True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 527: Wallace Shawn
Aired: 2026-03-06
Duration: 02:02:26


=== Why Wallace Sean Writes About Himself (15:27) ===

[00:00:01]  Okay, let me get a couple things out of the way first.
[00:00:04]  This is an interview I conducted with Wallace Sean, the actor and playwright at a sunny apartment here in New York City on February 25th, 2026.
[00:00:14]  After the interview was over, I realized I referenced a number of works Wallace Sean has written that not all of our listeners may be familiar with.
[00:00:22]  If I recall right, we talk about the designated mourner, evening at the talkhouse, and the fever.
[00:00:27]  These are all plays by Wallace Sean.
[00:00:30]  The designated mourner is about a horny, self-involved coward of meager talents who finds himself, absurdly, as the last man standing among a class of intellectuals who have either been absorbed or shot by a fascist regime.
[00:00:44]  Evening at the Talk House is a play about aesthetes, which is a word I don't know how to pronounce, but it's about aesthetes.
[00:00:50]  You know what aesthetes are.
[00:00:51]  It's about aesthetes reuniting and will be of particular interest to those who work for Palantir or these large AI companies that are being used to target strikes.
[00:01:01]  There's audio versions of both of these available and there's a film of the designated mourner, which John Early sent me on a Russian streaming platform that plays frightening ads every half hour.
[00:01:12]  The Fever is Wally's most famous work and also quite personal seeming.
[00:01:17]  It's a long monologue originally conceived as to be performed in living rooms.
[00:01:22]  It's about a man coming to terms with life, not just his life, but all lives of all people he's ever known that have ever existed in the world.
[00:01:30]  And famously, it contains a very concise description of commodity fetishism.
[00:01:35]  I'd read some of it to you, but that would be, you would find it, I would do it poorly.
[00:01:41]  I'm not going to do it.
[00:01:42]  I thought that would be like a good thing to do in the intro.
[00:01:44]  I tried to do it for two seconds.
[00:01:45]  I was like, I can't do things like this.
[00:01:47]  But it's great.
[00:01:47]  He reads it fantastically.
[00:01:50]  You should read it to yourself, or you can actually go see it.
[00:01:54]  And you can, in fact, see Wallace Sean perform it on Sunday and Monday nights at the Greenwich House Theater in Manhattan.
[00:02:03]  Unless you're listening to this episode in like three years, in which case, the run of the show is probably over.
[00:02:08]  Most other nights, the same theater, the Greenwich House Theater in Manhattan, will be showing his new play, What We Did Before Our Moth Days.
[00:02:17]  It's directed by Andre Gregory and stars Hope Davis, Maria Dizia, Josh Hamilton, and John Early, who is gracious enough to let us use his apartment for this interview.
[00:02:27]  So we already recorded this and are releasing this.
[00:02:30]  So I'm pretty sure Wala Sean doesn't listen to podcasts.
[00:02:34]  I hope he does not listen to podcasts.
[00:02:36]  So let me be completely honest with you, I loved the play.
[00:02:39]  I thought it was fantastic.
[00:02:41]  And it's a long motherfucker, too.
[00:02:43]  It's like three and a half hours long.
[00:02:44]  Well, with intermissions, but I had a, I really, I found it very moving.
[00:02:51]  So a couple other things to get out of the way really quickly.
[00:02:54]  We had talked a little bit about William Vollman prior to the recording, and so the references come from that.
[00:02:59]  Besides that, the producer of the show, Young Chomsky, has informed me that there's a slight audio issue at times.
[00:03:06]  Just ignore it.
[00:03:09]  Also, this episode, like I said, was recorded on February 25th, or maybe it was 26th.
[00:03:14]  I don't remember what I said.
[00:03:15]  But anyways, it was last Wednesday.
[00:03:19]  And so any references to an impending war on Iran are because it hadn't happened yet.
[00:03:24]  So there is a good chance you might come from a very different background than Wallace Sean, that you might have lived a very different life.
[00:03:31]  And listen, the world he's from, you know, his father was the second editor of The New Yorker.
[00:03:36]  He grew up in this New York theater scene.
[00:03:38]  He's lived his whole life in Manhattan.
[00:03:40]  It is foreign to me, but there's a humanity in all of his work that I find greatly, really, greatly affects me.
[00:03:49]  Really, greatly affects me.
[00:03:50]  Boy.
[00:03:51]  Well, it's okay, I don't write plays.
[00:03:54]  Anyways, this might be the case for you as well.
[00:03:57]  And without further ado, here is the interview with Wallace Shawn.
[00:04:18]  We're going to do my least favorite part of interviews first.
[00:04:22]  Okay.
[00:04:23]  Naturally.
[00:04:24]  Because my least favorite part is asking the first question.
[00:04:27]  Okay.
[00:04:28]  Because there's a certain, you know, we've been talking with each other for a little while now, but.
[00:04:33]  but obviously maybe neither of us are completely at ease.
[00:04:37]  And so I either like to start with a tough question or a really easy question, and I can't really think of either right now.
[00:04:44]  But let me try a little sideways approach then.
[00:04:50]  Thank you for coming on the show.
[00:04:52]  I'm terrified.
[00:04:53]  Go ahead.
[00:04:55]  You know, they did a New York Times magazine profile on you recently.
[00:04:58]  Yes.
[00:04:59]  Which I thought was good because it sort of, I don't know what, described you walking down the street and people sort of yelling out their favorite lines from movies you've been in.
[00:05:13]  I believe most notably The Princess Bride.
[00:05:15]  And it occurred to me that when I was reading that is that I don't think I've seen The Princess Bride or I certainly haven't seen, I don't think I've seen the Star Trek that you were in.
[00:05:23]  I didn't even know you were in Star Trek.
[00:05:27]  But in relation to some of your work that I have been ingesting over the past year and a half, it sort of struck me as interesting because do you think about that sometimes?
[00:05:38]  That you're really associated with these characters in these movies that are not necessarily the sort of things that you would make.
[00:05:45]  But to a lot of people, that is how they see you.
[00:05:49]  You're walking on the street, they yell inconceivable, as they see you.
[00:05:53]  Remind some of that.
[00:05:54]  Do you ever get the urge to shake people and to be like, you know, I've written some plays myself?
[00:06:00]  Well, I think when I was younger, I was more upset about it.
[00:06:13]  Now, I don't really believe as strongly in the idea of the individual as being a meaningful category.
[00:06:34]  I'm going to go a little far afield to tell you what I mean.
[00:06:37]  Go far away.
[00:06:37]  What do you think I'm going to do?
[00:06:39]  Go far afield.
[00:06:40]  Okay, so capital punishment puts the point most clearly.
[00:06:51]  A person in their 40s is killed by the state because of the concept of the individual,
[00:07:05]  which decrees that the person with the same body and the same name should be killed because of what that supposed person did 20 years ago.
[00:07:23]  Does that make sense?
[00:07:26]  Is that appropriate, really?
[00:07:28]  I'm not sure.
[00:07:32]  So I sort of no longer try to make sense of the fact that people have contradictory sides.
[00:07:46]  I mean, is the guy who brushes his teeth the same as the guy who writes a book or the same as the guy who acted 15 years ago in a movie?
[00:08:02]  I'm not sure that it's meaningful to say what a fascinating paradox.
[00:08:13]  A guy on the street thinks that he is a humorous actor, but meanwhile, he wrote a serious play.
[00:08:23]  I'm not sure it is a paradox.
[00:08:26]  I'm not sure that it's any more of a paradox than saying he brushed his teeth and two hours later he was writing a play.
[00:08:40]  I'm not sure it's a big paradox.
[00:08:44]  So I'm not too bitter about my other self in a certain way.
[00:08:50]  I'm now thinking of everybody as being like a box of colored pencils.
[00:08:56]  It's not a paradox.
[00:09:00]  It's not bizarre that there's a red pencil and also a green pencil in the box.
[00:09:07]  That's just what a box of colored pencils is.
[00:09:11]  So I'm not that upset in a certain way that they think I'm a funny comedian.
[00:09:21]  And yet I believe in the myth of the individual enough so that I get some satisfaction out of a compliment.
[00:09:33]  You know, it's of course not a compliment just to be recognized, because if you're in a movie and your image is reproduced, it's not really a compliment that somebody has seen your image.
[00:09:49]  And I don't particularly like it if people think I'm the guy that I played in the movie.
[00:09:58]  Which is more common than I think people would probably think, not just with you, but with, I think, actors in general.
[00:10:04]  Yeah, that, I mean, not that they literally think I am that character, but they think that I, if I'm a funny character, then I must be a funny person, or I must be in a funny mood, or I must have a great sense of humor, or that is kind of annoying.
[00:10:30]  And I do find any kind of shrinking down of an individual person demeaning.
[00:10:48]  Obviously, it's no longer the custom for men on the street to say to a woman, wow, you have a great ass, because the person who they're talking to thinks, well, that's, you know, diminishing of me.
[00:11:15]  There's more to me than that.
[00:11:17]  So I don't particularly, you know, like that feeling.
[00:11:22]  Yeah.
[00:11:23]  Well, I think it's probably an uncomfortable feeling to get yelled at on the street no matter what someone's yelling.
[00:11:30]  I remember I once, you know, the movie Kids?
[00:11:34]  I met one of the guys who was in that movie, who I didn't think really, I don't think really became a professional actor afterwards.
[00:11:42]  I think he sort of went on with his life.
[00:11:43]  But in the movie, I remember I watched it when I was a kid.
[00:11:46]  And obviously, I knew it was a fictional movie, but it was one of the first movies I had seen that was like sort of done from this very realistic and this very realistic style.
[00:11:54]  And in that movie, the guy that I met, he has HIV.
[00:11:58]  And as an adult, I met him and I asked him this question, which I thought was the most natural question in the world, which was, after you were in that movie, when it came out, because you were still a teenager, if you tried to talk to women, were you always a little worried that they might think that you had HIV?
[00:12:14]  And understandably, he looked at me like I was insane.
[00:12:17]  But that is sort of always something I wonder because I think people really do sort of associate actors, even if they're smart enough to know better or whatever, conscious enough to know better, with their characters.
[00:12:29]  And I cannot say that I am.
[00:12:34]  I've also, unfortunately, I'm realizing that I do that because I have just seen your most recent play, Moth Days, and I've actually just saw you do The Fever as well.
[00:12:47]  And I, you know, there's in several of your works, there's characters which I, I guess, unconsciously associate with you as a person.
[00:12:58]  And it took me a little while of sort of sort of to write out my thoughts about them before I came here and humiliated myself.
[00:13:06]  I realized that obviously you're not like, for instance, in Moth Days, I would associate John's character, Tim, with you because he's the son.
[00:13:16]  And then I realized, of course not.
[00:13:17]  That's not really how you didn't just write this play about these other people and then had yourself in there one-to-one.
[00:13:23]  But in The Fever, it does seem like it is you to an extent.
[00:13:28]  Well, that is certainly my only really autobiographical play.
[00:13:36]  It has a made-up story in which, for instance, the character receives a gift of Karl Marx's Capital, Volume 1, on his doorstep.
[00:13:52]  A mysterious gift.
[00:13:54]  A mysterious gift.
[00:13:55]  Now, that is a made-up episode, and it never happened to me.
[00:14:01]  And the play is a unisex play.
[00:14:04]  It could be done by a woman and has been many times.
[00:14:09]  I've seen it done by a woman.
[00:14:10]  And yeah, I mean, it's got a made-up story.
[00:14:16]  But the feelings and the conclusions and the thoughts and the struggle between the old person and the newer person, that's all real.
[00:14:30]  That all happened to me.
[00:14:32]  I mean, in other words, it is a chronicle of my own emotional journey in my early 40s from being a centrist liberal to becoming a leftist, if you want to summarize it in a shallow way.
[00:14:57]  But that really did happen to me.
[00:15:00]  And the thoughts are mine, really.
[00:15:05]  The argument, I would claim it has one, is mine.
[00:15:12]  And the debate that goes on between my, let's say, 39-year-old self and my 42-year-old self is that really is a chronicle of what really happened in a way.

=== Deborah's Influence (02:11) ===

[00:15:28]  I mean, the play, for those who aren't familiar with it, is a fever sort of dream, or a mix of a man actually sort of under, in the thrall of a fever or in the midst of a fever, but also dreaming at certain points.
[00:15:46]  Hallucinating.
[00:15:47]  Hallucinating and wrestling with these contradictions that he's sort of just becoming aware of.
[00:15:53]  And there's a story written by your girlfriend, I think around the same time as you might have written the fever, called Holy Week, which I love and deals with many of the same themes.
[00:16:06]  And it strikes me that perhaps this is maybe based on an actual incident.
[00:16:14]  Your girlfriend Deborah Eisenberg, who is an author of, I want to say several, I'm going to say many books, but who has got a giant short story collection I've read that I found fantastic.
[00:16:27]  She writes a rather similar account in certain ways.
[00:16:33]  And I wanted to know, like, you know, did you, was this based on a trip that the two of you took together?
[00:16:39]  Or is the Central American country, which I took to be Nicaragua sort of a stand-in for something here?
[00:16:46]  Well, this is an answer that would be of interest to people who have some interest in the fever and in Deborah's stories, several of which are set in Latin America.
[00:17:08]  Basically, I was becoming, I was going through this crisis in America based on whatever.
[00:17:24]  That's a whole other question.
[00:17:26]  But I was going through this crisis in my own country, and I had heard about this revolution, which had very recently taken place in Nicaragua, and I was very interested in that.

=== Fearful And Prepared (07:20) ===

[00:17:40]  But as I've already told you in private conversation, I am quite a fearful person and was brought up to be fearful, really.
[00:17:52]  I don't know if any of your listeners are Jews, but there's a kind of we're sometimes a little neurotic and afraid of a lot of things, understandably.
[00:18:13]  And basically, you know, my mother certainly felt if it was raining, you should wear what they had at that time, galoshes, sort of boots that you put on over your boots.
[00:18:29]  I mean, it's like there's a kind of self-protective instinct that happens.
[00:18:38]  And certainly, if you hear that people are fighting and killing each other, you should go the other way.
[00:18:48]  You shouldn't head toward that.
[00:18:51]  You should head away from it.
[00:18:54]  But I was very intrigued by the idea that maybe there would be a different kind of society that would be better.
[00:19:05]  And that people were trying to start a whole new system.
[00:19:17]  And I met a guy who was just as, who seemed at any rate to be no stronger, no more of a he-man, no more of a William Vohlman, let's say, than me.
[00:19:36]  I met him at a party, and I thought, wait a minute.
[00:19:43]  And he, I mean, not to be too self-fascinated, I was wearing my tweed jacket, and I think he was wearing his tweed jacket.
[00:19:56]  I thought, my God, if, and he said, oh, I just got back this afternoon from Nicaragua.
[00:20:03]  And I thought, my God, if this guy can go there, why shouldn't I go there?
[00:20:10]  Why not?
[00:20:11]  I know there's a war going on.
[00:20:13]  People are fighting there, but I really want to see what's happening over there.
[00:20:20]  So Deborah was never a centrist.
[00:20:26]  I would say she barely had any familiarity with what even that would mean.
[00:20:34]  I mean, the idea of like loving the Democratic candidate for president, I mean, she didn't, Deborah was born a rebel and a leftist, I think, quite seriously.
[00:20:54]  By the time she was around seven, she knew that society was all fucked up completely.
[00:21:04]  And she wasn't trying to convert me, but she certainly just tolerated my sort of more conventional attitudes in the political area.
[00:21:24]  Well, it seems, you know, I can't remember which book of yours or which essay of yours in your books of essays it's mentioned in, and I don't know if this is, I don't want to maybe presume too much, but you talk in these very romantic terms about a woman who lives in a very small apartment with sort of a shitty sink, but who cooked very interesting foods.
[00:21:48]  And you can tell in the way that you're writing, you're very enamored by this woman.
[00:21:51]  So I did take her to be Deborah.
[00:21:53]  She was Deborah.
[00:21:55]  I figured that she might be.
[00:21:59]  But I can't tell how much of this is you being self-effacing, because I think that you, from what I understand of your work, you can be a little bit self-effacing.
[00:22:09]  But you seem quite taken with her.
[00:22:11]  And was it she who introduced you to these concepts?
[00:22:17]  This concept, because even in the fever, you're saying you're talking about how you've heard of these Marxist concepts before, but you never really thought about them in any serious way.
[00:22:27]  And then it seems like once you meet this woman, and by this woman, I mean Deborah, that you begin to take this very seriously.
[00:22:34]  And it seems like you're sort of introduced to this world and into a new way of seeing the old world that you lived in.
[00:22:42]  Yes, I mean, that's absolutely true.
[00:22:46]  I think Deborah herself would deny.
[00:22:49]  Well, let's put it this way.
[00:22:51]  I met Deborah in 1972.
[00:22:55]  There was the old left, communists, 0.001% of the American public.
[00:23:04]  And there was the new left, 0.001 of the American public.
[00:23:11]  There were not a lot of left-wing people in America.
[00:23:18]  And I don't think that Deborah would have said, oh yes, I'm a Marxist.
[00:23:24]  On the other hand, she had, as well as being a born rebel, it so happened that she had, during the very brief time when the new school of social research offered an undergraduate degree and had all these extraordinary European intellectuals teaching there,
[00:23:51]  she had been very much, you know, come into contact with the Frankfurt School.
[00:23:56]  She'd written a long paper about Adorno.
[00:24:01]  Of course, she knew the work of Chomsky.
[00:24:06]  But she wasn't.
[00:24:08]  I mean, today, there's a huge number of Americans who are on the left.
[00:24:18]  And I don't know if I certainly, you know, if I meet a younger person, by the time I've talked to them for a very short time, I might very well have said, have you ever read Chomsky?
[00:24:35]  Or have you listened, do you ever listen to Democracy Now?
[00:24:39]  Or have you seen Michael Moore's movies?
[00:24:43]  These are not the arcane, mysterious, complicated part of the left.
[00:24:52]  These are just really normal American things that any American might have access to.

=== Preparing for the Journey (14:37) ===

[00:25:00]  So, yeah, I said to Deborah, well, let's take a trip to Nicaragua.
[00:25:08]  Well, then when we went to Nicaragua, or when we were going, I thought, well, we should be prepared to meet people there.
[00:25:19]  And we should, by the way, some of my answers could be too long.
[00:25:24]  I don't give a shit.
[00:25:25]  But anyway.
[00:25:26]  Well, it's a podcast.
[00:25:28]  So we can just do it for as long as we want.
[00:25:30]  And they love it.
[00:25:31]  They put it on when they're driving.
[00:25:32]  They drive for so long.
[00:25:34]  Half of these guys are probably truckers.
[00:25:35]  It's fine.
[00:25:36]  All right.
[00:25:37]  So one of the people that are probably the main person that, I mean, I got tips from a lot of people.
[00:25:48]  Peter Davis, Steve Schlesinger, and preeminently Susan Mycellus, the photographer who had taken incredible photographs of the Nicaraguan Revolution.
[00:26:06]  And we got names of people that we could look up and phone numbers.
[00:26:13]  And also Everybody advised us, well, don't just go to Nicaragua.
[00:26:21]  You should also go to El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and see what these other countries are like in order to have a perspective if you're going to go to Nicaragua.
[00:26:36]  So, yes, we traveled together, Deborah and myself, and we did do, you know, when I told you that I was physically, or I didn't go into this, but I am a cowardly person, and I always was a cowardly person.
[00:26:56]  But for about three or four years, I was so obsessed with finding out about these things that I kind of lost my fearfulness.
[00:27:10]  And then we did travel in Guatemala, where there were really horrible, unimaginable massacres of indigenous people going on.
[00:27:23]  And, well, it's too boring to go into, but we spent a night in a scary place, and it had no electricity, but it had a metal, unbelievably thick metal door protecting it.
[00:27:44]  And people were banging on that door.
[00:27:48]  I don't know who they were.
[00:27:49]  Maybe they were friendly.
[00:27:52]  Maybe they wanted my autograph.
[00:27:54]  I don't know.
[00:27:56]  But I was so frightened that I sort of thought, if I get out of this night alive, I'm never going to do anything scary again.
[00:28:07]  And that sort of was true.
[00:28:10]  But yes, some of what was included in Deborah's stories came from these trips.
[00:28:19]  We took a few trips to Central America, several.
[00:28:24]  I guess we took maybe three different trips.
[00:28:28]  Oh, really?
[00:28:29]  Yeah.
[00:28:29]  You know, I want to maybe return to the trips in a moment, but I want to actually ask you about the cowardly thing, because I feel like I don't want to, and I don't want to sound accusatory here, but I feel like, let me just give you an example for my own life.
[00:28:49]  Sometimes if I don't feel completely comfortable or at ease, which is not infrequent, I will be a little bit self-effacing.
[00:29:00]  And I'll say I'm an idiot or I'm stupid or whatever.
[00:29:04]  But it usually revolves around me because I have a really bad memory.
[00:29:08]  I have sort of a patchy education.
[00:29:10]  And so sometimes some of my, I guess insecurities, I try to paper them over by really exaggerating them and by making it seem like I'm really stupid.
[00:29:21]  And so, like I was saying before we did it, did the interview, so that if I say something even halfway perceptive or intelligent, people are like, oh, wow, look at this.
[00:29:31]  He's so good, you know?
[00:29:34]  And I got to tell you, I kind of get that impression from you, from some of your work, because there's sometimes such self-I mean, the fever, but really in the designated mourner, also.
[00:29:49]  Which again, I'm not saying that you are Jack in the designated mourner.
[00:29:53]  Thank you.
[00:29:54]  But certainly I can see you writing yourself into that character a bit.
[00:30:01]  That sometimes you can be so sort of self-accusatory of cowardice that it actually becomes maybe an exaggeration a little bit.
[00:30:09]  I don't know if that is necessarily true.
[00:30:11]  I'm not saying that you're, you know, Mr. Brave, but do you really see yourself as that cowardly?
[00:30:19]  Well, I do because it does come up.
[00:30:25]  You know, I do think physical courage is a pretty important characteristic.
[00:30:36]  I mean to say, well, it does come up in one's political narrative.
[00:30:46]  I mean, in other words, I'm, first of all, I don't know if you've, well, my brother has written a great book about phobias called Wish I Could Be There.
[00:30:58]  Yeah.
[00:30:59]  And he and my father and I share various phobias.
[00:31:07]  I mean, my father no longer living and to different degrees.
[00:31:13]  I mean, my brother suffers very severely from some that don't affect me as strongly, but I do have a fear of imprisonment, which is, I mean, most people don't want to go to jail.
[00:31:34]  Yeah.
[00:31:34]  I mean, very few people, I mean, it's a punishment because people don't like it.
[00:31:42]  But I feel I'm even more averse to going to jail than a lot of people because I really am terrified of the thought of being locked in a cell.
[00:31:56]  And I was locked in a cell in a movie because the third assistant director screwed up the lock.
[00:32:07]  And I was locked in the cell For a short time, you know, maybe 20 minutes or something, but I really didn't like it.
[00:32:18]  I was, it was true that I really am claustrophobic and don't like jail.
[00:32:24]  So if I had no fear of jail or of being hit on the head by a billy club, I would be running to the front of every demonstration.
[00:32:44]  Instead, if I go at all, I tend to be in the back.
[00:32:53]  And I certainly don't volunteer for arrest.
[00:32:58]  And if I wanted to, I could get myself arrested in defense of immigrants being attacked, certainly within the week.
[00:33:10]  I could simply take a plane to one of the places where they're doing that the most.
[00:33:16]  And I would have a higher opinion of myself than I do sitting here if I did that.
[00:33:25]  And if they come to New York, and if they, I don't know, maybe I will have the courage to resist ICE, or maybe I won't.
[00:33:39]  We'll find out.
[00:33:40]  But there's no, I mean, am I a physical coward?
[00:33:45]  Yes, obviously, or I would be doing these things because I actually believe in them.
[00:33:52]  You know, I'm not the, if I were an even greater coward, I wouldn't even go to the demonstration because there's always a chance that you might get hit on the head.
[00:34:08]  So there might be somewhere sitting in Manhattan a greater coward than me, someone who really would like to go to the demonstration, but just is so afraid of the tiny possibility that they'll be hit on the head that they don't go.
[00:34:27]  You know, so, I mean, yes, to be self-effacing is a defense mechanism that I may use, but you know, when you talk about, I mean, there are a lot of self-deprecating things that I say that I can back up with proof.
[00:34:57]  You know, I would love to call myself an intellectual.
[00:35:05]  I would love, Well, I'd love to be an intellectual.
[00:35:11]  But I know I'm not because I just haven't done the reading.
[00:35:17]  Wally, who the hell calls themselves an do you know people who I think Susan Zontag would have said she was one.
[00:35:26]  Yeah, but do you think that when Susan Tontag told people she was an intellectual, people were like, oh, wonderful, an intellectual?
[00:35:32]  Or do you think they said, oh, brother?
[00:35:34]  You know what I mean?
[00:35:34]  Like, this lady's calling herself an intellectual.
[00:35:38]  No, nobody.
[00:35:38]  I mean, first of all, you're an intellectual because you're, I mean, if we're going from Marx in terms here, that is kind of is what you are.
[00:35:46]  That is, your class is intellectual.
[00:35:49]  And, or certainly you would be called that by many Marxists.
[00:35:55]  They think actors are intellectuals, or they use that phrase.
[00:36:00]  Yes, it's true.
[00:36:02]  Well, not many of the ones that I've met.
[00:36:05]  No, I'm kidding.
[00:36:06]  Of course, they've all been intellectuals.
[00:36:07]  But I don't know.
[00:36:10]  You sort of undercut what I was about to get you back with when you said, yes, if you're truly a coward, you wouldn't be at the demonstration at all.
[00:36:17]  But I want to know where do you get your conception of bravery from?
[00:36:21]  Because when I was a kid, I was obsessed with King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.
[00:36:30]  And I had this really sort of wonderful picture book that these paintings in them.
[00:36:34]  And I would read the stories about them and I got more and more of these books.
[00:36:37]  And I had this very, I would say, 19th century, I guess, like boyhood fantasies of like knights and maidens and things like that.
[00:36:50]  And I realized as I grew older and less and less chivalric or however you pronounce it, that those lessons are really, of all the ones that I learned as a kid, those sort of the morals of those stories, which were not always, I mean, some of these people were cowards in them and some of them were dishonorable in them, but those stuck with me more than anything.
[00:37:12]  But that's how I got my conception of like what is brave and what is what is bravery, what is cowardice.
[00:37:21]  I mean, even today in my house, I realize that all of this sort of art that I've picked out on the walls depicts that in some way, or most of it does.
[00:37:28]  I also have a clown having sex with a beautiful woman.
[00:37:34]  But I was wondering, where did you get your kind of conceptions of these things from?
[00:37:37]  Because your own tellings, you know, you grew up in this very kind of good, loving family who taught you how to be a good person.
[00:37:46]  And that's what you always say.
[00:37:47]  It's how to be a good person, how to be kind to people and stuff.
[00:37:49]  But where did you get your ideas of what bravery is?
[00:37:53]  It's interesting.
[00:37:54]  I don't think I gave it any thought until I was a grown-up.
[00:37:59]  I didn't think it would be...
[00:38:03]  I mean, I was always the smallest and the weakest in my class at school.
[00:38:11]  And...
[00:38:12]  And I once sat at the same table as Martin Scorsese at an event.
[00:38:23]  And I have the fantasy that he said this to me, but it could be just some interview that I read of him.
[00:38:35]  But I think I said that I was never enormously afraid of people beating me up because who in the world would beat up a little kid?
[00:38:50]  I mean, I was the smallest.
[00:38:53]  None of the people in the school I went to would have beaten me up and they didn't try and nobody ever has beaten me up.
[00:39:02]  I don't mean to jinx myself on your show here.
[00:39:05]  Don't worry.
[00:39:05]  I'll give you a gun afterward.
[00:39:07]  But and I think Scorsese either said to me or said in some interview in his neighborhood, that was not the case at all.
[00:39:19]  That people enjoyed beating up the smallest kid.
[00:39:23]  I mean, I'm not quoting him exactly, but that was the idea.
[00:39:27]  I honestly don't think that I thought that the issue would arise until I was a grown-up.

=== Physical Courage and War Correspondence (04:22) ===

[00:39:38]  And obviously, you know, my parents were both from a journalistic background.
[00:39:46]  And I know, you know, my father and his friends were extremely enthusiastic about getting into the Second World War.
[00:40:00]  And when war was declared, they marched around the living room and went and enlisted the next day.
[00:40:10]  Now, my father was rejected.
[00:40:13]  He was a little bit too old, and I think he had flat feet, or he was not going to be a good soldier anyway.
[00:40:21]  But he did, as an editor, you know, he did send people to war, and some of them, you know, at least one I know was killed.
[00:40:37]  And so I knew about, you know, war correspondence.
[00:40:44]  And of course, Susan Mycellus, who became a friend, you know, you know, she to this day has no hesitation risking her life for the sake of a photograph.
[00:41:08]  And of course, on these trips that Deborah and I took, the question became completely clear.
[00:41:20]  We met, you know, I remember, well, I mean, we met a nun who was teaching in El Salvador, risking not only being killed, but being raped and tortured.
[00:41:39]  She was in a little village and she was serving the poor, teaching, and she had no defense.
[00:41:53]  I mean, there was nobody guarding her.
[00:41:56]  There were no weapons.
[00:41:58]  I mean, and it was clear what side she was on.
[00:42:03]  She was on the anti-army side.
[00:42:07]  And so we met several people who were physically courageous.
[00:42:15]  And yes, indeed, I did think, oh, I respect that.
[00:42:25]  I'm meeting somebody who I really do respect more than I respect myself.
[00:42:33]  I mean, it wasn't a contest.
[00:42:35]  Yeah.
[00:42:36]  I just did.
[00:42:37]  It was a fact.
[00:42:38]  I did respect them.
[00:42:44]  Yeah, the gorilla you sort of write about meeting in the fever.
[00:42:49]  It seems to be...
[00:42:51]  Well, the nun is not even a gorilla.
[00:42:54]  I mean, the gorilla had a...
[00:42:56]  Yeah.
[00:42:56]  Did you meet gorillas when you were down there?
[00:42:58]  We did.
[00:42:58]  We did.
[00:42:59]  But they're armed.
[00:43:00]  Yeah, and so there's a little exactly.
[00:43:02]  And well, the thing about being armed is actually, and I'm going to let you know a little secret there.
[00:43:07]  You can be as small and physically weak as possible.
[00:43:11]  But there's a reason in those old cowboy movies, they call it the equalizer.
[00:43:15]  And that can be a good thing and that can be a bad thing.
[00:43:17]  But it does, you know, it does, I guess, allow you to possess more physical bravery, or at least to be able to enact that physical bravery than you might otherwise be able to.
[00:43:31]  Yeah, but still, it's a million times more dangerous to be a gorilla in El Salvador than to be a partygoer in Manhattan.
[00:43:46]  Well, I want to ask about that, because that is a lot of what the fever is about.
[00:43:51]  And that's a lot of what Designated Mourner is about as well, or somewhat.
[00:43:56]  But when you got back, you know, you said this was a real revelatory experience.

=== A Sea Change (15:58) ===

[00:44:01]  And I got to be honest with you, I don't know if I've met a ton of people who had a complete sort of sea change or a change of perspective in their 30s, let alone between 39 and 40.
[00:44:14]  You know, you talk about how, you know, in the fever, again, this is obviously a sort of fictionalized version of this, you know, you sort of read this book on Marx and or you read Capital and you're able to see commodity fascization everywhere.
[00:44:32]  And then it sort of fades.
[00:44:34]  But for you, it didn't seem like it actually did fade.
[00:44:37]  You got back and you sort of, I don't know what, what did you see?
[00:44:40]  Because a lot of, it's interesting, you do have a theme in a lot of your writing where you sort of equate fancy restaurants and decadence, which I don't think is completely unfair, but like a hedonistic lifestyle, an upper-class lifestyle with going to fancy restaurants.
[00:44:55]  I mean, this is at everything from my dinner with Andre to moth days to everything.
[00:45:01]  When you got back, you're sort of taking stock, I assume, or during this period, you're taking stock of your own life and the lives of people around you, people that you love and that you know to be good people.
[00:45:13]  How do you wrestle with that contradiction?
[00:45:16]  Well, I was, there were a few years where I was an unbearable human being.
[00:45:23]  Oh, for me, it's been every year.
[00:45:27]  You're lucky you only had a few.
[00:45:29]  Yeah.
[00:45:30]  Well, you may not put in the effort to be liked that I do.
[00:45:36]  Maybe you do.
[00:45:37]  I don't know.
[00:45:38]  But I want everybody to like me, and I'm usually, I mean, I've usually been a very agreeable person.
[00:45:48]  That doesn't mean that they do like me just because I'm being agreeable.
[00:45:53]  But I have to understand the hatred that I felt was more for myself than for others.
[00:46:12]  But my hatred for myself was very extreme.
[00:46:22]  And I mean, I've changed in the sense that, well, perhaps it's just old age or time.
[00:46:34]  But I would say that I don't feel the blame that I did at that time.
[00:46:45]  I'm afraid my diagnosis of myself and other people has not changed.
[00:46:53]  But I don't hate myself now particularly, or others.
[00:47:00]  I don't really, and I actually don't any longer believe in blaming and hating.
[00:47:16]  which may divide me from perhaps some of my favorite leftists.
[00:47:21]  Well, you're talking to the number one.
[00:47:23]  I love, he can attest, I love every single person who's ever been born and ever will be.
[00:47:28]  But I do have some problems with some critiques of some people.
[00:47:31]  But I think one thing that is in your work that I think that that does come across is you don't really blame people.
[00:47:38]  You know, I can't remember what this is even from, but there's something you either wrote or, well, I guess you would have written in any case.
[00:47:44]  It was either one of the plays or the essays where you talk about like, well, okay, you know, if you were born me and had my experiences and had my thoughts and had my, you know, my life down to the detail, you would do the same things that I do.
[00:47:58]  And if I was born into your shoes and I had the same thoughts as you and I had the same experience as you and the same family as you, then I might do as you do.
[00:48:06]  And I think that is, I think, a pretty decent way of looking at it.
[00:48:11]  And not to say that people can't be evil or whatever, but I think it's essentially saying that like people are summaries of their experiences.
[00:48:17]  And a large part of that experience is their class that they're from.
[00:48:21]  And that is generally, or, you know, obviously people are able to overcome that, which I think is also a big theme in a lot of your work.
[00:48:31]  But that isn't necessarily, I don't, I think there's a tendency that I have sometimes to individually hate people.
[00:48:37]  And there are people.
[00:48:38]  I'm not maybe so saintly as you.
[00:48:40]  I hate a lot of motherfuckers.
[00:48:42]  But I try to say I hate that.
[00:48:43]  You know, I love them as well, but I do hate them.
[00:48:47]  But I love them ultimately.
[00:48:51]  But I do try to remember that people are the way that they are because of things that essentially are a little outside their control.
[00:48:59]  You know, you have this, I can't remember, this is, I guess if you're an essay, why I'm a socialist, but you talk about the lucky and the unlucky.
[00:49:05]  And it's people are just born randomly into their positions.
[00:49:12]  And I think it's some people are able to overcome the position they're born into.
[00:49:17]  And if they're rich, they're able to recognize their class, I guess, and maybe become a traitorous force.
[00:49:26]  And some, you know, some poor people are able to sort of come up and realize that like, oh, well, I don't have to be not all my class doesn't have to be the one at the bottom here.
[00:49:38]  Maybe the class of the poor can maybe be eventually at the top and we kind of run things.
[00:49:43]  But a lot of people don't.
[00:49:45]  And that's just is the way it is.
[00:49:46]  It's the way it's always been.
[00:49:49]  You know, I think that as we get older, we become maybe a little more generous towards people.
[00:49:55]  But also, you know, I would say that a lot of your work does talk about your reckoning with your place in this.
[00:50:04]  You know, I mean, that's what so much of the fever is about.
[00:50:06]  That's what Deborah's story about this is trips are about.
[00:50:10]  I mean, even at the end of that, she's talking about, you know, going, or at least maybe from your perspective, I don't know.
[00:50:15]  I don't know if that's supposed to be written from your perspective, but you know, talking about going to a restaurant, thinking about wrestling with all these things, then going to a restaurant and maybe ordering a meal.
[00:50:25]  But if you had just written The Fever and left it at that, then I think maybe I would take what you're saying.
[00:50:34]  Well, I don't want to call you a liar.
[00:50:35]  I would take what you're saying with like, you know, 100% at face value.
[00:50:39]  But a lot of your work since then has been dealing with these same themes.
[00:50:44]  And I think that there has to be a reason for that.
[00:50:46]  You're not just writing these plays just to write them, right?
[00:50:50]  I mean, even the talk house, the designated mourner, these are plays that deal with political issues.
[00:50:55]  And I think there's a reason that you write political plays.
[00:50:58]  What is that?
[00:50:59]  Well, I mean, it is an actual fact that we are enmeshed in society.
[00:51:11]  So it's easy to ignore that for a period or for a lifetime.
[00:51:20]  But once it's been revealed to you, then I think it's tough to unknow it.
[00:51:31]  I mean, I don't think you can un-know it once you've come in contact with that fact.
[00:51:40]  I mean, you know, I actually do pay taxes, and it's hard to face, but if I put $10 in the bank, the bank invests that money.
[00:52:02]  And they may invest it in, you know, weapons or in Elon Musk's companies or God knows what.
[00:52:13]  I mean, they don't tell me what they invested in.
[00:52:17]  We're involved.
[00:52:21]  And it's really, you know, how do you unlearn that?
[00:52:26]  It's impossible.
[00:52:28]  And, I mean, politics can be, to use a cliché, siloed off or, I mean, If you go to college, you can take a course in politics, or you could take a course in the history of music.
[00:52:53]  But in real life, they're not actually separated.
[00:52:58]  I mean, in real life, what we call politics is just part of the thing that's going on every day.
[00:53:10]  And so, yeah, I mean, this, my most recent play, what we did before our Moth Days has a family where the father has a long time girlfriend.
[00:53:33]  And that was the pattern in my family.
[00:53:38]  And naturally, I find that an interesting subject.
[00:53:44]  And similarly, you know, we live in a world where people are tortured and killed.
[00:53:57]  And I'm involved in that.
[00:54:02]  I'm in that world.
[00:54:03]  So, of course, I'm interested in that too.
[00:54:06]  Yeah, I do know.
[00:54:07]  I do know what you mean.
[00:54:09]  I want to talk about what we did before Moth Days a little bit.
[00:54:12]  And that's, I don't want to get too much into it because the reality is, is some small percentage of our listener base, well, probably not that small, percentage of our listener base lives in New York.
[00:54:21]  But the play hasn't been out for very long.
[00:54:24]  It's still, I think, will be in, maybe out of previews by the time this comes out next week.
[00:54:28]  I don't know when it's.
[00:54:29]  It's theoretical.
[00:54:30]  Opening night is March the 5th.
[00:54:33]  So I don't know what the hell day it is, but I think it'll still be technically in previews by the day this comes out.
[00:54:38]  I want to talk about your family a little bit.
[00:54:41]  Because, yeah, you mentioned that, you know, this is a play about a father who had an affair.
[00:54:48]  You've mentioned that your own father, you know, had an affair for a while.
[00:54:52]  You know, I'm not going to say that you wrote this play, from what I understand, is not completely autobiographical.
[00:54:57]  So I don't want to put your entire life over that.
[00:55:02]  But I did have a question about the character that John Early plays, Tim.
[00:55:08]  Timmy or Tim?
[00:55:09]  Tim.
[00:55:10]  Tim.
[00:55:10]  Maybe I want to call him Timmy because he's a little kid even when he's an adult, I think.
[00:55:17]  At least that was my impression of it.
[00:55:21]  And it's interesting because there is this theme throughout a lot of your work about these second generation maybe being a little less impressive than the first one.
[00:55:41]  And in fact, you've talked about that in relation to yourself and your father, which I think is a little bit, well, maybe you're just being nice to your dad.
[00:55:49]  I don't know.
[00:55:50]  But, you know, you've talked about sort of your downwardly mobile sons as opposed to the dads.
[00:55:57]  And in what we did before Amate is, I don't want to, you know, it doesn't give too much of the plot away, but the father is a somewhat successful novelist and the son is maybe a slightly less successful writer.
[00:56:11]  And the father is not exactly virtuous, but struggles with his virtuousness.
[00:56:16]  The son, while he struggles with it, is maybe a little less aware of his struggles with his own virtuousness or a little less attached to the idea of virtuousness.
[00:56:28]  You see the same thing with Jack in the designated Warner, sort of obviously it's his father-in-law, but he's less successful, he's less talented, and he also is sort of less virtuous.
[00:56:44]  You know, do you think of yourself as less talented or less virtuous than your own father?
[00:56:50]  Because I don't want to say, if it was one thing, one incident of you doing this, I'd be like, okay, well, you know, everyone's, you know, you write plays.
[00:56:56]  It's not like everything's about you.
[00:56:58]  But when it comes up as a theme, you got to wonder, you know?
[00:57:02]  Well, you know, I'm not wildly psychologically self-aware.
[00:57:11]  But, yeah, I mean, I, of course, my father was, I do think of him as being smarter.
[00:57:24]  And he was, it's complicated because he, his, the fact that he was involved with another woman as well as my mother was not a happy situation.
[00:57:51]  But you do have to say that he was someone who.
[00:57:56]  who's who.
[00:57:59]  Well, let's say, leaving out that story uh-huh uh, he was devoted to uh virtue in a way that uh is extremely unusual.
[00:58:14]  I mean to say he was, I would say, obsessed with behaving ethically.
[00:58:24]  And as he led a large organization, it came up, you know, every day.
[00:58:32]  And he strived to be a good person and make good decisions.
[00:58:40]  Now, I and he was intellectually extraordinary.
[00:58:47]  I mean, there's no doubt about it.
[00:58:51]  He had an amazing mind.
[00:58:53]  I have intentionally led a much, much, much simpler life.
[00:59:02]  I mean, I think he had 400 people working for him, and they were all complicated, tormented people with complicated problems.
[00:59:15]  I can imagine.
[00:59:16]  I have avoided responsibility partly, well, by, I mean, I watched him, and I not only did I decide that I didn't want to have that many responsibilities, but he encouraged me not to.
[00:59:42]  And my father may have been kidding himself, but I think he absolutely believed that he'd been trapped in these responsibilities and couldn't get out of them.

=== Strange Experiences Over Years (16:39) ===

[00:59:59]  And not only responsibilities to the people who worked for him, but he believed that the institution that he worked for was like a church and itself represented a kind of virtue that he wanted to continue.
[01:00:26]  And he was, he was, for the last many, many years that he worked at the New Yorker, which is the institution I'm speaking about, he thought he was struggling to make sure that it would continue in his vein after he left it, which didn't happen.
[01:00:53]  But he was very encouraging of both my brother and me not getting entangled with too much beyond our own work, really.
[01:01:10]  And he had wanted to be a writer.
[01:01:15]  And in fact, he also wanted to be a composer.
[01:01:17]  And my brother is a composer.
[01:01:20]  And I sort of have been a writer.
[01:01:24]  And he encouraged that.
[01:01:26]  And, you know, so I have avoided responsibilities.
[01:01:32]  I don't have children.
[01:01:34]  And, well, I don't have responsibilities, really.
[01:01:39]  I want to talk about books a little bit.
[01:01:42]  I'm not going to ask you what your favorite book is or what books you've been reading.
[01:01:48]  But although maybe that is a good question to start asking people.
[01:01:52]  I'm not going to ask you that, but maybe I'll start asking people.
[01:01:54]  Maybe I'll start asking people who don't really seem like they read that many books, what books they've been reading.
[01:01:58]  I mean, I've read a few over the course of my life that I am not afraid of mentioning, but I just don't like to be pinned down.
[01:02:06]  Yeah, because what if you're reading like a really lousy book?
[01:02:08]  Well, I'm humiliated by how little I've read, and I'm humiliated by how slowly I read.
[01:02:18]  But I do spend a lot of my time reading books.
[01:02:23]  Yeah, well, I would hope so.
[01:02:24]  I think that's how you got, in my view, that's how you learn how to write is, okay, yeah, you go to school or whatever and go to English class in high school.
[01:02:33]  But really, I feel like you learn how to write from reading books because you read a book and you're like, I love this book.
[01:02:39]  This makes me feel good.
[01:02:40]  This guy seems really smart.
[01:02:42]  I wonder how he did it.
[01:02:44]  And then, you know, you don't really figure out how he did it ever, but you just read that book and you read enough of them.
[01:02:48]  You kind of get the idea.
[01:02:50]  That's how I view it at least.
[01:02:53]  But there is a point where I, because I saw Lily Taylor?
[01:02:57]  Lily Thomas?
[01:02:58]  What's her name?
[01:02:58]  Lily Taylor?
[01:03:00]  I saw Lily Taylor do the fever a number of years ago.
[01:03:03]  I had a really strange experience.
[01:03:05]  Ex-girlfriend, who I did not hang out with one-on-one prior to that for many years or after that since.
[01:03:13]  I was visiting New York, I guess, four or five years ago.
[01:03:16]  And she wrote me and she's like, hey, I have two tickets to go see The Fever, which I'd heard of it, but I'd never seen it or read it.
[01:03:26]  And I said, okay, great.
[01:03:27]  I haven't been to a play in a while.
[01:03:30]  And it was front row, right in the middle.
[01:03:33]  And this was during the, well, this is kind of right after the acute part of COVID.
[01:03:38]  So the theaters were open, but there was no water.
[01:03:42]  You couldn't have any water.
[01:03:44]  And I didn't realize this.
[01:03:45]  I didn't put two and two together.
[01:03:46]  And I figured maybe there's an intermission or something.
[01:03:48]  You know, I can go out.
[01:03:49]  Well, first I figured maybe I can go get a bottle of water there.
[01:03:52]  Uh-uh.
[01:03:53]  And then I was like, well, maybe there's a water fountain taped off.
[01:03:57]  And so I'm sitting there watching her do this.
[01:04:00]  And I'm enthralled.
[01:04:02]  But I'm also undergoing one of the most painful experiences of my life because I grow more and more thirsty.
[01:04:08]  You know, when you get thirsty, you can't stop thinking about anything about how thirsty you are.
[01:04:12]  And that happened to me.
[01:04:14]  And so it was a sort of crazy experience that I saw or that I had while I was watching this play.
[01:04:21]  But something really stuck out for me with it is that there's a couple different points in it, but there's one dealing with the same sort of, I guess, metaphor.
[01:04:32]  But the book on your life.
[01:04:36]  And I've something I've thought about actually a number of times over the years.
[01:04:45]  That, you know, there's this book of your life that you are familiar with that has all your thoughts and your feelings and your motivations.
[01:04:52]  And it's a very thick book and how you perceived everything and this nuance to you and like your soul and your spirit in it.
[01:05:01]  And then there's the book that is actually available for print, which is quite short and, you know, describes sort of all the mundanities of your life that you might otherwise think are unimportant, but actually do make up the connective tissue from your birth until your death.
[01:05:16]  And, you know, I think about that a lot with myself because, you know, I'm very easy to caricaturize, not just because of my physical appearance, but, you know, I sometimes meet people and I realize they have a certain idea of me.
[01:05:31]  And I always want to be like, but no, that's not me at all.
[01:05:34]  There's so much more to me than that.
[01:05:35]  And even the things that you think about me are actually because of this and then you can't.
[01:05:41]  And what's sort of funny or a little bit ironic, I think, is that you are subject to the same force that everybody else is.
[01:05:50]  You have this sort of little book about your life that is you, you know, brushing your teeth, taking a shit, whatever, whatever, whatever.
[01:05:55]  But you also have this way of explaining sort of yourself in this and your thoughts and your feeling towards things.
[01:06:03]  And people, I think, take them quite seriously.
[01:06:06]  I think that you're seen as a sort of a sensitive man and a man of nuance and emotion.
[01:06:13]  And, you know, do you think of your work as a way to sort of explain yourself, I guess, in more detail, to make that sort of second, more detailed volume of your inner life available to people in the same way that that first quite thin volume of your outer life might be?
[01:06:32]  I've never thought of that.
[01:06:34]  I mean, I don't think of my plays as or even my essays as being attempts to explain or define myself.
[01:06:48]  I mean, to, I mean, maybe you think I'm obsessed, but to go back to Mr. Sean for a second, my father.
[01:06:56]  I mean, listen, if you're Jewish, you got to be obsessed with one of your parents at least.
[01:07:03]  He didn't think writers should be interviewed or photographed.
[01:07:08]  You know, he thought that was not only a kind of distraction from their work and a kind of absurd vanity, but I think he thought it was totally irrelevant.
[01:07:23]  You know, and I certainly, I mean, one of the reasons to go back to the very beginning of this interview where I think I said that people were like a box of colored pencils,
[01:07:39]  I certainly have known a lot of writers and they the guy who you meet is is rarely related to the author that you think you might meet from having read their book.
[01:07:59]  I mean, they're just not the same.
[01:08:02]  I've known some who are similar to their books.
[01:08:09]  And certainly in my childhood, I met many cartoonists, some of whom looked identical to their cartoons and some who didn't at all.
[01:08:22]  But I don't know what my writing, how it relates to me.
[01:08:27]  And I certainly don't think I've never thought, oh, well, this is a good way for people to get to know what I'm really like.
[01:08:38]  Yeah, that makes sense to me.
[01:08:40]  I don't necessarily mean to say that you're writing about, you know, books full of this is how I feel about this, or this is, you know, this is what love feels like for me or whatever.
[01:08:52]  But I think in both in terms of your fiction, which I think, yeah, obviously these are not, it's not like you writing these fucking episodes of your life and you're like, well, this is what I was thinking during.
[01:09:05]  I'm not saying that.
[01:09:07]  But I think that when we do write fiction, and I'm saying we, but I don't write fiction, but you know what I mean?
[01:09:14]  But I could, I could, you know, I've known some people who've written some fiction.
[01:09:18]  I don't think that there's not these like autobiographical, they're not these exegesis of like you sort of pouring everything about yourself, but it is you writing that.
[01:09:27]  And that is you sort of expressing this inner world that may not be your inner world, but it's an inner world informed by your own experiences.
[01:09:34]  But your essays, I think, are sort of a mix of, I think, political and personal writing.
[01:09:40]  And I think actually the essays, maybe this is all a trick to kind of to allow people a little bit in so that they don't go even further in, which is, I'm very familiar with this trick.
[01:09:50]  And I have many therapists or analysts over the years who would attest to this.
[01:09:55]  It's a very effective tactic.
[01:09:57]  But I think that there is something of ourself that you leave on the page no matter what you write, even if it's something very boring.
[01:10:03]  And I'm not saying that you're writing fiction or you're writing essays in order to just gratify that one part of yourself.
[01:10:12]  My question is, well, why do you write?
[01:10:14]  Or why do you write either fiction or non-fiction, either one, the essays or the plays?
[01:10:21]  It actually is a question that only has occurred to me recently, very recently.
[01:10:28]  I mean, why does someone do that?
[01:10:34]  What is it that I've never really thought about it because for my whole life I've sort of just taken it kind of for granted that why wouldn't a person want to write some plays and get them put on?
[01:10:55]  And then at a certain point, as I've become an ancient man, I've sort of thought that is a strange drive.
[01:11:07]  Why would someone want to do that?
[01:11:10]  But I don't have any answer.
[01:11:17]  And of course, being an actor is another question.
[01:11:21]  What kind of person wants to do that?
[01:11:24]  And why?
[01:11:25]  I don't know.
[01:11:28]  I have a hard time believing this.
[01:11:30]  You've never thought about, like when you first started doing it.
[01:11:34]  Well, how did you, well, because you first acted before in plays before you wrote one?
[01:11:40]  No, no, no.
[01:11:41]  You wrote plays before you acted, though.
[01:11:43]  Yes, many, many years.
[01:11:45]  I never dreamed of being an actor.
[01:11:48]  Absolutely never crossed my mind until I was 75.
[01:11:52]  You wrote experimental, yeah, it was like experimental theater at first.
[01:11:55]  I wrote my earliest plays were pretty strange.
[01:12:02]  Not necessarily strange, certainly not stranger than some of my later plays, but they were weird.
[01:12:15]  But I did, with my brother, I did puppet shows before I wrote plays.
[01:12:23]  And I mean, I and of course I also only recently began to think, why plays?
[01:12:35]  What a strange thing to do, particularly because I've always had a very odd relationship to the people who do plays and go to plays.
[01:12:57]  I mean, you know, I don't know what I don't know what kind of a fiction writer I would have been or could have been, but I mean, it might have been a little bit more comfortable.
[01:13:11]  I've had a very uncomfortable relationship with the theater going public, to put it mildly, and with the people who do theater.
[01:13:24]  This is now not true now that I'm an old man.
[01:13:31]  My most recent play seems to the audience seems comfortable with the play and I don't feel that there's any mismatch there or a kind of ridiculous non-meeting of minds.
[01:13:58]  But most of the time that I've been writing plays, I've really felt, gee, there are people in this town who might be interested, but they're sure not here.
[01:14:12]  And the people who are here are having a bad time and they're unhappy.
[01:14:16]  And what a big mistake it all is.
[01:14:20]  And yet I've been doggedly loyal to that form.
[01:14:27]  But you've never, you're just like, I guess this is just what I like?
[01:14:31]  Or do you even like it?
[01:14:32]  You're just like, this is just what I do.
[01:14:34]  I do like theater.
[01:14:37]  I mean, I do, yeah, I go to plays and I like plays.
[01:14:47]  I mean, I like going to them.
[01:14:48]  I don't say I admire all of them.
[01:14:50]  Well, yeah.
[01:14:51]  But it is, I will say, even when I go, actually, you know what?
[01:14:54]  I won't say that because I've been to some plays.
[01:14:57]  I was about to say, even when I go to plays that I don't really like, I still have a good time.
[01:15:01]  But I've been to a play in the not too recent past where I had such an excruciating bad time that actually it made me consider killing myself.
[01:15:16]  But then it was cured by the time I walked out.
[01:15:19]  But I tend to like going to plays unless it's really so lousy that it makes me consider either harming myself or other people.
[01:15:29]  Even if it's not that great of a play, I like at least going and sitting down there.
[01:15:34]  You know, it's interesting because, I mean, you know, do you feel the same way about acting as that you do about, you know, do you get the same thing out of it that you do from writing?
[01:15:48]  No, I mean, it's very, very different.
[01:15:51]  But it is a certainly, I've just been in a TV series for seven years.
[01:16:01]  I mean, I hasten to say I was not a regular.
[01:16:05]  I was what we call in show business, recurring.
[01:16:10]  I appeared basically every third show on average.
[01:16:16]  What show was it?
[01:16:17]  Young Sheldon.
[01:16:19]  Young Sheldon.
[01:16:21]  And of course, that was very, very interesting because I sort of thought, gee, because the audience loved the show.

=== Thought-Provoking Fanfare (02:36) ===

[01:16:38]  And I loved the feeling that I was in something that people loved.
[01:16:52]  And I did think, hmm, I wonder why I devoted my life to writing things that people didn't love.
[01:17:07]  And there were so few of them anyway.
[01:17:12]  Yeah, I guess it is true.
[01:17:13]  It's because, you know, you can write an amazing play that people love, but, you know, every third episode of Young Sheldon, millions of people will be like, we love this guy.
[01:17:24]  Yeah, I mean, it was unbelievably loved.
[01:17:34]  Yeah.
[01:17:35]  And when I meet people on the street who were fans, you know, their enthusiasm is incredible.
[01:17:47]  And it's true all over the world.
[01:17:50]  I mean, everywhere that I've traveled, there are fans of Young Sheldon.
[01:17:55]  And there are millions of them.
[01:18:02]  And it was thought-provoking.
[01:18:04]  I did think, oh, could I have written something that millions of people would enjoy?
[01:18:16]  I mean, probably not, but it just was interesting, thought-provoking.
[01:18:24]  I feel like My Dinner with Andre is like millions of people.
[01:18:29]  That's like a famous movie.
[01:18:30]  I knew what My Dinner with Andre was.
[01:18:33]  There's like a lot of stuff I got as like from like cultural osmosis as a kid where I had no real conception of what the movie was, but that it existed.
[01:18:41]  I think it was because it was such a cultural touchstone in many other things, sort of referencing it or like parodying it in some way that when I was a kid that I just sort of knew what it was before I actually had a conception of what it actually was.
[01:18:56]  And so I feel like you did that of that.
[01:18:59]  You know, that's like something.
[01:19:01]  It really a lot of people have seen.
[01:19:05]  I don't know if it reached millions, but a lot of people did see that.

=== Rewarded with Liking (06:39) ===

[01:19:15]  And Pauline Kahl said of me that I could perhaps have tried to expand that, to in some way follow that up with other things that would have been equally,
[01:19:46]  somehow in a connected vein and might have had a chance of being.
[01:19:51]  She didn't talk about whether they would have been well liked or not, but the implication, I think she said I could have become a kind of a little bit like Woody, that I could have my persona could have been used or something about my dinner with Andre could somehow have been extended, something about it, who knows what.
[01:20:19]  We could have had a Nebish Jew sort of expanded universe.
[01:20:23]  Well, I don't know.
[01:20:25]  I mean, she didn't say what she was thinking of, but she was surprised that I just kind of dropped it and went on, you know, writing my weird plays.
[01:20:39]  Why did you drop it?
[01:20:41]  Well, I've really been obsessed with these plays, you know, from the beginning.
[01:20:47]  Yeah.
[01:20:48]  Even though if you'd asked me, you know, 50 years ago, I would have said, well, I can do it or I can leave it alone.
[01:20:56]  I'm not, I have no obsession with writing these plays.
[01:21:02]  I'm not compelled to write them.
[01:21:05]  I just write them.
[01:21:07]  But then, well, I think COVID was a time when I really faced the fact that if I didn't even write a single sentence during a day, I was quite agitated.
[01:21:28]  I mean, I began to realize there was, I don't know what there was at the beginning, but writing had become Part of my physiology.
[01:21:45]  I mean, it was a need.
[01:21:47]  Yeah.
[01:21:48]  And were you not writing during that period or you were?
[01:21:51]  I wrote.
[01:21:53]  Yeah, I mean, but I mean, I have normally taken years off from writing and have never felt, as Tregoran says in The Seagull, you know, I must write, I must write.
[01:22:09]  I never felt that.
[01:22:12]  But somehow it has always been a part of my life since I was a boy, I guess.
[01:22:18]  Well, it's funny because, you know, you must write, but then, you know, I'm asking you why you do it in the first place.
[01:22:23]  And you're like, I guess I just kind of am.
[01:22:27]  Can you understand why maybe as an interviewer, I might have some suspicions about such an answer?
[01:22:36]  Because I can tell you, I'll speak from my experience, right?
[01:22:41]  Sometimes I have an idea and on very occasional times that are not lousy ideas and I'll try to enact those ideas.
[01:22:52]  And I'll have this, I guess, like you were saying, obsessive need to do it.
[01:22:57]  And sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn't work out.
[01:23:00]  But at the end of it, I will feel some satisfaction.
[01:23:03]  And I don't know necessarily where that satisfaction comes from, but I'll feel some kind of kind of unique, a satisfaction that's unique to like an experience like that.
[01:23:14]  And so, you know, there is a, and I understand kind of in retrospect, okay, well, I did this thing because, A, I kind of wanted to, I guess, express myself, or because this idea I thought was a decent enough idea that it should be made manifest in the world.
[01:23:30]  But at the end, I realized that I kind of do it for this satisfaction at the end of it.
[01:23:35]  And sometimes that satisfaction can have higher motives behind it.
[01:23:38]  Sometimes it can be completely selfish motives behind it.
[01:23:41]  And so, you know, I have a hard time believing that you just are doing these things because, what is it, God commanding you to?
[01:23:50]  Well, first of all, I've never had an idea that I executed.
[01:23:57]  Oh, okay.
[01:23:58]  So that doesn't occur with me.
[01:24:03]  My essays are somewhat of an exception to that, but my plays have always just emerged in some mysterious way without a plan, or certainly without a concept that I want to write about something.
[01:24:24]  And the rewards, I've been punished more than rewarded.
[01:24:33]  I mean, you know, I'm admitting in my recent years, I've become a respected elder statesman.
[01:24:40]  Yeah.
[01:24:41]  But, but, and, uh, and I am rewarded.
[01:24:48]  But I don't mean with wealth or, I mean, but, but, but, uh, I mean, I don't make a living as a writer.
[01:25:05]  But I have have been rewarded with people liking what I've done or even respecting it.
[01:25:15]  But certainly that in when I was in my earlier decades, it was brutal.
[01:25:26]  And I did not, you know, anticipate admiration.
[01:25:36]  I didn't get it.
[01:25:39]  I mean, granting that the bar for me has always been high.
[01:25:45]  I mean, in other words, I grew up, I never met a writer who didn't at least have their work in The New Yorker.

=== Defending Gaza Privately (15:04) ===

[01:25:55]  Yeah, oh, that would make sense.
[01:25:57]  Which is a each one of them felt that that was pretty great.
[01:26:05]  So I've always been, you know, sort of mourned to be vain in the sense of expecting more than I was getting, let's put it that way.
[01:26:18]  I mean, in other words, I always, you know, there was a writer, and I still don't know how to pronounce his name, but a writer who appeared really frequently in The New Yorker, H.L. Montsurus.
[01:26:34]  You're getting no help from me on that.
[01:26:37]  No one ever mentioned his writing.
[01:26:41]  And to me, he seemed to be the least known.
[01:26:46]  I mean, that name to me represented the least that a writer could be known because I'd never heard anyone mention him.
[01:26:57]  But he did appear a lot in The New Yorker.
[01:27:05]  And I assumed that I would be Montzurus at least as soon as I picked up a pencil.
[01:27:15]  And I was well and truly outraged that that was not the case.
[01:27:21]  Yeah, God.
[01:27:23]  So that's just how I happened to grow up.
[01:27:27]  You know, I wanted to ask, I think our audience would get too mad at me if we didn't kind of talk a little more about politics in this, even though I'm very curious about some of the other stuff as well.
[01:27:41]  But, you know, I saw a Times of Israel article.
[01:27:47]  Exorciating you.
[01:27:49]  Exorciating?
[01:27:49]  However you pronounce that.
[01:27:50]  Excoriorating.
[01:27:51]  Excoriating.
[01:27:52]  Wow.
[01:27:53]  That's a word I've really only read, I believe, or just mispronounced my whole life.
[01:27:57]  But I don't think I've been brave enough to say that in the past.
[01:27:59]  But you could, maybe you put me at ease because you couldn't pronounce this New Yorker writer's name, so I figured, what the hell?
[01:28:06]  For comparing, I think it was Netanyahu to Adolf Hitler, the one and only Adolf Hitler.
[01:28:15]  And I would say that it has been, as an actor, a delirious past few years, but longer than that, but really in the past since October 7th, 2023.
[01:28:30]  So I guess, what, two and a half years, in Hollywood of these kind of great conflagrations and these blacklists and these firings and these kind of back and forth.
[01:28:40]  And it's been interesting because the two sort of places that this has mostly happened has been in academia and I guess in the arts writ large, because there's been a lot of problems at museums and galleries.
[01:28:53]  But it's been interesting because there's been this sort of civil wars, although generally with, I guess, the side that represents Israel often with the advantage within these kind of elite institutions.
[01:29:11]  And I wanted to ask how that played out for you.
[01:29:13]  Obviously, you staked your ground out here for a while.
[01:29:16]  You've been talking about Israel and Palestine for a number of years.
[01:29:22]  But I was going to say, have you sort of witnessed any of these battles that have happened in Hollywood?
[01:29:29]  Well, I've yeah, I mean, I've had a couple of painful experiences.
[01:29:40]  You know, if the Times of Israel excoriated me for comparing Netanyahu and Hitler.
[01:29:48]  You know, that's a, if you're being intelligent, you have to go through a lot of points of similarity and difference between these two characters.
[01:30:04]  But the people who are Zionistically inclined are usually they feel actual fear of anti-Semitism.
[01:30:25]  And, You know, this goes for people in the show business community or in Hollywood or LA that, you know, there are people who genuinely fear anti-Semitism in America.
[01:30:46]  And I suppose people, you know, there are students at universities who have a genuine fear that anti-Semites will become more powerful or would harm them.
[01:31:09]  It may not even be like that they literally expect to be harmed.
[01:31:15]  It may be less concrete than that.
[01:31:18]  But I've had some painful encounters with people who feel that, and that's not fun.
[01:31:30]  And, you know, I hate to remind people of this, but I also experienced that when I wrote a play in which there was a sort of Nazi character,
[01:31:51]  and people thought I was exposing, giving too much exposure to Nazi ideas.
[01:32:01]  But as far as practical consequences, it's not something that I would know.
[01:32:08]  In other words, it could very well be that, I mean, let's be blunt.
[01:32:15]  I feel that I'm sickened by people who defend genocide in Gaza.
[01:32:34]  And I would, and I'm admitting it on your show here, and maybe it's a terrible thing to say.
[01:32:48]  I don't really want to.
[01:32:51]  I mean, I think there are people who ignorantly sort of come to the defense of Israel.
[01:33:05]  But anybody who knows what I know about what the Israelis did to Gaza and would still defend it, I'm sort of horrified by that.
[01:33:19]  And I think if I were Making a film, and I had the choice of casting an actor who eagerly defended genocide and an equally good actor who was against it.
[01:33:45]  I think I just picked the one who was against it.
[01:33:50]  And there may be people who feel a kind of revulsion against me and might conceivably just privately have thought, I don't want that little guy in my movie.
[01:34:04]  I don't like him.
[01:34:06]  I think he's, I mean, I met an elderly lady on the street a few years ago, long before, you know, this, but just based on things I'd said, and she said, well, I used to like you, but you hate Israel.
[01:34:31]  And there could be some people in Hollywood who might think that privately and they and, you know, maybe they're directing a movie and the casting director says, well, who did you like better, Wally or Fred?
[01:34:54]  And they may just quietly say, I think Fred would do the part very well.
[01:35:01]  Now, would that ever have happened in reality?
[01:35:04]  I have no idea.
[01:35:06]  I think about this a lot because especially right after October 7th, as you can see, the two of us very visibly Jewish.
[01:35:16]  But I know a lot of Jewish people and I know a lot of people with Jewish parents.
[01:35:20]  And I would say, none of the, at this point in my life, I don't think I know a single Jewish person that I regularly speak to or have any interaction with really who is a Zionist, let alone somebody who is really in favor of somebody that, of Israel's genocide in Gaza.
[01:35:38]  But I know a lot of people whose parents have this view of the world that it was very difficult for me to connect with.
[01:35:44]  I try to, much to some people's chagrin, I do try to understand, even people who I completely disagree with, at least try to get where they're coming from, even if the destination is a really crazy place.
[01:35:56]  And even if I think that they're, maybe privately, I think that they're scum for thinking that.
[01:36:01]  I try to understand what they're coming from.
[01:36:02]  But so much of the stuff that I was hearing from people, you know, relaying what their parents had said to them, was so absurd to me that it was really difficult for me to even place it in a reality that I recognized.
[01:36:18]  Who thought that subways were going to be gassed by Columbia students or that the Columbia students had foreknowledge of the October 7th attacks, you know, sort of secretly transmitted by Hamas to them, or that there was going to be pogroms in the South Williamsburg or whatever.
[01:36:37]  It just, it seemed to me that some of these things were so fantastical and yet so fervently believed by so many people.
[01:36:46]  You know, I just, it was one of those times in my life, it's not the only time in my life that it's happened, but that I just was like, wow, I really don't understand people as much as I previously did.
[01:36:57]  It's like the my worldview is so radically different than some other people's that I'm not even sure I could communicate with somebody like that just because we can't even agree on a glass, you know, if a or if the wall is white or the sky is blue or something like that.
[01:37:17]  Yeah, it's just shocking to me.
[01:37:20]  And it's been crazy too to watch how it seems like there really is this, even from people who were previously rather squishy on the issue, this tide that's kind of turning against at least the U.S.'s support for Israel.
[01:37:38]  And then we see, you know, we're like about to go possibly fucking bomb Iran, maybe get into a war with Iran.
[01:37:44]  And it's one of those things where I think that I'm just like, I can't, it's hard to, I can understand on some logical political level why these things happen.
[01:37:56]  But on a human level, it's very difficult for me to understand why sometimes that's because of your generational difference from me.
[01:38:06]  I mean, I was born in 1943 and those Zionists, The fanatical Zionists, it was burned into them by very real things.
[01:38:34]  I mean, we can't even fathom what it means, although in the Trump era we can begin to fathom it, people being carried off.
[01:38:53]  I mean, shocking and unimaginable as it is for, you know, 10 or 20 or in some places 50 immigrants or supposed immigrants being put into a bus and taken to a detention center.
[01:39:17]  That's unbelievable.
[01:39:19]  But I mean, imagine millions of people being taken off and not just taken to a detention center, but to an extermination camp where they were killed.
[01:39:32]  I mean, this is, I mean, experiences burn their way into the souls of people, and it can carry through more than one generation.
[01:40:00]  I mean, a 30-year-old Zionist is somehow fantastically attached to their parents in that way.
[01:40:19]  Or they're, you know, it's not rational, but it is based on something.
[01:40:28]  And I don't find it, I mean, I've known many people who were who could not break away from the deepest beliefs of their families.
[01:40:43]  And I don't find that.
[01:40:50]  I mean, you're right in saying when you said, I don't think I can even communicate with those people, you're right.
[01:40:58]  I mean, you can't.

=== Why Zionists Can't Think For Themselves (12:07) ===

[01:40:59]  Yeah.
[01:41:00]  Because this is not rational, you know, that's not, you can't have a discussion about it exactly.
[01:41:10]  It's not like even something like the class system, why should there be some people who are privileged and others who are oppressed?
[01:41:27]  It's much more arguable than this, than an irrational belief that the only safety that a Jew could have is in Israel, that the only place where Jews could be safe.
[01:41:45]  I mean, this is totally ludicrous, but if that goes, we have no safety.
[01:41:56]  They'll come and kill all of us.
[01:42:00]  It's not rational.
[01:42:03]  And Jews are not the main group of people who are being oppressed today.
[01:42:16]  But, of course, it's not ridiculous because there is, you know, a history that goes back many, many hundreds of years.
[01:42:29]  Anybody who said, I mean, you know, the Jews did feel very secure in Poland and they felt secure in Germany.
[01:42:42]  And I'm sorry to tell you they were wrong.
[01:42:46]  And so it's not, you know, if you say, oh, come on, Jews are not going to be persecuted in America.
[01:42:55]  Don't be ridiculous.
[01:42:58]  I think that the Zionist is within his rights to say, well, you know, I can adduce about millions of examples to show that, you know, it could happen again.
[01:43:15]  Yes, I know, but I think what makes it sort of so galling right now is that some of the most prominent people doing the persecuting in America are Jewish.
[01:43:26]  You know what I mean?
[01:43:27]  Stephen Miller.
[01:43:28]  I mean, practically all of the people, not all of the people, but quite a few of the funders of the current government.
[01:43:36]  And, you know, not to mention, you know, sort of the long arm of the Israeli foreign ministry, you know, sort of poking its head about in some of our college campuses and with Canary Mission and all that.
[01:43:48]  You know, it's crazy to me.
[01:43:49]  But, you know, and I do, I will say, like, I do understand on some level these people who have this, you know, this sort of family story that is really imprinted in their head.
[01:44:01]  But I think what always frustrates me, and maybe this is unfair, and this is, I sort of can generalize this politically, but it definitely is acute with a lot of people who especially are very, are Zionists, is that, well, can't you fucking think for yourself?
[01:44:16]  You know what I mean?
[01:44:17]  Like, why do you have to sort of repeat ad nauseum something you're don't you, you know, we all love our parents.
[01:44:23]  Well, you know, some of us do, but, you know, you love your parents to some degree.
[01:44:27]  But part of growing up and becoming an adult is realizing that they were wrong about some things.
[01:44:31]  And I think that especially when it comes to Israel, a lot of young Jewish people, you know, are just like, actually, my parents were completely right about that, you know, and become sort of frenzied.
[01:44:47]  And I think that's what sort of is so crazy about me.
[01:44:49]  It's this real blood frenzy where it becomes this, you know, this very militaristic culture and this very, and I'm not going to say that I, you know, how I mourn kind of the intellectual tradition of Judaism, but it has been, I think, in large part annihilated by the existence of Israel.
[01:45:06]  And, you know, obviously the Holocaust had a hand in that as well.
[01:45:09]  But, you know, the two are, I think, quite interlinked.
[01:45:12]  And it just, you know, it's like what you said about Netanyahu.
[01:45:15]  It's like it really is kind of like, you know, you just kind of become, I guess, what made become your father, I guess, in this instance.
[01:45:25]  But it is, I mean, maybe it was just like that, you know, Hitler, the Holocaust sort of midwife the existence of Israel, such as it is, into existence.
[01:45:36]  And I think that that has sort of that.
[01:45:38]  Well, I think that this is that the genocide, obviously, this is some kind of revenge for the persecution of Jews.
[01:45:53]  I don't, it's, it's, you know, it would take a smarter person than me to really be able to explain it or talk about it.
[01:46:04]  But I don't think it was even the secret that this was not a normal war.
[01:46:17]  Yeah.
[01:46:18]  There was something way, way beyond, I mean, war should never be normal, but just by definition, there are certain ways that war has, in fact, been waged.
[01:46:34]  And this went way beyond.
[01:46:36]  I mean, this was some kind of mad spasm of killing that they felt justified in doing.
[01:46:48]  And we can say, we can sit here and say, because they're totally out of their minds, which is true, but they felt justified in doing it because we're Jews and we're the persecuted people and we have the right to do absolutely anything.
[01:47:09]  But it went beyond even that.
[01:47:11]  I mean, in other words, it went beyond just, quote unquote, being sure that nothing like October 7th ever happens again.
[01:47:24]  It went beyond that.
[01:47:25]  I mean, and it's still going on.
[01:47:29]  You know, they still feel justified in a kind of sadism that is off the map.
[01:47:36]  It's just off the map of.
[01:47:40]  And that's not to say that the Vietnam War was not also off the map.
[01:47:47]  And Certainly Americans have nothing, they're not reacting against terrible persecution of them.
[01:47:57]  On the contrary, they have a history of persecuting.
[01:48:01]  I think the one difference, one of the differences, and this is not a defense of the Vietnam War, don't worry.
[01:48:08]  But I think one of the differences is that there was quite a large movement in the U.S., unpopular at the time, but a large movement in the U.S. against the Vietnam War.
[01:48:17]  And again, some of that was out of people's self-interest and that they didn't want to, you know, stop going to the SACOP in order to go to Da Nang or whatever.
[01:48:26]  But you don't really see that in Israel.
[01:48:28]  You see this.
[01:48:28]  And that's what makes it also just so unbelievable because I might have a slightly more, I'm going to say cavalier, but I have been in favor of some wars in my life and some extant wars, not wars waged by the U.S., mostly wars waged, in fact, entirely wars waged against the U.S. or compatriot governments.
[01:48:49]  But I've supported a number of groups, let's say non-state actors in my life, in my mind, never materially, in case anyone's listening to this.
[01:49:00]  But I just, it's to me, what's so baffling is that it just seems like there's not really, you know, even so the so-called like liberal parts of the Israeli government are still in favor of essentially everything that's going on.
[01:49:13]  And there isn't sort of this same kind of anti-war movement in Israel at all.
[01:49:17]  I mean, the Israeli left is vanishingly small.
[01:49:21]  And it's just, I don't know, it's just one of those things that's, again, like, it's like, I really try to understand everything, even if I don't, even if I really dislike it, I try to understand.
[01:49:32]  It's just very difficult for me to understand because even if I was, even if somebody nuked fucking San Francisco, I'm from San Francisco, someone nuked San Francisco, if in response to that, a bunch of people, or even me and people that I knew had to go somewhere and kill children, I would just be, I would have quite a great deal of hesitation.
[01:49:57]  I might even fight against that, you know?
[01:50:00]  And it just, I can't really fathom not feeling that same way.
[01:50:04]  And I try to, but it's very difficult for me to fathom that.
[01:50:08]  Yeah, well, they feel that the Holocaust will return.
[01:50:15]  And that and they, they, you know, this was a terrible idea to found a state that was, you know,
[01:50:29]  where Another group of people would have to be subordinated or expelled, and where geographically they would be surrounded by people from the same background as the ones that were being expelled.
[01:50:49]  I mean, this just was a recipe for disaster.
[01:50:54]  Seems like a bad idea.
[01:50:56]  It was certain people did know that.
[01:51:00]  And, you know, it's but it's not ridiculous for an Israeli to feel that Israel has never been very popular and now is, you know, unbelievably unpopular.
[01:51:24]  But, you know, we are just far enough removed from all that so that we don't feel it.
[01:51:36]  But the people who are supporting the Israeli government in Israel undoubtedly feel that their only possible hope is to be so monstrous and terrifying and heartless that no one dares to go against them.
[01:51:57]  You know, you mentioned earlier about bravery, and you say, I went to, I went, well, no, that's a horrible segue because it makes it sound like I'm calling myself brave.
[01:52:08]  So I was actually in Minneapolis recently.
[01:52:11]  And the morning I got there, there was, or the day after I got there, I got there at night, I witnessed ICE arrest an immigrant.
[01:52:23]  And it was in typical ICE fashion, very sort of Keystone cops.
[01:52:28]  There was an element of absurdity to it on one hand.
[01:52:32]  And then something I've really wrestled with since then is an impotence that I felt because I was sort of standing there five feet away from where this was happening.
[01:52:45]  And there had been this great commotion and everybody, we had all rushed over there and we'd sort of been chasing this guy for a while.
[01:52:51]  But then as they were arresting the guy and putting him in the back of the car and they'd pepper sprayed this woman that was with the people I was with and they had sort of wrestled someone else to the ground and they were yelling sort of obscenities at these people who were sort of gathered around.

=== Political Campaign Frustrations (05:59) ===

[01:53:07]  I realized that like, oh, well, I can't actually, there is a level above this that I can't go to for a variety of reasons, right?
[01:53:14]  Like, you know, I want to go to jail for something that would likely not really have a great outcome to begin with.
[01:53:22]  But I felt this like helplessness That has really sort of stayed with me and makes me kind of sick to think about sometimes.
[01:53:35]  And I don't know, I don't want to, I'm not trying to treat you like my therapist or something like this, but I kind of extrapolate that out further.
[01:53:42]  And I think of all this stuff that I care really deeply about.
[01:53:47]  And I'm talking about, for instance, like, you know, I really, a number of years have been really anti-Zionist and against the state of Israel, but also against, you know, my political views that I hold very sort of dear to myself and believe in that animate much of my life and also sort of, I guess, my moral outlook on the world.
[01:54:11]  And I think that's something that I wrestle with kind of psychologically is you can get to a point with all of those things, but then you kind of can't, mixed metaphors here, consummate them.
[01:54:21]  You know what I mean?
[01:54:22]  Like I can believe very strongly and hold very strong moral positions about something or political positions about something, but I can't, as try as I might, enact those things.
[01:54:35]  And I get this sort of frustration that I feel sometimes.
[01:54:40]  And sometimes this frustration really kind of drives me a little bit crazy.
[01:54:43]  I know people who've gone actually kind of crazy from it.
[01:54:47]  And I wanted to ask you, because you're a little bit older than me, but you've sort of had quite strong political opinions for a number of years.
[01:54:57]  How do you deal with that?
[01:54:58]  There's been, you say you sort of had this conversion when you were about 40 years old.
[01:55:06]  I would hazard a guess that there's been a number of times throughout your life where you've been very hopeful about things, and then some things have gotten better and then other things have gotten worse.
[01:55:15]  And I guess my question would be, how do you deal with that?
[01:55:20]  The sort of melancholia of all that.
[01:55:25]  I did feel when I was in Nicaragua, when the Sandinistas were very much the good guys, I did feel a certain, I did feel that they were going to create a much nicer type of society.
[01:55:50]  People can debate whether the seeds of their current awfulness were there.
[01:56:00]  I mean, people are still debating it about Russia, Lenin, et cetera.
[01:56:06]  Were the seeds there at the very beginning or not?
[01:56:12]  Was it the influence of American pressure that turned them bad?
[01:56:21]  So I did feel kind of an optimism about them.
[01:56:24]  I didn't think it was going to spread to America.
[01:56:28]  I've never felt, well, for whatever reason, I've never sort of felt any feeling that, oh, America is going to turn a corner and become totally different.
[01:56:43]  I just never have really felt that.
[01:56:47]  I mean, I just, I mean, I've always felt, you know, it would be, let's fight for a better world.
[01:56:59]  And maybe in the long run, there could be, but I've never sort of felt, oh, I think Barack Obama or whoever is going to make things better immediately.
[01:57:17]  I felt, well, I mean, I've never lifted two fingers for a political campaign up until the Mamdani campaign.
[01:57:29]  And I do feel that Mamdani will make a difference in New York.
[01:57:37]  And I'm excited about that.
[01:57:41]  But I haven't gone through my life constantly being overexcited about anybody.
[01:57:51]  You don't seem very cynical, which I think would be, you know, you meet a lot of people on the left who are quite cynical.
[01:57:58]  And I can lapse into a certain kind of cynicism myself, although I really do try to avoid it.
[01:58:04]  But I don't think of you as a very cynical character.
[01:58:07]  No.
[01:58:09]  No, I mean, I liked Bernie Sanders.
[01:58:16]  I think he could have done amazing things.
[01:58:19]  He could have won.
[01:58:21]  He came very close to being the candidate.
[01:58:25]  I don't think, and I think it's amazing that so many Americans change their mind about Israel and Gaza and millions of people went to Michael Moore's movies.
[01:58:49]  No, I don't have a cynical attitude that things can't get better.
[01:58:56]  I just have never sort of had a feeling, oh, everything is going to be great now.

=== April Afternoon Departure (03:20) ===

[01:59:06]  Yeah.
[01:59:07]  Yeah, that makes sense to me.
[01:59:09]  Well, Wally, I appreciate you taking the time out to spend the afternoon with us.
[01:59:14]  I guess I really have spent the afternoon.
[01:59:17]  You really have?
[01:59:18]  I didn't expect we'd spend the entire afternoon either, but I realize as the room has grown darker.
[01:59:23]  It is darker.
[01:59:24]  I think we've actually just breached the evening.
[01:59:29]  Yeah, yeah, I think so.
[01:59:31]  I think I should go.
[01:59:33]  I think you should as well.
[01:59:34]  Well, that sounds rude, but I think you probably have to go as well.
[01:59:37]  But do you think poor John has just been wandering?
[01:59:42]  Do you really care for John's welfare that much?
[01:59:46]  I do.
[01:59:47]  But if John, if during the course of this interview, John Early froze to death somewhere near Union Square, I think that would at least make for a kind of exciting interview.
[01:59:58]  I mean, we'd warn him, you know, what a way to go out.
[02:00:01]  No, I do care about his welfare.
[02:00:05]  And I just didn't realize that so much time was passing.
[02:00:12]  But it was probably through pauses of mine.
[02:00:17]  I don't know.
[02:00:19]  Well, Wally, thank you so much for spending time with us.
[02:00:22]  And you know what?
[02:00:25]  People should go see the new play.
[02:00:28]  Yes, yes, they should.
[02:00:30]  I mean, it's unfortunately very, very expensive.
[02:00:34]  I mean, I should say it's, if I've gone that far, if you go later, they're cheap tickets.
[02:00:44]  They're no cheap tickets, but they're tickets that are, I don't know, about $65, which at one time was an astoundingly high price, but that's a low price now.
[02:00:58]  But there, I think, many more cheap tickets if you postpone for, if you go now to their website and get the ticket, you know, for April.
[02:01:09]  To do it.
[02:01:09]  So people should wait a little bit or should go now.
[02:01:13]  Get them.
[02:01:13]  But get them for April.
[02:01:15]  Yeah.
[02:01:16]  All right.
[02:01:17]  Well, ladies and gentlemen, that was Wallace Shawn.
[02:01:39]  All right, ladies and gentlemen, that was the interview.
[02:01:41]  We would like to thank Wallace Sean for sitting down with us for a really long time and John Early for helping set this whole thing up and letting us use his place while he stumbled around in the cold as to give us some privacy, even though I tried to shanghai him into actually sitting down and doing the interview with me because I was too afraid to do it without Liz.
[02:02:05]  But listen, it has been a pleasure to be able to do this.
[02:02:11]  What the fuck am I saying?
[02:02:13]  It was a really great afternoon.
[02:02:17]  With that being said, my name is Brace Belden.
[02:02:20]  I'm producer Young Chomsky.
[02:02:22]  I'm Liz, and this has been Druinan.
[02:02:24]  We will see you next time.
[02:02:25]  Bye-bye.