Top 10 of 2025: #3 Arnold Schwarzenegger w/ Jon Gabrus

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello, zeich Gang, and welcome to the end of the year.
During these two weeks surrounding Christmas and the New Year,
we take some time off. During the mornings, we'll run
some new holiday and end of the year content that
you can listen to while we're taking a break. In
addition to all that stuff, in the afternoons, where we
would usually drop the Trends episode, we are rerunning the

(00:22):
ten most popular episodes of this year according to you.
You voted with your dang years and we listened with ours. Actually,
we looked at the data we're spying on you. Honestly,
I'm mostly in this podcasting thing for the rich marketing
data it provides to me about each and every one

(00:43):
of you. At the end of the year, when I
look back to see what made the top ten, and
this was actually my favorite year to look back at,
our top ten is full of episodes I feel like
made it because of a bunch of different reasons. There
are some episodes that dropped after huge news events. There
are some first episodes that dropped right after some hilarious

(01:07):
news events, some great new guests, some classic fan favorite guests,
and some new formats we tried out that We're very
excited to see that you guys enjoyed. Before we get
into it, I just want to thank you guys for
once again being such a cool community that's bloomed up
around this podcast we've been doing all these years. You
guys repeatedly make us proud. You're there for us when

(01:30):
we go through some really difficult shit. You show up
at shows of our guests, and we always get great
reports from our guests about our listeners. You are the
rare podcast audience that makes us extremely proud to have
you as listeners. So far, so don't funck this up,
you guys, and we are up to the top three

(01:52):
and coming in at number three is an episode called
Icons number four. So many numbers here. Icons number four
Arnold Schwartzegger with John gabriis one of our new iconograph episodes.
Great match of guest and subject matter. It was a
blast to record and we were very happy to see

(02:14):
that you enjoyed listening to it. It is our number
three most popular episode of the year. Enjoy Hello the Internet,
and welcome to this iconograph episode of Alley Zeitgeist. Oh yeah,
he's horny to that. Also, the noise you make when

(02:34):
you're horning instead of Instead of looking at the Zeike
guys through current events once a week, we're looking at
the Zekes through the lens of the powerful pop cultural
horcruxes that are our icons Einstein, Erkle, Miss Piggy. So far,
we use these characters and celebrities to create meaning, build identity,
to create the greatest soundboard in the history of mankind.

(02:56):
Oh stop whining, I'm a copy idiot. Learn room for
my face because with the remit in the istomic to
learn what a normal male human body is supposed to
look like with an early lesson I took from our
subject today. But most importantly, we learned that sometimes a

(03:16):
Polish American small town sheriff named Mark Kaminski has a
thick Austrian accent, and you don't need to worry about why.
It's just how it over it. That's right. Episode four,
we're talking Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Austrian oak A man who
took over the film industry and pop culture for two decades,
became the governor of the largest state in the United States,

(03:39):
and in the process snapped Barbara Bush's leg like a twig.
Something I've learned during the course of researching this episode.
Shout out to Jay McNab who provided the research dossier
on this one. Speaking of the research dossier, stick around
for the end of the episode for my note book dump,
where I give you my final thoughts and little information

(04:00):
nuggets I didn't get to in this conversation. I'm thrilled
to be joined as always by my co host, mister
Miles Graun. Oh man, that's say.

Speaker 2 (04:08):
It's just me, man, Its just me, nothing else, nothing
is me, nothing to see here.

Speaker 1 (04:12):
In our third seat. One of the greatest comedians, improvisers,
and podcasters in the business. Yeah. He co hosts one
of my favorite podcast, Action Boys on Patreon, which makes
him one of our foremost Schwarzenegger scholars. It's John Gabra.

Speaker 3 (04:30):
When I am on the Daily Zeitgeist is like, I
am calming all time. When you're saying my name, I
am coming. When I am doing my plugs, I am calming.

Speaker 1 (04:40):
Believe how much I'm in Heaven? Did you hear I'm
on Daily Zeitgeist? You of them coming?

Speaker 2 (04:47):
I went to high school a Luf Fergnoll junior whoa
And we would always say that to him.

Speaker 1 (04:52):
Yeah, was it? When when you were with him, were
you sometimes, you know, I'd imagine it wasn't too hard
for you to give him the wrong advices. Yeah, that's
one of my favorite under underrated quotes. Shout out to
my friend Sean who always talk about the part where
he's like, uh yeah, sometimes on workout day, I give

(05:13):
him advice and it's not too wrong to give him
the wrong and he says it's so like he's so
fucking clever, but he's saying advices like mine. I do
just want to acknowledge up up top because with all
these icons, they are like such a part of our brains.
They're burned in there. We kind of just take it

(05:33):
for granted that they've always been there, But just with Arnold,
I want to acknowl it. Like he entered a late
seventies movie landscape that was coming off of like the
auteur movement and was ruled by actors like Robert De Niro,
Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman who are like these normal sized,

(05:54):
two tiny men who were method actors and like disappear
into their roles. And he he came along and just
like does the complete opposite, his roles disappear into him.
He's the only actor I can remember who used the
same catchphrase in multiple movies. That's actually something Gabrius I
wanted to ask, like, is was did any of the

(06:15):
other action heroes like keep bringing back like he said,
I'll be back in so many different and then he gets.

Speaker 3 (06:22):
To a point Arnold understands where his bread is buttered.
Like he'll just go on late night talk shows and
say like I'll be back, and like you're terminated. He'll say,
like what he knows what to do. He's not precious
about what he says.

Speaker 4 (06:36):
And you got to.

Speaker 3 (06:37):
Imagine if you're like the writer or director of these
other movies and he's like taking your iconic line, You're like,
I guess it belongs to Arnold and he can just
say whatever the fuck he wants.

Speaker 1 (06:46):
Yeah, the brand was strong with him. I also think
it has to do with who. Like obviously it's who
he was. He's like this outsized, charismatic cartoon of masculinity,
but also like America was at the time. One of
my favorite details of his movies that you guys underline
a lot of Action boys is that he always made

(07:09):
the most sense in the mall, which was like the
most American location of the era, but like he fights
in malls in like raw deal Commando a terminator to
jingle all the way is like NonStop. That Kindergarten cop
opens in them all, true eyes has a horse chase
through them all.

Speaker 4 (07:27):
It's just like a venture hotel.

Speaker 1 (07:29):
Yes, you know, he is such a weird, unique figure.
But also like as I was researching this, I kept
being reminded of the Lebowski quote like sometimes there's a man,
you know, who's just the man for his time, And
like he really was.

Speaker 3 (07:44):
He was so foreign and then became like landed in America.
He was so fearn in the way he looked and
the way he sounded, and even like his hobbies and perspective,
and then he fucking got America on board with him.

Speaker 4 (08:01):
Yeah, like you know, like he.

Speaker 3 (08:04):
There's no fucking way you would still have an accent
in year fifty in America, And you're like, if you
actually tried, you wouldn't need it, but no, he kept it.
We adapted for Arnold. We changed movies so that Arnold
had a place in them. We were like, yeah, Arnold
can't play Serpaco, but he could fucking play Conan, you

(08:24):
know what I mean, Like he he changed culture to
make like to set it up, or we changed culture
because we were like we love this fucking save us
Ross Ubermensch.

Speaker 1 (08:35):
You know, yeah, I do. So there are definitely some
like fascist vibes that people people have pointed out throughout
his career, and it's coming along at a time in
America where like Jimmy Carter had made the like American
Malaise speech and everyone's like, fuck that that's boring, and

(08:55):
then Ronald Reagan was the answer to that. So his
care really kind of starts to make sense in that context.
But just on the subject of fascism, something I hadn't
realized is that his dad was not was a Nazi
soldier during World War Two, was like part of the

(09:16):
invasion of Leningrad, which he made it out. Yeah, And
for for Miles's first time playing the role of Arnold,
I just I put a quote in the in the
chat that I just want to have you read. This
is Arnold describing his father's status as a Nazi soldier.

Speaker 2 (09:39):
When my father arrived in Leningrad, he was all pumped
up on the lives of his government.

Speaker 1 (09:46):
He was being a nazis being pumped up. He still
gets to jam his brand in there. He's talking about
the dark history in which I come from. I will say, like,
you know me, I'm gonna always apologize for Nazis. That's
the other reason we wanted to have you on here.

Speaker 3 (10:07):
Other perspectives, but I really like Arnold talks about it.
He says like and he was he was wrong, and
it was awful and like all the ship and like
it is that crazy thing where you're like, what can
we hold the sins of the father to the child?
Like and it's like he got the fuck out of there,
and he you know, and he.

Speaker 4 (10:29):
Talks about it.

Speaker 3 (10:29):
He brings it up, and he talks about in his
book and in like recent posts during the as the
as the world is falling apart, he's talked about like
what the people were like before and after joining up
with the movement, and they're like people are fucked up
from having been part of it, you know what I mean.
It's right, He's like, guys, everyone out here who's like, yes,

(10:52):
let's fucking you know, kick Somalians out of Minnesota.

Speaker 4 (10:55):
It's gonna be bad for you eventually.

Speaker 3 (10:58):
Like this is like this this does bode well for anybody's.

Speaker 2 (11:02):
There Yeah, it's not like saying I used to be
the construction worker in the village people, right, I mean sure,
thanks to stick around psychologically a little bit more so.

Speaker 1 (11:14):
What one thing like, yes, he has spoken on that
there were a lot of allegations of Nazism throughout his career.
Dino di Larentis didn't want to hire him for Conan,
telling director John Millius, I don't like Schwartzenegger. He's a Nazi,
and then US News of the World tabloid once claimed
he was secretly pro Nazi. The writer of that article

(11:34):
then admitted the source was Sylvester Stallone, which we're going
to get into how heated and like childish that rivalry.
He was the one. The one thing is that he
did say in an old interview that he admired Hitler,

(11:55):
But then he did the thing that all people who
say that did. He said, I didn't admire him for
what he did with it. I admired his public speaking,
which these Republican guys like I can't help.

Speaker 3 (12:07):
But in my like, I look back and I see
raised like ten or twelve good public speakers.

Speaker 4 (12:13):
But before I have to get to like exactly.

Speaker 3 (12:17):
The architect of the Holocaust I could probably find a
couple of people before that that before I.

Speaker 1 (12:22):
Don't think I see a raving lunatic and they're always like,
I mean, you can't deny the guys get fucking star.
I don't. I don't think.

Speaker 3 (12:30):
So you react to the fucking gills with the absolute
worst POV and people are like, you know, he's like,
but you know, but you gotta.

Speaker 1 (12:38):
Admit he was good.

Speaker 2 (12:40):
I'm like, I think I would name miss teen South
Carolina from two thousand and seven as a better public
speaker before I said Hitler.

Speaker 4 (12:47):
Fucking Johnny Carson.

Speaker 3 (12:51):
It's gotta be a less harmful guy to look to
for public speaking.

Speaker 1 (12:57):
Although there is uh like these really crazy behind the
scene photos of Hitler, like hitting his poses, hitting his angles,
and like he was a studied like poser essentially like
and so maybe that's that's what Arnold saw in him
at that early age. I will just say.

Speaker 3 (13:18):
Arnold also an elite level poser, like he literally made
his he was a champion poser.

Speaker 1 (13:23):
Yeah, like it, we're about to get into that, but
I will just say in terms of like the fascist iconography,
like he is like a marble statue come to life,
and like he Like we've talked before about how like
one of the esthetic like details of fascism is like
admiring the human form with like the sex removed, like

(13:44):
in Starship Troopers, and like, I do feel like that's
kind of like they had to edit out like sex
scenes and stuff like that from a lot of his
movies because like he just doesn't that's not what people
were there for.

Speaker 3 (13:56):
I guess, yeah, well, it is that weird like bodybuilder
thing where it's like it's it's four guys in a way,
you know what I mean, more than it is. But
I always found it really funny in all his movies
when women are like, oh my god, he's so sexy,
but he looks like an insane freak, Like he's got
an insane body and if that's.

Speaker 1 (14:16):
The thing you like.

Speaker 3 (14:17):
But when women are like, oh dear god, it's like, yeah,
he has d cups that are rock hard.

Speaker 4 (14:23):
How you're into that his cycle? But it is weird because.

Speaker 3 (14:27):
Yeah, there is like that second in like that fascist
like it's like he's powerful, his output is tremendous and
no no connotations of sex, but Arnold himself legendary horny freak.

Speaker 1 (14:39):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. My pet Yes video is the most
any human has ever inhabited the role of Lenny from
of mice and men, Like it's just like Jesus, get
that guy, get all of those people out of there.
But in terms of like the fascist element of his

(15:02):
iconography and like how he appeared two people at the time,
the other main source besides Action Boys that I dug
into for this was the book The Last Action Heroes,
And they pointed out that the opening to Commando with
him like chopping down trees and carrying an entire tree
trunk on his shoulders, like that whole sequence was consciously

(15:23):
pulling images from Lenny Reefenstahl's like Nazi propaganda films. They
were just like, you know, what would work really well
with this guy? I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah, And I
don't think that was his idea. They were just like
that that makes sense. That's and that is what America,
like America has Inside America, it's much less appreciated, like

(15:48):
how much right wing American culture has in common with
a lot of like, you know, fascist imagery and ideology.

Speaker 3 (15:57):
Yeah, and for some reason, that's I know where that
I'll tell you one of my theories is somehow we
talked about this lot on Action Boys. I was raised
pretty much exclusively on movies that are spout like extra
judicial killings. The government I got. Powerful people are the
answer to everything. Send one guy into this Yeah, one

(16:18):
cop is the best job you can do. Internal affairs
or pieces of shit. Send one guy with a gun
into a country full of minorities and fix it, you know, Like, Yeah,
to be a fifteen year old kid with an opinion
on internal affairs just means like I'm watching the wrong
fucking movies. Yeah, to escape with a perspective that you know,
cares about my fellow man. But I'm assuming all these

(16:38):
people in power all grew up on the same bullshit
as me, but didn't find it as entertainment and found
it as like inspo and where like, actually, we do
need a John Matrix to go to Valverde and clean
it up with a fucking bazuoka with a quad Bozuka.

Speaker 1 (16:55):
So the way he initially appeared on the world stage
was by nineteen bodybuilding competitions including Mister Europe, Mister Universe,
and then Mister Olympia. Mister Olympia being essentially the Jeopardy
Tournament of Champions for mister Universe winners. But he did
and like openly admits that he built his body with
the aid of steroids. He says, I have no regrets
about it because at the time it was something new

(17:17):
that came on the market.

Speaker 4 (17:19):
He wasn't the only guy at these bodybuilding shows.

Speaker 1 (17:22):
Yeah, exactly. It was legal, Like everybody was doing it openly.
It was like cocaine, you know, in the seventies. Everyone
was like, this is kind of like coffee. This is
like our new coffee. We should bring this on to
more movie sets. But this one also makes me go
to the bathroom a lot too. Same deal. Yeah, he

(17:42):
did veto. Like when he was governor there there were
people who were not thrilled that he was pretty lax
on the performance enhancing stuff and called the supplements safe.
And I have to like, I don't know. So I
once heard from someone that like they worked with him
in the nineties and swore like at the time he

(18:04):
was like bright yellow and on dialysis like when he
was with them, and like that they were just like, yeah,
that's how you got through the like intense steroid cycles.
There's no known reporting on that. And the guy also
later told me that he thought his girlfriend at the
time may have slept with Arnold behind his back, so he.

Speaker 4 (18:24):
Might be motivated to shit.

Speaker 1 (18:26):
Yeah, but he has had like multiple open heart surgeries,
which he always goes out of his way to be
like it's a congenital condition.

Speaker 3 (18:33):
But I don't know that steroids are not, and yes
he has done them. But if you remove steroids from it,
carrying around that much extra mass, even if it is
pure muscle, is difficult on the human body, like maintaining
that caloric input that he's putting a lot of miles
on his body.

Speaker 2 (18:53):
I mean, I knew, like big guys don't live that long,
but when I saw Dave Baptista be like, dude, I
have to stop and like really be like I'm done,
and like watching him shrink and being like, no, it's
so I can live, Like being fucking jacked is it's
a fucking very very short timeline you have living with
that forever.

Speaker 1 (19:13):
I mean, it is interesting, just like talking about the
thing that like earlier were saying that like he comes
along with this ubermensch physicality at a time that America
is like maybe fascism is kind of what we do
in the eighties, And then like what once we got
back to that point, like in the past eight to
ten years, all of a sudden, the actors started looking

(19:34):
like John Cena and The Rock and Dave Bautista again.

Speaker 4 (19:37):
So yeah everyone, sorry, oh yeah.

Speaker 3 (19:39):
I could go off for hours about this, but like,
why why why does fucking Superman even have to be jacked?
He's an alien like like like there's like Hulk has
super strength, he could have a belly, like there's like
thor some of the people, like their superpowers aren't even
involved like with physicality.

Speaker 1 (19:58):
And they're still shredded. It's like, well, maybe what it
doesn't need to be diced? Yeah, right. Maybe the best
example of that, which we'll get to in a in
a moment, is the Terminator who went in the script
was supposed to be a normal sized, normal shaped person. Yeah,
it's like, yeah, to your point, Like the modern equivalent

(20:19):
is that movie The Gray Man that nobody saw but
it costs like two hundred and fifty million dollars, so
they had to pretend like everyone saw it. But it's like,
these are guys who just the the literal title is
you have these spies who are gray men who the
whole point is like they blend in wherever they go,
and it's played by like Chris Evans and Ryan Gosling

(20:41):
and their booty like shredded, just shredded, beautiful people who
like would stop traffic.

Speaker 3 (20:46):
And when you see pictures of real fucking the crazy
spies and assassins like that are Cia and Jaysock like
elite level guys.

Speaker 4 (20:54):
They all look like chemists.

Speaker 3 (20:56):
Yeah, they're all like five eight one sixty five glasses
and like weird teeth and you're like, what the fuck
is this guy?

Speaker 4 (21:03):
He's like six hundred and fifty confirmed kills.

Speaker 1 (21:06):
Yeah, jesus, I'm a delta operator like an airline. No
one other quick Arnold anecdote and if you guys have
any but somebody I know was golfing with him a
couple of years ago, and as they were teeing off,
he kept telling the guy he looked like two tense

(21:26):
and too uptight. And then after the guy hit the shot,
he Arnold got up to the tea and was like,
when was the last time you had a blowjob? And
the guy was like, I don't know, like answered, and
Arnold teed off and said that's fantastic, and then as
he like crushed his drive with a big stogy in
his mouth and like watched his ball he said, how

(21:47):
did it taste?

Speaker 4 (21:49):
Saw awesome?

Speaker 1 (21:50):
Got his ass. I do think the posing like you
were saying, the hitting the angles like that is something
that he studied all along, and I think that definitely
like played into his being a movie Yeah. Yeah, like
knowing how to appear on film with something that like

(22:11):
he was always good at.

Speaker 4 (22:13):
Like in Conan.

Speaker 3 (22:14):
You see it a lot because it's like it's a
it's like pre verbal for him, and the movie is
like written to that strength. But then he also trained
with a sword master for that movie too, And because
he's an athlete and like a guy who's got like
that that kind of folk, that kind of focus that
requires eating white rice, chicken and broccoli and steroids exclusively.

(22:35):
He he fucking looks awesome when he's swinging the sword,
when he's carrying the wheel of pain, he fucking and
it's like he knows. I refer to this once on
the blank Check podcast. But my pet theory is we've
heard of the male gaze, and you know people talk
about the female gaze. There's something about Arnold that is
the child gaze, Like you look at him, and you're
like in awe, and you're like a little kid, and

(22:56):
you're like, that's what grown ups are, you know, And
then all these action movies will copy it to all
be these poses where you're looking up at these imposing figures.

Speaker 1 (23:06):
Yeah, yeah, I think that's exactly right. Like I have, yeah,
I have written in here somewhere that he looks like
he was designed by a seven year old to be like,
this is what an action hero should look like.

Speaker 3 (23:18):
You know, this is what I want to look like
when I grow up, Like when you used to draw,
like I would remember being a kid drawing myself as
like a grown up, and like I would always have
like a headband and.

Speaker 4 (23:26):
A machine guns.

Speaker 5 (23:28):
I was like, you.

Speaker 3 (23:30):
Grow up, I'm gonna definitely grow up and be a
Special Forces probably.

Speaker 2 (23:34):
Yeah, I'm gonna drive a bulletproof Chevy Suburban.

Speaker 1 (23:37):
So he broke into the world of film with Hercules
and New York, where he had to be totally dubbed
by another actor for obvious reasons. Uh, they changed his
name to Arnold Strong, But the only reason he got
that role in the first place was Joe Weeder, the
co founder of the International Federation of Bodybuilders told the
producers that Schwartzenegger had been a Shakespearean actor in Vienna,

(24:01):
and they're like all right, like sure, and then he
showed up and again it's like that, you know, you
need to tell that lie to get him in the door.
But then he shows up and everyone's like this guy
actually like really fucking works on film.

Speaker 4 (24:15):
Is not great.

Speaker 3 (24:16):
His dub is weird, but he you're watching him and
you're like, this dude's a fucking star. There's not a
time where you don't say that. Early on in his career,
it's like it's like undeniable. His like you can't take
your eyes off him. And he is really charismatic in
sort of like the annoying jockway, but like he's got it, like.

Speaker 1 (24:33):
Face taste, you know, he got figured out. Yeah. He
also appears in like I didn't realize that I was
watching The longa Robert Altmans The Long Goodbye. He shows
how he's like a Jack Henchman and that he's in
a movie called Stay Hungry that was like an Oscar
buzzy movie that earned him a Golden Globe for Best

(24:55):
Acting Debut, even though it wasn't really his debut, but
it was like the first time that awards people noticed
it or he spoke maybe yeah, the first time he
had actually spoken on film. He also at this time
worked with a very serious acting coach who in the
book The Last Action Heroes talked about how he was
like eventually very impressed with his work. He did like

(25:16):
all the Stanislavskian ship, like this is the second invocation
of the Stanislavsky method with Arkle.

Speaker 4 (25:23):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (25:24):
No, with Miss Piggy. Actually, like how uh frank Oz
came up with her backstory was like just writing freehand
art backstory dark, super dark backstory from Miss Piggy. I
believe it.

Speaker 3 (25:38):
I gotta imagine based on how how powerful she's become.
She came from a lot, She came from a heart.

Speaker 2 (25:43):
Her mom had so many pigs. What was it like
her mom like her mother too.

Speaker 1 (25:48):
Many pigs that she never developed her mind was one
of the things. And then she had so many pigs.
She'd never developed her mind, and her dad was like
fucking around and then like the only way for her
to like survive was like winning beauty tests and she
was like, I'll never go back there. I think there
was like a mass killing two in there. But I
don't remember, but uh, he said the guy the acting

(26:11):
coach specifically, I called out two impressive moments in the
workshop that I thought were funny. One is where he
inhabits the body of a child opening a present on
Christmas morning, and she said he made the other people
in the acting class cry, which just trying to picture
Arnold like doing that.

Speaker 3 (26:29):
This is one percent alive, but it's that's ot. I'm
picturing it now and trying so I might tear up laughing.

Speaker 2 (26:36):
I know, I'm even trying to imagine what would that
performance look like where I'm so touched, like even without
even it being.

Speaker 1 (26:44):
Arnold with an adult doing this. Yeah, like one guy
who's just been like presumably like hitting on every woman
stopping this.

Speaker 3 (26:52):
Guy suddenly get spaghetti string racer back tank top on
with like his lepels and traps showing, and he's got
like cut off gold gyms, super shorts on, barefoot, just
going like I don't terrible man.

Speaker 1 (27:10):
Gets it something he would do in like Twins and
like some of those movies where he like plays an
innocent you know, just kind of like uh, yeah, I
don't know, like new to the world. And then the
other that he said was like really impressive was where
he like did this non linguistic growl and utterance, like
you invoke an animalistic, non linguistic growl and utterance and screams,

(27:32):
which sounds like it's like the when I think of Arnold,
I just think of you know, like all those like
noises that.

Speaker 3 (27:45):
Yeah, and that's so funny that he crushed that part
of the acting. Damn, this guy can and he's really
the best for them in the max bench press portion of.

Speaker 1 (27:58):
Everybody. But he does also like kind of become a
Christmas icon. And it's interesting to note that like the
only movie he ever directed, he directed an episode of
The Tales from the Crypt and then also a made
for TV like Hallmark Christmas remake of Christmas in Connecticut,

(28:18):
So he's there's something with Christmas there that will probably
never get to explore.

Speaker 3 (28:23):
But I feel like Germany, Europe, Poland, Eastern Europe, Vienna,
like that's Austria. It's very like Chris Christmas. Yeah, it's
like that.

Speaker 2 (28:33):
Everyone says, like the Christmas markets in Austria specifically are
like everyone models like whenever you see like a Christmas market,
they're all referencing like Austrian German Christmas markets.

Speaker 3 (28:44):
And some of your most precious white female friends will
tell you that I just want to go to Vienna
for Christmas, like really, like I don't know anything about it.
I want to go to Mexico. It's it's well because
my cousin just married someone who's from Austria and he'd been.
He's like, dude, Austria's fucking sick. And everyone I know
who's been there's like, do Vien sick?

Speaker 4 (29:03):
Yeah? Echotomy.

Speaker 3 (29:05):
Yeah, I think it's because how bad shout out Twins
real quick. That was the I heard in an interview
on Nerdiced where he was back in the day. That's
the most amount of money he's ever made on a movie.

Speaker 1 (29:19):
Yeah, that like set him up financially for the syndication kids.

Speaker 3 (29:23):
No, because yeah, they didn't want to make it because
like Arnold can't carry a comedy. So Arnold, Danny DeVito
and I think it's rightman. They all say. They all
worked for scale if with huge amount of points, and
then the movie was an absolute unknown, massive hit and
they all made insane money on it, which is makes

(29:45):
me so happy. Also, Arnold was already doing very well
for himself. Because when he arrived in America, him and
Franco Colombo, another bodybuilder, they were doing masonry work and
doing all this like labor, but he invested his bodybuilding
winning in like an apartment complex first, like somewhere on
the west side of La so American.

Speaker 4 (30:06):
He was so American.

Speaker 3 (30:07):
Someone told like an American businessman, maybe someone in his
team or something like that, said this is what you
got to do. And then he like owned a bunch
of properties for a while, like buying that nineteen seventies La.
You know, if you held on to it till now,
you're a fucking like Robert Baron.

Speaker 4 (30:22):
That's so fun.

Speaker 1 (30:23):
That makes sense, you know that.

Speaker 2 (30:24):
Like there's a clip from a couple of years ago
where he tried to make a joke about making a
million dollars that fell so flat, like on a radio show.
And now it makes sense to me because he was
he was making some landlord ass money like to start off.
I don't know if you've seen this clip, but.

Speaker 1 (30:40):
He's like, easiest way to make money.

Speaker 2 (30:44):
The first and most important thing is you know, everyone
tells you that the first million is the hardest to make,
so started with the second million, right.

Speaker 1 (30:53):
Uh, huh wow, Hello, Oh my god, wake up, wake up.
A breakfast show here. You need to get pumped up.
Any kind of joke falls flumped up off the lines
of your government.

Speaker 2 (31:10):
Wow, okay, anyway that makes that's because that's such rich
guy humor too.

Speaker 4 (31:14):
When you're like, yeah, so I was just like, I'm
not an awful joke.

Speaker 3 (31:17):
I would say, if you're hosting Arnold on your show,
you gotta laugh at his jokes.

Speaker 4 (31:22):
I think a job. I bet you Arnold never does
that show again.

Speaker 2 (31:26):
I think they probably just couldn't connect. Like his delivery,
they're like, oh joke, yes, thank you.

Speaker 1 (31:33):
Smiles didn't pause that in the middle, that that silence
was him just looking at waiting.

Speaker 3 (31:37):
For them wow, And you're like, oh, it must have
video must be over.

Speaker 4 (31:42):
Then he goes hello, and you're like, oh my.

Speaker 1 (31:44):
God, well this is a breakfast show.

Speaker 4 (31:45):
You got just wake up.

Speaker 1 (32:00):
But just overall, like the thing about him investing the
money smartly, like according to everyone, he is a sponge
who's like constantly focused on learning, like McTiernan in Predator,
like cast Carl Weathers, because he's like, that's the best
action movie actor that I've seen. And he's like I'm
going to put him in Arnold's way, and Arnold will

(32:22):
just like drink up and learn from him. And so
he is essential like the he is a terminator. He's
just this like super processing. Yeah, Q asshole, Dylan, you
son of a bitch.

Speaker 3 (32:36):
You got to put your pencils down there in the CIA,
and thank you for teaching me how to act.

Speaker 1 (32:41):
All of that, all all his early work though from
Hercules in New York, and his background work was overshadowed
by the massive success of a weightlifting documentary called Pumping
Iron Goddamn, which is it's easy to see why those
movies weren't quite as successful, because at no point in

(33:02):
those movies does he get to say that weightlifting is
like coming, and then Myles.

Speaker 2 (33:07):
Would like to read, oh wow, it's as satisfying to
me as coming is, you know, as having sex with
a woman.

Speaker 1 (33:16):
Then coming, So all up the first sentence by clarifying
what's not.

Speaker 3 (33:22):
I refuse to say it's jerking off. Yeah, it's gay
to jerk off with a.

Speaker 2 (33:27):
Human woman, and you coming, And so can you believe
how much I'm in heaven? I am like getting the
feeling of coming in the gym I'm getting the feeling
of coming at home. I'm getting the feeling of coming
backstage when I pump up. When I pose it from
the five thousand people, I get the same feeling.

Speaker 1 (33:44):
So I'm coming day and night.

Speaker 2 (33:46):
I mean, it's it's terrific, right, So you know, I'm
in heaven so awesome.

Speaker 3 (33:52):
And he will later retract that and say, like, I
was joking, I knew I and I will. I think
he may he actually believes this, or believed it at
the time, but he also does know how to get
sound bites and how to fucking Yeah. When you watch
Pumping Iron, it's a Rosetta stone to like why anyone
like why he's you just see he's so and he

(34:15):
didn't play a villain a lot in his career, but
he is fucking nearly evil in Pumping Iron.

Speaker 4 (34:23):
Like he's like mustache swirling bad.

Speaker 1 (34:25):
Guy in a way, like manipulating the people around him
who are like his best friend, like lifelong best friends
who are going to continue working and like being his
friend for the rest of his career. And he's like, yeah,
I kind of fucked with his head, yeah, into being
worse than me.

Speaker 3 (34:40):
Right, there's the famous if it bleeds. They're making of Predator.
It's like an hour long feature at you can find
it on YouTube. He had some crazy ongoing prank or
competition with Jesse the body Ventora who could have bigger biceps,
and he had the wardrobe department keep taking in the
biceps on the sleeves on Ventor shirt.

Speaker 4 (35:00):
So he thought he was getting pumped up, but he wasn't.

Speaker 6 (35:03):
Oh they make him complacent basically, yes, And then they
were doing they were doing a thing where they were
competing so much who could work out more and earlier
that eventually like they were like secretly opening the gym
that they had shipped to South America to film, like
or in Mexico wherever they I forget where they film,
and they're like fucking like going in at three thirty
in the morning, three in the morning, two thirty, like

(35:24):
racing to see who when you go to the gym,
who's already there working out.

Speaker 4 (35:28):
It's like, that's that's so fucking funny.

Speaker 3 (35:31):
That's like childish behavior over like, and these are all
people who are like making millions.

Speaker 1 (35:35):
It's so awesome, right, that's so funny. Yeah, that set
and I mean that movie is both like when I
first saw it, this did not hit me, but it
is like a satire of masculinity and like they're you know,
shooting at this alien and like completely you know, unloading
clips into the jungle and like just impotently you know.

Speaker 3 (35:56):
Yeah, and they're all like they're all like dry shaving
their uh, taking their shirts off, knives they're u limped
dickt f slurs before and then like you know, like
everything everything about that movie and also arguably like sort
of anti American interventionism too.

Speaker 4 (36:16):
Right, It's like when we.

Speaker 3 (36:17):
Arrived there, they end up like they're like hunting with
an alien, but they the CIA does get them to
like blow up a fucking full base full of locals.
Like there's no explanation as to like what the local
dynamics are or whatever, and it's like it's such a
it's a more there's so much more going on in
that movie than you think. And then the idea that
like this is the second team that they send in

(36:39):
and the first team just got fucking murked and none
of them know about that. It's like the most fucking
disposable American soldier shit ever.

Speaker 2 (36:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (36:46):
Yeah, it is almost like they're they're making a commentary
that going in and intervening in a jungle could go
badly for America. Yeah, I don't know where they're I
don't know where they were pulling that from. So his
first truly iconic role is Cone and like he's the
titular role in Conan movies and Watch It came about

(37:06):
thanks to pumping Iron. The director John Millius says that
Arnold said, treat me like a trained dog, which again
going back to it, he's just like, I don't give
a pot, Just tell me anything and I'll do it.
He would like get cut and like there would be
like he'd be bleeding and he'd be like does it
look good? How am I posing? And then they would

(37:27):
just like keep rolling with it, moving along with the
like fascist stuff. It's about an alpha male who battles hippies. Essentially,
the script was by Oliver Stone, but then it was
like whittled way down and directed by Millius, who calls
himself a zen fascist zen fascist, and Arnold said he's

(37:50):
so far to the right that he wasn't even a
Republican AKA ahead of his time, I guess. So this
becomes like one of his first roles. That's so iconic
that people just start calling him that. Like when when
you read about when Cameron's trying to cast him in Terminator,
people are like, you're gonna cast Conan in Terminator, and

(38:10):
then like after Terminator people are like, you can't put
Terminator in the you know. But like he's he's choosing
his roles pretty wisely.

Speaker 3 (38:20):
If you zoom out, Yeah, if you zoom out and
see that this guy who is this physical specimen but
is not quite there english wise or acting wise, yeah,
you cast him as a nearly silent tribal warrior who
fucking kills a bunch of people with swords. And then
you're like, okay, what else can he do? He's like,
how about a robot?

Speaker 1 (38:39):
Robot?

Speaker 4 (38:42):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (38:42):
Fuck, it's great, Like just the idea of like like
what what a way to like fucking make your way
into the huge movies that were huge because of him too?
And but he gets to just They're like okay, and
this like that'd be like all right in this you're
playing a fat New York podcaster gabers.

Speaker 1 (38:58):
This is your first job. I hope we can pull
it off. You're like, fuck, yeah, you're from Long Island.
I think I can do which exit off the twenty
five South Perfect? All right, I love it. It's actually
two away for mine, so we're gonna need to rewrite.
But so Cameron didn't originally have Arnold in mine for

(39:19):
the Terminator, as we were saying, he wanted Lance Henrickson
for the role who played Bishop, which is like, it's
such a profoundly different movie, but like it makes more
sense on paper, because yeah, why would the robot need
to be shredded and have an Austrian accent if.

Speaker 4 (39:34):
It be enormous and like, yeah, he would not blend
at all.

Speaker 3 (39:38):
He can and it makes no sense. Yeah, but it
fucking hurts.

Speaker 7 (39:42):
I know.

Speaker 1 (39:43):
I like it. That version probably works because James Cameron
like knows what he's doing, but there's no arguing that
it would have worked as well as it does with Arnold.

Speaker 3 (39:51):
No, and he got his Lance Hendrickson type with the
T one thousand.

Speaker 1 (39:55):
Uh that guy Robert Patrick. Robert Patrick and Lance Erickson
are constantly being confused in my head. So it's like
it's good casting, right, like think but also just like
going back to the initial point, like think about if
a brand that it is playing, Like think about if
the T one thousand was yoked again.

Speaker 4 (40:13):
Yeah, now they're like bodybuilding.

Speaker 2 (40:16):
Ripped because that juxtaposition made the T one thousand more terrifying.

Speaker 1 (40:20):
Yeah, you know what I mean. I love in interviews
it's going around again.

Speaker 3 (40:24):
When Cameron said the reason he made a T one
thousand a cop was because they kill indiscriminately, don't give
a fuck about humans, and like all this stuff, and
he's like, what better disguise for a person to be
able to do whatever they want to whoever they want
and be awful.

Speaker 1 (40:38):
You know, like hell yeah, yeah, yeah, so that's what
Like he in Terminator won. He was like, he it's
kind of good that he's foreign seeming, because everybody's afraid
of Russia, and Russia is like always the one that
starts the nuclear war in both movies, they're just like
fucking Russia. But he didn't want to even meet with Schwarzenegger.

(40:59):
They made him. He was like, I'm gonna like pick
a fight with him, I guess during lunch and before
he left, he told his friend, if it doesn't go well,
you can have the chair and the stereo, which I
think is just a funny window into how big a
deal stereos were for that generation of course.

Speaker 3 (41:15):
Yeah, it's like the highest, the most expensive thing in
anyone's house.

Speaker 1 (41:18):
Yeah, your Macintosh amplifier. Yeah. But Linda Hamilton was like,
I'm a trained Juilliard actor and this guy is Conan
was like this, this is a bad idea, Like this
will just be a blip on my career. And then
she went and they weren't on camera a lot together,
and so she went and like watched one of the

(41:40):
scenes where Arnold was like doing his thing in a
parking garage and she was just like, oh shit, Like
he just like he knows how to like his physicality
and like how he moves in that movie. She was like,
this is actually gonna work really well.

Speaker 3 (41:55):
Yeah, and like his like lack of mobility, he moves
very well in Conan, like he's he's wheel you know,
he's leaping around wheel and stuff. But he's a little
stiff because he's a giant. He's the Austrian oak, oak
chest and Terminator. It totally benefits him quick decide about Terminator.
Something we learned figured out on Action Boys, or noticed

(42:16):
on Action Boys is that the entire premise of the
Terminator movies require Linda Hamilton to let a time traveling
dirt bag raw dogger, Like she has to.

Speaker 1 (42:27):
Let Michael Bean fuck her. Wrong, Kyle reason has to
finish in her in order for the Terminator movies to happen.
And that's such crazy. Thank God.

Speaker 3 (42:36):
This guy, who I think is a homeless lunatic, I'm
gonna let him fucking finish it for.

Speaker 1 (42:42):
The world ends.

Speaker 4 (42:43):
Yeah, a cream pie saves the world.

Speaker 2 (42:46):
Sarah, This guy Kyle kind of stinks. No, he's from
the future and I gotta bang him to save the world.

Speaker 1 (42:51):
He said, Does she know that the part where they
have like is she on board at that point?

Speaker 4 (42:57):
No, I don't.

Speaker 3 (42:58):
She's on board with like maybe the reality of it,
but she doesn't know. Like it's like they're about to
make John Connor, which is such a funny specific because
John Connor sent him back. Did John Connor say like, Hey,
this is my mom. You have to be my dad,
Like you have to go fuck my mom.

Speaker 1 (43:15):
Yeah. Right, it's the opposite of back to the future.
You have to go back and fuck my mom. I
mean it's it's a romantic scene.

Speaker 7 (43:23):
They're making pipe bombs and he's like, I fell in
love with you the second I saw that shitty photo
of you from our Son from the Future and then
they have sex that fucking wild.

Speaker 1 (43:36):
But yeah, Cameron has said that for Terminator to you know, obviously,
Arnold's character suddenly becomes the hero, but he was initially
meeting with Cameron to play the Michael Bean role, which
does make more sense because like, if it's a human,
they have to be strong to set back. Yeah, you
send back a human that looks like Arnold to fight

(43:57):
a Terminator that looks like Michael Bean. But I think
Arnold just inherently understood like this is what I would
be good at, and then at a deep animalistic level,
my name will be the name of the movie and
I'll get to kill a lot of people, which we're
about to get into was was important to him. I

(44:17):
feel like there's like some part of his brain that
is like the same part of the like people's brains
that were like when you take a picture of someone,
you capture their soul, like wing photo photography. Like he
really like placed a lot of weight on like how
many people he got to kill in movies, and you know,
can't beat that with regards to the Terminator. But yeah,
Cameron has come out and said, like the reason a

(44:40):
cop is the bad guy in T two is cops
think all non cops are less than they are stupid,
weak and evil. They dehumanize the people they are sworn
to protect and desensitize themselves in order to do that job,
which fucking rules. Okay, So Schwarzenegger came away from reading
the script for Terminator Too with like a worried look
on his face, and Cameron's like, whoa what this is?

(45:02):
This is fucking perfect, And he was like, I just
like don't get to kill anyone in the script that
was he was like bummed that he didn't get to
kill anyone. Oh, man, Like this is this was a
big deal to him because I like it was one
of the pieces, like one of the pieces of data
that was like kept track of in his rivalry with Stallone.

(45:24):
Back at Cracks, we like once made a video counting
all the kills in Commando and that was by design.
You know the scene where he's just like going into
the uh Valverde yeah and just like yeah, yeah. But
then like there were there are parts where it's just
like five seconds of just like him shooting like waves
and waves of like indiscriminate bad guys. They do that.

Speaker 3 (45:45):
They do the ultimate cut, the ultimate like eighties action
movie cut where you see Arnold spray in M sixty
like fifty times. Then it cuts to fifty guys just
leaping out of different cover like, oh, we all got
hit in that one.

Speaker 1 (45:56):
It's awesome. They added that scene because I think it's
one one or the other. He had just seen Rambo two,
and I think that's what it was. He had seen
Rambo two and was like he got like a lot
of he killed a lot of people in that movie,
and so they like added scene. They were literally taking
extras who had just been shot and like spirit guming
a mustache onto their face, like differentiate them back from

(46:19):
there and then just being like get back out there
to be killed again. Oh, that's so awesome, man, for
all the hating.

Speaker 2 (46:25):
So stallone should have taken the role of terminator, because
wasn't he offered the role? Like, didn't he didn't Stallone
turn down the terminator role?

Speaker 1 (46:31):
Yeah, the Stallone episode is gonna be crazy like their
their rivalry. So let's let's get.

Speaker 4 (46:37):
Into the episode. Allow me to say I'll be back.

Speaker 1 (46:43):
Rights. Hey, it wasn't I got rights three. I assumed
that like The rivalry between the two of them was
like made up in my child mind, you know, because
they were like the two big, strong guys. But it
was not I want to I want to just tell

(47:04):
the stop where my mom will shoot. Yes, oh yeah, yes.
But this is a quote from Arnold Miles that just
appeared in the Yeah yeah, yeah, this is this is
from Arnold.

Speaker 2 (47:16):
Yes, we were movie rivals, but we took the competitiveness
to the extreme. We had to have the best body
to kill more people in our films, and we had
to have the biggest guns.

Speaker 1 (47:27):
Yeah. Wow, they were counting and like literal dick measuring guns. Truly,
they were just keeping tabs on how many people they killed,
and like Stallone was on lettermans. Then after a while
I started to like competition, this one upsmanship. He'd get
a bigger gun, I'd shoot more people, He'd shoot more people.
And so I think probably definitively and Gabers, I want

(47:51):
to get your official scholar's opinion on this, but I
feel like fourth Nager one right, like his movies did
better than Stallone's and it's all there's just the.

Speaker 4 (48:05):
Rocky one in Oscar, that's true.

Speaker 3 (48:07):
So there's like this one thing that that Schwarzenegger doesn't
have that Rocky had that Stallone had.

Speaker 1 (48:13):
Schwarzenegger probably doesn't give a shit about that, right.

Speaker 3 (48:15):
It doesn't matter because he was like governor, like you
know what I mean, Like he he won like a
million times over. Yeah, And I think history will be
kinder to Schwarzenegger than Stallone too. Stallone has maybe more
duds in his but Stallone has always been a little
bit more of an artist than Arnold too. Like Stallone
wants to be Robert de Niro, right, Arnold wants to

(48:37):
be Superman, not the actor, the aracter. But I think
you're I think I think the competition. I also think
we're talking about two guys who come across as really
dumb but are probably a little more savvy than they
for sure, And I think they understand k fabe and
a rivalry between two big guys will benefit.

Speaker 1 (49:01):
Both of them kind of, you know what I mean.
And so then they get to make the escape plan
and we all go and it's like it's like heat.

Speaker 4 (49:07):
It's like dumb heat, you know.

Speaker 1 (49:08):
Dumb heat fifteen years too late. I do like the
dreamcask in my mind, and I don't know if I
would want to change a perfect film, But it does
seem like if they had been able to get over
the rivalry and make sure it's an egger ivan drago
like that, it would have broken the world. Like that.

(49:28):
That movie already did incredibly well for a movie that
is like I think forty percent montage. Yeah, but you know,
like that that would have fucking destroyed people's brains.

Speaker 3 (49:41):
Yeah, arnold, Like and you see it with some of
the big actors now where their ego gets in their
way of like interesting choices, like where it's just like
I can't have Sly beat me up, and it's like,
but okay, cool.

Speaker 1 (49:53):
Yeah, literally everyone in the world would have seen it.
But yeah, and you would have gotten one more kill
than him in that movie.

Speaker 4 (50:00):
Yeah, kill your boy. Fuck yeah, Carl Weathers.

Speaker 1 (50:04):
That's right. It just wasn't properly pitched to him.

Speaker 2 (50:07):
Do you think there's any backstory to like, I feel
like the movie posters for Cobra and Terminator are very similar,
you know, like where Terminators like he's got like a
gun like this Cobra Stallone is also doing it with.

Speaker 3 (50:20):
Like a bigger gun, though he's not he doesn't have
a pistol. He has like a little.

Speaker 2 (50:24):
Exactly are you really going for the exact same composition
of a movie poster?

Speaker 1 (50:30):
And Cohn It's like no. It also has those weird
like techno vibe, like the aren't there like those music
video shoots in there that kind of look like.

Speaker 4 (50:39):
Up Nels is like shooting music videos with robots.

Speaker 1 (50:43):
Right. So I wanted to talk about Bridgitte Nielsen in
a second because she started out working with Arnold and
I feel like this is a good kind of summation
of who they were. So Arnold and Brigitte Nielsen co
starred in one of the Conan films, and like her
quote on it is like the set lights wouldn't be

(51:05):
out and we'd be off fucking each other. We like
we did every single thing to each other's body. He's
the like reads like a romance novel. Yeah, and then
Stallone goes on to marry her and like tightly control
her career and like she couldn't be in anything that
he wasn't involved with. And then when she was finally
in Beverly Hills Cop two, he called Eddie Murphy and

(51:28):
accused him of sleeping with her. Like it just seems
like he's like fueled by insecurity, and Arnold is just
this like bounding, confident puppy, Like, yeah, he's like a
giant Golden Retriever with his lipstick out. Yeah yeah, yeah,
Oh that's actually Arnold and Brigitte hit it off in
Red Sonya, which is not a Conan movie. Red Sonya

(51:51):
is red Sonya, and then Arnold plays exactly a character.

Speaker 4 (51:55):
Like Conan, but named like a name of thing different.

Speaker 3 (51:57):
Yeah, it's just like it's just like, yes, we can't
legally call him Knan, but he's a barbarian who fucks
a chick with his sword in this movie.

Speaker 1 (52:05):
Yes, And he also they he said that they shot
him from like three different angles in every shot that
he was on, so like they could just like stretch
the footage as much as possible because he was just like,
I don't really want to do this, and they're like, yeah, no,
you're just here for a couple of days, and then
they're like he's actually the star of the movie. But yeah.
So the one thing that Arnold always had the ability

(52:26):
to do, which is weird because he doesn't like seem
like that funny of a person necessarily, but he could
always do comedy and that drove Stallone crazy, and so
in nineteen ninety two he decided to fuck with Stallone
this is and tell him that the movie Stopper my
mom will shoot. That script was going around and he

(52:48):
said that he read the script. It was a piece
of shit. Let's be honest. I say to myself, I'm
not going to do this movie. Then they went to
Sly and Sly called me, have they ever talked to
you about doing this movie? And here, I'm gonna give
you the quote, Miles so you can read it.

Speaker 2 (53:05):
And I said, yes, I was thinking about doing it.
This is a really brilliant idea of the movie when
you hear that. Because he was in the competition, he said,
whatever it takes, I'll do the movie.

Speaker 1 (53:16):
And of course the movie went major into the toilet,
major into the major toilet. It's so awesome. That movie
is fucking bad and weird. You guys, you don't just
cover the good ones on action.

Speaker 3 (53:30):
No, Yeah, we haven't done Oscar yet, which is all
which is slies other attempt at comedy that fucking failed hard. Yeah,
Arnold just has a better sense of humor, even about himself,
which I think is like the thing that makes him better.
The Rock doesn't have that, like none of none of
our modern maybe Sena does, but none of our modern
people have that about themselves, like you know, like everyone's

(53:51):
too self serious or like worried that you know, like
that nineties toxic masculinity mentality of like, well, if I
make fun of myself then and everyone knows I'm a bitch, okay.

Speaker 1 (54:04):
Then what then I might become gay or something.

Speaker 3 (54:06):
Yeah, someone will think I'm day If Kevin Hart mocks
me in a movie, No, I should Hart in half.

Speaker 1 (54:13):
In this movie Predator, I think arguably his best movie.
I Don't Know Ta Too is probably my favorite of
his movies, but it's a really great movie. His muscles
are used for comedy and like that. That also gets
to the question of like does how much is he
aware of it? And how much is he just willing
to let himself be used by directors in the way

(54:34):
that like he like kind of finds the right people
to work with and then lets him do their job,
Whereas that seems to be the exact opposite of Selester Stallone.

Speaker 3 (54:42):
He gets like guys that he can bully and be
in charge of and fires the initial director and then
gets like some guy who he can just like put.

Speaker 1 (54:50):
Your more or less.

Speaker 4 (54:51):
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 (54:53):
Arnold's strong suit is like a trust in directors and
like a ability to go like, I don't fully understand
what I'm saying in this scene, but you just tell
me how to say phonetically and I'll get it out.

Speaker 1 (55:04):
Yes.

Speaker 4 (55:06):
And then you watch sly.

Speaker 3 (55:06):
Movies and realize, like English, what was Sylvester Sloan's first language?

Speaker 1 (55:13):
Rock?

Speaker 3 (55:15):
He sounds like that and English is the only language
he spoke in his life.

Speaker 1 (55:19):
The only other detail I learned about Predator in this
from Jam is that there was they had a problem
with their water filtration system. The cast got sick. As
far as I know, this is the only Arnold Schwarzenegger
movie in which he shipped his pants during the filming.
And I bring that up only because of a loose theory,

(55:40):
because that's also true of Harrison Ford and Raiders of
the Lost Arc all the all the desert films are
filmed while he's like running off to ship his brains
out because he was like incredibly sick. Also true of
the most iconic moment of Michael Jordan's career. I'm just saying,
when you have to. When you have to lick focus

(56:00):
your mind on not shitting your pants, you do some
pretty iconic work. We don't know, Like it's not it's
also not something that like Einstein would have said, like
you know, when I came up with the equals MC square,
I was shitting my back out of my button up pants.
It wasn't just a loose theory.

Speaker 2 (56:20):
It's a loose stool that led It's a really yeah,
I mean that's inspired me.

Speaker 1 (56:26):
Jack.

Speaker 2 (56:26):
I think next week I'm gonna do we'll do the
diarrhea episodes to see if that changes my performance here
on the.

Speaker 4 (56:31):
Put theory of dire relativity.

Speaker 1 (56:33):
Yeah, sorry relativity. Kindergarten Cop gave us the soundboard, which
I do think is like one of the most iconic
things about his career.

Speaker 3 (56:45):
Reinvigorated him in a weird way and it really made
him in like crystallized, like a joke version of Arnold
that then he got to like push against by becoming
a politician. Like it was like there's like this weird
thing where this is like he's a household joke with
the fucking soundboard, which we were all obsessed with that

(57:06):
shout out eBaum's world for giving you like fucking six
years of fucking joy and Howard Sterns where I first
heard it too, but then he survives becoming like that
much of a fucking joke somehow, which is just crazy.

Speaker 4 (57:20):
That's impossible. This soundboard still exists.

Speaker 1 (57:23):
Dude, who is.

Speaker 4 (57:24):
Your daddy and what does he do? Who is your daddy?

Speaker 1 (57:26):
I want to ask you a bunch of questions. Uh
huh I have answered immediately. Who is your daddy? And
what does he do for me? Who don't know what?
This is? Our yoga listeners? Like it was just it's
like a pool string toy, but like you know, you
can like hit everything, and it like gives you all
these different lines from Schwarzenegger. And it was used for

(57:47):
uh great like prank call effect on many a radio show.
And but I also think like something I think it
was Rogers said on Action Boys that I thought was
really smart is that both as a movie star and
like just how we thought of him, he's just an

(58:08):
action figure that you like dress up in different things
and like make do different things. And like that's why
I think the soundboard works so well, is because it's
basically the pool string toy for like pre Internet shit
posters where you can just like use Arnold quotes to
just like do whatever, like use it as many times
as you want.

Speaker 3 (58:28):
And there's no scene where he's a child opening up
a package making the audience cry watching the movie. Like
everything he says is like weirdly.

Speaker 1 (58:37):
Ah, you know, and it's like all right.

Speaker 2 (58:43):
My favorite one was he called the Gator Lodge was
one where confuses this old woman. Those are the best
videos or though I guess they were just you know,
audio clips at the time, but I think, like to
your point, it really was sonically, Arnold Schwarzenegger is just
in your sub conscious on this in this way that
you also got excited at the idea that someone was

(59:04):
just laughing in your face, playing blatantly Arnold Schwartzenegs And
they're like who is this And they're like, Detective John Kimball.

Speaker 8 (59:12):
You fucking it's Detective John Kibble. You idiots idiot, you idiot. Okay, hey,
Bennett's let off some steam. Yeah, remember when I told
you I'd kill you last I live. My friend is
dead tired. Commando. Commando is the most full of those,

(59:35):
like you're Commando and kindergarten cop.

Speaker 1 (59:38):
Yeah, yeah, Kindergarten Cop is the one that like has
so many of my favorite Kindergarten Cop like weirdly is
one of the ones that kind of looms the largest
in my memory other than Terminator two. Like Terminator two
is the most burnt on my brain movie of my life.
But Kindergarten Cop just really like every reviewing you go

(59:59):
back look is like this really shouldn't work. Why does
this work? But it like really fucking does.

Speaker 3 (01:00:05):
The Bad Guy is like too scary for like a
movie that also features children and Arnold, Like it's like also,
it's like our first time we see Arnold and a beard, right,
like and my guy and I'm a big fan of
Arnold with facial hair and he has a fake beard
in the beginning of that movie. And those weird little
like fucking shooter glasses. It's like very it's that is

(01:00:28):
that was Jack? I kind of get what you're saying
because we were young when we saw it exactly. I
was kind of like, you know, the other movies were
like grown up movies, but this felt like a movie
that we were like allowed to see. And so then
and then all of a sudden, you feel like, wow, imagine
if your fucking teacher, Like had a gun.

Speaker 4 (01:00:45):
You not to think about it would be sick.

Speaker 3 (01:00:48):
My dad he's a guynecologist and he looks at vaginas all.

Speaker 1 (01:00:53):
It was a time before that was actually a political
talking point that all teachers should have guns. But yeah,
Like I haven't really been able to get Arnold much
in front of my kids because like, I don't want
their first experience to be jingle all the way, because
I don't think that's like that good of a movie.
And so I was going to show them. I was

(01:01:13):
going to show them Kindergarten Cop. And then I listened
back to the actual boys. You're like, there's like a
drug overdose in this. Yeah, Like I don't want to
get on the wrong idea about drugs.

Speaker 3 (01:01:24):
You know, yeah, I know you will be using them
wisely in our house exactly.

Speaker 4 (01:01:28):
Both of my kids know where the narcan is.

Speaker 5 (01:01:31):
You got test strips, man, It says we have to
learn to use the Yeah, we're gonna go get our
fedyl vaccines today.

Speaker 1 (01:01:58):
His comedies are like again, all of this shit, like
he doesn't make any sense on paper, Like Twins is
a deeply fucked up eugenics story, Like it begins in
a top secret government lab where scientists are attempting to
create a physically, mentally, and spiritually advanced human being. And
the narrator has like a thick Austrian accent, so it's

(01:02:20):
like it doesn't make it seem like it wasn't about
x Nazi doctors trying to create a master race. And
then kindergarten cop is like gun toting policeman again goes
undercover the most conspicuous human being on the plant, Like
if that guy was just a cop, he would be famous.
How fucking cool he looks. And then Junior, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:02:42):
Yeah, Twins is like maybe your best bet to show kids,
but it's like all adult themed. It's not like it's
not like really fucked up, but it is like too,
like I couldn't imagine kids holding their interests like about
almost like if Conan wasn't so scary, that would be
the one that makes the most sense. But it's a
touch spooky with like snake worshippers and shit like that.

Speaker 1 (01:03:04):
Yeah, I am very interested to see, like if his
appeal still holds, you know, I'm sure it does. Right,
It's still like these movies are good. But then I
thought that about Jaws and my son was like, it's
almost as good as the meg too, So.

Speaker 4 (01:03:21):
Yeah, yeah, you know it's hard.

Speaker 3 (01:03:23):
You're like fucking with the modern attention span, which is
just like it's like modern consumption is on just a
different frequency than we had growing up.

Speaker 1 (01:03:32):
Yeah, you know, we.

Speaker 3 (01:03:33):
Kind of had no choice but to be like, well,
Jaws is what's on. I have to like set my
brain to be able to sit here for this, which
we'd barely ever see a shark. And then you're a
kid and you just get baby Shark, and then all
of a sudden, you're like, who cares about Jaws when
there's baby Shark?

Speaker 1 (01:03:48):
Why is the shark singing? Why does Chief Rody not
open the video by being like, hey, guys, you know,
talking directly to me. We're at the kind of part
where his career starts to go away a little bit,
starts to go downhill for the first time. He's like
kind of invincible for a long time. Two things that
happened in the early nineties. One is playing at Hollywood,

(01:04:08):
which was like a massive deal at the time, but
it just it fell apart pretty quickly. The food Suck
Schwarzenegger pulled out in two thousand he was notoriously bad
at pulling out early enough. Uh and the one time
he put one time, he pulled out one time actually
pulled out on top. And then the Last Action Hero

(01:04:30):
was like the big the big one. It was everybody
was like focused on it, so it got like watered
down by studio notes. It doesn't like totally cohere. There's
some like really good stuff in it, but like.

Speaker 3 (01:04:43):
An insanely good concept that they just fall a little
short on. And I remember loving it as a kid
and or it loved it at least wanting to love it,
and then rewatching it as a grown up, You're like, man,
this could be so much better. Yeah, they also movie
to remake. Everyone on these remakes movies that everyone loves
remake a movie that kind of sucked because it had like.

Speaker 1 (01:05:03):
Kind and yea, yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:05:05):
He was also listening to many discs I think, like
in his stereo in his car stereo. Just like technology.

Speaker 1 (01:05:12):
It's like a satire of action movies that like doesn't
really get a lot of action movie like tropes are
like there's a cartoon character walking through the police station.
He's like always throwing dynamite around.

Speaker 2 (01:05:24):
It's like, what the fuck is that he keeps calling
f Murray Abraham Salieri too. It's like that's Alma Dais what.

Speaker 1 (01:05:32):
Are we talking about it. They also made a pretty
confident decision by deciding to release it the same day
as Jurassic Park, which didn't go well. Oh wow, same
day June ninety three, What a time erected a gigantic
inflatable Schwartzenegger in the middle of Times Square. But it
was like kaijuicized and holding a bundle of dynamite, and

(01:05:56):
it was three days after the World Trade Center bomber.
She had to immediately move it out. They also put
the title of the movie on a NASA Space shuttle,
spent five hundred thousand dollars to have it on the
Space Shuttle launch, and then it got delayed till like
five months after its release date. It was like, that

(01:06:17):
is a like it would almost be at that point
like terrible luck for the NASA mission to like write
that movie's name on it. But it was also just
like in terms of action heroes, this is like Diehard
has come out, Batman has come out, like lethal Weapon,
and you're starting to see people kind of trend towards
more normal sized action heroes. It's just like people are like,

(01:06:41):
I don't know, it's kind of weird that that is
as fucking massive as he is.

Speaker 3 (01:06:45):
Right because much like the Brad Pitt paradox, or you know,
like if Arnold's movies were any more realistic, like every
scene would just have people stopping him on the street
going like what the fuck? Or the picture with your arm,
the brad Pitt one is like, dude, you are fucking hot.
Like every situation would just be absolutely ruined by like,

(01:07:06):
wait a minute, dude, you're fucking hot.

Speaker 1 (01:07:09):
You're a carpenter. Dude, I'm wearing glasses and have a
bucket hat on, so nobody's gonna even pay attention to me.
But just a quick anecdote from that time, Bruce Willis
says that after Diehard, he walked into a restaurant and
Arnold was already there, and he like called across the
dining room, do you know why You'll never be an
action hero? And then he flexs and he goes tooth

(01:07:30):
pick arms true eyes, I will say, is a incredibly
islamophobic but very watchable. This like late career part of.

Speaker 2 (01:07:44):
There with you don't mess with the Soohan, Yeah, it's
a fun fucking movie.

Speaker 3 (01:07:50):
But you can't believe it, you know, they're like, wow,
it's like really kind of Oh yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:07:55):
It's fucking crazy.

Speaker 3 (01:07:59):
I'll do anything for that. Jamie Lee Curtis strict sequence.

Speaker 2 (01:08:04):
Yeah, do it sexy, do it slowly, do some more.

Speaker 1 (01:08:08):
And even there he's doing he's kind of using a soundboard. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:08:11):
Well yeah, like in Running Man when he's picking out
his woman, Sleezy like that's a great one boardline Tozy athletic.

Speaker 1 (01:08:21):
His his You know, we we can offer all the
cultural commentary we want on why we think his movie
career faded down the stretch of like the nineties. Here.
His theory is that it was when he fixed the
gap in his teeth. He recently told Glenn palell Uh
during like the Running Man movie run up that he

(01:08:42):
thought it was he should have never fixed the gap
in his teeth.

Speaker 3 (01:08:45):
He might be right, but that's definitely not what it was.
Some people just start making bad choices, like money and
team like shit gets in the way and you just
start choosing stuff Like Arnold had like accidentally great taste
for what he would put you know what I mean,
Like like it just made like he would he was

(01:09:05):
in things that were so perfect for him and he
never like stretched too far. But then he would do
like Eraser and stuff, and you would be like, these
are bad versions of stuff.

Speaker 4 (01:09:14):
He's already done.

Speaker 2 (01:09:15):
Yeah, when you look at it, if you think like, okay,
true Lies ninety four, you're Harry Tasker. A great next
movie is Junior, Yeah you know, then Eraser, then Jingle
all the Way. You're like, oh, yeah, it's cresting now, yeah, yeah,
yeah yeah, And.

Speaker 3 (01:09:29):
Jingle all the Way would be a fun like career,
like aside if he kept the other shit going on,
but Jingle all the Way became, then he was just like,
oh this is who I am.

Speaker 1 (01:09:38):
Yeah yeah. And I think also like as you lose
the heat, like no, you're no longer working with James Cameron.
Now you're working with whoever directed like you know some
of these movies. And then it's like you don't have
Danny DeVito reteaming with you in Jingle all the Way
as he was supposed to. It's like, although symbat's great,
but you know, it's just like he stops having It's

(01:10:00):
hard to like sustain a thing like that. And I
always remember like Batman and Robin. Him coming into that
world felt like an admission of like being a failure,
like he had given up because it's just like, no,
this is like the thing where they have to paint
on your muscles, Like you don't you don't have to
do that. You're fucking in a suit. Due. Yeah, So

(01:10:21):
he's like, all right, my career is slowed down. I'm
going to become the governor of California. He does. There's
like a recall election, a bunch of celebrities, Gary Coleman runs,
He runs. Everybody treats it as a joke. At first,
he's doing like just terminator puns the whole time, but
then he wins and becomes like an actual politician. Uh,

(01:10:42):
and this is where we come to. You know, he
was bad. He had like, you know, he fought gay marriage,
and by saying that gay marriage should be between a
man and a woman, you know, the sorts of malapropisms
that you know you can edit out of a movie.
But then it becomes like thing that everybody.

Speaker 4 (01:11:01):
Yeah, when you're a lawmaker, it hits a little different.

Speaker 1 (01:11:03):
Yeah yeah, yeah. But there there was this moment where
I don't know if you guys remember Barbara Bush like
showed up with a cast and they said that she
like slid down an icy hill on a saucer sled
and that's how she broke her leg. Arnold recently told
the true story, which I'm gonna put in the Chat
Free Months.

Speaker 2 (01:11:23):
It was snowing up there and we had this toboggan
and Bush was trying to teach me how to slide
that because I was only used to sledding down with
Austrian sleds, which you direct kind of with your feet,
and so we went down totally out of control, and
of course we crashed into Barbara Bush, who broke a leg.
Then after that, Jesus, we.

Speaker 1 (01:11:43):
Just trucked poor Barbara Bush, and of course we crashed
into and of course we crashed when he says like
and of course.

Speaker 3 (01:11:53):
And of course we are crashing and like because we
talk about it like he has like these like rolling
dialog and of course we are. And then I am here,
I am on the dailiese Geist, I am talking to
Miles and Jack, and I know I am here with
Jack and Miles, and we are having fun and we
are talking about the sled and of course I'm sledding
and I'm sledding on with with Miles and Jack like
he like it's kind of you know, He's like, I

(01:12:14):
am here on the Tonight show to talk about Collateral,
and he's Collateral is the film I am.

Speaker 1 (01:12:18):
Coming out of this Collateral. Yeah. He just keeps going, Yeah,
that's I think the coolest thing he ever did as
a politician was, well.

Speaker 3 (01:12:26):
It's so funny because I remember being I was not
very politically minded, uh for a long time in my life,
and I remember being like, oh, that's cool, Arnold's the governor.
And then like some people whose opinions I liked as
a young kid were like, he's like not, he's not
that like cool, Like he's got he's got like bad politics,
and you're like, oh okay. And now, as like a
grown up, I'm like, fuck, Like imagine Arnold was like

(01:12:49):
what the right was a dream come true? And they're
just actually are only about taxes somehow and not about
like policing every fucking choice every person makes.

Speaker 1 (01:13:01):
He's like, uh, pro choice, but no healthcare. Yeah right,
I mean that's kind of the status quo, warm warmer progress.

Speaker 4 (01:13:11):
Yeah, uh, he said on Nerdus.

Speaker 3 (01:13:14):
Chris Hardwick asked him Uh, is there any law you
would change if you could as a lawmaker? And he
said it is obvious, but I would change the president
has to be natural boy, Like he.

Speaker 4 (01:13:27):
Would change the rules so he could run for president.

Speaker 3 (01:13:29):
Yeah, that's at the time, You're going like, yeah, right,
but a celebrity winning.

Speaker 4 (01:13:34):
President, I got no, man, I would kill that.

Speaker 1 (01:13:38):
Well. That is like one of the reasons we wanted
to do this show is like to like have more fun,
but also, like, you know, icons are powerful and like
they become they take on a life of their own,
and like Donald Trump was just a cartoon rich guy. Yeah,
you know, like you just I think we have a
tendency to like misunderstand what they become, how people became

(01:14:04):
kic and also like the power that they have over us,
and like I feel like he kind of he's been
a critic of Trump, but it's hard not to see
that his political career is like a template for Trump's rise,
where he's like a wealthy megastar who has just like
presented himself as an outsider underdog who could fix the problems.
But for the twenty years before he was a politician

(01:14:25):
with bad politics. You liked him so like you know,
it's hard to shake that. Like Trump, no one liked Trump,
but no one hated him either. He was like this
rich douchebag, and then he got like a TV show
and he was like kind of weird and kind of
funny and gaudy, and you were like, oh, it's fucking crazy.

Speaker 3 (01:14:43):
And then you're like, he's in my life. He's someone
I recognized. And then when he's like, oh, I'm running
for office, a lot of us went like that makes
no sense, and a lot of us were like I
know him.

Speaker 4 (01:14:53):
They're like, oh no, I hout for him.

Speaker 1 (01:14:55):
I know his name. He's not the ball determinator. Yeah,
he's Actually he's very rare show he does. He knows
how to get rich for everybody.

Speaker 4 (01:15:03):
So I'm going to be rich.

Speaker 1 (01:15:04):
I'm quoting like six of my family members in one
when I say that, right, right, right, exactly. Yeah. I mean.
There were lots of scandals in line with his run
for governor. Shortly before the two thousand and three election,
LA Times published a story documenting a long history of
sexual misconduct, with at least fifteen women claiming they were

(01:15:24):
groped or harassed by Schwartzenegger, and then in twenty eleven
his marriage, he married into the Kennedy family Maria Schreiber,
and it was revealed that he had fathered a child
with their housekeeper, which came to late because the kid
has ever looked more like Schwartzenegger before.

Speaker 3 (01:15:43):
It's funny because Christopher looks more like him than Patrick Doestrick.
Patrick has Kennedy jeans, which of course are beneficial. Christopher
is like big, square jawed, handsome, Like it's very but
I look, it's fucking you know, wear a rubber when
you have affairs with employees.

Speaker 1 (01:16:02):
That's a little lesson that we're taking away.

Speaker 4 (01:16:04):
That's amazing to take away.

Speaker 3 (01:16:05):
But I would also say, like it's bad, it's fucked up.
But the fact that he's like loves and accepts Christopher
is so fucking real, Like it's so Joseph is that Joseph, Joseph,
Joseph Joseph h. Patrick is the one from White Lotus.
Joseph is the Yeah, yeah that's the one we bought
a jeep. Yeah, it's just so like it's funny, like

(01:16:27):
it's he's just like, yes, he's I had affair with
but he's my son, and yeah, I was the governor,
like he's just like that's the power he like he's
he has where we're just like a, come on, Arnie,
what's twenty women reporting sexual assault?

Speaker 1 (01:16:42):
Your conen?

Speaker 4 (01:16:44):
What did I just say?

Speaker 2 (01:16:45):
He's not even because he's not a person in a
weird yeah idea.

Speaker 4 (01:16:50):
Yeah, Like I'm like, I.

Speaker 2 (01:16:51):
Don't know, I don't think Arnold Saker is a person,
to be honest, He's like, again, he's a fucking g
I Joe toy that you just fucking pose in different things.

Speaker 1 (01:16:59):
Allegations were not shocking to anybody who's seen that Brazil video.
There's a video from early, very early in his career
where they send him down to Brazil, and uh, it's
one of the wildest things. It's like the most overtly
horny anyone's ever been on camera, Like uh and yeah,
I mean he's like grabbing women's asses who are like

(01:17:22):
you can see sama dancers who are like pushing his
hands off of is.

Speaker 2 (01:17:27):
They're like dancing around him, like doing like carnival dancing,
and he thinks it's a strip club and he's like, yeah, yeah,
let's get let's let me grab you by the way shorty,
and it was yeah, it's it's pretty just everything, even
his interactions like with like that one woman, like he's
like feeding her carrots and.

Speaker 1 (01:17:44):
Shiit no, no, no no. It's wild, but overall like
a very weird, a very weird career that just like
I do wonder how much it's gonna fade over time,
Like do you guys think those movies are going to
make sense to people in like even like thirty more years,

(01:18:04):
is it going to be like Pauly Shore movies, you know,
where it's just like this was the thing that people
were obsessed with and like studied more sociologically. Some of
the movies are just like too good and undeniable, But
it does also feel like thirty years from now people
will look back and be like, it's so weird that
he's like this giant fucking.

Speaker 2 (01:18:26):
Oh right, Like is it more of a thing that
people like are like, oh okay, I get it, or
it's like one of those things and you're like, what
the fuck were people back then and think.

Speaker 3 (01:18:33):
We're anti seat belts, you know, like like that shit
when you're just like we smoked on planes.

Speaker 2 (01:18:42):
This guy clearly no one's asking why he's talking like
this in the reality of the film, right, Oh, all.

Speaker 1 (01:18:48):
Right, guys.

Speaker 3 (01:18:49):
Sure, I mean, if if film still exists, I'm sure
there'll be very interesting ways to discuss what the trends
are and stuff. But fucking up, it is funny, Jack,
like you just casually say something like in thirty years,
how will we look at that? And then my brain
just goes to be like, what the fuck is going
to be happening in thirty years? I mean, I'm talking
to two dads, so I feel I always lessen my

(01:19:11):
nihilism in those moments.

Speaker 2 (01:19:14):
God, Jesus Christ, I know.

Speaker 1 (01:19:20):
Over a glass of water. Based on your day job
here at TDZ, I'm assuming you guys are a little
plugged into that.

Speaker 2 (01:19:25):
Yeah, I'm always envisioning The Road by Cormick McCarthy.

Speaker 1 (01:19:31):
When we're doing the Road. Is gonna appreciate Arnold Schwarzenegger movies.

Speaker 3 (01:19:37):
All we have is this iPad preloaded with last action here.

Speaker 1 (01:19:40):
Sorry, I really wish i'd had and our terminator on.

Speaker 2 (01:19:43):
It him as a big Bridget Wilson fan, this is
a big break in it, Old John Gabris, such a pleasure.

Speaker 1 (01:19:50):
Thank you so much for coming on.

Speaker 4 (01:19:52):
Always such a good time talking to YouTube.

Speaker 3 (01:19:55):
I appreciate you having me on especially I don't have
to deal with today's.

Speaker 1 (01:19:59):
Awful news stories. We could just talk about I know
how awesome Arnold is. So even throw overtree to do
TDZ with you guys. But it's not about the state
of the universe good. It's about mister universe. Instead, it's
still Olympia. Where can people find you, follow you, hear you,
all that good stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:20:16):
I'm at Gabris on social media. I got a free
podcast with Adam Pally called Staying Alive wherever you get
podcasts or YouTube. I got Action Boys, which is a
Patreon podcast where if you remotely like what this episode's about,
it's unfortunately that for three hours every week. That's at
Actionboys dot biz. We have some free episodes that you
can get addicted, you know, we get you, get you hooked,

(01:20:38):
and then you come back for more. And then lastly,
I made this physical media thirty episodes of the Gino
Lombardo Show. It's like three ten episode seasons. I turned
it into a USB drive with like original art that
comes in like a cassette form and you can get
that at Geno dot Gabris dot com.

Speaker 1 (01:20:54):
If that's something that appeals amazing, any comedy Bang Bang
fans out there. Yeah, yeah, get that. But that's where
I first first heard. I still remember sound speeds. I
still remember writing Gino Lombardo and then John Gabris down
in my notes app but I think it was like
his first appearance, and I was just like, who the
fuck is this guy?

Speaker 4 (01:21:15):
That was like my second podcast appearance ever.

Speaker 3 (01:21:17):
I didn't even know what podcasts where I had moved
out here and I did Geno for Scott and I
had such a good time. Then I didn't know I
would be doing exclusively that.

Speaker 4 (01:21:25):
Character for the next fifteen years.

Speaker 1 (01:21:27):
One day we'll be doing an Icon episode about Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:21:35):
What's well, don't worry. His sexual assault scandals are are
coming in hot. He grew up the bagel boss guy.

Speaker 1 (01:21:46):
It'sed him on the back of the neck. All right,
that was a fun one. This is the notebook, dumb.
You may have noticed first of all, that we didn't
hit air standard question if this person character existed in
the present tens or in our reality, would they have
been on the Epstein flight logs. We didn't hit it

(01:22:08):
because this is our first icon who did exist in
our moment, and he wasn't on them. Dinging casino jackpots
sound effect he was not on them. I think we
decided Miss Piggy wasn't probably on them also in that
alternate reality and people were pissed. People were like, yes,

(01:22:28):
she definitely would have been with Arnold. I'll say the
internet actually couldn't believe he wasn't on it and made
a fake list of names that went viral on Twitter
claiming these people were on the flight logs. I mean,
it's still early. It's still early, folks. We still don't
know every we still haven't seen every file yet. One

(01:22:49):
thing that's becoming a recurring theme also as we look
at these icons, for me is the question of I
guess it's like kind of a nature nurture question, more
of a what them or was it us? Of the
icons we've covered so far, like Einstein is one extreme
because he's this super singular genius who is going to

(01:23:09):
be famous no matter where and when he existed. And
then Erkele's kind of the other side, probably doesn't become
an icon in most other moments historically or places in time,
but catches something peculiar about the cultural moment. And I'd
say Arnold is kind of somewhere in the middle there

(01:23:30):
kind of an enigma. I feel like he was gonna
be famous no matter what everyone who meets him, like,
even the people who go in being like, this guy
seems like an idiot, like James Cameron, for instance. They
come away from like a single meal with him being like,
this is the face of and titular character of my

(01:23:51):
next movie. But the specifics in the level of his
dominance feel very peculiar to the eighties and nineties, Like
it'll be one of the weirdest sections of the Future
Museum about the late twentieth century, Like people will just
be like, why is this guy everywhere? And why does
he look like that? I also wanted to note that

(01:24:11):
you can kind of see the specificity and the suddenness
and massive impact of his influence in movies he never
appeared in like the same way that you can see
certain cataclysmic volcanic eruptions in tree rings on like other continents.
Like the example I was thinking about is the Rocky franchise.

(01:24:32):
In the first Rocky movie, stallone's trying to play by
the roles of the seventies. He's a schlubby everyman who
isn't as ripped as his opponent. That was kind of
the point. It's an underdog tail, like all our movies
are generally underdogtails, so it doesn't make sense that he'd
be the superman. But then Arnold hits and by Rocky three,

(01:24:54):
Stallone looks actually like too muscular to make sense as
a boxer. By that time, the point was no longer
to make sense. The point was suddenly to always look
as conspicuously awesome as possible, no matter the role. And
then Arnold's influence fades, and you know, he and Van
dam are replaced by action heroes with tooth pickoms, and

(01:25:18):
Stallone goes back to playing a schlebby guy in Copland.
I think. Copland came out the year after Eraser, I think,
which was the first of Arnold's big swing action movies
that like doesn't really exist. It's not like a flop
or a bomb like last acting heroes just like people
are like I don't even remember what that movie was about.

(01:25:39):
On the subject of bodybuilding's relationship to acting, there's this
mystery at the heart of filmmaking I've always found interesting,
which is why do actors like Robert de Niro and
like John Turtrurou, who are these great actors. You know,
they're actors actors, but then when they direct movies, nobody

(01:26:00):
really like they're not great directors. And then the actors
who do make great directors are people like Ben Affleck
and Clint Eastwood and Robert Redford, who are kind of
one dimensional. I mean, they're movie stars, like you'd never
want to go see them in a stage play, but
they end up making great directors. And I think one

(01:26:20):
of the reasons is that they understand a very simple thing,
which is how to look on camera, like how to
show up, you know, without the interiority of the acting
process to rely on, they focus on everything outside of them,
their relationship to the camera, what angles make them look best.
If you're not a great actor, but you're good at

(01:26:42):
looking awesome on camera, you have to be sort of
directing while you act and like sort of bending the
movie around your face, which requires a much broader understanding
of how filmmaking works because they don't have the tools inside,
so they figure out how to work within the machine
around them to look awesome, and that sets them up

(01:27:04):
to be better directors than somebody who just like shows
up and is like I'm the Jordan of this shit.
I don't I don't need to pay attention to these
idiots with cameras. Obviously, Arnold didn't become a great director,
but I was thinking about that when researching how his
bodybuilding led into his acting career, because from a very
early age, he's thinking about how to pose and like

(01:27:25):
hit his angles and how to appear to people. He's
just like pure exteriority. He's studying how to show up
at the right angle to portray the right things, which
for him, the right thing is always to just look
awesome and strong, and that was the right thing for
America in the eighties and nineties. I mentioned how he

(01:27:46):
tried the Stanislovsky method. I talked about how his teacher
thought it got great results. Arnold disagreed. Arnold eventually was like,
I don't want to be that kind of actor. I
want to be an action hero. And he quit the
Stanzlowski method and committed to weapons training. And he won

(01:28:07):
all sorts of awards from gun nut magazines and shit
like that for being the best shooter of guns in movies.
I don't know, I don't subscribe to them. Next up,
I think the question. We kind of talked about this,
but the question of like is Arnold hot is interesting
and like why is he not? You know? Gabrius mentioned

(01:28:29):
that the women characters in his movies are often like
oh ho, hoba, look at this guy. But he kind
of gives off the same vibes as the Rock. He's
sort of like too invulnerable to make sense in that way.
He's sort of a marble statue come to life, which
I think does tie back into fascism. There's a really
good article called Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is

(01:28:52):
Horny on the website blood Knife that talks about the
sort of sexless, bloodless nature of movies while everybody has
suddenly become completely shredded, like the Rock and the Marvel movies.
And in that article, the writer Rs. Benedict connects it
back to Paul dhoven satire of fascism and American action

(01:29:14):
movie Starship Troopers and describes the co ed shower scene
as quote a room full of beautiful, bare bodies and
everyone is only horny for war. And I feel like
that's a perfect summation of Arnold movies. Like they had
to cut a sex scene from Commando because the actress
and the director were like, this doesn't make sense and

(01:29:35):
like it feels weird, but they were willing to add
an extra like one hundred and fifty people being killed
in the final scene. In terms of Arnold's relationship to
other action stars, as I was reading that book the
Last Action Heroes, I feel like John Claude Van Dam
and Arnold Schwarzenegger are sort of spiritually linked. They're just

(01:29:56):
these unquestioningly confident like puppy who've never been told no.
And then Stallone and Segal are these massively insecure, sort
of sad boys who refuse to let their guard down.
Their careers are like scar tissue that's like grown over
their wounded ego. And then Schwartzenegger and Van Dam are

(01:30:18):
like these aids that just sort of shed their super
ego like needless shirts and are just running around flexing
and waving their dicks in our faces. And finally, I
talked in a past episode about this theory I was
working on of like icons have to have like a
contradiction at their core, Like there's too many famous people.

(01:30:43):
We don't want to learn about another famous person. We're
already holding all this shit. We don't want to have
to pick up another famous person. But our brains are
intrigued by contradiction, and so you have, like Einstein is
not just a super genius, he's a super genius who
can't remember to put his shoes on before walking out
the door. Erkele's a dork, but he's a dork who's

(01:31:05):
extremely confident. This Piggy a career motivated diva primarily driven
by a romantic love of Kermit. And if I had
to jam Arnold into the contradiction theory, i'd highlight some
of the stuff we touched on. He's an American hero
who spoke with a thick Austrian accent. He's constantly going
undercover while being the most wildly conspicuous character in any movie.

(01:31:29):
And it's interesting that he thinks that the thing that
killed his career was fixing the gap in his teeth.
You know, he's a subscriber to the contradiction theory, apparently.
And you know, Stallone also had an imperfection with the
way he talked and kind of slurred his words because
like one side of his face was lightly crushed by

(01:31:50):
a forceps accident when he was being born. But I'm
going to shoot you guys straight. I don't think there's
a lot of contradiction here. I think Arnold is a
pretty straightforward, like card tune of a jock. He makes
locker room blowjob jokes, he smokes massive cigars. He's just
like the toxic masculinity of the seventies, pumped up to

(01:32:11):
the extreme to just like the physical embodiment of what
a seven year old would design an action hero to
look like. Yeah, so, I'm not sure where we're at
with this contradiction there. I feel like I might need
to replace it with our new theory that people do
their most iconic work while shitting their pants. All right,
that's going to do it for Arnold. We're back next

(01:32:32):
Monday with possibly the most famous and recognizable figure on
the face of the planet, who, depending on the tradition
that you follow, may have done their most iconic work
while shitting their pants. I'm talking, of course, about our
icon number five, Santa Claus Tati. Then iye

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Top 10 of 2025: #3 Arnold Schwarzenegger w/ Jon Gabrus