November 25, 2025 • 33 mins
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Luck and Load. The Michael Very Show is on the
air Borne two hundred and fifty one. With two and
(00:31):
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 was a passion for the word, and
(00:53):
there was a Christian monk named Anthony became Saint Anthony,
and he had as many many terms by which titles
by which he is referenced. Anthony of the Desert is
one you'll see. Because he was the first, he is
sometimes called the first monk. He's not the first monk.
(01:16):
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, living alone, studying, sacrificing, engaged
(01:39):
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 monk like behavior, and
he came to be known probably more. He lived in Egypt,
(02:02):
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 he really internalized the Christian
(02:27):
life and the Christian faith and spoke to the individual
about the society around them. I've read a lot about him,
but not a good biography. And I've asked Eddie Martini's
brother Fatherly is a priest, and I've asked him for
(02:47):
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 are coming when men will go mad,
(03:09):
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
(03:30):
Orwell line. 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
(03:54):
defy this, 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
(04:17):
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. Christopher Hitchins often quoted the
(04:40):
story of Socrates, who, 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 the elders to
(05:06):
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 was brought before
the church elders to defend himself against penalty of death.
(05:32):
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, Gregor Mendel of his day,
this great man of his era. But he wasn't being
(05:55):
called forward to be honored. He was being called forward
to be judged and to be killed, that he betray
what he knew to be true. Because in a time
(06:16):
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 reconcile science with faith.
(06:39):
Their ecumenical teachings had to be above the scientific teachings.
And Socrates was to be put to death and Hitchin So,
of course, was a known atheist and used this as
an example of the horrors of the church. And he
and I just have a disagreement on that, and that's okay.
(07:00):
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 are the wise ones. I
(07:23):
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 has kept his senses,
(07:44):
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 his very bravery
(08:07):
in descent is an indictment of their own inaction.
Speaker 2 (08:13):
It's their words of chordsman, aren't sor And the words
that were.
Speaker 1 (08:17):
Taken by Robbin FP.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
These children speak Chinese and Spanish.
Speaker 1 (08:21):
Michael, let's talk 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
(08:48):
that took 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. You get a god complex. Look at me.
(09:11):
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.
(09:33):
It's 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
(09:58):
they made. 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
(10:19):
that is one of the core problems with human relations,
desire to 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
(10:40):
instinct of control and dominance. It's natural throughout the animal kingdom.
That's what the hierarchy of species is all about, the
predator prey. The desire to change someone is the desire
to control someone. But here's the part that's important. You
(11:07):
got to figure out which fights are worth fighting. You
got to figure 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
(11:30):
wrong with It's just another word. You're picking a fight.
It really has no 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
(11:51):
were willing to thwart the rule. What did you gain?
No one was inspired by you. Whatever the 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
(12:12):
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 a lot
of people get themselves in trouble on social media by
saying things for shock value, because they're kind of curious
(12:36):
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 we do
that we provoked something just to see what will happen?
First time Mom told you don't don't touch the flame?
(12:59):
Oh I got touch now? Oh damn? And then what
do they say, idiot? We told you, I know. But
this will be Mom, This will be 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
(13:20):
that's very important, and that is understanding that we are complicit,
which means involved in allowing this to happen. And the
reason is for all our tough talk about how we
(13:41):
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 this plays out. There's a
group of guys got their lunch by their wives made
(14:01):
them send them to work. They work for a big company,
but they're out at the job site. Somebody makes a comment,
somebody adds to the comment. It's like a telephone game.
It starts going. It's all guys, and they're going around,
and then finally somebody says something that someone else views
(14:23):
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 question becomes do you say
(14:45):
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 justify. I mean, I'm
all for telling Joe's but man, he went too far?
Speaker 3 (15:03):
Did he?
Speaker 1 (15:04):
Have you never told that same joke? Well, yeah, I
mean 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.
(15:27):
That's the real that's the real interesting 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, I'll bet you ninety
(15:54):
of people who drink at all. If you don't drink,
you're probably not going to run the risk of this.
But 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
not hours you have no idea, get yourself a breathalyzer.
(16:20):
You'll be shocked, hafist, but you don't feel any compassion
for that person at that moment.
Speaker 3 (16:30):
When people say things like the government has to do something,
I say, have you ever study of what happens when
the government does something compared to what happens when they
don't do anything? And for one hundred and fifty years,
the governing in United States did nothing when there was
a depression. No depression during all those one hundred and
fifty years was ever as bad as the Great Depression
(16:50):
of the nineteen thirties in which the government did more
than it had.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
Ever done before in its entire history.
Speaker 3 (16:56):
The stock market crash occurred in nineteenth October nineteen twenty one.
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
(17:17):
months it was in double digits, and it stayed in
double digits for the entire decade of nineteen thirty.
Speaker 1 (17:25):
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, the restaurants. Seen so many weddings, funerals, the
(17:50):
things that mark our lives, the things that make life
worth living, gatherings, fellowship. And we had a gentleman on
the air. You commented that you were worried for him,
you felt bad for him, named Clifton Duncan. And he
is an accomplished actor, an actor of the stage, a
(18:10):
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 this is an adult man. I don't know how
old he was at the time, maybe thirty, And he
(18:31):
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.
Rather than go hide himself in a bottle or in
(18:53):
pills or in sadness, Clifton Duncan decided, you know what,
I'm going to make something 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.
Welcome to the program.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
Hey Michael, get to speak to you again. Thank you
so much for that great introduction.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
What caught my attention and I asked our team to
track 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
(19:38):
have left him marginalized in the popular Zeitch guest, let's
change that, and then you talk about your project, tell
us about that.
Speaker 2 (19:51):
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 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 these
(20:14):
students could create anything that they wanted. And I created
this one man's show called The Universe Project, which was
very autobiographical and very hip hop bassed, and I played
a lot of 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 to do
the show off Broadway and out of the theaters, and
(20:37):
for years now people have been asking me, a man,
it 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 Jones did a play
(20:57):
called Robison about Paul Robison. In twenty eleven, Laurence Fishburne
to the play called Third Goood, which is about Third
Good Marshal. You can actually still watch it on Amazon
Prime today. And in twenty fourteen, a great, great actor
named John Dougis Thompson too the play called Satchmo at
the Waldorf off Broadway, which is a play about Louis Armstrong.
(21:20):
And so I just said to myself, what would make
an interesting subject for a one man show that I
could create myself. And the obvious answer to me came
up was Thomas Sole. And he is someone who has
had a huge impact on my life, on many lives obviously,
and he's enjoying a nice kind of renaissance in terms of,
(21:42):
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 aspects of his life, you know,
just just something to the stage in the vein of
uh these other great these other great figures from the
(22:03):
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 1 (22:13):
Well, and and much like Clint Eastwood did, you're taking
control of your own career because sadly, 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
(22:34):
write this stuff yourself if it's if it's going to
be made. And you know, you hear that about some
actors that they couldn't get Sylvester Sloane couldn't get roles,
so he had to write the role so that he
would get to act. He didn't want to write roles.
He wanted to act.
Speaker 2 (22:49):
You know.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
Clifton Duncan is our guest. It's an interesting time, Clifton,
because I don't know that this 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
(23:09):
of the population. Both of them come from that population.
But both of them also 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
(23:34):
can't do that. I'm a victim mentality. What about Soul
attracted you to telling his story?
Speaker 2 (23:44):
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 the late sixties, early seventies, and he
just clinically took apart these these arguments that you that
(24:09):
you hear oftentimes from I guess you could say left
wing intellectuals pun that's you know, what have you?
Speaker 1 (24:17):
And I was like, who is this dude?
Speaker 2 (24:19):
In this, you know, with this the best AFRO ever
in these classes, just just clinically and even and wittily,
wittily taking down these arguments. But then I learned more
about him and 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
(24:45):
integrity and the intelligence to be able to say, well,
wait a minute, there's something else going on here when
confronted with evidence that contradicted his form 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 elective to taking a more maybe independent,
(25:10):
centralized view of things, And so I think that was
the big thing for me.
Speaker 1 (25:13):
Clifton Duncan, great actor, now doing a Thomas Soul a
one man show, is our guest. We'll talk more to
him going on Michael Show.
Speaker 3 (25:22):
And this is my damn country. I'll thought for this country,
this is mine.
Speaker 1 (25:29):
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 uh you know,
(25:50):
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 hours just talked
about our love of soul and things that he said
(26:13):
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 2 (26:26):
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,
(26:50):
entertainment complex, the comedians that we watched, the sitcoms that
we grew up watching, the music that we love, and
then the suppressed 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.
(27:15):
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 this term,
(27:38):
the vision of the anointed, or the unconstrained vision, or
the left wing vision of Black America, black history, 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
(28:05):
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 codes or an eber
Mixed Tindi or a Nicole Hannah Jones, people who I,
you know, I think have no respect for personally, but
you know, they just have way way bigger platforms partly
(28:27):
because of their ideology, and Soul has been kind of
marginalized because of his views which get coded as coded
as more conservative or right right wing, even though I
think a lot of Black Americans really agree with the
much of what he's saying. I mean, there's a great
sort of series of videos you can find on YouTube
(28:47):
of young people, young black people who are watching him
for the first time, and they're reacting and they're saying,
wait a minute, this dude is making no sense.
Speaker 1 (28:56):
How come I never heard of him before?
Speaker 2 (28:58):
Right, So it's really interesting, it's really it's really fascinating,
and he's kind of enjoying a renaissance among younger people.
But you know, it's the short answer to your question
is just that, you know, there's just a the the
the sources of ideas and information that that we consume,
and I mean we generally, not just Black Americans. They
(29:19):
just don't want to acknowledge 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 1 (29:31):
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 doesn't deal with the Hoover Institute, with with whom
he's he's associated and speeches that he's given over the years.
(29:52):
And he's really retreated, you know, from most of public life,
which I find unfortunate. 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 is and I
(30:13):
guess you could have you could say that that they
had to do this with the Robisom project that James
Earl Jones did, or Thirdgood that Fishburne did, or Satchmo.
How do you begin a research project like this because
you're an actor, you're not a researcher what you are now,
but how do you begin that?
Speaker 2 (30:31):
Well, you know, it's funny because I say that 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. Part of the job, 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
(30:54):
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 and things online,
you know, the audio. 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
(31:16):
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 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.
(31:38):
It's gold because we think of Soul as this intellectual dynamo.
Speaker 1 (31:44):
But you know, people aren't.
Speaker 2 (31:47):
Going to really want to sit 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 care, 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,
(32:07):
and look at his life 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
these sort of details about him and his life, and
(32:30):
you know, maybe his attitudes 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,
(32:53):
how he behaves, how he conducts himself, what he does
when he gets emotional, as well as at the information
stockpile of here's here's his life, and here's what he
has to say about his life, and and then again
his views and his point of view on a variety
of topics. You know, in forty five books and again
(33:13):
thousands and thousands of columns. So it's really in a
really privileged place because his work is so prolific. It's
it can be kind of daunting in terms of the
sheer volume. But that's what you do at the 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
(33:35):
in their way? What do they what do they do
in order to get what they want? And those like
the sort of the basic fundamental question that you asked
about any character, And so that's what I'm asking about
Soul now.
Luck and Load. The Michael Very Show is on the
air Borne two hundred and fifty one. With two and
(00:31):
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 was a passion for the word, and
(00:53):
there was a Christian monk named Anthony became Saint Anthony,
and he had as many many terms by which titles
by which he is referenced. Anthony of the Desert is
one you'll see. Because he was the first, he is
sometimes called the first monk. He's not the first monk.
(01:16):
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, living alone, studying, sacrificing, engaged
(01:39):
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 monk like behavior, and
he came to be known probably more. He lived in Egypt,
(02:02):
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 he really internalized the Christian
(02:27):
life and the Christian faith and spoke to the individual
about the society around them. I've read a lot about him,
but not a good biography. And I've asked Eddie Martini's
brother Fatherly is a priest, and I've asked him for
(02:47):
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 are coming when men will go mad,
(03:09):
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
(03:30):
Orwell line. 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
(03:54):
defy this, 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
(04:17):
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. Christopher Hitchins often quoted the
(04:40):
story of Socrates, who, 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 the elders to
(05:06):
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 was brought before
the church elders to defend himself against penalty of death.
(05:32):
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, Gregor Mendel of his day,
this great man of his era. But he wasn't being
(05:55):
called forward to be honored. He was being called forward
to be judged and to be killed, that he betray
what he knew to be true. Because in a time
(06:16):
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 reconcile science with faith.
(06:39):
Their ecumenical teachings had to be above the scientific teachings.
And Socrates was to be put to death and Hitchin So,
of course, was a known atheist and used this as
an example of the horrors of the church. And he
and I just have a disagreement on that, and that's okay.
(07:00):
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 are the wise ones. I
(07:23):
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 has kept his senses,
(07:44):
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 his very bravery
(08:07):
in descent is an indictment of their own inaction.
Speaker 2 (08:13):
It's their words of chordsman, aren't sor And the words
that were.
Speaker 1 (08:17):
Taken by Robbin FP.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
These children speak Chinese and Spanish.
Speaker 1 (08:21):
Michael, let's talk 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
(08:48):
that took 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. You get a god complex. Look at me.
(09:11):
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.
(09:33):
It's 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
(09:58):
they made. 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
(10:19):
that is one of the core problems with human relations,
desire to 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
(10:40):
instinct of control and dominance. It's natural throughout the animal kingdom.
That's what the hierarchy of species is all about, the
predator prey. The desire to change someone is the desire
to control someone. But here's the part that's important. You
(11:07):
got to figure out which fights are worth fighting. You
got to figure 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
(11:30):
wrong with It's just another word. You're picking a fight.
It really has no 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
(11:51):
were willing to thwart the rule. What did you gain?
No one was inspired by you. Whatever the 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
(12:12):
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 a lot
of people get themselves in trouble on social media by
saying things for shock value, because they're kind of curious
(12:36):
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 we do
that we provoked something just to see what will happen?
First time Mom told you don't don't touch the flame?
(12:59):
Oh I got touch now? Oh damn? And then what
do they say, idiot? We told you, I know. But
this will be Mom, This will be 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
(13:20):
that's very important, and that is understanding that we are complicit,
which means involved in allowing this to happen. And the
reason is for all our tough talk about how we
(13:41):
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 this plays out. There's a
group of guys got their lunch by their wives made
(14:01):
them send them to work. They work for a big company,
but they're out at the job site. Somebody makes a comment,
somebody adds to the comment. It's like a telephone game.
It starts going. It's all guys, and they're going around,
and then finally somebody says something that someone else views
(14:23):
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 question becomes do you say
(14:45):
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 justify. I mean, I'm
all for telling Joe's but man, he went too far?
Speaker 3 (15:03):
Did he?
Speaker 1 (15:04):
Have you never told that same joke? Well, yeah, I
mean 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.
(15:27):
That's the real that's the real interesting 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, I'll bet you ninety
(15:54):
of people who drink at all. If you don't drink,
you're probably not going to run the risk of this.
But 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
not hours you have no idea, get yourself a breathalyzer.
(16:20):
You'll be shocked, hafist, but you don't feel any compassion
for that person at that moment.
Speaker 3 (16:30):
When people say things like the government has to do something,
I say, have you ever study of what happens when
the government does something compared to what happens when they
don't do anything? And for one hundred and fifty years,
the governing in United States did nothing when there was
a depression. No depression during all those one hundred and
fifty years was ever as bad as the Great Depression
(16:50):
of the nineteen thirties in which the government did more
than it had.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
Ever done before in its entire history.
Speaker 3 (16:56):
The stock market crash occurred in nineteenth October nineteen twenty one.
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
(17:17):
months it was in double digits, and it stayed in
double digits for the entire decade of nineteen thirty.
Speaker 1 (17:25):
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, the restaurants. Seen so many weddings, funerals, the
(17:50):
things that mark our lives, the things that make life
worth living, gatherings, fellowship. And we had a gentleman on
the air. You commented that you were worried for him,
you felt bad for him, named Clifton Duncan. And he
is an accomplished actor, an actor of the stage, a
(18:10):
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 this is an adult man. I don't know how
old he was at the time, maybe thirty, And he
(18:31):
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.
Rather than go hide himself in a bottle or in
(18:53):
pills or in sadness, Clifton Duncan decided, you know what,
I'm going to make something 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.
Welcome to the program.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
Hey Michael, get to speak to you again. Thank you
so much for that great introduction.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
What caught my attention and I asked our team to
track 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
(19:38):
have left him marginalized in the popular Zeitch guest, let's
change that, and then you talk about your project, tell
us about that.
Speaker 2 (19:51):
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 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 these
(20:14):
students could create anything that they wanted. And I created
this one man's show called The Universe Project, which was
very autobiographical and very hip hop bassed, and I played
a lot of 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 to do
the show off Broadway and out of the theaters, and
(20:37):
for years now people have been asking me, a man,
it 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 Jones did a play
(20:57):
called Robison about Paul Robison. In twenty eleven, Laurence Fishburne
to the play called Third Goood, which is about Third
Good Marshal. You can actually still watch it on Amazon
Prime today. And in twenty fourteen, a great, great actor
named John Dougis Thompson too the play called Satchmo at
the Waldorf off Broadway, which is a play about Louis Armstrong.
(21:20):
And so I just said to myself, what would make
an interesting subject for a one man show that I
could create myself. And the obvious answer to me came
up was Thomas Sole. And he is someone who has
had a huge impact on my life, on many lives obviously,
and he's enjoying a nice kind of renaissance in terms of,
(21:42):
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 aspects of his life, you know,
just just something to the stage in the vein of
uh these other great these other great figures from the
(22:03):
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 1 (22:13):
Well, and and much like Clint Eastwood did, you're taking
control of your own career because sadly, 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
(22:34):
write this stuff yourself if it's if it's going to
be made. And you know, you hear that about some
actors that they couldn't get Sylvester Sloane couldn't get roles,
so he had to write the role so that he
would get to act. He didn't want to write roles.
He wanted to act.
Speaker 2 (22:49):
You know.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
Clifton Duncan is our guest. It's an interesting time, Clifton,
because I don't know that this 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
(23:09):
of the population. Both of them come from that population.
But both of them also 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
(23:34):
can't do that. I'm a victim mentality. What about Soul
attracted you to telling his story?
Speaker 2 (23:44):
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 the late sixties, early seventies, and he
just clinically took apart these these arguments that you that
(24:09):
you hear oftentimes from I guess you could say left
wing intellectuals pun that's you know, what have you?
Speaker 1 (24:17):
And I was like, who is this dude?
Speaker 2 (24:19):
In this, you know, with this the best AFRO ever
in these classes, just just clinically and even and wittily,
wittily taking down these arguments. But then I learned more
about him and 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
(24:45):
integrity and the intelligence to be able to say, well,
wait a minute, there's something else going on here when
confronted with evidence that contradicted his form 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 elective to taking a more maybe independent,
(25:10):
centralized view of things, And so I think that was
the big thing for me.
Speaker 1 (25:13):
Clifton Duncan, great actor, now doing a Thomas Soul a
one man show, is our guest. We'll talk more to
him going on Michael Show.
Speaker 3 (25:22):
And this is my damn country. I'll thought for this country,
this is mine.
Speaker 1 (25:29):
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 uh you know,
(25:50):
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 hours just talked
about our love of soul and things that he said
(26:13):
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 2 (26:26):
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,
(26:50):
entertainment complex, the comedians that we watched, the sitcoms that
we grew up watching, the music that we love, and
then the suppressed 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.
(27:15):
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 this term,
(27:38):
the vision of the anointed, or the unconstrained vision, or
the left wing vision of Black America, black history, 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
(28:05):
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 codes or an eber
Mixed Tindi or a Nicole Hannah Jones, people who I,
you know, I think have no respect for personally, but
you know, they just have way way bigger platforms partly
(28:27):
because of their ideology, and Soul has been kind of
marginalized because of his views which get coded as coded
as more conservative or right right wing, even though I
think a lot of Black Americans really agree with the
much of what he's saying. I mean, there's a great
sort of series of videos you can find on YouTube
(28:47):
of young people, young black people who are watching him
for the first time, and they're reacting and they're saying,
wait a minute, this dude is making no sense.
Speaker 1 (28:56):
How come I never heard of him before?
Speaker 2 (28:58):
Right, So it's really interesting, it's really it's really fascinating,
and he's kind of enjoying a renaissance among younger people.
But you know, it's the short answer to your question
is just that, you know, there's just a the the
the sources of ideas and information that that we consume,
and I mean we generally, not just Black Americans. They
(29:19):
just don't want to acknowledge 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 1 (29:31):
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 doesn't deal with the Hoover Institute, with with whom
he's he's associated and speeches that he's given over the years.
(29:52):
And he's really retreated, you know, from most of public life,
which I find unfortunate. 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 is and I
(30:13):
guess you could have you could say that that they
had to do this with the Robisom project that James
Earl Jones did, or Thirdgood that Fishburne did, or Satchmo.
How do you begin a research project like this because
you're an actor, you're not a researcher what you are now,
but how do you begin that?
Speaker 2 (30:31):
Well, you know, it's funny because I say that 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. Part of the job, 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
(30:54):
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 and things online,
you know, the audio. 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
(31:16):
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 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.
(31:38):
It's gold because we think of Soul as this intellectual dynamo.
Speaker 1 (31:44):
But you know, people aren't.
Speaker 2 (31:47):
Going to really want to sit 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 care, 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,
(32:07):
and look at his life 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
these sort of details about him and his life, and
(32:30):
you know, maybe his attitudes 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,
(32:53):
how he behaves, how he conducts himself, what he does
when he gets emotional, as well as at the information
stockpile of here's here's his life, and here's what he
has to say about his life, and and then again
his views and his point of view on a variety
of topics. You know, in forty five books and again
(33:13):
thousands and thousands of columns. So it's really in a
really privileged place because his work is so prolific. It's
it can be kind of daunting in terms of the
sheer volume. But that's what you do at the 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
(33:35):
in their way? What do they what do they do
in order to get what they want? And those like
the sort of the basic fundamental question that you asked
about any character, And so that's what I'm asking about
Soul now.
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