Zombie Schlongs

This podcast has never been above (or below) using a title to click-bait you into listening and this episode maintains that high standard. But rest assured, that’s not all that is discussed: the guys delve into F1, that New York Times Top 100 movies of the 21st Century list, the miracle that is Andor, what the Anchorman pitch meeting must have been like, Rob has a moral dilemma in Egypt, a very weird Broadway play, Jonah has a bad experience with an EV, and is Peter Thiel actually the Anti-Christ? We report, you decide.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Yeah, you know where about years ago when he won the.

Speaker 2 (00:07):
Oh sorry, you least if he's alone. People say, I
have friends everywhere.

Speaker 3 (00:24):
I have friends everywhere.

Speaker 2 (00:28):
Those words.

Speaker 4 (00:50):
Okay, we've reached the end of June and this is
Gloff culture, and boy are we spread out across America.
We got Jonah Goldberg and Aspen, Colorado. Hi, Jonah, Hey John,
You've got Rob Long in Princeton, New Jersey on a
telephone because, as you may know, Princeton University not a

(01:13):
friend to the Jews, and the Jews seem to have
knocked out the internet in Princeton, New Jersey, thus leaving
him solely on an iPhone. Is that right? I guess
you know.

Speaker 1 (01:24):
It's funny because I I usually blame the Jews for
everything but kind of tongue in cheic, and now you're
telling me that I was right all along.

Speaker 4 (01:31):
Well, there you go. You know what, if we're gonna
get blamed for it, we're going to take credit for it. Also, then,
Wired buddy.

Speaker 1 (01:37):
I was going to say, you haven't knocked out my
all my internet. I still have a lot of internet
capability left. It's got a ah ju kind of a
half job.

Speaker 5 (01:45):
I think you're celebrating a little too soon.

Speaker 4 (01:48):
I you know what, according to my after battle reports,
I believe that you are down to about three percent
Internet and should try to use your Internet. I do
want to know whether whether or not you are actually
going to.

Speaker 1 (02:06):
We're going to shut you down according to the Jews
that run Verizon or whatever I have, I don't think
it's not Horizon.

Speaker 4 (02:13):
So you have Exfinityinity, because I just got a report
from the Jews that you have Exfinity.

Speaker 1 (02:19):
According to the Jews that run Exfinity, I'll can have
it back in twenty minutes, by seven twenty, they say
seven twenty.

Speaker 5 (02:24):
So you know, I don't know. Look, I mean, I
think you'rey maturely.

Speaker 4 (02:27):
John, Jonah, Hey, John, let me just ask you as
you you're an Aspen I believe you're at the Aspen
Ideas Festival. Has your brain grown with the with the
incredible intellection on display at the Aspen Ideas, But do
you feel yourself coursing with ideas, new ideas, fresh ideas,

(02:48):
the ideas of the sort that can create an Antichrist
and Peter thel which we'll get to in a minute.

Speaker 3 (02:54):
So the short answer is no. But I want to
a little kind because they've been very gracious hosts to
me and they treated me very well here. At the
same time, I'm not one for interfacing networking, uh confabbing,

(03:15):
and the amount of that sort of thing and weird
words for like having a conversation has left me exhausted.
The order people have emailed me to say, Hey, I
see you're gonna be an Aspen. Do you want to
talk about what we're doing to prevent Gerbil famine in
Biafra or whatever? Is just it's just exhausting.

Speaker 4 (03:40):
But that's what Richard Gear said.

Speaker 3 (03:42):
Yeah, I know where you're going. You can't even drop
a Gerbil reference without like, now, we're not even getting.

Speaker 4 (03:48):
That, Missoul, and we're gonna have to do a damage report.
So I'm just going to be you and me Jonah
talking here as as we do on a case, not
only there, but just in life.

Speaker 3 (04:02):
Yeah, I mean, I would like maybe, uh, maybe we
even turned this into a cross promoted remnant.

Speaker 4 (04:07):
Who knows there we got a cross promoted remnant? Yeah? Yeah,
why not? Because because it's the two of us. Okay,
so if it's the two of us, let's figure out
what earth. So let me ask you, John, have you
ever been to Aspen. I have never been to ask them,
so I recommend SI ski.

Speaker 3 (04:27):
So it's very expensive here.

Speaker 4 (04:29):
It is not a billionaire.

Speaker 3 (04:31):
It is mind bogglingly the expensive. This morning, just to
give you a level setting, I got three cups of
black coffee, like regular drip coffee, twelve ounce cups, not
even like the big sixteen kind of ounce cups, and
two muffins forty nine dollars.

Speaker 4 (04:50):
Well, you know, it's really expensive to haul stuff up
the mountain base. I got to haul it up the
mountain with these workers who, as I remember reading, like,
have to live three hours away and somehow get there
and then get home three hours back. I don't really care.
I mean it's fine. Everybody I know who lives in
Aspen loves Aspen or has a house and Aspen they

(05:10):
don't even live. And no one lives in Aspen except
rich people go to Aspen to ski. And then there
are people work in the shops or their ski bums
who who teach them skiing. So everybody should they should
only enjoy and have a wonderful time, and you should
have one full time at the Ideas Festival.

Speaker 3 (05:27):
I'm done with the Ideas festival. I mean, I might
go to a party tonight, but I'm leaving in the
morning and my wife. I brought my wife with me
and we went to the Aspen Farmers Market, yes and
a local had warned me that the Aspen Farmers Market
is uh is all lip filler and doodles.

Speaker 4 (05:49):
What are doodles?

Speaker 5 (05:51):
What do you like?

Speaker 3 (05:52):
Laberdoodle, Bernie doodle, all of those doodles being like dogs.

Speaker 4 (05:56):
They sell dogs.

Speaker 3 (05:57):
It's like the dogs in Aspen, doodles of one kind.

Speaker 4 (06:00):
I thought you were going to tell me about stuff
being woke at the a or something at the Aspen
No farmer's market like the Park Slope co Op.

Speaker 3 (06:11):
I mean, I was saying to somebody yesterday that, you know,
you walk around the Aspen Farmers Market and there are
a lot of tinctures of mountain mushroom things and clever
soaps and candles and aroma therapy things. And I was like,
where's the one table for the bored husband son, you know,

(06:35):
the dude who just wants to see cool knives? Like
there should have been one table with like just cool
masculine things, and there was none. It was all skewed
towards UH, very attractive women with lip filler walking doodles.

Speaker 4 (06:51):
And we are, of course you're talking about. Isn't that
Lauren Bobert's district or it's right next to Lauren Bobert's district.

Speaker 3 (07:00):
I thought it was like Colorado Springs or something like that.

Speaker 4 (07:03):
I could be wrong. I'm wrong about many things, but
I do know that, yes, there are many right wing
people in Colorado. Not an assmen, not an Aspen. Okay.
I wanted to share with you one woke piece of
information because there's been a lot of talk on the
right about how the woke is dead. Woke is dead.
You know, people are really understanding now that everything went

(07:25):
too far and people have got to pull it back
and all of that. But I went to the theater yesterday.
I went to see a new version of Pirates Dependzance
on Broadway called Pirates depend Zance Musical at the Roundabout Theater,
a theater company that's been around for like forty fifty
years and is not noted for being particularly political. It

(07:45):
is one of the few theater companies which I can
say they do not look to stage extremely political things.
Oh my gosh, it is Rob Long has returned to
our broadcast here. How do I say, I am a
sound good? Does it sound good to you? Now you're
sounding bad? Okay? Oh go ahead.

Speaker 1 (08:08):
Well it was that I that the solution might be
just to go on my phone and on my iPad.

Speaker 5 (08:12):
But apparently that's not a solution.

Speaker 4 (08:14):
No, Now it seems fine. You sound okay, You sound okay.
Let's see how it goes, because we've already established as
a baseline that you are going in and out, so
if you go out, you'll go out. I just want
to finish my story about going to the Roundabout Theater
to see Pirates the Penzance Musical, as it's now called.
It's Parts of Pendzance, but it's set in eighteen eighty

(08:34):
in New Orleans. First half is fantastic, second half not
so good. But that's because they said it New Orleans.
And the great joke at the end of the Parts
of Penzance is that all the pirates turn out to
be noblemen's children, and they and they they come back
into the gentry, you know, into the nobility, and they

(08:54):
worship the queen and everything ends. And of course you
can't have that in America. But here's the point in
the lobby of the Roundabout Theater, there was a huge poster,
and the poster says, we're all in this together. Theater
exists only with an audience, and at Roundabout we're committed
to getting better and better at welcoming everyone. So please
feel free to engage with the show, genuinely, show kindness

(09:18):
toward each other, don't judge others' responses, and don't presume
you know someone else's story as they experience the show.
And then, in big capital letters, we all play an
ongoing part to dismantle racism, ableism, colonialism, discrimination based on
gender identity and sexual orientation, and all other forms of oppression.

(09:42):
Roundabout reserves the right to relocate or remove any person
who disregards our intention to make our theaters and events
welcoming and accessible to all. So they're trying to dismantle
all forms of oppression, and they are thereby going to

(10:02):
oppress anybody who objects to the means by which they
are going to repress oppression or something. So this is
why I say that while many people on the right
think that wokeism is done, it ain't done. And now
Rob is done because he is gone, he might come back,

(10:25):
maybe he's horrified by what I said. Jonah, what is
your experience with the supposed death of Woke, because I
think we're prematurely saluting the death of Woke. Yeah, I
see all.

Speaker 3 (10:39):
Of that kind of stuff as I mean, you and
I are older though, to remember that before Woke there
was political correctness, right, and like I see that as like, uh,
like you know, tides in a wetland, you know, they
come in, it goes out. I do think we are
not going to see the high wa water mark of

(11:00):
woke again for a while, but we're still going to
have to walk through some sludgy wokeness from time to
time to extend the metaphor inpermissibly.

Speaker 4 (11:11):
I like it. I like that metaphor. I think it's
an excellent metaphor. You know what else is a little woke,
But it's like one of the best things I've ever
seen is the show The Pit. I feel it necessary
to praise The Pit unreservedly. I've now seen seven episodes
of the fifteen episode show, which is about one shift
in an er in Pittsburgh. So each hour sort of

(11:36):
like twenty four is an hour? Is it elapsed hour
of time on one shift? And so I'm now an
hour seven and it's about the best hospital show I've
ever seen. It's by the people who made Er. In fact,
there is a lawsuit in which the Michael Crichton the
state claims that it was supposed to be a sequel
to Er and they should get part of the profits.

(11:57):
But it is just almost like the platonic ideal of
a hospital show set entirely inside the hospital. You are
on a shift in a hospital. There are doctors, there
are patients, There are little patient stories. The doctors each
have private lives. And as the show unfolds over these
fifteen hours, and as I say, I've only watched seven

(12:20):
of them, you learn who the doctors are, you learn
what their relationships are, you learn about the nurses, you
learn about the patients, and all of it is done
in the same kind of heart pounding, quick moving camera,
always moving way where you're moving from one patient to another,
to another doctor, to a resident, to an intern, to
a nurse, to the waiting room and so on. And

(12:43):
it's a sensational achievement in television.

Speaker 3 (12:46):
So I have not seen it. I've heard a lot
of buzz about it. My wife watched it without me
I was traveling or something, some deep betrayal there, and
she liked it, but she was surprised how much you
liked it. She was like, really, pod like it that much?
It's so didactic. That was her official response to your text.

Speaker 4 (13:06):
Ah. Interesting, Well, I can't say that I find it didactic.
Yet maybe it gets more didactic as it goes, and
as I say, it's.

Speaker 5 (13:17):
A little woke.

Speaker 3 (13:18):
You know.

Speaker 4 (13:18):
There's a plot about a mother and taking a girl
to the emergency room to get an abortion, and the
mother showing up and saying, that's my daughter. You're pretending
to be her mother, and she's seventeen and I don't
want her getting an abortion. So there's that, and there's
some other stuff. There's a transpatient, that kind of thing.
But I just as a connoisseur of the medical show

(13:40):
and a fan of the medical show since I loved
Marcus Welby when I was nine years old. Marcus Welby
MD huge hit when I was nine years old, number
one show on television in like nineteen seventy one. I
loved it. Then. I love doctor shows. This somehow is
the instillation of everything that's good about doctor shows and

(14:03):
throws away everything that's bad.

Speaker 3 (14:05):
Well, I will watch it, okay. But see, this is
one of the advantages of Rob not being able to
get on the podcast, as we can actually talk about
pop culture, and then listeners should know. Every now and
then Rob's either avatar or his visage reappears on our screen,

(14:27):
and it's sort of like you get a kind of
vibe like somebody drowning who's just coming back up to
the surface to ask for help, and then they sink
back down and disappear. So if we sound weird, it's
partly because of that. Have you watched murder Bot on
Apple TV.

Speaker 4 (14:43):
I've watched ten minutes of murder Bot and I really
enjoyed it, and I want to go back to it,
but I then somehow got sucked into the pit. So
I need to go back to murder Bot on your recommendation,
So I recommend it. I think we're allowed to out
that we are friends with Cliff Asnes here. It's not
like it's a secret. I recommended it to Cliff. He
loved it, which is a good sign, and I think

(15:06):
you will like it. Alexander Scarlsguard. I think that you
say his name right.

Speaker 3 (15:10):
He actually has a really great dry comedic timing pattern
that you know, it comes out a little bit in
that succession show, very dry, very Swedish. But I think
it's really really good. And when your biggest complaint is

(15:31):
that the episodes are too short, that's a good sign.

Speaker 4 (15:35):
Can I just say that the scars Guard family, this
is one hell of a family. So Alexander Scarsguard and
his brother. He has a brother named Bill. Bill played
nos Faratu in the really superb recent movie version of
nos s Faratu and played Pennywise the clown in the
first very scary movie of it and in the second

(15:57):
terrible sequel to the first movie of it. Very interesting actor.
And of course their dad is Stellin Scarsguard, who is
one of the great actors of our time in the
original movie Insomnia in ten thousand other Things, and and

(16:18):
or of course, in which he plays luth and Reel
the what would you call him? He's sort of like
the spy. He's sort of like the James Jesus Angleton
of the result. He is the spy Master of the Resistance.
In the years before the Plans, you know, the before

(16:41):
Luke Skywalker somehow gets his hands on the plans for
the Death Star in in R two D two and
sets off the plot of Star Wars.

Speaker 3 (16:50):
Yes, and you got we should listeners should know that
you and mac connetty did an excellent special episode the
Conjurerary Podcast doing a very deep dive into and Or,
which I agreed with you guys. I think and Or
was the best. I would say it's the best television
in a long time, but it was the best television

(17:11):
built out of a bad television premise, you know what
I mean? Yes, I know would say that. I mean
because some of the you know, some of the Star
Wars stuff is fine, some of it's bad, but like,
to get that level of excellence with that background material
was really, really, really impressive. I would argue the only
thing that was more impressive, which started with better base material,

(17:35):
was better Call Saul. The ability to make a sequel
of a much loved, very carefully crafted drama using it
without it being derivative, making it feel original but also
tied to the original stuff was really really impressive, I thought.

Speaker 4 (17:53):
But Andre's yeah, I mean, And what people should understand
about and Or is that is that it is a
It is a political thriller about about how it's kind
of three Days of the Condor in right, in Star Wars,
Star Wars, in the Star Wars universe. So it's hard

(18:17):
to it's hard to explain how bizarrely sophisticated it is
compared to everything else in Star Wars, which is glorious,
some of it, I mean, really the first two movies
and the the rest is garbage, But I mean the
is it the sophistication of the plotting of and Or,
which is about how how how a resistance forms against

(18:39):
a crumbling system that is being overtaken from within by
a you know, by a dictatorial tyrant in the form
of the Emperor is uh. I don't know, I've ever
seen anything like it before. It's almost like it's almost
like you would take a you know, you take a

(19:03):
book for children, and then you would write Machiavelli's The
Prints based on it or something like that. It's it's
a degree of difficulty that it's a little hard to
it's a little hard to explain. And then also it
was and Or. The second season of and Or is,

(19:25):
as a matter of structure, incredibly sophisticated. It's essentially three
or four three hour movies or four three hour chunks
of plot, each of each chunk taking a yeat, taking
place a year apart, and so as a result, there's

(19:50):
so little exposition. So it's like science fiction always dies
with exposition in my experience. So it's like, first you
get what it's like in this year, and then it
ahead to the next year, and then you have to
piece together what happened in the intervening eight months that
you didn't see, and then you do it again, and
then you do it again, and so you don't actually

(20:11):
have the well since the last time we were together,
don't get this apartment to hide.

Speaker 3 (20:17):
And ironically, you don't get the most Arguably, other than
the Death Star and Lightsabers, the most iconic thing from
the Star Wars franchise is the scroll of text at
the beginning of the movies, which is kind of funny
when you think about it, because that's what you kind
of want between these episodes. Here's what's happened since the
last episode.

Speaker 4 (20:36):
Yeah, it has been a dark day for and Or.
He trapped in an apartment and Coruscant with his beloved.
He is going stir crazy. Yeah, they don't do that anyway.
It's a very remarkable thing and it's a very interesting
use of television. And the interesting thing is, well, the
first season did not do very well in the ratings

(20:59):
and was an incredibly expensive The second season was even
more expensive and has proved to be an absolute rating sensation.
Like it's a huge hit.

Speaker 3 (21:09):
And you say rating, I mean, like, what what does
ratings mean on streaming on Apple TV?

Speaker 4 (21:13):
It's number. It's not Apple TV, it's Disney, so it
is it's a number of hours watched. And so they
they have all these firms now that somehow measure how
many hours in aggregate something is watched, and sometimes the
streaming services release those numbers, and sometimes they don't. So

(21:35):
we know, for example that you know, there are shows
that do shockingly well that you've never heard of, like
Ginny and Georgia, and then there are shows that get
enormous amounts of attention that I'm trying to think of
what that like that don't rate at all.

Speaker 3 (21:53):
It's sort of like Girls in the Older.

Speaker 4 (21:55):
Right example, or mad Men, which nobody watched. Yeah, but
so yeah, go ahead, no, that's okay.

Speaker 3 (22:06):
So since we're just it's like we're running with the
ball here with pop culture because probs, now, have you
seen twenty eight years later.

Speaker 4 (22:16):
You know what I haven't yet. I did see F one,
so I can talk about F one, So I like
twenty eight days and twenty eight weeks later though, Like,
as you know, I'm not a big fan of the
zombie thing, but I like Danny Boyle the director. So
were you a fan?

Speaker 3 (22:32):
Yeah? So I love the first one. I think the
first one was actually pretty impressive, you know, iconic filmmaking.
The second one it's like, remember that piece I did
for you about Battlestarta sar Galactica. I feel like twenty
eight weeks later suffered from the similar thing where they
had to make it about the Iraq War and London

(22:54):
becomes the green Zone, and it's it's a classic example
of not thinking through your metaphors, because according to this
then the Iraqis are the civilization destroying zombies, which is
not like the argument that he kind of wanted to make,
and so I thought it kind of failed on those purposes.
Twenty eight years later is some interesting filmmaking. I should

(23:18):
be very clear. My wife hated it with a blinding passion.
My daughter liked it, and I really liked it. But
it is a really British movie, and I'm kind of
eager to read some British reviews of it because it
plays on a lot of it's less a zombie movie

(23:38):
than an English movie. It's really kind of interesting. And
I could also do without the excessive male frontal nudity.
I mean, all the frontal nudity is bothersome to me
in this because it's it's grubby, dirty zombie frontal nudity,
which is not you know, it's not my metier. But

(23:59):
one of the things that this is not really a
huge spoiler since twenty eight years later the way, because
in the first two movies, the whole premise was if
you can make it like a week, the zombie virus
would die out because all the zombies would starve to
death because they're not really zombies, they're not undead, they
just have this crazy virus. So to make it last
twenty eight years, you have to they have to have
mutated somewhat, and one of the mutations is you get

(24:24):
these smarter, stronger, faster alpha zombies and they're very y large,
and they're very very as they would say, well endowed,
and you get exposed to a lot of of zombie Schlongs,
which I if I saw it alone I wouldn't love,

(24:46):
but seeing it with my wife and daughter, I particularly didn't,
you know, appreciate.

Speaker 4 (24:51):
So this negativity about zombie Schlanngs. I'm sorry, I find,
I find, I find, I find. You know, you're that's
very calm, stockish.

Speaker 5 (25:01):
I don't know.

Speaker 4 (25:01):
I would just say, you know, like like humanocentric and uh,
you know, yeah, So basically what I what I I
went to see F one. So F one is this
multi zillion dollar Brad Pitt movie about Formula one car racing,
in which they invented new cameras and they did they

(25:23):
they they worked with Formula one and they were able
to do this and Brad Pitt and his co star
drove the cars during the Formula one races and you
can see you can tell that it's them, according to
what I read, and so you could you can't tell
it to them. They're wearing helmets, it could you have
no idea what you could just be a stunt man.

(25:44):
That doesn't matter that they're driving the cars or not.
And I thought it was kind of boring, and then
I had this flash of revelation, which is that if
you want to see a movie about good that has
really good car racing sequences, you know what you want
to see Pixar cars. Those were some hell of a
car race car racing thing and sensationally good when when

(26:11):
lightning with Queen ends up racing, and so I'm very
enthusiastic about that. Compared to F one, all right, I
got nothing. I've never been interested in Formula one. I'm
not really interested in NASCAR either, And I have this
natural could be completely unfair. It's based on a handful
of anecdotes, but I just assume any promotion of Formula

(26:34):
one is paid for by like Katari Middle Eastern interests
who have some sort of back end deal, has to
be a placement of something, you know. According to this movie,
Brad Pitt goes to work for a team on f
on on an F one that has lost three hundred

(26:57):
million dollars in the current F one season, and there
are I think ten teams in Formula one, and so
if that's the case, then they're spending like one hundred
and fifty million dollars each on these two cars that
they make, and so it's a huge business. It's like
a huge sport and a huge business and it's so boring, Like,

(27:20):
what the hell, why does anybody want to watch this?
Like I can understand, It's like they're going around and
around and around. I've never in my toll I agetten
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That's bamboohr dot com Slash Free Demo, bamboohr dot com
slash and whole life. I've never understood this. Rob Long
has returned.

Speaker 3 (28:59):
I have.

Speaker 4 (29:01):
Let's see if he can stick around lights and everything,
all right, Rob, So Rob, we've been talking about f one,
which I didn't like. Jonah liked twenty eight years later.
I like the pit, Jonah likes murder Bot. That's where
we are. I'm not going to ask you what you
like that you're watching, because you're probably not watching anything.
So I think we should transition to the biggest cultural

(29:24):
question of our time, which is how angry or not
angry were you made? Or were what is anybody being made?
By The New York Times list of the top one
hundred movies of the twenty first century, as determined by
a panel of five hundred celebrities and some other people
and all of that, and I will just hand you

(29:46):
my list of the top one hundred movies of the
twenty first century. Number one, The Lives of Others, the
two thousand and six, a German movie about the Astasi
agent and the person whom he is tracking, and number
two to one hundred. Eh, that's my list of the

(30:08):
top one hundred movies of the twenty first century. However,
I will say Jonah was talking about how twenty eight
Years Later is a very British movie, and uh, they're
one of the movies in the top twenty is Children
of Men, and I want to talk quickly about Children Men. Okay,

(30:29):
here's why I want to talk about Children Men Children
Men made in two thousand and six by Alfonso Quoro
and the Mexican director, set in a Britain, in a
world in which no one in which no one has
had children. No one has children, The last child was
born eighteen year the human race is dying out, and it's.

Speaker 5 (30:46):
Right right the novelist, What do you want to say
about it?

Speaker 4 (30:49):
Here's what I want to say about it. So it's
a dystopian right wing novel about abortion, a metaphor for
abortion and how abortion is going to kill off the
human rights. That is what P. D. James, the writer
means intended. That's what the book is about. It's about
euthanasia and abortion and the evils thereof very religious allegorical theme.

(31:09):
Alfonso qauaand makes what is one of the best directed
movies ever made, with car chase scenes you cannot believe
and with a level of visual gorgeousness that is just
beyond belief. And he turns this into a story about
the evils of people who don't believe in unrestricted immigration.

(31:32):
That is what Children of Men is about. And according
to this movie, Children of Men the number eighteen movie
on the list or something. In a world in which
no one's been born for eighteen years, suddenly somebody is pregnant.
But it turns out that the person who is pregnant
is an the legal alien to England. And so what
do the authorities in England want to do when there

(31:52):
is a miracle a birth, the first birth, therefore the
human race will be saved. They have to kill her.
They want to kill her because she is an illegal
alien and she can't be the one to have a baby,
so they'd rather have the entire human race die off
than let her live, which is so a psychotic plot
and kind of ruins the whole. It's like, what, like,

(32:13):
what the hell are you talking about?

Speaker 5 (32:15):
Well, I don't know. I thought I see your point.

Speaker 1 (32:18):
To me, it feels more like that book Camp of
the Saints, because obviously Europe has been destroyed by decades
of sort of lackluster enforcement of immigration rules and a
giant wave of immigrants to not only to Europe but also,
I mean to you, not only to England, which where
its set, but also to like Europe. There's a whole

(32:39):
there's a whole subplot about people trying to save the
great works of Western art because they were being destroyed
in Rome and places like that. So it's a little
more complicated than that seems to me. Although I can't,
I just remember there was. I just remember it as
an astonishing, the great movie, incredibly great stuff in it,
and I think, actually I would say, if you want

(33:00):
to go back to twenty eight days later, twenty eight
weeks later, I haven't seen the twenty eight years later,
twenty eight weeks or twenty eight months.

Speaker 5 (33:04):
What it san was the middle one.

Speaker 1 (33:07):
What I liked about that was that the Great villain
or the person who blew it. Right, they had sort
of contained this virus on the island, and the person
who blew it was the person who showed mercy, momentary mercy,
who momentarily did a human thing and said, Okay, I'm

(33:29):
not suppos I'm supposed to shoot you, but I'll.

Speaker 5 (33:32):
Let you in.

Speaker 1 (33:33):
And that was the beginning of the end, at beginning
of the that was the second beginning of the second end.
So I just, I mean, I just think that's really
that was really clever and wise, and.

Speaker 5 (33:45):
I enjoyed it. But what's the.

Speaker 1 (33:48):
Most depressing thing about what you're saying to me is,
of all of the things you've said that have depressed me,
the most depressing thing you've said to me is that
The Lives of Others was one of your number one
movies for the twenty first century, because it just seems
like it was such a long time ago.

Speaker 3 (34:07):
I know that thing freaks me out too.

Speaker 5 (34:09):
And now you're telling me that it's.

Speaker 1 (34:13):
I just I don't know whether that makes me feel
really really old or just kind of out of touch
or both.

Speaker 5 (34:18):
It was twenty way.

Speaker 4 (34:18):
Years ago, was released twenty years ago. That's or nineteen
years ago, So it is kind of kind of amazing.
But if you consider what has gone on in the
world of filmmaking and this list, actually, if you guys
want to listeners, want to go look, just go look
at the list, and you will see the ways in
which the cinema, as the dominant form of the twenty

(34:41):
the dominant cultural form of the twentieth century, has ceased
being the dominant cultural film in the twenty first because
these hundred movies, half of them aren't very good. Half
of them are chosen for, you know, obvious political reasons.
But whatever they are, they are small, they are unambitious.

Speaker 5 (35:01):
There you don't have to have seen them. I mean
you don't. I mean you don't have to have seen it.

Speaker 1 (35:05):
You had to see close accounts of the third kind,
whether you liked it or you didn't like it, you
saw it. But these, like you know, you don't have
to see these movies. There's still I mean, the problem
with the entertainment business in general is that they made
more product, and they made more of everything, except there's
still the same number of hours in the day. You
still got to sleep and eat and like not watch something.
There's a period of time when you're not watching something.

(35:27):
It's crept into the working hours because I think most
people spend a good third of their day at work
watching YouTube videos and TikTok videos. But that just eats
inndy of the time, and so you know, we I
was arguing with a friend of mine saying that, you know,
with a great internet move was that they monetized nine

(35:50):
to five. There was a time when nine to five
you were kind of out of touch, like you couldn't
if you would walk through your office and people were
sitting there reading magazines, you'd be like, you find But
if you walk through office down, everybody's kind of on
the web. It's like the kind of typing a thing
it doesn't like you don't that's actually considered fine.

Speaker 3 (36:09):
Well, it's like that Netflix Netflix. Remember the Netflix executive
who said that they consider their real competition sleep. You know,
like it's kind of creepy and scary, but they have point.
I guess say, I kind of disgrace. I think both
of you guys are being a little too dyspeptic about
this list. I mean, I agree there's some the list
rank rankings almost always terrible, particularly when The New York
Times does rankings, but there's some comparison. But like Mad

(36:34):
Max Fury Road is a great movie. Uh, you know,
once upon a time in Hollywood it was a great
movie in Glorious Bastards. I have a soft spot for it.

Speaker 4 (36:49):
You know.

Speaker 3 (36:49):
There there are a bunch of like legitimate, like good
movies on here, and you know, like the Coen Brothers,
A big chunk of their work is been in the
last twenty five years. And I think the Cohen Brothers
are great, you know, uh, you do get the sense
that the curation of this list is is you know,

(37:16):
you know, yeah, Camel's course made by committee kind of vibe.
But there's you know, like A Dark Knight I think
is a great movie.

Speaker 4 (37:26):
Okay, I'm not saying otherwise.

Speaker 3 (37:28):
It's a big movie and people feel like that.

Speaker 1 (37:30):
I would say, but I think John's correct in the
sense that I think that there has been a little
bit of loss of losing their way because there you know,
there's just so much extra competition. But I would say
the bell Weather, the bell Weather, I mean, I'm sure
of this is my my new theory. I'm working on
the bell Weather for whether there's going to be a
future here or not.

Speaker 5 (37:48):
For mass show business, mass entertainment.

Speaker 1 (37:53):
It's whether they can produce in one year three comedies
in a row, just three.

Speaker 5 (38:02):
Consider they used to pot but you know.

Speaker 1 (38:03):
Really actually generate one a week in the heyday and
the summer had won a week. Because comedy is this
thing that you it's pure intuition, You, the audience, and
the executives. Either they laugh or they don't laugh, and
the laughter is totally involuntary, and it happens before you

(38:24):
have a chance to think about it, so you can't
Actually your brain doesn't work fast enough to say that
is an offensive statement. I'm not going to laugh at it.
I mean, you've laughed already and then you get angry
and you made Mostly the anger is because you laughed
because I tricked you into laughing at this racist joke.

(38:45):
But that that's be the true I think that's gonna be.

Speaker 5 (38:49):
The that's the the green shoot, that's the uh, you know,
groundhog day moment. If if if.

Speaker 1 (38:55):
Show business can't do that, then they've lost the thread
completely because they're now it's not able to do anything
at all.

Speaker 5 (39:02):
That everything has to be planned out, and you know.

Speaker 1 (39:05):
Like I always wanted to go into the meeting and
see the meeting where you know, Will Ferrell pitched Anchorman, Like,
what was that meeting?

Speaker 5 (39:16):
Like, I mean, if you're the executive, Well.

Speaker 4 (39:17):
Well I know what that meeting was.

Speaker 6 (39:19):
Like.

Speaker 4 (39:19):
It's interesting you mentioned that because I was listening to
a podcast about Anchorman last week. There's a podcast that
is also doing like the twenty five best movies of
the twenty first century, and Anchorman was one that they chose,
and I was thinking about Anchorman, and Anchorman was interesting
because you can summarize, and this is also true if
there's Something about Mary, you can do a log line
or a summary of the movie that is straight. Right.

(39:42):
A TV station in San Diego is thrown into chaos
when it is decided that the all male news team
has to be integrated with a woman as the co host. Right,
that's the plot. That is the plot of Anchorman. The
plot of There's Something About Mary is a man hires
a private detective to find the girl that he loved

(40:02):
in high school, and the private detective falls in love
with her too and wants to win her back. Then
you take these plots, you take these totally conventional. One
of them is sort of like a TV is like
is like a social drama plot and the other is
like a classic romantic comedy triangle and then you go

(40:22):
totally bananas.

Speaker 1 (40:24):
But but you don't, But you don't do that in
the meeting. You just you know, if you're in the meeting,
you just trust that it's gonna be funny, even though
I mean, I'm sure that if there was pitch them,
half these comedies when they pitch them are like, I
don't know, wait what they all suddenly sing afternoon Delight.
Wait a minute, all the anchormen go and they chop

(40:44):
each other.

Speaker 4 (40:45):
That's what I'm saying. You could have handed in a
script for Anchorman that was straight and then you improvised
on top of that.

Speaker 1 (40:53):
Saying you can't do but you can't start improvising until
you've got the money, right, So what I'm saying is
the green light of the meeting was based on the
idea that, well, these are funny people and they have
kind of a funny idea, and they're going to get
some of their friends to be in it, and I
don't know, I mean, it seems funny and that or

(41:15):
maybe maybe you say, I know, I know, I knew
an executive for a long time when She started every
meeting by saying, listen, I have no sense of humor whatsoever.

Speaker 5 (41:25):
But that was fine because she's like, but you do,
so you just do the funny thing.

Speaker 4 (41:30):
And it is amazing that until twenty eleven or twenty twelve,
comedy was like horror is now, comedy was the most
reliable Yeah, box office thing. You made it for relatively
modest money, and you got five times your return if

(41:50):
the movie if people liked the movie, so you were
you were guaranteed of five times your opening weekend or
your budget if people liked it. And then something happened.
I think Ferguson happened. I'm not entirely sure what happened.
Something happened where everybody got scared to.

Speaker 5 (42:06):
Make everybody got scared. And the problem is that if
you get the hang Out.

Speaker 4 (42:10):
The Hangover made Hangover, which is again a comedy that
sounds like a it sounds like a thriller, right, it's
what happened to the group, Yeah, what happened to the group.
The groom is missing. The groom is gone, and the
ring is gone, right, and that's the the and it
was filmed that way, and then it's a crazy comedy right,

(42:34):
So the hangover was huge. They made two sequels, they
both made a huge amount of money, and then the
entire business collapsed like a house of cards. I don't
even know when the last big multi you know, unless
unless you say, like Deadpool is a superhero? Is a
movie like that in the is a Farley Brothers or

(42:54):
one of those in the Guys of a Superhero movie?
But okay, so that's stopped.

Speaker 3 (42:59):
I think the according to Cannon on this podcast, is
the last great movie you can't you can't, you're not
allowed to make was Tropic Thunder.

Speaker 1 (43:09):
Oh my god, Yeah you can't. Yeah, I don't think
you can even. I think you're I think you're in
trouble for even mentioning.

Speaker 4 (43:15):
You couldn't even go to a You couldn't mention it
in a meeting, right, you couldn't mention.

Speaker 5 (43:19):
You And yet and yet you can't hear this.

Speaker 3 (43:23):
This is my It's a fantastic movie.

Speaker 5 (43:24):
It's a fantastic movie. This is my problem.

Speaker 1 (43:27):
Jack Black is tied up and he's making all sorts
of promises to die, just get some arrow, and it
is so great. Uh, but I guess you can't say
those things in Hollywood. But that is all over TikTok,
it is all over Instagram reels. There are funny people

(43:50):
who are making huge, huge, I mean, I don't know
how to make a lot of money. They get huge
audiences because they are absolutely one hundred percent willing to
swing with a fence content wise.

Speaker 4 (44:04):
Now, can I talk about something that you and I
both admired and I admired to my absolute shock, But
it speaks to your idea that the thing about commentary
is that there's no faking. It's involuntary comedy comedy.

Speaker 1 (44:18):
I'm not comedy, not commentary in the spell Burn Coast.

Speaker 4 (44:24):
No, I'm I'm trying to do product placements.

Speaker 5 (44:27):
O great, okay, tasting copper lights out, go ahead, okay,
go ahead, okay.

Speaker 4 (44:36):
Comedy is involuntary, and then you laugh. There's no way
to stop you from now. So I have two stories.
One story is about there's something about Mary. In nineteen
ninety eight, I went to the News Corp Senior Retreat
in Sun Valley, Idaho, by one place close to Aspen
that I've ever been, News corpor treat led by Peter Sherman,
then the number two person at Fox and the higher executive,

(45:01):
and I was then an executive at news Corp. Because
I was at the Weekly Standard or nineteen ten ninety seven,
I can't remember what year it was. And it was
an amazing experience, like three days lavish, you know, panel
discussions and this and then and then one they said, okay, everybody,
go to the movie theater at Sun Valley. We're going

(45:21):
to show you a movie that's going to open in
three months. And then this movie starts and there's Ben
Stiller and he's in a tuxedo and he's going to
his prom and then he zips out. He goes to
the bathroom, and then he zips up his he zips
up his pants and Schlong gets caught in the zipper

(45:42):
when he screams, and the entire executive core of News
Corps screamed with laughter and then spent the next two
hours screaming with laughter. I hadn't heard of this movie.
No one had heard of it. No one had had
you know, nothing. It came out of nowhere, and it

(46:03):
was kind of a genius thing that Turnon had done
to sort of say, hey, everybody should be excited about
what we're doing here at the movie studio. Because that
was something new. It was something entirely new. It broke
every boundary and changed the way people made movies for
fifteen years. There's something about Mary. Okay, I just saw another,

(46:23):
another thing with the word Mary in it. It's a
play on Broadway.

Speaker 5 (46:27):
Oh sure, Mary, did you like it?

Speaker 4 (46:30):
I thought it was one of the funniest things I've ever.

Speaker 5 (46:31):
He It is insanely funny.

Speaker 4 (46:33):
But it's exactly eighty minute. Yeah, it's it's eighty minute.
It's exactly describe it.

Speaker 1 (46:38):
It's a ninety minute, no no intermission, crazy farce in
which a guy named Cola Scola, who's actually really really
funny if you look him up, He's did some really
great like YouTube stuff.

Speaker 5 (46:50):
He plays Mary. Todd Lincoln.

Speaker 4 (46:52):
He wrote it right, he wrote he wrote, he wrote it.
I didn't see a minute. He's not in it now,
so I can say that it works without me.

Speaker 1 (47:01):
He was very talking Lincoln, you know, a revision a
revisionist history, historical view, in which she is a drunk,
frustrated cabaret singer married to a struggling and deeply deeply
closeted gay President Abraham Lincoln.

Speaker 4 (47:19):
Not that closetive.

Speaker 5 (47:20):
Well, me and the place is pretty funny.

Speaker 1 (47:24):
And it's a it's a new way of looking at
the events at Ford Theater.

Speaker 5 (47:29):
I'll just leave it at that about.

Speaker 1 (47:32):
But it's noisy and loud, and it starts at like
at like ninety thousand miles an hour, and people are
acting like, oh my god, this is the most most
amazing thing in Broadway ever. It was really funny. Here's
what it was. It's a Marx Brothers play. It's just
a big, loud, noisy, kind of dumb but hilarious, right.

(47:56):
And there's one running gag in which he keeps saying
there's a war on and she looks at him. She
was but between against who who with yeah, and it's.

Speaker 4 (48:06):
And he says he says the south and she says
south of where It's like anyway. It is stupid, and
it's deliberately stupid, and it is a crazy yeah, Barce
and you. I didn't want to see it because I
thought it was going to be woke. It's like, there's
a time Lincoln and there's a drag queen playing Mary

(48:28):
Todd Lincoln, and the whole thing is just going to
be some kind of a message without a message. There
is no message.

Speaker 5 (48:35):
There's no message.

Speaker 1 (48:36):
The play when I saw who originated the role played
Lincoln Conrad Rick Moro does this thing where he is
trying he is a big monolog where he's swearing off
any sort of gay desire or activity, and he's like

(48:56):
he kind of is like a mind piece where he's
like saying no more. Physic like he kind of mime's
putting it in a box and then locking it away
and then putting the box away on a shelf, and
he does it so great. I haven't seen a physical
comedy like that a long time. It's really really funny.
And of course, at any given moment, all of those

(49:18):
people would be in sitcoms that you know, you watch
sitcoms from the seventies and they're all these Broadway actors
inappropriately cast.

Speaker 5 (49:26):
In my opinion, it's like the idea that.

Speaker 1 (49:28):
Hal Linden played a detective was like ridiculous, but it
was the seventies and.

Speaker 5 (49:35):
And you know, I Hindy Winkler could play a cool.

Speaker 4 (49:37):
Agree with that at all. How Linden struck me very
much as like a bronx guy who Jewish precinct.

Speaker 5 (49:45):
Why I'm a must to investigate this crisch what it was.
I mean that show was good, but it was like,
come on, just like.

Speaker 4 (49:56):
His name was how ellipsips.

Speaker 5 (49:58):
Oh, I'm sure.

Speaker 4 (49:59):
Well, I went to I went to element to middle
school with his daughter Amelia, So you how Linden out
of your goddamn mouth.

Speaker 3 (50:10):
I went to grade school with Barbara Barry, who played
Barney Miller's wife, Uh, with.

Speaker 4 (50:15):
Her son, with her son Aaron Harnick.

Speaker 3 (50:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (50:19):
Yeah, And then and then I was on Judith Reagan's
Fox talk show with Barbara Barry. It was a supporter
of Clinton's impeachment on the grounds that Clinton did wrong
in the Oval was very did not behave properly in

(50:40):
the Oval office. Wow, Barbara Barry, missus missus uh, missus
Barney Miller.

Speaker 5 (50:45):
I know that we went.

Speaker 1 (50:46):
Can I just I want to I've been traveling. I
just want to change the subject by can briefly yes, because.

Speaker 5 (50:52):
I want to get you. I want to get your
thoughts here.

Speaker 1 (50:53):
I was traveling around and I was in Egypt, uh,
and I discuss I was in Cairo, and I wanted
to go to Alexandria, and the Egyptian economy is terrible,
especially against the dollars, is terrible.

Speaker 5 (51:09):
So I say, oh, how do the one.

Speaker 1 (51:11):
So I go to the hotel concierge and I say,
how much would it be to hire a car to
drive me from Cairo to Alexandria.

Speaker 5 (51:21):
It's about a two and a half hour drive.

Speaker 1 (51:24):
And she does a little whatever it's round because it'll
be about five hundred US dollars. I said, okay, thank
that that's a little more than I want to spend. Okay,
So I go and I sit for a minute, I
have a cup of coffee, and then I'm with my gods.
And then he says, want me to check uber? How
much would it be on uber? So we check uber
forty bucks? So obviously we choose the Uber. But I'm

(51:52):
not feeling like, well, you know, I don't want.

Speaker 5 (51:53):
To be just a.

Speaker 1 (51:55):
Jerk about this. So I thought, here's what we're gonna do.
We're gonna dig the uber and we're gonna give him
a tip on Uber. But I'm also gonna give him
another tip in cash equal to the price of the ride.
So another forty dollars, right, And I felt really good
about that, except, of course it was only forty dollars.

(52:16):
He's it's still ridiculously low, and I just didn't quite
know how to navigate my my my love of a
good deal, and also my feeling like, well, I don't
really you know. I mean, the guy's gonna drive for
two and a half hours one way into a half hour.

Speaker 5 (52:33):
It's a five hour day for him, no matter how
he looks at it. I think eighty bucks.

Speaker 4 (52:37):
You're saying, you're saying it would have been cultural appropriation
to give him the forty dollars tip.

Speaker 5 (52:44):
No, No, I don't.

Speaker 3 (52:45):
What's the moral dilemma?

Speaker 5 (52:46):
Yeah, should shouldn't have been more?

Speaker 1 (52:49):
I mean, if I was really trying to solve that problem,
would I want to, like, well, like if I thought, okay,
well in America, give.

Speaker 4 (52:54):
Him a hundred gave a hundred percent tip, like that
that's the best day he's ever had.

Speaker 3 (52:59):
I mean, the moral of this story is that the
hotel you were staying in is price gouging its Western cians,
not that you think.

Speaker 4 (53:07):
Do you think that that driver is getting five hundred dollars?

Speaker 5 (53:11):
Oh no, No, the.

Speaker 4 (53:12):
Person the desk clerk is getting two hundred and fifty dollars, right,
and the dispatcher is getting one hundred and fifty dollars,
and the driver is getting forty dollars and then the
I don't know, somebody else is getting sixty dollars. So
that's you see that I did math there on the future.
A very impressed there, Okay, I I don't see that
as a as a dilemma as a dilemma dilemma. By

(53:34):
the way, just just to let you know, Jonah got
a muffin this morning at an Aspen that costs five
hundred dollars and we should have given them forty dollars.

Speaker 5 (53:45):
Sure, and since what see what they did, one of
the smuffets could drive you to Alexandria.

Speaker 3 (53:57):
What So speaking of driving, just so you guys know,
I am we never had an EV, but we my
wife and I have never driven an EV before, and
since we were going on the strip and it was
easier to fly into Denver, we rented an EV. And
long story short.

Speaker 4 (54:16):
You ran out of a battery.

Speaker 3 (54:18):
We think Avis screwed us by telling us the battery
was fully charged and with one hundred miles left in
the Colorado Mountains, the car said, you have you're at
fifteen percent battery, find a battery right away. And it
was a very frustrating, annoying process.

Speaker 4 (54:34):
So everybody, I know that I know who has had
a fully battery charged car has some story. Not that
we all haven't run out of gas. Sure, Like I
ran out of gas the first year I owned a car.
I ran out of gas twice. I was eighteen years old,
So I deserved what I got, like in Chicago and
all of that. So I'm not I'm not judging, but

(54:57):
people do say, like this is ridiculous, like that they don't.
It's like your computer, it doesn't hold the charge it
claims to hold. Also, like you know, how you're on
your computer and it says it's like seventy percent and
then you like type for fifteen minutes and you look
and it's like, oh, it's an eight percent. What the
hell happened? So I called.

Speaker 3 (55:15):
I called friends of mine who have Tesla's and they
said that part of the problem is like Tesla would
never allow you not to know how much battery you
have left. But like this Kia Nyro, whatever the thing
it was like I don't know if it's Avis's screw
up or whatever, but like no one told us like
where the setting is and it's not obvious anywhere on

(55:36):
the dash, and so we didn't know. We took their
word for it when they said it was fully charged.
And then so we find a place to charge it
this sort of close to the summer ski resort, you know,
and plug it in and we don't know anything about
the plucking thing, and it's charging, and then we look
at the dash and the thing says you'll be fully

(55:56):
charged in forty four hours, which we found pretty inconvenient. Unfortunately,
some nice lady said no, no, no, no, you gotta go
to a paid charging station. Go to the Walmart in Frisco,
plug in and you can get charge. We did twenty
five bucks for took us forty minutes to get to

(56:17):
eighty percent. So there you go.

Speaker 1 (56:19):
Another anecdote, evy anecdote. A friend of mine had dinner
with an old friend of mine who's a started the
kind of an audio engineering he's part of an are
you engineering company that just started here in New York,
and hit one of his partner, actually's boss has a
cyber truck and they use it to take the stuff around.
And so she left the country said, look, just drive

(56:40):
it cyber truck around when you when you're taking you know,
your the load in the equipment and everything, and just
you know, just just keep it and you can just
park it. And so he's you know, he lives in
Brooklyn and he's driving around and it's that he can
see that he's running out of juice somehow, and uh,
and he's now he's really, really, really parent and freaking out.

(57:01):
He finally finds a place to park and he parks it,
and the next day he comes to get it and
it's covered in what is clearly dried spit.

Speaker 5 (57:10):
Or worse.

Speaker 4 (57:13):
Because of Elon Musk.

Speaker 1 (57:14):
Yes, and then he gets in the car and he's
trying to park it in the parking lot by the office,
and they're like, yeah, there'll be one hundred fifty dollars
an hour. Well, I think my boss parks it here
for less, No, no, one hundred fifty dollars an hour. And
he finally finally parks on the street again. So clearly
there's a problem in Brooklyn and Manhattan. Probably having a

(57:35):
cyber truck is is not not a good choice.

Speaker 4 (57:39):
I yes, by the way, before we go, I mentioned
this at the beginning of the show, But one of
the most astounding things I've ever listened to is the
podcast that Ross.

Speaker 3 (57:54):
Down Keep Oh, I tell them listened to this.

Speaker 4 (57:56):
He told me with Peter Thiel, Oh no, and which
Peter Teal kind of says he is the Antichrist. He's
been giving speeches on the Antichrist. And then he describes
essentially salvation, kind of Christian salvation, I guess as a
form of transhumanism, which strikes me as and I think

(58:20):
Ross basically said, so are you Are you saying that
you don't think the human race should still exist? And
Peter pauses for.

Speaker 7 (58:33):
A uncomfortably long time for he kind of acknowledges that, yes,
the human race should probably exist.

Speaker 4 (58:44):
You've got to listen to this thing. It is I
don't even know what to make of it. But the
other really interesting thing is that he said he had
had a conversation with Elon Musk three weeks ago. Of
course they started PayPal together, and that Elon he's very
disappointed in Elon. He's disappointed in everything. Nothing is working well,

(59:05):
as you may know, and everything is terrible, and that
Elon is no longer interested in going to Mars. It
always ever wanted to go to Mars, but Elon is
no longer Why because they're just going to get there
and then it's all going to be woke. Woke. AI
is going to take over Mars, and he doesn't want

(59:26):
to go to Mars anymore because it's just going to
be woke. And I thought to myself, I thought to myself,
this is really these guys have too much money, and
having this amount of money and thinking about things like
going to Mars and whether or not you can live
forever and that kind of thing is literally driving them insane.

Speaker 1 (59:50):
Yeah, I mean it's also so irritating. All those guys,
especially those two that you mentioned, feel this idiotic undergraduate
need to have one big, unified theory about everything that
is also shocking, and so that you're supposed to go,
oh my gosh, that's just shocking camp and that it's
so incredibly exhausting and tiresome.

Speaker 5 (01:00:12):
And the irony course is that that especially for Elon.

Speaker 1 (01:00:17):
I mean I think I pet Peter at now no
longer has a hedge fund that he ran into the ground.

Speaker 5 (01:00:23):
But Elon.

Speaker 1 (01:00:26):
Has lost lost the thread of his companies because he's
too busy having big thoughts. On Kenemine, none of this
is necessary. Just you don't have there aren't any big thoughts.
You don't have to be smart, you don't really have
to have. You know, you can be smarter one thing
and not have to have any any skills in anything else.
It's as stupid as if Peter thiels something he said,

(01:00:46):
you know, I'm also an opera singer, So AWESO can
I can?

Speaker 3 (01:00:49):
I just put forward a thesis and you guys can
read or disagree. I'm going to just stipulate. I'm going
to assert with a high degree of confidence, based solely
on my reading of like the Red Mars book and
watching the movie The Martian. Okay, that the first let's
say ten years on Mars are going to be difficult.

(01:01:13):
They're going to be stressful, they're going to be set backs. Sure,
And just as there are no atheists in Foxholes, I
am deeply skeptical that wokeness would play an important and
distracting role as people are trying to figure out how
to survive on a planet that does not have an
atmosphere conducive to human life.

Speaker 1 (01:01:35):
Yeah, it's I think I think there a lot of
people would go to Mars specifically because there is no
woke there.

Speaker 4 (01:01:43):
Well, that was what Elon was kind of saying, and
then his experience in government has now led him to
believe that there's no avoiding it, you see, So he's out.
Someone else can go to Mars. Now. I also want
to talk about the other theme of this podcast of
Teal and Ross Douth, and so Ross Douth that, as

(01:02:04):
you know, is a is a originator of the idea
that we now live in a decadent society, by which
he is not speaking about moral decadence, but rather the
fact that the culture has become uninventive, or has become
regressively invented. It invents nothing, It simply regurgitates and makes
sequels to sequels to sequels, and creates nothing new in

(01:02:24):
all of that. And that Teal, of course also said
they promised us flying famously said they promised us flying cars,
and we got one hundred and forty characters. Right, We've
got Twitter instead of flying cars. And I think that
both of these theories are I mean, Ross is kind
of interesting. And I myself said, I think, you know,

(01:02:45):
movies no longer have the standing that they used to,
and obviously people don't read great books, maybe the way
they use it's hard to know. But the idea that
we are an uninventive world, or that this the last
twenty five years have been tech know logically stagnant, which,
of course also Larry Summer said and others have said,

(01:03:06):
seems to me so unbelievably psychotic that I can't quite
wrap my mind around the fact that we are living
through a period as revolutionary as the Industrial Revolution, and
leaders of it, intellectual leaders of it, financial leaders of it,
economic leaders of it, fit thought leaders of it are

(01:03:29):
unable to see that fracking and Musks owned SpaceX, and
the kind of warfare that Israel and America just engaged
in in taking down Iran and all of that aren't hallmarks,
along with the fact that it cost you forty dollars
to call magically call a car to drive you to

(01:03:51):
Alexandria on a device that didn't exist seventeen years ago
in your pocket, and that people think that we're technologically stagnant?
What the hell is going on? How can they believe this?
I don't I'm not a scientist, but I mean, like,
this is an age of miracles and wonders. So I know.

Speaker 3 (01:04:16):
The most interesting panel I attended at the Aspen Ideas
Festival where I am in is uh uh. David Petraeus
and this woman and New Newburger used to be at
the who was the.

Speaker 4 (01:04:29):
Head of terrorism at the NSC.

Speaker 3 (01:04:31):
Yeah, and very impressive.

Speaker 4 (01:04:33):
Yeah, the first the first Hasidic Jew I believe or
ultra orthodox jew to be in a high position in government.

Speaker 3 (01:04:41):
And I looked up. I looked up for bio and
fun trivia. Her dad was on the plane that was
hijacked in Entebbe. Wow, isn't that wild? So like BB's
brother helped rescue her dad. Kind of kind of cool. Anyway,
Betrayus made this case very persuasively that like we're talking

(01:05:01):
about the future of the panels, on the future of war,
and he says, look, at least going by what's going
on in Ukraine, tanks are over, Like there's no tank
that can survive the battle space between Russia and Ukraine.
He said, all of the abrams that we sent are
either completely destroyed or completely disabled, and that you can't

(01:05:24):
just can't send tanks in there. You can't even send
normal military formations. I mean, I know this is not
the progress that teel. You know, it's not flying cars,
but like things are changing really friggin fast.

Speaker 1 (01:05:35):
It's because of little flying devices. I mean, there's flying
the three dollars. Yeah, decadence seems to me to be
an example of this kind of short sightedness.

Speaker 5 (01:05:49):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:05:49):
Decadence is when you're like, oh, nothing's happening, I'm so bored. Well,
where a by flying cars? And that that it's a
form of ingratitude.

Speaker 5 (01:05:58):
I think the second thing I would just say is that,
I mean.

Speaker 1 (01:06:06):
What we see happening now, especially in technology, is that
is the product of the digestion of a lot of
things that were innovated in the past fifteen twenty years.
So you have to actually there's a lot of capacity
that that has to find a reason and has to
find a point and then has to be digested and
put into something. And sometimes there's are good things, and
sometimes there's a bad things, or sometimes there's a important things.

Speaker 5 (01:06:27):
Sometimes they're not.

Speaker 1 (01:06:28):
But a lot of a lot of these products that
we use now and we think are like AI is
simply another way of organizing data, right, But the data
itself has been being collected for twenty years and been
sorted and tagged for twenty years. And the third thing
is like, I can't imagine a worse world than one

(01:06:51):
in which there are flying cars.

Speaker 4 (01:06:55):
Either, I don't want to flying car.

Speaker 5 (01:06:57):
I don't want to flying car. Most people can't on
the road. The idea that infinite amount of I know.

Speaker 4 (01:07:06):
But it's also like an infinite amount of vertical space.
Like the thing about roads which is good is that
they is that they eliminate it's just horizontal space. You
got nothing. The only thing that's a problem with vertical
space is a tunnel, whether or not you're.

Speaker 1 (01:07:21):
In a above you who won't move.

Speaker 3 (01:07:25):
Well, here's the question. Trucks for flying cars to have
windows that roll down, because otherwise people are going to
throw stuff out the window, right, and that's a problem.

Speaker 4 (01:07:38):
I don't know. This is the thing about these guys.
It's so crazy, like there are these cars driving all
around Los Angeles that don't have a driver, right. I mean,
that's not that you want a flying car or you
want a driverless car. Like I don't understand why Again,
I get the point, which is that we all got
this book which showed the Ford dream Car and it

(01:07:58):
could fly, and then you could fly. You can fly,
Go buy a plane if you can afford it. You
can buy a plane, and also showed you I recommend.

Speaker 1 (01:08:04):
Button and then a little stick of chewing gun comes
out and it's roast beef or whatever. Like, there's a
lot of stupid futurism that like it sounds horrible to me.

Speaker 4 (01:08:13):
Yeah, we just invented a or three years ago that
is going to solve the obesity problem on the planet
Earth by figuring out that if we just somehow with
were able to mass produce the internal secretions of the
stomach of the Gila monster, that no one will ever

(01:08:34):
be fat again. Okay, this is an age of wonders
and Gillicle.

Speaker 5 (01:08:40):
Thank God for I can only I think.

Speaker 1 (01:08:44):
I think the end of these what do they do,
lipto glue tides, whatever they're called. I think that there's
going to be something weird that's going to happen to
everyone who's taken them in twenty five.

Speaker 4 (01:08:54):
We're all going to become a Gala monster.

Speaker 1 (01:08:56):
Yeah, Or it'll be some enormous horn or something. It'll
be some thing that you'll you'll be oh.

Speaker 5 (01:09:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:09:02):
Take the plot of Iron Legend, you know, the movie
version of I Am Legend with Will Smith, which came
up with a very interesting solution to the question of
how the world becomes zombies, which is that at the
very beginning, Emma Thompson is a doctor who says, we've
cured cancer, and so everybody takes this drug to cure cancer.
Ten years later, everybody is a vampire except for Will Smith.

(01:09:25):
It was sort of an interesting you know, but we
do have the FDA, you know, and I know I
know you still No, now you're sounding like Robert F.
Kennedy Junior. Don't take the semi glue, tid you get
a horn in your head?

Speaker 5 (01:09:35):
No, no, I'm not. I'm not saying that. I'm saying it.
You know, like half of.

Speaker 4 (01:09:39):
The people were had placebos and they didn't and they
didn't get a horn in their head, and then the
people who took it didn't get a hold.

Speaker 3 (01:09:45):
Yeah, like Rob wasn't here for this earlier conversation, and
now my wife is in the room and she's gonna
hear me say these words. But I feel like we
have to call back to the earlier conversation about zombie schlans, and.

Speaker 4 (01:09:57):
It's very important zombie schlangs. Yeah, well, the thinner the
thinner man gets the longer, the larger his schlong appears
relative to the rest of his body.

Speaker 1 (01:10:11):
So wait, can you can you just give me a
quick recat just just I know we have to run,
but just a quick.

Speaker 4 (01:10:16):
Years later.

Speaker 3 (01:10:17):
Yeah, my wife really didn't like that movie. Uh, my
daughter kind of liked it, and I really like it.
But one of the things I agree with my wife
about I could have used a lot less full frontal nudity,
particularly from the Alpha zombies with their strom thurmoned adjacent
zombie schlongs. And so that's what we were talking about.

Speaker 4 (01:10:40):
Okay, Jason, But here's my question to you, Boris talker. Yes,
what does what does the Milton Burls girl King of the.

Speaker 1 (01:10:50):
What does the I mean I'm trying to recognizing they
were in a by the way, since we did the
one where were the Glock where we.

Speaker 5 (01:10:57):
Talk about like, I don't know, should keep doing this?

Speaker 1 (01:10:59):
People have come up to me to tell me kind
of very emotionally, yeah, you got to keep doing it.

Speaker 5 (01:11:04):
And I'm like, really because and I guess I guess
I the.

Speaker 1 (01:11:08):
Foundational my foundational reason for asking really like that way
is because of what I'm about to ask, which is
I'm going to see the movie eventually.

Speaker 5 (01:11:19):
But what what what is a zombie schlang supposed to do?
I mean, they don't procreate, right.

Speaker 3 (01:11:28):
Uh, it's supposed to capture the gaze of the movie audience.

Speaker 1 (01:11:37):
Yeah, the male games so so wait, so a zombie
schlong is like that.

Speaker 5 (01:11:43):
That's the original sort of butterface right.

Speaker 1 (01:11:47):
Like way of that, but you know, except for the
face which is half caved in.

Speaker 5 (01:11:53):
I mean, yeah, all.

Speaker 4 (01:11:56):
Right, pleasure to please say hid Jessica for me? She
my zoom background. Yes, I know, I know, so wedn't
have to see her, but I would love to see her.
And I hope to see her soon. Rob, I hope
to see you soon.

Speaker 5 (01:12:13):
Yeah, while I'm around.

Speaker 4 (01:12:15):
Uh and uh and we will. We'll be back in
July with maybe a different body part that we can
focus on, different zombie part.

Speaker 8 (01:12:26):
Well, it's really quite simple.

Speaker 4 (01:12:30):
It's kind of like.

Speaker 8 (01:12:34):
Gonna find my baby, gonna hold her tighte, gonna grab
some afternoon deal. Like my motto has always been, when
it's right, it's right. While waiting until the middle of
a cold, dark night, we everything's a little leer in
the light of day, and we know the night is

(01:12:56):
always gonna be any way.

Speaker 4 (01:13:00):
Taking up.

Speaker 6 (01:13:01):
He's working on my alber tie, looking forward to a
little afternoon daylight. Robin Stixon stones together make us Party nine,
and the thought of loving you is getting so exciting
sky rockets in flight.

Speaker 8 (01:13:16):
Afternoon Delight, you guys have it.

Speaker 4 (01:13:18):
I though, Afternoon Delight.

Speaker 6 (01:13:23):
You don't know, Ron, that sounds kind of crazy, sounds
like you have mental problems.

Speaker 4 (01:13:29):
Man, Yeah, you got mental problems. Man. Yeah, it really does.

Speaker 8 (01:13:33):
Man, Afternoon Daylight. I want to make a phone call
there