One GLoP At A Time

Why is this GLoP different from all other GLoPs? Because on this GLoP, the principals discuss the future of the show and how to evolve it given their divergent interests. But don't worry: there's also plenty of laughs involving Gavin MacLeod, his TV wife Joyce Bulifant (look her up), an actual joke about the holocaust, and another one about the N-word. And even some actual pop culture with some thoughts about Andor, Sinners, and BritBoxTV.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Are we going.

Speaker 2 (00:01):
We're going, let's go gold like punditry right, doing politics right.

Speaker 1 (00:11):
No, I think we should be as far away from
as possible act. I mean, I mean everybody does everybody
does that like we only we're the only people who
do us right. So the more we do us, the better.

Speaker 2 (00:24):
That is fantastic. It's the IDEs of May. And this
is pop culture. But start again, well I start again?
Is it because I said pop culture and not?

Speaker 1 (00:48):
That's funny?

Speaker 2 (00:48):
And that's because I have this in my head and
we're going to talk about it. So I'm not going
to start again. Glove culture May John pod Hornets talking here.
I'm looking here. You're not seeing him, but I'm seeing
in I believe in Princeton, New Jersey, in Manhattan, Oh,
in Manhattan, wearing a very nice striped shirt, and lie,
I like it. I'm enjoying it. And in his aria

(01:12):
in northwestern DC. Northwest DC, we don't say northwestern. See
is Jonah Goldberg?

Speaker 1 (01:18):
Hi Jonah? Hello John.

Speaker 2 (01:20):
I just want to say before we start that, I
just I spent about an hour reading the dispatches New
Acquisitions Scotus Blogs live blog of the Supreme Court proceedings
today May fifteenth, and it was absolutely fascinating. It was great.

(01:42):
I read it. I wasn't doing it, I wasn't following
it live. I actually read it after after the blog
had finished, and therefore was able to sort of read
it chronologically to see where the argument was going and
how things were. It was lively, It was funny, interesting, good,
juicy details from Sarah Esker on the fact that Neil

(02:04):
Gorson's has a gigantic moose's head in his office and
Amy Cony Barrett has some kind of anyway, So.

Speaker 1 (02:16):
What part of pop culture?

Speaker 2 (02:19):
John, Yes, we're gonna so this is what we're going
to see.

Speaker 1 (02:24):
Yeah, so this is gonna be the right Yeah, because
my question is my question is do you believe that
what you just said counts as pop cultures?

Speaker 2 (02:35):
I think anything that I say counts as pop culture
because you.

Speaker 1 (02:39):
Know what, I think it might have identified the problem.

Speaker 2 (02:41):
Okay, now, okay, we have been doing this podcast. I
believe we're trying to figure out twelve years. Thirteen years.
You did it for a year before I joined with
mark Stein, and then mark Stein went off as mark
Stein is inclined to do, and I came on and
we have been having this conversation monthly in front of people,

(03:02):
and we have conversations not in front of people for decades,
and why it was monthly May we used to do
it every two week.

Speaker 1 (03:10):
Yeah, yeah, that's true.

Speaker 2 (03:11):
Okay, So here's the thing.

Speaker 1 (03:13):
Do we still do it? I still do it. We
do it twice a month though.

Speaker 2 (03:17):
No, we don't, but we could. But here's the thing.
I'm worried, and I keep expressing my worry that we're
running out of gas, that we have had the conversations
right now that we're constantly defaulting to.

Speaker 1 (03:30):
I don't think that's true topics, but I think that is. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:34):
I can let John make the case before you get there.
I don't have a case, you know. I just keep thinking,
Oh my god, have we had this exact conversation before
about the episode of The Odd Couple when Felix and
Oscar each tell the story of or how they first

(03:56):
four different how they first met shows, or anything like that.
Have Have we done this before? Have we told our
anecdotes before? Have we talked about it? And we have
talked about because let's face it, we're not consumers of
the kind of pop culture that we once were when
we started right, We're not going to the movies as

(04:18):
much as we used to. We don't watch broadcast television.

Speaker 1 (04:23):
This is this is our memory care facility here, that's
what this is. Everybody, half podcast, half early on set
kind of therapy.

Speaker 2 (04:36):
I mean, if people knew the kinds of things that
I send to you guys offline from Facebook as a
result of Facebook, Like, do you think those people would do.

Speaker 1 (04:45):
You think they would be surprised? Is that what you're No,
I don't, okay.

Speaker 2 (04:48):
But it would just show the depth that what is
an interest to me that can't be of interest to
anybody else on the planet Earth, which is like what
we're the highest rated shows in nineteen sixty seven in.

Speaker 1 (04:59):
The discuss absolutely let me let me just say that Red.

Speaker 2 (05:02):
Skelton's Variety Show was the second highest rated television program
in nineteen sixty seven. And let's just guess how many
people listening to my voice right now know the name
Red Skeleton.

Speaker 3 (05:18):
Well, thirty of this audience, eighty percent of this audience,
because they're also pretty much in the same old agean we.

Speaker 2 (05:26):
Are, okay, all right, of average Americans?

Speaker 1 (05:31):
I once, yeah, I think that's a part of the
pop culture umbrella would include TikTok Uh, and TikTok is
a great place to watch TV if you don't want
to see TV. For instance, I mentioned a while back
that I hadn't seen that show Gilded Age, but I

(05:52):
actually went into TikTok and I said Gilded Age, and
there's like four like terrific scenes in it, and in
the whole series, I think, and I saw, I saw
them all, so I feel like I've seen the Guilded Age.
There's also some weird dude, John, who is I think
in some way probably has the other half of the
amulet you carry around your neck, who is uploading the

(06:13):
themes and title sequences to every night of primetime television
from the seventies on. And he's very melogous. It's Wednesday
in nineteen seventy three on NBC, and here's what you're watching.
And then he shows you what you were watching on NBC.
Sign severy three to me. Eventually, when the two of
you meet, it's going to be like, you know, he's murder.

(06:39):
He could write, well, he does that one too, he
could you. I would not be surprised if you were
once contacted by his doctor, because there you're a kidney match.
Put it that way, there's something very close to it.
So there's all sorts of there's also what we sometimes do,
which is we just we don't have a weird topic
that I mean, I chafe at because I just that's

(07:00):
that's my personality. Uh, and we kind of just go
off on little directions. We just kind of do our own,
our own weird thing, all right.

Speaker 3 (07:07):
So, can I summarize the broad brushstrokes of this this
not so much disagreement but uh and not in a conflict,
but friction of visions.

Speaker 1 (07:17):
Yeah, okay, oh here you go.

Speaker 2 (07:18):
Okay, so so so.

Speaker 3 (07:21):
John has been airing this reservation, these reservations about glop
for a while now with me, and I've mostly rejected them,
finding them fairly unpersuasive. And then in the wake of
last month our last episode, John said, Okay, here's what
I'm talking about. We try to talk about all these
things and Rob just doesn't care about pop culture anymore.

Speaker 2 (07:45):
And he was like, nah.

Speaker 3 (07:46):
And since that episode was fairly fresh in my mind
because this text came mere minutes after the show, I said, well, hey,
that's a good point and we should talk about that.

Speaker 2 (07:57):
I and you make a very.

Speaker 3 (08:00):
Powerful case that basically what this podcast is, I mean,
the glop culture, the pop culture part of it is.

Speaker 1 (08:07):
Part of the stick.

Speaker 3 (08:08):
But basically people tune in to listen to us gibbets
and bigger and reminisce and whatnot, and they they tend
to like it. And the fact that we're not doing
what the mission and it originally was as.

Speaker 2 (08:22):
Much as we once were.

Speaker 3 (08:24):
Most people who listen, by definition of the fact that
they're listening, they don't really give a rats ask. They
just want to hear us. You know, Uh, what's the
Yiddish word I'm looking for.

Speaker 2 (08:33):
It's kibbits. It's a kibbe, it's kibbits schnor no, that's
not it a beggar. So anyway, snoring is begging. So
all right, so let me put it this way. Let
me let me just so, uh, I feel because in
a weird way, hosting duties, not that there is a host,

(08:55):
kind of devolved to me over time how this happened.
So I feel like I.

Speaker 1 (09:01):
Have you'rey.

Speaker 3 (09:09):
Joy give the mic to John, he'll host anything, or like.

Speaker 2 (09:16):
A friend of mine realized he's an art historian and
he was sort of a young art historian and came
to get a job, his first tenure track job, and
people were like, hey, you're great, you are the greatest
thing ever. We want you to be chair of the department.
And he was like, oh my god, I'm going to
be chair of the department. And then he became chair

(09:39):
of the department. Of course, they all closed the door
and then burst out into gales of contemptuous left because
this is the worst job in the world, actually, being
a departmental chair at a second rank university where you
have no disciplinary authority or anything over anybody and you
just have to do administrative.

Speaker 1 (10:00):
Well, the new guy always gets a bad job. I
mean I've heard this from like uh old the old
but like middle middle career priests, episcopal priests, especially when
he started out. You know, the guy running the church,
the woman running church runs a little finger down the calendar.
It sees what the electionary calendar is, what the readings
are each Sunday. It decides that the Sunday where Jesus

(10:23):
says like, hey, if you're divorced, you're going to Hell,
or any of those really tough things. It's like, what
is the new guy do the sermon on that one right, yeah.

Speaker 2 (10:33):
Yeah, no, that's exactly it. So, so the hosting duty
has devolved to me, and then I feel this kind
of responsibility to introduce points of discussion, and Robin has
been your increasing habits not increasing, and I do that
to say, eh, so like.

Speaker 1 (10:53):
That's and that is a fair criticism, rob That is
a fair I I I absolutely one hundred percent cop
to it.

Speaker 2 (10:58):
I don't mind in the sense that then I think
maybe you're saying, because all of these topics are boring,
how do you feel about the fact that HBO went
back to HBO Max And.

Speaker 1 (11:10):
I love that about that.

Speaker 2 (11:11):
That's good.

Speaker 4 (11:12):
We should talk about that because that's delicious. Yeah, okay,
that's hilarious. Okay, So I guess what I mean is
this is.

Speaker 1 (11:17):
That uh uh uh you ever gone on one of
those well, I know, Joan of the answer to drones. Yes,
you're going to one of those NR cruises.

Speaker 2 (11:28):
We've all we've all.

Speaker 3 (11:29):
We of this podcast stretched back into the Okay, so wow,
you just came up with that right now.

Speaker 1 (11:39):
Well, back in the midst of I have an allergic
reaction to the cruise industry and their need to corral
you and organize you into areas in which you were
told where to be at a certain time, even when
that is inconvenience. So the idea, especially when you dis embark,
there's this, well you're purple, so you you will, We'll

(12:00):
call for purple. And I'm like, this is the stupidest thing.
I'm not playing this game. And when they say, well
you're doing I remember having it. I rarely have a Melton, Right,
but are you calling me?

Speaker 2 (12:10):
Are you saying no?

Speaker 1 (12:11):
Because I think that was a well run ship. But
I remember I went had dinner Julie McCoy, Yeah, exactly.
Did it was an eight? No? No, I'm probably like
the daughter, the little one on.

Speaker 2 (12:22):
The Amy Carter of the Pacific Prince. Yea the daughter
he didn't know, the daughter, the daughter that the closet
and Captain Stuming didn't know that he had as well.

Speaker 1 (12:34):
I love the idea that at no point with.

Speaker 2 (12:37):
Just so you know, I can't possibly have a daughter. Yeah,
I guess I can't say that, right because it's nineteen
seventy nine.

Speaker 1 (12:44):
Right, and ron bring her on and and and pay
no attention to the fact that she lives in a
cruise ship and is not being educated in any way
that she doesn't do anything but work.

Speaker 2 (12:55):
She's learning the rules of rum sobbi and the last.

Speaker 1 (13:02):
I'll tell you because anybody, anybody who could teach that,
it's Captain Meryl stupid. She's going to the mit of
that anyway. So you have to sit down at eight o'clock.
Sit down at eight o'clock, because that's why they tell
you sit out. So he said, out for dinner eight o'clock,
if you order your thing. And I wore your wine,
and I were wine at the beginning of the week,

(13:23):
and they keep bringing to you and then it sounds eight,
and I say, bring me this, and bring me the
wine and the bottle wine. And that's eight forty five
and nine o'clock and they're basically clearing the table and
I haven't had a glass of wine yet. So I
called the guy, said, where the hell is my wine?
Really I wanted the wine here. I'm here at eight, like,
where's the wine? It's nine o'clock. I've had, you know.
And he says this to me because he's the guy
running the plate as well, you know. So it's very
difficult for us because of course everybody comes at the

(13:45):
same time. And I just shouted at him, that's because
you made us. I would be happy to show up,
not at time. This is a schedule that you have created.
And he sort of looked at me. You know, it's
always it's always a Pacific islander or a Malay person

(14:07):
in those jobs for that reason, and he was struck
by my rudeness. But that so, I do have a
psychological problem about rules and order and calling a schedule
and then being corralled. And sometimes I feel like, Okay,
now we're gonna talk about a boring topic when we
could we're almost on the edge of an interesting riff
about something. Here's what here's what he's I'm going for

(14:28):
for true, for true, for true glop fans, they'll get this.
I'm going for some of that corn hole magic.

Speaker 2 (14:40):
You can't happen on his own. By the way, so
Meryl Steuming was played by Gavin McLeod. Gavin McLeod in
the sixties weighed one hundred pounds more than Gavin McLeod
did in the seventies, and so he played literal heavies

(15:03):
on every show ever. Mannix the Fugitive whatever. He was
a big, hulking fat guy and then he lost all
his weight went on the Mary Tyler Moore Show, as
Murray did that and then was did the did the law.
And what was interesting was how the weight covered up

(15:23):
the fact that he was Faye. He didn't seem Faye
as a big, hulking heavy on every television show. When
he was liberated from his fleshly prison, he basically came
out of his shell, shall we say? And of course

(15:46):
we never met Murray's wife on the Mary Tyler Moore Show.

Speaker 3 (15:50):
And yes we did, Murray, Yes we did, Yes we did,
we did, Yes we did.

Speaker 1 (15:55):
She was played by Joyce Boulevart. I believe.

Speaker 2 (15:59):
Joyce played Murray's wife.

Speaker 1 (16:01):
I believe she did.

Speaker 2 (16:01):
Okay, well, then I stand corrected. I actually now psychotic
podcast after all, a psychotagram. I read Joyce's memoir, I did.
I read her memoir. It was called My Five Hollywood Husbands. Literally,

(16:22):
I can believe she was married to after she was
married to Murray on the show, she was married to
William Asher, who had been married to Elizabeth Montgomery and
when they did Bewitched, and then she married William Asher.
How's that for a thrilling piece of trivia about Joyce.
Joyce ballafant?

Speaker 3 (16:41):
But are we actually saying, are we suggesting that Gavin
McLeod in real life was gay or just the Meryl
Steubing character presented as gay.

Speaker 2 (16:48):
No. I think Gavin McLeod presented as as as a
classic Hollywood character actor of the Faye dis position he
presented because I think he was married, you had kids.

Speaker 1 (17:04):
So do you ever remember tattle Tales that show tattle
Tales and they would they would have like real couples, right,
and then suddenly they would have like, like you know,
Richard Deacon and Dody Goodman who were kind of not

(17:27):
who were not a couple in the sense that Dody
Goodman was not a man, but also just they were
just it was, oh, no, you're gonna get And nobody
ever said, oh, you guys are going out or anything.
It was just we'll have Richard Deacon Doty Goodman. I
remember that, and of course it didn't make an difference
to me because I was a kid.

Speaker 2 (17:44):
What did I know?

Speaker 1 (17:45):
But he already this seems more interesting to me.

Speaker 2 (17:49):
Gavin McLeod, Well, now it's not became an evangelical Christian
that I do know, but that was after that was
like in the after the the eighties and the nineties anyway.
So I just thought it was an interesting detail that
he was once a fat guy and had a completely
different affect from when he was a thin guy.

Speaker 1 (18:16):
Do you think that now? If you do, if you're
going to reboot The Love Boat.

Speaker 2 (18:20):
They have rebooted The love Boat and it features and
it features a throttle. It's called Doctor Odyssey. It's on ABC.

Speaker 1 (18:27):
Oh my god.

Speaker 3 (18:28):
See this gets us back to the problem that you're
not paying attention to pop culture anymore.

Speaker 1 (18:32):
I really am not.

Speaker 2 (18:33):
Literally. So this show, which is produced by Ryan Murphy,
is about a cruise ship. Don Johnson is the Meryl
Stooping of the show. Jeremy Jackson, Joshua Jackson, who was
on Dawson's Creek, is doctor. And then there are two nurses,
one played by Philip as Sue is a nurse. Two nurses.
It's like a partly a medical drama, the medical drama

(18:56):
set on a cruise ship.

Speaker 1 (18:59):
Oh yeah.

Speaker 2 (18:59):
Every episode. Well, so here's the thing. It isn't a
preposterous but there's a love triangle. And the love triangle
is that Philip is Sue, the beautiful nurse who was
who was Eliza, and Hamilton Uh is torn between the

(19:22):
other nurse who is I think a Hispanic guy, and
Joshua Jackson, who is the doctor. Doctor No, then they
have a throuple. Then they literally she sleeps with Joshua Jackson.
On the next episode she sleeps with the other guy,
and then on the third episode they actually end the

(19:44):
episode having a throupple. On network tep, I believe perhaps
last on network television, because give Bryan Murphy, you're going
to give Ryan Murphy a show broadcast television. He is
going to try to introduce we used.

Speaker 1 (20:03):
To like we used to. We would get calls this
is the nineties where they'd say, you know, listen, you
know you said ass, like last week and the week before,
and this week you're saying, you know, bastard, can it's

(20:24):
your fault?

Speaker 2 (20:24):
Can you not? You know? Can you? Can you not?

Speaker 1 (20:27):
Next week? No ass? Can you just know? No ass?
For the rest of the season.

Speaker 2 (20:33):
You've hit your ass quota and.

Speaker 1 (20:35):
You hit your quote. And and then when I was
doing another show on the ad supporting case.

Speaker 2 (20:41):
Phrase Captain Steubing never heard because he had a different port.

Speaker 1 (20:49):
To another show. Later on, Uh, you could say ship,
but not if it referred to feces. Huh. You you
can say, I look at all that shit, Oh that
was bullshit. You know, everything you're saying is shit.

Speaker 2 (21:06):
This is all shit.

Speaker 1 (21:07):
But if you said, oh that that dog took a
ship over there, they would say, oh, you can't do that.

Speaker 2 (21:14):
You do that.

Speaker 1 (21:15):
And so now on broadcast TV, Little Dawson's Creek can
have a threatle have a three way.

Speaker 2 (21:22):
Now. So Eli Lake has a fantastic podcast out just
now about Lenny Bruce, and he actually says, look, here's
the story of Lenny Bruce. Lenny Bruce, the you know,
the sick comic who literally was thrown in jail for
making a joke about Jackie Kennedy like he was. He
went to jail for making a joke about Jackie Kennedy

(21:43):
running away from the bullet when when Jay.

Speaker 1 (21:46):
Was shot, she kind of did.

Speaker 2 (21:50):
That was his point. That was offensive, trying to buy
out the year was this? This was nineteen sixty four,
So there's anyway, right, No, but nobody here the too
soon factor here, right. But the reason that I'm bringing
this up is that Eli, it's a brilliant podcast talking

(22:10):
about how all of this ruined Lenny Bruce and like
nine years late. You know, five years later, Midnight Cowboy
wins the Oscar Like that that the the moment at
which obscenity disappeared from our entire understanding of the of
you know, what was right and wrong and how things

(22:31):
went was so fast and so quick that not only
Lady Bruce died overdosed and died in nineteen sixty five,
had he just lived a couple more years, he would
have been just fine, like nobody would have left him alone. Well,
but this rate, And then Eli says, well, I mean,
does Lenny Bruce deserve some censure or the world in

(22:55):
which there was there were people who wanted to throw
Lenny Bruce and Jail's also world that did not have
pornography on an iPhone. And we live in this world
you in which a five year old can find porn
on an iPhone. What are the two connected? Can you?
Can you prevent pornography from being on an iPhone without

(23:18):
having the standards that would lead you to throw Lenny
Bruce in jail? And that's an unanswerable question, but it
is sort of suggested by this Ryan Murphy story. Right,
you were very eager to say ass in nineteen ninety three,
and then in twenty twenty five, Ryan Murphy has Thrupples
on ABC in prime time that there that the slippery

(23:40):
slope was real, and it wasn't just slippery, it was
like retigenous. It was like falling off a cliff, you know.
I mean the neighborhood that Joan and I lived in
in nineteen sixty three, there was a movie theater called
the Midtown, which was a third rate theater, and by
the time I was seven years old at ninety ninth
and Broadway, it was a hardcore porn theater that I

(24:02):
walked by every day on my way to school, with
hardcore porn pictures, you know, with posters and everything right there.
That was again, five years after Lenny Bruce went to
jail for obscenity and you know, essentially seditious libel or
something like that. It's just sort of an interesting phenomenon

(24:25):
that it is okay for Ye Murphy to do a
thrupple on sure sure.

Speaker 3 (24:31):
So I mean, look, I so I have a couple
of different views on this.

Speaker 2 (24:34):
First of all, you see this in a lot of
different ways.

Speaker 3 (24:36):
Right, Poor Judge Ginsburg, who turned out he smoked pot,
lost a shot at the Supreme Court, and then five
years later it's like Ganjamin, who cares?

Speaker 2 (24:48):
Right?

Speaker 3 (24:48):
I mean, these things happened really fast. Without getting too
philosophical about any of this, I I think you can
have a society that says no porn on iPhones, but
it requires the will power to do it, But I

(25:11):
think I think it's worth thinking about. I agree a
lot of taboos have disappeared, but that doesn't mean we
don't have taboos.

Speaker 1 (25:18):
They just yeah, what is taboo?

Speaker 2 (25:20):
Changes?

Speaker 3 (25:21):
And it's sort of like my thing about censorship. I
used to love getting into big arguments with libertarians who
said they were against all forms of censorship. And I
would be like, okay, so like hardcorese enough films on
Saturday morning TV, You're fine with that, you know uh?
And they're like, well, no, no, of course not, that's not
that's that's not that's just community standards, you know, or whatever, right,
And so there are all sorts of things we Irvan

(25:42):
Crystal used to make this point is that censorship is
one of these words that we only use for the censorship.
We don't like everything else. We just don't call it
censorship community standards.

Speaker 1 (25:52):
Yeah, I like.

Speaker 2 (25:53):
Eli points out Eli points out that that in comedy, right,
bocuness has now been seems to have been overturned. Right
that guy Tony Hinchcliff made the joke about Puerto Rican's
at the Trump rally. He's doing fine. Now you can
use party again all of this. The one word that
you cannot say, right George Carlin said there were seven

(26:13):
words you couldn't say on television. There is one word
you cannot say period anywhere ever, and that's the end word. Right.
That is a thing where.

Speaker 1 (26:22):
That that's still a thing, that's still a thing.

Speaker 2 (26:24):
Unless you're black, or you're in you're a rapper.

Speaker 1 (26:26):
Or unless you're unless you were you know, a middle
aged Jewish comedy writer in the nineteen seventies writing for
Sanford and Son. Right, right, then you could then you
could use but let me let me just your two
end points here. From my own career, I used to

(26:47):
do my Martini shot, my famous Martini shot, which of
course everybody loves. I used to do it for the
Irish radio or it was on Irish radio, and I
did one that was I thought was completely benign, in
which I made a I told a story about James
conn on a BBC documentary about Hollywood in the late eighties,

(27:08):
in which he said, you know, Hollywood location shootings terrible.
People always think of it's so glamorous, location shootings, the
words shooting a movie on location is really really awful.
It's like Auschwitz. And we thought that was hilarious, and
so from the from that day on in the office,
we would say, yet, we're out of the little bottles
of Evyon, what is this Auschwitz? I wanted to turn

(27:30):
to smoke turkey wrap, not the regular roasted turkeys. This
is Auschwitz, which we thought was very, very funny. Of
course it's not, and uh and then some it's some.
The point was, somebody takes that joke home from the
writer's room, and that's a terrible idea. And somebody took
that joke home to Thanksgiving when I think it was like,
there was only three kinds of pie, and he's only
three kinds of pie? What is this Auschwitz? And he
forgot that his wife's grandfather who was there was the survivor.

Speaker 2 (27:56):
Ha ha ha.

Speaker 1 (27:57):
Did I get an email saying Hi, we had some
we had a complaint about your martini shots. Are really
gonna have to take a pause on it for now
because and I said, well, but but I was making
I was joking. It was a joke. It was I
was talking about how this is outrageous, but it didn't work.
So then yesterday or two days ago, whatever whenever, it dropped,

(28:18):
because that's what happens when podcasts they drop, this one
will drop. I was talking about when I was in
the hospital a few years ago for uh for vertigo.
But I was being we didn't know it was ver
to go until we thought it was a stroke. And
I woke up one kind of terrified in my hotel,
I mean my hotel, my in my hospital bed and

(28:38):
looked up and saw my neurology consult pet a staff
there from Letex Hill Neurology neurological department, and every single
one of the doctors, and he was about a dozen
in a semi circle around my hospital a bit. We're
either Asian or South Asian. And I thought to myself,

(28:59):
I'm gonna be okay. And I said this on NATIVZ
shat yes two days ago, and I'm still waiting to
see if it doesn't be any push back at all.
So I think I can say evidence example, a h
E A wokenus is near dead. Look, we all want

(29:19):
Wocus to be dead. We all want it to be dead.
I didn't really want it to be dead so that
Martyr Made could talk about how Winston Churchill was the
great villain of the Second World War, and so that
Kanye West could release a song called Hyley Hitler.

Speaker 2 (29:34):
That wasn't why I thought Vocus should die. Was too
free up. You can't tatzism. I mean, okay, but that's
the point, which is when you also when you suppress,
and then the suppression is ended violently right by like
the result of this twenty twenty four election. You have

(29:55):
no idea how it's going to how the how the
expression that has been sp is going to explode.

Speaker 5 (30:01):
Out, But you know it's going to be horrible, right,
It's not going to be someone's.

Speaker 2 (30:05):
Not going to write Ulysses, right, you know that's not right.
So the censorship battles of the early twentieth century were
making sure that great novels with erotic themes like Ulysses
or Lady Child's Lover or something like that, we're not
we're not kept out of the public view by censors
who were unable to grasp that they were works of value.

(30:28):
And but that's not what you're going to get.

Speaker 1 (30:31):
Now, well, that's not usually what you get. We get
more of culture and more of pop culture. You're gonna
get more crap. That's just the way it is. More
or more ship. You could say that now what we're
saying it right here right now.

Speaker 2 (30:45):
So I think the last book banned in Boston was
like not it was well into the sixties.

Speaker 1 (30:50):
Oh you know what book was it?

Speaker 2 (30:52):
You know? I don't, I don't.

Speaker 1 (30:57):
It's a great some crap, prob great Dick Cavit joke,
he said once about the Now, this is completely not this,
this idea does not connected to what you just said.
But he just said that. It was like you know
that old story about it. You know, a thousand monkeys
and a thousand typewriters will eventually produce works of Shakespeare.
And they actually did an experiment with a thousand monkeys

(31:19):
and a thousand typewriters in a room, and they didn't
write any work of Shakespeare. But four of them wrote
Bally of the Dolls. Okay, first great joke, by the way.

Speaker 2 (31:33):
I looked it up, and it's a great joke. I
looked it up. Naked Lunch was the last okay, last
book band in Boston in nineteen sixty five. But of
course there are plenty of book bands that aren't the
that aren't the sexually restrictive censorship. Right. There are book
bands all over the place. There there are kind of

(31:55):
do you remember the kind of weird moral panic over
American Psycho? Ellis's American Psycho, which is a satire, which
is a book about uh yuppies being materialist ciphers who
do everything that everybody else does and have no souls

(32:16):
and therefore, you know, are all It takes it to
the point where they not only dressed like this and
listen to Phil Collins and do this and do that,
but like are willing to kill people and eat them
and get away with it.

Speaker 1 (32:29):
Phil Collins was the gateway drug.

Speaker 2 (32:31):
But that's in the book. Patrick Bateman is obsessed with
is obsessed with Phil Collins.

Speaker 5 (32:37):
Another movie, by the way, American Psycho is a It
was a hard satire and people like Kurt Anderson of
Spy supported its suppression, but people wanted Random House to
pulp the book because they found it so disgusting.

Speaker 2 (32:57):
I actually think it's kind of brilliant, uh As Ellis
can be and and.

Speaker 1 (33:04):
You know it's he's super right wing right now, or
it's just not.

Speaker 2 (33:10):
I get you something. But that that book, by the way,
all of his work is like his Lesson zero is
a book about soulless material. You know, it's he's almost
well a back or somebody like that.

Speaker 1 (33:23):
He's like but like, it's like, is there that is
a weird social movement that I don't I'm gonna refer.
I'm going to defer to Joanah on this.

Speaker 2 (33:33):
Has it ever?

Speaker 1 (33:33):
Has this actually happened before? Where you have a bunch
of people who in this weird to punch drunk kind
of reaction to wokeism and censorship. And also now uh
Hamas and Gaza have found themselves. You know, if you
were a liberal and you were like, well, I'm you know,

(33:55):
I'm a liberal, so I'm a free hentoff liberal and
free speech liberal, and I also think that Israel's are
right to exist and to defend itself. And suddenly you
find yourself kind of marching in a parade with a
bunch of right wing kooks. Right, you know what I mean,
just bad.

Speaker 4 (34:11):
But let's do it reverse. So the age you don't
do it my way. I don't do it verse yet.

Speaker 2 (34:16):
Now I want to do it reverse because I thought
of an interesting verse example. So the ACLU existed as
the absolutist free speech organization, right, That's what it was
there for, to say the First Amendment gives you the
right to pretty much do anything. And that was season Skokie, right, Na,
Season Skokie. And then in the twenty seventeen or twenty

(34:37):
eighteen the head lawyer of the New York Civil Liberties
Union was a guy named Chase Strange EO. And Chase
Strange GEO decided he.

Speaker 1 (34:46):
Was not that was that was not his name.

Speaker 2 (34:50):
That is Strangeo. That is actually his name. That's like
the Beavis and butt Head cornfolio. Yeah. To bring it
back to yes, yes.

Speaker 1 (35:00):
A Strange Geo, Nazis and Skokie.

Speaker 2 (35:02):
That Chase Stranger would enjoy TP for his bunkhole as
as I will explain, because he became. His idea was
that the the the ACLU and the NYL you should
become advocates for the suppression of books about and articles
and things like that about trans that he didn't like.

Speaker 1 (35:23):
I see, so he literally hants to change you O.
So he probably his name probably isn't change.

Speaker 2 (35:29):
He just.

Speaker 3 (35:32):
Okay, So he was Phil status quoio, and then he
was Phil Danglio.

Speaker 2 (35:39):
Demanded that that Amazon suppress Abbiel Schreyer's book Irreversible Damage
out of his post at the American Civil Liberties Union
or the New York branch of the American Civil Liberties Union.
So you had this weird thing that happened, okay, and

(35:59):
that's the River twenty tens. Right. So now, if you're
a free speech advocate, right, the question now is.

Speaker 1 (36:07):
That's what I guess what I went from Joan is
like that has that ever happened before? As the cultural
movement historian.

Speaker 3 (36:20):
I'm hard pressed to think of a cultural analog. But like,
I don't know, like the I mean, the way you
were describing it originally about you find yourself marching in
lockstep with right wing, which.

Speaker 1 (36:36):
Is marching in the same parade, I mean maybe not,
you know.

Speaker 3 (36:38):
Yeah, I mean, like so the popular front stuff of
the nineteen nineteen thirties, right was I was recently rereading
chunks of Witness for this piece I wrote for Dispatcher
about some of this stuff. Like part of what he
talks about confronting was what he called the popular Front
mind and which is this this idea that you have

(37:01):
to have complete solidarity with your side, And of course
it never actually works that way because the people who
are really enforcing the popular Front crap the communists.

Speaker 2 (37:11):
In this case, the stalin is the second they could
throw other members of the faction under.

Speaker 1 (37:15):
The blast, they would.

Speaker 2 (37:16):
I mean, they have no solidarity for anybody. They want everything.
It's a one way or it's one way thing.

Speaker 3 (37:21):
And it's very similar to the MAGA stuff these days,
where you criticize Trump or anything in MAGA and you
get this, I guess you don't believe in Reagan's eleventh
commandment and they're like, why are you, like, you know,
get on the get on board. And then the second
you know you're problematic for anything, you cuck rhino squish.
You know, they have no problem throwing anybody else under

(37:45):
the bus. And I think there's a lot of popular frontism,
and I think the ACOU stuff is sort of an
example of that, where no one wants to stay in
their lane and actually do the job of their institution.
You know, remember the Poetry Foundation during the Black Lives
Matter thing were basically they were ordered to demonstrate their

(38:06):
racial enlightenment by essentially like dismantling their own organization, quitting
all their jobs.

Speaker 2 (38:14):
Yeah, no, so I think there is there are some
versions of this, but they're I mean, what happens is
that people have their eyes opened to the intolerances and
smallnesses and totalitarian tendencies of their own side. That happens

(38:34):
on both sides of the aisle, and then the question
is what is it that they can tolerate, What is
it about the other side that they can't stand, and
can they can they make their peace with the things
they can't stand on the other side, because the other
side at least isn't trying to make sure that they
end up in jail for having the views that they

(38:55):
might have. Right, That's the sort of the neo The
story of the neo Conservatives is they could no longer
affiliate themselves with a Democratic Party controlled by the mcgovernites,
which was that we're actively rooting for an American loss
in Vietnam. That was not you know, as Prooffrock would say,
that was not it at all. That's not what that

(39:18):
they could stand for. And so they sort of tried
to save the Democratic Party and that didn't go anywhere,
and then they sort of had a choice, which is
could they make their peace on the right, and then
could they make their peace with Republicans. And that was
a ten or fifteen year journey for a lot of
people who couldn't imagine, particularly Jews, couldn't imagine being that

(39:42):
way with Republican Party because the old Republican Party was
kind of genteel, anti Semitic country Republicanism. But it's a journey,
and there are people who are on that journey from
left to right now. It's just that people do seem
to shift a lot faster, just like everything is fast.

Speaker 3 (40:00):
But I'm you know, I'm fascinated by all that stuff,
and it is worth pointing out. I agree that the
shifts are faster, but if you go back and you
look at you know, I don't want to get too
close to home. But basically, everybody, every one of the neocons,
with very few exceptions, some exceptions. The gateway drug was

(40:23):
foreign policy for the nineteen seventies ones right right. For
the nineteen sixties ones, it's great society stuff. And for
the nineteen fifty ones, I would argue, you know, like
half of the founders of National Review were all ex communists,
and I still think that they followed the Neocon playbook.
It was communism, right, So like it's these different domestic
communisms as much as anything. But what is remarkable is

(40:47):
you have a gateway drug of a single issue, and
it's not very long until you know, Charles Crowdhammer is
just a full fledged conservative on almost every issue. It's
not very long. Your dad, you know, came over for
a specific reason. It became basically a full fledged conservative.
Bill Bennett, you go down a very long list, and

(41:08):
I think there's something about the cognitive dissonance of being
of switching aside, where you try to hold on tight
to all your old positions. It's catch one and it
gets really hard, and you start listening to your friends
and they get more persuasive, and I'm I'm not saying
it's an intellectually dishonest thing or anything like that, but
it is a fascinating sort of thing to see. Nat

(41:30):
Glazer basically had to like get and and and what's
his name, the first founder of the Public Interest. They, yeah, Bell,
some of those guys who were part of all that stuff,
they had to kind of pull back and hide a
bit because the poll of just having to join check
all the boxes seemed to be pretty strong.

Speaker 2 (41:50):
And they and they didn't want to and they in
the end Nat and Daniel bellnck Glazer and did not
so they were founding the Conserve. They did not end
up there. They ended up as kind of as kind
of moynihan liberal I don't know even know there was
no place for them, but they they were. They remained

(42:11):
discomfited mostly by the by the by the Christian right,
and they they could not make their peace with any
of that or or with really serious like with untrammeled
free market.

Speaker 3 (42:24):
Sure, but the exceptions are more are few and far between,
but they do exist. And meanwhile, I think it's it's
kind of amazing how and we don't because some of
these people are our friends. We don't need to get
into all that. But like, there are a bunch of
people on the anti Trump side who have just basically
become liberal Democrats now. And I think it's for the

(42:49):
same reasons. It's wanting to have a team and and
beyond the team.

Speaker 2 (42:54):
And I will say this, I will say.

Speaker 1 (42:57):
This, by the way, so is Trump a little bit
That's like pretty soon those are friends who are now
liberal Democrats will notice that he's also in the room.

Speaker 2 (43:05):
But I mean, i'll give it.

Speaker 1 (43:06):
I'll give you following you along whatever you join he joins.

Speaker 2 (43:10):
So I'll give you an example. Two issues that that
were not neocon issues, uh, that were enormously important to
the right, but we're not neocon issues guns and abortion.
Guns and abortion not important in neocons who were foreign
policy or when they were domestic policy. The central concepsia

(43:35):
of the of of neo conservatism was they're trying, they're
trying to do all this stuff and it's not going
to work right, It's not going to work, and it's
going to make everything the The intentions may be good,
but they're going to make everything worse, and it's going
to be a huge mess. And the great Society is
going to be a huge mess. It has bad incentives

(43:55):
and perverse incentives, and and better not to do it
and mess much everything up. But that wasn't more. The
moral frame was your goals are admirable, Your your your
stratagems are not right.

Speaker 1 (44:10):
I just want to know. I'm not trying to interrupt,
but I just want to note we started talking about
Joyce Boulevont now and this.

Speaker 2 (44:21):
Is what we getting you right now. Joyce balf voted
for voting for Trump.

Speaker 1 (44:26):
I'm sure this is what we do.

Speaker 3 (44:27):
And this is the only podcast where you can get yes,
you get that, you get the high and the low,
and then and where a person uses the word conceptsia, yeah, concept.

Speaker 2 (44:37):
Okay, but here's what I here's what just so, I
didn't care about guns, I don't care about a boy.
I really don't care about guns and an abortion, but
so I am. I find myself in close proximity to
people who care about these issues more than they care
about anything else. And when you don't really care about things,

(44:59):
you don't read about them all. You know, you don't
pay much attention to them. They bore you or they're
not that interesting. And then you start having conversations with
people about this because they're interesting and they interest you,
and they start telling you things and you start reading
up on it, and you're like, you know what, these
are really interesting, complicated matters, and you know, don't be

(45:24):
so quick to say I'm pro choice. You know, I
was there myself with my wife and you know, in
the in the doctor's office looking at the fetal heartbeat
and saying that's a living creature in there, right, you know,
I mean stuff like that, Like there's also I mean,
you're open to things that you they really ever think

(45:47):
you needed to be open to, although.

Speaker 3 (45:49):
I would argue that the catalyst is often different. It's
less that it makes you open to the new things.
It's that you start talking to your old friends from
your old position and they're like, how can you be
part of the party that supports guns or the supports
pro life or whatever? And you get defensive, and so
you start trying to come up with arguments right to
defend your associations, and it turns out the arguments aren't

(46:11):
as stupid as the people on the other side always
thought they were. And does I mean they're necessarily right
or wrong, But my point is that they're more complicated.

Speaker 2 (46:17):
Than people think.

Speaker 1 (46:26):
There's a theologian named Richard Rohorr who's written a little
bit about this, not quite the idea of like ideas shifting,
but the idea that you as long as you maintain
this sort of studious ignorance of the value of the
person that you're against right or the person that you
disagree with, you feel safe and so that's why you

(46:50):
want to do it. But the minute, for whatever reason,
that wall is broken. Sometimes broken because you're just you're
reaching out to somebody that you love, who you disagree with,
or because there's a bigger issue that draws you there.
That's when things start to get really really uncomfortable for people,
which is I think, what what? I don't know? He
would say, that's the goal is to be uncomfortable. I
will say just as a as a as a show

(47:12):
business anecdote, because that's my job. Here. I was walking
it's a National View conference, isn't this is not maybe
thirty years ago maybe walking down some walking down this
long path in the Centry Park Hotel in La with
Tom Selleck and Tom was gonna post that was going

(47:33):
to be see the dinner or something. We're walking down
and uh uh. The first person we passed it was
leaving another event in the hotel was Liza Minelli and
who just ran after. You know, there are weird time.
It's just some terrific it just terrific and she had
just done something and uh and and he said, well

(47:55):
great to see you, and she had such great to
see you. It's look good to see you a big kiss,
we said, walking and said, I don't know you.

Speaker 2 (48:00):
I've never met her before.

Speaker 1 (48:01):
It we're walking around the outside, you know how the
outside of these conferences always people with with tables and things.
And some guy runs up. The little guy runs up
to him and he's wearing this vest with all these
buttons on it, and he goes, I'm so glad to
know that you're one of us, Tom, and Tom so
I was like, well, I don't know who what you are?
You got any points to all the buttons because you've

(48:22):
got a lot going on there, just very much. And
you look at the buttons, and buttons are all that crazy,
like you know, the kinds of things that were alarming
back then, but now would would be completely normal. Uh
and would probably that guy could, as far as I know,
could be actually in the Trump administration now. He seems
to have the right views. But that is that is

(48:43):
the case. You like, you see something, you're one of me?

Speaker 2 (48:45):
Now, I'm I'm with you.

Speaker 1 (48:46):
Now, who slow down?

Speaker 3 (48:49):
Well, you know a bit of a tangent, but I
don't want to lose the ability to get the story
I probably told last time on here nine years ago.
But when you brought up Conceptsia the Housekeeper, which I
take prilosect for the Back in my early days when

(49:11):
I was a television producer working out of AI, me
and my buddies, we had this parlor game where we
would try to find examples of people using foreign words
where English words would be just fine for the pretentiousness
of it, right, And we had contests and we would
find you know, you'd be reading the New Criteria and

(49:32):
you find something commentary whatever, and you find.

Speaker 1 (49:33):
Something and then a new criteria Scott Scott nickol.

Speaker 2 (49:37):
Wait, I got a good new Criteria, Scott Nick Lucas, John,
you've Matt. He was at my roast, right, you know,
he comes running in like he won the lottery.

Speaker 3 (49:48):
And because he was reading a piece I believe by
Michael Jos Flajos, who's a smart guy. I'm not trying
to denounce him or anything like that. But he had
written something for the American Spectator where he said, and
I can't remember the exact context, but it was and
so we have to dig deeper into this con zept.

Speaker 2 (50:10):
And he spelt concept in the German with the K.

Speaker 3 (50:15):
And like like sort of like rob with the what
is this Auschwitz thing? But the next five years, anytime
said hey you want to go at some wings?

Speaker 1 (50:24):
Interesting?

Speaker 2 (50:28):
My favorite, my favorite new criterionism It wasn't wasn't the
use of a foreign word, but but but it is
the adoption of britishisms that are that are bizarrely out
of place or inappropriate. And the best one was a
sentence in which somebody this was Todd Lindberg's favorite. He's

(50:48):
the one who discovered this. That there was a passage
and he said, aha, someone wrote, you know this is
it the smoking pistol as it were the smoking pistol
as this you know anyway, So yes, so the so
if you're if you're blaming me for saying conceptci I know.

Speaker 3 (51:13):
So again, I just want to keep calling back to
previous bits of the conversation speaking of the N word, Uh,
my dad and britishisms. My dad had a business partner
in the UK who or a consultant that he worked with,
very nice guy, Oxford Don Good, fifteen twenty years older
than my dad, and they were talking about some sales

(51:35):
rights thing in the UK media market and there are
a bunch of people on the call and this guy,
very enlightened, sweet British guy, Oxford guy, he says, and
I'm going to boulderize it for our purposes because he
can't say it.

Speaker 2 (51:51):
He says, hm on.

Speaker 3 (51:52):
The question of rights on that, I think we have
a bit of an N word in the woodpile. Yeah,
and his total deafening silence. Oh god, Yeah, my dad
was like, Peter, we don't. We don't really use that
phrase anymore.

Speaker 1 (52:09):
But like, on another note, my favorite Agatha Christie novel
is Let's go Smoke some faggots.

Speaker 2 (52:17):
But that's the story. Agatha Christie's most famous novel until.

Speaker 1 (52:23):
A play, right was it a play too? But I
think Indians.

Speaker 2 (52:27):
Yeah, it was to be called ten Little Indians. Oh,
in America was called ten Little Indians. It was called
ten little n words. And when they when they made
the movie, there's actually a great movie made out of
it because it's basically one of these everyone.

Speaker 1 (52:44):
Died, everyone.

Speaker 2 (52:47):
Called, and then there were none.

Speaker 1 (52:48):
And then there were none. Is the name of the novel.

Speaker 2 (52:50):
It was was how Hollywood dealt with the but I
mean that's how that's how a word. It was in
the English language.

Speaker 1 (52:56):
I played the judge writer in England, I played the
judge in that in the High school, and it was
the job I was well, I had a very specific
conception that role. No, but I uh I uh okay,
this is another you know, name dropping Hollywood anecdote, this
time a slightly bigger star for you. I've worked for

(53:19):
years intermittently, happily but intermittently on a project that I
was pretty sure was going to never go uh with
Morgan Freeman, and I spent a lot of time with him.
It was a lovely, really thoughtful, incredibly smart guy, been
around like just could tell great stories and just a
wonderful guy. So I would fly to Mississippi where he

(53:40):
lived a lot of the time. He was born in Charleston, Mississippi,
and we would you have dinner and he'd tell me stories.
And we were working on a story set in the
Mississippi Delta, which actually was turned out was a great
great would have been a great series. And then he
had a car accident, a lot of other things happened,
so we didn't quite make it. Uh, But he told
me he would tell me each time, he would tell
me stories of encountering uh uh old Mississippi guys, old

(54:04):
Mississippi white guys.

Speaker 2 (54:07):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (54:07):
And he was a movie star, so they won't talk
to him, and the things that they would say. And
he said, this one old guy he likes very much,
so he's a friend of his. But the old guy
would talk about At one point said they're there. They're
having a drink because Morgan had and a friend of
his who's also helped on this project. They owned this
giant blues club called Ground Zero and Morgan, so they're

(54:27):
sitting there having drink and he goes, yeah, Morgan, I
can't tell you how different my life is now and
how different I am and my thoughts about you know,
the various social and cultural things that you Yeah, exactly.
He's basically making this kind of confession about how he's
changed over time, and he says, you know, for instance,

(54:49):
I I'll be honest with you, when I's growing up
for a long time, I would use the N word,
and my my, my father, my grandfather, the whole family
they used it. I mean, we used it all the time.
And I will not use that word. I would never
use that word, and I will tell the young people
in my world that that word is absolutely you did
not allowed to use the N word. And then he

(55:10):
said you pause, took a sip of his drink. But
on the other hand, you know, I hear the Ends
using it all the time. The Ends are driving up
and down they listen to their their music. That end
music's got that word an word in all time. But
the Ends just love that word more. You just love
that story so much. You didn't wait to tell me
that story.

Speaker 2 (55:28):
Oh that is fantastic, by the way, Just cultural recommendation time.
Speaking of Mississippi, this uh you know movie Sensation Centers,
which came out about a month ago. Yeah, with Michael B. Jordan,
a story about twin brothers returning to their hometown in

(55:49):
Mississippi and getting in order to open a big blues
club juke joy like the one that you're talking about
in the middle of the depression, and uh get get
waylaid by some vampires. And it is fantastic, which great
idea it is a It is a The movie itself

(56:10):
is spectacular, and it deals with all kinds of weird. Basically,
it's kind of the story of Robert Johnson, the famous,
the famous, the mythical, mythical guitar blues guitarist.

Speaker 1 (56:22):
Yeah, and I can't see that movie because somebody explained
that to me. And it was exactly what we were
trying to do. We were trying to do this multi
generational in and out, past and present, because there's no
spookier place in America than the city, and it's got
all this great story. It's just too.

Speaker 2 (56:44):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (56:45):
And Robert Johnson the story, well, Robert Johns the story.
Robert Johnson was a young uh blues guitarist and he
was terrible. He was terrible, and they were hooting him
off the stage. I mean, I wrote that I have
a scene written and he goes uh and he leaves
and he's sitting in the crossroads over sixty one and
something else, and it happens to be a full moon

(57:07):
and suddenly there's an old man sitting next to him
and it's the Devil. And that was good. That was
the part that Morgan was gonna play. He was gonna
play the devil who has been living in the Delta
forever and just he's always there and the guy is
a Robert Johnson, and he basically makes a deal because
the Mississippi Delta is like, we're a million deals being made,

(57:32):
and he wants to he wants to play the guitar
because the reading exactly right. It's the cutter of the
He wants play guitar because he's like been, he's been
dissed by all these all the hot girls in the club.
Nobody wants to do anything with anything to do with
him because he can't play. And so he sells his
soul and comes back to the club, disappears for about

(57:53):
a year, comes back to the club. But this is
all true, though. He did disappear for a year and
come back, and he's one of the best loose guitars,
if not, he created this and he created the whole genre.
And and you know that kicked off the show. It's
a great story.

Speaker 2 (58:08):
Yeah, I mean right, So the idea of how did
this kid couldn't play here come back as the greatest
guitarist anyone had ever heard? And the story was, obviously
he must have sold his soul to the devil. And
so this is one of the great American myths and
it is at the center of Centers. And I really
do highly recommend Centners, but not to rob because it

(58:29):
is really awful, I have to say. And I've known
people who have had this experience when when somebody makes
something that you wrote and then does it like and
you're like, I don't care if it's good.

Speaker 1 (58:44):
I'm never going to know the worst thing in the
world is.

Speaker 2 (58:49):
Great. Yeah. So I Jonah's mother and I became friends because.

Speaker 1 (58:57):
I came winter how that sentence went.

Speaker 2 (59:02):
In nineteen eighty two because I had an idea for
a humor book, and it was a parody, full on
cover to cover of TV Guide, like a week of
TV Guide. And this was when parody books were like
all the rage. And my idea is we would do
a fake issue of TV Guide, like the Sunday newspaper

(59:24):
parody that National Impoon put out or the Yuppi Handbook
or something like that, and the week and it was
really good. And I'm telling you right now, it was
really really good. And we did you know, I don't know.
I did twenty five pages of it, a day's worth
of listings, articles, whatever, and then was gonna and the
day that we were taking it out to market, somebody

(59:44):
bought one. Yeah, you know this firm, Andrews and McNeil
or whatever they decided they were going to They made
a deal with Tony Hendra or somebody like that to
do a TV Guide parody. And I was heartbroken. And
then it came out a year later and it's steak
and it was a complete bomb in the marketplace, and

(01:00:06):
that was very satisfying that.

Speaker 1 (01:00:08):
Yeah, but it's worse because then you're like, well, well
we have a good one, like, no, we've tried it,
and that happens and Joe is a lot. We've tried it. It
doesn't work. What do you mean it doesn't work?

Speaker 2 (01:00:16):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (01:00:17):
Everything can work.

Speaker 2 (01:00:18):
Yeah, I mean, now you could just put out what
you did on the internet, but then it had to
it was going to be mimetically perfect and all of that.
That is a that is a that is a rough.

Speaker 1 (01:00:29):
That is a rough.

Speaker 2 (01:00:30):
Go all right, so I guess waiting it? Are we
just going to keep doing this? Is that?

Speaker 1 (01:00:41):
That was a fun conversation, don't you think?

Speaker 2 (01:00:43):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (01:00:43):
Yeah, And because you're yeah, no, it was was fine.

Speaker 2 (01:00:47):
It was good.

Speaker 1 (01:00:48):
It was wait, voice, what up? When your voice goes
up like that?

Speaker 2 (01:00:51):
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (01:00:52):
Yeah, maybe we can't. Maybe we should change the name
of this HBO he Max bought Max Max klob.

Speaker 2 (01:01:04):
So it was HBO Max. First it was HBO, then
it was HBO Go, then it was HBO Max, then
it was Max and now it is HBO Max again. Right, okay,
here's my quick question for you, David Zaslov, who now
is the runs Warner Brothers Discovery, which is the parent
company ran Discovery, right that we ran the Discovery networks,

(01:01:28):
which were wildly successful and so successful that this guy
five six, seven years ago made and I'm not kidding,
in salary one hundred and fifty million dollars a year
in salary at Discovery. So the engineered this thing. Discovery
kind of takes over Warner Brothers and he's running everything

(01:01:50):
after at and T screws up and all this okay,
and he's now making fifty million, one hundred and fifty million.
Now I'm expect and people are saying okay, And people
are saying okay, people are saying, this is the dumbest
thing I've ever seen. What do you mean? They're calling

(01:02:10):
it HBO. They could have just why did they ever change?
This is this is what you get, This is the innovation,
this is what's going to turn the company around. What
the hell is going on? And I keep having these experiences,
particularly when I read about show business or about mergers
or about anything, where it's like, really, these people make

(01:02:31):
one hundred million dollars a year. And this is what
they do. Explain this.

Speaker 1 (01:02:39):
To I have a metric that I intend to use
like it's like it's the base input is number of meetings.
So the number of meetings that this calling it HBO,
HBO Go, HBO max max and back to HBO max.
The number of meeting and meeting hours supposed to have

(01:03:00):
been well, number meetings must have been at least two dozen,
so the number of eighty hours must have been at least
a thousand, probably a thousand hours of either consultant time
or an executive time to do basically nothing. And the
problem with HBO and HBO max and max and HBO
max has nothing to do with what they called it

(01:03:22):
right there, the amount of effort and money and time
spent trying to fix a thing that isn't. The problem
is everything you need to know about why they show
businesses in trouble and maybe why businesses get in trouble.

Speaker 2 (01:03:37):
So, Rob, you wrote a really great piece for me,
thank you, thank you about bob Iger bob Iger, Yeah,
out of Disney and basically based on his using his memoir,
and the question is bob Iger was this wildly successful,
like the most successful entertainment executive of his time and
took Disney to New Heights and all this, and he

(01:03:57):
wrote this book called Right of a Lifetime or something
like that, and the book begins with him deciding in
twenty fifteen to have an off site with all of
his lead saying, we need to make our path for
the future. And it's going to be streaming because you
can see Netflix here it is and Netflix and streaming

(01:04:18):
and Netflix and this whole thing basically is his bid
for immortality in the book by saying that unlike other
corporate executives who sat on their laurels and missed the moment,
he had jumped on it early. He had seen the threat,
he had addressed it, he was working on it. And
you know, three years later or something that they introduce,

(01:04:39):
you know, Disney Plus, and isn't this fantastic? Okay? Flash forward,
it's twenty twenty five and Disney Plus has materially destroyed Marvel.

Speaker 1 (01:04:51):
And Star Wars, the two.

Speaker 2 (01:04:54):
Things that they bought. Disney Plus said to Marvel, make
us twelve television series and they did. And now nobody
cares about Marvel anymore because there was too much of
it and it was too junkie, and this incredible cash
cow and the driver of show business for twenty years
was ruined. And even though and or the latest Star
Wars thing is great, it is great, it is great,

(01:05:17):
did exactly the same to Star Wars series after some
bad series, after the Acolyte at Obi Wan Kenobi and
the Book of Boba Fett and this and that, and
they created this series. They created the service to save Disney,
and they basically killed their milkcows and they over milked

(01:05:39):
their milk cows and now they're ruined. And it's interesting
because had he just retired, had he just retired and
gone off into the sunset and not come back or whatever,
had he not done this and he had just like, oh,
you know what, it's twenty eighteen. I guess we better
have a good streaming service. We'll just do it in
a year and we'll throw some stuff up and see
what happens. He wouldn't have had this drive to copy

(01:06:06):
Netflix and and try to compete there when Disney was
doing just fine.

Speaker 1 (01:06:12):
Where it was yep, yep.

Speaker 2 (01:06:16):
It's like the fear of not being innovative ended up being.

Speaker 1 (01:06:19):
There is a thing called pilot induced turbulence. And it's
when you're flying and your hand is on the stick
and you maybe hit a little buck, small buck, and
then you compensate for that, and then because you compensated,
maybe you overcompensate a little bit, and then you kind
of now you need to recompensate for that, and then
compensate for that, and before you know it, you're convinced

(01:06:41):
that you've hit choppy air because you keep bouncing up
and down. But actually you've created all that turbulence yourself.
And so they sometimes that happens in a big car.
They always hit a little your cabinet, me a little
choppy air up here. So I'm gonna put on a
he did it, he created it. It's because you just

(01:07:01):
script it to tight.

Speaker 2 (01:07:04):
Jonah blame the captain. Then Jonah hates Jonah is the
person I know who flies the most, who hates flying
the most.

Speaker 1 (01:07:11):
Fair.

Speaker 2 (01:07:13):
It's really not fair. And I think you should go
and yell at the captain.

Speaker 1 (01:07:18):
Just pound on the door. They love that, They love that.

Speaker 2 (01:07:20):
And you know you're not going to get in trouble
or anything, but.

Speaker 1 (01:07:22):
Put on a fun accent.

Speaker 2 (01:07:24):
They have guns now, they are they are?

Speaker 3 (01:07:27):
They not allowed to carry guns. I love to do
is yellar? That's great coffee anyway?

Speaker 2 (01:07:38):
And or is great? I mean, Andre just finished unbelievably
innovative second season. Did this thing where they released three
episodes per week each. These three episodes are take place
each a year apart, as we approach closer and closer
to the moment that theos are sent to Aldron Tattooine

(01:08:06):
and Luke finds them and sees the hologram of Princess
Leah saying help me Obi wan Kenobi are my only hope?
That was That's the entire backstory. Wow, twenty seven hours
of backstory and it's back to that moment. I know
we got to get out.

Speaker 3 (01:08:22):
But you know, one of my my my basic take
about why it's so good, unlike so much other stuff,
is that one of the first rules of fantasy stuff,
of escapism, sci fi, whatever, is you have to take yourself.
You have to take your actual product seriously. And so

(01:08:43):
much of the Star Wars stuff you saw it with
the problem with George Lucas was he had little kids
when he was making those prequels and they were his
test audience, and so they're all of these scenes in
those originals, not the originals in the sequels sequel prequel sequels,
Attack of the Clone, Revenge of the Cess, where they

(01:09:05):
basically wink or make inside jokes that only work in
our universe, right, that.

Speaker 2 (01:09:12):
Like like like little sort of cutesy.

Speaker 3 (01:09:14):
Oh that's got to hurt, right, And these kinds of
references that take you out of things. And we I
wrote about a little bit for the commentary piece about
Battlestar Galactago where where Obi Wan Kenobi, young Obi Wan
Kenobi has to get a little dig in against George w.
Bush with you know, uh when when Young Anakin Skywalker
says if you're not with me, you're against me, which

(01:09:37):
was like obviously a reference to the whole Moor Entior stuff,
and and George and and George Lucas the rose away
the entire metaphysics of the Force by saying only sith
deals and absolutes. Well, wait a second, I'm a burkiyan,
I'm with you. But the whole point of the freaking
Force was there's a light side of the dark slide
was mannekean, and there's all these things that they throw

(01:09:58):
out and and or gets back to this thing where
it takes itself seriously and lets you take it seriously
in a way that you can't with a lot of
those other crap that they put out.

Speaker 2 (01:10:08):
See what I love about it, what I loved about it,
and by the way, I love it even though I
hate its politics. It's basically a Howard Zinn story. And
you know, there's a lot of There's a lot there,
just as there's the cyth deals and absolutes. There's a
whole Fox News subplot there is, I mean, but it's
done so much better. It's not cartoony, so no, it's

(01:10:30):
so it's it's it's beautifully dumb, but it is there anyway.
Is that like Game of Thrones, which I also loved,
You don't have to cringe at the fantasy elements because
it's really it's about backdoor politics, right, That's.

Speaker 1 (01:10:49):
What I like about it. Nice go politics by thirty
years in Hollywood Bike Gavin mclos it's fair.

Speaker 2 (01:11:08):
I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I mean, let's get back to
paul In jokes.

Speaker 1 (01:11:12):
Paul In jokes, and what do you mean, what are
you insinuating.

Speaker 2 (01:11:16):
Richard Richard Deacon ellen Brady's brother in law. Yeah, yeah,
needed a job because otherwise he was going to be
out on Christopher Street. As you might say, anyway, sorry,
uh so and watch and or Centers, except unless you're rob.

Speaker 1 (01:11:37):
I'll see it anyway.

Speaker 2 (01:11:39):
I jack right on.

Speaker 3 (01:11:40):
Brit Box is fun. It's kind of nuts, but it's fun.
Brit Box is playing games though the whole season's out
and they're holding on to the last two episodes to
get people to check out other things on brit Box.
Oh and it's so freaking obnoxious, but.

Speaker 2 (01:11:57):
That is not good.

Speaker 1 (01:11:58):
Brit Box is fun because you and you and you.
There's like a category for murder mysteries in like the
countryside and and it's like the endless scroll You've never
you never see is it?

Speaker 2 (01:12:15):
Because I've never been on brother this is like countryside,
Scotland yard, Manchester Police Department. Right, That's how I would
That's how.

Speaker 1 (01:12:25):
It's more like you know that the Somerset County murders.
It's like and it's just a it's just everybody in
rural England is is killing everybody else in rural England.

Speaker 2 (01:12:38):
Yeah, we'll see what. I always showing up showing up
at my parents' house and they're like what is this
And they're like, well, it's Inspector McGill cutty. Okay, you know,
I mean I sort of jumped off this at Prime suspect.
But okay, that was many, many, many you guys like Modland.

Speaker 3 (01:12:59):
Not like my.

Speaker 1 (01:13:01):
It's okay, I saw my thing.

Speaker 2 (01:13:04):
I'm sposed to I'm supposed to watch it. I mean,
Pierce Brosidon is fantastic good in general. Yeah, he has
had a very interesting career. Like he's a guy who
like every five years pops up and you're like, man,
he's good.

Speaker 1 (01:13:17):
He's really good.

Speaker 2 (01:13:18):
And now he must be in his late seventy I
mean he must, right, Revington Steel was forty some odd
years ago, so it's got to be in the seventies.

Speaker 1 (01:13:26):
Like, boy is he good looking? Yeah, guy like that.
I've never heard anyone say anything about him that isn't.
Oh he's the nicest, greatest guy. Oh he's a running
to people and they oh he's you know, I had
a flat tire and he fixed it some crazy stuff,
you know, Like he's just apparently the world's nicest person.

Speaker 2 (01:13:45):
So can I give you one piece of credit before
we go, Rob, because I think you're the one who
came up with this, because you mentioned the Liza meeting
Tom in the hallway and they kissing and everything. He's
never matter Before that you said, there's this world. There
are these people. They're all face famous celebrities, and they
all feel like they're part of the same They're like

(01:14:08):
Jews as saint. It doesn't matter if they've never met,
doesn't matter. They know each other. They're all part of
the same congregation, and they can immediately be familiar because
nobody knows what it is like except them. They they're
the only people. It's sort of like the ex presidents.
Nobody knows what it's like to be really famous except

(01:14:30):
really famous people, and really famous people don't live normal lives,
and so they have this instant connection. It's like when
you see the photograph my favorite photograph, which is it's
the cast of Happy Days, and they're standing there and
in the middle there's this kid, and if you look
really closely, you'll notice that it's Sean Lennon. And then

(01:14:51):
on the left standing there also smiling is John Lennon.
So it's John Lennon.

Speaker 1 (01:14:59):
And Potzi, yeah, right, and Ralph.

Speaker 2 (01:15:04):
And on the far side is Henry Winkler and and
then Ron Howard. But basically Potzy and Ralph get to
be in a photo with John Lennon has more in
common with Potzy and Ralph than he does with.

Speaker 1 (01:15:18):
It's all show business. Everybody in show business isn't show
business and it's your Vin vendors. You're Mikyl Rischikov, You're
Joyce Boulevard. It's all show business. And don't act like,
oh well, I'm I'm, I'm, I'm I'm really actually a
very well known But no, no, no, you're you're in
show business.

Speaker 2 (01:15:35):
And I just want to say that Joyce Ballafan is
no Arleane Golanka. That's what I have to say. All Right,
So we'll we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll do this again.

Speaker 1 (01:15:48):
One one glop at a time. We're not gonna one
at a time.

Speaker 2 (01:15:53):
Uh. And we could do the inter music from One
Day at a Time for the top of the show.
There you go. Maybe maybe some quotes from Schneider Schneider
the only Jewish, the only you know, Pat Pat Harrington,
famous Irish comic playing a Jewish super in Indianapolis because
it's American comic from Queens only in America said of

(01:16:15):
the mayor of Dublin, who was Jewish, told that Bobby Briscoe,
the mayor of Dublin, was Jewish. Yo Eberra, who turned
a hundred, who would have turned a hundred three days ago,
said only in America, all right, mistake and legging one

(01:17:03):
day is shide one day, one day inside.

Speaker 1 (01:17:08):
His side.

Speaker 2 (01:17:10):
Day inside.

Speaker 1 (01:17:18):
Can't top that