- Wait, you have a TV? - No, I don't like to read the TV guide. Read the TV guide, you don't need a TV guide. ♪ Come on, listen, let it ♪ ♪ Come on, listen, let it ♪ ♪ Come on, listen, let it ♪ - Hello and welcome to TV Guidance Counselor. I am Ken Reid, your TV Guidance Counselor, and I am very excited for my guest this week. This is by far the longest episode I've ever recorded, but I think it's very interesting. The smartest man in the world themselves, Mr. Greg Proops, I really, really like talking to Greg as you will be able to tell when you hear this episode, we get into a lot of rather obscure knowledge about the Twilight Zone and weird pulp authors and all kinds of things that I really enjoy. It's a little academic, but what else would you expect? You know, that's what you're here for. If you're listening to the show for the first time because you are a Greg Proops fan, this show is sort of a typical of how the show normally is. It's always entertaining, but normally someone picks exact issue of TV guide from a specific week. We sit down, we go through night by night, what they would watch that week rather, and it's a little more specific with Greg. We got a little more heady, we got a little more off topic, but interesting nonetheless. So I think you'll enjoy it. Please sit back, relax, and listen. This week's episode of TV Guide and Counseling with my guest, Greg Proops. ♪ TV party tonight ♪ ♪ TV party tonight ♪ ♪ TV party tonight ♪ ♪ TV party tonight ♪ ♪ We're gonna have our TV party tonight ♪ ♪ All right ♪ ♪ We're gonna have our TV ♪ - Mr. Greg Proops, Greg, thanks so much for doing the show. - Hello, Ken, hello, everybody. - Hello. - Hello, people in TV guideline. Thank you for having me. - Oh, you're quite welcome. I grabbed sort of a selection for you based on a past experience and what the general age is of people usually pick, and you instantly gravitated towards 1969 issue there with Raymond Burr on the cover. - Well, my theory is that the shows that you watch between like six and 10, and I think you said as much to me before we started, are really the shows that you remember your rest of your life. I feel like I was lucky because when I was a little, we had the Adams family, Batman, Star Trek, and The Avengers, and there's all my childhood. And I don't think there's been, Anne Mann from Uncle, Wild Wild West. It was a great time for fantasy on television. - Yeah, really cinematic stuff too. - Really exciting and sexy and like, I don't think the TV holds up as well now as far as that kind of escapism and fantasy. - No, especially not for kids. I mean, that age group, you get fantasy now, it's like Game of Thrones and it's like, it's good, but then there's a bunch of boobs and-- - I was gonna say Anne. - Really good vitals. - And sexual violation. - Yeah, I mean, for Avengers, you know, The Avengers, that was about as titillating as it would get as a kid. We were like, I don't understand why I like this. - Right, right, I knew that she was hot and also they had an edict to have no reality in the show. - Yeah. - The Avengers had a serious show Bible. I don't even think they were allowed to have black people on the show and I'm not kidding. - Right, right. Well, it's England, no, I don't think-- - To a policeman either. They were never allowed to show a policeman. - I don't think-- - Because then it would have taken the sex out. - I don't think England got black people until 1978 anyway. - This is gonna freak you out, but I was in a BBC several years ago and there were some albums lying around in the studio. This is the one on Portland Street and one of them was a double fold out album of a TV minstrel show that ran into this-- - Oh yeah, the black and white minstrel show. - Yep, yep. - And I was like, when is this from and they're like the 70s? - Oh yeah, I think it went until like 1982. - Yeah, yeah, people blacked up on TV then and you just think, oh, holy cow. It's insane that that happened. They really didn't get black people in England until like, it was probably the late 60s. - Well, I mean, they always had black people, but they never certainly put them on television. - No, no, as like a culture, more part of the culture. - Oh no, no, they never, I mean, what did Roger Moore say this week? Idris Elba can't be James Bond 'cause he's not English, English, and that's code for he's black. - Exactly. - Even though he's sexy and dashing and has all the elements. - It would be perfect, of course, it'd be perfect. - The Centurion voice and all that. - Well, speaking of him, the saint was on at that time and that the saint was on the show. My father loved all these shows. - Yeah. - A Star Trek mission impossible. There was just a zillion shows that we watched. - So did you, is your dad introduced you to all this stuff? Or did you have siblings? Are you on the show? - Well, my sister was seven years older than me. So she was a teenager and yeah, she had her. By that point, she was sort of out every night. - Right, right, right. - Going to San Francisco and seeing concerts and stuff like that. Her whole room was covered with psychedelic posters and late 60s San Francisco. - Yeah, yeah. So she was not watching this much, Tully. My dad introduced me, my dad let me stay up to watch Star Trek 'cause it was on at 10 o'clock on Thursday night and that wouldn't first started. And that was really late for how old I was. - Right, right, absolutely. - But he didn't care, and he let me stay up 'cause he knew that I was desperate to see it. - Was he into sci-fi and fantasy and stuffer? That was just what was going on at the time. - I think more than it was just going on at the time than any thought the show was fun. - Yeah, his taste around toward war movies. - Okay, yeah, he's a dad. It's war in Westerns. That's like the eternal dad things that they like, especially at that time. - I remember there was a book from the '80s and it had like the dad channel and it's just "Meryl's Marauders" you know-- - That mission if possible. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. - Nothing but war shows. - Yeah, Zulu, yeah, Zulu always. - Zulu is like, if it's a Sunday afternoon, there's at least a thousand dads in the world watching Zulu. - Any day, it doesn't matter what decade. - I watched it again. I was on the bus with the improv guys, the Who's Line guys a couple of years ago and I brought only men's films and I showed them all and everybody sat wrapped. - 'Cause it was on the river Kwai, yeah, yeah. - Oh, it was bridge on the river, Brian Zulu. Guys, we just sat like this, like just-- - Men can watch it over and over. - Oh yeah, it never gets old. - Women are like, this is horribly violent and they're just killing black people for like a year and you're like, shh, it's about to be in the British Empire. - Film, yeah, it's a good film. - Yeah, so your dad, did you have a lot of questions about any of this stuff? I mean, that was kind of weird. - I mean, my dad spoke German, so when we'd watch anything that had, you know, war movies he loved, World War II, so what did they say, what did they say the whole time? - Right, right. - He would translate for me. - Was he ever like, that's not real German? - No, you know, 'cause his wasn't like fluent. - Right, right, right. - Because he spoke Yiddish and Yiddish is all German. He did speak German enough to get by. I would ask him quite, I remember watching a documentary once about the Borges or Popes or something and I said, but everybody in this is evil. Who are the good guys? And he went, sometimes there's no good guys. And that was the first concept. Time I was introduced to the concept of-- - How old were you? - Eight, seven or eight. - Yeah, that's about the right age to introduce the concept of the human condition to people. - He went, they're not, nobody's nice in this case and I was like, but I've been taught that there's good in that. - There's white hats and black hats. - Always, yeah. - And there was still on that. There was still Westerns on TV. - Absolutely. - In the '60s and there were still war shows. - Yeah. - Combat, like, oh I think I might've even mispronounced it, Meryl's Marauders, not only the last one here. - Wagon Train. - Wagon Train. - Pananza. - My Chaperelle, Pananza. - Yeah. - Pananza was so boring. We never watched Pananza. - It really is. - And we never watched Gunsmoke. - Gunsmoke was pretty boring as well. You had the rifleman and all those commercials like that. Chuck Connors, I sort of came back to the rifleman later 'cause I knew him from his sort of exploitation work in the late '70s, like, tourist trap. And all these movies were just a real sleazy. - So I went green. - Yeah, yeah. And so when I watched the rifleman, I'm like, he's the hero of the show. He's a terrifying monster and everything. I'm used to the other. - I love that he's supposed to be this peace-loving, non-violent dude, but the solution to every week's episode is to shoot a bunch of guys with a rifle. - Well, yeah, I mean, as the NRA will tell you, the key to peace is carrying a gun. If you have a gun on you, everybody's peaceful. - So his son is a, from the show, the guy who played Lucas, his name is Johnny something, has a full on orchestra in Los Angeles, like a society. - Really? - Yeah, I went to a film event maybe seven, eight years ago and Lee Hugh Hefner had funded. It was an old picture and they'd re-scored it and whatnot. - A silent movie? - Yeah. - And his band played. - That's pretty weird. - Yeah, and it was Lucas from the rifleman. I'm like, oh my God. - We're the only one that recognized him 'cause I have that issue. - Not a talk event. - There's too many old fashioned viewers there, but that was what he went up to. - Yeah. - Chuck Connors also had an awesome show called Branded after that that we used to reenact the opening of on the playground all the time 'cause he was slapped across the face, his buttons were cut off his tunic, his insignia were ripped off, his envelopes and they'd break his sword over their knee and then send him out into the desert. - Could you think? - That seems like the most sci-fi element is someone being able to break a sword over their knee. - How about that, right? - I've never seen anyone attempt that. - Other than the branded opening. - I could do that. - So that's an interesting thing too where you have, in the early '60s and the '50s, you have these very, you know, no pun intended black and white sort of shows. And then in the late '60s and into the '70s, they're the same genre, but it starts to question things a little more. So like the rifleman is pretty straightforward. Branded is a little more shades of gray. You know, combat really straight forward. Mash shades of gray. - Absolutely. - And you start to get these sorts of questioning things and I think the best example I can think of is the prisoner and secret agent man or whatever it was called in England before that. - Right. In the secret agent man, I remember watching the black and white one with Patrick. - McMe, no. - I always get them confused too. - It's Patrick McGoon. - Yeah. - Patrick McMe is the one from Clockwork Orange. - And Patrick McMe is from The Avengers. - Yes. Absolutely because we watch Secret Agent Man and then when the prisoner came on, we watched it all the time. - Right. - That was a huge show. And that's the first, like you say, Secret Agent Man, there's no question that spying is necessary. It's just a sexy world of gambling and Macau and picking up girls with bitch inheritance. - It's so James Bond. - Right, and smoking and jewels and bad guys with mustaches. And then the prisoner absolutely questions the role of government. - Yeah. - And the government is a horrible oligarchy run secret society. He's, he ends up in spy camp where you've got to be debriefed because you know too much. - Yes, and it's, that's the first show I can think of that was, you know, for lack of a better term of mind fuck. - It is. - That is the like the original mind fuck show. - It's too old up too. I don't know who he does. - I don't know who he does. - Lord, great to make that show. - I don't either. - He convinced him to do it, I think, 'cause he was such a big TV star at the time. - Oh yeah, I mean, he turned down James Bond at that time speaking to James Bond. - Yeah, James Bond. - Patrick McMe is one of my favorite badasses. - And he really was a contentious prick, I think. - Yeah. No one yells like Patrick McMe. - Oh no, I will not be phoned. - I am not a number, like every episode of The Prisoner, it's like, what would you like for dinner gov? Who are you? Like, it instantly goes off and it's fantastic. - I did it on my show a week ago and only a couple people got it. And I did the opening of the show. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. - Who are you? - Yes. - I'm the new number two. - Yes. - You are number six. - Who is number one? - I am not a number. - Who is number one? - Yeah, who is number one. - I remember seeing you on was, whose line is it anyway? - Yeah. - 'Cause you kind of went over to England and sort of made your name over there. - Right. - First I think it's fair to say. What was it like when you first went over there comparing it to all these things that you watched as a kid, all this, it was mostly swinging 60s stuff, like even, we even got stuff like Adam Adam Ant over here and some of the weirdest stuff. - And there was a really weird kid's show called The Double Deckers that ran for one year here that I think was more popular in England. It had a fat character named Donut and they lived on a, I remember the theme sign and come aboard with The Double Deckers, fun and laughter is what they're after on a double, double, double, double decker bus with a belting ding and a horn. And I remember watching that and thinking, "Oh, England must be so cool." - Yeah. - And then you get there, of course, and the streets are full of garbage and there's railings everywhere. - Yeah. - It wasn't dark. - It did live up to it because when I first went there in the late '80s, there are still red phone boxes which are kind of disappearing because of mobile phones and now they keep over points. - People don't need prostitutes anymore. And the red phone boxes were all the cards for prostitutes which are always called artist models. - Yes. - Right. And then, like, I think it was Bill Bryson who said, "Going there the first time, there's ever crossings that say, 'Look left' because, right, there's so many Americans who look the wrong way and you almost get creamed by a bus first day you're there." - Oh, I started comedy there as well. I went to school over there and yeah, I went to Goldsmiths down in South London. And yeah, it was, I mean, my view of England was always a little more dystopian because I kind of came of age in this sort of punk rock and all the '70s kids' shows from England I watched like children of the stones and the tripods and all these really grim survivors and all this stuff like that. So I was like, "Oh, it's not as bad as I thought." But I could see if you were like, '60s swinging England. - Well, I was a big fan of punk so everywhere I go in London and when I still do, if I'm in Hemersmith, I sing White Man in Hemersmith, LA, if I'm on the Waterloo Bridge, I sing Waterloo Sunset, like every neighborhood in London has a song about it. - Oh yeah, absolutely. - And Ray Davis of the Stones or somebody wrote a song about every bloody neighborhood. - Yeah, I lived in Brixton for a while and there wasn't a day that didn't go by that Guns of Brixton was not coming out of my mouth. - The whole synonym's horrible singing. - Yes. - The Guns All Brixton. - Guns All Brixton. Like you would have thought he would have been like, "All right, that's a great guide track. Let's do another take." - God. - He's like, "Wow." - What do you have mixing this one? - No, I'm fine. What is it? - Yeah, she gets her kicks in there. - They kicked down your front door. - When you were growing up in San Francisco area, it's the height of sort of psychedelic hippie-dom and you don't strike me as that kind of person at all. Like you're sort of a punk rock guy in attitude and in sort of outlook and life I think in a lot of ways based on, you know, what I hear you say, how did that come about? Does that seem sort of the antithesis of the area you grew up in? - Well, the one thing that I did get from the '60s that I think has poisoned me forever and the Bay Area did the same thing to me because of the atmosphere is the peace and love and non-violence thing. I never understood when punk came out, of course I loved it and went and saw the clash and everybody and had all the records and everything and we would drive up to San Francisco to see shows. I never understood why punk hated hippies so much. There was always this like kill hippies element to it and I always thought hippies weren't completely evolved. - Right. - But I just-- - They're not bothering anyone? - Well, you know, to be against war is not the worst thing in the world and that's the one thing I think I absorbed from there and that when I got into the regular world and started seeing other parts of the country and other places, I didn't realize that there wasn't that ethos and it's a shock when you leave the Bay Area. And all of a sudden you go places and people are fascist and have American flags everywhere and they care about guns. - They're the riflemen. - Yeah. - Exactly. And there's confederate flags and you go, "Oh, you really think this." It was a culture shock for me to be in the world and I think that's what I carry with me all the time is that information. I'm desperate to disseminate that information all the time and I find that the world is still highly resistant to-- - Oh no, I agree. - You know, how did you come about a lot of that stuff? Like I discovered a lot of that stuff, growing up here in Boston, we were lucky enough to have some really good college radio and stuff but there was a show called Night Flight on USA Network that showed another state of mind and smithereens and all these punk rock movies and that's kind of how I encountered that stuff. And how were you getting exposed to that stuff at that time? Was it older kids? Were you hearing it? - Oh, in the '60s? Yeah. My sister was seven years older than me so she was 16 when I was what, nine and so she brought home all those records and all that and all the radio and the Bay Area. This is the transitional period between top 40 and two big top 40 stations and they were really eclectic. You would hear soul music and white people music. There was no-- - It was an actual top 40. - Right, and novelty songs and occasionally a weird instrumental and every once in a while like a bizarre reggae fluke or some novelty shit would get in there that wasn't supposed to happen. And I memorized those. They used to, at the grocery store, there was a list of the top 40 every week. - Really? - You were supposed to go, yeah, we would just go get it and like I could, for some reason I could tell you like almost every song in the top 40 from one week in 1972, I simply remember reading it all the time, I was like honky-cat by Elton John and you know, City of New Orleans where Elton got me, and so I'd listen to those radios and then the transition in the late '60s, early '70s is when FM started to be really powerful and the people started to listen to it in their car, that was the big turning point. When cars started to carry FM frequency and then we had a radio station in San Francisco called K-San and that was a really hypoelectic station and it had enlightened management. Tom Donahue started it and that station embraced punk before everyone else. - Right. There's a free form. It would be like our WBCN was in the '70s. - Right. And then but you know, now FM radio is basically a classic rock and flake-ish, flake-ish. - If it even exists, one of the, it's a little off topic from television but I also collect top 40 broadcasts from the '60s all the way through the '90s from the UK and the US. And it's always interesting to me to play a 1982 UK top 40 versus a 1982 US top 40 because the UK is pure. It's actual sales. So you'll have the band discharge right after a disco song. And here it's clearly what the labels sent them, and that was a real revelation to me. - The English top 40 is really wild and when you watch those old top of the pops, you won't know half the acts. - Oh yeah. Who's Cesar and Cleo? - Yeah. - How they get in there? Who's Bonie Am? - Oh yeah. And you have bands like The Toy Dolls have a hit signal. - Right. - A hit signal. - That's kind of those poodles. - Yeah. It's really, really bizarre. And that was a huge revelation to me. And that was sort of opened my worldview when I would see that kind of stuff, you know, back to where you're talking about when you travel in the US and you realize every, you know, I had the same experience. And I remember there was a, there was a movie called The Intruder that Roger Corman directed, which you may or not have seen. So Will Shatner, William Shatner, and it's the, Roger Corman quotes it as the only movie ever made that lost money. - Oh really? - And it's a drama, straight drama. And it's about a white racist from the north who comes down south to like stir shit up basically. And it's Shatner and he's charming and it's really gray area and it's a really good movie. And it was written by a guy who wrote all the Twilight Zones that isn't Richard Matheson. - I was going to say Richard Matheson. - Yeah. - Earl Hamner. - Yeah. Charles Beaumont. - Yeah. - Probably. - And so I remember seeing that and that was kind of my first exposure of like the South. And I was looking at it like Twilight Zone episodes. - Yeah. - And I'm like, this is clearly sort of science fiction. And then when I was in my band, we went down south and I'm like, this is pretty accurate. This is terrifyingly accurate. So it's interesting to see like what you're exposed to on television, you know, how it all is on the same plateau. It's, you know, you're watching The Avengers, which is pure fantasy. And then you're watching a movie that's actually pretty realistic, but I would at, you know, eight, nine, ten pure fantasy and sort of reconciling those things is sort of terrifying. - Isn't it? - Yeah. - And when you get set out to see the reality of it, you're like, oh, the media distorts everything. And that's a big, that's a thing that I think is hilarious in this day and age when there's so much information and we're bombarded with it and everybody carries something we dreamed about when I was born. Which is a little device that you can- - It's a tri-quarter. - Yeah. - You can check things on it, you can go find out anything in the world instantly and yet people don't use that and people still believe what the media puts out. People are completely gullible, culpable, they repeat crappy memes that they've been told. - Yeah. - Nothing. - The misinformation is just staggering. - Memes, both of me say, I, this is a soapbox that I'm on all the time, but people who can't have sort of in jokes on their own volition, so they're just like, fail. - Yeah. - Oh, that kind of stuff, it's like, so online, I'm gonna, I'm like, no, just come up with your own stuff, like have an interaction with a human being. And it's, in a lot of ways, it's so much easier to interact with everybody in the world. As you said, you have the sum total of human knowledge and media in your pocket, but you need to know what to look for. And I think when, you know, when we were growing up and you're watching these things and you saw a movie late night or a really weird show that was only on, you know, a British show that was only on for one season, you looked at it, I dreamed that. And then when do you find a person who'd also seen it, you're like, you're my friend. We have this in common now. And that was not the case for the last 10 years in the future, maybe not. - No, it isn't, things were, you had to find things. That would be the biggest difference between punk rock and now. I don't decry now and I would never say the old days were better or anything like that. And the element of having smart phones and the internet to me is what we're able to do right now. The wild independence of that is very punk to me and fits in with my viewpoint of the world, which is that everybody should do what they need to do. The difference was, I think, you reminded me of something when you said the sum total knowledge of the universe, there was the outer limits and the twilight zone. - Yeah. - And the outer limits and the twilight zone had serious moral. - Oh, absolutely. - And the moral was always humanity. - Yeah. - The humanest shows. - Yeah. And don't be greedy and don't be a horrible monster. That we're monsters was the theme of both shows and that we have to quell those instincts and try to play higher. - They're the most atheist shows I can imagine. - Isn't that wild? - Yeah. - Like, that was where I got all my information about morality. - Me, too. Absolutely. - I know. And you think that's gone from TV because one, there's no anthology shows anymore. - No. - But two, there's no imperative to do anything moral. Dead people are main characters and shows now so much more and you see them as anti-heroes and rewarded for being sociopaths. You know, you get stuff like the Sopranas and Mad Men and that sort of stuff, which are quality shows, but the lead character is a horrible person with like no moral compass. - It deserves to be wild. - Exactly. Even in comedies like Kirby Enthusiasm or these sort of things. So you don't get, yeah, these moral plays anymore and it did it in a way that wasn't Davey and Goliath. It wasn't heavy-handed religious, you know? - That was hilariously overt and the Christianity. - Oh, it would be like, "This is great. This is great." And then all of a sudden you'd be like, "God is like that. Where is this coming from all of a sudden? I got the lesson. I didn't need the God in there." - Right. And I love that it was Davey and Goliath and that the dog was Goliath. - Which doesn't make any sense at all because Goliath is the emblem of the evil of the 16th. - The villain. - It made no sense. They're just like they flipped through a Bible and I'm like, "Yeah, it's two good names." - That was like, that was a Sunday morning boring when there was, like Saturday morning was awesome because all the banana splits was on and the Archie's and all my favorite cartoon shows and live action when like the banana splits was a complete freak out. - The most bizarre keys and days and night, like what if they wore costumes? I loved the banana splits and then like Sunday morning there'd be nothing. - No. You'd have church, maybe on a lot of stations. - Whatty Davey and Goliath. - Yeah. - Davey and Goliath. - Excuse me. - Was sort of mesmerizing. - It was. - It was so slow. - It was so slow and stop motion instantly as a kid I was like, this is sort of uncanny because it's not animated but it's not real and it was totally weirded me out and I couldn't not watch it. - Well usually the only things that were stop motion were like we'd off the red nosed reindeer. - Yeah. - All the ranking bass. - Yeah. Until ranking bass decided that was not worth the money and started doing those awful animated. - Yeah. - Like mad monster party, which is maybe my favorite ranking bass thing, but it's probably the worst script they have. It's just like shut the sound off and just look at it and also the female lead really hot for an animated-- - Yeah, that's true. - I was gonna say. Well the episode I was thinking of of the outer limits was I can't remember the name of it or anything. They land on a planet, it's an American crew of course, and they find these creatures who look like anemones and they live in an aquarium and they can speak and they possess the sum total knowledge of the universe and another race is coming to get them as part of like a vendetta payoff, they have to be destroyed and they realize this because they're higher beings. - They have the sum total. - And so the ship captain goes oh my god, do we save you? And they're like no, you can't save us because this other race demands are demise. But in the meantime, we're happy to give you all the information, but we won't be able to even give you but a parcel of it before they come and get us. And that was the moral dilemma of that show and you think that's not a question that gets asked. - No, that is. - Now that we have the sum total in our hands and a phone, people never look it up. They spend all their time looking at their friends and instagramming and being doucheous. - Look at these tits. - Yeah, right. - It's so weird. Like that would be like in that episode if these higher beings said we can give you the sum total knowledge and the guy was like you don't have a lot of time, can you just show me all the tits. - Right. - I just wanna see all the tits and maybe cats. - Yeah. - You could do that. I'm perfectly happy. Like that moral question or that more philosophical question raised in that episode, that's an entire college course. And it's on a network television show that you're eating your TV dinner watching. - Right, right. And your mom and dad are watching with you. - Insane. Insane. - Well they played at a high level. - Absolutely. - I mean like TV writing like you say is very good now, they're just, you know, breaking bad and all those shows, they certainly do present. - Right. - And morality. But in a very different way, there was a, I don't know, maybe it was the post World War II writers that were going for that. Maybe Richard Malison and Beaumont and Earl Hamner and all the, well Harlan Ellison, who I wouldn't say is the most moral person in the world. - Demon with a glass hand? - Not a soldier. - Which is amazing. - Which are Terminator. - Yeah. - Would you say it's successful? - Yeah. - Yeah. I mean I... - I love that episode. - I love that episode. - So great. - It goes over to the cat. What are your orders? - We, the people sort of who are making television and music and media and things, you know, sort of pre-1970, all had a life before they got into creating these things. Whether it be, you know, they worked in radio, or they worked in vaudeville, comedy, drama, all these things. They were authors worked in pulps. - Right. - And I think because of that, it brought sort of a, um, a naivety to creating things where they were saying, "I'm just making this. I'm not making it for television. I'm not making it for a intended audience." And after that we had a generation who grew up watching those things, and they're sort of tainted by it, for better or worse, but now they're making things with an audience in mind. They understand the mechanics of television, and weirdly as a result, you get less interesting things. - I know, right? And especially network TV where they just don't wanna, every once in a while, something gets through that has some creativity, but almost all of it's been relegated to cable and pay cable. - Yeah. And now Netflix and Amazon and da, da, da. - Which is almost out of desperation because they're going, "Look, we just, you know, it's a pay cable station they go, 'We just want something and, uh, hey, we're not gonna watch you because we don't understand anything, do what you want.' And then once they go, 'Oh, this formula works, we're gonna get involved in money people, it's awful.' - Right. - Right. - And I am kind of excited now that we're, the current times remind me of like the mid-80s where we still had movie theaters where people would go see movies and not just spectacle. We had, you had drive-ins and all these things still, you had cable and local television still because the Telecommunications Act hadn't wiped out local television. And so you were just getting all this content generated because all these stations needed content and they almost didn't care what it was. - No, no, no. They filled out the schedule. - Yeah. And so just by volume, you'd get some interesting stuff. And now with the arms race between the, the web people who just wanna, they'll lose money, they just wanna get established, we're getting interesting stuff again. I agree. I think you're right, the mid-80s were a wild time and the demise of local television is a terrible thing. There was lots of weird local shows and they've just gone by the way, so now what's left news, they don't even do kids shows anymore. - But even the news, I worked at a local news station here and it was, it was shocking to me to learn that basically they just have a consultant come in who, who just sells them how everything should look and sound. So Channel 7 in Boston looks and sounds exactly Channel 7 in Florida, same voice over guy. And a lot of the news packages are just PR pieces that are sent to them by companies who make the things that they're doing a report about. - And they're happy to play them. - Exactly. - And they're just big commercials. - Yeah. - The other thing that's sad is like I go in to do all these morning TV shows all over the country. - Right. - And there's no camera men anymore. - No. It's all robots. - New York City and, no, Chicago doesn't have them anymore. But New York City might be the last place where when you go on the floor, there's camera people. - Right. - And then maybe in LA one or two places, but it's all robots. - Yeah. - And then like I was in New Zealand a couple years ago and I did their breakfast TV and all their talk shows, not a camera men to be found. - Right. - So that job has disappeared. - Which is like an outer limit. - Yeah, it is, right? - Yeah. - Because these robot cameras just come swinging around here and everything and it's like, but what about the human element? - Right. - And like you say, local news takes buys corporate packages. - Yeah. - And literally to promote products and stupid things like that. - Yeah. - But Botox injections. - Right. - Yeah. - It's crazy. - Where's the reporting? Where's the, and without the other big point, I think, like you were saying about the mid-80s, the page six of this TV guide we picked here is about TV newsmen behind the Vietcong lines. - Yeah. - Not embedded newsmen. - No. - Not newspeople who were forced to go with the government and only show government footage. But the reason why the Vietnam War came to the crashing halt that it did was it was shown every night of my childhood that the nine, eight, nine years that it lasted at dinner, you would see combat footage. - The horrors of it. - And a guy standing in a flak jacket with a bunch of people shooting behind him. - Yeah. - And they would go, this village got wiped out. And then when Seymour Hurst did the exposé on Milai, which I think started in like the St. Louis dispatching and worked its way up to the New York Times and then became a giant story. That whole thing played out over my childhood of what is war because so we went into this village and Captain Medina ordered Lieutenant Callie to burn the fucker to the ground and kill every male woman and child. - Sometimes there's no good guy. - Right? - Yeah. - But then the public had to deal with that. - Yeah. - Whereas with Abu Garb and Guantanamo, and then the torture report that came out, we're not getting the same moral imperative from the medium. - No. - Because Cheney came on and said he'd do it again in a minute. - Yeah, and there were people who cheered him on. - Right. - And also-- - There were no remorse over it in going, "No, these are atrocities. Don't you see where as bad as the monsters were?" - I'm sure this has been covered before, but that man literally has no heart. He literally has no heart. He is a cyborg with a cybernetic heart machine that doesn't even beat like this. - And the last hardy got from a person, they asked him, "Do you ever think about the person you got the heart from?" And he went, "No." - "No." - "I never give it any thought." That is the most sci-fi thing I can think of. The most evil man in the last 20 years is a literal monster machine. - Yeah. - But that's insane. - The architect of the global economy collapsed, the architect of all the war, the endless war that we're in now. - It's crazy. I think one of the things that's changed as well is with the narrow casting and all the choices we have, and smarter people than me have covered this, you don't have to look at news that doesn't already reinforce your worldview. - Right. It's cherry picking, and liberals are as guilty of it as everyone's guilty of it. You go to a site that you disagree with and you're like, "Oh, I don't want that." - Let me find one I agree with. - Right. And then all of a sudden you find one that panders to what you like. On my podcast, I'm always telling people to never believe anything they hear. And then they go, "But what about you?" And I'm like, "Me either." - Yeah. - Excuse me. I say, "I have a giant agenda." But I'm free in telling you that I have an agenda. And that I try to tell the truth as I see it. But when you, I go, you read a newspaper, you watch TV, you're on the internet, whatever it is. - Remember. - Remember. - Question. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Don't accept blindly the things you bloody hear, because they're lies. - And, you know, not to say that, you know, in the '60s and '50s on television, what didn't have an agenda, because it certainly did. - Oh, no they didn't. It's not unvarnished treatment. - No. It certainly did, even the news and, you know, and Twilight Zone and Outer Limits, they were a very liberal bias, you know, very, you know, against the sort of communist hunts and all these things. But they were at least doing it in a way. And I'm talking this out now, I can't tell if this is better or worse. That was coded. - It was allegorical and not straight up, you know, morality plays. - Right. - So you could watch that with, by missing the greater comments. - Well, I mean, the other thing about, you know, the gory days of TV and all that is, news is reported by white men. - Yes. - And there were three networks. - Yeah. - And that was it, baby. - Yep. - So talk about a lack of diversity in the viewpoint. - Yeah. - And when I was a little, all the World War II guys were still on TV. - Oh, yeah. - It was Walter Cronkite and David Brinkley and Eric Severide and all the cats who'd worked with Murrow during the war and that whole clique. So they were middle-aged guys by then and they carried that with them. So now the diversity of TV, on the one hand, there's a million more channels and now there's actual women and black people and minorities are out to report the news. - Well, you gotta look for it. - Right. But the investigative journalism is completely up to the reporter. No giant news gathering group has any agenda other than to stay alive as an entertainment entity. - Right. And to keep getting paid. - Right. So Matt Taiby or Amy Goodman or the reporters that are Greg Palas that are really digging are in danger. - Yeah. - They're in physical danger. Like the cat who died last year in Los Angeles, his car blew up at four in the morning. - Yeah. Seriously. - He blew up that whole story about the Pentagon and you're like, I always say to my wife that the line in the Godfathers, the truest line of what does he say, if history's taught us one thing, Kay, it's that anyone can be murdered. - Yeah. Oh, absolutely. - And especially world leaders and especially people think they're immune to it, but there's bad forces all the time and people get disappeared constantly for the bad, for the things they say that are seem that appear to contradict the government are absolutely, I mean, you know, what was his name, the professor who was the arms, I'm blanking on his name. He was English and he went to Iraq and he discovered that there were no WMDs whatsoever. - Yes. - And he was found to have committed suicide. - Yeah. Well, clearly. - Like cutting one wrist open right before the war began and Tony Blair, like, oh, well, he was depressed. - That's what happens. But it's so, I think because we have all this knowledge and with the sort of mainstream nature of conspiracy theories and how people love these conspiracy theories and it's entertainment now, it makes the real stuff that we should be going, you know, the government clearly killed that person. People go, that's conspiracy theory. I'm like, no, this is different than chemtrails and alien blizzard's run, but they lump it all in together. - Yeah, they do. - And it discredits everything. - The confusion and also the democracy of the internet doesn't offer clarity. - No. - It's just not just like David, that man was a former footballer with a head injury. Like he has a traumatic brain injury. He's not a person who's like, no, I think we found radiation from the Russian government on this guy who was poisoned and you're like, okay, David, like, no, no, no, they're totally different things. - Right. And, you know, Matt Trudge and people like that just totally have a, they're, and there's a hate in their hearts and they want to, they're working it out on everybody. - And they're, they're all G Gordon Liddy. - Right. - They're all G Gordon Liddy. - Yeah. - The other thing is too, that I, that I find odd is that what passes for investigative journalism now is essentially prank shows. They're like catered camera. - I'm gonna catch you out. - Yeah. Like Alan Funt would have been like, he's like, no, I'm an investigative journalist. Like, no, you're doing a hidden camera prank show. Same thing. It's like, it's not the same thing. - No. - Who went to, to the Muslim bakery trying to get them to make a gay cake or, you know, whatever. It's like, this is a prank show. This is nonjournalism. - Right. Right. There's a, there's a lack of gravity and no one knows, uh, I don't know if we've lost it. I hate, I don't want to sound like an old person and say that there was values before and now there's not. Cause I think that's nonsense. - Yeah. - But there's, there was a nod toward gravity and dignity and we've lost that, uh, we don't dignify anything or anyone anymore, like we used to, used to have figures that you would go, well, I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt and let them be important. And now with the internet and the way that everything's, there's, they want to divide the world into black and white and that's the other thing I'm always harping on. There is no black and white. - You can't. - Every issues wildly complex. - Yeah. - But like, you know, people go, oh, like for just, this is just for instance, not something that Obama's a socialist, Obama is a Muslim. And this gets repeated again and again and again and all of it's nonsense. He's the least socialist president in the history of mankind. We've sold more arms than we did under Bush. Health care is not socialism. - Yeah. - I mean, and then the, oh, he's a Muslim and like, no, he's not. He might have even attended a madras or whatever, but who cares? - It's when did you stop beating your wife? - Right. - It's that's exactly what it is. People don't know, that's a famous question, like a gotcha question. I forget who asked it, but it's like, I never did. But now people just remember, he got asked when he stopped beating his wife. So he must have been. - Well, I was reading today about Hillary because, you know, she's going to throw her hat in tomorrow. - Right. - And, which I love that expression, I don't know where the fuck that came from. - Yeah. - And you imagine going to go into a boxing match and some guy in the audience throws his hat in the ring and it's like, he's going to fight him next. - Right. - Have to do what he threw his hat in. - I guess I'll raise a white flag. - Yeah. - Here's my towel. Let me throw that in and end this. And it said, remember, when you read about her and all the memes that keep getting repeated, secretive. - Yes. - And then secretive, secretive, secretive. She was secretive about her email. She was secretive about Benghazi. She was secretive. There was one. She wasn't. She testified in front of Congress. - Yes. - She did a lot of things that aren't secretive. - Craig, but did she? - Yeah, right. And then the guy says, the point is, if you repeat it enough, the word gets attached to you. Oh, she was fiercely defiant over this and things, defiant, defiant, defiant. I was like, well, first of all, if a man played it the way she plays it, they would just be being a man. - It's a heroic patriot. - Kenny, you know, holding your cards to the chest. Don't fucking tell me what to do. I won't be violent. - Rand Paul showing those reporters where to stick it. It's that kind of thing. - He shushed Savannah, got through the end. Like, talk about being out of temper with what's going on in the world. I understand the grandstand he's playing to. It's the don't put your cuffs on me, PC police, I'll do what I like, but she wasn't asking a bold question. This is a morning breakfast TV show. This isn't journalism time. - You're running for president. - And? So, instead, the other day, you're going to get to ask a million stupid questions. And a million more pointed questions. And if you're going to lose your temper the first time out of the box, he went, "Shit, just remember on television." And I was like, "Do you perceive how women and sensitive human beings perceive you shushing a woman on the morning?" - No. That's the problem. He doesn't. - No. And his card wants him to do that. They're tired of being bossed around by feminazis and blah, blah, blah, blah. - Two interesting things that this reminds me of is that one, you know, back to Vietnam, that was the first television war. And before that, when you saw footage from World War II, it was newsreels. And it was Saturday afternoon matinees and you would see, you know, radar men from the moon and then see a World War II report. And it was sort of, you put them, you know-- - Allies marching to Belgium. - Exactly. It was on the same thing. I was like, "It's a cliffhanger. Everyone's fine." But now you're seeing the true horrors. And punk rock sort of, you know, again, back a while ago, this, to me, I was in a punk rock band for years. And I feel like this is the most DIY punk rock thing I've ever done, though. I mean, I'm recording this myself or I'm releasing it myself. That's exactly what I want. And punk rock to me also was about questioning authority in a nihilistic way many times. But now I feel like we've gone way too far where we question everything. And nothing has graved us and nothing has truth and there is no final word anymore. And that's terrible. That's terrible in a lot of ways. It's gone far too far in the other direction. And we also have somehow rebranded the conservative world as the party party, you know, they're the deltas. You know what I mean? And it's like, "When did this happen?" They're like, "Hey, you guys are meowing my balls, man. We're just trying to have a good time with some ladies and some beers." And it's like, "No, no, that's, huh?" And it's come full circle. - We want the right to discriminate. And we want that legally shown note. - That's a good time, man. You're the PC police and that's why you can't have conservative comedy to me. - I agree. People ask me about that and they go, "Do you have a responsibility to show both sides?" And I say, "No. I don't have any responsibility because there aren't two sides. There's a million sides." - Comedy is about questioning things to me. - George Carlin said it. - Exactly. - The world is a circus and I'm here to stand on the side and watch it. - Yeah. - I'm not there to get in the middle of it and tell you what's right. I'm here to tell you everything's fucked up. - Right. And even a show like Laughing, you know, "Honor This Time," which was made by The Man. - Yeah. - Like that was old man at a network trying to make a youth show. And just because I think inherently because it was comedy and The Times, despite itself, is a questioning show in a world where-- - Yeah, it is. It is. - Which is weird. - It was really liberal and I think Dan Rowan had a lot to do with the viewpoint. Like they would do the news of the future on the show and Reagan would be president and things like that. - Yeah. - Which was unheard of in the late '60s. - Which is the science fiction dystopian science fiction future. - Right. And he would do general bull right and he'd come out in full uniform with all the duck and he made his children act like they were in the army. He was clearly a hawk and then Dan Rowan started wearing a peace sign every week during the show, which was real seditious in those days because you weren't supposed to question the war. - No. - Just like now. And then of course The Smothers Brothers Show, which was wildly, that's Dickey. - Yeah. - That show didn't actually even have to go off the air. They always talk about CBS pulled it and it's like Dick simply wouldn't do what they wanted him to do. - Right. He wouldn't play ball. - So he pulled it on. - Yeah. - And in essence, in a corporate speak way, he couldn't deal with him anymore. - Yeah. - And them getting mad at him every goddamn week for saying the war was killing people. - Right. - Which of course it wasn't. - And having Pete Seager on to have a big money. - And he's seeing big money and you have someone who was blacklisted and about a friend of communists and an absolute civil rights champion. You put him on TV and let him sing an anti, and a coached anti-war song. - Right. - Like you say, a coded anti-war song. - Yeah. - It's not even a song about Vietnam, it's a song about an officer asking people to kill themselves basically. - Right. - Yeah. - Well, you know, getting back to your point about how we were talking about the news, you know, the TV news in the 70s and 60s wasn't trying to give you the truth all the time. - No. - Because it took years to learn one that Vietnam was a complete fabrication. - Yeah. - And then later that the CIA was using it as a ground base to deal drugs and arms through the Golden Triangle, and all this had to be gradually uncovered. It certainly wasn't something the networks were desperate to tell us. And Watergate was a complete accident that even got uncovered and then that became a shitstorm. And now, of course, like you say, in conservative world, they've circled the wagons and they've tried to rewrite everything. They've written Nixon out almost entirely. - Yes. - Even Nixon did a couple of hilarious, well, he started the Environmental Protection Agency, which they seem bound and determined to disturb it. Someone put it very well once. Nixon, when he went to China and Russia, did something that he would have never allowed anyone else to do. And by doing it, he opened it up and it changed the face of everything. But if another president had said, "I'm going to go to China and talk to Mao, he would've gone, 'You call me lover, how dare you do that?'" - Did he do? - But he had the ball. - Did he do his Pepsi? Isn't that one of the things he did? He brought Pepsi to Russia? - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - Weird. - Famously, one of the generals, not Zhukov, but another famous Russian general during World War II, had a wild addiction to Coca-Cola, which he started drinking during the war. And Coca-Cola would send him crates of it in unmarked bottles. They did different bottles for him so that they didn't know he was drinking it when he was in the post-war Stalin administration. The Coca-Cola was supposed to have been the biggest disseminator of democracy during the war, right? Because everywhere the troops went, they made sure they had Coca-Cola. - The planes had Coke dispensing taps in them. That sounds insane, and people never believed me when I tell them this. But there were basically Coke kegs in World War II fighter planes, and they hooked all the GIs on it, they came back, and they went, "Love it, it's a taste at home." - It's the first drink that is not alcohol that had caffeine in it, that children were encouraged to take. This is that they came out during the patent medicine era, and when the patent medicine got taken away and they started to not let you drink opium over the counter, caffeine. And yes, it had an element of cocaine in the beginning. - And it still does, to a degree, it's actually, yeah. - But they started to market it to children, and that was the big turning point, like when soda pop became a giant entity in the world, it hadn't, there's always been like saspora and river and jobs like that. - Again, but local bottling plants. - Right. - It was no local. You had local TV, you had local bottling plants for beer and soda, and they all got bought up by corporations and just whitewashed and made everything the same. - And Cola went all the way to, basically, they didn't even want Pepsi to exist. - Right, right. - And Pepsi snuck up on them and kind of... - Some Nixon did a good thing, I've always been a best guy. Pepsi based in New York, Coke based in Atlanta, you know, I got to do the North South. - The war really made that though. I mean, I remember asking my dad was in the Coast Guard during World War II, and I asked him, did you ever meet anyone who didn't smoke during the war, and he went, no, everyone smoked during World War II, and he said, "They gave us cartons of cigarettes." - Absolutely. - Because they wanted us to pass the time, of course, now we know that blah, blah, blah. And it's very funny to me, because having performed in military bases overseas and stuff, they're smoking areas, and you think, "We're over here to kill people." - Yeah. - But don't do it slowly. (laughter) - That's insane. (laughter) - What's interesting to me, I don't know. - And they don't let them buy porn at the BX either. - No. - They can buy Macs in the magazine, and you know those kind of men's... - Yeah. - The men's ones that have bathing suits. - Which are so much sleazier than Playboy. Like, Playboy magazine has... This is a cliche, but it really does have decent articles in it, and Macs... - But there's journals. - Yeah, it's like, "Okay, there's no nipples, but this is the sleaziest thing of mine in my life." But there's no nipples, so it's fine. - But it's like, it's like, creepy guy magazine, and I always thought that was funny. You go to the BX and no porn at all. - Yeah. - You're not allowed to have that, but you can, of course, wipe people out and... - Or you can see the most gruesome thing you ever want, as long as you're not jerking off to it. - Yeah. - You're probably okay. Let me see a human heart. Done. - Yeah. - But I don't know if you're watching a lot of TV in the 80s. You know, you started... - I did up till a certain point, and then I was mostly, between like, you know, my teen years and my, into my 20s, I was out every night. I don't think I stayed home very much. I remember some 80s shows, but I never watched them. - My J-Fox family's hiding. - My J-Fox family's hiding. - My J-Fox. I never watched that one, and I never watched the facts of life. - Yeah. - But that was way outside your age. - Yeah, yeah. - I think at that point. - I'm with them Dave Quillier in Full House. - Full House. - Yeah. - Like, I know all about it. - Yeah. - Very San Francisco, probably the best representation of San Francisco on film. - And highly accurate. - Yes. - But I never, I was just out all the time. - But one of the interesting things about sort of the revival of the 60s shows in the 80s, you had the new Twilight Zone, there was a new Outer Limits, was the anti-Vietnam war stance. And so many shows had Vietnam vets who were fucked up as characters. - Right. - Like, although not television, Jacob's Ladder. - Yeah. - And you got things that questioned this stuff. And it was only 10 years, 15 years after the war started. And we're 10 years, close to 15 years after Iraq, Afghanistan started. We're not really seeing those things. We're not seeing these damaged people come back art. We're seeing it in new stories, if you look for them. But we're not seeing, I mean, there was a, there was a new Twilight Zone episode that I remember just chilled me as a kid. And it was Bruce Dern, and he keeps seeing this ghostly figure of a guy in a wheelchair haunting him. And he's a draft dodger. And it turns out that that's an alternate universe version of himself who went to the war and is in a wheelchair now. - And it's come back to say. - And it's come back to say. So it was like this thing where I was like, oh, the, you know, it inherently made me question these things as a kid. And it makes me wonder how anyone that grew up watching this stuff could be conservative now. You know what I mean? - When I was getting these sorts of things as a kid, I feel like I was almost, for better, we're sort of programmed against this stuff to question these things just based on the media I was getting. - Right. No question. Well, I think it's, you know, there's not, there's that thing is conservatism, like something in your brain, it seems to largely be based on fear and mistrust. - Yes. - And so, and then the comfort of that fear and the comfort of that hate, you know, like Orwell said, if you destroy love and the bond between people, then you have to fill it with something. - Right. - And what you fill it with is fury toward an unseen endless enemy. - Right. - And that the purpose of war is to diminish all the resources so that no one has anything good. - Right. - And that the ruling class can just carry on being ruling. And now we've seen everything you say said he knew it because it was the truth then. But it remains the truth and it's even more amplified now. And I think in the last couple of years, especially since Occupy, a lot of people really that surprised me were so vehemently against it and like, "Oh, they're just Spuffy Trust fun hippies." And dah, dah, dah, dah. And oh my God, they're shitting on the lawn and all that. Like that's a worse crime than ruining the economy of the world with chicanery and... - We don't have to clean that up. - Right. - One of my jokes was maybe if one of the heads of AIG or Sherson Lehman had shit in a park, then we could have arrested them. Because lots of people from Occupy are still going through the legal process. And nobody from the Wall Street scandal to my knowledge has been incarcerated, had cuffs put on them. - You had nice suits. - Uh-huh. - Nice suits. - But it raised the issue. And so I think it did a world of good for everybody because now the difference for me is I'll go on TV shows to plug my stuff for radio shows, which are largely irrelevant now. - Except for Goodale, which is hilarious. - I love Goodale. - I love how much of a fucking wreck that shows. - Yes, Goodale. - It's amazing. - Every time I go out, I have to watch it. - I love it as the old guy and the too hot girl. - And it's just crazy, like I get up early, because I was on East Coast time, so I will get up early and just sit and watch that and be like, "I love the train wreck bizarre." - How is this on TV? - Yeah, it's fantastic. - And it's news in LA, by the way. - Yeah. - Well, channel 13 in LA used to do the hilarious promo, "Get your news on. Get your news on." And then of course it would be two girls dancing on a bar, however, and we don't know what this is. - But in some ways, it's the most pure thing that goes on. That's what everyone's doing. They're just like, "We're just telling you exactly what we're doing." - Right, this is what's happening nonsense. - Sorry, interrupted. - Well, that's okay. The only point was I go on these shows, and whereas years ago, if you said something like, "Well, here's the thing, I'll go on now," and they'll say to me, "What's your bag?" or whatever, and I'll go, "The rich are onto the poor. The rich are controlling everything. The rich are dominating in the history." - There's no middle class. - Right, they're keeping everything secret. - They're living, they live. - There's a giant disparity between what the people, and they're ruining all the cities by buying things up. Now, on morning shows and news shows and radio shows, people go, "Mm-hmm." Whereas ten years ago, five years ago, they wouldn't have, they'd have contested me. Now, it's just a given, and I think that it's partly because the internet, obviously the internet explodes a lot of things like the Church of Scientology, which is heading for a wobbling fall here before they go down flailing and fire off all their grenades, is that the Occupied Movement brought that into high relief, and then Romney, the crappy Republican candidates of the last general election, Team Rape and all about, the eight guys that weighed in with rape all of the laws. - Binder's full of women! - Yeah, and when Romney said, "Binder's full of women," the 47 percent, and what was the other one? People think their entitled to food was an entitled to food. When he said those things and they were reported, and they were gacha-hidden-camera things, they put it in high relief for everyone. And so, even if you're just wandering through life and you're the kind of person which most people either go, "I don't want you to news, 'cause I don't want you to go, I'm still boring, check out this thing." - Politics, yeah. - I don't know how politics, 'cause it's, you know, it's confusing, and, you know, it's makes people mad. - Why don't they chill both sides, you know? A lot of people drift through life, but even those people have become aware. - You have to be. - There's a disparity between rich and poor, and that government offices are bought in the soul, and that we're living in a paid plutocracy, a kleptocracy, an oligarchy, whatever you want to call it, that there's no real democracy. And then at the same time that there's no real democracy, because the government's such a fucked up, hideous, convoluted, disorganized, corrupt entity, we can run around it all the time. We're still saying what we want to say, and we're not being arrested yet, which is what, the neutrality thing that went down, I was raving about on my show, and I was like, I said for me the worst part is not so much, the worst part is that I don't want the government aware, or the FCC aware, of what we're talking about. Because then comes the censorship, then comes the punitive fines, then comes pulling you off the air and going, "We're not going to allow podcasts because we find them disruptive, whereas now we still have the absolute freedom to say what the fuck we want." Absolutely. And I think that's the best part of it. And that has to be protected. I was surprised that it survived in its first form, the first group. Yeah. I mean, they're going to chip away at it. Oh, I'm sure they will. And in some ways, if you wanted a voice, you needed to be a corporation because the resources that I have now at this table and the recording and the things we have, I would have had to work in a billion dollar studio, and now I can do that on my phone. I have access, technological access, but it's good and bad because everybody does and there's so much. Right. It's a forest of trees, and you have to somehow rise above it to have some kind of profile. And then how much profile do you want to have? And then as soon as you have a lot of profile, like-- Your target. Well, one. Right. And it's a terrible thing about marrying yesterday on some blog, you know. They wanted to take a pot shot at them. And at the same time, like, you know, why shouldn't, if you work in your whole career in an entertainment to be as a comedian, why shouldn't you want to succeed? Why is that bad when everyone else is allowed to fucking grasp for everything they-- So you're a sellout because you do a thing and like, you think, you should be a plumber. That's a weird thing. Right. I mean, like when people complain about celebrities having an opinion on something, I'm like, they're a human being that lives in the country, like, they would have an opinion on it, just make your fucking movie, say your words. And it's like, no, how come an athlete can say it? Or a guy who's an electrician or a plumber, but if you have a different job. How about retired generals and all the crappy pundits that they drag out on TV who are paid by corporations to absolutely state party lines and restate talking points? That's all they're paid to do whenever a war or anything comes on. The next thing you see is men. Yeah. Very small percentage of women and minorities. Sometimes Condolee's a rise. Who's both? Sometimes Condolee's a rise. Both a paid corporate person and a black person. And highly educated to do those things. They come on and they blovey eight and they repeat the same thing over and over. And then there's all these, you know, what's his name, Crowdhammer, and you know, Fox has about 50 or 60 guys who simply are there to save the stupidest, most awful thing over and over and over again. And they're not experts on anything. No one is an expert now and everyone's an expert. It's like self-proclaimed experts. I mean, you know, we signed a treaty with, or we're getting ready to sign a treaty with Iran. This should be hailed as a moment, a small victory in what has been a comprehensive shitstorm of nastiness in Central Asia. Iran Contra. Right. I mean, Reagan sold arms to the Iranians. I have not heard that come up once in all the destruction of people complaining about this. What was going on with Reagan was shocking and how he won the election was by cabballing with the Iranians to make sure they didn't release the hostages before the election rolled around. And so Carter lost. Yeah. If Carter had been able to get the hostages out, there's every possibility he would have won that election. Right. And so, and not to mention the fact of Iran Contra, and I've always bring it up on my show because no one ever talks about it because Reagan has somehow be rewritten into being this great leader. I remember at the time, everyone complained about Reagan. Even conservative people complained about Reagan. How many people left his administration under a cloud or weren't indicted somewhere between three or four hundred? Andy was a joke. I mean, you had spitting image in a Genesis video making fun of Reagan. Right. He was a dinosaur. He was a joke. It was every Saturday night. Live. Everything. He was a joke. You know, he's like the second coming. They're like, right? He was a terrible and effective president. He ignored the AIDS crisis. I blame him for the deaths of zillions of innocent people war in Central America. The cocaine trade. Well, I'm making the unions. He was an evil, evil, cruel person. Speaking of San Francisco and punk rock, I mean, you had the dead Kennedys. Yeah. I mean, it was all, here's all the fucked up shit Reagan's doing. And you know, that was sort of the thing. I don't see people questioning that stuff in the same way now. No, they say stupid things about Reagan. Yeah. Like he was good. Yeah, that is probably the dumbest thing to say. Well, I mean, whereas I don't, like, you know, Nixon was as corrupt and venal as any president ever was. But he's sort of gotten dropped by the wayside a little bit. And you know, when he died and Clinton gave him that glowing obituary. Very weird. Well, I mean, it's like one's, you know, they're all in a club together and they're just tipping the hat to the other guy. Like, well, he got caught for all that jazz, but let's look at the three good things he did. Yeah. You mean like bombing Cambodia and starting opium trade and did I mention the Pepsi? You may enjoy this anecdote about Romney. I worked at a local TV station when Romney was running for governor Massachusetts. And I was working at the front desk and he comes in and he uses our bathroom in the lobby. And there's people waiting and all this stuff. And as he comes out of the bathroom, I could almost see it. It was this cloud of the worst smelling thing I've ever encountered in my life. And you saw it people. It just kind of came over them as it was coming towards me. And they all turned green and were nauseous. That man made the worst smell I've ever smelled in my life. And I'm like, and I actually said this to someone there I go. No one who's capable of that cannot be pure evil inside. Oh my God. What do you want to know? I have no idea. And we actually had to have-- and we went in there. Room was spotless. There wasn't like shit all over the place. We had to have a cleaning crew come in to like exorcise the smell. Really? And I always said that-- I have no idea. I always said if he ever was running for something or made it to president was getting for his second term, I would have gotten a super pack together to buy me 30 seconds of TV to just tell that story and be like, do you want to vote for him? And he's supposed to be so healthy and fit. He's Mormon. He's got magic underwear. And cure him of awful, you know, we're human beings, we have bad body smells, but it was inhuman. One day, this may be a false memory I have, but I remember seeing you on midnight collar. Yes, I was. Were you on midnight collar? Oh, it's fantastically. That was around the same time as who's running. Thank you for remembering. We were like a cab driver or something? Yeah, 1991. Yeah. I-- there's been two shows ever that were made in San Francisco. Yeah. Actually made in San Francisco. Not strictly San Francisco. At Nash Bridges and Midnight Collar. So everyone who lived in San Francisco that was a performer ended up on one of those shows. There's a Scottish show called Taggart, right? Yes. That ran for God, 14, 15 years, and it was the only show shot in Glasgow. So literally every Scottish actor that ever lived in Scotland between 1985 and whatever was on the show, Taggart. So I was on Nash Bridges. I mean, I was on Midnight Collar, and my buddy Reed was on Nash Bridges. So I go into the audition, and it was a cab driver, right? Yep. And it was down in some Quonset hut in the industrial part. Well, they like, Greg, can you just turn around and show us the back of your head? You got it. Yeah, right. Right. So this will, I think, amuse you. I wore a giant's cap. OK. And I did a New York accent. Just because you wanted to? All cab drivers are from New York. OK. And the lines were hilarious because I recognized him in the mirror, and I go, aren't you the guy on the radio? I listen to the radio. I listen to the show all the time. And I get out. You know, I'm in the cab. I get all these ideas. One of those. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's the annoying fan. Yeah. So I love the character. So I go, hey, aren't you the guy that on the radio? You know, I'm in the cab here by myself. And I get a lot of ideas. And I knew I had it. Yeah. I knew I had it in the mirror. Because you're the only one that had that take on it. It's a San Francisco cab driver. But all cab drivers, because of the old movies, we'd step on it. Follow that car. Sure thing, Mac. Yeah. Right? You got him. Yeah. Even when it's a lady cab driver, like in, what is it on the town with Frank Sinatra? Yeah. It's Betty Garrett. Yeah. And she's a New York cabin. OK, pal. That's right. That's right, Tally. Yeah. Which now they're all from the Middle East. Yeah. Of course, you would never do it now. Because the Middle East is the New New York. So I got the part, and I went, and we shot it at night, and we were down in the financial district near the-- not Alcoa Plaza, what's it called, Levi's Plaza, and Gary Coles in the background. Right. And people know Gary Coles is a comedic actor now. But this was a serious show about-- I was telling someone about it the other day. It was a cool show. Because he smoked in the studio, because you could still smoke, and he was the midnight. Not only was he a bitch in talk show host to Jack, he was a vigilante. Because at that point, in the '80s, there was a huge wave of like, "By night you fight crime, but by day you're whatever side of the white job." Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's a jar of celery. Yeah. She's a smear of color. Shadow Stevens fights crime. Yeah. That's basically what we had. And I remember his. What was the outline? He'd go, "Good night, America. Wherever you are." Yes. And he got a lot of fag. And he had a Chinese engineer, because at San Francisco, we wanted to share that there's conversations, and so we're in the cab together, and I go, "This neighborhood's full of yuppy fuck balls." And I remember Gary Cole laughing his ass off, and we had pound cake and coffee that I remember in the middle of the night. I was so excited to do it. So cut two years later, the Brady Bunch movie comes out the first one. Yes. And he's the father. Right. Now he's found his milieu. Yeah. Although he did that wonderful show for Sean Cassidy. Yes, American Gothic. American Gothic. Such a good show. It was really Satan. Yes. Like Jim Thompson meets. It was so surreal. That show, I'm so shocked that that show has not had a revival. Because that show-- One season. It's more Stephen King than anything Stephen King has done for television without having anything to do with Stephen King. It's very cool. Such a perfect choice to play that. It's this charming, just pure evil. Yeah. He should have been, what's the guy in the stand? Right. Right, a flag. Right, a flag. And the guy that even cast on the stand, Miniser's, was like a store brand Gary Cole. Yeah, he was. It should have been Gary Cole. Yeah. Because Gary Cole could have done them. Yeah. Hey. Why don't you come along? You like him. Yeah, you ever see what's the one that the killer inside me with Jim Thompson? Yeah. The friend? Oh, yes. Yeah. He's supposed to be-- well, they did one with, I think, Casey Apple. Casey Apple, which is not good, but there's a French one, isn't there? Yeah, there is. And population 320 also has a-- Population 1280 is coup d'etour, Sean, and they moved it to Equatorial Africans. Yes. But the killer inside is one of my all-time favorite books. Well, Gary Cooper begged to play the part. Yeah. And he was completely shunted down by his agents and managers who went, "You can't do this part." Yeah. Because for the people who are listening, he's a small-town sheriff. And he-- He's dumb. Oh, I ain't saying it is, but I ain't saying it ain't either. And finally, at the end, someone goes, "Cut the bullshit, Lou." Yeah. And in the meantime, he's beaten his shit out of his girlfriend. He is an evil-- And killing everyone. Yeah. And he's killing suspects. He's manipulating everybody. Yeah. It's a great character. And I always thought Gary Cole could have played it too. Of course, it would have been a revelation that it would have ruined his career at that time. It's like a less allegorical Jekyll and Hodge. Yeah, yeah. Because-- You know, how you doing, ma'am? Yep. And then he goes home and beats the shit. Yeah. Yeah, it's just horrible. Jim Thompson is a guy, again, who I'm like, all the two breaking bad, all these things. They're all Jim Thompson. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I'm like, why haven't we got the grifters and, you know, the chase and all these things, the getaway, as he doesn't seem to get a lot of mention these days. He doesn't get a lot of love. Yeah, he wrote by the word. He drank a lot. Was not a good guy. No, wasn't not a good guy. He's a brother-runner. Right. His father was a hero. Right. His father was a sheriff in Oklahoma. Yeah. And he used to drink it in Musos. He made-- he wrote two brilliant screenplays, The Killing and the Positive Glory. Yeah. Cooper kind of fucked him over, though, didn't he? She did fuck him over. Mitchum loved him and got him to write the screenplay for one of those Dash-- after Dark My Sweet. --in '84. One of the Chandler ones. And put him in it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's actually in-- he plays General Stern. Yeah. In the remake or whatever. So it's nice to see him and stuff. But I agree with you. I think part of it is because he wrote so many books, the best five of them, or six of them, are classics. Yeah. And then there's a lot that are just-- Just OK. Yeah, you know, because he really was writing by the word, he was getting paid by the word. And yeah, it's weirdo. Like you said, all of Pope owes him a huge debt. And that's mainstream now, like his sort of aesthetic into a less-- Which was outside her shit that you bought to-- Absolutely. --the little bottom shelf to read on that. It's under the counter step. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. His aesthetic-- and also a guy like Sam Fuller, who's from Worcester, Mass, and is a fascinating guy who was a crime reporter and got damaged by it, and you know, and this isn't for your benefits for the listeners, because I know I'm positive you know this and more than I know about it. But those are the guys that inadvertently sort of created our mainstream culture now. Yeah. And it doesn't get but had a gravitas to it. And we realized that these things were evil and dark and scary and not just entertainment. And I think that's where we've lost the plot a little bit. Well, Sam Fuller made that one POV movie where the prostitute kills the guy in the beginning. Yes. Not shock treatment. No, not shock treatment. It's a shock corridor. It's another one. My wife was showing me the beginning of it. Well, there's the lady in the lake, or that's the other POV that are-- Oh, lady. I don't love the lady in the lake. Yeah. It's all gimmick. It's such a gimmick. It gets boring after a while. One quick Sam Fuller story. My friend Nick Jones used to work for Film Four in acquisitions, so we'd go to film festivals and stuff. Yeah. And he said he went to one and Sam Fuller was there, and Sam Fuller, they would have like, you know, presentations and meetings and breakout sessions, whatnot. Yeah, yeah. Like eight in the morning, Sam Fuller lit cigar, eight in the morning, and he was in his 70s. Yeah. Fucking come into the thing, and he was a badass, right? Oh, yeah. The movie, um, "Return to Salem's Lot"? I killed that Nazi bastard in vampires. American friend? Yes. The American friend. It's a Ripley novel, but there's nothing to do with Ripley. Vimbender's made it, it's got Dennis Hopper, and Sam Fuller's the bad guy. Yeah. And he carries a gun in it, and he's wearing a suit. Yeah. And the other director, the one I'd, um, director, plays the artist in it. Oh, yeah. Not Lazlo to talk, uh, Lazlo, oh, Callie. All right, I'm blanking on his name, but we'll come up with it. Yeah. So cut to the Brady Bunch opening in, um, London, whenever that movie came out. '94? Yeah. They were having a party at a restaurant across the street from the Comedy Store. Okay. So somehow we were all invited to go, right? Lester Square. I was playing with the Comedy Store players. The model cafe? Yup. I had a 20-minute routine about that. I used to say, uh, because there was a picture of Claudia and Naomi, and, ooh, the other two of them. Uh, it was, uh, Cindy Crawford and Elle McPherson. Yeah. And I'd say, uh, four women who've never eaten in their lives over a restaurant. Was it, uh, Claudia Schiffers? Nothing could get through that wall of formidable SS ivory, um, so, but, uh, yeah, uh, we went to the party, the Brady Bunch party, and, uh, the cast was there. And I walked up to Gary, and I went, I don't know if you remember me, but I, and he went "Hi, Greg." Yeah. Yeah. Because it was four years later. Yeah. And I, I've never done it since, and I hate when people do it to me, and I refuse to do it. Yeah. I never do that. I bet you don't remember me, and I hate when people come up to me and go, I bet you don't remember me. Because that's the way I say I'm like, "Hey, you're probably an asshole." Mm-hmm. That, they might as well just say that. Why not just go, "We met on this." Yeah. You're a real fucking jerk. You met me before. Right. Like, what a weird way to do it. I introduced myself to everybody in Hollywood, uh, anywhere, all the time, and people go, some people, hilariously, especially in England where, you know, they, they're not always the warmest. They'll go, "Hi, I'm Greg Probes." And people will go like, "I know." Yeah. And then I'll go, "No, no, no. This is where you tell me your name, and we say, "I do each other, and how do you do?" Yeah. And then they get really, like, "Oh, you're going to do that." Stop being so American. Right. Well, it's like, you know, the reason I'm telling you is not because I'm being a dick, I'm trying to inform you. Right. I'm trying to be human. I was listening to an interview with him, and he said someone came up to him at a party and went, "You don't remember me or whatever." And he went, because he's shot in Houston, so awesome, "Help me." My favorite, "Heston" quote, is there's an EPK, an electronic press kit, on the DVD of the Omega Man. Oh, my God. And for some reason, he wanted to learn how to actually draw blood and synthesize serums. So he went to a hospital and learned this stuff. Or my character. My character. I'm in major in the army. And they show this footage of this person taking blood from his given blood. Wow. And they go, "This will tell us how much iron is in your blood whenever he goes. Do you have a machine that can show the level of passion in a man's blood?" And he's completely serious. He really asked us. He asked this nurse, and she's like, "No." No. That's the kind of guy we miss now. Oh, I love that. No, irony. No, no, no, no, no. It's completely sincere. Bizarre. Bizarre. Fantastic. My wife's always, I used to do a joke about it. My wife's always on me for liking Charles L'Huston. She goes, "He's the fastest and he can't act." And I'm like, "Precisely." Yeah. That's why I love him. I put him and Kirk Douglas up as the two actors who never played anyone lovable. They didn't even play dads or boyfriends. They very even rarely love a woman in a movie. And when they do, it's like, you say with, "Huston, what's the Hawaiian one?" Oh, yeah. L'Huston. You know how to make a man. I like a man. Yeah, I like it. Well, like touch of evil. There's no one. He's also Mexican. Yeah. I'm not here as a policeman. I'm here as a husband. Yeah. Are you? I don't believe you. No. But even him, so there's a right way. Oh, he's an asshole. He's an asshole. He never plays a likable character. There's a British on earth and the trains are there. Oh, yeah. He goes, "Get this chain off of me." You're like, "What the fuck? You're dying." You know. There's a right-wing guy. And he's in some of the most left-wing dystopian sci-fi. He wasn't always right-wing too bad. Yeah. Big civil rights after him. It was somewhere in the '70s or '80s he got cochier and then the gun thing. Yeah. And then the whole iced tea thing was like crazy. Like something clicked in his brain and like, "No, Chuck, you see, we did fight a war so that he could say cop killer." Yeah. Because black people are killed by cops and it's an issue and he was kind of blind on that side. Oh, yeah. I mean, I think he was a fascist. Yeah. But him and Reagan both were kind of suffering dementia anyway. Yeah, they were. And now we know for a fact that he did have it. Yeah. He played a lot of left-wing movies. Yeah. He landed at the Apes as a left-wing movie. Soy went green. He landed green as a wild left-wing movie. Yeah. Omega man. Omega man. You know, it's about a new society rising up and he's always killed at the end too. Yes, he is. He's got that Mel Gibson thing. Although I... He wants to be tortured and killed. Yeah. I could have done without the Jesus allegory and the Omega man that was not in the book. When he's laying there in the fountain at the end. With a spear in his side. Yeah, in the sea. Literally a spear in his side as the salvation of humanity. He drops the serum but they quickly pick it up. Yeah. And the thing that I hated about the Will Smith one is at the whole point of the book being "I Am Legend", you're the old society and you're a monster. You've been reading this book from the monster's point of view the whole time and don't realize until the end. Which as a kid reading that, I was like, "Holy shit." Yeah. Was it "I Am Legend"? Is that the one? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like you're the horror story we tell our children. You come and kill us in our sleep and that's what makes you question war and that's what makes... We're not the good guys. We thought we're the good guys the whole time. That's what you're not. You're Richard Madison. And that sort of thing I think is gone though. Now, the other part they never do in any of the three versions, because I've talked about it a lot on my show. The awesomeness and price when "Last Man on Earth" which gets the atmosphere. Yeah, it gets the atmosphere but in the book, I remember the vampire women take their chops off and try to get him to come out of his house. Yes. Because he hasn't had a woman in years. Right. He's been living alone. You're all freaked. Yeah. And then when he parks near the museum in a red zone, I remember one of the lines in the book is there's never a conference when you need one. He's got a morbid sense of humor. Well, he's losing his mind. Yeah. Yeah. It's a book about someone losing his mind. The last one is good because I always say like, so there you are the last person on Earth and so what is it you decide to do, exterminate? Yeah. And watch Woodstock every day. Yeah. Watch Woodstock in a theater by yourself. And he has that map where he goes through every neighborhood in L.A. to make sure he's exterminated as obvious. He's a monster. Yeah. Yes. Going gun-toting. Yeah. And they're, although insane, they're basically a communal, you know, communist or sort of the hippie dream almost, you know, they're living together and they're living off the land. Yeah. What's his name? Anthony Zurbi. Anthony Zurbi. He scares the shit out of me. He's even scarier in that movie as the newscaster before he gets the disease. Guys, I couldn't sleep when I saw it. I was up for like two nights. My dad used to go. We'd see a movie like that. We'd see a movie like Red Dawn and he'd go, that could happen. Yeah. That's what he would say to me. That's what he'd say. Like, thank you for-- I mean, the zombie apocalypse? Yeah. Or just like, yep. Talk about it. And not giving anyone credit. Richard Madison, thought of all of these. Yes. They're zombie vampires who can control in the world because man has destroyed everything and da-da-da-da. And I mean, that's Romero. We'll tell you. I got it from him. And Romero doesn't get the credit for-- Yeah, Romero. All of his movies. The thing when I am legend then-- And everyone's wrong except the black guy. Yeah. Exactly. Kind of the living dead. The black guy says we mustn't go out there. Yeah. Well, the thing I always explained, the whole, you know, I'm sorry I've taken some time. There's so much for your time. That's all right. But the thing that I've always loved-- Not enjoying this at all. I know. He's miserable right now, everybody. He's doing scratch tickets. Yeah. The thing I always loved about zombie movies was not the wish fulfillment. It was not the-- oh, I'd like to have no people around and take whatever I want. It was seeing how humanity fucked it up for themselves. And that was Romero's point the whole time. It was always-- if we just worked together in the beginning, this wouldn't have been a problem. It doesn't matter that it's zombies. It could be killer ducks. It's that we didn't work together and we argued and we had a religious pointer. We had us political point and we were vying for power and that's where we fucked up. Nothing gets that now. It's all about, yeah, you can mow these things now and it's like killing people but they're not people so it doesn't fucking matter. Right, right. And it's this sort of weird survivalist wish fulfillment and that scares me. Yeah. The point was never that. One of my favorite ones we showed a couple years ago at one of my film clubs was Return of the Living Dad. Yeah. The Dan O'Bannon. 85. Because that's the most nihilistic zombie movie of all time. Absolutely. The government kills everybody. The government kills everybody. When the zombies attack, there's no stopping them and unlike in other zombie movies, they can run. Yep. They can be-- they're organized and they know how to manipulate the system. Yeah. Send more cops. Send more cops. They're not even-- they're not helpless in any way. Yeah. They tend to always make them slow moving and this and that. You can't kill them. You can only wipe a few of them out in the movie and then at the end, it's the end of the world. Yeah. Like it's the worst ending for what is supposed to be basically a comedy, which it is. Yeah. It's a more-- It's a dark comedy. And that one that's scary and I postulated this theory on a prior episode but I see this obsession with sort of fantasy and magic and all these things in the mainstream now that wasn't when we were growing up. I mean, that was the realm of people like us. Right. You had to like sci-fi. You had to like sci-fi. You had to search it out and all these things and it's mainstream now and I think that the reason sort of millennials gravitate towards it is because it's all about rules. It's very hard rules. If you say these words, this magic thing happens. If there's this kind of monster, this is how you kill it. And if it's a zombie, shoot it and it dies. But "Return of Living Dead" is it's pure anarchy. There's no rules. There's no one, if you're moral, it doesn't matter. You're getting killed the same way. You can't stop them. There's no logic to it. And the government started it in the first place and also made it worse by trying to fix it at the end. And that is, I think, why that movie, although it has a big cult audience, it's still a cult audience because it doesn't have that fantasy fulfillment or you can't ignore that part of it. And I don't know if people agree with that or not, but it seems like, because there's no rules. And all the horror movies that, and I'm a huge horror guy, and all the horror movies that are mainstream now are ones with rules. It's about possessions. It's about ghosts. And you can cleanse a place. You can exercise these movies with rules. The jigsaw in the Saw movies. He has rules. If you pass his test, you are fine. It's not just some psycho killing people for no reason like in Halloween. And that's strange to me. It is. You're very right about that. That's interesting. Because I've watched it in my lifetime, sci-fi was very ghettoized and horror was low badge. Other than the Paramount stuff in the '40s, which is classy, but I'm sure they thought of it as second string. It was poverty row stuff, poverty row stuff. And then Kubrick is the first one to elevate it to this giant level. Because the difference between, say, Forbidden Planet and 2001 is that 2001 is an impenetrable philosophical treatise on top of a sci-fi movie, or under a sci-fi movie. Forbidden Planet's the Tempest. And Forbidden Planet is the Tempest with all the incest and delusional king, and talk about wanting some total knowledge of the universe, and what it does to you, and of course the Americans are all regular guys. We like pussy and-- Yeah, I'm just basically a plumber in space. Right, exactly. You've been wearing a plumber's outfit. And then I think it's really-- and then this is patently obvious, but Star Wars is the moment when-- not only for blockbuster movies, but to take sci-fi from one-- now it's for everybody. Yeah. Not just people who like space ships. All of our mainstream movies are B-movies and cult movies. In comic books-- shit that would have been-- Exactly, everything, AIP was doing in the car chase movies, Fast and Furious, those are Roger Corman stuff. Yeah. You know, horror movies-- Like that's gone in 60 seconds. Yeah, that's the biggest movies now. And it's-- I was never a sci-fi guy until it became an adult, and I was always a horror guy because to me-- and I've since revised this opinion-- but to me, sci-fi was horror with too much explanation. Yeah. You know, I was like, well, you've just explained it now and now it's not scary. But now it's more scary. And I also thought that sci-fi was not a pure genre. It had to be mixed with something else. So like, Aliens is the best thing for-- I was going to say Aliens. Yeah, the first Alien, haunted house movie, second one's a war movie, third one's a prison movie. They're not sci-fi movies. No, no, no. They're genre movies-- They're genre movies with sci-fi. But now I see that sci-fi-- Right. And the fourth one's a mess. Yeah, is a mess movie. Is a pure genre. And you don't see it anymore. You don't see pure sci-fi movies like-- I think the last one's probably Minority Report. Right. And that was a terrifying movie. Yeah. Terrifying. My only objection was I didn't find Tom Cruise convincing. Also, I didn't think Spielberg should have directed it. No. It was far too over budgeted. Yeah. But I love that. But I love that. But I love that. But I love that. But I love that. But I love that. I love that. Yeah, I love the, you know, the paranoia and raging, nef-fuel delusion of Philip K. Dick. Yeah. And his anticipation of all those things. Philip K. Dick is the counterculture, the true counterculture. And you have Spielberg and Tom Cruise in his movie. He's what didn't work for me. I was like, I love the idea of a detective who can pre- you pre-determine who the criminals are through a series of, you know, gyrations with the computer, this and that. Which people would do now. Right. And then at night, he goes out on the street looking for drugs. Yeah. Because he's a fucking mess. Yeah. And you can't look with that. He's not a law man. Yeah. He's a criminal who's now been stuck in the middle. And he's getting more and more delusional because he can't reconcile the two things. And that's what didn't work for me as the thing. But yes, it is pure sci-fi premise. I think that's really interesting what you said about the rules and all that. Because I don't mind that Pope fiction and pop culture have schlockified everything to the maximum power. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of fun as a fan of this. The big objection for me is like, I don't, I like, you have to go to independent films and foreign films to get character studies and content. Yeah. Because Hollywood has no interest in doing that. Does it make money? At all anymore. Yeah. And so what once was where you would have a studio system make the godfather and Chinatown and also... Blade Runner. Right. Then now it's Fast and Furious 100 and, you know, I can't get excited about comic book movies. They don't interest me. And I'm a huge comic book fan. Right. I grew up loving this stuff. And people always say to me, like, you must be like a pig in shit with this. I'm like, no, it's terrible. Because it's like, it's not the same, like, I hated liking comics as a kid. I hated having a subscription of Fangoria. I cursed my interests. I was like, I kind of wish I didn't like this stuff. You know, I kind of wish I couldn't, I wish I could unsee these things as much as I love them. But now people don't, they don't sort of suffer for them. And it's, you've taken the thing that I love and I, and you've changed it into something that it's not and it's, it's not the same. I can't quite, I can't quite express it. The most blowback, to use a word I've never used before, you heard it here first, everybody. Yeah. That I've ever had on any of my episodes was, I watched Pacific Rim, right? I was on a plane and I watched it. And I took a hack on the show and I got a million emails. You're wrong. Idris Alba's in it. He's a great actor. Don't you get that it's a female character? Yeah. On paper? Sure. And, and it's a monster movie. Right, my point was that like, when monsters keep coming up from the bottom of the ocean, and every one of them has to be killed by a robot that punches them to death, it's a tow-ho movie from 1960. Yeah, without the fun. Right. There's no funny costumes. They played it really seriously. Right. It was the mushroom people. Yeah. I was like, no, it's this illuminating thing and I was like, it isn't because if the monster just keeps being generated from the bottom of the ocean for no reason, and they're the same protoplasmic bullshit every time, there's no moral underpinning, there's no fucking overarching theme, there's anything to it. It's just a monster movie with a robot punching monster. So make it fun. Make it a romance. Make it ultra-man. Right. Right. Did it make it campy or make their, have a reason why the monsters keep appearing? It's like, people... It's us, we're manifesting them. We're the monster. We're the monster. Right. We're the monster. Right. We're the monster. We're the monster. Right. We're the monster. Right. We're the monster. We're the monster. Right. We're the monster. Right. We're the monster. Right. We're the monster. Right. We're the monster. Right. We're the monster. Right. We're the monster. Right. We're the monster. Right. We're the monster. We're the monster. We're the monster. Right. We're the monster. Right. We're the monster. Right. We're the monster. Right. We're the monster. Right. We're the monster. Right. We're the monster. Right. We're the monster. Right. We're the monster. Right. We're the monster. Right. We're the monster. Right. We're the monster. Right. We're the monster. Right. We're the monster. Right. We're the monster. Right. We're the monster. Right. We're the monster. Right. We're the monster. Right. We're the monster. Right. We're the monster. Right. We're the monster. Right. We're the monster. Right. We're the monster. Right. Right. We're the monster. Right. We're the monster. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. point him and Ellen that what was the movie the skin game with James Garner where he keeps selling the same slave over and over it looks cool though man well they're they're riding along him and creased off Walsh Jamie Foxx and creased up Walsh are riding along and all of a sudden I've got a name by Jim Croci comes on the soundtrack and I was like this is the most so on the nose everybody what's up like you're kidding right you just threw in the song from 1970s work as you remembered it yeah and and then and someone who's 29 he's never seen a movie goes crazy this is looking awesome and it's like that all I could think about what poor Carrie Washington was she had to be naked in that fucking box yeah and that's all I could think about when I saw the movie I didn't think it wasn't an indictment of slavery it wasn't an indictment of the Confederacy it had nothing to do with anything it was a crappy fantasy film sort of stuck on like the Inglorious Bastards right which isn't even a remake of Inglorious Bastards which is a movie I liked yeah yeah for me like I like Jackie Brown best of all of his pictures but that's the least Tarantino movie because it's a character steady yeah and the violence is into dental to the characters that James Delroy that it's based on a book guy did Ellie confidential no is it yeah I think so I think so Elmore Leonard Elmore Leonard that's yeah because that has a source material that's not Tarantino and and making her the middle-aged characters yeah people who are you know not your normal heroes and I really think that one is like his best constructed it absolutely is slow moving but then also the music fits like yeah she puts on the record of the Delphonics because she would right it's not look at my record collection man look how cool I am and I think people confuse and then later he buys it and plays it cuz he loves her they fall in love with each other it's integral to the plot yeah so when you keep hearing the song it's not just throwing in I've got a name right you know movie from that this must be in the 1860s but it's crazy man that's art I mean to to sort of as much as I could do this all day I know I'm sure you have to eat to sort of wrap wrap it up that the what we're talking about the beginning here about sci-fi in the in the 60s and 50s and making us question things if you look at things we've talked about now Scientology that's an actual fucking thing that would have been a outer limits or twilight time episode or going into a studio and doing TV where you don't see a real human being it's all robots someone's interviewing you on a TV screen you're not interacting with a human being you're traveling the world but you're like I could be in the same box I could be in Cuba I don't know that's a real thing you've experienced and that is sure phones which every sci-fi movie had that's a textbook example of dystopian sci-fi and every day I'm reminded of this stuff and it's crazy that we don't question them and it doesn't scare people we're not making media that really points that out anymore I agree I mean that's I think well Quentin Latino has no responsibility to make a factual movie no whether he wants to make these fantasy movies about World War II and the Civil War that's totally as prerogative and I'm sure he feels that but having said that like to address what you just said I feel maybe not a responsibility it's my motivation on my podcast to talk about exactly what you're talking about right now we're in a dystopian time that other people have talked about this that there's frames of reference for it that you have to understand the information that you're being bombarded with the advertising is an evil pernicious thing and that it's completely out of control right you literally can't go on anything on the web without an ad pumping up yeah without a targeted ad like in right or used specifically right my my joke that get that always gets a laugh and I've been doing this joke for about three years before the WikiLeaks Edwards noted in Chelsea Manning was that the government and the corporations gave us phones so that we wouldn't pay attention to the people we love in the matter at hand and that they could spy on us because of phone is and of course I was right yeah not that it required a great deal of patience but it's funny to see the joke in contacts before and after the information so when I used to do it people would be like ha ha ha or they get huffy with me yeah and be like no that's my love my phone there's conspiracy theory jerk right and then of course oh no every email yeah so I said the phone is a it's a microphone it's listening it's a camera it's watching when it's off it's a GPS and it's a when you use it to buy things they they're getting absolute chocolate everything you're doing it all times it's a control device it's not a divisive freedom yeah and then the joke is you go to the store you buy a bunch of bananas and the next day you open up your Facebook page and there's an ad that says would you like to meet women who like bananas yeah and it's the truth and people laugh at it now because they recognize it but I've watched I don't even I'm sometimes even sketchy about telling the joke anymore because the reality of it is not even a joke now it's not a joke yeah four years ago when I started telling it yeah I remember doing Edinburgh and one of the critics said everyone's talking about cell phones this year at the fringe at the Edinburgh French yeah four or five comics had routines about cell phones it was like because we're thinking about it yeah the perniciousness and the the the control element of what so like mine's on right now and it's sitting in my coat so clearly we could be heard yeah and monitor if they were of a mind to do that now information gathering is it Leviathan process thank God but with facial recognition and voice recognition it's all gonna you lived in England you know that there's no place in the world see you're more likely to be on camera yeah and that George Orwell in 1984 Winston goes into the the toilet in one of the scenes when he's working at the Ministry of Truth yeah and he says there was no place you could be more certain that you were being monitored yeah which alone in the toilet but I think people find comfort in that now instead of being terrified by it someone's watching me so I'm okay it's like I'm being babysat but but who you know like Napoleon said they said who who watch the criminals and the jails and he said bigger criminals here's here's the thing I don't know if you did it near England did you ever go to the milk bar that Orwell used to hang out out and wrote no no no you know what it is now McDonald's oh yeah of course it's a McDonald's on Oxford's Oxford Street oh yeah the one on Oxford I went in there and I'm like this was where 1984 is created and now it's a McDonald's in Hampstead and he fantastically lived up the road in what's called the veil of health yes he was the least healthy person that I think he made it to what 50 something like that yeah chain smoker he had he be he got shot during the Spanish Civil War he just like you know I just wrote a book to put a plug in and one of the few arguments that I had with my editor he was a very good Matthew Benjamin at touchdown he helped me and guided me quite a lot when I was writing the book because I had no idea what it was doing right and I didn't know what viewpoint to take I didn't know what person to speak it in but we got to a chapter and I was about books and I have a giant thing on Orwell in there and then he gave me the great notion of rather than describe the books do the the modern thing no one has time to listen to the description of the book so you're gonna summarize a book in one line yeah the blink and you miss it review right and then do a bio of the author yeah so now you have all the context for the book but you don't know where it came from right and I don't spoil or alert all that and and in my lexicon I have a lexicon in the book as well I put Orwellian in there yeah and a bunch of other ones like oligarchy and cryptography and all these things because people bandy these words around they don't know where they come but they don't know what they come from then they don't know what I mean and I said it's very imperative that if you're gonna use the word Orwellian and they read 1984 you understand where it came and he went there's too much of Orwell you've got too much of it in here and I said that was the one point I argued in one I went there's not enough there's too much in our world I said we're living in this bloody Orwellian you know distopia blah blah and of course he wasn't right about everything right it's more of a combo plotter of Aldous Huxley and Heinlein and Heinlein which I just read last year he could have been president I think if Heinlein was around now that asshole would be speaking of Scientology another naval officer and and Frank Herbert also was a sailor to write oh yeah all these great sci-fi minds were all in that fucking naval services we were on room 101 no no that was such a weird show in England oh oh the TV show TV show because that's a comedy show right about the things you hate yeah and it's based on a terrifying notion right in what's in room 101 and I think O'Brien says the worst thing in the world yeah for some people it's not even fatal yes as yeah it could just be having ants crawl on you know or whatever for you Winston it's rats yeah and takes the cage right out of his eye line and he hears the rats jumping around and that's when you kill Julia and that's a show that I enjoyed it's a fun movie show in England is it Nick Hancock no I think it's um oh man it's a guy you're in whose line with Paul Merton did he hosted that I think he did room 101 you're probably right he's a made-a-mind yeah but a show that I liked but I think that shows how far we've come we take a thing that's an absolutely yeah bone chillings terrifying concept yeah big brother it's a fun show about people doing it right we get them drunk we hope they fuck we we put the camera on the memory and people love having the camera on them all the time Kim Kardashian it might be the most you know a significant cultural signifier of the last because she isn't pretending to do what she's dealing and she does have a job people always like she doesn't have a job she doesn't do anything it's like she's doing her job you're you're patronizing her job I mean this is a slight tangent but the to take pictures of herself is her job yeah that's a job to make a leaked porno movie but I think if you get far enough away from a horrific thing pop culture can latch on to it and make it warm and fuzzy yeah and the example I always bring up and people think I'm an asshole every time I do this when someone ever orders the drink and Irish car bomb I always go oh how long till we have a drink called the Iraqi and Surgeon IED they're like what are you talking about people die from those and I'm like you just ordered a fun drink with the girls that killed people in the 70s oh sure but you're okay with it because it's far enough away ago and big brother is far enough away ago that it's a fun show with boobs in it right and that's the terrifying thing that I think we should be making media about and question I agree in our in our fiction well and and I'm never going to stop doing that and the like for instance I have a car and it's a new one and I don't think it's got a computer that's watching me yet what I would want you to think and what's next I think for everyone and the technology which isn't benign in any way right I refuse to believe that simply because things get more convenient that there's a there's a price impulse yeah and I'm always pointing out and I'm going to carry on the subject of my next podcast is going to be about how venal all the tech people are in Silicon Valley and how their agenda is I mean I brought it up in the last show no different than people who make munitions and sell them to third world countries they profit and growth of the definition of a corporation in any case the next step for cars and whatnot will be there'll be a breath alizer there'll be a camera there'll be sensors so that if you're high or you smoke a cigarette or you stop at McDonald's too much the insurance companies will be able to collect and collect that information and raise your rate and then the they're allied insurance companies will be able to rise your health insurance you know what you do you eat at Burger King too fucking much yeah no I don't sure here's the data here's all of the data yeah they can collate your credit card thing your thing thing the insidiousness I find in companies like uber and Airbnb is that they're a bit lawless and they go around regulation regulation but also the lack of the lack of control leads to people being raped and violated there's no boss you know it's a it's a you put it on your phone you never talk to a person you could get in the uber and not even talk to the person driving there's no accountability there's no there's no Tom bodeck no there's no guy I'm the president of the company if you have a problem come to me you know there's even leia coca you know what I mean like he was the human being I could go I drove my was a General Motors yeah my car blew up I'm gonna go to leia coca and say there's no one to do that on the other night we're in Santa Barbara doing a gig and we're my wife and I were having a walk and a drunken bar and people spilling out the bar what not row of cabs yep rove cabs and all New York cab drivers yeah yeah yeah all Pakistani here outdoors because it's the new and a girl teeters out of the bar and there's a car parked up there and she goes are you my uber driver and he goes uh-huh sure and she jumps in and I thought at the very basic level of primitive human survival and women know this better than anyone you mustn't do that and it that I feel is a gross violation of the human contract it's like running someone over in a crosswalk if you get in a car for hire you're likely with 99 out of a hundred cow brides maybe one for once in a while someone's an asshole but that's the worst of it they don't stop and kill you they don't rip you off you know what I mean like sometimes they take you the long way or whatever but the the human contract requires that we be able there's an assumption of rules well if you go to a restaurant almost everything in your life you pay for first but in a restaurant you pay after right because you have to decide whether you like it or not yeah or whether it's merits you to pay if you don't like it within a couple of bites you can send the fucker back and walk the fuck out like children right but the convenience like you say there's always a cost but no one weighs that no they would rather just be I have had women say to me I'm addicted to uber and I always want to say to them the amount of cab drivers that assault their patrons as opposed to uber is quite minimal right my wife voices to me when we lived in London as you know if you called a black cab or a regular car like an Alison they're vetted they're vetted they also have to have the knowledge and they have to have the knowledge mini cab all the mini cab you could be taken my wife said she got into minicab once and the guy started taking the wrong way oh yeah and they were notorious in London it's like human shopping women and it was uber 30 years ago yeah I remember getting in a mini cab in North London and I was trying to do two gigs in a night right because of the red rose in North London and I wanted to go to Leicester Square to do a set at the store and I got in a cab and this is the parochialism of London to London such a giant city with what 10-15 million people it's as big as LA it's so spread out it really goes out to the M25 it's LA New York right it's like this giant like like Orwell predicted it's airstrip one yes this insane mass yeah and there's so many immigrants who aren't assimilated and I got in the cab and the cab driver was probably African and I said because you know Africa's a country it's not a series of different countries and it's not the biggest continent in the world that every other country could fit in and it's not the source of humanity it's simply a country called Africa I think she was Nigerian or whatever but I said I want to go to Leicester Square and she went what's Leicester Square yeah and it's like you're a cab driver in London that's like one of three places you got the cabin bastion and we'll take me to the Commons and they want what's the what is that you want to go to East Boston yeah that's all I know and and I had to guide her yeah to take me all the way to the center of London which is where everything is I thought you've never been to the center of London and then I got to ride home with one of the bouncers at the comedy store once and I lived in Hampstead like I said in WWE 3 which is a very white people yeah actor place to live yeah I was Glenda Jackson was our MP yeah to give you an idea like Michael Palin lived there yeah and Peter Cook lived across the way from us and he's from he's not from Jamaica he was from another island I can't remember which I remember yeah yeah definitely you know six kids with five different women you know like a real Londoner was a billy ocean you wanted to be my lover boy yeah and and I got out of his dreams oh from Trinidad into his car license Taylor yeah and was he oh yeah so but anyway he gave me a ride home and he'd he'd never been to North London yeah he'd never been across that border yeah Camden town to that area and I was like you know how to get home mate and he's like hmm find a Greg you know and I'm like go back down the high street and just carry on cab driver person I assume has the knowledge to do this it's like going to adopt not quite like going to a doctor but you go in and you're like I have a foot problem and they're like well I studied in lungs but if you could guide me through it maybe I could do it yeah sort of breaking that contract and technology won't make it better GPS means people won't have to learn it well I'm as guilty as not of anyone else I used to have to find my way as a road comic yeah when I was an opener and when I was a feature docked drive to fucking Seattle then find the gig in Portland wherever that was I remember doing road trips with other comics where we'd have a map out make it back a lot right and then get to oh we've got to find this Mexican restaurant in Salem Oregon do the fucking gig then get to the next town there was no cell phones there was no GPS you did it with naps and fucking open we missed our exit shit we got a double back and you phone calls which meant pulling over finding a phone finding a phone and I was able to do all that and now I'm incapable of it but you had a skill and to sort of bring it back to TV guide we sat and we planned our week yeah we saw you made choices about things that you wanted to watch if you missed it you missed it if you if you saw a life-changing thing you saw it and it had a weight to it and these shows stuck with you at that age because you actively participated in the the finding of it and you sort of absorb it you were participant in watching it and now there's probably 20 TV guides in this table and the two of us on our phones could probably watch every single show in these right now on our phones and it sort of means nothing that's the weird part like my show my podcast is an archivist kind of thing you know I talk about a lot of old movies books this this this and I have a lot of young people listening which warms my heart because in my I'm in my 50s let's be honest and to communicate with people in their in their teens and 20s on a one-to-one level is a huge journey important when my parents when they're 50s I know way no and of course their precepts were completely yeah and the thing I find is one that I'm amazing but you know that I say to my wife don't they it doesn't everybody know these things she goes no you're 101 you're you're you're the base course for the pop culture that they need to hear but kids will come to me and go I loved this book you recommended or I loved like the Ohio players something as simple as a fucker curated it which we don't have right and that and that's the thing is the curation they they go now I have this now I see how fun it is and how and the other thing that always I don't know if it's sad or good people will write me and go I can't get over that you're enthusiastic yeah about things you like stuff that you should see this or you should watch this or you should feel emotional about this or you should understand that war is bad yeah it's not good it's not something it's not a natural and they'll go I can't get over your enthusiasm for seven I think well aren't people enthusiastic what are you doing right what are they doing is my question well there's a big difference I think between this net nothing means anything nothing music there's a big difference between Netflix recommending things you might like and going to the video store in the clerk that you talk to every week who sees what you rent says you would like this movie on the surface they seem like the same function but they are completely different and I don't want it to be triangulated as Spotify style yeah you know what I mean like you go on your computer and a YouTube and I watch this YouTube and then it goes well you might like this it's like no those are commercial that's a different thing those are commercial entities pushing commercial I liked this movie I know you're aesthetic or what I think you're aesthetic is I think you might like this thing you maybe haven't heard of my wife and I have this discussion all the time and it it goes back to the age of bookstores and record stores yeah and video stores you'd go into a bookstore when we were little kids we frequented I remember the old bookshop in the town I lived in San Carlos and the cat around the store had a a minor bird in a cage which I thought was fascinating but like say you'd buy a book yeah like a Ray Bradbury book or something then he'd go like after a few times in they didn't warm to you immediately you had to be a grown-up about it they treated you earned it yeah yeah they go you know since you bought this book why don't you try this book right buy another author and then you'd read that one and your mind would be expanded right and that's exactly what you're talking about I'm just reiterating what you said but that's the difference is there isn't the friendly neighborhood like my wife's a music aficionado and a real I don't like the word geek but she's kind of a geek she bites the heads up chickens right right she works in a circus and in a side ship yes and she's a circus she said you know she was a 13-year-old girl and all of her friends liked you know whatever they like then Tony Orlando and Don or you know crappy am pop and she's buying fucking Bob Billin albums and Lou Reed and John Kale and and like deeper heavier so she'd go to the record store and of course guys who work at record stores have never changed it's always like high fidelity it's it's never been different it's either young guys or middle-aged guys which is a comforting thing right who live in the world of vinyl and they are very snobby about their fucking precepts so what's good and what ain't good yeah we carry it but only because we have to yeah and praise the bills right and then the kids come in and buy the shitty stuff and they look at them the fine here's that that transaction just one I don't care but when someone comes in so she said she'd go to record stores and she's a 13-year-old girl and go do you have guts by John Kale who told you to ask for that right and they all of a sudden you found respect from this men yeah and they're like okay well if you like John Kale oh we don't have it we'll order it yeah and then two weeks later your phone rings there's Scott Walker yeah we just got this and yeah and so I miss that interaction it's a chess game to get the keys to a certain level it's like a video game but you have to fight for your rights if you can understand exactly that the underground existed there was an underground of records movies culture pulp this this this that wasn't mean you know when I first lived in San Francisco we would go to see like Russ Meyer maybe yeah and then I remember going to see also we're going to guy right at all he loved was Ted yep just give me big kids and violence and evidently was a really lovely yeah everyone's all the actresses who worked for him no one ever said they were hard done by it well there was no sex on on the show was allowed yeah he did he forbid them from having sex at all yeah he did it was crazy yeah he was more realistic than way and I remember going to seem like them must have been in the 80 81 faster Pacific at the strand was hard to see right a great movie theater in San Francisco that I don't think it exists anymore sticky floors homeless people lived in it you know you I think it was two dollars to go we are the Mitchell brothers and a special showing and for some reason it showed at the strand I mean you go upstairs and like if you wanted to get a blowjob like there was a balcony that was basically the early learning center up there even if you didn't want to get one right like if you sit there and smoke weed which is why we do it yeah and then of course guys would cruise you and you'd be like oh god I know you know I don't want to be I just want to get mine watch the stuff the stuff yeah can't get enough stuff so but I remember going to the faster Pacific I think and there was 500 people there like the place was back for it and that was that kind of like this is way before the internet way before phones an immediacy yeah the crying need that all of us wanted to go see this fucking movie and they never showed it in theaters like you said it was a hard get's not playing on TV get it on video then you couldn't yeah it wasn't playing on TV it was never playing on TV I don't think they played any Russ Meyer movies on TV up until probably beyond the belly of the dolls would play occasionally okay and it's such a freak show that this is my happening and it freaks me out yeah and then what's his name Mike Myers ripped off all those lines from yeah just took them wholesale absolutely you're pretty greedy boy and our man Flint yeah he pulled the Tarantino well I mean we all do yeah we did we're craftspeople but yeah yeah so there was there was more of a and so I kind of feel like I'm the old dude who works at the record store yeah but but we do it over the internet we do it over the phone instead of you having to come and see me but the difference is when I do live shows people bring me stuff and so I've been exposed to a whole lot it works both ways and so you know like the other night I got 5,000 poetry books and every other goddamn poets I haven't heard of yeah writers I haven't read so I'm having to you know run furiously ahead of the pack and try to tread water to like not get caught up but that's exciting it is and a lot of people don't want that though they want they want here's your will mail you a box every month with the things you need to know it's cliff notes people want cliff notes they don't want primary sort of stuff and maybe it'll change maybe it won't but I think for for guys like us and it's not an elitist thing I think we just have a passion for people who actually liked things yes guy who ran a bookstore liked books yeah you don't even got a record store did it because he enjoyed records right wasn't just like well this is the only job I can get well that right and that's what I find so you know as show business disintegrates and splinters into you know warring factions and non entities the best part is of course that we're allowed to do this and that you can just about almost not make a living doing yeah it's I don't lose as much money right it's a bubble on that one we haven't you know maybe maybe the top ten podcasters make a living from it probably and even they have to do live shows and stand up and TV shows to a lot of ads yeah and take ads on but the oh god I've lost my complete thread my blood sugars it's the best of times and worst of times is that the people who run show business and that are in shows this don't often care at all yeah about entertainment or anything they don't like actors and they don't like comedians in particular they have to work with them and they might as well work in a bank or what other financial things they could have come up with their bean counter types and there's no passion yeah and that's the antithesis of art right but I mean it was never different obviously it's not like Samuel Gold one with some he was a pure artist yeah he was a human being who cared about people most of the whole time Hollywood producers just wanted to nail actresses and make movies yeah they also didn't interfere as much in the content up to you know the censorship point of view right they let the filmmakers make the fucking movies as long as the movies made money you're the chef you know what you're doing right the dinner and I'll sell it yeah but uh that's the thing that rubs me the wrong way in show businesses when I meet particularly comedy he's being in the comedy business people who don't who clearly don't like comedy yeah and they're in charge of that and they'll tell you what's funny mm-hmm and they sit with their corporate thing and look at you and judge you and you think you don't even you are intimidated because one I'm giving off the vibe that I don't dig you I can't hide it yeah and secondly you probably think I'm too I'm gay I'm too prissy I'm too smart I'm too esoteric I'm too not mainstream the things that make you interesting the things that Oscar Wilde said yeah I remember years ago I was with an agent and I don't do much TV anymore but I was at a big agency that's a famous one in LA that represents a lot of comedians and there was a show uncle was it the army show Brian for Sam Craig and it was that the Higgins brothers were in it yeah and and then Jamie Foxx show that's so that'll give you an idea what decade this is and I I booked both in one week I went on auditions for both it was small comedy parts on both played him as New York cab divers right well I was gonna say playing the usual my other characters was a fruit bag right like cuz the way I'd look and act I'm always an art predictor you know yeah and and I booked both those shows and I had to turn one down I think we turned down the army show to do the Jamie Foxx right and I went into the agents office and she was a reasonably intelligent woman and she goes what are we gonna deal with you and I went what do you mean and she goes boy we gotta think outside the box for you and I went I just booked you fucking mainstream I just made you money network shows in one week what do you mean out of the box yeah and it was because she couldn't get her head around that I talked this way not this way right that I'm not some sort of lantern job or I'm a regular you know like a schlubby you know that everybody thinks a comedian is either Artie Lang or laugh at them right yeah right yeah you know and like I love Louie for like being so keen and intelligent and insightful yeah and emotional and bringing all that to the fucking table yeah and because we live in the air we do finally his show would have never been on that were absolutely not it wouldn't be then it wouldn't be now he would have been showing art movies at colleges and being disgruntled and people would have gone what happened to this guy's career yeah instead he's got an honest show that's really a reflection of people watch it that he is the most hangs on creator writes directs edits he's talking about the lenses that he's using yeah I mean it's fantastic and that that's the best change I can see and that they had the good sense of FX to get the fuck out of his way yes and and once it was a hit then they really got the fuck out of it yes no one gets to take a year off no no one gets to take a year but no one was doing that for decades and it's happening again now and back to you know we're talking about the beginning as much as we've been complaining there's the seeds of hope oh very much so and it could turn around and it looks like it isn't a lot of I think so yeah and also I think people asked me about like you know because I'm older the comedy this and not and and I'll never say it was better when I started yeah I just don't think it's true different it was different there's a more there's a more egalitarian thing now the difference is you to be a live performer you have to go through the process of playing in dives yeah and and doing that for years and years and years until you're funny that hasn't changed but then of course there's the YouTube element now and and people jumping right in and and all that but at the same time you're also learning your craft by doing that yeah it's just a different medium and so I don't like people go was it better than or whatever because there was there's different tools whoever whatever comics were great and I think no this is a golden age right now and I'm pretty proud of my generation of comics because we're all around the same age and you know I'm talking about Patton Oswald and Mark Marin and Louis C. K. and Dana Gould like these are all my contemporaries where I consider myself in their in their class and and and Margaret Cho and Sarah and all the information and politics and passion and and and how much they care about it that's what they're doing so I I feel like I could stand my class up with any with the Seinfeld Larry Charles I mean Larry David it's just a different duty to need a whichever bells are yeah Richard Lewis class or or the 60s class of Newhart and yeah full of stiller or you know you go back to the 50s class of Mort Saul Jonathan Winters and and and Bob Hope and Bruce who all started the same year and he too yeah like there's always another wave coming and of course now there's so many brilliant comics in their 20s and 30s yeah but one of the truths about comedy that I think is mostly true is you're funnier in you're not as funny as a teenager and in your 20s as you get to be in your 30s and 40s because you're more of a fully-formed person then you your your worldview is developed you're your your way of delivering so that's the people always go oh it takes 10 years to get good comments like no it's because you started comedy at 22 and it takes you 10 years to figure out who you are yeah yeah and that's when you can do art right right that's what it is right you have to know who you are occasionally there's an eddy Murphy occasionally there's a bow burner or whatever there's savants right people spring fully blown you know like there's the Beatles but sometimes there's teenager ox stars who have everything at their command ever sometimes there's a an Anthony art tower you know a Dylan Thomas you 16 you're the greatest boy you're ever going to be you're never going to be better than very rare very rare yeah I think I hate that person who came up with a theory what does it call what you have to do 10,000 hours oh Malcolm Gladwell yeah I got quoted in the New York Times really because I was the only person who would say something against that because there was a comic who was doing a gimmick of I'm gonna do 10,000 hours of shows in a year and I'm a comic now and I said that is bullshit technical skill is not art no you go to guitar center right now and every single one of those guys gonna play you Eddie Van Halen yeah not one of them can probably write a song and that's why they're working in guitar center you get the Ramones day one barely just enough to be able to play a song they're writing a song it does not equal the thing I said if you if you can build a chair doesn't mean you can design an interesting one it's totally different no question and I it drives me insane but he's the kind of glib political or social philosopher that gets so much play now yeah it's easy to digest for people there's very clear rules yeah 10,000 hours you can't write any came up with that bullshit number of 10,000 hours now you're an expert right but it's like no you spend a lifetime yeah we're a guild for better or worse comics and people always think that yeah there's always petty jealousy and hatred that's just humans but by and large were I use the word to encompass women as well a fraternity yeah because we all know what we have to do and there's a shared experience and we yeah we know the stakes of it and we know the disappointment and the highs of it and so therefore we can relate to each other in a way that no one else and we presumably went into comedy because we all share an interest in comedy yeah which I find isn't always the case no people don't know anything about comedy that are comedians they don't know who George Carlin or whatever and it's like no you have to understand not that you have to listen to every record ever made but don't you like things they have to understand what came before you and understand where the reason why we're allowed to say cocksucker on stage like people want to jail for this yeah clubs were closed and lives were ruined and cavalry cards were taken and names were exchanged in court battles ensued and lawyers were thrown around and like this isn't I mean it's not the civil rights struggle but right but the freedom of expression struggle never stops wait to it there's nothing and nothing has a way to it anymore there's way to it it's very important and serious that that Louis CK or whomever can get on TV and say the things they want to say and then someone said to me years ago and this is how a little understanding people out of the media I've run into a little bit of censorship over the years doing stand-up on TV which is a whole nother egg right and I remember years ago on Craig Ferguson's show and it wasn't Craig because he's lovely it was one of the producers and he's a punk rock guy yeah very much so and so of course I relate to him but he said the joke was we're afraid of the wrong people we were afraid of young black man and we put them in jail I'm more afraid of middle-aged white guys who run companies or whatever that was so yeah I can't remember the whole joke and he said will you change black men to urban and I went no I won't because I don't speak in code but down speaking corporate code and no one has ever called a black person an urban person but if you do it maybe they will right but the presumption that all black people live in an inner city and are standing next to a trash can right with a with a fucking hoodie on and like what the fuck so I said no I won't do it and then you know my wife related it to a friend of ours and she went oh I thought you could say whatever you wanted on TV I'm not kidding and that was like two years ago and you're like a lot of people think that my and in my point about TV is it's the opposite of that absolutely or absolutely constricted to be able to not say what you want on TV because they don't if you could say what you wanted on TV the lead story in the news would be the rich have all the money in there destroying the world yeah yeah women are being raped and killed all the time by their boyfriends guns are out of control and they're wiping everyone out and there's no legal rules to fucking deal with this those would be the first stories not no one would watch your grandmother a time bomb yeah are your legs restless yeah you know we'll find out it's getting people to kind of understand and like you say think about it analyze maybe critical thinking it's okay if they hate stuff because now they're thinking about it and if they can say why do I hate this right they might come to a revelation maybe it's because you lived in England as well but I found this to be very true in England and the biggest difference not so much anymore because the English are dumbed down as much as we are yeah which is disappointing I found that English cards have gotten and I played there for 25 years stupider they have here too but they do have an England when they would have come to England it would be very pointed oh my god I'm stating I've listened to your act I've digested it and I've found a logical hole that I don't agree with and now that just like fuck you oh I fuck off yeah um yeah it's it's they're they're from a reference for stuff I remember talking about Paul McCartney I wanted the podcast about a year ago and literally the crowd didn't fucking know any of his songs well I think he was and I thought well am I just that old yeah well I think an interesting thing I've noticed what England as opposed to here is that in the 80s they had that alt revolution with all the comic strip guys and they became the mainstream right that was their mate when we had airplane food people their mainstream was this punk rock fucking weird I Lexi sale aesthetic and because that was the mainstream I feel like it's come all the way around and you now have people doing impersonal hateful one-liner type stuff there and your Michael McIntyre and your Sarah Millicans without Anna Dine my favorite thing and I'm not blaming those guys no no but it's just a shift it's just a shift in the commercial comics yeah and that's their stick and there's no crime in that my favorite thing Vic Reeves did was it was actually doing a Peter K thing but he goes he was doing a take on that he goes number old-fashioned pants you put him on you took him off old-fashioned pants and I'm like that's kind of what people are watching now and it's it's interesting to see you know it's almost like the hippie parents making a conservative kid oh yeah except the culture has done that with comedy yeah well what I was gonna say was in England the difference is in America people say I think I read something somewhere yeah or I feel this way don't matter I know how I feel yeah and what I found when I lived in England was if you expressed an opinion back it up back it up and you were forced to yeah in a cocktail party atmosphere in a bar wherever you were people didn't just blindly accept the stupid shit that came out of your mouth if I remember my wife said something like corporations run the world or something at a party and a guy went oh do they yeah and broke it down on her site resources how what if you lived in this situation yeah you wouldn't feel that way and what if you and she had to fucking acquiesce and I realized then that I you got it back it up yeah because you were put on the spot to and also when I lived in there in the in the 90s that the papers were so important yeah because of page page 3 right which finally I think it's gone now yeah it took till this year yeah but I would get asked because I lived there and I was on telly and whatnot and I was part of the alternative yeah we want your point of view yeah they would ask me to write a piece on this or that and you were expected to be able to acquit yourself on paper yeah and I don't mean like I want you bar and I got drunk and a dog got on I'm writing a college essay essentially yeah you had to make a point you had to fucking do this you had to do that you're a communicator for a living you should be able to do it on so I ended up writing all these pieces for magazines and newspapers when I was over there and I thought no one ever asks me to do it here no they don't care I mean I finally I wrote a book or whatever but like most comedians books are memoirs or or schlockfest transcripts of their act or or road stories or how they got laid or whatever and that's fair enough that's what comedy is - yeah I don't denigrate it in any way but like to be able to acquit yourself on a topic and and back your shit that's the skill set that a lot of people don't have well I mean and so because they're not forced to no on the podcast I I'm a little bit lazy about it but mostly I try to when I cite something or start a subject I'll say this is from the Guardian UK this is from Fox News yeah and I'll often go excuse me this is the byline it was written by this person yeah now you can go look at it for yourself if you want to you attribute things always I think attributing is astounding important and knowing where the sources because people write me all the time and they'll ask the simplest questions like where should I go to look for news yeah but people don't know yeah you know context has been lost in our day-to-day society and that's a bad thing and we need it back yeah we need context and we don't need free-floating context that can be whatever you need the context to be at that time and that's why people get offended so easily because there's no context that's why people can say but I think this way because there's no context that's why the truth doesn't isn't a definitive thing because context is gone and I think it has to come back because you can't have less context than we have now and and do anything I know I hope I hope it does I mean that's what I find about like here I know this is an obvious choice but like Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh those bloop the you know those types those clowns yeah they know what they're doing well it's all show business and they don't really have any convictions or anything but they never cite sources or facts they don't need to they don't need to and their audience doesn't want them to it's asked for forgiveness not permission right right let it out and well we said it so let's do with it yeah oh women all do this or black people do this or they shouldn't resist arrest yeah that kind of nonsense yeah and you're like you that's not empirically valid and anyway and yet it gets flowed out there black and white and that yeah and that's why I'm always I try to be meticulous occasionally I get too high and forget where I fucking found it but I'll always try to and and I'll use right wing sources as well yeah when I say right wing I mean things like Time magazine like the mainstream thing yeah but I will go to Fox News sometimes I'll have the fun of like a story I'll come up and I'll go immediately to Fox News to see what their angle is yeah because but I don't understand like the people who don't like you said they cherry picked their news because they want to be reinforced to what they know is right I'm as guilty of as anyone I get when I read everybody is you human no one's purely objective but I think the fun of it is to go to a bunch of sources and see how they all check on it yeah and then and I don't mean opinion I mean like what supposedly right to be news reporting you want to rush him on it right you know what I mean a different bunch of you it's basically we live in a world where Rosham on is one movie yeah with just one of the stories people go no you could you can pick one of these ten right you can't watch all of them and they're all and they're all true if you want them to be yeah if you feel like they're true yeah well great I don't want you to start to death so thank you so much I don't there's great talking to you thank you for doing this is a three hour show it is this is our longest episode ever oh my god thanks Ken thank you holy cow I have to go on and there you go that was great proofs as I said the longest episode we've done thus far I'm pretty sure that if you are currently in college it will count as probably at least four credits for you I don't know give it a shot let me know if it works out and as always please email me at can and I can read calm or at TV guidance counselor at gmail.com love to hear from you we have a new episode every Wednesday so make sure you subscribe and rate the show review the show on iTunes if you like it it's a huge help and we'll see again next week on an on new episode of TV guidance counselor sometimes there's no good guy oh you really think this if history's taught us one thing it's that anyone can be murdered get your new zone that I feel is a gross violation of the human contract it's like running someone over in a crosswalk
