440: David Mamet—Whore That I Am

Arguably America's greatest living playwright, David Mamet, drops by to discuss movies, theater, philosophy, and his new book, The Disenlightenment: Politics, Horror, and Entertainment https://www.amazon.com/Disenlightenment-Politics-Horror-Entertainment/dp/0063455099/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&dib_tag=se&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.gtUkxF_Os0HCXFQ6sD67OmYyITK_ubWWnj6M-PIVYx6OIFU9ANLDRPBzmcm85_ouD4kdTnrSCLyNMUdn3bB7J46ExGMhK2M3QMnmY4udiOyX4hCakHuFK4CduhB3Hfxb4KGTGMWRtU5W86HvhYIKaF_x54MEx6oajijAW6KsutR6UR0G-6qxm4LbCITksaa7Mg5zo2vMy0gKTPIwCZJBOsq0R2B8-FI1bWcE9KOkVskRtpxII7oNv2yhyIbS7qVMFMqPmAFHQ_QUaCrSr1v3yMrG5DJHf7cdOSdH5OWDZSA. MOz8eJvcYVxauxdLkXUQMySaoW-hzsAYHAeI1OUAmrU&qid=1750110464&sr=8-1, in which he offers sharp insights into American culture, politics, and the art of storytelling. WARNING: THIS EPISODE IS MARKED EXPLICIT as the language gets quite spicy, and we did not quack the f-bombs. Otherwise, the episode would resemble a waddling of ducks.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Mike Rowe?

  Well, they say you should never meet your heroes.

• 0:08Mike Rowe?

  But they're wrong.

• 0:10Speaker 01

  Totally. Are you kidding me? This is great.

• 0:12Mike Rowe?

  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 Mamet. But I was in my head a little bit.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  Just a little bit, yeah. I mean, I was right there with you, man. And I was just watching, and I was like, hmm.

• 0:35Mike Rowe?

  Yay. This episode is called Whore That I Am.

• 0:40Speaker 01

  And why is it called that, Mike?

• 0:41Mike Rowe?

  Because David Mamet, among many other excellent decisions, had the good taste to marry Rebecca Pidgen, 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?

• 1:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02Mike Rowe?

  Boy, that made me laugh. A lot of things made me laugh in this conversation. If you're not up to speed, David Mamet 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?"

• 1:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24Mike Rowe?

  Was a Mamet play.

• 1:25Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:43Mike Rowe?

  The postman always rings twice. The verdict, The Untouchables, House of Games. Things Change, Homicide, Glengarry, 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...

• 2:07Speaker 01

  He's done a million things.

• 2:09Mike Rowe?

  I mean... He may be the greatest living playwright, reasonable people could disagree, but I wouldn't.

• 2:14Speaker 01

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

• 2:20Mike Rowe?

  State and Main, 25 years ago, yeah.

• 2:22Speaker 01

  Love it, yeah.

• 2:23Mike Rowe?

  So, why was I in my head? Because I sent David Mamet 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.

• 2:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:41Mike Rowe?

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

• 2:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:47Mike Rowe?

  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 won't do.

• 2:56Speaker 01

  He's rewritten the release, yeah.

• 2:58Mike Rowe?

  Right. Now, what am I gonna do? I'm like, am I gonna rewrite David Mamet?

• 3:02Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 3:03Mike Rowe?

  I don't want to rewrite David Mamet, 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 gonna 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.

• 3:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:24Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 3:42Speaker 01

  Yes. He objected to the word alter.

• 3:46Mike Rowe?

  Right. He doesn't want you to alter his image.

• 3:48Speaker 01

  Which is fair. Well, not his image, but his points or whatever.

• 3:51Mike Rowe?

  Well, he's 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 that.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  It's like, well, technically, I guess we could.

• 4:01Mike Rowe?

  I suppose I could.

• 4:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 4:02Mike Rowe?

  Well, I'm not gonna do that, but whore that I am. I am gonna tell you this, uh, this is, I think, one of the only episodes we're gonna do that's gonna come with a, um, what's the warning that has to accompany course language?

• 4:15Speaker 01

  Well, basically, I'm marking this episode explicit, which isn't really explicit, but let me just say, this is David Mamet, and if you're familiar with David Mamet, you know that, uh, he uses colorful language, and this would just be nothing but a series of duck quacks if we, uh,

• 4:32Mike Rowe?

  And honestly, you know what, man? You and I have talked about this a bunch. We're all grownups 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 explode.

• 4:50Speaker 01

  Multiple times, but if you're not, you have been warned.

• 4:54Mike Rowe?

  You have been warned, because whore that I am, I would be remiss if I didn't tell you that this is an excellent episode with a living legend.

• 5:03Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 5:04Mike Rowe?

  That gets a little potty-mouthed here and there.

• 5:06Speaker 01

  A little bit, a little bit, a little spicy.

• 5:08Mike Rowe?

  I loved it, I bet you will too. Whore that I am.

• 5:12Speaker 01

  How many times you gotta say that?

• 5:13Mike Rowe?

  I just like the way it sounds, with David Mamet, right after this.

• 5:22Mike Rowe?

  Couple of weeks ago, on this very podcast, I talked with Brooke Rollins, our Secretary of Agriculture, about the incredibly complicated business of delivering affordable beef to our citizens without disadvantaging American ranchers. We also discussed the very controversial decision to import 300,000 metric tons of ground beef from various foreign countries, and the maddening policy that allows meatpackers to label imported meat as a product of the USA. Well, shortly after that conversation, one of my sponsors, Good Ranchers, reported an unusually high level of interest in their product. And this is not surprising. Given a choice, most people would prefer to buy their meat

• 6:06Mike Rowe?

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• 6:16Mike Rowe?

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• 6:56Mike Rowe?

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• 7:11Mike Rowe?

  The legendary David Mamet has just handed me his phone, and it says, "Great playwright and filmmaker, David Mamet 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 exclamation point. Well, I guess this is it. Your ship's finally coming in.

• 7:35Speaker 02

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

• 7:36Mike Rowe?

  Oh, Donald J. Trump.

• 7:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, my dude.

• 7:40Mike Rowe?

  What a weird life you're living, brother.

• 7:42Speaker 02

  That I'm living?

• 7:44Mike Rowe?

  Yes.

• 7:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, sure.

• 7:46Mike Rowe?

  Who coined the expression "the great man" in history? Do you know?

• 7:50Speaker 02

  Oh, it's probably Catherine the Great, because that's what she was looking for. But she expressed it not as "the great man," but she's in Russian, it's a number of inches.

• 7:59Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, you're just horsing around now.

• 8:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 8:02Mike Rowe?

  I see what you're doing. Hey, thank you for making the time to do this.

• 8:05Speaker 02

  You're so welcome.

• 8:06Mike Rowe?

  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?

• 8:15Speaker 01

  I did, when I was out of breath coming up the Five Light of Stairs, yes.

• 8:19Mike Rowe?

  How many people have told you that over the years?

• 8:21Speaker 02

  Oh, a lot. It's pretty great. It's great. I was writing those, um... Two kinds of plays, there were 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.

• 8:34Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 8:34Speaker 02

  And one of them was Glengarry when I was working in a boiler room, selling nonexistent 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.

• 8:49Mike Rowe?

  So great. That was at, I want to say Fels Point?

• 8:53Speaker 01

  Fels Point Theater.

• 8:54Mike Rowe?

  Fels Point?

• 8:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:55Mike Rowe?

  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 nauseam over the last two months in the course of promoting your amazing new book.

• 9:17Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 9:18Mike Rowe?

  And the film, Henry Johnson.

• 9:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:21Mike Rowe?

  Which I've only seen the trailers.

• 9:23Speaker 02

  Well, you got to see the movie, it's good.

• 9:24Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 9:38Speaker 02

  Oh, I always saw him as a great actor.

• 9:40Mike Rowe?

  Did you?

• 9:40Speaker 02

  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.

• 9:51Mike Rowe?

  That's insanely high cotton. You've never worked with a better actor?

• 9:56Speaker 02

  No, I've worked with actors who were as good. And I worked with everybody, but I never worked with a better actor.

• 10:01Mike Rowe?

  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 forty-seventh president.

• 10:10Speaker 02

  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.

• 10:19Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 10:19Speaker 02

  Saying, when they say, "My God, thank you," glug, glug, glug, that's... And that's pretty great. And that's what he said. That's what Malkovich said to him. About to do another movie, another, another movie with John Malkovich and El Pacino and Shia and Rebecca Pidge, everybody's gonna be in it. Patti 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 in 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.

• 11:00Mike Rowe?

  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, etc. How does it happen? Like, is it the result of maybe the Spanish prisoner? I'm thinking of Rebecca Pidge and like, when did you know that this was a group of people who you were absolutely going to work with?

• 11:21Speaker 02

  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 Metcalf, and then there was Billy Peterson, and then there was Malkovich and his people came in. And we were all part of a garage theater. And Joey Montegna and Dennis Franz all part of a garage theater milieu. And we were all hardworking.

• 11:45Mike Rowe?

  Was that French?

• 11:46Speaker 02

  Milieu, yeah. That's right. It means a medium.

• 11:50Mike Rowe?

  You spoke French?

• 11:51Speaker 01

  That's what he does, man.

• 11:52Mike Rowe?

  Well, wait a minute, is Sinise in this orbit?

• 11:55Speaker 02

  Sinise, yeah. Gary and John came in with the Steppenwolf Theater, a little bit younger than we are. And they took over our space. We had this space in a garage on Halston Street, around the corner from Riley 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 gonna write the next play. Say, yeah, sure. I'm gonna 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, but writers.

• 12:35Mike Rowe?

  And trust, maybe?

• 12:36Speaker 02

  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.

• 12:48Speaker 02

  So that's kind of been, like I just called Patti Lupone, you know, I just called on the way up. I said, I'm doing this new, 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 engages, yes, sure.

• 13:06Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 13:06Speaker 02

  So what could be better?

• 13:09Mike Rowe?

  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?

• 13:23Speaker 02

  Of course we did.

• 13:24Mike Rowe?

  What do you mean, of course?

• 13:25Speaker 02

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

• 13:27Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 13:35Speaker 02

  Aren't we all?

• 13:36Mike Rowe?

  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 and morphed.

• 14:06Speaker 02

  Well, beliefs change, certainly, but my dedication, 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 in the hills with a girlfriend, and they go off to the beach to, you know, for a wild weekend. You could say, how could you say, you didn't have enough experience to say that that was the most magnificent thing? But being young doesn't bar you from having ecstatic experiences.

• 14:43Mike Rowe?

  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, uh, who was the bank robber?

• 15:00Speaker 02

  Willie Sutton.

• 15:01Mike Rowe?

  That's where the money is.

• 15:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, but that's not where the money was, and that was part of the joy of being younger than Chicago. When they say to be in England was a very dream and to be young was, was very heaven. We were all very young, we were working very hard, having the time of our life. And there was not only, there 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 those, that British group, the Beatles, were, uh, we were working day jobs in order to put on these plays at night because we're having the time of our life. I always felt after that, when you, when I'm directing something, either on stage or in, in the movies, if you're not having the time of your life, you're in a lot of trouble.

• 15:45Mike Rowe?

  Joke's on you.

• 15:46Speaker 02

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

• 16:07Mike Rowe?

  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, um, 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, I knew that's how long it was gonna 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 gonna be filmed?

• 16:46Speaker 02

  Sound is very important because when you write a screenplay, you, the sound that comes from the screen is gonna have to compete against the sound of people eating popcorn. But when you write a play, the sound that comes from the stage is gonna have to compete against the sound of people turning their programs because they're bored out of their fucking mind.

• 17:11Mike Rowe?

  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 Jones?

• 17:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, Our Town is in, I believe it's in the 30s. And The Fantastics, I actually worked in the first production of The Fantastics off-Broadway, and that was 1967. It had been running for a year, ran for 40 years more. And I was a house manager and usher and assistant stage manager. So I had to say that frickin' thing eight times a week.

• 18:00Mike Rowe?

  So you hate it now, or?

• 18:02Speaker 02

  No, no, I hated it then.

• 18:05Mike Rowe?

  My point is, what the heck was that in the way of a set? And how important is a set, really?

• 18:12Speaker 02

  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, you probably, 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.

• 18:40Mike Rowe?

  Writing talent, directing talent, acting talent?

• 18:43Speaker 02

  No, no, no, 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, is 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.

• 19:09Mike Rowe?

  Do you believe production? Is the enemy of authenticity?

• 19:15Speaker 02

  Well, no, you gotta produce a play. The question is, what are you gonna, you're gonna 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 gotta pick the chairs, you gotta pick the costumes, and you gotta pick the lighting. But the question is, what do you do next? And the answer always is, maybe something, and maybe not, 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.

• 19:44Mike Rowe?

  Where does that leave musical theater? Where does it leave Moulin Rouge? Where does it leave the spectacle of all of it?

• 19:51Speaker 02

  I don't know. See, what's happened in both, in theater, the 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 Maxine Gorki, right? They want to see a spectacle. They want to see, you know, as the-

• 20:12Mike Rowe?

  Cirque du Soleil.

• 20:13Speaker 02

  Well, of course. As the French thought 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.

• 20:25Mike Rowe?

  What business are you in?

• 20:26Speaker 02

  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, doesn't matter what costume I have on, right? I've just almost semi-hypnotically induced you to go along and enter into my fantasy.

• 20:47Mike Rowe?

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

• 20:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, okay.

• 20:52Mike Rowe?

  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, also?

• 20:59Speaker 02

  Oh, okay. This cassowary is very, very different than an ostrich, which is very different than a kiwi. A lot of people would consider it a microaggression. I'm one of them.

• 21:10Mike Rowe?

  I saw an ostrich once.

• 21:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:12Mike Rowe?

  Charge an open door on an F-150 and tear it off its hinge. These things could go from zero to 40 miles an hour in about six steps. Their breastplate is so thick, you could shoot it with a 38 caliber and the slug will bounce off. Their knees are all, you know, they're all that jacked up crazy power. Their eyes are bigger than the eyes of a shark.

• 21:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:36Mike Rowe?

  Their brains are about the size of a mar- these are dinosaurs. They'll kick in in next week.

• 21:40Speaker 02

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

• 21:45Mike Rowe?

  In a footrace?

• 21:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:47Mike Rowe?

  Stamina? Like the ostrich peaks to that's what?

• 21:49Speaker 02

  No, I just made that up.

• 21:51Mike Rowe?

  Oh, see. Well, there you go. That's not really a story so much as a uh.

• 21:54Speaker 02

  That's a lie. It's called a lie.

• 21:56Mike Rowe?

  A prevarication.

• 21:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:58Mike Rowe?

  Is it okay to lie to the audience?

• 22:00Speaker 02

  No, of course not. The, listen, how would one lie to the audience? One can abuse the audience. One can, it's very easy to abuse.

• 22:09Mike Rowe?

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

• 22:13Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 22:14Mike Rowe?

  Have we just been lied to?

• 22:15Speaker 02

  No.

• 22:15Mike Rowe?

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

• 22:18Speaker 02

  Here's how you abuse the audience. I'll show you how.

• 22:21Mike Rowe?

  Believe me, listeners of this podcast know.

• 22:24Speaker 02

  Oh, good. So I say what an armadillo and ostrich and a nun go into a whorehouse. 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 a hu- 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?

• 22:59Mike Rowe?

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

• 23:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:03Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 23:27Mike Rowe?

  That's a really interesting relationship.

• 23:29Speaker 02

  Well, exactly so, because you've set the boundaries. You've said, I'm gonna 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 fuck you, right?

• 24:08Mike Rowe?

  I did not pay for that.

• 24:10Speaker 01

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

• 24:13Mike Rowe?

  Takes a whole other dimension to turn your head and spit.

• 24:17Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 24:19Mike Rowe?

  See what I did?

• 24:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, I did.

• 24:20Mike Rowe?

  I took it from merely unerrable to promotable.

• 24:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right.

• 24:25Mike Rowe?

  Now it gets cut into the open.

• 24:27Speaker 02

  Oh, great.

• 24:29Mike Rowe?

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

• 24:35Mike Rowe?

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• 25:17Mike Rowe?

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• 25:57Speaker 02

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

• 26:29Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 26:30Speaker 02

  In her own urine.

• 26:31Mike Rowe?

  1917, 16?

• 26:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, 1918, I think. In her own urine. And so there's 1,000 years of scholarship about what this note meant. And that's a pretty funny book.

• 26:44Mike Rowe?

  Wilson?

• 26:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:45Mike Rowe?

  I haven't read it. That's one of your...

• 26:46Speaker 02

  No, nobody's read it.

• 26:47Mike Rowe?

  Oh. That's what makes it funny. Yeah. Actually, I have an ostrich friend who read it and said it was just a kick. So Glenn Gary?

• 26:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:58Mike Rowe?

  Have you seen the current version?

• 27:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's great. Yeah, they're doing great.

• 27:03Mike Rowe?

  Why is it great?

• 27:04Speaker 02

  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% off on Rinso White and Rinso Blue." But they don't got to.

• 27:19Mike Rowe?

  The thing that's... forgive me again. You've talked about it 1,000 times. But Chuck, I even remember back in the day when you were doing American Buffalo. That was maybe your second play?

• 27:31Speaker 02

  Something like that. I don't know.

• 27:33Mike Rowe?

  It was a long time ago.

• 27:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:34Mike Rowe?

  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?

• 27:46Speaker 01

  Walter Huber actually played Teach.

• 27:48Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, right. And you played like Bobby, wasn't it?

• 27:51Speaker 01

  Bobby, that's right. I played Bobby.

• 27:52Mike Rowe?

  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." "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...

• 28:11Speaker 01

  Reverence.

• 28:11Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, and care.

• 28:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:13Mike Rowe?

  So what the... 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.

• 28:35Speaker 02

  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.

• 28:50Mike Rowe?

  Wow.

• 28:52Speaker 02

  Nobody ever liked my work except two groups. One is the actors, the other's 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 do is get up there and the great ones realize that and say the stupid fucking words.

• 29:19Mike Rowe?

  Right, right.

• 29:20Speaker 02

  Because that's all there is.

• 29:21Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 29:22Speaker 02

  There isn't any character beyond that.

• 29:25Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 29:41Speaker 02

  Well, exactly. It's the same thing. You know, you don't want to take Mozart and say, you know, mind if I improvise, you know, mind if I, you know, do it or don't do it.

• 29:51Mike Rowe?

  And yet, have you come across John Batiste before?

• 29:57Speaker 02

  No, who's that?

• 29:58Mike Rowe?

  He's a piano player and a singer. I first found him when I heard him playing Beethoven furiously 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-

• 30:28Speaker 02

  Well, why not? You know?

• 30:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's easy to play a furry leash for rack time, but it's harder to write the lyrics. And my daughter Clara did it. It was furry, furry, furry, furry, furry, furry, furry, furry, for a leash.

• 30:43Mike Rowe?

  Chuck, make a note. Turns out that Wilson wasn't the funniest thing David Mamet ever did. It was that.

• 30:49Speaker 01

  Noted.

• 30:51Mike Rowe?

  What's for a leash mean?

• 30:53Speaker 02

  It means for a leash. He wrote it for some broad named Elise.

• 30:57Mike Rowe?

  Are you sure Elise wasn't covered in hair?

• 31:02Speaker 02

  No, I'm not. She's wearing a furry leash, right? Yeah.

• 31:05Mike Rowe?

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

• 31:09Speaker 02

  No, that's an idiom. It's ancient. It's ancient.

• 31:11Mike Rowe?

  I thought so too.

• 31:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:13Mike Rowe?

  But back to Glengarry, 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, well, 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.

• 31:40Speaker 01

  House of Games.

• 31:42Mike Rowe?

  Directed that, I believe, right?

• 31:43Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 31:44Mike Rowe?

  Yeah. So you ever been swindled? You've been conned?

• 31:49Speaker 02

  Of course, of course.

• 31:50Mike Rowe?

  Me too.

• 31:50Speaker 02

  You ever go to the doctors?

• 31:54Mike Rowe?

  I have. I have. Yeah.

• 31:57Speaker 02

  You ever buy a car in a car lot?

• 31:59Mike Rowe?

  I have, yeah.

• 32:00Speaker 02

  Okay. So what's that about? Anyone who walks onto the car lot wants to get swindled. We're saying, my God, where'd you get that shirt? And what 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 frickin' car. Right? So somebody said a crush is an absence of information.

• 32:28Speaker 02

  That's good, isn't it?

• 32:30Mike Rowe?

  A crush is an absence of... Wow, I mean, that's pretty fatalistic. You're saying the more you know, the less you love.

• 32:37Speaker 02

  Not necessarily. Not necessarily. The information might be good or bad, but a crush is an absence of it. You've got the endorphins, bam, now all of a sudden, wow, you know, please take my money. I'm gonna leave my wife and blah, blah, blah, and lose my thing, my kids will never talk to me. But, hi honey, what are you doing tonight?

• 32:56Mike Rowe?

  So how does that translate to your work? I mean, if the audience starts out with an absence of information.

• 33:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:03Mike Rowe?

  Of course, they must be ignorant because the play hasn't begun yet. But then you tease them along.

• 33:09Speaker 02

  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?

• 33:20Mike Rowe?

  I have.

• 33:21Speaker 02

  There were apparently these two Irishmen. Ah, and the one guy, as he says through his, 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 want to lead you along, make you wonder what's gonna happen next, and then pad off in a way you didn't understand. There's no difference between that, that a joke, and Othello.

• 33:48Mike Rowe?

  Except for maybe two and a half hours.

• 33:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right. But also, I, you know, it's possible to condense plays. And part of the problem is they're overwritten. I wrote a 10-second version of Oedipus Rex. So it takes place on a windswept mart, mountain in Thebes, at Rize. Oedipus and a kindly shepherd, right? Oedipus says, "Ho kindly shepherd, what news?" Shepherd says, "You fucked your mother."

• 34:21Mike Rowe?

  Giacosta, as I recall.

• 34:23Speaker 02

  That's right, you bet.

• 34:25Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, one of the greatest, um, peripetias, I think Aristotle would have called it, right? And, I mean, maybe one of the first ones. That whole notion of, uh, I riffed on that years ago when somebody invited me to do a a TED Talk of all things, but anegnesis and peripetia and the Aristotelian definition of a, of a tragedy vis a vis dirty jobs struck me as an interesting way to, to maybe string out a story, maybe surprise.

• 34:53Speaker 02

  Well, you know, what Aristotle says, you don't want to string out the story, you want to condense it, right? Single action, right? Single place, day and a half, you want to condense it, you don't want to struggle.

• 35:04Mike Rowe?

  Well, condense the time.

• 35:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:06Mike Rowe?

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

• 35:16Speaker 02

  I like Shakespeare very much, you know, for any, well, 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?"

• 35:44Mike Rowe?

  "Where's my lucky pillow?"

• 35:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:47Mike Rowe?

  No, no, that's, uh, that's Macbeth, yeah. Othello, Iago. Oh, I got nothing. I want so bad to have a, a pithy Othello thing, but no, I don't have it. Crap. I got some Macbeth.

• 36:01Speaker 02

  No, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, do not say that word.

• 36:06Mike Rowe?

  Oh, right. That's a theater thing, right? Yeah, but we're not before a performance, are we?

• 36:11Speaker 01

  We're not in a theater.

• 36:12Mike Rowe?

  We're not in a theater.

• 36:13Speaker 02

  No, it still counts.

• 36:15Mike Rowe?

  That's interesting. Explain that old, uh, what is that?

• 36:20Speaker 02

  "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 humanities, 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.

• 36:44Mike Rowe?

  Are you suspicious?

• 36:46Speaker 02

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

• 36:54Mike Rowe?

  Now we're getting somewhere.

• 36:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:56Mike Rowe?

  How does suspicion inform your worldview, your work? Or fill in whatever, fill in the blank, however you want. But I'm really interested, and 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.

• 37:24Speaker 02

  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?

• 37:41Speaker 02

  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, men and women's sports, and I want to open the border,

• 38:25Speaker 02

  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?

• 39:07Speaker 02

  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, I'll 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 calling out, he's a good man. He happens to be a Democrat, he's a good man. He comes out and says he wants to support Israel and say, oh, you know what? He's obviously lost his mind, right?

• 39:49Speaker 02

  So we have to keep our head when all about us are losing theirs and blaming it on us, as Rudyard Kipling said.

• 39:59Mike Rowe?

  So it really, it's a kind of a 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 cogito, 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

• 40:44Mike Rowe?

  book, The Disenlightenment, at base, it's an explanation.

• 40:50Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, you gotta say what's actually happening. But if someone says, oh, no, who are you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes? You're in a lot of trouble.

• 40:57Mike Rowe?

  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 has 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 powerful?

• 41:18Speaker 02

  Because it can't get out. That's the thing, that someone who's got 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 gonna have to speak out or lose my self-respect. But if I keep my self-respect and speak out, I'm gonna 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. Eighty percent of them stayed behind. They said, I'm happy here.

• 42:02Speaker 02

  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 Could?

• 42:15Mike Rowe?

  Sure.

• 42:15Speaker 02

  Has to cry.

• 42:16Mike Rowe?

  I think I can. I think I can.

• 42:17Speaker 02

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

• 42:28Mike Rowe?

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• 43:10Mike Rowe?

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• 43:53Mike Rowe?

  Well, how did it work out? I forget how that story ends.

• 43:56Speaker 02

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

• 44:00Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 44:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:14Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 44:28Speaker 02

  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, 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's, he wants to do is wrong. He wants to kill his uncle, how's that gonna help? He wants to tell off his mother, how's that gonna help? How Polonius?

• 45:10Speaker 02

  It seems to be against him and Polonius's daughter, who's Hamlet's girlfriend, seems to be in league with her father. His two best friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, want to kill him. This guy's in a lot of trouble.

• 45:21Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 45:22Speaker 02

  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 cognitive dissonance such that ghosts are talking to you for Christ's sake. So 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.

• 45:53Mike Rowe?

  Wow, okay. There's a lot there, but the business of rather not knowing, the business, back to your ostrich for a moment, all right? He didn't walk into a laundromat. He just walked down the beach and stuck his head in the sand.

• 46:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:07Mike Rowe?

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

• 46:14Speaker 02

  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 the 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, yeah, he's got a point. The other guy's got a point too. How are they going to work it out?

• 46:48Mike Rowe?

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

• 46:53Speaker 02

  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 has come to us all, which is doing our laundry. Everyone has to do laundry. We may have someone do it for us, that one remove, but there's a bunch of bullshit. But that's what Most things passing as drama today are.

• 47:23Mike Rowe?

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

• 47:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:33Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 48:00Speaker 02

  Oh, but you can.

• 48:01Mike Rowe?

  I can.

• 48:02Speaker 02

  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. 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 the myth of woke-ism. This is absurd. In addition, it's blasphemous.

• 48:25Mike Rowe?

  Some did.

• 48:26Speaker 02

  What?

• 48:26Mike Rowe?

  Some did.

• 48:27Speaker 02

  That's correct.

• 48:27Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 48:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:41Mike Rowe?

  An ostrich, a priest and a whore. Three things that normally aren't grouped up together. You do that a lot.

• 48:51Speaker 02

  Oh, thank, thank you so much.

• 48:53Mike Rowe?

  You're welcome.

• 48:53Speaker 02

  You know, um, I started realizing, uh, uh, check that. Tom Sowell did one of his wonderful books about ten years, fifteen years ago called, uh, Dissolving America or something like that. I gotta, I'm so sorry I put up. It's a great book where he describes everything that's happening today.

• 49:10Mike Rowe?

  Is this Tom Sowell you're talking about?

• 49:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:13Mike Rowe?

  The best.

• 49:13Speaker 02

  No, let's find the name of that book. It's Dissolving America.

• 49:17Mike Rowe?

  Dissolving America.

• 49:18Speaker 02

  It's better than that.

• 49:19Mike Rowe?

  Just so people know, he must be, he's gotta be in his nineties.

• 49:22Speaker 02

  I think he's ninety or ninety-one.

• 49:23Mike Rowe?

  And he's out of the Chicago School?

• 49:25Speaker 02

  Yes, he's out of the Chicago School, in Moulton and Freeman. And interesting, out of the Chicago School in nineteen fourteen, one of the precursor, um, great economists 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.

• 49:45Mike Rowe?

  Dismantling America.

• 49:46Speaker 02

  Dismantling America, that's what it is, thank you. Dismantling America.

• 49:49Mike Rowe?

  Look at that, five stars, of course.

• 49:51Speaker 02

  Oh, it's magnificent.

• 49:52Mike Rowe?

  Seven hundred and seventy-four ratings.

• 49:53Speaker 02

  It's magnificent book, the guy, he writes so-

• 49:55Mike Rowe?

  He can't write a bad book.

• 49:56Speaker 02

  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 all the nonsense and get to the meat? So, anyway, Torsten Veblen is an economist at the University of Chicago in nineteen fourteen, 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 a hundred and ten 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

• 50:38Speaker 02

  learning a trade, this is what you talk about, they're talking, 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 a journal, right?

• 51:22Speaker 02

  So, here's the, 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 Torsten Veblen said in nineteen fourteen, 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?

• 51:50Mike Rowe?

  On the college side?

• 51:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:52Mike Rowe?

  Uh, the latest treat in terms of to get you to enroll?

• 51:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:59Mike Rowe?

  Or the promise of getting the diploma?

• 52:01Speaker 02

  No, fuck the diploma.

• 52:03Mike Rowe?

  Okay, so, so the inducement.

• 52:05Speaker 02

  The latest treat.

• 52:06Mike Rowe?

  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, uh, tell me, what is it?

• 52:13Speaker 02

  Kill the Jews.

• 52:15Mike Rowe?

  Oh.

• 52:15Speaker 02

  That's the latest treat that these swine are selling. Come and yell, "Free Palestine!" from the lib-- blah, blah, blah. Burn stuff down, disrupt everything, make the Jews feel blah, blah, blah, and dare us to, uh, 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, uh, obscenity. They say, "Yeah, you bet."

• 52:42Mike Rowe?

  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?

• 53:16Speaker 02

  Well, it's the whole thing.

• 53:17Mike Rowe?

  Around it.

• 53:18Speaker 02

  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 of things we can do. One is, I'm not 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 their frickin' head down, or they're gonna get hit on the head. What are they gonna do with the degree?

• 54:03Speaker 02

  From that school, other than go to work for somebody who likes that school, who's gonna 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. Eighty percent 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 gonna find out what you do next till you leave Egypt. And you're not gonna 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.

• 54:45Speaker 02

  He's sending them back to die in the concentration camps, for God's sake. Stop voting for, what do you 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 a hundred 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.

• 55:22Mike Rowe?

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 55:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:27Mike Rowe?

  You're out of Fs to give, as they say. I get that. You live right up the road from here, somewhere, somewhere between Sodom and Gomorrah. There you are, in the belly of the beast.

• 55:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:38Mike Rowe?

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

• 55:42Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, Everywhere in Oink, Oink.

• 55:43Mike Rowe?

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

• 55:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:49Mike Rowe?

  I guess I'm just asking the obvious question. When, when did you, uh...

• 55:56Mike Rowe?

  Stop being a liberal. And when did you stop caring about who knew it?

• 56:04Speaker 02

  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 I wrote an article called Political Civility for The Village Voice.

• 56:19Mike Rowe?

  Was this about Lincoln?

• 56:22Speaker 02

  No, it was about a kind of, no, it was about a contemporary president.

• 56:25Mike Rowe?

  Okay.

• 56:25Speaker 02

  Who's 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 and they, 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 a 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.

• 57:10Speaker 02

  Do I have the power to pardon turkeys? So as the yes man says, yes, Mr. President, you do. He says, good, get those guys back here. Tell them I want 300 million dollars 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 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. Boom, everybody loses my number.

• 57:43Mike Rowe?

  Where are we now? What year?

• 57:45Speaker 02

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

• 57:46Mike Rowe?

  25, okay. So around 2000, right around the?

• 57:49Speaker 02

  I think so, yeah. So I looked around, I said, oh, well, that's interesting. It's like Sarah Silverman said, she got whacked personally. She said, it's my own party. And I wanted to say to her, dude, that's right.

• 58:03Mike Rowe?

  Yeah. So you lost friends for real?

• 58:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:07Mike Rowe?

  Well, or you, or did you?

• 58:09Speaker 02

  Well, I lost acquaintances.

• 58:11Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 58:11Speaker 02

  But on the other hand, I made friends.

• 58:15Mike Rowe?

  Like who?

• 58:16Speaker 02

  Well, Shelby Steele was one.

• 58:17Mike Rowe?

  Mm-hmm.

• 58:18Speaker 02

  Tom Sowell, I used to hang out with him. Victor Davis Hansen.

• 58:21Mike Rowe?

  Mm-hmm.

• 58:23Speaker 02

  Abigail Schreier.

• 58:24Mike Rowe?

  Terrific.

• 58:25Speaker 02

  Barry Weiss.

• 58:26Mike Rowe?

  Yep.

• 58:26Speaker 02

  Nellie Boyle, Susie Weiss.

• 58:28Mike Rowe?

  Now Barry Weiss, that's Free Press, right?

• 58:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:31Mike Rowe?

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

• 58:33Speaker 02

  I do a cartoon for them every week. And I'll, I'll tell you my best, one of my best cartoons.

• 58:39Mike Rowe?

  I'm gonna see it.

• 58:40Speaker 02

  It's, um, 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."

• 59:01Speaker 02

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

• 59:05Mike Rowe?

  That's, it's your sandbox, man.

• 59:06Speaker 02

  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, uh, the Free Press. Check 'em out, people.

• 59:31Mike Rowe?

  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?

• 59:46Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, 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, uh, give me a retraction or you're fired." And so she wrote a letter, you should all look it up, was she, beautiful letter where she resigned from the New York Times.

• 1:00:11Mike Rowe?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:00:11Speaker 02

  And with nothing, and so then she and Nellie created this magnificent newspaper called the Free Press, which is now extraordinarily successful.

• 1:00:24Mike Rowe?

  Ever since Chapter started advertising on this podcast, I've been getting letters and emails from satisfied customers all over the country. Last week, I got one from Joseph, a retired veterinarian in Texas, who just learned his Medicare plan was shutting down. I can't tell you Joseph's last name because his medical history is complicated and personal, but his situation is not uncommon at all. Given his medical history, Joseph was unable to find a local provider that would include the doctors he'd come to rely on. Happily, Joseph listens to this podcast, and Joseph heard me talking about Chapter just last week. And Chapter exists for one reason:

• 1:01:05Mike Rowe?

  to help people on Medicare find the plan that's right for them. It's a free service. Anyhow, Joseph called Chapter. He connected with an advisor named Heidi. And Heidi caught something that most people miss because his current plan was about to close. Joseph had a limited window to continue with his current coverage through a new plan without any additional medical underwriting. In other words, Heidi found a way to get Joseph the coverage he needed with the doctors he preferred. Then she found great coverage for his wife, too. Moral of the story? Medicare plans are constantly evolving. You are too. Call Chapter. Make sure you're on the best plan for you.

• 1:01:49Mike Rowe?

  Also, people who switch plans after calling Chapter save an average of $1,100 a year. 804-Chapter. That's the number. Call it today. It's free. Whole thing takes about 20 minutes. 804-Chapter. Have you talked to Megyn Kelly?

• 1:02:08Speaker 02

  I talked to her a long time. I'd love to talk to her again. I talked to her, you know, two iterations ago. She's great.

• 1:02:13Mike Rowe?

  I think you guys would get along terrifically. 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 antisemitism? 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.

• 1:02:57Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 1:03:11Speaker 02

  Yes, that's right. It's in the book.

• 1:03:13Mike Rowe?

  What is the grout, though? What, like, 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?

• 1:03:31Speaker 02

  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 antisemitism? 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.

• 1:04:12Speaker 02

  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,

• 1:04:23Speaker 02

  I've seen this before. So people say of chess, how many moves can someone think in advance? A great chess player, someone can think three moves in advance. It's not true, nobody can think three moves in advance to billions. But what the chess, 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, gets out of office. Trump, what's his name? Biden comes in and after Trump, and things start to go to hell. And whose interest is it? And the answer is, it's in the interest of various groups.

• 1:05:07Mike Rowe?

  Keybono.

• 1:05:08Speaker 02

  Various groups who come into an abandoned city. So I'm saying, we're looking at it as an abandoned city, just like Moscow in 1812, just like Paris in 1944, like Milan in 1945, Naples 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 antisemites and you get all sorts of racists and so forth. Each one says, you know what, give me that Autopen. Jimmy, you got to get out of Afghanistan the other day.

• 1:05:52Speaker 02

  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 it. Wait a second, Jenny says, wait a second, what about me? I didn't get to use that Autopen 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, he's like, yeah, I don't know if it's stupid or not, but so is opening the border and so is getting out of Africa. That's the fuck what I want to do. Billy says, wait a second. It's an open city. So just like Paris in nineteen forty-four, you got the Marxists, the communists, the

• 1:06:37Speaker 02

  Trotskyites, the Lovestonites, you got the resistance. Everyone is getting together for the moment if that works, but on the other hand, they're saying, fuck you, now I'm gonna go loot over there. The other thing you get into in 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 many, many more. You know what? I don't like that motherfucker, Trump. Here's what I'm gonna do. Da, da, da. Okay, okay, well, huh? He's got that right. You know, when I go, da, da, da, I'm gonna give what's-her-name, Stacey Abrams, I'm gonna 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.

• 1:07:22Mike Rowe?

  Things fall apart.

• 1:07:23Speaker 02

  Things fall apart.

• 1:07:24Mike Rowe?

  The center cannot hold.

• 1:07:25Speaker 02

  Cannot hold. Well, that, you know, he was the greatest poet, yeah, he's the greatest poet since Shakespeare.

• 1:07:30Mike Rowe?

  Mere anarchy loosed upon the world.

• 1:07:33Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:07:34Mike Rowe?

  Is that, um, what rough beast has our come round at last?

• 1:07:40Speaker 02

  The, the, the blood dimmed tide.

• 1:07:41Mike Rowe?

  The second coming.

• 1:07:43Speaker 02

  And everywhere a ceremony of innocence is drowned. And what rough beast it's our come round at last slouches toward Bethlehem to be born. Great stuff.

• 1:07:54Mike Rowe?

  Pretty great.

• 1:07:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:56Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, that was out of, uh, you know, Crazy Jane Talks to the Bishop, whole series.

• 1:08:01Speaker 02

  Oh, my B, yeah.

• 1:08:02Mike Rowe?

  So great.

• 1:08:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:08:04Mike Rowe?

  So that's a lot, too, Dave.

• 1:08:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:08:07Mike Rowe?

  To, to my earlier point, well, here it is, the subtitle, staring me in the face, politics, horror, and entertainment.

• 1:08:13Speaker 02

  Here's the thing.

• 1:08:14Mike Rowe?

  That, that was, everything you just said was political, horrifying, and entertaining.

• 1:08:19Speaker 02

  Oh, thank you.

• 1:08:20Mike Rowe?

  You're welcome.

• 1:08:21Speaker 02

  Thank you very much. So with Trump, who's, you know, I, I've worked with a lot of geniuses in the arts and so forth, but genius, as far as I understand it, is Trump. Talent beyond my ability to understand it, right? Somebody can be 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 it'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, right?

• 1:09:04Speaker 02

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

• 1:09:16Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 1:09:29Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 1:09:29Mike Rowe?

  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?

• 1:10:11Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 1:10:19Speaker 02

  Ruat suelum fiat justicia. Ruat suelum.

• 1:10:22Mike Rowe?

  Yes. Let the heavens fall. That's where I feel like you're coming from. I'm not saying you're not persuasive.

• 1:10:28Speaker 02

  I'm not trying to persuade anybody because did anybody ever persuade you of anything? Nobody ever persuaded me of anything.

• 1:10:35Mike Rowe?

  Well, you know what? Hold on. I'll tell you. I'll speak for Chuck, who was a... May I?

• 1:10:42Speaker 01

  I can't stop you.

• 1:10:43Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 1:10:52Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:10:53Mike Rowe?

  But, you know, was it Larry Elder? Was it Dennis Prager?

• 1:10:56Speaker 01

  Both.

• 1:10:57Mike Rowe?

  The... Right? So, it takes time.

• 1:11:01Speaker 02

  That's the answer, is 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 I do, 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.

• 1:11:37Mike Rowe?

  Come on, wait a minute, wait a minute. There's gotta 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 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, that's different than just some guy who writes words and... Right?

• 1:12:02Speaker 02

  I don't think so. No, no. Here's the thing. It's like they say, the whatchamacallit is always the last to know. Getting betrayed is one of the least enjoyable of human experiences.

• 1:12:14Mike Rowe?

  It's a drag.

• 1:12:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. When you give someone you trust, and you think that they admire you, or they believe in you, and you would support them, and then all of a sudden you found out that they betrayed you, that's... That's really taken it down to the metal. And so that's so I went.

• 1:12:31Mike Rowe?

  It's operatic is what it is.

• 1:12:33Speaker 02

  So that's, that's what I was going through for a couple of years. I say, 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 Hansen and Tom Soul 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. What we're looking at here is an ancient human problem.

• 1:13:04Mike Rowe?

  So you were persuaded? You simply, you weren't sold. You bought something. To take your metaphor, you went on to the used car lot and you told the salesman to pound sand. And you said, I'm gonna take my time. I'm gonna walk around, I'm gonna kick the tires, I'm gonna 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 pain than to be betrayed.

• 1:13:49Mike Rowe?

  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, uh, since we're doing French stuff, your raison, raison d'être?

• 1:14:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, that'll do.

• 1:14:17Mike Rowe?

  Come here, tell me I'm close.

• 1:14:18Speaker 02

  Oh, you're perfect.

• 1:14:19Mike Rowe?

  All right. I like it perfect.

• 1:14:21Speaker 02

  Um, 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 was, uh, met some people at my synagogue, one of the wonderful man named Andre Bala, who was 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.

• 1:14:46Speaker 02

  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 of books you might wanna, might wanna read. You got any questions, 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 repast. To a request to explain their, uh, their religion. Oh, what are you, a Trump lover?

• 1:15:16Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:16Speaker 02

  One of the things I realized, people say, you know, you can't say that. What they're doing is, they aren't objecting their warning. They're saying, don't you know that you can't say that?

• 1:15:28Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 1:15:29Speaker 02

  Right?

• 1:15:29Mike Rowe?

  Let me help you. Let me give you a helpful little tip.

• 1:15:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, really.

• 1:15:33Mike Rowe?

  So you won't, uh, 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.

• 1:15:45Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:15:46Mike Rowe?

  Maybe that's part of why your brain was like struggling to make sense of the fact that why would friends turn their backs on me? Why, 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 a, uh, as an inevitability.

• 1:16:05Speaker 02

  But the, the pro dromo, since we're talking Latin, was when I first started hearing people say, uh, this may not be politically correct, but. So that went on for twenty fucking years.

• 1:16:16Mike Rowe?

  But everything before but's bullshit, right?

• 1:16:18Speaker 02

  This may not be politically correct, but why does one think one has to introduce a statement of one's procession, uh, position? By acknowledging that there's an alternative. That's brainwashing.

• 1:16:31Mike Rowe?

  Or a bungled attempt to be persuasive. The faked expression of reasonableness, right? All of that stuff that proceeds but really is bull crap 99% of the time. It's just, it's the stuff of confidence. You know, the truth comes after but, or at least the truth of what you mean to say.

• 1:16:54Speaker 02

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

• 1:17:27Mike Rowe?

  You gotta help me with that resurgio what?

• 1:17:29Speaker 02

  The resurgence.

• 1:17:31Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, but give me the Latin again.

• 1:17:33Speaker 02

  Resurgimento, that's Italian.

• 1:17:37Mike Rowe?

  Pretty close, though.

• 1:17:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:17:39Mike Rowe?

  Uh, interesting call back to Lincoln. As I recall, it was he who ushered in the pardoning of the turkeys.

• 1:17:48Speaker 02

  Oh, that's true, that's true. It's his son. Yeah, they want to kill the fucking turkey, yeah.

• 1:17:53Mike Rowe?

  Well, I mean, that's a loose translation. I think of the original text. Last thing I'm gonna do is rewrite David Mamet.

• 1:17:59Speaker 02

  No, not at all. I mean, there's a famous story that a kid has a pet.

• 1:18:05Mike Rowe?

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

• 1:18:09Speaker 02

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

• 1:18:32Mike Rowe?

  What if, say, five years ago, some big oil company offered a promotion that gave you a chance to lock in the price of gasoline at $2.50 a gallon for the rest of your life? Would you have taken that deal? Or what if a nationwide grocery store had given you an opportunity to lock in the price of ground beef at, say, $2 a pound for as long as you live? Would you have taken that deal? Yeah, me too. Unfortunately, those deals were never on the table, but this one is. Today, as in right now, for a very, very limited time, Pure Talk is offering every American the opportunity to purchase unlimited talk, text, and data, along with a 30 gig hotspot,

• 1:19:16Mike Rowe?

  for just $29.95 a month for life. Not your phone's life, your life. No contracts, no commitments, just a very rare opportunity to lock into a ridiculously low rate for unlimited talk, text, and data for the rest of your life. It's the unlimited data plan from Pure Talk, and it will not be around for long. $29.95 a month for as long as you live. Taxes and fees not included. Some restrictions do apply. See puretalk.com for details. Offer ends 11/15/26. So chop, chop. Pure Talk. Now, that's called a tease.

• 1:20:01Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, good.

• 1:20:01Mike Rowe?

  Excellent.

• 1:20:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:20:02Mike Rowe?

  You got somewhere to be? Are we done? Can I plug your book a little bit?

• 1:20:05Speaker 02

  No, no, I got nothing. Are you kidding? I'm just here, as my wife said, I should begin every sentence by prefacing it, whore that I am.

• 1:20:16Mike Rowe?

  Your wife said that?

• 1:20:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:20:19Mike Rowe?

  She sounds terrific. What's her name?

• 1:20:20Speaker 02

  Her name is Rebecca Pigeon. She is terrific. I'm crazy about her.

• 1:20:24Mike Rowe?

  You married Rebecca Pigeon?

• 1:20:26Speaker 02

  You bet I did, about 35 years ago.

• 1:20:29Mike Rowe?

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

• 1:20:35Mike Rowe?

  She was, now was that around the time, uh, Spanish prisoner, Steve Martin?

• 1:20:38Speaker 02

  Before that, she was doing a play of mine in, um, London called Speed the Plough, which he 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 Ole Anna, which is a very politically upsetting play, and then we've been working together ever since.

• 1:21:00Mike Rowe?

  Congratulations.

• 1:21:01Speaker 02

  Thanks.

• 1:21:01Mike Rowe?

  What'd she think of your book?

• 1:21:03Speaker 02

  She loves it.

• 1:21:04Mike Rowe?

  Yeah?

• 1:21:04Speaker 02

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

• 1:21:08Mike Rowe?

  The book is called The Disenlightenment: Politics, Horror, and Entertainment. All I can tell you is it's, I'm about halfway through, and, 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?

• 1:21:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think the short story is, 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 Mopetson, then, and then in 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.

• 1:22:05Mike Rowe?

  Did the pulps come out of that?

• 1:22:07Speaker 02

  Maybe, they maybe did, the pulps are actually a very old form, and it started in, uh, again, in England, late Victorian, uh, there were two things, there were the penny dreadfuls, which were long, um, basically romance novels about slice and dice and Jack the Ripper, and then there were a lot of magazine, and then the, uh, a lot of the great, um, authors wrote in serials, Charles Dickens, and Wilkie Collins, and Mary Elizabeth Brennan, and so what, 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, uh, we don't got magazines no more,

• 1:22:48Speaker 02

  so there's really no place that I know of to put, um, a short story.

• 1:22:53Mike Rowe?

  I believe it's Ain't Got No Magazines, no more. I was reading the other day, one of my favorite writers, uh, John D. McDonald. Um, 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.

• 1:23:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, a guy came to me a couple of times over 20 years. He said he had the rights to Travis McGee and would I, uh, would I want to write it as a movie?

• 1:23:33Mike Rowe?

  Oh, my God. What'd you say?

• 1:23:35Speaker 02

  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 Bright Yola for the Shroud and bop and all that shit. I said, yeah, no, I can't work that way, you know? He's, I said, you want to, you want me to write a Travis McGee novel? A movie, I'll be glad to do it. And he said, well, what about the, uh, the ongoing creative process? I said, what did we just have? But that didn't happen.

• 1:24:01Mike Rowe?

  I think, I mean, Chuck's 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 Forrest Gumped my way across the deep blue goodbye and picked up this time capsule of this boat bum in 1965.

• 1:24:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:24:26Mike Rowe?

  Right? Going after confidence men.

• 1:24:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:24:30Mike Rowe?

  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, 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 and.

• 1:24:53Speaker 02

  Oh, it's great.

• 1:24:54Mike Rowe?

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

• 1:24:59Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:25:06Mike Rowe?

  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 then blood in his stool.

• 1:25:16Speaker 01

  It was always a broken girl too.

• 1:25:18Mike Rowe?

  And it was always.

• 1:25:19Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:25:20Mike Rowe?

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

• 1:25:26Speaker 02

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

• 1:25:33Speaker 02

  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?

• 1:25:44Mike Rowe?

  Jack Carr?

• 1:25:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, it's Jack, what's his name, but it's, it's the other thing. He's got a guy who was a Navy SEAL and he, it was without mercy, without remorse.

• 1:25:53Mike Rowe?

  Without remorse, yeah.

• 1:25:54Speaker 02

  By?

• 1:25:56Mike Rowe?

  By Big Dick Branigan.

• 1:25:59Speaker 02

  By Tom Clancy.

• 1:26:01Mike Rowe?

  By Tom Clancy.

• 1:26:01Speaker 02

  Tom Clancy writes this wonderful book, it's about a mariner character, he's got his own book, Without Remorse, he lives on a boat and he's an 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 he 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.

• 1:26:22Mike Rowe?

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

• 1:26:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:26:27Mike Rowe?

  But yeah, I'm so glad to know that you, uh, that you were touched by him. What about George MacDonald Frazier? Have you stumbled across The Flashman Chronicles?

• 1:26:36Speaker 02

  Oh, sure. He did some marvel, he also wrote a wonderful war book called Quarter to Save Out Here.

• 1:26:44Mike Rowe?

  Quarter to Save, I've got it.

• 1:26:45Speaker 02

  That's a great book.

• 1:26:45Mike Rowe?

  It's a terrific book.

• 1:26:46Speaker 02

  The Flashman books are just superb.

• 1:26:49Mike Rowe?

  He was in, uh, Burma.

• 1:26:50Speaker 02

  I think he was, and there's, he's so frickin' funny, God, he's funny.

• 1:26:55Mike Rowe?

  Well, talk about Politically Incorrect, that book doesn't get published.

• 1:26:58Speaker 02

  Flashman?

• 1:26:59Mike Rowe?

  Flashman today, no way.

• 1:27:01Speaker 02

  What gets published, I don't know.

• 1:27:03Mike Rowe?

  Well, you should, because the Disenlightenment just came out, somehow or another, unless you're gonna tell me that you and Rebecca, like, published this yourself or something?

• 1:27:11Speaker 02

  No, no, no, it was published by some guys and blah, blah, blah.

• 1:27:14Mike Rowe?

  No, who publishes this thing, seriously?

• 1:27:16Speaker 02

  Well, you have to tell me.

• 1:27:18Mike Rowe?

  Oh, no, I'm looking inside. David Mamet is a fantastic, right, Mark Levin, that's nice.

• 1:27:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:27:23Mike Rowe?

  Like, 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 that happened?

• 1:27:34Speaker 02

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

• 1:27:37Mike Rowe?

  Harper Collins. Harper Collins, thank you.

• 1:27:39Speaker 02

  Harper Collins, yeah, Henry Johnson, you can find that, henryjohnsonmovie.com, and it stars Shia LaBeouf and Evan Jonakite.

• 1:27:48Mike Rowe?

  Terrific.

• 1:27:48Speaker 02

  It's a pretty good movie.

• 1:27:52Mike Rowe?

  What are you reading now and what do you recommend?

• 1:27:55Speaker 02

  Well, I've been reading lately a whole bunch of books by Sash de Grammont. Sash de Grammont was a French count, but he was from the poor, from the poor branch. And they were intermarried with the Rospoles 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 Grammont to Ted Morgan, which is an anagram of de Grammont. And he wrote spectacular, um, nonfiction, a biography of mom, biography of T R, biography

• 1:28:37Speaker 02

  of F D R, a biography of Roosevelt. And he wrote a wonderful book about the Red Scare called Reds. And he wrote a book about Love Stone, who was the communist.

• 1:28:52Mike Rowe?

  Reds, the turned into the movie Reds?

• 1:28:54Speaker 02

  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 forbears during Louis the 15th. 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 during, 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 there are the Resistance and the Communists and the collaborators and the Nazis. And it's really stunning about what people will do to kiss ass.

• 1:29:39Mike Rowe?

  Because power hates a vacuum.

• 1:29:42Speaker 02

  Power hate's 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 does 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. 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? 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?

• 1:30:23Mike Rowe?

  Hmm. Well, the way you put it before, in fact, it's funny. Tim Allen sat right there not long ago and said, "Qui bono?" Who benefits? Who profits?

• 1:30:33Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 1:30:33Mike Rowe?

  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. Qui bono must be Latin.

• 1:30:42Speaker 02

  You bet.

• 1:30:42Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:30:43Mike Rowe?

  Okay, good. I thought he was, so I'm sure he was gonna say, "No, it's Italian, dummy."

• 1:30:46Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:30:47Mike Rowe?

  Just 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.

• 1:31:05Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, I mean, the question is home. And at the beginning of that poem, Yeats says, "How can you compete, being honor-bred with one who, were it known, he lies, or neither shamed in his nor in his neighbor's eyes?" So a congressman gets up, a senator gets up, and a Fox woman 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."

• 1:31:42Mike Rowe?

  That guy is Chuck Schumer, I believe.

• 1:31:44Speaker 02

  Oh, was it?

• 1:31:45Mike Rowe?

  I believe so.

• 1:31:46Speaker 02

  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 civilization in decline.

• 1:32:01Mike Rowe?

  You've used the word whore. I've been counting four times.

• 1:32:06Speaker 02

  Whore?

• 1:32:07Mike Rowe?

  Whore.

• 1:32:08Speaker 02

  Oh whore, yeah.

• 1:32:08Mike Rowe?

  W H O R E. It pops up. A whore's profession.

• 1:32:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:32:13Mike Rowe?

  Is that a play or a book?

• 1:32:15Speaker 02

  It's a book.

• 1:32:16Mike Rowe?

  How did Rebecca encourage you to introduce yourself? Whore that I am.

• 1:32:21Speaker 02

  Whore that I am.

• 1:32:22Mike Rowe?

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

• 1:32:26Speaker 02

  But listen, also, I wrote Diary of a Porn Star, 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, um...

• 1:32:39Mike Rowe?

  People?

• 1:32:40Speaker 02

  Her people.

• 1:32:41Mike Rowe?

  A lot of them.

• 1:32:42Speaker 02

  And say, "This is a great deal. I tell you what, put your name on it, we'll split the profits." Diary of a Porn... It's a very funny book, I think. Diary of a Porn Star by Stormy Daniels, a lost opportunity.

• 1:32:52Mike Rowe?

  It really was, you know what?

• 1:32:53Speaker 02

  But then I went out to Elizabeth Warren and, um...

• 1:32:58Mike Rowe?

  Go ahead. Say it.

• 1:33:00Speaker 02

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

• 1:33:03Mike Rowe?

  You had your own punchline to that. I had my own punchline. I'm not gonna say it, but that's great.

• 1:33:08Speaker 02

  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, she 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..."

• 1:33:54Speaker 02

  He says, "I'll tell ya." 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, 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, right? Gets his courage up. There's a nice woman sitting down at the bar. He comes up, he says, tickle your ass with a feather. And she slapped me. He says, what? He says, I said, you ought to shove a fucking feather up your ass. You may ask-

• 1:34:34Mike Rowe?

  Raining like a bitch.

• 1:34:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, you may ask why Elizabeth Warren made me think of that. I think that the answer's clear.

• 1:34:41Mike Rowe?

  I see what he did.

• 1:34:44Speaker 01

  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?

• 1:34:55Mike Rowe?

  Well, then-

• 1:34:57Speaker 02

  I gotta tell you, my son's, the time he made me laugh, because we create jokes all the time, that's what we do in my family. I'm still telling 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 gonna improve that joke. Wait, I gotta tell you the improvement.

• 1:35:22Mike Rowe?

  Okay, hit me.

• 1:35:23Speaker 02

  Noah says, okay dad, here goes. Guy comes up, he says, invisible man's here. The guy says, tell him to go fuck himself.

• 1:35:35Mike Rowe?

  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 Swit, 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 Rains.

• 1:36:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:36:08Mike Rowe?

  Now Claude Rains, 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, yes, drip, drip, drip. The joke finally lands a day and a half later when I'm in the library. And like, oh, oh.

• 1:36:31Speaker 02

  Well, see, that's the problem when you get too old and the, nobody gets the jokes anymore. There's another example of my son Noah. Am I eating up your guys' time?

• 1:36:38Mike Rowe?

  No, no, we have, this is, don't worry, none of this will be used.

• 1:36:41Speaker 02

  Excellent. So the joke, I tell him 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.

• 1:36:55Mike Rowe?

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

• 1:36:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was a guy, Max Factor, his name is-

• 1:36:59Mike Rowe?

  Like a name, you know?

• 1:37:00Speaker 02

  Myron Factorowicz, 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 Rubinstein get pregnant? You know?

• 1:37:25Mike Rowe?

  No.

• 1:37:26Speaker 02

  Max Factor. So my, my, 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? Oh, Helena Rubinstein.

• 1:37:43Mike Rowe?

  Was that the Rubinstein, was John Rubinstein her son?

• 1:37:50Speaker 02

  Maybe, it's a common Jewish name.

• 1:37:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, he did Pippin, right, yeah.

• 1:37:54Mike Rowe?

  Well, I mean, since you invoked Yates 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.

• 1:38:21Speaker 02

  Well, that the old joke about engineers, these three engineers are talking about, what's the stupidest, 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 our, the electrical impulses which allow us to move. So obviously, God is a, 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 God, yeah, he says, but on the other hand, it's, it's possible that God is a civic engineer because he put a playground next to a sewage disposal pad.

• 1:39:04Mike Rowe?

  All right. I see where this is going.

• 1:39:09Speaker 02

  You are, you brought out the worst of me. I hope you're happy.

• 1:39:12Mike Rowe?

  Look, man, I, like I said, who in the world is gonna rewrite David Mamet? The book is The Disenlightenment. The movie is Henry Johnson. You can download that at henryjohnson.com.

• 1:39:23Speaker 02

  HenryJohnsonMovie.com.

• 1:39:25Mike Rowe?

  HenryJohnsonMovie.com.

• 1:39:26Speaker 02

  Thank you so much.

• 1:39:27Mike Rowe?

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

• 1:39:32Speaker 02

  I know.

• 1:39:33Mike Rowe?

  Thank you for signing my stupid release. I gotta tell you something, man. My relationship with releases over the years has probably been similar to yours.

• 1:39:46Speaker 02

  I know, you wrote that, yeah.

• 1:39:48Mike Rowe?

  Well, yeah, but that was my first draft. He shouldn't have said, just so the listener understands, we've got the same bull crap 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, I just, 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, he's crossed out certain, certain sentences and, you know, this paragraph not here, this doesn't quite work. And, 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.

• 1:40:30Speaker 02

  You wrote a new release?

• 1:40:32Mike Rowe?

  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. Here it is. It's the David Mamet 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 to do.

• 1:40:54Speaker 02

  You guys should, you should have seen this release. It says, "We get to use your likeness in anything."

• 1:40:59Mike Rowe?

  I know.

• 1:41:00Speaker 02

  Now invented or forever invented, yeah. Throughout the universe.

• 1:41:03Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:41:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, then until the end of time. Then it says, "We get to alter it in any way possible to the end of time." Well, you're gonna fucking lull me and make me look like a beagle? I don't know about that. And it says, "We get to make love to your wife on alternate Saturdays and piss in your mouth on shavuos." I said, "You know what?"

• 1:41:21Mike Rowe?

  I just can't do it. Well, first of all, I read the fine, I read everything.

• 1:41:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, me too.

• 1:41:26Mike Rowe?

  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 basic, like, if you don't know somebody, you're basically saying, "I need you to trust me

• 1:42:11Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 1:42:21Speaker 02

  Well, that was, yes, I understand, but...

• 1:42:22Mike Rowe?

  If you're gonna be interesting, get the mic on your...

• 1:42:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, 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."

• 1:42:34Mike Rowe?

  That's what I, and they're like, "Well, it doesn't mean we're gonna do that." I'm like, "Then why would you say it?"

• 1:42:39Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:42:39Mike Rowe?

  And the answer is, "Because it's better to overreach." So, on your way, did you drive yourself here?

• 1:42:45Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:42:46Mike Rowe?

  Look at you. That's amazing.

• 1:42:48Speaker 02

  How about that, huh?

• 1:42:49Mike Rowe?

  You know who else did that? Jean Simmons came in here two months ago, got stuck in traffic. Took him an hour and 45 minutes to get here from Malibu. It's unbelievable, that guy.

• 1:42:58Speaker 02

  I saw, she's still stuck in the garage.

• 1:43:03Speaker 01

  Different Gene Simmons.

• 1:43:04Mike Rowe?

  She's still stuck in the... I'm talking about the rock star from Kiss.

• 1:43:09Speaker 02

  That Gene Simmons?

• 1:43:11Mike Rowe?

  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 Mamet release. It's the release that inspired me.

• 1:43:24Speaker 02

  So what's in it for me?

• 1:43:27Mike Rowe?

  Well, aside, you know what? I predict, how many of these books you think we can sell? Like, if I really lean into it?

• 1:43:34Speaker 01

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

• 1:43:36Mike Rowe?

  That's what I would think.

• 1:43:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:37Speaker 02

  Sold.

• 1:43:38Mike Rowe?

  Folks, this book, Whore That I Am, by David Mamet and Mike Rowe. It's a pop-up, and I think you're gonna... I think you're gonna 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.

• 1:43:55Speaker 02

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

• 1:43:57Mike Rowe?

  That's what I'm saying, don't... I mean...

• 1:43:59Speaker 02

  Oh, I was just gonna think.

• 1:44:00Mike Rowe?

  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...

• 1:44:09Speaker 02

  Oh, yes, please, I'm honored, thank you.

• 1:44:11Mike Rowe?

  The David Mamet release.

• 1:44:12Speaker 02

  You bet.

• 1:44:12Mike Rowe?

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

• 1:44:18Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:44:18Mike Rowe?

  Out of my... Out of this little part of my life. I couldn't have done it without you.

• 1:44:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. Thanks for having me, and thanks, Chuck.

• 1:44:27Mike Rowe?

  Really an honor, a privilege, a pleasure.

• 1:44:29Speaker 01

  Truly.

• 1:44:30Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:44:30Mike Rowe?

  All that stuff.

• 1:44:31Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:44:32Mike Rowe?

  Chuck, going, going. You have one question for David Mamet?

• 1:44:36Speaker 01

  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 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 Mamet."

• 1:45:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, truer words whenever.

• 1:45:23Mike Rowe?

  Keep on out, everybody. See you next week.

• 1:45:26Speaker 01

  If you like what you heard... And even if you don't... Won't you please... Won't you please, pretty please, pretty please... Subscribe! Well, I hate to beg and I hate to plead, but please, pretty frickin' please... Please sub... Please subscribe!

• 1:45:56Speaker 03

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• 1:46:27Speaker 04

  What's that?

• 1:46:28Speaker 05

  My fresh detector.

• 1:46:29Speaker 04

  Uh, your what?

• 1:46:30Speaker 05

  There it is.

• 1:46:31Speaker 04

  What is it detecting?

• 1:46:33Speaker 05

  Fresh produce, fresh meat.

• 1:46:35Speaker 04

  Okay, what happens if it detects something really fresh?

• 1:46:41Speaker 05

  Apparently, we celebrate.

• 1:46:43Speaker 06

  At Food Lion, you can count on fresh food at fresher prices. When your fresh detector is going off, head to your local Food Lion or shop at foodlion.com.