In this episode, we talk about George Orwell's novel, Animal Farm, and why he is considered one of the greatest writers of all time. We also talk about Stalin and his role as a dictator, and the role of the left in bringing about totalitarianism in the 20th century. And finally, we discuss religion and its role in the modern world, and whether or not God is really in charge of the world, or it's just a figment of our collective unconscious. Logo by Courtney DeKorte. Theme by Mavus White. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. All rights reserved. Used by permission. No commercial uses, unless otherwise specified. This episode was produced and edited by Riley Bray. The opinions expressed here are our own, not those of our companies, and do not necessarily reflect those of any other companies or organizations. We do not own the rights to any of the music used in this podcast. If you like what you hear, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. It helps us to keep improving the quality of our music and provide a better listening experience to our listeners with more opportunities to listen to more quality music. Thank you for listening to and supporting the podcast. We make no claim to the music we produce. Please be kind and share it with your friends, family and family. . We thank you for all the support and support our efforts to make quality, diverse, diverse and diverse music and production. in any way we can be heard by you, everywhere. Thank you! - we can do that. - it helps us out there - we are making a difference in the best possible way possible. we appreciate it. -- thank you. and we appreciate you, thank you, Thank you, thanks you, we really appreciate it, and we are grateful, we can t do it, we love you, more than you can do it and thank you in advance, you are amazing, we are so much, we appreciate all of you, you're listening, we're listening out, we have a lot of it, thanks, you really are listening, you can see it, more of you're beautiful, we hear it, you, it's not enough, we get it, enough, and you're amazing, you love it, it means it's good, we know that it's amazing, it really means that we can help us, and it's beautiful, and so much more, we'll see you, and they're grateful, you have it, etc.
00:01:48.000Classically, when we think about depictions of totalitarianism and authoritarianism, when I was a kid, we always thought of it as being a right-wing thing.
00:01:59.000There was always a right-wing dictator-type character that imposed censorship and authoritarianism.
00:02:07.000You didn't think of it as something that would be coming from the left.
00:03:00.000Also, he tossed all the Japanese Americans in prison.
00:03:04.000He said, go into a concentration camp.
00:03:06.000By the way, all of our loyal German Americans in New York and Yorkville, we're going to leave them alone because they're white.
00:03:12.000Meanwhile, Yorkville, New York and Baltimore were full of Nazi spies.
00:03:19.000You could see the shipping being torpedoed from the beach at Coney Island because they were giving away all that information.
00:03:28.000The left has always believed—the idea of fascism means a bundle, everything's together, everything's for the state, nothing against the state, nothing outside of the state, as Mussolini said.
00:03:40.000And with the exception of those particular fascists, the Nazis, it's always been the left because they don't believe in the individual.
00:03:51.000So you think that that's the root cause of it, not believing in the individual, believing in the collective, that that automatically lends itself to erasing individual rights?
00:04:06.000I mean, it also goes back to the enlightenment, to the idea that God doesn't exist, and the idea that a human being is the measure of all things.
00:04:17.000Well, if the human being is the measure of all things, what does that mean?
00:04:55.000Although you think you are, you think that because you're human.
00:04:59.000But God's in charge of the world, and there's a certain way things are.
00:05:02.000And if you'd like to get out of your wretched self-consciousness and self-delusion, you better get your ass into church.
00:05:11.000But don't you think that, you know, when atheists talk about religion and they criticize organized religion and criticize the Bible, they talk about things that are in the Bible that seem preposterous, right?
00:05:26.000They talk about people rising from the dead and walking on water, particularly the Old Testament, right?
00:05:31.000Like, to use that as a guidebook for life, you have to kind of ignore some of the stuff that doesn't make sense.
00:05:44.000The Bible, especially the Christian Bible comes out of the Jewish Bible.
00:05:48.000It's a retelling of the story in a different way.
00:05:51.000But the Jewish Bible is a myth, and the myth is the myth of creation and the myth of human experience.
00:05:57.000So what it does is, chapter by chapter, story by story, it...
00:06:09.000What does it really mean to escape from Egypt?
00:06:16.000Does it mean escaping from your inner pharaoh?
00:06:18.000What does it really mean to part the Red Sea?
00:06:20.000So these stories are told, any myth is a Dramatic retelling of an underlying reality that can't be expressed rationally, right?
00:06:33.000So the atheists say everything can be expressed rationally.
00:06:36.000For example, you know that the earth is burning up.
00:06:39.000You can tell that because sometimes things get warmer and sometimes things get colder.
00:06:43.000You can also tell that when things get colder, that's obviously because the earth is burning up, because the sun is melting the glaciers and the glaciers are raising the temperature.
00:06:53.000You can also tell, of course, that to be fair to everyone, children change sex.
00:07:30.000Because the Jews were always saying, who the hell do you think you are?
00:07:33.000So the Old Testament is the story of atheists, really.
00:07:39.000Saying, who the hell do you think you are?
00:07:43.000So, when you're talking about the Bible, right, and the lessons in the Bible, isn't part of the problem is that people translated it from ancient Hebrew to Latin to Greek and all these other languages and eventually to English?
00:07:59.000Like, a lot's lost along the way, right?
00:08:01.000And a lot is open to interpretation, like a lot of what we're talking about in these myths and stories that people take as factual occurrences.
00:08:10.000They probably were some sort of, there's some sort of a lesson in the myth, some sort of allegory.
00:08:17.000There's things about these stories that probably have hints of truth, but isn't it hard to kind of decipher it all if you can't speak the mother language?
00:09:39.000Do you think the Bible is a bunch of very wise people got together and they formed these stories to sort of illustrate the folly of mankind and how one needs to have like a moral compass and guiding principles that are set in stone and that you have These rules to live your life in a moral and just way and that'll make for a better society?
00:10:05.000What do you think the Bible actually is?
00:10:09.000Well, a friend of mine, a Reformed rabbi, was applying to get into an Orthodox yeshiva, an Orthodox college, and he's a Reformed rabbi.
00:10:20.000So the guy says, he says, you have very good credentials and you're very well-learned.
00:10:24.000Do you think the Bible is literally the work of God?
00:10:37.000So Dennis Prager, you know, who I'm crazy about, said the other day, he said, you know, I don't believe in the Torah, the Jewish Bible, because of God.
00:10:50.000He said, I believe in God because of the Torah.
00:10:52.000So if you read the Torah, the Jewish Bible, and the Christian Bible's just an extension of that, you say, my God, this is incredible wisdom.
00:10:59.000This goes back to the beginning of time.
00:11:02.000People who've tried to figure out everything, and they didn't have the language that we have.
00:11:08.000But they had the language that they had, and this was thousands of years of experience progressed and compressed into a myth.
00:11:16.000So we know that this is true because, like, liberals have always been in love with the myths, especially Jews, with the myths of other cultures.
00:11:51.000Yeah, but there's a purpose to having myths, right?
00:11:54.000This is like Joseph Campbell's The Hero's Journey, all that stuff.
00:11:59.000Of course there is, because we need myths, right?
00:12:02.000So when you destroy the old myths, you're always going to get a new myth, because we need to mythologize our life.
00:12:10.000We need to have something to hold on to.
00:12:12.000I've been very curious about this lately because it seems like, as you were saying, like from the left, you're getting a lot of what seems like very cult-like behavior and this very cult-like, this ignoring of basic truth to fit a narrative.
00:12:30.000And I think that in the absence of religion, it's almost like we're hardwired for some sort of Some sort of guidelines that we all collectively agree to follow, whether it's Judaism or Mormonism or whatever it is,
00:12:51.000like a collective group of guidelines.
00:12:53.000It's almost like human beings are hardwired to follow some sort of a guideline.
00:12:59.000And if we don't have one, we create one.
00:13:01.000And even though we don't say it's a religion, we behave exactly if it's a religion.
00:13:39.000My dads and my uncles, everybody I knew went through the war.
00:13:42.000My grandfather fought in World War I. I've made a living when I should have been in jail or homeless because I don't have any talents except writing.
00:13:51.000And because I could do that, I made a living.
00:13:53.000I have a wonderful family because of America.
00:13:56.000And I'm a Jew and I'm not getting killed because I live in America.
00:14:01.000And I saw the country transform when I was a kid.
00:14:05.000I used to go down south and there were chain gangs and there were lynchings and there were separate.
00:15:04.000Well, look, if you say, as I've heard, perhaps you have, people say, you know, my kids don't want to have kids because we live in such a dreadful place.
00:15:29.000Although the seas are rising, I'm going to buy a house in Martha's Vineyard.
00:15:33.000And although we're poisoning the atmosphere with carbon dioxide and inert gas, I'm going to fly in my private plane that brings 3,000 blah, blah, blah.
00:16:32.000That at the end of every civilization, when a civilization starts to crumble, they become obsessed with gender.
00:16:37.000They become obsessed with swapping gender, acting out in different genders, like gender nonconformity.
00:16:44.000And he doesn't have an answer why, but it seems like when things...
00:16:49.000For whatever it is, whatever cause of society collapsing, there's something where they become obsessed with definitions and particularly gender definitions.
00:17:01.000Well, yes, they become obsessed with definition.
00:17:04.000They also become obsessed with sex because it offers experience, right?
00:17:13.000The problem is if you become sexy, you know, when I was a kid, we used to joke about, say, you know what, I bet you if we got an old guy, he could rent a post office box, we could get Playboy, right?
00:17:23.000Now, Playboy, those Playboys, they look like the shipping news, right?
00:17:28.000But the problem is you can just chase pornography so far.
00:17:32.000We say, we'll show this, we'll show that, we'll do this, we'll do that.
00:20:28.000These are the concerns of everybody in the middle class.
00:20:32.000But when the middle class is gone, you've got people at the bottom of the food chain who are gang-raised on the streets because there's no alternative to them.
00:21:17.000The cops are going to come take you to jail.
00:21:20.000If you steal from the store, no, not anymore, right?
00:21:24.000And we're going to let your line die out.
00:21:27.000If you're a billionaire and you're engaged in child pornography and money laundering, you know, and bribing the president of the United States, we're going to send you to jail.
00:26:48.000I said, but you know, I'm kind of a fashion maven.
00:26:51.000I've been wearing jeans and t-shirt all my life, but you know, I kind of like...
00:26:54.000I had a clothing company and I do a lot of designs for movies.
00:26:58.000So I said, I feel kind of queasy about it because it's a flight jacket, but I don't know how to fly a plane.
00:27:04.000So he says, come on, walks me across the street to the Santa Monica airport, introduces me to a guy, and 20 minutes later, I'm flying a plane with this guy.
00:28:19.000There are wonderful things that we can do, rather than saying, you know what, I guess we as a country, we're going to sit down and we're going to play golf till we die.
00:28:27.000Why do you think, though, I'm curious myself.
00:28:31.000I'm asking this because I'm trying to figure it out myself as well.
00:29:08.000Energy which is used, it's like gasoline.
00:29:11.000Energy that's used on A cannot be used on B, right?
00:29:15.000Alexander the Great died when he was 33, right?
00:29:18.000Energy that's used at this point in your life is probably going to be decreased at that point in your life.
00:29:24.000So what you learn as you get older is you have to conserve energy.
00:29:28.000So the old thing is you should never try any new business practices after you're 60. Because the stuff that I did when I was 20, 25, I can't do anymore.
00:29:37.000I have a certain amount, I hope, of increased wisdom and knowledge, but I have a decreased fund of energy.
00:29:43.000So the question is, what are you going to spend the energy on?
00:29:47.000So when we come to a point that has never been experienced in human history, of magnificent prosperity, of freedom, freedom from want, What do we see?
00:29:59.000That for the first time in human history, rather than worrying about how am I going to get enough calories to keep from dying, they worry about how can I lose weight?
00:30:08.000Rather than saying, thank God, you know, we became the power, the world power, the greatest power the world has ever known in the 20th century.
00:31:12.000I can have all the sex I want, and I can go on TV, and I can gain power, and I can raise money to gain power, and gain power to raise money.
00:33:38.000And I look at all these people in office, you know, we call them politicians, and most of them are thugs and whores and thieves and fools and blah, blah, blah.
00:34:05.000So I thought, but wait a second, these people in high office, is it possible that they had the power to warp a civilization so that we dealt with prosperity through fear?
00:34:19.000Because that's what we see around us all the time.
00:34:21.000It's called anger, the anger of the left.
00:34:29.000I'm not going to mention any names, but you people can fill in your own They're idiots who say that we have to get out of Afghanistan and leave everything there, or we have to give Iran the nuclear bomb, or that we have to stop digging for oil,
00:34:44.000though we're going to import oil, etc., etc., etc.
00:35:09.000But we remember lovingly that one good teacher that we might have met, but we remember with shame and hatred The teacher who abused us, who humiliated us, who dissed us, who called us stupid.
00:35:50.000And Milton Friedman said if you took the same skills that a teacher has in a public school into the workplace, he might make 55% of what he makes.
00:36:00.000And they're treated as if they were treated as if they were good and powerful and hardworking.
00:36:09.000Well, maybe a few are, but they aren't any better or worse than you and me.
00:36:16.000They're kind of at the bottom of the food chain socially, kind of hanging on, always hanging on to the...
00:36:55.000The union becomes one of the biggest, maybe the biggest donor to the Democratic Party.
00:37:00.000So all of a sudden, they're in charge of a large extent of the Democratic Party because the Democrats, you know, being human beings, want to stay in power and want to be rich.
00:37:41.000I'm going to say that there's no such thing as men or women.
00:37:44.000And I'm going to start teaching kindergartners there.
00:37:47.000But this is not like how they decided to do it.
00:37:49.000Like the idea behind critical race theory, I believe, was that they thought that there was a lack of Of either appreciation or education about the history of the United States, particularly the history of racism and slavery and Jim Crow laws and segregation and redlining and all these different aspects that have led to this disproportionate number of African Americans in prison and in these crime-ridden,
00:38:19.000gang-ridden neighborhoods and Trying to come up with some sort of educational method of explaining some of the holes in our history that haven't been discussed.
00:38:31.000The problem that rational people have about it is that, with any concept, Sometimes it starts with good intentions and then along the way you have bad actors who get involved and they use it for their own gain and they use a movement of real concern a thing that has like a genuine origin in fact in history and then they start Using it,
00:38:58.000you know, the worst term I've heard is like, you're a race hustler.
00:39:04.000And there's a lot of people that elevate their careers by taking these ideas of critical race theory and then they get hired by universities or hired by corporations to give speeches and they wind up making exorbitant amounts of money.
00:39:19.000And they keep making more and more inflammatory statements and the more outrageous these statements get and they put them on Twitter and they write blogs and articles and op-eds and these outrageous statements get a lot of heat behind them and then they get more and more calls for these speaking gigs and they wind up making a lot of money and they make the discourse extremely toxic.
00:39:41.000So instead of having conversations about the history of it, then it starts being all people are racist.
00:39:49.000All people have biases and black people can't be racist because they don't have power and racism is only a thing that white people can, which is ridiculous, right?
00:40:01.000Right, of course, but this is where it comes from.
00:40:04.000It comes from people taking an idea...
00:40:07.000That has some merit, and you take it to a point where people are either exaggerating or changing that idea to suit their own purposes as a speaker and as a person who reflects these ideas.
00:40:30.000It doesn't have a place in the schools.
00:40:33.000I got a friend of mine, she's a black woman, and she took her kids out of school, eventually had to go to Catholic school because she went to school and she was objecting to what they were teaching.
00:41:31.000Well, you know, when the whole George Floyd thing happened, one of the schools that my kids were going to back in California released this email saying that it's not enough to not be racist.
00:42:45.000They weren't that good at teaching in the first place, and now here they are saying they're going to tackle something, not just tackle something as complex as race in America, but you're going to establish rules That you can't just be not racist,
00:43:12.000If you want to say all human beings are created equal in the eyes of love and the Lord and God and heavens and the universe, and really the differences are about climate, where people evolved, and then the differences are social,
00:43:29.000what communities they come from, and what part of the world they come from, and You know, what their ancestors encountered and what their relatives, their mom and dad encountered, and what they've encountered in life.
00:43:39.000And that human beings are vast resources and reservoirs of potential.
00:44:02.000So they have to go find racism and confront it?
00:44:04.000The problem is, this is the thing about censorship.
00:44:07.000This is what I was saying when people were calling for censorship.
00:44:10.000There were some people that celebrated certain people getting removed from Twitter.
00:44:15.000Like in the early days, it was like Milo Yiannopoulos, then it was Alex Jones.
00:44:18.000And I was like, hey man, if you don't see where this is going, do you understand that once they start censoring people for what they believe is something that's objectionable, that obviously the person who said it doesn't think it's objectionable, it's going to keep going further and further, and they're going to keep moving the goalposts.
00:44:33.000And then eventually it's going to come to you, and you're not going to be left enough, and you might be a really left-wing Democrat like Bill Maher.
00:44:41.000They're coming for Bill Maher all the time now.
00:44:51.000You are on the censorship train, and there's only so many stops before it gets to your fucking house.
00:44:57.000And that's how I feel about all this stuff.
00:45:00.000If you want to say that human beings should be able to express themselves, and we need to do it with...
00:45:07.000In a way that doesn't harass people or dox people or threaten people, but we have to be able to express ourselves because it's the only way we sort out what's right and what's wrong.
00:45:41.000That's the same with whether it's anti-racism.
00:45:44.000That's the same with corporate greed and anti-capitalism.
00:45:48.000That's the same with when people start going after stuff.
00:45:51.000Like when people start deciding that this thing that we've always accepted for so long is no longer acceptable and now we have to attack it and we have to attack it by the parameters that I believe are just and right.
00:47:05.000But I'll tell you why I know it's here, because the guy who's in charge of defending the law asked me to write a brief, a little amicus brief about free speech.
00:47:15.000So that's what I realized about myself.
00:47:19.000The reason I'm not dead or in a mental institution or in a joint is because of free speech.
00:47:25.000Because I came up in a time where it was just assumed that if you could write, you could put your plan in a garage, maybe they'd come, maybe they didn't.
00:47:34.000But if they did, maybe you'd put your play in a little theater.
00:47:37.000And if they liked it, maybe you could put your play on on Broadway.
00:47:40.000And then you could buy a car and get married.
00:49:28.000But what he said is, your correct answer is, of course, yes sir, no sir, yes sir, and then soothe their ass back to the beginning of time.
00:49:35.000Well, fortunately, in my case, the cop came around because he had a video camera.
00:49:40.000But it was kind of interesting because there was a guy who was driving like a maniac and he was cutting in and out of lanes and I don't think he saw me and he was in a big pickup truck and I was in a Tesla and he pulled into my lane and I had a swerve Almost into incoming traffic to avoid him slamming into the side of my car.
00:50:04.000And then because I was at a Tesla, because it's so fast, I just shot around in front of him.
00:50:10.000And the moment I did that, I saw blue lights.
00:51:14.000Which is what we see in these big city people out of their fucking minds.
00:51:17.000Well, it's just a simplistic solution to a complex problem.
00:51:21.000And the problem needs to be addressed in terms of training, respect for police officers as well.
00:51:29.000This is a very difficult job that we need.
00:51:32.000And if you don't think we need it, Wait till something happens you need to call a cop because there's a lot of fucking people that are like you know you know get rid of the police get rid of the police and then the shit hits the fan and they need cops and then they complain about it they complain about the fact that the cops aren't helping them Well, you know,
00:51:48.000I live in this wonderful neighborhood on the west side of L.A., and we had a shootout outside my house in the middle of the night, bang, bang, bang.
00:53:22.000If that's all it takes, imagine you're involved in shootouts, violence, all the crazy shit you see in car accidents, but some lady, while you're getting a cup of coffee, asks for your vax card too much.
00:59:14.000So I park at Williams-Sonoma and I come in through the back door, the parking lot, and this woman says, excuse me, sir, did you not see that sign that says this is not an entrance, it's an exit?
01:00:20.000Where was the humor of the last two years?
01:00:23.000Everybody's afraid to joke because humor is all about repression.
01:00:27.000Well, that sounds like, the Williams-Sonoma thing sounds like you just caught the wrong person at the wrong time, and you had the wrong joke, and she didn't like it.
01:02:00.000Well, fair to the people that are trying to get in, in comparison to the people that are already here.
01:02:04.000Like, if you talk to my grandparents, they're dead now, but if you talk to them while they're alive and ask them how hard was it to get into America, all they had to do was show up.
01:02:25.000It's one of the things that made this country so fantastic that you have a legitimate melting pot in the 20th century with all these people coming from all over the world trying to seek a better life and risk takers, right?
01:02:36.000People that are willing to try out a new continent, get on a boat with their family.
01:02:40.000And when my grandfather came over here, he was a young boy.
01:02:42.000And to be able to do that and to establish, you know, the lineage that, you know, he has left behind in this country, it's pretty fucking cool.
01:02:53.000It's the coolest country in that regard is that we're all immigrants.
01:02:57.000Everybody here, there's no like, you know, if you go to China, Generally speaking, Chinese people look Chinese.
01:04:07.000Because as soon as you say that, and then you're also letting people in, they know that the people that are allowing them to vote are people in the Democratic Party.
01:04:17.000So you're basically allowing people to come in, because those are the people that are interested in allowing people to come in illegally, right?
01:04:24.000Those are the ones that don't fight it.
01:04:26.000And then once they're in, you want them to be able to vote.
01:04:30.000So you're essentially saying, hey, we got you in, you know who to vote for, because we're the people that let you in.
01:04:39.000It's a beautiful thing in their eyes, because you've got this built-in voter base now, and you're allowing them to come in.
01:05:04.000This doesn't mean that they're more evil than the rest of us, although they are.
01:05:08.000It means, you know, I grew up in Mayor Daley's south side of Chicago.
01:05:11.000It's all about buying votes, keeping the people in their place.
01:05:14.000And if you want a job, turn out the vote.
01:05:17.000And if you want to stay on the police force, kick back two weeks of your pay and shut the fuck up.
01:05:25.000Right, but you don't think Democrats want everybody to be on welfare, right?
01:05:28.000I think that the Democratic Party wants everybody to be on welfare.
01:05:32.000The Democratic Party has gotten so far away, not only from its liberal base, but from its liberal constituents.
01:05:39.000What are you basing that on though, that statement that they want everybody to be on welfare?
01:05:43.000Because the people on welfare are the people who vote for the Democratic Party.
01:05:49.000Because somebody said a long time ago, they said a democracy dies when the people realize they can vote for the government to give them money.
01:05:56.000So if the people can vote for the government to give them money, they're going to do so.
01:06:00.000So the question is, who is paying for the welfare?
01:06:33.000So the only way the Social Security can function is to endanger the future.
01:06:41.000Unemployment insurance existed at the beginning to help somebody who'd lost their job in the period before they got the next job.
01:06:48.000So now it exists to keep somebody on unemployment insurance for two years so they don't work.
01:06:55.000You know, if I was a kid and that's all that I knew, I'd do it too.
01:07:02.000The aid to dependent children started to help mothers who didn't have babies, who didn't have a wage earner around, that they were young, they were single mothers, they didn't have a wage earner around.
01:07:13.000So then it became evident, two things, that the more children you had out of wedlock, With no man in the house, the more money you got.
01:07:26.000And the only way you could keep on getting that money was if the man was out of the house.
01:07:56.000And so my dad was raised by a single mom in the Depression.
01:08:01.000He did very well, but it's not a good way to bring up kids.
01:08:06.000So when you've got no men in the house and women having a lot of babies because they get more money, But do you think they're having babies because they get more money?
01:09:31.000So if the school has the worst teachers in the world and they're teaching the young kids, you know, you've been put upon and you're a victim.
01:09:40.000You're perpetuating the death of the inner cities.
01:09:43.000When Trump comes along and says, you know what, let's stop that.
01:11:30.000You know, he grew up in these elite schools, whether the public schools in an elite area or the private schools, and they filled his head with trash.
01:12:01.000He can't undertake an alternative view because that means to him giving up his life.
01:12:05.000Well, don't you think there's a lot of people that have alternative views that just don't know how to express them because they're worried about being rejected by their peers?
01:12:38.000I can't over-recommend my friend Shelby Steele's books because he's devoted his life.
01:12:42.000The black man's devoted his life, and he's a very close associate of Tom Sowell, to understanding the problem, the heartbreaking problem of his people.
01:12:52.000I'm a Jew, so I got the heartbreaking problem of my people.
01:12:55.000He's got the heartbreaking problem of his.
01:12:58.000I don't understand the specific problem, but I understand the phenomenon.
01:13:02.000So he was talking in a black community in Los Angeles the other day, and they said, what can we do?
01:13:22.000Okay, that's a pretty simplistic answer.
01:13:25.000If you're really poor and you're stuck in a neighborhood like that and you have roots there, maybe you have a job there, and someone says move, that's a lot easier said than done.
01:16:48.000The agencies, the whole idea is it's predicated on the idea that they're going to seek work for you, and then they're going to take a percentage of that work.
01:16:55.000If they just take the money up front, they have zero incentive to do any work for you.
01:17:16.000If someone comes along and says, I'll give you $100,000, But that takes away the incentive.
01:17:23.000The whole idea of agents getting a percentage is they now have an incentive to go seek work for you because if they can get you $100,000, they're going to get 10 grand out of that.
01:17:35.000If someone comes along and says, I'll give you all the money up front, they're like, for what?
01:17:40.000Now I don't have any incentive because I got your money, and I don't think you're going to get any work anyway because you have no history of working in this business.
01:19:35.000The guy was so fed up, because he was a crazy person, working for David Spade, got fed up with David Spade and decided he was going to kill him.
01:21:15.000But, I mean, there are circumstances where people are down on their luck, and it'd be great if the government stepped in in a good faith effort to try to help those people get back on their feet and move forward.
01:21:26.000And sometimes it works that way, right?
01:21:29.000But we've had 60 years of welfare, and we've had three generations of people living on welfare.
01:22:00.000But if it doesn't work, if it leads to poverty, if it leads to violence, if it leads to broken homes, the government has gotten so much power From expanding welfare that they're going to keep expanding it.
01:22:14.000So you think the government has got so much power from expanding welfare because in expanding welfare they put it out there that these people who want welfare and they want that money to keep going and you've got to vote Democrat.
01:22:25.000If you vote Democrat, they're the ones who want to continue these programs.
01:24:44.000And I think if done correctly, in good faith, with good intentions to eventually wean yourself off the system and use it as something that can help you get back on your feet, I think there's a great benefit to it.
01:24:56.000And I'm happy to pay taxes if I can provide families with the same sort of benefit that I experienced and my family experienced when I was a boy.
01:25:06.000But the difference in my thinking is that, because I've been involved in a couple of philanthropic ideas and a couple of money-raising ideas and so forth, that what about if you took the taxes that you paid I think?
01:25:50.000And I'm going to keep an eye on the soup kitchen.
01:25:52.000And I'm going to make sure that the soup is good.
01:25:54.000And I'm going to make sure that the people...
01:26:46.000When you get to a place like an urban area, like New York City, something like that, where millions and millions and millions of people, it's so hard to think of that as a community.
01:26:52.000Well, it's not a community, you know, but...
01:26:56.000There's a certain size behind which it's impossible to go and have everybody know the same, everybody's name.
01:27:03.000The size of like an infantry company, the size of a clan, the size of a movie set.
01:27:47.000Yeah, that's a post-Trump statement, isn't it?
01:27:51.000Post the Trump administration, people on the left just got so fucking crazy with politics that they don't just oppose the ideas, they feel like they have to actively oppose the person and shame the person and shun the person.
01:29:13.000The goalposts keep moving until you're living in an authoritarian dictatorship where anything that you say that doesn't go with the party line, you have grave consequences.
01:29:23.000And that's the real problem with today's society when people are talking about the implementation of a centralized digital currency that the government controls.
01:29:30.000I'm like, are you out of your fucking mind?
01:29:59.000He says, maybe I'll go down and lose it.
01:30:02.000So the people who are frightened by prosperity, who don't have some gratitude to their forebears, to their parents, to their church, to the country, to God...
01:30:14.000You can't let people call attention to their fear.
01:30:17.000Anything which causes attention to their fear has to be killed.
01:30:20.000How do you feel they're frightened by prosperity?
01:30:22.000Well, of course they're frightened by prosperity.
01:30:39.000I've had conversations with people about climate change and the thing that's shocking to me is that they absolutely do believe that we're doomed.
01:31:12.000I'm a believer that there's a real problem with fossil fuel production and what we're doing in terms of the environment.
01:31:19.000Partic particulates in the atmosphere and coal burning power plants have destroyed cities where you get like a fucking fine mist of cold dust over people's cars and people breathing that a host of health problems that come along with those things but there's No models that show that like within our lifetime or our children's lifetime that the earth is fucked but people believe that and For some reason.
01:34:19.000The thousand people at the top, they got all the money in communism.
01:34:24.000You wrote this book, which is—you've written so much in terms of, like, these great movies and films and plays, but you wrote a book, which is basically like a social commentary book, right?
01:34:43.000And what was the premise behind it and what inspired you to do this?
01:34:47.000Well, Recessional is a poem by my good friend, Rudyard Kipling.
01:34:51.000He said, it's a poem said that writing at the height of British power, he said, we're the most powerful nation in the history of the world.
01:35:01.000Let's remember That we're all children of God.
01:35:05.000That we're all here to help each other.
01:35:33.000This magnificent adventure that I've had here.
01:35:36.000I mean, it's a better life than anyone could possibly deserve.
01:35:40.000I've had nothing but fun and trauma and tragedy and love and all this marvelous stuff.
01:35:46.000Because my grandparents came here from the Ukraine and from Poland, and they put up with – not only did they not have any money, they didn't speak the language, and they came here and lived through the Depression.
01:36:03.000My grandmother raised my dad in the Depression, a single mom, working in a sweatshop.
01:37:30.000It exists as a memory and it exists as a means of paying homage, but it's gone.
01:37:37.000That my grandparents came from Eastern Europe where everybody spoke Yiddish and they lived in these little shtetlach, these little villages.
01:37:44.000They lived there for a thousand years.
01:39:45.000So let's start from the beginning of this round of yours and let's concentrate first on censorship.
01:39:52.000Censorship is a key part of your book and it's a key part of some of the problems that we're facing today.
01:39:57.000The right feels disproportionately censored because the tech people are almost universally left-wing.
01:40:06.000That's one of the more fascinating things about these gigantic social media companies.
01:40:11.000I mean, there are some companies that are coming up like Rumble and Gab and Minds that don't share this same sort of ideology that the people on Twitter and Facebook and a lot of these other places.
01:40:27.000They have this idea that these are private companies and they should be able to govern them by their own rules.
01:40:33.000And in doing so, one of the things they do is censor things that they think are objectionable or that they don't want on their platform.
01:40:45.000And disproportionately, that favors people on the left and criticizes people on the right.
01:40:51.000It's a real problem and it's also a problem in that it in many ways fuels extremism because if you do have extremism and you kick them off your platform, they're going to go somewhere else and they're going to go see they are against us and they're going to team up and then they'll be more hardened in their efforts or more galvanized in their approach.
01:41:48.000And this is a problem with the social media sites that are not just simply a private company.
01:41:54.000You could say Twitter is just a private company, but I think that's crazy.
01:41:58.000It's an unprecedented experiment in human history where one entity has an enormous portal to the discourse in not just America but the world.
01:42:14.000The amount of communication and the amount of information that gets distributed and the amount of debate that happens on Twitter is unprecedented.
01:42:23.000You could say the same thing about YouTube.
01:42:25.000You could say the same thing about Facebook.
01:42:27.000These are unprecedented new entities in civilization.
01:42:31.000It's not as simple as these are private companies.
01:42:33.000Nothing has ever existed like this that has the kind of impact and the kind of influence.
01:42:41.000I believe, my position is, they should be treated like utilities.
01:42:45.000And I think if you do something horrendous, if you dox people or hack into their accounts and put all their nudie pictures online or whatever horrible shit you want to do, if you threaten people's lives and call to attack people and try to organize people,
01:43:17.000But the worst thing that we can do is just start deciding what can and can't be discussed when people disagree about that.
01:43:26.000If you say, nope, I'm in control, this is my private company, and I'm not going to allow you to discuss certain political ideologies or social ideas, you can't fucking do that.
01:43:37.000Well, if you don't have free speech, you don't have anything in this country.
01:43:41.000And I agree with everything you said, except you said everything should be any ideas in good faith.
01:43:47.000I would even take that off the table, because the question is, who decides what's in good faith?
01:43:55.000But the law in the United States has always been, you can say whatever you want, except advocating violent overthrow of the United States government.
01:44:33.000I was so thrilled to find out that there were people who, you know, on podcast and on AM radio and a couple of other outlets who had the capacity to stand up and say, you know what?
01:44:55.000I brought up Twitter, also created the podcast, so thank God.
01:44:59.000So all you can do is, you know, as they say, put on the armor of God and stand fast to stand up for what you believe in and say, yeah, you know, I get it.
01:45:07.000There may be a cost for speaking my mind, but it's not as great to me at this moment on this subject as the cost of not speaking my mind.
01:45:18.000Yeah, that is, I mean, that should be a foundational principle.
01:45:26.000We shouldn't deviate from that in any way because without discourse, without discussion, without debate, we never find out what we really think.
01:45:35.000It's so valuable to watch two people with opposing perspectives hash it out and try to figure out who's got the better argument.
01:45:44.000It's so important for trying to solidify your own ideas or trying to figure out why you think the way you think.
01:45:50.000Or maybe someone will say something that completely shifts.
01:45:52.000If you have a good open mind, and I pride myself on having as open a mind as possible, When I see a good debate and someone says something that goes against what I thought I believed, but I start agreeing with them, it's a fascinating moment.
01:46:09.000Because you get a chance to examine all these thoughts that you have bouncing around your head and go, oh...
01:46:26.000It drives me crazy because I feel like I'm very fortunate.
01:46:30.000And then I snuck in before people realized how big podcasts could be.
01:46:36.000And I think that's the same thing in many ways with Twitter, but they have control over this, you know, centralized sort of portal to information.
01:46:45.000And they're doing things to try to censor it and move it along and move it in a way that they would like it to be.
01:46:52.000But they didn't do that with podcasts.
01:47:15.000Because talking to a liberal, like I was talking to some guy and he said, well, you know, I said, Dr. King, we have two American saints, right?
01:47:28.000I said, Dr. King, the most famous speech after Lincoln is this, I have a dream speech, where a person will be judged by the content of the character rather than the color of the skin.
01:50:31.000If there are no rules of debate, all that we're left with is sluggery.
01:50:35.000So do you think the people that are saying we should revamp the Constitution, they believe the Constitution offers protection for things that they feel are questionable and need to be eradicated from society?
01:50:46.000I don't know what the hell they think.
01:50:47.000I don't think they've read the Constitution.
01:50:49.000I mean, it'll take them about 10 minutes to read the Constitution.
01:50:52.000I don't know what there is to object about.
01:50:54.000Well, I think, again, during the Trump administration, I think there was a lot of people that felt like we have to stop this from ever happening again.
01:51:03.000To stop a guy like him from ever getting to a position of power because the way he communicates is so aggressive and bombastic and so contrary to what we think of when we think of a statesman, when we think of a leader of the free world.
01:51:17.000We don't want that kind of person in power who insults people and says rude things and Talks about himself in a very braggadocious manner and that this is negative and that he has this horde of followers that will just believe anything he says and start cheering for him at these rallies and we don't like it.
01:51:35.000People start comparing him to other dictators.
01:54:26.000Okay, the political play there with Nathan Lane on Broadway is hysterically funny.
01:54:30.000It's about a president who's the worst president of all time, and he's getting voted out of office, and he's got like two weeks to earn enough money to...
01:55:00.000He says, I want the head of the National Association of Turkey Manufacturers We're good to go.
01:55:22.000So, I wrote an article for The Village Voice about political debate and I said, we're in the midst of having some unfortunately heated political debates.
01:55:34.000Why can't we debate with political civility?
01:56:26.000But also, you know, there is no refuting.
01:56:29.000There's no refuting to the people that don't believe, but there is, you can express yourself in a way that reasonable people can see your point and they get it.
01:56:37.000Yes, but, see, the only people that I knew to communicate with were my supposed friends of the NPR and the New Yorker and the New York Magazine.
01:57:51.000Of course, yeah, because when you're a playwright, it was before the internet, if you're a playwright, you've got to go to New York, you've got a good review from Right.
01:57:59.000They had a stranglehold on it back then because it was all about the reviews.
01:58:03.000There was no social media word of mouth like Rotten Tomatoes type deal.
01:58:10.000The Rotten Tomatoes thing is really fascinating to me because it's shown the difference and the very clear difference between the way critics look at things, where a lot of them are ideologically captured, Like very overwhelmingly left-wing versus the way the audience looks at things.
01:58:28.000You know, like my friend Dave Chappelle's special, Sticks and Stones, when that came out, that was one of them where they showed the difference between Rotten Tomatoes' version of it and the Rotten Tomatoes where the critics had looked at it and gave it like 4% or something like that.
01:58:44.000And then the most recent one, The Closer, is the best one.
01:58:49.000Because when it first came out, I think it was like something crazy.
01:58:54.000Insanely low Rotten Tomatoes score by the critics, but insanely high Rotten Tomatoes score by the general public.
01:59:00.000Yeah, but see, the critics have always been, I've dealt with them for 50 years, like the woman behind the counter at the auto registry.
01:59:48.000They have the capacity to fuck things up.
01:59:50.000And there were two guys when I was very active in New York theater that were John Simon and Frank Rich who were the theater critics for...
02:00:01.000Respectively, New York Magazine and the New York Times.
02:00:04.000And it would come to the openings, every opening, and they would go down to the bottom of the aisle, right by the curtain before the show, and they would turn around.
02:00:14.000And they would look out at the audience and gossip.
02:00:16.000So they were in effect saying, oh, guess who the show is tonight, folks?
02:01:06.000So, this Village Voice article comes out, you get excommunicadoed by the left, if that's a verb, and then from there you decide, I'm going to join the right?
02:03:59.000Because I was exposed to the difference between what I thought I thought And what I really thought, because I realized that a lot of things I thought I thought, I wasn't operating in that way.
02:04:13.000You know, I might have said that wealth is bad, but I wanted more.
02:04:22.000I knew that there was a lot of prejudice against Jews, and I knew there was a lot of prejudice against black, but the question was, what's the responsibility of a human being in this situation?
02:04:33.000Was it to give more money to, quote, social programs?
02:04:52.000Shelby said, my good friend Shelby, and I started reading Shelby's works, and Shelby said, if we did away with welfare, the trauma in the inner cities would stop tomorrow.
02:05:06.000Well, in his words, and I got to agree with him, he's a black guy, I'm not.
02:05:10.000Because people would say, wait a second, we're all in the same boat, let's work for a living.
02:05:13.000And the same thing that I went through and you went through.
02:05:18.000Unless we say that somehow, there's two groups in the United States that have always, well, one group for 150 years, another group for 60 years, have been under government control by accepting government largesse.
02:05:36.000And from having worked a long time with kids, especially young men, it's real easy to warp them, right?
02:05:43.000I know a lot of young men of my son's age who went to these colleges, and they get out, and their parents say, well, I've got to give them a little bit of money.
02:05:51.000And it's extraordinary how little money it takes to warp a young man, whether that young man has just gotten out with a degree in It's the same thing.
02:07:13.000You know, I can't even say Republican because the Republicans were the people when I was a kid who wore white pants and white shoes and lived at the— So what do you identify as?
02:07:55.000Because I'd like to conserve just as my own life has reached a stage where I'd love to be able to go on and enjoy some of the fruits and engage in some contemplation.
02:08:08.000I would like the life of my beloved country to continue in maturity.
02:08:13.000Which it can't do it as it could in adolescence.
02:08:16.000In maturity as an honorable, decent place to live with liberty and justice for all.
02:08:21.000But don't you think a lot of people on the left share that idea?
02:09:07.000For example, if in Hollywood, I wrote my first movie, I think 1979, and the guy who gave me notes on the movie was a guy called Samson Rafelson.
02:09:16.000Samson Rafelson is famous because he wrote the first talking picture.
02:10:40.000And the movies have become so corporate, you know, just like Twitter, that all the decisions, they aren't being made by some, you know, the people I grew up with, you know, or ancient Jews like me smoking a cigar.
02:10:53.000I said, yeah, it seems like a good idea.
02:12:00.000So when I was starting out in the theater, I started out in a garage, you know, with William H. Macy and Joe Mantegna and Dennis Franz and Billy Peterson.
02:13:58.000And okay, over a hundred years, vaudeville died, and then there was radio, and then radio died, and then there was television, and then the movies, and then the television drove out the movies.
02:14:12.000The movies are dead, and television becomes streaming.
02:14:15.000So the method of distribution, I hate to sound like a Marxist, is determining the content.
02:14:50.000So, I'm still trying to figure out, like, what's this leap that you're making to being, like, this hardcore conservative, or whatever you are.
02:15:45.000So he says, the first thing he says in the book is there's no different, he says the greatest Disparity in the world is between the people who are looking for work and the people who are looking for help, right?
02:15:56.000So the people looking for help are always saying, Jesus Christ, I can't get good help.
02:15:59.000And the people looking for work says I can't get a job.
02:16:47.000You're slowly educating yourself to these different ideas, and those ideas resonate with you more than the ideas you had previously accepted, maybe because you hadn't examined those?
02:17:16.000So, I'm very fortunate having written plays for a million years, because when you're writing a play, You're constantly saying, I don't get it.
02:19:31.000In terms of film, in terms of television, in television it's almost 100%.
02:19:36.000I mean, it's in the high 90s, other than like Fox, Fox News, right?
02:19:40.000That's probably the only thing on television that you can point to that's clearly conservative is Fox News Channel.
02:19:45.000Everything else, like shows and television shows, There's so many left-wing leaning production houses and so many left-wing leaning Democrats that are working as executives and as writers and as producers.
02:21:59.000You say, oh my god, this is the thing that has to be, it's the worst thing in the world, that the family would break up, so maybe he's not really blah blah little Susie, or maybe she's asking for it, or maybe I'm wrong, but you can't allow the possibility to come out of your mouth.
02:22:15.000So that's the same thing with the left.
02:22:19.000They're living a life that doesn't stand up to the test of reason, and it's destructive, but they can't allow any alternative To come to their consciousness, let alone out of their mouth.
02:22:32.000Because if it comes to their consciousness, they're a hypocrite.
02:22:50.000I've experienced that with many friends where they would talk about their ideas that they have that might be, you know, right wing or more conservative and that they can't talk about it on sets and they can't talk about it.
02:23:58.000And so what we saw in this transformation in 50 years has become part of the culture.
02:24:02.000Which is a really good thing about the way the culture has aged in the last 50 years.
02:24:11.000And another good thing is the way that being black has aged in the last 50 years and among the majoritarian of white culture where they say, wait a second, I get it.
02:26:06.000They have the capacity to force you to do certain things.
02:26:09.000So what the Constitution says is let's limit that capacity only to force you to do things which promote the general defense, provide for the common welfare, and get the blessings of prosperity for you and your progeny.
02:26:26.000That the government is good for the post office, the army, the navy, the roads and the sewers, that's it.
02:26:32.000It does those things well because everybody, as Milton Friedman said, everybody needs them but nobody can pay for them.
02:26:38.000So when the government decides to do something other than that, something that everybody needs and nobody can pay for, right, all that they can do is do something nobody needs.
02:27:20.000And this is Milton Friedman's great contribution.
02:27:23.000He said when he was tutoring doctoral students for the thesis at the University of Chicago, he said, when you submit your thesis for a doctorate in economics at the University of Chicago, it can't be longer than 500 words.
02:28:22.000That's inevitable because you put people in power, they're going to use it.
02:28:25.000So this book, you start writing this book, and this book sort of outlines the way you feel, all the problems that you feel are happening today in this society, with censorship, with the decay, the moral foundation decay of society.
02:28:43.000When you sat out to do this, why did you put it together in book form?
02:28:50.000Well, I started, I was doing a lot of writing at the time.
02:28:53.000I was writing for National Review, writing for Wall Street Journal, writing for Flying Magazine, the Jewish Journal.
02:28:59.000And I wrote a lot of essays and I started calling them in favor of a book.
02:29:05.000And the form of the book is really, it's a bunch of anecdotes.
02:29:08.000Rather than saying, here are my thoughts, I say, well, here's a story, here's a story, and here's what it makes me think of.
02:32:55.000So from the moment that Moses takes them out of Egypt, they don't want to leave, until Moses dies, which is the end of the story, they want to kill Moses.
02:33:27.000I'm going to go up the mountain and talk to the big fellow.
02:33:30.000He's a half an hour late coming down, and they've torn off all their clothes, and they've made this molten calf, and they're worshiping the molten calf.
02:34:02.000And that's why it's a great idea to study it.
02:34:05.000Because everything you see in the Torah, you're seeing around you and in yourself every day.
02:34:13.000Do you think that it's imperative that a society have some kind of structure to follow, whether it's some kind of religion or some kind of ideology?
02:36:23.000Listen, I'm 75. I'm not going to go out and chase girls.
02:36:27.000In addition to being blissfully married, You know, and try to get my name in all the papers and blah blah and write a million plays and make all that money, all the stuff I did when I was young.
02:37:20.000But I'm just asking if there was a way.
02:37:22.000I mean, I feel like every time someone talks about the problems with X, you should also approach it in what's the solution to these problems?
02:38:16.000If you think it's good, your neighbor will think it's good, but that's not true, because people have different desires and different understandings.
02:38:22.000The Jewish tradition is, I don't know what's good for you, but I know what's bad for me, and I'm not going to do that to you.
02:38:29.000So that's the solution to a happy life.
02:38:33.000Do you have any desire to continue making films?
02:41:57.000And as the movie comes out, the Monica Lewinsky scandal breaks.
02:42:01.000So I'm in New York promoting something or other, and for one time only, thank God, time in my life, I was stalked by the press all week.
02:42:10.000I couldn't leave the hotel because they all wanted to say blah, blah, blah.
02:42:13.000But one of the reasons was there's a scene in the movie where the supposed president, I guess, is talking to somebody who looks exactly like Monica Lewinsky.
02:42:55.000Everybody was like, he's doing that to distract attention from the Monica Lewinsky scandal and say, hey, listen, we had to bomb some people.
02:43:02.000Let's not talk about this nonsense and let's talk about something serious like this military action that was absolutely necessary and had nothing to do with distracting people from the fact that I was having sex with an intern.
02:43:15.000Well, you know, I knew Patty Chayefsky pretty well, and I think one of the only guys I ever envied is a writer.
02:43:22.000I envied people who made more money than me, certainly, but I never envied their writing.
02:43:26.000But I envied Patty that he created, among other things, the phrase, I'm mad as hell, and I'm just not going to take it.
02:43:33.000But then I created that phrase, wag the dog, so I felt very rewarded.
02:43:38.000I mean, that phrase gets repeated all the time when people are talking about propaganda or things that they don't believe in.
02:43:44.000Well, the other thing, there was somebody, I think it might have been a rack or a random, was saying, we're going to do this, we're going to do that.
02:43:50.000That's the Chicago way, which is, I made that up for Untouchables.
02:45:56.000And listen, from that day to this, anytime we're in the same place, I haven't seen him recently, we used to see him a lot, he would always cross the room and see great gentlemen, say, ma'ams, how you doing?
02:46:46.000Everybody, Sarah Jessica Parbis, Sylvia, Julia Stiles, everybody's in the movie.
02:46:53.000And there's a scene where Alec Baldwin is out getting drunk with this underage girl and he cracks up his car and the car turns over and he crawls out of the car.
02:48:49.000And, you know, that's another thing I feel very good about is a lot of salespeople come up to me and every one of them says, oh, my God, thank you.
02:49:04.000He's a fascinating guy, Alec Baldwin, because he's such a movie star guy.
02:49:13.000Also, I did a great movie with him and Anthony Hopkins called The Edge, which I wrote about these two guys, the world's richest guy, Anthony.
02:53:53.000What you're talking about happened, but it says in 2003, Antonio Inaki offered Hickson $5 million to fight against Fujita, but had no answer.
02:54:25.000I had dinner with Hickson and his son and his wife once, and he was talking about they were trying to get him to fight Fedor, which would have been incredible.
02:54:58.000You know, I don't think anybody could say that anybody was gonna kick Fedor's ass back then.
02:55:03.000Not in 2000. You know, it's just, he was too fucking good.
02:55:07.000From 2000 to 2000, whatever it was, 2005. There's a certain amount of years that an athlete, particularly a combat sports athlete, can compete at their very best.