440: David Mamet—Whore That I Am

Well, they say you should never meet your heroes,

but they're wrong.

Totally.

Are you kidding me?

This is great.

Absolutely.

It's terrific.

I haven't been nervous really on this podcast.

I've been apprehensive because I don't often understand, you know, like early on the tech and like really what we were doing, but I haven't been nervous interviewing anybody.

And I wasn't really nervous interviewing David Mammet, but I was in my head a little bit.

Just a little bit, yeah.

I mean, I was right there with you, man, and I was just watching and I was like, hmm.

This episode is called Whore That I Am.

And why is it called that, Mike?

Because David Mammet, among many other excellent decisions, had the good taste to marry Rebecca Pidgeon, an amazing actress.

And

she suggested to him, apparently, that he should proceed all of his interviews by introducing himself, or that I am, and then make his point, right?

Yeah.

Boy, that made me laugh.

A lot of things made me laugh in this conversation.

If you're not up to speed, David Mammet is an American playwright, screenwriter, film director, author, widely recognized for his distinctive dialogue style, an exploration of themes such as power, corruption, and the American dream.

But why would I read all that when I could just say one of your first plays, Chuck, that you ever did?

Yeah, yeah.

Was a Mammot played.

I think it was 1983.

I don't even know that it had been on Broadway for very long, if at all, because I saw a preview performance of American Buffalo with Al Pacino and an actor by the name of James Hayden who went to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.

We had the very same acting teacher.

The Postman always rings twice.

The verdict, The Untouchables, House of Games.

Things change.

Homicide, Glenn Gary, Glenn Ross, Wag the Dog, The Spanish Prisoner, Heist,

Hannibal.

I mean, and that's just films' as screenwriting or directing.

You go down through his TV and his literary and his nonfiction, just blah, blah, blah.

The guy's.

He's done a million things.

I mean, he may be the greatest living playwright.

Reasonable people could disagree, but I would not.

I totally agree.

And I'll tell you, my favorite movie of his that he also directed was State and Maine.

State and Maine, 25 years ago.

I just love it.

Yeah.

So why was I in my head?

Because I sent David Mammet a traditional talent release that everybody on the podcast has to sign.

I've signed 100 of these things over my life and I hate them.

Everybody hates them, but you just kind of sign them because the lawyers run the world.

But, you know, if you're David Mammet and you're 76 years old, you read it and you go, oh, bull crap.

And then you start making notes and crossing stuff out.

So he said, the greatest living playwright sends me back a release outlining what he'll do and what he wants.

He's rewritten the release.

Yeah.

Right.

Now, what am I going to do?

I'm like, am I going to rewrite David Mammet?

Wow.

I don't want to rewrite David Mammet, but my partner, you know, and my legal team are like, well, look, if you want to be able to put this on YouTube, you're going to have to ask him to rethink it.

Long story short, we had some release drama, and it led, and we'll talk about this later in the conversation, but it led me to completely rewrite the whole thing.

without lawyers.

I still need to get it approved, but my goal is just to get all the legal mumbo jumbo out of these things and just talk to people like they're human beings because honestly i think that's what pissed him off you know there was just stuff in here that was kind of silly and it wasn't really gently proffered

yes he objected to the word um alter

right he doesn't want you to alter his image is fair well not his image but his points or whatever well his point was like look mike i mean honestly i signed this you could put a beagle head on my body and make me bark sounds and i couldn't do it

i was like well technically, I guess we could.

I suppose I could.

Well, I'm not going to do that, but whore that I am,

I am going to tell you this.

This is, I think, one of the only episodes we're going to do that's going to come with a.

What's the warning that has to accompany?

Well, basically, I'm marking this episode explicit, which isn't really explicit.

Why not?

Let me just say, this is David Mammet.

And if you're familiar with David Mammet, you know that he uses colorful language, and this would just be nothing but a series of duck quacks if we

and honestly you know what man you and i have talked about this a bunch we're all grown-ups here we ought to be able to talk freely but i also know and i'm very very lucky to have a lot of uh families who listen to this or a lot of kids who often listen to this and if you're okay with them hearing the f-bomb yeah explode multiple times but if you're not you have been warned You have been warned because poor than I am,

I would be remiss if I didn't tell you that this is an excellent episode with a living legend that gets a little potty mouthed here and there.

Little bet.

A little bet.

A little spicy.

I loved it.

I bet you will too.

Whore that I am.

How many times are you going to say that?

I just like the way it sounds.

With David Mamet right after this.

It's funny how sometimes you don't see things until you start looking for them.

And ever since Company Cam started sponsoring this podcast, I've been looking at tradespeople on job sites taking pictures of their work and sending them off to their supervisor this is not new as long as there have been smartphones skilled workers have been documenting their work with photos but now they're doing it with a new level of ease and efficiency thanks to company cam clients today expect to see how their projects are progressing at every stage and companies need to provide their clients with visual proof of what's happening on the job site.

Obviously, taking pictures is easy, but organizing all those photos in a way that's truly useful has been an absolute nightmare.

That's why Company Cam is crushing it.

On the management side, Company Cam has made it absurdly easy to track a project's progress, be it a roof, a foundation, or anything in between.

On the workers' side, it's incredibly easy to execute.

The result?

Over a billion photos so far, dramatic improvements in customer communication, customer satisfaction, and overall efficiency.

Schedule a free demo at companycam.com.

And while you're there, check out a gajillion or so five-star reviews.

People love this thing.

There are countless glowing testimonials and a simple explanation as to why so many skilled workers with a job to do are getting it done with Company Cam.

That's companycam.com.

If anyone, anyone can,

it's company cam.

It's company cam.

The legendary David Mammet has just handed me his phone.

And it says, great playwright and filmmaker David Mammet just wrote an incredible new book, The Disenlightenment, Politics, Horror, and Entertainment.

David is a special man and talent.

Get this book now.

And of course, now is in caps with an explanation point.

Well, I guess this is it.

Your ship's finally come in.

Well, you got to tell them who the quote's from.

Oh, Donald J.

Trump.

Yeah.

My dude.

What a weird life you're living, brother.

That I'm living?

Yeah, well, sure.

Who coined the expression of the great man in history?

Do you know?

It was probably Catherine the Great, because that's what she was looking for.

But she expressed it not as the great man, but in Russian, it's a number of inches.

Yeah, you're just horsing around now.

Yeah, I see.

Exactly so.

Hey, thank you for making the time to do this.

You're so welcome.

I appreciate it.

Like most of the people who interview you, I know enough probably to be dangerous, but I feel...

Chuck, did you tell him that you were an American Buffalo once upon a time?

I did when I was out of breath coming up the five flight of stairs, yes.

How many people have told you that over the years?

A lot.

It's pretty, it's great.

I was writing those.

Two kinds of plays there were one with the Apollonian and one with the Dionysian.

And the Dionysian plays came out of my experience doing the kind of jobs you're talking about in Chicago.

And one of them was Glen Garry when I was working in a boiler room, selling non-existent land for a year.

And one of them was when I was doing various things and hanging out in a poker game with a lot of thieves.

And I wrote American Buffalo about that.

So great.

That was at, I want to say Fells Point.

Fells Point Theater.

Fells Point.

Yeah, theater once upon a time in Baltimore.

This is going to be difficult because I'm interested in really everything that I know of that you've done, which means there's a bunch of stuff you have done that I'd be even more interested in, but I don't really know how to ask you about that.

And I would desperately like not to ask you a series of questions that you've already answered ad nauseum over the last two months in the course of promoting your amazing new book and the film, Henry Johnson, which I've only seen the trailers.

Well, you got to see the movie.

It's good.

I'm halfway through your book, and I've only seen the trailer for Henry Johnson.

And I'm just going to say,

I was never opposed to Shia LaBeouf at all, but I never saw him as a great actor, and I'm starting to think he might be.

Oh, I always saw him as a great actor.

Did you?

Oh, yeah.

If you look at him in Honey Boy or Peanut Butter Falcon, this guy's...

I never worked with a better actor.

So he plays a convict in this.

It's a stunning performance.

That's insanely high cotton.

You've never worked with a better actor?

No, I've worked with actors who were as good.

And I worked with everybody, but I never worked with a better actor.

Wow.

You just made him feel in much the same way I bet you felt when you just read that five-star review from the 47th President.

Well, the other thing is true too.

It's the when an actor says, give me this stuff, I'll say it all day.

That's a spectacular compliment.

When they say, my God, thank you, glug, glug, glug.

That's...

And that's pretty great.

And that's what he said.

And that's what Melcovich said to him.

I'm about to do another movie, another, another movie with John Melcovich and El Pacino and Shaya and Rebecca Pidge.

Everybody's going to be in it.

Patty Lupone.

And these are guys I've worked with forever.

And when they say, yeah, like I did a play with Malkovich in London, in the West End, and I sent him the script one day, like five o'clock in the morning in Boston.

He called me back two hours later, said, yeah, I read it twice, I'll do it.

Where are we going when?

Which is the best thing in having a coterie and also having a certain reputation.

Regarding the coterie, I mean, it doesn't always happen, but it seems to happen a fair amount, you know, when you think of Scorsese and De Niro, et cetera.

How does it happen?

Like, is it the result of maybe the Spanish prisoner?

I'm thinking of Rebecca Pidgin.

And, like, when did you know that this was a group of people who you were absolutely going to work?

Well, it was always a group of people.

I mean, I started out in Chicago 50 years ago and more on the stage with William H.

Macy, and then it was Laurie Metcalfe, and then it was Billy Peterson, and then there was Melcovich, and his people came in, and we were all part of a garage theater.

And Joey Montagna and Dennis Franz, all part of a garage theater, Melieu.

And we were all hard-working.

Is that French?

Melieu, yeah.

It means a medium, a medium of friendship.

That's what he does, man.

Well, wait a minute.

Is Sinise in this orbit?

Sinise, yeah.

Gary and John came in with the Steppenwolf Theater.

They're a little bit younger than we are.

And they took over our space.

We had this space in the garage on Halston Street, around the corner from Bradley Field, and then they took over before us, but Laurie Metcalf had been working with us previously.

It was a great time.

See, the thing is, it's like what you know is what you learn.

So what we learned was get together with the people who say you bet.

And one of them says, you know what?

I'm going to write the next play.

Say, yeah, sure.

I'm going to direct the next play.

Yeah, sure.

So that's how you build a theater company.

And that's how you create not only actors, but writers.

And trust, maybe?

Well, of course, because, you know, the Chicago cops say of their partner, the best place, they say, you know what, fuck it, you're right.

And if you're not right, fuck it anyway.

So that's kind of been, like, I just called Patty Lupone, you know, I just called on the way up.

I said, I'm doing this new thing, I need you to.

Because with these people who are your brothers and sisters in arms, the answer, unless they're dead or otherwise engaged is, yes, sure.

Right.

So what could be better?

Not much.

But philosophically, I did want to ask you, because you kind of glossed over it when you were just talking about what an extraordinary time that was.

Did you know it was an extraordinary time when you were in the midst of it?

Of course we did.

What do you mean, of course?

Well, because we were having a time of our lives.

But you hadn't lived enough.

to know that it was true.

It was the time of your life up until that point.

But you know what I mean?

Like, you're older than you've ever been right now.

Aren't we all?

Yes, we are.

But I mean, I know that I've changed a bunch over the years.

And the way I remember things seems to, oh, I don't know, fade in and out like some things suddenly become more significant than I ever thought they would be.

The way I heard it is why it's kind of what inspired that whole sort of point.

And when I think about your own life, not just as an artist, but as a person with ideas and opinions and strongly held beliefs and the way many of those changed changed and morphed.

Moved.

Beliefs changed, certainly, but my dedication that I learned very, very young to

I hate to use the word art, but I guess I have to.

To art has never changed.

The idea was that's where the fun was.

So to say, well, how could you say that was the best time of your life when you were young?

Well, you could say that to the first time, the guy's 20 years old, he falls head over on the heels with a girlfriend and they go off to the beach

for a wild weekend.

You could say, how could you say,

you didn't have enough experience experience to say that that was the most magnificent thing, but being young doesn't debar you from having ecstatic experiences.

Of course not.

But I'm just, I forget who you were talking to, but somebody asked a similar question, and you didn't say, because that's where the fun was, you said, because that's where the money was.

And I think that person said, isn't that what...

No, you said it.

Willie,

who was the bank robber?

Willie Sutton.

That's where the money is.

Yeah, but that's not where the money was.

And that was part of the joy of being young and in Chicago.

When they say, to be in England was a very dream, and to be young was very heaven.

We were all very young.

We were working very hard, having a time of our life.

And there was not only wasn't any money, there was no chance of any money because you couldn't make money doing theater in a garage.

So what we were doing, just like

that British group, the Beatles, were

we were working day jobs in order to put on these plays at night because we were having a time of our life.

I always felt after that,

when I'm directing something, whether on stage or in the movies, if you're not having a time of your life, you're in a lot of trouble.

Jokes on you.

And the thing is, as a director, both on the stage and in the movies, there's a person who's in charge of seeing that everyone's having a time of their life, and that person's the director.

And if something other than that is happening, someone is at fault, and it's the director.

Because why not?

I mean, what's more fun than making a movie or putting on a play?

Nothing.

But what's more different than making a movie or putting on a play?

You know, one is rooted in,

as we were making our coffee and tea earlier, we were talking about

the business of live, you know.

Live, an hour takes an hour.

A half hour takes a half hour.

My appearance on Trey Gowdy, you mentioned the other night, took five minutes and 40 seconds.

And I knew exactly, I knew that's how long it was going to take before I sat down.

There's no cut, in other words.

Movies are all just cuts, right?

And so how do you think when you're writing a play versus writing a screenplay that you know is going to be filmed?

Sound is very important because when you write a screenplay,

the sound that comes from the screen is going to have to compete against the sound of people eating popcorn.

But when you write a play, the sound that comes from the stage is going to have to compete against the sound of people turning their programs because they're bored out of their fucking mind.

The audience, then, is not too dissimilar.

You've got people who are fidgeting.

It's a war for their attention, essentially.

But there's a sparseness about the stage, I think, that you can get away with that you can't necessarily in film.

Although sometimes your stuff migrates pretty well, but when I think of the Fantastics or Our Town, right, or some of these great plays that were written, I guess, before you were writing, I think, maybe, close to it.

Wilder and Tom Johnson.

Yeah, Our Town

is in, I believe it's in the 30s and The Fantastics.

I was actually worked in the first production of Fantastics off Broadway, and that was 1967.

It had been running part a year, ran for 40 years more.

And I was a house manager, an usher, an assistant stage manager.

So I had to say that freaking thing eight times a week.

So you hate it now?

No, no, I hated it then.

My point is, what the heck was that in the way of a set?

And how important is a set?

Right, a very good point.

A set is not important.

Here's how we know, that we can listen to a great play on the radio when we lose nothing.

So the question is, can you do a play on a bare stage?

And if you can,

it's probably a pretty good play.

The next question is, is it possible to create a scenic environment that's better than a bare stage?

And the answer is yes, but it takes a lot of talent.

Writing talent, directing talent, acting talent.

So it takes designing talent to do something that's better than a bare stage.

Because what you want to do is engage the audience's attention.

And you want to engage their suspension of disbelief.

It's one way to say it, but the other thing is you want them to say, yeah, okay, tell me a story.

So most of the things that are called production values in the theater are garbage.

They're trying to gild the lily,

right, rather than to focus the attention.

Do you believe production is the enemy of authenticity?

Well, no, you got to produce a play.

The question is, what are you going to, you're going to make choices, whatever you do.

The question is,

as they say, first, do no harm.

Even if it's a play on stage with three chairs, you've got to pick the chairs, you've got to pick the costumes, and you've got to pick the lighting.

But the question is, what do you do next?

And the answer always is maybe something

and maybe nothing, but what you don't want the audience to do is leave a play talk or a movie talking about the production values because that means they had a wretched time.

Where does that leave musical theater?

Where does it leave Moulin Rouge?

Where does it leave the spectacle?

All of it?

I don't know.

See, what's happened in theater, Broadway became a tourist destination.

And so what the tourists want to say legitimately is spectacle.

People don't want to go to Las Vegas and see The Lower Depths by Maxim Gorky, right?

They want to see a spectacle.

They want to see, you know,

Cirque du Soleil.

Well, of course, as the French taught us, they want to see tits and ass, and they want to see lights, and they want to see people jumping off of things.

That's a spectacle.

There's nothing wrong with that.

But that's not the business I'm in.

What business are you in?

I'm in the business of plays and movies.

I'm in the business of telling a story.

So if you can tell a story, it's like telling a joke, there's no difference, right?

If I say, you know, an ostrich, a priest, and a whore go into a laundromat, it doesn't matter what costume I have on, right?

I've just almost semi-hypnotically induced you to go along and enter into my family.

It does beg a series of questions that I'm going to insist on answering.

Yeah, okay.

I mean, when you say an ostrich, are you talking the Asian or the African?

This is a cassowary, I assume, with two, not three, claws.

Oh, okay.

This cassowary is very, very different than an ostrich, which is very different than a kiwi.

A lot of people would consider consider that a microaggression i'm one of them

i saw an ostrich once yeah charge an open door on an f-150 and tear it off its hinge these things can go from zero to 40 miles an hour in about six steps their breastplate is so thick you can shoot it with a.38 caliber and the slug will bounce off.

Their knees are all

jacked up crazy power.

Their eyes are bigger than the eyes of a shark.

Their brains are about the size of a marble.

These are dinosaurs.

They'll kick in the next one.

Pug Ugly.

But did you know that an armadillo can beat an ostrich over 100 yards?

In a foot race?

Yeah.

Stamina?

Like the ostrich peaks today?

No, I just made that up.

Oh, see.

Well, there you go.

That's not really a story so much as a

lie.

You just call a liar.

It's a prevarication.

Yeah.

Is it okay to lie to the audience?

No, of course not.

Listen, how would one lie to the audience?

One can abuse the audience.

One can very easy to abuse.

Well, let's say this ostrich, this priest and this whore didn't go into a laundromat.

Have we just been lied to?

Or is that some sort of literary permission you've given you?

Here's how you abuse the audience.

I'll show you how.

Believe me, listeners of this podcast know.

Oh, good.

So I say, what an armed-all an ostrich and none go into a whorehouse.

And so you're waiting.

You've given up your reason, for example.

You parked it over there.

Say, no, no, I haven't lost my mind.

I'm just giving it up for a second.

You are going to tell me a story at the end of which I'm probably going to laugh because something was revealed to me about myself, my thought process, I didn't know.

Ha ha ha ha ha.

But if I say an ostrich, an armadillo and a priest go into a whorehouse and you say yeah, and I say, how dare you respond like that?

I mean, why would you think a priest would go into a whorehouse?

With an armadillo or possibly an ostrich or the aforementioned nun.

What you're saying is we buy

the premise, whatever it is, unless you happen to come across a person of extraordinary skepticism or disagreeability who might immediately jump in and go, wait a second, ostriches don't walk into laundromats and priests don't walk into whorehouses, at least not in normal business hours.

So to accept the premise on its face.

That's a really interesting relationship.

Well, exactly so because you've set the boundaries.

You've said I'm going to tell you a joke.

You can park your reason for a second.

You don't have to say, is it a conservative or a liberal ostrich?

You can park it for a second.

It's not going to hurt you.

Because when you're listening to a joke, or when you're listening to a play or a movie, you say, I get it.

I've parked my thing because you aren't going to take advantage of me.

Most of the political and quasi-political garbage that's in movies, television, and plays is we park.

our rationality and then people try to sell us something.

It's as if you went to the dentist and he put you under nitrous oxide and then fucked you, right?

I did not pay for that.

I'm not going to let that happen again, for sure.

It takes a whole other dimension to turn your head and spit.

Oh.

See what I did?

Yeah, I did.

I took it from merely unerable to promotable.

Yeah, that's right.

Now it gets cut into the open.

Oh, great.

What's the funniest thing you've ever written?

Dumb.

It occurs to me that David Mammet, like many other guests on this podcast, is a true American giant.

Arguably, he's our greatest living playwright, and his legacy in that regard is already assured.

For that reason, I probably should have given him an American Giant sweatshirt as an expression of my thanks for talking to me for 90 minutes today.

In fact, I should probably start giving all of my guests an American Giant sweatshirt because, frankly, I can't think of a better expression of gratitude than a high-quality garment made here in the USA.

For 15 years now, American Giant has been delivering on a pledge to make American clothing spun from American cotton, crafted by American workers who live in the American towns where American Giant decided to build their factories and invest their resources.

Today, they're not just cranking out quality sweatshirts and t-shirts and jeans and all the other essentials.

They're creating jobs in this country.

reinvigorating towns in this country, and proving that it's still possible to make quality goods at a fair price in these United States.

This is why I encourage you to support American Giant and all the other sponsors of this podcast who insist on making their stuff in America.

The better way is never the easier way, and if we want to be truly independent, we can't depend on other countries to grow our food, mine our energy, provide our timber, manufacture our medicine, or make our clothes.

So, do me a favor: go to American-giant.com/slash Mike and buy something awesome.

Use code Mike to get 20% off your order.

AmericanDash Giant.com slash Mike.

American Giant, American Made.

American Giant, American Made.

The funniest thing I've ever written was a book called Wilson, which is curiously

about a time 3,000 years from now when all the knowledge has been put onto computers and the computers have crashed.

And so people are trying to reconstruct the 20th century from artifacts.

And the most precious artifact to them is a note written by Edith Wilson, who's the president's wife.

She was the actual president when he was out of his mind.

Right.

In her own urine.

1917, 17.

Yeah, 1918, I think.

In her own urine.

And so there's a thousand years of scholarship about what this note meant.

And that's a pretty funny book.

Wilson.

Yeah.

I haven't read it.

That's one of you.

Oh, nobody's read it.

That's what makes it funny.

Actually, I have an ostrich friend who read it and said it was just a kick.

So, Glenn Gary?

Yeah.

Have you seen the current version?

Yeah, it's great.

Yeah, they're doing great.

Why is it great?

Well, it's a terrific play and terrific cast.

I mean, what else do you want?

They could pass out little things that say, if you collect 14 of these, we'll give you 10% 10% off on Rinso White and Rinso Blue, but they don't got to.

The thing that's,

forgive me again, you've talked about it a thousand times, but Chuck, I even remember back in the day when you were doing American Buffalo, that was maybe your second play?

Something like that, I don't know.

It was a long time ago.

Yeah.

But even then, there was like a weird,

forgive me, not weird, but there was a reverence around the words.

And I remember the guy who was directing that, was it Walter Huber, maybe?

Walter Huber actually played Teach.

Yeah, right.

And you played like Bobby?

Bobby, that's right.

I played Bobby.

I remember going out for drinks with these guys while they were rehearsing, and the conversation was, we just can't mess with any of it.

All right, what's he mean here with this dash versus this ellipses?

What's he mean here?

And so that was really the first time I heard actors talking with that level of reverence.

Yeah, and care.

Yeah.

So, what how did that happen with your second play?

I get it now, but I mean, there's just this eternal struggle, it seems, between actors who want to make things their own, directors who might want to take a spin, versus writers, right, who'd normally take it in the neck, but occasionally one comes along who you dare not screw with.

Well, they finally gave Henry Fonda an Oscar for all of his great work.

It was a lifetime achievement.

Oscar meant thank you, go die now.

So he said he wanted to thank all the directors who broke him of his good ideas.

Wow.

Nobody ever liked my work except two groups.

One is the actors, the other is the audience.

So

an actor who sees the worth of my work, which is very flatteringly most of them,

wants to do that work.

They don't want to use it as an excuse, right, to quote be themselves or to, quote, investigate the character.

All they have to do is get up there and the great ones realize that

and say the stupid fucking words right right because that's all there is right there isn't any character beyond that

well if you take

your finest script and compare it to

I don't know Mozart

you know something that's been written it's just language right notes over here words and letters over here well exactly it's the same thing you know you don't want to take a Mozart and say, you know, we mind if I improvise, you know, you mind if I, you know,

do it or don't do it.

And yet, have you come across John Batiste

before?

No, who's that?

He's a piano player and a singer.

I first found him when I heard him playing Beethoven for Elise.

with a ragtime Scott Joplin take just kind of creeping into it.

And it incited between my mother and I a real conversation about heresy, art, inspiration, good, bad, right, wrong, stupid, pointless.

What do you do with that?

And I don't have a good answer.

I mean, I.

But why not?

You know?

Yeah, it's easy to play a fur-release for ragtime, but it's harder to write the lyrics.

And my daughter, Clara, did it.

It was furry, furry, furry, furry, furry, furry, furry, fur-release.

Chuck, make a note.

Turns out that Wilson wasn't the funniest thing David Mammet ever did.

It was that.

Noted.

What's furry mean?

It means for Elise.

He wrote it for some broad name, Elise.

Are you sure Elise wasn't covered in hair?

No, I'm not.

I just went out of furry leash, right?

Yeah.

Did you write always be closing, or was that already an idiom?

No, that's an idiom.

It's ancient.

That's ancient.

I thought so, too.

Yeah.

But back to glengarry that uh

that stuck but what really stuck for me and what i should have asked you about initially because you brought it up was just the business of

oh it is the business of lying it's cons

it's grifters and thieves you described in your poker game and you know writing about

you know petty crooks in american buffalo and maybe bigger crooks in glengarry house of games directed that i believe right

Yeah.

So

you ever been swindled?

You've been constantly.

Of course.

Me too.

You ever go to the doctor's?

I have.

I have.

Yeah.

You ever buy a car in a car lot?

I have, yeah.

Okay.

So what's that about?

Anyone who walks onto the card lot wants to get swindled.

We're going to say, my God, where'd you get that shirt?

And where do you work out?

Your wife is so pretty over there.

What are you driving?

Oh, that's a very, very good car.

I'm glad you came over here because I got a special thing.

Right?

Ha ha ha, this guy really loves me.

Any car you drive off the lot, next week it's a hunk of junk.

It's a freaking car, right?

So somebody said, a crush is an absence of information.

Right?

That's good, isn't it?

A crush is an absence of.

Wow, I mean, that's pretty fatalistic.

You're saying the more you know, the less you love.

Not necessarily.

Not necessarily.

The information might be good or bad, but a crush is an absence of it.

You get the endor fence, bam, now all of a sudden, wow, you know, please take my money, I'm gonna leave my wife and blah, blah, blah.

I'm gonna lose my thing.

My kids will never talk to me.

But hi, honey, what are you doing tonight?

So how does that translate to your work?

I mean, if the audience starts out with an absence of information,

of course, they must be ignorant because the play hasn't begun yet.

But then you tease them along.

Well, that's the whole point, and that's what most people, very few people understand.

It's very hard to write a play because most people just don't have, most people can't tell a joke.

Did you ever notice that?

I have.

There were apparently these two Irishmen,

and the one guy

says to his,

right, they don't know how to tell a joke.

So if you don't know how to tell a joke, you don't know how to write a play, because a play is basically a joke.

I want to get your attention, I'm going to lead you along, make you wonder what's going to happen next, and then pay it off in a way you didn't understand.

There's no difference between that, a joke, and Othello.

Except for maybe two and a half hours.

Yeah, that's right.

But also,

it's possible to condense plays, and part of the problem is they're overwritten.

I wrote a ten-second version of Oedipus Rex.

So it takes place on a windswept mountain in Thebes at Rise.

Oedipus and a kindly shepherd, right?

Oedipus says, ho, kindly shepherd, what news?

Shepherd says, you fucked your mother.

Jocasta, as I recall.

That's right, you bet.

Yeah, one of the greatest

peripatetas, I think Aristotle would have called it, right?

And I mean, maybe one of the first ones.

That whole notion of...

I riffed on that years ago when somebody invited me to do a TED talk of all things, but anagnoresis and peripatetia and the Aristotelian definition of a tragedy vis-à-vis dirty jobs struck me as an interesting way to maybe string out a story, maybe surprise.

Well, you know, what Aristotle says, you don't want to string out the story, you want to condense it, right?

A single action, right?

Single place,

a day and a half.

You want to condense it, you don't want to struggle.

Well, condense the time.

Yeah.

But the story itself, I guarantee you, you do a 10-second version of Othello at Broadway, they're going to be calls for some sort of refund.

I like Shakespeare very much.

First off, he was like me, he was a Jew, and secondly, he was a terrific writer.

But I think it's very easy.

The one bit that I'd put in if I could fix

Othello,

right, is

Othello turns to Iago before the fact and he says,

Iago, where's my lucky pillow?

Where's my lucky pillow?

Yeah.

No, no, no.

That's uh that's Macbeth.

Yeah, Othello, Yago.

Oh, I got nothing.

I want so bad to have a pithy

Othello thing, but no, I don't have it.

Crap.

I got some Macbeth.

No, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh-uh.

Do not say that word.

Oh, right.

That's a theater thing, right?

Yeah, but we're not before a performance, are we?

We're not in a theater.

We're not in a theater.

No, it still counts.

That's interesting.

Explain that, old...

What is that?

I can't and I won't, but the Greeks, right,

spent a great deal of time talking about the

honored ones.

And the honored ones are the Eumenides who are

the Furies.

And they say, you really don't want to attract their attention, so I'm going to apologize to the honored ones.

And let's move on.

Are you suspicious?

Everybody's suspicious.

The only problem is very few of us are suspicious of the things we should be suspicious of.

Now we're getting somewhere.

Yeah.

How does suspicion

inform

your worldview, your work, or fill in whatever, fill in the blank, however you want.

But I'm really interested in that's really because it gets to your book and it gets to your work and whether it's suspicion or skepticism or doubt,

all those things feel adjacent, and you seem to be either afflicted or blessed with all of it.

Well, the thing is, you know, anyone who's ever worked for a living,

who's ever sat down at the kitchen table and said,

here's a piece of yellow paper, here's a column of how much we're making, here's a column of how much we're spending, what do we do,

has to become a reasonable person, right?

And because they have to ask that as of everything, right?

As Tom Sowell says, it's just not that complex.

You know, as Hayek says,

and as Milton Friedman says, it's just not that complex.

What do I want?

What do I actually want?

What is it actually going to cost?

How will I know when I'm done?

How will I evaluate if it was worth it?

What do I do then?

Because that's how the people who actually work for a living and the people who actually sit down at the kitchen table rule their lives.

They don't have time to say, you know, please piss on me and tell me it's raining because I want to take my time up with putting men in women's sports and I want to open the border because that makes me that makes me feel good.

So the Constitution is basically

a guide to sitting down at the kitchen table and saying who gets to do what to who, what happens if I don't like it, what happens if they don't respond to the Constitution, what are my options, Because I want to be in charge as a voter.

I don't want to give anything up.

It's enough that I have to give up my hard-earned money.

I don't want to give up my self-respect and put my reason in my back pocket to somebody who's the best idea they can come up for a slogan for their 2024 run is joy.

I mean, what does that mean, right?

So this person is saying, if you believe this,

if you vote for this, you will vote for anything, which is all about what all of the obscenities we see today, like letting criminals in, letting them out the back door, denigrating the police, letting men into women's sports, letting Harvard say, kill the Jews, in effect.

What the left is saying constantly, constantly, if you believe this, you'll believe anything, because guess what happens if you don't?

Even John Fetterman, right?

Terrific.

He's going out and he's a good man.

He happens to be a Democrat.

He's a good man.

He comes comes out and says he wants to support Israel.

They say, oh, you know what?

He's obviously lost his mind.

Right?

So we have to keep

our head when all about us are losing theirs and blaming it on us, as Rudyard Kipling said.

So it really, it's a kind of plea for reason, I think, what you're talking about.

If you're suspicious and skeptical in a healthy way, and by the way, you would probably know this.

Somebody told me that the quote from Descartes has been mangled.

Ergo Kajito, ergo sum, I think, therefore I am.

I read somewhere that the better translation, or maybe the more accurate one, was, I doubt, therefore I am.

So his whole existence

is either rooted in his ability to think or his decision to doubt.

I like the decision to doubt more, but regardless, if it informs a plea for reason, whether it's in a budget from a kitchen table, or a kind of explanation that you offer in this book, The Disenlightenment, at base, it's an explanation.

Well, yeah, you got to say what's actually happening.

But if someone says, oh, no, who are you going to believe me or your lion eyes?

You're in a lot of trouble.

Yeah, but what's actually happening is different than like all those things you just mentioned, which are now their own separate headlines.

And it leads a lot of people to want, you know, how, like Riley Gaines is sat here.

And so we have this conversation about how in the world did the frog stay in the boiling water so long as to make that power.

Because it can't get out.

That's the thing, that someone who's like tripled down on a whole life of believing one thing, and they formed a coterie, which they can't leave.

Someone who's on the left says, oh my God, if I allow myself to perceive this nonsense,

I'm probably going to have to speak out or lose my self-respect.

But if I keep my self-respect and speak out, I'm going to lose my wife, my job, and my friends, and my livelihood, and perhaps my kids.

So people get so formally entrenched for someone to actually break free is called heroism, which is what the Jews did leaving Egypt, because they didn't want to leave.

80% of them stayed behind.

They said, I'm happy here.

And as soon as they left, they said, I want to go back.

But the thing that I think is interesting about Descartes, I think, therefore I am, is it was taken up in the original version of the little engine that could.

Remember the little engine that should that has to cry for the numbers?

I think I can.

I think I can.

Exactly.

But the original version, he's saying, I think I can, therefore I am I can.

Dumb.

If you run a business, you may have noticed the tariff and trade policies are dynamic, supply chains are squeezed, cash flows tighter than ever.

And if your business hasn't adapted to these vagaries in real time, you may have also noticed you're in a world of hurt.

What you need is total visibility from global shipments to tariff impacts to real-time cash flow.

And that's exactly what NetSuite by Oracle offers.

This is an AI-powered business management suite and it's trusted by over 41,000 businesses.

Nobody's better.

This is the number one cloud ERP for all sorts of reasons, but mostly because it brings accounting, financial management, inventory, HR, everything into one source of truth, giving you the visibility and the control that you need to make quick decisions.

And with AI embedded throughout, you can automate a lot of the everyday tasks and let your teams stay strategic.

NetSuite helps you know what's stuck, what it's costing you, and how to pivot fast.

If I didn't have a business management firm overlooking my own company, this is the product that I would use hands down.

If your revenues are at least in the seven figures, download the free e-book, Navigating Global Trade, Three Insights for Leaders.

It's terrific.

It's free at netsuite.com/slash Mike.

That's netsuite.com slash Mike.

That's netsuite.com.com.

Netsweet.com.

NetSuite.

Yes, NetSuite.

I said NetSuite.com.

You said NetSuite.com

slash Mike.

Hmm.

Well, how did it work out?

I forget how that story ends.

He gets the goods across the mountain to the good little children in time for Christmas.

Well,

by way of comparison, the person who ran on Joy thought she could too.

She thought she could.

She thought she could.

And the people around her thought she could.

And that engine couldn't.

Yeah.

So

I think it's important, I mean, whether it's positivity or belief or whatever it is, in the end.

It is Hamlet, right?

I mean, it's you lose the name of action.

It's not what you think, it's not even what you say.

Well, see, that's why Hamlet's such a great, great play, is the greatest play in the English language, greatest piece of literature in the English language.

Because it's not that he's indecisive, and it's not that it's not because, you know, it's someone Ernest Jones says it's Hamlet and Oedipus.

It's not that he wants to screw his mother and blah, blah, blah.

It's that his whole world fell apart.

He came home from college.

His dad's been murdered, Hamlet should be king, and everyone's turning against him.

He doesn't know what to do.

And everything he seems he wants to do is wrong.

He wants to kill his uncle.

How's that going to help?

He wants to telephone his mother.

How's that going to help?

Polonius seems to be against him.

And Polonius' daughter, who's Hamlet's girlfriend, seems to be in league with her father.

His two best friends, Rosencrantz and Gillenston, want to kill him.

This guy's in a lot of trouble.

Many of us have been in that place in that long night when everything that you knew falls apart, and you're involved.

That's what PTSD is, you're involved in a cognitive dissonance such that ghosts are talking to you for Christ's sake.

It's another part of your mind saying, get a hold on it, get a hold on it.

And they're telling you things you'd rather not know.

Hamlet would rather not know that his mother and uncle conspired to kill his dad.

Wow.

Okay.

There's a lot there, but the business of rather not

knowing, the business, back to your ostrich for a moment.

He didn't walk into a laundromat.

He just walked down the beach and stuck his head in the sand.

Yeah.

It stayed that way.

How much of that is in this book, our unwillingness to look squarely at a thing?

Well, it's all in that book.

That's what the book is about to a large extent.

It's about repression because all of drama is about repression.

Because if it weren't repressed, it wouldn't be drama.

People come in and say, oh, you got a black hat, so you're the bad guy.

I got a white hat, so I'm a good guy.

You say things, everyone says, oh, that's the bad guy.

That's bullshit.

That's melodrama, right?

But in drama, each person acts for the reason he thinks is best.

And the audience has got to say

in the best of all possible worlds, yeah, he's got a point.

The other guy's got a point, too.

How are they going to work it out?

Is it that the cognitive dissonance you're talking about when you put the bad guy guy in the white hat?

No, no, that's not the best.

No, no, what that is is repression.

It's saying, I'm going to take your time.

I'm not going to tell you a rabbi, a priest, and a minister go in to a laundromat.

So you see that it's possible to have ecumenical differences and still get together to engage in a task which is common to us all, which is doing our laundry.

Everyone has to do laundry.

We may have someone do it for us at one remove, but there's a bunch of bullshit.

But that's what most things passing as drama today are.

But that's the, I mean, the brilliance of that joke and whatever iteration it is, let's just go with the ostrich and the whore

and the priest.

Yeah.

Okay.

Now, the fact that these three are together is implausible.

And the fact that they're walking into a laundromat is statistically impossible.

But the fact that the laundromat itself exists as a place into which they can walk, well, we've all done that.

You've given me something real to hang on to.

I know what a laundromat is, and I know what these individual three disparate things are, but I've never, ever, ever imagined them together before.

Oh, but you can.

I can.

Oh, on the other hand, if I were to say to you, God created the heavens and the earth and everything that's in them, and blah, blah, blah, and then God took a rib from Adam's side and made a woman and blah, blah, blah.

You say, what the fuck?

This is nonsense.

Right?

One would say of that myth, it's nonsense, but one doesn't say either of the ostrich myth or of the myth of wokeism.

This is absurd.

In addition, it's blasphemous.

Some did.

What?

Some did.

That's correct.

Some did.

That's the great story.

That's why this book is kind of important.

And like so many books, the subtitle might even be better than the title.

But I mean, politics, horror, and entertainment.

An ostrich, a priest, and a whore.

Three things that normally aren't grouped up together.

You do that a lot.

Oh, thanks.

Thank you so much.

You're welcome.

You know,

I started realizing, Shell, check that.

Tom Soule did one of his wonderful books about 15 years ago called

Dissolving America or something like that.

I'm so sorry I put up.

It's a great book where he describes everything that's happening today.

This is Tom Soule, you're talking about Tom Soule, yeah.

The best.

Let's find the name of that book.

Dissolving America.

Dissolving America.

It's better than that.

Just so people know, he must be, he's got to be in his 90s.

I think he's 90 or 90.

And he's out of the Chicago school.

Yes, he's out of the Chicago School in Moulton and Freeman.

And interesting,

out of the Chicago School in 1914, one of the precursor great economists, who was a progressive, was Thorsten Veblen.

And he, of course, is famous for writing theory of the leisure class.

Social justice.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dismantling America.

Dismantling America.

That's what it is.

Thank you.

Dismantling America.

Look at that, five stars, of course.

Oh, it's 774 ratings.

It's a magnificent book.

The guy he writes.

He can't write a bad book.

Well, I mean, people like that, and people like Doug Murray, and people like Abigail Schreier, I mean, they're so, and Barry Weiss, they're such an inspiration to me.

Say, can you be more concise, Dave?

Can you write better?

Can you write clearer?

Can you take out the nonsense and get to the meat?

So anyway.

Thorsten Veblen is an economist at the University of Chicago in 1914, and he wrote a book called The Higher Learning about colleges.

It was originally called The Higher Learning, an exercise in depravity.

And so this is 110 years ago, he says the colleges are corrupt.

He says the higher learning is selling nonsense.

What they're doing is they're taking people who are, and they're saying rather than learning a trade, that's what you talk about.

They don't have to learn a trade.

What they'll have to do is broaden their mind.

So what they start doing is they're selling extra things,

extra credit for, as we see as we go along the years,

life experience or extra credit for writing an essay, or in effect, they're selling a diploma.

So, what he says is that what happens is people get out of an undergraduate degree, they don't know a fucking thing.

So, then they go to a graduate degree, and that's the first time that they're going to start to learn perhaps something applicable to their life.

But the problem is that they've already been warped by four years of saying, you have all the knowledge inside of you, right?

Discover yourself, write Write a journal, right?

So

here's where we end up.

That colleges, first they start selling football, right?

Okay, then they start selling individual study.

Then they start selling

woke-ism, right?

They're constantly, as Florst from Veblen said in 1914, giving you a come on, a special treat in the box of Cheerios, right, to induce you to come.

So what's the latest treat that they're selling?

Do you know?

On the college side?

Yeah.

The latest treat in terms of to get you to enroll?

Yeah.

Or the promise of getting the diploma.

No, fuck the diploma.

The plastic diplomats.

Okay, so the inducement.

The latest treat.

I mean, if it's not the student union, if it's not the football, it's not the shared experience of cohabitation and all the normal stuff, tell me, what is it?

Kill the Jews.

Oh.

That's the latest treat that these swine are selling.

Come and yell free Palestine from the liver, blah, blah, blah.

Burn stuff down, disrupt everything, make the Jews feel blah, blah, blah, and dare us to take arms against you, which the schools won't do because that's what they're selling.

They aren't selling education, right?

They're selling obscenity.

They're saying, yeah, you bet.

Okay.

Well, let's go there.

Let's talk about Harvard and whatever other hotbed you want.

I think I'm most interested in understanding

what

disgusts you more.

Is it the existence of

people

calling for this kind of insanity?

Is it the tolerance of the people who should be running that asylum to allow it to happen?

Or is it the silence?

Well, it's the whole thing around.

Listen, we either have laws against hate speech or we don't.

We either have laws protecting students or we don't.

Everybody on those campuses is violating the Civil Rights Act.

The only reason they aren't enforced is because they're against Jews.

Someone who can show me the error, write me a letter.

I'll be glad I don't find it.

So that the one, there's a couple things we can do.

One is, I'm going to speak to my fellow Jews, two things.

First, take your school, your kids out of those schools.

Just take them out.

What are they going to learn other than that you, the parents, and the government and the schools are willing to see them abused?

That's what they're learning, that they better keep the freaking head down or they're going to get hit on the head.

What are they going to do with the degree from that school other than go to work for somebody who likes that school, who's going to believe in the same thing?

So the first thing is take your kids out of school.

Just take them out.

So the question, what do I do next?

is exactly the same question that the slaves had to ask when they left Egypt.

They didn't want to leave.

80% of them stayed behind because they said, what are you saying?

What do I do next?

What do I do next?

Well, you ain't going to find out what you do next until you leave Egypt.

And you're not going to find out what you do next till you take the kids out of the school.

Take them out of school for the love of God.

The second is, for the love of God, stop voting for the Democrats.

It's not Franklin Roosevelt anymore, and he hated the Jews.

He sent them back to die in the concentration camps, for God's sake.

Stop voting for the.

What do they think that you're doing?

Voting for these people who don't like the state of Israel.

They refuse to meet with the Israeli ambassador.

Kamala Harris, who went to a sorority meeting rather than preside over the Senate, which was her job.

They're just willing to sell you out.

Why?

Because they know that for 100 years my fellow Jews have voted for the Democrats, whatever they do.

And now they're killing us again in the streets of America.

So just stop voting for them, for God's sake.

Can I ask you a personal question?

Yeah.

You're out of F's to give, as they say.

I get that.

You live right up the road from here,

somewhere between Sodom and Gomorrah.

There you are, in the belly of the beast.

In fact, you wrote a terrific book, Oink, Oink.

Oh, yeah, Everywhere in Oink, Oink.

Everywhere in Oink, Oink, which was really an indictment on and of Hollywood.

I guess I'm just asking the obvious question.

When did you

stop being a liberal?

And when did you stop caring about who knew it?

Well, the two things happened independently.

I think I was doing a play in New York with Nathan Lane.

It was a

political comedy, very funny, called November.

And he wrote an article called Political Civility for the Village Voice.

Was this about Lincoln?

No, it was about a no, no, it was about a contemporary president who

gets jammed up because nobody likes him.

And so he has no money left to buy his library.

And so it's Thanksgiving, and so these guys come to him from the turkey lobby, and they say, Mr.

President, da-da-da, we'd like you to pardon a turkey as you always do.

We always give you 50 grand to pardon a turkey.

And he says, well, yeah, I could use the money.

They say, good, this year we want you to pardon two turkeys because we have an alternate because the last year's Turkey got sick.

So he says, well, two turkeys, that would be like 50 grand to Turkey, that would be 100 grand.

They say, no, we ain't giving you 100 grand because you're a loser.

Your poll numbers are lower than Gandhi's cholesterol.

With 50 grand, take it or leave it.

So he thinks about it and he says, wait a second, do I have the power to pardon turkeys?

So his yes man says, yes, Mr.

President, you do.

He says, good, get those guys back here.

Tell them I want $300 million right now.

I'm going to pardon every fucking turkey in the United States of America.

So that's the premise of the play.

I wrote an article about political civility.

I said, we've got to be civil to each other.

I said, I'm not even civil to myself.

I always refer to myself as a brain-dead liberal.

So the village voice comes out, whole front page.

Mamet says, why I am no longer a brain-dead liberal.

Boomf.

Everybody loses my number.

Where are we now?

What year?

I don't know, 25 years ago, something like that.

25.

Okay, so around 2000, right around the...

I think so, yeah.

So I looked around and I said, oh, well, that's interesting.

It's like Sarah Silverman said.

She got whacked for something or other.

She said, it's my own party.

And I wanted to say to her, dude,

that's right.

Yeah.

So you lost friends, for real?

Yeah.

Well, or you, or did you?

Well, I lost acquaintances.

Yeah.

But on the other hand, I made friends.

Like who?

Well, Shelby Steele is one.

Tom Sowell used to hang out with him.

Victor Davis Hansen.

Abigail Schwier.

Terrific.

Barry Weiss.

Yep.

Nellie Boyle.

Susie Weiss.

Now, Barry Weiss, that's free press, right?

Yeah.

And don't you write a cartoon for them like every week now or something?

I do a cartoon for them every week.

And I'll tell you one of my best cartoons.

I want to see it.

It's

Benjamin Franklin.

And the title is

When Benjamin Franklin Realized He Had to Stop Smoking Pot.

And Benjamin Franklin is saying, and for America's national bird, I suggest the turtle.

But the other one, I mean, how raunchy can we get on this program?

It's your sandbox, man.

The other one, I think, even better, was It's About Me Too, right?

It says, when will it end?

When will it end?

And it's a picture of the cookie monster, right?

And the caption is, he didn't realize the mic was still hot.

And he's singing, P is for pussy, that's good enough for me.

So these are the kind of cartoons I do every week for the free press.

Check them out, people.

I will.

Now, what's interesting, though, I mean, Barry Weiss,

female, seems to be or have gone, undergone some sort of, I don't know, similar transformation, revelation.

Have you guys talked much about that?

Well, yeah, I mean, it was very famously, she and Nellie, her wife, were the apex reporters and columnists for the New York Times and were adored by the New York Times, as they should have been.

And then Barry said something that didn't hew to the party line.

And they said, no,

give me a retraction or you're fired.

And so she wrote a letter, you should all look it up.

Was she a beautiful letter where she resigned from the New York Times and with nothing?

And so then she and Nelly created this magnificent newspaper called the Free Press, which is now extraordinarily successful.

It pains me to talk poorly about our public education system.

It really does.

I'm a product of a public education.

I come from a family of public school teachers, and I owe a debt of gratitude to the excellent teachers that I had who helped me along the way.

But times have changed, and the facts are really not in dispute.

In cities and towns all over the country, kids are graduating from high school completely and totally unprepared for the real world and for the opportunities that exist in it today.

That's why I recommend K-12's tuition-free online public schools and their career and college prep program.

This is a great way for students to explore high-demand industries and equip themselves with relevant skills and hands-on experience.

It's a great way to build connections with professionals through internships and networking opportunities and even get assistance with job placement, including the important business of crafting a resume and preparing for an interview.

These guys have been in business for decades, and if your student chooses to go to college, K-12 can help them every step of the way, from finding the right schools for their needs to providing expert guidance on applying for scholarships and financial aid.

Plus, students can get a head start by earning college credits in dual enrollment programs while still in high school.

Go to k-12.com/slash row today to learn more and find a K-12-powered school near you.

That's the letter K, the number 12.com/slash row.

K-12.com slash row.

The letter K,

the number

12.com/slash Row.

Have you talked to Megan Kelly?

I talked to her a long time.

I'd love to talk to her again.

I talked to her before, you know, two iterations ago.

She's great.

I think you guys would get along terrifically.

I I know she and Barry have become close.

But back to the book and back to Harvard in a way.

The point I was trying to make, and I'm not sure I did it justice, was that while Abby Schreier's story is going on and we're talking about men and women's sports and asking ourselves how could that possibly be happening, we're seeing this kind of thing happen in Harvard, and we're wondering how in the world can we tolerate that kind of naked anti-Semitism, while at the same time, we're dealing with whatever we've been dealing with with the border and trying to understand how we can be told that that's a secure border while we're looking at 10,000 people coming across it.

Your book outlines a dozen of these different things, and they're all seemingly unrelated because they have their own little brilliant essays.

But somehow or another, there's grout.

that connects them.

Yes, that's right.

It's in a book.

What is the grout, though?

Is Is the very fact that these things all happen contemporaneously the point?

Like, could they have not happened individually?

Would they have garnered enough attention and skepticism and doubt that they would have been shouted down?

Well, when I come to the end of the book,

as I say, I ask myself the same question.

I say, I don't understand why.

do we have people who want to free Palestine

and we have people who are queers for Palestine and at some point they're connected when they want to kill each other.

Why at the same time do we have people who want to open the border, and at the same time, we have people who want to give money to who have anti-Semitism, and they're all part of what seems to be a same movement.

What do they have to do with each other?

I list a lot of the enormity.

Who in the world would stand up for women playing against men's sports?

It's absurd.

And yet, those same people are in line with the people who want illegal alien criminals to come in.

What does it all mean?

And the answer is,

I said,

I've seen this before.

So people say of chess, how many moves can someone think in advance?

A great chess player is someone who can think three moves in advance.

It's not true.

Nobody can think three moves in advance.

There are billions.

But what the great chess player can do is recognize a similarity of situations.

Say, ah, this looks just like that.

I get it.

I see what that is.

So what we're looking at is a civilization which has been abandoned.

Like Obama

gets out of office.

Trump, what's his name?

Biden comes in and after Trump and things start to go to hell.

In whose interest is it?

And the answer is, it's in the interest of various groups.

Ki-bono.

Various groups.

who come into an abandoned city.

So I'm saying what we're looking at is an abandoned city, just like Moscow in 1812, just like Paris in 1944, like Milan in

Naples in 1943, 1944.

The invaders, the Bidens, the Obamas, have retreated and the new administration, in this case Trump, has not yet taken power.

So you had four years, nobody is in power in the White House.

So in that vacuum of power, you get staffers and you get ideologues and you get anti-Semites and you get all sorts of racists and so forth.

Each one says, you know what, give me that auto pen.

Jimmy, you got to get out of Afghanistan the other day.

I let you get that.

It was fucking stupid.

But you said, I want to get out overnight.

Okay, here's what I want to do.

Okay, you owe me now.

I want to not only open the border, that's great, I want to fly people in and pay for them to come into this country, right?

That's what I want to do, and you owe me because I did.

Wait a second, Jenny says, wait a second, what about me?

I didn't get to use that auto pen lately.

You know what I want to do?

I want to put men playing in women's sports.

I say, well, Jenny, that's fucking stupid.

Now you say, yeah, I don't know if it's stupid or not, but so is opening the border and so is getting out of Afghanistan.

That's the fuck what I want to do.

Billy says, wait a sec.

It's an open city.

So just like Paris in 1944, you got the Marxists, the Communists, the Trotskyites, the Lovestoneites, you got the resistance.

Everyone is getting together for the moment if that works, but on the other hand, they're saying, fuck fuck you, now I'm going to go loot over there.

The other thing you get into an open city is people settling scores.

Things fall apart, then someone who says, well, yeah, I get it.

You get to do this, you get to do the border, you get to do minimum wins, you know what?

I don't like that motherfucker Trump.

Here's what I'm going to do.

Da, da, da.

Okay, okay, we're all, huh?

He's got that right.

You know what I'm going to go, oh, da, da, da, I'm going to give, what's her name, Stacey Abrams, I'm going to give her a couple bucks.

Well, okay, how much?

Well, what the fuck difference does it make?

Two billion dollars out the door.

So, what we're looking at is an open city.

Things fall apart.

Things fall apart in the center.

The city cannot hold.

Cannot hold.

Well, that, you know, he was the greatest poet.

Yeats, the greatest poet since Shakespeare.

Mere anarchy loosed upon the world.

That's right.

Is that

what rough beast has our come round at last?

The blood-dimmed tide is

the ceremony of innocence is

drowned.

And what rough beast, it's our come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born.

Great stuff.

Pretty great.

Yeah.

Yeah, that was out of

Crazy Jane Talks to the Bishop a whole series.

Yeah.

So great.

Yeah.

So that's a lot, too, Dave.

I mean,

to my earlier point.

Well, here it is.

The subtitle staring me in the face, politics, horror, and entertainment.

Here's the thing.

Everything you just said was political, horrifying, and entertaining.

Oh, thank you.

Thank you very much.

So with Trump, who's, you know, I worked with a lot of geniuses in the arts and so forth, but genius, as far as I understand it, is

talent beyond my ability to understand it, right?

Somebody can be a greatly talented, like Shakespeare.

Yeah, I get it.

He's a genius.

I get it.

I'm a writer, too.

But Trump has a genius for politics that's beyond anything I've ever seen.

That I would, like I and my like, you know, getting into the final boarding process, got our heads down during the Biden administration and said, in effect, I hope it lasts out my time because there's nothing to be done.

And Trump says, well, that's actually not true.

You got a...

fucked up situation and it's a Gordian knot, but we're going to untie it.

How are we going to do it?

One thing at a time.

Because it's very, very easy to say, oh, there's so much to do, I can't do anything.

It's the time though David it's like I mean is he really a political genius or is he that's what I meant earlier when I talked about the great man theory in in history if they're out of their time they're just men of course but if they're if things triangulate in such a way that all of a sudden I want to kind of pivot a little bit and talk about all of this through the lens not of belief but of persuasion like what do you find persuasive And do you care?

Honestly, I think that the country basically has two kinds of people in it, and it's not Republican and Democrat.

It's persuadable and unpersuadable.

And whether it's advertising or entertainment, I think it feels anyway like you have to know at least that much.

Are the people in your audience persuadable?

And if they are, do you wish to persuade them?

Or do you simply want to take a position, say a thing, and let the, what's the Latin for let the heavens fall?

Whatever that is.

Ruat suelum, fiat justicia, ruat suelum.

Yes.

Let the heavens fall.

That's where I feel like you're coming from.

I'm not saying you're not persuading you.

I'm not trying to persuade anybody because did anybody ever persuade you of anything?

Nobody ever persuaded me of anything.

Well, you know what?

Hold on.

I'll tell you.

I'll speak for Chuck, who was a.

May I?

I can't stop you.

I do believe you were fairly dyed in the wool, a liberal young man once upon a time who drip, drip, drip.

It took time.

Yep.

But, you know, was it Larry Elder?

Was it Dennis Prager?

Both.

Right.

So it takes time.

Well, drip.

It takes time.

That's the answer.

Drip, drip.

Drip, drip, drip.

Yeah, sure it is.

Drip, drip, drip.

Because

I think I went a little bit nuts for the first couple of years after I got blacklisted.

I actually knew because nothing, I was like Hamlet.

That's the first time I understood Hamlet.

Because I was out of my fucking mind.

Everything I believed in was wrong, though everything that I, all the people I thought believed in me tossed me to the wolves.

I didn't know what the fuck was happening.

I thought, Jesus Christ, you know, here I am, just a guy.

I just write stuff.

People laugh, people cry.

Give me a couple bucks.

I give it to my wife.

She buys shoes.

Come on, wait, wait a minute, wait a minute.

There's got to be some other alternative.

I mean, like, you know, this sounds so supercilious, forgive me, but I mean, if you don't think of yourself as the the greatest living playwright, a lot of people do.

And so you surely must be aware of that at this time when you feel as though you have been blacklisted.

And that's different than just some guy who writes words.

Right?

I don't think so.

No, no, here's the thing.

It's like they say, the watchama call it is always the last to know.

Getting betrayed is one of the least enjoyable of human experiences.

It's a drag.

Yeah, when you you give someone you trust and you think that they admire you, they believe in you, and you would support them, and then all of a sudden you found out that they've betrayed you, that's

that's really taken it down to the metal.

And so that's so I went through.

It's operatic, is what it is.

So that's what I was going through for a couple of years.

I said, I just don't understand.

Was I wrong?

What in the world is going on?

And so for answers, I went to Dennis Prager and Larry Elder and Victor Davis Hanson and Tom Sowell and Tom Payne and J.S.

Mill and Locke and I just read and read and read and read and read.

And eventually, eventually, like the dripping, it began to make sense.

So what we're looking at here is an ancient human problem.

So you were persuaded.

You simply, you weren't sold.

You bought something.

To take your metaphor, you went onto the used car lot and you told the salesman to pound sand.

And you said, I'm going to take my time.

I'm going to walk around.

I'm going to kick the tires.

I'm going to think about it.

I might go home, have a meal, come back the next day, maybe test drive it.

I knew we'd get to it.

It took an hour.

But when we talk about skepticism and persuasion and all of these things together, and then look back at your work and the role of the confidence man,

And the idea of betrayal, you just said it perfectly.

There's no more exquisite exquisite pain than to be betrayed.

That's right.

Whether you're swindled by a trusted financial advisor, been there, or whether true love didn't turn out to be all that true or all that lovely, right?

We've all kind of felt those things.

The degree to which that exists in your fiction and your nonfiction.

That's your,

since we're doing French stuff, your

raison d'être?

Yeah, that'll do.

Tell me I'm close.

Oh, you're perfect.

All right.

Perfect, perfect.

Also, I'll tell you what made a huge impression on me when I was first saying, I don't understand, I don't understand.

I met some people at my synagogue, one of them, a wonderful man named Andre Ballo, who is a very close friend of Dennis's, and so forth.

And he started talking to me very gently, and I was so impressed by his demeanor that I think that's what helped me turn the corner, that he wasn't didactic, right?

And that he wasn't bombastic.

He just said, well, here's what I think.

Here's a couple books you

might want to read.

You got any questions to ask me?

I said, wow.

You know, that's not, how dare you, or certainly you can't mean, or all this nonsense that seems to be the left's only riposte to a request to explain

their religion.

Oh, what are you, a Trump lover?

Yeah.

One of the things I really people say, you know, you can't say that.

What they're doing is

they aren't objecting, they're warning.

They're saying, don't you know that you can't say that?

Right.

Right.

Let me help you.

Let me give you a helpful little tip.

Yeah, really.

So you won't, that sound you're hearing is the ice cracking beneath your feet.

You know, nobody was talking about cancellation

back when you were describing it just now.

Maybe that's part of why your brain was struggling to make sense of the fact that why would friends turn their backs on me?

Why is any of this happening?

We just didn't have the right word for it.

Or maybe it just hadn't happened to a degree where you could see it as

an inevitability.

But the pro dromo, since we're talking Latin, was when I first started hearing people say, this may not be politically correct, but.

So that went on for 20 fucking years.

But everything before but's bullshit.

This may not be politically correct, but why does one think one has to introduce a statement of one's

position by acknowledging that there's an alternative?

That's brainwashing.

Or

a bungled attempt to be persuasive, the faked expression of

reasonableness.

Right?

All of that stuff that precedes but really is bullcrap.

99% of the time, it's just, it's the stuff of confidence.

You know, the truth comes after butt, or at least the truth of what you mean to say.

Well, you know, Abraham Lincoln, one of our presidents apparently, said you can fool some of the people some of the time,

fool all the people some of the time, some of the people all the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time.

And I thought, Abe, you didn't live through this time.

But

it's true.

It's true.

I mean, this, the resorgiamento of MAGA and Trump proves it's true.

Whether or not, whatever happens next, oh, Abe, rest in peace, you cannot fool all the people all the time.

Wonderful.

You got to help me with that.

Resurgio, what?

The resurgence.

Yeah, but give me the Latin again.

Risorgiomento.

That's Italian.

Pretty close, though.

Yeah.

Interesting.

Call back to Lincoln.

As I recall, it was he

who ushered in the pardoning of the turkeys.

Oh, that's true, that's true.

It was his son.

It was his son.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, that's a loose translation.

I think of the original text.

Last thing I'm going to do is rewrite David Mammoth.

No, not at all.

I mean, there's a famous story that a kid has a pet

or Madillo, ostrich.

We're working our way through the whole freaking animal kingdom here.

He's got a pet turkey.

And he loves the turkey.

And it comes to be Thanksgiving.

He loves the turkey, loves the turkey, loves the turkey.

That probably fucked this joke up.

You know what?

Ask me back next time, and I'll finish that joke.

I really don't know of a better way to talk about this product than to tell you that every time I do a read for them,

more people are alive.

than who otherwise would be.

LifeFac has saved over 4,100 lives so far in 30 countries in a relatively short period of time.

This is an invention that should be in every home, just as surely as a smoke alarm and a fire extinguisher should be.

It saves lives every day.

16 people who listen to this podcast are alive because they heard the inventor, Arthur Lee, sit down with me a couple of years ago and chat about this invention and how it came about in his garage.

It's a terrific story.

And if you looked at the 4,100 faces in the headquarters of LifeVac, they line the walls, you'd get it.

So I hope you do get it.

You can save 20% off with code Mike when you go to LifeVac, L-I-F-E-V-A-C dot net.

It is the simplest device out there, and it is, I believe, the most effective.

It's the device you're going to want to reach for if you or someone you care about starts to choke or even a total stranger, right?

It's a life-saving device.

It truly works.

There's a bill in the Texas Senate right now waiting for the governor's signature that'll require an airway clearance device in all schools.

That'll be huge if that goes through.

I sure hope it does.

For now, get one for yourself, lifefack.net, code Mike, to save 20%.

It's no joke when you choke.

So get life back and live.

Without breath, there'll be death.

So get life back and live.

Get life back and live.

Get life and live.

Life back and get life back and live.

Now that's called a tease.

Oh, yeah, good.

Excellent.

You got somewhere to be?

Are we done?

Can I build it?

Are you kidding?

I'm just here.

As my wife said, I should begin every sentence by prefacing it.

Whore that I am.

Your wife said that?

Yeah.

She sounds terrific.

What's her name?

Her name is Rebecca Pidgeon.

She is terrific.

I'm crazy about her.

You married Rebecca Pidgeon.

You bet I did about 35 years ago.

Well, that explains why she's in all your freaking movies.

Now, was that around the time, Spanish Prisoner, Steve Martin?

Before that, she was doing a play of mine in

London called Speed the Plow,

which you eventually did here.

And she was in that.

And then I did a play with her.

And William H.

Macy off-Broadway ran for about a year and a half called Oleana, which is a very politically upsetting upsetting play.

And then we've been working together ever since.

Congratulations.

Thanks.

What's she think of your book?

She loves it.

Yeah?

Yeah, she's a great fellow, great supporter.

The book is called The Disenlightenment, Politics, Horror, and Entertainment.

All I can tell you is it's I'm about halfway through.

Oh, I wanted to ask you about essays.

and about short stories and how you think about those.

I dabble, and I find it super satisfying, partly because,

you know, a beginning and a middle and an end, and you can damn near write one in a, you know, in a day or two, I think, anyway.

Is it a dying form, the short story?

Yeah, it's a short story.

It's a very late-occurring form.

You know, it starts out in the 19th century with the growth of late 19th century with the growth of magazines.

They needed filler.

And then people started writing short stories for magazines.

I think first in France, kind of the Maupesson then.

And then in England, England, people started writing short stories for magazines for filler.

And then it became a form, blah, blah, blah.

And it was taken up by magazines over here.

Did the pulps come out of that?

Maybe.

They maybe did.

The pulps are actually a very old form, and it started in,

again, in England.

late Victorian era.

There were two things.

There were the Penny Dreadfuls, which were long,

basically romance novels about slice and dice and Jack Ripper.

And then there were a lot of magazines.

And then

a lot of the great authors wrote in serials.

Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon and so on.

They wrote for the magazines in serials.

They would say, here's two chapters, here's two chapters.

Then it came up over here when we had magazines, and we don't got magazines no more.

So there's really no place that I know of to put

a short story.

I like to say that

we ain't got no magazines.

No more.

I was reading the other day, one of my favorite writers, John D.

McDonald,

started writing these short stories to his wife when he was in the war because his mail was so heavily censored.

And she started submitting them into some of these magazines that you're talking about.

And when he came home, he found he had a toe hold anyway.

and then started writing like the Travis McGee mysteries and all that

great stuff.

He came to me a couple times over 20 years.

He said he had the rights to Travis McGee and

would I want to write it as a movie?

Oh my God, what did you say?

I said, yeah, sure.

It never worked out.

He said, well, we got this idea for this and this idea for that.

And we have to put in the bright yellow for the shroud and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah and all that shit.

I said, yeah, no, I can't work that way.

I said,

you want me to write a Travis McGee novel?

movie, I'll be glad to do it.

And he said, well, what about the ongoing creative process?

I said,

what did we just have?

But that didn't happen.

I think, I mean, Chuck Sick of hearing me talk about it, but Travis McGee was

maybe the most important thing I ever read because of the time when I read it and the way I found it.

Like I truly just forest gumped my way across the deep blue goodbye and picked up this time capsule,

this boat bum in 1965,

right?

Going after confidence men, helping people recover that which was illicitly taken from them and keeping half for his trouble and always paying a price and always a consequence.

And he was Paladin plus Quixote, the classic knight errant.

And I was at a time in my life when I'm like, my God, I'm about to base my business.

on this guy's worldview.

Take my retirement and early installments.

Oh, it's great.

I mean, I just, I was so impacted by a fictitious character.

It's very cute stuff.

It's lovely stuff.

Always got the girl, got a different girl, and got like a girl and a half in every book.

But he always paid for it.

McDonald never let him, you know, he got what he got, but he also got a broken nose and a black eye and a limp and right and blood in his stool.

It was always a broken girl, too.

That's right.

He was always picking up the little damaged birds with its broken wing and ultimately, ultimately healing himself.

Well, interesting that you brought that up because you know who picked that up was

in the

God, I'm burning down, is one of the techno thrillers has got this character who was a Navy SEAL.

And who am I talking about?

Jack Carr?

Yeah, it's Jack.

What's his name?

But it's the other thing.

He's got a guy who was a Navy SEAL, and it was without mercy, without remorse.

Without remorse, yeah.

By

big Dick Brannigan.

By Tom Clancy.

By Tom Clancy.

Tom Clancy writes this wonderful book about a minor character.

He's got his own book.

Without remorse, he lives on a boat and he's in ex-Navy SEAL and blah, blah, blah.

And then Without Remorse, he does the same thing.

He picks up this girl on the boat and takes her on the boat and she's a junkie and he gets her all cleaned up and blah, blah, blah.

It's a good book.

Without remorse.

It's the same thing.

Obviously, influenced by John D.

McDonald.

Well, there are only, what, seven stories out there anyway, really, something like that.

Yeah.

But yeah, I'm so glad to know that

you were touched by him.

What about George MacDonald Frazier?

Have you stumbled across the Flashman Chronicles?

Oh, sure.

He did some marvelous.

He also wrote a wonderful war book called Quartered Safe Outside.

Quartered Safe.

I've got it.

That's a great book.

It's a terrific book.

The Flashman books are just superb.

He was in Burma.

I think he was.

And he's so freaking funny.

God, he's funny.

Well, talk about politically incorrect that book doesn't get published flashman flashman today no way what gets published i don't know

well you should because the disenlightenment just came out somehow or another

unless you're going to tell me that you and rebecca like published this yourself or something no no no it was published by some guys and blah blah blah no who who publishes this thing seriously well you have to tell me oh no i'm looking inside david mammet is a fantastic writer mark levin that's nice yeah look at ben shapiro says some nice things who publishes this thing?

I'm only asking because I can't figure out who published your movie, Henry Johnson, or who produced it.

Like, how'd that happen?

Well, we found some people who wanted to put it in like a directory.

Harper Collins.

Harper Collins.

Thank you.

HarperCollins, yeah.

Henry Johnson, you can find that HenryJohnsonMovie.com.

And it stars Shia LaBeouf and Evan Jonikite.

Terrific.

That's a pretty good movie.

What are you reading now, and what do you recommend?

Well, I've been reading

lately a whole bunch of books by Sanges de Gramond.

Sanchez de Gramond was a French count, but he was

from the poor branch, and they were intermarried with the Raspolis and the Rothschilds, but he didn't have any money.

So he came over here from France and he worked as a journalist, and then he went back and he was drafted into the French army for Algeria, and he came back and he worked for a lot of publications.

And he changed his name from de Gramont to Ted Morgan, which is an anagram of de Gramont.

And he wrote spectacular

nonfiction, a biography of mom, biography of T.R., a biography of FDR,

a biography of Roosevelt, and he wrote a wonderful book about the Red Scare called Reds.

And he wrote a book about Lovestone, who was the communist.

Reds that turned into the movie, Reds?

No, no, it's something else.

No.

It's about the Red Scare.

And then he wrote a couple of great novels.

One of them is called The Way Up, which is a fiction about his forebears during Louis XV.

And he wrote a very, very, very important book that asked you all to read called Lives

to Give.

And it's about the French resistance

in Paris during World War II.

And he was in Paris as a kid during World War II, and it's about an open city.

It's about everyone fighting with each other.

and it's not quite an open city.

The Nazis are just leaving and so they're the resistance and the communists and the collaborators and the Nazis and it's really stunning about what people will do to kiss ass.

Because power hates a vacuum.

Power hates a vacuum and people got to get along but the question is when does getting along become

being complicit which is the question that all of us I think face in our political lives if not in our daily lives.

at what point is going along being complicit?

You know, you're seeing young women get kicked off the podium because some kid says a guy says he can't make it among the men.

Or you see Harvard saying, well, you know, we're not sure that it rises to the level of hate speech.

At what point does it become complicit?

And that's an open question.

It's not a yes or no question, but it's a question that many of us might do well to ask.

Is it time to ask it?

Well, the way you put it before, in fact, it's funny.

Tim Allen sat right there not long ago and said, Kibono, who benefits?

Who profits?

You've said the same thing.

And I think maybe, I mean, to land this plane on something that's, I guess that's Latin.

Kibono must be Latin.

You bet.

Yep.

Okay, good.

So I'm sure he was going to say, no, it's Italian dummy.

No.

Let's get something right.

That truly might be the shortest, most succinct way to reframe the conversation.

And every essay in this book,

right, if it's preceded or followed by that query,

kind of starts to take on a different weight.

Well, yeah, I mean, the question is how,

and

at the beginning of that poem, Yeats says, how can you compete being honor-bred with one who, were it known he lies, were neither shamed in his nor in his neighbor's eyes.

So a congressman gets up, a senator gets up, and a Fox Poem and says, well,

when did you know that Biden was demented?

And the guy says,

We're going forward.

And she's stunned.

She's absolutely speechless.

And she says,

That's it?

And he says, That's it.

That guy is Chuck Schumer, I believe.

Oh, was it?

I believe so.

In any case, that's a quote for someone who is not shamed in his own eyes and does not fear

being shamed in his neighbor's eyes.

So that's a civilization in decline.

You've used the word whore,

I've been counting, four times.

Whore?

Whore.

A whore.

W-H-O-R-E.

It pops up a whore's profession.

Yeah.

Is that a play or a book?

It's a book.

How did Rebecca encourage you to introduce yourself?

Whore that I am.

Whore that I am.

Whore that I am, Chuck, which may be the title that we need to go with.

It may be.

But listen, also, I wrote Diary of a Pornstar, which is a very funny book, and I wrote it just at the time that Stormy Daniels was coming out, and I tried everything to get in touch with her and her

people

to say, this is a great deal.

I tell you what, put your name on it, we'll split the profits.

Diary of a Pornstar.

It's a very funny book, I think.

Diary of a Pornstar by Stormy Daniels, A Lost Opportunity.

It really was.

You know what?

Then I went out to Elizabeth Warren.

Go ahead.

Say it.

No, no, that's as far as I get.

You had your own punchline to that.

I had my own punchline.

I'm not going to say it, but that's great.

Elizabeth Warren, it reminds me of my son's Noah, who's 26.

The first time, he was a hysterically funny kid.

The first time I ever reduced him to screaming laughter was about this guy at a bar, right?

And he's a lonely guy, and every night he sees another guy at the end of the bar, and he sits down next to a beautiful woman and she slaps his face and then he says, wait a second, wait a second.

And they start laughing and they go off together.

Every night, guy sits down next to a new woman, she slaps his face, he says something, slaps his face.

They laugh, they go off together.

So after like a week, our guy comes over to the guy, says, excuse me, I gotta have, every night you seem to insult this woman, and then you laugh and you go home together.

What is it?

The guy says, well,

he says, I'll tell you.

He He says, I sit down next to them and I say, tickle your ass with a feather.

And the woman says, what?

And she slaps me.

And I say, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

What did you think I said?

And she said, well, what did you say?

He says, I said particularly nasty weather.

So they laughed, they laughed, they go home together.

So the next night, our guy goes to the bar.

He gets drunk out of his mind.

gets his courage up.

There's a nice woman sitting down in the bar.

He comes up, he says, tickle your ass with a feather.

And she slapped me says what

he says I say you want to shove a fucking feather up your ass

you may ask raining like a bitch

yeah you may ask why Elizabeth Warren made me think of that I think that the answer is clear

I see what he did.

I heard it differently.

I heard it that he says, hey, lady, shove a feather up your ass.

And she says, what?

And he goes, raining like a bitch, ain't it, Lady?

Well, then.

I've got to tell you, my sons, the time he made me laugh, because we trade jokes all the time, that's what we do in my family.

I'm still telling him jokes that my father told me.

I said, Noah, here's my favorite joke my father told me.

He says, okay.

He says, guy says, hey,

the invisible man is here.

The other guy says, tell him I can't see him.

So Noah says, yeah, Dad.

I'm going to improve that joke.

Wait, I've got to tell you the improvement.

Okay, hit me.

Noah says, okay, Dad, here it goes.

Guy comes up.

He says, the invisible invisible man's here.

And the guy says, tell him to go fuck him, sorry.

Well, here's one that most people wouldn't get at all today, but it kind of proves the whole, you know, man in time or out of time.

But in the, I think it was the second season of MASH,

Hawkeye

and Hot Lips, rest her soul, Loretta Switz, just lost her.

They're sitting around talking, and they're in a tent, and it's windy outside, and the flap blows open, and then blows closed, and everybody just kind of looks at it.

And it was an improv line.

Alan Alda just looked at it and goes, hmm, Claude Reigns.

Right.

Now, Claude Reigns, of course, played the invisible man back in the, what is it, the 50s or 60s.

And I had to ask, like, before there was an internet, I saw that.

And I knew it was funny, but I had no idea why.

And so I had to go figure out

yes.

Drip, drip, drip.

The joke finally lands a day and a half later when I'm in the library.

And I'm like, oh, oh.

Well, see, that's the problem when you get too old and nobody gets the jokes anymore.

It's another example of my son, Noah.

Am I eating up your guys' tourists?

No, no, we have,

don't worry, none of this will be used.

Excellent.

So the joke, I tell them this joke from show business from these two people who, Max Factor invented makeup.

He didn't just invent a makeup, he invented the idea of makeup.

Most people, I bet, don't even know that was a dude.

Yeah, it was a guy, Max Factor.

His name is Max.

Like a name, you know.

Iron Factorovich, and he was Polish.

And the other woman who invented inert face cream was Helena Rubinstein, and she was Polish, too.

They were both Jewish.

And Max Factor was working for the movies, inventing makeup.

Then he went from there to...

not only doing makeup for the stars, but inventing the idea of makeup.

So the old joke was, how did Helena Rubenstein get pregnant?

Do you know?

No.

Max Factor.

So

my son says,

this little piss cutter, God bless him.

He says, no, Dad, I can make that joke better.

I say, okay, let's do it.

How did Max Factor get pregnant?

How?

Helena Rubenstein.

Was that the Rubenstein?

Was John Rubinstein her son?

Maybe.

It's a common Jewish name.

Yeah, he did Pippin, right?

Yeah.

Well, I mean, since you invoked Yeats and whores,

I'll leave you with, if I remember it, this is one of that crazy Jane Talks to the Bishop series.

A woman can be proud and stiff when on love intent, but love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement.

For nothing can be whole or sold

that has not been rent.

Well, the old joke about engineers, these three engineers are talking about

what's the best kind of engineers.

And one guy says, well, the best kind is God because God created this incredible electrical system that is the electrical impulses which allow us to move.

So obviously

God is a

electrical engineer.

And the guy says, yes, he says, no, but God is all-powerful and great because obviously God created the veins and the arteries.

So God is actually a fluid engineer.

And the guy says, yeah, he says, but on the other hand, it's possible that God is a civic engineer because he put a playground next to a sewage disposal cat.

All right.

I see where this is going.

Okay.

You brought out the worst of me.

I hope you're happy.

Look, man,

like I said, who in the world is going to rewrite David Mammot?

The book is The Disenlightenment.

The movie is Henry Johnson.

You can download that at henryjohnson.com.

You can pick up the book.

HenryJohnsonMovie.com.

HenryJohnsonMovie.com.

Thank you so much.

And you can pick up the book wherever Harper Collins sells his books these days, which I imagine is pretty much everywhere.

I don't know.

Thank you for signing my stupid release.

I got to tell you something, man.

My relationship with releases over the years has probably been similar to yours.

I know you wrote that.

Yeah.

Well, yeah, but that was my first draft.

He shouldn't have.

Just so the listener understands, we've got the same bullcrap release that every other person hands out.

And some people, myself included, read these things and they see all the legal mumbo jumbo and they're like, you know something,

why does it have to be this way?

So David Mamet sends back our standard release and he's taken the time to read it and he's crossed out

certain sentences and

this paragraph not here, this doesn't quite work.

And I just looked at it and I was like, I can't believe I'm collaborating with David Mamet on something written.

This is amazing.

So anyway, you inspired me.

And you wrote a new release?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

In fact, you don't have to sign it, but if you do,

if you do, I want you to know that I've titled it,

where did I put it?

Here it is.

It's the David Mammet release, now for everyone.

And it's the friendliest way I could.

come up with to say the same pile of crap that I need people.

You should have seen this release.

It says we get to use your likeness in anything

now invented or forever invented.

Yeah, I said okay.

Throughout the universe.

Yeah, then until the end of time.

Then it says we get to alter it in any way possible until the end of time.

Well, you're going to fucking lola me and make me look like a beagle.

I don't know about that.

Then it says we get to make love to your wife on alternate Saturdays and piss in your mouth on Shavuas.

I said, you know what?

I just can't do it.

Well, first of all, I read the fine, I read everything.

And obviously you do as well.

And what happened was when the lawyer sent it back, I looked at it and I said, look, I understand what we're trying to do, but I'm offended too.

And I'm embarrassed on behalf of myself.

And I'm sorry that you had to read a bunch of nonsense.

And all the lawyers tell me is, look, it's just the way it is.

I'm like, but no.

It's actually not just the way it is.

There's a way to talk to people like they're human beings and just to step away from the precipice, you know?

So, I mean, I literally spent like, I'm still messing with it because I just,

look, it's a really hard thing.

Like these things are leaps of faith.

You're basically, like, if you don't know somebody, you're basically saying, I need you to trust me with your name and likeness

forever in the future to help promote whatever this thing is.

And that's a hell of a thing to ask.

Well, that was, yes, I understand.

If you're going to be interesting, get the mic on your book.

Yeah,

I understand.

I get it.

That's a little bit excessive, but it's completely understandable.

The part that I found egregious was you're saying, and we get to alter.

That's what I told.

And they're like, well, it doesn't mean we're going to do that.

I'm like, then why would you say it?

Exactly.

And the answer is, because it's better to overreach.

So on your way home, did you drive yourself here?

Yes.

Look at you.

That's amazing.

How about that, huh?

You know who else did that?

Gene Simmons came in here two months ago, got stuck in traffic, took him an hour and 45 minutes to get in here from Malibu.

It's unbelievable, that guy.

I saw she's still stuck in the garage.

Different gene set.

She's still stuck in the garage.

I'm talking about the rock star from KISS.

That gene set?

He's still in the garage, too, tragically.

All I would ask is that you read it, and if I have your permission to call my releases

from this day forward, the David Mammet release.

It's the release that inspired me.

So what's in it for me?

Well, aside,

you know what?

I predict, how many of these books do you think we can sell?

Like, if I really lean into it.

Oh, if you really lean into it, maybe 5,000?

That's what I would think.

Sold.

Folks, this book, Whore That I Am, by David Mammot and Mike Rowe, it's a pop-up, and

I think you're going to love it.

The book is great.

It's called The Disenlightenment.

Obviously,

I'm at your disposal.

I owe you one for what that's worth.

No, I do.

Wait, didn't I already sign this stupid fucking piece?

That's what I'm saying.

Don't say, I mean,

if you read it and like it, then sign it.

But what I'm really asking you to do is,

if I have your permission, I want to call this new release.

Please, I'm honored.

Thank you.

The David Mammet release.

You bet.

Because it's the thing that inspired me to get all the legal mumbo-jumbo forever

out of my...

out of this little part of my life.

I couldn't have done it without you.

Yeah.

Thanks for having me.

And thanks, thanks, Chuck.

Really an honor, a privilege, a pleasure.

Truly.

Okay.

All that stuff.

Okay.

Chuck, going, going.

You have one question for David Mammet?

Yes, I got one question, and it really is, I just want to know if you're aware of this joke, because you're in it.

I'm sure you are.

Where a drunk is on a subway, and a

Methodist pastor is sitting there quietly, and the drunk is just going from side to side, and the Methodist pastor is thinking, please don't sit next to me.

And the drunk drunk sits right next to the Methodist pastor, belches right in his face.

The Methodist pastor looks down his nose and says,

you know, cleanliness is next to godliness.

That's John Wesley.

He goes, oh,

fuck you, David Mammet.

Yeah, you know, truer words matter.

Keep on all, everybody.

See you next week.

If you like what you heard, and even if you don't like it,

won't you please pretty, please, pretty, please subscribe.

Well, I hate to beg and I hate to plead, but please, pretty, freaking please,

please subscribe

If you thought goldenly breaded McDonald's chicken couldn't get more golden, think golden!

Because new sweet and smoky special edition gold sauce is here.

Made for your chicken favorites.

I participate in McDonald's for a limited time.

Less carbs, more crushing it.

That's what you get with Egg Life Egg White Wraps.

When your schedule awakens from its summer slumber, turn every meal into a chance to level up your protein game.

We're talking bring-it-on breakfast tacos, Ready to Roll Wraps, and Power Packed PBJs.

Egg Life Egg White Wraps, the winning play in your mealtime playbook.

Egg Life, Sneaky Protein.

Find us chilling in the fridge at Aldi, Target, Whole Foods, and more.