Speaker 1: Maybe maybe the situation is that you're not full of
Speaker 1: rage because your new calling.
Speaker 2: Has Let me say something, John, don't you remember the
Speaker 2: introad last week. It's called Christianity, not Buddhism. I'm I'm
Speaker 2: still mad at Paul as in the Apostles.
Speaker 3: That's that's very neat of you. Need you put it all,
Speaker 3: puts it all on Paul.
Speaker 1: I'm mad at him. You don't know.
Speaker 2: I think I do. I do it from mad, Yes,
Speaker 2: I call him so well.
Speaker 1: I don't like muhammad a.
Speaker 2: This is gold. We took care of everything.
Speaker 3: I believe me we did.
Speaker 1: Did I turn off the coffee?
Speaker 2: Did you lock up? Did you close the garage? That's it?
Speaker 2: I forgot to close the garage. That's it. No, that's
Speaker 2: not it.
Speaker 1: What else can we be forgetting? It's February. We're between
Speaker 1: the polar vortex and the bomb cyclone, as I understand it,
Speaker 1: and therefore we thought we'd take a minute here at
Speaker 1: glop culture to warm ourselves in our own presence. I'm
Speaker 1: John pod Hornz in New York. In Princeton, New Jersey.
Speaker 1: We have Rob Long.
Speaker 2: Hello, God, is it bomb cycle? Is that real? Or
Speaker 2: are you thinking a jokes? I'm looking at it. When
Speaker 2: is that happening?
Speaker 1: Last weekend was supposedly a bombs last weekend, and this
Speaker 1: weekend is the polar vortex. And since I don't know
Speaker 1: when people are listening to this, we're somehow caught between
Speaker 1: the bomb cyclone and the polar TwixT and between That's
Speaker 1: what she said, and there is Jonah Hey Goldberg in Washington.
Speaker 1: Have they picked up your garbage? I have not. They
Speaker 1: have not. Christine Rosen just told me this more it's
Speaker 1: Friday morning into the like the sixth of February that
Speaker 1: they just picked up that.
Speaker 2: See.
Speaker 3: The thing is, like I was trying to explain this
Speaker 3: to Lucy, my daughter, that like the apartment building I
Speaker 3: grew up in, not a huge apartment building, but a sizeable,
Speaker 3: normal Upper West Side apartment building probably had what I
Speaker 3: don't know, one hundred and fifty two hundred apartments in
Speaker 3: it something like that, you know, maybe a little less
Speaker 3: hundred apartments more like.
Speaker 2: So yeah, I mean I guess I'm five per floor
Speaker 2: or twelve. Okay, So that makes sense. Okay, So you.
Speaker 3: Think about how much garbage we produce as one family,
Speaker 3: and then you think about how much garbage each building
Speaker 3: when there are thousands and thousands of those buildings. For
Speaker 3: them not to pick up garbage in New York City
Speaker 3: is biblical in a way that it's just.
Speaker 2: Not in DC. I mean it's just yeah. I remember
Speaker 2: walking through the city once years ago with somebody who
Speaker 2: was not from New York City or even from a
Speaker 2: big city, and she's in there's, you know, bags of
Speaker 2: garbage on the streets. Well, I guess tomorrow's garbage day.
Speaker 2: It's well, that's everyday day here in the big city.
Speaker 1: You don't notice it here in New York where they
Speaker 1: have picked up some of the garbage. But when they
Speaker 1: haven't picked up the garbage, it looks like trench warfare.
Speaker 1: In world's snow, I mean black we have. There's snow
Speaker 1: and and there's these black bags stacked up ten feet high.
Speaker 2: And yet if you have to have a garbage collecting
Speaker 2: strike or cessation, you want to have it in the
Speaker 2: frozen temperatures, not in the incubation July or AUGUSTA. Yeah,
Speaker 2: this way where the lush, jungle climate. But I will
Speaker 2: say this, it's a it's a long standing set up,
Speaker 2: joke setup where someone goes you asked me, if they
Speaker 2: pick up my garbage. Have they picked up your garbage? No? No,
Speaker 2: my mother in law is still here. How's your headache?
Speaker 2: That's on a podcast called Club.
Speaker 1: Okay. I got to begin by telling the Frank Sinatra story,
Speaker 1: which is completely it's not connected to anything, but I
Speaker 1: heard it this morning. It's the comedian Mike Burbilia. Barbiglia
Speaker 1: had on his college friend John Mulaney on his podcast,
Speaker 1: and they've known each other forever. So Mulanie's like, you
Speaker 1: gotta tell the Frank Sinatra story. So Birbiglia tells this
Speaker 1: story about Frank Sinatra. He says to his aunt, who's
Speaker 1: from Buffalo, says, have you ever gone to a concert
Speaker 1: or like a show, like a like a live music show?
Speaker 1: And she was like, oh, yes, when I was a kid,
Speaker 1: when I was a teenager, we went to see Frank
Speaker 1: Sinatra and we loved Frank Sinatra. He came to Buffalo
Speaker 1: and we went to the concert, and then afterwards we
Speaker 1: wanted to go see him come out the stage door.
Speaker 1: So we went down into the alley and the door
Speaker 1: opened and there was Frank, Sandra and my friends and
Speaker 1: we start yelling, Frankie, Frankie, Frankie, we we love you.
Speaker 1: Frankie and he comes up and he pushes us out
Speaker 1: of the way, and he says, get out of the way,
Speaker 1: you fat pigs. And then he gets into limo and
Speaker 1: drives away. Oh, we just love Frank Sinatra. Get out
Speaker 1: of the way. It's the perfect story because it's like
Speaker 1: the long con. It didn't affect her feelings about Sinatra
Speaker 1: at all the way they were and they were fat pigs.
Speaker 1: I guess I.
Speaker 2: Mean bossic people. Yeah, I mean, what's that old David
Speaker 2: Suskyn's story. I think it's David skin story about Frank
Speaker 2: Sinatra where he's somewhere in a restaurant and Sinatra comes
Speaker 2: to his table. No no, no, no no no, this is
Speaker 2: no no no. That's a different It comes to his
Speaker 2: table and says, I'm a huge fan. I love your show.
Speaker 2: But I get David had talk show at some point.
Speaker 2: I love your show. Was watching it last night. It's great.
Speaker 2: I just I really I love that there's that on TV.
Speaker 2: And I just wanted to I tell you that I'm
Speaker 2: a big fan. That's all I did. And it sounds well,
Speaker 2: thank you so much. That's great. I really I'm a
Speaker 2: huge fan. And they had a little chit chat. It
Speaker 2: was great. It was a great, big moment in Suskind's
Speaker 2: life when Sinatra makes the effort to come and tell
Speaker 2: you how great you are, and then like a's coincidental
Speaker 2: to have it two days later. Just two days later,
Speaker 2: he's at a restaurant and Sinatra's there too. I guess
Speaker 2: Sonatra's in town. And he gets up and crosses to
Speaker 2: Sinnatra's table to say hello, and he goes, Frank, I'm
Speaker 2: so glad to see you. It's amazing, you know, to
Speaker 2: two nights, you know, almost in a row. I hope
Speaker 2: you have a good meal. And he sticks his hand out.
Speaker 2: It's doctor looks at him and says, I looked at
Speaker 2: his hand and says I'll shake your hand, but I
Speaker 2: won't kiss it. But it's just.
Speaker 1: What a psycho anyway. I just but I that was
Speaker 1: such a great story I had to share it.
Speaker 3: So it just on the reference to the Sinatra shaking
Speaker 3: hands of all of the really stupid conceits, including being
Speaker 3: able to purchase a second chunnel boring earth moving UH
Speaker 3: drill on short notice and get it to Nevada in
Speaker 3: Oceans thirteen. Perhaps the dumbest thing was the conceit that
Speaker 3: no one would betray someone who had shaken Frank Sinatra's hand. Yeah, right,
Speaker 3: like that is like the ultimate like honor among thieves. Right,
Speaker 3: no one betrayed anybody.
Speaker 2: Nobody is more honorable than he.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, anyway, I'm sorry to I'm sorry to have
Speaker 1: gotten this.
Speaker 2: No, no, But can I speak a request at some point?
Speaker 2: I know we have a lot to talk about. I would,
Speaker 2: and I know maybe everyone's bored of this. I wanted
Speaker 2: to float a cultural idea to you guys about my
Speaker 2: my thoughts on on on Epstein, and I just I
Speaker 2: don't we don't have to talk about the whole thing
Speaker 2: that's so sortid and but incredibly juicy. I'm totally riveted,
Speaker 2: but I have it. I have a theory, and I
Speaker 2: just we don't talk about now. We can talk about later.
Speaker 2: We could, we could, we could say this is juicy
Speaker 2: stuff and we can talk about later. So nobody tunes out?
Speaker 2: How about that?
Speaker 1: Okay? Later? So we are you are literally teasing.
Speaker 2: It's a little teaser.
Speaker 1: You're teasing the second.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I've got another. I got another. I speak
Speaker 2: of teasers. Let them tell you something, I'll tell you.
Speaker 3: I'll tell you it's just like a human Chekhov's gun here.
Speaker 3: I mean, this is amazing.
Speaker 2: I'm not uh we in my in my in my day,
Speaker 2: in my career, we didn't call them teasers, call them
Speaker 2: cold opens. They none of we called them teasers. I
Speaker 2: can't remember. No, we are different things. I don't know.
Speaker 2: They're the same. Seriously, yeah, the same, Yeah they are. Well,
Speaker 2: we called a little bit on the on the Cheers
Speaker 2: episode that was the joke before the title, which then
Speaker 2: became people called the cold open. We just called it
Speaker 2: a teaser. I was always called a teasers, called it
Speaker 2: teasers since time memorial that that that that's cannon that
Speaker 2: goes act to Sid Caesar. So don't let's not argue
Speaker 2: over this. And they lift them off. They've been lifting
Speaker 2: them off to go to syndication. So because they they
Speaker 2: were non related to the story, the first thing the
Speaker 2: syndicator would do is like step off the minute and
Speaker 2: a half and that would be your used car mattress
Speaker 2: kind of ads on your local t. And there's somebody
Speaker 2: on Instagram I think maybe Twitter, maybe TikTok to and
Speaker 2: Instagram doing something called Cheers shorts where he's taking every
Speaker 2: episode of Cheers I think, and cutting them up into
Speaker 2: little instagram bable reels and they're in they're in my season.
Speaker 2: By the way, I'm getting paid precisely nothing. Just so
Speaker 2: you know. It's a violation of every kind of trademark
Speaker 2: law there is. But nobody seems to own paramount right now,
Speaker 2: So no one's suing anybody. And he's found some teasers,
Speaker 2: and I don't know where he's found him.
Speaker 1: Maybe they're they're on the DVDs.
Speaker 2: Are the DVDs full?
Speaker 1: They're probably on the and they're probably on the dv
Speaker 1: these I'm sure there must be.
Speaker 2: Like, I don't want to apologize, Rob, I looked it
Speaker 2: up and you were correct. I shouldn't have doubted you. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I'm correct.
Speaker 1: Okay, well I was you are What do you call it?
Speaker 4: Then?
Speaker 1: When when when you're when you're on a news show
Speaker 1: and it's like coming up.
Speaker 2: Uh, the business is falling apart.
Speaker 1: Okay, there you go. Things don't mean it's a terrible thing.
Speaker 1: It's an absolutely terrible thing, to be fair. Look, look,
Speaker 1: just because of President of the United States' account tweets
Speaker 1: out something that has an image of Barack Obama and
Speaker 1: Michelle Obama looking like apes, doesn't mean that he meant.
Speaker 2: It no, and you know you're reading into it, and
Speaker 2: then in turn did.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it was funny turn uh Braxton Himmler, that's
Speaker 1: what about. That's my favorite thing that Penn did. So
Speaker 1: Penn University of Pennsylvania. The Administration UH, in its effort
Speaker 1: to deal with campus anti semitism, asked Pen to supply
Speaker 1: them with a list of professors and others on camp
Speaker 1: and administration who were Jewish, clearly to try to figure
Speaker 1: out whether or not there was some pattern of discriminatory
Speaker 1: hiring that seemed to be working against Jews. And in
Speaker 1: order to have that kind of hard data they needed,
Speaker 1: they needed.
Speaker 2: A list denominator right to figure out what the numer.
Speaker 1: And then Penn, channeling Otter from antal House, does the
Speaker 1: This is the worst case of the administration's anti Semitic efforts.
Speaker 1: To you know, to sort of like target and have
Speaker 1: us named Jews on a list is the darkest thing
Speaker 1: that's ever happened. Whereas the whole point of it is
Speaker 1: to to determine whether Penn is being anti So I
Speaker 1: won't put up with this.
Speaker 2: How Whereas everybody knows that it's everyone in the economics department.
Speaker 1: I will, Oh yeah, yeah, you will anyway. It just
Speaker 1: it just cracked me up because it has that quality.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Did I ever tell you that the CBS thing
Speaker 2: when I was like putting together a staff or CBS
Speaker 2: and like, this was not this was like before twenty twenty.
Speaker 2: This is before COVID. This's like a twenty eighteen or something.
Speaker 2: And they sent along thing, you have to do a
Speaker 2: webinar and all this stuff and all that because I
Speaker 2: had to. And then you're talking to the person at
Speaker 2: CBS who was tasked with that. They hadn't quite developed
Speaker 2: the sort of post George Floyd post twenty twenty name
Speaker 2: for it, but that the person and and they that
Speaker 2: person had not taken the webinar in double speak, because
Speaker 2: that person was saying, look, you know, I want you,
Speaker 2: we want you to try to when you're putting your
Speaker 2: writing staff to look to diversity, to try higher that
Speaker 2: we're going to help you. We have a program we
Speaker 2: have just let me know. And I said, well, look,
Speaker 2: you know, I only have you know, three slots. You know,
Speaker 2: It's like it isn't a question of like what I do,
Speaker 2: It's a question of how money I have. I don't
Speaker 2: have I mean my budget smaller this year. Well, look,
Speaker 2: we don't want to give you the impression that we're
Speaker 2: counting it up. Okay, this is not a This is
Speaker 2: not a quota. We don't have quotas. It's just at
Speaker 2: the end of every quarter, when we get the numbers,
Speaker 2: we want the numbers to be in a certain place.
Speaker 2: I said, well that, yeah, okay, I'll do that. Well,
Speaker 2: it's like, do you.
Speaker 1: Know about you know about one hundred percent participation game?
Speaker 1: This is my favorite. You work in a company, right,
Speaker 1: and they say we're collecting free United Way. Obviously what
Speaker 1: you do with your charitable donations is up to you.
Speaker 1: How you choose to give your money away is up
Speaker 1: to you. Whether you want to give money aways up
Speaker 1: to you. But we are looking for one hundred percent
Speaker 1: participation in your department, and we know you know we
Speaker 1: were essentially we're watching. But of course if your if
Speaker 1: your charitable giving is aimed in a different direction, we
Speaker 1: understand that. But we need one hundred percent participation in
Speaker 1: your department, and you make up one tenth of your department,
Speaker 1: you know, so, so that kind of weird. The weird
Speaker 1: coercive non coercive language of the world of corporate double speech.
Speaker 2: Were all disappointed. We didn't see what Bible study yesterday.
Speaker 1: You hear that a lot, Rob, No, I think that's
Speaker 1: the first line. That's the first line of dat Problems
Speaker 1: book of About the Bush White House. Didn't see what
Speaker 1: Bible study yesterday.
Speaker 2: We're doing Habit Cook.
Speaker 1: That would be the easiest Bible study. Cook is the
Speaker 1: shortest book is twenty one two k's, so it's double funny.
Speaker 2: Three yeah, three, that's a two K sounds yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 2: you never want three k want three ks? Right, I
Speaker 2: have three k's, but you never want them to rub right.
Speaker 1: Because as we know from the Sunshine Boys, Lloyd's been
Speaker 1: a pickle is funny. Lettuce is not funny. The great
Speaker 1: is my comic Lessons of all times? All right, speaking
Speaker 1: of comic lessons of all times or comics of all
Speaker 1: times are lit. We were very sad, obviously to note
Speaker 1: the passing, the sudden passing of Catherine O'Hara and and
Speaker 1: it's a moment. It's died at seventy one this week
Speaker 1: apparently took ill very relatively suddenly, and because she had
Speaker 1: been filming the second season of the Apple TV show
Speaker 1: The Studio when she was taken ill and then passed quickly.
Speaker 1: And it's fascinating to me because one would never like
Speaker 1: stop in the middle of the week, last week or
Speaker 1: two weeks ago to say, let's do something about Catherine o'hana, right,
Speaker 1: But then someone dies and you end up in this
Speaker 1: kind of like memorial moment where you go, oh, boy,
Speaker 1: was she great? And then you're like, boy, she really
Speaker 1: was great like and not only was she great like,
Speaker 1: she was great for fifty years and every ten years
Speaker 1: or so there was a moment when you were like,
Speaker 1: oh my god, Catherine O'Hara is great. It's not like
Speaker 1: she faded away or went somewhere else, or she had
Speaker 1: her best moment when she was in waiting for Gusman
Speaker 1: or on SETV. It's like, suddenly she pops up in
Speaker 1: the studio last year giving this astounding performance basically playing
Speaker 1: Amy Pascal, a version of a fictionalized version of the
Speaker 1: studio executive Amy Pascal, and is hillarious, hilarious at the
Speaker 1: age of seventy. And so I was reminded, just like,
Speaker 1: how many people like that like her have there been?
Speaker 1: And the truth is not knowing.
Speaker 2: Most I think part of it. I mean, you know, yeah,
Speaker 2: trying to say this so that it doesn't sound like
Speaker 2: I'm some kind of crackpot feminist. But part of it
Speaker 2: is like when you're playing these female parts, right, you
Speaker 2: off especially like Home Alone is a good example, like
Speaker 2: she has to play it'd be kind of funny, but
Speaker 2: she also has to be believably a good mother, right,
Speaker 2: because so you don't believe that a bad parent, that
Speaker 2: they're bad parents, and that there's true that she really
Speaker 2: desperately needs to get.
Speaker 3: You have to feel her pain, ads and the audience
Speaker 3: have to feel like, oh, that could have happened.
Speaker 2: To me, That could happen to me, And she still
Speaker 2: has to be funny, and she brought that kind of
Speaker 2: humanity and that kind of like, you know, she legitimized
Speaker 2: every part she played in a way that sometimes like, look,
Speaker 2: I mean I love Anchorman, right, but you do not
Speaker 2: bel leave one second of it, and you're not supposed to.
Speaker 2: But you're supposed to believe her when she plays Even
Speaker 2: when she plays Moira Rose on Shit's Creek, she plays
Speaker 2: a woman who's all sorts of psychotically narcissistic and everything
Speaker 2: and bananas, and she's got an accent that changes within
Speaker 2: one line, like in one line of dialogue, her accent
Speaker 2: will change. She did that, but she absolutely loves her
Speaker 2: children and would never leave her husband. And that is
Speaker 2: just a staggering performance. And she's still hilarious. So go
Speaker 2: back fifty years earlier.
Speaker 1: On SCTV when SETV, which was the best sketch comedy
Speaker 1: show ever on television, started, she was twenty one years
Speaker 1: and she did there was this bit where Eugene Levy
Speaker 1: is Alex Trebek and he is the host of its academic.
Speaker 2: Right, Oh my gosh, that's such a great school high
Speaker 2: school show.
Speaker 1: And she is Mary Margaret o'hallahan. I believe it's her name.
Speaker 1: And so she's a girl from you know, Central High
Speaker 1: School and her problem is that she can't not hit
Speaker 1: the buzzer.
Speaker 2: Now let's start the game.
Speaker 4: The first question worth twenty points and the subject is
Speaker 4: authors Margaret Me and Parkdale.
Speaker 2: Henry minute.
Speaker 4: I'm sorry, Margaret, let me please finish the question first.
Speaker 2: All right, what famous Margaret Me and Parkdale do hugo?
Speaker 4: Oh, I'm sorry, Margaret, if you just let me finish
Speaker 4: the question first, see how it works.
Speaker 2: Okay, what famous humors Margaret Me in.
Speaker 4: Parkdale carry to Margaret, I'll have to ask you to
Speaker 4: please let me finish the question before answering, because that
Speaker 4: answer was extremely wrong.
Speaker 1: It keeps going on, and the thing is, she can't
Speaker 1: help me, and as it goes on, she starts crying
Speaker 1: in humiliation because she knows she can't stick get the
Speaker 1: answer right, because she can't, but she can't stop herself,
Speaker 1: so that by the fifth time, you know, she presses
Speaker 1: the button and she's like, you know, judge Jay, and
Speaker 1: she's like leaping and so. And the thing is, it's
Speaker 1: totally credible that she's seventeen years old, that she's on TV,
Speaker 1: and that she can't press the and it's hilarious and
Speaker 1: touching and kind of a little ruthless and all these
Speaker 1: things at once, and all she's doing is pressing a
Speaker 1: button buzzer and saying over.
Speaker 2: And you know what's infuriating about her is that none
Speaker 2: of that, none of that was on the page. She
Speaker 2: she did it all herself. There's a moment in I
Speaker 2: talked about this in the Martini shutage about her this
Speaker 2: week in Guffman, when she's she and Fred Willard, who
Speaker 2: can't believe they're both yet it's horrible and they're they're
Speaker 2: the the local stars of the community, theater Lons of Lane. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and they run the travel agency and they're and they
Speaker 2: do all the theater tricks and everything. Just so you
Speaker 2: just just they're they're hilarious, right, they're going into audition
Speaker 2: and the audition piece they have as they're singing, they're
Speaker 2: doing a number set to midnight at the Oasis, Ding dong, Oh,
Speaker 2: I wonder who knows I'm vacationing here at the oasis?
Speaker 1: Am I late?
Speaker 2: You surprised? How did you find me?
Speaker 1: I have my ways?
Speaker 2: Would you like to come in for coffee?
Speaker 1: You don't need to add sir.
Speaker 2: They just don't need to speak.
Speaker 1: Manys and I will be your sheep.
Speaker 2: I don't need a harem honey when you're by my side,
Speaker 2: and you won't need a.
Speaker 1: Cam no no, when.
Speaker 2: I take you for a ride and we need some
Speaker 2: coffee to go with that ride, won't we? We are
Speaker 2: all so surprising.
Speaker 1: Let's say, I wonder do we have time for that coffee?
Speaker 2: What time is it? What time is it?
Speaker 1: Haven't you been paying attention? It's sinn I had oh,
Speaker 1: thank you good.
Speaker 2: But for every line of dialogue that Fred Willard has
Speaker 2: Catherine Harra when she auditioning, she mouths it like she's
Speaker 2: in the elementary school play. You know, when it's not
Speaker 2: your part, you memorize the other person's part two. And
Speaker 2: it's like, I didn't notice it when I saw it
Speaker 2: in the theater. I don't think i've noticed it. I
Speaker 2: only noticed like a year ago when I saw a
Speaker 2: clip of it. I thought, wait a minute, she's mouthing.
Speaker 2: But it's like that, And nobody wrote that down and said,
Speaker 2: mound this. That she just she's just knew who that
Speaker 2: person was, and that she knew that person was working
Speaker 2: really hard, and she knew that person was really terrified
Speaker 2: even though she's supposed to be. You know, she knew
Speaker 2: that her husband was a total jerk, which he is
Speaker 2: and was in crebby domineering and then and then and
Speaker 2: she would of course she'd mouth his words while he's talking,
Speaker 2: and he would notice because he's not paying attention to
Speaker 2: her either.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I was just thinking. In the studio, which
Speaker 1: is really a very good show. The first moment you
Speaker 1: see her, Seth Rogan has found out that she his boss,
Speaker 1: has been fired and that he is taking her place,
Speaker 1: and he goes to her house to say I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: you know, but he also has to get her to sign,
Speaker 1: and he both has two motives. He both wants to
Speaker 1: say sorry and then also get get her not to
Speaker 1: sue or do something or other. And she just opens
Speaker 1: the door and she looks at him and she bursts
Speaker 1: into tears. Instead of going oh it's you, you know,
Speaker 1: or like ah, my betrayer is here, she just sort
Speaker 1: of goes mayby and like weeps, and it's again funny,
Speaker 1: totally unexpected. It's not the scene you expected to see,
Speaker 1: and it's touching and it's me and it's true. It's
Speaker 1: like a like a completely honest piece of acting. And
Speaker 1: she's seventy years old when she does this. She was
Speaker 1: twenty one on SCTV. She was like thirty seven or
Speaker 1: something when she made Home Alone. You know she she
Speaker 1: was you know, she was in her forties on Guffman.
Speaker 1: She was in her fifties on Bestined Show. And you know,
Speaker 1: I mean like she just a mirror alone.
Speaker 2: Home Alone was a beginning of a billion dollar franchise.
Speaker 2: And it would not they would to be at Home
Speaker 2: Alone two or three or any of that stuff. It
Speaker 2: would not have been the biggest grossing holiday movie of
Speaker 2: all time. If it was a movie about bad parents
Speaker 2: who leave their kid at home, and she made it
Speaker 2: by good parents, I mean, that was the and.
Speaker 1: She has that, and she has this beautiful I'm not
Speaker 1: even that fond of Home Alone, but she has this
Speaker 1: beautiful little scene with John Candy where she's in despair
Speaker 1: in an airport, in terror and despair at an airport,
Speaker 1: and he comforts her. He's like part of this band
Speaker 1: or like Poland and something like that, and they have
Speaker 1: this like two minute moment, which is, as you say,
Speaker 1: crucial to the success of the movie, because if you
Speaker 1: don't have empathy for her, you're like, WHOA, my god.
Speaker 3: This is you think about it because Candy was at
Speaker 3: CTV two and like and Candy has that's sort of
Speaker 3: the male fat guy version of all these qualities were
Speaker 3: describing to her.
Speaker 2: Yeah, right, that.
Speaker 3: Ability to be a believable mensch schlub guy who's really
Speaker 3: funny but also really relatable, you know. I mean, like
Speaker 3: the fact that they both came from the same you know,
Speaker 3: training round.
Speaker 2: As while.
Speaker 1: I mean that's why SETV was so great because them
Speaker 1: it was you Gene Levy, who obviously also has this
Speaker 1: ability to make you feel for him and Martin Short
Speaker 1: also like has those colors and uh, you know, and
Speaker 1: and and and flavors and uh, and that quality one
Speaker 1: of the reasons they could do these like twenty minute
Speaker 1: long sketches on that on that show because they were
Speaker 1: character based.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but some of them are so.
Speaker 1: They were just parodic. They were character parodies they did.
Speaker 2: But with Rick Brannis's Woody Allen and Dave Thomas is
Speaker 2: Bob Hope because Woody Allen that there was a period
Speaker 2: where Woody Allen was, like, I think he had just
Speaker 2: written a piece about it, but like just talk about
Speaker 2: how much he loved Bob Hope, how much he how
Speaker 2: much he adored by I guess he and Dick Cavot
Speaker 2: were most of the Bob Hope like fanatics. And so
Speaker 2: I think somebody SETV read that article. But oh, let's
Speaker 2: just make a Woody Allen movie about Woody Allen and
Speaker 2: Bob Hope. Hey, how you doing? Okay? Yeah? Yeah, I
Speaker 2: tell him if your jobs to just get in the
Speaker 2: car and go like he was. He was great Bob Hope.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, oh that was that anyway, it is if
Speaker 1: you've never watched s CTV go find CTV. Go find
Speaker 1: Battle of the PBS Stars where where Fred Rogers and
Speaker 1: Julia Child are in a boxing ring against each other.
Speaker 3: So I do wonder, you know, I I've made this
Speaker 3: point about conservatives on college campuses having to know their
Speaker 3: own culture and the majority culture, but I always begin
Speaker 3: it by saying, Look, there's a reason why the vast
Speaker 3: majority of comedians and comic actors are Canadians, Blacks and Jews, right,
Speaker 3: And there is something about you know, Mike Myers, all
Speaker 3: those guys, they grew up what on American pop culture,
Speaker 3: but they were alienated from it too, And maybe there's
Speaker 3: just something about being Canadian in a certain way that
Speaker 3: sorts for these kinds of personalities in the business.
Speaker 2: I don't know, it's interesting. Well, I mean they would
Speaker 2: say like they do. And SDV did this great parody
Speaker 2: of a American talk show called The Sammy Maudlin Show,
Speaker 2: and Eugene Levy played the comedian Bobby Bittman and Catherine
Speaker 2: Harrow was Lola Heatherton, so she was some combination of
Speaker 2: Lola Falana and Joey Heatherton. And she would come in
Speaker 2: at the old pants so she looked like Sharon Stone
Speaker 2: and Casino. That's kind of how what was the vibe there?
Speaker 2: And I think that that was like when that was on,
Speaker 2: I was the age I was. I knew there was
Speaker 2: something ridiculous about those shows. I just couldn't quite put
Speaker 2: my finger on it. And if you were a Canadian
Speaker 2: and you got there faster you were, you got faster
Speaker 2: the point where you're like, oh, this is just show
Speaker 2: business nonsense. So by the time that that cycle was over,
Speaker 2: suddenly David Letterman had appeared and and you and you
Speaker 2: there was a guy who knew that this was show
Speaker 2: business buffoonery and he was never going to have Jerry
Speaker 2: Lewis on his show and not make it clear to
Speaker 2: the audience. And he finds Jerry Lewis to be, you know,
Speaker 2: a joke, and that that is there was a period
Speaker 2: there where I like said, the late seventies, early eighties,
Speaker 2: maybe I don't know what really exactly when, but that
Speaker 2: they got there first because I think they saw it
Speaker 2: already from afar. And also they love it.
Speaker 1: They loved it, They loved it, and Letterman didn't love it.
Speaker 1: Letterman was contemptuous of it. And Martin Short in his
Speaker 1: memoir actually talks about how when he did you know,
Speaker 1: these like letter perfect imitations of people, like he did
Speaker 1: this thing where he was Katherine Hepburn or he was
Speaker 1: Katherine Hepburn's nephew Marty at the Hot Car Sound. And
Speaker 1: the old point is he loved them. They loved they
Speaker 1: loved them, They didn't hate them. And Dave Thomas loved
Speaker 1: Bob Hope and obviously working Ass loved Woody Allen. And
Speaker 1: so there were they this these were these were very accurate,
Speaker 1: often very savage parodies, right nonetheless that were based in
Speaker 1: isn't this amazing?
Speaker 2: Right? I think also like can you believe it were
Speaker 2: Canadians are doing this? But also I mean the thing
Speaker 2: that Katherine Katherin Heppern thing I think is great because
Speaker 2: Martin Short did Katherine Hepburn's nephew. He also did Katherine
Speaker 2: Hepburn and Katherine Harrah did Katherine Hepburn. Katherine Hepburn was
Speaker 2: like an st TV staple. And I was once with
Speaker 2: a bunch of people who were at CTV. It's a
Speaker 2: long time ago, and it wasn't It wasn't Ohara, and
Speaker 2: it wasn't Martin Short. It was like it was a
Speaker 2: Dave Thomas and Rick Brannis and in the room and
Speaker 2: we were talking about a friend of ours and I
Speaker 2: I tell you the story, that Steven Sondheim story, all right, okay.
Speaker 2: So we had a writer's assistant on cheers, an older
Speaker 2: gentleman at the time whose name was Barry. And Barry
Speaker 2: grew up in rural Pennsylvania in the fifties, I guess
Speaker 2: our sixties and was a big fan of the musical theater.
Speaker 2: If he get my drift, yeah, the code was not
Speaker 2: yet thick, okay. And he and a friend of his,
Speaker 2: another big fan of musical theater. At high school, they
Speaker 2: took the bus early bus into I think scrand to
Speaker 2: New York and they go to New York as they're
Speaker 2: going to go see the matinee of a funny thing
Speaker 2: happened the way of the Forum, and so go see
Speaker 2: the mattine of a funny thing happened the way in
Speaker 2: the forum. I think it was the matinee. And that
Speaker 2: those days, when you were leaving the theater, there was
Speaker 2: a phone book. There's a phone booth there with a
Speaker 2: phone book in it, and they looked up Sondheim, Thomas Stephen,
Speaker 2: and they found him in the phone book, which of
Speaker 2: course you could those days, you know, one set in
Speaker 2: place or whatever it was, and they called him to
Speaker 2: tell them how much they loved funny thing half Flora
Speaker 2: for him, and he said, get out of my way,
Speaker 2: you've fat pigs. Well, no, because this setup was slightly different.
Speaker 2: They said, Hi, we're two teenage boys who've taken the
Speaker 2: bus in from Pennsylvania. That's exactly what he said. I'll
Speaker 2: pay for the taxi. Get over here. And they went
Speaker 2: over there, and then they then they we're all like
Speaker 2: all the writers are like everything at work stopped for
Speaker 2: the day. I'm telling you what he's telling is the
Speaker 2: story we had. Like I got to know everything. And
Speaker 2: he's like, well, I'm not gonna tell you everything, but
Speaker 2: I'll put it this way. Stephen Sondheim was one of
Speaker 2: the early adopters of the polaroid camera. Because you could
Speaker 2: take a picture, you didn't have to get developed at
Speaker 2: the drug store. Okay, that kind of let your mind wander.
Speaker 2: But his his his, uh, his neighbor was Katherine Hepper. Yes,
Speaker 2: and I so I jumped in because I was, you know,
Speaker 2: I was gonna do my Katherine Hepper and I was
Speaker 2: gonna did I jumped at Kathryn Hepburn. So did Katherine Hepburn, Barry,
Speaker 2: did you ever hear her banging on the door, Stephen, Stephen,
Speaker 2: you let those boys go, You send in the clowns.
Speaker 2: I'll send in the police. And Dave Thomas said, that's
Speaker 2: more of a Martin short Katherine Hepburn than the Katherine
Speaker 2: and harrickper And it's true because we always said his
Speaker 2: Bob Hope was kind of people who did Bob Hope
Speaker 2: were did his version of Bob Hope. They weren't doing
Speaker 2: Bob Hope. They were doing the day Conn's Bob Hope.
Speaker 2: But anyway, that's why Katherine Hepper's store.
Speaker 1: That is a great That is a great story.
Speaker 2: The polaroid little detail. You need the detail to make it.
Speaker 1: Real, becan detail. Yes, do you have an ad?
Speaker 2: I do speak at pcond details. I was just busy
Speaker 2: with my anecdote. And what's interesting about this ad is
Speaker 2: that I think I'm I rarely. I mean I don't rarely.
Speaker 2: I often read ad copy for products that I believe in,
Speaker 2: but I have never really hoped for in its own
Speaker 2: Can you hear that buzzing a little bit? Okay? Because
Speaker 2: this construction going on I can't give a show up,
Speaker 2: but speak of buzzing and conflict. We hear a lot,
Speaker 2: especially online, about conservatives attacking other conservatives. Sometimes it even
Speaker 2: seems like conservatives are fighting each other more than they
Speaker 2: fight the left. And that is where the new podcast,
Speaker 2: Conservative Crossroads with Henry Olsen, who's a senior fellow at
Speaker 2: the Ethics of Public Policy Center comes in. I love Henry.
Speaker 2: It doesn't shy away from these disputes. It leans into
Speaker 2: them by putting two conservatives who disagree about an important
Speaker 2: issue together to hash it out on the air. Every
Speaker 2: other week, Conservative Crossroads does what no other program does.
Speaker 2: It explores Conservatism's disagreements without name calling. Conservative Crossroads is
Speaker 2: the podcast for conservatives who want to understand what's happening
Speaker 2: to their movement. Henry has been a guest on the
Speaker 2: Rickashet podcast forever and he's always great. I am a huge,
Speaker 2: huge fan of his and I kind of feel like
Speaker 2: this is something if we're gonna if there's gonna be
Speaker 2: a conservative movement, it's gonna have to figure out what
Speaker 2: it stands for. And he's a perfect person to moderate
Speaker 2: those conversations. So I think that this is going to
Speaker 2: be a great and maybe even meaningful set of conversations.
Speaker 2: So my hope is that we will all join Henry
Speaker 2: Olsen and his guests at Conservative Crossroads every other Monday
Speaker 2: as they hash out the ideas and principles that will
Speaker 2: decide the future of the right. You can get Conservative
Speaker 2: Crossroads from Ricochet or any platform where you get your podcasts,
Speaker 2: but I recommend Ricochet, and it's called Conservatives Conservatism at
Speaker 2: the Crossroads, and it is at the crossroads, which is
Speaker 2: why all conservatives need Conservative Crossroads. Listen today, and I'm
Speaker 2: thrilled that Henry's doing that.
Speaker 1: So one place that Henry Olsen has been applying his
Speaker 1: rhetorical and policy rich and pole rich wares is in
Speaker 1: the pages of the Washington Post, which of course had
Speaker 1: a gigantic layoff this week. A third of its staff
Speaker 1: apparently dismissed in one fell swoop. Everyone told to stay
Speaker 1: home eight thirty in the morning, log onto a zoom,
Speaker 1: and the people who were let go were removed from
Speaker 1: the computer system at nine am, no longer able to
Speaker 1: have access, and were sent on their merry way. Now,
Speaker 1: if you are a person on social media, which I
Speaker 1: recommend you not be, but if you are, and you
Speaker 1: follow people in the media, which is kind of the
Speaker 1: only real reason to be on something like Twitter, because
Speaker 1: it's a way of getting news early. So my account,
Speaker 1: my Twitter accounts disproportionately weighted toward news gatherers or people
Speaker 1: in the news business. And you would have thought that
Speaker 1: Japan had won World War Two from the tone of
Speaker 1: the writing, not only on the part of the people
Speaker 1: who had been laid off or the people who had
Speaker 1: formerly worked at the Washington Post and were watching the layoffs,
Speaker 1: but everybody else in media, that a thing of historically,
Speaker 1: historically cataclysmic awfulness had happened, and that there was one villain,
Speaker 1: and one villain alone, and that was the guy who
Speaker 1: in the previous twelve years had lost one hundred bajillion
Speaker 1: dollars publishing The Washington Post and clearly had grown tired
Speaker 1: of losing one hundred bajillion dollars and was maybe looking
Speaker 1: to figure out a way to lose five bajillion dollars
Speaker 1: instead of one hundred bajillion dollars. And for the suffering
Speaker 1: that he endured over twelve years of losses, he has
Speaker 1: been accused of being a monster, a tyrant, authoritarian, a
Speaker 1: supporter letting democracy die in darkness and all of that. That,
Speaker 1: of course, being Jeff Bezos. I'm told Rob, Yes, I'm
Speaker 1: told that, I'm heartless.
Speaker 2: I should understood.
Speaker 1: Layoffs are a terrible thing, and people suffer through layoffs,
Speaker 1: and you can't be happy about such things. First all,
Speaker 1: it's bad karma. And second of all, you know, obviously
Speaker 1: it's a terrible moment when anybody loses a job. You
Speaker 1: know what I say to that, You know why, because
Speaker 1: if I lost my job, every one of those people
Speaker 1: who got laid off at the Washington Post would be
Speaker 1: dancing a jig and writing celebratory tweets about it. Brian
Speaker 1: Stelter of CNN, who was you know, has been like
Speaker 1: doing threnities and sorrowful this and sorrowful that. Literally said
Speaker 1: something like he hoped that Elon Musk would go bankrupt
Speaker 1: for buying Twitter four years ago or three years ago,
Speaker 1: he hoped that Twitter would go out of business because
Speaker 1: Elon Musk was such a bad person, or something like that.
Speaker 1: But not, you know, but in this case, yeah.
Speaker 2: Whatever doesn't make it right, John, doesn't make it right,
Speaker 2: doesn't make what much right. Just because bad people do
Speaker 2: bad things doesn't mean that you that is right, it's
Speaker 2: okay if you do bad things.
Speaker 1: I don't believe that anybody is owed a job. I've
Speaker 1: never believed that anybody was owed a job. And and
Speaker 1: so you know, I've been through job changes that were
Speaker 1: visited upon me that I did not want, and I
Speaker 1: did not I will say I did not complain because
Speaker 1: if you lose somebody's confidence or something like that, then
Speaker 1: you go on your merry way and find another way
Speaker 1: to make a living. We find another somebody else who
Speaker 1: wants the whares that you peddle. So I don't think
Speaker 1: I'm inconsistent. And I think that they produced a garbage product,
Speaker 1: that it was a bad newspaper. It's been a bad
Speaker 1: newspaper for more than a decade. Bezos's investments did not
Speaker 1: make it a better newspaper, and that wasn't his fault
Speaker 1: because he's not the person making the paper. He's just
Speaker 1: the person paying the bills. And so, like I say,
Speaker 1: he got tired.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I love the idea though, that all of this
Speaker 2: talk about it, all the all the complaining about this,
Speaker 2: and the moaning and whining about it, that the solution
Speaker 2: was simple puzzles, fun things, puzzles and recipes. Yeah, and uh,
Speaker 2: you know, consumer information. That's why The New York Times
Speaker 2: is robust and the Washington Post is not. Because they
Speaker 2: have puzzles and recipes five ways to cook chocolate chip cookie.
Speaker 2: People liked that. That give them what they want. If
Speaker 2: you're not going to give them juicy celebrity stories and
Speaker 2: lurid murder accounts, which is another thing they should be doing,
Speaker 2: then give them, you know, like which TV should I buy?
Speaker 2: Which headphones are good? How do I make a blueberry pie?
Speaker 2: And uh, well here's the jumble, and they act like, oh,
Speaker 2: it's beneath us. Well, okay.
Speaker 1: The whole point is that The New York Times is
Speaker 1: a well run company that saw was it always red,
Speaker 1: wasn't always but red tea leaves. It saw things happening,
Speaker 1: It did tests, It developed things and had a puzzle.
Speaker 1: It realized people love the puzzle, so it's like, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe we should have another puzzle. So that they bought
Speaker 1: wordle from this guy who had invented wordle online. And
Speaker 1: then they were like, you know, maybe word people love wordle.
Speaker 1: Maybe we'll invent another puzzle, So then they added spelling. Me. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: they always knew that the food section was popular, so
Speaker 1: and you know what people really love in the food section, recipes.
Speaker 1: So they started a separate section called cooking, and they
Speaker 1: not only did they have recipes and you had to
Speaker 1: pay x I. There was great. There was a thing
Speaker 1: where you but they then showed videos of how to
Speaker 1: make the thing that you were making, the pasta dish
Speaker 1: that they said was really great and could take half
Speaker 1: an hour. And then they tested that. It turned out
Speaker 1: a lot of people wanted that, so they gave them more.
Speaker 1: And then it was like, well, if they like food,
Speaker 1: if they like recipes, maybe they'll also like instructions on
Speaker 1: what luggage to buy, because people want to learn, like
Speaker 1: have some practical And then they did that and that worked. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: the Washington Post is like Trump is bad, Trump is bad.
Speaker 1: Trump is bad, And the New York Times did Trump.
Speaker 2: Is bad too, with cookies.
Speaker 1: Plenty of Trump is bad, but also a rest and
Speaker 1: a wild cutter, and and and and spelling bee and
Speaker 1: Sudoku and uh, you know, the new whatever and the
Speaker 1: crossword and so it. Because when we were kids, newspapers
Speaker 1: were fun.
Speaker 2: Did the jumble, the jumble.
Speaker 1: The jumble, comic strips, the sports section, the.
Speaker 2: Going up to the California. The San fr Zoo Chronicle
Speaker 2: had X rated movie listings, so you got a little like,
Speaker 2: oh look at that little jolt.
Speaker 1: The New York Times would not two X rayed listings,
Speaker 1: but the New York List didn't too x.
Speaker 2: Ray man that Actually, you know, people, you know, I'm
Speaker 2: not gonna go I'm not gonna go to that movie theater.
Speaker 2: But I'm I'm I didn't know that Wet Nurses was
Speaker 2: playing there, now I know. So I generally agree with
Speaker 2: all that.
Speaker 3: I have a slightly different take in so far as
Speaker 3: I think. And I was talking to a former Washington
Speaker 3: Post guy about this, but I don't want to credit
Speaker 3: him on the record, but you know, we we we
Speaker 3: talked about it for a long time. Part of the problem. Look, so,
Speaker 3: first of all, I come to this. My dad ran
Speaker 3: a newspaper syndicate. Right, He ran features. He was the
Speaker 3: guy who discovered Scott Adams and Dilbert. He was friends
Speaker 3: with Charlie Schultz.
Speaker 1: Right, he sent out, you should you should explain to
Speaker 1: people what a newspaper syndic it was, because this is
Speaker 1: a job that doesn't exist.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so like newspapers used to get like, let's put it.
Speaker 3: I'll do it a really easy way for syndicating columnists.
Speaker 3: If you were the Buffalo Times Dispatch, right, and you
Speaker 3: wanted Tom Soul Tom Soul's column which appeared and that's
Speaker 3: just say for the sake of argument, the San Francisco Chronicle,
Speaker 3: the way you did it was you went to something
Speaker 3: called a syndicate and said, we want to subscribe to
Speaker 3: that column because that was the only way someone in
Speaker 3: Buffalo would be able to see it. It was a middleman, right,
Speaker 3: And you know George will was syndicated in hundreds of newspapers.
Speaker 2: Well, M.
Speaker 3: Buckley was syndicated in hundreds of newspapers. But it wasn't
Speaker 3: just you know, my dad's company made a huge share
Speaker 3: of its money. Forget Peanuts, which they owned, and Garfield,
Speaker 3: which they owned for a long time. There was this
Speaker 3: thing called VCR Plus, which was this code that appeared
Speaker 3: in the TV listings that allowed you to sort of
Speaker 3: pre DVR. You punched in this code to this box
Speaker 3: and it would record. It would set up to record
Speaker 3: some show that you wanted to watch while you were
Speaker 3: away on a VHS tape. And they licensed the ability
Speaker 3: to use those numbers and TV listings and so my
Speaker 3: dad ran features where he had stringers writing stories about
Speaker 3: state fairs or interesting animals, like don't even get my
Speaker 3: dad started on the lie about that old phrase. You know,
Speaker 3: dog bites man isn't a story, but man bites dog
Speaker 3: is a story. Because my dad tried to play stories
Speaker 3: about people biting dogs all the time and no one
Speaker 3: would run them. But regardless, So anyway, the point is
Speaker 3: I became a syndicated columnist in two thousand, right as
Speaker 3: the syndication business was starting to die. But it took
Speaker 3: a while, and what really killed the syndication business and
Speaker 3: ultimately over time the newspaper business was the decline of
Speaker 3: the two or three newspaper town. And you know you
Speaker 3: used to be my dad would send a salesman and say, hey,
Speaker 3: do you want I don't know George Will, for say argument,
Speaker 3: And they'd said love George Will. And the salesman would say, okay,
Speaker 3: there'll be five hundred dollars a week, and the other
Speaker 3: would be like, oh, that's too rich for my blode
Speaker 3: to say, okay, I'll go across the street and see
Speaker 3: if the post wants it. And you would have competitive
Speaker 3: pressure for building, forbidding on stuff Once the second newspaper
Speaker 3: died because of cable, this was long before Internet. The
Speaker 3: newspaper could say, sure, I want George Will. Salesman says
Speaker 3: five hundred bucks. You say, I'll give you five, and
Speaker 3: since you that was the only sale to make in
Speaker 3: that district, you took the five bucks right. And then
Speaker 3: when the Internet comes along, it commodified all this stuff, like,
Speaker 3: if you want to read George Will or Tom Sol,
Speaker 3: you didn't need to subscribe to some local paper. You
Speaker 3: can get it on the internet at you know, a
Speaker 3: dozen different sites, the drudge link and that kind of thing.
Speaker 3: So it kind of destroyed the business anyway. The reason
Speaker 3: I bring that up is that there was this period
Speaker 3: of time after the second newspaper died, and all of
Speaker 3: these cities where the newspaper left standing had an effect
Speaker 3: a monopoly, and they were making enormous amounts of money.
Speaker 3: And the problem was most newspapers paid dividends on their stock,
Speaker 3: and shareholders would not take cuts and dividends to allow
Speaker 3: newspapers to reinvest in their newspapers. And so eventually, as
Speaker 3: more and more of the Internet took more and more
Speaker 3: of what newspapers do, starting with classifieds, which was like
Speaker 3: a death now.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: When it became less necessary to check the newspaper for
Speaker 3: sports scores, when it became less necessary to check a
Speaker 3: newspaper for stock prices, newspapers were left with no understanding
Speaker 3: of how to like adapt, and a bunch of them
Speaker 3: just got worse and worse and worse and started selling
Speaker 3: off parts of themselves. The Washington Post lasted longer and
Speaker 3: developed a culture that was so entitled because it was
Speaker 3: a massive monopoly. I mean, John, you know better than
Speaker 3: I do about how vicious the Washington Post was. To
Speaker 3: keep the Washington Times from getting anything like market share,
Speaker 3: they would go to a car dealerships and say, if
Speaker 3: you advertise in the in the Washington Times, you'll never write. Well,
Speaker 3: you'll never advertise in the Washington Post. They made it
Speaker 3: really hard for them to deliver the Washington Times. But
Speaker 3: so that's why Warren Buffett invested in the Washington Post.
Speaker 3: It was a monopoly and it was throwing off huge
Speaker 3: piles of money. The problem with monopolies is they don't
Speaker 3: learn lessons from competition, and so over time the smug
Speaker 3: kind of Oh, we're the party of Woodward and Bernstein,
Speaker 3: We're the newspaper Woodward and Bernstein, that became their only
Speaker 3: understanding of their mission. What in reality, getting back to
Speaker 3: my dad's point and your point, is that lots of
Speaker 3: people bought newspapers just for the sports, or just for
Speaker 3: the local coverage, or just for the funny pages, or
Speaker 3: just for the movie listings or whatever it was. And
Speaker 3: when a newspaper starts to think, oh, no, we have
Speaker 3: to the only reason we put about this newspaper is
Speaker 3: for a ten part series on the climate crisis in Botswana.
Speaker 3: It turns out a lot of people don't want to
Speaker 3: buy it, and The Times because it's essentially competing in
Speaker 3: one of the last multi newspaper major cities in America,
Speaker 3: and it's also competing in a national marketplace. It's not
Speaker 3: the idea that the thing that draws me crazy is
Speaker 3: people say, oh, it's outrageous that Wordles paying for the
Speaker 3: Africa Bureau. Well, Peanuts and Garfield paid for the Africa Bureau,
Speaker 3: you know, three years ago at a different newspaper. It's like,
Speaker 3: newspapers are products, and if you just think it's your
Speaker 3: only job is to sell a pretty sanctimonious thing, and
Speaker 3: then you get bad at that. Right, They let Politico
Speaker 3: eat their lunch. If you let another media outlet get
Speaker 3: out of front of you in the nation's capital on
Speaker 3: the beat.
Speaker 2: Following politics, my god, that they could have start for sure. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Politico was done by two Washington Post reporters who went
Speaker 1: to them and said, we have this idea for a
Speaker 1: politics only internet based publication that we would do out
Speaker 1: of the Washington Post. And the Washington Post said, well,
Speaker 1: we don't want that, and they were like, okay, we'll
Speaker 1: go and raise money on our own independently and go
Speaker 1: do this and it was a profit maker in about
Speaker 1: a year. Something like that. Politico could have been inside
Speaker 1: the Washington Post. So the thing was that the New
Speaker 1: York Times innovated and the New York Times became a
Speaker 1: is a subscription product. Remember the thing about newspapers was
Speaker 1: that they lost money on their subscribers. It costs twenty
Speaker 1: it would cost thirty five cents, or it cost fifty
Speaker 1: cents to print and deliver a newspaper per paper. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but you charge ten cents of paper so that you
Speaker 1: have advertising. So it was the TV advertising model that
Speaker 1: died because of the Internet and because classified has died
Speaker 1: and all of that. Times figured out a way to
Speaker 1: get people to subscribe online, and so did the Wall
Speaker 1: Street Journal, and you know who didn't The Washington Post
Speaker 1: because their product was garbage and nobody.
Speaker 2: Times iterated on the app over and over again. They
Speaker 2: were they were pushing updates on that app. It was
Speaker 2: incredibly irritating, but at the same time you understood what
Speaker 2: they were doing, which they're trying everything, and they actually
Speaker 2: were making it pretty good app. The weirdest thing about
Speaker 2: that subscriber number is that home subscribers, if in one
Speaker 2: way economically, are kind of lost leaders. But the other way,
Speaker 2: that's who you know is going to buy the paper
Speaker 2: even if they don't want to read it. It's going
Speaker 2: to come to their door and they may not get
Speaker 2: to it, whereas people who buy the paper on you know,
Speaker 2: on the way from the newsstand are buying it because
Speaker 2: they're going to read it. And you always want to
Speaker 2: have a mix, You want to have a mix of people.
Speaker 2: Some people were just like it's like the it's the
Speaker 2: health club, you know, the health club the gym model,
Speaker 2: like I want you to I want you to be
Speaker 2: in the gym, but I don't want you to come
Speaker 2: necessarily because if they've alybody who belonged to the Equinox
Speaker 2: showed up on Tuesday, it would be a disaster. What
Speaker 2: you want is people on you know, between January one
Speaker 2: and January ten to sign up for a year, and
Speaker 2: they never show. That's how you'd tell you pay for
Speaker 2: the everything, the sauna and all that stuff. But the
Speaker 2: weirdest thing about I think, for all this stuff is
Speaker 2: that is that they keep forgetting that you're the only
Speaker 2: way to have a product that makes money is to
Speaker 2: give people something they actually want. And if you give
Speaker 2: them something that you think they should want, you're giving
Speaker 2: them homework, which is what the front page of every
Speaker 2: newspaper is. But if you don't give them some dessert,
Speaker 2: you know, and some little candy in there, they're just
Speaker 2: not going to do it. And it's a very strange
Speaker 2: thing that they didn't know that. That's that's the business
Speaker 2: they have always been.
Speaker 1: In, the reporters. So the reporters don't know that because
Speaker 1: reporters are idiots. And I mean, if you work in
Speaker 1: a business, I've worked in this business more than forty years.
Speaker 1: And if you work in a business and you get
Speaker 1: into management, for example, which a lot of people don't,
Speaker 1: but if you if you want to know your business,
Speaker 1: you have to know how it works, where the money
Speaker 1: comes from, how the advertisers interact with the business side,
Speaker 1: what comes from where, who's supporting what, what, What drives
Speaker 1: readership and what doesn't drive readership. But your average workaday
Speaker 1: reporter journalist pays no attention because he's a sallipsist and
Speaker 1: he's only interested in what he's interested in, and he
Speaker 1: pays no attention, and he thinks that he you know,
Speaker 1: it's the it's the it's the story about the actor
Speaker 1: you know, gets a part. And then somebody says, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm in Hamlet. Oh yeah, what's that about. Oh it's
Speaker 1: about this, it's about this guy second guard.
Speaker 2: Well, it's a William Christopher story. He played father more
Speaker 2: Kahe on Mash and someone asked him, well, what's Mash about?
Speaker 2: What's about this priest?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Exactly No. So right, so everybody thinks that they
Speaker 1: have main.
Speaker 2: Character, main character syndromes. Right, what I like? I don't
Speaker 2: know this. I'm this number may not be right, Okay,
Speaker 2: but the point is the same. I heard Steve Hayward
Speaker 2: said this number. It may not be right. I mean,
Speaker 2: I may be misunderstanding mishearing it. You know, one of
Speaker 2: the great tragedies of the Washington Post convulsions is that
Speaker 2: thirteen of their sixteen reporters covering climate issues were let go.
Speaker 1: You know, this is absolutely untrue. Rob, I'm shocked that
Speaker 1: you would mention this. Really, it's fifteen out of nineteen.
Speaker 1: Out of nineteen they had nineteen climate.
Speaker 2: I will say, and now I will say, there are
Speaker 2: only two. There are only two kinds of people in
Speaker 2: the world, kinds of people who think that's funny, and
Speaker 2: the kinds of people are like, I don't get it.
Speaker 2: And if you are and I don't get it, I
Speaker 2: have some very bad news for you. And if you
Speaker 2: if you're the think it's funny, then you understand why
Speaker 2: the Washington Post is having trouble.
Speaker 3: So I'll just on that point where quickly, because like
Speaker 3: part of the philosophy of the Dispatch is to find
Speaker 3: market gaps where journalists, mainstream journalism is not meeting the
Speaker 3: right demand. Right and we're a small niche player all
Speaker 3: that kind of stuff. But you know, we have a
Speaker 3: religion thing on Sundays that really isn't about MAGA or
Speaker 3: you know, washing it know the story about you know,
Speaker 3: our evangelical kind of support Trump. It's about the other
Speaker 3: things that people want to read about in religion. I've
Speaker 3: been pushing and we finally have launched this thing called
Speaker 3: Dispatch Energy. And part of the whole point of it
Speaker 3: is that is exactly this point is that I once
Speaker 3: went through and looked at the number of people who
Speaker 3: were on the climate desk at NPR, right they call
Speaker 3: it the climate disc or the climate desk at the
Speaker 3: New York Times or the Washington Post, and virtually all
Speaker 3: environments reporting is really just climate change reporting.
Speaker 2: And what I always.
Speaker 3: Would pitch when I talk to investors, when I talk
Speaker 3: to other people about it is that, like, I have
Speaker 3: relatives in Alaska, who are you know, they don't all
Speaker 3: think climate change is a hoax, but they're not particularly
Speaker 3: worried about it. If you live in Alaska, being told
Speaker 3: is going to get warmer, it is not the mys
Speaker 3: scariest thing. And they're pretty sort of right wing on
Speaker 3: a whole bunch of issues. They're you know, pregging mag
Speaker 3: adjacents on stuff. But they're huge hunters and fishers, and
Speaker 3: they care a lot about like land use and water
Speaker 3: quality and conservation and all of these kinds of things,
Speaker 3: and yet go try to find coverage of that stuff
Speaker 3: that doesn't have at least three two b shore paragraphs
Speaker 3: near the top about how climate change is making all
Speaker 3: of this work, or how in an era of climate
Speaker 3: change right right, And there are lots and lots and
Speaker 3: lots of stories about the environment that have jack to
Speaker 3: do with climate change. And it's very difficult to find
Speaker 3: mainstream reporting about the environment that isn't really just a
Speaker 3: bunch of kids just doing more special pleading about how
Speaker 3: everyone needs to care as much as they do about
Speaker 3: climate change.
Speaker 2: Well, here's the article you'll never read, or the headline
Speaker 2: you'll never see. Washington Post financial disruption fourteen of their
Speaker 2: nineteen reporters covering lurid unsolved serial killer mysteries or let go,
Speaker 2: and I would I would submit to you, sir, that
Speaker 2: had the Washington Post had fifteen reporters covering lurid unsolved
Speaker 2: serial killer mysteries, they'd be breaking it in. They'd be
Speaker 2: printing money. Well.
Speaker 3: Also, a more serious point, if the Washington Post cared
Speaker 3: more about local coverage and crime, which a lot of
Speaker 3: people in Washington actually care about, it would be good
Speaker 3: for fighting crime. If the police thought, oh, crap if
Speaker 3: we don't get I mean, I haven't looked in recent years,
Speaker 3: but it wasn't very long ago that the homicides you know,
Speaker 3: solve rate whatever it's called, was way below half. It's like, literally,
Speaker 3: people are getting literally getting away with murder. And maybe
Speaker 3: if there was more political pressure that came from people
Speaker 3: reading about all these murders, the cops and the politicians
Speaker 3: would respond to it and do something that you know,
Speaker 3: made them deal with murder. And like, the people getting
Speaker 3: murdered are wildly disproportionately people of color, poor people, people
Speaker 3: in bad neighborhoods. And yet that's the reason why they
Speaker 3: didn't want to do a lot of the local coverage
Speaker 3: is because it was sort of embarrassing to their worldview anyway.
Speaker 2: It's very annoying.
Speaker 1: Yeah, anyway, So I just it was. It's been an
Speaker 1: amusing couple of days for those of us who do
Speaker 1: not cry crocodile tears over the job losses of people
Speaker 1: that we do not know, because you know, Amazon laid
Speaker 1: off sixteen thousand people last month, and I didn't see
Speaker 1: people writing the you know, sadly I've been let go
Speaker 1: from my Amazon warehouse job. He is you know, dm
Speaker 1: me on signal if you have another job at another
Speaker 1: warehouse or you know the Jeff Stein, the economics reporter
Speaker 1: of the Washington Post, saying, it's so terrible what happened
Speaker 1: in the layoffs at Amazon, because they don't like Amazon,
Speaker 1: so they don't care, and they don't care about Amazon.
Speaker 1: They care about climate change or whatever it is they
Speaker 1: care about, or they want to, you know, support Amas.
Speaker 1: They want they want to see Israel sink into the sea.
Speaker 1: That's what's important to them. And fine, they get to
Speaker 1: have their passions if they have them. I can have
Speaker 1: contempt for them and hope that their institution fails because
Speaker 1: I think it does more harm than good. And Jeff
Speaker 1: Bezos can decide at some point that he's not going
Speaker 1: to spend one hundred million dollars on their foolishness and
Speaker 1: things that he has literally no reason to believe are
Speaker 1: making the country, as Jonah you would say, are making
Speaker 1: either the city that the paper is in or the
Speaker 1: country that the paper is about out any better. And
Speaker 1: so what is he doing this for?
Speaker 2: Yeah, so what is he doing?
Speaker 3: I take your point on all the individual examples of
Speaker 3: shoden Freud and arrogance and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 3: At the same time, I like newspapers. I want to
Speaker 3: see just Bezos succeed here. And I will say, you know,
Speaker 3: the amount of the number of people. I mean, we've
Speaker 3: talked about this years ago, is like the number of
Speaker 3: people in media is smaller than like the number of
Speaker 3: coal miners now right. It's just like there's not a
Speaker 3: lot of jobs and journalism, and I think that's bad
Speaker 3: for the country. But I think it's also I don't
Speaker 3: know this, but I've now heard this from a couple
Speaker 3: of different people who think it's true that that Bezos
Speaker 3: and the new and will Lewis and these guys, they
Speaker 3: probably didn't want to lay off everybody in the sports
Speaker 3: section like that, or everybody in the Forum and the
Speaker 3: so many of the people in the Foreign Bureau and
Speaker 3: the Middle East BUAU and all that kind of stuff. But
Speaker 3: because of the union and the contract, you cannot fire piecemeal.
Speaker 3: The only way to get rid of the bad apples
Speaker 3: is to throw away the good apples. And a couple
Speaker 3: people have said to me, don't be surprised if some
Speaker 3: of the non Hamasnik foreign correspondents or some of those
Speaker 3: are some of the good sports writers get hired back
Speaker 3: on contract because the Post has done that in the past,
Speaker 3: and it's a way to get around some of these
Speaker 3: kinds of problems. But I think the the the unwilling.
Speaker 3: So my brother used to be obsessed with this, and
Speaker 3: I've thought about this in all sorts of other context
Speaker 3: about stories that newspapers will not cover for their own
Speaker 3: business self interest. And the example my brother always used
Speaker 3: to use was that, you know, my brother is the
Speaker 3: guy who taught.
Speaker 4: Me that.
Speaker 3: The one of the key parts of the Mob's business
Speaker 3: model is to get go after put pressure on you
Speaker 3: on things that are on a clock, right, And he
Speaker 3: learned this because he drove a fish delivery truck at
Speaker 3: the Fulton Fish Market. And if you don't get your
Speaker 3: fish delivered on time, your fish is useless. If you
Speaker 3: don't get your newspaper delivered on time, your newspaper is useless.
Speaker 3: And it's not like the Mob could stop any of
Speaker 3: these things, but it could delay it.
Speaker 2: And the Mob owned like.
Speaker 3: The newspaper delivery trucks for all these newspapers, and no
Speaker 3: newspaper would write about it because it would be a
Speaker 3: death now for them. And I think the dog that
Speaker 3: doesn't bark in all of this story about the role
Speaker 3: that the Guild or whatever these things are called plays
Speaker 3: in this story. The fact that no one wants to
Speaker 3: write about it is just telling. It's sort of a
Speaker 3: revealed by revealed preference.
Speaker 1: I got one thing since you mentioned the Dispatch I
Speaker 1: want to talk about. I mean commentary, like the Dispatch
Speaker 1: is a minno in the sea of mass media mass media.
Speaker 1: I mean our podcast is now reasonably close to mass media.
Speaker 1: Was looking at some cable news numbers and our audience
Speaker 1: is not that much smaller than some of the lower
Speaker 1: ratings shows.
Speaker 3: I've made a point to the new people. It's sort
Speaker 3: of like there's some of these charts going around about
Speaker 3: how all of these central banks their gold assets are
Speaker 3: eclipsing their dollars, and everyone's talking about how like that's
Speaker 3: so scary about lack of faith in the dollars. It's
Speaker 3: because gold is going up threefold in price. So like
Speaker 3: when ratings collapse for the networks, it doesn't really good everything.
Speaker 1: Podcast, I will say, I'm saying so, but just talking
Speaker 1: about mino side. So I took over Commentary in two
Speaker 1: thousand and nine, and it is a not for profit institution.
Speaker 1: For sure, gets some of its money from subscriptions. It
Speaker 1: gets some money from advertising, both on the podcast and
Speaker 1: in the magazine, and then it has to rely on
Speaker 1: the large s of donors who aren't Jeff Bezos. But
Speaker 1: I have a very generous donor base, and they provide
Speaker 1: donations that are you know, tax exempt.
Speaker 2: Can imagine. I can't.
Speaker 3: I can't believe Rob is not making a snide comment
Speaker 3: about the quote unquote commentary donor base.
Speaker 1: Well, he's paid by commentary, so you better watch out there.
Speaker 3: Okay, it's like the it's like the mobbed up trucks.
Speaker 3: He just can't talk about it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, listen, you know there are proud people. There are
Speaker 2: proud people, and I salute them and I salute their traditions.
Speaker 1: He's a columnist with commentary. Yeah, he's the truck. I'm
Speaker 1: the truck. I'm the mafia, and he's the truck. But
Speaker 1: here's my point, which is that I took over an
Speaker 1: institution in two thousand and nine, okay, in the middle
Speaker 1: of the financial meltdown, and some of our money went
Speaker 1: down and all of that, and I'm one of my
Speaker 1: obsessions is I want to make sure the commentary survives
Speaker 1: to its hundredth birthday, which is Nomber nineteen to twenty
Speaker 1: forty five. Started in November nineteen forty five. I will
Speaker 1: not be the editor Commentary in two thousand and four
Speaker 1: to five, should I be alive at that point, I
Speaker 1: will be eighty four years old. And I assume that
Speaker 1: I will, you know, be on a sharpest attack. I
Speaker 1: won't be on a golf course because I don't play golf,
Speaker 1: but I will be adjacent to some golf course, perhaps
Speaker 1: with one of those hats, with a little you know,
Speaker 1: you'll be on.
Speaker 2: A golf cotp. I just won't know it right.
Speaker 1: So, but this is like my obsession. So and I
Speaker 1: want to provide more bang for the buck and run
Speaker 1: an efficient institution. So over the course of the seventeen
Speaker 1: years that I've been the editor of Commentary, the staff
Speaker 1: has gone from fifteen full time employees to six. Now
Speaker 1: why was that possible? It was possible because as things developed,
Speaker 1: some of the jobs that existed that were part and
Speaker 1: parcel of what it meant to run a magazine no
Speaker 1: longer were. I didn't need an advertising director because advertising
Speaker 1: it didn't work that way anymore. I didn't need a
Speaker 1: circulation director because circulation went basically mostly through an online system.
Speaker 1: And I didn't need someone to manage it day by day.
Speaker 1: I didn't need four people working full time on the website.
Speaker 1: I didn't need this. I didn't need that. I only
Speaker 1: I didn't need four editors. Basically we have two and
Speaker 1: like that. So in the end, I have run an
Speaker 1: institution that has gone from fifteen staffers to six and
Speaker 1: has and I have done this while continuing to raise
Speaker 1: money and trying to put money away that we raise,
Speaker 1: an access and all of that. So I so when
Speaker 1: I say that I am you know, I find this
Speaker 1: all a little appalling. I say this from the perspective
Speaker 1: of somebody who has had to make very hard decisions
Speaker 1: over the course of my tenure as a boss about
Speaker 1: employment of people and whether or not they are necessary
Speaker 1: to the core emission of my institution, and or whether
Speaker 1: it can be run by having someone double up that job.
Speaker 1: Or you know, I edit almost everything in the magazine myself,
Speaker 1: for example, like there are a fits, whereas that wasn't
Speaker 1: always the case, and so that is something that I've
Speaker 1: done to provide for the continuing health and vitality of
Speaker 1: my small Nonetheless, its loss would be an incalculable loss
Speaker 1: in my view for American culture and American life, and
Speaker 1: so I'm husbanding it and trying to be a steward
Speaker 1: of it properly.
Speaker 2: You are doing a great job. Has everybody told you
Speaker 2: that you're doing a fantastic.
Speaker 1: Thank you very much. I'm very but I would.
Speaker 2: Quibble with some of the budgetary outlays. But really, you
Speaker 2: know here there mostly it's fine. Yeah, it's fine, but
Speaker 2: you may have to cut you know, I know you
Speaker 2: have fifteen people covering the loyalty is reel first desk.
Speaker 1: That's right, Yes, yes, it's fine. Don't look at apex
Speaker 1: foolishness in New Jersey. We are not look over here.
Speaker 1: It's terrible thing that a Muslim says, that's what we
Speaker 1: do here in commentary you do. I'm only bring this
Speaker 1: up to say this is how we this.
Speaker 2: Is how you do, This is how we do.
Speaker 1: This is this is what you do in this atmosphere.
Speaker 1: If you're not you know, if you what you want
Speaker 1: to do is like make something like build its foundation,
Speaker 1: make it firm, make sure that it will serve.
Speaker 2: Nobody, nobody, nobody's You're not on trial here. John. We
Speaker 2: know you're doing.
Speaker 1: But you know who is you know who is on
Speaker 1: trial seven years after his death, Jeffrey Epstein.
Speaker 2: Right, yeah, let me float this to you guys. Okay, yes, now,
Speaker 2: I'm not talking about like, oh the Grand Conspiracy there.
Speaker 2: I just need a way to like, I'm baffled by who.
Speaker 2: I mean a lot of it's just that I'm a
Speaker 2: Pollyanna in any ways, and I just never imagine that
Speaker 2: this it is true. But like what I'm a'm baffled
Speaker 2: by who Jeffrey Epstein was. And I'm looking at that,
Speaker 2: and I'm looking at the emails and I'm reading them,
Speaker 2: and it seems to me that all the people he
Speaker 2: hung out with he deeply hated. Like there's like, if
Speaker 2: you're going to create a character, he's like a character
Speaker 2: out of a Ballzac novel or a social novel from
Speaker 2: the nineteenth century. He's this guy who is connected to everyone,
Speaker 2: but he hates them. And I think that if Jeffrey
Speaker 2: Epstein could be it's alive somewhere, it could be. Possibly
Speaker 2: he's not. But if you could come back to Earth
Speaker 2: right now, he'd be thrilled at the destruction of the
Speaker 2: reputations of the people that he called. He wouldn't be appalled.
Speaker 2: He wouldn't say, oh my god, these are my friends.
Speaker 2: So there were decent people. I think he hated them
Speaker 2: so deeply that the one person who's completely thrilled by
Speaker 2: all this would be Jeffrey Epstein. What do you think?
Speaker 1: I mean, it's all a question of what, like what
Speaker 1: it's like the conundrum of you know, Satan in Paradise lost,
Speaker 1: right it is? Or Satan or the whole idea of
Speaker 1: the devil or something like that. Does the devil love
Speaker 1: the love the evil doers that he is brought over
Speaker 1: to his side? Or is he the ultimate enforcer of
Speaker 1: the divine? Is he there because he knows what evil is?
Speaker 1: The evil doer does the evil? The evil doer goes
Speaker 1: to hell and the devil punishes him for eternity. Isn't
Speaker 1: he serving ultimately the moral system of good by being
Speaker 1: by enforcing the evil? So it's like, is Jeffrey Epstein?
Speaker 1: Does Jeffrey Epstein hate these people? If you're right? Does
Speaker 1: he hate them because he knows he's evil and he
Speaker 1: knows their evil and he believes ultimately that they should
Speaker 1: all himself included, come to a horrible end? Or you know,
Speaker 1: was he Iago and evil was his good, and therefore
Speaker 1: he enjoyed being evil, and he didn't mind these other
Speaker 1: people being evil.
Speaker 3: I think we needed like a five thousand word essay
Speaker 3: and commentary on the Theodicy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I agree, I totally agree.
Speaker 1: We don't believe in the Odyssey here in Judaism.
Speaker 2: But unfortunately you do agree with five thousand word essays. Well,
Speaker 2: I mean the question mark we not.
Speaker 1: You say we may not believe in the Odyssey, but
Speaker 1: Theodos believes in us. Is that your point? Okay? But no,
Speaker 1: But I'm just it's an interesting question. Like that world.
Speaker 1: You know, it's like demonic types. Uh, you know, when
Speaker 1: he evokes these emails or receives these emails from people
Speaker 1: who seem relatively otherwise upstanding, who then we we we
Speaker 1: see in this gigantic dump, right, these absolutely disgusting emails
Speaker 1: back to them that we have no business seeing. We
Speaker 1: should never have seen any of this. It's an outrage
Speaker 1: that Congress passed this law and that Trump signed it.
Speaker 1: This is an exposure of private material that people themselves
Speaker 1: who are not criminals and never did anything criminal have No,
Speaker 1: it's not our right to see it. It's a terrible thing,
Speaker 1: and I think this was a real evil thing.
Speaker 2: Maybe they're super juicy that I'm really into them.
Speaker 1: That's what I'm saying. So nonetheless, they're there, so we're
Speaker 1: going to react to it. And it's like raises the
Speaker 1: question like are is it when you're when you're in
Speaker 1: proximity to one of these kinds of like you're in
Speaker 1: or like the dark figure in your life. Do you
Speaker 1: just let loose and write like repellent, disgusting things in
Speaker 1: emails because you get a chance to that's your truest self.
Speaker 1: Or do you kind of just get touched by some
Speaker 1: kind of like dark thing in yourself momentarily and then
Speaker 1: you write something about a woman's area smelling a certain
Speaker 1: way or something like that, or you write something about
Speaker 1: teenagers that you would never say never don't actually believe
Speaker 1: or whatever? What do you?
Speaker 2: What do you?
Speaker 1: What are we seeing in these emails? Is what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: Are we seeing these people exposing their truest natures? Or
Speaker 1: are we seeing them at the darkest at sort of
Speaker 1: these dark moments of their you know, like where they
Speaker 1: just let loose for a second, like a little they
Speaker 1: let out a little gas.
Speaker 3: I think it's a little boat. I mean, I don't
Speaker 3: think it's binary, right, I mean, I think yeah, the
Speaker 3: I mean the we all have or have had friends
Speaker 3: who are on the sketchier side, and the way you
Speaker 3: talk to your sketchy friends is different than the way
Speaker 3: you talk to, you know, your more upstanding friends. You know,
Speaker 3: this is that on steroids, right, Like you hit a
Speaker 3: point of diminishing returns where your friends and ceases to
Speaker 3: be just sort of have a dark sense of humor
Speaker 3: or be you know, cut corners to being a total
Speaker 3: evils comebag, and at that point you shouldn't be your
Speaker 3: friend anymore. But I think about it in some ways,
Speaker 3: like with with Donald Trump. Right, So Donald Trump is
Speaker 3: not Jeffrey Epstein, but Donald Trump brings In order to
Speaker 3: communicate with Donald Trump, you have to debase yourself in
Speaker 3: so many different ways. First of all, just with the flattery,
Speaker 3: Like I find I'm I'm fine with complimenting people when
Speaker 3: I'm sincere. But the I find the act of complimenting
Speaker 3: people when I don't mean.
Speaker 2: It to be it's it's it. I gag at it.
Speaker 2: I find it.
Speaker 3: I find it like an assault on my integrity in
Speaker 3: a way that I feel just cheap and and authentic.
Speaker 3: But there are a lot of politicians who have just
Speaker 3: no compunction doing that, And there are a lot of
Speaker 3: people in business who think that's what you do in business,
Speaker 3: is you you you sing them a song to get
Speaker 3: the deal, and then just by the way, and then
Speaker 3: you talk crap about them afterwards. And so I understand that,
Speaker 3: like I have a lower tolerance for this stuff than
Speaker 3: a lot of otherwise decent people. But the problem is,
Speaker 3: you know, our friend, you've all liven, He's made this
Speaker 3: point many times, is that cynicism is hard to sustain.
Speaker 3: And eventually, if you find yourself in a transactional nature
Speaker 3: where you feel like you can just keep making moral
Speaker 3: compromises in order to like have accessor or get a
Speaker 3: job or whatever like that, eventually you convince yourself that
Speaker 3: it wasn't a lesser of two evils thing, It wasn't
Speaker 3: a moral compromise. It's just that you bend your moral
Speaker 3: yardstick to fit the object in front of you. And
Speaker 3: so I think a lot of people who hung out
Speaker 3: with Jeffrey Epstein, they may not have started as corrupted souls,
Speaker 3: but I think some of the people who spent more
Speaker 3: time than others got corrupted by it, or that brought
Speaker 3: out or the corrupted part of the passes of them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's scratch a little itch that they have like you,
Speaker 2: if you're respectable nerdy Bill Gates or for that man
Speaker 2: or Larry Summers, that the idea that you've got this
Speaker 2: cool friend who does this stuff in this island and
Speaker 2: always seems to have these hot chicks. Even though it
Speaker 2: seems inconceivable to us that those guys couldn't do the
Speaker 2: same thing, they didn't feel they could. So the weird
Speaker 2: currying favor with him was interesting, the weird the flattery
Speaker 2: and the hey, the chummy locker room BONHAMI with him
Speaker 2: from people who really had no particular experience with that.
Speaker 2: I mean, I guarantee you Bill Gates was not on
Speaker 2: the lacrosse team, right, So it's like there's this this
Speaker 2: very kind of adolescent male stuff happening. And I think
Speaker 2: with him, with the Epstein, there was this contempt that
Speaker 2: you get when you've operated yourself, and you've operated enough
Speaker 2: to be in the room of the most powerful people
Speaker 2: that were completely remote to you and that you are
Speaker 2: the outside of when you were teaching at Spencer's Teaching
Speaker 2: and that you realized that they're just they're just incredibly weak, appliable, vulnerable,
Speaker 2: desperately needy guys that I can push around, and I'm
Speaker 2: going to do it.
Speaker 1: So you go and new flatter Donald Trump. Right, Donald
Speaker 1: Trump is the president of United States. He is the
Speaker 1: most powerful man in the world, and he his favor
Speaker 1: on You can have enormous ramifications. Jeffrey Epstein in these
Speaker 1: emails and in this file is a convicted pedophile who
Speaker 1: has pled guilty to trafficking in sex with minors and
Speaker 1: is up is on parole, and it is these people
Speaker 1: didn't say I will be friends with a convicted pedophile?
Speaker 1: Are you emailing me? Go into a hole and disappear forever.
Speaker 1: You're evil, like there's no pedophilia is not excusable. You
Speaker 1: don't know. I agree, I agree, pay the fine and
Speaker 1: to drive again.
Speaker 2: Already good, I have a good joke to get a
Speaker 2: sad Okay, I.
Speaker 3: Was just gonna will close on your joke just two seconds.
Speaker 3: It reminds me of the psychiatrist in The Sopranos who
Speaker 3: tells Carmela, I'm just I'm I'm I'm entertaining this conversation
Speaker 3: with you just so you can know that you can
Speaker 3: never say you weren't told, right, And so I a
Speaker 3: huge distinction between pre revelations of of Epstein and post revelations. Right,
Speaker 3: like one thing, Oh, this guy's a party animal, and
Speaker 3: it's another thing when he's been doing.
Speaker 2: A shocked shocked, like profoundly.
Speaker 3: Evil things and you still want to go to his island,
Speaker 3: then it's it's a it's a completely different thing.
Speaker 2: I agree with that.
Speaker 1: Okay, don't we need to make some recommendations before we go, but.
Speaker 2: We have we have a pedophile joke from rob oh
Speaker 2: pedophile choke. Yeah you want to hear it? Yeah, sure, yeah,
Speaker 2: you don't tell it. You want to hear Jock got
Speaker 2: cars speeding down the road. Cop pulls the car over.
Speaker 2: It's got two priests in it, crools to the window, says, uh,
Speaker 2: you guys are going pretty chose. Yeah, we're just we're
Speaker 2: on away somewhere, goes okay, well we just stop everybody.
Speaker 2: We're looking for two pedophiles and the priest look at
Speaker 2: each other and go okay, we'll do it now. It's terrible.
Speaker 2: I do not approve of that anyway.
Speaker 1: Okay, all right, So I feel like going from that
Speaker 1: to this is Okay, Joan and I would both like
Speaker 1: to recommend wonder Man on Disney Plus. Huh, yes, I've
Speaker 1: seen the whole thing. We haven't seen the whole thing.
Speaker 1: And here's what it's funny. It's a story about a
Speaker 1: superhero who wants to be an actor. He doesn't want
Speaker 1: to be a superhero. He wants to be like a
Speaker 1: guy who has two lines on American Horror Story. That's
Speaker 1: his goal in life is to be like a guy
Speaker 1: in you know, to be on to have a day
Speaker 1: part on a rob long sitcom. But he's actually a superhero.
Speaker 1: But no, no, no, no, no no. All he likes is
Speaker 1: movies and seeing Midnight Cowboy at an afternoon show at
Speaker 1: the Arrow, and that's all he wants to do.
Speaker 2: So it's you say, if you can save the line,
Speaker 2: then I'm all for it.
Speaker 1: Anyway, I'm just saying that's that is the funny gimmick
Speaker 1: of wonder Man is the superhero who wants to not be.
Speaker 2: A superst I gotta watch this.
Speaker 3: It's sort of a heady PG version of the Boys
Speaker 3: in some way right where they do that kind of blurring.
Speaker 3: But it's like, you know, I think it's it's really
Speaker 3: interesting yeah, I like it.
Speaker 2: I am watching the new mid Gray series that got
Speaker 2: a really nice review, and I think it was in
Speaker 2: the Wall Street Journal got a nice review, and it's
Speaker 2: I'm sort of enjoying it, but I prefer the older ones.
Speaker 2: He's the French detective at Paris, and the ones that
Speaker 2: are pure atmosphere is set in the thirties or the
Speaker 2: even the twenties. Thirties and fifties are great. And this
Speaker 2: is interesting, but it's not quite It doesn't quite have
Speaker 2: it's more of a just detective story. That's you know,
Speaker 2: he and his wife tried to have a kid, and
Speaker 2: his wife works, and it's like, you know, it's not
Speaker 2: as good as he used to be when he come
Speaker 2: home for lunch and his wife would make him an omelet, which.
Speaker 1: Is not what happened with Seminon, because he would come
Speaker 1: home for lunch and he would do three women, and
Speaker 1: then he would write a novel, and then he would
Speaker 1: go out for drinks at five.
Speaker 2: Look, everybody's got their own.
Speaker 1: I wrote two hundred novels and claimed to have had
Speaker 1: sex with twenty thousand women. So you do the math
Speaker 1: in terms of just how many days in your life? Well,
Speaker 1: Frank has sex and how many France? Right? Okay? I
Speaker 1: watched The Seven Dials on Netflix, which is an annaptation
Speaker 1: of an early Agatha Christie mystery which is set in
Speaker 1: the nineteen twenties, and it is very eye catching, but
Speaker 1: it reminded me of how boring a Christie is. I mean, basically,
Speaker 1: Agatha Christie's most popular writer practically who ever lived, wrote
Speaker 1: sixty six books, sold one hundred millions of copies. Those
Speaker 1: books were short, they were sweet, you're in and out,
Speaker 1: and like the mysteries aren't interesting, and she she made
Speaker 1: like too interesting detective, but like, so it's.
Speaker 2: Just it's the vicar did it.
Speaker 1: It's just a weird nostalgia play to watch any of
Speaker 1: this because you're watching and then they solve the mystery
Speaker 1: and it's like, well, it could only be one of
Speaker 1: three people, so it's this one. It's like three cards,
Speaker 1: Like it's like a it's like a three card Bondie gap,
Speaker 1: you know. It's like, well it's one of the three cards.
Speaker 1: So all right, we gotta go. Uh, everyone's gonna leave.
Speaker 1: Have a great again, Okay, I.
Speaker 2: Oh, can we talk about uh murdered even song? Is
Speaker 2: anybody watching that? No? Oh? I saw that. Is that
Speaker 2: a thing, Yeah, it's a brick box or or something
Speaker 2: like