David Mamet | Club Random
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I know you think liberals want to destroy the family. No, I don't think they want to destroy the family. I think they have destroyed the family. Oh, that's... You know, I don't know. I think he's gotten into the wrong... But that's your business. Yeah, he's gotten into the wrong pew. Calling the roll. Hey, darling. Mommet! How are you? Thanks for having me. Excuse the laughter. Nothing to it. Nothing to it. What's new?

I love the way you're amusing yourself. Oh, this is a great pool table. Yeah, it's amazing nothing's ever spilled on it because, like, there's so many drunks around it all the time. I'm not naming names. Yeah, I got a couple extra rooms in my house, but both of them, three of them, but all of them are just, like, six inches too short for a pool table. I never saw you in a hat like that. Is this because you're coming off a directorial...

Oh, and you have a book. I mean, my God. Yeah, I know. Well, since I got retired and blacklisted, I've been like a swine. Well, we're going to talk about all of it. But first, I read in here that at a dinner party, the conversation always lapses 20 minutes after the hour and before the hour. So say you, so say the French. That's right.

Okay. Can we put that to the test? Does this count as kind of a dinner party or is this not counting because we're drinking and smoking? No, it doesn't quite count as a dinner party because we aren't convivial here. We're actually having a structured conversation. You think this is structured? Boy, did you get the wrong email. It's definitely not. No? Okay. Is that what you got from our other times here, that I'm structured?

Did I have like an agenda that I know where I'm going with any of this? No, no, I think you're doing fine. This is club random. This is random. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, but what, I mean, I find this hard to believe that, and what is the reason in this? Why does conversation lag? You say there's like seven minute increments when people are talking. So then like after three, they stop. Yeah.

So, yeah, that's about the length of an old-style vaudeville turn. It was about seven minutes. And that's about the length of a guy who's telling a story at a dinner party. But we're not all telling stories. Say what? We're not just always telling a story. That's about the length of one story. If you look at it, you'll see it. And the way that I first came to notice it was people quiet down at the theater. They come to the theater at 8 o'clock.

And at six or seven minutes after eight, there's a hush. Because they're waiting for the play to start, no? But why at six or seven minutes after the hour? Because, I don't know, my guess is because they think, oh, well, we've been here for a few minutes. The play's supposed to start at eight. I bet you it's going to start right around now. That's exactly my point. Why at that point?

Why not after two minutes or after 20 minutes? Because that's built into the human consciousness that at a certain time we start to look around to reassess our situation because we're basically animals. And I don't mean just the Democrats. Yeah, I mean, man.

Each book, you get more right wing, I have to say. Like the last one, I remember you were on my show and there was like one line in it that was, and I said to you on the air, like, are you implying that Trump, that election was stolen by Biden? No, I didn't.

You were kind of like hedging it, and now you're like... Well, you don't know what happened to me the next morning. You don't know what happened to me the next morning. I was on your show, and you said, are you implying that the election was stolen? And I was kind of iffy on it, right? Next morning, 8 o'clock, the phone rings. The woman on the phone says, Mr. Mamet, will you hold for the president?

I said, wait a second, Biden is calling? It's Trump. It's during the Biden administration. He says, David, it's Donald Trump. I say, oh, Mr. President, thank you for calling. To what do I owe the honor? He said, I saw you on Bill Maher yesterday. You were great. He said, but you wussed out on the question of the stolen election. And then he talked to me for like 20 minutes.

about how the election was stolen. But it wasn't. Well, I think it was. But they've adjudicated this. They've looked at this. Republicans have looked at this. It was tested in court like 60 times. It was thrown out every time. Trump's own commission, appointed by his own commissioners to look at the election...

The Cyber Security Commission, it's called, or agency, there's two of them. One of them is within the Department of Homeland Security. They all said the same thing. It was the most fair, honest election we've ever had. I'm not talking about the votes. I'm not talking about counting the votes.

that the Hunter Biden laptop was suppressed, the COVID information was suppressed. Zuckerberg said himself that the White House pressured him not to bring forward the information on the laptop. Rasmussen said, had that come out, there would have been a 17-point spread. Oh, please. That's so ridiculous. Those things are true. And they did suppress Hunter Biden. The press did not.

do that. I've said this many times myself and COVID. Nobody was more out there about, fuck you, we weren't allowed to hear about what we wanted to hear about COVID than I was. But would it have swung the election? Every election, some things are suppressed. It's not a very fair game, politics, but we do play within a certain type of rules. One of them is no ringers from the outside.

Wait, wait, we play within a certain amount of rules? Yes, we always did before. Like, we're not going to have other countries involved in our elections. That was, we'll do whatever we want to each other, but we're not going to do that. Who did it?

Well, Trump publicly said, Russia, if you're listening, could you get into Hillary's emails? That kind of stuff. Dude, he was joking about. Oh, boy, you swallowed the whole. Also, wait a second. Are you saying that he would not? Okay. You want to adjudicate the last eight years where you're saying he was a Russian spy? I did not say that. Do you say he? I said he, it's a ringer. You know, Dave, when I used to play in the Broadway show league, and maybe you have, you've had many big successful shows on Broadway. Maybe they had you on the team. Did you ever play in the Broadway show league? No, I didn't.

I have no eye-hand coordination. Well, okay. Well, okay. So, you know, it was, you know, you'd play Annie or, you know, Man of La Mancha, and the comedy club had a team. We were sort of in the Broadway world. And once in a while, a team, you know, would be like,

Batting third for my fair lady, and it was Jose Canseco. You know, it was like some bartender's friend who like would hit the ball a million. That's a ringer. That's called a ringer. You're not really supposed to be in that game. And Trump invited that in a way nobody else ever did in American politics. I'm not saying he's a Russian spy. I don't think that. I even think he really wants to make America great. I do. I just, I don't agree with how he's doing it.

And he certainly feathers his own nest in a way no president has ever even come close to doing.

What he's selling, the Bitcoin, you know, have dinners with the open bribery that goes on. Okay. People don't seem to care about that. But he certainly invited another country to do things. And they took advantage of it, of course. Would it have made a difference? I don't know. How did they take advantage of it? Well,

Trump's campaign manager was sharing polling data with a GRU agent. Maybe. Okay, that's something that, I mean, even Nixon didn't do that. Wait, that's the first that I've heard. A, and B, if it's true, and I'm not saying that it is, how did that influence the election?

Well, we know that Russia would put things on the Internet that weren't true just to get people fighting, you know, that kind of stuff. Like what? You know, they would say like, you know, the Pope, they would put up some meme about, you know, the Pope is backing Trump. It wasn't true, but people believed it and then they started to fight over it. Here's my question. When last we spoke several years ago, you were stuck on this issue. You're still stuck on it. How come?

Because it's not been resolved. So how, wait, what is it that hasn't been resolved?

the asymmetry of American elections, the fact that if one party, the Republican Party, wins the election, the other party goes, okay, you win some, you lose some, and they go home. Hillary Clinton went home. Kamala Harris went home. You can't imagine Trump ever going home. Excuse me. Now what you're doing is injecting metaphysics into what might be a matter of

So the question is not what he did. The question is not even what he might do. What you've just said is one can't imagine what he would do. But on the other hand— No, no, I don't have to imagine what he did in 2020, which was never concede the election. Dude, he didn't have to concede the election. He lost. If somebody is beaten in a prize fight and the other guy gets the belt, the person who's beaten does not have to concede.

It's not necessary. He's lost. Well, it is necessary. The analogy falls down because if a prizefighter loses, it doesn't inspire people to riot. How did he inspire people to riot? By not conceding the election. Oh, come on. Oh, come on. What?

Come on. So wait a second. He didn't say the words, I concede, and so that meant people rioted? Yes. What do you think January 6th was about? What do you think January 6th was? It was about people who did not hear their leader say, as every other leader in this country has said after an election, okay, we're going to do this.

I lost. We welcomed the new guy. We had disagreements, but now we're all Americans. When Obama took over, George Bush stood by next to him and he said, we want you to succeed because when you succeed, Trump didn't do any of that. Okay. So what? So what?

But it inspires half the country to not accept the basic democratic principle that we have elections. And when you lose, you go away and then you become the loyal opposition. They're not they don't see themselves as the loyal. Well, you like me have built a career out of nothing except talent and a little bit of luck and a lot of hard work. But you're full of shit. I don't understand what you say that he did not say the words I concede because half the country, which you just said, to riot.

No, I didn't say half the country rioted. A lot of people rioted, and it was less than half the country because he got less than half the votes and still won. That's okay. That's our system. But a good deal of the country, approaching half, the people who are MAGA, the people who love him, at least a third of the country, will now in the future never accept any electoral results. And a democracy can't continue in that way. You have to have this situation we've always had where

where the one football coach walks across the field and shakes the hand with the coach who just beat him in the game. Okay, what do you think we'd be today if Kamala Harris had won? What, sir? What do you think we would be today if Kamala Harris had won?

What would happen? Would Israel still exist? I don't think so. Still exist, of course. Why wouldn't they exist? Why wouldn't they exist? Because the Obama Marxist, Leninist, Islamist that were taken up during the—here's a good question that I would ask you.

is who was running the country during those four years when Biden was out of his mind and demented? Well, he wasn't out of his mind and demented for four years. He probably wasn't out of his mind or demented even on the last day. He just did the view. Did the Democrats do a horrible thing in propping him up and keeping him in office and trying to run him again? Yeah, they did. Of course.

I am never easy on the Democrats or the left. And I'm totally with you on Israel, but they would, of course, still exist because they can defend themselves. But you've said things like, you know, liberals have never done anything for Israel. That's bullshit. Harry Truman recognized Israel when many people told him not to. Excuse me. I never said that. Yeah, you did. Show it to me. I'll tell you what. Show it to me and I'll give $10,000 to the charity of your choice. No, wait, no. Okay.

I'm serious. No, wait a second. I'll find it. No, no, you're pretty good. I'll find it. Good. I'm going to give $10,000. You show it to me, and I will give $10,000 to the charity of your choice. Okay. Because you're throwing around a lot of generalizations, and I have a bigger question. Not generalization. Oh, really? What's the generalization? That half the country would have rioted? If I got that quote wrong, I apologize, and I will take it back.

I got another question. I sit down and all of a sudden you're attacking me about I got to come up. I have to come up with new idea about Trump and I have to talk. What the hell do you care? Let me ask you a question. First of all, it was not my plan to attack you. And I'm sorry if you think I'm attacking you. We just got onto this and I'm sorry that I'm not going to pretend that I agree with you. Well, I'm asking you to agree with me, but I got a good question. How you you you started off.

with a very difficult question and a question which you have very strong views, and I do too.

How would you like this part of the conversation to end so that we can move on to something else? What would end it to your satisfaction? Well, we're at the 20-minute mark, so we could just end it. What would end it to your satisfaction? When you want it to end. I don't want to piss you off. I'm your biggest fan. The fact that we don't agree on something...

so fundamental is still completely okay with me. I don't get it the way you don't get me. You just said I'm completely full of shit. And of course, people who disagree to this level, they think that of the other person. And what we have to do is, of course, learn to live harmoniously with people we just don't agree with that much. So we can just get past this. You're right. We should. And I'm happy to. And there's a million things in here and in the movie that I think are great and I would love to talk about. Go ahead.

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I think, or identify things that are connected that don't seem to be, but actually are part of a single disease. Yeah. Okay. That's one. And then another one is like you said, this book is about how government is like Hollywood and they're both like myth.

I said they both run out. Yes, that's right. They both run on the power of myth. That's correct. So you want to get either one of those as the way you describe the book itself? So what's the first one that you suggest? Single disease. Yeah, so single disease. So I was looking at the horror of the Biden years and at the absolutely a bunch of...

events and actions which were in themselves incomprehensible, but in total were absurd because I couldn't understand a common theme. What was the common theme between saying boys have to play in med sports and saying that Israel is a terrorist state and saying that the schools have to... Well, the Biden administration didn't say they were a terrorist state.

The administration didn't. People on the left do. Well, the Biden administration withheld arms—congressionally mandated aid to Israel. Biden and Kamala Harris refused to meet with Netanyahu, and they refused to condemn the world court for calling Netanyahu a war criminal. I'm with you on all this. Okay, I know you are. So—

Boys and men's sports open borders, which is completely indefensible. Why? It's in the Constitution. If you don't have a border, you don't have a country. Rights for illegal immigrants. Climate change. These are all of these things which are, at best, debatable. And...

I said, but more than that, they don't seem to be part of a program. They don't seem to be part of, say, if we say the left has a program, whether it's overt or covert, to do something. These things don't add up to a combined program. They add up to a, I said, okay, I know what they look like.

They look like an open city. That is to say, Paris in 1944 or Naples in 1943-44 or Moscow in 1812. The inhabitants have left. The attackers have left. The city is open. So it's open to marauding gangs, each of whom is going to prosecute its own enemies.

its own program so i said ah that's exactly what the biden years look like there's a bunch of people each prosecuting their own programs it sounds to me this is before the the real information about his uh senility came out like a bunch of people sitting at a conference table one of them says you know what i'd like to do i'd like to get out of afghanistan today somebody else says well you know

Getting out of Afghanistan is a good idea, but all the Joint Chiefs have said, if you get out today, people will die. No, fuck it. Guy says, I want to get out today. Well, guy says, I don't want to vote for that. So this guy says, I tell you what to do. You want to open the borders.

I want to get out of Afghanistan today. I'll sign your auto-penn thing and you sign mine. Somebody says, wait a second, wait a second, wait a second. What about me? I think that men should play in women's sports. Well, fuck, okay, you want to vote for that? What will you do for me? I'll vote for men and women's sports. What do you want to do for me? Okay, I'll tell you what I'll do for you. I will vote to not meet with the Prime Minister of Israel. So looking at the facts...

That's what one does when one tries to make a, write a play. I'm going to look at the facts, which seem unconnected and saying what connects them. And what connects them is the idea of a committee

of brigands who've taken power and they're each going to prosecute their own agenda because no one's going to call them on it. The cat's away in the mouse's play. So that's what led me to a large extent to write that book. You do know that there are people listening to this who are hearing you say a bunch of brigands took over prosecuting their own agenda and they're going to think,

He's talking about the Trump administration, right? Okay. Well, I'm not. I know. I know you're not. But you understand why some people would think that? Sure, because they watch the legacy media and they watch CNN News. But they're going to say, and it sounds to me like you may watch a lot of Fox News. Sure. Okay. Let them say it. All right. The question is, if you read the Constitution...

which I do, which is pretty easy, about 20 pages. What is the Trump administration doing that's unconstitutional? The answer is nothing. Well, they're not obeying judges' orders. That is unconstitutional. What are you talking about, the one district judge who said, bring the guy back from El Salvador? There have been many judges' orders about the immigration issue, yes, that they're just ignoring. Well, no, I think your information there is wrong. I think that what they're doing is, in some cases, they may be...

They may be slow walking it, but I don't believe that there's any... Here's what they're doing, is that all these rogue district judges are issuing restraining orders against the president in his performance of his constitutionally mandated duty. It's his constitutional duty to take care of the border. It has nothing to do with the judiciary. If someone feels wronged, they have the opportunity to sue...

But the court does not have, the district courts do not have under the Constitution. What's very clear in the Constitution, because it's been both the Fifth and the Fourteenth Amendment, is that they could have said the word citizen both times, and they said the word person. A person has a right to a trial.

Yeah, they do have a right to a trial. They purposely didn't say citizen. That's why it's, yes, unconstitutional and illegal to take people off the streets without any hearing at all and send them to a foreign prison. That is not in the Constitution. No, but you're wrong as to the facts again because here, let me explain it this way. Say that you have a fellow who hates you, okay, and he is...

throwing stuff at your car and throwing stuff at your blah, blah, blah. And he gets sent to prison. Okay. He gets convicted, right, of harassment. He gets convicted of assault or whatever, whatever, whatever. Say, okay, he's in prison and he gets out. He's got a parole. But one aspect of the parole is he has a restraining order.

He cannot come within 1,000 feet of you or your house or your place of business. If he comes within 1,000 feet of you, your house, your place of business, his parole is violated. It's exactly the same situation as the people who have been convicted of crimes and who have been deported and have then reentered the United States. They have the right to due process to find out whether or not that's the same guy. But prior to that, their crime and their sentence has been adjudicated.

So can I use the topic of prison to seg into a plug of your movie? Oh, yeah. If you must. I loved it. Henry Johnson. Thank you. Yeah, well, of course, the first thing I thought was, you know, you have said, I think, now don't throw another 10 grand at me if I get the quote wrong, but I think you were even here maybe talking about it, that movies almost don't need dialogue.

Yeah, they don't. And yet, this movie is all dialogue. Well, what am I going to do, you know? As John Wayne said when he was playing Chloe Alanis, listen, I didn't write this shit, right? But I did write that shit. But it's, I thought it was delicious. It's three scenes, really, and Henry Johnson is in all of them, and he's with a different person in each of the other ones. I don't want to give too much away. The first is someone at a firm he was working out with, and then

Then he's in prison, and that's the one with Shia LaBeouf, who has never been better than in that role. He's amazing. And then the prison guard. And, you know, to me, the through line, not just through there, but a lot of your work is...

You do feel like people are always conning people. I mean, a lot of your work is about con artists and different ways of conning. Aren't we? Yes, I'm not saying you're wrong, but I'm saying that to me is like the through line.

If I had to think of, like, so many of the David Mamet stuff that I love, it's like you just getting into that subject of people conning each other in all the different ways we do it. I mean, some of them are direct cons, the Spanish prisoner, and things that are, like, classic cons that people are actually doing as a con. Like, those are fun. And then it's just the more subtle ways. I mean, Shia's whole speech is really about that, is it not? Yeah. I mean, it's...

I'm not quite sure what the play's about, what the movie's about, but I think it's about a guy who is so accommodating that he not only gets taken advantage of by everybody he meets, but causes havoc around him constantly by his goodwill. Somebody said that there are...

Old fools and young fools, happy fools and sad fools, but there never was a fool who wasn't cruel. So this is a guy who's so good-willed and so wants to please everybody, he's a fool, that A, everybody takes advantage of him, and B, ends up getting everybody killed. The same old story. Yeah, I can't help but see a little...

in that? I don't think so. Between the lines? I don't think so. No? Okay. No. Listen, I think I've been fairly clear. I've written a whole bunch of plays and movies and fiction and so forth, but then independently, I've written a bunch of political stuff, but I'm pretty clear about keeping the two... In fact, I'm dedicated to keeping the two separate. I think a lot of people would be surprised if they heard a playwright of your magnitude say...

I'm not sure what the play's about. Is that the way it's supposed to be? That it's a mystery even to you to a degree? Well, here's the thing. If something is a work of art, which I think that if you're a creative person, you aspire...

There's mass entertainment, right? Then there's entertainment. And then there's, at some point, it's possible for it to be art. And at some point you aspire, however popular your stuff may be, and I want to be popular, you know, too. But at some point you say, I would like to aspire to the realm of art, which means something beyond the ability of the consciousness to quantify, right?

You say, oh, again, I laughed, so obviously that's a comedy, or I cried, so obviously that's a drama. But art is something beyond the ability of the consciousness to quantify. So if somebody said of the Chopin etude, what does it mean? But Chopin goes, fuck, I don't know. I do it the best I can. So I'm trying to aspire to have my stuff quantified.

which is to say beyond the human capacity to encapsulate. Because if you're going to encapsulate it, you stop thinking about it. Oh, I get it. See, maybe I'm not that bright. Yeah, no, you are. Because one reason I enjoyed it so much is because when it got to the end, I said, I get it. What I thought you were aiming for and in your artistic way, and maybe I'm just too...

one-dimensional and I should be thinking about it more and maybe I could never get it. But I really took it, you know, and I relished it that, you know, do-gooders are people who try to do the right thing sometimes. They wind up hurting the people even more. Not always. I mean, we shouldn't end do-gooderism, but...

But there is a certain level to this guy that he keeps in all these iterations being taken in, and it's a fool, whatever your quote was. Yeah, but see, it was great that you said, I get it, but that to me means differently than I understand it. I get it means, oh yeah, which is what...

craft is in playwriting, where you would DM someone and say, oh my God, it was in front of me the whole time. Everything that I thought, this doesn't make sense, this doesn't make sense, ah, now it makes sense. Yes, I must say, and maybe we talked about this, but to me, great art, movies anyway, plays, like the ending, that's the hard part. Anyone can think of a movie, how do you end it? And to make the ending both

Surprising and... Inevitable. Inevitable. Yeah. That's the trick, and I felt like you ducked the landing on that one. Well, that's what Aristotle said. He wrote the book called The Poetics a little while ago. He said the ending has got to be surprising and inevitable. Oh, really? He said that? Oh, yeah. He said that's it. So if we know that as dramatists, it's no different than a joke.

The ending's got to be surprising. Oh, aha. And make sense enough. Yeah. I didn't see where you're getting at. That's why we laugh. That's right. Because it reconvinces us

happily that we really aren't that fucking smart right so the joke and the good play frees us from our self-absorption i'm so smart or why am i not doing better or someone's trying to fuck me over no no no it's because i i'm too lazy i'm doing this and that no i'm not in that that that's what we do on our stupid minds all day long right so a joke frees us from that yeah

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From plumbing to electrical, roof repair to deck upgrades. So leave it to the pros who will get your jobs done well. Hire high-quality pros at Angie.com. But, okay, so you say you separate the political from the other. And yet, like, did you not say last time that you were working on...

A JFK? Yeah. Okay. And also Lincoln Gay? Oh, yeah. That's coming up. Okay. So if you're doing Lincoln and Kennedy, how can you separate the political? They're political. They're politicians. Listen, it's the same thing as saying I want to do a movie about doctors. That doesn't mean I want to operate on people in the fucking audience. Okay. Right? Yeah.

Okay, so what's going on with Lincoln Gay? I'm anxious to see this. No, no, no. I'm working on this movie about these two con men who... Say, con men. Sure. You love your con men. I do, too. We all do. They're fun. They are great. It's always interesting to watch a con and someone being conned. Yeah, I was just writing about today. Like, we just... Please screw me over.

Please lie to me. There's so much a part of our human condition is Ricky Jay, the great magician, said that the more intelligent the person is, the easier they are to con because they believe in their own intelligence. So they're trying to beat you to the punchline. I know what you're doing. So while they're trying to beat you to the punchline, their attention is over here while you're picking their pocket. So was Lincoln gay? I mean, probably. Because?

Well, the question to me, a different question, right?

It became part of an American culture, and it started with biography, to say, oh, who did what with his dick? As if that was important, as if that were important. Whereas we see now it's become part of the culture. Thank goodness. The fuck difference does it make? Oscar Wilde was sentenced to two years in prison for homosexuality.

by a section of society, which is the British aristocracy, the British upper class, all of whom practiced homosexuality in some form or another. But he broke the taboo about talking about it. Look at the hypocrisy about homosexuality in the Muslim world. Well, yeah, sure. I mean, anytime you cover the women and segregate the women to that degree, you're going to have rampant heterosexuality.

Which I guess is hotter because if they catch you, they throw you off the roof. Yeah, that's right. See, that's why in the Muslim countries, a lot of the time, they will not build a house that's more than two stories tall. Is that true? Yeah, because if they catch you fucking another boy, they throw you off the roof. I'm kidding with you. But you know what? That's the thing. It could be true. Yeah.

It could be true. So the question to me is not whether or not Lincoln was gay. Who knows? But whether somebody who's that – these con men find a guy who's that interested in the subject that they say, wow, I can take advantage of this guy, right? He's so interested in being right about this subject that I can sell him this letter that proves that Lincoln was gay. Right.

Because at the end of it, he asked for Streisand tickets? I mean, what was in the letter? I'm very curious that that would, like, lead one to... Because I know that people did not...

write letters in that era where they would be explicit about it. Well, quite to the contrary. Actually, Oscar Wilde's a little bit later, Oscar Wilde's 30 years later, but they passed this rule law in 18, like 1893, that made, as they said, sodomy a crime in England. They made it a crime for the first time. And somebody said that

In Chelsea, which was the artistic Bohemian era of London, after they passed it, the air in Chelsea was black with the smoke of burning love letters. Yeah.

So he had a very good friend, a link named Joshua Speed, who he lived with for many years. Yeah, but didn't everybody on the frontier have to bunk together because they were on the frontier? Hey, as we say, let me finish. So anyway, he wrote a lot of letters to Joshua Speed, which are...

in the Lincoln Library somewhere, and they're very loving letters, right? And so some guys who were interested in gay history have always said, oh, the letters might say this, the letters might say that, but I'll bet you there's another letter where the whole thing comes out of the closet. Why were you attracted to this subject, of all the things you could write about? I don't know. I mean, you know, what are you drinking?

Tequila. Well, why not vodka? Because I like this better. Okay, there you go. I know, but okay. I mean, you could fill in the... Your thing is a little deeper than what liquor I like. You could fill in the details a little. Like, no? The muse just strikes you that way. Yeah, sure. Somebody asked me a long time ago where I got my ideas, and I told them...

And I'll tell you that there's a little Mexican guy who's got an old Camino, and he parks in a Vons parking lot on Encino every Saturday, and he sells ideas off the back of the truck. Really?

And you've taken advantage of that, huh? You bet I have. All right, so what about the JFK one? Oh, that kind of fell apart through the people who were making the movie ended up suing each other, and I ended up going wee, wee, wee all the way home. But some very good things happened from it, one of which is I cast Shia, who was going to play Oswald.

Oh. And Louis was going to play. Perfect casting. Yeah. Louis was going to play Jack Ruby. Louis. Louis C.K. Was going to play Jack Ruby. Yeah. The cast went on forever. It was great. Oh, wow. Yeah, John Travolta was in it. I think I finally understand the assassination. Mm-hmm. You know, this guy Marcello, the mob boss. Mm-hmm.

He was pissed. There was three wings that were very pissed at Kennedy. One was the mafia. They felt they were double-crossed because they helped Kennedy win, and then Bobby Kennedy prosecuted them when he was Attorney General. Okay. Then there was like the standard...

Right-wingers that are always here in this country. Let's not get into that again. They're wonderful people. You know, they were the John Birchers back then, and they became the Birthers. Now they're MAGA. They're always there. It's about a third of the country. Very far right-wing. That was that guy, Guy Bannister. Mm-hmm.

He just hated Kennedy because Kennedy represented everything that was just horrible about America. And then there was Ferry, Daniel Ferry, played by Joe Pesci in the Oliver Stone movie. And he had run...

guns to the Cubans, you know, they were trying to, Castro took over in 59, they were trying to oust him. So he felt double-crossed by Kennedy, the Bay of Pigs. So you have three people here in this Agatha Christie story who really want to kill John F. Kennedy. And then Oswald, I mean, what's so weird about the Oswald thing that we just gloss over is

is the time he spent in the Soviet Union, our desperate enemy at the time. It's treated in the press as if it's just another interesting fact about Lee Harvey Oswald. Oh, and did you know he spent some time in the Soviet Union and he was a stamp collector? You know, yeah, he was there in the Soviet Union and then came back to America and shoots the president. If he shot the president.

Oh, you don't think he shot the president? No, I don't think so. Well, I mean, he, yeah, I think there was a conspiracy and there were other gunmen. I mean, you. I think there were certainly other gunmen. I don't know. I don't know that he was one. But he was the perfect patsy. He was a perfect patsy. So the perfect movie about the Kennedy assassinations, The Parallax View, where Warren plays this. It's a wonderful talk about.

Everything coming together in the last 10 seconds. Warren is this investigative reporter trying to investigate blah, blah, blah. And at the end, we find out 10 seconds to go on the movie. They'd been leading him on to the point where he's up on a catwalk with a rifle. Right. And he's going to be the patsy. But did you know that one of Marcello's girlfriends was Lee Harvey Oswald's mother?

I did not. Check it out. He was all over Oswald. He was part of a whole crew at the Jack Ruby's bar. Yes. There's lots of witnesses who saw them together. I mean, it's just passing strange to me that we just gloss over that part of like, if you just wrote a script and said, okay, well, there's two bitter enemies and one of them defects to the other country and then comes back and kills their leader and

You would think that that was a little suspicious. Well, I think he was fairly obviously a CIA low-level throwaway. Then he went over, they said, fuck it, okay, go over to Russia, and they put him assembling radios over there. In the book, The Disenlightenment, sorry, I forgot the title, I think you say you don't believe in the Brutus Pruder film is faked. I know it's faked. Everybody knows it's faked.

I didn't. Well, if you look at it, there are several frames missing. Every frame is numbered, right? And several frames are just missing. And there's no other explanation for what that could be than foul play? No, there have been a couple of explanations, one of which is that they were too brutal. Another one of which is right around the... But they would have to be deliberately taken out? Yeah, they've been taken out. Another one of which is the blood spatter was painted on.

How do I know it's painted on? Because I've been making movies for 40 years. You can see it. In one frame, it doesn't exist. In the next frame, it does exist. And in the next frame, it doesn't exist. So what would actually... The film goes by 24 frames a second. If you're an actual blood spatter, you would see it grow, and then you would see it disperse. But it's just painted on. It's very, very...

So who did it? Who faked the Zapruder film? Well, I wrote that movie too, which has yet to get made, about the guy who faked the Zapruder film. Well, see, that's a different movie. That's interesting. That's a good movie. Yeah. You wrote it? Yeah. It's already, but it's just... I was going to do it with Cate Blanchett, and that fell apart at the last minute. Maybe I'll do it some other time.

Oh, I would have jumped on that one. Yeah, me too. No, I mean getting her for the movie. Oh, she was great. I went down to see her, and she said, yeah, I'll do it. She was going to do it for nothing. She was going to do it for a skit. She just loved the part. What part is there for a woman there? There's none in the story. Aha. So the movie is about this woman who's...

grandfather made a lot of money in the movie business. Then it turns out he was working for the Air Force during the Area 51 alien incursions, right, in Roswell, New Mexico, and that he was altering the, doing the same thing with the UFO footage. So she chases that down.

And that's not true either. And then people start trying to kill her because she's getting too close, too close, too close. Then it turns out he was the guy who altered the Zapruder film, that they were shot in, shot by Zapruder, who'd been in the OSS, the precursor to the CIA. Yeah.

It was shot, obviously, in Dallas, but instead of giving it to Kodak in Dallas to develop, they shipped it to Los Angeles. But what's the part they took out and why? The part they took out and why was they shot from the front. He wasn't shot from the back. They blew his head apart from the front with several shots to the face. Well, that would have been Oswald. No, because it wasn't from that angle. It was from the street angle.

But the way the Zapruder film is, as we have seen it, only makes you more suspicious. It doesn't, like, cover up the crime. It makes it look more ridiculous. Yeah. Was that their intent? Well, no. No, no, I don't know. Also, Dershowitz was, Alan Dershowitz, I know pretty well, was clerking for one of the guys on the Warren Commission who told Dershowitz, who told me, da-da-da, that the whole thing was a cover-up.

but that we have to do it for national security reasons. That I believe in general, yes. So the other thing is, how do they know that this guy, they said, oh, we determined in one hour that this guy is the shooter and B, that there are no other shooters.

They didn't know. No. And the other thing is the single bullet theory. Of course. It's nonsense. It's so ridiculous. There's just no way to talk your way out of it. Except everybody shut up and anybody who says, anybody who objects is a conspiracy nut.

Well, I mean, you mentioned UFOs. I happen to think UFOs get lumped in with conspiracy nuts unfairly because there is nothing unscientific about thinking that there could be other life in the universe and or they could be watching us right now or could be in the next room. And we don't know. That's not unscientific. That's not a conspiracy theory. Is that where you are with that? Well, no.

My wife and I saw the UFO. We saw him. And I saw him twice in my life. I know lots of people who are not crazy people, who have seen what some people would call a ghost, and a few people who have seen something that you would call an alien. Now...

I've quizzed them very closely, trying to ascertain were you drunk, were you dreaming? And like, if somebody put me through that and like, I would be very frustrated because I know when I'm drunk or dreaming. So,

I don't know what to say about that, except I got to think that whatever stations we're tuning into on our radio, there are other stations we're not receiving. I don't know what exactly they are. I agree. But here's the other thing I think, that if the front page of, does people read newspapers anymore? If the front, do they? I do. The New York Times still publishing? Of course, and it comes out and I get the actual dinosaur print edition. Oh, that's great. And it pisses me off as much as it pisses you off.

So I'm not the horrible person who you thought I was when we sat down and you said I was attacking you. I'm not. The New York Times, I understand, is as slanted and as full of shit. I think that too. But I still read it because I want to read it.

I want to know what that side is thinking. Also, it's not all full of shit. They have some great writers, some great columnists who I still love. And they also have reporters everywhere in the world. And even though what I'm reading, even now from overseas, I feel like, okay, this is still, everything has to have your kind of times slant to it. I still can get the information. I want to know what's going on in Mogadishu and nobody else is there.

So, yes, it still prints. I would love to know where Mogadishu is. Where is it? Come on. That's where I left it, right? My point, or it's going to be in the last place I look, but my point about the New York Times, it's funny that they're still publishing, is that they came out with a big scare head tomorrow, Aliens Land in New Jersey.

everybody would say, yeah, okay. Don't you think? And they'd say, yeah, what else is new, right? Not that they'd seen UFOs, but I got my plate full already, okay? I got to deal with this, I got to deal with that. So does aliens, you know. The gig is on the hate. Well, I mean, they could make things better. I mean, look...

I'd love to know what you think about that. This has changed so much. I was at dinner in November of 2020.

Two? Okay, I think that's when it was. Maybe 23 even. And I remember, right after the season ended, somebody first had chat GPT and showed it to me on their phone. This is only a couple of years ago. And they said, write a scene where Bill Maher is on the show Succession and Logan Roy wants to hire him away from HBO. And like in two seconds, it had printed out this scene.

Which was not a genius and not what a real playwright can do, but would be a start for a lot of people. And I thought, well, life is different than it ever has been before. Sure. And we are now, I've accelerated it, and everybody I know has it on their phone. I mean, we do have like a robot butler. It may not be a physical one yet.

but they use it for every possible thing, sometimes valuable. I hurt my finger playing ball, and the person I was playing with looked up right on chat GPT and showed it a picture of this, and then the thing was able to identify it and tell me what to do. I mean, I just know some of this is good, but instinctively, I feel this is going to be very bad. Well, the big changes in civilization...

Everything changed. First one was the industrial revolution, and the second one is the computer revolution. So we're in the midst of being—everybody in the Western world is undergoing a certain kind of moderate cognitive dissonance because nothing makes any sense anymore. So because they're undergoing cognitive dissonance, they do what somebody does. They lose their mind and start looking for people to blame. Right.

whether that's Biden or whether it's Trump or whether that's the transsexuals or the transphobes, whether it's Israel or et cetera, et cetera, whether it's tariffs or lack of tariffs, people want, rather than having cognitive dissonance and being, in effect, basically catatonic by the change, they want to be able to become phobic and say, okay, I get it. It's that.

It's right. It's just like crazy people say it's that guitar that's trying to kill me. Right. Because they're nuts. So to a certain extent, we're not. This is what a lot of people think of the right. You're describing exactly what a lot of people would say about mega nation. Yeah. And it's exactly what 51 percent of the people would say about the left. And it's true.

I'm one of the ones. Yeah. I'm always there with you on that. They're just aggressively anti-common sense people. People who just want to, and this is what loses them elections. People just look at them and go, why are you obstinately trying to be so counterintuitive? Yeah. And I can't let people like that control the levers of power. I get why Trump wins.

And I'll give you something else about your boy. Like, I don't think he's read Spengler and I don't think he's read Toynbee and I don't think he's read a lot, but he gets on a whatever level, basic level, that Western civilization good. And I'm on that level too.

But I know it because I actually read this shit, and I know what happened in history and blah, blah, blah. Western civilization, good. The ideas of Western civilization, good. And the ideas of, well, let's keep the women covered up and people don't have, you know, you have to have a two-story home because you're going to throw the gays off the roof. Yeah. Like...

I did this on my show a couple of weeks ago. I was talking about the college kids. I was like, not only do they hate America, not only do they hate the civilization they should adore because it's given them everything, including their rights as well as their material comforts, but they love the wrong one.

Yeah. They love the world. They want to globalize the intifada. They hate the right one, the one of free speech and free elections and women are equal and gays, all the stuff these parties love. And they embrace this other one that is so anti-liberal. So I get...

Why? It's very appealing. If you just look at the big, big, big picture to have the guy who goes, I get it. Western civilization, good. Although those Qatari planes that are free, that's sweet. And Western, yeah. And that to me is probably what's going to be the issue of the next election again. Because the Democrats, they cannot seem to divorce themselves from this. We're with the Palestinians.

Well, the problem is there's no party anymore.

There's no Democratic Party anymore. It's completely fragmented. It might reform, but when they keep saying we have to find a message, we have to find a message. Well, if you don't have a fucking message, what are you doing being a political party? That's not the issue. They always say that. Nobody heard our message. They have a message. People just didn't like it. That's certainly true. Right. Yeah. Their message, again, is that we will always, count on us to always...

If you go against the grain of common sense, we will back the thing that doesn't really make any sense. Here in California, if someone breaks into my home and I shoot them, I could go to jail. You see how counterintuitive that is, people? But we will back that. But why are we living here? As Elon said, it's the most expensive weather in the world. That's a great line. It is to this...

sunshine what oil is to oil producing countries. It corrupts them. It allows them to get away with things they never would be able to get away with if they didn't have the oil. And that's what sunshine is out here. You're absolutely right. Yeah. But yet we, I mean,

I mean, do you know how important sunshine is? I love it. Who doesn't love sunshine? But, you know, my wife grew up in Scotland, and like anyone who comes from the British Isles, the moment they see California, they say, you know, everything I left behind, fuck it. You can't get me out of here. You know, it's nice. It's beautiful weather 400 days a year. Fuck Scotland. I felt that about New Jersey. Yeah. And New York. I came from New York, and I moved here on New Year's Day.

And, you know, I was zipping up my jacket a little bit and coming from the freezing cold. And I was like, fuck, why did I do this three years earlier? Yeah, indeed. But are we overtaxed? Yes. Are we overregulated? Yes.

And the tragedy is that it doesn't have to be that way. You could have the sunshine and the common sense. Because the problem about being overtaxed is it's confiscatory. Is that because I got a couple of bucks? Probably, but it's also because what's the money being used for? Because it's not being used for the cops. It's not being used for the fire department. The schools are the worst in the nation. Terrible. So why are the taxes going up?

No, I mean, I've confronted our governor about this many times. And I mean, I know this guy is probably not your cup of tea, but at least we see, I mean, Gavin Newsom was like the poster boy for the far left, California government, blah, blah, blah. And he's come around on women in sports. He's come around on getting the homeless off the streets. He's come around on free Medicare. Well, I know how to fix that is elect him.

The lectern will go right back to the left.

Maybe. But I think he wants to be president, and I think to be president you have to move to the center. I mean, at least we see a movement. I mean, you would agree that we need two parties, right? We need a choice. Okay. So it's good that there are voices on the Democratic side who are coming more to the middle. Yeah, but some of them are and some of them aren't. I mean, I really—Flederman is doing—is extraordinary because he's a Democrat who actually has self-respect for—

The opposite of which is shame. They'll say any fucking thing in order to get a vote or money or airtime.

I think that's a concept which is kind of foreign to Gavin Newsom. I get it. As the election time comes closer, the liars are going to come closer to trying to lure more people in. The funny thing to me is that anyone still listens to their pronouncements rather than looking at their record. Have you driven through the Palisades in Malibu? No. Why would I...

purposely i'm not a ghoul like you no no i get it because i was over there visiting somebody and they gave me a pass to come back through it's it's beyond anything i mean it's out miles and miles and miles and then you you get off of the pch and drive up sunset into the pacific palisades or the richest most beautiful communities in the united states which burnt down because they didn't have any water in the wet in the reservoir

- Right, I mean, I'm thinking back now to January and what I was saying about that shit, which seemed to me like the reasonable middle position, which I always think of myself, maybe, I don't know, maybe I'm wrong, maybe everybody else is right. I just think, was wokeness a part of it? Yes. But there was also 100 mile hour winds. They also built the city in a stupid place to build a city.

If you ask me, that was 80% of it. But when you're living in a disaster zone like this, you can't afford to make any errors. And they made plenty of errors. And the police chief, I think the top three spots in the fire department, I think, were lesbian, something like that. And it's like, I think lesbians can do the job, of course, but

I just don't think you should pick among lesbians when you're looking for a chief. And I think that's what they did. It was like they checked. That's the Democrats' problem. They checked the identity box first. Well, sure. I think they decided they wanted a lesbian. And that's not right.

Well, here's what I think. I mean, you know, whether they're a lesbian or not doesn't... I couldn't care less, and it certainly doesn't affect their ability to do the job. But the woman who I believe was the fire commissioner issued a statement when she first got the job saying that her first priority was going to infuse equity and inclusion and DDI. Yes, yes. I would have thought it was to put the fucking water in the fire victims. Right, put out the fires. Another one said...

When there's a disaster, be it a fire or something else, when the first responder gets there, people want to see someone who looks like them. Yeah, that's cute. What? That's cute. That, in a nutshell, is what's wrong with the left, right? Yeah, they're crazy. Well...

Okay, so if we agree on that, what drove them to that place? Can you take me on the journey? Because I always try to make the distinction between liberal, old school liberal, which is what I basically think of myself, and woke, which is this kind of shit. To me, this is not the liberals that my parents were that I grew up with. Maybe you were in the 80s or some shit like that.

Maybe not. I mean, you were always out there. No, I don't know. I mean, you know, as Lennon says, it always starts in the schools, right? That the schools got taken over by this, by the... Horrible. Yeah, terrible. And so now we have people like Randy Weingarten and so forth, clumping for the right of the schools to teach whatever they fucking want in contravention to the wishes of the parents and common sense. Yeah.

So if you get the kids young, those kids are going to become the teachers. And if you get them young at the end, you get them into the elite institutions, they're going to become the levers of government. And then you're in a lot of trouble. Yeah. I mean, you have a line in the book there about, I'm forgetting how it says it. You said it so well about...

liberals like relish the odor of sanctity as if it was courage, something like that. Oh, it's a good line. I hope I said it. That's a good line. You don't remember? No, I don't, but thank you. I like it. But I mean, and again, if I had to encapsulate the problems with the left, it would be, it would fall under that category. It's so important to them always to be the good people and,

And, you know, to have the lawn sign in this house, we believe. And of course, they're always very hypocritical, which which is the infuriating thing about them, about so much of this. They're so obsessed with privilege while they live these very privileging lives. I call them liberals in theory. You know, there's liberals in theory, but they actually treat their housekeeper like shit.

You know, they treat their assistants like 24-7 slaves. They just do things that are so, to me, unliberal. Things that my father or mother would never do because they were old school liberals who, like, treated people really well. Yeah, I believe in treating people well. No, no, I know, but I'm just saying that is their thing.

To me, that's the thing that bugs me most about them when I think about them is that you're only liberal in theory. Yes, your politics are liberal, but I actually see the way you act. Well, exactly so. I don't understand how any, not a good person, but a rational person who wants to run for re-election can say we have to have men and women's sports and expect people to vote for them. Maybe they're right. I don't know. I just don't get it.

There's a clip I saw the other day that's just LOL about, it's like the steeplechase, like the high, where they run and then they jump over a thing, whatever they call that race. And it's like these beautiful life women, and then there's this one just tree-trunk-leg person who's just, and it's just like, come on, man. Like, again,

We can't vote for you if we think there's a worm in your brain of some kind. You know, we can't vote for you if you just obstinately want to die on these hills that make no sense. You know, men can get pregnant and so forth. And that, but that's what opens the door to, you know, we don't need to get into it, but what I think is a greater threat. And, but, you know,

What can I say? Somebody sent me a very sad email the other day about a very dear friend of theirs who was unfairly, I think, like frog-marched out of the country for being a migrant. And all I could answer back was, you shouldn't have lost the election. That's what happens when you lose elections. Elections have consequences. You went way too far with your crazy left-wing bullshit and

And the people said, no, he's less crazy than this. And you just, you did it to yourself. So I'm real sorry about your migrant friend. And that isn't right, but it's predictable. And you could have stopped it. If you really thought Trump was the existential threat he was, then, you know, to your point earlier, why put up Biden?

If it was really that important? I mean, Democrats will never be able to answer that question. If that election was really that important, you couldn't summon the courage to confront an old man that your time has passed? That's a good question. That's a good question. And part of the answer is, as always, who benefited? Criabono. Exactly so. And the answer is...

The mice who could play while the rats away, the cats away, the mice could play. So a lot of people have a very good time having a lot of power with absolutely no responsibility and thinking that they were secure from any oversight because of the press. And they were. But now we'll see.

But since there's been this vibe shift, like, it hasn't helped you in the business? I mean, you said before when you sat down, blacklisted and blah, blah, blah. No, the business is over. You know that. Oh, but it's more that the business is over. Well, no, no. A, the business is over. B, I'm real old. And C, I'm working a lot. I'm just, you know, I'm not working as I was working before.

40 years ago in the last decade of the studio system. That's all gone. Right. But I'm making movies, I'm doing plays, I'm writing books. What about streaming? Do you think that that is helpful, hurtful? Could that be good for you? Sure. Yeah. Sure. Why not? Why not? I mean, the worst thing in the world for me was having to sit in a room

With a bunch of idiots, right, who knew nothing about movie making and explained to them what the script meant, right? And so through logic, you know, I didn't do it. I said, you know, make the movie or play me or trade me. But the only worst thing that I had is to sit in a room with a bunch of idiots who don't know what the script meant and have no idea who I am.

It's like Joe Mankiewicz, he came in when he was an old guy and the studio executive said, "What have you done?" And Mankiewicz said, "You first." Well, you know the Shelley Winters story, right? What's that? Shelley Winters had three Oscars and she was asked to audition and she walked into the office and she put her Oscars down on the guy's desk and said, "Maybe you don't know my work." That's good. So what are you writing now?

Well, I got this movie, Henry Johnson, and I got the book. But you wrote that. Yeah. What are you writing now? Tomorrow when you go to the title. I'm working on that book.

The Confidence movie. And I think I got somebody who's going to make it. And we got some really interesting people involved in that. And I got a couple of the little books coming out over the years, especially during COVID. I did so much stuff that now it's all jammed up. And I made a huge mistake many decades ago. I realized that because I like to write a lot that I needed to create other identities and names. And I should have done it, but I never did.

You mean like, who was the one who wrote all those French mysteries and it wasn't really the person's name? Oh, Simenon. Simenon. Yeah. George Simenon. Yeah. Yes. Yeah, it's a way to be more prolific. I mean, you're so prolific as it is, but yeah, I guess you could write other things. Or it could be like the front. It could be like the blacklist era. That's right. Because you're blacklisted. Exactly so. Of course, your style is...

very often distinctive. But somebody could be like

Now, as long as they have the cover. But I think that's going to change. I do. What about overseas? I would think you would have like a Woody Allen kind of thing, Jerry Lewis thing like overseas, like they would adore you in ways that this country sometimes is too provincial. Oh, I don't know. They seem to like my work a lot in Italy, and I got a lot of supporters. In fact, that Henry Johnson movie premiered at the Taormina Film Festival. That was a world premiere. Yeah.

Other than that, I've always been very interested in education, and I wrote this novel that's coming out soon called Some Recollections of St. Ives, which is a false memoir of a guy teaching for 40 years at a New England prep school. I'm very, very happy with that. So that's coming out next month. And do you know what that's about, or is that one where you— No, I wrote—that's all written already. I know, but you said before you don't always know what it's about.

Yeah, it's about education. It's about a fellow looking back and saying, really, what is education? What did we do with this school that's different than other schools? What have I learned? And so years ago, I said to my wife, I want to write a book about education. She said, please, please don't. So instead, I wrote a novel about a school. It is, I mean, you could easily write a series of books on how

The downfall of education is the source of all our problems in this country. Well, I think so. But see, the other thing is the contributory factor is the Internet, because kids are addicted to these. You know, I got a bunch of kids and they came into the end of school.

They're addicted to this stupid fucking machine, which means that they don't see the world. And you walk around my neighborhood, you see not only teenagers on the stupid fucking machine, but guys pushing a baby carriage, and the fucking baby's on the stupid fucking machine. No, not a baby. Yes, indeed. Yeah.

I have pictures. Babies don't have cell phones. You're saying babies have cell phones? No, not a cell phone, whatever they are, the little games, right? So the thing about all these machines is that they're hypnotic. So they're just like cigarettes, right? They get you all jazzed up, and so they make you want to...

smoke more cigarettes because you're jazzed up. The periodicity of the machines is hypnotic. You can't look away. So you have to give yourself a reason that you've been hypnotized. And you say, oh, it's because I like secession rather than the Game of Thrones, or because I need to stay involved, or because I need this, or because I need da-da-da-da-da-da. But to me, the giveaway phrase, I think I put it in the book, is I just have to.

What are you doing? It's 10 o'clock. I just have to do this, right? You don't say, I just have to have a drink of water. Yeah, I know. Maybe I'm sure it's just that I'm from a different generation, but I can look on, I mean, I'm barely on these sites, but I must be on Instagram. I have it. And if I go on it, all it is,

is dogs doing funny things. Because it must have been that the only thing I ever clicked on or watched was dogs doing funny things. So it was just an endless scroll. And I could...

watch it all day. It's endlessly amusing, but I don't. But I say to myself, because I'm a sentient being after two minutes, well, that was great, but I do have a life to live. You mean that's beyond the can of the younger generation? They can't just discipline themselves enough to do that?

Well, they can't discipline themselves to do anything because why should they? If their parents don't discipline them, the school doesn't discipline them, the church doesn't discipline them, the Boy Scouts doesn't, the military doesn't, why should they learn discipline? Yes. We learn discipline when we have to, not before. Yeah. I mean, that was one of the themes of my last talk.

stand-up special was that I really placed it back on parents. If you indulge your kids, if you kiss their ass so much when they're kids and tell them they're really just shorter adults and that their thoughts are just as valid as that of an adult. I mentioned the time, or it actually wasn't the time, it would have never been a time, but I would often see my parents when I was a kid

discussing personal, not personal, but political events in the living room with their friends. The idea that I would have walked into that room and said, you know, I have some thoughts about Vietnam.

And yet I see, I've been to people's houses where their kids invite themselves into adult conversations and are not reprimanded for doing so. So if you bring up a child that way, and of course they're not, the brain is not even fully developed. If you bring up a kid that way and then they start saying, well, men can get pregnant and whatever the latest crazy thing is,

Of course, that's what's going to be the downstream upshot of bringing up kids that way, that their stupid ideas are just as valid and should be taken seriously. It kind of reminds me of the way, you know, sometimes in medieval times or Renaissance times, any time when they were still having kings, and the king would die and a four-year-old would take the throne.

The dolphin, the Dauphine, right? And then there would be a regent. But, you know, at a certain point, the kid would make pronouncements. We're so, we talk about Hunter Biden.

You saw me lower my left and you got the hook in. You calmed down and I drilled in. But it is kind of like that, you know, when you have to take the rantings of a child seriously, because that's what would happen, is that the five-year-old would say something ridiculous and then the whole court would have to pretend to...

that it was something that we should... The council were meeting on the idea that we should examine his poop twice a day. See, that's why we have to have school choice. Because if the government is going to tell you where you must send your kids and you don't like what they're teaching you in school, you've just given your kid to the government. Did you take your kids out of school? I took... I had a couple of kids from a previous relationship who went to a...

impossibly elite, loathsome, woke seminary in Santa Monica. And then I had my daughter Clara, who dropped out of school when she was 14,

Because she just couldn't take it anymore. And she became an emancipated minor. Really? And went to work on a Disney show for two years. And she was great. So she didn't have any school. And then my son went to a couple of schools. And he got into just this thing extraordinary. He's 25. And when he started to be 20, he says, Dad, I want to create a video game.

I said, okay, good, good, good. You may not know every young kid of that age wants to create a video game. That's their dream. Five years later, he's taught himself code. He's created this video game. It's just released and it's on the internet. I said, how'd you do? He said, it's been out for a week. Oh, I just made $5,000. I said, what?

This is a kid, you know, sitting by himself. So I should maybe cool my jets because he spent all these years sitting on his computer. He made this gorgeous video game. Now he's going to make another one. But was that enough to make a living? I mean, is it enough to start? I said, you know, dude, you're doing much better at your age than I was at your age. You know, I was just starting to ride. I was driving a cab for a living. Right. He's working on a straight job, too. I said, you know, one thing at a time.

So what are you going to get out of going to school? Also, why are these parents, these idiots sending their kids, especially the Jews, sending their kids to these, quote, elite universities? It's insane. Well, I think because when the parents went to those elite universities, they were elite.

People don't understand that it's not your dad's college. That's true. Boy, that's true. But because these colleges are living on fumes now. Well, I mean, your boy's going after them hard. Good. Good. Okay, but you know what? Look, again, everything is always over the top. Like...

Was I with him that I've said it for years about Harvard and these places, especially after October 7th, that they're just asshole factories. That's right. They're asshole factories, and they don't understand...

They have no perspective on anything, which is how they wound up on the wrong side of what's liberal. They cannot figure out who the good guys are in this battle. As you say in your book, Israel is really the leader of the free world now. I think that's kind of true. Thank you. But to ban all foreign students, I mean, most of the foreign students who come here are not for the globalizing the infatada. They're Chinese and they're...

I know you'd like to believe that I would too. How do you know? You think most of the foreigners didn't know some because they're coming to America for the same reason many of them have always come to America, because it's a beacon of hope and it's a place where you can study and where you can learn and where the labs are good. And that's why we have kicked ass in the world with 4% of the population, because we stole ideas and good people and good brains from all over the world because they wanted to come here.

And he is fucking with that. People are not going to want to come here and already have stopped coming here. And we don't want to have a brain drain out of the country, which is also happening. We want to have a good... We're here. What? We're here. We're here because we're too old to leave. We want to have a place that attracts the best brains. That was always one of our big secrets. Here's the thing.

I don't want my tax dollars to go to give an endowment to Harvard. I don't either. Okay, so Trump says, wait a second. You have to do away with the anti-Semitism. They say, fuck you. They say, wait, no, no, no, you really have to. It's against the law. It's against the Civil Rights Act. You have to stop. They made some concessions. What were they? Do I have it written down? Exactly so. They said they were going to make some concessions. I don't know if they made any. But here's the thing.

If it were blacks or gays or women, you wouldn't say... They made some concessions. Oh, my God. So, Trump says, you have to fucking stop it. And they say, I'm not going to. So, they say... So, he says, okay, guess what? I'm going to have to raise you back. We're going to play hardball. That's what he's doing. Yes, I understand that. Did you ever play poker? No. Okay. When you play poker...

You have to dominate the table. You can't just say, I'm going to call your bet and see what happens. You have to raise people. You have to put people on the back. You have to make them respond to you. So that's what he's doing. What if you don't have the cards to do that? What? What if you don't have the cards to do that? Then don't play the hand. But if you do have the cards, you have to make people fear you and wonder what you've got. So that once in a while, when you don't have the cards, you...

You muscle them, and either you win, or once in a while, they call you and they find that you're bluffing, so that the next time you can win. It's playing the long game. Is that what he's doing with tariffs? Sure, of course that's what he's doing. Okay. Of course that's what he's doing. What do you think about tariffs on foreign films he wants to put on? I don't know. You know, I don't know. I think he's gotten into the wrong... But that's your business. Yeah, he's gotten into the wrong pew.

Right. The point is, listen, the thing about somebody in a position of great power is that they are enthralled to the people that they choose to advise them about the people that they should choose. Right. Right? So we're the same thing. You go buy a house, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You're going to say, hmm, I want this. Who am I going to pick for the architect? Who am I going to pick for the designer? Who am I going to pick to do the permitting? And then you're fucking fucked. You better hope you guessed right. Right? So...

Somebody is advising him about getting into the film, making our films better here by putting tariffs on foreign films. That's not going to make our films better here. The reason that films aren't better here is Hollywood, right? So the way to make the films better is to let the market work. Yeah. I mean, you're the guy who says, you know, they should make popcorn and not diversity rules. And I agree with you.

Yeah. Also, it's just that I like popcorn movies and you don't. I love popcorn movies. I hate Titanic as a guard piece of shit. But I went to a movie just the other day and I ate a whole bunch of popcorn. But then I think there was something in it. What are some popcorn movies you like? Popcorn movie that I like? Well, I like old movies.

Most people wouldn't consider those popcorn. Say what? Most people would not consider that a popcorn movie. I mean, I just watched a bunch of old movies. I like them too. Yeah, but I have really good popcorn that we cook at home in an air popper. But okay, I mean, you said the business is dying. They just had their best box office weekend ever because of Lilo and Stitch, whatever the fuck that is, and...

Mission Impossible. Mission Impossible is the ultimate popcorn movie. Yeah. Exactly so. Do we hate it? What comes after the ultimate?

Ultimate two. Still ultimating. So you're absolutely correct. He lived to be forever at some point. Tom Cruise has got to shuffle off this mortal coil. He says he's going to do action movies when he's 100. Good. God bless him. But how many other people employed here are doing movies? No. I'm just saying the communal experience of going to the movies is not dead.

Well, I went to the communal experience of a movie to see this movie on the third street mall, which is dead with a couple of friends. And the two of us were there with one other person.

The mall is dead. Not the third street mall. I love the third street. When's the last time it's dead? There's nobody there. Why? Because it got closed down because of COVID, and then it closed down because of the riots, and then it closed down because of the homelessness. So 90%, I think, of the stores are empty. There's nobody there. Holy shit. It's terrible.

Okay. Well, that is not a good argument for California-izing America. No, no. No, that's going to be a tough one to get around. Well, I can't tell you how much I appreciate you coming by.

I, sorry I pissed you off at the beginning. I adore you and I hope you don't hold that against me. I did not intend to like immediately get onto that subject. We just did. I told you there was no agenda here. It just happened. I appreciate it. Also, you know, I like what you said about your meeting with Trump because you just told the truth. Just told the truth. Yeah.

I want everyone to keep talking. I do too. And especially for the Democrats who have no power. How ridiculous to think you can get away with not talking to people when you have no, to your poker thing, you have no cards. Yeah, there's no... You have no cards. Plus some things died. The Whig Party died. It was replaced by the Republicans in 1860. Yes, parties can die. And the Democrats...

they will either go to the middle and stop being the party of, I can't trust you because you're always counterintuitive, or they will die. And I think they will go to the middle. I think they will survive because things want to live.

Well, I hope that they do. I mean, people like Fred and people like Josh Shapiro, they're great. But, I mean, you know, Pocahontas and the governor of Maine who says, I insist on boys in the girls' bathroom. Right. That's crazy. It's just freaking crazy. Right. It's not just wrong. It's crazy. I know. I know you think liberals want to destroy the family. No, I don't think they want to destroy the family. I think they have destroyed the family. Oh, that's...

Okay. But they haven't destroyed my family. But they didn't really do it on purpose. What you're saying is I didn't know it was loaded, right? Yes. That's what Lee Harvey Oswald could have said, right? Okay. But liberals actually think they're doing good. I know a lot of times it's really just about making them feel good, which is what's so obnoxious when they do that.

But they're not actually trying to. What we understand as dramatists is that nobody ever did something for a bad reason. But see, this is why I think I understand Henry Johnson. Yeah. Because I think that. He thinks he's doing everything for the best reason. I think that's what I think the movie's about. Yeah. I got you. Oh, good. Thank you. It is political. Thank you.

Thank you so much. You okay? Yeah. Did you hurt yourself? Basketball. Rebounding. Jam it? Yeah. Oh, that's terrible. Okay.

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