Sean Penn

Impolitic with John Heilemann

Audacy | Puck

News, Politics

4.8 • 4.5K Ratings

🗓️ 2 February 2021

⏱️ 61 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

If you looked up the hyphenate "artist-activist" in an illustrated dictionary, next to the entry would likely be a picture of Sean Penn. In a film career spanning forty years, Penn has appeared in more than 50 features, received five Best Actor Oscar nominations and won the award twice — for his leading roles in "Mystic River" and "Milk" — and staked a plausible claim to being the preeminent actor of his generation. He has directed five films, three of which he wrote, as well as publishing two novels. At the same time, Penn has courted political controversy with high-profile trips to Iraq, Iran, and Cuba, and in particular with his friendship with former Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. But alongside his controversial forays on the world stage, much of Penn's time and energy in the past decade has been devoted to humanitarian relief efforts. In 2010, he founded a non-profit now known as CORE (Community Organized Relief Effort) to mobilize emergency workers and distribute aid in Haiti after a devastating earthquake rocked Port-au-Prince that January. CORE did the same in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, in the Bahamas after Hurricane Dorian, and in Florida after Hurricane Michael. When COVID struck, CORE responded by opening 49 testing sites in the US, including the largest in the country at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. That facility has now been converted into a massive Covid vaccination center — without a dollar from the federal government. On this week’s episode of Hell & High Water, Heilemann brings Penn on to discuss the fight against COVID, Penn’s activism and acting career, and the lasting cultural significance of Jeff Spicoli, his character in "Fast Times At Ridgemont High." To learn more about CORE or make a donation to support their work, please visit coreresponse.org. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everyone, John Hyalman here and welcome to Hell in High Water. My podcast from the
0:14.5	recount and I Heart Radio with big ups to the one and only Rizza for our dope theme music.
0:21.4	Joe Biden has been warning us for weeks that America was about to plunge into a quote
0:25.6	very dark winter when it comes to COVID and now while the winter is here and it's not
0:31.2	only extremely dark but frigid and forbidding.
0:34.4	Past few weeks have been the most lethal so far, the coronavirus pandemic, but death
0:38.5	totals routinely exceeding 4,000 a day and the overall tally in the US now nearing 450,000.
0:45.3	But alongside these grim figures we now have another set of numbers whose Rizza costs
0:49.7	for hope instead of dread. The 1.3 million doses of COVID vaccine being administered every
0:55.4	day across the country. The rapid widespread manufacture and distribution of those life-saving
1:00.3	doses is a public health imperative and the paramount challenge facing the new administration
1:05.1	of Joe Biden. But when it comes to actually getting tens at ultimately hundreds of millions
1:09.5	of shots and arms, the task falls not to the federal government but to states and cities,
1:14.4	hospitals and clinics and an array of non-profit groups working together on the ground where
1:19.0	the rubber meets the road. Last week I got to watch one such collaboration in action
1:23.3	out in my hometown of Los Angeles where the city of LA and its chief executive, my pal
1:27.9	Mayor Eric Garcetti, the LA County Department of Health, the LA Fire Department, the USC School
1:33.4	of Pharmacy and the high tech health provider, Carbon Health, have turned the parking lot
1:38.0	at Dodger Stadium into what may be the world's largest COVID vaccination center, a place
1:42.9	that Garcetti calls Vaxi land. Because in this dire pandemic moment, a rubber cone strewn
1:48.4	expanse of black top in Shab-Ezzar-Vine where thousands of Angelinos are driving up and
1:52.8	getting jabs in their arms each day without even getting out of their cars has replaced
	...

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