Full transcript: Richard Dreyfuss on London Real
2:36 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Richard Dreyfuss, the Hollywood actor who starred in some of the most successful movies of all time. Your career has spanned an incredible 50 years and includes standout performances in films like American Graffiti, Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and The Goodbye Girl, for which you won the Oscar for Best Actor, becoming the youngest ever to win at age 30. During a five-year period in the 1970s, your movies grossed $1 billion at the box office, making you one of the most recognizable faces on the planet.
3:16 Your nonprofit organization, the Dreyfuss Civics Initiative, endorses the need for civics education in schools to ensure that future generations appreciate the power of their citizenship and the principles that hold America together. Your new book, One Thought Scares Me, explores the failing Democratic Republic in the United States and outlines a clear path to reclaiming American ideals. Richard, welcome to London Real.
3:46 Richard Dreyfuss: I am. Thank you.
3:47 Brian Rose: It’s great to have you here. I got to ask, how is my hometown of San Diego? I notice you’re there and not in LA. Obviously, I’m in London. Feels like maybe we should be roles reversed. But how is San Diego treating you?
4:01 Richard Dreyfuss: San Diego is becoming more and more civilized every day, and you get to meet the strangest and most wonderful people. I spent the first six months having an ongoing debate between myself and Japanese scholars who wanted to know why I took so long to study the way they study. And I said, well, I thought you were already doing it right. And they said, no one’s doing it right. And that kind of put a shiver down the back of my neck. And I realized that, yes, no one was doing this correctly. And so I was at St. Anthony’s, which is the school at Oxford that receives foreign students.
5:07 And I was, I found out, not quite a student and not quite a faculty, but I could dip into both. And I learned a lot. I had been a Cambridge lecturer for many years as I came in and out of town. But the day that I, for instance, the day that I told the cab driver that I was here to see the Queen’s reaction to close encounters of the third kind, I had never seen horizontal tears until that minute. And he cried with such passion that they went, bing! And they went right to the front window. And he was speechless.
6:07 Brian Rose: And this is what you said when you got to Oxford to spend your four years over here.
6:17 Richard Dreyfuss: Yeah. Yeah. They asked me, do you have a project that we could approve or disapprove of? And I said yes. And it was in and around the subject of civics. And I had discovered that unbeknownst to me, civics was not being taught at all.
6:43 And so how they expected to create a civil society, that was something I was really looking forward to, to understanding. And I found it. And I found it all over the place. So it was something very cherishable. And I got more out of that first year.
7:27 Brian Rose: And I really want to jump into the meat of the book and a lot of the thoughts that you have in there. But I think a lot of it seems to be framed with your family history. And I’m wondering if we can maybe touch on that, because your family emigrated from various parts of Europe. And I know they were all of the American left. And then they had this kind of fascinating journey of like gangs of New York, and they went to the war. And I feel like somehow that DNA is somehow in the book and your thoughts on this.
7:57 I was wondering if you could speak on kind of the Dreyfuss clan, where they came from, what their values are, and how that shapes your perspective of why we need civics today.
8:13 Richard Dreyfuss: Well, actually, I said to my father, when I was in my 20s, that sooner or later I knew that I was going to be asked to write an autobiography. And I said, that autobiography will say that I was born in 1881, because that’s the year that all of the stories began that really shaped my moral character.
8:41 And I knew who and why and when. And so it was a group effort. And well worth it. Well worth it.
8:51 Brian Rose: And is it true that your great, great grandmother was kind of involved in an assassination in Russia, and she kind of had to flee and a lot of excitement and drama in your family. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised knowing you.
9:15 Richard Dreyfuss: Yeah. As a matter of fact, there was, I have the rare privilege of saying, of being able to say, my great aunt, Helzia Elfman, a member of the narrative on the will of the people, along with Alexander Lennon. Nikolai’s older brother, they assassinated Zara Alexander in 1881. I’d like to say that again. My great aunt, Helzia, she was an activist or boy.
10:08 And so she came out of the shtetl and popped Alexander. And because of the privileges that came along with his cast and class, he very easily would have been able to get away without selling the prison time or the execution. But he didn’t want to. And so he willingly was hung. And Helzia was not because even the Okrana, the secret police, even the Okrana did not kill pregnant women.
11:05 And so she was sent exiled to New York, and she went into Ellis Island, being Helzia Elfman, and she came out a few minutes later, known as Elsie Hoffman, which was the exact name of my grandmother. And my grandmother was Helzia’s niece. And if the Irish clerk on Ellis Island had any trouble at all in pronouncing her name, they changed it, and that’s what they did. So Helzia became Elsie, and her helthman became Hoffman. And so she came in one way and went out the other. And I wish I had known her personally, but I didn’t.
12:20 Brian Rose: And then your father went to the war, but before that, there was kind of a little bit of a gangs in New York scenario kind of happening in Brooklyn. And just you said that they were kind of all of the left. And I’m just wondering how some of those pieces kind of shaped who you became. You were born in 47, I think. How did that all change you?
12:41 Richard Dreyfuss: Well, it was an enormous impact on my life. And I can say that if that had not been the case, I would not be here and I would not have received the melodrama of her life as a part of mine. And she was a tough little bird, apparently, and she had every right and reason to circle this central drama. She was my own Thoreau, because there’s this famous story about Thoreau refusing to pay the taxes for the Mexican war, and Ralph Waldo Emerson visits him in the jail.
13:43 And he says, Henry, what are you doing in there? And Thoreau looked at him and said, Ralph, what are you doing out there?
13:58 Brian Rose: Yeah, very fitting on times like they are today as well, right? That story.
14:07 Richard Dreyfuss: And then my mother, my grandmother was an upfront witness to the Triangle Shirt Waste Factory fire, which was one of those catastrophes that kept plaguing the newly arrived immigrants.
14:29 And you couldn’t avoid that catastrophe, that terrible event. And my grandmother, who was only 11 or 12, came upon the remnants of that awful pile of death, 154 girls, all from Eastern Europe, and just then learning the mechanics of learning English, and they had none. She had to learn, and very quickly, because they gave her no allowance for the time spent on her English lessons. And so the reason that they gave for locking up the windows to get to the fire escapes is because they were taking too many cigarette breaks, and so they locked the windows from the outside.
15:53 And that was the doom of those women. And I grieve, I grieve for that experience, and for those girls. But they were also beyond belief. They had created a mythical series of images of gods and goddesses, because as they stepped out and their hair, which was their prize, their hair was burning, and with the sun coming in from behind them, they looked like the goddesses of the Norse trilogy, and that lasted for a half second. And then they held hands and stepped out onto nothing. And they then, holding hands because they were, they loved each other, and they loved about to do.
17:31 These girls who hardly had time to store their toothbrushes, 154 of them stepped out into nothing, and they were betrayed by that nothing. And they fell right at my grandmother’s feet. I shouldn’t say grandmother, but as they fell, they changed from being a majestic picture of gods and goddesses to the wrecked remnant of crows all in black and all dead. They fell 19 floors, and there was nothing that anyone could do. And that’s that.
18:44 My grandmother, the story goes, turned around and went directly to the Socialist Party headquarters, and she eventually became Eugene Debs’ private secretary. And that was a name that all of us knew and revered. And that’s who she was. I see her all the time whenever I’m called upon to do something political, or do you have anything to say about this, Richard? I can hear her.
19:32 Brian Rose: And what does she say to you when, say in 2004, you decide you’re no longer a Democrat? What does she say? I’m curious.
19:42 Richard Dreyfuss: Well, my grandmother and my mother and her sisters all were intensely proud of the fact that they had never voted for a winner. And they didn’t think of themselves as FDR’s liberals. They thought of themselves as immigrant girls who knew they had one shot, one moment of life left to them. And they took it and died on the pavement.
20:23 Brian Rose: But I guess what I was trying to ask, would she understand your change in politics? Would you be able to have a conversation with her about it, and would she understand your mindset and methodology?
20:47 Brian Rose: I don’t know. You say you talk to her sometimes. I’m just curious if you ever had that conversation with her and what she might say.
21:00 Richard Dreyfuss: I’ve had similar conversations with many people, all of my neighbors, because my father was the leader of a Jewish gang in Brooklyn, and he fought the Italian gangs and the Irish gangs. And they moved a lot. They moved from one ethnic corner to another, and they were very, very proud of that.
21:28 And I can’t express this really as well as I might, but I was incredibly proud of my father’s pre-war war. And there was a great deal of violence and death and stories about someone grabbing a radio antenna off of a car and sticking it in his opponent’s eyes. And then when Hitler made his second-act appearance, they all knew that they were going to specifically kill him and his ideas. And that was the trope of that moment. Pick up your tempo.
22:48 Brian Rose: And then how does that all affect Richard, Richard Dreyfuss? How does that get all boiled down into a young man? Were you angry? Were you violent? Were you proud?
23:04 Richard Dreyfuss: I was not violent, but I was active, and I was active in a very political way. And I knew that my family was connected to the human race in some pretty melodramatic ways. I am related to Captain Alfred Dreyfuss. I am related to the killer of the Czar. And I learned that my life was a connective tissue to the politics of the 19th century, both in Europe and in America.
23:56 Brian Rose: And yet you chose to pursue acting. Had you ever thought about going into politics?
24:08 Richard Dreyfuss: Only afterwards. I didn’t really think of myself as anything but an actor. I also knew that I could give some honor to the profession of acting.
24:29 And I did. I think actors have a step up that other people don’t realize. When you’re an actor, you have to really study the people who also were actors. And if you’re good as an actor, you have an insight into people’s behavior that is slightly more than the issue of, can you see the motivation? Can you see the reason why you might know more? And I did. I played various people who had mice, and I knew why.
25:32 And I was very proud of that, that it gave me an insight into some human behavior that I could justify. And I never wanted to play villains because it would have meant that I would have misused the knowledge that I had. So I played Dick Cheney, and someone said, how could you play Dick Cheney? And I said, how could I not? And there’s a little bit of Cheney in all of us.
26:16 And I totally, completely believe that. And it’s also the fact that I was a history buff, and I knew about the immigrant experience in America. And there’s never been a country that offered itself as a destination, as a goal, and took power from a king and spread it so well. And you don’t find that impulse in everyone. And I was born in 1881. And everything that happened to my family, my grandfather and his brothers, who worked for Waxy Gordon, and my uncles, who all were either communists or socialists. I went to my mother once, and I said, why were you a communist? Why were you a socialist and not a communist? And she said, better donuts.
27:45 And so I had to be what I was. I was the recipient of all of my family’s political activism. And I could always spot my grandmothers sitting in the back. And she was known as Big Grandma. And she said to me one day when we were listening to the radio and hearing about an exhibit that Man Ray was giving at the museum, he was the worst stickball player that she ever played with.
28:26 And I said, really? And she said, yes, and there’s no mystery about his name. There had been, of course, a terrible mystery. How did he get that name? And she looked at me and said, Emmanuel Rabinowitz, Man Ray.
28:51 Brian Rose: I get it. Okay. And you said earlier, as an actor, it’s almost like you have more of an emotional intelligence than maybe other people did. So you almost had a superpower in kind of understanding people’s behaviors and seeing things maybe that other people didn’t see. Am I getting that right? Or being able to kind of unlock, unlock things other people can’t unlock. And you wanted to use it responsibly, not as a villain, but in other ways. Right. Okay.
29:27 And I heard these stories that you used to set your alarm to wake up in the middle of the night to watch movies so you could study and that you also would monitor your own emotions. So like if your brother made you cry, you would, you would notice that emotion and go into the bathroom and then try to repeat that emotion and then try to repeat it again. Are the rumors true, Richard? Is this, is this what you used to do?
30:02 Richard Dreyfuss: Yeah. And it’s what I do now. It’s, it’s the way to, to acknowledge that you can step out of your life, observe your life and find, find value in that active quality.
30:16 And that’s why I had the heroes that I had, Clarence Darrow and various justices and, and I wanted to be what I called a witness. I have no real, I have no standing as a witness, but I am a witness to the world as I came to know it. And I, I was as connected to the human race as you could possibly be. So that made me a perfect actor and a perfect actor’s friend.
31:04 Brian Rose: And you’ve, you’ve talked about, you know, yourself and you say you don’t like to use the word bipolar. You like the word, the term manic depressive and, and I’m wondering if that even further connects you sometimes to the points in the book or to the human race or I mean, even to your roles on screen.
31:44 I can’t think of, you seem to me to be the first actor that ever brought that into the roles in such a way. I mean, it’s in Jaws, it’s in Close Encounters. We see this guy who is this kind of manic depressive and I’m, I’m curious if that was intentional when you brought that in or was that Richard just being Richard. And in those moments, are you ultra connected? I don’t know to the, to the human race.
32:10 Richard Dreyfuss: Well, I’ll tell you, when I was asked by George Lucas to appear in American Graffiti, he offered me two roles. I could take my pick of two roles. One of them was Charlie, the kind of nerdy goofball, smart but a goofball. And the other one was Kurt, the actor, the character who was me. And I, I, I, I chose Kurt and George said why.
33:01 And I said, because Kurt is self aware. He’s aware of who he is in school in his family and he had this awareness. And so we designed one, one moment in the film is, is all about that. It’s about the fact that I, I try to open up my, my locker, which is no longer mine. And I can’t, I don’t know the new formula for getting in.
33:42 It makes me laugh. And it was just for no real reason, my way of, of, of expressing that life goes on and things that you think mean your intimate knowledge of the character is all gone. Wiped clean, a whiteboard and other people now have a closer understanding of that. So I’ve imposed that quality on almost every character I’ve ever played. And I see it now.
34:30 Brian Rose: Now I see it in so many of your roles and I got to tell you a quick story.
34:40 So almost 11 years ago to this day, I quit my job in banking and I started broadcasting just like we are here today, having long form conversations in my kitchen. Nobody was doing it. Everyone thought I was crazy. There was no business model. My friends and family didn’t even watch it for years, Richard years.
34:59 And, you know, after I stuck with it for five years, 10 years, started having some success. And some people said, well, what kept you going? And I always say, you know what? I was a bit like Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I was building my mashed potatoes and I didn’t know why, but I knew it was something I was connecting to something bigger.
35:19 It was going to be part of something bigger, maybe something to do with humanity. But I didn’t know what I was doing into the outside world. I look crazy. But then later it seemed to play a part in this common goal of pushing humanity forward. And that’s an analogy I use sometimes. And people look at me in a strange way and then they usually change the topic.
35:40 But I thought I’d share that with you.
35:44 Richard Dreyfuss: That is exactly what I say. It’s exactly what I say. And I’ve used that character, Roya Nirey, as the perfect example of that. Because he does have the courage to go with something that is clearly beyond his understanding.
36:07 And it actually takes him away from his family. And especially in those days when we shot the film, one of the things that made it special, and it was special, that this is a character who did something against the wishes and desires of his entire family, his children and his wife. And I would have insisted on that, but I didn’t have to because Stephen completely understood why I wanted to do that.
36:55 Brian Rose: And so that was you and him kind of collaborating and saying it needed to be that extreme.
37:06 Because she takes the kids and leaves. I mean, that’s a very hard thing to happen to a man. And yet you still are honoring this pull to do this thing. And it’s visceral. And I think so many people relate because it was so raw. And you didn’t really see that in movies back then, like you said.
37:29 Richard Dreyfuss: Yeah, if you had such a compulsion or such an obsession, it was usually explained in some way that made it seem okay. But there was no okay. There was no allowance for that kind of behavior. It was it was a write off as far as my wife was concerned. And it was a terrible, damaging moment in my children’s lives.
38:09 But there was no choice. And I think if I’m not mistaken, there was on the set a decision was made that allowed me to make a decision that was going to hurt and damage his own reputation, his own feeling of moral correctness. And and I said, Yes, he is. But he has no choice. None. And if you notice, there’s a woman, the last the last person who is seen in that montage is an old lady. And she’s thrilled to be there. And that’s my grandmother, because she’s she’s seeing it from an old lady’s point of view.
39:34 Brian Rose: How much of that was acting and how much of that was just Richard?
39:45 Richard Dreyfuss: Well, Stephen is a very open director. He mixes it up with his actors. And there was a lot of Stephen in that characterization. And with my enthusiasm and support. Yeah.
40:11 Yeah, he loved he loved any idea that that kept him Roy near me and yet allowed him the room to express this odd thing. And it was great.
40:32 Brian Rose: Did you enjoy making that? Or was it also exhausting?
40:40 Richard Dreyfuss: Well, it was both. But certainly I enjoyed it. I was in the grip of of an obsession. And many years later, Stephen said that had he been married as the character or as Stephen.
41:06 If he’d been married and had children, which he did, he would never have had the same ending. And I said, with all due respect, there was no other ending. And it would have ended in that way. It would have ended with him doing something like getting on that ship that he he had to do it. Yeah.
41:53 Brian Rose: And do you feel like Roy sometimes, especially when you’re with your pursuit with an maybe obsession of civics and everything you’ve been doing for the last while coming up on 20 years now since you were here at Oxford, do you sometimes feel like him?
42:19 Richard Dreyfuss: Yes, I feel like I understand like those Chinese dolls that fit into one another. And each one each one is the same doll, but bigger and smaller.
42:33 Brian Rose: Don’t they Russian? The Russian.
42:37 Richard Dreyfuss: Yes, Russians. I have a Russian wife and she’s she’s correcting me as we go along.
42:45 And I knew that my life was at various times as big as I thought and never as small as I thought it might be. And I had this enormous image of how people are always saying, I, I looked up into the universe and I thought how, how small I was. Well, when I looked up into the universe, I thought how, how enormous I was. And I, I would hold to that, knowing that if there were ever such a contest, I would have won the largeness of my interior vision. My mind, you know, I see this vast, vast, enormous thing, which I knew when I was about 12.
44:10 I knew that I had to make friends with the one person that I would travel through my life with. And that was me. I had to make friends with me and not think of him as a companion, but to think of him as we’re going to share this revelation, a series of revelations. And, and without that, I, I would not have been whatever it was that I was becoming.
44:50 Brian Rose: Is this your life’s work? Is this the most important thing you think you will do in your life, this work on civics, or is it just something that you’re doing now in your life?
45:10 And you’ve done many important things with, with, with your roles on screen and highlighting other parts.
45:25 Richard Dreyfuss: I think that yes, what I’m doing in terms of civics is the most important thing that I am spending my life on. Yes, I don’t think people have oftentimes the rights or the set of circumstances that allow someone to say, I’m doing something to save my country. And this is what I do in order to save my country. I think that without it, there’s a very good chance that it wouldn’t get done.
46:20 And we would be the, the, the terrible moment when two roads appear and you’ve got to pick one. And if you don’t pick correctly, you will regret that choice for the rest of your life and perhaps past that.
46:39 Brian Rose: Well, let’s jump into it, shall we, when it comes to civics. And there’s a great video of you taking a boat past the Statue of Liberty where I think grandma passed through Hoffman, as you mentioned earlier. And I think you define civics and it needs defining. And maybe it needs defining. Maybe that very fact is the point of your book, as in we don’t know what civics is because we’re not taught it.
47:15 Well, we can get to that. But you say civics on that boat, you say, besides being the most boring word in the English language, is the understanding and comprehension of maintaining this particular Republican democracy. And you say it’s the tools and expertise that all of our children should know because they are going to be the power mandated in the Constitution. The people themselves will be the final arbiters of political power and give this statue you’re pointing to the Statue of Liberty some meaning.
47:45 Brian Rose: Am I defining that correctly? Or would you like to add to that?
47:55 Richard Dreyfuss: I think it has to be added to. But it’s the kind of subject that the proper amount of time must be given to that because we are a revolutionary people. We have a revolutionary structure and we gave the best of ourselves to that revolutionary posture that was undone and under appreciated at the time.
48:42 And what a story. You know, you grow up in France or you grow up in England or Russia or wherever, and you’re proud of your story, your national birth tale. But does it hold water? Does it hold up? Does it hold up? And you say, I’ve got a birth tale that’ll just slay you.
49:19 And that happened more than once and many, many, many times. And I attended at one point a class at Harvard which was run by people who wanted as their students the people who ran nonprofits. And they wanted each person, there were about 87, 89 people there. Each person was to stand up, give your name, and then describe what you have created as a nonprofit organization. And as soon as I heard what this was, I knew that I had this one beat. And they started over here and each person spoke.
50:26 And they finally got around to me and I said, without any glimmer of reluctance or downsizing or whatever, I stood up and I said my name. And I have developed a curriculum for the teaching of civics and that if we didn’t commit, really commit to the re-establishment and rediscovery of the revolutionary doctrines that we had come up with, that we would be culpable in the death of the mythology of America. And I personally could not have gone on that way because we really were the most important, the single most important political theory or choice that had ever been and one that was as important as all of the other political discoveries that might have been in some strange, it was the acknowledgement by some humans that humanity could prevail in its best way.
52:37 Wearing a great suit and being proud of everything, being proud of every failure and every candid moment. And yes, that was a great story and a better story than any other I knew of. Yeah.
52:55 Brian Rose: And I was another quote from you where you said, civics training enables people with opposing views to learn methods of controlled communication, such as civil discourse and debate, clarity of thought and expression, and the agility one needs to put values and issues in context.
53:21 You also go on to say that civics has not been taught in the American public school system since 1970, which means that everyone in Congress never studied the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. And that’s a critical flaw because it’s why we were admired and respected for so long. And you go on to talk about this cycle of decay where we don’t teach the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, governance theory to our kids. And that’s now been 50 years, right, Richard? And you are asserting, I believe, that that is now being manifested in the state of the world or the state of America right now.
53:59 And to counter that, we need to go back to these basics.
54:08 Brian Rose: Am I understanding where you’re going with this book?
54:17 Richard Dreyfuss: Yes, as long as you include that we came up with the practical reality of taking the values of the Enlightenment era and finding their utilitarian comradeship in the governance theories that took the place in history of who we were and why we were. And it was a real compliment to the soul of the people who were being invited here. There was no way that the poor of the world would ever be invited anywhere they were.
55:26 That was an impossibility. And what we were, the people that we were inviting to build America with, were all people who they contributed their backs, their strong, painful backs and little else because when they came here, they were not educated in any way. They were not allowed to even think that they had touched the boundaries of their capabilities. They had no capabilities. They were, as far as the aristos and monarchs were concerned, they were all the necessary strong backs that held up all the other classes who had been feted and applauded and praised and not them. They were strong backs and that’s all.
57:15 And if you asked for permission to learn anything above your cast, you were immediately punished for that request so that if you wanted to learn how to read, you lost something for that request. And it was quite normal to have one limb to farmers and if you killed a deer on the King’s Land in order to feed your family, you were either subject to the loss of a limb or a nose or you were killed. And that was that. And we promised them that we would free their minds so that they could be unshackled and that was a promise that we kept for a long, long time.
58:34 Brian Rose: Right. Until we started forgetting about it and you talk about this return to senselessness and how maybe you want to bring back common sense, maybe like Thomas Paine did when he published his book in 1776. And I assume that’s why you’re writing this book because you kind of want to ignite the country, I think, as you said, just as Thomas Paine did. I think you want to take a passive citizen and turn them into a participating citizen. How do we do that, Richard?
59:10 Richard Dreyfuss: Well, first, you limber up. You have to limber up. And second, you have to understand that you’re about to embark on an endeavor that had never been done. And that the chances were that you would probably fail. But sooner or later, you were going to be allowed to drop the shackles that had kept you imprisoned.
59:52 And that you were allowed to think as far as your native brains could take you. And that had never been an encouragement. We had never, ever wanted grandparents that said, do as much as you can and go for it. We had never done that. No part of the human race. And when you think of that alone, that no matter where you start, whether you go back to Ur and Mesopotamia or any other particular moment in the picture that we draw of how lucky we were, there was never a moment when the people of this species, of this world, were ever encouraged to go on.
1:01:09 They thought this would only cause chaos and confusion. And I say that that chaos and confusion was kind of like the discovery of quantum physics. On the face of it, it looks a little bizarre. And without it, we’re missing the boat. We’re missing the possibility of prevailing in this universe.
1:01:49 Brian Rose: And what do your friends in Hollywood make of all this? What do your friends on the left make of all of this?
1:01:58 Richard Dreyfuss: My ex-friends on the left.
1:02:00 Brian Rose: Is that why you’re living in San Diego? Did they throw you out of LA or you voluntarily left?
1:02:08 Richard Dreyfuss: Oh, no, I voluntarily left. As a matter of fact, before I left, I announced that I was retiring. And I was retiring from the film business. I wasn’t retiring from theater, but yeah, I was retiring from the movie business, which I just in the 30 years that I’d been working in that I never really got it. I never got it. And the more I knew about it, the less I wanted it. And, you know, I have Elsia Elfman in my family.
1:03:01 I have Elsie Hoffman. I have my father and my mother. And I have to answer to them a lot. I have to really look at my mom and I’m not alone. You know, Hillary Clinton said it takes a village. I’m a village.
1:03:36 I’m a village that is very willing. But there’s a story that comes out of Russia about a guy who brings his wife to the hospital because her water broke and she’s ready to give birth. And he says to the doctor that he’s going to step out and have a cigarette and he does. And his wife, meanwhile, proceeds to give birth to 13 children. And when the husband comes back and finds out that he is now the father of 13, he faints.
1:04:32 And there’s something about that story that is so the story of America, because there’s more here. And we are more than a country and we are more than anything that you could think of so glibly. We’re an amazing accident of history. And if you can say that you have America in your blood, you are accepting a compliment that was the rarest, it was a massive compliment, a massive miracle of forward thinking.
1:05:25 Brian Rose: You know, I’ve been here 22 years, Richard, but I’ll always be an American. I’ve got a British passport, but I’ll always be an American. And it’s very hard to explain sometimes what that means to people because, you know, I grew up in this petri dish, this environment, this experiment in the 70s in San Diego, right where you are.
1:06:07 And it’s all inside of me, everything you’re talking about, all that old DNA. I think about my grandpa who was in Oklahoma in the Dust Bowl and had to go west and had seen things I couldn’t even comprehend. And he didn’t even need to open his mouth and I could see it on his face and all that stuff passed inside of me and I see it now in my behaviors. And it is this thing, maybe this incredible thing. And I guess what worries you is that we might lose it, right? It might be something a thousand years from now.
1:06:38 We look back as this experiment that happened for a couple hundred years and that bravely concerns you, right? Because it’s a piece of innovative technology that needs to stay and maybe even continue to be improved on. But you see it going away and that’s a tragedy and you’re putting all your efforts into trying to get it back on track. Is that right?
1:07:16 Richard Dreyfuss: That’s right. That’s it. That’s unless we remember what we have deliberately forgotten, unless we really attach ourselves to what had been attached so, so closely to us, then we won’t, there may be a country called the United States of America, but it won’t be the real country. It will be a pretend country.
1:07:49 And it will, it will fake its way through all the stories and all the little anecdotes that have built an America that we’ve always been so proud of. And, you know, no one in this world, no one ever says, I can’t wait to get to Norway. I can’t wait to get to Kenya. I can’t wait. They don’t say anything like that.
1:08:28 They say, I can’t wait to get to America because America has meaning to this world. And it’s been fought for and over from the very beginning. And it has said in many different ways, we have to protect what we have created here. We have an obligation to create, to further the discovery or revelation that man belongs in this work in progress. And very few countries are such things. Very few countries can ever say that they deliberately set out to be a better country.
1:09:41 A hundred years after they first came upon that thought, we have a great deal to be proud of. We have a great deal that we’ve introduced the rest of the world to so many thoughts and ideas and room to have them flourished that it’s beautiful as a work of art. There’s some kind of auction going on under the feet of heaven and they’re auctioning off the value of America. And it’s way up there. I don’t want to seem one of two ways. I don’t want to seem like a person who says, if you’re not a militarist and you’re not proud of America because of its great ability to win wars, you’re not enough of an American.
1:11:13 That’s bullshit. And there’s also, we are not the divinely inspired nation that is closer to God and has been helped by God. God has this ironic sense of humor where he sets himself up above a battle and he knows that both sides think that they are all blessed with his special sauce, with his special relationship.
1:12:04 People who have died for that feeling. And we all have to share that feeling because it’s not something that he gives to some and not to others. No. We have no reason to be proud of America because it has a great army or it has physically it’s south of Canada. We have very, very clear understanding that we are special in only one way that we adhere.
1:13:01 To what the divine asks of us. The divine asks that of many, many people. And we come pretty close. But we also commit sins by the bushel. And we will answer for those the moment we die.
1:13:40 Brian Rose: Richard, how do you feel when you hear young people in America say they would prefer communism?
1:13:49 Richard Dreyfuss: Well, first of all, I would say to anyone who said that, I would say, can you define communism? And they couldn’t. And they couldn’t. No kidding.
1:14:03 We’ve established a set of enemies and we know nothing about them and know nothing about why we so glibly assign them to villainy and evil. No. No. We’ve had enemies and those enemies have been vivid and very, very clear. And some of them have been some of them have been worthy of the effort of killing them fast and we will and we should.
1:15:06 And we have to. We have to make our way through this work in progress. And then we have to show up and answer for everything that we’ve lied to ourselves about. And that’s it.
1:15:39 Brian Rose: What’s been the reception to the book and your ideas so far?
1:15:46 Richard Dreyfuss: Without anyone knowing the details, I have received one comment. And that is, it’s about time. I have received only one comment. And that’s from the left and the right.
1:16:07 They all stop, hear it out and say, yeah, it’s time for that. Yeah. Yeah. We’re suffering from its absence. Yeah. I know of no one.
1:16:31 I spoke so far in front of 200,000 people. I know of no one who is against the teaching of civics and to come upon and this was like a miracle to come upon an issue that has no enemy. There is no one who really disagrees with the absolute necessity of returning to the values of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. And that means that it can be done. And and that means that we could succeed at this.
1:17:35 We had a revolution and it was a revolution. And then we had a counter-revolution, which we won’t admit to even now, 50 years later. But we won’t cop to it because it would mean that we were as in denial as we’re being accused of. Well, I don’t care whether I drag people back to an understanding of what is willingly or unwillingly. I do know that if we let it go so that it turns into some kind of national anecdote, we will have created shame. Very few countries have the acts that end up as shame. And we’re right in the middle of ours.
1:18:56 Brian Rose: Richard, I read somewhere that you once said you were always the happiest when you were struggling to find work. Something that probably surprised people because that was probably earlier in your career and afterwards maybe you didn’t. And I wonder if you’re happy now because this seems like a struggle too. Like it seems like you’re also struggling to get people to pay attention and to realize that time is of the essence. Is it a similar feeling that you had when you were struggling to find work where you were on a mission and time was important and there wasn’t even a chance to take a break?
1:19:30 Richard Dreyfuss: Well, I have to tell you that as opposed to every single other person I know, I had no doubt none. I was absolutely certain 100% that I would make it, that I would succeed as an actor and that that was a done deal. The book is called One Thought Scares Me because I had no other thought that scared me. I’ve read American history and world history really for as long as I can ever remember. And let’s say that I started when I was nine. I learned that we were a strange and awesome collection of people who have very little in common except they all came from somewhere worse.
1:20:52 That’s how bad the human race’s history has been because they came from somewhere worse. Rich people never came to America. Why would they? They were doing quite well where they were. And we said, no, there’s more than that. And if there ever was a pursuit of what was valuable, we came to the one that was valuable so early and started measuring, well, yeah, this fits perfectly. And then that was the one that favored the few and oppressed the majority. And they all felt, yeah, this is good. This is a good thing.
1:22:09 And no one questioned it. No one. We were quite fine with making the few happy and treating the rest like cattle. And that’s why the philosophy is called the enlightenment because it brought a beam of light into a world of darkness. And that darkness is hovering right next to us.
1:22:52 We are just thinking, yeah, we can do this for a few more hundred years. No, we can’t. And this country and I call it America. This country will not survive in any shape or form. That we can be proud of past the middle years of this century.
1:23:30 Brian Rose: Are you going to be active politically going forward? Or do you just try to stay out of the parties and try to push this core message of getting the youth to kind of relearn this language, perhaps, that they’ve lost?
1:24:03 Richard Dreyfuss: I can honestly say that I have not an interest in hell in becoming part of a partisan system that is as far away from its better angels than it could be. I don’t have any political desire. I have a desire to teach both conservative and liberal and whoever that we share something enormous and we can share it and build a country together. For us to think that we have nothing in common. The blue states and the red states have nothing in common is silly. And we just haven’t learned it again and again and again. And that’s what we have to do.
1:25:22 We have to learn it so much that at the mention of it, children will weep. And I mean that. I mean you here, I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country. And if you don’t have those kids weeping, you’re doing it wrong.
1:25:46 Brian Rose: Just a couple of final questions, Richard. What’s the best way for people to get a hold of this book or at least to learn about the message?
1:26:00 Richard Dreyfuss: The best way for people to get a hold of the message is to buy the book and read it. And it’s a very readable book and you will enjoy the book. However, if you don’t like to read, you can listen to it. I recorded it so you can hear me reading the damn book.
1:26:23 Brian Rose: Nice. Nice. That is good. And I’m curious if there’s a 20 year old listening to us right now, some country in the world who’s kind of intrigued by some of the things you said today and who’s curious to learn a bit more about something that they don’t know much about.
1:26:47 And they’re kind of curious to kind of fill a gap of something they haven’t been taught. What’s the best way for them to start engaging in civics? Are there a few things to look in? Should they go directly to the Constitution, Bill of Rights? How do you instruct even younger people to start this journey?
1:27:06 Richard Dreyfuss: Well, you know what a glory tale is? No. The glory tale are the tales that you tell the first graders and second graders and third graders and kindergarten and you tell them with a great deal of pride and their stories that you have already heard. They are George Washington saying, I cannot tell a lie. It was I that chopped the cherry tree and it was Patrick Henry. Patrick Henry has to be told to children in order because if you don’t do it in order, you’ll get them all confused since he had 150 slaves.
1:28:03 And yet he spoke as if he didn’t. But he was he passed the message on and he knew the secret, which was this was a country that was on the other side of the largest body of water ever. And that body of water kept the monarch from ever, ever being up to date with how to rule. And they they faked it, but they were always behind. And over the centuries, the people in the new world began to realize they didn’t need the king. They needed the document. They needed the promise made to themselves and to the poor of the world that they would not be abandoned.
1:29:29 And all over the world, people heard that and decided, OK, I’m I’m coming. And that was the largest, the largest voluntary movement of human beings in the history of the human race. You cannot underplay such a thing.
1:30:00 Brian Rose: Richard, I appreciate you speaking about this. You’re clearly passionate about it. The book is called One Thought Scares Me.
1:30:17 I highly recommend people read it. The whole team here has been reading it. And what I like about what you’re doing here, Richard, is you’re one of the few people that isn’t trying to make the two sides grow further apart, you know, because that’s not getting us anywhere. This is almost like the one thing, like you said, people can agree on. For me, it feels like it’s a language we never taught our kids. And who wouldn’t want to say they should speak a common language.
1:30:43 So if they can learn that again, it’s almost as if we can have real conversations. And if you’re getting that response already, I don’t know. Maybe this is one of the few things that can bring people back together or to at least have a discourse, which is usually how solutions are found by having that language. So, yeah, thank you for bringing this up. You know, I’m trying to remember as a kid, if I ever learned civics, maybe I caught a little of the tail end of it, but that was it.
1:31:11 It was a little bit of history in there, but it was never really taught to me like Spanish and science and all these other basics. And I hope some people start paying attention to this. Just your final thoughts. I’d love to hear them.
1:31:34 Richard Dreyfuss: I’ve never written a book alone. I’ve never written a nonfiction book.
1:31:41 And it took me a long, long time to gather the courage to start writing. I knew something about the country. And when I realized that no one else was joining that thought, I said, OK, then write it. It’s the hardest thing I ever did. It demanded of me a better Richard and a far better Richard than I ever thought I could be. And the book is not one of the great books of history.
1:32:48 The book is could be improved. And but I know of no one who would argue this point is unnecessary. That this point is anyone who says that to you shoot them, anyone who says as it was said to me once that the secretary of the Treasury was flogging his book and his book was called On the Brink. And I said to him, was anyone ever prosecuted or investigated or held for trial and sent up the river? And he said, oh, no, no, no, you misunderstand.
1:33:56 There was nothing ever really wrong with the country. And I said, if there was nothing really wrong, why did you call your book On the Brink? And he had no answer. We are On the Brink. And there is a question I hesitate to ask. If America fails, what then? What then are we going to play host to a nightmare again, a nightmare that was thousands of years in the making?
1:34:57 No, no, we have come too far and lost too many. No.
1:35:02 Brian Rose: I appreciate you making that point. And when you put it like that, it becomes much, much more serious. So I really hope everyone’s listening. And I appreciate you putting the weight of your career behind this because that makes a big difference, you know.
1:35:28 And I was going through a little memory lane today preparing for this and remembering all those special moments you brought to, you know, billions of people around the world. And, you know, when you’re saying it, it also that helps that helps push this message along. So, yeah, thanks for that incredible work that you did. And thanks for parlaying that into this message. And I can just hope that both sides embrace it and we start to see some change.
1:35:53 So thank you, Richard. I appreciate that. I recommend everyone go get this book. And if you got the audible with you saying it, come on. Doesn’t get much better than that. That must have taken you a week, right?
1:36:07 Richard Dreyfuss: I want to thank you for having me. That’s been my pleasure. And I suggest next time we do this, let’s do it in person, either in London or in San Diego. I came to London and did an evening, which was a Q&A about this. And at a certain moment, I realized that I had fulfilled a dream I didn’t even know I had.
1:36:39 And I had come over to tell people that we were in desperate straits and we had to fight our way out. And that’s what we’ve got to do. I have nightmares now, nightmares of my grandchild. And he’s saying, he’s saying, how could you have abandoned us like this? And let me tell you, I have no answer. I’m not going to abandon them anyway.
1:37:43 Brian Rose: I appreciate the passion you have for that. And I can tell it’s extremely important to you. And it’s part of this legacy. And you see it across us from back to 1881. And you see it going forward hundreds of years. And yeah, I wish more people could see the seriousness of this situation. But I guess it starts now. So yeah, thank you. Thank you for writing this book.
1:38:07 I’m sure I’ve heard it’s with the loneliest thing to do is write a book. And like you said, you had to become a better Richard to do it. And I appreciate the passion and emotion you bring to this. And I think people will get the message here if they listen to you. So yeah, thank you, Richard. Appreciate you writing this. Again, the book is One Thought Scares Me. And it’s available, obviously on Audible and to buy. And yeah, let’s do this again sometime in person. I’d love to.
1:38:37 So. All right. Fantastic. Thank you, Richard. And thank you, everyone.
1:38:43 Richard Dreyfuss: May I recommend that? Yes. Next time we do this, let’s get some people together around the table who don’t agree. If we can find people who are willing to say, I don’t agree, we can have a great, great time. Okay.
1:39:03 Brian Rose: Yeah, let’s do that. Let me try to find some people. We do that here in London, maybe, or in San Diego. Yeah, that’s what that’s where you really come up with solutions is when you start to be challenged on your ideas. And that’s when you find compromise and moving forward, right? Well said, Richard.
1:39:21 All right, that’ll be next time. Thank you. There’s the book right there, folks. Grab a copy. Thank you, Richard. Please take care of my hometown. And everybody else will see you next time on London.
1:39:32 Richard Dreyfuss: Take care. Bye.
