Bad Bosses In The Bible

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Let's think it happen.

Speaker 2 (00:02):
If you're almost seven, what is Issue fourteen going to be? Martini?
Tiny tabletop.

Speaker 1 (00:09):
Acid? Rain?

Speaker 3 (00:09):
Long Ellen, al Ge, I think you'll swellen all have?

Speaker 2 (00:13):
I know young, you know quite well.

Speaker 4 (00:15):
You'll check O Lundon, JG, Jemmy Jummy, Jammy Mayhew.

Speaker 1 (00:20):
You're insane, John wrong.

Speaker 4 (00:23):
I'm perfectly saying, everyone else, however, is insane and trying
to steal my magic.

Speaker 1 (00:37):
So here we are. I don't even know what month
it is. Hold on, it's October. It's October tenth, it's
the middle of October. It's block culture. I'm John pun
Hortz in New York with Jonah Goldberg in Washington. Hi, Jonah,
Ay John, and Rob long Is. I don't even know
where the hell you are?

Speaker 2 (00:53):
Rob?

Speaker 1 (00:53):
Where are you?

Speaker 2 (00:54):
I'm in Los Angeles, California.

Speaker 1 (00:56):
You're in Los Angeles, California, where you no longer live.
But where you? But where you a locker?

Speaker 2 (01:01):
I don't keep a locker, keep nothing.

Speaker 1 (01:02):
I'm here.

Speaker 4 (01:03):
I was invited to talk a little bit at a
conference for young filmmakers. I don't know, I guess because
I don't know why, because I was once was one.
But I came in yesterday morning, and I'm leaving tomorrow
because of course I work Sundays.

Speaker 2 (01:20):
Now, that was the other issue.

Speaker 1 (01:23):
Yes, that's the thing.

Speaker 2 (01:23):
They don't tell you.

Speaker 1 (01:25):
They don't tell you that when you go to I'll
tell you.

Speaker 2 (01:27):
Hey, way you want to do this, you got to
be working Sundays.

Speaker 3 (01:31):
Well, just to be clear, are you working Sundays because
you're studying or because as a Christian?

Speaker 4 (01:36):
Uh, I'm an intern. I'm an intern. I'm an intern
at the church I would go to. I'm an intern there.
I do internal stuff in spots.

Speaker 1 (01:48):
Or you have to bring coffee and get abused by
abused by I know, I keep waiting physically abused, I
mean abused the way you you abused inn.

Speaker 2 (01:57):
It's the wrong denomination for that, Yes, I said, But
I'm you.

Speaker 1 (02:01):
Are a man who had interns for many years. I did, yes,
at your at your profession, and according to the way
you talk about yourself, you may have not have been
the easiest boss.

Speaker 2 (02:16):
You know that's actually is that not true? How very
dare you? That is? Actually?

Speaker 1 (02:21):
I'm thinking about how you say it. I was grumpy
and I did this, and I was so grumpy and.

Speaker 4 (02:26):
I used to that's the uh, yeah, getting called grumpy
from I am not.

Speaker 1 (02:33):
I am not ask anyone who worked for me about
whether I was grumpy is not my problem. Loquacious maybe
rage fell I'm only I'm only rage filled alone. But
I'm in a room alone. There is social media nearby.
I am ordinarily not rage feld.

Speaker 3 (02:51):
Greatest gathering of rage field people. Since you've known me.

Speaker 1 (02:56):
For thirty five years, Jonah, have you ever seen me
in a ray age? Have you actually ever seen me
in a rage?

Speaker 2 (03:04):
Are we really good?

Speaker 3 (03:05):
I think I've been texted by gotten text from you,
and I've gotten rage texts. I feel like I have.

Speaker 1 (03:11):
Again, and I'm texting you that's not okay, Like are
you not?

Speaker 2 (03:16):
I mean you're somebody else?

Speaker 4 (03:18):
Yeah, I have to say, and I mean, you know,
I'm so glad we're talking about this because I have
I think I've said this before and someone heard it
and they didn't quite understand what I meant, which I
needed to sort of clarify. I have you know, when
all the meat you stuff has been coming out and
all that other stuff happening, and sometimes you read well,
I mean we could we could talk about it right now.
What's your name, Katie Porter? It's a Katie ports name.

Speaker 1 (03:41):
Katie Porter, the senator, the senatorial candidate from California. In
the in the Democratic she's doing.

Speaker 4 (03:47):
A zoom I guess when the for the Biden administration,
and there's somebody moving around behind her, and then she
kind of explodes and you know, I want to with
an expletive, get out of my effing shot.

Speaker 2 (03:58):
She says, get on my effing shot.

Speaker 4 (03:59):
And people are talking mentally, and I have a little
group chat with friends of mine and they were talking
about it, and I said, am I the only person
who wants to know, actually, why was she in the
ECD shot? Like I am hashtag team pak Porter. She's
absolutely right, get out of the shot.

Speaker 1 (04:12):
Yeah, you can stand.

Speaker 4 (04:13):
In front of me with a sign, what is this thing?
And then when she gets mad, everyone gets mad at her.
And now I'm sure there's all sorts of reasons why
she's objectionable. I'm not defending her in general, but I mean,
you know, I'm am I the only person who watches
the movie Devilawaar's Prada and just says no, no. Meryl
Streep is the hero of that movie, hands down, And
I really do mean that.

Speaker 1 (04:36):
I have a slightly different take on the delawars Prada.
Here's my take on The Devil wars Prada, which is
of course a portrait the novel in particular, not the movie,
which actually does, in fact convert Miranda Priestley, the character
played by Meryl Streep in the end, into a hero.
But in the book, it's about working for a monstrous boss,

(04:56):
being a kid working for a boss's monster, and what
the experience is like for this young you know, college graduate,
gets this flashy job at Conde Nast, goes to work
for Anna Winter basically and is mistreated coldly and from okay, now,
but here's.

Speaker 2 (05:14):
What they were called to me, Oh give me a break.

Speaker 1 (05:17):
Here's what's interesting about that book because I knew a
bunch of people in New York around the time that
book came out who were horrible bosses. Yeah, and that
book changed people's behavior, particularly in the world of publishing,

(05:37):
because the idea was, you know, if you mistreat your
twenty two year old assistant, she could turn around and
write a book about you, and the New York Observer
and page six and everybody would surface the fact that
it was you, and your reputation as a human being

(05:58):
would be destroyed. And I knew at least two people
whose behavior toward their interns markedly improved as a result
of the fear of being the subject of a book.

Speaker 4 (06:10):
Like let me alternate view that you are And by
the way, I was, I was, I'm it was the
nicest boss.

Speaker 1 (06:19):
I believe that I.

Speaker 2 (06:22):
Never was.

Speaker 4 (06:22):
I was cranky, and then they would give me a
you know, a pretzel and I was fine.

Speaker 2 (06:26):
I was.

Speaker 4 (06:27):
I stormed around and was angry about the copy or
machine because I felt like the copy machine was broken
and I didn't know why I couldn't read the script.
And then the PA went out, unknownst to me, was
ordered to go out by the co exec producer and
buy at CVS a bunch of readers in all different magnifications,
you know, the reader's reader glasses. And they brought them

(06:47):
back to me and said, try these, and it turns
out I needed them. And it was like it was like, hey,
you were moving a thorn from my paw. I was like,
you know, what day is it?

Speaker 2 (06:54):
This is it Christmas Day? Right?

Speaker 4 (06:56):
But I would just say just to I would reframe
that because I actually, I also do believe this is
true that if you are a nasty to your underling.
But you are doing something you know big, like running Vogue,
and that your underling writes a book about how mean
you are, your reputation will soar, it will soar. Anna

(07:20):
Winter is more of a hero culturally and more important
and more important culturally now because of that book.

Speaker 2 (07:27):
Like you said, I saw pictures of her.

Speaker 4 (07:29):
You're greeting Meryl Streep, who plays her as supposed to
be the villain, and they greeting each other like best friends.

Speaker 3 (07:34):
So can I ask a question? This is a sincere
question that I've struggled with for twenty years, something like that.
As you guys know, particularly John, I worked for a
guy named Ben Wattenberg when I first came to Washington,
and already really clear Ben was not a bad person.
He wasn't deliberately cruel, he wasn't deliberately mean, but he was.

(08:03):
He had he struggled to escape the gravitational pull of
his own self interest to a degree that the only
person I can think of who mirrors him in some

(08:24):
ways is Donald Trump. Like could not and I have
some fantastic stories that I have never retailed because he
was good to me. He gave me my first job.
I have some positive stories, but I also have a
lot of negative stories and I've never told them. And

(08:44):
at some point, you know, we are all in the
content business. I want to know what the statute of
limitations is when I can, without a guilty conscience tell
some of them.

Speaker 2 (08:58):
You can, now.

Speaker 1 (08:59):
You're totally stagulations.

Speaker 3 (09:02):
Is he died ten years ago?

Speaker 1 (09:04):
Rights up? Second of all, the whole question is whether,
in this circumstance, by retailing the stories, given the fact
that Ben has become an obscure figure years after his death,
you will be granting him perhaps a measure of immortality
by retailing a story that others will repeat and thus

(09:27):
make him a figure of legend. Maybe not the kind
of legend that he wanted to be as a prognosticator
and an analyst of elections and the trends in parties
and in American society. But we don't get to pick
what legends we have after our death. This is history.

Speaker 4 (09:48):
I will say he would be I would I would
say that if you did that, you would be winterizing him.

Speaker 3 (09:54):
Okay, so I think in a good way, Just to
be clear, like, he's not John McLaughlin, who was a
bad and mean person to his staff. I might have
told some of the stories, but I was one kid.
I had. One of my best friends was a producer
for him. I found out only about a year ago
that Karen Swisher was ghost wrote his column for a

(10:15):
National Review of All Things, and we shared a whole
bunch of stories about John McLaughlin. And for the six
young people listening, John McLaughlin was a big deal. I
had to think called the McLaughlin Group TV shows. But
at one point McLaughlin was so cruel to one of
his staffers that everyone went to lunch and they found

(10:37):
a post it note on his computer screen that just read,
for reasons that should be obvious, I will not be returning.
And that was his resignation letter. But so but Ben
wasn't that?

Speaker 1 (10:50):
Ben was not done the cloth? Right? Yes, John, although
although unlike you who are now you are seeking to
become a I'm fully consecrated. Hearing the call, he of
course was a I don't think. I don't think you
say that someone who leaves the priest could is a
disgraced man of the cloth. You are permitted to leave
you to it and get but he was get married

(11:13):
and then cheat on your wife, and and and and behave.

Speaker 4 (11:17):
Like a like an asshole, as you said, Roman Cathayeah.

Speaker 1 (11:21):
We have not I I am. I will say nothing
about denominations. I'm just saying that he and you do
share in this vocation or he had the vocation and
lost it and you did not have vocation and are
achieving it and uh and so anyway, I just.

Speaker 4 (11:42):
I would just say that the thing that he and
I have in common is that we both like a drink.
But I would say, I would say this, I'm just
as a as a just a you know, since you
brought it up, you turned it into religion, John, not me.

Speaker 2 (11:58):
I do this thing I don't do myself.

Speaker 4 (12:00):
But in a church, we have this great tradition that
our one of our rectors has imported from another church
in Oklahoma, which is a great thing, which is on Mondays.

Speaker 2 (12:11):
She calls it pub theology.

Speaker 4 (12:14):
So Mondays you go to a local bar, but you know, well, no,
you just sort of sit around and you drink beer
and eat MACHOs, and then people, you know, you bring
up a subject that seems interesting or funny or way
way of talking about things.

Speaker 2 (12:26):
And I did one about them.

Speaker 4 (12:28):
Really, they were really the funniest parts of the Gospels
that I think are genuinely funny and supposed to be laughs.
And then the second one I did was called The
Bad Bosses in the Bible, and people enjoyed the funny thing.

Speaker 2 (12:40):
They liked it.

Speaker 4 (12:41):
But the Bad Bosses was really interesting because you know,
you start, you know, there's some obvious bad boss and
I don't just mean evil people, right, King Salt Salt,
but also Daveaul.

Speaker 1 (12:51):
David David certainly a bad boss, but he repented, he
did repent. And of course, as we say, we don't
his legend is mar by his bad bosshood. Right. He
otherwise would be almost without staying except for the story
of his treatment of Bathsheba's.

Speaker 4 (13:09):
Right, but he's relentlessly that it's relentlessly on.

Speaker 1 (13:12):
It a very but King Saul is a very bad
boss boss, very.

Speaker 3 (13:17):
Very very bad.

Speaker 4 (13:17):
Extremely But but it's interesting because the people that just
spontaneously shared their best bad boss stories, everybody's got them.

Speaker 2 (13:27):
Uh.

Speaker 4 (13:28):
And then when we came to Pilot. It's interesting about
Pilot because Pilot actually, you know, if you know the story,
you know, he's like he just he just wants to
get out of this trouble. He doesn't have a particular
perspective on any of it. He doesn't really care. He
just wants there to be no trouble. And we tend,

(13:52):
I think I tend anyway you want to pick when
you pick the who you're going to be in the
various scenes and the pageants, like I want to be Jesus,
I want to be this, I want to be that,
And people kind of don't want to be Pilot. But
in fact, I think that's mostly the most modern character.
We are the most modern boss, which is you don't
really you think you have all this power, right, but
you're just you're just getting it from upstairs and you're

(14:12):
just it's just rolling downhill, and you know pretty much everybody.

Speaker 1 (14:16):
I know.

Speaker 2 (14:16):
A friend of mine was worked for one a very
very powerful banker.

Speaker 3 (14:20):
Pilot was sort of like Colonel Blake from mash just
sort of like, come on, let's.

Speaker 1 (14:24):
Just he was an okay guy, Colonel Blake.

Speaker 2 (14:26):
He wasn't bad guy, but you know, you always have
this always some guy above you yelling at you.

Speaker 3 (14:31):
Yeah, And that.

Speaker 2 (14:32):
I think is what's you know?

Speaker 1 (14:33):
That that more like Colonel Clink or is he more
like Sergeant Schultz? That would be the question. Clink to
be right. So he is a Clink. So Pilot is Clink,
and and and Herod is Hitler. Then under this, Harrod's
got to be bad.

Speaker 2 (14:47):
Well Harod, Yeah, I mean it.

Speaker 1 (14:50):
Maybe I think similar and and and the Emperor is Hitler.

Speaker 2 (14:54):
I don't think. I mean I think Clink Schultz this
and the Hogan's hero cinematic universe.

Speaker 1 (15:04):
Yes, exactly, yes.

Speaker 3 (15:07):
Just because when when are we going to be back
on this? I think maybe I've told this story before
about Alan Keys, but he famously among my friends.

Speaker 2 (15:21):
How's he doing, by the.

Speaker 3 (15:21):
Way, I have no idea. I have no idea. For
all I know, he's ensconced at some think tank, or
people are the rowing coins in his cup on the
subway platform. I just have no idea. But he, Uh,
when he was at National Empowerment Television, he got into
there's a whole other story, Yeah, I know. Uh, he

(15:43):
got into an elevator with an assistant and he was
standing at the front of the elevator by the elevator
button panel, you know whatever, and the assistant was in
the far corner away from it, you know, three steps away.
And Alan Keys looks at the panel of buttons and
says to his assistant that button's not going to press itself,

(16:08):
meaning that like he couldn't be bothered to hit L
in the elevator and had to make the kid press
it for him because he was just that kind of egomaniac.

Speaker 1 (16:18):
You know. The Great Elevator story in Washington is, of course,
the one involving Representative Fred Grandy. Yes, go for which
we mentioned. I mean, but I'm doing this podcast for
like twelve thirteen years. So every story we've had we've
told before.

Speaker 3 (16:32):
But as we become old men, we forget that we've
told stories before. We got them again, So.

Speaker 4 (16:37):
Tell stories about discharges. Yes, I got this thing? Can
you see it in the zoom? What does that look like?

Speaker 2 (16:44):
Look at that? What does it look like to you?

Speaker 1 (16:46):
Yeah? That's that's Yes, we could play again. We also
we could make it like a game for the for
the listeners. It's sort of like what was the discharge? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (16:54):
Please?

Speaker 1 (16:55):
Yeah? If you the first five listeners who find out
who can guess what the discharges will get a glop mug.

Speaker 3 (17:02):
We don't have the next segment of separating wounds.

Speaker 1 (17:05):
Yes, the Fred Brandy story is that Fred Grandy, of course,
was a gopher on the Love Boat. Love Boat being
a show of the nineteen seventies and early eighties, very
popular ABC Saturday Night, you know, three stories with a
permanent cast.

Speaker 2 (17:22):
And he was the person always Carol Channing.

Speaker 1 (17:25):
And Carol Channing and Charro, Yes, Charo and Carol Channing
always on the boat right away.

Speaker 2 (17:33):
Spanish, not Mexican, not Mexican.

Speaker 1 (17:36):
Not Mexican, that's right, And in fact, one of the
greatest living guitarists. She was, in fact a genuinely brilliant
Flamenco guitarist. Anyway, But Charo, so Fred Grandy, when he
is interviewed as Gopher on the Love Boat, huge hit

(17:56):
show for like eight years, never fails to mention that
he went to Harvard in any interview. He went to Harvard.
He went to Harvard, you know, as a Harvard man.
He graduated from Harvard. Did you know we went to Harvard,
not unlike every other person who went to Harvard, by
the way, just to be fair, yes, anyway, So he's

(18:17):
from Iowa, goes back to Iowa, he runs for office
as a Republican. He gets elected as a House member
from Iowa, and he is in the elevator of the
one of the House office buildings, and he gets in
the elevator and at the time and maybe still, but
I haven't been on Capitol Hill in years. Every elevator

(18:38):
had an elevator operator, in other words, the button pusher,
because those buttons and pushed themselves, right, And so Fred
Grandy gets in the elevator, and the elevator operator says
to him, LEDO deck, sir, And he gets off the
elevator and he calls, I don't know, the Master of

(19:01):
the house and has the guy fired for his disrespect.
That I think remains the greatest elevator's story.

Speaker 4 (19:11):
Yeah, I think it's like and I you know, I
guess the thing about that is I kind of get it,
I guess, but I colso feel like, come on, man, no,
I mean.

Speaker 1 (19:19):
Of course you get it. Of course you understand. I'm
not telling it in a way that right, not tell
it in a way that sort of like makes it
as obnoxious as it could possibly be for him to
have done what he did. It was just like a
high spirited and everybody was crowded, was funny, and people
the other funny, and he could have just laughed and
all of that. But of course he didn't because he
was a Harvard Man and now he was a The

(19:40):
whole point of his life was to get away.

Speaker 4 (19:41):
From being, to get away from being. The thing that
got was right, Yeah, exactly. I had a friend who
was an intern for Alan Center, Alan Cranston Center from
Californians a million years ago, and he was Allan Krantz
was giving a breakfast speech in a one of these
hotel ballrooms in DC. They're all the same, but this

(20:04):
one everybody knew. This one has this thing where the
elevator it's on the fifth, four or tenth floorsing, and
you leave.

Speaker 2 (20:12):
And you get in the elevator. You gotta get The
elevator is.

Speaker 4 (20:15):
The end of the hall, at the end of the room,
so like the elevators in the room. So what you
don't want to do is you do not want to
finish your speech. Applause of blaws clause but like thanks
to never coming, waved everybody, and then walk to the
elevator and then press the button and wait for the
button the elevator to come while the meeting is awkwardly
stalled and nobody knows to do. So his job was

(20:36):
whatever you do. Here's the speech when it gets here,
call that elevator and hold it and hold it, and
hold it and hold it. And he did, but it
went on a little longer, and then the elevator and
then the elevator closed, and then that was when the
speech was over. And he's propagating the button furiously, like

(20:57):
rantically pressing the button as alan Can is making its
way down. And of course they did have that like
one and a half minute. It seemed like a ten
hour lifetime wait for the elevator to lumber its way.

Speaker 2 (21:08):
Thank you again, senator. Okay, see ed he got into
the elevator.

Speaker 3 (21:12):
I love that.

Speaker 2 (21:12):
I just love the idea of that.

Speaker 3 (21:18):
So so I was gonna say, when you first told
me you were an intern for the clergy, and then
we got digressed into this fantastic content what kind of
called There's one of my favorite scenes in The Simpsons
is where the executive producer of Itchy and Scratchy is

(21:42):
the cigar chomping old style kind of like I don't
know if he's supposed to be Jewish, but jewish ish
guy who doesn't have a lot of patience for people
and just wants to get the scripts done and he's
stuck with all of these writers from Harvard who want
to make it scratching more uh, you know, sophisticated or whatever.

(22:03):
And so he's crumpling up their script and saying this
is terrible. And the writer starts to protest, and he says, hey,
sing fair Harvard for me, and the kid starts belting
out fair Harvard, and the executive producer grabs his name
plate from his desk and the rose hucks it at
him and it smashes him in the mouth. And so

(22:23):
I was just kind of wondering, like, what is the
equivalent for you? Like the guy say, you know, Rob,
what's the nice end creed and then ROAs stuff at you.
You start to talk or like what what is the.

Speaker 1 (22:36):
What's the trigger? Yeah?

Speaker 3 (22:37):
What what? What is the thing that you can screw
up as an intern? Well, I mean, you know, there's
our souls in jeopardy. If you screw somebody, it's lot
a heresy.

Speaker 2 (22:45):
I mean, you, Uh.

Speaker 4 (22:48):
The thing about the thing about the and the clergy,
it's hard for the I think for clergy is that
there are there are moments when your parishioners get together
to talk about stuff like Princess pub theology, et cetera.
And you kind of don't want to be there because
it does lapse into heresy every now and then they
don't mean to, but before you know it, they're you know,

(23:10):
like the Episcopalians on any given Sunday start worshiping ball well,
I mean yes and no, I mean this is this,
this is this gets into the hilarious, hilarious area what
they enjoyed of what.

Speaker 3 (23:27):
Of what the means.

Speaker 4 (23:29):
But you know, I mean in the Episcopal Church along
with the kind of like the Catholic Church, we believe
that the Eucharist, at the euchrisis, the which is communion, which
is that's the real presence of Christ is there, the
real presence, And then if you're a Baptist, you kind
of believe it's just kind of remembrance, remembering that symbolic
sater symbolic. And if you ask High Church Episcopalians every

(23:52):
now and then, they'll say, well, you know, it's symbolic,
and you don't want to tell them, well, actually, now
you sound like a Baptist, because they don't want to
sound like a Baptist, that's for sure. But you know
you have to be you have to have a very forgiving,
loose and loving attitude towards all of these things. So
what I could do to screw things up is probably
not much, because of course, our faith is based on forgiveness.

Speaker 2 (24:15):
Look look it up. It's actually it's a great deal.

Speaker 3 (24:17):
I've heard that.

Speaker 2 (24:18):
Yeah, But but.

Speaker 4 (24:21):
In fact, there is a weird thing where every now
and then, uh, if you this doesn't happen for something
like me, but if you're ordained and you and the
and you do something or you skip something in the
eucharistic prayer or like you're just trying to get through
the weekday whatever, and you may miss something or skip
something or say something to fast. Uh, and you and

(24:42):
someone in the in the in the in the congregation
is upset by that. They will call the bishop, like
like a lot of rectors get calls from the bishops saying, hey, look,
I got this complaint about you. Sometimes it's because you
were a little too political from the pulpit, or maybe
weren't political enough whatever. So there's some there's some tattletales. Well,

(25:06):
because they're people. People are tattletales. So but that's about
the only thing I have to worry about.

Speaker 3 (25:11):
Do you ever tell people you know snitches get stitches.

Speaker 4 (25:14):
That's what you kind of want to say, right, A
call from the bishop, call for the bishop.

Speaker 1 (25:20):
That sounds like the problem is, of course, you don't
have a secretary. So it's not like someone could say, Rob,
the father in law, the bishop is on the phone.

Speaker 2 (25:28):
I have the bishop on two the bishop.

Speaker 1 (25:32):
It is the bishop, sort of like Charlie right, just
to speak.

Speaker 5 (25:35):
Of the how are you, uh, mister Long, I understand
that there was a moment there was some conflict and
public theology.

Speaker 2 (25:49):
John Forth Size, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (25:52):
I h I do think you know, Rob, One of
my favorite observations of yours is that people dress and
the clothing that they wore at the hot at the
moment when they had money success, and so they stay
in that I use. And so I was just thinking,
since I just made He's here are the references that
I've made so far on the show. The Love Books,

(26:17):
Ogan Zeroes and Charlie's Angels, and Charlie carl Channing, although
Carol Channing was was was Rob's. And so this of
course was me in my teens and twenties, and much
has happened.

Speaker 2 (26:33):
In the world.

Speaker 1 (26:35):
The brilin Wall fell, Bill Clinton became president. OJ did
it nine to eleven, Iraq, the rise of Barack Obama,
the Sopranos, Oppenheimer, Barbie Trump, right, all of those. These
cultural references that I just made are fresher to me

(26:59):
or more immediate in my head, and cultural references that
I could make that I totally experienced from the nineties
to the twenty twenties, which is a little alarming if
you think about it, because Okay, so it imprinted on
me young, and so it's like vivid burned into sort

(27:19):
of like my memory board. But it's not like you
couldn't make up Polly Walnut's reference to me, or a
Simpsons reference or a Seinfeld reference or any of that.
It's just that that's not what I analogize when I
think things through.

Speaker 2 (27:37):
But also they're not funny.

Speaker 4 (27:40):
It's not this weird pleasure pleasant like every now and
then on TikTok somebody, there's these people who just serve
up old love boat stuff, right, and it's just like
mesmerizing is how bad it is. It's just hilariously great
how bad it is. And so that's like it's what
you want to remember. You want to remember the stuff
that is kind of funny and a little bit a

(28:02):
little bit unbelievable. And of course the and the irony
is that people, you know, they used to, like not
that long ago, they would do clips like that as
they look at those absurd fashions, look at the absurd
look at those pant legs.

Speaker 2 (28:16):
Yeah, and now those are all back and people.

Speaker 4 (28:19):
Are walking around pray walking around Manhattan dressed looking in
bill bottoms.

Speaker 1 (28:24):
So we trade amongst ourselves these videos off TikTok and Instagram.
There are these accounts that clip variety shows from the
nineteen sixties and the nineteen seventies. A lot of them,
by the way, Canadian, but not all Canadian. One's called
it's something like the Savannah Bananas, but it's a Cemanna
is a minor league baseball team, and it's sort of

(28:45):
like the Crazy Bananas or something like that is the
name of the Instagram account, Oh yeah, right, or some others.
And they show you these production numbers and you cannot
believe that they ever existed because they're so bizarre and
they're high spirited. They're supposed to be just.

Speaker 3 (29:06):
Like a gratty bunch variety show.

Speaker 1 (29:09):
I think that's the apotheosis of it, right, because that's
literally people who had no business being on a variety show.
They couldn't dance, they couldn't sing, They were characters from
another sitcom doing a variety show. Sids are actually like
dance troops or people who are recruited to be dancers,
doing dance numbers to pre recorded music in costumes that

(29:33):
are very loud on sets that are very loud, and
you think, I'm watching this and I cannot believe my eyes.
It's like I'm on, I'm with you on an ayahuasca journey.

Speaker 2 (29:46):
It does have that feeling. It can't make any sense.

Speaker 1 (29:50):
Yeah, But then it wasn't like that at all. This
was all bland and inoffensive.

Speaker 3 (29:58):
Then go watch Taxi Drive and see what America was like.

Speaker 1 (30:02):
It was all the opposite. It was all the opposite
of looking at something and going, I feel like I'm
a man from Mars. What am I looking at? Who
are these people? This was all done to be pleasing
to sixty year olds who would be offended if you
said darn. And now we look at it and it

(30:23):
looks as though we have taken a journey, an acid trip,
and it's so I wonder what we what were going on?
People that will make people think they're on an acid
trip in twenty fifty.

Speaker 3 (30:36):
Well, I so, like John knows, I'm I pick a
lot of fights with people. We're texting about it recently.
You know, Tucker Carlson recently said that he really thinks
feudalism was better, and we've talked about why that kind
of stuff is so incredibly stupid, right, But there are
you know, there's this whole genre of memes about this

(30:57):
is what they took from us, and they have pictures
of like nineteen fifth these houses and all that kind
of stuff. And there was one the other day that
was I guess a population control slash anti immigrant kind
of feed. I don't exactly understand like the philosophy on it,
but it was called there was the account was tweeting

(31:20):
about how this is what America was like when it
had a population of one hundred million, just one hundred
million people, sort of making the point that immigrations ruined everything, right,
And the video that they showed was from a Gillette
ad in like nineteen ninety one. It was like just

(31:40):
happy families and like for shaving or it was like
the dumbest friggin thing and like the population then was
already two hundred and ten million, and again it was
a stupid ad. But like there are the fascination that
a lot of kids to younger people have today with
not what America was actually like fifty years ago or

(32:03):
thirty years ago, but they think that like commercials and
clips from TV shows were representative of like some real thing.
And it's like the dumbest form of nostalgia I've seen
in years, because it's like so easily checked, it so
obviously not real, but like people are into.

Speaker 1 (32:22):
It so again, so that stuff totally fascinating to me,
because it's like if you went back in a time
machine before we were born. Like my fantasy time machine
thing would be to like be in New York in
the late forties or early fifties to see what it
was like, because that's my sort of great sort of
like crime free, clean Broadway is the you know, it's

(32:45):
the center of everything, and you know, and it's America
and it's high water mark and enthusiasm and excitement and
all that. And I would get in the time machine,
I would get out and you know what, I would
discover There was no air conditioning anywhere except the theaters,
and so from June until September, riding on a subway,

(33:06):
walking down the block, working in your office would be agony,
and you had to wear a suit, so you had
to wear and maybe you had a summer weight suit,
but maybe you didn't have enough money to have summer
weight and winterweight suits, so you were in the same
suit and you would just be unhappy all day.

Speaker 4 (33:27):
I loved the day, and the lack of summer weight
suiting is how you go back and that's been terrible.

Speaker 2 (33:37):
That's summer weight suits.

Speaker 1 (33:38):
So they invented the Poplin suit to help you help
you through the summer.

Speaker 2 (33:43):
It was like still casual fridays. Put it that way.

Speaker 1 (33:46):
So I'm just saying that, like even when I have
these dreams of times that were literally ten years before
I was born, even in those ten years, yeah, life
improved so materially that I would go back in time
and be miserable in the experience of right not being

(34:09):
able to make an out of town phone call to
somebody because it would cost twenty two dollars when twenty
two dollars was one hundred dollars, or get on a
plane because that was not even really achievable except for
very wealthy people and that kind of thing. It's just
interesting how nostalgia works.

Speaker 4 (34:27):
But I think your question those interesting is like what
I mean, and you know, we are now at the
time of year for me, in the holiday time, meaning Halloween,
where you can on YouTube see the best version of
what we're talking about.

Speaker 2 (34:40):
Would you be Paul Lynde Hollywood? And I'd say that.

Speaker 4 (34:44):
What I love about that is it had Donnie Marie Osmond,
Florence Henderson.

Speaker 2 (34:52):
And kiss and kiss yes and right yes, and they're
all there together.

Speaker 1 (34:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (34:58):
And Paul Lynde has to dance, he has to dance
Misco Yeah, and uh.

Speaker 1 (35:03):
Uh in a in a vampire outfit.

Speaker 4 (35:06):
And Ros Pinky Tuscadero, Ros Kelly, Pinky Ros.

Speaker 2 (35:10):
Pinky Tuscadero, Tell Kelly and else.

Speaker 3 (35:16):
Sorry, was Pinky Tuscadaro and anything else?

Speaker 1 (35:19):
I don't think so. You know, although Pinky Duscadaro's sister,
Leather Tuscadero was in fact a punk rock star, Yeah, yeah, yeah,
and Susie Quatro. There was this one sort of weirdly
hit moment on Happy Days where they brought in a
New Waves singer to play Pinky Tuscandaro's sister. So like

(35:40):
as though you know you would suddenly bring on Patti
Smith to be on Simon and Simon.

Speaker 3 (35:48):
Is that I still give you crap about it every
now and then. There was an episode of the Commentary
podcast where Continetti or Seth or somebody made a reference
to Kevin McCarthy back when he was still speaking, and
you stopped him to explain to the audience that it
wasn't the actor Kevin McCarthy, but the actual speaking And
we're just glibly talking about Pinky Tuscanero right up.

Speaker 2 (36:12):
Necessary, Yes I would.

Speaker 1 (36:16):
Yes, by the way, was Mary McCarthy's brother. I just
want you guys to know that if you didn't know well.

Speaker 3 (36:21):
And and Pinky tuscan Era was the Malachi brother's cousin,
So like, you know, what are you gonna do.

Speaker 1 (36:25):
The Malatchi brothers.

Speaker 2 (36:26):
You don't know the mala brothers even I don't know who.

Speaker 1 (36:29):
That is very frightening. I just made he had to
jump over, you know, in order to beat the Malachi brothers,
he had to jump over the cars. And that was
before he jumped.

Speaker 3 (36:41):
Well, the Malachi brothers were famous for the Malachie crunch.
I mean, let's just.

Speaker 1 (36:45):
Was really one of the most important Auto Derby move. Yeah, okay,
you're assuming.

Speaker 4 (36:52):
That peoples assume that the commentary the only one are
the ones who do.

Speaker 2 (37:00):
Yeah, everyone that I'll see you know.

Speaker 4 (37:02):
Some people tweet like, hey, is it time for a
new glob and like what you want another one?

Speaker 2 (37:07):
All right?

Speaker 3 (37:09):
I have the nurse reminded me it's time for a
new glob.

Speaker 2 (37:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (37:12):
For for people who do like this, there is a
podcast I simply must impress upon you. It's a new podcast.
It's been on for six or seven weeks. It's called
Fun for All Ages, and it is the podcast of
Frank Santo Padre, who, if you are a podcast person,
you know because he was the co host of the

(37:33):
greatest pop culture podcast ever. That was Gilbert Godfried's amazing
Colossal podcast, in which Godfreed and Frank Santa Padre interviewed
second and third rate Hollywood professionals from the last sixty
or seventy years every week and ask them crazy questions
and it was absolutely delightful. Anyway, Frank has a new podcast.

(37:56):
It's called Fun for All Ages. And just to give
you an example of how this would be, child's play
for the Fun for All Ages podcast, which just did
a series of podcasts on game shows of the fifties, sixties,
unsuccessful game shows of the fifties, sixties, and seventies, and
the hilarious backstage stories of what happened on these game shows.

Speaker 4 (38:20):
But my question then is like, just to go back
to your question, is what are we experiencing now that
we don't know is actually cheesy and awful and will
eventually and everyone will look back on.

Speaker 2 (38:35):
It and snicker.

Speaker 4 (38:36):
Or is that a thing that now that was unlimited
band with unlimited store with everybody's experiencing their period of
culture or whatever they want to experience. It, is that
something that we're not going to have anymore? That nostalgia
has to be a thing that a past that was
buried and forgotten for a while and then is resurrected
and everything is some extent sorry.

Speaker 3 (38:54):
Have to be shared to asserme.

Speaker 4 (38:56):
Yeah, yeah, but if everything is like I mean kind
a friend in the music business who said that the
thing that really hurt the music business wasn't streaming or
anything like that, it was unlimited store width because the
goal of music was that you replace the music you're
listening to with new music. So you and you don't

(39:17):
get up and change the CD changer, or you're the
LPs you're listening to are the ones that are right there,
and you tend to listen to them over and over
again and put them away and never go back to them.
So new music competes with new music and not with
everything in your music collection all the time. But if that,
if it's as easy to listen to something that's one
hundred years old or ten years old, or five years
old or a day old as it is to listen

(39:39):
to anything else, that all music competes with all music
all the time, because it's all the same amount of effort.

Speaker 2 (39:48):
And I wonder whether that's the way it's going to be.

Speaker 4 (39:51):
I mean, we're gonna look back and say, isn't that
funny I've saw old Sopranos episode. Can you believe that
people bought that.

Speaker 1 (40:00):
There are things? I mean, I would love that my
political biases would be fulfilled by what I imagine would
happen in twenty fifty when they'd say can you believe
that this is the kind of thing that they thought
was okay? And say the mainstreaming of trans for example,
or drag that twenty five years from now people would say,
oh my god, look at what they thought was like

(40:24):
ok that what they were trying to get across to
people was okay, and it's actually really quite horrible. But
that would be my hope. I can't I assume reality
television would have some version of that, or like clips
from the view, like serious conversations on shows like The

(40:45):
View where morons with audiences in the millions blathered ignorantly
about stuff that people in the future will know was
absolutely preposterous, like you know that thilan All causes autism,
tylo all and and circumcision cause autism.

Speaker 3 (41:07):
Alex Jones is not going to be treated well by history.

Speaker 1 (41:11):
But would you laugh at him or would you go,
oh my god, that's really well.

Speaker 4 (41:14):
It depends, you know, are we are we laughing at
him from a culture that's survived and thrived and flourished,
or were laughing at him from some.

Speaker 2 (41:23):
Kind of sinking ruin.

Speaker 4 (41:25):
Yeah, yeah, like like look that more on ha ha
yeah yeah.

Speaker 1 (41:29):
I mean we're looking at him and saying, my god,
t s L. I mean, it's so hard to understand
the wisdom of an Alex Jones from from our perspective today,
where he wasn't.

Speaker 2 (41:39):
Honored in his time, didn't you suit him? Yeah, like
just for telling the truth.

Speaker 1 (41:45):
Who is the writer who was neglected? Who is now?
You know, who's like the Anthony Trollop or Herman Melville
who emerges again? It turns out that it's you know,
somebody who was writing you know, fan slash fanfic porn
on you know, it's like fifty shades of gray. People
are like, people made fun of this at the time. Yeah,
but from our perspective in twenty sixty, this is this

(42:07):
is greater than Wuthering Heights or something like that.

Speaker 4 (42:10):
I remember a million billion years ago when Dan Quail
was vice president or whether maybe he was just just
had just finished being vice president. And his wife, I
think Susan Quail Marilyn Marilyn Quayle wrote a novel, Yes
she did.

Speaker 1 (42:29):
That's her sister, Yes, with her sister.

Speaker 2 (42:31):
And the novel was called Embrace the Serpent.

Speaker 4 (42:36):
Yes, And everybody was like, huh, it's an interesting title,
Embrace their What else do you want to do to
the serpent?

Speaker 1 (42:43):
There's other there's stuff about the serpent in that, there
is serpentine material in that in that book.

Speaker 3 (42:50):
Well, don't Circumcise the Serpent, though, because James novel might
be remembered.

Speaker 1 (42:55):
Interestingly, James Comy co authored with James Patterson. I think,
didn't he Can you write a book with James Patters?

Speaker 2 (43:01):
I think so.

Speaker 3 (43:02):
I don't know, but I just got a copy in
advanced copy of Harlan Coben and Withersman.

Speaker 1 (43:07):
I got that to wow, Harlan Coben has written a
novel with Reese Witherspoon, which is to say that Harlan
Coben has written a novel another. Can I tell a
story again? I'm gonna tell a story I've told before,
but it's about Jonahs much so Johan has to give
me permission because it's actually his mother's story. But it's

(43:27):
a story about being My favorite ghostwriting story of all time,
aside from the story of Charles Barkley reading somebody reading
a passage to Charles Barkley from his own autobiography and
saying who wrote that? On on on the air on television.
It's like, I don't know who wrote that? And I said, well,
it's your autobiography anyway. Maureen Dean, the wife of John Dean,

(43:53):
the Watergate lawyer, who was very very very pretty, and
Maureen was Maureen was very very pretty. John was fine anyway,
but she was very pretty. And she was played by
Meredith Baxter in the and All the President's Men. That's
how pretty she was and famous. She said something like,

(44:13):
we have honor in our house in the movie, like
she was the hero of All the President's Men. Anyway,
Maureene Dean was contracted to write a novel about Washington,
as people were doing in the wake of Watergate, like Earlokman,
John Arlokman wrote a novel and all this, and so
Mariene Dean wrote a novel called Washington Wives, whose author

(44:34):
was in fact Lucy Anne Goldberg, not Mariene Dean. And
the tour they paid her a lot of money at
the time, whatever that was, and paid Jonah's mother whatever
percentage of.

Speaker 3 (44:47):
Not enough, not enough to tell you right now.

Speaker 1 (44:50):
And the press tour begins on a Monday on the
Today Show, and Mariene Dean is seven fifteen in the more.
I think it's like, here's Maureene Dean, very excited to
have her with her first novel, Washington Wives. Marine tell
us the plot of your novel or something like that.

(45:11):
And it turned out as this interview went on for
about five minutes that Marine Dean had not read Washington Wives.
And it occurred to Brian Gumbel or Tom Brokaw, whoever
was the host, who was taught Barbara Walters, yeah whatever,
who was ever interviewing her, that she had not read
Washington Wives. And apparently it was agonizing to watch, and

(45:38):
Simon and Schuster or Crown or whoever it was who
had published the book canceled the tour and that was it,
and that was the that was the beginning and the
end of Washington Fortunately, I believe Jonah's mother paid a
flat fee, so she was not in fact going to
benefit from any sales. But that is the great ghostwriting

(45:59):
story of all time, that she could not be bothered
to read to read the book that had her name
on the jacket.

Speaker 3 (46:04):
So a similar story which we all know. And I'm
just kind of more curious about the death of shame
kind of thing. Look, I've written things that I got
stuff wrong and I'm embarrassed by and had to do retractions.
I'm sure you have, John, I don't know if.

Speaker 1 (46:20):
Never millions of words that I've gotten nothing wrong.

Speaker 2 (46:25):
But so like I have that edition.

Speaker 4 (46:28):
I have the benefit of never writing anything that's factual.

Speaker 3 (46:32):
There you go. So but Naili Wolf right when she
had her book, and if no one's ever seen it
out there, you can find it, I'm sure on YouTube.
She had this theory about I can't remember what the
theory was, something I'm having to do with sex or

(46:52):
women or whatever. And the whole, the whole thing was
premised on her supposed like deep archival research of original
sources in English history where she said all these people
had been executed for committing these sins or whatever, and

(47:13):
she gets she's going on and on about it, and
then this BBC or Sky News I think it was
a BBC interviewer says, well, you know the phrase that
you keep citing, you know, recorded as executed or something
like that doesn't mean they were put to death. It
means that the sentence was expedited or whatever it was.

(47:35):
And it completely, one hundred percent undermined the entire thesis
of the book. And that is like one of the
most horrifying things to me as a writer to find
out that I spent a year, two years, three years
writing a book based on something entirely wrong. Now I
know people are going to say, well, I've done that,

(47:57):
but like the thing is, like I can offend what
I wrote, Like she basically just has to say, never mind,
I just.

Speaker 1 (48:04):
I just looked it up. So the story, So just
to get the story, is that in records, if men
who were convicted of sodomy in Victorian England, it could
be recorded that there was swift execution of their sentence,
which would mean that they were quickly put in jail
for thirty days and then released. And she read this

(48:27):
as they were swiftly executed, and in fact, no one
was executed for sodomy in Victorian London. And the whole
thesis of the book was about how Victorian Victorianism was
so horrified by sex that they put people to death
for sex crimes, which was not true. And therefore not
only was the book undermined, but in fact it was

(48:48):
withdrawn from publication and pulped in England. And then somehow
she kind of turned around and had it published in
the United States because somebody didn't read that part of
it or something like that, and then it happened Toga
and in the United States because she didn't care that
it wasn't true or not true.

Speaker 3 (49:03):
But what do you just, like, wouldn't you just give
up on, like be trying to be a public figure
if he did something. I just I find it just
utterly bizarre that you can just sort of be like, eh,
mistakes happened, kind of, It's okay.

Speaker 1 (49:16):
She's now She's now like twice a week on Mark
Stein's podcast.

Speaker 3 (49:19):
So, uh is Mark Stein or.

Speaker 1 (49:21):
Whatever she she became because she was a she was
a COVID skeptic, which I mean that she believed that
there were microchips that Bill Gates had put in the
in the vaccine, right eptic uh, and this world of
COVID skepticism that went beyond simple you know, they're overdosing us,
and there's too much of it and kids don't need

(49:42):
it and all of that stuff, which turned into the
this is an effort to you know, like biometrically chip
us across the globe, which sadly Mark and his decline
I believe. I don't want to get super him, but
he's a friend, he's a former friend, end of ours.
I mean, I still would be friendly to him. I

(50:02):
just don't like a lot of the directions they've taken.
But Naomi Wolf became sort of like one of his people,
and I think even went on one of his cruises
and all that, because she she in fact is nuts,
like she went nuts, like has Nutso theories about aliens
and all kinds of stuff.

Speaker 2 (50:23):
But what did you think about circumcision?

Speaker 4 (50:26):
Well, I believe I'm sure not the only I'm not
trying to bring this up, but I find this, yeah, fascinating.

Speaker 1 (50:32):
Yeah, so you're referring to, of course.

Speaker 2 (50:36):
Yes, averring that circumcision causes autism.

Speaker 1 (50:39):
Well, it's a complication because it's circumcision that is that
correlated with autism, which is then treated by Thailand. All
it's not simply circumcision itself, but circumcision, the pain of
which is then treated with Now two things about.

Speaker 3 (50:58):
Them, I would take some til another clarifier, he says,
the studies that show early circumcision, which I think is
code for Jew.

Speaker 1 (51:08):
Well, okay, no, not necessarily, because early circumcision Jews are
circumcised on the Jews of the eighth day of their life.
If you're in a hospital and you are circumcised in
the hospital, you were circumcised, I guess twenty you know,
within hours of your of your birth. So but of

(51:30):
course an attack on circumcision, which by the way, has
happened in Europe. Like European European countries have attempted to
claim that this is general mutilation and have attempted to
ban circumcision, and I think in at least in one
country circumcision was has been banned, which is essentially a
way of banning Jews, because the fundamental Jewish covenant is

(51:52):
the Act, is the law, which literally means covenant is
that that you are to be circumcised on the eighth
day if you were a male, and so therefore going
at circumcision is a way of basically forcing any believing Jew,
or basically any Jew who wants to be identified as
a Jew, leave the country forever.

Speaker 2 (52:12):
But I mean, you know, I mean Jews as side.

Speaker 1 (52:14):
Yes, sixty percent of Americans are circumcised.

Speaker 3 (52:18):
Jesus side a phrase you use a lot at pub theology.

Speaker 2 (52:21):
I wish I could.

Speaker 1 (52:23):
Jews are never aside in my head.

Speaker 2 (52:25):
We never have.

Speaker 4 (52:25):
But Jesus side, you know, there's a you know, Europe's
got more Muslims than Jews, and they're also like, are
there are there autistic Muslims?

Speaker 2 (52:34):
Run around it?

Speaker 1 (52:35):
Right? But So the central thing is that what he
wanted to do is combine his idea of circumcision, which is,
you know, like Matt Sullivan went on a whole thing
about circumcision being a general mutilation.

Speaker 2 (52:49):
I guess, oh yeah, there is that likes it.

Speaker 1 (52:51):
He likes it raw easy, okay, anyway, I'm just saying
he embraced the he knows, he knows which set serpent
he wants to embrace, and he wants one with the
coat on.

Speaker 4 (53:03):
And he wants turtle neck exactly.

Speaker 1 (53:08):
Anyway, So sixty five percent of people in the United States
are circumcised. So what he what he what he has
done here?

Speaker 5 (53:13):
Well?

Speaker 2 (53:14):
Men, men?

Speaker 1 (53:15):
Well obviously yes, okay, so okay, fair enough quote unquote,
well yeah, those assigned the gender male at birth, that's right, Okay, yeah, okay,
there's no way.

Speaker 3 (53:26):
This conversation could go anywhere.

Speaker 4 (53:27):
But go on, oh yeah, guess what I have a
I have a related topic already returned to Cornhold.

Speaker 1 (53:34):
Anyway, just to finish it, he says that it's circumcision
followed by a dose of tile and all for the
pain that is correlated with autism in some fashion. Now,
I don't know about non Jewish circumcisions. But I can
tell you I know sadly having to had to witness

(53:58):
my own sons, having been through one myself, which I
fortunately have no memory of, and having been to many. Uh.
The treatment for for dealing with circumcision at the point
of circumcision and afterward is not til and al. It's
something even more funny, which is that you get the

(54:19):
kid drunk because you give you take a piece of
cotton uh, and you dip it in wine, and you
let the baby suck on the cotton ball while the
snipping is being done. And then when it's done, you
put on antibiotic ointment and a bandage. And that's how
you treat. You don't give the kid til and all.

(54:41):
I don't believe that anybody giving.

Speaker 4 (54:43):
A kid alcohol seems more Episcopalian than Jewish. But so
episcopalian you give to get a little bit of barkini
olive kids like like Gibson, so.

Speaker 1 (54:54):
They so anyway, So uh, the Jewish attack doesn't work
because no jew gives a kid. First of all, I
don't think any I'm sure there's no hospital on earth
that gives a baby baby tilt all. So the whole
thing is him in his psychopathy going absolutely hogwile.

Speaker 4 (55:17):
In every instance of Thailand, all every application of Tilan
all so you.

Speaker 1 (55:20):
Can literally said, we're trying to prove this. He said,
we're doing studies to try to prove this. Now, is
that how you do studies? You do studies to try
to prove this? Anyway, what's the related topic?

Speaker 4 (55:35):
The related topic is in West Africa and parts of Africa.
This is the thing that it is a general mutilation
of female circumcision, which is a very controversial topic. And
there's by all means let's talk about it on lap.
Well there's like I just say this this ends up.
I don't quite know where I'm how I'm gonna land

(55:57):
the plane yet, but let's just go for the ride.

Speaker 3 (55:59):
Let the record show that this is like the first
or second in twelve fifteen whatever year since we've been
doing this were Scott Immigrant is not here for the
production side of it to say, please know and he's
going to find out that this is where this went
so anyway, right.

Speaker 4 (56:15):
So, and it's like there's a there's cornhole when you're
circumcised exactly right. There are NGOs designed to try to
stop this barbaric practice. A friend of mine was working
for one, and and you know, it's it's a great
I mean, you know, I wish them the best. I
think it's terrible what they're doing. And she is at
a dinner in Cambridge, Massachusetts with a professor, a bunch

(56:41):
of people and a professor who was I think he
was from Molli, but a very westernized professor from Africa
who was I think a professor of economics or something
or some stem something. And he said, well, what are
you doing? He said, well, you know, i've spin in
Malli I was doing this and may maybe been Niger

(57:02):
but something like.

Speaker 2 (57:02):
That, And what are you doing?

Speaker 4 (57:04):
And he said, well, I mean, assuming this professor western
from Harvard.

Speaker 2 (57:09):
Would have said, well, that's good for you.

Speaker 4 (57:12):
And she told him what she was doing, try to
stop female mutilation, female circumcision, and he said, oh, well,
you know it's I mean, it's kind of a good practice, right,
I mean, otherwise the women just go insane. And she
should have looked at him like, is this the is
this a bizarre but kind of brilliant joke that he's
making and she said, sorry, sorry, what he goes, Yes,

(57:34):
you know, people in the West don't like to hear it,
but it's really better for them. And she kind of
slunk away, thinking, Oh, this is You can be in
the faculty lounge at Harvard in Cambridge, you'd have tenure.
You could have a degree from Harvard or Yale or
Princeton or Oxford. You can be you can read the Atlantic,
and you could be wearing a j press suit and

(58:00):
lift the hood. You never know what you're gonna find.

Speaker 3 (58:02):
Well, I told you the story. My dad was doing
business in London and he was having dinner with a
very very very westernized, highly educated like Oxford or Cambridge,
Muslim guy, and and my dad asked him, just out
of legitimate, just theological curiosity, and he asked, do women

(58:28):
go to heaven in Islam? And the guy puts his
napkin down, pushes back from the table and says, huh,
that's a fascinating question. And he wasn't trying to be
a jerk or but this is just like it had
never occurred to him one way or the other, you know,

(58:50):
which I think is itself kind of fascinating.

Speaker 1 (58:52):
You know, my favorite cultural relativism, the Great It's probably apocryphal,
but the Great cultural relativism. Anecdote of all time involves
the British imperium in India. Colonel Napier, Is this the
Colonel Napeer story?

Speaker 3 (59:12):
I think, okay, I think okay.

Speaker 1 (59:16):
So it is a real story. So the story is
that a man dies and the ideas that his wife
is to throw herself on the funeral pyre and burn
herself up to death. And she and either she didn't
want to do it or this was Colonel Napier was
informed that this is what was to happen. Uh and

(59:39):
and was told by some Hindu elder of some sort
that this was the cultural this was their tradition, this
was their way, and that this was what they needed
to do, and that this was something that that you know,
the British should respect, and that if this isn't this
is the same story. Jonah, Yeah, I actually you do? Okay,
please then go ahead.

Speaker 3 (59:59):
Yeah. So he's a he's informed that, you know, there's
a rich tradition and custom in the country for wife burning,
and he says, be it. So this burning of widows
is your custom, prepare the funeral pile. But my nation
also has a custom when men burn women alive. We
hang them and confiscate all of their property. My carpenters

(01:00:20):
shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned.
When the widow is consumed, let us all act according
to our national customs.

Speaker 1 (01:00:29):
It is, it is, it is. It is one of
the great stories because, of course, when you come right
down to it, nobody is a cultural relativist. Not really,
no one is ever a cultural relativist. We are supposed
to accept barbaric customs that we are, we think barbaric,
in order to create social calm and social peace and

(01:00:50):
all of that. And and we we don't really ever
accept it, but we pretend to, or we are to.
We're we're told we are obliged to.

Speaker 3 (01:01:03):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (01:01:03):
And then when you when you live in a world
of cultural relativism, like your friend uh in the with
this westernized molly professor, you simply have no vocabulary for it, because,
on the one hand, what are you going to say
to him? You live in a world in which you're
not supposed to say, well, that's the most disgusting thing
I've ever heard. What how how dare I don't want to.

Speaker 4 (01:01:27):
Be I don't want to come off as you know.
Hashtag team suti. But but the tradition is that she
is supposed to volunteer, she's gonna she wants to throw
herself on the funeral pier. The word suti, actually the
Sanskrit it means to become. It isn't even that, it
isn't a thing that you do, it's a thing you are.

(01:01:49):
And to consider the highest form of being for the
wife to throw herself on the funeral I'm not trying
your your.

Speaker 1 (01:02:00):
Your you have you have proved your South Asian. I did,
in fact, take an entire year course at the University
of Chicago in South Asian civilization and taught by famous fame,
very famous people, uh uh, and found it a remarkable,

(01:02:24):
extraordinary civilization with remarkable extraordinary works, the Mota, the Ramayana,
all of that. And yet nonetheless I prefer my own
and I believe, and I believe that I believe that
the cosmology of of the West and of the Judeo

(01:02:44):
Christian tradition, which speaks to human dignity and the importance
the centrality of the person and the person's relation to
the divine, as opposed to the Hindu view, which is
a kind of chaos. Well, there's a kind of uh
uh unorganized system where the organization is very hard to discern,

(01:03:11):
and it involves berths and rebirths and reincarnations and a
very hard end and orders that are not to.

Speaker 2 (01:03:18):
Be no rest, no summer weight suits, that's for sure.

Speaker 1 (01:03:22):
Well, but they don't need suits because they have They
have more comfortable clothing than we do.

Speaker 3 (01:03:32):
So do you know the other I think it, sadly
might be apocryphal, but the famous other quote attributed to
Charles Napier, I do not so when because he was
like the Viceroy of India, right, he was the military
commander and he when he captured the province of sind
he Again, I think it's apocryphal, sadly, but he was

(01:03:56):
reported to have sent a note to like the Home
Office with the sing goal Latin word pacave and pacave
means I have sinned, and it was supposedly one of
the most legendary puns of the ninety.

Speaker 1 (01:04:10):
Yes, that is, by the way, Charles Napierre is not
only this legendary figure but a character actor of the
seventies and eighties. I was famous for famous for being
in Jonathan Demi movies and playing the Chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff and Austin Powers International Many History.

Speaker 3 (01:04:28):
And he owns the bar. No he yeah, he he, No,
he doesn't know the bar. He is the head of
the Honky Tonk band in the Blues Brothers.

Speaker 1 (01:04:36):
Oh yes he is. Yet there you go, so nap.
Through the centuries, Charles contributed to our civilization.

Speaker 2 (01:04:44):
I work with him. I forget what I did.

Speaker 4 (01:04:45):
He was, he was on there and and we were
remembering all the all the things he'd been in. And
he was a cop. He had his face carved off
in Silence of the Lambs and all that things. Right,
we were kind of talking about it, and he was.
He was really good. He played he was supposed to
play a little menacing I forget. It might have been cheers,
I can't remember.

Speaker 2 (01:05:04):
And our.

Speaker 4 (01:05:07):
Our our writer's assistant at the time was sort of
an older guy, uh, flamboyantly gay, older flamboyantly gay guy
was would would you know, take notes and do our
script stuff? And and we were talking about it and
he said, uh huh. He was also in other kinds
of movies. Oh well, well, you work stopped for the day,

(01:05:33):
Like we gotta know what those movies are and like
Tony Danza, Yeah, yeah, like, but I think they were
kind of more tame sixties kind of you know, but
they were definitely movies of a certain to appeal to
specific audience demo.

Speaker 3 (01:05:49):
Mostly shown in eight milimeters kind of thing.

Speaker 2 (01:05:51):
Yeah, I think, mostly shown in the you know, the
backs of places.

Speaker 1 (01:05:54):
Yeah, you know, I saw I watched about half of
The Blues Brothers a couple of months ago, and I
was stuck because I remembered when I had seen it
when it came out that I found it overproduced in
loud and noisy and garish, and I was struck, It's
going to sound like a weird thing to say, by
how beautiful it was, how beautifully it was shot, what

(01:06:16):
it looked, the sort of the portrait of Chicago mostly
at night, and these the composition. I don't think of
John Landis, who directed it, as a visual stylist or anything,
but it just reminded me that there were these movies
when as long as you're willing to spend a certain
amount of money on them, where the craft of filmmaking

(01:06:37):
was just so high that you could rely on making
a movie like The Blues Brothers and the and the
photography being forty five years later kind of like I
like I beautiful.

Speaker 4 (01:06:52):
Part of that was, I think because you couldn't fix
it later, especially that movie.

Speaker 2 (01:06:56):
Oh that can't fix it later.

Speaker 4 (01:06:58):
You only you want shot this, And especially with that movie,
with the music numbers, there's there's no capturing it again,
and there's no way to manipulate the image or manipulate
the sound, like the amount of They just say this
when I was in film school, and they and I
still say this to young filmmakers too, which is that
even today, nobody cares what.

Speaker 2 (01:07:17):
A movie really looks like.

Speaker 4 (01:07:19):
If you're going to spend money on something and you're
making a movie, and it's the sound. The sound is
the most important thing. And obviously if you're gonna make
a big movie, it's gotta the visuals matter, but the
sound is the first most important thing. And I think,
I think when you're when you're making the movies back then,
and you had and especially that movie, we had a
big budget and and you could make it. You could

(01:07:40):
spend time and make it really great. I mean that
those that Aretha Franklin music number.

Speaker 3 (01:07:45):
Oh fantastic.

Speaker 1 (01:07:46):
It's I mean, the whole movie is fantastic, and I
really did not I genuinely did not appreciate it when
I was nineteen and saw it. Then I found it,
I found it sort of overdone, Like it was just
seemed over done to me. And now it is a
kind of fairy tale. It has this sort of eternal

(01:08:08):
fairy tale quality. It's not set in any real period.
It's not you know, there's nothing dated about it because
it's not really about anything real.

Speaker 2 (01:08:18):
It's in the middle of some weird time.

Speaker 3 (01:08:20):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, curious about your point about First of all,
I'm not sure I agree that people don't care what
a movie looks like. But we can have that conversation
a lot of time.

Speaker 4 (01:08:30):
Well, you mean if you have a choice, like, yeah, okay,
if you if you're a young filmmaker, don't obsess about picture,
obsess about sound.

Speaker 3 (01:08:37):
The But uh, for some reason, one of the pay
cable networks that I one of the many pay cable
networks that I subscribe to, has been running a movie
that I had never heard of when it came out,
called Terminator Woman, and it was clearly trying to play
off of the name terminator because whatever, but it's not

(01:09:00):
about a cyborg from the Future. It's this woman who
knows how to kickbox and it's But what I find
fascinating about I mean I haven't watched the whole thing,
but dawdling over it a couple of times I've seen
it is how unbelievably badly shot the thing is. Yeah,
and it's in nineteen ninety three, and I just didn't

(01:09:22):
think there were still making movies that looked that bad.
I mean, Jim Katta was better shot.

Speaker 1 (01:09:31):
Well.

Speaker 4 (01:09:31):
Look, remember that that's the that's the high point of
video rentals. So that's a maazing for the Blockbuster video
rental box.

Speaker 2 (01:09:44):
You know, you and four people.

Speaker 4 (01:09:45):
In your family or in your group are at the
Blockbuster and you're trying to pick a thing to rent.

Speaker 2 (01:09:50):
Yeah, so it's all sold on that picture.

Speaker 4 (01:09:53):
And so they were just churning these things out, and
they had there was like the Hollywood sort of in
a middle zone. It's in a middle zone now where
you had it was easier to make these movies, easier
to distribute these movies. But these it's still kind of
costs money to make them, and that you didn't want
to spend the money on it.

Speaker 2 (01:10:12):
They were gonna look terrible.

Speaker 4 (01:10:14):
I mean, I you know, one of the biggest, one
of the biggest streaming hits ever right or at least
right now, is are these Reacher shows? And they are
They are atrocious looking television. I mean, I think everyone
should be just.

Speaker 1 (01:10:30):
I mean, they look worse. They look worse than a
backlot show.

Speaker 2 (01:10:34):
They should be slapped.

Speaker 4 (01:10:35):
It's like they're shooting it all in something in your
background in Georgia. Yeah, yeah, it's terrible. It's terrible. And
you could see what they're doing. They're making everything, they
shoot everything in a weird light and weird night time,
so they don't ever have to pay for backing of anything.
And and they're reusing the reusing locations within a within

(01:10:57):
an episode.

Speaker 2 (01:10:59):
Oh this is the coffee up. Well now now it's
the church.

Speaker 4 (01:11:01):
It's like this is and you're just you're just you're
uplighting it and but nobody cares.

Speaker 1 (01:11:10):
You wanted to talk before we go, You wanted to
talk about this weird phenomenon of these Chinese.

Speaker 2 (01:11:20):
Made am I the only one.

Speaker 1 (01:11:21):
No, I've been watching them myself, so out of China.
In the model of Quibi, which was the two billion
dollar raised video streaming service that Jeffrey Katzenberg started You
Could Watch on your Phone that started just to the
round around the time of of COVID and failed in

(01:11:44):
three months and lost its entire investment. China is making
these serialized movies and TV shows. Yes, in English, and
they're making in all languages. And every episode they're seventy
episodes and they each last a minute, or there's sixty

(01:12:07):
episodes and they last two minutes or something like that.

Speaker 2 (01:12:09):
And the idea is to get and they're called out like.

Speaker 1 (01:12:11):
My billionaire boss is getting me pregnant exclamation pointeh or
something like that. And if you if you're on Facebook
or you're on something like that, they will, right, they
will sort of throw it into your feed like in
the middle of it, and you watch a minute of
it and you're like, what the hell is this? Well, yeah,

(01:12:34):
they're pretty performers.

Speaker 2 (01:12:36):
They're like silent movies.

Speaker 1 (01:12:37):
Yeah, because they're written by AI. I literally think they're written.

Speaker 2 (01:12:41):
They're written by AI, and they are.

Speaker 4 (01:12:44):
They are all the same pattern of the ones I
don't I don't get my billionaire boss wants to get
me pregnant. I get revenge stories. It's a lot of
revenge and there's one on now that I just keep getting.
It's like, it's like this woman and shit, well everybody's
signing documents in front of the like four people holding

(01:13:05):
up phones and were supposed to be the media, and
this big boss is she's giving up her I'm giving
up my empire to my son. And then the minute
she gives up the empire, turns out her husband and
her son and her assistant have been includes against her.
And even I'm making it sound more sophisticated, it really
is just people sort of standing in a line, misser blocking.

Speaker 2 (01:13:25):
It's all in a one shot saying.

Speaker 4 (01:13:27):
I couldn't love a hag like you go and live
in the dirt.

Speaker 2 (01:13:30):
And I'm actually, I think that's actually that's a lot of.

Speaker 4 (01:13:33):
Dial kind of dialogue they have, and so right, and
then then eventually, of course there's this great moment where
there's revenge on on the bad people. But but before that,
they really want you to download the app. You know,
they're trying to get you to download the app.

Speaker 1 (01:13:45):
There is and I did, oh man, you didn't, I
did well. I canceled it, but I downloaded it for
a months because I wanted to see what the hell
this was.

Speaker 3 (01:13:54):
And now the Chinese Communist Party has all your bank records, no,
no doubt, no doubt.

Speaker 1 (01:13:58):
But I camera wood. It's called because it's on my iPad,
and I don't have my iPad with me. But they
have different they have things that are romances, they have
things that are vampires, they have things that are revenge.
They're called and they have these crazy titles that sound
like they were transliterated from or you know, like you know,

(01:14:20):
literally translated from the Chinese, like hey, boss, don't kill
that vampire, exclamation point, something like that. And supposedly I
read some article in some trade saying, people really think,
oh maybe I heard Matt Bellanie on the town. People
really think this is the future. This is going to

(01:14:42):
be the future, the one minute movie on TikTok. And
you know, there are now Americans who are going on
trying to raise hundreds of millions of dollars to make
to do versions on this, And I, on the one hand,
I look at it and I think this is never
going to work. It's only what it is because it's
sort of like some bizarre version of a Hallmark movie

(01:15:04):
in which you watch it for a minute and it
gives you a little taste of something and then you
go away. You're not gonna pay subscription money for it.
It's not worth it. It's just you know. But maybe
I'm wrong. Maybe this is the future. Maybe everything is
going to come in one minute movies in one minute
increments or cereals and one minute increments.

Speaker 2 (01:15:21):
I I problem with that.

Speaker 1 (01:15:22):
I didn't think to Twitter would work either.

Speaker 3 (01:15:24):
What do I know?

Speaker 4 (01:15:25):
But the problem with that, I think is that once
you boil out, boil a story down to the one minute,
they all sound the same.

Speaker 2 (01:15:31):
You know, it's all it's all you know.

Speaker 4 (01:15:33):
I mean, King Lear is one of these like old
man gives up a treaty and then they turn on
get out way. To me, old man, it's just yea
and then he but he doesn't get his revenge and
in this version he gets his one minute revenge.

Speaker 3 (01:15:45):
And the drags in the middle.

Speaker 1 (01:15:47):
I'm not dead and drama is the same to the Greeks,
if the if, if he would be yes, if dick
it no.

Speaker 4 (01:15:58):
I just mean that that the point is that you
boil it down to a minute, everything kind of gets
to be a minute. It has that logic to it.
Who knows, but I am mesmerized by them. But they're
also like, there's another genre. The cheaper genre is just
their audio. They're doing Reddit stories and turning them into audio,
and just an AI voice just narrates a Reddit story.

Speaker 2 (01:16:19):
But they're almost always the same.

Speaker 4 (01:16:20):
There's always this outrageous behavior by people, by your family.

Speaker 1 (01:16:24):
Yeah, well, there's a whole Reddit category which is called
AI t A yes, am I? The ass blank right
and the store And so some people go on Reddit
and they're like, my daughter said I. You know, my
daughter came to me and said she had cancer and
her leg was falling off and could she just come

(01:16:46):
in and have a glass of water. And I was like,
get the hell out of here. What do I have
to give you water? After I gave you all of this?
And now she's sitting on my porch crying, am I?
And then thousands of people on Facebook right like so
it is perfect. I don't know who's doing it because

(01:17:07):
it all sounds like it's AI.

Speaker 2 (01:17:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:17:10):
Can I tell you quick a, I say, and then
we'll stop because this is like a horrifying story. My
sister texts me this morning and she says, oh my god,
your friend was in a horrible car accident. I just
read about it, and I was like, what what are
you talking about? So I have a friend who is
the daughter of a very famous person, and she herself

(01:17:31):
is a well known person in New York but is
not a famous person. But she's the daughter of a
famous person. And there was a story on Facebook that
came through my sister's feet in Israel that said prayers
are being offered up for a famous person because his
daughter was in a car accident as in critical condition.

(01:17:54):
And the story is like a thousand words long, and
it's set. It has quotes for other famous people Josh
Grobin and Susan Sarandon and other people sayings heart and
Charles Nipper, our heart is bleeding for famous person where
heart is broken. We're praying and she's such a lovely

(01:18:17):
person in her own right, and we're also praying for
her father. And and it goes on like for a
thousand words with these quotes, and the whole thing is
invented like she's fine, nothing happened to her, there's no
the angle.

Speaker 2 (01:18:32):
I don't get the angle.

Speaker 1 (01:18:33):
I don't either. I don't know what it's from. It's
click it's literal clickbait. But the but the very famous
person who is the father? Isn't like a movie star.
I mean, i'll tell you guys later who it is. Off,
I don't want to like publicize it because I don't
want the story to circulate. But he is very famous,
but he's old. He's famous in a certain way. He's

(01:18:54):
not like if you walk down the street, you might
not recognize him. And he was really famous, like twenty
years ago, but not that famous. Not you're trying to
guess who it is.

Speaker 2 (01:19:03):
I'm trying to get who it is.

Speaker 1 (01:19:05):
You won't be able to. But but this was an
AI generated clickbait story about a person in critical condition
who was related to another famous person, and it's all
made up.

Speaker 3 (01:19:22):
I could see a point of go fundme or something
like that.

Speaker 2 (01:19:24):
Yeah, but I tell you.

Speaker 3 (01:19:26):
I know we're supposed to get out of here, but
just very quickly. I mean, this is actual, real advice.
I now have heard versions of this story from two friends,
a relative.

Speaker 1 (01:19:38):
You know.

Speaker 3 (01:19:40):
Matt Welsh told a similar story on the Reason podcast
a few months ago. Really, they are these stories about
people getting phone calls from loved ones, usually like kid
calling their parents, like a grown kid, grown person growing
like that, and it says, oh my gosh, I'm down

(01:20:02):
at the police station. I act I was looking at
my phone. I hit a pregnant woman when she was
in the crosswalk, and I need cash now because blah
blah blah. And there's some story about why you need
to get money. A friend of mine's mom was literally
putting on her coat to go down to the bank
to get money, and because they imitated his voice, and

(01:20:24):
it's all fake, right, And I mean this is real advice.
You need to come up with some phrase, some term.

Speaker 2 (01:20:32):
Safe word.

Speaker 3 (01:20:33):
Yeah, so your family so like when they ask you,
is this really you, you can say venezuela or whatever
and they'll know and we'll.

Speaker 2 (01:20:43):
Don't make a venezuela now because.

Speaker 3 (01:20:45):
Exactly that's the problem.

Speaker 1 (01:20:46):
Right.

Speaker 3 (01:20:47):
So it's like here, here's my password from my Gmail account.

Speaker 1 (01:20:50):
Right. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:20:51):
But like my wife and I used to joke around
about like what phrase could we use to signal that
there was something going on, you know, like if we
had kidnappers in the house or something like that. And
now I think you, I think you legitimately need an
organic phrase to use with loved one. Anyway, my friend

(01:21:11):
he his mom would have gone and got the money,
except his dad was like you know what I call Doug,
you know, see, and it turned out he was fine,
you know, And it's just a lot of that stuff.

Speaker 1 (01:21:23):
Going on now, I know it's it's you know, I
mean talk about like moving into I mean, it's not
dystopian exactly. It's some kind of bizarre nether world. The
reason the story was credible is precisely because my friend
is not the.

Speaker 4 (01:21:41):
Details and also has it seemed a fully formed story too,
and it was once.

Speaker 1 (01:21:48):
You looked at it. The reason I knew that it
wasn't real from the beginning, or I was sure it
was pretty sure wasn't real, is that it wasn't duplicated
anywhere else, and like it would have been in the
New York Post or something like that that had it
been true, we should well well enough known that it
would have been in the New York Post. And there
was a picture of a car crumpled in the course
of this story, which is some kind of fake news

(01:22:11):
generated AI story on some fake news site, and what
it's for, I don't know. I don't know. It wasn't
clear that there was something to click. But anyway, just
telling that as a sort of story of how everything
in our culture is galloping away from us and has
this weird threatening quality to it. Yay, that's fun, you.

Speaker 4 (01:22:32):
Know, and it's going to be fun and let nostalgically
look back on it from our whatever, our our little
coal fires as to lead together keeping the other tribes away.

Speaker 1 (01:22:42):
Exactly. Well, I would say we should talk about give
people recommendations if you anybody got anything to recommend, But
if you don't, it's fine.

Speaker 4 (01:22:50):
I mean, I would just recommend what I've been because
I'm in the car more than I ever was before
for a long time, and so you know, I go
into the driving New York City from Princeton and I
and I know this is probably old news to you
guys and to other people.

Speaker 2 (01:23:03):
But the podcast The Rest is History Love the.

Speaker 1 (01:23:08):
Project is as been talking about the rest of history
for three years.

Speaker 2 (01:23:12):
It is an absolute delight. I love it.

Speaker 4 (01:23:16):
I love it, and I'm excited to I agreed to
go in drive in to have lunch with somebody in
New York City. Didn't even want to like go have lunch,
but I was like, well do it because I could listen.
I can finish the Mary Queen of Scott's podcasts.

Speaker 3 (01:23:32):
The Uh some of their stuff about America. I think
it's bad, but let's get wrong. But I was just
tweeting about this last week. There's a fantastic episode about
Enoch Powell which I learned some things from and was
really useful. We don't need to get into who Ianon
Powell was, but uh uh Dominic what's his name? Dominic?

Speaker 2 (01:23:59):
The Yeah, that guy, the modern historian.

Speaker 3 (01:24:03):
He kept you know, in America we say fewer, you know,
like when there's an outcry about something and he says
over and over again, fiore furiore fioroa, yeah, or fiori
or something. And I asked, what I've done this a
few times because that and the Telegraphs Ukraine podcast they

(01:24:26):
pronounced things sometimes that that shocked me, even though I
know they're British, and I was like, I the weird
thing is, so I asked on Twitter, Hey, is this
really how Brits pronounced this or that or the other thing?
And the the weird thing is a lot of Brits said, yes,
that's how we pronounce because there's an e at the
end of it in British English, And okay, that's interesting.

(01:24:48):
But I also will periodically get responses from British people
saying absolutely not. We don't say that like they they
say on the rest of the History podcast instead of
quotation marks. They referred to him as inverted commas. And
I once asked on Twitter, do all Brits really say
inverted commas instead of like quotation marks, and like eighty

(01:25:09):
percent said ye, had some twenty percent said no, And
that's really weird to me. Yeah, but it's a great podcast.

Speaker 2 (01:25:17):
It's a great podcast.

Speaker 1 (01:25:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:25:19):
The American stuff is almost always I mean, it's always
complicated when they do it. The one thing I'm enjoying
is that. And he's a wonderful historian. I love his books.
I can't wait to get and ordered his new translation
of the Twelve Caesars Tom Holland. He's got a slight, tiny,
almost imperceptible speech impediment, but it makes it hard for

(01:25:45):
him to say which is actually is kind of a
complicated word anyway, the word sixth, sixth. Because of that,
it gets and he ends up saying sixth.

Speaker 3 (01:25:57):
He sounds like the actor who played Missus trench Bull
in Minneesilda.

Speaker 1 (01:26:02):
Well, it's lucky that they're twelve, there's not six. So
all right, Well, we've we've we've kept these we've hat
these good people too long in the car ride from
Princeton as already you're already sitting in the garage.

Speaker 2 (01:26:18):
Yeah, you're sitting there waiting. Yeah, build over rest.

Speaker 4 (01:26:21):
But the good news here is that we managed to
talk about a culture, a more broad definition of culture,
which that makes me very happy.

Speaker 2 (01:26:27):
What you want to thank you, fellas, And.

Speaker 3 (01:26:29):
I appreciate that we don't explain who Pinky Dexero is
and all that kind of stuff, but we do have
some new listeners, and so I was thinking, at some
point I should explain why we kept dropping this word.
I'll just do it now very quickly. We did an
episode I don't know ten years ago about the game
corn Hole, and we could not stop amusing ourselves talking

(01:26:50):
about it. Yeah, and it's it's it's not it. We
amused ourselves. It was so purient and lurid and juvenile
and all the rest. But in the context of what
we're talking about it now, if you didn't know that,
you might think we were being even more base and groups.

Speaker 1 (01:27:06):
Yes, although we've never been as based as that. But
just to just to conclude on the proper note of
cultural references that are preposterous to make today. That cornhole
episode of ours was a version of the as God
is My Witness. I thought turkeys could fly. Yes, And
if you get that reference, you are the perfect Listen.

Speaker 3 (01:27:30):
You're in the core of demo.

Speaker 4 (01:27:33):
If you get that reference, remember that dinner will be
served at four down in the day room.

Speaker 1 (01:27:42):
All right. See sorry for me, the Lord We've got
an understand it. We're on a mission from God.

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

CrimeLess: Hillbilly Heist

Crime Junkie

Stuff You Should Know

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Bad Bosses In The Bible

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

.css-r6mb8g{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:1;overflow:hidden;}CrimeLess: Hillbilly Heist

Crime Junkie

Stuff You Should Know

All Episodes

Bad Bosses In The Bible

CrimeLess: Hillbilly Heist