David Mamet returns to The Joe Rogan Experience, comparing California to Orwell’s 1984—off by just 1.2%—and tracing left-wing authoritarianism from Stalin to modern policies like critical race theory, which he calls irrational and harmful. His shift from liberalism to conservatism began after reading Hayek and Friedman, realizing government dependency distorts personal growth, while Hollywood’s corporate control stifles artistic risk. Mamet warns free speech erodes under arbitrary censorship, comparing it to thuggery, and praises capitalism’s natural solutions over bureaucratic ones, urging gratitude and adherence to ethical principles like avoiding harm rather than imposing good. His new book Recessional arrives today alongside critiques of modern media and societal decay. [Automatically generated summary]
But it's when classically, like when we think about depictions of totalitarianism and authoritarianism, when I was a kid, we always thought of it as being a right-wing thing.
There was always like a right-wing dictator-type character that imposed censorship and authoritarianism.
He didn't think of it as something that would be coming from the left.
So you think that that's the root cause of it, not believing in the individual, believing in the collective, that that automatically lends itself to erasing individual rights?
But don't you think that, you know, when atheists talk about religion and they criticize organized religion and criticize the Bible, they talk about things that are in the Bible that seem preposterous, right?
They talk about people rising from the dead and walking on water, particularly the Old Testament, right?
Like, to use that as a guidebook for life, you have to kind of ignore some of the stuff that doesn't make sense.
The Christian Bible comes out of the Jewish Bible.
It's a retelling of the story in a different way.
But the Jewish Bible is a myth, and the myth is the myth of creation and the myth of human experience.
So what it does is chapter by chapter, story by story, it challenges us with disturbing and bizarre images.
And it says, why don't you try to understand this?
See if you can understand this.
What does it really mean to escape from Egypt?
Does it mean escaping from your inner Pharaoh?
What does it really mean to part the Red Sea?
So these stories are told, any myth is a dramatic retelling of an underlying reality that can't be expressed rationally, right?
So the atheists say everything can be expressed rationally.
For example, you know that the earth is burning up.
You can tell that because sometimes things get warmer and sometimes things get colder.
You can also tell that when things get colder, that's obviously because the earth is burning up, because the sun is melting the glaciers and the glaciers are raising the temperature.
You can also tell, of course, that to be fair to everyone, children change sex.
You know that, don't you?
And you can tell that men can compete as women and women compete as men.
This is all human confusion because we trust our senses and we trust our mind and the mind just, it doesn't work real good.
We're very cunning, but we aren't very smart, human beings.
And that's the message of the Bible.
And so if you look at Moses, sorry, Moses, Moses was, the Egyptians tried to kill him all of his life.
The Egyptians tried to kill him.
He didn't have any trouble with the Egyptians because God was on his side.
He had trouble with the Jews.
Because the Jews were always saying, who the hell do you think you are?
So that's all the Old Testament is the story of atheists, really, saying, who the hell do you think you are?
So when you're talking about the Bible, right, and the lessons in the Bible, isn't part of the problem is that people translated it from ancient Hebrew to Latin to Greek and all these other languages and eventually to English.
Like a lot's lost along the way, right?
And a lot is open to interpretation.
Like a lot of what we're talking about in these myths and stories that people take as factual occurrences, they probably were there's some sort of a lesson in the myth, some sort of allegory.
There's things about these stories that probably have hints of truth.
But isn't it hard to kind of decipher it all if you can't speak the mother language?
Do you think the Bible is a bunch of very wise people got together and they formed these stories to sort of illustrate the folly of mankind and how one needs to have like a moral compass and guiding principles that are set in stone and that you have these rules to live your life in a moral and just way and that'll make for a better society.
So Dennis Prager, you know, who I'm crazy about, said the other day, he said, you know, I don't believe in the Torah, the Jewish Bible, because of God.
He said, I believe in God because of the Torah.
So if you read the Torah, the Jewish Bible, and the Christian Bible is just an extension of that, you say, my God, this is incredible wisdom.
This goes back to the beginning of time.
People who have tried to figure out everything.
And they didn't have the language that we have, but they had the language that they had.
And this was thousands of years of experience progressed and compressed into a myth.
So we know that this is true, because liberals have always been in love with the myths, especially Jews, with the myths of other cultures, right?
We say how beautiful it is that this culture has that myth, that the Haydn Indians say the world was formed by a large beaver.
And when the beaver slapped his tail like that, it made the oceans and when the blah, blah, blah.
That's gorgeous myth.
Nobody says of that myth, wait a second, you can't have a beaver that big, right?
I've been very curious about this lately because it seems like, as you were saying, like from the left, you're getting a lot of what seems like very cult-like behavior and this very cult, like this ignoring of basic truth to fit a narrative.
And I think that in the absence of religion, it's almost like we're hardwired for some sort of some sort of guidelines that we all collectively agree to follow, whether it's agreed, whether it's Judaism or Mormonism or whatever it is, like a collective group of guidelines.
It's almost like human beings are hardwired to follow some sort of a guideline.
And if we don't have one, we create one.
And even though we don't say it's a religion, we behave exactly if it's a religion.
I'll get there in a second because I spent a couple of years of COVID thinking, I just don't get it.
I'm a child of the mid-century.
You know, my dads and my uncles, everybody I knew went through the war.
My grandfather fought in World War I. I've made a living when I should have been in jail, right, or homeless because I don't have any talents except writing.
And because I could do that, I made a living, I have a wonderful family because of America, right?
And I'm a Jew and I'm not getting killed because I live in America.
And I saw the country transform when I was a kid.
And I used to go down south, and there were chain gangs and there were lynchings and there were separate.
That's pretty gosh darn close.
And those people who were being treated that way, their great-grandparents had been slaves.
And now we see that racism is in effect gone.
There's certain prejudices of whites against blacks.
Well, duh.
There's certain prejudices of blacks against whites.
But it's gone.
We see that gays who committed suicide or lived their life in terror or were blacklisted or Are not normalized.
These are wonderful things.
This is a magnificent country that we live in.
And to see it go to shit in front of my eyes when half the country said, you know what?
Well, look, if you say, as I've heard, perhaps you have heard people say, you know, my kids don't want to have kids because we live in such a dreadful place.
Douglas Murray, who's a brilliant guy, a British intellectual, he said something that I've never forgot.
I keep harping on it.
That at the end of every civilization, when a civilization starts to crumble, they become obsessed with gender.
They become obsessed with swapping gender, acting out different genders, like gender, non-conformity.
And he doesn't have an answer why, but it seems like when things, for whatever it is, whatever cause of society collapsing, there's something where they become obsessed with definitions, and particularly gender definitions.
I mean, that's a gross generalization that kids aren't.
I think kids are very interested in sex.
I think there's a whole host of problems with people getting interested in pornography.
And one of them is that they wear themselves out beaten off all day and they don't have any energy for the opposite sex.
And also there's the thing that it's just so accessible.
You know, children are so impulsive.
Young kids are so impulsive.
You get a 20-year-old kid or an 18-year-old kid, you give him a phone.
He's going to just watch porn on it.
They're not going to be able to help themselves, especially if they never saw it before, and now they have access to it anytime they want on their iPad.
You look at a person who's like, I know a lot of people give him shit, but when it comes to like billionaires' kids, he's about as good off as I've ever seen one.
But what happens is this country is the wealthiest, the most prosperous, the safest until recently in human history.
And the question is, what are you going to do when the middle class is gone?
There's nobody.
The merchants are gone.
The farmers are gone.
The bootmakers are gone.
The middle class and the industrialists, and the people who, the agriculturists, thought about the world every moment of the day.
If you owned a shoe store, right, and you were an independent contractor, you had to say, my God, what does this leather cost?
What can I sell it for?
What happens if I am late with my payment?
Is this a good enough grade?
Can I be nice to this person as a son of a bitch?
Can I get them to pay a little bit more?
What is my rent cost?
What happens if it rains tomorrow?
These are the concerns of everybody in the middle class.
But when the middle class is gone, you've got people at the bottom of the food chain who are gang-raised on the streets because there's no alternative to them, or very little, and people who are gang-raised in the elite schools.
And they're both taught there's no reason to work, that strife is error.
That's what they're taught.
To have to strive for something is wrong.
It should either be free or it should be easy, but to pay for your school is wrong.
Someone should pay for the school, right?
To have to pay for that iPhone is wrong.
I should be able to go into the store and take it out, right?
So if no one's, if the middle class is not along, I don't have to say, wait a second, I'm in charge here, right?
I pay the effing taxes.
I'm in charge.
The cops are going to come take you to jail if you steal from the store.
No, not anymore, right?
And we're going to let your line die out if you're a billionaire and you're engaged in child pornography and money laundering, you know, and bribing the president of the United States.
We're going to send you to jail.
Say there's no rules anymore.
It was the middle class that had to insist upon the rules, because if they didn't have certainty, they couldn't live.
They needed to know what the results of their actions were going to bring about, right?
Because if they didn't, they couldn't order the leather.
They couldn't sign a lease.
They couldn't throw the robber out of the store.
So they were involved in human interaction every moment of every day.
And that's the history of America up until recently.
And so later I'm having lunch with somebody else, and he admires a jacket.
I say, it's great.
I said, but you know, I'm kind of a fashion maven.
I've been wearing jeans and t-shirt all my life, but you know, I kind of like, I had a clothing company and I do a lot of designs for movies.
I said, I feel kind of queasy about it because it's a flight jacket, but I don't know how to fly a plane.
So he says, come on, walks me across the street to the Santa Monica airport, introduces me to a guy, and 20 minutes later, I'm flying a plane with this guy.
Yeah, so that's what I think about prosperity, right?
That there are fascinating new interests.
We don't have to be dead.
We can find, fascinating new interests, fascinating new people, like Barry Weiss, right, is starting a university here in Austin.
And I'm playing along with her.
There are wonderful things that we can do rather than saying, you know what, I guess we as a country, we're going to sit down and we're going to play golf till we die.
Why do you think, though, I still, I'm curious myself.
I'm asking this because I'm trying to figure it out myself as well.
Like, what is it about prosperity?
Is it just as simply as like we're spoiled, like spoiled kids, the kids of rich people, like billionaire sons tend to be spoiled and not have good character?
You can't say of somebody who's 80, why is he behaving like that?
Whatever kind of life he had, energy drains.
Energy which is used, it's like gasoline.
Any energy that's used on A cannot be used on B. Alexander the Great died when he was 33.
Energy that's used at this point in your life is probably going to be decreased at that point in your life.
So what you learn as you get older is you have to conserve energy.
So the old thing is you should never try any new business practices after you're 60.
Because the stuff that I did when I was 20, 25, I can't do anymore.
I have a certain amount, I hope, of increased wisdom and knowledge, but I have a decreased fund of energy.
So the question is, what are you going to spend the energy on?
So when we come to a point that has never been experienced in human history of magnificent prosperity, freedom, freedom from want, What do we see?
That for the first time in human history, rather than worrying about how am I going to get enough calories to keep from dying, they worry about how can I lose weight?
Right?
Rather than saying, thank God, you know, we became the power, the world power, the greatest power the world's ever known in the 20th century.
But wait a second, here we still are, what do we do now?
Huh, what about the Vietnam War?
Let's fight that.
That's a good idea.
Although we said from the first, there's no particular end to it and we can't win it.
Now we've got into it.
How do we get out of it?
So the problem about prosperity is one of them is you make choices and then you have such an infrastructure you can't correct them.
Right?
That gets us into the Vietnam War.
You make choices.
Let's have a representative government.
And it's so powerful that they, of course, are going to take on themselves the responsibility of running your life.
Because somebody goes into Congress, they say, okay, you know, da, da, da.
They say, Washington is Hollywood for ugly people, right?
So here I am.
I'm not very good at anything, but I can smile and kiss babies.
Oh, guess what?
I can have all the sex I want and I can go on TV and I can gain power.
And I can raise money to gain power and gain power to raise money.
What else can I do?
I can trade favors with that guy over there.
He wants to build a bridge in Alabama.
I know it's a bunch of bullshit, but I want to build a courthouse in Louisiana.
So we'll trade favors, right?
And so the government becomes so powerful.
They say, well, let's have an income tax.
Okay, 1%, good.
2%, good.
Now, you live in California, 60% of your income.
It doesn't make any sense, right?
The government is in charge of your pocketbook.
They're in charge of everything.
But it got that way because of prosperity.
So the Asians, some of the Asian sects, they say that a successful man, when he turns 56, 60 years old, he says, okay, good.
I'm going to become a monk now.
It makes some sense.
The question is, how do you correct for the accelerated decay of age?
Because people will decay in age.
All human endeavor decays with age.
Where's ancient Greece?
Where's Rome?
Great Britain was the greatest power in the history of the world in August of 1914.
Where were they four years later?
That's inevitable.
So what the conservatives are saying is, we don't know, but we got a good guide.
That guide is called the Constitution.
Let's go back to this simple 20-page document about how the country should be read, and let's stick to it, because that got us here.
Who would have thought that those were going to be the politicians?
Well, everybody who wrote the Constitution thought that.
And everybody who ever read the Bible thought that, because that's what happens when people have power.
So I thought, but wait a second, these people, you know, these people in high office, is it possible that they had the power to warp a civilization so that we dealt with prosperity through fear?
Because that's what we see around us all the time.
It's called anger, the anger of the left.
It's not anger, it's really fear.
Is it pos why would these people are idiots, right?
You know, I'm not going to mention any names, but you people can fill in your own, they're idiots who say that we have to get out of Afghanistan and leave everything there, or we have to give Iran the nuclear bomb, or that we have to stop digging for oil, though we're going to import oil, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
They're fools.
What happened was not that they caused the decay of the civilization.
What happened was that the civilization went through a transition and they came out of the woodwork.
But we remember lovingly that one good teacher that we might have met, but we remember with shame and hatred the teacher who abused us, who humiliated us, who dissed us, who called us stupid.
We remember those all our lives.
We always have that dream.
Every human American anyway, has that dream about, I forgot to do my homework.
What shall I do?
I have to kill myself, right?
Teachers, down through history, at least through Western history, have a lower middle class.
They don't have very high skills.
And Milton Friedman said if you took the same skills that a teacher has in a public school into the workplace, he might make 55% of what he makes.
And they're treated as if they were treated as if they were good and powerful and hardworking.
Well, maybe a few are, but they aren't any better or worse than you and me.
But they're kind of at the bottom of the food chain socially, kind of hanging on, always hanging on to the-Public school teachers.
Exactly.
And as I say, some of them have been magnificent and some haven't.
So these people have something very, they discovered something very powerful.
And what they discovered was fascism, meaning the group, right?
So they say, well, wait a second, I myself am nothing.
I got to smile at Mr. and Mrs. Smith over there and tell her how good Johnny's doing.
But I don't give a shit about that kid and I got my own problems.
Leave me alone.
They form a union.
The union becomes one of the biggest, maybe the biggest donor to the Democratic Party.
So all of a sudden, they're in charge of a large extent of the Democratic Party.
And because the Democrats, you know, being human beings, want to stay in power and want to be rich.
Okay?
So they say, well, let me kiss the ass of the teachers' union.
How can I do that?
Hmm, say the teachers' union.
You know what?
I'm tired of being powerless.
I'd like to be powerful.
I'm going to say that white people are no good.
And that's what we're going to teach.
And I'm going to call it critical race theory.
It happened to my son.
He went to school.
Yeah, that's a good idea.
Person at B says, you know what?
I got a great idea.
Kids love talking about sex.
I'm going to say that there's no such thing as men or women.
And I'm going to start teaching kindergartners there.
Like the idea behind critical race theory, I believe, was that they thought that there was a lack of either appreciation or education about the history of the United States, particularly the history of racism and slavery and Jim Crow laws and segregation and redlining and all these different aspects that have led to this disproportionate number of African Americans in prison and these crime-ridden,
gang-ridden neighborhoods and trying to come up with some sort of educational method of explaining some of the holes in our history that haven't been discussed.
The problem that rational people have about it is that with any concept, sometimes it starts with good intentions and then along the way you have bad actors who get involved and they use it for their own gain.
And they use a movement of real concern, a thing that has a genuine origin in fact in history, and then they start using it.
You know, the worst term I've heard is like you're a race hustler.
And there's a lot of people that elevate their careers by taking these ideas of critical race theory and then they get hired by universities or hired by corporations to give speeches and they wind up making exorbitant amounts of money.
And they keep making more and more inflammatory statements.
And the more outrageous these statements get, and they put them on Twitter, and they write blogs and articles and op-eds.
And these outrageous statements get a lot of heat behind them.
And then they get more and more calls for these speaking gigs.
And they wind up making a lot of money.
they make the discourse extremely toxic.
So instead of having conversations about the history of it, then it starts being all people are racist.
All people have biases, and black people can't be racist because they don't have power.
And racism is only a thing that white people can, which is ridiculous, right?
It comes from people taking an idea that has some merit and you take it to a point where people are either exaggerating or changing that idea to suit their own purposes as a speaker and as a person who reflects these ideas.
But, you know, there's thugs on both sides of the aisle, and we'd all like to make money.
My point is that it doesn't have a place in the schools.
That the schools should just, like, got a friend of mine, she's a black woman, and she was, and she took her kids out of school, eventually had to go to Catholic school because she went to school, and she was objecting to what they were teaching about.
Well, you know, when the whole George Floyd thing happened, one of the schools that my kids were going to back in California released this email saying that it's not enough to not be racist.
I'm like, these kids are not even remotely racist.
Like, they have all sorts of different kinds of friends.
I've never heard them discuss it once.
It's just, I like this person and she's nice to me and we like to play together and we both like the same things.
So to tell a nine-year-old that you have to be anti-racist, well, then they're going to go looking for racism.
And they're going to go looking to confront it.
But I don't know if it's power.
It's an ideology that captures people.
And I think the roots of it, in their mind, is good.
That is, you're going to stomp out racism.
But it's this naive person who's an educator who's, you know, I mean, I don't want to disparage anybody, but they weren't that good at what they were doing in the first place.
Like, they weren't that good at teaching in the first place.
And now here they are saying they're going to tackle something, not just tackle something as complex as race in America, but you're going to establish rules that you can't just be not racist.
You have to be anti-racist.
And you're going to teach this to a nine-year-old.
It's like, what are you saying?
Like, what exactly are you saying?
And what is your fucking end goal?
If you want to say all human beings are created equal in the eyes of love and the Lord and God and heavens and the universe, and really the differences are about climate, where people evolved, and then the differences are social, what communities they come from, and what part of the world they come from, and what their ancestors encountered and what their relatives, their mom and dad encountered, and what they've encountered in life.
And that human beings are vast resources and reservoirs of potential.
All of us.
And that brilliant people can be Asian and black and white and all kinds of things.
And that racism is stupid.
If you want to teach that, I'm all with you.
But if you want to tell my nine-year-old they have to be anti-racist.
Well, the problem is, this is the thing about censorship.
This is what I was saying when people were calling for censor.
There were some people that celebrated certain people getting removed from Twitter.
Like in the early days, it was like Milo Ioiannopoulos, then it was Alex Jones.
And I was like, hey, man, if you don't see where this is going, do you understand that once they start censoring people for what they believe is something that's objectionable, that obviously the person who said it doesn't think it's objectionable, it's going to keep going further and further, and they're going to keep moving the goalposts.
And then eventually it's going to come to you.
And you're not going to be left enough.
And you might be a really left-wing Democrat like Bill Maher.
Like, they're coming for Bill Maher all the time now.
You are on the censorship train, and there's only so many stops before it gets to your fucking house.
And that's how I feel about all this stuff.
If you want to say that human beings should be able to express themselves and we need to do it in a way that doesn't harass people or dox people or threaten people, but we have to be able to express ourselves because it's the only way we sort out what's right and what's wrong.
I'm with you.
But as soon as you start saying, I want to only hear thoughts that I agree with.
Well, that's not discourse.
That's propaganda.
You want only your side to be represented, which is crazy.
And that's what's happening on social media.
That's what's happening in Twitter.
That's what's happening in all these things.
And that's the same with everything.
That's the same with whether it's anti-racism, that's the same with corporate greed and anti-capitalism.
That's the same with when people start going after stuff, like when people start deciding that this thing that we've always accepted for so long is no longer acceptable, and now we have to attack it and we have to attack it by the parameters that I believe are just and right.
But this, I'll tell you why I know it's here because the guy who's in charge of the defending the law asked me to write a brief, a little amicus brief about free speech.
So that's what I realized about myself is the reason I'm not dead or in a mental institution or in a jointer is because of free speech.
Because I came up at a time when it was just assumed that if you could write, you could put your play on in a garage.
Maybe they'd come, maybe they didn't.
But if they did, maybe you'd put your play in a little theater.
And if they liked it, maybe you could put your play on on Broadway.
And then you could buy a car and get married.
So that's right?
Because that's in some order.
So that's the United States of America, and people died for this right forever.
And talking about racism, I'm very good friends with Shelby Steele, right?
Shelby wrote notably White Guilt, where he says black power and white guilt are the same thing.
It's just a simplistic solution to a complex problem.
And the problem needs to be addressed in terms of training, respect for police officers as well.
You know, this is a very difficult job that we need.
And if you don't think we need it, wait till something happens and you need to call a cop because there's a lot of fucking people that are like, you know, get rid of the police, get rid of the police.
And then the shit hits the fan and they need cops and then they complain about it.
They complain about the fact that the cops aren't helping them.
Well, I live in this wonderful neighborhood on the west side of L.A. and we had a shootout outside my house in the middle of the night, bang, bang, bang.
So I park at Williams-Sonoma, and I come in through the back door, the parking lot, and this woman says, excuse me, sir, did you not see that sign that says this is not an entrance, it's an exit.
You came in through the wrong side.
I said, it's okay, I'm an illegal immigrant.
She says, I find that a very, very offensive comment.
Well, that sounds like the William Sonoma thing sounds like you just caught the wrong person at the wrong time and you had the wrong joke or you didn't like it.
Well, fair to the people that are trying to get in in comparison to the people that are already here.
Like, if you talk to my grandparents, they're dead now, but if you talk to them while they're alive and ask them how hard was it to get into America, all they had to do was show up.
They showed up.
They wrote their names down.
A lot of times they changed their names, like a lot of Italian names that were too hard to pronounce.
They changed them.
And they were in.
And then they founded this country.
It's one of the things that made this country so fantastic, that you have a legitimate melting pot in the 20th century with all these people coming from all over the world trying to seek a better life and risk takers, right?
People that are willing to try out a new continent, get on a boat with their family.
And when my grandfather came over here, he was a young boy.
And to be able to do that and to establish the lineage that he has left behind in this country, it's pretty fucking cool.
It's the coolest country in that regard is that we're all immigrants.
Everybody here.
There's no like, you know, if you go to China, generally speaking, Chinese people look Chinese.
You know, that's just, they're from China.
You're dealing with thousands of years of genetics and the same people living in the same area and a billion of them now.
And America's everybody.
America's people from Africa, from Ireland, Scotland, and Mexico.
But it's fucking hard to get in now if you're a poor person from another country that wants a better life.
You have to show that you have something that we don't have here.
Like you have to show that you have some sort of a special skill.
What is that allowing people to come in through the southern border?
Do you think that what's going on, and this is the argument that I've heard, is two things are happening.
One, like in New York City, the mayor, I believe Eric Adams said that he believes that illegal immigrants should be allowed to vote, which is fascinating.
It's a fascinating thing to say.
Because as soon as you say that, and then you're also letting people in, they know that the people that are allowing them to vote are people in the Democratic Party.
So you're basically allowing people to come in, because those are the people that are interested in allowing people to come in illegally, right?
Those are the ones that don't fight it.
And then once they're in, you want them to be able to vote.
So you're essentially saying, hey, we got you in.
You know who to vote for because we're the people that let you in.
And you've got a built-in, like you've got a, it's a beautiful thing in their eyes because you've got this built-in voter base now.
Listen, Social Security started out as an interim program to deal with the elderly who didn't have any savings during the Depression.
So now we have all of this money paid into Social Security, social security.
It's not there anymore.
It's all been spent.
So the only way that Social Security can function is to indenture the future.
Unemployment insurance existed at the beginning to help somebody who lost their job in the period before they got the next job.
So now it exists to keep somebody on unemployment insurance for two years so they don't work.
You know, if I was a kid and that's all that I knew, I'd do it too.
You know, the aid-to-dependent children started to help mothers who didn't have babies, who didn't have a wage earner around, that they were young, they were single mothers, they didn't have a wage earner around.
So then it became evident two things, that the more children you had out of wedlock with no man in the house, the more money you got.
And the only way you could keep on getting that money was if the man was out of the house.
So the men left.
Now this is not specific to the black community, but it's endemic.
Same thing happened in the Jewish community.
When my grandparents' generation came over in the 20s, about a third of the men just left, including my grandfather, just couldn't take it anymore.
They couldn't take the shock of immigration and the new language.
They just left.
And so my dad was raised by a single mom in the Depression.
That's not a good way to do very well, but it's not a good way to bring up kids.
So when you've got no man in the house and women having a lot of babies because they get more money, you know.
Okay, so now you look around and you say, well, wait a second, the inner cities, there seems to be more crime.
Well, there is more crime because there's more gangs, right?
It's not that the people are depraved, or that's not racism to say so.
It's true.
It's unfortunate, but it's true.
So what's one way that you turn it around?
Is you let the people in the inner cities choose their own schools.
Because the teachers' union has always sent the worst teachers to the black neighborhoods, always.
And they're still doing it, right?
So if the school has the worst teachers in the world and they're teaching the young kids, you know, you've been put upon and you're a victim, you're perpetuating the death of the inner cities.
When Trump comes along and says, you know what, let's stop that.
Let's have school choice.
Parents should be able to pick where their kids go to school.
And let's incentivize people to put industry in the inner cities and give everybody a job.
So the parents, the Democrats say, no, no, terrible idea.
That's racist.
How dare you say that?
No, no, no.
Parents shouldn't be able to pick where to put their children to school.
What if the parents make the wrong choice?
But if the parents can't make that choice, the kids are going to be raised on the street to a largest extent.
Not that they can't get up.
It's going to be very, very difficult for them to get out.
But don't you think there's a lot of people that have alternative views that just don't know how to express them because they're worried about being rejected by their peers?
I can't over-recommend my friend Shelby Steele's books because he's devoted his life, the black man's devoted his life, and he's a very close associate of Tom Soule, to understanding the problem, the heartbreaking problem of his people.
I'm a Jew, so I got the heartbreaking problem of my people.
He's got the heartbreaking problem of his.
I don't understand the specific problem, but I understand the phenomenon.
So he was talking in a black community in Los Angeles the other day, and they said, what can we do?
If you said this, if a kid had actually worked for his living at any point, and you said, guess what?
You want to spend four years in college?
Okay.
Take the skills you now have and earn that money.
Go out and see what it takes to earn the amount of money.
To earn a quarter of a million dollars and then see, having earned it, if you want to spend it on listening to some idiot talk about deconstruction, right?
Because they don't go to college to learn some idiot, have some idiot talk about deconstruction.
Nobody knows why they go to college.
They go to college, I'm sure, to get high and to get laid, have a good time.
Of course, physics and biology, but physics and biology are also being ruined by the left with the people being taught in biology that it's an open question what a man or what a man or what a woman is.
I mean, that's insane.
I'll tell you a Boombo Mancini story.
So Bumbo Mancini, my good friend, champion of the world, one of the great boxers of all time, comes out to, and I made a couple of movies with him.
He comes out to Los Angeles and he goes to creative artist agencies.
And he says, I'd like you to represent me.
I'm champion.
You know who I am.
I'm Boombo Mancini.
Ray Boombu Mancini.
They say, well, you want to be an actor and stuff.
He says, yes, I do.
They say, well, you know, we can't take on a new client unless he can make a million dollars a year.
So Ray says, well, what's your commission on that?
Guy says, $100,000.
Ray says, okay, I'll write you a check right now, $100,000 to represent me for a year.
Guy says, well, I can't do that.
Ray says, well, then you're full of shit.
And he leaves.
So the question is, what are you actually getting from a degree?
That's like you're giving someone money to represent you.
That's not what an agency does.
The agency's, the whole idea is it's predicated on the idea that they're going to seek work for you, and then they're going to take a percentage of that work.
If they just take the money up front, they have zero incentive to do any work for you.
Yeah, if that's real, but if they don't have any faith in you in the first place, you just gave them $100,000 for no reason.
It's like to them, that's their way of saying they're not that interested because there's no history of you being successful in this world.
And that makes sense.
If someone comes along and says, I'll give you $100,000, but that takes away the incentive.
The whole idea of agents getting a percentage is they now have an incentive to go seek work for you because if they can get you $100,000, they're going to get $10,000 out of that.
And that's the whole business model.
If someone comes along and says, I'll give you all the money up front, they're like, for what?
Now I don't have any incentive because I got your money.
And I don't think you're going to get any work anyway because you have no history of working in this business.
Like, the guy was so fed up with, because he was a crazy person working for David Spade, got fed up with David Spade and decided he was going to kill him.
He had like duct tape.
Remember that story?
Yeah, like he was going to duct tape him and wound up tasering him.
Wild shit, but I was like, you don't want an assistant.
You don't want someone that's just like in your business all the time and a part of your work.
But, I mean, there are circumstances where people are down on their luck, and it'd be great if the government stepped in in a good faith effort to try to help those people get back on their feet and move forward.
But we've had 60 years of welfare, and we've had three generations of people living on welfare.
So it's a good idea that it has some bad consequences.
And the problem with government is not that they don't get good ideas.
But once in a while, they do.
You know, a blind pig can find a truffle.
The problem is that if the idea turns out to be bad, they never fix it, ever, because with the idea comes power.
But welfare may have been a good idea at the beginning.
Okay, I don't know, maybe so.
It seems humane.
But if it doesn't work, if it leads to poverty, if it leads to violence, if it leads to broken homes, the government has gotten so much power from expanding welfare that they're going to keep expanding it.
So you think the government has got so much power from expanding welfare because in expanding welfare, they put it out there that these people who want welfare and they want that money to keep going and you've got to vote Democrat.
If you vote Democrat, they're the ones who want to continue these programs.
The reason why I'm talking about this is because my family was on welfare when I was a kid, and they worked their way out of it.
When I was a young boy, when I was seven, from age, I think seven to like maybe 11 or something like that, my family was on welfare.
We were on food stamps.
We're poor, and they worked out of that.
They got to San Francisco when I was a young kid, and we didn't have any money.
And my mom was working, and my stepdad was going to college, and it was a hard time.
And through welfare, we were able to get by.
And then they eventually did well, and they eventually became well off.
And my stepdad formed a business, and it was super successful and did real well.
But I remember being a kid and being on welfare.
And so I've always had a soft place in my heart for these social safety nets because it was responsible for feeding us when I was a kid.
I don't think it's all bad.
And I think if done correctly, in good faith, with good intentions, to eventually wean yourself off the system and use it as something that can help you get back on your feet, I think there's a great benefit to it.
And I'm happy to pay taxes if I can provide families with the same sort of benefit that I experienced in my family experience when I was a boy.
But the difference in my thinking is that because I've been involved in a couple of philanthropic ideas and a couple of money raising ideas and so forth.
That what about if you took the taxes that you paid and said rather than giving it to the government, which is going to waste most of it in administration and waste the rest of it, waste most of it in administration, waste a lot in waste, where did it go, and waste some of it in theft so that very little is going to trickle down.
But if you said, you know, geez, I got, you know, whatever, five million bucks, here's what I'm going to do.
I'm going to open a soup kitchen myself, and I'm going to keep an eye on the soup kitchen, and I'm going to make sure that the soup is good, and I'm going to make sure that the people, I'll talk to the people, say, what do they need?
When you get to a place like a shore in there, like New York City, something like that, with millions and millions and millions of people, it's so hard to think of that as a community.
Well, it's not a community, you know, but there's a certain size behind which it's impossible to go and have everybody know the same, everybody's name.
It's the size of like an infantry company, the size of a Klan, the size of a movie set.
Everybody knows each other.
Well, that used to be in the absence of everything else.
That used to be the neighborhood.
The neighborhoods are gone now.
And so the question is, how do we reconstruct them?
And I don't know.
We're challenged.
But that's what we've got to do is bring back some community.
So that when I was a kid, I don't know if we knew any Republicans, but if we did, we would have talked to them.
And up until very, very recently, the Republicans and the Democrats met at the church, they met at the Scouts, they met at blah, blah, blah.
They met at work, and nobody said, oh, yeah, you're the other party.
You see a lot of people saying that we should rework the First Amendment.
Of course, tweak the First Amendment.
I've seen morons say that.
It's like, oh my God, what the fuck are you even saying?
Where does that go?
It goes the same way censorship goes on Twitter.
It keeps moving further and further.
The goal polls keep moving until you're living in an authoritarian dictatorship where anything that you say that doesn't go with the party line, you have grave consequences.
And that's the real problem with today's society when people are talking about the implementation of a centralized digital currency that the government controls.
Because what happens, the society gets, everybody gets frightened by prosperity at some point.
They used to say when I was a gambler, right, that the loser can't get enough to eat and the winner can't sleep.
All of a sudden, I mean, think about it.
You go to the casino, and all of a sudden, doink, you just won $10 million.
That guy can't go to sleep.
He doesn't know what to do with this money.
Does he deserve it?
Is somebody going to steal it?
He puts it underneath the couch.
He puts it in the safe.
He says, maybe I'll go down and maybe I'll go down and lose it.
So the people who are frightened by prosperity, who don't have some gratitude to their forebears, to their parents, to their church, to the country, to God, can't let people call attention to their fear.
Anything which causes attention to their fear has to be killed.
But if they looked at the models, it doesn't show that we're doomed.
If they look at the worst-case scenario models of climate change, it's not good.
But it doesn't mean the human race is doomed.
There's no one saying that.
Not only that, if you look at the model, like I've had multiple discussions on this podcast about it, and I'm a believer in climate change.
I should say that.
I'm a believer that there's a real problem with fossil fuel production and what we're doing in terms of the environment and particulates in the atmosphere and coal-burning power plants that have destroyed cities where you get like a fucking fine mist of coal dust over people's cars and people breathing that, a host of health problems that come along with those things.
But there's no models that show that like within our lifetime or our children's lifetime that the earth is fucked.
So let's start from the beginning of this round of yours, and let's concentrate first on censorship.
Censorship is a key part of your book, and it's a key part of some of the problems that we're facing today.
The right feels disproportionately censored because the tech people are almost universally left-wing.
That's one of the more fascinating things about these gigantic social media companies.
I mean, there are some companies that are coming up, like Rumble and Gab and Mines that don't share this same sort of ideology that the people on Twitter and Facebook and a lot of these other places they have this idea that these are private companies and they should be able to govern them by their own rules.
And in doing so, one of the things they do is censor things that they think are objectionable or that they don't want on their platform.
And disproportionately, that favors people on the left and criticizes people on the right.
It's a real problem.
And it's also a problem in that it, in many ways, fuels extremism.
Because if you do have extremism and you kick them off your platform, they're going to go somewhere else and they're going to go see they are against us.
And they're going to team up and then they'll be more hardened in their efforts or more galvanized in their approach.
What can be done?
What do you think can be done?
Other than like Elon Musk today, it was announced that he bought 9% of Twitter.
So Elon Musk is now the number one shareholder in Twitter.
It's incredibly important for a free democracy and a functional government and a functional society where people get to communicate about ideas.
You need to have free speech.
You need to be able to figure out what's right and what's wrong.
And one of the best ways is to let people discuss things.
Of course.
And this is a problem with the social media sites that are not just simply a private company.
You could say Twitter is just a private company, but I think that's a crazy way to say it's an unprecedented experiment in human history where one entity has an enormous portal to the discourse in not just America, but the world.
The amount of communication and the amount of information that gets distributed and the amount of debate that happens on Twitter is unprecedented.
There's never been anything like it.
You could say the same thing about YouTube.
You could say the same thing about Facebook.
These are unprecedented new entities in civilization.
It's not as simple as these are private companies.
Nothing has ever existed like this that has the kind of impact and the kind of influence.
So I believe my position is they should be treated like utilities.
And I think if you do something horrendous, if you dox people or hack into their accounts and put all their nudie pictures online or whatever horrible shit you want to do, if you threaten people's lives and call to attack people and try to organize people, attack people, that's one thing.
Barring that, I think all ideas should be open to discussion, all ideas that are in good faith.
And then when people don't have good faith ideas, those are the type of people you shouldn't communicate with.
You should ignore them.
But the worst thing that we can do is just start deciding what can and can't be discussed when people disagree about that.
If you say, nope, I'm in control.
This is my private company, and I'm not going to allow you to discuss certain political ideologies or social ideas.
But the law in the United States has always been you can say whatever you want except advocating violent overthrow of the United States government.
It's in the Constitution.
Now you've got people on the left who are advocating violent overthrow of the United States government, but you can't say that there's no difference between that there's a difference between men and women.
So free speech doesn't mean you have the right to say happy birthday.
Free speech means you have the right to say anything you want except violent incitement to treason.
And it's completely under attack.
And it's been, I was so thrilled to find out that there were people who, you know, on podcast and on AM radio and a couple of other outlets who had the capacity to stand up and say, you know what?
No.
So of course it should be a public utility.
But the same organism which brought up Twitter also created the podcast, so thank God.
So all you can do is, you know, as they say, put on the armor of God and stand fast, to stand up for what you believe in and say, yeah, you know, I get it.
There may be a cost for speaking my mind, but it's not as great to me at this moment on this subject as the cost of not speaking my mind.
It's so important for trying to solidify your own ideas or trying to figure out why you think the way you think, or maybe someone will say something that completely shifts.
If you have a good open mind, and I pride myself on having as open a mind as possible, when I see a good debate and someone says something that goes against what I thought I believed, but I start agreeing with them, it's a fascinating moment because you get a chance to examine all these thoughts that you have bouncing around your head and go, oh, I think I know why I thought this.
Oh, I was under the impression that this was the case.
But in fact, there's more to the story.
And those kind of discussions are being fucking silenced.
That's right.
And it drives me crazy.
It drives me crazy because I feel like I'm very fortunate.
And then I snuck in before people realized how big podcasts could be.
And I think that's the same thing in many ways with Twitter, but they have control over this centralized sort of portal to information.
And they're doing things to try to censor it and move it along and move it in the way that they would like it to be.
But they didn't do that with podcasts.
Podcasts just got out.
And then people just started developing followings and have this ability to have conversations with anybody.
And then you see people saying, you shouldn't platform this person.
We need to decide this person needs to be taken off the air.
Because talking to a liberal, like I was talking to some guy and he said, well, you know, I said, Dr. King, we have two American saints, right?
Dr. King and Abraham Lincoln.
They lived and died to fight racism.
I said, Dr. King, the most famous speech after Lincoln is this I Have a Dream speech, where a person would be judged by the content of the character rather than the color of the skin.
This person's a white liberal said, Well, you know, if Dr. King had been alive today, he would have come around to the opposite view.
And I thought, what?
You know, if Hitler had been alive today, he might have become a rabbit.
So do you think the people that are saying we should revamp the Constitution, they believe the Constitution offers protection for things that they feel are questionable and need to be eradicated from society?
Well, I think, again, during the Trump administration, I think there was a lot of people that felt like we have to stop this from ever happening again.
To stop a guy like him from ever getting to a position of power because the way he communicates is so aggressive and bombastic and so contrary to what we think of when we think of a statesman, when we think of a leader of the free world.
We don't want that kind of person in power who insults people and says rude things and talks about himself in a very braggadocious manner and that this is negative and that he has this horde of followers that will just believe anything he says and start cheering for him with these rallies and we don't like it.
I think, you know, I grew up, my dad, they were all involved.
My dad was a labor lawyer, and I knew my friends of mine, their parents were involved with Saul Lelinsky and, you know, all the, you know, when I grew up in Jesse Jackson was in my neighborhood and all that race baiting and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So I grew up in the turbulent 60s and I grew up in the theater.
So I didn't know a conservative.
And so I grew up with people saying, oh, Barry Goldwater, you may remember.
Barry Goldwater is a wonderful man.
He loved Arizona.
He was a committed outdoors.
He didn't want to be a politician, but he was.
And he said of the Vietnam War, and this is a combat pilot.
He understood war.
He said, bomb them back to the Stone Age or get out tomorrow.
Meaning, get out tomorrow.
If you aren't prepared to fight a war, for God's sake, stop killing people and get out.
They had 400 psychiatrists who wrote into the New York Times and signed a letter saying he is a psychotic.
So that was Barry Goldwater.
William Buckley, so he's a psychotic.
He's the John Birch Society.
Ronald Reagan, he's a jumped-up actor, blah, blah, blah.
So then I wrote a book.
I wrote a book about this.
I do a lot of thinking about my wonderful poor people, the Jews.
And I wrote a book called The Wicked Son called Judaism, Self-Loathing, and Anti-Semitism.
And I wrote this book and I thought it was a fairly straightforward understanding of what was going on with the Jews.
And another writer read a manuscript and she said, oh my God, wait till you see what the left is going to do to you.
And I said, well, like Sarah Solomon, I said, what do you mean the left is going to mean I am the left, right?
I'm a congenital Democrat.
I am the left.
There's nothing objectionable in here.
So then the thing started to fray.
And then I wrote a political play, and the New York Times came, it was a comedy.
It's pretty fucking funny.
I wrote a political play, and the New York Times said, oops, guess what?
Okay, the political play there with Nathan Lane on Broadway is hysterically funny.
It's about a president who's the worst president of all time, and he's getting voted out of office, and he's got like two weeks to earn enough money to jack up his campaign.
No one's going to give him any money because they say his numbers are lower than Gandhi's cholesterol.
So it's about to be Thanksgiving.
And every Thanksgiving, the president pardons two turkeys, right?
And they put them on national television and they walk through Disney.
It's a big deal.
I pardon the turkey.
So the president gets this idea.
He says, I want the head of the National Association of Turkey Manufacturers in my office in an hour.
So the national, the turkey guy shows up and the president says, I want $300 million.
I'm going to pardon every fucking turkey in the United States of America.
So it's all about him shaking down the turkey administration.
It's hysterically funny.
So I wrote an article for The Village Voice about political debate.
And I said, we're in the midst of having some unfortunately heated political debates.
Why can't we debate with political civility?
It's called political civility.
I said, for example, I used to refer to myself, I've always referred to myself as a brain-dead liberal.
I said, this is not even being civil to myself.
Wonderful, recent article.
Village Voice comes out on Monday.
The whole front page, Why I Am No Longer a Brain-Dead Liberal by David Mammot.
There's no refuting to the people that don't believe, but there is, you can express yourself in a way that reasonable people can see your point and they get it.
That's sort of the rotten tomatoes thing is really fascinating to me because it's shown the difference in the real, the very clear difference between the way critics look at things, where a lot of them are sort of ideologically captured, like very overwhelmingly left-wing, versus the way the audience looks at things.
You know, like my friend Dave Chappelle's special, Sticks and Stones, when that came out, that was one of them where they showed the difference between Rotten Tomatoes version of it and the Rotten Tomatoes where the critics had looked at it and gave it like 4% or something like that.
And then the most recent one, The Closer, is the best one.
Because when it first came out, I think it was like something crazy.
It's insanely low Rotten Tomato score by the critics, but insanely high Rotten Tomato score by the general public.
And there were two guys when I was very active in New York Theater that were John Simon and Frank Rich were the theater critics for respectively New York Magazine and the New York Times.
And they would come to the openings every opening and they would go down to the bottom of the aisle right by the curtain before the show and they would turn around and they would look out at the audience and gossip.
So they were in effect saying, oh, guess who the show is tonight, folks?
It's us too.
So I wrote an article that said John Simon and Frank Rich are the gonery and syphilis of American theater.
Because I was exposed to the difference between what I thought I thought and what I really thought.
Because I realized that a lot of things I thought I thought, I wasn't operating in that way.
You know, I might have said that wealth is bad, but I wanted more, right?
I knew that there was a lot of prejudice against Jews, and I knew there was a lot of prejudice against black, but the question was, what's the responsibility of a human being in this situation?
Was it to give more money to, quote, social programs?
Well, in his words, and I got to agree with him, he's a black guy, I'm not.
Because people would say, wait a second, we're all in the same boat.
Well, let's work for a living.
And the same thing that I went through when you went through.
Unless we say that somehow, look, there's two groups in the United States that have always, well, one group for 150 years, another group for 60 years, have been under government control by accepting government largesse.
And from having worked a long time with kids, especially young men, it's real easy to warp them, right?
If you take, like, I know a lot of young men of my son's age who went to these colleges and they get out and their parents say, well, I got to give them a little bit of money.
And it's extraordinary how little money it takes to warp a young man.
Whether that young man has just gotten out with a degree in philology from Dartmouth or the young man has just joined a gang on the streets, the same thing.
It's a hard transition to become a man.
It's probably a hard transition to become a woman.
I wouldn't know.
But it's a hard transition.
And young men, I did, and probably you did too, looked at the gap.
They said, geez, you know, I'm young.
I'm not very strong.
I don't know how I'm going to get a job.
I don't know how I'm going to get a wife.
I don't know how to get a car.
I don't get it.
I can't make that transition.
But you make it little by little.
But if someone says, you know, son, you got out of Dartmouth, here's $1,000 a week.
You know, I can't even say Republican because the Republicans were the people when I was a kid who wore white pants and white shoes and lived at the— So what do you identify as a kid?
Because I'd like to conserve, just as my own life has reached a stage where I'd love to be able to go on and enjoy some of the fruits and engage in some contemplation.
I would like the life of my beloved country to continue in maturity, which it can't do as it could in adolescence, in maturity as an honorable, decent place to live with liberty and justice for all.
Because not only did that thigh, the movies are dead.
The whole idea of movies was, I'm going to get my best gal and my best boy and blah, dah, dah, and we're going to go out on a Friday, Saturday night.
We're going to sit in the dark.
We're going to eat popcorn.
And there's the people that are 20 feet high.
They're like gods.
We're going to have the best possible time.
And if I don't like that movie, I'll see another movie, blah, blah, blah.
But now the movies are being played on this, right?
And the movies have become so corporate, you know, just like Twitter, that all the decisions, they aren't being made by some, you know, the people I grew up with, you know, ancient Jews like me smoking a cigar, said, yeah, it seems like a good idea, go make it.
They're being made by 30 people sitting around a board table, you know, playing silly buggers and pig Latin with each other's pronouns, right?
I get it.
You know, things mature and things die.
Who would have thought that Kodak would go out of business?
So when I was starting out in the theater, I had a blessing.
I started out in a garage, you know, with William H. Macy and Joe Montagna and Dennis Franz and Billy Peterson, people who became John Malkovich, the people who became huge stars.
We just were working in a garage because we could.
And then we eventually moved to Broadway and got some credibility because we could.
But if you can't, if you can only start off by entering at the corporate level, what are you going to do?
For example, the people who made the chop shops in Southern California, right?
They took cars and they said, wow, this would be a good idea.
Let's take the blazer and cut the roof off.
I tell you what, let's take this Jeep and raise the funders.
Let's take blah, blah, blah.
Those were guys in a garage, just like I would meet John Melcovich in the garage, and all those ideas got adopted by GM, right?
Where they looked at this marvelous invention, saying, well, that's a good idea.
I'll do that.
And so this year, last year, Ford bought out another Bronco.
But if you take a degree in automotive design and get hired by Ford, you're going to be designing taillights for 10 years, right?
So where's the individual initiative?
It's not going to exist, as Milton Friedman says, until you give the people with inspiration a reason to reveal it.
You know, who wants to make a film that's not going to be financial?
Nobody ever did.
You know, sometimes the film was so expensive it didn't matter anymore.
The bottleneck is the corporation which controls the high ground or the method of distribution.
That's the bottleneck.
And okay, over a hundred years, vaudeville died, and then there was radio, and then radio died, and then there was television, and then the movies, and then television, then the television drove out the movies, the movies are dead, and television becomes streaming.
So the method of distribution, I hate to sound like a Marxist, is determining the content, right?
So if somebody, so you say, okay, I want to, rather than saying, honey, let's go out and see if there's anything with Clint Eastwood in it, you say, no, no, no, I bought a subscription, right?
What's on my subscription series?
What can I get on Netflix?
So they're turning out sausages.
Of course they are.
But the movies were turning out sausages too to the largest extent.
You're slowly educating yourself to these different ideas and those ideas resonate with you more than the ideas you had previously accepted, maybe because you hadn't examined those?
In terms of film, in terms of television, in television, it's almost 100%.
I mean, it's in the high 90s, other than like Fox, Fox News, right?
That's probably the only thing on television that you can point to that's clearly conservative is Fox News channel.
Everything else, like shows and television shows, there's so many left-wing-leaning production houses and so many left-wing-leaning Democrats that are working as executives and as writers and as producers.
If you're a person, like there's very few people that are Republicans or that are right-wing or conservatives that are openly conservative and talk about it openly and talk about politics openly that exist in Hollywood.
They just, you get like John Voigt, right?
But he's kind of on the way out.
You know, he's done a million movies, a legend, has been around forever.
He doesn't give a fuck anymore.
And he's been, you know, talking about his right-wing ideas for a long time.
But other than him and Clint Eastwood, who the fuck else is there?
So in the codependent family, if daddy is schlipping little Susie, right?
The problem is not in that family, if they're codependent, that little Susie is getting sexually abused.
The problem is that one must never draw attention to the fact.
Because if anyone says, wait a second, daddy is schlipping little Susie, the family breaks up.
It's all over.
So when you're kids, you say, oh my God, this is the thing that has to be, it's the worst thing in the world, that the family would break up.
So maybe he's not really blah, blah, little Susie, or maybe she's asking for it, or maybe I'm wrong, but you can't allow the possibility to come out of your mouth.
So that's the same thing with the left.
They're codependent.
They're living a life that doesn't stand up to the test of reason.
And it's destructive.
But they can't allow any alternative to come to their consciousness, let alone out of their mouth.
Because if it comes to the consciousness, they're a hypocrite who wants to be a hypocrite.
So what they do is they become arrogant.
And they say, it's not that I'm a hypocrite, it's that you're wrong.
There's also a genuine fear of losing your income, right?
There's a genuine fear of being kicked out of the community.
Absolutely.
I've experienced that with many friends where they would talk about their ideas that they have that might be right-wing or more conservative, and that they can't talk about it on sets, and they can't talk about it.
But there's a lot of strength to be gained from examples.
And one example that I took a lot of strength from is gay liberation, because I grew up in a gay business with a theater, right, surrounded by gay people who were all closeted because they had to be in that time, right?
And I can't imagine the hell that that was, because their choice was either to shut up or to come out and perhaps lose your income.
It happened with Stonewall, and they said, wait a second, it's not my problem that I'm gay.
That's what I am.
It's your problem.
You have to deal with that.
I don't.
And so what we saw in this transformation in 50 years has become part of the culture, which is a really good thing about the way the culture has aged in the last 50 years.
And another good thing is the way that being black has aged in the last 50 years among the majoritarian white culture, where they say, wait a second, I get it.
Slavery was bad, blah, blah, blah.
Not only has slavery been over, not only has segregation been over, we're going to go too far in the other direction and blah, blah, blah.
But there's no more lynching and there's no more church burnings, right?
And there's no more people.
Look at white actors have a very, very difficult time now because it's hard for them to get hired in the business.
That's unfortunate.
But on the other hand, black actors had to put up with it for 100 years.
It's understandable.
Is it equality?
Maybe, yes, maybe no, but it's completely understandable.
Anybody who had anything ever to deal with the government went home weeping, right?
Because the government is of necessity forced.
That's all that a government is.
They have the capacity to force you to do certain things.
So what the Constitution says is let's limit that capacity only to force you to do things which promote the general defense, provide for the common welfare, and get the blessings of prosperity for you and your progeny.
That the government is good for, the post office, the army, the navy, the roads and the source.
That's it.
It does those things well because everybody, as Milton Friedman said, everybody needs them, but nobody can pay for them.
So when the government decides to do something other than that, something that everybody needs and nobody can pay for, right?
All that they can do is do something nobody needs, right?
Like a train to nowhere or like a diversity department, right?
Because the great blessing of capitalism is if people needed it, somebody would supply it.
If nobody's supplying it, it means that nobody needs it.
So what I realized was, and this is Milton Friedman's great contribution.
He said when he was tutoring doctoral students for the thesis at the University of Chicago, he said, when you submit your thesis for a doctorate in economics at the University of Chicago, it can't be longer than 500 words.
It's kind of brilliant.
So what I realized is you've got a pad of paper and a pencil and a kitchen table.
If it doesn't work at the kitchen table, it's not going to work at the governmental level.
There's no magic.
What did I earn?
What did I spend?
Was it a good idea?
What should I do next?
What do I learn from my mistakes?
That's it.
That's how we all run our lives.
Except when you give the power to the government, the government says, Well, I'm doing good for people, so fuck you.
I'm going to run you.
I'm going to teach your children about sex.
I'm going to teach your children about race.
I'm going to have a diversity department.
I'm going to, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
That's inevitable because you put people in power, they're going to use it.
So, this book, you start writing this book, and this book sort of outlines the way you feel with all the problems that you feel are happening today in the society with censorship, with the decay, the moral foundation, decay of society.
Like, what is your, like, when you sat out to do this?
Like, why did you, why did you put it together in book form?
But when you read the toys, I say I read the Bible every day, read the Torah.
The Jews are crazy, right?
So it's Jews as, to a largest extent, the progenitors of Western civilization, right?
The Abrahamic religions, right?
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, all come out of this one tradition.
But Moses takes the Jews out of Egypt, and the first thing they do is they say, fuck you.
I want to go back.
I don't like it here.
Weren't there enough graves in Egypt?
Why do you bring us out here to die in the desert?
We have nothing to eat.
So Moses says, well, what's your favorite food?
They say, quail.
So it rains down quail.
And they eat the quail until they say the quail comes out of their nose.
So then they come back to Moses.
They say, you know, we're tired of quail.
I'm really tired of quail.
He says, okay, I'm going to give you this other stuff.
It's called manna.
It's going to fall, and you gather it up, and it's going to taste like whatever is your favorite food that day.
They get tired of manna.
So from the moment that Moses takes them out of Egypt, they don't want to leave, until Moses dies, which is the end of the story, they want to kill Moses.
They're nuts.
The people are fucking nuts.
They see Moses part the Red Sea.
He takes them out of Egypt.
Pharaoh's army gets drowned.
God appears in fire on the mountain.
Moses says, okay, guys, wait here.
I'm going to be back in 40 days.
I want to talk to the big fellow.
You know who I'm not talking about, right?
The big fellow.
Yes, right.
I'm going to go up the mountain and talk to the big fellow.
He's a half an hour late coming down, and they've torn off all their clothes, and they've made this molten calf, and they're worshiping the molten calf.
They just saw God.
Moses says, what the fuck?
These people are nuts.
And throughout the Torah, either he's saying to God, let me get rid of these people and start again, and God says no.
Or God said, I'll tell you what, Moses, you get rid of the people, we'll start again, and Moses says no.
But the Torah, the Jewish Bible, is the history of human insanity.
That's what it is.
And that's why it's a great idea to study it, because everything you see in the Torah, you're seeing around you and in yourself every day.
So the answer is, is it going down the drain or we had a place of, listen, in 1914, the people in England could not have foreseen what was going to happen to them with six months.
They They came back to a world they couldn't foresee.
The people in 1939, World War II, they came back to a world we couldn't foresee.
And the same thing has happened with the computer, the growth of the computer.
This is the hugest upheaval.
It's more than any war.
It's the hugest upheaval in human history.
But it starts with Adam.
It's inevitable that if you've got enough leisure, I don't know if 5,000 monkeys will write Shakespeare, but it's inevitable that Alan Turing and Bill Gates will come up with the computer age.
And the answer, the only answer I know is with gratitude, right?
Gratitude to God putting us here.
The fact that we still have it.
Listen, I'm 75.
I'm not going to go out and chase girls, in addition to being blissfully married, and try to get my name in all the papers and blah, blah, and write a million plays and make all of that money, all the stuff I did when I was young.
I'm at a different place in my life.
And the country's at a different place in its life.
But the young people are young, right?
And they're going to have to determine how to live in this society.
And one of the great things that I see in California is the Hispanic Americans, because they're religious, they love their family, they love their country, they work hard, and it's inevitable that that will yet again, once again, the Spanish land grants will become Hispanic.
And for, you know, for the one time, only, thank God, time in my life, I was stalked by the press all week.
I couldn't leave the hotel because they all wanted to say blah, blah, blah.
But one of the reasons was there's a scene in the movie where the supposed president, I guess, is talking to somebody who looks exactly like Monica Lewinsky.
If you go back, and she's wearing, she looks like Monica.
And let's talk about something serious, like this military action that was absolutely necessary and had nothing to do with distracting people from the fact that I was having sex with an intern.
My wife and Phil Hoffman, my wife, Rebecca Pidgeon, and Phil Hoffman were the stars, and Alec played.
It's called State in Maine, and it's about a movie company on location.
And they've just lost their Billy Macy's, and if they just locked their location because the star played by Alec Baldwin was founding a Girl Scout.
And so they have to come to a new town and they destroy the town in three days.
It's pretty funny.
Everybody, Sarah Jessica Parpus, Sylvia Julia Stiles, everybody's in the movie.
And there's a scene where Alec Baldwin is out getting drunk with this underage girl and he cracks up his car and the car turns over and he crawls out of the car.
Clark Gregg's in the movie.
And he says, looks around, and she's crawling out of the car and the cops are coming and she's underage.
And he turns around and he says, wow.
I thought, we're about to shoot.
So I say, hold up, stop, stop, stop.
Hold on.
I say, Alec, when you crawl out of the car, turn around, look around, and say, well, that happened.
And he did, you know, how that scene came about is Alec was supposed to play a part, I think, was eventually played by, I can't remember whom, but then he had to drop out because he had a contract with some other show.
And as often happens in Hollywood, they say, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I know that you're done shooting, but we have you under contract for two more months.
We might have to do reshoots.
So I had to write him out.
cast somebody else.
But then the contract finished and they said, yeah, you're done.
You're You can go do the movie.
So Alec comes back.
He says, you know, what can I, I'm so heartbroken.
I said, what can I do?
He says, write me another scene.
So I did.
So that scene, which doesn't occur in the play, I wrote for Alec, too.
I had dinner with Hickson and his son and his wife once, and he was talking about they were trying to get him to fight Fedor, which would have been incredible.