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It's just we have comedy backgrounds, most of us. So we're just looking for those moments and we're playing that timing. I'm playing us, hopefully, trying to play a spirited version of Shelley, somebody who really, really believes he's about to make his big score.
Absolutely has no second thoughts about that. And that is Bob Odenkirk talking about the play that's playing right around the block from us. Glengarry Glenrosh, David Mamet, the award-winning playwright and author of the new book, The Disenlightenment Politics, Horror and Entertainment. David, welcome to Brian Kilmeade show. Thank you, Brian. Nice to be here. So do you still go every night to the play?
Oh God, no, no, no. I don't live in the United States. I live in California. And so I'm on the other side of the country.
Okay, but did you get it up and running? No, no, no. It was directed by Patrick Marber in a terrific production. And after I'd done a play once, if I'm not directing revival, I just say, wait, it's not enough for me to do. I got better things to do with my life and they got better things to do with their life than to listen to me to say, that's not the way that we did it when the dinosaurs roamed the earth. Oh, it's still in other words, a while ago. And you talked about that when the movie came out, you made the role for Alec Baldwin.
Here he is talking about it, cut 43. Only one thing counts in this life, get them to sign on the line, which is dotted. A, B, C, A always B, B, C closing. Always be closing.
Always be closing. A, I, D, A attention, interest, decision, action, attention. Do I have your attention? Interest. Are you interested? I know you are.
You close or you hit the bricks. Decision. Have you made your decision for Christ? That is, he was great in that, right? And why was he perfect for it?
Yeah. What made him perfect for it, David? Well, I wrote the part for him. I did, they were doing this movie, Jamie Foley just died, rest in peace, the spectacular, spectacular production of the movie of Glengarry Glen Ross called the play. And Alec was going to play a part, but he was restricted because a studio had him on hold for a project which didn't come through. So someone else played the part and Alec called me up when the studio let him go, we were about to shoot. And he said, I want to be in the movie.
What can we do? I said, the part's gone. He said, write me another part. So I did.
And it was worth it. Also, he's from Massapequa too. And I had, his dad was a teacher at Massapequa High School. So I know the whole family.
So didn't get to know him though, he was a little bit older. So David, let's talk about what your passion for politics comes from. When did it really take root in your life? Well, I got kicked out of the left about 25 years ago and I had to stand back and say, wait a second, I'm a lifelong Democrat.
My parents were first generation immigrant Jews. Everybody was a Democrat. We didn't know any Republicans because as far as we knew, they all lived in the country clubs from which we were restricted and they all wore white belts and drank Manhattans. So I didn't know any Republicans, so I didn't understand what conservatism was. And then I got kicked out of the left and I started researching what the constitutional conservatism was about. And I got very, very interested and very excited about it, and here I am now.
How'd you get kicked out of the left? I just done a play on Broadway called, a very funny play called November about a president of the United States who's about to lose an election because he doesn't have any money because as they say, his numbers are lower than Gandhi's cholesterol. And the Village Voice said, write an article promoting the players called November. And so I wrote an article called Political Civility. I said, we have to be civil to each other.
That's what this play is finally about. It makes fun, not of a politician, but of politics, but we have to be civil to each other. I said, I'm not even civil to myself. I even refer to myself as a brain dead liberal.
That's not civil. Next week, the Village Voice comes out the whole front page, why I am no longer a brain dead liberal by David Mamet and everybody lost my number. So I have, like Trump, after the 20 election, I had a little bit of time to think about things. And that made you dig in more rather than change. That instead of taking a back step, you step forward and just reinforced your conservative beliefs? Well, I discovered my conservative beliefs because I discovered everything I thought I believed about the Democratic Party was false. That the Democratic Party had always been the party of first off slavery, and then of segregation, then of Jim Crow, and that affirmative action was just an extension of that. And the Democratic Party was not representing the working people of this country, wasn't representing the actual Americans. It had become a party of the elites. And I started to go back and reread Hayek and I was very close, I'm very close to him.
So Shelby Steele was friends with Tom Sowell and went back to the original, right? I went back to JS Mill and Locke and tried to understand what a constitutional democracy is. And I liked it. I liked it a whole lot, because the whole idea was let's all get together and decide according to the rules, which we have enshrined when we were not emotional.
Let's decide according to those rules what we're going to do now that we are emotional. Just take a step back, before I really can build on that, I wanted to just take one step back that I've not got a good answer for. If you are successful in your business as a playwright, as an actor, as an actress, it's all meritocracy.
I don't care who you know, you might get a part. But if you're not good, if you can't produce under pressure, you're not gonna do well. Why wouldn't that mindset transfer into the love of capitalism and appreciation for hard work? Why wouldn't there be more David Mamet's in that world and less socialists? Well, that's a very good question. What I saw when I was beginning to understand conservatism was the theater was a complete, at that point, a complete meritocracy that if you could get the asses in the seats, you could pay the rent on your apartment.
And if you get enough asses on the seats, you can buy a house. And that the audience at the time didn't care what the politics were. The problem was as things became very corporatized in media, they became homogenized and actors started just like anyone else. Look at Carine Jean-Pierre and what's his name, Tapper, all of a sudden came out and they wanted to make more money off of the horrors, which they'd inflicted on us personally by saying, gosh, we didn't know.
I get it. So that actors who were concerned and writers who were concerned about their place wanted to hedge their bets by saying, I'm a liberal too. And it started in the 60s doing plays about diseases, right? Cancer is bad, fighting cancer is good, blah, blah, but blindness is bad, fighting blindness is good. Okay, then it became plays about social consciousness.
Black people are people too, gay people are people too. But the problem with that is everybody knows that. So we don't wanna come to a theater or a movie to get lectured to, right?
Right, our wives will do that. So that in order to keep their place, the idea of a meritocracy crumbled in the media. So the awards and safety or the illusion of same was awarded to those who could scream loudest, I'm good and I'll tell you who's bad so you can hate him and get a kick out of that.
Got it. So the disenlightenment, politics, horror, and entertainment, when did we start moving, when did we stop being trained on a path to enlightenment? Why did it become disenlightenment? Well, there's two reasons. I think everything in life, life is organic. Organic means it's born, it lives, it decays and it dies. And there are two reasons why any organism decays and dies. One is it's unsuccessful and the other is that it is successful. So just as with the tree, if you don't prune the tree, the tree wants to put out more branches, wants to put up more branches to get more light.
But if you don't prune the branches once in a while, the branch structure overwhelms the root structure and the tree gets blown down. So as our country became more and more and more successful, we got people in power who wanted to double down on building their power. Why not?
They're human beings. The problem is that, for example, in California, if the taxes go up, which means that the revenue goes down, as the revenue goes down, the people in the Democratic state know only one way to increase revenue, which is to increase taxes. So the people that you're taxing away don't add to what you're doing.
They don't add to the revenue stream, so you keep increasing taxes and the state dies. So that's what we've seen in California and, in fact, in all of the blue states, that they don't have the capacity to cut, to prune. They don't have the capacity to say, I get it, but we're gonna restrain ourselves. But David, don't you feel optimistic that as you see the decay in the cities like New York and Chicago and Los Angeles and the lack of being able to rebuild in Pacific Palisades, that people are beginning to realize the model doesn't work. All we get is more homelessness, higher taxes, people are voting with their feet. Do you feel as though America is self-correcting again? Well, America is self-correcting again, as we saw in the election. Nationally, it's self-correcting again, and the red states are thriving. The question is, what's gonna happen to the other states? And the answer is, I don't know. I mean, my hopes for this wonderful state of California, this is the most beautiful spot in the world, is that the Hispanic population, which is a super hard-working population and a growing population and a religious population, is gonna take the Spanish land grants back and, you know, invoke us into conservatism again.
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Explore Disney's impact at thewaltdisneycompany.com slash economic dash impact. Yeah, it would be great. I saw like I've been watching you to do your press tour. I saw you on with Bill Maher the other day. I just want to let the audience hear a little of your exchange.
Let's watch. I don't have to imagine what he did in 2020, which was never concede the election. Dude, he didn't have to concede the election. He lost. If somebody is beaten in a prize fight and the other guy gets the belt, the person who's beaten does not have to concede. It's not necessary. He's lost.
Well, it is necessary. The analogy falls down because that if a price fighter loses, it doesn't inspire people to riot. How did he inspire people to riot?
By not conceding the election. Oh, come on. Yeah, dude, huh? I liked it. And he went back for one thing. He can have real conversations. You could disagree with him on his own show.
It's great. And you went on to you went on to say, yeah, he didn't because he did not inspire people to riot. And you also went on to say, too, is that Trump called you after your interview with Bill Maher and he said, hey, go the rest of the way and defend me on 2020, right?
That's exactly right. But see, Bill, who's, I like him very much. We get along very, very well. But he's in a very difficult position because his rice bowl is playing to a liberal audience. I get it. And on the other hand, well, he's capable of thinking clearly from time to time. So it's but what he did to me is a perfect example of magical thinking because he said that people, quote, rioted at January 6th because Trump did not say these two words. I can concede that Trump said those words that had that would have had the power to alter history. So this is magical thinking exactly on the level of saying that Jews poison wells.
I hear you. And by the way, just to keep people up to date, the president did announce about an hour ago he had a 90 minute conversation with President Xi, at which time they agreed to visit each other's countries and a positive and move forward on trade. That's all they talked about. And now the president's meeting with the Chancellor of Germany.
And it's always intriguing to see them in the Oval Office. Final thought, David, as we look at this book, Disenlightenment, Politics, Horror, and Entertainment, you're listening, my audience is very into these subjects and you go deep into it. What will we discover in your book in reading it? Well, here's what I think. I think there are a bunch of essays on various topics. But what I did in the book is at the end, I tried to draw it all together and say, what are we seeing? How are open borders related to quiz for Palestine?
How are they related to global warming? How are they related to covering up COVID? And what I came up with was there's nobody home. It's not that we have an evil administration during the Biden administration. We have no administration. So the underlings, the cat being away, the underlings played, and they sat around the table saying, okay, you can have open borders if I get to pull out of Afghanistan. Susie, what do you want? Well, I want quiz for Palestine.
Okay, you can have that if Bob gets to put drag shows in the high school. So what we're looking at is what was called an open city. For example, Paris in 1944, the Nazis got out of town, the Allies had not yet come in. So you had a bunch of little groups, each with its own depredation on each with its own territory, fighting each other.
And in the midst of that, because there was no law, you had people settling scores saying, well, I'm not a communist, I'm not a capitalist, I'm not a resistance, but I got a big grocery building, I'm gonna shoot the grocer. So that's what we saw. That's what I'm saying in the book. That's the totality of what I'm trying to say. Yeah, David, I'm just encouraged by I feel like we're really woken up to a lot of these issues and we're fixing them in real time.
And President Trump is doing it. And I think the majority of the American people who aren't even political understand there's a logic and a common sense to it that I think is back. So pick up David Mamet's book, Disenlightenment, Politics, Horror, and Entertainment. Thanks, David, for your time.
Yeah, you're very welcome. Let's go talk to you, Brian. It is time to take the quiz. It's five questions in less than five minutes.
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