 Donald Trump says it's time to rewrite America's tax code. Donald, instead of rewriting America's tax code, why don't you first try obeying it? It's 3 a.m. on Tuesday, March 27th, 2017. I'm David Feldman. We've got a lot of shows, so let's get right to it. Welcome to the broadcast. I'm David Feldman. DavidFeldmanShow.com. Every Tuesday and Friday at exactly 3 a.m. we launch a new episode. On today's show, TV comedy writing legend and author, Meryl Marko. She's featured in the new CNN documentary on the history of comedy because when it comes to comedy, she made history. Meryl Marko and David Letterman created the beloved NBC talk show Late Night with David Letterman. She went on to win more Emmys and Writers Guild awards than any bookshelf can handle without collapsing. She's also a brilliant author. Her bookshelf also includes books that she's written. CoolCom and Contentious, a collection of essays. I strongly urge you to go out and buy CoolCom and Contentious. It's hysterical. Other books include Nose Down, Eyes Up, and What the Dogs Have Taught Me. It's great. She's a great writer. It's been a while since Meryl has done this show. She can talk about anything and on today's show she does. We talk about dogs and Trump. God knows what else. Also, Howie Klein from Down with Tyranny tells us what is next for the GOP and what special elections you and I should keep an eye on. Please read his Down with Tyranny blog. We have some great episodes you should try to get to. The one with Gilbert Gottfried on Friday was one for the record books. I cannot recommend it enough. It is as funny as funny gets. He is the gold standard of comedy. I mean, it was just an honor having Gilbert on the show. So much fun. Also, Sarah Tiana was on the show. We put her on after Gilbert. I didn't know what to do. Sarah is an amazing writer and comedian and we thought, should we put her in front of Gilbert or behind Gilbert and Jackie the Joke Man is also on that show. Great episode. Kevin Avery and Chuck Closterman should check out that episode. We have episodes with Bobby Slaton and Will Durst, Kathleen Madigan, Todd Glass, Sam Seder, Judy Gold, Jerry Stahl, Brian Stack and Lewis Black, Bob Saget, Andy Kindler, Dana Gould, Rich Voss, Mazda Brani, Super Deluxe's Vic Berger. That's February and March. Check out our older episodes. The show is just getting better and we're not going to waste your time. That's why I'm asking you to share this episode. That's all I ask you to do. Whichever way you're listening, just tell your friends. I promise you I would only introduce you to the best and I know some of these shows are longer than others, but I will not waste your time. If somebody is on my show, you need to know them, follow them, become their friends. Friday's show with Gilbert Godfrey is incredible. It cured me. I've been sad, depressed, lonely and spending time with Gilbert cured me. So if you're down, hopefully this show will help you. But if you're really down, I prescribe Gilbert Godfrey. Go listen to Gilbert on my show, then go to his podcast and listen to Gilbert on his show. Gilbert Godfrey's amazing colossal podcast. He is nothing short of a comedy miracle. So listen to his podcast. Hey, I'm doing a pay what you want thing with my new comedy album. We're posting the first 10 minutes on David Feldman show.com trying to figure out how to do it securely. So it's taking a little more time than we thought, but it will be done. And I'll, I think on Friday's show, we'll be able to tell you how to do it. It's basically pay what you want. We're building an album this year of comedy. This is a comedy show. Meanwhile, go to my site and check it out. DavidFeldmanshow.com. Root around. There's eight years of old episodes that I haven't had time to catalog. Eventually when the show settles in and we can hire more people, we'll have somebody catalog all our episodes to make them more readily available to you. Do some content curation for us. Thank you all for your emails of support. It means the world to me. This is all I've got basically. So your support on Twitter, on Facebook. Thank you so much for contacting me at DavidFeldmanshow.com and telling me what you like about the show and what you don't like about the show. I answer all my emails. So thank you. Coming up on our show on DFS. I'm being told we should refer to the show as DFS David Feldmanshow. That's so I'm trying to try to call it DFS. DFS. Coming up on DFS. Really? Do I have to do that? I guess I do. Okay. Coming up on DFS. Eminem. Merrill Marco stops by and you can see Merrill on CNN's history of comedy. She is a wrecking ball when it comes to television. When Merrill trained her eyes on television, she and David Letterman did what any good artist does. They destroyed it and then they put it all back together again. America is a wrecking ball and it's one of our saving graces. Things are bad right now, but I'm an optimist. All the millions of Americans in pain, notwithstanding, things in America get better. They do. Unless of course you're the victim of gun violence, police brutality, lack of health insurance, if you're homeless, you're broke, living in your car, unable to pay your bills, or you've just been rounded up by ICE and separated from your children and sent back to Guatemala, things in America always get better. All right. Things in America don't get better. Humans are resilient and Americans are, we're told, optimists. I think that's a survival thing. We forget what's happened to us. Sometimes we need help from the psychiatrist to remind us what the priest or the babysitter did. That's how humans survive. We conveniently forget what's happened to us and more importantly, we forget what we've done to others. So I'm an optimist about America. I'm a white heterosexual male. I have every reason to be optimistic about America. I always love the people who say, you know how America survived George W. Bush? We can survive Trump. America survived Bush. Did Iraq survive Bush? Did Afghanistan survive Bush? What about New Orleans? Did New Orleans ever survive Bush? What about all the people who used to have homes and jobs and lost it all because Bush and his Goldman Sachs cronies deregulated and destroyed all of the protections that we used to have to keep us immune from corporate greed? Let me sum up American resilience or what we think is American resilience, our optimism. This is what American optimism is. And I am an optimist, but I think it's chemical. I don't think there's any reason to be optimistic, although there is reason to be optimistic. You have to walk into the light, but some people should not be optimistic. Some people should not be resilient. Twelve years ago, I had a friend. He used to go on television as a stock picker. In fact, he's still on television as a stock picker. He just used to be my friend. He's not my friend anymore. And he said, I watched him on television 12 years ago. Maybe it was 14 years ago. I don't remember the year. He said, sell Apple. It's over. They only have the iPod. Get rid of it. Steve Jobs is sick. Get rid of Apple. I actually saw him go on CNBC one day and say that he proudly proclaimed that he had gone over Apple's books and they got nothing in the pipeline. He said Steve Jobs is sick. He had a nice run. The iPod is great, but she can't build a business just on an MP3 player. A year later, I called him on my new iPhone and I said, hey, remember when you told everyone to sell Apple? And he said, we don't talk about that. I said, what? He said, we don't talk about that. We don't talk about that. He then told me I was being rude for bringing that up. And I said, but you were on TV telling people to sell Apple stock and now Apple's on fire. And he hung up on me. He said I was, I had a chip on my shoulder. I was jealous because I wanted to talk about that because he went on television and told people to take their hard earned cash and sell Apple stock. But we don't talk about that. Well, we don't talk about a lot because I haven't talked to him since. No accountability. He's still on TV recommending stocks. And I'm always amazed that nobody on these shows ever says to him, hey, remember when you said buy WorldCom or Enron in the corporate controlled news business and on the corporate controlled cheerleading that goes on at CNBC or Fox Business News to ask that question to say, hey, you know, you got some things wrong. That would be considered bad manners. Someone said to me to justify rebooking this guy over and over while they put him on the shows. They said to me recently, hey, he has to make a living too. He has to make a living too by presenting himself as an expert, then giving bad advice and wiping you out financially. There's a word for those kind of people. Divorce attorneys. Actually, divorce attorneys is two words. What's sucker? That's one word, right? Or is it hyphenated? Well, anyway, divorce attorneys, two words. Okay, I always confuse it with sucker because sucker is one word. Well, that kind of resilience, that refusal to look behind and admit the damage you've caused. That's why we all believe things get better in America. We just conveniently forget the past because the past is rude. Looking at the past is rude. I look at the past. I like to know how we got where we are. And I'm not so keen on sunny optimism. I never bought into that whole civil war was the best thing to happen to America and that whole to make a more perfect union thing that Lincoln did. I don't get the Lincoln thing. Seems like the civil war was bloody. And while slavery is our original sin, we probably could have come up with a more efficient way to free the slaves, something more efficient than wiping out more than half a million Americans. And Lincoln, truth be told, didn't care about slaves. He attacked the Confederacy because he cared about preserving the union. Slavery was our original sin. It had to be eradicated. You know, we had to get rid of slavery, but preserving a union with Mississippi and Alabama as equal partners, not sure was worth a sacrifice. And I have a feeling the people who live in Mississippi and Alabama could vouch for that. Some of my friends read a couple of books about Lincoln. They know something I don't know. And then they spend the rest of their life lording their knowledge over me. They lured their knowledge of Lincoln or Mark Twain over me. Yeah, okay. So you suffered through Mark Twain. So now the rest of us have to. You're smart. You get the jokes. We're stupid. So I'll sit down and pretend I respect you because you think Huckleberry Finn is the greatest American novel. It's only the greatest American novel because it's the only thing you read in college. You wrote 10 term papers on it. But you have to talk about Huckleberry Finn at parties. How else could you justify the hours you spent jerking off in the dormitory? How else could you justify the hours you spent vomiting in the sink unless you have something to show for it? And the only thing you have to show for it is you read Huckleberry Finn and some book about Lincoln. You wrote your senior thesis on Huckleberry Finn. So for the rest of your life, the rest of us have to hear you talk about Huckleberry Finn. Everything comes back to Huckleberry Finn. Everything. I'm having a heart attack. Well, you know, in Huckleberry Finn, how many times do I have to hear the justification for N-word Jim? Well, you'll have to read the book. And in its context, it's perfectly fine because I only read one book and obviously N-word Jim was of the time and Twain was commenting on racism by calling him and I read another book you asked. Every goddamn party you show up and you start talking about Huckleberry Finn and we're glad because once you start talking about Huckleberry Finn, everyone at the party just stops paying attention to you and they agree. They nod their head and they think about what they have to do tomorrow wishing you would shut up and die. Good for you. You read Mark Twain and a book on Lincoln and that makes you morally superior, you pampered, self-involved, intellectually stifled, middle-aged, middle-management, broken robot who mistakes the three sniffers of brandy inside of him for a screenplay that's just dying to come out. That screenplay about growing up upper middle class in a middle-class neighborhood, it's just dying for you to finally sit down and finally write it at the age of 52. If only you had the time to write it and if only you had the connections to write that screenplay because everybody knows it's not about writing the screenplay, it's about who you know. David, can you get me an agent? There's nothing more annoying than a drunk prattling on about Lincoln and Mark Twain and how he wishes he had the time to finish that screenplay about growing up upper middle class in a middle-class neighborhood and telling me about how he has this idea for a play because he read a book about Mark Twain. He has this idea for a play on Broadway because he read a book about Lincoln and he read Huckleberry Finn. He has this idea that Lincoln and Twain meet on a train and it's called Lincoln and Twain on a train. Get it? It will be great. Yeah, why don't you kill yourself? Good for you. You read two books 30 years ago and bought some screenwriting software. Shut up. Get another drink and damage your liver. You don't love Lincoln. You don't love Twain. You don't write. You love drinking. If you were a real writer, you'd protect the one thing you need more than everything else, your brain cells. You'd stop drinking and you'd start writing. But instead you'd rather drink and talk about what you wish you could do if you weren't an effin alcoholic. Yeah, that's right, folks. I haven't had a drink or smoke pot since 1988 and if I can't be happy, nobody gets to be happy. So if you're listening to me, you're all diseased. Sorry. But you are. You are, Blanche. You're all diseased. You just drink and you have fun. You take the easy way out by smoking the alcohol and drinking the pot. But not me. Not David Feldman because I'm strong. I'm soldiering through life because I'm a man and real men are miserable. Real men don't enjoy life. Real men have no fun because we're morally superior. Jesus Christ, one drink. One drink. I actually dream about wine. I dream about white wine. Moderation management, I hear that works for 1% of the population of Alkes. Supposedly you have one or two drinks a day and that's it. Surely, if I haven't had a drink since 1988, I could handle one or two drinks a day, right? I hate all of you. I do. You and your fun and your relaxation, your wine, women and song. You know what I've got? This. This is all I've got. This is all I've got. All I have in my life is this show, coffee, anxiety and the fleeting spiritual smugness that comes from convincing myself that I don't need alcohol or pot to be happy. Do you have any idea how hard it is to flirt with a woman when you're sober? Has anybody ever flirted sober? I have to flirt sober and it can't be done. You cannot flirt with a woman sober. I was married and then I quit drinking and now I have to flirt because I'm divorced sober and it's impossible to flirt with a woman when you're sober. I was getting my physical last month and the doctor says, David, have you had any unprotected sex? And I said, sure, what's the copay? He was asking me about my love life. I thought maybe it was a proposition. He asked me about my love life and I said, not good. Keep this in mind. I am pretty much completely naked except for the ball gag in my mouth. I'm pretty much naked and I tell him, my love life is no good. He looks at me and he says, you just need a billion dollars. That's what my doctor prescribed for my love life. I'm serious. He said, you just need a billion dollars. He sees me naked and in his informed opinion, in order for David Feldman to get laid, I recommend a billion dollars. And I just smiled and asked for a second opinion and the nurse said, four billion. And we all laughed as I sat there naked. We laughed. So screw all of you with your happiness and the love in your life. Me, I'll be here, holding down the fort, reading the paper. Well, you're all out there having fun, turning your back on Mother Nature. Well, you're picking up women and men and dancing and singing, having the light of the universe shine on you. Just remember, David Feldman is back here, masturbating for your sins. Or maybe I'm masturbating to your sins. All I know is I'm masturbating and people don't like to hear the word masturbation. You know what's worse than hearing the word masturbation? Sing it. I'm suffering for your sins, folks. I'm your sin eater. You know, I don't have a Jesus complex. I don't think I'm Jesus. Although much like Jesus, I'm not too thrilled about this whole Jewish thing either. If you're not miserable right now, then there's something seriously wrong with you. Something seriously wrong with you, like being in a committed relationship, which is an illusion. You're not in a committed relationship. You think you're in a committed relationship. Anyone who thinks a committed relationship lasts forever should be committed. Love dies. Love dies. That's my show. Thanks for listening. Drive safely, everybody. Love dies. And if you're lucky, love dies at the same time. Forget simultaneous orgasms. You want your love to die simultaneously. Oh, I want a simultaneous orgasm. I don't want to share my orgasm. That's mine. You have yours. I have mine. Go have yours in the other room for all I care. This is my orgasm, and right now I'm having it, and let's focus on me. You just sit there and wait for your orgasm. Let me finish my orgasm, and you spot me and make sure the jumper cables are securely fastened to the battery because I don't want the sheets to catch fire again. What matters more than the simultaneous orgasm is simultaneously falling out of love. That, that is the key to a good, healthy relationship when you stop loving each other at the same precise, exact time. That is the goal a couple should be working towards. Everything you do, everything you talk about, should point, should lead up to that fairytale moment when she whispers, I don't. And you say, that's amazing. I was just about to say the same exact thing. That's two hearts beating as one. It's a beautiful thing. But guys, it requires patience. It requires listening. You really need to listen to your partner and men aren't good at that. You really need to listen to her. You need to listen to the way she criticizes you, the way she goes on and on about some stupid show on Netflix. Because guys, when you listen, when you really, really listen, then you discover what they need. And when you discover what they need, and that only comes from listening, then you can take the relationship to the next level and learn how to stop loving them. Otherwise, you're both trapped in this endless cycle of I love you, but you hate me. Let's give it time. Okay, now I hate you, but you love me. What about the cat? Who gets the cat? Okay, sex. Great. Okay. Back to the cat. Wait, I forgot. Do I hate you? Or do you love me? You hate me and I hate me? Right. We both hate me. You know what? The cat is sick. Instead of you're moving out, let's pay for the cat's kidney stone operation with the deposit on a new apartment instead of you moving out and getting having to put the money on a deposit for a new apartment. Let's pay for the cat's kidney stone operation because there's something way more important than whether we love each other. And that is whether our 22-year-old cat can pee in the middle of the night without waking the neighbors. Forget whether I love you or you love me. Morton is 22. He needs his operation. Okay, great. And I don't want sex because between Morton's cat box and you and I unable to decide whose turn it is to clean out the refrigerator, this place smells like Turkish prison rape. And not the good kind. By the way, I don't mean to traffic and ugly stereotypes. There's a very ugly stereotype about Jewish men and it's unfair. There's a stereotype that Jewish men make the best husbands. It's ugly. It's unfair. And most importantly, it's true. Jewish men do make the best husbands because no Jewish man ever in the 6,500-year history of this business consortium we call a religion. My mother's going to be so pissed at me for saying in the 60s, I used to go to bar mitzvahs and break it to the bar mitzvah boys that Judaism was invented in 1950 as a real estate deal. I didn't get invited to many of my children's friends bar mitzvahs after that. I would just say let me tell you the truth about Judaism. It didn't exist before 1948. We came up with it because it was anyway. Yes, Jewish men do make the best husbands. The marriages last with the Jewish man because in the entire history of the Jewish people, no Jewish man ever declared to his wife, honey, this isn't working out. I'm not happy. Happy. There's no happiness in baseball. If you're a Jewish man, happiness isn't factored into the equation. Jewish man gets married. For a Jewish husband, there are far more important things to worry about than being happy, like being miserable, much more important. I'm not saying we're miserable people. We just have a lot on our minds, like the Ten Commandments. We all know about the Ten Commandments, but for the Jews, that's the bait and switch. As a Jewish kid, you're told, hey, there are Ten Commandments, and you say to yourself, I can handle that, and then they send you off to the Yeshiva. The Ten Commandments think we lied. You lied to me? Yeah, there are actually 613 Commandments, but if you add up 6, 1, and 3, that's 10. No, no, I don't care about the numerology. You told me there were only 10 Commandments. Well, that was the teaser rate. We wanted to get you into the house of worship, but now that you're locked in and we have you, it's ballooned up to 613. 613? Really? 613 Commandments? Why didn't you tell me this? I'm 10 years old. Yeah, kind of like 6, 1, and 3. Oh, shut up. Okay, Rabbi, what are the 613 Commandments? What are they? Nobody's ever asked that before. There are 613 Commandments, and you're in violation of all of them. Now, David, go sit down and think about what you've done, what you should be doing, what you should have been doing, and think about all the people on this planet who are not doing what they should be doing while you just sit there saying nothing, making you just as culpable as they are because you kept your mouth shut and refused to speak out against they're not doing what they should be doing. Happiness, that's not the way I was raised. But Jewish men make good husbands because marriage, being a husband, we treat it if you're Jewish man as an obligation. That's all it is. It's not about happiness, it's just another obligation. Which is why when a Jewish man gets married, the first thing he does before kissing his wife is he breaks a glass with his foot because now that you're married, you won't be drinking. Jewish men don't drink. I don't drink. Maybe I'm not an alcoholic. Maybe I'm just Jewish. We want to, we don't. If you're unaffected by the Republican Party's policies, or think you're not affected, I think you can objectively and calmly enjoy Trump as a wrecking ball. Wrecking balls are necessary. You can't build a New York City unless you wreck things first. In economics, they called it creative destruction. I think it's shumpeter, I'm not sure, I think it's shumpeter and creative destruction. In art, it's just called creation. If you believe energy can't be manufactured or made to disappear, then you know that whatever you wreck can always be put back together again, but it's going to look different. It's going to sound different. It's going to affect people differently. But contained within that new creation's DNA is everything that came before. So when Merrill Marko and David Letterman were wrecking TV, they were also rebuilding it using the DNA of Ernie Kovacs and Steve Allen and at the same time making it all their own. And that's what art is. That is what love is. That's what governing is. It's what propels all human beings. We need to destroy something and rebuild it. That is the story of civilization. It is the story of American democracy. We need to destroy something and rebuild it. It's why we love car wrecks just as much as we love wandering aimlessly through car shows. I did that once. I went to a car show last year and I thought, this is what normal people do. They walk around the Javits Center looking at cars. Yet all I want to do is hang out on the first floor where the white windowless vans are being displayed and play catch a predator. That's what I wanted to do at the Javits. When I went to the Javits Center last year to the car show, I just wanted to look at the white vans and just watch these guys checking out the windowless white vans. When I took my family to Disneyland and we used to go all the time because it's a great way to pretend you're emotionally engaged with your kids. I was obsessed with finding the overweight guy with a baseball cap all alone who refused to grow up. That was my game, catch the predator. Do not trust older men in baseball caps all alone at Disneyland. Back to art and destruction and creativity. You will never ever lose the instinct to destroy something. Destruction is part of the human condition. We destroy and then rebuild. And that's what love is. Love is destruction and creation. We destroy and we rebuild. Think of all your closest relationships. I'm not talking about your parents or your children or your dog. Those relationships have biological and societal boundaries. And some dogs lie. That's not the love I'm talking about, the relationship between your parents and you or children and you, raising children, dealing with your parents. That's not an active creativity. It's a series of obligations prescribed by society or nature. I'm talking about the art of loving. The art of a loving relationship between two people who are unrelated. Another reason Lincoln should have let Alabama and Mississippi secede from the union because they have no idea what I'm talking about right now. I'm talking about love that is a choice. Love that is not blood. When love is a choice, when you choose to love someone, it's art because it's the ultimate reaffirmation of whatever higher being you might think created you. Whatever you believe in, whatever God you believe in, the decision to love something is art because art is what brings you closest to your creator. Again, this is not the love of your child or your parent or your lying pet who will say anything about you if it gets in the treat. I'm talking about the love of another person who you're not related to. That is a man-made, a woman-made construct. You chose to love that person and that person chooses to love you. That is art. That is a form of creation. That is a spark of genius and that is the act of creation that destroys everything that came before. It destroys every relationship you had before. It destroys every feeling and every emotion that came before and it rebuilds into a brand new love comprised of the DNA of all the other love that came before, especially the DNA of her father and my mother. Those will always be the issues front and center. I'm going to get to governing. I'm making a larger point here. I'm saying something that is very deep and that is my dog lies. My dog lied about me, Your Honor. Love is art. Love is art and great art combines passion with a purpose. There are seven billion people on this planet and it's important to convince each other when you're in love that when you met it was kismet that all the forces of the universe lined up so that the two of you would meet. But that's not really true. You fall in love, you decide to fall in love and the other person decides to fall in love with you. It's not kismet. It's a choice. Love is a choice. It's a man-made construct. It's self-intoxication. You decide to be intoxicated. In fact, kismet is a Turkish word. I'm not making this up. It means potion. It's a potion, kismet. We always mistake the use of the word. We say, oh, it was kismet. I was destined to meet you. No, I was drunk. I gave myself a potion. I put myself under a spell. That is the real meaning of the word kismet. It's a Turkish word and the Turks have given us two of the most powerful expressions in the English language, kismet and prison rape. There are still people who maintain French as the language of love. Did the French give us the word kismet or the phrase prison rape? No, the Turkish people did. Prison rape is still funny because it's men raping other men. Fully aware, there's an exploration date on prison rape jokes. I think there's about three more months until prison rape jokes are no longer funny. I just wanted to use my prison rape jokes before they went sour. Prison rape, I know. I can see the iTunes review right now. David Feldman presents himself as a progressive, but his prison rape jokes fly in insensitivity, unbecoming someone who does a podcast in his mother's basement. I thought I could trust someone who crawls into his mother's basement to record a podcast like Rupert Pupkin. I believe in the universe. I believe it unfolds. And if you don't fight the universe too much, if you listen to the universe, you can find your true love, your true path. But you have to keep your eyes open and look for what the universe is presenting to you. You have to learn how to catch luck and not question luck. Don't wrestle with God. That's a problem the Jews have. Israel means wrestling with God. I think it was Jacob. I'm not sure. I think it was Jacob who wrestled with an angel who turned out to be God. And God said, you're a thick-necked people. Why are you always questioning me? Well, because we created you. And that's how Jews parent their children. We have a thing called conditional love, God. We created you. And when we don't like the way you're behaving, we let you know. Hence the lack of happiness. What I'm saying is don't wrestle with God. You can be a Jew. You can be whatever you want. But don't wrestle with God. Accept the universe for what it is. You do. I can't. But you try to. Try to just accept the universe. Become a Buddhist like Leonard Cohen. Fall in love. Stay in love. Catch luck. Recognize luck. When it comes to love, remember that love doesn't happen without a purpose. It's not kismet. There's a reason you're in love. You decided to be in love because you want something. For men, I'm not trying to be funny here. It's sex or companionship or to get the love you didn't get from mommy or to get more of the kind of love you did get from mommy or sex and sex and more sex. It's to feel needed, to feel important, to feel alive. Why do women fall in love? I have no idea what women want. I don't even know if they fall in love. I don't understand women. I don't think women understand women, which is why I wish I was gay. I wish I was gay. I do. I wish I was gay because I don't understand women and I love the taste of semen. I'm joking around. I don't enjoy the taste of semen. I am working blue today, aren't I? I need to ease back. I think after Friday's show, all bets were off. I'm just kind of unfiltered. Back to love. Love is art. And art is passion with a purpose. So what is the purpose of your love? Is it biological to make a baby? That's a purpose. And the love will thrive. But what happens when the baby is sent off to school? Your love has to find a new purpose. How does love survive after the children leave? You need to turn to each other and start taking care of one another the same way you used to take care of your children. And that's why I try to save my emptiness marriage by walking around in a fully loaded diaper and crying a lot. Obviously it didn't work. I'm pretty sure it was the crying. Maybe it was the fully loaded diaper. But dollars to donuts, it was the crying. By the way, dollars to donuts is what my diaper was fully loaded with because I have an odd relationship with food and money. I'm trying to help folks because love is the most important thing on this planet. Love is important. Sex is important. But a relationship is more than sex. It's asking for more sex. Is that the police coming? God, I hope they're coming for me. I did a lot of bad things. Sex is important. Sex is important because sex is taking care of one another. That's what you need to do. You need to take care of each other. Make dinner, earn money, have fun because you want to take care of someone. Taking care of another person isn't some noble calling. It's what we all do as humans. It's part of our survival instinct. It's hardwired into our brain. When we take care of someone, it makes us feel good. It releases dopamine. It lights up the brain. That's why I have to tape it to the thigh whenever I'm serving at the soup kitchen. It arouses me taking care of people because sex is taking care of someone. Honey, I'm about to serve at the soup kitchen. Do you mind taping me down? You know how I get when I help. So you young guys listening and you old guys trying to listen, but the battery in your hearing aid is shot and you're too lazy to run down to the drug store, which also happens to be your father's excuse for why you're here in the first place. I agree with the Christian conservatives. Sex education does not belong in our schools. I want love education. And I'm not trying to get all John and Yoko on you, but I mean it. Love education, not sex education. Love education. We teach sex in the schools. They teach the mechanics sort of, but we don't teach our kids about love and how much it costs and why it's so much cheaper in Thailand. Maybe that's less sex education and more like home economics. They should have a home economics class. Kids, you're married, your wife thinks you're disgusting, but she also wants a new dishwasher and a patio. So you compromise, you split the difference. She gets the dishwasher, the money you were supposed to spend on a patio, goes to your three nights stay in Nakom Baton. Can anybody here tell me where Nakom Baton is? Very good, Thailand. And what is their national currency? That's right, the bot. And how many bot for bottle service? Right, very good. That would be a good home economics class. Sex education? I know what they teach. And it's not love. They teach our kids about the parts of our body. The question I always asked when my sons came back from their sex education class is, did they teach you about the clitoris? That's what I want to know. Did they teach you about the clitoris? Because I was naive. I didn't get the kind of education that some of these kids are getting. For years I believed in the vaginal orgasm. And it wasn't until I was 46 that I found out that I didn't even have a vagina. These kids in school are being taught about the penis, the vagina, breasts, contraception, but they're not being taught about the clitoris and how to stimulate the clitoris. And how can you have sex with a woman if she's not having an orgasm? I mean, other than very quickly and efficiently. You would definitely have sex very efficiently with a woman if she's not having an orgasm. But if the woman doesn't have an orgasm, is it really sex? To supplement my income, I will come to your home and teach your entire family about the birds and the bees. And by the way, birds and bees is disgusting. It should be the birds and the birds and the bees and the bees. You don't mix the species. That's how you end up with hybrid life forms like donkeys and Travis Kalanick from Uber. By the way, did you know that Ariana Huffington sits on the board of Uber? She does. She's a real champion of the left sitting there on the board of directors over at Uber. I noticed that the Huffington Post went union five years after Ariana Huffington sold it and pocketed several hundred million dollars. Finally went union. Real liberal Ariana Huffington. Sex. When I was a kid, we called it making love. Now they just call it sex. Isn't that interesting? This was back when we supposedly knew nothing about sex, but they still knew to call it making love. And what does making love mean? It means the love is already there, but the sex manifests it. Are we clear here what sex is? It's creation. It's creation and making love takes love that already exists and it makes it manifest. It makes it apparent. It makes it quantifiable. Ten cc's if you had zinc and oysters the night before. I'm worried about millennials because I'm not sure they understand making love. The porn, the rap, the sitcoms, everything is sex. Sex is the most important thing in our lives because it's biological, but it doesn't happen the right way unless there's love. Sex without love is biological and it's unfulfilling unless the man knows his way around a clitoris. If the woman isn't pleasure, then it's not sex. It's ignorance. It's shameful. It's one-sided. It's what meat eating, unevolving the andrithals engage in. So get rid of sex education in our schools and start teaching kids how to love one another, how to make each other feel good, specifically teach them about the clitoris. I still can't find my clitoris. I've been to millions of doctors. They still can't find my clitoris. Nobody's good at sex. You're never going to get good at sex. Warren Beatty is not good at sex. Jack Nicholson isn't good at sex. You know who's good at sex? Married couples because they have the dance moves down to a science and they can do it in their sleep. And when you're married, that's often how one of them gets through it, sound asleep. Nobody's allowed to be asleep during sex. When you're involved with someone, you get better and better at sex with them. Until the sex gets so amazing, it's horrible. But then when you have a new partner, you're back to being bad at sex again. And it's great. Learning new terrain is exciting, yet clumsy. There's nothing better than lumbering, gawky, ham-fisted sex. And when I say ham-fisted sex, I'm not just talking about pleasuring a woman who keeps kosher. I'm saying that the best sex is when you're when you're all thumbs or all index fingers. Being bad at sex is the best kind of sex. Stumbling in the dark. Exploring a new woman, for me it has always been like Columbus coming to the new world. Because my very first instinct is to hand her a blanket filled with smallpox. Touching a woman for the first time and whispering things into her ear like, wow, your vagina has a running board? Two running boards. So old fashioned. How old did you say you were again? The vagina with two running boards. We're going to get back to politics on this show. We're going to have professors. I'm not doing well. Being bad at sex. Prostitutes are good at sex. I know I was when I worked my way through acting school. Prostitutes, in all honesty, only appear to be good at sex because they lie to the man. They tell the man that whatever the man is doing is pleasing the woman. And that tells us about how hardwired it is in all of us to be giving. That a prostitute thinks a man will reach orgasm quicker if he thinks he is pleasing the prostitute. A prostitute will tell the man anything. That seems to be the game. They want to get the man off. So prostitutes are really only good at sex in that they're good at convincing the man that he is engaging in what he mistakenly believes is sex, pleasuring another woman. The guy gets off thinking he's getting her off. But he's not. She's acting. She's faking it. Which is why, whenever I'm done having sex, the first thing I say is, was that orgasm a flugazi? I need to know. Tell me the truth. Was that orgasm a flugazi? And don't you lie to me? And then I make her take a lie detector test and swear on a stack of Bibles. Because if there's one thing this Italian stud will not tolerate, it's a flugazi orgasm. I don't want sex with a prostitute. Let me rephrase that. I don't want to pay for sex with a prostitute. If you're running some kind of introductory offer, okay, look, prostitution isn't funny. It's sad. And yet our culture celebrates pimps. What's that about? Obama said his favorite song two years ago was Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly. Is Obama even allowed to say the word pimp? Wasn't that the deal he struck before getting to be America's first African-American president? You get to live in the White House. You get to veto some bills. You get to bomb Afghanistan. But you can never say the word pimp. When he said to pimp a butterfly, I was like, wow, isn't pimp a bad word? I used to joke about prostitution in my act until I had some daughters and suddenly prostitution stopped being funny and started being a business. But I ran out of my home. No prostitution isn't funny. It's tragic. Yet men go to strip joints and they go into the back room and it's perfectly acceptable for them to objectify women like it's harmless, like nobody's getting hurt. Maybe it is. I don't know. I can't do it. I can't go to a strip joint. I don't know how it works. I, Lord Kite Linger gave me this joke about going to a strip joint and putting a 50 in the G string and trying to make change. It never worked. But I love the joke because it's offensive to women and Jews. I just love the image of me at a strip joint trying to break a 50 off a G string. Is it funny if I sell the audience that a woman gave me the joke? It still doesn't indemnify me. Here's a joke that I did 20 years ago and it never worked. I said something along the lines that a prostitute must be great at sex because it's her job. Like I write jokes for a living, so I'm funny at parties because that's my job. So a prostitute must be amazing in bed. I'm not saying prostitution is right, but I just wish sometimes my wife made love to me like the rent was due. Never got to laugh because it's wrong. But it's funny. I know it's funny. I know you're laughing if you're alone. Is anybody getting hurt? I don't know. Probably. It trivializes sex trafficking and I don't know. Is a joke about sex trafficking any worse than all those movies where Liam Neeson can't find his daughter? He's exploiting sex trafficking. I can't defend that joke other than it makes me laugh because I'm twisted and so is everyone listening right now. It's all context. There's a time and a place for these kind of jokes. I just want to laugh. That joke about a woman making love like the rent is due. It's ugly. It taps into economic injustice, income inequality, the oppression of women. It's wrong. Here's a joke that did get a laugh, but I stopped doing it. I started doing this joke when Reagan was president and the joke is horrible. It's a horrible joke, but it used to get a big laugh. I stopped doing it. I'll tell you why in a second. I would point out how bad the economy is. Three million homeless, highest unemployment rate since the Korean War. This was like 1983, 1984. Highest unemployment rate since the Korean War, three million homeless, but at least the hookers are getting better looking. At least the hookers are getting better looking. I was much younger at the time and so was the country and it got a huge laugh. The woman I was seeing at the time told me to stop doing it because she was a prostitute. She told me to stop doing the joke. This was like early to mid-80s. She said it was a sad joke and I said, it's making the audience laugh though. She said, you do that joke, I'm not going to go out with you because it's trivializing the plight of prostitutes. So I stopped doing the joke. I don't know if we'd get a laugh now. I don't know. I'm not going to find out, but back then you could do jokes like that. This was before Reagan really had a foothold of insensitivity on our culture. This was early 80s. We were still coming off the 60s and the 70s, the kumbaya. This was like pre-politically correct. You didn't need a politically correct movement back then because we didn't have Reagan yet. The politically correct movement started around 88, 89 as a rejoinder to all the hatred that was spewing out of the jocks who felt enabled, empowered by Reagan. Reagan left office in 88 and then the politically correct movement pretty much rose up around 88, 89. Before that, in the 70s, I wasn't doing stand-up in the 70s, I can't imagine comedy being politically incorrect. It was the 60s. Everybody was still liberal. It was Reagan who unleashed all the hate and the comedy got ugly when Reagan became president. So I don't know. The hookers are getting better looking. I guess that joke worked because Reagan was president. So I think doing that joke back then was okay. I think now it could kill your career unless, of course, you're calculating enough to slip it into a podcast under the cloak of economic injustice. But that would be manipulative and I would never do that. Christ, did you hear the podcast with Gilbert? I don't think he and I said one socially redeeming sentence. I listened to it and I just start giggling and laughing hysterically. There's a time and a place for that kind of humor, 1936 Berlin. I told my kids that if something's funny and nobody's getting hurt, it's okay. But you have to know that jokes do hurt. They can't hurt. If somebody's feelings are bad, can I just laugh and have some fun? I don't drink. I don't smoke. Can I just laugh without feeling guilty? There's so much pain and suffering in this world. If being inappropriate makes me laugh, is that so wrong? Yes, of course it's wrong. That's why I laugh so hard at horrible things. And here's the weird thing. People who listen to this show know that I'm not in favor of censorship, but I am kind of picky about words. I don't like the F word. I believe people have a reason to be offended. That's why Gilbert's an artist. He says the most inappropriate things. But from his mouth, they come across as cinnamon scented breath mints made by angels. Rickles was able to get away with it. Kenneson did. It's tough. You got to know what you're doing. And I try not to go there because I suspect people think I mean it, or I worry that people might think I mean it. But here's the truth about making people laugh. If you want to kill, if you want to knock somebody to the ground and hurt them with laughter, most times, not always, but most of the time, it's got to be rough, wrong, and there has to be a taboo associated with it. Really bad jokes that are morally reprehensible create an intimate moment. It's a bonding experience. I'm going to tell you the most horrible joke in the world. I'm going to tell you the most horrible joke in the world. And if you tell anybody I said it, it'll ruin me. But I trust you so much that I know you're going to laugh and not get me in trouble. It's a way some people bond. It's why the cops on the take in Serpico wanted Al Pacino to take the cash, even though he wouldn't take the bribe. They needed to trust him. They needed to know that he was dirty. He wasn't as dirty as they were, but he was dirty. Take the cash. We know you didn't accept the bribe, but take the cash. We need you to be dirty in order to trust you. That's what a filthy dirty joke does. It has to be wrong. Otherwise, there's no trust between the person telling the joke and the person listening to it, laughing at a horrible joke, signals to the people around you that, hey, we all know we shouldn't be doing this, but it gets us off. It's porn. And we're going to keep the secret among us. That's why the Gilbert episode for me is a landmark episode. There were no complaints. I think I have an unwritten social contract with my listeners that I can have members of Congress on this show, professors, authors, feminists. I can talk about really important stuff, but it's also okay to kick back and laugh negligently because laughing negligently, it's the best. It's the best. And my kids grew up around some of the funniest people in the world, and I mean that. And we watched Family Guy in South Park because, and they were really young at the time because I didn't want to watch My Little Pony. And I remember when Joe from Family Guy, Joe was a cop who was injured on the job and he's in a wheelchair in case you don't watch Family Guy, which I think, you know, I love Family Guy. So Joe's in a wheelchair, I'm watching this with my kids. And there was an episode where he was sleep-dragging in the middle of the night. He would wake up in the middle of the night, fall out of bed, and then sleep-drag down the street. And I would laugh impulsively. My kids would look at me, and they, you know, they're under 10. And I'm kind of apologizing and saying you shouldn't laugh at that. Before they were 13, I took a couple of them to see Lisa Lampinelli. It was as raw and unfiltered as Lisa can possibly get. She drops the N-word. I timed it 20 minutes into her set. She drops the N-bomb. There are African Americans in the room. And it was, it was perfect. She says the N-word and the place just explodes. How does she get away with it? That's art. That is art. How does she get away with saying the N-word? So I took my kids to see her. People looked at me and I was walking around. I'm going, what? You're here. I have nothing to hide from my children. That's not true. But they had already seen Lisa Lampinelli. I'm Comedy Central after 11 o'clock. They had already seen it. Your honor. My kids are great. And they knew how to play me. We walked out of Lisa Lampinelli raw from laughing. And one of my kids said, well, she was funny, but she crossed the line. It's easy to do those kind of jokes. And I just turned to the kid and said, don't play me. Don't play me. You laughed. I laughed. I saw you. Don't tell me she crossed the line. She was hysterical. Now go figure it out. Go figure out what that was. I'll talk to you about it, but try to figure out what that was. There is a time and a place for that kind of stuff. And it's complicated. It's very complicated. I was the first one to say Charlie Hebdo was wrong for those jokes about Muhammad. There is a time for offensive humor. I like offensive humor when it's offensive for offensive sake. That is something that's stupidly funny. There is something funny about a dumb, racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-Semitic joke because it's stupid. And we laugh at stupidity. But you have to make sure you're laughing at the stupidity when Leslie Jones was being trolled on Twitter by Milo Yap and Appalappalus and the guys from Breitbart. It's one of the worst things I've ever seen a comedian go through. It was horrid. And Twitter, I don't even want to get into it. When I would talk about it, I would giggle because I couldn't believe the stupidity. I couldn't believe that there were a group of guys who decided that with all that's going on in the world, their life mission was to troll Leslie Jones. What they did was reprehensible, hurtful. She's an amazing person. She's much stronger than I could ever be. And nobody should have to put up with what she put up with and Twitter is to blame. But there's something that makes me giggle about some lost, ignorant, homunculus, so devoid of purpose that he would actually say to himself, oh, where'd the time go? 3 p.m. I have to go troll Leslie Jones. I mean, the consistency with which they went after her. That's just so stupid. It's funny. Probably not for Leslie. I can't change what makes me laugh. My heart is in the right place. But if you really want to make me laugh, tell me something horrible. As a nightclub performer telling jokes, I scrubbed jokes that I feel are in bad taste. I think the podcast is a lot more, I know so. I know that I tell jokes on the podcast that are much filthier, much more insensitive than the nightclub actor. Anything I would give to a show I was working on, that's being in the podcast bubble. There are no ramifications here. What did I do? I did something for the BBC with Rich Hall on Tuesday. I was in front of a live audience in London. I had a joke that I opened the Gilbert show with. It was, what was the joke? Ice, the guys from Ice, are separating mothers from their children. Do they even know how to perform abortions? I came up with that while talking to Rich Hall for his new radio show for the BBC. We both laughed and I did it because we both thought it was funny. The entire audience booed, good-naturedly. I thought, okay, I'll do that in my act. When you're in a bubble with this podcast, don't have an audience. So, there's nobody governing my sensibility. I will tend to save the most horrible things imaginable because there are no consequences. That doesn't necessarily mean this is who I am, but it is. Yes, I stopped doing that joke about hookers getting better looking. Because I wanted to impress the girl. This was back, I don't know, 83, 84 when Reagan's massive recession was in full bloom. I was just beginning to do comedy. Reagan had come into office in 81 and it was Marie-Anne Schwann at that time. Nancy Reagan was wearing these fancy gowns and telling everybody to eat cake and she was buying new china for the White House. Can you imagine this? Nancy bought new china for the White House and it was scandalous. People thought it was scandalous that the First Lady was spending all that money on china for the White House. We don't even know what the monthly budget is for the White House anymore. We couldn't care less the amount of money that gets wasted in the White House. Yeah, Reagan came in and it was all about tax cuts for the rich. I remember thinking this is wrong. It's immoral and God is going to rain down a plague of frogs on America for buying into Reagan's greed. And sure enough, we had this massive recession due to Reagan's tax cuts. Massive, worst recession since the Korean War. And I remember thinking, naive me, thinking, well, we've learned our lesson. It's time to repent. We're going to get rid of Reagan, but we didn't repent because television, because of the corporatization of our democracy, our media, Reagan was allowed to thrive. The Democrats and the Republicans, especially the Republicans, were standing on the fairness doctrine's breathing tube, letting it die a slow death. They let the fairness doctrine die. That meant radio and television, local radio and local television could promulgate right wing claptrap without having to present an opposing viewpoint. It gave rise to people like Sean Hannity. So while the country never really recovered from that massive recession, jobs never came back. Unions were destroyed. Homelessness grew. The rich got richer. The middle class got middle classer and the budget deficit grew by leaps and bounds because the fairness doctrine died. A myth grew, grew on AM radio on local television. That was mourning in America. But it was a hoax. The media had been hijacked by mergers and acquisition hucksters serving Wall Street and servicing debt. And Americans were tricked into no longer training our eyes on the poor, on the weakest among us. Instead, we became enthralled by lifestyles of the rich and famous. Corporate chieftains were what kept our country going, we were told. Inherited wealth was divine providence. And the rich and powerful got there not through accident of birth, but because they deserved it. And don't be naive. I remember this, somebody said to me, don't be naive. Mick Jagger went to the London School of Economics. It's all about business. It's all about money, falcon crest, dynasty, Dallas, different strokes. It all celebrated the rich. And all of us on the bottom were looking up while looking down at ourselves for not having any money. We became convinced it was our fault that we were broke because certainly in America, anything is possible. And then just when we felt we were being left out, suddenly we were told not to feel bad. Sure, the jobs are going overseas and there's no real work for you, but you can be just like the richest one percent. Here, have some cheap money. Have a credit card. You don't need a job if you have a credit card. Here's a credit card. Now you're free to have the same exact aspirations as the people who actually do have money. Go take the credit card and have what the rich have because this is America and it's a level playing field. Here's a credit card. Here's a $50,000 line of credit. That means you now have 50 grand to spend on whatever you want, just like Trump's kids. And credit cards must be okay because the people from American Express are so friendly. And is that former Senator Sam Irwin, the folksy country lawyer with the yo-yo eyebrows whose Watergate hearings helped bring down Nixon? Do you know me? That was the ad. Do you know me? That was the advertising campaign. I'm Sam Irwin. And he carried his American Express card because people didn't know him, but when he had his American Express card, they did know him. And he was an honest man. He brought down Nixon. And now he was endorsing a credit card. So credit cards must be good and credit must be a good idea because America is good and there's equal justice and opportunity. So I'll get a student loan. I'll get a credit card. And I'll spend on that credit card because they're telling me it's good for the economy. It's good for America. The patriotic thing to do is to consume because America is the greatest wealth-creating machine in the history of civilization. And a credit card couldn't possibly lock me into an endless cycle of debt. The Reagan's just sold us this horseshit. Meanwhile telling us to control our impulses, say no to drugs, but say yes to everything being sold to you, even though you can't afford it. Say no to drugs, the 60s are over and materialism is good. Materialism is good. Meanwhile homelessness under Reagan increased, jobs disappeared, unions got weaker, the rich got richer, the American flag got bigger, and religion got louder. And the military was everywhere because when you're busy transferring wealth from the middle class up to the richest one percent, and that's what Reagan's tax cuts did, he didn't balance the budget. He increased the debt. The Reagan tax cuts took jobs and money away from hard-working ordinary Americans. They transferred the jobs overseas and the profits were transferred to people who already had more money than they knew what to do with. So when you're doing that, you better hide behind the Bible. You better hide behind the flag. You better have a war. You better invade Granada. You better talk about our military because you do not want the American people finding out what you're doing to them. You got to instill faith and fear and patriotism. If you were alive back in the 80s and most of my listeners weren't, you didn't know what was going on. It was very subtle because the media back then was corporately owned, but it was getting more corporately owned than we realized. And the Democrats were turning away from their roots. They were mad at George McGovern. They were mad at Hubert Humphrey. They were mad at Walter Mondale. They were mad at the populists. The Democrats were mad at the populists who believed that the Democratic Party should be the party of labor, which it should be. We should have a labor party in this country the same way the United Kingdom sort of kind of has a labor party. By the late 80s Americans were gorging on the Reagan myth. We started to believe that the only way for Democrats to win a national election was to make peace with Wall Street, placate the beast, placate Wall Street, placate corporations, which was hell bent on destroying unions, jobs. So the Democratic Party instead of defending the working people, the Democratic Party started to behave like the working people. The Democratic Party started to behave like Reagan Democrats. Those were Democrats who ended up becoming Republicans. Those aren't Democrats who liked Reagan but still voted Democrat. Democrats became Reagan Democrats in order to win back the Reagan Democrats who went and voted for Reagan. They became Reagan because they were scared. So they stopped defending the working people. Instead of being the advocate of the poor and the disenfranchised, the Democratic Party became frightened, felt abused, isolated, and so it identified with the suppressor Wall Street. The Democrats, for the first time, took blacks and unions for granted because where else are blacks and unions going to go? The Democrats took the money from Wall Street because where else was the Democratic Party going to go to get money? The economy was changing. The money was in Wall Street. Democrats needed the money to compete against the GOP myth machine, which was being funded by Wall Street, which was being funded by the corporations. 92 came around. Bill and Hillary were dialing for the same dollars George Bush was dialing for. They beat Bush. They rode the wave of Reaganomics into the White House. That's how Bill and Hillary beat Bush in 92. And as Democrats, we bought into the Bill and Hillary myth because they won, even though they abandoned our party's core principles. We were proud that after eight years of Reagan, four years of George Herbert Walker Bush, there was finally a Democrat who knew how to win. It felt good to have a Democrat in the Oval Office because it feels good to win. But we weren't winning because we were now Republicans. Clinton was a Republican, which is why under his administration they overturned Glass-Steagall. That was the New Deal bulwark against banks wrecking our economy. Clinton deregulated the economy. He leveled a wrecking ball against welfare because he needed to win. His sick, twisted, deviant advisor Dick Morris was sneaking into the Oval Office to advise him. Morris told him to triangulate. He needed to become a mutant, someone who talked like a Democrat but acted like a Reagan conservative, which is why Ralph Nader ran in 2000 because Al Gore was just going to be more of the same and history has borne that out. In 2000, the Democrats were never going to rock the Wall Street boat. Al Gore never had it in him. And after he lost the election, after he lost the electoral college, we all know he won the popular vote, he went off and sat on corporate boards. He made hundreds of millions of dollars helping Apple. He started current TV where I worked. That was supposed to be the liberal antidote to Fox News. But when Al Gore had an opportunity to sell out, like Ariana Huffington, when he had the opportunity to pocket somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 million, he sold it to Al Jazeera and he walked away and he kept the money. Yeah, he's big on climate change and he won that Oscar for an inconvenient truth and he's right. And he's been an early Cassandra when it comes to climate change. Maybe if Al Gore dedicated more time to climate change and less time trying to pocket hundreds of millions of dollars off current off Apple, off all the financial favors owed to him for his decades of public service, maybe if he made climate change his real life purpose, then we'd be further along in the reduction of greenhouse gases. But Al Gore, like Bill Clinton, are neoliberal Wall Street stooges who think the engine of human potential is the corporatization of everything, everything from government to charity to medical care and education. Because Al Gore and Bill Clinton can't understand anything, anything other than their own ambition, greed, and narcissism. They are constitutionally incapable of seeing the good in something that doesn't turn a profit. Bill Clinton is a rapist and Hillary defended her rapist husband and slimed his accusers. And Al Gore was more of a decent man. That's why he didn't want Clinton to campaign for him in 2000. People mock him. They say that was a mistake. I believe it was one of the few signs of decency Gore displayed that year. I believe he actually put aside political expediency just to say, I don't want to be associated with the sociopath Bill Clinton and his enabling wife. But Al Gore still buys into the lie that neoliberal corporatism can save the world because he couldn't possibly understand that what really motivates people, but really motivates us is something very simple. It's to take care of one another. But how could he understand that? He grew up in Washington. His father was a senator. Al Gore lived in a hotel in Washington like Eloise. Then he went to Harvard. He went off to Vietnam not as a participant, but as a reporter because Al Gore was the quintessential insider. He was born on the inside, but when I came to the human condition, he would always be on the outside looking in. He was a reporter in Vietnam. He observed, but when the battle got too tough, he sought cover and let other men fight so he could make it home in one piece and tell their story. Bill Clinton was born to poverty, but he was also born with great intelligence and a pathological need to excel, which he did. And even though he will always have both his feet stuck in the working class mud of despair, he will always have his back turned away from where he came from because he believes that America is a meritocracy and that he deserves to be where he is because he worked hard and took advantage of his luck. But Bill Clinton, you succeeded because just like Trump, you're lucky. You have flashes of brilliance. But most importantly, you lack the shame gene. You will do anything to get to the top. Bill Clinton is not the beneficiary of a meritocracy. You didn't get to where you are through excellence. If excellence was the propellant that got you to where you're supposed to be, then Hillary would have been president and not you. Bill Clinton, like Trump, he got where he is because unlike normal humans, Bill Clinton was willing to do and say whatever it takes to get what you want. And the same sort of kind of goes for Hillary. I know we like Hillary. We should have elected Bernie. I know we needed a woman in the Oval Office. That would have been a nice cosmetic change. I don't mean to be glib. It would have been hopeful for women. I don't understand what it means for women to have a woman in the Oval Office. I don't. I'm not so sure Hillary was that great a friend to women, especially the way she punished her husband's victims. Hillary would have made a great president, not because of who she is, but because of who we are becoming. The times would have dictated that she become great because we are awake. And I'm actually optimistic. I needed a breather from Trump. You know that last week. I needed Gilbert. I needed to laugh. And while I was laughing, you guys defeated Paul Ryan's healthcare bill. You did that. Your constant vigilance, your faxes, your showing up at town hall meetings, your anger, your rage was channeled at the right people. You are the continuation of what all began in 2011 with Occupy Wall Street. I know like the proverbial lobster that Al Gore talks about, you don't feel the water's heat. You're not aware that we're on the cusp of a massive progressive wave that began with Occupy Wall Street. But we are. And Occupy Wall Street is not a joke. As I've been saying throughout the show, America is a nation of wrecking balls. Revolutions within revolutions, constant change. We are countries within countries, parties within parties. This is a nation of swirling chaos. And that's why we have stability in Washington because with all this chaos, there's no palpable mandate for change yet. Yet. Nobody really wants the kind of change that's necessary yet, but it's happening. What I'm saying so far is nobody wants to get rid of Obamacare. They want to improve it. And that's what we got. And that proves that our system is working. I'm an optimist. The system is responding not to the majority, but to the people who want it the most. That's how America works. We're not a democracy. We're a republic. And in a republic, the squeaky wheel gets the oil depletion allowance. In a republic, you don't need to get a majority. You just need to be louder and more civic minded than the other guy, than the people on the other team. And our side last week, we proved that. That's how we saved Obamacare. So I'm an optimist. Yes. Things are bad and things are always going to be bad and things are always going to be good. We're a surveillance state. There are people listening to me right now. I just know that. The police oppress and kill black people. There are undocumented workers rounded up and separated from their families. There are people of color forced into a cycle of poverty by police officers pulling them over for a busted tail light and then fining them, sending them to prison for not being able to pay a traffic fine, which is against the Constitution. We have turned our jails into debtor's prisons, which is against the law. And we are turning our prisoners into workers who are in 50 cents an hour. That is against the law. We are doing horrible, horrible things, but we are also capable and right now doing wonderful, wonderful things like saving Obamacare and telling Paul Ryan to take his healthcare bill and shove it where the sun don't shine. And I don't mean Seattle. That is what America is. We're a chaotic mess of peoples within people, religions within religions, countries within countries and Washington DC just sits there waiting for a mandate, a mandate that just hasn't come to them because people of color aren't allowed to vote. Yes, that's true, but the people who can vote aren't voting. They aren't making their voices loud enough because the mandate in the end is how loud you're willing to scream, do your job, do your job. So the Republicans won in November, but we screamed, do your job. And they got the message. They did their job, sort of. They didn't vote for a lousy healthcare bill. The system, it's horrible, but it works when you work it, when you learn it and work it. Work within the system. This is what I tell my kids. It's not fair, it's exhausting, but work the system. The system in Washington, it's been set up to resemble the matriarch and a big Irish Catholic family with 12 kids, 40 grandkids, and it's Thanksgiving. And there are 100 people showing up and some are gay, black, Jewish, disabled, drunk, and we're all related and we're all ignoring someone because it's loud and everyone can look around and find one person to disapprove of for whatever reason, but it's Thanksgiving and it's family and it's hard to focus. Someone is pregnant, someone is sick. It's horrible. It's fantastic because you're alive and everybody accepts that life is messy and all you want to do is get through the day and not kill anyone. That's what Washington DC is. Washington DC is the matriarch in a messy big Irish family and the matriarch in a messy Irish family says, let me know if it's a health emergency, otherwise it's not important. And we had a health emergency last week and we took care of it. Let me know if it's a real financial crisis, otherwise don't bother me. Let me know if all of you have decided we need to paint that fence and if all of you think it's a good idea and you can come up with the money, we'll paint the fence, otherwise leave me alone. That's the system. That's what America is. America, Washington, that's what Washington DC is. It's a big, sloppy Irish Catholic family with lots of people where perfect isn't just the enemy of good. Perfect doesn't exist. You accept life warts and all and you only tackle the weighty issues when there's consensus. Think Tip O'Neill. That's what Washington DC is. It is a big, huge, sloppy Irish Catholic family and perfect doesn't exist because there's no such thing as perfect. It's a myth. So I get why Washington doesn't do anything because the GOP have shut it down. Washington doesn't do anything except for protecting wealthy donors. I hate the Republicans, but it is an ideology. Part of governing. It is a legitimate political ideology. Part of governing is not touching anything. It's not what I want, but that is a legitimate political belief. First, do no harm. I'm a progressive. I'm a big liberal Democrat elitist. I believe the bureaucrats in DC in the end and I'm probably wrong. I believe they know what's best for the people living in Alabama because I grew up during the civil rights movement and I saw how Alabama treated black people. I still believe citizens need proper parenting from wise elder statesmen. The word Senate comes from the Latin root, old. The Roman Senate was for the older men to guide the Republic. Senate comes from the same root as senile, old. We can learn a lot from old people. We have to. I'm a big government progressive who would rather see the government waste tax dollars, which it doesn't. That's a myth. The Barack Obama stimulus plan was more than a trillion dollars when all was said and done. We were told it came in under a trillion, but when you added it all up, it was way more than a trillion and there was no fraud. Yeah. No fraud. None. It doesn't exist. Just like voter fraud. There's no such thing as voter fraud and there was no fraud when it came to Obama's stimulus bill. Cylindra went belly up, you know, the solar panel company. Yeah, Obama picked a loser, but there was no fraud. There was no waste. Vice President Joe Biden was in charge of making sure there was no waste and you can be sure the House Oversight Committee, Darrell Issa, the GOP, they wanted to find some waste, but they couldn't. And let's say there is a little waste in the federal government. Government waste is Keynesian. It spreads money into the economy. That's the theory. There's actually a theory that you can reboot an economy just by paying people to dig holes and then refill them. That's Keynes came up with that theory, pay people, have the government, pay people to dig holes. So yeah, waste, government waste is bad. It doesn't create long-term growth, but it jump starts the multiplier effect of government spending. One dollar given to someone who needs it, somebody in the middle class, is eventually going to turn into $100 because that dollar gets spread around it and it becomes an asset. It gets turned into a bond and then somebody else grabs the dollar and it becomes a loan and then an IOU and they purchase stock with it. That's the multiplier effect. One dollar that the government pumps into the economy, if it goes to the middle class, that one dollar becomes $100 in assets because the middle class spends it. That dollar moves from hand to hand and when it moves from hand to hand, it increases in value. That's the multiplier effect. I have a dollar. I put it in the bank. I still have that dollar. The bank takes that dollar that still belongs to me and they lend it. Now the bank has that same dollar. So two people now have that one dollar and it goes on and on and on. When you give money to the middle class, not tax cuts to the people who don't need it, the richest one percent. Corporate waste is far more prodigious than government waste and corporate waste does nothing for the economy. It just gets skimmed off. It just gets hoarded by the CEOs and their cronies and then parked into offshore accounts where they don't pay taxes. Anybody who has ever worked for a corporation knows how profligate their spending is, how wasteful it is, how wrong-handed it is. A corporation will waste billions on anything. Anything except pay a livable wage for its below the line employees. A corporation, unlike government, is not wedded to any morality other than showing the potential for profits. That's the morality of a corporation. It must show the potential for profits, not actual profits, a potential for profits. A stock price doesn't reflect actual profits. It only reflects the potential for profits and potential is illusory. CEOs and boards of directors legally cook the books, give themselves these amazing salaries, all in the service of creating the illusion that the company, the corporation, has future prospects for growth. What's happened on Wall Street now is companies used to pay dividends. They really don't anymore. Companies don't give money back to the investors because those profits that used to go to the investors as dividends, those profits are used to buy back more stock. Because buying back more stock, taking stock, this is when the company buys up the stock and then retires it, it disappears. That creates fewer shares and fewer shares automatically forces the share price up because it's supply and demand. I don't know if this is confusing or not to young people, so I apologize, but it's really important and you need to understand the fraud that is corporate America, that is Wall Street. The money Wall Street makes is used to buy up shares and to retire those shares. They disappear and they create this false demand for stock in a company by buying up shares. They're not sharing profits with the investors or the employees, they use the profits to buy back more stock, retire it to create fewer investors. They do that because the people in charge are depending on something called stock options, which they eventually cash out when they retire. They use the profits, the CEOs use the profits of the company they're running to buy back more stock, which increases the price of those stocks in the short term, but it doesn't grow the company. It doesn't go towards research and development. It goes towards artificially increasing the price of the stock. You buy stock, the supply diminishes, price of the stock goes up. That is far more wasteful, far more deceptive than anything our government could ever do with our treasury. It's one of the reasons we're in a constant cycle of boom and bust. It's why there are no longer any stable blue chip companies. This isn't creative destruction, it's just destruction. Take a company that's stable, hire a greedy CEO whose entire fortune will be predicated on his ability to exercise stock options in the company when he's ready to cash out. So he wants those stock options to be higher. His entire motivation is to drive up the share price of the company's stock as quickly as possible, not return the profits in way of dividends, not give raises to the employees. He wants the share price to go up so he can exercise his options and cash out. And he does that not through innovation, not through research and development. He does it by shipping jobs overseas, selling off assets, not paying taxes by parking cash in the Cayman Islands and not repatriating it. He creates a shortage of the stock by buying more of it, which means the price goes up. And then he or she exercises his or her stock options and he quits the company and then the stock plummets and it starts all over again. How is that better than government? How is that not wasteful? So like I said, I believe in good government. And I also believe government is only as good as the governed and that government is the Irish matriarch, the mother of a big sloppy Irish Catholic family. We have to come together and convince grandma that the fence needs painting and we're going to pay for it. Otherwise, she's not interested. She's just going to read. And I believe we're on the cusp of a massive progressive wave, a wave the Republicans simply can't believe hasn't already washed them away. Republicans have been abusing us since 1980 and they were convinced. I'm convinced that they're convinced that they always act quickly because they know they better do it quickly because eventually we're going to wake up and take it all back. They're terrified. They know more about our potential than we do. They're terrified of the 99 percent. They cannot believe we haven't taken back what's rightfully ours. That's why they move so quickly. They keep thinking they're about to be found out while they've been found out. Now it's unquestionable. Many of us rose in 2011. Occupy Wall Street. Occupy Wall Street is not a joke. It is not a joke. It was a very successful movement unlike anything we've ever seen because there was no leader, no leader. The GOP has been hanging in there because they're good at dividing the 99 percent. They're good at frightening us. The Democrats, which are part of the 1 percent part of the problem, they practice identity politics and identity politics just doesn't cut it anymore and the 99 percent are catching on. We are the 99 percent and that's not a joke and we have to rise up legally and take back what belongs to us and that's our government. We're the 99 percent. I didn't make that up. That's brilliant. It's terrifying. Well, I believe we're the 99 percent. I believe that's what unites us. I'm not going to walk completely away from identity politics. I made a mistake years ago and so did Bernie Sanders. I made a mistake when I, a white heterosexual male, said that people needed to stop talking about being black, Jewish, women, gay, etc. What really matters is economic inequality. That's what unites us and we need to be united and I still believe that because I'm a white heterosexual male. But I've also learned that there are issues that are equally important, that are equal to, that are just as important as economic inequality and that if all you do is try to solve economic inequality, then you're really a Clinton neoliberal who thinks the solution to all our ills is spreading corporate wealth to as many people as possible. There is something more important than economic inequality and that's dignity, respect. That's why the Democrats who are in the pocket of Wall Street, who are run by the richest one percent, that's why Democrats turn off so many voters. Too many neoliberal limizing Democrats, loud outspoken Hollywood Wall Street liberals, they don't factor in human dignity. They're big on the issues, they're right on the issues, abortion, gay marriage, but Lena Dunham launches a book tour with struggling artists but forgets to pay them. John Stuart fights the Writers Guild. That's about dignity. That's more than economic inequality. That's about dignity. The black man pulled over when he's just trying to get home from Disneyland with his kids in the back seat sound asleep. The black man pulled over and his kids wake up to see a cop handcuffing him for no reason. That's not about economic inequality, it's about dignity. And lack of dignity is the root often in economic inequality. I believe we're the 99 percent. I believe we need good jobs. But what good is forcing corporations to hire women, forcing them not to discriminate against gays. What good is it if those same corporations refuse to offer dignity? So while I believe in the 99 percent, while I believe that economic inequality is the issue of our time, that universal health insurance will solve all our domestic problems and that a military draft will solve all our foreign policy problems, I believe we as Democrats also have to approach everything from the standpoint of human dignity. Are we respecting another person's dignity? Are we respecting another nation's dignity? As Tony Soprano said, if you want respect, you have to give respect. When our side shows up to the town hall meetings demanding the sanctity of Obamacare, we're just not demanding health care. We're demanding human dignity. And those Republican lawmakers for the first time in their careers this past month, they got a taste of what it's like not to be treated with dignity. They know what it's like to be treated with dignity. That's why they're Republicans. They're beaten. But up until this year, they were in a bubble. You scared them. You treated these Republican lawmakers with the same exact dignity they afforded you. Do your job. Do your job. You work for us. Do your job. Otherwise you're fired. Do your job. And if we can't fire you, we're going to make your job impossible to perform. So do your job and do it right. You don't deserve dignity. There are a thousand excuses for Paul Ryan's health care bill failing. But the real excuse, and you're not going to want to hear this because it means we all have to get back to work. It means I have to get back to work. Less Gilbert Gottfried and more Howard Zinn. Paul Ryan's health care bill failed. And Obamacare is only temporarily the law of the land because I'm sorry to say this again. The system works. But the system only works when we work, when it's jump started. Or the system works when you grind the gears to a halt like you did with Paul Ryan's health care bill. The system works when it's working. The system works when we get it to stop working. It depends on what you want. And in order for the system to work, we have to work the system. The system worked last week because despite everything, we still are free to throw ourselves on the gears of that system and grind it to a halt no matter how much it hurts. As I said earlier, real progress, real creation starts with destruction. Roosevelt destroyed what came before him. He rebuilt our economy and so doing created something that this country never had before, a vibrant, massive middle class. Reagan started with destruction. He came in and destroyed our government and he rebuilt the economy in his own image. He destroyed the middle class. He made the rich, richer, the poor, poorer and the frightened terrified. That's how it works. That's how governing works. That's how love works. That's how art works. You have to destroy what came before you and rebuild it in your image, in your vision. Rebuild it with your image, with your vision. So we're not even close to a real victory lap. All we did last week was destroy the GOP plan, but that was easy because there was no political will. There was no plan. All the Republicans know how to do is destroy. They had no plan to rebuild. They just want to destroy Washington and then turn the scrap metal over the Koch brothers, to the Walton family, to the 40 richest families in the world, and let these richest families, let the richest 1%, take the dust of our great democracy and fashion it into more money for themselves. There is no political will for that. The people don't want that. Blocking Ryan's health care bill and saving Obamacare, that should have been easier. That should not have even been in question. We weren't working hard enough. So while we deserve a pat on the back, we need to get to work. What do you want, Democrats? What do you want? What do you want? Well, I want dignity. I want justice. I want economic justice. But I'll tell you what I really, really, really want. And that's the spice girl in me talking. I'll tell you what I really want. Universal health insurance, Medicare for all. Are you with me? Because now is the time to run the tables and demand it. Obamacare isn't good enough. And we can't wait for the midterms. We need to plant the seed right now. Medicare for all. It is owed to us after the humiliations and the indignities we have suffered to prop up the richest 1%. We deserve Medicare for all. Bill Crystal, he's the monstrosity who created PNAC, which led us into the war against Iraq. Well, before Bill Crystal killed all those Iraqis, his first couple of million people he killed were back in 1994 when he wrote a memo urging, I think it was Bob Dole. I'm pretty sure he was Bob Dole. He urged Bob Dole to do this. He urged Bob Dole, who was a Republican, I believe he was the Senate Majority Leader at the time. I'm pretty sure. He urged Bob Dole to kill Hillary care because he said once Americans get a taste of universal health insurance, like they did with Medicare or Social Security, they will never let it go. He warned Hillary care would create a permanent Democratic majority. And he was right. He's right. People want universal health insurance. They wanted Hillary care, which wasn't universal health insurance, but it was a step in the right direction. Basically used Kaiser Permanente as the template upon which all health care would be delivered. But the GOP listened to evil Bill Crystal's advice. They put party above country and they killed Hillary care along with millions of Americans. Millions of Americans died because the GOP listened to Bill Crystal and they manipulated us with Harry and Louise commercials and they tricked and conjoaled and deceived and convinced the media that the political will wasn't there for Hillary care. The political will just wasn't there to give each child, each American, what every other citizen in the industrialized world takes for granted, universal health care. Obamacare, it's a miracle. And somehow through budget reconciliation, Barack Obama passed Obamacare and that's our foot in the door. We needed a public option because it would have put the insurance companies eventually out of business because the insurance companies could never compete with government, not because government is too powerful. It's because government is moral when it comes to health care. Government is efficient. Despite all the grumblings about Medicare social security and the VA, American citizens wouldn't trade a government bureaucrat with a corporate apparatchik in a second because we know, we've sat on hold for two hours. We know how corporations treat us. We know how the health care industry treats us. We know that the health care industry's sole purpose is to delay, delay, delay and make you fill out more paperwork because the more they delay, the more likely you are to give up and save the health insurance company thousands upon thousands of dollars by dying. They want you dead because corporations are not moral. Their only obligation is the bottom line and it's not even the bottom line. They don't care about the bottom line. These corporations are run by two or three stakeholders, CEOs, shareholders who want what's coming to them. They're stock options. They want what's coming to them no matter whether or not the company or the customers end up dead. Government is moral. Government spends our money and knows it's spending our money and except for the Pentagon and the Fed, which nobody can audit, we know where the rest of that money is going. Republicans can't govern. They don't want to govern. They only want to destroy and create one thing from their destruction, more wealth for the 40 richest families in the world. We're Democrats. We are the builders, the contractors. We're the working class. We roll up our sleeves and rebuild. We look at a home that's falling apart and say, let's fix this or let's destroy it and create a new one. Obamacare, we can fix it. It's not perfect, but if you listen to Bernie Sanders, if you listen to Hillary on the campaign trail, you would know that with good intentions, putting country before party, Obamacare can evolve into Medicare for all or there can be a public option. Obama wanted to get rid of the health insurance industry, but they were so deeply entrenched on K Street, they still are. It was impossible to get rid of the health care industry. Health insurance, health care, the health care insurance game is one-sixth of our gross domestic product. One-sixth of our gross domestic product is health insurance. That's just not gross. It's immoral. So there was no way they, they, one-sixth of our economy, was going to let him, Obama, shut them down. They weren't going to allow the government to, to replace health insurance. That would have been the moral thing to do. More than that, more than the moral thing to do, universal health insurance is good business. If we had universal health insurance, it would unleash the animal spirits. It would be great for our economy. That one-sixth of our economy that is health insurance, health care, it would be replaced by the greatest human ingenuity ever seen on this planet. Imagine universal health insurance. Imagine Medicare for all. Imagine not being enslaved by your boss. Imagine not being enslaved by your boss. And you are enslaved by your boss because your boss currently holds the keys to your employer-based health insurance. Imagine if you could pursue your dreams without worrying about whether or not your wife and kids or you are going to lose your health care. You would have dignity. Your boss could lose you. He would have to treat you properly because he could no longer hold your life in his rapacious hands. Universal health insurance, Medicare for all, dignity, peace, calm, free from worry about how you're going to pay for your child's operation, free from the fear of bankruptcy if your daughter contracts meningitis. That's not some utopian pipe dream. That's Great Britain. That's France, Holland, Germany, Japan, Israel. Ask the Canadians. Ask the French. Ask Great Britain about America. The first thing they will say after what's up with all those guns. The first thing they will say after asking us about our guns is, are you kidding me with health insurance? But we have an uninformed electorate that buys into the lie that we don't want the Canadian health care system. We do. We do. Talk to a Canadian. Talk to a Brit. The closest the Brits have to a national religion is their universal health insurance. I'm not making that up. That's what they say. The closest we have to a national religion is universal health insurance. Yeah, it's flawed. But don't think for one second the Brits, the Canadians, the French, the Germans would replace their system with ours. Don't think for one second that any right-minded individual would trust their child's health to a corporation. Who do you really want making decisions about your child's health? A corporation or the government? I'll take the government because corporations don't answer to the customers. They don't answer to the employees. They don't answer to the stockholders. They trick the customers. They cheat the customers. They don't answer to the stockholders. They trick the stockholders. They cook the books and buy back stocks to artificially drive up share price. So the CEO and a couple of his totes can cash in their options and walk away with hundreds of millions of dollars. Corporations, health care corporations, rob sick people of their dignity because once you lose your dignity, it's easier to part with your money because you become convinced once you lose your dignity that you no longer deserve your money or to live. President Obama knew Obamacare wasn't perfect, but he knew firsthand how evil health insurance companies were. He talked about watching his mother die from cancer and instead of getting to spend those last few moments with the woman he loved, his mother, he was forced to sit on the phone with insurance companies fighting them to pay for her treatment. That's how we, if you're listening overseas, that's what we as Americans do. We don't get to spend time with our dying loved ones. We're on the phone with insurance companies. Health insurance companies are in the business of murdering Americans for profit. I'm not sure you heard that, so let me repeat that. Health insurance companies in America are in the business of murdering us for profit, just like Raytheon murders foreigners for profit. Health insurance companies murder Americans for profit. It's the banality of evil as Hannah Arendt talks about. If a soldier can sit in a barn in Nevada and fly a drone over an Afghani wedding party, press a button and kill innocent civilians in order to take out an alleged al-Qaeda operative, that American soldier can do that with a clear conscience. Utterly convinced he's keeping us safe. How hard is it to convince someone from Etna, Blue Cross, Humana, to get on the phone with the relative of a dying cancer patient and deny them the medicine that their mother or father needs to keep them alive, or the medicine they need to relieve the pain? Those health insurance apparatchiks, those bureaucrats can do it. They can press a button and kill somebody, because American workers have been so beaten down since Reagan took office that we've lost all economic hope. Many of us fear for our lives. 99 percent of Americans have no financial security. There are three or four paychecks away from bankruptcy. There are one catastrophic illness away from bankruptcy that's slowly changing with Obamacare, but it would end with universal health insurance. We cannot continue to let people who work in the healthcare industry, we cannot continue to continue to allow them to kill us because they've been promised a Christmas bonus. We are a sick and dying nation, so call your congressman, fax them, demand Medicare for all. This country is sick. We are mentally ill. Only a mentally ill nation could do this to itself. Maybe on a subconscious level, we're killing ourselves because we think it's karma for some of the bad that we've done overseas, certain unjust wars. I don't know. I just know we're killing ourselves. We are. Our healthcare system is killing us. We're killing ourselves with what we eat, what we consume, what we buy. We are killing ourselves by buying, consuming, and eating up the Republican lie that government is bad and corporations are good. That's why we're fat, stupid, and getting killed by health insurance companies. That's why we need a strong government to protect our dignity from the soulless. Let's be clear here, I do mean soulless greed of corporations. Did you ever need the Supreme Court to convince people that you're a human being? Well, Citizens United ruled that corporations are human beings, but they're not. They're not human beings. They're soulless golems. The people who work at Humana, Etna, and Blue Shield will tell you, oh, healthcare is very complicated. You're just naive. No, we're no longer naive. You're just a golem who puts money ahead of dignity. You have no idea how to create wealth. You only know how to destroy it and then seize it. You don't know how to make love. You couldn't find a clitoris with the National Geographic's top cartographer working as your speedlunker. All you know how to do is break things and kill. That's the GOP. They broke Iraq. They broke our economy. They broke Veterans Affairs. They literally broke the bank by repeating the same old lie that you can balance a budget by cutting taxes. It's not true. There's no factual science, no factual economic science to back the idea that tax cuts for the richest 1% create jobs and balance the budget. But Republicans have to repeat the slide because it puts money into the pockets of the richest 1% and that's who they work for. There's not one single piece of credible evidence that climate change is caused by anything other than greenhouse gases, but the GOP will repeat that lie over and over because they work for ExxonMobil. There's not a single piece of evidence that voter fraud has ever taken place, but the Republicans continue to repeat that lie because that lie justifies their state by state crusade to deny people of color, people who are poor from exercising their right to vote. The biggest lie that the GOP tells is that they believe in America, that they believe in democracy, that they believe the American people are smart enough to make the right decisions. Republicans don't believe in democracy. They don't believe the American people are smart or they don't want to believe the American people are smart because a smart American people terrifies them. They don't want you to vote. If they did, they would promote universal suffrage, but the GOP knows that if the American people could vote, they couldn't possibly remain the party of ExxonMobil, the party of lies, climate change deniers, the party that supports health insurance companies over the lives of citizens, the party that favors tax cuts for the rich and the end of food stamps and unemployment insurance and welfare for those of us who are struggling. The only way the GOP can continue to do what they're doing is by keeping us from voting. As long as corporations control radio in America and television and soon our public schools and our colleges, we will keep getting dumber and dumber. We will continue to lose our ability to think critically, which we need for a strong and vibrant government and democracy. Government is the solution. The 10 most dangerous words in the English language are, hi, I'm from corporate America and I'm here to help you. And until Americans start getting their education and their news from somebody other than corporate-owned media, we will continue to believe the really big lies and it's the really big lies that kill us. The big lie that government is inefficient, that corporations can spend money better than the government can, that tax cuts stimulate the economy, that government spending on infrastructure is a waste, that drilling for oil will create energy independence and cheaper gas, that climate change is a hoax, that crime is going up, murder rate is going up, the police are under siege. We need more prisons, but we need those prisons to be run by corporations because the profit motive is the real engine of morality. The profit motive, the profit motive. I like money. You can do a lot of good with money. You can make life worth living with money. You can make other people's lives worth living with money. You can keep people alive with money. And money is a pretty good yardstick when time has rendered all the other things a yardstick measures too depressing to measure. Money is a nice thing to measure. Some other things as you get older, you stop measuring. But the idea that the profit motive, the idea that it's good to unleash animal spirits with the profit motive, that it's good when we all compete to make more money because competition is good. It's moral. That is the complete opposite of what it means to be human. I don't clamor for the animal spirits because I'm a human and humans are better than animals. We can control our impulses. We're humans. We think about the greater good. We have souls. We can find the clitoris. We want to take care of each other. We have souls. I believe animals have souls. I'm a vegan. I'm a vegetarian. Vegan want to be. I believe animals have souls. I'm convinced all my dogs had souls. Republicans, they eat meat because they don't believe animals have souls. They don't believe animals have souls. So why would they want animal spirits? Why would Republicans want to unleash the animal spirits as though that's a good thing? It's soulless. And in the end, it's bad business because greed is bad business. It doesn't get you money. You can't make money just being greedy. Karl Marx warned that capitalism left to its own devices will eventually implode. It will fall into itself. That happened a long time ago. This isn't capitalism. This isn't the free market. This is corporations using the government to control the market. This isn't crony capitalism. It's feudalism. It's feudalism packaged in a thin wrapping cloth with freedom written all over it. Trump, Hillary, they're corporatists. Trump employs the language of populism to further the agenda of the corporatists. It's become apparent. We all knew it. But now his voters are finding out because Donald Trump treats the voter just like a customer. And that's what fascism is. Treat the voter not as a citizen but as a customer. Be a corporate huckster. And fascism always fails because they never get repeat business. In the end, the customer realizes they're being cheated. And soon, the corporate huckster is hanging upside down with piano wire around his feet. This is an opportunity. This is an opportunity right now. Don't wait for the midterms. This is an opportunity right now for Medicare for all, for universal health insurance. Trump supporters, Republicans are weak now. They know the Republicans who voted for Trump know they were sold to Fugazi. They're now realizing that Trump never had a plan to replace Obamacare. They know he's going to rewrite the tax code to benefit his friends. So now it's time for a peaceful, legal revolution, the kind of revolution that's built into our system. A revolution inside the Democratic Party. Right now, it's time for Democrats to start feeding on each other. It's time to have a vicious debate. It's time to clean house and get rid of the Schumers, the Pelosi's, the Clinton's and the corporatists, and the neoliberals. It's time to become the party of labor, the party of the working family. It is time to stop taking money from Wall Street. It is time for the Democratic Party to represent unions, minorities, children, old people, undocumented immigrants who don't vote. We need to be the party who understands that there is more to life than money, more to life than stock options. That the only way to fix this economy and create economic equality is to focus on human dignity, to measure the economy with yardsticks other than growth. We need to be the party that is against jobs that are soul crushing, jobs where nobody cares about our dignity, our time, our family and our health. That's who the Democrats need to be. And we're not going to become that party if we continue to take money from Wall Street, from corporations. The engine of social change is not profit. The engine of political change is not profit. It's focusing on each individual's biological need to take care of one another, to help each other, to help each other learn how to help each other, to help me help you, to help Cuba Gooding Jr. lift up the dress of his co-star going into Tom Cruise, Jerry Maguire helping Cuba Gooding, helping himself. And I get what Cuba Gooding lifted up, lift somebody's dress. We are a really sick nation. We're mentally unbalanced and it's going to take years to get good again. But you're entitled to your dignity. A job isn't a gift. It's a right. A livable wage isn't a gift. It's not no bless oblige from the one percent. It's a right. Healthcare is a right. Obamacare isn't good enough. The fight has to continue. The GOP never had a plan. The Democrats do. Medicare for all. Medicare works. Everyone deserves Medicare. It's yours. It's your money. It's your taxes. It's your health. The company you work for doesn't have money this year for Christmas bonuses, but they have enough to pay Neil Diamond, half a million to play at the corporate retreat in Las Vegas. There's money. It's out there. Go get it. Fight for that money. Obamacare isn't good enough. Medicare for all. You've had your jobs and your money stolen from you by the one percent. Take it back. Don't wait for the midterms. Make them do it right now. Keep showing up at the town halls. Keep faxing the GOP. Make them do it. We can crush Trump. We can be the wrecking ball that destroys the Republican party and rebuilds the government in our image. Now is the time. Right now. Don't wait for the midterms. Now is the time to get the GOP talking about Medicare for all. We need to put these insurance companies out of business. Government sponsored universal health insurance. We need to stigmatize the people, the murderers who work for health insurance companies. Anytime you talk to somebody from Etna, Humana, tell them they're monsters. Don't let them tell you it's complicated. When you talk to somebody on the phone from a health insurance company, do not let them tell you it's complicated. Tell them it's simple. It's only complicated for you because you can't find other work. It's complicated for you because you're a sadist. It's complicated for you because you're filled with bile and hatred and are willing to do anything to make money. And because you lack empathy and you're a bully and what you do hurts people. It doesn't protect them. It hurts people. And if you had a shred of human decency, you would quit your job. You need to tell that to the people who work for these companies. And you need to believe that because it's true. That's how you can affect change. Remind these corporate stooges what they're doing. We are all corporate stooges. I am. We all are. We need to remind each other that we're corporate stooges. And we have to pay attention to the people we're damaging. We have to take care of one another. And that means paying attention to government. That means Medicare for all demanding Medicare for all. It means unions. And it means reminding people who have immoral jobs that it's not good enough to say, well, I have to support my family. If what you do for a living kills people, your family isn't worth supporting. I assume you have anything else to say. Joining us is Meryl Marcos. She's no stranger to this show. I'm going to give you a introduction later on in the show so we can just get right to it because we're rolling and I don't want to waste your time. All right. I'm going to give you the Jewish compliment. And I realized I realized when I said it to you before we started that this is a typical Jewish compliment. I said it's great to have you on the show. It's been too long. And that is a form of hostility and insensitivity. Well, that's interesting. You mean because you're saying, you know, you're criticizing me? Well, no. It's, in a way, it's criticism. In a way, it's saying, I love you. You're fantastic. Why have you been avoiding me? Right? That is very Jewish, isn't it? It's not good enough, given my family of origin. I'm just moving the microphone closer. Hang on. Given my family of origin, it's not good enough to say, wow, Meryl Marcos. What an honor to have you back on my show. Your books are a myth. There is some kind of thing. I'm not sure if it's Jewish or not, but there's something about being the person who loves you so much. They will be your harshest critic. Like that's a good thing. That's the mark of really achieving love for someone, is to really just take them down a peg because you think that much of them. What is that about? I've noticed that. I'm divorced and meeting new people. Some of them are people. Oh my goodness, you're divorced. You are not divorced the last time we saw you. Yeah. Well, people change. Well, I'm sorry, I guess, or else I'm happy, however it is. Both. It can be both. But there is a need in some people to criticize others, like a coiled snake in the grass waiting for you to make a mistake. That is a personality trait, isn't it? It is. I would have thought it was Jewish because my mother did it, but then I've seen it in its multitude of religions. I guess they call it passive-aggressive, or they also call it double binding, where you just, you're always looking for like a dark thing. Some of it, I think, has something to do with, first of all, let me say I was not raised with any religion at all. My parents are probably. But hang on, your mother's name is Ronnie, so that's as good as a bat mitzvah. Yeah. Is it really Ronnie is a Jewish name? It's a Jewish American name. It's a perfect name for Jewish summer camp. If I met somebody whose mother was Ronnie Marco, I'd go, this is, you know, Assimilation 101. Yes, it's in the book. I can send it to you. Well, she wasn't married once you had the summer camp, so you would have met her with a different. No, if I met you at summer camp, if I met you at summer camp, and you said my mother's name was Ronnie Marco, I would instantly know that there's nothing you could do to change your DNA. You could convert to Buddhism. You will always be. Anyway, go ahead. I'm sorry. Well, I never knew that. But I was just going to say that I'm told, and I don't have any real data on this because I don't really know what is or is not in the Jewish religion. But there's, you know, the evil eye is always sort of watching you until you never want you never really want to say anything to too happy because if the evil eye, as I understand it, sees that you're enjoying anything, it takes it away from you. So you're always supposed to couch it. That's what I was told about. You're supposed to couch it with confusion, because the evil eye easily confused much as, you know, our president easily confused. You can't, doesn't do double entendres. So you go, they say, how are you? And then you go, could be better. And then the evil eye is going, oh, well, this sounds good. It doesn't take it away from you. That's what I was told. Right. And there's also a thing. It's from what I understood. Jewish women. I don't know that one. And Kina Hora. Don't give it a Kina Hora. Can I tell you what I did to my mother? I went, Scott, yes. It was an award ceremony and they accidentally leaked the winners. It was a mistake. The press release went out. So I knew I had won. I'm not going to say what it was or when it was, because I would get the person. But I knew that I had won an award that would make my mother happy for about 30 seconds. And so I called her up and I said, Ma, this is when I know I was going to win. I feel it. Don't say that. Not up this. I, as God is my witness, I am going to win this. We are going to win. I don't know. It's it can't, it has to be. And she kept saying, don't say that. And then I knew we were going to win because I saw the press release. But when they were doing the announcements for the nominees, my heart started pounding thinking maybe she's right. Maybe the press release got it wrong. Yeah. It's also Catholic too, by the way. I mean, I live with someone who's got the same kind of advice coming from his family. But on the other hand, the way he always phrases it is don't boast while the gods are looking. So he gives, he takes it away from the evil eye and gives it to an assortment of gods. Just a little more of a feat sort of the evil eye is kind of kind of reminds me of who's that guy and the hobbit, you know, that, that, um, that troll. I never read that creepy troll in the hobbit. I forget what his name is. He says precious all the time. You know, I don't know my hobbits. I never even read. I'm embarrassed to tell you. I've never read it. Do you think it's it? Anyway, the don't boast while the gods are looking sounds a little more like an exhibit at LACMA. What is then? What is the difference between boasting and gratitude? You know, boasting and pride mean gratitude because being if you were to say to our parents, oh, I've got it's so great. It's I'm so it's so and they go, but, but, but, but, but isn't that gratitude? Aren't you spitting in the eye of God? Yeah, that's a good point. Um, yeah, you are supposed to just be taking doing a gratitude list every day. That's the nice thing about being alive is that whatever they give you, they take it away from you almost instantly. You know, it's like trying to stay on the right diet. I had, I've been a fanatic because I come from really bad at genetic stock and everybody expired young. So I've been trying to be on a really, really good diet for most of my life, maybe since teenage and eating every time I see a list on online of 14 important superfoods you should not be missing out on. I run out and I get them blueberries and a side berries and I eat all this stuff. I ate because I'm thinking, you know, it's got magical properties and and and last spring I was put in the hospital for I had to have my gallbladder removed and it came out of the blue. It had no previous history in my family and it when I was in the hospital, all the nurses started saying to me, what kind of diet do you eat? I said, well fresh blueberries and wheat germ and I never eat fried food and nobody believed me. It actually got down to a discussion with a doctor who was saying took my my boyfriend outside and said to him, she's kidding about the vegetarian stuff, right? This is that's just some sort of a joke because that's just really not possible. And my boyfriend came in and said to me, you wouldn't lie to me, would you? You're, you're, you know, you can trust me and I won't judge you. What was all this eating a side berries for all these all these years? Geez, it was just paid off not at all. I went back to cookies after that. But you know, that's the perfect thing. It did. They just take it away from you. You know, it's like one drink a day prevents cancer. One drink a day causes cancer. So you're not allowed you're not allowed to pick one. I know, I know. The only consistency is coffee. There is not a single study out that proves coffee is bad for you. Even though I have a good authority that coffee, especially caffeine, is very bad for you. Well, then you then there must be at least one study. No, no, no. I mean, you're my own personal study. Let me be Cures Parkinson's disease, the thing that makes you shake Cures Parkinson's disease. But but the one thing they're leaving out is that if you they haven't done any studies, but I know this is a fact, if you drink a lot of coffee, you will have massive anxiety attacks that and hang out. Well, that's not good. Although maybe some people could use an anxiety attack. Yeah, I could distract you from other things. Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, are they capable of an anxiety attack? Do you think there's any panic going on? Well, I thought it was really a gutsy, nervy move that the two of them want to ask, and one health bill was going up for a vote, you know, given all any narcissist that I've ever lived with. Parents included, you don't. It's a smart thing to do to get away from from the eye of the storm. But it's also a dangerous thing. You're going to be blamed. Are you there's not there's really, don't you suppose that was a really bad moment that he went crazy on them for being off somewhere? And I just I'm not trying to be cute here, because that would be impossible. But I just realized when you said this, I don't think Ivanka converted to orthodox Judaism for any reason other than having an entire day as an excuse to stay away from him. Right? That's a great idea. I'm serious. As you said that, I realized, my God, we know what it's like to have a malignant narcissist in our lives. If I could, what could be the one thing I could do to keep him away from me for at least one day, marry an orthodox Jew? Everything he probably, well, yeah. Although my guess is that Kushner is also a malignant narcissist, because what what everyone does is pick somebody similar. You marry your father, you know, it would be unlikely that she at her young age and her cloistered life had the self examination to have picked an entirely different sort of person. So the gallbladder, this is about Trump, the gallbladder is a vestigial organ. All right, me. What does vestigial mean? It means it's part of your body. A network executive. There was a time when you needed network executives and they're still around, but they're vestigial organs. They keep them around just because you're supposed to have somebody giving you notes. We've evolved past the goal. We don't need the gallbladder anymore. Yeah, that was what I was told. So I mean, at least I was I was lucky that it was a thing had to come out that had a duplication was was not a yeah. Is that what vestigial means that you can get rid of it? I was told I'm I kept my prehensile tail just because I like to hang from trees and eat. But the gallbladder produces bile or it stores bile as something to do with bile, right? I had never given five minutes of thought to my gallbladder. You know, I was very dizzy worrying about everything, but I had never given any thought to my gallbladder, which I guess is why it was getting ready to attack me. It was felt neglected. So I really didn't know what it did did. But apparently you can happily without it because without your gallbladder, you still have gall. Are you are you are you still filled with hatred? Not that you ever were filled with hatred, but you're not really filled with hatred. You know, I just I guess as much hatred as I ever feel is is just the the craziness I feel about the everything since the election, like a lot of people, but I don't really carry around a lot of hatred. I don't really think about stuff like that. You're great comedy mind, one of the greats. You're featured in the new CNN series on Jesus, nothing to do with comedy. I have no idea why they do an entire segment on Merrill Marco and G no, you're in this new the history. They wanted to hear just just be rip on it. Yeah, they just thought maybe I'd have some new insights. And I read them for their purposes. Some people say my version of them is kind of supersede the original version of them. The mean is what I mean, Jesus, right. Yeah, that would be a book of John revelations. There's that's so you're in this new CNN series on comedy. You know, I'm just a talking head, you know, I haven't actually watched the series because I don't watch anything I'm in so that I don't have the opportunity to pick myself apart and worry about how I look. Well, you don't are I'm not going to embarrass you, but you are. I'm considered the most fabulous person in the in the war. I'm just gonna say you are. And then I'm gonna talk about you when you're not present to remind people. Yeah, you can just edit anything you want. You really are. And does it come from contempt? I mean, you have to be watching Trump. And are you just yeah, well, that makes me crazy. That has just been making me crazy. I can't I can't tolerate stupidity. And I can't our whole culture is based on or certainly the upbringing I had was based on that lying is the worst thing you can do. So when you see somebody just lying to you, it's it's more than I can comprehend that you're allowed to do that suddenly. They the other the other and then there aren't necessarily the consequences that you expect for it, especially from a president. It's just it's sort of mind boggling. What would happen? You know, I I'm it's gotten so bad. I'm actually watching MSNBC around the clock. I've been paralyzed. I having trouble reading. I the one joy in my life is to read for long stretches of time. And now I've just been on my back watching MSNBC. And they ran something the other night right before the health care bill died. It was a series a montage of Trump on the campaign trail saying day one on day one repeal and replace and then they cut him saying I never said that if you if you show him if you sit him down and show him that what do you think his reaction would be? I'm guessing he must he must add quotes to everything and say that it was right. There's no other way out of it. He must say well when I said repeal and replace I meant you know quote unquote repeal and replace by which I've been the same way that he does with what's the thing he's they're catching us wiretapping. He just meant any kind of surveillance and in any in any form he must put air quotes around everything. That's all I can think of that. Well you worked in a business. You're a brilliant writer. You work in a business where people will say anything to get something done or made. It does in other words people focus on the outcome. They say whatever takes what forget the behavior forget what I said we need to get this made and that's all that matters. Is there some virtue to that? Could you live a life like that? If you could you be willing to if I said to you you could run a major studio but it would require saying anything necessary to get these projects made but it could be any project you want. Would you would you compromise the way you were raised? There is a correct answer to this by the way. Yeah no I don't know I guess that would be on a case by case basis depending on what you were what you were committing to saying whether it was evil if it was evil I wouldn't say it. I mean you know the other part of this though that you you just went right on past of this thing of watching NMS NBC and you're not reading and stuff there's a funny danger to the adrenaline hit that that all of this boo-ha-ha is giving you know it's it's I've thought about it a lot like I've gotten recently way too hooked on Twitter and and I don't think it's useful and I think it's ridiculous and I just realized that I'm waiting for it's kind of a little Pavlovian waiting for an adrenaline hit from what else what else what else it's so terrifying all the things that are happening so many things are coming at you in a row that you just think you're looking for another one you know I mean it's it's like getting a hit of cocaine or something or it's something to really be avoiding because it it doesn't really have anything to do with the outcome of it you're not really helping or contributing to the solution or the problem if you're not reading you know you're just you're just making your yourself a rat that's sitting there waiting for another hit of cocaine right absolutely absolutely but there really is a thing like that going on an adrenaline hit thing and I think it's the way that Trump himself lives you know he's got that ADD thing a thing I never really had but he's given us all ADD because we're all tuned in way too much maybe maybe it's in a even in a co-dependent way sort of to his whole psyche and we're thinking well it's been a little while since he said anything he should be saying something stupid right about now and then and then we all wait and look for it we look and then we look for the ramifications of it and we watch what all the other people say about what how stupid it was and then we wait for it to tumble down and become bigger and suddenly Germany has a comment and this one you know you're we're all on his schedule with him of insanity co-dependent that I haven't heard anybody I know that's an old word we don't really even say that I used to get a credit on a television show as a as a co-dependent well that's that's unusual you're in the rider's guild is representing co-dependent is it have a minimum because that's a much better situation for the co-dependent they told me if they told me if we got renewed I'd be a dependent but never made it all the way up to just a co-dependent but so co what does co-dependent mean because it sounds like I'm kind of co-dependent with Trump even though I'm not quite sure you know that we both have to be sick in order for the relationship to yeah it's that it's really sort of that it's like you know what they in the world of narcissism they they call it narcissism and echo where one person is feeding off the other kind of and in an unhealthy way and the whole country is kind of feeding off of him and his stupidity as a distraction now you know it it really is a huge distraction it's filling in programming it's filling in conversations it's got everybody staring at those goddamn electric boxes wherever they might be you know the phone or whatever else you got your eye for one second maryl marco hang on for one second I got to figure this out this is I remember co-dependent being something like all right you're married he's an alcoholic so you grew up with an abusive father and even though you're not an alcoholic you need a husband who is a drunk who right yeah because you find your value in controlling them and helping them and helping them not harm themselves and they hold you responsible for stuff and then you carry that responsibility as your as part of your worth you know I think it's something like that they yeah that's what they always say about alcoholics is that um uh what is it what do they always say it's the it's um what's that thing of um this is going to be really boring maybe well this is fantastic don't be silly but what do they always say that that um you're only as sick as your secrets well there's that one but there's the thing of what do they call a person who they don't call him a co-dependent they call an enabler okay right that's that's sort of and in that case you know all of us are sort of enablers to the whole media frenzy that goes on with this stuff I mean it's one thing yeah and you know what's really making it really really bigger and bigger and bigger is this call your representative call your representative which we all have to do we saw suddenly all have to really be activists but it really kicks into gear this whole idea there's things I'm gonna be doing I'm I better be doing things I mean I sometimes am calling my god damn representative three four times I'm on a stalker list for the guy now I think they see my phone number and they worry it's it but it really rubs you up into a whole um system of behavior that is is uh it's kind of crazy making well it's it's did you call your mother I have a list of my sister's going did you call mommy she called my hand I gotta call Barbara boxer because she's retired and she's gotta I gotta call it is kind of that it is kind of call your mother the whole thing well and then then then he's your crazy mother but I would say it's helped me in my relationship with some people in that it's it's you know uh what's families always need a problem child to focus on so that right they always find one even if nobody's a problem so that it makes them superior we don't have to discuss our relationship we'll just focus on Donald what are we gonna do about Donald and I have noticed that when I get together with certain family members I am no longer the the source of it's like what are we gonna do about Donald's what are we gonna do about Donald's so that are you referring to Trump are you referring to somebody in your family named Donald Trump Trump it's a I'm getting well I think he's a good in many ways he's a gift because we can talk about something other than I forgot to call Aunt Bernice why am I why why are you killing me by not calling your Aunt Bernice that kind of stuff or you know why did you did you send a condolence card to sell it no I did but this now it's just Trump so and he gives you so much to worry about he's got such a wide variety of erratic behaviors that he always surprises you so it's a constant kind of stimulus thing it's a constant feeding of your adrenal glands or whatever part of your body gets super stem simulated so we need him so that's the codependent right well well we're coming to need him if we're if you're on that train that's what I'm saying you should sit and read because I'm trying to get off it that's why I'm trying not to allow myself to look at Twitter so much because I'm following people on Twitter who are all behind the scenes gathering news and I think I'm gathering news and I'm doing nothing I'm just sitting there reading Twitter so it's a ridiculous set of habits do you think we're in a bit I mean it's one thing if you really are getting out there and gathering news and it's another thing if you really are calling your congressman but the interim stuff of just watching MSNBC you're getting nothing really you're giving them ratings and you're not and you're missing out on I read that CNN is going to make a billion dollars in profit for this year that they're yeah well you know they really were responsible for him getting elected as anybody everyone's putting the recriminations in but who was giving him coverage every single time he made a stupid speech everyone because he was really bringing in ratings you know that was before the he was calling them fake news and whatever they were all feeding off of the fact that everybody wanted to watch him say something stupid like I love you and he never failed he always delivered he's you know that I was just thinking about that stuff this morning is the guy is just really in my opinion he's really an idiot he's just a almost an imbecile but he sure is he could have been a stand-up he would have had a horrible act but he wouldn't on crowd because he doesn't generate material but he really knows how to work a crowd he feeds off it and it pups him up he becomes high and mighty from it you know and you and it's the kind of person who is really really a good performer they just feed off the audience it's as opposed to somebody like me who if since you know I never was really good at very at crowd manipulation at all but this guy it's like like vitamins to him I'm not so sure it's he loves it I'm not so sure it's crowd manipulation I think he says things that he knows the crowd will enjoy and and so he lets the mob dictate policy I noticed that with certain comedians who became political I'm not going to mention any names but a couple of guys I know who became very political instead of reading foreign policy or the New York Times they they noticed what the mob reacted to so they figured that must be right and I think that's what Trump is doing I think he's letting the the mob the mob form his thoughts well also he does what comics do though he remembers his greatest hits you know I mean if that's why he keeps getting out that that repetitive stuff about the electoral and the lies about the electoral college is that plays well with the crowd the things he that he gets the most response to he goes right back to him it's just exactly like a bit like yes so if you're not I mean this if you're not Hispanic or Arab gay poor a woman Jewish uh atheist we're out of the woods right so it's going to get better now if I mean now that the health care bill died and Obamacare is the law of the land have we do we deserve a victory lap are we safe no I think you can have a victory lap there's all that stuff that there is on the line now the to me of equal measure and the stuff that has me the most panicky is the the climate change and getting rid of the EPA all those regulations that had said we're putting some kind of moral responsibility on people some kind of consequences to elect a clean water act how can you repeal a clean water act that's almost a joke it's almost something you would see in a villainous cartoon you know like on a Saturday morning kid show he's come to take the clean water act oh yeah yeah yeah there's nobody would ever come to get the clean water act and and he has it's it's so crazy it's but all of that needs to still need to happen you know to say nothing of mr. Gorsuch who speaking whose mother was against the clean water act yeah I mean how could you get rid of the environmental protection agency you know the that's been bothering me since college is people who are against in protecting the environment where do they think they're going to live you know they say factories we have to we need jobs and you think where are you going to have these jobs if it's not on this planet where exactly are your jobs going to be taking place you did it that lack of sense makes it just makes me crazy who are these i know like i remember after watergate before you were even born no i remember watergate clearly that was my first real big political engagement i was watching it rapidly and um and i for a while this russia gate stuff has and i hate the idea of putting gate on the end of everything because what does gate have to do with russia but most gate have to do with anything except for that one place watergate but but anyway that's another topic um i started watching the these pieces of this russian puzzle and i suddenly was really really reminded of watergate because it's like a puzzle coming together you know remember how riveting watergate was yeah it's it's really really fascinating and it's coming together sort of like that or it seemed to be whether anybody follows through is what you have to worry about anymore there used to be before this administration there used to always be people who would in fact follow through on stuff i and now i don't know whether whether we've gotten rid of all of them because there's like 500 jobs that that um trump hasn't even filled he got rid of all the judges you know and he didn't put any new anyone new in there it's also it's just this crazy time i think if i may go down a path that will really put your head in the oven when i watched watergate which was a great series it was a great series that an oj fantastic fantastic fantastic i thought well that's it we've we've ridded our nation of corruption they're going to pass campaign finance law which they did and then i noticed people were voting for reagan within six years of his resident within six years they brought in somebody far more heinous than nixon and every lesson that had been learned from watergate had really been learned by the people who were found guilty in watergate they just learned how to become better criminals yeah well you do see that i mean after eight years of obama where there was you know he would i i don't want to start saying that he was perfect in every way i mean there are things that bothered me about the way he ran the administration but he as a guy was pretty great and um you would think okay we've now hit another level you know it's sort of like like your old your really bad old boyfriend is back again you thought after you had a good marriage that now you were on to only good marriages and now your horrible old boyfriend is back i say that and speaking as a female since you don't have a horrible old boyfriend that i know of well now she's a boyfriend old boyfriend it's she had you came and do that joke anymore that the the transition jokes well i but i do understand it because i did marry a very sweet kind giving person who taught me about unconditional love who didn't care about certain things and made a great life for me and then that came to an end and i've been saying i'm gonna try something different i'm gonna look for a horrible human being i swear to you it's just but yeah well you know i had uh 25 you know because that always works out really well when when you define the other thing you're looking for as horrible you know that there's a pretty good chance it's gonna work out for the best that just it just works like that it's it's it's weird but it's true you know my shrink said to me the same thing tony shabrano heard from lorraine brocco that with all your flaws you were smart enough to pick the right woman like carmela was the right woman for you and i have noticed that you know now that i'm looking around i too gravitate to the complete opposite or horrible horrible people just you know to be different love dogs is there a gene i know that they have planted a salmon gene in into a tomato a salmon gene into a tomato and so tomato is not i would love to see that boy that's my dream world go out go catching tomatoes in in nature so dogs they didn't plant the salmon gene in into dogs no but they they planted they didn't plant a tomato gene in the dogs did they i'm just gonna make sure everything's okay what if they were to plant a dog gene into human beings would you be opposed to that that would be tampering you mean sexualizing your relationship with your dog is what you're saying no part of is that what i would part of what what i really i think people really really gravitate to and love about dogs except for those very few people and i don't even want to imagine them too clearly the ones who who have a different kind of relationship to animals but the most of us um is is that it's it's so pure you know it's it doesn't it isn't corrupted by um by sexuality leads to a lot of weird behaviors i guess what i'm saying and and it even although it leads to less weird behavior with dogs who seem to take it very very casually in fact i almost don't notice that they're doing it i had dogs who are having sex and it's like they're both they don't even yeah they don't even look at each other no and then it goes by and then it does there doesn't seem to be any later discussion or necessarily any affinity for each other either it just kind of was a moment like oh um i think i have a plea oh no i don't anymore it's kind of like that but but i think that um that part of the the love you have for your dog is um got this other if you sexualized it would really corrupt it in a creepy as possible way it would not it would be way less narrow marco let me let me let me let me ask you about this for a second you're not planning this actual no not at all are you uh because even a dog won't have sex with me that's how bad things are right now uh so okay they say now bear with me here because i'm just i'm spitballing here they say that a dog's behavior is not love but now they're pushing back and i've heard them say well at first it wasn't love it was learning how to get scraps of meat from you but over yeah thousands of years it has evolved into whatever we think love is i think it's a much better version of attachment than love love is a really complicated emotion that as we all know turns on us in the most unpredictable and um frequently love okay we'll get to that in a second hang on it's almost like having the flu but that's now if we've if we've taught let me let me ask you this question because this is i could go forever on this topic so but let me ask you this question if we have trained dogs over thousands and thousands of years to be in love with us which i think we have we've taught dogs what love is they have not i don't think we've teaching them what love is i think we're teaching them what dependence is and you know here's the thing we taught dogs i was recently decided to to learn a lot more about dogs and i did for about two days and then i forgot to do it the third day but here's what i learned on those two days where i was reading the word nyotny have you ever heard that word yeah well what well we did that with dogs we we bred for um for dogs to act like juveniles has that one for me what do you mean what so what we did was we we um we were intentionally selectively breeding the dogs that never grew to maturity in an emotional way and didn't become the way an emotional emotionally mature dog in a pack would be we went for improprietity juveniles and that's how they act so that's part of what we're thinking of is love is they always act like kids we did that to them wow that's a weird one isn't it so that fulfills a need to have because we like our children assert we bred them to be a certain age before our kids turn into a pain in the neck uh yeah they they they stay eternally dependent and playful is what we bred them to do because we think it's cute and we we find it endearing and so forth so that's part of what we're seeing as love is they're just um in perpetuity dependent they wait for us to to feed them they wait for us to walk them they they sit and stare at us all day long it's partly what i like about them they're just hilarious you know but are they mentally but i don't know if it's love i think i don't ever really i think that they're yeah i don't even know what they're complicated emotional structure is i've i've never really figured it out i think that they love affection there's they come to you for for affection and they like that whether it's got a more overriding and many of them are loyal i know there's there's a lot of loyalty there so i think that maybe affection and loyalty would be what it is and i don't know about the other so i know you've written several books about dogs well i i just sometimes write pieces about them i never wrote an entire book about them i i like them as characters or things to analyze or yeah they're they're in my life so much that it you know i never had kids so i just um when i'm out of topics i just look down at my feet and they're staring at me and and so i write about that they're always staring at me they think i'm really really interested you are just by the way that i am i'm i'm that's what they tell me so uh so i don't and also i really enjoy them they make me laugh all the time that they just are hilarious dogs are the product of what is essentially a uh hitler euthiogenics program selectively breeding traits into a species is that a fair statement that that that we so and you're saying that humans went out of their way is yeah over centuries or whatever met however long we've been doing these um having dogs live in the home with us whatever i forget i get dates all mixed up but what that early stuff you were talking about about how they were you know they originally were coming for scraps of food and then they started we started intentionally giving them sprouts of food whatever period that was however many thousands of years ago that started i think it was i don't even know no no it's okay because if we know what we're talking about then there's no point in it's not interesting and i i don't have a show if we actually knew what we were talking about there'd be no point to listening to this but oliver wendell holmes supposedly one of the great jurists of the 20th century justified mass sterilization we were doing sterilization before hitler was yeah we were sterilizing uh mentally what what they called at the time imbeciles and cretins and there's a famous quote from oliver wendell holmes where he's justifying the mass sterilization of imbeciles and that is three generations of imbeciles is enough and now we would just give them a reality show because three generations of imbeciles is a perfect reality show is this but imbecile was you know if you had looked up i i don't know if it was the dsm back then but if you looked up the the the bible for doctors and shrinks imbecil and cretin was a level of stupidity that could be measured back then and we were sterile we the americans began this mass sterilization of people whose iqs were not acceptable with dogs we did the opposite and it worked pretty well didn't it because look how smart it really changed the course of history jeez talk about a thing that didn't play out the way they felt well maryl an argument could be made that things were going pretty well until they reversed oliver wendell holmes's decision and stop what year i don't know i think after world war two well wait a minute so that would be the baby boomers they're not turning out to be such a brain trust either well i'm saying is that had we allowed let's say because neither one of us know what we're talking about but let's say after world war two america selvi quote unquote error of its ways and said you know what this mass sterilization has a whiff of nazism to it let's not do the mass sterilization and so baby boomers were were born there was this big boom because nobody was being sterilized right well uh yes but the their the previous generations before them the people who gave birth to them were sterilized so they would be the the grand the parents and grandparents would be the result of that sterilization so the baby boomers would be the fruit of the sterilization well no i'm saying that i mean of the smarter people who survived i'm saying they were i'm saying they were probably like neotomy you know they'd be the the great achievement would be the baby yes the people who weren't assuming i knew what i was talking about but what i'm saying is we didn't sterilize everybody in the 20s and the 30s there were still some imbeciles around okay let's move on the question i have you're right uh so dogs so had we could we breed if we've been breeding idiot dogs we we sort of happen well not all but suppose we we're keeping as we started breeding really smart dogs who would go again with the tennis ball are you kidding me with the f in tennis ball you chase that thing 60 minutes is about to start i mean could you breed are you kidding me 60 minutes is about that you or do you do improvising a dog saying 60 minutes is about to start i was gonna say are you watching tv while you're having this conversation because now that is a very very multi focused person no but do you think you could start breeding because i would assume you breed the alpha out of a litter right you you don't want the alphas you want the the supplicants the betas well the dogs i get i always have a lot of people who have the sort of compassionate view of animals that i have you always go and get rescues so you know like i i just have the dn you know that you can get a test to get the dna of your pet now i don't know if you know that but you can buy the kit on amazon for about 60 bucks and they tell you as far as they can what the different breeds that go into your dog are i mean this is if you're buying rescues like a excuse me getting rescues like i am and and you have no idea what it is you got you're just kind of curious you want to blow 60 bucks i found out you know my dog um that i got at a west side german shepherd rescue is got nine or eight breeds and what are they so uh he's um well i know he's 17 percent pit bull he's uh no he's 37 percent pit bull he's 17 percent chow 25 percent german shepherd and then the rest of those percents are are divided up into um five other breeds that they couldn't really specify it was too small of an amount for them to but they could distinguish five different do breeds have personality traits or is that oh yeah no they did that well that's yeah that's what dogs really are except for that's why which is why i always go for months is yeah they've they've um they've done that really specifically you watch that what you must have seen that westminster kennel club show where they do they get they have really particular personalities really specific and they've been bred for that and some of them are really difficult and some of them are really tuned into people the ones that are most popular for pets which are um laboratories german shepherds and golden retrievers have been overbred sometimes to the point where they have nervous breakdowns and they they have built in um problems with cancer or blindness or whatever you know there's a lot of crazy stuff going on with dog breeding it's pretty bad all the way around i think breeding's but it gives those nice westminster people something to do with their afternoons every february that's the important thing are they breeding because of this i i know that they breed physical traits into a dog but are they and they have real specific personality traits oh sure they do you know yeah bred into them as well in other words if um they come with with the thing i mean they're over breeding you know it's it's like breeding cousins you don't need to tell me about they end up with them but what i'm saying is okay you're breeding old english sheep dogs and you look at the litter and you say okay this dog has all the physical characteristics but it doesn't it doesn't like it's hyperactive it's paranoid it uh it's cheap we want to we don't want to breed that personality trait into it don't do you don't you think that is taken into account before they mate the behavior um by who you mean by the by the brilliant human beings who vote for Donald Trump by the president are looking for more bull and nebula smarter but there are some you know there are some breeders i guess who do that stuff um who breed the smartest with the smartest or whatever but a lot of there's so whole breeds of dogs that are just terrific and and adorable and you would love them if you met them who just get cancer at and five typically because they're it's just being passed along because of all the inbreeding there's whole situations like that it's a yeah they're definitely our personality traits that get passed along that first how many dogs before we go and you thank you for doing this this was easy right yeah i don't know are you kidding are you kidding before i wanted to ask you about dogs on the cnn thing what did you talk about revolutionizing television comedy something as simple as that and did you know you were revolutionizing tv comedy or was it just a job no i did i didn't talk about revolutionizing tv i don't know i don't know what i talked about you know i blank out when i do a thing like that i just think i'm gonna if i pick it apart i'm gonna make myself a nervous wreck so i just don't ever think about it again including the same as you want to after i publish something i just blank it out because if i keep looking at it i'm gonna find ways that i need to rewrite it so i blank it out and then later when i see it i think i didn't write that and then i think really i wrote that i mean it's very weird you're a great one so i don't know what i said on that cnn thing i hope it wasn't too ridiculous you're a great writer and i'll read off the list of books later you're a great writer and in order to be a well thank you for saying that that's kind of you think and in order to be a great writer you have to be a reader i think i think yeah i like i i i have not been watching so much mms nbc that i can't read in order to be a visionary in television do you have to be a great tv watcher are you a great tv watcher well i'm not such a visionary in tv lately i have i've just been writing print for the last x number when you when you were reinventing television according to cnn some of that came out of being an art student i think you know i mean i i got a master's degree in art and then i moved down to la and and was teaching art for a while and then i started doing that stuff that led to that show um letterman show and that i think was partially inspired by my art is there a time in your you know which is all about about ideas and um was there a time in your life when you binge watched tv and were you a student i'm going to hypothesize something i'm going to answer this i lately binge watch tv i ever since everybody else has been doing it sure i've been there's a lot of shows that i've binge watched in the last five years but when you were when you were making you know going into tv my theory is that you have a bachelor's in art that's not a theory you went to berkeley a master's in art my theory is that you went into tv with is it a gimlet eye what is that what i don't even know what that means well i know it's not gimlet now that's what i meant to say gimlet that you that you uh gimlet doesn't that mean like gin and tonic i don't know i'm trying i'm trying to i don't know either that you had you had contempt for television as opposed to you didn't come in reverentially right you're like a wrecking ball well that was a period of time where we all had contempt for television it was actually the period of time it's just post the period of time where saturday night live was born and that was born completely of contempt for television and it was only because there was a long period of time there were television just became so self-reparantial and so um was so impressed with itself was so full of um boasting and and and and fraudulence and just all that kind of slick creepy um fake stuff that that whole period it started television started out it was vaudeville really it was vaudeville put on the screen and then it's slowly but surely became this kind of oily slimy kind of slick thing little with scandals and fraudulence and stuff with no artistry in it and then and then it got kicked to the curb again and started over again sort of i mean that's that's a theory and so we were part of that i for me the big show that felt like the revelation that i was really relieved to see i didn't watch any tv all the way through college and i was living in the san francisco bay area where it's a legal for me anyway this is identical to me go ahead and so i didn't watch any tv for a long time and then i decided um after i got out of school i had this idea that i could write for tv and i started watching in the shows that were inspiring to me at that time where um saturday night live and mary hartman which you worked on mary hartman mary i didn't work on that i worked for the woman who was the head writer of it i did research for for a different show but i never worked on mary hartman i mary hartman yes yes yes i before you go and that's going to be the name of this podcast uh you but before you go i my experience with television is i came into it having not watched it since i was like 16 i just said this is i remember i had a moment i remember this vividly i was watching welcome back codder and and i thought yeah well this is a waste of time at 16 you weren't this is you know it was one of those things they were they were back for another season maybe i was a big john chert voltafan and he quit or something i don't know but at one point i just said i'm not going to do this anymore i'm not going to watch tv and i you know i did stand up and i really didn't watch tv until my mid thirties when i started writing for television and i noticed that 99.999 percent of the people i was meeting in television and this is unfair to say this but it might be true their whole life was television they were all they did was reference television and they would build if they were you know if it was a sitcom they would refer to other you know i will remember this happened on bewitched what if instead of this happening to darin this happens to so and i go really you're allowed to do that yeah you're allowed to reference an idea for instead of saying you know i have a babysitter who just i actually would tell stories from my life and they'd go oh yeah that's like when aunt b went away and opi and andy griffith had to keep the place messy so she would feel needed really because that's what we did with our babysitter we wanted her to feel that yeah they did that on the andy griffith i go wow so you don't have to have a life you can just i just huh well when i first started i um i had recently started watching tv but i remember i i can't remember i think i told you the story once but but um when i came down here from the san francisco bay area was uh sent out on so i got an agent kind of quickly and i was sent out on job interviews and i went to be interviewed by the people who rubbed welcome back otter and uh and i i felt exactly as you did about the show and the guy who was the head writer or the producer whoever i had my interview with said to me do you like the show and i thought it was a trick question like if i said yes he'd go well we don't want her we need people who want want to fix the show because the show is harmful so i did not answer the question i didn't want to say the wrong thing oh well yeah which of course i did not what was your answer but that's how crazy i was i thought it was a trick what did you answer uh i didn't say yes i said oh i said like well this is the beginning of our conversation like a jewish thing uh well you know and i i did not get that job but that was a period of time where there used to have all those um those creepy specials that were on when you can find them all on youtube now but they were all kind of that where the action is kind of shows you know where they would have some host guy that was not dick clark but somewhat like dick clark and they'd bring on people and then they'd have a band and they'd be standing on risers of different heights and then they'd leave and then there'd there'd be a sketch by three guys you didn't know who they were but they would all seem to be around fifty there were a lot of shows and then everybody would somehow or other be wearing like strapped sport coats and i don't know what you're referring to here exactly but isn't that what we grew up on and then you just grew to load them the only show i liked when i was in high school was monty python which was that weird interesting combination of brainy and cerebral and silly in a whole other kind of way and after that everything else just seemed uninteresting to me until saturday night what's your guilty pleasure now on tv um i keep looking for one because they really do exist anymore you know tv really for me turned around in the best possible way when breaking bad showed up that was for me the greatest revelation i've ever had after years and years and years of going out to meetings and pitching shows and having them go well they're not likable well well that the fact that um um what is gilligan feds gilligan saw the show the premise of which was a cancer-ridden math teacher um who is dying um decides to become a meth dealer that he even said that out loud at a meeting anywhere it's just the greatest joy to me but it's just so completely the opposite of what you are taught to do and that it worked it became the greatest show ever it's just it's been a wonderful landscape of shows is that the greatest show ever it was a i think so i thought it was fantastic i haven't rewatched it lately but i've seen a lot of really good shows lately i i guess the most recent one that i enjoyed but not i think i enjoyed breaking bad it's right at the top of my favorite shows but i just recently watched the americans and thought it was good you think of fever sometimes captures television and then you go back and you you say oh but do you think sometimes we just get this fever about a show and believe it's you know groundbreaking and the acting's amazing and then you go back and rewatch it five years well no because you know what that where i knew how great breaking bad was was i got about four years ago maybe well i don't know when breaking bad was maybe four or five years about that yeah maybe longer um right at the when it was just sort of kicking off or no i guess it was in about its third season and i had been paying no attention i still hadn't learned to watch tv at all i was just staying away from everything pretty recently and uh and i got this amazing gig the writer's guild asked me to host um an evening called the hundred best written tv shows and that was a terrifying offer because in the audience we're going to be the people who wrote the hundred best tv shows and that's that's a judgmental ornery audience of writers and i do that was going to be a scary audience so i was almost going to back out of it and then i didn't because i'm also letterman show and a couple of other things i've written for i guess newheart and what was the other one moonlighting i only just wrote episodes of those but um but they were nominated and the letterman show was was on the list so they so i was going to attend anyway i decided to go ahead with it just to scare myself silly i guess and it and uh when i knew i was gonna what what was going to be required of me was i was going to do jokes and then i was going to interview the a bunch of panels of people they had broken it into segments this kind of show and that kind of show and they picked some representatives and then i was supposed to lead an interview kind of situation and i knew i was going to have to talk to vince gill again and the guy weiner matthew weiner and um or is it whiner i forget he changes and who didn't matter what you do with weiner or whiner he'll tell you it's pronounced wrong well then there's it's a no win situation for me no wine situation so yes so so anyway before i thought well it's going to be rude if i haven't seen these people's shows at all because i hadn't i was i was intentionally just avoiding because i didn't want to get caught up in the whole bunch of stuff so i wasn't hadn't seen Breaking Bad or Mad Men or any of these shows and i thought in order to interview these people i'm going to watch three episodes or two episodes of everybody's show so i can appear knowledgeable and i watched two episodes of this show and i watched two episodes of that show and i was pretty proud of myself and then i sat down to watch my two episodes of Breaking Bad and i watched five seasons maryl marco it is an honor to have you on the show i'm going to wrap it up because i'm learning to leave a little for next time leave a little that's what i that's one of the things i'm learning is that in the past i would keep somebody going and going and wring them dry and i'm and the trick is not to wring people dry it's to make them say well that wasn't that bad maybe maybe i can get her back sooner so sure you know it's just where i live is just that it's a a drive that involves so much traffic i missed a party yesterday i missed dinner with a friend earlier this week because of traffic i blame trump and trump no i'm not missing people because of trump i refuse to let him change the structure of my life but traffic there must be a new yorker cartoon that says it's not you honey it's trump there has to be right i'm sure there already is one right well you should draw one it's there no uh don't get me started on the new yorker maryl marco yeah well that is another subject cool comment contentious is a great introduction to the writings of maryl marco it's just a good well thank you very much that's kind of you to say great read and it's just a collection of not just it's a collection of your essays one of them includes uh your mother's diary which is my mother's many diaries and it's a great introduction to maryl marco if you want to learn more about maryl marco watch the cnn history of comedy well i don't i think i'm probably just uh interstitial in between clips of of um famous people you that's what i always assumed when they were they were sitting here talking to me i thought okay what can i say that will uh proceed rosanne you're in the pantheon you are and i'm just going to say you are a pantheon maryl marco thank you maryl thank you i'll talk to you later coming up from down with tyranny howie klein please share the show with all your friends copy and paste the link send it in an email to your friends share it on facebook or twitter i have an album i'm working on it and we're posting it on my website it's a pay what you want kind of thing i'll tell you more about that on friday's show and i want you to listen to this episode any way you can i want it to be easy for you so we have a youtube channel it's an audio version of this show please subscribe please go to youtube type in david feldman comedy and there we are subscribe its audio share it you can listen to us on itunes stitcher and by going to david feldman show dot com how do you listen let me know what's the easiest way for you to hear this show joining us in the hollywood hills is the founder and treasurer of the blue america pack which raises money for progressive candidates all over america and he writes the down with tyranny blog howie klein i have to keep this short because you're rushing off to dinner with alan grayson congressman alan grayson yes he's visiting la today and we're going to dinner in a few minutes i live in in los fielas by the way not the hollywood hills when guys like you go out to dinner with alan grayson there's a level of conversation that we're not privy to right you're talking about things that we're not allowed to know uh not really i mean i i i i can't recall things that alan has told me that you're not allowed to know and i probably share them with you anyway uh he doesn't say to me i don't remember him ever saying this is a secret how much of it is gossip maybe things about his personal life uh you know about like child rearing or something like that something that it would have no interest for anybody else you know that's completely personal maybe talking about his kids or something like that but in terms of what the way you're asking the question about governmental kind of stuff not secret at all i mean i think i've i've said on this show that alan one time said to me that i should just assume that every conversation that he and i have on the phone is being taped for example in america i think that's a safe bet when you're talking to a politician is it gossip or is it policy what percentage of the meal will be gossip and what percentage will be policy is he consumed is he consumed by policy so for example um if say i'm speaking with um walter jones a republican from north carolina it will be 100 percent about policy and government i have no personal relationship with him i don't i wouldn't mind having a personal relationship with him i like him i like his politics and some levels but the times that we've been on the phone have been strictly strictly policy and government and what there's what percentage of these congress people some call them people are policy wonks and how many of them are just politicians for example paul ryan has been presented to us as a policy wonk as opposed to a politician he's somebody who rolls up his sleeves and knows where the bodies are buried in the budget is that true about ryan is that true that he's a policy wonk no it's not true and long before paul krugman who's given the credit for um you know letting people know that that wasn't true long before paul krugman ever wrote about it i had been writing about it at down with tyranny so it's been over a decade that i've been saying that paul ryan is a complete fraud and there's nothing wonky about him at all when he was in high school he read two and ryan books and uh and that that's about it that's about as wonky as he's ever been and and and remains that that wonky he's a manufactured product of his uh of his big donors and of of you know specific special interests we've given him millions of dollars and given him a career and and they they tell him what to say and he says it he's he's not he's not a wonk in any way now i would say that among the republicans the the the number of uh real truly wonkish republicans in congress isn't that great and and even among the democrats it might not even be that great either among progressives on the other hand it's gigantic i mean sometimes i get very frustrated with the progressive democrats because they don't care about politics they don't raise money if they can help it they don't care about the mechanics of politics they only care about policy not all of them alan in fact is a good example of someone who is who cares about both so alan is one of the most wonkish policy guys i know alan greyson but on the other hand he's very very interested in politics uh and everything about politics so he's he's more or an all-around guy in that way but you take some of these these folks like a guy like mike honda for example who just got defeated he's a great policy wonk he used to write the progressive budget i mean he's into the such minutiae that it's very very hard to follow along with the way his mind goes he's so into it but when it comes to politics pretty clueless now i don't care about it i have didn't want to be bothered by it i have a theory about the d triple c and the republicans and how they build a house of representatives and you could tell me if this is true or not because it comes out of washington dc that there's really no grassroots campaign rising up in each congressional district that's a fair statement right that most guys get into congress because they were handpicked and vetted by somebody from the d triple c or nancy polosi's office right and then they throw some money behind this person and if they're willing to play ball well it's an obvious simplification it's partially true and partially not true so it definitely describes some members of congress but it doesn't describe all members of congress i think alan grayson would be the exception to the rule i would assume he would be one of the exceptions to the rule he certainly was not only not picked by the d triple c they opposed him at every moment in his career and does nancy polosi want somebody like alan grayson to caucus with her party isn't he a pain in the neck wouldn't she prefer somebody who's just gonna say yes ma'am no ma'am and follow i could only speculate on that you know alan was very loyal to nancy likes her very much personally never said a bad word to her even if i was in the you know raging fit of cursing at her he would never agree with me on that i mean right now i'm i'm in a a little uh you know i don't know if she's even aware so when i say i'm in a fight with her i'm i'm talking in terms of me fighting in her maybe not even knowing i'm fighting right so but this is the thing so the d triple c is i'm telling you this not for only for this story itself which is interesting but but also as an example uh that goes to the question that you asked the d triple c has never been interested in taking on darrell isa people have approached them over the years saying uh let's take on isa and they always say no too he's too rich he's too strong the district's too red uh we're not going to do it and they never have done it they never ever and that's the same i mean devin nunyes is the most villainous person in america right now in the d triple c won't touch him they're insane but well that's another story let's stick with isa for a minute so his district is the northern part of san diego county and the southern part of orange county mostly san diego the diego county and it's a it's a transitioning district it's becoming slightly more blue so a guy decides that he's going to do it it's a it's a guy a former marine colonel this is one of the most marine districts in the country there's lots and lots and lots of marines and retired marines there and this colonel who's now uh he's out of he's retired as um as marina and he's now an attorney he decides he's going to take on isa he goes to the d triple c says i'm taking on isa and they say good luck sunny let us know how it goes and they and that's that and suddenly he's running neck and neck with isa the polling show he's running neck and neck the d triple c calls him back and says hey remember us we love you and he says yeah and they say yes we want to help he says great how do you want to help send money and they say no no we want to send you some consultants and he says okay give me a call when i'm in congress and they they wouldn't help because he wouldn't accept their their consultants and when they say consultants they mean they will run his campaign they'll tell him what to do what to say what not to do what not to say etc he he rejected that the month passed he's doing better and better against isa is collecting huge amounts of money from the grassroots without any d triple c help and suddenly about a month before a month and a half before the election nancy Pelosi and her crew realized this guy's gonna win and they start throwing money into the campaign it was too late and they don't know how to spend money anyway they always do it wrong they screw things up and this was the last election that was decided for the year 2016 and what i mean by that is it was so close that there were recounts and more recounts and challenges and it wasn't until an election that took place in november it wasn't finally announced who the winner was until late in december the you know the final final didn't come till late in december so that's how close that that race was the next day doug applegate the democrat the progressive democrat says he's running again he says these kind of races are two cycle races you don't be an incumbent necessarily the first time you've got to just go at it again and he says he's going to go at it again meanwhile one of Pelosi's posse so she's got like this group of giant mega donors around her her whole life is based on the on these people that that's that's it she she you know people think she's the congresswoman from san francisco that's completely she's a congresswoman from these 20 or 30 mega donors that's it i mean the everyone in san francisco gets one vote to to their thousand votes in her world and one of these big mega mega donors a guy named iro lechner who is the original i'll just tell you this kind of funniest side because i know you'll appreciate it remember when uh bernie sanders was running a male prostitution ring out of his house in dc barney frank knew he was gay barney frank yeah barney frank but i iro lechner at the time was a lawyer in uh virginia and he got barney frank off the hook you know they blamed it on you know the other people see the barney and it was happening in my house i never knew they were having prostitutes in my house my god they must have been doing it when i was out to breakfast in any case so this guy iro lechner who got barney off he's a mega donor he gives every year huge huge amounts of money to the d triple city and to the dnc and to everything that nancy polo if you want them to give money to he decides he because he lives in san diego now that he has a better candidate than the one who nearly beat darrell isaac but some friend of his another attorney and he's going to run this guy and he calls up nancy a friend of mine happened to be on the line and he says uh can you push this dog out of the race i i need to i need him out of the race and then he said i'll do it i'll push him out of the race which he's trying to do now she i don't know that she she's a little senile sometimes and i don't know if she realized she's dealing with a marine colonel who doesn't get pushed out of a race by her but in any case i noticed yesterday joy reid one of these msnbc people who pretty much does what she's told was told to have a lechner's candidate i don't remember his name it doesn't matter he won't be around long but she had him on and as the opponent for darrell isa which was just a joke just an absolute joke he debated he debated darrell isa no no joy had him on just it was just a you know a promo thing you know in in response to the d triple c asking her you know we need we need you to get this guy on and you know his pr guy you know and pushing and you pull this string and that string and suddenly you get your your candidate on national tv are there deals made this is another theory i have maybe i've seen it on the west wing i'm not sure do darrell isa and paul ryan he runs unopposed right i know bainer ran unopposed the democrat yeah well there have been people who have opposed not anymore but there were people you know that you know isa was a very red district it's not so much anymore but but ryan's district was a swing district before before i mean they were democrats who were in recent time who have represented that district and it's a district that is quite winnable but the d triple c doesn't go after powerful republican leaders they don't go after committee chairman that's just part of their hideous ugly dna once polosi is gone that'll change but right now and as long as she's around the the um the policy at the d triple c they'll never admit this but the policy of the d triple c is never go after any republican leaders so not the speaker not the majority leader or the minority leader not um not any anyone with any power and and no committee chairman the republicans by the way are not reciprocal about that they sure they don't go after polosi or uh or or other top leaders or hoyer for example or cliburn but they they do go after democratic committee chairs and they went and they got fully they get rid of didn't fully they get rid of fully that's right when he was speaker yeah they they don't respect that rule and and the democrats do which which is just you know another example of how pathetic they are by the way just for the people who are listening who don't know me i just want to say one thing i i in some ways i really do respect nancy polosi as a as a leader she's accomplished a lot especially when she was younger at one time she was my congressperson when i lived in san francisco long ago and she's very good at some of the things she does especially legislative stuff some say she's the best that there is and she's certainly better than ryan that's for sure in terms of congressional leadership what she's not good at is anything to do with the d triple c the democratic congressional campaign committee and it reports to her and she has put every single person that she's picked to run it has been a disaster and and and it's it her tenure as the person who runs the d triple c has just been absolutely catastrophic they've lost dozens and dozens and dozens of seats and it's it's because of her do they end up like robert redford at the end of the candidate who said now what do i do he wins now what do i do do they really want to be in charge does paul ryan really want the republicans to have all the levers of power in washington dc that's what we're trained to believe that he does but he does want he wants all that power even though he doesn't know what to do with it he does know what to do with it but he doesn't know how to make that happen he's not very good i mean nancy is much better at that than he is she kept she can she keeps her caucus together much much better than he does if paul ryan were good at what he does what would he give us what would there have been a replacement for obama care did he have an actual plan did he really roll up his sleeves and figure out a way to come up with an alternative because it sure it sure looks like he didn't sure looks like this was just past during i mean i mean according to steve bannon so bannon told us to republican members of congress some of whom have personally told this to me i know this is true bannon went around and he whispered to congressman that ryan who's taken millions literally of dollars in bribery although we had we've had this discussion about how you define bribery but in the way i define bribery ryan has taken millions of dollars from the insurance companies and he let the insurance companies write the bill the part of the bill that involved insurance companies which is a very big part of the bill it wasn't really a health care bill it was a take away health care bill that was really all about giving a giant tax breaks to very wealthy people that that that's what that bill was but you've probably seen those graphics of what the insurance companies would no longer be forced to cover uh... you know no emergency room visits for example no ambulatory care no um hospitalization i mean they were there was just you know all the things that people want to use health insurance for no longer were required to be covered by the insurance companies you know you you you want to get tested and you want to get your labs you pay for the labs that i mean the bill was insane it was it was nothing to do with health care which is why it was popular only among 17 percent of the people and my great suspicion is is those 17 percent of the people were either employees of insurance companies or too stupid to understand what the bill was and everybody else in america either said i don't understand the bill and i have no comment or the bigger amount of people said they didn't like the bill and they weren't for it which is a really good thing in fact i know you want to talk with me about the special election coming up three weeks from today about a quick question i i do and i know you got to go but i have a quick question you had a professor from yale on the raffinated radio hour who's written this book about the signs of fascism he is very skeptical he's very pessimistic he says that america literally has about nine months left before the republic comes to an end i asked him are you more optimistic now because of obama care being preserved he said absolutely not am i a fool to watch what's going on in washington dc and this past weekend breathe a sigh of relief and say you know what it's flawed but the system is wearing trump down yes you see his his popularity is just sinking today it was what 34 percent or 36 36 percent it's unprecedented and what i was just about to say about the special election in georgia this is the next step you're talking about how the health care bill failed for the republicans the next step is is three weeks from today in in the in the suburbs north of atlanta there's a special election to fill tom price's seat who's tom price for a long time very very very right wing republican from that district is now trump's health secretary he helped write this horrendous bill and his seat has to be filled well right now there's a a fairly progressive democrat who's coming in first and in in polling that came out yesterday they asked who would you vote for in a one-on-one because it eventually will be a one-on-one right now there's a lot of candidates he's the first of many but there are a lot of republicans in that race but in the one-on-one against the two republicans that have any shot at all of being in the runoff in june he beats them both so that's that's a very very big deal part of that when you dig down into the numbers was the question what do you think about the republican health care plan and the majority of the people in that district these are republican districts they haven't had a democrat in there in i don't know how many a hundred years i mean some huge number of years and and and not a hundred but many many many many years certainly not in our lifetimes and and it was the it was the the district that tom price came from the guy who wrote this bill or partially wrote the bill and yet they and by a majority of them said they dis they did not like the bill and they didn't want to see that bill become law so they're you know i don't i wouldn't make a prediction that we're going to lose lose our democracy or that fascism was taking over or anything like that nor would i make a prediction that uh trump is going to be impeached but if i if i was forced on pain of death to pick between those two propositions i would say yes he'll be impeached or he'll just dangle slowly in the wind for the next three and a half years i'm not predicting anything but yeah you know yeah i i don't see us losing our democracy i would say he he'd be gone before that happens on some but somehow were you certain this was gonna happen did you have faith that the system and it was really the republicans who wore him down hopefully i mean what did you think we're where did you think we would be 67 some odd days into his presidency right now where did you think we would be right now um i well i did think that they would be able to at that long ago 67 days ago i did think they would be able to pass a repeal to obama care but as those days ticked down i it's it started becoming clearer and clearer to me that they didn't have the together that ryan wasn't didn't have the kind of skills that nancy polosi has to uh shepherd a bill like that through congress and then you know about a month ago i realized it's the thing is going to die he can't do it before you go you're going to have dinner with alan grace and he's out of office now he goes in and out of office depending on how they gerrymander florida right he's no longer a congressman is that correct yeah he's no lower congressman because he gave up his seat so he could run for the us senate so he's he's adam office right now he's traveling and having a good old time and writing some books okay here's what i don't understand alan grace and harvard undergrad harvard law school self-made man millionaire can do anything he wants in life he is an outlier he's a rebel he is an apostate he challenges the authority in the democratic party as i as i understand the democratic party the way being a congressman works is you either play ball or get to the back of the line you have to do your time like al franken learned from hillary in the senate you're a star hide your tail shut up listen and learn spend six years being a policy wonk and you'll rise up the ranks otherwise you're just gonna you're not going to get any support from the party we don't need stars here unless you're barack obama and you've been handpicked by harry reid to be president so or if you're really good and you could pull it off like elizabeth warren correct why would he want to go back into the house because oh alan yeah i don't know that he wants to go back into the house oh okay i would assume he wants back in why i just assume i know that he was in and out in and out and he wanted to be senator he lost rubio he might i'll ask him ask me next week when we talk i'll ask him tonight what is the attraction to being somebody alan the attraction is is absolutely easy easy peasy he has policy he wants to pass that's what alan is about alan is driven to get certain things like for example ear and ear and eye doctors added to medicare i mean it may sound weird that someone could be driven by that but i've known alan for over a decade he's driven by that that's what he wants to do and do these guys succeed can they look back to congress because it seems to me on the outside looking in that you get into congress and these days you craft a bill that never gets out of committee or you put a writer to a medicare funding bill that includes you know ear doctors and eye doctors and those doctors is that all you can hope for when you look back you say well after 12 years in congress there was a writer to a bill that provided some of that isn't very important and you can get it done alan can look back and say he led a movement that was success that successfully kept the us from getting involved with the syrian civil war that's a pretty big deal okay i'd be curious to to corner these guys and say as you leave office what do you look back on and say i that was mine i did that it just feels like and again it's feeling not knowledge that they're serving pelosi and schumer dialing for bucks trying to keep the majority or maintain or get them and that was never what gracing was about i mean gracing work was great with ron paul ron paul had been trying to get an audit of the fed forever and he was never able to do it he didn't know how to reach across the aisle and then alan gracing came along and said hey ron let's do this together and they did it together they succeeded alan passed more legislation in it in a republican controlled congress no less but he passed more legislation than any other single member of congress democrat or republican while the democratic party was in the minority he still managed to do it alan gracing is one of these rare congressmen there are others he but he's one of them who understands how you work across the aisle not the way a blue dog or a new dem works across the aisle adopting republican ideas he understands how you take core democratic ideas craft them in a way that will be appealing to republicans and get it passed and he he's done that per miller giapal from seattle is doing that right now ted lou in los angeles is doing that right now that's what the great members of congress are able to do there aren't many of them but there are some now before you go first head on a stick outside the white house who's who goes first we've already had go yeah i mean mike flin went first right yeah but that doesn't count he was a national security advisor yeah but i mean that wasn't they weren't they were just starting the engine oh i think that's a pretty big deal um i don't know bannon has been predicting that he'd last a year you know that they're you know a lot of them depend on how heavy and hard this whole thing comes down with putin gate there's a lot of people as members of the cabinet as well as um trumps inner core of uh of criminal types who are going to have to have their heads on that stick and i don't know who's going to be first i mean i'd like to see obviously banding go gorka there's the the commerce secretaries as bad as as they come wilbur robert roce yeah wilbur roce yeah yeah all right i mean there there's a lot of them there there there's he's got the can the cabinet from hell does he know that he doesn't know that does he doesn't know anything i mean i may have mentioned this already on another on another time that we spoke but when he came across bethy divorce one day he looked at her he said yeah weren't you the education gal wow not since reagan in the twilight of his senility when he was passing on into alzheimer's how he Klein is the founder and treasurer of the blue america pack and you should read him every day at down with tyranny i look forward to talking to you next time sir okay take it easy great have fun tonight thanks for listening please give us a good review on itunes share this episode with your friends go to facebook post on twitter post it on reddit post it on facebook share this there's information 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