they come from the bowels of hell Jungle worms and swamp rats, run around your feet. Bought a dog that killed a calf that ate the canary. What is true? And once again, welcome back. And we're back. So let's get to it. Jane Borden is here. Jane is the author of the book, Cults Like Us, Why Doomsday Thinking Drives America. This is everything I love in a book. It's informative. It's really funny.
It's about weird shit that's true, and I quite frankly can't recommend it highly enough. Jane Borden, Cults Like Us, coming right up. Also, Mike Reese is here. Mike's an old buddy of mine, incredibly smart and funny gentleman. One of the original Simpsons writers goes back to season one. He also ran the show for a time. He is now a reluctant world traveler. He goes all over the world, but he doesn't really want to. And he discusses that topic at length in his new substack, which you can get.
on your phone or computer. His substack is called Now I've Seen Everything. Mike Reese. Ladies and germs, you're gonna like it. True Tales from Weirdsville takes us into the second part of our story on the late, great David Lynch through the lens of his magnum opus, Twin Peaks. This segment covers the fascinating period from the height of his and the show's fame to their mutual absolute rock bottom. It's a very Hollywood story. It's a very American story.
From the top of the heap to the bottom of the barrel. From the bell of the ball to the bum on the bench. From the homecoming queen to a dead body wrapped in plastic. all in a period of under three years. As for me, I will be appearing, along with my close and personal friend, Dr. Z, at GalaxyCon in Oklahoma City. May 23rd, 24th, and 25th, and on May 29th, 30th, and 31st,
Bobcat Goldthwait and I will be appearing on the same stage at the same time at The Laughing Tap in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity if you plan on dying the next day. So please come if you can. In other news, my stand-up special Perfectly Normal has just passed 100,000 views. I'm very happy about that. Very flattered and gratified. If you've yet to see it, please give it a gander or a listen. The special is on YouTube and the album is on iTunes.
You can also see Dr. Z's new spring special, April with a Z, live from Dynasty Typewriter with Maria Bamford, Paul F. Tompkins, and Broadway Barbara. at Dynasty Typewriter's website or on the new Dr. Z Vimeo channel for links and details to all of this stuff. just visit danagould.com, won't you? Our show is brought to you by you. So if you enjoy it, we encourage you to become a Sky Cadet and join our Patreon. Five bucks a month and you get some stuff.
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It is a gray, rainy, windswept day high atop the Mulholland Drive view shelf here in the formerly sunny Southern California. And hopefully... to be sunny again here in the people's republic of california in the former united states my guest today is the author of a fantastic new book entitled cults like us which is
Everything you want it to be that the title implies and so much more. Beginning with the fact that I did not know that we're going to get right into from the gate is that the country in which we live. essentially as a doomsday cult. And that's the focus of the book. It is why Americans seem to be addicted to doomsday-based belief systems. And she will now correct everything I've said incorrectly. America's girl next door, Jane Borden.
Hi, thanks so much for having me, Dana. Thank you for that lovely introduction. Yeah, your book is great. We were talking before I started the interview on how, you know, when you have a podcast, you got to read a lot of books. if you want to sound like you know what you're talking about when you interview the author.
Um, but this was actually, I read it for pleasure. I just like, I just started it and breathed through it. And my, and my wife basically took it out of my hands and started reading it because, uh, it was, uh, it's, it's really, really. accessible and an easy read, but there's so much vital information in it. It's weird because we don't live in a time when cult-like behavior seems to be something we look at every day. But we'll try to imagine what it must be like to live in a culture like that.
You have written articles about cult behavior for, I believe, Vanity Fair. You wrote a big article of these. And what was the original appeal of this and how did you sort of fall into? I guess a few different roads I'd been traveling down converged. I had been reporting on cults for Vanity Fair. I started researching that beat for them, I guess, in 2017. I was a religious studies major in school, so I've always been interested in belief and its connection to identity and group dynamics.
Let me stop you right there. Yeah, please. Why in the hell? Did you become a religious studies major? Were you? Did you look at it as somebody that had a spiritual sort of yearning or quest or was it? I kind of realized I wasn't going to use my liberal arts education in any kind of applicable. way in the marketplace. And so I decided to take advantage of the opportunity to study whatever was the most fascinating thing to me.
going through the catalog of classes available. I just kept ending up in the religious studies department. That's great. That's great. But I love that I've come back around there because my plan was to enter academia in that field. And I decided to take a gap year. I moved to New York and I... randomly fell into the improv comedy scene and just pinballed off in a completely different direction. So after years... Speaking of cult-like groups.
Oh, yeah. I mean, you know, page four of the book. Was it at UCB or where did you end up? Yep. I started at UCB. I was there for several years. I'm sure we know a lot of the same people. I'm sure we do. Yeah. Yeah. It was so fun. I mean, I... foundational moment for me in my life. Improv is the best thing that happened to me next to my kid. Right. Which sounds cool to you. I've heard the latter. I've heard the latter half of that phrase a lot, never the first. you
Fair. You sound like a sane individual. Well, no, I'm a comedian. I have the soul of an improviser, but I can't bear the thought of someone else talking. Sure. Well, you're a stand up. There you go. Yeah, exactly. So so all these ideas were kind of rolling around in my head. And and since 2016, I guess, and since the election of that year, that that's when I at least woke up to how.
We are politically as a nation. And I guess I didn't see it coming because I'm living in a liberal bubble, perhaps, but. I remain incredibly saddened by the division, you know, no matter what you believe, shouldn't we at least not try to harm one another? We really have so much more in common than we do differences. And so I started trying to figure out the cause of the division and cult-like thinking is...
not only divisive by nature, but is fueled by division. It gets its strength from division. And I started seeing... All of this cult ideology I'd been researching everywhere in American culture, in secular culture, outside of groups in mainstream American culture.
I just traced the thread farther and farther back. And one day it dawned on me, oh my God, the Puritans were, I mean, today most people would call them a cult. Well, that's what... immediately uh engaging about your book is the premise being and then you lay it out very clearly that the united states is by definition, it's a cult. It's the cult of America.
People think that he's just a spice-happy adventurer. But there was so much, not unlike Paul Atreides, but it actually goes much, much deeper than that, that he was basically trying to foment. The second coming of Jesus. Yeah, the second coming. Can you go into that just a little bit? And here's what I found incredibly comforting about your book. There's nothing new. Yeah. We've done this before, and it just...
gets a little bit more every time. But we've been here. We've done that. We've been here. We've done that. Absolutely, yeah. I found that comforting too. I found comforting the research I did into the evolutionary origins of violence for the same reason. I think when you understand. patterns and you understand where they come from, it's harder to be, you know, it's harder to just fall apart over it and easier to find solutions. But let's see. Oh, Christopher Columbus.
And this is just one example of, I mean, I started pulling this thread and it just everywhere it bore fruit. I mean, this book could have been 300 pages longer. There's so much to explore. But yeah, Christopher Columbus was trying to bring Jesus back. It was his whole goal. He was...
out for money, but it was because it's very expensive to bring Jesus back. He had a checklist. He was working through specific items, one of which was, to kick all of the Muslims out of the Holy Land, and that would have required a war. And we have written evidence, correspondence between him and Ferdinand and Isabella saying that this is what he's raising money for is this war.
Yeah, he was going to get money to raise funds, to build an army, to go to war with Muslims, to foment the second coming. Yeah, that's what it was about. And he was looking for Eden. He was trying to find Eden, which he thought existed at where the nipple would be. He thought the world was like a woman's breast and that paradise was at the nipple.
which was another thing that needed to happen before Jesus would return, apparently, in his mind, and many of the people in the 1500s and starting, I guess, in the 1300s. One of the horsemen of the apocalypse. His specific job was finding That's right. That's right. He had a staff. On the top of it was a little nipple sensor. Yeah, exactly. And he waved it around like when you're looking for water. He's the world's first boob man. That's right.
He had a very smothering mouth. God's boot man. He's a boot man for God. I'm God's boot man. No, but I love the idea. address me as such then you will address me god's poop man pbm guided by uh yeah um I love the idea of Jesus just like sitting up in heaven waiting like, well, you know, A, B, and C. Come on, guys. Yeah. That's a thread you can't yank because then the whole thing falls apart almost instantly. I'm all powerful. God's in charge, but we're really waiting on y'all. Right.
And then the next step is the Puritans, who also were much closer to a doomsday cult by definition. Yes, they believed the end was near. Any day now, there were some predictions, of course, that never came true. They thought... Armageddon was going to be triggered in England. They thought God was first going to... rain-down terror in England because of England's insufficient They had insufficiently expelled the traditions of the Catholic Church from the new Protestant.
Anglican church, and they thought for this, everyone in England would burn. So when they left for America, the pilgrims, they were outrunning Armageddon. They thought they were. Right. I mean, not unlike the Branch Davidians or the Hale-Bopp people. I mean, it's kind of the same thing. It's the same thing. And it's the, and we'll get into this, but it's always, to me, the hubris.
of it is the world has been here for billions of years, but it's going to end while I'm here. Yeah. It's main character syndrome. Well put. You know, we're taught as children in public schools. The Puritans came here for religious freedom. And that is a very American sort of ethic, though we think of it as an American ethic. But the way it's phrased, it makes them sound rebellious and cool.
Yeah. Like, it's actually, no, they came here because the church that they were attending wasn't oppressive enough. They were like, no, no, we want to burn witches and be afraid of the woods. This pork chops on Friday. It is not working for us. Yeah. I mean, they they felt they were being persecuted and they were in many ways. I mean, when Mary took the throne and.
restored Catholicism to England. You know, she killed like 280 of them, burned at the stake. But yes, you're right. They thought the church was not pure enough. They thought they knew better. And could do it their own way and left to do that. But the persecution part of the perceived persecution. especially which we see which we see today which we see everywhere today yeah and that
allows you a certain amount of freedom to act against your enemies. Because if you're the one who's getting bullied, then any sort of violent... response is justified it's righteous right yeah and and that is you know you talk about our our political divide And it's not equitable on both sides to go into both sides-ism, but there is... among people on the right that the people on the left are so evil.
that anything is justified in keeping them out of power. Yeah. My friend, I have a friend who's a political commentator named Mike Murphy. And as Mike said, you know, what happened is, and this started in the 90s, we went from I'm right, you're wrong to I'm right, you're evil. And then anything is justified. But what I find interesting, and you can tell me if this is also, well, it is historically accurate. I was thinking specifically about John Humphrey Noyes, Noyes? Noyes. Every...
Accusation is a confession. You know, if you look at, yeah, if you look at the QAnon cult, which is a very, to jump ahead a couple of centuries, their big accusation. Anyone they disagree with is a pedophile. Because there's no way to counter that. It's a brilliant accusation.
Because your defense is no, I'm not a pedophile. And that doesn't help you either. As as Lyndon Johnson said, he accused the guy of cheating on his wife and his aide said, but he didn't. He goes, I know he didn't. I just want to hear him deny it. But if you look at the people that are being found out to actually be pedophiles... all these QAnon preachers. It's all of these religious people that are pointing the finger at everyone else. And for some reason, that seems to be...
either a side symptom of the personality type that becomes a cult leader, or it's an intrinsic element of it. Talk a little bit about... God's electricity and John Humphrey noise. That was the one that really rang my bell. I was like, oh, this guy could be alive. This guy could be alive today. Oh, yeah. And if there were a cult, I would join. I think this one's the most interesting to me. So he was part of what we now call the perfectionist movement. And this was in the late 1800s.
lots of communes at the time. It was almost like the 60s in the fact that people were setting up experimental communities everywhere. most of which would not by today's definition be considered cults, but the Oneidans certainly were. And John Humphrey Noyes was their charismatic leader. And his whole idea was that... We don't have to wait for God to deliver New Jerusalem to us. We can bring it on ourselves.
which is a very American ethic, agency, that can do Protestant work ethic. So he thought that the way to get to God and to perfection... Because he believed that we all have a little bit of electricity in us. This was at the time when scientists were understanding electricity as a force, and he caught wise to that.
He thought Jesus was pure electricity and that we each have a little bit of electricity in us, a little bit of Jesus in us. And that when we connect our batteries to one another, so to speak. we increase the electrical currents within us and get closer to God. And so the more sex and the more different partners, specifically, the closer we can get to heaven. He put out a decree at one point that they were heaven. They had created heaven. They had gotten there.
Guys, I just got the memo. We made it. We made it. We did it. Like George Bush with the... Yeah, mission accomplished. Mission accomplished. Wait, it's raining. It's muddy. It's muddy in heaven? I have a cold. That's strange. He fashioned himself as a god, as cult leaders always do. But he was... I'm looking at my notes and I have... John Humphrey noise equals super pedophile. Yeah. So he was really into, he was really into people that he shouldn't be having sex with.
Yeah, so he felt that since sex was like one of the main bags. in their community that young people needed to be initiated into their whole process, which he called complex marriage. The idea was that he eventually created this system called Ascending Fellowship. And the idea was that... The older women would initiate the younger men, which worked out well because the older women couldn't get pregnant and the younger men weren't very good at controlling their seed.
Oh, that was sidebar. And another idea in the community was that the men were not supposed to ejaculate. which was ultimately because babies were expensive. They needed to find a way. They weren't making enough money as a group. And they were like, well, what do we do? We stopped making babies. And he was like, oh, actually, if you want to get to God, just don't come. I mean, it's absurd.
And that's the interesting thing, because this also existed in Synanon in California. That whenever there is a problem... They just invent a new rule to counter the problem. It's like, hey, we need to fix the roof, but we don't have the money. No, you're not supposed to have roofs. That's a new thing. Did I not mention that? Everybody needs a hole in the roof. You know, it's just like, and people, and that leads me to a question that I had.
You know, one of the, I think you say three or four rules of cult. You need a charismatic leader. Who's worshipped. Who's worshipped. And then. Undo influence. Coercive control. Coercive control. Economic deprivation. Well, so so then the third element would be, yes, economic deprivation, isolation. Those are forms of coercive control.
controlling what people eat, changing people's names, keeping people up all night. Those are all part and parcel of coercive control. And then the third criteria... The third criterion is that actual harm is done, whether to people within the group or outside of the group. Right. And which can which which. puts into place an us versus them mentality that drives you towards the leader.
That's right. You know, in any group of in any group of three people at some point, two are going to turn against the other. And those two are going to bond much tighter. I can only point to the jam as an example. What's the jam? The jam is a power trio group in the 70s, maybe. definition. Ladies and gentlemen, a cheap trick is the finest example of this mentality. But here's my question. I'm sorry. Okay, okay, okay.
These leaders that come along, are they really that charismatic or are their followers just really that feeble minded? Interesting. Feeble-minded being, by the way, a scientific term created during the eugenics craze, which was also, as I explore in the book, very cult-like. There's a lot to unpack there. And I also, if you'll allow me to make a couple of quick clarifications. because we mentioned the definition of a cult. By that definition, the Puritans and the Pilgrims
were not cults because you could argue that there wasn't a charismatic leader being worshipped. Now, Jesus was a charismatic leader whom they worshipped. However, he'd been dead for 1,600 years. What about to that point, Mormonism? Well, I think a lot of people argue that Joseph Campbell was...
worshipped as a charismatic leader. And then the church changed quite a bit after his murder. People say cult plus time equals religion. And that happens a lot that what we think of as cults become institutionalized. And often that happens when there is no longer a charismatic leader and they get a more democratic power structure in place. It will be interesting to see what happens. to the MAGA grouping when their leader is no longer...
Mm hmm. I mean, I often what happens is when the cult leader dies, the spell breaks and it just kind of dissipates. But let's see. Yeah, we're discussing. Are people just that feeble minded or are leaders really that? really that uh charismatic i mean i'm just gonna pull one like like mother of god like amy carlson the mother god yeah
I don't look at that person and go, my leader. Yeah, no. And she was certainly charismatic and to some degree controlling, but she was not a traditional cult leader. Love Has Won was a group that... Very recent in the last, you know, five years. It fell apart. She died. I believe, as do some others who've studied the group, that it was... suicide by addiction, essentially. This was the woman, her corpse was silver because she'd been ingesting.
Colloidal silver? Yes, the substance which she believed was a panacea of sorts. Which will also make you turn blue if you take too much of it. Yes, her body was like bluish, purplish, silver-ish, the corpse was. And they were driving it across country. They decorated it in lights. So it was grim and gruesome and got a lot of attention. What's fascinating to me about this group is that...
Her followers, I think, were driving the train. And it's usually the other way around. I think they really wanted... to have a leader to follow, and they thought it was she. And also, this group is important in my mind because a lot of these followers were looking for health care. because they'd been burned by the inadequacies of our healthcare system or sick care system, as people call it. But at any rate, in a typical cult,
And I think the question you're getting at, it's a little bit of both. You know, I wouldn't call followers feeble-minded, though. I think that... First of all, people join cults at moments of vulnerability. Anyone, anyone, it can happen to anyone. a typical type of person who joins a cult. What's typical is the context in which they join the cult. So it happens after the loss of a loved one, after the death of a loved one, after divorce.
Kids go to college and they've lost their cutoff from their communities and they're in a new place. That's why cults often recruit on college campuses. So it's when we're isolated from community and it's when we're lonely. And that's why. social media has, in my opinion, driven cult participation.
in the nation because it's isolating us and dividing us and we're experiencing a loneliness epidemic right now. And so the other thing at play, though, is these leaders are charismatic, sure. I think... that is to a certain degree the charisma is to a certain degree part of it i mean the the effect that people describe these people like the way he looked at me you know what i mean it's a thing it's palpable
Anyone could Google, how do I start a cult and do it tomorrow? It's not that hard. The thing that's stopping you, Dana Gold, from starting a cult is the fact that you have empathy. It's literally the only thing in between most people. and starting a cult. Recently, empathy has been in the news. Because a wealthy, powerful person said that empathy was one of the leading contributors to the downfall of Western civilization.
You try to maintain an objective distance, but it's right in your face. It's like you're not even subtle about this. Yeah. And I often wonder, let's use a great microcosmic example, because the numbers are finite of the followers, but their actions were agreed. You know, Charles Manson, you know, grew up in jail and was in and out of prison, read Andrew Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, read Dianetics.
I learned how to control people by growing up in prison and hearing how to control people from pimps who are very good at finding disenfranchised people and controlling them. And that was basically what he did. He went out, he love bombed, he found these sort of lost lambs, love bombed them. isolated them. I mean, it's just, you tick the box. Yeah. I also think in his case,
you know, the heavy ingesting of drugs, separated people from their sanity. How much of that is also these people all have something wrong with them or they would not do what they do? Like, you know, kill people. Was Hitler evil or crazy or both? There's a line, you know? Yeah. I mean, evil is a whole other conversation, which, as you know, I explore a bit at the end of the book. Right. And I will say I was very flattered. You mentioned me by name.
to me. Evil incarnate Dana Gold case study A. I mean, look at him. The piece of evidence, you know, fired from the Catholic Church. There you go. There you go. I believe that when... I believe that the search for power, which is insatiable, begins with people who lack empathy. And the more power you get, the less empathy you have. You know, studies have shown that the effect of power on a person causes that person to focus attention more on themselves.
But attention is, we have a limited capacity for attention. So the more attention you're focusing on yourself, the less attention you're focusing on other people. And it is by focusing attention on other people that we develop empathy because, for example, when you're talking to someone, you literally mimic their facial expressions. So if someone is sad, you unconsciously mimic.
The facial expression. And then you feel the emotion. So it's the physical state that leads us to the emotion. But if you're not paying attention to someone, you're not mimicking them, you're not. taking on their emotions. And so you're... Your well for empathy gets drier and drier the more and more power you seek. And the search for power, as I said, is insatiable. And so people who are currently running our country, elected or otherwise.
started out, maybe not with a lot of empathy, and then we're watching it just completely drain out of them. And that's how cult leaders go from being somewhat problematic narcissists. to megalomaniac financial and sexual predators. Right, right. And they have to do it because they need the fix. Yes. You know, they're never... The power fix. Yeah, and they're never...
Are these people, I was going to say, are they happy? Are they capable of being happy? Or do they live in a constant state of dissatisfaction because there's never enough? That's a great question. I would say probably a little bit of both. I mean, I think they find the trappings of power attractive.
Trump talk about how good the like services at the White House. Right. Yeah, sure. Yeah. You know, I think I think they like all of that. And I think they like the sex or whatever, you know, if we're talking about a traditional cult leader. Right. But yeah, I would say ultimately they're dissatisfied. I mean, studies into happiness show several things. First of all.
When you're actually searching for happiness, you're going to become unhappy, which is something I explore in the chapter on the self-help industry. But also that... Happiness is found in other people. Happiness is found in mutual aid. Happiness is not found in financial success, career success, any of that. We're a social species. We evolved because of our ability to cooperate. those of us who could cooperate passed on our genes.
stays with us. Right. And it's interesting that you talk about the self-help industry, which can be very predatory. And there is a lot of... cult-like exploitation that to a standard empathetic progressive you know, would come from a good place, but it immediately devolves into that puritanical. punishment, excommunication. I have four brothers, a sister, and my dad. They're all still ongoing franchises. And they all... You know, they're Trump supporting Fox News, gun owning.
We don't discuss that stuff. But I know them as people. I know that they would help you if you had a flat tire on the side of the road. So I have to look at the things that they look at me and roll their eyes. In retrospect, it was kind of creepy when Oprah Winfrey called Obama the one. I can see how people would go, it's a little, it's a little much. You have to start with yourself. Am I in a cult and I don't know it?
Like, you know, I wake up every morning and I can't believe that anybody is going along with what is going on. So maybe I'm not. What does your wife say? Oddly, we don't speak. No, she has an ability to... take it in and compartmentalize it and move on with her day. And she's just like, half the time she'll look at me to go arguing with a bot because, you know. You know, nine times out of 10, Lib Hate and Dad is just a software program.
You know, it's true. I gave to his Patreon. But it is true. It's like I am literally doing exactly what they want me to do. Old man yells a cloud. You said when you talk to someone who is sad. you mimic their expression, you meet them on their level, and you take on their feelings. In writing this book, did you speak to people that have been in these situations? Are you now, did you have to put up empathy boundaries for yourself? Did you become trauma informed in writing this book?
I lived in a dark space for, it's been five years, I guess. It can be very dark, and that is specifically why I wanted to fill the... fill the book with some lighthearted humor when possible. Yeah. It's really cool. That's the book's really funny. The book is really fun. Thanks. It's also a compulsion. I can't help. Yeah. You're preaching to the choir. But it's not mocking humor. I mean, if there's ever anyone I mock, I guess it's the megalomaniacs.
I was reading it very late. I actually woke my wife up because I was reading it like one in the morning in bed. And it was when he was like, I've been in the sorority. I know what's up in that top room. It's cocaine. So. Yes, it's dark, no doubt. But I found it all, and I alluded to this earlier when I talked about studying the origins of violence. I found it all strangely comforting because, as you said, we've been here before.
And because when you understand how the card trick works, you don't fall for it anymore. Right. You know, I hope your listeners will want to buy my book so I can continue to have a career, but mostly I hope that they'll want to buy the book because I'm trying to spread. The trick, I'm trying to spread the solution. This is how it works. Because if we see it, we have to start seeing it and then acknowledge it.
And then we can all stop falling for it. And it works. It is the same trick. It's the same trick. And we've hundreds of years. You know, yeah. And it's just like, yeah, they do it because it works. Because it works. And I, you know, we've spent a fair amount of time talking about the far right. And that's certainly part of it.
Especially now. So you might be hearing this and think, well, I'm not falling for that. But it's so much more pervasive than that. Like I said, the self-help industry, it's in, of course, advertising and public relations. The American sales economy in general is just riddled with it. It's in the way we understand our very identity as Americans.
whole rebel idea for freedom it's it's all wrapped up in it you talk about the anti the anti-intellectualism movement um and we see it now uh in the the hatred of experts And the theory is I don't have any expertise. I'm just going to go with my gut. That was the appeal of George W. Bush. I go with my gut. I can see how my brother would look at George W. Bush and look at Al Gore and go, I'm not voting for that guy. I'll vote for them.
There's an element of that that's admirable, that's sort of egalitarian, but there's also this insane narcissism that... anybody who knows more than i do is suspect i know just the right amount of stuff You know, it's not a bug. It's a feature. Right. Of the American mentality. Absolutely. And it's very puritanical. They were trying to distance themselves from. from Europe, from the manners and elitism that they believed was persecuting them and ignoring them.
Satan became conflated with... the princely gentleman, the suave, well-dressed character, and the Puritans lionized the simplicity of dress or manners or thought. Let's talk about the self-help industry and how it and what you call LGAT, large group awareness training, that these things that employ these things that employ cult. methodology that you wouldn't think would be a cult. So... Large group awareness trainings really exploded in the 70s and...
This one scholar I interviewed for, it says it's everyone's every group is two degrees from Scientology. They all people who started these groups all went through, you know, at least a month or two of Scientology and then stole some of the ideas. But, of course, you won't be surprised to hear that I believe this all traces to the Puritans as well. This intense, compulsive self-investigation. It's in the DNA. It's in the DNA.
Of the country. Of the country. Of the country. So a large group awareness training, the one people are most familiar with today is called Landmark. But there have been so many. Insight was a big one. Landmark grew out of one called S. Yeah, I was wondering if your parents have. No, I've heard of it. I'm very old. And the whole idea was that 100 people or so get into a conference room for a weekend. It was usually two weekends in a row.
So four intense days of self-investigation, group training. And they were hugely successful. I mean, the nation went crazy for them. And Est had a lot of bold-name devotees like John Denver. I'm not going to remember them all off the top of my head. Famous megalomaniac. But he was apparently a real bastard. Oh, that makes me so sad.
Never meet your heroes. So I believe these groups genuinely helped a lot of people. People got a lot out of it. For some people, it was life-changing, but for a lot of people... Weren't John and Yoko big S? They dipped their toe in everything. I'm not sure. That didn't come up in my research, but it doesn't mean it wasn't there. But a lot of people experienced legitimate psychological breaks.
So these programs, what they would do is they would kind of tear you down and then build you back up. And some people... just never left the teardown phase. And they were in psychiatric wards for months. I mean, it took some people years and years to return to work. And so there were real psychological manipulative techniques at play in these groups that are traditionally cult-like, if you start to investigate them, you know, to any layer beneath the surface.
I think part of the reason for the incredible success of these groups is just because people hadn't really been doing therapy. I mean, therapy had been around, of course, for 100 years or whatever, but there was still stigma. around it and people weren't really exploring it and and in this group It was much more comfortable and approachable, and it became this cool zeitgeisty thing to do. And so that's, in my opinion, why they found any success at all.
They became very culty toward the end when you were at your highest high, which was all manufactured. The breaking down was manufactured. The rebuilding was manufactured. Oh, you had a breakthrough. Let us show you that you did. Oh, I guess I had a breakthrough. And then they ask you for all this money and they ask you to go out and recruit more people and they became huge money-making machines.
And the one I explore, well, there's a couple I explore in depth in the book, but one of them was a feeder into an actual cult, a movement of spiritual inner awareness. which Insider is called Messiah. Very handy. I mean, that's just good branding. And that was led by a guy named John Roger, who was raping a bunch of men in his organization in addition to taking people's money, et cetera, et cetera. And let me guess.
He talked a lot about the evils of homosexuality. Oh, for sure. I'm sure. I mean, I'm not remembering, but I know that he was not honest about his homosexuality and was not a fan. So the Puritans... were obsessed with self-investigation. They believed in predestination. And by the way, I'd just like to acknowledge, because I've been getting some emails from people, the Pilgrims and the Puritans were different groups. I do explain all of that in the book.
But they were all radical Protestants, and I'm exploring radical Protestantism, so here we go. The Puritans... arrived prior to the pilgrims. No, 10 years later. The pilgrims were 1620. The Puritans started coming in 1630. Right. Yeah. The main difference was just that the pilgrims were separatists.
They were like, forget you, Church of England, we know better. And the Puritans also thought they knew better, but they wanted to purify the church from within rather than throw the baby out with the bathwater. So, they all believed in predestination, the idea that God had already chosen who would and wouldn't be saved, and there was nothing you could do to change that. And there was also no way to know.
However, they were like, well, but we're pretty sure we're chosen, right? And the way they came to that conclusion was through these trials of self-investigation. They would literally just sit and think and try to find within them. signs of election, of being chosen.
And then you would kind of come out of it and you would be like, yep, I saw it. I'm in the tribe. Or you'd be like, I don't know. I'm wracked with guilt. What is it? And the church magistrate would be like, well, keep looking. And so over the years. as power corrupt. And the Puritan church magistrates, I mean, this was a high control group. So over the years, as they became...
more eager to hold on to the control and power they'd acquired, they made it more and more difficult to gain entry into the church. So you could only get into the church if you could say with certainty, I looked inside and I'm among the chosen. And so over the years, they would say, are you sure, though? But are you sure? But maybe you should go back and check again. Probably. You're not. You're probably you're not sure.
And so church numbers dwindled. At any rate, this is all very culty. I see a lot of this in the patterns today in the self-help industry. If we solve your problem, you're not a customer anymore. We don't actually want... to help you improve. We want you to keep coming back. But are you sure? But are you sure you're happy? And the home of our funniest president, Richard Nixon. So. Mr. Giggles, as he was known to his friends.
People thought that was his pet monkey, but no, it was him. Have you ever gone to the Nixon Museum? No. I was very obsessed with Nixon for a long time. Okay. Just because he's so Shakespearean. You know, very Shakespearean. Yeah. And you go to the Nixon Library. And there's a thing you can ask him a question. And what it does is it just has answers that he gave in other interviews.
And so if you just ask him a question, right? Yeah. And you just like, what's your favorite food? And you press a button and it's a clip of him talking about his favorite food. And the clip is favorite food. It's just Richard Nixon going. There's nothing quite like a char-grilled hamburger. Very American answer. Yeah. Probably his favorite fruit was like asparagus. Yeah. But you know, remember, remember, remember when he was.
the worst thing. I remember a time when I, and this is why I, again, like you have to apply this litmus to yourself and you have to look at your work. and be sort of rigorous in your own policing. I can remember a time in my adult life. When I couldn't imagine anything worse than Mitt Romney being the president of the United States. And today I would crawl over glass. Please, please bring us Romney.
When the FTC started going after Amway, they had a closed door meeting with their buddy, Gerald Ford, because they all grew up around the same place in Michigan. And then shortly thereafter, the case kind of petered out. And Amway was found guilty of like one charge. They paid some money, paid a fine and it went away. But they were not found guilty of being a pyramid scheme of like the market saturation, the pyramid structure.
And so, therefore, basically the court said the sky is green and we all bought it. And now MLMs have proliferated at a staggering rate. Because they're all able to say, We're structured just like Amway. It's interesting, too, that a lot of those MLMs are based on vitamin supplements, which... which in and of themselves are by and large hollow things. It's like, it's a ghost selling an invisible thing. It's the whole thing is based on consumption economy. Yeah.
So you've done all of this research, you've done all of this work, and you've seen this pattern. Are you hopeful? I am hopeful to a fault. That's maybe just my personality. I believe that... Well, research suggests that cult-like thinking increases during times of crisis. During times of when people feel their worlds are wobbling because we desire control, it's part of the human experience is to want to control the chaos. Right. People often turn to religion for that.
technological revolutions lead to increases in cult participation and increases in cult-like thinking. We're certainly experiencing that right now with social media and AI. major shifts in, was major societal shifts. lead to increases in cult-like thinking. America is going to be minority majority in just a few more years. General crisis leads to increases in cult-like thinking, you know, climate change being arguably the biggest crisis we've ever faced.
I think the biggest contributor right now to the crisis-led increases in cult-like thinking come from income inequality. Americans are chronically... Unresourced. This has been happening since the Reagan administration. We've seen money trickle up. We've seen wealth redistribution, essentially, in a variety of ways. Tax cuts. Corporate profits only going to the top. Lobbying to decrease regulations that allow for risky behavior that bankrupt.
coffers, subsidies, tax breaks. I think I said, I mean, it goes on and on and on. Money has risen to the top, which we all know. Yeah. Any chart. We'll show you the income inequality. And I don't know why somebody who doesn't run for president just walks out with a cardboard chart of like. This was the difference in pay from the average worker and the average CEO in 1977. This is it now.
it was 20 and now it's 300 right many times more now it's 300 times more yeah yeah and so uh and the problem is the people that are in the 20 There is this belief that those people are just. died in the wool socialists, waiting for the right candidate to make them. No, they're just, they're embarrassed that they're not in the 300 yet. Well, we've been taught to worship the wealthy, which is chapter six.
in the book, and that comes from the Puritans. And we've been taught that if you don't have money, it means you're a sinner, and God...
looked at you and decided you weren't worthy. And so instead of helping poor people, we punish them. Right. So how is it that you are hopeful with all of this? Because I think as soon as we can diminish the wealth gap and get people resourced, that they're going to stop falling for con artists and demagogues and cult leaders and autocrats, self-fashioned autocrats. Now, of course, how do we...
diminish the wealth gap, you need another expert on your podcast for that. But I think none of it, we're not going to have the political will to do any of it. until we start turning toward one another. And so, like you said, you talk to your family, you find ways to talk to them. We have to bridge the divisions that are feeding. cult ideology, because ultimately the people benefiting from the divisiveness in our nation are the billionaires.
And the more we can turn toward one another, the more we can bridge division within ourselves, which is the division between the mind and the body, the gut, that's also very Puritan, this idea that nature is evil, but we have this soul that's going to escape and go somewhere else. That's the kind of division that cult leaders can prey on and take advantage of people that way. Oh, don't listen to your gut.
It's like, well, my gut is what's telling me that you're abusing me, right? Right. So the more we can bridge the divide between the way humans see ourselves versus the rest of the planet. That would diminish extraction economics. I mean, division is the problem. And so mitigating division, in my opinion, is the answer. And we have resourced the chronically under-resourced before. It happened after the Gilded Age. It happened after the trust busting.
It led to a golden age of democracy and we invented the middle class. And arguably that's when America was at its strongest. So I do think it's possible. I think. you know, Trump and Musk, et cetera, are... destroying the American government right now. And that's terrifying. And all I can hope is that If it gets destroyed so thoroughly, perhaps from its ashes, we can build something better. The actual leader's definition of leadership being someone who cares for the people that are.
under their care, actual leaders have to get into power first, of course. Yeah. And I look at that as, you know, will it be that with the economy? Like, you know, once they trash the economy, which they're doing aggressively, will people catch on or get fed up? I don't know if they will. And I don't know if they'll understand. And who actually did the tooling to them. Right. But what I go to is.
Why are they doing it? Because they're looting it. They're looting it. If only I had hope. You're much more hopeful than I am. It's right here. you know, the technological revolution, social upheaval, crises. We are in a perfect storm of elements that put people into a place of insecurity and pressure that they fall for this stuff. It is also just as predictable that that cycle will complete. And the results of that will lead to circumstances. that allow people to make better choices.
I look at it all as evolutionary hangovers. Yeah. You know, we're just... Well, that's what conspiracy theories are. Yeah. Our tendency toward them is an evolutionary hangover. Yeah. And the idea of like, let's give that chimp a flamethrower and see what happens. It's not going to be good. What is the goal that they're looting at? Because I think money is power. There's not really a distinction. What do they want non-monetary power for? Monetary power, you get both. You get money and power.
Bill Murray said a lot of people want to be rich and famous. They should try just being rich. To anyone listening, Jane Borden's new book, Cults Like Us. It's an easy read. It's a brief read. It's really funny. And it shows you chapter and verse. This happens repeatedly. So in a way, it's an oddly very comforting book to read because...
Yeah, we've been here. We've done that. And we got out of that. We've been here. We've done that. We've got out of that. We've been here. We've done that. And we've got out of that. So to that end, it's a book that I would actually buy, buy to people and give them. Thank you for taking the time to come on the show. Dana, thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure. I'm okay. I'm going to hit record and we'll start the interview.
popcorn rich with hot melted butter steaming hot coffee your favorite cigarettes Make sure you get yours and enjoy it now. It was May of 1990, and David Keith Lynch of Missoula, Montana was on top of the world. His television series, Twin Peaks, co-created with Mark Frost, which had premiered in April and was only halfway through its first season run, was well on its way to becoming a global pop culture phenomenon.
His new film, Wild at Heart, had just won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. beating out such other movies as Akira Kurosawa's Dreams, as well as new films by Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, and Clint Eastwood.
Lynch was able to share his prize with his beautiful and talented partner the actress Isabella Rossellini. To add yet another layer of icing to this already well-frosted cake So popular was Lynch's TV show that on every Thursday night during the Cannes Film Festival, the festival itself held a Twin Peaks party. so attendees could drink coffee, eat pie, and watch the latest episode of the show.
1990 was the summer of Lynch. The throw caution to the wind party of the Reagan 1980s was in the rearview mirror. And Lynch's dark, twisted view was just what the doctor ordered as America began to reckon with the inevitable hangover. In a few months, as Twin Peaks was preparing its second season premiere, Lynch would grace the cover of Time magazine, labeled America's Czar of the Bizarre. The problem with being on top of the world is, where do you go from there?
Let's start with Wild at Heart. Yes, it won the Palme d'Or, but it was not universally loved. Among the con attendees loudly voicing their unhappiness with the choice was film critic Roger Ebert, who was not shy in any way about his disdain of Lynch's previous film, Blue Velvet.
was no better. You know, I've thought a lot about this movie since it won the Cannes Film Festival last May, which I totally disapproved of. And I think what bothers me the most about David Lynch is what I would call his only kidding syndrome. He wants to deal with the most shocking possible imagery. He wants to deal with subject matter that involves violence and images that are sure to absolutely repel the audience, and then he wants to always end with a punchline that's a joke.
I hate it when Lynch tries to get off the hook of his violence by giving us those cornball laughs at the end of every one of those sequences like that. The reviews were mixed. Its box office take was good, but not great. It's not that the film wasn't of its time. It was. It just showed up a little too early. Barry Gifford, who wrote the novel it was very loosely based on, called it a big, dark musical comedy. The key word...
for Wild at Heart, being dark. The late 80s and the early 90s were a dark, weird time. The country felt like a boiling pot with the lid clamped down just a little too tight. Lynch described the mood in an interview printed in the book, Lynch on Lynch. The atmosphere gets stranger and you pick up on that. Physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual bodies get affected by it, whether you realize it or not.
There's a tension in the air and it's not going away. It's building. And there's a feeling that you can't plan for the future. You think more short term. Get it while you can because the way things are going, it ain't going to be there after a while. You get shot down in the street. You can't drive on the freeway. I almost have a heart attack on the freeway. People drive like four inches apart at 75 miles an hour. The speed limit is 55. Everybody's right on the edge.
It's like being locked in a building with 10 maniacs. Wild at Heart's detractors considered the film too weird, too violent, too extreme, lacking in the folksy charm that Twin Peaks employed to soften the blow, as it were. The Washington Post said, if Twin Peaks hinted at menace and a world gone wrong, wild at heart rubs your face in it. But the film did speak to the menace. and the sense of a world gone wrong that really was in the air at that time.
As I said, it just spoke it a little too soon. 20 months after the film's release, in the spring of 1992, a group of Los Angeles police officers who'd been caught on film blatantly beating the shit out of a guy named Rodney King were all acquitted. And David Lynch's beloved Los Angeles exploded in fire and rage that came to be known as the Rodney King riot.
That same year, Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs embraced a level of on-screen mayhem that, despite coming only two years after Wild at Heart, seemed right in sync with the time. The following year, Michael Douglas' falling down told the tale of a Los Angeles man who'd had enough and takes matters and a shotgun into his own hands.
In 1994, Pulp Fiction, and more specifically Natural Born Killers, which bore more than a passing resemblance to Wild at Heart, became hipster film nerd darlings. But all of that was in the future. As David Lynch flew home from Cannes, his flight was headed for Los Angeles, but his work lie in the second season of that mythical town in the Pacific Northwest, Twin Peaks. No one involved in the show was prepared for its success. not on the show or at the network.
In retrospect, there was no way the second season could have held up to the level of mania of season one. The first season of the show was comprised of the 90-minute pilot movie and only seven episodes. all written and filmed before the show went on the air, in a vacuum, free from scrutiny. Season two had a full order of 22 episodes, nearly three times the size of season one.
And it went into production at the height of the show's mania, when you could not walk down Melrose Avenue without seeing at least a dozen people wearing Who Killed Laura Palmer t-shirts. That was the question on everyone's lips. It was an inspired promotional gimmick. If you can call blatantly ripping off Dallas's Who Shot JR inspired. The audience was clamoring for the answer.
The problem was, David Lynch and Mark Frost did not want to give them the answer. The premise of the show would be the pursuit of that mystery. That would be the thread that flowed throughout the entire run of the series. Were it to be solved, were it ever to be solved, it would have been in the very last episode ever, whenever that was. The model for this was a TV series called The Fugitive, which ran from 1963 to 1967. The Fugitive told the story of Dr. Richard Kimball, played by David Jansen.
and later by Harrison Ford in the film adaption. Dr. Richard Kimball was on the run after being falsely accused of killing his wife. And he went on little adventures as he searched the country for the infamous one-armed man, who only Dr. Richard Kimball knew. The series finale shown in 1967 was a huge mega blockbuster television event. It was watched by 78 million viewers. 72% of all households watching TV were watching The Fugitive.
The Super Bowl is usually good for about 42%. The Fugitive was so influential on Twin Peaks that a one-armed man was put into the cast. Portrayed by Al Strobel, he was originally intended to be just a quick cameo, a nod to the show's debt to The Fugitive. But Lynch and Frost were blown away by Strobel's Shakespearean voice and acting chops. and he quickly became an indispensable part of the cast. Indeed, it is the one-armed man known as Mike who intones the famous...
Through the darkness of future past, the magician longs to see one chance I'll... between two worlds. Fire, walk with me. The problem was the audience wanted to know who the killer was. And when they didn't find out, some of them stopped watching. To make matters worse, ABC had been sold to a giant media conglomerate named Cap Cities. And Cap Cities was very conservative.
The suits in the executive suites at Cap Cities were uncomfortable with Twin Peaks, and bowing to pressure from upstairs, ABC head Bob Iger, who did fight hard to get the show on the air to begin with, made the suicidal decision to move the show out of its Thursday night time slot on over to Saturday nights at 10. also known as the death slot. Now, this was not an insurmountable problem. But it was a problem that could have only been solved with everybody on the same page and all hands on deck.
Lynch had a lot of other stuff to do. In addition to Twin Peaks, he had in the past year co-created another show with Mark Frost, American Chronicles, and two other series were in development. He created and filmed Industrial Symphony No. 1, co-wrote an album for Julie Cruz.
He directed numerous TV commercials and music videos, including Chris Isaac's Wicked Game. He still spent time with his other loves, painting, photography, sculpture, building furniture, and oh yeah, did I mention he had a family?
Mark Frost wasn't around as much either. He was distracted putting the finishing touches on his feature film directorial debut, Storyville. Writers Harley Payton and Robert Engels were brought in, but they, through no fault of their own, were not David Lynch and Mark Frost. Citing the steadily dwindling audience, the network leaned hard on the creative team at the show to solve the goddamn murder. Give us something to advertise.
So, against their better judgment, they did. The killer was revealed to be, well, you know. And if you don't, I don't want to ruin it. And then the show drifted. New storylines were introduced, but it was all weak sauce. With Lynch and Frost not on the job full-time, the show became kind of a parody of itself. The ratings continued to nosedive, and despite the fact that it did eventually slowly begin to recover, the bloom was off the old blue rose. And in April of 1991,
After the 20th episode of the second season, ABC canceled the show and took it off the schedule. There were two episodes left. and they would be aired as a special movie in June, which was ABC's way of saying both episodes will be dumped on the same night in the summer to limit their damage. It was one month shy of a year since David Lynch had won the Palme d'Or, his show The Hottest Thing on Television. The gods giveth, and they taketh away.
But something unexpected did happen, as it always does. Although overwhelmed by the day-to-day grind of a 22 episode show order, Lynch did love his creation. And before it left the airwaves, he wanted to regain control of it. He came back to direct its final episode. The party's over. White Queen. It's time for the last act. Black Lodge. The final episode of a television legend. It's the two-hour conclusion of... Red Room. Twin Peaks. Monday.
The final episode of Twin Peaks second season aired on June 10th, 1991, and is one of the most amazing, surrealistic, mind-bending hours of network television ever broadcast. Set primarily in the Black Lodge, Lynch threw out the script and improvised his way through the hour. In the book Lynch on Lynch, he told Chris Rodley, when it came to the Red Room, it was, in my opinion, completely and totally wrong. Completely and totally wrong. And so I changed that part.
Twin Peaks staff writer Harley Payton, who along with Robert Engels and Mark Frost wrote the original script, said, When word started trickling back that David was making some changes, I reacted with outrage. Until I saw the episode. And then I was just in awe. That finale was one of the best hours of TV I'd ever seen. And it's true. The season two finale is an hour-long, largely silent, surrealist collage.
And it's mind-boggling to think that it aired on network television between commercials for cars and beer and coolware. And no, it did not wrap up the show in a tiny bow. In fact, it posed more questions than it answered. It did, finally. stumble upon a storyline that would have matched Who Killed Laura Palmer. Unfortunately, they came up with it about 13 episodes too late.
After confronting his evil doppelganger in the Black Lodge, Twin Peaks concluded with Kyle McLaughlin's Dale Cooper consigned to the Red Room. while his evil doppelganger is free to wreak havoc in the world. The show ended with Dale Cooper's evil twins smiling into the bathroom mirror while the demonic spirit Bob, who possessed the man who killed Laura Palmer, stared back. He then smashes his own face into the mirror, and as blood gushes down from the wound, he starts laughing. The end. What?
The series finale of Twin Peaks was so good, it actually gave ABC second thoughts about canceling the show. but they got over it. Lynch and Frost's other series, American Chronicles, Hotel Room, and On the Air all died quick death. It would seem to be the end of a chapter in his career and in his life. He had broken up with Isabella Rossellini and seemed poised to make a fresh start on all fronts. Enter the French!
Lynch may have been on a downward trend here in America, but he was beloved by the French. Just like Jerry Lewis. It does explain Wild at Heart's win at Cannes. While Lynch saw Wild at Heart as the story of, in his words, two people finding love in hell. The French saw Wild at Heart as a satire on America the same way they saw Jerry Lewis as a living satire of America.
And whether or not that was the direct intention of Dave or Jerry, only they know, and you'll need a Ouija board to ask them. But... French construction magnate Francis Boisier had more money than he knew what to do with. So he formed a company called CIBY2000. I guess it's CIBY2000. And CIBY2000 was going to make movies. So he made a sweetheart deal with David Lynch. Lynch could make four movies.
and they could be anything he wanted, and he would have final cut and complete directorial control as long as he kept the budget under $10 million. Now, he could have used this opportunity to close the chapter on Twin Peaks, which had lost favor with the public. He could have gone after his long, elusive, cinematic white whale, Ronnie Rocket. He could have remounted one saliva bubble with Steve Martin and Martin Short, but he never viewed his career that way.
He got into filmmaking through painting. not film. He viewed movies as paintings that moved, and painters paint what's in their head. And so, only one month after it went off the air, The series finale coming in 59th in the ratings. Below, among other things, Morris the Cat Salutes Hollywood Pets, hosted by Alex Trebek. It was announced his new film would be... A Twin Peaks movie. What? Yep, in his own words, he was still in love with that world and he was not ready to leave it.
Twin Peaks diehard fans were happy. Thank God. We'll get to find out what happens to Dale Cooper. That's what series co-creator Mark Frost thought as well. Nope. That ain't the story Lynch wanted to tell. The last week in the life of Twin Peaks MacGuffin, Laura Palmer, Mark Frost, really wanted to move the story forward, not backwards. Why make a movie to which everyone knows the ending? But Lynch, ever the painter.
could only do what was in his head. So Frost stepped away and Lynch wrote the film with Twin Peaks staff writer Robert Engels. The resulting movie was 1992's Twin Peaks. Fire, walk with me. People hate me. hated it hated it hated it The only people who were ever going to see that movie were the people who still loved Twin Peaks. And those people wanted Twin Peaks. Cherry pie and coffee. The log lady. A spooky mystery offset by funny stuff and weird shit.
The movie didn't star Kyle MacLachlan. It starred Cheryl Lee, who had very little track record and was initially hired off an 8x10 to play a chorus. Fortunately for all involved, Lee turned out to be something of a powerhouse and was more than up to the job. Now, Dale Cooper did have a huge role in the film. He was supposed to appear in about the first 30 minutes and then come back towards the end in Lynch fashion, flashbacks from the future.
But despite being Lynch's on-air avatar since 1984's Dune, McLaughlin felt abandoned by Lynch when he stepped back from the show's second season and allowed it to flounder. He didn't like the tone or the violence or the lack of Twin Peaks-y charm in Fire Walk With Me's script and didn't want to be in it. Other major cast members, Lara Flynn Boyle and Sherilyn Fenn among them, also declined to be in the movie for similar reasons. Undeterred, a dog with a bone,
Lynch marched on. Kyle McLaughlin's Dale Cooper became Chris Isaac's Chet Desmond. Before production began, Lynch and McLaughlin did bury the hatchet. They were, after all, close friends, and Coop did come back for what amounts to a prolonged cameo. Now, many of the other show's characters did return for fanservice-y scenes. But when the first cut of the film came in, it was close to five hours long.
And Lynch's editor, Mary Sweeney, who was by now his romantic partner as well, convinced him to cut everything that was not intrinsic to Laura Palmer's story. She was right in that it did get the film down to an acceptable two-hour and 15-minute running time. But Laura's story is a downer, to say the least. Drug abuse, prostitution, incest, and murder. Throw in popcorn and a soda, and you've got a night of the movie.
Two years after Wild at Heart won the grand prize at the Cannes Film Festival, Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me premiered there and was booed. The press conference for the film was hostile. Roger Ebert, rubbing his palms together, called it a shockingly bad film.
who was at Cannes at the same time with Reservoir Dogs, and who was well on his way to quite successfully supplanting Lynch as the cinematic hipster's auteur du jour, said, After I saw Twin Peaks fire walk with me at Cannes, David Lynch had disappeared so far up his own ass that I had no desire to see another David Lynch movie until I hear something different and I loved him I loved him It was released in late August of 1992, the cinematic equivalent of Saturday night at 10 p.m.
The film only made about $4 million, far less than its budget, and was out of theaters in a little over a month. The Lynch Frost comedy series On the Air premiered around the same time and disappeared just as quickly. Hollywood is chock full of films that were maligned critically upon their first release and or were box office bombs. that went on to become classic.
Oh, Citizen Kane. Am I comparing Firewalk with me to Citizen Kane? No, I am not. Although it would be safe to say that it is the Citizen Kane of incest murder movies. But there are films like Blade Runner, The Shawshank Redemption, Fight Club, Touch of Evil, John Carpenter's The Thing, Apocalypse Now. Films that were considered creative and or box office failures upon their release that were re-evaluated over time,
found their audience, and achieved their current classic status. Twin Peaks' Fire Walk With Me has undergone a similar critical and audience reassessment. At its core, the TV show was A parody of primetime soap operas that would ping pong back and forth between being really ridiculous and funny and being really creepy and scary. And believe me, that's my favorite thing. At its core, the movie.
was a tragedy. It was just the dark, sad tale of the destruction of a young woman because of sexual abuse. It's not goofy. It ain't silly. It ain't fun. You know, we're not talking apples and oranges. We're talking apples and root canal. In 1992, at least in terms of popular culture, when it came to sexual abuse People did not want to talk about it. They did not want to think about it. And when confronted with it, they reacted with hostility. But since then...
Our culture has evolved. The Me Too movement happened. And as the culture changed, so did people's attitudes. You know, I think there have been more books, articles, and think pieces written. about Fire Walk With Me than any other Lynch film. When the film was released on Criterion, they added an hour and a half of footage that was cut, which basically amounts to a whole other movie called The Missing Pieces.
And The Missing Pieces is basically all of that fan service stuff with the other characters. If you go online, you can find fan edits. where this footage was put back into the movie, and you get a sense... that original very long cut would have felt like. I saw one called the Q2 fan edit, and I actually think that it is an improvement. It's three hours and 15 or so minutes, maybe even longer.
does tend to lighten the tone intermittently and it does recreate a sense of the show while not being so light that it is invalidating to the harsher material. So I kind of recommend it. One last thing, at the risk of becoming heavy, the film has been embraced. by the survivors of abuse because it tells their story. And, you know, Laura Palmer in the film never... stops fighting. She never surrenders. So I would call the film an unsuccessful triumph.
But that is now. In 1992, the film bore the stink of a million skunks. Lynch was mystified by the reaction to the film and retreated from all things Hollywood. He never stopped working, but he and Mary Sweeney and their new child bought a house on a lake in Wisconsin. Lynch painted? designed furniture, bought a motorboat, and went into a long period of quiet battery charging. And then, in September of 1994, He started doing something that would
plant the seed for the project that would eventually put him back behind the camera. It was the most normal, unremarkable, un-David Lynch-y thing David Lynch ever did. He began watching the OJ trial. The story concludes next month. With Fluffo, Canada's highest quality shortening at a low, low price. So pure and creamy, Fluffo makes the tenderest, flakiest pie crust you ever tasted. Fluffo, Canada's highest quality shortening at a low, low price. And now, on with the show.
It's a warm, sunny spring day. High atop the Mulholland Drive view shelf here in sunny... Southern California, the People's Republic of California, here in the former United States. My guest today is an old friend who I've known longer than I care to. He was one of the original Simpsons writers, started in season one, I believe. Yeah. And has had one of those has had one of those careers and you've you've you've packed three lives into your life.
And at the tender age of 86, you're just now getting started. and i want to you not only have you written for you know the simpsons you created the critic and you you and your partner al jean were writers on the tonight show starring johnny carson like we are we have to get into Was there more coke there or at the Simpsons? We'll get to it. The other thing about Mike that that we're going to talk about is that you are. A world traveler.
I am. And you have a new substack that... recounts your your live and adventures and they're really what's great about it is i'm i'm on substack and it's a lot of political rage and then Your pieces are, they're really, they're short, they're easy reads, and they're hilarious. And they're a little aperitif in between. in between rage buffets. And I highly recommend it. If you're not on Substack, get on Substack.
It's a lot of really smart people, and it's a really great platform. And subscribe to Mike Reese's. Now I've seen everything. Yes. That's what it's called. M-I-K-E-R-E-I-S-S. It's under travel and humor. You can find it. It's Mike Reese, R-E-I-S-S. Yes. You are like me. Well, you travel more than I do. And you seem to do it reluctantly. Yes. I would as well. And Denise is like cat, which is like, oh, we have two days where I don't have to do anything. Let's go to Norway. No, I just said.
Yes, I dated my wife for two years, and we never went anywhere. I mean, we never left the apartment. TV, and I thought, I have found my dream girl. And it was it was the classic bait and switch where we got married and we couldn't honeymoon for a long time because I was working all the time. And then I finally said, all right, we got to figure out a honeymoon and we'll each get to make two suggestions. And I said. I pick Disneyland or Disney World.
And she said, I suggest Yemen and Siberia. Yemen and Siberia. Yemen and Siberia, without a hint of irony. And I told her, you know, those are places people are trying to get out of. But that was it. And it was the first fight of our married life. And as you say in your sub stack, we compromised and went to Yemen and Siberia. That was correct. And then we were off to the races.
She just will travel 365 days a year. She's just like Kat. She's just like Kat. Yes, she never wants to be home. And I don't want to go anywhere. I'm with you. I've seen 147 countries. I've been to more places. 99.9% of the people who have ever lived, and I don't want to go anywhere. I'm perfectly happy here. I'm the same. I'm, we are the same person. I like, I, you know, I really do. One of my favorite places to go is I love to go to Magnolia Boulevard and Burbank.
I like to go to Bob's big boy and have a coffee sit with my notebook Go down to a couple of bookstores. My friends run a record store on Magnolia called Runout Groove. Maybe go to a vintage clothing store. I'm so happy. I live in Times Square and I live. So who needs to go anywhere? But I live next to a 25-plex. And a 14 plex. They're a half a block away. So that to me, that's as far as I ever need to go. If there's one thing that COVID did. In the positive category. Yeah. It got me out of...
Flying to Norway and staying in a hotel made of ice. Wow. Did you actually do that? We had to cancel it. It was booked. When I do go, I have a great time. Like I did. Me and my wife is. It's her family from Sweden and Norway. And, you know, when we went, I went to the Munch Museum. I jumped in a freezing fjord over there. If there's a frozen lake and they see a hole in the ice, they go, oh, we can go swimming. And they just jump.
My wife went in our pool last night at about 1130. Wow. The heat's not on. And she'll just drop trial and jump in the pool. And, and I'll just hear like, and I'll be in the house and I'll just hear. They love cold water. Speaking of water, this is how... people may have heard of you we're working backwards you're going you know it's like this is your life we're working backwards Okay. The little mini submarine that went down to the Titanic.
That had a catastrophic malfunction and killed a bunch of people. Yeah. You were on it. I was on it one year before. One year before, I took the sub. Same ship, same captain, same thing. The very same sub, I knew two of the five people who were vaporized. Is that what happened? They were, that's what they said. They were. They were crushed in a 20th of a second. So they were crushed faster than their minds even could register that they were killed. So that's actually.
Good. Who wouldn't want that? Yeah. That is a great way to go. But it was fun. It was the captain who was a very good friend of mine. He had it all. He was handsome and funny. He was brilliant. He was rich. His name was Stockton Rush. And they named him after the property the family owns called Stockton, California. Sure, I know Stockton.
So, yeah, so that's definitely like a name that you would see in the script and go, well, that's like, why don't we name him Buck Murdoch? Right. Exactly. It was it was a crazy, you know, name is destiny. I mean, the guy. Could not be a dog groomer. And, but just a great guy. And then suddenly gone, just gone into Adams. But if this ever happens to you or anyone listening. My wife and I, we came home, we turn on TV, the sub is missing, and we go, oh, that's us, that's our guys.
I immediately said, they're dead. She said, I'll bet it imploded. And yet. We never felt sad. We never felt sad for our friends who died. We never felt like, ooh, we dodged the bullet or, ooh, isn't that scary? Because it was just... It was such a dangerous thing to do. We all knew it was dangerous. And it's like, okay, well, that happened. It's very weird. It probably sounds callous.
I never understood it. And then I met a race car driver who said, sometimes you're racing and you look over and you see a friend of yours. crash and burst into flames and die. And you just go, all right, well, time to pack up, go to the next race. Yeah, no, there's a funny story. Naturally, I'm going to pivot to the traveling Wilburys. Of course. That when Roy Orbison died, George Harrison called Tom Petty and he just said, are you glad it's not you?
It will be, George. Now that people know I did that thing, they keep inviting me to dangerous things. And they go so south. I was supposed to fly on a biplane. My friend Jim Downey, the very famous comedy writer, said you're going to know Jim Downey from Night Live for 45 years. Right. Yeah. He said, I booked us a trip on a biplane. We're going to fly over the Hudson Valley in the last remaining biplane. And he said, because that's the kind of thing you like.
He calls the next day. He said, well, it crashed and killed my friend, the pilot. So we're not doing that. I was supposed to go on a mini sub once to look at fish. Yeah. In Hawaii. And we were on the boat going out to the sub. And I started to think. I don't want to do that. I have a very specific. kind of claustrophobia like i'm fine in an airplane if it's enclosed you know fine no problem at all um any anything where i can just walk out
Like anything with a doorknob, I have no problem. Elevators or submarines where I am powerless to leave under my own power if I want. I'm not cool. And we're... On this little boat, I remember this specifically, I start to, I can feel a panic attack coming. I'm not even on the sub yet. I can feel a panic attack coming. And my daughter's little and she literally said at one point.
As I'm quelling a panic attack. Daddy, do mermaids have tongues? Like, it was just like, not now, honey. We get to the boat goes to where the sub comes up. I go into the sub. And it's just like a waiting room of a doctor's office. It's about that big. And there's no bathroom. And I immediately go like, well, what have you got in the bathroom?
And I said, how long is this? And the guy goes, that's 45 minutes to an hour. And I go, what if you have to go to the bathroom? He goes, you've got to wait for 45 minutes to an hour. And I said, yeah, I don't think this is for me. So there were other adults in our group. So I said, I'm cutting out. I go back up to get on the boat.
to go back to shore. And it's the last crew from the, it's the last tourist group from the submarine is on the boat now. So they see me go down into the submarine and then come back up. And somebody looks at me and just went, it's fixed. You're never in danger. But I was just, it was one of those things where something in my head went, no, no, no, no. Our lives, especially my life is one big. Final destination. I just keep missing out. And then I'm going to.
Sooner or later, I'm going to have to die in 10 terrible ways at once. Yeah, no, you're just going to slip away at 112. I'll take a fall in the tub when I melt it. You'll do, as we call that, a 4A Ackerman exit. I fell in the tub. That's it. It's what got George Burns. It was like nothing could kill George Burns except the bathtub. Yep. Well, you know, it's a funny thing about really old people. I should say you're not 86.
You know, they say, why do people fall and break their, why do so many old people fall and break their hip? I know this one. Usually they break their hip and then they fall. Correct. The hip just goes. I've had enough. And it's the same with, I said, why do people die of, they fall asleep and they have a heart attack in their sleep? And I go, why don't just as many people just drop on the street?
And they say that, well, falling asleep is part of the heart attack. Your heart slows down. You get really tired. You fall asleep. And it's all... It's sort of the overture. So that's it, kids. Take anything away. Don't sleep. Yes, don't ever sleep. Don't ever sleep. I don't think you'd go wrong. People clearly want to know about what it was like at the start of The Simpsons, but I want to talk about some of your travels. But first, I have to... make you go back over what it's like.
to work for johnny carson yes and how old were you at that time i think i was i'm i was 22 i was 22 and he was about 60 and To spend your 22-year-old brain, spend a year and a half in the head of a 60-year-old man. really hard it was not good for me yes yeah i can imagine but i don't know what the good stories are but this is also peak tonight show like he had several periods of a big resurgence and like during the reagan 80s that show was on fire
I was there for that. And yet, I was there. You wrote Bitch McNuggets. I did write Bitch McNuggets. The greatest joke ever assembled by AI. It's a funny story. I once, I wrote, I'm going to tell this story. I hope I didn't tell it. I'll bet I told it last time. I won't tell it about the worst Karnak I ever wrote.
There's no such thing. Okay, I'm going to tell it. You can cut it out. When I'm working on the Tonight Show, you had to write 60 jokes a day. There was a quota. And you can write 60 good jokes a day. I wish. The quote had been, write 10 great jokes. But no, it was just 60, and it just meant anything that came out of your head. And I wrote this current act that went red square.
And the question was, what do you call that blotch on Gorbachev's head? Now, I mean, many of your viewers don't even remember Gorbachev. He had a blotch on his head. Oh, all of our listeners do. Believe me. It wasn't red. It wasn't a square. It was just a terrible joke. Johnny goes on the air. He reads it. It dies. He goes to Fred de Cordova. We got to fire that guy. And Fred goes, they're all guys. And Johnny goes, the Jewish one. And Fred said, that doesn't narrow it down.
on the air no no but my job so he was serious oh he was serious he was like mad he would have fired me but i was new on the job and he didn't know my name and uh So I was safe for six months, and then six months later, he's doing Karnak again. And I see the cue cards and red square. My Gorbachev joke is back up there through some horrible clerical error. And now he knows my name. Now he's going to fire me.
And then he reads it on the air and it kills. And it gets a huge laugh that it didn't deserve. And that's when you realize, oh, there's no science to this. No. No. Still. Yeah. I'm sure you've tried. I go to AI all the time. I said, write me a Karnak joke about Mikhail Gorbachev. And it came up with this. It goes, the answer is Mikhail Gorbachev. And the question is, name a leader of the Soviet Union. Well, no, I've never gone to AI. I don't even know how to go to AI. I don't.
I do write a lot of Carnacs because Dr. Z is General Carnassist. And, um, what I do is I go to Ken Daly and I go, I, cause Ken Daly, my very good friend can, yeah, he's the greatest and Ken can crank out those things. Better than anybody. Ken Daly and Blaine Kapatch are like two bizarre anomalies of nature that they can just like spit out those things like a Gatling gun.
One of my favorite Ken Daly, General Karnasas. And it is one of those things because I talked to Alex Sulkin about this a lot. Things that come up that you're sorry, Johnny's dead. do a kardashian joke you know you would have like you know johnny would have been would have loved to be like may a crazed web designer hack your sister's mainframe He would have gone to town. But all of these things...
He passed. Ken Daly had Scarlett Johansson. Yes. What do you get when you're too rough with your Johansson? Did you know? I didn't recently. Carnac was invented by Marshall Brickman. I didn't know that. He wrote for The Tonight Show. Then he went on to write Annie Hall. Then he wrote Jersey Boys. That's his first play. That's about Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, correct? It's a fantastic show.
Before that, before he was ever a comedy writer, he wrote and recorded a song called Dueling Banjos. That was him from Deliverance. You're kidding me! And before that, he formed a band in high school called the Mamas and the Papas. Amazing, amazing man. Oh, my God. The fact that Dueling Banjos was written by a Jewish guy from New York. A Jewish guy born in Buenos Aires. Oh, he was born in Buenos Aires. I didn't know that. That's insane. Speaking of Mr. Allen,
I stood next to Bob Weedy last week and he wouldn't look at me because of something I said about Woody Allen. I was on a panel for Drew Friedman's documentary. And somebody asked Drew if any celebrities ever took umbrage at his portrayals of them, his caricatures. And he said the thing that shocked him was the guy that loved it.
Jerry Lewis was like, loved it. And he said, for you, I'll do it. And Drew got Jerry Lewis to talk about Sammy Petrillo on a documentary. And Jerry Lewis said, I'm only doing it because you asked. Wow. Why would anybody want to talk about Sammy Petrillo? Everybody out there is getting the Sammy Petrillo references. Yeah, well, this audience, they do. And if they don't, I'm sorry. That's the price of admission.
So he said, well, Woody Allen, I did him on the cover of the Observer or New York Magazine, and I gave him a lot of liver spots on his hands and stuff. It was the thing about the Mets or the Yankees. I don't even know. I don't know. And Woody had his sister call up and say, You know, he's never going to do anything for your magazine again. He hated that. And then I said on the panel,
I don't think that was a good, I don't think that was a proper response. And it's weird that even Woody Allen would have such a lapse in judgment. And then I found it later that Bob Weedy was in the audience and he would not look at me afterwards. The world's leading Woody Allen apologist, Bob Weedy. Biggest defender. Yeah. And the point that I make is... is awful. I'm not even going to get into the thing that's debatable. I'm not going to say that.
Right. We'll take it as a given. He married his stepdaughter. Yeah. Yeah. Here was the list of people you couldn't cheat on your wife with. Yeah. Her mom, her children. Anybody else is fine. Anybody else, anyone would understand. That's right. And he made a classic film about dating a 16-year-old girl where nobody objects. Dr. Z does this thing in the live shows where he sings songs that are now not cool. I have a show Sunday and we're doing your 16, which is just like mind boggling.
Ringo Starr had a hit with it when he was 33. You're 16, you're beautiful, and you're mine. You're mine. Yeah. When we kissed, I could not stop. It's just a transcription of a confession at a police station. It would be such a great score in a horror movie. A guy with somebody, a girl locked in his basement. Yeah, yeah.
oh yeah that like whispering is playing oh yeah that is a good idea yeah like barbarian they should play that it would really be a good scene this last question i'll ask but i'm genuinely curious like did you ever deal with carson like one-on-one or It was really amazing. We got the job. pending an interview with Johnny Carson. He insisted on interviewing every writer, and there are only two he ever turned down, and one I know was 400 pounds.
I can tell this, I guess. And the other one was black. Those are the only two who didn't make the cut. I'm not saying, I'm not saying anything, but Al Jean and I go in for our interview to his office. which is set up like the tonight show. He's got a desk and a couch and we sit on the couch and it was weird. He was wearing a, uh, strapless t-shirt or no you know what a wife beater oh really you weren't a wife beater wow you're a wife beater and he may have been one and he uh
He you see him, you go, he's got a bit of a gut. He's got a super obvious comb over. But you go. This is such an attractive man. Yeah, handsome fella. He was so handsome. You know, you kind of don't get that on TV where you just go, oh, he's a pleasant face on TV. You just go, wow, what a great looking guy. Then he interviews me and Al for.
10 minutes, the length of a Tonight Show segment. And he finally, he makes a joke and we both laugh and he lets us go. And if he could have cut to commercial, he would have done it. That was almost our only, we had one other personal dealing with him when he would do, he did a yearly segment called New Product. where he would just show new products and make fun. I like the name new product. New product.
And so they'd bring out like 40 new products, and we'd walk the set with them, looking at them, thinking if there was anything funny. And I remember... We see a product called constitutional briefs, and they were the U.S. Constitution printed on boxer shorts. You're kidding me. That was my friend actually invented those and made a fortune off of them.
But so they've got the Constitution on them. And I just mutter, oh, you might ask your girlfriend to take the fifth. And and Johnny just repeats it out loud. You might ask your girlfriend to take the fifth. And everybody laughs. And I said, wow, he stole a joke right in front of me. And I mean, that was my job. But you could see he was just happy to take the laugh off a joke someone else made. And that.
that was my only dealing with the man and he did not it was a very dark time for him he was getting divorced and It was a bad time, and he never wanted to see his writers. Yeah. Did you ever read the... Yes, I did. I loved it. Oh, I did too. It was just like, well, that was the man. I think he really captured him. In fact, again, you can cut this if you want.
Your manager's father. I think about him a lot. My manager, Tom LaSalle, and his father, Peter LaSalle, was the producer of the Tonight Show. was the only sane man at The Tonight Show. I really liked him. He's still... alive. He's still alive. Tom's dad is, I think he's 95 or 96. Mel's 98. My dad's 94. Of the three, my dad is the only one that is not currently sober. Yes, I like theater, but I mean, it was...
It's sort of like The Simpsons is now, where they've just been doing the same thing for so long. Everybody's a little crazy and nobody quite notices it. Yeah, it's incremental insanity. But that was I like Peter very much. I'm glad he's alive. That's great. Yeah. Wow. That is. Yeah. No, it is amazing. Joel Hodgson and I used to want to do a.
This is why we're so successful. We wanted to do a parody of Melvin and Howard where it was just Johnny Carson being driven around the country. And he doesn't understand that the country is not his show. Like he would just see like people at the beach and go, now do they work for me? Is this my beach? And like, no, that guy's a doctor. Well, let's go to the clip. There's no clip. There's one other funny story. Well, then talk about dysfunctional Johnny.
had a stalker. He had a stalker back in the... Oh, I didn't know that. I know Letterman had a bad stalker. He had a stalker, and Johnny's idea to fix it was to put him on staff, and he hired the stalker. And it worked. The guy was the model employee, and he immediately got over his fixation with Carson. This is so weird because I was talking about this with Kat last night. Robert Pattinson, the actor, Batman.
he had a stalker yeah and and this is not recommended by uh i had a i had a problem with a person in the 90s when i was hot crap and uh i had a meeting with uh the then stocking expert gavin de becker okay uh now personal security for jeff bezos um but back then he wrote the stocking law And his one rule is no communication whatsoever. You never respond. You never give them anything. Brick wall. But Robert Pattinson took his stalker out to lunch and just complained.
About his life for the duration of the lunch. And that was it. Wow. Not recommended. Okay. Yeah. And what was the journey from The Tonight Show to The Simpsons? By this time, you have a writing partner, Al Jean, who you have worked with since the Harvard Lampoon. Right. He was my roommate in college. We wrote together. We shared apartments together, and there were points where I would forget which guy I was.
like i said a phone call will come hi is al there yeah this is al oh no wait i'm so we're very very close we're still very close and so yeah we worked on the tonight show and then i think we i We went to ALF, the puppet, and Sledgehammer, the police parody show, and then It's Gary Shandling show. And I've been very lucky. Somebody told me once.
everything you've worked on has a cult following, which is true, which is great. You know, some of them were very short jobs, but people remember them all. When you were on ALF, did you work with Jerry Stahl? Oh, yes. Now, I'm going to blow the whistle. Do you know Jerry Stahl? I've met him, and I know for people who don't know, Jerry Stahl wrote a very famous book called Permanent Midnight. about being a heroin addict while being a TV writer. And...
He also wrote a very good book about Fatty Arbuckle called I Fatty. He's friends with Mark. I've met him at Mark Maron's house. But he's an, as somebody that is, as he said, you know, I was writing for Alf and I wanted to be Keith Richards. I've never wanted to be Keith Richards, so I can't really relate. Yes, I'm going to blow the whistle on Jerry Stahl, because especially if you've seen the movie Permanent Midnight, they show him running out.
And the weird thing is, I think he's played by Ben Stiller. He's played by Ben Stiller. Whose mother was on Al. She was a regular. Was Ann on Elf? Ann Mira was on the show. I got to work with her. Lovely woman. She played. Oh, Ann and Jerry were the, Ann and Jerry were the nicest people on the planet. Yes. Yeah. I got, I got to work with Jerry too. I'd love to. And, uh, But so, in the movie, he's running the show. And people always ask about it.
No, what happened was, I think he had written an article for Playboy, and the showrunner goes, I like this Playboy article, let him write an episode of Alf. And he came in, and... You know, he very famously had to go shoot heroin in the middle of the pitch meeting. And guess what? He turned into the script, and it was terrible. Yeah, well, it's just not a lot of great junkies. Good Al on Smack. And so we had to do a page one rewrite on it. And then the show came out great. So the next year.
The showrunner goes, well, we got to bring him back. And we said his script was terrible. And they go, well, it came out good. So he wrote another terrible Al script. It was another page one rewrite. That is his involvement with the show. Yeah, that was an angle of cool that I never... wanted to have. It's one of the things I talk about this a lot with people in the modern era with the The sort of the kill Tony of it all, if you even know what that is. When did...
comedy become the world's most macho job. The ad for Kill Tony is these five grim guys with their arms folded in front of... barbed wire and bloody walls. I don't, we're not in the same universe. When you and Al, so you worked on Shandling Show. You must have worked with Ed Solomon on It's Gary. This is not Larry Sanders. This is It's Gary Shandling Show. It's Gary Shandling Show. On Showtime.
a great show, won lots of awards, and now completely eclipsed. Yes, it really is. It's strange. You can't, it never... bubbles to the surface ever and it was as It was as inventive and revolutionary as Larry Sanders was. Yeah, I mean, Gary couldn't do a dull show. I mean, he did. It was a very... He couldn't be not inventive. He couldn't do just the normal show. Were you guys aware that it was the George Burns show?
No, no, I was not aware. And I don't say that in a derogatory way. It was a similar two-camera device that George Burns used in a show. Right. It's a show about a guy who's on a show and he knows he's on a show. And it's funny how far back in TV, TV started getting meta. Because it's even before George Burns, the Milton Berle show, as far as we know, that's the first show ever.
And by season four, Milton Berle was a show about Milton Berle putting on the Milton Berle show. I had no idea. That's it. That's where you go. In fact, I think the pitch. to Showtime for its Gary Shanling show was it's the Milton Berle show with a normal cock. Gary Shandling was not a normal cuck. I was on the picket line when the writers were on strike last year and a whole bunch of old channeling show writers bunched up as they do.
And I was saying, everybody asks me about channeling all the time. I always have to say he was a nice man, but he was the worst boss you could ever imagine. And my friend goes, I didn't even think he was a nice guy. And why was he the worst? Because he held you to his crazy standard of perfection? Yes, he I would say you never pleased him. He was never happy. And, you know, he just and you're old enough to know that's just. His projecting his own lack of satisfaction.
satisfaction onto the people around him right i mean you could he was never mean he was a nice fellow and he came to my wedding and all that stuff very nice man but I mean, he was impossible, literally. It was impossible. to please him. The best you would get is Al and I would pitch him a joke because we'd write jokes too.
uh, for his standup sets. And we, we pitch him a joke and he goes, that's funny. And you go, yeah. And then he goes, that's funny because what I thought you were going to say is this. say something else. So we were there to pitch him set up. That was our service. And his joke would beat your joke or he would put his joke in? He would put his joke on our setup. Sometimes it was better. Sometimes it wasn't.
You could just never have them just go, that's great. Oh, we'll do that. You know, it is interesting. People that have, I mean, I kind of love it in a weird way. Mel Brooks was like that. You pitch him a joke and he'll go. That's funny. Yeah. Because he can't laugh. Because he has no more laugh in his soul. And then, as do all comedy writers, I'm not signaling out, singling out Mel.
But comedians do the same thing in comedy clubs. If a comedian says something funny, you're in the club and you want to laugh, but you can't laugh anymore. So comedians go, ah! Oh, really? It's really just like I hear it. I would laugh if I could. So was Ed Solomon on when you, did you know Ed from college? I knew Ed, not from college. He is the first. Friend I made in LA, Al and I.
Came to L.A. and we went to a party one night and we meet Ed and his partner. And it was just like Chris Mappelsen. It was just like, oh, here's a slightly better looking version of us. And we're the same age. They really are. They would be the guys that played you guys in the movie. Right. And Ed and I even have the same birthday.
So we go, hey, so what are you, young writer? What are you doing? And they said, we're writing Gremlins 2. What are you doing? We're writing Airplane 2. And it was almost like a sketch. Sure, funny, yeah. And then two, maybe two years later, Al and I get fired from some job. And we're walking sadly through Westwood.
And we've run into Ed and his partner walking sadly in the other direction. And they'd just been fired too. So that's, that's my life. It's like that scene in Shaun of the Dead with a two. Exactly. Analogous group of survivors pass each other. For people who don't know, Ed Solomon went to, like Mike went to Harvard, but Mike, your attitude. Are you sure he didn't go to Harvard? No, he didn't. No, he did not. Did he go to Todd? Where did he go?
I don't know. Maybe he had a joke. Okay. This is why I say that Ed and I were on an HBO comedy special in the summer of 1983. called Campus Comedy, and it was comedians that were still in college. Wow. Was Andrea Michaels? Yes, she was. Andrea Michaels was on it as well. Ed had a joke where he held up a traffic sign that said, slow children.
and said, welcome to Harvard. That's why I think. And John Michael Higgins was also on that special. Amazing. Yeah, I think Joe Piscopo hosted it. And if it ever surfaces, I will destroy it. I was 18. But so Ed and I became friends. And Ed and his partner, Chris Matheson, wrote the Bill and Ted movies. And then Ed went on to write Men in Black. And they had storied careers.
Do you know who Chris Matheson's dad is? Of course. The great Richard Matheson. Amazing. Yeah. And Chris said something, one of those great... Things a guy says that makes you go, holy shit. We were just talking and he went, my mom used to hate it when Rod Serling would come over for dinner because the drapes would smell like cigarettes for a week. Wow. My dad once killed a deer with his hands. Yeah, that's great. But your attitude, you're...
When you work at The Simpsons, you work with a lot of people that went to Harvard because people hire people that they know. And people that went to Harvard know other people from Harvard. So you just, well, I know this guy, so I'm going to hire him. But your attitude towards Harvard is refreshing because I never went to Harvard, but I worked there. I worked at the coop and, and, uh, your, your undergrad, your Harvard undergrad is Harvard undergrad is all TAs. Harvard undergrad is.
Not spectacular. Yeah, I just hated the place. I would still, any moment, I would love a giant meteor to come and just flatten it. I would book the first plane to go look at the, look at the crater and pee in it. Yeah, I have nothing. And I hate Harvard and not just because I met my wife there. I love my dear wife. Of course, Denise is lovely. She is really a great wife. When was the last time you were at Harvard Square? I get up there every year or so.
It's like Vegas. It's like Harvard Square from 1983 to now is unrecognizable. It's like Vegas. Remember the Harvard, was it the Cambridge Sci-Fi Fantasy Bookstore? Yes. There was a guy that worked there that... He seemed to have no upper arms or legs. He just had the lower extremities. It's like his elbow joint was at his shoulder. He was this kind of rotund guy with these small hands and small legs, and he wore a fedora and thick glasses and beard mustache.
And I just remember being in the store and he was wearing a T-shirt that said, make mine Heinlein. Okay. And it was like, you know, it was the Reagan 80s and, you know, everybody was afraid of the war, you know, the Russians were going to destroy us. And we didn't know that we would destroy it. And he goes, well, if the Russians are going to bomb us, my advice would be to read as much science fiction and fantasy as you can. It's like you are. You are the atomic clock of who you are.
It was full of, Harvard Square was full of these just like crazy, great, weird eccentrics. Yep. I remember I was in Harvard Square, I don't know, 20 years ago, and this movie, it was playing in Harvard Square. It was a movie called With Honors. And it was about a bum who wanders into... I think Brendan Fraser's in it too, but a bum played by Joe Pesci. Yeah, that was, it was Joe Pesci. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. He wanders into Harvard classrooms and everyone's.
so taken with his bumly wisdom. And, you know, and there's George Flint and playing a professor. Yeah. Joe bum makes a lot of good points. Yeah. And then outside the movie is an actual bum. And everyone in Harvard Square is going, get away from me. Exactly. Give the bum a chance. Wow. so when you and uh how did you guys end up at the simpsons and were you at the time the only harvard guys at the at the show oh that's a good question it was it was just Starting up, it was turning into a TV show.
And it had already been on the Tracy Ullman show. The shorts have been on the Tracy Ullman show. And they found, oh, there are all these 10 year old boys kind of squirming through 27 minutes of Tracy Ullman just to watch three minutes of Simpsons. They said, let's give it a shot. Let's turn it into a show. And nobody wanted to work on it. That was the real secret of the show. That's how they came to us. Al and I...
We were on a three-month hiatus from It's Gary Shandling Show. It's Gary Shandling Show was... the next to the lowest rated show on TV only below us was the Tracy Ullman show. We were 99 and a hundred. And all, all, This was on at the time when the Ben Stiller show wasn't also on. Oh, well, yeah. Because I believe, young man, we then took that title. I was working with Alan Dwight Bell at the Shandling Show.
And apparently he had never seen the ratings before. He picked up the paper one day and he was just so shocked because we worked so hard there. We worked 90 hours a week. He looks at it and sees us. We're 99 out of 100. And he says, I knew we weren't ahead. so anyway they're starting up and then the truth of it is they wanted max pross and tom gamble the gold standard of comedy writers impeccable career lovely guy everyone wants to work with him and they didn't
Oh, you'll like that. Were they in L.A. at that time or are they still in New York? They were in L.A. They were working with us at the Shanling show. They turned down The Simpsons to work on a show called The Boys, and The Boys... was a sitcom from Alan's White Belt set at the Friars Club, and it starred Norm Crosby and Norman Phelps. No other sitcom had two norms on it. Yeah, but so much sex, how much sex appeal on one screen?
And that was it. And they turned down the Simpsons. That's amazing. I want to work on the boys. So they recommended us, and Al and I took the job. And the whole summer, I'm writing The Simpsons thinking, oh, I could be on The Boys right now. I could meet Norman Phelps. And that was it. It was just the summer job. I think Al and I wrote three of the first six scripts.
But if you just look at that original Simpsons writing staff, who's so well regarded now, none of them had ever written a TV script before. There were a couple of sketch writers and some joke writers. Who was there? Who was in the room? Jake Hogan and Wally Wolodarski had just written sketches for Tracy Ullman. That was their first show. uh it was george meyer who just you know was a letterman writer right and uh
John Swartzwelder, who was an advertising man. He was a madman. Who I think was a sports writer at the time. So no. No real professional writer wanted to work on The Simpsons. And Jay Cogan, of course, his father is a legendary comedy writer. Arnie Cogan. Begged him, don't take this job. So that's it. That's how we got the job because everybody else turned it down.
you and Al end up running The Simpsons. Right. We're scared to death. Yeah, you're thoroughly unprepared for this. We've never run anything in our lives, and they put us in charge of... This hit show that everybody loves. And this is like 92. No, we're at 91, 92. Yeah. Cause I remember going to see, and just for people that have grown up with the Simpsons and, you know. I remember going to see, I believe it was Field of Dreams with Kevin Costner.
And they ran a Simpsons short from the Tracy Ullman show before it. And the theater went bananas. Like, people just loved it. And it was... There was a, like, the 30,000-foot view of it is... It was the 80s hangover. and the original you know the concept of the simpsons was it's not the cosby show this is not a perfect family this is a really messed up family but there's still a family um and
It was so beloved and it really was a cultural moment, you know. It debuted to the highest ratings in the history of the Fox Network. So right away, people knew we want to see this. This is something we've been waiting for. And interestingly, you know, nobody wanted to work on The Simpsons because. Animation at that time was probably in its 120-year history at its absolute nadir. It was just Saturday morning.
crap cartoons and disney every couple of years would put out like the rescuers down under just Totally forgettable crap for kids. Now they're doing a live-action remake of The Rescuers Town. But that year, The Simpsons came out, and I think the same month, The Little Mermaid came out. And so it was really just sort of... this tipping point for anime. Suddenly, oh, grownups can watch this stuff too. But we never saw it coming. We never thought the show would succeed. And we just had fun.
It's glib, but I think maybe that's why it worked, is we never thought anyone was going to watch it. And we said, well, let's just amuse ourselves. Yeah, let's make episode 12 can be a parody of Jean de Florette. Yeah. And did you work? So Sam was in the room at that time, Sam Simon. That's the greatest comedy writer I've ever seen in my life. Yeah.
the mozart of comedy writers and we talked a little bit about sam because people you know the the three people that get the you know the three guys that created that show are james l brooks sam simon and matt graining um but Sam was the workhorse of those three. right he put in the long hours he he figured out the crazy structure simpsons would take that The first act would have nothing to do with the second act. You know, Matt Groening, who's a brilliant guy, brilliant guy and such a nice guy.
You know, he was not a TV writer. The only TV he'd ever written were one-minute shorts. And the shorts are really inspired if you ever can find them. And Fox has them in a vault somewhere. They've got not just the whole Simpsons family, Krusty's in them, Itchy and Scratchy, Grandpa. There was a lot in those one minute shorts. But Sam, you know, turned it into a show. And he also revised the design. Like, if you look at the early designs, they're different. And it was Sam.
That redesigned them and made them a little more visually pleasing. He personally designed Mr. Burns and Bleeding Gums Murphy. Yeah. He owned a boxer. He found a no-name boxer and brought him to champion of the world. And then he got into poker and became champion of world poker. And then his ex-wife became champion of world poker. Yeah, it's crazy. I've told this story before. I was on the Warner Brothers lot shooting Father's Day. Remain seated. Don't clap. And I was not.
This was, God, eight years before I went on the show. And I'm just walking to the commissary to get lunch. And Sam knew me because Sam used to go to Uncabaret with George Meyer a lot, the live shows we did. This guy goes, Dana, get in. And I knew him. I was like, I said, just get in. And I'm like, I have to be back in an hour. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, get in.
So we drive, we roar off the lot and then drive to the smokehouse, which is directly across the street, which would have been a much shorter walk instead of getting into his car. He's talking about, you know, he goes, I'm trying to come up with a pilot. He's like, why do you want to do a TV show? Your act is so great. Because I'd like to make a hundred thousand times as much money and not have to fly all over the country. Can you handle that, dude?
I want to be rich. Can I be rich too? But he was very... He was... So lovely as a guy. He was so generous and generous of spirit. You know, he's just really a beautiful and very famously abrasive to people. aided him and again somebody tried to tell me don't take the simpsons job you'll be working with sam simon and you know it was great the job was great but he's life-changing and amazing
amazing man. Did you guys rub up against him? Or did you guys get along? I never had one bad moment with the guy, in fact. but one day him and matt did not get along they did not get along at all yeah again i blame you know matt you know it's just an easygoing lovable and it was it was just sam sam didn't get on with him. Well, some people, they say Terry Gilliam is like this. They have to work in opposition. If there is no opposition, they'll create one.
Sam was so brilliant and so funny that... He just had no respect for anybody who wasn't as smart or as funny or working as hard. So I wouldn't spend a day with him. I'll just follow. I'll go with Sam and run errands. And we went. And we went to dry cleaning and got some rec, went out to lunch, and he offended people everywhere we went. And he had no idea he was doing it. But we just left a trail of angry people behind us all over Pacific Pound Sea.
Yeah. Why aren't you as smart as me? I do wonder how he would have. Like, I feel it's like I've sort of worsted formula. I'm so glad he's not alive to see where we are now. Yes. Yeah. I think that about my father too. Yeah. I think that about like Carlin. Yeah. Yeah. He would have just killed, he would have killed. And was Jim, was Jim Brooks around as much then? He would just come in. He was... He would oversee everything, and he would just... contribute a scene or a line or something.
But he would give us a line and say, put that in. And we wouldn't even get the joke, but we'd put it in. And the next day, that was all anyone was talking about. He didn't give us a ton of stuff, but whatever he gave us. was golden and he of course he's the reason the simpsons has heart i don't think yes yes would have thought we would have made a funny rambunctious satirical show
But the fact that it moves people and catches them off guard, that's 100 percent. Yes. He was not a fan. This was in my tenure. of when Homer chloroformed March. We went through, I think this, I'm pretty sure this was George. found an easy way to get out of uncomfortable conversations was just to chloroform people i know they were there too for this where It's Bart strangles Homer with a phone cord.
and bangs him unconscious with the receiver. And of course, Bart's not only brutalizing his father, not getting him unconscious, but he's doing that thing of shh, shh, shh. And that was a Jim and Jim did not like that either. I'm guessing that came from George because this did come from George. It was the Treehouse of Horrors parody of one of our timely, timely skewerings of Day of the Dolphin.
okay yes and in the foreground of the shot a dolphin is banging someone's head into their car door like they have the door they have the door open and the guy's head in the door and the dolphin is banging the door shut on the guy's head And in the background, there's a dolphin beating a guy with a bag of oranges. And I know that was definitely George.
Do you still watch the show? You know what? No, because I don't have network. I don't have cable. When I can, I'll watch four in a row on my laptop. But the shows are great now. Yeah, they're great. Yeah, they're great. Yeah. Exceptionally great. And... Yeah, I didn't know the show still had this much life in it. I just left the show in November after 36 years.
It's like this giant, you know, it's been my life. And people don't understand. You used to fly to work. Right. I was coming down to a day a week at The Simpsons. And I go, why am I spending six days a week in L.A., which I hate every minute. And so we moved to New York. And I would fly into work every Wednesday.
My whole job there was to tell people it's Wednesday. They would see me go, oh, I guess it's the middle of the week. That seemed to be my all. I remember I was one of those people. Oh, Mike's here. All right. It's hump day. That was it. And it finally got to be too much for me. You know, we were on Zoom for four years and that meant I could do all my travel and just Zoom in. I Zoomed in from.
Tanzania and places like that. I do it from cruise ships and that kind of thing. Right. And that brings us full circle back to your substack, which we want to direct people to. Why did you... Do you have a larger plan for this? Do you want to collect these into a book, or is this just like a clearinghouse? They're so funny, and they're really fast and really funny. Thank you. Yeah, you know, I've just been writing up my travels.
In any form that was available. It was a podcast for a while. There's a magazine nobody reads, and I'm their travel correspondent. Which one is it? American bystander. Funny magazine. I don't know. Now that's called Congress. We'll be right back. So I and one day I look, I go, I've got 80,000 words and pictures of travel writing up funny travel stories. And then your sub stack came out. It was literally you. I said, oh, Dana's got a sub stack. And I recognize this stuff. You know, you had.
15 years of your podcast to mine right but then you're i think you're doing what i'm doing which is i go all right i'll just cut and paste old stuff won't this be easy and then yep i go i can't just do that right tons of new material for the thing. Sure, sure. Self-imposed. twice a week deadline to tell funny stories and dig through the photos. I only go to the places that my readers wouldn't set foot. So yeah. Libya. I've been to North Korea and the North Pole. And again,
I don't want to go anywhere and I'm at the fucking North pole. Well, yeah. And just so for people to get a sense of it, the two, the two that you, the last two that you've posted was your, uh, You're recounting the cheapest haircuts on earth. You get a 78 cent haircut in Ethiopia. The whole village came in to see it. The blue eyed devil get his haircut.
And also Searching for Tampons in the Arab World, which is the sequel to Searching for Comedy in the Muslim World, the Albert Brooks film. And if you didn't see the story, it was... My wife, we travel all the time. And my wife, well, I'll say one of us always forgot her tampons. So she would send me out for tampons in Cambodia and in, you know, North Korea and that kind of thing. One day, she sent me into the Persian bazaar, I think, in Syria. Syria, you can't even go there anymore. Yeah.
I'm deep, deep in this Persian market, like something out of Aladdin. And I see a pharmacy and... The pharmacist doesn't speak English. It's not Europe where everybody knows English. It's just like you're really on your own. So I'm trying to mime what tampons are and ending over and inserting things into myself. Finally, the lights go on and he sells me something in a white box.
and I get them home to my wife, and it's a rectal thermometer. Yeah, how would a dude request a tampon to somebody that doesn't speak English? That is... That's a hard one. Right. Go to an improv class with that. That is a challenging charade. It did not work out. So I've got a million stories like this. It's been very fun and easy to write. And the amazing thing is I tell these stories for years. To the point where I go, this is bullshit, right? It's a good story, but...
Now I'm digging through the archives and I have photos to back up. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's great. It's, it's, it's, it reminds me of the Michael Palin show, you know, like, yeah, it's just like. You know, it's a shame that you guys didn't have a film crew with you the entire time. It's short. It's funny. As I say, I don't want to be there. And also, I'm the only guy, only travel writer.
I think who will tell you the truth. So like the Northern lights suck. Nobody knows that everybody comes home and oh, they were great. They.
fucking suck the northern lights oh that's one that's one of my wife's bucket list so tell me why they suck are the photos of them better than the reality that is exactly true i mean it's just it's a phenomenon of photography where they just look like smoke they just look like az smoke and then you look at them through the camera and they're beautiful i get it yeah yeah yeah and that was the only thing I ever encountered. That is weird that... This is a weird analogy.
I was with George. I was with George at a concert at the Hollywood Bowl. our friend George Meyer. And this couple came by to talk to us, this guy and this woman. And we chatted for a couple of minutes. So they walk away and I say to George, who was that? And he goes, oh, that was David O. Russell and Naomi Watts. Wow. Now, I had seen Naomi Watts.
I think Mulholland Drive was the year before. I knew who Naomi Watts was. Right. I was looking right at her. I was like a foot away from her talking to her for five minutes. Right. But you put a camera on her and it's like, oh, it's Naomi Watts. That's it. We all know the phenomena. Mine was Julianne Moore. Yeah. You know, she just looks like anybody. But yeah, so the northern lights. Yeah, but then they get on camera and something weird happens.
Thank you. Will you be updating it on your Substack or will you be going back into an old thing? I bought a yo-yo in Moscow. What I do is the Substack. I've written through Thanksgiving. I've got them planned out, written through Thanksgiving. But if something exciting, you know, the subject is based on the premise. I'm having a terrible vacation. Sure. That's why it's funny. If that happens to me, it'll be on the subset. So I can, you know, you can move the order around. Sure. Yeah. Yeah.
I will. I think I'll be, we'll be going to the world's fair in Osaka and I'll probably do a week of some sec about that. People should, I don't know if we're recording or not. People would enjoy it. And there is a paid premium level where I save all the really funny stuff. Yeah, it's great. It's great. And especially for people that are.
if you spend a lot of your time doom scrolling, it's a great break because it's short, but funny and well done. And it's a highly recommended. Thank you, Mike Reese. We didn't even get into your work as a stunt man, but we'll do that next. Pleasure. Thank you. It's great to be back. I was on eight years ago and it took me to do something notable again. This has been the Dana Gould Hour, brought to you by the Internet.
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