Ep 170 | Why Oscar Winner Richard Dreyfuss Is Grateful Glenn 'Outed' Him | Richard Dreyfuss | The Glenn Beck Podcast
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 23 minutes
Words per Minute
118.76858
Summary
Actor Richard Dreyfuss joins host Alex Blumberg to discuss his new book, One Thought Scares Me, and why he believes that when American fails, what do we do with the people who stand in our way?
Transcript
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Today's guest has been a violent bank robber, a shark fighting marine biologist, a passionate
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composer, an uptight psychiatrist, a notorious scam artist, a lovelorn detective, a wizard named
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Oz, and a suicidal architect trapped on a sinking ocean liner. He has encountered aliens and faced
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3D piranhas. He has held the office of Republican Senator, a general, White House chief of staff,
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and a vice president who ran the show. All of these as characters, of course, but he brought
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each of them to life. As a kid, my guest today wanted to be the greatest actor in the world,
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and it became an obsession. He won an Oscar when he was 29 for The Goodbye Girl. At the time,
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he was the youngest actor to win a title he held for 25 years until Adrian Brody snatched it. He's
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worked with George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Oliver Stone, you name it. He was in American
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Graffiti. Along the way, he got into some high-profile feuds. Bill Murray threw a glass
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ashtray at his face. But today, he is not here to talk about his Academy Award or his celebrity feuds,
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although I do have to ask him a few questions, or his iconic roles in Mr. Holland's Opus and Jaws.
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He was never a Hollywood insider. He's here to sound the alarm, to protect the Constitution,
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to stir the healthy dissent, to protect the lone voice. He told me right before the podcast that
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I was the one who outed him in Hollywood. When I apologized, I didn't realize that.
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He said, no, no, no, this is one of the best things that's happened to me.
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He is a man committed to nothing less than saving America. It has been his mission for the past few
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decades, and it is the subject of his new book called One Thought Scares Me. He wants us all to
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ask ourselves, when American fails, what then? Please welcome on today's podcast, Richard Dreyfuss.
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Welcome, Richard. How are you? Hiya. I just want to start with this because you probably haven't
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seen this well. Usually we slate the show, but we should slate with Steven Spielberg's slate from
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Jaws. I don't know if you remember that. Well, it was originally named Jews.
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Was it? You know, we've spent just a few minutes backstage a few years ago. I don't even know how
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long ago. 2016. And we've spent maybe a half an hour today before this. I don't know, but I think if we
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lived next door to each other, we'd be friends. Absolutely. Absolutely. The idea that we wouldn't
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be friends is such a contemporary nightmare of a country that it's not acceptable. But I don't mean
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like friends out of respect. I think you, we may disagree and we'll find out on stuff. We may disagree
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on a few things, but you're rooted in the truth. You're rooted in history. You're not, it's,
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it's very popular now to just dismiss history or miscast it and not care because you want it to bend
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your way. Uh, yeah, there are people who now think that opposing views are un-American. They don't know
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that opposing views are entwined and threaded through the constitution, the bill of rights,
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and what we show to the world we believe in. You know, there's a very simple thing and it's
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these documents tell the world who we are and why we are to be. And we strive to be. And we say,
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because they are works in progress, they tell us who we want to be when we grow up. Yes. Yeah. I mean,
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uh, I've often said, but we, we dismiss the declaration and the constitution now so much
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but I I'll lose my American, you know, ism or my love for America. If you can show me a country
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whose mission statement is better than those truths that we hold self-evident that all men are
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created equal and, you know, endowed by a creator that is, we're not even close to that. We never
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have been close to it. There's been times where we get closer and then like with Martin Luther King
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need to be reminded and we get a little closer again. But I fear that that now is being lost as
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old dusty words that mean nothing. I certainly think that when we allow our kids to tell us what is
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valuable and what is nurturing, we're going to the wrong people. What does that mean? It means
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there's, there's a book called Five Minds for the Future and it's about the development of the human
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brain and basically it says that there are a number of different kinds of brains that we can
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shoot for but until you're in the fourth grade you cannot conceive of abstraction. So you can't
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understand metaphor, simile like that. And yet it's, it's our obligation to get that young
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an audience to fall in love with their country. And so we created Glory Tales and they are good for the
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kindergarten, first, second and third grade. And in the fourth grade they are armed to the teeth
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and they know that Nathan Hale is a stand-in for America. And that George Washington throwing
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the thing across the river is a stand-in for America. So that when they start to learn the
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details, they're already in love. Right. When you hear of educators saying, we're going to hold off on
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all of that until the university level, then you know, not only did those educators last read
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the Constitution when they were in the third grade or fourth grade, but no university level child
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can understand the Constitution because they're built to be skeptical and cynical.
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Right. And that means you can't tell them to love their country. Right. They will give you this.
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Right. So you've got to get them in love with the enlightenment values that the Constitution has
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and you've got to get them in love with defending those things. And they have been gone from the
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curriculum for 50 years. That's the core problem. That's the problem. We're not even saying,
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well, if you studied a little bit more, they have no idea about the Constitution.
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They have no idea about the Bill of Rights. No. None. And they think that the Republican or
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Democratic parties are on an equal level with the Constitution. And that is infantile and suicidal.
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So you wrote the book, One Thought Scares Me. And that thought is,
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we teach our children what we wish them to know. We don't teach them what we don't wish them to know.
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What does that mean? It means that they've taken it out. They've taken civics out because we don't
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want you to be a participating citizen. We don't want you to be the child of that revolution.
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So, but if you look at, if you look at what's happening now, it seems like all they're doing
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in school is training kids to be an activist. Oh, no, no. Activism terrifies these people. And I'll
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tell you who they are, because there was a very real reason for it. I'm a baby boomer, right? And that
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means that there was a generation above me, but not so above that they actually went to World War
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II. And I call them the James Dean generation. Okay. Too, too young to help their dad in World War
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II and too old to take acid with me. Okay. My mom was in that generation and it was a screwed up
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generation going between the two. Yeah. There was good and bad. And we were proud of all of it as an
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exercise in the Bill of Rights. And others hated every minute of it because they thought that they
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had proven the defeat of participating citizenship. And 1968 was the year when you watched on television
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the Democratic Convention, the Democratic Convention of 68, the mayor of Chicago yelling you on TV,
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the Chicago cops beating kids who were wearing funny clothes. And everyone had forgotten all of their
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drug taking just in time to declare war on us for our drug taking. And that happens to be an hysterical part
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of this story. Washington, I was asked here by one of your staff, who was my favorite founder? And I
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humped. I didn't give him a straight answer. And then I realized when you were showing me through the
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museum, I have a very real answer for that. And it's George Washington. Because Washington was,
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as an inarticulate writer, said the most profound things about us. And he said, the Constitution must
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always be central. The factions must always be peripheral. And we live in the absolute
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opposite, absurd opposition to that. And we've actually had it removed long enough so that we have no
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muscle memory of it. So, I mean, we have destroyed our history. And may I say, yeah, it happened this
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way. In 1971 and two and three, those those members of that generation were on school boards. That's the
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way they first became adults. And they were on school boards. And the first thing they did was to kill
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civics. Because they thought civics had caused the Democratic Convention of 68. And within 10 years,
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civics was gone from every school district in the country. And I mean, the whole thing, the knowledge
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of the birth tale of the country, the opposition to the way they did it in England, to the monarchy,
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we fired a king for fraud. Wow. And the aristocracy. And we said, we will teach you that which you have
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never been allowed to learn. And that's when they started to come. And we dealt only with the poor.
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And we said, you learn these values. And you become American. There is no limit to what you will
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achieve. Correct. And that was a thing they'd been wanting to hear for 5,000 years. Right. And we have
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and enter the discount code of GLEN50. Tell me, because you grew up in a great, crazy family.
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Your grandmother fought on the campaign of Eugene Debs, if I'm not mistaken. Your father was in the
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Battle of the Bulge. Your mother was a Vietnam protester. My great-grandaunt assassinated Czar
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Alexander in 1881. Shut up. My grandaunt assassinated the Czar in 1881. She popped the Czar
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Czar. Wow. Wow. So you have some rebellion in you. But there's a difference to me. There's a great
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deal of difference between Martin Luther King did, which he was saying, remember who we're supposed
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to be and who we're trying to be. And now it is so anti-American. What happened? When did that happen?
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It happened because of the 60s. But wait, wait, wait. But if I'm not mistaken, your family, I mean,
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socialism, communism, had to be a lot of people around you. But they loved America.
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We loved America. I loved America. I was born as a red diaper baby. Right. I'm a communist son.
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Right. I am a communist child. I was born on the left. And I learned where I differed and where I
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didn't. Because these men who had fought in gangs in Brooklyn first, and then in the war against
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Hitler, they knew, all of them, why they were fighting. And when they came back from World War II,
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they were each given a gift, a gift of the GI Bill of Rights. And that meant a house, a college,
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a university. It meant the ability to change your life for the better. And it was done because the
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government recognized that these guys hadn't been kidding. This was a nightmare. My father's
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unit, the usual turn is 21 days in combat. My father was 69 days behind the German lines. And
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the government knew that they were asking this army of citizen soldiers to do the impossible.
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And they did it. And when they came home, they came home to gratitude and love. And I have never known
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a generation, never, that was so willing to weep at the national anthem at Yankee Stadium. And I would go
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at every opportunity I had. And they would look down at me and my brother, and I'd be singing the words,
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and they would cry. And one day, one of the guys, whose name was Tommy Grosso,
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I was talking to him. And I said, I get it, I get it. Your totalitarian psychopath is better than his
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totalitarian psychopath. And he started laughing so hard that his milk came up through his nose.
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And if you could not find a generation that did not revere America, then those guys.
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And then skipping a few generations, Robert Dole, a war hero, was brought back to the well of the Senate
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Senate when they were going to re-up the GI Bill of Rights. And Santorum got up and made a lovely speech
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about Robert Dole. And then he took down the GI Bill of Rights. He did not re-up it. He took it down
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and humiliated Dole. And I watched this. I couldn't believe that an American political party would do
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such a disgusting thing. But he had. And that's when I changed. I became enormously active.
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And I think I've become active on an issue that is not partisan, that is for everyone, and that has
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no enemies. To want to revive the study of civics, which means the study of the birth tale of America
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and the birth tale of putting the Enlightenment values to work in our system. That is not a partisan issue.
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And when I have been accused of that, I say, I am not a liberal.
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I am a libo, conservo, rado, middle-of-the-rodo, just like most of you. You just haven't given it any
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thought lately. And that's who I am. This is not to be discarded as a partisan issue.
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Unfortunately, I think we have made, because of the lack of civics, we have made the flag our country.
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And the images, and that means nothing. It means nothing. It is what those symbols stand for.
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And now those symbols are rejected by one half of the country. But we're not talking, we're fighting
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over that. And we're not talking about, but what do they represent? And I used to believe
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that, I mean, I know our unum, e pluribus unum, came from the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of
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Independence, who we want to be, not who we always are, who we want to be and strive to be.
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Yeah. And then the Bill of Rights. I always thought those were sacred. And we can argue about
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commas, we can argue about a lot of things. But those rights were sacred, sacred. And there's a
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system to amend them. You know what I mean? Hey, nobody even knows them anymore.
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That's right. We are violating all of them. And all of the chaos of the world is happening
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because we no longer even know them. And those who do reject them or ignore them.
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They've been the object of an argument for far longer than we know. Oliver Wendell Holmes said
00:24:21.180
no to Congress shall make no law. And he allowed crying fire in a crowded theater, etc. And John
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Adams, on his last day in office, passed the Alien and Sedition Act.
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I can't believe that somebody who was there at the beginning passed that. I mean, that's crazy.
00:24:50.560
And that craziness was you are not allowed to speak against the government, period. And this
00:25:00.560
by one of the founders, one of the writers of the damn thing. And when Eugene Debs, my grandmother
00:25:10.820
was a witness to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.
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And it was because of what she saw that day, 154 girls who hardly spoke English, jumping,
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trying to fly out of the 19th story of the Triangle building.
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If anybody remembers, the images from 9-11, very similar.
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And let's stop on that for a second. They were so destroyed on 9-11, there was no body.
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But the ones that jumped out, there were a few that jumped to their death out the windows.
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I saw them. I saw them jumping up. I didn't know that they were.
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The thing was, 154 girls looking at the top, on the top of the building, like grand, fiery goddesses
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because their hair and the sunlight created that image.
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They stepped off into nothing, the first betrayal, and they fell at the feet of my 12-year-old grandmother
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And she turned around and went to the Socialist Party headquarters and volunteered.
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Ultimately, she became Eugene Debs' private secretary.
00:26:50.440
At the beginning, she was just a volunteer, and she heard Debs give a speech that said that
00:27:01.180
Woodrow Wilson should not be applauded because he had actually run on the platform,
00:27:11.060
And then the first thing he did was get us into it.
00:27:15.060
And he was denied his vote and given, I think, a life in prison.
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He freed Eugene Debs, and he gave him back his vote.
00:27:44.080
And we're going through, I think, that time again.
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I remember I first started really doing, I realized, I'm a recovering alcoholic.
00:27:59.980
I'm 30 years old, and I realize I got to stop drinking.
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I'm a big, fat dummy that doesn't know anything.
00:28:12.620
And I start to read everybody who really disagrees.
00:28:14.940
I went to the bookstore or the library, and I'm like, this guy and this guy in the room would be crazy because they're so different.
00:28:23.760
And then just kind of went in and found the connections.
00:28:29.320
And I remember reading Immanuel Kant, and he said, there are many things that I believe that I shall never say, but I shall never say the things I do not believe.
00:28:40.140
And I thought, what kind of place, what must have that been like, where, as you say in your book, I had to whisper, you have to whisper your political views.
00:28:57.580
Yeah, that meant to those people who had been denied vividly any right to learn anything for 5,000 years, they heard this rumor on the wind that there was this place now across the Atlantic.
00:29:23.760
But when they heard that the ones who had left earlier were now mayors and policemen, that's when they had to say, I will risk the lives of my children to get there.
00:29:42.120
Before that, the only ones who went were adventurers and torturers.
00:29:49.380
And so these poor had to risk getting across the Atlantic, which by itself was the end of the world.
00:30:02.340
And you had to realize how hungry these people were for the right to learn how to write or read.
00:30:11.960
And when they got here, they were kept, basically, on their ships until a corrupt politician from Tammany walked up the gangplank and said,
00:30:28.920
My name is Jack O'Halloran, and I'm here to make you a Democrat.
00:30:35.060
And if you give me your vote, I'll give you a vote, a job, and a house.
00:30:47.400
So they all became Democrats until Woodrow Wilson said that was illegal.
00:30:53.220
I think it was Roosevelt who did that, wasn't it?
00:30:57.240
Actually, it was before Wilson, because there's a wonderful book called Plunkett of Tammany Hall.
00:31:06.560
And Plunkett used to have his shoes shined and spout to the newspapers.
00:31:13.080
And he said, if we are not allowed to do this thing, America will fall.
00:31:24.020
So they passed this law that said you could no longer nominate the patronage.
00:31:32.240
And then they said, and guess who was the next minority that came?
00:31:41.900
And Tammany stood there and said, we can't help you.
00:31:49.960
We would be normally giving you a house and a job, and we can't.
00:31:57.100
And that's why they stuck in Harlem for 80 years, and why it bred more racial injustice or racial silence.
00:32:17.340
You believe giving everybody a house and a job and everything else is good.
00:32:30.260
Because that system was, when you first arrived in America, the first thing you tried to do was to take hold of a crime.
00:32:40.120
So the Jews took kosher food, the Italians had the mafia, the Irish had the five points, and each group first grabbed on to being a criminal class.
00:32:55.920
Their kids then went and took a city bureaucracy.
00:33:01.720
The Jews took accounting, the Italians took sanitation, and the cops were taken by the Irish.
00:33:09.260
And that's the way it lasted until 1950-ish, when all of a sudden, because of the change of progression, there were black cops in the car with the Irish and the Italian.
00:33:26.840
And, of course, they were treated like blacks were treated in those days.
00:33:30.720
And it got so bad that there was a meeting held in White Plains between all of the sergeants, Irish, Italian, Jewish, and black.
00:33:43.360
And they came to a piece, and the piece was, we'll stop calling you nigger if you let us share in your, what do they call it?
00:34:03.360
Each of them had a specific kind of cultural payoff.
00:34:08.340
The Jews took a solid percentage of any retail because of accounting, and the Irish took numbers, prostitution, like that.
00:34:28.720
And so there was enmity between these cultures.
00:34:35.440
And then they came to a piece because the black cop would go to his, you know, get his payoff, and his payoff was in drug money, which was 10 times what numbers and prostitution.
00:34:52.760
So while the Italian and Irish cop are counting out their usual $300, the black cop was counting out $1,500.
00:35:05.720
And they said, wait a minute, we want in on that.
00:35:11.200
And they got it for the piece, for the knowing I have a backup behind me because they weren't sure.
00:35:24.460
And that's how drugs made it into the middle class because the New York Police Department let them.
00:35:33.260
And it came through the harbor, and it was dispersed.
00:35:39.040
So that culture opened up racial segregation and the drugs and everything else.
00:35:53.960
So what was interesting about it for me is my family is very political.
00:36:11.380
She came up with the phrase, war is unhealthy for boys and girls and other living things, something.
00:36:20.720
And women took over the jobs that their husbands left when they went to the draft or the war.
00:36:35.500
And they changed their names from Helen or Billy or Bobby Sue to, to, what are they, God, it's amazing how when you get older, you forget all the names.
00:37:00.580
But they became the workers, and they kept the country together.
00:37:11.180
They kept the army together because they made the weapons.
00:37:17.680
And then the big lug came home, and she had more conflicting emotions about that because given the gift of a week in bed, hopefully, he then turned to her and said, thanks for keeping my job for me because I'm taking it back now.
00:37:42.380
And she lost more self-esteem at that moment than any other moment in history.
00:37:54.560
And she kept sane because of mother's little helper, and that was opium.
00:38:03.940
And that kept her going as long as she needed on the prairie and in the city.
00:38:13.920
You're telling almost the story of my mother in a way.
00:38:16.980
She was addicted to Valium, and it was because she could not settle in her mind her role.
00:38:26.400
She wasn't a hippie, so she wasn't burning bras, but she wasn't the World War II, you know, pre-World War II girl either.
00:38:36.440
So when she's lying next to her husband, she's actually feeling some of the strangest emotions that any human ever had.
00:38:50.380
And yet she wanted to take a frying pan and smash it over his head.
00:39:00.040
And we gave her, or she took, this mother's little helper, which from the prairie on, literally from the days of the immigrant wave, you know, populating the country.
00:39:14.960
These women, knowing they had to face another winter with six children and no husband, got loaded.
00:39:30.240
And then in the 50s, they, the way I say it in the book was, they put a little sparkle in the suburbs, you know.
00:39:43.420
They just had to because they were told to get out, but not told to go anywhere.
00:39:55.660
And, and they forgot, by the way, that they were taking Librium and all that stuff just in time to be angry at their kids for taking acid and marijuana.
00:40:21.200
I wrote one, which was, the boy sees the car with his father in it, weaving as it comes home.
00:40:29.140
And so, when he comes into the kitchen, he starts to kind of try to make him look better.
00:40:36.080
And the father, being a little loaded, pushes him away.
00:40:43.020
A comic strip fight, you know, with the cloud of discord.
00:40:50.240
They forget why they started this fight, but they're fighting.
00:40:59.220
Well, he's telling me what to do and how to dress and what to, how, how, and what's valuable.
00:41:06.600
They fought in the same way that every antelope fought the older antelopes.
00:41:22.720
And we weren't smart enough to realize that's what was going on.
00:41:32.560
When it, in fact, it was just business as usual.
00:41:37.560
And all the times of tranquility, they were rare.
00:41:45.700
We think that they weren't, but they were rare.
00:41:53.700
And when the fathers fought the sons, they thought they were fighting over drugs.
00:41:59.860
They thought they were, they thought they were fighting over, well, the way I like to put it, everyone remembers that James Dean died.
00:42:10.720
No one remembers the plot of Rebel Without a Cause.
00:42:17.340
And the plot of Rebel Without a Cause is the story I'm telling you now.
00:42:32.260
The father, who is now upset and worried about getting a raise, couldn't possibly be the guy with the hidden pictures from the war,
00:42:45.760
holding a bowie knife in his teeth and ears of Japanese people.
00:42:54.040
And they couldn't be the same one, but they were.
00:42:59.820
When Marlon Brando was asked in The Wild One, what are you rebelling against?
00:43:11.540
And, and no one realized the profundity of all of this.
00:43:16.680
They didn't know why, but they knew that they had to.
00:43:23.100
Millions of years of evolution was forcing this to be an issue.
00:43:27.260
And that's why, no matter how good the civics was, as taught in public schools,
00:43:37.460
the, the television, which was a new and magic technology, which when turned on, hypnotized you.
00:43:47.060
And advertising, advertising was relatively new in the, in that form.
00:44:00.300
They were just plunked down in front of the television.
00:44:03.420
And then the television showed them the democratic convention of 1968, which blew civics out the window for everyone.
00:44:13.960
So that in 1972, knowing that they couldn't get rid of it, they moved it from history to social studies, up one flight and around the corner.
00:44:27.300
And social studies became this gentle panorama of life in the USA, not a bring, bringing these questions to bear on our lives, which is what we did.
00:44:46.520
And so if, let me say this, and I say this better than I ever do in the book, this was a revolution, and that meant we turned all the virtues and all the values on their head, all over the world.
00:45:06.580
If you're going to run a counter revolution and take every one of those things out of the curriculum, it deserves the same noise, the same yelling and screaming and, and marches and parades that the original revolution had.
00:45:30.340
And it didn't, it didn't have anything but silence.
00:45:39.100
So we ran right through the seventies and eighties.
00:45:42.660
And it wasn't until close to the turn of the century that anyone bothered to say, oh, we're not teaching civics anymore.
00:45:59.460
I have read every book about this subject that is written in English.
00:46:03.600
So let's, let's concentrate on that for a second.
00:46:07.460
What, tell me what civics is and, and how to put it in back in to our lives.
00:46:17.000
Civics is the general name for the tools that can make you expert in thinking.
00:46:27.600
They are how to think, not what to think, but how to think.
00:46:35.180
And they teach things like clarity of thought, clarity of expression, and history.
00:46:43.780
History, and history cannot possibly be one version.
00:46:51.960
And I, if I fantasize myself as a high school teacher, I say to my history class, there's always two versions.
00:47:03.080
How many kids here in this room have the same politics as their parents?
00:47:10.440
Whatever number the hands show, I say, for the next semester, you take the opposite view on everything.
00:47:19.380
Everything, everything, everything, every test, every question, and I'll know if you tank and I will fail you out of this class.
00:47:30.240
So that they've got to be exposed to the opposite view.
00:47:36.580
And that is, that's why I started reading opposites and then moved in.
00:47:44.740
You know nothing if you don't know, I mean, my, my, my favorite teachers were the ones who you could never pin down.
00:47:53.660
You'd be like, wait a minute, halfway through the semester, you'd be like, he's switching sides.
00:48:00.900
I think, you know, you think he's one way and he goes the other way.
00:48:05.600
And I, I, I, I, I so regret that my being 75 makes it impossible to believe that she's still alive.
00:48:17.480
Mrs. Palmer was my history teacher, sixth, seventh, and eighth grade.
00:48:30.740
I asked her once, why were you a socialist and not a communist?
00:48:41.300
So I carried the water between Mrs. Palmer and my mother.
00:48:45.740
And I literally told my mom what she had said, what Mrs. Palmer had said.
00:48:50.420
And then I would tell Mrs. Palmer what my mom had said.
00:48:55.960
And she was the best teacher I ever had because she made no bones about her being a Republican.
00:49:02.620
And she taught through that filter and defended it.
00:49:17.940
And I, my respect for her cannot possibly be illuminated.
00:49:40.980
I, I run from anyone who says, don't read this.
00:49:50.540
My mom went to a very specific high school in Brooklyn.
00:50:43.280
And you know, in the 30s, that's when the State Department was anti-Semitic.
00:50:51.640
And, and you had to respect the system that allowed the eccentricities of a teacher.
00:51:01.460
As long as they didn't try to make you into them.
00:51:09.500
I once called Mrs. Wilcox, who was a teacher of mine in the seventh and eighth grades.
00:51:15.300
And I found her in San Diego, where I now live.
00:51:19.240
And I found her, because we used to make jokes that, that San Diego was where Republican history teachers go to retire.
00:51:31.660
And before she could say anything, I said, Mrs. Wilcox, you won't remember me, but I was a student in your class at Horace Mann Grammar School in Beverly Hills.
00:51:41.340
And I want you to know that everything I have come to love in my life, I learned in your class.
00:51:59.060
She was the same person then as she was when I was a Harris student.
00:52:03.240
In the same way it matters how you vote, it matters how you spend your money.
00:52:11.520
Every chance you can, you need to buy American.
00:52:15.540
And that's really hard because some things will be like, oh, assembled in America, made in America.
00:52:19.840
But like this pen, I doubt any of it was made in America.
00:52:24.000
But maybe one part is, look, we need to start making quality products again.
00:52:33.180
There's a company out there that I'm so proud to have as an advertiser.
00:52:38.040
With Grip6, you're getting the true American experience, products that you can count on.
00:52:43.160
Now, their belts, wallets, their wallets are great, their socks.
00:52:47.060
When you buy just, let's say, their socks, you're supporting American ranchers who raise
00:52:52.560
these specially bred sheep that produce the modern wool that is unlike any other, very
00:53:01.780
The American manufacturers who wash the wool, process the wool, weave it into socks, and then
00:53:12.740
Please, please, support those companies that are taking such a huge hit and risk by making
00:53:19.720
everything here in America a great quality company.
00:53:33.200
You said to me before we went on the air that I outed you.
00:53:38.380
And, and I immediately responded, I'm sorry, I didn't know, I didn't, you know, and you
00:53:56.420
And how can we get Hollywood or other people and people on, you know, the other side as well?
00:54:18.100
And start to be a little more brave to say, yeah, that's who I am.
00:54:31.240
It was great because now I had a, a kind of place in my universe.
00:54:46.800
And if you had asked me what communism was, I could not have told you.
00:54:56.920
Um, I, I knew that I was changing and I knew that I was changing for the better, the clearer,
00:55:16.480
And I, I, I began to see the phrases that indicated that that writer was a duck, was a duck, was a loser.
00:55:25.440
And I, I found them everywhere, um, on the left and on the right.
00:55:33.180
And it was easy for me to be anti-right because my whole community was anti-right.
00:55:39.860
But I began to move, really, until I became a celebrity and I joined, um, Common Cause.
00:55:51.280
It was an institution that was, uh, by John Gardner, who worked for both Republicans and Democrats.
00:56:02.500
And he wanted to create an institution for those people who were neither Republican or Democrat or both.
00:56:15.640
So I joined that when I became famous and I went to Washington and immediately said, where are the Republicans?
00:56:31.100
And what had happened was that it had become an adjunct to the Democratic Party.
00:56:36.040
Then I joined, I also joined the Constitution Center and I spent 10 years on the Constitution Center board saying, where is the honest history instead of the safe history?
00:56:51.440
And they were really the right-wing version of Common Cause.
00:57:10.600
And I realized that I had no place there either, in Washington.
00:57:36.840
You need me because it's sounding like such a repeat.
00:57:45.680
And what bothers me for real, and this is for real, they're not news organizations.
00:57:54.100
If they change the name of MSNBC and Fox to opinion channels, I would have no argument.
00:58:07.180
But to call them news is to mislead the country.
00:58:13.160
Because I think when I was at Fox, I made it really clear, I'm an opinion guy.
00:58:22.180
And, you know, there were a couple of times where I said, I'm not a journalist.
00:58:34.200
But that became so white hot ratings bonanza and everything else that I think a lot of people
00:58:42.960
in the media who were just used to reading the news thought, oh, no, excuse me, there's
00:58:50.900
a huge difference between what I do and what a journalist does.
00:58:59.280
And there is no there's I don't think there's such a thing as a journalist.
00:59:03.140
I said to Megyn Kelly that when I watched the 2016 and 2020 presidential debates, I was watching
00:59:14.580
I was not watching a debate that had anything to do with the presidency.
00:59:19.460
So much so that I expected in 2016 that the next one in 2020, they would be wearing red
00:59:44.420
I've never felt all the world is but a stage as much as right now.
00:59:59.440
We're being delivered this and arguing about this.
01:00:11.900
How about the fact that we have not waged a legal war since Korea?
01:00:21.480
And I'm giving it to Korea because it was that phone call overnight that forced him into
01:00:27.600
But, you know, the Congress has been completely left out of its power and they gave it away.
01:00:47.340
And that means if you're going to go and give away your most precious resource, your children,
01:00:54.300
children, you've got to convince people who are against this war.
01:01:01.860
And that doesn't mean, in my opinion, it doesn't mean that the president, because of the way
01:01:06.420
things are today, we could be dead in 12 minutes.
01:01:09.140
It doesn't mean the president doesn't have some leeway to take some action until Congress
01:01:22.900
And when Bill Fulbright had had floor walked the the War War Powers Act from Johnson through
01:01:32.480
the Senate, because he had been told to do that and he had been told it was true when
01:01:41.220
That's when he realized there had never been a Gulf of Tonkin incident, which he was basing
01:01:54.200
And that's why the war was papered over with investigation and committees and committees and committees
01:02:03.820
until the president of the United States and the defense secretary were hidden in the Oval
01:02:12.620
Office at two o'clock in the morning designing airstrikes.
01:02:16.820
They were so hugely fought and I felt so sorry for Lyndon Johnson because I knew Lyndon Johnson
01:02:29.960
wanted to compete with only one man and that was FDR because he to him FDR was the be all
01:02:39.340
So he tried to wage a war and fight the war on poverty.
01:02:46.220
And sorry, Lyndon, there's not enough money in the printing press to do that.
01:02:53.680
And when he said that afternoon, I have been your president for the last five years, I burst
01:03:02.620
into tears and I had been fighting him in every Century City, Century Plaza Hotel, all
01:03:10.020
of the things that we did to stay out of that war.
01:03:23.720
That is, if we would just read that speech, we misinterpreted military industrial complex.
01:03:31.400
It is and it goes into the education complex and the scientific community and that complex.
01:03:38.400
That is the merger between big money, big tech, big science, big war, whatever, all of that working
01:03:50.640
with the government and providing the answers that I don't think you can name an institution
01:03:57.680
in America that has not been thoroughly corrupted.
01:04:03.880
The courts, the media, these are all these are all now victims of money, of profit.
01:04:14.320
And when I and and greed and power, I mean, individuals who just want to do the money.
01:04:31.280
San Diego and someone was sick in my family and we went to a doctor and I noticed his business
01:04:39.540
card and it said on his card, concierge medicine.
01:04:46.100
And I said to the doctor, do you know what this says?
01:04:52.000
I said, it's been a plank of the Republican Party for 85 years.
01:04:59.160
And what they did to achieve it, because it's on the card, pay more, get better service.
01:05:07.180
Now, that means that they took the obligations of a doctor, which are known to everyone, 24 hour
01:05:19.340
availability, hitching up bests and going in the middle of the night, all the things, and
01:05:28.060
drew a line and said, the rich get all of this that's on top and the poor get all of
01:05:40.320
And I watched them mistreat my own mother-in-law who spoke no English when she tried to use the
01:05:51.960
bathroom in the doctor's private office, and a nurse in the office literally held her out
01:06:00.660
of the bathroom until my wife, and you don't screw around with my wife.
01:06:09.840
She, she eviscerated that nurse, and more power to her.
01:06:25.720
We, this is hard to say, but when hotel people get my wife and I in a hotel, they will be rude.
01:06:38.220
The normal thing is to be rude until they find out that the guy is a movie star, and then
01:06:47.740
And what you learn in school called civics is, among other things, civility, which cannot
01:07:10.700
It is the oxygen that Republican democracies require, or else they'll die.
01:07:21.560
And when you realize, we have now been raised without charm school, or civics, or civility,
01:07:33.780
And that means that every person who works in a doctor's office, or in retail, or anywhere
01:07:50.980
And I remember what it was like when you dealt with Macy's.
01:08:00.740
They would say, we don't have it, but if you go down the block, you'll get it at that store.
01:08:22.260
And how about, let's give immigrants who've just arrived within the last 80 hours a cab to
01:08:36.340
He doesn't know what Madison Avenue is, much less where Central Park is.
01:08:48.360
I have lived, since my graduation from high school, in a spiral of decay.
01:08:54.860
I have only known politics to become worse, and live off distraction and denial.
01:09:04.920
When first there was Willie Horton, then there was the flag amendment.
01:09:10.880
And each presidential election was decided on hot air.
01:09:23.740
And no attempt has been made in any other way to teach civility and to teach kindness.
01:09:33.820
And I would say it's gasoline on the fire of social media.
01:09:40.880
Because there's no payoff in teaching what the churches used to teach, and now are a joke.
01:09:53.160
Every institution has either been corrupted or betrayed its position.
01:09:59.260
Final segment with Richard Drivis here in just a second.
01:10:04.540
Here are the words of a former guy who was a criminal and turned his life around, but this
01:10:16.980
Nobody thinks that I can take their house and borrow against the house.
01:10:26.160
They would call me, you know, what he's calling you?
01:10:29.280
After I've stolen the title, borrowed against it, or sold the property, or done whatever I've
01:10:33.420
done with it, it's 60 to 90 days to even figure out that they're the victim of this crime.
01:10:38.060
You know, by that point, you start getting foreclosure notices, and you realize you've
01:10:43.540
Not only that, you don't even own your home anymore.
01:10:49.340
In five years, it'll be completely different than it is now, and this is completely different
01:10:56.060
You need to keep up on these things to keep your home title safe so you don't lose your
01:11:04.840
A little prep work now may save you a ton of trouble.
01:11:07.620
Home title fraud growing two and a half times faster than credit card fraud.
01:11:14.180
Make sure that your home hasn't already been stolen by somebody.
01:11:36.380
There are only two performances that have ever stuck with me.
01:11:41.440
Um, that I actually wanted to watch the Oscars because it mattered to me.
01:11:51.120
And your performance in the Goodbye Girl, when you are drunk and you, I can play this role
01:12:02.880
and you start reciting Richard III, thank you for that.
01:12:21.860
I'm walking up Broadway and a Serbian grandmother walks up to me and says,
01:12:41.260
And I could talk for years and years about the nobility of acting.
01:12:54.140
That's why it bothered me so much that someone invented this feud thing about me and Robert Shaw
01:13:07.740
And then I was on an Irish talk show not that long ago.
01:13:38.600
I saw you crying backstage because you were talking to Robert Shaw's granddaughter.
01:13:49.680
And I couldn't explain that he was a grand personality.
01:14:21.660
I'll play Claudius to your Hamlet if you play the fool to my Lear.
01:15:28.860
When people said I would be nominated for a film called the apprenticeship of Judy Kravitz.
01:15:40.000
And then I was told I was nominated for the goodbye girl.
01:16:08.360
Because I knew what their stories were and where they're,
01:16:21.520
really because I asked who won best actor last year.
01:16:43.160
That's why I said there's only two performances.
01:16:45.360
One was Peter O'Toole in my favorite year speech he gave at the very end.
01:17:54.480
And I'm happy that the guy who made that decision
01:18:42.580
What is the most important thing you've learned
01:18:53.060
I don't think anything could have been told to me