Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux - Surviving Woke in the ARTS! CALL IN SHOW

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Nov. 3, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:29:28

Surviving Woke in the ARTS! CALL IN SHOW

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	So, I am a mixed race gay millennial from the Midwest.
	Like you, I majored in theater, got my master's degree in Boston, and was finally at a point where I could actually live off of theater with some supplemental work.
	So, I quit my job.
	I was working as a genius or as a mobile technician at Apple at an Apple store in Cambridge side, in Cambridge in Massachusetts.
	And so, I eagerly anticipated a year with the five contracts lined up and enough planned income to actually sustain and even save money.
	This was December of 2019.
	So, as you can imagine, the year didn't go as planned.
	I found myself without contracts and broke because of the pandemic, with the whole industry utterly crushed by COVID in a way that no other entertainment-related industry was, at least as far as the arts is concerned.
	So, it has not recovered.
	In the subsequent five years, I've lived live theater has become an artistic wasteland.
	I've tried to keep doing shows, but when things began reopening, the environment and the community that I remembered had been transformed into this radical, hate-filled tribe of virtue-signaling, ideologically captured zealots.
	There is no more storytelling.
	Everything has a message.
	Everyone has an agenda.
	And the idea that anyone in the community would disagree with the opinion of the mainstream urban monoculture has become absurd.
	They assume you agree with their absurdities, all of them.
	If you're in theater, you hate Trump.
	You believe in intersectionality, in critical race theory, in sterilizing effeminate boys and more masculine girls.
	I do shows, and the integrity and virtue of storytelling has disappeared.
	The people are nihilistic, disingenuous, constantly angry, and every production I've done feels like a parody of what great theater was.
	I feel lost.
	I have no respect for my fellow artists, the people I once look up to.
	I dare not voice my personal opinions.
	Maybe this production of Wizard of Oz doesn't have to be about the patriarchy.
	What is wrong with this straight actor playing a gay role?
	Aren't we just actors?
	So I keep my mouth shut because literally one wrong comment, social media post joke, and I would never work in that town again.
	I can't do it anymore.
	I love performing more than anything else in the world, but I don't love that.
	Love that in order to play any roles, I have to also play the role of one of them.
	At the end of the day, none of it is good.
	I spent nearly two decades training and learning and honing my skills for a job in industry that simply doesn't exist anymore.
	So I have all but stopped auditioning.
	I've redirected my energy into tech and graphic design, making music when I can, but it is not enough.
	I go months without singing and I start to go crazy.
	I hold on to the hope that the world I remember will come back, that people need theater as a form of human connection to learn to be challenged, exposed to ideas that, God forbid, make them question the narratives, assumptions, and perspectives they hold.
	Theater's essential purpose, as Shakespeare said, is to hold, as it were, a mirror up to society.
	But now I feel like it just holds a smartphone with an Instagram filter and it's too busy affirming your beliefs and agreeing with you to allow any moment of transformative contemplation.
	Even if there were so an abundance of contracts and well-paying opportunities now, I wouldn't want to be part of this epidemic of the uninteresting and its volatile environment of opinion landmines ready to blast the critical thinking out of any dissenters.
	What advice would you give to those of us devoted to an industry whose work has been hijacked by mass psychosis and whose workers have become occult?
	Do I pretend and drink the Kool-Aid or do I die of thirst?
	So great, some great writing.
	I read that earlier and I was like, oh, that's the creative juices.
	It's very nice.
	Very good.
	Very good.
	Thank you.
	Very good.
	And it's funny because you sort of say, I don't like the identity politics.
	And how do you introduce yourself?
	Exactly.
	Well, okay, for context, I guess for context, because it's very easy to be a young, white, straight male in society and have these opinions.
	Oh, like, so you're sort of saying, I've got some bona fides because I'm gay, I'm biracial, and so I'm not just some white guy with these perspectives.
	Is that what you mean?
	Well, it's it's also that when I enter in those spaces because of those prerequisites, because of those immutable characteristics, it's already assumed whether or not I was even in theater that I am on that side of things, right?
	Right.
	Because I'm part of the LGBTQ community, the black community.
	It's just, you know, all of the, all that stuff is kind of assumed upon entry into the into the tribe in any way.
	So I guess that's why I added for a particular context for you and for whoever's listening.
	Okay.
	But no, but no, that's not how I introduce myself.
	No.
	In fact, I find those things to be the least interesting things about me.
	I am what I do, not what I didn't have control over.
	Well, now I must, I must ask.
	I don't must ask, but I will ask.
	You don't have to answer anything.
	When you say biracial, that's quite a like putting your hand in the scrab bag, scrabble bag and trying to figure out what you're going to get.
	What kind of biraciality are you talking about?
	So I always make a joke and say that I'm a mutt, but I've said that before in front of black friends and they found that offensive.
	But when I did the 23andMe thing, it was West African, Scottish, Native American, and a Dutch, very, very Dutch.
	Ah, okay.
	So that's so.
	And do you know much about the family tree?
	How this all came about?
	Is this something that's no, I don't.
	I know that I have, I know that because of my last name, I have a clan in a Tarkin and Scottish that I could like purchase if I wanted to.
	But I've done a little bit of investigating, but no, I don't know.
	My family hasn't kept enough records and whatnot.
	And on my mom's side, her father's family kind of disowned my grandmother.
	There was a divorce and there was, so I have a whole kind of like side of my family on that end that I never knew.
	And that line was kind of broken by a lack of contact because they didn't like my grandmother.
	I don't know much about that drama.
	So I'm kind of, you know, mostly just going by my last name and what I got from, you know, the 23andMe thing.
	Okay.
	got it and tell me a little bit about your well actually i'd love to hear a song if you have something handy Before, I don't know how tired your voice gets, but a song.
	Yeah, I mean, you're a singer, right?
	You write music.
	I'd love to hear a song.
	I do.
	You don't have to.
	I'm in life, but you know, I love hearing people's musical talents in particular.
	I envy good singers, so I'd love to hear a song.
	I could, I could, I could, I could, I'm not warmed up, and I could, I could give you a, I haven't sung in a while.
	That's another reason why I'm just, like, like I said it before, I go crazy when I don't sing for too long.
	But I mean, I could give you a link to my kind of YouTube reel in general if you wanted to hear some of that.
	Would you mind if I included a song?
	Like we could just paste it into the show after.
	You don't have to.
	It's totally up to you.
	Yeah, I guess I'd prefer.
	In an ideal world, God, I wish I could say yes because it would be great exposure.
	But yeah.
	Yeah, okay.
	All right.
	All right.
	I'll just, you know what?
	I'll sing Simbronsky beat and I'll just pretend it's you.
	Okay.
	All totally set.
	Totally set.
	All right.
	So tell me a little bit about your origin story, your background, your lore, your childhood and all.
	Well, I grew up in the Midwest and in an area where I was kind of the art.
	It was a relatively well-off middle-class neighborhood.
	I kind of, I guess, had slightly less money and had to work a little bit harder than I think my peers in general.
	But I was very tokenized because of how because of the demographics of where I grew up.
	But I didn't really take offended to that.
	Sorry, what do you mean by tokenized?
	As the one black guy in the group of friends or the one gay person that everyone knew, you know.
	And tokenized, does that mean like that you're treated differently or special because of that?
	Or is that something else?
	More of just a general sense of reverence.
	When my high school newspaper did a story about kids in high school coming out, I was the one that they went to.
	When the diversity speaker came to school, they had like a big thing in the auditorium.
	They had me, they just, the administration just came to me and said, would you like to introduce them?
	Because I was charismatic and outgoing and I was in theater, but also because I represented a whole lot more diversity than the school in general had.
	So I don't say tokenized in a relatively negative way.
	It was just like I would have conversations with people like, I never knew, you know, I've never known any gay people before.
	It's interesting that you don't insert stereotype here.
	Right, right, right.
	Okay.
	So, so, you know, so I had a very encouraging family.
	I just, I kind of fell into theater when it became clear when I was in like elementary school that I was not able to sit still and be quiet.
	And my elementary school teacher was like, get this kid into theater.
	He was one of the directors at the community theater in the area.
	My mom and I, my mom took me to my first audition and I went there kicking and screaming.
	I didn't want to do it.
	But the second I was on stage, she couldn't get me off.
	So from then on, I was doing theater anytime I could.
	I started doing choir in high school, which led to learning singing.
	I started playing viola in fourth grade.
	So I was in orchestra.
	So that kind of gave me all of my kind of music theory.
	Sorry, you sat ground viola.
	Yeah.
	That's interesting because that's actually technically the gay violin, but that's a proper topic for another time.
	I played violins, though.
	I was the straight violinist.
	I wish I had played violin.
	They trick us into playing viola because nobody wants to play viola.
	All of the viola jokes are a thing.
	So I always resented my first music teacher for looking at my hand and going, you have a viola hand because I wanted to play violin.
	It also screwed me up.
	It's sort of a thing, but it also screwed me up because reading AltoClef, which is the viola is the only instrument in the entire orchestra, even outside of strings that plays exclusively in AltoClef.
	So I couldn't read any other music.
	So when I got into choir, I was like, what is this?
	So I had to learn how to, when I started to do singing too, I was like, okay, now I have to read travel and bass clef.
	Great.
	I have to learn two more.
	Right.
	Thank you for ruining it.
	So anyway, so between doing choir and that in theater in high school, I started taking dance when I was in middle school.
	I just kind of like all of these things kind of coalesced into, you know, I love being on stage.
	I love I love storytelling.
	I love the, you know, the singular aspects of it.
	It's not like being in movies.
	It's that one production that you go and see is the only time that production will ever happen for both the audience and for the people on stage.
	It's a unique, kind of ancient tradition within human cultures that I really appreciate.
	And so I went into musical theater, graduated from an undergrad in Western Michigan University, and then I went on to Boston Conservatory.
	After a couple of years of battling with Sally Mae and figuring that there isn't a whole lot of theater that is union in the Midwest, I had to get somewhere where there was.
	And so I looked at, there's only two master's degrees at the time, there were only two master's degrees in musical theater in the country.
	One was in San Diego and the other one was in Boston, Boston Conservatory.
	So I went there for my master's and then I stayed there.
	And so that's when I graduated there in 2018 and kind of just entered the theater world of New England, which is upwards of like 60 plus union theaters.
	It's a bit of a clicky kind of in-group thing.
	It's hard to get into playing more than just ensemble roles.
	You kind of have to be one of the Boston, they call them Boston favorites.
	But It was really difficult because theater school, you said you went to school for theater, right?
	I did, yeah, I did.
	I don't know if it was the same for you, but my experience with theater school is an extremely toxic environment full of people who are more interested in breaking you down than actually helping your talents or helping foster your talents.
	If they don't mind fostering your talents as long as you're willing to foster their stupid ideologies, then that's right.
	But if you have any questions or criticisms or anything like that, then yeah, they loathe you.
	Oh, yeah, exactly.
	And I found, especially when I got to Boston, it was just, you know, it was, that was one of the most toxic environments that that whole experience that I've ever been through.
	I almost, I graduated from there, like afraid, afraid in a way that I never was before to get up in front of people because I felt just like the idea of progress in a class setting is you get up in front of them and you sing a song and they tell you to remember how your, you know, your some sort of horrible childhood trauma and then recount it in front of a bunch of strangers and then you start crying and then you sing your song again and everyone says, wow, that was so much better.
	Right, right, right.
	Yeah, it's basically a struggle session.
	Yeah.
	So it's trauma.
	Trauma is not training.
	So, you know, I got out of that.
	But I think the real reason, the real benefit to being there was not the geographic location, the access to technology through Berkeley, through the merger with Berkeley that was happening at the time.
	So I got a whole lot of access to great music, production technology and whatnot, a bunch of software.
	I just sat in Berkeley Library and stole everything I possibly could so that I could keep it forever.
	And then I started auditioning.
	I was doing really well relatively, like I said, up until about 2019.
	Well, so tell me a little bit about what, because that's always the big challenge, right?
	Like what was it that happened for you after the school?
	Because, you know, school, you've kind of got guaranteed roles and then what?
	Well, as soon as I graduated, you know, there's the like, you're going to be on Broadway idea of being an actor.
	And, you know, that's really, that's just kind of the marketing campaign they put in there to get people into their schools.
	It's, it's the idea that you can make a career out of theater that isn't being on Broadway isn't really part of part of, you know, the message that they purport to enforce throughout, you know, your goal is to be on Broadway.
	That is the height of being in theater.
	When, you know, I came to realize, especially in my master's degree program, that, you know, being in theater, being a theater major, making a career in theater can be any number of things, you know, and that doesn't have any sort of geographic location.
	And after seeing a few shows on Broadway that I thought were utterly trash, especially at the time, I'm just like, you know what?
	I've seen a product, I've seen this production done twice as good in some regional theater nobody's ever heard of.
	I think I need to rethink this.
	And so, you know, I spent, as soon as I graduated, I decided I liked Boston.
	I liked that I could, you know, after 20, I could drive 20 minutes and be in like a, you know, a nature reserve, see trees.
	And at the same time, there was the city demographic and there was a lot of auditioning in the area.
	So, and I knew a lot of people, the connections were relatively good.
	So, you know, I was auditioning for as much as I could.
	I did a couple of shows while I was in school, though.
	They kind of discouraged that because of the workload.
	But I was getting pretty consistently good role, consistent roles, not like mainstream, not like lead roles, but I would get cast in something because I was a man, I was a dancer, so I could be in the core, I could be in the ensemble of just about anything, relatively versatile.
	My biggest problem is that they don't really know where to put me in general.
	I've had actually did a workshop with John Bacchino, who came to, or not John Pacino, God, I can't remember.
	Just a really, really great composer whose name eludes me at the moment.
	He he told, pulled me aside after we did the workshop in school, and he said, You have a fantastic and very, very unique voice and memorable presence.
	And I want you to be prepared for the fact that nobody is going to ever know what to do with you.
	Sorry, but why, why tell me, I'm still not sure why they wouldn't know what to do with you.
	Because there is type is a huge thing, and pushing back against your type or whatever your type is.
	Being a black guy in theater gives you a set of pre-assumed probable roles that you'll want to play.
	The Richie in chorus line, the seaweed in hairspray, that kind of like, I sing like a black guy.
	I sing like I, you know, like I got gospel church background.
	I sing, you know, that kind of sound, that kind of like style, that kind of presentational.
	I don't know if you've seen or heard about Hades Town.
	You know, the MC in Hadestown is very much like that.
	But at the same time, my dream roles never really had anything to do with my type.
	Like I would, one of my dream roles is George and George Surat and Sunday in the Park with George, which is a role.
	Sunday in the Park with George.
	Oh, yeah, okay, got it.
	Which is Sondheim.
	It's not really traditionally black music when it comes to like, it's not gospel.
	It's not like heavy jacket.
	It's Sondheim.
	It's Golden Mage relatively.
	So, but that didn't really matter.
	It wasn't about riffing like a black singer.
	You know, I don't want to sing like Usher or Beyonce or whatever.
	It's really about playing whatever role I think I can really devote myself to.
	I know that maybe historically speaking, George Seurat probably wouldn't have been black, but that isn't, I think, really the point of the show itself.
	However, if I were to walk into an audition for Sunday in the Park with George, I'd have to really, really go against preconceptions about who and what would play that role.
	Mandy Patinkin originally played that role.
	I think Jay Jillenhall played it in the revival.
	It's kind of got a traditional, this is what we assume is going to be for that role.
	And then so I'm always fighting my own stereotypes or my own pre-assumed type when I walk into auditions, which means that it makes it's kind of like the getting getting someone to consider something that they, because directors in audition rooms have a, you know, they have an idea of what they're looking for.
	And if it's not, if you're not that, but you could do something better, it's really hard to get past that assumption.
	So that's what I mean by that.
	Okay, got it, got it.
	Okay.
	So you got some, I hate to say secondary because, you know, some secondary roles, you got some decent stage time and you got to play with the audience and all of that, that kind of stuff.
	So what happened from there?
	Sorry, when did you graduate?
	2018 was when I graduated from timing.
	Oh, the Lord.
	I know, right?
	Right.
	So this was, so I had one year of a couple of, I went to all of the audition season stuff, but I was still in school at the end of my master's degree.
	So the year of 2019 was really when I started going heavy on auditions, revamping my website, getting all of my reels and stuff together.
	And so I, and I managed to book quite a few roles that would have, as of the end of around late fall of 2019, was when I had been working for a year and a half at the Genius Bar at Apple.
	And when I looked at the contracts that I have that I had lined up for the following year already, and I looked at, you know, financially speaking, I wasn't going to be rich, but I could actually live off of this because I had joined Actors Equity.
	As far as the minimum wage, like I knew what at minimum I was going to make for each of these contracts.
	I did supplemental work to still do graphic design and UI/UX design.
	And so, you know, I chose to, rather than kill myself in a retail store dealing with disgruntled customers all day long and then going to rehearsals every night, which was absolutely exhausting.
	I tried that twice and it absolutely killed both jobs.
	So I was, you know, this is what I went to school for.
	This is what I want to do.
	And I have, I now feel like I have enough to do it.
	So I quit Apple.
	This was the December of 2019.
	I quit Apple.
	And then the next three months happened and COVID hit and every single theater shut down.
	All my contracts were canceled.
	And from there, I was kind of sent adrift into the world.
	And so, you know, and like I said, after theaters reopened, it was, it's not the same.
	Auditioning isn't the same.
	Theaters, when they didn't go bankrupt, they do shows now that they that are safe, that they know that they have the money to do.
	They do far less contracts.
	There's pre-casting is rampant because it's much easier to do a show and pre-cast with people you know who you've already worked with that you know are going to work well.
	You know, that there's, it's much more, much less likely for anybody to take a chance on someone that they haven't put a whole lot of responsibility on before because they just, you know, if the show tanks or if the show doesn't do very well, if there's issues, you know, recasting is just difficult.
	The casting process is expensive.
	They have less administrative capabilities.
	All of these things lead to theater being kind of more of a if you're already in, you're in kind of thing.
	Otherwise, it's very, very difficult.
	So, you know, I've done a couple of productions since then that feel like I did a production of Wizard of Oz.
	And it was like they cast the absolute minimum amount of actors to do way too much, each one of us.
	And it like, it was, it was, it ended up being just, we were, it was a bad show.
	It was a bad show because we didn't have enough resources and it wasn't, it wasn't fulfilling.
	The whole process was exhausting and not even worth the amount of like energy and time we put into it.
	And, you know, at the end of the day, it, it made the theater the money that it wanted, that they wanted it to, I guess.
	But, you know, beyond that, it was, it was rough.
	And so I'm looking at, I look at other auditions that are available and, you know, I go to them, I get callbacks and whatnot, but at most, I'll get cast in an ensemble role playing three, 13 different minor characters.
	You know, so, and again, it's because, you know, okay, well, he's a man who can dance, who can sing, who can play, who's, you know, a tenor who's got a relatively low to high range.
	So we can stick him in 17 different places at once.
	But at no point am I considered for the, you know, the lead role or for any sort of like lead supporting character, specific character, because it's much easier to put me in a place that they don't have a whole lot of other people for.
	And so, you know, on top of that, it's just, like I said, there's just less, there's far less.
	And I get into, I did a production of The Color Purple.
	And it was way different than I had ever expected.
	It's not because I don't know if you've ever seen or read The Color Purple.
	Yes, I've seen it.
	But it became this weird kind of, are you this kind of like black enough hierarchy?
	I was called back for one of the main roles.
	There aren't a whole lot of main male roles in that, but the one that I was called back for, I know damn well I nailed.
	And I don't, I have, I have enough humility to know when I do a good or a relatively bad audition.
	And I know I nailed that callback.
	I know that it felt very much like the guy who cast who was cast in the role was blacker than me, and that's why he got it.
	And that kind of like sense of things, like at one point at the beginning of the audition or of the rehearsal process, one person had to drop out.
	And so the ensemble, the ensemble role that they filled, there's a sequence in Africa where there's like an African tribal leader character, and the person who was set to play that role had to drop out.
	So another girl who just been singing it in the ensemble as a placeholder, we just assumed she would take it, but she spoke up and said something along the lines of, I don't feel like I'm black enough to be playing an African tribal, this African tribal role.
	I feel like that's kind of that could be potentially problematic.
	First of all, it's like a dream sequence, so it's not actually like literal anyway.
	And second of all, what does that even mean?
	Like what, what, who, what African tribal leader is going to watch this and then write an angry letter to, like, I don't, I don't understand how that kind of, and as soon as someone spoke up, like that person said that, the rest of the room was like, well, now we can't do it.
	Now we can't keep it there because it was said, that was said out loud.
	So now we have to put someone else in.
	And they did.
	They put something blacker in it.
	So it was just like, you know, and at one point they were talking, we had, we had a blackout night.
	One of the, one of the shows was, they called it blackout night, and it was a night where specifically black people were invited.
	They didn't explicitly say white people weren't invited, but obviously that's the assumption that you don't buy tickets to the blackout show if you're not black.
	Like that just to me is so counter.
	Like I don't see the distinction between that and Jim Crow, in my opinion.
	Like I don't, I don't, I don't see this like, we need a blacks only night.
	What?
	What if the alternative were to have what?
	I mean, what if we did a production of On the Town and had a white only night?
	Like, I mean, I just, I feel like this, the conversations around what stories we're telling or whose stories we can tell and why are just like have dissolved into this like tribalistic, boring, uninteresting schlop.
	And, and, and I, I find, I find myself like wishing that there was some sort of light at the end of this tunnel.
	But as far as like what demographics of people became the most woke when woke kind of took over, like, I think the last, the last drags of woke are going to be left over in the entertainment, the theater and movies like that.
	That industry can keep it going for a lot of time.
	I know, and they, I'm sure they will.
	Um, so, so yeah, so that's, you know, that's that's kind of, I just get, it's, it's exhausting.
	It's exhausting because I'll sit in a rehearsal room and they'll be just talking about whatever thing Trump said the night before, and everyone has to make a joke about it.
	Everyone has to have an opinion about it.
	And I just like, I stay silent.
	I like, you know, I believe I've been a follower of you and people like Jordan Peterson for a long time.
	And I believe very strongly in the idea that the more you lie, the more you kind of degrade your own soul and sense of integrity.
	And yeah, so, so, so I just stay silent unless someone asks me a question and I try to be as unspecific as possible, lest I, you know, give away the fact that I'm not one of them.
	No, it's like you got to rub yourself in the zombie juice to get through the zombies, right?
	Exactly.
	Exactly.
	So, so, you know, this is the first year where I've really just kind of stopped.
	I didn't, I didn't even do the audition season this year.
	I've kind of transitioned.
	I've been doing cabarets with actually more like mini concerts with a group of people.
	They're mostly for charity.
	They're mostly for free.
	It's all kind of, we don't get paid for it or anything, but it scratches that itch a little bit.
	But, but yeah, so It became another thing too, because without those contracts, without that amount of pre-COVID opportunity, I was like, okay, well, now I have to have a career again.
	Now I have to figure out what the hell I'm going to do with my life so that I can pay bills.
	Because I had only ever used kind of graphic design and UI UX design as a supplement.
	I never really, I didn't go to school for it.
	I was more self-taught.
	And so I kind of ramped that up in the last couple of years.
	And, you know, it's still not the living I want it to be, especially in Eastern Mass.
	The cost of living is astronomical.
	So I've kind of had a whole kind of crisis of future in that what, you know, I never really wanted to being on Broadway wasn't the height of what I wanted to do.
	I have other aspirations.
	I have a whole different kind of set of goals that at one point I want to get a doctoral degree in what's called, there's several names for it, but biomusicology or neuromusicology, basically the science of how music interacts with the brain on a biological level.
	And because there's a whole lot of really interesting studies that go along with that, studies from scientists, and then like there's like theater theater therapy and music therapy, but there's never really been a comprehensive like deep dive into like understanding from a musical theory perspective how these kinds of combinations of sounds make your brain remember and feel and and and uh interact with the world um and
	interact with other people socially speaking um so you know like why is it that a minor chord instills this kind of um this kind of feeling in everybody just despite what background they're from or what part of the world they all feel the same thing when they hear these sounds and why um and that has you know there's there's a little bit of research into it but um but i feel like there's a whole um there's a whole kind of set of potential research opportunities there that i really want to explore um and so that's kind of my my end goal one of my end goals is to is to
	is to explore that um you know open an institute the other thing is uh at some point this is the the loftiest goal is uh i think the best artistic collaborations come from people who are from different not just different backgrounds but wildly different artistic perspectives or cultural perspectives and that is even less likely nowadays um because of you know differing perspectives become a hierarchy of which which perspective is most victimized and
	therefore most important to to uh to communicate and so um you see far less collaboration or if you see collaboration it's less of a collaboration more of a one one tribe works with another tribe by conceding that the other tribe's message is better um so i think that uh you know so i've had ideas about you know creating a like a scholarship program slash institute that that creates um artistic collaborations but uh
	particularly musical and theatrical collaborations between different cultures, cultures that are wildly disparate.
	So, my actual graduate thesis was an exploration of this from a music perspective.
	I took all the different pieces of my own personal demographic using 23 Mean and whatnot, and used all, created a 40-minute production of songs that were interpolated using instruments, using instrumentation and background tracks that I wrote myself using all the instruments that were native to all the different cultures that represent me.
	It was all about identity.
	Your identity is essentially what you do and what you make, given all of the combinations of things that went into you.
	And so, my advisor was like, there's no possible way this is going to work.
	You can't put drone instruments like bagpipes and whatnot along with any sort of electronic instrument or electric guitar or anything.
	And I was like, I'm going to prove you wrong.
	And I did.
	So, that kind of thing I think is really, really interesting, exploring combinations of things you wouldn't ever think you can combine.
	So, anyway, that's kind of the diatribe on where I am and where I want to go.
	But at the moment, it's hard to know where the financial stability aspect of this comes into play because, yeah, you know, and at the same time, I don't want to abandon.
	I don't think theater is, it's just so different.
	It's so different.
	And it's creative, you know, everybody says, well, back in my day, I just remember the first professional production I did over the summer while I was still in my undergrad.
	And I just remember what working with, it didn't really matter what you looked like or where you were, like all of these identity political things were not part of the storytelling.
	They weren't part of the rehearsal process.
	They weren't taken into account in a way that is detrimental to just telling the story.
	You know, it just seems like everything is so superficially secondary.
	Everything is so much more about, and I, for example, I don't know if you've seen Hamilton.
	No.
	I have a very unpopular, don't bother.
	I have a very unpopular opinion about Hamilton because I think all it really does is tell a bunch of people that they're already not racist by what, by in essence, and this is something I took from an article I read, to looking at history and blackwashing it as a way of making things more palatable.
	And it doesn't like, it doesn't challenge you.
	You don't walk out of that thinking something new.
	It's all about just being something, being progressive, being, you know, making this statement.
	Isn't it cool that we're all singing rap music, even though we're founding fathers?
	Except we had to cut the part about slavery where Jefferson and Hamilton are arguing about slavery.
	There's a whole rap sequence where they do that because Hamilton was actually pro-slavery, Jefferson was not.
	And because that didn't really work with the message of the show, we couldn't say Hamilton, Hamilton couldn't be advocating for slavery.
	They had to cut that because it was an inconvenient truth of the history that they were trying to recreate.
	It's just like, you know, that kind of thing is just, if you're going to tell a story, if you're going to, what is the, isn't the purpose of this to show someone who wouldn't normally go to a show like this that there's that there's a different way of thinking, isn't it?
	Isn't the purpose of any sort of any sort of like transformative entertainment experience for someone to think differently than they already have, not for a bunch of people who are already woke to smile and feel good about how woke they already are?
	It just, you know, it feels, it feels, everything feels so disingenuous.
	It feels like, you know, we were the people for diversity.
	We were the different people.
	The theater kids were the weird kids, but now it's like, you know, if you're, if you're one of us, you have to believe all of the, it's just, it's, it's, it's so hilariously hypocritical that like you can't think differently, you can't say differently, you can't, you can't behave differently while they call it progressive.
	It, it baffles me.
	So anyway, that's where, that's where I am now.
	And you said that you came out, was it high school or something like that?
	You know, yeah, high school.
	And how was that process for you?
	I mean, so when did you know and, you know, that sort of stuff?
	I mean, I always kind of knew that was never really a big issue.
	I had a relatively progressive family.
	My mom was never really that issue.
	Like, I'm fairly certain that she, her best friend was gay.
	I always called him Uncle Jim.
	I never really knew that we never really talked about it, but like any, but like it wasn't, there was never a time where I thought I wouldn't be accepted.
	I do remember because we didn't have, there was any sort of like gay straight alliance or anything like that.
	And so I, I was part of the, the first group of people to create that in my high school.
	We got a little bit of pushback from our administration until our advisor, which was one of my English teachers, was like, no, actually, if you, if you, if you stop us from forming this, we can take legal action.
	But it wasn't like, it wasn't like one of those things that would be on the news now because whatever, you know, we made, we had a GSA, a bunch of kids came to it.
	And then at one point, the school newspaper did a story about kids.
	A gay straight alliance.
	Okay, so yeah.
	I'm not sure if that's still kind of a thing in schools, but it was, that was kind of the, you know, the thing to do if you, if you wanted to kind of create a group where that was an ally.
	Yes, yes.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	So so yeah, so that I mean, I came out, like I said, the newspaper did a story on me and like one other student who came out while they were his story was a whole lot more tragic.
	His parents weren't really accepting.
	He had to move out.
	So that I wasn't really all that featured in the story because my process for me wasn't really that crazy.
	But I kind of knew I came out as I came out to my friends first and then to some close family member, family friends.
	And then I told my parents and that was kind of that.
	So it was never, it was never really an issue at home.
	So I think that the only issue my mom was my mom had was that she would never have grandkids.
	At least that was her assumption.
	I still plan on having children at some point, one way or another.
	I have some moral hangups about that recently, especially just thinking about it.
	I've been with my partner for over 12 years now, planning on getting married as soon as there's, it's more of a financial and like kind of life status thing.
	Getting married is very expensive.
	We want to be, we want to have, it's much more of a priority to get to get land and find stability.
	And so, but yeah, so that wasn't really ever an issue for me.
	Aside from the fact that, you know, I ended up being, you know, the one gay people, gay guy everybody knew that, you know, that everyone was like, oh, I've got this friend.
	You're gay.
	Can you answer this question about how all gay people think?
	Sure, I can answer that for you.
	So, but I never got offended.
	I never found it offensive.
	I don't like, I don't see those people and wag fingers at them because it's just like when you don't have any sort of information, you need information.
	You know, no, no, not, not all gay people love to go shopping.
	In fact, I freaking hate shopping.
	You know, that kind of thing.
	So, yeah.
	Okay.
	All right.
	I think I, I think I understand as a whole, and I'd love to dive into the sort of theater world and how I could best help you in that area.
	So You want to say in the theater world, it's repulsive to your sensibilities in the ideological capture, right?
	I don't mean to overly summarize what you're saying, but it's something sure, sure, yeah.
	I mean, I mean, sensibilities in the sense that, like, I rem I remember what it was like when everything didn't have an underlying quote-unquote message.
	I remember when it was just kind of an experience that wasn't rife with this constantly polarized, overly political umbrella above it.
	Um, that felt it just feels very, it feels very oppressed by that.
	It feels like there are certain things you can't really say or do, certain shows you probably just should avoid.
	And if you do them, you have to make sure that you're saying the right thing or doing it the right way.
	You know, ideas like a straight person needs to stop playing a gay role when there's a gay person available.
	Aren't we all just actors?
	Like, that idea wasn't really a thing when I when I first entered the professional world, and now it's like rampant.
	So, you know, yeah, right, right.
	Or you should put you can put non-whites into white roles, but never the other way.
	Oh, of course, exactly.
	Right, right.
	Okay.
	Well, I suppose, how close are you to finding it unbearable to be in the theater world?
	In other words, what do you have to lose at the moment?
	Um, my mind.
	No, no, no.
	I mean, practically what I mean by that is, um, you say, oh, one social media post wrong, one this, one, that, and you're never working again.
	So, how much do you want to work in this town again?
	More than anything, more than, well, not more than anything, I guess.
	I guess, uh, and that isn't that isn't really hyperbole either.
	Like, I've seen like because you say, I it was close when I was in when I was in my undergrad or my graduate school.
	Um, this was this was when uh Trump was going for his first term, and I found Hillary to be a demonic otherworldly being.
	And I, and uh, I, uh, you know, I, I wasn't vocal about it, but I wasn't like, you know, I was pretty sure that I was going to vote on it.
	Now, I'm going to have to set up a special folder in my email inbox for demonic otherworldly beings who are now highly offended and having been compared to Hillary Clinton.
	So, let me just say, let me just do that.
	Okay.
	Hold on.
	Yes.
	How dare you compare us, minions of hell.
	Okay.
	All right.
	Right, right.
	So, but, but of course, one of the one of my fellow classmates had to have a sit-down with me so that I could tell her why I was a quote-unquote Trump supporter, because that is now a class of person.
	So, you know, that and so it's that kind of thing easily gets around extremely quickly.
	What that person goes to an audition or that person is behind the table because they're a consulting choreographer for that production and they're in the casting room and my name comes up.
	And the fact that I am a quote-unquote Trump supporter is like that key just kind of turns that kind of like, no, no, we're not really interested in that.
	You know, that happens and it's like it's like a pandemic.
	It just kind of races through.
	So the only way that you can really overcome that is if you are such a moneymaker, you know, like some massive, you know, whatever, like some of the action stars of the past and so on, then they'll hold their nose just, but if you know, if you're not a guaranteed moneymaker.
	And the other thing, I saw, I forgot to mention this earlier in terms of going with the unknowns.
	I'm sure you've had this process.
	I've certainly gone through this process as a director where somebody gives a fantastic audition and then the closer they get to the show, the more they start to choke.
	And you're like, oh, God.
	Whereas at least somebody who's tried and true, they've carried a show.
	You know they can handle the pressure.
	You know that they rise to meet the challenge of the occasion and so on.
	So yeah, the great audition and the terrible stage presence is an unfortunate coincidence, but it does happen.
	For sure.
	Well, and that's what I was saying.
	You know, that's why directors are far less inclined to take any sort of risk for somebody.
	They haven't worked.
	They haven't been vetted in that kind of role before.
	Yeah.
	Just because so much more is at stake.
	So pre-casting, you know, like pre-casting is just a huge thing.
	You know, if you're one of the quote-unquote Boston favorites, you are pretty much insured to get a role and to get several roles to be to have them fighting over you for whatever, because you'll make them money.
	So, yeah.
	Okay.
	So, yeah.
	So what is your, I mean, the theater world is a smoking ruin financially.
	It's become increasingly dependent on the state, which means leftism.
	And it's become toxically, of course, and claustrophobically ideological.
	And art is supposed to be about play.
	It's not supposed to be like everyone has to stand in line in the blood-soaked avenue to the revolution or something like that.
	It's really supposed to be a spontaneity, play and fun.
	And this is a, you know, Mother Courage and her children, Bertold Brest style.
	Just grim, horrible.
	Everything's cliched.
	You know, all the, all the rich people are fat people with monocles and all the poor are just noble and heroic.
	And it's also, I can't do theater because it's just all so grindingly predictable.
	And, you know, it's, it's like when you go see a, what was it?
	I watched a movie with Kenneth Brownach.
	It was a Death on the Nile, right?
	And I think there are like six people who might have done it, and two of them are black.
	And you're like, well, you know, it's not going to be the black people.
	So it's my, the mystery has gone down by at least 25%.
	There's no way.
	Exactly.
	It's going to be the black people.
	So yeah, it's just kind of boring and dull and predictable and so on.
	Right.
	And so I guess, yeah, I mean, what is your status at the moment of getting work in sort of mainstream theater?
	Non-existent.
	I did not audition this year.
	I'm actually one reason is because the amount of time and effort it takes to do it just couldn't be sacrificed lest I am not able to pay rent.
	And so, you know, I had to, I had to make some decisions about how important it was for me to survive first.
	And so if it, if not only, I'm willing to not make enough money, I'm willing to scrape and grind if I need to, if it means that there's some sort of payoff.
	I've done one, I did one production that I absolutely loved, and it was kind of an enigma.
	It was always called the Christmas Truce of 1914, 1912.
	Christmas production.
	It was beautiful.
	Yeah, beautiful, beautiful production.
	And I loved every moment of that.
	It was, you know, it fed my choral background because it's all a cappella.
	It was really, really musically intensive.
	It was a story about entirely different cultures coming together.
	And it was in like seven different languages and a bunch of different, really interesting folk stories were part of it.
	It's like a gem of a production.
	We actually won the Elliott Norton Award that year.
	So it was beautiful.
	It was a beautiful experience.
	It was a beautiful production.
	And I loved it.
	And those kinds of productions are, I've found exceedingly rare, especially now.
	So I didn't audition this year.
	I'm actually, I'm part of a team of developers working on an application for a lawyer.
	And, you know, it's just a kind of a startup thing.
	It makes a decent amount of money, but not an application for a lawyer.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Like legal case management software.
	So it's just an application for theater.
	Sorry.
	I got a whiplash.
	Yeah, we're diving out of the theater world.
	So now we're talking about entrepreneurial tech stuff.
	Well, yeah, exactly.
	I mean, that was where that's where my supplemental income has always come from has been has been doing graphic design tech work, that kind of thing.
	So I've kind of had to ramp that up, unfortunately, at the expense of any sort of really furthering of artistic stuff.
	And because the audition environment is so rampant or rife with pre-casting and the productions are relatively unfulfilling, the amount of time that I would have to take to do it, it's just not worth it anymore.
	It's not worth it at the moment.
	So I did not.
	So hang on.
	So when you say it's not worth it at the moment, the time, I mean, you have your songs, you have your audition pieces, and I'm sure all of that.
	So going for an audition doesn't take that long, right?
	So tell me what it means when it says not worth going.
	Do you just not think you're going to get the role?
	Because it's not like, well, you need two weeks full-time work to do an audition, right?
	You just, I'm not, I'm not, it's not exactly a dip into that, but it's not a massive commitment.
	I mean, right?
	Doing the production itself is a massive enough commitment to where I like if I was, if I'm coming home every night after all is calm and I feel like I'm doing a really, really great thing.
	I feel like this storytelling is great.
	The fact that I'm not making as much money as I would if I were focusing entirely on something, something that, you know, the contract that I had to give up in order to be able to do this production because I couldn't do this, you know, the contract for this, you know, this logo designing, this brand development job, I had to give that up because I chose to do this production because it's something that I just want to assure you.
	You're saying financially, it's not worthwhile.
	Correct.
	Okay, got it.
	And it would, it would be, I would be able to take that.
	I would find a way to take that hit financially if I felt like every production I did was fed that need within me.
	But I still, I feel just as hungry for some sort of, I would be more willing to do it if I felt like each one of these productions still had that kind of artistic integrity juice that I still feel like furthering ideas you find abhorrent and so on.
	Right.
	Okay.
	And you said also just in terms of financial survival, but you know, I'm sure you know that old joke, what do they call a, what do they call a drummer without a girlfriend?
	Homeless.
	I've not heard that.
	I mean, wouldn't your partner, I'm not sure what his financial stability is like, but wouldn't your partner fuel and fund your ambitions if that was necessary for your joy?
	Yes.
	And I would be far beyond homeless if it weren't for him at this point, for sure.
	But I guess I guess I wonder, again, is it really where I want to be beyond the financial thing?
	Is it really what, like, I love performing for the sense of like integral storytelling?
	I love, I love it so much.
	And I've like the last few productions I've done, I've gone home and gone, I don't feel like I'm doing this.
	I feel like I'm doing something else.
	I feel like I'm playing a part, the part of somebody who's in this tribe and we all do this thing and we all talk about this thing, this like weird ideological system.
	We all have to constantly push forward with our production.
	And I'm like, this isn't why I wanted to do theater.
	And I guess, so I guess for me, it's less about wanting to do money for the service of good, not of corruption, right?
	Right.
	And I don't know how and where to do that anymore.
	And maybe, you know, it doesn't necessarily have to be theater, but I feel like it's, I don't know what that is if it isn't theater anymore.
	So for so long, I thought it's not that nobody's interested in exploring the richness of the human condition or challenging established ideas or just being curious about what it is to be alive.
	It's all, yeah, it's all just ideological and splitting and anti-white and blah, blah, blah.
	It's a yeah.
	Yeah, it's pretty, it's pretty, pretty wretched as a whole.
	So, sorry, you were saying something else and I interrupted.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	No, that was, that was, that was it.
	So it feels wretched to do it.
	I think is the biggest part of that.
	Like I can, you know, it's just like, you know, what I was saying before, that feeling of like, I'm, I'm lying to both myself and my peers and this audience right now.
	And I don't like it.
	I don't, I'm not serving myself.
	I'm not serving them.
	I'm not serving humanity by doing this.
	Yeah, I remember as I was at the National Theater School in Canada, and I remember being at a production of a play called Figaro Gets a Divorce, which was a sequel to, of course, the famous Marriage of Figaro.
	Figaro Figaro.
	And I just remember looking around and like, I feel like I'm in an asylum here.
	I don't feel like I feel like I'm in a deeply sick place.
	Yes.
	Deeply sick place.
	This is, of course, you know, decades.
	So this is like 40, 40 years ago, a little less, but yeah, a long time ago.
	So yeah, the rot is deep and the rot is old.
	And I eventually just couldn't, I couldn't stand it.
	I just found it, everything just felt weird and unhealthy and unnatural.
	And I've always thought, you know, I grew up on, you know, Dickens and Shakespeare and Ian Foster and so on.
	So for me, everything should be, you know, deeply human.
	You should never feel more connected than when you're doing art.
	And I never felt less connected and more alien than when I was doing art.
	How do you feel?
	I'm assuming you went into theater wanting to do that.
	How do you feed that need within yourself?
	Or how did you find kind of redirect that kind of like artistic need or that need for artistic fulfillment in general?
	That is a fine question.
	That is a fine question.
	I mean, I could write.
	So I moved to novels.
	I mean, I produced a play or two and I moved to novels.
	And that was my way of sort of staying connected to the sort of humanity question.
	And I believe that art should further the good as a whole.
	So I mean, I still have, I wouldn't say a lot.
	I still have a little bit of ideology in there.
	And that's sort of my concession.
	Like, I'm not going to write the novel if it's just going to be nothing about virtue or goodness.
	And so I have to sort of say to my creative engines, okay, you can let Rip, but we're going to have to vaguely drift in the direction of, I'm not like Ayn Rand and other sort of people, or I guess people like Bertolt Brechton and so on.
	They're like rigid straitjackets of ideology.
	Like nobody steps out of line.
	The salmon all swim in the same freaking current and everybody stays on the bus until the bus is at the destination.
	Nobody looks out the window.
	And I sort of, but I'm also not like mad chaos play guy.
	I do have to have some, I like a sprinkling of ideology just to sort of make it good, but most of it's play.
	So I had that option.
	But of course, I went into the tech world, as you may or may not know.
	But so I was sort of able to keep it going.
	But yeah, the idea of going back into the theater world, it may be in the very outlying areas in the real amateur productions.
	It's less of this ideological straitjacket, but I perceive that to be the absolute opposite of art.
	Art is there, as you say, to hold up a mirror to nature and to help us more richly and deeply connect to ourselves and to others.
	And this is all about divide and conquer and further the revolution and sow the endless seeds of hatred that have been plaguing mankind since the fall, right?
	So I couldn't do it.
	But you can do it.
	Yeah.
	I mean, if you want to be on stage, I can tell you how to do it.
	And it actually won't be that hard.
	Okay.
	Well, do you think that society's a little fucking tired of this work stuff?
	Yes.
	Yeah.
	So write a parody.
	Write a parody about someone trying to keep any vague semblance of humanity, like the producers, right?
	Right, Mel Brooks?
	So you could write a play about making a play.
	You could write a play about trying to keep humanity among these lunatic blue-head ideologues.
	And pitch it to who and where.
	Who cares?
	Just do it yourself.
	Yeah, I mean, and I say this from experience, though, obviously not a lot of experience.
	So, no, take that for all that it's worth.
	But you just come up with an absolutely, you know, as funny as you can make it, as biting as you can make it.
	Come up with this funny, I mean, that's the easy part, right?
	Just come up with a great play.
	Right.
	But no, just, I mean, you've got the experience.
	You've certainly got the righteous anger.
	And a lot of the best comedy comes from righteous anger.
	And so what you want to do is just be, you know, Freddie Mercury, death on two legs style vicious.
	Write down all of your incredible frustrations, how hypocritical and bullying, because the atomization of identity politics is a ripe subject for comedy.
	Like really kind of biting satire comedy.
	The best kind of comedy is that which eviscerates the sacred chaos.
	And the more sacred and the more cow-like, see, it's even got nosy, the better, right?
	So you can just write about the theater world and how impossible it is to do a show when you have these identity politics.
	It can be incredibly funny.
	It can be extremely daring.
	It will absolutely get attention.
	I mean, there's no way.
	I mean, it might get a bit alarming attention and so on, because the left doesn't have a massive sense of humor, least of all about itself.
	But for the average person, I mean, in terms of doing good in the world, if I was still in the theater world, I would absolutely be writing as biting a comedy as I could.
	I just finished reading the audiobook, a comic chapter in my audiobook.
	So I'm sort of in that mood.
	But I would just write as scathing and biting a comedy as I could about this woke world.
	And you would be absolutely shocked at what a chord this will strike because everybody is tired of this relative minority of lunatics running the entire artistic agenda.
	Yeah.
	I guess there's a line that I guess I keep avoiding making the decision of whether or not I would cross it as to, you know, if I were to do something like that, I can give you a giant list of all the people that would never ever speak to me again.
	Okay.
	And so?
	I mean, you know, you're talking to the canceled king on the planet, right?
	So, oh, no, the ideologues who hate humanity maybe won't be talking to me.
	Oh, no.
	Right.
	Well, not even that so much as I see, I don't, and I don't fault the vast majority of people who are stuck in an echo chamber they're being forced into that they don't even know exists.
	Hang on, hang on, hang on.
	Well, this is why you can't write a biting comedy.
	Where's this forgiveness thing coming from?
	I don't know.
	I want to.
	I mean, you could be right.
	Hey, if you can carve me off a slice of that forgiveness pie and shove it down my windpipe, my life would be a whole lot easier.
	So I'm ready and willing to be fed, bro.
	What do you got?
	How are they not responsible?
	I don't know.
	I guess the average person stuck in this ideology because of their echo chamber.
	No, there's no echo chamber.
	We've got the internet.
	What are you talking about?
	The internet.
	Well, yeah, the algorithms are there.
	No, no, no, who you choose to follow, right?
	Everybody who's intellectually responsible finds ideas that oppose them.
	You have to, right?
	You have to.
	Nobody's intellectually responsible anymore.
	That responsibility has been taken over.
	No, it hasn't been given over.
	There are people who are intellectually responsible.
	But what I'm saying is, I believe the echo chamber stuff.
	If you're born and raised in an 11th century Buddhist monastery, okay, I get that.
	You know, you kind of got a monoculture going on, and it's not like you get to read ancient Aramaic or know the sign language of the Cherokee or something like that.
	But like literally, opposing arguments or different perspectives, or it's like it's in your ass all the time.
	Everybody's got the Library of Alexandria up their ass constantly because you put your phone in your back pocket, you have access to all human information, past, present, and of course, increasingly in the future as we sort of get stuff, new stuff in the pipeline.
	So, at a time when I mean, it's literally somebody who's born in a library and is taught to read everything goes to like three books over and over again.
	You say, Well, but they're in an echo chamber.
	It's like, bro, they're born in a library.
	We have a library in our ass.
	Well, so how do you agree?
	So, to go along with that metaphor, if they are convinced that if someone has convinced them that every other book in that library except for those three are absolutely demonic and will therefore send them to hell for reading them, they have no interest, they have no, they have no the fear and anger toward all of those other books overcomes their inherent sense of curiosity.
	And so they are convinced.
	No, it's not that, it's not that.
	It's that what's the big D word they value so, so much.
	What's the big D word?
	Diversity, right?
	Right, right.
	So, if you value, so I value all perspectives, I live in a library, I only read three books: Howard's in Communist Manifesto, or whatever it is, right?
	So, so, but if they claim to value the if they claim to value diversity and they don't read opposing opinions, they are damned by their own standards.
	There is no escape from that.
	Well, that's true.
	I agree with you.
	Uh, it's really hard to get anybody to see that obvious and but that's why you write a play, you're right, yeah.
	I mean, you could write it with songs, you could write it with wild costumes, you could write it with books coming to life, you could write it with Karl Marx popping out of his grave and saying, Whoa, guys, guys, too far, yeah, too far.
	What are you doing?
	Right, Santa Claus bringing the gifts of actual diversity, uh, dressed as Karl Marx.
	I don't know, like, this, I'd be just good, I'd riff all day, right?
	But but you could do a lot of things to just make this because there's no level of absurdity you can't go to that somebody hasn't already done, and so it is a ripe target for satire.
	That's true.
	And do you think that um because I mean, you said that the rod is deep and it's old, and that you've experienced it much longer than sorry, the use of the rod, you mean the punishment?
	You said that the kind of rot, this kind of like ideological capture, the capture as it, you know, it's it's deep and old.
	And do you think the eradication of this rot is possible only if people do exactly what you're recommending more often?
	Or, you know, do you see the light at the end of this kind of tunnel?
	Well, I do.
	I mean, I wrote a woke character, a pretty scathing portrayal of a woke character in my novel, The Present, and certainly struck a chord with people.
	So, I mean, if art is here for health, then art has to be an antibody to indoctrination because art is not supposed to be indoctrination, art is supposed to get you deeper in touch with your humanity and your reason.
	And so, it's a very powerful thing to be to be doing.
	And it certainly, because you've been tormented by this for well over a decade, right?
	Because you had it in your education, your master's degree as well, right?
	So, when you've been emotionally charged and tormented by something for over a decade, that's where your creative juices are going to be.
	Yeah, my partner keeps telling me to write.
	He's also a decent writer.
	He does, he's one of those jack-of-ball treats people who also has an overwhelmingly great sense of personal discipline and has found a way to create his own business that's livable.
	But on top of that, he's a guitarist and an artist and kind of an anomaly.
	But, you know, he's tried to convince me for the longest time that I can write.
	Oh, you can.
	And honestly, like the letter that you sent was funny, biting, deep, incisive, was great.
	I mean, that was you just typing, hey, here's what I'd like to chat.
	So without a doubt, you could write.
	Without a doubt, you have the characters.
	And where is the anti-woke comedy?
	Right.
	It's not here yet.
	SNL did some stuff about this, you know, so black lesbian job application 90s, right?
	But where is now, you might do it and get bomb threats.
	I don't know, right?
	So there may be a reason why I'm not saying do it.
	I'm just saying that look into it and certainly give a shot and see if there's enough emotional energy there to write a script.
	But I sort of think back on.
	I don't care about the bomb threats.
	I'm sorry?
	I wouldn't mind the bomb threats.
	Right.
	Yeah, the insurance company might, the theater might.
	But no, I sort of think of like everybody was completely exhausted with lawyers when Dickens wrote his great anti-lawyer diatribe because he was a court reporter before he was a novelist.
	And Dickens wrote his great anti-court diatribe, Bleak House.
	And that actually led to some reforms, some serious reforms in how legal cases were pursued.
	And because it was just an endless, endless process.
	So there is the sort of scathing, the scathing takedown of the pompous and the over indulgent and the hyper-important, the satirist pricking the vanity.
	What King Leo did to arrogant elders, right?
	So, you know, if I were in your shoes, again, please remember I've been canceled.
	So make your decisions accordingly.
	But if I were in your shoes, I would at least try the script.
	I would at least say, because having a good person that the audience sympathizes with boxed more and more into an immobile, paralyzed corner and making it funny.
	I mean, it's like the dark comedy of Kafka.
	And I can never remember the name of it.
	There was a wonderful film set with a based on Bertolt Brecht, I think.
	And read, please read.
	Paul Johnson's got a book called Intellectuals, which has a fantastic chapter on Bertolt Brecht and how corrupt he became.
	But there's a German movie about a director constantly who was being captured by ideologically captured and funded by the communists and just how corrupt it becomes.
	And yet that level of corruption, I think I almost can't take the woke.
	I know it's dangerous.
	I get that, right?
	Because it certainly has had some challenges for me, which is, I guess, natural to their worldview.
	But it is, they're so goofy in so many ways.
	I know.
	That I feel like, and this is why it's sort of left-count meme, right?
	But I feel like if I were in your shoes, I would just sit down and write.
	And I wouldn't write with the intent of getting it ever done.
	I would just sit down and write and say, I'm just going to pour everything out about how impossible this world is.
	And I mean, you could have incredibly funny dialogue.
	You would take a Shakespeare play or whatever, right?
	That's completely innocuous and not based upon class or race or gender or anything like that.
	And you would just have it completely atomized by everybody's ideological interpretations and we can't do this and we can't do that and this is better and this is worse and nobody can get anything done and so on.
	And you'd need a counter tension, right?
	Whether it's a backer who just wants a fun show for his grandmother to come and watch or there has to be someone that can push the agenda forward with the resistance of the left wanting to sort of capture it.
	Or maybe the lead guy is more based and he's funding it, right?
	And so he's hired a bunch of the quote best actors.
	They're all super woke.
	He's driving it though and they need his paycheck, right?
	So the idea that you would have socialist ideologues greedy for the capitalist money would be funny too, right?
	That's kind of comic as well.
	So whatever you could sort of set up, because you need both the tension towards the left and you need the tension away from the left to produce sort of the sparks of good comedy.
	And of course, it would be naturally there would be a director who would be against the exploitation of the workers, who'd be trying to sleep with every female male, perhaps even pet cast member that's in the, because that's almost inevitable, like the moment somebody says that they're against the exploitation of the workers, you know, they're trying to, you know, bend over a course like a pipe cleaner.
	I'm sorry?
	Right.
	Well, as soon as they say they're against the exploitation of workers, they're most likely exploiting the workers.
	They're either paying them for free or trying to impregnate everything that moves.
	Yeah.
	So, yeah, I remember a friend of a friend was in a play.
	It was in Macbeth and the director was working his way through the witches throughout the entire production.
	He's kind of a leftist.
	Anyway, so I would, I would, because you can definitely write and you definitely have the emotionally charged experience.
	And you would absolutely cast yourself in the lead, right?
	Because, you know, as a sort of gay, biracial actor or singer, you would, you know, imagine you won the lottery, right?
	And you wanted to put on a play and you didn't necessarily understand all the woke stuff.
	You just wanted some really good actors and you wanted to cast yourself in the lead, then you would be funding it and you would have all of that weight and clout.
	And maybe you just won so much money, you could open it on Broadway.
	So everybody's just desperate to do it, but also desperate to hijack it.
	And, you know, there just could be a lot of really funny tension there because the left normally just runs roughshod, right?
	Because they control everything, right?
	They control the media.
	They control the funding sources and the theaters and the unions and so on.
	Right.
	But if you won the lottery and you got to put on a play and wanted it, I just want to tell a straight story.
	Not a straight story.
	You know what I mean?
	Yes.
	I just want to tell a plain story with good characters, rich depth and human.
	And I don't want gay unicorns.
	I don't need Peter Pan who's bi-species or something like that.
	So that would be something that a lot of people have faced this kind of frustration and to get people to laugh at that, which scares them is a very powerful thing.
	So again, just sort of goofing around here, but I would say that to write, just write, just write it as if it's never going to get put on.
	Because if you think about it getting put on, it's going to, you can't ever see it from the audience viewpoint when you're writing things.
	You can only see it from the inside, from the character's viewpoint.
	So just pour everything you have out about your incredible anger and frustration.
	These assholes took away what you love the most.
	And they took a beautiful thing in the human experience.
	They took a beautiful thing and corrupted it.
	They're like gollom without a redemption arc, right?
	So I would say that just pour it all out.
	Never ever be afraid of becoming too absurd.
	I mean, I had flying.
	There is no such thing.
	I had a flying robot angels protecting children 500 years from now, right?
	In my novel, The Future.
	So never ever be afraid.
	Always go further.
	I love comedy that doesn't ever stop.
	Like, you think there's a lie?
	They're just keep going.
	Right.
	And so I would.
	Have you seen Book of Mormon?
	I think that was more.
	That's one of the, because Trey Park and Matt Stone were part of the part of the creation of that.
	I think they wrote the book for it.
	It's one of the, I think, one of the best book musicals of the latter 21st century.
	Yeah, I noticed they try that only with the nicest religion known to man.
	So I wouldn't put them down as particularly courageous.
	Well, I mean, yeah.
	It isn't just about Mormonism.
	It really does rip apart just about every single mainstream Western religion across the board.
	It doesn't pull punches.
	I think that's how Park is coming.
	I mean, we have a new mystery religion of identity politics and so on.
	And so I think that, and also, you know, however you would do it in a novel, it would be pretty easy.
	How you do it on stage is a different kind of challenge.
	But one of the things that's kind of a true meme is that people whose personal lives are a complete disaster truly believe that they have the right to tell everyone else how to live.
	It really is.
	So how you portray the sort of utopian ideology of the people in the play within the play and then compare and contrast it to how absolute a disaster their personal lives are would be something that would give it a kind of bittersweet.
	To me, comedy that's bittersweet is really, you know, where you like laugh.
	I thought I cry.
	So you could also have a little couple of side vignettes in order to, and also the other thing you could do, which would be pretty funny, just sort of popped into my mind, is you would get 12 actors or 15 actors a night to protest.
	So they'd be in the audience and they would throw things at the stage and they would protest, light themselves on fire.
	No, don't have that.
	But no, you would have them protest and you would have, as part of the play, the protest and the arguments.
	You could even throw in some stage combat as they rush the stage.
	You could have security take them down and then the curtain could come falling down and that's your intermission.
	And everyone's like, was that real?
	Like that to me would be a lot of fun to stage.
	So honestly, just make the whole experience.
	Make the whole, you know, everything that wild and crazy that you could imagine would happen.
	You could hire protesters to be outside.
	That's so frickin'.
	And stuff pamphlets with donation, donation URLs into the hands of people.
	Like, how dare you go into this monstrosity of a play?
	Right.
	He's the mocha chino white supremacist.
	I don't know whatever they're going to, whatever they're going to be saying, but I would, yeah, I would just make it the full, the full woke experience.
	I would even, again, depending on your budget, I would even get to Tanya McGrath from X, who's like this parody of the left.
	I would buy fake articles and just how outrageous this all is and beat sort of left at their own game.
	And honestly, you could just have a whole campaign to just, you know, this horrifying and make it kind of cool to go and so on.
	And I think it would be, you know, you could even, you could even, three quarters through the play, you could end the play because a credible threat has been received and you have to clear the clear theater.
	And that's the end of the play or something like that.
	Right.
	Like you could just make it the full the full experience.
	Oh, you could also have You could have prizes for who informs on someone else in the audience.
	Oh my gosh.
	Yes.
	Like if you see anyone or hear anyone saying anything remotely not woke, you know, just put their seat number in.
	You're going to pick a random prize every night, or somebody's going to get a reward.
	So you could, the full Eastern European stasi experience, the Eastern German stasi experience of informing on your neighbors.
	Like you could just work, it would be a whole, I love the stuff that spills off stage.
	And so you could just have to shine a spotlight, shine a spotlight on them in the middle of the show.
	And so this person was, this person is, is not part of the tribe.
	This person thinks differently.
	We hate them.
	Well, and you could actually even have that person be an actor, direct up on stage, put them into a struggle session.
	Like there could be any, any number of things.
	Like a Jordan Peterson re-education.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	So something like that.
	Like just have them re-educated and so on.
	You could give rotten fruit to people in the audience to throw.
	I don't know.
	You could just really make it a wild evening that would be completely unforgettable.
	And again, you know, total brainstorm.
	It just like no idea is too outrageous about just what an experience you could make it.
	And people would come out.
	It would be like a cleansing fire.
	People would just come out feeling like a million bucks, like they finally got to laugh at all of these people who've been driving society crazy for the last 50 years.
	Yeah.
	Well, and force them to find a way to laugh at themselves.
	I mean, it's really hard.
	It's funny to watch people who don't want to be, who don't want to laugh or don't want to be amused be captured by something that they can't help but laugh at and then catch themselves and get angry that they laughed at it.
	Oh, absolutely.
	I would break the fourth wall continually and have the actors be completely enraged that the audience is laughing at them.
	Yeah.
	Yep.
	So, I mean, I'm Piron Delo's Six Characters in Search of an Author is a play that's probably worth because it's a real sort of famous Break the Fourth Wall play.
	But I think that kind of stuff would be just a riot and people would have no idea what was coming next.
	They wouldn't know what was real or not, you know, and sort of that Andy Kaufman wrestling thing.
	Like they wouldn't know what was real or not.
	And you could actually have some ad libs and have the play sort of change every night.
	And I think that it would be something that would then be worth for people to come back to what was real and what was not.
	Well, you'd have to come back to find out kind of thing, right?
	Right.
	Yeah.
	That's a great idea.
	And also, I mean, just the act of doing it might, it sounds at least a little bit cathartic.
	Well, it would be, yeah, so even if for whatever reason you never got it off the ground, just writing it all would just be great to just get stuff out of your system.
	And because what, you know, I think what a lot of people feel is helpless, right?
	Yeah.
	And if you were to sort of fight that helplessness and really give people, you know, sometimes, sometimes you just have to show courage and it breaks the spell, right?
	And if you wrote, and it is ripe for satire, hell no, I'll write it.
	Just kidding.
	I'm kind of busy at the moment.
	But no, I would, I would, and if you've got a, if you've, if your partner writes as well, that would be really great.
	I'm sure.
	I mean, you have a great sense of humor, so I'm sure that the comic stuff would be enjoyable.
	But yeah, just and satire on art is long overdue.
	And certainly it was what's been going on over the last 50 years.
	Very much overdue.
	Cool.
	Yeah, I will definitely do that.
	You know, I've been battling this for a while.
	It's also just kind of like a what is what is my future job?
	What is my, what is the person that I, that I see myself as 15 years from now?
	Like in the last five years or so, that person has entirely been like, I don't see, I don't want, I don't know.
	I don't know who that really, that person is anymore.
	And maybe it's the playwright who kind of started the process of pulling theater back from the dregs of woke mess.
	So it's a possible.
	Do you see, do you see, I mean, like I said before, it's been like this for so long.
	Do you see an actual change in the arts or is it more of a kind of like wrangling in of all the people who agree with us?
	And it just, you know, more turtling of it as opposed to.
	So you mean at the moment, like absent the sort of stuff we're brainstorming at the moment, you mean sort of.
	Correct.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	No.
	So art has moved from the provocation of division and hostility to preparing people for actual violence, right?
	So this is all of the zombie movies.
	This is the horror movies.
	This is the, you know, the gore stuff, like the 28 days, weeks, and years later and so on.
	So yeah, the art is now preparing people for significant levels of violence, which is why everything's just so weird and dark and gruesome.
	Yeah, there are significant levels of violence.
	The Overton window for what violence is acceptable has come into a differently interesting place too.
	So yeah, it does feel like that anger and violence and radicalism is like the only thing that exists right now for anybody.
	Yeah, and everything that is nice turns horrifying, like the midsummer, oh, what a nice little town.
	And it's like, oh, right.
	So no spoilers.
	But yeah, everything, there's no good guys winning.
	There's no good guys.
	There's only bad guys.
	And violence is the only language that's really spoken.
	Which is a shame because that's just not how, I don't know, that just seems to be, we've learned, I feel like we've learned that lesson several times over in several different societies over the course of human history at this point.
	Like the idea that just beating up a problem is going to solve it is something we feel like we could have, we should have already kind of gone past.
	Well, it solves the problem if the problem is there's not enough violence for some people.
	Some people, they really thrive on and love violence.
	And a peaceful society is hell to them.
	And they just need to, you know, you see these videos of like Sweden in the 1960s, like everyone that's strollers and walking along in a suit and tie.
	And it's like, that's hell for some people.
	They just want nature red and tooth and claw and they'll just keep poking society until they get what they want.
	Why do you think that is?
	I think there's evolutionary reasons.
	So a peaceful society gets complacent and a peaceful society is almost always taken over by a more aggressive society.
	So it is technology made that sort of impossible.
	So there's different ways that they're taking over countries now, as you know.
	But I think that there's just a bunch of people who evolved to be very violent because that worked in terms of getting resources.
	And, you know, the horrifying crime of rape that was enacted throughout almost all of human history by whatever conquering tribe meant that the most violent got to spread their genes the most, right?
	Like one out of every 17 people in East Asia traces their lineage back to like Genghis Khan's balls, right?
	Which were about the most active outside of the NBA I've ever heard of.
	So I think that there's just evolutionary reasons for that.
	But we need to be able to identify that and keep that at bay, which we've sort of lost the ability to do so because we put people who like violence, like statists, we put people who like violence in charge of our children's education.
	So it's all downhill from there.
	Yeah, well, I've long since decided that if and when I have children, they won't go anywhere near the public education system.
	Yeah, so I would say give that a shot.
	I mean, you can do that on the side and you can do that while working full-time and even entrepreneurial stuff.
	So I would work on, and it doesn't have to be what we're talking about here.
	It could be anything, but the stuff that is the most passionate for you is the stuff that the best art is going to come from.
	Like Shakespeare wrote Hamlet after his son Hamlet died.
	Right.
	So whatever is the most emotional and powerful for you is where the greatest creative fruition is going to come from.
	And most people who are actors, particularly actors who enjoy more complex texts, can write.
	And I would not underestimate your ability, particularly if you've got a partner to do that.
	And finely tuned comic anger is one of the great purifying forest fires through the overtangled human psyche to sort of clear and start things anew from a fresh perspective.
	And I think it's been quite overdue for a while.
	And yeah, let me know if you won't do it and I'll do it.
	I will do it.
	Well, I will certainly try.
	I will certainly sit down and put some ideas out there.
	Are there any other books?
	You mentioned the book, Intellectuals, and the Six Characters in Search of an Author.
	Any other books or plays or anything that kind of like reflect this idea or have a historical kind of reflection of what's going on right now?
	Yeah, so I'm just talking in terms of sort of flexibility of stagecraft.
	You might want to look into Anne-Marie McDonald's six characters.
	Good night to Stimona.
	Good morning, Juliet.
	That's a pretty good play.
	Of course, Shakespeare in love.
	The movie has a play within a play.
	Ayn Rand's The Night of January the 13th, I think it is, or January the 21st.
	It's a play which is a crime thriller.
	And the jury is taken for the audience.
	And depending on how the jury votes, the play ends differently.
	And so, yeah, I would definitely look for the kinds of plays that are breaking the fourth wall.
	Obviously, Death of a Salesman is pretty classic, one where the fourth wall kind of comes and goes.
	I don't think he directly addresses the audience, but there's lots of play in the movement of the story.
	But yeah, I remember six characters in Search of an Author.
	There's a mistake when the curtain comes down and the character kind of stuck in front of the curtain.
	They have to find their way back.
	That's actually the intermission, but it's supposed to be an accident.
	So I thought that was quite clever.
	And audience plants.
	I was a friend of mine within a play called Catching Sam and Ella.
	Catching Sam and Ella, Catching Sam and Ella.
	And there were audience plants.
	Audience plants can be great in a play, particularly if they're really good and really are believable.
	Then that's pretty wild.
	Noises Off is another good idea.
	I'm just remembering that.
	Yeah, Noises Off.
	The producers, of course, is a great satire on artistic production and so on.
	And I'm sure that others will come to mind, but I would look into that kind of stuff.
	Fight Club, of course, breaks the fourth wall from time to time as well.
	But so yeah, I would just say like absolutely no limit.
	Like no rules, theater is the best because it really keeps people's attention when they don't know.
	And you'll get the smartest people to come because dull people like repetition, smart people like novelty.
	And I do love that what the heck is going on.
	Is this real or is this not real?
	I think that's really a fertile place.
	And I think that would be a lot of fun for audiences to participate in.
	And boy, would that ever be something that people would talk about?
	Like, I went to this play last night.
	They were yelling from the audience.
	There was a fist fight on stage.
	Someone got dragged into the wings.
	You know, like there was a bunch of police.
	They were playing with some kind of threat.
	It's like, it was wild.
	Like, I don't know what the heck was going on, but it was hilarious.
	The bits that I saw.
	Something like that, I think would be a lot of fun to play with.
	The UK police broke in and carted somebody off because of a tweet.
	Yeah, don't, don't, don't, I wouldn't, I wouldn't have it open in the UK.
	That's not it.
	Cool.
	Well, thank you.
	I very much appreciate this.
	It's nothing else just to kind of get these thoughts out.
	Writing, just writing that letter to you was cathartic.
	Like I said, I've got a lot of friends that I've made through the industry.
	And then I've got like my partner, but I feel like the group of people that I feel like I can actually not be playing the role of myself, of the palatable version of myself for them, it just gets smaller and smaller.
	And so, you know, being able to say these things out loud to another human without feeling like I can, I mean, and also there's a relative sense of anonymity, and also that most of the people that I know probably will never, ever, ever watch this.
	Well, if they do, like, when, when you're out of a particular group, trying to hammer your way back in won't work because, especially if it's a group that thrives on power, right?
	So if you've kicked out of a particular group that thrives on power and ostracism, trying to get back in is just going to reinforce their power and have them become even more cruel.
	Right.
	So you have to abandon the old to get to the new.
	Now, if you put on a play like this, then you'll meet, I guarantee you, you will meet a whole bunch of new people.
	And those whole bunch of new people, like through the show, I've met a whole bunch of new people through what it is I've done over the last 20 years.
	So all of those new people, they're going to be your future friends.
	They're going to be your future companions through life.
	They're trying to get your way back.
	As you said, in audition this year, it's almost November, right?
	So, that's why I was asking, like, how done are you with that world?
	Now, if you're done with that world, there's no point trying to court them.
	There's no trying to point trying to please them.
	You know, that old meme, you know, I wouldn't do this because it might offend the left.
	Well, the left is offended whether you would wish it or not.
	And so you put on something like this, and it will open up entirely new social connections that are completely invisible to you at the moment because you're stuck between worlds, if that makes sense.
	Yeah, it does.
	Frustrating kind of purgatory for sure.
	Okay, so thank you.
	Is that helpful?
	Is there anything else that, I mean, the most practical thing that I can think of is to sort of use your very legitimate and I sympathize with it, pain, and hit back in this way?
	Yeah, no, there's nothing else.
	I'm sure I'll have it.
	I'll call in again at some point.
	This has been very enjoyable.
	And I'm so glad that you're kind of back.
	Oh, yeah.
	Listen, it's fun if you want to brainstorm, man.
	I live with that kind of stuff.
	So if you want to fight around with things that might be fun to do from a play standpoint, I've written like, I don't know, 30 of these damn things.
	So if there's anything that I can do to help, it would be a fun.
	And I think people would enjoy hearing the creative process.
	So yeah, feel free to come back in and we can fart around some more with ideas.
	That sounds good.
	Quick question about the recording.
	Do I get, I know that you're recording this.
	Do I am I able to get like a copy of that or how that works?
	How does that work?
	Yeah, yeah.
	So it's a call-in show.
	So it goes out, but I can send you a copy ahead of time for sure.
	That'd be great.
	Yeah, for sure.
	Cool.
	Well, I look forward to the nervousness of seeing myself on YouTube.
	Oh, yeah.
	Don't worry about it.
	No problem.
	I can make your voice a little deeper or anything like that.
	If you want to do a little bit of disguise, that's totally fine.
	I think the circumstances will get me away if there's any.
	I don't know.
	I'm not really, I'm not going to like share it on a bunch of social media.
	This was really more for me anyway.
	So, okay.
	All right.
	We'll keep you posted and I wish you best of luck and I appreciate the chat today.
	Will do.
	Thank you so much.
	Bye.

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