

all stop playing the desperately dangerous game of nuclear chicken that the hawks on both sides of the Atlantic seem so comfortable with and have at it. Yep. Just blow each other and the world to smithereens. The problem is I have kids and grandkids and so do most of my brothers and sisters all over the world. And none of us would relish that outcome. So please, Mr. Putin, indulge me and make us that assurance that he hasn't done yet. But I have no doubt that it's part and parcel of what he is now saying publicly. All right, back to the table. If I've read your previous speeches correctly, would you like to negotiate a state of neutrality for a sovereign neighboring Ukraine? Is that correct?

Assuming such a peace could be negotiated, it would have to include an absolute binding agreement not to invade anyone ever again. Full stop. I know, I know the USA and NATO invade other sovereign nations at the drop of a hat or for a few barrels of oil. But that doesn't mean you should. Your invasion of Ukraine took me completely by surprise. It was a heinous war of aggression, provoked or not. When Mrs. Zelenska replied to me via Twitter, I was very surprised and mightily moved. very surprised and mightily moved.

If you were to reply to me, I would mightily respect you for it and take it as an honorable move in the right direction towards a sustainable peace, yours sincerely. So what did Putin say in terms of wanting a resolution? Well, you're going to have to look up his accession speech because I'm not going to start trying to quote Putin in translation without some words in front of me because I could get it wrong. Got it. And blah, blah, blah, blah.

He said one thing that could be seen as combative, which I can remember he said. to the table, I want to cease fire, I want to negotiate, negotiate peace, not dictate peace, negotiate peace with the Ukraine, with Zelenska. He said, but the will of the people in the Donetsk, Lubansk, Kirschen, and whatever the one is whose name I can't remember, is inviolate. That is not up for discussion. whose name I can't remember, is inviolate. That is not up for discussion. Zelensky, in response, said,

I will not negotiate with Russia until Putin has been removed. Oh, Jesus. And you go, President Zelensky, are you? I mean, that really is. That's an insane thing to say. Yeah, it's poking in the eye with a sharp stick, and it's not helpful at all. No. Anyway.

It's also not likely to happen. I think it's extremely unlikely. There's nothing unites people more than an existential attack upon what they consider to be their sovereignty. attack upon what they consider to be their sovereignty. And let us not forget anybody who would like to join this conversation with me or John Mearsheimer or any of the other people who are pro-peace and pro-diplomacy and pro-negotiations and pro-learning to get on with all our brothers and sisters in Russia who are very good people. in Russia who are very good people, as my mother would say. My mother used to say that about the Americans because she came here for two years on an exchange when she was a student. And she spent the summer near Akron in Ohio at a Girl Scout camp. And then she spent another few months in Texas.

So that was her thing. And I'll never forget, she used to say to me, you know, Roger, the Americans, they're really very interesting people. He said, they're very good people. They're very good-hearted people. They look after you. They're very, very hospitable and very, very good in that way.

She said, but they are also very naive. And I thought, wow. I mean, this is from years and years ago. I wrote a poem. I'm going to show this. I'll pull this up earlier. So if you don't mind, there's a poem that pertains to this that I wrote. How do I find this?

Why can't I Oh, here it is. Yeah. Oh, brilliant. I found it immediately. Alright. So I was I wrote this just after G.W. Bush was elected for the second time. And it's just called America.

It used to be called Why Cannot the Good Prevail? I need to wet my whistle. Or I shall run out of spittle before I get to the good bits. All right. Yeah, I can keep those up. Okay, here we go. It's short. America. Why cannot the good prevail?

Here in America, there is at heart a people just and true, open, sometimes to the point of ridicule. Good neighbours to rebuild the barn, the doctor's note of Western legend carried forth beyond the grave. I knew your pa enough. I knew your par, enough. In caucuses across the land, deliberate they'll always stand, defenders of the Rosenbergs, symbolic of that yearning to be better than before. They never will give up their brother to the grocer's cold machine, belt welts livid from the strong arm of the law.

On campuses, in boardrooms, over giving thanks and pumpkin pie, on hustings in committee rooms, whenever tyrants loomed, we always held in our esteem the ones who hold on to the dream, unflinching while the bullies pose and fiddle on the hill. Has commerce so reduced the free that, blinded like a tot, contaminated by the dogshit in the grass, we blunder, slaves to humbug and this Texan dynasty? No. Beyond the grip of trade, the young strain beautiful and proud. The hoarfrost breath of new blood needs but nudges from the old forgotten guard to scale the moral high grounds in the clouds. Wow. It makes me almost emotional to read that because I wrote that 18 years ago now.

But the idea of a younger generation coming up and saying, enough with this bullshit. This is bullshit. This is who we are. We are the good neighbor to rebuild the barn. That's who we want to be. You know? rebuild the barn that's who we want to be you know i think the young people do have good hearts and good intentions it's just the narrative is so cloudy and it's so difficult to sort out what's

actually going on versus what you're being told yeah that people just sort of lose interest in it except for the very few that are very driven and very disciplined and really do spend the time to look at things. And those people ultimately usually wind up becoming activists or very involved at least. Yeah. And many of them cling to their activism

till their dying day, like me, for instance. But I know so many. And they're men and women that you just want to hug. You just want to go, oh, my God, you're such a – you're so dogged but also brave. And you've got such a big heart that you care about people enough to make a fuss. It makes a difference.

Sometimes it doesn't feel like it does, but that signal does get out there. And the people that have that signal, as small as their audience might be, occasionally that signal will reach someone else and they'll spread it. Yeah. It's like, I mean, this is all right. Luckily, we've got time. We've got all the time in the world.

Which is huge because that jogs a bit of my brain that wants to say, go on then, if you could paint a picture of the future, what might it include? What would be the first step? You're the king of everything. What's the first thing that you do tomorrow? You got to take money out of politics. Number one. Citizens United. Go on. Number one, take money out of politics because the decisions that are being made are not being made in the best interest of the people. They're being made in the best interest in the people who have money. Quite right. Well, I'm with you on that.

That's the number one thing. That's the number one reason why we get involved in wars that we have no business in. I mean, Eisenhower warned us about that when he was leaving office with that speech about the military industrial complex. I don't know if you noticed

because I sent you a stick of my show. But before we do the song Sheep, the last thing – it says Orwell was right to warn us in Brave New World in 1984 and Aldous Huxley was right to warn us of the coming dystopia in – yeah, no. Aldous Huxley in Brave New World. And Dwight D. Eisenhower was right to warn us in his military industrial speech. I was right to warn us in my song Sheep. And then we play it. Anyway. Well, I'm really excited to see your show tomorrow night.

But one of the things that's so cool about your show is that you do – you have all of these messages that are tied into the music. all of these messages that are tied into the music and you have this incredible visual accoutrement to this this gigantic thing that goes along with your show yeah yeah it's a yeah it there's no question that that visually and sonically is impressive and also i i use my almost that's not my whole body of work but a small bit of things that go back to the beginning of when I started writing songs and things. So we play about half of Dark Side of the Moon. But, of course, all the stuff from Dark Side of the Moon, it was all about the same stuff that I'm banging on about now.

So it's all kind of, it's all very relevant. But I'm very interested in what you said. I'd like to pursue that because you're so right about that. All right. What's the second thing? Well, money in politics is number one, right? So the only reason why people would get involved in politics without money is to try to make the world a better place. And you would, I think you would, you would recruit more people that have good intentions and you would make it less attractive to people that are just looking

to make money. Yeah. I mean, you look at what's going on, like Nancy Pelosi just shot down this thing where it bans Congress from trading in stocks. It's, she shot down something to ban insider trading. Well, there's only one reason to do that, because you want to keep making money insider trading. You're talking about a woman who's on the last days of her life, who's worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Like, why do you give a shit, lady? Like, you talk about lost in the game. Well, maybe because she's worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Well, you got your money. You've got it all. Like, how are you even going to spend all that? Yeah. She's 80-something years old, money. Yeah. You've got it all. How are you even going to spend all that? Yeah. She's 80-something years old, right? Yeah. If you're lucky, what, you got 20 years left? But how any of them...

You got $200 million? It's not about spending. It's about power. Right. Exactly. I gather you spoke to Zuckerberg a few weeks ago. Zuckerberg, Bezos, Gates, I don't care who they are. They're hugely rich American oligarchs.

I'm sure it's true of Russian oligarchs and Chinese oligarchs. They amass the huge amounts of money because it gives them power. Then they buy newspapers and television stations and whatever. So they become part of the system of propaganda to keep us all in line. And I actually wrote a sketch about, I know you're in comedy. I wrote a sketch about Zuckerberg. Unfortunately, it's not in the show.

But I'll tell you what it was because it's unlikely that it'll get into the show now and i was writing it about being down here i the show originally when i wrote it was about them up there in the cloud and i actually had a city on a cloud floating about it's gone now it's now a penthouse so it's attached to in the show um And I write about them up there, the oligarchs up there in the penthouse now. And one of them is Zuckerberg. So I wrote a little sketch,

and it's about... Go away! He goes like... And then the door opens and a flunky comes in. And it's Zuckerberg, and he's sitting there at his desk in front of his computer working. And he goes, get out! I don't know if he speaks. I'm sure he doesn't speak like that because I've heard him speak and he's a bit soft spoken.

Yeah, he's very soft spoken. And the flunky says, but sir, Mr. Zuckerberg, sir, it's really important. You know, I have to speak to you. You know, and then he tries again and Zuckerberg's just screaming out. I think Zuckerberg at one point says, I've told you never to interrupt me when I'm grading co-eds. When you're what? Grading co-eds. Oh.

Could you grinned at least? I like that. So whatever. And he says, anyway, I'm going to stop acting because I can't use up my voice. Really, I shouldn't be. And the flunky says to him, we've run out of space to store the money. And Zuckerberg screams at him, buy another fucking island. Get out.

And then he throws his laptop away and it goes through the window and comes down and lands in the Netherlands so that was my little sketch and I'm sorry I didn't manage to find a space for it in the show because I kind of like it do you think it's possible for someone to become that insanely wealthy and

not be greedy? no of course not you can't do it without killing people, actually, is my belief. How so? Like with Zuckerberg? Well, I don't know because I don't know the history well enough. Well, he created this social network and it became wildly popular.

And he's now in cahoots with the FBI and the CIA and has some cozy meetings with them, deciding who to allow to communicate with their brothers and sisters and who to censor. Well, we discussed that on the podcast. Did you? Yes.

What did he have to say? Well, because I brought up the Hunter Biden story because I brought up censorship in social media. He said that the FBI had contacted Facebook and told them to be wary of a lot of Russian disinformation that was going to happen right before. I mean, this is... Russiagate! Hooray! It's even invaded our afternoon. They can fuck off.

Well, if I ever hear about Russiagate again, in fact, I did hear about it again. Where did I... I read something about it. Oh, it doesn't matter. Well, the fascinating part of that is that it's not true. Right. That's the fascinating part. The fascinating part is that there wasn't Russian disinformation in regards to that laptop.

Right. That's not what was going on. It was an actual real laptop from a man who is the at the time the vice president's son who had a serious drug problem and was kind of off the rails and he left this laptop at a repair station and it turned out inside that laptop was a bunch of crazy shit and it's real and they were saying that this was russian disinformation which would be the most wildlessly slanderous thing wildly slanderous thing that Russia has ever done. Like create a laptop and fill it with the son of the vice president, like pornography and bribery and all this crazy shit that's supposedly in that laptop. So the FBI contacts Facebook and tells them that there's going to be

some Russian disinformation leading towards the election. And they, I don't believe he specifically said that that laptop was a part of it, but they certainly were insinuating that. And then they decided to limit the engagement that people had with that. That's very vague. I don't know what he was saying when he said that, but my perspective was, now imagine if you are him and you're running something like Facebook. You are, first of all, you're insanely busy. And if you have trust and faith in the FBI and the intelligence agencies, you definitely don't want to be distributing disinformation from a foreign company or a foreign country that's trying to undermine our election. So what do you do? Well, he didn't censor it the way Twitter did, which I think is pretty egregious. But what he did do is limit its engagement. I don't know what that means. The problem with that

term, like limiting the engagement, like how are you doing that? What does that mean? You tell me what you do. And they don't. They don't tell you what's involved in whatever, at least limited engagement protocol they have, whether it's censorship or it's I don't know what you want to call it, because you could put it on. You could put that story on your page. It would just limit the amount of people who see it. But I don't understand how you're doing that. And I don't think they want to reveal that either. Well, the fact is, in my view, what's really dangerous is that this prick has any hand at all in deciding what any of us read about anything. Right. He should not have his finger on the delete button on anything that goes through Facebook, in my view. Well, I'm a pretty… I mean, you could say there might be rules that say you can't have people saying

you should go out and murder children. Right, right. But certainly anything to do with foreign… For instance, anything to do with the Ukraine war, you can't have meta deciding what we should believe about that. It's bad enough that the whole of the print section of mainstream media and all television has decided what we should believe about the Ukraine. So they're all completely happy to tell us that Russian soldiers have been raping babies to death. And, you know, and then three days later, you find out that it's unattributable.

And where did that story come from? And it came from some nebulous site somewhere in the Ukraine. But nevertheless, it's already been printed and it goes somewhere into the consciousness. You build up this thing. We can really hate these people enough so that people are now saying, we should just kill them all now.

We should start the nuclear war now. Right. Some prick on Twitter yesterday said it. Thieman or something. I only know that because I've seen the tweet. What did he say? What did he say? That we should actually go to war?

Yeah. Nuclear war? Yeah. Go to nuclear war and wipe them all out. Because, he said, we've been threatened. The only thing to do is to wipe them out now what is this person's position in life i'd have to look it up on twitter i've no idea was it a journalist was it a no i don't know do you know what it is jerry have a look

that's a that's such an insane perspective yeah i haven't got i wonder how many people say things like that just to get attention and likes and just to get views because I think that's a big part of what Twitter is it's like look at me. I'm gonna say something outrageous. Well, yeah, you could be right about that And you probably I'm sure you are right I'm sure there's a lot of look at me involved in a lot of these posts that go out Good and also a lot of what we'll think what will people think of me? Which is the whole if you think about it all this, if it all developed from the beginnings of Facebook and for whatever that site was that Zuckerberg started with, grading co-eds,

that's sort of the beginning of it and the FOMO and the this and that and sending pictures of yourself to your friends and caring what your schoolmates think about and all of that. And it blowing up into something that is far, far, far more important than your mother telling you, read as much as you can, get educated, make sure you know what you're talking about, and do the right thing. Because none of them are telling us to do that. They're telling us to buy. Well, that would be wonderful if your mother ran Facebook.

That would be great. I think the world would genuinely be a better place. It would definitely be better, except she'd never do it. They're telling us to buy. Well, that would be wonderful if your mother ran Facebook. That would be great. I think the world would genuinely be a better place. It would definitely be better. Except she'd never do it. Of course. Because she'd go, Roger, if you think I'm going to waste my time

with something as flimsy as Facebook, you've got another thing coming, darling. But what I tried to get from him and what I wanted to try to understand is what is it like

when you create something that literally is just a social network? You're just supposed to be socializing with people and sharing photographs, which is pretty innocuous. And then it becomes something that can influence elections and foreign policy and the way the world is viewed and the way narratives are spun. And, you know, it's a daunting task. And especially when you didn't set out to do that in the beginning, nor did Twitter. Twitter set out to just be something where you just post, oh, I'm going to the movies today.

And then it became what it is now because people realize, well, this is a tool to distribute information, and you can just put up anything. And now should we just limit that information? And that's what they've decided to do. should we just limit that information? And that's what they've decided to do. They've decided to take this moral and ethical position and impose their own ideas on what should or should not be said. But all based at some point on their position that they want to go on getting richer and richer and richer

and they want Meta to be the biggest company in the world and to own everything else. And then they really will rule the world. I think that's the mental aberration. Well, that's the problem with every technology or, excuse me, every corporation. They want to continue growing and getting bigger. And you have shareholders and they demand that you make more money next quarter than you made this quarter. And if you don't, you are not doing your responsibility. Funnily enough, there's groups of

Chevron shareholders are going to the AGM now and telling them to pay the indigenous people of the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador the money they owe them because they don't sleep at night. Well, that's great. Which is great. That is really important. Well, that's what you would want from people that have that much fucking money. Yeah. To say, hey, you would want from people that have that much fucking money. Yeah. To say, hey, you know, like, I'd rather have a little bit less and be able to sleep. Yeah.

Yeah. But, you know, if you... I've never been to Davos and I never will because the World Economic Forum seems to me to be a can of worms that I don't want to get within... That's a scary can of worms. We have a photo of Klaus Schwab in the bathroom. Have you seen it? No. The one where he's wearing the crazy outfit where he looks like he's in Star Wars We have a giant metal photo. He started that was right. He's the yeah, he started well

He's the one that's you know, you will own nothing and you'll be happy like Yeah, I read that Well, that's what he is is almost like a character in a movie like you would if it was a movie you would go Well, that's too over the top. There's no way there's a guy with a German accent that's telling the world how to live and they get all the billionaires to come and meet with him and decide what to do with the future of food and health care. Well, Davos, the world economic film, is like a bad movie.

It is. It's like a really badly written Hollywood movie. It's bizarre. That you would just go tear it up and throw it away. Well, they're all flying there to talk about climate change in private chats. I mean, it's so ridiculous. Like my friend Bono. Yeah.

I met him once. Yeah? Yeah, I met him. I'm going to tell you. I shouldn't tell you. I'm going to tell you this story. Tell me the story. Because it's faintly ironic. And people will want to hang me. I shouldn't tell you. I'm going to tell you this story. Tell me the story. Because it's faintly ironic.

And people will want to hang me for it because it doesn't. Well, you can make up your own mind because you might think it's brilliant. And people do sometimes write to me and say, why are you such an arsehole? Why aren't you more like Bono? So here I am. I am going through an FBO. So I've just got off a private plane in Zurich. And suddenly there's Bono and he sidles up to me and whatever.

And that grin he's got. And it starts sort of trying to make small talk. And I know very well what he's doing there. He's going to Davos. He's flown in for Davos. So that's why he's there for Davos. But what I didn't tell him, and this is going to sound like boasting, and it is. The reason I'm there is because I've just been to northern Iraq and been across to northeastern Syria and picked up two kids from Trinidad with their mother and flown them to Zurich. And then we're flying them back to Trinidad because their father joined ISIS and stole the children and took them there.

And then obviously he was killed. And my friend Clive Stafford Smith said, what are we going to do about these two kids in Camp Roche in northern Syria? And it was one Christmas and it was 2019, I think. And I thought, what am I going to do? And I thought, what am I going to do? Am I going to go and sit by a roaring fire in Switzerland and occasionally go skiing? Or am I going to go to Syria and try and rescue these kids? So we went to Syria.

But I thought it was a really interesting meeting because I've never understood his whole thing of, you know, George W. Bush is a good bloke. I'll go and visit him on his ranch in Texas. He killed a million people, not on his own. Obviously, the rest of the neocons were with him, Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney and Bill Kristol and all the rest of them. They were all in it. And Tony Blair, let's not forget. They were all in it together. They all did it together.

They all knew it was a lie. They all knew it was nonsense. They all knew they were doing it to steal oil or whatever they were doing it for. But it certainly had nothing to do with 9-11 and it had nothing to do. And so, obviously, I still boil with rage. You can't ignore 100 million dead. You can't. You just can't go, oh, well, that was 17 years ago.

Forget about it. Forget about it. You know, you can't. Well, I can't. Right oh, well, that was 17 years ago. Forget about it. Forget about it. You know, you can't. Well, I can't. Right. But obviously Bono can. I assume. Otherwise, why is he going to visit George Bush?

Anyway, I know that I probably shouldn't have told you that story or said any of that stuff. I think, I mean, if you really wanted to find out what a person like that is like That would be an incentive to go visit George Bush to find out like whether or not that does Hang on his conscience like what it was it like to talk to him. That's interesting. Yeah, I would do that I would do that just to talk to him try to figure out like what do you how do you feel knowing that there were no? Weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but you wouldn't get a straight answer from him, would you? I don't know. I don't know what you would get.

I've seen the paintings of his feet that he did in the bath. It's bizarre paintings, right? Aren't they weird? Yeah, they're weird. And it's like you, I mean, obviously I'm armchair psychologist here, but I'm looking into them like that's a man that's very troubled. psychologist here, but I'm looking into him like that's a man that's very troubled. That's a man that, I mean, the weight of the world and the deaths that were caused by the decisions that he made as a president and the amount of American lives that were lost, the amount of Iraqi lives

that were lost, the way the world has changed, the way the world thinks of America post 9-11 is so different. There was a window of time right after the attacks on the World Trade Center where the whole world was united with America. And that was squandered for money. Yeah. That was squandered. That was squandered when we invaded Iraq. That was squandered when people had this real true understanding of what the motivations really were. And the fact there weren't really weapons of mass destruction and that we saw the devastation and the lost lives and the way the world looks at us is incredibly different.

From September 11, 2001 to today, it's just a complete polar shift. Yeah, you're completely right, of course. And the interesting thing as well is that on February, I believe it was Valentine's Day or the 15th or something, there were over 20 million people all over the world in the streets saying there are no weapons of mass destruction. What are you thinking about? This is insane. Hans Blix has already told you there's nothing there.

They've hunted and hunted and hunted. Colin Powell stood up and lied in the United Nations knowing full well that he was lying. He can't. He must have had access to all the information. They all knew and whatever. And yet you're going to do this thing. My theory would be if you go and see George Bush. He's still alive, is he?

Yes, he's still alive. Well, if you go and see him. You could drive there from here. Why don't you drive over there one weekend? I think they'd probably shoot me. I don't think you're allowed to just drive to George Bush's house. Well, they let Bono in. Yeah, well, he probably had a meeting in advance

and assured them of his intentions and just kind of go over there and sing Ordinary Love. Well, my theory would be that he never escaped from the dynasty, you know, from his genes, whatever, from that family because it's a supremely toxic background to come out of, From the dynasty, you know, from his genes, whatever, from that family. Because it's a supremely toxic background to come out of, i.e. Bush Sr. All that bullshit about getting rid of the CIA. Yeah, and getting rid of the Vietnam syndrome.

That's why Desert Storm or whatever the first one was called happened. And all of that, all of that history is fascinating reading but it's also completely insane it's completely insane and it's terrifying it's terrifying it's terrifying that when you see the eisenhower speech and you realize like well that's it in motion that's it in action you're seeing it right there that is the military industrial complex making decisions it's no more insane than what's going on right now right right and this is where when during my show i touch on this occasion because in my show as well as you will see tomorrow night um i sing two bits of a new song called the bar and uh i make absolutely certain that the audience understand what the song is about. It's about this place that I carry around inside me and I said we all have it if we can find it in us,

in our hearts or in our soul and it's a place where we can converse with others and share opinions. Do this. Have a conversation about things and share our feelings and even if we're lucky enough share our love with other human beings in the world in a place that's safe and I call that place the bar why am I telling you this? I tell you why I'm telling you

because what I've discovered doing these shows and I've done about 30 of them or a few more in the United States, is that people get it. The audience gets it. You can see them getting it. And in a way, what is good about it is that singing those three verses that I do of that song, it gives them permission to disagree with me and yet not feel they have to stand up and wave their fists and walk out. agree with me and yet not feel they have to stand up and wave their fists and walk out because because they've understood what i'm saying was it's all right to disagree about

things and have different opinions about but we have to allow one another to express our opinions and it may be that we'll meet somebody who's you know who who understands more about things you know if you meet the Dalai Lama, you're going to learn something from them. I'm not saying I'm the Dalai Lama. But, you know, there are things we can learn from other human beings. Yes.

That without going on Facebook or picking up our phone and, you know, and whatever. Anyway, I'm not making much sense. No, you are making sense but i think that's one of the great things about your show is that you combine this amazing music that has this incredible history to it with all of these messages and with all these visuals and i think oh you got a lot of attention during the trump administration because of the flying trump pigs and all the other the he did, people loved it.

But then when you put up a photograph of Biden and said he was a war criminal, then people like, wait a minute, you're on the wrong side now. What are you doing? Yeah, well, let's see what happens, shall we? Before we come to a final conclusion about Biden. As I said in the Shmoe Connish interview, I said there's something criminal. It is criminal not to be trying to end the war in Ukraine, but just by trying to pour weapons into it, just pouring weapons into the Ukraine. many weapons you give them you just they're just cannon fodder that policy shows that joe biden and anthony blinken and the administration and whoever is pulling their strings to go all conspiracy theory for me couldn't give an f about the ukrainian people they couldn't care less how many of them they've said so i saw what's his name not mcconnell lindsey graham i saw him in an

interview the other night going we are going to help the ukrainians fight to the death jesus he said it in an interview on a television station and you go what their death well i mean i didn't i wasn't there so i could not but that's what he means. Yeah. Let them fight. Who cares? They never cared about a Ukrainian before. Why should we care about them now? Well, the answer is because it suits the geopolitical aspirations of the people who buy the election that you were talking about. they're weakening Russia so that they can become the unipolar you know the hegemony can produce again they can rule the world they want to rule the world they said so back in the 90s

Paul Wolfowitz told Wesley Clark in the Pentagon face to face we are going to destroy seven countries in the next five years. Wesley Clark has gone public about it. We all know it because he's told us all. And people go, well, so what?

Yeah, that speech where he discusses that. Let's play that because it's very powerful. Pull up that Wesley Clark, the discussion where he talks about the seven countries, how they laid it out. And a lot of that has already been put into motion. Absolutely. Syria's almost gone. The Yemen's pretty well gone. Iran is the big.

Somalia's gone. I can't remember what the others were, but we'll find out. That was an eye opener for people because you're listening to a general and he's discussing this. Well, the general is relating the story that was told to him by an undersecretary of state at the Pentagon, whatever Wolfowitz was at the time. I can't remember. Right, so you're listening to someone who is one of the people that actually gets to discuss these things with the people that pull the strings. Yeah. And he's relaying it to us So let's play. So this is retired US General General Wesley Clark

Wars were planned seven countries in five years on YouTube. I saw Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz. I saw Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz. I went downstairs just to say hello to some of the people on the Joint Staff who used to work for me, and one of the generals called me in. He said, sir, you got to come in and talk to me a second. I said, well, you're too busy. He said, no, no. He says, we've made the decision.

We're going to war with Iraq. This was on or about the 20th of September. I said, we're going to war with Iraq. This was on or about the 20th of September. I said, we're going to war with Iraq? Why? He said, I don't know. He said, I guess they don't know what else to do. So I said, well, did they find some information connecting Saddam to al-Qaeda? He said, no, no. He says, there's nothing new that way. They've just made the decision to go to war with Iraq. He said, I guess it's like we don't know what to do about terrorists, but we've got a good military and we can take down governments. And he said, I guess if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem has to look like a nail. So I came back to see him a

few weeks later. And by that that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said, are we still going to war with Iraq? And he said, oh, it's worse than that. He said – he reached over on his desk, he picked up a piece of paper, and he said, I just – he said, I just got this down from upstairs meeting the secretary of defense's office today. And he said, this is a memo that describes how we're going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and finishing off Iran. Wild. Wild. Yeah.

Just wild to hear him lay that out. Yeah. Because it's conspiracy theory, but... Well, it's not. It's history. Right. But actual. Yeah. it's conspiracy theory but what's not but history right but actual yeah and yet it disappears into the ether like it doesn't matter it's not important yeah they were yeah but what yeah it's like who cares i care i care yeah imagine if you were somalian or leban or Syrian or Iraqi. Libya is a failed state now. It's an incredibly dangerous place.

They have open slave trade that you could watch on YouTube. Yeah. There's a lyric in another new song of mine, one of the other songs I wrote in lockdown that talks about, I'd say, in Timbuktu or in the Republic of the Congo and other states where some things, I can't remember, I'd have to look it up, but it's saying for the old slave trade to merge seamlessly with the new.

So I'm making that point that this foreign policy is reintroducing slavery to the world and reintroducing the slave trade in Africa, North Africa, West Africa, and the Middle East. That's what it's doing. And people seem to think it's all right. But what's it for? Why? What is it? Even if you can't.

I've written another letter to somebody, which I haven't posted yet. Oh, I know. It's to a counselor in the Ukraine who has declared me persona non grata in Krakow, which is a big town very near the Polish-Ukrainian border, because he claims I'm a Putin apologist. And so all my asking everybody that I can get to listen to me to make peace, to stop the war, to start negotiation or whatever, for them, all they want to do is kill every Russian that they can get their hands on or whatever. Why did I bring that up?

I'll remember in a minute. And when I do, I'll tell you because it's to do with the whole thing. Oh, yeah. No, I can't remember. I've lost it. But it will come back to me. That's how my brain works, unfortunately. What is your creative process when you sit down to write music, when you sit down to compose songs?

How do you go about that? I always used to say for years and years, I don't go about it. Oh, I haven't in the past. In the past, my answer would always be, I don't do anything until I get a pregnant feeling. And I can't describe the feeling, really, except that I know that I'm about to give birth to something. So that's as close as I can get. It's a weird sort of fog of nothingness that feels as if it might clear and I might see something or something might pop out and very often after that I put myself in in a physically in the same room as

a guitar or a piano and with a legal pad and a barrow and hey presso sometimes something pops out and I go oh that's. And then I work on it. More recently, when COVID happened, I did two things. One, I wrote some songs that had been bubbling a bit. And it might be just a little guitar riff or a chord sequence or something, and then I might play it. And then my brain is a very fertile place for ideas and for lyrics and for the way lyrics scan against bits of music.

So it comes kind of quite easily once I've had a first idea. I did that. But also I thought I've got a couple of years of this. I've been meaning to write a memoir. So I'm going to do it now. So one day I got this out and I went well go on then you prick go on then clever clogs so I opened a word document and I went and I started to write and before I knew it I'd written 10,000 words and I went and I was probably a bit drunk and so I went oh and I went back a couple of days later and I went, bloody hell, it's prose.

And it's quite funny, but it's deep as well. And it's actually rather moving. And so I had a eureka moment. I went, fuck me, I can write prose. I couldn't believe it. Because I love prose. I mean, I love to read books. I love books. But you never I love to read books. I love books.

But you never sit down intentionally to write like that? I never sit down like, you know, professional writers, sometimes they say, I get up at six every morning, have a cup of coffee and a piece of bacon, and then I go to my room and I write until 12.30. Right. And then I have a bottle of champagne and pass out in line. Whatever it is they do. But they have a routine.

I don't have that. So I work when I think hmm. Or I might be drifting past the piano and sit down and go oh that's it. And I might even reach for a pen and write a chord sequence or something down. So it's a very, it's not a regimented protest uh process at all when you're as busy as you are in touring and all these things how do you find time to create do you do you allocate time to create or just sort of like let no when i'm touring i get back to the hotel. We have a trough.

We have a golden trough after the show, which means that there's always food and drink for everybody. And then I normally would get up to my room at 2 o'clock in the morning or something. And then usually I put the stick of the show into the side of the laptop. And then I might look at a bit of it. And if I didn't look at it then I look at it the next day and I make notes I change the show every day really yeah every day yeah wow and I go in the next to the next show with notes what are you playing there and there may be visual notes or

the text or the but I'm changing it constantly. I had, it was my production manager, Chris Cansey, lovely man, been working with him for umpteen years. It was his birthday yesterday. And I went and had a small glass of wine with him. And we were talking and he said, we did 211 wall shows when we did the wall. We did it for nearly three years starting in 2010. And I said, oh, yeah.

He's reminiscing. And he said, do you know what I remember? And I said, what's that? He said, the 211th show was in somewhere or other. I can't remember where it was. And he said, and you came in with notes and changed the show on the 211th show. On the last show. Wow show wow that was it we were never gonna do it again so I'm a bit obsessive well that's why it's so great maybe partly yeah yeah I don't think there's any other way yeah there's

there's this huge excitement to go then we could do this we could do that or I would be better if that word was changed or if we do this or we could do that or it would be better if that word was changed or if we did this or if we changed that or so well that speaks to the ethic of what you're trying to do that you're tweaking it to the very last show of a tour yeah i'm going to talk to you with me just for a second about prose yeah i told this to chris edges the other day but i'm going to tell it to you as well because that that's what jogged my memory. You know that thing when you're reading a book, OK, and you've got it on your bedside table or whatever and you read it or any time it doesn't. You could be lying on the beach and it's a great book.

It's a really great book. And you get to about 10 pages from the end and you find yourself putting it down quicker because you don't want it to finish i do this anyway and you a lot of people who read i think will know this experience so you keep putting it down because you don't want it to finish well i wrote a poem about my experience with cormac mccarthy's um all the pretty. I don't know if you've read that novel, but if you haven't, you should. It's a fantastic book. And I was feeling like that about it. So I wrote a poem and I sent it to him. He never replied, but that's fine.

I wasn't really expecting a reply. And it's just called On First Reading All the Pretty Horses. And I'll try and remember it. There is a magic in some books that sucks a man into connections with the spirits hard to touch that join him to his kind. A man will eke the reading out, guarded like a canteen in the desert heat, but sometimes needs must drink.

And then... Hang on. And then the final drop falls sweet. The last page turns. The end. I know I fucked it up because I forgot the last... That's all right. You got the point across

Cormac McCarthy I haven't read that book I said it's like and a river runs through it and Hedges just went oh the last paragraph of and a river runs through it, do you know that book? Norman Maclean anyway I don't know why I brought that up

I do because we were talking about writing yeah and so during the pandemic when you had all that free time, that's when you started writing prose. Yeah. Yeah. And I've written a book. It's done? It's 500 pages long, more or less.

Pretty well. I mean, we're starting to put it in a proper order and figure out whether I need to write anymore or what I need to do. And when you wrote that, did you have a process like a writer does where you just get up every day or did you just do it whenever the spirit moved you? No, because I was in lockdown, so I was in the same house all day every day, that if I wasn't sort of doing anything else, which most of the time I wasn't, I'd go, where was I?

And just pull the laptop over and write another chapter about something different or leaving all the Pink Floyd stuff to last, obviously, for obvious reasons. Hard things to write about stuff, so you just leave it alone for a bit. Well, it's the biggest breakup in probably rock history don't you think I mean it's it's I don't know it's up there you know maybe I don't I'm not very up on rock history because I well I'm not very interested in most popular music I mean there are certain people that I'm great fans of that mainly the the sort of the writers,

the singer-songwriters, you know, like so Dylan and Neil Young, but I won't start a long list because I probably could, but it's that end of the spectrum that I'm more interested in than I'm not really interested in loud rock and roll, which some people are and they love it, but I couldn't care less about ACDC or Eddie Van Halen

or any of that stuff. I just, who? I don't go who, because obviously I know the name. Right. And I'm sure Eddie's brilliant and a great guitar player and wonderful. It just doesn't interest me. Right.

But look out, Marl, there's a white boat coming up the river. You know, what was that called? The Powder Monkey, I think, which is on Rust Never Sleeps. Something like that. I kind of have to take a deep, I have it. You know, it's like, wow, what did he just say? When the first shot hit the dock. So you don't really consume rock and roll music? wow, what did he just say? When the first shot hit the dock.

So you don't really consume rock and roll music? No, I'm too busy working on my own stuff. Wow. Seems to be working out though. Whatever that process is. It's filled in 79 years, sort of. And I'm really excited about it. These are the best shows I've ever done, by far.

Really? I've made a real breakthrough. This is the first time I've ever sort of managed to communicate with an audience in a way that is satisfying. What's different? I've opened my heart. I'm vulnerable. I've opened my heart, I'm vulnerable. And yet, because I've done that, they're responding and in consequence I've become bolder.

You know, the more you risk, the more you potentially lose, but also the more you potentially gain. When you share your heart with somebody, they can either you know step on it or give you a bit of theirs back well so many performers particularly musicians they put up this wall there's this wall of image and you know what they're projecting and you get this rock and roll show you get this superstar and then you're the audience and there's not the

connection is only that you love them they appreciate you you love them good night everybody yeah but in showing vulnerability and trying to establish true connection you feel like that's where you've made this breakthrough yeah and And it's risk-taking as well. So I sing a song unashamedly about nuclear war at the end of the show when everybody's just watched the second half of Dark Side of the Moon and they're all, you know, really happy and quite rightly because my band is really good and so everybody's

very moved I take the risk of saying you know there's something that is a lot more important than any of this we are teetering on the edge of annihilation and they've arrived at a point in the show then where they go

but they also go let's listen to what he has to say and some of them even know the song which is from the Final Cut which was the last record I made in 1983 with Pink Floyd and then we do it and there and they and a lot of the audience respond they want to show me that they understand and that they care and they stand up and that when when everybody's being blown to bits and it's the end of the world in the song and we it's visual as well it's a beautiful animation that sean evans has made who's my uh collaborator in all things visual in these

shows and and the people sort of get it but it's still it still it's pretty somber because there's nothing really rah-rah or rock and roll about nuclear war. Nothing. But you can't ignore it. And when I say, you know, if you run into Joe Biden in the street, you might just tap him on the shoulder and say, hey, Joe, shouldn't we get rid of nuclear weapons? Why not spend our time? Let's talk to Putin about that and also China. All the nuclear power. Why don't we all get together and say, listen, these are too dangerous.

Can we all agree now? We've had them since 1945, and they've done nobody any good. Can't we just get rid of them so we don't have to worry about them anymore? The problem is they would worry that someone wouldn't and that person would have the nuclear advantage. Well, somebody maybe wouldn't while we've got them. Part of the worry about the big accident is them falling into wrong hands.

Yes. And that's a perfectly legitimate concern in my view. It is. Is it possible, do you think, to put that genie back into the bottle though? Yeah, of course. It can be done. I think so, yeah. All it requires is the will of the people to persuade. But again, it's like you, you can't do it until you can separate, until you get rid of Citizens United. You can't do it until you take money out of politics. You certainly can't do it until you take money out of politics. You certainly can't do it over here in the United States, whether they could do it in Russia. You know, Russia's an autocratic state, so who knows?

When people bring up, yeah, Russia and or China with me, you know, I say, you're talking to the wrong bloke. I don't speak Russian. I don't speak Chinese. I've never lived there. I know a little bit about the United States and about the United Kingdom and less but a little bit about – I speak Greek so I know a bit about Greece. And we learned French when I was at school and there are neighbors who we hate across La Manche. But I can't – without speaking Russian and Mandarin, how can you possibly know what's going on? And also, how could you know in the context of their culture?

Like you don't totally understand their culture unless you speak their language. Exactly. That's exactly right. Language is so important. That's why it's no surprise that Chomsky, you know, his work in linguistics was the thing that brought him to the notice of other academics and intellectuals back in the 50s. And he's right because, you know, linguistics has always been hugely important. Linguistics is the basis of all philosophy. And unless you speak the language that the philosophy is being described in you can't begin to take part in the conversation one thing i have to ask you because i i i can't forget this

the synchronization with the wizard of oz is bullshit is it bullshit, of course it is. I mean, it may not be. It may be that if you do what they say, it may be if you do what they say, but it has nothing to do with us, any of us. Nothing to do with anyone in Pink Floyd or anyone who wrote or recorded any of the music. It's something that somebody thinks.

So it's a coincidence of some time. Maybe it's cosmic coincidence. I do like the story, though, of the cop in Louisiana following a bus and it was weaving about the road a bit. And so he pulls it over, young motorcycle cop, puts the bike up on the stand,

opens the door, nearly falls over. There's so much smoke coming out through the bloody door. He goes in, he goes through and he's trying to find people, you know, with dope because it's just full of marijuana smoke. Eventually he gets to the back of the bus where there's a private compartment and he opens the door and goes in. And there's Willie Nelson. back of the bus where there's a private compartment he opens the door and goes in and there's willie nelson and he and the story is that willie nelson is listening to dark side of the moon and watching the wizard of oz on the tv and i don't believe it for a minute but i like the story yeah i don't even want to investigate that i want it to be true i don't want to find out it's not true but if you i But I've watched it.

I've watched The Wizard of Oz listening to The Dark Side of the Moon while high on marijuana. And if it's not on purpose, it is a cosmic coincidence because it's kind of amazing. It's kind of amazing how it just flows. If only I smoked dope, I could join you in that experience. You don't smoke at all? No. Never? Oh, yeah, yeah.

Ever, yeah. Yeah. I tell you why. Because I used to smoke cigarettes a lot and way, way too much. And particularly when I was working, I chain smoked literally. So I would smoke three packs at least a day of Marlboro Reds. And I gave up eventually. And I gave up like in the late 60s. But I didn't really give up.

I gave up smoking rolled cigarettes. I continued to smoke cigarettes with tobacco and hashish in them. So I pretended I'd stopped smoking cigarettes. But I hadn't. I was addicted. That's a big thing in England. Spliffs. When I was over there, I was fascinated by that. I was like, why do you guys have

cigarettes in your marijuana? Like, what is this? But it's pretty good. Well, I did it because I was addicted to nicotine. And then, in 1975, I realized that that's what I was doing. And after that, I never smoked dope again. I didn't like it.

I don't like being stoned. I don't like the feeling. It makes me paranoid. That's what I like about it. What, being paranoid? Yeah, I like it. Oh, my God. I enjoy the feeling of vulnerability sometimes.

Wow. Well, good for you. Chacun a son goût, as the French have it. I don't like it. I'm paranoid enough already without smoking. Oh, I am too. But occasionally I think just that there's an understanding of vulnerability that comes through marijuana that I enjoy. It's sort of a perspective enhancer for me sometimes.

Okay. Well, good for you. But, you know, with Dark Side of the Moon and with The Wizard of Oz, the combination, pretty incredible. All right. Good. Well, we got that out yes so when you guys like in the early days of the band what was like that's always the connection with rock and roll and drugs like this is like that's the narrative yeah was that in the early days of Pink Floyd, was that the case? It wasn't really relevant.

I mean, during the time when I was smoking hash every day was 1970, 71, 70. So it's pre-Darkside. It's when we were making medals, so it's echoes and things. I don't think it had, I don't think it impinged on my burgeoning writing career, if you like, when I was starting to write songs because Sid went crazy in 1967. And so by 69, we weren't seeing him anymore. He disappeared completely. And was that because of lsd or was it no i don't think so but you know that's the narrative right yeah that's the narrative or one of the narratives um it may be because he he was mixing with people who were doing acid on a regular basis, I think, in 67.

And I'm sure he did too much of it. Was he teetering on the edge of what might be called schizophrenia at the time? I think so, probably. A lot of the things that he was saying, and it was right at the beginning of us getting our first record in any chart which was arnold lane no it was after arnold lane it was in when see emily play came out and we were beginning to do tv shows in england and i and i he went very odd and he started i remember him at top of the pops in the dressing room one day um He had hair a bit like that painting on the wall. And he going sort of like that and then going,

looking worried and a bit frightened and then going, John Lennon doesn't have to do this. You know, which was kind of wacky. This was like three quarters of the way through the Beatles' career because they'd only had that one decade, really. And so he had misgivings about being on a miming pop show. He said, this is what we've worked towards for the last four or five years, is to be on top of the pops and make a few

quid you know buck up boy let's get on with it and uh but he never did buck up from from sort of that moment on really he wrote a few more songs but nothing of any any real note and he just got more and more and more detached until he was completely wacky and not making any sense and we may i mean i made a lot of um attempts to find out what was wrong and to involve his family you know he had elder brothers who i would ring up and say hey there's something really wrong with roger as they called him, because he wasn't his name was Roger Barrett, not Sid Barrett. I said, he's not well, I think. And one of the brothers actually came to London and went and saw him and called me up and went, he's fine.

You know, he's had some troubling times, but he's actually fine. And I went, Alan, he's not. He's not. But trust me, I live with him, you know. Anyway. And we tried to get him to a shrink um so on a number of occasions but he would never go in and but and then he just got weirder and weirder like in what way weird like what was incommunicative not making any sense at all not making any it's like i actually mentioned one actually mentioned one of the, one of the periods,

one of the moments is in the show. Cause it's, it's in when we play wish you were here and I do wish he was here. And I, I mean, he's, he's partly what that song's about and shine on you. Crazy diamond is just completely about Sid,

but we were, I tell the story in text in the show and it goes we'd been to a meeting at the Capitol Tower in Los Angeles and Sid and I were walking down the street after it and we stopped at the traffic light at Hollywood and Vine

Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street in Los Angeles and he looked at me and smiled and he said it's nice here in Las Vegas, isn't it? Well, we were in LA. So he already had no idea where he was, even like that. But then he, I say in the thing, you'll see it in the show, it says, then his face darkened and he looked down at the ground and spat out one word, people.

And that sort of encapsulates what it was like. Nothing made any sense. Disjointed. Blank, disjointed, you know. And there we were, all young, all very young, and trying to make our way. And by that time, Dave had already joined the band to play guitar because Sid didn't play.

I'm not saying he couldn't. Well, he couldn't really because both of us made his solo records with him, helped produce his solo records after that point. And it was pretty kind of disjointed and difficult to get him to do anything. Did he continue to deteriorate further after that? Yeah, and then he went home to live in Cambridge and he lived a very solitary life.

Now I spoke to his sister, Rosemary, after that and I said, does it make any sense to go and visit? No, don't do that. And she told me. I said, why not? And she said, well, he gets very agitated and upset if he's reminded of what happened before, whatever this is. He doesn't like it.

He doesn't want to see people from his past. He'd rather be left alone and he did and he used to paint a little bit and live just on his own in Cambridge until he died when he was 60 wow So I don't know what else to say about it, really. It was tragic, obviously. But those of us who were in Pink Floyd at the time experienced it as an existential threat as well. Fuck me, what are we going to do? He writes the bloody songs. Well, I wrote about 20% of them before. But they were nothing. Sid's songs were the things that were different they had that weird english romanticism

about them you know they were beautiful i've got a bike you can ride it if you like it's got a basket a bell that rings and things that make it look good i'd give it to you if I could but I borrowed it that's so quirky in terms of its meter the way the lyric attaches both to the melody and to the time signature and the tempo of the thing is remarkable

and it wasn't just you know there were lots of quirky little songs like that all in a very English romantic tradition and whatever. So how could we possibly survive? If the guy writes the songs and the band goes crazy, you're fucked, basically. Unless somebody else starts to write. Luckily, I did. I did start to write.

I'm not, I don't mean to laugh because he was a huge loss. And I did love him. Unfortunately, sometimes there's comedy and loss. Yeah. But what was it like to make that transition for you to make that shift in responsibility to start writing. Well, it all comes back to my mum, really, because we made, in 1970, we made a record called Medal. And on one side of it is a very long track called Echoes that is sort of me thinking a bit more metaphysically

about our trip, you know, as humans from ancient times overhead the albatross with Bligh. It was all a bit kind of romantic and science fiction. It was a bit Marvel comic-y. You know, it had kind of attachments to Doctor Strange. No Doctor Strange mentioned in the lyrics. I mentioned Doctor Strange in other songs that I was writing at the time. But it has one verse in it that defines everything I've done since.

And the verse is this. It goes, two strangers passing in the street by chance two passing glances meet. And I am you and what I see is me. And will we something, will they call us to move on and whatever? But that's the important couplet is to recognize your connection with your brother or sister, whoever they are, wherever they are. So to say, to make that attachment and to make a declaration that we're all in this together. So that's why I sing songs about the potential descent into a nuclear holocaust.

To my audiences in, well, tomorrow, Austin, Texas. It's just me saying, I see you. And that's what the bar is all about as well. That's what the vulnerability is. It's saying, I recognize that we're all African. When you say that to a crowded room of Italian journalists, they all look at each other. He's a crazy. We're not African. We're Italian. No we you're misunderstanding me genetically you know we now we have the genome yeah we can stop worrying about race there isn't any there's no race we just look different yes but we're not we're not at all isn't that isn't that reassuring it is to me it's fascinating

it is reassuring and one of the beautiful things about art, and particularly music, is that you can get a message like that across. And because people love the music and they'll listen to it over and over again and they'll remember your concert, it'll resonate. And it becomes a part of the way you think. It enhances the way people think. think it enhances the way people think and that idea like like a like a positive mind virus will grow in your head well we hope so it does it's a bit like when i sing us and them now i stop playing my bass when we get to with without and who'll deny it's what the fighting is all about because i wrote that in 1972 wow okay that line and it's still fucking true that's crazy you know so you wrote that line during vietnam yeah yeah i was a small boy forward he cried from the rear and the front rank died so that's like that's another

version of the bravery of being out of range which i wrote in 1990 so i wrote 1990 i wrote the bravery of being out of range so that's 20 years after i wrote us and them and us and them is only about two strangers passing in the street because there is no us and them it's all us right and so but the people with the money who by the elections that you would describing in the Citizens United bill of conversation they would have us they own all the newspapers and the TV stay and they would have us believe that the us and them is real and that we are good and they are evil that's why we've got to kill them all. Yeah.

And they sell that lie. And some people believe it. Intelligent people believe it. That was what was so disturbing about that conversation that you had with that gentleman on CNN. Right. Was that that was an us versus them conversation. Yeah. Yeah.

I'm not sure Michael McConnish is a gentleman. What do you call him? I certainly wouldn't have him in my club. No, I'm kidding. That was Groucho Marx. He's a guy working for a propaganda arm of the Democratic Party. I know. I mean, that's what CNN is. I know. Yeah. I mean, if you want to work there, that's what you do. You know, you want to be a baker, you got to work near an oven.

Groucho Marx, I believe, said, I wouldn't want to join a club that would have me as a member. Yeah. Didn't he? Or something like that. Yeah. Well, I agree with that. There was a thing called the intellectual dark web that was a bunch of us that were like sort of different thinkers online and they grouped us all together and called it the intellectual dark web.

And I was like, oh, fuck no. I'm not. So I started calling it the intellectual, the international dork web. I started, I started calling it all sorts of different things to mock it and much of the chagrin of some of the people that were involved in it. But ultimately it's kind of stopped. stopped talking about it but it was like listen don't make a club just don't do it just don't it's just don't even don't even pretend yeah it's just people yeah it's just humans so lump us in together then it's just

yeah clubs are a problem because they're always exclusive in one way or another. There's plenty of exclusivity in the world. We don't need more of it. Yeah. Yeah. True. Well, that's one of the beautiful things about music, right, that it unites people. And one of the beautiful things is that it unites people with different political philosophies,

different religious backgrounds, different... If you enjoy music and you enjoy art yeah it it brings people together in a very unique way because they have a they have the connection to this work they have a connection to this thing that this band or this person has created yeah it's beautiful yeah it is Yeah, it is. No, it is. You're absolutely right. I don't know why, but I saw a picture of Dirk Bogard the other day because... Oh, I know. Do I know? I was watching a documentary about Buster Keaton and stuff. How did Dirk Bogart get into that?

Or maybe it wasn't. Maybe that was another thing. But I couldn't look at Doug. I was thinking how unbelievably handsome and elegant Doug Bogart is sitting there with his knee crossed over like that, you know, with a cigarette and whatever. Doug Bogart. Dirk. Dirk Bogart. Yeah, he's an English actor

sorry I shouldn't anyway he was in a movie called Death in Venice yeah there he is well at the opening of Death in Venice he's sitting in a deck chair

on the Lido and it's Mahler's Fourth Symphony or is it his fifth? Fourth, I think it's the Adagiato from Mahler's Fourth Symphony. And it's just like you just go, when you hear that music with those shots, him on the Lido, and there's a boat going across the Grand Canal or something like that, you just go. going across the Grand Canal or something like that, you just go... So I find classical music often more moving

than almost any of the pop music that I'm attached to. But if it's popular music, for me, anyway, it's more likely to be Billie Holiday than anything contemporary. I was reading about God Bless the Child, and I read for the first time the story about her because she wrote the lyrics to God Bless the Child,

and it's a true story. Billie Holiday goes to borrow money from her mother who won't give her any because she's skint. She's skint? What's that? Skint, out of cash. Oh. Broke.

Oh, okay. She's broke. So she goes and tries to borrow money from her mother. Get the hell out of here, or whatever she says to her. So Billie Holiday writes, God bless the child who's got his own. Mama may have and Papa may have, but God bless the child who's got his own. Mama may have and Papa may have, but God bless the child who's got his own. And when you listen to that lyric, not knowing that it's literal story of her trying to borrow money from a parent.

I made up all kinds of stuff about it. What does that mean? Right. God bless the child who's got his own. What are you talking? What does that mean? Right. God bless the child who's God. He's like, what are you talking? What does that mean? And I'm trying to figure it out. And then I read.

Now it takes me. I'm 79 years old. And I read. That's what it was. Oh, my goodness. Anyway. Well, it's interesting because it means different to different people. They attach meaning to things.

And they decide. And they'll have discussions about it much like connecting dark side of the moon to the wizard of oz it's like people have decided yeah that there's and it it adds to the lore of what the art is yeah no that's right and i i love kind of enigmatic lyrics in things. I love lyrics that are very direct. I was talking about Neil Young earlier, you know, how I lost my friends, I still don't understand. They got lost in something station,

so it became park bench mutations in the blah blah blah, they were waiting away, which is an absolute direct, but me, I just headed north to where the pavement reads, reads the road and all that stuff, narrative songs like that. But there's also a lot of stuff that is open absolutely to interpretation. Of my songs that I like to hear people talking about, or don't, but I would notice, it's like the second verse of Wish You Were Here goes, notice it's like the second verse of wish you were here goes um did they get you to trade your heroes for ghosts hot ashes for trees hot air for a cool breeze cold comfort for change and did you exchange a walk-on part in the war for a lead role in a cage well there's so many ideas all wrapped up in that in those words i know what they mean for me but a lot of people

sometimes either misinterpret or they interpret them in ways that mean something to them I think I think also they attach it to meaning that applies to their own life yeah exactly yeah yeah exactly which is cool yeah it is cool it is cool I mean there's songs that become an anthem for a period of time in people's lives. And when they hear that song, it just immediately connects them. Yeah. It's a beautiful thing. It's funny that Hey Teacher, Leave Them Kids Alone, which has now been taken up in Iran in all the protests in the streets because of the beating to death of, what's her name, Amsa Amini is the girl's name who died.

For incorrectly wearing her headscarf. For incorrectly wearing her hijab. It's fascinating what an uprising has come from that all over the world. I saw this massive protest in New York City and countries all over the world. Yeah. And in Iran, it's wild right now. Yeah. I didn't go on yesterday to check it out.

But they're still killing people in the streets. Yeah. The government, it's a tricky situation because obviously I'm against the idea of a theocracy under any terms. Just as much of the Iranian mullahs, the Ayatollah, as I am against the Israeli state, which is another theocracy and whatever. But I'm also very wary of, and not that it hasn't stopped me making videos and sending my support to the protesters and saying because it's separate from the politics of the thing

because there's a lot of talk that is encouraging the destruction of Iran in the right wing of politics in the United States. What Wesley Clark was talking about on there. Because they are on the list. They're on the list of countries that need to be destroyed. And obviously. Anyway, what am I trying to say? So I had to make the decision when friends in Iran said to me,

look, they've just done this, do something. So I started making videos immediately. So, of course, hey, Ayatollah, leave them kids alone has become a big catchphrase in Iran. And they're using it. And it was, you know, it started off, all my work was banned in apartheid South Africa because the kids in the townships were singing,

Leave Those Kids Alive, Hey Teacher, Leave Those Kids Alive. It became a protest anthem for them there. So I'm really happy that it fulfills that function in different parts of the world. And whenever it does, it's always against an errant authority of one kind or another, which again is sort of the story of my life. I don't care who you are or what country you rule. If you're in authority and you're getting it wrong

and not adhering to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights from Paris in 1948, I'm against you. And the rest of it I don't care about, really, but I care about that. Well, unfortunately, most countries, when they get to a position of power, don't adhere. No, they don't. It's almost like the default setting. Yeah. Yeah, it is almost a default setting.

It would be nice to see, to allow a bit more leeway, particularly, say, in Latin America, to the new Colombian administration or the new president of Chile or the whatever. If we leave them alone and let them get on with it, whether or not they might develop societies where they don't feel that they need the heel of the jackboot to maintain control of air, you know. So it's hard to know because we, the West, the UK and the United States and the rest of NATO have interfered mightily in experiments in other ways to address social responsibility of governments in other economic models, say, like in Venezuela or in Chile or places where we attempt to depose the duly elected democratic

government isn't it almost ironic that the one country that was founded within the last few hundred years to escape from the control of a dictatorship became the country that intervenes in more countries government than any yeah it's pretty wild if you really think about the origins of the United States. What's really interesting is, yes it is very very interesting, it's fascinating, but if you read the Constitution, you've probably read your Constitution more carefully than I had and the Bill of Rights and the whatever

and the way the Electoral College was set up. It was sort of set up so that the people never really have a chance to have any power in it. It's set up to be ruled by the elite who created and wrote the Constitution. But what I was going to say was, what was I going to say?

Isn't it? Yeah, but it's interesting as well that the media is so powerful and so sewn up and says the same thing in context. Democrats and Republicans, all of it together, which is, no, we're the good guys. Nor that the United States of America has interfered in more elections and they've been involved in more coups and invaded more countries and deposed more democratically elected. Yeah. Not least the government of the Ukraine in 2014. And it's not, it's like none of it ever happened, you'd think. Right.

We wave the flag and, no, everything's great. No, it's not. It just isn't. We just have so much momentum in this country for the dissemination of propaganda. To put a halt to that and start objectively analyzing the United States' role in all these foreign conflicts and where money has played a part and what are the motivating factors for us to get involved in this and who stands to profit and what are the forces behind this. To expect that from mainstream media at this point, it's like, you know, they're almost like, well, that's just not what we do. Well, the unfortunate thing is, and without wishing to decry all journalists everywhere, but most of them in the mainstream media, the problem is that if you speak up against the story that they're selling on behalf of the ruling class, you get fired.

You get fired. Yeah. You're gone. Just happened to Katie Halper from The Hill. She agreed with Rashida Tlaib that Israel is an apartheid endeavor, which it obviously is. You're fired. You're not

allowed to say that. So it's really problematic. And it may well be that in journalism school, they may well teach people now that you have to be really careful to toe the line. You can only say what they want you to say. You can't.

I nearly said little prick, but the guy from Rolling Stone, he's not from Rolling Stone, who interviewed me the other day. CNN? No, not Michael. This was Rolling Stone. This was like two days ago. I was a bit hot under the collar about it two days ago I was a bit under hot under the collar about it two days ago because it was a hatchet job if you if you don't believe me read

it but I know you do believe me I believe you anyway this kid um yeah we were having a conversation and I was talking to him about something where there is a narrative. And we... Yeah, I will. I'll just say this one. Okay. And it's about Syria and it's about false flag and it's about chemical weapons and it's about Duma

and it's about April the 13th and it's about the OPCW and it's about the inspectors, Ian Henderson and Inspector B and it's about the whole narrative and about how it was taken eventually to the security council by Aaron Marte from Grey Zone and others and blah, blah, blah. So there are two narratives. One is a sad, gassed people, which is the officially accepted narrative. And the other is that he didn't.

The other is that he didn't. It was a false flag by al-Nusra and al-Qaeda who were in Douma in control of the place on the day it happened but left the next day because they'd already given up. And the Assad government actually sent the buses to take them all away saying, let's not fight in the streets. You've lost. You can go. Anyway, so this kid started accusing me because I've done so much reading and research into this particular subject, and I've been in a lot of trouble since 2018 because I stood up on stage in Barcelona

and expressed my misgivings only because the United States and the UK and the Republic of France were about to go and bomb Syria in reprisal for a chemical weapons attack that there was a huge amount of

doubt about. All I did was I stood up on stage and said, could we just wait and find out what really happened? See what the OPCW says and whatever before we go bombing a foreign, foreign country. No, they didn't. They went and bombed Syria anyway.

So why am I telling you this? Oh, because he just shouted me down in the conversation. Shouted you down. Yeah. Just said and accused me in the post thing of being a conspiracy theorist and having weird ideas about. How old was this gentleman? Not old. Little prick? Old enough to know better. He's called James Ball.

Yeah. Yeah. I didn't describe his prick. I said he was a little prick. Yeah. And so he was shouting. Anyway. Well, you can listen to it. Okay. You know. Anyway.

But we never resolved anything. That's the problem. The thing is that, you know. Oh, and he claims to run something called the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Oh, really? And you buy this story of the Duma chemical as if it was absolutely the truth and you know it. How do you know?

Oh, I know people in, you know, the smacks of Bellingcat and Elliot Higgins and all of that stuff. Higgins and all of that stuff and the intermingling of the security services, both in England and on the side of it, and probably in Russia and God knows where else, you know, none of this is, you can't believe anything. You really do have to read everything and you have to read the small print and you have to look in if you want to know the truth about things that happen. When you're doing something like that, you're reading both sides and you're trying to get an objective assessment of what actually happened how do you discern how do you how are you well well you have to read everything and particularly you have to read the documents that are leaked by whistleblowers. There were new documents as late as 2020 from the OPCW

from a further person who came out and said, I'm going to give you these documents now because they show that what you're saying is true. And they show that Ian Henderson's misgivings about the official OPCW document, which was an absolute made-up job. The guy who runs the OPCW now is called Arias, okay? And they produced a final report on Duma that said it is likely that these people died of chlorine poisoning from a canister drop from a helicopter or whatever. None of the evidence points to that. It all points to the fact that nobody quite knows

who killed these people, but the evidence all points to the fact that the canisters that were found at the site were put there, were placed there, were left there. They were not dropped from the air. Anyway, I don't want to go through the whole thing. Again, if you want to know about it or if anyone out there wants to know about it, you should read Aaron Marte's articles in The Grey Zone. That's the first place to go.

And then you should read, I've forgotten his name, but the guy who actually started the OPCW, who was fired because he started asking questions. You should read what he has to say about it. This is the guy who started the, you know, the OPCW, something for protection of chemical weapons. I can't remember what the O stands for. Anyway, I'm going to stop talking about it.

So this person who shouted you down, they had not read all this. No. So they had this narrow-minded perspective, this one-side perspective, which is the mainstream narrative. Yeah. And if you question it, they say you're a conspiracy theorist and a Putin apologist and a Russian bot. And they just call you names and call you names and laugh at you as if

you're an idiot. Which obviously I'm not. And I had read an awful lot more than this, which is why we couldn't have a conversation about it. Because he hadn't read any of this stuff. I've read it all. Well, you always have to be when someone starts shouting you down and they haven't read the other side of it.

That's never a good sign. It's never a good way to show the veracity of your argument. Well, it's public so people can listen to the conversation. But they may do. Somebody else from Rolling Stone, the very next day, i.e. yesterday, they recorded a conversation between the two of them before playing a recording of the conversation I'd had with the little prick. And that conversation they had was 10 minutes of hatchet job. I can't believe he said that about the Jews. You know, that sort of thing. I.e. trying to make up the story that I'm an anti-Semite.

Right. Again. Yeah. And load that onto. I wonder why people do that. Do you think they do that to just support their own argument, to try to make it look like it makes more sense what they're saying, and then calling you a conspiracy theorist?

So just for their own ego? No. Do you think that this is something that they're being encouraged to do by the publication well the anti-semite thing if i could take that they do it because they have no argument there is no position there is no defense for the apartheid state of israel and its occupation of the palestin None. And so by calling you an anti-Semite, they just stopped the conversation dead in its tracks because that's an indefensible position. Exactly.

Yeah. And you're not allowed to say, I'm not. Right. You're not allowed to. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, you once put the Star of David

on the side of a pig in a show. Yeah, but I also put this hammer and sickle and the crescent and whatever and a dollar sign and, you know. Yeah. No, but you put the, yeah, well, it's a symbol of an oppressive state, you know. Yeah. I am lumping you in.

But you're not, it's not like just you. Right. But that is just me criticizing the policies of your government. And I'm afraid the Star of David does represent the nation that is committing the crime of apartheid every day and murdering Palestinians every day. Men, women and children every single day. So, yeah, I did. Yeah, I did. And I'm unapologetic about it. But at the time when it happened, which was in 2013, I think, somebody complained. And I thought, God, this is more trouble than it's worth. I actually took it off after a few gigs because

I was sick of it. And at the time, the ADL said, well, we don't approve of everything he does, but he's not an anti-Semite. But by God, they've changed their mind now. They, you know, they constantly, and it's not just me, obviously. It's mere anyone, anyone who dares to suggest that there's something bad about their policies.

And so that's why the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism is so bad and so dangerous and why the guy who wrote it has said, I'm sorry. It's been taken completely out of the context that I meant it. He's called George Steve or something. I've forgotten his name, sadly. But he stood up in public on many occasions, speaking to academics and, you know, colleges and whatever, and said, I really apologize for writing this

because it's been taken in completely the wrong way, and I wish I'd never suggested it. I was, you know, influenced by people i shouldn't have been influenced by and it's bullshit the guy wrote it but they've got they're off and running and so but it has to be it has to be walked back from the ihr the international holocaust remembrance association alliance sorry alliance definition of anti from the IHR the International Holocaust Remembrance Association Alliance sorry Alliance definition of anti-semitism is you can't take a word and change its meaning completely right or you can but you'd have to get everybody anything to do with dictionaries to agree to change the meaning if you want anti-semitemitism to mean criticism of the Israeli government,

you have to say this isn't like the anti-Semitism that we talked about, which is where you're down or criticize or say bad things about Jewish people or the Jewish faith. That's what anti-Semitismism means to me yes and to everybody else but it doesn't you but the idea that you can't that israel can be behave like people in the past behave towards jews in northern europe no it can't mean that it cannot mean that no it can't to criticize your behavior now is not anti-semitic it's something else it's being it's being in favor of equal human rights for palestinians so it's in being in favor of the palestinians having rights is not anti-semitic it's pro-human rights it's pro-human being yeah it's pro the culture of the world

yeah when when you did that show in florida and they uh the jewish group removed the children from the show did you replace them with other children yeah imagine those poor kids who were going to come and do the show would have been an amazing experience for them yeah yeah i mean i'm in contact with quite a lot of the kids that have worked with us in shows yeah oh yeah because some of the stories you know particularly in South America where they were a bit bit needier than in Europe they were by and large fairly all right but in the United States we did a thing they've just come back to me We had these kids who were a bit

older than usual and they were in Oakland, up in the Bay Area. And they were black kids, all black kids. You know, and the boys had sort of almost had mustaches and they were surly and uncooperative and really you know very difficult to work with and didn't want to you know and it was hard work and i can remember feeling a bit negative towards these people anyway they it, and they did the show, and they were fine and whatever. And like a week later, there was a phone call came in another city into the production office, and it was a guy on the phone, and he was talking to one of the girls in the office,

and he wanted to talk about these kids. And she was busy and went, yeah, what, what? He said, well, hold on a minute. Don't get short with me. I want to talk about these kids. And she was busy and went, yeah, what, what? You know, and he said, well, hold on a minute. Don't get short with me. I want to talk to somebody. And I didn't talk to him, but somebody just went, oh, well, hold on, who's that? Oh, it's Sean from Oakland, whatever.

I brought the kids to the show. Oh, yeah, hi, Sean, how are you doing? He said, good, but I think I need to say something. Could you pass this on to Roger? Yeah, he said, because I could see it was difficult working with my kids. He said, yeah, what? He said, well, I want to tell you about those kids.

He said, none of them has two parents of those 12 kids, boys or girls. They either have a mother or a father, but none of them have both. If they have a mother, she's a hooker and she's a junkie. If they have a father, he's in prison. So if they were a bit uncooperative,

I can feel myself getting emotional now. That's why. And he said, the other thing I want to tell you is this. He said, nothing like that has ever happened to any of those children before. And they've talked about nothing else since they came and did that show.

It's the first thing that they've ever done that they're proud of. Those kids. Wow. I know. I think I was in Chicago. That night. I tell you what I can tell you. I don't know why. Yeah, I do know why in Chicago that night. I tell you what I can tell you.

I don't know why. Yeah, I do know why I'm telling you because, you know, we were having an open conversation. I think I was in Chicago. Steve Bing, do you know who that is? He was a rich bloke from L.A. Yeah. Got left a ton of money and he was in film production and this and that. And he was a strange bloke.

He killed himself in the end. Somebody told me that the other night. I said, do you know that Bing threw himself off a 27-story building? When did that happen? I don't know. A few weeks ago, I think, or months ago. I honestly don't know

because I hadn't spoken to Steve for years. So I don't know. He had more money than sense and he did a lot of junk. Anyway, that's not the thing. But he happened to be in Chicago and came to the gig in Chicago. And when I heard this news about these kids in Oakland,

so I said, you should send them some money, Steve. You're rich. To this group of kids in Oakland so they can maybe do something theatrical and he said you've got money why don't you

send them some money and so I think we sent them either 50 or 25 grand each and I was really glad so they got a check for 50 or 100 grand I don't know what it was I can't remember but they did and I never spoke to the guy again

and I have no idea what happened to the money and I don't know but I do remember when I heard him say that's the most important thing that's ever happened to these children it's amazing isn't it you touch those lives however however briefly. And you brought it up because you talked about the kids in North Miami who weren't allowed to sing with

me because some prick had told the mayor that I'm an anti-Semite. Some probably very worthy feeling, you know, local Jewish community association. and i'm sure they believe it they probably think i'm bloody you know goebbels or somebody there's a very defensive position that's taken up by many people where any criticism of the policies of israel is anti-semitic yeah and it's a like a absolute almost a binary thing it's either you're on or off. You're either with us or against us. Yeah. Well, luckily, I mean, I have lots of, you know, close friends who are in organizations

all over the world who are actually Jewish people, in Jewish Voice for Labor. I won't mention their names, but become close friends of mine. So it's a weirdly divisive thing that anybody should think that the settler

colonial project in Palestine has anything to do with Judaism. It shouldn't have. You know, if you're going to be a settler colonialist nation and subjugate the indigenous people to death, well, okay, but you can't do it under the cloak of your religion. And so you can't criticize this because of my religion.

As I said to you before, how would that be if we suddenly decided that the United States was a theocracy and only Christians could have rights? What? What? Yeah. Anyway. Yeah, it would be insane. It's somehow – well, it's removed from our – it's not discussed publicly. It's also removed from our view. It's not something that we see. We're not discussed publicly. It's also removed from our view.

It's not something that we see. We're not over there. And I've had friends that have gone over there, and Abby Martin in particular, who's come on the podcast and said, talked about the atrocities that are committed there and even attacks on journalists and murdering of journalists over there

by Israeli troops. And she just gets mercilessly attacked for talking about this. She even interviewed people on the street in Israel and asked them questions about Palestinians and got these horrific responses, dehumanizing the othering of those people. I know them both. I know Mike and Abby very well. And I believe you. And I've heard those stories from her as well.

Well, they are, it's a small country and they're a long way away. And the press is completely, well, it's not actually. Funnily enough, there's one independent paper called Haaretz in Israel. And a close friend of mine, who is an Israeli Jew, writes articles for it.

And they're very humane. But somehow they just get brushed aside. His name is Gideon Levy. If you ever want to look up somebody who's making sense from that side of the tracks or that part of the world, Gideon's your man.

I don't know why. Yeah, it's very hard to shine a light brightly enough that people go, oh, I get it. And particularly if the leader of your great country is going, I don't want to hear anything. I'm not interested. I will be the greatest supporter of Israel. One three million percent that there's ever been ever in the whole history of everything,

whatever they do, I don't care. There's no political consequences for saying that, that's part of the problem. You can say that and there's zero political consequences. But if you do talk about the Palestinian people and their rights and the plight of the Palestinians, then you are connected to Hamas. And then all of a sudden you're connected to this terrorist organization and it doesn't matter about those people. Yeah. The narrative is support of Israel equals you're on the right side. Yeah. The narrative is support of Israel equals you're on the right side. Yeah. Yeah.

Regardless of how their policies impact individual human beings through no fault of their own, just happen to be born Palestinian and been stuck in this apartheid state. Yeah. And that's the other thing is that they, you know, it's very binary in that way. It's like you either with israel or you're with hamas you're with this terrorist organization that puts its people in danger purposely and uses them as cannon fodder so they can gain support internationally and and does all these human rights atrocities and launches missiles at israel well yeah, I know. I hear all of this just the same as you do. But they're just human beings. Well, they're also the democratically elected government of Gaza, Hamas.

And there is an armed wing and whatever. But if you actually read international law at all or the Geneva Conventions, an occupied people have an absolute legal and moral right to resist the occupation. And this is a fact that is not bandied about when they talk about firing rockets into Israel, which almost never do any damage because they're very ineffectual but it's and another thing that is a great worry to the Palestinian community is that

the Israelis seem now to have a policy of pushing them, murdering so many of them that they are absolutely trying to create another intifada so they can make it an armed conflict where they're a thousand times, 10,000 times more powerful than the Palestinian people who they are hoping will arm themselves and the young people gather together in bands and try and have an insurrection and armed intercession.

So they can just kill them all. When you say that Hamas is the democratically elected leaders of Palestine. How corrupt. I didn't say of Palestine. I said of Gaza. Excuse me, of Gaza. Yeah. How corrupt is that election? I have no idea.

I wasn't there. But it was in 2011, I think. Right. Has there been an election since then? I don't know. How you would organize anything in Gaza, which is a prison. Right. It's got borders. The Israelis control who comes in and goes out. then I don't know how you would organize anything in Gaza, which is a prison. It's got borders.

The Israelis control who comes in and goes out. They opened fire on Palestinian fishing boats again yesterday. So I can't really answer that question because I'm not there and I don't know. Does anybody have a clear path of resolution that makes sense for that area where they could sit down and come up with some sort of humane, logical, compassionate way to mitigate some of these problems? Does anyone? Yeah, I do. What is yours? You do. You give equal human rights to people, but you would have to stop the occupation and stop one group of people

oppressing another group of people. You would have to accept the principles of Paris 1948, and everything would develop from that. Then you could have a process. You could all get on a plane and go to Oslo and have meetings. They did that once before, but nobody stood by anything that was agreed in Oslo. It was just a delaying process to consolidate the occupation of Palestine, i.e. the settlement building, the private roads, all of that stuff. But yeah, but you would need the will. You would need the will of the Israeli government and then it could move forward. Is there any discussion from the Israeli government or from Israel about the human rights of the people of Gaza? None.

None. They're implacable. All they want is for Liz Truss to move the UK embassy to Jerusalem and compound the problem just like Donald Trump did when he did that. And he exacerbated the problem beyond all measure because it's like, oh, look, the president of the United States has said it's all right for us to annex the Golan Heights and occupy the whole of what was left of Palestine in 1967 and establish an apartheid state. Donald Trump says it's okay. Even though the whole international community up until that time had said,

no, Jerusalem, it cannot be all combined under the control of the state of Israel. That is not what we all agreed in 1947. And so the occupation in 1967 of East Jerusalem was illegal and still is. All the settlements in the occupied territory are illegal, not just under international law but under the fourth Geneva convention as well and it's also illegal not to allow the

refugees to return into Israel as well you can't do it it's illegal but the fact that international law as we know because the United States isn't a party to the treaty of Rome they said law as we know because the United States isn't a party to the Treaty of Rome.

They said, well, we didn't sign any of those treaties. So we're not subject to international laws. So the United Nations Charter is a wonderful document. Charter is a wonderful document, but unfortunately, the United Nations came in the ashes of the Second World War and included within its charter is the fact that the five permanent members of the Security States, France, England, China and Russia all have the power of veto of any resolution. And so the United Nations actually has no teeth if you have the power of veto. So you get anything to do with Israel is always vetoed. Any resolution that says they better stop behaving badly and do the

right thing, as my mother would say, is always vetoed by Israel, the United States, the Marshall Islands, Australia, and a couple of other odds and sods. It's always the same five or six people. Well, who support, or rather who don't support resolutions in the General Assembly that say Israel should behave better. So it's very difficult. Thank goodness it exists and that people are allowed to stand up on their hind legs and make speeches. And thank goodness that they can make alliances that are outside the control of this of the Security Council but they can't make it they can't

exert any pressure there's no they can't make sanctions or they can't they can't exert pressure which is so it has no teeth but it is a great forum still for discussion I actually spoke not to the General Assembly,

but I spoke to the Human Rights Committee of the General Assembly of the United Nations on the 29th of November, 2012. Really? I put a suit and tie on, and I called them Your Excellencies. It was the weirdest thing. It's on YouTube. I'm sure suit and tie on and I called them your excellencies. It was the weirdest thing. I'm sure you can find it. If you want to see

what I said you can find it. What was that like? I loved it. Yeah? It was really great. You know and the ambassador with this bloke came up in a suit but with a funny collar and he put his hand out and he went, I want to thank you and blah, blah, blah.

That was a great speech and whatever. He said something and he wandered off. And I said, somebody, who was that? And they said, oh, he's the ambassador to the United Nations from Iran. And I went, wow, how cool is it to meet such a person even? Yeah. Anyway, they've never invited me back. Well, I think that's a one and done type situation.

But it's, you know, if I hadn't done that, it would be on my bucket list to go and talk in an august gathering of people like that. And they clapped as well when I'd finished. I was only calling for peace, just like I'm with the Ukraine. Yeah. My platform is no different. Paris 1948.

Come on, that's all we have to do. What a weird world we live in where calling for peace is controversial. Yeah. And you can get you. You're considered a traitor. Very strange. Yeah. Well, people are just so, there's so much confusion as to how the world actually works.

Yeah. And there's so much confusion as to like what the clear solution is. And what you're saying is a clear solution to be a good person, to do the right thing. Yeah. And to apply that to the whole earth. Yeah. Well, the problem is or a big problem here, as I've said many times before, is that that group, including Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld and Cheney and Bill Kristol and the rest of them, the whole neocon cabal has no interest in doing the right thing. They want to rule the world.

That's all they care about. And keep making money and never give any power to the people and make certain a democracy never appears anywhere in the world. They want to be in charge of everything and keep everything going just as it is. They want Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg and the rest of them to get richer and richer. And they don't give a fuck about the rest of you or me. They don't care. They probably find it hard to believe that we haven't revolted, that there hasn't been a revolution. Do you really think they find it hard to believe?

That they find it hard to believe. Yeah, but they – Well, no, no, probably they don't. I find it hard to believe. But we're all, you know, throw the dog a bone. Right. Give him a phone. Check out your Facebook likes. Yeah, exactly.

Everything will be all right. Let them kill Assange, you know. The Assange thing is bizarre. Yeah, it is. It's the most bizarre. Yeah. Because there's no case. No.

For what they're doing to him. And initially it was like some sexual thing. And now it's ambiguous. The little prick wanted to argue with me about that as well. What did he want to argue? And this is a guy who claims to run something, which I haven't had time to look into, called the Bureau for Investigative Journalism. And he doesn't give a fuck about Julian Assange being murdered. It's insane.

By Liz Truss. Slow murder. Slowly. Tortured. Boris Johnson and the whole of the English judicial system and with the connivance of or at the behest of the U.S. government who want him dead. They want him hung up like a magpie

in a hedge as a warning. And it bloody well will be a warning. Can you imagine going to journalist school and going, I know one thing I mustn't do. Don't leak anything that's very important. Or don't publish it. He didn't leak anything. He just published it.

It's amazing how little support there is for him and how much you just you don't hear anybody outraged. It's just it's nothing. And even if someone is in support of him being arrested or him being deported to the united states there's no good argument there's nothing there think about all the things that people have gotten away with yeah i mean look at this fucking galene maxwell thing yeah galene maxwell this i've said this before i'll say it again she's the only person ever to be tried and arrested and put in jail for sex trafficking to no one. There's no list.

Where's the list of the people that she sex trafficked to? Well, the problem is we know that they're head of state, billionaires, wealthy people, famous people. King's brother. Yeah, King's brother. Where's this list? Where's the list of people? The list does not exist. So you're trying her and convicting her for a crime

where if you're sex trafficking, that means you're trafficking to someone. And if that someone is an American citizen or a British citizen, that is an illegal act. So who are these people that have committed this illegal act? Because they're responsible as well. Right. So who are these people? And how is there no discussion of this?

Well, there's no discussion because Geoffrey, watch his face, hung himself in his prison cell. Yeah. Yeah. Which is insanely bizarre, right? That one. That's insane. Oh, the cameras just happen to not work. How convenient. Yeah. There's ligature marks around his neck and a fractured neck bone. No worries. Yeah. That's what happens when you hang yourself. We were having a cup of coffee.

Yeah. Or whatever it was. I confess I don't know a huge amount about the Jeffrey Epstein affair. I know too much, unfortunately. I've read too. It's a very disturbing thing. But the most disturbing thing is that there's no list. Like this is – that's a real crime, right? Isn't it that Andrew's supposed to have given somebody 12 million quid to go away? Yeah.

And to get off the list? Supposedly. It's hard to know whether or not that's true. But for sure, money's been exchanged. Influence has been exchanged. People are just, they're not throwing any bones. There has to be a large group of people that were involved in this, and there's none that are being exposed, which is quite fascinating. Because I guess if you did get exposed, if someone said, hey, blah, blah, blah, head of this bank, we have evidence that you were

having sex with underage girls, that person could say, okay, what about Bill Clinton? What about this guy? What about that guy? He was there too. And then the House of Cards comes down. Bill Gates. Bill Gates. Hard to imagine. Not just Bill Gates, but Bill Gates after Jeffrey Epstein had been arrested and convicted for statutory rape. Right?

I mean, he had that very light slap on the wrist. Yeah. Did he, as I said, I don't really know much about this. But one journalist who kind of tracked this down and hounded this story until it became exposed publicly and then Then he got rearrested and then he got arrested and tried for other crimes and then once he was in jail That's when they you know Suicided him. Yeah It's a wild story. Yeah, but just the fact that there's a place like that, there's an island that he owned. Like, where is this guy getting this fucking money? I don't know what you mean.

To own an island. And the island is for sale now for, I think it's $100 million or something like that. Like, where'd you get that money? You know, and then the CEO of Victoria's Secrets gives them a $60 million mansion in Manhattan. Like, what? And then you find out that these other CEOs have given them $100 million, $150 million, $50 million. Like, what? What is this?

Some bizarre intelligence operation? Like, what is this? Like, what are they doing here? You sound like a conspiracy theorist. I am a conspiracy theorist. Look, some of them are real. I'm not an outrageous or illogical conspiracy theorist, for the most part. I believe you. But there's a lot of conspiring. The idea that conspiracies don't exist. Well, what about Enron?

of conspiring. The idea that conspiracies don't exist. Well, what about Enron? What about the Iraq War? What about, there's so many conspiracies that you can prove easily. They've turned out to be true and just follow the money and power. Yeah.

It's a weird world we live in, Roger. Sure shit is. It is. world we live in, Roger. Sure shit is. It is. I'm living in, but I confess I'm living somewhat in the moment at Nat right now. And I don't, we shouldn't talk about the Ukraine anymore, but that's kind of mostly what I think about. Is the Ukraine. Yeah. Well, it's the most potent possibility for the

destruction of mankind yeah it is and there are so many people that are putting Ukraine flags and their Twitter bio and causing for an escalation calling for an escalation rather yeah and it's very disturbing yeah it's very disturbing. Yeah, it's very, very, very, very disturbing. Well, you know, all I can do is keep writing letters to Mr. Putin and Mr. Biden, you know, and Mr. Zelensky and Mrs. Zelenska. I had no idea that you changed the letter at the end of their name depending on gender. But now I know. Yeah, I didn't know that either. Well, she's Zelenska and he's Zelensky.

It's interesting, isn't it? It is. What you learn about, you know, other people. Hey-ho. Well, what should we talk about now? We can wrap this up. Well, we still have some pool to play. Yeah, let's go play some pool.

We'll play some pool. We'll wrap this up. But it's been a very enjoyable visit. Thank you very, very much. I really appreciate it. I appreciate your time. I appreciate your courage. And I appreciate your intellectual curiosity and the way you chase down these ideas and these stories and you have so much information

at your disposal when you're discussing these things. You're so informed. And I think that's very, very rare. Well, thank you for that. I really appreciate it. Thanks for being here. It's been a great pleasure.

Thank you. And I can't wait to see your show. I can't wait to see you get that bloody pool stick out and break. Let's do it. It's your a great pleasure. Thank you. And I can't wait to see your show. I can't wait to see you get that bloody pool stick out and break. Let's do it. It's your break. Okay. All right.

Bye, everybody. Bye, everybody.