 You're listening to highlights from The David Feldman Show, heard nationwide on Pacifica Radio, or as a podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, and now YouTube. Please subscribe to this channel. For more information, go to davidfeldmanshow.com. Thank you for listening. The David Feldman radio program is made possible by listeners like you. You sad, pathetic humps. John Fugelsang joins us. He is the host of Tell Me Everything on Sirius XM 121, Insight. Yes, sir. And you're going to be starring in a new series, a syndicated series called Page Six, based on The New York Post's Page Six. Indeed I am. Let's talk about that for a second. That's exciting. It's pretty interesting. Last summer I was in this point where I thought, you know, I've been doing political humor for so long and we're so divided. It's so ugly. Once this election is over, do I really want to spend the next couple years of my life defending President Hillary Clinton? Is that really how I want to spend 2017 always standing up for President Hillary Clinton and first gentleman Bill Clinton whenever they do something corporatist and embarrassing and if they don't pass my purity test, I'm not going to want to defend. You know what? I'm going to take a break when this election is done and do a show with a live studio audience where I can make fun of Kardashians and Bieber. Then things turned out differently. And at first I was nervous, but now I've realized most of the interviews I do for Page Six, they want to talk politics anyway because there's no longer a wall between pop culture and state. Page Six, New York Post, tell people what Page Six is. Well, growing up, you know, Page Six is the legendary gossip column, you know, for which celebrities are in trouble, they're rumors and entertainment news. At first I thought, I'm the wrong guy for this. You don't want to have me when they called me up. Someone had seen a tape of me on the Wendy Williams show. I think someone sent in an audition of their appearance on Wendy Williams and I was there and they wanted me to come in. And I was like, well, Wendy Williams pays me. What does your audition pay? But I went to do it and I said to them when I came in, I was friends with the casting director and I said, I'm the wrong guy for this. And then they said there was going to be a live studio audience. And I'll tell you, David, that's what turned me on. I've had so many meetings about news shows and I've hosted news public affairs shows, but when they said a live studio audience and I thought, you know, there really is no intentionally funny shows about pop culture anymore since Chelsea lately went away and Best Week Ever and The Soup are all gone. TMZ is not bad. TMZ is not bad, but I don't really consider that a comedy show. There are no comedians on that show. Unintentionally funny show, yeah. I mean, look, I've known Harvey for a long time. He's a great guy. I like Harvey. I mean, wacky sound effects and Harvey B rating, you know, his charges is not the same as having joke tellers. And there's no studio audience. I hate to say it, but as soon as they told me studio audience, I'm like, oh, I want to come to the callback. Because I just thought the chance to actually do material about Bieber, Kardashians, whatever Taylor Swift's latest fake relationship is, it sounds really healthy and maybe that's the spoonful of sugar America needs. The hope is that in a divided country, after you have dinner, that you can get the whole family together and your right wing loved ones and your left wing loved ones can all come and laugh at Kardashians at 7 p.m. and let the healing begins here. Is this show going to be on at 7 p.m.? Different markets in New York and LA. It'll be on at 7. I'm learning a lot about syndication. I mean, we had a three week trial run last summer and we were on it like one in the afternoon in Tampa, 11.30 at night in Detroit, 12.30 in Dallas, 6.30 in the evening in Atlanta. It'll be different times in different markets. That's the world of syndication. Who are you doing the show with? Well, Carlos Greer is a reporter for Page Six. Elizabeth Wagmeister is a journalist for Variety. Wagmeister? Wagmeister. She's a doll. She's a terrific, terrific broadcaster. She's going to have a big career, I think. And Bevy Smith is one of the legendary stars of Andy Cohen's show and she also hosts here on Serious XM. What constitutes gossip? That's the thing. Does gossip have to be true? Because gossip is not by its definition necessarily true. And I go with George Harrison. I always thought gossip was the devil's radio. That was the thing that really kept me away until I actually got there. And here's the dirty secret of Page Six TV. They call it a gossip show. I'm calling it a comedy show about pop culture. But really what it is, is it's a sourced entertainment news show. Gossip is the stuff these insiders tell me off camera that they can't say on camera. Who's gay? Who's sleeping with who? Who's an addict? What have you? The actual show, they can't gossip on TV. They'd all be sued. So they have to rely on sourced entertainment news. But what I also liked about it was they wanted to just have an entertainment show with a New York perspective. Normally we see these things. And they're all Hollywood. And here's Mario Cantone with the spray tan. Not Mario. I'm sorry, Mario Lopez. Mario Cantone was cast on our show. He did the test shows. And he'll do some of the shows when we launch the series. For me, having a very New York flavor meant that the show doesn't just deal with celebrities. It deals with politics, with sports, with real estate, with business events. And I hope it's going to be a smart show about silly stuff. That's what Page Six did. They took politicians, moguls, business people, and pushed them into the gossip pages. Which I respect. I think Trump, let's not talk about him, but he was one of the beneficiaries of Page Six. We began in New York to follow rich people, as though they were actors and actresses. Is gossip just schadenfreude? That's basically what it is. Yeah. And that's another one of the concerns when I first heard about this. I thought, oh, I don't want to be a part of that. I tried doing an entertainment comedy show a couple years ago. And to me, a lot of it was just making fun of famous addicts. And, you know, we're addicted to addicts in this country. And even more, I think, we're addicted to watching addicts fuck up. And the Ann and Nicole Smith experience taught me that if you're just making a joke out of somebody's disease in public, I mean, if you've ever loved an addict, you know how easy it is to be an unwitting enabler. And I keep thinking, you know, if we just keep on making jokes about the freak show, I think this with Lindsay Lohan all the time, then we're really part of the problem driving this person's dysfunction. Early on with page six, I said to them, this show will not work if it's FU. It will work if it's WTF. If we're just having a laugh about how absurd all this nonsense is, we'll have an entertaining, smart show. If it's mean, it's dead. And I don't want to do a mean show. And so that's really what I'm hoping that it'll be, that we'll take the piss out of these fevered egos, but it's not going to be hostile or toxic. What is the virtue to taking the piss out of famous people? I happen to think, what is it? The First Commandment? Thou shall not worship false idols? That's not the first one, but yeah, I mean... Oh, that shall not kill. Thou shall not have other gods before me. Oh, well then I think it is only the graven images. It depends on which Ten Commandments you're looking at, because there's more than one list at the top. The First Commandment, I thought, is by God thou shalt have no other gods before me. And here we have that. Celebrities are our royalty. That shall not kill is number two? It's in the top ten. Thou shalt not wear white after Labor Day. Thou shalt not wear open-toed boots. Thou shalt learn the difference between your and your... I don't know, these are my commandments, I think. So the First Commandment is don't worship graven images. Celebrities graven images? No, they're living images. They're people who have assumed God-like properties. I mean, it used to be kings, right? Rick Overton has this great bit about how there's a reason that kings originally made the first crowns looking like the sun. They were just trying to completely make themselves as God-like as possible. And then somewhere along the line, I think America, in the 1930s during the Great Depression, celebrities became the new royalty. And in some cases that means worshiping artists, which is great. In some cases that means worshiping people who are famous for being famous, which is not so great. I think that Donald Trump getting the presidency is the next logical step in the Kardashianification of the American psyche. I mean, we're now giving reality show stars the nuclear codes. And to me, there's sort of a moral responsibility in making fun of that. My hope with page six is that the way a lot of people who didn't care about politics watch the Daily Show, because it was fun, in much the same way people who don't care about those people you see on supermarket tabloids, you'll tune in because it's fun. And I learned a lot about how Taylor Swift has incredibly fake relationships that are staged like a Civil War battle reenactment. Is that true? The publicists hooked these people up, right? All last summer I was watching her, you know, we did these three weeks of test shows and I had to watch her and Tom Hiddleston, who is Loki the brother of Thor, popular British actor, and see how the two of them had this passionate relationship that consisted of them walking together on beaches fully dressed for the same photographer, the same paparazzi happen to be at every beach getting the official shots of them. And it became really obvious to me that this was, you know, a stage like a Donald Trump wedding night. What I said to the, what I wound up realizing what my role was as the host was, okay, I'm not the guy into this, but these people are the experts on my panel, so I can play the audiences fill in. And it became interesting for me to be like, okay, I know that publicists, part of their job is using these relationships to help launch a project and when a movie is coming out very often you'll hear of the star's dating. I mean, Rock Hudson had all kinds of girlfriends, right? And... He was quite the ladies. Indeed he was. And they still do it. And so for me, it's interesting to talk with our panelists about how this whole community of bullshit operates. Publicists. Yeah. They are, many say, the real power brokers in Hollywood. I think people's 10 most beautiful women issue should be called the 10 most persuasive publicists, because that's where the power is. I've heard various theories about publicists. One is that they're pimps, that there are a lot of actors who have trouble meeting women, so they go to their publicists to fix them up for these shoots, really, that a lot of matchmaking gets done on the premise of we need to promote this movie or it would be a good idea if people thought these two were dating and it's matchmaking. Always, yeah. I heard that Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt, when they were dating, they were fixed up by publicists that they both enjoyed marijuana. And it was a match made in heaven. It seems bizarre, doesn't it? I mean... So some say publicists are glorified pimps. Or matchmakers. Well, I must have used the wrong publicist then when I was in the business. I find, you know, when I've hired publicists in the past, a lot of it's been let's get you on shitty TV shows to get your name out there, all promotional stuff. I mean, in the past few years, I've only hired a publicist when I had a tour or something specific to promote. When you have the kind of coin and the regular TV gig that you need to keep yourself in the public eye to continually promote yourself, a lot of it is getting free stuff. A lot of it's going to events, being seen at parties, Broadway shows, red carpet events, Playboy Mansion would have you. And a lot of it is just getting yourself on TV to spout off your opinions. I mean, I guess you've got to be at a pretty exalted level to get a fake relationship out of it. Your work schedule, to me, is... I don't know how you do it. How do you... You have this show, we're in the Sirius XM studios. You do three hours a day of glorious work. Thank you. It's great. You have the greatest show on Sirius XM. How much prep time do you need for each show? It really varies, to tell you the truth. Very often, you know, we're in a phase now where we're trying to de-trumpify the show a bit and get back to other things like pop culture and history and science. Why? Because there's an outrage. There's umbridge fatigue, I think. Is there really umbridge fatigue or are we fatigued? I've noticed this with my show. I'm avoiding Trump. And people are saying, why aren't you talking about Trump? I'm fatigued. Is it you who's fatigued or is the audience fatigued? I think there's a difference between tired of Trump and tired of being outraged over Trump. Right? And I do think that at a certain point, you have to take counter-programming into consideration. I can tell you that I will talk about what the president said or did not say today, what he did, what policy debates there are. I will cover that on every show. But I don't need it to be taking two and a half hours of a three hour show. For me, it's important to counter-program that if, you know, you tune into my show every day, yeah, you'll hear commentary on what's going on in the news. But I don't do a breaking news show. I bring on people to talk about things that are journalists and authors and historians and political folk and what have you and a lot of comedians. Generally, I find comedians are the smartest people when it comes to these things because if a joke doesn't have truth in it, it's not going to be funny. And I think that's why people trust comics more than they trust the media or politicians. So in terms of prep time, I mean, we have authors almost every day and I've got to spend time with their books. Often we'll have film stars or musical stars and I've got to learn all about their album or their movie. It's very hard to fake your way through an interview about a... I just had a director, screenwriter and movie star and I hadn't seen the film. The screener didn't work and I convinced them all I'd seen it. But it's almost like more work goes into bullshitting your way through it than actually doing it. When you're interviewing an author or director, do you have to know the work or can't you be representative of the audience and ask them to sell it to you? I find the best results come from when you make them think you know the work. That's good for them and their ego, but what about the listener? Well, you have to know enough of the work to ask the right questions to elicit good storytelling for the listener. You know, if someone's coming in with... Today we had a book about the first attack submarines in naval history and the guy who built the first one. But, you know, they were trying to build submarines from the 1500s to the 1900s. They only just got it right in the 20th century. I didn't have time to read the book. I've had a crazy week. So for me it's about going through the book, going through the publisher's notes, reading reviews and finding the... And skimming the book itself, you know, reading bits of each chapter and the intros and closings of each chapter to get a sense of the points. And then finding what do I think will be good stories for the audience? What would keep me listening to a guy talking about a hundred-year-old submarine design for 30 minutes? And you really just go with what sounds the most interesting. But with an author, you never know what kind of talker they're going to be. So usually, you've got to get a sense of what their energy is and then try to steer the conversation to make sure that they're doing a dance with you for the listener. They think they're selling a book. What they're really doing is providing quality radio time. You never let your ego get in the way. Well, I have intensely self... I interrupt you sometimes on this show and you just let it happen. I've noticed Bill Maher does that too. But you have to. Yeah. You have to. Otherwise you're thin-skinned like Trump and you look at... Also, I was raised very Catholic and I hate myself. So that comes into play as well. What do you do when you got a joke and somebody's talking? My technique is... Ooh, ooh, ooh, stop, stop. I have a joke. Wait, everybody. Well, we just wrapped a segment with you, Frank Conif, Alan's, Whitebell and Judy Gold. So it was just like... It was beautiful. It was wonderful. And so many times you want to start and the danger on radio with five people is you'll start to get the premise out and then someone else is talking, you've got to stop and then you feel like an ass if you set up your premise a second time and very often the joke dies that way. Do you find sometimes the show goes great in the studio but the people at home don't enjoy it? I'm never with the people at home. I'm always here. But it sometimes surprises you that the shows that you think didn't go well were compelling and the shows... Yeah, it always surprises me. Honestly, it always... It surprises me and stand up. I'm a very poor judge of my own stuff and, you know, maybe you've had this experience. The jokes that I think are brilliant, that I think are the cleverest things I do, sometimes they just don't get the response and you're attached to them and you've got to kill your darlings, right? Which is great editing to realize that the most brilliant line I've ever written just doesn't fit here. But by the same token, the stuff that's like throwaway, and I bet you've had this, the jokes you invent on stage that you think are so trite and obvious get huge laughs and you realize, oh, sometimes you need something a bit more mainstream to anchor it and I'm all about making discoveries. And for me, you know, I've had radio interviews where I thought it was just dead as disco but listeners have really, really loved it. Your energy level is phenomenal. You do the show here, you're going to get on a bike, pick up your son. You're going to do stand up tonight? No, I have a night off tonight. How many nights a week are you doing stand up? Right now only like, you know, three, four maybe. I mean, I was at a U2 concert last night in Jersey until 2 a.m. so I'm a special kind of hungover exhaust. You went to see U2? My 11th U2 show. Go with your wife? Yeah. How many hours out of the day was that? That was a lot. I biked out of here at five o'clock, got down to my wife's office by around 5.30 and then along with two of our best friends, these two women that we've known for many years, the four of us, we actually did the bougiest thing I've ever done. Like, I am no longer a kid. We got a limousine to take us to MetLife Stadium and watch a U2 concert. Like, I have become middle-class, middle-aged, swine. I kept trying to explain to the ladies, you don't do this. You're supposed to take a limo from New Jersey to Manhattan, not the other way around. But we thought this is the best way to avoid the hell that is stadium traffic. And the use of your time? Well, yeah. I mean, it was actually nice. It forced me to sit in the back of a limousine for the first time that wasn't for a parent's funeral in 25 years. And just have a good time with my friends. And I don't ever do that. All I do is work. Like, right now, I've got a deadline on a book proposal that takes up every free night. How do you schedule your day? This is Thursday, right? I've been up past 3 a.m. for the last three nights. How do you schedule your day? Do you start the week scheduling your week? Or when do you figure out how your day is going to go? Golly. You've got Page Six, the new television series. Yeah, Page Six. You've got this series XM show. Well, I'm actually taking on the fourth job to make my life easier. Because Page Six will be from like 6 a.m. until about, you know, noon. And then I'll have to come over here and do the radio show from 2 to 5. And then I'll get out of here home by 6. So the way I sold it to my wife was, yes, I'll be working 12-hour days, 4 days a week, but I'll be home to cook dinner for our child every night of the week. On the road, stand up maybe 2 weekends a month. And I actually think that working that crazy will stabilize life a little bit. I don't know when I'm going to get to write a book, but at the same time, for me it's like, I've had years of working jobs I don't like and that's draining. And I've had years of not working and that's draining. So working a ton can be draining, but if you like the work and it inspires you, it gives you more energy than it takes. I think you're right. I think you're right. And if it's sufficient, if you travel for work that's just work, you hate travel and you're eating garbage and it's drudgery. If you're traveling for work that excites you. I mean, I just went to Albuquerque to do 35 minutes of stand-up for a political set. And it was wonderful. I mean, it was just, I loved every second of the travel because I knew I was going to have a great sold-out crowd and I was going to get to talk about political material with a crowd that really was in the mood for that. And every part of the journey was positive and the 35 minutes of actual performance was bliss. And so I can't really complain about the hours because I've just had too many years of doing terrible TV for a paycheck or even just awful gigs that I didn't believe in. I'm so full of gratitude that I'm having fun. And I've been through so much like death in the last couple of years in my life and losing people close to me that I'm sort of a recovering cynic. I've burned out on it. I just, I have to be positive. Having a kid is horrible in that regard. I can't be a negative dick anymore. Yeah, I've heard you describe parenthood as a sexually transmitted disease. No, I've said that children are sexually transmitted parasites. The other night, my five-year-old's there and my wife calls me and says, listen, I'm going to be held up late at work and I'm making dinner for the kid and I said, I've got a benefit show at the Ethical Culture Society at 8 o'clock and I can't get a babysitter right now. What am I going to do? And I've never done this before. I saw the picture. I said, five-year-old, you are coming to my show with me and I didn't give him a bath, I didn't put him in his PJs. At his bedtime, 8 p.m., I put him on my shoulders and took him to the show. My wife did show up and she was like, well, let's let him watch. We're late already. So I actually had the five-year-old in the back of the room and towards the end of my set, when I began talking about how horrible children are and how awful having a child has been for my life, the five-year-old just announces, dad's talking about me and every head in the room swibbled back to see him. I am a big proponent of this. I think it's great. And so what was the ride home like? The ride home? Were you talked about your set? We just walked home. He liked it. He's beginning to understand. It used to be he would see photos of me on stage and he would say, daddy's singing. And then my wife brought him. I did a matinee show in North Carolina. My wife brought him to see me on stage doing this whole shtick and he's beginning to get a sense of it. Well, there's a picture of him that you posted on Facebook where he's talking into a microphone. Yeah, he went on stage after the set and we lowered the mic stand for him and he was working on his mic technique. He was swallowing the mic and saying things off mic. He's learning his chops. This makes me so happy and yet nostalgic and in the true definition of the word nostalgic, pain. I remember nostalgia was pain for the past, right? I don't know. Is that what it is? Yeah. I mean the Brazilians call that soldage. But is nostalgia always pain? Sometimes nostalgia, having just seen you two last night do their first nostalgia tour, I think a lot of times nostalgia is a longing for the past, not a pain of the past. What's the difference between longing and pain? Well, pain means you don't want to remember and longing means, oh my God, I'd love to go back to this. I went and saw you two do their first nostalgia tour for Joshua Tree, 30 years anniversary last night. It was like the third concert I ever saw when I was a teenager and then to go 30 years later and see them do the whole album and all these Gen X people that are just miserable, destroyed, desolate, burned out shells of adults now. I guess the nostalgia really was more about the joy than the pain. How great was it? It was interesting. It wasn't the best show I ever saw. But what they did that I liked was when they got to side two of the album, which is not as adored as side one, it was like they knew it and they worked harder. Side two is always great when they tour with new music because they've got to sell you new songs and earn their mantle as the biggest band in the world. Stones don't care. They'll do one album every 10 years, but you two is always toured with a new record. You want to see the artists you like still being creative. Dick Gregory's still doing new material. I was kind of surprised like this isn't as magical as I thought it would be. This is not a nostalgia act. I want to hear new music from these guys. Then they sold the side two so hard. Then they did something that I thought was the most brilliant thing they could have done to allay any criticism of a nostalgia tour. They're closing every night in their stadium with a new song. It's called The Little Things That Give You Away. I've never seen a band close a stadium tour with a song that no one in the stadium knew. It's really audacious, but it was the best song of the night. It's like a stand-up opening with a brand new joke. Sort of, but it's also... Can you imagine Sinatra? Closing with a brand new tune? Brand new. Not like a song from our new album, a song that you've never heard before. No artist does that. It was the best song of the night. It was a great U2 song. The entire audience was on their feet by the end. It was sort of like, just when I wanted to get cynical of, oh this is just a cash grab, I'm going to the audience. The best is still coming. We're writing the best stuff of our career and the next tour is going to be nothing like this. It's going to be all about looking to the future. And it ended something that could have been kind of weird on a really high note and really made me respect the band. Your intellectual discipline. Does not exist. How many hours of sleep do you need? I don't know. It's a hard question. What do you need? Four? Eight? You mean every night? You know, I mean it's hard because I had a child and you get used to getting very little sleep for years and years and I'm still off my game on that. I mean I've only had about five hours, four hours for the past four nights, because I've been staying up late writing and it's brutal. And what do you use to stay awake? Fear. And focus. If I need to I'll have some Coca-Cola or some five hour energy shots or stuff like that. Oh you do the five hour energy. For me, I've had some days in raising a child, I had a couple days where I actually hit for the cycle and had coffee, tea, soda and energy shots all on the same day. If I do all four I know I'm pushing it too hard. I've never done a five hour energy shot. I like it better than coffee because there's no crash. It's very subtle. But you know, again it tastes awful and those are things that like you shouldn't do too much of. Do you know when you're burnt out? Yes. What's the tell? The tell is when I'm more drawn towards going on Twitter and getting angry over racists and fascists and homophobes than being funny. When I am more drawn towards outrage than playfulness I know I'm burned out. And what do you do? I check out. I stop. I mean like, you know I went on vacation recently for a week which I haven't done. I've been on vacation. You just work harder. That's true. But I did take some actual time off. And like last night I went about 20 hours without going on social media because I went to a concert and got ossified and this morning I was hung over and I was so grateful that I didn't feel like checking the news on Twitter. If you're unplugged, no social media no computer, you're going to end up working harder because you can't turn off the mind. That's true. So you're going to go to a yellow canary pad and start writing. And you get up at a certain, and I do use yellow legal pads. They're the best things in the world. Woody Allen writes all of his scripts on yellow legal pads. Still, do you have a set time of day where you write? Do you believe in getting up early in the morning and writing before the brain can be cluttered with anything else? I believe in it. But you don't do it. I try to do it. But you're a real professional writer so you don't have to do it. Well, I'm writing jokes basically. For this show ideally I'd be getting up every morning and writing but there just doesn't seem to be enough time in the day. And I lose control of my day more and more and it pisses me off. I know what you're saying having these five jobs because you can't lose control of your day. Yeah. I'll be honest with you. I reached a point where my wife and I were together a long time and we were together a long time before we married and a long time before we had a child. In fact, I've never met a couple that waited as long into their relationship as we did. I mean, in the Ozarks we'd be grandparents. And we waited a very long time to have this baby but I was at a point where I was living in L.A. and my show was canceled and my dad went into hospice and we moved back to New York and I had to give away everything and lose everything. And then in like an 18 month span my dad died, my wife's grandmother died, the aunt who helped raise me died, my best friend killed herself, she was diagnosed with a horrible rare degenerative disease that killed her. I moved back to New York. You moved back to New York and both my cats died. Any of those things would be devastating. Having them all happen in an 18 month span was almost unbearable and I didn't want a kid but we began thinking we have to do something radical to change the trajectory of our lives. Things were so bleak and so bad for so long and I had said I'm not going to have a kid until I'm rich when I grow up someday but then it just felt like no I'm going to throw something into these gears and do something radically disruptive of my own life and I don't know if it will make my life better or worse but I know that I need to change things and this represents radical change which is the rationale a lot of unstable women used for having kids and unstable guys too but I'm glad I did it because I had to develop disciplines I didn't have I had to suffer in ways I never thought I could suffer and I know that I didn't want to be that person anymore so I put myself through something that made me a stronger person and a better person and a tougher person I'm not afraid of bad things happening the way I used to be and I think it's made me funnier and more playful because I just don't give a damn in ways I used to. You're going to bring your son to more shows? If he wants to then who bring your kid to shows in LA? It got to the point near the end when my son was in high school where he was this is so horrible I can remember my son coming late to one of my shows with his friends and they were all black African-Americans Asian Black African-American Asians? Yes and I would point to one of the African-Americans or the Asians and say there's my son and I put it in quotation marks and they knew to go hi Mr. Feldman Anyway, it was pretty horrible it got to the point where people would say are you sure this is okay? and I'd say let's find out where the children were exposed to some of the filthiest comics I was doing things on stage borderline where your act shocks me. It was borderline for your son's friends who are 17 to act as though there were rent boys but at the same time they get to see their friend's dad being radically edgy when other dads are asking if they want to reply to the ROTC and you're going up there talking about how they're rent boys there is an integrity to that in my opinion I never got any pushback from their fathers and mothers I was surrounded by the filthiest parents who did the most disgusting things in front of their children and they had no problem with it Are you protective of your kid that way? It's very interesting because my wife grew up with a real hippie northern California kind of thing and everyone's parents smoked weed and everyone swore I grew up abnormally I had the most conservative parents and the most liberal parents at the same time they were ex-clergy, mom had been a nun dad had been a Franciscan he had the autobiography of Malcolm X on his desk he was a big social justice guy he didn't want us to be Republicans but he did dress us like them and we were the only kids who had to have short hair just the nerdiest kids and yet the most politically progressive parents as well so I grew up very impressed dressed like the enemy, that's what I tell my kids clip on bow tie, thick glasses but I mean my class picture looks like 37 little almond brothers and buddy hollies and bread cousin so it was pretty awkward this has been great, John Fugl saying hosts, tell me everything on channel 121, Insight, SiriusXM watch them on page 6 TV soon to be saturating TV commercials and billboards near you it's just begun Mel Brooks, how do we hear your interview with Mel Brooks? I think if you subscribe to SiriusXM you can go onto the website or go to my Facebook page I've shared some clips of it we went to do a half hour with Carl Reiner in his house and I had met Carl before in a TV show we did we were told that Mel might come then we were told Mel can't come he just got back from the Baptist and he's really jet lagged so I thought alright that's too bad but Carl, an hour with Carl, that's great we sat down, PBS was there filming it in Carl's living room halfway through the shoot here is all this lights and 90 year old Mel Brooks he just lost $400 at the track he wasn't exhausted from the Baptist he was at the racetrack he walks in so annoyed that he lost $400 sits down and joins our interview in the worst mood possible and it just gets more chaotic from there it was magical, it was comedy bliss and it's one of the reasons why I love working in a place like SiriusXM where we can just pitch our bosses Mel and Carl, can we fly to LA and they'll say go do it Wow, John Fugl saying thank you David, I'd rather do your podcast than the best podcast in all of comedy and I mean that I want to thank you for bringing so many of your listeners to the brink of entertainment Hey, I'm here to poach all your guests including you, thank you Thank you You're listening to highlights from the David Feldman show heard nationwide on Pacifica Radio Stitcher and now YouTube please subscribe to this channel for more information go to davidfeldmanshow.com Thank you for listening