Speaker 1: Bro. I like the glasses.
Speaker 2: That's a good minute.
Speaker 1: I like the glasses, I said.
Speaker 2: Jesus Christ, give me a second.
Speaker 3: You can really tell he's going to seminary.
Speaker 2: Where does that place Henry Jefferson, who's number two?
Speaker 1: See number two?
Speaker 4: Because me, Hey, they can only be one number one
Speaker 4: and one number two. I life made Jefferson number two
Speaker 4: long before I come along.
Speaker 2: I suppose that the Puerto Ricans are number.
Speaker 4: Three, then well no, not necessarily shouting it that little girl.
Speaker 4: Your porto Vecans could be four, your draction, your change
Speaker 4: could be three.
Speaker 5: Welcome to the first glob culture of twenty twenty six.
Speaker 1: I am John putt Or. It's in New York, in Washington,
Speaker 1: d C.
Speaker 5: Jonah Goldberg Him, Jonah'm John, Hello John Jonah. I just
Speaker 5: want to introduce everybody to your new angle, the new
Speaker 5: Jonah Goldberg glop angle. You were used to having a
Speaker 5: little window over Jonah's shoulder, his basement window, and now
Speaker 5: he's just turned the camera around and we have this
Speaker 5: beautiful bookcase very much mirroring my bookcase behind me. So
Speaker 5: Jonah and your bookcase, welcome to twenty twenty six.
Speaker 3: Thank you. I didn't I was not aware that any
Speaker 3: glop there were glop viewers. Do we actually put this
Speaker 3: video out anywhere?
Speaker 1: I don't know now that I think about it.
Speaker 5: No, So you guys don't know what a thrilling change
Speaker 5: this is.
Speaker 1: This is like Charlie.
Speaker 5: This is like the fact that one of the biggest
Speaker 5: stars in radio was a ventriloquist, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy.
Speaker 5: He was a ventriloquist on the radio.
Speaker 2: That's how good his material was.
Speaker 5: By the way, it really was good material. He was
Speaker 5: hilarious and it was very interesting. But he was a
Speaker 5: ventriloquist on the radio.
Speaker 2: And of course, speaking here, all ventriloquists insane. And that
Speaker 2: the the the dummy sat at Thanksgiving table and he
Speaker 2: moved the room. He loved the dummy more that he
Speaker 2: loved his own daughter, Candice Bergen.
Speaker 5: Who wrote a very good memoir about being Charlie McCarthy's sister.
Speaker 2: My I can say that I can tell the story
Speaker 2: now because.
Speaker 3: About mime on radio, because I would really like to hear.
Speaker 2: That loocause both I think both the both the people
Speaker 2: involved are dead.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 2: Cannis Bergen died, right, did she?
Speaker 1: No?
Speaker 2: I guess maybe not?
Speaker 1: No, No, I don't think she's dead.
Speaker 2: But okay, well, but she does the gloss.
Speaker 3: She won't hear about it from it won't be like
Speaker 3: she's dead.
Speaker 2: She one year for the Emmys, Kirsty Alley was up
Speaker 2: and kind of felt that she deserved it. We sort
Speaker 2: of sugar too. She had a really great season. She's
Speaker 2: done some great stuff. And so was cannis Bergen for
Speaker 2: Murphy Brown. So Christy Alley for Cheers Murphy Brown, Cantisburg
Speaker 2: for Verney Brown and uh. Kursey grew up in Kansas,
Speaker 2: in the kind of rural Kansas, and her dad owned
Speaker 2: a giant lumber yard, and which when she lost her
Speaker 2: auter a Emmy party, I think a few people would
Speaker 2: want and and she stood up a chance. hYP I
Speaker 2: don't think she was drunk. I don't think she didn't drink.
Speaker 2: And but she's outragyou his eyes want to say too,
Speaker 2: we ought to make toast. I want to say that
Speaker 2: cannis Bergen's father had one little wooden puppet. My father
Speaker 2: owned a whole freaking lumber yard.
Speaker 1: See, this was the thing. She of course made one
Speaker 1: of the great probably that's Rob Long, of course.
Speaker 5: Speaking here from Prince to New Jersey, she did make
Speaker 5: one of the great award speeches sort of when she
Speaker 5: did win, when she thanked her now long ex husband
Speaker 5: that was she's of course no longer with us, but
Speaker 5: she divorced him not that long after. But when she
Speaker 5: said that she wanted to thank her husband, Parker Stevenson
Speaker 5: for giving her the big one all these years, a
Speaker 5: memorable forty years later that she said that.
Speaker 2: And then at the Emmy party he arrived, not the
Speaker 2: Emmy party, sorry, the Premiere party, which happened after the
Speaker 2: Emmys in September. He arrived. We've had it at Chasin's.
Speaker 2: He came in. It was a kind of a joke.
Speaker 2: He came into the room late carrying a big inflatable
Speaker 2: number one. He said, Oh, Kirsty, you left this in
Speaker 2: the car.
Speaker 1: Good it's good material.
Speaker 2: See one of the hardy boys on the Hardy Boys.
Speaker 5: He was indeed one of the hardy boys with uh
Speaker 5: was it Sean Cassidy?
Speaker 3: Sean Cassidy that sound that sounds right? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: We're three old.
Speaker 5: Guys, three old guys talking as usual about being old.
Speaker 2: But you know what, now we can make it a
Speaker 2: point like things were. We could actually literally say with
Speaker 2: an all truth. You know what, things made more sense
Speaker 2: back then.
Speaker 5: That that is totally true. So here here is my
Speaker 5: last five days just for your understanding. And this will
Speaker 5: maybe be of interest to Jonah's ideological tracking. So, of course,
Speaker 5: the horrible thing happens where Renee Good is shot in Minneapolis,
Speaker 5: obviously a terrible tragedy of errors for all concerned. My
Speaker 5: initial impulse watching the film is that the officer in
Speaker 5: question was justified and the shooting the car was turned
Speaker 5: toward him, and he already told she was costplaying she
Speaker 5: should get out of the car, and you know, and
Speaker 5: having like two days of being yelled at for having
Speaker 5: bad opinions and my yelling back at people for them
Speaker 5: having bad opinions and all this, and then like last
Speaker 5: night I watched for the seventy five thousandth time, like
Speaker 5: one of the videos, and I did have this moment
Speaker 5: of the things made more sense back to and where
Speaker 5: I was like, you know, why are these ice agents?
Speaker 5: Why do they look like they're about to go into Flujah?
Speaker 5: Like you know, you know, I because I was so
Speaker 5: caught up in the it's not fair, fair, you know,
Speaker 5: they're murderers. And then in Minneapolis is going to go
Speaker 5: up again like George Floyd and having that fun.
Speaker 1: And then I just did have the this.
Speaker 5: Is really like where these are federal laws, Like what's
Speaker 5: wrong with a nice uniform? They could just wear like
Speaker 5: a uniform that's aid ice on it without a mask,
Speaker 5: and like I'm looking like they're a swat team. You know,
Speaker 5: They're just immigration and Customs enforcement officers.
Speaker 1: They're not Delta.
Speaker 5: They're not the Delta force that was my journey over
Speaker 5: the where And then I'm like, you know, things don't
Speaker 5: make more sense than they.
Speaker 1: Used to do.
Speaker 5: Maybe maybe it's justified because they are people are dosing people,
Speaker 5: and they're they're wearing masks so that their faces don't
Speaker 5: get facial ide recognition, and then people don't come to
Speaker 5: their house to kill them.
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 5: But nonetheless, what the hell is what I'm saying?
Speaker 3: See, I am to keep this on pop culture rather
Speaker 3: than getting into a contentious gold dress versus blue dress
Speaker 3: kind of fight about the rachaman that was the shooting.
Speaker 3: The analogy I keep using is like this is like
Speaker 3: Fred Thompson in Hunter Road October where he's standing up
Speaker 3: on the crow's nest of the ship saying this is
Speaker 3: going to get out of hand and people are going
Speaker 3: to die. Right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I.
Speaker 3: Think the shooting was legally justifiable, which does not mean
Speaker 3: it was the best procedure. Right. I think it was
Speaker 3: out of policy, but he was not. He's not a
Speaker 3: murderer and she is not a domestic terrorist.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: But when when you have the rhetoric from both sides,
Speaker 3: and I don't think it's equal, but when you have
Speaker 3: the rhetoric from both sides being so outlandish, you're gonna
Speaker 3: get more of this, right, just the law of large
Speaker 3: numbers is just gonna get more of this. And it's
Speaker 3: a Baptist and bootleggers kind of situation right where the
Speaker 3: Trump administration wants more resistance. They love talking about how
Speaker 3: they are so against it, but they want more hysteria,
Speaker 3: more crisis, more sort of reasons to invoke Alien whatever
Speaker 3: Act and all that kind of stuff they want. They're
Speaker 3: really pissed that Antifa isn't doing a bigger job, a
Speaker 3: better job of like provoking them, and there are a
Speaker 3: bunch of people who want to provoke them. And it's
Speaker 3: like Normans who just want to have like nice uniforms
Speaker 3: on people like we got we got nothing here because
Speaker 3: it's just it's it's cultivated freaking craziness.
Speaker 5: Rob as our resident clergyman, could do provide words of
Speaker 5: comfort and wisdom, evoking the greatest and noblest of sentiments
Speaker 5: of human nature.
Speaker 3: But if you can, but if you can keep it
Speaker 3: up with the waterfront kind of language, the doc worker
Speaker 3: language you're using at the beginning, that would be gay.
Speaker 2: But I don't mind. I'm not ashamed of that language.
Speaker 1: I'm a priest.
Speaker 2: We say to h at the beginning of every episcopal ceremony,
Speaker 2: to say, the college for purity. You know, we say
Speaker 2: to God, to whom all hearts are open, all desires known,
Speaker 2: from whom no secrets are hid, so like he already
Speaker 2: knows that he's this language. I was asked to do
Speaker 2: just that yesterday speaking Johns'd like to make Someone said,
Speaker 2: what do you What could you possibly say about all this?
Speaker 2: And I will say, I have no idea except that
Speaker 2: I think Joan is right that we live in oily rags,
Speaker 2: dry garage country right now and seems to be walking
Speaker 2: around light and matches and including the president of the
Speaker 2: Commander in Chief, which seems very strange to me. This,
Speaker 2: all of this beats destroys my general theory of life,
Speaker 2: which is that people just kind of want to these
Speaker 2: kind of want to try the temperature down all the
Speaker 2: time that were exhausted. And I kind of feel like,
Speaker 2: I don't think that America is exhausted. I think America
Speaker 2: is just rare to go and.
Speaker 1: Is it America.
Speaker 5: That's of course the ultimate difficult question to answer is
Speaker 5: does the ordinary workaday America wants to be living in
Speaker 5: this hothouse lunatic asylum. I assume the answer is no,
Speaker 5: but I have no confidence.
Speaker 2: I agree. I thought the answers are too. I hope
Speaker 2: the answers still know and we're just living in a
Speaker 2: strange amplification time. I would just say, like, since you
Speaker 2: mentioned the clergy, there's a guy who does this great
Speaker 2: subsett called graphs about religion, and he does he didn't
Speaker 2: want a couple months ago, and it basically he just
Speaker 2: does a lot of meta analysis of Pew data and
Speaker 2: Nielsen data and sort of like big study cultural study data,
Speaker 2: and he be came a really interesting look the different
Speaker 2: to the political outlook. Disparity between people in the pews
Speaker 2: and people in the pulpit is immense in the mainland
Speaker 2: in the mainline Protestant churches, people in pews are like
Speaker 2: sixty five percent identify as Republican or independent, and basically
Speaker 2: the independent thing is I'm a Republican. I don't want
Speaker 2: to say I am. Yeah, that's what it always is, right,
Speaker 2: And like seven percent identify as demert the piscical churches,
Speaker 2: it's even more lopsided, like seven percent in the pulpit
Speaker 2: are Republicans. And so even the idea of going to
Speaker 2: your church to try to make sense of something like this,
Speaker 2: which is a big thing that people are struggling with,
Speaker 2: in a lot of ways, it's fraught with another layer
Speaker 2: of partisanship, which is like, I don't want you to
Speaker 2: go and tell me that I'm an evil person because
Speaker 2: I voted for Trump, or that I'm an evil I
Speaker 2: voted for co or whatever it is.
Speaker 3: You should talk to Russell Moore at some point. Russell
Speaker 3: has these stories because you know, a lot of pastors
Speaker 3: and preatrisens have called him for advice, and starting about
Speaker 3: five six years ago, he started hearing from a whole
Speaker 3: bunch of people who you know, the past, the clergy,
Speaker 3: you are trying to keep the and this is mostly
Speaker 3: Southern Baptist, right, but the clergure you are trying to
Speaker 3: keep politics out of the church. And but they all
Speaker 3: have these stories about how they would give their sermon
Speaker 3: and then someone would come up to them and say,
Speaker 3: you know, I wish you could keep that wokeness stuff
Speaker 3: out of here, you know, and all that left wing stuff.
Speaker 3: And he's like, what are you talking about? You talk
Speaker 3: about turning the other cheek. Yeah, and he's like, you
Speaker 3: do know that's like scripture.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, there's like there's a lot of stuff like
Speaker 2: Turga welcome the stranger as what so there all this
Speaker 2: is this is all the struggle, right, This is all
Speaker 2: stuff that's food for struggle and should be in in
Speaker 2: the in the pulpit instead. I mean there are people
Speaker 2: who feel that way. There are people feel the other way.
Speaker 2: It's what's strange about it to me is that, like, uh,
Speaker 2: the there's a way to tet to to complain if
Speaker 2: you're in a church a piscical jeordgy what you call
Speaker 2: the bishop that you basically you call the headmaster, and
Speaker 2: you're like a Korean mom calling the teacher to say,
Speaker 2: give my kid a better grade. And that I think
Speaker 2: people are resorting to and I'm not sure where they're
Speaker 2: resorting to it on which side, but this is one
Speaker 2: of is weird things where like, well, the problem ultimately
Speaker 2: is this is that. And I think it's the problem
Speaker 2: that the liberal media, which I think we could all
Speaker 2: agree here exists that that there, that's their problem, which
Speaker 2: is that they made everything political for so long that
Speaker 2: if you once you sit in the pulp in the
Speaker 2: in the pews, that you hear the preacher talk about
Speaker 2: the Paris Climate Accords as like, oh my god, what
Speaker 2: a great tragedy. We didn't you know, or you know,
Speaker 2: internet or whatever, there's a web neutrality, like it's just
Speaker 2: it's hard enough to see it everywhere. And if you
Speaker 2: do talk about web neutrality and Paris Climate Accords from
Speaker 2: the pulpit, you you know, you're not gonna have that
Speaker 2: much leverage left when you want to talk about what
Speaker 2: I think was a pretty shameful shooting in Minnesota.
Speaker 5: So if we defall to our comfort zone, which is
Speaker 5: ridiculous popular culture.
Speaker 3: No, No, let's look from years ago.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm talking about screams America.
Speaker 1: The question is what would TJ. Hooker have done?
Speaker 5: And this is I think I'm not joking when I say,
Speaker 5: I think America thinks that what police officers are supposed
Speaker 5: to do in a situation where a car is driving
Speaker 5: at them is jump up and grab onto the window
Speaker 5: windshield and ride on the car while the car is driving,
Speaker 5: and the guy is going, get off my windshield, man,
Speaker 5: and then T. J. Hooker's like, I'm gonna take you
Speaker 5: in like that. That is, we live in a world
Speaker 5: in which we've spent fifty years watching nonsense depictions of
Speaker 5: cops and chases and cars in which nothing that actually
Speaker 5: happens in the real world happens in these depictions, because
Speaker 5: of course, car chases are always in movies about how
Speaker 5: a car smashes into another car and then guess what,
Speaker 5: it can still drive eighty miles an hour as opposed
Speaker 5: to your car, which is, if your car hits a.
Speaker 1: Like a speed bump, it gets.
Speaker 5: A flat tire, but you need to pull over and
Speaker 5: wait for triple A, you know. Whereas in the Lethal
Speaker 5: Weapon movies they jump off a half finished ramp off
Speaker 5: the LA Freeway.
Speaker 6: Forty yeah, none of those bad guys are irritating committedly
Speaker 6: irritating lesbian mom who are protesting the bad guys are.
Speaker 1: Like evil the South Africans.
Speaker 2: Yeah, people, right, they're.
Speaker 5: Just camantic community. Joss Alan leath a weapon too.
Speaker 2: There was during the little window where all all criminals
Speaker 2: were South African.
Speaker 3: Right, just one correction, you know, okay, on the t
Speaker 3: J Hooker thing, that was much more of an Adrian's
Speaker 3: mad move.
Speaker 5: Yes, oh, t J was on the side, was on
Speaker 5: the side going jump onto that car.
Speaker 1: Adrian's med something like that.
Speaker 5: Yeah, my fer was wearing like a bathing suit. She
Speaker 5: happened to be staying there in her bathing suit instead
Speaker 5: of her the world.
Speaker 2: She was wearing a child's halloween cop of a cop favorite.
Speaker 1: Here.
Speaker 2: Here's okay, here this is you asked t J Hooker,
Speaker 2: TG Hooker. This is the TJ Hooker, Uh parable there
Speaker 2: was an episode of t Hooker. I don't recall this
Speaker 2: is this.
Speaker 3: About Tijuana or okay, should never minding.
Speaker 2: The story the plot, but let's just stipulate bad guy,
Speaker 2: very bad guy. Uh.
Speaker 1: T J.
Speaker 2: Hooker finally caught him up, caught him and he was
Speaker 2: kind of a little weasel kind of character, and he
Speaker 2: finally caught him. But he was truly evil, committed murder
Speaker 2: of some terrible kind. And Hooker is holding him is
Speaker 2: screaming at him, holding him. Resist the rest, Please, Beggy,
Speaker 2: you resist your rest and he doesn't do it. And that,
Speaker 2: I think is how it works in te j Hooker Land,
Speaker 2: that the cop admittedly wants to do something but is
Speaker 2: incredibly restrained. In Teach Hooker Land. In Jack Webland, had
Speaker 2: she had she wanted to, she would have run over
Speaker 2: the cop.
Speaker 3: So well, I've been recent I think I mentioned this
Speaker 3: a couple of months ago. I I sometimes will tune
Speaker 3: into Colombo because I'll see it while channel surfing. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and and I was thinking about it again because I
Speaker 3: was telling Pod before we started. I've been watching Foyle's
Speaker 3: War and they do something similar from time to time.
Speaker 3: I'm fascinated by these scenes. It's in Colombo. I think
Speaker 3: it's probably an Ironside and a few others, but where
Speaker 3: there's the confrontation at the end, right, oh, just one
Speaker 3: more thing, right, And Colombo gets the murderer not to
Speaker 3: not only confess right because they figured out the crime right,
Speaker 3: and but also that this person who committed various heinous
Speaker 3: murders is alone in a room with a dude that
Speaker 3: could definitely kill or beat in a fight, and they
Speaker 3: have nothing to lose, right. I mean, it's like it's
Speaker 3: I'm gonna go to the chair or spend a life
Speaker 3: in prison, or I'll kill Colombo. And it never occurs
Speaker 3: to one of them to like, hey, you know, I'm
Speaker 3: already up for a murder one beef. Why not give
Speaker 3: it a try.
Speaker 2: It never occurs to Jack to take off his ascot
Speaker 2: and unbutton his Neghbrew jacket.
Speaker 5: But of course, but of course, of course, all that
Speaker 5: those killers are all whimps. That's the secret of They're
Speaker 5: always coming up with some sophisticated poisoning or like have
Speaker 5: a thing where they're never in the room because there,
Speaker 5: of course feet intellectuals and upper class geniuses, and they
Speaker 5: can't beat Colombo to death. He's like the working class.
Speaker 5: When it comes Bush comes to shove, he could probably waal,
Speaker 5: you know, we could kick Richard Kylee's ass or you know,
Speaker 5: wouldn't stand a chance against Colombo because you know, he's
Speaker 5: while he's mister, you know, the head of a corporation.
Speaker 1: Columbo's like a street cop, right, and who knows what's
Speaker 1: in the raincoat.
Speaker 5: He could have a he could have a walther in
Speaker 5: there in the raincoat to protect himself.
Speaker 3: And one in one of these carnival owners curb stomp Shaggy.
Speaker 3: I mean, come on, okay.
Speaker 1: Now, fair enough, damn fair enough.
Speaker 5: They're too busy pulling off the mask and then trying
Speaker 5: to get the glue off their hand when they pull
Speaker 5: off the mask and say I would have gotten away
Speaker 5: with it. Well, although you know Scooby again, Scooby very
Speaker 5: very loyal to Shaggy.
Speaker 1: I mean, Scooby is a great day like Scooby. What
Speaker 1: happens if Scooby gets mad?
Speaker 2: It's still an animal.
Speaker 5: I know, we gets scared and his teeth chatter and
Speaker 5: everything like that. But if Shaggy were really threatened.
Speaker 3: So it'll be awesome. Like you know how they're making
Speaker 3: all these horror movies of a Betty Boop or whatever
Speaker 3: because they're out of copyright. We just have to wait
Speaker 3: another thirty years for some really dark Scooby doo.
Speaker 5: Yes, Scooby, Scooby is actually a pit bull and like
Speaker 5: you know, yeah.
Speaker 2: Or just Scoo porn. I wonder if redd It has
Speaker 2: that Oh my god, s Goooby, I have prompt AI prompt,
Speaker 2: all right, I'll share one more anecdote.
Speaker 3: There's an Internet rule. It's like rule forty eight or
Speaker 3: something like that that says, if you can imagine a porn,
Speaker 3: it already exists.
Speaker 2: If you can imagine a porn and it doesn't exist,
Speaker 2: it can exist with a few prompts into a porn
Speaker 2: generator that you probably already subscribe to. I mean you
Speaker 2: specifically you, Jonah probably. We We did a show years
Speaker 2: ago and it was a two hander with Bob Newhart.
Speaker 3: And leading porn generators.
Speaker 1: Ye right, it's a one hand.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Uh, I'm trying you guys hard into the theatrical
Speaker 2: showbis jargon and uh we leave on the other side
Speaker 2: of it.
Speaker 3: And I'm pretty sure too hander is theatrical show bite
Speaker 3: jargon for porn industry. But anyway, one, I'm saying that, Yeah,
Speaker 3: if you can imagine.
Speaker 2: It, John, if you pay a little bit more, you
Speaker 2: get a two hander. Anyway, So we uh, we were
Speaker 2: briefly uh uh. Peter Falals, who played Columbo, his agent
Speaker 2: called out the head of the studio to say, look,
Speaker 2: I've read the script. It's great, Peter wants to do it.
Speaker 2: And the head of the studio had been at Universal
Speaker 2: ran Universal for a long time and knew Peter fought
Speaker 2: very well from Colombo and from some subsequent things. And
Speaker 2: he called us in and we love Peter Paul. Peter
Speaker 2: Folk is amazing, he'd be great, called us in and
Speaker 2: sadus you know he's he's in the in laws, one
Speaker 2: of the j and sat. We had a bit formal
Speaker 2: meeting like you were, which you rarely had. You just
Speaker 2: dropped into the office. I needed you to com in
Speaker 2: at two thirty because I got to call this guy
Speaker 2: back at three thirty. And he spent the entire hour
Speaker 2: explaining how awful it's going to be for us to
Speaker 2: work with Peter Falk's here, he is, how incredibly insane
Speaker 2: he is, that you're you're going to be up all
Speaker 2: night and he's going to look at all the cuts.
Speaker 2: That's how he who he is. And as long as
Speaker 2: you know that, I'm telling you he'd be great in
Speaker 2: the show. But I'm telling you this, and and he's
Speaker 2: worth also, I'm telling you, and I will, he said,
Speaker 2: I will put this in writing too. You can never
Speaker 2: call me to complain. I told you.
Speaker 1: This is the head of the studio, or this is
Speaker 1: the chairman of the chairman.
Speaker 2: Okay, yes, right, okay, well carry all right, Well you know,
Speaker 2: but we still want to explore it. We have a
Speaker 2: meeting with Well, you're not gonna have a meeting with
Speaker 2: him till you you tell you you you make him
Speaker 2: an offer, and then you know. So we said, we
Speaker 2: went back to the age, said, listen, were really interested
Speaker 2: in Peter. We just kind of want to talk a
Speaker 2: little bit more about how it all works out. Can
Speaker 2: we have a meeting? And then A said, yeah, I
Speaker 2: know what you're talking about because you work with you.
Speaker 2: I know you because carry the guy name was Rand
Speaker 2: the studio is carry my cluggage and then you work
Speaker 2: over carry out and so then so then he said, well,
Speaker 2: I'm going to send you his his his his, his
Speaker 2: financial and procedural proposal, which is a phrase we never heard.
Speaker 2: And we get this messenger comes and delivers to us
Speaker 2: into the studio, this like very thick document of what
Speaker 2: his absolutely non negotiable demands are, which includes every TV
Speaker 2: cliche from the nineteen seventies. He basically didn't know we
Speaker 2: were in a comedy in front of an audience, so
Speaker 2: he said, and the show will end with a freeze
Speaker 2: frame on me, laughing with executive producer Peter Falk.
Speaker 1: It was.
Speaker 2: It was fantastic madness from a guy who was like, well,
Speaker 2: when I do a TV show, here's what happens. And
Speaker 2: this is gonna TV show, so here's what's gonna happen.
Speaker 2: He you know, uh needs to say. We didn't go
Speaker 2: with Peter. We went with another great actor, Judd Hirsh,
Speaker 2: which was a delight and incredibly fun and funny and
Speaker 2: completely bananas in a wonderful way. But like Peter hawk'shrop,
Speaker 2: am I the only one? And I think I am.
Speaker 2: But you guys, I know you guys are not on
Speaker 2: TikTok right, not right?
Speaker 5: I mean my kids send me them, but I don't.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, on TikTok and and I wrote about this
Speaker 2: in commented briefly but it actually I should have read
Speaker 2: a whole column about it because it's really fascinating and
Speaker 2: it is a real thing. There are short multi part dramas,
Speaker 2: usually serialized dramas. They are the worst pieces of crap
Speaker 2: in your life. The writing is not AI would do better.
Speaker 2: They sound like they are translated from the Turkish and
Speaker 2: I'm not kidding some of them are.
Speaker 1: I think they are literally translated from Chinese.
Speaker 2: Like some of them are shot in the Far Valley
Speaker 2: in La.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Every now and then you'll see an actor that you thought, wait,
Speaker 2: I think I read that woman like thirty years ago.
Speaker 2: They are actually a way, they are making money and
Speaker 2: there's a business here. But if you ever wanted to
Speaker 2: see anything, I mean, you know, we and I we
Speaker 2: all send each other like stupid clips from YouTube, from
Speaker 2: old billy crappy TV shows because they're hilarious. This is
Speaker 2: another level. This is stuff that's so bad no one
Speaker 2: will ever no one will ever think it's funny bad.
Speaker 2: It's just weirdly shot and over the top. But they
Speaker 2: spend three cents and you could tell they spend three
Speaker 2: cents on it. And I fear, like everything else, the
Speaker 2: crappy version of what we thought was already crappy but fun,
Speaker 2: it's going to be the reality, not just in show
Speaker 2: business but in politics and everything else.
Speaker 5: So I went the step of subscribing to one of
Speaker 5: these services on my iPad. It's called Real Shorts. Yeah,
Speaker 5: that's what I'm and so it's out of China. It's
Speaker 5: some kind of Chinese product. And what they have is
Speaker 5: it's essentially a movie that has been cut into sixty
Speaker 5: two to seventy two segments of a minute to two each,
Speaker 5: and they promote them on TikTok by putting a couple
Speaker 5: out and then you have to subscribe to see the
Speaker 5: rest of it.
Speaker 2: And they're so dumb. They're all like, yeah, the CEO
Speaker 2: is coming to the gala, the chairman is coming, and
Speaker 2: we're going to and there's always like this weird that
Speaker 2: you murdered my daughter, give all your assets. All that's
Speaker 2: written with's crazy stuff. It can never really happen.
Speaker 5: Yeah, no, it's not even that. It's also it's also
Speaker 5: like a woman and another woman. Yeah, she's the secretary
Speaker 5: and the other woman is the boss, and she's like,
Speaker 5: I am the boss, and then she will slap the
Speaker 5: other woman across the face and say, now you will
Speaker 5: bring me your shoes.
Speaker 1: You know. It's like because it all does.
Speaker 5: Literally translated from Chinese.
Speaker 2: Well, there's a guy that's an American guy doing it,
Speaker 2: and I think he's doing so he's his quality slightly better.
Speaker 2: But what's about it is that the the the evil
Speaker 2: is so bald, is so like unrestrained. It's like, yeah, nothing,
Speaker 2: you're gonna be in the gutter. You don't belong in
Speaker 2: this gallon looking the way you do this is where
Speaker 2: it school. One one woman gives another somebody a credit card.
Speaker 2: He looks, just go to by god, this credit card.
Speaker 2: Why the bank he issues this to this its most
Speaker 2: prestigious customers. With his credit card. Yeah, with his credit card,
Speaker 2: you could do whatever you want.
Speaker 5: Anyway, it is these things are and so yeah. So
Speaker 5: there is an interesting debate going on if you want,
Speaker 5: if you listen to industry podcasts, everyone in the entertainment,
Speaker 5: as Rob writes about in the upcoming issue of Commentary
Speaker 5: and others like, there is a sense of apocalypse that
Speaker 5: every modality that has run the American entertainment industry is
Speaker 5: eighteen months away from complete collapse. That's not to say
Speaker 5: there won't be an entertainment industry. There will, and it
Speaker 5: will continue. And the more people want to be entertained
Speaker 5: by more stuff on screens than ever before. The only
Speaker 5: reliable driver of entertainment at the moment is sports. So sports,
Speaker 5: any sports league is making unbelievable bank, including sports that
Speaker 5: don't particularly rate like baseball, and the and the NBA
Speaker 5: are getting home and Cornhall cornhole could be there could
Speaker 5: be a competitive cornhole league anyway.
Speaker 1: It goes on.
Speaker 2: I mean, I probably spent all weekend, well watching Cornhole.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean so yes, So there's a sense of
Speaker 5: apocalypse and so people. I was listening to this podcast
Speaker 5: with Jeff Sigansky, who ran CBS and is now an
Speaker 5: investor and was very very very intelligent, and he he
Speaker 5: was saying basically that cable is now television. Streaming is
Speaker 5: now cable. So what is going to be streaming? In
Speaker 5: other words, what's the thing now that everyone's gonna want
Speaker 5: that they never had before? And he said there are
Speaker 5: two things. One is free streaming, which is to be Pluto,
Speaker 5: the services, which is just TV. Now that is like
Speaker 5: you watch TV and there are commercial on that. My
Speaker 5: money's on that.
Speaker 2: But yeah, okay.
Speaker 5: But so in other words, the third forty year experiment
Speaker 5: of making you pay for things you can get for
Speaker 5: free is now flipping on its head, and now you're
Speaker 5: gonna get everything free again with ads like none of
Speaker 5: this ever happened. You're just gonna watch it on your
Speaker 5: computer screen instead of on a television. But you might
Speaker 5: be able to watch it on television because you can
Speaker 5: watch an app on your television. Or there are gonna
Speaker 5: be these new cheaper forms of media produced that the
Speaker 5: real shorts thing you're talking about is probably like it's
Speaker 5: like the garbage that it's like it's like community theater,
Speaker 5: and they'll figure out how to up it so that
Speaker 5: it's more like Broadway over time.
Speaker 2: I think the hope is and I talked about HBO
Speaker 2: because there's the guy. He wants to talk about it
Speaker 2: like it. Their hope is that it somehow gets to
Speaker 2: be the quality of say a the old show Small Wonder.
Speaker 5: That would be like that is the revolutionary change, that's right.
Speaker 5: And so you remember when streaming, when streaming shows first
Speaker 5: started and streaming movies first started, it was like these
Speaker 5: are terrible, right except for House of Cards. Like then
Speaker 5: House of Cards came on. They spent two hundred million
Speaker 5: dollars on House of Cards and it was it was
Speaker 5: pretty good. So then we were like off to the races.
Speaker 5: But like streaming shows were some version of this and
Speaker 5: was like I'll never do a stream you know how shocking,
Speaker 5: like the only people who ever do streaming shows or
Speaker 5: ya da da da da. And when Adam Sandler made
Speaker 5: the deal to make movies for Netflix ten to eleven
Speaker 5: years ago, was like, Adam Sandler, this just proves that
Speaker 5: Adam Sandler's finished.
Speaker 1: He can't get a movie office.
Speaker 5: His career is over, and he's made a billion dollars
Speaker 5: through Netflix, making movies on Netflix when comedies died.
Speaker 1: At the cinema. And so.
Speaker 5: But it's interesting because I'm telling you my wife's in
Speaker 5: the business. Rob's in a bit like the sense that
Speaker 5: five years from now, everything that we understand to be
Speaker 5: the way entertainment has structured. All this stuff. You're hearing
Speaker 5: fights about the Warner Brothers Paramount merger or whether Netflix
Speaker 5: is going to buy Warner Brothers. It's all narsch Kite,
Speaker 5: it's all deck chairs on the Titanic. Something new is
Speaker 5: going to replace all of this, and it's coming faster
Speaker 5: than anybody realizes. And the great joke is Hollywood like
Speaker 5: gave birth to the new California, and now it's one
Speaker 5: hundred years later and nothing is being made in California.
Speaker 5: Rob Lowe makes a game show called The Floor Game Show,
Speaker 5: the cheapest thing on television because of union deals, and
Speaker 5: it's union deals and the cost of doing anything in Hollywood.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they're gonna fly everybody to Ireland.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, to film the Floor.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: It's actually everything upside down because it used to be
Speaker 2: that the word The last thing you want to do
Speaker 2: is fly anybody, because that was the most expensive thing.
Speaker 2: And now of course it's it's been flipped, and there
Speaker 2: are a whole bunch of reasons for that. I'm not
Speaker 2: quite sure that it's not entirely the unions and those deals.
Speaker 2: It's other stuff too. But what's bizarre to me and
Speaker 2: interesting to me is that like when I was like,
Speaker 2: remember when things was streamingly started, and like, look, this
Speaker 2: is the early like two thousand and six, thousand and eight,
Speaker 2: right around the first big strike or the first big
Speaker 2: strike of the twenty first century, and I spent a
Speaker 2: lot of time in Silicon Valley its meeting a lot
Speaker 2: of people, and they were like very excited about how
Speaker 2: the internet was going to change the way you know,
Speaker 2: people watch TV and along with bringing us all together
Speaker 2: as a as a brotherhood of man. And I remember
Speaker 2: thinking like that could that could easily happen and they
Speaker 2: were allen disrupting this, disrupting that. I remember having conversation
Speaker 2: a venture capitalist friend of mine. Here's like, why do
Speaker 2: you when you're if you're gonna do a pilot, why
Speaker 2: don't you go to everyone involved and just get them
Speaker 2: to take you raise a little bit of money and
Speaker 2: get everybody to have a stake in the upside, right,
Speaker 2: and then you're all like, then if then goes that
Speaker 2: you can make you all make money, why don't you
Speaker 2: do that? Like, then you could then you keep your
Speaker 2: what eye you could be you could keep fifteen, twenty
Speaker 2: thirty percent and I already get thirty percent. He says, yeah,
Speaker 2: but I mean this way, you'd get thirty percent, and
Speaker 2: you you could other people could get what they're already
Speaker 2: paying me in an astronomical amount of money plus giving
Speaker 2: me thirty percent. It's like, why would.
Speaker 1: I just take the thirty percent?
Speaker 2: Yeah? And his response was, oh, you guys, Oh you're
Speaker 2: you're you're in for it. You're sense at all. And
Speaker 2: it's true, it doesn't make any sense, but it is.
Speaker 2: Those are exactly the deals that Netflix is making. And
Speaker 2: when when Silicon Valley moved down to Hollywood, it's not
Speaker 2: like Hollywood changed, Silicon Valley changed. Like when Netflix is
Speaker 2: buying a studio that it doesn't need to buy for
Speaker 2: no reason, for zero reason, do you know that the
Speaker 2: allure of show business is too great? It doesn't many sense?
Speaker 2: But there.
Speaker 5: Okay, so Joan, you and I have a disagree. So
Speaker 5: there's a movie. There are two movies this year, very
Speaker 5: controversial in many ways. I think are the like the
Speaker 5: last movie in other words, like there are movies that
Speaker 5: were exciting to me in ways that movies haven't been
Speaker 5: in a long time. They're big, they have big canvases,
Speaker 5: they're beautifully cast, brilliantly said. They're long, they're involving, they're melodramatic,
Speaker 5: they're rich, kind of thing that made me love movies
Speaker 5: in the first place.
Speaker 1: I like them.
Speaker 5: You don't like them, But I do think that there's
Speaker 5: something very interesting that they represent the end of something
Speaker 5: and not the beginning. They're not a model for the future.
Speaker 5: They are the last gasp of a past that's one
Speaker 5: battle after another, which will likely win the Oscar for
Speaker 5: Best Picture and Marty Supreme, which will likely win Timothy
Speaker 5: Shallomy the Oscar for Best Actor. Do you agree with
Speaker 5: me that there is something, given that you are a
Speaker 5: moviegoer as I am, that there's something different about them
Speaker 5: in the scale, the ambition, the way they are made,
Speaker 5: that hearkens back to some golden age in some weird way.
Speaker 5: And then of course you look at it and you say, well,
Speaker 5: there's no This is not anything anyone's ever going to
Speaker 5: do again, because nothing can ever make enough money at
Speaker 5: the box office to justify the budgets that these things cost.
Speaker 3: Yes, and look up, there are things about both movies
Speaker 3: that I think are very well done, right. I mean,
Speaker 3: I think Shallomy probably deserves the Oscar right, but uh,
Speaker 3: you're right, first of all, just they feel like they're
Speaker 3: shot on film, you know. I mean, I don't mean
Speaker 3: that they're shot on film in the technical sense. They
Speaker 3: have that look. They have a cinematic vibe to them
Speaker 3: that does feel like a throwback, you know, sort of
Speaker 3: like they almost DePalma's cinematographer or whatever, you know, like
Speaker 3: that kind of feel the way. I agree with that,
Speaker 3: and I agree that both movies, particularly Marty Supreme, hold
Speaker 3: your attention, which is something these days. I will cut
Speaker 3: to the chase and simply say my my overarching problem
Speaker 3: with both of them is that I didn't like any
Speaker 3: of the characters like as people like, like Marty is
Speaker 3: a just a is a schmuck right now, I know
Speaker 3: he's supposed to be a schmuck, right, and and Leon
Speaker 3: DiCaprio and one about after another, he's a loser, and
Speaker 3: he's supposed to be a loser. But I also like,
Speaker 3: I don't want to put on my John podorit's hat here.
Speaker 3: But like I feel like at this moment in the
Speaker 3: plight of American jewry, to make a movie that was
Speaker 3: so redolent of pushy jew uh sort of obnoxiousness, is
Speaker 3: was just it was a it was a choice, you know,
Speaker 3: and it made me on Like watching Marty Supreme felt
Speaker 3: like in some ways, you know, one of my favorite
Speaker 3: German words is is fem shaman, which is the feeling
Speaker 3: of being embarrassed for somebody else in like all eight
Speaker 3: seasons of the Office are based on that feeling, right
Speaker 3: we just oh my god, I can't even look kind
Speaker 3: of feeling. Yeah, that's how I felt about this, Like,
Speaker 3: you know, sort of semi iconic are supposed to be
Speaker 3: iconic American jew for two hours in the movies, and
Speaker 3: I was like, is this really the time that we
Speaker 3: need to like do this?
Speaker 2: But wait, so Timothy shall Make plays a Jewish guy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, so.
Speaker 2: How it feels like jew face to me?
Speaker 3: He is Jewish?
Speaker 1: Really, yeah, He's halochically Jewish. His mother is Jewish.
Speaker 2: Okay, he just is this pure PRETENTI okay.
Speaker 5: Well, you know Jews are very can be very pretentious.
Speaker 5: I assure you that we you know you, you goam,
Speaker 5: do not have the corner on pretentiousness. I will defend
Speaker 5: it as follows versus a movie, we'll deal with the
Speaker 5: Jewish thing. I am almost of the opinion, though I
Speaker 5: understand the idea that it's a dislikable character, which I
Speaker 5: don't mind, because you know, the anti hero is a
Speaker 5: figure anything, you know, Tony Spratt, whatever. This is a
Speaker 5: movie that is a sports movie, a gangster movie, a
Speaker 5: kidnapping movie, a dog movie, a com a romantic comedy,
Speaker 5: a comedy about adultery, a crazy family story, a.
Speaker 1: Shootout, a this that rich guy.
Speaker 5: Screwing other people, theater in the nineteen fifty Everything in
Speaker 5: this movie. It's like, I almost have the if you
Speaker 5: don't like this, you don't like movies, because it moves
Speaker 5: like a freight train. It does forty things at once.
Speaker 5: They are all quite brilliantly rendered and talk about like
Speaker 5: the end of an end of career, like this is
Speaker 5: the last gasp. The guy who did the production design.
Speaker 5: This movie set in nineteen fifty two, so and it
Speaker 5: goes from Brooklyn to Manhattan, to Tokyo to Britain to
Speaker 5: Staten Island, and it the art direction, the incredible verisimilitude.
Speaker 3: I agree, that's all wonderful. I agree with.
Speaker 5: It was done by a man named Jack Fisk, who
Speaker 5: is eighty years old and was the production designer on
Speaker 5: bad Lands, Terence Alex's.
Speaker 1: First movie fifty four years ago.
Speaker 5: And did Days of Heaven. And like he's actually he's
Speaker 5: Sissy's basics husband. He is one of the greatest art
Speaker 5: directors who ever lived, and like this is his almost
Speaker 5: like culminating masterpiece of work. And he was one of
Speaker 5: these seventies new cinema geniuses. And here he is with
Speaker 5: this quite young director, Josh Saftie, who I think is
Speaker 5: forty and you know, making this movie. And Safti said
Speaker 5: something really interesting, which I thought, So, this is a
Speaker 5: movie huge cat, very big panoramic cast, goes to a
Speaker 5: lot of different settings. Safti was obsessed with making sure
Speaker 5: that the faces of the people that were seen on
Speaker 5: screen look like they existed in nineteen fifty two, because
Speaker 5: he said, when I see a period movie and I
Speaker 5: see someone, I look at them and I say, oh,
Speaker 5: that's a guy who could like be on the Lower
Speaker 5: East Side today and not in nineteen fifty two.
Speaker 1: Takes me out.
Speaker 5: I'm done, Like my suspension of disbelief is shot. And
Speaker 5: the care with which all of that is done. And
Speaker 5: he does this crazy casting like the big the famous
Speaker 5: thing is that he cast Kevin O'Leary of Shark Tank
Speaker 5: as the as the villain, someone who's never acted before,
Speaker 5: who is sensationally good.
Speaker 3: I wanted to dislike him, but I couldn't.
Speaker 5: And George Garvin, the Iceman basketball player of the eighties
Speaker 5: as the guy who owns the ping Pong parlor in
Speaker 5: Midtown and there's like all over the place. Like the
Speaker 5: casting is remarkable.
Speaker 3: So it's funny as a side note it because it reminds
Speaker 3: me of conversation you and I had where I was watching,
Speaker 3: you know, twenty minutes of Godfather for the twelfth billionth time,
Speaker 3: and I texted you to say, you know, one of
Speaker 3: the most remarkable things about this is that it's full
Speaker 3: of ugly people. Yeah, and like the the girls that
Speaker 3: Sonny is boffing, you know at the wedding whatever is
Speaker 3: is not a looker, and all that kind of stuff
Speaker 3: and the people and it was and you pointed out
Speaker 3: that it's this casting agent who did it all. But
Speaker 3: like that thing about looking like you belong in that
Speaker 3: period is a real thing, Like you know there.
Speaker 5: But Diane Kete, that's an interesting thing about Diane Keaton
Speaker 5: and the god Diane Keaton, the cutest woman in America
Speaker 5: in nineteen seventy two, whom Coppola deliberately planes up. She's
Speaker 5: given a bridge to make her teeth stick out a
Speaker 5: little bit. She's got a really ugly hairdoo like the
Speaker 5: same year she was in Sleeper, like Enchanting. He knew
Speaker 5: the whole point of Ka was that she was He
Speaker 5: wanted her because she was like this waspy New England girl.
Speaker 5: But she wasn't supposed to be some alluring sex goddess.
Speaker 5: She was like a prim example of something that he
Speaker 5: could have had if he hadn't gone gangster. But he
Speaker 5: got to keep her anyway.
Speaker 3: If he had.
Speaker 2: Another question, you guys text each other.
Speaker 5: It's Ashley Tisdale here we have it. Do you know
Speaker 5: about the Ashley Tisdale story? Oh my god, do you
Speaker 5: know about this? Ashley Tisdale, who was a teenage actress,
Speaker 5: was in high school musical and stuff, like that wrote
Speaker 5: this piece for The New York magazine about being uh
Speaker 5: kind of ostracized by her mommy group and how horrible
Speaker 5: this experience was.
Speaker 2: Why would she.
Speaker 5: Well, here's the thing. She says, she doesn't know why
Speaker 5: she was ostracized.
Speaker 2: Just to connect, you're saying I'm Ashley Tisdale in this.
Speaker 5: I'm saying you're feeling like Ashley Tisdale. But I now
Speaker 5: can explain to you why you either are Ashley Tisdale
Speaker 5: or not. Either you're Ashley Tisdale because in fact, your
Speaker 5: texting is so awful and you're such a terrible person
Speaker 5: that we are right to ostracize you and keep you
Speaker 5: out of our out of our group chat. Because that's
Speaker 5: what Hillary Duff's husband said in response to Ashley Tisdale's piece,
Speaker 5: that they all hated her because she was hateful and
Speaker 5: they didn't do anything to her. They just like put
Speaker 5: her off to one side because she was the poisoned person.
Speaker 5: Either that's you or it's not you. And you have
Speaker 5: to understand that we we text each other because we're embarrassed.
Speaker 3: Yeah by what, Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 1: We're embarrassed.
Speaker 2: You're a very You're much higher and are You're just
Speaker 2: jealous of me.
Speaker 5: That's it. I told her, that's what I'm saying. I'm
Speaker 5: not a lot of it has to do with Channel
Speaker 5: eleven in New York City.
Speaker 1: In nineteen seventy nine, and you didn't live here then.
Speaker 2: Now I have to reveal to Jonah that John and
Speaker 2: I text each other too, which means that John spends
Speaker 2: twenty six hours a day somehow what weird youtubes and
Speaker 2: thinking about Channel eleven. And I feel like this is
Speaker 2: one of the things that happens that it happens before
Speaker 2: the intervention where the friends gather and say, well, I
Speaker 2: know he's late because he was with you, like he
Speaker 2: goes with me, Oh my god, he's got he's clearly
Speaker 2: got a problem.
Speaker 3: So I knew that. I mean, like, like, if you
Speaker 3: listen to the commentary podcast, there's a significant portion of
Speaker 3: sentences from John that begin as I was texting with
Speaker 3: so and so and it wasn't me, and it wasn't you.
Speaker 3: I think John is just texting all the time.
Speaker 5: I you know, I don't really understand why I'm the
Speaker 5: bad guy.
Speaker 2: How did I get to be the bad You interpreted
Speaker 2: that as a bad guy?
Speaker 1: Would I would just say that my.
Speaker 5: Life is so bizarrely discontinuous that this is what happened
Speaker 5: to me yesterday morning. Somebody texts me yesterday morning at
Speaker 5: eight am, a friend of mine who grew up in
Speaker 5: New Orleans, to say, there's this absolutely horrible story. A
Speaker 5: synagogue in Jackson, Mississippi was set on fire. Two tours
Speaker 5: were certified. This is a place I've been dozens of
Speaker 5: times because I grew up nearby and have gone to
Speaker 5: barn bamtz is there? Why isn't the media covering the story?
Speaker 5: What is going on? Why is there no coverage of this?
Speaker 5: This is a shool that was targeted by the Ku
Speaker 5: Klux Klan in the fifties and set on fire. What's
Speaker 5: going on now? We're not talking about it? So I say, okay,
Speaker 5: let's see what I can do. I tweet it out
Speaker 5: and say why is anybody covering? And that my first
Speaker 5: I've been tweeting for fifteen years. This is like the
Speaker 5: first tweet I've ever done that genuinely went viral, like
Speaker 5: it was retweeted I think by now close to ten
Speaker 5: thousand times. It was commented on three or four thousand times,
Speaker 5: and by the middle of the day it had become
Speaker 5: a very big news story. And this is one of
Speaker 5: the few things I've ever been proud of on social
Speaker 5: media that I must have brought it to the attention
Speaker 5: of people in the know, who then started spreading it,
Speaker 5: and then news organizations started covering it. As this is
Speaker 5: going on, I just happened to be on Instagram and
Speaker 5: somebody serves up a Broadway Memories. One of the Instagram
Speaker 5: feeds I follow has a clip from how to Succeed
Speaker 5: in Business Without really Trying, Robert Morse doing the eleven
Speaker 5: o'clock number Brotherhood of Man. And in the middle of
Speaker 5: all this, as this most serious thing is going on,
Speaker 5: I write a tweet that says, Okay, I've decided, fifty
Speaker 5: years of going to the theater paying enormous attention, Brotherhood
Speaker 5: of Man is the best eleven o'clock number.
Speaker 1: A lot of people would say.
Speaker 5: It's Roses turn from Gypsy or sit Downiel rocking the boat,
Speaker 5: but I'd say it's Brotherhood of Man.
Speaker 1: That's who I am. I am a psychotic.
Speaker 5: I am like tweeting about Jackson, Mississippi and Brotherhood of
Speaker 5: Man in the same half hour. There is something wrong
Speaker 5: with me. I'm willing to accept it. I think you
Speaker 5: guys should be willing to accept it.
Speaker 3: So I don't know if it's my only viral tweet,
Speaker 3: but it's the only major viral tweet I've had in
Speaker 3: the last few years, certainly like in the last three
Speaker 3: or four years. And I think, I look the other
Speaker 3: day because it came up on my feet again. It's
Speaker 3: been viewed like eight million times or something like that.
Speaker 3: And you know what it was. It was me watching
Speaker 3: Morning ca bold news stuff flipping around and I got
Speaker 3: I've been upset. I was. I used to be obsessed
Speaker 3: with the Travago pitch man with the big teeth, and
Speaker 3: I'd be like, is anybody else freaked out by the
Speaker 3: Chrovago guy, particularly his teeth? And that was it. That
Speaker 3: was a whole tweet. And I did not know that
Speaker 3: this dude who has a certain like mentos the fresh
Speaker 3: maker vibe, right, he feels like he's just not quite
Speaker 3: American adjacent kind of thing. Turns out he's like the
Speaker 3: world's most famous football soccer coach and he's like the
Speaker 3: coach of Manchester United or something like that. And it
Speaker 3: went crazy viral, particularly among Europeans. But oh, look at
Speaker 3: these dumb Americans who think this guy who thinks whatever
Speaker 3: his name is I still don't remember is is just
Speaker 3: a pitch guy for Travago or whatever. And I still
Speaker 3: it's the It's the only thing I've ever tweeted where
Speaker 3: I really get mercilessly mocked that I do not mind
Speaker 3: in the slightest and I don't push back on it.
Speaker 3: I just think it's funny anyway.
Speaker 2: I wear it like a badge of honors.
Speaker 3: Sir, your booze mean nothing, for I've seen what you cheer.
Speaker 1: In nineteen ninety four, nineteen ninety five, No like nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety eight. I'm sorry.
Speaker 5: Rudy Giuliani announced as part of his second term efforts
Speaker 5: that he was defunding and closing the city run The
Speaker 5: City of New York had a television station, Channel twenty
Speaker 5: five WNYE that was paid for by the City of
Speaker 5: New York, and Rudy said, I'm closing it down, or
Speaker 5: we're not going to do this anymore. Didn't really happen,
Speaker 5: kind of still went on anyway. So I wrote a
Speaker 5: piece in favor of this decision for The New York Post.
Speaker 5: Because I am opposed to government support for telement for arts, right,
Speaker 5: I don't do not belie. You know, I'm against the
Speaker 5: Corporation for Public broad Casting. I'm against PBS, I'm against
Speaker 5: NPR like don't I don't Constitutionally, I don't think these
Speaker 5: things should exist. I don't think that taxpayer money should
Speaker 5: be used to support the speech of others. And and
Speaker 5: you know, this is like a very this is a
Speaker 5: very absolutist about this. And in the course of writing
Speaker 5: this piece, I said, and I don't even know who
Speaker 5: even watches this channel. All I see on if I
Speaker 5: turn it on is some weird Chinese show for kids
Speaker 5: with a monkey, and like a guy in a monkey
Speaker 5: outfit and he's talking to people, and it's in Chinese,
Speaker 5: and the subtitles are very unclear, and I don't even
Speaker 5: know what the hell this thing is, like something like
Speaker 5: that basically, so it shouldn't even be there, because that's
Speaker 5: all it's airing at some show with a monkey. And
Speaker 5: then the post gets five hundred letters which are like,
Speaker 5: you idiot, this is the monkey King. This is like
Speaker 5: the Lord of the Rings of China or like you know,
Speaker 5: or like the you know, the Don Quixote of China.
Speaker 1: It's like the most.
Speaker 5: Important myth of all Chinese culture and you are so
Speaker 5: stupid you don't even know it and all of that,
Speaker 5: and I don't know. I sort of felt embarrassed that
Speaker 5: I know. But on the other hand, it really was
Speaker 5: like a stupid show with a guy in terrible monkey
Speaker 5: you know, like a monkey costume, and did not need
Speaker 5: to be on public television.
Speaker 1: So I don't know what by the City of New.
Speaker 3: York, like Rob probably doesn't do. You know, there's a
Speaker 3: certain let's put it this way, quality beats quantity, but
Speaker 3: there's a certain quality to quantity that all its own.
Speaker 3: John and I write a lot and have written a lot,
Speaker 3: so I don't know if you have one, but like,
Speaker 3: what was the most surprised I'll go first, what was
Speaker 3: the most surprising backlash you got for something you wrote?
Speaker 3: Mine was I mailed in a column this fifteen year
Speaker 3: yars ago. Now on how because I discovered this amazing
Speaker 3: statistic and people can look it up right, Feral cats
Speaker 3: or outdoor cats or just the combination of them kill
Speaker 3: hundreds of millions, if not billions upon billions of birds
Speaker 3: in America every year. I mean, just the numbers are staggering,
Speaker 3: And like the thing I hit on was like in
Speaker 3: Minnesota alone. The estimate was like four hundred million birds
Speaker 3: a year die from it. And I did this thing,
Speaker 3: you know, and with a jokey title called like first
Speaker 3: kill all the cats or something like that, and I
Speaker 3: wrote about people started writing me the most vicious hate
Speaker 3: mail of about Okay, are you going to clean up
Speaker 3: my car when the birds shit on it? I mean
Speaker 3: like they just covered the entire water front of possible
Speaker 3: objections to it, And editors were like, we need you
Speaker 3: to write something addressing this because the backlash is just
Speaker 3: like through the roof and and like so to this day,
Speaker 3: like I'm like, I am more scared of pissing off
Speaker 3: supporters of feral cats than I am about, you know,
Speaker 3: pissing off MAGA or or or the resistance side or
Speaker 3: any political constituency. Because it was just the sheer vitual
Speaker 3: I'm coming to your house and I'm going to kill you.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: It was like so much of that kind of stuff.
Speaker 3: But you wouldn't expect cat lovers, yeah exactly from from
Speaker 3: not even indoor cat lovers be.
Speaker 2: Like lonely sixty year old women pulling up their superw forester.
Speaker 2: You know. Yeah.
Speaker 5: Anyway, so so do you have one, or maybe it's
Speaker 5: a maybe it's a version of a television like a
Speaker 5: pro show.
Speaker 2: You. Yeah, look, I I want to I I wish
Speaker 2: everybody well. I hope everybody. I'm not. I'm not. I
Speaker 2: don't write any hate columns the way Jonah does. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I'm like, you know, I try to, you know, bring
Speaker 2: people together. I guess there's so much division now. I uh,
Speaker 2: we got a lot of stuff. You get a lot
Speaker 2: of letters when you do a TV show, And my
Speaker 2: favorite one was the first series We ever did. I mean,
Speaker 2: I have told you the story already and we The
Speaker 2: joke was a simple joke. It's a bunch of guys
Speaker 2: sitting around talking about when when it is you're going
Speaker 2: to settle down, When you're gonna settle down, And one
Speaker 2: guy who's kind of the jerk of the of the
Speaker 2: group says, listen, you know it's okay when you're our age. Now,
Speaker 2: you you see a lot of women, you date, you know,
Speaker 2: you go out, you you get you know, you play
Speaker 2: the field. That's okay. But there comes a point in
Speaker 2: your life when you are ready to uh make a
Speaker 2: commitment and you're ready to settle down and you're ready
Speaker 2: to start the next phase of your life and you're
Speaker 2: ready to find that thing called love, and that is
Speaker 2: when you fly to the Philippines and you buy yourself
Speaker 2: a wife. This was early nineties, big joke, laugh everything,
Speaker 2: and like the show premieres nine months later, it's six
Speaker 2: months later and we get and then so that episode
Speaker 2: promotes like I don't know, within a year, right, and
Speaker 2: we get an angry letter from the anti Asian American
Speaker 2: Hate something, you know, Guy Aoki was the guy's name.
Speaker 2: He used to run this, you know group, pressure group,
Speaker 2: outraged that we had done this mail order bride's thing.
Speaker 2: And it was like three paragraphs. Would you have said, well,
Speaker 2: when you want to fly to Tel Aviv and you'll
Speaker 2: put some shekels down? Would you have said all the
Speaker 2: things that would you have said? This is just the
Speaker 2: same thing, And then it winds up. It's it's a
Speaker 2: it's a big wrap up paragraphs And for your information,
Speaker 2: the Philippines outlawed male order brides in the early nineteen nineties.
Speaker 2: Our show premier in nineteen ninety three, Like we missed
Speaker 2: the window by six months. But that's the angriest that's
Speaker 2: the one I remember. That was like the one we
Speaker 2: talked to Ad laughed about.
Speaker 3: All right, pod before you go, just because that reminds
Speaker 3: me and I won't all forget go ahead. I've now
Speaker 3: heard Jacob frye, we're not getting back to Minnesota, right.
Speaker 3: But Jacob fry the mayor of Minneapolis. He I've heard
Speaker 3: him do it two or three times now, including this
Speaker 3: morning on NPR where he'll say, and he's been saying
Speaker 3: it for the last few days. We have a low
Speaker 3: crime city. I mean, so far this year, we've only
Speaker 3: had two shootings. We're recording this on January twelve. It's
Speaker 3: like I remember Ron Brown when he was on he
Speaker 3: was on Meet the Press in the early Clinton administration
Speaker 3: and he had some terrible you know, it's some scam
Speaker 3: about taxes evasion or something like that, and Tim Russert
Speaker 3: interviewed him and he said, so are you going to
Speaker 3: come clean about all this? And Ron Brown said, Tim,
Speaker 3: I paid those taxes last year. And he was recording
Speaker 3: like on January three, and he had paid them on
Speaker 3: December twenty eighth or something like that. Anyway, I'm sorry,
Speaker 3: go on.
Speaker 5: No, but I had I had instructive experiences in like
Speaker 5: mass responses as a young journalist that were that were valuable.
Speaker 1: So my first job was as a researcher.
Speaker 5: At Time magazine. And Time magazine at the time had
Speaker 5: four million readers. And my sisters actually had worked at
Speaker 5: Newsweek a couple of years earlier and had start in
Speaker 5: the letters department. And these magazines were so popular and
Speaker 5: so paid attention to that they literally had departments to
Speaker 5: read the mail, four or five people working in them
Speaker 5: to read the mail and to answer some of the letters,
Speaker 5: particularly if they had objections, factual objections or you know,
Speaker 5: question something that was wrong in the magazine. And so
Speaker 5: I knew about what they did, and I knew that
Speaker 5: there were egalized on this. And I was the researcher
Speaker 5: on a little story about a giant dam that was
Speaker 5: being built on the border. This is this is how
Speaker 5: you know, like it's almost like a joke that there
Speaker 5: was actually a story about this in Time magazine. A
Speaker 5: giant dam was being built on the border of Brazil
Speaker 5: and Paraguay and it was like the third biggest dam
Speaker 5: in the world. Still got a story, a forty line,
Speaker 5: one column story, and so one of the details that
Speaker 5: it was it's this size, fifty thousand people are working
Speaker 5: on it. They're pouring two hundred zillion, you know, cubic
Speaker 5: meters of cement. Da da da da da. And it
Speaker 5: was published and we got five thousand letters because it's
Speaker 5: not cement. Cement is the origin product when you turn
Speaker 5: it into something that is used to make a dam.
Speaker 5: It is concrete. And it wasn't one letter, and it
Speaker 5: wasn't five letters, it was five thousand letters. And so
Speaker 5: you know, I didn't know this, and nobody toe and
Speaker 5: so now don't get off the heads, right, and that.
Speaker 1: There are people in because you know this is who
Speaker 1: times read.
Speaker 5: You know, people are like, oh my god, he said
Speaker 5: cement when he meant concrete.
Speaker 1: I mean, what kind of idiot is that?
Speaker 5: But it shows you something very important about what happened
Speaker 5: when you write about or talk about highly technical things
Speaker 5: that you do this and people who care, really care
Speaker 5: and really don't like it for sure when you make mistakes.
Speaker 5: And the other thing happened two or three years later
Speaker 5: where I wrote a review of Top Gun and I
Speaker 5: said that a tragedy occurs to Goose's best friend, his tailgunner,
Speaker 5: Goot to Maverick's best friend, his tailgunner, Goose. And again
Speaker 5: this was in either the Washington Times or an Insight,
Speaker 5: not particularly highly read publications, hundreds and hundreds of letters.
Speaker 5: He's not a tailgunner. He's a weapons opera. I can't
Speaker 5: remember what his title was, but that I was I
Speaker 5: had shown unbelievable offense to our military, to its standard,
Speaker 5: to the history of warfare, and to everything good and
Speaker 5: true and beautiful by referring to him him as a
Speaker 5: tail gunner when he was actually a secondary weapons optional
Speaker 5: military specialist.
Speaker 1: Or something like that. And again I did not object
Speaker 1: or I did not feel like I was being you know,
Speaker 1: overwhelmed by social media hostility, because of course whoever said
Speaker 1: this was correct and I was wrong, and so I.
Speaker 5: Should be able to admit that. But again it mattered.
Speaker 5: Think there are things that matter to people, that really
Speaker 5: matter to people. And when I watch a movie or
Speaker 5: a TV show about a newspaper or a magazine that
Speaker 5: features preposterous and you know, falsities about how the newspaper
Speaker 5: is done on a daily basis or something like that,
Speaker 5: and I'm like, Oh, couldn't they hire somebody like just
Speaker 5: to do a little I had this with nobody likes this.
Speaker 5: The Netflix show about the interfaith couple with a rabbi
Speaker 5: and they get they got the Jewish stuff all wrong.
Speaker 5: And I'm like, couldn't they hire someone like this is
Speaker 5: the oldest religion in the world. Like find somebody who
Speaker 5: can tell you what a rabbi would wear, you know,
Speaker 5: or something like that.
Speaker 1: And so that was valuable.
Speaker 5: That's not like something where I got, you know, rained
Speaker 5: down upon that I feel was on you know, was
Speaker 5: was was unjust.
Speaker 3: So it's funny. I like because I came of age writing,
Speaker 3: you know, I did some freelance stuff in the nineteen nineties,
Speaker 3: but you know, with NRO, I was just blogging every
Speaker 3: single day, and I would start to acquire you know,
Speaker 3: you probably remember I had my my Air Power guy
Speaker 3: and my Middle East guy right now, these guys who
Speaker 3: would like take me under their wing and say, n
Speaker 3: that's not quite right. Here's you know whatever. And it
Speaker 3: became essentially intellectual technical sources. And it was great for me.
Speaker 3: But like it's one of these things that like you
Speaker 3: only start to know it's one of the things that
Speaker 3: the experience actually matters, because you'll get young writers who's say,
Speaker 3: going to write about this, and like, because you've been
Speaker 3: attacked with people with torches because you wrote something thirty
Speaker 3: you can say, now, make sure you don't say this right,
Speaker 3: you know, or keep in mind that the you know
Speaker 3: that people take the debate about seat belts on school
Speaker 3: buses crazy seriously, which is a fact in fact true. Like,
Speaker 3: start offering your opinions about whether school buses should have
Speaker 3: seat belts and you'll get a lot of interesting mail.
Speaker 2: I was having dinner in Santa Monica a million years ago,
Speaker 2: and I don't know, somebody came up to me. I
Speaker 2: guess they recognized you from something i'd done. Said are
Speaker 2: you Are you Rob Long? And I said yes, I
Speaker 2: just want to tell you we are huge. He was
Speaker 2: out the business center he's at with one of his employees.
Speaker 2: We are huge, huge fans of Jonah Goldberg. Really that's great.
Speaker 2: Well I'll tell him was yeah, we watched where we
Speaker 2: spent all George Town on the corner and I forget
Speaker 2: what he goes I when guy said I'm kind of
Speaker 2: Joanah's real estate guy, and then the other well, actually
Speaker 2: I'm his real estate guy.
Speaker 1: Okay, but can I give you a Can I give
Speaker 1: a cautionary tale about the guy? About that guy?
Speaker 5: So, also on the corner, our old friend Jim Garrity
Speaker 5: had a guy whom we called Obi Wan Kenobi. Remember this,
Speaker 5: and so this was when Jim wanted to talk about
Speaker 5: the real inner workings of Republican politics. He would say,
Speaker 5: I just got a call from my source, obi Wan Kenobi,
Speaker 5: and I call him Obi Wan Kenobi, and he's forgotten
Speaker 5: more about Republican policies I've ever known. And here's his
Speaker 5: analysis of what's going on. Here's why Romney is going
Speaker 5: to win, Here's why you know Jim Carter is going
Speaker 5: to win in New Jersey. Who knows it, doesn't matter
Speaker 5: what the thing was. But he was very learned and
Speaker 5: sounded great and all of this, and was often really
Speaker 5: very very wrong, very wrong. And when Obi Wan Kenobi died,
Speaker 5: Jim revealed.
Speaker 1: Who Obi Wan Kenobi was.
Speaker 5: And he was my old boss from the White House,
Speaker 5: Tony Dolan, the head of speech writing under Reagan, whom
Speaker 5: I loved. He was a lovable fun quite a brilliant reporter,
Speaker 5: baracterly good speech writer, complete lunatic, I mean, and everybody
Speaker 5: who knows him will tell you this, Like he was
Speaker 5: a complete lunatic, lovable, talented off his rocker, and like, yeah,
Speaker 5: he knew a lot of stuff, but you would never
Speaker 5: in a million. And so Jim, I think, in innocence
Speaker 5: thought looked at Tony's credits and life and everything like
Speaker 5: that and thought, my god, he's like, you know, he's
Speaker 5: really a wise man. And the problem was that I
Speaker 5: knew him.
Speaker 1: Once I found this out, I was like, I felt
Speaker 1: a little.
Speaker 5: Sorry for Jim because like you just had to take
Speaker 5: anything that Tony ever said right with a roughly like
Speaker 5: a Santa Monica beach is worth grain of salt, Like.
Speaker 3: That's fair, but like like that's like my airpower guy
Speaker 3: was like a thirty years right, you know, guy who I.
Speaker 1: Trust your airpower.
Speaker 5: I just say that sometimes even there, you gotta be sure.
Speaker 5: And of course you were. You were using him as
Speaker 5: a backstop. And Jim didn't say he was right or wrong.
Speaker 1: He was just providing Tony inside analysis.
Speaker 2: But we've all had this experience. I'm sure everyone has.
Speaker 2: If you you you read an article in the newspaper
Speaker 2: about something that you.
Speaker 7: Know, a subject or an event where you were in
Speaker 7: the room or you know exactly what happened, and the
Speaker 7: account is basically wrong, and you think, though, does this
Speaker 7: mean that everything else is wrong or somewhat not accurate.
Speaker 2: And the answer to that question is yes, which is
Speaker 2: always yes, always yes.
Speaker 3: It's Crichton has a very famous great essay on this
Speaker 3: about like Feller faster whatever it is, but like it's
Speaker 3: this thing about how anytime you know about a subject, Yeah,
Speaker 3: at least one or two things just wildly wrong in
Speaker 3: the article.
Speaker 2: We used to have this. We should imitate old writers
Speaker 2: in the room. You would, you know, complain, you know,
Speaker 2: you bump into them and write a school meetings. I
Speaker 2: wrote sixty two, mister Rand's I can't get a meeting?
Speaker 2: Would you ever hire any older writers? I? You know,
Speaker 2: we know what a button is, nobody knows what a
Speaker 2: button is, all that stuff. And uh, not only have
Speaker 2: I become one, but I remember once finding meeting a
Speaker 2: very old writer who's very distinguished writer in New York
Speaker 2: and and having lunch with him and and he and
Speaker 2: and this is way a group working a place, and
Speaker 2: he'd actually said something very close to me, like, you know,
Speaker 2: what's what's crazy to me is I wrote sixty two
Speaker 2: somethings I can't get a meeting. My agent tells me
Speaker 2: I can't get a meeting. It's like, really, who's your agent,
Speaker 2: and he mentioned somebody who I thought at that point
Speaker 2: I was pretty sure had been deceased for years. And
Speaker 2: then after lunch then these two younger women came and
Speaker 2: sat with me and they said, oh, so you know
Speaker 2: this guy again, because you know, he's really helping us
Speaker 2: because he's a you know, he knows everybody. So we've
Speaker 2: written this pilot and we're working on something and he's
Speaker 2: he's going to help us get this pilot read and made.
Speaker 2: And I was like, oh, great, I said, is he
Speaker 2: also building a time machine, because that's what you're gonna
Speaker 2: Oh I didn't say that. I thought that, yeah it is. Well,
Speaker 2: sometimes you know the great guy, but like you know,
Speaker 2: time moves on for all of us, the Reaper comes
Speaker 2: for all of us.
Speaker 1: Whatever. So I think I've come to the end.
Speaker 3: Although actually, just a quick shout out today, I just
Speaker 3: saw on the twitters from that Danny Duraney account that
Speaker 3: we all find today fifty five years ago all the
Speaker 3: Family premiere. So that and we don't need to talk
Speaker 3: about Rob Reiner really because that's just too much of
Speaker 3: a downer to end on.
Speaker 1: But I fifty five years ago fifty arguably the most
Speaker 1: important show in the history of television, well one of them.
Speaker 1: If you if you have to make a list of.
Speaker 2: Ten, I just I just made that sound.
Speaker 3: But if you think about it, like hey here close
Speaker 3: rob off the top rope and defensive.
Speaker 5: Actually, I think about if you think about a show
Speaker 5: that changed everything about television after its premiere, All in
Speaker 5: the Family was probably that show more than any other
Speaker 5: show that it introduced an entirely new framework for how
Speaker 5: to have success in television with a contemporary story that
Speaker 5: actually touched on real world themes that was not what
Speaker 5: the sitcom was like or anything in television.
Speaker 1: Was like.
Speaker 2: Good Punky Browser story.
Speaker 1: Punky Brewster then took that into the orphan realm.
Speaker 2: Yeah. The actor who played Punky Brewster's named so let
Speaker 2: moon Fry. She was like, you don't know it is
Speaker 2: a Punky Brewster was a young girl, and she was
Speaker 2: during a period where all these like orphans and urchins
Speaker 2: were being adopted by older creepily by older men, older
Speaker 2: rich men, and she was one of them. The Different
Speaker 2: Strokes was a version all that stuff. By the way,
Speaker 2: I saw a great different Strokes mean, which was the
Speaker 2: entire cast at Different Strokes, But they had they had
Speaker 2: airbrushed one side of their face kind of paralyzed in
Speaker 2: different ways. It was combat bane and all the entire
Speaker 2: act cast of different strokes as if they just had
Speaker 2: a stroke. Yeah, uh, pretty good. But so so then
Speaker 2: years later, you know, this is like it was on
Speaker 2: And then a friend of mine we were having lunchins
Speaker 2: with towards so many other people, and some made a
Speaker 2: punky Breucher joke and one of the guys said, hey, listen,
Speaker 2: I uh, i'm I had a great meeting with so Lay.
Speaker 2: She's coming back. She wants to a show. I had
Speaker 2: a great meet with Soilay last week. Let me tell
Speaker 2: you a punky brewster. And then he does that thing
Speaker 2: that men do to show that she's you know, got
Speaker 2: a rack, and we kind of stopped talking. I mean,
Speaker 2: because you got to use that, right, You got to
Speaker 2: use that. Everybody would be thinking that, right, you got
Speaker 2: to use that like, oh dear lord, oh dear lord. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I wasn't ready. I wasn't ready. I didn't want to
Speaker 2: eat and show business that much.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that whole genre just to and and just to
Speaker 5: conclude with the was if you think about it, the
Speaker 5: creepiness of the adopted or Orphans shows family affair, Bill
Speaker 5: and mister French living in the house with Sissy, Buffy
Speaker 5: and Jody, Like, what the hell was going on there?
Speaker 5: Where were the social workers making sure that there was
Speaker 5: nothing untoward going on there?
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's it's it's it's the liberaci liberaci phase where
Speaker 2: you're like, nobody noticed something weird.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's like, uh, mister French does not seem to
Speaker 5: have an interest in adult ladies.
Speaker 1: At least Bill.
Speaker 5: Pretended to date or there was always a plot where
Speaker 5: he was dating someone.
Speaker 1: But yeah, so very strange.
Speaker 3: I do wonder like, is it possible, you know, look,
Speaker 3: there's always a time lag where Hollywood picks up stuff
Speaker 3: that is derivative of people's lived experience from ten or
Speaker 3: fifteen years earlier. I wonder if like there were a
Speaker 3: bunch of people who grew up during World War you know,
Speaker 3: around World War Two who lost parents and there were
Speaker 3: a lot more sort of mainstream kind.
Speaker 1: Of like I live with my uncle.
Speaker 3: Yeah, or if in experiences like like kind of like
Speaker 3: percolated through in a way that seemed really.
Speaker 5: Absolutely that has to be true. In other words, like
Speaker 5: that you were out of the goodness of your heart,
Speaker 5: you brought children into your home. That was something praiseworthy
Speaker 5: and nobody should gainsay it.
Speaker 2: And but there's there's something dirty about it. I mean,
Speaker 2: I mean the cliche New York rich, New York bachelor
Speaker 2: uncle can only mean one thing. And I think what
Speaker 2: happens in TV they're like, well, yeah, but he's like yeah,
Speaker 2: he's got he lives with an English guy who helps
Speaker 2: him out, who serves him. But it's perfectly normal. You
Speaker 2: just keep saying it's perfect, it's fine. It's like, yeah,
Speaker 2: Conrad Bain is a rich widower and he adopts two
Speaker 2: the little black boys, and they they call him dead
Speaker 2: and they run to his limo and he opened the
Speaker 2: limo door and they run to it, like yeah, it's
Speaker 2: prefetly fine, it's perfectly fine and well altered. It view
Speaker 2: just lighting it a slightly different way, so you charge
Speaker 2: through it. You charged through it.
Speaker 3: Like then there is don't even get me started on
Speaker 3: Bruce Wayne and his ward.
Speaker 5: Oh well you can't even let's not start with the ward.
Speaker 5: But I did want to I'll conclude on this, which
Speaker 5: is one of the most I didn't know that it
Speaker 5: happened at the time because I wasn't watching sitcoms the whatever.
Speaker 5: So it turns out there was this episode of Fresh
Speaker 5: Prince of bel Air. Okay at the whatever that moment was,
Speaker 5: so there was a fresh Prince of bel Air and
Speaker 5: of course Will Smith is the Fresh Prince of bel Air.
Speaker 5: Huge hit, right. He's again sort of a opted by
Speaker 5: this rich families from Philadelphia. It comes out to his
Speaker 5: Reledi's living there in this house and there's an episode
Speaker 5: about how his father, his deadbeat dad played by Ben Vereen,
Speaker 5: shows up and at the end of the which I
Speaker 5: only saw it like six months ago, and at the
Speaker 5: end of this episode, you know, he's got the hearty
Speaker 5: guy who is his adoptive father. And they turns out
Speaker 5: that Ben Vereen, his dad, has showed up to try
Speaker 5: to get money out of the father, out of the
Speaker 5: adoptive father, and he and Will Smith have a confrontation.
Speaker 5: Will Smith says, get the hell out of here. I
Speaker 5: don't ever want to see you again, and then he
Speaker 5: turns to his adoptive father and bursts into tears and says,
Speaker 5: why didn't he love me? Why didn't he love me?
Speaker 5: And that he sobs. His adoptive father grabs him, holds him.
Speaker 1: That's the end of the episode.
Speaker 5: Yeah, like so that was some weird thing where whoever
Speaker 5: made Fresh Prince of bel Air was like maybe or
Speaker 5: Will Smith said, I want to show I can cry
Speaker 5: on camera. I don't know what happened, but it's sort
Speaker 5: of like this, WHOA hold up a little bit there,
Speaker 5: you know, like that's a that's a that's a little
Speaker 5: close for comfort, you know with a show about a rich.
Speaker 3: But that's the thing. What you don't know because you're
Speaker 3: watching it thirty years later, is that that could have
Speaker 3: been on a very special Fresh Prince.
Speaker 5: Yeah, there you go, the ultimate Usually the very special
Speaker 5: ones were where they're getting molested by somebody.
Speaker 3: But yes, well you remember the one with different strokes
Speaker 3: where the guy tries to molest Arnold and his friend.
Speaker 3: You know who the molester was. It was played by
Speaker 3: mister Carlson from w k rp Oh, Gordon Jump. Yeah
Speaker 3: it hit hard.
Speaker 5: Yeah, all right, well we have to gott Scott, We're
Speaker 5: gonna has to go. We've we've we've come around to
Speaker 5: the most salacious and depressing ending that we could possibly achieve.
Speaker 2: Although Gordon Jump, you gotta admit kind of hot, right, Okay,
Speaker 2: Bailey or.
Speaker 5: Or Bailey Bailey not not Jennifer.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I gotta go with Bailey.
Speaker 3: I'm also a Meranda over Ginger guy, but that's me
Speaker 3: me too, all right.
Speaker 2: Well I think that's that's that's what that's cannon at
Speaker 2: this point.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay.
Speaker 2: Also that's the leat moon Fry.
Speaker 5: Oh see you guys.
Speaker 2: Wait wait wait, centering, breath, centering, cleansing breath. All right,
Speaker 2: now start