An Ex-Con's Plan for Fighting Violence & Crime

Show Transcript

A Plan for Fighting Violence & Crime

[00:00:00] Bob Gatty: Hey, would you take advice about how to reduce crime and make our streets, schools, workplaces and homes safe again from an ex con who spent nearly five years in prison for running a Ponzi scheme that defrauded investors? That's our guest today, and we're going to talk about his controversial plan to cut crime when we come back.

[00:00:25] Herbert Kay spent nearly five years in prison for running a Ponzi scheme operation, taking money from new investors to pay returns to old investors. Today, freed, he continues to pay restitution to his victims. In between, Kay's been a retailer, insurance salesman, stockbroker, registered principal. Public speaker, best selling author, venture capitalist, business turnaround expert, TV talk show host, network talking head, consultant, direct marketer, and real estate developer.

[00:01:06] Now either this guy is much in demand, very talented, or he just simply can't hold a job, and I don't know which one it is, but we'll find out. And now he's the front man for a 501c3 non profit that promotes what he calls the 1964 plan, which he says would make America the safest country in the world, if implemented.

[00:01:30] Herbert Kay, thanks for sharing your story with us today, pal. I appreciate 

[00:01:34] Herbert Kay: it. It's my pleasure. By the way, the newspaper said I ran a Ponzi scheme. That's not what it was. What I was guilty of, I was a real estate developer. And by the way, I was guilty of what I did. And so I'm not trying in any way to mitigate that.

[00:01:45] I'm not I'm not what's the word I'm looking for? Weaseling on what I did. I was guilty. I got what I deserved. But just to be clear, I wasn't taking money from Peter to pay Paul. What I was doing was, is believing my own bullshit, trying to save my development company in Mexico. that went down in the 2008 crash and rather than bankrupting it, which is what I should have done and fallen on my sword like a man, I went way beyond the boundaries of where I should to raise capital to try to keep it alive and ultimately it imploded and that's what happened.

[00:02:15] And guilty as charged. Absolutely. It's one of those things where I backed into it without, it's like being a sick gambler in a sense that I backed into it without really realizing I was doing it. But once I realized it and I could have stopped, I didn't stop. And that was my 

[00:02:31] Bob Gatty: crime.

[00:02:32] Exactly. 

[00:02:33] How did you do that? What did you do? That was 

[00:02:36] Herbert Kay: illegal.

[00:02:37] It's it was more not no single act. So I portrayed possibility as fact to raise capital and I'm very persuasive. And when I do public speaking and, this is going to be. It's like my superpower, and I can make people believe almost anything, at least in those days. And I used my superpower for ill.

[00:03:00] I I depicted a risky venture as not as risk, not remotely as risky as it was. Okay, and I took down a lot of innocent people who were my friends Oh, and I still and I pay restitution to them to this day and i'll probably pay for the rest of my life And I do it proudly actually it doesn't bother me at all.

[00:03:19] Just the opposite actually and it just If people choose to the you know, judge me by the worst thing i've ever done There's nothing I can do about it But i'm not going to get into the weaseling business and start like a politician, you know Trying to make an excuse for what I did. I did it I shouldn't have done it.

[00:03:34] I knew better and I still did it. 

[00:03:36] Bob Gatty: Tell me this you said that in the stuff that you sent me, you said that prison was the best experience of your life. Why? How could that possibly be? 

[00:03:46] Herbert Kay: It was like going to a monastery and that's how I treated it. I treated it as a monastic experience from the very, very beginning.

[00:03:53] If you think about it. You live on basically you sleep on it on a hard shelf with a very thin mattress a cot Less comfortable than a cot a monk would sleep on you wear exactly the same clothes every single day You follow rules that you have absolutely nothing to do with and your life is simply not your own but what you get for that Is an enormous amount of time to think and I needed a timeout and I had built so much pressure into my life that by the time I went to prison it was cathartic. Plus And again, this is not making an excuse and I always I'm going to preface this I'm going to bring up a childhood thing, which is really, it makes me feel pathetic at 66 years old. So I came from an extremely abusive background and I'm not going to go into the details of what it was, but basically every kind of abuse you can think of I experienced.

[00:04:44] Okay. And what that does to you, there's only, when you come out of an abusive childhood, when a person does, when you, me, whoever, it's much more common than I ever thought. And that's a sad point. So I'm far from unique. There's two ways to come out of it. Either you go into a lifelong fetal position where you end up in unending therapy crushed as a human being or you become like me so and what and to become like me which is to be like charismatic and always look happy regardless of what you feel like is because you develop A second channel.

[00:05:19] I'm gonna use a word that my youngest daughter uses. She calls it channel one and channel two. And you develop this channel two because your channel one present is so horrible. So to escape it... You live in this alternate reality, and it's just a little bit skewed, and you, after a while, you stop realizing it's an alternate reality.

[00:05:38] That's how I could believe my own lies. Because, to me, they weren't in this skewed reality. And it took prison to slap me out of it. Now, and up until prison, I carried an enormous amount of hatred for two people in particular. And in prison, I was able to let it go. Just forget about it. And, at some point, I It was just an opportunity to really do some serious introspection.

[00:06:03] And for that, it was the best thing that ever happened to me. 

[00:06:05] Bob Gatty: All right. So what did you learn in prison that resulted in this 1965 plan of yours and 

[00:06:13] Herbert Kay: 64? The reason I call it 64, by the way, is that's the year that the civil rights passed. The Civil Rights Act passed. So from that day forward, all discrimination in the United States became illegal.

[00:06:24] Now, we're not, of course there's still discrimination and of course there's still battles to be fought, but that was when it became illegal. So much has changed since then. For example, 1964, before the Civil Rights Act passed, For example, and I think you're old enough to remember this if you saw a mixed race couple in a restaurant everything would get quiet and people would stare and now nobody cares and that's just a Really good example of society has come a long way.

[00:06:49] It's got a long way to go I'm, not I this is not a discussion of racial equality. I'm just saying that it became illegal So and the united states was at the top of its game. We were the world's dominant power .No one ever heard the word school and shooting in the same sentence or club shooting or office and shooting or whatever it might be. You know, you could leave your keys in your car even in a big city I grew up in pittsburgh and miami both and you know There was never any question of anyone's going to break into your car or your house It just didn't happen and then we managed to drive, we basically ran the whole train off the tracks But until I got to prison I was like everybody else either Depending on your politics, it really falls into two groups, and it's always the same.

[00:07:31] Every time something horrible happens, on the right they call for lock them up and on the left they call for gun, gun control of some kind and Okay, it's enough of this conversation because everyone's got to get a grip on reality First of all to the right wingers The united states has 25 percent of the world's prison population with four percent of the world's globe of the global population We imprison more people than any other country in history as a percentage of our population We imprison more people in number than china korea And russia combined and that's a disgrace for the world's greatest republic So locking up more people might make it seem like it's getting better But the way prisons are run and that's why prison reform is a big part of the 1964 plan All you're doing is warehousing a disaster and putting it off for another day most of these guys are doing life on the installment plan and that's how they Because every prison sentence is a life sentence in the sense that once you're tarred with that label You will never escape it.

[00:08:28] I mean I deal with it But the difference between me and a lot of those guys is that I have a lot more on the ball And you know to a kid that has no background. No experience has come from a fatherless family has no healthy role models in his life. His mother's a crack whore and he and He's just resigned himself to being a lifelong criminal. It's his expectation of when he'll be down next. It's a badge of honor to have a low number when you're in prison. The lower your number the more it's been the longest time since you were taken in they issue these prison numbers in numerical order I mean I still remember mine and but mine was 301 231 and the guys that got Respect started with 198.

[00:09:08] These were guys that were Just lifelong and the sad part of it was, is that most of them were perfectly intelligent. And had they been born in a different family, they would've grown up just fine. And it became clear to me, and it's, it also has nothing to do with guns. Look, there are 400 million guns in circulation.

[00:09:24] We had, we were armed to the teeth when the pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, and we didn't have this kind of a problem until subsequent to 1964. And so I began to think of it that way and it's because I had so much time to think. And I also became a yard dad. So what that means is those boys are hungry for a father I'm just telling you of all races and Interestingly when I was in prison, I rolled black I didn't roll white and the reason I didn't roll means who I affiliated with. And I affiliated with the black guys which are called the kinfolk because i'm jewish And the whites are run by the aryan brothers and they're vicious nazis. And I could and I just couldn't I didn't want to deal with rolling white.

[00:10:06] So I rolled black. And it was, and that was better for me. But as a result of that, I got to know a lot of very heavy duty black gangsters very personal, very, in a friendship relationship, and I got to know the gangsters in the cartels. I got to understand the drug business. It was an education on crime that, that was unique.

[00:10:27] It and at the level that it wasn't a sociology class, you know I can tell you how drugs are brought in I can tell you how most Illegal immigrants are brought in. I can tell you all the tricks that they do. And it became obvious to me that everything we're doing is stupid and we need a restart And that's what the 1964 plan is.

[00:10:46] It's all the lessons. I learned in prison Consolidated into pieces That will actually work and you know I, if you've looked at it there, I'm sure there are pieces that you hate of it, and that's fine. That's why it's a plan, not propaganda. There are parts you're going to love and parts you're going to hate, but go ahead.

[00:11:01] Yeah, 

[00:11:01] Bob Gatty: we're going to get into the plan, the details of it in a minute, but I'd like to just, would you share some of the experiences that you had in prison. You talked about rolling with the with the blacks. 

[00:11:15] Herbert Kay: Yeah. So prison is segregated. Are 

[00:11:17] Bob Gatty: you accepted by that? What did it take? Oh, 

[00:11:21] Herbert Kay: yeah.

[00:11:22] Nothing. I just sat with them. The chow hall is segregated. You're not allowed to sit with any other race. That's not a, by the way, a prison rule that's self imposed by the inmates themselves. So there are the whites. That are called the woods, which is short for pecker Woods.

[00:11:35] There's the I'm not making that up. And they like it. Don't ask me. With their Nazi swa, swastika, tattoos, whatever. Okay. Then there's the Chicanos, then there's the Pisces. The Pisces are the non-American, the not the foreign National Latinos are Pisces. The Pisces and the Chicanos hate each other.

[00:11:56] And they hate each other because the Pisces view the Chicanos as sellouts, and the Chicanos view the Pisces as stupid. And so the two of them together just don't get along. So they, they're separate. The blacks are called kinfolk, so I rolled kinfolk. The Native Americans are called chiefs. And I think that's all the groups.

[00:12:14] There's no Asian group because there's so few Asians. Like I, I think I met three Asian guys the whole time I was in prison. There were more Jews than Asians, and that's saying something. There weren't that many of us to begin with. And I was, because I was a Jew, I'll tell you a really interesting prison story.

[00:12:26] It shows you what can happen. In the least expected places. So when I first went into prison, they took me to a place called Alhambra. Alhambra is a maximum security prison. It's called a five yard. It's the highest you can get is where they take everybody put us into cells and then figure out where to place us based on our risk.

[00:12:46] And, are we violent? Are we nonviolent? How many years to get out? That kind of thing. Are you mentally ill? What's wrong with you? How do you go? And I'll end by saying I was only there eight days and then I ended, I was trucked off the Yuma, which was what a fun ride that was.

[00:13:01] But anyway, while I was there, I was in a 14 man cell that was holding 20 guys because of the overcrowding. So six guys were sleeping on the disgusting floor. There's no other way to put it There is a single shitter that was also the sink in the middle of the room with absolutely no privacy whatsoever And it was a lesson right away on how they deal with it Like for example, no one likes to poop in public. So what the inmates did was tore apart a sheet turned it into a cord wrapped it around poles and supports on the beds the bunks and the supporting beams that were in the room and then Drape blankets over it to make a like A semi private area where you could go when you had to you know poop And then what you did was is anytime this is going to be needlessly graphic But the toilet had an unbelievably powerful flush so you would literally hold the button down to suck every odor and You just hold it down as long as it took you try to get it over with and then you got out of if you had to fart, frankly, in a room like that, you went and sat on the toilet, even with your pants on, just fart into the toilet and hit the button because it would sink that sink at that.

[00:14:09] I'm not joking around. That's really how it was. I'm not making this up. So anyway, naturally i'm in there and i'm not happy and it's all by the way, it's arizona It's the summertime. It's june. It's hot as hell. I And they had evaporative cooling only in the prison. So let's just say It was sweaty, really sweaty.

[00:14:29] And so all of us were stripped down to our waist and, we had overalls, orange overalls, but you didn't wear them inside the cell because it was too hot. So you would strip them off and basically you laid in your bunk all day. Cause that's all there was to do. They took you out for 10 minutes to take a shower and that's about it and twice a day, once a day to eat once a day to eat in the evening, everything else.

[00:14:49] They brought you a bologna sandwich on white bread for your breakfast and lunch that they'd give you in the cell along with a little thing of milk or something and maybe a cookie. So anyway, second day I'm in there, I'm absolutely miserable, I'm feeling very sorry for myself, and who walks in but this gigantic white guy.

[00:15:09] With his head shaved, he had to weigh 350 pounds, with every Nazi swastika tattoo you can possibly imagine, and a war eagle tattooed across his chest. Now, when they wear a war eagle, they're only allowed to wear it by the Aryan brothers if they've killed someone. So right away I knew that this guy was a murderer.

[00:15:30] His prison handle, most guys don't go by their name in prison, they go by their handle. His handle was evil, and it fit. And people somehow knew him, other inmates knew him, they had been in with him before. And he had a I mean he was as terrifying a human being as you can possibly imagine and here I am A jewish guy an older jewish guy for christ's sake this guy was probably 35 Give or take a nickel and i'm trapped in a room with hitler's henchmen.

[00:15:56] I It was frankly frightening so I thought to myself what am I going to do about this to get out of this alive because you could really get beaten up very badly in prison in certain situations So I decided what I was going to do is get beat up on purpose. So When we went to the we went to the showers on wednesdays and sundays So I and he came in on a tuesday So I decided the next day when we went to the showers and there was going to be a lot of A corrections officers around the reason I picked the showers is there would be a ceos around to break up what was going to come. I decided to pick a fight with him in the showers, get beat up and then get put into protective custody away from him. That was my plan to take basically take a beating to protect myself.

[00:16:37] I know how that sounds convoluted but in prison That's the logic, And so I walk up to him And we're in the shower room and I said, Hey, and I'm, and I'm six foot three. I'm looking up at him. He's huge. Okay. And I look at him and I say, evil, here's the deal. I'm a Jew. I'm the real thing.

[00:16:54] I'm not going to pretend I'm not going to. And if, look, if you're going to beat the shit out of me, let's just have it out right now. This is literally what I told him. Let's have it out right now. You'll win, but I'm going to try my best to hurt you, but let's just get this over with right now. And I got ready to take the punch and he looked at me and then he smiled and grabbed me and picked me up with a big bear hug and he said, man, you've got balls.

[00:17:16] And I said not really. I'm just, he couldn't figure out any other plan. I was honest with him. It's not that I had balls. I just couldn't think of anything else to do, and I figured I, I'll take a beating, get it over with, the COs will save me, and then they'll lock me in protective custody where no one will get at me.

[00:17:33] Anyway, it worked. He ended up being my prison tutor, and he, we, I spent the next six days with him as he taught me everything I needed to know for the rest of the time I was in prison about how it works from top to bottom. He was the one who told me to roll black. He told me, don't roll white, you're going to make yourself a misery, and it was, he was right.

[00:17:51] Wow. And it was an education. It was an education. Yeah. That's just one, I have so many of those stories, but Yeah. Eagle, by the way, ended up going to a four yard. I never saw him again. I went to a two, he went to a four. Okay. It was... I never saw him again. And he was in, interestingly, he was in because he'd come in on purpose, he got into a fight on purpose so that he could murder a guy in the jail in the county he came from because the guy had raped his niece and he had gotten himself arrested to murder the guy that raped his niece and he didn't, I don't know if he was successful or not, but there was, they sent him to a four yard, which is a murderer's yard.

[00:18:28] So there you go. That's the story. Holy 

[00:18:31] Bob Gatty: mackerel. A lot of people listening to this are going to wonder, what was it like trying to take a shower? Were you worried? No. 

[00:18:41] Herbert Kay: No. At Alhambra, it was a big public, it was horrible. It smelled like urine. It was, you just couldn't imagine a bigger shithole than Alhambra Prison.

[00:18:50] I just can't. The Shawshank prison in the movie was a holiday inn compared to Alhambra prison. I'm just saying, okay? There was no private rooms or two to a room nonsense. They were packed in there like sardines. But when I got to Yuma, everything changed. Prison is better than jail, okay? Much better than jail.

[00:19:10] So we get to Yuma, and it's About 11 o'clock at night by the time we get there and at that point the whole yard has been locked down Yuma, what's is what is called a working yard meaning that all the inmates have to have a job when they're Housed there. The jobs are menial. It's not when I say a job.

[00:19:27] It could be anything I worked in a call center just because I have the gift of gab and I ended up actually making money in prison, but most of the guys did some kind of Physical labor, you know worked on golf courses on the outside shoveled shit, whatever it might be clear the road, Fight brush fires.

[00:19:44] They just it was a working yard So nine o'clock lights out and everything got quiet because these guys were exhausted and they wanted to sleep and So I get in there and it's all really quiet and the co For at this point i'm so used to being told where to go and being led around I didn't quite know what to do.

[00:20:01] So he gives me my mattress and my pillow and my, my basic supplies. And he says, you're in bunk, whatever it was. And I said, are you going to take me over? He says, no, it's right over there in that building. And I, that struck me as weird to begin with. So I go and I said, can I take a shower?

[00:20:15] Cause I stunk by this point. I am just as ripe as right can be before I was even transported. I was sitting outside in a cage. It had a plywood top, but it was 113 degrees outside. And I was out there for hours and I stunk. Stunk. Okay. So all I really wanted to do was take a shower. To your point, that's, this is a long way to the same story.

[00:20:36] So I, we get in there, I put up my mattress, yada yada, and I go to where the showers are, and the first thing that, that I smell is Clorox, which to me was roses. It smelled clean right away. And the second thing was it had individual stalls, and the third thing was it had curtains on the stalls.

[00:20:57] Wow. So I'm like, Oh my god privacy. So now when I was in both pima county jail That's when I was transferred that you always go to jail to get transferred into the prison system I was there for a short time though It was like no hot water was just cold and it came out like a bullet And but not a good stream like one of those cheap shower heads that drill you but you hardly get any water And that's also how it was at alhambra So I turned on the water and it had Yuma prison and so in Kingman, my, the second one I went to had great water pressure.

[00:21:28] So all I can tell you it had a good shower head and great water pressure and it was I'm telling you it was a the little things in life become very appreciated when you're in that position and I took a terrific shower and then I Had I basically been holding my bowels for days because let me just tell you so I went and they had doors on the poopers and They were clean And I was like, I said to myself, I can do this.

[00:21:58] I can do this. And I could and then I just settled into it. All 

[00:22:03] Bob Gatty: We need to talk about your 1964 plan. Now you say that it would eradicate mass murder homelessness, human trafficking violent crime and addiction. How in the hell would it do that? 

[00:22:16] Herbert Kay: Two things the restoration of the nuclear family and the end of the drug war and the oh three things and the devolution of Welfare to the state level now, let me explain each part You pick what you want me to talk about first you go ahead.

[00:22:30] You just do it. Look, at the core of this, the first thing I noticed was none of these guys had a father. That's why I was a yard dad. They gravitated towards me because they're all looking for father figures. And that's of all races. I had, I, by the way, I speak Spanish, so I had a lot of young Paisa guys, Latino guys.

[00:22:48] I had, the black guys I was rolling with, they all, I was their yard dad, even some of the white guys. In fact, you want to see my prison ink? Here's my prison ink that I got when I was in prison. Oh, look at that. OG and a star, yeah, you like that? OG stands for original gangster. When I first went in, I thought it stood for old guy.

[00:23:03] That's how experienced I was. But anyway, I got it because I wanted a souvenir. And I, a guy named Flacco, who was a... A young chicano who is a tattoo artist. He's now in casa grande did it for me in prison That's another long story. They do it with and anyway I could go on and on and we're not gonna have the time for this Okay, so let's go back to the plan.

[00:23:20] So the common thread Of virtually everyone in prison at least in male prison I assume it's the same for women is they don't have a father they come from a socio economic class Where virtually none of them have a father? It's it's you know, and if they do he's a sperm donor they might know who he is.

[00:23:38] He might be a gangster that they know in the neighborhood, but there's no fathering going on and You and I would agree, I'm sure, that there are just more sociological studies than you can cite that says that if you grow up without a father, you're, you've got two strikes before the first ball is pitched.

[00:23:55] Then when you grow up without a father and you're in a place Where your mother is a crack whore because when women grow up without father men grow up without fathers and they seek it in their male structure in the gangs and in the criminal groups. Women have babies They start when they're 13 and 14 years old by different men under different last names. And the reason is without a father What does the father do for a young woman and I speak as a father of two daughters and two sons But my job as a father of two daughters was to tell my daughters how important they were and where they stand in the world And that they have value and all those things that a father should do. They're growing up in an environment where their mother is a crack whore then they become a crack whore ,And they get more welfare payments by having more babies. And that also allows them when you collect welfare, then logically you sell drugs because you don't have to report the income or even talk about the income against your welfare payments.

[00:24:48] It's a giant sea of hopelessness. All rooted in fatherlessness. So I began to look at what could we do to restore the nuclear family? So as I by the way, there was a decent prison library and the librarian and I got to know each other very well. She was a lady our age give or take a nickel and she brought me any kind of book I'd asked for You know when I started doing my research And that became my second job.

[00:25:13] I became one of the librarians, which was great. I loved being one of the librarians, because I read all day long. And I was, I've always been a reader. But in prison I had... A lot of time to read so I started looking at statistics We weren't allowed on the internet everything I got I had to get in writing or in a book or in some other study That you would get from me and bring in or print the study for me that i'd ask for whatever it might be And because they didn't want to obviously talking to the outside and so on and so forth, which I completely understand. So Anyway, in 1960 to give and I'll use the group I rolled with the kinfolk the black guys as an example in 1960 86 percent of black children in the United States were born into two parent families.

[00:25:56] Okay. Okay. 86 percent today 82 percent or not. It's it's completely reversed and it is not some kind of coincidence that the weight of the prison population falls heaviest among the black community because they're the most fatherless of all the groups that Latinos are next at about 56%, whites are about 36%.

[00:26:15] Asians are not worth mentioning hardly any, it's, but the primarily it falls so heavily on minorities because of Without a father. And if you in a certain socioeconomic class, this is where you go. Plus, the other thing was, is there was an enormous amount of drugs in prison. So I began to look at, for example, in In Kingman prison I was recruited a lot by the cartels to launder money for them.

[00:26:39] When I got out, that was certainly a career choice I could have made. Now I got to tell you, don't do the crime. If you can't do the time. And I'm a one and done kind of guy. I, there's no way I was going to do that. But the more I told them, no, the more they liked me. Plus they love it. They love the gringo that could speak Spanish.

[00:26:54] So I would hang out with them and I learned. So in Kingman prison, we had about 1800 inmates and. About 1400 of them had active addictions. I never saw Heroin until I went to prison in my life. I heard of it I've seen it in tv shows, but I saw it every day in prison. I saw crack every day. I saw meth Every day and all of those things I had heard about on the street, but i've never seen it The only other drug I ever saw besides marijuana, which i've smoked my whole life was cocaine which I never did I was on wall street in the 80s and I saw a lot of cocaine It was in the men's rooms.

[00:27:30] I mean there was a lot of cocaine, Cocaine was they don't do cocaine. They do crack because it lasts longer You know the cocaine eyes evidently too short but in drugs alone and heroin and meth Alone the pisces were doing all the all of the distribution They were bringing it into prison and how they brought it into prison was by drone. So a drone would come to the corner when the yard would lock down and all the prison houses all the different Dormitories, let's call them for lack of a better word We're locked down a drone would bring the drugs to the to a corner of the yard Where a corrupt corrections officer would pick it up and then he would bring it To the pisces and the pisces were distributed on the yard. They were doing three and a half million dollars a year in drug revenue in kingman prison And that's in prison The cartels were doing three and a half million dollars a year in prison in drugs. If you can't control drugs in prison, you might as well just forget about it.

[00:28:22] I mean that there's The drug war was lost from the day and it's created so much havoc. So The plan revolves, I know I'm jumping a little bit, but the plan revolves around the restoration of the nuclear family and some prison reform and some homelessness reform and things that'll cost money, but the money to pay for that's going to come from ending the stupid drug war, where we've spent a trillion dollars since 1971 and Richard Nixon declared the stupid thing, and we've stopped nothing.

[00:28:49] Nothing. It's just it's and we're not going to stop it. It's not gonna the cartels have unlimited funds, And they hire the best people where policemen are essentially bureaucrats with guns and i'm not denigrating. They do an important job I'm, not anti police. I'm just saying they're not by caliber nearly as smart as the guys they're coming up against They're just not in the same, one guy's I knew truck drivers who made a million dollars a year hauling drugs, and you know How they haul the drugs across the country is in milk trucks. So when you see those big, steel milk things carrying along a lot of them have a big collection of drugs right in the middle because the dogs can't smell through the milk, so That's i'm just that's just one little tip that I can share with you about drugs 

[00:29:31] Bob Gatty: You mean the drugs are in some 

[00:29:33] Herbert Kay: They're in a plastic water, milk tight container down and down in the sea of milk. It's really a milk truck and they own a bunch of of dairies around the country. And, through shell corporate, let me tell you, if I really was a financial criminal, these guys could have taught me a lot.

[00:29:50] And, what I knew a lot about was, because I was a real estate developer in Mexico, that's where my real estate development company was, I know a lot about Latin American finance, and that's why they like me, because I know about the banks and how they work and all that kind of stuff. But, which is to say they don't work, it's Latin America.

[00:30:05] Bob Gatty: Okay, so when talking about drugs, you want to legalize 

[00:30:08] Herbert Kay: drugs, all drugs? Absolutely, yeah, all drugs, and not decriminalize. Okay. The first thing you have to understand is and I came to understand this in prison as well Is that for a lot of people longevity is not their goal I understand that we made we make certain drugs illegal because we're trying it's how you go to hell the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

[00:30:27] We want to help these people. They don't want to be helped Yeah, the reason that rehab is such a miserable track record even for 12 step programs Is that unless you want to quit you're not going to quit and most of these people Have no expectation of a better life .All they're trying to do is escape for a few minutes, but because drugs are illegal They're extremely expensive compared to their production cost. So one of the examples I cite in the white paper that's on the 1964 plan. org website is I talk about the price of heroin. Now, heroin, and by the way, this was backed up. I learned this in prison, that I went to see if there was a study that backed it up, and Yale did a study on this that does back it up. The if you sold heroin at 100 percent profit, you would be selling it at 5 percent of its street price.

[00:31:14] Everything else is recovering the cost of interdiction. There's so much, they have to spend a lot of money to deal with the interdiction threats from the various things, and that's what drives up the cost of drugs. Plus, Because interdiction is so expensive drugs are not a competitive market. It's not a free market So ironically our drug laws protect the cartels from competition Because very few other people could afford to spend the money to do what the cartels do to bring the drugs into the country. So we're in a weird way the last people i'd tell you right now I know this firsthand the last people on earth who want drugs legalized are the cartels.

[00:31:49] It's it is positively a license to print money and They're never going to go away and they're just stabilizing all of central and south america If we legalize drugs if it would be as easy remember heroin It's just i'm keep using that as an example because everyone knows what it is. Heroin is not patentable. It's been around forever. It's like aspirin You could sell it generically generic producers could produce it and I don't believe in decriminalization either because Decriminalization is a code word for replacing one useless bureaucracy with another. So these drug addicts What they need is safe a safe supply of drugs, be able to go get treatment if they want it Okay, and otherwise be left alone. By doing that they'll be able to support their drug habits on 1/20th of what they need to get now, which means when I was in prison about 36% of the guys there statistically are there for drug charges, which is possession or sale. But all the other violent crimes Are all associated with drugs and the reason for that is that drugs are illegal and since drugs are illegal. You cannot go to court to enforce a contract between two drug dealers. So if it's all a handshake business. So if I'm not making an excuse for all the murder that goes on but i'm just giving you the context of It goes on because it's illegal and they can't go to court for the same reason that in the old west Ranchers would string up rustlers because there was no law around. And they didn't have a jail to put them in so they'd string them up And leave them hang from a tree and that's what happens when there's no law.

[00:33:25] There's no structure There's no courts .Law is not a bad thing and we need it ,But when you have an illegal enterprise, they can't use it. Therefore their only recourse is violence. That's their only recourse. And if we did away with drug with the drug laws in their entirety, all drugs are legal, A week later, violent crime would drop by 80 to 90 percent just overnight.

[00:33:48] And if you've ever been, have you, let me ask you a question, Bob, have you ever been stolen from? Have you ever been robbed? Had your car broken into? Had your house broken into? Been mugged? Anything like that in your whole life? 

[00:33:57] Bob Gatty: Yeah, we had a break in at a home that we had where somebody stole some stuff while we were 

[00:34:03] Herbert Kay: away.

[00:34:05] There's a 99% chance that would've never happened if drugs were legal. Yeah, that, that. It's as simple as that. And just to use, Arizona is the state I live in, so I'm gonna use it 'cause I know the number is cold. And then you can extrapolate it to any other state. Arizona, all states spend money on the same three things.

[00:34:19] They spend money on prison, schools and infrastructure primarily. They different percentages, different states, red, blue, all that kind of stuff. But basically all states do those three things. Arizona spends $1.1 billion a year on prisons right now. If drugs were illegal 80 of those prisons could be shut down. That's 800 million dollars a year that they're spending that they wouldn't have to spend that doesn't include Powering down the drug cops, shutting down all the departments, closing down the dea.

[00:34:45] There's so much money to be saved By ending the drug war because all of these bureaucracies feed at its traugh. And we can use that money to, for example, end the homeless situation. That mean it's, there's not that many homeless people. It's a disgrace that the richest country in the world has people living on the streets.

[00:35:02] But all we ever do is, we have plenty of money to send to Ukraine, but we don't have any money to deal with this. Let's end the drug war. We'll have so much money, we won't know what to do with it. And then, We can deal 

[00:35:12] Bob Gatty: with it. Go ahead. Yeah, I want to talk about the restoration of the nuclear family next.

[00:35:18] Okay. Are you saying that you want women to stay home, cook and clean and tend to the kids, puppies?

[00:35:25] Herbert Kay: Of course not. All right. No. I called the 1964 plan because that's the year the Civil Rights Act passed, which I consider The most important piece of legislation since the 13th amendment freed the slaves and it made all discrimination illegal in the United States moving forward and like you and I talked about before the show.

[00:35:43] Of course, there's still discrimination, but it's illegal. Before that, that, Jim Crow ended in 1964 and America was at the top of its game. We weren't in Vietnam. We weren't stuck in a trap of, we hadn't spent 32 trillion dollars to no effect. Yada. Okay. All we had to do was not blow it, which we did.

[00:36:02] Now, let's, and how we did that was destroy the nuclear family. And there were three Causes for it. The first cause is no fault divorce Okay, the second cause is the birth control pill and the third cause is the federal welfare state So i'll go through them one by one So and by the way women will never go back to the kitchen The reason is because the technology is all the stuff women used to do we can do with a machine, right?

[00:36:26] I mean You know, there were no dishwashers when women stayed at home. There was no one to wash the diapers. There was no such thing as disposable. That, the world has gotten much better for women. And no, I'm not advocating they go home. I'm saying we don't go back to the past, but the way we face the future.

[00:36:40] In the past, you know just with hope and resilience and as one group of people not a tribalized society of people screaming at each other and looking for offense. But let's go back and deal with the no fault divorce So prior to 1967 there was no such thing in this country as no fault divorce. Today Everyone has no-fault. That means all you have to do today is go to the court and say I don't get along with my Soon to be ex and that's all the reason you need you don't have to prove anything. You don't have to prove that there was any abuse or anything else and the only time that comes up is when there's a lot of money involved and that's when the accusations start. But i'm saying That if children and I want to make this clear if you don't have children no fault divorce is fine. But if you have once you have a child, it's not about you anymore as a human being your role on earth You are here.

[00:37:28] We are here biologically to replace ourselves. That is at our base, the reason for life and of all species, not just human beings. So when you choose to have a child, it's not about me anymore. And divorce should not be easy because what no fault divorce did was change marriage from a solemn contract into just another long term relationship and the divorce rate zoomed as a result. So that's What no fault divorce did and I would reinstate In the case of having children you've got to have a reason there's got to be some abuse or something That why are you destroying the family?

[00:38:05] And by the way yelling and screaming is not an excuse. And I understand that some kids grow up in houses where they have alcoholic parents or this or that but see No one ever talks about Objective reality. The objective reality is, for example, I grew up in Mount Lebanon, Pennsylvania. It's an Irish Catholic neighborhood, even though I was like the only Jewish kid, but it was an Irish Catholic neighborhood.

[00:38:24] I'm telling you that virtually every mother and father in that neighborhood were functioning alcoholics, virtually everyone. The drinking started at first thing in the morning. They would, and in those days, you left your back door open and the screen door, and Jews really don't drink. We like to chew our calories.

[00:38:37] But we always kept liquor in the house. That's why Jews are fat. We'd like. We like, we prefer to, I really don't drink, I will socially, but that's typically, that's a, Jews have the lowest incidence of alcoholism, except for Asians. And that, there's just a reason for that.

[00:38:51] Both cultures are really into their food. It's really, very food, but anyway, but in this Irish, it was some stereotypes have a seed of truth in them and a seed of truth in the Irish stereotype is they drink a lot, but they're functional. And there's a lot of screaming and yelling you don't Okay, children to be prepared as adults.

[00:39:11] You cannot protect them all the way Yeah, some bad things have to happen to toughen them up for what's to come. So the reason for a divorce has for example an absolute reason for divorce is mult is violence against the woman. Okay, that's an absolute reason for divorce. But here's something that's here's an objective fact You can fact check me on this 80 percent of domestic violence is caused is done by women. 80 percent of arrests for domestic violence are women being arrested.

[00:39:37] I know that's never talked about, but the truth is most men don't hit women. I understand that it seems like that when you watch movies, but the reason that most men don't hit women is we all know that we're strong enough to kill a woman. We know that. We know that even here I am 66 years old. I'm in relatively good shape But I know that if I slugged the 21 year old girl I could I'd knock out her teeth and god knows only what so you just don't hit women I raised my sons that there was absolutely no reason to hit a woman and most men feel that way. 80 percent of domestic violence is done by women, and 100 percent of domestic violence involves alcohol.

[00:40:13] 100%. If domestic violence is taking place regularly, and it's the man attacking the woman, then that's certainly a grounds for the woman to leave. It just doesn't happen as much as you would think. And so most marriages need to stay together. On to the second point, the birth control pill. Now, let me preface.

[00:40:31] I'm not suggesting we're going to repeal the birth control pill. I'm just going to speak to how it destroyed the nuclear family. No. That

[00:40:38] horse is out of the barn, man. But it changed everything. Okay. So again, you and I are old enough to remember this. Back before the birth control pill a bit was invented and became legal through the FDA in 1961. Prior to 1961 There was no such thing as a birth control pill .There were condoms and you know all kinds of diaphragms and stuff, but they were you know The truth is, most people married as virgins.

[00:41:02] Most women kept their virginity until marriage and that was a big deal, and most men did, and if they did get laid before they got married, it was usually in connection with for example, they were drafted, they went overseas to Korea, and while they were there, they had a little fun, but they came home, and they weren't bringing those girls home to mama, okay?

[00:41:19] They were going to marry a virgin, and there was a reason for that, and I know how antiquated that sounds, but this Goes to a point that I've noticed, which is we as a society tend to kick down fences without asking the three most important questions and birth control was one of those fences and chastity and, and having a lot of sex before marriage because The first question is, who put the fence up?

[00:41:43] The second question is, why did they put the fence up? And the third question is, was the fence there to protect us, or to hold us back? And in fact, it was there to protect us. Because the weight of It used to be a disgrace to have a child out of wedlock and there was a reason for that. The reason was it's bad for the culture.

[00:42:01] Everyone knows a fatherless child is bad for the culture. So it was strongly discouraged. Now what that meant was that most people got married either very sexually inexperienced or virgins which also meant that Sex was sex is like pizza. It's great unless you start comparing it to everything else. So well now when a woman typically by the time she gets married and she's much older now than she used to be, Which brings up another issue which we'll get to in a minute, but she's had many sexual partners and men know that. Why do you think viagra is sold by the bucket full by HIMS on tv and all the rest of it?

[00:42:34] because of the wild insecurity men have over sexual comparison because women have so much sex, and It's done nothing good for the culture, nothing good, and it's led to people getting married too late because women are waiting for a man that doesn't exist, this man who makes love like in the movies, and by the time they realize that's not true, they're about 30, and now they're going into the decline of their childbearing years, and I'm not saying this because I'm some kind of a lunatic, again, I'm going to cite Yale, And I footnote this in the white paper.

[00:43:05] Women are the unhappy. They just did a study. Yale is not a right wing organization by any stretch of the imagination. Women are the unhappiest they've ever been. All of this has done nothing but make women unhappy. And that's a bloody shame. And it's Part of that is owed to sexual promiscuity. Again, I'm a hypocrite.

[00:43:24] I was there for the sexual revolution. I got laid a lot. I've been divorced twice, but you have to break, the, all good decisions come from experience, but experience comes from bad decisions. And I'm telling you that was a mistake. Now, the third thing is the federal welfare 

[00:43:38] Bob Gatty: state.

[00:43:38] Wait a minute before you go there.

[00:43:40] Go ahead. Okay. All right. So you say, it sounds to me like you're saying, okay, we all need to be celibate until we get married. And no as much as possible, we're not going to take away the birth control pills, but you're going to have to do something 

[00:43:56] Herbert Kay: We can yeah, we can Teach chastity in schools the same as part of sex education Just the same way we teach kids not to smoke. Cigarettes aren't illegal.

[00:44:04] You don't have to make something illegal To discourage it people don't, hardly anyone smokes anymore, and that's because of education. When you and I were kids, people used to throw litter out the windows all the time. Then they started running ads about, the Indian chief with the tear running down his face and all that, and no one litters anymore.

[00:44:20] And again, that was all the result of public education. Which by the way today is not very good, but I advocate as part of sex education chastity And but not talked about you know The stork brings the babies a frank discussion of why it's smart why it's to your advantage. No one talks to kids that way we talk like anything that feels good That's called post modernism. And that is that's just a fancy name for nihilism And we've got to pull our kids back from nihilism where nothing means anything and they're only pursuing their own pleasure. But anyway, I'm, you want me to stay there?

[00:44:56] You want me to move on to the federal welfare 

[00:44:58] Bob Gatty: state? 

[00:44:59] Herbert Kay: Now I'm going to go to the federal welfare state and I keep using the word federal for a reason because I'm not opposed to welfare. But I look around the world and I see that the most successful welfare states in the world are in Scandinavia. Now, There's a reason for that and then I tried to bring that idea to the United States.

[00:45:17] No one is saying let's throw people who are having a bad time on the streets. I want to make that very clear. I'm saying let's copy scandinavia. Sweden is the i'm gonna use sweden as an example A because bernie sanders constantly says they're a socialist country, Which they aren't. They're actually a much freer economy than we are. We're ranked 62nd in the world for free market economics.

[00:45:36] They're ranked 11th Okay, they abandoned socialism in 1981 because everyone knows socialism just doesn't work So they became a market economy with a welfare state now it works. They have a very good national health care system They have a very good Retirement system, a very good child care system a very good everything that the state provides they do a better job than anyone else except maybe the norwegians and the danes and the fins. Okay. Now there's two reasons for that number one is sweden is the largest scandinavian country and they have 10 million people. In other words, the entire population is less than greater new york city.

[00:46:12] That's number one. So it's a lot easier to administer a plan effectively to a lot fewer people. 10 million is much more manageable than 340 million. Okay, that's number one. And number two is they're racially homogeneous. Now, because of that, everyone in Sweden is a Swede. They're descended from some part of Sweden, whether it's Vikings or the Spaniard women that they drink.

[00:46:35] My ex wife is Swedish and she, we, she did, we did a 23andMe test and she's a third spanish. Because clearly, when the Vikings were raiding the Spanish coast, they grabbed some of her ancestors, which is why she has dark hair. She's a Swede. Okay, her maiden name's Knudsen. Swedes are Swedes. And it's also much easier to manage a program when you're dealing with people who all basically think the same way.

[00:47:00] Now, the United States is the most diverse country in the history of the world, and we clearly don't all think the same way. We think different ways by religious group, by racial group, by gender, by a lot of things. We all think differently. And so we can't, a one size fits all approach in the United States has clearly failed.

[00:47:20] Welfare has been paying women to have children without husbands since 1965 and it is no shock in the black community For example, we've gone from 86 percent of black children in 1960 We're born to two parent families and today it's exactly reversed 82 percent are born to single parents. And that's not healthy and that's true through all the other communities as you go down the list.

[00:47:42] We've killed people with kindness so what I think we should do is devolve it to the states because the united states Are 50 little countries in a free trade zone. That's what the united states are. Our constitution is a federalist constitution With most power is given to the states explicitly in the constitution. Congress usurps it all the time But constitutionally, we're a federalist country.

[00:48:06] The founders were very specific about this. So that means that each governor and each legislature can design a welfare program That fits the demographics of their state. So when you're doing it for minnesota, which is for example heavily german and norwegian heavily Okay, that's going to be one kind of welfare plan, But a state like alabama with a majority black population is going to be a very different welfare plan And let the states do it.

[00:48:33] Now. The other thing people don't understand about Scandinavia is the middle class pays for it because that's where the money is, it's in our country It's become very fashionable Let's take the money from the billionaires if we cost if we confiscated all of the american billionaires money It would pay six months of the national debt interest.

[00:48:49] They have a lot of money individually. They don't have a lot of money collectively. The money is in the middle class. So in sweden the beginning tax rate for a middle class person making thirty two thousand dollars a year is fifty six percent Without any deductions. The average swede in the middle class pays 56 of their income right out of the gate For their welfare state, but it's worth it to them because they're getting value For what they're paying for, and we've got to stop lying to people. It's immoral to borrow from the future to pay for the present For benefits that the future is never going to benefit from. So for example when we borrowed an enormous amount of money to build the interstate highway system under eisenhower way back when, that made perfect sense because everyone down the road as they paid back those bonds they used to borrow the money We all benefit from the interstate highway system. We all love driving on it. But when you borrow money to pay for current welfare benefits Because you're afraid to tell people who has to really pay for it You're creating a disaster, which is where, we didn't, we don't really have to be 32 trillion dollars in debt with money we don't have.

[00:49:55] But that's, this is how we did it. So if we devolve it to the states are not allowed to print money. That's what makes the federal government so dangerous. So since the states cannot print money, they have to balance their budget every year. Since they have to balance their budget every year, they'll design their programs to be efficient.

[00:50:12] Now without the drug war, a third of their budget suddenly will not be spent on prisons. Okay, they'll have an enormous amount of money to reallocate, but you've got to be straight with people. People should get as much government as they're willing to pay for. I'd be willing to pay 50 percent of my income if I was getting the quality of Sweden, where you walk into a hospital and it's one of the best in the world, and you get retirement, and you get childcare, you're getting value.

[00:50:37] But you're not getting value here, okay? And the people, the bottom half of our, of our society pays no tax at all. And you can't, the reason the founders set up the the rule that only landowners could vote was because they understood you can't allow people to vote for how much they take without paying for it.

[00:50:55] You just can't. That's a, that's an extremely dangerous, perverse incentive. And that's how we've ended up where we are today. But anyway, there you go. 

[00:51:03] Bob Gatty: You know what, there's a couple of other aspects of your plan I want you to touch on. We're running really long here but the first one is national compulsory service requirement for every teenager, and the second is addressing homelessness and how you would do that.

[00:51:19] Herbert Kay: Okay, I'll cover national, I'll cover national public service first because it's brief. Since most kids are born into fatherless families, I don't want to write right off the current generations. If we did everything that i'm advocating and i'm not naive enough to think everything i'm advocating will be advocated. The enemy of good is part is perfect. Progress would be good.

[00:51:40] So let's assume that we've done everything right, but we still have this huge group of people coming through our culture without Fathers without direction without morality taught to them without any understanding of how to run their lives. Now. I am a navy veteran Okay. That's another thing I've done in my life.

[00:51:56] I served four years in the Navy. I was a Russian linguist. I rode submarines out of Norfolk. I was stationed at the national security agency at Fort Meade. NSA is a military agency. A lot of people don't understand that, but the director of the NSA is always either a general or an admiral. When I was in, it was Admiral Bobby Inman and it was president Carter was the president and then president Ford after that.

[00:52:16] So it's been a long time, but it, this is how it works. Things that I learned in basic training. Things like how I fold my bed and my socks. I know this sounds ridiculous, how I organize my day, how I go about things are what I learned. In basic training because I grew up as I told you in the highly my abuser was my stepfather my male role model was not good. So I got all of those lessons in the military and if you talk to any veteran and are you a veteran?

[00:52:47] No, i'm not okay, but if you i'm sure plenty of veterans, right? My father my 

[00:52:51] Bob Gatty: father was a career, army officer 

[00:52:53] Herbert Kay: So he'll he would have agreed that there are lessons to be learned by that kind of training Okay Now i'm advocating not that it's not a military draft that the kid can select whether they want to go to the military Or whether we're going to create another arm of national service a lot like the peace corps, Only a paramilitary.

[00:53:12] It should be structured just like a military, but without guns. So the kids will still go through basic training, they'll still get all of the discipline. They'll still learn how to take an order. The one of the most important lessons I learned in the military was to be a good order giver.

[00:53:25] You've gotta first learn to be a good order taker. And how many kids today have any idea how to take an order seriously? I learned to take orders from people that I knew were not as smart as me, but because of their position. They had earned the respect of me following their order. And when you're operating as a team, it's not, there's no time to discuss, especially when lives are at risk.

[00:53:46] When I served on submarines, I learned right away, this is not a time for individuality. If the company, if the captain says, do it, it's for a reason. And there's no time when the guns are firing to get into a discussion of whether you agree, it's an important life lesson. And what I advocate is every 18 year old Upon graduation from high school or 17 if they graduate early, for example, I graduated at 16 I was just one of those guys or if and or younger It's either 17 if you graduated early or 18 when you graduate. No exemptions. No, one of the problems with the draft back in the day, and i'm a vietnam era veteran I didn't go to vietnam.

[00:54:23] I don't want to be misleading. I just served when vietnam was at this very end. We drafted a lot of the wealthy got out of the draft. They would get educational deferments. They would, I'll give you a good example. My cousin, Marty, my cousin, Marty, who I love, he's like a big brother to me is an attorney now, but, and he was, he used his he went into the Coast Guard.

[00:54:43] He, his father was a big attorney in Miami that pulled a bunch of strings and Marty went into the Coast Guard. Then he finished his law degree at the Coast Guard's expense and served in the Judge Advocate Corps in the Reserve for years. But he never went to combat who went to combat where the poor kids, the black kids, Latino kids, the kids who couldn't get out of it.

[00:54:59] And we can't have that again. That divides a culture. So I believe a national service two years, 18 to 20. And then you're done, just like Israel does it, just like Switzerland does it, just like Liechtenstein does it, just like lots of modern countries do it. And the only thing we'll notice is, we'll have more mature kids today, and college football will be better because you're going to get 20 year old freshmen playing and they're going to be that much better.

[00:55:25] That's it. Okay. That, by the way, that's why Brigham Young always kicks the crap out of teams by surprise, because all those kids go on Mormon mission for two years, and when they come back, they're freshmen at 20 instead of 18, so they're physically going to be intimidating. Anyway, that's a small digression, and I live out west, so I live with a lot of Mormons.

[00:55:42] I know lots of LDS guys, but anyway. 

[00:55:45] Bob Gatty: Let's talk a little bit about the homelessness aspect of your 

[00:55:48] Herbert Kay: plan. Okay, prison taught me also that we use prison to house a lot of homeless. We have no place to put these people, so they get sucked up, they get charged with, whatever it might be. Vagrancy, breaking and entering, whatever they do, and they end up in prison over and over.

[00:56:04] Broadly speaking, the homeless fall into two groups. Those that are severely mentally ill and those that are just severe addicts. Now all homeless are addicts. The severely mentally ill and the non mentally ill all medicate with alcohol, generally speaking. There's very little heroin use or crack use.

[00:56:22] They basically drink because it's the cheapest drug for them to get their hands on. And they drink an enormous amount and it's virtually 100 percent of the homeless population. So let's start with, and the reason that the mentally ill drink, Is they don't like the feeling of the psych drugs that they're given.

[00:56:38] So the minute they walk out of the psych ward after their, 24 hour hold, because no one can afford to hold them any longer. They throw out the psychotropics and they go buy some MD 2020 and they're right back to doing what they're doing. And It's just again a disgrace. There's only at any given time and the homeless population goes in and out We have people go into homelessness and come out of homelessness every day. And if that population there's only about six hundred thousand of them in the whole United States. Now I'm not including those families in certain areas that are finding themselves homeless because they can't find a place to rent and Still work that is more an issue of zoning and I'm not going to get into that now. Okay, that's if you want to learn something interesting about that michael schellenberger who's I think he's at berkeley has a very has a lot of interesting things to say about that But I want to address these hardcore homeless.

[00:57:27] So now we don't have the drug war We're saving in arizona alone a billion dollars a year every state's saving the same money. We take part of that money And we build, I hate the word asylum or san, we build sanitariums, beautiful, staffed, clean, comfortable, secure, protected places where these homeless guys, we can sweep them up and we give them their choice.

[00:57:51] If they want to sit in a room and drink themselves stupid, they can sit in a room and drink themselves stupid. If they want to get psychotropic drugs, it'll be available to them, but they can spend the rest of their lives in comfort. Taken care of with medical care and everything they need because folks these are these people are not going to get better. You just have to accept that they're I know these people firsthand.

[00:58:13] They're not going to get better. That's not cynical. It's objective reality Okay, then on the other end of the spectrum are the hardcore addicts. Now for them I have a variation on a theme instead of obviously they're not mentally ill. They're just Wildly alcoholic generally speaking, but some do you know, there's a little heroin.

[00:58:30] There's a little of this but mostly alcohol Here's what we do We take some of the money we're saving from fighting the drug war and on the outskirts of every metropolitan area in the city We find a piece of property, Maybe in an industrial area that no one has any nice houses around or anything else to disturb anybody, And the municipality buys it and on it They put tiny houses.

[00:58:50] Are you familiar with what tiny houses are? Yeah, those little manufactured homes. They get it's like a studio apartment It's a little house. Yeah, they're every yeah, they're pretty nice actually Myrtle 

[00:59:00] Bob Gatty: beach, south carolina, and they're building these things for for 

[00:59:02] Herbert Kay: seniors They're, by the way, they in Tempe, they have here's, it's a suburb of Phoenix, just to my south, where the Arizona State University is.

[00:59:10] They have tiny home communities for seniors as well. They're, but instead of that, we build them on the outskirts of town for the homeless, basically. Okay. And we, the police pick them up. It's not a prison. They can leave, but they won't want to. The reason they don't go to shelters and the reason they're homeless is they don't like rules.

[00:59:26] Again, this is one, this is firsthand experience. They're on the street by choice. There are places for them to go. Here in Phoenix alone, there's St. Vincent de Paul, and there's the Salvation Army, and there's all kinds of public the CSI community services, and there's a whole bunch of things, but most of them don't go there because that means rules.

[00:59:45] That means having to do things, especially no drugs, and they don't want to be bothered with that. I propose we round them up. We take them out and give them their own little tiny home. That's theirs. Their only rule is keep it clean. And we make cleaning of, and by the way, most of them are clean.

[01:00:00] I know this sounds strange. They're dirty on the street without, because they have no choice, but in prison, they're fastidious. When given the chance to be clean, they're clean and they have to clean their home. And on the grounds, we have a clinic for the inevitable overdoses. We have another we have psychologists, if they want to get therapy and treatment it's available to them for free. And we also have a store where they can a convenience store where they can pick up food to eat So they don't starve to death for free, and they can stay as long as they want They can leave if they want but they'll never leave. Oh, and we also make the drugs available to them For free, whatever your drug of choice is, you can have it.

[01:00:37] You can go into your home quietly. Look guys, here's the important thing to reiterate a point I made earlier. Their goal is not longevity. They don't have any illusion. They're going to live past their forties or fifties at the most. Okay. That's they don't want to their life. Their backgrounds are so hellacious, the stories would make your hair fall out.

[01:00:57] They're not on the street by some accident. Let's stop thinking we're going to fix the unfixable and instead treat them humanely and take them to a place where they're safe, they're air conditioned, they're heated, they have, they're taken care of, and they're not shitting on the sidewalks, and they're not bothering anybody else.

[01:01:13] And if they want to pull it together, they can leave and pull it together. God bless them. Stop putting them in prison. We're not going to make them better in prison. It's not going to work. 

[01:01:23] Bob Gatty: Okay. Now I want to go back to one thing about drugs real quick. What are your thoughts about Trump's wall as a way to keep illegal drugs out of this country?

[01:01:35] Herbert Kay: Unbelievably stupid. Because I actually know how drugs come into the country. By the way, unbelievably stupid no matter who builds the wall, whether it's the governor of Texas or Donald Trump or now the president is starting to rebuild the wall. Stupid. Okay. First of all, the immigrants and I live in Southern Arizona.

[01:01:50] So in addition to prison, my family is in the produce business and how we came to Arizona was Nogales, which is on the Mexican border, which is the largest crossing point in the world between two countries of fresh produce. So I have a special understanding of illegal immigrants. When I was in high school I worked in produce warehouses with nothing but illegal immigrants.

[01:02:10] Okay, nothing. Okay, but in those days there was a difference. Now Back to the wall I learned in prison that most of the people and drugs are brought into this country through tunnels not Across the border the people you're seeing across the border are the bottom of the barrel. They're the ones stupid enough to try to cross the border on land and pay some coyotes some ridiculous amount of money to get caught.

[01:02:33] Okay Most of the people are brought through tunnels So there are mexican families who raise their children like west virginia coal miners to grow up and build tunnels This is all they do and there are thousands of these tunnels thousands of them Under the mexican border with the united states and where they are is not out in the middle of the desert. That makes no sense.

[01:02:53] They're right in the middle of the cities. They go from the basement of one house on one side to the basement of another house on the other side for example, in Nogales. There's Nogales, Arizona. There's Nogales, Sonora, right across the border. There are a jillion tunnels coming from basements of houses on one side over to the other.

[01:03:09] Now, the cartels only use those tunnels twice. Because they assume that the dunderheads they're bringing through the tunnels, that's how they look at them, will eventually rat the tunnel out. So they only use it twice. They use it twice, then they fill it in, and they go and they do another tunnel.

[01:03:24] And this is how most of it is brought into the country. Once it's brought into the country, it's moved into... Mostly dairies and it's moved in milk trucks because the dogs can't smell through the milk all the it's all wrapped in plastic and stuff. But The wall is a typical political symbolic gesture It's just it's a waste of 

[01:03:42] Bob Gatty: time talking about politicians And this is my last question in the white paper, introducing your plan, You say this quote our politics have descended into a pit of obsequious, glad handing weasels without a single vertebrae, and they have spent us to the brink of destruction.

[01:04:06] Now, what makes you think these glad handing weasels would embrace your plan, parts of which would be hated by those on the right and the left? 

[01:04:19] Herbert Kay: Yes. I'm, I know that it'll never happen with these guys in office, but now I'm going to put on my finance hat. All right. I, my background is heavily in finance.

[01:04:31] So I'm just, and I'm not going to bore you with all the reasons why, but I, we will not get to the 2024 election without an economic collapse of such a degree. It's going to make the great depression look like a happy memory. And when it happens, it's not an, if there's no stopping it now, I'm, I have no suggestions on how to prevent it.

[01:04:49] Because at this point, the die is cast. It's too late. It's going to happen. What'll kick it off will be something unexpected like it always is. My feeling is it'll come from china first, but it's but it doesn't matter The global economy is going to melt down the .Whole planet all at once and it's going to cause enormous political upheaval. The radical becomes reasonable when the shit hits the fan and the shit's about to hit the fan and when that happens ,People will start looking for alternative ways to do things that they would have never considered before Because it would have been And I, I wouldn't blame them.

[01:05:27] Look, I hope I'm wrong. I hope that it all just cooks along and fixes itself. But I'm not wrong. It's gonna happen. And when it does... My plan will be an alternative to the other side They're going to be people that are going to make donald trump look like a happy memory that are going to be demagogues in the extreme that are dangerous much more dangerous and This is how hitler's come into power History is littered with countries falling apart and taken over by demagogues at times like this So i'm trying to put forward a reasonable alternative and what makes me Qualified is I have no I personally have no desire For power at all.

[01:06:07] That's, this is just nothing I'm interested in. I just want to be the ideologue. I don't, I, I am uninterested in running for office and it's going to, I'd be, I wouldn't be surprised to see it happen by Christmas. It'll certainly happen early next year and it's going to be horrible.

[01:06:23] And I, I can spell it all out, but it'll just make you sad. And I have four children and two grandchildren and more on the way and I hope I'm wrong, but I'm not. And that's the answer. 

[01:06:33] Bob Gatty: That's a sad way to end this discussion because it was interesting. A lot of fun in some places. 

[01:06:41] Herbert Kay: And thank you.

[01:06:43] Certainly listen, Bob here's the deal. After it happens, the buildings won't fall down. The roads will still be there. Your car will still be in the driveway. You'll still have clothes. It doesn't descend into a zombie apocalypse. That's not what I'm talking about. It's just, the things are going to get very tough.

[01:06:59] It's going to be like Argentina here for a while. And when that happens. We will pull out of it. The question is will we pull out of it as a people or are we good? We're so tribalized now and the politicians are so pandering to it that We're just not in a position to pull together and that's a mistake.

[01:07:16] We're all just americans I don't give I hate hyphenated americans. I don't call myself a jewish american. I'm just an american just an American. And my kids didn't marry Jewish people. And you know what? I don't care. I don't care. My grandchildren aren't Jewish. I don't care. We're Americans.

[01:07:34] Enjoy yourself. It's a great country. Let's not screw it up. 

[01:07:37] Bob Gatty: All right. Thank you so much Herb. I appreciate you being with us on the Lean to the Left podcast. Interesting discussion. And I 

[01:07:47] Herbert Kay: thank you. One last thing. If folks would go to the website 1964plan. org, I would love that. That's it. 

[01:07:53] Bob Gatty: Oh, yeah.

[01:07:54] I forgot to ask you where people can learn more. And that's the answer. 

[01:07:58] Herbert Kay: If you go to the website, you'll see a learn more button. That's where the white papers are attached. You can take them out one at a time. I wrote them so that you could read them. They're not they're footnoted, but I didn't write them academically.

[01:08:09] I think they're funny actually. So enjoy yourself and read about it and you'll learn more. 

[01:08:13] Bob Gatty: Actually, they are. I read your white papers and they're entertaining and they're informative. You guys don't don't hesitate. Check them out. It'll take you about five minutes to read each 

[01:08:24] Herbert Kay: one of them.

[01:08:25] They're pretty good. Yes, it's not a doctoral dissertation, but it lays it out.