April 14, 2017 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:11:18
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unidentified
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(upbeat music) | |
| (upbeat music) | ||
| Everyone seems to know everything about everything these days. | ||
| I don't mean that people just seem to have an opinion on any given topic, which of course is great, and that's what free speech is all about. | ||
| Instead, what I'm talking about here is the constant and endless stream of people pretending that they know exactly how to run the world if only everyone would listen to them. | ||
| The Iran nuclear deal? | ||
| Well, that anime Twitter fox who knows all about enriched uranium. | ||
| How to destroy ISIS? | ||
| Your unemployed cousin knows exactly how to demolish them. | ||
| The best way to administer health care? | ||
| Your mom's friend on Facebook who can't figure out how to unlock her iPad has finally figured out how to make single payer work. | ||
| This constant expression of fake knowledge is partly a function of social media, which rewards us for quick hits and maximum snark, but it's also a function of something that's been built into us since our beginning, the human ego. | ||
| Ego is constantly rewarded in this crazy world we live in. | ||
| Do you think the rise of Trump might have had a little something to do with ego? | ||
| Clearly Trump understands the way we all connect to a powerful personality and he uses that power in every interaction that he has, be it Via speech, meeting or on Twitter. | ||
| But beneath this connection seems to be the fragile ego of a child who must lash out anytime they hear anything not to their liking. | ||
| By the way, I don't think a politician using the persuasive power of personality is something new as far as the presidency is concerned. | ||
| While Trump is a particularly interesting case of ego in the White House, let's not pretend that Barack Obama, with his promises of hope and change, didn't have one as well. | ||
| Or Bill Clinton, who was a master at making every person in the room feel like they were the only person he cared about. | ||
| While there isn't a direct comparison to the charm of Obama and Clinton, to the alpha male tactics of Trump, there is an interesting through line to what types of people we respond to. | ||
| Interestingly, I'm not sure that you could say that George W. Bush falls into this strong ego bucket. | ||
| Like W or not, there was a humbleness, perhaps born of insecurity that he had, that I think the others lacked. | ||
| Of course, W had his own set of problems, but that's a whole other story. | ||
| Let me back up here for a second. | ||
| I don't think having an ego is bad. | ||
| After all, each of us has an ego in some way. | ||
| By definition, an ego is a person's sense of self esteem or self importance. | ||
| Of course, having a sense of self esteem and self importance is good overall. | ||
| Nobody wants to be walking around feeling worthless or irrelevant. | ||
| Feeling worthless isn't healthy for you, and it's not great for anyone around you either. | ||
| Of course, on the other hand, an inflated sense of importance can be dangerous too. | ||
| Here's where I have to be careful. | ||
| Many of the brightest minds in arts, sports, politics, science, and virtually every other field have an inflated sense of self-importance, and this trait is partly what helps them in achieving greatness. | ||
| I think it's fair to say that the astronomical success of people like Steve Jobs, Michael Jordan and Beyonce all have a little something to do with their sense of self importance, driven by an inflated self esteem. | ||
| The endless dedication, the hard work and the sacrifice that it takes to be a leader in your field can often be born out of ego. | ||
| To pretend this doesn't exist in the people we love and admire, or that is somehow exclusively a bad thing, would be to deny them something very human. | ||
| And by the way, I won't be presumptuous enough to think that I don't have an ego myself. | ||
| After all, I talk on camera for a living. | ||
| The ego that we all have, to various degrees, is partly what's causing such a disconnect in our conversations right now. | ||
| We judge too quickly, we jump to conclusions without evidence, and we condemn too fast, all somehow guised as a way of showing how smart and how correct we are. | ||
| I for one have no problem telling you I don't have all the answers. | ||
| I think you guys know most of my opinions on the big issues and I love sharing them with you as my opinions change, evolve or strengthen. | ||
| But on major complex issues like the Iran deal or healthcare or abortion or gun control, I don't pretend to have every answer. | ||
| Do you think that most of the so-called experts who pontificate on everything actually read the full text of the Iran deal? | ||
| I doubt that most of them did. | ||
| How many experts or even congressmen who wrote it actually fully read Obamacare or the Republican replacement? | ||
| I'm guessing some did, but it's probably a very small minority. | ||
| Instead of doing the rigorous work to figure out what's best, they instead pretend to know everything and make us feel as if only we would listen to them that we'd have a perfect society. | ||
| This is silly, lazy thinking. | ||
| Of course our mainstream news, which doles out supposed important conversations in 5 minute clips with 8 different guests all talking over each other at once, really isn't helping the situation. | ||
| And on the broader issues, like abortion or gun control, pretending that you know exactly how the law should be so that everything will work out just right for society is equally as nonsensical. | ||
| We live in a pluralistic society, and the human factor, the simple fact that we're all individuals, is proof that nothing will ever be perfect for all of us. | ||
| What we can do is limit the amount of control we have over each other, while at the same time respecting others' beliefs and the same right to property and happiness that we want others to afford to us. | ||
| Most of us want sensible answers, and being real with ourselves is the only way we're going to get there. | ||
| Saying I don't know, or I haven't decided, or I need more information shouldn't be seen as a weakness, it should be seen as a strength. | ||
| Oh and by the way, of course I'm guilty of sometimes jumping to conclusions and judging before I have the proper information. | ||
| And again, I have an ego too, one by the way which you often help me keep in check. | ||
| But I will never pretend that I have all the answers, and if I ever do, I have no doubt that you fine folks | ||
| will let me know in the comments right down below. | ||
|
unidentified
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(upbeat music) | |
| Joining me today is an actor, a producer, a director, and a good old-fashioned liberal, Mark Duplass. | ||
| Welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| I'm really looking forward to this because I feel like destiny has put us here. | ||
| How's that? | ||
| Old-fashioned liberals willing to have a conversation. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| We're sort of a dying breed here. | ||
| I think there are more of us than we think. | ||
| Probably. | ||
| But they've kind of been silenced or quiet or something. | ||
| But before we get into all that stuff, let's just do a little bit of your history and your work and stuff like that, because we're gonna go mostly into politics. | ||
|
unidentified
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Great. | |
| So, in terms of your work, what do you want people to know about you most? | ||
| And you just said to me, we don't have to do much of that promotion, but for someone tuning in that doesn't know who you are, Yeah, I mean, I think, like, I got my start in independent film, and I was making, like, little $3 movies with my brother, and started out at the Sundance Film Festival, and I really was just like a kid from the suburbs who didn't know what he was doing. | ||
| And we ended up kind of building this career kind of brick by brick. | ||
| You know, our first feature was a $15,000 movie. | ||
| And then I kind of made my way into Hollywood eventually. | ||
| And I kind of have one foot in the Hollywood system where I work as a writer and an actor, and I have one foot outside where I continue to produce and make my own movies. | ||
| And I've been in shows like The League, where a lot of people would know me from, and I ran a show for HBO called Togetherness for a while. | ||
| And, you know, basically I'm sort of like trying to find a way to be exactly who I want to be creatively inside of the Hollywood system without drowning inside of it. | ||
| Yeah, and I mean my audience knows that I find that concept fascinating because I've sort of bounced around from some kind of mainstream stuff to online stuff to now owning what I do. | ||
| And even for you that's a little more entrenched in the Hollywood system that you're trying to figure out Your way. | ||
| It's pretty cool and I've read some articles where you talk about that. | ||
| How do I build what I want and own it and feel good about it? | ||
| That's the challenge. | ||
| It is a real challenge and the industry continues to change and it's a lot like our world right now. | ||
| For whatever reason I'm headed towards this place of Ownership, where I feel like the only way for me to do exactly what I want to do creatively, maintain not only creative control, but honestly control the environments in which I work. | ||
| Work with really nice people, be able to support young people. | ||
| My brother and I are big on mentoring young talent as producers and raising them up. | ||
| Studios just don't want that. | ||
| They want a proven talent. | ||
| And so I always thought my career was gonna be start at film festivals, start independently, and that will be a stepping stone to get to Hollywood. | ||
| And once I get to Hollywood, I'm gonna be set. | ||
| And then I got here in my late 20s, and I was like, I'm set! | ||
| I'm here! | ||
| I don't like this. | ||
| This is really weird. | ||
| And strangely enough, choosing independence and choosing ownership has not only been better for me creatively, but it's actually been a lot better financially in the long run. | ||
| So we're now in this weird spot where we're kind of like, Running our own production on all of our own TV shows and movies. | ||
| We kind of work in television. | ||
| My brother works in Transparent. | ||
| I work in The League and things like that. | ||
| I make money there and I fund my own stuff. | ||
| We're like our own little studio, which is funny to me because I always joke how I really am as liberal as they come when you look at me on paper, except When you look at what I've done from a business perspective, I am at the very least a fiscal conservative, but probably more libertarian than anything else, where I'm just like, if you look at Hollywood as government, where I'm just like, get away, I don't want you in my face, let me do my thing, I know what I'm doing, I'll handle it myself. | ||
| That is a very conflicting thing with a lot of my liberal philosophies. | ||
| Isn't that interesting though, because that's sort of where the rubber meets the road. | ||
| It's like you have this idea, now you've built something, and you go, wait a minute, I either want to keep what I've earned, or I want to spend it the way I feel is right, or any of that stuff, and that's where your ideas actually get challenged. | ||
| It's 100%. | ||
| I look at a Hollywood production, and I see waste everywhere. | ||
| I'm just like, you are spending on catering, one day's catering for a Marvel movie, what I spend on a whole movie. | ||
| Literally, you're not making that up. | ||
| I'm not making that up. | ||
| I mean, the amount of money that's tossed around there. | ||
| And that drives me insane. | ||
| And I understand how conservatives look at government a lot of times. | ||
| And they're like, this makes me insane. | ||
| The inefficiency makes me insane. | ||
| So I'd rather just get rid of the whole thing. | ||
| And so I get that. | ||
| I know we don't have a whole craft services thing for you in the green room, but I thought our stats were okay. | ||
| Fiji water. | ||
| The coffee was at least a 6 out of 10. | ||
| That's Nespresso, man. | ||
| Yeah, that's pretty good. | ||
| That's the good stuff. | ||
| I'll tell you a little more about Hollywood at the end, because it kind of relates to all the politics, but politics is kind of how we got here. | ||
| I saw you on Steven Crowder, and he's a buddy of mine, and we have all our political differences, and we put those aside to come and talk, and that's exactly what you did on his show. | ||
| And immediately after, on Twitter, everyone's like, Dave, you gotta get this guy. | ||
| There's another one of you. | ||
| There's another liberal. | ||
| You were the first one that everybody said. | ||
| As soon as I went on Crowder, they're all like, you gotta go see Rubin. | ||
| All right, so here we are. | ||
| So first, let's just talk about growing up, because you mentioned this on Crowder and we spoke about it earlier. | ||
| You grew up in a Reagan household in the South. | ||
|
unidentified
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100%. | |
| Tell me about that. | ||
| I grew up in New Orleans, grew up in the suburbs, you know. | ||
| My grandfather was, you know, ninth grade education, built his laundry cleaners business by himself, pretty much sure he | ||
| stole some money to do it. | ||
| Like, we were that self-made family. | ||
| My dad was the first guy to go to college, went, you know, became a lawyer, and we were this family that was like | ||
| in-group, out-group mentality. | ||
| Talk about the America First attitude. | ||
| We were just Duplass First. | ||
| We are in our home. | ||
| We're finally financially sustainable here. | ||
| We've moved into the middle class. | ||
| And Reagan was God in our house. | ||
| It was just like, here we go. | ||
| Let's cut these taxes. | ||
| Let's take care of it. | ||
| Trickle-down economics is going to work for us. | ||
| You know, and I guess you could call that fiscal conservatism, but realizing the value of a dollar, realizing that, like, if I can just get my arms around my own business and run it my own way, we can do it. | ||
| And my father worked at a big law firm. | ||
| He split off when he was 30. | ||
| When we were very young, took the chance, started his own firm with his own money, invested in it, and built his thing. | ||
| And I have always looked to that model and thought, That feels very, very right to me, you know, in my core. | ||
| Like I said, it's very... It sounds like exactly what you're doing with yourself right now. | ||
| It is what I have done in the film business, and I really followed those footsteps, and I didn't think about it until I started to think a little bit more politically. | ||
| I started to actively look for connection points, you know, between liberals and conservatives, libertarians. | ||
| I started asking myself those questions, and I started saying, well, what do you share? | ||
| You know, what makes you not the classic elitist Hollywood libtard that everyone thinks you are? | ||
| You know? | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| We'll talk about those people in just a second. | ||
| Here's one. | ||
| You know, here's one thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's been interesting to me, because, you know, the more I talk about that with conservatives, they're like, yeah, that's me. | ||
| I look at the government the way you're looking at Hollywood. | ||
| Same thing. | ||
| Yeah, so a lot of this you're sort of awakening to this or this this sort of last couple months where you've kind of been reaching out to the other side and trying to figure out what people think and all that. | ||
| It has a lot to do with Election Day, right? | ||
| Yeah, Election Day was big for me. | ||
| You know, I've I've been not very politically involved my whole life. | ||
| I've been very Self-oriented, self-involved, in terms of like, how do I become a successful artist? | ||
| Because as you know, you're a stand-up role, it's so hard, it requires all your time and energy. | ||
| I was very insular-focused. | ||
| Having children got me a little more out of myself, and then the election pulled me way out of myself, you know? | ||
| And my first reaction, like, you know, all of my friends, and a lot of liberals out there, was just, Blind anger and fear. | ||
| And I was very upset. | ||
| I felt like we were going to take a lot of steps backwards. | ||
| And I just started screaming on Twitter. | ||
| I was doing it in funny ways with comedy. | ||
| I was doing it in incendiary ways. | ||
| I was, admittedly, grabbing headlines of things when I wasn't even fully that educated about them. | ||
| Tweeting them out and just being like, This is terrible. | ||
| And while I think that some of those opinions were and still are valid, when I honestly looked at what the outcome was, I was like, well, that's just chumming me up more closely to people who already believe like I do and creating a further divide from people who don't believe like I do. | ||
| So I was aware enough and I've been to therapy enough to know after a few weeks, this is highly not productive. | ||
| So, how can I find a way to channel some of this and do it for good? | ||
| Look, I don't really hide this. | ||
| I'm a person who has been through a lot of anxiety in my life, a lot of depression in my life. | ||
| I've been through therapy for a long time. | ||
| I've learned how to Communicate and deal with very complicated relationships. | ||
| I work with my wife. | ||
| I work with my brother, who is also my best friend. | ||
| My parents live two miles from me. | ||
| We hang out every Sunday with the whole family. | ||
| And I know, I guess, what it means to Be the first one to say you're sorry, even if you think the other person may have done even worse to you. | ||
| How to step in first. | ||
| I know what it means to stop looking at what all the differences are, to ferret out connection points, and to try to nurture those things and grow them so that you can start to effectively communicate. | ||
| That's what I've made my whole life about. | ||
| I'm lucky enough to be an upper middle class person who didn't have to deal with starvation, so I dealt with relationships. | ||
| And so, when I started thinking about that, I was like, Maybe there's a space for me to try to reach out with some of these things that I've learned in the political arena. | ||
| So I changed my Twitter tactic, really, from yelling to, sorry, sorry about the yelling, is there something you want to tell me that I don't understand? | ||
| And the first question I asked, which was, you know, If you held your nose and voted for Trump, I get it. | ||
| I was on fire for Hillary. | ||
| It was a little bit of nose-holding for me, too. | ||
| I was psyched about having the first female president. | ||
| She was going to guard my basic policies. | ||
| I wanted to get the Supreme Court anointee that I thought I could get for her. | ||
|
unidentified
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It was good. | |
| It was working for me. | ||
| If you looked at Trump in that way, You're a one-issue voter, you're pro-life, or you wanted that Supreme Court justice that he would get for you, you know? | ||
| Great. | ||
| If you're on fire for Trump, I don't understand it, so please try to explain this to me. | ||
| And it was very interesting, by pulling back and not yelling, and just by being willing to listen, I got a bunch of really good responses from people saying like, first of all, thank you for just listening. | ||
| Just that, right? | ||
| That was huge. | ||
| Just that, yeah. | ||
| And I was like, oh. | ||
| I have been here really bummed about these really loud, incendiary, quite frankly, assholes, conservatives, who have been tweeting at me, saying these horrible things to me, and I'm like, there's a bunch of people on the left doing that to them too. | ||
| And I realized how much they appreciated me not doing that, and I was like, oh, They're feeling it too, so we're at least equally guilty on this side of slinging shit at each other. | ||
| Yeah, so wait, let's pause there for a second because I think what's interesting is, as a guy that lives and works in Hollywood, that for me, and I mentioned to you before, I've only lived in New York and L.A., so I've never lived in the middle of the country, but I think I've been sort of attuned to what they're talking about because I had a few guests on Like Scott Adams who created Dilbert and even Milo who it's a different thing but was talking about what the people are attracted to in Trump and a couple other people that I heard it so when the election happened I can't say that I was totally shocked. | ||
| I was on Joe Rogan show the day before and I said I think it could happen like I really wasn't shocked. | ||
| Were you completely shocked? | ||
| Like how much was the shock related to the lashing out? | ||
| A hundred percent. | ||
| I would say that they were part and parcel, because the policies bother me, and some of the policies still very much bother me, and that's almost beside the point of what I'm trying to do in this space. | ||
| But I was certain that Hillary would win, and part of that is because I was just not that politically educated, and I was really resting on my laurels. | ||
| I had great Eight great basic years with Obama, as far as I was concerned, and I was reading headlines, but I wasn't reading all the articles. | ||
| And I was like, we're good. | ||
| It's good. | ||
| And so this was a big awakening for me. | ||
| And I think that eight to 10 years from now, I think there are going to be a lot of people that are going to say, one of the best things that happened in this country was getting Trump elected so that people could wake up and they could start reading deeper into the headlines and start to figure out where we belong. | ||
| And I know that when I say something like that, And this is a sensitive subject, and I don't know how to say it correctly, but I know that as an upper middle-class white male, I have a certain comfort to be able to say, like, it's time to heal the divide, because there are a lot of people who would just be like, easy for you to say, man, you're not in the direct crosshairs of the policies that this man is trying to enact that could threaten you, you know? | ||
| So I'm like, I get that, but I can only speak from where I am and what I believe in. | ||
|
unidentified
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Somewhere deep in my gut. | |
| I was raised Catholic. | ||
| I was raised on New Testament stuff. | ||
| I was raised on Jesus principles. | ||
| I rejected them all, got away from religion. | ||
| But the core of being a person for others and the MLK message and the Jesus message of the only way forward is through creating positivity, reaching out, trying to find laughter, and building something out of that. | ||
| It's what I've learned in my marriage. | ||
| My wife and I have been together for 15 years. | ||
| It's basically the best marriage I could have hoped for, but we have our shitty moments. | ||
| And when I look at our marriage, and I look at that as a microcosm for the country and the gridlock that's happening, when things get really bad for us, we promise ourselves we're not going to point out our differences anymore. | ||
| We're going to look for connection points. | ||
| And a lot of times that is a lowest common denominator connection point. | ||
| For us, It's the Big Lebowski and a six-pack of Coors Light. | ||
| When we get that, we can sit on the couch together and not look at each other and enjoy this thing. | ||
| And then the good vibes start to come. | ||
| And then suddenly, one of us will be like, You wanna order some Chinese food? | ||
| I'll get it. | ||
| And then the person, oh, that was a generous, nice little move towards me there. | ||
| And then Chinese food comes in, it's like, hey, look, I'll put it on the plates for us and I'll bring it out. | ||
| And then all of a sudden, brick by brick, by not examining the differences but the things we could share, you get there. | ||
| And I, again, I'm jumping into something that I'm not fully aware of the consequences. | ||
| I'm not as well read as I should be on politics to even be on this show. | ||
| But my goal is to Try and find these connection points with people who disagree with me as much as possible, honestly, and see what we can build. | ||
| This idea that you can be okay saying, I don't know everything or I want to figure out more, that's sort of been lost on us, right? | ||
| It's like especially because of social media where everyone suddenly knows everything about the Iran nuclear deal and How to run healthcare! | ||
| These people who can't tie their own shoes, but somehow they know everything about everything. | ||
| So even coming from that humble place first, I think, is how you make the connection. | ||
| Think about it in the space of business. | ||
| Think about your bosses. | ||
| Think about how wonderful it feels when you bring a problem to your boss. | ||
| When I'm on set as an actor, and I go to my director and I say, this scene's feeling a little bit weird, I'm not sure what's going on, and when they, when I see their eyes, Get insecure and then they come at me with a really strong answer so that they'll seem confident. | ||
| I lose all respect and I lose all confidence in what's happening. | ||
| And when they look at me and they go, that's a really interesting idea and I don't know the answer to that. | ||
| Let's see if we can figure this out. | ||
| I'm like, Thank God! | ||
| You're a human being, you're with me, you're one of me, and I am looking for tons more of that. | ||
| And don't you think there's way more people like that than we hear of? | ||
| Because I really, I truly, truly believe that that's how most of us are, and we've just been caught. | ||
| We've been caught in the crossfire of Twitter and an age of judgment and all that, but most people that you meet Yeah. | ||
| Something else happens. | ||
| it's what you just said. | ||
| They'll wanna sit down over a movie or a beer, or it's why I like the gaming community so much, | ||
| which I've sort of gotten into a little bit lately, because they're getting together over video games. | ||
| And then, you know, then they'll be like, wait a minute, you're a libertarian? | ||
| You happen to be a lefty? | ||
| Who cares, you know? | ||
| My brother and I have this thing that we do where whenever we have a really tough thing | ||
| that we're disagreeing on to talk about, we go on a hike together, | ||
| because we realize we don't have to look each other in the eyes. | ||
| We can just look forward. | ||
| And while we're focusing on not dying on the hike, the secondary element comes up and it's a lot easier to do and you're less defensive about it. | ||
| And that defensiveness, it's so human, it's so natural, I get it. | ||
| I'm not criticizing anybody for defending their position in an argument, but I'm giving that up right now. | ||
| So long story short, what ended up happening is as I reached out on Twitter asking for | ||
| sort of what are feelings of people who are on fire for Trump, Stephen Crowder was the | ||
| first guy who tweeted right back at me and he says, "If you're willing to come on the | ||
| show, I'll talk to you about it." | ||
| So I was like, "I've never even heard of him. | ||
| I'm going to look this guy up." | ||
| And I looked up some of his clips and I was like, "Oh, he's really good looking. | ||
| He's really well built. | ||
| He's extremely intelligent, if you can tell by looking at him. | ||
| And he kind of bullies some people sometimes with his comedy. | ||
| So I went back straight in and I was just like, if your interest is to bring me on here and wipe the floor with me with your wealth of political prowess and my lack of political prowess, I'm not interested in that because I'm an easy target. | ||
| I don't know enough. | ||
| This is what you do all day long. | ||
| And he said, "No, no, no, no, no. | ||
| "I wanna have a respectful conversation." | ||
| So I thought, as I do in therapy, I gotta take this first step. | ||
| I gotta step into his environment and just see how we do. | ||
| And I was so nervous. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah? | |
| I was so-- - It doesn't come across. | ||
| I mean, there was a little moment at the beginning where you could feel a little tension between you guys, | ||
| but then it just really went away pretty quickly. | ||
| I really think it was me. | ||
| I was scared that I would be exposed for not knowing enough to have an intelligent political debate. | ||
| But I realized, you know, I really wasn't there to debate. | ||
| What I was there to do was to ferret out some possible connections and to learn, really. | ||
| And I just kind of opened myself up and just said, look, I don't really know what I'm doing. | ||
| I want to learn. | ||
| And if I have any Anything useful to offer here, it's probably in the fact that I have tons of liberal friends who I can go back to them and say, like, I learned something here by listening. | ||
| And I did. | ||
| I learned a bunch of really great things on there. | ||
| And so it wasn't really a plan of mine, but it kind of spiraled. | ||
| And you reached out to me from there. | ||
| You know, Glenn Beck reached out to me and said, let's try and find this stuff. | ||
| And I'm getting excited about this potential of what we can do as a connection point. | ||
| So I've started to pinpoint charities as maybe a place where Well, who doesn't feel good when they're giving? | ||
| Maybe this is an easy spot for us. | ||
| Again, maybe that's going to be the big Lebowski of the political spectrum. | ||
| Yeah, and now it sounds like you might be going to Africa. | ||
| So Glenn Beck and I are going to Africa. | ||
| I had him on, he didn't ask me to go to Africa. | ||
| Well, you know, the truth is... | ||
| Um... | ||
| [laughs] | ||
| Oh, I'm not gonna get into that. | ||
| [laughs] | ||
| So, so yeah, it was, you know, we had a really... | ||
| I was gonna go wherever you were about to go there. | ||
| I could see it happening. | ||
| It was about to be a 20 minute run down that wormhole but I was like, we'll leave that for next time. | ||
| My conversation with Glenn was really great because he and I really do disagree on so many things and we laughed about the fact that we should have been screaming at each other on that show. | ||
| And if we had chosen to pick apart the things we disagreed with, we would have. | ||
| We would have yelled. | ||
| But we found two very quick and easy things. | ||
| My strong penchant towards independence and business dovetails with his libertarianism. | ||
| We could connect on that. | ||
| And we're both big charity guys. | ||
| And so I was like, great. | ||
| Let's just look at these two things. | ||
| And we had a lovely conversation. | ||
| And we'll go to Africa where it's a bunch of money for a lot of this "really problematic sex slave trade stuff | ||
| "that he's really involved in, "and I will lend my face to it, | ||
| "and whatever that helps." | ||
| And it's great. | ||
| And I got a lot of shit for going on Glendale. | ||
| That's exactly what I was gonna ask you. | ||
| Yeah, I got a lot of shit. | ||
| I got a lot of, a lot of his fans were, to be honest with you, they were incredible. | ||
| They reached out and they were just like, thank you so much. | ||
| I don't agree with anything, because I know what you're kind of up to politically. | ||
| But the fact that you're just trying to take a stand and to reach your hand out was really great. | ||
| And honestly, a lot of my liberal fan base was just like, What are you doing? | ||
| All he's doing is trying to use you to get a good look for himself because he's in trouble. | ||
| So I get the exact same thing. | ||
| Literally when he sat in that chair, I got the exact same thing. | ||
| So I'm curious what your response is. | ||
| So my response is, I don't know Glenn Beck well enough to know what his intentions are, but let me lay out two possible ones for you. | ||
| Guy isn't having a hard time in his life, he's gone through some serious personal issues, he's found some religion, he's really turned around, and he's definitely interested in charity, and it's a pure altruistic motive. | ||
| That's easy and maybe a little idealistic, but in that scenario, we win, I'm going to Africa with the guy and we're going to do some good. | ||
| Second scenario, Glenn Beck is a sociopath. | ||
| Glenn Beck is only using me to get a good look. | ||
| Six months later he's going to say something else crazy on the show and you know what? | ||
| You're going to go to Africa with him and you're going to raise a bunch of money for sex slave trade. | ||
| Look at the end results. | ||
| You're going to go to Africa with Glenn Beck and you're going to raise a bunch of money for kids who need it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't care what his motivation is, and I can't possibly know it truly. | ||
| At the end of the day, I'm finding a sliver of connection. | ||
| We're providing a model for people to look at that says, oh my god, these guys are really different on paper. | ||
| And we were able to have laughs and connect over these couple of things and make it work. | ||
| So like... | ||
| I might discover three or four months down the line that I did some form of enabling or something, and I'm willing to admit there may be a problem, but I'm not seeing it right now. | ||
| And my instinct is telling me, connect, and if the connection does some ancillary good, This is a good thing. | ||
| But for your fan base that's giving you shit on something like that, doesn't that, it shows sort of a lack of faith in what they think you are. | ||
| I don't mean that in an offensive way to you, but my policy on this when I've gone on Glenn's show or had him here or plenty of other people, I went on Alex Jones' show a month ago, and people were so angry at me on the left, and I said, guys, we aired it live, he said it's 100% live, they didn't do any pre-interview or anything, I said all I'm gonna do is say the things that I believe and maybe, just maybe, some conservatives or alt-righters or whatever his audience is is gonna hear me and go you know what that guy's kind of interesting let me let me check out what he's doing and then I'll have shown them what a what a decent liberal is. | ||
| By the way... So it's a dismissiveness of us in a bizarre way like as if we don't know what our own faculties are. | ||
| And in all fairness I would say like You could. | ||
| I'm not that offended that I would be dismissed because I'm very new to this space. | ||
| They could say, Mark, you're just stepping into something dangerous here. | ||
| You're putting yourself out there, so it's irrelevant. | ||
| But what I found even the most powerful, or at least in my limited time reaching out and what I'm doing here, is as As I erroneously and previously thought, if you voted for Trump, you are essentially some form of a racist because you are promoting this person. | ||
| And then I look a little closer and I'm like, okay, there are a lot of people that are just scared. | ||
| They feel like their jobs are going away. | ||
| They're a little in-group, out-group, and they're thinking and they want to protect their community. | ||
| I used to think that way in New Orleans. | ||
| I was a little in-group, out-group, you know. | ||
| I can understand that, and maybe they are not directly racist like I might have thought they were. | ||
| On the flip side, I'm realizing that my profile, the rich, white, male, elitist, Hollywood libtard thing, I mean, we are being majorly profiled. | ||
| I don't feel sorry for myself. | ||
| My life is good, and a lot of us are yelling, but by going on to Crowder, by going on to Glenn Beck, and just Being one person of this group who listens and says, and in my group of friends, we're all, we want to hear, we want to listen, that has been the biggest thing, is just hearing from conservatives, hearing from Glenn Beck's fan base, Crowder's fan base. | ||
| Thank God you're willing to listen, because we really thought all you guys just hated us and didn't give a shit. | ||
| And that's a real bummer. | ||
| That's where we've gotten that gridlock. | ||
| So does that make you think that there's more, I mean I think I already know the answer to this, but that there's really a lot of room to build bridges there? | ||
| Because what I'm struggling with right now is I'm having trouble building bridges with people on the far left, right? | ||
| Not even far, just the basic progressives that use all these buzzwords that you and Crowder talked about, this racist bigot, homophobe, Islamophobe. | ||
| I'm having a lot of trouble building bridges there. | ||
| I'm trying, but I'm not having trouble building bridges the other way because I see guys like Beck and Shapiro and Prager who I disagree with on God stuff and abortion and death penalty and all kinds of stuff, but that we're sort of able to agree to disagree and I don't see that coming out of the left right now. | ||
| Yeah, you know, I'm not deep enough into this, honestly, because all I'm doing is reaching out to the right right now, because that's just, like, that's the new side for me, you know? | ||
| So I don't really know what that means on the left, and I guess there's also a distinction between, like, the thinkers, the talkers, the leaders, and then just, like, the general constituents, you know? | ||
| But what I have definitely found is that when I am a moderate Open, listening voice, conservatives across the board are really appreciative of it and they generally have a belief that most liberals hate them and are ready to call them all racists and aren't listening. | ||
| And that is really not happening amongst all my friends. | ||
| I don't feel like that that day. | ||
| But the message, it looks like that on Twitter. | ||
| It really does. | ||
| Yeah, how much of that is just general, like, kind of the way that Hollywood and the media frames things? | ||
| So like, I get it, your friends are probably more tolerant liberals, right? | ||
| Like, that don't hate everybody in the middle of the country, and many of them probably came from the middle of the country. | ||
| But just the stuff that Hollywood and the media kind of put out making everyone in the middle of country look backwards and making traditional values or whatever look archaic and that kind of thing. | ||
| I would blame all media across the front, because I look at Fox News in the morning, and I want to check out what's going on there, you know? | ||
| And I'd say they're both, just like anyone in an unhealthy argument, gridlocked into their positions, and the more they feel threatened by the other side, they just start clenching that sphincter harder and harder and harder to hold on to it. | ||
| So, you know, I personally, again, not nearly as well read and researched as you have been along these lines, but when I look at those headlines, I see both sides in a major gridlock and a fear that if they give up one inch and say, | ||
| well maybe you are right, that they're gonna lose all of their ground | ||
| and all of what they've gained. | ||
| And to me, again, bringing it back to that unhealthy marriage thing where it's just like, | ||
| man, you gotta be the first one to step in and say, all right, maybe I'm missing something. | ||
| Can you explain to me your point? | ||
| And it's just, the word validate. | ||
| Where has the word validate gone? | ||
| To just sit there and listen and be like, your opinion as a human being is valid, and I'm going to hear it before I start yelling. | ||
| I mean, that is just gone in the political conversation, as far as I can tell. | ||
| Yeah, that's the funny thing. | ||
| It's like we live in a country of 300-something million people. | ||
| The whole point is we all came here from different ethnic backgrounds and economics and all this, and we're supposed to disagree. | ||
| We're not supposed to destroy each other in the process, but that's kind of gone. | ||
| Yeah, so now that I've been thinking about, okay, what can I contribute to this? | ||
| What can I do to push this forward? | ||
| Again, I keep bringing back this lowest common denominator thing, and my next question that I went out with, I said, I think charity is a good space for us to cross the divide and do some bipartisan change together. | ||
| So I said, Conservatives, what are the things that you value? | ||
| And what are the charities that you think kind of suck? | ||
| Got some great answers on that. | ||
| Most things I knew was like, we like to give to our churches because we trust how they give locally. | ||
| And I was like, that's going to be a little harder for the left to get on board because of the religious aspect. | ||
| They really valued Efficiency and giving, and feeling that conservatism. | ||
| I want to know where the money's going, and I want to know that it's not bloated to a bunch of people's salaries, and I want to be able to track it. | ||
| I was like, good, that will dovetail with the left. | ||
| They'll feel good about that. | ||
| One thing that I really was surprised about is how much the left and the right love foster care. | ||
| That was a big thing for both sides. | ||
| And I was like, okay, the kids thing is gonna be big. | ||
| So I was like, who doesn't like kids? | ||
| So then education for kids was enough, and then health for kids was enough, and then there were two blind spots that I loved finding, one on the left, one on the right. | ||
| Big left blind spot is veterans. | ||
| Nobody on the left supports veterans, and I think it's because it is unfairly tied to military spending, where it's like, don't give it to the military, give it to education, and then you hear veterans and you're kind of like, It's a big blind spot on the left. | ||
| We've got to take care of these dudes. | ||
| It's so interesting you say that because I even know, or I'll see on Memorial Day or Veterans Day, that my friends on the left very rarely will even tweet out something. | ||
| They don't do that, yes. | ||
| And I think you're totally right. | ||
| It's that they don't want to be seen somehow as if they would just say that it's good to be a veteran or thank you veterans. | ||
| You know, even in a war that you, even if you haven't thought our last few words were just, that you might think World War II is just, there are veterans from World War II, but they don't do it because they think that that somehow will tacitly mean they endorse colonialism. | ||
| Military spending, 100%. | ||
| So that's a blind spot, and when I challenge anyone on the left for 30 seconds, they get it immediately and it's clean. | ||
| Likewise, on the right, there's a little bit of this All-pervasive America first attitude that gets a little clinchy. | ||
| It's like protect myself. | ||
| We don't have enough money here and so A lot of times there's a lot of like third world great work that can be done that they generally agree with once I explain it like I'm like you we believe in Giving out fishing poles and not fish and teaching people how to do it so that we don't have to be there to continually Take care of them great We can install these clean water systems for like 42 cents a day over the course of a month, and then it's there and they're getting clean water. | ||
| That appeals to your sense of efficiency. | ||
| I know it's not at home, but whenever I give that to the right, they're like, Oh yeah, that totally makes sense. | ||
| Do you find that they're willing to do that without the religious attachment to that? | ||
| Because there is obviously a lot of religious outreach, like in South America you'll see Mormon missionaries or Christian missionaries that'll do a lot of that, but I wonder without the religious part. | ||
| I didn't get that far into the difference between whether it worked with or without religion to back it up, but I did a GiveDirectly campaign. | ||
| It was my first campaign. | ||
| It was the first charity that I picked because They were doing a variety of different things. | ||
| They're hyper-efficient, they're giving nearly 100% of what they give. | ||
| And so I ran the campaign based around them, because a lot of it was clean water systems, a lot of it was health for third world countries, a lot of it was some basic domestic care and had some foster care issues. | ||
| highly curated, you can track where the money goes, you can track the story of that family as they improve. | ||
| And so once I tweeted that all out, I was like, okay guys, conservatives, liberals, we're good, | ||
| give directly, and everybody was like, yeah, we're good. | ||
| So I was like, okay, here's what we're gonna do. | ||
| I'm putting down $10,000, I'm gonna ask all of you guys, I have 380,000 followers on Twitter, | ||
| if 10,000 of you give $1, you're gonna match me, and then give directly, reached out to Google, | ||
| and got them to promise if we were able to make 20,000, they would give 20,000. | ||
| And in 36 hours, we raised $50,000. | ||
| So I was like, okay, we're onto something here. | ||
| That got me really, really excited. | ||
| And I think it was the, I don't wanna, it was the Sam and Diane from Cheersness of it. | ||
| It was the opposites attractness. | ||
| It was slightly perversely exciting to conservatives and liberals alike that it was just like, I am sleeping with the enemy right now. | ||
| There was this excitement that we were all giving into something and sharing it. | ||
| And I really feel like it has the potential to be contagious. | ||
| So I'm gonna try to start building these campaigns slowly. | ||
| I mean, I went in with Beck yesterday, and he was like, whatever you put down in your next one, I'm gonna match. | ||
| So now I'm gonna take that, and I'm gonna be like, alright, Judd, who I'm friends with, I know you fucking hate all these people, but like, you're rich, and I need your money, because I got some conservatives, I got some libertarians, let's all come in, and then try and make it a bigger campaign. | ||
| My thing is just like, There are all these people out there like Wells Fargo. | ||
| You have the worst look in the world right now. | ||
| I will sacrifice myself and come in and shake your hand and take a picture next to your sign, but you've got to pony up a $100,000 match for me if we can do it. | ||
| So that's going to be my thing. | ||
| If we can get The positive feeling you get from charitable giving going and we can start to like share these things and maybe even co-mingle at a party every now and then. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| By focusing on that stuff, you know, might we, like you're saying, while we're gaming, I suspect that's not going to be the case. | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| I literally don't know if it's gonna work. | ||
| But my feeling is the worst case scenario is that it crashes and we raise some money | ||
| for some people who needed it. | ||
| So that would be good. | ||
| I suspect that's not gonna be the case. | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| 'Cause it sounds like you've got nice momentum and this is what people, | ||
| everyone's just begging for some bridge building. | ||
| They're begging for it, and they don't know where to turn. | ||
| They don't know where to turn, exactly. | ||
| And so I'm like, all right, well, what do I have a little bit of a surplus of? | ||
| And it's just like, the only thing that I can give right now is money. | ||
| I've been lucky enough to make money. | ||
| And I want to put that stuff down and put my voice out there and just see where we can go with it. | ||
| So we'll see. | ||
| I'll know a lot in a few months. | ||
| Yeah, do you think some of this can trickle up to the political part? | ||
| And I know you said you're not a political analyst, but that if we can start building some of it here, that actually our politics will change? | ||
| Because I look at the Democrats and Republicans, almost everyone involved in politics, there's so few people that I think are really good at what they do. | ||
| To me, Rand Paul, who I have certain disagreements with, He's the closest I see to someone that sort of has the things that I believe in. | ||
| Well, I see people taking steps. | ||
| I see a guy like Van Jones who steps up and he's just like, it's the love army and we're gonna bridge the divide, but then he gets triggered and then he falls back. | ||
| And I forgive that, I really do, because I'm just like, I get it dude, nobody's perfect. | ||
| So I'm seeing the seeds of it. | ||
| I really like, have you heard of his cut 50-50 deal that he's doing? | ||
| It's really interesting. | ||
| I think it bears mentioning with your question of can this charitable giving in the private sector maybe find a way to get into the political sector. | ||
| What's happening is He has a friendship with Newt Gingrich. | ||
| Newt Gingrich was a mentor to him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, they were on Crossfire together. | |
| Yeah, so they're buds, despite all the differences. | ||
| So I was like, oh, that's good. | ||
| And they both agree that the political system is in the shitter. | ||
| Neither of them knows exactly how to fix it or is opinionated, but they both have come to the agreement that there are a lot of people in jail who don't need to be in jail. | ||
| We're bleeding a lot of money there that we don't need to have there. | ||
| And, you know, a lot of, a big portion of them, you know, are a lot of black males that have come out of the, like, war on drugs from the 80s and the 90s that are serving these, like, life sentences for marijuana and stuff like that. | ||
| So they are trying to do a cross-the-aisle initiative together as these two guys from different sides to say, like, let's try and cut down 50% of these people who are in prison for no reason. | ||
| and rehabilitate them and spend the money there. | ||
| And that has been a bipartisan thing that they have been able to agree on | ||
| and they really believe that they're gonna get everybody to come in. | ||
| So, okay. | ||
| For the record, I do have to mention that I invited Van Jones on the show. | ||
| He publicly said yes and his people have privately said no. | ||
| A lot of people are asking me. | ||
| Van, Van! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Van! | ||
| All right, love army. | ||
| You made the point. | ||
| I like to see you're a pro. | ||
| You went right to the camera. | ||
| It was very professional. | ||
| But, you know, it's interesting. | ||
| I think he's a particularly interesting case of this because he's a progressive, and I see him use some of the words that you mentioned earlier, where he calls people racist very quickly, in my opinion. | ||
| Again, I want him on the show. | ||
| I respect him. | ||
| I think we'd have a great discussion. | ||
| But then, every now and again, I see him throw a bone to Trump, and then I watch the left turn on him. | ||
| So I don't know if you saw the night that Trump gave the big speech, the congressional speech. | ||
| And what happened, Keith Olbermann, who I think is starting to lose his mind, just between us, he tweeted that Vann's a sellout. | ||
| And it's like, wait a minute, he tried, he just heard something, listened to it in and of itself, and made a call. | ||
| And that's why I want to talk to the guy. | ||
| But this constant politics of destruction. | ||
| There is a fear, there is a fear on the left that to validate Anything means you are enabling something, and you cannot do this. | ||
| And I, as I have started to reach out, am doing, in all honesty, a lot better with backlash than I thought I would. | ||
| I'm not getting a ton from the left saying, like, how dare you try to reach out at all. | ||
| I'm getting little bits here and there, and like I said, I got a little bit with Glenn, like, why are you going to Africa with Glenn and doing this kind of thing, you know? | ||
| So I'm not getting as much of that, but I understand what you're talking about, and I think that that is real. | ||
| I can't speak with any experience about what it means to be on the right and reach out to the left. | ||
| Are you seeing people do that? | ||
| Who's doing that? | ||
| Well, Glenn. | ||
| Yeah, Glenn. | ||
| Glenn's one. | ||
| I've had a couple other guys like Shapiro and Prager and a few others. | ||
| That again, I have these major differences with. | ||
| A guy like Prager, who's really not for gay marriage, he's kind of hedging it a little bit with, I don't want the government involved. | ||
| My studio's in my house, I'm married to a man. | ||
| But I'm willing to have that conversation, and I don't think he stares at me and puts me in judgment. | ||
| But I'm never gonna get him to come to my side by berating him. | ||
| You homophobe. | ||
| Barack Obama ran for president nine years ago, was not for gay marriage. | ||
| Do you think he was a homophobe? | ||
| So it's like we gotta let people change. | ||
| Yeah, that is the way I feel. | ||
| And it's a very delicate thing going on here, and I don't like to talk about it too much, | ||
| but a lot of the reaching out that is happening right now, even though there's not a ton of it, | ||
| is with the intention of come here, I want to listen to you and validate your opinion. | ||
| I'll put my arms around you. | ||
| But at the same time, they're going to reach their arm around and put your finger up your ass and say, I'm going to change you. | ||
| I'm going to do it with a hug. | ||
| And that shit is a little evil. | ||
| And I've got to admit that even when I first started reaching out, I realized subconsciously, oh, I think I might be just trying to be gentle so I can show them the error of their ways. | ||
| But isn't that where you just have to be not only confident in what you believe and what you say, but also I mean, I have to believe this as an interviewer, because I try to talk to people over the place, that you have to trust that other people have the faculties to realize what's happening, too. | ||
| They have to know some things. | ||
| And look, I struggle a lot with this whole thing of, like, You know, just the basic conservative tenet of like, let's save on taxes, and these programs that we want to cut, I want to cut them because the government shouldn't be involved, and because this should be a private sector thing, and the private sector should give, and give charitably to HUD or this or whatsoever, and then by cutting taxes, those people will give. | ||
| My thing is just like, they're not going to give, and then nobody's going to get the care they need. | ||
| Even though you say you wouldn't. | ||
| Do you think they won't though? | ||
| Because I think that we may have a little difference on this one. | ||
| Because I've come, six months ago I probably would have said that. | ||
| You would have said that, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, and I think I've changed on this because I think you're giving me evidence that they would change because you just told me about it. | ||
| They will give, and I hope. | ||
| Listen, I'm talking about In a big, big global way. | ||
| So what I'm going to kind of look to right now is a little bit of a test and call people on some things through these campaigns and say like, okay, I'm going to challenge you on the right, I'm going to challenge you on the left. | ||
| The left challenges are actually really easy. | ||
| You voted for Hillary Clinton? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I'm not going to stick you to this, but let's just for argument's sake say that if your vote happened exactly how you wanted it, you would be in a tax bracket that's much higher than the tax bracket you're about to incur. | ||
| You are already ready to give away 8-10% more of your salary than you're going to have to give away next year because Trump's in there and he's going to cut those taxes. | ||
| So why don't you pledge half of that to charity? | ||
| Give to the people that are being cut. | ||
| Let's go in big. | ||
| I'm ready. | ||
| I've talked to my wife about it. | ||
| I'm in a 52% tax bracket right now. | ||
| And what's that gonna come down to with Trump? | ||
| I don't know, you probably know more. | ||
| What's it gonna be, 43, 44? | ||
| Something like that? | ||
| Yeah, it'll be a little less than that. | ||
| That's a pretty significant amount of money. | ||
| And already you live in California where your state taxes are insane. | ||
| So I'm just like, alright. | ||
| If you're on the left and you voted for Hillary, are you ready to give that money away? | ||
| I'm not going to ask for all of it, but I want half of it. | ||
| And let's go in big and let's save these programs. | ||
| We can't change the fact that we have a conservative government and they're going to want to cut these programs and they believe they're going to come from a private sector. | ||
| We can't change that for the next four years. | ||
| What we can do is just try to go ahead and privately fund it with the money we saved. | ||
| And so maybe we can develop this system of like, hey, Democrats in power, you know what? | ||
| You're getting taxed a little bit more, get a little bit less this year. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| Conservatives in power right now, taxes are coming down, let's use that money that you got taxed for, and then maybe we can just be juggling all these programs and kind of like keep them afloat that way. | ||
| What's interesting is you're using a very sort of libertarian idea there, in that you're really putting it back to the individual. | ||
| Like, you believe something? | ||
| Well, quite literally, show me the money, if you believe in something. | ||
| And you and I might disagree, and I could be proven wrong in six months. | ||
| As I could! | ||
| Once people get some money in their bank account, they're only going to let 30% of it go at tops. | ||
| But maybe I'm wrong. | ||
| I had no conversation with Glenn Beck, and I know he's worth a lot of money, but to have him, within 30 minutes of talking to him on the phone, be like, whatever you're willing to put down on your next campaign, I'm going to match it dollar for dollar. | ||
| I'll jump in on something with you, but I can't give you Beck money. | ||
| We're not at the Beck level. | ||
| That's the key to all of this stuff. | ||
| I got dollar contributions from my fan base and we were able to compound that and make that into $50,000. | ||
| I will gladly figure out a way, not just, I'll donate some money, but I'll also figure out a way to help you get this thing out there. | ||
| That would be awesome. | ||
| Let's run a test. | ||
| Let's run a test and see what happens. | ||
| You're the interviewer, but my question is... I give everybody one question. | ||
| Yeah, everybody gets one question, you know. | ||
| What are you seeing? | ||
| Because what I really feel from you when I look at your interviews, when I look at your Twitter feed, is like, you have a sort of a relentless pursuit of the truth right now. | ||
| You're willing to criticize any and everyone. | ||
| You're willing to just say like, CNN got it wrong here, Fox News got it wrong here, Fox News got it right here! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| You know, and I really appreciate that. | ||
| What are you seeing on the right, in terms of people that are doing that, that I can point my friends to and say, because I can point my friends to you and just be like, this is great. | ||
| We got the gay Jewish male losing himself as a liberal, wants to be there, he's really fair, go check him out, and there's traction. | ||
| Who else is doing this right now that I can point out? | ||
| So I think if you want to show somebody what a good conservative is, like a conservative who makes consistently logical sense and who isn't going to just drub you over the head endlessly, I think Ben Shapiro is the best example of that. | ||
| We absolutely have our differences. | ||
| Policy-wise and that kind of stuff. | ||
| And we actually agree on a lot of things too. | ||
| But I think he knows what he's talking about and he's not doing things for points. | ||
| So you'll see him call out Trump as often as he calls out the left. | ||
| In a way he actually calls out Trump more than I do. | ||
| My feelings with Trump are Because of the level of hysteria that everyone is putting out there, that I've tried to control my hysteria, because I don't think it helps. | ||
| Everyone's doing it. | ||
| So, for example, he's been president now for, you know, about 80 days or so, and it's like, I actually don't know of major things that he's done to be hysterical about. | ||
| So, like cutting things, like the art stuff that he cut. | ||
| He cut like 800 million from the humanities, something or other. | ||
| Now, I love art. | ||
| I got some good art around here and in the house, and I know artists, and my sister's an artist. | ||
| The idea that the government has to fund art, and that we have to just involuntarily be taxed to give money to that, I believe that if that disappeared, that it wouldn't hurt art, it might help art, because part of being an artist is having to deal with the struggle. | ||
| And perhaps that when the government does it, then the things that get to the museums are really because of political connections and financial connections. | ||
| I don't know about all that. | ||
| I'm not an expert in this field. | ||
| But some of those things, when people say, ah, he's cutting all of this stuff. | ||
| Now, if you're going to cut meals on wheels that people absolutely need, and we don't know yet that private charities will come in, that's also the rub with that. | ||
| People always say, well, no, private charities aren't going to do it, but we have to give them a chance to do it, too. | ||
| That's why I haven't been too hysterical. | ||
| I don't sense we're going to war with Russia, but if the Democrats were in, we might be, because they seem to think we've installed a fake Russian president. | ||
| You know, he's been fined for the gays. | ||
| You know, there was all this gay hysteria. | ||
| Did you know they canceled the gay pride parade in LA this year? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's going to be a protest instead. | ||
| But what has he done against gay people? | ||
| He got a standing ovation talking about gay people at the convention. | ||
| Allow me to refill your water. | ||
| Thank you, sir. | ||
| Would you, if you were, if you were, like, because you're such in this middle ground, it's interesting, like, if you're kind of looking around at this budget and you're seeing all this defense spending that's kind of popping up and you're seeing money coming from the arts, like, do you think that that's a good move for us? | ||
| Or would you be like, maybe we can still do Meals on Wheels and do a little less in the military? | ||
| What do you think about that appropriation? | ||
| I mean, if you, right, so first off, again, I'm not an economist, so I can just give you the broad sense of what I think is basically right. | ||
| It's a spending issue. | ||
| So I had Austin Peterson on yesterday. | ||
| I think, actually, the interview's gonna air after we do this, so it's a little confusing, but you're right, it's very back to the future. | ||
| But he ran as a Libertarian candidate, lost to Gary Johnson, and that whole thing was a disaster, but that's for another show. | ||
| He was saying that just start trimming pennies off everything across the board. | ||
| So that when you go for the arts, or you go for Meals on Wheels, and people see you hatchet that thing, it adds to the hysteria, right? | ||
| So if you're somebody on the left, and you see Trump do that, it's like he's- The big slash, it's a trigger. | ||
| He's just going for the trigger, and then you go hysterical, then the right base goes, you see how we triggered these hysterical lunatics, and the snowflakes are melting, and all that. | ||
| So what Austin was saying was basically, just start trimming little bits each year, and that what you realize is, the government, they do all these crazy things where they have to spend all their money, Or their budgets don't, I mean Hollywood does this kind of thing too. | ||
| We don't spend it or we don't get it back so we just dump it. | ||
| Right, so they keep making these, Michael Bay, I don't know what you're feeling about him, these movies keep getting bigger and more explosive and they don't get any better, in my humble opinion. | ||
| I think you're not alone there, you're alright, you're alright. | ||
| I used to love the Transformers, I grew up on, you probably grew up on the Transformers too. | ||
| You and I are the same age, that was my jam. | ||
| Yeah, everything that I believe I learned in the original. | ||
| Why can't Optimus Prime be president? | ||
| I would vote for Optimus Prime. | ||
| He turned Optimus Prime into a complete psychopath. | ||
| He used to be a moral, decent guy. | ||
| He was forthright. | ||
| He had that nice, solid, deep voice. | ||
| That great voice. | ||
| Great voice. | ||
| Anyway, so something about these little incremental things across the board. | ||
| Yeah, could we cut 20% of our military spending probably tomorrow? | ||
| Now, a lot of people would be upset with that, and they probably do a lot with jobs, but little Just slowly being like, guys, this year we're cutting the whole thing 3%, and we're gonna try it again next year, and is all hell gonna break loose? | ||
| Probably not. | ||
| So I would be for something like that. | ||
| Yeah, I don't see that happening for some reason. | ||
| I don't know why. | ||
| Well, because it kind of sounds too sensible. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like, who would come in? | ||
| That's part of the problem right now, right? | ||
| That if you come in with a sensible answer, people go, what the hell is this guy talking about? | ||
| What's the incentive? | ||
| I guess I just don't understand that. | ||
| I mean, I look at, like, I look at a lot of the oil pipeline stuff, and it's like, this is jobs creation. | ||
| And then I'm like, well, if the facts that I'm reading are true, there's a lot of these temporary jobs, but it's like, is it really only 35 permanent jobs that we're creating here? | ||
| And so what is your... | ||
| What is your initiative in lifting these restrictions? | ||
| Is it really about your deep level credo that government should be backed off? | ||
| Or are you just standing behind that so you can get some support from some of these oil guys? | ||
| And I'll never be able to understand that. | ||
| And I feel like a lot of people in my position are feeling that way in all fairness. | ||
| I think that I'm willing to give a little more attempt to listen and hear where a lot of most liberals that I know are just like He's just taking his oil money. | ||
| And he's saying it's for jobs, and he's saying it's for deregulation, | ||
| but that's bullshit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What do you say to that? | ||
| What is the answer to that? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know exactly what the answer is, other than things are probably a little more complex | ||
| than what-- | ||
| Than just taking the bribe. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I see this on both sides. | ||
| A Democrat does something that the Republicans don't like, and then Republicans will tweet out, well he took $2,000 from the book! | ||
| And then they do it the other way too, and it's like, I'm pretty sure they're not being bought off for $2,000. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It's not $2,000. | ||
| At the end of the day, if Goldman Sachs is giving Hillary $100,000 for a speech or whatever it was, I think maybe it was $250,000, it probably has a little something to do with influence. | ||
| But I would say even beyond the money, it's just the collusion of all of these people going to, you know what this is like in Hollywood even, all these people going to the same parties, being around the same people, everyone likes to take a picture in front of the step and repeat with the celebrity, with the politician. | ||
| Some of it may be subconscious. | ||
| Hugely! | ||
| I don't think they realize it when they're doing it, but that's actually a great segue to just Hollywood in general related to all of this. | ||
| So as you've been talking about this, you've mentioned sort of your friend circles and things like that. | ||
| Are you privately getting pushback from people? | ||
| So I'm getting mostly really positive responses when they talk about the theory, 30,000 foot theory, let's reach across the aisle, let's focus on what we share as opposed to our differences, and let's try to build bridges. | ||
| That is very hard to malign, no one really gets upset about that, but that's the base level. | ||
| Then there's like the next level, when I sort of As opposed to tweeting out a damning tweet for cutting meals on wheels but send out like... So a genuine question for conservatives out there who support this, do you really believe that the private sector is going to come in? | ||
| Do you think that hopefully they'll come in but I kind of don't care if they don't because I'd rather put the money somewhere else. | ||
| There are a couple people who say to me like, why are you Dipping your toe in the waters of enabling here, why don't you use your voice to just say, these are old people who need food and need attention, and we need to support that. | ||
| And so I understand that. | ||
| So it really comes down to intentions, right? | ||
| Because your intention is to really figure out what people are thinking. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| And it sort of goes back to what we talked about a few minutes ago, there's no way of knowing unless If the government stopped doing that, would someone step in? | ||
| And would they not? | ||
| And then are we willing to deal with the ramifications if they don't? | ||
| And for my choice, I would rather not take that risk. | ||
| I would rather know for sure that the government is putting the money there, and I also don't fully trust that if people get their money back, trickle down, that they're gonna actually give. | ||
| That's just me being a little probably cynical, but at the same time, I am, that's why I'm trying to run these little test model | ||
| campaigns to see, again, I'm not saving the world right now, I'm doing, turning 10,000 of my | ||
| own dollars into 40,000 dollars. | ||
| It's not putting a dent in anything. | ||
| But if the microcosm there can work and I can get some data that says, like, holy shit, | ||
| I didn't, like you might believe, I didn't realize how much people would really give | ||
| from the private sector when they know it's not happening from government, and the conservatives | ||
| were not just hiding behind that. | ||
| They really will do it. | ||
| Or vice versa. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| They just say that they wanted to give from the private sector, but they're not gonna do it. | ||
| I don't know yet, you know? | ||
| But if I can figure that out and get some data on that, I think that there's a possibility to do some bigger things. | ||
| And in my mind, again, this is thinking way far ahead, but like, If we can provide this bedrock of safety, so that says, like, okay, Democrats are in power, they're going to tax the shit out of everybody, and they're going to give to HUD, they're going to give to the arts, they're going to overgive. | ||
| It's going to be not fully efficient. | ||
| As a liberal, I'm willing to accept that something might not be efficient. | ||
| That doesn't mean I should pull the rug out from under it. | ||
| I'd rather have a non-efficient thing than a non-entity. | ||
| So that's going to happen then. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Now there's a conservative in power. | ||
| We're cutting all those programs. | ||
| You, sir, are saving 8-10% on your taxes. | ||
| I want you to give half of that back efficiently into those programs, and we're still going to keep those programs afloat. | ||
| So that basically, plus or minus where the money's coming from, we're kind of juggling these things and keeping them afloat. | ||
| You're a social scientist. | ||
| I'm a social scientist, yeah. | ||
| And my true belief in all of this, and it's just based on my own experience, is that Giving is infectious and that once you start to open your eyes to the space. | ||
| There's a great book called strangers drowning That's about what happens when you enter this space and how it is so infectious in fact that it can destroy you once you start to realize how many people could use help and there it's a stories of people who literally just give away everything they have because they got too caught into it and I have conversations with my wife constantly where she's like, don't make me the asshole who has to stop you from giving. | ||
| Put the brakes on a little bit here because we can get a little bit crazy. | ||
| But I just know when I talk to people who have gotten involved and they see where that dollar goes that you start to realize, oh my god, I can do so much good with this. | ||
| So my hope is that Eventually we could depend on the private sector to be a baseline giving perennial in the event that we have a conservative government who wants to cut those programs. | ||
| What about just the general morals that we get from Hollywood? | ||
| As a guy that makes movies, you make movies literally at every level of movie making. | ||
| There's a certain segment of society that thinks we should get morals, or whether we should or shouldn't, we do. | ||
| One way or another, we do get a certain moral code from movies. | ||
| And I think a lot of people think there's secret meetings in Hollywood where they're sitting around, I mean people really believe this, that they're sitting around going, what can we push? | ||
| I see a lot of the social justice that they push that I don't like. | ||
| I mentioned to you before we started that I just finished Transparent, which your brother's on. | ||
| I just finished it last night, and when I started watching it just 10 days ago or something, I thought it was gonna be social justice palooza. | ||
| I really did. | ||
| But it wasn't. | ||
| They actually pushed back on it despite it being about a trans family and there's a ton of LGBT stuff and some interesting Rachel stuff, I mean all over the place. | ||
| And they didn't. | ||
| So for somebody that is in Hollywood, are you involved in secret meetings to engineer the society? | ||
| So look, I will admittedly tell you, I am not in the top level meetings with the Paramount executives and the $150 million movie. | ||
| But I am involved in quite a bit. | ||
| And this is what I see, honestly. | ||
| And it's going to sound a little bit biased. | ||
| The only people I know who are truly making really agenda-driven films that don't show any fairness in the antagonists, the only films that I have seen that truly do that are coming from the extreme religious sector of filmmaking. | ||
| People who make movies like God's Not Dead and such like that, where it's literally like an Ayn Rand novel, or one of those I don't have a problem with that film being made. | ||
| from the platonic method, where they're in a cave, and they're coming out to have someone prove | ||
| to someone else on the screen why they're wrong, and that's an agenda-related film, in my opinion. | ||
| I don't have a problem with that film being made. | ||
| I don't have a problem with that film going out to audiences who love it | ||
| and bussing in the people. | ||
| I don't wanna see the movie. | ||
| I have no problem with that being made from just a purely free speech standpoint. | ||
| What an evolved opinion. | ||
| You're actually, if something comes out you don't like, you won't see it. | ||
| You're not going to try to burn down the studio, right? | ||
| It's totally wonderful. | ||
| Now, I do see agenda-oriented films from the left. | ||
| I do see movies that come out and say like, my goal here is to tell a great story but at the same time I want to show you a young, gay, black male protagonist who you may not normally have gotten to know in your life and normalize him and make him feel at home with you. | ||
| So that is an agenda, but also in that film I do feel like most of the time There's a fairness addressed to all the characters, even the antagonist who comes at that person. | ||
| There's an attempt to be a nuance there. | ||
| That's the independent filmmaking sphere. | ||
| That's, you know, what I see. | ||
| But what I can say directly to anyone who is not in Hollywood, please don't be paranoid that there are a group of people with agendas trying to shove something down your throat. | ||
| And if you feel that way, just know that it's not dissimilar to That wonderful religious film that you enjoyed, that you were able to experience your agenda being pushed, and you enjoyed it, and then, if you didn't want that movie, you could've stayed home. | ||
| That's the worst it's ever gonna get. | ||
| Yeah, well, to me, when people ask me about that, they say, you live in Hollywood, and I'm like, so off. | ||
| I did take the WB studio tour, that was pretty good, on the little cart, you know, I went to the commissary, that was very exciting. | ||
| But my thing is, it's that it's a business, like every other business. | ||
| They will make things that they believe Yes. | ||
| make money, and I think in probably 99.9% of the cases, that will supersede some sort of political agenda. | ||
| I would say 100% of the time. | ||
| They wanna make money, and that's the way a business is supposed to be. | ||
| Yes, I mean, what's really interesting right now is a movie like Moonlight wins the Oscar. | ||
| You know, I love this movie. | ||
| It's a 1.5 million dollar movie, you know, with a young gay black male protagonist. | ||
| We don't see movies like this very often. | ||
| They don't get funded. | ||
| Now Hollywood, it's just funny to me. | ||
| It's just like, well let's make a whole bunch of movies with young gay black males in it because it's money! | ||
| They're not thinking about that from a social justice perspective. | ||
| They're thinking about it from a money perspective. | ||
| Likewise, I'm hearing a big call right now from my fan base saying like, Where is the independent film about the young Rust Belt family that's making $26,000 a year and the struggles that they face? | ||
| Why are all the struggle movies you're making right now about the marginalized people, whether it's a minority or whether it's LGBTQ or something like that? | ||
| I'm hearing, like, what about me? | ||
| And I think that that's part and parcel with why Trump was elected. | ||
| There's a lot of with that. | ||
| And I think that there is a valid point to that, and I think that you're gonna start to see some stories come out about that. | ||
| I suspect you might be involved in one. | ||
| I'm involved in a lot of this stuff, and I hear a lot of this, and it's like, I'm like, yes, this is another element of society that we should represent, and it's good. | ||
| And I hear that veterans are not represented enough from the right and stuff like that. | ||
| So, I mean, look, it's... | ||
| It's all super nuanced in the independent sphere. | ||
| In the big budget sphere, in my opinion, follow the dollar. | ||
| That's just what they're doing. | ||
| And, you know, whatever. | ||
| It's not what I do, but it's fine. | ||
| Yeah, at the end of the day, to kind of bring this full circle, would the ultimate answer to this be sort of what you stated at the beginning? | ||
| One of a hundred percent. | ||
| your grandfather struggled, got your father to be in a better position, | ||
| got you to be in a better position. | ||
| So that's truly the American dream. | ||
| But it sounds like you got a lot of your values out of that and not out of Hollywood. | ||
| And that's what I always try to tell people. | ||
| Why would you look, don't look for this to give you values. | ||
| You gotta find them somewhere else. | ||
| It might have something to do with your family or your community or whatever else. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, look, my sphere of people that I work with, we're like, I don't wanna overstate this, | ||
| but we're scrappers. | ||
| I still hang lights on set, and I still cook on my sets for people, and I made a little black and white movie with me and Sarah Paulson that I made for Netflix for basically no money, and then Netflix pays me a lot of money for those movies, and I make this huge check, And then I take that check, and I cut bonus checks to everyone who was on the set with me, including the PAs. | ||
| And that way, I'm actually a communist. | ||
| I'm all over the map. | ||
| But for those who think Hollywood is just a greedy system that's all about money making and all this stuff, There are ecosystems of wonderful people out here who are using their power to produce and foster young filmmakers and raise them up. | ||
| When I did a movie called Your Sister's Sister with Emily Blunt, Rosemary DeWitt and myself, we made it really cheaply. | ||
| We happened to sell it for a lot of money. | ||
| The three of us made a ton of it. | ||
| And I went to the girls and I was like, let's give some money back to the crew | ||
| and let's give some money back to Seattle and their filmmaking environment. | ||
| And we gave away half of what we made and it filtered in that community. | ||
| And this stuff is going on and you might not see it 'cause the, you know, shit's loud and incendiary | ||
| on Twitter from Hollywood. | ||
| But some good-hearted people out here, we care, we're trying to listen. | ||
| And I would just say if you're a conservative watching this show, please don't think that. | ||
| Everyone thinks you're a racist and everyone is yelling at there are a couple people yelling that you know and by the way There are a couple people yelling at me for being a fucking baby killer because you know I want to support any organization that has to do with abortions You know I'm getting yelled at too. | ||
| You're getting yelled at don't believe that that represents everybody there's a lot of space in the middle for us to come together Yeah, you know how to end a show That was pretty solid. | ||
| I'm going to be real quiet. | ||
| You can zoom in slowly on my face. | ||
| Yeah, you just did your own sort of fountainhead style speech at the end there. | ||
|
unidentified
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I think you could even swell up the music score. | |
| Elizabeth, it was a pleasure talking to you. | ||
| I suspected we were going to kind of vibe in this way, and I absolutely, if you want some help on this thing... I would. | ||
| Love it. | ||
| And I'm going to come back to you and hit you hard because it's on tape. | ||
| You guys saw it. | ||
| He's going to give. | ||
| We don't edit. | ||
| There's nothing I can do. | ||
| For more on Mark and his interesting political voyage, check him out on Twitter. |
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