Speaker 1: What do we do we get to begin this or
Speaker 1: what are we doing?
Speaker 2: So I just start?
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I mean okay, let's turn somehow make words.
Speaker 3: Go now, I mean why are you here? There must
Speaker 3: be a reason for you to be here. Yes, I'm
Speaker 3: here to fight for truth and justice in the American way.
Speaker 4: You're gonna end up fighting every elected official in this country.
Speaker 2: All right, well, here we are. It's August. This law
Speaker 2: culture of John pod Horns in New York. Somewhere in
Speaker 2: the wilds of New Jersey, I believe is rob Long, Jersey.
Speaker 2: As we speak.
Speaker 1: I am here. I am in Princeton, Jersey.
Speaker 2: A Princeton Jersey, a beautiful place, is a problematic institution,
Speaker 2: architecturally significant, and it has a train called the Dinky.
Speaker 2: So these are some of the measure.
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, I mean architectual significant.
Speaker 5: And and it foisted Woodrow Wilson on our country, so
Speaker 5: it has a lot to answer too.
Speaker 1: True. Yeah, I mean architectually significant.
Speaker 2: Architectually notable for its.
Speaker 1: Beautiful I guess yes. Okay, they all look the same.
Speaker 2: There we go, And of course in Washington in his lair,
Speaker 2: Jonah Goldberg, how's it going.
Speaker 1: It's good?
Speaker 2: How are you I'm good.
Speaker 5: I was just before we got on. I don't know.
Speaker 5: This is probably gonna get me in a lot of trouble.
Speaker 5: You may have maybe you've had this experience, maybe you haven't.
Speaker 5: But like remember, like in high school, dudes used to
Speaker 5: say about girls, oh she's good from far, but far
Speaker 5: from good, Like if you saw him at a distance,
Speaker 5: you thought they were looking when you got close. I
Speaker 5: think we needed a term for that. That for people
Speaker 5: who are really attractive in the little thumbnail avatar for
Speaker 5: their Google profile or their Twitter profile, and then you
Speaker 5: click on it to get a better look at them,
Speaker 5: and you're like, oh, oh no, back back to the
Speaker 5: thumbnail with you.
Speaker 2: Well, I don't know, thumbnails I'm offended. I'm deeply offended
Speaker 2: because obviously you're referring to me, and so I understand
Speaker 2: that I look better very little than I do in full.
Speaker 6: So John, right now, I mean, our listeners can't hear,
Speaker 6: but I can't see, but I can describe that you
Speaker 6: are in what we call soft focus.
Speaker 1: I would say that you are in.
Speaker 6: What some actresses would demand themselves to be filmed in constantly.
Speaker 2: You're right, as I look at our zoom here, I
Speaker 2: have gone into some weird pixelated fourth. It's like the
Speaker 2: Brood from television in nineteen seventy seven.
Speaker 1: Do not adjust focus.
Speaker 2: I didn't adjust focus in the first place.
Speaker 1: I don't touch anything because right now it's worth.
Speaker 2: The internet is working poorly in some facts, which which
Speaker 2: is which is nothing new here on.
Speaker 1: Glock it is.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's any any technical problems.
Speaker 6: It's a Fade don Away kind of situation. You got
Speaker 6: a fade down Away thing going on where she would
Speaker 6: always demand that her shot be a soft focused and
Speaker 6: she would go and check it just to make sure,
Speaker 6: just to make sure that she was in fact in
Speaker 6: soft focus.
Speaker 2: Okay, So here's the interesting thing about Fade down Away.
Speaker 2: It's weird you mentioned fade dun Away because.
Speaker 6: From a millions ago on this podcast, it seems like
Speaker 6: it's perfectly on brand.
Speaker 2: Interestingly relating to the little picture of beauty versus the
Speaker 2: big thing.
Speaker 1: Sure.
Speaker 2: Uh, Chris Starwalt texts me out of nowhere and says,
Speaker 2: what was up with Fade down Away? Did people ever
Speaker 2: think that she was attractive? And I was like, well, yeah,
Speaker 2: she was unbelievably beautiful. I do think that I never
Speaker 2: found her sexy, but she was beautiful. And he was like,
Speaker 2: I don't know, and I said, actually she was a
Speaker 2: really good actress, famously difficult person. And then I think
Speaker 2: I may have told We're now in the glop section
Speaker 2: where I say, I think I may have told this
Speaker 2: story before, but I will now tell the story again.
Speaker 2: Stipulated stipulated, Yes, all stories may have been told before that.
Speaker 2: I had a friend who was a publicist for CBS
Speaker 2: and Fade Down Away did a sitcom on CBS in
Speaker 2: like nineteen ninety.
Speaker 1: Four, something like this is my story, but go ahead.
Speaker 2: No, no, this is my story about my friend whose
Speaker 2: initials were BA, who was a publicist at CBS, who
Speaker 2: took who was taking Fade down Away to the as
Speaker 2: it was called the Critics Press Tour at the Universe.
Speaker 2: This one was at the Universal City Hotel, the Universal
Speaker 2: the show at Universal City, and I was present for
Speaker 2: it and my friend, who I will leave not unnamed
Speaker 2: because it's her story. It's thirty one years later, but
Speaker 2: she doesn't the taurus of having exposed. Faye dun Away said,
Speaker 2: before I do my panel, I have to go to
Speaker 2: the bathroom. Can you show me the bathroom? My friend
Speaker 2: takes her into the bathroom, Faye Dunaway is wearing a
Speaker 2: tube dress, very skinny, you know, and like cleaning dress.
Speaker 2: And she she calls to my friend, she's excuse me.
Speaker 2: My friend is out waiting for her, you know, like
Speaker 2: outside the stall, and she says, I'm having some trouble
Speaker 2: adjusting everything. I need your help. And basically my friend
Speaker 2: had to wipe fade done away and shortly thereafter left
Speaker 2: the profession. Well that works public relations.
Speaker 6: Although to be honest, that was not the least dignified
Speaker 6: thing he did.
Speaker 1: She public relations, she did.
Speaker 2: At least it was a she.
Speaker 6: It was the top twenty humiliating omens, but not not
Speaker 6: number one I did. I already tell you, Mike fate
Speaker 6: Don it's just we're to lose all.
Speaker 1: Of our listeners this early.
Speaker 6: I will tell you that she The show she was in,
Speaker 6: I think it was the CBS was with Bob Urick,
Speaker 6: the actor Robert Urick, and she played his literary agent,
Speaker 6: and he played a famous novelist who had moved to
Speaker 6: I don't know, rural somewhere and she moved with him
Speaker 6: and kind of a green acres thing, and and it
Speaker 6: was a comedy. You have our comedy, which so somebody
Speaker 6: had some kind of weird brain aneurysm in CBS who said,
Speaker 6: I know Fate down Away for this sitcom, So they
Speaker 6: put her in a sitcom. Of course, they test focus
Speaker 6: group everything, and they focused group the first half of
Speaker 6: the season, and the show's not doing very well. Everybody
Speaker 6: loves Urick. Nobody loves her. Everybody hates her. They hate her,
Speaker 6: they hate her. Dials down on Faye down Away, dials down,
Speaker 6: way down. Everything they tried, they couldn't get her dials up.
Speaker 6: And this show knew they needed to do something, because
Speaker 6: you know CBS, especially reallies entirely on audience reads arch
Speaker 6: to make the decision. So they decided to do an
Speaker 6: entire episode that they knew was going to be focus
Speaker 6: grouped in which fate Alick has to take care of
Speaker 6: a box of puppies.
Speaker 1: The theory being that puppy.
Speaker 6: Everyone has puppies, so like she will bask in the
Speaker 6: glow of the dials up warm feeling of a box
Speaker 6: of puppies. And so they took it and they focus
Speaker 6: grouped it, and it turns out that everybody hated the
Speaker 6: puppies too.
Speaker 1: Like she was so toxic.
Speaker 6: She was so toxic that she made puppies unlikable, and
Speaker 6: I think that.
Speaker 1: That's pretty that's uh, you know, that is an accomplishment.
Speaker 1: Put it that way.
Speaker 2: Got to give her, gotta give her credit. I mean,
Speaker 2: the thing about her was that she was willing to
Speaker 2: play difficult, unpleasant and unsympathetic women at a time when
Speaker 2: that was something that a lot of actresses would not do. Right,
Speaker 2: she was Evelent Mulray in Chinatown, famously unpleasant. Of course,
Speaker 2: her oscar was for playing a like a gorgon the
Speaker 2: Network that Diana Christensen in in Network. Uh, and you
Speaker 2: know Bonnie and Bonnie and Clyde, and she that was her.
Speaker 2: And of course then Joan Crawford like she played unsympathetic
Speaker 2: people and uh, and obviously that was typecasting.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: The first thing about her is she never had to
Speaker 5: ask the director, what's my motivation?
Speaker 1: Anyway, She stayed in character the whole time. In fact,
Speaker 1: she's still I have.
Speaker 2: To say, I'm very puzzled by the fact that Starwalt
Speaker 2: was somehow allergic or unable to appreciate her beauty, because
Speaker 2: she was certainly astonishing.
Speaker 1: Do you think.
Speaker 6: That's a thing though, I mean, I mean, just to
Speaker 6: broaden the conversation to include our listeners to the twenty
Speaker 6: first century.
Speaker 2: Sidney sweety yeah, can we just we can.
Speaker 1: Okay? Can I can I finish? Do we think that.
Speaker 6: Levels of attractiveness or the way we define attractiveness has
Speaker 6: radically shifted in the past twenty thirty years? And I
Speaker 6: think it has in only one sense, in that fitness
Speaker 6: is I mean, everyone is sort of much more fit
Speaker 6: than they ever were. I mean, if you watch old
Speaker 6: movies where Kerry Grant takes off his shirt, you're like, yee, dude,
Speaker 6: lay off the bread.
Speaker 5: Johnny Weismuller did not have a six pack app as
Speaker 5: toz No, No, he looked like a seal. Yeah, I
Speaker 5: mean he had some six packs. But that's the difference.
Speaker 6: Yeah, And so, I mean so I guess that is
Speaker 6: part of the part of what.
Speaker 1: I don't know. Things change, right, I mean they there
Speaker 1: was a thing. Was it Napoleon? I can't forget.
Speaker 6: Maybe it's Louis the sixteenth who was returning home. I
Speaker 6: think it was Napoleon returning home after some war or
Speaker 6: campaign and he wrote to his either.
Speaker 1: Was Josephine or Louis? Was Maria?
Speaker 6: Tent out of something like He's wrote I will be
Speaker 6: home and weeks don't bathe?
Speaker 2: Well, those are those are those are those are changing standards.
Speaker 2: That is that is for that is, that.
Speaker 1: Is for dur bathe.
Speaker 5: So was it just who was Josephine the one who
Speaker 5: had no teeth? And well, Napoleon had a lover for
Speaker 5: whom historians have been trying to figure out in in
Speaker 5: his letters about how much he loved and it was
Speaker 5: like some expression the zigzags or something like that.
Speaker 1: Okay, I got it, I got it up.
Speaker 2: I'm looking in my explain Andrew Roberts's biography. It does
Speaker 2: explain how everything that Andrew has written except that book
Speaker 2: and uh, and how.
Speaker 6: That it does explain how long ago that was that
Speaker 6: a person felt it was necessary to specify to somebody
Speaker 6: in France to not bathe like that's those are eons ago.
Speaker 6: My god, you know the world is tilted on different
Speaker 6: access now.
Speaker 5: It's like someone writing from Newcastle bring cold.
Speaker 2: I mean, I mean, isn't that whatever? Is that what
Speaker 2: everybody says about? How? And I think this is true
Speaker 2: of seventy years ago, let alone one hundred and fifty
Speaker 2: years ago. That you know, if you went in the
Speaker 2: time machine, you went back in time. The thing that
Speaker 2: would get you the worst was the smell that we
Speaker 2: we don't even understand how much cleaner the air is,
Speaker 2: how much how how how much people take care of
Speaker 2: their personal hygiene so that and you know how air
Speaker 2: conditioning and stuff like that has kept people from living
Speaker 2: in a state of complete, particularly in summers, obviously in
Speaker 2: complete like sweat, body odor, dampness, right.
Speaker 6: Though, I mean, I know, but I still feel like
Speaker 6: this is probably the least pleasant conversation ever.
Speaker 1: But it feels like it should we should have.
Speaker 5: Let's get back to washing starlet's assess.
Speaker 1: An odor for a minute, like and I can we
Speaker 1: stop you it?
Speaker 3: No.
Speaker 6: It is also a personal anecdote that there are, of course,
Speaker 6: you know, people who taste wine. There's a wine tasting category.
Speaker 6: You say, when you taste a certain burguend to yourselfing,
Speaker 6: you say, has barnyard odors, And you swirl it and
Speaker 6: you try, and sometimes that's something that you want. Barnyard
Speaker 6: odors means the the manure manure of a of an herbivore, right,
Speaker 6: which is different from the manure of a carnivore. But
Speaker 6: manure and the smell of feces is kind of like
Speaker 6: it's unpleasant, but you know, you know what, I don't know,
Speaker 6: it's like, okay, right, it's okay.
Speaker 1: Sewage.
Speaker 6: You kind of maybe smell it, you know, smell it
Speaker 6: walking down the street in New York City. I was
Speaker 6: gone for about a month from my home and and
Speaker 6: it was in Europe, and during that time I was
Speaker 6: in Africa.
Speaker 1: And then during that time.
Speaker 6: There was some worms here and the power went out
Speaker 6: and then the power, I guess, came back on at
Speaker 6: some point, and the power search was so great that
Speaker 6: it knocked out my internet. But it also for some
Speaker 6: reason fried the refrigerator. So the power came back on,
Speaker 6: the refrigerator did not come back on. So that must
Speaker 6: have happened, you know, several weeks before I arrived home
Speaker 6: at late at night on a late flight to enter
Speaker 6: my home, which smelled like a Charnel house. It smelled
Speaker 6: unbelievably terrible, the worst smell ever worked. I mean, the
Speaker 6: smell of human feces, the smell of animal fece.
Speaker 1: Eh, you know, whatever.
Speaker 6: It's not great, but whatever, but I would have that
Speaker 6: would have been an improvement to the smell of rotting food,
Speaker 6: rotting meat, which permeated the entire house for two weeks,
Speaker 6: and it was so I guess, I guess what I'd
Speaker 6: like to say.
Speaker 2: You do? What did you do? How did you get
Speaker 2: it out of the house?
Speaker 1: I I empty.
Speaker 6: I threw everything out of from the refrigerator right and
Speaker 6: put it in the little back garbage ship. So that
Speaker 6: stuff for five days until they can be collected. Anyway,
Speaker 6: that's not my job. And then I I kind of
Speaker 6: wiped it down with these chloroxy lyesyl bleech wipes and
Speaker 6: put all the trays in the boxes and everything in
Speaker 6: the dishwasher for seventeen times. And then I went and
Speaker 6: bought four cans of coffee and I put it on
Speaker 6: four plates and left the door of the refrigerator open
Speaker 6: and put a fan pointing to the door. And by
Speaker 6: day nine, and I really mean day nine, you couldn't
Speaker 6: really smell it.
Speaker 2: So wow, Because what about the rest of the house.
Speaker 2: Did you like candles? I mean, what did you what did.
Speaker 1: You I like candles of course all the time, as
Speaker 1: you know, well, I know, because you're you're in seminary,
Speaker 1: Yeah exactly.
Speaker 2: Well, the first of all, there's prayer and then there's of.
Speaker 1: Course devotional Yeah, yes.
Speaker 5: So because I don't know when I'll ever have an
Speaker 5: opportunity on this podcast or any other. When you were
Speaker 5: talking about smelling this, it reminded me. I've been reading
Speaker 5: what God hath wrought this book about America from eighteen
Speaker 5: fifteen to eighteen forty two, so to speak, eighteen fifty
Speaker 5: and there's this great passage that really stuck out with me,
Speaker 5: and I opened it up on my kindle. I'll read quickly.
Speaker 5: Life in America in eighteen fifteen was dirty, smelly, laborious,
Speaker 5: and uncomfortable. People spent most of their waking hours working
Speaker 5: with scant opportunity for the development of individual talents and
Speaker 5: interest unrelated to farming. Cobbler made shoes, being expensive and uncomfortable,
Speaker 5: country people of ordinary means went barefoot much of the time.
Speaker 5: White people of both sexes were heavy fabrics, covering their
Speaker 5: bodies even in the human heat of summer, for they
Speaker 5: believe correctly sunshine bad for their skin. People usually owned
Speaker 5: only a few changes of clothes and stank of sweat.
Speaker 5: Only the most fastidious bathed as often as once a week.
Speaker 5: Since water had to be carried from a spring or
Speaker 5: well and heated in a kettle, people gave them spells
Speaker 5: gave themselves sponge bathses using the washed up Some bathed
Speaker 5: once a year in the spring, but as late as
Speaker 5: eighteen thirty two, a New England country doctor complained that
Speaker 5: four out of five of his patients did not bathe
Speaker 5: from one year to the next.
Speaker 2: That's well, there's that story about the cowboys, right, the
Speaker 2: cowboys would come into town for their annual bath. Right
Speaker 2: that you would go into Fort Worth or you know,
Speaker 2: a town in tech after a cattle drive and you
Speaker 2: would have your annual bath, and you would your annual bath.
Speaker 2: So yeah, so that's the thing about this is the
Speaker 2: interesting phenomenon because we don't we don't know how good
Speaker 2: we have it in this respect that we don't have
Speaker 2: to deal with this question.
Speaker 6: Yeah, but if it always smells bad.
Speaker 2: Yeah, then it doesn't smell bad anymore or whatever.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, Like you know, it's like it's like if
Speaker 6: everything is like it's sort of like politics and culture. Right,
Speaker 6: if everything is terrible and weird, you just have to
Speaker 6: have a hard time remembering what's terrible and weird.
Speaker 5: That's it, everybody, Thanks for thanks for listening, Thanks for listening.
Speaker 2: Okay, so we are we are being we have been
Speaker 2: requested by our producer, Scott Emergot to discuss the cancelation
Speaker 2: of of Stephen Colbert. Right, So here's what I have
Speaker 2: to say about that. Yay. I don't really have much
Speaker 2: else to say except yeay. I hate him. I've hated
Speaker 2: him for years. He's not funny. I don't need to
Speaker 2: be preached. You know, if I want to listen to
Speaker 2: a televangelist, I will listen. I don't want to listen
Speaker 2: to any televangelists, but I certainly don't need to listen
Speaker 2: to a liberal televangelist at the eleven.
Speaker 1: Thirty at night.
Speaker 2: And I'm very happy that he had been retired, hasn't
Speaker 2: been retired. He's getting ten months two wind down, so
Speaker 2: muzzle talk to him. It's all I have to say
Speaker 2: is yay. Is there anything else say but yeay?
Speaker 1: I would just say I did.
Speaker 6: The only thing I would want to be persnickety about
Speaker 6: because I had this argument with a good friend of mine,
Speaker 6: is that Stephen Colbert was not fired and he was
Speaker 6: not canceled. His show was canceled. The category was canceled,
Speaker 6: so it doesn't make any money. It was really invented
Speaker 6: out of whole cloth, just to find a place for
Speaker 6: David Letterman. It's a very very very very competitive category
Speaker 6: in which the profit overall profit's gone way down, So
Speaker 6: the pie is shrinking and shrinking and shrinking, and there
Speaker 6: are more people slicing it and slicing it. It made
Speaker 6: no financial sense to have that show on.
Speaker 1: It isn't.
Speaker 6: I mean all the people screaming yelling about how oh
Speaker 6: my god, you know, he's been censored because he was
Speaker 6: too liberal anti Trump.
Speaker 1: The show has been canceled.
Speaker 6: If they really wanted to koutout at Trump, they would
Speaker 6: have hired somebody who was a political They didn't they
Speaker 6: because it doesn't make any money, and so it's just
Speaker 6: important for.
Speaker 2: It was losing, losing, And there was a point at
Speaker 2: which Johnny Carson made was it forty percent of the
Speaker 2: annual profit of NBC came.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, Carson was amazing.
Speaker 2: Nobody means forty percent of the profit of a nationwide network.
Speaker 2: And he got paid a lot of the three and
Speaker 2: he got paid I think the equivalent of two hundred
Speaker 2: million dollars a year or something like that when you
Speaker 2: took in everything cuts. He got of avertisements and he
Speaker 2: worked three days a week and stuff like that like
Speaker 2: he did. And by the way, that's an interesting aspect
Speaker 2: of this which is a little discussed, is these guys
Speaker 2: now I think Jimmy Kimmel and ABC takes the summer off.
Speaker 2: But for years the idea was and Leno I think
Speaker 2: started this when he came on and was like he
Speaker 2: and he and Letterman were locked in more. You know,
Speaker 2: Carson had guest host, Carson took ten weeks off, Carson
Speaker 2: only did three days a week, blah blah blah. And
Speaker 2: as a result of that, he was able to stay
Speaker 2: on the air for thirty five years or something like that.
Speaker 2: And these guys will not get off the stage like
Speaker 2: they want. If they have an hour, they're there for
Speaker 2: an hour. They're there two hundred times a year, an
Speaker 2: hour every night, and it's like, I wonder they seem
Speaker 2: to burn out or not before or get old, or
Speaker 2: it's like all old and nobody wants to watch it,
Speaker 2: like it's too much. It's like having a podcast every day.
Speaker 5: It's just too much, just too much.
Speaker 1: The audience has fatigue.
Speaker 2: The audience has fatigue.
Speaker 1: You end up just sounding like it's a machine.
Speaker 2: You can just those podcasts where people are on every
Speaker 2: single day they just say the same things over and
Speaker 2: over and over and over.
Speaker 1: It's just too much, too much.
Speaker 5: So uh, I'm so many ways I could go with this,
Speaker 5: but keep it, keep it on Colbert for a moment. Yeah.
Speaker 5: I mean, like all the analysis has been said, it
Speaker 5: was a broadcast show in a narrow cast media environment. YadA, YadA, YadA.
Speaker 5: All that stuff is true. He's doing fan service and
Speaker 5: he just had he just had Robert Reisch on his
Speaker 5: show because that's what you know, that's what the young'ins
Speaker 5: really want.
Speaker 2: Well, he needed someone to pick up that thing that
Speaker 2: was between the desk and the wall. You know, no
Speaker 2: one else to it.
Speaker 5: But I do think that there's one part of which
Speaker 5: is probably worth just sort of glancing over here, one
Speaker 5: part of the conservative criticism that I think is wrong
Speaker 5: that got a lot of currency out there. You know,
Speaker 5: we've talked about a million times that old you know,
Speaker 5: Roger All's genius was to discover this niche half the
Speaker 5: country argument right and the the whole. And there were
Speaker 5: a lot of Conservatis saying doing this whole like Colbert
Speaker 5: was only speaking to his fan base, and that's an
Speaker 5: MSNBC fan base, and he was sharing it with two
Speaker 5: other networks. And I think that's all true. And then
Speaker 5: they would saying, look, look at the ratings that Gutfield gets.
Speaker 5: The shows that like, you don't have to be a
Speaker 5: left winger, YadA YadA dah. Also true. What they kind
Speaker 5: of miss is that Gutfield's ratings, which are good for
Speaker 5: a which are great for a cable show and better
Speaker 5: than a lot of these broadcast networks, it's still just
Speaker 5: another niche. It is not you know, he's not getting
Speaker 5: Carson numbers or anything like that. And he's just as
Speaker 5: partisan on the right as Colbart is on the left.
Speaker 5: The thing is like his show costs a tenth as much.
Speaker 5: And I do think there are a lot of people
Speaker 5: who elided over this point that that gut Faeld doesn't
Speaker 5: prove you can do mainstream stuff. It proves that you,
Speaker 5: if you get your cost structure right, you can do
Speaker 5: niche stuff successfully.
Speaker 6: Well, yeah, I mean I think that's true. I mean
Speaker 6: I don't know whether I you know, I have written
Speaker 6: about this. Once the audience gets split into twelve pieces
Speaker 6: and eleven of them are all one partisan side, then
Speaker 6: the guy who is the only one is going to
Speaker 6: clean up. Yeah, but if Leno and or Carson were
Speaker 6: still in a chair, there will be no Greg Guttfeldt.
Speaker 6: I mean we only the conservatives or sort of right
Speaker 6: leaning types don't want to be hectored about politics by
Speaker 6: the left. They don't mind it from the right, especially
Speaker 6: they sort of rabbit. I mean, once you start saying,
Speaker 6: all I want is a million people, but you can
Speaker 6: always get a million crazies who or rabid diehards who
Speaker 6: will watch you and laugh at every joke you make.
Speaker 6: But the other problem with all these shows is that
Speaker 6: even a successful TV show, people who say to them,
Speaker 6: who say to people, I love Colbert, I love Colbert,
Speaker 6: and then you ask them, Okay, how many times a
Speaker 6: week you watch it?
Speaker 5: Nurse, I love Colbert? How do I work this remote?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 5: Right?
Speaker 6: What they What you find is they either don't watch it,
Speaker 6: they watch the clips on TikTok or Instagram, or they
Speaker 6: watch it once a week and now they think they
Speaker 6: watch it every day, but they don't.
Speaker 1: Nobody does.
Speaker 6: So once you start splitting the audience like that, then
Speaker 6: the guy that has the most reliable slice this is
Speaker 6: the guy who does the best.
Speaker 2: And this is the other part of where the bias
Speaker 2: argument does work. Because I agree with you that if
Speaker 2: you can dominate a niche, then you are a niche.
Speaker 2: You're niche programming, but can be very successful. But ordinarily
Speaker 2: in a world in which like this podcast, totally like
Speaker 2: this podcast. Ordinarily in a world like that, Guttfeld comes on,
Speaker 2: he sort of figures out how to get two or
Speaker 2: three million people or whatever it is. He gets it,
Speaker 2: and then somebody would chase, like somebody would say, Okay,
Speaker 2: he's figured out a formula, let's do a show like his.
Speaker 2: But they don't. You see, they don't the other CNN
Speaker 2: and MSNBC don't Chase, and CBSNBC and ANBC don't chase.
Speaker 2: Just like Angels Studios comes out, they make Sound of Freedom.
Speaker 2: Sound of Freedom makes two hundred and fifty million dollars domestic,
Speaker 2: and everybody says, oh, you know, in Hollywood, all they
Speaker 2: care about is profit. If you can show that you
Speaker 2: can make money, you can make a profit, they'll make
Speaker 2: the move. That's they're not idiologically driven. They want money
Speaker 2: and that's all they want. And all this, where are
Speaker 2: the other Sounds of Freedom? It's been through by the way.
Speaker 2: Sound of Freedom was made for Fox five years before
Speaker 2: it was released and they put it on a shelf.
Speaker 2: So there is that weird aspect of this, which is
Speaker 2: that underserved audience that Fox has made billions and billions
Speaker 2: of dollars on. It has made billions of billions dollars
Speaker 2: on for two decades or twenty five years, because it's
Speaker 2: still so toxic to everybody else in the news and
Speaker 2: entertainment business to even touch the Fox audience that they
Speaker 2: have been, they have left it unmolested and totally in
Speaker 2: the hands of Rupert and Lachlan and whoever else and
Speaker 2: whoever it is that they put on the air. And
Speaker 2: that's what's interesting as a market as a bizarre market failure.
Speaker 5: I have slightly different take on that. So, like part
Speaker 5: of our argument when we were launching the Dispatch was
Speaker 5: this market gap argument that like, there's this eight hundred
Speaker 5: pound gorilla of Fox, and then there's a lot of
Speaker 5: the mainstream media and there's this stuff. You know, the
Speaker 5: economist is sort of in this space. But there are
Speaker 5: not a lot of things in the that white gap
Speaker 5: that value reporting that are right of center but aren't
Speaker 5: like Foxy. And the funny thing is there are a
Speaker 5: bunch of places that have tried it. Oh, an started
Speaker 5: trying to make that kind of argument, right, And the
Speaker 5: problem is is that the sticky eyeballs for cable news
Speaker 5: want want red meat, want the raw stuff. And so
Speaker 5: O N decided it was going to go crazier than
Speaker 5: Fox as the model. So did Newsmax right, and that
Speaker 5: the model became Fox has gone to stream to tell
Speaker 5: you that the election really was stolen, at least in
Speaker 5: its news reporting, and so they went even nuttier. And
Speaker 5: that freaked the crap out of Fox because the one
Speaker 5: thing they couldn't their brains couldn't handle was being first
Speaker 5: of all, losing in the ratings than any fifteen minute increment.
Speaker 5: But secondly, you know, I had to go to school
Speaker 5: on this because I got I got subpoena and for
Speaker 5: the dominion lawsuit stuff, and they had to go They
Speaker 5: couldn't freak. They completely freaked out and change their internal
Speaker 5: policies in response to Martha McCallum losing for one hour
Speaker 5: during the recount crap not recount, the stolen election stuff,
Speaker 5: and all of these plans, the pivot back to the
Speaker 5: center and be more serious went out the window because
Speaker 5: they can just they know everyone's cutting chords. They know
Speaker 5: that their viewers are gonna be the last ones to
Speaker 5: cut chords. And it's a giant ATM machine, so you
Speaker 5: might as well keep pandering for as long as it's
Speaker 5: throwing off cash. And they had to crush Newsmax and
Speaker 5: Oan for biting into that business model.
Speaker 6: And yeah, I mean the interesting thing about all that
Speaker 6: is how much these things develop and how often what
Speaker 6: they say they want to do then meets market realities
Speaker 6: and they have to change. So I mean, Newsmax went
Speaker 6: on TV, became a network, and the business plan of
Speaker 6: Newsmax was old people lifestyle stuff. It was not supposed
Speaker 6: to be. They didn't want politics. They just want an
Speaker 6: old people lifestyle. They wanted vitamins and wellness and culture
Speaker 6: of stuff. They wanted all that. And I remember that
Speaker 6: because the guy who runs and told me this. And
Speaker 6: then you get there and you start, you know, you
Speaker 6: start looking and it gets hard and you got to
Speaker 6: make the money. And then there's this, you know, there's
Speaker 6: this machine where you can make some money and you
Speaker 6: and you keep saying to yourself, well, we own you
Speaker 6: do this for a little bit, and then we're going
Speaker 6: to pivot back to the stuff that isn't toxic and
Speaker 6: isn't gonna bring us all down or cost us a
Speaker 6: lot of money eventually. That doesn't work, right. I Mean,
Speaker 6: the only thing I think you could maybe say as
Speaker 6: successful has been the rebranding, which was never done publicly
Speaker 6: or never announcement. You could see it on the programming
Speaker 6: of Fox Nation, which was supposed to be Fox Nation,
Speaker 6: supposed to be the looney bit, right, so everybody who's
Speaker 6: too crazy for the for TV, who might get a sued,
Speaker 6: We're gonna put on the streaming service and it's gonna
Speaker 6: be bananas.
Speaker 1: It's going to be diamond and Silk and Dan Bongino
Speaker 1: and all sorts of thing.
Speaker 6: Deputy sorry, Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino.
Speaker 1: Like all that.
Speaker 6: And they discovered that that and they were committing directly
Speaker 6: with newsbacks, and they decided that was probably not a
Speaker 6: valuable thing to do. It was just too stinky to
Speaker 6: the brand. So then they pivoted and now they have
Speaker 6: like you know, they have fancy program they good program
Speaker 6: in Fox Nation. It's really I mean, I've worked for it,
Speaker 6: I've done shows for I'm hoping you do another one.
Speaker 1: And they're great. I mean, they're it's a really great network.
Speaker 1: They have really really good.
Speaker 6: Shows, and then Martin Scorsese won and they have you know,
Speaker 6: they had the one I did, and they have a
Speaker 6: bunch of things, and they are they they understand who
Speaker 6: their audience is, but they're not trying to they're not
Speaker 6: trying to pander to its politics. Just to as sort
Speaker 6: of kind of cultural stance. You really do have to
Speaker 6: be able to read the tea leaves to watch Fox Nation, and.
Speaker 2: The basic Fox station is basically the twenty four hour
Speaker 2: documentary version of a Budweiser commercial during the Super Bowl
Speaker 2: or a Chevrolet commercial during the super Bowl. It's light focus.
Speaker 2: America is great, and it's a country of individualists who.
Speaker 1: It's nineteen fifties A and E. Nineteen fifty Yeah, on that.
Speaker 2: That is a good market position. Again, not only does
Speaker 2: it not only is it serving an underserved audience. And
Speaker 2: it's a subscription service, so they'll know if it doesn't work,
Speaker 2: and they'll just close it down or they'll sell it,
Speaker 2: or they'll do something else. But again, you're talking about
Speaker 2: a kind of view or vision or projection of the
Speaker 2: country that you just don't get elsewhere, and that is
Speaker 2: part of how you open a market up. There is
Speaker 2: this thing going on, and Jonah, you and I should
Speaker 2: you and I should discourse on this Superman movie opened, right,
Speaker 2: it's the first Superman movie since Man of.
Speaker 5: Steel, since the last one, for sure, No.
Speaker 2: But I mean there was one with called Man of Steel.
Speaker 2: Then Superman was in various movies with Batman the Justice.
Speaker 2: But Man of Steel, which was in two thousand and
Speaker 2: nine and was the humorless brooding Superman fighting the other
Speaker 2: Kryptonians after you know, came in after a previous one.
Speaker 2: And then there was Christopher Reeve. So here we have
Speaker 2: this new Superman and it's doing really well at the
Speaker 2: domestic box office, and it's apparently not doing particularly well overseas.
Speaker 2: The Chinese market is now basic. China's decided it does
Speaker 2: not want to open its cinemas to American movies. It
Speaker 2: is now making a lot of movies on its own.
Speaker 2: The most popular movie of twenty twenty five is a
Speaker 2: Chinese animated movie called Neja two, which has made two
Speaker 2: point two billion dollars, almost not of it here. I
Speaker 2: think it's made eighteen million dollars here, and you know,
Speaker 2: two billion dollars in China and then money abroad. So
Speaker 2: Superman's made about three hundred and fifty million dollars here.
Speaker 2: It's not making money abroad. And there is this line
Speaker 2: that is now being peddled that the reason that Superman
Speaker 2: is not popular outside the United States is because the
Speaker 2: world now hates America because of Donald Trump, and they
Speaker 2: don't want Superman is an American hero and not a
Speaker 2: world hero, and they don't like him, and yeah, bah blah,
Speaker 2: bah blah, and the thin I don't maybe it's true.
Speaker 2: I don't know. Maybe people don't want to see the
Speaker 2: most famous the character that originated comic books and made
Speaker 2: comic books popular and is the oldest character in comics
Speaker 2: except for Batman. I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong.
Speaker 5: So uh, there's a great irony in this, right, because
Speaker 5: I was guilty of it too. Hollywood kept trying to
Speaker 5: make Superman a globalist, right, a citizen of the world,
Speaker 5: diogenies and tights, right, and and concerned, you know, they
Speaker 5: cut out and the American Way from some of them
Speaker 5: and all that kind of stuff, and and it was
Speaker 5: one of those sort of minor pop culture culture war truveralls.
Speaker 5: And so it's kind of funny that now the if
Speaker 5: it's true that the headwind for Superman is because he's
Speaker 5: an American, that that we're getting that when America during
Speaker 5: America first stuff. I look, I don't know, I'm torn.
Speaker 5: I suspect that some of it is a superhero fatigue, right,
Speaker 5: I mean, we were talking about that twenty minutes ago
Speaker 5: before this movie, so obviously that's got to be a thing.
Speaker 5: A lot of Marvel movies, you know, petered out because
Speaker 5: people were just like enough already. Disney doesn't do as
Speaker 5: well as Marvel movies, though, do for good reason, because
Speaker 5: it's worth worst content. And so I don't know. I mean,
Speaker 5: I think it's entirely possible. I remember one of the
Speaker 5: I think the first piece I ever wrote for National
Speaker 5: Review was about how the guys who had made Independence
Speaker 5: Day their follow on movie was Godzilla, the Matthew Broderick
Speaker 5: Godzilla and independancegue I got all this blowback because it
Speaker 5: was too American and that America was leading in the
Speaker 5: world and all this kind of stuff. And so the
Speaker 5: Godzilla movie, the American Army were all hapless losers and
Speaker 5: idiot It's the American political leadership was all losers. The
Speaker 5: only real badasses who knew what they were doing were
Speaker 5: the French, and I think that there's some gaming like that,
Speaker 5: you know, for these kinds of things. I just didn't
Speaker 5: the only thing I and this is the only thing
Speaker 5: where I actually disagree with you, and I'm loath to
Speaker 5: bring in Israel. So I was I think it was
Speaker 5: more anti Israel than you're you've given it credit for.
Speaker 5: And I want to be really clear, I think that
Speaker 5: the one of the few things that all of John's
Speaker 5: detractors and his super fans will agree on is that
Speaker 5: John has very sensitive antennae for insults to the State
Speaker 5: of Israel and the Jews. And so when you told
Speaker 5: me that it's all stupid, I was like, well, John
Speaker 5: says that it's got to be true. And then I
Speaker 5: watched it with my daughter, and my daughter like immediately
Speaker 5: that they're talking about Israel and and I kind of
Speaker 5: waved her off and said, we'll talk about it afterwards.
Speaker 5: And then, you know, I understand why people had that interpretation.
Speaker 2: Morea we should explain for people who haven't seen the
Speaker 2: movie that Superman involves himself in a cross border war
Speaker 2: between a country that is clearly run by a Vladimir
Speaker 2: Putin substitute and a defenseless country on his border. Uh,
Speaker 2: and everything is being manipulated by Lex Luthor in some
Speaker 2: fashion and I can't even remember what, and that the
Speaker 2: cross border of the people that he is attacking look
Speaker 2: vaguely Middle Eastern and as though they literally just come
Speaker 2: out of Lawrence of Arabia or something. They're sort of
Speaker 2: like in desert clothing there there. I don't know. They
Speaker 2: they have vests, woolen vests, and they have sticks.
Speaker 5: And standing around in.
Speaker 1: A musical note whenever they appear, and it goes.
Speaker 2: No, no, no, it's just that they're staying there facing this.
Speaker 2: They're facing this, you know, like first World army, and
Speaker 2: then they're a bunch of ragtag rebels. And people have
Speaker 2: read this as though this is clearly meant to read
Speaker 2: like the Palestinians in Gaza. But I didn't read it
Speaker 2: that way for this reason, which is that the antagonist
Speaker 2: is Putin and the movie was written and started filming
Speaker 2: in twenty twenty three, and remember October seven didn't start
Speaker 2: happening until October of twenty twenty three, and so I
Speaker 2: thought it was clear that it was supposed to be
Speaker 2: some kind of Ukraine thing, except that the Ukrainians look
Speaker 2: more like Afghanis than they did like Ukrainians. I don't
Speaker 2: dispute that if you watch it in twenty twenty five,
Speaker 2: after the last two years, when you look at the
Speaker 2: at these people that Superman is trying to protect from
Speaker 2: from the evil Putin guy, that that they you, that's
Speaker 2: how you would read it. I just don't think that
Speaker 2: that was what was intended. But what do I know?
Speaker 5: Okay, So two data points three data points. One, we
Speaker 5: should stipulate that the movie is pretty stupid. I mean,
Speaker 5: it's fun, but we shouldn't take it too seriously. But
Speaker 5: this is a serious interpretation that people are having, right.
Speaker 5: So second, the I agree that it's supposed to have
Speaker 5: some overtones of the Russia thing too. It's like an amalgam,
Speaker 5: but the leader of the evil country kind of talks
Speaker 5: more like an Ariel Sharon and looks more like in
Speaker 5: Israeli with the with the weird Harry doesn't look like
Speaker 5: Vladimir Putin. And he gives this little speech at one
Speaker 5: point where he says, America and Zavonia, whatever the name
Speaker 5: of the country is, we had a rock solid alliance
Speaker 5: until Superman got in the way. Going back decades, we've
Speaker 5: never had a Rocksoud alliance with Vladimir Putin right, and
Speaker 5: so it was. And also just the unbelievably I mean
Speaker 5: you called them the innocent victims whatever rebels. I mean,
Speaker 5: they were like literally like holding I don't know, mops
Speaker 5: and sticks and stuff, and so it just it seemed
Speaker 5: like a hamhanded way to it. If it was trying
Speaker 5: to play off of Ukraine, it kind of failed miserably,
Speaker 5: I thought, and lent aid and comfort to people who
Speaker 5: wanted to say it was about Israel.
Speaker 1: I agree.
Speaker 2: The country the countries in the bad country is called Bravia.
Speaker 2: And the country that they invade with the people with
Speaker 2: the sticks who were Superman protect who super Instrra, it's
Speaker 2: called Jarhanpour. So we're Braven. President's name is a vasil Gurkhos.
Speaker 2: So I don't know, Jarhanpour sounds south like it's South Asia. Anyway,
Speaker 2: I'm not defending it it is. I enjoyed it. I
Speaker 2: enjoyed much of the movie. I wish that it hadn't
Speaker 2: gone into this weird place where he's in the anti
Speaker 2: matter river that's leading to the black hole and stuff
Speaker 2: like that. What was good about it was what is
Speaker 2: always good about Superman movies, which is the conflict between
Speaker 2: Superman and Lex Luthor, which is always good, and the
Speaker 2: relationship between Superman and Lois Lane, which is always good.
Speaker 2: And the how he saves people from efforts to trash
Speaker 2: them and say he saves them and invent ways and
Speaker 2: that's really good. And some of the other superheroes are
Speaker 2: funnier than I expected.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I otherwise it's I had to have Tevy Troy,
Speaker 5: our friend Tevy Troy explained to me why is Green
Speaker 5: Lantern such an unbelievable dickhead? And he explained it to me,
Speaker 5: it's a new character, blah blah, but it's a thing
Speaker 5: in the comics. The one complaint I have, and it's
Speaker 5: true of his Suicide Squad movies too, James Gunn Yeah,
Speaker 5: the James Gunner director.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like.
Speaker 5: They want these things to be so visually distinct from Marvel.
Speaker 5: That but Marvel took all of the good set colors
Speaker 5: and paint colors and costume colors, the whole all the
Speaker 5: good palette. And so that's a lot of like Japanese
Speaker 5: lunchbox pink and weird color profiles that I just I
Speaker 5: think there's a reason why Marvel doesn't use those colors
Speaker 5: because it's kind of stupid.
Speaker 2: So the whole thing kind of look. I got to
Speaker 2: move on, and Rob is looking like he wants to.
Speaker 6: No. I'm actually sort of interesting because when you mentioned
Speaker 6: I mean, this is not minutes ago. But I made
Speaker 6: a little note because when you mentioned the antimatter thing
Speaker 6: and then the black hole, I thought what was interesting
Speaker 6: was their comment that the components of traditional science fiction.
Speaker 2: No, but I do have to ask Jonah, because Jonah
Speaker 2: is a comic book person and there is this big
Speaker 2: comic book movie that came out Fantastic four.
Speaker 1: First steps were moving on, but I guess we're not.
Speaker 2: No, I just want to do two minutes on this
Speaker 2: and then move on. So as I understand it, Fantastic four,
Speaker 2: which debut I think at the beginning of the sixties.
Speaker 2: This is now like the seventeenth effort to reboot the
Speaker 2: Fantastic Four. And it looks really good. And because it
Speaker 2: looks like The Incredibles, it's like a live action version.
Speaker 2: It's like their way of making them.
Speaker 1: A giant first weekend, giant first weekend.
Speaker 2: And then and then it collapsed. But it looks like Incredibles,
Speaker 2: and I think the Fantastic four is unbelievably stupid as
Speaker 2: a I don't understand why. I mean, I didn't read
Speaker 2: that's so, there's stretchy arms, there's his Mariland. Now this
Speaker 2: is the other thing is his wife looks like supposed
Speaker 2: to look like Marilyn Monroe, but can make herself invisible.
Speaker 2: Why Marilyn Monroe want to make herself invisible is not clear.
Speaker 2: My brother can light himself on fire and fly, and
Speaker 2: then this good looking guy ends up looking like a
Speaker 2: giant rock monster, and I guess they all have are
Speaker 2: tortured by their various powers and abilities, except in this
Speaker 2: version of it, the rock monster guy has no problems
Speaker 2: being a rock monster. He doesn't think he's ugly, he's
Speaker 2: not complaining about being ugly. The one who slights himself
Speaker 2: on fire is perfectly happy to light himself on fire.
Speaker 2: She's fine, everybody's fine, there's no conflict, and the powers
Speaker 2: are dumb. They're just dumb, Like I so am I wrong?
Speaker 2: Like this? Was this a great comic book and it
Speaker 2: really like crystallized what was great about comics, and the
Speaker 2: movies just haven't been able to match the magic of it.
Speaker 5: Or yeah, I think that's it. I mean, I honestly do.
Speaker 5: I mean like, there were all sorts of comics that
Speaker 5: just for years didn't lend themselves to making movies about them,
Speaker 5: and then CGI kind of caught up and all that
Speaker 5: kind of stuff. And the problem is is that I
Speaker 5: just think the Fantastic Four, which was a great comic
Speaker 5: in its day, doesn't lend itself to it. So it
Speaker 5: was kind of smart for them to do the homage
Speaker 5: to the Incredibles, which was an homage to the Fantastic
Speaker 5: for in the first place, kind of thing. I haven't
Speaker 5: seen it yet, but Cliff Asnes, who's even more are
Speaker 5: Friendclys Avenues and the subject of the commentary roast this year,
Speaker 5: it was even more of a comic book nerd than
Speaker 5: I am, and he really liked it.
Speaker 2: Okay, that's all I got for it. It is great
Speaker 2: looking great. Now here's something else, a movie that I
Speaker 2: think I've seen that you guys probably have not seen,
Speaker 2: that I strongly want to urge people to see, though
Speaker 2: it'll probably be streaming in about a week because it
Speaker 2: really didn't make any money and so the window will close.
Speaker 2: But it's this film Eddington, made by the director or
Speaker 2: right director Ari Astor.
Speaker 5: Which mister Fantastic in it.
Speaker 2: With pedropuscal in it right, which is about a town
Speaker 2: that goes insane in the early days of COVID in
Speaker 2: New Mexico, and it is a movie about America losing
Speaker 2: its mind over COVID, and it is brilliant, and it
Speaker 2: is brilliant because it accepts it. It provides a framework
Speaker 2: in which all arguments about COVID are taken seriously, and
Speaker 2: all arguments about what happens in America during COVID from
Speaker 2: the left. You need to wear You're gonna make other
Speaker 2: people sick. And you can't just walk around doing whatever
Speaker 2: you want, because we live in a society in which
Speaker 2: we need to be able to think about each other.
Speaker 2: Or I have asthma. I can't wear a mask. Leave
Speaker 2: me alone. I'm six staying six feet away from you.
Speaker 2: Stop yelling at me, Let me be. And the conflicts
Speaker 2: that arise that get more and deep and more and
Speaker 2: more and more crazy, until in the most amazing twist
Speaker 2: of all, Antifa actually shows up. There's a George Wood
Speaker 2: protest in this empty little town in New Mexico and
Speaker 2: Antifa shows up, and it is a sort of portrait
Speaker 2: of America gone insane in twenty twenty, and it is remarkable.
Speaker 2: I mean, I wouldn't say that it's the most pleasant.
Speaker 2: It's very nerve jangling.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's why I'm reluctant to see.
Speaker 2: But it is great, and like, there's so few movies
Speaker 2: that are any good anymore, like The Naked Gun. I
Speaker 2: went to see the reboot of The Naked Gun. It's
Speaker 2: like I laughed seven or eight times, but it's so
Speaker 2: wand you know, and it's like you remember how explosively
Speaker 2: funny those movies were, and then you make a wan
Speaker 2: new version of it, and you know it's got to
Speaker 2: be better, not worse, Like it's got to actually improve
Speaker 2: on the original, not be a kind of pale reflection.
Speaker 2: So I haven't they a wild comedy and then make
Speaker 2: a less wild version of a wild comedy and then
Speaker 2: think that's supposed to be open.
Speaker 5: So I haven't seen it, but I have a theory
Speaker 5: about why a lot of those kinds of movies stopped
Speaker 5: being made. And be curious what you guys think. So
Speaker 5: I thought the Police Squad Show TV show was fantastic.
Speaker 5: It only thought lasted like what six six episodes? Six episodes?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 5: And I think that part of the problem is sort
Speaker 5: of like that movie Top Secret, and there's the airplane movies.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 5: You need a mass audience that has grown up on
Speaker 5: certain plot conventions and certain sort of structures that you
Speaker 5: feel like, oh, I know what's gonna happen, because this
Speaker 5: is the formula for every episode of Dragnet and Streets
Speaker 5: of San Francisco and everything blah blah blah, And so
Speaker 5: you have it's a double edged sword problem. On the
Speaker 5: one hand, the people who do know all of that stuff,
Speaker 5: they've heard the joke already, right, so like you can't
Speaker 5: keep playing on those things once you've punctured all of them.
Speaker 5: And then on the other hand, younger people they don't
Speaker 5: know them, right, they haven't seen enough episodes of Banichick
Speaker 5: and Matt Bock or whatever.
Speaker 1: Sort of soundchick good.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, I mean I think that's probably true. I mean,
Speaker 6: I guess the Police Squad didn't really work so well
Speaker 6: on TV. I think because there was no place for it, right,
Speaker 6: I mean, TV, especially then was really about making sure
Speaker 6: there's a programming flow, and you know, there was there's
Speaker 6: such a tone shift between Naked Gun, which was I mean,
Speaker 6: between Police, Police Squad and everything else around it that
Speaker 6: I think it was hard for it to have a
Speaker 6: home even though it was incredibly funny.
Speaker 1: And and interesting.
Speaker 6: It lives very very I mean must live prominently on
Speaker 6: TikTok because I see clips of it constantly. And then
Speaker 6: of course then the Naked Gun movies sort of like
Speaker 6: took over that sort of event kind of thing where
Speaker 6: you go and you'd sit there and they'd be making
Speaker 6: jokes you didn't know you you know, the Queen of
Speaker 6: England would be thrown naked into the.
Speaker 1: You know, pig trough or something like that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's great.
Speaker 1: So I don't know about this one.
Speaker 6: I mean, this one feels to me like what I
Speaker 6: don't want to have happened is for it to not
Speaker 6: work and then people to say, oh, this stuff doesn't work,
Speaker 6: because it does work, because big loud, noisy, you know,
Speaker 6: dumb comedies work.
Speaker 2: What's wrong with is it's not big loud and noisy.
Speaker 1: That's yeah, Actually I just have to get the execution right.
Speaker 6: Yeah, but the category, I mean, people in show business
Speaker 6: now are just removing things from the categories because they
Speaker 6: did a bad version of it and because they are
Speaker 6: now risk averse because of all the things have been
Speaker 6: going on, and that is gonna you're gonna get it's
Speaker 6: gonna get smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller, like well, okay,
Speaker 6: well pretty soon you're not gonna know. The only way
Speaker 6: you're gonna know you can make a movie is if
Speaker 6: if you're willing to spend five hundred million dollars on it.
Speaker 6: And that is the beauty of the naked gun movies.
Speaker 6: The beauty of those kinds of comedies is then you
Speaker 6: don't have to spend five hundred million dollars on it,
Speaker 6: and you can put it on in the summer when
Speaker 6: people kind of want to go to the movie theater
Speaker 6: and watch a stupid movie. And I just to me,
Speaker 6: it's baffling why that product that product line is is disappearing,
Speaker 6: Because if McDonald suddenly said, you know, we're not going
Speaker 6: to be so much about the burgers.
Speaker 2: Okay, So I uh, two things about that, one of
Speaker 2: which is for some reason, COVID killed the comedy twenty
Speaker 2: eighteen and twenty nineteen. David Poland, the sort of a
Speaker 2: film analyst guy, pointed out that they made there were
Speaker 2: twenty five studio comedies in twenty eighteen and twenty seven
Speaker 2: studio comedies in twenty nineteen and this year there are three.
Speaker 2: And what happened was COVID? How why COVID killed off
Speaker 2: the studio. There's all sorts of things, you know, George
Speaker 2: Floyd did it? Yea, you know me too did it?
Speaker 2: And all that. And they were still making them. They
Speaker 2: were still making them and they weren't very good. Was
Speaker 2: part of the problem. And then you really, comedy doesn't
Speaker 2: the big noisy comedy is something you want to see
Speaker 2: in a theater the way you want to see a
Speaker 2: horror movie in a theater, because it's a communal experience.
Speaker 2: You want to hear other people laughing. That's part of
Speaker 2: the pleasure of it. And for some reason it died.
Speaker 2: We don't and your our friend Roy Price has many
Speaker 2: theories about this, and yes, can this category come back,
Speaker 2: It can absolutely come back. This is not one of them,
Speaker 2: but I do think that some of it. So there's
Speaker 2: the show The Boys, which both Jonah and I really like,
Speaker 2: and The Boys is the Naked Gun of the Superhero movie,
Speaker 2: by which I mean it is a show and it's
Speaker 2: gone four seasons and all that, which is about what
Speaker 2: if Marvel, what if you made a satirical version of
Speaker 2: a world with Marvel superheroes in it a very dark
Speaker 2: but they were all psychopaths and did disgusting things. And
Speaker 2: this is where the satire part. It's not family friendly,
Speaker 2: but it is totally comic and it is totally satirical,
Speaker 2: and it does everything that the that the Zuker Abraham
Speaker 2: Zucker guys did with those movies with this one format.
Speaker 2: And there's so there were so many Superiero movies over
Speaker 2: so long a period of time that you could introduce
Speaker 2: all of these related characters that everybody who want as
Speaker 2: you would say, as Jonah, you would say, like, this
Speaker 2: is the convention and everybody who is alive now knows
Speaker 2: which is the conventions of the superheroes, and The Boys
Speaker 2: takes it and twists it into these crazy pretzels.
Speaker 5: Yes, but I just want to be really clear for
Speaker 5: our audience. First of all, I think it's a very
Speaker 5: good point. But second when really clear for our audience,
Speaker 5: given what we suspect are the demographics of our audience.
Speaker 5: If you thought the fade gunaway tushy wiping scene was
Speaker 5: offensive at the beginning of this podcast, yeah, do not
Speaker 5: watch The Boys. That is Mary Poppins compared to The
Speaker 5: Boys or.
Speaker 2: That or that show whatever. The gen X Boys spin off.
Speaker 5: Is yeah, yeah, just anything Boys related right from the
Speaker 5: universe of the Boys.
Speaker 2: But it is effectively that it is sort of like,
Speaker 2: if Howard Stern, who is now apparently retiring, got his
Speaker 2: hands on a TV network and unlimited resources to make
Speaker 2: a nehilistic version of a superhero franchise, you would get
Speaker 2: you would get The Boys. It's very depressing, by the way,
Speaker 2: because there's there are these trailers for movies of the
Speaker 2: sort that we're talking about here, or sort of like
Speaker 2: eighties type movies that people used to love that came
Speaker 2: out in the last couple of weeks, for movies that
Speaker 2: are opening later in the year. James L. Brooks has
Speaker 2: a movie out about a young a young female politician.
Speaker 2: He's not three years old. It has the worst trailer
Speaker 2: I've ever called Ellen mackay, I've never seen a worst trailer.
Speaker 2: He's obviously being reward. It's like a bonus for him
Speaker 2: to get to make this. Fox is making it because
Speaker 2: how much money has he made for Fox by having
Speaker 2: created the Simps bill and billion dollars I mean.
Speaker 1: So yeah, like yeah, I mean who knows.
Speaker 2: Who can even calculate.
Speaker 6: But also who knows who knows the motivation here?
Speaker 1: Yeah, but it's hard.
Speaker 2: But there are a bunch of these sorts of like
Speaker 2: people are trying to make slice of life dramas of
Speaker 2: the sort that dominated the box office in the nineteen eightys,
Speaker 2: where movies like that could make two hundred million dollars,
Speaker 2: you know, like Out of Africa or ray Man or
Speaker 2: you know, Tender Mercies or Kramer Versus Kramer, like things
Speaker 2: that you know, you made Kramer Versus Cremer today, which
Speaker 2: was The Moat, which was the most successful movie of
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy nine, the biggest box office movie in nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy nine, and you made it today, you would have
Speaker 2: to make it for five million dollars. It would go
Speaker 2: to sun Dance and then it would go to Hulu,
Speaker 2: and that way it would.
Speaker 1: Never get made.
Speaker 6: Because a wonderful moment in Cramer Versus Kramer, which is
Speaker 6: one of my favorite moments, where after dust after Meryl
Speaker 6: Streep leaves Dustin Hoffman in the morning, or you know,
Speaker 6: in the first reel, and he's and he's at his
Speaker 6: job and is obviously he's performing. You know, they're they're
Speaker 6: worried that he's going to get that he's gonna be
Speaker 6: distracted from his job as an advertising executive. And he's
Speaker 6: talking to his boss about what happened and he says this.
Speaker 6: He goes, I don't know what happened. I mean, she's
Speaker 6: a home and there's this we have.
Speaker 1: A neighbor upstairs.
Speaker 6: He's a single goal and you know, they got together
Speaker 6: and it was the Women's Lib d and he makes
Speaker 6: the little you know, talking YadA yada's gesture, the little
Speaker 6: it's so great, and he and his boss are like,
Speaker 6: it's like bad men. They're like, well, he'll be back.
Speaker 6: She just wants some attention. But I just I just
Speaker 6: I can't imagine, man. I can easily imagine that script
Speaker 6: in nineteen going through development in nineteen seventy seven, seventy eight,
Speaker 6: where they are probably zero development women in the movie business,
Speaker 6: but now when they are entirely they're all women.
Speaker 1: There would be like, yeah, you can't and he can't,
Speaker 1: he can't, No, he can't. So the Women's lib And.
Speaker 6: It's been in my head for forty fifty years on
Speaker 6: I just remember that so well, Women's Lib.
Speaker 5: So they made a few years ago marriage story with
Speaker 5: Scarlett Johansson and Am Driver, which I could not get
Speaker 5: through it. I don't want to hear people all it
Speaker 5: is just screaming about how you're like your mother, No,
Speaker 5: you're like your mother, all that kind of stuff. But
Speaker 5: there was I just don't find that relaxing. Like No,
Speaker 5: but there was a story I think it was in
Speaker 5: the Wall Street Journal recently that trust me. The payoff
Speaker 5: is here. In order to keep wolves from going after livestock,
Speaker 5: they have drones following them and they blare loud like
Speaker 5: and human yelling and other noises to scare way the wolves.
Speaker 5: And they've decided to instead use argument scenes from marriage story,
Speaker 5: bluring it out from the throne the wolves.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but that's why it's such a brilliant scene. I'm
Speaker 2: sorry this fight with Adam between Adam Driver and Scarlett
Speaker 2: Johansson in which they basically you know which he says,
Speaker 2: and I can't believe because we have this child. I
Speaker 2: can't believe I have to deal with you for the
Speaker 2: rest of my life. We're getting divorced. I hate you,
Speaker 2: I want you to die, and I'm gonna have to
Speaker 2: deal with you anyway for the rest of my life.
Speaker 2: It is a good way to drive away the wolves.
Speaker 2: I will agree. I do think it's a brilliant movie.
Speaker 2: But but what can I tell you anyway? I really
Speaker 2: so I recommended Eddington. I think people really should see
Speaker 2: Eddington again. Not not a calming if that's what you're
Speaker 2: looking for.
Speaker 1: It's not.
Speaker 2: It's not be calming. But I think Rob just give
Speaker 2: us two minutes to just complain about one thing. Joe
Speaker 2: and I complaining together. A show we were really enjoying,
Speaker 2: which was the latest Star Trek show called Brave New Worlds,
Speaker 2: which is the prequel to the original.
Speaker 1: Star Trek Strange Worlds.
Speaker 2: Strange Worlds, which is the captain of the Enterprise right
Speaker 2: before Kirk, and he appears in the pilot. His name
Speaker 2: is Christopher Pike. He gets What was really interesting about
Speaker 2: this show when they debuted it is that everybody knows
Speaker 2: who watches Star Trek that Christopher Pike ends up in
Speaker 2: this horribly mangled condition, because that's and that rescuing him
Speaker 2: is what they try to do in the pilot from
Speaker 2: his condition, and so you make him the hero of
Speaker 2: the show, and you know he's going to end up
Speaker 2: in this you know, like Darth Vader, almost like it
Speaker 2: with a body that's a wreck and a machine, and
Speaker 2: they set it up, I think, quite brilliantly, which is
Speaker 2: that he ends up going through some temper anomaly where
Speaker 2: he learns of his fate. The show begins with him
Speaker 2: knowing that he has five years to live and then
Speaker 2: he's going to be turned into this His body is
Speaker 2: going to be destroyed, and that's where it starts. And
Speaker 2: he therefore is making all these decisions and choices and
Speaker 2: things with this haunting knowledge in him. And it was
Speaker 2: a really great premise for a show. It was fun,
Speaker 2: it was interesting, they had interesting villains and all of that.
Speaker 2: And then this third season starts and it is a
Speaker 2: catastrophe because it's just become this camp, ridiculous fan service
Speaker 2: and it's cringingly bad. And I've never seen a show
Speaker 2: take a worse turn in sort of like going from
Speaker 2: being respectable and interesting and tough to being a total embarrassment.
Speaker 5: I am Rob is going to hang up his microphone,
Speaker 5: get in a car, drive to DC, and smash my
Speaker 5: guitar against the Delta house wall. But I have to
Speaker 5: point out at this point that the pilot of the
Speaker 5: original Star Trek was not that one.
Speaker 2: I know the pilot was actually Pike the original Star
Speaker 2: Trek used scenes from it.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, right right yes.
Speaker 5: And also I'll look, you have no idea the people
Speaker 5: I would hear from if I let that, okay, And
Speaker 5: and and Spock was kind.
Speaker 2: Of I knew that too, And I knew that too, Okay,
Speaker 2: but ok other.
Speaker 5: Than that, I grew with pot one hundred percent. It
Speaker 5: is like, it doesn't mean you can't have fun, but
Speaker 5: like and I said this on toy today and people
Speaker 5: were giving me all this hard time, and I stand
Speaker 5: by it one hundred percent. The worst sin, particularly in
Speaker 5: science fiction, that you can commit is not taking yourself seriously.
Speaker 5: Because if you don't take yourself seriously, why in the
Speaker 5: world should the audience. And it is so much of
Speaker 5: can't be winking, nodding, just silliness this time around, and
Speaker 5: it's just dumb. It's just contrary. Like if if you're
Speaker 5: I was the show runner and these are the scripts
Speaker 5: that were coming in, I would have just said, all
Speaker 5: of you get out of here. The reason why our
Speaker 5: audience likes the show is because it's actually going back
Speaker 5: to the original self seriousness of the original Star Trek
Speaker 5: and and then a complete blown opportunity, so maybe it'll
Speaker 5: pick up in the second half.
Speaker 2: But let me ask you a question. Have you did
Speaker 2: you ever work with Carol Kane? She ever appear on
Speaker 2: anything of yours?
Speaker 6: I did not work with her, but I am not directly,
Speaker 6: but I was helped out on something she was in.
Speaker 2: Okay, I'm asking this because Carol Caine is on Brave
Speaker 2: New Worlds. She is the best character in newly introduced
Speaker 2: character on Brave New world She plays a person who
Speaker 2: is from a civilize where they live hundreds and hundreds
Speaker 2: and hundreds of years.
Speaker 5: Too much backstory to explain it all, but yes, but.
Speaker 2: Harold Caine has been in show business for fifty five
Speaker 2: years something like that. She was in five Easy Pieces,
Speaker 2: or she was in some carnal knowledge, like when she
Speaker 2: was eighteen she got nominated for an oscar in a
Speaker 2: movie in which she spoke only in Yiddish when she
Speaker 2: was like twenty two. Here we are in twenty twenty five.
Speaker 2: Fifty years later, she has this role on Star Trek
Speaker 2: a Stranger Worlds, and she is fantastic. And there is
Speaker 2: this wonderful quality to certain things in show business where
Speaker 2: these people if they if they survive and they live long,
Speaker 2: and they keep themselves in good shape, and they don't know,
Speaker 2: like lose their brains to drugs and all of that.
Speaker 2: When they when they emerge in their seventies or however
Speaker 2: seventies eighties, into things they can do just incredible. World Like,
Speaker 2: it's an incredible thing to have half a century of
Speaker 2: experience to draw on, to know exactly how to build
Speaker 2: a character, to make yourself memorable, to read a line,
Speaker 2: to have a presence, isn't that? I mean so that
Speaker 2: I was just struck by that thinking about a career
Speaker 2: like hers, because it's just kind of like just gone
Speaker 2: along every decade. She's on one or two shows, She's
Speaker 2: in one or two movies.
Speaker 5: You know, she was lack of Gravis's wife on taxi.
Speaker 6: Yeah, she's a big Jim Brooks and the Jim Brooks Rep.
Speaker 1: She's always she always shows up.
Speaker 7: Yeah, unusual, just a also like one of these the
Speaker 7: seventies characters who just is an unlikely, unlikely recurring character.
Speaker 1: I've never you know, not not mind.
Speaker 2: She doesn't do it for you, but I mean again,
Speaker 2: in your stupid voice, I don't like Okay, you don't
Speaker 2: like the voice, but she by the way, does really
Speaker 2: funny things with the voice because she has an accent
Speaker 2: in this that she's invented, you know, since obviously she's
Speaker 2: from a planet, so you can speak in whatever accent
Speaker 2: you want to. But I just there are these people
Speaker 2: and they pop Sometimes they pop up literally out of nowhere,
Speaker 2: like this actress June Squibb, who whose most notable credit
Speaker 2: before she appeared out of Nowhere and About Schmidt in
Speaker 2: like you know, twenty years ago, was that she was
Speaker 2: in Broadway on Gypsy as one of the strippers in
Speaker 2: the original production, and then went away for forty years
Speaker 2: and then showed up as an old lady in About Schmidt,
Speaker 2: and then in this movie Nebraska. And she was just
Speaker 2: the star of this movie called Thelma in which she
Speaker 2: played and this hilarious, brilliant movie in which she played
Speaker 2: this ninety year old woman. And now she is starring
Speaker 2: in Scarlet Johanson's directorial debut at the age of ninety six.
Speaker 1: We call that growing into your look.
Speaker 2: Okay, so, Rob, you have been very much. Is there
Speaker 2: anything you want to talk about before?
Speaker 5: You've been a good sport, Rob, I have very good
Speaker 5: sport sport if you if you want to talk about
Speaker 5: you know, uh some odors twelfth century monastery and it's
Speaker 5: you know chance can no, No.
Speaker 6: I mean I I that's what I went and traveled
Speaker 6: and saw a bunch of those. I would like to
Speaker 6: say that I will have watched a TV show that
Speaker 6: I enjoyed. I enjoyed the TV show The Day.
Speaker 1: Of a Jackal.
Speaker 2: It wasn't bad that he redmain.
Speaker 6: Yes, I enjoyed that. I enjoyed the the the adventure.
Speaker 6: I enjoyed the thrilling episodes. I enjoyed the hang hanging episodes.
Speaker 1: I enjoyed the.
Speaker 6: I enjoyed the way that they they echoed and rhymed
Speaker 6: a little bit with the original movie.
Speaker 2: I am.
Speaker 6: I enjoyed the project, and yet I am not. The
Speaker 6: problem is that this is something that I enjoyed, and
Speaker 6: at no point am I thinking to myself, I can't
Speaker 6: wait till the next next one, if they're even going
Speaker 6: to do a next one comes out, I just don't care.
Speaker 6: And I think I in that respect, I am like
Speaker 6: I am the canary in the coal mine, which is
Speaker 6: I mean not even at this point advanced bad news,
Speaker 6: but I think it is.
Speaker 1: I am a classic.
Speaker 6: Consumer now weirdly of show business product which is that
Speaker 6: I just if it's good, if.
Speaker 1: It's in front of me, I'll watch it.
Speaker 6: If I'm jet lagged and I need to like do something,
Speaker 6: and I'll remember I wanted to watch this one. I'll
Speaker 6: get hooked on it and watch it, and I just
Speaker 6: have absolutely zero loyalty to it.
Speaker 1: And that is.
Speaker 6: That's why I show business isn't such big, big, big,
Speaker 6: big big trouble.
Speaker 2: All right.
Speaker 5: So I have a show recommendation. Good uh, My wife
Speaker 5: and I we like British crime stuff, and someone recommended
Speaker 5: Line of Duty. And one of the things that has
Speaker 5: going for it is there are many episodes, so you
Speaker 5: can like if you like it. There's some runway, and
Speaker 5: earlier were talking about like defying conventions. This is one
Speaker 5: of these shows where like I'm often stunned or at
Speaker 5: least surprised by the twists and turns, not all of
Speaker 5: them entirely plausible. But it's a show about an anti
Speaker 5: corruption unit basically the I D you know what is it?
Speaker 5: Internal Affairs of England, and it's it's sort of you know,
Speaker 5: I was gonna say about The Jackal One of the
Speaker 5: things I like that show too, and I like that genre.
Speaker 5: But the way they sort of take fast and loose
Speaker 5: with just like Europe being a place where police from
Speaker 5: one country do stuff in another country. You know, like
Speaker 5: there's a lot of like jurisdictional stuff they just sort
Speaker 5: of gloss over. There's some of that in this is
Speaker 5: like they don't quite tell ever say it's in London,
Speaker 5: but it's obviously in London. But anyway, it's a good show,
Speaker 5: holds your interest and takes in some surprizing places and
Speaker 5: it's like six seasons. You have to be able to
Speaker 5: answer three questions from a sphinx, pluck a pebble from
Speaker 5: a shaman's palm, and several other things to figure out
Speaker 5: how to watch it on streaming platforms because it's scattered
Speaker 5: across like seven different platforms. But it's good.
Speaker 6: You can sometimes tell the story of the shows like this,
Speaker 6: usually when they're international productions like Jackler. A lot of
Speaker 6: these where crucial story sequences take place in countries that
Speaker 6: coincidentally have really really good tax rebate deals for studios.
Speaker 6: So in Jackal, so much of it takes place in
Speaker 6: Hungary for zero reason. So much of it takes place
Speaker 6: in Budapest for no Some of the stuff that's supposed
Speaker 6: to take place in Spain, clearly took place in Budapest
Speaker 6: because Hungary's got these great deals. You know, that's just
Speaker 6: my own like I enjoy I enjoy looking at that.
Speaker 6: I enjoy seeing that.
Speaker 5: That's why how in countless movies, Washington, DC looks remarkably
Speaker 5: like Toronto.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, exactly. I will make one recommendation. Then we
Speaker 2: got to go. And it's odd because it's a show
Speaker 2: I watched the first two seasons of it and didn't like,
Speaker 2: but I watched it because it was like wallpaper and
Speaker 2: that's the Gilded Age on HBO. And here's why I'm
Speaker 2: recommending so the third season out of nowhere. It's like
Speaker 2: Julian Fellows who created it and wrote it, like took
Speaker 2: his weedies and like the eights and weedies or had
Speaker 2: had had had inspiration that he didn't have in the
Speaker 2: creation of it and the running of it in the
Speaker 2: first two seasons. Because it is really good now and
Speaker 2: I don't quite know whether you could if you could
Speaker 2: just go to Wikipedia and read the plot summary of
Speaker 2: the first two seasons and then just start.
Speaker 1: With the stuff happens right in it.
Speaker 2: Now, things happen there because I saw a.
Speaker 6: Clip I saw a clip of it on TikTok years ago,
Speaker 6: I mean last year, at some point in the past
Speaker 6: few months, where all the people are begging what's his
Speaker 6: name to not destroy them, and one actually gets down
Speaker 6: on his knees and says, I'm begging you.
Speaker 1: I'm begging you. And I thought, oh, that's interesting.
Speaker 6: I want to see that, and then trying to find
Speaker 6: that episode and then try to buy that episode so
Speaker 6: I could watch that episode, and then buying the wrong
Speaker 6: one and watching that one, and then realizing it's the
Speaker 6: next episode and watching that one. Nothing happens in these episodes.
Speaker 6: Nothing is so insanely boring. It was insanely like very
Speaker 6: much like doubt nab that either. Things like the stakes
Speaker 6: are so bizarre. It's like, oh my god, you use
Speaker 6: the run stable spoon.
Speaker 2: Yes, oh my god. This season is about the Gilded Age.
Speaker 2: It's about a an investment gone wrong, a railroad problem
Speaker 2: and the invention of a new device, a family in crisis,
Speaker 2: divorces causing scandals, a book a real book Ward McAllister's
Speaker 2: books side creating a huge scandal, and so things really happen.
Speaker 2: The acting is sensationally good. The set, the set and
Speaker 2: it got good, and that's all I'm saying.
Speaker 6: But isn't there like I mean, I'm sure it's good, right,
Speaker 6: I'm gonna I'm planning to watch it actually, but isn't
Speaker 6: there like.
Speaker 1: A little too much of this?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 6: The suffrage movement is very important, and it's more are
Speaker 6: in America or fraud?
Speaker 2: It is? It is more. It is more interesting than
Speaker 2: you expect in almost every respect on those matters.
Speaker 1: Okay, that's what that's.
Speaker 2: What's so surprising about this third season. That's all I'm
Speaker 2: going to say. Hey, we got through a show. Rob
Speaker 2: did not yell at us for talking about too much
Speaker 2: science fiction.
Speaker 1: Thank you Rob for the button really helps.
Speaker 2: Okay, that's good. And uh and and also you you know,
Speaker 2: playing Candy Crush and.
Speaker 1: Stuff like that.
Speaker 2: Does anyone still play Candy Crush? I don't even know someone. Okay,
Speaker 2: So we'll we'll, we'll, we'll do another one of these
Speaker 2: because you people seem to like it. I don't know why.
Speaker 2: But you know, as I say, it's not like I
Speaker 2: I I don't podcast enough. So that's my problem. So
Speaker 2: you know, I need I need an extra you know,
Speaker 2: at least an extra hour a month to because no
Speaker 2: one's listening to me, that's for sure. All these people
Speaker 2: podcasting every day, it's crazy.
Speaker 1: What was that was that it No one's taking the bait.
Speaker 5: John sa