Ep 170 | Why Oscar Winner Richard Dreyfuss Is Grateful Glenn 'Outed' Him | Richard Dreyfuss | The Glenn Beck Podcast

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Today's Today's guest has been a violent bank robber, a shark-fighting marine biologist, a passionate composer, an uptight psychiatrist, a notorious scam artist, a lovelorn detective, a wizard named Oz, and a suicidal architect trapped on a sinking ocean liner.

He has encountered aliens and faced 3D piranhas.

He has held the office of Republican senator, a general, White House chief of staff, and a vice president who ran the show.

All of these as characters, of course, but he brought each of them to life.

As a kid, my guest today wanted to be the greatest actor in the world, and it became an obsession.

He won an Oscar when he was 29 for the Goodbye Girl.

At the time, he was the youngest actor to win, a title he held for 25 years until Adrian Brody snatched it.

He's worked with George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Oliver Stone, you name it.

He was in American graffiti.

Along the way, he got into some high-profile feuds.

Bill Murray threw a glass ashtray at his face.

But today, he is not here to talk about his Academy Award or his celebrity feuds, although I do have to ask him a few questions, or his iconic roles in Mr.

Holland's Opus and Jaws.

He was never a Hollywood insider.

He's here to sound the alarm, to protect the Constitution, to stir the healthy dissent, to protect the lone voice.

He told me right before the podcast that

I was the one who outed him in Hollywood.

When I apologized, I didn't realize that.

He said, no, no, no, this is one of the best things that's happened to me.

He is a man committed to nothing less than saving America.

It has been his mission for the past few decades, and it is the subject of his new book called, One Thought Scares Me.

He wants us all to ask ourselves, when American fails, what then?

Please welcome on today's podcast, Richard Dreyfus.

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Welcome, Richard.

How are you?

I am.

I just want to start with this because you probably haven't seen this.

Well, usually we slate the show, but we should slate with Steven Spielberg's slate from Jaws.

I don't know if you remember that.

Well, it was originally named Jews.

Was it?

You know, we've spent just a few minutes backstage a few years ago.

I don't even know how long ago, 2016.

And we've spent maybe a half an hour

today

before this.

I don't know, but

I think if we lived next door to each other, we'd be friends.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

The idea that we wouldn't be friends is such a contemporary nightmare of a country that it's

like friends out of respect.

I think you

we may disagree, and we'll find out on stuff.

We may disagree on a few things,

but you're rooted in the truth, you're rooted in history, you're not, it's it's very popular now to just dismiss history or miscast it and not care because you want it to bend your way.

Yeah, there are people who now think that opposing views are un-American.

They don't know that opposing views are entwined and threaded through the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and what we show to the world we believe in.

You know, there's a very simple

thing,

and it's

these documents tell the world who we are and why

we are to be.

Who we strive to be.

And we say, because they are works in progress,

they tell us

who we want to be when we grow up.

Yes.

Yeah.

I mean,

I've often said, but we dismiss the Declaration and the Constitution now so much,

but

I'll lose my Americanism or my love for America if you can show me a country whose mission statement is better

than those truths that we hold self-evident, that all men are created equal and endowed by a creator.

That is...

We're not even close to that.

We never have been close to it.

There's been times when we get closer and then like with Martin Luther King, we need to be reminded and we get a little closer again.

But I fear that

that now is being lost as old dusty words that mean nothing.

I certainly think

that when we allow our kids to tell us what is valuable and what is nurturing,

we're going to the wrong people.

What does that mean?

It means

there's a book called Five Minds for the Future, and it's about the development of the human brain.

And basically, it says that there are a number of different kinds of brains that we can shoot for, but until you're in the fourth grade, you cannot conceive

of abstraction.

So you can't understand metaphor, simile, like that.

And yet it's our obligation to get that young

an audience to fall in love with their country.

And so we created glory tales, and they are good for the kindergarten, first, second, and third grade.

And in the fourth grade, they are armed to the teeth.

And they know that Nathan Hale is a stand-in for America.

And that George Washington throwing the the thing across the river is a stand-in for America.

So that when they start to learn the details, they're already in love.

Right.

When you hear of educators saying,

we're going to hold off on all of that until the university level,

then you know not only did those educators last read the Constitution when they were in the third grade or fourth grade, but

no

university level child

can

understand

the Constitution because they're built to be skeptical and cynical.

Right.

And that means you can't tell them to love their country.

Right.

They will give you this.

Right.

So you've got to get them

in love with the Enlightenment values that the Constitution has, and you've got to get them in love with defending those things.

And they have been gone from the curriculum for 50 years.

That's the core problem.

That's the problem.

We're not even saying,

well, if you study it a little bit more, They have no idea about the Constitution.

They have no idea about the Bill of Rights.

No.

None.

And they think that the Republican or Democratic parties are on an equal level with the Constitution.

And that is infantile and suicidal.

So

you wrote the book, One Thought Scares Me.

And that thought is.

We teach our children what we wish them to know.

We don't teach them what we don't wish them to know.

What does that mean?

It means that they've taken it out.

They've taken civics out because we don't want you to be a participating citizen.

We don't want you to be

the child of that revolution.

But if you look at...

If you look at what's happening now, it seems like all they're doing in school is training kids to be an activist.

Oh, no.

No.

Activism terrifies these people.

And I'll tell you who they are, because there was a very real reason for it.

I'm a baby boomer, right?

And that means that there was a generation above me, but not so above that they actually went to World War II.

And I call them the James Dean generation.

Too young to help their dad in World War II and too old to take acid with me.

My mom was in that generation and it was a screwed up generation going between the two.

Yeah, there was good and bad and we were proud of all of it as an exercise in the Bill of Rights and others hated every minute of it because they thought that they had proven the defeat of participating citizenship.

And 1968 was the year

when

you watched on television the Democratic Convention of 1968,

the mayor of Chicago yelling you

on TV,

the Chicago cops beating kids who were wearing funny clothes.

And

everyone had forgotten all of their drug taking just in time to declare war on us for our drug taking.

And that happens to be an hysterical part of this story.

Washington, I was asked here by one of your staff who was my favorite founder.

And I humphed.

I didn't give him a straight answer.

And then I realized when you were showing me through the museum, I have a very real answer for that.

And it's George Washington.

Because Washington was, as an inarticulate writer,

said the most profound things

about us.

And he said, the Constitution must always be central.

The factions must always be peripheral.

And we live in the absolute absurd opposition to that.

And

we've actually had it removed long enough so that we have no muscle memory of it.

So,

I mean, we have destroyed our history.

And may I say, it happened this way.

In 1971 and two and 3,

those

members of that generation were on school boards.

That's the way they first became adults.

And they were on school boards.

And the first thing they did was to kill civics

because they thought civics had caused the Democratic Convention of 1968.

And within 10 years, Civics was gone from every school district in the country.

And I mean, the whole thing, the knowledge of the birth tale of the country, the opposition to the way they did it in England, to the monarchy.

We fired a king for fraud.

Wow.

And the aristocracy.

And we said,

we will teach you that which you have never been allowed to learn.

And that's when they started to come.

And we dealt only with the poor.

And we said, you learn these values.

And you become American, there is no limit to what you will achieve.

Correct.

And that was a thing they'd been wanting to hear for 5,000 years.

Right.

And we have now forgotten it since the 70s.

Back to Richard Dreyfus in just a second.

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Tell me, because

you grew up in a great, crazy family.

Your grandmother

fought on the campaign of Eugene Debs, if I'm not mistaken.

Your father was in the Battle of the Bulge.

Your mother was a Vietnam protester.

My great-grandaunt assassinated Tsar Alexander in 1881.

Shut up.

My grandaunt assassinated the Tsar in 1881.

She popped the Tsar.

Wow.

Wow.

So you have some rebellion in you.

But

there's a difference

to me.

There is a great deal of difference between Martin Luther King did, which he was saying, remember who we're supposed to be and who we're trying to be.

And now it is

so anti-American.

What happened?

When did that happen?

It happened because of the 60s.

But wait, wait, wait.

But if I'm not mistaken, you're, I mean, socialism, communism, had to be a lot of people around you, but they loved America.

We loved America.

I loved America.

I was born as a red diaper baby.

Right.

I'm a communist son.

I am a communist child.

I was born on the left,

and I learned where I differed and where I didn't,

because

these men who had fought in gangs in Brooklyn first, and then in the war against Hitler, they knew, all of them,

why they were fighting.

And when they came came back from World War II, they were each given a gift,

a gift of the GI Bill of Rights.

And that meant

a house, a college, a university.

It meant

the ability to change your life for the better.

And it was done because the government recognized that these guys

hadn't been kidding.

This was a nightmare.

My father's unit,

the usual turn is 21 days in combat.

My father was 69 days behind the German lines.

And

the government knew that they were asking this army of citizen soldiers to do the impossible.

And they did it.

And when they came home, they came home to gratitude and love.

And I have never known a generation, never,

that

was so willing to weep at the national anthem at Yankee Stadium.

And I would go at every

opportunity I had, and they would look down at me and my brother, and I'd be singing the words, and they would cry.

And one day,

one of the guys, whose name was Tommy Grasso,

I was talking to him and I said, I get it, I get it.

Your totalitarian psychopath is better than his totalitarian psychopath.

And he started laughing so hard that his milk came up through his nose.

And if you could not find a generation that did not revere America than those guys.

And then, skipping a few generations,

Robert Dole, a war hero, was brought back to the well of the Senate when they were going to re-up the GI Bill of Rights.

And Santorum

got up and made a lovely speech about Robert Dole, and then he took down

the GI Bill of Rights.

He did not

re-up it.

He took it down and humiliated Dole.

And I watched this.

I couldn't believe that an American political party would do such a disgusting thing.

But he had.

And

that's when I

I became

enormously active.

And I think I've become active on an issue that is not partisan, that is for everyone,

and that has no enemies.

To want to revive the study of civics, which means the study of the birth tale of America and the birth tale of putting the Enlightenment values to work in our system.

That is not a partisan issue.

And when I have been accused of that, I say,

I am

not

a liberal.

I am

a libo, conservo, rado,

middle-of-the-rodo,

just like most of you.

You just haven't given it any thought lately.

And that's who I am.

This is not to be

discarded as a partisan issue.

Unfortunately, I think we have made, because of the lack of civics,

we have made the flag

our country.

And

the images,

and that means nothing.

It means nothing.

It is what those symbols stand for.

And now those symbols are rejected by

one half of the country.

But we're not talking, we're fighting over that and we're not talking about, but what do they represent?

And I used to believe

that, I mean, I know our unum, e pluribus unum, came from the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, who we want to be, not who we always are, who we want to be and strive to be.

Yeah.

And the Bill of Rights.

I always thought those were sacred.

And we can argue about commas, we can argue about a lot of things.

But those rights were sacred.

Sacred.

And there's a system to amend them.

You know what I mean?

Hey.

Nobody even knows them anymore.

That's right.

We are violating all of them.

And all of the chaos of the world is happening because

we no longer even know them, and those who

do

reject them or ignore them.

They've been

the object of an argument for far longer than we know.

Oliver Wendell Holmes said

no to Congress shall make no law,

and he

allowed

crying fire in a crowded theater, etc.

And John Adams, on his last day in office, passed the Alien and Sedition Act.

I can't believe that somebody who was there at the beginning passed that.

I mean, that's crazy.

And that craziness was

you are not allowed to speak against the government.

Period.

And

this by one of the founders, one of the writers of the damn thing.

And when

Eugene Debs,

my grandmother was a witness to the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire.

Wow.

And it was because of what she saw that day,

154 girls who hardly spoke English.

jumping, trying to fly out of the 19th story of the triangle building.

If anybody remembers the images from 9-11, very similar.

Yeah, except there were bodies.

Yeah.

And

let's stop on that for a second.

They were so destroyed on 9-11, there was no body.

But 150-year-olds.

No, no, no, no, no.

The ones that jumped out, there were a few that jumped to their death out the windows.

I don't know if you never saw that.

I saw them jumping out, but I didn't know that they were.

Yeah.

But they didn't.

The thing was, 154 girls looking at

the top of the building like grand fiery goddesses

because their hair and the sunlight created that image.

They stepped off into nothing

the first betrayal

and they fell

at the feet of my 12-year-old grandmother

and 154 bodies.

Wow.

And she turned around and went to the Socialist Party headquarters and volunteered.

Ultimately, she became Eugene Debs' private secretary.

At the beginning, she was just a volunteer.

And

she heard Debs give a speech that said that Woodrow Wilson should not be applauded because he had actually run on the platform, I'll keep your children out of war.

And then the first thing he did was get us into it.

Oh, yeah.

And he was denied his vote and given, I think, a life in prison.

And

what's his name?

Harding, who came after him, Harding of the

bad reputation,

he freed Eugene Dibbs and he gave him back his vote.

So as far as I'm concerned, he's the best.

Yeah, Wilson was the worst.

I think he is.

Yeah, he was the worst.

And we're going through, I think, that time again.

I remember

I first started really doing, I realized, I'm a recovering alcoholic.

Me too.

So when I'm 30 years.

40 years.

Good for you.

Good for you.

I'm 30 years old, and I realize I got A, stop drinking.

And now

I'm a dummy.

I'm a big fat dummy that doesn't know anything.

So I really start to read.

And I start to read everybody who really disagrees.

I went to the bookstore or the library and I'm like, this guy and this guy in the room would be crazy because they're so different.

And then just kind of went in and found the connections.

And I remember reading Immanuel Kant and he said,

there are many things that I believe that I shall never say, but I shall never say the things I do not believe.

And I thought,

what kind of place, what

must have that been like?

Where, as you say in your book, you had to whisper, you have to whisper your political views.

We're here.

Yeah.

We're here.

Yeah, that meant to those people who had been denied vividly any right to learn anything for 5,000 years.

They heard this rumor on the wind that there was this place now across the Atlantic.

And

they didn't move right away.

They waited almost 70 years.

But

when they heard that the ones who had left earlier were now mayors and policemen,

that's when they had to say,

I will risk the lives of my children to get there.

Before that,

the only ones who went were adventurers and

torturers.

Correct.

And so

these poor

had to risk getting across the Atlantic, which by itself was the end of the world.

And

you had to

realize how hungry these people were for the right to learn how to write or read.

And when they got here,

they were kept basically on their ships

until a corrupt politician from Tammany walked up the gangplank and said, my name is Jack O'Halloran and I'm here to make you a Democrat.

And if you give me your vote, I'll give you a vote,

a job, and a house.

And he did.

So they all became Democrats until Woodrow Wilson said that was illegal.

I think it was Roosevelt who did that, wasn't it?

No, no, no.

Actually, it was before Wilson, because there's a wonderful book

called

Plunkett of Tammany Hall.

And Plunkett used to have his shoes shined and spout to the newspapers.

And he said,

if we are not allowed to do this thing,

America will fall.

And everyone said he was crazy.

So they passed this law that said you could no longer nominate

the patronage.

And then they said, and guess who was the next minority that came?

They were the blacks from the South.

And Tammany stood there and said,

we can't help you.

We would be normally giving you a house and a job.

And

we can't.

It's illegal.

And that's why they stuck in Harlem for 80 years

and why

it bred more racial injustice or racial silence.

And they never had a chance.

They never had a show.

I want to make sure I understand.

You believe

giving everybody a house and a job and everything else

is good.

Well, in that system, yes.

Because that system was,

when you first arrived in America, the first thing you tried to do was to take hold of a crime.

So the Jews took kosher food, the Italians had the mafia, the Irish had the five points, and each group first

grabbed on to being a criminal class.

Their kids then went and took a city bureaucracy.

The Jews took accounting, the Italians took sanitation, and

the cops were taken by the Irish.

And that's the way it lasted until 1950-ish,

when all of a sudden,

because of the change of progression,

there were black cops in the car.

with the Irish and the Italian.

And of course, they were treated like blacks were treated in those those days.

And it got so bad that there was a meeting held in White Plains between all of the sergeants, Irish, Italian, Jewish, and black.

And they came to a peace.

And the peace was: we'll stop calling you nigger

if you let us share in your

what do they call it?

I'm losing my train.

The payoffs.

Each of them had a specific kind of cultural payoff.

The Jews

took a solid percentage of any retail because of accounting.

And the Irish took numbers, prostitution, like that.

And the Italians took their restaurant

stuff.

and so there was enmity between these cultures

and then they came to a peace because

the black cop

would go to his you know get his payoff and his payoff was in drug money which was ten times

what numbers and prostitution

so while the Italian and Irish cop are counting out their usual three hundred dollars

The black cop was counting out $1,500.

And they said,

wait a minute, we want in on that.

And they got it.

For the peace, for the knowing

I have a backup behind me, because they weren't sure.

And that's how that happened.

That's how drugs made it into the middle class, because the New York Police Department let them and

it came through the harbor and it was dispersed.

So

that culture

opened up

racial segregation

and the drugs and everything else.

So

what was interesting about it for me

is my family is very political.

So my mother

was...

How do I say this?

She came up with the phrase, war is unhealthy for boys and girls and other living things.

Something.

That was a banner of the anti-war movement.

And

women took over the jobs that their husbands left when they went to the draft or the war.

And they changed their names from Helen or Billy or Bobby Sue

to

God, it's amazing how when you get older, you forget all the names.

I'm not your age, and I do that all the time.

Oh, my God.

It's awful.

But they became

the workers.

And they kept the country together.

They kept the corporations together.

They kept the army together because they made the weapons.

The Rosie the Riveter.

Rosie the Riveter.

Thank you so much.

And then

the big lug came home.

And she had more conflicting emotions about that

because

given the gift of a week in bed, hopefully,

he then turned to her and said,

Thanks for keeping my job for me

because I'm taking it back now.

And she lost more self-esteem at that moment than any other moment in history.

She was just summarily dismissed,

and

she kept sane because of mother's little helper.

And that was opium.

And that kept her going

as long as she needed

on the prairie and in the city.

And

you're telling almost the story of my mother in a way.

She was addicted to Valium.

And it was because she could not

settle in her mind

her role.

She wasn't a hippie, so she wasn't burning bras,

but she wasn't the World War II, you know, pre-World War II girl either.

So what am I?

So when she's lying next to her husband, she's actually feeling some of the strangest emotions that any human ever had.

She loved him.

She worshipped the fact that he got back.

And yet she wanted to take a frying pan and smash it over his head.

And that was Rosie the Riveter.

And

we gave her, or she took,

this

mother's little helper, which, from the prairie on, literally from the days of the immigrant wave, you know, populating the country,

these women,

knowing they had to face another winter with six children and no husband,

got loaded.

And they got loaded because they had to.

And then in the 50s,

the way I say it in the book was

they put a little sparkle in the suburbs.

You know, they just had to because

they were told to get out,

but not told to go anywhere.

So they sat and did nothing.

And

they forgot, by the way, that they were taking Librium and all that stuff just in time to be angry at their kids for taking acid and marijuana.

So it was a hand down.

It was a hand off.

And I wrote I used to write cartoons.

And I wrote a cartoon.

Comic strips or cartoons?

Comic strip.

Okay, yeah.

I wrote one which was the boy sees the car with his father in it weaving as it comes home.

And so when he comes into the kitchen, he starts to kind of try to make him look better.

And the father, being a little loaded, pushes him away.

And they get into a fight, a comic strip fight, you know, with the cloud of discord.

And

they forget why they started this fight, but they're fighting.

That generation is fighting.

And they're fighting what?

Well, he's telling me me what to do and how to dress and what to how to and what's valuable.

They had to.

Just like

every other mammal on the planet Earth,

they fought

in the same way that every antelope fought the older antelopes.

And

we weren't smart enough to realize that's what was going on.

So we thought it was a nightmare when, in fact, it was just business as usual.

Right.

And

all the times of tranquility,

they were rare.

We think that they weren't, but they were rare.

Discord

was the norm.

And when the fathers fought the sons, they thought they were fighting over drugs.

They thought they were fighting over,

well, the way I like to put it, everyone remembers that James Dean died.

No one remembers the plot of Rebel Without a Cause.

And the plot of Rebel Without a Cause is the story I'm telling you now.

It is about

no one listens to me.

You're tearing me apart.

The father, who is now

upset and worried about getting a raise, couldn't possibly be the guy with the hidden pictures from the war holding a buoy knife in his teeth

and ears of Japanese people.

And they couldn't be the same one, but they were.

And so they were totally confused when Marlon Brando was asked in the wild one,

what are you rebelling against?

His answer was, what have you got?

And no one realized the profundity of all of this.

This was real.

They didn't know why, but they knew that they had to.

They had evolution behind them.

Millions of years of evolution was forcing this to be an issue.

And that's why, no matter how good the civics was as taught in public schools,

the television, which was a new and magic technology,

which, when turned on,

hypnotized you.

And advertising.

Advertising was relatively new in that form.

They

didn't need a nanny.

They were just plunked down in front of the television.

And then the television showed them the Democratic Convention of 1968, which blew civics out the window for everyone.

So that in 1972, knowing that they couldn't get rid of it, they moved it from history

to social studies, up one flight and around the corner.

And social studies became this gentle panorama of life in the USA,

not

bringing these questions to bear on our lives, which is what we did.

That's why they call it a revolution.

Right.

And so let me say this,

and I say this better than I ever do in the book.

This was a revolution, and that meant we turned all the virtues and all the values on their head.

All over the world, they either accepted or rejected.

If you're going to run a counter-revolution and take every one of those things out of the curriculum, it deserves the same noise, the same

yelling and screaming and

and marches and parades that the original revolution had.

and it didn't it didn't have anything but silence

they took it out and didn't tell anyone

so we ran right through the 70s and 80s and it wasn't until close to the turn of the century that anyone bothered

to say

oh we're not teaching civics anymore

they still haven't i have read every book

i have read every book about this subject that is written in English.

So let's concentrate on that for a second.

Tell me what civics is

and

how to put it back in to our lives.

Civics is

the

general name for the tools.

that can make you expert in thinking.

They are how to think, not what to think,

but how to think.

And they teach things like clarity of thought, clarity of expression,

and history.

And history cannot possibly be one version.

There's always at least two.

Correct.

And if I fantasize myself as a high school teacher, I say to my history class,

there's always two versions, always.

How many kids here in this room

have the same politics as their parents?

Whatever number the hands show,

I say, for the next semester, you take the opposite view on everything.

Everything, every test, every question.

And I'll know if you tank and I will fail you out of this class

so that they've got to be exposed to the opposite view.

Yeah.

And that is, that's why I started reading opposites and then moved in.

Yeah.

You, you,

you're a paper tiger.

You know nothing if you don't know.

I mean, my, my, my favorite teachers were the ones who you could never pin down.

You'd be like,

wait a minute.

Halfway through the semester, you'd be like, he's switching sides.

I think, you know, you think he's one way and he goes the other way.

My favorite teacher, and

I so regret that my being 75 makes it impossible to believe that she's still alive.

Mrs.

Palmer was my history teacher, sixth, seventh, and eighth grade.

Wow.

She was a die-hard Republican.

My mother was a die-hard socialist.

I asked her once, why were you a socialist and not a communist?

And she said, better donuts.

All right?

So I carried the water between Mrs.

Palmer and my mother.

And I literally told my mom what she had said, what Mrs.

Palmer had said, and then I would tell Mrs.

Palmer what my mom had said.

And I carried the water between these two.

And she was the best teacher I ever had because she made no bones about her being a Republican and she taught through that filter and

defended it

and you were totally allowed to disagree.

And she wanted,

that's why she did it.

Right.

And

my respect for her cannot possibly.

be illuminated.

I only wish that she was still alive.

Yeah.

Those teachers change you.

Yeah.

They change you.

When you are presented with things you've never thought about and you're encouraged,

I

run from anyone who says, don't read this, don't watch this, don't run,

run.

And how about this?

My mom

went to a very specific high school in Brooklyn

and she was teacher's pet.

and one day the teacher told her

she said Jerry

what's your what's your last name

and she said Robbins

what was it before it was Robbins

Rabinowitz

and she said

you're a Jew

and she was anti-Jewish

but

she was still teacher's pet.

She still utterly respected my mom, but she was an anti-Semite in the 30s.

Wow.

And you know, in the 30s, that's when the State Department was anti-Semitic and turned those children away.

And

you had to respect a system

that allowed the eccentricities of a teacher as long as they didn't try to make you

into them.

And they didn't.

I once called Mrs.

Wilcox, who was a teacher of mine in the seventh and eighth grades, and I found her in San Diego, where I now live.

And I found her, because we used to make jokes that

San Diego was where Republican history teachers go to the top.

But I found Mrs.

Wilcox,

and before she could say anything, I said,

Mrs.

Wilcox, you won't remember me, but I was a student in your class at Horace Mann Grammar School in Beverly Hills.

And I want you to know that everything I have come to love in my life, I learned in your class.

And she said, thank you very much, and hung up.

She went, thank you very much.

Click, wow.

She was the same person then as she was when I was her student.

Wow.

In the same way, it matters how you vote.

It matters how you spend your money.

Vote with your wallet.

Every chance you can, you need to buy American.

And that's really hard because some things will be like, oh, assembled in America, made in America.

But like this pen, I doubt any of it was made in America.

But maybe one part is, look, we need to start making quality products again.

And I mean start to finish.

There's a company out there that I'm so proud to have as an advertiser.

It's Grip Six.

With Grip Six, you're getting the true American experience, products that you can count on.

Now, their belts, wallets, their wallets are great.

They're socks.

When you buy just, let's say they're socks, you're supporting American ranchers who raise these specially bred sheep that produce the modern wool that is unlike any other, very stretchy.

It's, I mean, it's really great.

The American manufacturers who wash the wool, process the wool, weave it into socks, and then you just wear them.

So it's not just a pair of socks, it's an American experience.

Please

support those companies that are taking such a huge hit and risk by making everything here in America a great quality company making quality products is Grip Six.

Go there now.

GripSix.com.

That's griptheumber6.com/slash six.com slash back.

You said to me before we went on the air that

I outed you.

And

I immediately responded, I'm sorry, I didn't know.

I didn't, you know.

And you said, no, that was a good thing.

That was a good thing.

In what way?

And

how can we get Hollywood or other people and people on you know the other

side as well

to

stop with the tribalism stop both sides stop it

um and start to be a little more brave to say yeah that's who I am yeah

did you get pushback when I said oh my gosh I'm so sorry Richard Richard.

I'm so sorry.

No, it was great because now

I had a

kind of place in my universe.

I had been a liberal.

I had been a communist when I was younger.

And if you had asked me what communism was, I could not have told you.

As I think it's true now.

Yeah.

You wouldn't know how to describe it.

I knew that I was changing and I knew that I was changing for the better, the clearer, the above, the

nicer.

I knew that.

I could feel it.

And I began to see the phrases that indicated that that writer

was a duck, was a loser.

And

I found them everywhere,

on the left and on the right.

And it was easy for me to be anti-right because my whole community was anti-right.

But I began to move, really, until I became a celebrity and I joined

Common Cause.

Do you remember what Common Cause was?

It was...

an institution that was

by John Gardner, who worked for both both Republicans and Democrats.

And he wanted to create an institution

for those people who were neither Republican or Democrat, or both, and could criticize both.

Yes.

So I joined that when I became famous.

And I went to Washington and immediately said, Where are the Republicans?

And no, they didn't talk about that.

And what had happened was that it had become an adjunct to the Democratic Party.

Then

I also joined the Constitution Center.

And I spent 10 years on the Constitution Center board saying,

where is the honest history

instead of the safe history?

And they were

really the right-wing version of Common Cause.

And

they finally found a way to kick me out.

And that's true.

I mean,

that's what happened.

And I realized that I had no place there either.

In Washington, there was no place for to be what I am now.

I am pre-partisan.

I worked at CNN,

really found no home.

I worked at Fox, really found no home.

Yeah, I've said to Fox people,

you need me.

You need me, because it's sounding like such a

repeat.

Everyone is just repeating the same.

And what bothers me for real, and this is for real,

they're not news organizations.

No, I know.

If they changed the name of MSNBC

and

Fox

to opinion channels, I would have no argument.

But to call them news is to mislead the country.

It's really interesting.

Because I think

when I was at Fox, I made it really clear, I'm an opinion guy.

This is my opinion.

And, you know, there were a couple of times where I said, I'm not a journalist.

Journalists need to do their work.

I'm a commentator.

But that became so white hot

ratings, bonanza, and everything else, that I think a lot of people in the media who were just used to reading the news thought, oh no,

excuse me, there's a huge difference between what I do

and what a journalist does.

And now they've just merged into one, and there is no, I don't think there is such a thing as a journalist.

I said to Megan Kelly

that when I watched the 2016 and 2020 presidential debates,

I was watching vaudeville.

I was not watching a debate that had anything to do with the presidency.

So much so that I expected in 2016

that the next one in 2020, they would be wearing red noses and funny, floppy feet

and and she basically agreed yeah

and it's not reality it's a game we're watching i've never felt in almost everything i've never felt all the world is but a stage as much as right now it feels like we are

everything is just a play that's not what's really going on what's really going on is behind the set

we're being delivered this and arguing about this, and that's not it.

It's this stuff that we know is happening.

It's happening back here, and nobody wants to recognize it.

How about the fact that we have not waged a legal war

since Korea?

And I'm giving it to Korea because it was that phone call overnight that forced him into action.

But, you know, the Congress has been completely left out of its power.

They gave it away.

Yeah, they gave it away.

Lyndon Johnson took it, and that was the end.

Yeah.

And

I'm sorry.

I'm a constitutionalist.

Yep.

And that means if you're going to go and give away your most precious resource, your children.

Children.

You've got to convince people who are against this war.

Yes.

And that doesn't mean, in my opinion, it doesn't mean that the president, because of the way things are today, we could be dead in 12 minutes.

It doesn't mean the president doesn't have some leeway to take some action until Congress can get their crap together.

But after 30 days, dude, you don't have that?

We're not there.

Pull them back.

Right.

And when Bill Fulbright had floorwalked the

War Powers Act from Johnson through the Senate because he had been told to do that and he had been told it was true.

When he walked that through,

that's when he realized there had never been a Gulf of Tonkin incident, which he was basing all of it on.

And he went to war against Johnson.

And that's why the war was papered over with investigation and

committees and committees and committees until the President of the United States and the Defense Secretary were hidden in the Oval Office at 2 o'clock in the morning designing airstrikes.

They were so hugely fought.

And I felt so sorry for Lyndon Johnson because I knew Lyndon Johnson wanted to compete with only one man, and that was FDR.

Because to him, FDR was the be-all and end-all.

So he tried to wage a war and fight the war on poverty.

And

sorry, Lyndon,

there's not enough money in the printing press

to do that.

And

when he said that afternoon,

I have been your president for the last five years, I burst into tears.

And I had been fighting him in every

Century City, Century Plaza hotel, all of the things that we did to stay out of that war.

And

I heard Eisenhower's speech.

I did not hear it then.

I heard it many times.

The military industrial complex.

That is, if we would just read that speech, we misinterpreted military-industrial complex

and it goes into the education complex and the scientific community and that complex.

That is the merger between big money,

big tech, big science, big war, whatever, all of that working with the government and providing the answers that

most empowerment.

I don't name an institution in America that has not been thoroughly corrupted.

I don't think so either.

Education,

the courts,

the media,

these are all,

these are all now victims of money, of profit.

And when I went.

And

greed and power.

I mean, individuals who just greed is money.

Yeah, yeah.

And so I live in San Diego, sorry.

And in San Diego,

it's a doctor's town.

I mean, yikes, there are more doctors in San Diego.

And

someone was sick in my family, and we went to a doctor, and I noticed his business card, and it said on his card, concierge medicine.

And I said to the doctor, do you know what this says?

He says, what?

I said, it's been a plank of the Republican Party for 85 years.

That's all it is.

And what they did did to achieve it, because it's on the card,

pay more, get better service.

Now,

that means that they took the obligations of a doctor, which are known to everyone,

24-hour availability, hitching up

best and going in the middle of the night, all the things,

and drew a line and said, the rich get all of this that's on top, and the poor get all of this,

which is not.

And

I watched them mistreat my own mother-in-law, who spoke no English,

when she tried to use the bathroom in the doctor's private office.

And a nurse in the office literally

held her out of the bathroom until my wife,

and you don't screw around with my wife.

I know, I know.

Okay.

I know.

She

eviscerated that nurse.

And

more power to her.

We have forgotten the politeness.

We,

this is hard to say, but when

hotel people

get my wife and I in a hotel,

they will be rude.

The normal thing is to be rude until they find out that the guy is a movie star, and then they become obsequious.

And

what you learn in school called civics

is, among other things, civility,

which cannot be learned in any other way.

It's not handed down through the bloodline.

It is not just politeness.

It is the oxygen that Republican democracies require, or else they'll die.

And that's more than politeness.

And when you realize, we have now been raised without charm school or civics or civility for 50 years.

And that means that every person who works in a doctor's office or in retail or anywhere else

has the right to mistreat you.

I remember, I'm old now.

I'm an old Jew, and I remember

what it was like

when you

dealt with

Macy's,

they would say, we don't have it, but if you go down the block, you'll get it at that store.

They're not allowed to say that anymore.

They don't say that anymore.

If they don't have it,

it doesn't exist.

And

bus.

And how about

let's give immigrants who've just arrived within the last 80 hours

a cab to ride,

to run.

He doesn't know what Madison Avenue is, much less where Central Park is.

And that's just nonsense.

That's crippling the country.

I have lived since my graduation from high school

in a spiral of decay.

I have only known politics to become worse and live off distraction and denial

when first there was Willie Horton, then there was the flag

amendment, and each presidential

election was decided on

hot air.

That's since I graduated.

And

no attempt has been made

in any other way to teach civility

and to teach kindness.

And I would say it's gasoline on the fire of social media.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Because there's no payoff in teaching what the churches used to teach and now are a joke, all of them.

You said it earlier.

Every institution

has either been corrupted or betrayed its position.

Yeah.

Final segment with Richard Drevis here in just a second.

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We are so over time.

Can I just tell you one thing?

There are only two performances that have ever stuck with me

that I actually wanted to watch the Oscars because it mattered to me.

And

your performance in

The Goodbye Girl, when you are drunk and you, I can play this role, and you start reciting Richard III.

Thank you for that.

It was one of the greatest performances.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I have to tell you that

I'm an actor.

I'm walking up Broadway, and a Serbian grandmother walks up to me and says,

Thank you.

That's the best thing I could possibly get.

And that means

I was successful.

And I could talk for

years and years about the nobility of acting.

And I'm not kidding.

That's why it bothered me so much that someone invented this feud thing about me and Robert Shaw because

I had so much respect for him.

And then I was on an Irish talk show not that long ago, and I was introduced to his granddaughter.

And I lost it.

I burst into tears.

And then I told her she had never met him.

I told her story after story after story.

And then we were on the show.

Then the show was on.

And

the host said,

I saw you crying backstage because you were talking to Robert Shaw's granddaughter.

What was that all about?

And I burst into tears again, and I couldn't explain

that

he was a grand

personality.

He was a great artist.

He was a writer and an actor.

And he

deserved my devotion.

And one day he said, I know,

I'll play.

I'll play Claudius to your Hamlet if you play the fool to my Lear.

And I said, you got it, but not for 10 years.

And he said, why?

I said, because you'll burn me off the stage, that's why.

And that's what we were planning.

Well,

why does,

when I said that to you, what is it

Because I understand the Shaw story, but when I said that about the good fight girl,

why does that

impact you?

And I'm asking for a selfish reason because I'm 60 now and getting to the age where you kind of,

you know, you look back at everything and you're like, what was really worth it.

So I'm wondering,

what was that?

The honest truth is

I bet money against myself

when people said I would be nominated for a film called The Apprenticeship of Duty Kravitz.

And I knew I wouldn't be, and I made money.

And then I was told I was nominated for The Goodbye Girl, and I asked who else is nominated.

And when they said Richard Burton,

Marcello Mustriani

Whoever.

Whoever.

Yeah.

Woody Allen.

And I said, I'm going to win.

Because I knew what their stories were and where they were perceived by the Academy.

And I won a fortune.

And the next year, I won a lot of money, really,

because I asked, who won best actor last year?

And I was the answer.

No one got it.

That's what the Oscars are.

They're a fun night

and that's all.

Yeah, but the Oscar is, it wasn't.

That's why I said there's only two performances.

One was Peter O'Toole in my favorite year, a speech he gave at the very end that is,

I just love it.

And

it just comes alive.

I'm going to kill you right now.

Why?

Because when my series, which was The Education of Max Bickford, The Story of a Professor, and it was an adult story, every week was an adult story,

CBS called on the day and said, we're not picking you up.

And I laughed, I joked, because I thought they were kidding.

And then they made themselves clear.

And I said, Peter O'Toole

wants to play

second fiddle

on every episode of the second year.

And they said, Peter O'Toole.

Oh my gosh.

And I went nuts.

You know

what it means to have Peter O'Toole.

I know what that means.

And they said, Peter O'Toole.

And I just went nuts.

And I'm

happy that the guy who made that decision is out of CBS because he's a sexual maniac.

I'm going to let you say that and no comment on that.

No names, just said it.

Hello.

One last question.

I've done everything I can,

you know, hoping and praying.

doing everything I can that my daughter

just did not have the talent to act.

Unfortunately, she does,

but I do not.

God, I don't want her going there.

But my folks supported me in this, and there was no chance of this working.

What is the most important thing you've learned that you wish you knew at the beginning of your career?

I don't think anything could have been told to me that would have persuaded me away from it.

No, I'm not saying persuade away.

I'm saying if she goes in

which she plans on doing

what is the advice that you would give to anybody going in that you wish you would have had if you want to be an actor in America you can fulfill that up to the gagoons

in almost any city in America because they have local

and they have regional and they have Shakespeare.

But if you want to be a movie star,

then you have to go to LA or New York.

And

those are rough,

rough towns.

And we don't live in LA

because

in 204, I

retired

and went to Oxford for four years to learn this subject of

civility and civics and the damage being done to my country.

And

I gave up something I loved and had loved since I was nine years old

only for something else I loved as much, which was saving my country.

And I firmly believe that if we don't revive the study of civics, we will be dead before 2050.

We'll have the same name.

Long before.

And it'll be a nightmare.

So

I

had led

a blessed life.

And I gave it up for a blessed life.

And

I think that this book

is not perfect, but boy is it, Richard.

And it

infuriates me

that people don't

understand

what this place means, what an advance on human progress, this country, is all about,

and how quickly we can abandon it

without a second thought.

I once said that

we hold this pearl in our hands,

and then we think, nah, who cares?

And we toss it away, and it lands at the top of the stairs, and we trip over it, and we fall down through this state of constant decay

until we reach Donald Trump and

the cheapening of every great

thought

and every great move

that we gave to humanity.

And it just kills me.

It's beyond my ability to comprehend

why

people who are in a position

to burnish our reputation,

make it filth

choose to make it filth i just don't get it

may i say

i don't know of

somebody

that is as accomplished as you

who is as different

as you

That I've

I

walk away with

profound respect.

You are a remarkable, remarkable man.

Thank you for loving your country so much.

Thank you.

Just a reminder, I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it can be discovered by other people.

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