November 26, 2024 • 33 mins
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
It's that time, time, time, time, Luck and load.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
The Michael Very Show is on the air for years
(00:32):
two hundred and fifty. Money took two and a half
centuries after the birth of Christ, two centuries since the
death the Christian's church was quite different than it is today.
It was developing, it was strengthening, it was spreading. There
(00:53):
was a passion for the word, and there was a
Christian unk named Anthony became Saint Anthony. And he has many,
many terms by which titles by which he is referenced.
Anthony of the Desert is one you'll see. Because he
(01:15):
was the first, he is sometimes called the first monk.
He's not the first monk. He was the first monk
to lead by desertification, going out into the desert. This
sort of what we now considered monk like behavior, monasticism,
(01:37):
living alone, studying, sacrificing, engaged in pure thoughts and pure action.
This sort of behavior is often identified with him, and
is often credited to him as saint like and monastic
(02:00):
monk like behavior, and he came to be known probably more.
He lived in Egypt, and he left the city to
go out to the desert, which is a harsh life.
As you can imagine and to study to purify his
thought and action. And he came to be known as
Anthony the Great. And what's interesting about him is that
(02:27):
he really internalized the Christian life and the Christian faith
and spoke to the individual about the society around them.
I read a lot about him, but not a good biography.
And I've asked of Eddie Martini's brother Fatherly is a priest,
(02:51):
and I've asked him for a good biography on him,
and when I find it out, I'll share it. But
there is a line that he wrote that I would
advise you for so many of you who are going
through what I'm talking about, And he said, the days
(03:11):
are coming when men will go mad, and when they
meet a man who has kept his senses, they will
rise up against him, saying you are mad because you
are not like us. You've surely heard thee Orwell line.
(03:37):
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is
a revolutionary when you see someone speak out about COVID,
when you see someone speak out about an issue where
the conventional wisdom says you don't you don't defy this,
(04:00):
you just go along, even though secretly we all know
or question that may not be true. The term mad
is used in this translation for crazy. The days are
coming when men will go mad, and when they meet
(04:23):
a man who has kept his senses, they will rise
up against him, saying, you are mad because you are
not like us. Christopher Hitchins often quoted the story of Socrates, who,
(04:48):
for his scientific advancements, had been called by the Church elders,
who were the leaders of both the church and the nation.
And he had been accused of a crime punishable by death,
and that crime was blasphemy. And he was called before
(05:08):
the elders to explain this blasphemy of his scientific developments
and writings, theories which we would later embrace, in which
would be central to our world of science. And he
(05:28):
was brought before the church elders to defend himself against
penalty of death. So here was Socrates, a man who
should be honored, the nobel prize of his day, the
Einstein of his day, the Jonas Sawk of his day,
(05:51):
Gregor Mendel of his day, this great man of his era.
But he wasn't being called forward to be honored. He
was being called forward to be judged and to be killed,
(06:12):
that he betray what he knew to be true, because
in a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is
a revolutionary act. The teachings of the church and the
state at the time were at best naive. They couldn't
(06:37):
reconcile science with faith. Their ecumenical teachings had to be
above the scientific teachings. And Socrates was to be put
to death. And Hitchins, who of course was a known atheist,
(06:58):
and used this as an exist sample of the horrors
of the church. And he and I just have a
disagreement on that, and that's okay. But imagine a moment.
Imagine how Socrates felt. Here was the state condemning the individual.
Lest he say, no, no, I've changed my mind. You
(07:25):
are the wise ones. I will bend my need to you.
You are the ones that are right, and I am wrong.
How dare I question? The days are coming when men
will go mad, and when they meet a man who
(07:47):
has kept his senses, they will rise up against him, saying,
you are mad because you are not like us. So
many people like to throw a man overboard today because
(08:09):
his very bravery in descent is an indictment of their
own inaction. There the words of Georgeman, Aren't Shore and
the words that were taken.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
By robbint f p Thief, children speak Chinese and Spanni Michael.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
Talking about strategies for surviving and thriving in this world.
The first one is the serenity prayer. Understand that you
cannot change broken people. This was a lesson that took
(08:53):
me a good part of my life to accept. Because
I think I'm superman. I can fix any problem. I
can solve anything. People come to me with all sorts
of problems and I solve them all day. It's very rewarding.
(09:13):
You get a god complex. Look at me. I can
do this, And I realized that's a drug I feed
off of and I've had to learn it'll also take
you down. But I also realized over a period of
time that you cannot change people from their core. It's
(09:38):
a fool's errand but more than that, it's diving into
the water to save someone that's going to drown you too.
You can throw them a lifeline and if they kick
it back, you can recognize that's a decision they made.
(10:04):
They have agency, they have authority over their decision making,
whatever that may be. And at some point you have
to live with that. It's hard because we want to
fix people, We want to change people, and that is
one of the core problems with human relations, desire to
(10:29):
change other people, and in many cases, the desire to
change other people is really the desire to control other people.
And that gets to our basic animal instinct of control
and dominance. It's natural throughout the animal kingdom. That's what
(10:54):
the hierarchy of species is all about, the predator prey.
The desire to change someone is the desire to control someone.
But you're the part that's important. You got to figure
out which fights are worth fighting. You got to figure
(11:17):
out which behaviors are worth defending. Is it worth it
if you think that people ought to be allowed to cuss?
Is it worth it to go into a children's school
dropping f bombs? I hope you wouldn't do that, even
if you don't think there's anything wrong with it's just
another word. You're picking a fight. It really has no
(11:40):
benefit to you to win, and I see this all
the time. You're picking a fight over a principle. It's
not even really a deep principle. You didn't change anybody's mind.
You just showed that you were willing to thwart the rule.
Did you gain No one was inspired by you. Whatever
(12:04):
their level of respect for you was, they have less
of it now than they did before. So you have
to decide what do I want to offer my opinion on,
what do I want to say publicly? Who do I
want to be that I think it's very important people
understand that. That me showing that, expressing that. I think
(12:31):
a lot of people get themselves in trouble on social
media by saying things for shock value because they're kind
of curious if it will cause them a problem, and
by the time it does cause them a problem, it's
too late. Well that was dumb. How many times do
(12:53):
we do that we provoked something just to see what
will happen? First time Mom told you don't don't touch
the flame. Oh I got touch the slave now, Oh damn?
And then what do they say, idiot? We told you,
I know. But this will be Mom, this will be
(13:15):
a lifelong problem for me. I will be warned not
to touch the flame, and I will touch the flame.
But here's the part that's very important, and that is
understanding that we are complicit, which means involved in allowing
(13:38):
this to happen. And the reason is for all our
tough talk about how we won't bend the knee, we
also won't lift a finger to help another person. I
watched this all the time. Let me tell you how
(13:58):
this plays out. There's a group of guys got their lunchbox.
Their wives made them send them to work. They work
for a big company, but they're out at the job site.
Somebody makes comment, somebody adds to the comment. It's like
a telephone game. It sort of starts going. It's all
(14:20):
guys and they're going around, and then finally somebody says
something that someone else views as offensive, and they run tell,
because that's what people do. They run tell. And then
the question becomes what do you do about it? The
(14:45):
question becomes do you say that man is not at
fault unless everyone is fired. He shouldn't be fired. Most
people don't do that. Most people hide. And here's how
they justified. I mean, I'm all for telling Joe's but man,
(15:07):
he went too far?
Speaker 1 (15:08):
Did he?
Speaker 2 (15:09):
Have you never told that same joke? Well, yeah, I
mean I yeah, I guess I have. So why didn't
you say that that's a joke. Everybody in the group
is told, Well, he was an idiot for telling it
at the time. You could have told him at the time,
but you didn't. That's the real that's the real interesting
(15:35):
study of how many people will judge another person for
getting a DWI when, but for pure luck, they don't
have one, they could have had twenty five Most people,
(15:58):
I'll bet you ninety of people people who drink at all.
If you don't drink, you're probably not going to run
the riskiness. But for people who drink at all, I
think over ninety percent of people, if they're honest, especially
as low as the number has come now, I think
it's point oh eight. Over ninety percent of people would
have blown hot. And you're not always you have no idea,
(16:23):
get yourself a breathalyser. You'll be shocked fist, but you
don't feel any compassion for that person at that moment.
Speaker 1 (16:35):
The stock market crish occurred in nineteenth October nineteen twenty nine.
Right two months later, unemployment peaked at nine percent, and
then it started declining and by June of nineteen thirty
it was down to six point three percent. That was
when the first government intervention took place, and within six
(16:56):
months it was in double digits and it stayed in
double digits for the entire decade.
Speaker 2 (17:04):
Many of you will remember during the dark days of
the authoritarian Covidians that America shut down for all intents
and purposes. One of the great losses was live theater, Broadway, concerts,
(17:25):
the restaurants. Seen so many weddings, funerals, the things that
mark our lives, the things that make life worth living, gatherings, fellowship.
And we had a gentleman on the air, and many
of you commented that you were worried for him, you
felt bad for him, named Clifton Duncan. And he is
(17:45):
an accomplished actor, an actor of the stage, a purist
in that sense, with a lot of credits to his name.
And yet he wouldn't play the game, and he lost
not just his job, but in a sense I felt,
maybe part of his identity. So he went back home
where he had not been for quite some time. And
(18:07):
this is an adult man. I don't know how old
he was at the time, maybe thirty. And he went
back home and lived with his parents and started waiting
tables and people would say, you know, you seem it
seemed kind of beneath you, and he would say, well,
I'm actually a stage actor, and he didn't believe him
because there's no chances it's happening. But this is happening.
This was really happening. Well a lot has happened since then.
(18:29):
Rather than go hide himself in a bottle, or in
pills or in sadness, Clifton Duncan decided, you know what,
I'm going to make something of this moment, and he
he rebuilt himself and we are honored to have him back.
As you can probably tell, I'm a huge fan Clifton Duncan.
(18:49):
Welcome to the.
Speaker 3 (18:50):
Program, Hery Michael, get to speak to you again. Thank
you so much for that great introduction.
Speaker 2 (18:56):
What caught my attention and I asked our team to
try you down was a post you put up on
February twelfth that said Thomas Soul was born during the
dark days of Jim Crow and went on to become
one of America's foremost thinkers. His uncompromising and countercultural views
(19:16):
have left him marginalized in the popular Zeit guests, let's
change that, and then you talk about your project. Tell
us about that.
Speaker 3 (19:30):
Well, it's actually been on my mind for several years,
and so a lot of people don't know about me
is that in my last year of conservatory, we had
a program called free play, and I guess the best
equivalent you can think of is, you know, maybe a
dissertation for you know, a graduate program or something. But
it's an assignment, I guess you can call it. Where
(19:52):
these students could create anything that they wanted. And I
created this one man show called The Universe Project, which
was very to biographical and very hip hop based, and
I played all these different characters and it actually got
me my first agent before you know, months before I
got out of the program, and I was able.
Speaker 2 (20:09):
To do the show off Broadway and.
Speaker 3 (20:13):
At the theaters, and for years now people have been
asking me, a man, that show was so great, when
you're going to make another one? And I was like, well,
I don't have anything to say first, or I don't
have anything to say, and then, you know, as I
say in my campaign video back in nineteen seventy seven,
or I discovered back in nineteen seventy seven, James Earl
(20:34):
Jones did a play called Robison about Paul Robison. In
twenty eleven, Lawrence Fishburne did the play called Their Good,
which is about Fairgod. Marshal Well, you can actually still
watch it on Amazon Prime today. And in twenty fourteen,
a great, great actor named John Dougis Thompson did a
play called Satchmo at the Waldorf off Broadway, which is
(20:56):
a play about Louis Armstrong. And so I just said
to myself, well, what would make an interesting subject for
a one one man show that I could create myself?
And the obvious answer to me came up was was
Thomas Soul. And he is someone who has had a
huge impact on my life, on many lives obviously, and
(21:17):
he's enjoying a nice kind of renaissance in terms of
you know, people who are really into his work and
discovering his work. But I said to myself, you know this,
it will be a really really interesting project to bring
the story of Soul or aspect of his life, you know,
just just something to the stage in the vein of
(21:39):
uh these other great these other great figures from the
twentieth century. And you know, I've already done the show before,
so like, what else could I bring to this particular project.
And you know, people are very very very enthusiastic about it,
which is nice.
Speaker 2 (21:52):
Well, and and much like Clint Eastwood did, you're taking
control of your own career because sadly, because because performance
is your art, you typically have to work for someone else.
And maybe the only way to get to do what
you want to do is to control control of the
product yourself. And I guess you're going to have to
(22:12):
write this stuff yourself if it's going to be made.
And you know, you hear that about some actors that
they couldn't get Sylvester Stallone couldn't get roles, so he
had to write the roles so that he would get
to act. He didn't want to write roles. He wanted
to act, you know. Clifton Duncan is our guest. It's
an interesting time, Clifton, because I don't know that this
(22:32):
has ever been the case before. But in my estimation,
the two greatest thinkers in America today, Clarence Thomas and
Thomas soul happened to be black men, which what are
the odds thirteen percent of the population, and both of
them come from that population. But both of them also
(22:53):
come from a generation and a time and a struggle
and an experience and a perspective. And I wonder how
much I wonder if there will be another generation like that.
I wonder if a young black man today is often
poisoned with these with I can't do that, I'm a
(23:14):
victim mentality. What about soul attracted you to telling his story?
Speaker 3 (23:23):
Well, I think the biggest thing for me, or one
of the big things that turned me on to him originally,
was the fact that he changed his mind. I mean
I stumbled upon a video of him, a clip of
him on the Bill Buckley Show from I guess it
was maybe the late sixties, early seventies, and he just
(23:43):
clinically took a part these these arguments just get you
that you hear oftentimes from I guess you could say
left wing intellectuals pun that's you know, what have you?
And I was like, who is this dude in this
you know, with this the the best afro ever in
these glasses, just clinically and even and wittily, wittily taking
(24:08):
down these arguments. But then I learned more about him,
and it's the fact that he grew up and had
one mindset, and even after studying with someone like Milton Friedman,
maintained that mindset, but then still had the integrity and
the intelligence to be able to say, well, wait a minute,
there's something else going on here when confronted with evidence
(24:31):
that contradicted his his former worldview. So I think that
was the big thing for me because it reflected when
I discovered him, probably about ten years ago. It reflected
my own journey from being kind of a default leftist
to taking a more maybe independent, centralized view of things.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
And so I think that was the big thing for me.
Clipton Duncan, great actor, now doing a Thomas Soul one show.
We'll talk more to him Michael Verry Show.
Speaker 1 (25:01):
And this is my damn coatiny I'll thought for this couture.
Speaker 2 (25:03):
This is mine. Clifton Duncan is our guest. He is
doing a new one man show on the great Thomas Soul.
Why do you think obviously it's not just a conservative,
(25:28):
uh you know, sort of doctrine he espouses. It's almost
his own. It's just this soulism or souloism. Why do
you think though, that there haven't been more people We
interviewed as a young guy who wrote a book about
him a few years ago, and he was just a
super fan and he and I just for probably two
(25:48):
hours just talked about our love of soul and and
things that he's said and his experience. But why do
you think that more people haven't, if not, done, what
you've done, Because that's kind of a niche thing. It's
a hard thing to do. Why has it been more
written about him? Why has he not talked about more?
Speaker 3 (26:06):
Well, it goes back to what you were saying previously
in your previous question about the kind of mindset that
is prevalent in much of Black America. And part of
the issue is the education system, the public education system.
Another issue is the I guess, the mass media complex,
(26:30):
entertainment complex, the comedians that we watch, the sitcoms that
we grew up watching, the music that we love, and
then the suppress as well, in addition to the algorithmic
manipulations of these big tech companies. So all that combined
together leads to this sort of gatekeeping of information about people.
(26:54):
And the thing about Soul and men like him, people
like him, is that he completely contradicts and goes against
this prevalent worldview or vision as he calls them, and
so they either berate him or dismiss him, or that
they have to ignore him because the things that he's
saying completely clash with the you know, to use his term,
(27:18):
division of the anointed, or the unconstrained vision, or the
left wing vision of Black America, black history, of these
kinds of things, and so he must be denigrated, he
must be dismissed, he must be destroyed reputationally. And you know,
it's really a shame because you know, there is a
there's a great, a great variety of intellectualism and thinking
(27:45):
in Black America, but the it's far far easier to
access people like you know, I'm not saying he's a
great thinker, but kind of easy coats or an eber
mixed Tindy or a Nicole Hannah Jones, people like you know,
I think, have have no respect for work personally, but
you know, they just have way way bigger platforms, partly
(28:06):
because of their ideology. And and Soul has been kind
of marginalized because of his views, which get coded as
coded as more conservative or or right right wing, even
though I think a lot of Black Americans really agree
with much of what he's saying. I mean, there's a
great sort of series of videos you can find on
YouTube of young people, young Black people who are watching
(28:30):
him for the first time, and they're reacting and they're saying, wait,
a minute.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
This dude is making sense. How Come I never heard
of him before?
Speaker 3 (28:38):
Right? So it's really interesting, it's really it's really fascinating,
and he's and he's kind of enjoying a renaissance among
younger people. But you know, the short answer to your
question is just that, you know, there's just a the
the the sources of ideas and information.
Speaker 2 (28:52):
That that we consume.
Speaker 3 (28:54):
And I mean we generally, not just Black Americans. They
just don't want to knowledge Thomas Soul because his work,
his body of work, really takes down everything that they
stand for. So it's not really surprising that they just
sort of ignore him.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
So he has a big body of work, and I've
spent a creepy level of time studying his life and
his writings and his influences and and his interviews he does.
He does a deal with the Hoover.
Speaker 4 (29:25):
Institute, with with whom he's he's associated and speeches that
he's given over the years, and he's really retreated, you know,
from most of public life, which I find unfortunate.
Speaker 2 (29:37):
I have begged for an interview and I can't get one.
But but I talk about him a lot, I quote
him a lot, We play things that he says a
lot on the show. When you begin a project like this, this,
this is and I guess you could have you could
say that that they had to do this with with
the Robison project that James Earl Jones did, or Thurgood
(29:59):
that Fish did or Satchmo. How do you begin a
research project like this because you're an actor, you're not
a research what you are now, but how do you
begin that?
Speaker 3 (30:11):
Well, you know, it's funny because I say, there's there's
really no excuse for a dumb actor, which might surprise
a lot of people, because part of the job is
learning how to research.
Speaker 2 (30:21):
Part of the job.
Speaker 3 (30:22):
You get a new role and you just read and
read and absorb all the information that you can about
this particular person. The great thing about Soul is that,
like you said, he has this huge, huge body of work,
forty five books, thousands of columns, hundreds of hours of
interviews and podcasts and lectures and speeches.
Speaker 2 (30:42):
And things online, you know, the audio.
Speaker 3 (30:45):
But like, there's so many ways to absorb his information.
But for me right now, I'm just starting at just
square one. Like one of the things that one of
the things that you do as an actor initially is
when you're confronted with a new character, you say, well,
what does the author say about this character? What does
the characters say about themselves? What do other people say
(31:07):
about the characters? So I actually just ordered Soul's book,
A Personal Odyssey, and just a couple of hours ago,
I was slipping through just you know, to a random
page and I said, this is just gold. It's gold
because we think of Soul as this intellectual dynamo. But
you know, people aren't going to really want to sit
(31:27):
through a play of just a bunch of intellectualism, you
know what I mean. So they need to see what
the underbelly, the emotional underbelly of the person is, And
can you really dive into the subconscious of the character,
subconscious of the character. And so I kind of have
to take a detached look at Soul, despite all my
respect and admiration for him, and look at his life
(31:50):
in his own words, and look at what others say
about him and how they perceive him. And it's really
just a I have a teacher who once said that
information is inspiration. And so what you do is you
fill yourself up with all the sort of details about
him and his life and you know, maybe his attitudes
(32:11):
and points of views, and you begin to form your
interpretation of this particular person that's on the page, and
then you bring him to life. But you know, it's
also unique because then I have his interviews to listen
to as well, so I can really immerse myself in
his mannerisms and who you know, how he behaves, how
(32:34):
he conducts himself, what he does when he gets emotional,
as well as add to the information stockpile of here's
here's his life, and here's what he has to say
about his life, and then again his views and his
points of view on a variety of topics, you know,
in forty five books and again thousands and thousands of columns.
(32:55):
So it's really in a really privileged place because his
work is so prolific.
Speaker 2 (33:02):
It's it could be kind of daunting in terms of.
Speaker 3 (33:04):
The sheer volume, But that's what you do at the
very at the very beginning of a role, is just
your research around it. You know, who is this person,
what do they want, why do they want what they want?
What's in their way? What do they what do they
do in order to get what they want?
Speaker 2 (33:20):
And those are the sort of the basic fundamental questions
that you.
Speaker 3 (33:23):
Ask about any character, and so that's what I'm asking
about soul now. M
It's that time, time, time, time, Luck and load.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
The Michael Very Show is on the air for years
(00:32):
two hundred and fifty. Money took two and a half
centuries after the birth of Christ, two centuries since the
death the Christian's church was quite different than it is today.
It was developing, it was strengthening, it was spreading. There
(00:53):
was a passion for the word, and there was a
Christian unk named Anthony became Saint Anthony. And he has many,
many terms by which titles by which he is referenced.
Anthony of the Desert is one you'll see. Because he
(01:15):
was the first, he is sometimes called the first monk.
He's not the first monk. He was the first monk
to lead by desertification, going out into the desert. This
sort of what we now considered monk like behavior, monasticism,
(01:37):
living alone, studying, sacrificing, engaged in pure thoughts and pure action.
This sort of behavior is often identified with him, and
is often credited to him as saint like and monastic
(02:00):
monk like behavior, and he came to be known probably more.
He lived in Egypt, and he left the city to
go out to the desert, which is a harsh life.
As you can imagine and to study to purify his
thought and action. And he came to be known as
Anthony the Great. And what's interesting about him is that
(02:27):
he really internalized the Christian life and the Christian faith
and spoke to the individual about the society around them.
I read a lot about him, but not a good biography.
And I've asked of Eddie Martini's brother Fatherly is a priest,
(02:51):
and I've asked him for a good biography on him,
and when I find it out, I'll share it. But
there is a line that he wrote that I would
advise you for so many of you who are going
through what I'm talking about, And he said, the days
(03:11):
are coming when men will go mad, and when they
meet a man who has kept his senses, they will
rise up against him, saying you are mad because you
are not like us. You've surely heard thee Orwell line.
(03:37):
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is
a revolutionary when you see someone speak out about COVID,
when you see someone speak out about an issue where
the conventional wisdom says you don't you don't defy this,
(04:00):
you just go along, even though secretly we all know
or question that may not be true. The term mad
is used in this translation for crazy. The days are
coming when men will go mad, and when they meet
(04:23):
a man who has kept his senses, they will rise
up against him, saying, you are mad because you are
not like us. Christopher Hitchins often quoted the story of Socrates, who,
(04:48):
for his scientific advancements, had been called by the Church elders,
who were the leaders of both the church and the nation.
And he had been accused of a crime punishable by death,
and that crime was blasphemy. And he was called before
(05:08):
the elders to explain this blasphemy of his scientific developments
and writings, theories which we would later embrace, in which
would be central to our world of science. And he
(05:28):
was brought before the church elders to defend himself against
penalty of death. So here was Socrates, a man who
should be honored, the nobel prize of his day, the
Einstein of his day, the Jonas Sawk of his day,
(05:51):
Gregor Mendel of his day, this great man of his era.
But he wasn't being called forward to be honored. He
was being called forward to be judged and to be killed,
(06:12):
that he betray what he knew to be true, because
in a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is
a revolutionary act. The teachings of the church and the
state at the time were at best naive. They couldn't
(06:37):
reconcile science with faith. Their ecumenical teachings had to be
above the scientific teachings. And Socrates was to be put
to death. And Hitchins, who of course was a known atheist,
(06:58):
and used this as an exist sample of the horrors
of the church. And he and I just have a
disagreement on that, and that's okay. But imagine a moment.
Imagine how Socrates felt. Here was the state condemning the individual.
Lest he say, no, no, I've changed my mind. You
(07:25):
are the wise ones. I will bend my need to you.
You are the ones that are right, and I am wrong.
How dare I question? The days are coming when men
will go mad, and when they meet a man who
(07:47):
has kept his senses, they will rise up against him, saying,
you are mad because you are not like us. So
many people like to throw a man overboard today because
(08:09):
his very bravery in descent is an indictment of their
own inaction. There the words of Georgeman, Aren't Shore and
the words that were taken.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
By robbint f p Thief, children speak Chinese and Spanni Michael.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
Talking about strategies for surviving and thriving in this world.
The first one is the serenity prayer. Understand that you
cannot change broken people. This was a lesson that took
(08:53):
me a good part of my life to accept. Because
I think I'm superman. I can fix any problem. I
can solve anything. People come to me with all sorts
of problems and I solve them all day. It's very rewarding.
(09:13):
You get a god complex. Look at me. I can
do this, And I realized that's a drug I feed
off of and I've had to learn it'll also take
you down. But I also realized over a period of
time that you cannot change people from their core. It's
(09:38):
a fool's errand but more than that, it's diving into
the water to save someone that's going to drown you too.
You can throw them a lifeline and if they kick
it back, you can recognize that's a decision they made.
(10:04):
They have agency, they have authority over their decision making,
whatever that may be. And at some point you have
to live with that. It's hard because we want to
fix people, We want to change people, and that is
one of the core problems with human relations, desire to
(10:29):
change other people, and in many cases, the desire to
change other people is really the desire to control other people.
And that gets to our basic animal instinct of control
and dominance. It's natural throughout the animal kingdom. That's what
(10:54):
the hierarchy of species is all about, the predator prey.
The desire to change someone is the desire to control someone.
But you're the part that's important. You got to figure
out which fights are worth fighting. You got to figure
(11:17):
out which behaviors are worth defending. Is it worth it
if you think that people ought to be allowed to cuss?
Is it worth it to go into a children's school
dropping f bombs? I hope you wouldn't do that, even
if you don't think there's anything wrong with it's just
another word. You're picking a fight. It really has no
(11:40):
benefit to you to win, and I see this all
the time. You're picking a fight over a principle. It's
not even really a deep principle. You didn't change anybody's mind.
You just showed that you were willing to thwart the rule.
Did you gain No one was inspired by you. Whatever
(12:04):
their level of respect for you was, they have less
of it now than they did before. So you have
to decide what do I want to offer my opinion on,
what do I want to say publicly? Who do I
want to be that I think it's very important people
understand that. That me showing that, expressing that. I think
(12:31):
a lot of people get themselves in trouble on social
media by saying things for shock value because they're kind
of curious if it will cause them a problem, and
by the time it does cause them a problem, it's
too late. Well that was dumb. How many times do
(12:53):
we do that we provoked something just to see what
will happen? First time Mom told you don't don't touch
the flame. Oh I got touch the slave now, Oh damn?
And then what do they say, idiot? We told you,
I know. But this will be Mom, this will be
(13:15):
a lifelong problem for me. I will be warned not
to touch the flame, and I will touch the flame.
But here's the part that's very important, and that is
understanding that we are complicit, which means involved in allowing
(13:38):
this to happen. And the reason is for all our
tough talk about how we won't bend the knee, we
also won't lift a finger to help another person. I
watched this all the time. Let me tell you how
(13:58):
this plays out. There's a group of guys got their lunchbox.
Their wives made them send them to work. They work
for a big company, but they're out at the job site.
Somebody makes comment, somebody adds to the comment. It's like
a telephone game. It sort of starts going. It's all
(14:20):
guys and they're going around, and then finally somebody says
something that someone else views as offensive, and they run tell,
because that's what people do. They run tell. And then
the question becomes what do you do about it? The
(14:45):
question becomes do you say that man is not at
fault unless everyone is fired. He shouldn't be fired. Most
people don't do that. Most people hide. And here's how
they justified. I mean, I'm all for telling Joe's but man,
(15:07):
he went too far?
Speaker 1 (15:08):
Did he?
Speaker 2 (15:09):
Have you never told that same joke? Well, yeah, I
mean I yeah, I guess I have. So why didn't
you say that that's a joke. Everybody in the group
is told, Well, he was an idiot for telling it
at the time. You could have told him at the time,
but you didn't. That's the real that's the real interesting
(15:35):
study of how many people will judge another person for
getting a DWI when, but for pure luck, they don't
have one, they could have had twenty five Most people,
(15:58):
I'll bet you ninety of people people who drink at all.
If you don't drink, you're probably not going to run
the riskiness. But for people who drink at all, I
think over ninety percent of people, if they're honest, especially
as low as the number has come now, I think
it's point oh eight. Over ninety percent of people would
have blown hot. And you're not always you have no idea,
(16:23):
get yourself a breathalyser. You'll be shocked fist, but you
don't feel any compassion for that person at that moment.
Speaker 1 (16:35):
The stock market crish occurred in nineteenth October nineteen twenty nine.
Right two months later, unemployment peaked at nine percent, and
then it started declining and by June of nineteen thirty
it was down to six point three percent. That was
when the first government intervention took place, and within six
(16:56):
months it was in double digits and it stayed in
double digits for the entire decade.
Speaker 2 (17:04):
Many of you will remember during the dark days of
the authoritarian Covidians that America shut down for all intents
and purposes. One of the great losses was live theater, Broadway, concerts,
(17:25):
the restaurants. Seen so many weddings, funerals, the things that
mark our lives, the things that make life worth living, gatherings, fellowship.
And we had a gentleman on the air, and many
of you commented that you were worried for him, you
felt bad for him, named Clifton Duncan. And he is
(17:45):
an accomplished actor, an actor of the stage, a purist
in that sense, with a lot of credits to his name.
And yet he wouldn't play the game, and he lost
not just his job, but in a sense I felt,
maybe part of his identity. So he went back home
where he had not been for quite some time. And
(18:07):
this is an adult man. I don't know how old
he was at the time, maybe thirty. And he went
back home and lived with his parents and started waiting
tables and people would say, you know, you seem it
seemed kind of beneath you, and he would say, well,
I'm actually a stage actor, and he didn't believe him
because there's no chances it's happening. But this is happening.
This was really happening. Well a lot has happened since then.
(18:29):
Rather than go hide himself in a bottle, or in
pills or in sadness, Clifton Duncan decided, you know what,
I'm going to make something of this moment, and he
he rebuilt himself and we are honored to have him back.
As you can probably tell, I'm a huge fan Clifton Duncan.
(18:49):
Welcome to the.
Speaker 3 (18:50):
Program, Hery Michael, get to speak to you again. Thank
you so much for that great introduction.
Speaker 2 (18:56):
What caught my attention and I asked our team to
try you down was a post you put up on
February twelfth that said Thomas Soul was born during the
dark days of Jim Crow and went on to become
one of America's foremost thinkers. His uncompromising and countercultural views
(19:16):
have left him marginalized in the popular Zeit guests, let's
change that, and then you talk about your project. Tell
us about that.
Speaker 3 (19:30):
Well, it's actually been on my mind for several years,
and so a lot of people don't know about me
is that in my last year of conservatory, we had
a program called free play, and I guess the best
equivalent you can think of is, you know, maybe a
dissertation for you know, a graduate program or something. But
it's an assignment, I guess you can call it. Where
(19:52):
these students could create anything that they wanted. And I
created this one man show called The Universe Project, which
was very to biographical and very hip hop based, and
I played all these different characters and it actually got
me my first agent before you know, months before I
got out of the program, and I was able.
Speaker 2 (20:09):
To do the show off Broadway and.
Speaker 3 (20:13):
At the theaters, and for years now people have been
asking me, a man, that show was so great, when
you're going to make another one? And I was like, well,
I don't have anything to say first, or I don't
have anything to say, and then, you know, as I
say in my campaign video back in nineteen seventy seven,
or I discovered back in nineteen seventy seven, James Earl
(20:34):
Jones did a play called Robison about Paul Robison. In
twenty eleven, Lawrence Fishburne did the play called Their Good,
which is about Fairgod. Marshal Well, you can actually still
watch it on Amazon Prime today. And in twenty fourteen,
a great, great actor named John Dougis Thompson did a
play called Satchmo at the Waldorf off Broadway, which is
(20:56):
a play about Louis Armstrong. And so I just said
to myself, well, what would make an interesting subject for
a one one man show that I could create myself?
And the obvious answer to me came up was was
Thomas Soul. And he is someone who has had a
huge impact on my life, on many lives obviously, and
(21:17):
he's enjoying a nice kind of renaissance in terms of
you know, people who are really into his work and
discovering his work. But I said to myself, you know this,
it will be a really really interesting project to bring
the story of Soul or aspect of his life, you know,
just just something to the stage in the vein of
(21:39):
uh these other great these other great figures from the
twentieth century. And you know, I've already done the show before,
so like, what else could I bring to this particular project.
And you know, people are very very very enthusiastic about it,
which is nice.
Speaker 2 (21:52):
Well, and and much like Clint Eastwood did, you're taking
control of your own career because sadly, because because performance
is your art, you typically have to work for someone else.
And maybe the only way to get to do what
you want to do is to control control of the
product yourself. And I guess you're going to have to
(22:12):
write this stuff yourself if it's going to be made.
And you know, you hear that about some actors that
they couldn't get Sylvester Stallone couldn't get roles, so he
had to write the roles so that he would get
to act. He didn't want to write roles. He wanted
to act, you know. Clifton Duncan is our guest. It's
an interesting time, Clifton, because I don't know that this
(22:32):
has ever been the case before. But in my estimation,
the two greatest thinkers in America today, Clarence Thomas and
Thomas soul happened to be black men, which what are
the odds thirteen percent of the population, and both of
them come from that population. But both of them also
(22:53):
come from a generation and a time and a struggle
and an experience and a perspective. And I wonder how
much I wonder if there will be another generation like that.
I wonder if a young black man today is often
poisoned with these with I can't do that, I'm a
(23:14):
victim mentality. What about soul attracted you to telling his story?
Speaker 3 (23:23):
Well, I think the biggest thing for me, or one
of the big things that turned me on to him originally,
was the fact that he changed his mind. I mean
I stumbled upon a video of him, a clip of
him on the Bill Buckley Show from I guess it
was maybe the late sixties, early seventies, and he just
(23:43):
clinically took a part these these arguments just get you
that you hear oftentimes from I guess you could say
left wing intellectuals pun that's you know, what have you?
And I was like, who is this dude in this
you know, with this the the best afro ever in
these glasses, just clinically and even and wittily, wittily taking
(24:08):
down these arguments. But then I learned more about him,
and it's the fact that he grew up and had
one mindset, and even after studying with someone like Milton Friedman,
maintained that mindset, but then still had the integrity and
the intelligence to be able to say, well, wait a minute,
there's something else going on here when confronted with evidence
(24:31):
that contradicted his his former worldview. So I think that
was the big thing for me because it reflected when
I discovered him, probably about ten years ago. It reflected
my own journey from being kind of a default leftist
to taking a more maybe independent, centralized view of things.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
And so I think that was the big thing for me.
Clipton Duncan, great actor, now doing a Thomas Soul one show.
We'll talk more to him Michael Verry Show.
Speaker 1 (25:01):
And this is my damn coatiny I'll thought for this couture.
Speaker 2 (25:03):
This is mine. Clifton Duncan is our guest. He is
doing a new one man show on the great Thomas Soul.
Why do you think obviously it's not just a conservative,
(25:28):
uh you know, sort of doctrine he espouses. It's almost
his own. It's just this soulism or souloism. Why do
you think though, that there haven't been more people We
interviewed as a young guy who wrote a book about
him a few years ago, and he was just a
super fan and he and I just for probably two
(25:48):
hours just talked about our love of soul and and
things that he's said and his experience. But why do
you think that more people haven't, if not, done, what
you've done, Because that's kind of a niche thing. It's
a hard thing to do. Why has it been more
written about him? Why has he not talked about more?
Speaker 3 (26:06):
Well, it goes back to what you were saying previously
in your previous question about the kind of mindset that
is prevalent in much of Black America. And part of
the issue is the education system, the public education system.
Another issue is the I guess, the mass media complex,
(26:30):
entertainment complex, the comedians that we watch, the sitcoms that
we grew up watching, the music that we love, and
then the suppress as well, in addition to the algorithmic
manipulations of these big tech companies. So all that combined
together leads to this sort of gatekeeping of information about people.
(26:54):
And the thing about Soul and men like him, people
like him, is that he completely contradicts and goes against
this prevalent worldview or vision as he calls them, and
so they either berate him or dismiss him, or that
they have to ignore him because the things that he's
saying completely clash with the you know, to use his term,
(27:18):
division of the anointed, or the unconstrained vision, or the
left wing vision of Black America, black history, of these
kinds of things, and so he must be denigrated, he
must be dismissed, he must be destroyed reputationally. And you know,
it's really a shame because you know, there is a
there's a great, a great variety of intellectualism and thinking
(27:45):
in Black America, but the it's far far easier to
access people like you know, I'm not saying he's a
great thinker, but kind of easy coats or an eber
mixed Tindy or a Nicole Hannah Jones, people like you know,
I think, have have no respect for work personally, but
you know, they just have way way bigger platforms, partly
(28:06):
because of their ideology. And and Soul has been kind
of marginalized because of his views, which get coded as
coded as more conservative or or right right wing, even
though I think a lot of Black Americans really agree
with much of what he's saying. I mean, there's a
great sort of series of videos you can find on
YouTube of young people, young Black people who are watching
(28:30):
him for the first time, and they're reacting and they're saying, wait,
a minute.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
This dude is making sense. How Come I never heard
of him before?
Speaker 3 (28:38):
Right? So it's really interesting, it's really it's really fascinating,
and he's and he's kind of enjoying a renaissance among
younger people. But you know, the short answer to your
question is just that, you know, there's just a the
the the sources of ideas and information.
Speaker 2 (28:52):
That that we consume.
Speaker 3 (28:54):
And I mean we generally, not just Black Americans. They
just don't want to knowledge Thomas Soul because his work,
his body of work, really takes down everything that they
stand for. So it's not really surprising that they just
sort of ignore him.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
So he has a big body of work, and I've
spent a creepy level of time studying his life and
his writings and his influences and and his interviews he does.
He does a deal with the Hoover.
Speaker 4 (29:25):
Institute, with with whom he's he's associated and speeches that
he's given over the years, and he's really retreated, you know,
from most of public life, which I find unfortunate.
Speaker 2 (29:37):
I have begged for an interview and I can't get one.
But but I talk about him a lot, I quote
him a lot, We play things that he says a
lot on the show. When you begin a project like this, this,
this is and I guess you could have you could
say that that they had to do this with with
the Robison project that James Earl Jones did, or Thurgood
(29:59):
that Fish did or Satchmo. How do you begin a
research project like this because you're an actor, you're not
a research what you are now, but how do you
begin that?
Speaker 3 (30:11):
Well, you know, it's funny because I say, there's there's
really no excuse for a dumb actor, which might surprise
a lot of people, because part of the job is
learning how to research.
Speaker 2 (30:21):
Part of the job.
Speaker 3 (30:22):
You get a new role and you just read and
read and absorb all the information that you can about
this particular person. The great thing about Soul is that,
like you said, he has this huge, huge body of work,
forty five books, thousands of columns, hundreds of hours of
interviews and podcasts and lectures and speeches.
Speaker 2 (30:42):
And things online, you know, the audio.
Speaker 3 (30:45):
But like, there's so many ways to absorb his information.
But for me right now, I'm just starting at just
square one. Like one of the things that one of
the things that you do as an actor initially is
when you're confronted with a new character, you say, well,
what does the author say about this character? What does
the characters say about themselves? What do other people say
(31:07):
about the characters? So I actually just ordered Soul's book,
A Personal Odyssey, and just a couple of hours ago,
I was slipping through just you know, to a random
page and I said, this is just gold. It's gold
because we think of Soul as this intellectual dynamo. But
you know, people aren't going to really want to sit
(31:27):
through a play of just a bunch of intellectualism, you
know what I mean. So they need to see what
the underbelly, the emotional underbelly of the person is, And
can you really dive into the subconscious of the character,
subconscious of the character. And so I kind of have
to take a detached look at Soul, despite all my
respect and admiration for him, and look at his life
(31:50):
in his own words, and look at what others say
about him and how they perceive him. And it's really
just a I have a teacher who once said that
information is inspiration. And so what you do is you
fill yourself up with all the sort of details about
him and his life and you know, maybe his attitudes
(32:11):
and points of views, and you begin to form your
interpretation of this particular person that's on the page, and
then you bring him to life. But you know, it's
also unique because then I have his interviews to listen
to as well, so I can really immerse myself in
his mannerisms and who you know, how he behaves, how
(32:34):
he conducts himself, what he does when he gets emotional,
as well as add to the information stockpile of here's
here's his life, and here's what he has to say
about his life, and then again his views and his
points of view on a variety of topics, you know,
in forty five books and again thousands and thousands of columns.
(32:55):
So it's really in a really privileged place because his
work is so prolific.
Speaker 2 (33:02):
It's it could be kind of daunting in terms of.
Speaker 3 (33:04):
The sheer volume, But that's what you do at the
very at the very beginning of a role, is just
your research around it. You know, who is this person,
what do they want, why do they want what they want?
What's in their way? What do they what do they
do in order to get what they want?
Speaker 2 (33:20):
And those are the sort of the basic fundamental questions
that you.
Speaker 3 (33:23):
Ask about any character, and so that's what I'm asking
about soul now. M
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