Well, I mean, it's a—our neighborhood became, it was kind of, you know, white, working class, lower middle class,

old, internal suburb of an old city, Richmond [Virginia].

So I was inside the city limits, very close to downtown, and it became predominantly black in the '60s.

And my parents, you know, wouldn't leave; that was our neighborhood.

So it was a pretty—you know, it was a fairly tough—the north side of Richmond is a fairly tough section of town,

and you just kind of, you know, you just—I was raised in a working-class, Irish Catholic family,

went to a military prep school, and I was just kind of a, you know, just—just raised to not back down.

If you believe in something, you believe in something.

And you can't—if you show any weakness in a neighborhood—it's quite Darwinian as a young person, right?

If you show weakness, you're going to just get picked on and bullied and all that.

So you've got to—you've just got to—you just learn from the playgrounds, and you learn from the schools and the sports.

You know, there's no big, organized Little League or anything like that;

everything was kind of inner-city baseball leagues or basketball leagues, etc.

You just learn you've got to stand up for yourself, and you've got to fight.

And if you fight, people give you some space.

And if you don't fight, it's just… you know, it's not a great life.

So it was just—and it was—and it wasn't any big deal.

It was kind of like breathing air.

So I remember the story about your dad that you told that almost felt like one switch gets turned on,

and young Steve Bannon—you're a grownup by then, but it goes to this idea of trust,

trust in the government, trust in your company, trust that your dad had in his retirement accounts.

Well, look, we're Irish Catholic.

The Catholic Church, the Bell—

my grandfather and father I think are the only two guys in the history of the Bell System to be both 50-year employees.

My grandfather worked there 50 years as a lineman and a PBX [Private Branch Exchange] guy,

and my dad was 50 years, started in the sewer pulling cable and worked for 50 years.

So as a father and son worked 50 years for the phone company.

You had these big institutions.

I was fortunate enough to be raised in a great time in America, right, the '50s and '60s.

But you believed in these big institutions: the Catholic Church, the phone company.

And these were, you know, permanent fixtures in your life, and it was kind of that stability.

I came from a neighborhood that was a little bit tough, but it was not like—it was a very solid, great background.

As I go throughout the world and meet these very wealthy people I deal with all the time and see their kids,

the greatest thing you can give a kid is that kind of basic, core, loving family that's there and rock-solid.

So the family, the church, the community, the phone company, these are institutions.

And so institutions are everything.

It's a very institutional life when you think about it, and quite hierarchical.

But it gives you a set framework that you can grow and be—

you know, get to be an adult, and there's a real sense of, you know, something that's solid there, something that's real.

I think that's what broke down the financial crisis.

I mean, my father would rather—

he would tell me stories back in the Depression about one of the things

about his father working at the phone company is that they never laid anybody off during the Great Depression.

My dad was born in 1921, and as a very young person, he remembers all the neighborhood fathers got let go.

His dad still had a job; the phone company didn't let anybody go.

He also told stories about the, you know, borrowing against—they had like one or two shares of stock,

which was everything, and they would borrow against the stock to like buy the house and buy—

I think the house cost like 2,500 bucks or something in the '30s to build.

They borrowed against their AT&T stock.

AT&T, the Bell System, incentivized working-class people

to put X amount of their income away and actually become a shareholder.

And being a shareholder in the phone company, that's where my dad's entire net worth was.

And so, when, after the collapse, a couple days after the collapse, when Cramer went on TV,

Jim Cramer went on TV on CNBC and that morning just goes,

“Hey, if you need cash in like, the next five years of your life”—I mean, he's in a full panic.

If you watch the video it's quite shocking. It's shocking CNBC actually let him on.

But he's sitting there going, “If you need cash in the next five years, you've just to sell everything and go to cash,

because we don't know where the bottom of this is.”

And two days later—I remember, I'd been at Goldman Sachs, and my dad asked me my opinion.

A couple days later he sold all of his AT&T.

He would have sold his stock in the Catholic Church before he sold his stock in AT&T.

And he sold his stock.

And that—that struck me as that this is a crisis of the institutions of our country, right?

This is a—this is a massive—we now have an institutional crisis.

When guys like Marty Bannon, who the country's—kind of this Steady Eddie guy who the whole thing is to raise a family,

to be there for the family, to be there for his community,

he's the kind of—these are the kind of building blocks that society, civic society's built upon.

When guys like that are questioning the system and dumping their ownership in the system, the system can't go on like that.

You're now in a real crisis.

It felt to me when we were watching—we made a number of films about it, and one of the—

one of the things that happened in the cascade, because we make political films, we were thinking about—

let's talk about Sarah Palin, for example, somebody who could identify in some way what that was,

what that fear and that anger was, probably in your dad and lots of dads and moms all over the country. …

That's one of the reasons I came back.

You know, I was actually living in Shanghai at the time.

I was living in the French Concession, spending most of my time there.

I had a—I had a massive multiplayer video game company that had a big Asian presence in Hong Kong,

Kowloon, South Korea and in China…. So I was living there.

Came back because I thought there were some financial problems.

I was going to sell real estate.

But then my sister pointed me to this woman, Sarah Palin, who'd just been named—was going to be the vice president.

I actually went to the Republican convention as—

just with a filmmaking guy, the guy who produced The Passion of the Christ, Steve McEveety,

and went to the—and saw something unique in Palin and saw her go round.

People forget.

When the financial crisis, when Lehman was put into bankruptcy, which was put into bankruptcy, I think,

on the morning of Sept. 15 in London, right, and then it cascaded down,

the smartest guys in the room didn't realize that the commercial paper market, the global commercial paper market,

which is the way that every company in the world gets its working capital to kind of, you know,

make payroll and to pay for the lights going on and for the janitors and for everything that's pay—

you know, GE, the biggest companies of the world, the commercial paper market,

every day you're selling commercial paper to provide working capital.

When that froze up on the morning of the 15th, the whole system froze up.

On that date, Sarah Palin and John McCain, I think, were up one point in the Gallup Poll on Barack Obama;

that people forget, Palin came with such force out of that thing

for the first two weeks before she started to be kind of destroyed, they were on fire.

It was, in that sequence of events that week, I think talks about the corruption of our institutions,

and I think it talks about how the elites are comfortable with decline.

Remember, on that Thursday morning—Monday, it goes into bankruptcy.

By Thursday, there's a crisis that nobody knows what's going on in this commercial paper market.

The whole way that the whole entire global system is financed is now frozen up.

And that's when you have [Chair of the Federal Reserve Ben] Bernanke and [Treasury Secretary] Hank Paulson,

who are not alarmists, particularly not Bernanke, and he's an expert—

remember, he's an expert in the Great Depression.

That's his claim to fame; that's what his Ph.D. is in.

They go to the Oval Office to go see Bush, and they have a meeting, and they tell him, hey—

and we know all of this by congressional testimony later.

So these are the facts.

They go to him and say: “Hey, by 5:00 today, we need a trillion dollars of cash infusion into the system,

or the American financial system will collapse in 72 hours.

The world financial system will collapse 48 hours after that, and we will have global anarchy and chaos.”

And Bush goes: “That's interesting, but we've kind of—

the White House counsel said we've kind of checked the Constitution.

I don't really have authority to do that.

You've got to go over to Capitol Hill. It's kind of their problem.”

And so they go up to Capitol Hill.

They go to Nancy Pelosi's office in the afternoon, and they had the same meeting.

In fact, they've got to keep their—they've got to keep their Blackberries outside it's so confidential.

And they talk in there about they need this cash infusion.

That's when, you know, Hank Paulson gets on his knees to Nancy Pelosi and makes some sort of pitch to her.

… The country's in literally—what the Germans and the Japanese military and the Soviets,

what nobody could ever do to us, Osama bin Laden, nobody, we've now done to ourselves.

We have literally caused a financial crisis that will bring down the entire system in 72 hours.

The biggest revolutionaries that have gone after the United States could never dream of what we had done to ourselves.

And so that began a cascade of—and here's the thing.

Nobody, nobody's ever been held accountable for it. Nobody's ever taken responsibility for it.

And it just kind of—that's why, you know, we have never recovered. We've never recovered from that catastrophe.

Somebody's been held accountable, which is probably why we have Donald Trump sitting in the White House now.

It's conceivable to me—and you and I can talk about it—

what happens politically among the group that become the “deplorables” to Hillary Clinton,

the “forgotten” to Donald Trump— …

The bang that went off on Nov. 9 of 2016 at 2:30 in the morning was lit in the Oval Office on Sept. 18 of 2008.

It was lit right in that room.

Why?

It was lit, that fuse, that long fuse that has this populist explosion exploded.

But every financial crisis, I think, in at least modern history is always followed by some sort of populist—right?

Now sometimes that devolves into fascism and other things.

But every time there's a financial collapse—and remember, this is the biggest financial collapse in the country's history.

This is bigger than—this is bigger than the Great Depression.

This is bigger than the one in the 1870s that caused such a big problem.

This is bigger than the one that caused the Federal Reserve [sic] in the early 20th century.

This is the biggest financial collapse in American history.

And this was one that was not done just by simple Ponzi schemes.

This was done by an organized, thought-through effort of the financial and corporate elites that—

remember, the scams pulled off here are absolutely outrageous. …

And so that's why you had this immense collapse.

You had so many of the elites making so much money.

Then when it collapsed, they wanted the taxpayers—the whole thing of the trillion dollars.

… The Federal Reserve didn't call all the financial institutions together and corporations and say:

“Hey, boys, we've got a problem, right?

This is a problem, and we need to pass the hat.

You've got to cough up some cash.”

That trillion dollars was from Marty Bannon.

They hit “print,” right?

They hit “print,” hit “print,” but the guy's who's going to pay for it is the little guy.

… We live in neofeudalism. This is not capitalism.

This is where you have an underclass, right, a Lumpenproletariat almost that's taken care of by the state;