Episode 1370 - Abigail Disney
Guest:Lock the gates!
Marc:All right, let's do this.
Marc:How are you?
Marc:What the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck buddies?
Marc:What the fuck nicks?
Marc:What the fuck puppets?
Marc:What?
Marc:What the fuck puppets?
Marc:Where'd that one come from?
Marc:I don't feel like I've said that before.
Marc:Have I said that before?
Marc:Somebody please go back through the 1400 episodes and just skim through to see if I've said what the fuck puppets.
Marc:It seems like I have.
Marc:I'm sure I've done it like 90 times, but listen to me.
Marc:What the fuck puppets?
Marc:What the fuck buds?
Marc:How's it going?
Marc:Oh, thank you.
Marc:Yes, you did miss my birthday.
Marc:It was Tuesday, but thank you.
Marc:How could you have known?
Marc:Many of you didn't.
Marc:And I appreciate the birthday greetings.
Marc:I'm 59 years old.
Marc:And I felt it coming.
Marc:I knew it was coming all year.
Marc:I knew it was coming.
Marc:Like right after I turned 58, I'm like, man.
Marc:59 is coming, and then 60 if I'm lucky.
Marc:But I always feel lucky.
Marc:I don't project that much into the future.
Marc:I try to use my imagination to think of horrible things that can happen to me in the world.
Marc:I don't think about, hey, what am I going to be doing a month from now, a week from now, tomorrow, 15 minutes from now?
Marc:No, I'd rather think like, oh, fuck, we're in trouble.
Marc:We're all in trouble.
Marc:Oh, my God.
Marc:What do you got planned for the future?
Marc:What future?
Marc:What are you talking about?
Marc:But I did have a birthday.
Marc:I had a birthday.
Marc:I could tell you about it.
Marc:I could.
Marc:But let me tell you about the show for a second.
Marc:Abigail Disney is on the show now look she is the daughter of Roy Disney and the grandniece of Walt her grandfather was Walt's brother yeah that Disney how is there is there any other Disney's around that aren't Disney Disney's she's a documentary filmmaker and producer she's produced dozens of documentaries going back to her first one in 2008 pray the devil back to hell which I have to watch she told me I had to watch it
Marc:She's I want to watch it.
Marc:I'm not you know, you can't I'm I'm busy learning how awful America was, you know, to the Jews.
Marc:I got it.
Marc:I got to sort of pace myself.
Marc:I'm watching the Ken Burns one that is basically saying that you think it's anti-Semitic and racist now.
Marc:Well, before the Nazis, it was even worse.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But but Abigail is also a prominent activist, in particular, on the issue of pay equity.
Marc:And she's been particularly critical of the global corporation that bears her family name, you know, Disney.
Marc:She's the co-director along with Kathleen Hughes of the new documentary, The American Dream, and other fairy tales, which I watched.
Marc:And got me back into a zone, man.
Marc:Got me back into that zone that I used to be in every day when I was hosting the morning show on Air America, Morning Sedition.
Marc:Just locked me in.
Marc:When was the last time you talked about the Powell memo?
Marc:Yeah, exactly.
Marc:Huh?
Marc:When was the last time you talked about Milton Friedman?
Marc:Uh-huh.
Marc:Yeah, coming at you.
Marc:Look out.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:The Powell memo.
Marc:I was obsessed with the Powell memo.
Marc:Obsessed.
Marc:That was the key, man.
Marc:That was the key.
Marc:Everything that we're experiencing now from the right and all the full spectrum of it is just payback for the 60s and payback for FDR.
Marc:I'm learning two things from the docs I'm watching that they've been pissed off since FDR, since the New Deal.
Marc:They've been pissed off since immigration policy changed in the 30s.
Marc:And then there's a whole other group of them that were just furious at the possibility of socialism infusing into our structure here in the 60s.
Marc:And ever since, they're pushing back.
Marc:And the Powell memo set that standard.
Marc:It basically says, we must do whatever we need to do at any cost to protect capitalism, no matter what.
Marc:Anyway, this stuff comes up in my conversation with Abigail.
Marc:We don't need to talk about it right now because I'm going to talk about my birthday.
Marc:I also want to talk about what I mentioned on Monday.
Marc:I'll be doing a live WTF at the Bloomsbury Theater in London on Wednesday, October 19th.
Marc:My guest will be comedian and writer David Baddiel.
Marc:Go to WTFPod.com slash tour for tickets.com.
Marc:Yeah, I just read this guy's book, but apparently he has a long track record as a comedian and television creator and everything else.
Marc:It's weird that Britain's no slouch in the media and content and theater and movies and TV world, but I don't know much about it.
Marc:I'm not tapped in.
Marc:I got to get a little tapped in.
Marc:I want to show up to talk to David Baddiel just about Jew stuff.
Marc:Let's go with the gamut of straight up Jew stuff and kind of subtle Jew stuff and just hidden Jew stuff.
Marc:Who wrote this?
Marc:A Jew?
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:Probably.
Marc:Who could know?
Marc:Let's look at the names.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:Jews.
Marc:So look, I had a birthday.
Marc:I got to be honest with you guys.
Marc:I've been spiritually uncomfortable, emotionally uncomfortable, mentally uncomfortable.
Marc:I think it had something to do with my birthday, had something to do with my mother is going into surgery today.
Marc:And I had to deal with that on my birthday.
Marc:We had to make sure that she was it was kind of spontaneous.
Marc:My mother's having spontaneous surgery.
Marc:She was scheduled to do it at the end of the month, and then she decided, well, they got an opening.
Marc:Why not do it at the end of the week?
Marc:My brother, who lives down there, is not even going to be there.
Marc:It's just been, all right, a little impulsive, but on my birthday, I had to wrangle that, make sure she was set up for some in-home care if necessary and on the phone with my cousin and dealing with that, dealing with my mom, who's not that much older than me, as I mentioned, just a little older than me, my mother, only 22 years older than me, my mother is.
Marc:And she's going into surgery.
Marc:My dad, interestingly, who, as you know, is beginning the dementia process.
Marc:I don't think he'd mind me saying that.
Marc:To be honest with you, I don't think he'd remember.
Ha, ha, ha.
Marc:Oh, man, I threw myself a softball on that one.
Marc:The only reason I'm laughing and it sounds like I'm kind of glib is that Rosie, my dad's wife, has been making him listen to these shows.
Marc:So like if anyone's going to be like the odds of him knowing me when I call are going to be pretty good because he's listening to this.
Marc:So he couldn't figure out how to listen to it by himself for, I'd say, about 1,340 episodes.
Marc:But now I guess it's something she does.
Marc:She just sits him in front of the computer and he can listen to his son ramble on and talk to famous people.
Marc:Hi, Dad.
Marc:How are you?
Marc:It's me, Mark, your son.
Marc:Hello.
Marc:Hi, Dad.
Marc:Hi, Rosie.
Marc:But anyways, my point was, you know, my dad, when he was in it, was an orthopedic surgeon.
Marc:And when I saw him in Phoenix...
Marc:And I was talking to him about the procedure my mother's getting on her neck.
Marc:But my father used to do some of that surgery when he was at the top of his game, doing backs and knees and necks, legs, hips.
Marc:Yeah, my dad was just a hammer and saw man.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But when I saw him in Phoenix, I asked him about it.
Marc:And he was like, he just locked right in, man.
Marc:Told me about the operation, said it was pretty common, not a long operation.
Marc:Recovery is going to be a little painful and tricky, but as far as the operation goes, simple stuff, simple stuff, the old man said.
Marc:And he locked right in and explained it to me and everything when I brought it up.
Marc:And I called him the other day to say she was going in.
Marc:He's like, yeah, it should be good.
Marc:It should be.
Marc:I said, what about the post-op?
Marc:He's like, yeah, I should just have a collar.
Marc:Like right, right there, man.
Marc:It was all right there.
Marc:My dad, who is always great to engage with medical problems, which is why, as I've explained before, I had a history of hypochondria was because like, you know, how can I get my dad's full attention?
Marc:Dad, I think I have cancer.
Marc:No, you don't.
Marc:My arm hurts.
Marc:You want to check it out?
Marc:Bring it.
Marc:Come over here.
Marc:Let me feel it.
Marc:And you do all the little wiggling and pullings.
Marc:That's what they do in orthopedics.
Marc:So pull and wiggle your arm.
Marc:Hold it still.
Marc:All right.
Marc:Does it hurt?
Marc:All right.
Marc:Hold on.
Marc:Pull it.
Marc:Ow.
Marc:It hurt when you did that.
Marc:It did?
Marc:No, it doesn't hurt, but you hurt it.
Marc:All right.
Marc:My dad broke my leg and my foot.
Marc:Do you know that?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I don't know if it was, I wouldn't say it was for experimentation.
Marc:I think it was just an accident, negligence.
Marc:Here's how he broke my leg in fourth grade.
Marc:It's been a while since I told these stories, I think.
Marc:But maybe it'll make, Dad, these are for you.
Marc:Remember this.
Marc:I'm going to share some memories with my audience.
Marc:Remember, Dad, when we were skiing?
Marc:And he's listening.
Marc:You remember, Dad, when we were skiing and I had those Cubco bindings, which were supposed to be the safest bindings?
Marc:You remember those Cubcos?
Marc:But they kept popping off and I was not having a fun day.
Marc:I kept complaining that my skis kept popping off.
Marc:And then you tightened them up, boy.
Marc:You tightened those bindings up, Dad.
Marc:You remember this?
Marc:And the next time I fell, boom, spiral fracture on my tibia.
Marc:I remember you said that pretty quickly.
Marc:You're like, yep, that's a spiral fracture on the tibia.
Marc:I'm like, well, can we get somebody down the fucking slope in a toboggan?
Marc:Is it a toboggan?
Marc:They just strapped me into one of those sleds with the ski patrol.
Marc:Yeah, I was the guy in the stretcher, the sled stretcher going down, put it in a splint.
Marc:They threw me in the back of the blazer.
Marc:My old man did.
Marc:I'm in the back of the blazer with the splint on going down the mountain, bouncing around in the back of that fucking orange blazer with a splint on a freshly broken leg.
Marc:So we got to the hospital.
Marc:Yep.
Marc:That happened.
Marc:Right, dad?
Marc:That was a good day.
Marc:You remember that day?
Marc:I'm sorry.
Marc:I didn't mean to cut into the fun day to the ski time.
Marc:But we got to the hospital and guess who set my leg?
Marc:Yep.
Marc:My dad.
Marc:I had the full leg cast all the way up to my hip.
Marc:Very difficult to pee.
Marc:Very difficult to bathe.
Marc:It itched.
Marc:All the way up.
Marc:Classic plaster cast.
Marc:Old school.
Marc:But, long story short, I still walk funny.
Marc:But that's because my dad ran over my foot.
Marc:Remember, Dad, that day where I was for summer school?
Marc:And...
Marc:You know, we were dropping me off.
Marc:I was in the back seat.
Marc:David Kleinfeld was in the front seat.
Marc:We were taking him somewhere.
Marc:I guess he may be.
Marc:I don't know why, but I was getting out for summer school and I opened the door.
Marc:I hung my legs out.
Marc:I reached around to get my books and you took off and the back wheel rolled over my foot and I was on the ground screaming and then you backed back over it.
Marc:And, you know, I was in trouble and crying and screaming in the seat.
Marc:And you didn't think it was broken.
Marc:And then when we got to the hospital and they x-rayed it, and it was like it popped like a fucking, like an apple under there.
Marc:It didn't shatter, but it popped a bit.
Marc:You're like, yeah, I knew it was broken.
Marc:I could tell by your face.
Marc:Yeah, could you?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So because I didn't do any physical therapy, my right foot kind of,
Marc:wings out but i'm not blaming you dad i'm okay i'm all right i'm in good shape i'm in good shape it was you know we live and learn we do things we make mistakes you didn't know you didn't know you were going to run me over and you didn't know that the bindings would not release if you tighten them all the way like a screw holding something in you didn't know i'm not blaming you right you didn't know right you didn't
Marc:So, look, Abigail Disney turned out to be a pretty great conversation.
Marc:I didn't know what to expect because I watched the doc.
Marc:I watched her in the doc.
Marc:But but, you know, I'm talking this hurt.
Marc:Her grandfather was Walt Disney's brother.
Marc:She grew up.
Marc:Disney.
Marc:And that's a pretty small group.
Marc:All right.
Marc:So it was kind of we were able to spread the conversation around the issues, but also around her upbringing.
Marc:It was kind of great.
Marc:The American Dream and other fairy tales is now playing in theaters and is available on digital on demand platforms.
Marc:And you can go to American Dream Doc dot com to find theaters near you.
Marc:And this is me talking to Abigail Disney.
Marc:I think there is a big difference with film in a way.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:I think there's the look and also, you know, you don't get as many shots.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, but with film, it just costs money, you know, and so digital, you just roll and roll and roll and roll and roll and roll and roll.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Why not?
Guest:If somebody sneaks something in there, I mean, that's the beauty of digital.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because you never know.
Guest:I mean, we interviewed the guy who used to be one of the main lobbyists for the NRA for years.
Guest:And during a break, he showed us that he could still do the splits.
Marc:So you had to have that.
Guest:You never get nut on film.
Marc:Well, that's humanizing the guy.
Guest:Exactly.
Marc:And occasionally you do want to humanize the people.
Marc:That was for Armor of Light.
Guest:Yeah, we had a lot of stuff with NRA people that we never wound up using.
Guest:It became a different film along the way.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Which is the other great thing about digital, honestly.
Marc:Well, it's also the weird thing about making choices in documentary.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Is that if you have an ideological through line that is being compromised by the humanity of the people...
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:You know, I don't think of what I do as ideological so much as spiritual, which sounds crazy.
Guest:Not spiritual, you know, God-y wise, but spiritual in the sense of like the spirit of the place and the spirit of the people and the spirit of what we're trying to accomplish.
Guest:That you find in people in the most unexpected ways and you follow that.
Marc:Right, right, about community, human perseverance, fight.
Guest:Yeah, and in Armor of Light, what we were looking for was, are you willing to, in good faith, come out of your little bunker and just talk to me about it?
Marc:It was about an anti-abortion minister primarily, but he was pro-gun rights.
Guest:Well, he was, so he was, I mean, the way the film started was I picked up the phone and called a bunch of different guys who were pro-life.
Guest:And that was hard for me.
Guest:But I said, look, I believe you're in good faith.
Guest:You believe what you believe.
Guest:I believe what I believe.
Guest:We Googled each other.
Guest:We could fight.
Guest:What if we chose not to fight?
Guest:Like, what if we chose if we just talked about the things that we share?
Guest:Because I also think murder is bad.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So you had that one.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:So let's choose to inhabit this little island of what we share and see if it grows under our feet.
Guest:We just live on it for a minute.
Guest:And he was just amazing the way he was willing to do that with me.
Guest:And so I sort of downloaded to him, like, okay, so every life is sacred.
Guest:um well then like why did we take that duty to retreat out of self-defense law i don't understand that right so it you know kind of like that stuff the most crazy out there aggressively pro-death stuff that's in a lot of gun law yeah that's what i wanted to talk to him about and he said he kind of narrowed his eyes just like you did yeah and um and he said i have never thought about it before
Marc:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Because you're so caught up.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that's kind of the magic of just like going to somebody you're not supposed to talk to.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And saying things you're not supposed to say.
Marc:Yeah, because everybody gets caught up in their belief system and there's a certain momentum to it that doesn't enable a lot of reflection or they don't take the time to do it.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And you're highly aware of the people around you.
Guest:who really there are consequences, you know, for saying something or admitting, you know, you might be right about that.
Guest:And so that's why you go quietly and it's just the two of you when you offer friendship.
Marc:Yeah, right.
Marc:And those kind of...
Marc:Not knowing what those consequences are insulating yourself in a point of view with a certain community of people has now become extreme.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Marc:So like not only do they not see consequences, but they they don't register them as real.
Marc:Or that, you know, it's just now with sort of bubble culture, it's kind of crazy.
Guest:So all the way up to Donald Trump's nomination, that minister from Armor of Light, Rob Shank, and I would go from church to church, far right-wing churches across the Midwest.
Guest:We'd show the film and then we'd stay there and talk.
Guest:And I was like a space alien because I would say, I am a pro-choice feminist all my adult life.
Guest:But I don't think you're crazy or bad.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Can we just talk?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so there would happen these extraordinary conversations.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And for them, it seemed crazy that I, you know, I wasn't an obvious murderer.
Guest:I didn't drink children's blood.
Guest:I didn't delight in the, you know, in this awfulness and that I had a decent set of human values.
Guest:I mean, one of the things Rob said to me was the most surprising thing to me about you as I got to know you was how much you loved your children.
Yeah.
Guest:And I just, I can't get over that.
Guest:And so that's the kind of thing, like if you go to Krispy Kreme, but I only go to McDonald's, you know, the way we're segregating now.
Guest:And that kind of amazing conversation that we had went right until the end of July of 2016.
Guest:And then it was like a hammer came down.
Marc:Right.
Guest:With the Trump presidency.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And just his nomination.
Guest:I mean, honestly, people weren't sure that summer.
Guest:And, you know, I was talking to people.
Guest:Maybe Ted Cruz.
Guest:Maybe it's Michael Rubio.
Guest:And, you know, they were trying to figure it out.
Guest:And then it was like an edict came down.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, they don't really have a pope.
Guest:Right.
Guest:They have like a bunch of guys that serve like a pope.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the bunch of guys had a meeting and made a decision.
Guest:It was when they got Mike Pence.
Guest:It was like.
Marc:Within the evangelical community?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:But, okay, so going back to what this new doc is about.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:which is a family thing in a way.
Guest:Yeah, very much.
Marc:But as we were coming in here, you said the new doc is The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales.
Marc:That's what it's called.
Marc:It's rooted in the workplace dynamics and wage disparity in the Disney company.
Marc:And you're at Disney.
Guest:Yes, I am.
Marc:And you grew up around here.
Guest:Yes, I did.
Guest:Glendale, California.
Marc:There's a lot of Disney in Glendale.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:There's tons of Disney in Glendale.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's why we lived here.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And it was, I think, didn't it sort of come about, wasn't the original Disney studio in Burbank right here?
Guest:Hyperion Boulevard over... In Silver Lake.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:In those bungalows.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And unfortunately, I think it's a Whole Foods now or a Galeson's.
Marc:Oh, yeah, right there.
Guest:Where the studio actually was.
Guest:Oh, that was where the studio was?
Marc:Right there at Hyperion in Glendale?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Well...
Guest:You know, over a little more, over Hillwise and Silver Lake.
Guest:And then they went to Burbank and they're still there on that lot in Burbank, but they moved animation to Glendale.
Marc:To ABC over there right off of- Oh, before ABC.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:They moved animation to Glendale for a long time and they had Imagineering in Glendale because it was near Caltech.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:And that's where they were training people almost?
Guest:Imagineering was where they brought in people who were trained in engineering, but use their imaginations.
Guest:And so they wanted people with physics degrees and electric engineering degrees.
Guest:That's where the audio animatronics came from.
Guest:I mean, I remember walking through there as a child.
Marc:The animatronics for the park.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:I remember seeing the Wicked Witch's head in the ball, the hologram.
Guest:I remember watching them work on that.
Guest:Oh, really?
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:But there was a whole different division around the film stuff, right?
Guest:Yeah, and the films were mostly on the lot over there in Burbank.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And they shot tons of stuff on that lot.
Guest:They didn't like locations.
Marc:So your dad was Roy O. Disney?
Guest:No, my grandfather was Roy O. My father was Roy E. My brother is Roy P. My nephew is Roy E. And your grandfather's brother is Walt.
Marc:So it was your grandfather and Walt that were the Disneys who built the company.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And it was called the Disney Brothers Studio at first.
Marc:Originally.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And my grandfather didn't like it.
Guest:He's like, I'm not drawing.
Guest:I'm not doing that stuff.
Guest:So, you know, I'll take care of the books.
Guest:I'll make sure the law is in order, all that stuff.
Guest:But, you know, you just go do your imagination.
Marc:Walt was the mad wizard.
Guest:Yes, exactly.
Marc:But like when you're growing up here, I mean, I have to imagine it was an all immersive Disney experience all the time.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yes and no.
Marc:Because when you were a kid, your father hadn't taken, he wasn't any part of the company yet.
Guest:No, my father always was part of the company.
Marc:Oh, he was?
Guest:So my father came up and was an editor and he shot things and he was making films all my whole time growing up.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:So if you watched on Sunday night, you know, and you saw like a story about a boy and his dog or a boy and his baby bear that got loose and he tamed him or something like that, that was my dad.
Guest:He made
Marc:He made the weekly Disney movies for the, what was it called?
Marc:The Walt Disney Hour?
Marc:The Wonderful World of Disney.
Marc:Wonderful World of Disney with the fireworks.
Guest:Yeah, there you go.
Guest:That was the sound of Little Mark.
Marc:It was like Sunday night, right?
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:It was so fun.
Guest:Once every year, year and a half, one of his would come on and we'd all sit around and we'd applaud his name when it would come up.
Guest:He made one about a peregrine falcon that was the one time he really fought with his father.
Guest:I'm really proud of him for this.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Because they were making a story about how this peregrine falcon kept sitting on her eggs and they would break.
Guest:And it was very tragic.
Guest:And, you know, all the anthropomorphizing and, you know, it was a whole plot.
Marc:It wasn't animated though, right?
Guest:No, these were live action.
Guest:So he was really interested in the wildlife stuff.
Guest:And wildlife was very much part of what they were thinking about what they needed to do in the 1960s and 70s.
Guest:And so Sunday night, much of it was wildlife.
Marc:Yeah, right.
Marc:They'd have a narrator, right?
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:Winston Hibbler would often do it.
Guest:He lived down the street.
Marc:So the mum bird sat down and that kind of stuff.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:And then the egg broke.
Guest:And so the narration is DDT.
Guest:Because of DDT, the egg broke.
Guest:And I guess Union Carbide was one of the sponsors.
Guest:And so my grandfather was like, you know, you don't get to say Union Carbide.
Marc:So the DDT that the bird was consuming was creating fragile eggs?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that's the huge part of the story of why raptors almost disappeared from the United States.
Guest:And so he remade the dialogue to say something like pesticides.
Marc:Oh, okay.
Guest:So general.
Guest:But it got through.
Guest:And years later, people at the Audubon Society gave him this big award because like most of them had seen that as children.
Yeah.
Guest:And most of them had said, nope, we're not letting the Peregrine Falcon disappear.
Guest:I love that because you never know.
Guest:This is what's so great about making a film and doing it with integrity.
Guest:It's like you don't know.
Guest:That little kid is seeing it and changing.
Marc:That is an interesting message because all kids were taking in Disney in some way.
Marc:And it was sort of a rare thing that it wasn't part of the consolidated vision of Disney and that your dad just got committed to this idea and it planted these seeds.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:So he didn't know the seeds.
Guest:He was just throwing them out there and they were like wildflowers.
Marc:It was such a rare thing for Disney to do that.
Guest:Well, yeah, kind of.
Guest:I mean, when they started the wonderful world of Disney, I don't think they were thinking of this vertical integration and synergy and all the rest of that.
Guest:That came in the 80s with the new leadership and a new ideology about business.
Guest:I mean, that's partly what the film is about, is that ideology about business.
Marc:Corporate business.
Marc:Radically changed.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And I think that there's some good information in there.
Marc:But like when you're a kid, so it starts with, I mean, really the Disney operation starts with the movies and then, you know, Walt, you know, designs this strange world.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:So there's the little animated seven minute shorts, right?
Guest:That's where he started.
Marc:Steamboat Willie and whatnot.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:And like everybody was churning out those things.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And he had a hit with this thing called Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, but he hadn't nailed down the copyright.
Guest:And so it was taken from him by his distributor.
Guest:It's part of the reason my grandfather is important because he was like, okay, hold on now.
Guest:Then they figured out licensing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because licensing was massive.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So all of a sudden little Mickey Mouse toys and the beginnings of the watches and things like that start happening.
Guest:So, oh, look, two income streams.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The movie was crazy to make a whole feature length film.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, because, like, can you imagine every single frame was hand drawn, hand painted, multiple layers?
Guest:Because he invented a multi planar camera to give the sense of three dimensions.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He invented that shit.
Guest:So, you know, it's kind of amazing.
Guest:My father was born in 1930.
Guest:They were very, very successful at that point.
Guest:But she said, I really wasn't sure when our next meal was coming from.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Because every- Your mom said that?
Guest:My grandmother.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:She said every single thing that they made, they plowed right back into the company.
Guest:And so for the first 30 years, it was just risk, risk, risk, risk, risk.
Guest:And somehow my grandfather was alone for that ride.
Guest:Being the sensible guy he was, and thank God there was a sensible guy there, because I don't think he would have been able to survive.
Marc:So Walt was just kind of a chaotic genius?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yes, that's exactly right.
Guest:I mean, which is not to say he didn't have a business sense or whatever.
Guest:But he wasn't like planning that I will have this empire and everything will be connected.
Guest:He was really driven by the creativity.
Marc:Well, you know, a lot of people put that on him, you know, because like even...
Marc:me when I was talking to my producer, I'm like, yeah, I want to find out if Walt was anti-Semitic.
Marc:And my producer was, he kind of said, well, I think Walt was a kind of a pre-war conservative.
Marc:And whatever was part of that ideology was probably there, but he was not any sort of rabid, you know, fascist.
Guest:Well, he bordered on rabid fascism instead of my grandfather, borderline, right?
Guest:Right.
Guest:And you can go back and you can find like the original Three Pigs.
Guest:Have you ever seen that?
Guest:The Three Little Pigs?
Marc:I don't think so.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:So the original Three Little Pigs movie was one of their sort of, I think it was 16 minutes.
Guest:So it was a bit of a pushing it experiment.
Guest:And the original Big Bad Wolf is a Jewish peddler.
Marc:I kind of remember seeing this.
Guest:They were not shy about delving into the stereotypes if it served them or they thought it served them to do so.
Guest:And it got bad.
Guest:If you look at Dumbo and the Crows, one of those Crows is named Jim Crow.
Guest:And then when they made Song of the South, look, people from the NAACP came to the studio and said, please don't do it this way.
Guest:Please talk to us.
Guest:Paul Robeson turned down the part.
Guest:So they knew they were making...
Marc:Well, that's sort of the argument is that like, you know, that Disneyland in and of itself in its enclosed way is some sort of American fascist fantasy.
Guest:Well, yeah, that's what it is.
Guest:I mean, it is and it isn't.
Guest:The thing is that like...
Guest:I think what they they were men of their time.
Guest:And that's not an excuse.
Guest:Right.
Guest:To to to not give a shit that the NAACP says this is these are the ways in which the search.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Don't do it.
Marc:That voice was out there.
Guest:That was there.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It wasn't like, oh, oops.
Guest:We didn't know that this would be horrible.
Guest:They knew.
Guest:What year was that, Song of the South?
Guest:Song of the South is 50, I want to say 58, 54, maybe.
Guest:But like, okay, we've got a civil rights movement.
Guest:Things are happening.
Guest:You know, there are consequences.
Guest:And they had an idea of how the world worked, right?
Guest:And in the idea of how the world worked, sadly, that involves people remaining in their places.
Guest:I think that for them, it was more a question of
Guest:order than superiority or anything like that don't mess with the system yeah yeah yeah and and and Walt when he builds Disneyland I mean one of the most interesting things to me about the place is how unconscious you are of where you are once you're there yeah like I mean I've been there I was there when I was a kid and I think I've been there as an adult maybe twice because of people that I've been dating who were fixated on it
Guest:Tell me that wasn't a deal breaker.
Guest:I mean, that's kind of odd to me always.
Marc:What, when there are grownups who are fixated on Disneyland?
Marc:Yeah, I'm not sure what it was about, but when I went back, you do feel, you're kind of fascinated by the design of it, how effective you are in a different world fairly quickly.
Guest:Well, the very first thing, the very most important part of the design is this huge earthwood mark berm around the park.
Guest:And it's planted and landscaped and everything like that.
Guest:So you're not even conscious you're going through...
Guest:through some kind of barrier when you walk in through the gate.
Guest:It's very subtle, but it grows pretty tall.
Guest:And so you don't even see the tops of the buildings around you.
Guest:It's quite remarkable, actually, piece of design.
Guest:And that was very, very conscious.
Guest:This is a perfect world.
Guest:We're going to show you a perfect world.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And so there's benign and passive prejudice and then there's active and malign prejudice.
Guest:That's how I divide it in my head.
Guest:And much of what's in Disneyland is the benign and passive kind in the sense that like I'm going to replicate everything good I remember about my Midwest upbringing.
Guest:And and so, like, here's this main street and these are the barbershop quartet.
Guest:And it's all just very perfect.
Guest:And so when we decided in the film to kind of bring race up, it honestly feels impertinent.
Guest:You know, it feels like, well, what does that got to do with anything?
Guest:You know, there's no nothing happening here.
Guest:But of course, the things happening there by design.
Guest:And in the early days, part of that whole barbershop quartet routine and whatever is Aunt Jemima singing and dancing and tap dancing.
Guest:And so they were tapping into the stereotypes when it helped them to advance a narrative because they saw the place as a narrative, but a place.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And this and and and and that also reflected some of the like the stories that the films were telling.
Guest:I mean, exactly.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And but when you were a kid, you know, you're in how many like cousins and stuff do you have?
Marc:How many Disney's?
Marc:What's the extended Disney family?
Guest:It's not as big as you would imagine.
Guest:Walt had two daughters.
Guest:And his first daughter, Diane, married and had, I think, eight children.
Guest:So there were a lot of kids.
Guest:And Sharon had three children.
Guest:And so obviously we were, as cousins, we were all, lots of them were around the same age.
Guest:We saw a lot of them.
Guest:Then there was kind of a falling out.
Guest:My father was an only child and then there's the four of us.
Guest:And after Walt died, my grandfather kind of stepped in and helped finish Disney World and, you know, and then died very suddenly, almost immediately afterwards.
Guest:And then there was some leadership questions.
Guest:And so there was a really a rivalry, right?
Guest:The nephew or the son-in-law.
Guest:And it was this classic patriarchal setup.
Marc:Your dad or the son-in-law?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so there was like kind of a rivalry.
Guest:Feelings got really charged and bad.
Guest:It was really unfortunate and very personal.
Marc:But when you all were kids, y'all got along.
Guest:We hung out and we loved each other.
Marc:Where did everybody live?
Marc:What was the big family house?
Marc:Where was Walt's house?
Guest:Walt's house was in Homely Hills.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And so once once things got rough between my dad and our cousin.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That we just stopped seeing each other.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Just heartbreaking and bad.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I hated that.
Guest:So we never really saw them.
Guest:And we grew up in Toluca Lake, which is like just right down here.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And that's so you're just right across town.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And you're all in L.A.
Marc:It's kind of trippy in the sense that like where so once you kind of grow up and you're a Disney and you know, you're vested.
Guest:Yes.
Marc:In the company.
Guest:In many ways.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And, you know, when do you start?
Marc:And outside of your childhood experience and the insulated nature of being privy to all this magical stuff, I mean, what do you do with your life?
Guest:Well, that is the question of my life, right?
Guest:What do you do with your life?
Guest:Because it feels like there are two options.
Guest:One is to turn your back, run, run, run, never look back.
Marc:But as a kid, are you running around?
Marc:Are you trying acting?
Marc:I mean, what do you do?
Guest:I, well, I went off to college and, uh, started to study English literature and just thought that was like the best thing ever.
Guest:Um, Yale.
Guest:Oh yeah.
Guest:And so from there I went on to get a PhD and I had settled in New York.
Guest:And so I stayed in New York and honestly being in New York was great because I just, I never really liked LA very much.
Guest:I didn't love the city.
Guest:Um,
Marc:But your other siblings stayed out here?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And I just dreamed of being in a different kind of a place.
Guest:And there was something about New York, everybody bumping into each other.
Guest:L.A.
Guest:is kind of like, I'm here, the car's going by over there.
Guest:There's a lot.
Marc:But how deep was the, you know, was it rebellious?
Marc:Yes.
Yeah.
Guest:Do I really have to tell you that?
Marc:No, but I mean, you know, because it just means that, you know, something, the brainwashing of a childhood in the Disney family, you know, outside of the park and everything else.
Marc:I mean, that's a lot.
Marc:That's not just sort of like my parents are conservative.
Marc:It's sort of like, yeah, we are the ones that it's that Disney.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:There are no other Disneys.
Guest:There are no other Disneys.
Guest:You know, like if you're related to the Kennedys, you know, you just go disappear into the world.
Guest:But I don't get to do that.
Guest:And so, you know, I lied a lot when people would ask if I was related.
Guest:And once my dad was standing behind me and he looked so much like Walt.
Guest:And somebody said, oh, are you related?
Guest:And I was like, no.
Guest:And he just dissolved into laughter standing right behind me.
Marc:Well, but not unlike the Kennedys.
Marc:It doesn't always go well for Kennedys.
Guest:No, it doesn't.
Guest:It doesn't.
Guest:You think it always goes well for Disney?
Marc:No, that's what I'm saying.
Marc:You just said that Kennedys can go off and do other things.
Marc:They can't really.
Guest:No.
Marc:They always turn up Kennedy somehow.
Guest:Yeah, tossing the football while you're skiing.
Marc:Yeah, but were there tragedies within the family?
Guest:No, nothing Kennedy-esque like that.
Marc:No drugs or car accidents?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, we have our share of drugs.
Guest:Drugs happen.
Guest:Drugs happen to all of us.
Guest:I mean, and I think if you talk about drug and addiction and all that kind of thing in any family where there's resources, you'll see that actually it's harder to get sober, much harder to get sober.
Guest:When you have money?
Guest:When you have money.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:you know, it's, it's, it's like, it's so hard when you're abjectly poor and you have to go back to the same neighborhood with no support and all the rest of it.
Guest:And then it's so hard when you're like trapped in a family, can't really get out of it because you rely on it for your money.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Everybody's telling you you're brilliant and smart and perfect and you run the world and,
Guest:And, you know, I always thought it was so important that with Betty Ford, when she went to the Naval Hospital, before there was such a thing as Betty Ford, and they put her through the rehab program, the first thing they did was now scrub the toilet.
Guest:And she was like, I'm the first lady.
Guest:I'm not scrubbing any toilets.
Guest:And, of course, immediately she got it.
Guest:It was like, oh, yeah, that's right.
Guest:I use a toilet.
Guest:I should be able to scrub it.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:You know, and that whole thing of, like, you're not too good to scrub the toilet, I think is, like, one of the first and most important things about getting sober is just being a regular member of the human race.
Marc:Worker among workers.
Guest:Service first.
Guest:And wealthy, especially wealthy men, have a very hard time getting there.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You seem to be talking passionately about this as if it's from experience.
Guest:Of course it is.
Guest:Of course it is.
Guest:Are you sober?
Guest:I'm not...
Guest:I'm complicated.
Guest:I'll just say that.
Guest:I'm very Al-Anon.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:And I read Lois's book.
Guest:Because I'm so proud.
Guest:We talked about that.
Guest:You read Lois's book?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's like her little memoir.
Guest:I can't remember what it's called.
Guest:It's a fascinating book.
Guest:It really is.
Guest:Because I can picture all these nice ladies out in the kitchen drinking coffee while their men are over there.
Guest:And somehow it's all their problem.
Guest:And it's all about them.
Guest:And I can see how Al-Anon would come out of those books.
Marc:Someone told me a brilliant thing that really stuck with me.
Marc:I got a long time sober and I've done my share of Al-Anon work as well.
Marc:But someone said to me, the difference between something like ACOA and Al-Anon is that Al-Anon was written for people who want to stay.
Guest:Mm hmm.
Marc:You know, which is a really interesting distinction.
Guest:It's a really interesting distinction.
Guest:And like, you know, if it's your parents, you know.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Like, yeah, I guess the option is not to stay, but it's a pretty that's a pretty nuclear option.
Marc:Sure, yeah, but I mean, it's framing the kind of detachment thing.
Marc:But you go to New York and you go to Yale, so in terms of how screwed up was your brain around, because what year is that?
Guest:78.
Marc:Okay, so it's later.
Marc:So how did you fare, I mean, you're a little older than me, but not much, but we were not really kind of that cognizant in the 60s when culture really started to shift.
Marc:But did you have any sense of what was going on with the company then?
Marc:Like when there was actual radical activism going on everywhere and Disneyland is just sort of this little pocket.
Guest:I know, right?
Guest:Because Disney did this crazy thing where, and one of the charges that they're anti-Semitic is there they are in the late 60s, mid 70s, and they still haven't hired a Jew.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, like you're in the film business.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, you know, I mean, you had to be working hard not to hire Jewish people.
Guest:So so so that's there.
Guest:And that was in the political environment I was raised in, too.
Guest:It was just nobody said, oh, Jews bad and work with Jewish people.
Guest:But at the same time, it wasn't like, you know, there was it was sort of, you know, it's like a fog in the house, you know, ideology.
Marc:But there are also those people within the business.
Marc:And I imagine that was really the issue where they were like, you know, the Jews can't have everything.
Guest:Well, yeah.
Guest:I mean, like, you know, Toluca Lake, the country club over there in Toluca Lake, it was set up as sort of in reaction to the L.A.
Guest:Country Club, which was didn't have Jews in it.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Because they didn't want Jews.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But so Riverside was set up and that was for movie people.
Guest:And that was a way of saying, oh, Jews can come to the club.
Guest:So Toluca Lake was, OK, we want movie people, but no Jews.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:That was the Lakeside Country Club, which is bizarre, right?
Guest:So a little right-wing enclave sort of formed in Toluca Lake.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:And so you had your Bing Crosby and your Bob Hope and people like that.
Guest:And we actually had around that lake, we had like Amelia Earhart and W.C.
Guest:Fields.
Guest:I mean, it was crazy around that lake.
Guest:But really, in fact, that country club was a lake.
Marc:Is that where Amelia landed?
Marc:Right, she's at the bottom of the lake.
Guest:I should have looked.
Guest:The rumor is they had like these ducks on the lake.
Guest:No, what am I saying?
Guest:They had swans on the lake.
Guest:And W.C.
Guest:Fields apparently used to get just completely lit and come out with a shotgun.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:Wow, that's quite a history.
Marc:But, you know, in the 60s, I mean, that was around the time where the Wonderful World Disney was on.
Marc:When did your dad make the Falcon one?
Guest:So he made that in the 70s.
Guest:My grandfather died.
Guest:So he must have made that in the 60s because my grandfather died in 1971.
Guest:My dad stayed at the company until 78.
Guest:So he kept doing that.
Guest:And then he ended up leaving because he was really kind of at war and being treated, he felt really badly.
Guest:So he went off on his own and started investing money and he made his own documentary and doing other things.
Guest:But he stayed on the board.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:And what was his position at the company when he left?
Guest:He was, I think, head of 16mm Productions when he left.
Marc:And who was running the place?
Guest:And it was Ron Miller, our cousin's husband, and the folks that sort of supported Ron Miller.
Marc:So you go to Yale, you get your PhD, and then what is your life?
Guest:I'm teaching a little bit, but by then I've started having children.
Guest:So I just sort of like hunkered down over my children and did a lot of not-for-profit work.
Guest:And that was where my political life was.
Marc:It started there.
Marc:And was all of it, do you find, a reaction to?
Guest:Yes.
Guest:You don't have to finish that question.
Guest:Yeah, I mean, I definitely did the predictable thing where if you say right, I'll say left.
Guest:If you say up, I'll say down.
Guest:I did that through my 20s and into my 30s.
Guest:But by the time I got into my 30s and I had started working like with these small women's foundations.
Marc:Did you ever say like, I don't want the money?
Marc:No.
Absolutely.
Guest:I did say I shouldn't want the money.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:But I had to tell myself the truth.
Guest:You know, honestly, it's a little bit of a hothouse flower problem.
Guest:You don't know for sure you can swim unless, you know what I mean?
Guest:And so I came right up to the edge of giving it all away more than once and then chickened out.
Guest:And I hate that about myself.
Guest:I probably should have.
Guest:But at the same time, there was so much I could see that I could do that seemed good.
Marc:Well, yeah, that seems to be the right shift.
Marc:Like, you know, I imagine like, you know, disinheriting yourself or dumping your stock options, you know, would be the natural kind of immature rebellion.
Guest:Right, right, right.
Marc:To follow through with.
Guest:There are great people who do that and have done it.
Guest:And Chuck Collins from the Hormel family did that and is a really great advocate for inequality.
Guest:I mean, against inequality.
Guest:And he runs inequality.org.
Marc:From Hormel Meat.
Guest:And he just said, no, I don't want it.
Guest:And has lived happily ever after.
Guest:Is he a vegetarian?
Guest:I'm not sure.
Marc:If it was similar to your situation, you would think he would be an animal rights activist.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Marc:But were you at different times in your life among these American billionaire family, the billionaire class?
Guest:I have known those folks and been among them either because they were there where I went to school or once I started getting active in giving money away, I would meet the daughters of families like this.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And daughters are different.
Guest:It's a different thing to be a woman in a family like that.
Marc:But you found people you related to.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I would imagine.
Guest:I mean, that saved me.
Guest:If I hadn't, I think I would have lost my mind.
Like who?
Guest:Well, you know, not going to name names, but there are people from pretty prominent families who like women.
Guest:So you're not expected to take over, you know, like they look at you and go, oh, look, an extra, you know.
Guest:And so there's a mercy in that.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Because it's like, oh, nobody expects anything of me.
Guest:So I can kind of do what I want.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I think it's a little harder on the men because it's a little bit like this toadstool they grow up under.
Guest:Oh, God, I've got to do that.
Guest:And I've got to do it better.
Marc:They've got to sort of evolve into a leader of some kind.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:And like, what if that's not what you were going to be?
Marc:Then you become a drug addict or a rock musician.
Guest:Yeah, a lot of people.
Guest:A lot of people choose that path or fall into that path.
Guest:And so for me, there was a little bit of a freedom in it.
Guest:And so I did a lot of like, I went on to boards and helped raise money.
Guest:And I figured out grant making and philanthropy and foundations.
Marc:This is why you're raising your kids.
Marc:And what's your husband do?
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:He's a writer.
Marc:You're still with him?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Oh, wow.
Marc:That's pretty good.
Guest:I know.
Guest:Amazing.
Guest:It's from 1979.
Marc:Wow.
Guest:That's crazy, right?
Guest:Good for you, yeah.
Guest:But there's a little four-year awfulness in the middle there.
Guest:You've got to have your awfulness.
Marc:Things got bad for a while.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:You came back around.
Guest:We found our way back.
Guest:And we have four kids, and they're spectacular.
Guest:And I chalk a lot of that up to being in New York where...
Guest:i mean if we'd been here there would have been like oh there's they're opening a ride down at the park or oh there's a new movie and like the temptation to go and do that and stand in the front and so your siblings grew up with that they had kids and it's like you know it's like hey we can go to disneyland well i mean like they don't do it as much as all that you know um but yeah there's that i didn't get special cards and stuff
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:And then there's things like private airplanes, which are, you know, I came to believe after using them for a while, kind of bad for you.
Marc:For your mind?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They're bad for your spirit.
Marc:The Disney-owned airplane?
Guest:No, it's my father's owned airplane.
Guest:He was 737.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Wow, that's a big point.
Guest:I mean, can you fucking imagine?
Guest:I know.
Guest:There was one time when I was flying home because I needed to get home and I was there at a meeting with the family and the business and everything.
Guest:And I'm the only person on a 737 with a queen-size bed that has a giant seatbelt like that the FAA requires.
Guest:You put this giant seatbelt on the queen-size bed.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And people bringing me things, you know, and I have really lowbrow taste.
Guest:I want Diet Coke and French onion dip and Lay's potato chips.
Guest:And it's just all in Waterford Crystal and the rest of it.
Guest:And that was the trip where I thought, oh, just no.
Guest:How old were you?
Guest:No, I was in my 30s.
Guest:I would love to tell you I was 18 and I just had so much principle.
Guest:It took me a while to get that much principle.
Guest:It takes a while.
Guest:It's like making your way out of the forest.
Guest:You know, you have to part this, you know, curtain of vines and go through it.
Guest:And it's scary.
Marc:And to figure out like, you know, how I imagine that there's a guilt driven.
Marc:element of philanthropy and and activism and and that you know at some point if that's what you're doing you realize that it's it's reaction based so to actually walk the walk and own yourself in in that in activism uh and that's a different thing
Guest:Yeah, it takes a lot of time.
Guest:I think guilt is a much maligned state of mind.
Guest:I don't actually think it's as horrible as all that.
Guest:It is reactive.
Marc:No, no, I mean, I think it drives a tremendous amount.
Marc:Without guilt, there'd be no charity.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:Exactly.
Marc:Not everybody's that service oriented or Christian.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:But like what you want to do is move past the reaction to something like justice, you know, and charity is not justice.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:This is not.
Guest:No.
Marc:Then you get into a more Jewish element of the old school thinking where, you know, to to, you know, you truly have concern for those in need and to sort of bring the underclass up to where.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I.
Marc:Yeah, I mean, it's a hell of a life in terms of trying to make that because it'd be so not easy mentally or emotionally or spiritually to just live your rich life.
Guest:Well, rich people, the people doing most of the charity and philanthropy in the world, are really poorly prepared for genuine justice by just being rich.
Marc:Well, because they hire people to actually do the charity.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Well, there's that.
Guest:Philanthropy consultants, I imagine.
Guest:You're not taught to listen to people.
Guest:You're not taught to shut up and just hear somebody else's point of view.
Guest:What about empathy?
Guest:Empathy gets a bit of a workout when you have money because you can separate yourself from people.
Guest:You can look from a distance.
Guest:And you can rationalize.
Guest:And you forget what it hurts like.
Guest:Or if you ever knew.
Guest:What is the last rich person you knew who had to stand in line much longer than they really wanted to stand in line?
Guest:That's actually a powerful, important human experience, right?
Guest:Standing in line.
Guest:Standing in line is everybody has equal importance in this line.
Guest:And I got here 27th.
Guest:So I'm going to be the 27th person regardless of how important I think I am.
Guest:That is fucking huge.
Marc:Yeah, I get frustrated.
Marc:Like, you know, like I've earned some money over time.
Marc:And now that I have a little money, I do always, you know, generally when I'm in a line, think like, is there any way I can avoid this line?
Guest:Isn't there a private way?
Marc:Is there a guy I can call?
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:So if you grow up with that.
Guest:If you grow up and you're immersed in that, it's really hard not to wonder, like, isn't there a private entrance?
Guest:Should I go around the side?
Guest:And there is.
Guest:For you.
Guest:There almost always is.
Guest:Yeah, there almost always is.
Guest:And that's why I hate private airplanes more than anything.
Marc:So that was your real kind of white light moment, the airplane?
Guest:Well, you know what?
Guest:There's no epiphany big enough to get you to humanity.
Guest:Because being raised with all these resources makes you different.
Guest:F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said, the rich are different.
Guest:Not because they're born different, but because they become different.
Guest:Because their circumstances are so changed just by money.
Guest:Because this is a highly classified society.
Marc:Yeah, the 1%.
Marc:When you really think about now with the disparity and how it's pictured.
Marc:Because now I know peers of mine who are fucking comics who make $100 million.
Marc:Yeah, exactly.
Marc:So all of a sudden, they enter that world.
Marc:Yeah, exactly.
Marc:And there's more people in that world now.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:It seems.
Marc:I mean, there's obviously the richy richest of the rich, but there is a class of people within that.
Marc:I think the one percent is probably three percent now.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Well, you know, the thing is that actually it's still only one percent and less than one percent, really.
Guest:It's just that there are more famous people in it because of the way media pays.
Guest:So that's the thing.
Guest:And so you've heard of more of them.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But I guess what I'm saying is that that rarefied life is they can only hang out with each other and they can't you know it's you can no longer you don't function you're not part of the the real world so to speak.
Guest:Yeah the first lesson when you get to college is you can't talk about your life.
Guest:when everybody else is talking about their lives um because they're like oh my god you know i don't have enough money to pay for the books this year and like everybody's that's what people get together and talk about when you're in college and is the unspoken rule yeah yeah well if the first time it's spoken you never forget it yeah
Guest:So, you know, to shut up because and this is why a lot of people like me go, they dress like shit.
Guest:You know, I would take a cab and get out 10 blocks before where I was going, you know, and they live in a hovel and you kind of pretend you sort of you're a tourist in it.
Marc:But you know.
Guest:But you know, as long as you know there's a safety button that you could push and leave that reality, then you're not in that reality.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But I think it's not totally without earnestness in terms of like you want to have that experience, but you can't have it genuinely.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Right, exactly.
Guest:So you prefer your kid to have that ingenuine experience.
Guest:And you prefer them to want that experience, God knows.
Guest:Then, you know, we've also seen kids respond really differently.
Guest:And they learn a lot, you know.
Guest:My daughter worked for a while at a strip club in New Orleans on Bourbon Street selling, you know, these drinks called hand grenades out onto the sidewalk.
Guest:And, you know, she got her experience.
Yeah.
Marc:Was that her rebellion?
Marc:Of course.
Guest:Of course.
Marc:Yeah, that's funny.
Marc:You went to Yale to rebel and she's out in Bourbon Street handing out giant drinks.
Guest:We all find our ways.
Marc:And she came back around?
Guest:Well, I wouldn't say back around, but she has grown into a spectacular human doing her own thing.
Guest:She has a book coming out next year.
Marc:Oh, about what?
Guest:About her life.
Marc:Oh, really?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Oh, that's interesting.
Guest:She's a very interesting kid.
Guest:How old is she?
Guest:I'll send you the book.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:She is, well, she's 31.
Guest:I call her a kid.
Marc:She's 31.
Marc:What's the book about?
Guest:It's like a series of personal essays about identity.
Guest:Oh, okay.
Guest:And knowing you're a Disney, she doesn't have it as a last name, but knowing you're a Disney.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And people knowing you're a Disney and like where do you find yourself and all that?
Guest:And how do you situate yourself?
Guest:A lot of the things I struggle with, how do you situate yourself relative to what you know to be a really, really checkered history around race and class and the rest of it?
Guest:And like where am I in all this?
Marc:Well, so you were doing nonprofit work, but when did you step into the media part of it, into film?
Marc:I mean, and what was really your evolution through nonprofit into actual activism?
Guest:Right.
Guest:Well, first of all, I just really wanted to be with actual people.
Guest:So I started working with this thing called the New York Women's Foundation, which just was just freaking genius because we were cross class.
Guest:And so you were working peer to peer with people that ultimately you would never know otherwise.
Guest:And I'd go out to programs and I'd meet the people who were doing the work of just gluing the city together, especially in the 80s when it was not glued together very well.
Guest:And like they tended to be women almost always.
Guest:They tended to be one over and over again.
Guest:I met these amazing women who, you know, was so much less than I ever had.
Guest:You know, we're doing miraculous things.
Guest:So I developed a belief system about how it works.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so years later, I didn't want to do media.
Guest:I didn't want to do film.
Guest:It felt like a trap door.
Guest:I didn't want to step on.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But I was in Liberia years later because as things developed, you know, further and further afield.
Guest:And in 2006, I went to Liberia and I heard this remarkable story about what the women had done there.
Guest:And like all that time, having known the kind of women who do this kind of thing, I knew it was true, even though nobody had reported on it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And basically, the Muslim and the Christian women had gotten together across their lines.
Guest:They had formed a peace movement nonviolently.
Guest:And they forced peace talks.
Guest:They had a sex strike, as part of it.
Guest:And they surrounded the peace talks that eventually happened when they fell apart.
Guest:And they locked arms.
Guest:And they held everybody in the building hostage.
Guest:And, you know, they forced a peace agreement.
Guest:Right.
Guest:That's an amazing thing.
Guest:No newspaper wrote about it.
Guest:And I came home furious because I know enough about women's history to know we fucking disappear every fucking time.
Guest:The water closes over our heads as we sink.
Guest:And it's like we were never there.
Guest:And I was like, damn it, no.
Guest:And that was the first film I ever made.
Guest:It was like, there's no way.
Marc:Pray the devil back to hell.
Marc:2008.
Guest:so watch it please watch it okay and you produce that i produce it but but it was the director and i made the film together yeah yeah and it was my first experience and like i remember flying over there with a crew to shoot and i was so nervous i thought what am i doing maybe imagine this like who do i think i am that sentence goes through my head a lot yeah and i swear to god my foot at the tarmac in monrovia and i thought well i know exactly how to do this job
Guest:I knew it.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, to the tips of my toes.
Guest:And like, I have not looked back since then.
Marc:Good.
Marc:And then the next movie was the one we talked about at the beginning.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, actually, no, because Pray the Devil Back to Hell turned into a series for PBS called Women, War and Peace.
Guest:And we made five films in five different settings about how war plays out differently in the 20th century, 21st century.
Marc:In relation to women.
Marc:Oh, okay.
Okay.
Guest:And the theory was basically all war films go with John Wayne.
Guest:The camera is in John Wayne's head.
Guest:And what if you put the camera in a woman's head?
Guest:How would it feel and look different?
Guest:And it is a very different phenomenon if you look at it through a woman's eyes.
Marc:Are you are you in any way engaged with this Ukrainian conflict?
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:So the woman in Pray the Devil Back to Hell went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011.
Guest:So awesome.
Guest:And she's been engaged with women in Ukraine.
Guest:So I'm hearing a lot from her.
Guest:And she and the rest of the women who've won Nobel Peace Prizes have been working with the Ukrainian women a lot.
Guest:They're very interesting.
Guest:Most of the tram drivers are women, and they have never stopped driving in spite of everything.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:It's something like 20%, which is the highest percentage in combat history of women in combat.
Guest:It's a very interesting news story.
Guest:It's very different from what we were talking about back in 2011.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:So this has been sort of the through line, was primarily women's issues initially.
Guest:That's how I got started.
Guest:And to tell you the truth, the Armor of Light was a little bit of a women's...
Guest:Sure, it sounds like it.
Guest:It's made from a women's point of view in the sense that I know conservative women.
Guest:I was raised by Phyllis Schlafly, basically.
Guest:And conservative women hate women.
Guest:They really hate women.
Guest:They don't trust them.
Guest:They don't want to talk.
Guest:I thought, if you could move conservative women to think differently about guns, how would they move their families to behave differently on the issue and how would they vote differently?
Guest:So that was the thesis.
Guest:And I thought, I need a man to talk to them because they won't listen to a woman.
Right.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So you got that guy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And he seemed like the right guy once you turned him around.
Guest:He's more of the right guy now than he was then.
Guest:I mean, he's like basically completely switched.
Guest:I overshot, way overshot with him.
Guest:He's writing essays about how we shouldn't overturn Roe versus Wade.
Marc:What's his name?
Guest:His name is Rob Schenck.
Guest:And he's a really interesting guy.
Marc:But you really turned him around, huh?
Guest:I didn't mean to.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:I thought that's the intent.
Marc:You got one.
Guest:Truth be told, at the very, very beginning, that was my fantasy.
Guest:Turn him around.
Guest:But then I thought, honestly, we could all use a little bit of this.
Guest:Who do I think I am?
Guest:He's a grown man.
Guest:He's responsible for his moral imagination.
Guest:Why do I think mine is any better than his?
Guest:Let's just be.
Guest:Let's offer each other love and friendship and see what happens.
Guest:And that's literally how that happened.
Marc:Yeah, well, congratulations.
Guest:I did it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So how do you, why was this the time?
Marc:Because it's interesting in this new film, which I watched, The American Dream and other fairy tales, that you lay out
Marc:you know, Disney and your relationship with Disney, you know, as a Disney, and we've talked about it fairly thoroughly here, but that's not necessarily, that's just to sort of define who you are coming into this.
Marc:I mean, this is about wage disparity and labor and unfair pay and practice.
Marc:And I guess by sort of digging in with the Disney thing and focusing on Disney, you can talk to a much broader issue.
Marc:Now, as you said earlier,
Marc:with the company in the early 80s, after your father left, and your grandfather, and they were all dead, and this is your cousin's husband, that corporate culture started to shift.
Marc:And I think you do a good job in showing that, that there was this kind of almost evangelical movement
Marc:idea around free market that became infused in the culture across the board.
Marc:And we're really paying for that now in a way because that's evolved.
Marc:Once it didn't work out for enough people that they couldn't accept that they may have been wrong about free market capitalism.
Marc:So now we've shifted into a sort of severely
Guest:fascist grievance yes that's misdirected that's exactly that's exactly how i see it too yeah i mean we we one of the things that's hard to grasp is that that there was a plan you know and then people made this happen i mean that's so we refer to the the powell memo the pamela the powell memo is something i was obsessed with yeah
Marc:uh you know when i was at air america you know because no one knew about it yeah and this was really something that this defines you know republicanism in a way yeah uh conservative uh economics but but really what it was like is that they felt so threatened by the 60s that they there was a moment there where they're like you know this could tip yeah and capitalism could lose to socialism exactly and we can never let that happen yes ever
Guest:Exactly.
Marc:That was what the Powell Memoir was about.
Marc:And he sent it out to the Chamber of Commerce's.
Marc:And that was that.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:And became a Supreme Court justice, not incidentally.
Guest:But, you know, so I was raised in a very conservative household.
Guest:And in fact, my mother's side of the family was more conservative than my father's side.
Guest:So these were people who truly, truly, truly believed in this free market idea.
Guest:Partly it was moral cover that this idea that, well, free markets do the best and everybody does as well as can be expected in any society under a free market.
Guest:So we should really throw all in.
Guest:But the other thing was the wrong people were trying to run the show.
Guest:Always.
Marc:How is that not going to happen?
Marc:And also, what's weird is about the free market idea crashing is now we just have a nation of fucking grifters who believe that by any means necessary, you get away with it.
Marc:Oh, God, yes.
Guest:Yeah, that's why I call it the assholeification of America.
Guest:That's because I was there in 1987 when Gordon Gekko said greed is good.
Guest:And he's the villain of the movie.
Guest:And I saw people in the theater go bananas applauding him.
Marc:And that was Milton Friedman's whole trip.
Guest:Yeah, well, and that came from Ayn Rand.
Guest:Milton Friedman loved Ayn Rand.
Guest:And by the way, so did Alan Greenspan, who was a little acolyte.
Guest:What about Leo Strauss?
Marc:Leo Strauss at the Chicago School, right?
Guest:Strauss and others, Hayek and Von Mies and the rest of them.
Guest:There was a whole...
Guest:And by the way, right when people are once again reading on these and Hayek and those and so they're once again picking up those books and talking about them on the radio.
Marc:They want a new intellectual class around these philosophical ideas that have caused this cancer.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And the idea, actually, what I meant when I said the wrong people were running the show was there is an idea among people who are wealthy and powerful that if you're not wealthy and powerful, it's because you're a fucking idiot.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And so why would Lee let you run the country?
Guest:Democracy sucks.
Guest:I mean, I have had that said to me by relatives who are free market capitalist purists who said, like, democracy is kind of a bad idea.
Marc:But it becomes very clear in that congressional, when you spoke to Congress, what was that panel exactly?
Guest:Yeah, that was a finance committee panel.
Marc:A finance committee panel and that congressman from- Indiana.
Marc:The one who said, you know, this is socialism.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Is that, you know, that whole idea, it's become so clear now that there are pawns of corporate interests.
Guest:Yeah, it's so clear.
Marc:So it's not even a philosophical notion.
Marc:It's just that most politicians are craven hacks.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Who are easily sold out.
Guest:I mean, they're functioning in a very broken system.
Guest:And basically now, all they have is like a set of clubs, you know.
Guest:And like, I'll use the socialism club on this lady and I'll use the Marxism club on that lady.
Guest:Yeah, because I'm owned.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:I mean, and they have not a very, I would say most of them, not a very well-developed intellectual system.
Guest:And they're not thinking about the word socialism as having anything more than a single, it's like a bucket system.
Guest:you know, of a word.
Marc:And so they throw everything into that one bucket.
Marc:And we have functioning socialism within the bureaucracy of this country that most of these older people, whether it's Medicare or Social Security, that, you know, they all...
Guest:We have corporate socialism.
Guest:We talk about that in the film a little bit, too.
Guest:I mean, we don't even scratch the surface on Anaheim and its relationship to the Walt Disney Company.
Guest:But a $500 million bond in 1996 that they are still paying off.
Guest:And there is a law that says that any surplus in the government's budget has to go to pay that bond down.
Guest:They're not allowed to use the surplus on the fire department or the education department or anything else.
Guest:It must pay that bond down.
Marc:So Disney owns the town.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So people of Anaheim took that and they pay a dollar a year and yet they own the place?
Marc:For the parking structure.
Guest:And when the bond is finished and it's paid down, Disney owns it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:On what deal on earth would you ever sign that favored the other side that egregiously?
Guest:You would never.
Marc:Well, they sold them on the economic benefit.
Guest:Except they also passed a law saying we indemnify you against any future tax on admission.
Guest:So, like, where's the benefit to Anaheim?
Marc:But this was not your grandfather's Disney.
Guest:No.
Guest:I will say he was a very aggressive guy around Florida.
Guest:Because they bought that land in Anaheim.
Guest:They built the park there.
Guest:And then immediately there was all this stuff around it.
Guest:And they got limited in square footage.
Guest:And Anaheim, as a business proposition, is a square footage problem.
Guest:How do you maximize revenues out of that?
Guest:Very limited thing.
Guest:So they bought, you know, they still only use like 40% of the land in Orlando that they bought.
Guest:They bought so much land there.
Guest:And then they went to the government.
Marc:Don't they have like a housing community there now?
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:So they went to the government and said,
Guest:Give us everything we want, please.
Guest:We want our own fire department, our own police department, our own water and sanitation, everything.
Guest:So it's almost like Andorra there.
Guest:It's like a state within a state because of how much the government was just happy to hand them over anything.
Marc:Wasn't there a conflict recently with DeSantis?
Marc:What was that about again?
Guest:So Reedy Creek is what it's called, this special status that Disney has.
Guest:It supplies its own, what's really interesting about it.
Guest:And all these tax, and everybody assumes it benefits Disney.
Guest:But actually, as it's worked out, it saved Orlando a lot of money in having to police and send fire departments to Disney.
Guest:And it wound up benefiting Orlando to the tune of something like a billion dollars a year.
Guest:I sort of think a company shouldn't have that kind of autonomy.
Guest:I mean, they have their own police departments.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It seems like a corporate police department doesn't make me comfortable.
Guest:So I think we should probably have a conversation about how appropriate Reedy Creek is.
Guest:And that was completely my grandfather's invention.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But DeSantis, I think, acted really rashly and said, let's just take it away.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And didn't think it through and didn't really understand.
Guest:Orlando was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Guest:Like, you know, shit is going on quietly because like you see a news story and it's up here and then it disappears from view.
Guest:That's a lot.
Guest:He got, he got, sure.
Marc:He got his talking point and it's probably, you know, Orlando, you know, pushed back and said, look,
Guest:No, I'm sure Disney went with hat in hand and said, what can we do to make you happy, Mr. DeSantis?
Guest:Tell us how to make you happy.
Guest:No, I'm sure Disney ate shit for them.
Marc:But all this getting to the point that you focus on specifically...
Marc:what they call the cast members of Disney.
Marc:And these are people on the janitorial staff.
Marc:These are people who set the park up overnight.
Marc:They're people that work in all different positions in the park who are really being underpaid, do not have access to healthcare, are not unlike many people in these positions in corporate structures.
Marc:There's no union that functions properly within it.
Marc:And so you made it personal by making it Disney.
Marc:But the stories were all there.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:I mean, the thing is, I made it personal because it is personal because these are persons.
Guest:Right.
Guest:These are all people living lives, human beings.
Guest:And like we leave that out of the equation when we have these conversations.
Marc:But it was interesting that, you know, it was the way to frame it, you know, with your own sort of moral compass.
Marc:And then, you know, trying to reach out to what's it, Iger, who's no longer there.
Marc:So the Jews eventually got Disney.
Yes.
Marc:But a couple of shoes.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But because you have no, you don't sit on the board.
Marc:You're not, you know, you just are a, you know, what is it?
Marc:You're a stockholder.
Guest:I'm a stockholder.
Guest:No, I don't even really have as many shares as most people.
Marc:But you just reached out as a person.
Guest:Yes, exactly.
Marc:With the name Disney.
Guest:Yes, who happened to have Bob's email.
Guest:The magic power that I didn't ask for.
Guest:So, yeah, basically, I'll tell you, I witnessed it.
Guest:I witnessed the change happen in front of my eyes.
Guest:Because as much as my grandfather was super conservative and anti-union and the rest of it,
Guest:He was like this decent man.
Guest:He was so warm.
Guest:He was so genuine.
Guest:And so when I would walk into the park with him... That's across the board?
Marc:That's not a granddaughter ideal?
Guest:No, I actually... I have tested this.
Guest:And I know people who do it still who will say the same thing.
Guest:It's not just an imaginary thing.
Guest:And I would walk into the park with him and we would come in through the cast member entrance and people would come up to him and call him Roy.
Guest:And he would remember their names and he would ask about their families.
Guest:I mean, like...
Guest:It was really amazing that way.
Guest:And he did seem to believe, as far as I can tell, that what the thing is with capitalism when it's working well is people are making money and having lives.
Guest:That was part of one of his concerns as a person.
Marc:That was how the middle class was invented.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:So it was like, you know, you pay them enough, they can buy a house.
Guest:There were all these government subsidies helping them do all these things.
Guest:But nevertheless, it mattered to him that people could raise their children and get health care and all the rest of that.
Guest:And I tell this story all the time because it's really important to me.
Guest:It says something so much about the difference of the place we're in now.
Guest:He used to pick up garbage when he would walk into the park.
Guest:And it's kind of a famous thing at Disney.
Guest:It's like one of the first things you learn is you pick up garbage.
Guest:I don't care if you're a manager or whatever.
Guest:And I asked him about it.
Guest:And he said, I want people to know nobody's too good to pick up a piece of garbage, no matter who he is.
Guest:And that...
Guest:If you think about contemporary CEO and how they roll and how they walk into spaces and how they see themselves and how we look at them when we put them on magazine covers and so forth, it's just inconceivable that they would bend over and pick up a piece of garbage.
Guest:And so in some ways, we have taken this class of people and we've given them like supernatural status.
Guest:Which is not who they are and not what they have.
Guest:And in handing them over this idea that they have such special skills that no one could possibly do their job, they can't be replaced, that's how we justify giving them these ridiculous paydays.
Guest:And it's like, I have no problem with a person having $65 million.
Guest:I really don't.
Guest:But at the same company, they can't put food on the table?
Guest:that doesn't feel on the back of people who are living in tents and have no sort of safety net at all and i have and i have in the business press i have one set of people who call me and ask me to talk about ceo pay and a totally different set of people who call me and ask me to talk about the pay for the workers why are those different people because we're not seeing them as working at the same enterprise yeah and that's a problem
Marc:Yep.
Marc:And the fact that Iger pulled out right before the pandemic and got his big bucks, his 65 million parachute, primarily because of negotiating the Fox deal, I imagine.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he became a billionaire during the pandemic from the money he'd accrued, all of the different paydays he'd had over the years.
Guest:That's partly because Disney prices went crazy, but also...
Guest:Why did Disney prices go crazy?
Guest:Nobody could get into the park.
Guest:It's just not rational.
Guest:We keep being told that the stock market is rational, and it's not.
Guest:Because Disney Plus was doing so well.
Guest:And so everybody was like, oh, great.
Guest:Streaming is now... So they're at home.
Marc:Yeah, everyone's at home watching and signing up, and no one's going to the park.
Marc:And meanwhile, you've got all the people that worked at the park furloughed, bordering on homeless, if not homeless, with families, on the street, with no...
Guest:no one it was interesting because you did talk to a woman who'd worked there for 40 some odd years and she saw the arc of a change yeah well let's be clear that they they said we're going to furlough you and you go ahead and you sign up for unemployment but in the background every single day of our lives up until this point we've been fighting not to have to pay taxes to the state that's now going to have to pay you unemployment
Guest:Like, think about that.
Guest:Like we have been trying to disable and deconstruct and wither the state away as active lobbyists.
Guest:But the second that there's trouble, it was like, oh, the state will pay for that.
Guest:I mean, it tells you that the only ideology really actually is the self.
Guest:And unfortunately, a corporation has a self, which is this collected brain of people at the top.
Guest:And they share a set of ideologies that are incredibly poisonous.
Marc:Yeah, and whereas as somebody with a sense of that, the immorality of that, it seems such a simple thing.
Marc:It's like you have all this fucking money.
Marc:What are you gonna do with all this money?
Marc:Why can't you just take care of this group of people?
Guest:Well, but here's the thing.
Guest:They don't have a lot of money lying around.
Guest:So one of the most profitable years in history going into the pandemic,
Guest:In the eight years up to the pandemic, they had spent, and I'm going to get the number wrong, but I think it's over $8 billion of free cash flow on share buybacks.
Guest:Share buybacks.
Guest:And if you think about, so a share buyback was illegal in the early 1980s, and it was considered unethical for many, many years.
Guest:But they're standard now.
Guest:And basically, the company looks at its share price.
Guest:It has a lot of cash lying around.
Guest:It says, well, let's just buy shares.
Guest:We don't care if the price is high.
Guest:Like, what's rational to do with money in a company?
Guest:You know, wait till the share price drops if you're going to.
Guest:Don't pay top dollar for it.
Guest:But nevertheless, they buy their shares.
Guest:That pumps the price up, which offers value to the shareholders.
Guest:And so, theoretically, you're rewarding your shareholders, your owners.
Guest:But the people you're really rewarding are your managers who are primarily...
Guest:compensated in shares at low value yeah so they get pumped up also so they nobody just the same as you've got this on-time inventory philosophy that really killed us during the pandemic this like i don't want free cash flow sitting around on my books attitude left them totally ill-prepared for the pandemic so immediately disney had to start borrowing money
Guest:You would think a profitable company would not need to dip into borrowed money, but of course, it's anathema to have cash sitting around, even for an emergency.
Guest:A lot of business practices contributed to the way our workers were screwed during the pandemic, and not just the fact that they were so low paid for so long that there were articles right before the pandemic, I don't know if you remember them, about how
Guest:Nobody could afford a $400 emergency if it came up.
Guest:There were a whole series of articles right before the pandemic.
Guest:Sure enough, they had a big emergency, more than $400, and they had to go right out to the food banks.
Guest:There was no padding for anybody.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It's awful because you would have to rebuild.
Marc:You have to create an infrastructure to actually take care of people, and they just don't give a fuck.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:And we had an infrastructure at one time that was imperfect.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But but it was like it was like a hedge.
Guest:We stopped.
Marc:Or God forbid you give them stock options.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, you know, God forbid.
Guest:And if you have free cash flow, like if you have, you know, 400 million extra dollars just lying around as a result of how profitable you are.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:and you think it should go to people who deserve it, why are your employees who produce much of that value not considered as important as your shareholders when you return that value to the people who deserve it?
Guest:So where's that?
Guest:And if year after year after year you're profitable, why are their wages not raised?
Marc:And why are they dying in their cars?
Guest:Yeah, and they are dying in their cars.
Guest:The person who died in her car that really just killed everybody was, she had played Winnie the Pooh six days a week for eight years.
Guest:And then one day she just didn't show up and nobody knew where she was and nobody could find her.
Guest:Was she living in her car?
Marc:That's terrible.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Was that in the movie?
Guest:No, I mean, we couldn't.
Guest:There's only so much you can shove in a movie.
Guest:And like we shoved that movie so full of stuff.
Guest:And oh, that story kills me.
Marc:It's terrible.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And so it's unfortunately, you know, what really sat with me and I've noticed it before is this sort of, you know, when you do have the union strike in front of the park.
Mm hmm.
Marc:That you have, you know, families walking into the park with dismissive looks, you know, like that there's this natural aversion to, you know, the the to activism and to and to wanting to putting voice to a very vulnerable and angry reality.
Marc:That, you know, people who might just be convinced because of their credit that they were at a different class than that are looking down at these people as they enter the park.
Marc:That tone of engagement always kills me.
Guest:You know, at least half of those people maybe 40 years ago wouldn't have dared to cross the picket line.
Guest:Wouldn't have dreamed of it.
Guest:And so that Powell memo, to go back to that Powell memo, is really important because he—
Guest:It was a given in the Powell memo that we should obliterate the union movement.
Guest:It should be destroyed.
Guest:And certainly that's the first thing Reagan got to work on in the 1980s.
Guest:But what he was focused on was, how do we make people hate unions?
Guest:Let's go into the schools and retrain people in how to think about unions.
Guest:Not just business schools, but high schools and colleges.
Guest:Let's write books.
Guest:Let's have our own academic papers.
Marc:And also, let's blame the mob.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:So there was a massive social campaign against movements.
Guest:And I still, even after that film, have to talk to people about why unions aren't bad.
Guest:And unions have gotten obliterated.
Guest:I mean, they are barely functioning and they are working as hard as they can.
Guest:And they're brilliant people in them, but they don't have enough money and they don't have enough time and they don't have enough staff.
Guest:They need much more support.
Marc:And I guess, you know, coming from a place where I don't know anything, I think there was a period in the 60s and 70s where they were a victim of bad leadership and payoffs and stuff.
Guest:Yeah, no question.
Guest:No question.
Guest:I mean, that was the problem.
Marc:But the idea of it, right.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You know, it was really about like, hey, you know what?
Marc:You can't have kids working all night long with no food, making shoes or whatever.
Guest:Thank you, union movement, for a weekend.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And an eight-day workday.
Guest:And child labor laws.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:So, yeah, no, there are some brilliant people in the union movement who are really trying to kind of pick up the pieces from.
Guest:And you see the way that teachers union –
Guest:is so wildly controversial.
Guest:But all a union is is a recognition that workers, if they can't bargain collectively, they're fucked.
Guest:And so what we're being asked right now, especially as we move more and more to a gig economy, is we're being asked to trust the CEO class to take care of, how paternalistic is that, workers.
Guest:No, workers have rights.
Marc:Right, or else to just trust that workers would take care of themselves.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Marc:That there's a selfishness involved to our perception.
Guest:Right, right.
Marc:That through this weird kind of like cherry pick your reality business.
Guest:And at the heart of the anti-union kind of campaign was stop thinking that we rely on each other.
Guest:This is not how society works.
Guest:Each of us is one little blade of grass sticking straight up, totally unconnected.
Guest:One little fuck you finger.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:That's a beautiful lawn image I have in my mind now.
Guest:And so when Milton Friedman says society runs on individuals pursuing their self-interest,
Guest:I find that to be the most offensive because he says it as though this is all obvious, that this is just a thing you say, the sky is blue.
Marc:Which is really not how the species works.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:And have you been at birth?
No.
Guest:Like, have you seen how that works?
Guest:You come out of a person.
Guest:And there's all these people there helping that happen and then holding that person so the other person can get better.
Guest:And then, you know, what's it called?
Guest:A family.
Guest:We interrelate.
Marc:It's a real problem when, you know, when intellectuals who...
Marc:their job is to think provocative things and philosophical ideas to promote debate within academia, kind of get released into the real world.
Guest:Exactly, and that's what happened with Milton Friedman.
Marc:Sure, it's happening again with worse people, with Jordan Peterson.
Marc:It's like there's definitely people that's like, they're supposed to be in academia.
Marc:This is supposed to provoke thought and debate.
Marc:It's not supposed to be practical, applied debate.
Guest:Have you ever met people who are trying to get sober, but they're just too smart to get sober?
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Because they talk so much sense, they don't know how to talk sense.
Marc:Well, they refuse to accept the idea of powerlessness.
Guest:Well, yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But there's also the person who can just talk and talk and talk and talk and talk.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Because you don't have to connect it with anything human.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I have met so many academics like that.
Guest:That's how you thrive in academia.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:And so then you pull him out of academia and you say, oh, construct a program.
Marc:He's the leader.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And Milton Friedman is so much worse news than even we make him in the film.
Guest:Because if you've read The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein's amazing, that's an amazing book.
Guest:Read that fucking book.
Guest:It'll make you want to kill Milton Friedman.
Guest:Just dig him up and bury him again.
Guest:Because he was talking to Pinochet in advance of the coup, planning his flight down there with all his Chicago folks.
Guest:With a whole set of laws they were going to pass within months.
Marc:It was the Chicago School's global experiment on how to kind of aggressively free market everything.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Marc:So what has happened since the doc?
Marc:I mean, because you know after the doc establishes itself that there's not going to be some closure at the end where everybody gets their payday.
Guest:Well, I will say this.
Marc:Yes.
Guest:The hotel mates on property at Disney have just achieved $23.50 an hour.
Guest:When I started working on this, they were in the 11s.
Guest:And $23.50 is dangerously close to a living wage in Anaheim.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So they have actually made incredible strides.
Guest:That's great.
Guest:And if that's where the hotel mates are, it's going to have to go up from there.
Guest:And they're not going to be able to retain anybody unless they go up from there.
Guest:So that's massive.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That is massive.
Marc:And it's also the interesting thing about the pandemic is a lot of people are like, fuck it.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Marc:You know, it's like we're not going to go work.
Guest:And you can't.
Guest:I mean, people have an expectation when they show up at that park that the people they greet there are nice.
Guest:And it's very hard to be nice.
Guest:You know, when you're making $18 an hour.
Guest:So let's be clear.
Guest:They have no choice.
Guest:If they believe in the proposition of Disneyland, they have no choice but to go radically up with wages.
Guest:So first of all, I'm going to keep the pressure on as much as I can.
Guest:I support the unions as much as I can.
Guest:But there's a bigger issue here because wages are only one aspect of this ideology that took over corporate America.
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Guest:And there's another ideology kind of becoming more and more prominent.
Guest:It's the public benefit corporation or the B Corp or things like this.
Guest:What if Disney became the largest B Corp in the country?
Marc:I don't know what that is.
Guest:It's basically you agree to a series of...
Guest:about transparency, political lobbying, how you treat your employees, how you treat the environment.
Guest:It's basically, if you're a B Corp, you're a corporation running the way a corporation would run if you gave a shit about human beings.
Guest:As if people mattered.
Marc:There's a few of those around, aren't there?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Are there a few?
Guest:There are a bunch of them.
Guest:I think there's something like 8,000 of them in the United States right now.
Guest:And it's growing really quickly.
Guest:So little by little, smaller corporations are signing on to this pledge.
Guest:And there are legal ramifications to it because it relieves them a lot of shareholder lawsuits because they've given up the idea of shareholder primacy for its own sake.
Guest:And so that's massive.
Marc:Of what?
Guest:Shareholder primacy is Milton Friedman's thing that only shareholders matter.
Guest:If you can get past that and start to recognize success as something more broad than simply, you know, if you could say that my success isn't a success if I just dumped a lot of shit in the river that nobody can drink from the river ever again.
Guest:That actually should count in the company.
Guest:It should be a cost, the company.
Guest:That's what the B Corp movement is about.
Guest:And what if you shifted Disney to becoming a B Corp?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Imagine it.
Guest:And imagine the size of the power of that company and how many companies might follow.
Guest:It's not crazy.
Guest:Larry Fink, who runs BlackRock Capital, who's the largest trillions of dollars under management, one of the largest investors in the world, has said, I would look favorably on any management who proposed B Corp status to the shareholders.
Guest:That's interesting.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:So there is a shift and there are people who normally you would think of as Darth Vader's in this who are suddenly coming around and saying like, well, oh, we're going to just burn this planet up if we don't.
Marc:Well, that's right.
Marc:It's taken a long time.
Marc:And now what they have to deal with is like, you know, these brain fucked, you know, you know, just irregular people who have become nihilistic monsters.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:with no moral compass or no understanding of repercussions and they just, you know, something has shifted in a lot of humanity and it seems to be driven by the desire to see the shit burn.
Guest:Yeah, I think that is true.
Guest:I don't think many of them are shareholders.
Marc:No, no, of course not.
Marc:But I'm just saying like, you know, this was this is the repercussions of the philosophy that you're talking about.
Guest:I think we've arrived at the only logical place we could possibly.
Marc:When the grievances become so deep and the quality of life becomes so compromised that it's not about truth.
Marc:It's just about honoring anger.
Marc:And a lot of that anger is going to be directed at whatever they perceive as proactive or woke or diminishing their grievance.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:But let me just say one but.
Guest:Yeah, sure.
Guest:January 6th, the folks who showed up there, if you take out of it, winnow out of it, the evils.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And you ask people what their analysis was.
Guest:Much of it was corporations and elites don't care about us.
Guest:They've taken over.
Guest:They're running things and we fucking hate them.
Marc:Well, that's great.
Guest:Not wrong.
Marc:No, it's not wrong.
Marc:But a lot of them are just sort of like the government.
Marc:Now, granted, the government doesn't function properly.
Marc:Many of them are owned by corporations and elites.
Marc:But that's not that connection isn't made.
Guest:But it is important that their analysis isn't that far off of right.
Marc:That's right.
Guest:If you could somehow take it past the government.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:And, well, they're not just saying government.
Guest:Like, they pick and choose their corporations they're angry at.
Guest:They're angry at Facebook and Meta and whatever else.
Guest:But if you can actually find a way to tap into that rightness and connect it to this rightness over here, then you have something interesting.
Guest:Then you have the classes, actually the class, working together.
Guest:And isn't that why we're so divided?
Guest:That's the thing that scares the powerful more than anything, is that we put it together.
Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So so it's not I'm very close to hopeless, but not completely.
Marc:Well, good.
Marc:And I'm glad you made the movie.
Guest:Thank you.
Marc:And it's important that people put this information out there and that they're passionate about facilitating change or at least putting the ideas out there.
Marc:You know, I I'm hard on myself that I don't do it enough.
Marc:because it is easy to get depleted.
Marc:But this movie is personal, and it's good, and it's enlightening, I think, to a lot of people.
Guest:Well, thank you for saying that.
Guest:I really, really appreciate that.
Guest:Yeah, well, thanks.
Guest:Nice to talk to you.
Guest:Nice to talk to you, too.
Marc:That was a full, rich, deep conversation.
Marc:Personal, political, emotional.
Marc:Good.
Marc:You can find the movie, The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales, at AmericanDreamDoc.com.
Marc:You can also watch it at home on digital, on-demand platforms.
Marc:And, yes, so why don't we all just, you know, process, think, reflect, think,
Marc:My foot's okay.
Marc:It just bows out a little bit.
Marc:And we'll reconvene here in a second.
Marc:So just hang out for a minute, will you?
Marc:Okay, listen.
Marc:Next week on Monday, we have writer and director Tony Gilroy on the show.
Marc:He's the showrunner of the new Star Wars series Andor.
Marc:He did the Bourne movies.
Marc:And he's also the writer and director of one of my favorite movies, Michael Clayton.
Marc:So I needed some answers.
Marc:But I'm, you know, like I'm not going scene for scene.
Marc:Me and Brenda did that.
Marc:You can hear that on the if you're a full Marin subscriber next week, we're going to post a special episode with me and Brendan spending an hour talking about Michael Clayton, almost scene for scene.
Marc:But I just like this.
Marc:Tony Gilroy just blew me away.
Marc:He's engaged.
Marc:He's smart.
Marc:He's got a great personal story.
Marc:And the Michael Clayton process was was amazing for me to talk about.
Marc:God knows I talk about the movie enough.
Marc:So listen to that and listen to me and Brendan talking about Michael Clayton.
Marc:But that'll be next week after I think we talk to Tony Gilroy.
Marc:But right now you can listen to the movie talk we posted this week, which was all about movie stars and documentaries and a bunch of stuff that was on our minds because of this week's episodes with Sigourney Weaver and Abigail Disney.
Marc:Me and Brendan.
Marc:Together.
Marc:On the mics.
Marc:We go way back at this point.
Marc:Are you kidding?
Marc:I've been with Brendan since 2004.
Marc:Dude.
Marc:He grew up with me, this guy.
Marc:I watched him grow up.
Marc:Always was much more grown up than me.
Marc:Even when he was 24, he was like, what's the matter with you?
Marc:What?
Marc:But yeah, so we're talking.
Marc:If you have that full Marin subscription, you can hear it.
Marc:And if you don't have a full Marin subscription, you can click on the link in the episode description or go to WTF pod.com and click on WTF plus.
Marc:A lot of things happening.
Marc:A lot of talkie talk.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So listen, I'm in Toronto tomorrow night and Saturday night at the Queen Elizabeth Theater.
Marc:Next week, I'm in Livermore, California at the Bankhead Theater on October 6th and Carmel by the Sea, California at the Sunset Center on October 7th.
Marc:You might want to come to that if you can.
Marc:So it's not just me and Laura Bites and 12 people, maybe, you know, in a circle.
Yeah.
Marc:It'll be fine.
Marc:It's going to be pretty.
Marc:It'll be nice.
Marc:It'll be fine.
Marc:I'm in London doing that live WTF at the Bloomsbury Theatre on Wednesday, October 19th with comedian and writer David Baddiel.
Marc:Then I've got stand-up shows at the Bloomsbury Saturday and Sunday, October 22nd and 23rd.
Marc:I think those are sold out.
Marc:Dublin, Ireland.
Marc:I'm at Vicar Street on Wednesday, October 26th.
Marc:Then in November and December, I'm in Oklahoma City, Dallas, San Antonio, Houston, Long Beach, California, Eugene, Oregon, Bend, Oregon, Asheville, North Carolina, and Nashville, Tennessee.
Marc:And finally, my HBO special taping is at Town Hall in New York City on Thursday, December 8th.
Marc:Go to WTFPod.com slash tour for all dates and ticket info.
Marc:and now i'm going to show you how impressively limited i am at guitar because this is all i got this is this is pretty much all i got
Thank you.
Thank you.
Marc:Boomer lives.
Marc:Monkey and La Fonda, cat angels everywhere.
Marc:That was messy, but there were some good moments.