The Joe Rogan Experience - #522 - CJ Werleman

Episode Date: July 16, 2014

CJ Werleman is an Op-Ed Columnist for Salon/Alternet, also known for authoring the books "Crucifying America" and "God Hates You. Hate Him Back".

My guest today, C.J. Werleman, will definitely ruffle some feathers, ladies and gentlemen. If you are of the religious inclination, if you are ultra sensitive, if you have a problem with seeing Uncle Sam crucified on the cover of a book that says crucifying America and on top of it, he's not even a fucking American. When you hear him talk, you're going to go, hey, pal, you're not even from here. What's going on? Why are you shitting on us? What about your country, man?

Thanks for joining me, man. I appreciate it. Thanks, Joe. Thanks for having me um thanks for joining me man i appreciate it thanks joe thanks having me on mate please i appreciate it um i watched a very fascinating interview today or conversation that you had today about the the religious right and how much hate do you get on a daily basis because like you're you're going hard here man you got you got uncle sam crucified on your book i mean i always tell people that they ask me, where do you live? I always say Southern California, and I never give the exact address because there is a fatwa put out on me.

Actually, and no joke, the Westboro Baptist Church, which we all know very well. When my first book was released in 2009, the title is God Hates You, Hate Him Back, they sought a title without understanding what the content of the book was and thought that I must have been on their side. And they thought, hey, we've got somebody who's written a book in pro of our mission. Once they took a look at my book, they realized how off base that was, and I was attacking them for some of their beliefs.

And Fred Phelps actually issued a public fatwa to have me killed. So I want to leave my address in Southern California because I do have kids. But he's dead, right? Does that fatwa have any teeth? I don't know. Do you inherit a fatwa? It's a good question. Do it just get passed down?

I'm not sure. Well, whatever happened to Salman Rushdie? He's around now. Yeah, he's now out in the open. I think that maybe people who want other people dead, particularly literal people, they have short memories. Well, that was a weird one, man. He wrote a book that people had interpreted as being about the Prophet Muhammad, but it wasn't necessarily, right? No, it's more about the poetry

which was written on a segment of Islam, and it wasn't actually taking scripture from the Quran itself. So, I mean, what he wrote would be very mild in, say, comparison to a South Park episode where the Prophet Muhammad is dressed up like a bear. Islam is a very fascinating religion to me in so many different ways. But it's also fascinating in that liberals have for whatever reason chosen that as being the one to defend in some weird sort of a way like anytime someone criticizes islam they become islamophobic but you will never hear like certain segments of the progressive population shit on someone who is criticizing christianity you don't become a christianophobe mate that's i mean you've hit on a very important point here. The problem, I mean, Chris Hedges

wrote a great book called The Death of Liberalism in America. The liberal class no longer exists in America. It has no voice. And to underscore that point, Hillary Clinton's popularity. Hillary Clinton doesn't, she doesn't stand for populist economics or she doesn't stand for progressive causes. She's a brand and a brand only. So the liberal class has been left to be the political police force for PC correctness and that's it. liberalism, things like the welfare state, free trade, and so forth. You had President Clinton, who gutted the unions, destroyed welfare, and implemented NAFTA, which outsourced 800,000 jobs abroad. You're left with a liberal class that all they do is eat wines and cheeses and pick up people who are saying the wrong things politically. So yeah, I have a problem with political correctness. Yeah, pick on people who are saying the wrong things. That's the big one. Saying the wrong things, not actions, not picking on people. And the Islamophobic one, that to me is a weird

one, man. Like, if you're going to be scared of any religion, in my opinion, it might have a good, it's a good one to pick. Islam's a good one. The number one suicide bombers, the number one people that are the things that they're doing to women in Islamic countries, the things that you're seeing in the news on a daily basis that are from predominantly Islamic countries, if you're going to be scared of a religion, that seems to be a good one. Yeah, but my point is that that's happening over there. If we're going to worry about what's happening here, you're far more likely to be called by a right-wing terrorist than you are by an Islamist terrorist. Since 1990, there's been 345 Americans killed by American Muslims, whereas there's only been 20 Americans killed by Muslim Americans. You can't count the 9-11 attackers as Muslim Americans because they're external.

They were foreign fighters fighting for a foreign cause. So that's why I think the most dangerous threat to American democracy and our secular values is not Islamicism. It really is these Christian theological whack jobs that represent what is the Tea Party, which is really a proto-fascist movement. In this country. In this country. In this country, yeah. In this country, yes, you're definitely less likely to be attacked by an Islamic terrorist. And that's because America's doing its job in keeping us safe over here. We fight over there so we can keep you safe over... I mean, I'm not exactly sure if that is a zero-sum game.

I'm not sure how that is working or if it's working or if it's just some massive debt that we're going to have to come back and pay, sort of like the housing crisis. I mean, it kind of seems like it, doesn't it? Well, it's blowback. I mean, we've meddled in the Middle Eastern affairs for so long and we wonder why shit happens. I mean, if you listen to the conservatives, they'll say that they want to attack us for our freedoms. They want to attack us because we like drinking beer or watching porn on the Internet. You know, they have a very, very specific agenda.

They hate the fact that we have our fucking military bases in the middle of the Holy Land. They hate the fact that we're not willing to operate in a bipartisan manner to solve the Israeli-Palestinian situation. And so that's why they're angry. You know, it's got nothing to do really with religion. And if you actually look at all terrorist attacks over the world, 95% of all suicide bombing attacks have been committed against occupying forces rather than being a religiously motivated event. So religiously motivated in that they have inspired these people to attack and blow themselves up with religion? Good point.

What it is, you've got the power structure, if you go all the way back to Osama bin Laden, say he's the top of al-Qaeda, they have very, very specific political objectives. Obviously, the fundamentalist Islamic lowest common denominator in society who's starving and doesn't have a job, has no future. They're the ones they recruit to carry out their deeds. But they're certainly rather politically motivated rather than religiously motivated.

Yeah. I would assume that if you're living in a country and you have a giant, huge empire that has invaded not just your country, but a hundred different countries. We have military bases in more than a hundred different countries all over the world. I would feel like you would want to resist that. That would naturally be something that people would be resisting. Imagine if JFK Airport was a Saudi national airport and they're flying their fighter jets in and out there and doing loops of New York City all day long. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, you've got guys in the South and the Confederate States that love to blow up the Capitol because there's a black man in the

White House. Imagine if there was an airport. Well, I'll tell you what, CJ, with your fancy accent, you tell me how else we're going to keep America safe. Too true. At this point, how can you? I mean, that is the big question. Like say, big question. I don't know what the real number is, but it's more than a hundred. More than a hundred military empire. Fuck Genghis Khan. Fuck all those other people, those amateurs that came before us. This is the nuttiest empire that's ever existed. How could you ever pull, how do you pull that back? What, like, look what's going on in Iraq right now. by these jihadists once we're pulling out the American troops and the Iraqis are being inundated with these various terrorist groups, this ISIS organization. It's scary stuff when you see what happens when the predominant power, military power in the area pulls out and then it's left this vacuum and this power struggle. What is the solution? Well, I mean, you first have to look

back at the the root cause of it all and the root cause was we drew up fictitious we the west not just the us but we the west me buddy i wasn't involved so we drew up fictitious borders and we said here uh basically said the three different people you know the kurds the sunnis the shias here's a country we're going to draw the borders now, coexist and get along and kumbaya. What happens, of course, it's those three, you know, three different, you know, sectarian sects can't get along. So you needed a hard man, a dictator to keep the people suppressed and controlled. So it leaves internal strife out. Remove him like we did and then not replace it with a

suitable alternative leaves this massive power vacuum and that's why we have the situation where we today where we have all that civil war um so is the solution do you continue having a uh a hard line dictator like saddam hussein which was you know obviously you know a brutal oppressive guy or do you just withdraw? Obviously, there has to be a midpoint where it has to be a political solution, and that's the only way out of this. A political solution, though. But how do you organize a political solution when you're faced with these overwhelming numbers of jihadists

and people blowing themselves up and the Sunnis versus the Shias? The whole place is just overrun with turmoil. I mean, how does that ever become a political solution? That seems like just a phrase that you can use. We need a political solution. But what does that really mean? A political solution. I mean, the only way forward, the only answer to this is you draw Iraq up into three different countries.

But America will never allow that because you'll end up with the Kurds being a proxy state to Turkey. You'll end up being the Shia majority in the south being a proxy state of Iran. Saudi Arabia will never allow that because they're our ally. Iran, which is our natural ally for the wrong reasons, but they are our natural ally, the U.S. will never allow that either. So the workable solution is three different states, but America is never going to allow that to happen. So this is a massive shitstorm. A huge shitstorm. The perfect shitstorm.

Did you see the recent interview with Dick Cheney where he said that his number one regret was that he didn't invade Iran at the same time as Iraq? Please. That motherfucker is made out of pure evil. They need to scrape that guy and put him in a test tube and find out. He might not even be human. I think he's part, you know, sif.

He's a demon. He's a demon. I mean, when he didn't have a heartbeat, remember that? Yeah, yeah. When he had that fake heart, you know, artificial heart that was keeping him from having a heartbeat. He had no pulse. Isn't that in the Bible somewhere? him from having a heartbeat.

He had no pulse. Isn't that in the Bible somewhere? I mean, I guarantee you there's a religious text somewhere about a warmonger, someone who brings death and destruction through the land. He has no pulse. His heart beateth not. That was a Goliath, I think. A guy who deferred from the Vietnam War. Five times.

Five times. Yeah, five times. Was never drafted, figured out a way to weasel his way out of the system. Got to a position where he runs a company that what they profit off of is rebuilding things that the military

blows up. They get these giant contracts to rebuild places that the United States military blows up. And then he becomes the vice fucking president of the United States and starts blowing shit up. And then he becomes the vice fucking president of the United States and starts blowing shit up. And then they start making money and he starts making money from the company that he used to be a part of. Pure evil.

It's unbelievable. And this is something I write about a lot is, you know, America, what America is today is a corporate totalitarian state. And How to Difference is a great book by, you know, Democracy Incorporated by Sheldon Wallen, who was a Harvard, or I think may still be a Harvard professor. And he says in the classical totalitarian state, something like Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia, you have a charismatic figure at the top. And it's where, in a classical totalitarian state, it's where politics trumps economics. In inverted totalitarianism, like we have United

States, economics trumps politics. Now, everything has been sold to the highest bidder in this country. So corporations run anything. And you've touched on such a good point with Halliburton. Jeremy Scahill, author of Dirty Wars and so forth, I'm a huge fan of. He spoke in a length how at the height of our occupation in Afghanistan, we had a total of 250,000 men on the ground in Afghanistan. Only something like 45,000 Americans, 45% of that footprint was actual American military force. The rest are corporate contractors, whether it's for food delivery, whether it's for arms supplying, medical or whatever, or infrastructure rebuilding. So when you have corporations who profit from war and you have a political class in Washington who only is totally

100% beholden to these corporations, we now live in a country where wars are for profit. And we'll make our decisions based on what's profitable and not in the interest of national security or the American population. The wars are for profit and also the wars become a business that you can't just end. You can't just end that business because then you take people out of work. I've heard that argued about the war on drugs. It's one of the best arguments about the reason why there's so many lobbyists against legalizing marijuana. When you look at the actual health risks of marijuana being so minimal and the actual medical benefits that you have for people that have cancer and AIDS, there's so many different ways you can use it. The idea that

this isn't something that someone's decided to like, hey, well, we can use this for people and people can benefit. Why isn't it? Well, one of like, hey, well, we can use this for people and people can benefit. Why isn't it? Well, one of the big ones is because there's a whole business in arresting people, imprisoning people, making sure that prison guards stay working, making sure that prisons stay filled, making sure that sheriffs, they need a certain amount of sheriffs, need a certain amount of deputies.

Like there's a whole business behind that. And people have to recognize that when you change a law, sort of just like what's going on in Iraq right now, where there's this giant void when we pulled out of Iraq. If you just cut the ties on all these laws and say, look, this is all legal now. All you guys that were arresting people for all this shit, you're going to have to find some new shit to do. There's going to be a mad scramble, and they're going to have to figure out some new way to profit. Well, that's the situation that we're in right now with war. The amount of money that's coming in from war is staggering. The percentage of our economy that's dedicated just to war is substantial.

It's far greater than many, many other things that would be very important. Inner city restoration, education, public education. I mean, the amount of money that's being spent on tanks and missiles and fucking just feeding troops and sending people over there, and then contractors like Halliburton that are fixed. There's just amazing amounts

of money that's flowing back and forth. And to cut that off, it's like you've got so much momentum and entropy. It's like, how do you stop that? Well, I mean, you've just talked about, you talk about our incarceration problem or our prison problem in this country. Again, that's another part of the corporate totalitarian state. Now, you take a poor person, a poor black guy on the streets. What is he worth to the corporations?

He has no money. He's not going to spend his money at Walmart or Macy's or whatever. He has nothing. no money, he's not going to spend his money at Walmart or Macy's or whatever, he has nothing. But to put that poor black minority person into a prison, all of a sudden, these private prison organizations will make $50,000 per year out of taxpayer money for him being in prison for a nonviolent crime. So when we're trying to dismantle and find solutions, you've got, that's the kind of headwinds that you're running against.

There's too much influence of the corporations over the political structure. We can have these conversations all day, right? But what possible solutions can be offered? C.J. Werleman, if you were the president of the United States, you can't be in We're Porn Here. You've got a weird accent. It was good enough for Arnold Schwarzenegger for California.

Well, it was probably good enough for Arnold Schwarzenegger before he fucked his maid to be the president. She wasn't even hot. God, no. He's an animal. He's just one of those guys. There's a chick around him. He'll fuck her. But I think if you had a position where they said, look, man, you seem like a reasonable guy.

You've written some great books. Run this thing. Well, the solution for America, and this stops me from getting booked on a lot of shows, is the solution is socialism. Oh, you said it. You said it. You said the bad word, bro. What the fuck? You're trying to take everybody's money.

It's like saying the C word. Redistribution of wealth. I know. Envy of the rich. It's all that sort of stuff. But, you know, Americans, you know, nowhere in the Western world is the socialism or the S word more, you know, associated with demagoguery than here. I mean, you say socialism and American thinks of Stalinist Russia or East Germany. When I hear the word socialism, I think of the country I'm from, Australia. I think of Canada to a lesser extent.

And I think of all of Western Europe. Socialism doesn't mean the absence of capitalism. It means where, you know, basic human rights are catered for in a structure which is paid for by the rich and the corporations. What we have in America is, you know, you've got corporations paying the lowest tax contribution to the federal government in US history. Republicans will defend that and say, oh, but our corporate tax rate is 35%. It is that on paper. The effective rate, after all the loopholes, after all the deductions,

all the loopholes have actually been written in Washington by these pro-corporate lobbyists. The effective rate is 12%, which makes it the lowest amongst all OECD countries. And that's the reason why America doesn't have nice things, like bridges. Nice things. That's why we can't have nice things.

Like high-speed rail. I mean, look, America today looks like a third world country. I've spent 10 years of my life in Indonesia, the last 10 years before I moved here. America basically looks like Bangladesh with white people. It really does. Nothing works. Our high schools are falling apart. Our rail is running off its tracks. Our bridges are collapsing in the water below them. Not one U.S. city is ranked in the top 20 most livable cities in the world. Not one U.S. airport is ranked in the top 100 airports in the world. And that's because we...

Is that true? Yeah, that is true. And it's because we have no... We've starved the federal government the revenue it needs to build a happy society. You go to Europe, and I'm always staggered by my hardcore conservative friends, debates I have online or in interviews on radio panels and so forth. And I hear conservatives come back from Europe and go, God, I had a lovely holiday. It's so nice there.

You just see no poverty. The public transport works like it can set your watch to it. And you wonder why? Because they have a state where corporations are paying their fair share. In Germany, which hit economic hard times at the same time we did in 2008, their economy is booming because they have a good blend of social democracy and capitalism. They made a law in Germany where if you have a company of more than 50 employees, at least 50% of your board must be represented by the working force. The working force, 50% of your board?

Must be elected by 50% of the labor force in that company. Oh, okay. So the folks that work, whatever you make, they have a vote. So half of them have to be elected by those people, so they have to represent the needs and wants of the people that work for that company. Exactly. That's fascinating. And Germany's booming. It hasn't stifled Germany's boom. But the opposite of the American way at the moment is still trickle-down economics. And you look at Kansas. Kansas,

which is basically a laboratory for Tea Party, hardcore conservative thinking. They put the most aggressive tax cuts on the rich that we've seen in the last 20 or 30 years. Total Reaganomics in 2010, now got a $338 million budget blowout. And now they can have to cut education and services to the poor and safety wealth net because they've got this budget hole that they can't explain. Now, I'll tell you how you fucking explain it. You just took a massive cut to the rich and the corporations and nothing comes back for it.

Well, there is definitely a real problem in America with when you were talking about the corporations paying a small amount of taxes and then you look at the infrastructure. The infrastructure is, there's some shaky spots in this country, especially like New York City. The Brooklyn Bridge just had a giant collapse recently. Have you see that yeah There's some big chunk of it. Just fell down like yeah, you got to fix that fucking thing man Like how much where's all that money going?

Especially when you consider like in New York they they have to pay tolls everywhere like every time you go somewhere What's what's that? What is it like seven bucks or nine bucks? I think we looked up as like 7507.58. $7.50. I mean, that's lunch somewhere. And you got to pay that every time you drive across a spot. And you and I have to pay for that. All the people in the middle class in New Jersey have to pay for that. And that's because the wealthy aren't paying their share of taxes in that state. So the middle class are the ones who get lumped with the tax bill. Isn't it fascinating that when you start talking about this kind of stuff, you start talking about this kind of stuff,

you start talking about socialism, that the rich pay their share, the big resistance seems to come from a lot of poor conservative people. When the big resistance to socialism comes from these people that, I don't know if it's like they have this idea in their head that one day they're going to be prosperous, so they don't want you mucking it up for their chances. Yeah. But I found this quite fascinating, that one of the big resistances to the ideas of communism

or the ideas of socialism, and these are just ideas, just bringing them up, but a knee-jerk reaction comes from the lower middle class or middle class conservative folks. Yeah. I mean, what John Steinbeck said at base, he said, Americans are temporarily embarrassed millionaires in waiting. That's hilarious. That's hilarious. Everyone in this country thinks we're going to be rich.

That's that individual ruggedism, which Americans believe in. And it's very hard to break that. Barbarism, which Americans believe in. And it's very hard to break that. You've got the working class in these red belt states, which are voting for a party, which exclusively is only benefiting the top 1%. Yeah. I mean, how does a poor person in, say, Mississippi or Alabama pull the lever for the Republican Party, who has blocked the expansion of Medicaid, basically blocked the expansion of universal

health care? One of the biggest predicators of poverty is your access to healthcare. If you don't have it, you're destined for poverty. And they vote against that only because they say Jesus a few times before they go to the polls and hallelujah. You just want yourself a vote. A lot of folks don't realize that that all started with Reagan. Reagan changed politics in America with his embracing of the religious right and using them as a political base, as a base of people you can guarantee are going to vote for you if you start talking Jesus. Yeah. I mean, Reagan morally and financially banked up this country. Not only did he bank drop this country with trickle-down economics fiscally, but he also banked up this country because he taught Americans, a whole generation of Americans, how to hate the poor.

And that's where we are today. That's why it's so easy for people on the right to cut veterans' benefits, cut food stamps and so forth, because it comes down to that Christian welfare, prosperity theology. If you're rich, even though Jesus was a Marxist before Marxism had a name, if you're rich, it means Jesus has bestowed great wealth on you because you're honorable and you're pious. But if you're poor, it means you must be a sinner. And therefore, if the blacks and Hispanics are poor, it means Jesus hates them.

So be damned with them. What about poor white people? Jesus loves them. He loves them, but they still need to fend for themselves because ironically, they get their philosophy from Ayn Rand Who is an atheist Oh, Ayn Rand, that's a hilarious one The Ayn Rand one is a really interesting one

Because that's one that the libertarians seem to cling to And they pull them up by their bootstraps Pull themselves up by their bootstraps attitude It's easy to think like Ayn Rand If you're born into a privileged white neighborhood area Everyone's got an an equal shot what are you talking about yeah i love canada and any any ideas that anybody has against what you're talking about like socialized medicine always like it's not the best in canada like i have friends that live up there and they say like they've hurt their knee and had to wait 10 months to get a surgery, and that sucks. That's not cool. But they're nice as fuck.

They're educated as fuck. Education is free. You get good universities all over the country that are pretty much commensurate, so you don't have this thing where you have to fly all the way to New York to go to NYU or go to Boulder to go to – you can go to a neighborhood university, and you're going to get an excellent education. It's a different sort of an environment up there. Well, and that's a problem because we've capitalized and privatized the education

system to hear such a degree. I mean, if you get a degree in Australia, whether it's Macquarie University or Sydney University or University of New South Wales, an MBA at one of those schools is exactly the same as an MBA at any one of those schools. Here, not only does an MBA matter, but also then it has to be from the right school. So an MBA from Harvard or an Ivy League school trumps an MBA from University of San Diego or something like that, and that shouldn't be the way. And in fact, what that does, it still keeps propelling that plutocracy because there was a study done that at least for every student at Harvard, each student at Harvard has at least one parent earning at least $400,000 per year.

So we're still, you know, with the capitalization of everything, we're forming a system where we have, you know, the very wealthy at the top and we have everybody struggling at the bottom. That the elitism involved in education is really fascinating to me today, especially because there's so much access to information. So many books, so much online, so much to read. You can get so much access to information that would, you know, a long time ago, the difference between going to Harvard and going to San Diego State was pretty gigantic. But with what you have access to today, the average person has access to the exact same information that they're teaching at any school anywhere. Yeah.

But I had a conversation with a friend of mine, and he was wrong about something. And I brought up this woman who had, you know, she had went to the University of Mississippi. But she went there, and this was her major, like this thing that we were talking about. And he goes, well, this guy went to Yale. But he didn't even go to Yale for that. He went to Yale for something else, and he's 80. So he went to Yale in the 1960s. Who knows what the fuck they were teaching back then.

Like, what are you talking about, man? But his first initial reaction was, look, she went to the University of Mississippi. He went to Yale. I'm like, oh, that's hilarious. But that is the way we think in this country. It is. And also, not only is it the way we think, but these kids that are going to that's such an insular job market where only the networks, the alumni from these prestigious

schools get to really apply from it. All the kids working at Google, they all went to these fancy schools that could be afforded by their wealthy parents. Yeah, that's kind of creepy. The elitism amongst education, I think, is kind of creepy. It's also creepy that you wind up having these skull and bones type organizations where all these people inside these you know george bush yeah these fraternities and john kerry yeah you know they they get into these fraternistic groups these you know very insulated groups and they they feed off of each other and they you know they they become very

nepotistic and they they help each other in business and they form these little teams together. I found it in sitcoms. In sitcoms, it was fascinating that a lot of the writers had went to Harvard. They worked for the Lampoon. And, like, they would recruit other guys from Harvard. And those were the guys that they wanted to hire as writers. And I was like, that is really fascinating. Like, you guys all went to this little club together.

So, you know, you're feeding off each other yeah and then meanwhile they get in front of the camera and say I did it all myself I'm self-made you know so well at this point there is no self-made you know there's we one of the things that Obama made a critical blunder with was this whole you didn't do that yourself you didn't build that yeah if you made your own business you didn't build that I thought it didn't build that. Yeah, if you made your own business, you didn't build that. I thought it was a huge blunder because instead of celebrating, you know, someone who does innovate and create their own business and get out there and do it, instead of, you know, saying this is a great thing and more people can do this

and more people can contribute, instead he kind of focused on the negative aspect of it. Instead of saying something along the lines of, I think it could have been, look, I couldn't imagine what the workload of a guy like Obama is. How much time does he have to actually consider every chess move that he makes, everything that he says, how it's going to be interpreted, how it's going to be twisted and turned. But that was a big blunder. It seemed like an obvious checkmate move. The you didn't build it was taken a little bit out of context because the full transcript of that he muddled the punchline

basically. He was channeling Elizabeth Warren who had given a speech earlier on that and basically saying the universities which taught those kids you didn't build that. The roads which you're taking the trucks on and using transport to deliver your goods to market, you didn't build that. The roads which you're taking the trucks on and using transport to deliver your goods to market, you didn't build that.

And the bridges and so forth. And he messed up the execution of the point and then it was caught on basically and meant every entrepreneur in America, you didn't build your business. But that certainly wasn't the message. But even saying it in that fashion, saying you didn't make those roads,

duh. Yeah. roads, duh. Yeah, duh. Everybody knows that, man. Why concentrate on that? Why not say, but you did a great thing. You created your own business. But in order for that business to prosper, we need the infrastructure that all of us are contributing to. We need the educational system that is going to bring up the new workers that are going to be a part of your company.

We need the roads. We need all these things. We all work together. But you understand that, Joe, because you're literate on politics. But people like libertarians and these crazy right-wing Republicans, they don't understand that. They think these bridges and roads and infrastructure comes from thin air. They believe, actually libertarian, they believe the tax rate should be almost zero, and the corporations from thin air. They believe, actually libertarian, they believe the tax rate should be almost zero, and the corporations will provide everything. My only problem with taxes is that I feel like most people that are in positions of government, I just feel like the system that we have currently set up

is so inherently flawed that throwing more money at it is just going to make a larger bureaucracy, going to make more jobs, more regulations, more people. And that whole system that sort of feeds off of the money, like we were talking about with private prisons, or we were talking about with prison guards and keeping drugs illegal in order to feed this machine. When you make the business of government larger and larger, I don't necessarily think that's the best way to fix the problems that we have. I don't necessarily think that – I've had this argument with friends that are very liberal that we just need higher tax rates. And I'm like, no, then you're going to have more government. And I don't think more government is the answer.

I don't think more regulations, more people, more things, more forms you have to fill out, more people that are in some strange office somewhere that have to justify their existence. I don't necessarily think that's the answer. I think it has to be some sort of a top-down organization, reorganization of the very structure that this society operates under. Because right now it's this foundation of this unfixable bullshit. It's so flawed that just throwing money at it is like putting gum on a breaking dam it's like you need more than that you need some sort of a

comprehensive philosophy designed to reconstruct this whole situation from the bottom up from the top down the whole thing. Exactly. And, you know, I would argue that, you know, the way you rebuilt the economy is the opposite of every conservative politics or economics. How do you build economy? And I'm not an economist, but I listen very intuitively to people like, you know, Robert Reich or Jared Bernstein or Paul Krugman, guys who are Nobel laureate economists in their own right. And the reason the American economy isn't growing, despite the fact that we have record numbers on Wall Street, despite the fact that the official unemployment rate is falling,

the unemployment rating is falling, but not with jobs that pay well. It's always these service paid jobs and so forth. What's happening is we're not having shared prosperity. You know, we have the minimum wage level, which is below the 1969 level. The middle class income has stagnated and has fallen since 1979. So while you have corporations today sitting on record $3 trillion profit, that productivity isn't being shared with the American worker. And when it isn't being shared with the American worker, we live in a consumer economy now.

We no longer make stuff. Our economy is basically financial services and military. So when it comes to financial services, instead of making products, we make stuff up. So if we have a consumer economy and we recognize that, then the middle class and the working class needs more to spend. And the only way you can do that is you lessen the tax burden at the bottom and you increase the tax burden at the top so consumers have more to spend. And the only reason these corporations, despite their record profits, aren't hiring is because there's no consumer

demand. What do you say to the argument that corporations shouldn't have to pay profits because they're not people? The idea that they shouldn't have to pay taxes, that the people in the corporation pay taxes. So the that they shouldn't have to pay taxes, that the people in the corporation pay taxes. So the corporations themselves should not have to pay taxes. Yeah, I mean, that's just absurd. I mean, these corporations benefit from our airports, our bridges, our roads, our transport, you name it, our rail networks, interstate highway systems,

you know, R&D technology, you name it. But the people that are in the corporation already do pay taxes. I'm going all Peter Schiff on you right now. Right? I see where you're going. The people that are in, the corporation is just a group of people. Now, if all the group of people all pay taxes, the idea that the corporation itself, this unit has to pay taxes on top of that, isn't that sort of justifying this notion that a corporation is a person,

that a corporation is like an individual, which is one of the things that they've used to justify corporations being able to contribute vast sums of money to political campaigns, that a corporation, like the Supreme Court has ruled this, that a corporation can sort of act as an individual in that regard. I mean, we need to move away from that whole line of thinking. I mean, this Supreme Court is basically radicals in robes. And since Reagan, I mean, it's been a conservative-dominated court for the last three decades.

I mean, we haven't had a liberal judge appointed to the bench since LBJ. Who is the guy that's in the Supreme Court that said that pedophilia that no having sex with a man is just like having sex with no different than having sex with an animal? Yeah not Alito the other guy the big fat guy. Scalia? Scalia yeah yeah Scalia. What the fuck man you're a Supreme Court judge? He said, what did he say? That if a man wants to have sex with a man, what's to stop him from wanting to have sex with an animal? Is that next? That's exactly what he said. Whoa, son, for real?

You don't think that people are gay? I mean, do you know anybody? How could you say that? I mean, I've got a lot of gay friends. I know that sounds like one of those guys who says he's got a lot of black friends. And they're right before a good black joke. But I do have a lot of gay friends, and I've been to very gay parties, and I can tell you

straight up that not one of my gay friends has said, man, I just pounded some ass, and I can't wait to pound your dog. There's the next logical step. Well, there's no denying that there are certain people that are fucked up and they do have sex with animals. But, you know, that. I was young. I'm not sure if that's the same. And I don't think that you should be allowed to be a fucking Supreme Court judge if those are the sort of connections that you're making.

I mean, the five conservative judges on the Supreme Court are all Catholics. And that's fine. I've got no problem with that. But that means that... I've got a problem with it. The Supreme Court is the highest court in the land, but you've basically got five out of the nine representatives on that bench who appeal to a higher authority, which is the Vatican and the Pope. So, I mean, remember when JFK... I mean, you and I are probably too young for...

Definitely too young when JFK, I mean, you and I are probably too young for, definitely too young when JFK was elected, but for when JFK's campaign in 1960, the biggest issue against him was the fact he was a Catholic because Americans were worried that he would have to answer to somebody outside of the United States. And, well, we have that situation today, but no one seems to want to talk about it. Yeah, that is a fascinating thing that at one point in time, that was a detriment that him being a Catholic was thought to be like a knock. Meanwhile, we almost had a fucking Mormon in the president. And no one wanted to talk. Mitt Romney said, my Mormonism is off the table. And the media went, oh, okay. How the fuck is your Mormonism off the table?

Why didn't one person in the media say, do you still believe that in the Mormon heaven, black people will be your servants? I mean, why isn't that a valid question? Do you still believe that you get Mormon heaven, black people will be your servants? I mean, why isn't that a valid question? Do you still believe that you get your own planet when you die? Yeah, and do you believe Jesus, when he inevitably returns, will be to Missouri? Yeah, and do you believe that the American Indians were actually the lost tribe of Israel? Yeah.

Why didn't anyone ask you that? Because you said it's off the table. Do you believe that Joseph Smith, who was a fucking con man. Convicted fraud. Yeah, who found golden tablets at the age of 14, but they mysteriously disappeared because the angels took them away. Yeah, I would have been happy if Joseph Smith was convicted for having sex with an animal or stealing something. But he was convicted for fraud. The very thing that he's trying to defraud the American public with. And it's really funny that the Mormon church, the sect of the Mormon church that Romney was involved with,

was so radical that they moved to Mexico in the 1800s in order to keep having sex with multiple women. They wanted to have multiple brides. Like, you know, the United States said, hey, look, you can't marry fucking 20 chicks. Cut the shit. And so they go, fuck you, man. We're going to Mexico. And they went to Mexico back when it didn't matter. Because it didn't matter. The difference between the United States and Mexico before there was cars wasn't that great. You know, Mexico was like Arizona. Just get down there. It's no big deal. We'll be in Mexico. We'll see you over there. You want to come visit us?

Get on a horse. You know, but then all of a sudden, at some point in time, like America became America and Mexico became what it is today. And these fuckers are still over there. People don't realize the Romney church, they're still over there. Romney's dad was born in Mexico. That's why he couldn't be a president. And no one asked for Romney's birth certificate. It's off the table.

It's off the table. My Mormonism, my faith is off the table. When my dad was born, untouchable. Five guys in the Supreme Court, Catholic, and the head Catholic guy who I like. I like this new pope. I think if you wanted to have a pope, this guy is the best you could hope for. He has a very conservative chair that he sits in. He got rid of that crazy throne.

He doesn't drive the popemobile anymore. He said, look, at my age, I have very little to lose. If someone wants to take me out, here I am. And he also said that he believes that 2% of Catholic priests are gay or pedophiles. But he hasn't interviewed the other 98% yet. But how crazy is that? 2% are pedophiles, right? Yeah. Well, I mean, I'm with you. I actually wrote a piece for Salon on the new Pope. And it wasn't my headline, but the headline Salon put was, the lesson atheists can learn from Pope Francis.

And, I mean, he's very progressive. I like the fact that he's denounced trickle-down economics. He's called it an abject failure. He's talked about the poverty this has inflicted upon all countries around the world. He's talked about the failure of globalization and so forth. Yeah, I think, you know, we still have to remember that he hasn't, you know, denounced, you know, bigotry against gays. I mean, you know, and so forth. He hasn't, and he's still, he's just starting on their child rape factor.

But yeah, I mean, there's certainly good points to be spoken about when it comes to pope francis certainly better than the uh the the former nazi who uh moved pedophiles around to different churches because he busted him giving head jobs to boys he was the worst he was the worst pope ever he was the scariest guy ever folks who don't know pope benedict the guy who was before pope francis was involved in a case where he moved a child molester who would actively target deaf kids. And then he moved him, and the guy molested 100 more deaf kids after he moved him. I mean, this guy was just a predator. Yeah, he's an evil fuck.

And Pope Benedict, they've kind of cooled down off of what charges people were rallying against him, but they wanted to charge him with crimes against humanity. I mean, they wanted... The Vatican itself is... The way the Vatican works is it's its own state, correct? Like, they have their own laws. Created by Mussolini.

It's the last bastion of fascism in Europe. They also own a gay bathhouse. You know that? There's a gay bathhouse that's owned... That's not Berlusconi's bathhouse, is it? Well, I'll pull it up. Hold on a second. Gay bathhouse Vatican. There was a gay bathhouse that's owned. That's not Berlusconi's bathhouse, is it? Well, I'll pull it up. Hold on a second. Gay bathhouse Vatican.

There was a big controversy. This is back when Homeboy was still the Pope. Right. Yeah, the Vatican plays landlords to Europe's biggest gay bathhouse. The Catholic Church paid $30 million to acquire a building that houses a senior cardinal, drumroll, and a huge gay sauna this is on your on salon you don't have pictures downloaded do you no but i have that picture that guy's awesome god that was uh rat singer rat singer when he um when he when he used to

have that crazy golden throne yeah he looked like something right out of the fucking lord of the rings i mean he really did right with his conch god he's so sick looking what an evil fuck that guy yeah there's another great picture i don't know if you've ever seen it of him he's sitting there on his crazy throne and they had these gymnastics guys do some sort of crazy gymnastics demonstration in front of him with their little tights on and he's sitting there watching this i'm like this for all the shit this guy's accused with you would think that he would want to be as far away from young men in tights as humanly possible his pr consultant needs to be fired oh they're so lost and dark and creepy and trying to adjust for

all the years and years of evil that the Catholic Church has committed. What I like about the Catholic Church, and what you've got to say about Pope Francis, is the fact that it shows you exactly how man-made religion is. Because, I mean, Pope Francis is basically coming along. He's trying to adjust religion to modernity. So he's basically just making the rules up as he goes to adjust it. This is like via committee. Yeah, it's so crazy.

Well, I mean, all of it is that way. I mean, the whole reason why they had to bring about this idea of purgatory was because they were trying to convert these pagans. Like, oh, yeah, well, you guys have the land of fate. We got something like that. We have this thing. If you're not totally good, you go to this place, and you're in kind of a waiting room.

Yeah, same as circumcision. I mean, we're not trying to sell circumcision, the Jewish faith, too, which was, you know, Christianity was rebranded in from, you know, Hebrewism. They go to the Romans, hey, we've got this new religion for you. The catch is you've got to cut off the tip of your penis, and the Romans are like, hey, wait, wait. What are you talking about?

Christ. Yeah, yeah. It's also the history of all of our major holidays i mean the reason why christmas is celebrated during the winter solstice that was because it was a pagan holiday and they're like what a coincidence that's when our baby jesus was born no no he wasn't if you pay attention to the bible he was born in the spring he wasn. It wasn't supposed to be born then. What are you guys doing? You're fucking moving around the dates. You guys are assholes.

They're trying to sell it. It's hard to pay attention to that old shit in the first place because it's so difficult to decipher. You're going from language to language. And then on top of it, you've got a bunch of people monkeying with the dates to try to bring in other people. You're messing up the whole thing, man. It just shows you how ridiculous it is, the idea that someone could have said something in stories and songs for a thousand years before they ever figured out how to write. And then they started writing things down, and then they translated it from one language to another, back and forth, back and forth, but it's still 100% correct and definitely

the word of God. And you mean, you know, America's the most Western Christian nation on the world, and something like 85% of Americans have no idea of that historical context of the Bible, how it came from Greek, and how it was translated by scribes, you know, and so forth. And these were stories told in the oral tradition, and where the Gospels came from and who they were, which we don't know. Americans just think that the Bible came down in perfect form from, fell from the sky, and that was it. Came from Jesus, and it's a lot of it. It's about gay folk.

About gay folk and their desire to have sex with animals as well. Keep it away from my children! Keep it away from my children! Keep it away from my children! Yeah, we got a strange world we live in, man. We got a real strange world we live in when it comes to religion because they focus on certain aspects of the Bible but ignore some of the most ridiculous ones.

Like, you're not supposed to wear two different types of cloth together. Like, you're not supposed to eat shellfish. You know, if you eat shellfish, you're going to hell. Do you know that? Yeah, you can't go to Red Lobster, man. You're supposed to eat shellfish. You know, if you eat shellfish, you're going to hell. Do you know that? Yeah, you can't go to Red Lobster, man. You're going to go to hell.

You can't go to the oyster bar. You're going to rot in a fucking cave somewhere. At Red Lobster, you're fucked. Yeah, you're fucked. The whole place, Red Lobster is just like the den of sodomy. It's a terrible place. As a matter of fact, it's more hated in the Bible. It's brought up more often. Well, it's funny.

There was a Barna Group study which talked about biblical illiteracy in America. And 25% of Americans believe that Joan of Arc was Noah's wife. And 40% of Americans believe Sodom and Gomorrah were a married couple. Oh, God. That's hilarious. That asked for anal a little too often. Well, there's so few people that actually pay attention to the things that are in the Bible. Like, I have a friend who's pretty religious and he has a religious tattoo.

And I'm like, dude, you've got to read the whole book. You're not supposed to wear a tattoo. You're not supposed to have tattoos, especially not religious tattoos. Having a religious tattoo, if God does come back, he's going to be like, man, you fucking missed the point totally. It's on the same level as homosexuality. Yeah, you're not supposed point totally. It's on the same level as homosexuality. Yeah. Yeah, you're not supposed to get tattooed, son. Okay, you're fucking this whole thing up.

Have you ever read or heard of the sacred mushroom in the cross? No, I haven't. The oldest version of the Bible is the Dead Sea Scrolls. And there was a guy named John Marco Allegro who was a, forget where he went to school Cambridge or Yale whatever it was he was a well respected scholar and he was one of the members that was deciphering the Dead Sea Scrolls right and he was the only one out of the whole group that was an agnostic and it was because he was an ordained minister but during his studies of of religion he realized that it's kind of kind of

horseshit. So he became agnostic, but because he was an ordained minister, he was still allowed to be on this. He wasn't a vocal agnostic. Studied the Dead Sea Scrolls for over 14 years, and it was his conclusion after 14 years of translations that the entire Bible was a huge misunderstanding. The Christian religion was a huge misunderstanding.

And it was really all about religious ceremonies that were based on the consumption of psychedelic mushrooms and fertility rituals. And that all these ancient customs were hidden in parables to cover them up and hide them from the Romans. When they were captured and when they were imprisoned and killed, they would cover up their ancient traditions of these consumptions of psychedelic mushrooms and the religious ecstasy that they would achieve from eating these mushrooms. It was a fascinating, fascinating book. I guess that lends to what I say, the book of Revelation is a cryptology book that's written in code to protect it from being interpreted by the Romans. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, he went to Oxford. That's where he went. Okay. He studied Hebrew dialects, and he was a scholar of ancient languages. And he wrote this book, and it was very quickly bought up by the Catholic Church. The only way to get this book is you've got to get an old copy of it. But in the 1970s when the book came out, it was very, very controversial.

Now a guy named Jan Ervin has republished it through his family. He got permission to do it. Fascinating, fascinating book. There's also another book that he wrote that he wrote a second book because the first book got bought out. The second book was The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth. And it was very, very controversial because of the fact that this guy was extremely educated and agnostic, very intelligent, very well respected, and rock-solid credentials. You couldn't deny the things that he was saying.

The people that read his work, a lot of his strange conclusions were undeniably bizarre in the context of religion. He traced back the word Christ to an ancient Sumerian word that meant a mushroom covered in God's semen. And that they believed that when it rained, this is, you know, you're talking 6 ten thousand years ago when it rained that was god coming on the earth and that these mushrooms that would appear out of nowhere underneath it's really crazy because it was it's all based on just a massive bukkake party yes a giant bukkake party of magic mushrooms but this is a long story to get into i've discussed it on this podcast before the people that are listening right now probably probably moaning like, not again. But it's also connected to the ancient story of Santa Claus and Christmas because these mushrooms-

Santa Claus is coming. Santa Claus is coming to town. These mushrooms have a mycorrhizal relationship with carnivorous trees. So you would find them underneath pine trees, which is where people always have pine trees as these Christmas trees, fir trees, whatever. And these red and white mushrooms look like Santa Claus. You ever seen the Amanita muscaria mushroom? Do you know what it is? No.

The Amanita muscaria mushroom is fucking Santa Claus. I mean, hold on. That's extraordinary. Yeah. This is what it looks like. And all the ancient images of Christmas, cards, old Christmas cards. Jamie, see if you can find some old Christmas cards. They all used to have pictures of these mushrooms.

There was elves and these mushrooms. And by the way, take mushrooms, see elves. It does happen. It's fascinating that these mushrooms are connected to, and also the colors of the mushrooms are exactly the colors of Santa Claus, the red and white. The fact that you hang these stockings by the fireplace. Yep. Like, why do you have red and white stockings?

What the fuck is that? Because that's how they dry out these mushrooms. The way they would dry out these mushrooms is by hanging them over the fire. So these red and white mushrooms were representative. Look at this. These photos, see them up there? Those are all ancient Christmas cards. See the Amanita muscaria mushroom appears over and over and over again. And all of these, it's kind of been lost. The symbology has been lost, but that is the same mushroom that's on the cover of the sacred mushroom and the cross.

If you pull that up, Jamie, the book, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, the John Marco Allegro book, it's all about this psychedelic mushroom, the Amanita muscaria, which is a very confusing mushroom because it apparently varies geographically. It varies genetically. That's the book, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross. Same mushroom. Oh, that's a must-read. I'm going to get rid of that. And just an incredible sort of a connection. But it totally makes sense. If you think about it, you're living 10,000-plus years ago. You find these psychedelic mushrooms.

You eat them. You have these intense religious ecstasy experiences. And then the Romans are coming. You hide the stories. You come up with these parables that you can disguise as stories. And the apple of Adam and Eve supposedly was this Amanita muscaria mushroom. Wow. That is the word apple.

There's very many translations for the word apple, but one of them is red, the color red. And the idea of the eating of the red meaning the eating of this mushroom, this red mushroom. Oh, man, that's extraordinary. They were tripping balls, bro. They were all tripping balls and trying to write things down. And then along the way, it got, keep my children away from the gays. And what is it that kept them from the original message? Well, most likely is the absence of these psychedelic experiences,

these ego-dissolving experiences, which are just forbidden. I mean, if you look at the modern Christians, what's the one thing that they... Keep the children away from the drugs, the drugs, the evil marijuana, and all the things that are ruining our youth. No, what's ruining your youth is ignorance as to what you're teaching in the very first place. What are the roots of what you're actually saying? So few of them actually even know it. Yeah. Historical and contextual understanding of the religion is so poor.

It's so hard too. I mean, a guy like Allegro, a guy studying this book for 14 years, that's the big thing is that's the oldest version of the Bible we know of. That's the oldest version of the Bible that's in Aramaic as well. So it's trying to add that to what people have just decided is the New Testament, which we all know was concocted by Constantine. They took a bunch of bishops and they threw some shit out and put some shit in. In the fourth century. Yeah, clearly. Well after. Well after Jesus and clearly the hand of man involved.

Clearly. And that always blows Christians away when you speak to them. And they believe that Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and John were eyewitnesses to Jesus' life. But Mark was the first gospel to write. And he wrote a good 40 to 50 years after Jesus had passed away. Matthew and Luke copied from Mark but used their own respective external sources 70 years after Jesus had passed away. And John wrote his gospel 100 years after the death of Jesus. So, you know, these stories were campfire stories passed down.

And when you – it's interesting. One of my books, Jesus Lied, He Was Only Human, I take the New Testament. And normally when you read the New Testament, you'll read, you know, Matthew. You read Mark and then you read Matthew and then you read Luke and when you read the New Testament, you'll read Matthew, you'll read Mark, and then you read Matthew, and then you read Luke, and then you read John. And if you hear what each of the Gospels has to write about each of the key moments in Jesus' life, whether it's his birth, his baptism, his ministry, his trial, his execution, they kind of sound almost the same. But if you just focus on one story in Matthew, let's say it's his baptism, and then one story on baptism in Luke, and then baptism in Mark, and so forth, you see how wildly these stories differ, which almost have no resemblance at all when it comes to the facts and so forth.

Not only that, that's a long fucking time ago. The idea that you're going to take anything from 2,000 years ago and it's gonna make any sense whatsoever yeah in 2014 this piecing it together it's the idea that that's the foundation of the very structure of your society that's the foundation of your your ideology that's the foundation of your morals it's all based on this 2000 plus year old garbled shit and not based on what we know today the experiences that we have today what we know today about values and ethics and communication and the blowback of negative behavior that we're not trying

to formulate our own new guidelines for life that we're all basing this on don't eat clams and don't get tattooed and don't fuck guys like all this crazy shit that's old as fuck and it was based on nonsense you know it's it's it's it's quite amazing the hold that it has today and i think one of the best examples of one of the major problems that we have as a culture, and that's our fear. Our fear of the unknown, our fear of death, our fear that we're not living our lives the wrong way. So if we have one particular ideology that we follow, anybody that follows another ideology is immediately attacked.

And that goes for the people that are religious Also, it goes to the people that are on the left that attack Without doubt anything that's on the right it goes for the people that are on the right that attack anything that's on the left It goes for fucking Yankees fans that hate the Dodgers. It goes for people who like max You know that those fucking PC guys are assholes like we're weird with that we don't we want our choice to be the correct choice and want our life exactly and and america is now and polls will show this america is more polarized today than it was on the eve of the civil war and whilst whilst 20 yeah whilst 20 or 30 years ago we kind of all got our news from the same source. You know, there was CNN or wherever.

Now, you know, the liberal camp and the conservative camp get their news from their own camps. It becomes an endless feedback loop of confirmation bias and, you know, opposing thoughts and opposing opinions are taken no consideration. And that's why, you know, these political parties now, more so on the Republican side and more party of this Tea Party side, they've become a cult. They demand ideological purity. And if you're not ideological pure, I mean, Eric Cantor, their, you know, their majority representative in the House, was thrown out for not being conservative enough. Eric Cantor, not being conservative enough. What was it that he wasn't being conservative enough on? Immigration was the big thing. But, you know, I think Virginia's borders are well secured.

It's a hike. It's a fucking hike from Mexico. Why are you going to Virginia? What is so attractive? Yeah, we need to build a war in the South Virginia. I like girls with that certain accent. Yeah. Build a wall around Virginia.

That's hilarious. a certain accent. Yeah. Build a wall around Virginia. That's hilarious. Yeah. Well, the immigration thing is one of the best examples of how this country is fucking crazy and insane is because it's a country that was founded by immigrants. Yeah.

So this idea that we're going to keep all the immigrants out of a country that was found by immigrants is holy shit crazy. Yeah. I mean, that is, not only that, it's evil. You got a bunch of people that are living below you in the South that are in a third world country that's connected. Like it's an artificial boundary created by man. It's not like it's across an ocean,

like you have to get in a plane to get to Australia. Like that's separate from America. And you guys are closer to us than Mexico. We're more concerned with the Australians than we are with the Mexicans. I mean, Mexicans are involved in some brutal fucking drug wars. They have terrible crime. They have terrible corruption. Mexico City is one of the most polluted cities on the planet as far as air pollution.

It's terrifying that this is all right next to us, and these people are trying to flee to get out of this to get a better life and we're like fuck you this is america you can't even come over here i know i like how irony is lost on the right i was watching a sean hannity uh piece and he's talking about his immigration crisis and um and he's got a headline to his piece was um uh trouble in the heartland or defending the heart sorry it was defending the heartland and the Heartland or Defending the Heartland. And the graphic he had for Defending the Heartland was the Statue of Liberty

which was a gift from France and promotes immigration. That is hilarious. That is hilarious. What is the writing on the Statue of Liberty? Send us your poor huddled masses yearning to be free.

Oh, God. They're not immigrants. These are refugees fleeing intolerable violent circumstances inflicted upon by policies, not only our draconian drug wars, but also free trade. NAFTA, again signed into law by Bill Clinton, displaced three to four million Mexican farmers alone by allowing American agribusiness to go down there, build up their monstrosity industrial farming complexes, able to oversupply the market because of economy scales with cheap food and cheap fruit and produce, sends these Mexicans off their farms, sends them into the urban areas,

and then the only profitable business is drug running. And then with America's appetite for drugs like cocaine, which come from South America at a historical low, they're fighting over a smaller and smaller bit of market share. And that's why they become more violent and more tolerant and more violent trying to defend their smaller market share and turf in these places. So we've created the circumstances down there. And anyone who says we shouldn't take a kid who travels that far through the desert on their own they're the people you want i mean and we're not talking big numbers we're talking 40 000 we've got a population of 350 million if we can't take 40 000 kids who bust their nut to get across this in you know in hospitable terrain to make it in

this country well give me them any day over any day over Some white confederate in the deep south Yeah We're going to take America back South's going to rise again South's going to rise again It's amazing too That confederate flag thing That's a fascinating one

The confederate flag was representative Of so many things to them Pride, southern pride All and all these different things. Maybe you guys should come up with a new flag. Like, maybe come up with one that doesn't have a swastika on it, you know? Because that's essentially what it's like for black people. That's why they like it so much. Because you imagine driving around with your, you know, if somehow or another, you know,

you find yourself in the Deep South and you're a black person. You drive around and you see these rebel flags everywhere. You would think of that a lot like a jew would look at a swastika i understand that the swastika meant a lot more than that and at one point in time it was actually like a symbol of prosperity and like this national pride yeah i mean the swastika at one point in time was like it was it was like this ancient symbol um maybe it was reversed but it was used it was stolen from the hindus yeah in certain types of martial arts it was like old versions of karate they had these swastikas so yeah there's a hindu uh temple that's near my house yeah that um i visited and they have a big sign up explaining why there's swastikas everywhere yeah

well we lived in uh bali indonesia for when you drive around Bali you see all these Hindu temples everywhere with a swastika but it's actually in reverse. Right. You know and but yeah I mean everything is you know mythologies are always borrowed and ideologies are always borrowed from elsewhere and and yeah. Yeah it's fascinating that they cling to that goddamn flag. I get you like being from the South. That's cool. Well, the South has never gotten over losing the Civil War.

They're the worst runners-up in the history of sports. And they'll never get over it. If you look at the Republican Party today, most, because the Republican Party is so monolithic, such as a monolithic control of the South, that affords the Southern representation of the Republican Party the most senior positions. Eric Cantor's from Virginia, Marco Rubio, Mitch McConnell, you go down the line. They're all Southern you know the whole policy of blocking Obama is built around obstruction nullification and

And you know and that drives the you know the thrust and power of who they are as far as a reactionary party It's also something that unites them you know unites them in this this group that they have you know well southern pride I'm a southern boy you southern boy. I'm a Southern boy. You Southern boy? I'm a Southern boy as well. You know, this group, their own version of skull and bones, you know? Yeah. And when they say take your country back, well, to where? And I'll leave a say to the pre-Civil War days, but they won't say that in public. But then what they want to take America back to is the 50s. That's their idea of the ideal America. But that was the era of big federal government with the FDR's New Deal and so forth.

Yeah. And that's when they had it good, when liberalism was on the march in America. Isn't that something that people always do, though? Don't they always long for some day a long time ago when things made sense? Nostalgia. Yeah. They have this nostalgia for the archaic. It's very common, right?

Yeah. And oftentimes like ridiculously so like i i used to date this girl she used to talk about like high school about this amazing like high school was amazing we were all young and free i'm like bitch you had zits everybody was mad at everybody like come on yeah you tell me 15 you got finger banged once and everybody got told to school about it yeah you didn't have bills back then. Must have been awesome. Come on.

You were living with your mom. It fucking sucked. Get out of here. You can't think like that. Enjoy this moment. This moment is the best moment human beings have ever achieved. I believe right now this is the greatest time to be alive the world has ever known. Yeah, it's fraught with peril and all fucked up and economically completely out of whack,

but I still think this is the best time ever because information is being exchanged at a freer pace. It's being exchanged at a faster pace. It's being exchanged amongst people that have never been able to communicate before by translation software, by just the fact that you have this internet that's allowing people to send messages

and exchange information and ideas and communicate back and forth and influence each other in a way that's never been available before to anyone ever in the history of the human race. And if there's one thing that has separated us from the other animals in the world, it's our ability to communicate with each other. Well, our ability to communicate has never been better than it is right now. And I think there's a change that I've seen in my lifetime where people are moving towards more progressive ideas. I think a lot of this resistance that you're getting from this conservative party is this battening down the hatches and trying to avoid this inevitable change. And I think this change, a lot of it comes from that from this exchange of information from understanding each other better well I

think it's we're seeing the death throes of of that white minority politics in America and as and and what what we're gonna see more dangerously is America it's the browning of America by year 2050 Browning yeah and by here 2050 fear of a black planet is that what you're saying? Talking some Chuck D type shit here, man The browning Can you say browning? Are you allowed to say browning? I think so

You can't say colored people But can you allow to say brownies? I didn't say brownies Brownies Why is it brownie bad, but blacks? No, that's not a bad thing You can't say blacks Have you noticed that?

Yeah, you'd know The blacks You can say black people But you can't say blacks I'm Australian I don't know what I'm allowed to say i don't know either it changes all the time but uh i mean the browning of america by 2050 uh you know whites will be a minority in this country in 2012 actually that was the first year where white bump white babies were the less number you know were outnumbered by black and

brown babies so as we become um browner, this white minority politic, this reactionary movement is going to become more aggressive, more frustrated because they don't feel like they have representation. And where terrorism starts, terrorism is a reactionary response to political weakness or political impotency. And we saw the shooters in Las Vegas, those two white extremists who shot those two police officers and the Walmart worker.

If you read their manifesto, that's what the Tea Party manifesto- Which guys are these? Is this a recent thing? Yeah, four weeks ago, six weeks ago, they walked into a pizzeria, shot two cops to death. In Vegas? Yeah, in Vegas. They had their Batman and Robin masks on, and then they shot themselves. I didn't even hear about this one.

Yeah, really. No, it was national news. There's too many of those goddamn things. You're watching too much of that wrestling stuff. That's what it is. Too much of that wrestling stuff. I didn't even hear about that one. But what was their manifesto?

Well, the manifesto was uh basically that uh you know uh you know whites are losing white christians are losing representation america's been taken over by brown liberals progressive feminists and so forth so we're gonna dress like batman and shoot white folks yeah we're gonna take it out on cops and a walmart worker and end up shooting themselves but we're gonna see more and more of this and actually the new york times had a great piece on it the rise of hate or the data of hate. And the explosion of right-wing militia groups in this country is frightening. And the more they feel that they're the minority and the more they start losing national elections.

Let's face it, the Republican Party is not going to win a presidential election for the next 20 years. In every demographic in America, the Democrats are gaining market share. In every demographic in America, which is shrinking, the Republicans are gaining market share. So they're not going to win present elections. And that's why they focus on gerrymandering these districts, voter suppression. So trying to win at the state level. But is there a benefit other than socially? I do believe there's a social benefit to having liberals in office. I do believe that one thing that I think that Obama has done, I think there's a social benefit to having a guy like that in office. Well, there's a social benefit.

Well, look, I'm critical of Obama because he's governed like a Clinton. He hasn't governed as a liberal at all. Name a liberal policy he's implemented. Obamacare, that was far from a liberal policy. A liberal policy, when they had unilateral control of the Senate and Congress, should have been universal health care. But he didn't even fight for universal health care, even though he campaigned for it. I would argue we haven't had a liberal president since Nixon. And Nixon didn't implement

liberal policies because he was liberal or had a conscience or was moral. He was the last US president to be scared by liberals. And there's a great story with Nixon when he's at the height of the anti-war movement, and he's in the Oval Office, and he has Henry Kissinger standing next to him. And it's on the Nixon tapes. And he turns to Henry Kissinger and says, and all the White House is lined up with all these yellow buses of all the anti-war protesters. And Nixon turns to Kissinger and says, holy fuck, man, they're really going to storm the White House and drag me out this. He really believed that. And that's what you want the White House to feel like. You want the White House to feel like they're afraid of the people. You want politics and politicians in Washington to feel like they're

afraid. And the problem is they're not afraid of the liberal class anymore. The liberal class is dead. And to underscore that point is the popularity of Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton is just a brand. She stands for nothing. In 2008, she ran on no platform other than she was Hillary Clinton. She's going to run on the same platform because they believe they're not going to be against a once-in-a-lifetime candidate like they had in Barack Obama. So she's not going to stand for progressive liberalism. Liberalism, there is no such thing in liberalism in America. There's no one fighting for universal health care. There's no one fighting for free education or anything like that or higher taxes on corporations and the rich.

I mean this is – we live in an area where conservative politics trumps. Is there also a bottleneck in the two-party system, which is essentially what we have? I mean, you could say that there's a Green Party. You could say that there's a Libertarian Party, all you want. But the reality is they don't get included into the debates. As soon as the debates get heavy, I mean, what they did to marginalize Ron Paul, who is a Republican, shows you what they do to anybody who doesn't play ball. I mean, what you saw, like, you would see him placing in polls, like, second and third, and they would ignore him and concentrate on who was fourth and fifth.

I mean, that was what they did in the media to marginalize that guy, effectively to do so. Isn't that the bottleneck? The bottleneck is that corporations are sponsoring these people. Corporations are sponsoring their campaigns, paying for their campaigns, massive donations. And then they have this agenda once they get into place to help these corporations that paid for them to get in there in the first place. Is that- That's the problem. You've hit the nail on the head. And the problem is, I don't see the problem as being the two-party system.

I mean, in most Western democracies, you have a two-party system, Australia, the UK, and so forth. The problem is, but in Australia and the UK, you have public financing of elections. Here, it's the opposite. So our voices don't get heard. Politicians don't come out to visit you and I. They come and visit and do these $30,000 per plate dinners, and they listen to the 50-odd thousand lobbyists, which in Washington, and are paying their campaign finance. So there was a mere 32,000 donors in the 2012 elections represented more than 99% of all political donations in that campaign cycle.

So 0.01% of the population is donating 99% of the campaign finance to these two political parties. Until you get rid of that, you're going to have two political parties which represent the interests of corporations and not of the working or the middle class. Those numbers are crazy. Stop and think about that. I mean, everybody's fixated on the 1% in this country, the 1%. It's a 0.01%. That's madness. Yeah.

That's madness. Yeah. All the money's coming from them. Yeah, that's it. I mean, so our $50 donation, who gives a fuck? Is there anybody that you see on the horizon? Is there any movement, any humans that you see that are really trying to implement some sort of a change that you think have a chance? Two.

Well, two, but only one has a chance, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. If Elizabeth Warren runs, she beats Hillary. Really? And I'll tell you why. In 2008, it was a referendum on Iraq. Hillary Clinton, if Hillary Clinton had not voted for Iraq, she would have been a nominee and she would be the president right now. The referendum and the Democratic primary selection in this cycle

will be income inequality. On that, she will lose to Elizabeth Warren because of her associations to Wall Street, her husband's record in not being a progressive. Elizabeth Warren is a champion for the middle class, a champion for the working class. She wants to dismantle Wall Street. She wants to dismantle these financial debt products

which have wreaked havoc on the American population and these laws and regulations haven't been changed since we had the crash in 2008. We now stand on the precipice of repeating what happened in 2008. Nothing has changed. And she wants to fight for these causes, which will end the rigging of the game, so to speak. Bernie Sanders, I like him as well, but he has no chance in a national electorate. Elizabeth Warren could win the DNC nomination and also become president. Why does Bernie Sanders have no chance? And how do you think a woman's going to be president? Well, because, number one, Democrats yearn for a historic candidate, a woman.

They already tried a black guy. Didn't work out so well. Let's go with a chick. Yeah, so we want another piece of historic moment. All the white men are all fucking around their wives and shit. I want to catch those bitches as soon as they run for president. They're all wienering. Yeah, and Sanders,

well, Sanders is too much of an open-shirted socialist, identifies him as socialist, and so I think the media and the Republican Party will be too easy for them to slay him with the S-word, whereas Elizabeth Warren

has never mentioned the S-word and is more of a populist than a socialist. The S-word. The S-word, is that insurmountable? I mean, is it possible that what you were talking about before, that if you look at what's happening in Europe and you look at the benefits of socialism as far as Canada and some other countries, Australia, socialized medicine, socialized education. Is it possible that that can be discussed in some sort of a way that's not going to knee-jerk turn people off in America? Well, the problem is you have a failed media class because the media class won't report

the facts. The media class, you know, a Republican gets on TV and says there's no such thing as gravity. Then CNN says, well, we need to get a Democrat to speak on it. And Democrat says gravity is real. CNN says, look, Democrats and Republicans are fighting again. You know, so you'll never have an honest fact-based argument and you'll never have the facts which are discussed. Social democracies work. Germany and these Western European countries have far less income inequality than we do. They also have happier people than we do.

On their World Happiness Index, the top 15 countries are all social democracies. America is the richest country on the planet, but rates 17th on the World Happiness Index. We rank behind Mexico. So it won't be long before they build a wall down there to keep us out. But that doesn't even make any sense. If all the Mexicans are trying to get over here, but we're not as happy as them, that doesn't make any sense.

What is the World Happiness Index? And how does that even – no one's talked to me. Nobody interviewed me. Asked me. I'm not buying it. I'm pretty happy. You look pretty happy. I'm a very happy person.

I don't get it. Yeah. Well, the World Happiness Index is measured on some metrics such as pollution, access to health care, access to education, gender equality, income equality, pollution, crime rates, teen pregnancy, and so forth. And Mexico is better than America? We rank behind Mexico on the World Happiness Index. Someone is not doing a good job in America because most of the places that I see look a lot better than the places in Mexico. That shit doesn't make any sense. Man, you're in Woodland Hills here. Canoga Park, specifically.

Yeah, Canoga Park. But I don't think that there's any way that you can qualify a whole nation like that, though. You know what I'm saying? I don't think there's any way that you can say, like, hey, this is a happier country. This is a happier... Because, you know, you kind of... You start statistic mining in that way.

Like, America's the least happy, the least this. But we're also the most innovative. We create more things. We have more art, more music, more pop culture, more comedy, more movies. So many things come out of America because of this turmoil and this crazy, fucked fucked up sort of a way we live. It also lends itself to creativity. It lends itself to the distribution of, of, of, of media. You know, we have more

shit that comes out of here, good or bad. I'm not saying that all of it's great, but a lot of influence comes out of this one spot. Absolutely. I mean, you know, this is, whenever i speak i try not to uh come across as the uh the typical american basher because i'm not too late like this is why piers morgan lost his job oh that guy was a shit that's why he lost his job yeah he should never got that job in the first place he was involved in fucking tapping into people's phones, asshole. Too true. I was up him for that so many times and I went to get noticed. But look, I'm obsessed with America and always have been.

My friends in high school would always criticize me for being a wannabe American. The reason I moved here is because I am in love with America. And who loves America more than an immigrant who wants to come here and help make and make things better i still believe in america but we're doing things the wrong way are you a citizen no i'm still a resident i have talking shit you're not even one of us i can't vote yet you can't even vote so if you become if you become a citizen you can vote but you'll never be able to be president i can be governor of california that's isn't that weird yeah that's weird i'm sorry this idea is based on the notion that someone be able to be president I can be governor of California Isn't that weird That's weird I'm sorry This idea is based on the notion that someone is going to be

Groomed by Al Qaeda To come over here And be one of them white skin terrorists And me living in the world's Most populous Muslim country For 10 years won't help my resume either At all right Jesus Christ.

You probably don't even know you're a commie. You probably don't even know you're over here to fuck up our freedom. Yeah, there's a red in the bed. Jesus Christ. You don't even know, man. I'm a sleeper cell. Why is it that America produces so much as far as creativity? So much innovation, so much technological innovation, so much creativity.

So many good things come out of this place as well. Oh, well, you know, America is a great country. I think, you know, the U.S. has produced a litany of good things. Its contribution to the world culturally is, you know, you can't argue against it. But my point is that it benefits so few. And if you look at the new economy, inverted economy, as far as the technology, you know, there's Facebook producers

and there's, you know, what was that? WhatsApp just sold for how many billions of dollars? $15 billion? But they got a workforce of like 25 people. 25 people benefit out of the sale of that. So in the things that we're producing now, no longer have any social capital. We're not producing great products which can be exported to the world. Our technology

has been bought out by the military industrial complex. Most of the R&D and technological research done in this country is to the benefit of figuring out how we can kill people better in other countries. Is that really true? Yeah, it is absolutely true. I mean, how much of it is done on electric cars? How much of it is done on electronics and cell phones? Well, look at the electric car, and that's a great point. I mean, Tesla, you see plenty of them around in

these rich white neighborhoods, and certainly where I'm from in Laguna Beach, you see a ton of them. They're the new Toyota. You fucked up. You said, where are you from? I know. I never tell people where I'm from. God damn it. You fucked up. said where you're from i know i never told people

where i'm from god damn it i said newport beach no you didn't you fucked up i did can we edit this nope too late it's live it's live is this really live yeah it's really live god damn it god damn it i said maguna beach no you didn't can't deny it we gave up two things, Canoga Park and Laguna Beach. We're fucked. Oh, my God. I'm going to be hearing Al-Aqba, but in the conservative way. So we look at the opposition to Tesla. I mean, if it wasn't for big oil, we'd have the electric car years ago.

And Elon Musk has spoken at great length of the opposition he's faced in bringing the electric car to market. So, yeah, we're producing great things, but, you know, the corporate totalitarian state, big oil and these kind of interests will always trump. Look what's happening. Look at all these states which have posed Tesla. You know, New Jersey, for example, Wisconsin. Yeah, look at Chris Christie, man. Texas, you know.

What is that guy all about? Chris Christie Not anymore He's getting slim and ready for 2016 They're going to fucking wheel him out there As a cannon fodder What do you call those motorized two wheel things? That guy's such a goofball He's done

He doesn't have to worry about Christie anymore He's not a candidate He's not? He's given up? Well, he hasn't given up, but all the big money has moved away from him because politically he's dead in water. Because these lawsuits are going to follow him well into the 2016 election cycle. With the bridge? Yeah. Is that just the bridge thing?

It's the bridge thing, but it's the whole culture of intimidation, that whole New Jersey sopranoano like atmosphere which turns off women and independent and minority voters so plus it's fat yeah did we mention that already yeah fat acceptance people step aside because you're being silly okay i don't accept smokers either smoking acceptance i think is equally stupid that's a there's dumb habits. So is being morbidly obese. It's a dumb thing to do. Well, I've got no problem with being morbidly obese if you're poor, because the poor in this country can't afford to be skinny. But if you're rich and white like Christy is, well, you have no excuse of being a fatty. That is true to a certain extent, but still, it means overeating.

That is a personal choice, even if you're poor. If you're getting bad food, that's one thing. Bad nutrition is another thing. But the overabundance of this bad nutrition is just simply gluttony. Man, look, if you're a family of four and you've got a husband and wife on a minimum wage, let's call it, you're netting $400 a week. You've still got to pay rent. You've still got to pay the car. You can either go to Trader Joe's and buy a $15 pun of broccoli and some potatoes, or you go to Wendy's and you feed the whole family for four.

Yeah. You know, that's... That is fucked. But the reason they're fat is not because they're barely getting by with that food. It's because they're eating more of it than they need to. Yeah. You know, it sucks that they're getting bad food, for sure. It sucks that it's so expensive to eat healthy.

Those are absolutes. Yeah, yeah. Hey, I am with you. I'm a fattest like you are i'm a fattest i'm sorry sorry fat people some of my best i have really good friends that are fat as fuck it's not that i i hate it's just that there is a certain reality to being morbidly obese that i don't i don't think you're helping people with this idea this notion of fat acceptance and i think this is this is the the the broad end of the spectrum when it

comes to this these new ideas that i think where people are becoming more progressive and more sensitive and more open-minded i think there's great things to that but i think there's also things like fat acceptance where it gets to a point where like listen stop i got in trouble i got in trouble on twitter a couple of years ago for tweeting, I'm the Rosa Park of not giving up my seat on the bus for fat people. You got in trouble for that? I don't know why. Was a fat person trying to take your seat on the bus? Did that really happen?

No, it didn't really happen. So you just gave it up? You're just fucking around? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Being mean to fat people? Yeah, just being an asshole. Listen, that feeling of shame, this idea of fat shaming, people don't like that. But that feeling of shame, the negative feeling, is a feeling of social failure.

And that feeling of social failure, that ostracized feeling, the only benefit of that, it's not good to be cruel. But the only benefit of that to the person who receives it is that it will motivate them to lose weight. That's just a fact. And fat acceptance, that means you're happy the way you are you're good the way you are no you're gonna die quick your fucking heart is pumping through sludge all right you need to eat some vegetables you fuck jesus christ you've never messed about over chloe kardashian there's uh chloe kardashian the big one but she's barely big you know what i mean if you talk about that's not fat. I don't call her fat.

She might be a big girl. Yeah, yeah. But, you know, who's that woman who's the McCarthy girl who's on all those movies now? No, no, Jenny's the hot one. Melissa. Melissa McCarthy. Oh, yeah, Melissa McCarthy.

She's the enormous one that everybody loves. She's America. Look at her. She's all chubby and everything, but all friendly and wacky. Poor gal. She's going to fucking die. Her heart is not going to keep beating if you do that. It's not going to last.

No. Those really big fat ones, they never hit 60. They just don't. They never make it. Don't have a heart attack in Disneyland oil. Yeah, exactly. With a churro in each hand. Two fisting.

Fucking with one of those hats on. And a soda. Or a backpack. Like one of those camel backpacks. Hey, freedom. With fucking Mountain Dew in it. Yeah, look, there's a lot of bad things to the American diet. That's for fuck sure. And a lot of it is, do you ever watch that documentary King Corn?

No. God damn. Amazing. Right. The depth that the corn industry and the corn lobby and the corn, there's these people that have grown corn and that this subsidization, subsidization, is that a word? Yeah, yeah.

Subsidizing by the American government. Yep. The corn and corn syrup, like this, how much of this is involved in our food and our diet? Everything. It's amazing. Yeah. It's in our bread and our everything it's amazing yeah so it's in our bread yeah they have corn syrup in people's fucking sodas and they're this and they're that and there was

a thing about um uh it was a lawsuit about mexico um trying to force out um uh corn syrup because they were trying to force them to use corn syrup in their production of Coca-Cola, and so they resisted it, and then they were sued. The whole thing is just corn is a wacky fucking plant, man. Well, I mean, it's so pervasive because no coincidence that Iowa is the first stop on both parties' nomination process. That's where they spend all the time, you know. Yeah, isn't that crazy? Carpetbagging.

No coincidence whatsoever. Yeah. But for anybody who wants, I mean, I'm not going to go into depth about it because we've talked about this before, but please watch the documentary King Corn if you get a chance. Food Inc. is another good one. It's a scary one. Yeah. That's a scary one.

Yeah, that'll shy you away from fast food. You know, I've taken a lot of heat about this subject of minimum wage by a bunch of people that think that folks who work in fast food or folks who work in entry-level jobs should not get paid $15 an hour. That's the number that I always throw around. I'm like, you can't live off of less than $15 an hour, man. You just can't. $15 an hour, you can pay your rent, you can get something to eat, and it's still not a lot of money. Yeah. And if you run a company that can't afford to pay your workers $15 an hour, it means

you're making too much. Either you personally are making too much money, you're not giving the workers enough, or something's happening. You're not profitable. You need less workers. You're not, your system is not efficient. There's got to be some way that you can pay. If someone works for you all day and they get paid less than a survival wage, you essentially have slaves.

Well, this is what the problem is. And I keep coming back to this point. In America, we have socialism for the corporations, but we have capitalism for the rest of us. So you take Walmart or Bank of America. They pay their workers so little that we have to subsidize them with food assistance, housing assistance, and so forth. them with food assistance, housing assistance, and so forth. Every Walmart, the four Walmart heirs own more than the combined bottom 42% of Americans, yet are allowed to pay their workers so little that the average taxpayer, the average Walmart employee costs the average taxpayer in this country $1,300 per year in taxes.

So you and I are funding the workforce for a ridiculously fucking wealthy bunch of individuals that can afford to pay their employees more. That's incredible. So that's socialism for them and capitalism for the rest of us. Hit me with those numbers again. The most wealthy people of Walmart. And they inherited their wealth. They did not build that. Motherfuckers.

They did not build that. They did not build that motherfuckers they did not build that i did not build that so okay the four walmart heirs own more than the bottom 42 percent combined in this country the four walmart heirs four people earn more money per year than the bottom 42 percent of the entire country yep and google it i can't i'll throw up on my keyboard. That's incredible. Yeah. That's it. So all we have to do is kidnap the four Walmart heirs, take all of their money, redistribute it to the bottom 42%. We've essentially cured poverty. You and I. With four people. High five. That's a new Melissa McCarthy movie. Melissa McCarthy, she fucking gets a mouthful of donuts.

She gets a good sugar rush and she runs out and kidnaps the wall and she lets them see the errors of their ways and they wind up working and at the end of the movie they're happy

and they're working in like Costa Rica like fucking saving people from hurricanes or some shit. Yeah. That's a crazy statistic. So,

and with all that wealth, you and I are paying each $1,300 per year to Walmart to subsidize their workforce. Four people. Mm-hmm. That's incredible.

Yep. Yep. That's incredible. Well, the Koch brothers combined, the two Koch brothers own more than that. I think you'll have them Google us, but it's around about the bottom 50%. Two guys own more than the bottom 50% of this country. Okay. So we got an issue.

We got six people. We kidnapped six people. We take their money. You're leaving out the torturing part. But we don't have to torture them. We got six people. We kidnapped six people. We take their money. You're leaving out the torturing part. But we don't have to torture them. We just kill them. I don't mean that.

Don't put me on a list. But if those people, just those people as well, so six people, you said 50% and 42%, but that's not combined. No, no, no, not combined. The equal thing. Separate. You've got to separate them.

Right, but how does that work then? Because that means like if the combined 42%, but then you also have the combined 50%. What the fuck is that? You can't add them together. Why can't you add them together? Because you're still working from the same number. So the combined wealth of the Koch brothers is more than the bottom roughly 50% of the nation. Right. But the combined wealth of the Walmart heirs.

So you're working from a fixed number. more than the bottom roughly 50% of the nation. Right. But the combined wealth of the Walmart heirs. So you're working from a fixed number. So you can't, if you add them both together, it's not like, you know, the six of them own 92%. Right. They don't own 92%, but they own double 42%. Yeah. So what is that? How does that creep it up to 60%?

What does it creep it up to? I think I told you at the beginning, I'm not an economist. Well, I'm, well, I'm dumb as fuck, so we're screwed. Not only am I not an economist, I'm not good at counting shit. So if you think about that, though, just the fact that the four people from Walmart and the two Koch brothers, just those six people, what is the total money, the total amount of money that those guys have? Well, the Koch brothers are worth a combined about $55 billion. And most of their money is from speculation, not from hiring people or building stuff. Most of it is from oil speculation.

So stock market shit. Stock market stuff, which has no social value. Money fuckery. Yeah, money fuckery. That's really what it is, right? That's what Paul Krugman said. We're going from a country that made stuff to a country that makes stuff up. You ever hear what Putin said about the United States?

It was before the crash. He said, I don't understand the United States economy. It seems that they just buy and sell each other's houses. He was right. Yeah. I mean, it was all before the shit hit the fan. It's all these wacky financial instruments, you know, moving numbers on a screen. How can that be fixed, though?

I mean, first of all, the only way to fix the Koch brothers' situation is there's no way, right? I mean, you would have to- Well, you'd have to end all speculation. But Robert Reich, who speaks about this extensively, is you have a trading tax. At the moment, these guys can trade minor pips, every pip of a scrim, to the three decimal places, whether it's on currency, whether it's on gas. And when you're moving tens and hundreds of millions of dollars, one pip is a ton of money.

But there should be a trading tax on each one of these trades, because there's volume of trade, there's volume of money, benefits society in no measurable mean. God damn, man. What a weird world we live in when that's real. These are the numbers that Jamie just threw up here. The collective wealth of the six richest Waltons rose from 73 billion to 90 billion, while the wealth of the average American declined from 126,000 to 77,000. 13 million Americans have negative net worth. That's a crazy thing. I was exactly right. The Since Walmart has now have more wealth

than the bottom 42%. God damn. I didn't just make numbers up. I didn't think you did. I didn't even check. I thought you were telling the truth for sure. There was a recent article that I brought up in yesterday's podcast that Michael Shermer wrote in Scientific American that was torn apart about the myth of financial inequality. It was like one of the dumbest articles I've ever written. The way I know whether something's dumb is if I think it's dumb, is if I can see the logical fallacies in your argument about finance. But what is that coming from? What is this like, everything's fine, this everything's fine thing

where people want to sort of manipulate statistics and look at things from sort of a rose-colored glasses point of view. What's that from? What causes people? Because people have no experience to what is happening in America. I'm not going to say the name of the town that I already said that I live in. You live in a nice spot. In a nice spot. And the area I live in is, I'm going to guess, 90% white and moderately wealthy to wealthy. And they have no clue what's happening in these rust belt states through the northwest, which are particularly the basis of manufacturing. I mean, these are economies which have been absolutely destroyed through globalization.

There is no economic recovery. through globalization. There is no economic recovery. You know, despite, and you spoke with us before, despite the Dow record highs and despite the unemployment number happening, we're not going to get these jobs back because we now have the Walmart business model is the model that the rest of the corporate world in this country emulates. In the 18th century, it was the Pennsylvania railroad country. In the 20th century, it was IBM. Today, it's Walmart. country. In the 20th century, it was IBM. Today, it's Walmart. So what Walmart does with it, it makes cities bid against each other to get tax breaks to move it. So they're going to say, hey, we're going to put a store in your place. They get two cities that bid against it. So it becomes a race to the bottom as far as corporate subsidies and welfare.

Every time a Walmart store opens, every time Walmart employs a new employee, 1.4 American workers is displaced. Now, their control of the American economy, the retail economy, is so dominant that they have such control over their suppliers. Procurement at Walmart, they demand a 5% reduction of their suppliers every year. If you can't reduce your costs to Walmart by 5% every year, then well, fuck off, goodbye. So after about five years of doing this where you've cut 5%, 5%, eventually Walmart says to their suppliers, well, you need to move to China. And if you move to China, we'll help you set up. If you don't move to China, we do no business no longer.

And that has happened with countless number of companies. Companies like Rubbermaid, a great American company, which had a workforce and hundreds of thousands of people in the 70s and the 80s, almost no longer exists in that form anymore because they couldn't, and initially they didn't move to China, but they have now. So this globalization is free trade, it's not benefiting anyone, and that's the model that we operate under. Is there a way to, first of all, there was a number that you threw out that I got confused about. You said for every time a Walmart opens, 1.4 Americans are misplaced.

Is displaced. Displaced. What is it, 1.4? What is it? It's one person? So every time a Walmart employs a person, 1.4 Americans loses a job elsewhere. Every time they employ one person, 1.4.

Okay. So for every one person they employ, more than one. That American worth is lost. So for every one person they employ, more than one. That kind of makes sense. And the mom and pop store, the death of the mom and pop store has been really criticized, both by people that are against Walmart, but also people that they're saying, you know, why don't you shop and vote with your dollar? Like if you appreciate mom and pop stores and they cost five more dollars when you go in there,

just go. Pay them the five more dollars. Do you understand how Walmart is making things so cheap? Do you understand that the people that work there, with the number that you threw around, that for every Walmart worker we pay, what was the amount of money that every person has to pay in tax dollars?

$1,300. $1,300. If those things were just made more clear and people voted with their dollar more, do you think it's possible that something like Walmart can slowly die away, that these monolithic corporations that have this massive control over economies... But Walmart destroys communities to such an extent

that people in these communities can only afford to shop at Walmart. It becomes this vicious cycle. So it's, you know, unless you put in policies which regulate trade and protect the working class, protect the class, you're not going to solve the problem. And this is another great sort of hypocrisy is how, for example, the Republican Party presents itself as the party of small business

because it's a nice nostalgic picture that draws, that's painted in people's mind, that picture of Ma and Pa, small business operation, you know, on Main Street in middle America. But name a single policy that the Republican Party have helped small businesses with. Has the Republican Party protected the Mar-a-Mar operation from these monopolies, these oligopolies? Do they give the same tax breaks that they do,

these corporate subsidies that they do to these big organizations to drown the business? No, they haven't. You know, the Republican Party hasn't looked after

the small businesses at all in this country. And, you know. And that's just the way it is. I mean, no one's fighting against that. That's not like a big rallying cry

of neither the Democrats nor the Republicans. This is not something that anybody's bringing up. No. And that comes to political ignorance and political ignorance born from either our education system or the fact that the mainstream media only reports titillating issues. We're still talking about flight missing M8-370 or Anna Nicole Smith's death. It's a focus on celebrity and trivia rather than on real issues. There's no Walter Cronkite's in the news anymore. That is true. There's no real news anymore. There's television programs that highlight, there are entertainment programs that highlight things they think people are going to be interested

in, but they don't have a desire for journalism. Well, they don't, and it's corporate-controlled media. How many venues on corporate-owned media do you think I'm going to get booked when I talk about the corporate totalitarian state? Not a lot. Your show. You can come back for sure. Do you get chills down your spine when you see things like what's going on with Edward Snowden, when you see what's going on with Julian Assange, when people do expose some really horrific things that our government's involved with. The underpinnings of our society itself, the mechanism involved in what's turning the wheels of the military industrial complex. When that gets exposed and you see like some court just upheld the arrest warrant against Julian Assange. For what?

For having sex with a woman, supposedly? Yeah. Or whatever the fuck. Yeah. I mean, it's one of the most dubious and questionable charges of all time that's involved in an international incident. Yeah. I mean, has there ever been a more transparent situation when they're going after someone and pretending it's something else? I mean, it's always dangerous grounds to, I guess, guess to trivialize any rape charge but you're dead right i mean it's

not even a rape charge yeah i mean it was right so yeah it's so the circumstances which i've read is so fishy and dubious as you've said but uh you know i the one of the most frustrating things is we would be more the american population certainly would be more angry about the NSA overreach if there was a Republican in office the fact that it's a Balmer in office has placated you know Democrats and the liberal class I just think oh well if Obama is happy with it it must mean it's okay I guess it's not too bad yeah and also part of the problem is with you know the millennial pop it the mental millennial

generation it's you know it's hey hey look at me you know um so we've come such a hey look at me you know instagram selfies facebook accounts twitter and the more they think the more exposure the better um so when they talk about you know being watched well they like being watched there is that thing though that it if it was a republican that was in office and you were dealing with this nsa leak where you find out that they're downloading every fucking email you have every phone call you make is being recorded people would be up in arms but because of the fact that it's a democrat the very same people who would be up in arms are sort of letting it slide in a way. Yeah.

Partisanship. It is. And that's how, you know, coming back to what I said earlier, you know, we're living in the most polarized moment in American history. And we only see things and issues through the lens of our political parties. You know, we're deeply entrenched in our own camps. And we only listen to the talking heads who feed red meat to our respective camps. We're goofy as fuck, in other words. Yeah, not too many Tea Party voters read my pieces,

you know, in Salon. No, yeah, Salon, you can be, well, if they do read it, they read it to get angry, before they go out to the rifle range and fucking shoot pumpkins with Obama's picture pasted on it, you know. God damn it. Did you hear what he said about Jesus?

Yeah. Well, you're actively trying to piss him off with your titles of your books, right? I think so. I think so. Crucifying America. Atheists can't be Republicans. God hates you, hate him back.

Yeah, all those. I just got an email yesterday saying God doesn't hates you, hate him back. Yeah, all those. I just got an email yesterday saying God doesn't hate you, everybody else does. Oh, how rude. God loves you, but I hate you. Is that what they're saying?

Yeah, pretty much. Well, then you're not a child of God. Who the fuck are you? You're not doing it right, right? They're not. They're doing it wrong. You can't just run around

saying that God doesn't hate you, but I do. Exactly. Fuck. If you know that, if you know God doesn't hate you, but I do. Exactly. Fuck. If you know that, if you know God doesn't hate you, you're supposed to love them then. Isn't that what they're supposed to do? Turn their other cheek? Yeah, I don't see much forgiveness.

I'm not copying much forgiveness at all. Have you ever met a real Christian like that who forgives you for your... Yeah, actually, I have a lot of friends who are Christians. Do you really? Yeah, I do. You've said this twice. You said, I have a lot of friends who are Christians. Do you really? Yeah, I do. You've said this twice. You said, I have a lot of friends who are Christians. You said a lot of friends who are right-wing Republicans.

A lot of gay friends. I said that as well. Do you really have these friends? No, I just make it up. I knew it. To be honest, I think there's seven billion people in the world. I really only know four of them. Really well, right?

Yeah, exactly. But I do. I mean, actually, it's funny. Mormons, and? Yeah, exactly. But I do. I mean, actually, it's funny. Mormons, and I had this conversation with a friend the other day. Every Mormon I've met is actually super nice. Actually, one of the hottest Mormons on the planet is Abby Huntsman, John Huntsman's daughter. She's on MSNBC.

Oh, my God. And I do have a little crush on her. Do you? Yeah, yeah. You've seen her. I might have. Which one is she? What's her name?

Abby Huntsman. I don't watch NMSNBC. I try to avoid all mainstream media at this point. I get almost all my news from the internet. I've kind of completely given up on watching Fox. I might watch Fox just for the hot chicks. I watch Fox just to see chicks cross and uncross their legs back and forth. Is this her?

She's a Mormon? Yeah, she is. She's beautiful. Yeah. But she's a silly bitch. There's no doubt about it. If you're a Mormon, I don't care. You could be a Mooney. You could be a Scientologist.

It's all the same to me, man. Yeah. You're right. You could be born a Mormon and get locked into it. I had a neighbor who was a Mormon who was great. Nicest guy. Yeah. Super sweet people.

They're very friendly, very, you know, very warm and compassionate. Well, and it's also, too, I like to say that, you know, the South, you travel down to the southern states, and individually, the nicest people on the planet. You know, southern hospitality is a real thing. But put them all in the room together, and you're talking about the biggest bunch of bigoted assholes, you know, you've ever met met talk about taking their guns and black men fucking their daughters what not on my watch yeah well i think a lot of that is just again fear ignorance these isolated folks that live in these you know small towns that are separated from the larger cities by vast distances. Those larger cities mean, you know, tend to be the centers of diversity.

Yeah. Yeah, you're going to have ignorance and fear in a lot of those places. But, you know, it's also fed upon by the politicians that are running for office in those very areas. Exactly. And it's fed upon by this right-wing echo chamber, which constantly keeps in fear of the external enemy, whether that's liberals, whether that's Muslims, whatever it's, you know. The echo chamber. Yeah keeps them fear of the external enemy whether that's liberals whether that's muslims whatever it's you know the echo chamber communist but isn't salon kind of an echo chamber to the left a little bit yeah yeah yeah it's a very very friendly audience

yeah very friendly audience to the left yeah i mean there's certain but but we'll see you do have an echo chamber on the left but in the the left echo chamber, facts aren't made up. Whereas in that right-wing echo chamber, there's a total disregard for facts. Even Romney's head pollster, Neil, and I can't remember his last name, and I guess it doesn't matter, but he even said on camera, you know, facts don't matter, you know, in his campaign. What? Yeah. Come on.

No. I mean, they can say anything. Is Romney taking another run in it? Come on. No. I mean, they can say anything. Is Romney taking another run in it? I think there's a big wing in the establishment wing of the Republican Party that wants him to run.

I don't think he will. But the establishment is desperate for a candidate because at the moment, Rand Paul is going to be the nomination. And he scares the life out of establishment Republicans because he's not a neocon. That's why Dick Cheney's in the media at the moment. At the moment, trying to water down this isolationist libertarian wing of the Republican Party. Because as it stands today, he would be the nominee. Rand Paul. And what scares you about Rand Paul? What should scare people about Rand Paul?

What scares me? You're asking me? Yeah, what scares you? What scares me? Well, he's a libertarian for one. I think libertarianism would only exacerbate the winner-takes-all society that we have at the moment. We need to be doing the opposite of that. Libertarianism would grant more power to the corporations in this country and less.

What scares the establishment wing, the Republican Republican Party is he's an isolationist and sort of military industrial complex. And there was a great piece done recently that if Hillary's a nominee and Rand Paul's a nominee, neocons will vote for Hillary. Neocon Republicans will vote for Hillary. What? Because she's more hawkish than Rand Paul is. than Rand Paul is. Whoa.

That would be crazy. Could you imagine Dick Cheney advising people to vote for Hillary Clinton over Rand Paul? He would. Could you imagine a race of Hillary Clinton versus Rand Paul? It would be the biggest landslide since LBJ Barry Goldwater in 64. Do you think Hillary would win? I think Hillary could almost win every state. Whoa.

Yeah, almost win every state. What do you think would hold people back from voting for Rand Paul? Well, his ideas are unproven, except for Somalia, number one. I think that a lot of things are going to come back to haunt him. He doesn't believe in the Civil Rights Act. He believes that private property trumps everything. There's a great video of him. He's asked, well, do you believe in the Civil Rights Act? Well, I don't know, but I kind of think it was a good thing,

but I also think private property owners and restaurant owners have the right not to serve. He didn't use the word blacks, but they have the right not to serve black people they don't want to. Wow. So, you know, I think he'd be a disastrous candidate. Barry Goldwater, the same people who voted for Barry Goldwater are the same people who vote for Rand Paul. And we saw what happened to Goldwater.

That's not where America is. America is a center-left country, not a far-right country. But people love his dad. Huh? People love his dad. Well, white, well-to-do people loved his dad. He's a neo-Confederate. I mean, you know his dad. He's a neo-Confederate. And Rand Paul is a neo-Confederate. He regularly speaks at Sons of the Confederate meetings. It's all about nullification of states' rights. What does state rights mean? That means these states can ban abortion, deny black people the right to attend restaurants, you know, coloreds only.

It also means they can allow gay marriage. They can allow people to smoke marijuana. They can allow people to do a lot of things that the federal government does not allow. Yeah. So it's not entirely a negative thing, like the idea of states' rights. Yeah. The non-interventionalist foreign policy. Yeah, which is a good thing.

I'm for that. I think Ron Paul had some very good ideas. He's definitely a wacky old dude. But who's not? How many old dudes stay alive, and especially in the world of politics, get to be that old and just don't have utter disdain for the established system. Yeah, Joe McCain. Yeah, I mean, there's this whole thing that we've been doing from the beginning of time

of profiting off of sending young men to death for things that they don't understand, sending over them to fight in foreign lands for some cause that they don't know to, they don't know what they're doing. They're too young. They're too young to see the hustle. I mean, that's the oldest trick in the book as far as like the military. And that was one that Ron Paul stood very firmly against. Yeah. And he was one of the few people that was doing it right or left.

Yeah. And I'm with Ron Paul and Rand Paul when it comes to military and I'm with both of them when it comes to ending the drug war. But, you know, thinking that Ron Paul or Rand Paul is good for America because they're anti-drug and anti-war is like thinking a Big Mac is good for you because it has lettuce in a pickle. But what is good for America, though, at this point in time? When we've clearly established that you've got massive amounts of money that are financing politics. What is good for America is what has already worked in the past. And what has worked in the past was FDR's New Deal. And that is socialism. America came out of the Gilded Age. We went into the biggest economic crisis America has ever seen. We implemented social reforms,

America has ever seen. We implemented social reforms, economic reforms, political reforms. And from the end of World War II to 1980, we built the great American middle class, where we built the most prosperous middle class the world has ever seen. We put a man on the moon. We built the interstate highway systems. We had the GI Bill. We had free education. We had access to education. We established Medicaid with the Great Society. Happy days, Laverne and Shirley. Yeah. Good shit happened. And, well, you know, my dad lived in America for 10 years during the 60s.

His generation during that time, just the husband, just your dad worked. And you still had enough to afford a mortgage and have two cars. Now both husband and, you know, dad and mother have to work. They can barely keep their head above water. They're saddled with debt. We have no way out. And that's the world we live in. We have to go back to that era, and we have to put in social, economic, and political reforms,

which redistribute the wealth from the top back to the middle. Now, how would you do that? So if someone came to you, you have all these radical ideas, you've written books about it, if someone was running for president, be it Elizabeth Warren or whoever it is that reads your stuff, what would you implement? How would you fix this in a reasonable way that makes sense? Well, number one is the tax code because their denial of tax revenue to the federal government is extreme at the moment. That's why, you know, we said earlier, America doesn't have nice things is because corporations are contributing the lowest percentage of the overall revenue to the federal government.

So, but if you contribute more money, where does that money go? And who gets to dictate where that money goes? Well, first of all is you're building an infrastructure. I mean, infrastructure is falling apart in this country. Spending money on... It goes back to Keynesian economics, which has worked in the past and will work again. We have to build bridges, we have to build highway systems,

we have to build higher-speed railways. That creates jobs and that creates markets in new economies. We have to then build up the middle class and the working class with better labour reforms. We've gone from... From the moment that Reagan destroyed the unions that will sack the air traffic controllers in 1981, we've gone from America protected by collective bargaining went from something like 35% to 7%

today. In every social democratic country like Australia and Scandinavia and Western Europe, upwards of 85% of their populations are covered by collective bargaining. So the workers have a say or a shared prosperity. You know, from 1954 to 1979, their productivity gains were shared equally between corporations and the working class. Today, only 12% of the gains are shared with the working class and middle class. So we have to...

That comes through the tax code. It comes through labor reform, access to health care and education and so forth. Do you trust the federal government to do the appropriate thing with the new taxes? Say if we did reform the tax code and say if we did change the contributions that corporations are forced to make, say if we did change the contributions that corporations are forced to make, do you really trust the government as it's in place right now with all of its glorious incompetence to redistribute that money and do a good job with it? Well, people will say, well, government always does a shitty job. Corporations, 90% of corporations fail in their first five years. So government is not a perfect solution or a perfect

be-all to end-all, but there has to be a balance. And we have that in other countries, where there's capital investment, but also public investment. And public investment or liberalism, liberalism was never meant to be a left-wing thing. Liberalism was always meant to be a countervailing power to capitalism. Where capitalism falls short, liberalism was supposed to pick up the slack and protect the downtrodden, the people that capitalism leaves behind. And you need public investment to fund those initiatives. There's always going to be waste. That's just part of the problem. For every Solyndra that you have, you're going to have Tesla. And people in the Republican wing like to bash government spending on the

failure of Solyndra, but they also forget that government funding has made Tesla an enormous success. Do you think that a part of what's going on now with the internet, that this access to information would also deter at least a certain percentage of waste because people would be more responsible for it, because it will be more responsible for it because it'd be more transparent than ever before well the stimulus the stimulus was the greatest uh public stimulus program in u.s history since fdr's new deal but it was also the most transparent spending of public spending we've ever seen i mean the federal government put up a website

with every vendor and contractor and the details of that available for anyone to see. I mean, the waste of that stimulus, which wasn't enough, the size of the stimulus should have been double the $800 billion that it was. It worked. It added two points to GDP, created X amount of million private sector jobs. But it was transparent. I don't know how much more transparent it could be. You never see it. You're never going to eliminate waste totally. But the offside to that is it's filled by the private sector.

And the alternative is Reagan's Holy Trinity, monopolization, deregulation, and privatization. And there's greater waste there and more crony capitalism than you have on the other side. Certainly with deregulation. That's scary shit that people would want that. I think that would be a good idea.

There's a reason why regulations are in place. It's to keep them from running amok with natural human instincts of conquering, natural human instincts of deception. These are just natural things that you have to guard against with laws. And that's the thing. Corporations are not concerned with the common good. It's just a profit motive.

Right. It's a machine. Yeah. And it was Clinton who deregulated Wall Street with Glass-Steagall, and that led to the chain of events which collapsed the entire fucking universe in 2008. Dirty Clinton. Yeah. And we haven't had one except for Dodd-Frank, which is a pissy effort to regulate Wall Street. We're back to the same place we were

leading up to the days of the crash in 08. What do you think to people that thought that they should let the banks fail? Like that's the Peter Schiff idea. Quite a few people, Ron Paul believed that as well, that don't bail out the banks. Yeah. The former Fed chairman, Paul Volcker, believed the same thing. What do you think about that? Well, in my uninformed opinion, there's this great book called The Confidence Men. And it's really an insider's account of the Obama White House in the first four years. And obviously, as he came into office, he was dealing with the

biggest economic catastrophe America's seen since the Great Depression. And he was listening to all the ideas going forward. There was Team A and Team B. Team B was the likes of Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner and Paul Rubin, who was a Clintonite. And Team A was Paul Volcker and so forth. Paul Volcker and Team A believed in letting him fail, totally get rid of this debt leverage vehicles that have created this fictitious wealth and fictitious products. In the end, Obama went with Team B, the Larry Summers, who were there to protect the status quo of Wall Street. And you have these Wall Street bankers like the CEO of Bank of America saying, thank God Team B was chosen. We'd never be back to where we were. If we had to let Wall Street

fail, I don't know enough to be able to give a quantified opinion on what today would look like. The arguments that you hear, well, we had to, you know, prop them up to avoid an even bigger catastrophe seem valid as well. So I don't know. Do you look at the future of this country and think it's going to work out? Or do you look at it and say, I'm going back to Australia in about 10 years when the shit hits the fan? I think it's almost too late. Too late? Yeah.

I think where we are today, this is what America is going to look like. Have you seen the movie Elysium with Matt Damon? Yes. That's what America is going to look like. So everyone is going to live in a gated community in space? So the rich people will retire behind gated communities. They'll be able to afford goods and services which the rest can't afford. And the rest of America is going to live in a crime-riddled society with no public infrastructure and services,

which, you know, the rich will have, you know, there'll be no middle class. But don't we have lower... Which is what third-world countries look like, a really rich top and a really poor bottom and nothing in the middle. But you're fond of statistics. Yeah. Don't we have lower crime, lower murder rates than ever before? Murder rates are falling from the height of the 1980s.

Except Chicago. Yeah, they love the shit people at the moment. Chicago's fucking up the whole curve. Yeah. Obama's town, goddammit. Yeah, Ram and Megan's down there. Son of a bitch. People in Chicago, man, don't like Obama.

It's amazing. Some black woman in Chicago was in the news the other day saying he's the worst president we've ever had. Yeah. Oh, wow. A black woman. Well, worse than Bush the other day saying he's the worst president we've ever had. Yeah. Oh, wow. A black woman. Well, worse than Bush. Stepping up. Worse than Bush.

Yeah. I don't know about all that. No. I mean. If you're a whistleblower, he's the worst. If you're Snowden, he's the worst. Yeah. But when you see those statistics, those numbers, what makes you think that it's going to get way worse?

Well, I mean, crime. have you read Freakonomics? No. Okay. I mean, it's a great book. Freakonomics makes a – you know, causation doesn't prove – or correlation doesn't prove causation, but they make a very strong argument that the only reason that violent crime has fallen in this country is because of Roe v. Wade. Roe v. Wade abortion basically destroyed a whole generation of potential criminals. Because poorer communities don't have access to abortion.

That's so crazy. I mean, yeah, it's got racist underpinnings, that finding. In a deep, deep way. That's so fucking harsh to get behind. But when you look at it scientifically, if you have just data to analyze, really yeah yeah and uh but violence is one is you know is one aspect you know they're really i mean what future is there in america where education becomes unaffordable where those who graduate are settled with debt they can never get out of um and where housing becomes unaffordable

and where there's no well-paying jobs, where you have stagnant wages, where you have a country where income has been totally redistributed to the wealth, where the share of income is, you know, it's what the top 1% used to get 12% of the income. Now the top 1% gets something like 37% of the income in this country. You know, you're creating this massive underclass with no way out. So you're saying we need more abortions? Yeah. That's what I'm hearing.

Well, some people ask me if I'm, you know, they obviously know I'm liberal. They ask me if I'm pro-choice, and I say, no, I'm not pro-choice. I'm pro-abortion. There's a big difference. Well, I wish it didn't involve killing a fetus. The reality of what an abortion is is something that people don't want to discuss. I've had these conversations with people who are liberal, and just when you talk about it flat, objectively, no ideology attached,

what is going on? Well, there's a person that's growing in a body, and we snuff it out. And at what point in time is it okay to snuff it out? I hear you. I mean, it is that. That's what it is. Is it okay a snuff it out? I hear you. I mean, it is that. That's what it is. I mean, is it okay a week in? Yeah, it's a bunch of cells.

Is it okay six weeks in? Things start getting squirrely. They start getting squirrely when you see fingers. You start seeing a head and little feet. It starts having a heartbeat. When is it a person? It's only a person when it's born. Really?

So a nine-month-old baby that hasn't been born yet, you can reach in and suck that baby out with a vacuum, and that's groovy? Yeah. Man, when is it, when it's viable outside the womb? I mean, it's very... Well, then you throw in, is it viable? And then you add in the rape and the incest part to the equation as well.

Oh, sure. You know what I mean? And isn't it one of those things, like many things in this world, where there isn't a clean cut, black or white? There are many, many shades of gray yeah and i i you know and i i i'm glib and i joke about my pro-abortion comment but the uh how dare you how dare you joke about something so important yeah i mean it's a very emotionally contentious minefield or riddled you know well it's also one that women you know rightly

so take umbrage with men being able to decide what they can and can't do with their body. I'm not trying to decide. And I most certainly am pro-choice as far as how I vote. But when I look at the reality of what an abortion is, it disturbs me that because of ideology and because of the stance that they take left or right, that people will argue against the reality of what an abortion is and i think when you do that you do a disservice to the topic sure it's a tricky situation you're killing babies it is i mean there's no way abortion is a tragedy no matter which way you cut it and then you you then have to deal sensibly with the tragedy that unless you had a one-night stand with a crazy bitch and she says don't worry i'm getting an abortion and then it's amanda if you're listening don't call me time to party yeah um i wish there was a better way you know wish there

was a way that you could immediately you know there was really i have a joke about this that it should be a better way to make people than sex i mean at one point in time maybe that's what the aliens are all about because when you see the aliens they're always sexless yeah right they always have these smooth bodies and they have no muscles because they use their brains to move things around yeah they probably got to a certain point in time and they realize listen we're not going to evolve unless we get rid of these animal instincts to breed and conquer and dominate and the only way we're going to move to this really utopian society concept that everybody has you know we theations, the steps away from being an animal, from being a violent predator to being some enlightened being.

Somewhere along the line, you're going to have to get rid of sex. Well, you can ejaculate into a baker, but I mean, I don't mean to brag. It's really hard to get it in there. I'm saying reproduce through genetic manipulation, reproduce through cloning. I mean, we're already doing that. If we could all become eunuchs, I think the world would be a better place. I'm saying reproduce through genetic manipulation, reproduce through cloning. I mean, we're already doing that. If we could all become eunuchs, I think the world would be a better place.

I'm not saying that sex is bad. Sex is awesome. The sexual differences between men and women are a fascinating dynamic that I think fuels passion and poetry and life. Not poetry. I never fucking read poetry. I don't even know what I'm talking about. Art. There's a lot of good to that struggle. There's a lot of great things that come out of struggle but there's

also the reality that if you had to extrapolate from here forth from where we are to what we used to be so it's some if you believe in evolution if you're one of them if you want to go back to the times where we were fucking living in caves and fighting off T-Rex or whatever the hell was going on and extrapolate that 1,000 years in the future, 10,000 years in the future, at some point in time, the elimination of sexual urges might be imperative. Yeah. I mean, that's our most base urge. And, you know, David Suzuki, the environmentalist, said it best. He said, as advances we become technologically, and if you look at the infant, we created this information superhighway,

and we thought this was going to change the world and change the universe, yet 85% of the content in there is porn. Is it 85? Is it that high? I don't know. I might have made another statistic up, but it's high. I think it's pretty high. Yeah. We've looked at it before. I think there's varying numbers.

Actually, the number I think was 65%. I think I might have I think it's pretty high. Yeah. We've looked at it before. I think there's varying numbers. I heard that actually the number was, I think it was 65%. I think I might have added to it for greater emphasis. I thought it was 37%. Let's find out right now. What percentage of the internet is porn? Here we go. What are you going to say, 60? I'll go 60%.

Okay. What of the internet? Okay. Let's find out here. How much of the internet is actually porn? On Forbes it says, Okay, let's find out here. How much of the internet is actually porn? On Forbes it says, don't make me click some shit to continue to the next site.

God damn it. It's probably a link to Red Troop. Yeah, probably. You porn. Not that I know what that is. That's a bad place. Hmm. It says,

okay, in 2010, 13% of web searches were for erotic content. Only 4% of the top million websites. Huh. So 4% of the, but what is the volume? This fucking, they're fucking around with numbers here. Give me the volume, bitches. They're not giving me the volume right off the bat. That's not this one.

Forbes is hiding information. Goddamn elitists web porn just how much is there 37 i was right yeah 37 yeah all right that's what it is 37 that was the number 37 7 of the internet is made of pornographic material man that's wow still high that's remarkable pretty high yeah nutty according to estimates from uh scandinavian research 90 of all the data the human race has ever produced has been generated in the past two years whoa wow that's nuts yeah that is fucking bananas. That's crazier than porn. I can't jerk off to that one. 90% of the data the human race has ever produced has been generated in the past two years. Wow.

How much of that is just bullshit on Twitter and Pinterest? I remember reading something like that, something like 80% of man's knowledge, everything that man knows has been acquired since 1969, the year we landed on the moon that's always that's always that's always thrown about how could that be possible when the bible is 2 000 years old you don't know what the you're talking about son that's weird everything we know is from 1969 ford yeah is that 80 but it's sort of been yeah it must be 80 odd percent that

makes sense because everything is built upon yeah Yeah. You know, you needed the infrastructure of, you know, you needed the people to figure out the combustion engine for them to figure out the electric car. It was only 100 years before that we thought if someone had the flu, it meant they were demonically possessed. Yeah. Yeah. The numbers are pretty crazy when you look at 90% of all the data over two years.

What is it going to be two years from now? Then when you look at that exponential increase in technology, I'm hopeful. I don't think that your vision of Elysium is going to come to pass, but I'm an optimist. Are you an optimist or are you a pessimist? But I'm an optimist. Are you an optimist or are you a pessimist? If you ask friends, I'm a glass half full kind of guy. And I mean, I have the advantage of being here.

And I know when things really do get to the shit, I just get them planning to go back to Australia. Where we have universal health care. That's why we don't trust you. And pensions and social security. That's why you can't be president, son of a bitch. That's why we don't trust you. And pensions and social security. That's why you can't be president, son of a bitch. I'm pessimistic until the liberal class in this country becomes a force again.

Because there is no countervailing power to capital in this country at the moment. Until the liberal class becomes a force again. What are the detriments, though, of having liberals in control? A bunch of pussies. That's what the detriment is. The fucking Al-Qaeda is going to come over here and kick our ass. A bunch of panty wastes running this land. Clinton loved blowing shit up. Did he, though?

He only blew shit up when he got caught getting blowjobs. That's what he really liked, blowing shit up. Remember that? Oh, yeah. Son of a bitch. Out of all the women he could have had. He probably had a lot of them. We found out about a mouthy fat girl.

In more ways than one. I mean, didn't he supposedly bang Elizabeth Hurley? Did you see all those photographs that came out recently? Not really. There's one look of him and her looking at each other. You know they fucked. You just know they fucked. She's a good girl. She'll give you a secret.

I love her. Yeah, sure. She's actually engaged to one of Australia's greatest cricketers ever. Really? Yeah, Shane Warren. How old is she now? I'm going to guess she's early 40s. Hanging in there, huh?

Yeah. Barely. Yeah. Tooth and claw. I'd do her. Would you really? How dare you? You would do that Mormon broad too. You're just horny, man. God damn it.

So, what are the negative aspects of liberals taking over? Well, you know, nothing is a solution. You know, there's no one-size-fits-all obviously. Right. And, you know, I think that countries struggle through with trial and error. I think that what's happening in Australia and Germany,

there's not pure liberal societies at all. It's a balancing act always between liberalism and capitalism. And I think there's countries that juggle the two balls better. At the moment, it's so lopsided in favor of capital. Capital trumps politics. It all started in this country, not to get too historical, but Justice Powell wrote a memo when Nixon was in the White House and said that the sleeping giant in American politics is the CEO of America. And from that point on, that memo turned into the greatest migration of Wall Street lobbyists,

migration from Wall Street to Washington. And today you have something like 50-odd thousand lobbyists in Washington who have the ears of politicians. So liberalism has no chance. And again, if liberalism had a chance, we would have had universal health care when the Democrats had unilateral control of Congress. But we didn't. We ended up with a very capitalistic solution

to our health care problems. But what would fuck up if liberals ran things? What would be the real big issue? Well, what fucked up when FDR was in power for all those years? Yeah, but that was so long ago. There's a different world. That's like talking about a culture that's, you know, Aboriginal culture that had some sort of collective government

and comparing it to ours. It's so different. Some of my friends are Aboriginals. I'm sure. Along with your gay friends, your Christian friends. What, I mean, what would be the negative? I mean, would there be any negative, any weakening of this great nation by having like a real liberal idealist? Yeah.

Well, I mean, you've got to give it a go, don't you? Do you? You've got to go back to what's worked. And liberalism has worked. It's a proven success. You know, free market capitalism hasn't worked in this country. We know it. A trickle-down economics hasn't worked.

Again, Kansas, if the need – George Bush came into power. Bill Clinton raised taxes on the rich three times, created 23 million jobs. George Bush came into power, put in the biggest tax cuts on the wealthy since World War II, and had a net loss of one million jobs, not including, even if taking out the years of the Great Recession and the Great Crash out of consideration. We see it happening in Kansas. That free market capitalism, trickle-down economics mantra just has been of abject failure wherever it's been tried. So is liberalism going to be the perfect answer? No, but there has to be the perfect answer? No, but there has to be some measure where the corporate state is put in control.

But if you did that, liberalism gets into power, and then this sort of anti-war sentiment gets firmly put into place. What do you do about the vacuum that's created in these 100 different countries where we have military presence. FDR was a liberal and we went into World War II. Right, but there was a different world, right? I mean, wasn't it a different world? Not really. No, there was no terrorists.

There was clear enemies. We were after the Nazis. It was sort of a different time, more clearly defined. The Middle East, there's no problem in the Middle East that's going to be solved with military intervention. I mean, Iraq is purely a political situation. You're not going to quell the violence by putting – look, we couldn't stop an insurgency in Iraq when we had 150,000 troops on the ground. Now we're sending 800 military advisors. What the fuck is that going to do?

So, Syria, you're not going to stop unless, you know, these borders were, you know, redrawn. So if isolationism, you could argue, well, how's isolationism going to hurt when there is no military solution to these geopolitical problems? Well, the idea of the military solution is the suppression. If we're not solving it, at least we're suppressing the power from gathering steam and forcing them. There was some situation where they could collectively form some large threatening group. We're dissipating that in some sense by our military presence in these countries. That our foot on their neck is what's keeping them from growing large and then fighting over there so we don't have to fight over here. So we're going to have freedom over here.

I mean, that's the logic behind it, right? But we couldn't do it with 150,000 troops. So how many troops do you want to keep in these countries for how long? Does it become like an endless occupation in every hotspot around the world? Well, I mean, I don't think that's a good idea, but it seems to be what it is. I mean, it seems to be what we're doing. Yeah, well, I think Obama's... I mean, you look at all the geopolitical issues

which have come up in the last few years, everything from Syria to Libya to Russia to now Iraq. The Republicans have pleaded Obama to get military involved in all four of these situations. Three of those situations aren't even in the news anymore, and we would have had a military force there. So, you know, I think the Obama doctrine, for lack of, you know, I know he doesn't like calling it Obama doctrine, it's

working. It's, you know, stand on the sidelines, use proxies, don't put boots on the ground, look for political avenues, whether it's through sanctions or pressure on currencies and so forth. These things work. The reason Russia is withdrawing from the eastern borders of Ukraine is because these sanctions have crippled the oligarchs in Russia, and they're in turn putting pressure on Putin to withdraw. Has it really worked? There's a lot of people that argue it hasn't, and that Obama's policies have been disastrous.

I mean, there was an article in Politico recently. I don't know if you read it. It was the man who broke the Middle East. It was this figure, this picture of a pensive Obama, like looking old as fuck. But if anybody's hit the wall, like aged while they've been in office, that poor bastard. Who knows what kind of pressure and stress they must be under to be in that position. I mean, I can't even imagine why anybody would want that. But this guy, Elliot Abrams, wrote this article about the policies and what it's done to the

Middle East and how fucked up things are now. A lot of people don't think that the policies work, and they think that they've created more problems than they've solved. Yeah. Well, I mean, how's it... I mean, we broke Iraq. I mean, the Republicans like to be revisionists at the moment and say that things were all rosy when we withdrew in 2008, or is it 2009?

There was a civil war raging there still. You know, last year there was an on average 800 to 1,000 Iraqis killed in terrorist attacks each month in that place. The civil war has been raging. Putting military intervention doesn't solve that. We have to either put pressure on the Iraqi government or Maliki to be more inclusive. I mean, we fucked the pooch when the day, you know, I got friends who worked as security contractors, friends who worked for Global Corp who were in charge of monitoring the green zone during the early days of the occupation in Iraq. And they said after the Saddam statue fell in Baghdad, you could, sacked the buffers out of the police force and the military, that created a civil war from that point on.

Now, we put Maliki in power or we endorse Maliki in power. And he's just perpetuated that policy of, you know, she is only and the Sunnis become the underclass. So it doesn't matter how many people we put there. It's not going to solve the problem. What solves the problem? How do we fix the world, dude? You know, one of the problems with these conversations, I love these conversations, but I also hate them. I love them because they're fascinating.

They're stimulating. But at a certain point in time, we have them and I go, we're not getting anything done here. Nothing's changing. We're just mentally masturbating and then we leave and it all stays the same. Yeah, and these intellectual conversations always end up circular like that. I mean, if you're going to ask me to be a prick for a minute, I would say the solution is we put in another heavy autocratic regime that suppresses large segments of the population. Now, Muslims are going to be sending me death threats now.

But that's what America has done. If you want peace in the Middle East, then we need to prop up autocratic regimes. But why is the Middle East different than any other part of the world? Because they're not countries in the way that we think of them as countries. These are artificial countries. It's the same reason that Yugoslavia blew up. Because we told either the Bosnians and the Croatians and the Serbs, here, here's your country. Pretend to like each other.

Get along and govern as a single country. But they're different people. Iraq is three different countries under one, but we're telling them with British borders to get along nicely and to treat each other equally under a democratic government, when in these countries, I don't even know what democracy is. Can they be taught? I mean, wasn't Iraq a real country at one point in time i mean there's some that argue that iraq that baghdad hasn't been the same since genghis khan invaded in the 1200s yeah that that fucked up that i mean they killed everybody in baghdad in like 1220 or whatever it was yeah and that the country's literally never recovered yeah well you i mean if you want to end violence

here you just go you draw a big circle and say, that's Shia-stan, and you draw another big circle and you say, that's Sunni-stan. Now, get in your corners and stay the fuck there, and that's the end of it. Really? But then they're going to say, you know, I like it over there. Yeah, and then the Saudis are going to go, what, we've got so much money and wealth, we don't want to share it with anyone else. And the Iranians are going to go, well, we have so much money and wealth, we're not going to share it with these poor Shia populations like Syria and, you know, in the south of Iraq. I mean, isn't that going to be just another Israel-Palestine type situation, living right next door to people you hate that look exactly like you? Yeah.

I mean, bottom line, that region is fucked. Maybe we should just nuke the whole region. Put a massive Burger King there. I would go with in and out, but I see what you're saying. Fuck, man. That's the problem with these conversations. They always hit this point where you go, okay, well, what? What can be done?

And the answer is almost always there's no answer. Yeah, and the only answer is us to stay the fuck out of air and just put, you know, our ally there is one of the most oppressive autocratic regimes in the world, Saudi Arabia. there is one of the most oppressive autocratic regimes in the world saudi arabia um you know if we don't support them the price of oil will have oil shock the american economy will be doomed even more i mean we're we're sitting on such a precipice of potential disaster it's ridiculous if the price of oil skyrockets japan is fucked japan is so dependent on us keeping us america keeping the price of oil down because they have no oil of their own.

I mean, oil goes straight through the roof. I mean, not only are we going to have problems in the Middle East, we're going to have a worldwide catastrophe. That's why we need fracking. We need to support fracking. All these assholes that are worried about their wells getting poisoned. You go to Walmart, you buy your water like everybody else. Do you get any hope at all when you see a situation like what happened with Syria, where

the United States, a press conference, Obama got on television, military action against Syria was inevitable. Everybody just said, fuck this. The whole country collectively, right and left, was like, get the fuck out of here with this. And then it went away. Yeah. It went away.

I mean, do you remember that speech? Yeah. That speech seemed like we were on the verge of war. The red line speech? Yeah. And then where's the war? Where's the war? Short attention spans.

Yeah. Well, not just short attention spans, but the government recognized that there was a huge resistance. Yeah. And that might be the straw that breaks the camel's back. That might give birth to not just a Occupy Wall Street, but something global. Yeah. And that might be the straw that breaks the camel's back. That might give birth to not just a Occupy Wall Street, but something global. Yeah. Something where people really did step in and say, you guys are fucking crazy.

Yeah. And you guys are making the whole world a dangerous, scary place, and we're not buying it anymore. Yeah. And also, again, Assad is big of a prick of ears. Well, the alternatives could be worse. Right. You've got foreign fighters, Islamist groups that want to turn Syria into a theocracy.

Lisa Saad, as bad as he is, is a secularist. But wasn't Saddam Hussein a secularist? Saddam Hussein was a secularist. Baghdad, Iraqi, except for maybe a few excursions into Kurdistan, kind of kept Iraq in check. Oh, my God, I'm in trouble for saying that. You're in big trouble. What about the people that lived there and had to deal with these evil fucking serial killer sons? Yeah, yeah, well, I mean, you've got death squads, you know, going door to door again now,

knocking on doors in the Sunni neighborhoods, dragging people down the street and executing them right now. I mean, unless you give these separate sects of Islam their own countries, unless they can be formed, you're never going to solve the problem. Yeah, you will. Get rid of religion? Mushrooms. Get these motherfuckers the same shit they were eating when they were the sacred mushroom in the cross. Just airdrop MDMA. Yeah, spray it on them.

You know what we need, for real? The problem with, we have such a fast food culture, microwave, instant download society. We need like a psychedelic taser. Where you just instantaneously get enlightened. Like we don't have time for you to take a mushroom and be reasonable for an hour and 20 minutes. And then get the effects and then sort of contain it. We need to just taser people.

It's like, oh, I was being a dick. Just zap them. I'm trademarking it the minute I get out of here. Psychedelic taser? You can. I already said it online. It's just live, man. Just like Laguna Beach.

The shit is live. What are you talking about? I don't know what you're talking about. Psychedelic tasers. We need to go over there and just tase the shit out of everybody with some sort of a DMT taser. Just a quick introduction to God. Like those Agent Orange airplanes over Vietnam. Just like, fill those up.

Just fill the skies with enlightenment. I did that in Laguna Beach. Just finished writing a great book, The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, and how Laguna Beach was the, not that I live there, but how it was the center point for all the best Afghan hash into America. Really? Yeah. And they had this big concert.

I think it was in 67 out in the canyon of Laguna Beach. I don't know where that is. But they dropped this cargo plane, flew over this crowd, 20,000 people. It was like a Grateful Dead concert and dropped acid all over the crowd and it became like a five-day concert. I never knew this history of the city I don't live in. Well, you know what? That was back when people were experiencing this new psychedelic freedom.

The word hash is such a strange word too because hash in a lot of places gets considered as being much more illegal than marijuana. In a lot of countries, in fact, you can get put to death for hash. But all it is is thc all it is is cocaine crack you know sort of but not in the effects have you ever smoked hash it's just a it's just a pure version of thc it's just more potent but it's very similar in the ways to smoking marijuana just more more powerful that's all it is it doesn't do it it's not like heroin it's not like it's you know it's just more powerful. That's all it is. It's not like heroin. It's not

like it's, you know, it's not crystal meth or anything crazy. It's just hash. I got an 18-year-old son and, you know, obviously him growing up in Indonesia, which has the lowest tolerance of drug use probably anywhere in the world. He's got a friend actually who went to jail for, you know, six months, just, you know, he was 16 at the time for just having one joint. You can have one joint, you can be in jail for 10 years if you're an adult. And so all his friends in Indonesia, he went out and got his medical marijuana card. One of us, the green doctor on Venice Beach, got his card, and he puts it on Facebook. And he says, I get home delivery with my own weed.

He said, God bless America. So he sees optimism here. What were you doing in Indonesia? America. So he sees optimism here. What were you doing in Indonesia? Well, I, I, you know, I only meant to live there for a year. Um, and then when you turn into 10 years, I had a business in Australia, which I sold, uh, I wanted to go to Indonesia, uh, you know, had a bar there at one stage, like, uh, you ran a brothel, you ran a goddamn brothel in Indonesia. I didn't want to say hash bar. Wow. So, uh, so yeah, and then I started writing full time when brothel in Indonesia. I didn't want to say that. A hash bar. That's true. Wow. So, yeah, I started writing full-time when I was in Indonesia.

So you're a real international traveler. You've seen it from all around. Yeah, yeah, kind of. Well, what propelled me into writing about religion was I sort of witnessed the 05 terrorist attack in Bali. Twin suicide bombs on Jim Brown Beach. We were right there that night. And that made me, from a journalistic point of view, really wanted to delve into what's in these religious texts, which would make somebody strap C4 to themselves and blow themselves a smithereen in front of a crowded,

well, within a crowded restaurant, taking women and children with them. Yeah, well, you just fucking put a somber note to the end of this podcast. You want to talk about weed again? No, no. I mean, it really is all about the end of this podcast. You want to talk about weight again? No. No. I mean, it really is all about the mechanisms of the human mind, right?

That ideologies can allow people or give people the motivation to do some crazy shit, including things of their own selves. And not just ideologies that are accepted, established ideologies like Islam or Christianity, ideologies like Islam or Christianity, but like those Heaven's Gate guys who cut their balls off and fucking wore purple Nikes and waited for the spaceship behind the comet. There's something about the human mind that is so easily influenced by an alpha or an idea or a message from a higher power, whatever it is. There's something about the human mind that's so easily influenced. It's truly a dangerous but malleable thing. We want to believe in something higher than ourselves. It's human proclivity. We want that. But why is that? Is there something higher than ourselves that we just haven't accessed yet?

Well, I think our higher sense of consciousness, as you said before, our ego can't let go of the fact that once we're dead, we're dead. I don't think our ego can accept the fact that we're really nothing more than a virus. We're a bacteria that occupies the planet. And people who do believe, I'm not an evangelical atheist by any means. And there's a lot of those guys but i'm not but i always like if i'm going to give some sort of literature other than my own books to uh to someone who's religious it's carl sagan's pale blue dot i mean that really puts into perspective you know uh you know the meaningless of uh of the human existence yeah have you ever been to the keck observatory in the big island no i haven't

i just got back i've been there once before the time i went before was way better because i this time i went during the super moon and the moon was so big you couldn't see jack shit like you just saw the moon you didn't see any stars but the last time i went it was the moon was dark right and you see the entire cosmos it's so fascinating because the Keck Observatory is established in an area of Hawaii that's above the clouds yeah and the Big Island has certain diffused streetlights so it doesn't put up light pollution so when you're up there you get the full vision of the night sky and it's unbelievably amazing unbelievably spectacular and also like it's unbelievably spectacular.

And also, that word life-changing gets used a lot for experiences that people have. But my experience the first time I went, which is I guess about nine years ago, my first time going up there was truly life-changing. I looked up there and I saw the stars. And I realized, we're on a planet. We're on a planet. we're flying around in space we're just so preoccupied in our own bullshit that we forget that we're on this planet and how small we are yeah if we I think if we could see the stars on a daily basis I think we would be a different attitude slowly but surely I think people would establish a different attitude just the sheer humility that comes with looking at the stars, just gazing up at that thing.

You know, and just if you want to look for a greater power, you want to look for a greater thing than us, just the vastness of the infinity that you're looking at is enough. Because when it's just black, it's too easy to ignore. You look up, you see a couple dots. Yeah, well, the moon's out tonight. You know, you get back to your house and you watch fucking Kardashians and fall asleep with your socks on like a fucking idiot. You know, I mean, it's too easy to do that. It's too easy to fall into these traps. I think people that are looking for something larger than life itself, it's right above us.

We're in it. It's not even above us. It's around us. We're floating in it. And it's humbling. And, you know, it makes your earthly worries seem insignificant. It puts things in perspective, I think. Well, that was the Reagan speech.

Remember that Reagan speech? We talked about how quickly we would put our differences aside if we were being faced with a threat from another planet? Yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah. Remember? Yeah, yeah. Boy, the fucking UFO nuts love that. Those UFO nutters, they cling to that one speech by this crazy old man who's probably suffering from dementia.

Which he was. Was he, though? In the end, he was. In the end, he was. But remember when those Iran-Contra trials were going on and they asked him, yeah, like, did you really sell arms to Iran? And he was like, I don't remember. I don't recall. Remember that? That was what he remember. I don't recall. Remember that?

That was what he said. I do not recall. And they allowed him to get away with it because he was an old man. That was the strategy. His son, Ronald Reagan, same name, in his book about his dad, he said, yeah, in the last two years, he was

in full mode dementia. Probably the CIA. cia dosed him up with some crazy shit keep him stupid so i couldn't tell you just started a new conspiracy website somewhere probably yeah his son's gay too right he's like a ballet dancer and i think so i'm not sure it's like a liberal talk show host and stuff like completely rebelled yeah yeah although there's two sons there's one there's one who's a liberal one who's on the talk show and the other one is uh not he's a right-wing loon oh the other one that didn't the right-wing loon though didn't know his dad very well right that's correct yeah what a mess yeah trying to fucking recapture the old glory yeah it's so weird when i see people

fall in love with the idea of what Ronald Reagan was. Like they reminisce about the Reagan administration and what the great president Reagan was. I've had these conversations with people. I'm like, what the fuck are you even talking about, man? Are you like doing a Disney movie of Ronald Reagan? The mythology is incredible. I mean, he didn't lower taxes on the middle class or the poor or anything like that. He only raised taxes on the wealthy and sent the budget, blew out the budget the next year and put the economy into a recession and then had to raise taxes something like four or five times after that. So the whole myth of him being a tax cutter and a job creator and so forth,

it's all steeped in mythology. And the big one, of course, his introduction to the political world of the religious right. That and the big one of course his introduction of the political the to the political world of the religious right yeah that was the big one boy that was a well if it wasn't for them the jerry falwell's moral majority he would never have been president you know the christian rights webbed him into power jerry motherfucking falwell isn't that crazy yeah but wasn't it like al capone that made who who was it that, it wasn't Al Capone, but who was it that made JFK president? It was also the Chicago mob. Oh, it was the Frank Sinatra connection.

Mickey Scarfa, whoever the fuck it was. Yeah. Yeah, I mean. In Chicago. The mob that. That apparently wreaked some ballots in there. South of Chicago. We only love people when they're dead.

We really do. We celebrate them when they're no longer with us. That's it. America. It's America. Fuck yeah. When Jimmy Carter dies, he's going to be a goddamn saint. Right now, he gets maligned, misunderstood.

He's probably, in my opinion, the most philosophical and the most interesting former president ever. Well, here's something interesting. former president ever. Well, here's something interesting. When six months after Jerry Falwell was out of power, his approval rating was 64% roughly. You mean Ronald Reagan? No, no, Jerry Falwell.

Jerry Falwell was out of power. Jimmy Carter. Did I say Jerry Falwell? Yes, you did. What did you put in my coffee? I'm sorry, man. It tasted too good. I had to dose you up to get the most out of you. Yeah, no, when Jimmy Carter's approval rating six months out of office was something like 64%,

Ronald Reagan's approval rating six months out of office was something like 42%. Now, polls aren't everything, but they take a snapshot in time of the political wins. Reagan wasn't a popular president when he left office. It was only much later. Much later. Decades later. Decades later. Decades later. After two administrations.

Yeah. And look what's happening to Bush now. Revisionism is glossing over or trying to tarnish the toad that was Bush's legacy now. Or the original Bush, which has completely been glossed over. Herbert Walker Bush? You never hear a negative thought about that guy. No. He's a saint now.

Yeah. He's a fucking guy who was the head of the CIA. Yeah. Herbert Walker Bush, you never hear a negative thought about that guy. No, he's a saint now. Yeah. He's a fucking guy who was the head of the CIA. Yeah, yeah. Jesus Christ, we're weird. We're weird when we do that. Yeah, yeah. I've had conversations with people about Carter, the weakest president ever, and this and that. I'm like, oh, fucking stop.

Yeah. Have you ever listened to the guy talk? He's a very philosophical, introspective guy. Yeah. Probably one of the most open, honest, introspective guys we've ever had as a president. But Americans are hostile to intellectuals. They like Americans to act on raw emotion and anger and fury. Can't we have both?

Can't we have both? I think foreign policy-wise, Obama has tried to be circumspective and to think with clarity before he acts. Yeah, but this whole NSA thing will be his legacy. The Edward Snowden thing will be his legacy. When you look at the Hope and Change website that they had in place before when Obama was running for president and his established position of assisting whistleblowers who are exposing crimes and then you look at what he's become you look at what his legacy is it's that's that's that's really exactly and i often say when uh you know when people ask in you know interviews or so forth how do you think obama will be remembered as a president i always say he'll just be remembered

as slightly better than the alternative. That's how his presidency will be remembered. And with that, we're out of time. That was an awesome three hours, man. What's that three hours? It fucking flew by. Wow, that's incredible. That's how it works over here. We're going right into peak hour traffic.

We dose you up and we send you away. I don't think we got anything covered. I don't think we figured anything out. No solutions. But it was a lot of fun. Thanks anything covered. I don't think we figured anything out. I don't think we changed. No solutions. But it was a lot of fun. Thanks, man. I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me on.

Thank you. Thank you for having me. And please go buy his books. They're very highly rated, and you can check them out on his website. You can check them out on Amazon. If you go to C.J. Werleman, that's W-E-R-L-E-M-A-N on Twitter if you go to his Twitter link

there's a link to his Amazon page and that Amazon page has Crucifying America on it, it also has Atheists Can't Be Republicans God Hates You, Hate Him Back Jesus Lied, He Was Only Human all sorts of things to piss off anyone religious in your family send it to them for Christmas, Hanukkah

your birthday, send peoplekah, your birthday. Send people things for your birthday. Say, happy birthday to me. Go fuck yourself. Here's a book. Read it. It's by C.J. Werleman. Do you have a website, too? Yep, cjwerleman.com. Thank you very much, man. Really appreciate it. It was a lot of fun. Great chat. Thanks, mate. And thanks to our sponsors. Thank you to

LegalZoom.com. Go to LegalZoom.com and use the code word ROGAN in the referral box at checkout for savings. And thanks also to Stamps.com. Stamps.com. Use the code word JRE when you click on the microphone at the top of the homepage. Type in JRE and get your $110 bonus offer. Thanks also to Onnit.com.

Go to O-N-N-I-T. Use the code word ROGAN and save 10% off any and all supplements. We'll be Onnit.com. Go to O-N-N-I-T use the code word ROGAN and save 10% off any and all supplements. We'll be back in a little bit with the Fight Companion podcast that will air live that coincides with the Fox Sports 1 broadcast which is at

7 o'clock tonight. So, until then, much love, big kiss, see you soon. Mwah! I can't believe I was straight down.