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Sept. 22, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
48:45
THE POWER OF FILM Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep670
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Coming up on the eve of releasing my new film, Police State, I'd like to talk about the power of film, reflect on some of my previous films, and comment on the impact that films can have on politics and culture.
Debbie joins me. We're going to discuss the national debt crossing 33 trillion, FBI infiltration into January 6 protests, accusations against Rudy Giuliani and Russell Brand, and whether Venezuela has a chance to climb out of the socialist pit. Hey, if you're listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify or watching on Rumble, please subscribe to my channel.
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I'd like to talk about the power of film and about the importance of we as conservatives not merely being critics of culture, not merely about denouncing the left-wing takeover of the culture, but about being entrepreneurs of culture.
making culture, if you will, and then also supporting projects to make an advanced culture with our values and on our side.
I'm actually looking at an essay by a film producer whom I know, although not well, and also a former media executive.
His name is Michael Pack.
And this is an essay in Real Clear Politics.
It's called, And Pat goes on to say that, look, the left has achieved cultural dominance, not just by aspiring to it, but by working really hard at it.
And they've been working hard at it, he says, for 30 years.
They've created a whole infrastructure for their side to flourish in the field of film industry.
They've done it in many other fields as well, but specifically he's talking about films and he's talking also about documentary films in particular.
And he says, you know, if you're a young guy and you're interested in making documentaries, what do you do?
First thing you do is you go to film school.
Well, the film schools have been sort of taken over by the left, so they are...
Right away encouraging you.
Let's make a documentary about climate change.
Let's make a documentary about how the temperatures of the oceans are rising.
Let's make a documentary where you look at people who have transitioned from male to female or the other way around and how happy they are and how well-adjusted they are.
So, the film school is step number one.
Once you graduate from film school, you want to work for documentaries, and the left has a massive infrastructure, some of it publicly funded through the Corporation of Public Broadcasting, PBS, some of it privately funded.
Netflix is funding documentaries.
Apple is funding documentaries.
Most of the executives who make those decisions are on the left.
So what Michael Pack is getting at is that the left-wing guy doesn't have to look very far.
You need money? Okay, well, here you've got all kinds of people who are putting in venture capital.
And so tens of millions of dollars, he says, flows to documentaries.
Think of the life of Michael Moore.
He wants to make a documentary.
He goes to a studio. They're like, here's $10 million.
Go make a movie. Michael Moore makes a movie and then it's like, leave everything else to us.
We will have the movie in all the theaters.
We will take care of the distribution.
We will do all the legal work.
We'll book you on The View.
We'll book you on Good Morning America, The Today Show, all the various talk shows, Bill Maher, and so on.
Your job is just to show up, kind of clear your schedule for a week, and that's it.
And I'm thinking of all this and reading about this because I know that what Michael Pack is saying is true.
And I'm thinking, this is really why it's so hard for people on our side.
And this is why I'm also excited that I've gotten into the film business.
This is why I keep doing it.
I got into it almost by accident a decade ago.
And this new film, Police Data, what is it?
I think now film number seven, honey?
I think the seventh documentary, not counting the feature film, that Debbie and I made together called Infidel.
And this is, I think, far and away the most powerful of the films.
And we've released a teaser.
A teaser is not quite a trailer.
It's sort of a 90 minute, just a glimpse of what the film is all about.
If you haven't seen the teaser, make sure you check it out.
It's at the top of my feed on Twitter on X. What's this?
90 seconds. Did I say 90 minutes?
90 minutes is the length of the whole movie.
And we're currently working on the full official trailer.
The official trailer will be twice as long, probably just over three minutes.
It'll really give you a window into the film and the version that we've seen.
Debbie and I were virtually speechless.
It's awesome. We're going to release it toward the end of this month or the very beginning of next month.
Now, the rollout plan for this film, and this is where you come in, because you can support us in all kinds of ways.
I mean, the first way is to share the teaser.
Share it with your friends.
And a lot of times when people go on social media, they just hit like.
And that's good. That helps a little bit, but it doesn't get the teaser to anybody else.
What you really want to be doing is hitting, you know, retweet or retruth.
And this way, the trailer, the teaser is amplified to your followers, to people who, to your friends.
And so that's a good way to help us get the word out.
That's one thing that you can do.
Another thing that you can do is...
Get theater tickets.
I mean, the theater is the best place to see a movie.
You can see a movie all kinds of ways these days.
I've seen people actually watching a movie on your phone, and that's okay.
Sometimes on a plane, I'll see a guy watching a movie.
He's got a tiny phone.
I'm like, wow, can you actually see anything?
But the theater, I make the movies for the theater.
They have that grandeur to them.
They have spectacular scenes and effects.
And we go to a lot of trouble to do all that to create that theatrical experience.
I think it's probably fair to say that we're just about the only people in the country who do that.
Even if you watch Michael Moore's documentaries, they're kind of dumb.
They're not really made for the theater.
They're kind of a clown act.
But these movies and Police State being the culmination of my work, because one of the cool things about a movie is you learn and you get better along the way.
So we've bought out hundreds of theaters.
And so your job is to get tickets.
And you do that. There's only one way to do it.
You can't go to Fandango.
You can't go to theatrical sites.
You have to go to policestatefilm.net.
That's the website, policestatefilm.net.
And sign up.
Why not buy tickets for your family?
Round up your friends.
Go see it. You don't have to buy out the whole theater.
We've already done that. What you can do is decide how many of you are going to go, and it can be your book club, it can be your church, you can do a sign-up list at your church, or you can go with your Republican club.
It's awesome. The Women's Republican Club of Houston or of St.
Louis, go see the film together because, one, it's great to see it in the theater, and two, it's great to see it with like-minded people Because then you have the ability to talk about what you've just seen, to express your feelings about it, to take a full gauge of what you've just witnessed, and to take a full gauge of the perilous situation in which the country currently finds itself.
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Debbie and I are here for our Friday roundup.
And while we're about to dive into politics, we do have to make an observation about little Marigold, our granddaughter, which is that she has just crossed the two-month mark.
And I noticed that she's doing new things.
And of course, you've been down this track.
You're like, of course she is.
But... I've had two of them.
You've had two of them. So I know that at about the age of two months, they start smiling at you.
Right. Which, you know, is a huge milestone.
Because before then, they're kind of like in their own little world.
They can't even focus, you know?
Wide-eyed and look around.
They don't focus on you, on your face, until about two months.
I noticed the other thing is that she's starting to not obviously speak, but make noises that seem to be...
It's called cooing.
Cooing. And it's really just fun to...
And I guess mothers develop a sort of a cooing language.
Motherese. Motherese.
There you go. So anyway, we're enjoying this.
We get sort of our daily dose of a couple of photos and then sometimes a video so we can watch.
Super cute. All right. Now...
Unfortunately, she's going to be left with a lot of debt.
W. Debbie navigates a transition to our first topic, which is the U.S. national debt topping $33 trillion for the first time.
$33 trillion. Now, you just made the point a moment ago, we don't have a single person in the world who's a trillionaire.
Mm-hmm. If you take Elon Musk, his net worth, what?
Something perhaps around the range of $200 billion.
And that's a giant number.
And Elon Musk had to found multiple companies and make them massively successful to get there.
Obviously, you've got a couple of other people in the $100 billion range, but a trillion is $1,000 billion.
And then $33 trillion, it's a stunning amount of debt.
And... You know, people don't think about this, but in some ways, a country being in debt is not different than a family being in debt.
It's on a different scale. You can look at it as a collective debt that is owed by 300 million Americans all collectively, but it's still a really big number.
And I know that you and I, just because of where we grew up and the way we came from coming to this country as immigrants, we're very allergic to debt.
I mean, one of the first things that you were like when we were talking about buying a house, you're like...
Are we going to go into debt?
Do we have to borrow money?
Are we going to have a mortgage?
And of course, it is customary to have a mortgage and people borrow money to have a car.
But people, by and large, are always making sure that the amount of debt you have is manageable given the income that you have coming in and given the wealth, the net worth that you have.
Well, and I know so many people that, unfortunately, they want to keep up with their friends or their neighbors or whatever, so they go into debt.
They buy things that they otherwise wouldn't buy because they can do it on credit.
And so they end up really racking up a lot of credit and a lot of debt, and then they can't sleep at night because they don't know how they're going to pay their bills.
Right. So it's a problem.
And so I think when you see the national debt tops $33 trillion for the first time ever, you know, you wonder, well, what does this mean to the everyday American?
Here's a shockingly irresponsible statement by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.
She says she's comfortable with the nation's fiscal course because interest costs as a share of the economy remain manageable.
So imagine saying, imagine if you and I were to say...
Let's decide how much money we can afford to pay in interest and borrow that amount of money where we are just able to pay the interest in order to stay afloat.
In order to avoid a default.
Well, that's a country that is on the brink of collapse.
Because all it takes is for a few things to go wrong.
And this is why I often tell you when we'll read things like, you know, The Ordinary American or a lot of people have like a couple of thousand dollars in the bank and that is the extent of the available cash.
I'm almost like slightly frightened for them because I think, what if something happens where you need $5,000 to get you out of a situation or there's an accident or there's a medical expense that's not covered by insurance?
You're suddenly stranded.
They don't have savings. Look, I mean, and look, there are people who are in that situation by, you know, it's no fault of their own and they're working really hard, but we're a rich country.
We don't have to be in this situation.
We could easily say, and we don't have taxes that are too low, we're getting the money in, let's only spend what we're taking in.
Well, unfortunately, we have a political party, and this political party has been this way for a very, very long time, and that is that they love entitlements.
They love to promise people money that we do not have.
In exchange for votes that they need to stay in power.
And so then, once you give the candy to the baby, how are you going to then want it back, right?
And this has been a push by the Republicans.
You know, are you going to take away our entitlements?
Because people, that's why they're called entitlements, right?
They feel entitled to that money that really they shouldn't feel entitled to.
But the Democrats have made it a part of their campaign to make us go into debt.
So... In other words, the Democrats are the party of Santa Claus, the Republicans are the party of Scrooge.
And so the Democrats are always able to say, you're the bad guy, you're taking away these people's benefits, even though in the process they are bankrupting the country.
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The former assistant director of the FBI was testifying before Congress and said something.
That is quite significant and has become a news story in itself, and rightly so.
We're talking here about Stephen D'Antonuo.
Now, this is a very interesting character.
He used to be head of the Detroit FBI. In fact, the very FBI that orchestrated the Whitmer kidnapping hoax.
Then he was moved to Washington, D.C. Well, anyway, this guy was testifying, and somebody asked him about the number of FBI agents who were embedded in We're good to go.
And he was asked, well, how many of these FBI agents were there?
Was it two?
Was it three? And he goes, he said, there were so many that he didn't even know where they were coming from.
He knew about the FBI agents from the Washington Bureau, meaning from the D.C. Bureau, but there were other bureaus around the country that also sent agents who were in plain clothes and blending in with the crowd.
And he says that the FBI, this is the crusher, The FBI lost count of how many paid agents and informants were at the Capitol and now have to do an audit to find out how many there were.
So, what does this tell you?
It tells me that this was an orchestration and not really what they claim it was.
It means that it was fabricated.
It means that it needed paid people to do this deed.
And it was not a spontaneous thing or, you know, a planned by the right thing that they claimed.
Now, I'm sure if you would talk to D'Antonio, he would say, well, look, Debbie, you know, we learned that all these people were coming to D.C. We learned that their focus was going to be the capital where the count was going to occur.
And... We needed to kind of have information about the crowd, kind of monitor what's going on, if necessary, notice who's engaging in illegal behavior.
So it's not wrong for law enforcement to have this kind of embedding.
It doesn't mean we orchestrated it.
Well, but here's the thing.
If they had all of this information, this intel that they claimed that they had to pay informants to do, why didn't they stop it?
Right. Why did it take place?
And not only why did it take place, but every time you look at it taking place, you do see some fracases and skirmishes outside.
But in the Capitol, you've got essentially motionless...
Orderly. Officers.
You've got people walking inside the ropes.
You've got people apparently in some cases getting a guided tour where the officers are taking the shaman guy, for example, around through the doors and so on, escorting him.
So none of this squares with the rhetoric of insurrection or government takeover.
And when the FBI itself says we have so many embedded informants, we don't even know how many there are.
That, to me, is indicative of the fact that this was a case where the authorities were in on it.
We don't know the degree to which they egged it on, but they certainly didn't do, as you said, they didn't do what they could have done to stop it.
They could have stopped it right then and there.
I mean, there were so many factors that went into letting it get out of control that didn't have to be there because they could have gotten the National Guard.
Trump did ask for it.
It was denied. So that's one aspect.
Denied by the mayor and denied also by Nancy Pelosi.
So that was one factor.
The other factor is if all these informants were telling the FBI, this is what's going to happen, this is going to take place, and this and this and this, well, then it was their job as the FBI to stop a crime from being committed.
Exactly. Let's say the FBI embeds some informants and some people who are planning to, you know, blow up a building.
And the FBI now learns that they're planning to blow up the building.
What does the FBI do? Prevent the building from being blown up.
Not blow it up themselves.
Exactly. Not encourage people to blow it up and then essentially go, okay, now we're going to go get all the guys.
And fortunately, our informants will help us tell you who they were.
This is deeply suspect.
You can see why a jury, even in the blue state of Michigan, looks at these three Whitmer kidnapping defendants and goes, nah, they were put up to it.
This is a case where our government orchestrated this kidnapping, and perhaps someday people will look back and go, that's what really happened on January 6th.
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It seems that Me Too is in the news again.
And by Me Too, I'm referring to the Me Too movement of a woman or women, in some cases, making accusations of a very sordid nature.
And there are two I thought we could focus on, and they're very different.
One of them is, of course, Russell Brand.
And I've talked about Russell Brand before, this idea.
Much of it dating back many years now of people who knew Russell Brand, in some cases dated Russell Brand, claiming that he raped them.
So those allegations are serious.
And then there is this other allegation, which I didn't know about until you brought it to my attention.
Former Trump aide Cassidy Hutchinson accuses Giuliani Of groping her.
I mean, I don't mean to laugh at a sense of frivolity, but I laugh because of the unexpected nature of the alienation.
Well, I laughed when I was like...
Cassidy again? Right.
She surfaced in front of the January 6th committee, and she was obviously one of these people who decided that it would benefit her career if he pivoted away from Trump.
So you're dealing here with an opportunity.
And she lied about something.
She was like, you know, the Trump member.
Oh, the Trump, yes. When he was supposedly in the backseat of the limo.
And he dived into the front seat.
Yeah, and he tried to grab the steering wheel from one of the agents.
Elbowing aside the agents.
Yeah. Yeah, and so that ended up to not be true, and so now she's saying this, and, you know, again, you kind of have to take it with a grain of salt.
Look, I'm a woman, and I do know, I mean, I worked for some bosses that were extremely flirty.
And rude and inappropriate.
And rude and inappropriate. I didn't come out and, you know, do any me-toos on them or anything like that.
Well, one of them would ask you, for example, hey, Debbie, I need to go do some shopping.
Yeah, will you accompany me?
And I was like, why would I come with you to do shopping?
You can shop by yourself or ask your wife, you know?
So things like that.
And I had another boss that was extremely flirty with some of the girls.
He hired only young, pretty girls.
And that was, you know, a whole other thing.
But again, this thing that can ruin a man's career, and some of it is I, in my opinion, not justified.
Number one, you're never going to have any evidence that they did any of this.
But if you pile it on, you can ruin their career.
I mean, you really can.
Absolutely. The allegation itself suffices.
It does the work of the conviction, even though there's no conviction.
I mean, let's turn to Russell Brand for a moment, because here you're dealing with, there is a massive effort underway to cancel this guy, to cancel his performances.
He's been demonetized on YouTube.
They're trying to, the British government wrote a letter to TikTok and wrote a letter to Rumble, basically saying, we hope you're not going to be featuring Russell Brand.
This is the British, and this is a Tory government.
This is the conservatives, supposedly, who are running the country.
So think of how bad this kind of cancel culture has become when you have a guy who is, yes, he's accused.
And did you see the thing that Megyn Kelly did where she was like, you know, she said, I... I don't like all these people who are coming to the defense of Russell Brand because they don't know the evidence that is against him, right?
Now, Megyn Kelly is not saying that he's guilty, but she's saying that she's implying that we need to take this position of neutrality where we grant the seriousness of the allegations and suspend all judgment.
Now, my view of this is that this is not human nature.
The way human nature is is Okay, I know Russell Brand from the Russell Brand I see.
I like the stuff that he says.
This is a guy who's reformed his life in many ways.
He's a brave critic of the vaccine.
He's willing to go out on a limb, and he's taken a lot of risks to do that.
So that's the Russell Brand we know.
Now you're coming along and saying, well, yeah, but he also did X, Y, and Z. And I don't even know who you are.
I don't even know whether you're telling the truth.
So why should I go, now suddenly, oh, this is a very serious allegation, so guess what?
From now on, I'm going to treat Russell Brand as at least an accused and maybe a presumptive rapist until he's exonerated in a court.
No, I'm going to say, listen, until I have more credible information that is going to somehow change my opinion of Russell Brand, it's not going to change.
It's going to stay where it is right now.
Until proven up Until proven otherwise.
So, in other words, when you think about innocent until proven guilty, and I'm not just talking about the legal standard, I'm talking about the broader idea.
Innocent until proven guilty means treat the person as innocent because they haven't been proven guilty.
And I think that's the right standard.
So... But in this case, I'm not sure that we can ever prove it one way or another.
You know what I mean? Because, again, this happened a long time ago.
This happened or didn't happen.
Or didn't happen a long time ago.
It could be that you had mentioned something about that he dated a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of women.
Oh, yeah. And that in the law of averages, you know, if he dated 100 women, five women are going to say this happened.
Yeah. This is what Scott Adams was saying on social media.
He was like, listen, if you live that Hollywood lifestyle, let's say you've had sex with 100 women, the odds are that four or five are going to say, I didn't consent.
That's just the nature of, that's the math of it, so to speak.
But it's terrible because this is a case where, and in some ways, even if you are legally exonerated, the public stain doesn't really fully go away.
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Feel the difference. When I think about police states around the world, the one that most closely resembles where we seem to be headed is your native country of Venezuela, because we're clearly not North Korea.
We're not becoming North Korea.
We are becoming a little more like China, I think it's probably fair to say.
In other words, we thought the Chinese would become more like us.
Guess what? We're becoming a little more like them, but we're not headed all the way there.
Venezuela, on the other hand, you see a lot of similarities, and you've been really out front talking about them.
There's a big election coming up in Venezuela for the presidency next year, 2024, same as here.
Talk about how that's all shaping up.
Right. Well, first of all, you know, my buddy, Trish Regan, sent me an article.
Trish was, as some of you know, Trish was in Fox News.
She was in Fox Business.
And she talked about Venezuela a lot.
We became friends. I was very happy that she did bring it up a lot.
Some people weren't as happy, but I totally wasn't.
And she had a Venezuelan following, yeah.
A huge Venezuelan following.
But anyway, she sent me this article and it's basically a UN-backed panel investigating human rights violations in Venezuela said Wednesday that the South American country's government has intensified efforts to curtail democratic freedom with threats, surveillance, and harassment as Nicolás Maduro, I can't even call him president, Nicolás Maduro faces a re-election contest next year.
So he's facing...
Re-election in 2024.
And my good buddy, Maria Corina Machado, is the frontrunner in this election.
And she's getting support from all over Venezuela.
I love seeing her videos that she puts out because it's just thousands of people that are just supporting her because they want her to win this presidency.
Right. And even though they try to portray her as a candidate of the bourgeoisie, you see very simple people, peasants, ordinary people, and they're like, things have reached a breaking point.
Yeah, but, you know, and so I'm very, I'm actually, I mean, I love seeing her out in center, but I'm also very afraid for her safety because Nicolás Maduro is a thug, he's a dictator, and he's going to stop at nothing to make sure that she does not win this election.
Absolutely. Look at the things that the UN is pointing out.
I think to me it's interesting to even think about what's happening in this country as you listen to this.
Now the report said authorities are increasingly repressing specific members of civil society, politicians, journalists, other real or perceived opponents.
The targets have been subject to detention.
Surveillance, threats, defamatory campaigns, and arbitrary criminal proceedings on hate speech or terrorism charges.
So think about Trump.
Think about the January 6th defendants.
Think about all the co-defendants, for example, in the Georgia case.
So as you read, and it's interesting, you've got these American journalists.
This is AP News, by the way.
Yeah, exactly. And it's almost like they don't have any self-awareness at all the stuff.
Oh, you're deploring. This is the way they treat the...
They're locking up the leading candidate of the opposition party in Venezuela, Dinesh.
Yeah, yeah. And I'm like, yeah, they are.
They are. And actually with her, this is what happened with her.
So they issued alleging that she had fraud and tax violations.
Right? Just dated.
Three days after she entered the primary race.
So they're trying to put her in jail.
They're trying to silence her, right?
Because, again, she's seen as a threat to the Maduro regime.
And this is so funny because, well, I mean, it was not funny in that sense, but, you know, people are like, Debbie, why do you worry so much about Venezuela?
Well, first of all, Look at the illegal aliens that have come from Venezuela in the last year.
Most of them criminals from Venezuela.
This is not the best, you know...
These are not the entrepreneurial Venezuelans.
These are not the best citizens in Venezuela.
These are criminals. These are thugs coming into Venezuela.
Why? Because Maduro has made Venezuela a hellhole.
So I want Venezuela to go back to its glory days so people stay in Venezuela.
That could solve half of our issue here with illegal immigration, right?
So it is related.
So when you say, oh Debbie, don't talk about Venezuela anymore, it is related.
We have to make sure that that country not only is safe for its own citizens so they don't come over here, but that enemies of America aren't situated there.
I mean, interestingly, one of the ways you and I met, and we may have talked about this on the podcast, I'm not sure we have, is that the radical leftist Bill Ayers in America was down in Venezuela trying to learn about the Marxist education system to bring it here.
So there is a very conscious recognition that the perversion of democracy, this kind of gangster regime that has been set up in Venezuela, is the model for leftists, or at least a number of leftists in the United States.
Even the leader of BLM was in Venezuela with Maduro, getting her, like, you know, trying to figure out how they do it in Venezuela, the Marxist movement there.
So it's definitely a movement that is kind of, it's rooted in South America, but it's making its way here.
And the other thing, the reason that the sanctions do not work with Maduro is they don't need to work, because while Russia, China, Turkey, and Iran, you know, are propping them up, giving them all the money they need.
Why would they need us?
Scary.
We honor you father for all that you've done for us.
Chief Division Counsel in DOJ have approved a no knock breach.
you We want the subject to be on display, doing the walk of shame, full visual impact.
Any questions? Are we becoming a police state?
Government told American citizens they couldn't go to church on Sunday.
For the first time in my life, I'm saying to myself, am I going to get a knock at the door?
FBI warrant! Come to the door now!
The Patriot Act and FISA were used against Donald Trump.
These individuals have commissioned the biggest propaganda play in U.S. history.
They don't go after the people that rigged the election.
They go after the people that want to find out what the hell happened.
We don't need to have a crime.
What we need is a person to look at.
And then we go find out what crime you did.
Our focus is shifting.
Our main priority as a bureau is going to be domestic terrorism.
It really paints anybody who's right of center.
If you're a pro-life, pro-family Catholic, they define you as radical.
These are anti-government.
We have freedom of religion and freedom of speech.
Violent extremists, and they must be dealt with.
We can do anything we want.
I'm going to be a good boy.
And I was like, what?
What's it about? And she's like, no, it's all about Vanna White and Pat Sajak.
Now, of course, Pat Sajak is one of the few Hollywood guys that is on the conservative side.
And pretty outspoken about it, by the way.
Probably, I'm guessing, Vanna White is also conservative.
And I take this because Debbie and I also have a rule.
If there's a Hollywood figure who doesn't say anything about their politics, they're probably conservative.
Why? Because there's a high price to be paid for speaking out.
So, so many actors and actresses speak out on the left, but on the right, there are a few that speak out.
Well, that's And Sajak actually does, which is kind of amazing that he tweets things that could get him, you know, canceled, but he doesn't care.
He's been a real icon.
I mean, this show has been around for 40 years, Wheel of Fortune.
And, you know, I mean, I was amused when I first saw the show as a 17-year-old when I came to this country, and it was fun to watch.
And, of course, I think Banna White was doing it.
Was she still, was she turning the letters?
Yeah, yeah. She's been turning the wheel for 40 years.
Can you imagine that?
Since 1983. So anyway, Debbie and I may end up having a disagreement about this one because evidently this is the story.
Pat Sajak, of course, is stepping down.
But Pat Sajak, this is such a successful show that Pat Sajak was paid for a while something like $15 million a year.
Apparently, Vanna White makes $3 million a year, but she's been making $3 million a year for 20 years.
Now she wants a raise.
And what is your take?
Do you think she deserves a raise?
Oh, yeah, I do.
Now, you know, again, people are like, really?
For turning a letter? Hello, hey!
But the thing about Vanna is that, you know, and I think this is what she was trying to say at first.
She was like, well, can't I at least get half of what he gets?
I get that I'm not the one front and center.
I get that I'm not the one that talks to the guests.
I get that. But I am part of Wheel of Fortune.
I mean, when you have the Wheel of Fortune game, you not only have Pat Zajac, but you have Vanna White.
And she's right there with the iconic letters.
So she is part of it.
I think you're making a key point.
I mean, I would normally be on the side of the view that what kind of labor does it take to turn a letter?
But here's something interesting.
who knows Pat Sajak's name, knows Vanna White's name.
And this is not necessarily true of all shows.
Because you've got people who are sidekicks on various shows, and they play a sidekick role, and nobody knows who they are.
In other words, their name and their identity is not important to the branding of the show.
But that is not true of Wheel of Fortune.
Vanna White is, I would say, if not as much, almost as much a part of that show as Pat Sajak himself.
Yeah, because when you think about it, Vanna doesn't really turn the letters.
She taps it and then it turns.
So it really could be done electronically without Vanna standing there.
Right. But she was kind of the ice candy, you know, for the...
And, you know, to be fair, this woman, 66 years old, and she still looks amazing.
She looks amazing. Yeah. Yes, and so I think that was part of the glamour of the show, is that you've got this bombshell Vanna White, and she's the one who is like, you know, she's the one who does the reveal, so to speak, of the show.
So I think, you know, that for that reason, I think she definitely deserves a raise, but she also deserves to be a little closer to the host.
And, you know, Ryan Seacrest, who is going to be taking over for Pat Sajak...
Have they already announced that?
They've already announced it, yes.
He's going to be taking over... He was eight years old when it started.
Okay? Eight years old.
And he's going to be making, reportedly, I think, $28 million.
Something like that.
$28 million. That's still a lot more than Vanna.
And I don't know if Vanna's going to be able to reach that deal with Sony where they're going to pay her a lot more per episode.
I think she may be asking for $7 to $10 million.
So that's... I mean, these are astronomical numbers for most people.
So this is not something where, you know, I think anyone's going to be outraged, whatever the outcome of it.
But I think what you're getting at, and this is something that's worth thinking about, and we think about it ourselves in our own way, is that when you have a product, what goes into making that product successful?
What is the key to that product success?
Because sometimes it's not even, sometimes it is just a product.
And it doesn't matter who makes it or who doesn't.
But you take something like the Apple phone, I would say, quite clearly, the success of that product is the phone.
The phone is the heart of it.
It's a really good phone.
It does things that other phones don't always do.
But a lot of it was also Steve Jobs.
It was Steve Jobs' image.
It was his entrepreneurial skills, but also his marketing skills.
If you watch a Steve Jobs kind of marketing presentation, it didn't look the same as anybody else's.
And so the value that somebody like that brings to the table is sometimes very hard to put a number on, but it's clearly intrinsic to the success of the overall product.
I just saw someone complaining about the fact that Elon Musk was getting some benefit from One of his companies.
And I'm thinking, well, he created the company.
So, you know, does it make any sense to talk about he's getting way too many perks from SpaceX?
Or that he borrowed money from SpaceX or something like that.
In order to buy Twitter, to buy X. Yeah, that's right, to buy Twitter.
So... Well, anyway, I think this is all the way of saying that we think that Vanna is part of the show, part of the value and the brand of the show.
And so even though this is a big number, nevertheless, it may not be unreasonable under the circumstances.
I'm in the opening section of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago.
He's talking about his own arrest and he doesn't do a whole lot of talking about himself in this book.
Very surprising in a way because this is a guy who lived in the gulag.
He knows the gulag from the inside.
He does use his observational insights And of course, he recounts all kinds of testimony by other people.
He also has a deep psychological understanding, but he doesn't refer to himself a whole lot.
In fact, right after this section, a relatively brief section where he talks about himself, he says, this is not going to be a volume of memoirs about my own life.
But for this reason, because he does not focus on himself, when he does, in the rare times that he does, it's always very revealing and very important.
So I'm going to go through this section a little bit slowly.
Mine was the easiest imaginable kind of arrest.
It did not tear me from the embrace of kith and kin or wrench me from a deeply cherished home life.
He goes, one pallid European February, happens to be, by the way, the year 1945, it took me from our narrow salient on the Baltic Sea where, depending on one's point of view, either we had surrounded the Germans or they had surrounded us.
And it deprived me only of my familiar artillery, battery, and the scenes of the last three months of the war.
World War II is coming to an end.
Solzhenitsyn is fighting for Russia.
He's fighting in the Red Army.
And he has, even here, you see that whimsical, ironic...
You know, he goes, the battle?
I couldn't tell you. Either we surrounded the Germans or they surrounded us.
I don't really know who had the others surrounded.
But anyway, there was kind of a battle ongoing.
And guess what? That's when I got arrested.
And so the point he's trying to make here is, for a lot of people, the arrest is downright horrible because you're in some comfortable, trusted surrounding.
You're at home, or you're at work, or you're at the local club, or you're drinking some vodka with friends, and they burst in and they grab you.
So you're wrenched out of this comfortable, familiar, warm surrounding.
But Solzhenitsyn goes, it wasn't like that for me.
I was actually, you know, at the battlefront.
So I was yanked out of the battlefront three months before the war came to an end.
Let's see what happens. The brigad commander called me to his headquarters and asked me for my pistol.
I turned it over without suspecting any evil intent.
When suddenly, from a tense, immobile suite of staff officers in the corner, two counterintelligence officers stepped forward hurriedly, crossed the room in a few quick bounds, their four hands grabbed simultaneously at the star in my cap, my shoulder boards, my officer's belt, my map case, and they shouted theatrically,"'You are under arrest.'" Wow.
So Solzhenitsyn here, would you turn over your pistol?
He's happy to do it.
Military people are trained to follow orders.
It never even crosses his mind.
And then, boom, these guys jump out, grab him, take away all his other military insignia.
You are under arrest.
That kind of poignant phrase which defines this whole chapter.
Burning and prickling from head to toe, all I could exclaim was...
Me, what for?
So he heard Solzhenitsyn, and he is Solzhenitsyn, and yet he responds the same way everybody else does.
Me, what for? And I'm sure going through his mind, is this some kind of a mistake?
So all the normal human emotions, the gullible emotions, the sheep-like emotions that we have when we are faced with this kind of calamity, Solzhenitsyn has it too.
And even though there's usually no answer to this question, surprisingly, I received one.
So here's Solzhenitsyn saying, normally, when you're arrested, they don't even know why.
You're just on a list.
Go get this guy. But he goes, in my case, I actually got an answer, and let's see what happens.
He says, there's a brigad commander, his own military superior, standing across from him.
Solzhenitsyn, come back here.
With a sharp turn, I broke away from the hands of the men, the Smirsch men.
This is the guys arresting him.
I stepped back to the brigad commander.
I had never known him very well.
He had never condescended to a run-of-the-mill conversation with me.
To me, his face had always conveyed an order, a command, wrath.
But now it was illuminated in a thoughtful way.
And the Brigade Commander says to Solzhenitsyn, you have a friend on the first Ukrainian front.
Now, this is a really important clue because Solzhenitsyn suddenly realizes that now he knows why he's being arrested, because he said something to his friend who is on the Ukrainian.
So, he is able to place the exact time and circumstances of his offense.
Now, the counterintelligence guys jump in and they go, it's forbidden, you have no right.
They're shouting at the colonel saying, you can't tell him anything about the arrest.
But, right Solzhenitsyn, but I had already understood.
I knew instantly I had been arrested because of my correspondence with a school friend and understood from what direction to expect danger.
And then, writes Solzhenitsyn, my commander, Zakhar Gregorovich Travkin, could have stopped right there.
But no, he says, standing erect, he rose from behind his desk, he had never stood up in my presence in my former life, reached across the quarantine line that separated us and gave me his hand, although he would never have reached out his hand to me had I remained a free man, and pressing my hand...
He says, I wish you happiness, captain.
Now, this may seem like an unimportant incident, but it's really not.
Basically, Solzhenitsyn's superior is expressing sympathy, is expressing solidarity.
He's saying to Solzhenitsyn, listen, I'm on your side.
I wish you well. And even though he can't do anything to help him, even though Solzhenitsyn is going to go off to the gulag, it means so much to Solzhenitsyn that this man who He didn't even think cared about him.
In fact, he normally encountered him where the man is sort of up here and Solzhenitsyn as a lowly fighter is down here.
The man never speaks to Solzhenitsyn, never engages in any even pleasantries with him.
But now in the moment of crisis, this guy steps forward and he goes, in effect, I wish you well, Solzhenitsyn.
And Solzhenitsyn remembers this and brings it up right here in a critical opening section of the Gulag Archipelago.
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