Ep. 180: "The Other Pope"
Hello.
Hi, John.
Merlin, ma'am.
John Roderick, we stand on guard for thee.
Yeah, that's interesting.
When you say my name in song form, it always sounds like a hymn, like a Methodist hymn.
Say it soft.
It's almost like praying.
John Roderick.
John Roderick.
I just met a man named John Roderick.
Oh, now it sounds like a musical.
I'm doing Maria.
Uh-huh.
What's your stance on musicals?
Oh, they always make me uncomfortable.
You know, there's so much of culture, and I'm not even going to say popular culture, just culture, that makes me wince.
I walk into it wincing.
Hmm.
Stand-up comedy shows.
Improv.
Bands I don't know.
People's first novel.
YouTube videos.
I just go into it just waiting to get like – it's like I'm waiting to get whacked in the face with a cricket bat.
Because I'm just like, oh, don't – oh, most stuff is so awful.
Please don't be awful.
And then it is.
It's the breaking into song, I'm guessing.
Well, I mean, some of those great musicals where there's a lot of dancing and stuff.
He's going to tell.
He's going to tell.
He's going to tell.
I think it's the songs.
I think a lot of the songs I just don't think are good songs.
Oh, man.
That's funny.
It's the songs that I like.
Yeah, I know.
It's the songs that a lot of people like.
I mean, there's a lot of musicals that, I mean, I just want to clarify, I don't consider myself to be like a Broadway musical person.
I mean, I don't know I'm chapter and verse, but there are a dozen musicals where I would, some of my favorite songs in the world come from those.
I mean, look at all the Fred Astaire songs where he introduced those Cole Porter songs that we now consider standards.
The movies are a little bit of a slog.
You're like, Jesus Christ Superstar, I'm good to watch that every four to seven years.
The songs in that are great.
My mind is clearer now.
Do you think you're who they say you are?
At last, not too well.
Let's make this the musical episode.
We'll just sing songs.
We watched Jesus Christ Superstar in my ninth grade social studies class because it was in.
So in ninth grade, East High School in Anchorage had a school within a school.
It was called School Within a School or— That's a terrible name.
SWS.
That would look terrible on a jersey.
SWS.
And SWS had its own building, which was connected to East High School by way of a two-story corridor, like an external corridor.
You sure it just wasn't in-school suspension or something?
No, it was SWS, and it had its own principal and its own faculty.
And it was a program that you had to, I guess, apply for and get into within East High.
And I think the general population of East High School considered SWS to be the freaks and the geeks.
And it was that.
The principal at the time was named Dr. Richard Krieger.
And he wore a lot of turtlenecks and had an afro.
Did he have rap sessions?
Did he turn the chair around?
He did.
Absolutely.
Later on, my good friend Don Shackelford became the principal of SWS.
And he was a pal.
And even though Don Shackelford was the one that reported me...
for having pipe bombs in my locker, for which I was given an emergency suspension.
And Don ratted me out.
This was when he was still an English teacher.
But he was disappointed.
He was very disappointed in me.
And then he became a very good friend and a mentor.
But so SWS, I went into that school freshman year because I felt like that's where I belong, right, with the freaks and geeks.
Mm-hmm.
And, you know, you would take some normal classes in East High, but most of your classes were in SWS, and all of the teachers were hippies.
There was Doug Blankensop, who had a red beard and was a little bit of an elfin.
Uh, character.
My biology teacher was, he looked like Steve jobs, uh, tucked his teacher, you know, tucked his turtlenecks into his jeans.
That sounds very experimental.
It was very experimental.
And my social studies teachers was a wonderful woman.
And her idea of like social studies was like, let's watch Jesus Christ superstar.
Let's talk about sheep.
You know, they would show Monty Python episodes.
I mean, real freak freaks and geeks.
Yeah.
And then at the end of my freshman year, it was determined that I did not have the discipline to be in such a rigorous program that required self-determination.
That was determined by the hippie teachers?
Yeah, because there were couches in SWS.
You could go down to the – I mean the school was carpeted.
So it wasn't like a school.
It was like a big hippie tower.
Yeah.
And so after my freshman year, it was clear to everybody that I was taking advantage of the laxity and spending a lot of time sitting on the couches.
And so I was booted back into the regular school.
But SWS was connected to the regular school by these corridors, so I would skip class and go to SWS and sit on the couches.
But I wasn't in SWS, so it's not like they could kick me out.
They already kicked you out.
They already kicked me out.
I forged a hall pass at one point.
And, you know, I remained in newspaper, and the newspaper was in SWS, so I was there all the time.
I would go sit in Don Shackleford's office.
Did you feel left out?
Did you feel rejected?
No, it turned out that it was true.
I didn't belong in SWS.
What I belonged in was this sort of special class, the adjunct class.
You know I like to be in a special class.
And the special class was in the regular population of East High School, but welcome in SWS.
And, you know, I could I could be in both worlds.
And that's what I see.
You sleep in gen pop.
But but you're also you're a what do they call that in the prison?
You're a like a trustee, a trustee.
That's right.
So, for instance, all the real honors classes, all the kids that were going to Ivy League schools, they didn't they never crossed the threshold into SWS.
They didn't want anything to do with it because it had that it had the taint.
It had the stench of Dungeons & Dragons.
I know that stench.
Yeah, so stay away from there, said the kids that were going places.
If you wanted to get into Dartmouth, you didn't want anything to do with a special program.
You wanted to excel in the normal program.
Oh, John, I hate to do this to you in front of all these people, but you know a great way to communicate what you just described?
Over here, all you hear, you got all the socias that are on the track to go to the schools.
You cross over a literal corridor to get to the big hippie tower full of the weirdos.
There was one weirdo that couldn't fit in.
This sounds like a musical.
Yeah, it does.
This would be a really good musical.
Too weird for SWS.
Yeah, I mean, it's just Blue Sky Solutioneering.
But I mean, I'm just saying that would be a musical.
First of all, so many of your relationships sound a lot like a romantic comedy where it starts out with some opposition and then a kind of grudging respect.
It becomes a buddy movie for a while and then eventually you fall in love.
I like to think of them as romantic dramedies because the drama kind of starts to get in there.
It's like, is this funny?
I'm not sure this is funny.
Yeah.
Comedy is all about editing.
It's all about knowing where to cut it off.
It's funny, but it's sort of like uncomfortable funny.
Yeah, right.
So romantic dramedy, I feel, is appropriate.
A rom-drom?
A rom-drom.
That's precisely it.
A rom-drom.
The problem with the rom-drom is when you spell it, it looks like rom-dram.
Yeah, people think you've got a fancy word for taking a drink.
Yeah, but it's not.
It's rom-drom.
I bet the geeks would know that.
Oh, the geeks for sure know it.
So, yeah.
So, I mean, there it was, right?
Yeah.
There we were.
It was the 80s.
We were in a special program.
Maybe this is a projection, but I think this is mostly true for most people is that for most of your youth, you're very careful about picking the things where you stick out.
especially if you're a college track type normal kid, is that, you know, you want to be recognized as getting the best grade on this physical science class test.
Right.
But you don't want people to notice that you've got like the cheap version of the iZod or whatever.
Right.
And I think most of us, and I see this in my kid's school.
I see it everywhere.
People don't want to be noticed as sticking out.
I mean, it sounds like a really obvious point, but I think when you say something like, well, we're going to have this program to help these kids or these kids or these kids or these kids, anytime you're being taken out of class, it feels a little exceptional.
Yep.
And you don't really want that.
You want to be in the normal class.
Yeah.
Either way, you don't want to be in the remedial class.
You don't want to really be in the exceptional class unless there are some true privileges attended to it.
And in my case, the biggest privilege was...
This is all I wanted in high school, to be able to roam the halls freely while everyone else was in class.
Oh, that's the dream, isn't it?
And to pop into classes where the teacher welcomed me as a friend.
And so, you know, you eat lunch in the band room.
That's got a lot wrapped up in it.
You've got the specialness of being able to move freely, like you've got diplomatic papers.
Right.
But then you also have the implicit buddiness and peer relationship.
I'm just going to go pop in and see how Mr. Plumlee is doing today.
Exactly.
Precisely.
I don't know why I keep saying precisement.
Where does that come from?
Because France.
Yeah, France.
I'm a little bit fancy and I love France.
But yeah, you pop in.
You used to be in the debate class, but then you got kicked out of debate class because you didn't ever take it seriously and you just got up and you extemporized debating, which isn't what they're looking for.
So you get kicked out of debate club.
But everybody in there knows you and likes you and the teacher likes you.
So you pop into debate club.
Yep.
Sit around, kick your feet up.
You know, today I know you like, you said you like to argue with text.
Yeah.
So like today they should have a Francis club for people who like to type.
Yeah.
A whole different, a whole different line of reasoning.
You know, things would move, move a lot faster.
You move it along.
I mean, I could, I could ace any high school class by texting.
I bet a lot of kids would love that.
If they just texted me the questions, I would text them the answers.
Problem solved.
Would you send a shoulder shrug made out of little characters?
I don't really do a lot of emoticoning.
Particularly not those emoticons where you have to copy it off of somebody else's feed because you don't know how to make them yourself.
Yeah, I know.
I don't want to do that stuff.
But yeah, I mean, and ultimately that extends to colleges like certainly Evergreen, but also Reed College and Colorado College.
These colleges that are like, they're good colleges.
People try to get in them.
I wanted to go to them.
But there's also a tint to them like, well, it's that smell.
Like Reed College is a good college, but you know that they're making their own acid there in their dorm rooms.
Yeah.
And so it's like not, it just doesn't quite have the, it's just not a normal college.
You would see that constantly at New College because it's – as I think I've described, New College combines a lot of the fruity stuff from all the different schools but all in one place.
So there's no grades.
You get written evaluations.
You do your own class.
You can make up your own classes, make up your own major.
You do independent study in January.
You have to do three independent study projects while you're there.
And you can just see how different people would handle that in different ways.
You could get like –
Baking bread could be your independent study project as long as somebody was willing to sponsor it.
Whereas other people were like, you know, writing a novel in a month, like when they're, you know, 19 years old or they're doing some kind of like research internship where they're actually going and like working.
Right.
Who the hell are these kids that can actually shoulder the responsibility of independent study?
Who has that kind of self-awareness at that age?
It's staggering.
And there are enough of them that whole programs are devoted to them like, oh, I'm going to independent study something.
It's like independent study was absolutely code for me that you can wander the halls and nobody will yell at you.
Well, that's very much the same feeling.
Yeah.
You have lunch in the band room.
You go pop by SWS, sit in Shackleford's office for a while.
Shaq says, shouldn't you be in class?
And you go, ha, ha, ha.
And he says, ha, ha, ha.
And you think, this is paradise.
Yeah.
I look at my last year of high school and the stuff that you could do, and it really does seem like another world.
The most obvious one, maybe, smoking area.
If you were 16 years old, if you were 16 – because that was the age to buy cigarettes in Florida.
If you were 16, you could smoke cigarettes at school.
It was called the smoking area.
This seems utterly amazing to me right now that you could go and as a 16-year-old go and smoke cigarettes.
Yeah.
There was a lot of things like this.
But the one that really got me, and I have to say, because I had a lot of the same tendencies as you, the one that was my undoing was that if you were – I can't believe more people didn't do this because they're smarter than me.
If you were 18 years of age and you're a senior, you could sign yourself out of school at any point.
As long as you'd been there, I think, for two periods, three periods.
But definitely around lunchtime, like fourth period, you just go to the office and they hand you a little piece of paper.
You sign yourself out.
And I would do that.
I did that, especially the last semester.
I never skipped school.
I mean, I didn't skip.
I didn't play hooky.
I didn't skip classes.
But I would literally sign myself out of school before I'd gone to science class.
Just what you're saying right now, sign yourself out of school, it still gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling.
It's like Nietzsche said, right?
It's always there.
It's a comfort to know you're never more than like a few dozen steps from being done with school for today.
And for me, it came in the form of – I've told you before about my experience of being editor of the East High School newspaper, The Zephyr.
where i believed that i was the editor and the new newspaper so doug blankensop was the was the newspaper teacher and i was groomed to be the editor throughout my entire high school career and then my senior year i walked into class two weeks before school started i was already at the school introducing myself around to the new teachers
In the summer.
You're Max Fisher.
I fucking was.
I went to introduce myself to the teachers like, hey, you're new at East High.
I just thought you should know who the seniors are and who in particular is running the senior class.
And it's going to be me.
And hello.
Nice to meet you.
It's going to be better for everybody if you know who to pay attention to.
That's right.
Let's develop a relationship right now.
And I went to the newspaper teacher and I said, hi, I'm John.
I'll be a senior this year and I'm the editor of the paper and we should get to know each other.
And she was like, um...
I'm the teacher and I thought I would be the editor of the paper because I'm, you know, and I was like, what?
No, no, no.
The teacher isn't the editor of the paper.
Here's how we do it at East Tide.
There's a student editor.
It's like the coach being the quarterback.
Yeah, exactly.
It's like, what are you fucking talking about?
You're going to be the editor.
And she was a young teacher.
It was brand new.
Lots to learn.
We went to war and she decided that the fact that I thought that I was the editor, the entitlement that I showed, she was going to teach me a lesson by not letting me be the editor.
But I walked that school like I was the editor and I ran that paper.
I ran that paper from a non-editor position and fucking was the editor of that paper.
You're the Pope at Avignon.
Thank you.
That's exactly right.
I'm the other Pope.
Again, France.
Sur le pont d'Avignon, on a dansa.
Dans le oeuf, sans le oeuf, sur la mer.
And so I ran that paper, but the first thing I did was I made a press pass.
You're just one giant fucking Wes Sanders.
Was it laminated?
And laminated.
I took the press pass down to the office, down to the...
office in the in the real school tool not in sws took it down to the real office where they had like a whole bunch of secretaries and stuff like sws just had a receptionist who sat out in front of don shackleford's office uh formerly richard krieger but the real school had 10 secretaries and i went down there and i was like hi i need to get this laminated and they laminated it without asking because i was john roderick editor of the newspaper
and I had a press pass, and then I would flash that press pass to the security guards who roamed the halls to make sure that nobody was truant.
You not only forged your own credentials, you actually, from whole cloth, you made up the whole idea that there could be credentials.
Yeah, there was no press pass.
That was not a thing.
No one had ever had one, but I made one, and because the security guards at that school knew me very well,
The first time I showed, you know, that first week of school, I was like, press pass.
And they were like, okay.
And the entire rest of the year, I could roam the halls with my press pass.
Doing coverage.
Doing stuff.
I was going down to talk to a teacher about a story I was working on.
Absolutely.
I had to be here right now.
I'm working on a story.
And I actually showed that thing to teachers, too.
And they would be like, oh, okay.
It was absolutely...
It was really, I peaked right at that moment.
The moment that I had that press pass laminated, that was as good as I was ever going to be.
And I, oh, it was great.
I would just, I would flaunt it.
I would just, I'd walk down the halls just strolling, eating a Hershey bar with almonds.
Mm-hmm.
Press pass in hand.
Top of the world, Ma.
They never checked it.
After a while, they didn't check it.
You just got to sell it that first time.
You sell it and it's like, yeah.
And the thing was, I did edit the paper.
I wrote four articles every issue.
I mean, I was working.
That was something I actually worked hard at.
I wish I had a press pass now.
You can make one.
We're going to buy some lamination stuff.
Everything seems more real when it's laminated.
My daughter has a biweekly spelling assignment where she's got her ten spelling words, her five sight words, and then you have to do projects.
You pick the projects where you can draw it in shaving cream.
You can make it in chocolate pudding.
You can make it fancy on the computer, however you want to do it.
And we like to make flashcards.
So today my wife is getting some lamination stuff.
materials.
So if you want anything laminated, just send it to me and I can make that for you.
Thank you.
Having a lamination facility in your house is not a terrible idea.
It's a wonderful idea and it has to be the right kind of lamination.
You don't want bubbles in it.
People see a bubble in your laminated press pass and they're like, this is a forgery.
There's 10 secretaries.
They know what they're doing.
But yeah, if it's laminated properly, it's not a forgery.
I think it helps if it's thick and has really nice, satisfying curved edges.
It shouldn't be sharp.
It's got to have curved edges.
And frankly, I had a pair of shears and I worked on the curve of the edges of my press pass over the course of senior year.
I was always improving it and just making it seem more and more official.
Yeah.
This is a big problem with the schools, and I'm going to say it.
I'm going to say it's a problem with parenting, is you don't realize that what kids do in order to be dishonest and lazy is some of the most interesting, frank, and useful work that they will do.
Figuring out how to game shit is one of the great skills of a young person.
I'm trying to teach my daughter this.
I'm very proud of her when she figures out how to trick me.
I'm not super bright, but you know...
Smart enough.
But don't whisper loud about what your plan is.
I think I mentioned this to you.
I mean, I was explaining to my daughter that one of the ways we surprise my wife and tickle her.
And I was telling my daughter, you can't whisper really loud to me, let's tickle mom.
And so I introduced to her the idea that one of the programs we're working on is called planting a false flag.
And she literally, she turned to my daughter, she turned to my wife on the couch and said, it's called a false flag.
Oh.
Can you believe that?
So that's an area of improvement.
I'm going to get the kid a laminator.
Yep.
You know, maybe.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I just feel like a kid learning to be tricky is not necessarily a terrible thing.
It's not a criminal thing.
Tickle your ass with a feather.
Mm hmm.
What did you say?
Excuse me.
Excuse me.
Yeah, you got it.
I mean, I realized this with my kid.
Not very long ago, I realized that she was a dominant child and was going to be in everybody's face all the time.
And that what she needed to do was learn a little subterfuge.
Yeah.
You know, just like, hey, lady, it's OK to get to try and get people to do what you want.
But like you got to you got to put a little spin on the ball.
You know, don't just stand there just palming the basketball, just putting it in their face, like taunting them with your power.
You got to do a little Harlem Globetrotter stuff.
You got to have a ladder.
You got to have a ladder.
You got to have a bucket of confetti.
Yep.
There's a lot of... Rip Taylor and the Harlem Globetrotters can teach us a lot about life.
And also remember, goddammit, remember it's a hustle.
It's a hustle.
You go and watch that pool hustling movie with the guy from the spaghetti sauce.
The point of the hustle is you have to make them think that they can win.
That's the con in con.
It's confidence.
Well, there's the guy with the – there's the spaghetti sauce guy when he's the hustler.
Right, and then the guy from Honeymooners.
Well, that's right, with the Honeymooner.
And then there's the hustle movie where it's the guy from Bartender, the movie –
Oh, right.
Spitting his bottles and stuff.
Oh, yeah.
What, the guy from FX?
Well, yeah, the guy from the... Yeah.
They don't like me to mention Scientology on the program, but he's famous for that.
He's an OT, man.
Have some respect.
They know the hustle.
Talk about the hustle.
Oh, man, they know the hustle.
Hold these cans.
So what I'm saying... They literally can't.
Yeah.
We got to teach them.
I saw an e-meter.
I watched a lot of science here.
You've seen a real e-meter?
Let me just say that between professional wrestling...
And Scientology, I've seen a lot of documentaries.
And it's still amazing to me.
I mean it really – they really have not tried to make the e-meter look like any more than a Fisher-Price toy.
When we talk about Scientology, I really get the feeling that our German fans sit up in their chairs.
They move to the edge of the chairs.
They really are – they put their hands on their headphones like, tell us more.
But they're –
I do feel like... I feel like our actor friends get a little uncomfortable.
Well, you know, it's a lot about who you know.
I'm just saying.
Now, there are some things that I believe.
This I believe.
I believe in... Go ahead.
I believe in kindness.
I'm trying to teach... I've told you some friends of mine, they have the rules of the house written by their front door.
You can stop now.
The rules of the house, like on a chalkboard or like in a painting?
They've written it in perma-chalk.
And one of the rules of the house that I think about all the time because I really like it a lot, it says, you don't have to be nice, but you have to be kind.
And I think that's a really, really good distinction.
Like being nice, that's something you tell girls when you're asking them to smile.
But kindness to me is a good thing.
And I think you can still be kind and trick people.
It's a big part of tricking people is being kind.
A big part of being kind is tricking people.
Well, yeah, it works both ways.
You know what I mean?
There are a lot of people.
So this is the thing.
There are lies of omission and there are lies of delight.
And you are doing people a favor sometimes.
But it's also a way to trick her into learning that kindness is a good thing in general.
Being polite, and I think all these words mean different things.
Being polite is a fantastic thing.
Like saying please and thank you.
Wow.
You have no idea how much shit in life you are going to get away with by saying please and thank you.
But also being polite.
This is the thing.
Don't pick your nose.
I mean, if you're going to pick your nose.
Not where I can see it.
Listen, there's I mean, there are a lot of reasons to pick your nose.
And one of them is just that it's fucking pleasurable.
It's just like touching your clitoris, except it's in your nose.
It's not like a jigsaw puzzle.
You don't do that in a restaurant.
No.
And that's the clitoris part.
Either one.
Yeah.
Don't pick your nose.
Don't pick your clitoris in a restaurant.
But this is all going to work great in the musical.
That's right.
Don't pick your nose.
There's a handful of things that you never knew.
There's a couple of things you should never do.
Don't pick your nose or your clitoris.
Even if your name is Doris, no matter how good that meal is, keep your finger out of your crotch.
Oh, I love this musical.
Everything's free in America.
Jesus Christ in America.
Oh, Rita Moreno, where are you now?
Oh, my God.
That's what we need right now in this culture.
We need Rita Moreno and we need Rip Torn.
Rip Taylor.
No, we need Rip Torn.
Rip Torn was fantastic.
I loved him on that comedy Gary Shanley show.
He was fantastic.
Yeah, you know, Rita Moreno was the first person I knew of as an EGOT.
She's like the original EGOT, isn't she?
Fucking top EGOT.
Oh, she's amazing.
She's amazing.
You ever seen West Side Story or heard it?
Come on.
Okay.
Yeah, because there's a thing in there.
If I hear this, especially there's a YouTube video you can watch of this, the one called Quintet, which is like when everything is coming together.
And like, we're going to da-da-da-da-da-da tonight.
Tonight.
tonight and it does all the songs come together and all the gangs are walking together and Rita Marina is putting on her stockings and it's totally awesome and it's like this is like a super cut no no it's about two thirds of the way in and it's right before the action really like fucking goes down the gangs are getting ready the Jets all gotta have their way tonight and then Puerto Ricans fight us I never heard it but anyway it's all the songs and it keeps popping around you're popping around you're going over to what's his name and then you got Natalie Wood
That's powerful.
Nobody does that anymore.
I don't always want to sit down and have three hours of that.
But, you know, I'll bust out a little bit of, sorry, with the fringe on top.
Well, you know what it is.
It's basically the going to the mattresses scene from Godfather.
Oh, so much so.
It's a montage, but it's happening right now.
It's a montage.
It's happening.
And the songs are linking up.
The songs are like...
pow in key with each other yeah i went to i was forced now forced you can talk about hamilton everybody's talking about hamilton no no no no i'm not gonna i i was not forced to to uh to consume hamilton i feel like i should consume hamilton it's kind of a meme right now this is worse than that i was forced to consume the movie worse than hamilton well worse than being forced to consume hamilton yes
is being forced to consume this movie with Robert De Niro and the girl who is a manic pixie dream girl.
The intern.
The intern.
Oh, dear.
I was forced to consume this movie.
I happen to really like her.
I have dreams about her.
And there's no way I would see that movie.
She is, you know, she's very she's very exciting, particularly in this role as a CEO who every the script keeps saying the script keeps putting in people's mouths in this movie.
Like, oh, she's really tough to work with.
She's a real ball breaker.
She's a tough CEO lady.
But the character actually as written and played, she breaks into tears all the time.
She's flighty and can't decide.
She's a manic pixie dream girl who is apparently the CEO of this company.
But all the script indicators are like, oh, she's a real powerhouse.
And the incongruity is jarring.
And so the twist is that the titular Robert De Niro is the intern.
Right.
Robert De Niro is the intern.
He's an old man.
He wears a suit every day.
He comes from the old school.
I bet at first they don't get along very well.
They don't get along at all.
That's right.
She doesn't need this kind of adult supervision, and he is just very patient.
He's absolutely like a Dharma person.
Have I talked to you about Buddhism?
He's a shawarma.
You know what I mean?
He's a shawarma.
That's a form of Buddhist shaman.
That's right.
He's a Buddhist shawarma, and he just sits there on his toadstool.
He's very wise.
He's wise, and he's waiting, and he does menial tasks without complaining, which is what wise old men do.
Mm-hmm.
in order to eventually earn the trust of everyone in the, and you know, young guys look up to him and they want to, they want to wear their tie the same way that he does.
It's et cetera, et cetera.
You can write the script yourself.
Um, but someone has to, a little bit of the Robert De Niro in this movie problem is it's like, it's like when Fonz was in night shift.
Um,
Oh, yeah, playing against type.
Right?
So the first movie that the Fonz does.
Fonz was good, though.
He was good in that movie.
He was, but it's the first movie he does after Happy Days.
He's playing low status, yeah.
And he's playing low status.
He's like a wiener.
And you're like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Not the Fonz.
Yeah.
I mean, anybody but the Fonz.
And then you realize, oh, he's great, but the rest of his life, you know, Henry Winkler can't.
I mean, every other role he did were roles that Alan Alda rejected for being too wimpy.
Yeah.
Because he's like, I don't want to be the Fonz anymore.
He's had a great third career, though.
He's wonderful.
Henry Winkler is wonderful.
But Robert De Niro, he's limping around in this movie.
I think he's taking an extended victory lap at this point.
I don't know.
Does he need the money?
Well, you know, actors work, you know, they like, you know, working, working is good.
It keeps you young.
It keeps you relevant.
But, you know, you still still kind of hope like, man, do you have one more in you?
Do you have one more that's just going to blow us out of the water?
This is Vito Corleone.
He went back.
He went back to the olive oil guy and stabbed him in the chest and then like threw his fucking glove at him or whatever that whatever.
He stabs him and then he throws like a.
I don't know what he throws.
Brings his wife a pair.
Ha-pow!
And now he's limping through this movie where he's planning an intern.
I just can't swear.
Goodfellas is 25 years ago now.
It wasn't... Goodfellas was about events that were 10 years prior to the... 20?
Well... Oh, the Lufthansa heist, I think, was in the late 70s.
It was 78.
Yeah, yeah.
And the movie came out in 91.
I mean, it's like... It's like 12 years, and now it's 25 years from the movie.
Ugh.
Oh, come on.
But, like, what... You know, name an awesome Robert De Niro movie post-1991.
You got to analyze this.
Analyze me.
Nope.
Get analyzed.
Nope.
Final analysis.
Nope.
I don't accept them.
Drink talk.
Don't accept it.
Final answer?
What else?
Just do a little typing right here.
I saw a movie where his family was under attack by some terrorists that was like an attempt to get him back into, and it was absolutely the worst movie ever.
Cape Fear?
No, I mean, but that... Okay, Cape Fear.
Cape Fear, what year is that?
It's early.
It's back in the good days.
Nick Nolte was good.
Right.
Right.
And you got, what's her head?
The Scientologist is in that.
Patricia Arquette.
No, no, no.
Julie Lewis.
Juliet.
Juliet Lewis.
Juliet Lewis.
Juliet Lewis.
She's a Scientologist.
Which one was in Desperately Seeking Susan?
That's a Rosanna Arquette.
All I want to do is see you in the morning, Rosanna, Rosanna.
Rosanna Arquette.
Now that's – I think I always get Juliette Lewis and Rosanna Arquette mixed up because – This is another one of those rat's nest of actors problems.
It's like me with Wilfred Brimley.
I always think Wilfred Brimley is all those same guys.
I think he's Brian Dennehy.
I think he's Dolph Sweet.
I think they're all the same guy.
I can't tell the whole part.
No, no, no.
What are you talking about?
Wilfred Brimley is Wilfred Brimley.
He was in The Thing.
He was in the thing.
He was also in Cocoon, I mean, famously.
He was like 50 years old.
He's basically the same age that you and I are, except he was in Cocoon playing like in 90s.
Oh, by the way, a follow-up.
In a recent podcast, meaning the one we recorded two hours ago, I talked about Archie Bunker on All in the Family.
You know how old he was in the first season of All in the Family?
How old?
47.
Oh, my God.
Ha, ha, ha!
The same age as me.
Yep.
Archie Bunker.
Archie Bunker started out younger than me.
And you knew where you were then.
Girls were girls and men were men.
So we could use a man like Herman Hoover.
Don't tell me you don't like musicals.
Listen to you go.
Didn't need no welfare state.
Cheeks and ducks and geese better scurry.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Dirty Grandpa.
He's in a movie called Dirty Grandpa.
Who?
Archie Bunker?
No, Robert De Niro.
2016 has got a movie coming out called Dirty Grandpa where he plays Dick Kelly.
I don't want to see that.
He's in those dumb movies with Mr. Funny Dump.
He meets the parents.
That's right.
He is the parents.
He's the titular parent.
And he's playing.
It's like it's like the naked gun.
He's playing.
Oh, he's doing a Leslie Nielsen.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Serious role in the center of a dumb comedy.
Casino 1995.
Never saw it.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
That's a great movie.
Yeah, I've heard that's really good.
What, you've never seen Casino?
No, I haven't.
Oh.
Yeah.
Oh, Merlin.
I should see that, huh?
Well, it's very depressing.
That's good.
I like that.
And in some ways, it's appalling.
But a wonderful, wonderful film.
That's Sharon Stone.
When she's got her game on, she's really something to watch.
So Sharon Stone goes so far into this movie, Casino, her acting...
is so tremendous that she makes you, A, despise her, and B, she actually like visibly comes apart in the filming of this movie.
Like you can tell.
She does like a Shelley Duvall.
it's like martin sheen in apocalypse now she's sitting in a hotel room uh drunk crying and like shooting at the walls hot and you see it in the film and you're just like oh my god and of course james woods woods is there to just put this layer of slime on everything yeah he's so he's just so awful and he's suing people about twitter yeah i know he's he's a he's a crazy person now
You got Wag the Dog, 1997.
Analyze this.
I don't allow it.
Analyze that.
Nope.
Analyze those.
Meet the Fockers.
Analyze these nuts.
Little Fockers.
No.
Oh, Silver Linings Playbook.
Mm-hmm.
I don't know what that is.
Never saw it.
Oh, it's that guy.
It's the guy that does those movies with those two people that are always in his movies.
Oh.
You know, he's got like- Werner Herzog.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Many of the people who are released out of the mental system find the world has become even darker than they could have imagined.
Carries this steamboat.
Did you know I have a friend who – well, I think we may have talked about this.
I don't know.
I can't remember whether it was this podcast or my other one.
But I had a friend that owned a boat called the Fitzcarraldo.
Is that right?
Yeah.
That seems like maybe not such a good idea.
It's Bernard the Austrian.
Oh, Bernard the Austrian.
Bernard the Austrian had a boat called the Fitzgerald.
American Hustle, also by that one guy.
Oh, American Hustle.
Who is that guy?
Who am I thinking of?
David Jacob Domino Pack.
No, it's Ernesto... Ernesto Mamet.
What's the guy's name?
David Foster Copperman.
What's his name?
Bradley Cooper is the guy who's always in his movies, and the director's name is... Rufus W. Firefly.
Wildman Fisher.
David O. Russell.
David O. Russell.
David O. Russell.
David Selznick.
David Selznick.
Erwin Thalberg.
Boy, you know what's great?
Do you ever go to the plot keywords section of an IMDb movie?
Well, historians and mostly fetishists, I think, have gone in and indicated that something happens in this movie.
So here's some plot keywords from American Hustle.
Cheating husband, drunk wife, sexual attraction, New Jersey, divorce.
But you also have hair and curlers, homemade toupee, women wearing a one-piece swimsuit.
Uh-huh, uh-huh.
Abscam, right?
That's all about Abscam.
Abscam, charm bracelet.
You got charm bracelet, woman in a bikini, woman in a bikini.
You got open blouse, balding, and you got homemade toupee.
So Amy Adams.
I like to tag her keywords.
It's extraordinary.
Oh, I think she's amazing.
She's an extraordinary actor.
She's incandescent.
She really is tremendous.
And anything she's in, she lights up the screen.
And some of her outfits in this film are truly worth their own film.
I would watch a supercut just of Amy Adams from this film.
But American Hustle is the debut as far as I was concerned.
The debut of Jennifer Lawrence.
Oh, she's magic.
And I then went back and watched Jennifer Lawrence movies.
X-Men movies.
She's Mystique.
She's the second Mystique.
Rebecca Romijn was the first Mystique.
Rebecca Romijn was incredible.
That's Rebecca Romijn's famous.
That's right.
That's not Charlie Sheen.
Totally fantastic as the blue girl.
She's a good blue girl.
She's a Hunger Games movie.
She's very good.
But I did not watch the subsequent X-Men because it felt like it was fanfic.
Oh, don't worry.
You didn't miss anything.
Right?
I mean, there were the first couple X-Men.
I'll tell you which ones to watch.
Don't worry.
First couple X-Men were great.
And then it just went into this world of like it's like the Star Wars cartoons.
John, you probably do not have too many friends that are bigger X-Men fans than I am.
And there's just there's two movies I just I couldn't even get through.
I know.
I know.
I know you're the.
And that's why we haven't talked about this before, because I know that it's very important.
A little close to home.
Your cosmology and the X-Men cosmology, I think, have overlapped so much that it's hard for you to tell what's happened to you in your life and what has happened in the X-Men.
Which one am I?
Yeah, exactly.
But Jennifer Lawrence... Yeah.
I mean, I wasn't even going to watch those ones where she carries a crossbow around and dumb things are happening.
First one's better than you think.
The first one's actually good.
It's really good.
It gets very much into like... It starts to be like...
season five of lost after a while where like voices are coming out and there's a polar bear and there's some smoke smoke man it's just like I'm not saying it's the greatest book and movie ever made but I mean there's a lot of levels to that when I watched I was I was unprepared for like how sophisticated the cultural criticism of that was
You know who should have been a script doctor on that film?
Somebody who's really good at doctoring action movies?
Yours truly.
But Jennifer Lawrence walks onto the screen in American Hustle, the movie, and then the movie is forever altered.
She's so great.
Choose up the scenery.
That's what they say about her.
It's got Batman's in that one, too.
Yeah, and he doesn't do a bad job.
But my feeling is Bradley Cooper is the one that drags that movie down.
Oh, interesting.
And part of it is his 70s makeup just isn't convincing.
He does not look like a 70s person.
Yeah, the other two do.
Hawkeye and Batman both look very 70s.
And Jeremy Renner can pull off a lot of things.
I like that guy.
But I feel like Bradley Cooper – you know, it's like when you look at a picture of people from 1911 and they just don't look like us now.
They totally – yeah, totally, totally.
And you see one person who does look like us, it really sticks out.
Right.
So you make a movie about 1911.
You don't put any Amy Adams in it because there's just nothing you can do.
You can't put her hair in a bun and make her look like anything.
she's going to look like now and Bradley Cooper just has one of those faces where it's like at any previous time if a child was born looking like Bradley Cooper they would have drowned him in a bucket now he's this big movie star but in 1911 they would have been like what happened this little child his face is too pinched put him out of his misery they were looking for people with needier features back in the day do you keep up with any of the people from SWS
Let me think.
Well, Terrell Walker was in SWS.
You know, SWS was a pretty diverse group of people.
Terrell Walker was a kid who played the keyboard, and he wore a bow tie, and he was African American.
And this was early 80s, and he was a very, very, he was a good friend.
Terrell Walker, many years later,
Uh, through Facebook or something, maybe it was at my 20 year reunion.
He expressed incredulity.
that of all the people in the world who had become a professional musician, it would be me.
Because in high school, he religiously practiced the piano and wore a bow tie and was prepared to go to the show.
Day one, he's ready to go.
He was showbiz.
And I think he still plays the piano and maybe has done a lot of performance over the years.
But he was like incredulous in a way where he was like congratulating me, but he was also like, what the fuck?
How did you become a professional musician?
You didn't do anything in high school except walk around with that press pass and sleep on the couches in the middle of the day.
How did you even get away with that?
How did you sleep on the couches in school and still graduate, let alone then go on to become a musician?
And I was like, Terrell, I don't know what to tell you.
But, so Cheryl Walker I see on the internet, but I'm actually still pretty good friends with Don Shackelford.
Oh, that's nice to hear.
Yeah, he came, so he retired as a high school principal and got his ear pierced.
Wow.
Right?
Yeah.
Like child of the 60s, he was waiting the whole time and at age whatever, 65, got his ear pierced.
And then, yeah, we see each other.
He comments on my Facebook page all the time.
You know, we like to play the dozens.
And I still consider him a friend, Don Shackelford, or Shaq, as we call him.
Call him the Shaq.
Yeah.
I sent you one of the Terrell Walkers I could find.
I don't know if you got that link.
And it's an African-American guy who just mostly posts photos of his midsection.
He pulls up his shirt and he takes a photo and then he puts it on his Twitter.
Let me see.
That doesn't sound like my guy.
Yeah, he looks a little young.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
No, I mean, yeah, he's a handsome guy.
She likes pictures of his midsection.
Well, you know, he's got a real six-pack there or an eight-pack.
But, boy, it seems like he's got a gold grill, too.
Oh, look at that.
Yeah, you're right.
It's all selfies.
Right there in his profile picture is him holding up a shirt and taking a picture of his stomach.
Yeah, sexy for a real bad one.
The baddest.
Our dis ain't ready.
Yeah.
He's kissing girls here.
When people put a Snapchat address in their Twitter profile, are you supposed to send them a photo?
Are you basically asking people to send you boobie pictures when you do that?
Why do people do that?
Why are there so many people who put their Snapchat information in their profile?
Will you explain to me what Snapchat is?
I'm not sure.
I think Snapchat is the one where teens send each other expiring dick pics.
I think that might be Snapchat.
Right.
You explained to me one time what negging was.
Yeah, sure.
I'm so glad that you explained that to me.
Start seeing it everywhere.
I'd be in the dark if I didn't know what it was.
And Snapchat, they talk about it all the time, and I'm like, I am an archivist.
I do not want pictures to disappear.
I want pictures to be collected.
I am not inbox zero.
I am inbox 25,000.
Yeah, no.
Yeah.
Yeah, but I notice when I get fake Twitter followers and sometimes they're not even trying.
You get the fake Twitter followers and it's some stolen picture of a lady and she mostly writes in like dollar signs and emojis and they always got their Snapchat address in there.
So it's like a social network but you send each other pictures, right?
Is that it?
You don't know either.
We should bring somebody in.
Maybe John Syracuse could tell us what it is.
Well, this could be what our intern does.
Oh, we should get an intern, John.
We do a grant writing process.
We bring in an intern.
They can explain what Snapchat is.
What are we looking for in an intern?
I mean, I've got ideas.
You want enthusiasm?
Curiosity?
The right amount of enthusiasm.
There are a lot of young people that come up to me with a tremendous amount of enthusiasm.
Too much.
Want to tell me how I help them.
And I go, well, that's great.
And then they want to go get some pho.
And I'm like, I'm not going to go get any pho with you.
Go find people your own age to get pho with.
I mean, I'm on my way to get pho.
If you see me there, you can nod at me.
I don't want to hear about your girlfriend problems.
So I want a young person with enthusiasm, but you've got to have a strong back too.
There's going to be a lot of heavy lifting.
There's a lot of heavy lifting.
They could help us if we're curious or we just simply don't understand something.
They could serve as a kind of translator or emissary.
There were people on my campaign staff that did that quite a bit.
There was one kid who really knew Reddit, and I did a Reddit AMA.
Oh, yeah.
And he was just doing all the facilitating so that I could sit there on my keyboard and just be like, I'm doing some writing, I'm doing some writing.
And then he was like...
I guess weeding through the questions and pitching me questions, and I didn't have to read through all the 25 questions that were like, do you still think punk rock is bullshit?
You did a nice job.
You and your team did a great job of picking good questions and providing good answers.
I thought that was very well done.
Well, so I could do the answers because I wasn't having to figure out what the questions were.
That was a young person.
If you're over 25, if you're under 25, I think the interface of Reddit probably makes a lot of sense.
I find it very confusing to look at.
Well, all the people that know all the shortcuts.
Oh, you got to know the shortcuts.
Oh, yeah.
Command H is to get hella.
You send somebody a hat.
Yeah, right.
Oh, you don't know what Command H is?
That's, you know, hop to it.
Or hupped, as Arcrumb would say, hupped.
Right?
Arcrumb said hupped.
Oh, but anyway, about IMDB, when you Google, let's say, I'm going to test it out right now.
Yeah.
I'm going to Google Amy Adams.
Amy Adams.
Adams.
And then what comes up?
Amy Adams, IMDB, right at the top.
Yeah.
And I don't want to interface with IMDB because they have a certain – they think the world is constructed a certain way.
So I click on IMDB.
I turn it on.
Turn on IMDB.
And then I'm offered a picture of her, which is –
delightful and then oh i've got to click on something to see the full bio i've got to look down here just feature films sort by rating i don't care about that filmography that's not what i'm looking for i want to know about amy adams so i get off of imdb and i go to wikipedia which is where i really want to be that has all the information all the same information that imdb does but in in a place that has lots of hyperlinks which i like
You can also go to WikiFeet, which always shows up high in the returns.
This is something many people have noticed.
I used to worry that it was just me, but whenever you put in the name of a celebrity, two things pop up, net worth and feet.
What's WikiFeet?
Oh, it's pictures of ladies' feet.
It's all like celebrity feet.
But it's strange that of all the picadillos that show up there, everybody seems to get this.
If so, you type in Amy Adams.
Let's see if we get net worth or feet.
Amy Adams.
All right.
Let's see here.
Oh, no feet on the homepage.
Look at that.
A lot of the time, if I type in the name of a celebrity, you get plastic surgery, net worth, feet, or gay.
You get that sometimes, too.
I mean, one quarter to one third of Amy Adams' page on IMDb is devoted to asking the question, who is Negan on Walking Dead?
Walking Dead World is abuzz about the casting of Jeffrey Dean Morgan.
Yeah, that's big.
That's that guy from Watchmen.
Yeah, that has he placed the comedian in Watchmen.
No, no.
Well, you know who owns the IMDb?
Who?
Amazon.
All the pieces are fitting together now.
See, they want to feed you back into the system.
I don't want to buy anything.
I'm not a privileged consumer.
I just want to see the information.
I want to know that Amy Adams was born in Italy.
And you don't want to raise your daughter that way.
You don't want her growing up looking at the internet as a consumer.
You're not going to do it.
Are you calling me through an engram machine?
Why?
What happened?
Well, it seems a little bit like you're talking to me through a can.
It might be your microphone.
Oh, no, I sound great.
You sound great to you.
Yeah.
Should I disconnect and reconnect?
I mean, as long as you feel like it's recording properly, I think we just keep going.
Yeah, it's all fine on this end.
Let me watch.
All right.
Yeah, it all looks okay from here.
Okay.
Then it's just something in the interwebs.
Yeah.
Yeah, I don't know.
I didn't like that Superman Man of Steel movie.
Didn't like it.
No, no, no, no.
We talked about that, right?
I think we did.
Like 80 million people die in that movie and there's absolutely no acknowledgement.
Yeah, you know what we did?
We did.
We did talk about that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I feel like Wikipedia – oh, here's a question that I wanted to ask you.
Yes.
What is the internet?
Okay.
I mean like literally where does it live and what is it?
I mean anymore I know what websites are but like what is the internet exactly?
It's where websites live.
Yeah, I'm the wrong person to ask about the technical parts of that.
I mean, where is John Sircuso when you need him?
He'd tell us what the internet is.
We couldn't stop him.
He believes in the evolution, the evolution of the internet, the way that it's evolved over the years through adaptations.
Yeah, it just it just it wants to be a thing and it just evolves to it.
I'll tell you what I was told in in 1993 was that it started out as a DARPA project.
It was mainly about ensuring that communications could continue in the event of like an apocalypse.
Thank you.
That's true.
That's what I've heard.
But now it's a series of tubes.
It's not like the back of a truck.
It's running through the Nevada desert, and it has Google on it.
Yep.
And Amazon, presumably.
And you can't see all parts of it from China.
Then you got Tor.
Yeah.
Oh, you got Tor, the deep web, the onion.
Yeah, there's some websites you can only see if you're running Tor.
And on those places, you're paying for drugs with Bitcoin.
Not anymore.
Oh.
Oh, I don't know.
I mean, the Silk Road, they shut that thing down.
Yeah.
But you're sharing videos that other people don't want to see.
It's an interesting idea, though, because I tried Tor.
I'll probably try it again at some point.
I tried it a few years ago, and it was too much overhead for me.
But I think I had never known about the fact that there are websites you could only get to through, you know, obfuscating encryption.
It's a very interesting idea.
So Tor is a search engine?
No, Tor is a protocol that obfuscates your IP address and makes it so that you can't really tell who's doing what.
And that also has a component that only allows you – that gets you through a doorway and there are all these websites that are hiding?
Well, yeah.
This is when they talk about – I get the words wrong, whether it's darknet or deep web or whatever.
But basically there's this idea – Dark web, deep net.
Yeah, I love that comic.
But there's a whole bunch of the internet that we can see, which is on HTTP public websites.
Then there's this whole internet that consists of places that we don't see or can't see.
So that includes stuff like, theoretically, your finance accounts or whatever, all kinds of intranets, but also a lot of sites that are not findable by Google, all the way down to sites like some of the hackerific sites you can only get to using the Tor browser.
I've seen this graphic on 4chan where there's a picture of an iceberg.
And up on the top of the iceberg, the visible part of it is like Google and Amazon and, you know, Friendster.
And then the whole bottom of the iceberg, the largest part of the iceberg, is deep web.
What do you imagine that is?
Well, having spent some time on 4chan where some of the brown froth of that deep web comes up to the surface, I have some sense of what it is and I don't want to see it.
Yeah.
But then there's all that curiosity about like, well, wait a minute, what's really going down?
You could get the real story on Amy Adams maybe.
But see, I really don't want to know the real story.
And also, I don't want to be running...
xhtml or whatever like i don't want to how do we get on to this i don't have to learn about something i don't want to learn anymore i just want to see here's what i want to see i want to see celebrities who are in revealing outfits you know i want to see nips lips um i want to avoid people on facebook who talk about gun control
I want to post on Twitter and not be yelled at.
And every once in a while I want to go on eBay late at night and have a sort of a bipolar B episode where I buy a lot of
Old military emblems.
It's not really that complicated.
No.
Your needs are not – they don't seem difficult.
No.
It's easy.
It seems like the technology should be there for you to do pretty much all of that.
It's easy.
Oh, also, if people are talking about me on the internet, I want to be able to go on there and take them aside and –
And sometimes maybe put them in a hot box and say, what we have here is a failure to communicate.
Oh, okay.
Put them in the box.
I get it.
What do they call that?
Like a huddle room.
Like where my wife works, it's an open plan.
Everybody's got a desk.
Get a standing desk.
And then you can have a huddle room.
And it's all this little, like smaller than a conference room, bigger than a phone booth.
Like where you can go in.
You can take a phone call.
You can have a minute.
Yeah.
There's one where you can just go in and change your clothes if you want to go running.
It's really nice.
So anyway, you want a huddle room, but it seems to me you also want to be able to capture their connection in such a way there's nowhere they can go but the huddle room.
Thank you.
And then B, they're not allowed to leave until you're done.
That's right.
Like, hey, guess what?
Your internet now is just looking at me for a while.
And we're going to talk about some stuff you said, and we're going to talk about you.
What you want is a pop-up principal's office.
That's right.
Come on in here and why don't you take a seat?
Have a seat.
Close the door behind me.
You're only going to need the edge of that chair, buddy.
Yeah.
And I also want to use the internet to sequester Dick Cheney in a shipping container that's been buried in the desert.
Okay.
And give him small doses of LSD while I play on repeat.
You realize you're pulling me down with this?
What are you going to play?
What are you going to play?
Well, prison, colon, incident.
All right.
All right.
Nicole, Mason, say one prison, colon, incident.
Until he just goes mad.
No, I want to.
First of all, I want to do a super cut of all of.
All of the television footage where Dick Cheney gave like any kind of press conference and all of the sort of accompanying television footage of like all the stuff that actually was going on and the newscasters talking about that.
You know, it's like it's it's like a montage scene from a Vietnam film.
where the background is like, this is the end, my only friend, the end, while the helicopters are coming in.
That'd be a good use.
Somebody should do that.
That'd be a good use of that song.
Don't you think you use that song to do a Vietnam montage?
Somebody should do that.
They could totally do that.
Yeah, that's a good idea.
But we'd do a similar type of thing.
With Dick Cheney, except I guess the soundtrack would be Right Said Fred or something.
What would you put on there?
What was popular at the time?
Which golf?
The more recent golf war?
Well, I mean, Cheney's had a long career.
He's helped a lot of people.
Actually, we could start with the doors and move through the history of music.
But then, so he's sitting in the room.
He has to drink water.
There's a sink there, right?
So he's drinking water to keep alive, but there's a little bit of LSD in the water.
And so he's like, whoa, why are the, but you know, the room is pretty plain.
So he's just like, whoa, the walls are kind of breathing or, but, and then the TV is on and, and it's only one channel and it just plays like him.
It just plays himself to him.
But just slightly, we just start to slightly edit it, slightly modified.
Or it's just like not quite how he remembers it.
Very slowly morphs into Grimace.
Just a little bit at a time.
And he's in a shipping container buried in the desert.
But there are windows in the shipping container where we have put some trompe loyal, like there's palm trees outside the window.
So he can open up the shades and there's a little like, there's a diorama there.
Where he's like, it looks like the outside.
He's living in a third graders like experiment for school, like with little army men in it.
Yeah.
And it's just good.
And the outside is like, you know, Sid and Marty Croft.
Sort of like.
Oh, like a H.R.
Puffin stuff.
H.R.
Puffin stuff.
But but it looks at first it looks real.
So he's like, oh, but the window won't open.
He feels like he's in a real place.
And then little by little, more and more stuff is introduced.
That just seems like, wow, was the desert always that color?
And then Charles Nelson Reilly walks out of a top hat.
Yeah, and I just feel like little by little, you know, and then every once in a while, you know, oh, and we'll also we'll tilt the floor just by just like a millimeter.
Just start to tilt the floor.
Just a millimeter at a time.
And it's one of those optical illusion things where it doesn't look tilted.
Oh, right.
He's down on his hands and knees.
He's looking at the floor.
Something's fucked up here.
But there's just enough LSD in the water that he can't quite be sure.
Part of the idea is you're keeping him right on the edge.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's that thing when you first take acid and you're like, is it happening?
I can't tell.
Is it really happening?
It should be like that for like six years.
Yeah, that's right.
And the thing is, it's just enough, right?
That it's just like, whoa, does it... Oh, my hands are so... Have you ever looked at your hands?
No, I mean, have you ever really looked at your hands?
But he's all by himself, right?
In a shipping container.
Two years in, the floor has dropped in one corner, two and a half millimeters.
And it's just like... And he's looking out the window at the desert and it just...
The sun comes up.
The sun goes down.
But did you see that?
What was that?
He's staring out the window all day because it's all there is to do.
And then he's also, and the TV is on.
The palm tree shifts a little bit over time.
It's just broadcasting this loop.
But over the course of years, like just little bits get shaved out of the loop.
Things start to, it's like, what was that?
What did I just see?
There's a little like instant, just one frame dick shot.
oh god and then over yeah just over the time and then oh we're also videotaping him the entire time um so yeah and that you know and rumsfeld is in the shipping container right next to him lawrence eagle burger condi rice
It's seriously, it's going to be extremely, extremely uncomfortable right now.
The problem is I want to get this done before he dies of a heart attack.
And, you know, like I don't want I don't want him to die of a heart attack on my watch.
Right.
That's a pre-existing condition.
And I think probably by now his heart is just mostly made of aluminum.
So, I mean, I might have decades.
People are going to ask.
So I'm going to say, if you're looking for the name of that song, Precencol and Ensign Cusel, just go to Google and type in P-R-I-S-E-N-C-O-L, and it should auto-fill the rest.
Yeah, but there are several videos.
You want the one that starts with the classroom, with the girl standing up, and she goes, professori, and he says, si, tika.
And that's how you know you're on the right one.
Because it's actually an amalgam of a couple of- And then it shows the 72 original with the dancing lady.
The black and white dancing.
She's great.
That lady can dance.
Well, and she was the lead actress in Vaughn Ryan's Express.
I was reading about her.
I was Googling her after seeing her in that video, as you do.
And yeah, she became like a famous actress, right?
Well, and I think was even before she did the prison colon ensign cues.
But she was a TV presenter, right?
Yeah.
Von Ryan's Express is one of those movies that pops up in Netflix all the time when you're like, I'd like to watch a World War II movie that features spies.
And if you put in World War II spy movie, Netflix is like, that returns no results.
So you're like, okay, spy movie.
And they're like, that returns no results.
You're like, okay, movie.
That returns no results.
You're like, I don't understand your fucking algorithm.
You have a search...
window i'm looking for some things it never works but what they do do every once in a while is pop up von ryan's express here's the thing you might like and you're like well it stars frank sinatra so you know i'm not going to like it netflix if you know anything about me but then you watch it because it's a world war ii movie and frank sinatra is not convincing in world war ii you just you know that he skipped that war yeah
Uh, but it's a, you know, it's a, there are a lot of things that I should like about it.
It's on a train and it features the woman from prison colon ensign cues.
So, I mean, maybe Netflix or maybe Netflix knows more about me than, than, than I know.
Yeah, as much as you got to credit Frank Sinatra for the one and done, like one take approach he took to things, it doesn't always make for great viewing.
No, you're watching a World War II spy movie.
You don't want somebody to say shooby-dooby.
That's not where you're coming from.
It's not hip.
World War II is not hip.
No, you're up to your elbows in mud.
I watched a Hitler movie the other night.
It was a new one to me on, I want to say Netflix, maybe Hulu.
But the conceit of it is, here's a whole bunch of color footage from World War II.
Oh, yeah.
And so then they make a TV series out of that.
So the narration's a little clunky because what they don't want to say is, and here is more color footage of Hitler.
But they have to kind of construct the narrative around the footage that they've got.
Right.
But it is pretty amazing.
It's pretty amazing.
Goering was head of the Air Force.
Yeah, we know.
Goering was the head of the Air Force from a slightly different angle.
And did you know the Air Force was run by Herman Goering?
There are some planes which are part of the Air Force, also known as the Luftwaffe.
Luftwaffe.
I watched one of those documentaries the other day about Goering's brother.
Doug?
Doug Goering.
I don't know.
He's a great magician.
Yeah.
And it was one of those.
I was on Netflix.
I was trying to find World War II spy movies.
It wasn't returning any results.
And they were like, maybe you'd like to watch this documentary about Goering's brother.
And I was like, has it come to this?
You're out of stuff now.
Am I watching a documentary about Goering's brother?
Okay.
All right.
Fine.
Sure.
Sure.
I'm not doing anything.
Fine.
And so I watch it.
And it's one of those things that originally aired as a TV show.
That sounds like a history channel to me.
You know, they come back from commercials and they kind of are recapitulating the thing that they just talked about.
Yes.
And you're like, this is not a feature film.
That's the bottom of the barrel.
You might start with all the hitters.
You start with Sorrow and the Pity, you watch Showa, you watch Schindler's List, you watch all the classics, right?
And then you start getting into the really good documentaries.
And there are some really, really, really good documentaries.
The height or low, and I don't mean to make light of this, but like...
Be careful the night that you decide to go to archive.org and actually watch the original – the movies that they shot when they first uncovered the camps.
Oh, yeah.
Have you seen this?
Oh.
That's rough viewing.
We talked about this, where they make the people from the town like –
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Go and do the shoveling.
Walk into the shed with the pile of – and so you're emotionally wrecked.
You're several weeks into your Hitler movies.
And then the thing is Netflix is on to us.
There are so many World War II things on Netflix and so many of them suck.
Oh, they're terrible.
You can see, you go look at the star ratings.
I mean, everything's already way over high rated on Netflix a lot of the time.
But when you see the things that are like one and a half stars, Garing's brother.
Well, and so did you ever read the book Nietzsche's Sister?
Nope.
Well, so Nietzsche's sister has a very fascinating story.
Nietzsche's sister became a Nazi, a nationalist.
Elizabeth Furster Nietzsche.
Yeah.
And she was married to Wagner's son or something like that.
Talk about a national socialist rat king.
Oh, my God.
That's right.
And they actually went to South America to form a new Reich, a German town in the far off northern Argentina.
Uruguay or worse, Paraguay.
It's called Nueva Germania.
Yeah, Nueva Germania.
And they're up there in the, like, hacking out of the jungles a Nazi town.
Where they were like – and this is the beginning of the whole idea that all the big Nazis fled to South America after the war through the Odessa files or whatever, through the Project Vermspringer or Project Spectre.
Octopus.
Project Octopus.
Yeah.
Octopussy.
Anyway, they all... At some point, you became a captcha.
Rumspringa forestall.
The Bishop of Rome is helping spirit these Nazis into South America to be with Wagner's sister-in-law, cousin-in-law.
And she's Nietzsche's sister.
And they're insane.
They're absolutely crazy.
And they're remnants of this town.
I wish this were a musical.
Remnants.
It should be.
It should be.
Right?
We are going to.
Two of us going honk, honk, honk.
On the project.
Octopus.
Nueva Germania.
Spectre.
So that book, I was just like, tell me more.
I wanted to buy a ticket on Lawn Airways and fly the fuck down there and see this place.
But, you know, it's one of those things when you get into the neighborhood and you start.
Oh, yeah.
You start asking questions and nobody wants to.
What?
What are you talking about?
What?
Yeah.
No, no, no.
There's nothing.
It's like, why is everybody here so blue eyed?
And they're like, keep moving.
I'm a ceramicist.
I know nothing of these people.
Did you ever see the did you ever see the movie about like the Eichmann, like repatriating Eichmann from.
Oh, that's.
Is that where the the the Israel went after him?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, that was a feature film, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But also there are documentaries about it where they go back there and they're just like, okay, we're going to stuff him in the trunk of a car.
Is that Massad?
Who did that?
Oh, they are so badass.
We're going to stuff him in the trunk of a car and we're going to drug him and we're going to walk him to the airplane as though he's our drunk friend.
Ready?
Here we go.
And that really happened.
Yeah.
crazy um but so those guys sometimes go down there and they're walking around these villages and they're like hey we're looking for uh we're looking for ben um johnson do you know and there and everybody in the town is like no ben johnson here but and no one by that name and it's really fucking you know some concentration camp doctor
But but anyway, so in the spirit of Nietzsche's sister, they make this movie about Goering's brother and Goering's brother seemed like he was kind of a fuck up and he had some Jewish friends and he didn't you know, and he was he was nice to them and he saved some people, but he was no Schindler.
And you're watching this thing and the guy that's making the documentary is like, Goering's brother needs to be reappraised by history because he actually saved all these people and he was a true hero of the war.
And then you watch the film that he's making the case for this and it's like, Goering's brother just kind of – he would just say –
Like the people, the cops would come and try and arrest him for moonshining.
And he'd be like, you know, my name is Ben Goering.
And then the cops would be like, oh, sorry, sorry.
And they'd all run away.
It's like, it's not very heroic.
Yeah.
Just really, it's heroic just in context, like, you know, next to his brother.
Yeah, right.
I mean, he was like, he was milking his brother to get some stuff.
And every once in a while that involves like saving some Jews.
But it was like, like he saved six to 11 people.
Yeah.
Not exactly.
I mean it's not bad.
No, every little bit helps.
But it's sort of not – I mean he's probably in the pantheon of heroes in Israel.
So Eichmann – look at this.
Spoiler alert.
So Eichmann went to trial, huh?
Oh, yeah.
And he didn't kill himself.
They killed the execution by hanging.
Look at that.
It was a big deal.
It was a big deal.
They set him up in the glass cage and they did the whole thing where they were like –
You're going to listen to this, every bit of it.
And he sat there with his grouchy look and said, I apologize for nothing.
It was a real – it was a time.
SS Obersturmbannfuhrer.
That's a hell of a title.
That's not a Sturmbannfuhrer.
It's an Obersturmbannfuhrer.
Yeah.
That's the same as that lieutenant colonel.
Yeah.
He's over the Sturmbannfuhrers.
Schutstaffel.
That's the thing.
As you move up the ranks of German military, they just add in another word.
Oh, it's insane.
If you go and look again, looking at the pages for how they come up with these names, it's bananas.
Yeah.
What's a six-star general in Germany?
Oh.
I don't even know how to say star.
It's a Stroopwafel.
It's a Stroopwafel von Scheisse.
No, I believe, I think, you know, in German Army, you're a private, and then you're a Stroop private, and then you're an Uber Stroop private.
And then you just keep adding words onto it until you get to six-star general.
You get to be – oh, goodness.
Oh, my goodness.
Field marshal.
Field marshal.
You could be an Anwarter, a Junker, a Schutze, an Uberschutze, a Sturman, a Volkssturman, a Stabschatzführer, a Rottenführer, an Oberrottenführer.
Yeah, those are the bad ones.
An Unterscharfuhrer.
Let's see.
Then you get a little higher up.
You get to the Obersturmbannfuhrer.
That's what the guy wants.
You can be a Gruppenfuhrer, an Obergruppenfuhrer, or an Oberst Gruppenfuhrer.
Oberst Gruppenfuhrer.
Yep.
That's a lot of Fuhrer.
Yeah.
God, these are crazy names.
You're Oberst.
Like Connor.
Anyway.
Covered a lot.
Why is the floor moving?
Listen.
God damn it.
God damn it.
I know the floor is moving.
I know it is.
He's the same.
He's the same.
He's the same.
God damn water.
Let's take my pills every day.
Who moved it?
That's exactly right.
Just go in in the middle of the night, move his glass.
Just a little bit.
Just a little bit.
One tiny thumbprint on his glasses.
Why is my vision occluded?
You start going in and pouring a little bit of water on his crotch.
He starts to think he's wet in the bed.
I made a tinkle.
He doesn't know why.
God damn it.
There's more water in the toilet today.
Every day, a little bit more water in the toilet.
Oh, he's so upset.
You just keep putting slightly smaller shoes in.
There's something in the water.
I can't stop drinking it.
I've gone so far as to imagine how you would drip the precise amount of LSD into the water.
You'd have to have a little... Please use Tor when you're searching for that.
How much LSD to drug Cheney?
Do I sound phlegmy?
No.
Do I?
Well, no.
Is it a character of mine, though, that I have too much yellow bile?
I don't think so.
I mean, you cough a lot.
Well, yeah.
What is that?
Respiratory disease, heart disease, grip.
Could be dropsy.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I mean, I want to have, you know, I don't want to have a wet humor.
You know what I mean?
Mm-hmm.
I mean, I want my humors to be... Appropriately boosted.
What are the right... What are the humors that you want?
Let's see.
You got phlegmatic.
You got bucolic.
Yep.
You got caloric.
You've got... What's the one that's about outside?
That's bucolic, right?
Well, there's melancholic.
Melancholic.
All right.
Right.
And there's... Bodily humors.
There's...
There's phlegmatic, which is what I'm hoping not to be, and sanguine.
Oh, sanguine, that's because you've got a lot of blood.
Yeah, sanguine is a lot of blood.
But again, that's a wet humor.
That's moist.
The dry humors are... Phlegmatic is relaxed and peaceful.
Yeah.
That's weird.
Calm.
But again, that's a wet one too.
That's like cold and wet.
Choleric is short-tempered and irritable.
And that's a hot.
That's hot.
Are you talking about Chinese energies?
Are you talking about cheese?
No, no.
We can all agree on cheese.
Ah!
Ding!
Good night, everybody.
That was stupid.
Why didn't I even say that?
That's just dumb.