0
SPEAKER_01
Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert.
0
SPEAKER_01
I m Dan Rather, and I m joined by Lily Padman.
0
SPEAKER_00
Good morning time.
0
SPEAKER_01
We have a legend today as our expert.
0
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
0
SPEAKER_01
Rob Reiner.
0
SPEAKER_01
He s an award-winning actor and filmmaker.
0
SPEAKER_01
Of course, as an actor, all in the family, Meathead.
0
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, classic.
0
SPEAKER_01
textbook 70s, 80s TV, 70s, I guess.
0
SPEAKER_01
But as a director, he s directed like an impossible amount of incredibly seminal movies that everyone holds dear.
0
SPEAKER_01
This is Spinal Tap, the first mockumentary.
0
SPEAKER_01
Stand By Me, When Harry Met Sally, The Princess Bride, one of the greatest, most rewatchable movies of all time.
0
SPEAKER_01
He has a documentary out right now that was very, very good.
0
SPEAKER_01
I watched it and loved it.
0
SPEAKER_01
I would have watched it on my own, even if he hadn t been a guest.
0
SPEAKER_01
God and Country, about the rise in Christian nationalism.
0
SPEAKER_01
And we get to it right out of the gates with him.
0
SPEAKER_01
But this is a very pro-Christian.
0
SPEAKER_01
This isn t anti-Christian.
0
SPEAKER_01
This is anti-Christian nationalist.
0
SPEAKER_01
Big, big difference.
0
SPEAKER_01
And this is in no way a takedown of Christianity.
0
SPEAKER_00
This is such a treat of an episode.
0
SPEAKER_00
We get some really fun stories out of Rob.
0
SPEAKER_01
It s a very Hollywood episode in a fun, fun way.
0
SPEAKER_00
Very fun.
0
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
0
SPEAKER_01
Enjoyed it.
0
SPEAKER_01
Please enjoy Rob Reiner.
0
SPEAKER_01
So we just started in here and there wasn t a door.
0
SPEAKER_01
And then once in a while you get hit by lightning.
0
SPEAKER_01
You ve been hit by lightning a few times.
0
SPEAKER_01
Six or seven times.
0
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
0
SPEAKER_01
And then you get superstitious.
0
SPEAKER_01
I don t know why this worked.
0
SPEAKER_01
It s working beyond all expectations.
0
SPEAKER_01
Let s not tamper with anything.
0
SPEAKER_01
And even that building you saw that s almost done, that was being built to be the new studio.
0
SPEAKER_01
And this was going to get torn down.
0
SPEAKER_01
And Monica was like,
0
SPEAKER_01
I don t think we should tamper with this.
0
SPEAKER_01
So you re going to stay here forever?
0
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
0
SPEAKER_01
Do you have any of those superstitions or have you over the years?
0
SPEAKER_03
I ve noticed that I have some OCD.
0
SPEAKER_03
I think everybody does.
0
SPEAKER_03
You do certain things in certain orders and you just
0
SPEAKER_03
get used to that, and then you think, if I don t do that, something bad could happen.
0
SPEAKER_03
Absolutely.
0
SPEAKER_01
The shoe will drop.
0
SPEAKER_01
And I also think if you endeavor on anything that has a low probability of you controlling the outcome, this is most present in athletes, right?
0
SPEAKER_01
You ll see these pictures and they ve got like a 12-minute routine.
0
SPEAKER_03
Okay, so here s a great story.
0
SPEAKER_03
I was playing in one of those celebrity baseball games prior to an all-star game.
0
SPEAKER_03
This is in Pittsburgh a few years ago, and we re in the locker room before the game is starting, and there s Bill Mazeroski.
0
SPEAKER_03
He was a second baseman for the Pittsburgh Pirates.
0
SPEAKER_03
He hit a very famous home run
0
SPEAKER_03
in the 1960 World Series against the Yankees.
0
SPEAKER_03
He was not a home run hitter, he was a singles hitter, but he got up in a critical situation and it won the World Series for the Pittsburgh Pirates.
0
SPEAKER_03
I come up to Bill Mazeroski and I said to him, I m responsible for you hitting that home run
0
SPEAKER_03
in the 1960 world series he says really tell me how i said i was 13 years old i was in high school and they let us listen to the world series on the radio during gym class and i was rooting for you guys because the yankees always won they won every year
0
SPEAKER_03
And if you looked at that series, the games the Yankees won, 14 to 2, 11 to 1.
0
SPEAKER_03
When the Pirates won, 3 to 1, 2 to 0.
0
SPEAKER_03
It got down to the seventh game.
0
SPEAKER_03
I m like this in gym class.
0
SPEAKER_03
I m holding my knees with my hands in a curled up position.
0
SPEAKER_03
And I m rooting for the Pirates.
0
SPEAKER_03
And the Yankees pull out to a lead.
0
SPEAKER_03
And then all of a sudden, I get into this position.
0
SPEAKER_03
The Pirates start to come back.
0
SPEAKER_00
They re coming back.
0
SPEAKER_03
They re coming back.
0
SPEAKER_03
They re coming back.
0
SPEAKER_03
Yep.
0
SPEAKER_03
And I said to my friend, Bob Lowe, sitting next to me, Bob, get in this position.
0
SPEAKER_03
If you get in this position, it s going to do.
0
SPEAKER_03
He gets in the position.
0
SPEAKER_03
Pirate s still coming back.
0
SPEAKER_03
He starts to move.
0
SPEAKER_03
I said, don t move.
0
SPEAKER_03
Get back in that position.
0
SPEAKER_03
I stayed in the position, Mazeroski hits the homer, I tell him the story, and he says to me, thank God you didn t get out of that position.
0
SPEAKER_01
He says, no way do I hit that homer if you get out of that.
0
SPEAKER_03
That s the kind of superstition that gets.
0
SPEAKER_01
If you re Sue Pine.
0
SPEAKER_01
I can relate so much.
0
SPEAKER_01
When I used to be super into basketball, what has happened on more than one occasion is, same thing, they re down, I go to the bathroom, they hit two three-pointers in a row, and they re back.
0
SPEAKER_01
And then I sit down and I m watching, and then I go to the bathroom a second time and they have another run,
0
SPEAKER_01
I have sat in my bathroom listening to games before.
0
SPEAKER_03
Oh no, you have to do that.
0
SPEAKER_03
There have been Super Bowl games.
0
SPEAKER_03
I was a big New York Giants football fan, and there were times when I wouldn t let my wife back in the room.
0
SPEAKER_03
She could not come back in the room.
0
SPEAKER_03
You ve got to protect the team.
0
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, you ve got to.
0
SPEAKER_01
Did you um, did you have any kind of like routines though that you or let me ask you this is a better question You ve done a bunch of different things.
0
SPEAKER_01
You ve done a lot of writing.
0
SPEAKER_01
You ve done a lot of acting You ve done a lot of directing of those three which one is prone to give you the most anxiety directing
0
SPEAKER_03
and also the most pleasure and the most satisfaction.
0
SPEAKER_03
Acting is fun, but you don t have the responsibility.
0
SPEAKER_03
I remember years ago, Ron Howard called me up and said there was a part in a movie that he thought I d be good for.
0
SPEAKER_03
It was called Ed TV.
0
SPEAKER_03
It was with Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey.
0
SPEAKER_03
I said, okay, I ll do it.
0
SPEAKER_03
And he said, well, I m going to send you the script.
0
SPEAKER_03
Don t you want to read the script?
0
SPEAKER_03
I said, no, no, I don t have to read the script.
0
SPEAKER_03
I said, if it stinks, it s not my fault.
0
SPEAKER_03
I m just acting in it.
0
SPEAKER_03
You don t have responsibility for the director.
0
SPEAKER_03
You have responsibility for everything, but it is most satisfying.
0
SPEAKER_01
I bet you ve had the experience I ve had too where it s like I had just directed a movie and then I had a very marginal role in another movie and I m sitting there and I m watching the sun go down and I m like, they re fucked.
0
SPEAKER_01
They re going to have to kick two of these scenes to God knows when next week.
0
SPEAKER_01
And I wasn t scheduled, you know, and I m starting to think about all the stress and anxiety of that.
0
SPEAKER_01
And then all of a sudden I was like, Oh, not my problem.
0
SPEAKER_01
I literally got to stand on this dot and say some fucking words.
0
SPEAKER_03
I did a part in a Woody Allen movie called Bullets Over Broadway, and I show up on the set.
0
SPEAKER_03
The first day was an outdoor scene at night at a cafe, an outdoor cafe down in the village, and I m looking around and I m seeing
0
SPEAKER_03
Ooh, I don t know if there s enough light here. 
0
SPEAKER_03
Right, right.
0
SPEAKER_03
I said, unless they ve invented a new film stock that I m not aware of, it s not going to show up.
0
SPEAKER_01
ISO 2000.
0
SPEAKER_03
But I m not going to say anything.
0
SPEAKER_03
I don t want to say anything.
0
SPEAKER_03
It s Woody Allen.
0
SPEAKER_03
It s Carlo De Palma, you know, this great cinematographer.
0
SPEAKER_03
So I don t say anything.
0
SPEAKER_03
I just do the scene.
0
SPEAKER_03
Then I get a call the next day at the hotel.
0
SPEAKER_03
We looked at the dailies.
0
SPEAKER_03
It s a radio show.
0
SPEAKER_03
It s totally black.
0
SPEAKER_03
We can t see a thing.
0
SPEAKER_03
We gotta redo it.
0
SPEAKER_00
Oh my God.
0
SPEAKER_00
If you were acting on a movie, it d be so stressful for the director to know you were there.
0
SPEAKER_01
Well, that s what I was gonna ask.
0
SPEAKER_01
They know you re a great director.
0
SPEAKER_01
And so I think they ve been inclined to wanna maybe include you more, or they feel like they wanna be respectful.
0
SPEAKER_01
Like, I know you understand how this works, but you re actually going like, oh, I love that none of this is my problem.
0
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, but I m also aware of the fact that they re the boss
0
SPEAKER_03
And I have been in their position.
0
SPEAKER_03
I don t want to do anything that s going to cause them any more anxiety than they already have.
0
SPEAKER_03
And for me, it s fun because I get to see how other directors work.
0
SPEAKER_03
I did a part in Wolf of Wall Street with Martin Scorsese was directing.
0
SPEAKER_03
You get to be around Martin Scorsese and he does it the way he does it.
0
SPEAKER_03
I m not going to tell him what to do.
0
SPEAKER_03
He s a great director.
0
SPEAKER_03
You just watch people and let them do what they want.
0
SPEAKER_03
And even ones that don t have as much experience, you say, I don t want to cause them grief.
0
SPEAKER_03
I just want to be a team player.
0
SPEAKER_03
I want to do what they want me to do.
0
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
0
SPEAKER_01
I don t want to lower their confidence.
0
SPEAKER_01
Now to score Sazi, I ve watched all those movies.
0
SPEAKER_01
There is this weird magic that exists in all of them.
0
SPEAKER_01
How does it come about?
0
SPEAKER_01
I could care less if they cut me out of the movie.
0
SPEAKER_01
I would love to just see like what does happen and has this most predictable outcome.
0
SPEAKER_03
First of all, he s got an incredible eye and a credible composition, and he knows how to use the camera better than just about anybody.
0
SPEAKER_01
Technically, he s one of the masters.
0
SPEAKER_03
He s absolutely brilliant.
0
SPEAKER_03
Then with the actors, he lets you go.
0
SPEAKER_03
If you look at scenes from Raging Bull, there s the improvisation.
0
SPEAKER_03
It s not exactly scripted that way.
0
SPEAKER_03
and he lets you go if he knows you can do it.
0
SPEAKER_03
And I remember seeing that I did, I would play Leonardo DiCaprio s father in it and John Favreau, the director, he was playing the lawyer, Leo s lawyer in this thing.
0
SPEAKER_03
And Leo s character, Jordan Belfort, he was going to get arrested and sent to jail because of all the stock manipulations.
0
SPEAKER_03
And we re looking at his beautiful estate and there s his wife and the little daughter on a horse.
0
SPEAKER_03
I said, what are you doing?
0
SPEAKER_03
You don t want to throw this away.
0
SPEAKER_03
You ve got a great life.
0
SPEAKER_03
And the lawyer, Favreau, was telling him, you make a deal, a plea deal, two years, I can get you off.
0
SPEAKER_03
And I said, listen to him.
0
SPEAKER_03
And this is what Leo says.
0
SPEAKER_03
I hear you.
0
SPEAKER_03
And that was the scene.
0
SPEAKER_03
And then I said, I don t think you do.
0
SPEAKER_03
I don t hear you hearing me.
1
SPEAKER_01
I felt like I was in a Scorsese movie, because I m saying that line.
1
SPEAKER_01
And I actually said, I feel like I m in a Martin Scorsese movie.
1
SPEAKER_01
He said, all right, cut, cut.
1
SPEAKER_01
That s enough.
1
SPEAKER_00
That s enough.
1
SPEAKER_00
That s enough out of you.
1
SPEAKER_00
That couldn t be more perfect.
1
SPEAKER_00
You actually had the experience where it s like, it felt like you would hope it would feel.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_01
I felt like I was in.
1
SPEAKER_01
And then the scene where Jonah Hill, they re talking about the Spence account.
1
SPEAKER_01
They got $20,000 for dinner.
1
SPEAKER_01
And he says, well, we ordered sides.
1
SPEAKER_01
I said, what, $20,000 of sides?
1
SPEAKER_01
I said, what do these sides do?
1
SPEAKER_01
They cure cancer?
1
SPEAKER_01
And he says, yes, these sides do.
1
SPEAKER_00
You know, it s just improvising.
1
SPEAKER_00
Fun.
1
SPEAKER_00
Pretty wild that both you and Favreau in one frame while Scorsese s directing.
1
SPEAKER_00
Do you also have this?
1
SPEAKER_00
If I am on a set as an actor,
1
SPEAKER_00
wondering when we re getting out of here.
1
SPEAKER_00
I want to know if we re moving.
1
SPEAKER_00
I have that sense that I d like to go home at some point.
1
SPEAKER_00
And when I m there as a director, I m like, I wish this day were 55 hours.
1
SPEAKER_00
You re making the same thing, but the point of view is so different.
1
SPEAKER_00
And I m so grateful to have had it simply because to your point, I think it s made me a lot easier with director.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
1
SPEAKER_01
It does.
1
SPEAKER_01
I did a couple of movies with Michael Douglas, but what I love about working with him is that he had produced movies.
1
SPEAKER_01
So he knew what was at stake.
1
SPEAKER_01
So not only did he not cause any problems in that way, but he would often have ideas of how to skin the cat.
1
SPEAKER_01
In other words, how to make the day.
1
SPEAKER_01
He said, wait a minute, what if we do this, that, and the other?
1
SPEAKER_01
And it would be good creative ideas that you could get everything you needed within the day and not go over budget and all that stuff.
1
SPEAKER_01
It s like having an ally.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_00
When you were younger, were you singular set on any one of these?
1
SPEAKER_00
I d imagine having the dad you had, you would have intuitively known that all were an option, that you wouldn t have to pick per se.
1
SPEAKER_01
When I was very young, I didn t think about any of this stuff.
1
SPEAKER_01
When I became a teenager, I started going with my dad to the Van Dyke show when I was off for the summer at school.
1
SPEAKER_01
But when I was little, I didn t think about that.
1
SPEAKER_01
What were your fantasies?
1
SPEAKER_01
I loved sports.
1
SPEAKER_01
I thought, you know, wow, I d love to play baseball.
1
SPEAKER_01
My dad told me this story.
1
SPEAKER_01
I don t really remember it, but he told me that when I was like eight years old, I came up to him and I said, I want to change my name.
1
SPEAKER_01
And he thought, oh boy, this poor kid, you know, he s like drowning in the shadow of the shadow of, you know, he has to live up to and all of that.
1
SPEAKER_01
And he said, well, what do you want to change your name to?
1
SPEAKER_01
And I said, Carl.
1
SPEAKER_00
You had a great Stern interview by the way so much of it I have memorized But you tell a bunch of different stories along that period one of them mean your dad didn t see that you were really funny But weirdly Norman Lear happened to watch you interact with his own child
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I was about eight years old.
1
SPEAKER_01
Norman had a daughter, Ellen, she was nine, and we were at the beach house, and I m teaching her how to play jacks.
1
SPEAKER_01
For those of you, you may be too young.
1
SPEAKER_01
It s a game, you throw up a rubber ball, you pick up these metal things.
1
SPEAKER_01
And I was teaching her, showing her how to play.
1
SPEAKER_01
I don t remember, but he said, boy, you were so funny, explaining the rules to her.
1
SPEAKER_01
And he told my dad, he said, you know, your son, he s a funny kid.
1
SPEAKER_01
And my dad said, that kid?
1
SPEAKER_01
He s sullen, he sits in a corner, he s a mopey kid.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, yeah, melancholy.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_01
So he was the first guy that said, okay, that gets funny.
1
SPEAKER_00
And then when you re going to the Van Dyke show, you are witnessing that this hill, should you try to climb it, is so hot.
1
SPEAKER_00
You said he s writing like 25 scripts a year.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, 20 to 25 scripts every year by himself.
1
SPEAKER_01
And I remember
1
SPEAKER_01
at age 13 or 14, they d be down on the stage, and they d be staging stuff.
1
SPEAKER_01
And I wanted to be so much like him.
1
SPEAKER_01
I snuck up to his office one time, and I sat at his desk, and I was all alone.
1
SPEAKER_01
And there s scripts laid out, and I m looking at them, and I m thinking, I can t do this.
1
SPEAKER_01
And I felt so bad.
1
SPEAKER_01
I mean, I was only 13, so how am I expected to do it?
1
SPEAKER_01
But I thought, I ll never be able to do what he does.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it s quite intimidating.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it was, except I did grab Mary Tyler Moore by the ass.
1
SPEAKER_01
I was actually 14 years old, and I m not telling things out of school because Mary put it in her book and she told the story on the Letterman Show, so it wasn t like I m telling it, but I was 14, and she must have been 24, 25.
1
SPEAKER_01
She was gorgeous, and she wore these really tight capri pants.
1
SPEAKER_01
My hormones were raging like crazy, and I just, I don t know, the devil or something, and I just went up and I just grabbed her tush, you know?
1
SPEAKER_00
What was her response?
1
SPEAKER_01
You know, she went and told my father on me because he called me into the office.
1
SPEAKER_01
He said, uh, did you grab Mary Tyler Moore by the tush?
1
SPEAKER_01
I said, yeah.
1
SPEAKER_01
He says, don t ever do that again.
1
SPEAKER_01
Now there s a great payoff to this.
1
SPEAKER_01
You have to know the Van Dyke show to know what the payoff is.
1
SPEAKER_01
But if you know the Van Dyke show, she used to go, oh Rob, all the time with Rob Petrie played by Dick Van Dyke.
1
SPEAKER_01
So now they re doing a reunion show.
1
SPEAKER_01
And I ve already now made some movies, I ve directed, I ve done all the family and stuff.
1
SPEAKER_01
And I walk onto the set, they had finished a scene and I said to the camera, I said, just keep rolling, keep rolling.
1
SPEAKER_01
And I walk out there and there s Mary, she s in an evening gown, Dick is in a tuxedo, they had just come from some affair.
1
SPEAKER_01
And I go up to Mary and I said, Mary, I just want to apologize to you.
1
SPEAKER_01
I feel so bad that when I was a kid,
1
SPEAKER_01
I grabbed you by the tush and I just really feel bad about it.
1
SPEAKER_01
But you know, I was young and you were so beautiful.
1
SPEAKER_01
Not that you re not beautiful now.
1
SPEAKER_01
I said if I wouldn t get arrested for sexual harassment, I would do it now.
1
SPEAKER_01
She then bends over, she bends over, I grab her by the tush and she goes, oh Rob, and the place went nuts.
1
SPEAKER_01
They started screaming.
1
SPEAKER_01
Amazing.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it was a good payoff many years later.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, you set that seed a long time before.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yes, pay it off.
1
SPEAKER_00
I wonder if some part of that interaction for you was that she was on TV.
1
SPEAKER_00
There s something very abstract about her being a thing on TV and then her being in front of you.
1
SPEAKER_00
Confusing.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_00
We shared this in common.
1
SPEAKER_00
We re both Bruins.
1
SPEAKER_00
Oh, you went to UCLA?
1
SPEAKER_00
I did.
1
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
1
SPEAKER_00
I graduated in 2000.
1
SPEAKER_01
Were you in the theater arts program?
1
SPEAKER_01
Anthropology.
1
SPEAKER_01
Oh, anthropology.
1
SPEAKER_01
Interesting.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yep.
1
SPEAKER_01
What year did you?
1
SPEAKER_01
I was there 64, 65, 66 and part of 67.
1
SPEAKER_00
So selfishly, I m so curious what it was like then, because I obviously had an experience that was 23 years removed from that.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I was in the theater school.
1
SPEAKER_01
So the film school, Coppola had already done his master s.
1
SPEAKER_01
There was a lot of heavyweight people.
1
SPEAKER_01
My friend, Phil Mishkin, who I wind up writing with, and we started an improv group together.
1
SPEAKER_01
He was getting his master s degree, MFA, and he was directing a play, El Camino Real.
1
SPEAKER_01
It s a Tennessee Williams play.
1
SPEAKER_01
and Jim Morrison was there at UCLA.
1
SPEAKER_01
Attending UCLA?
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and Ray Manzarek.
1
SPEAKER_01
They were both there at UCLA.
1
SPEAKER_01
And Jim auditioned for that, and he auditioned facing away from the director with his face, and he s just reading the book.
1
SPEAKER_01
And Phil said, maybe you want to turn around, and they could see.
1
SPEAKER_01
Maybe you want to turn around.
1
SPEAKER_01
And then I remember one time I went to see The Doors.
1
SPEAKER_01
They were playing at this club on Sunset Strip.
1
SPEAKER_01
Halfway through the show, Jim Morrison just walks off.
1
SPEAKER_01
He just leaves, and I go backstage.
1
SPEAKER_01
I said to Ray, I said, Ray, what s the story here?
1
SPEAKER_01
Well, he says, we finish the show a lot of times without Jim these days.
1
SPEAKER_01
Oh, wow.
1
SPEAKER_00
He used to perform also with his back turned to the audience, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_00
He did that a lot.
1
SPEAKER_00
It s kind of his signature move.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
1
SPEAKER_00
It was his Kramer entrance.
1
SPEAKER_00
So between graduation in 69.
1
SPEAKER_01
I actually didn t graduate.
1
SPEAKER_00
Oh, you didn t?
1
SPEAKER_00
I left.
1
SPEAKER_01
What happened was I started an improv group
1
SPEAKER_01
at UCLA.
1
SPEAKER_01
Myself, Larry Bishop, who was Joey Bishop s son, was in it, and Richard Dreyfuss.
1
SPEAKER_01
He was in a movie called Inserts.
1
SPEAKER_01
And Inserts was kind of an indie movie where Dreyfuss played a wunderkind director who was down on his luck like Orson Welles, and he was doing these softcore porn movies.
1
SPEAKER_01
And my mother and father went to see the movie, and my mother turned to my father and said,
1
SPEAKER_01
I don t want Robbie playing with Ricky anymore.
1
SPEAKER_00
I guess that s a testament to how believable he was in the movie.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_01
Anyway, it was this improv group called The Session.
1
SPEAKER_01
We rehearsed in the basement of Royce Hall until the cops found us.
1
SPEAKER_01
They kicked us out.
1
SPEAKER_01
But then what happened was we got auditions.
1
SPEAKER_01
We got our own theater up on Sunset.
1
SPEAKER_01
So I was already doing what I wanted to do.
1
SPEAKER_01
So I left school.
1
SPEAKER_00
Did you have any writing, directing aspirations at that point?
1
SPEAKER_01
Well, that s what I did.
1
SPEAKER_01
I directed the show.
1
SPEAKER_01
Oh, okay.
1
SPEAKER_01
I directed and I was in it.
1
SPEAKER_01
That s what I always wanted to do from the get-go.
1
SPEAKER_00
Right.
1
SPEAKER_00
Funny you would say that not to be self-indulgent, but I was in the groundlings.
1
SPEAKER_00
I was making tons of video bits.
1
SPEAKER_00
That was like my favorite.
1
SPEAKER_00
And that was before YouTube and before people made that.
1
SPEAKER_00
And I was like, Oh, this is very stimulating.
1
SPEAKER_00
It s funny how it s always been there, but you don t know it s always been there.
1
SPEAKER_01
I was 19 when I started that, but I also directed a play.
1
SPEAKER_01
It was Roxbury Playhouse or something in Beverly Hills.
1
SPEAKER_01
And Dreyfus was in that too.
1
SPEAKER_01
I did a production of No Exit.
1
SPEAKER_01
My father came backstage and saw that.
1
SPEAKER_01
It was the first time I ever got a real compliment from him.
1
SPEAKER_01
I was 19.
1
SPEAKER_01
He looked me in the eye and he said, that was good, no bullshit.
1
SPEAKER_01
That was a cool thing because he said, whatever you want to do, you re going to be okay.
1
SPEAKER_01
So I always wanted to direct.
2
SPEAKER_02
layers of these moments with dad there are stepping stones right there s never the complete one there s the you pitch a joke at 16 that they like that s a moment for you that was a moment he sees you at 19 and he says that we have this fantasy right that one magic thing will be said but it is a long way and it doesn t work that way and people always ask me did he give you advice
2
SPEAKER_01
There was never a moment where he sat me down and said, son, you just watch the way people live their lives and how they behave.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s the advice you re getting.
2
SPEAKER_01
He modeled the advice.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, he modeled.
2
SPEAKER_01
I mean, but it s not intentional.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s just who he is.
2
SPEAKER_01
Right.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I was lucky enough to have him and Norman Lear as role models, as models that I could say, okay, this is the way you conduct yourself and live your life.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s almost chicken or the egg.
2
SPEAKER_00
You were so impressed by your dad.
2
SPEAKER_00
So maybe that made you more interested in directing and acting, or were you impressed by him because of his prowess at that?
2
SPEAKER_01
I was around it.
2
SPEAKER_01
I saw him doing it.
2
SPEAKER_01
The people that came to the house, Mel Brooks and Norman Lear and Larry Gelber.
2
SPEAKER_01
I mean, it was funny people.
2
SPEAKER_01
So I think I was around that and that seemed fun.
2
SPEAKER_01
People always ask me, what was it like at your house?
2
SPEAKER_01
And I say, well, I thought it was normal.
2
SPEAKER_01
Until I went to my friend s house and saw it wasn t so funny over there.
2
SPEAKER_01
He is a little funnier here.
2
SPEAKER_02
Well, I was going to say it s a two-sided coin, because on one hand, you re exposed to all this greatness, which is informative and helpful.
2
SPEAKER_02
And at the same time, you start in the tiny pond.
2
SPEAKER_02
You re not the kid who goes and sees another shitty band and goes, well, fuck, if they re up on stage, I could be up on stage.
2
SPEAKER_02
So it s really two-sided.
2
SPEAKER_02
Because I also would imagine as you re defining your identity and you re trying to build and muster your confidence, and the people you re comparing yourself to in the living room are like, your father becomes a father figure to Steve Martin.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
2
SPEAKER_01
And if you look at the people that were the writers and the performers on your show of shows and Caesar s Hour, which is where my dad got his start, it was a satire show.
2
SPEAKER_01
everything that you ever laughed at in the second half of the 20th century was probably generated by one of those people.
2
SPEAKER_01
Because it was Mel Brooks, it was Woody Allen, it was Neil Simon, it was all these brilliant people.
2
SPEAKER_01
And these are the people I saw, and it s hard to live up to.
2
SPEAKER_01
So when I, at 16, came up with an idea for a joke for them, it was like, wow, they took it and they went on the Ed Sullivan Show with it, or Howard Ballas, I mean, wow, that was a big deal for me.
2
SPEAKER_02
They created a paradigm that we still live in, basically.
2
SPEAKER_02
They wrote the original format and blueprint for all that stuff.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
2
SPEAKER_01
I mean, when everybody talks about, now Saturday Night Live s been around since 1975, it s been around forever, but show of shows, that was the, I mean, yes, there was comedia before that, and there was Punch and Judy shows and stuff, but for television, that was the first time anybody did satire and really took off on political things, or mostly they did on social things and art of the day.
2
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_02
After college, you start writing on The Smothers Brothers Show.
2
SPEAKER_02
Again, that was before my time, but I am around people nonstop.
2
SPEAKER_02
That too was very informative for a whole generation.
2
SPEAKER_01
Well, yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
We were cutting edge like crazy.
2
SPEAKER_01
After I did my own improv group, I got into another improv group called The Committee.
2
SPEAKER_01
The Committee was out of San Francisco, was an offshoot of Second City.
2
SPEAKER_01
They came and did a production in Los Angeles, and I was asked to come and be part of the company.
2
SPEAKER_01
part of that company for a while.
2
SPEAKER_01
And Tom Smothers came one day, and he plucked me and Carl Gottlieb, who was one of the writers on Jaws.
2
SPEAKER_01
They were actually doing a summer show.
2
SPEAKER_01
It was for Glen Campbell.
2
SPEAKER_01
It was called the Summer Brothers Smothers Show, and Glen Campbell hosted it.
2
SPEAKER_01
And we were hired as writers.
2
SPEAKER_01
But then you re around these great writers, and you re on this cutting edge.
2
SPEAKER_01
And listen, I didn t know.
2
SPEAKER_01
I was an idiot.
2
SPEAKER_01
I was like,
2
SPEAKER_01
21 when I started working there, and you know, it was the 60s, and there was a civil rights movement, there was a war in Vietnam going on, there was a women s movement.
2
SPEAKER_01
All these things were happening, and Tommy wanted to be cutting edge, and he was.
2
SPEAKER_01
And we as young people were saying, come on, I couldn t understand why he didn t get this sketch on or that sketch.
2
SPEAKER_01
I didn t realize the pain that he went through with the censors and with the network people.
2
SPEAKER_01
But we did some amazing things.
2
SPEAKER_01
We had the Pete Seeger anti-war thing.
2
SPEAKER_01
We did religious stuff.
2
SPEAKER_01
We did all kinds of things.
2
SPEAKER_02
And did you feel like, because you were participating in that aspect of it, that you were participating?
2
SPEAKER_02
Or did you have some sense that you should have been at more rallies or been more involved?
2
SPEAKER_02
No, because we were always a politically active group.
2
SPEAKER_01
But we felt we were doing what we could do to call out the wrongness of the war in Vietnam and all those racial inequalities that we were trying to get across on the show.
2
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_02
So 1971, All in the Family comes along.
2
SPEAKER_02
And I m curious, at that stage,
2
SPEAKER_02
what was your fantasy of what that thing might be, and then the reality of it, and how much dissonance was between those two things.
2
SPEAKER_02
People that don t know, it was the number one show in America for five years straight.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I ve always said it s odd because you couldn t tape anything.
2
SPEAKER_01
There was no DVR or TiVo.
2
SPEAKER_01
So if you wanted to watch the show,
2
SPEAKER_01
You had to watch it when it was on.
2
SPEAKER_01
That was the only time.
2
SPEAKER_01
So here we were, a country of maybe at the time 200 million and 40 to 45 million people every week watched the show.
2
SPEAKER_01
So you had this communal shared experience.
2
SPEAKER_01
One in four people.
2
SPEAKER_01
And people were talking about all the issues that we got into.
2
SPEAKER_01
Now you ve got a country of 335 or whatever.
2
SPEAKER_01
If you get 10 million, 50 million, that s a smash, that s a smash.
2
SPEAKER_01
And they don t all watch it at the same time.
2
SPEAKER_01
I can t tell you how many dinner parties I ve been.
2
SPEAKER_01
I m sure you have too, where you start to talk about a show that you were watching and they said, don t tell me I am only on season one.
2
SPEAKER_01
I don t know.
2
SPEAKER_01
So you can t talk about any show.
2
SPEAKER_01
Oh yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
Game of Thrones.
2
SPEAKER_01
What are you talking about?
2
SPEAKER_01
It s a decade ago.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
I didn t see that.
2
SPEAKER_02
But when we came on, we thought this is too hip for the room.
2
SPEAKER_02
Had Norman had a lot of success before that, forgive my ignorance?
2
SPEAKER_01
Well, he had some success.
2
SPEAKER_01
He wrote, he was a writer for Jerry Lewis for many years, and he had some shows that he worked on.
2
SPEAKER_01
This was the big thing though.
2
SPEAKER_01
He wasn t a Larry David yet.
2
SPEAKER_01
No, not yet.
2
SPEAKER_01
But he did, he was partnered with Bud York, and they found these two projects.
2
SPEAKER_01
They were both British shows.
2
SPEAKER_01
One was Steptoe and Son, which became Sanford and Son, and the other was Till Death Us Do Part, which became All in the Family.
2
SPEAKER_01
They had no idea those were first... Yeah, they acquired the rights to that, and they did American versions of it.
2
SPEAKER_02
They feel so American, both those shows.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
But we had no idea.
2
SPEAKER_01
We thought, this isn t gonna succeed.
2
SPEAKER_01
Nobody s ever done anything close to what we were doing then.
2
SPEAKER_01
And CBS put a disclaimer when it first came on.
2
SPEAKER_01
They said, the views expressed on this show are not the views of the... Basically saying, you wanna watch this show, fine.
2
SPEAKER_01
But we don t know how it got on.
2
SPEAKER_01
We don t want to have anything to do with it.
2
SPEAKER_02
Take your complaints elsewhere.
2
SPEAKER_02
We too don t want it on the show.
2
SPEAKER_02
But you re coming out of an era where husband and wife slept in separate beds on TV.
2
SPEAKER_02
This is a completely different landscape before that show arrived.
2
SPEAKER_01
In the first episode, there was a toilet flush.
2
SPEAKER_01
Which was the first ever.
2
SPEAKER_01
Because nobody went to the bathroom on sitcoms.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s so wild how much... But it s true, the actors that played in sitcoms in those days didn t have assholes, so they didn t have to go to the bathroom.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s right.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s a little-known fact.
2
SPEAKER_00
This is behind the scenes.
2
SPEAKER_02
The assholes were not adopted until the very late 60s.
2
SPEAKER_01
No, not until much later.
2
SPEAKER_01
The Screen Actors Guild had a whole thing about, hey, come on, they have to go to the bathroom, what are they going to do?
2
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, the assholes wanted representation.
2
SPEAKER_01
They did.
2
SPEAKER_01
And they got it.
2
SPEAKER_01
They did.
2
SPEAKER_02
So we ve talked to a few people that have been in the situation, but generally people ramp up a little bit.
2
SPEAKER_02
They were third on the call sheet in a movie and four people said hi to them that month.
2
SPEAKER_02
I have to imagine if ever there was a light switch that happened in someone s career in life.
2
SPEAKER_02
I mean, what a fucking light switch.
2
SPEAKER_01
It was weird because I had done a number of shows.
2
SPEAKER_01
I had been on That Girl and Gomer Pyle and Andy Griffith and Hey Landlord and all these shows.
2
SPEAKER_01
But like you say, guy number five.
2
SPEAKER_01
And then this comes on and the first 13 weeks, nobody really watched that much.
2
SPEAKER_01
So it wasn t a big deal.
2
SPEAKER_01
Then they played the first 13 again.
2
SPEAKER_01
So we were on 26 weeks in a row.
2
SPEAKER_01
And after that period, you know, you couldn t go anywhere.
2
SPEAKER_02
It might ve been the first, what do they call it?
2
SPEAKER_02
yeah yeah water cooler probably was right because it was provocative people talked about it and everybody discussed what happened on all the family last night what did you see and do you think part of the premise was a bit of a cake and eat it too which is if you were conservative and watched it you were delighted and if you were super
2
SPEAKER_02
liberal in Washington, you were delighted.
2
SPEAKER_02
That s true.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I think that s why it was successful, because people tuned in to see Archie s point of view, the bigot, or Mike s point of view, the liberal.
2
SPEAKER_01
And Norman Lear had said this, and I ve mentioned this a number of times, but he said that one of his favorite plays was Major Barber, which was by George Bernard Shaw.
2
SPEAKER_01
And George Bernard Shaw was a liberal.
2
SPEAKER_01
But if you didn t know he was a liberal, and you went to that play, you would say that the hawk and the dove positions were equally presented.
2
SPEAKER_01
And you d leave discussing.
2
SPEAKER_01
And that s what Norman wanted to do with All in the Family.
2
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_02
Who was it?
2
SPEAKER_02
Were you reading the paper and you saying like, oh my God, so many such and such people were stabbed this year.
2
SPEAKER_02
And he goes, would you rather they was pushed out of windows?
2
SPEAKER_02
I can t remember what I said.
2
SPEAKER_02
Archie Bunker.
2
SPEAKER_00
Oh, oh, oh, oh.
3
SPEAKER_02
He s like, would you rather they was pushed out of windows?
3
SPEAKER_02
Like as a little kid, I remember these lines.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s funny.
3
SPEAKER_02
Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.
3
SPEAKER_02
How did you respond to the immediate loss of anonymity and
3
SPEAKER_02
Did it give you any compassion or understanding for an experience perhaps your father had had or people in your life had had?
3
SPEAKER_01
Well, the lucky thing is that my father, because of doing The Sid Caesar Show, was famous.
3
SPEAKER_01
I saw how people would come up to him, so it wasn t so alien to me.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I saw how he handled it.
3
SPEAKER_01
Always very gracious to people.
3
SPEAKER_01
So I thought, okay, that s part of what you do.
3
SPEAKER_01
So it wasn t that big of a shock.
3
SPEAKER_01
Although I must say there was a moment where Jean and Sally and I were at the airport and we walked into one of the restaurants at the airport and the whole place stood up and cheered.
3
SPEAKER_01
That was a weird feeling that everybody in that place stood up.
3
SPEAKER_02
Okay.
3
SPEAKER_02
So to your point, 45 million people are watching that.
3
SPEAKER_02
I was on a show that 5 million people watched on MTV.
3
SPEAKER_02
They were all my age.
3
SPEAKER_02
And again, I hadn t done anything.
3
SPEAKER_02
All of a sudden I was on the show and I was in every episode.
3
SPEAKER_02
And so on a hugely reduced scale, I was at a Fuddruckers and I have the very, very visceral memory of going seven or eight tables are staring at me.
3
SPEAKER_02
I no longer can watch, I m going to be watched.
3
SPEAKER_02
And that felt very claustrophobic.
3
SPEAKER_02
And I had a very panicked feeling of like, wow, I hadn t anticipated this.
3
SPEAKER_02
In fact, the great joy of my life was watching.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_01
You get recognized.
3
SPEAKER_01
People are seeing you.
3
SPEAKER_01
They come up to you, want an autograph.
3
SPEAKER_01
You go back to your home, your life.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then time goes by and then you go out in public again, you forget that you re somebody that they know, because you re just you.
3
SPEAKER_01
So you just walk out there and then you go, oh yes, I m that guy that they know.
3
SPEAKER_01
So that s a weird thing for me every time.
3
SPEAKER_02
It is.
3
SPEAKER_02
And that was the thing that caused the panic attack is that I have lost control of the decision.
3
SPEAKER_02
Like the horses are out of the barn.
3
SPEAKER_02
I can t choose to be famous when it s fun.
3
SPEAKER_02
Right.
3
SPEAKER_02
And then not when I feel awkward that I m eating solo at a fat burger in Austin, Texas, and they re thinking, oh, this guy s a loser.
3
SPEAKER_02
I thought he was on TV.
3
SPEAKER_02
Those kinds of thoughts.
3
SPEAKER_00
Right, right.
3
SPEAKER_02
But then I ll add something that s even grosser to admit.
3
SPEAKER_02
That show was 20 plus years ago.
3
SPEAKER_02
The experience has infected my memory in a way that I now I actually don t remember not being that way.
3
SPEAKER_02
In some bizarre way, I feel like I ve always been.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s interesting you say that because I was having lunch one day with Warren Beatty.
3
SPEAKER_01
This is many years ago, but he said to me, you know, I ve been famous Longer than I ve been a person.
3
SPEAKER_00
Mm-hmm.
3
SPEAKER_01
I thought wow What a statement But that means he s had to be this person that s a famous person Yeah, it also means being famous is contradictory to being a person.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s an interesting framing of it
3
SPEAKER_02
Those are two different things.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
3
SPEAKER_01
Because I think that s true.
3
SPEAKER_01
And in so many ways they are.
3
SPEAKER_01
Because the fact of the matter is, nobody is anything other than a person, but if you do something that causes fame, because Johnny Carson once said this, he was from Nebraska, and he d go back to his hometown, and they would say to him, do you feel like you ve changed?
3
SPEAKER_01
He said, I haven t changed.
3
SPEAKER_01
People around me change.
3
SPEAKER_01
They change in the way they behave around me.
3
SPEAKER_01
I m the same guy, but now they re acting differently around me.
3
SPEAKER_02
And by the way, both things are true.
3
SPEAKER_02
The thing I m more interested in now is acknowledging clearly I ve changed.
3
SPEAKER_02
How could I not?
3
SPEAKER_02
I react to things.
3
SPEAKER_02
My world has changed.
3
SPEAKER_01
Well, you might be more guarded.
3
SPEAKER_01
I find myself a little bit more guarded than I used to be.
3
SPEAKER_01
But as I get older, you don t get to recognize as much.
3
SPEAKER_01
But it s always weird to me that somebody still will come up to me at the airport or wherever and say something, you know, oh yeah, I m that guy again.
3
SPEAKER_02
Of course, of course.
3
SPEAKER_02
When this show ends, do you have
3
SPEAKER_02
I ll give my own experience.
3
SPEAKER_02
I was on a show for six years and both things were true.
3
SPEAKER_02
I never wanted it to end because it was the most wonderful family and I m a factory worker at heart.
3
SPEAKER_02
I love going to the same place.
3
SPEAKER_02
And then also I was very excited for it to end to see what was next.
3
SPEAKER_02
And I was very scared for it to end.
3
SPEAKER_02
Where were you at as it was ending?
3
SPEAKER_01
I had always wanted to direct.
3
SPEAKER_01
Did you direct any of those episodes?
3
SPEAKER_01
No, because I m in them.
3
SPEAKER_01
You can t direct because it s done on a different day with tank cameras.
3
SPEAKER_01
You can t watch playback.
3
SPEAKER_01
No, but I, I wrote on four of the episodes with my partner, Phil Mishkin.
3
SPEAKER_01
So I got to do that and I hung around the writer s room a lot.
3
SPEAKER_01
But since I wanted to always direct, after the first two years, I was like, oh no, I m going to be doing this for the rest of my life.
3
SPEAKER_01
You got scared a little bit.
3
SPEAKER_01
I got a little scared.
3
SPEAKER_01
By season four, I made a peace with myself.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I said, OK, you re going to be doing this for a while.
3
SPEAKER_01
Let s go to school.
3
SPEAKER_01
let s learn as much as you can, hang around the writer s room, go up into the broadcast booth, look and see what they do. 
3
SPEAKER_01
And I did.
3
SPEAKER_01
But I still, when it was time to leave, it was good, and I was ready to become a director.
3
SPEAKER_01
But then they don t want you to be that, because you ve now established this character, and they throw a lot of money at me and Sally Struthers to keep doing those characters.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I m saying, no, I don t want to do that.
3
SPEAKER_01
I want to do something else.
3
SPEAKER_01
Is that why the show ended?
3
SPEAKER_01
Carol wanted to end the show, initially.
3
SPEAKER_01
Carol said, this is enough.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then when we did this final episode where they have Mike and Gloria move to California, he then said, well, maybe we ll do some more.
3
SPEAKER_01
He wanted to do more.
3
SPEAKER_01
So I think they did two more years of Archie Bunker s Place or something like that.
3
SPEAKER_02
Oh, you just said something that cued.
3
SPEAKER_02
You learn it.
3
SPEAKER_02
I lost it.
3
SPEAKER_02
I lost it.
3
SPEAKER_02
It ll come back.
3
SPEAKER_02
It ll be a week from now, but it ll come back.
3
SPEAKER_02
Can I have your phone number so I can ask you this question next week?
3
SPEAKER_02
Here s the thing.
3
SPEAKER_02
You re way younger than me, but trust me.
3
SPEAKER_02
I know what I wanted to say.
3
SPEAKER_02
It s going to get worse.
3
SPEAKER_02
It s accelerating.
3
SPEAKER_02
I can feel it already.
3
SPEAKER_02
As is time.
3
SPEAKER_02
I know what I wanted to say was that you, maybe more than any other, I don t know who matches it, but Meathead, you said, if I live to win a Nobel peace prize, they would say.
3
SPEAKER_02
The headline would be Meathead wins Nobel.
3
SPEAKER_01
I still get that.
3
SPEAKER_01
I still get it.
3
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_02
I mean, that wins.
3
SPEAKER_01
So true.
3
SPEAKER_02
Okay, so the show ends in 79.
3
SPEAKER_02
You don t do Spinal Tap to 84.
3
SPEAKER_02
What happens in those five years?
3
SPEAKER_01
Well, we shot Spinal Tap at the end of 82.
3
SPEAKER_01
It came out in 84.
3
SPEAKER_01
But from 78 till 82, I did a special on television called The TV Show, which was satire of just a guy sitting in his chair flipping the channels, and we d cut in little bits and pieces of every show.
3
SPEAKER_01
Telethons, half-hours, dramas.
3
SPEAKER_02
And they were all parodies of those things.
3
SPEAKER_01
Parodies.
3
SPEAKER_01
One of the things we did was a parody of a show called Midnight Special, which was a late-night rock and roll show, and it was hosted by Wolfman Jack.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I played Wolfman Jack, and that was the first time Spinal Tap ever appeared.
3
SPEAKER_01
Chris, Harry, and Michael, we created this thing.
3
SPEAKER_01
They were doing a song called Rock and Roll Nightmare.
3
SPEAKER_01
Russ Kunkel played the drums, who was Jackson Brown s drummer and Linda Ronstadt s drummer.
3
SPEAKER_01
We had a band, and they started improvising in characters, these British rockers, and we just didn t think much of it.
3
SPEAKER_01
Then Harry and I said, hey, maybe we can make something out of a rock and roll tour.
3
SPEAKER_01
We had an idea called Roadie.
3
SPEAKER_01
It was all about road managers behind the scenes.
3
SPEAKER_01
Then a picture called Roadie came out, which was with meatloaf.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then we said, okay, forget that.
3
SPEAKER_01
But meanwhile, Chris and Michael had done this little sketch about two rockers who run into each other in a hotel or something.
3
SPEAKER_01
And they remember vaguely that they used to play in a band together, really funny characters.
3
SPEAKER_01
So we came back together and decided, okay, let s see if we can do something together.
3
SPEAKER_01
And the idea was to do a fake documentary.
3
SPEAKER_01
I got a studio to fund a script, but then we realized we can t write this thing because it has to be improvised.
3
SPEAKER_01
It has to feel like it s really happening.
3
SPEAKER_01
So I went to the guy and we had $60,000.
3
SPEAKER_01
I said, give me the money and I ll make some of the movie for you.
3
SPEAKER_01
Backstage, some performance bits, some interviews, and I added some money of my own, the boys, we all added, and we made like 20 minutes.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then we couldn t sell it anywhere.
3
SPEAKER_01
Nobody wanted it.
3
SPEAKER_01
It went on for years.
3
SPEAKER_01
We would get close, and then they d say, no, no, no, and they d scrap it.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then one day, they were making a movie at AFCO Embassy called Take This Job and Shove It.
3
SPEAKER_01
Oh, yes.
3
SPEAKER_01
And Robert Hayes, who had been in Airplane, was going to star in this thing.
3
SPEAKER_01
And they were looking for a director.
3
SPEAKER_01
And this agent, who wasn t my agent, he had seen this 20-minute thing floating around town.
3
SPEAKER_01
He suggested me to the executive.
3
SPEAKER_01
Her name is Lindsay Duran at Avco Embassy.
3
SPEAKER_01
And she said, well, what has he directed?
3
SPEAKER_01
He hasn t directed anything.
3
SPEAKER_01
Well, here s this 20-minute thing.
3
SPEAKER_01
Maybe take a look at it.
3
SPEAKER_01
She looked at it and she said, well, forget this.
3
SPEAKER_01
Take this job and shove it.
3
SPEAKER_01
What about this?
3
SPEAKER_01
Let s do this.
3
SPEAKER_01
I said, well, I don t have any money.
3
SPEAKER_01
I don t have anything.
3
SPEAKER_01
She said, well, I think I can convince the head of the studio to distribute it, and maybe that ll help you find some money, which it did.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I found some money.
3
SPEAKER_01
I went to put it together.
3
SPEAKER_01
They were ready to go.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then Jerry Perenchio and Norman Lear bought AFCO Embassy, and they scrapped every project that they had, including this.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I went to Alan Horn, who s a
4
SPEAKER_01
Dear friend, and Alan and I and Andy Scheinman and Martin Schaeffer and Glenn Patton, we started Castle Rock together years later.
4
SPEAKER_00
Alan later became the president of Warner Brothers.
4
SPEAKER_00
Then the president of Disney.
4
SPEAKER_01
He s like a brother to me.
4
SPEAKER_00
He s a great guy.
4
SPEAKER_01
So Alan says, I m sorry, we can t do this.
4
SPEAKER_01
I said, Alan, please, let me talk to Norman.
4
SPEAKER_01
Please.
4
SPEAKER_01
So they get a meeting, and there s Jerry Parenchio, Norman Lear, and Alan, and a couple of other people from the company, and I m making this insane pitch about how this, you gotta, it s gonna be the thing, and I m screaming like this, and I leave, and what I m told after I left is Norman turned to everybody and said, who s gonna tell him he can t do it?
4
SPEAKER_01
Right, this guy s lost his mind.
4
SPEAKER_00
So they let me do it.
4
SPEAKER_00
Well, now this is where you enter my life, basically.
4
SPEAKER_00
Because when it comes out, I am nine years old.
4
SPEAKER_00
My brother loves it.
4
SPEAKER_00
We re now in an era where we re approaching VHS, we re approaching cable, maybe on TV, it s on.
4
SPEAKER_01
Did you dig it?
4
SPEAKER_01
Did you understand it?
4
SPEAKER_00
I totally did, but it was the kind of get it.
4
SPEAKER_00
The only thing I can compare it to is watching Raising Arizona, where I was like, why is this movie so different than everything I ve seen?
4
SPEAKER_00
And what are the mechanics of what s happening?
4
SPEAKER_00
Well, very few people did get it.
4
SPEAKER_00
Well, this, I loved learning.
4
SPEAKER_00
I would have never guessed this, but well, first of all, you re inventing a genre in the mockumentary.
4
SPEAKER_00
The improv movie is not a thing.
4
SPEAKER_00
You re just doing a lot of firsts.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, we did.
4
SPEAKER_01
We improvised the whole movie.
4
SPEAKER_01
And people said, I can t believe your first movie, you do it as an improv.
4
SPEAKER_01
I said, to me, that s the easy part.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s a scripted movie where where s the camera going?
4
SPEAKER_01
This was easier for me.
4
SPEAKER_01
And you had to hire a real documentarian that had made some rock films.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, Peter Smokler, who shot a bunch of rock and roll films, including the horrible Altamont with the Rolling Stones, where somebody died.
4
SPEAKER_01
But we re making the movie.
4
SPEAKER_01
And he says to me at one point, I don t understand what s funny about this.
4
SPEAKER_01
I said, this is what they do.
4
SPEAKER_01
I said, yeah, but it s a little, we re twisting it a little bit.
4
SPEAKER_01
And then we screened it in Dallas.
4
SPEAKER_01
That was the first place.
4
SPEAKER_01
Nobody got it.
4
SPEAKER_01
They didn t understand what the hell was going on.
4
SPEAKER_01
People come up to me and say, why would you make a movie about a band that nobody ever heard of?
4
SPEAKER_01
They thought it was real.
4
SPEAKER_00
And one that s so bad.
4
SPEAKER_01
Do something about the Beatles or the Rolling Stones or something.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I don t mean to be disparaging to anyone, but I will say my similarly, my wife just did this Netflix show a few years ago that was called like the woman in the house across the street from the woman in the window.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s like it s clearly a parody of all these psychological, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
And it s preposterous.
4
SPEAKER_00
There s a 20 minute set piece where she fights a six-year-old and people will come up to her and go, I really liked that thing, that twist.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I m like, some significant percentage doesn t see that this is a parody.
4
SPEAKER_00
I know, it s tough.
4
SPEAKER_00
And you don t want to be disrespectful, especially what if they liked it on its own merit.
4
SPEAKER_00
But I ll tell you, it s funny you asked, did I get it?
4
SPEAKER_00
At first you don t.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s dead real.
4
SPEAKER_00
I don t know these people.
4
SPEAKER_00
I m young.
4
SPEAKER_00
The rock stars I m seeing are old and I don t know who they are.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s the cocoon, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
Him getting trapped in the cocoon.
4
SPEAKER_00
on stage where all of a sudden I start going like well this couldn t possibly be what happened right this is clearly stupid as hell and then it kind of took off for me and then it s one of these things that you just watch over and over we re talking about doing the sequel now and we go to New Orleans at the end of the month and we start shooting in March oh you are doing the sequel yeah
4
SPEAKER_00
Oh my god, this is such wonderful news.
4
SPEAKER_00
A lot of sequels are bad ideas, but aging rock stars couldn t be more right.
4
SPEAKER_01
Well, we have an idea.
4
SPEAKER_01
For years, people said, do another one.
4
SPEAKER_01
We never had a good idea.
4
SPEAKER_01
But now I think we have an idea.
4
SPEAKER_01
And one of the things is they are old.
4
SPEAKER_01
There s no getting around it.
4
SPEAKER_01
They are old, and we ll see what happens.
4
SPEAKER_01
I think it ll be good.
4
SPEAKER_01
We have some good people in it.
4
SPEAKER_01
Fun.
4
SPEAKER_00
You then go on to direct Stand By Me.
4
SPEAKER_00
I mean, look, I want to get to your new movie, but I just want to touch down on a couple of these.
4
SPEAKER_00
There s only a few people that went on a run like this.
4
SPEAKER_00
There s just one after another that s just memorable.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s in the canon.
4
SPEAKER_00
But Stand By Me, of course, I m probably most curious in, because as a young man, I just was so drawn to River Phoenix.
4
SPEAKER_01
Well, you were right around that.
4
SPEAKER_01
I think Stand By Me came out in 86?
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, so I m like 11 years old.
4
SPEAKER_00
I m the age of the- You re the age of the kids, yeah.
4
SPEAKER_00
Absolutely.
4
SPEAKER_00
And not only that,
4
SPEAKER_00
I m wrestling with the thing I imagine the way you describe yourself as a young boy, which is like, I have all these emotions and they are unacceptable.
4
SPEAKER_00
I don t know where to put them, but I know I can t have them on the playground.
4
SPEAKER_00
I can t have them when talking to a friend.
4
SPEAKER_00
What am I fucking going to do with these?
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_01
There s a great moment in the movie where they re walking on the tracks and Gordy turns to Chris Chambers, played by River Phoenix, and he says, do you think I m weird?
4
SPEAKER_01
And River says, yeah.
4
SPEAKER_01
But so what?
4
SPEAKER_01
Everybody s weird.
4
SPEAKER_01
And it s that feeling that you re talking about, which is something s happening in your body and you don t know what it is and you feel odd and out of it.
4
SPEAKER_00
And if anyone sees it, I m going to be excommunicated, which is like my greatest fear.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it s the outcast story and it s incredible.
4
SPEAKER_00
I have, of course, as you have, I ve been around a few actors.
4
SPEAKER_00
One example would be Heath Ledger, where I like came to know him a little bit and obviously he was so exceptionally talented.
4
SPEAKER_00
Incredible actor.
4
SPEAKER_00
But that was obvious since just being around him, there was a depth and weight he was carrying around that was palpable.
4
SPEAKER_00
You could sense it.
4
SPEAKER_00
It made me insanely compassionate towards him.
4
SPEAKER_00
Even when things were going well, I just could acknowledge, I don t have as much weight on my shoulders.
4
SPEAKER_00
I can feel it.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I just am curious, is there anything about that experience with River where you just felt like this is a very special human being?
4
SPEAKER_01
Well, yeah, because he had a very strange kind of background upbringing.
4
SPEAKER_01
His father had struggled with alcohol and they lived out of a VW microbus, like they were hippies.
4
SPEAKER_01
They were members of communes and stuff?
4
SPEAKER_01
Communes and culty things.
4
SPEAKER_01
And the whole family was
4
SPEAKER_01
I mean, Joaquin Phoenix, I don t remember his name, but there was River, there was Sky, there was Summer, there was Leaf.
4
SPEAKER_01
I think he was Leaf.
4
SPEAKER_00
Oh, then.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, they all had this, you know.
4
SPEAKER_01
I used to make the joke all the time, because I was introduced to two people, and this really, he said, this is Sky, and this is Oxygen.
4
SPEAKER_01
So I said, well, then you re 80%.
4
SPEAKER_01
of her.
4
SPEAKER_00
But they were all from that world.
4
SPEAKER_00
I would be totally guessing, but my hunch is the stability of that experience must have been very appealing.
4
SPEAKER_00
You must have sensed that and you had to have some compulsion to rescue.
4
SPEAKER_01
Well, yeah, I mean, but the weird thing about it, Dax, was that the film came out and did very well, and then a couple of years later, River must have been 17 at the time, and we hung out at a hotel in New York.
4
SPEAKER_01
I could tell he was using, you know, and it was not good, and I thought, he s going off the rails here.
4
SPEAKER_01
And then when I was doing that Wolf of Wall Street, and Leonardo DiCaprio told me that he saw River that night,
4
SPEAKER_01
before he was at the Viper room and he said it was a strange thing to see a guy go in that direction and then the horrible thing of him dying because when I saw him I thought this could be another James Dean here I mean he s like this kind of talented guy.
4
SPEAKER_01
You could sense
4
SPEAKER_01
And I said to Leo, I said, you know, when I first saw you, the first couple of things, this boy s life and what s eating Gilbert great, I thought, oh my God, this guy has got insane talent.
4
SPEAKER_01
I hope that he has some kind of stable background.
4
SPEAKER_01
And he said, yes, even though his mother and father got divorced, they were stable with him and he was okay.
4
SPEAKER_01
And he didn t get into drugs or anything like that.
4
SPEAKER_01
But when I saw River doing that, I said, oh my God, here we go.
4
SPEAKER_01
He s off the rails.
4
SPEAKER_01
And you try to talk to the mother.
4
SPEAKER_01
I mean, you can t really.
4
SPEAKER_01
And then this happens to him.
4
SPEAKER_01
And then you look at the film now.
4
SPEAKER_01
In the film, he disappears out of the film.
4
SPEAKER_01
He s the only one that dies.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s a bizarre.
4
SPEAKER_00
Some foreshadowing.
4
SPEAKER_01
Well, we don t know.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I know.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s just a weird thing to look at the film now.
4
SPEAKER_00
I guess all that s just to say that we are in a business where you get to interact with some very special artists.
4
SPEAKER_00
It often comes with quite a bit of weight and it can be heartbreaking and then so special and you just got to be grateful for the time you got to see what they do.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I mean I saw this kid.
4
SPEAKER_01
There s a scene there at the campfire and he has to tell a story about how he was accused of stealing the milk money even though the
4
SPEAKER_01
teacher had taken the milk money.
4
SPEAKER_01
And the first couple times we did it, he didn t get to it.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I just took him aside.
4
SPEAKER_01
I said, I want you to think about a time in your life when an adult let you down.
4
SPEAKER_01
Just think about that.
4
SPEAKER_00
And he only had to go back to that more.
4
SPEAKER_01
I said, I don t want to, you don t have to tell me what it is, just do.
4
SPEAKER_01
And the take that you see in the movie is right after that.
4
SPEAKER_00
Princess Bride, have you ever met Seth Green, the actor?
4
SPEAKER_00
I have, but only briefly.
4
SPEAKER_00
Okay, I hope this will be yet another feather in your cap, but I went to his wedding.
4
SPEAKER_00
His wedding was at Skywalker Ranch.
4
SPEAKER_00
He s the nerdiest of all nerds in the most beautiful way.
4
SPEAKER_00
They say, I do, and they literally go, now please join us in the theater.
4
SPEAKER_00
We went from, I do, directly into a movie theater and watched the Princess Bride.
4
SPEAKER_01
No, that s so amazing.
4
SPEAKER_00
That is his soul, his religion.
4
SPEAKER_01
We ve got stories about people building their weddings around Princess Bride, where they have on their wedding rings, it says, as you wish and all of that stuff.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_00
So I just thought, Oh, this is the most special thing.
4
SPEAKER_00
And it was so fun.
4
SPEAKER_00
And then we went to the reception, but the very first order of businesses, we all watched this movie together.
4
SPEAKER_01
I ve had a million Princess Bride stories, but one of the best was two stories.
4
SPEAKER_01
One was Nora Ephron and Nick Pelleggi took us to this restaurant in New York, an Italian restaurant, and it was known that John Gotti, the mobster,
5
SPEAKER_03
Every Thursday, we d come in, and sure enough, at 8 o clock, in walks John Gotti with, like, six wise guys around him.
5
SPEAKER_03
And I look over there, and I don t really want to pay too much attention to him.
5
SPEAKER_00
I don t know, yeah, hello, how you doing?
5
SPEAKER_03
Don t look at me, you know?
5
SPEAKER_03
We finish eating, we go outside, and there s a big limousine parked outside with a guy that looks like Luca Brasi from The Godfather standing right in front of him.
5
SPEAKER_03
And he looks me in the eye and he says, you killed my father, prepare to die.
5
SPEAKER_03
And I almost, I almost went on the sidewalk because I thought, Oh, he says, I love that movie.
5
SPEAKER_03
The princess bride.
5
SPEAKER_03
Oh, that s epic.
5
SPEAKER_02
I did miss one thing.
5
SPEAKER_02
I just want to point out because again, we already talked about the kind of steps in your life, but stand by me for you was very formative.
5
SPEAKER_02
It was a moment where you actually said, okay, I am my own man.
5
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
5
SPEAKER_02
I am not in a shadow.
5
SPEAKER_03
Right.
5
SPEAKER_03
And it s true because people have asked me all the time.
5
SPEAKER_03
What s your favorite movie of the movie you made?
5
SPEAKER_03
And they always say, you know, they re like, all your children, you love them all the same, even the rotten ones, you know.
5
SPEAKER_03
But this one meant the most to me because it was the first time I ever did anything that was so far field from anything my father would have done.
5
SPEAKER_03
Spinal Tap, even though he probably wouldn t have satirized heavy metal, he certainly was in the world of satire.
5
SPEAKER_03
And The Sure Thing was a romantic comedy for young people.
5
SPEAKER_03
This was the first time that it was something really reflective of my personality.
5
SPEAKER_03
It had humor in it, but it also had some melancholy and nostalgia.
5
SPEAKER_03
And so I thought, this is really the kind of thing I want to do.
5
SPEAKER_03
And then the fact that it became successful, it validated.
5
SPEAKER_03
It said, okay, okay, I can do some of these things.
5
SPEAKER_02
And then just great shit just starts flying when Harry met Sally, which is so incredible.
5
SPEAKER_02
What I was shocked with in hearing you talk on Stern is just how many of these movies the lead was the ninth choice, not maybe because of your doing, but maybe because of studio pressure or whatever else.
5
SPEAKER_02
I love hearing these stories.
5
SPEAKER_03
It s true for every director.
5
SPEAKER_03
Yeah.
5
SPEAKER_03
I ve had conversations with Steven Spielberg about he didn t get his first choice on number of movies.
5
SPEAKER_03
That s so crazy.
5
SPEAKER_03
That always happens, you know, they re not available.
5
SPEAKER_03
They don t like the script, whatever the reasons are.
5
SPEAKER_03
Yeah.
5
SPEAKER_03
But then I always say that when the movie starts,
5
SPEAKER_03
and the cameras start to roll.
5
SPEAKER_03
Now they don t have cameras rolling, but they put the chip into the thing.
5
SPEAKER_03
Whatever the start, there ll be somebody in front of the camera.
5
SPEAKER_02
And then what s even crazier is this thing happens where that s who you got.
5
SPEAKER_02
And then on the backside of it, you re like, I can t imagine that it would have been anybody.
5
SPEAKER_00
Why read the list of people?
5
SPEAKER_02
Like he had to go to Tom Hanks, Michael Keaton, Albert Brooks, Richard Dreyfuss, all these people for When Harry Met Sally.
5
SPEAKER_02
And of course, in my mind, this movie only works as Billy Crystal.
5
SPEAKER_03
It works with Billy.
5
SPEAKER_03
because he can play the edgy part, but he s sweet.
5
SPEAKER_03
It has a mixture.
5
SPEAKER_03
And he s great.
5
SPEAKER_03
And I didn t go right away to Billy because he was like my closest friend at the time.
5
SPEAKER_03
And I thought, oh man, what if this doesn t work?
5
SPEAKER_02
It s a complication you might not want when you already have so much on your plate.
5
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
5
SPEAKER_03
But then I m so unbelievably happy that he did it because not only is he great in the movie, but he gives you freebies.
5
SPEAKER_03
You get little gifts.
5
SPEAKER_03
I ll have what she s having.
5
SPEAKER_03
That s a line that Billy wrote.
5
SPEAKER_03
And that s his mom though?
5
SPEAKER_03
That s my mom.
5
SPEAKER_02
That s your mom.
5
SPEAKER_02
That s my mom.
5
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, someone s mom.
5
SPEAKER_02
And then Scorsese has his mom and the Goodfellas do it.
5
SPEAKER_03
The last speech in the film where Billy runs in to see Meg and says, when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.
5
SPEAKER_03
And that was Billy.
5
SPEAKER_03
Billy wrote that stuff.
5
SPEAKER_01
God, what a movie.
5
SPEAKER_01
All these movies you read, I mean, it s like- It s impossible.
5
SPEAKER_01
They ve also stood the test of time.
5
SPEAKER_01
When Harry Met Sally is still a huge movie.
5
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, you re not even born yet either, or you re just born.
5
SPEAKER_01
What year were you born?
5
87.
5
SPEAKER_03
Well, yeah, when Harry Mazzoli came out in 89.
5
SPEAKER_01
You were two years old.
5
SPEAKER_01
But it was a huge rom-com for me.
5
SPEAKER_03
88, I think.
5
SPEAKER_02
One years old.
5
SPEAKER_01
I was one years old, but it s carried through.
5
SPEAKER_02
Now, would you intentionally pursue projects that were mirroring what was going on in your real life?
5
SPEAKER_02
Because I know Misery for You was one of these moments where the lead character, again, James Caan, who s like the 15th choice as well,
5
SPEAKER_02
This is a writer who s been defined by something and wants to escape it.
5
SPEAKER_02
And no one will let him, to the degree that they ll break his anchors.
5
SPEAKER_03
Right, and that s what I wanted.
5
SPEAKER_03
I didn t want to be a sitcom actor for the rest of my life.
5
SPEAKER_03
I wanted to direct.
5
SPEAKER_03
So I did relate to that character.
5
SPEAKER_03
I don t... I try to find my way into a movie.
5
SPEAKER_03
I can t be a traffic cop.
5
SPEAKER_03
I have to have some kind of emotional connection.
5
SPEAKER_03
You gotta anchor it.
5
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, somehow.
5
SPEAKER_02
All these questions you get into when you re directing, where it s like it s 51% to 49%, you don t know.
5
SPEAKER_02
But you need that tether.
5
SPEAKER_03
Well, what draws you to something?
5
SPEAKER_02
You feel connected to it.
5
SPEAKER_02
Yes, exactly.
5
SPEAKER_02
That makes your decision for you.
5
SPEAKER_02
You ultimately go, well, what would I?
5
SPEAKER_02
Which is helpful.
5
SPEAKER_02
And then, of course, just a few good men.
5
SPEAKER_02
You told one story about this that I think is incredible.
5
SPEAKER_02
At the table read of a few good men,
5
SPEAKER_02
Nicholson does it nearly identical to how he does it.
5
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, he came to play, as they say.
5
SPEAKER_03
He sat down and he had all these great actors, young actors, Kevin Bacon and Demi Moore and Tom Cruise.
5
SPEAKER_03
And when he starts to do the table read and it s full out performance, it sends a signal to everybody else.
5
SPEAKER_03
We re here to do this thing.
5
SPEAKER_03
It brought everybody s game up.
5
SPEAKER_03
I always liken him to somebody like Magic Johnson because they know that if the other people are doing their best, it s gonna make him look better.
5
SPEAKER_03
He s definitely out there to make everything better.
5
SPEAKER_02
Talk about some lines and scenes and performances that just get completely stamped into our shared consciousness.
5
SPEAKER_03
You can t handle the truth.
5
SPEAKER_01
People who don t even know where it s from know it.
5
SPEAKER_03
Here s my favorite thing of all that is I ll have what she s having and you killed my father, whatever the things are, you know, from the spinal tap, this goes to 11.
5
SPEAKER_03
Elon Musk.
5
SPEAKER_03
Made it into Tesla.
5
SPEAKER_03
I DM d him today because when he first Tesla came out, he showed me, he said, look, the radio goes to 11 because he loved the movie.
5
SPEAKER_01
Oh my God.
5
SPEAKER_01
Did you not know that at all?
5
SPEAKER_01
I did not know that.
5
SPEAKER_02
Oh yeah.
5
SPEAKER_03
Wow.
5
SPEAKER_02
And yeah, for any spinal tap freak like me, I was like, oh, this is fucking incredible.
5
SPEAKER_02
This thing made its way into a real product.
5
SPEAKER_03
So the thing that gets me more than anything is I did this film called The Bucket List, which was Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman.
5
SPEAKER_03
And they are both guys who would die from cancer.
5
SPEAKER_03
Right.
5
SPEAKER_03
Dying from cancer.
5
SPEAKER_03
And they re going to do all these experiences.
5
SPEAKER_03
They have a bucket list.
5
SPEAKER_03
Everybody thinks that that s a term that s been around for a million years.
5
SPEAKER_03
It was made up for the film.
5
SPEAKER_01
That is crazy.
5
SPEAKER_01
I mean, I saw the movie, but in my head, it was just a ubiquitous, but no, it was made up.
5
SPEAKER_02
I only have one thing like that, which is people will go, are you punking me?
5
SPEAKER_02
That s like in the vernacular.
5
SPEAKER_02
I m getting punked.
5
SPEAKER_02
It wasn t a thing.
5
SPEAKER_03
Yeah.
5
SPEAKER_03
It wasn t a thing until it was a thing.
5
SPEAKER_02
And everybody says, well, it s on my bucket list.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
5
SPEAKER_02
Okay.
5
SPEAKER_02
We re off of your incredible movies, by God, literally just thank you.
5
SPEAKER_02
Those are like some of my favorite experiences in life, sitting and watching those movies.
5
SPEAKER_02
We re both obsessed with Russia, I think.
5
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, I had a website during the 2016 election.
5
SPEAKER_03
It was called the Committee to Investigate Russia.
5
SPEAKER_03
When we had heard that the Russians were playing in the 2016 election, we found out that they were.
5
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, and Trump was fine with that.
5
SPEAKER_03
And so that was the beginning of a real string of corruption that he started and continues to this day.
5
SPEAKER_02
Have you watched any of the front lines on him?
5
SPEAKER_02
Because they are among my very favorite docs I ve ever seen in my life.
5
SPEAKER_02
In particular, there s like a three hour one about how we came to power.
5
SPEAKER_01
Oh, you mean Putin?
5
SPEAKER_02
Putin, how he came to power.
5
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, he was a functionary, KGB guy.
5
SPEAKER_03
He was Yeltsin s right-hand man.
5
SPEAKER_02
And Yeltsin brought him in because he had been the right-hand man of the St.
5
SPEAKER_02
Petersburg governor.
5
SPEAKER_02
And the long history in Russia is every time these guys step down from power, they get tried on embezzlement and they all end up dying in prison.
5
SPEAKER_02
And Putin masterminded an exit of this St.
5
SPEAKER_02
Petersburg governor.
5
SPEAKER_02
He got him out of the country.
5
SPEAKER_02
He faked a medical episode, he put him on a plane, and Yeltsin said, I want to step down.
5
SPEAKER_02
I don t want to rot in prison.
5
SPEAKER_02
I need this guy.
5
SPEAKER_02
I ll just add it because it s so fascinating, but that Yeltsin very much wants to be able to hand over the power to Putin.
5
SPEAKER_02
And so he funds this huge campaign to raise the awareness of Putin.
5
SPEAKER_02
And it s getting nowhere because Putin has no personality.
5
SPEAKER_02
It s not working.
5
SPEAKER_02
And then lo and behold, mysteriously, three apartment buildings get destroyed and blown up.
5
SPEAKER_02
by, quote, the Crimeans.
5
SPEAKER_02
I don t know what we call the Chechenians.
5
SPEAKER_02
And later revealed some of the armaments didn t go off in a fourth apartment building, and they were all discovered to be Russian armaments.
5
SPEAKER_02
So they blow up these three buildings with their own civilians, and then he puts Putin in charge of the invasion of Crimea, and then all of a sudden the people want him to be president.
5
SPEAKER_02
Like, what?
5
SPEAKER_02
You couldn t write an origin story for a bad guy.
5
SPEAKER_02
I know.
5
SPEAKER_02
And Yeltsin was struggling with alcohol and he was a mess.
5
SPEAKER_02
And later came to regret this and had spoke out about some of the anti-democratic things he was doing.
5
SPEAKER_03
And if you look at what happened in the 2016 election, it didn t take very much to swing it because all it took was three cities, Milwaukee, Detroit, and Philadelphia.
5
SPEAKER_03
And the aggregate of those three cities are 79,000 votes.
5
SPEAKER_03
And all you had to do is suppress the black vote in those three cities, which they did.
5
SPEAKER_03
And then you flip.
5
SPEAKER_03
And all of a sudden, even though Hillary has 3 million more votes, she loses.
5
SPEAKER_03
Yeah.
5
SPEAKER_03
And that s what I m afraid of now.
5
SPEAKER_02
Yes.
5
SPEAKER_02
And that s what your new documentary is about, God and country.
5
SPEAKER_02
OK.
5
SPEAKER_02
I think the most important thing that we say up front is that this movie is not anti-Christian.
5
SPEAKER_03
Oh, no.
5
SPEAKER_03
It s the opposite.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s very pro-christian.
6
SPEAKER_00
It has included many, many trusted, outspoken members and leaders of Christianity.
6
SPEAKER_01
That was important because my name being associated with it, first of all, I m Jewish.
6
SPEAKER_01
Second of all, I m a Hollywood libtard.
6
SPEAKER_00
That s what I am.
6
SPEAKER_00
Right.
6
SPEAKER_01
So we wanted to make sure that this movie, which is about Christian nationalism, in no way diminishes Christianity.
6
SPEAKER_01
And so we have the most respected, conservative, devout Christian leaders talking about not only the danger that Christian nationalism poses to the country, but to Christianity itself.
6
SPEAKER_01
That this is not a religious movement, it s a political movement.
6
SPEAKER_01
and it is basically destroying Christianity in that it completely negates the teachings of Jesus.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so quickly, I think people have heard the term white nationalists.
6
SPEAKER_00
Everyone s pretty clear about that.
6
SPEAKER_00
Those are people that would like to see an America that is just white.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s their birthright to be here and no one else s.
6
SPEAKER_01
Christian nationalism is by and large white.
6
SPEAKER_01
It s over 90% white people.
6
SPEAKER_01
And that element of racism that you re talking about
6
SPEAKER_00
is there?
6
SPEAKER_00
As we ll find out, it s foundational to the formation of the Christian nationalists.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
6
SPEAKER_00
But what I didn t really know, and I think I m up on this stuff, is that Christian nationalists are people who believe truly that this should be a Christian nation.
6
SPEAKER_00
We should have biblical laws.
6
SPEAKER_00
Like, I m talking, if you think Sharia law is bad, this is Sharia law, but this is anti-gay, no marriage, this is anti-abortion, this is anti-books, this is anti-secular education.
6
SPEAKER_00
This is a dramatic draconian approach.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, they don t believe in separation of church and state.
6
SPEAKER_01
They will tell you that there is no separation of church and state in the Constitution.
6
SPEAKER_01
Well, the words separation of church and state are not per se in the Constitution, but the idea of separating church and state is mentioned three times in the Constitution.
6
SPEAKER_00
In fact, it s so fully articulated that we use the term separation of church and state to just condense what is written in there.
6
SPEAKER_00
That s exactly right.
6
SPEAKER_01
The reason for that is the founders of the country, many of whom came from Europe and were running away from religious persecution, wanted to make sure that the country would not have a religion, that you could pray however you wanted, and it s in the Bill of Rights, that there s no test for a religion into holding public office.
6
SPEAKER_01
All of that was very intentionally done, so much so that the first words in the Constitution are, we the people.
6
SPEAKER_01
Which was revolutionary.
6
SPEAKER_00
Revolution.
6
SPEAKER_01
It had never been done.
6
SPEAKER_01
It had always been, it s all divine.
6
SPEAKER_01
They were saying, we, the people, will govern ourselves, self-rule.
6
SPEAKER_01
And so they don t believe in that.
6
SPEAKER_01
They don t believe in separation of church.
6
SPEAKER_01
They ll tell you there is no separation.
6
SPEAKER_01
And they believe that we should be living toward whatever their ideas are, the rules of God.
6
SPEAKER_01
But it certainly isn t Jesus s teaching, because nowhere do I see Jesus saying, take up arms and kill somebody who doesn t believe what you believe.
6
SPEAKER_01
Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.
6
SPEAKER_00
Okay, so it starts, I think on the surface, people, myself included, would have assumed that this got organized in the wake of Roe v. Wade, but there s an interesting history that actually predates Roe v. Wade, and the kernel of this movement really gets started with the beginning of desegregating schools.
6
SPEAKER_00
That s exactly right.
6
SPEAKER_01
1954, you had Brown versus the Board of Education, which said that we have to make the schools desegregated.
6
SPEAKER_01
We have to make sure that blacks and whites can go to the same school.
6
SPEAKER_01
Well, that wasn t liked very much by a certain group of people, so they decided to make these religious schools and not allow black people to come to their schools.
6
SPEAKER_01
And that became the galvanizing issue for the beginnings of this white Christian nationalist movement.
6
SPEAKER_01
problem they had is it s really ugly to say, we re going to base a movement on racism.
6
SPEAKER_01
It wasn t going to work even in 1954.
6
SPEAKER_01
Well, that was the thing, and they resisted it.
6
SPEAKER_01
It s an extension of the Civil War that was fought over blacks not being allowed to be free.
6
SPEAKER_01
And so all of a sudden in 1972, 73, Roe v. Wade comes along and they went, ah,
6
SPEAKER_01
here s something we can build a movement on. 
6
SPEAKER_01
And they used that, and they built this movement, and it s gotten incredibly powerful.
6
SPEAKER_01
It s very well-funded.
6
SPEAKER_01
It is not the majority of Christians.
6
SPEAKER_01
The vast, vast majority of Christians don t like this and don t believe in this, but
6
SPEAKER_01
As you know, any political movement, if you can get 25, 30% of a country, particularly with a system that we have here in America, the Electoral College, only have to pick off five or six states and you can win an election, even though you may lose a popular vote by 10 million votes.
6
SPEAKER_00
Well, and this is in the documentary that of the 15 most populous states, only 30% of the citizens live in a rural setting, yet they control 70% of that Senate outcome.
6
SPEAKER_00
That s right.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s enormously lopsided, and it s inherently anti-democratic, in a sense.
6
SPEAKER_01
When the founders formed the country, they gave two senators to every state, and that s OK.
6
SPEAKER_01
But the Constitution s been amended many, many times, and it s time to amend the Constitution and have the Electoral College done away with and have a popular vote.
6
SPEAKER_01
Whoever gets the most votes wins.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, we have the technology to do this now.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s plausible.
6
SPEAKER_01
But the problem you have in order to do that is very difficult because you have to get two-thirds majority in the House, two-thirds majority in the Senate, and then it has to be passed by simple majorities in three-fourths of the state legislatures.
6
SPEAKER_01
That s a big heavy lift because Republicans, the way they are now, they know that if you change that system and let the best man win, best woman, whoever gets the most votes, they ll never win an election based on the ideology that they have.
6
SPEAKER_00
It also ignores the demographics of 1776.
6
SPEAKER_00
I don t know the numbers, but I know that far more people lived in rural areas than lived in cities.
6
SPEAKER_00
And so it really ignores this enormous migration and where the actual citizens live.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, well, you got, let s say, Maine or Vermont.
6
SPEAKER_01
Vermont, they got a million people.
6
SPEAKER_01
Or Rhode Island, Montana, they got a million.
6
SPEAKER_01
Two senators.
6
SPEAKER_01
California, 40 some odd million.
6
SPEAKER_00
Two senators.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s kind of crazy.
6
SPEAKER_00
So I grew up, obviously, post this movement coalescing around Roe v. Wade.
6
SPEAKER_00
Obviously, Jerry Falwell is a big figurehead in this movement.
6
SPEAKER_00
So I grew up in an era where evangelicals were outspokenly against abortion, but I was shocked to learn in the documentary when Roe v. Wade, that was a very split thing even among evangelicals back then.
6
SPEAKER_01
Well, evangelicals, there s no mention of abortion in the Bible, and the people who believe that religion should be practiced freely
6
SPEAKER_01
don t feel that you should impose your ideas on other people.
6
SPEAKER_01
You can make the arguments if you want, but you should not use religion as a way of imposing your will.
6
SPEAKER_01
And so most evangelicals, they may believe, and they have heartfelt beliefs, that you should not have abortion.
6
SPEAKER_01
And you have to respect that.
6
SPEAKER_01
I respect that.
6
SPEAKER_00
But they re saying don t impose that will on somebody else.
6
SPEAKER_00
That s the distinction is that although they still were dramatically majority pro-life, they didn t believe at that time that that should be the rule of law.
6
SPEAKER_01
Right.
6
SPEAKER_01
And what they felt was it s a decision a woman makes with her doctor and her family and her God.
6
SPEAKER_01
And that s a decision that s up to her.
6
SPEAKER_01
They would say, think twice about it.
6
SPEAKER_01
Maybe you want to put a child up for adoption.
6
SPEAKER_01
Maybe we can find a way of providing.
6
SPEAKER_01
But they don t say that.
6
SPEAKER_01
They re just saying you can t have an abortion.
6
SPEAKER_01
So you wind up with a 10-year-old girl having to leave Ohio in order to get an abortion.
6
SPEAKER_01
And now you re seeing it s the dog that caught the car.
6
SPEAKER_01
All of a sudden, this issue, which played very well for them as a wedge issue, is playing well the other way, which is people are saying we don t want somebody who was raped by their uncle or their father.
6
SPEAKER_00
One of the experts you have in the documentary says, I personally held this position until I represented a 10 or 12 year old girl who had been raped by her uncle and was carrying a baby.
6
SPEAKER_00
And she said, I had to really confront what this really is in some cases.
6
SPEAKER_01
That s right.
6
SPEAKER_00
So this movement gets more and more fervent and more violent by nature.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s really fascinating to watch you show the progression of the sermons and this very popular notion in Christian nationalists of Jesus as a warrior.
6
SPEAKER_00
They really home in on Revelations.
6
SPEAKER_00
you re showing the covers of these books in the doc, and it looks like a spinal tap creation.
6
SPEAKER_00
There s like a ripped Jesus, and he s out hell-bent for blood.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, the muscular Jesus.
6
SPEAKER_01
And it s explained perfectly by Russell Moore, who is the editor of Christianity Today, one of the most respected people in that field.
6
SPEAKER_01
He says,
7
SPEAKER_04
Jesus believed you fight with the gospel.
7
SPEAKER_04
You don t fight with weapons and guns.
7
SPEAKER_04
You fight by convincing people.
7
SPEAKER_03
That s how you fight, not killing people.
7
SPEAKER_03
Right.
7
SPEAKER_03
Now, I guess I wouldn t have made this connection until I saw this movie.
7
SPEAKER_03
When I looked at the Capitol riots, I looked at the people that were attending.
7
SPEAKER_03
My first thought was like, what s binding this group together?
7
SPEAKER_03
I can t figure out.
7
SPEAKER_03
There s so many different signs.
7
SPEAKER_03
You ve got like, don t tread on me.
7
SPEAKER_03
You got this over here.
7
SPEAKER_03
What I was kind of missing is how many Jesus saved signs, how many crosses were being held.
7
SPEAKER_03
And I didn t know this part that all of that was preceded the day before by the Jericho marches of January 5th.
7
SPEAKER_03
You know about those?
7
SPEAKER_01
I don t.
7
SPEAKER_03
That s really what this film is about, is that the Capitol Six riots or insurrection was fully organized by these Christian nationalists.
7
SPEAKER_03
And that there was steps to this and the Jericho marches, which was recreating the storm of Jericho where the walls fell.
7
SPEAKER_03
They would have been advertised and promoted and this was all part of the same thing.
7
SPEAKER_03
They got on buses, they got Roger Stone preaching at that thing.
7
SPEAKER_03
All the piety in Jesus is like, what?
7
SPEAKER_03
I didn t know that connection.
7
SPEAKER_03
My assumption was they were mostly Christians, but not that they were Christian nationalists first.
7
SPEAKER_03
Yes.
7
SPEAKER_04
And we re not saying that all the rioters of January 6th were Christian nationalists, but they formed the nucleus and the foundation for what happened on January 6th.
7
SPEAKER_04
I mean, you had Alex Jones out there screaming about God is on our side.
7
SPEAKER_03
We re going to war.
7
SPEAKER_03
We re going to go to battle.
7
SPEAKER_03
And you see the amount of people that were at the January 5th Jericho march.
7
SPEAKER_03
It s a lot of people.
7
SPEAKER_03
It s clear to me that certainly a good deal of those people hung around for
7
SPEAKER_03
And you see them praying on the floor of the Senate.
7
SPEAKER_03
Yes, when they seize control, in quotes.
7
SPEAKER_03
In the name of Jesus.
7
SPEAKER_03
And the Speaker of the House, where he sits or she sits, there s a bullhorn and he s leading a prayer.
7
SPEAKER_00
I don t feel like people talked about this much.
7
SPEAKER_04
Well, I think the problem is there was a January 6th committee that looked into all of this.
7
SPEAKER_04
But if they had talked about Christian nationalism, first of all, it s a term that not a lot of people understand.
7
SPEAKER_04
They think if you re saying that, you re bashing Christianity in some way.
7
SPEAKER_04
And I think that the January 6th Committee understood that.
7
SPEAKER_04
That if they put that there was a fervent fight from Christian nationalism, then it would have made people not listen.
7
SPEAKER_03
It would have further perpetuated their own narrative that Christianity is under attack.
7
SPEAKER_03
Under attack, exactly.
7
SPEAKER_04
And you notice all the people that spoke there and all the witnesses, they were all Republicans, and they consciously did that, but they left out this part of it.
7
SPEAKER_04
And I think there was right to do it, because we have to spend an hour and a half in this film explaining to people what Christian nationalism is and why it s a danger not only to the country, but to Christianity.
7
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, it s very comforting to hear so many of the leaders in the Christian world be so outspokenly against this.
7
SPEAKER_04
And a lot of people are starting to understand that now.
7
SPEAKER_04
There are even people in the film, Robert Jeffress, he s gung-ho Christian nationalist.
7
SPEAKER_04
I ve read some things where he s starting to back away and say, maybe I didn t think this through because they want abortion to be overturned.
7
SPEAKER_04
And that s the thing that they feel they achieve.
7
SPEAKER_04
But what are we doing now to people?
7
SPEAKER_04
And how far have we gotten away from the true teachings of Jesus?
7
SPEAKER_03
Well, and you also acknowledge that because their story about Trump was he was the chosen one.
7
SPEAKER_03
Right.
7
SPEAKER_03
You have so much news footage of these people right in public saying he s the chosen one.
7
SPEAKER_03
And so if the chosen one
7
SPEAKER_03
doesn t win the election, clearly God wanted him to.
7
SPEAKER_03
There has to be a conspiracy.
7
SPEAKER_03
You have no other choice.
7
SPEAKER_03
If God s backing this candidate, then what choice do you have but to believe?
7
SPEAKER_03
It s like they painted themselves into a corner.
7
SPEAKER_04
That s right.
7
SPEAKER_04
And it also gives you permission to do anything if you re doing it in God s name.
7
SPEAKER_04
What s interesting is this movement has been around for a long time.
7
SPEAKER_04
It s grown, it s gotten more powerful, it s more well-funded, but it all of a sudden had a mouthpiece.
7
SPEAKER_04
He s pandering like a motherfucker.
7
SPEAKER_04
Yeah, because he knows that at this point it s his ticket to get out of prison, get out of jail free card.
7
SPEAKER_04
I mean, that s what he s looking to do.
7
SPEAKER_04
So it s been amplified by his voice.
7
SPEAKER_04
And he s more than happy to keep saying, I m the chosen one.
7
SPEAKER_04
I m your retribution.
7
SPEAKER_01
Why do they just believe it when he holds the Bible upside down and when he s like saying the craziest stuff and just his history?
7
SPEAKER_01
Why are they so susceptible to believe it just because he says it?
7
SPEAKER_03
Because he s saying out loud, Christianity is under attack and needs to be saved.
7
SPEAKER_03
I m a true believer.
7
SPEAKER_03
He is playing to the audience.
7
SPEAKER_04
Yes, and I m going to be the one who is going to make this a white Christian nation.
7
SPEAKER_04
I m going to shut the borders down.
7
SPEAKER_04
I m going to have a Muslim ban.
7
SPEAKER_04
I m going to make sure that there s a wall.
7
SPEAKER_04
All of those things are to feed that.
7
SPEAKER_04
But think about this for a second.
7
SPEAKER_04
The guy wins the Iowa primary, wins it handily.
7
SPEAKER_04
Handily.
7
SPEAKER_04
And the next day he goes to a trial where he was found that he had raped a woman.
7
SPEAKER_04
This is the person that these Christian nationalists are all in favor of.
7
SPEAKER_04
A guy who raped somebody.
7
SPEAKER_03
Yeah.
7
SPEAKER_03
Weirdly, the doc did answer a question, because let me just say, I don t think the right s crazy.
7
SPEAKER_03
I don t think the right s bad.
7
SPEAKER_03
I don t hold that opinion.
7
SPEAKER_04
I don t either.
7
SPEAKER_03
Nationalism is a different thing.
7
SPEAKER_03
I totally agree with you.
7
SPEAKER_03
But I was genuinely perplexed how people were buying into the stolen vote narrative.
7
SPEAKER_03
You have Republican governors saying, no, there s been no fraud.
7
SPEAKER_03
You have the makers of the machine going, here s the data.
7
SPEAKER_03
So what was missing for me?
7
SPEAKER_03
was answered by this, which is, if God picked Trump, that s how I can overlook all this stuff.
7
SPEAKER_03
Because I was not clear.
7
SPEAKER_03
I m like, how are they perpetuating this belief?
7
SPEAKER_04
Right.
7
SPEAKER_04
And it s amplified by the fact that you have some very spineless Republican elected officials
7
SPEAKER_04
Who know?
7
SPEAKER_04
They know it s not stolen.
7
SPEAKER_03
Listen to Tucker Carlson s tag team.
7
SPEAKER_03
They know, they know.
7
SPEAKER_04
They all fucking know.
7
SPEAKER_04
But they feel this is their ticket to maintain power and they ll stay with them.
7
SPEAKER_03
The funding for this is a billion dollars.
7
SPEAKER_03
There s a billion dollars on the table to fund this.
7
SPEAKER_04
Well, more.
7
SPEAKER_04
They just gave this guy Leonard Leo.
7
SPEAKER_03
He got a billion six.
7
SPEAKER_03
The money is there.
7
SPEAKER_03
But you have to tip your hat to this group because they re explicit about it.
7
SPEAKER_03
They re not hiding it.
7
SPEAKER_03
They re like, here s how this system can be exploited by us.
7
SPEAKER_03
Right.
7
SPEAKER_03
They know they re a minority and they know that they could be in power and they have the playbook and they re not hiding it.
7
SPEAKER_03
No.
7
SPEAKER_04
And the way our system is set up, they can be in power with a minority.
7
SPEAKER_04
Yes.
7
SPEAKER_04
Because all you need to do is get that guy in the White House, and then he starts firing all the civil servants, putting in political loyalists, and then there you have it.
7
SPEAKER_03
Yeah.
7
SPEAKER_03
Well, it s a really, really well-made documentary.
7
SPEAKER_03
I loved watching it so much.
7
SPEAKER_04
Good, good.
7
SPEAKER_04
Well, it s going to be in theaters February 16th.
7
SPEAKER_04
And then we have a Spinal Tap 2 coming.
7
SPEAKER_01
Oh, that s so exciting.
7
SPEAKER_01
That s a while away.
7
SPEAKER_01
We can get excited.
7
SPEAKER_03
What a discovery today.
7
SPEAKER_03
All right, the last thing I want to end on is I m
7
SPEAKER_03
listening to many interviews of you last night, laying in bed.
7
SPEAKER_03
I m sorry.
7
SPEAKER_03
And no, I enjoyed every moment of it.
7
SPEAKER_03
And my wife s walking back and forth throughout the bedroom, going here, going there.
7
SPEAKER_03
And at some point she goes, why are you having Kimmel on again?
7
SPEAKER_03
You just had him on.
7
SPEAKER_03
And all of a sudden I went, oh my God, that is your voice.
7
SPEAKER_03
You mean I sound like Kimmel?
7
SPEAKER_03
Yes.
7
SPEAKER_03
Obviously Kimmel sounds like you.
7
SPEAKER_03
You re older.
7
SPEAKER_03
Wow.
7
SPEAKER_03
I got to listen to Kimmel a little bit more.
7
SPEAKER_00
It s pretty crazy.
7
SPEAKER_03
I was curious if you ever had gotten that prior to this.
7
SPEAKER_04
No, this is the first Kimmel reference and I m going to now start, you know, compare and contrast.
7
SPEAKER_03
You should be calling people and saying, this is Jimmy Kimmel and just make a mess of his life.
7
SPEAKER_03
I think that s what you should do.
7
SPEAKER_03
Well, Rob, it s an incredible pleasure to meet you.
7
SPEAKER_03
This has been so fun.
7
SPEAKER_03
You re a great interviewee.
7
SPEAKER_03
Thank you.
7
SPEAKER_00
So prolific and an icon.
7
SPEAKER_00
I know you know it, but it s so fun for us to get to have people like you in here.
7
SPEAKER_03
Truly, truly, truly, truly.
7
SPEAKER_04
You guys are good at this.
7
SPEAKER_04
Think about doing it for a living.
7
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
7
SPEAKER_03
Thanks for coming.
7
SPEAKER_03
Everyone should check out God and Country.
7
SPEAKER_03
It s a very, very well-made documentary.
7
SPEAKER_03
You will love it.
7
SPEAKER_03
I hope we get to talk to you again soon.
7
SPEAKER_03
Maybe you ll come back for Spinal Tap too.
7
SPEAKER_03
All right.
7
SPEAKER_03
Stay tuned for the fact check so you can hear all the facts that were wrong.
7
SPEAKER_02
Hello.
7
SPEAKER_03
Hello.
7
SPEAKER_03
Stormy night.
7
SPEAKER_02
It s raining.
7
SPEAKER_03
It s 1 p.m., but it would appear to be 8 p.m.
7
SPEAKER_03
right now, light-wise.
7
SPEAKER_02
It s dark.
7
SPEAKER_03
It s a dark and stormy night.
7
SPEAKER_03
That s what I was trying to think of.
7
SPEAKER_02
And it s rainy as hell.
7
SPEAKER_03
There s a new blouse.
7
SPEAKER_02
I got a new blouse.
7
SPEAKER_03
Anything you wanna tell me about it?
7
SPEAKER_02
It s very cozy.
7
SPEAKER_03
Okay, great.
7
SPEAKER_02
And I love it.
7
SPEAKER_02
Well, sure, I went shopping.
7
SPEAKER_03
Okay, when?
7
SPEAKER_02
On Saturday.
7
SPEAKER_02
I did a quick shop.
7
SPEAKER_02
I just did a stop in.
7
SPEAKER_03
Was it after you brought steaks?
7
SPEAKER_02
It was before I brought stakes.
7
SPEAKER_03
It was?
7
SPEAKER_02
Yes.
7
SPEAKER_03
So you were already the owner of this garment at that point?
7
SPEAKER_02
I was, did I seem different?
7
SPEAKER_03
Well, I would have expected you to have a little more spring in your step.
7
SPEAKER_02
I know, okay.
7
SPEAKER_03
Knowing that that was in the trunk.
7
SPEAKER_02
Well, yeah.
7
SPEAKER_02
I ve been having a little bit of a tough time.
7
SPEAKER_03
Mentally.
7
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, mentally.
7
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, you ve been blue.
7
SPEAKER_02
And I think for the most part, it s, I mean, there are things that have contributed
8
SPEAKER_00
but also I think so much of it is just truly hormonal.
8
SPEAKER_01
Right.
8
SPEAKER_00
But rough, like worse than a normal like PMS or something.
8
SPEAKER_00
I ve been combating that a little bit and- One of your tried and true tools- Is shopping.
8
SPEAKER_00
Is to go shopping.
8
SPEAKER_00
But I was trying not to, because I know what that s all about.
8
SPEAKER_01
Right.
8
SPEAKER_00
But then I was driving by it.
8
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
8
SPEAKER_01
And you thought, we gotta do it.
8
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, had to do it.
8
SPEAKER_00
And so I did a little shopping.
8
SPEAKER_01
Well, that must mean you were out on the streets early.
8
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, because I had my witch at 10.
8
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
8
SPEAKER_00
Oh yeah, and that s- That s in Beverly Hills.
8
SPEAKER_00
It s rough.
8
SPEAKER_01
It s rough for you.
8
SPEAKER_01
It would be like if I had a dentist next to a crack house 20 years ago.
8
SPEAKER_01
Exactly.
8
SPEAKER_01
It s not a great location.
8
SPEAKER_01
You need to probably find a witch somewhere with no shopping.
8
SPEAKER_00
I ll always find shops.
8
SPEAKER_01
You re right.
8
SPEAKER_00
But yeah, I stopped in.
8
SPEAKER_00
It did help.
8
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
8
SPEAKER_00
For like.
8
SPEAKER_01
An hour.
8
SPEAKER_00
15 minutes.
8
SPEAKER_01
Oh, only 15.
8
SPEAKER_00
Well, it helped the whole shopping time, and then 15 minutes after.
8
SPEAKER_00
I also got some intel, but I can t share it.
8
SPEAKER_01
Then you shouldn t say it.
8
SPEAKER_01
Like, I found out a secret I m not gonna tell you.
8
SPEAKER_00
Sorry.
8
SPEAKER_01
Right?
8
SPEAKER_01
Or will you tell me and.
8
SPEAKER_00
I can tell you.
8
SPEAKER_01
And then cut it out.
8
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I can tell you, I just can t share that publicly.
8
SPEAKER_00
It wasn t about you.
8
SPEAKER_01
I got you, I got you.
8
SPEAKER_00
So anyway, so that was that.
8
SPEAKER_00
And then I brought some steaks over to your house.
8
SPEAKER_01
They were delicious.
8
SPEAKER_01
My father-in-law cooked them up.
8
SPEAKER_01
He travels with his meat thermometer, which I gotta tip my hat to him for doing that.
8
SPEAKER_01
You re serious about barbecuing when you travel with a meat thermometer.
8
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, big time.
8
SPEAKER_00
So he made them and they were delicious?
8
SPEAKER_01
They were delicious.
8
SPEAKER_01
He cooked them to absolute perfection.
8
SPEAKER_01
I cook them differently.
8
SPEAKER_01
I like how I do it, but his are different and it s great.
8
SPEAKER_01
He s more of a medium heat and he gets that center at the perfect temp.
8
SPEAKER_01
I like to blast it, time it.
8
SPEAKER_00
Oh, okay.
8
SPEAKER_01
And then wrap it in tin foil so it does some more cooking while, once it s off the grill.
8
SPEAKER_00
Oh, and where d you learn that technique?
8
SPEAKER_01
I read about it online, I think.
8
SPEAKER_00
Nice.
8
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
8
SPEAKER_00
Do you have a chef like I do?
8
SPEAKER_01
Google, yeah.
8
SPEAKER_01
Oh, just Google.
8
SPEAKER_01
You know like when you type in a question and it brings up a box, you re not even sure where it s from.
8
SPEAKER_00
Yes, that s my whole fact check.
8
SPEAKER_01
I bet, yeah, yeah, yeah.
8
SPEAKER_01
Just whatever that box is, like how long should you cook a ribeye to be medium?
8
SPEAKER_01
Now the tricky part is, is these ribeyes fluctuate so much in how thick they are.
8
SPEAKER_01
Right.
8
SPEAKER_01
But now I ve done enough of them that I can- But that s why they meet their mom.
8
SPEAKER_00
That s the whole point of it, right?
8
SPEAKER_01
Right, but I won t use it.
8
SPEAKER_01
Oh, why?
8
SPEAKER_01
He got me one for Christmas.
8
SPEAKER_01
And it was a thing I kept hiding from him.
8
SPEAKER_01
And then finally I just said to him, I haven t used it.
8
SPEAKER_00
Oh, wow.
8
SPEAKER_01
And I m not going to.
8
SPEAKER_00
Oh my God.
8
SPEAKER_01
I had to be honest with him.
8
SPEAKER_01
It was not easy for me to deliver that news.
8
SPEAKER_00
It s a hill you wanna die on, huh?
8
SPEAKER_01
Well, just, I don t want to do it.
8
SPEAKER_00
Wow, I use one all the time.
8
SPEAKER_00
You do?
8
SPEAKER_00
And I love it.
8
SPEAKER_01
And it s a wireless one that goes to your phone?
8
SPEAKER_00
No, no, no, no.
8
SPEAKER_01
You mean you just slide it in it when everything s done?
8
SPEAKER_00
Well, to check if it s done.
8
SPEAKER_00
Right.
8
SPEAKER_00
Like I do it for chicken, I do it for everything.
8
SPEAKER_01
No, this is, you insert the probe in long before you start cooking it, and then it s on your phone, and it tells you the temp.
8
SPEAKER_00
It s awesome.
8
SPEAKER_01
There s no reason I shouldn t use it, other than I don t want to figure out how to, and I have a system that I love.
8
SPEAKER_00
Sure.
8
SPEAKER_01
You know?
8
SPEAKER_01
So I m not trying to fix anything that s not broken.
8
SPEAKER_00
I get that.
8
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, you can relate.
8
SPEAKER_01
I have an update.
8
SPEAKER_00
Let s hear it.
8
SPEAKER_01
On the last fact check, I had vaguely remembered that someone s housekeeper built a replica of their house.
8
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
8
SPEAKER_01
I mean, and even as I was saying it, I thought, that can t really be.
8
SPEAKER_01
And then as you recall, I text Jimmy about it.
8
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
8
SPEAKER_01
He then responded like, I totally know that story, but I don t know who it s about.
8
SPEAKER_01
I can t remember.
8
SPEAKER_01
So I took to Google, as we were just discussing.
8
SPEAKER_01
And this is what I found.
8
SPEAKER_01
Jeanette de Cordova spent her years in Beverly Hills throwing lavish soirees for the biggest names in film.
8
SPEAKER_01
Among the names said to have attended her parties are Billy Wilder, Gary Cooper, Frank Sinatra, and fellow Rat Packer Dean Martin.
8
SPEAKER_01
Her opulence outdid her income, and she was forced to sell her home upon the death of her husband, who, by the way, is my voice now, he was a producer of The Carson Show.
8
SPEAKER_00
Oh!
8
SPEAKER_01
Upon his death, leaving her with nothing, with all the friends of her wealthy days gone, she turned to Kovarubias, who is said to have performed many duties beyond the call of a housekeeper, including steering her drink for her as she walked around.
8
SPEAKER_01
In an ending that is stranger than fiction, de Cordova winds up living in Mexico in a replica of her home that her housekeeper built with her earnings.
8
SPEAKER_00
Wow.
8
SPEAKER_01
That s gotta be the craziest story ever.
8
SPEAKER_00
That s so strange.
8
SPEAKER_00
Did Jimmy know it?
8
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
8
SPEAKER_01
He s like, oh my God, right.
8
SPEAKER_01
It was the wife of the producer of the Carson Show.
8
SPEAKER_00
Huh.
8
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
8
SPEAKER_00
Crazy.
8
SPEAKER_01
When I searched the internet looking for it, it was part of, of course, it was in like either the Hollywood Reporter or Variety, because it was reporting on the fact that HBO had optioned that story.
8
SPEAKER_00
Oh, got it.
8
SPEAKER_01
Which I wish they would make.
8
SPEAKER_01
Although.
8
SPEAKER_00
I d like to see that.
8
SPEAKER_01
If you know where it s going.
8
SPEAKER_00
Spoiler.
8
SPEAKER_01
You re just waiting to see the replica of the house, I guess, in Mexico.
8
SPEAKER_01
That s a beautiful segue.
8
SPEAKER_01
I am on episode, I guess probably seven of Mr. and Mrs. Smith.
8
SPEAKER_00
There s only eight, right?
8
SPEAKER_00
I hate that.
8
SPEAKER_00
I know.
8
SPEAKER_01
I hate that there s eight.
8
SPEAKER_00
I know.
8
SPEAKER_01
I hate eight.
8
SPEAKER_01
We love eight because it s even.
8
SPEAKER_01
I love it.
8
SPEAKER_00
It s awesome.
8
SPEAKER_01
I can see that you weren t inflating it at all.
8
SPEAKER_00
Thank you.
8
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it s incredible.
8
SPEAKER_00
It s so good.
8
SPEAKER_01
Fuck, is it fun.
8
SPEAKER_00
I know.
8
SPEAKER_01
To have a budget like that.
8
SPEAKER_01
I gotta say, when they first were in Austria, I assume they were using stock footage of exteriors, and then they were in a ski lift.
8
SPEAKER_01
I m like, oh, they re not really in a ski lift.
8
SPEAKER_01
Oh, they re at this hotel, they re not really.
8
SPEAKER_01
They re everywhere, they re really, they re at Lake Como, and they re in Austria.
8
SPEAKER_01
It s so cool and sexy.
8
SPEAKER_00
It s very sexy.
8
SPEAKER_00
They have such a good banter.
8
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, what chemistry.
8
SPEAKER_00
Chemistry out the wazoo.
8
SPEAKER_01
She s incredible.
8
SPEAKER_00
I know, I love her.
8
SPEAKER_01
Oh, I love her.
8
SPEAKER_01
Amazon Prime, if people wanna check it out.
8
SPEAKER_00
Amazon Prime, please watch it.
8
SPEAKER_01
We gotta support shows like this.
8
SPEAKER_01
Shows like this have to win.
8
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I agree.
8
SPEAKER_01
Because I don t think, even though Atlanta was insanely brilliant, it wasn t like a hit, you know?
8
SPEAKER_01
I don t meet people who watched Atlanta.
8
SPEAKER_00
Hmm.
8
SPEAKER_01
And I want shows like Atlanta and season five of Fargo and Mr. and Mrs. Smith to be rewarded so they keep getting made.
8
SPEAKER_01
I agree.
8
SPEAKER_01
For me, selfishly, so I have great content.
8
SPEAKER_00
But I think networks are doing a good job, for the most part, of
8
SPEAKER_00
having shows that they know aren t gonna be like everyone s cup of tea, but they still put money in and they make it up on other shows that are other people s cups of tea, and it s just so different than old school network TV.
8
SPEAKER_01
Yes, but I will say this, I was watching it, and this is why I want everyone to watch it, because, and I hope that Donald Glover would not be offended by this observation, but
8
SPEAKER_01
I would say he got that show from cache.
8
SPEAKER_01
So Atlanta is so respected.
8
SPEAKER_01
Everyone recognizes the genius and the brilliance, but this show is clearly $150 million show.
8
SPEAKER_01
So he gets one cache show of this variety, but it has to be profitable.
8
SPEAKER_01
Like he ll only get,
8
SPEAKER_01
you re only gonna get so many shows from cachet.
8
SPEAKER_01
If you re great but nobody watches your shows, streamers and networks will stop spending $150 million on it.
8
SPEAKER_01
They need to work, and so I want everyone to watch this because it deserves to work, and I want him to go on to do 100 more shows.
8
SPEAKER_00
Me too.
8
SPEAKER_00
There s an interesting business history to that show because- Being the daughter writing it?
8
SPEAKER_00
No, no, Donald and Phoebe Waller-Bridge, this was their project.
8
SPEAKER_01
Right, what happened?
8
SPEAKER_00
Do we know the- Together, uh-huh.
8
SPEAKER_01
Oh, you ve done some research?
8
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and he s come out and said that basically they just had creative differences while making it.
8
SPEAKER_00
They did not see the same show.
8
SPEAKER_00
And yeah, he said that he s used to working in a specific way and he felt like he couldn t, basically he felt like he couldn t really be honest with his feedback.
8
SPEAKER_00
And kind of said like, it was essentially a divorce and it was who gets the cat.
8
SPEAKER_01
Oh, right.
8
SPEAKER_00
So he got it.
8
SPEAKER_00
And then he brought on a different co-showrunner.
8
SPEAKER_01
Who s the daughter of the original author of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, have you noticed that?
8
SPEAKER_00
Oh, I didn t know that.
8
SPEAKER_01
Because at the end of the first episode, it s dedicated to somebody.
8
SPEAKER_00
I saw that.
8
SPEAKER_01
And I immediately was like, that has to be the father of this woman.
8
SPEAKER_01
So yeah, her dad wrote the- The original.
8
SPEAKER_01
Feature film.
8
SPEAKER_00
Got it.
8
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
8
SPEAKER_00
Oh, that s fun.
8
SPEAKER_01
So that s cool, I think.
8
SPEAKER_01
Francesca something.
8
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
8
SPEAKER_00
Sloan or something.
8
SPEAKER_01
Sloan, yeah, good job.
8
SPEAKER_00
Something like that.
8
SPEAKER_01
From the Sloan and Kettering Foundation.
8
SPEAKER_01
Every time I listen, I watch Frontline, I hear about the Sloan, and it s always brought to me.
8
SPEAKER_00
That s your ad?
8
SPEAKER_01
Well, they re philanthropic.
9
SPEAKER_02
That s what s so weird about PBS is like, there s no advertisements, but they tell you who the show s brought to you by through a philanthropic endowment of the Sloan and Kettering.
9
SPEAKER_01
Well, that s nice.
9
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it s great.
9
SPEAKER_02
But I don t know the line between an advertisement and not an advertisement, right?
9
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
9
SPEAKER_00
Okay, well, we love it, and then I have a new thing I love.
9
SPEAKER_01
Oh, already?
9
SPEAKER_00
Mm-hmm.
9
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
9
SPEAKER_00
I watched this weekend, I watched, well, I watched two things.
9
SPEAKER_02
I m nervous you re gonna say one of them, I hope you don t.
9
SPEAKER_00
I know what you re thinking I m gonna say, and I did see that.
9
SPEAKER_00
And then I saw Anatomy of a Fall.
9
SPEAKER_02
Okay, you saw, that s not what I was thinking of.
9
SPEAKER_00
I know.
9
SPEAKER_02
But you saw that.
9
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
9
SPEAKER_02
And you loved it.
9
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
9
SPEAKER_02
And I tried to see it yesterday, but we have eight house guests.
9
SPEAKER_00
Right.
9
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, three different families.
9
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
9
SPEAKER_00
And- I sense you re a bit on edge.
9
SPEAKER_02
Right now?
9
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
9
SPEAKER_00
Oh, no.
9
SPEAKER_00
Oh, okay.
9
SPEAKER_00
And I thought maybe that was why.
9
SPEAKER_02
No, I m in hog heaven.
9
SPEAKER_02
I think maybe I just raced to Sherman Oaks to be on someone else s podcast and then came back and there was this horrific accident in the left lane.
9
SPEAKER_01
Ooh.
9
SPEAKER_02
And so, you know, I was kind of trying to rush to get here, but so maybe that, maybe I drank too much caffeine there.
9
SPEAKER_01
Oh, okay.
9
SPEAKER_02
But no, I m delighted.
9
SPEAKER_02
But it is stressful when you have three families at your house to make everyone happy.
9
SPEAKER_02
And many of the members are kids with their own individual opinions.
9
SPEAKER_02
So there was no point this whole weekend where all the kids were all happy with any one thing.
9
SPEAKER_02
And I had some crazy fantasy that I was gonna get them to watch a movie and then I d be able to watch that as an adult with the other adults in the theater in the daytime.
9
SPEAKER_02
No, instead we went to a park and my kids hated the park and there was an epic tantrum.
9
SPEAKER_02
Sometimes you re just getting through.
9
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
9
SPEAKER_02
Sometimes, you know, not just for parents, but in life, I guess, you re just getting through.
9
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that s right.
9
SPEAKER_00
It s also two and a half hours, so that would be a hard one.
9
SPEAKER_02
To pair with a kid s movie.
9
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
9
SPEAKER_02
It all worked out because I watched Barbie for the fourth time.
9
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, you ve seen it so many times.
9
SPEAKER_02
Which was also my idea, so I didn t feel too bummed out because I got to see also the other movie I wanted to see.
9
SPEAKER_02
It just keeps delivering.
9
SPEAKER_02
I can t believe how rewatchable that movie is.
9
SPEAKER_02
I love it.
9
SPEAKER_02
That s great.
9
SPEAKER_02
The pacing of that movie is just sublime.
9
SPEAKER_02
It s so quick.
9
SPEAKER_02
Things are happening, stories just unfolding every 30 seconds.
9
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
9
SPEAKER_02
Okay, so you loved Anatomy of a Fall.
9
SPEAKER_00
Anatomy of a Fall, it s so good.
9
SPEAKER_00
It is so good.
9
SPEAKER_00
It is.
9
SPEAKER_00
Very small, like it s a small story-ish.
9
SPEAKER_00
I mean, it s like the opposite of Barbie, right?
9
SPEAKER_00
Like there s no- Spectacle.
9
SPEAKER_00
Exactly.
9
SPEAKER_00
But it was so intense, I almost turned it off like three times.
9
SPEAKER_00
Wow, that s a good sign.
9
SPEAKER_00
It was hard, it was hard for me to get through.
9
SPEAKER_02
Ooh, awkwardness or too riveting or too stressful?
9
SPEAKER_00
to so stressful and the injustice.
9
SPEAKER_00
Oh, yeah.
9
SPEAKER_00
Because the premise is, and this is in the first scene or second scene, there s a wife and a husband and a son and
9
SPEAKER_00
The son goes on this walk, he comes back and his dad is dead.
9
SPEAKER_01
Oh boy, okay.
9
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, like outside the window, like outside, he s bleeding from the head and he s dead.
9
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
9
SPEAKER_00
He s dead.
9
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, we lost him, he s passed, his fight is over.
9
SPEAKER_00
He passed, yeah.
9
SPEAKER_00
The whole story is essentially like who s to blame for this.
9
SPEAKER_02
And stop there.
9
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
9
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
9
SPEAKER_02
Cause I want us, you ve gotten me intrigued.
9
SPEAKER_00
It s really good.
9
SPEAKER_02
I want to see it.
9
SPEAKER_02
And then what was the second thing you watched?
9
SPEAKER_00
Well, I don t want to say if you re going to be upset.
9
SPEAKER_02
What was it?
9
SPEAKER_00
The JLo thing.
9
SPEAKER_02
Oh, what s that?
9
SPEAKER_02
Oh, that rom-com with J-Lo?
9
SPEAKER_00
No, she has a big thing that came out this weekend.
9
SPEAKER_00
It s kind of this like long, hour-long music video.
9
SPEAKER_02
Oh.
9
SPEAKER_00
Oh, I thought that s what you were talking about.
9
SPEAKER_02
No.
9
SPEAKER_00
What are you talking about?
9
SPEAKER_02
True Detective.
9
SPEAKER_00
Oh, I didn t watch that.
9
SPEAKER_02
Okay, great, because I think that s something we could watch at the same time.
9
SPEAKER_00
Oh.
9
SPEAKER_02
It s supposed to be spectacular.
9
SPEAKER_00
Really?
9
SPEAKER_02
People keep telling me to watch it, like don t miss it, so.
9
SPEAKER_02
Ooh, that s exciting.
9
SPEAKER_02
That s exciting to have another show, because when Mr. and Mrs. Smith ends,
9
SPEAKER_02
This is exciting.
9
SPEAKER_02
I m gonna be completely crestfallen, so that s gonna be the next.
9
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
9
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
9
SPEAKER_00
Well, great.
9
SPEAKER_00
No, this is J-Lo, J-Lo s hour-long special.
9
SPEAKER_00
It s called This Is Me Now.
9
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
9
SPEAKER_02
What s it on?
9
SPEAKER_02
Because while I m on Prime for Mr. and Mrs. Smith, I m seeing something advertised from her, but it looks like a movie.
9
SPEAKER_00
It kind of is.
9
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
9
SPEAKER_00
It s an hour-long movie slash music video
9
SPEAKER_00
There s dancing and she s singing multiple songs that maybe are on a new record or something.
9
SPEAKER_02
Okay.
9
SPEAKER_00
And there s all these cameos.
9
SPEAKER_02
Fun cameos, pop-outs?
9
SPEAKER_00
There s some fun pop-outs and cameos.
9
SPEAKER_00
And it starts and stops with the music.
9
SPEAKER_00
She s in therapy, regular, and then she ll go into a song.
9
SPEAKER_02
And is it real therapy or reenactment of therapy?
9
SPEAKER_00
Reenactment, it s like, yeah.
9
SPEAKER_00
Oh, okay.
9
SPEAKER_00
Although it s about her
9
SPEAKER_00
Journey, and so it s very autobiographical, right?
9
SPEAKER_00
And it s interesting cuz she I mean sort of the whole journey is about her being a love addict Which is like a very brave thing to put out there.
9
SPEAKER_02
Mm-hmm.
9
SPEAKER_02
Absolutely.
9
SPEAKER_00
Yeah
9
SPEAKER_02
That s so funny, I just was on a podcast this morning, and that was a big topic.
9
SPEAKER_00
Love addiction.
9
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, and how, I feel like sadly, sex and love addiction is in a place, societally, that AA was in in the 70s, where it s like you really wanted to hide it, and there was still a lot of shame surrounding it.
9
SPEAKER_00
People don t understand it, really.
9
SPEAKER_02
They don t understand it, I think they think it s a cop-out.
9
SPEAKER_00
Right, definitely sex addiction, people think that.
9
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, they certainly thought that when,
9
SPEAKER_00
Tiger, yeah.
9
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, they did not accept that.
9
SPEAKER_00
No, they didn t.
9
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, so I m glad she s addressing that.
9
SPEAKER_02
I think a lot of us are love addicts.
9
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I mean, I think probably like all addictions, it s a spectrum and it depends on, I also, I don t know, like I think you can be a love addict in certain relationships or with certain types of people and not across the board.
9
SPEAKER_02
Sure.
9
SPEAKER_00
And sex addiction too, probably.
9
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I just think if someone has experienced the euphoria and elation and distraction and cure-all nature of attraction, and that s something that they can prolong, curate, and start to use very heavily as a regulator, I think a lot of us can relate to that.
9
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
9
SPEAKER_02
Of the things we ve been sold in America on television, we used to be sold Budweiser beer nonstop and cigarettes at some point.
9
SPEAKER_02
But really, I think above all those things, every single thing we watch is a love story.
9
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, definitely.
9
SPEAKER_02
There s almost no, I mean, why do we like Mr. and Mrs. Smith?
9
SPEAKER_02
Sure, the fucking James Bond stuff s cool, but no, them farting in front of each other is fun.
9
SPEAKER_00
I know.
9
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, connection, I mean, that s really what it is.
9
SPEAKER_02
But it definitely has been Hollywoodized, you know, it s been productized, it s been.
9
SPEAKER_00
I mean, it s what fairy tales were about, so yeah, we re very programmed.
9
SPEAKER_02
Yes, and it s very heightened and overly romantic and holding the jam box above the head and all this stuff, all these images we have.
9
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
9
SPEAKER_02
No one had a chance.
9
SPEAKER_00
I wonder if I should talk about this.
9
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
9
SPEAKER_00
Okay, there s been a series of events lately
9
SPEAKER_00
I think on top of the basis that I just don t feel good about myself right now at all.
9
SPEAKER_00
So then there s just been this like series of events that have happened in succession that almost comically that are reiterating that.
9
SPEAKER_00
And it s so hard to come back from that feeling.
9
SPEAKER_01
It s rough.
9
SPEAKER_01
Yes, yep.
9
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, when you feel.
9
SPEAKER_00
And then you continue to see it, right?
9
SPEAKER_00
Like it keeps popping up places and reminding you that you re ugly and stupid and unattractive.
9
SPEAKER_02
Unattractive, you re not attracting people.
9
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
9
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
9
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, that s a terrible feeling.
9
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, which I m sure a lot of people feel a lot.
9
SPEAKER_02
I think, yeah, most humans.
9
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
9
SPEAKER_02
Because even if people are attracted, you ll just signal out the group that s not.
9
SPEAKER_02
Like all humans will do that.
9
SPEAKER_00
And then you start caring about things you wouldn t care about.
9
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I guess I ll say this, this morning I was on Instagram and Chad Sanders, who we do a show with, he does AMAs or whatever.
9
SPEAKER_00
And I was just watching them and then all of a sudden one pops up and it s, do you have a crush on Monica?
9
SPEAKER_00
Ah.
9
SPEAKER_00
And then he is choosing to answer this, right?
9
SPEAKER_00
So of course, for me, I m like, huh, what?
9
SPEAKER_00
I guess he s inundated with this question.
9
SPEAKER_01
Oh, really?
9
SPEAKER_00
He must be, because that s why I think he decided to answer it, right?
9
SPEAKER_00
We wouldn t even know this.
9
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
9
SPEAKER_00
And he said, you guys, you keep asking me this, or you keep...
9
SPEAKER_00
insinuating yeah uh-huh and and then he said a lot of very nice things about me and then he said basically but no right and he doesn t i know that like i know he doesn t yeah and i know this is just my fragility and my fragile ego but i i didn t like it right like why
10
SPEAKER_02
Why are you publicly saying you don t have a crush on me?
10
SPEAKER_01
Right.
10
SPEAKER_02
And I know you don t, I don t want him to have a crush on me.
10
SPEAKER_01
Right, right, right, right.
10
SPEAKER_02
But I also, it hurt my feelings.
10
SPEAKER_01
Right, right.
10
SPEAKER_02
Which is, yeah, yeah.
10
SPEAKER_01
Which again, on a different day and time and space, wouldn t it?
10
SPEAKER_02
Probably not.
10
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
10
SPEAKER_02
Anyway, okay, so you have all these house guests, anything else from the house guests?
10
SPEAKER_01
Pop-outs or big surprises?
10
SPEAKER_01
Liz s, yeah.
10
SPEAKER_01
Oh, Kenny and I took a, we did the six mile hike on Saturday morning, which was lovely.
10
SPEAKER_02
That s nice.
10
SPEAKER_01
I fucking love that goddamn hike, man.
10
SPEAKER_01
I just, it s intoxicating.
10
SPEAKER_02
If you guys wanna see Dax in the wild, you should probably just go on that hike.
10
SPEAKER_01
I think people know that.
10
SPEAKER_01
One of two things is happening.
10
SPEAKER_01
Either we, our core fan base,
10
SPEAKER_01
hikes in Griffith Park, like somehow our exact demo is hikers of Griffith Park, which I don t know is possible, or maybe they know I m there and they want to say hi.
10
SPEAKER_01
Regardless, I like it.
10
SPEAKER_01
I love it.
10
SPEAKER_01
I love meeting them, especially in the hiking trail because there s this like built-in, everything s great.
10
SPEAKER_01
They re generally going downhill, I m going uphill.
10
SPEAKER_01
So we re going different ways.
10
SPEAKER_01
We re not going to walk together.
10
SPEAKER_02
Okay, yeah, because that could be a fear.
10
SPEAKER_01
It could just be like, how long can we keep doing small talk all the way to the top?
10
SPEAKER_01
You know, I don t know.
10
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
10
SPEAKER_01
But that s not even a fear of mine.
10
SPEAKER_01
Like, you know, I guess I would call it elevator fear.
10
SPEAKER_01
It s like, you don t say hi to everything or you say goodbye, blah, blah.
10
SPEAKER_01
And then you get in an elevator together and I don t care how much you like the person.
10
SPEAKER_01
You re like, oh, this is rough.
10
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, everyone can relate to this.
10
SPEAKER_01
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
10
SPEAKER_01
But anyways, so everyone knows they re on a mission, they re trying to keep their heart rate up, but I always like it.
10
SPEAKER_01
I met a bunch of really, really lovely armcherries out there.
10
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, fun.
10
SPEAKER_01
They re the best out there.
10
SPEAKER_02
They really are.
10
SPEAKER_01
I ve had a lot of different people consume stuff I ve done, and this is it.
10
SPEAKER_02
The best group.
10
SPEAKER_02
By far.
10
SPEAKER_02
That s nice.
10
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
10
SPEAKER_01
Parenthood folks are quite nice as well.
10
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I was a parenthood fan.
10
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
10
SPEAKER_01
There s a huge overlap, I think, between armchairs and parenthood.
10
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
10
SPEAKER_02
Okay, real quick, though, just, because I don t think we talked, or did we talk about American Nightmare?
10
SPEAKER_02
I don t know if we talked about it, and we don t have to give anything away, but the combination of seeing American Nightmare and then Anatomy of a Fall, which is fiction, I am feeling very perturbed by the justice system.
10
SPEAKER_01
Oh, sure, sure, sure.
10
SPEAKER_02
It feels crazy.
10
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
10
SPEAKER_01
I know it s really hard to know if...
10
SPEAKER_01
it s a false negative.
10
SPEAKER_01
It s hard to know because obviously what makes it across our desk is the huge miscarriages of justice.
10
SPEAKER_02
Yes, of course.
10
SPEAKER_01
And so we don t really know, is it one in every 2,000 cases that has some diciness?
10
SPEAKER_01
Is it 10%, is it 15?
10
SPEAKER_01
So it can be very misleading.
10
SPEAKER_02
Yes.
10
SPEAKER_02
We have some stats around false confessions and stuff, but we don t have enough, we don t know.
10
SPEAKER_01
Right.
10
SPEAKER_01
I mean, there is this, obviously, there s a data, because I remember reading an Malcolm Gladwell book, or maybe for economics, something about like the difference between conviction rates and sentencing from right before lunch and right after lunch for judges.
10
SPEAKER_01
Like, that s highly variable on whether they re hungry or not.
10
SPEAKER_01
That s so scary.
10
SPEAKER_02
That is so bad.
10
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
10
SPEAKER_02
And it s so dependent on who you get, who s your judge, who s your, ugh, who s your jury.
10
SPEAKER_01
I used to think of this kind of stuff like when I d have to test a movie for the studio.
10
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
10
SPEAKER_01
And they would pitch like, what about, you know, Tuesday, this day, the theater s open.
10
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
10
SPEAKER_01
And I d be like, no, I wanna be third, I wanna be halfway to the weekend.
10
SPEAKER_02
Oh, so they re excited.
10
SPEAKER_01
Well, just that just everyone feels different between Monday and Thursday.
10
SPEAKER_01
Your baseline excitement and happiness level is affected by whether the weekend s two days away or it just finished.
10
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
10
SPEAKER_01
Like, I don t know that you get a fair shake.
10
SPEAKER_01
I mean, probably most neutrals to test on Wednesday, I guess.
10
SPEAKER_02
Hump day.
10
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, but of course, I m gonna push for, I mean, ideally, Friday night test the movie.
10
SPEAKER_01
That s when I want audience, because that s when they re gonna see it.
10
SPEAKER_01
Like, let s find out how people going on a Friday night feel about this movie.
10
SPEAKER_02
That s interesting.
10
SPEAKER_01
People aren t going Monday night to go see any movie.
10
SPEAKER_02
God, okay.
10
SPEAKER_02
I don t know, if I had a movie, I don t know that I d want to test on a Friday night, because- Expectations?
10
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, like they re competing with, they could do anything on Friday night.
10
SPEAKER_02
They could be seeing a different movie.
10
SPEAKER_02
They could be going to a club.
10
SPEAKER_02
They could be going to a fun dinner.
10
SPEAKER_02
There s so many things.
10
SPEAKER_01
Better movie came out that night.
10
SPEAKER_02
Not better.
10
SPEAKER_01
Which is one they ve been already advertised.
10
SPEAKER_01
Dying to see or something.
10
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, and then they get there, and so maybe their expectation, or maybe they re looking to be sort of mad at it.
10
SPEAKER_01
I don t think they ever do it, because it s way more costly, obviously, to rent out the theater on a Friday night.
10
SPEAKER_01
But for me, Thursday s the sweet spot.
10
SPEAKER_01
Thursday sounds good, yeah.
10
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
10
SPEAKER_01
People can just smell the weekend around the corner.
10
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
10
SPEAKER_02
Thursday used to be my favorite day of the week.
10
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
10
SPEAKER_02
That s when Friends ran.
10
SPEAKER_01
Oh, Must See TV.
10
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, Must See TV Thursdays.
10
SPEAKER_02
Loved them.
10
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, all right.
10
SPEAKER_01
Well, this is sort of- I m gonna take one request from an arm, Cherry.
10
SPEAKER_02
Oh, great.
10
SPEAKER_01
It might be hard for you to get through, but I m gonna cover my face.
10
SPEAKER_02
Oh, Hermium?
10
SPEAKER_01
Yep.
10
SPEAKER_01
I like Hermium.
10
SPEAKER_01
Someone asked that they would really like to hear Hermium Permium sing Way Down Yonder on the Chattahoochee.
10
SPEAKER_02
Oh, wow, okay.
10
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, a very specific request.
10
SPEAKER_01
I screen grabbed it.
10
SPEAKER_02
Okay, great.
10
SPEAKER_01
So I m gonna try it, okay?
10
SPEAKER_02
Great, okay.
10
SPEAKER_00
Way down yonder on the Chattahoochee Ickis hollers on the hoochie coochie We laid robber on the Georgia asphalt It got a little crazy but we never got caught Down by the river on a Friday night A pyramid of cans in the pale moonlight Talking about girls and dreaming about women Never had a plan, just living for the minute Oh, way down yonder on the Chattahoochee Never knew how much that muddy water meant to me Well, I learned who I was and I learned who I was
10
SPEAKER_00
♪ A lot about livin  and a little about love ♪ He messed up one of the lyrics, but that s okay.
10
SPEAKER_01
I think I said I learned about livin  and I learned about livin .
10
SPEAKER_02
I didn t hear it, I didn t notice it.
10
SPEAKER_01
He was nervous, he doesn t love the lion pyramid of cans in a pale moonlight.
10
SPEAKER_02
Why, what, did that make him?
10
SPEAKER_01
That s drinking, that s excessive drinking.
10
SPEAKER_02
He doesn t like that.
10
SPEAKER_01
That s scary.
10
SPEAKER_01
I get nervous when people over-imbibe.
10
SPEAKER_02
Oh, yeah.
10
SPEAKER_01
They get really unpredictable.
10
SPEAKER_01
I prefer to be able to predict people.
10
SPEAKER_02
Wow.
10
SPEAKER_01
That s why I spend a lot of time in my apartment.
10
SPEAKER_02
Oh.
10
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I know what s going to happen there.
10
SPEAKER_02
Oh, no.
10
SPEAKER_02
He s getting sad.
10
SPEAKER_02
He s turning into Elmer Fudd.
10
SPEAKER_01
No, I m very happy over there in my apartment.
10
SPEAKER_00
I got all the things a young man or middle-aged or older man, however you see me, would need.
10
SPEAKER_02
Cutie pie, cutie pie.
10
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, Elmer is very sad.
10
SPEAKER_01
Very sad.
10
SPEAKER_01
Oh, I m so lonely.
10
SPEAKER_02
It s really sad.
10
SPEAKER_02
Oh boy.
10
SPEAKER_02
Well, this is all a ding, ding, ding.
10
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
10
SPEAKER_02
Because we talked a lot about movies and- Film and television.
10
SPEAKER_01
That s right.
10
SPEAKER_02
This is for Rob Reiner.
10
SPEAKER_01
Oh, this was so fun.
10
SPEAKER_02
I know.
10
SPEAKER_02
He s old Hollywood, baby.
10
SPEAKER_01
He is, and he s like of the ilk that like can tell a goddamn story.
10
SPEAKER_02
I know.
10
SPEAKER_02
Like he has a story after story.
10
SPEAKER_02
It s so fun to listen to.
10
SPEAKER_01
And there was kind of like a Rat Packy tradition where these people do late night shows and they could hold your attention.
10
SPEAKER_01
They could tell a whole tale.
10
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
10
SPEAKER_01
And I feel like as editing got quicker and attention spans got shorter, like that skill s a little bit lost.
10
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I think that s true.
10
SPEAKER_01
But he told some long ones and I was like on the edge of my seat.
10
SPEAKER_02
Same.
10
SPEAKER_02
Okay, so a couple facts.
10
SPEAKER_02
One, well, also, we talk about Russia and Putin.
10
SPEAKER_01
Uh-huh.
10
SPEAKER_01
Oh, yeah, right.
10
SPEAKER_01
That was before.
10
SPEAKER_02
Before Navalny s death announced.
10
SPEAKER_02
So maybe keep that in mind.
10
SPEAKER_01
If we re not giving the
10
SPEAKER_02
We re not mentioning that or, yeah.
10
SPEAKER_02
What percentage of sky is oxygen?
10
SPEAKER_02
That s because we were talking about River Phoenix and he was saying all their names and he said something like, one of them s sky, one of them s oxygen.
10
SPEAKER_02
And I said, well, that means you re 70% of her or something.
10
SPEAKER_02
21% oxygen.
10
21%.
10
SPEAKER_02
78% nitrogen.
10
SPEAKER_02
The Earth s atmosphere.
10
SPEAKER_01
And the rest carbon?
10
SPEAKER_02
Small amounts of other gases too, such as carbon dioxide, neon, and hydrogen.
10
SPEAKER_01
And methane.
10
SPEAKER_02
Methane if there are farts.
10
SPEAKER_01
Oh yeah, there s a lot of cow farts.
10
SPEAKER_02
Yep.
10
SPEAKER_02
Okay, and then on that same thread, he wondered if Joaquin s name was Leaf.
10
SPEAKER_01
Prior to Joaquin.
10
SPEAKER_02
Uh-huh, and it was.
10
SPEAKER_02
I mean, his name is Joaquin, born Joaquin.
10
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
10
SPEAKER_02
But then for a while, he went as Leaf.
10
SPEAKER_01
Oh, okay.
10
SPEAKER_01
Do we have all the names of the Phoenix children?
11
SPEAKER_02
I d love to hear them.
11
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
11
SPEAKER_01
River.
11
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
11
SPEAKER_01
Rain.
11
SPEAKER_01
Liberty.
11
SPEAKER_01
Summer.
11
SPEAKER_02
Summer.
11
SPEAKER_01
And then there s another child.
11
SPEAKER_02
Well, I know Summer.
11
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
11
SPEAKER_02
She is wonderful.
11
SPEAKER_02
And she s so stunning.
11
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, Jodian is a half-sister.
11
SPEAKER_02
Okay.
11
SPEAKER_01
What a life, this like cult and the whole.
11
SPEAKER_02
Oh, the early life?
11
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, anyway, maybe he should, he should call into armchair anonymous cult stories.
11
SPEAKER_01
What if he did?
11
SPEAKER_01
That d be so cool.
11
SPEAKER_01
His real last name is Bottom.
11
SPEAKER_02
I would ve named one of my kids Les, so that when they read the roll call, last name first, it d be Bottomless.
11
SPEAKER_02
because I love bottomless salad or bottomless breadsticks or bottomless soup.
11
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, we all, everyone loves bottomless.
11
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, but then they changed it to Phoenix.
11
SPEAKER_01
So, okay.
11
SPEAKER_01
I found the clip, you said a quote from All in the Family, and I found the clip.
11
SPEAKER_02
Oh, you did, oh good.
11
SPEAKER_01
Also, it wasn t him, it was this woman.
11
SPEAKER_02
Oh, by the way, people pointed out to me, I was just remembering this, Chris Rock does end up talking about The Janitor had we listened longer.
11
SPEAKER_01
Oh, really?
11
SPEAKER_02
Yes, yes.
11
SPEAKER_02
Oh.
11
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
11
SPEAKER_01
Did you know that 65% of the people murdered in the last 10 years were killed by handguns?
11
SPEAKER_01
Would it make you feel any better, little girl, if they was pushed out of windows?
11
SPEAKER_01
That s it.
11
SPEAKER_01
I used to love All in the Family.
11
SPEAKER_01
My mom and I would watch it together.
11
SPEAKER_02
Oh, really?
11
SPEAKER_02
God, I would have thought you were way too young to have seen any of that.
11
SPEAKER_01
I was, sort of, but she loved it.
11
SPEAKER_02
It was nostalgic for her.
11
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, so we would watch it in her bed.
11
SPEAKER_02
Oh, fun.
11
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
11
SPEAKER_02
They had a TV in their bedroom?
11
SPEAKER_01
Oh, yeah.
11
SPEAKER_02
Oh.
11
SPEAKER_02
Definitely.
11
SPEAKER_02
Well, I guess my dad did.
11
SPEAKER_02
My mom didn t.
11
SPEAKER_02
No, no.
11
SPEAKER_01
Did she watch a lot of TV?
11
SPEAKER_02
No.
11
SPEAKER_02
Where I grew up, you had antennas.
11
SPEAKER_02
You would have had to have had a big aerial antenna on your roof to get the signal from Detroit.
11
SPEAKER_02
We didn t.
11
SPEAKER_02
Oh.
11
SPEAKER_02
So it was unwatchable what we got.
11
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
11
SPEAKER_02
She loved movies.
11
SPEAKER_02
She loved going to the movies.
11
SPEAKER_02
And now she s addicted to Netflix like all of us, but no, we didn t have, there was no investment made.
11
SPEAKER_02
We never had a good TV.
11
SPEAKER_02
I think my sister kind of grew up with cable, but I was living with my dad by that point.
11
SPEAKER_01
So interesting, I just grew up on TV.
11
SPEAKER_02
Right, can you imagine it not even being an, like for me it wasn t even an option.
11
SPEAKER_01
No, I can t even, no, I can t.
11
SPEAKER_02
I had to go hang out with a kid I didn t like to watch Dukes of Hazzard so that I could see it.
11
SPEAKER_02
Right.
11
SPEAKER_02
Because he had an antenna on his roof.
11
SPEAKER_01
Lucky him.
11
SPEAKER_02
Well, you know, there is something about wanting stuff when you re a kid, like the people you ll hang out with just so you can have access to stuff, like I don t even know
11
SPEAKER_02
That certainly doesn t exist for my kids, but I kind of think it might be a good skill to have.
11
SPEAKER_01
Oh, to like adapt.
11
SPEAKER_02
Yes, because, you know, you don t have everything and you want stuff.
11
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
11
SPEAKER_02
I mean, you re using the person, let s call it like it is, but that person s also using you for whatever thing you provide.
11
SPEAKER_01
Sure.
11
SPEAKER_02
So hopefully it s an even exchange, but it s just not a dynamic my kids would ever be able to relate to.
11
SPEAKER_01
It s funny.
11
SPEAKER_01
I mean, I can relate to it in a, I wanted white people approval, but I can t relate to wanting something specific, like to ride this person s bike or to like have snacks.
11
SPEAKER_01
A lot of people would go to other people s friends  house because they had better snacks.
11
SPEAKER_02
Me, yeah.
11
SPEAKER_02
I mean, luckily my friend Trevor Robinson, I genuinely loved him, but
11
SPEAKER_02
Damn straight, we re sleeping at his house every single sleepover.
11
SPEAKER_02
We would never go to my house.
11
SPEAKER_01
Because of the snacks?
11
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, because he had unlimited snacks and frozen pizzas and cable and all this stuff.
11
SPEAKER_02
Think about this one.
11
SPEAKER_02
This might feel a little more understandable.
11
SPEAKER_02
No one had a pool, right?
11
SPEAKER_02
So the couple kids who had pools, well, come summertime, you want to be at the pool party.
11
SPEAKER_02
Like everyone s going to be there.
11
SPEAKER_02
So you gotta have some kind of rapport with the person with the pool.
11
SPEAKER_01
Interesting.
11
SPEAKER_02
Or you re gonna be left out of this thing that happens.
11
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
11
SPEAKER_01
You guys didn t have neighborhood pools.
11
SPEAKER_02
No neighborhood pools.
11
SPEAKER_02
Now, mind you, we had a lake, which is great.
11
SPEAKER_02
And that s actually, pools are not a great example for me, but I think an example that all the kids I knew that lived more in the city, they can relate to.
11
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
11
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, we were just all in the lake, luckily.
11
SPEAKER_02
Very democratizing.
11
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, very.
11
SPEAKER_02
Everyone had access to the lake.
11
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, we just have so many neighborhoods, cause that s, you know, the suburbs, that s what it is.
11
SPEAKER_02
I also specifically Southern, right?
11
SPEAKER_02
Cause we hear all these stories about like black folks not being able to swim in these public pools and stuff.
11
SPEAKER_02
That doesn t even make sense to me in Michigan.
11
SPEAKER_02
We don t have any public pools, but it sounds like all these little Southern towns, even when they were small, had a little public pool.
11
SPEAKER_01
There are public pools in the city, but then there are in your neighborhood, in your subdivision.
11
SPEAKER_02
The HOA.
11
SPEAKER_01
Exactly, there s a pool.
11
SPEAKER_01
Many slash most neighborhoods had one, like we have one, my parents.
11
SPEAKER_02
In Duluth.
11
SPEAKER_01
In Duluth, and my subdivision has a pool.
11
SPEAKER_02
And would you go there in the summer?
11
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, all the time, all the time.
11
SPEAKER_02
And was it just chock full of kids?
11
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I mean, me and my friend Ashley went every day, we ordered a Papa John s pizza to the pool.
11
SPEAKER_01
Oh my God, what a life you had.
11
SPEAKER_01
Well, that is the site of the Teddy incident.
11
SPEAKER_01
It was at that pool.
11
SPEAKER_02
Interesting, I had placed it in someone s home pool.
11
SPEAKER_01
No.
11
SPEAKER_00
Wow.
11
SPEAKER_00
Maybe it s a weather thing, because we didn t have a ton of public pools.
11
SPEAKER_00
There was one pool that you could pay for, but it was closed half the year because of the winter.
11
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, yeah.
11
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, well, it s not really a thing in Michigan.
11
SPEAKER_02
I mean, there are some, but it s certainly, there was none in Highland or Milford or.
11
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it s just funny what you think is normal.
11
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, exactly, standard.
11
SPEAKER_01
And ubiquitous, yeah, and it s not.
11
SPEAKER_02
Even the people I knew who had pools, no one had an in-ground pool.
11
SPEAKER_02
Everyone had an above-ground pool, like their dad had bought this thing.
11
SPEAKER_01
Totally.
11
SPEAKER_02
At a hardware store and filled it up, and then they inevitably broke.
11
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, my neighbor had one of those for a little bit.
11
SPEAKER_01
Anthony, shout out Anthony, his family had an in-ground pool they had installed or whatever, and my friend Kim, very wealthy friend, they had in-grounds and they were so nice.
11
SPEAKER_02
I told you, I constantly look at my kids and I m like, it s so weird that they have a pool.
11
SPEAKER_01
You have an in-ground pool.
11
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I mean, yeah, it makes sense that I do, because I,
11
SPEAKER_02
set out to have one or whatever.
11
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
11
SPEAKER_02
But they just don t know, they ve not ever lived in a house without a pool.
11
SPEAKER_02
That s so bizarre to me.
11
I know.
11
SPEAKER_01
And most of their friends, a lot of their friends have pools, that s also.
11
SPEAKER_02
The majority of their friends have pools.
11
SPEAKER_02
Well, I wouldn t say their classmates, but definitely in our pod.
11
SPEAKER_01
Right, yeah.
11
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
11
SPEAKER_01
Literally.
11
SPEAKER_02
Everyone.
11
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
11
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
11
SPEAKER_01
That s weird.
11
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
11
SPEAKER_02
I mean, California, obviously, is over-indexed in pools.
11
SPEAKER_01
For sure.
11
SPEAKER_01
Can you do per capita pools or something?
11
SPEAKER_02
I wanna guess.
11
SPEAKER_02
My guess is gonna be that Phoenix has the most per capita.
11
Yeah.
11
SPEAKER_02
Do you have a guess?
11
SPEAKER_01
I m gonna say, I wanna say here.
11
SPEAKER_02
LA, Los Angeles.
11
SPEAKER_01
Good old Los Angeles.
11
SPEAKER_01
Phoenix is a good guess, though.
11
SPEAKER_01
It s so hot.
11
SPEAKER_02
You wanna buy city?
11
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
11
SPEAKER_02
Most pools per capita per city.
11
SPEAKER_02
That whole section of Barbie when they re gonna distract the men so that they can deprogram the other Barbies.
11
SPEAKER_02
And she s like, I just don t know about money.
11
SPEAKER_02
I have all mine in the bank.
11
SPEAKER_02
Is that okay?
11
SPEAKER_02
No, you should have it in CDs.
11
SPEAKER_02
And then some Barbie s on the computer and she s like, I don t know how to select.
11
SPEAKER_02
What s the select tool?
11
SPEAKER_02
He s like, you have to have it highlighted for, you know.
11
SPEAKER_01
Oh, it s so good.
11
SPEAKER_01
I m not interested at all in talking about snubs at all.
11
SPEAKER_01
But I wish Greta had been.
11
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, it s preposterous.
11
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I wish she had been nominated.
11
SPEAKER_02
What I like, I m not making some misogyny claims, some racial claims, it s not even that.
11
SPEAKER_02
It s just like any human that had directed that movie and didn t get nominated, I d be outraged for.
11
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, let s hear it.
11
SPEAKER_00
Number one is Phoenix.
11
SPEAKER_00
Good job.
11
SPEAKER_01
32.7% of property is with pools.
11
SPEAKER_02
A third of the pop has pools.
11
SPEAKER_02
You don t have to make friends with anybody you don t like.
11
SPEAKER_01
No, you can isolate.
11
SPEAKER_01
What a place to grow up.
11
SPEAKER_01
Wow.
11
SPEAKER_00
Then Miami, Tampa, Orlando, Vegas, LA, Riverside, San Diego, Sacramento.
11
SPEAKER_01
Wow, okay.
11
SPEAKER_00
LA has 19%.
11
SPEAKER_01
Okay, that s, wow, Phoenix, good job.
11
SPEAKER_01
Okay, let s see.
11
SPEAKER_01
Archie Bunker s Place, which was the show after All in the Family, ran for four seasons.
11
SPEAKER_02
Okay, that s great.
11
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
11
SPEAKER_02
I know we ve talked about it before, but I m constantly in a situation where I m doing research for someone we re interviewing, and they were on a show that I liked in the 80s or 90s that I am certain had to have run for eight years.
11
SPEAKER_01
Right.
12
SPEAKER_00
I know.
12
SPEAKER_02
So many of these shows that I thought ran for eight years ran for like three or four.
12
SPEAKER_00
I know, like Full House.
12
SPEAKER_00
It s shocking.
12
SPEAKER_02
How many years did that run?
12
SPEAKER_00
Like, not that many.
12
SPEAKER_02
Really?
12
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
12
SPEAKER_02
Yes, I would think that was on for eight, nine, 10 years.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
12
SPEAKER_02
Eight seasons.
12
SPEAKER_00
Oh, fuck.
12
SPEAKER_02
87 to 95.
12
SPEAKER_00
Damn.
12
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, that was a real shocker.
12
SPEAKER_02
You did get me.
12
SPEAKER_00
She was eight by the end of that?
12
SPEAKER_00
They, they were eight?
12
SPEAKER_00
I want to add them to my Illuminati list.
12
SPEAKER_02
Oh, wow, but they re gonna take up two spots.
12
SPEAKER_00
No, they can be one, can we make them one spot?
12
SPEAKER_00
Well, they would feel.
12
SPEAKER_00
If they come up with one.
12
SPEAKER_01
Full house it, they can swap out.
12
SPEAKER_02
Oh, they can never both be there at the same time.
12
SPEAKER_00
Okay, that s fine.
12
SPEAKER_00
Because they re busy, so that actually is probably better for their schedule.
12
SPEAKER_02
It ll probably increase the chances of them accepting their invitation into the Illuminati.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
12
SPEAKER_02
I m a little nervous we have a little too many artists, but we do need women, so that s good too.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
12
SPEAKER_00
I thought of a bunch of people and then I forgot them all.
12
SPEAKER_02
You did?
12
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, of course.
12
SPEAKER_02
You re gonna need a note.
12
SPEAKER_00
Oh, the woman who, the CRISPR woman.
12
SPEAKER_02
Oh, for sure.
12
SPEAKER_02
I know her name.
12
SPEAKER_02
Wait, don t tell me yet, Rob.
12
SPEAKER_00
Fuck, I know her name.
12
SPEAKER_00
I totally forget.
12
SPEAKER_02
Give me the first letter, Rob.
12
SPEAKER_02
J?
12
SPEAKER_02
That didn t help.
12
SPEAKER_02
All right, what is it?
12
SPEAKER_02
Jennifer Gunda, is that right?
12
SPEAKER_01
D-O-U-D-N-A.
12
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
12
SPEAKER_01
Biochemist.
12
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
12
SPEAKER_00
I d like to add her.
12
SPEAKER_02
Absolutely.
12
SPEAKER_02
Absolutely.
12
SPEAKER_02
We could even kick someone out for her.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
12
SPEAKER_00
I d like that.
12
SPEAKER_02
Great.
12
SPEAKER_02
Great thinking.
12
SPEAKER_02
Thank you.
12
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
12
SPEAKER_00
Anyway, I looked up where the phrase skin the cat comes from cause he said it and then
12
SPEAKER_00
I wanted to know that.
12
SPEAKER_02
I feel like I just learned one.
12
SPEAKER_02
Well, certainly out-of-pocket or in-the-pocket.
12
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
12
SPEAKER_02
Don t know if I realize that comes from football, but that s not the one.
12
SPEAKER_00
Out-of-pocket, like paying out-of-pocket?
12
SPEAKER_02
No, when you say like you re out-of-pocket, like you re not in the place you should be.
12
SPEAKER_02
In fact, it was in Mr. and Mrs. Smith.
12
SPEAKER_00
Oh, interesting.
12
SPEAKER_02
Whereas if you re in the pocket, like, oh yeah, she was super in the pocket.
12
SPEAKER_00
Right.
12
SPEAKER_02
That s where she s supposed to be.
12
SPEAKER_02
But that s the little zone that the defense is, the bubble that the defense is creating around the quarterback is the pocket.
12
SPEAKER_02
So you want to be in the pocket.
12
SPEAKER_02
If you re out of the pocket, you re going to get tackled.
12
SPEAKER_00
Oh, that s interesting.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
12
SPEAKER_00
I didn t know that.
12
SPEAKER_00
I know in the pocket, but I ve never heard out of the pocket.
12
SPEAKER_02
Well, they ll say out-of-pocket.
12
SPEAKER_02
He was out-of-pocket on that, or she was out-of-pocket.
12
SPEAKER_00
Okay, skin the cat.
12
SPEAKER_00
Humorous Seba Smith indicated as much in her short story, The Money Diggers, when she wrote, as it is said, there are more ways than one to skin a cat, so there are more ways than one of digging for money.
12
SPEAKER_02
Well, I can think of several ways you would dig for money.
12
SPEAKER_02
Gold, oil, rare earth metals.
12
SPEAKER_00
Well, at that point, they probably sold animal skin, would be my guess.
12
SPEAKER_02
Sure.
12
SPEAKER_00
But a cat.
12
SPEAKER_02
Why were people skinning cats so frequently?
12
SPEAKER_01
It was spread through UK because wild felines were hunted and bred for furs.
12
SPEAKER_01
Oh, gross.
12
SPEAKER_02
What kind of fur, that s cat fur.
12
SPEAKER_01
It was a cheap substitute for wild options.
12
SPEAKER_01
So domesticated cat was then used.
12
SPEAKER_02
Isn t it crazy that you could get, beaver pelts were a huge industry and people were rich.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
12
SPEAKER_02
The beaver trading company and all this stuff.
12
SPEAKER_00
We did a whole flightless bird on it, it was crazy.
12
SPEAKER_00
You did?
12
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
12
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, that was like jackpot, that was like a gold rush.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
12
SPEAKER_00
People got really, what s the guy, Astoria.
12
SPEAKER_02
Waldorf Astoria, that Astoria?
12
SPEAKER_00
No, not Astoria, the one that s on Astor Place, like something Astor.
12
SPEAKER_02
Oh, Astor, yeah.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, he was big in the beaver trade.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
12
SPEAKER_00
Which is crazy.
12
SPEAKER_02
I know I ve already said this on here before, but it s been a very long time, and do you remember how Waldorf Astoria became one thing?
12
SPEAKER_00
No.
12
SPEAKER_02
Because that s two different families, the Waldorfs and the Astorias.
12
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
12
SPEAKER_02
And at one time they were two rich families in Manhattan and one had a brownstone and the other one built one that was taller.
12
SPEAKER_02
So they, the other family responded and built taller and they got in an arms race of building their apartments bigger and bigger, trying to block each other s view.
12
SPEAKER_02
And then at some point they came together and it became the Waldorf Astoria.
12
SPEAKER_00
So they like made a truce or something?
12
SPEAKER_02
I don t know how they ended up mending their differences, but I wanna say also they had a train stop in the bottom of their house.
12
SPEAKER_02
That s how fucking gangster they were, yeah.
12
SPEAKER_00
Wow, oh my God.
12
SPEAKER_00
Okay, I just looked up origin stories of phrases.
12
SPEAKER_02
Oh, great.
12
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
12
SPEAKER_00
Get on a soapbox.
12
SPEAKER_02
Oh yeah, this is where people would make political speeches.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yes, would-be motivators of crowds would use them to stand on as makeshift podiums to make proclamation speeches or sale pitches, so it became a metaphor for spontaneous speech-making or getting on a roll about a favorite topic.
12
SPEAKER_02
Oh, she was on her soapbox.
12
SPEAKER_00
Okay, I m gonna tell you them, you tell me which ones you wanna know about.
12
SPEAKER_02
Okay, great.
12
SPEAKER_00
Tomfoolery, Go Bananas, Run of the Mill, Read the Riot Act, Hands Down, Silver Lining,
12
SPEAKER_02
I want hands down.
12
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
12
SPEAKER_00
Hands down comes from horse racing, where if you re way ahead of everyone else, you can relax your grip on the reins and let your hands down.
12
SPEAKER_00
When you win hands down, you win easily.
12
SPEAKER_02
Oh, see that one.
12
SPEAKER_00
That s good.
12
SPEAKER_02
That s the kind I like, where it s super literal.
12
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
12
SPEAKER_02
And it makes a ton of sense.
12
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
12
SPEAKER_00
Okay, we have silver lining, have your work cut out.
12
SPEAKER_02
Ooh, I want that one.
12
SPEAKER_02
Have your work cut out for you.
12
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
12
SPEAKER_00
The expression, you ve got your work cut out for you, comes from tailoring.
12
SPEAKER_00
To do a big sewing job, all the pieces of fabric are cut out before they get sewn together.
12
SPEAKER_00
It seems like if your work has been cut for you, it should make jobs easier, but we don t use the expression that way.
12
SPEAKER_00
The image is more that your task is well-defined and ready to be tackled, but all the difficult parts are yours to get to.
12
SPEAKER_00
That big pile of cutouts isn t going to sew itself together.
12
SPEAKER_02
Oh, I like this, okay.
12
SPEAKER_02
It s quite literal, cut out.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, through the grapevine, the whole shebang, push the envelope.
12
SPEAKER_02
Whole shebang, that s a good one, I love that term.
12
SPEAKER_00
The earliest uses of shebang were during the Civil War era, referring to the hut, shed, or cluster of bushes where you re staying.
12
SPEAKER_00
Some officers wrote home about running the shebang, meaning the encampment.
12
SPEAKER_00
The origin of the word is obscure, but because it also applied to a tavern or drinking place, it may go back to the Irish word shebean for a ramshackle drinking establishment.
12
SPEAKER_02
Hmm, I ll take the whole shebang is a weird offshoot of that, like what it means versus what it, like I don t even know why someone would say they want the whole encampment.
12
SPEAKER_00
You take over encampments.
12
SPEAKER_02
Oh, okay.
12
SPEAKER_00
In war.
12
SPEAKER_02
The whole shebang.
12
SPEAKER_00
You take the whole shebang.
12
SPEAKER_02
We got the whole shebang.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
12
SPEAKER_02
Oh, okay, yeah, that makes sense.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
12
SPEAKER_02
All right.
12
SPEAKER_00
We got them all.
12
SPEAKER_02
It s like a little territory.
12
SPEAKER_00
Okay, push the envelope, can t hold a candle.
12
SPEAKER_02
Push the envelope.
12
SPEAKER_00
Push the envelope.
12
SPEAKER_00
Pushing the envelope belongs to the modern era of the airplane.
12
SPEAKER_00
The flight envelope is a term from aeronautics, meaning the boundary or limit of performance of a flight object.
12
SPEAKER_00
The envelope can be described in terms of mathematical curves based on things like speed, thrust, and atmosphere.
12
SPEAKER_00
You push it as far as you can in order to discover what the limits are.
12
SPEAKER_00
Tom Wolfe s The Right Stuff brought the expression into wider use.
12
SPEAKER_00
That s cool.
12
SPEAKER_00
can t hold a candle, the acid test, I don t know what that is, go haywire, called on the carpet.
12
SPEAKER_02
Let s do haywire, let s end on haywire.
12
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
12
SPEAKER_00
What kind of wire is haywire?
12
SPEAKER_00
Just what it says, a wire for baling hay.
12
SPEAKER_00
In addition to tying up bundles, haywire was used to fix and hold things together in a makeshift way.
12
SPEAKER_00
So a dumpy, patched up place came to be referred to as a haywire outfit.
12
SPEAKER_00
It then became a term for any kind of malfunctioning thing.
12
SPEAKER_00
The kind that the wire itself got easily tangled when unspooled contributed to the messed up sense of the word.
12
SPEAKER_02
Uh-huh.
12
SPEAKER_02
Everything went haywire.
12
SPEAKER_00
Those were interesting, I thought.
12
SPEAKER_02
I like that, yeah, yeah.
12
SPEAKER_02
That was similar to acorns.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I love acorns.
12
SPEAKER_02
We re doing a lot of new segments on the show, acorns and now.
12
SPEAKER_00
Colloquial phrase, origins.
12
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
12
SPEAKER_00
Jim Morrison did turn his back to the audience a lot, because he was shy.
12
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
12
SPEAKER_02
Shy guy.
12
SPEAKER_02
That s the fourth category we hadn t thought of.
12
SPEAKER_02
Sexy man.
12
SPEAKER_02
Shy guys.
12
SPEAKER_02
Best boy.
12
SPEAKER_02
Fuck.
12
SPEAKER_02
Shy guy.
12
SPEAKER_02
Although we already used guy.
12
SPEAKER_00
Oh.
12
SPEAKER_02
Cool guy.
12
SPEAKER_00
Right.
12
SPEAKER_00
So we can t.
12
SPEAKER_00
Plus I think there s a lot of crossover between shy guys and best boys.
12
SPEAKER_02
That s possible.
12
SPEAKER_02
Of the Venn diagram of overlapping of those four categories, they probably have the most overlap.
12
SPEAKER_02
Although cool guy and sexy guy also probably have quite a bit overlap.
12
SPEAKER_02
Definitely.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
12
SPEAKER_00
The least amount of overlap, unfortunately.
13
SPEAKER_01
The best boy and sexy guy.
13
SPEAKER_00
Although Kimmel is very sexy.
13
SPEAKER_01
I know, well, remember, he s all, he s all.
13
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, he s a big ol  anomaly.
13
SPEAKER_01
Well, this is why we definitely can t have Shy Guy, because he s not Shy Guy, and we need him to check all the boxes.
13
SPEAKER_00
That s true.
13
SPEAKER_00
We can only introduce new categories.
13
SPEAKER_00
That he fits.
13
SPEAKER_01
All right, well, that s it for Rob Reiner.
13
SPEAKER_00
Okay, well, I loved Rob Reiner.
13
SPEAKER_01
Me too.
13
SPEAKER_00
What a treat.
13
SPEAKER_00
So fun.
13
SPEAKER_00
Love you.
13
SPEAKER_01
Love you.