Has anybody, has anybody watched Three Body Problem? But me? I have
really Rob Oh, Rob show, you're out of order, I know,
and I show you out order. You don't know what out all it is,
mister trash. I'd show you, but I'm too old, I'm too
tired, I'm too blind. If I were the man I was five years
ago, I take a fame through to this place. Here we are at
the end of March, and this is Gloff Culture. I am John Podhortz,
New York. Elsewhere in New York, Rob Long, Hi, Rob,
Hi, John, And in his basement redoubt in Washington, Jonah Goldberg,
Hi, Jonah, Hello John. It is a basement with doubt right
like there, you are sort of like below ground level with the window.
I am, although it's weird. So we're on a hill. I guess
you've never been in my house. So we're on a hill. So in
the front door of everyone is one floor up, but the backyard I'm at
ground level with the backyard. So it's Yes, it's like a ground apartment.
What do you call those garden apartment? Garden apartment. Yeah, now's
a nice. It's a nice you know, people who don't know Washington.
I have one interesting Washington is not a particularly eccentric city, but there is
one eccentricity that I was always amused by based on where I lived. I
lived in a lot of places when I lived in Washington over like fourteen years,
and it is that there are a bunch of buildings that are essentially built
into the side of Rock Creek Park. Yeah. And so I lived in
a building on which I lived on the sixth floor, and when I got
into the lobby, I had to go down on the elevator to get to
the sixth floor. At an office where I was on the third floor,
again had to go down in the lobby. And so that is aside from
the fact that apartment buildings in Washington are often very wide but not very tall
because of the building height restriction that said that you couldn't have a building taller
than the top of the Capitol Dome. They built them out instead of up,
which is what we would normally associate with large apartment buildings. And so
they all had shining halls, like the halls in the Shining with the girls,
you know, Danny going down on the yeah exactly. Yeah. Yeah,
So Jonah, you're being in a house of of interesting levels in the
side of a you know, in the side of a hill. That is
much of mid century Washington apartment building construction life. Yeah, Souse is actually
kind of interesting in that we put a lot of money into it because we
practiced the real estate advice buy the worst house on the best block you can't
And it was built by an admiral in the Navy during World War Two.
And when we did the first round of renovation, we would come visit it
and see how the construction was going or reconstruction, and we would find these
booze bottles, these empty booze bottles, like lots and lots of booze bottles,
and are like, Jesus, are these construction workers just getting lit every
day? And I would look at one of the bottles and it would it
said it was like some rum company, and it said their headquarters were at
two hundred Madison Avenue. And I know where two hundred metis. That's where
Putnam used to be. I don't know if it's still there, but that's
a nice building. And I was like, there's no frigging way this cheap
rum is it out of there? And until we realized the guy who built
it was this crazy alcoholic and he had been hiding bottles and every floorboards and
nooks and crannies every day to hide him from his wife apparently, and the
construction workers would just find them everywhere. And I wish we had saved them
because people call them like that stuff, yeah, like ninety year old bottles.
And we didn't. We just didn't put it together. But like the
label, the label art is always amazing. Yeah, And there were hundreds
of them. I mean at least a hundred of them. I mean,
it was great. What I loved about those build apartment buildings in d C
is that they used to have They still have the old fashioned amenities. You
know, the the the zinc line drawer where you would get your ice delivered
every day. They would connect to that potato, yes, potato cooler for
vegetables below the window that was open to the air right closed with a hard
metal door there. And then so the external the outside the hallway closet so
that your your dry cleaning could be returned to you, but not no one
would enter your home. They would just put it in a closet that had
two doors, one opening the hall one opening to the to the pantry or
whatever, and I love that stuff. Yeah, and before there was air
conditioning, I knew this. I know this particularly in Baltimore in the eighties
when I dated a couple of women who lived in Baltimore in like, you
know, Midcenter Baltimore Twins and they they Baltimore, they had they had draft
doors. Do you guys remember before there was air conditioning, you would have
two doors and one door was your front door that you could lock, and
then you could open your door and have a door that was steel sometimes yeah,
but that was you know, open, had slats so that air could
come in from the window and you could get a draft in your apartment and
keep cool when it was incredibly hot. So also the built in the built
in uh what ironing board that was? That was another big feature in the
kitchen. You would have a sort of like flat handle, you'd open the
handle and an ironing board. Yeah, come down, shing. How even
to my old apartment I grew up in, right of course. Yeah,
so that apartment, which is a great apartment, couldn't afford it on market
prices, but rent stabilization was our friend. And uh, it was built
back in the days where you didn't mind having a tiny kitchen because that's where
the staff you were never there, right, And in the dining room we
had a button on the floor, yeah, for ringing the Yeah, your
kitchen was small. Your kitchen was small, but you had a pantry.
There was a butler's pantry, Yes, that always connected the kitchen to the
dining room. So the bedrooms off of the pantry in my yeah, we
have that too. So we grew up in a building. I grew up
in a building very much of the same era as as yours. Interestingly,
on the site of the Strouss mansion. Strauss owned Macy's. And the Strouses
died on the Titanic. Yeah. Uh, they're actually depicted in the movie
Titanic. They're the couple he refuses, she refuses to go on the lifeboat,
and you see them lie down on their bed together in their stateroom,
and that's the last you see of them. So the Hornges are going to
get our apartment. So the Stressing Stresses had a mansion at one hundred and
fifth and Broadway, and they died on the Titanic, and their mansion was
purchased, and this very grand apartment building that, like the one you grew
up in, by the time my parents moved in, was rent controlled and
had seen better days, but had all of these features, had the button
on the floor you could summon maids from any room. Two major rooms and
two interesting features of my building. One there had been a rooftop restaurant,
and by the time I end but that that sadly did not. But there
was a was a very big physical plant, and so there was a rooftop
restaurant that had closed, you know, god knows when, and you know
this I'm talking about now in the sixties, early seventies, but it must
have closed in the thirties. But there were still poles up that hadn't been
taken down, that had probably had overhanging cupolas or you know, like vinylis
and to keep you you know, exposed, you know, not susceptible to
the elements. And it was advertised as the world's first fireproof department building,
which meant that there was an internal staircase off the back hall that was the
fire staircase that was lined with asbestos in the walls. Safe asbestos, yes,
what can we just say for a minute, asbestos actually is perfectly fine
as long as long as you don't leave it, as long as you leave
it alone. Yeah, they announced that. You know, when they announced
that you had to mitigate asbestos. If you were in a building with asbestos,
that meant that you were disturbing the asbestos in the walls. You were
spreading it out. And people were going to inhale inhale the fire years ago
left it in the wall, it would be fine. Years ago, I
was looking at a house in Venice, Venice, California. Yeah, and
it was really cheap. It was a beautiful, old, beautiful building,
a beauti house, old, great old neighborhood, super cheap. And I
was like, a real why is so cheap? As well? It's covered
in its best as tile. Now wait a minute, when I basically turned
with no, wait a minute. Yeah, uh, here's what you do.
You can do two things. You buy the house and then you gotta
hire hire. The guys come in spacesuits, They tent the whole thing.
It cost one hundred and fifty thousand dollars and it takes six months and then
your neighbors all know and then you get suited anyway, or you just come
into the house and every time you leave the house, you just pull a
tile off the wall, off the side of the house, and at nighttime
you pull like you know, just do five a day, ten to day.
Nobody notices before you know what the house needs to get, you know,
Resha, nobody knows. Just throw it out. Just throw it out,
Just throw it out in the garbage. And I said, that's outrageous.
I'm going to get caught. That's the first of all. It's illegal
because I'm not telling you to do it. I'm telling you to embrace the
possibility. I'm telling you to embrace the possibility of embracing the possibility of doing
this. And I didn't do it. And in retrospect, it would have
been this, that would have been the smart move. And now that house
is owned by Nicole vice presidential candidate Nicole Shanahan. But I'm bummed out by
this because I loved the image of you smoking a cigar, coming up with
scripts for cheers or whatever, walking on the beach like Andy Dufraine in the
Shoshang prison yard, scattering the tile like like Stalog seventeen or whatever. Yeah,
yeah, yeah, the Great escape. Yeah, that's the Great escape
of dirt. From the tunnel. But it is true that when it's inert
it's fine. It's sort of like, you know, I was a friend
of mine. It tells this great story. He grew up in a Long
Island. He's a New York native, and his dad and his family company
and they make Geiger counters and they make a radiation stuff and he's just a
super brain and they make all sorts of stuff now. And he remembers as
a teenager, in the middle of the night, state police come in to
his house, knock on his door and saying to his father, we need
you. And it was three mile Island and I said, oh wow,
so you guys, goes yeah, and I in three miles, I was
Basically, we happened. A lot of it happened in our living. He
didn't live up there, he lived in like that's what they talked about all
day. And he said, and just just for the record, there was
no disaster there. There was no leakage, there was no disaster, nothing
happened. It was all fine. And because of this systeria, crazy overreaction
and I'm Jon, yes, yeah, we don't. We we our left
America. We gave we be giving the Saudi's a trillion dollars, some of
which they used to support the crackpot al Taia. Yeah, so Jane Fonda,
in many ways is responsible for nine to eleven. I knew it.
I know it. For years. I used to say, uh that,
uh, Ted Kennedy's car killed more people than the nuclear power, but then
the Fukushima thing happened. Yeah. My favorite Ted Kennedy one was. It
was the Boston Globe writing in an assessment of his time in the Senate,
this is before he died, saying that you know, had she lived,
Mary Joe Capekti would be sixty five now, and she would be the beneficiary
of many of the programs that Ted kenn centeror Ted Kennedy spearheaded. That was
if you Will. That was if you Will, written by Charles Pearce.
Oh, I remember it very well. It was the winner of the first
annual Favor in Media Worst Sentence in American History. It was a great It
may well have been that Jonah's own mother, Lucy Ann, was the master
of ceremonies at the banquet at which Charles Pearce won the War Sentence in History
award. It is a great sentence, great it was an astonishing sentence.
Yes, yes, she would have been comforted in her old age by the
social net that Teddy Kennedy constructed for her, had he not killed her and
frowned her. So swim them away. There's a lot of pushback on it
from him, right. He always thought he was being unfair because he did
have his to be sure sentence in there. Yes, she did die,
but he did write it, and it was the kicker. It was supposed
to be the line that you took away from the piece, which you will
say, had she lived, Sharon Tate might have been able to play Squeaky
from in the TV movie they made about the Manson family in the late seventies.
Yes, had she lived, she could have recorded Charles Manson's song that
he had sent to Terry Melcher that Terry Melcher had rejected from the Beach Boys,
thus making Charles Manson a successful songwriter and Sharon Tate the original Taylor Swift.
We can do this all day. Yeah, yeah, I was gonna
say, I'm sure someone has done something similar with Jews in the Autobahn,
but let's not go there. Yeah. Oh my god, oh my god.
Okay, so we want to favor our producer Scott Immergut with paying him
heed for things he thinks that we should talk about in the realm of popular
culture. I think there is one that we can talk about that its current,
which would be nice. So we're not talking about Wow, real estate
in nineteen sixty or is anybody in nineteen seventy two? Is anybody ready for
that? I don't think so. Okay, So last week Netflix premiered three
Body Problem, the first television program produced by David Benioff and David Weiss,
who had made well Game of Thrones John, Yes, brace yourself. Yes,
I watched it. No, I watched a lot of it. You're
not going to snore. You're not going to snore? Well, I have
some thoughts about that. I have some thoughts about no spoilers passed, like
the first couple of episodes, okay case that, Yeah, okay, I
the only way I could I could. I won't spoil it, but I'll
make a generic complaint that I think is true. And I also say this
is that the crawl on that show, the above the line names, I
mean, you say it was produced by what's his name and what's his name?
From Game of Thrones, but I mean the credits include Brad Pitt and
people like that, like it's a big, big production. I don't know.
I would love to see there above the line budget, meaning that everybody
in the whatever he's getting paid above the production line, because it must be
astronomical the amount of money that that is going out just for names on the
crawl who probably showed up to one meeting. I mean, right, I
get my guess, and I loved the idea of it. I think they
throw away the coolest thing about it too soon. I think they fall in
line this. Eventually all these things become a Star Trek episode. The big
turn in the movie, the in the show. I just found myself just
almost getting up and turning it off. Was essentially it felt like Captain Kirk,
the Captain Kirk episode. It looks fantastic, I mean just gorgeous.
It's a gorgeous production. I mean it's one of those things where you watch
it and you think, okay, I'll bet you'll A lot of money was
on this. It has a kind of it feels like guys who spent a
whole lot of money on Game of Thrones thinking well, what if we spent
real money. Uh, and and they it's it's really really visually stunning.
I just I just ultimately find it. It is the interesting things about if
they throw away too quickly, it ends up being too quickly. About the
international groups grew working group with the physicists together in a remote manner, coming
up with ideas like that is like I'm out. I'm out. This is
so boring. So but the rest of it is okay. So there I
saw so well, hold right, I have to say, And it had
not occurred to me because I didn't realize Brad Pitt was part of this.
So maybe this is his revenge for getting screwed by the Chinese after seven years
in Tibet. But the depiction of the Chinese Communist Party, particularly the Maoist
Chinese comedy in nineteen sixties, as being as crappy and evil as it was,
is really welcome and kind of courageous. Agreed. Agreed, yet now
so that fantastic. So so what you're saying. The show opens in Red
Square with a humiliation session during the Cultural Revolution in like nineteen sixty six of
a physics professor who is accused of believing in physics and an evolution and in
various other matters of science, and holding out the possibility that God could exist.
Right, and then he is beaten to death by the Red cadre while
his daughter looks on in the From what I can tell, is either the
first, the only, or or if it is not the first, the
only, the most compelling portrayal of the cultural revolution that has ever been shown,
certainly in this country and probably in China, and therefore maybe anywhere.
It is a It reaches the level of the scene of the massacre in Chindler's
List in the Ghetto. I mean, it is that powerful, It is
that precise and almost documentary, I have to say fiction. It has a
fantastic, fantastic called a coda to that scene that's super powerful. That that
was really, really, really great. So the thing is this is not
three Body Problem is based on a novel by a Chinese science fiction writer named
Hinjinlu. And one of the reasons that all of those all of those names
are above the title is that the book, I think, was published in
the United States in two thousand and eight or two thousand and nine. Translated
into English, it became a sensation. Barack Obama said that he had read
it, and he thought it was the most imaginative work of science fiction he'd
ever read, and so Hollywood snatched it up before realizing since whoever bought it,
I'm sure didn't read it, realizing that it is unfilmable, and therefore
I'm sure it passed from hand to hand and company to company, and options
expired and people still held this part of the rights or something else, and
everybody gets money. By the way, it is three novels in sequence.
This show is takes aspects portrays the first, and takes some aspects of the
second and into integrates them into the first. And the novels, which are
incredibly brilliant, are very difficult to follow. So and they're very hard science
Like this is hard science fiction. And when I say hard, I mean
hard. I mean we're talking about dimensional folding and how spaceships would fly and
what would happen with this and that, and it's it's very hard to follow.
And the adaptation, this is what I have to say about it.
You think it's boring and all of that. As a work of adaptation,
it is as remarkably concise, precise, and accurate as anything I have ever
original sources that could be that could be just better. You either like it
or you don't like it. But I see, like you know cch Pounders
now the UN Secretary General and the Secretary and the UN comes in. All
of this stuff just reminds me of it just becomes all these all of these
productions become the same one where it ends up being essentially Independence Day, which
is fine. But Independence Day took two hours of my life and it was
fun. I had a big thing at the end. But the ludicrous part
of Independence Day, which is you recall, was that that I think Will
Smith was going to upload a virus into the computer of the invaders is not
any more ludicrous than what's going on in this show. I so okay,
I totally disagree in this sense. The whole brilliance of the plot of Three
Body Problem, which again is very hard to follow, is the idea that
an alien intelligence many light years away has determined that its own atmosphere they're going
to die. They have an unstable atmosphere, and Earth is the place they
should go. And what they realize they need to do is it's going to
take them hundreds of years to get to Earth, and they need to make
sure that Earth doesn't progress technologically so that by the time they get there,
Earth has the means and the resources to stop them from taking over Earth.
And they figure out because they are more technologically advanced than Earth, but Earth's
technological advancement proceeds so rapidly that they need to do something to slow innovation on
Earth down. That's new. That is, But that's kind of my point
is that that's really interesting, and it's over in the second episode, and
then it just becomes the un is convened the thing and they're going to do
a thing to stop the thing. It's just that that the most interesting thing
about it. It's becomes a detective story they solve. Okay, I can't.
I can't answer your complaint without spoiling it. And I can't answers your
complaint is incorrect how it works and co host can finish it. Yes,
I think exactly. Okay, So all I want to say is it's an
amazing job of adaptation of an unbelievably difficult source material. You know what I
hate about it? Yeah? Cut, Yes, I also hate this part
about it. It's this cliche thing where there's a character saying, you know,
the people have failed, the earth has failed. We can't do we
we we were declining. We can't possibly uh our our our society. And
I'm not gonna sput away. So once you have that, like and and
and that, that is demonstrably not true by any measure of the human experience
on the globe. It isn't even true internally. It has no internal logic
in the show, which totally wait, let me finish, let me finish,
as its premise is that human science is so rapid and our adventsment is
so quick that will overtake aliens. And then and I just I just to
me, I'm just I'm just so bored of that has taken out his headphones
so that he doesn't hear the spoilers. I was not spoiling. Okay,
anyway, we can talk about this offline anyway, back on Jonah, what
do you think of it thus far? Thus far? I like it.
I am not up to where some of the stuff Rob has said, but
I could see some of that coming. But that doesn't necessarily bother me.
But how they do it, I uh, I figured out the stuff with
the game. I get that. I know where that's going, But what
I've been dreading and don't tell me that it doesn't sound like it's. Think.
One of my biggest peeves in so many of these movies is the sort
of weak tea, you know, popularization of Marxist colonial theory that explains why
aliens would conquer Earth right here for our water, you know, that kind
of stuff. And I'm dreading that because like the idea there, Yeah,
okay, that's that's the idea that aliens, like an independ say, they
raise this. There's that that movie, that one about La being invaded.
Yeah, there are a bunch of the movies, and they always talk about
like they're here for our natural resources. It's like, if you can do
faster and light travel, there are a lot of planets out there you can
mine without the bother of killing all these you know, yes it was Abes.
Yeah. Well, first of all, they can't do faster than light
travel, which is one problem for them. And the other problem is that
they have an uninhabitable They live on it on a planet that they have figured
out how to adapt to, but that is fundamentally uninhabitable. And the uninhabitability
and yeah, because there are there are three sons and it turns out that
if you that this is a classic problem in physics, that you cannot plot
a consistent pattern if three objects are moving independently of each other, you canlop.
Thank you, Thank you very much. Anyway, I think it's great.
I've been so disappointed by television over the last I think we even talked
at this the last time, like nothing has excited me. I very much
admired these books, particularly the first one when I read them like four or
five years ago, and they by the way, they have this planet where
they have this problem. It was so uncanny because when we started with COVID,
because the conceit in the book is that the people who live on this
planet, when it becomes uninhabitable, have the capacity to dehydrate themselves and turn
themselves into sort of human husks and go into kind of a hibernation state until
things repair themselves cool. And it was like what we were being asked to
do when COVID happened, that the lockdowns, that this was the perfect literary
analogy to the lockdown culture. It'll be fine, you just go inside.
You don't see anybody, you don't see your parents, your kids don't go
to school, you're not a ll Let's go to a playground, can't walk
on a beach, and then we'll let you know when you can breathe oxygen
outside of your house. I would have just assumed, knowing you and your
prior is that you would have said the perfect literary problem for this literary solution
to this was that the Anthiens needed to invent Fred McMurray because he knew how
to handle his three sons just fine, exactly right. He was pretty good.
Now we are going back, I thought we were. Let me let
me say this, say this television, Let me say this. Are you
gonna talk about Fred McMurray and the plumber? Because I can't. I can't
go raise of three body problem. I will say this, It's not as
stupid as a lot of crap like it. You know, Rob, you
have praised very any That is the highest praise I think you will ever given
anything in years in the science fic fantasy realm, in the science fiction fantasy,
not just there practically ever, did you not like Battlestar Galactica the remix?
You know? Like you know, I was told I never watched it.
I was told to watch it, and I should have. I'm sure.
I'm sure. I First, when people talk about when people acknowledge and
hear me and are and witness to me the things that I don't like about
science fiction, they almost always say, I hear you, you should watch
Battlestark, like I just haven't brought myself to do. Okay, I was
thinking about why I like to watch streaming science fiction when I'm actually not that
big a science fiction fan, and I was thinking about it in these terms,
which is, like these shows, they they're very elaborate, right,
They spend tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars on them,
and you watch them and somehow the stakes are misallocated, and you're watching
something that you know was unbelievably difficult to produce and took all this time and
immense amounts of money, and it's just not popping because somehow it do.
You don't get invested in what's going to happen to any of these people?
Right that? And so science fiction, because every most things in science fiction
end up being of the in the way they're structured, being of the very
highest stakes possible. Right, the Earth is going to blow up, the
universe is going to blow up, You're going to you know, ten billion.
How many people die in Dune sixty billion people die after Paula Tredes takes
over the universe and Dune Messiah whatever. So the stakes are automatically very high,
and therefore it's kind of easier to say, well, this is kind
of compelling, like they're playing for all the marbles, as opposed to some
show where someone's grief stricken because they they kid died drowning and now they're trying
to rebuild their lives. And ordinarily I would love that in a movie or
in a drama or something like that, but I'm not going to spend twelve
hours watching something like that because it just doesn't seem to deserve the time invested.
Does that, Jonah? Does that make sense to you? Yeah?
I just I if these things can hold my attention past the second episode,
I'm grateful because I'll just walk away from them otherwise at this point. And
so like this clears that bar for me, it clears another bar that it's
maintained my wife's interest, which is, you know, difficult for a lot
of sci fi stuff. So I am not, I'm not. I'm again,
I'm I am on the fifty yard line between Rob and Pod here and
that I I like it. I have not fallen in love with it the
way you have, but I don't hate it the way Rob does. Well,
you've got to get to you got to get to the fifth You got
to get to the fifth you got to get to the fifth episode, really,
because that's where that's what it's building to, this five hours into your
life. If you don't like it, don't watch it. But if you're
liking it, I'm telling you it actually gets better as it goes on.
That's that's all that would be. That was you know, I think that's
probably my fundamental problems to be Okay, well that's a problem. And uh
and I I I fully acknowledge that that's a problem. That's the thing about
I just watched the show on Apple TV called Constellation, and it did it
to me again. It's another one of these things where it's an astronauts.
She's in space, she comes back and everything is a little different, and
and meanwhile she saw things in space that didn't happen. And it's a puzzle
box and it's eight hours and guess what, they don't resolve it. You
know what it's like. It's still well every everything that was posed in the
first episode is still posed in the eighth episode with no explanation. And that's
one thing about this that I have to say. It doesn't do that good.
You hang what Reacher? I like Reacher. Yeah, I liked the
first season of Reacher. I did not like the second season of Reacher because
I don't want Reacher with a gang. I want Richer to come into a
town to kill everybody and then leave. That's what the novels are like.
Yeah, and suddenly he has a gang and he has friends and they're they're
they're like trying to joke around with he's having sex with a former colleague.
Like, I don't need that. He's the lone ranger. He's the lone
ranger. He's not supposed to have a crew. Everybody. Everybody's a title
to relax, John, Okay, you know what you shouldn't relax about,
though, Rob, You should not relax about life insurance. That's true because
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Pacino appeared on the The Oscars and just sort of announced that Oppenheimer had won
Oppenheimer. He said, my eyes, my eyes see Oppenheimer. I believe
is what he said, My eyes the Oppenheimer. He was supposed to apparently
have done that as a two as a two hander with Michelle Pfeiffer, but
she had to cancel because of a family emergency, so they sent him out
alone. They said, don't name all ten pictures because we've named them through
the show, just you know, say who won. And then he was
having trouble reading the teleprompter and they just opened the envelopment and said, my
eyes see Oppenheimer. And I have to go to the envelope for that and
I will, so I said fun on Twitter, I said, and Joe
fun fact. Al Pacino, at the age of eighteen, was the office
boy at Commentary magazine, and this is entirely true. In nineteen sixty one,
I think for eighteen months he started working at Commentary as the office boy,
a job that no longer exists in but that every office had and he
was the gopher, you know, the the have an office boy at seatpack.
Oh now, I have a non disparage clause here for four hundred and
eighty thousand dollars. Jonah. Anyway, I'll give you ten minutes off my
crutch. I want to throw a flame throwing in his place. Anyway,
you're out of order. So he was sounded like that. He was so
Michael Corleon. Yeah, so he was eighteen and he you know, he
got the mail from the mail room and he handed it out and he would
go get sandwiches for lunch. Yeah at a male room. Yeah yeah,
yeah, yeah. Anyway, and so when okay, so when I was
thinking things like a we're all part of the same hypocrisy, Norman, Yeah,
you're out of order. Ye're that you win is out of order.
The Congress is out of order. Everybody's out of oid. Okay, what
is this fire? Next time? Crap? He So, I will tell
you two stories that I know from when he suddenly became famous. So he
had become a working actor in the mid sixties in New York. He won
a tony but he know hadn't made it big. He was in start in
one movie called Panic and Needle Park. But so the Godfather comes along in
nineteen seventy two, nineteen seventy three, and of course turns al Pacino into
al Pacino. And around that time I went to work, like as a
summer job, as like as the office boy when I was fourteen, And
there were people then who did things like when subscription cards came in, they
had to be put in a you know, there was a hard database,
like you put them in a file folder and you stamped them, and you
had to type them into something and send it off to the fulfillment house which
sent out the magazines. And you had to answer the phone and do customer
service and all this. And there were three or four relatively elderly women who
worked in the back and did all that, and they had been there when
al Pacino was the office boy. And one of them Freda, who said
he was I He was very, very, very a lovely boy. But
his mother, his mother gave him all kinds of trouble. He gave them
all kinds of trouble. And we would tell him, al you got to
move out, you gotta move out of your ow an apartment because your mother
is nothing but trouble trouble l So that was one. It was one one
story. It doesn't sound like somebody named Freda. Freda Agalof was her name.
Okay, so there you go. And the other story was that when
he was interviewed, I think by the New York Times in a preview profile
of him before the Godfather came out, and he was you know, he
said, well, I had a lot of jobs. I you know,
waved a lot of tables and uh and I I worked at commentary, and
I played chess with Norman pop Horns. And I can testify to the truth
of this. My father said, I never played chess with him. I
never played chess with anybody. I don't play chess, and this is absolutely
true. He never He was not. I think he just got confused to
think de Niro played chess with Irving Crystal and he was the exactly it was
all it was all. It was all mixed up, that's right. So
anyway, that is the al Pacino as office boy, I would have it.
I was the office boy a commentary. I got fired as I banged
a chick named Frida in the office. They fired me. There's of course
the great Woody Allen line, right, which is that he went to n
y U and he was thrown out because he cheated on his metaphysics final.
He looked within the soul of the boys sitting next to him. Okay,
so I don't take anyway. He was remembered fondly, I think, although
maybe no one would ever remembered him at all if he didn't get famous.
That's the one thing you just never know. Okay, So the commentary remembered
fondly, he wasn't fond old. It's a different thing. Different now.
Now we're right now and the American Conservative Union, and I want to point
out, I want to point out that it was all a misunderstanding that the
head of sea pack might have been handled someone, and on the other end
was also a misunderstanding that he didn't. They both agreed that there was a
misunderstanding in both directions. And then one person paid another person, or the
insurance company paid another person four hundred and eighty thousand dollars. And it wasn't
Matt Slap who got paid the four hundred and eighty thousand dollars. It's Shortinger's
pants, it's you know, it's it's all perspective. So I think what
the misunderstanding was is that he asked the kid to watch Jerry Falwell's wife with
the Cabana boy with Jerry Fowell Junior. Now we're getting into the Roberts.
That was Roberts. It's a singularity, the singularity, rob Do you have
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So Christopher Nolan wins the oscar for Oppenheimer. Both I say, oh,
your eyes say your pants say up. Okay, that's how my pants
are saying. Producer wins. Producer wins for a director capping a twenty year
career a more than twenty year career. But that really began with the release
of his movie Memento, which made his reputation. The strange thriller about the
man with extraordinary short term memory loss who has to write things on his hands
and his body to remember what was going on, and then is used as
some kind of a I don't know what you would call it, as himself
he's the mcguffin in a murder plot or something like that. Everybody was kind
of blown away by that. Then he made a remake of with al Pacino,
the great Swedish movie Insomnia, set in Alaska, a serial killer and
al Pacino is a cop who is can't get to sleep during the white Nights
in Alaska, which we've all experienced on various magazine cruises that I guess none
of us is ever going to go on anymore. Then he made a movie
called The Prestige, and then he hit it big right. He made The
Dark Knight, he made The Dark Knight, he made Batman Begins, he
made The Dark Knight, he made The Dark Knight Returns. He became one
of the superstar directors. Then he made Inception, Then he made Interstellar,
Then he made Dunkirk, then he made Oppenheimer. Scott Immerget is asking us
what we think of his career as a director and as a creator. He
is now a brand. He is one of now the three or four directors
that people whose names people know, who can make a movie that reliably will
make hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office, and who has a
distinctive style and a distinctive interest in rambling time and re and and trying to
tell stories in a different way. Uh, Jonah, what is your favorite
Christopher Nolan movie? Well, I mean I gotta say, I mean this
is a little difficult. I think it is indisputable. He made the single
greatest, uh, the single greatest superhero movie. Yeah, comic book movie
with the with the with the Dark Knight, the second one, you know,
and that's got to count for something. So that's the one with Heath
Ledger as the Joker, Right that Heath Ledger got a posthumous oscar for Which
is the moral which is the moral drama of the superhero? Right, that's
the point of that movie is there's he is supposed to be order, there's
chaos. Chaos is represented by the Joker, and he is he Batman faces
a series of moral riddles and difficulties that are posed to him for no reason
other than the distinction between order and chaos. Yeah, and there are and
the I mean, there are a lot of people who, I think,
for legitimate reasons, thought that you know, the War on Terror deeply informed
those movies about you know, some there's some lines that were that worked their
way into those debates. You know, some people just want to see the
world burn, you know, live die a hero, or live long enough
to see yourself become the villain. You know, these were like acknowledgments of
the moral costs of doing the right thing outside the lines. And I just
think it's they're great. I really am a big Phantom Memento. I didn't
like Prestige, I thought. The thing I like about Nolan I really liked
Interstellar. I'm one of the few people I know that really really liked Interstellar.
The thing I like about Nolan is that he is He's a little bit
like the Coen Brothers in so far as he makes the movies he wants to
make, and so even when I don't necessarily love it, I like to
see the coherent vision play out, and I give him respect for like not
just thinking what we'll work at the box office. This is the movie I
want to make and expects the audience to respect him for it, and I
do. I like that. You know, I did not like Insomnia very
much, but that's mostly because I didn't like al Pacino in it. Stellin'
stars Guard is in the Swedish version of Insomnia the original. It's the movie
that made Stellen stars Guard's reputation as an actor internationally, and that is a
fantastic movie. So I strongly recommend. I think Insomnia the remake is okay.
Yeah, Pascino is not good in it, really, but that's one
recommendation. That's interesting, Like you can go find it. I'm sure it's
somewhere available on streaming, and it's sensationally as a serial killer movie. It's
incredibly good. So, uh, do you have an opinion on Christopher Nolan
Rob? Yeah, I do. Actually I like the mento a lot,
and I even like the one What's the one that bread that where Leond DiCaprio
was walking was like in your reception, Exception Exception, I look beautiful.
It was really kind of thoughtful and interesting and stylish, and I have no
idea what happened in it, but I I enjoyed it. I thought it
was different, and I like that. I like the I like, like
Jonah said, I think the singular kind of voice you get from somebody like
that. I think it's almost it's worth it. Even when they make a
stinko movie that you don't like, it's worth it because it's like, at
least they're swinging for the fence, you know, so you're doing a movie
should do, Like that's what a movie should That's a fact. I think
it is a very good example. What what's a movie now when everything's streaming?
Like that's a very good exam. It's a very strict contract you're making
with the audience. You come in, you you pay your you buy your
ticket, you buy, you know, twenty dollars worth of die coke at
Jujubi's, and you're gonna leave this theater tonight, you know, the next
couple hours or so, and we're gonna have given you a full story and
it's gonna be interesting, it's gonna be transporting, and then you're done.
And I think that that is, in fact, the way the movie business
can reclaim itself, I think if it wants to so. Howard Hawks,
the great producer director who made westerns and comedies and musicals and everything over a
forty year career, you know, the guy who made His Girl Friday and
Rio Bravo and To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep and everything good
that was ever made, once said, all a movie really needs is three
good scenes, because all anyone's gonna remember three good scenes. It's interesting because
he made better movies than that that weren't just three good scenes, but that
was something that he had in his head that if he knew that he had
delivered like three good scenes. One thing you can say about Nolan is like
or dislike his movies. In every one of them, there are three scenes
where he does something that you've never really seen before. I agree with that,
and like an inception. It was the fight where the walls start curving
and they're fighting insane by ways, and right in the Dark Knight returns,
which I kind of like more than The Dark Knight, which I know is
a probably like a heretical opinion and I'm not really right creatively, but the
fact that he goes there with this idea that Gotham City is actually taken over
by Robespierre and the Jacobins, and what would happen if a city in a
contemporary time were taken over by a radical mob, and what would happen to
ordinary Americans living under that kind of tyranny. That was kind of a dazzling
turn, like you didn't know what was coming and you had no idea.
Yeah, yeah, and it's going there. The football stadium thing was that's
a scene you remember, Yeah, there's a scene even if Batman begins,
which I think is not very good. Yeah, there's Christian Bale figuring out
how to climb out of this prison in the middle of I don't know where
Afghanistan or something where he's two hundred feet in the under the ground and there's
no ladder, and how you know this is the great task that is actually
going to turn him into the great crime fighter that he is. Again unbelievably
meant with all that and everything said, Oppenheimer is probably the best American movie
of the last decade and maybe of the last twenty years. And therefore he
made Oppenheimer. And whatever you can say about everything else, and whether you
like it or not, Oppenheimer, which I have problems with ideologically and problems
with formulaically, there just hasn't been an American movie to compare with it,
you know, since I don't even know when. So you know, that's
that's a statement about a statement that cannot be proved. It shows to certainty.
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thank them for sponsoring the glob podcast. So Sam bankmanfreed was set to twenty
five years in prison for his fraudulent handling of the money that was invested with
him in cryptocurrency a not tangible asset. Yeah exactly, yes, speaking of
an on tangible asset crypto, I wanted to share with you guys if I
can find it the quote. So in the last month or so, members
of his family and friends and all this have been writing to the judge seeking
a more lenient sentence because the prosecutors had asked for one hundred and ten years.
His lawyers were arguing for six years. Eventually the judge gave him twenty
five years. And these letters are very interesting because various people in his ambit.
I mean, it's a hard thing to argue that he since everybody around
him said he did it. And then he testified in his own defense,
and when was being cross examined and kept saying he didn't remember things that had
happened three years earlier, you know what I mean, like or four years
earlier, or two six months earlier, that kind right, Okay, So
they said you got to leave him alone. He has two things. He
has autism. One of my favorites is he has Anne Hodonia, which is
of course the Pleasure, which was the original title of Annie Hall. But
I digress. So his mother, his parents famously are professors of law at
Stanford, and his mother, Barbara Freed, wrote a letter to the judge
asking for leniency, and this is how the Wall Street Journal puts it.
In her letter to Kaplin, she said her son had sought to do good
in the world from a young age. When he was four years old,
she said he tried to help a fall in toddler, He was precocious as
well. In high school he counseled classmates were depressed, despite that battling depression
himself. But this is not just a personal tragedy, she wrote to the
judge. The ease with which we consign young lives with so much promise to
the trash heap is a societal tragedy as well. So, according to Barbara,
do we want to understand why Sam bankuinfreed has no moral sense? His
mother just said that sending somebody convicted of a crime who did very wrong and
had lost eight billion dollars and misused, mishandled and screwed around with eight billion
dollars of his investors' money, we're just consigning that person to the trash heap.
And it's a tragedy. It's unfair that person raised somebody who either knew
right from wrong and decided to do wrong, or didn't know right from wrong
and didn't know that what he was doing was wrong, because nothing has any
moral consequences except whether or not society gives you things. Am I over Do
you think I'm overreading this? Or is she just a desperate mother who you
know, was just trying to come up with any argument to save her son
from purgatory. I don't I don't know, but I'm fascinated by this family,
you know, because because they raise this kid and he, you know,
goes off. He goes off to work on Wall Street, even though
they're like leftists. He's making money to be an effective altruist. And then
the whole idea is he's going to spend all his money helping the world.
And then he moves the he moves to the Bahamas. He has a polycule
with his friends. He he targets celebrities. It's a polycule. You never
had a polycule. No one ever gave John It's a polycule, all right,
So am I overreact? That's where you have sex with lots of different
people. It's like an orgy household. Yeah, I got you, Okay,
Yeah, I just haven't heard the word polycool. I've been invited to
the wrong parties. Yes, definitely. Anyway, am I reacting because she
just had to say something? Or am I onto something? I think it's
probably both right. It seems to me like she is going to write whatever
if if her lawyers had said or his lawyers had said, write a letter
explaining on how you know, he he always loved unicorns. She would write
about unicorns. Right, So they're they're trying to make you know, they're
trying to polish a turd here, you know, And and so there's only
so much, you know, there's only so much the written written word can
do, you know, to make a plausible case that this you know,
pasty faced, arrogant piece of crap can be you know, can you can
find sympathy for him? And at the same time, like it does feel
like the kind of thing that people in these weird bubbles who have this sort
of Russoonian view that civilization itself is the real crime. And you know,
he was just being his authentic self, and how can you punish that?
Does seem to be that that's their lingua franca. And I agree with you,
I have contempt for all of them, and except you know, like
like I would write all sorts of ridiculous things if someone told me that's how
I would keep my daughter out of prison. But I don't think that's what's
going on here, you know, entirely. Well, I would you say
two things about One is that he's thirty two years old, and you could
just see. Part of the problem is that these parents are like deeply,
deeply they keep referring to him as like a little boy. It's like a
boy's he's thirty two, he's a grown man. He did grown man things.
Second thing is that if you wanted to stay out of prison, what
you do is you say, I'm really sorry, I broke the law and
I did break it, and I broke it for stupid reasons, but I
knew I was breaking it and I'll never do it again, and I accept
and I admit what I did. And I think that's the one thing that's
really missing in the Sam Banquent free story. And his parents are saying,
yes, he broke the law, Yes he did in bezel money, Yes
he did that, and he knew he was doing it, and he did
it anyway. Instead there's all this little weasel wording and like my poor boy,
poor autistic boy, genius. And I think that's, you know,
eventually that we're going to do. But you know, he is, he's
a thirty two year old man, and they're treating him like he's just this
college kid who just made a couple of mistakes. And that's kind of creepy.
And weird for somebody who was extremely privileged as a little boy. At
some point you got a you know, man up. Look, the judge
sentenced him the way he sentenced him, because he said, if I let
you out, or if I do this or I do that, I have
absolutely no faith. Then you're not going to go out and defraud other people.
You haven't admitted wrongdoing, you haven't said that you did anything wrong.
You lied on the stand and and and when you were out on bail,
you were using your computer to threaten people, you know, indirectly by saying
you had this about them, and you knew that about them. You were
sending them emails. And we had to revoke your bail and send you to
jail at the Brooklyn Correctional Facility for a year because we told you you couldn't
use a computer, and you went home to your parents' house and used the
computer. And moreover, you were doing things that you were legally forbidden to
do. So how can I give the boy a break? We're throwing him
on the trash heap. He should be on the trash heap. That's why
we had prisons. This is what I have prisons, So people like this
can't get out and steal eight billion dollars more money. You know it's weird.
Here's what you probably don't know is that Sam Bankman Freed was the office
boy at National Review for many years. So I just want to say.
I know we have listeners who don't like it when we talk about Trump or
not Trump or all this kind of stuff, But I just want to say,
like, remember that scene in Contact where Jodie Foster is like they should
have sent a poet. When I see the sentence this is the only Bible
endorsed by President Trump, I just I lose, like I lose the ability
to construct sentences, to capture the awesomeness of the ability to an ironically say.
I mean, take that Council of Nicea on Mandy Thursday, of all
days, endorsed that office boy. But at least he's holding it right side
up in the unlike but he did it in front of the Saint John's in
d C during the riots. You know this, I will say this that,
uh I I do. The church I go to is upper Upper east
Side pysical church St called Saint James. Lovely place, lovely people. I've
never been happier, but I do want to buy ten copies of the Trump
Bible and aud slip them in the pews and just you know, some Sunday,
just here's somebody's head explode, because it would be it would be a
horrible thing to do, and I won't do it. But but it's sort
of like in rock and roll high school and they play the rock and Roll
in mice and they explode. Everybody wants to get their hands on that Bible.
We all want to see that Bible. I do A lot of us
is going to buy that Bible. Am I right? We cannot do it.
We cannot do it. But like Matt Kottnetti yesterday on my podcast said
something like I need to buy that Bible, and then we were all,
you cannot. Here's the thing. The only other virtuals of the Constitution and
the Decrivation God and the and the sheet music to God Bless the USA by
Greenwood. Right, it's the Lee Greenwood Bible. The only thing that compares
to this that I can think of is that in nineteen whatever, nineteen eighty
nine, when the or when the Soviet Union officially collapsed and there was sort
of a power problem, the power vacuum in these in the former Central Asian
republics, that one of the Soviet apparatchicks forms of the Operaticks, took control
of a country, culture Menistan, and he renamed himself. His name is
Sapoov Novs. He renamed himself Turkman Bashi, which means leader of all Turkmen.
And he changed some of the names of the cities to Turkmenbashi. This
turk Mbashi Dad. And he renamed one of the months of the year,
I think, a name in honor of his mother. And he wrote a
sequel to the Quran that was in had to be in every mosque. You
had the Quran and then you had the Turkman Bashi Koran. This is the
closest thing to that I've heard, although at least he's give this a Trump.
I'd say two things about Trump. One is, at least he's not
doing that yeah yet. Yeah, he's going to make Christian Yeah exactly,
yeah, Macca. And at least it isn't this which is happening tonight in
New York City, one night only an evening, This is literally happening.
Mandy Thirsty, by the way, an evening with President Joe Biden and Presidents
Barack Obama and Bill Clinton in conversation with Stephen Colbert. Wait for it gets
you know, as if that doesn't drag you in with special guests Cynthia Arrivo,
Queen Latifa, Lizzo, Leah Michelle, and Ben Platt, hosted by
Mindy Kayley. Now you had a choice, you gotta either buy the Bible
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good times. Look, I before we go, I have to make a
special announcement to glop listeners and indeed to my co panelists, a surprise special
announcement. Uh Rna McDaniel will be joining glop as a commentator. And I
don't know if you uh and uh. In fact, I didn't tell you
about it. And when you get angry at me, I'm then going to
go tell the press that I had nothing to do with it, which is
what NBC's leadership did. They said, maybe you should come on. She's
like, I don't know. They said, hey, you can go on
MSNBC. She said maybe. They said, how about three hundred thousand dollars
a year? She said, okay. They announced that she is on,
that they are hiring her. The entire staff of NBC News has a cow
and then the head of MSNBC says, I didn't know anything about this,
And the head of NBC News, Rebrecca Blumenstein, says, I didn't hire
her. And then somebody close to the negotiations let it be known that this
was all their idea. So in the annals of sniveling, lying cowardice,
I, by the way, wouldn't have hired her if I were NBC News.
I think she's an untalented and uninteresting person who supported an insurrection, So
I wouldn't have hired her. But for them to go around saying, somebody
does that guy over there? I didn't have anything to do with it.
When when? What did they think? Ronal McDaniel wasn't going to tell all
the reporters that they came after and offered her all these jobs. My brain
is exploding. In fact, yes, ronal McDaniel was the intern at New
Criterion. The Poetry in turn yeah, fun, Yeah, exactly. Okay,
So obviously you guys have nothing to say about this, so I will
be leaving Glop in protest of our higher McDaniel, you knew nothing about it.
I Am not going to stand here and let you guys hire Ronal McDaniel.
This is just I just did a forty five minute conversation about this for
the Dispatch podcast because we're all worked up about it. Sarah Isger had her
experience in CNN. Steve was on set when Chuck Todd last Sunday when you
know, started all this, and and we just all had our takes.
And the only thing I'll just from that long conversation I'll add here is look,
when I left Fox, I did not know I was going to have
another contract anywhere. I got a contract. You know, both CNN and
MSNBC or NBC were interested. I ended up going to CNN, Steve went
to NBC. Steve is not on MSNBC. He does not do MSNBC.
That was part of his contract. But like I'll just tell you, like
the people who were talking to us, they went and called various on air
talent and we're like, what do you think about bringing Jonah Goldbriot, what
do you think about bringing Steve Hayes and you know that kind of stuff.
The idea that they didn't do that for Rona McDaniel I find really amazing.
So like, and maybe they didn't, right, because I have a hard
time. I don't think Chuck would lie. I kind of trust Chuck on
this. Chuck Wing why And I say that, by the way, not
I ironically, he's a friend of mine. I like him. I think
he's being totally earnest. And he also was angry at NBC News because they
ousted him from Meet the Press, so well, I'm not sure, Well
we're gonna talk about that off air, but like so he he but he
also doesn't have a show. But like, yeah, like Scarborough said,
he didn't, No one asked him about this. Rigel Maddow said it,
and so like, if that's true. And again I'm not using anybody of
lying, but it's so bizarre to me that they wouldn't say, hey,
what do you think about this? Would you use these people? Use this
person? That the failure to sort of just run the traps and think forty
eight hours ahead of the announcement is so spectacularly stupid. And if some of
these people did know and they're pretending that they didn't, then shame on them,
you know, for having this tantrum. Yeah, because they're captured by
an audies. But it is just it was so unbelievably badly. I think
it was wrong to hire. I think it was wrong to fire. But
I gotta say I like Nicole Wallace. She's a nice person. I mean,
I actually don't know where personally, I just I think she comes acrost
as a nice person and all that when she says she when she literally uses
the phrase our sacred airwaves that Ronald McDaniel would sully our sacred airways, airwaves
that are sullied by Al Sharpton every brigging day, right, you know what
I mean? Like the idea, like the sanctimony of all of it is
just a static to me, you know. Yeah, I would say.
The other takeaway is that if you are in Trump world, you can never
leave Trump World. You can never. You're not going to go to the
airport and convert your currency back to dollars. You just gotta You're living in
Trump world now. Whether you live in Trump World, whether you go to
MSNBC as a representative from Trump world. You can't not be Trump world.
That's good. Well, I'm not sure I agree. Entyler like McK malvaney,
you know, they do. He fit at CBS, you know,
and because of mcmonlvaney worked for Trump, they were he fitted CNN under the
other regime about Sarah is ger read nothing to do with January sixth. Malvaney
had nothing to do with January six right, Kevin Williamson had nothing to do
with anything. And you know, the Atlantic, I guess what I mean
there is that that if you're if you're I guess what I mean to I
Trump world, I mean the Trump message world. Yeah, if you were
think I think Jonahs got it though, Yeah, I think Jonah's got it
though. I think January sixth is a is a hinge point. And if
you were you were Mick mulvaney, you didn't have anything to do with January
six If you're Mark Meadows, you had somebody to do with January sixth,
you know, if you're I don't know who Jeffrey Johnny, Johnny what he's
getting right, Yeah, exactly, like that's a hinge moment. And Sarah
wasn't that person. And they complained about Sarah at CNN. And the interesting
thing is, again, uh, there is this idea abroad in the higher
ranks of these places that have to think about things like stock prices and you
know, the board and stuff like that, where they're like, you need
somebody who can talk about X, Y or Z. And the truth is
that the gut feeling of the people who staff these networks is no, we
don't Trump. No one should speak for Trump, no one should say anything
good about Trump ever. And if it happens on our right now, I
think there's an argument to be made. You hire Ron McDaniel, you're Joe
Scarborough and you bring her on every week and you have a two minute hate
with her. You just say, tell me what the line is on this?
Oh really? Oh you're you're so full of it, Like just and
torture her for her for her three hundred dollars a year because she can't say
no because she's under contract. So I don't know that would be my that
would be my idea of how to handle this and actually make good television.
But this is now, you know, guild subscription audience driven stuff, right,
So they are terrified of losing their audience to anybody else and so,
and they can't bear to hear it, They cannot stand it to go into
their ears. What they want to do is just yell about it and fine.
So that's it's yea, I will say, but this is a problem
across cable, it's across media. Right, Audience captures a problem for The
New York Times, An NPR audience capture is a problem for Fox. I
mean the sanctimony from people at Fox about how, oh they don't value intellectual
diversity any algy University. Fox paid eight hundred million dollars under the thought while
that they had to respect the audience. Yeah, right, I mean,
everybody has got mud on their shoes and all of this. But I'll tell
you one other thing, which is there is this idea, and I think
it's a fair idea somebody in the world of when when you have the ideological
changes in the country, and you have things happen that you don't understand,
you want interpreters who are sympathetic or from that world to be able to explain
it. Right. That's one of the reasons that he'll Billy Elergy was such
a hit and if Jdvans hadn't go into politics and lost his soul, he
might have been such a commentator. But the problem with Trump World is this.
I have read in the last two weeks three different books that our attempts
to make a synthesis between Trump and old Republicanism and Reaganism and this and that.
Here's a new synthesis, and here's a book, and it's two hundred
and fifty pages long, and the person has a respectable academic credentials, And
all three of them, I'm not going to name them, are garbage.
They are factitious, they're false, they are incredible. They make claims about
Trump and what he believes that are manifestly not true because they're trying to shoehorn
him into a posture that he does not fit. And this is a really,
really hard job. Like I'm not sure I wouldn't publish somebody who was
a Trumper, you know, if they made a good argument. I just
don't get I get articles every now and then that are efforts to do just
what I'm talking about, and they're insupportable, they're intellectual supportable. So this
is a really hard challenge because this is a personality cult. It is not
about ideas. It is not about the future of America. It is about
one man and this man and what he wants and what he wants from you
and the fealty that he demands. And there's just no way around the problem.
Yeah, So, like I agree that this is what I was talking
about today too. But like like in the old days, when we were
growing up, we would call people like Rob a squish or a rhino because
he was weak on abortion or defense, or taxes or something like on a
Arle inspector Republican. Right now, the very weekend, the only real definition,
which Trump has asserted time and time again, of what defines a rhino
is insufficient loyalty to Donald Trump. I mean he calls Chip Roy a freaking
rhino, right, Like Chip Roy from our definitions of what rhino used to
me is the opposite of a rhino, right. And and so the problem
is you can't bring people on to articulate and defend the conservative position. If
the conservative position in our two party system is defined by the cult of personality
that you're talking about, that's the that's the fundamental problem. And like Roni
McDaniel had to go on and sort of like the poor physicists at the beginning
of three body problem. You know, they wanted her to recan't the January
sixth stuff, that she supported, the hostage stuff, that she supported all
of those things because, to Rob's point, you can't convert your currency at
the airport. Like, so she said, I was lying, taking one
for the team because I was the head of the RNC. Yeah, well,
like that's really problematic if you're supposed to be an honest, an honest
commentator. You know, Also this world at which people say, okay,
you know what, there are too many the revolving door and it's terrible.
And I sort of agree, like there's something gross about the world in which
people are on the White House podium one day and then there were and then
they're hosting a show on a news network the next day, sometimes with the
administration they worked for still in power, which is really sorry, right exactly.
But on the other hand, you have to say, at the same
time, one of the two or three best columnists of the last fifty years
was a Nixon hack, right, was William Sapphire, who went from being
a Nixon speech writer and strategist and all of that to the New York Times
where he wrote an astonishingly brilliant column for many decades and George Stephanopolis, however
you feel about George Stephanopolis in your way. George Stephanopolis left the Clinton white
House and wrote a book called All Two Human, which was about his own
ambitions and the failures and mistakes and errors committed by the Clinton white House during
the first term when he was serving. And that was a moment kind of
like the ronom. It wasn't a recantation, but as a moment in which
he said, I am now willing to be honest about what I did and
what happened and what I think went wrong. And that's something no Trumper can
do, right. That is something we what we've seen is people go anti
Trump and say everything was crazy and it's terrible and I you know, he's
a monster, and that was this. But we haven't had somebody who said,
you know, I believed in this. I believed in that, here's
what happened in the White House and that and that was so crazy or whatever.
And nobody can do that for reasons that elude me, or maybe they're
not good enough or they're not talented enough, but no one has done it.
No one will do it because the cost, the threat. Maybe Bolton
you can say, did it. I didn't read Bolton's book, I have
to confess, but the threat of what Trump will do to you is too
terrifying to attempt to play that game with him. That's how I look at
it. Therefore, they'll never be able to change their currency at the airport
for that, for that very reason, like they're they're taking a huge risk
and the likelihood of the return is very small. Okay, we got to
go. Anybody have anything to recommend that isn't three body problem the show that
Rob is wrong about. Hmm yeah, I like slow, oh yeah,
do you I haven't finished it slow Okay, that's it has one ridiculous thing
in the end. You want to just like throw your throw your drink at
the at the screen. Do the aliens want to steal our resources? And
at the end it's actually worse. Yeah, yeah, it's actually it's actually
worse. Okay, Okay, yes, okay. So that's Monsieur Spain on
AMC. I am in the middle of reading a novel that I doesn't need
any recommendation for me, because I just read in the New York Times that
it's sold, it's sold a million copies this year. But that's The Heaven
and Earth Grocery Store by James Bride, which is about a small town in
Pennsylvania and a little world of seventeen Jewish families that lives side by side on
a hillside with black families in the nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties, and so
far halfway through it is a glorious piece of all near folklore, American folklore
about you know, a Jewish immigrants and up from up from the South African
Americans, you know, for whom slavery is either a living memory or something
that they were born into and escape from. Anyway, it's a beautiful book
so far. So if anyone is looking for a novel like that, as
I say, what's wildly popular. It's called The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store
and it's the best selling novel this year. So, like I say,
it's hardly something that I need to you know, like surface an obscurity for
you to enjoy. But but I really really do do love it. So
so I guess that's it for us. Yeah, that's it. Uh as
as as Misieur Spade would say, you know adieu. Well, he'd say
see ya, but yeah, he'd say see you in a fake American accent
because he's Clive Owen and he's not an American. But he's got the good
Bogart haircut. All right, I'm gonna try it. See ya next time
at comping from