Spy vs. Spy

They come from the balls up now. The Dana Gould Hour! Jung the worms and swan fresh run around your feet. What a dog that kills a calf that ate the canary. What is true? And once again, welcome back. Hello and welcome back to the Dana Gouldauer Podcast. Our old friend Tom Shabilla is here. Tom joined us previously to discuss his book Primetime 1966-1967, which was the story of how network televisions first all color season revolutionized the way we watch TV.

His new book is entitled James Bond and the 60s Spy Craze. They say that pop culture in the 1960s was comprised of the three bees, beetles, batman, and bond. The first James Bond film in 1962, Dr. No, kicked off a pop culture craze that dominated movies and television for the next six years. Some good, a ton bad, and some laughably laughably bad. And Tom Shabilla is here to discuss it. Rachel Feinstein is here.

Rachel is a really, really funny stand-up comedian with a new special on Netflix called Big Guy. You may know Rachel from the show Inside Amy Schumer, the show, not the place. She's also on Amy's new show Life and Beth. She's been on the show Crashing Red Oaks. You may recognize her voice from Grand Theft Auto if you happen to play that. Do you play Grand Theft Auto? Or do you just live it? Not sure. I'm just gecks.

Speaking of spies, True Tales from Weirdzville tells the sorted tale of the origin of the CIA. From its sketchy beginnings in World War II as the OSS, into the mysterious behemoth it is today. If you're a fan of Dr. Z and who isn't, he will be appearing live at GalaxyCon in Raleigh, North Carolina on July 27th. And I will be appearing in my human form at the Irvine Improv on August 16th, 17th, and 18th.

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My guest today is a really great friend of mine and a terrific author who seems to be like, if I was an author, if I could get it together to write a book, I would want to write what he writes. It's odd in that my area of interests in terms of pop culture precede the age that I should be interested in it. I'm interested in things that were relevant kind of before my time. Yeah. I personally, because that's the stuff that I was watching on television in reruns.

You are the same way, but you're even younger than I am. Again, yeah, but I grew up watching this stuff on television in reruns. It was the same. It's that thing. Yeah, I never introduced you first. Wait. Oh, sorry. He crashed the stock market in 1922. He crashed the stock market in 2022.

He wrote an excellent book called 1966 to 1967, the full spectrum of television's first all color season, which really talked about the birth of what we used to see as a modern network television, which is now a museum piece. And his new book is as my as well have been titled Dana by this. It's called James Bond and the 60 spy craze, which is it's a it's about the spy craze in cinema and television in the 1960s.

But it's actually it's actually about show business and the way in the way show business runs. Please welcome your friend in mine, America's boy next door. Tom Shubila. Hey, okay. I like that. I'm not stealing that. That's my new. My new under my name. I like it. It's, but yeah, what's interesting is to put it in a to put it in a broader context, Hollywood. And I get probably literature too.

It moves in phases and you know, there was a time when everything was a Western and America wrote its mythology through the Western, the, you know, the rugged individual who, you know, and it's the the downside of that mythology is still a cancer in our culture. Ever ever metastasizing. And then his Western war movies went with it.

And then after World War II and then, you know, Phil Moore was huge after World War II came the spy craze, which is always, there were always espionage films, Hitchcock made espionage films during World War II, about World War II. But what we think of as a spy movie really didn't hit until the 1960s. Right. The song tongue in cheek larger than life saves the world with this hat pin. That's fine. Yeah. And that's certainly where where my book picks up. Right. Yeah, I acknowledge.

Yeah. You know what? There was a lot of spy films, espionage films made prior to that. There were silent espionage films. But when Dr. No was released, the first time that's gone film in 62, 62, yes. That just blew everything up. It was really the first, I guess, modern action film. And it brought all of that together. So there was action, there was sex, there was espionage, and it just hit at the right time, right place. And it is completely exploded from there.

It's also so, which is weird also because it's British. It's not, it wasn't, it wasn't American. Right. It wasn't like, when people think of like, you know, the American hero, John Wayne, you know, just out there killing what he disagrees with. The image of John Wayne is the typical American image, tough guy, physically strong, single-minded, not overly educated. Don't apologize. Don't apologize. Keep the guy in the face. Kill your enemies and keep going. What is Joe Rogan if not that?

I mean, in terms of how people see themselves, who else buys a fucking cyber truck, you know? Yeah, that or me, I would, I bought one because I like to drive something that reminds me of where I pee at the ballpark. It does. It looks like the ballpark. It does. It looks like the ballpark. It looks like the ballpark. It looks like the Gerard, he can't be stadium. Or the Jawa vehicle. But no, it's mind boggling. And I get that, you know, and that's what it is.

But the spy craze, which was, like in 1966, there were like every movie was a spy movie. And it started, it started in Britain, but also that was the 60s. The Beatles and James Bond. Okay. Defined pop culture in the 1960s. And that was the, actually, before my first book, part of one of the first incarnations of that was Beatles Bond and Batman. That was the third one. Yeah, Beatles Bond and Batman. Why pop culture in the 60s?

Batman and how television had revolved around Batman in 1966 and the color aspect of it. And then so this book is kind of the natural progression. It was well, you know, I really need to dive into something revolving around James Bond. And I started kicking around ideas. And I was reading a spy novel that was, it was by my friend Gary. Oh, yeah. Yeah, and I was reading it on vacation and I thought, wow, there could be a lot here. There's a lot of content here. There's a lot of movies.

A ton of stuff came out. And the one thing that I also tried to do is make sure that everything revolved around James Bond because he was the catalyst for the craze. And all of these films had some James Bond connection. Sure. And James Bond or pushed James Bond. And the connection that makes it so American is JFK. Yes. Because not only did the Bond movies, and I know this because of your book, not only to the Bond books gain a lot of traction in America.

And JFK said from Russia with Love was one of his favorite books that the year. But also the image of James Bond was very much the image of JFK. And it was really a new self image that America had after World War II, after Eisenhower, a young, dashing, a man with no sexual morals. But like, you know, also Captain Kirk was also JFK. Yeah. JFK now to space. Young, young, dashing, you know, love him and leave him quick, triggered dude, white dude.

And so I think that's how America latched on to James Bond. And it makes perfect, it makes perfect sense. Absolutely. And yeah, and JFK was a big fan. And it probably saw himself in James Bond. Oh, 100%.

And here's the weird thing, Louis Halleck, history and fiction and time together quite literally, you know, the Bay of Pigs, this giant international fiasco, the could have triggered World War III was JFK and Alan Delas, who ran the CIA at the time, sitting around going, what would James Bond do? And in the book, I talk about this quite a bit that there's just documentation. There's interviews with Andrew Dulles of them saying, well, you know, what would James Bond do here?

Like, how could we maybe kill Castro in a way that James Bond would kill Castro? It was literally like a poison cigar. No, it's mind boggling. And here's another thing, do you know what the one of the CIA's clandestine operations to try to kill Castro in a James Bond way was called Operation Ortsack, which is just Castro backwards. This is real. This is real. There's a great book by, I think it's Tim Weiner or weiner called Legacy of Ashes, which is the history of the CIA.

And they have like a 98% failure rate. It's really, it's really, it's really insane. But, but thank God one of the big successes was installing the Shah of Iran because that never came back to bite us. We're good. It's fascinating to see how we as a culture see ourselves in these fictional characters. And now, I mean, it's probably waning, but now it's, and for a while, it was the MCU. Like, really Robert Downey Jr.'s version of Tony Stark was an extension of that. Right.

It was basically a wise cracking, self-aware white dude with super, you know, that did not was not from Krypton created his own self-made, self-made same with Bruce Wayne. You know, and it's a very, it's a very American thing and admirable when used, when used in the right way. But it all came from, it all started really with Ian Fleming, who was a super British snob. Who was a spy?

Well, it was a spy was a World War II that so, and, and you know, again, like, you know, I'm sure Kennedy had some connection with them there as well. Yeah. And I found something, again, the Kennedy connection is something that I'd always heard about, but I never really researched too, too much. And then, you know, again, started diving into this and, and started hearing the stories of how President Kennedy propelled the books, how President Kennedy was such a big fan.

You know, apparently, from Russia with Love was the last movie that he had seen in office. Oh, that's good news. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. And there was a really cool story that we're filming, Gold, not, er, to Gold, my, Gold finger. Right. And they needed the, the aerial shots of Fort Knox. And they needed some approval. And it was kind of like, I think we know a guy. I think we know a guy at the White House who could help us out with this. And we know a fan.

So certainly was a big proponent of the films as well. Yeah. And so, you know, I think, they were all incredibly, they were, you know, denied you can't see inside it. So Ken Adam just made up what he thought it would look like based on the exterior photos and basically nailed it. They were really, wait a minute. I told you not to go inside. And I think that went, yeah. And then when Kennedy was killed, it, it almost, you know, it's fine. This was an intentional.

you know, gold finger is really the first Bond film that kind of lifts off from reality. Yes. You know, I mean, from rush with love outside of him being a sex addict is a pretty conventional spy story. You know, gold finger is when it gets into the all hot girl air force. Yes. And I have my favorite line in that movie, champagne leader to champagne one. I had, I teach, I teach out of community college. I mostly teach public speaking, but I also teach

a film class. And I showed gold finger and you talked about it and one girl raised her hand and said, so James Bond sexually assaulted that woman and then turned her straight and went, yes, he did. Yes. You could do that back then. Very stupid. Yeah. You can do that. Like it's a now. Yes. Now it's prey away the gay. It used to be, it used to be rape them straight. That's how we do it. That's quite literally that. Well, in Thunderball, I mean, I used to do a bit about this

in my standup in Thunderball. He outwrapped rapes a woman. He got right. Right. Rapes a woman. And that woman never comes back in the movie with like a bunch of cops. That's him in the jetpack. And that's, you know, speaking, you know, this is just a license to kill. I don't see anything. You need to be a triple O for this. That's that's what's important. One of the things, you know, again, when, when writing this book, I would run into time and time again. And, you know,

I always believe in writing from a historical perspective. And before what I write, you know, from where I write writing from a historical perspective, looking at it and saying, here's what people were saying in 1964. Right. It's what if you don't want to have this, yeah. If you want to have this discussion of, of, of, is James Bond a good guy? Is James Bond a bad guy? Be my guest. You know, I'm just telling you what they were talking about. And there was very

little discussion of this in 1964. But, you know, again, there were, there were some of them actually at the time. And I actually, I think I'd bring it up in both books that I have that Roger Moore called James Bond at A Moral Character. And he would ever want to play him. I mean, there were so many things in the early 60s, especially with Doctor, the other movie that was really revolutionary and that came out in 1962 is Psycho. Like there's so, you know, it really

was. And I don't know why it took so long for it to happen after World War II, because it was that generation that did it. Right. That in that particular decade, everything cracked. You know, everything broke at once. But everyone regards Goldfinger as the, like sort of the, the perfect James Bond movie. Like itself, itself, away. I mean, other people like, well, they, like from rush with love better or people like whatever. But most people Goldfinger is sort of the,

if somebody had to watch one James Bond movie, you go watch that. That's what they are. And that's when he became the Super Spy. Yes, that's when he became a superhero. And he became the superhero, Super Spy, whatever you want to call him. And, but as I kind of point out in the book as well, that when the other spy spoof's knockoffs, imitators, wannabes, when they started getting produced, I see that that started pushing Bond even further. Yes. 64. Yeah, he was a bit of a Super Spy.

Things were still somewhat guarded in real. We were still based in some reality. He was still basically on earth. Thunderball. Yeah. Okay. You know, a little bit more, dealing more atomic things to use it to use a Beatles analogy to me. Like, you know, Goldfinger and Thunderball are sort of the rubber soul and revolver of the James Bond. Like that was right at their, although some people don't like Thunderball. It's my favorite. Oh, I'm actually not,

yeah, I love Thunderball, but my favorite one is not the best one. But we'll and we'll get to that. But Thunderball, Thunderball, absolutely my favorite because it's, and you get a lot about 20 minutes of Thunderball and no one would miss it. There's a lot of this show. That's true. There's a lot of underwater stuff. But I see this like, because I see this, the Simpsons, like people always say, like by the second season of the Simpsons, people like,

oh, it's over. It's not what it was. Bosley Crowder, who was a famously personality critic for the New York Times. I love his reviews, by the way. If I find a Bosley, it's going in the book, no matter what book I'm writing. If I see a review by him, we're talking about it. Bosley Crowder writes reviews as if he was that guy in Laura that typed in his bathtub.

Sorry. You know what I mean? Yes, you'll read about this in my column. I get the first, the first sentence of Bosley Crowder's review of Goldfinger is old 007 is slipping. Rather his writers are, he knows I guess already over two movies in. It's already. Yeah. Yeah. He was, he was thrown in the towel for James Bond in 64. Yeah. Well, I have, and I think also in that review, I think it's the same review. You talked about that.

Well, there weren't as many girls to look at. Yeah. I'm sure Bosley Crowder's. I'm sure Bosley Crowder's really drooling after the ladies. Yeah, and he complains that they're too manly. Yeah. Her name is Paul. If that's the manly pay, which also is in, it's so funny. How like, they could do that then. And there's a, there's a famous photo of now one honor black man who played Psygillor was 38 at the time, which was like, um, what's right. It's not long. Yeah, not long

and the two came from the Avengers. Her character's name is Psygillor, which is in the book. One of the best lines in the entire bond canon is when he wakes up in the plane and she goes, I'm Psygillor and he goes, well, I'm most big dreaming. There's a photo of her. You get standing on a beach with the word pussy written in the same that and she's just staring up at the camera. And it's just like, I know you're thinking what I'm thinking.

I think I'd go to the book clearly leaning into the cell. Yeah, no, she thought it was hilarious. Like she clearly knew what she was doing and thought it was hilarious. And the other thing is 64. That's when the Beatles explode too. Like bond and the Beatles both exploded in the same year. Both British. And that really took over Western pop culture for the, for the, I mean, the big, the big movements in Western pop culture were

through, well, for the next six or seven years, we're all aping British things. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, yeah, you know, definitely, yeah, American bands trying to sound like the Beatles. All those, like all those haircuts came, well, they came from Germany to the Beatles to America. Much like, much like the spy craze, you know, you had bands in America, like the Gras Rock bands of the era, the psychedelic bands of the era that were trying to just catch up with

the, those, those bridge bands. Yeah. Yeah. What I love in your book, I mean, it's so, it's so well researched that the minute bond took off you had the episode where Herman Munster becomes a spy, the episode where Jethro Bodine becomes a spy double, double not spy. And just recently, me TV started running ads about Jethro being a double not spy. I don't want to know that. Took it from me. It's amazing that he had time to be hot Rod Herman and a spy.

Yeah, the hot Rod Herman, the monkeys, they got involved in SP and I, I, I, I, I, I fight every portion and the movie so so you get from going for the year, 60 to get in the Thunderball and it's really taking up help as a bond movie. Yeah. Let's throw, you know, help as a Beatles, as the Beatles and a spy, even the music, if you listen to the The Song help, there's two versions of help. One starts with John Lennon and going, help. The other one starts with a very John Barry Ish, guitar lick.

D-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d. So they absolutely do what they're doing. And the color palette is very, very Thunderball. So when did they start the Xeroxing of a successful franchise starts and everything is, everything is a spy movie. Everything is a spy movie. 66 was the... Right. 66 was the... That was the... Yeah, the Xeroxing was going on and it's still with the first generation of Xeroxing. Right. And Batman, and it's also the, you know, to put

in cultural context, that's the year of... It's still... The last year of the conventional Beatles. No. It's Robert Solen Revolver before they went groovy. Before they went to psychedelic, they were groovy. Right. And Batman is... Taking off. Taking off. So hilarious and so perfect. Kennedy's dead. Kennedy's still dead. Kennedy's still dead. Vietnam has been really escalated. That much were there. Right. You know, we're talking about it.

But in 66, much like any cultural impasse, any cultural phenomena, critics and things like that, okay, we're pushing this along. We're saying, okay, yeah, this is great. We're writing puff pieces about spy films. Spice films are really cool. You could see in 66 by mid-66 all of the sudden spies are not cool, you know. So the same people that brought this up ripped it down. You know, it was Passe, it was... There was just so many spy films

that were just invading theaters each and every week. It's exactly what we went through the MCU last year. Yeah. Yeah. It was just so many... So many... There were movies that... I started looking at them and I'm like, what is this? Like, I was like, oh, it was a TV show. It was on a platform that you didn't have. I don't know what that says. It's on

Vuzuvialon. Don't you have it? Who did the Mark Maren? Yeah. Mark Maren? Mark Maren. You did a really great skit about, you know, before you could tell somebody, well, what channel is this show on? It's, oh, it's on ABC. And he said, oh, okay, it's on ABC. I can watch it on ABC. And he goes, now it's like, well, it's on clomper. Well, you have to be a part of a clomper community. Clomper. There's a patronon of clomper. Like, you don't know

where this is. So insane. Just to give you an example of... Yeah. By the way, all that's going to change. I think a lot of these streamers are going to merge. That's going to be the next earthquake because what they've realized is people don't want to subscribe to 18 different platforms. And most platforms have only one or two good things on them. There was, and which is not to say that they're only one or two good things, but one of two things that

appeal to any random individual. People don't want to be for 18 of them. You said YouTube channel watcher, not if you're a writer. It's guys, they like, you know, they go to like haunted houses. Okay. They'll go to haunted houses. They go to me. Yeah, they go to haunted houses and they go to, you know, they they talk about like true crime, you know, like, okay, we're gonna solve. Like, here's what happened. Like kind of stuff. They came out about

a month or two weeks ago and said, we're leaving YouTube. We're going to our own platform. Everybody has to pay us $10 a month. And it was like, screw you. They're like, they're careers because then they had to backtrack like two days later because everybody's like, we're not paying you $10. Yeah. There's, I mean, it will go story. It's very hard to and

it's utterly ran, you know, and it's also just random. It's utterly random. By 1966, it's when the spy craze sort of, and it's also, it's when it hits, it's when it hits television, what I didn't know that I learned from your book was that the first Lensstone's movie was a spy barrier. Yeah. Yeah. It's actually pretty good. I really liked it. I

enjoyed it. You know, a lot of bond callbacks, one arm and flint callbacks. And it was, it was eerily like, was the man who never was, which was a spy show that came out the same time and had a similar theme to that where somebody had the same, Fred Flintstone looked exactly like a spy. Oh, okay. It was also the plot of North by Northwest,

Northwest. Yeah. That too. The three major, like, there were so many smaller ones, but the three major sort of bond copy franchises, well, there are two bond copy franchises that were huge, which was red helm with Dean Martin, who's more James Bond than James Bond if you ask me. And more American, he liked women and he liked his alcohol. Yeah. So, yeah. And those were, I think, I think when people watch the Austin Powers films, they think

James Bond, but it's mad help. The Austin Powers really dictated the direction of the current bond franchise, or the now, like the Daniel Craig was specifically cast as a response to Austin Powers. Like, I think originally was possibly, before Austin Powers, it might have been Henry Campbell or somebody like a real square jawed. And when Austin Powers came out, they were like, no, we can't do this. We've got a, we've got a zag where they're zigging.

I think they also, you know, any jokes just couldn't be there. You know, we're not a joke at all. Yeah. Well, there was not a wink and a nod to anything. Yeah. We're, the Sean Conor, James Bond did that a lot. You know, there was a lot of funny parts that was a lot of wink and nods to other things. Well, by the time you get to my favorite bond movie, you only live twice, which is by far not the best bond movie. That's completely insane.

And, and let's be honest, bracingly racist. This is another thing that I was thinking about. I was saying, you know, again, with the book, you could read it. And you could say, yeah, James Bond is a little racist in this book. Yeah, James Bond is a lot of racist in this book. A couple of things. Yeah. You only have twice is so insane. One, he tells a Japanese guy how to serve sake, which is great. And then for absolutely no reason, he has to look

Japanese. So he's got a plastic surgery. I watched this. I watched this. I watched this movie so many times. And again, I watch it while writing. And I probably watch it twice. And every time I'm going, wait, why did he become Japanese here and get married? Why? I mean, it is in the book. It is in the book. But the book is a very different story. And you can, again, you can just like scissors. You can lock that right off. You don't need

to get down that air card. Yeah. It is completely, I mean, in the book, it's interesting because he loses his mind. And he really does spend months in this fishing village. Right. You know, and then he's kidnapped by the Russians and, and then the next book, he's programmed to kill him. And they send him on his last mission thinking it will kill. That's the man with the golden gun is the last book. And when you get to the last book in the Fleming

series, he's really fucked up. It's actually, it's really, it's interesting to read. But yeah, they're sort of chasing it. And by that time in 1966, when Connie was like, I can't do this anymore. It's, he was too famous for his own comfort. As he, as he said, it was the bond in the Beatles, but there were four of them. There was only one of me. He literally like couldn't function and it started to drive him bananas. James Cobraan

is not as famous as Dean Martin is now. He didn't, right. You know, didn't become larger than life the way Dean Martin was. But those movies are amazing. The bad hell movies, you know, getting really over the top that the Derek Flette movies also vary over the top, especially the, the sequel where he talks to dolphins. And I believe the, the, the name of the, the name of the evil organization is Zawi. That was, I know I know is that the Z stands for Zonal. That's a bit of a, a bit of a stretch.

It's close. I was looking at, and all those films did really well. That's the other thing. Yeah, everything's making money. So why stop? You did really, really well throughout the, throughout the years. So yeah, those were certainly a, and that's the analogy to the superhero movies is that these movies come out. They do well. So the show is, well, let's just fuck it to death. And it's just like everything is a spy movie until people are like, stop it.

And it's amazing that everything ended by the, you know, sometimes there's spillover from a previous decade. Yeah. And a decade is, it's 10, 10 years that we have put together it. Yeah, the 60s did not end in 1969. They ended in 72. Right. What? In the terms of Beatles bonded Batman. They're all over in 19, nine. That's true. They're all over by the, by night. Beatles break up. Conor relieves, Conor relieves Batman's cancel. The spy phrase is over.

Yep. That's really true. And, and, and even, even by the late 60s, the Beatles are chasing pop culture like the, the, the Beatles last look as a band was them trying to look like the band. Well, yeah. That's true. Yeah. They cover of it. Finally, they never could not the trend setter. Yeah. They were the trendsetters anymore. Yeah. And it's something that's like, it fall. You know, it, it, we were talking about this last night with some people, you know,

genius touches people, but not permanently. You have a period of genius. And then the genius goes to somebody else. The Beatles had a period of genius. Python had a period of genius. Brian Wilson had a period of genius. You know, and then it goes away. Bond is the only thing that survives. But it survives. It, it, the movies change because they have to mirror. Yeah. The time. Not in their original form whatsoever. You have, you know, Bond using the 44 magnum,

live and let die, which I never noticed before. As they started copying other, uh, the black exploitation film. Yep. Uh, moon raker like the Omega man, like Omega man. Explosive. Explosive. No. Um, uh, uh, moon raker. They said, well, Star Wars, get me one of those. Yeah. Star Wars is big. Let's do Star Wars. My favorite, uh, and I've talked about this before, but I was in a, uh, antique store fairly recently. And there was a novelization of moon raker. And some, and the note was novel based

on the movie based on a novel. Oh, so you, so you're looking at a copy of James Bond and moon raker. Yes. Yes. Yes. Which I, which I had. I just thought that that note. I just, I went, wow, that's very astute and very funny. Oh, yeah, I was doing a, um, I was recently looking at, uh, a fun fact. I was talking about the last episode. The, the 1980s film version of the little shop of Hars, which was a movie based on the musical based on the movie. And the, the first movie

was shot in two days and two nights, uh, with no stars and no money. And the second movie we had a all star cast and a luxurious multimillion dollar budget. Uh, and the first movie made its money back and the second one didn't. Yeah. Baroness. Mm-hmm. It's an interesting arc in the, in the, if you look at it and as, uh, uh, an example of spy movies in the 60s, they start out since here. Then they start to make fun

of themselves. Uh-huh. And then they're over and can only exist in parody. Yeah. And that, that's, that's what they, they can only exist in parody and is again, kind of as a mix of pop culture. This, the candy colored version of pop culture that was the 60s goes away. Right. And the 70s are a cultural hangover. Yeah. And it's the rock, the rock got down in dirty. The movies got down in dirty comedy. Get down to everybody's, you know, it's dirty Harry. It's, uh, you know,

the black Sabbath, you know, just like everything get the, the early 70s word. And I think, and a lot of it was, and, and this didn't set it off, but this embodied it, you know, it went from flower power to Manson. Yeah. That, that, that's what the view of hippies became. Yeah. Um, and, and, and he's in, you know, it, it, it with films, you know, one of the things I point out is, you know, you, all of a sudden you've started having films like, you know, like dirty Harry, like the conversation,

um, like the deer hunter. Yeah. Those are, you know, they're not fun to talk to. Those are, you know, the thing with hippies with Joe, you know, you have, you have a much less,

uh, talk about Joe for people who don't know about it. Oh, yeah. Joe Peter, Peter Boyle, uh, he's, uh, and he's a, an archie, a conservative guy, you know, my, my favorite wide in the whole film, anytime I see a Budweiser, I think of him said, King of Beers, uh, guy comes into the bar who, who has killed his daughter's boyfriend and, you know, Joe's running his mouth and he says, you know, uh, you know, I like to kill one of those hippies, you know, and the guy says, well,

I just did. And they, um, unwillingly he becomes his friend because the guy now knows that, you know, yeah, Joe now knows that the guy killed his, uh, friends, his, his, his daughter's boyfriend. It's, it's interesting too, because we, I'm going through this now because I'm, I'm writing on the show Ted, uh, the Seth McFarland, oh, okay. Eddie Beershow. Celtic called Teddy Beershow. That's like, but Ted, if you, if you want it, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's very, it's really influenced

by all the family. Um, yeah. The, the father character, uh, Maddie Bennett, uh, played by Scott Crimes, played very well by Scott Crimes. Um, is, is it very much an archie bunker kind of character? Yeah, I see that. Yeah. And, uh, a lot of, a lot of his stuff comes from my father, um, who is the same guy, but in the same way that with like archie bunker, it starts off is a parody. You're making fun of it, but people don't get the joke. Like, people love, you know,

nobody loves Michael Stivock. Everybody loves archie bunker. And they don't realize that archie's a buffoon. Yeah. You know, and I don't think Michael Stivock was intended to be a buffoon, but he became Archie's foil. Um, and that, that, that always happens. I was talking to Phil Henry about Rush Limbaugh that when, when Rush Limbaugh first broke, he was kind of parodying those guys. Like he was still a conservative, but he was the character that he was perfect for,

portraying was very much affected. Yeah. And then he just started to believe it. I became the character that he created the character that he became because that's where the money was. You know, it's, it's all, it's very, it's very, it's very cyclical in that regard. It just, it's, it becomes sincere, larger than life, utter parody, and then, and then a period of non-existence, and then it goes back to where it starts again. Like the, the Roger Moore bond movies in the 70s

are basically mad hell movies. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then finally in 1981, they reboot the franchise and make like a serious by movie. For your eyes only is serious. Yeah. I actually was just watching your trailer from hell for, I think you did not enough for your eyes only, but you did living daylights. Living daylights. Yeah. We didn't daylights. I was just watching that. And you know, how every so often they, they come out. No, no, this is a serious bond. And with

Pierce Bros. then you had, that was almost in super speed of this where Goldnye was kind of the stripped down. Yeah. Pretty good. And then wickly. They immediately get to invisible cars. Yeah. Yeah. Invisible cars. And, and, uh, oh, a reverse, uh, uh, you only live twice where you had a Asian guy becoming British. Some reason. And also the Spy who love me. It was like, it was like, oh, we have to, we have to, where are the? The movie, the Spy who love me,

is a complete remake of you only live twice. Yeah. Let's, sure, complete remake of you only twice. Um, and then, and then it starts, uh, it, it, it, well, thank God the good guys wanted the end of the only, of, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, living daylights as well. Yes. Uh, he's basically helps those some have been. Lawden. Like, thankfully, the good guys want, when you watch, you, everybody listen to this, go back and watch the living daylights where James Bond

teams up with a sum of and lawden to defeat the Soviet incursion of Afghanistan. And it's, it's, but that guy is like studied in England. He is a sum of, uh, uh, what you have now, and I see this because I love Spy, uh, Spy literature and, you know, uh, uh, uh, what you see now, and you saw it in the last Bond film, uh, and you see it a lot, I don't know, have you ever read or seen slow horses? No. Okay. Slow horses is a series of spy novels

by Danny Mick Heron. And it's been made into a series on Apple TV. It's the best thing on television. Um, um, slow horses is an analogy for a subset of MI5, uh, called Slaw House. And what it is, is it's basically the animal house of the MI5. It's all the fuck ups. And instead of firing them, they move them off to this outside precinct called Slaw House, hoping that they'll quit.

You know, and Gary Oldman, uh, plays the guy that runs it, who is like a, a master spy, like an old smiley master spy, who's, uh, not politically savvy and has ended up out of the, outer burrows. Um, he, uh, the show is hilarious, but it's not a comedy. The spy stories are all very genuine and real and clever, really smart. But Gary Oldman is, his character is such a pig that is really funny. Like he has a terrible flatulence problem.

But they never, like, hill, there's a scene where Kristen Scott Thomas plays the head of MI6. And she knows how good Gary Oldman's character is, a guy named Jackson Lamb. And so they're like having a clandestine meeting on a park bench talking about this thing. And they're talking, and suddenly Chris has got Thomas goes, Jesus Christ. And he just goes, yeah, better out than in. But oh, it's, you know, I'm envious that you get to see it for the first time.

But the thing that's interesting with, uh, the slow horses novels, anyway, there's a lot with LaCara, a LaCara too, is that all of the intrigue is also caused by MI5. It's also caused by MI6. Like, you know, the, I mean, it's certainly true of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. It's absolutely true of the, the spy who came from in from the cold. Um, it's, it's all MI6 fucking over their own agents. Um, and it was also the story of, you know, if you saw no time to die, which I did not like.

Um, it's all create, it was the whole problem was created by MI6. Yeah. But because that's what are so cynical now that people believe the only supervillains people will believe are their own government. That's true. The thing with bar, I, I love it in the theater. And then I get it, I watch it later and I was looking good. I didn't like it because if you, it's too late, if you haven't seen it, this is a spoiler. But if you haven't seen it by now,

I don't care. Um, if he dies, you, you've missed the point of the whole character. You know, and he says, I love you like seven times. No, he's a sociopath. The whole, the whole point of the character is he's wounded and incapable of forming bonded relationships. He's addicted to pain medication and wounds. Yes, yes. And he's a broken man acting out. And the, you know, the, and there's nothing wrong. It's just like, it's fine. You can do it. But don't call it a James

Bond movie because that's not, that's not who he is. Um, yeah, that, and also his death was completely avoidable, completely avoidable. Yeah. So, but that, that going back to Harry Plummer. Yeah. The Harry Palmer comes out in the first movie is the IBCrest Files in 1963. Yeah, 63, 64, I say, yeah. Yeah. Um, written by novel calendars, the anti James Bond. Yeah. In a sense that he's a working class guy. Yeah. Working class guy. He wears glasses. He

makes his own breakfast. Right. He has the, the governor, the, the English government, national health, national health classes, national health classes. There we go. Yeah. And if you think about it, it's like, well, Bond is this guy. He has a vacation home in Jamaica. He has cool cars. He's got a real nice apartment. Um, but he's a government worker. Yeah. I, and the Harry Palmer, you can check out my salary on governmentsalaries.com. I'm not like

nothing of the, uh, the scoreboard here. Well, and it's all, it started Michael Cain, who was himself white revolutionary in terms of British actor. And he was a, not, not unlike Marlon Brando here, not in his acting style, but he was a unabashedly middle class guy. Right. And he had a Cockney accent. He didn't have a posh affect to his accent. You know, every all British actors with put it up to that point where all Lawrence Olivier.

Well, Cain was the only guy. It's all like this. You know, he was the only guy that like unabashedly was blue collar. And he becomes the, if you want to do a Cockney accent, Michael Cain. Yeah. It's Michael Cain. Yeah. And, uh, and what I didn't know was that Michael Cain, there's Michael Cain. And then there's the character of Michael Cain. You know, and what made that popular was Peter Sellers. Yeah. Doing Michael Cain.

You're Michael Cain. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Peter Sellers invented a catch phrase for Michael Cain. That Michael Cain never said. This was like Peter Sellers. Michael Cain was an example would be, you know, it takes 53 seconds for a blout to fall from a top a big band to Graham. Not a lot of people know that. And not a lot of people know that became like the Michael Cain catch phrase. I never said it. It was all Peter Sellers said that.

That's the little beauty, beauty of England. Yes. Exactly. It's the same thing. You never said it. The, but the Harry, the Harry Palmer films are great because it is like the blue collar James Bond. Like you see him making his own breakfast and reading the paper and he's got a, you know, it's their, their, their really great. And they made a terrific series of the Ippcress files. I think in 2019 again, you love it. Said in 1963, they have a really good actor playing Harry

Palmer. And it's, it's great. It was, it's just like, if you like this stuff, it's like crack. It's so good. And that's it. It's an antiquated drug reference. I always feel like that should be, I mean, if I were, if I were the broccoli family, how I would, I would make James Bond in the six, I put him in the 60s. You know, just do it. What am I 1962? You know, put it, put him in 1955. I don't know. There was always a story. Yeah,

I would be great to put to really do it in the right. I mean, here's the thing you got to give them credit. Those movies, they shouldn't still be making those movies. It, they have what they have. What I mean is successfully and they do. Right. You know, it's like, they're really having a hard time continuing the Star Trek franchise on television and in features because they, what they haven't figured out is how to bring in new people, but placate the, the traditional fans. Right.

And what they end up doing is making a movie for nobody. Like they make, like the last Star Trek movie is like, we get the fast and furious director. Great. Star Trek fans don't want to see it and people that aren't Star Trek fans don't care. But Bond, they always, and I think it's just because there will always be a strain of male fantasy that is attracted to the, you know, Star Trek is not a male fantasy. It's an intellectual fantasy that there will always be a male fantasy of

guys that want to be James Bond. Right. And, and, and they'll go, but they do manage to reinvent him successfully. Yeah. Well, they never really had that bit of a miss. The first incarnation of Bond in the casino royale television show. Harry Nelson, Rick Barrett Woodbury Nelson, you know, I think he, he, he, he and Connery kind of have, you know, he kind of, I think he did a decent job. I've never seen it. Oh, it's good.

You know, I, I, I, I, you know, some similarities to him to being him and Connery, but he plays in America. Right. Jim, Jimmy Bond, Jimmy Bond, which that makes you American. For Jimmy, not James. Yeah. It would have been great if they just did a spinoff of that. Well, this is, this is how crazy the Roger Moore movies became even right out of the gate. They bring the man with the golden gun, which is terrible. Yeah. They brought back that cracker

sheriff. Yeah. Yeah. What are you sure? I'm kind of death machine. I never quite understood that. Also, I've done the fewest kills in a James Bond movie. Cause, but he does, he does push a child into a polluted river. No. And it's so funny because Roger Moore goes, yeah, I always hated that. He could change anything I did. I would have go back and fixed that. Because he was saying, apparently Roger Moore was like the sweetest man on the planet.

And he was like, he became a chair, like the ambassador. I'm ambassador to unicef. Like he really cares. Oh, I hated that. I hated that. That's what I, it's really true. Yeah. I like, I love, licensed living daylights is interesting because he does, he does help. Oh, some a bit lot in the plot. I can't figure out that plot. I've seen it four times. I love license to kill only because it's not really a James Bond movie.

It's just a weird 80s action that happens to have a guy in it named James Bond. And then yeah, the browser movies are the browser movies. I'm, I'll be, I'm curious to see what they do next. I guess they know who it's going to, there's some guy they say this is the guy, but they just haven't announced it yet. Yeah, that's why I keep hearing too. Yeah, Aaron Taylor or something. Yeah, he looks like he looks like a man. Yeah,

it shouldn't be Henry Cavill. He looks too much like a, you look to square jobs. He played Superman. Yeah. Did he play long range? No, that was the army. Hannibal, the cannibal, but it will be interesting to see when I would go like how these movies evolve. I guess Quentin Tarantino was going to wanted to make a Bond movie set in like 1959. Yeah. I should just do it. I don't want off. I don't. Yeah. You know, in terms of when the Cold War ended, I mean, ostensibly the Cold War ended in 1989

when the wall came down, right. But in terms of like cultural, in terms of like espionage, it ended on 9-11. That was kind of like the end of an era like there are no more, there are no more state-sponsored enemies. All the enemies, I mean, all the enemies now are just row groups of lunatics or billionaires. I mean, even before 9-11, you saw that with the guy in another day where you had the world of sun, not the world of sun, not the moon.

Which is the one with the guy that diamonds in his face? I don't remember. But yeah, that was that was the one where the Asian guy became English. Yeah. That's it. That's the guy with the diamonds in his face. Which is a great thing. He opens up the case and it blows up. Yeah. And it's just implants a bunch of diamonds in his face. That's pretty good. Yeah. Yeah. That's that certainly changed a lot of the trajectory of it.

And you could see in those, again, early brothen films is like, well, it's no longer the Soviets. What do we do? Yeah, what do we do? We don't have an enemy anymore. There was a great scene in Golden Eye where he meets his former opposite number from the Soviet Union and they're literally in a statuary graveyard. And all these, it was a great, like, yeah, this is over, just behind us.

Back to the holes. Yeah. It was really, it was really great. But there is something to be, especially when you step back and you look at what the Cold War was all about, it was like, it was just people chasing their tails. Let's outspend it to the other guy. Yeah. But I never understood how like when you looked at, when you look at people that were western communists, you want to go like, have you seen me, Sprillin?

It's right here. Look at this and look at that. Look at rock and roll records over there. I don't know if you guys know. We went to Berlin on our honeymoon because like a lot of newlyweds, we wanted to see where Hitler got to start. But like even now, without the wall, the architectural, like you absolutely know when you are in what was Sprillin. Yeah. Yeah. Like just the austerity of the architecture is astounding. And West Brillin is much

gruvier. But I do love that. Yeah. Like Funeral in Berlin. I, it's such a seductive place to set stories. Yeah. Definitely. And then anything that was shot there, you could definitely, it's always interesting. Yeah. You can clearly see it. It'll be interesting to see what they do. They keep trying to redo others by things. But they never, they never make them in temporary. I had a meeting when they did, they remake Get Smart. Right.

With Steve Carell. Yeah. I remember. Right. So I met on that movie to write it. And I immediately killed any opportunity I had to get the job. But I stand by my point, although I'm sure there are better people to write it. But it was like Get Smart is a parody of something that no longer exists. Get smart is a parody of Goldfinger from Russia with Love Thunderball. And the quote, the word just in general. Right. What you need to do is take Maxwell Smart, but make him the Jason

born version of Maxwell Smart. Because that, those are the movies that were popular at the time. Yeah. And at least you're making some fun of something that's contemporary. Yeah. Yeah. It's like the monsters. It's like you're making fun of some. I don't know what you're even making fun of. It's the reason not really like a wholesome sitcom for you to make. Yeah. And it's the reason the rob that Rob Zombie monsters movie, which I did not see. It's like

this is a parody of something. And I don't even know what you're parodying anymore. You know, I imagine like you said with Star Trek, you're alienating the like, there's people like me that love the monsters. Right. I didn't see it. Right. Because you've made a movie for nobody. You got to move them for nobody. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's really interesting. Yeah. I'm very curious to see where the bond franchise goes. Because I know in some, they

have these off brand books. Now that are like books about bond that he's not in like there's a group of MI6 people trying to find him. Okay. And in it, Q is like an AI computer. Like it's like an orb that's like an AI orb. So it's interesting. Yeah. It's interesting. It's like they how they do try to make it temporary. Contemporary. Yeah. It'll be interesting. It'll be interesting to see what they do. And so this book is called James Bond and the 60 Spy Craze. It's so it's such an

easy fun read in this. We never touched on half of the fascinating stuff. The 1967 Casino Royale, which is an atrocity. A mess. Yeah. That's the one. Operation Kid Brother. In Neil Connery Sean Connery's brother. Yeah. We've got it. She's got it. Conneries. Brother. And it was almost one of those films. I was researching it going, how was this even made? Like Dr. Goldfoot and the Girlbombs. There's so many. Dr. Goldbombs was a sequel to two films,

which is a Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini machine and then a Italian film. And I don't again, I don't know how that was conceived or made or what I even did surprise. What's it called? The first one was Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini machine. Yeah. What's the film called? Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini machine? When do I show up? Like, I'll be there. And that was a film where it was early enough in the spy craze where they said, okay, we're making this movie. It's a

beach movie. We have to have a spy. We have to have a spy in it. Yeah. We have to have a spy. How are we going to do that? I don't care. Pro card in there. Like Fred Flintstones just by Herman Munchers just by. Herman Munchers by their fries now. And then again, I talk about all the euro spy films. There's several Mexican spy films that came out. My one criteria was that it had to have played in America in the 60s. So I had to have found a... Oh, that's okay. That makes sense.

That makes sense. That makes sense. That makes sense. That providence that, yeah, this movie played. And some of the Mexican films, I was... Blue Demon was like the basic, the Mexican James Bond. Blue Demon, Al Santo. And none of the Blue Demon films played in America, but one of the Al Santo ones did Operation 67. I think it was at a drive-in in El Paso. And he's okay. He's making that method cut. Those movies are, those movies are just again, like, you just got

to see him. Like, it James Bond in a Mexican wrestling mask. That will move me. Once again, in my film class, I talked about the spy craze as a, as a whole, talked about the James Bond and then the knockoffs. And I mentioned the Mexican films. So I said, yeah, I don't even guess. And I'm a broad girl raised her hand. And she said, did they wear the masks to spy? Yes. Were they undercover? Yes. With the masks. Yep. Yeah. Would they put like a wig over the mask?

Yes. Okay. It's just accepted. It's okay. Yeah. It's just like, there's something about the craziness of that that will never be repeated. And it's gorgeous. My, I have a very good friend of mine lived in Mexico in the, he grew up in Mexico in the 60s and 70s and moved to the States in the 80s. And you know, when I first met him, you know, and I said, oh, like, where'd you, where'd you grow up? He said, oh, Mexico City. And I said, oh, did you ever, you know, hear of El Santo and

Jim and then he said, look at me. Like, you know, white guy from Pennsylvania. How do you know about these guys? I'm like, oh, I really like the movies. And then wrestling. He's what? Like, what's, like, what's wrong with you? And then so now every time he goes to Mexico, brings me back a ton of really cool stuff. Oh, great. When I met his wife for the first time, he goes, oh, tell him what kind of movies you like. Oh, like, I like, and she's like, what? Like,

no, those things like, those are awful. What's not? What's, you know, they're beautiful. They're beautiful. They're beautiful. What is your next, what is your next book? I was like, though, books, I'm still pitching a couple ideas. I don't really have anything. Well, you've done basically you've done Batman. Yeah. And you've done bond. Right. Something

that has never been done. A book about the Beatles. Wow. Okay. Whoa. Now that I don't think anybody's ever tackled you should do a get back style deep dive into the mosquitoes, which was the Beatles band that got stuck on Gilligan's Island. Yeah. You can eat us. I'm kick your out of a couple ideas. Again, maybe I would go in that direction. I'm also, I do want to kind of travel into something that we have talked about a little

bit. I think last time I was on, we are both monster kids. Sure. And I would like to dive into that realm. My agent Lee Sobel, he has told me that books about a singular subject sell a little bit better to. So I don't know. So I'm going to have to go with a specific movie or a biography. I don't know. So we're going to kick around a couple ideas. And also right now I am an executive producer on the Drew Friedman documentary. Available now. The book is James Bond in the 60s

by craze. It covers the the the bond. So much more really is an entire swath of pop culture that although it's you've limited it to the 60s, it absolutely shows you how things go now. I mean, the arc of the MCU is the same exact thing. Invention to putressants. I agree. Yeah. And the ever dwindling window that we managed to do it in. Tom Shabilla, thanks so much. We will look for the book and hopefully I'll see you at a Friedman screening soon.

Please, I would love to know the awesome. Thank you so much. Thank you, Dana. I always a pleasure. Of course. Visit our concession and see for yourself the delicious treats, drinks and snacks awaiting you. If you are thirsty, try ice cold soft drinks or a cup of hot flavorful coffee. Get something to go with it like a sizzling and satisfying hot dog or a tasty tender sandwich. Try one of these delicious treats and you'll be back at the concession for more before the show is over.

The service at our concession is friendly and efficient. There's true tale from weird to tales from weird to canter true. Can your heart stand the shocking facts? It all started with a little international squabble that came to be known as World War II. The president of the United States, Franklin Roosevelt, knew that to fight the war effectively, the United States needed to gather intelligence on its enemies.

Now up until that point gathering intelligence was done on something of an ad hoc basis. The army gathered it for the army, the navy gathered it for the navy, the FBI gathered it for domestic affairs, etc. etc. So to assert a sense of order over this mess, Roosevelt formed the Office of Strategic Services or the OSS. Now up until the OSS was formed, the United States government was not very good at gathering

intelligence, nor did it really seem to want to. In the 1920s there was a man named Herbert Yardley, who ran a code-breaking operation for the American military. It was shut down in 1929 by the secretary of state who said, and I quote, gentlemen don't read each other's mail. Okay. So to get the show on the road as it were, Roosevelt tapped one of his college friends,

William J. Donovan, known to his friends as Wild Bill Donovan. Donovan was born in New York, went on to study law at Columbia Law School became a lawyer, and eventually helped form the New York National Guard, from which he was mobilized and fought in the American campaign against Pancho Vía. He led an infantry battalion in World War I, was decorated for bravery, and then after World War I he became the US attorney for the Western District of New York, which remains a prominent position to

this day, asked Donald Trump. Donovan was based in New York, up in Buffalo, and he was a part of Buffalo's high society. Now, high society in those days did not include Catholics, which Donovan most certainly was, but he had married into it and was therefore tolerated. One of the high society haunts in Buffalo at the time was the Saturn Club, which served liquor, which was illegal because it was during prohibition. So Donovan, despite being a member of the Saturn Club, rated the Saturn

Club. His friends were apoplectic. His wife, supposedly, never forgave him, but he did it anyway because, as you will see, Wild Bill Donovan was a nut. There's a book written by a guy named Tim Weiner called Legacy of Ashes, and that is the primary source for everything you are hearing in

this piece today. And one of the points that Tim Weiner makes is, from the start, the American Intelligence Service was chock full of the well-healed, the well-bred, the well-connected, upper-class, white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants, with the exception of Wild Bill Donovan, the old boy's network. And nobody was well-healed, well-bred, and well-connected, then President

Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And so, in between World War I and what would become World War II, Franklin Delano Roosevelt asked his closest friends, and they were all lawyers, stockbrokers, businessmen, and the like, to keep their ears to the ground as they traveled about the world. Get a sense of where the world was going. Bill Donovan made a lot of contacts in Europe and Asia, and he became convinced that a second World War was inevitable.

Now, there were those who thought war was avoidable, at least as far as the United States was concerned, even if it meant appeasement. One such person was Roosevelt's ambassador to Great Britain, Joseph P. Kennedy. Now Roosevelt disagreed with Kennedy, as did Winston Churchill,

Wild Bill Donovan, and Kennedy's own son, John F. Kennedy. In 1941, Roosevelt appointed Donovan the coordinator of intelligence for the Office of Strategic Services, which was designed to function as a combination of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service and its Special Operations Executive. In other words, Donovan was the COI of the OSS, which was a combination of the SIS and the SOE. Among the OSS's successes in World War II was the running of a spy named Heinrich Meier.

Heinrich Meier was a Roman Catholic priest and a member of the Austrian resistance. Through the OSS, Meier was able to pass on plans and locations of Germany's V2 rockets. Meier's group had contacts with the workers at the Semperit factory, which was located near Auschwitz, and it was through Meier that the first reports of the Nazi's mass extermination programs were passed back to America. Eventually, the Nazis discovered Meier's group, and Meier and all of

his comrades were executed. Indeed, working for Wild Bill Donovan was a dangerous job. He was full of hair-brained ideas and had absolutely no compunction about ordering them into action without properly vetting them. He had a plan to drop two man teams behind enemy lines in Germany to contact the German resistance and perform acts of sabotage. He dropped 22 two man teams behind enemy lines. 21 of them were immediately killed. He loved gadgets. He hired a guy named Stanley P.

Lovel as essentially a one-man cue branch. Lovel came up with things like the Bino grenade that looked like a smooth avocado but exploded on impact. A black Joe, which was a grenade disguised as a lump of coal or an Aunt Jemima, which was an explosive disguised as a sack of flour. All OSS uniforms had a button that flipped open to reveal a compass inside. Officers carried decks of playing cards that could be assembled into a map. They all carried 16-millimeter cameras

the size of a box of matches. They also carried K7 tablets, which were flavorless poisons, because, again, working for Bill Donovan might get you killed and there were cases in which you might want to do it yourself. Despite being old friends Roosevelt did have doubts about Donovan because he was a whack job. To quote his aide David Bruce in Legacy of Ashes, his imagination was unlimited. Ideas were his playthings and excitement made him snort like a

racer. Woe to the officer who turned down a project because on its face it looked ridiculous or at least unusual. For painful weeks under his command I tested the possibility of using bats taken from Western caves to destroy Tokyo by dropping them into the sky with incendiary bombs strapped to their backs. Your tax dollars at work. All Roosevelt wanted was a spy service to provide information to the Pentagon. Donovan wanted a secret police service to not only

provide information but to perform clandestine operations. As far as Roosevelt was concerned, that wasn't cool. In fact, the plan was described in the White House as an American Gestapo, which will give you some sense of their opinion of it. How did the Pentagon feel about the OSS? Oh, they didn't like it either. You see, the OSS was separate from the Pentagon and was run by a civilian and the Pentagon feared that they would be cut out of the loop between the OSS and the

president. The president felt that he would be cut out of the loop between the OSS and the Pentagon. Everybody was so afraid that the new girl was going to date the other guy, they decided that it would best ascender to a totally different school. Now it's important to recall that these were all the same people who completely missed Pearl Harbor. Different military organizations had different pieces of the puzzle. Broken Japanese code here, uninterrupted communication there,

but it wasn't organized or under the same roof. Everyone was so paranoid of competition from everybody else that nobody shared their info. The little pieces were never allowed to fall into a big picture. Now with World War II drawing to a close, Donovan feared for the future of the OSS. But despite Roosevelt's reservations, Donovan was convinced that he could convince his old college friend to save the agency. And then Roosevelt died. Shows you, Donovan assumed the OSS

would die with him. Now, one of the things that Roosevelt did do before he died was to commission a report on the effectiveness of the OSS by Colonel Richard Park, the White House chief military aid. Richard Park hated William Donovan. And to complete his report, he worked with the joint chiefs, who also hated Donovan. And then he worked with the head of the FBI, Jay Edgar Hoover,

who hated Donovan twice as much as the other two groups combined. And so as Roosevelt's vice president Harry Truman settled in behind his desk on his first day as the president of the United States, he was presented with a report on William Donovan's OSS compiled by half a dozen people who hated his guts. The report was a detailed catalog of every OSS blunder and failure, with scant mention of any success. One particularly stinging quote, how many American lives were lost

in the Pacific because of the stupidity on the part of the OSS is unknown. Other gems? Donovan had lost a briefcase at a cocktail party in Bucharest, and it was subsequently turned over to the German Gestapo by a Romanian dancer. He had sent a detachment of men to a far away outpost in Liberia and then forgot about them. He had dropped a group of commandos into Sweden, which was neutral. There was a German ammunition dump that was captured in France.

Donovan sent guards to hold it. Then he blew up the dump and the guards along with it. On May 14, Donovan finally met face-to-face with Truman and was given an opportunity to pitch the importance of America's retaining and effective intelligence service. Truman gave him 15 minutes, thanked him for coming by and wished him off. On September 20, two and a half weeks after the end of World War II, Truman fired Donovan and gave the OSS 10 days to disband.

The United States would do away with its intelligence service in a week and a half. But right at the same time Donovan was fired, Henry Stimson, the United States Secretary of War, resigned. And Stimson, like Truman, was dead set against the idea of having an intelligence service. But Donovan's deputy, a guy named John McRooter and Stimson's deputy, a guy named John McCloy, got together and drew up an order that if nothing else, muddy the bureaucratic waters enough to buy

the OSS some time. This was actually a good thing. Truman felt that with the war over, peace would rain over the globe. That illusion did not last long. In fact, in the fallen city of Berlin, the Cold War was already up and running. With the surrender of Germany, the United States and the Soviet Union virtually on a dime went from being allies to adversaries. And Berlin was ground

zero for the face-off. Forces from both countries were frantically combing through the rubble to locate and recruit the best Nazi rocket scientists and weapon experts for their own use. Now was not the time for the United States to abandon its clandestine service. The OSS's man in Berlin was a guy named Richard Helms and Helms could not believe that Truman pulled the plug on the agency. Undeterred, he kept spying anyway. He went about doing

everything he could to find out what the Russians were up to. Now in Washington, DC, the joint chiefs, if not the president, were quickly realizing that the Soviet Union was indeed a viable threat to the safety and security of the free world. By November of 1945, they had already fastened their grip on the whole of East Germany. The joint chiefs believed, correctly, that the Russians sought to control as much of Europe as possible. The train was on the tracks. The United States was

absolutely going to have to have an intelligence service. Whether the president wanted it or not. The question was, what kind? As we said before, there are always two versions of what an intelligence service should be. One would employ a global network of spies to slowly and methodically gather information so that those in the US government who needed to know the world could know the world. The other view was the service should take an activist role through covert action and sabotage.

America's spy service could use its knowledge of the world to wage secret war on America's enemies. President Truman insisted that if America had to have a spy agency, that it would deal in information only. To which everyone said, yeah, yeah, sure, sure. Who wanted to run this new agency? Turns out everybody. The joint chiefs thought that they should be in charge. Jay Edgar Hoover thought the FBI should be in charge. And according to Tim Winer's book,

the postmaster general made a strong pitch. Maybe he should figure out a way to buy two stamps in less than 45 minutes before he started waging war on America's enemies. It was John McGruder who pointed out that the operations of this agency would have to, on occasion, employ tactics that were to use his words extra legal. And therefore, neither the joint chiefs nor the FBI should be anywhere near it. The postmaster general didn't get a say because he was 45 minutes late

to the meeting. On June 10th, 1946, the United States appointed a new director to what was now being called the Central Intelligence Group. Was it John McGruder? No! Was it Richard Helms? No! It was some dude named Hoyt Vandenberg. Helms stayed in Europe where his job was to oversee the Soviet Union's activities in East Germany, Austria, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. He described his job as an apprentice juggler trying to keep an inflated beach ball, an open milk bottle,

and a loaded machine gun in the air. The first thing Helms realized was that well over half of what he was learning about the Russians was utter, intentional, bullshit. But it did become clear that the Soviets were very intent on extending their sphere of influence wherever they could. Their first target was Romania. Vandenberg quickly decided that the best way to blunt the Soviet

advance was to sever its supply lines in Romania. This was one of the Central Intelligence Group's first official actions, and it was already in direct violation to President Truman's orders. So Vandenberg sent his aide Clark Clifford to the White House to tell Truman that, yeah, you know that thing you wanted? Yeah, we're not doing it. We're doing something else. And so it was. Clifford would go on to become one of LBJ's chief advisors in Vietnam,

and we all know how well that went. But back to Romania. The Central Intelligence Group set about turning Romania's National Peasant Party, a far-left agrarian populist political party, think Bernie Sanders with a bean farm into an armed military resistance force against the Soviet Union. On Monday, you're a farmer, on Tuesday, you're a Navy SEAL. What could go wrong?

This all went down in the late summer and early autumn of 1946. By the end of that winter, Soviet intelligent agents and the Romanian secret police had uncovered the plot and prisoned the leaders of the peasant party, killed whoever was left over, and secured the rise of a brutal dictatorship in Romania. Swing in a miss! January 1947, Romania is a right-off, next stop, Greece, and the aftermath of World War II, democracy in Greece and Turkey, was being propped

up by massive support and aid from Great Britain. But that was set to end, and the US feared that a communist infiltration there would serve as a beachhead for a communist influx in Western Europe. It was estimated that it would cost something along the lines of a billion dollars over the next four years to keep Greece and Turkey in our column. By now, Truman realized that he had been dead wrong in his initial post-war assessment. He also had his back against the wall. The Republicans

had destroyed him in the midterms, taking over both the House and the Senate. Republicans like Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon were loud chest-thumping anti-communists. The red scare was getting underway, and Truman, whose popularity was in the toilet, had to look tough. And so, Harry Truman signed the National Security Act of 1947. The Act re-established the United States' new attitude to fighting foreign threats, i.e. communism, back then. The Air Force separated from the Army to

become its own division of the armed services. The position of Secretary of Defense was created. The Act created the National Security Council, and it created a new, permanent American Intelligence Gathering Organization with a brand new, shiny name. The Central Intelligence Agency, or the CIA, and everybody lived happily ever after. In Puerto Rico, we call ourselves Boricua, we're proud, passionate, and full of life.

Our island adventure finds you. Strangers are in strangers for long. The size of the audience doesn't change the beauty of the music, and we celebrate every last ray of sun. Boricua. Then let's go. It's show time. It's a beautiful sun, dAppleday, high atop the Mulholland Drive-U shelf here in sunny Southern California, and I'm speaking with a very, very funny, and I say that about every

comedian, but I rarely mean it. But in this case, I actually do mean it. Rachel Feinstein has a new Netflix special coming out May 21st entitled Big Guy, it is her third Netflix special. Now normally, I'm familiar with Rachel, and I thought, well, okay, I'll watch like five minutes in the middle, five out of watch, five minutes at the beginning, five minutes in the middle, five minutes in the end. I'll get it, set down with my wife who works the whole thing,

run to back. It's my day. Yeah, it was really, it's genuinely funny, and it includes my new favorite expression, a hostile amount of turquoise. That's perfect. That's my mom's jewelry. And anybody who asks about her jewelry, she has a whole plate. It's from Yosemite. It truly loves to tell you where she gets her tau pas or her turquoise from. And she's also very concerned about what she wears to weddings. I remember my wedding. She talked to me for hours

about which men of possible capes she was going to wear. I'm like, what could matter less than what a 75-year-old bitch wears to a wedding? It's truly like a tree falls in a forest. I hope I get to that age and realize it doesn't matter. But there was a lot, speaking of hostile, there was a hostile amount of discussions of which shawl she was wearing, which like tau pas brooch. Let me give you a little bit more background. You've seen her on Inside Amy Schumer. You're on

Colin Quinn show. You're, you came up in, you came up in the New York scene. Yes. Were you born and, were you born and raised in New York? No, I grew up in Maryland. I moved to New York when I was like 17 with this guy and his band. I'm a big sister. That's the son. None of that sounds good. And we said we were out of high school. Yes, I never went to college. There wasn't even any discussion. I was like a urgency dumb. Yeah. I was very remedial and that was,

I was always getting scanned. They were always trying to figure out what was wrong. It wasn't kind, but you had a, but you had a feral intelligence. Thank you. I need you for you. I don't even know what that means. You could say something. You had it in a street smart. It should be a final street smart. Yes. Yes. Like you surrounded by enemies and, and survive with a broken bottle. Like you could get out of that situation. That's true. And I have had a soft taco thrown at my

tip before. I heard the soft taco story. It was it in the, it was in the, was it in the carolinas? I think it was in the special. It is. It was, I can't remember it. I think if it was in Des Moines or Carolina, I get the things thrown at me mixed up. I had a note thrown at me once. The Tom, some guy wrote a note and crumpled enough. And it said, go back to the kitchen. Which is funny because we saw me in the kitchen. I feel like you wouldn't want me to return there.

But yeah, I've had some funny things thrown. Let's go, let's go right into that. What year did you start doing stand? I don't know what year it was, but like, wait, let me think. I guess probably around 2000. Okay. So you and I are, you and I are, are, are similar in certain ways. And, and polar opposites in, in, in, in, in other ways, culturally. But I think in both of our cases, our ability to do stand up has allowed us to have a life that we probably wouldn't have otherwise. Definitely. Yeah.

Like, there was a kid that wrote on the Simpsons, really funny kid. He's a man. He had a choice between becoming a doctor or being a comedy writer because he was pre-med at Harvard. Wow. Yeah. And he just like, and Bill Odenkirk literally has his masters in like, like his master's thesis, he invented a new number or something. And yeah. And then decided to become a comedy writer. You and I did not have that option. We had so cool to know that makes me feel so better than I

didn't have anything. You didn't have that option either. That's a major cage fighters. Now I can do this one thing. That's it. Yeah. And because of that, both of us have lives that I don't think we otherwise would have had. Like, definitely. Yeah. You started comedy in 2000. I started it in 1982 when I was 17. Wow. And I was in the original kind of 80. I've been in my third boom. Like I did comedy in the 80s. I told jokes about Reagan. Nobody ever threw anything at me.

Yeah. You know, I get to jokes about Reagan. You get to josephal. Clinton, you get to josephal. I mean, I did all of these things. There wasn't the sort of the everything is everything in life now is Red Soxie Anguis. Everything in life is you're on this team or that team. And there's a reason for that. It's profitable. Yeah. It generates it generates revenue. But I find that even in comedy, it's really changed in that. They're really are the cultural divide that we have in our in America.

Is very prevalent in comedy as well. Like you had that whole half of LA had to move to Austin because they couldn't make fun of trans people here. There's this whole that I don't I can't get involved in it. I'm too I have a life. But if you will actually get people, why did someone through I guess the question I'm wondering though is why did someone throw a soft taco at your breast? Well, I was performing at a college and I'm remembering the whole gig now. It was actually

the you know, the culinary institute of Las Vegas. So it was a well made very high ends. Very high ends. Yes. Actually, the thing is people wanting a street taco. This is like in this particular in this particular situation, I wish it was because I was like saying something really like controversial and like, people weren't ready for my thoughts. But it was because I they put the stage in the audience in front of like some kind of food station and the kids wanted to get to the food

station. So I was just standing on this box in the way of what they wanted and I've done stand up so many times like that where I'm just an impediment to people's other people's joy. Stand up comedy should not be foisted upon you. No. Also like you should never get in. You can click to show on you today. And that's what and these colleges they'll put like,

I mean, it's ludicrous. They don't know how to like set up a show. So they put it up in the middle of this cafeteria, but they actually put in front of food stations for kids that were hungry. And and they wanted to get at this microwave thing so that they could microwave their like treats or hot pockets or whatever. And I was in front of it. And one guy was just getting angry and angry and I was making jokes about that. But it pissed him off. It just goes into my

identity. Really wanted to fucking hot pocket or whatever and then he hurled it at me. And it just fell off my pitch because there's a sadness to how it toss off taco falls. But yeah, it was it was one of the dumber moments on stage. We've all had we've all had those moments. I was performing in Vermont at a bar like a one night or bar. And we were it was like a bar and then there was a ramp down to a dance floor. And we performed at the foot of the ramp.

If evil, can evil were to jump the bar, he would start his acceleration from where they might was. And and a drunken man wandered down the ramp towards me. It took him a full two minutes to navigate because he had to he'd like skiing like he did that. He pizzaed down. And then just stood next to us. And no one thought maybe he maybe we should move this person away from the down the performer. And you just think, yeah, this is what I do. And for so, you know.

Yeah, I mean, because it's like nobody thinks that there's a lot of situations where the last thing they're thinking about is the comedian, including like it'll be really funny. You'll go to a club and I just wanted to like order some mozzarella sticks. I'm like Rochester. And they were like, we got a packed house out there. Yeah. We're real backed up like it. I'm like, but I'm performing. But they were like, yeah, it's going to have to be after the show

because one of the drunk twats that's going to hurl a bottle at you. She needs her sticks first. She needs her chicken sticks before you heard mozzarella sticks. It's fascinating. The way that happened the lot. And the way there's a certain kind of person that just ends up being in the front row. I mean, you know, comics always like about the person that's their arms folded. I think a comic one said to me, and last comment, I was doing last comic standing. And I was like,

why is it if I could have a great crowd? Why is it that I focus on the one guy with his arms folded in the front row because they're always in the front row. It's the drunk twats are always in the front row. The guy that's just on the fence glaring who's probably like just, you know, like freshly traumatized from something else. But we always internalize it. Yeah. Yes. And I will tell you, it took me decades, literal decades to not let it to just like understand you're on your own

journey. And this doesn't this has nothing to do with me. Would be on stage. In front of 3,000 people, there would be one guy in the back not laughing. And he'll blazer in on that guy. And it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Yeah. And this isn't a, this you don't have to enjoy me. Yeah. But maybe coming to come on for you.

No, sometimes I was in Vegas a while ago. And a guy was just fast asleep at my show. And there was a while, there was a long time ago that that would have, it would have infuriated me a little bit more. But I'm like, he needed it. I was on stage at a comedy club in Boston called stitches. And there was a woman passed out on the table right in the front. And her friends, three of them, and her friends left. She had two people and they left it. So she was just a long passed out.

And during my set, she came to for a moment. And it was literally this. She just looked up and she just went, you're an asshole. That was like, that was like her brain had three words. Like we can get three words down to the mouth. And then we had to start again. What three do we want? And you know what? It wasn't you. It was her dad. What was your dad in that moment? Wave a finger at me and then fall back a slave like, like try to erase me. Like I'm a

bit shocked board and then just kind of fall back again. Just like, yeah, what do you do? I mean, my first vector. My friends said that's that's the voice you believe. But I feel like, you're why do I focus on these? Because that's the one you believe. And if you believe that voice, you wouldn't be a comedian. So true. No one has ever said, now that I've worked out all of my emotional trauma, I'll go into bars and beg strangers to love me. Yeah, exactly. But I will say

that I it bothers me less too. Like it bothers me a little less than it did before. You can't care. You can't care. But I also don't. And what I've really liked about your special and your special, this is your third, your first one, your first one, you had a half hour and then you had only horse wear purple. And then you have a big guy that comes out of May 21st. Yeah. And what I really like about your shows, it's very autobiographical. It's very natural.

And you do the kind of thing that I really admire is that it doesn't like officially start. And it's it's clearly like you came into the middle of a conversation that you're having with this group of people. It flows really naturally. And then it's over. It's it's it doesn't feel like a performance. It feels like a conversation in which you do all the talking, which I think is the is the best way to do this. It was really natural and and and and it's really it's really funny.

And you don't there's no pandering. People say the public gets what the public wants. Yeah. Here. I go to the public wants what it gets. Like I'm going to do what I want to do and you're free to like it or not. Yeah. I do right. Because otherwise it does seem kind of sending. Like they don't people really really want to be kind of said to us and they can sense it. You're right. Yeah. And there are there are comedians that I think Leno I think I especially

guys when they can you do the tonight show a lot? You do is it the tonight show or or cold bear that you can. Tonight show. Yeah. I've done it like three times. Yeah. Right. Like Jimmy Fallon has to be not as good as he is. Right. To be accepted by everybody. To broaden out that. Yeah. And I will say Johnny Carson wouldn't do that. Interesting. If you didn't get him, he didn't give a fuck. Yeah. Now Jimmy Fallon and Johnny Carson exist in completely different worlds.

In terms of like the corporate, the baloney of comedy. But I can't. So in that regard like I sort of feel bad for these people that have to have to be a little dumber than dumber's not the word. Beamy and like broader tone down. Yeah. Just like this little water down. So what they really are capable of. Yeah. Everything's got to be soft. All the ice cream has to be soft, sir. Yeah. So and big and a big guy in your special is the nickname that you're that your name and

your marriage. Correct. Yes. That's what my husband calls me when she's delighted by the specials name that everybody always says like by the way after my shows, they always go like, uh, oh, it must be so hard that when she talks at how is it and he loves it. He loves standing out there and having people say that to him and then he goes, uh, you know, you're wrong with it. Like you did. You're wrong. Like you said that in the first place. And the same thing about him that

makes them call me big guy and not see why that bothers me is the same reason that he loves it. Like he could care less. I thought he would watch my acts and then have a couple of notes for himself because he walks around. He follows me around the house now. Brushing is mustache. She is this ludicrous like Scotland yard mustache. The more it infuriates me, the like bigger it gets. Well, we should say what we should say. He's a

fire man. He's a fire man. I believe I believe the mustache is mandatory. I think I don't think you can not have a mustache and be a fire man. That is fair. That is fair. He follows me around just and going, hey, she's my big guy. Hey, brushing his dumb mustache. She's my big guy. It's for you. He calls me big guy. He doesn't know how to compliment. If I go, do I look okay? He goes, hey, go. Like he really doesn't know any of this shit.

And he never thinks about it later. And if he does, he just thinks that that's great that his thing got a laugh. So it's like it's not going to change anything. And the murder real man. Yeah, he could give a fuck about. There's no, you know, when you look back in the beginning, or in your first mess up, but then you're like, I was thinking this where you thinking that. Like he wasn't thinking anything. He was like, it was solid. I was like, do you ever think

about our first day? He's like, yeah, solid. You know, there's no extra thoughts. But that's because this is where we're totally the opposite of each other. You come from very progressive, liberal family. And you married an Irish Catholic fireman. Yeah. You went from, you know, you went from like the white Jefferson's to all on the family. Um, we're mind I did the opposite. Really. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I come from a really blue color,

a blue color environment. When you met your, so this is a, you might not know the answer this question. Like people say, you marry your mother, you marry your father, you marry your did it. Who did you marry? I think I married my father in a lot of ways. Even though my husband could be more opposite in terms of his like, like physical prowess. My dad has like a talk about especially like a never ending sinus infection. He's always kind of laying down or resting.

And uh, well, rather than greet somebody, he'll tell you about like some kind of stomach problem he's having. Yeah. But, uh, but he's a civil rights lawyer. Like he prosecuted KKK cases in the south. Yeah. So work for the department justice. But he's emotionally a did desert and so is my husband. So my dad is like for different reasons. My dad's like, you know, like he's probably memorized like 70% of the dictionary. Like my dad is like, he's read every book, but he's never said I love you

and calls me like Roxanne. You know what I mean? He's very funny and weird. Like he used to have these dreams about, um, he thinks there's nothing funnier than British royalty. Like nothing funnier. So we'd have these dreams about different people puking on the queen. He's also blues musician. So he would dream about like muddy waters puking on the queen would laugh himself to sleep every night. Sometimes he would laugh so loud about these dreams that he would wake my mom up and she

would come downstairs and he would narrate the dreams. He'd be like, God, damn it. You gotta see this. It's great. Guess who just puked on the queen? Muddy waters and sunny boy Williams said, right? This bitch is first. And he would just laugh, laugh, laugh. And my mom would come downstairs and be like, I think the reason your father has these dreams about the queen and people vomiting on her is that she was arousing at a very young age. Like so they're both so weirdly inappropriate in different

ways. She was like, she was a sexual figure, I think in a psyche. And and so that's my dad. Jewish intellectual blues musician. Yeah. He would be with a, uh, then attraction repulsion complex to royalty. He's pretty, he's hilarious. Howie. I mean, but you know, again, emotionally, you're not going to get anything from him. But like, I remember one time asking him if I looked okay. My mom, no, I bought something from the mall. My mom said, do you like Rachel's

new outfit? I was like 14. And my dad goes, Oh, you look like a cow girl. I got like a ballerina. Like he, that he just remembered the things I would want to be when I was four. My mom was like, Howard, she's 15. Just tell her she looks nice because I don't look like that. The girls on the gas stations that they grease them up and they're on the cars with the calendar. And she's like, what the fuck? Like, you know, he's just completely, he didn't know. He's like one of those two things.

He didn't know. And my husband's the same way. Like I realized he really doesn't know that thing. I need, he can't sue, you know, he's like a first responder. I have to place his hand on my lower back. Like I have to like prop him to wear it. And my father is saying way on my wedding day, he was like in a rush down the aisle. He's like, come on, I gotta go. Like I'll go out and scotly. You know, I'm not dead. You've just ordered to be after this. So I've never. So he's very

similar to Pete in that way. And my dad, when he makes jokes, he only needs to amuse himself. He doesn't care if he's connecting to anyone. So he used to email, he had a band called the Vomitones in high school. Yeah. The vomit tones. He had a band called the vomit tones. Great. The vomit. There's a thing there with you. But puking. Yeah. There's a thing.

Really funny. Yeah. Yes. And my mom is always trying to analyze it. But I mean, I it's anyone's guess, but he thinks there's nothing fun here that puking or a story that involves puking. And he and what does your husband do? But vomit water onto flame. Nothing else. But I think he waters the same spot in the lawn. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, he always he loves talking about my friend. We sold it.

Yeah. But he like, my diet when he was in the vomit tones, they had to one tour, which is called the hands across your ass tour, which just it consisted of like two. Yes. He's hysterical. Yeah. Which is because this is like two dive bars in Michigan. By the way, was it, was it a blues band? Because it's a blues band. He plays piano inside of go accordion. And he's a brilliant piano player, like all by ear, old blues tricks and everything.

The vomit tones is like a punk band. Yeah. But, but they played blues. They play it blues. And like some covers like don't know much about his story. That kind of stuff. You know, so he would play in this tour. He would pick me up from school and his vomit tones hands across your ass shirt. And he would email and the other guy in the bands. Oh, one more thing about my dad for multi cultural night at our school. He like, you could submit your multi cultural

band. We grew up outside DC. So it's all like diplomats and people from all over the world. Sure. Sure. So my dad is submitted the vomit tones as representing the rich cultural heritage of Ghana. It was like a bunch of like white shoes from Bethesda. And then somehow I guess they did like look, they didn't really do a lot of research at my elevate shoe school. But apparently they got in the parent night or whatever. And the vomit tones played. And this is all for adults at my

school. But as everybody's parents and then they played blue moon at the end of their set. And then everybody moaned the school. So all my friends knew that the vomit tones that had moond my all the parent population of my school. My mom never forgave them for that. But she was he was always missing a house of many rooms. But he's famous for he would email my friends dad, the other member of vomit tones. He was also a very successful doctor. And he'd email him at his work and say and

is pretend to be a priest. And you'd be like, Oh, you're not going to believe how wonderful today was this father finestein here. I was able to just find a bush, a bushload of boy-ass, just a nice bucket of boy-ass that I was able to slam through. And what a week it's been like praise God. So lucky for all these this fast-good-a-boys that was just delivered to me by he and the good lord himself. And David with Ruben O's name was would email my dad back be like, you know, how he,

these priest fucking children really funny. But if you could just put him on over to my personal email. My secretary does read all of this. How old are the minutes of blood? I'm over. My dad's like probably 75 now. Yeah. So and then my dad's famous for this. He would say to David, David, I'm sorry I put you in this position. It wasn't appropriate. And I'm sorry you had to have this uncomfortable conversation with me. And I'll tell you what, it's not going to happen

again. And then he would never stop doing it after it. And my husband is the exact same way. Like I'll be like, Pete, don't get me something from Costco. I don't want it. Like I talk about it in the special, but I'm like, I don't want any thing you can, you know, whenever he'll get me something from Costco. The actual thing and he'll look at me and be like, I hear you. It's not

going to happen. So I think they just they're out for their own laugh. And they really don't think very much about how anyone else is perceiving them, which makes for a lot me to be infuriated a lot. It gives me a ton of material. But I feel like he's pretty happy. I love that expression too. They're out for their own laugh. Yeah. That's really beautiful. And it's it's I envy it. Yeah. He's never he's never wondering what people are thinking about him. I mean, he's also in he leaves

a trail of infuriated and broken people behind him. Of course. Yeah. They leave a wake. There's just a wake of people. I understand that. Yeah. But I yeah, it seems to me because it's because it is so I'm fascinated by it because it's the reverse. There's an emotional approval and acceptance that is in both men. It cannot be articulated. But it is always shown in action. And I think that that as my wife would say their love language is it's not verbal. Yeah. It's not verbal. And that's the level

of comfort. My my first wife was really a go getter. And there's a lot of security in that. You know, it's like because because my dad was not interested. Let's say you had a broken collar bone. But the Bruins were on. You were going to the hospital. Maybe when the game was over. Oh, wow. Yeah. And if my mother had not heranged him into taking me, I probably wouldn't have gone. Where so you do you go to oh, well, this is say this is safe for this is where my wife now

is my mother a hippie witch. I love a hippie witch. By the way, I love my one. I want to have somebody read my or I like the person that's like here in the middle of America. Just that woman. That's just like you don't see it. But it's coming. I love my people. My home. You're a comedy writer. I'm a comedy writer. We're cynical people. Yes. My home is full of crystals. And my wife, all this stuff. I love her reading. Yes. All of it. My wife will come to me and say

sweetheart whisper a manifestation into this crystal. I'm aware of that marriage is a compromise. That's a sense. And mine is I often have to pretend I'm a wizard. That is amazing. Yeah. And probably necessary. Like a little bit of that is good. But you know what I've learned over the course of my life. You just do it. You just do it. There's no. Yeah. And there's no there's no like a beating to be the whole thing.

I mean, everybody to understand everything. No, you just do it. I do feel like that was helpful in this marriage is that I just it's like I'm attracted. Obviously to people that are very different, very blue collar guys. I've always been attracted to that. Not like me. Like a real man. You're a blue collar guy, Dana. Yeah, but I'm not a real man. I'm a sissy.

Look at me. You're not a sissy. I type in a shape. No, I mean, you got the kind of abuse that I mean, look, I won't see abuse because I'm sure you've reformulated it somehow, but in your head, but the collarbone story says a lot. You're a man. You can't go through that. And you're yeah, I mean, the kids, the stories now like I wear my I wear my damage. I wear my damage like a day glow visor. I don't even know what I was going to say.

That's the best words. Like a sad wound. No, that's the kind of ingredients that makes you a man. That's what comes like a median. Yeah, so abuse your kids. Come on guys. I will say this. I have four brothers and a sister. We're all. I don't know so much about my older brother, my oldest, but he's the whole net team. He's our father. He just he decided, you know, I can break this chain or reinforce it. I think I'll reinforce it.

I think the worst I've ever did. I was asking my kids what they wanted for dinner, what they wanted, and what do you guys want? What do you guys want? No one would answer me and finally said, all right, I'm ordering a pizza and my tunnel and you don't have to get violent. That was that was the most aggressive thing. I had a gentle hand. I decided what to eat without can without conferring that I made. I made it. That was it. All right. Hey, there's abuse as the stop.

Hey, my parents would they were abusive, but they would just pick us up and hurl us when we were doing a bad thing. No, you're right. It was really nice. Come from a very different, but you have that you came from upper middle class emotional austerity. Yes. Oh yeah, my and my dad was sitting all the time. Which carries on. It's carry. Do you have any siblings? I have two brothers, older brother and a younger brother. I'm that. That was the older brother. Just that's it. I know

you had one brother because I just know. And I was like everybody, all the focus in the whole home was like what in the fuck are we going to do with racial? Like this is a huge problem because everybody else was just smart. You know, like my parents were smart. Boy boy boy. Yeah, you had to throw a lot of sharp elbows to get any kind of attention. Yeah. And it was I asked my mom like who was the favorite. I was like I said because my husband was a favorite son. He's a fire fighter.

He's the first son. You know, but I said mom, you know, you love air in the most than Justin, than me. And she was like, well, like she couldn't lie. Like she just made like a sound. She's like, like she fucked her neck up trying. She couldn't do it. I love Justin. But yeah, but they weren't just like I was just they were so upset just constant phone conversations. But I had this therapist when I was like 16 that they sent me to and he was like, it's not about

what? And then why? Like, why did you go to therapists at 16? What was the problem that my mom Rachel finds Dean. Find sign. Find sign at 16 that you went to a therapist. I think even earlier, I went to a lot of testing a lot. I was never not getting tested. You're learning disability. And yes, I had ADD, but they thought that I had something called finger ground where you see

you can't tell the difference between one voice and like a sea of voices. My mom was just in, she would just be on the phone with her therapist friends analyzing me all the and I hear the conversation. She's like, you know, I think it is. It's figure ground. You know, so they were just really ramped up about me all the time. And it was just because I wasn't learning. Like I mean, you couldn't stuff information into my brain. Like there was a there was a tutor they

had for me that I was math and I hated math so much. I was just crying cry cry about fucking math. Also, and you don't need any of it. Like it's so stupid. So I would go to this tutor's house and he found his name was Mr. Files. I found out later that he had molested like a gaggle of girls. Didn't touch me. Not even a second look because I infuriated him so much and he was so exhausted. I was an I was in a Boston, uh, ultra boy in Boston in the 80s. Nobody laid a

finger on me. Yeah. Always the bridesmaid never the bride. Exactly. Yeah. I think you know, it's just like that. By the way, is that it's like what what do you I might have to cut? Always the bridesmaid never. What do you call a group of molested children? I think it's a gaggle. It's a gaggle. It's a murder like a murder of crows. A murder of yeah. I have a name for like when you get a, it's very like when you get a group of bros. It's a a scroat. It's a full scroat of bros were in the front.

Um, scroat on getting very, very forever. Yeah. It's so satisfied. Matt right. A full scroat of bros at the Hollywood bullshit. I don't even know what I was talking about. I'm talking about being tested. Uh, because, oh yeah. So yeah. But basically just they, they, they, they were just really obsessed with figuring out what was wrong with me. And I think my mom at like to build, say, at a level of anxiety and, you know, whatever mom was like a wild

alcoholic, a giant front of her when she was like 17. Oh, but, but so, you know, I was just like this problem to be solved from very young. And I do remember everybody, everybody, everybody brings their damage to child to the party. Hey, down. Yeah. They do. It's really true. Your marriage is four people. Oh my god. It's. It's a adult Rachel child Rachel and Peter. Peter. Yeah. Adult Pete and child Pete. Yes. And most of the times your worst fights is child Rachel versus

child Pete. That is so true. And you know, he's not really turning inwards. So what I've learned to do is just to be like, okay, like my husband is even have the language to, you know, like in the human, in the toolkit of humanity, your husband is a hammer, indispecible, indispensable, but not for fine work. So as I said, perfect description. It's absolutely perfect description.

Yeah, I can't add anything to that. That's exactly what he is. Yeah. And when this all collapses, when we're wrestling, when we're fighting, fighting rats in the street for food, your husband will be much more vital than I will be to the survival of our race. That's, it doesn't mean that, yeah, like he's not going to, I mean, emotionally, all the clowns will be in the special cave. They'll let us out for an hour. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. He's always like, there's always like a

dent in the microwave or something. And he's always like running into the whenever he used to drink, he was just like run into the woods. He was like, I like just wild noises and just run. But, but no, I mean, in the city, as you have to drive out to the woods, get out of the car and then run. We would be on the way somewhere and are like, and you would get out and run or we would be out somewhere and people would go running. And it's first it was started with him screaming about

the founding fathers. It was exhausting. It was always yelling about the founding fathers when he was drunk. There's always a book in our house that I've had. I, he got so mad at me because I hit one of his books. It was like the democracy, the lie that never was. There's, there was some libertarian thing I'm like trying to sneak under a couch so he doesn't scream about it when he drinks. He gets to always off on the founding fathers again. Forget it. This is going to be.

That's one thing about being that and hanging out with comics that I love is that at least for all their nonsense, comics will laugh at how full of shit they are. Like somebody could call me on my own bullshit and nothing would make me laugh harder. I'm like, like, I wear at this all day and the night and he's just kept being like, racial's dumb. Here's what he don't have to stand about. Rachel, she's dumb. And just this silly as shit like that will make me laugh so

hard or when just somebody knows that I'm trying on an affect and calls me out on it. I do feel like it's good because it keeps you not believing in your own more shit. It is interesting in comedy now and that there is some sort of like, like, there's that. And I think it comes from social media. We're like, hey, what if everybody had a voice? You know what we realized? They're not a great thing. Everybody's always trying to label. Your label does something

or your like because your husband is a fireman. He sounds like I don't know what his political leanings are, but people people you are tell that people flag that when you're doing shows. Yeah, they'll be like, wait, wait. So your husband, what's that? So your husband's like a a trumper. Your husband's a libertarian. I'm like, I don't know. Like he's Pete. Like he just, he's, he didn't even vote that the last election went to the firehouse. He was at the

end of people are like, oh, he didn't vote. Like they're always trying to catch you doing the wrong thing. And that reminds me of school and infuriates me. So I was always being caught doing the wrong thing and like that whole idea that somebody is either like good or bad. Me is so, so obtuse, so stupid, so insulting. And I just feel like it's, it's what's wrong with a lot now. Like that it's like instead of trying to do something, everybody's trying to catch somebody doing

something wrong. And I'm like, that's what I didn't like teachers for. I wanted them to get off my like dead beat it. It's kind of like we're 50s. And I'm like, we're alone. Yeah, having some fun, having a laugh. Like don't, yeah, don't, don't become like that supervisor. And anything can be like funny. And then on the other side of it, sometimes like some comics will always act like they're, you know, they're, they're breaking some big controversial rule. You

know, and I don't want to either have the energy like what I'm on stage. Like I'm about to be arrested for what I'm saying. Like maybe nobody cares. Maybe it's all fine. You know, just actually know you're a clown. Yes, it's fine. What would it be? And so I feel like that idea that they're either chasing controversy. Like, and they want to be controversial in their identity is that or they're trying to catch people, which I'm like, you guys suck.

I just, I don't like that all both of those attitudes. Like, well, I feel like it's the same person. It's the same as that girl that needs to get on Instagram and cry. Like it's like, you can't just cry. You have to leave on Instagram. You dumbed. I feel like they're just the people want to be so important. What they're, what they're feeling and one thing that makes them important is catching somebody else doing bad shit. It's, it's the same as like catching a skipping class or

bring your whip. It's take the to class that we sometimes did in lunch break. I don't want to catch me doing this. Like, uh, like, uh, ready whip. Yeah. In high school, we went to this little school that was for like bad kids. I thought I got into the school, but it was turned. That was like a last resort school. I was like, Oh, I got into Thornton friends. They're like, that's like Juby. You know, like audition to be there. But, uh, friend, my friend would bring a whip at stake

to school. And there was like one person that told on us or whatever, because we were doing whipheads at lunch. I'm not saying people should do whipheads, but come on. Just don't be that skank that tells the teacher. Did they ever find a learning disability or did just, I have like, you know, people say they have ADD or whatever, but I'm like a bang gold teaming. Like it's extreme. Like, I was shedding debit cards every day. So that was part of it. But it's a real thing. I, and I say

the very real thing. My oldest has it. She got on medication. She is a third year paleontology major. She just yesterday. She had her final and biometric pathogenesis. She's a superbrain, but needs her medication to do it. Yeah, me too. I mean, I was and it's a very real thing. It's a real thing. And it's like people love to say that it's like, you know, it's kind of become a popularized term. But when you really have that level, it's like, it's formed my whole

consciousness. And many people that have that have depression that comes with it and other things too, because you can't, I mean, like my back was wet every day at school because I didn't dry my hair and it was like always dripping. You know, she mentioned like my bag. Now it's dripping. Sam always makes fun of me because he's like, there's always something dripping from your bag. But it's like for me, like, or people would be like, why? I wish people like, my husband's always

like, just put things back in the same place. I'm like, it's not like that. It's like your hands take little trips all day. I don't know if it's going to be anywhere. They could be at a fucking horror house for all I know. I don't know where my hands went. You're assuming that they're I am connected in that way. So it's very, it's like, and you have to work. I wife you and my wife, same thing. She's probably listening. We'll take the laundry out of the

hamper, wash it, dry it, and then take it and put it back in the hamper. And I won't know if it's clean because it looks exactly the way it looked two hours ago. And I understand that she can't fold a full load of clothes. That's like asking too much. Sure. What if you folded one, fold one item right on the top? And then I'll know they're clean. I'll fold the rest. I have a zen. I find it meditative and satisfying. Yeah. My husband's always trying to ask me like he's like, but why?

Why? Why don't you just like he doesn't understand? Like his side of the bed is just like it's just like it looks like the way a desk would be organized before like a military officer kills himself. You know what I mean? Like it's like, by the way, that in that regard, that is exactly us. Like my yeah. My side of the room looks exactly like a pre-suicide military officer. And my wife's side looks like a Hiroshima. Yeah. It's crazy.

But you know, I'm dressed in the morning after the bombing. Yeah. It's like they didn't. Now they never got to the bottom of it. But I think that I even now when I like smell a school, I brought back to all those same feelings. But and I am learning to do it differently with my daughter. And thankfully, I think in terms of school, you could tell kind of early. I was like, oh, what if she's just teaming with ADD like I was like now she's like, she's a little more purpose.

Bombing is perfect. If she's following with ADD. I feel like my husband, she's a little more like him. Thank God. So I try not to bring in all those beers to like pre-protect her from whatever my issues were. I think she's a little more organized. Thank God for just to make her life easier. But you know, it's it. I think they were probably trying to like fix some. A lot of it was a lot

focused on me rather than whatever was going on in their their lives. But yeah, it's and it is amazing that we get, you know, we're also at this picture of scientifically where you can find out with these things. And then you want to okay, so not to make this leap from my daughter, the manson like was manson like was he evil or did he have a brain normally, you know, right? Right. Yeah. Can we still hate him if he's like, you know, he definitely did. I mean, come on.

Yeah, but if that's the thing too, I do feel like, you know, I think his problem was when we're in love with love. I used to and people have the ranks too, you know, Hitler had a lesser known book. Besides mine, conflict was about relationships. It was called because I said so. So it was about how men and women communicate. So and you never know because people have others. There's an interesting thing but you know, Hitler only had one ball. I did not know you. He did all that on one ball.

All that's not I'm not lying. That's a imagine if he had a full set. Do you think of a full set of balls that there would be six million. Excuse the world or none or none. No, no, no, no, which way it would've gone. I'd damn it. You're right. The world war two song. Hitler has only got one ball. Boring as two, but they are small. Himmler has something similar. But world go go has no balls at all. Wait, did you make

this? No, that's a real song from World War two. Oh, really? That's a life ball. You couldn't make Hogan's heroes today. Now, but the people that made Hogan's heroes actually fought the Nazis. Robert Clary who played Lebo was in a fucking camp. Wow. And I find it interesting that the revulsion comes from the people that didn't even know it. Like were they too close or that they have a better understanding of it? It's very strange. When you were when did you decide to become

a comedian if it was even a conscious decision? And who are the comedians that you tacked onto as you were either a kid or starting out? Or were you just a savant? Your abilities are clearly very innate. Thank you. I did voices from very young and I didn't study voice because anything that I had to do with school or studying, I would have been turned off to because you know, my brain

kind of closes like a box. I'm supposed to teach something in a formal setting. So, but I think my mom thinks I got that little voice thing from my dad because my dad plays everything by ear, pianos, I don't go courty, anything. So I kind of did a little bit of the same of voices when I was little and I like people's affectations and was really obsessed with just, yeah, those those things. How people say so that weird word choice something somebody uses.

And I loved Tracy Olman when I was a little girl and I put on my mom's robe and do that thing that she'd do in the end like, you know, go go go go. Yeah, I thought she was really fun and really funny and some of those comedy movies I told you about and but I was not the kid that would watch stand-up albums like listen to stand-up albums growing up and I don't think that I really thought that

I loved those those comedies some of the ones I just mentioned but I and I don't think that I really knew that I could do that because some of the stand-up I'd seen was very clever and I've always wanted to be able to write like this but I can't write like a quick monologue style joke, you know? And so it was almost yeah, it was almost just smart and some organized way for me, you know? And the people that I love or the people more or that I related to more was just storytellers,

you know? And so I liked that. I like people to tell you stories. I like people that reveal things about themselves and their childhoods and their vulnerabilities. I always felt the finest example of if a guy person came from outer space and I'm like, what is stand-up comedy? The first Richard prior concert film, Richard prior live and concert from 1979. That's as good as this gets. That's Charlie Parker, you know, that's Miles Davis. So this is this is what this thing is. That's

and and whether or not you've seen it, you do the same thing, you know? I have I should say that I have it. It's live and concert not live on sunset strip not here and now everyone goes to live and see the trip. Yeah, same here and now on sunset strip but I haven't seen this one. Let me I'm gonna have Texas. Richard prior live and concert. That's the one and when you watch you do and you don't even know it, but you do the same thing. Really? Oh my god, this is the best

moment in my life to east of that to me. You are like a black man drug addict in that way. Say that again live and what? Sorry. Live and concert. Live and concert. Okay. From 1979. Okay. God yeah. It's the finest example of stand-up comedy. And it's everything that you just said. It's just like it comes on. He starts talking. What it does do. It makes it very difficult. For me, you seem to have done. Okay. Is when you do a TV set, which is like,

now it's like you have two minutes and 15 seconds. You know, we need 18 jokes and you can't mention liquids. Having like a good starting joke. Yeah. And I will say that's very hard for me. I'm trying to do a balance set right now. And it's doing five minutes. There's nothing more challenging. I always try to jam too much in. And it's very hard for me to trim and cut the fat. And I get I am a lot of my jokes. They're very long. So like I can't say the same thing. Yeah. So

so it's like and I like that. Like I like watching people like you because I love I love word choices and I love that extra detail. I love things that people's parents said to them. I think it's all fascinating. When you're a confused kid, when you don't know what you want to do, and you don't fit into, you know, the the the scholastic ice cube tray. It's great. It's great to see something. And they're like, Oh, I can do that. Now I get these people.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Now I get that with me. It was George Carlin. Oh, yeah. I can do that. I get that. Yes. I like George Carlin too. My dad was showed me George Carlin. I thought like wow, he's he's amazing. He's cool. And I like tell you broke things down and took his time. And like he didn't try to it wasn't like a quick little snippet. Like he broke it all the way down. And that was fun because I always wanted to hang out a little more. And I felt like he would let you

I like to hang out a little more in a joke too. So I feel like he would let you hang out a little more and like really absolutely deconstruct something. And I think that's very satisfying. And the way I'd learn in general. So I liked that. And I loved, you know, I watched like the old SNL and my dream was to be on SNL. And I wasn't I set them all these tapes. I never did get to do that. But you know, that's the other thing with comedy is you kind of figure out. That's also it's

still a little bit. Thing is never what right. I mean, and you think that thing is never what you think the thing is going to be that can change too. But I like I like doing the thing and it's not going to make you it's all going to come, but it's never going to come when you want it. And it's never going to come in the way you want it. But it does. That's a good thing about being a parent too. It's like, but now I have his little girl. Right. So really fun. The special premieres

May 21st on Netflix. It's called Big Guy. You're also on life and Beth and inside Amy Schumer Rachel Feinstein. And people can follow you on on you have a Rachel Feinstein.com. I'm assuming Rachel Feinstein on platforms. Yeah, you can go to my Instagram. Rachel Feinstein underscore that I'll link to everything or Rachel dash Feinstein.com. Thank you so much. Rachel Feinstein underscore one word underscore in that you want Instagram. Yes, that's my Instagram. Then all the links will be

there. Yeah. All right. Thank you, Dana. This is the best. I needed this. I had the best time. Thank you so much. We're going to have a great time. This has been the Dana Gould hour brought to you by the internet. Music by Andy Paley with Jake Posner behind the board produced by Jeff Fox, graphic design and web production by Spencer Hunt and Seagun Friend sound editing and post production by Jolinda Palmer and Joan Apalotano.

Tom Kenny speaking. I'm a DJ. I'm a DJ. I'm a person. I'm a person. I'm a single. I'm a single. I love to sing and DJs. Boom. DJs. DJs. You want me? Play some. Boom.