Ep. #439: Paul Hawken, Kurt Andersen

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, No, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's gonna tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

Yeah, aka Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night Series, Real Time with Bill Ma.

Start the clock.

Three.

Nice to know.

Thank you very much.

Okay.

All right, we got a lot of show.

Thank you.

Now, first of all, before we start the show,

let's all take a knee, shall we, ladies?

Take a knee.

Ah, yes.

Donald Trump is now officially the drunk at the end of the bar.

Bitching about football.

And, you know, this is the world that we live in now.

The stupidest asshole alive

says something ignorant every three days, and we have to debate it.

This just in, the president has just tweeted that dogs are gay

and Chinese people spit in the laundry.

Discuss, America.

So.

O.J.

Simpson is getting out of jail next week, and he's a football player that Trump likes because he never took took a knee.

A couple of heads but never a knee.

It's been 23 years folks.

Get over that one.

No, I've got an idea.

Let's tell Trump that there are lots of black people kneeling in Puerto Rico.

Maybe he'll get focused on that.

Yeah, he's

very sensitive about this because they're saying the relief efforts there are a disaster, which is very unfair.

He's tweeting as hard as he can.

No, he will get on it as soon as he finds out that they speak Spanish and can come here anytime they like.

Trump says, of course he cares about Puerto Rico because he's from New York.

That's what he says.

Know them.

I've evicted them.

No, he is going to head down there to Puerto Rico as soon as someone from his cabinet frees up a plane.

Because, you know, this.

You know this.

This week we learned that the Trump administration is going to make America great again, but not if they have to fly commercial.

You can't do it that way.

And today, just a few hours ago, we lost another one, another resignation from the administration, one of many, Tom Price, the

Health and Human Services Secretary.

He resigned because he had run up a million-dollar tab flying private jets.

This after the Treasury Secretary, remember Steve Mnuchin, took the Air Force jet down to Fort Knox so his trophy wife could take a selfie with the gold.

And then the Secretary of the Interior, he needed a private jet to go up to Vegas.

And all of them used the same excuse, you know, that their cabinet secretary business, so urgent, like they're SEAL Team 6, you know, we've got a code red here in Cleveland.

I got to get a housing secretary here yesterday.

You know, it takes a lot of jet fuel to drain the swamp, ladies and gentlemen.

And they are going to drain that swamp.

They're going to drain the Treasury first, and then they're going to get around to draining the swamp.

These guys should be sentenced to fly on Spirit Airlines forever

in the

In the middle seat in the last row by the toilets the one that doesn't recline in between an obese guy and a baby with an ear infection

Now, have you been following what happened this week down in Alabama?

Judge Roy Moore won the Republican primary.

There he is.

Look at that.

Pull out a fucking pistol.

Yes, he pulls out pistols at paid rallies.

He believes gay people should be jailed.

He thought 9-11 was God's punishment for sodomy and abortion.

He is what is known in Alabama as a moderate.

And boy, I thought Mike Pence was tough on homosexuality.

This man says homosexual behavior is a crime against nature, an inherent evil, an act so heinous, he says, it defies one's ability to describe it.

So we can't expect him to be caught at a highway rest stop men's room in

five,

four,

three,

two,

hew it.

There you go.

Homosexual sex defies the ability to describe it?

Two people have sex, except they're both guys, and it's in the butt.

I think I did it.

Speaking of getting a fucked up the ass,

Trump unveiled his tax plan.

Speaking of getting fucked up the ass,

Trump unveiled his tax plan, you see?

Oh, there you go.

That's okay.

Hold on twice.

Although unveiled, it's still pretty veiled, that tax plan.

What he says, here's what we know about it for Trump.

It's terrific.

It's revolutionary.

It's going to make jobs start pouring into our country.

It's going to make the economy take off like a rocket.

He said all these things.

Boy, I tell you, this guy, the wall, the health care bill, bringing the mining jobs back, he's always overselling, isn't he?

It's always overselling it with Trump.

Trump, and then it's always a giant letdown.

He's like the guy who gets the woman into bed by promising her an orgasm like she has never had before.

And then he comes putting on the condom.

All right, we've got a great show.

We've got Tom Morello, April Ryan, John Heilman.

And a little later I'll be speaking with author Kurt Anderson.

Of course, he's an environmentalist and the author of, and the editor of Draw Down, the most comprehensive plan ever proposed to reverse global warming.

Please welcome Paul Hawkin.

Professor?

Doctor?

Okay, so we have had three hurricanes now that have been pretty disastrous.

So I thought it was a good time to have someone who says they have the most comprehensive plan to solve global warming.

Tell us why your plan is different and why it is the most comprehensive.

Well, it's very different because it's the first one ever.

Actually, just go Google it yourself.

There There is no plan to reverse global warming.

So we were at ease when we said it was the most comprehensive plan.

We could have said the most literate or nuanced plan because 40 years in to climate being in the public sphere, there has been no plan to reverse global warming.

And it's the only goal that makes sense.

Right now, most of the rhetoric is about slowing, reducing, mitigation.

But if you're going down the wrong road, why would you want to slow down?

You're still going down the wrong road.

It's kind of like Thelma and Louise in slow motion.

The only thing that makes sense is to go back the way you came.

Right now, the greenhouse gases, we are told, are 407 ppm in the atmosphere.

That is basically

50% greater than it was in the pre-industrial age.

But in fact, if you add the other greenhouse gases, nitrous oxide, methane, et cetera, we're at 490 ppm.

And humanity in all its forms, genus, Homo erectus, florinthiensis, sapiens, all those, for two million years we've never lived here when it's been over 300 ppm until 1937.

And now we've gone right by 300 and we're at 490 ppm and it doesn't make sense to talk about stabilization.

There is no stability at this point.

So what's the number there where we, you know, all die?

You're at 490, you say?

We're at 490, yeah.

What does it have to get to?

Why go there?

Why not go the other way?

You know?

I mean, because really, in a sense, that's what...

Why go there?

No, I don't want to go there.

I want to know how close we are to the number.

But that's really what the climate communication, the climate establishment has done, is keep scaring us, keep so.

Well, we should be scared.

Well, on a scientific point of view, but once you have a problem statement, which is what the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has done, it's a great problem statement.

Once you have hurricanes and headlines that validate the problem statement, then let's pay attention to the solutions.

And that's what we did at Project Radio.

And you have no doubt that the weather in the 21st century is partly caused by the global warming.

No doubt.

Because we're still getting the talking points from the right wing.

I know you're laughing and I'm laughing, but it's not funny because of the 490 thing.

Or whatever that number is, you would tell me, I'm going to get it out of you.

I want to know how much longer we have, you know.

And, you know,

they can always come up with something about, you know, well, you know, we haven't had a category three hit the southern part of the country since 1936.

These still silly points.

It's silly, right?

I mean, this is really happening.

It is really the last three, Harvey, 64 inches in Jefferson County, broke the world record for rainfall, okay?

Then Irma,

the longest sustained category category five hurricane in history, and then Maria in Puerto Rico, okay, then we had two feet of rain in 12 inches.

Can you imagine LA, two feet of rain, there's nowhere, it's nowhere for the water to go.

And so we broke three records within 30 days and people talking about this being a weather event.

It's not a weather event, it's basically

the atmosphere giving us feedback on what we've done down here and we've got to reverse it.

Okay, so in the book it talks about seven different categories, places where this solution can start to happen.

Yeah.

One of them is women.

Yeah.

Why?

What are the things that we're talking about?

Well,

let me step back a little bit.

What we did is MAP measured and modeled the hundred most substantive solutions to global warming.

And what I mean by solutions, I mean things that are at hand.

We know how to do it.

They're scaling.

W.W.

Granger, whatever.

These are things that are in place and that we are doing right now.

So that's what we modeled.

We didn't model things we could do or ought to do or should do.

And the number six solution, and we ranked them by impact in terms of carbon, all based on peer-reviewed scientific literature, by the way.

None of the data at Indrada is our data.

The carbon is from science.

The economic data is from respected institutions like the World Bank, the IEA, the IPCC, et cetera.

I get to the women.

Well, I get to the women.

Always.

And

we don't know how much time we have left.

Exactly.

I mean,

it could be.

Yeah.

It could be 491.

Yeah, exactly.

So the number six solution is educating girls.

And you say, well, what does it have to do with climate change?

It has everything to do with population.

And that is if you take girls out of school, which they are all over the world, to put their brothers through school for early marriage, child marriage, those women have an average of five or more.

And religion likes to keep women in the age of school.

With culture, religion, family, you know,

basically doing this again and again and again.

But women can drive in Saudi Arabia now.

Yeah.

Wow.

My applause is sarcastic.

That's why I didn't applaud.

And

if a girl is allowed to stay in school, supported to stay in school, to say the equivalent of high school, she becomes a woman on her terms.

And she plans her family because she earns more money, she's better educated, she puts those resources into her children.

You're right about women farmers, right?

Yeah.

They're good at farming.

We don't think of women as farmers.

Well, 40% of the farmers are women, and they are not good at the moment.

In the world,

I didn't know that.

And they're less likely to fuck the sheep.

Okay, so, so all right, so let's quickly get to this.

So

another big thing that we can do, we all, this is everybody's life every hour of the day almost, food waste.

Yeah.

We waste just a ridiculous amount.

It's the number one thing individuals can do, is stop.

It is number one.

It is number three in overall impact, but we don't measure methane emissions from landfilled food.

It'd be even higher.

But food waste is ubiquitous.

Everybody does it everywhere all the time, and they don't think about it in developed countries because it's so abundant, whether it's at the restaurant or at home or when you're out or whatever it is.

In the developing countries, it's the other way around.

Poor people don't waste food, but it doesn't get to them.

They lack cold chains, they lack distribution, they like good storage areas.

So they lose it from the farm to the city.

We lose it on the city or at the store, at the house, or to the restaurant.

And you're actually an optimist on this, though.

I mean, I see that you think we can innovate our way out.

I get very nervous when people say that because then people get complacent.

So I want you to tell us the truth, but please add, don't get complacent about it because I think people think, ah, fuck it.

You know, we can do what we're going to do.

We aren't telling Louise.

We're driving right toward the Grand Canyon.

But somebody will come up with something, some big machine that will soak up all the pollution.

What is the innovation that's going to stay?

That's the silver bullet mentality, and it's corrupt.

Okay.

What we're saying is we have 80 solutions we model.

With those, we scale them.

They're scaling.

We scale them over 30 years to see if we can achieve drawdown reversal by 2050.

In addition to that, what we want people to know is that humanity is on the case.

Humanity is brilliant, inventive, ingenious.

And so we have 20 more coming attractions.

Yeah, but those aren't the people who control things.

They don't need to be.

They do.

No, they don't.

They control ideas and imagination.

Ideas surpass corruption.

Well, that's a very optimistic point of view.

But our president just pulled out of the Paris Climate Accord, and he wants to build more

cold plants.

So it does matter who's in charge.

So like all this stuff that we can do, it really has to all come down to voting.

We look for love in all the wrong places in terms of the president.

Let's be real.

What?

Wingnuts have been here for the last...

We do.

We look, I mean, wingnuts have been leaders all throughout history, and they come and go.

He made 100 million people aware of the Paris Agreement who didn't know about it.

So we have to give him credit for that.

Because by pulling out of it,

you can't.

No.

All right.

And then you had governors and you had CEOs all over this country saying, we're going to do it anyway, sorry, you won't be with us.

But nothing good is going to happen.

It's not optimistic.

It's really describing what we're doing.

All right.

Well, my point of view is, and it's my show.

Nothing good is going to happen on this issue or any other issue until the Democrats take over Congress.

So

I think it's a great book.

And everybody should read this one.

Really?

If you're going to read a book, I've never said that on the show.

If you're going to read one book, read this one.

Thank you, Doc.

I appreciate it.

All right.

Let's clean up travel.

Hey.

What on there?

How are you?

Good to see you.

Okay.

Oh, thanks.

All right, here they are.

He is the national affairs analyst for NBC News and MSNBC who co-wrote Game Change and its sequel in the 2016 election, will be published on April 3rd.

John Heilman's over here.

John Heilman.

He's an activist and guitarist.

Guitarist, some guitarist, maybe the best for Prophets of Rage, whose debut album is now available.

A rock star in many arenas, Tom Morello.

And she is the White House correspondent for American Urban Radio Network and author of The Presidency in Black and White, now available in paperback.

April Ryan, great to see you.

Okay.

So there are important things, and I say every morning, I'm not going to let myself get sucked into what the shock jock in chief

is talking about today.

So maybe we could dispatch the issue quickly.

But it does bother me, the thing with the football players and the kneeling and the national anthem that we lost track of what they were kneeling for because he's so good at that.

We forgot that there was a protest and it was a meaningful protest about something real and now we're talking about the national anthem.

He actually said, people have died for the anthem.

Did anyone ever die for the anthem?

Well, isn't it, I think it's telling that when athletes protest racism, it's assumed that they're protesting America.

I think that's a very interesting point.

There's two sides, there's two sides to the flag.

There's the flag that flew over the founding of our democracy and over soldiers who have fought in our wars and that was emblazoned on the uniforms of the heroic 9-11 first responders.

It's the same flag that flew over slavery and the genocide of the Native American population, the napalming of Vietnamese children, the destruction of Afghanistan's civilian hospitals, and it's on the uniform of every police officer who's killed an innocent African-American person.

It's also a flag.

It's also a flag that's in the

flag that's in the courtroom of every judge who's let every one of those cops go free.

So if you're uncomfortable watching football on Sunday, imagine how uncomfortable the families are of the African Americans who've been killed by the people.

Bill is right.

The football players have lost the narrative, unfortunately.

This president has this big microphone, this big bully pulpit to use, not just 140 characters, but he is talking and people are listening.

He has changed the narrative talking about the flag.

This is about the unjust, police-involved shootings that have left so many African Americans dead.

And unfortunately, that is being covered up.

It is not about the flag.

This is just a vehicle to stand together in unity, to show people, look, there is a problem.

It is not about the flag.

These people are just as patriotic as any one of us in this room.

They just want to bring attention to something that's been going on since slavery.

See, but I see this in a slightly different way, right?

So first of all, I think if Trump were an NFL team, he'd be 0-16.

because his playbook is the most predictable playbook in the world, right?

Whenever he has something that's going on that he wants to distract people from, he launches usually a race-baiting culture war, right?

So that's what he did in this case.

But this week, the culture culture wars have generally worked pretty well for him politically.

This week you saw two places where the culture, the parts of the culture that he likes to demonize, kind of rose up and smacked him back.

One was on the healthcare bill, right, where I think Jimmy Kimmel did as much as anybody, any individual in the country to stop

the Cassidy Graham bill from becoming, from getting on the floor.

And then on the NFL side, where Trump's trying to basically make an issue out of the things that both Tom and April are talking about.

But in reality, instead of dividing a bunch of people, you got the players, the coaches, the owners, the fans, all basically getting together and saying, fuck you.

We're going to stand with our guys.

However much the meaning might have been diluted, we're going to stand up with our guys.

And I'll just say,

if you're going to fight a culture war, you don't want to fight a culture war with the NFL.

The NFL is American culture.

And Donald Trump found himself on the opposite side of the NFL this week, and I think he lost that fight.

Well, he thinks differently.

He thinks he's won.

He's wrong about a lot of stuff.

Trust me, trust me.

As you know.

Trust me, I know.

But here's the problem.

This president has gone up against the NFL before.

He tried to be an owner, and those 32 members of that exclusive fraternity said, no, this is part of the problem.

And then going to your point, when he went to Alabama

to promote and talk about Lance Strange, guess what?

Guess what happened?

This president decided not to use the lightning rod of Charlottesville and inserted the American flag issue with taking the knee.

So he played this game and he thinks he's winning.

But it's divided every NFL stadium, and I think that's okay.

I don't think people should be comfortable watching football or listening to music as long as this kind of the injustice and the

forget there's a lot of people out in this country who don't agree with what we all are saying here right now.

I mean, I'll give Donald Trump credit for one thing.

He did something that's very difficult to do in American politics.

He looked at a conventional wisdom that we all believed and said no.

And the conventional wisdom was the Republican Party pretty much over because of demographics.

You know, the white people, their numbers keep going down, and they just don't have enough to win anymore.

And Donald Trump went, that's funny because I see a lot of white people when they go outside.

I know a lot of white people.

In fact, everybody I know is white.

I think there's still something to white people in this country.

And you know, it's like 70% of the country still.

We may not think of it here, but you know, get on Highway 10 going east, and before you get to the next coast, you're going to see a lot of whiteness.

And those people are out there.

I mean, you know, the old silent majority.

But they're furious watching football on Sundays now.

And I think that that's all right.

I think it's much more important to stand, to stand.

But it's not all, but it's not all white people.

It's a generational debate.

He's talking to old white people.

A lot of young white people are looking at the NFL thing.

You know, some even old white people like Bottis, the owner of the New England.

That is not true.

Stand up to him.

That is not true.

No.

Whites under 30 voted for Trump over Illinois.

I'm talking about on 5.

I'm talking about on this.

I thought we were talking about the NFL here.

I'm not talking about more broadly.

There are a lot of white football fans who are with

the players on this issue and are standing up.

They're for Seth Curry and they're for Colin Kaepernick and they're for the players' rights to express themselves.

I'm not talking about in the electorate, but I'm aware the whites voted for Trump across the board.

Under 30?

Yeah, across the board.

It wasn't until this week I read that.

I was surprised.

I didn't realize that.

Let me ask you about this guy, Roy Moore.

I remember this character when he put what?

When he put, he was a judge.

He's your kind of guy, Bill.

He's my kind of guy.

Yeah.

He makes for good TV.

Well,

I remember when he put the Ten Commandments in front of the courthouse, and I was like, wow, that is just, that's ballsy.

Because it's a courthouse.

I mean, and we are specifically in the legal realm, especially, supposed to know the separation of church and state.

The one thing you would not put up.

So he got disparred.

Then he got disbarred again because

he wouldn't cotton to gay marriage.

In fact, he's been a guest on the Pastor Kevin Swanson show.

Wow.

Yeah, me too.

Pastor Kevin Swanson believes that gays, because it says in the Bible, should be stoned, not in a good way.

And they asked Roy Moore, who's going to be a senator, about this, and about this opinion of stoning to death gay people.

He said, I'm not here to outline any punishments for sodomy.

So we'll put him down as a maybe

on that one.

So, but we agree, right, with the Ten Commandments thing

that you can't just go by what you feel.

You have to go by principle.

We're not going to be looking at property anytime soon in Alabama.

That's what this looks like.

I know you were thinking about that until the primary one.

Alabama is actually a beautiful state, though.

Oh, yeah.

It really is.

It's a shame we can't do that.

But the cities are.

How about that?

How about that?

How about that?

But we agree, right, okay, that you have to go by principles, just not not what you feel, right?

You can't, I feel the Ten Commandments is the truth, but that's the principle is that, okay.

So I'm just asking this because last week we did a new rule about this guy, this guy who was dressed up as a Nazi in Seattle.

And he may really be a Nazi or he may be just a crazy person and maybe there's not a big difference.

But, you know, when people saw him there on the bus, it went around the internet and some good Samaritan, according to some people, went out and punched him out.

And it got a lot of raves by liberals.

And liberals should not be raving about this.

I mean, we have a First Amendment.

I don't like Nazis either.

I rooted against them on Hogan's heroes.

But we have to go by principles and not feelings.

That's what the other side does.

You can't just punch Nazis.

The First Amendment says that the government can't pass laws that abridge free speech.

I mean, I grew up in the home with an anti-fascist.

He was my uncle, who was a World War II veteran who fought against fascism.

And if he was riding that bus and saw a Nazi symbol of someone who wanted to throw all Jews into ovens and ethnically cleanse all colored people from the planet, my 90-year-old uncle, if he was alive, would have punched that son of a bitch in the face and I would have had his back.

The violence.

The violence.

But then you're

just throwing Jews into ovens violence?

This guy was not throwing Jews into ovens.

This isn't not on a bus in CI on a bus with a plastic on his arm.

I'm intimidating using an insignia that breeds hate and it's talking about death.

But it's a so we get to punch him in the face?

No, I don't believe in violence.

I don't believe in violence, but there needs to be something, something.

This man should have, something.

But wait a minute.

So we can or can't punch knocks.

No, he should have been touched.

To me, that doesn't seem like a complicated issue.

So it's just how you

depend on what they're doing.

Exactly.

It depends on what they're doing.

And

we don't believe in the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court said they could march in Sokey.

Right.

And we just saw that

they were allowed to march.

I mean, this is what the First Amendment says.

Even if something is odious, this is America.

You are allowed allowed to explain it.

If you throw the principle out the window and just say, it's how I feel, then you're just as bad as them.

But you know, build out.

First of all,

I'm not as bad.

Just because I want Nazis to be punched is not making me as bad as people who want to throw all Jews.

We all want them to be in the oven.

We all want them to.

But you know, but here's the problem.

We live in a nation of law.

They're not confronted wherever it raises its own.

Yeah, but they'd be confronted by better speech and more speech.

That's the kind of principle here.

The notion is, I think, that obviously if someone is about to do violence, if someone shows up with a torch or with a club and is threatening someone,

punching that person is

different.

But you should be allowed, again, according to Bill's principles, the First Amendment, the Constitution, all the things we believe, you should be allowed to speak.

without being punched in the face.

Or sit on a bus.

So we should be able to say that we hate Nazism.

We hate Nazism.

We hate fascism.

We're against it.

Well, it's also saying we don't like violence.

There's this dog whistle that's been going around the nation and people are listening to the call.

And the problem is some of these old laws need to be revisited because they just don't fit some of what's going on.

And the bottom line, he has freedom of speech, but yes, he was intimidating, inciting, and that is not right.

And also, this is what bothers me about liberals.

There are no Nazis throwing Jews in the ovens now in America.

This thing about

doing something that looks like looks like it takes courage and it doesn't.

First of all, I'm not a liberal.

Okay, so...

But the difference between Charlottesville and Boston was very, very clear.

The odds were even in Charlottesville, and that's when someone got killed when Tiji

torches in the streets.

In Boston, the Nazis were outnumbered 20 to 1, and they hid in the little cabana coppola place, scared to death, and asked for the police to take them out of there because

people stood up and said, we're not going to, under any circumstances, allow this ideology to be one that has reign in the United States.

But they did it in a peaceful and non-violent way in Boston.

But you did.

Very effectively.

But they felt they were coming.

That's what they did.

They felt comfortable marching without hoods there because they are now without hoods in the Oval Office, and that's where it stands.

I'm going to say something.

Harry Belafonte said something.

That was deep, though.

Harry Belafonte said something to me before.

Harry Belafonte said, you know, when he walked with Dr.

King and W.E.B.

Du Bois, he said, when there's great pain, there is a time for activism, and that activism creates change.

And we see it at these little moments.

But there needs to be some kind of galvanizing and coming together because it should not be that people walk down the street about

whether it's Nazism or whether it's about the Confederate statues.

This has got to stop because there is a bubbling up in this nation right now when it comes.

E.B.

Du Bois was alive?

With

Harry Belafonte years ago.

Really?

Yes.

He walked with him and talked with him.

Paul Robeson and Dr.

King.

Wow.

Yeah.

And Frederick Douglass.

That's

it.

Frederick Douglass is alive.

We're running late.

Let me bring out Kurt because we're going to.

Kurt, can we go to Kurt?

All right, never mind.

I don't know.

There you go.

You know, listen.

He's the New York Times best-selling author of Fantasyland, How America Went Haywire, a 500-year history and host of the public radio show Studio 360.

Please welcome Kurt Anderson.

There he is.

How are you, sir?

Great to see you.

You are well timed for this discussion, and you you have written an amazing book, which has, I think, a great thesis, which is that America is exceptional.

Exceptional in its ability to be divorced from reality.

And anybody who thinks that this new era of no facts and Donald Trump and I'm entitled to my own facts is new is crazy because this has been going on, you say, from the very beginning of American times.

That is American exceptionalism.

We were created in the North, in New England, by a religious cult of extreme zealots.

I mean the Puritans in England were the most extreme Protestants there, but their extreme faction who couldn't make it, who didn't want to be in England, didn't want to be in Holland, just said we're going to come to this blank place and create our theocracy.

So

those were the pilgrims.

Create a theocracy.

Well, and theocracy had just come into the language.

I thought they were escaping religious persecution.

They were, because they wanted to come here to create a theocracy.

So that's like the Salem witch trial.

Well, they eventually got to that.

But yes, indeed.

And then in the South,

the people who also had a different passion to believe the untrue, which is that there was gold in Virginia, which they came and died looking for, came and died looking for 20 years they spent believing there was going to be gold that they were going to find in Virginia.

So those are our two,

the super greedy, money-mad people in the South and and these religious zealots in the North, those were the two founding nodes of America.

So

we codify, oh, you can believe in absolutely anything.

That's the great enlightenment part of our country.

Anything this is more than any other country.

You think this is unique to America?

I mean, it's not just a human thing to believe in fantasy and to want to believe what's not true.

It's not unique.

It is a defining thing of Americans as it is nowhere else in the developed world.

Is that why we're more religious?

Well,

I would maybe reverse it.

I would say we are so religious, so extremely religious, such outliers in the developed world as religious people, that

that easily bleeds over into believing all kinds of unprovable or untrue things.

Well, amen to that.

And of course, we begin as the Enlightenment nation as well.

And we think, oh, the Enlightenment, that's John Adams, that's Thomas Jefferson, that's Ben Franklin, that's reason.

Yes.

But it also,

which people really don't realize, the Enlightenment gave everybody the right to believe any Kakame thing no matter what.

And that's good until suddenly it gets out of control, until the grown-ups are no longer in charge, and this great anti-establishment, anti-expert part of Protestantism and the Enlightenment kind of metastasizes into too much of a good thing.

Right.

I mean, I was very surprised that you blame a lot of it on the 1960s.

I think a lot of it sentimentalized the 60s.

Sure.

But yeah, you're right.

It was a time when people were questioning the establishment and saying everybody could really do his own thing.

And you're weaving that into this narrative.

Correct.

We get there finally.

And again, until the 60s, my argument is anyway, my history is that there was a good dynamic balance between, yeah,

do whatever, invent your own sect, invent your own commune, do whatever, your own religion, because the grown-ups were in control and the establishment, reality-based people were in control.

In the 60s, suddenly, rationality, reason, science,

the man.

No, don't believe any of it.

It's all up for grabs and it was all up for grabs.

And here we are.

But you also put drugs in that category.

And I have to quote something from your book.

I wrote it down in my own handwriting.

That's a valuable document.

You say, psychedelics and even marijuana fog up the boundaries between reality and fantasy, making it easier to believe that all sorts of delusions and imaginary connections are true.

Yes, sir.

You really think that?

You really think that's what us potheads are doing?

You really think that smoking pot fogs up the boundaries between reality and fantasy, and we believe all sorts of delusions?

No, we're just high.

Of course.

This is.

It's one of the things.

All right.

I had to stand up.

Transformation.

I had to stand up for my peeps.

Come on.

Just take that sentence out of the book and they'll read it.

You also mentioned Hugh Hefner in the book.

I do.

The late Hugh Hefner.

The late Hugh Hefner, and he was somebody who was a friend of mine.

And, you know, I think if people saw just the sex, they missed a lot of what went on there.

If you've ever seen one of those documentaries about him, you could see black and white

video of him saying things like, homosexuals are the most persecuted people in America when nobody else was saying that.

And he was progressive politically about the War in Vietnam and many other things.

However, he did this.

But that is a fantastic, that is definitely part of your narrative.

It is.

He, as this extraordinary figure in the 50s, created Playboy Enterprises, the first big business based on enabling the great fantasies necessary, apparently, to masturbation,

and building a business on that was an extraordinary thing, as well as allowing every man who read it.

Ken, who was selling 7 million copies when

you and I were young.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And enabling them to imagine themselves as a cool cat, James Bond, who was getting laid like crazy, even though he probably wasn't.

He wasn't.

Yes.

So

he is part of the evolutionary.

Even at the Playboy Mansion,

it was mostly Heff getting laid.

Oh, there you go.

Yes, absolutely.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And certainly not.

Because I went there all meeting.

I mean,

they were having orgies and they weren't inviting me.

I think it was mostly have

in the grotto.

I really do.

Okay.

One last thing about your book, and I want to turn it over to the panel on this point.

The people who I think who have been really

up to this idea of Americans as fantasists are the Russians, because what we are learning about.

what they have been doing with social media.

There apparently is nothing that you can't put on Facebook.

They knew this.

That a million idiots won't believe right away and spread like wildfire.

You could say that Hillary is running a pedophile ring out of a pizza parlor, and you put it on there, and boom, it'll go.

And

I find it very, very ironic that Silicon Valley, the bastion of liberalism, we're finding out really helped elect Donald Trump.

Isn't that true?

It's 100% true, I think.

And one of the things that, I mean, we focused a lot during the election on the ways in which the Russians tried to intervene in the election by hacking into the Democratic email systems, the DNC, and then John Podesta's email and how those leaks happened, WikiLeaks, all that stuff.

In real time,

no one really saw the real story, which was the last week of the election when in key states like Wisconsin and Michigan and Ohio, suddenly there was this profusion of

conspiracy-minded bullshit about Hillary Clinton.

She had Parkinson's, there was the Clinton kill list, she was part of a, there are a million of them, right?

And it all came flooding out, and didn't just come flooding out, but came flooding out in very particular places, aimed at very particular voting groups that were the ones that needed to vote for Donald Trump.

So

it came from Russia.

And it came from Russia.

It came from trolls and bots in Russia.

And no, and humans.

So we now have a situation where I think probably, if you think about where the special prosecutor is going in the Russia investigation, I know you're going to talk about this a little bit, Bill, but...

If the place, if there's, if in the end we end up with a story about collusion with the White House and the campaign, I think this is where it's going to be.

It's going to be in this digital realm where we're going to find that somehow there was guidance given

to the Russians to guide their efforts in this area.

There's a deeper issue with this because...

Social media was not created for this.

And Silicon Valley is very scared right now.

And what this could actually do, it might mean that Washington may have to go in and start helping them regulate so this won't happen again.

Because what is sacred to us, our election process has been tapped with by Putin and the Kremlin.

But isn't this the pot calling the kettle black?

Who are the founding fathers of election tampering?

The United States of America, who have exit who have assassinated elected heads of state, coups across the

funded and under and manipulated elections across the globe, and now are like boo-hoo-hoo, the only thing that's not.

Which, ironically, is the Trump position.

Hey,

why are you so tough on Russia?

We're just as bad.

We're not because we're better.

He did say that.

Well, yes, and all that is

not been

the executions executions of elected officials by Russia, yet

to do that.

The United States has been.

You know, it's from the Soviet playbook, this kind of undermining, oh, we don't know what's real.

We don't know what's true.

You know, the Nazis did it, the fascists in Spain did it, and the Soviets did it.

But, I mean, what you say is absolutely true.

America has fucked with elections in horrible ways in the past.

But that doesn't mean we should just say, well, the chickens have come home to roost.

We're not going to do anything.

I mean, it's amazing when you read the details of this that you, and they're doing it now, by the way.

It's not over.

Have you seen one editorial that brings up the fact that this is something that we do to other countries all the time, are continuing to do?

Not exactly like this.

Not exactly like this.

What they're doing on social media is getting Americans to hate each other.

They take both sides.

Both sides, right?

They take both sides.

I thought the internet was for porn.

It is.

No, apparently it's to start bar fights.

It is.

That's what it's for.

It is.

Look, here's what I think is interesting is the fact, here's what we're now finding out, though, is that put aside, Tom's got relevant points.

You can talk about the Russians, you can talk about how important what they did was.

The reality is that Twitter, Facebook, Google, these companies are the most powerful companies in the world.

They are more powerful than the broadcast networks, than what television does, than certainly what newspapers and magazines do.

And they have for a long time basically said, we are neutral, we are a platform, we can't police anything, no regulations apply to us.

And not only did that allow this stuff to happen, but then they lied about it from November until just the last couple weeks.

They covered it up, they lied about it, they weren't straightforward with it.

And we are now going to move into a new era where people are going to look at these companies and say, if you guys are going to have this kind of power, and half the country is going to get its news from Facebook, you guys are going to start to be treated like media companies, like journalists, and that is the right thing.

They must take more responsibility when they are this pervasive and this powerful.

All right.

So

you saw that, right?

I saw it.

I saw it.

That was Putin.

That's a little drone he said to me.

Okay, I have one more thing to ask.

It's a question I asked last week when we were talking about Obamacare and how it was paid for.

And I said, how come only the Democrats have to pay for things?

Because Trump's tax plan, now, we don't really know what's in it.

And of course, he lies.

He's like, they want to get rid of the estate tax, this fucking obsession that Republicans have.

And Trump said it affects millions of farmers.

It affects 80.

But not the first time he saw millions when they weren't.

Okay, but whatever it is, it's going to blow a giant hole in the debt and the deficit.

And they just scream about this shit when they're out of power.

And as soon as they get in, it doesn't matter when it's a Democrat, when it's Obama, how can you do this to our grandchildren?

Democrats and hawks, right?

Yes, the one thing Republicans are supposed to be good at.

They are not good at.

Fiscal conservatives, they ain't.

Well, them that has gets.

Yeah, that's true.

And the bottom line, like ACA on numerous occasions or Trump care, whatever you want to call it, they never had the score for it.

And then when they found the score, how many people were going to be hurt?

How many people were going to be cut off?

They don't.

And Cohen came to the briefing room this week and said, oh, we, you know, we want to make sure that the middle-income

American gets their savings, $1,000, a tax credit, and then, you know, we don't care about the price.

But the price does matter.

It does matter when you have costs coming out of the wazoo for Puerto Rico, for Harvey, for Irma, for allegedly the wall, for whatever else that's going on, you know, in the war, in Afghanistan, what have you.

I mean, you know what they just bipartisanly up to

defense spending.

That's the one thing they never argue about.

They gave the Pentagon more than Trump even asked for with the Democrats' help.

He asked for

$603,000 they gave him $640 billion because they each get a little piece of it.

Of course.

They're making 94 F-35s, 24 more than the Pentagon wanted.

The Pentagon said, we can't use this shit, please.

Our defense budget.

That's socialism.

Our defense budget is as much as the next seven countries combined.

Right.

Just because it gives money to corporations that make those products.

Right.

Some of which are allies.

Yeah.

All right.

Thank you, panel.

Time for new rules.

Very enlightening.

A very enlightening group.

All right.

New Roll, Republicans have to answer this question.

You're kidding, right?

This is the guy you want to be in the United States Senate, the theocrat waving around a gun in a Roy Rogers costume.

This isn't a senator.

This is the guy you hire to play your kid's birthday party.

New Roll, just because our dogs are playing together at the dog park, it doesn't mean you and I have to talk.

They're dogs.

When they see an asshole, they sniff it.

I'm a human.

When I see an asshole, I pretend I'm listening to a podcast.

Thank you, John Eilmer.

New rules, now that Saudi Arabia is letting women drive, they must let them take the burqa off while driving.

This way, there won't be any confusion if the car breaks down and she says, can you take a look under the hood?

New world, now that this relationship has degenerated into cliché name-calling, Kim and Trump have to partner up to solve crimes.

Atomic meet blonde

in the new movie, Crouching Tiger Grabbing Pussy.

New rule, Pope Francis has to admit that he sometimes wonders, why did I become a priest?

It's good to be the Pope.

Look at me, I'm a few stupid rules away from being Hugh Hefner.

A little tribute.

All right, and finally, New Rule, you can't demand that everyone stand for the flag if you've colluded with a foreign government to subvert the very democracy that flag represents.

the Russia scandal is complicated, and that makes a lot of people shrug it off.

So, we thought tonight we would do what every other crime investigator does these days, at least on every cop show and serial killer movie I ever saw.

We made one of these.

Huh?

Nice job.

So, So, the crime we're tracking starts in the 90s with this man, Donald Trump, aka Fat Donnie.

AKA Donnie retweets, aka Edward Babyhands.

A string of bankruptcies had made Fat Donnie a deadbeat on the street, but somehow he keeps getting money from somewhere.

But where?

Well, according to this man, Don Trump Jr., aka Donnie Douchebag,

aka the asshole that didn't fall far from the tree.

He said, Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of our assets.

An admission corroborated by this man, his brother Eric shortbus Trump.

AKA Tweedle Dummer.

who tells his golfing buddies, we don't rely on American banks.

We have all the funding we need out of Russia.

Bingo!

Sarah Palin might see Russia from her house, but Trump could see it from his bank account.

And that's when he decided he was bored with Milani and ready to fuck someone new.

America.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, this man, ex-KGB agent Vladimir Putin, aka Vladimir Bats,

aka the bodfather,

is looking to install a stooge in the country he still hates.

But who?

Who's desperate and dumb enough?

And so, according to the Steele dossier, Putin reached into his old bag of KGB tricks to compromise Trump, not just with the bank loans, but by secretly filming him with this woman, Ivana Goldenshauer.

And

her fellow prostitute, Natasha Uren, cost extra.

Consider them armed and hydrated.

Cut to 2014, Vladimir Bats invades Ukraine, which causes the U.S.

President Barack Obama and his concigliary, Hillary Clinton, aka Hot Sauce Hill.

aka the nutcracker,

to impose crippling economic sanctions on Russia, which which scuttles a multi-million dollar deal for Black Sea oil between Russia and ExxonMobil.

Who headed ExxonMobil at the time and received Russia's Medal of Friendship?

This man, our current Secretary of State, Rex, I drink your milkshake Tillerson.

Coincidence, I think yet.

Vladdy Batts doesn't like his oil deal going south, so he does what Russians do when they want something fixed in Washington.

He pays millions to this man, Paul Paul Manafort, aka Paulie Numbnuts,

a.k.a.

Slime Shady, currently under investigation by every agency in the U.S.

except William Morris.

And for good reason.

He's so far up Putin's ass he can taste his lunch.

So it raised eyebrows when one day, out of nowhere, he becomes campaign manager for Fat Donnie.

Even offers to do the job for free.

Although word on the street is someone was paying.

And here's a coincidence.

Paulie Numnuts used to be partners in a lobbying firm with Fat Donny's albino assassin, Roger Stone, who happens to be Twitter pals with Gussifer, aka Russian intelligence.

And they've been hacking the Democratic Party's private emails and sending them to this man, WikiLeaks founder and Hillary hater Julian Assange, aka gay Richard Branson.

On October 7th, 2016 at 1.03 p.m., the famous Access Hollywood tape is leaked, which should have been Fat Donnie's ticket to Mitt Romneyville.

But 29 minutes later, Wikileaks announces it suddenly came across a trove of DNC emails and releases the first 2,000.

Every intelligence agency in America says the hack came from Russia.

But our president, who supposedly is defending our country, doesn't agree and says it could be anybody.

Could be the work of a fat guy on their bed.

Yeah, a lot of things could be.

Like the meeting Donny Douchebag set up with eight Kremlin-connected Russians in the middle of the campaign that he said was about adoptions.

Could be, except it wasn't.

An email turned up addressed to Donny promising very high-level and sensitive information that is part of Russia and its government's support of Mr.

Trump.

Little Donnie's response, I love it

because he's a fucking idiot.

Also at that meeting, Paulie Numbnuts and fat Donnie's son-in-law, Jared the Jew Kushner.

AKA Silent Jared, aka baby fuckface.

Jared also needs Russian money to cover bad bets, so he meets secretly with the Russian spy master, I mean ambassador, Sergei Kesliak, aka Big Potato.

A meeting which also includes this man, Michael Flynn, aka Mikey Headcase,

who had accepted buckets of cash to advise Russia and oh yeah, then served as national security advisor to Fat Donny, a position he had to resign after being caught lying about Russia to this man, Mike Pence, aka Mike Pence.

Everybody lies about knowing Kislyak, except for Fat Donnie, who invites him right into the Oval Office to yuck it up the day after he fired this man, FBI Director James Jimmy the Giant Comey, aka the Boy Scout, aka the election fucker,

who'd been investigating the whole mess.

It all adds up.

The only thing we don't have is a confession.

When I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, you know,

this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story.

Watergate was follow the money.

This case is roll the videotape.

And it all points to a Russian plot to degrade our faith in democracy, install a puppet state, and fuck over an old enemy.

But hey, I guess it could be just a fat guy on his bed.

Thank you very much.

That's our show.

I want to thank John Heilman, Tom Morello, Akron Ryan, Kurt Anderson, and Paul Hawkin.

Join us now for overtime on YouTube.

Thank you, folks.

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