Richard Dreyfuss joins the podcast to discuss his book, One Thought Scares Me, arguing that removing civics education since the 1970s has eroded national identity and trained children as activists rather than citizens. He recounts how Senator Robert Dole's betrayal of the GI Bill shattered his family's reverence for America and criticizes institutions like CNN and Fox News for merging into opinion channels that mislead the public. While sharing anecdotes about his Oscar win, feud with Bill Murray, and a canceled CBS series, Dreyfuss warns that without reviving civic education, the United States faces collapse before 2050, urging Americans to reclaim their constitutional values before the nation is irreparably tarnished. [Automatically generated summary]
Today's guest has been a violent bank robber, a shark-fighting marine biologist, a passionate composer, an uptight psychiatrist, a notorious scam artist, a lovelorn detective, a wizard named Oz, and a suicidal architect trapped on a sinking ocean liner.
He has encountered aliens and faced 3D piranhas.
He has held the office of Republican senator, a general, White House chief of staff, and a vice president who ran the show.
All of these as characters, of course, but he brought each of them to life.
As a kid, my guest today wanted to be the greatest actor in the world, and it became an obsession.
He won an Oscar when he was 29 for the Goodbye Girl.
At the time, he was the youngest actor to win, a title he held for 25 years until Adrian Brody snatched it.
He's worked with George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Oliver Stone, you name it.
He was in American graffiti.
Along the way, he got into some high-profile feuds.
Bill Murray threw a glass ashtray at his face.
But today, he is not here to talk about his Academy Award or his celebrity feuds, although I do have to ask him a few questions, or his iconic roles in Mr. Holland's Opus and Jaws.
He was never a Hollywood insider.
He's here to sound the alarm, to protect the Constitution, to stir the healthy dissent, to protect the lone voice.
He told me right before the podcast that I was the one who outed him in Hollywood.
When I apologized, I didn't realize that.
He said, no, no, no, this is one of the best things that's happened to me.
He is a man committed to nothing less than saving America.
It has been his mission for the past few decades, and it is the subject of his new book called, One Thought Scares Me.
He wants us all to ask ourselves, when American fails, what then?
Please welcome on today's podcast, Richard Dreyfus.
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How are you?
Hiya.
Slating the Show with Spielberg00:09:34
I just want to start with this because you probably haven't seen this.
Well, usually we slate the show, but we should slate with Steven Spielberg's slate from Jaws.
I don't know if you remember that.
Well, it was originally named Jews.
Was it?
You know, we've spent just a few minutes backstage a few years ago.
I don't even know how long ago, 2016.
And we've spent maybe a half an hour today before this.
I don't know, but I think if we lived next door to each other, we'd be friends.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
The idea that we wouldn't be friends is such a contemporary nightmare of a country that it's not.
But I don't mean like friends out of respect.
I think you we may disagree and we'll find out on stuff.
We may disagree on a few things, but you're rooted in the truth.
You're rooted in history.
You're not, it's very popular now to just dismiss history or miscast it and not care because you want it to bend your way.
Yeah, there are people who now think that opposing views are un-American.
They don't know that opposing views are entwined and threaded through the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and what we show to the world we believe in.
You know, there's a very simple thing, and it's these documents tell the world who we are and why we want to be.
We strive to be.
And we say, because they are works in progress, they tell us who we want to be when we grow up.
Yes.
Yeah.
I mean, I've often said, but we dismiss the Declaration and the Constitution now so much.
But I'll lose my Americanism or my love for America if you can show me a country whose mission statement is better than those truths that we hold self-evident, that all men are created equal and endowed by a creator.
That is, we're not even close to that.
We never have been close to it.
There's been times where we get closer and then, like with Martin Luther King, need to be reminded and we get a little closer again.
But I fear that that now is being lost as old dusty words that mean nothing.
I certainly think that when we allow our kids to tell us what is valuable and what is nurturing, we're going to the wrong people.
What does that mean?
It means there's a book called Five Minds for the Future, and it's about the development of the human brain.
And basically it says that there are a number of different kinds of brains that we can shoot for, but until you're in the fourth grade, you cannot conceive of abstraction.
So you can't understand metaphor, simile, like that.
And yet it's our obligation to get that young an audience to fall in love with their country.
And so we created glory tales, and they are good for the kindergarten, first, second, and third grade.
And in the fourth grade, they are armed to the teeth, and they know that Nathan Hale is a stand-in for America, and that George Washington throwing the thing across the river is a stand-in for America.
So that when they start to learn the details, they're already in love.
Right.
When you hear of educators saying, we're going to hold off on all of that until the university level, then you know not only did those educators last read the Constitution when they were in the third grade or fourth grade,
but no university level child can understand the Constitution because they're built to be skeptical and cynical.
Right.
And that means you can't tell them to love their country.
Right.
They will give you this.
So you've got to get them in love with the Enlightenment values that the Constitution has, and you've got to get them in love with defending those things.
And they have been gone from the curriculum for 50 years.
That's the core problem.
That's the problem.
We're not even saying, well, if you study it a little bit more, they have no idea about the Constitution.
They have no idea about the Bill of Rights.
No.
None.
And they think that the Republican or Democratic parties are on an equal level with the Constitution.
And that is infantile and suicidal.
So you wrote the book, One Thought Scares Me.
And that thought is.
We teach our children what we wish them to know.
We don't teach them what we don't wish them to know.
What does that mean?
It means that they've taken it out.
They've taken civics out because we don't want you to be a participating citizen.
We don't want you to be the child of that revolution.
But if you look at, if you look at what's happening now, it seems like all they're doing in school is training kids to be an activist.
Oh, no.
No.
Activism terrifies these people.
And I'll tell you who they are, because there was a very real reason for it.
I'm a baby boomer, right?
And that means that there was a generation above me, but not so above that they actually went to World War II.
And I call them the James Dean generation.
Too young to help their dad in World War II and too old to take acid with me.
My mom was in that generation, and it was a screwed up generation going between the two.
Yeah, there was good and bad, and we were proud of all of it as an exercise in the Bill of Rights, and others hated every minute of it because they thought that they had proven the defeat of participating citizenship.
And 1968 was the year when you watched on television the Democratic Convention of 68, the mayor of Chicago yelling you on TV,
the Chicago cops beating kids who were wearing funny clothes, and everyone had forgotten all of their drug taking just in time to declare war on us for our drug taking.
And that happens to be an hysterical part of this story.
Washington, I was asked here by one of your staff who was my favorite founder.
And I humphed.
I didn't give him a straight answer.
And then I realized when you were showing me through the museum, I have a very real answer for that.
And it's George Washington.
Because Washington was, as an inarticulate writer, said the most profound things about us.
And he said, the Constitution must always be central.
The factions must always be peripheral.
And we live in the absolute absurd opposition to that.
And we've actually had it removed long enough so that we have no muscle memory of it.
So, I mean, we have destroyed our history.
Heating Bills and Destroyed History00:02:50
And may I say, it happened this way.
In 1971 and two and three, those members of that generation were on school boards.
That's the way they first became adults.
And they were on school boards.
And the first thing they did was to kill civics because they thought civics had caused the Democratic Convention of 1968.
And within 10 years, Civics was gone from every school district in the country.
And I mean, the whole thing, the knowledge of the birth tale of the country, the opposition to the way they did it in England, to the monarchy.
We fired a king for fraud.
Wow.
The aristocracy.
And we said, we will teach you that which you have never been allowed to learn.
And that's when they started to come, and we dealt only with the poor.
And we said, you learn these values and you become American.
There is no limit to what you will achieve.
Correct, and that was a thing they'd been wanting to hear for 5,000 years.
Right, and we have now forgotten it since the 70s.
Back to Richard Dreyfus in just a second.
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Rebellion Across the Atlantic00:15:40
Tell me, because you grew up in a great, crazy family.
Your grandmother fought on the campaign of Eugene Debs, if I'm not mistaken.
Your father was in the Battle of the Bulge.
Your mother was a Vietnam protester.
My great-grandaunt assassinated Tsar Alexander in 1881.
Shut up.
My grandaunt assassinated the Tsar in 1881.
She popped the Tsar.
Wow.
Wow.
So you have some rebellion in you.
But there's a difference to me.
There is a great deal of difference between Martin Luther King did, which he was saying, remember who we're supposed to be and who we're trying to be.
And now it is so anti-American.
What happened?
When did that happen?
It happened because of the 60s.
But wait, wait, wait.
But if I'm not mistaken, your faith, I mean, socialism, communism, had to be a lot of people around you.
But they loved America.
We loved America.
I loved America.
I was born as a red diaper baby.
Right.
I'm a communist son.
I am a communist child.
I was born on the left, and I learned where I differed and where I didn't because these men who had fought in gangs in Brooklyn first and then in the war against Hitler, they knew, all of them, why they were fighting.
And when they came back from World War II, they were each given a gift, a gift of the GI Bill of Rights.
And that meant a house, a college, a university.
It meant the ability to change your life for the better.
And it was done because the government recognized that these guys hadn't been kidding.
This was a nightmare.
My father's unit, the usual turn is 21 days in combat.
My father was 69 days behind the German lines.
And the government knew that they were asking this army of citizen soldiers to do the impossible.
And they did it.
And when they came home, they came home to gratitude and love.
And I have never known a generation, never, that was so willing to weep at the national anthem at Yankee Stadium.
And I would go at every opportunity I had.
And they would look down at me and my brother, and I'd be singing the words, and they would cry.
And one day, one of the guys, whose name was Tommy Grasso, I was talking to him, and I said, I get it, I get it.
Your totalitarian psychopath is better than his totalitarian psychopath.
And he started laughing so hard that his milk came up through his nose.
And if you could not find a generation that did not revere America, then those guys.
And then, skipping a few generations, Robert Dole, a war hero, was brought back to the well of the Senate when they were going to re-up the GI Bill of Rights.
And Santorum got up and made a lovely speech about Robert Dole, and then he took down the GI Bill of Rights.
He did not re-up it.
He took it down and humiliated Dole.
And I watched this.
I couldn't believe that an American political party would do such a disgusting thing.
But he had.
And that's when I changed.
I became enormously active.
And I think I've become active on an issue that is not partisan, that is for everyone, and that has no enemies.
To want to revive the study of civics, which means the study of the birth tale of America and the birth tale of putting the Enlightenment values to work in our system.
That is not a partisan issue.
And when I have been accused of that, I say, I am not a liberal.
I am a libo, conservo, rado, middle-of-the-rodo.
Just like most of you, you just haven't given it any thought lately.
And that's who I am.
This is not to be discarded as a partisan issue.
Unfortunately, I think we have made, because of the lack of civics, we have made the flag our country and the images.
And that means nothing.
It means nothing.
It is what those symbols stand for.
And now those symbols are rejected by one half of the country.
But we're not talking, we're fighting over that.
And we're not talking about what do they represent.
And I used to believe that, I mean, I know our unum, e plurbus unum, came from the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, who we want to be, not who we always are, who we want to be and strive to be.
Yeah.
And the Bill of Rights.
I always thought those were sacred.
And we can argue about commas.
We can argue about a lot of things.
But those rights were sacred.
Sacred.
And there's a system to amend them.
You know what I mean?
Hey, nobody even knows them anymore.
That's right.
We are violating all of them.
And all of the chaos of the world is happening because we no longer even know them.
And those who do reject them or ignore them.
They've been the object of an argument for far longer than we know.
Oliver Wendell Holmes said no to Congress shall make no law.
And he allowed crying fire in a crowded theater, etc.
And John Adams, on his last day in office, passed the Alien and Sedition Act.
I can't believe that somebody who was there at the beginning passed that.
That's crazy.
And that craziness was you are not allowed to speak against the government, period.
And this by one of the founders, one of the writers of the damn thing.
And when Eugene Debs, my grandmother was a witness to the triangle shirtwaist factory fire.
Wow.
And it was because of what she saw that day, 154 girls who hardly spoke English jumping, trying to fly out of the 19th story of the triangle building.
If anybody remembers the images from 9-11, very similar.
Yeah, except there were bodies.
Yeah.
And let's stop on that for a second.
They were so destroyed on 9-11, there was no body.
But 104% of people.
The ones that jumped out, there were a few that jumped to their death out the windows.
I don't know if you never saw that.
I saw them jumping out, but I didn't know that they were.
Yeah.
But they didn't.
The thing was, 154 girls looking at the top on the top of the building like grand fiery goddesses because their hair and the sunlight created that image.
They stepped off into nothing the first betrayal and they fell at the feet of my 12-year-old grandmother and 154 bodies.
Wow.
And she turned around and went to the Socialist Party headquarters and volunteered.
Ultimately, she became Eugene Debs' private secretary.
At the beginning, she was just a volunteer and she heard Debs give a speech that said that Woodrow Wilson should not be applauded because he had actually run on the platform, I'll keep your children out of war.
And then the first thing he did was get us into it.
Oh, yeah.
And he was denied his vote and given, I think, a life in prison.
And what's his name?
Harding, who came after him, Harding of the Bad Reputation.
He freed Eugene Debs and he gave him back his vote.
So as far as I'm concerned, he's the best.
Yeah.
Wilson was the worst.
I think he is.
Yeah, he was the worst.
And we're going through, I think, that time again.
I remember I first started really doing, I realized I'm a recovering alcoholic.
Me too.
So when I'm 30 years.
40 years.
Good for you.
Good for you.
I'm 30 years old and I realize I got A, stop drinking.
And now I'm a dummy.
I'm a big fat dummy that doesn't know anything.
So I really start to read.
And I start to read everybody who really disagrees.
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.
And then just kind of went in and found the connections.
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.
And I thought, what kind of place, what must have that been like?
Where, as you say in your book, you had to whisper.
You have to whisper your political views.
We're here.
Yeah.
We're here.
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.
And they didn't move right away.
They waited almost 70 years.
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.
Before that, the only ones who went were adventurers and torturers.
Correct.
And so these poor had to risk getting across the Atlantic, which by itself was the end of the world.
And you had to realize how hungry these people were for the right to learn how to write or read.
And when they got here, they were kept basically on their ships until a corrupt politician from Tammany walked up the gangplank and said, my name is Jack O'Halleron, and I'm here to make you a Democrat.
And if you give me your vote, I'll give you a vote, a job, and a house.
And he did.
So they all became Democrats until Woodrow Wilson said that was illegal.
I think it was Roosevelt who did that, wasn't he?
No, no, no.
Actually, it was before Wilson, because there's a wonderful book called Plunkett of Tammany Hall.
And Plunkett used to have his shoes shined and spout to the newspapers.
And he said, if we are not allowed to do this thing, America will fall.
And everyone said he was crazy.
So they passed this law that said you could no longer nominate the patronage.
And then they said, and guess who was the next minority that came?
They were the blacks from the South.
And Tammany stood there and said, we can't help you.
We would be normally giving you a house and a job, and we can't.
It's illegal.
And that's why they stuck in Harlem for 80 years and why it bred more racial injustice or racial silence and they never had a chance.
They never had a show.
The Tammany Betrayal00:15:31
I want to make sure I understand.
You believe giving everybody a house and a job and everything else is good.
Well, in that system, yes.
Because that system was, when you first arrived in America, the first thing you tried to do was to take hold of a crime.
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.
Their kids then went and took a city bureaucracy.
The Jews took accounting, the Italians took sanitation, and the cops were taken by the Irish.
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.
And of course, they were treated like blacks were treated in those days.
And it got so bad that there was a meeting held in White Plains between all of the sergeants, Irish, Italian, Jewish, and black.
And they came to a peace.
And the peace was, we'll stop calling you nigger if you let us share in your, what do they call it?
I'm losing my train.
The payoffs.
Each of them had a specific kind of cultural payoff.
The Jews took a solid percentage of any retail because of accounting.
And the Irish took numbers, prostitution, like that.
And the Italians took their restaurant stuff.
And so there was enmity between these cultures.
And then they came to a peace 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.
So while the Italian and Irish cop are counting out their usual $300, the black cop was counting out $1,500.
And they said, wait a minute, we want in on that.
And they got it.
For the peace, for the knowing I have a backup behind me, because they weren't sure.
And that's how that happened.
That's how drugs made it into the middle class.
Because the New York Police Department let them and it came through the harbor and it was dispersed.
So that culture opened up racial segregation and the drugs and everything else.
So what was interesting about it for me is my family is very political.
So my mother was, how do I say this?
She came up with the phrase, war is unhealthy for boys and girls and other living things.
Something that was a banner of the anti-war movement.
And women took over the jobs that their husbands left when they went to the draft or the war.
And they changed their names from Helen or Billy or Bobby Sue to what are they.
God, it's amazing how when you get older, forget all the names.
I'm not your age, and I do that all the time.
Oh, my God.
It's awful.
But they became the workers.
And they kept the country together.
They kept the corporations together.
They kept the army together because they made the weapons.
Rosie the Riveters.
Rosie the Riveter.
Thank you so much.
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.
And she lost more self-esteem at that moment than any other moment in history.
She was just summarily dismissed.
And she kept sane because of mother's little helper.
And that was opium.
And that kept her going as long as she needed on the prairie and in the city.
And you're telling almost the story of my mother in a way.
She was addicted to Valium.
And it was because she could not settle in her mind her role.
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.
So what am I?
So when she's lying next to her husband, she's actually feeling some of the strangest emotions that any human ever had.
She loved him.
She worshipped the fact that he got back.
And yet she wanted to take a frying pan and smash it over his head.
And that was Rosie the Riveter.
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, these women, knowing they had to face another winter with six children and no husband, got loaded.
And they got loaded because they had to.
And then in the 50s, the way I say it in the book was they put a little sparkle in the suburbs.
You know, they just had to because they were told to get out, but not told to go anywhere.
So they sat and did nothing.
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.
So it was a hand down.
It was a handoff.
And I wrote, I used to write cartoons.
And I wrote a cartoon.
Comic strips or cartoons?
Comic strip.
Okay, yeah.
I wrote one which was the boy sees the car with his father in it weaving as it comes home.
And so when he comes into the kitchen, he starts to kind of try to make him look better.
And the father, being a little loaded, pushes him away.
And they get into a fight, a comic strip fight, you know, with the cloud of discord.
And They forget why they started this fight, but they're fighting.
That generation is fighting, and they're fighting what?
Well, he's telling me what to do and how to dress and what's valuable.
They had to.
Just like every other mammal on the planet Earth, they fought in the same way that every antelope fought the older antelopes.
And we weren't smart enough to realize that's what was going on.
So we thought it was a nightmare.
When in fact, it was just business as usual.
Right.
And all the times of tranquility, they were rare.
We think that they weren't, but they were rare.
Discord was the norm.
And when the fathers fought the sons, they thought they were fighting over drugs.
They thought they were fighting over, well, the way I like to put it, everyone remembers that James Dean died.
No one remembers the plot of Rebel Without a Cause.
And the plot of Rebel Without a Cause is the story I'm telling you now.
It is about no one listens to me.
You're tearing me apart.
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 holding a buoy knife in his teeth and ears of Japanese people.
And they couldn't be the same one, but they were.
And so they were totally confused.
When Marlon Brando was asked in the wild one, what are you rebelling against?
His answer was, what have you got?
And no one realized the profundity of all of this.
This was real.
They didn't know why, but they knew that they had to.
They had evolution behind them.
Millions of years of evolution was forcing this to be an issue.
And that's why, no matter how good the civics was, as taught in public schools, the television, which was a new and magic technology, which, when turned on, hypnotized you.
And advertising.
Advertising was relatively new in that form.
They didn't need a nanny.
They were just plunked down in front of the television.
And then the television showed them the Democratic Convention of 1968, which blew civics out the window for everyone.
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.
And social studies became this gentle panorama of life in the USA, not bringing these questions to bear on our lives, which is what we did.
That's why they call it a revolution.
And so 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.
They either accepted or rejected.
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 marches and parades that the original revolution had.
And it didn't.
It didn't have anything but silence.
They took it out and didn't tell anyone.
So we ran right through the 70s and 80s, and it wasn't until close to the turn of the century that anyone bothered to say, oh, we're not teaching civics anymore.
They still haven't.
I have read every book.
I have read every book about this subject that is written in English.
So let's concentrate on that for a second.
Tell me what civics is and how to put it in back in to our lives.
Civics is the general name for the tools that can make you expert in thinking.
They are how to think, not what to think, but how to think.
And they teach things like clarity of thought, clarity of expression, and history.
And history cannot possibly be one version.
Right.
There's always at least two.
Correct.
And if I fantasize myself as a high school teacher, I say to my history class, there's always two versions.
Always.
How many kids here in this room have the same politics as their parents?
Whatever number the hands show, I say, For the next semester, you take the opposite view on everything.
Everything.
Every test, every question.
And I'll know if you tank and I will fail you out of this class.
So that they've got to be exposed to the opposite view.
Yeah.
That is, that's why I started reading opposites and then moved in.
Yeah.
You're a paper tiger.
You know nothing if you don't know.
Carrying Water Between Two Worlds00:04:14
I mean, my favorite teachers were the ones who you could never pin down.
You'd be like, wait a minute.
Halfway through the semester, you'd be like, he's switching sides.
I think, you know, you think he's one way and he goes the other way.
My favorite teacher, and I so regret that my being 75 makes it impossible to believe that she's still alive.
Mrs. Palmer was my history teacher, sixth, seventh, and eighth grade.
Wow.
She was a die-hard Republican.
My mother was a die-hard socialist.
I asked her once, why were you a socialist and not a communist?
And she said, better donuts.
All right.
So I carried the water between Mrs. Palmer and my mother.
And I literally told my mom what she had said, what Mrs. Palmer had said.
And then I would tell Mrs. Palmer what my mom had said.
And I carried the water between these two.
And she was the best teacher I ever had because she made no bones about her being a Republican.
And she taught through that filter and defended it.
And you were totally allowed to disagree.
And she wanted, that's why she did it.
Right.
And my respect for her cannot possibly be illuminated.
I only wish that she was still alive.
Yeah.
Those teachers change you.
Yeah.
They change you.
When you are presented with things you've never thought about and you're encouraged, I run from anyone who says, don't read this, don't watch this, don't run, run.
And how about this?
My mom went to a very specific high school in Brooklyn and she was teacher's pet.
And one day the teacher told her, She said, Jerry, what's your last name?
And she said, Robbins.
What was it before it was Robbins?
Rabinowitz.
And she said, you're a Jew.
And she was anti-Jewish, but she was still teacher's pet.
She still utterly respected my mom, but she was an anti-Semite in the 30s.
Wow.
And you know, in the 30s, that's when the State Department was anti-Semitic and turned those children away.
And you had to respect a system that allowed the eccentricities of a teacher as long as they didn't try to make you into them.
And they didn't.
I once called Mrs. Wilcox, who was a teacher of mine in the seventh and eighth grades, and I found her in San Diego, where I now live.
And I found her, because we used to make jokes that San Diego was where Republican history teachers go to die.
But I found Mrs. Wilcox.
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.
And I want you to know that everything I have come to love in my life, I learned in your class.
And she said, thank you very much and hung up.
She went, thank you very much.
Click.
Wow.
She was the same person then as she was when I was her student.
The Power of Your Vote00:15:43
Wow.
In the same way it matters how you vote.
It matters how you spend your money.
Vote with your wallet.
Every chance you can, you need to buy American.
And that's really hard because some things will be like, well, assembled in America, made in America.
But like this pen, I doubt any of it was made in America.
But maybe one part is, look, we need to start making quality products again.
And I mean start to finish.
There's a company out there that I'm so proud to have as an advertiser.
It's Grip Six.
With Grip Six, you're getting the true American experience, products that you can count on.
Now, their belts, wallets, their wallets are great.
They're socks.
When you buy just, let's say they're socks, you're supporting American ranchers who raise these specially bred sheep that produce the modern wool that is unlike any other, very stretchy.
It's, I mean, it's really great.
The American manufacturers who wash the wool, process the wool, weave it into socks, and then you just wear them.
So it's not just a pair of socks.
It's an American experience.
Please support those companies that are taking such a huge hit and risk by making everything here in America a great quality company making quality products is Grip Six.
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That's grip, the number 6.com slash back.
You said to me before we went on the air that I outed you.
And I immediately responded, I'm sorry.
I didn't know I didn't, you know.
And you said, no, that was a good thing.
That was a good thing.
In what way?
And how can we get Hollywood or other people and people on, you know, on the other side as well to stop with the tribalism?
Stop both sides.
Stop it.
And start to be a little more brave to say, yeah, that's who I am.
Yeah.
Did you get pushback when I said?
Oh my gosh.
I'm so sorry, Richard.
I'm so sorry.
No, it was great because now I had a kind of place in my universe.
I had been a liberal.
I had been a communist when I was younger.
And if you had asked me what communism was, I could not have told you.
As I think it's true now.
Yeah.
wouldn't know how to describe it um i i knew that i was changing and i knew that i was changing for the better the clearer the above the nicer I knew that.
I could feel it.
And I began to see the phrases that indicated that that writer was a duck, was a loser.
And I found them everywhere, on the left and on the right.
And it was easy for me to be anti-right because my whole community was anti-right.
But I began to move, really, until I became a celebrity and I joined Common Cause.
Do you remember what Common Cause was?
It was an institution that was by John Gardner, who worked for both Republicans and Democrats.
And he wanted to create an institution for those people who were neither Republican or Democrat, or both, and could criticize both.
So I joined that when I became famous.
And I went to Washington and immediately said, where are the Republicans?
And no, they didn't talk about that.
And what had happened was that it had become an adjunct to the Democratic Party.
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?
And they were really the right-wing version of Common Cause.
And they finally found a way to kick me out.
And that's true.
I mean, that's what happened.
And I realized that I had no place there either.
In Washington, there was no place to be what I am now.
I am pre-partisan.
I worked at CNN, really found no home.
I worked at Fox, really found no home.
Yeah.
I've said to Fox people, you need me.
You need me because it's sounding like such a repeat.
Everyone is just repeating the same.
And what bothers me for real, and this is for real, they're not news organizations.
No, I know.
If they changed the name of MSNBC and Fox to opinion channels, I would have no argument.
But to call them news is to mislead the country.
It's really interesting.
Because I think when I was, when I was at Fox, I made it really clear, I'm an opinion guy.
This is my opinion.
And, you know, there were a couple of times where I said, I'm not a journalist.
Journalists need to do their work.
I'm a commentator.
But that became so white hot ratings, bonanza, and everything else, that I think a lot of people in the media who were just used to reading the news thought, oh, no, excuse me.
There's a huge difference between what I do and what a journalist does.
And now they've just merged into one and there is no, I don't think there is such a thing as a journalist.
I said to Megan Kelly that when I watched the 2016 and 2020 presidential debates, I was watching vaudeville.
I was not watching a debate that had anything to do with the presidency.
So much so that I expected in 2016 that the next one in 2020, they would be wearing red noses and funny, floppy feet.
And she basically agreed.
Yeah.
And it's not reality.
It's a game.
We are watching.
I've never felt in almost everything.
I've never felt all the world is but a stage as much as right now.
It feels like we are everything is just a play.
That's not what's really going on.
What's really going on is behind the set.
We're being delivered this and arguing about this, and that's not it.
It's this stuff that we know is happening.
It's happening back here and nobody wants to recognize it.
How about the fact that we have not waged a legal war since Korea?
And I'm giving it to Korea because it was that phone call overnight that forced him into action.
But, you know, the Congress has been completely left out of its power.
They gave it away.
Yeah.
They gave it away.
Lyndon Johnson took it, and that was the end.
Yeah.
And I'm sorry.
I'm a constitutionalist.
Yep.
And that means if you're going to go and give away your most precious resource, children, you've got to convince people who are against this war.
Yes.
And that doesn't mean, in my opinion, it doesn't mean that the president, because of the way things are today, we could be dead in 12 minutes.
It doesn't mean the president doesn't have some leeway to take some action until Congress can get their crap together.
But after 30 days, dude, you don't have that.
We're not there.
Right.
Pull them back.
Right.
And when Bill Fulbright had floorwalked the War Powers Act from Johnson through the Senate, because he had been told to do that, and he had been told it was true.
When he walked that through, that's when he realized there had never been a Gulf of Tonkin incident, which he was basing all of it on.
And he went to war against Johnson.
And that's why the war was papered over with investigation and committees and committees and committees until the President of the United States and the Defense Secretary were hidden in the Oval Office at 2 o'clock in the morning designing airstrikes.
They were so hugely fought.
And I felt so sorry for Lyndon Johnson because I knew Lyndon Johnson wanted to compete with only one man and that was FDR.
Because to him, FDR was the be-all and end-all.
So he tried to wage a war and fight the war on poverty.
And sorry, Lyndon.
There's not enough money in the printing press to do that.
And when he said that afternoon, I have been your president for the last five years, I burst into tears.
And I had been fighting him in every Century City, Century Plaza hotel, all of the things that we did to stay out of that war.
And I heard Eisenhower's speech.
I did not hear it then.
I heard it many times.
The military-industrial complex.
That is, if we would just read that speech, we misinterpreted military-industrial complex.
And it goes into the education complex and the scientific community and that complex.
That is the merger between big money, big tech, big science, big war, whatever.
All of that, working with the government and providing the answers that are.
I don't think you can name an institution in America that has not been thoroughly corrupted.
I don't think so either.
Education, the courts, the media.
These are all, these are all now victims of money, of profit.
And when I was...
And greed and power.
I mean, individuals who just went to the market.
Greed is money.
And so I live in San Diego, sorry.
And in San Diego, it's a doctor's town.
I mean, yikes, there are more doctors in San Diego.
And someone was sick in my family, and we went to a doctor, and I noticed his business card, and it said on his card, concierge medicine.
And I said to the doctor, do you know what this says?
He says, what?
I said, it's been a plank of the Republican Party for 85 years.
That's all it is.
And what they did to achieve it, because it's on the card, pay more, get better service.
Now, that means that they took the obligations of a doctor, which are known to everyone, 24-hour availability, hitching up best and going in the middle of the night, all the things, and drew a line and said, the rich get all of this that's on top,
and the poor get all of this, which is not.
And I watched them mistreat my own mother-in-law, who spoke no English, when she tried to use the bathroom in the doctor's private office.
And a nurse in the office literally held her out of the bathroom until my wife, and you don't screw around with my wife.
I know.
I know.
Okay.
I know.
She eviscerated that nurse.
And more power to her.
We have forgotten the politeness.
This is hard to say, but when hotel people get my wife and I in a hotel, they will be rude.
The normal thing is to be rude until they find out that the guy is a movie star.
And then they become obsequious.
And what you learn in school called civics is, among other things, civility, which cannot be learned in any other way.
It's not handed down through the bloodline.
It is not just politeness.
It is the oxygen that Republican democracies require or else they'll die.
And that's more than politeness.
And when you realize we have now been raised without charm school or civics or civility for 50 years.
And that means that every person who works in a doctor's office or in retail or anywhere else has the right to mistreat you.
Home Title Lock Promo Code00:03:50
I remember, I'm old now.
I'm an old Jew.
And I remember what it was like when you dealt with Macy's.
They would say, we don't have it, but if you go down the block, you'll get it at that store.
They're not allowed to say that anymore.
They don't say that anymore.
If they don't have it, it doesn't exist.
And how about let's give immigrants who've just arrived within the last 80 hours a cab to ride, to run.
He doesn't know what Madison Avenue is, much less where Central Park is.
And that's just nonsense.
That's crippling the country.
I have lived since my graduation from high school in a spiral of decay.
I have only known politics to become worse and live off distraction and denial when first there was Willie Horton, then there was the flag amendment, and each presidential election was decided on hot air.
That's since I graduated.
And no attempt has been made in any other way to teach civility and to teach kindness.
And I would say it's gasoline on the fire of social media.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Because there's no payoff in teaching what the churches used to teach and now are a joke, all of them.
You said it earlier.
Every institution has either been corrupted or betrayed its position.
Yeah.
Final segment with Richard Drevis here in just a second.
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If actually I'm not going to.
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You know, what he's calling you.
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It's 60 to 90 days to even figure out that they're the victim of this crime.
You know, by that point, you start getting foreclosure notices and you realize you've got four mortgages on your house.
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We are so over time.
Can I just tell you one thing?
Why The Goodbye Girl Stuck00:06:41
There are only two performances that have ever stuck with me that I actually wanted to watch the Oscars because it mattered to me.
And your performance in The Goodbye Girl, when you are drunk and you, I can play this role and you start reciting Richard III.
Thank you for that.
It was one of the greatest performances.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I have to tell you that I'm an actor.
I'm walking up Broadway and a Serbian grandmother walks up to me and says, thank you.
That's the best thing I could possibly get.
And that means I was successful.
And I could talk for years and years about the nobility of acting.
And I'm not kidding.
That's why it bothered me so much that someone invented this feud thing about me and Robert Shaw because I had so much respect for him.
And And then I was on an Irish talk show not that long ago, and I was introduced to his granddaughter.
And I lost it.
I burst into tears.
And then I told her she had never met him.
I told her story after story after story.
And then we were on the show.
Then the show was on.
And the host said, I saw you crying backstage because you were talking to Robert Shaw's granddaughter.
What was that all about?
And I burst into tears again and I couldn't explain that he was a grand personality.
He was a great artist.
He was a writer and an actor.
And he deserved my devotion.
And one day he said, I know, I'll play Claudius to your Hamlet if you play the fool to my Lear.
And I said, you got it, but not for 10 years.
And he said, why?
I said, because you'll burn me off the stage.
That's why.
And that's what we were planning.
Well.
Why does, when I said that to you, what is it?
Because I understand the Shaw story.
But when I said that about the Goodbye Girl, why does that impact you?
And I'm asking for a selfish reason because I'm 60 now and getting to the age where you kind of, you know, you look back at everything and you're like, well, it was really worth it.
So I'm wondering, what was that?
The honest truth is I bet money against myself when people said I would be nominated for a film called The Apprenticeship of Judy Kravitz.
And I knew I wouldn't be, and I made money.
And then I was told I was nominated for the Goodbye Girl, and I asked, who else is nominated?
And when they said Richard Burton, Marcello Mastriani, whoever.
Whoever.
Yeah.
Woody Allen.
And I said, I'm going to win.
Because I knew what their stories were and where they were perceived by the academy.
And I won a fortune.
And the next year, I won a lot of money, really, because I asked, who won best actor last year?
And I was the answer.
No one got it.
That's what the Oscars are.
They're a fun night.
And that's all.
Yeah, but the Oscar is, it wasn't.
That's why I said there's only two performances.
One was Peter O'Toole in my favorite year.
Speech he gave at the very end that is, I just love it.
And it just comes alive.
I'm going to kill you right now.
Why?
Because when my series, which was the education of Max Bickford, the story of a professor, and it was an adult story, every week was an adult story.
CBS called on the day and said, we're not picking you up.
And I laughed.
I joked because I thought they were kidding.
And then they made themselves clear.
And I said, Peter O'Toole wants to play second fiddle on every episode of the second year.
Wow.
And they said, Peter O'Toole.
Oh, my gosh.
And I went nuts.
You know what it means to have Peter O'Toole.
I know what that means.
And they said, Peter O'Toole.
And I just went nuts.
And I'm happy that the guy who made that decision is out of CBS because he's a sexual maniac.
I'm going to let you say that and I'll comment on that.
No, no, just say it.
Hello.
One last question.
The Blessed Life vs. Filth00:04:20
I've done everything I can, you know, hoping and praying and doing everything I can that my daughter just did not have the talent to act.
Unfortunately, she does, but I do not want her going there.
But my folks supported me in this, and there was no chance of this working.
What is the most important thing you've learned that you wish you knew at the beginning of your career?
I don't think anything could have been told to me that would have persuaded me away from it.
No, I'm not saying persuade away.
I'm saying, if she goes in, which she plans on doing, what is the advice that you would give to anybody going in that you wish you would have had?
If you want to be an actor in America, you can fulfill that up to the garoons in almost any city in America because they have local and they have regional and they have Shakespeare.
But if you want to be a movie star, then you have to go to LA or New York.
And those are rough, rough towns.
And we don't live in L.A. because in 204, I retired and went to Oxford for four years to learn this subject of civility and civics and the damage being done to my country.
And I gave up something I loved and had loved since I was nine years old only for something else I loved as much, which was saving my country.
And I firmly believe that if we don't revive the study of civics, we will be dead before 2050.
We'll have the same name.
Long before.
And it'll be a nightmare.
So I had led a blessed life.
And I gave it up for a blessed life.
And I think that this book is not perfect.
But boy is it, Richard.
And it infuriates me that people don't understand what this place means, what an advance on human progress, this country, is all about, and how quickly we can abandon it without a second thought.
I once said that we hold this pearl in our hands, and then we think, eh, who cares?
And we toss it away and it lands at the top of the stairs and we trip over it and we fall down through this state of constant decay until we reach Donald Trump and the cheapening of every great thought and every great move that we gave to humanity.
And it just kills me.
It's beyond my ability to comprehend why people who are in a position to burnish our reputation, make it filth, choose to make it filth.
I just don't get it.
Profound Respect for a Remarkable Man00:00:32
May I say, I don't know of somebody that is as accomplished as you, who is as different as you, that I walk away with profound respect.