Rob. Have you watched purs No?
Have you watched Death by Lightning?
No? I haven't seen any of the stuff. I don't know what anybody, I don't know when you have to.
Watch the nice and Creed?
Well, yes, go ahead, make my day.
Well, we're approaching Thanksgiving, which means it's time for a pre winter post fall glop culture. I am John pud Worretz in New York with Rob Long eating his lunch. I believe in Princeton, New Jersey.
I am doing that.
How are you, Rob?
I'm fine, that's good.
What what are you eating? Just so we can, just so we can get this out of the way.
Little Japanese shrimp, shrimp noodles with the shrimp.
So there're shrimp noodles with shrimp. Yeah, you have to specialis shrimp Oyeah?
Okay?
And in Washington. Jonah Goldberg, Hi, Jonah.
Hey, John, We should we should, we should let listeners know that I chastised I preemptively chastised Rob to say, if you're going to eat your lunch on the podcast, which he says he'll do, because we're going to talk about shows that he doesn't he hasn't seen that he should at least put himself on mute so he doesn't make a smacking sound and guess that's one of those things that drives me crazy. And then he got really annoyed with you for like having a conversation with him.
He had to keep unmuting and and stop chewing to talk to you.
So so the point you're trying to make is there's a lot of tension. We're beginning the show in an atmosphere of high tension. Who knows what's going to happen. Explosive emotions could like in a family play about Thanksgiving, just come up to the surface, secrets revealed, uh, you know, truths there that are never bared before.
And then there'll be a silent moment on stage and you John will go just to the window and pull your sweater closer to around you, and you'll say it's getting colder out now, and soon the Canada Canada geese will will leave.
Okay, while we were terrified of the episcopalian Savonarola's rage, yes yes.
He is he this is a very interesting I'm gonna I'm gonna mention this once and then move on from Tucker Carlson. But I note I wanted to ask Rob as a as as somebody who was seeking to become an Episcopalian minister. Yes, uh, Tucker Carlson has referred to Christian Zionism as a heresy and has is talking virus demonology, a brain virus and all of that. And Tucker I believe is as in his in his upbringing and his schooling,
as mainstream Episcopalian as you can possibly get. That he went to Saint Paul's boarding school, that his wife, Susie, he married, the daughter of the headmaster of Saint Paul's boarding school which he attended, and so would would the idea what is the notion of heresy? As he lays it out, is this Episcopalian doctrine? This sounds more like medieval Catholic doctrine to me that there are you.
Know, well, I mean I don't I don't know.
It certainly is a doctrine, and I don't think it's well, there's an incredibly delicious irony that the person who studied at Saint Paul's named after Paul, who in many ways of the architect of the Christian Faith, hasn't really read Paul, I guess or understood it fully because the term zion Of course, there's no Zionism in the New Testament of Zionism before you know, the nineteenth century. But Paul has wrote obliquely and directly and bafflingly and clearly in all
different ways about this topic. And my guess is that Paul would be uh, were he alive today, would probably be living in Jerusalem, happily, good Jewish boy, he would be. He's he's he's a say, the patron saint of Jews for Jesus. So I'm pretty sure. I don't know if he is that for real, but he should be. The it's just a complete misreading, which is like, look, there's a whole lot of misreading. I mean, that's what the Bible is, one giant way to misread it.
Well, you know, look look all of Judaism, all of post biblical Judaism is uh, people arguing over whether they're misreading the Bible. That's the tomos well, our disputations about how to read the Bible.
So and they probably are.
That's the other thing is they probably no matter what you're saying, you're probably not quite right right.
I'm just I just think the language that he is adopting in his quest to revive not only the spirit of to take the spirit of Martin Luther, the spirit Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the spirit of Himmler, and the spirit of Gerbels and put them all together and like have a celebrity podcast with problem as a panel involves things that don't necessarily comport with his religious background and training, isn't.
Yeah for a former star of dancing Mitch the Stars. Yeah, okay, we can drop the demon stuff I find fascinating though.
I mean, we could go with demons.
I mean mean the attack of the demon.
The attack of the demons. I mean, is it clear was a demon? I mean, well the demon won? You see, that's the thing he was. He was attacked by a demon, and the demon apparently possessed his body and his mind in his spirit, and he is now practicing.
Evil as the demon would wish to. So I accept the idea that he I just think the demon, the demon won. That's that's that's that's where I am.
So that's the reason why I don't believe the story, is I mean, there are many reasons why I don't believe the story, but but part of it.
You're you're the person who wrote a book. You're the person who wrote a book that begins with the sentence there is no God in this book.
But at the end, it's sort of like Grover the Monster at the end of this book, God sneaks in at the end of but I I just want to say, like, like Tucker, in his own accounting of this, sleeping with four or five dogs in his bed, wakes up in the morning with a scratch on his arm, and he's like, must have been demons, And like the idea that Beelzebub or Mephistopheles or whatever we're talking about here crossed the
stingy and the sticking inter dimensional. You know, Barrier made it all the way to Tucker's house and contented himself with just scratching Tucker's arm and then going home. Doesn't really make a heck of a lot of sense to me. I mean, like, why make why schlep so to speak all that way if if all you're going to do is scratch Tucker's arm And he then says, it's like
his only witnesses to this are his dogs. Obviously, It's like all those memes where the dog says who could have done this as he's standing around the flower pot right.
Like I didn't do this package of cookies. Let's let's let's us investigate immediately. Yeah, the dog did nothing wrong.
It was demon.
Also, even a demon with a man lying in a bed with five adorable dogs would go aw. Yeah, I should probably go to some other house and try to possess somebody else because those dogs are so cute. Come on, all right? So moving on from moving on from Tucker Carlson, Jonah did something interesting. He went on X and asked people what we should discuss on today's show, and I thought maybe we would use this as our template for
discussing things on today's show. So there are two shows I would say, in the course of the many responses here that we have been asked the streaming shows that we've been asked to discuss. One of them is Pluribus on Apple TV, the new show by Vince Gilligan who made Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. And the other is Death by Lightning on Netflix, which is the four part show about James Garfield and his assassin, Charles Guiteau. So I have seen both. I think Tucker at Tucker Jesus,
that's terrible. I apologize, Jonah. Wow, well, at least at least Jonah. I'm not responsible for your career. Who I'm responsible for, Tucker, so I do you can blame me for for that. But you have not seen Death by Lightning.
I believe I watched the first two episodes last week. You did, okay, good, So yeah, preparation for this, okay, and I've watched all I believe there are only three episodes of Pluribis.
Of Pluribus, yes, should.
We take two seconds and just talk about spoilers? So like, uh yeah, I don't think we need to warn too many people that James Garfield was shot and killed. So like, sorry to ruin that for you. But if you haven't watched Pluribis, and you you know, I don't know, we don't the fast forward a minute here and yeah, so I.
Think basically, we'll we'll, we'll, we'll take a couple of minutes and then uh yeah, so skip skip for about ten minutes and then we'll and then we'll we'll, we'll we'll move on because pluribus is is no I think the situation with Pluribus, which is kind of a remarkable show, although I'm already worried that it's starting to spin its wheels a little bit. Pluribus is a puzzle box show about basically the last woman on Earth that there is an event.
Well, it's more like what if invasion of the Body Snatchers? What if the aliens? What if the pod people were nice? Nice? Right?
Yes, and the pod people are nice, and the one person who remains human or there are eleven people on Earth who remain human, but the one person remains human is rotten Lousey is like an unpleasant, bitter, depressed, sour puss.
A bit of an angry lesbian, right, I mean it's.
Not a bit of an I mean an angry lesbian. Ay, really entirely not a very unhanged.
I hate to come in, but I realized this is not my segment here. But your interpretation of Body Snatchers is that the invaders are evil, Well.
Unless they are, they are zomb they're sort of soulless zombies.
Basically, we wake up in a world with no pain and no hunger and no yeah.
Yeah, that's letter speech, and in good.
Speech, in the good speech right in the second Body Snatchers, right, first one communists obviously, they're all, yeah, it's communism. And the second one is kind of like I heard the second New Age. I prefer the second one too, but it's basically like letter Letter Nimoy, who becomes the spokesman of the of the Body Snatcher, says, you know you must, you must, you must rid yourself of old concepts of being and join us in our New Age, written county.
Yeah, conscious, sounds great, we're all going to move to Well.
Then you'll really like pluribus because pluribus is they're all really nice. They all know everybody is, everybody has everybody else's memories, and everybody has everybody else's talents and abilities. Anybody can do anything, everybody knows everything. There's no crime, so they don't need to have the lights on at night in a city. They can turn all the lights out because there's no reason to have lights on because everybody is safe.
And then there is this one.
Yeah, is there just one person just going crazy just like raping everything similated?
Oh not only Yeah, go ahead.
So I think you're just mischaracterizing a little bit because at least so far, and again these are spoilers, so sorry people, but they're like eleven or fourteen people left on planet Earth. And what makes her unique is not that she's the last person with personal agency. It's like she's the only one who has a problem with the
rise of the pod people. All the other people are like, well, this is kind of like there's one guy who's just getting laid and having fun and or ding lobster, and there are other people who are so like, what's so bad about this? You know? And she is like the American And so I texted with you about this. Yeah, my super hardcore, crazy right wing take on this, which is that it is remarkable so far, who knows where
turns it's going to take. So far, she's the only white person, the only American who is immune to the brain virus, and she's also the only one with a problem with it. All of the people from the brown and black people, all the people from sort of developing countries, the global South, whatever, they're all into it. And I think it is like the ultimate kind of sci fi American exceptionalism kind of point.
Well, there's one person that we haven't met yet, right according to according to the scheme of the show, there is one person who is in Paraguay. Who is just if you call him on the phone and say hi, He's like, leave me alone, leave me in peace. You put.
I was gonna say he's the John Yes, so this is so we both agree he is not the Jonah Goldberg. Yeah, so this show just just to clarify, this is a world in which the aliens have come in, and the aliens are practicing.
The the philosophy of.
And and you are detecting, Jonah, that this the secret of this the DNA, and the show is bad.
Well so far. Interesting.
The theaters of the show is that is that the first communication that we receive from outer space, it turns out, is a virus that invades O our RNA in some fashion and and turns us all turns human beings into a collective consciousness.
Yeah, well we know they try to do so.
They're not they're not being possessed by it. They're still themselves, but they have no individuality left. I guess everybody is everybody else.
They took they took the vaccine. Well that's the.
Point, isn't it. That's part of where I am in agreement with Jonah that this is a very very right wing coded show.
I have never said I have never said these words on this show.
Before I'm about to say them. I got to see that show.
Rare Seahorn. People think she's giving a fantastic performance. I think she is in the sense that I find her character so off putting, which I think is what she's supposed to be. That she is doing a brilliant job of making somebody an attractive and off putting and therefore I don't know if she's doing a great job, but I think where it is coded in all kinds of ways. So it has that question. The ornery American who will not be subsumed? Right, That's it's like, what are you
talking about? I'm gonna we're all disappearing here. Why aren't you upset? That's number one? Number two? Is she is? Is this a show about AI? Is this you? Now? We're all human beings. We're all living in a world in which everything can be done for us. There's no reason to be, no reason to work, There'll be no reason to have fights, to have nothing, because because the way the world is now situated, all this stuff is
going to be done. Everyone's going to do stuff for each other, and so we can just all sit around together. Is this the end of humanity? Not because we're being attacked and destroyed, but because we're just going to get everything we ever wanted and at the price of our individuality, our drive, our get our our you know, get up
and go. And I think all of that is really interesting, but it's all speculative now because the first three episodes have simply been a way of laying out the stakes and the groundwork, and now it's really got a.
Still landing a lot. Yeah, although Vince Gilligan, like the thing, you got to give him credit for Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad. He had a multi seasonal vision about where he was going with things. That's probably my own. And we can get off of this because we're probably pissing off people who are in the waiting room who
want to avoid the spoilers. But my biggest complaint about it so far, I mean, I agree with you with her characters are ill annoying, but I like her so much where I think they kind of I would have loved to see him and take the events of the first episode and make that the entire first season, because there could have been this incredibly dramatic reveal at the end that of like you think it's going to be this horrible alien takeover and then it turns out everybody's
nice and is bringing you lunch, and like that would have been a great season finale rather than a first episode finale. But yeah, see it is the way.
It reminds me that part of the thing in streaming is that and you hear people say this who work in streaming and are creating for streaming, is they have a huge problem, which is, like, you know, the barrier to entry is unbelievably low. So you turn on a show and if you don't get people in the first ten minutes, they're going to turn it off and they'll never watch it again. What do you do to get
them to watch the show? It's a real problem. And one of the things they do is that they mix up timelines and they start things in the middle, and then they go backwards and they go forwards. All of this seems to be a way of trying to keep people engaged and slightly off on the back foot so that they don't quite know what is happening next.
Yeah, I mean I have a I take a slightly different view of this stuff for the streamers. That and I think the streamers are discovering this, by the way, is that the harder you make it the story to get into, and the more you promise that these secrets are going to be unrolled and unfolded, the harder it
is for people to jump in. That. The the problem with streaming is that not that it's too easy, it's it's too hard, and so everything just takes this immense amount of choice, and and they don't make it easy for you, and they try to like, well, no, stick around. Episode three, some of this stuff will be revealed, and
then episode five something is going to happen. And then and then people say in a lot of ways, they say, you know, that first episode that first season should have been the first episode, and I think they're this, look, you know, they're starting to.
They're I'm explaining that. I think what they know, what they have learned down to their marrow, is you have to make the big reveal early.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, right, Okay, that's a desert.
First show into the explanation of the big reveal. Yes that is otherwise it's lost. And yes, there's a point in which.
Everyone I call that the Rob Long rule because I've been screaming about that for fifteen years. I call dessert first, because the truth is, what people do. It's a it's a it's a psychological problem that people who do TV shows and people who are executive TV shows and streamers, they just assume that the first you could hear when they talk, they say, Okay, so here's what we're gonna do with our audience. But blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. And the problem is that you don't have an audience.
Yet. You don't have one. Your audience is.
Zero, and so it is in a question of like what am I going to do with the twenty million people who tune in? It's this is not Laverne and Shirley when you're gonna get twenty million people to tune in, because twenty three million people tuned in for Happy Days. This is something different, and you do not have an audience, and you must constantly be giving them something really interesting and not baffling, and not opaque and not confusing and not arrogant.
You must give them dessert first. They demand dessert first.
Right, So this is dessert. So this, this show in that sense, is here's what happens. The first episode is the world changes, and we watch the world change, and at the end of the first episode the world has changed. As I say, my fear is after after three episodes and we're only like a week I think. I think basically according to the countdown, it's like four days have transpired over the course of these three episodes. Now the plot has.
To kick in.
Now what is she going to do to save humanity or what are they going to do to try to stop her from saving humanity? Or you know, who else is who else is involved? Or what's the overall scheme. That's that's what we go to from here. So it's really really, really interesting.
I could be wrong. I mean I probably am wrong because I don't know why you would do this, but I thought it was interesting where it turns out that they will not kill anything, so like this guy orders lobster and they say, well, we couldn't find any in the area and we won't kill anything, so if it's not in existing stores, we're not gonna get it for you. If that extends to plant life, like they won't harvest crops, how then they have a whole party storyline about it.
How Yeah, they have to feed themselves, you know, would be kind of interesting.
Well, the other problem with the show, and this is always true of post apocalyptic shows, right, which is showing what's happened is almost impossible, by which I mean we are told at some point in the second episode that eight hundred million people have died. Sorry, my dog is going crazy, a dog demon. Eight hundred million people have died of that virus. No, whatever happens.
Yeah, yeah, we don't want to give too many spoilers, but it doesn't.
Look but there is no evidence whatsoever. They eight hundred million people have died, So that's a tenth of all humanity and there's literally no evidence. But let's why don't we move on to Death by Lightning? Which is interesting because it's not it's not a streaming series. It's essentially what we used to call it mini. It's a four hour mini series that tells the story of the last year in the life of James Garfield. So, James Garfield's
a congressman from from Ohio. He's going to the Republican Convention in Chicago in eighteen eighty to nominate his fellow Ohioan and give a speech to nominate that guy in the speech on the floor is so electrifying that he become He becomes the nominee of the Republican Party and wins the presidency. And as we watch this, we are also watching his the degeneration of the man who would become his assassin, Charles Guiteau, who is and so it's
a parallel story. So we have the Guito story as he desperately decides that his future lies in attaching himself to the Republican ticket and getting himself a patronage job after Garfield wins, and how Garfield goes on as a sort of semi accidental president with an incredibly corrupt party
establishment simply wanting to control and dominate him. And this is one of the best TV shows of the last decade, I think, without question, in part because it is because it's four hours and done like they're not trying to hook you into five seasons, and it is telling the story. And it's based on a book called I'll tell You in a Minute because I can't remember the name of it by Candice Millard, which is a really remarkably wonderful book about Garfield and Guiteau and the Geto's mental illness
and Garfield's medical treatment which killed him. It was the treatment of Garfield that killed him, not Geito's bullet, because they had yet to believe in things like anticept it right, they didn't believe in the germ theory of disease. And so you know, you see Jelko Evonik playing a doctor who was like digging his unwashed hand into Garfield's back looking for the bullet with his finger and stuff like that, all of which is told really wonderfully well in the book.
And Jody, you've seen two episodes.
You said, yeah, I think it's fantastic, and it's the cast I think is really perfectly done. And and I got to admit, like I was talking to I was talking to a historian recently who was telling me about the show, and they were basically saying, it's a it's remarkable that, like, it's entirely possible that James Garfield would have been up there in the pantheon with Lincoln Washington and Jefferson but for this assassination, and like it never
really occurred to people to think in those terms. But the show kind of the show and the book kind of I don't know it kind of turns you around on all that. And but I just think it's it's a great example of how there's a whole of stuff that we were sort of culturally taught to think is boring, you know, that sort of weird nineteenth century stuff. Yeah, and uh, if you have the right eye for it, there's actually there's just an enormously rich vein of American
Americana that that you can do. You know, not the very comedy about you know, this isn't the comedy, but it's got some comedic touches, but you can you can bring the life in ways that are really compelling. It's very daunty chaunty period.
It's also kind of strange we had that attitude about the sort of Victorian era in general, that's sort of the anglophone Victorian era, that everybody was really uptight, you're uptight all the time, and they were all repressed. The truth is they were like incredibly emotional all the time, and the Secretary of War would sit down to write poems and they were weeping, all fainting, and they were they were incredibly affected or in a good way. And then but then I can't help that the joke is
going to make with us Garfield. But the course is you, as we all know, the assassination of Garfield was really when American lost its innocence.
Well, by the way, so the reason the book which is called Destiny of the Republic by Candice Millard. So the book is what rehabit, what reintroduces as a popular history. Garfield as a as a potentially great American figure, and his story is unbelievable. It's only told glancingly during the course of the show, which really is focused on this one year. He apparently was a fantastic speaker, was a great orator, and was and was obsessive. He was like
a tweeter in this sense. According to Cannis Millard, he would get up forty times a day to speak from the well of the house, almost like me on Twitter. Right. So, and then this thing happens where he doesn't really have ambitions to be president, but gives this electrifying speech basically about how we've been spinning our wheels since the beginning
of reconstruction. He was very progressive. He was a he was an emancipator, a you know, anti anti Jim Crow and anti the spoils system and getto became famous for the appellation which never appears on the show that we now know. You know, you know how Time magazine always came up with something we called somebody a like you know, da da dada, like these kind of Homeric epithets. So the homeric epithet for Charles Getau was disappointed office seeker
Charles Guteau and was he wanted a job. People knew he was crazy. They threw him out of his office, and then God started saying to him in his ear, everything would be much better if the president were gone. And so he goes and shows up at a train station.
Of the time.
Exactly anyway, Matthew mcphaden, who plays Guto, is not only astonishingly good, but if you look at his makeup and then you'd google a picture of Geto, it is beyond uncanny. It is literally as though as though Guito were walking and talking right in front of you.
So but so one of the things, just because it's we are in, you know, waiting for the Supreme Court to say something about tariffs. Yeah, one of the funny things. About a year ago, I did the deep dive trying to figure out where the cliche came from that we should run government like a business, Like when did people
start to doing that? And I because there are few things that drive me more crazy than people who say that, both because it's not just when they say it, it's that they say it as if like they're the first person who had occurred to and you hear that from people all the time. And second, they think it's incredibly wise and insightful. Right, and so I did this deep
dive and it's funny. So Chester Arthur, as they discuss briefly in the at least the first two episodes, was basically the chief revenue officer for the New York basically New York City Harbor, right, he's the customs officer. And they make a big point about saying how most of the money, that the most of the revenue that the government gets is through New York. And they make it
very clear that justter Arthur was pretty corrupt. And it turns out that like I couldn't get a definitive thing on this, and anybody wants to send me something that's dispositive, that would be great. But it appears that it comes out basically out of that practice that the tariff system, particularly in New York, was so unbelievably corrupt that people started saying, you know what we need to do. We
need to run government according to best business practices. And it was really an accounting point more than anything else.
And what's funny about it is like the reason why we switched to an income tax was in large part because the tariff system was so inherently corrupt and corrupting, right, not even like bribery corrupting, just sort of like special pleading all that kind of stuff that they said, we got to come up with a different source of revenue that doesn't turn every single politician into a pressure point
for lobbyists and special pleading. And now we live in an age where the President of United States thinks that that aspect of tariffs is a feature, not a bug. Right, That's what gets people to come to the White House, yeah, with gold bars and gold clocks and Boeing seven sixty sevens because he wants he wants the pressure point to force people to come compliment him, talk about how they
love his musk and give him trinkets. And it's really just I think it's a great little, sort of serendipitous thing.
There's a moment in the show in the book where Garfield is talking to James Blaine, who is his secretary of.
State, and he was a.
He was a continental liar from the state of Maine.
I believe that he was. And he was. He was the Republican candidate for president in eighteen eighty four. Gob Cleveland defeated him and ended the twenty four year Republican an uninterrupted Republican of the White House. Correct He says to Blaine, bla, you know, you know one thing about if we could get Arthur on our side, maybe we can find the money. Right literally, we can find the
bills that he and Roscoe Conkling have been hiding. Because eighty percent of the government's revenues came from the Port of New York in the form of actual cash payments made to pay for the imported you know, pay the importers. We're paying to bring in their good hoods. And there were stacks of bills.
That always a good thing.
And then the stacks of bills would go missing, and and it was like hide the salami. You know, it's like, you know, where is where's the money?
Wasn't exactly hide the salami.
But I think it's a metaphorical hide the salami again a great point, Shonah. It's a very very interesting moment. And the point is that this, this the murder of Garfield, led to the creation of the Civil Service, by which the idea was, we cannot run the government as a spoil system. It cannot be that you you want to become president so you can give people jobs and so
that they can run the customs houses. It has to be that there has there have to be fair rules so that anyone can get a job if they pass a test, and it's not just in the hands of some people at least if that can happen in cities
and town and all that until that changes. But it was the bizarre fact of history that Chester Arthur, who himself was the ultimate ultimate spoil system creature, was as a result of Garfield's assassination at the hands of somebody who was angry because he didn't get a job, that Arthur championed and pushed through the Pendleton Civil Service Act that led to the creation of the modern idea that people who work for government should be qualified, and that
there would be a way to qualify them through a test and you know that was a I mean the size of that change, which has good parts and bad parts, because ultimately it leads to the most evil you know, Jonah's favorite American villain, Woodrow Wilson, believing that you can take this principle and then apply it to all of life in which some form of expertise gets to dominate and control everything, including everything you do and everything the
government does and all of that. So it's not like there aren't an attendant consequences from stuff like that.
And and the James Blaine in this is the Blaine of the Blaine Amendments, right, yeah, yeah, which is uh, it'd be fun if they got into his sort of more of his anti Romanism stuff just for color, but I guess they.
Yeah, well it's yeah, it was late. I mean he was already, this is already the they had moved on. They had moved on from that. Okay, so other questions here that that that come up. Uh all right, so someone asks what are the ten best biography showbiz biographies that I have ever read? And I'm not doing ten,
and I'm not going to do five. I am going to recommend one and then maybe you each if you know if you can think of when you can recommend another I think right now the best biography is actually a memoir. The best memoir of Hollywood that I have ever read, I believe, is Stories I Only Tell My
Friends by Rob Low. May surprise you to know that Rob Low has written a great book, But Rob Low has actually written a great book, and it is the story of his upbringing as a kid from Ohio whose mother moved him to California because she was having an affair with her psychiatrist, who then moved to California, and he grew up as a wild child in Malibu in
the early seventies and then became a TV actor. And the book is a portrait not only of Hollywood, but of America in the seventies as adults went absolutely hogwild and abandoned their children. Upper middle class parents abandoned their children to their own devices. I know, we hear all this talk talk about free range kids and how there's
too much helicopter parenting. But if you ever want to a book that makes the case for helicopter parenting, it is Stories I Only Tell My Friends by Rob Low, which talks about this world of Malibu that he was in that the Sheen brothers were in, that Sean Penn and his brother were in, and all of this, and this bizarre surfing, criminal, hyper sex, hyper druggy world of kids who had been simply let loose, cut loose by their parents to do whatever the hell it was that
they wanted to do. And how so many of them, including ones you've never heard of, not known just actors, but just kids around Malibou, died, killed in surfing accidents, you know, drug overdoses, all of that simply because nobody was paying the slightest attention to them. For now, we could just make it like great Hollywood books if you want, like that would be my pick for the memoir biography thing. Aside, of course, from Rob Rob's conversations with my agent, which would also I think.
Be available than a double volume. My first and second books are put together so you can just see, you see exactly what a rip off they were.
Anyway, I have to confess I am hard pressed I of Hollywood biography type of book.
It just seems ridiculous for any you, either you or even or me to comment on this topic.
Jonah, I don't know what. I don't know what.
Twitter user on Jadorits was thinking when he asked.
This question, what you you you like? This is you know ten twenty people you know have written books about Hollywood at least.
Yeah. So I I read Wired by Bob Woodward when it came out. Sure, and I read I have no idea who wrote it. I read when I was a Star Wars geek. I read some biography of George Lucas. I am trying to think of what other Hollywood biographies I have read. It's just not a genre of book that I've ever spent a lot of time in.
Neither, I think the only I guess that it's not Hollywood bug I can't. I see nothing's more painful. I mean, I'm sure that Rob low is a nice guy and a very smart guy and very funny guy. So I'm sure the book is great.
I've heard the book is great.
I mean, I would read Act One by Moss Heart. That's Broadway by agree, but it's really good. It's really it's funny and interesting and it says a lot about writing and kind of is good early Broadway kind of showbiz stuff. So it's maybe if you're insted in the topics, it's probably a good Probably good one to start.
Can I tell you one detail that I learned from a book that I read earlier this year? I think, I again, I'm now losing my mind. So I think I haven't mentioned this, although I think I told you guys about it. I certainly told Rob about it. So if I mentioned this on the last show, I apologize, and maybe Scott can just cut this out of figures this out. But I read this biography of Clint Eastwood, right, So Clint's been amazing life. He's ninety five years old,
He's still literally still directing movies. I don't know how the hell that's possible. So Clint Eastwood was not intending to be an actor, and he somehow. The story that is in this book that is, and then there's a little footnote about it, is that he came across in the late forties a guy named Albert Lewin who became his agent. Only Albert Lewin was not an agent. Arthur Lubin, excuse me, not Albert Arthur Lubin. He was not an agent.
He was a film producer and his may the work that made him famous and rich were the Francis the Talking Mule pictures, Frances Talking Mule. Donald O'Connor made a series of seven movies. He meets Francis the Talking Mule while he is on an island during fighting in World War two France. This is a mule on this island and he's fighting the Japanese. He encounters this talking mule. Okay, so Luban makes Francis the Talking Mule movies and then later on is the creator since you don't drop a
concept once it's shown to be successful. Of mister Ed, the show about Wilbur and his talking horse.
Hello, I'm mister Ed.
I did not know that was the same person.
Yeah, okay, Well, so if you think about mister Ed, mister Ed is an extremely gay coated story because the story is there's Wilbur, he's married, he's got his wife in the house, but out in the barn is his true love, whom no one can ever know about. No one can ever know that he has this horse that can talk, and no one must ever.
Know and he it's a very specific reading of mister Rann.
I had to say, okay, okay, but Arthur Clubin was gay. He was as close to being openly gay as possible in Hollywood. In like nineteen fifty and he put Clint Eastwood under personal contract as his agent and got him his first four or five jobs in television. And the question that this book raises that has never answered is was there a quid pro quo between Arthur Lubin and Clint Eastwood? Which is an unanswerable question unless Clint Eastwood
ever decides to answer it. But apparently people have occasionally asked him this and he has demured. So this hidden history of Clint Eastwood could be that his entire career is the result of the fact that an older man attracted to this incredibly good looking six foot four inch fellow, you know, kind of took him under his wing. In all senses of the term. This is the kind of nugget that you can dig up if you are willing as I am, to forage through the you know.
Yeah, so at the end of the day, the end of the day, you are. The nugget for you is did an elderly person no one's ever heard of, in some weird way have a required or unrequited sexual relationship with a ninety year old now ninety year old film director.
Well, and the biggest, arguably the single most influential person in the last seventy years, and in show business, you could make the click case.
Yeah, I think you'd be I think you'd be that's a I don't think you'd be right, but you could make that case. But even retroactively, it's just like that's that's ultimately the problem with these biographies is that they require you to believe that these events are consequential, when in fact it's like you're just working backwards from the outcome. You know, Clinice would smart and good actor, and you know, maybe somebody else would have well.
I don't know, you know, with the mister ed tie. And there's that phrase from you know, medicine, like when you hear hoof beats, think gay private personal services contract.
Yeah right, okay, I'm sorry, but I'm a Clinice would not a very good actor. And the whole book makes the point that for the first fifteen years of his life, or the first ten years of his life before he was cast in Rawhide, the TV show that made him famous, he could barely speak a line, and that people were doing Albert Lubin a favor by letting his protege get
these jobs. And if if Clint Eastwood. Were were a twenty year old girl instead of a twenty well, I would would have nobody, everybody would have understood.
Yeah, yeah, that's lessons dancing lessons a big star.
Okay, exactly, Okay, all right, we can move on from this. I just wanted to bring that up because it's just too juicy. And you may you may be tutting me on how juicy that is, but you are wrong. Now what on earth have I done with the Jonah list of.
I gotta say?
Yeah, I mean, hold on, I got hijack, you can, you can anything you want.
Yeah, it seems like the list may maybe may well get good. What is the list saying, let's don't want to have five more minutes?
So let's sick with all this?
Jason asks, what is Rob's take on the new Archbishop of Canterbury.
The boom Wow?
How about that, buddy?
Yeah, that seems that seems very niche. Uh My take is I don't really know enough about her to know. I mean, I assume what he means is, what do I do I care that it's a it's a it's a lady bishop, and I as an American, as an episcopalian, I don't we have lady bishops left and right. We're allowsy with lady bishops, and the Episcoal Church of America.
Is lady bishop. The term of art is that what you call it.
No, no, I just I'm saying, it's just a it's a she is a lady bishop. It's also kind of strange to me. There's kind of I guess there's kind of there's a lot of pushback and schism talk in the Church of England now about this, which is strange because it really mean, you may as well if you're if you're if you're holding out for that kind of tradition of all male clergy, you've uh, it's a strange
hill to die on. After the churches in general have made statements about climate change and a lot of other things that the idea this is the last straw is kind of too bad. But in general, like you know, I think it, uh, I think of anything the weird non arch bitch of a Canterbury time that we had before, you know, after the last one was sort of gone and then the next one was was chosen or designated that that to be the most interesting part of the church,
right because in that intervening was intervening months. We had a pope die and it was the Presiding Bishop of America of the episode Church of America who sort of kind of represented them what we call the Anglican Communion at that point. These are all boring church things. But I will say the only cool thing about all of the process is that she still had to be basically chosen by King Charles, Like he had to have a meeting with her and talk to her and then he
picked her. Like it's kind of a funny thing. That is the King Charles the Third, This Charles who who seems to be in general his life has been sort of bad when it comes to the HR choices. You know, he got to make this one anyway, The daughter.
In law choices is what it was, what you're referring to.
I think, not.
Well, just any maybe the wife choices, the all the HR choices. He doesn't seem to really he's not good at it, which is fine because he's you know, never had to do it.
Okay, So we are people are asking us to talk about uh, Ryan Liza and Olivia Nosey and I just spent just before we came on. I spent like an hour talking about this on the commentary podcast. So I'm I am a little drained, and I don't know if we want to go into full detail about what the story is that people don't know it about this journalistic couple and their war against each other, her and a new memoir and him in a response to her new
memoir in the articles about her new memoir. But if you wish to discourse on it, have you anything to say? I will say that Jonah. I remember at the beginning of Me Too, At the very beginning of Me Too, Jonah sends me a text that says Ryan Liza out exclamation point, exclamation point, exclamation point because Ryan Lizza was one of the first people to lose his job. He lost it at the New Yorker because of an accusation of sexual whatever whatever. He was me tooed and he
was fired by the New Yorker. And uh, Jonah, Jonah was right there on top of it in my text chain to inform me that this scalp, this establishment journalist scalp, had been secured. That's what I'm sure you don't remember.
Yeah, I mean, this is one of the things you can either talk about very little or a long time, right, and we don't have a long time to talk about it.
I will just say I hats off to Larry Summers, right, who was embarrassed by stuff that was in the Epstein emails, which is another topic we could spend a long time on, and he said, you know what I'm gonna I'm going to retreat from public life for a while and just not and just and just and lick my wounds because I did something bad and it's bad that John Perfumo or how are you pronounced that guy's name? You know that kind of yeah, Perfumo. That kind of behavior is so
unbelievably sorely missing in America. The idea that you that either of these people would take it up. I mean, I think she's a worse actor than he is in all of this, but that's a really competitive field right now. And the idea that like, you're entitled to translate your incredibly bad behavior into more celebrity and that everyone and
everyone rewards. It's the thing I hate the most about the attention economy is that it incentivizes a level of shamelessness that I mean, it ties us back to what we're talking about with Ana, with Tucker. I mean, like there is a purely cynical argument that he knows exactly what he's doing. He's not actually motivated by evil and
all these other things. He is just cynically milking engagement, and he doesn't it doesn't matter that what he's doing is objectively evil and dishonorable, and there's so much shameful behavior that people monetize and use the you know, get better jobs and all that. That's the thing. I just think it's so freaking gross about all of this.
Yeah, I also feel it's weird that I don't that I now know things about people I do not give a crap about, Like I don't, I mean, none of that. This all seems so grade d to me. Also delisting
bad like low rent kind of stuff. But it is ultimately the the what all the journalists and journalism has to end up at because they There's one thing that runs through both of these threads, right, the Nozy Lizza that's interesting news, Lisen Nusley, the Nusley affair, is that these are terrible people at their job, and they have
all of this of the badges of of that enterprise. Right, they have all the language and the cliches down, but in fact they're they're kind of lousy at it, and but nobody cares because the people judging them and hiring them and firing them, or at least hiring them and praising them, are also bad at that job. It's a it's a confederacy of really bad people of incompetence, and they all kind of agree that. You know, the same people would say, like, Mike Wallace is a powerful journey
is not a power? Come on, all this, all this aggrandizement of the journalist is just so. It could only end here with a guy writing shamelessly about arranging his girlfriend's shoes and about Keith Olberman saying sure I paid her rent, you know, because I was making all this money then, like all this stuff, it's just like, of course you people are terrible at this, because you're terrible at your jobs. But the but you've all agreed to never say that about each other.
I mean, I think the shamelessness story is the is the story, but without question and and the question it's too enjoyable to watch people's lives melt down in front of us, to avoid the schadenfreud of feelings and just the you know, it's like what what what life is like? It's like how life turns into a novel?
What's melting down?
I think? But Joe's Place is not melting down. That's the problem.
Well, it melts down and then there's another episode. Like it's like a soap opera, you know, and soap operas, people you know end up, you know, their villains one year and their heroes the next, and nothing ever ends. It's just the same people, but it but it can be very melodramatic along the way, I suppose.
I mean the sentence that you that you were disappointed that this sitting Secretary of Health and Human Services gave a perfunctory response to you sending pictures of your butthole. We have lost the plot as a culture.
Well, I mean every part of the sentence that you just spoke means we have lost the plot, including these sitting Secretary of Health Human Services being a man who's half who, whose brain was eaten away by a worm, who has spent decades in body.
Yeah, it's actually worse.
He sort of embodies everything I hate about the current political administration, which is that he is a moron by any definition. He's a fool, and he is a he currently uses drugs that are also currently illegal, so he's
a pompous and entitled fool. And somehow the people who support the administration will have to nod and agree and make all sorts of and come up with a new acronym for his movement, the Maha movement, because everyone has sort of every sort of the self castrated eunuchs that surround the or they are basically in the Republican Party now and it's it's kind of bananas, but like, at no point is anything worse than that. That seems like the worst part of the whole parade is that you
have this guy who is mentally incompetent doing it. You know what is I don't know what quarter it was a quarter of the federal budget or is it twenty something giant it's some giant chunk.
Well most of it, most most of it goes in and out the door automatically. So fortunately he doesn't really have control of it. That's you know, Medicare and Medicaid is not anything that he can and Social Security or not anything that he can can he can futs around with.
But look, let me be honest with you, I am a user and a proponent of the use of psychedelics, and the effort I have to go to to acquire safe and trustworthy psychedelics is sort of amazing, considering that they are, that they're actually fine, and we should be
able to buy them legally. And the Secretary of Health of Human Services does the same thing, but he doesn't want you to take tail and all that he wants to get you to stop taking, and that to me is just so phenomenally stupid, so phenomenally stupid that it's unforgivable, and everybody around him, and everybody around the people around him should be ashamed of themselves and should got a hole and jump in the hole and stay in that hole for the next twenty years.
So say it's twenty years from now and they've jumped in the hole and they come out at all, yeah.
Right, okay, and not send pictures of that hole the next Secretary of Health of Human Services.
One of the things that will have happened in those twenty years is that in many places cannabis will have been legal for a generation. And I keep hearing stories of people I know around my age I who have found themselves wittingly and this is genuinely to have two friends who went through this unwittingly ended up taking edibles or you know, taking or one case took more of an edible than he was supposed to take, and two people that I know had many psychotic breaks from taking from THHC.
Yeah, well, I.
Don't know whatever. So one story involved somebody took an edible at a party but had you know, three chunks of the chocolate rather than one and instantly had a paranoid like satanespersu and I I know had like a paranoid episode where he decided that the people at the party were going to kill him and he and his what He and his wife had to leave immediately and drive to a hospital so that he could get the
care that he needed. Another story was about a friend of mine who went to was going was at his son's high school graduation, suddenly had a complete meltdown, ran out of the graduation, had to go to a hospital. It turned out that he had picked up in his house an eminem that was one of his kids eminem's only a one to no eminem. It was a very powerful edible and he didn't know that he had taken it, and he basically started saying I should die. I don't
have a reason to live. My son is graduating from high school. What am I going to do with myself for the rest of my life? And he needed to
get an IV and all of this. So I'm bringing this up only to say that I do feel like we were engaging in this gigantic nationwide experiment in the legalization of marijuana or marijuana like products that are vastly more powerful than they were when I was a kid, and I am terrified at what the country is going to look like in twenty forty five, based on what little I know about people who have kind of ended up falling into this almost inadvertently in twenty twenty five,
given the potency of of of the stuff. And I am you know, I didn't want I believe in any of this. Unlike you, I don't think that these drugs should be legal. But Joanah, I think you are you are. You're also, like me, a pretty hardline person on.
Im Like I mean, the microdosing thing under Supervillain microdosing, if it's difficult but possible, I'm fine with that, right at least from what I understand. I think the pot thing was an obvious mistake. I think that, by the way, the online gambling stuff was an obvious mistake. Oh my god. And I love my friends at Reason magazine and the libertarians and whatnot. I think it is just absolutely preposterous
to talk about legalizing heroin and uh. And I've had this argument for thirty years with people, and.
Uh.
I was for decriminal slow decriminalization of weed. I would have been happy if we were now sort of saying, Okay, Colorado has done this for ten years, let's study what happened there. That's where I would have rather be right now than the entire country going all in on this stuff. And so yeah, I mean this is a very down way to end this podcast. But yeah, I'm still pro drug war. That doesn't mean I'm pro to every single way we do it, or for blowing up fishing boats in the Caribbean.
So blow them up, I say, we need to. This is this is our lake, this is our hemisphere. James Monroe had it right. Don't you be sending your boats out with the crap on it. We're gonna you know, we're gonna blow them up. Just don't send the boats out. That's what I say, got no problem with it.
What do you think I think if we actually know that's true. But I'm kind of open to it at the same time, like arresting drug dealers and interrogating them is actually kind of useful and just killing them.
This is America. We get to blow up a boat every now and then. That's what I say.
I understand if they had such a great legal justification for it, they would release it, or at least they would show it to the British who just said they're no longer going to cooperate with us because they think what we're doing is illegal.
So well, I mean, that's that's very that's very wholesome of you. I'm just saying, I like a good I like a good boat, you know, with the kind of stand down or we'll we'll we'll take you out, you know, with the speaker with the help.
They don't do the standown thing. They just blow them up, right, that's the problem. I'm with you with the stand doown thing.
Just stand on niceties. You know, you guys, are you're such you know, send.
My compliment to stand down? Yeah no, they don't do that.
Okay, So this is a down way to end the podcast. So let's let's let's up with people. How can we go? How can we Thanksgiving is coming? What is your favorite dish? How about that? Got a favorite dish? Jessica's a great cook. She's a great cook. Uh. You know.
I love a good uh extra cheesy scalloped potato. I like dark meat over white meat when it comes to the bird, and I will say uh, just very quickly. I talked about on the Dispatch podcast recently when my mom was no longer up for cooking Thanksgiving, but we wanted to have Thanksgiving with her and she couldn't come down to DC. We went up there and jess found this place that does Thanksgiving dinner peaking duck style. Oh wow, So they did a whole turkey red farm duck style. Yeah,
red farm, red farm. It was so unbelievable good with the scallions and the pancakes, and they managed to keep the turkey moist. And I highly highly recommend it.
I got it.
I got it.
Anyway, that sounds amazing, Rob, Do you have a favorite.
Well, just to bring it all together, my favorite Thanksgiving dish is is sixty milligrams of one PLSD.
Very thankful for that.
Not milligram, My god, milligram, but I'd be I would be dead microgram. Sorry, Mike's as we say in the viz uh.
I like it all. I love.
I think Thanksgiving is a great meal.
I think it's a great meal. It's my favorite holiday argument.
It's a really really good All of the pieces of the Thanksgiving meal are good. All of the side cars on the Thanksgiving that have attached themselves to Thanksgiving meal are good, like macaroni and cheese and.
Things like that.
I think those are all good. The fact that people are eating sort of squashes and pies made of squashes is good. The truth about the the only downside of the Thanksgiving meal is it kind of takes turkey out of the running, you know, except as a lunch meat, which is too bad. And it kind of takes some of the the healthy winter vegetables out of the running because people associate them entirely with Thanksgiving instead of like, well, no, actually they're good.
They're good all year round. Parsnips, Brussels sprouts.
Brussels sprouts, but they russel sprout's had it maybe made a huge comeback about ten years ago, which is great.
I mean gords, gorgs and squashes, you know, mostly because of the sex video and then just sort of like it re up the Brussels Sprout's best celebrity. That's probably true.
Yeah, I don't like turkey, and I'm not afraid to a minute. If I'm going to have turkey, I will have the dark meat because the white meat is it is like taking Yeah, it's like it's like taking one of those pills that.
Sucks all of the it shouldn't be, but it turns.
It's like the thing on Star Trek where they turn the dial and then you turn into a into a cube of at That's that's what it's like for me. If I if I eat turkey.
Pe king duck style turkey, you would love Okay, sounds.
Amazing movie obviously, avalon.
The tykey.
You cut the tyke, cut the tikey, don't cut the tikey.
Best Thanksgiving me.
That's one of my favorite actors.
That's Thanksgiving movie Plans, chains, autobiles.
Yep, that's my answer to Yeah, yeah, is.
There another I'm trying to think of other Thanksgiving movies? Usually, the usually family movies of the last twenty five years are always like the family gets together and then they all yell at each other for three hours. I don't really which is not? Which is not?
That? Not that I hate movies. I think those ones are stupid.
The Family Stone and I that Holidays and that movie.
You could drive me to violence if you made me say and watch it?
Yeah, yeah, the Family That the idea that what people really want to do is go to turn on a TV show and watch a dysfunctional family yell at each other over a holiday table. Yeah. Where people got the idea that that would be enjoyable, either for people who are from families like that, who do not need to be reminded that that is what it is like for them, or for those of us who are not like families like that, who watch it and go, oh my god, that looks so awful. Those people to watch.
People telling on themselves when they make those movies, Yeah, we're not.
We're not really, because they probably don't see there, They don't see their family at all, so they just assumed that everybody with a family must be miserable. I remember saying once to somebody like, my parents are coming to visit this weekend, and the response was, oh, oh, I'm sorry.
Is it gonna be okay. Yeah, I like my parents. I'm happy to see.
That is that was it?
But I would I'd say the.
Terrible Thanksgiving movie and play trope, which we started.
Is still you know, it's still as it's getting colder, and it's a Thanksgiving with the secrets come out.
Yes, And my favorite Terrible Thanksgiving scene is in what is in fact an atrocious movie that for some reason people still love ordinary people, which is just terrible from start to finish, horrible, horrible, horrible, but it has these great, two great moments of Thanksgiving badness. One when all the uptight Watts are in the Winnetka or Levenston kitchen or Lake Forest, I guess, and they're sort of arranging of this stuff and the aunts and uncles are there and
they're talking about you know, the sun. You not the son who died, but the son who tried to commit suicide. And somebody says, yes, he's he's fine, fine, And then the Chris Donald Sutherlan who's the good guy, says that yeah, he's seeing a doctor. He's sing, you's seeing a psychiatrist.
We're really excited, doctor Schmelman or something, and play by Judd Hirsch and uh, and one of the aunts looks up and says a Jewish doctor, And we think, well, I know she's a lop, but I think she knows that all doctors are Jews in.
The nineteen seventies.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I memore.
Yeah, well, you know, every doctor I ever run into now is South Asian.
And then there's a and then there's a moment where the somebody drops a plate and it breaks, and Mary Tyler Moore, in an atrocious performance, says, it's okay, it's a clean break.
Oh yeah. See at that point, just terrible. You need to click in the AI and have Donald Sutherland from Invasion of the Body Snatchers. He raises bony finger.
Okay, so here's what we're recommending. We're recommending ploribus or we're recommending death by anything, and of course we're recommending the amazing nineteen seventy eight Invasion of the Body Snatchers with Donald Sutherland, directed and written by Philip Kaufman. That's where we are for you. Watch those three you will be happy. We'll be back next month.
Uh, have a great Thanksgiving.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone.
Yeah, Jesus, that was a long one.
Holi that's what she said.