Maybe maybe the situation is that you're not full of rage because your new calling.
Has Let me say something, John, don't you remember the introad last week. It's called Christianity, not Buddhism. I'm I'm still mad at Paul as in the Apostles.
That's that's very neat of you. Need you put it all, puts it all on Paul.
I'm mad at him. You don't know.
I think I do. I do it from mad, Yes, I call him so well.
I don't like muhammad a.
This is gold. We took care of everything.
I believe me we did.
Did I turn off the coffee?
Did you lock up? Did you close the garage? That's it? I forgot to close the garage. That's it. No, that's not it.
What else can we be forgetting? It's February. We're between the polar vortex and the bomb cyclone, as I understand it, and therefore we thought we'd take a minute here at glop culture to warm ourselves in our own presence. I'm John pod Hornz in New York. In Princeton, New Jersey. We have Rob Long.
Hello, God, is it bomb cycle? Is that real? Or are you thinking a jokes? I'm looking at it. When is that happening?
Last weekend was supposedly a bombs last weekend, and this weekend is the polar vortex. And since I don't know when people are listening to this, we're somehow caught between the bomb cyclone and the polar TwixT and between That's what she said, and there is Jonah Hey Goldberg in Washington. Have they picked up your garbage? I have not. They have not. Christine Rosen just told me this more it's Friday morning into the like the sixth of February that they just picked up that.
See.
The thing is, like I was trying to explain this to Lucy, my daughter, that like the apartment building I grew up in, not a huge apartment building, but a sizeable, normal Upper West Side apartment building probably had what I don't know, one hundred and fifty two hundred apartments in it something like that, you know, maybe a little less hundred apartments more like.
So yeah, I mean I guess I'm five per floor or twelve. Okay, So that makes sense. Okay, So you.
Think about how much garbage we produce as one family, and then you think about how much garbage each building when there are thousands and thousands of those buildings. For them not to pick up garbage in New York City is biblical in a way that it's just.
Not in DC. I mean it's just yeah. I remember walking through the city once years ago with somebody who was not from New York City or even from a big city, and she's in there's, you know, bags of garbage on the streets. Well, I guess tomorrow's garbage day. It's well, that's everyday day here in the big city.
You don't notice it here in New York where they have picked up some of the garbage. But when they haven't picked up the garbage, it looks like trench warfare. In world's snow, I mean black we have. There's snow and and there's these black bags stacked up ten feet high.
And yet if you have to have a garbage collecting strike or cessation, you want to have it in the frozen temperatures, not in the incubation July or AUGUSTA. Yeah, this way where the lush, jungle climate. But I will say this, it's a it's a long standing set up, joke setup where someone goes you asked me, if they pick up my garbage. Have they picked up your garbage? No? No, my mother in law is still here. How's your headache? That's on a podcast called Club.
Okay. I got to begin by telling the Frank Sinatra story, which is completely it's not connected to anything, but I heard it this morning. It's the comedian Mike Burbilia. Barbiglia had on his college friend John Mulaney on his podcast, and they've known each other forever. So Mulanie's like, you gotta tell the Frank Sinatra story. So Birbiglia tells this
story about Frank Sinatra. He says to his aunt, who's from Buffalo, says, have you ever gone to a concert or like a show, like a like a live music show? And she was like, oh, yes, when I was a kid, when I was a teenager, we went to see Frank Sinatra and we loved Frank Sinatra. He came to Buffalo and we went to the concert, and then afterwards we wanted to go see him come out the stage door.
So we went down into the alley and the door opened and there was Frank, Sandra and my friends and we start yelling, Frankie, Frankie, Frankie, we we love you. Frankie and he comes up and he pushes us out of the way, and he says, get out of the way, you fat pigs. And then he gets into limo and drives away. Oh, we just love Frank Sinatra. Get out of the way. It's the perfect story because it's like
the long con. It didn't affect her feelings about Sinatra at all the way they were and they were fat pigs. I guess I.
Mean bossic people. Yeah, I mean, what's that old David Suskyn's story. I think it's David skin story about Frank Sinatra where he's somewhere in a restaurant and Sinatra comes to his table. No no, no, no no no, this is no no no. That's a different It comes to his table and says, I'm a huge fan. I love your show. But I get David had talk show at some point. I love your show. Was watching it last night. It's great. I just I really I love that there's that on TV.
And I just wanted to I tell you that I'm a big fan. That's all I did. And it sounds well, thank you so much. That's great. I really I'm a huge fan. And they had a little chit chat. It was great. It was a great, big moment in Suskind's life when Sinatra makes the effort to come and tell you how great you are, and then like a's coincidental to have it two days later. Just two days later, he's at a restaurant and Sinatra's there too. I guess
Sonatra's in town. And he gets up and crosses to Sinnatra's table to say hello, and he goes, Frank, I'm so glad to see you. It's amazing, you know, to two nights, you know, almost in a row. I hope you have a good meal. And he sticks his hand out. It's doctor looks at him and says, I looked at his hand and says I'll shake your hand, but I won't kiss it. But it's just.
What a psycho anyway. I just but I that was such a great story I had to share it.
So it just on the reference to the Sinatra shaking hands of all of the really stupid conceits, including being able to purchase a second chunnel boring earth moving UH drill on short notice and get it to Nevada in Oceans thirteen. Perhaps the dumbest thing was the conceit that no one would betray someone who had shaken Frank Sinatra's hand. Yeah, right, like that is like the ultimate like honor among thieves. Right, no one betrayed anybody.
Nobody is more honorable than he.
Yeah. Yeah, anyway, I'm sorry to I'm sorry to have gotten this.
No, no, But can I speak a request at some point? I know we have a lot to talk about. I would, and I know maybe everyone's bored of this. I wanted to float a cultural idea to you guys about my my thoughts on on on Epstein, and I just I don't we don't have to talk about the whole thing that's so sortid and but incredibly juicy. I'm totally riveted, but I have it. I have a theory, and I just we don't talk about now. We can talk about later. We could, we could, we could say this is juicy
stuff and we can talk about later. So nobody tunes out? How about that?
Okay? Later? So we are you are literally teasing.
It's a little teaser.
You're teasing the second.
Yeah, and I've got another. I got another. I speak of teasers. Let them tell you something, I'll tell you.
I'll tell you it's just like a human Chekhov's gun here. I mean, this is amazing.
I'm not uh we in my in my in my day, in my career, we didn't call them teasers, call them cold opens. They none of we called them teasers. I can't remember. No, we are different things. I don't know. They're the same. Seriously, yeah, the same, Yeah they are. Well, we called a little bit on the on the Cheers episode that was the joke before the title, which then became people called the cold open. We just called it
a teaser. I was always called a teasers, called it teasers since time memorial that that that that's cannon that goes act to Sid Caesar. So don't let's not argue over this. And they lift them off. They've been lifting
them off to go to syndication. So because they they were non related to the story, the first thing the syndicator would do is like step off the minute and a half and that would be your used car mattress kind of ads on your local t. And there's somebody on Instagram I think maybe Twitter, maybe TikTok to and Instagram doing something called Cheers shorts where he's taking every episode of Cheers I think, and cutting them up into little instagram bable reels and they're in they're in my season.
By the way, I'm getting paid precisely nothing. Just so you know. It's a violation of every kind of trademark law there is. But nobody seems to own paramount right now, So no one's suing anybody. And he's found some teasers, and I don't know where he's found him.
Maybe they're they're on the DVDs.
Are the DVDs full?
They're probably on the and they're probably on the dv these I'm sure there must be.
Like, I don't want to apologize, Rob, I looked it up and you were correct. I shouldn't have doubted you. Yeah, I'm correct.
Okay, well I was you are What do you call it?
Then?
When when when you're when you're on a news show and it's like coming up.
Uh, the business is falling apart.
Okay, there you go. Things don't mean it's a terrible thing. It's an absolutely terrible thing, to be fair. Look, look, just because of President of the United States' account tweets out something that has an image of Barack Obama and Michelle Obama looking like apes, doesn't mean that he meant.
It no, and you know you're reading into it, and then in turn did.
Yeah, and it was funny turn uh Braxton Himmler, that's what about. That's my favorite thing that Penn did. So Penn University of Pennsylvania. The Administration UH, in its effort to deal with campus anti semitism, asked Pen to supply them with a list of professors and others on camp and administration who were Jewish, clearly to try to figure out whether or not there was some pattern of discriminatory
hiring that seemed to be working against Jews. And in order to have that kind of hard data they needed, they needed.
A list denominator right to figure out what the numer.
And then Penn, channeling Otter from antal House, does the This is the worst case of the administration's anti Semitic efforts. To you know, to sort of like target and have us named Jews on a list is the darkest thing that's ever happened. Whereas the whole point of it is to to determine whether Penn is being anti So I won't put up with this.
How Whereas everybody knows that it's everyone in the economics department.
I will, Oh yeah, yeah, you will anyway. It just it just cracked me up because it has that quality.
Yeah. Did I ever tell you that the CBS thing when I was like putting together a staff or CBS and like, this was not this was like before twenty twenty. This is before COVID. This's like a twenty eighteen or something. And they sent along thing, you have to do a webinar and all this stuff and all that because I had to. And then you're talking to the person at
CBS who was tasked with that. They hadn't quite developed the sort of post George Floyd post twenty twenty name for it, but that the person and and they that person had not taken the webinar in double speak, because that person was saying, look, you know, I want you, we want you to try to when you're putting your writing staff to look to diversity, to try higher that we're going to help you. We have a program we have just let me know. And I said, well, look,
you know, I only have you know, three slots. You know, It's like it isn't a question of like what I do, It's a question of how money I have. I don't have I mean my budget smaller this year. Well, look, we don't want to give you the impression that we're counting it up. Okay, this is not a This is not a quota. We don't have quotas. It's just at the end of every quarter, when we get the numbers, we want the numbers to be in a certain place.
I said, well that, yeah, okay, I'll do that. Well, it's like, do you.
Know about you know about one hundred percent participation game? This is my favorite. You work in a company, right, and they say we're collecting free United Way. Obviously what you do with your charitable donations is up to you. How you choose to give your money away is up to you. Whether you want to give money aways up to you. But we are looking for one hundred percent participation in your department, and we know you know we
were essentially we're watching. But of course if your if your charitable giving is aimed in a different direction, we understand that. But we need one hundred percent participation in your department, and you make up one tenth of your department, you know, so, so that kind of weird. The weird coercive non coercive language of the world of corporate double speech.
Were all disappointed. We didn't see what Bible study yesterday.
You hear that a lot, Rob, No, I think that's the first line. That's the first line of dat Problems book of About the Bush White House. Didn't see what Bible study yesterday.
We're doing Habit Cook.
That would be the easiest Bible study. Cook is the shortest book is twenty one two k's, so it's double funny.
Three yeah, three, that's a two K sounds yeah. Yeah, you never want three k want three ks? Right, I have three k's, but you never want them to rub right.
Because as we know from the Sunshine Boys, Lloyd's been a pickle is funny. Lettuce is not funny. The great is my comic Lessons of all times? All right, speaking of comic lessons of all times or comics of all times are lit. We were very sad, obviously to note the passing, the sudden passing of Catherine O'Hara and and
it's a moment. It's died at seventy one this week apparently took ill very relatively suddenly, and because she had been filming the second season of the Apple TV show The Studio when she was taken ill and then passed quickly. And it's fascinating to me because one would never like stop in the middle of the week, last week or two weeks ago to say, let's do something about Catherine o'hana, right, But then someone dies and you end up in this kind of like memorial moment where you go, oh, boy,
was she great? And then you're like, boy, she really was great like and not only was she great like, she was great for fifty years and every ten years or so there was a moment when you were like, oh my god, Catherine O'Hara is great. It's not like she faded away or went somewhere else, or she had her best moment when she was in waiting for Gusman
or on SETV. It's like, suddenly she pops up in the studio last year giving this astounding performance basically playing Amy Pascal, a version of a fictionalized version of the studio executive Amy Pascal, and is hillarious, hilarious at the age of seventy. And so I was reminded, just like, how many people like that like her have there been? And the truth is not knowing.
Most I think part of it. I mean, you know, yeah, trying to say this so that it doesn't sound like I'm some kind of crackpot feminist. But part of it is like when you're playing these female parts, right, you off especially like Home Alone is a good example, like she has to play it'd be kind of funny, but she also has to be believably a good mother, right, because so you don't believe that a bad parent, that they're bad parents, and that there's true that she really desperately needs to get.
You have to feel her pain, ads and the audience have to feel like, oh, that could have happened.
To me, That could happen to me, And she still has to be funny, and she brought that kind of humanity and that kind of like, you know, she legitimized every part she played in a way that sometimes like, look, I mean I love Anchorman, right, but you do not bel leave one second of it, and you're not supposed to.
But you're supposed to believe her when she plays Even when she plays Moira Rose on Shit's Creek, she plays a woman who's all sorts of psychotically narcissistic and everything and bananas, and she's got an accent that changes within one line, like in one line of dialogue, her accent will change. She did that, but she absolutely loves her children and would never leave her husband. And that is just a staggering performance. And she's still hilarious. So go back fifty years earlier.
On SCTV when SETV, which was the best sketch comedy show ever on television, started, she was twenty one years and she did there was this bit where Eugene Levy is Alex Trebek and he is the host of its academic.
Right, Oh my gosh, that's such a great school high school show.
And she is Mary Margaret o'hallahan. I believe it's her name. And so she's a girl from you know, Central High School and her problem is that she can't not hit the buzzer.
Now let's start the game.
The first question worth twenty points and the subject is authors Margaret Me and Parkdale.
Henry minute.
I'm sorry, Margaret, let me please finish the question first.
All right, what famous Margaret Me and Parkdale do hugo?
Oh, I'm sorry, Margaret, if you just let me finish the question first, see how it works.
Okay, what famous humors Margaret Me in.
Parkdale carry to Margaret, I'll have to ask you to please let me finish the question before answering, because that answer was extremely wrong.
It keeps going on, and the thing is, she can't help me, and as it goes on, she starts crying in humiliation because she knows she can't stick get the answer right, because she can't, but she can't stop herself, so that by the fifth time, you know, she presses the button and she's like, you know, judge Jay, and
she's like leaping and so. And the thing is, it's totally credible that she's seventeen years old, that she's on TV, and that she can't press the and it's hilarious and touching and kind of a little ruthless and all these things at once, and all she's doing is pressing a button buzzer and saying over.
And you know what's infuriating about her is that none of that, none of that was on the page. She she did it all herself. There's a moment in I talked about this in the Martini shutage about her this week in Guffman, when she's she and Fred Willard, who can't believe they're both yet it's horrible and they're they're the the local stars of the community, theater Lons of Lane. Yeah, and they run the travel agency and they're and they
do all the theater tricks and everything. Just so you just just they're they're hilarious, right, they're going into audition and the audition piece they have as they're singing, they're doing a number set to midnight at the Oasis, Ding dong, Oh, I wonder who knows I'm vacationing here at the oasis?
Am I late?
You surprised? How did you find me?
I have my ways?
Would you like to come in for coffee?
You don't need to add sir.
They just don't need to speak.
Manys and I will be your sheep.
I don't need a harem honey when you're by my side, and you won't need a.
Cam no no, when.
I take you for a ride and we need some coffee to go with that ride, won't we? We are all so surprising.
Let's say, I wonder do we have time for that coffee?
What time is it? What time is it?
Haven't you been paying attention? It's sinn I had oh, thank you good.
But for every line of dialogue that Fred Willard has Catherine Harra when she auditioning, she mouths it like she's in the elementary school play. You know, when it's not your part, you memorize the other person's part two. And it's like, I didn't notice it when I saw it in the theater. I don't think i've noticed it. I only noticed like a year ago when I saw a clip of it. I thought, wait a minute, she's mouthing. But it's like that, And nobody wrote that down and said,
mound this. That she just she's just knew who that person was, and that she knew that person was working really hard, and she knew that person was really terrified even though she's supposed to be. You know, she knew that her husband was a total jerk, which he is and was in crebby domineering and then and then and she would of course she'd mouth his words while he's talking, and he would notice because he's not paying attention to her either.
Yeah, well, I was just thinking. In the studio, which is really a very good show. The first moment you see her, Seth Rogan has found out that she his boss, has been fired and that he is taking her place, and he goes to her house to say I'm sorry, you know, but he also has to get her to sign, and he both has two motives. He both wants to say sorry and then also get get her not to sue or do something or other. And she just opens the door and she looks at him and she bursts
into tears. Instead of going oh it's you, you know, or like ah, my betrayer is here, she just sort of goes mayby and like weeps, and it's again funny, totally unexpected. It's not the scene you expected to see, and it's touching and it's me and it's true. It's like a like a completely honest piece of acting. And she's seventy years old when she does this. She was twenty one on SCTV. She was like thirty seven or
something when she made Home Alone. You know she she was you know, she was in her forties on Guffman. She was in her fifties on Bestined Show. And you know, I mean like she just a mirror alone.
Home Alone was a beginning of a billion dollar franchise. And it would not they would to be at Home Alone two or three or any of that stuff. It would not have been the biggest grossing holiday movie of all time. If it was a movie about bad parents who leave their kid at home, and she made it by good parents, I mean, that was the and.
She has that, and she has this beautiful I'm not even that fond of Home Alone, but she has this beautiful little scene with John Candy where she's in despair in an airport, in terror and despair at an airport, and he comforts her. He's like part of this band or like Poland and something like that, and they have this like two minute moment, which is, as you say, crucial to the success of the movie, because if you don't have empathy for her, you're like, WHOA, my god.
This is you think about it because Candy was at CTV two and like and Candy has that's sort of the male fat guy version of all these qualities were describing to her.
Yeah, right, that.
Ability to be a believable mensch schlub guy who's really funny but also really relatable, you know. I mean, like the fact that they both came from the same you know, training round.
As while.
I mean that's why SETV was so great because them it was you Gene Levy, who obviously also has this ability to make you feel for him and Martin Short also like has those colors and uh, you know, and and and and flavors and uh, and that quality one of the reasons they could do these like twenty minute long sketches on that on that show because they were character based.
Yeah, but some of them are so.
They were just parodic. They were character parodies they did.
But with Rick Brannis's Woody Allen and Dave Thomas is Bob Hope because Woody Allen that there was a period where Woody Allen was, like, I think he had just written a piece about it, but like just talk about how much he loved Bob Hope, how much he how much he adored by I guess he and Dick Cavot were most of the Bob Hope like fanatics. And so I think somebody SETV read that article. But oh, let's just make a Woody Allen movie about Woody Allen and
Bob Hope. Hey, how you doing? Okay? Yeah? Yeah, I tell him if your jobs to just get in the car and go like he was. He was great Bob Hope.
Yeah. Yeah, oh that was that anyway, it is if you've never watched s CTV go find CTV. Go find Battle of the PBS Stars where where Fred Rogers and Julia Child are in a boxing ring against each other.
So I do wonder, you know, I I've made this point about conservatives on college campuses having to know their own culture and the majority culture, but I always begin it by saying, Look, there's a reason why the vast majority of comedians and comic actors are Canadians, Blacks and Jews, right, And there is something about you know, Mike Myers, all those guys, they grew up what on American pop culture, but they were alienated from it too, And maybe there's
just something about being Canadian in a certain way that sorts for these kinds of personalities in the business.
I don't know, it's interesting. Well, I mean they would say like they do. And SDV did this great parody of a American talk show called The Sammy Maudlin Show, and Eugene Levy played the comedian Bobby Bittman and Catherine Harrow was Lola Heatherton, so she was some combination of Lola Falana and Joey Heatherton. And she would come in at the old pants so she looked like Sharon Stone and Casino. That's kind of how what was the vibe there? And I think that that was like when that was on,
I was the age I was. I knew there was something ridiculous about those shows. I just couldn't quite put my finger on it. And if you were a Canadian and you got there faster you were, you got faster the point where you're like, oh, this is just show
business nonsense. So by the time that that cycle was over, suddenly David Letterman had appeared and and you and you there was a guy who knew that this was show business buffoonery and he was never going to have Jerry Lewis on his show and not make it clear to
the audience. And he finds Jerry Lewis to be, you know, a joke, and that that is there was a period there where I like said, the late seventies, early eighties, maybe I don't know what really exactly when, but that they got there first because I think they saw it already from afar. And also they love it.
They loved it, They loved it, and Letterman didn't love it. Letterman was contemptuous of it. And Martin Short in his memoir actually talks about how when he did you know, these like letter perfect imitations of people, like he did this thing where he was Katherine Hepburn or he was Katherine Hepburn's nephew Marty at the Hot Car Sound. And the old point is he loved them. They loved they loved them, They didn't hate them. And Dave Thomas loved
Bob Hope and obviously working Ass loved Woody Allen. And so there were they this these were these were very accurate, often very savage parodies, right nonetheless that were based in isn't this amazing?
Right? I think also like can you believe it were Canadians are doing this? But also I mean the thing that Katherine Katherin Heppern thing I think is great because Martin Short did Katherine Hepburn's nephew. He also did Katherine Hepburn and Katherine Harrah did Katherine Hepburn. Katherine Hepburn was like an st TV staple. And I was once with a bunch of people who were at CTV. It's a long time ago, and it wasn't It wasn't Ohara, and
it wasn't Martin Short. It was like it was a Dave Thomas and Rick Brannis and in the room and we were talking about a friend of ours and I I tell you the story, that Steven Sondheim story, all right, okay. So we had a writer's assistant on cheers, an older gentleman at the time whose name was Barry. And Barry grew up in rural Pennsylvania in the fifties, I guess our sixties and was a big fan of the musical theater. If he get my drift, yeah, the code was not
yet thick, okay. And he and a friend of his, another big fan of musical theater. At high school, they took the bus early bus into I think scrand to New York and they go to New York as they're going to go see the matinee of a funny thing happened the way of the Forum, and so go see the mattine of a funny thing happened the way in the forum. I think it was the matinee. And that those days, when you were leaving the theater, there was
a phone book. There's a phone booth there with a phone book in it, and they looked up Sondheim, Thomas Stephen, and they found him in the phone book, which of course you could those days, you know, one set in place or whatever it was, and they called him to tell them how much they loved funny thing half Flora for him, and he said, get out of my way, you've fat pigs. Well, no, because this setup was slightly different. They said, Hi, we're two teenage boys who've taken the
bus in from Pennsylvania. That's exactly what he said. I'll pay for the taxi. Get over here. And they went over there, and then they then they we're all like all the writers are like everything at work stopped for the day. I'm telling you what he's telling is the story we had. Like I got to know everything. And he's like, well, I'm not gonna tell you everything, but I'll put it this way. Stephen Sondheim was one of
the early adopters of the polaroid camera. Because you could take a picture, you didn't have to get developed at the drug store. Okay, that kind of let your mind wander. But his his his, uh, his neighbor was Katherine Hepper. Yes, and I so I jumped in because I was, you know, I was gonna do my Katherine Hepper and I was
gonna did I jumped at Kathryn Hepburn. So did Katherine Hepburn, Barry, did you ever hear her banging on the door, Stephen, Stephen, you let those boys go, You send in the clowns. I'll send in the police. And Dave Thomas said, that's more of a Martin short Katherine Hepburn than the Katherine and harrickper And it's true because we always said his Bob Hope was kind of people who did Bob Hope were did his version of Bob Hope. They weren't doing Bob Hope. They were doing the day Conn's Bob Hope.
But anyway, that's why Katherine Hepper's store.
That is a great That is a great story.
The polaroid little detail. You need the detail to make it.
Real, becan detail. Yes, do you have an ad?
I do speak at pcond details. I was just busy with my anecdote. And what's interesting about this ad is that I think I'm I rarely. I mean I don't rarely. I often read ad copy for products that I believe in, but I have never really hoped for in its own Can you hear that buzzing a little bit? Okay? Because this construction going on I can't give a show up, but speak of buzzing and conflict. We hear a lot,
especially online, about conservatives attacking other conservatives. Sometimes it even seems like conservatives are fighting each other more than they fight the left. And that is where the new podcast, Conservative Crossroads with Henry Olsen, who's a senior fellow at the Ethics of Public Policy Center comes in. I love Henry. It doesn't shy away from these disputes. It leans into them by putting two conservatives who disagree about an important
issue together to hash it out on the air. Every other week, Conservative Crossroads does what no other program does. It explores Conservatism's disagreements without name calling. Conservative Crossroads is the podcast for conservatives who want to understand what's happening to their movement. Henry has been a guest on the
Rickashet podcast forever and he's always great. I am a huge, huge fan of his and I kind of feel like this is something if we're gonna if there's gonna be a conservative movement, it's gonna have to figure out what it stands for. And he's a perfect person to moderate those conversations. So I think that this is going to be a great and maybe even meaningful set of conversations.
So my hope is that we will all join Henry Olsen and his guests at Conservative Crossroads every other Monday as they hash out the ideas and principles that will decide the future of the right. You can get Conservative Crossroads from Ricochet or any platform where you get your podcasts, but I recommend Ricochet, and it's called Conservatives Conservatism at the Crossroads, and it is at the crossroads, which is
why all conservatives need Conservative Crossroads. Listen today, and I'm thrilled that Henry's doing that.
So one place that Henry Olsen has been applying his rhetorical and policy rich and pole rich wares is in the pages of the Washington Post, which of course had a gigantic layoff this week. A third of its staff apparently dismissed in one fell swoop. Everyone told to stay home eight thirty in the morning, log onto a zoom, and the people who were let go were removed from the computer system at nine am, no longer able to
have access, and were sent on their merry way. Now, if you are a person on social media, which I recommend you not be, but if you are, and you follow people in the media, which is kind of the only real reason to be on something like Twitter, because it's a way of getting news early. So my account, my Twitter accounts disproportionately weighted toward news gatherers or people
in the news business. And you would have thought that Japan had won World War Two from the tone of the writing, not only on the part of the people who had been laid off or the people who had formerly worked at the Washington Post and were watching the layoffs, but everybody else in media, that a thing of historically, historically cataclysmic awfulness had happened, and that there was one villain, and one villain alone, and that was the guy who
in the previous twelve years had lost one hundred bajillion dollars publishing The Washington Post and clearly had grown tired of losing one hundred bajillion dollars and was maybe looking to figure out a way to lose five bajillion dollars instead of one hundred bajillion dollars. And for the suffering that he endured over twelve years of losses, he has been accused of being a monster, a tyrant, authoritarian, a supporter letting democracy die in darkness and all of that. That,
of course, being Jeff Bezos. I'm told Rob, Yes, I'm told that, I'm heartless.
I should understood.
Layoffs are a terrible thing, and people suffer through layoffs, and you can't be happy about such things. First all, it's bad karma. And second of all, you know, obviously it's a terrible moment when anybody loses a job. You know what I say to that, You know why, because if I lost my job, every one of those people who got laid off at the Washington Post would be dancing a jig and writing celebratory tweets about it. Brian Stelter of CNN, who was you know, has been like
doing threnities and sorrowful this and sorrowful that. Literally said something like he hoped that Elon Musk would go bankrupt for buying Twitter four years ago or three years ago, he hoped that Twitter would go out of business because Elon Musk was such a bad person, or something like that. But not, you know, but in this case, yeah.
Whatever doesn't make it right, John, doesn't make it right, doesn't make what much right. Just because bad people do bad things doesn't mean that you that is right, it's okay if you do bad things.
I don't believe that anybody is owed a job. I've never believed that anybody was owed a job. And and so you know, I've been through job changes that were visited upon me that I did not want, and I did not I will say I did not complain because if you lose somebody's confidence or something like that, then you go on your merry way and find another way to make a living. We find another somebody else who wants the whares that you peddle. So I don't think
I'm inconsistent. And I think that they produced a garbage product, that it was a bad newspaper. It's been a bad newspaper for more than a decade. Bezos's investments did not make it a better newspaper, and that wasn't his fault because he's not the person making the paper. He's just the person paying the bills. And so, like I say, he got tired.
Yeah. I love the idea though, that all of this talk about it, all the all the complaining about this, and the moaning and whining about it, that the solution was simple puzzles, fun things, puzzles and recipes. Yeah, and uh, you know, consumer information. That's why The New York Times is robust and the Washington Post is not. Because they have puzzles and recipes five ways to cook chocolate chip cookie.
People liked that. That give them what they want. If you're not going to give them juicy celebrity stories and lurid murder accounts, which is another thing they should be doing, then give them, you know, like which TV should I buy? Which headphones are good? How do I make a blueberry pie? And uh, well here's the jumble, and they act like, oh, it's beneath us. Well, okay.
The whole point is that The New York Times is a well run company that saw was it always red, wasn't always but red tea leaves. It saw things happening, It did tests, It developed things and had a puzzle. It realized people love the puzzle, so it's like, you know, maybe we should have another puzzle. So that they bought wordle from this guy who had invented wordle online. And then they were like, you know, maybe word people love wordle.
Maybe we'll invent another puzzle, So then they added spelling. Me. Meanwhile, they always knew that the food section was popular, so and you know what people really love in the food section, recipes. So they started a separate section called cooking, and they not only did they have recipes and you had to
pay x I. There was great. There was a thing where you but they then showed videos of how to make the thing that you were making, the pasta dish that they said was really great and could take half an hour. And then they tested that. It turned out a lot of people wanted that, so they gave them more. And then it was like, well, if they like food, if they like recipes, maybe they'll also like instructions on what luggage to buy, because people want to learn, like
have some practical And then they did that and that worked. Meanwhile, the Washington Post is like Trump is bad, Trump is bad. Trump is bad, And the New York Times did Trump.
Is bad too, with cookies.
Plenty of Trump is bad, but also a rest and a wild cutter, and and and and spelling bee and Sudoku and uh, you know, the new whatever and the crossword and so it. Because when we were kids, newspapers were fun.
Did the jumble, the jumble.
The jumble, comic strips, the sports section, the.
Going up to the California. The San fr Zoo Chronicle had X rated movie listings, so you got a little like, oh look at that little jolt.
The New York Times would not two X rayed listings, but the New York List didn't too x.
Ray man that Actually, you know, people, you know, I'm not gonna go I'm not gonna go to that movie theater. But I'm I'm I didn't know that Wet Nurses was playing there, now I know. So I generally agree with all that.
I have a slightly different take in so far as I think. And I was talking to a former Washington Post guy about this, but I don't want to credit him on the record, but you know, we we we talked about it for a long time. Part of the problem. Look, so, first of all, I come to this. My dad ran a newspaper syndicate. Right, He ran features. He was the guy who discovered Scott Adams and Dilbert. He was friends with Charlie Schultz.
Right, he sent out, you should you should explain to people what a newspaper syndic it was, because this is a job that doesn't exist.
Yeah, so like newspapers used to get like, let's put it. I'll do it a really easy way for syndicating columnists. If you were the Buffalo Times Dispatch, right, and you wanted Tom Soul Tom Soul's column which appeared and that's just say for the sake of argument, the San Francisco Chronicle, the way you did it was you went to something called a syndicate and said, we want to subscribe to that column because that was the only way someone in
Buffalo would be able to see it. It was a middleman, right, And you know George will was syndicated in hundreds of newspapers.
Well, M.
Buckley was syndicated in hundreds of newspapers. But it wasn't just you know, my dad's company made a huge share of its money. Forget Peanuts, which they owned, and Garfield, which they owned for a long time. There was this thing called VCR Plus, which was this code that appeared in the TV listings that allowed you to sort of pre DVR. You punched in this code to this box and it would record. It would set up to record some show that you wanted to watch while you were
away on a VHS tape. And they licensed the ability to use those numbers and TV listings and so my dad ran features where he had stringers writing stories about state fairs or interesting animals, like don't even get my dad started on the lie about that old phrase. You know, dog bites man isn't a story, but man bites dog is a story. Because my dad tried to play stories about people biting dogs all the time and no one
would run them. But regardless, So anyway, the point is I became a syndicated columnist in two thousand, right as the syndication business was starting to die. But it took a while, and what really killed the syndication business and ultimately over time the newspaper business was the decline of the two or three newspaper town. And you know you used to be my dad would send a salesman and say, hey, do you want I don't know George Will, for say argument,
And they'd said love George Will. And the salesman would say, okay, there'll be five hundred dollars a week, and the other would be like, oh, that's too rich for my blode to say, okay, I'll go across the street and see if the post wants it. And you would have competitive pressure for building, forbidding on stuff Once the second newspaper died because of cable, this was long before Internet. The newspaper could say, sure, I want George Will. Salesman says
five hundred bucks. You say, I'll give you five, and since you that was the only sale to make in that district, you took the five bucks right. And then when the Internet comes along, it commodified all this stuff, like, if you want to read George Will or Tom Sol, you didn't need to subscribe to some local paper. You can get it on the internet at you know, a dozen different sites, the drudge link and that kind of thing.
So it kind of destroyed the business anyway. The reason I bring that up is that there was this period of time after the second newspaper died, and all of these cities where the newspaper left standing had an effect a monopoly, and they were making enormous amounts of money. And the problem was most newspapers paid dividends on their stock, and shareholders would not take cuts and dividends to allow
newspapers to reinvest in their newspapers. And so eventually, as more and more of the Internet took more and more of what newspapers do, starting with classifieds, which was like a death now.
Right.
When it became less necessary to check the newspaper for sports scores, when it became less necessary to check a newspaper for stock prices, newspapers were left with no understanding of how to like adapt, and a bunch of them just got worse and worse and worse and started selling off parts of themselves. The Washington Post lasted longer and developed a culture that was so entitled because it was a massive monopoly. I mean, John, you know better than
I do about how vicious the Washington Post was. To keep the Washington Times from getting anything like market share, they would go to a car dealerships and say, if you advertise in the in the Washington Times, you'll never write. Well, you'll never advertise in the Washington Post. They made it really hard for them to deliver the Washington Times. But so that's why Warren Buffett invested in the Washington Post. It was a monopoly and it was throwing off huge
piles of money. The problem with monopolies is they don't learn lessons from competition, and so over time the smug kind of Oh, we're the party of Woodward and Bernstein, We're the newspaper Woodward and Bernstein, that became their only understanding of their mission. What in reality, getting back to my dad's point and your point, is that lots of people bought newspapers just for the sports, or just for the local coverage, or just for the funny pages, or
just for the movie listings or whatever it was. And when a newspaper starts to think, oh, no, we have to the only reason we put about this newspaper is for a ten part series on the climate crisis in Botswana. It turns out a lot of people don't want to buy it, and The Times because it's essentially competing in one of the last multi newspaper major cities in America,
and it's also competing in a national marketplace. It's not the idea that the thing that draws me crazy is people say, oh, it's outrageous that Wordles paying for the Africa Bureau. Well, Peanuts and Garfield paid for the Africa Bureau, you know, three years ago at a different newspaper. It's like, newspapers are products, and if you just think it's your only job is to sell a pretty sanctimonious thing, and then you get bad at that. Right, They let Politico
eat their lunch. If you let another media outlet get out of front of you in the nation's capital on the beat.
Following politics, my god, that they could have start for sure. Yeah. Yeah.
Politico was done by two Washington Post reporters who went to them and said, we have this idea for a politics only internet based publication that we would do out of the Washington Post. And the Washington Post said, well, we don't want that, and they were like, okay, we'll go and raise money on our own independently and go do this and it was a profit maker in about a year. Something like that. Politico could have been inside
the Washington Post. So the thing was that the New York Times innovated and the New York Times became a is a subscription product. Remember the thing about newspapers was that they lost money on their subscribers. It costs twenty it would cost thirty five cents, or it cost fifty cents to print and deliver a newspaper per paper. Yeah, but you charge ten cents of paper so that you have advertising. So it was the TV advertising model that died because of the Internet and because classified has died
and all of that. Times figured out a way to get people to subscribe online, and so did the Wall Street Journal, and you know who didn't The Washington Post because their product was garbage and nobody.
Times iterated on the app over and over again. They were they were pushing updates on that app. It was incredibly irritating, but at the same time you understood what they were doing, which they're trying everything, and they actually were making it pretty good app. The weirdest thing about that subscriber number is that home subscribers, if in one way economically, are kind of lost leaders. But the other way, that's who you know is going to buy the paper
even if they don't want to read it. It's going to come to their door and they may not get to it, whereas people who buy the paper on you know, on the way from the newsstand are buying it because they're going to read it. And you always want to have a mix, You want to have a mix of people.
Some people were just like it's like the it's the health club, you know, the health club the gym model, like I want you to I want you to be in the gym, but I don't want you to come necessarily because if they've alybody who belonged to the Equinox showed up on Tuesday, it would be a disaster. What you want is people on you know, between January one and January ten to sign up for a year, and they never show. That's how you'd tell you pay for
the everything, the sauna and all that stuff. But the weirdest thing about I think, for all this stuff is that is that they keep forgetting that you're the only way to have a product that makes money is to give people something they actually want. And if you give them something that you think they should want, you're giving them homework, which is what the front page of every newspaper is. But if you don't give them some dessert, you know, and some little candy in there, they're just
not going to do it. And it's a very strange thing that they didn't know that. That's that's the business they have always been.
In, the reporters. So the reporters don't know that because reporters are idiots. And I mean, if you work in a business, I've worked in this business more than forty years. And if you work in a business and you get into management, for example, which a lot of people don't, but if you if you want to know your business, you have to know how it works, where the money comes from, how the advertisers interact with the business side, what comes from where, who's supporting what, what, What drives
readership and what doesn't drive readership. But your average workaday reporter journalist pays no attention because he's a sallipsist and he's only interested in what he's interested in, and he pays no attention, and he thinks that he you know, it's the it's the it's the story about the actor you know, gets a part. And then somebody says, you know, I'm in Hamlet. Oh yeah, what's that about. Oh it's about this, it's about this guy second guard.
Well, it's a William Christopher story. He played father more Kahe on Mash and someone asked him, well, what's Mash about? What's about this priest?
Yeah? Exactly No. So right, so everybody thinks that they have main.
Character, main character syndromes. Right, what I like? I don't know this. I'm this number may not be right, Okay, but the point is the same. I heard Steve Hayward said this number. It may not be right. I mean, I may be misunderstanding mishearing it. You know, one of the great tragedies of the Washington Post convulsions is that thirteen of their sixteen reporters covering climate issues were let go.
You know, this is absolutely untrue. Rob, I'm shocked that you would mention this. Really, it's fifteen out of nineteen. Out of nineteen they had nineteen climate.
I will say, and now I will say, there are only two. There are only two kinds of people in the world, kinds of people who think that's funny, and the kinds of people are like, I don't get it. And if you are and I don't get it, I have some very bad news for you. And if you if you're the think it's funny, then you understand why the Washington Post is having trouble.
So I'll just on that point where quickly, because like part of the philosophy of the Dispatch is to find market gaps where journalists, mainstream journalism is not meeting the right demand. Right and we're a small niche player all that kind of stuff. But you know, we have a religion thing on Sundays that really isn't about MAGA or you know, washing it know the story about you know, our evangelical kind of support Trump. It's about the other
things that people want to read about in religion. I've been pushing and we finally have launched this thing called Dispatch Energy. And part of the whole point of it is that is exactly this point is that I once went through and looked at the number of people who were on the climate desk at NPR, right they call it the climate disc or the climate desk at the New York Times or the Washington Post, and virtually all environments reporting is really just climate change reporting.
And what I always.
Would pitch when I talk to investors, when I talk to other people about it is that, like, I have relatives in Alaska, who are you know, they don't all think climate change is a hoax, but they're not particularly worried about it. If you live in Alaska, being told is going to get warmer, it is not the mys scariest thing. And they're pretty sort of right wing on a whole bunch of issues. They're you know, pregging mag
adjacents on stuff. But they're huge hunters and fishers, and they care a lot about like land use and water quality and conservation and all of these kinds of things, and yet go try to find coverage of that stuff that doesn't have at least three two b shore paragraphs near the top about how climate change is making all of this work, or how in an era of climate change right right, And there are lots and lots and lots of stories about the environment that have jack to
do with climate change. And it's very difficult to find mainstream reporting about the environment that isn't really just a bunch of kids just doing more special pleading about how everyone needs to care as much as they do about climate change.
Well, here's the article you'll never read, or the headline you'll never see. Washington Post financial disruption fourteen of their nineteen reporters covering lurid unsolved serial killer mysteries or let go, and I would I would submit to you, sir, that had the Washington Post had fifteen reporters covering lurid unsolved serial killer mysteries, they'd be breaking it in. They'd be printing money. Well.
Also, a more serious point, if the Washington Post cared more about local coverage and crime, which a lot of people in Washington actually care about, it would be good for fighting crime. If the police thought, oh, crap if we don't get I mean, I haven't looked in recent years, but it wasn't very long ago that the homicides you know, solve rate whatever it's called, was way below half. It's like, literally,
people are getting literally getting away with murder. And maybe if there was more political pressure that came from people reading about all these murders, the cops and the politicians would respond to it and do something that you know, made them deal with murder. And like, the people getting murdered are wildly disproportionately people of color, poor people, people
in bad neighborhoods. And yet that's the reason why they didn't want to do a lot of the local coverage is because it was sort of embarrassing to their worldview anyway.
It's very annoying.
Yeah, anyway, So I just it was. It's been an amusing couple of days for those of us who do not cry crocodile tears over the job losses of people that we do not know, because you know, Amazon laid off sixteen thousand people last month, and I didn't see people writing the you know, sadly I've been let go
from my Amazon warehouse job. He is you know, dm me on signal if you have another job at another warehouse or you know the Jeff Stein, the economics reporter of the Washington Post, saying, it's so terrible what happened in the layoffs at Amazon, because they don't like Amazon, so they don't care, and they don't care about Amazon. They care about climate change or whatever it is they care about, or they want to, you know, support Amas. They want they want to see Israel sink into the sea.
That's what's important to them. And fine, they get to have their passions if they have them. I can have contempt for them and hope that their institution fails because I think it does more harm than good. And Jeff Bezos can decide at some point that he's not going to spend one hundred million dollars on their foolishness and things that he has literally no reason to believe are making the country, as Jonah you would say, are making either the city that the paper is in or the
country that the paper is about out any better. And so what is he doing this for?
Yeah, so what is he doing?
I take your point on all the individual examples of shoden Freud and arrogance and all that kind of stuff. At the same time, I like newspapers. I want to see just Bezos succeed here. And I will say, you know, the amount of the number of people. I mean, we've talked about this years ago, is like the number of people in media is smaller than like the number of coal miners now right. It's just like there's not a lot of jobs and journalism, and I think that's bad
for the country. But I think it's also I don't know this, but I've now heard this from a couple of different people who think it's true that that Bezos and the new and will Lewis and these guys, they probably didn't want to lay off everybody in the sports section like that, or everybody in the Forum and the so many of the people in the Foreign Bureau and the Middle East BUAU and all that kind of stuff. But because of the union and the contract, you cannot fire piecemeal.
The only way to get rid of the bad apples is to throw away the good apples. And a couple people have said to me, don't be surprised if some of the non Hamasnik foreign correspondents or some of those are some of the good sports writers get hired back on contract because the Post has done that in the past, and it's a way to get around some of these kinds of problems. But I think the the the unwilling.
So my brother used to be obsessed with this, and I've thought about this in all sorts of other context about stories that newspapers will not cover for their own business self interest. And the example my brother always used to use was that, you know, my brother is the guy who taught.
Me that.
The one of the key parts of the Mob's business model is to get go after put pressure on you on things that are on a clock, right, And he learned this because he drove a fish delivery truck at the Fulton Fish Market. And if you don't get your fish delivered on time, your fish is useless. If you don't get your newspaper delivered on time, your newspaper is useless. And it's not like the Mob could stop any of these things, but it could delay it.
And the Mob owned like.
The newspaper delivery trucks for all these newspapers, and no newspaper would write about it because it would be a death now for them. And I think the dog that doesn't bark in all of this story about the role that the Guild or whatever these things are called plays in this story. The fact that no one wants to write about it is just telling. It's sort of a revealed by revealed preference.
I got one thing since you mentioned the Dispatch I want to talk about. I mean commentary, like the Dispatch is a minno in the sea of mass media mass media. I mean our podcast is now reasonably close to mass media. Was looking at some cable news numbers and our audience is not that much smaller than some of the lower ratings shows.
I've made a point to the new people. It's sort of like there's some of these charts going around about how all of these central banks their gold assets are eclipsing their dollars, and everyone's talking about how like that's so scary about lack of faith in the dollars. It's because gold is going up threefold in price. So like when ratings collapse for the networks, it doesn't really good everything.
Podcast, I will say, I'm saying so, but just talking about mino side. So I took over Commentary in two thousand and nine, and it is a not for profit institution. For sure, gets some of its money from subscriptions. It gets some money from advertising, both on the podcast and in the magazine, and then it has to rely on the large s of donors who aren't Jeff Bezos. But I have a very generous donor base, and they provide donations that are you know, tax exempt.
Can imagine. I can't.
I can't believe Rob is not making a snide comment about the quote unquote commentary donor base.
Well, he's paid by commentary, so you better watch out there.
Okay, it's like the it's like the mobbed up trucks. He just can't talk about it.
Yeah, listen, you know there are proud people. There are proud people, and I salute them and I salute their traditions.
He's a columnist with commentary. Yeah, he's the truck. I'm the truck. I'm the mafia, and he's the truck. But here's my point, which is that I took over an institution in two thousand and nine, okay, in the middle of the financial meltdown, and some of our money went down and all of that, and I'm one of my obsessions is I want to make sure the commentary survives to its hundredth birthday, which is Nomber nineteen to twenty
forty five. Started in November nineteen forty five. I will not be the editor Commentary in two thousand and four to five, should I be alive at that point, I will be eighty four years old. And I assume that I will, you know, be on a sharpest attack. I won't be on a golf course because I don't play golf, but I will be adjacent to some golf course, perhaps with one of those hats, with a little you know, you'll be on.
A golf cotp. I just won't know it right.
So, but this is like my obsession. So and I want to provide more bang for the buck and run an efficient institution. So over the course of the seventeen years that I've been the editor of Commentary, the staff has gone from fifteen full time employees to six. Now why was that possible? It was possible because as things developed, some of the jobs that existed that were part and parcel of what it meant to run a magazine no longer were. I didn't need an advertising director because advertising
it didn't work that way anymore. I didn't need a circulation director because circulation went basically mostly through an online system. And I didn't need someone to manage it day by day. I didn't need four people working full time on the website. I didn't need this. I didn't need that. I only I didn't need four editors. Basically we have two and
like that. So in the end, I have run an institution that has gone from fifteen staffers to six and has and I have done this while continuing to raise money and trying to put money away that we raise, an access and all of that. So I so when I say that I am you know, I find this
all a little appalling. I say this from the perspective of somebody who has had to make very hard decisions over the course of my tenure as a boss about employment of people and whether or not they are necessary to the core emission of my institution, and or whether it can be run by having someone double up that job.
Or you know, I edit almost everything in the magazine myself, for example, like there are a fits, whereas that wasn't always the case, and so that is something that I've done to provide for the continuing health and vitality of my small Nonetheless, its loss would be an incalculable loss in my view for American culture and American life, and so I'm husbanding it and trying to be a steward of it properly.
You are doing a great job. Has everybody told you that you're doing a fantastic.
Thank you very much. I'm very but I would.
Quibble with some of the budgetary outlays. But really, you know here there mostly it's fine. Yeah, it's fine, but you may have to cut you know, I know you have fifteen people covering the loyalty is reel first desk.
That's right, Yes, yes, it's fine. Don't look at apex foolishness in New Jersey. We are not look over here. It's terrible thing that a Muslim says, that's what we do here in commentary you do. I'm only bring this up to say this is how we this.
Is how you do, This is how we do.
This is this is what you do in this atmosphere. If you're not you know, if you what you want to do is like make something like build its foundation, make it firm, make sure that it will serve.
Nobody, nobody, nobody's You're not on trial here. John. We know you're doing.
But you know who is you know who is on trial seven years after his death, Jeffrey Epstein.
Right, yeah, let me float this to you guys. Okay, yes, now, I'm not talking about like, oh the Grand Conspiracy there. I just need a way to like, I'm baffled by who. I mean a lot of it's just that I'm a Pollyanna in any ways, and I just never imagine that this it is true. But like what I'm a'm baffled by who Jeffrey Epstein was. And I'm looking at that, and I'm looking at the emails and I'm reading them, and it seems to me that all the people he
hung out with he deeply hated. Like there's like, if you're going to create a character, he's like a character out of a Ballzac novel or a social novel from the nineteenth century. He's this guy who is connected to everyone, but he hates them. And I think that if Jeffrey Epstein could be it's alive somewhere, it could be. Possibly he's not. But if you could come back to Earth right now, he'd be thrilled at the destruction of the reputations of the people that he called. He wouldn't be appalled.
He wouldn't say, oh my god, these are my friends. So there were decent people. I think he hated them so deeply that the one person who's completely thrilled by all this would be Jeffrey Epstein. What do you think?
I mean, it's all a question of what, like what it's like the conundrum of you know, Satan in Paradise lost, right it is? Or Satan or the whole idea of the devil or something like that. Does the devil love the love the evil doers that he is brought over to his side? Or is he the ultimate enforcer of the divine? Is he there because he knows what evil is? The evil doer does the evil? The evil doer goes
to hell and the devil punishes him for eternity. Isn't he serving ultimately the moral system of good by being by enforcing the evil? So it's like, is Jeffrey Epstein? Does Jeffrey Epstein hate these people? If you're right? Does he hate them because he knows he's evil and he knows their evil and he believes ultimately that they should
all himself included, come to a horrible end? Or you know, was he Iago and evil was his good, and therefore he enjoyed being evil, and he didn't mind these other people being evil.
I think we needed like a five thousand word essay and commentary on the Theodicy.
Yeah, I agree, I totally agree.
We don't believe in the Odyssey here in Judaism.
But unfortunately you do agree with five thousand word essays. Well, I mean the question mark we not.
You say we may not believe in the Odyssey, but Theodos believes in us. Is that your point? Okay? But no, But I'm just it's an interesting question. Like that world. You know, it's like demonic types. Uh, you know, when he evokes these emails or receives these emails from people who seem relatively otherwise upstanding, who then we we we see in this gigantic dump, right, these absolutely disgusting emails back to them that we have no business seeing. We
should never have seen any of this. It's an outrage that Congress passed this law and that Trump signed it. This is an exposure of private material that people themselves who are not criminals and never did anything criminal have No, it's not our right to see it. It's a terrible thing, and I think this was a real evil thing.
Maybe they're super juicy that I'm really into them.
That's what I'm saying. So nonetheless, they're there, so we're going to react to it. And it's like raises the question like are is it when you're when you're in proximity to one of these kinds of like you're in or like the dark figure in your life. Do you just let loose and write like repellent, disgusting things in emails because you get a chance to that's your truest self.
Or do you kind of just get touched by some kind of like dark thing in yourself momentarily and then you write something about a woman's area smelling a certain way or something like that, or you write something about teenagers that you would never say never don't actually believe or whatever? What do you?
What do you?
What are we seeing in these emails? Is what I'm saying. Are we seeing these people exposing their truest natures? Or are we seeing them at the darkest at sort of these dark moments of their you know, like where they just let loose for a second, like a little they let out a little gas.
I think it's a little boat. I mean, I don't think it's binary, right, I mean, I think yeah, the I mean the we all have or have had friends who are on the sketchier side, and the way you talk to your sketchy friends is different than the way
you talk to, you know, your more upstanding friends. You know, this is that on steroids, right, Like you hit a point of diminishing returns where your friends and ceases to be just sort of have a dark sense of humor or be you know, cut corners to being a total evils comebag, and at that point you shouldn't be your friend anymore. But I think about it in some ways,
like with with Donald Trump. Right, So Donald Trump is not Jeffrey Epstein, but Donald Trump brings In order to communicate with Donald Trump, you have to debase yourself in so many different ways. First of all, just with the flattery, Like I find I'm I'm fine with complimenting people when I'm sincere. But the I find the act of complimenting people when I don't mean.
It to be it's it's it. I gag at it. I find it.
I find it like an assault on my integrity in a way that I feel just cheap and and authentic. But there are a lot of politicians who have just no compunction doing that, And there are a lot of people in business who think that's what you do in business, is you you you sing them a song to get the deal, and then just by the way, and then you talk crap about them afterwards. And so I understand that, like I have a lower tolerance for this stuff than
a lot of otherwise decent people. But the problem is, you know, our friend, you've all liven, He's made this point many times, is that cynicism is hard to sustain. And eventually, if you find yourself in a transactional nature where you feel like you can just keep making moral compromises in order to like have accessor or get a job or whatever like that, eventually you convince yourself that it wasn't a lesser of two evils thing, It wasn't a moral compromise. It's just that you bend your moral
yardstick to fit the object in front of you. And so I think a lot of people who hung out with Jeffrey Epstein, they may not have started as corrupted souls, but I think some of the people who spent more time than others got corrupted by it, or that brought out or the corrupted part of the passes of them.
Yeah, it's scratch a little itch that they have like you, if you're respectable nerdy Bill Gates or for that man or Larry Summers, that the idea that you've got this cool friend who does this stuff in this island and always seems to have these hot chicks. Even though it seems inconceivable to us that those guys couldn't do the
same thing, they didn't feel they could. So the weird currying favor with him was interesting, the weird the flattery and the hey, the chummy locker room BONHAMI with him from people who really had no particular experience with that. I mean, I guarantee you Bill Gates was not on the lacrosse team, right, So it's like there's this this
very kind of adolescent male stuff happening. And I think with him, with the Epstein, there was this contempt that you get when you've operated yourself, and you've operated enough to be in the room of the most powerful people that were completely remote to you and that you are the outside of when you were teaching at Spencer's Teaching and that you realized that they're just they're just incredibly weak, appliable, vulnerable, desperately needy guys that I can push around, and I'm
going to do it.
So you go and new flatter Donald Trump. Right, Donald Trump is the president of United States. He is the most powerful man in the world, and he his favor on You can have enormous ramifications. Jeffrey Epstein in these emails and in this file is a convicted pedophile who has pled guilty to trafficking in sex with minors and is up is on parole, and it is these people didn't say I will be friends with a convicted pedophile? Are you emailing me? Go into a hole and disappear forever.
You're evil, like there's no pedophilia is not excusable. You don't know. I agree, I agree, pay the fine and to drive again.
Already good, I have a good joke to get a sad Okay, I.
Was just gonna will close on your joke just two seconds. It reminds me of the psychiatrist in The Sopranos who tells Carmela, I'm just I'm I'm I'm entertaining this conversation with you just so you can know that you can never say you weren't told, right, And so I a huge distinction between pre revelations of of Epstein and post revelations. Right, like one thing, Oh, this guy's a party animal, and it's another thing when he's been doing.
A shocked shocked, like profoundly.
Evil things and you still want to go to his island, then it's it's a it's a completely different thing.
I agree with that.
Okay, don't we need to make some recommendations before we go, but.
We have we have a pedophile joke from rob oh pedophile choke. Yeah you want to hear it? Yeah, sure, yeah, you don't tell it. You want to hear Jock got cars speeding down the road. Cop pulls the car over. It's got two priests in it, crools to the window, says, uh, you guys are going pretty chose. Yeah, we're just we're on away somewhere, goes okay, well we just stop everybody. We're looking for two pedophiles and the priest look at each other and go okay, we'll do it now. It's terrible.
I do not approve of that anyway.
Okay, all right, So I feel like going from that to this is Okay, Joan and I would both like to recommend wonder Man on Disney Plus. Huh, yes, I've seen the whole thing. We haven't seen the whole thing. And here's what it's funny. It's a story about a superhero who wants to be an actor. He doesn't want to be a superhero. He wants to be like a guy who has two lines on American Horror Story. That's his goal in life is to be like a guy in you know, to be on to have a day
part on a rob long sitcom. But he's actually a superhero. But no, no, no, no, no no. All he likes is movies and seeing Midnight Cowboy at an afternoon show at the Arrow, and that's all he wants to do.
So it's you say, if you can save the line, then I'm all for it.
Anyway, I'm just saying that's that is the funny gimmick of wonder Man is the superhero who wants to not be.
A superst I gotta watch this.
It's sort of a heady PG version of the Boys in some way right where they do that kind of blurring. But it's like, you know, I think it's it's really interesting yeah, I like it.
I am watching the new mid Gray series that got a really nice review, and I think it was in the Wall Street Journal got a nice review, and it's I'm sort of enjoying it, but I prefer the older ones. He's the French detective at Paris, and the ones that are pure atmosphere is set in the thirties or the even the twenties. Thirties and fifties are great. And this is interesting, but it's not quite It doesn't quite have
it's more of a just detective story. That's you know, he and his wife tried to have a kid, and his wife works, and it's like, you know, it's not as good as he used to be when he come home for lunch and his wife would make him an omelet, which.
Is not what happened with Seminon, because he would come home for lunch and he would do three women, and then he would write a novel, and then he would go out for drinks at five.
Look, everybody's got their own.
I wrote two hundred novels and claimed to have had sex with twenty thousand women. So you do the math in terms of just how many days in your life? Well, Frank has sex and how many France? Right? Okay? I watched The Seven Dials on Netflix, which is an annaptation of an early Agatha Christie mystery which is set in the nineteen twenties, and it is very eye catching, but
it reminded me of how boring a Christie is. I mean, basically, Agatha Christie's most popular writer practically who ever lived, wrote sixty six books, sold one hundred millions of copies. Those books were short, they were sweet, you're in and out, and like the mysteries aren't interesting, and she she made like too interesting detective, but like, so it's.
Just it's the vicar did it.
It's just a weird nostalgia play to watch any of this because you're watching and then they solve the mystery and it's like, well, it could only be one of three people, so it's this one. It's like three cards, Like it's like a it's like a three card Bondie gap, you know. It's like, well it's one of the three cards. So all right, we gotta go. Uh, everyone's gonna leave. Have a great again, Okay, I.
Oh, can we talk about uh murdered even song? Is anybody watching that? No? Oh? I saw that. Is that a thing, Yeah, it's a brick box or or something like