April 10, 2022 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| Nobody saw those movies, right? | ||
| Because nobody says, honey, let's look through the TV guide thing and see if there's any wonderful things about racism or anything about diversity. | ||
| I really, you know what I like at the end of the day? | ||
| There's a really great diversity humor, right? | ||
| There isn't any. | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin, and joining me today is an American playwright, a filmmaker whose works | ||
| include Glenn Gary, Glenn Ross, The Verdict, Wag the Dog, and more, and author of the new | ||
| book Recessional, The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch. | ||
| I've got a copy in my hand right now. | ||
| David Mamet, welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thanks so much, glad to be here. | ||
| I've wanted to talk to you for quite some time, and I was going through the book this morning and I thought, man, This guy sees the world sort of as I see the world, so why don't we do a little 101 first for people that aren't that familiar with you. | ||
| What got you into playwriting, writing screenplays? | ||
| Did you always have something to say and wanted to put the pen to paper? | ||
| Well, yeah, I was raised as a smartass and everyone always said when I was a kid nobody likes a smartass, but I didn't find that to be true because I always made jokes and I always dramatized. | ||
| My mother used to say, David, why must you dramatize everything? | ||
| But because that's what I, you know, I was born with that gene, just like, you know, Sandy Kovacs was born to throw the fastball. | ||
| And because that worked, I never did anything else. | ||
| You know, I would never do any schoolwork. | ||
| And I worked a million menial jobs. | ||
| We'd call them entry level jobs. | ||
| Now we call them menial jobs then. | ||
| But when I realized there was this thing called the theater, And that I could actually get in there and have the most fun in the world. | ||
| I was never coming out. | ||
| And that's the thing that I see about young people, whatever they're going into. | ||
| If they discover something, for example, aviation, or they discover the theater, they discover the military. | ||
| If it's in their DNA, they say, you can kill me. | ||
| But you're going to have to kill me because I'm never leaving. | ||
| So that's how I was about theater. | ||
| So I started writing plays when I was very young and got from there into writing and directing movies and the rest is, you know, there it is. | ||
| Yeah, so I do want to jump into the movies a little bit, but let's start with the book because your defense of free speech, but really beyond free speech, your defense of America and your explanation of sort of this very strange pivotal moment that we're in where we're either about to Continue or maybe reinvent it, perhaps, or just let the whole thing go, I think is really apropos. | ||
| It's what I'm thinking about a lot. | ||
| It's what I'm talking about on my show all the time. | ||
| When did you really start realizing something was wrong here? | ||
| Well, I wrote a book about 20 years ago called The Secret Knowledge, a political book, and it was looking at what happened in New York and what's happening in the theater and what's happening I grew up as a red diaper baby, right? | ||
| My dad was a labor lawyer and everybody we knew, the more radical people, were the communists. | ||
| But in our thing, they were all first-generation immigrants. | ||
| They just wanted to make a living. | ||
| And they were liberals. | ||
| And what liberal meant then was give some money to the NAACP and put your kid in an Episcopal Reformed temple. | ||
| They'd all fought in the Second World War, so everybody loved America. | ||
| But America, to them, meant do your job, raise your kids, don't get in the other guy's way, exhibit a little tolerance if you can, and try to take care of yourself. | ||
| Although, at that time and again now, we Jews were a despised race. | ||
| When I was a kid, there were still restricted hotels that didn't accept Jews, clubs that didn't. | ||
| They were very open about it. | ||
| No Hebrews need apply. | ||
| Professions that didn't accept Jews. | ||
| And so like, as Jews down for the last 2,000 years, we said, well, okay, I can figure this out. | ||
| I'll keep my head down and I hope nobody kills me. | ||
| And so this, I was born right after, two years after they were throwing my people, our people, in the ovens. | ||
| So that's the world that we grew up in, that I grew up in. | ||
| And I discovered, first of all, my Jewish identity. | ||
| And I said, wait a second, I'm a Jew. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Those are great people. | ||
| We don't have to keep our head down. | ||
| I want to discover what it means to be a Jew. | ||
| So I started studying the Torah. | ||
| And I said, OK, there's two things. | ||
| One, there's Yiddishkeit, right? | ||
| The idea of Eastern Jewish, the Ashkenazi heritage, where all my people came from. | ||
| You know, which is a Broadway, an upper Broadway in New York, and gefilte fish, and speaking a little bit of Yiddish, and blah, blah, blah. | ||
| Very good. | ||
| But the Nazis, the Germans, are destroyed there. | ||
| It doesn't exist anymore. | ||
| It still existed when I was a kid, because there were the immigrant generation and their kids. | ||
| It was my parents. | ||
| And they're gone now. | ||
| And so that civilization is just the magnificent, thousand-year-long, very rich civilization of the Eastern European Jews is gone. | ||
| But the thing which is not gone is the Torah. | ||
| And so I started studying the Torah and reading the Torah. | ||
| And I said, oh my God, this is a record of human experience. | ||
| It's told in story form, but we Jews tell everything in a story form, right? | ||
| That's how we communicate with each other, right? | ||
| And I realized, I said, they said that the German humor is all based on the bathroom and French humor is all based on the bedroom. | ||
| But Jewish humor is all based on the mind. | ||
| It's based on the credible, inbred adoration of ambiguity. | ||
| And the Torah takes it down to the bare bones. | ||
| And it says, wait a second, here's something you aren't going to understand, right? | ||
| Why did God create the snake? | ||
| Why did God, the first act that human beings perform, First off, Eve turns her back on God, and then the first act that Adam performs, the first thing that a human man says is he blames his wife. | ||
| He rats her out. | ||
| He says, the woman made me do it. | ||
| So if you read through the Torah time and time again, you say, I just don't get this. | ||
| I want to make sense of this. | ||
| It's not how to do this and you'll be a good person. | ||
| It's things which are shocking. | ||
| So when I grew up, all the Jews were about Buddhism and Zen Buddhism and the sound of one hand clapping and the Zen koans. | ||
| Well, okay, very good indeed. | ||
| But everything in the Torah is a provocative koan. | ||
| It just doesn't make sense until you have to look at it, look at it and figure out what did it mean. | ||
| And when you figure it out, you realize it's all about human nature, which means about my nature. | ||
| That everything in the Torah is about betrayal and incest and adultery and bastardy and murder, and that's who we are, that we're incredibly flawed. | ||
| So I took that study and that understanding of the world and tried to apply it to the world that I see around me. | ||
| Say, wait a second, how did we end up here? | ||
| Okay? | ||
| So the answer is not the Democrats took us here, right? | ||
| Which they did, or that the Marxists have come out of the woodwork, which they have, or that the press has imploded upon itself. | ||
| The answer is something different, that these things that occurred to me are not the cause, but they're the result. | ||
| So they're the result of what? | ||
| They're the result of a certain point in civilization. | ||
| And so if you look at the Torah, That point is, it's perfectly clear from the Tower of Babel. | ||
| These are the richest people in the world. | ||
| What do they want to do? | ||
| They wanted to raise a tower to heaven so they can be like God. | ||
| And it all came tumbling down around them. | ||
| So I say, okay, I get it. | ||
| What's Greenpeace trying to do? | ||
| They're trying to raise, what's the ACLU trying to do? | ||
| They're trying to raise a tower to God so they can be like God. | ||
| So they can be in charge of the world. | ||
| So I started to see the world in a very, very different way as And so I said, what brought us to this point? | ||
| Well, the same thing that brought the Tower of Babel, it was prosperity. | ||
| I realized that the billionaire's children don't work. | ||
| And when the boss stops being the assistant and becomes the boss, he forgets how to use the Xerox machine. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And he doesn't put his gas in his car, and he doesn't mow his own lawn, and he's not connected to anything around him. | ||
| So what happens to this rich person? | ||
| They become frightened. | ||
| They surround themselves with security, and they know themselves to be a flawed human being, but they forget. | ||
| They say, wait a second, I'm like a god. | ||
| There's nothing that I can't buy, there's nothing that I can't do. | ||
| I'm the richest country in the world. | ||
| I don't have to work. | ||
| Americans won't do stoop labor, we'll open the borders, right? | ||
| I don't have to defend myself, haha, because we all really want the same things. | ||
| So as soon as you say, geopolitically, we all really want the same things, some other guy over there is going to say, these guys are suckers, I'm going to take advantage of them. | ||
| That's the history of the world. | ||
| That's what we see now. | ||
| So with all of that in mind, I mean, that's very much what you're talking about in the book. | ||
| So do you think there is a rebirth of people realizing some of this related to either the Bible or age-old stories versus sort of the purely secularism on steroids that we seem to be stuck in at the moment? | ||
| Well, I don't think it's a rebirth. | ||
| I think it's there all the time. | ||
| Half of the country anyway voted for Donald Trump. | ||
| These people, and you know who it is, What happens when the people become too prosperous is the country divides, any country, into the rich and the powerful, and then the parasites who live off of the rich and the poor want to supplant them. | ||
| For example, Black Lives Matter, you know, and the Squad. | ||
| And the poor, who are getting bribed to stay poor, which is what we see in the inner cities. | ||
| But the people who have always been America have been the middle class, right? | ||
| Been the doctor, the lawyer, the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, the shoemaker, | ||
| because they have to deal with each other, they have to deal with the supply system, | ||
| they have to deal with customers, they have to deal with credit. | ||
| The rich don't have to deal with any of those things and neither do the poor. | ||
| So the middle class is very, very connected to each other, but the middle class is vanishing, vanishing, vanishing. | ||
| And especially with the centralization of distribution, and then with outsourcing everything to China. | ||
| But there's still a middle class, and it's basically in the South, right? | ||
| Because the South is the last vestiges of the wonderful heritage of agrarianism. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And the farmers Harry Truman said the farmer is the smartest guy in the world because he's sitting on his tractor 12 hours a day and he's thinking about the weather and about the railroads and about the credit and about the price of grain and about the farmer realizes that every moment he spends on tax task a he can't spend on task B. Right. | ||
| Which is. | ||
| Tom Sowell, and which is Hayek, and which is Milton Friedman. | ||
| It goes back to, you know, Jon Stewart. | ||
| You only have so much energy. | ||
| If you spend it on A, you can't spend it on B. So I also realized that all pilots are conservative, right? | ||
| Because the pilots realize, I just have so much gas. | ||
| You know, I can spend it on A or I can spend it on B. I mean, you can't just make it up. | ||
| I thought we could just print money, make up gas. | ||
| You can't do that? | ||
| Exactly so. | ||
| You can't spend it twice. | ||
| So, Friedman says price just indicates the way that we get together. | ||
| To say, I'm not going to ask you how hard you worked for the money. | ||
| You're going to ask me how hard I worked on the shoes. | ||
| What degree on the price? | ||
| We'll do business. | ||
| But if everything becomes centralized, we're no longer doing business with each other. | ||
| The rich and the poor are Both look for ways to gain power. | ||
| So the Black Lives Matter, and Antifa, and the Squad, and blah, blah, and the teachers unions, right? | ||
| And the service unions say, fuck it, you know? | ||
| Okay, I know how to gain power. | ||
| Power comes through unity. | ||
| Power comes through strength. | ||
| Well, okay, to a certain extent, yes. | ||
| There's something in the labor movement. | ||
| But on the other hand, that's fascism, right? | ||
| It's that nobody has to take responsibility because they're all part of the fascia. | ||
| They're all part of the group. | ||
| And the rich say, yeah, fuck it, I don't care. | ||
| Raise taxes, I don't care. | ||
| I'll stay here 180 days in the Republic of Santa Monica, and then I'll go to a low-tax state. | ||
| So what happens, the rich, having despoiled California, Oregon, Washington, New Mexico, go to a low-tax state and take the virus with them. | ||
| They didn't cause it. | ||
| Forgive my being blunt. | ||
| They're like a pimple. | ||
| You don't get the pimple because your skin is upset. | ||
| You get the pimple because your metabolism is upset. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Your blood is... So, I realized that to say, you know, Biden and Kamala Harris and all those guys, look what they've done. | ||
| They're just opportunists. | ||
| That's all that they are. | ||
| This is an absolutely predictable point in human history. | ||
| And it's up to us to decide, okay, what would we like to have happen? | ||
| And let's see if we can bring it about. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that really is what the book is about. | ||
| I do want to say for the record, as a Californian refugee who just moved here to Florida, I came here for the right reasons to do the right things. | ||
| So I will keep this place as, as free as Florida has always been. | ||
| You're in LA still. | ||
| You are in L.A. | ||
| still. | ||
| Anyone that listened to the last few minutes is going, wait a minute, how is this guy in Hollywood, in L.A., saying these things? | ||
| How can you make a living still? | ||
| How can you get gigs? | ||
| Can you walk into CAA and they're gonna still talk to you? | ||
| I mean, how has that been for you? | ||
| Well, as we used to say in Chicago, I drove my car here, I didn't come on the bus. | ||
| So, I've continued to have a pretty You know my agent? | ||
| God given career as a playwright to do my plays all around the world. | ||
| In fact, I got a play now on Broadway with Lawrence Fishburne and Sam Rockwell and Darren Criss, | ||
| an older play of mine called "American Buffalo." | ||
| And as far as getting hired in the movie business, I'm too old to sit in a room with 12 guys named Jason. | ||
|
unidentified
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(laughing) | |
| You know my agent? | ||
| They're all named Jason. | ||
| (laughing) | ||
| But how about that? | ||
| I mean, just living in L.A. | ||
| right now, I mean, after two years of COVID and just the way, the whole industry has collapsed. | ||
| I mean, that was one of the reasons, there were many reasons I left L.A. | ||
| But it was also that there was, it wasn't just the COVID craziness and the crime and the homelessness, okay, we could do all that. | ||
| It was just that it felt that there was nothing cool about it anymore. | ||
| Whatever was cool and creative about L.A. | ||
| felt completely gone to me. | ||
| Well, you know, cities grow for a reason. | ||
| And when the reason is gone, they get repurposed. | ||
| When I was first working in New York a million years ago, I was working in Greenwich Village and anything south of Houston Street was a slum. | ||
| Absolute slum. | ||
| There were people who were squatters, who were artists and homeless people living in those lofts that used to be a manufacturing district. | ||
| And eventually the city came in and said, okay, okay, you artists, You can live here forever. | ||
| 200 bucks a month you can rent. | ||
| So I got friends whose grandchildren are living in lofts for 200 bucks a month that would sell for 30 million dollars. | ||
| Okay, so now what used to be lofts and manufacturing becomes artists. | ||
| So as always, along with our brothers the homeless, the bohemians come in and repurpose a neighborhood. | ||
| And because the Bohemians come in and repurpose a neighborhood, then the restaurants come, then the shops come. | ||
| So now Soho becomes the prime shopping district on the East Coast. | ||
| And people come from all over the world to shop in Soho. | ||
| Gets repurposed, right? | ||
| What happens then? | ||
| Black Lives Matter and the rioters come in and say, fuck you. | ||
| They clean everything out. | ||
| And what does the New York police do about it? | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| So what you see is what started off as an industry catering to the shipping trade in New York, then became abandoned, and then became a place for squatters, both the homeless and the artists, and then became a shopping district, and is now, yet again, going to become a slum. | ||
| So this is the history of the world. | ||
| So how do you liken that to L.A.? | ||
| What do you think is going to happen to L.A.? | ||
| And I do have to tell you that every time I mention California on my show gratuitously, I have to put $5 into this jar, and at the end of the year, I'm giving a couple thousand bucks away to someone who lives in California to move to Florida. | ||
| So if you're looking to move, I might have a couple thousand for you. | ||
| What do you think is going to happen to L.A.? ? | ||
| Well, first I want to say about Miami is I used to go to Miami all the time in the 50s with my dad who had business down there. | ||
| We'd fly down there. | ||
| And I'm still trying to get the zinc oxide off my nose. | ||
| Yeah, it's sunny, but it's all right. | ||
| What's going to happen to LA? | ||
| It's happened to LA. | ||
| Here's the thing. | ||
| Just as there's no, there's no business like no business. | ||
| There's no, when you do away with the theaters, you do away with the possibility of independent production. | ||
| And there's no reason for the film industry anymore to be in L.A. | ||
| I mean, they came out here because there was a sunshine, and they made a bunch of crap every year. | ||
| They made a bunch of crap and a couple of movies that were memorable, and a couple of people snuck through and made something beautiful, and a couple of people snuck through and made a fortune, and sometimes the two people were the same, and sometimes they weren't. | ||
| So the industry grew up here, first, because it was sunny, and second, because they were They were fleeing the Edison Company, which held the patents in New York. | ||
| So the bootleggers came out here to make movies. | ||
| So the studios, just like Soho, grew up around these bootleggers, right? | ||
| And then they gave rise to this incredibly magnificent community. | ||
| They had 5,000 people working as musicians and sent their kids to graduate school here, right? | ||
| 10,000 people working as actors. | ||
| All of the professions and so forth were a middle class that supported the film industry. | ||
| But as films became more and more successful, they became more and more expensive. | ||
| And so any film that you see... When I first started making movies, my producer, the guy who taught me about movie making, said, any movie can be made for any price. | ||
| You can make the hundred million dollar movie For $5 million. | ||
| In fact, today, with an iPhone, you can make it for $50,000. | ||
| And you can make the $50,000 movie for $100,000. | ||
| So people are making comedies, which is two people standing in a stupid room, talking to each other, for $200 million. | ||
| They don't make any sense. | ||
| So what happens, because they have so much energy and so much money to distribute, what happens is they attract parasites. | ||
| They said, just like if you're rich, you say, well, I have a housekeeper. | ||
| How about that? | ||
| Oh, I'm richer. | ||
| I have two housekeepers. | ||
| Oops. | ||
| Got to keep an eye on them. | ||
| I'm going to have a household manager. | ||
| Oops. | ||
| Got to keep an eye on them because they have friends and delivery. | ||
| I'm going to get security. | ||
| Oops. | ||
| Now I'm going to get us. | ||
| So eventually the superstructure brings down the ship. | ||
| Right? | ||
| There's more restaurant critics than cooks or customers. | ||
| So there's no reason for the business to be here anymore. | ||
| In fact, most of it isn't. | ||
| But yet we have these huge, like you mentioned, CIA people who, if they all went away, nothing would change in the movie business. | ||
| But they spawn other parasites. | ||
| Right? | ||
| The agent gets a sub-agent and the sub-agent gets a blah, blah, blah. | ||
| And then people get a manager to deal with the agent. | ||
| No one's ever exposed with a manager. | ||
| Tell me what a manager does. | ||
| So there's all of this superstructure, but who's working? | ||
| I am proud to say that I've never had a manager. | ||
| I have agents. | ||
| I'm still not totally sure what they all do, but I never had a manager because that one was well beyond me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, the job of the agent is you give them 10% to say, geez, I tried everybody. | ||
| I did the best I could. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I get him the deal. | ||
| He takes 10%. | ||
| Uh, I signed something. | ||
| It's pretty good. | ||
| Pretty, pretty good gig. | ||
| But, but so do you think, so, so what are you doing there still? | ||
| I mean, if you, if you feel this about LA, I asked this to all of my LA friends, which is why I'm asking you, I mean, most have left already, but do you, what's going to come of this place? | ||
| Well, it's dead. | ||
| I mean, for example, I started looking in New York many years ago, 40 years ago, they started putting up the, I saw it first in Chicago, they started putting up the nicknames of the streets on the street signs. | ||
| I grew up in Chicago, State Street, State Street, all of a sudden it's State Street, that great street. | ||
| Broadway, Broadway, Broadway, Broadway. | ||
| Outliers, right? | ||
| And I started making a little bit of money in my twenties, and my friends said, why don't you buy a place over there? | ||
| You know, on the ocean, there's nothing between you and Portugal. | ||
| It's going for nothing. | ||
| So I said, yeah, no, yeah, no, yeah, no. | ||
| So now those places are selling for $1,500 million. | ||
| But you're not going to find anybody who makes harpoons on Martha's Vineyard, which used to be a whaling It's gone. | ||
| So that Soho and Chelsea where I used to live was where the ships Chandler's live when New York was originally one of the great seaports of the world. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| And when I was a kid working there, it was the it was the capital of the world. | ||
| But but you can't be the cultural capital of the world without artists. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And the reason that the cities existed was You took disparate elements, which would never, ever meet in life. | ||
| For example, in Chicago, this woman wrote a book about 20 years ago called Terrible Honesty about Harlem in the 20s. | ||
| She said, you have these three groups that are completely scorned, and they have their own wonderful cultures. | ||
| Black America, gay America, and Jewish America, right? | ||
| But they all met in Harlem, and they met in Broadway, and they cross-pollinated each other. | ||
| It was incredible energy. | ||
| But now we're completely separate in the city. | ||
| I mean, I say, going to my neighborhood restaurant in Santa Monica, I said that the definition of diversity is someone who has 10.1% body fat. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, they destroyed Santa Monica. | ||
| The promenade, the whole thing, they destroyed it. | ||
| Yeah, no, it's, you know, the diversity of somebody who hasn't had Botox. | ||
| So there's no cross-pollination, cross-pollinization anymore. | ||
| And what happened to free speech is the Democrats and Republicans don't even speak to each other anymore. | ||
| Those who used to meet at the synagogue, at the church, right, at their kid's baseball game, she's a black woman And a white guy across the street, went over to a baseball game, and she was talking to her kids, her black kids, about something or other. | ||
| And he said, excuse me, you shouldn't, white guy says to her, excuse me, you shouldn't talk to your kids that way about racism. | ||
| She's saying to her kids, racism is all gone, get out there and play, big deal. | ||
| And he's... That's white woke 101 right there. | ||
| So what do you think Hollywood can produce? | ||
| I mean, do you see anything sort of new and inspirational coming out of that machine? | ||
| We're shooting, we're taping this right now just a couple days after the Oscars, | ||
| which I realized that I didn't even know the Oscars were on. | ||
| Of course I found out because of the slap heard 'round the world. | ||
| But then when I went through the best movie list and I went through a bunch of the other lists, | ||
| I did it live on the show, I think I had seen one of the films. | ||
| You know, I flipped through Netflix and Hulu and it's very hard to find something that feels new | ||
| or original or inspirational. | ||
| That the machinery, because of the reasons you're talking about, the Hollywood machinery seems unable to give us, or maybe can occasionally choke out something new and fresh, but there just doesn't seem to be anything left. | ||
| Well, there isn't. | ||
| I mean, nobody saw those movies, right? | ||
| Because nobody says, Honey, let's look through the TV Guide thing and see if there's any wonderful things about racism or anything about diversity. | ||
| I really, you know what I like at the end of the day? | ||
| There's a really great diversity humor. | ||
| Right? | ||
| There isn't any. | ||
| I like to be lectured by late night comedians about how I'm racist right before I go to bed. | ||
| That's my thing. | ||
| Yeah, me too. | ||
| It's terrific. | ||
| So the question is, who's watching? | ||
| See, when you got a theater, you know who's watching, because if they go to sleep or they leave in the middle of the first act, you better change your mind pretty quick. | ||
| But when you own the high ground, there's no connection with the audience. | ||
| They say, oh, you know what? | ||
| If you want to see the weather channel, you're going to have to buy this whole package and we'll sell you whatever crap we want. | ||
| So yet again, It's not that the inmates have taken over the asylum, but that they've been kicked out of the direction of the asylum. | ||
| Because the inmates of the asylum were the artists. | ||
| When you kick the artists out, say, I get it. | ||
| I know how to use the theater. | ||
| I know how to use film. | ||
| I'll tell people what life is like. | ||
| That black people are people too. | ||
| Everyone's people too, except the Jews. | ||
| And that sick people are sick and they deserve our, you know, there used to be all these plays in New York about sick people, people who are blind, people who are deaf, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| They always won the Pulitzer Prize, you know, for telling us that the bad guy, doesn't the bad guy realize that a blind person is a person too? | ||
| So you come in humming the play, but nobody likes that play, except the Pulitzer Prize committee. | ||
| What about sort of the Disneyfication of the theater that, you know, in the heyday of the theater, it was all it's everything you're talking about. | ||
| It was these incredible independent writers and playwrights who could come up with original stories. | ||
| And now basically everything is a redux of a Disney movie, either from 50 years ago or sometimes from three months ago. | ||
| Yeah, well, when I was a kid in New York, the theater district was A slum. | ||
| It was dangerous. | ||
| It was sex trafficking, and confidence men, and mugging, and massage parlors, and whorehouses, and pool halls where you can buy anything in the world, and great theater. | ||
| But as the theater brought people to... Look, the cause of decay is always growth, right? | ||
| When the growth stops at some point, it always has to stop. | ||
| Decay takes over to, as the yogis would say, to repurpose it for the next thing. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So the theater district, especially 42nd Street, is all... When the middle class left New York, the theater still existed. | ||
| But the middle class couldn't afford to live there. | ||
| So the theater, because it was a moneymaker, appealed to tourists. | ||
| That's who goes to the theater, it's all tourists. | ||
| So you can't appeal to the tourists with a new play by a new guy nobody ever heard of on a subject that you can't reduce to a tagline. | ||
| No one's going to do that because, you know, whatever costs five million bucks to stage a play. | ||
| So the artists aren't coming to New York. | ||
| Who wants to go do that play? | ||
| You know, anybody can write that play. | ||
| And I was looking at it was really they used to have ads on TV. | ||
| I watched TV years ago. | ||
| They said, not actors, real life people. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The people in this commercial are not actors. | ||
| They are real life people. | ||
| I realized if you turn it around, what you say is, yeah, I get it. | ||
| Look good to me. | ||
| Oh, you don't need to be an actor. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So you don't need to be an actor if there's no scripts. | ||
| Because anybody can say, you know, I'm kind of like, I don't know, I kind of look around and I kind of say, you know, anybody can do that. | ||
| Anybody can write that garbage. | ||
| Where are the artists going to grow? | ||
| They aren't going to grow in the cities. | ||
| We can't afford to live there. | ||
| Well, you're doing it. | ||
| and no one's gonna put on their stuff. | ||
| So something else will happen. | ||
| So how do we get out of this thing? | ||
| I mean, it's connected to what the purpose of the book is, the point of the book of this pivotal moment, | ||
| can we save this great experiment? | ||
| But how do we get out of this sort of culturally, politically, spiritually, however you wanna take that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, you're doing it. | |
| I'm trying to do something. | ||
| I mean, what, you know, it's like Golda Meir said, remember her secret weapon? | ||
| Remember what it was? | ||
| I should know this. | ||
| I should know this. | ||
| It was the people? | ||
| It was the people? | ||
| No, she said there's no alternative. | ||
| Israel is a secret weapon. | ||
| There's no alternative. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So our secret weapon, is there no alternative? | ||
| So is that going to mean we're going to die at our post? | ||
| Yeah, maybe. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| We're going to die anyway. | ||
| So the question is, how do we want to spend our lives in the midst of this vast upheaval? | ||
| So for years, I thought it was a huge mistake on the right for people to say, well, if we did this, if the Republicans did this, I can't believe that. | ||
| Well, it's time to believe it now. | ||
| It's because it's true. | ||
| that there's a moment in our country that something new has to emerge. | ||
| We're either going to emerge into a... | ||
| All civilizations die. | ||
| We're going to emerge, except the Jews, which is why people hate us. | ||
| We're going to emerge into a vigorous maturity, or we're going to be taken over by Russia, China and Iran. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| I suspect you don't think that the people in charge at the moment | ||
| are quite up to the task. | ||
| Well, they aren't in charge. | ||
| They're along for the ride. | ||
| You know, there's a bunch of politicians, with a couple of exceptions, are whores, thieves, thugs, and fools. | ||
| That's what politicians are, all of them, with a couple of exceptions. | ||
| That's why we have a Constitution. | ||
| Because the people who wrote the Constitution understood that, right? | ||
| That they were just regular guys, and right now regular guys and women, right? | ||
| And that maybe, They would abide by the rules. | ||
| And because they weren't going to abide by the rules, every couple of years we had to kick them out. | ||
| Because they didn't abide by the rules. | ||
| And, if they were caught cheating, lying, whoring, whatever, the newspapers would rat them out. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So newspapers don't do that anymore. | ||
| The legacy newspapers. | ||
| And if you look at the politicians who weren't whores, thieves, thugs, and fools, What happened to all of them? | ||
| They killed him, right? | ||
| Pretty good examples. | ||
| My favorite Jew, Jesus, killed him. | ||
| Churchill, they threw him out of office, right? | ||
| Saved Western civilization. | ||
| They shot Dr. King. | ||
| They shot Lincoln. | ||
| They took Trump, who only wanted to do a good job, and treated him worse than any other citizen in this country has ever been treated, and they're still at it. | ||
| So the people who say, wait a second, no, no, no, do not look behind the curtain. | ||
| The left. | ||
| And so the right says there's nobody there. | ||
| That was what my book was like, the secret knowledge. | ||
| There wasn't any secret knowledge. | ||
| Because what does it cost? | ||
| Here's what politics is. | ||
| It's the post office, the Navy, the Army, and the Marines on the coast. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Anything beyond that, you're going to attract the horse, the baba, and fools. | ||
| So Trump comes in and says, yeah, let's deal with that. | ||
| We'll let everything else go hang. | ||
| They want to kill him. | ||
| Because he's completely opposed to the zeitgeist, to the spirit of the time, on the left. | ||
| So they say, oh my God, he said this and he said that, but grab me in the groin, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| That's bullshit. | ||
| That's the same thing as saying that Jews, you know, they're greasy. | ||
| You know? | ||
| It's finding a reason for your prejudice that seems to make sense to you. | ||
| Or say, oh, okay, you know, he's got a big mouth and he sticks his foot in it. | ||
| Therefore, I tell you what, let's open our borders and give all of our money and start a nuclear war with Iran. | ||
| Does that seem like a good idea? | ||
| So the people and the conservatives say, that's a rotten idea. | ||
| Let's stop it using the means at our disposal. | ||
| The problem is, in any catfight, the person screaming the loudest is probably in the wrong. | ||
| Because the other person is saying, well, okay, I get it. | ||
| You're out of your mind. | ||
| Let's abide by the rules and see if we can come to some mutual agreement. | ||
| So that's the right. | ||
| So that's why the right gets accused of everything. | ||
| So how do you think we shift that paradigm? | ||
| I'm sure you've heard the phrase, the Breitbart phrase, that politics is downstream from culture. | ||
| The right obviously lost culture over a certain amount of decades. | ||
| I think that actually is shifting right now. | ||
| A little bit, at least. | ||
| But in terms of art and everything else, is there something better that, say, right-leaning or conservative? | ||
| I mean, you described yourself before as an old-school liberal. | ||
| I mean, that's what put me on the map. | ||
| I was trying to save liberalism from the left five years ago or seven years ago. | ||
| But for any of us that are roughly freedom-loving, you-just-want-people-to-live-and-let-live kind of people, what can we do culturally or artistically Or through the type of work that you do to turn this thing around? | ||
| Because it's not going to be the political leaders that turn it around, obviously. | ||
| We can't do anything because that's not the purpose of art. | ||
| Art is the conjunction of inspiration with an audience. | ||
| The artist has some inspiration. | ||
| And if the inspiration is reducible to be kind to black people, hate white people, or people dying of cancer deserve our compassion, It's not inspiration. | ||
| So that's what art is. | ||
| Art is very closely akin to religion, and it's not at all connected to politics or culture. | ||
| It's like the oyster. | ||
| The oyster makes the pearl, but the oyster can't use the pearl. | ||
| Other people can use the pearl, but the oyster can't. | ||
| The oyster is making that pearl to influence people to dress up their honey when they go out to the nightclub. | ||
| Right? | ||
| The oyster has to make the pearl. | ||
| It's going to go nuts. | ||
| There's nothing that art can do. | ||
| What we can do is speak the truth to each other and not give in. | ||
| Because it's the daily erosion of life. | ||
| I'm going to tell you my five pronouns, or you like to, wait a second, you have to identify yourself, or are you vaccinated? | ||
| This constant shepherding each other day to day, which is killing. | ||
| And to be able to deal with this retail is exhausting. | ||
| It has to be dealt with wholesale. | ||
| And the way you deal, the individual deals with wholesale say, thanks, I'm not playing. | ||
| I'm not playing that game. | ||
| You know, it's like what we learned from, you know, I learned anyway from my, you know, gay friends, gay liberation 30 years, 40 years ago. | ||
| We're here, we're queer, get used to it. | ||
| Right? | ||
| It's not my problem that I'm gay. | ||
| If you've got a problem with it, that's your problem. | ||
| So that's what we have to do. | ||
| We have to speak up and say, you know, in effect, we're here, we'll get used to it. | ||
| Because then it starts to crumble a little bit. | ||
| That look on people's face, you know, when you've seen it, where they say, oh my God, he's not, he's not playing my game. | ||
| That actually gets nicely to a phrase that's in the book that I really loved. | ||
| You talk about a virus of conformity, and that seems to be it almost more than anything else, that the media, the politicians, the people, you know, COVID vaxes, gender pronouns, the whole thing, that everyone is in on a bunch of stuff that nobody really believes. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| But as Shakespeare, another Jew, said, truth's a bitch that must be whipped to kennel while Lady the Brach can sit by the fire and stink. | ||
| Lady the Brach means a female dog. | ||
| Truth's always a bitch that must be whipped to kennel. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Here's the thing about religion, think about the Torah, is it says, behave in this way and you'll be, that's what God wants. | ||
| He wants you to do justice, love, mercy, and walk humbly with God. | ||
| The rest of it is not in your control. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Like they say, like Cicero or somebody has said, when someone said, what do you do when the tyrant says, do A, B, and C, or I'll kill you? | ||
| He said, you say to the tyrant, I never told you I was immortal. | ||
| So the question is, If you were given the chance, if they came to you and they said, okay, here's what I'm gonna do, I need you to recant, right? | ||
| Because A, if you don't recant, we're gonna ruin you. | ||
| And if you do recant, we're gonna make you a billionaire. | ||
| Up to you, what are you gonna say? | ||
| Well, A, I would know they're most likely gonna make you a slave, actually, not a billionaire, if you do recant, especially if you're recanting for something you didn't do. | ||
| Exactly so, but another way to look at it is, I never told you I was immortal. | ||
| Are you going to say that you're going to ruin me for not proclaiming that men and women can turn into each other? | ||
| Well, that's up to you. | ||
| It's not up to me. | ||
| What's up to me is my conscience, right? | ||
| Now, am I going to fall off the wagon and be a coward sometime, be a fool sometime, and be wishy-washy? | ||
| Probably. | ||
| So what do you do then? | ||
| You get back on the wagon. | ||
| And you meet the best people in the world, don't you? | ||
| You absolutely do. | ||
| The people that I've met on the other side of this thing, it's incomparable to what I was doing before. | ||
| Incomparable. | ||
| It's like Ruth Weiss at Harvard, teaching at Harvard, and a teacher comes up to her and says, Ruth, you know, I want to say blah, blah, blah, but what will happen if I tell the truth? | ||
| Ruth said, you'll be free. | ||
| It's better to be free. | ||
| It's exhilarating to be free. | ||
| And you might as well blow your fucking brains out, you know, if having seen a little bit of the truth of our contemporary civilization, you say, yes, but I'm going to conform. | ||
| Because you're dead then. | ||
| You're just dead. | ||
| I got one more for ya. | ||
| What's inspiring you these days? | ||
| What do you look at, or see, or hear, or listen to, or read, that you go, that's got the thing that I'm looking for? | ||
| Or at least got the spirit of it, maybe? | ||
| I read everything, because that's what I do all day. | ||
| Years ago, I was going out to my office. | ||
| My oldest daughter was about 10. | ||
| She said, Dad, where you going? | ||
| I said, I'm going to work. | ||
| She said, nighty night. | ||
| Because that's what I do, you know, I nap all day and I read and every once in a while jot something down. | ||
| But I discovered some really great writers in the 20s who were writing about business. | ||
| There's a guy called Jesse Sprague, and he wrote several books about the building trades and about the wholesalers and about credit and the romances. | ||
| What do you call it? | ||
| Fictional romances of an imaginary guy in these trades. | ||
| And he takes all of America apart and he makes it just fascinating. | ||
| The view of the 20s. | ||
| Check it out. | ||
| Jesse Sprague. | ||
| The romance of credit. | ||
| Or confessions of a building trades contractor. | ||
| Marvelous. | ||
| So I ask you what's inspiring you and you throw me back a hundred years. | ||
| That sort of says everything, I suppose. | ||
| Well, listen, Barry Weiss is inspiring me. | ||
| You know, Barry started at the University of Austin, Texas. | ||
| And, you know, she asked me would I play along. | ||
| So I'm going to play along. | ||
| So that's inspiring. | ||
| Young people today, like, you know, Barry said to me, Dave, Dave, she said, don't be a curmudgeon. | ||
| So I said, oh, my God, that's true. | ||
| I got to stop being a curmudgeon. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And saying, oh, you know, Grandpa says when I was young, fall, fall, fall. | ||
| Well, of course, that's true. | ||
| Because the point is not when I was young, things were better. | ||
| Well, of course, they were better because you were young. | ||
| But now what? | ||
| You know, so what can I contribute? | ||
| I'd love to contribute. | ||
| You know, what can I contribute to my magnificent country right now? | ||
| You know, tell the truth the best I can, you know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's it. | |
| You're speaking my language, man. | ||
| David, I've really enjoyed talking to you. | ||
| We're going to link to the book down below, and I hope you'll come to the free state of Florida. | ||
| I don't know that they're going to let me back in L.A., so I don't know that we could break bread there, but you're welcome here in Florida anytime. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| It was a pleasure talking to you. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop yelling, check out our politics playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist all right over here. |
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