Speaker 1: Rob. Have you watched purs No?
Speaker 2: Have you watched Death by Lightning?
Speaker 1: No? I haven't seen any of the stuff. I don't
Speaker 1: know what anybody, I don't know when you have to.
Speaker 2: Watch the nice and Creed?
Speaker 3: Well, yes, go ahead, make my day.
Speaker 2: Well, we're approaching Thanksgiving, which means it's time for a
Speaker 2: pre winter post fall glop culture. I am John pud
Speaker 2: Worretz in New York with Rob Long eating his lunch.
Speaker 2: I believe in Princeton, New Jersey.
Speaker 1: I am doing that.
Speaker 2: How are you, Rob?
Speaker 1: I'm fine, that's good.
Speaker 2: What what are you eating? Just so we can, just
Speaker 2: so we can get this out of the way.
Speaker 1: Little Japanese shrimp, shrimp noodles with the shrimp.
Speaker 2: So there're shrimp noodles with shrimp. Yeah, you have to
Speaker 2: specialis shrimp Oyeah?
Speaker 1: Okay?
Speaker 2: And in Washington. Jonah Goldberg, Hi, Jonah.
Speaker 1: Hey, John, We should we should, we should let listeners
Speaker 1: know that I chastised I preemptively chastised Rob to say,
Speaker 1: if you're going to eat your lunch on the podcast,
Speaker 1: which he says he'll do, because we're going to talk
Speaker 1: about shows that he doesn't he hasn't seen that he
Speaker 1: should at least put himself on mute so he doesn't
Speaker 1: make a smacking sound and guess that's one of those
Speaker 1: things that drives me crazy. And then he got really
Speaker 1: annoyed with you for like having a conversation with him.
Speaker 1: He had to keep unmuting and and stop chewing to
Speaker 1: talk to you.
Speaker 2: So so the point you're trying to make is there's
Speaker 2: a lot of tension. We're beginning the show in an
Speaker 2: atmosphere of high tension. Who knows what's going to happen.
Speaker 2: Explosive emotions could like in a family play about Thanksgiving,
Speaker 2: just come up to the surface, secrets revealed, uh, you know,
Speaker 2: truths there that are never bared before.
Speaker 4: And then there'll be a silent moment on stage and
Speaker 4: you John will go just to the window and pull
Speaker 4: your sweater closer to around you, and you'll say it's
Speaker 4: getting colder out now, and soon the Canada Canada geese
Speaker 4: will will leave.
Speaker 1: Okay, while we were terrified of the episcopalian Savonarola's rage,
Speaker 1: yes yes.
Speaker 2: He is he this is a very interesting I'm gonna
Speaker 2: I'm gonna mention this once and then move on from
Speaker 2: Tucker Carlson. But I note I wanted to ask Rob
Speaker 2: as a as as somebody who was seeking to become
Speaker 2: an Episcopalian minister. Yes, uh, Tucker Carlson has referred to
Speaker 2: Christian Zionism as a heresy and has is talking virus demonology,
Speaker 2: a brain virus and all of that. And Tucker I
Speaker 2: believe is as in his in his upbringing and his schooling,
Speaker 2: as mainstream Episcopalian as you can possibly get. That he
Speaker 2: went to Saint Paul's boarding school, that his wife, Susie,
Speaker 2: he married, the daughter of the headmaster of Saint Paul's
Speaker 2: boarding school which he attended, and so would would the
Speaker 2: idea what is the notion of heresy? As he lays
Speaker 2: it out, is this Episcopalian doctrine? This sounds more like
Speaker 2: medieval Catholic doctrine to me that there are you.
Speaker 1: Know, well, I mean I don't I don't know.
Speaker 4: It certainly is a doctrine, and I don't think it's well,
Speaker 4: there's an incredibly delicious irony that the person who studied
Speaker 4: at Saint Paul's named after Paul, who in many ways
Speaker 4: of the architect of the Christian Faith, hasn't really read Paul,
Speaker 4: I guess or understood it fully because the term zion
Speaker 4: Of course, there's no Zionism in the New Testament of
Speaker 4: Zionism before you know, the nineteenth century. But Paul has
Speaker 4: wrote obliquely and directly and bafflingly and clearly in all
Speaker 4: different ways about this topic. And my guess is that
Speaker 4: Paul would be uh, were he alive today, would probably
Speaker 4: be living in Jerusalem, happily, good Jewish boy, he would be.
Speaker 4: He's he's he's a say, the patron saint of Jews
Speaker 4: for Jesus. So I'm pretty sure. I don't know if
Speaker 4: he is that for real, but he should be. The
Speaker 4: it's just a complete misreading, which is like, look, there's
Speaker 4: a whole lot of misreading. I mean, that's what the
Speaker 4: Bible is, one giant way to misread it.
Speaker 2: Well, you know, look look all of Judaism, all of
Speaker 2: post biblical Judaism is uh, people arguing over whether they're
Speaker 2: misreading the Bible. That's the tomos well, our disputations about
Speaker 2: how to read the Bible.
Speaker 1: So and they probably are.
Speaker 4: That's the other thing is they probably no matter what
Speaker 4: you're saying, you're probably not quite right right.
Speaker 2: I'm just I just think the language that he is
Speaker 2: adopting in his quest to revive not only the spirit
Speaker 2: of to take the spirit of Martin Luther, the spirit
Speaker 2: Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the spirit of Himmler,
Speaker 2: and the spirit of Gerbels and put them all together
Speaker 2: and like have a celebrity podcast with problem as a
Speaker 2: panel involves things that don't necessarily comport with his religious
Speaker 2: background and training, isn't.
Speaker 4: Yeah for a former star of dancing Mitch the Stars. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 4: we can drop the demon stuff I find fascinating though.
Speaker 1: I mean, we could go with demons.
Speaker 2: I mean mean the attack of the demon.
Speaker 5: The attack of the demons. I mean, is it clear
Speaker 5: was a demon? I mean, well the demon won? You see,
Speaker 5: that's the thing he was. He was attacked by a demon,
Speaker 5: and the demon apparently possessed his body and his mind
Speaker 5: in his spirit, and he is now practicing.
Speaker 2: Evil as the demon would wish to. So I accept
Speaker 2: the idea that he I just think the demon, the
Speaker 2: demon won. That's that's that's that's where I am.
Speaker 1: So that's the reason why I don't believe the story,
Speaker 1: is I mean, there are many reasons why I don't
Speaker 1: believe the story, but but part of it.
Speaker 2: You're you're the person who wrote a book. You're the
Speaker 2: person who wrote a book that begins with the sentence
Speaker 2: there is no God in this book.
Speaker 1: But at the end, it's sort of like Grover the
Speaker 1: Monster at the end of this book, God sneaks in
Speaker 1: at the end of but I I just want to say, like,
Speaker 1: like Tucker, in his own accounting of this, sleeping with
Speaker 1: four or five dogs in his bed, wakes up in
Speaker 1: the morning with a scratch on his arm, and he's like,
Speaker 1: must have been demons, And like the idea that Beelzebub
Speaker 1: or Mephistopheles or whatever we're talking about here crossed the
Speaker 1: stingy and the sticking inter dimensional. You know, Barrier made
Speaker 1: it all the way to Tucker's house and contented himself
Speaker 1: with just scratching Tucker's arm and then going home. Doesn't
Speaker 1: really make a heck of a lot of sense to me.
Speaker 1: I mean, like, why make why schlep so to speak
Speaker 1: all that way if if all you're going to do
Speaker 1: is scratch Tucker's arm And he then says, it's like
Speaker 1: his only witnesses to this are his dogs. Obviously, It's
Speaker 1: like all those memes where the dog says who could
Speaker 1: have done this as he's standing around the flower pot right.
Speaker 4: Like I didn't do this package of cookies. Let's let's
Speaker 4: let's us investigate immediately. Yeah, the dog did nothing wrong.
Speaker 1: It was demon.
Speaker 2: Also, even a demon with a man lying in a
Speaker 2: bed with five adorable dogs would go aw. Yeah, I
Speaker 2: should probably go to some other house and try to
Speaker 2: possess somebody else because those dogs are so cute. Come on,
Speaker 2: all right? So moving on from moving on from Tucker Carlson,
Speaker 2: Jonah did something interesting. He went on X and asked
Speaker 2: people what we should discuss on today's show, and I
Speaker 2: thought maybe we would use this as our template for
Speaker 2: discussing things on today's show. So there are two shows
Speaker 2: I would say, in the course of the many responses
Speaker 2: here that we have been asked the streaming shows that
Speaker 2: we've been asked to discuss. One of them is Pluribus
Speaker 2: on Apple TV, the new show by Vince Gilligan who
Speaker 2: made Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. And the other
Speaker 2: is Death by Lightning on Netflix, which is the four
Speaker 2: part show about James Garfield and his assassin, Charles Guiteau.
Speaker 2: So I have seen both. I think Tucker at Tucker Jesus,
Speaker 2: that's terrible. I apologize, Jonah. Wow, well, at least at
Speaker 2: least Jonah. I'm not responsible for your career. Who I'm
Speaker 2: responsible for, Tucker, so I do you can blame me
Speaker 2: for for that. But you have not seen Death by Lightning.
Speaker 1: I believe I watched the first two episodes last week.
Speaker 1: You did, okay, good, So yeah, preparation for this, okay,
Speaker 1: and I've watched all I believe there are only three
Speaker 1: episodes of Pluribis.
Speaker 2: Of Pluribus, yes, should.
Speaker 1: We take two seconds and just talk about spoilers? So like,
Speaker 1: uh yeah, I don't think we need to warn too
Speaker 1: many people that James Garfield was shot and killed. So like,
Speaker 1: sorry to ruin that for you. But if you haven't
Speaker 1: watched Pluribis, and you you know, I don't know, we
Speaker 1: don't the fast forward a minute here and yeah, so I.
Speaker 2: Think basically, we'll we'll, we'll, we'll take a couple of
Speaker 2: minutes and then uh yeah, so skip skip for about
Speaker 2: ten minutes and then we'll and then we'll we'll, we'll
Speaker 2: we'll move on because pluribus is is no I think
Speaker 2: the situation with Pluribus, which is kind of a remarkable show,
Speaker 2: although I'm already worried that it's starting to spin its
Speaker 2: wheels a little bit. Pluribus is a puzzle box show
Speaker 2: about basically the last woman on Earth that there is
Speaker 2: an event.
Speaker 1: Well, it's more like what if invasion of the Body Snatchers?
Speaker 1: What if the aliens? What if the pod people were nice? Nice? Right?
Speaker 2: Yes, and the pod people are nice, and the one
Speaker 2: person who remains human or there are eleven people on
Speaker 2: Earth who remain human, but the one person remains human
Speaker 2: is rotten Lousey is like an unpleasant, bitter, depressed, sour puss.
Speaker 1: A bit of an angry lesbian, right, I mean it's.
Speaker 2: Not a bit of an I mean an angry lesbian. Ay,
Speaker 2: really entirely not a very unhanged.
Speaker 4: I hate to come in, but I realized this is
Speaker 4: not my segment here. But your interpretation of Body Snatchers
Speaker 4: is that the invaders are evil, Well.
Speaker 2: Unless they are, they are zomb they're sort of soulless zombies.
Speaker 4: Basically, we wake up in a world with no pain
Speaker 4: and no hunger and no yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's letter speech, and in good.
Speaker 2: Speech, in the good speech right in the second Body Snatchers, right,
Speaker 2: first one communists obviously, they're all, yeah, it's communism. And
Speaker 2: the second one is kind of like I heard the
Speaker 2: second New Age. I prefer the second one too, but
Speaker 2: it's basically like letter Letter Nimoy, who becomes the spokesman
Speaker 2: of the of the Body Snatcher, says, you know you must,
Speaker 2: you must, you must rid yourself of old concepts of
Speaker 2: being and join us in our New Age, written county.
Speaker 4: Yeah, conscious, sounds great, we're all going to move to Well.
Speaker 2: Then you'll really like pluribus because pluribus is they're all
Speaker 2: really nice. They all know everybody is, everybody has everybody
Speaker 2: else's memories, and everybody has everybody else's talents and abilities.
Speaker 2: Anybody can do anything, everybody knows everything. There's no crime,
Speaker 2: so they don't need to have the lights on at
Speaker 2: night in a city. They can turn all the lights
Speaker 2: out because there's no reason to have lights on because
Speaker 2: everybody is safe.
Speaker 1: And then there is this one.
Speaker 4: Yeah, is there just one person just going crazy just
Speaker 4: like raping everything similated?
Speaker 2: Oh not only Yeah, go ahead.
Speaker 1: So I think you're just mischaracterizing a little bit because
Speaker 1: at least so far, and again these are spoilers, so
Speaker 1: sorry people, but they're like eleven or fourteen people left
Speaker 1: on planet Earth. And what makes her unique is not
Speaker 1: that she's the last person with personal agency. It's like
Speaker 1: she's the only one who has a problem with the
Speaker 1: rise of the pod people. All the other people are like, well,
Speaker 1: this is kind of like there's one guy who's just
Speaker 1: getting laid and having fun and or ding lobster, and
Speaker 1: there are other people who are so like, what's so
Speaker 1: bad about this? You know? And she is like the
Speaker 1: American And so I texted with you about this. Yeah,
Speaker 1: my super hardcore, crazy right wing take on this, which
Speaker 1: is that it is remarkable so far, who knows where
Speaker 1: turns it's going to take. So far, she's the only
Speaker 1: white person, the only American who is immune to the
Speaker 1: brain virus, and she's also the only one with a
Speaker 1: problem with it. All of the people from the brown
Speaker 1: and black people, all the people from sort of developing countries,
Speaker 1: the global South, whatever, they're all into it. And I
Speaker 1: think it is like the ultimate kind of sci fi
Speaker 1: American exceptionalism kind of point.
Speaker 2: Well, there's one person that we haven't met yet, right
Speaker 2: according to according to the scheme of the show, there
Speaker 2: is one person who is in Paraguay. Who is just
Speaker 2: if you call him on the phone and say hi,
Speaker 2: He's like, leave me alone, leave me in peace. You put.
Speaker 4: I was gonna say he's the John Yes, so this
Speaker 4: is so we both agree he is not the Jonah Goldberg. Yeah,
Speaker 4: so this show just just to clarify, this is a
Speaker 4: world in which the aliens have come in, and the
Speaker 4: aliens are practicing.
Speaker 1: The the philosophy of.
Speaker 4: And and you are detecting, Jonah, that this the secret
Speaker 4: of this the DNA, and the show is bad.
Speaker 1: Well so far. Interesting.
Speaker 2: The theaters of the show is that is that the
Speaker 2: first communication that we receive from outer space, it turns out,
Speaker 2: is a virus that invades O our RNA in some
Speaker 2: fashion and and turns us all turns human beings into
Speaker 2: a collective consciousness.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well we know they try to do so.
Speaker 2: They're not they're not being possessed by it. They're still themselves,
Speaker 2: but they have no individuality left. I guess everybody is
Speaker 2: everybody else.
Speaker 1: They took they took the vaccine. Well that's the.
Speaker 2: Point, isn't it. That's part of where I am in
Speaker 2: agreement with Jonah that this is a very very right
Speaker 2: wing coded show.
Speaker 4: I have never said I have never said these words
Speaker 4: on this show.
Speaker 1: Before I'm about to say them. I got to see
Speaker 1: that show.
Speaker 2: Rare Seahorn. People think she's giving a fantastic performance. I
Speaker 2: think she is in the sense that I find her
Speaker 2: character so off putting, which I think is what she's
Speaker 2: supposed to be. That she is doing a brilliant job
Speaker 2: of making somebody an attractive and off putting and therefore
Speaker 2: I don't know if she's doing a great job, but
Speaker 2: I think where it is coded in all kinds of ways.
Speaker 2: So it has that question. The ornery American who will
Speaker 2: not be subsumed? Right, That's it's like, what are you
Speaker 2: talking about? I'm gonna we're all disappearing here. Why aren't
Speaker 2: you upset? That's number one? Number two? Is she is?
Speaker 2: Is this a show about AI? Is this you? Now?
Speaker 2: We're all human beings. We're all living in a world
Speaker 2: in which everything can be done for us. There's no
Speaker 2: reason to be, no reason to work, There'll be no
Speaker 2: reason to have fights, to have nothing, because because the
Speaker 2: way the world is now situated, all this stuff is
Speaker 2: going to be done. Everyone's going to do stuff for
Speaker 2: each other, and so we can just all sit around together.
Speaker 2: Is this the end of humanity? Not because we're being
Speaker 2: attacked and destroyed, but because we're just going to get
Speaker 2: everything we ever wanted and at the price of our individuality,
Speaker 2: our drive, our get our our you know, get up
Speaker 2: and go. And I think all of that is really interesting,
Speaker 2: but it's all speculative now because the first three episodes
Speaker 2: have simply been a way of laying out the stakes
Speaker 2: and the groundwork, and now it's really got a.
Speaker 1: Still landing a lot. Yeah, although Vince Gilligan, like the thing,
Speaker 1: you got to give him credit for Better Call Saul
Speaker 1: and Breaking Bad. He had a multi seasonal vision about
Speaker 1: where he was going with things. That's probably my own.
Speaker 1: And we can get off of this because we're probably
Speaker 1: pissing off people who are in the waiting room who
Speaker 1: want to avoid the spoilers. But my biggest complaint about
Speaker 1: it so far, I mean, I agree with you with
Speaker 1: her characters are ill annoying, but I like her so
Speaker 1: much where I think they kind of I would have
Speaker 1: loved to see him and take the events of the
Speaker 1: first episode and make that the entire first season, because
Speaker 1: there could have been this incredibly dramatic reveal at the
Speaker 1: end that of like you think it's going to be
Speaker 1: this horrible alien takeover and then it turns out everybody's
Speaker 1: nice and is bringing you lunch, and like that would
Speaker 1: have been a great season finale rather than a first
Speaker 1: episode finale. But yeah, see it is the way.
Speaker 2: It reminds me that part of the thing in streaming
Speaker 2: is that and you hear people say this who work
Speaker 2: in streaming and are creating for streaming, is they have
Speaker 2: a huge problem, which is, like, you know, the barrier
Speaker 2: to entry is unbelievably low. So you turn on a
Speaker 2: show and if you don't get people in the first
Speaker 2: ten minutes, they're going to turn it off and they'll
Speaker 2: never watch it again. What do you do to get
Speaker 2: them to watch the show? It's a real problem. And
Speaker 2: one of the things they do is that they mix
Speaker 2: up timelines and they start things in the middle, and
Speaker 2: then they go backwards and they go forwards. All of
Speaker 2: this seems to be a way of trying to keep
Speaker 2: people engaged and slightly off on the back foot so
Speaker 2: that they don't quite know what is happening next.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean I have a I take a slightly
Speaker 4: different view of this stuff for the streamers. That and
Speaker 4: I think the streamers are discovering this, by the way,
Speaker 4: is that the harder you make it the story to
Speaker 4: get into, and the more you promise that these secrets
Speaker 4: are going to be unrolled and unfolded, the harder it
Speaker 4: is for people to jump in. That. The the problem
Speaker 4: with streaming is that not that it's too easy, it's
Speaker 4: it's too hard, and so everything just takes this immense
Speaker 4: amount of choice, and and they don't make it easy
Speaker 4: for you, and they try to like, well, no, stick around.
Speaker 4: Episode three, some of this stuff will be revealed, and
Speaker 4: then episode five something is going to happen. And then
Speaker 4: and then people say in a lot of ways, they say,
Speaker 4: you know, that first episode that first season should have
Speaker 4: been the first episode, and I think they're this, look,
Speaker 4: you know, they're starting to.
Speaker 2: They're I'm explaining that. I think what they know, what
Speaker 2: they have learned down to their marrow, is you have
Speaker 2: to make the big reveal early.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, yeah, right, Okay, that's a desert.
Speaker 2: First show into the explanation of the big reveal. Yes
Speaker 2: that is otherwise it's lost. And yes, there's a point
Speaker 2: in which.
Speaker 4: Everyone I call that the Rob Long rule because I've
Speaker 4: been screaming about that for fifteen years. I call dessert first,
Speaker 4: because the truth is, what people do. It's a it's
Speaker 4: a it's a psychological problem that people who do TV
Speaker 4: shows and people who are executive TV shows and streamers,
Speaker 4: they just assume that the first you could hear when
Speaker 4: they talk, they say, Okay, so here's what we're gonna
Speaker 4: do with our audience. But blah blah blah blah blah
Speaker 4: blah blah. And the problem is that you don't have
Speaker 4: an audience.
Speaker 1: Yet. You don't have one. Your audience is.
Speaker 4: Zero, and so it is in a question of like
Speaker 4: what am I going to do with the twenty million
Speaker 4: people who tune in? It's this is not Laverne and
Speaker 4: Shirley when you're gonna get twenty million people to tune in,
Speaker 4: because twenty three million people tuned in for Happy Days.
Speaker 4: This is something different, and you do not have an audience,
Speaker 4: and you must constantly be giving them something really interesting
Speaker 4: and not baffling, and not opaque and not confusing and
Speaker 4: not arrogant.
Speaker 1: You must give them dessert first. They demand dessert first.
Speaker 2: Right, So this is dessert. So this, this show in
Speaker 2: that sense, is here's what happens. The first episode is
Speaker 2: the world changes, and we watch the world change, and
Speaker 2: at the end of the first episode the world has changed.
Speaker 2: As I say, my fear is after after three episodes
Speaker 2: and we're only like a week I think. I think
Speaker 2: basically according to the countdown, it's like four days have
Speaker 2: transpired over the course of these three episodes. Now the
Speaker 2: plot has.
Speaker 1: To kick in.
Speaker 2: Now what is she going to do to save humanity
Speaker 2: or what are they going to do to try to
Speaker 2: stop her from saving humanity? Or you know, who else
Speaker 2: is who else is involved? Or what's the overall scheme.
Speaker 2: That's that's what we go to from here. So it's
Speaker 2: really really, really interesting.
Speaker 1: I could be wrong. I mean I probably am wrong
Speaker 1: because I don't know why you would do this, but
Speaker 1: I thought it was interesting where it turns out that
Speaker 1: they will not kill anything, so like this guy orders
Speaker 1: lobster and they say, well, we couldn't find any in
Speaker 1: the area and we won't kill anything, so if it's
Speaker 1: not in existing stores, we're not gonna get it for you.
Speaker 1: If that extends to plant life, like they won't harvest crops,
Speaker 1: how then they have a whole party storyline about it.
Speaker 1: How Yeah, they have to feed themselves, you know, would
Speaker 1: be kind of interesting.
Speaker 2: Well, the other problem with the show, and this is
Speaker 2: always true of post apocalyptic shows, right, which is showing
Speaker 2: what's happened is almost impossible, by which I mean we
Speaker 2: are told at some point in the second episode that
Speaker 2: eight hundred million people have died. Sorry, my dog is
Speaker 2: going crazy, a dog demon. Eight hundred million people have
Speaker 2: died of that virus. No, whatever happens.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, we don't want to give too many spoilers,
Speaker 1: but it doesn't.
Speaker 2: Look but there is no evidence whatsoever. They eight hundred
Speaker 2: million people have died, So that's a tenth of all
Speaker 2: humanity and there's literally no evidence. But let's why don't
Speaker 2: we move on to Death by Lightning? Which is interesting
Speaker 2: because it's not it's not a streaming series. It's essentially
Speaker 2: what we used to call it mini. It's a four
Speaker 2: hour mini series that tells the story of the last
Speaker 2: year in the life of James Garfield. So, James Garfield's
Speaker 2: a congressman from from Ohio. He's going to the Republican
Speaker 2: Convention in Chicago in eighteen eighty to nominate his fellow
Speaker 2: Ohioan and give a speech to nominate that guy in
Speaker 2: the speech on the floor is so electrifying that he
Speaker 2: become He becomes the nominee of the Republican Party and
Speaker 2: wins the presidency. And as we watch this, we are
Speaker 2: also watching his the degeneration of the man who would
Speaker 2: become his assassin, Charles Guiteau, who is and so it's
Speaker 2: a parallel story. So we have the Guito story as
Speaker 2: he desperately decides that his future lies in attaching himself
Speaker 2: to the Republican ticket and getting himself a patronage job
Speaker 2: after Garfield wins, and how Garfield goes on as a
Speaker 2: sort of semi accidental president with an incredibly corrupt party
Speaker 2: establishment simply wanting to control and dominate him. And this
Speaker 2: is one of the best TV shows of the last decade,
Speaker 2: I think, without question, in part because it is because
Speaker 2: it's four hours and done like they're not trying to
Speaker 2: hook you into five seasons, and it is telling the story.
Speaker 2: And it's based on a book called I'll tell You
Speaker 2: in a Minute because I can't remember the name of
Speaker 2: it by Candice Millard, which is a really remarkably wonderful
Speaker 2: book about Garfield and Guiteau and the Geto's mental illness
Speaker 2: and Garfield's medical treatment which killed him. It was the
Speaker 2: treatment of Garfield that killed him, not Geito's bullet, because
Speaker 2: they had yet to believe in things like anticept it right,
Speaker 2: they didn't believe in the germ theory of disease. And
Speaker 2: so you know, you see Jelko Evonik playing a doctor
Speaker 2: who was like digging his unwashed hand into Garfield's back
Speaker 2: looking for the bullet with his finger and stuff like that,
Speaker 2: all of which is told really wonderfully well in the book.
Speaker 2: And Jody, you've seen two episodes.
Speaker 1: You said, yeah, I think it's fantastic, and it's the
Speaker 1: cast I think is really perfectly done. And and I
Speaker 1: got to admit, like I was talking to I was
Speaker 1: talking to a historian recently who was telling me about
Speaker 1: the show, and they were basically saying, it's a it's
Speaker 1: remarkable that, like, it's entirely possible that James Garfield would
Speaker 1: have been up there in the pantheon with Lincoln Washington
Speaker 1: and Jefferson but for this assassination, and like it never
Speaker 1: really occurred to people to think in those terms. But
Speaker 1: the show kind of the show and the book kind
Speaker 1: of I don't know it kind of turns you around
Speaker 1: on all that. And but I just think it's it's
Speaker 1: a great example of how there's a whole of stuff
Speaker 1: that we were sort of culturally taught to think is boring,
Speaker 1: you know, that sort of weird nineteenth century stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and uh, if you have the right eye for it,
Speaker 1: there's actually there's just an enormously rich vein of American
Speaker 1: Americana that that you can do. You know, not the
Speaker 1: very comedy about you know, this isn't the comedy, but
Speaker 1: it's got some comedic touches, but you can you can
Speaker 1: bring the life in ways that are really compelling. It's
Speaker 1: very daunty chaunty period.
Speaker 4: It's also kind of strange we had that attitude about
Speaker 4: the sort of Victorian era in general, that's sort of
Speaker 4: the anglophone Victorian era, that everybody was really uptight, you're
Speaker 4: uptight all the time, and they were all repressed. The
Speaker 4: truth is they were like incredibly emotional all the time,
Speaker 4: and the Secretary of War would sit down to write
Speaker 4: poems and they were weeping, all fainting, and they were
Speaker 4: they were incredibly affected or in a good way. And
Speaker 4: then but then I can't help that the joke is
Speaker 4: going to make with us Garfield. But the course is you,
Speaker 4: as we all know, the assassination of Garfield was really
Speaker 4: when American lost its innocence.
Speaker 2: Well, by the way, so the reason the book which
Speaker 2: is called Destiny of the Republic by Candice Millard. So
Speaker 2: the book is what rehabit, what reintroduces as a popular history.
Speaker 2: Garfield as a as a potentially great American figure, and
Speaker 2: his story is unbelievable. It's only told glancingly during the
Speaker 2: course of the show, which really is focused on this
Speaker 2: one year. He apparently was a fantastic speaker, was a
Speaker 2: great orator, and was and was obsessive. He was like
Speaker 2: a tweeter in this sense. According to Cannis Millard, he
Speaker 2: would get up forty times a day to speak from
Speaker 2: the well of the house, almost like me on Twitter. Right. So,
Speaker 2: and then this thing happens where he doesn't really have
Speaker 2: ambitions to be president, but gives this electrifying speech basically
Speaker 2: about how we've been spinning our wheels since the beginning
Speaker 2: of reconstruction. He was very progressive. He was a he
Speaker 2: was an emancipator, a you know, anti anti Jim Crow
Speaker 2: and anti the spoils system and getto became famous for
Speaker 2: the appellation which never appears on the show that we
Speaker 2: now know. You know, you know how Time magazine always
Speaker 2: came up with something we called somebody a like you know,
Speaker 2: da da dada, like these kind of Homeric epithets. So
Speaker 2: the homeric epithet for Charles Getau was disappointed office seeker
Speaker 2: Charles Guteau and was he wanted a job. People knew
Speaker 2: he was crazy. They threw him out of his office,
Speaker 2: and then God started saying to him in his ear,
Speaker 2: everything would be much better if the president were gone.
Speaker 2: And so he goes and shows up at a train station.
Speaker 1: Of the time.
Speaker 2: Exactly anyway, Matthew mcphaden, who plays Guto, is not only
Speaker 2: astonishingly good, but if you look at his makeup and
Speaker 2: then you'd google a picture of Geto, it is beyond uncanny.
Speaker 2: It is literally as though as though Guito were walking
Speaker 2: and talking right in front of you.
Speaker 1: So but so one of the things, just because it's
Speaker 1: we are in, you know, waiting for the Supreme Court
Speaker 1: to say something about tariffs. Yeah, one of the funny things.
Speaker 1: About a year ago, I did the deep dive trying
Speaker 1: to figure out where the cliche came from that we
Speaker 1: should run government like a business, Like when did people
Speaker 1: start to doing that? And I because there are few
Speaker 1: things that drive me more crazy than people who say that,
Speaker 1: both because it's not just when they say it, it's
Speaker 1: that they say it as if like they're the first
Speaker 1: person who had occurred to and you hear that from
Speaker 1: people all the time. And second, they think it's incredibly
Speaker 1: wise and insightful. Right, and so I did this deep
Speaker 1: dive and it's funny. So Chester Arthur, as they discuss
Speaker 1: briefly in the at least the first two episodes, was
Speaker 1: basically the chief revenue officer for the New York basically
Speaker 1: New York City Harbor, right, he's the customs officer. And
Speaker 1: they make a big point about saying how most of
Speaker 1: the money, that the most of the revenue that the
Speaker 1: government gets is through New York. And they make it
Speaker 1: very clear that justter Arthur was pretty corrupt. And it
Speaker 1: turns out that like I couldn't get a definitive thing
Speaker 1: on this, and anybody wants to send me something that's dispositive,
Speaker 1: that would be great. But it appears that it comes
Speaker 1: out basically out of that practice that the tariff system,
Speaker 1: particularly in New York, was so unbelievably corrupt that people
Speaker 1: started saying, you know what we need to do. We
Speaker 1: need to run government according to best business practices. And
Speaker 1: it was really an accounting point more than anything else.
Speaker 1: And what's funny about it is like the reason why
Speaker 1: we switched to an income tax was in large part
Speaker 1: because the tariff system was so inherently corrupt and corrupting, right,
Speaker 1: not even like bribery corrupting, just sort of like special
Speaker 1: pleading all that kind of stuff that they said, we
Speaker 1: got to come up with a different source of revenue
Speaker 1: that doesn't turn every single politician into a pressure point
Speaker 1: for lobbyists and special pleading. And now we live in
Speaker 1: an age where the President of United States thinks that
Speaker 1: that aspect of tariffs is a feature, not a bug. Right,
Speaker 1: That's what gets people to come to the White House, yeah,
Speaker 1: with gold bars and gold clocks and Boeing seven sixty
Speaker 1: sevens because he wants he wants the pressure point to
Speaker 1: force people to come compliment him, talk about how they
Speaker 1: love his musk and give him trinkets. And it's really
Speaker 1: just I think it's a great little, sort of serendipitous thing.
Speaker 2: There's a moment in the show in the book where
Speaker 2: Garfield is talking to James Blaine, who is his secretary of.
Speaker 1: State, and he was a.
Speaker 4: He was a continental liar from the state of Maine.
Speaker 2: I believe that he was. And he was. He was
Speaker 2: the Republican candidate for president in eighteen eighty four. Gob
Speaker 2: Cleveland defeated him and ended the twenty four year Republican
Speaker 2: an uninterrupted Republican of the White House. Correct He says
Speaker 2: to Blaine, bla, you know, you know one thing about
Speaker 2: if we could get Arthur on our side, maybe we
Speaker 2: can find the money. Right literally, we can find the
Speaker 2: bills that he and Roscoe Conkling have been hiding. Because
Speaker 2: eighty percent of the government's revenues came from the Port
Speaker 2: of New York in the form of actual cash payments
Speaker 2: made to pay for the imported you know, pay the importers.
Speaker 2: We're paying to bring in their good hoods. And there
Speaker 2: were stacks of bills.
Speaker 1: That always a good thing.
Speaker 2: And then the stacks of bills would go missing, and
Speaker 2: and it was like hide the salami. You know, it's like,
Speaker 2: you know, where is where's the money?
Speaker 1: Wasn't exactly hide the salami.
Speaker 2: But I think it's a metaphorical hide the salami again
Speaker 2: a great point, Shonah. It's a very very interesting moment.
Speaker 2: And the point is that this, this the murder of Garfield,
Speaker 2: led to the creation of the Civil Service, by which
Speaker 2: the idea was, we cannot run the government as a
Speaker 2: spoil system. It cannot be that you you want to
Speaker 2: become president so you can give people jobs and so
Speaker 2: that they can run the customs houses. It has to
Speaker 2: be that there has there have to be fair rules
Speaker 2: so that anyone can get a job if they pass
Speaker 2: a test, and it's not just in the hands of
Speaker 2: some people at least if that can happen in cities
Speaker 2: and town and all that until that changes. But it
Speaker 2: was the bizarre fact of history that Chester Arthur, who
Speaker 2: himself was the ultimate ultimate spoil system creature, was as
Speaker 2: a result of Garfield's assassination at the hands of somebody
Speaker 2: who was angry because he didn't get a job, that
Speaker 2: Arthur championed and pushed through the Pendleton Civil Service Act
Speaker 2: that led to the creation of the modern idea that
Speaker 2: people who work for government should be qualified, and that
Speaker 2: there would be a way to qualify them through a
Speaker 2: test and you know that was a I mean the
Speaker 2: size of that change, which has good parts and bad parts,
Speaker 2: because ultimately it leads to the most evil you know,
Speaker 2: Jonah's favorite American villain, Woodrow Wilson, believing that you can
Speaker 2: take this principle and then apply it to all of
Speaker 2: life in which some form of expertise gets to dominate
Speaker 2: and control everything, including everything you do and everything the
Speaker 2: government does and all of that. So it's not like
Speaker 2: there aren't an attendant consequences from stuff like that.
Speaker 1: And and the James Blaine in this is the Blaine
Speaker 1: of the Blaine Amendments, right, yeah, yeah, which is uh,
Speaker 1: it'd be fun if they got into his sort of
Speaker 1: more of his anti Romanism stuff just for color, but
Speaker 1: I guess they.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well it's yeah, it was late. I mean he
Speaker 2: was already, this is already the they had moved on.
Speaker 2: They had moved on from that. Okay, so other questions
Speaker 2: here that that that come up. Uh all right, so
Speaker 2: someone asks what are the ten best biography showbiz biographies
Speaker 2: that I have ever read? And I'm not doing ten,
Speaker 2: and I'm not going to do five. I am going
Speaker 2: to recommend one and then maybe you each if you
Speaker 2: know if you can think of when you can recommend
Speaker 2: another I think right now the best biography is actually
Speaker 2: a memoir. The best memoir of Hollywood that I have
Speaker 2: ever read, I believe, is Stories I Only Tell My
Speaker 2: Friends by Rob Low. May surprise you to know that
Speaker 2: Rob Low has written a great book, But Rob Low
Speaker 2: has actually written a great book, and it is the
Speaker 2: story of his upbringing as a kid from Ohio whose
Speaker 2: mother moved him to California because she was having an
Speaker 2: affair with her psychiatrist, who then moved to California, and
Speaker 2: he grew up as a wild child in Malibu in
Speaker 2: the early seventies and then became a TV actor. And
Speaker 2: the book is a portrait not only of Hollywood, but
Speaker 2: of America in the seventies as adults went absolutely hogwild
Speaker 2: and abandoned their children. Upper middle class parents abandoned their
Speaker 2: children to their own devices. I know, we hear all
Speaker 2: this talk talk about free range kids and how there's
Speaker 2: too much helicopter parenting. But if you ever want to
Speaker 2: a book that makes the case for helicopter parenting, it
Speaker 2: is Stories I Only Tell My Friends by Rob Low,
Speaker 2: which talks about this world of Malibu that he was
Speaker 2: in that the Sheen brothers were in, that Sean Penn
Speaker 2: and his brother were in, and all of this, and
Speaker 2: this bizarre surfing, criminal, hyper sex, hyper druggy world of
Speaker 2: kids who had been simply let loose, cut loose by
Speaker 2: their parents to do whatever the hell it was that
Speaker 2: they wanted to do. And how so many of them,
Speaker 2: including ones you've never heard of, not known just actors,
Speaker 2: but just kids around Malibou, died, killed in surfing accidents,
Speaker 2: you know, drug overdoses, all of that simply because nobody
Speaker 2: was paying the slightest attention to them. For now, we
Speaker 2: could just make it like great Hollywood books if you want,
Speaker 2: like that would be my pick for the memoir biography thing. Aside,
Speaker 2: of course, from Rob Rob's conversations with my agent, which
Speaker 2: would also I think.
Speaker 4: Be available than a double volume. My first and second
Speaker 4: books are put together so you can just see, you
Speaker 4: see exactly what a rip off they were.
Speaker 1: Anyway, I have to confess I am hard pressed I
Speaker 1: of Hollywood biography type of book.
Speaker 4: It just seems ridiculous for any you, either you or
Speaker 4: even or me to comment on this topic.
Speaker 1: Jonah, I don't know what. I don't know what.
Speaker 4: Twitter user on Jadorits was thinking when he asked.
Speaker 2: This question, what you you you like? This is you
Speaker 2: know ten twenty people you know have written books about
Speaker 2: Hollywood at least.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So I I read Wired by Bob Woodward when
Speaker 1: it came out. Sure, and I read I have no
Speaker 1: idea who wrote it. I read when I was a
Speaker 1: Star Wars geek. I read some biography of George Lucas.
Speaker 1: I am trying to think of what other Hollywood biographies
Speaker 1: I have read. It's just not a genre of book
Speaker 1: that I've ever spent a lot of time in.
Speaker 4: Neither, I think the only I guess that it's not
Speaker 4: Hollywood bug I can't. I see nothing's more painful. I mean,
Speaker 4: I'm sure that Rob low is a nice guy and
Speaker 4: a very smart guy and very funny guy. So I'm
Speaker 4: sure the book is great.
Speaker 1: I've heard the book is great.
Speaker 4: I mean, I would read Act One by Moss Heart.
Speaker 4: That's Broadway by agree, but it's really good. It's really
Speaker 4: it's funny and interesting and it says a lot about
Speaker 4: writing and kind of is good early Broadway kind of
Speaker 4: showbiz stuff. So it's maybe if you're insted in the topics,
Speaker 4: it's probably a good Probably good one to start.
Speaker 2: Can I tell you one detail that I learned from
Speaker 2: a book that I read earlier this year? I think,
Speaker 2: I again, I'm now losing my mind. So I think
Speaker 2: I haven't mentioned this, although I think I told you
Speaker 2: guys about it. I certainly told Rob about it. So
Speaker 2: if I mentioned this on the last show, I apologize,
Speaker 2: and maybe Scott can just cut this out of figures
Speaker 2: this out. But I read this biography of Clint Eastwood, right,
Speaker 2: So Clint's been amazing life. He's ninety five years old,
Speaker 2: He's still literally still directing movies. I don't know how
Speaker 2: the hell that's possible. So Clint Eastwood was not intending
Speaker 2: to be an actor, and he somehow. The story that
Speaker 2: is in this book that is, and then there's a
Speaker 2: little footnote about it, is that he came across in
Speaker 2: the late forties a guy named Albert Lewin who became
Speaker 2: his agent. Only Albert Lewin was not an agent. Arthur Lubin,
Speaker 2: excuse me, not Albert Arthur Lubin. He was not an agent.
Speaker 2: He was a film producer and his may the work
Speaker 2: that made him famous and rich were the Francis the
Speaker 2: Talking Mule pictures, Frances Talking Mule. Donald O'Connor made a
Speaker 2: series of seven movies. He meets Francis the Talking Mule
Speaker 2: while he is on an island during fighting in World
Speaker 2: War two France. This is a mule on this island
Speaker 2: and he's fighting the Japanese. He encounters this talking mule. Okay,
Speaker 2: so Luban makes Francis the Talking Mule movies and then
Speaker 2: later on is the creator since you don't drop a
Speaker 2: concept once it's shown to be successful. Of mister Ed,
Speaker 2: the show about Wilbur and his talking horse.
Speaker 4: Hello, I'm mister Ed.
Speaker 1: I did not know that was the same person.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, Well, so if you think about mister Ed,
Speaker 2: mister Ed is an extremely gay coated story because the
Speaker 2: story is there's Wilbur, he's married, he's got his wife
Speaker 2: in the house, but out in the barn is his
Speaker 2: true love, whom no one can ever know about. No
Speaker 2: one can ever know that he has this horse that
Speaker 2: can talk, and no one must ever.
Speaker 1: Know and he it's a very specific reading of mister Rann.
Speaker 2: I had to say, okay, okay, but Arthur Clubin was gay.
Speaker 2: He was as close to being openly gay as possible
Speaker 2: in Hollywood. In like nineteen fifty and he put Clint
Speaker 2: Eastwood under personal contract as his agent and got him
Speaker 2: his first four or five jobs in television. And the
Speaker 2: question that this book raises that has never answered is
Speaker 2: was there a quid pro quo between Arthur Lubin and
Speaker 2: Clint Eastwood? Which is an unanswerable question unless Clint Eastwood
Speaker 2: ever decides to answer it. But apparently people have occasionally
Speaker 2: asked him this and he has demured. So this hidden
Speaker 2: history of Clint Eastwood could be that his entire career
Speaker 2: is the result of the fact that an older man
Speaker 2: attracted to this incredibly good looking six foot four inch fellow,
Speaker 2: you know, kind of took him under his wing. In
Speaker 2: all senses of the term. This is the kind of
Speaker 2: nugget that you can dig up if you are willing
Speaker 2: as I am, to forage through the you know.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so at the end of the day, the end
Speaker 4: of the day, you are. The nugget for you is
Speaker 4: did an elderly person no one's ever heard of, in
Speaker 4: some weird way have a required or unrequited sexual relationship
Speaker 4: with a ninety year old now ninety year old film director.
Speaker 2: Well, and the biggest, arguably the single most influential person
Speaker 2: in the last seventy years, and in show business, you
Speaker 2: could make the click case.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think you'd be I think you'd be that's
Speaker 4: a I don't think you'd be right, but you could
Speaker 4: make that case. But even retroactively, it's just like that's
Speaker 4: that's ultimately the problem with these biographies is that they
Speaker 4: require you to believe that these events are consequential, when
Speaker 4: in fact it's like you're just working backwards from the outcome.
Speaker 4: You know, Clinice would smart and good actor, and you know,
Speaker 4: maybe somebody else would have well.
Speaker 1: I don't know, you know, with the mister ed tie.
Speaker 1: And there's that phrase from you know, medicine, like when
Speaker 1: you hear hoof beats, think gay private personal services contract.
Speaker 2: Yeah right, okay, I'm sorry, but I'm a Clinice would
Speaker 2: not a very good actor. And the whole book makes
Speaker 2: the point that for the first fifteen years of his life,
Speaker 2: or the first ten years of his life before he
Speaker 2: was cast in Rawhide, the TV show that made him famous,
Speaker 2: he could barely speak a line, and that people were
Speaker 2: doing Albert Lubin a favor by letting his protege get
Speaker 2: these jobs. And if if Clint Eastwood. Were were a
Speaker 2: twenty year old girl instead of a twenty well, I
Speaker 2: would would have nobody, everybody would have understood.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, that's lessons dancing lessons a big star.
Speaker 2: Okay, exactly, Okay, all right, we can move on from this.
Speaker 2: I just wanted to bring that up because it's just
Speaker 2: too juicy. And you may you may be tutting me
Speaker 2: on how juicy that is, but you are wrong. Now
Speaker 2: what on earth have I done with the Jonah list of.
Speaker 4: I gotta say?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, hold on, I got hijack, you can,
Speaker 1: you can anything you want.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it seems like the list may maybe may well
Speaker 4: get good. What is the list saying, let's don't want
Speaker 4: to have five more minutes?
Speaker 1: So let's sick with all this?
Speaker 2: Jason asks, what is Rob's take on the new Archbishop
Speaker 2: of Canterbury.
Speaker 4: The boom Wow?
Speaker 2: How about that, buddy?
Speaker 4: Yeah, that seems that seems very niche. Uh My take
Speaker 4: is I don't really know enough about her to know.
Speaker 4: I mean, I assume what he means is, what do
Speaker 4: I do I care that it's a it's a it's
Speaker 4: a lady bishop, and I as an American, as an episcopalian,
Speaker 4: I don't we have lady bishops left and right. We're
Speaker 4: allowsy with lady bishops, and the Episcoal Church of America.
Speaker 1: Is lady bishop. The term of art is that what
Speaker 1: you call it.
Speaker 4: No, no, I just I'm saying, it's just a it's
Speaker 4: a she is a lady bishop. It's also kind of
Speaker 4: strange to me. There's kind of I guess there's kind
Speaker 4: of there's a lot of pushback and schism talk in
Speaker 4: the Church of England now about this, which is strange
Speaker 4: because it really mean, you may as well if you're
Speaker 4: if you're if you're holding out for that kind of
Speaker 4: tradition of all male clergy, you've uh, it's a strange
Speaker 4: hill to die on. After the churches in general have
Speaker 4: made statements about climate change and a lot of other
Speaker 4: things that the idea this is the last straw is
Speaker 4: kind of too bad. But in general, like you know,
Speaker 4: I think it, uh, I think of anything the weird
Speaker 4: non arch bitch of a Canterbury time that we had before,
Speaker 4: you know, after the last one was sort of gone
Speaker 4: and then the next one was was chosen or designated
Speaker 4: that that to be the most interesting part of the church,
Speaker 4: right because in that intervening was intervening months. We had
Speaker 4: a pope die and it was the Presiding Bishop of
Speaker 4: America of the episode Church of America who sort of
Speaker 4: kind of represented them what we call the Anglican Communion
Speaker 4: at that point. These are all boring church things. But
Speaker 4: I will say the only cool thing about all of
Speaker 4: the process is that she still had to be basically
Speaker 4: chosen by King Charles, Like he had to have a
Speaker 4: meeting with her and talk to her and then he
Speaker 4: picked her. Like it's kind of a funny thing. That
Speaker 4: is the King Charles the Third, This Charles who who
Speaker 4: seems to be in general his life has been sort
Speaker 4: of bad when it comes to the HR choices. You know,
Speaker 4: he got to make this one anyway, The daughter.
Speaker 2: In law choices is what it was, what you're referring to.
Speaker 1: I think, not.
Speaker 4: Well, just any maybe the wife choices, the all the
Speaker 4: HR choices. He doesn't seem to really he's not good
Speaker 4: at it, which is fine because he's you know, never
Speaker 4: had to do it.
Speaker 2: Okay, So we are people are asking us to talk
Speaker 2: about uh, Ryan Liza and Olivia Nosey and I just
Speaker 2: spent just before we came on. I spent like an
Speaker 2: hour talking about this on the commentary podcast. So I'm
Speaker 2: I am a little drained, and I don't know if
Speaker 2: we want to go into full detail about what the
Speaker 2: story is that people don't know it about this journalistic
Speaker 2: couple and their war against each other, her and a
Speaker 2: new memoir and him in a response to her new
Speaker 2: memoir in the articles about her new memoir. But if
Speaker 2: you wish to discourse on it, have you anything to say?
Speaker 2: I will say that Jonah. I remember at the beginning
Speaker 2: of Me Too, At the very beginning of Me Too,
Speaker 2: Jonah sends me a text that says Ryan Liza out
Speaker 2: exclamation point, exclamation point, exclamation point because Ryan Lizza was
Speaker 2: one of the first people to lose his job. He
Speaker 2: lost it at the New Yorker because of an accusation
Speaker 2: of sexual whatever whatever. He was me tooed and he
Speaker 2: was fired by the New Yorker. And uh, Jonah, Jonah
Speaker 2: was right there on top of it in my text
Speaker 2: chain to inform me that this scalp, this establishment journalist scalp,
Speaker 2: had been secured. That's what I'm sure you don't remember.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, this is one of the things you
Speaker 1: can either talk about very little or a long time, right,
Speaker 1: and we don't have a long time to talk about it.
Speaker 1: I will just say I hats off to Larry Summers, right,
Speaker 1: who was embarrassed by stuff that was in the Epstein emails,
Speaker 1: which is another topic we could spend a long time on,
Speaker 1: and he said, you know what I'm gonna I'm going to
Speaker 1: retreat from public life for a while and just not
Speaker 1: and just and just and lick my wounds because I
Speaker 1: did something bad and it's bad that John Perfumo or
Speaker 1: how are you pronounced that guy's name? You know that
Speaker 1: kind of yeah, Perfumo. That kind of behavior is so
Speaker 1: unbelievably sorely missing in America. The idea that you that
Speaker 1: either of these people would take it up. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think she's a worse actor than he is in
Speaker 1: all of this, but that's a really competitive field right now.
Speaker 1: And the idea that like, you're entitled to translate your
Speaker 1: incredibly bad behavior into more celebrity and that everyone and
Speaker 1: everyone rewards. It's the thing I hate the most about
Speaker 1: the attention economy is that it incentivizes a level of
Speaker 1: shamelessness that I mean, it ties us back to what
Speaker 1: we're talking about with Ana, with Tucker. I mean, like
Speaker 1: there is a purely cynical argument that he knows exactly
Speaker 1: what he's doing. He's not actually motivated by evil and
Speaker 1: all these other things. He is just cynically milking engagement,
Speaker 1: and he doesn't it doesn't matter that what he's doing
Speaker 1: is objectively evil and dishonorable, and there's so much shameful
Speaker 1: behavior that people monetize and use the you know, get
Speaker 1: better jobs and all that. That's the thing. I just
Speaker 1: think it's so freaking gross about all of this.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I also feel it's weird that I don't that
Speaker 4: I now know things about people I do not give
Speaker 4: a crap about, Like I don't, I mean, none of that.
Speaker 4: This all seems so grade d to me. Also delisting
Speaker 4: bad like low rent kind of stuff. But it is
Speaker 4: ultimately the the what all the journalists and journalism has
Speaker 4: to end up at because they There's one thing that
Speaker 4: runs through both of these threads, right, the Nozy Lizza
Speaker 4: that's interesting news, Lisen Nusley, the Nusley affair, is that
Speaker 4: these are terrible people at their job, and they have
Speaker 4: all of this of the badges of of that enterprise. Right,
Speaker 4: they have all the language and the cliches down, but
Speaker 4: in fact they're they're kind of lousy at it, and
Speaker 4: but nobody cares because the people judging them and hiring
Speaker 4: them and firing them, or at least hiring them and
Speaker 4: praising them, are also bad at that job. It's a
Speaker 4: it's a confederacy of really bad people of incompetence, and
Speaker 4: they all kind of agree that. You know, the same
Speaker 4: people would say, like, Mike Wallace is a powerful journey
Speaker 4: is not a power? Come on, all this, all this
Speaker 4: aggrandizement of the journalist is just so. It could only
Speaker 4: end here with a guy writing shamelessly about arranging his
Speaker 4: girlfriend's shoes and about Keith Olberman saying sure I paid
Speaker 4: her rent, you know, because I was making all this
Speaker 4: money then, like all this stuff, it's just like, of
Speaker 4: course you people are terrible at this, because you're terrible
Speaker 4: at your jobs. But the but you've all agreed to
Speaker 4: never say that about each other.
Speaker 2: I mean, I think the shamelessness story is the is
Speaker 2: the story, but without question and and the question it's
Speaker 2: too enjoyable to watch people's lives melt down in front
Speaker 2: of us, to avoid the schadenfreud of feelings and just
Speaker 2: the you know, it's like what what what life is like?
Speaker 2: It's like how life turns into a novel?
Speaker 4: What's melting down?
Speaker 1: I think? But Joe's Place is not melting down. That's
Speaker 1: the problem.
Speaker 2: Well, it melts down and then there's another episode. Like
Speaker 2: it's like a soap opera, you know, and soap operas,
Speaker 2: people you know end up, you know, their villains one
Speaker 2: year and their heroes the next, and nothing ever ends.
Speaker 2: It's just the same people, but it but it can
Speaker 2: be very melodramatic along the way, I suppose.
Speaker 1: I mean the sentence that you that you were disappointed
Speaker 1: that this sitting Secretary of Health and Human Services gave
Speaker 1: a perfunctory response to you sending pictures of your butthole.
Speaker 1: We have lost the plot as a culture.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean every part of the sentence that you
Speaker 2: just spoke means we have lost the plot, including these
Speaker 2: sitting Secretary of Health Human Services being a man who's
Speaker 2: half who, whose brain was eaten away by a worm,
Speaker 2: who has spent decades in body.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's actually worse.
Speaker 4: He sort of embodies everything I hate about the current
Speaker 4: political administration, which is that he is a moron by
Speaker 4: any definition. He's a fool, and he is a he
Speaker 4: currently uses drugs that are also currently illegal, so he's
Speaker 4: a pompous and entitled fool. And somehow the people who
Speaker 4: support the administration will have to nod and agree and
Speaker 4: make all sorts of and come up with a new
Speaker 4: acronym for his movement, the Maha movement, because everyone has
Speaker 4: sort of every sort of the self castrated eunuchs that
Speaker 4: surround the or they are basically in the Republican Party
Speaker 4: now and it's it's kind of bananas, but like, at
Speaker 4: no point is anything worse than that. That seems like
Speaker 4: the worst part of the whole parade is that you
Speaker 4: have this guy who is mentally incompetent doing it. You
Speaker 4: know what is I don't know what quarter it was
Speaker 4: a quarter of the federal budget or is it twenty
Speaker 4: something giant it's some giant chunk.
Speaker 2: Well most of it, most most of it goes in
Speaker 2: and out the door automatically. So fortunately he doesn't really
Speaker 2: have control of it. That's you know, Medicare and Medicaid
Speaker 2: is not anything that he can and Social Security or
Speaker 2: not anything that he can can he can futs around with.
Speaker 4: But look, let me be honest with you, I am
Speaker 4: a user and a proponent of the use of psychedelics,
Speaker 4: and the effort I have to go to to acquire
Speaker 4: safe and trustworthy psychedelics is sort of amazing, considering that
Speaker 4: they are, that they're actually fine, and we should be
Speaker 4: able to buy them legally. And the Secretary of Health
Speaker 4: of Human Services does the same thing, but he doesn't
Speaker 4: want you to take tail and all that he wants
Speaker 4: to get you to stop taking, and that to me
Speaker 4: is just so phenomenally stupid, so phenomenally stupid that it's unforgivable,
Speaker 4: and everybody around him, and everybody around the people around
Speaker 4: him should be ashamed of themselves and should got a
Speaker 4: hole and jump in the hole and stay in that
Speaker 4: hole for the next twenty years.
Speaker 2: So say it's twenty years from now and they've jumped
Speaker 2: in the hole and they come out at all, yeah.
Speaker 4: Right, okay, and not send pictures of that hole the
Speaker 4: next Secretary of Health of Human Services.
Speaker 2: One of the things that will have happened in those
Speaker 2: twenty years is that in many places cannabis will have
Speaker 2: been legal for a generation. And I keep hearing stories
Speaker 2: of people I know around my age I who have
Speaker 2: found themselves wittingly and this is genuinely to have two
Speaker 2: friends who went through this unwittingly ended up taking edibles
Speaker 2: or you know, taking or one case took more of
Speaker 2: an edible than he was supposed to take, and two
Speaker 2: people that I know had many psychotic breaks from taking
Speaker 2: from THHC.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I.
Speaker 2: Don't know whatever. So one story involved somebody took an
Speaker 2: edible at a party but had you know, three chunks
Speaker 2: of the chocolate rather than one and instantly had a
Speaker 2: paranoid like satanespersu and I I know had like a
Speaker 2: paranoid episode where he decided that the people at the
Speaker 2: party were going to kill him and he and his
Speaker 2: what He and his wife had to leave immediately and
Speaker 2: drive to a hospital so that he could get the
Speaker 2: care that he needed. Another story was about a friend
Speaker 2: of mine who went to was going was at his
Speaker 2: son's high school graduation, suddenly had a complete meltdown, ran
Speaker 2: out of the graduation, had to go to a hospital.
Speaker 2: It turned out that he had picked up in his
Speaker 2: house an eminem that was one of his kids eminem's
Speaker 2: only a one to no eminem. It was a very
Speaker 2: powerful edible and he didn't know that he had taken it,
Speaker 2: and he basically started saying I should die. I don't
Speaker 2: have a reason to live. My son is graduating from
Speaker 2: high school. What am I going to do with myself
Speaker 2: for the rest of my life? And he needed to
Speaker 2: get an IV and all of this. So I'm bringing
Speaker 2: this up only to say that I do feel like
Speaker 2: we were engaging in this gigantic nationwide experiment in the
Speaker 2: legalization of marijuana or marijuana like products that are vastly
Speaker 2: more powerful than they were when I was a kid,
Speaker 2: and I am terrified at what the country is going
Speaker 2: to look like in twenty forty five, based on what
Speaker 2: little I know about people who have kind of ended
Speaker 2: up falling into this almost inadvertently in twenty twenty five,
Speaker 2: given the potency of of of the stuff. And I
Speaker 2: am you know, I didn't want I believe in any
Speaker 2: of this. Unlike you, I don't think that these drugs
Speaker 2: should be legal. But Joanah, I think you are you are.
Speaker 2: You're also, like me, a pretty hardline person on.
Speaker 1: Im Like I mean, the microdosing thing under Supervillain microdosing,
Speaker 1: if it's difficult but possible, I'm fine with that, right
Speaker 1: at least from what I understand. I think the pot
Speaker 1: thing was an obvious mistake. I think that, by the way,
Speaker 1: the online gambling stuff was an obvious mistake. Oh my god.
Speaker 1: And I love my friends at Reason magazine and the
Speaker 1: libertarians and whatnot. I think it is just absolutely preposterous
Speaker 1: to talk about legalizing heroin and uh. And I've had
Speaker 1: this argument for thirty years with people, and.
Speaker 6: Uh.
Speaker 1: I was for decriminal slow decriminalization of weed. I would
Speaker 1: have been happy if we were now sort of saying, Okay,
Speaker 1: Colorado has done this for ten years, let's study what
Speaker 1: happened there. That's where I would have rather be right
Speaker 1: now than the entire country going all in on this stuff.
Speaker 1: And so yeah, I mean this is a very down
Speaker 1: way to end this podcast. But yeah, I'm still pro
Speaker 1: drug war. That doesn't mean I'm pro to every single
Speaker 1: way we do it, or for blowing up fishing boats
Speaker 1: in the Caribbean.
Speaker 2: So blow them up, I say, we need to. This
Speaker 2: is this is our lake, this is our hemisphere. James
Speaker 2: Monroe had it right. Don't you be sending your boats
Speaker 2: out with the crap on it. We're gonna you know,
Speaker 2: we're gonna blow them up. Just don't send the boats out.
Speaker 2: That's what I say, got no problem with it.
Speaker 1: What do you think I think if we actually know
Speaker 1: that's true. But I'm kind of open to it at
Speaker 1: the same time, like arresting drug dealers and interrogating them
Speaker 1: is actually kind of useful and just killing them.
Speaker 2: This is America. We get to blow up a boat
Speaker 2: every now and then. That's what I say.
Speaker 1: I understand if they had such a great legal justification
Speaker 1: for it, they would release it, or at least they
Speaker 1: would show it to the British who just said they're
Speaker 1: no longer going to cooperate with us because they think
Speaker 1: what we're doing is illegal.
Speaker 2: So well, I mean, that's that's very that's very wholesome
Speaker 2: of you. I'm just saying, I like a good I
Speaker 2: like a good boat, you know, with the kind of
Speaker 2: stand down or we'll we'll we'll take you out, you know,
Speaker 2: with the speaker with the help.
Speaker 1: They don't do the standown thing. They just blow them up, right,
Speaker 1: that's the problem. I'm with you with the stand doown thing.
Speaker 2: Just stand on niceties. You know, you guys, are you're
Speaker 2: such you know, send.
Speaker 4: My compliment to stand down? Yeah no, they don't do that.
Speaker 2: Okay, So this is a down way to end the podcast.
Speaker 2: So let's let's let's up with people. How can we go?
Speaker 2: How can we Thanksgiving is coming? What is your favorite dish?
Speaker 2: How about that? Got a favorite dish? Jessica's a great cook.
Speaker 2: She's a great cook. Uh. You know.
Speaker 1: I love a good uh extra cheesy scalloped potato. I
Speaker 1: like dark meat over white meat when it comes to
Speaker 1: the bird, and I will say uh, just very quickly.
Speaker 1: I talked about on the Dispatch podcast recently when my
Speaker 1: mom was no longer up for cooking Thanksgiving, but we
Speaker 1: wanted to have Thanksgiving with her and she couldn't come
Speaker 1: down to DC. We went up there and jess found
Speaker 1: this place that does Thanksgiving dinner peaking duck style. Oh wow,
Speaker 1: So they did a whole turkey red farm duck style. Yeah,
Speaker 1: red farm, red farm. It was so unbelievable good with
Speaker 1: the scallions and the pancakes, and they managed to keep
Speaker 1: the turkey moist. And I highly highly recommend it.
Speaker 2: I got it.
Speaker 1: I got it.
Speaker 2: Anyway, that sounds amazing, Rob, Do you have a favorite.
Speaker 4: Well, just to bring it all together, my favorite Thanksgiving
Speaker 4: dish is is sixty milligrams of one PLSD.
Speaker 1: Very thankful for that.
Speaker 4: Not milligram, My god, milligram, but I'd be I would
Speaker 4: be dead microgram. Sorry, Mike's as we say in the
Speaker 4: viz uh.
Speaker 1: I like it all. I love.
Speaker 4: I think Thanksgiving is a great meal.
Speaker 1: I think it's a great meal. It's my favorite holiday argument.
Speaker 4: It's a really really good All of the pieces of
Speaker 4: the Thanksgiving meal are good. All of the side cars
Speaker 4: on the Thanksgiving that have attached themselves to Thanksgiving meal
Speaker 4: are good, like macaroni and cheese and.
Speaker 1: Things like that.
Speaker 4: I think those are all good. The fact that people
Speaker 4: are eating sort of squashes and pies made of squashes
Speaker 4: is good. The truth about the the only downside of
Speaker 4: the Thanksgiving meal is it kind of takes turkey out
Speaker 4: of the running, you know, except as a lunch meat,
Speaker 4: which is too bad. And it kind of takes some
Speaker 4: of the the healthy winter vegetables out of the running
Speaker 4: because people associate them entirely with Thanksgiving instead of like, well, no,
Speaker 4: actually they're good.
Speaker 1: They're good all year round. Parsnips, Brussels sprouts.
Speaker 4: Brussels sprouts, but they russel sprout's had it maybe made
Speaker 4: a huge comeback about ten years ago, which is great.
Speaker 1: I mean gords, gorgs and squashes, you know, mostly because
Speaker 1: of the sex video and then just sort of like
Speaker 1: it re up the Brussels Sprout's best celebrity. That's probably true.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't like turkey, and I'm not afraid to
Speaker 2: a minute. If I'm going to have turkey, I will
Speaker 2: have the dark meat because the white meat is it
Speaker 2: is like taking Yeah, it's like it's like taking one
Speaker 2: of those pills that.
Speaker 4: Sucks all of the it shouldn't be, but it turns.
Speaker 2: It's like the thing on Star Trek where they turn
Speaker 2: the dial and then you turn into a into a
Speaker 2: cube of at That's that's what it's like for me.
Speaker 2: If I if I eat turkey.
Speaker 1: Pe king duck style turkey, you would love Okay, sounds.
Speaker 4: Amazing movie obviously, avalon.
Speaker 1: The tykey.
Speaker 2: You cut the tyke, cut the tikey, don't cut the tikey.
Speaker 1: Best Thanksgiving me.
Speaker 2: That's one of my favorite actors.
Speaker 4: That's Thanksgiving movie Plans, chains, autobiles.
Speaker 1: Yep, that's my answer to Yeah, yeah, is.
Speaker 2: There another I'm trying to think of other Thanksgiving movies? Usually,
Speaker 2: the usually family movies of the last twenty five years
Speaker 2: are always like the family gets together and then they
Speaker 2: all yell at each other for three hours. I don't
Speaker 2: really which is not? Which is not?
Speaker 1: That? Not that I hate movies. I think those ones
Speaker 1: are stupid.
Speaker 2: The Family Stone and I that Holidays and that movie.
Speaker 1: You could drive me to violence if you made me
Speaker 1: say and watch it?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, the Family That the idea that what people
Speaker 2: really want to do is go to turn on a
Speaker 2: TV show and watch a dysfunctional family yell at each
Speaker 2: other over a holiday table. Yeah. Where people got the
Speaker 2: idea that that would be enjoyable, either for people who
Speaker 2: are from families like that, who do not need to
Speaker 2: be reminded that that is what it is like for them,
Speaker 2: or for those of us who are not like families
Speaker 2: like that, who watch it and go, oh my god,
Speaker 2: that looks so awful. Those people to watch.
Speaker 1: People telling on themselves when they make those movies, Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're not.
Speaker 4: We're not really, because they probably don't see there, They
Speaker 4: don't see their family at all, so they just assumed
Speaker 4: that everybody with a family must be miserable. I remember
Speaker 4: saying once to somebody like, my parents are coming to
Speaker 4: visit this weekend, and the response was, oh, oh, I'm sorry.
Speaker 1: Is it gonna be okay. Yeah, I like my parents.
Speaker 1: I'm happy to see.
Speaker 4: That is that was it?
Speaker 1: But I would I'd say the.
Speaker 4: Terrible Thanksgiving movie and play trope, which we started.
Speaker 1: Is still you know, it's still as it's getting colder,
Speaker 1: and it's a Thanksgiving with the secrets come out.
Speaker 4: Yes, And my favorite Terrible Thanksgiving scene is in what
Speaker 4: is in fact an atrocious movie that for some reason
Speaker 4: people still love ordinary people, which is just terrible from
Speaker 4: start to finish, horrible, horrible, horrible, but it has these great,
Speaker 4: two great moments of Thanksgiving badness. One when all the
Speaker 4: uptight Watts are in the Winnetka or Levenston kitchen or
Speaker 4: Lake Forest, I guess, and they're sort of arranging of
Speaker 4: this stuff and the aunts and uncles are there and
Speaker 4: they're talking about you know, the sun. You not the
Speaker 4: son who died, but the son who tried to commit suicide.
Speaker 4: And somebody says, yes, he's he's fine, fine, And then
Speaker 4: the Chris Donald Sutherlan who's the good guy, says that yeah,
Speaker 4: he's seeing a doctor. He's sing, you's seeing a psychiatrist.
Speaker 4: We're really excited, doctor Schmelman or something, and play by
Speaker 4: Judd Hirsch and uh, and one of the aunts looks
Speaker 4: up and says a Jewish doctor, And we think, well,
Speaker 4: I know she's a lop, but I think she knows
Speaker 4: that all doctors are Jews in.
Speaker 1: The nineteen seventies.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I memore.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, you know, every doctor I ever run into
Speaker 2: now is South Asian.
Speaker 4: And then there's a and then there's a moment where
Speaker 4: the somebody drops a plate and it breaks, and Mary
Speaker 4: Tyler Moore, in an atrocious performance, says, it's okay, it's
Speaker 4: a clean break.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah. See at that point, just terrible. You need
Speaker 1: to click in the AI and have Donald Sutherland from
Speaker 1: Invasion of the Body Snatchers. He raises bony finger.
Speaker 2: Okay, so here's what we're recommending. We're recommending ploribus or
Speaker 2: we're recommending death by anything, and of course we're recommending
Speaker 2: the amazing nineteen seventy eight Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Speaker 2: with Donald Sutherland, directed and written by Philip Kaufman. That's
Speaker 2: where we are for you. Watch those three you will
Speaker 2: be happy. We'll be back next month.
Speaker 1: Uh, have a great Thanksgiving.
Speaker 4: Happy Thanksgiving everyone.
Speaker 6: Yeah, Jesus, that was a long one.
Speaker 1: Holi that's what she said.