 When Jared Kushner finally arrives in prison, it will mark the first time he ever got anywhere completely on his own. It's 3 a.m. Tuesday, May 30th, 2017. I'm David Feldman. We have a lot of show, so let's get right to it. This is the David Feldman Radio Network. Good news for the White House. Trump's new health care plan now includes immunity from prosecution. Welcome to the broadcast. I'm David Feldman, DavidFeldmanshow.com. Please friend me on Facebook, follow me on Twitter, and do all your Amazon shopping via the David Feldman Show website. We get a small percentage of everything you purchase. It doesn't cost you more money. And for as little as $5 a month, you can gain access to all our premium content. Please go to DavidFeldmanshow.com, hit the go premium button. We accept all major credit cards. If you're already a subscriber and you forgot the password, please hit the contact button. Email me and I'll send you our password. Hit the contact button anyway and stay in touch with me. I answer all your emails. On today's show, down with tyranny's Howie Klein, peels back the curtain on what's in store for the GOP when it comes to getting rid of Obamacare, denying African Americans the right to vote, and impeaching Donald Trump. Sunday was menstrual hygiene day around the world. Millions of girls and women around the world, especially refugees, lack the hygiene and facilities to attend to their period. I read about this in an article over at theconversation.com that was written by Dr. Marnie Summer from Columbia University, who joins us today in Tanzania, where she is working inside two refugee camps. Then we lighten the mood by talking with my old friend, John Ross. John's a comedian, a comedy writer. He has a steel-trap memory and he's going to provide a follow-up to my conversations last week with Jake Johansson and Fred Stolar about the early days of the San Francisco comedy scene. Speaking of the San Francisco comedy scene, Mark Hirshon is the host of Suck-A-Tash. It's a terrific podcast that's a weekly roundup of what you should be listening to in terms of podcasts, especially comedy podcasts. Mark writes for the Huffington Post, Splitsider, he's written several screenplays for the Hallmark Channel. Like I said, he joins us from Sausalito to discuss the current state of podcasts, as well as the early days of stand-up comedy in San Francisco. And then she's back. House is in the Laura. Laura House is in love and on our show. Stay with me. Joining us is the- As always? As always, I'm out of it. It's, you know, I should have taken the weekend off and I don't. I don't stop. I never stop. I just keep going and going until I crash. Joining us is the founder and treasurer of the Blue America pack. He also writes the down with tyranny blog, Howie Klein. Howie Klein, the Blue America pack raises money for progressive candidates all around the country. The D-Triple-C will not run anybody against Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, but I understand the Blue America pack has found a candidate to take on Paul Ryan. Yes, we're part of a coalition of groups that have been scouring the southeast part of Wisconsin, which is where Paul Ryan has his district. And we've been doing this really, really hard. I mean, certainly Blue America has been nonstop working on this. And we finally found someone who would be a great candidate, not us alone, but working families party, which is strong in Wisconsin, and the labor unions, which are, you know, very, very strong and in fact, much stronger than the Democratic Party in Wisconsin. So between the labor unions, the working families party in Blue America, we have come up with an incredible guy named Randy Bryce. And he hasn't declared yet. It's still sort of under the radar a little bit. People don't know yet, although in the next few weeks, I think everyone will know your listeners are getting a little early warning on this, something that hasn't happened yet, but will. He's an iron worker. Yes, he's an iron worker. He is, you know, he's, you know, he's the real thing. I mean, he is, you know, Hillary lost that district. This guy is pretty much the opposite of her. I mean, he's got all the good stuff that she had, like, you know, he's pro-choice and pro-equality and, you know, all that sort of stuff. And he's good on the environment as she was. But in terms, when it comes to the bread and butter issues that people didn't like her stands on, the kind of, you know, a little bit establishment way that she approached that stuff is very different from Randy, who, you know, it was a Bernie, it was a leader of Bernie's campaign in his part of Wisconsin. And in fact, Bernie won that district in the primary. It's a very much when people describe the white working class districts that she did so poorly in that Trump won. This is one of those districts. And, you know, Obama won the district and Hillary lost the district. And the DCCC has never, ever once run a candidate there. Not only do they not run candidates, but when candidates do run there, they sabotage them. And when I talk about sabotaging a candidate, people say, well, what the hell are you talking about? And what I'm talking about is Steny Hoyer and Ben Ray Luhan and Nancy Pelosi getting on the phone and calling unions and calling big democratic donors and saying, don't give, you're wasting your money, don't do it. This time they're not going to be able to do that. Randy is very beloved among the unions. He's an activist in his union and he's the head of the AFL-CIO's outreach to veterans. He's a veteran as well, but he's the head of their veteran operation for the whole state. And in his part of Wisconsin, he's an official of the iron workers union. So he's not someone that the Democrats are going to be able to mess with the way they have messed with previous candidates. So that's a really good thing. I'm going to challenge you. Before you do, I just want to just put in a little plug here, which is that you can follow Randy on Twitter by his name, which is iron stash. So in other words, he's an iron worker, as you mentioned, and he's got this big mustache. So he calls himself iron stash on Twitter. What's the challenge? I'm a challenge just to make it interesting. You say that they don't run anybody good against Paul Ryan. They don't run candidates against Paul Ryan. Okay. So Ryan, I'm looking this up. Paul Ryan, the Democrats ran a guy named Ryan Solin. He ran as a Democrat. That's different from the Democrats ran. I mean, the DCCC doesn't run any candidates against him. And what I said is that not only do they not run candidates, but they sabotage anyone who looks like they could possibly give a Paul Ryan any kind of a challenge. So this guy Ryan Solin was just some random person who ran and the DCCC didn't even look twice at it. It didn't matter to them. He didn't raise any money. He didn't make any noise and it didn't make any difference. But the last time a viable Democrat ran against him, it was a few years ago, and a guy who had been a local city official in, I think either Racino, Kenosha, one of those towns, a guy named Rob Zurbon ran against Ryan and he managed to raise a huge amount of money and the DCCC freaked out and they really were flipping out that he could actually cause Ryan some kind of damage and they really went after him in a horrible way. So instead of helping a Democrat, a good solid progressive Democrat who was raising lots of money and looked like he could do some, maybe win, possibly win, they didn't want to know about it. Now, I want to tell you why this is so horrible. I mean, it destroys the Democratic party when the DCCC does this kind of stuff. Just as an example, this coming in 2018, the U.S. Senator who's a Democrat, a very good progressive Democrat named Tammy Baldwin is up for reelection. Don't you think that if there's a Democrat running in one of the congressional districts, it's going to help to turn out votes that will help Tammy Baldwin keep her seat? That's expected to be a very tight and crucial race. I mean, the Democrats need everything they can get to keep her in the Senate. It's crucial. It's so important and yet here we have the DCCC just say no. That's it. That's all I know how to do when it comes to Wisconsin. They publish their list of districts that they're going to be targeting this year. I mean, some of the districts that they're claiming they're going to target are absurd. I mean, literally absurd. A district in Alabama where they have as much chance of electing somebody in that district as you have of becoming Trump's vice president in the next month. I mean, it's insane. And yet they have no candidates against Ryan, but no candidates in the state of Wisconsin at all. They're not targeting one district in Wisconsin, a purple state where Democrats win. And that's the DCCC for you. I've said so much about them already. I feel like your audience is probably ready to kill me. And when I say DCCC, by the way, that's Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. They're charged with electing Democrats to the House, and they do a terrible job at it. I want to pitch you an idea for Dan with tyranny that you might want to write or assign. Oh, I hope you want to write it. Here's the idea. Okay. Paul Ryan is going to kill 24 million Americans with his new health care plan. He's from Wisconsin. Do you know that Wisconsin is notorious for producing serial killers? Supposedly, there's something in the water that drives people mad. Jeffrey Dahmer, Ed Gein, David Spandbauer, some guy named Walter Ellis. Some of the greatest serial killers in American history. You know that I wasn't a serial killer, but someone went into a Sikh temple in Ryan's district and shot a bunch of people there, and that was just a couple of years ago while Ryan was in Congress. He follows in a long tradition of serial killers from Wisconsin. I'm being serious. Wisconsin is plagued by serial killers. I would love you to write that story for Dan with tyranny. I think you would make it really funny and fun. All right. Hang on. I'll do it if you'll edit it for me because I tend to overwrite it. All right. I will write that. Okay. That would be fun. North Carolina has been disciplined by the Supreme Court. North Carolina used to be a Democratic stronghold. The Republicans have taken it over and they want to keep all their power by making it impossible for African Americans to vote twice the Supreme Court has wrapped their knuckles saying, stop it. This is racist and the North Carolina legislature goes back and they rewrite their gerrymandering laws and their voting right laws. You say something is happening in Illinois on Memorial Day yesterday. What happened yesterday? It happened in Illinois. It's a little bit different. I mean what the Supreme Court did was fabulous and what hopefully that and what it's based on the idea of racial gerrymandering that you're not allowed to use race to egregiously gerrymandering states. They tore up their map. They said these two districts cannot be used and you have to redraw them. The thing is you can't just redraw two districts because the districts around them are then affected. So they really have to come up with a new map. So that's really good news. The other part of that though that's important is that what the Supreme Court has, the conservatives on the Supreme Court have always said is that partisan gerrymandering rather than racial gerrymandering is okay and the Supreme Court seems to be moving away from that now. So there'll be some cases that come up probably pretty soon. There's one in fact in Wisconsin this day we were just talking about where they said, well we didn't do racial gerrymandering. We just did partisan gerrymandering. So they purposely tried to pack Democrats into a few districts so that there would be lots and lots of Democrats in just a couple of districts and that would make it easier for Republicans to win in districts where there were fewer Democrats. So now the Supreme Court is considering that and a few other cases and that's imminent. So that's an outgrowth of this Supreme Court decision that came down a couple of weeks ago in North Carolina. Now what happened yesterday which has to do with voter participation is that the Illinois legislature met, I was surprised to hear that they were meeting on Memorial Day, but happy that the House met. So what had happened is I think about a week or so before the Illinois State Senate unanimously, so that means every Republican and every Democrat voted unanimously. So yesterday, the Illinois State Legislature passed also unanimously a bill for automatic voter registration. That means if you go and get a, you know, do any kind of business with the state like get a driver's license, a new driver's license, anything that has to do with the state, that automatically registers you to vote if you're a citizen of the state. So if you're a citizen of legal age and you get a driver's license, that means unless you ask not to, so you could opt out if you don't want to register to vote, but if you, unless you ask not to, that means you can register to vote. You are automatically registered to vote. So that's a really good thing. It passed in Illinois yesterday like I said the week before. It passed in the Senate unanimously. Yesterday it passed in the House unanimously. Now it had passed the year before as well, but they've got a Republican governor, this guy, Rauner, who's pretty awful, and he vetoed it, but they worked with him to address his concerns and now it looks like he's going to sign this bill that passed yesterday. Now today, Maine is looking at the same bill. And just before I spoke with you, I was on the phone with Shana Bellows, an old friend of mine who's a state senator in Maine and an ultra progressive. She's fantastic. She used to be the head of the ACLU in Maine and she ran for the U.S. Senate, but she's in the state Senate now and she's the sponsor of this automatic voter registration. So the, the, the Maine House passed it on Thursday. So last Thursday, the House of Representatives of Maine passed this bill. Every Democrat, every independent and one Republican voted for it. So it passed. It was narrow, but it did pass. And then today, actually, today, the, the, the state Senate is going to vote on it. They need to get one Republican to go along with it and then it'll pass. The problem with it is the, they have a terrible governor, this crazy guy named Paul LePage, and he's very likely to veto it. Right. He's the one who's trying to get rid of all the socialist art in the state capital. That's right. And he's a racist. He's against increasing the franchise. He's against more people voting. He really opposes that stuff. And he will vote, he will veto this bill. He's going to veto the bill. How do you know he's going to veto the bill? Well, as soon as he got elected and Republican legislature was in power back in 2010, they did a very odd thing. In the early 1970s, I think 1972, Maine was one of the first states to do a same day registration. So same day registration means when you go, when you go to vote, you can say, Hey, I want to register to vote that day at the same place. So you can register to vote and vote on the same day. So that's considered really, really progressive. Maine has had that for over 40 years. Along comes Paul LePage. And what does he do? He has the Republican legislature repeal that of something that's been on the books for over 40 years. This is, this is a crazy person. And so fortunately, Maine has this thing that other states don't have called the people's veto. And Shena, by the way, was the, the head of a basically like a state referendum to repeal the repeal. And they were successful. So Maine is still a state that has same day voter registration. Thanks to Shena who, as I said, is the sponsor in the, in the Senate today of automatic voter registration. Explain to me what automatic voter registration means. It means same day registration or you're just automatically registered. Yeah, if you, if you deal with the state in any way, like, like I said, driver's license, say for example, that automatically, if you're, and if you're of, you know, if you're a citizen of the state and you are of, of, you know, the, whatever age the voting ages, I guess it's seven, it's 18 everywhere, I think. I'm not sure. I think some states may have a, have a different voting age. That's what I've, I've read a little bit about the, there's some questions about that. But I think there are states that have slightly different voting age. I think it's 17 and 18 though. Yeah, not for federal elections. So for federal elections is 18 everywhere, but in some states for state elections, it's 17 in any case. So if you're of the right age to vote and you deal with it in any state office, like the DMV is a good example, you will be asked if you want to opt out, if you want to opt out and not register to vote, then they don't register to vote. But, but other than that, you will be registered to vote. So Oregon did this and they were the first state. They did it in 2015 and it's gigantically increased their, their voter participation. And then the second state that did it also in 2015, but a few months later with California. So it's really exciting to happen all over the country. I mean, Connecticut has it, Colorado has it now, Alaska passed it, Vermont, there, there, there are more and more states that are doing it. New Jersey passed it also. But again, they, unfortunately they have a, that huge slob, I can't remember his name. Oh, Chris Christie, he vetoed it as well. He also vetoed a bill that would have outlawed underage marriages. You read that. Yeah, you read that. I bet he would also outlaw a bill that outlaws marrying your cousin. I'm going to ask. No, that was, I keep mixing them up. Right. If people were allowed to vote in this country, if the people who are willing to get off their ass and go vote were allowed to vote, if all the people who wanted to vote were allowed to vote, what would this country look like? Well, it would be far more progressive. There would be far fewer Republicans in office. So how do I know that? There was a study recently done about what happened in Wisconsin. Why did Wisconsin go, you know, very, very narrowly, but it did go for Trump? And how did that happen after giving such good solid majorities both times for Obama? And what they, what they, you know, they had instituted some very, very stringent anti voter legislation in Wisconsin. They have a state center controlled by the Republicans, a state house controlled by the Republicans, and of course a very, very right wing crackpot Republican governor. And they, you know, they have, you know, really strict voter ID, which, which is very specifically targets black people and the elderly and students. So they do, they tend to discourage people from voting instead of encouraging people from voting. And when you think about Wisconsin, Wisconsin is the birthplace of progressivism. I mean, it's the last state in the world you would expect to be doing this kind of thing, but they, they did do it. And it, and African American voter participation in 2016 was weighed down. And it is, it is thought certainly this, this, this study that I looked at makes the assertion that that is the reason why Trump won fewer voters. That's what they were, that's what they aim for and that's what they got. Going back to gerrymandering, do we know if in 2016, whether or not more Americans voted for a Democratic congressman than a Republican congressman? No, they have been times when the Republicans have controlled the house, even though there were as many as a million fewer Republican voters. But 2016 wasn't one of those. Really? Really? That kind of speaks to, that kind of speaks to Trump and gives him a bit more of a mandate than I was willing to, to give him. Oh wait, what does it have to do with Trump? You were talking about congressional people voting for Congress? I know, but you know, he didn't win the popular vote, but the fact that the Republican House got more votes than the Democratic House gives them a little bit more legitimacy. No? Well, okay, I mean, I, it shouldn't, you shouldn't have that in your mind, because most Republican, not all, but most Republicans, or certainly most Republican incumbents did much better than Trump. So in other words, you go, you go to, you know, I'll just pick a district at random that I was thinking about recently, a district in Houston, where John Colberson is the congressman. Colberson won reelection, handily, he, you know, he won, I don't know, 60% say, very, he did very well. And Trump lost to Hillary in that same district in Texas. So, so Trump, even in the districts that, a lot of districts that Trump won, he, he underperformed the Republican, he underperformed almost every Republican senator. So that, that's an easy comparison, because it's a whole state. So, you know, Republicans, you know, John McCain, I'm going to make this figure up, this isn't a real figure, but just to give you an idea, John McCain got, you know, one, you know, I don't know, three million votes in Arizona, and Trump had two and a half million votes in Arizona. So that those aren't real figures, but it gives you the idea of what I'm talking about. The senators, the Republican senators, almost all of them beat Trump. Gianforte. We got that whole thing about legitimacy. Okay. I listen, Donald Trump is an illegitimate president, the Republicans are illegitimate. Greg Gianforte is the new congressman from Montana, despite body slamming a reporter for The Guardian. Were most of the votes already cast when he? Yes. 260,000 votes had already cast. So the majority of votes had been cast. They, the secretary of state reported they were getting calls all day from people asking if they could, if they could change their vote. Unfortunately, the vote on election day was not that different from the early voting. So Gianforte was going to win this thing with or without the body slamming. I think that there were even some people, some Republicans, not people who were excited about the body. But it was a good idea. He raised $100,000 that day, and people specifically, some, not all of them, but some people specifically saying they were giving him money because of the body slamming, because these horrible, you know, liberal media types deserve to be beaten. He actually identified the reporter as a liberal reporter. Right. I don't know how he knew that, but somehow he thinks he does. I mean, I don't know what that reporter, I don't know that reporter's politics. If you're a reporter and you're trying to ascertain the truth, that automatically makes you a liberal in America. Well, maybe, maybe that's the point. Maybe that makes you a liberal wanting to report the truth. Because what the guy was asking him, I mean, Gianforte, although he told a call full of lobbyists that he was overjoyed that Trump care passed. He was trying to raise money from lobbyists and they were on the phone when Trump care passed and he was overjoyed about it. But when it came to talking to the voters, he couldn't very well say, you know, I'm in favor of this bill that's going to take away 10% of the people who live in Montana take away their insurance. He didn't want to say that. So what he said is he can't make a comment on how he would vote on it until he sees the CBO report. So the CBO report came out and what this reporter was asking him is, Hey, the CBO report came out. Can you make that comment now about how you'll vote on the Republican healthcare bill? And that's when he decided to beat him up. You know, it wasn't just body slamming. According to the Fox News reporters who were there, who swore on an affidavit, he also choked him. They said he put both his hands around the guy's neck and was pummeling him. Well, it reminds me of Grimm, the congressman, Grimm, who threatened to throw away... Although Grimm threatened to do that. You're right. But no one ever saw Grimm do that. Here we have witnesses. I mean, Grimm has done much worse than that before Grimm was a congressman. He was a murderer, but a mafia guy. What? But no one ever saw him murder anybody. Really? I thought he was like an FBI agent or something. He was a double agent. He worked for the FBI and for the mafia, and he would go back and forth, and eventually the mafia kicked him out because they realized that he was more on the mafia side than on their side. More on the FBI side than the mafia. Oh, no. He was more on the mafia side. Oh, he was kicked out of the FBI for being more on the mafia side. Mafia will embrace him. And he threatened to throw a reporter off the ledge inside the Capitol. He ended up going to prison for tax evasion, I believe, or campaign finance laws that he violated. Yeah, they let him off very, very, very easy. I mean, they had so much stuff on him that he resigned from Congress and was able to get a very light charges against him. He is a long record that goes way, way, way back, and the FBI is very, very savvy to it, but he always made a threat that he could bring down a lot of people with him. I'm sure he could have. Right. Greg Gianforte is 56 years old. I'm going to assume this is not the first time he's been violent with somebody. Sending him to Washington D.C. will be interesting. Yes, I don't think that the other members of Congress are excited to have a violent guy like that amongst them, but hey, everything is so partisan these days that people don't look beyond party labels. Everything is so partisan right now. Is it more violent now than you've ever seen? You have the governor of Texas holding up a pistol and saying he's going to use it on reporters. There's a lawsuit, one of the white supremacists who beat up a protester at a Trump rally is suing Trump because he says Trump claimed that if you punch a protester, I'll pay your legal bills. How violent is our culture? I was around in 68 when Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated. Is this as violent as 68 or is it just being overreported? Well, I don't think it's being overreported and we are yet to see how violent it gets. Trump has certainly created a very violent milieu and I'm somewhat worried about it. I think a lot of people are worried about it. He's enabled these kind of people. Everyone saw what he did at his campaign rallies, telling people, bemoaning the fact that you have to be politically correct and you can't just break their legs and stuff like that. His fans are extremely low IQ and a lot of them are very, very addicted to prescription drugs. And you put that together and you could have some major violence. And they have guns. They're addicted to guns and the adrenaline of being angry. And oxy cotton. Before you go, I want to ask you about Tom Price's seat, but two questions. One is, you weren't expecting Gianforte to lose, were you? I was hopeful. I was definitely hopeful that he would lose. I don't know that I would say I expected it. I knew it was going to be close. I had seen polls that showed him leading and I had seen polls that had shown what's his name, the singer leading. And that would have been a major, I'm sorry. Rob Quist, the guy who's the singer. But that would have been a big upset. Yes. And most of the professional polling elite said that Quist was going to lose. They were all positive he would lose. But I felt it was going to be close. Tom Price gave up his seat to run Health and Human Services and destroy Obamacare. There's a special election coming up. Where does that stand right now? When is it and what are you expecting to happen? Well, the most recent poll shows the Democrat ahead by seven. John Osloff leading Karen Handel, the Republican, by seven points. That's huge. Most people are saying ignore that poll. It's an outlier because every other poll shows them one or two points, just one or two points separating them. So I tend to think that this is a tie. And again, it's going to all be about turnout. If the Democrats turn out their people, Osloff will win. If they don't, then Handel will win. And when is that election? When is it? Just like in Montana, the amount of money that the Republicans have poured into this is mind boggling. I mean, they're pouring in six or seven times more than the Democrats are. When is the election? It's June. I forgot which day it is, but it's a couple of weeks from now. It's coming up in June. And finally, Trumpcare. Is McConnell going to make it happen? Well, he's going to try to make it happen, whether he can succeed or not. If he can succeed, it'll be a miracle because there are so many Republicans that have said no to this issue or that issue that I don't see how it can. And then you had Trump, you know, sort of still high from his perceived home run that he hit in Europe, although no one else sees it that way. But he does coming back and saying, we need to pour more money into healthcare. Which, you know, I'm sure that all of the Republicans in Congress are thinking, what the hell is he talking about now? Because they're taking money out of healthcare. You've got people like Lisa Murkowski from Alaska and Susan Collins saying they're not going to vote for the bill if it includes defunding Planned Parenthood. Okay. Well, the Republicans in the House are not going to vote for the bill unless there is the defunding of Planned Parenthood. So there's a lot of that on a lot of different levels. I mean, especially Republicans who are seen as vulnerable in some way are not going to vote to defund Medicaid to the tune of $880 billion. They don't want to do that. That's going to put a lot of people, it's going to kill people. So my gut tells me that McConnell's not going to be able to pull this off. Okay. And lastly, before you go, and this really is the final before you go, two things are happening right now. One is Kim Jong-un keeps firing these ballistic missiles into the Sea of Japan. Trump is silent, not saying anything. It's also pretty much settled that the only way to get Trump out is through impeachment, that Mueller's investigation will reveal obstruction of justice, but there's no way to prosecute a sitting president unless you get rid of him first. So the only way to get rid of Trump is political. You have to do it through impeachment and you can't impeach the guy unless you overthrow the House of Representatives and then the Senate. So he's going to be there for a while. Probably. I mean, the thing is, remember, if Mueller finds a smoking gun, a real smoking gun that even Republicans can't stomach, he could be impeached. I don't expect that he'll be impeached until 2018. If the Democrats take back the House, I think there's a good chance that Trump will be impeached. Now being convicted is another story. Remember, Clinton was impeached, but he was not convicted. The Senate found him innocent. So that's a political vote, and it's not likely that the Democrats are going to have 60 votes. I mean, the Democrats are not going to have 60 votes to find him guilty. So yes, you're right. He will be around probably until 2020 unless he keels over eating some fast food or he decides to retire or resign for one reason or another. He'll be there until 2020. The smoking gun may be North Korea. What happens when Mattis and Rex Spillerson and China say, okay, that's it. No more test missiles. Ra, ra, we're going to war against North Korea. What happens to impeachment then? Did you say China? Yeah, wouldn't China go in and discipline North Korea now? Isn't there talk that China is going to work with you? Well, that talk is from Trump. I don't think North Korea is going to do anything like that. But let's just leave China out of this and just say that the US decides to do something. I don't know what it is that they can do. I mean, you don't think they're going to fight a grand war in Korea, do you? I'm saying that once they find out that Trump obstructed justice and it's incontrovertible evidence to impeach, he starts bombing North Korea. Well, he can't bomb it. He's not bombing anybody. And I don't think that Mattis and Tillerson and any of them are going to go along with something that crazy. I really don't. And Mattis went along with the travel ban? Yeah, well, the travel ban is different from incinerating Seoul and Tokyo. Okay, Howie Klein is the founder and treasurer of the Blue America Pack. People should go to the Blue America Pack and give money to the Blue America Pack if you're progressive and you want to give to a cause where all the money goes to where they promise then go Well, actually, let me interrupt you there for a second. What we encourage people to do is to give directly to the candidates, not to the pack. If they want to give to the pack, they're welcome to. We love it. But we, most of the money that comes through Blue America goes directly to the campaigns of the progressive candidates. And we would much prefer since the candidates know best how to spend their own money, how to spend money, we prefer people to donate to them. So we have a list of progressive candidates that are well vetted who are guaranteed progressive. And if you go to the Blue America Pack, the list is there. And if you want to give one guy $5 and one guy $10 and one guy $1 or you only want to give $100 to one person and nothing to anybody else, you have all those opportunities to do that. Right. And pay attention because the only way to get rid of Trump is through politics. And I think you're right. Yeah. And read down with charity. I get to talk to you next week, sir. Great. Look forward to it. Thank you. Bye-bye. Bye, David. The United Nations says the world is facing the worst refugee crisis since the end of World War II. How does this affect the hygiene and safety for millions of women and girls? What happens when displaced women are menstruating? This past Sunday was Menstrual Hygiene Day. For more on this, we go to Tanzania to speak with Dr. Marnie Summer, who is an associate professor of socio-medical sciences at Columbia University Medical Center. Thank you for joining us. Thank you. It's great to be here today. So you're in Tanzania. We're going to talk about women, refugees, menstruation. Maybe if we have time, we'll get to a study you're working on now about alcohol and rape. First off, tell me about Tanzania. What's it like today? It's along the Indian Ocean. It is. It is. It's actually fun when you visit here because in the morning, when you head out to meetings, the ocean is very, very, very far out. The tide has withdrawn, and then when you come back at the end of the day, it's full on water. It's steamy. It's the end of the rainy season, so there's pouring sort of trenches of rain every once in a while, but lots of squawking birds and traffic and nice people. So good to be here. From what I've read, it's a peaceful nation. They have about 100 tribes, but they're not fighting one another. Are you relaxed? I know you have serious, some sad work to do, but are you able to relax and enjoy Tanzania? Yeah. Yeah. It's one of those places that I think people really like to work. It's beautiful being on the ocean. It has been a very peaceful and united country since independence, and while there are, I think there's actually 120 ethnic groups or tribes, everybody speaks Swahili. I think everybody in this particular country feels like one nation, and it's a nice place to be. I've been coming here since 2006, so pretty used to being here, but I like being here. Tanzania was first occupied by the Germans during the imperial era at the turn of the 20th century, and then after World War I, the British took it over and then it became its own country. Tell me about menstrual hygiene day. That was Sunday. Yeah. What is menstrual hygiene day? So menstrual hygiene day was launched a few years ago now by an NGO based in Europe. I think it was with funding from the Gates Foundation. What's an NGO? Sorry, non-governmental organization. So sort of a non-profit, an organization aimed at doing good in the world that isn't part of a government of any sort. And they saw, I think they saw, there was growing attention to this issue of menstruation, and particularly around girls in school and the challenges that they're facing, and that there was sort of more and increasing efforts to talk about this issue, to try and bring attention to it with one of the biggest hurdles, frankly, is just talking about it in public, getting people in government, in donor, sort of the parts of the big, those parts of various governments around the world that are donating money to countries to try and do projects, local communities to get people to break the taboo and start talking about the topic. And so I think it was, I'm not sure if they really knew how wonderful it would turn out in terms of just spinning out into people writing about it all over the world, holding menstrual hygiene day activities all around the world. So it's really mushroomed into quite an experience, and it was really fun on Sunday watching things pop up from countries, low-income countries, high-income countries, places all over the world that were trying to break that taboo and make it something that everybody can talk about. The taboo. We have Republican politicians in America who don't understand female reproduction. When it comes to menstruation, Trump said, and I quote, it's too disgusting, I don't want to think about it. I'm not going to clutch my pearls and say, what's going on in these third world nations? Why don't they talk about menstruation? There is a taboo. What is the taboo in the United States? And how does it compare to the taboo and say the refugee camps that you visited in Tanzania? So I think that taboo is widespread, obviously, as demonstrated by our government right now. When I was doing my original study on this in 2006, 2005, and started looking into it as a doctoral student, I would go to dinner parties or other gatherings in the US, and people always, they meet a doctoral student, they want to know what you're studying, and I would start to tell them about menstruation, and very quickly it would be, please pass the potatoes, let's move on to the next topic. I think that it is historically, if you go back in time, there's anthropology around menstruation, there's it's sort of linked with either power, women sort of women having this that blood is somehow powerful, or that it's polluting and dirty and unhygienic, and there's fear surrounding it, and so it either becomes something people are uncomfortable and scared about, I think when they don't understand it, or seen as a way to sort of relegate girls and women to sort of a status of something we don't talk about, that diminishes them, and I wouldn't say that that is universal, I think there are cultures and societies that celebrate menstruation, I think that there are some cultures and societies that traditionally girls and women maybe got rest time during their menstruation, sometimes that one may perceive that as negative, they might have felt banished, and they might have been banished, and in other circumstances, there may have been a situation where they actually didn't have to do all those chores, but the taboo is strong people, I mean in the US, I don't think people talk about it regularly, maybe the younger generation starts talking about it, I think that is changing, as more and more media does pieces on it, I certainly go to very few dinner parties now where someone hasn't heard something about it, isn't interested to hear what I'm doing, but it's really easy for us in the US because we have toilets, we have supplies, we can buy drugstores, we can get on the internet, go to the library, learn whatever we need to know, when you go to lower income countries or you go to refugee camps or other camps for displaced populations, they may not have access to good information, they may not have easy access to any kind of toilet or a safe or clean toilet or a toilet with a door, they may not have access to water, they may not have anywhere to go at night, they may not be able to get supplies that they need, it's fine to use cloth if that's what you're comfortable using, but maybe they don't even have good cloth, and so I think and then there are taboos, there are taboos around what you eat, about whether or not you can pray in certain places, I've heard taboos around you can't garden during that time, you can't take care of the animals, you can't be in the kitchen, you have to sleep in a separate place, so again it's it's very dependent I think on the cultural context, so there's I think a significant amount of variation, you should bathe, you shouldn't bathe, so I think it's important to always try to understand and learn what the local taboos are, but I think one of the nice things about this growing sort of form of people trying to talk about it in different countries is to say okay what are these taboos and not to denigrate a culture in any way, but to try to sort of tackle those that may be hindering girls and women's abilities to go about their day, and to feel good about their bodies. Did you say you wrote your doctoral dissertation on menstruation? I did, yes. And it was an anthropological study of menstruation? No, I mean I am in public health, so there are certainly anthropologists in my department at Columbia at the Mailman School of Public Health, but I was looking more at what is the intersection of menstruation and girls education. There was very little out there and having grown up always having sort of no challenges around getting to go to a good school and getting to pursue the education that I wanted to pursue, I was concerned about the ongoing sort of gender gap in education around the world and started to look into what are some of the issues that we don't know enough about and we don't understand enough about, and there's a lot out there. We know a lot, we know a lot about why girls miss school, why they don't go to school, why they don't finish school, and their problems with boys too, but I honed in on this one piece that there were, this was back in 2004, but there were references to girls drop out of puberty, girls can't go to school because there aren't toilets, but there was very little actual empirical data on what's actually happening with girls. So that's what I did. I came to Tanzania in 2006 and 2007 to spend a lot of time hanging out with girls and also some time with teachers, parents, religious leaders, trying to understand with my Tanzanian research assistant what was really going on and what was happening around that age in relation to just their own understandings of their body and in relation to sort of their school participation and engagement and ability to manage their periods when they were at school. We are talking to you via Skype. You're in Tanzania. It's pretty amazing that we're able to converse. I'm in Manhattan. There are a hundred tribes in Tanzania. Are you able to see the different taboos among those 100 tribes? Does each tribe have a different taboo when it comes to menstruation? So I think there's actually 120 tribes. I think there's even more than 100, but I haven't tried to study all of them. When I first came, I was focused on one region of the country trying to understand the tribes in that region and we certainly heard what some of the beliefs and traditions were around menstruation. This was in the northeast part of the country. Traditions were, taboos were diminishing. It's a part of the country where there was pretty strong influence from colonialism. Girls' education was already more well respected in that region and so initiation ceremonies and other types of traditions that might have been linked to menstruation were already diminishing. That being said, I certainly asked a lot of questions about other parts of the country and there are some tribal populations such as the Masai who are in both Tanzania and Kenya, the Zeramo, some of the other tribal groups that have much stronger cultural beliefs around menstruation or around menarchy and menarchy being the first time a girl gets her period and what that means in terms of initiation ceremony and expectations for her. Do any of these tribes celebrate the first period? Yes, I think they do. I haven't spent time with a tribe that does but I absolutely heard that in some of the tribes in Tanzania and certainly in other countries that it is still or was at some time celebrated. Sometimes that celebration in some context is linked to the days when girls were expected to be sort of married off or start to have babies at some point after they started menstruating and so it was almost in in some cases not everywhere an indication, a celebration both of her young womanhood but also an indication that she was now becoming ready for sort of that next phase of life. How many understand that it's fertility? I think it's pretty widespread that they understand. I think that I've always sensed that the recognition of menarchy as even something celebrated or hidden was often linked to the knowledge that it is linked to reproduction. Is that because of imperialism that they understand that? Or does it predate? I think predate. I think it's the natural rhythm of life and probably the societies understood that something shifted at that point in time and sort of had ancient traditions around this sort of period of life when both boys and girls bodies are changing, their sort of way of understanding things is changing, their ability to do more things around the house or in the sort of local community is changing. So I'm pretty sure that predates. Whether or not they use the language of reproduction and fertility, you know, there are things about the language we use that are sort of Western but that is sort of I think just the ancient rhythms of life that I think were well understood. And the bleeding, you kind of intimated that that signals power in some cultures. I would assume they see a woman bleeding and not dying and they assume some kind of otherworldly power. Yeah, I think that those aren't societies that I've studied but when you get into reading the anthropology administration and some of the Mary Douglas and some of the other sort of early writers on how menstrual bleeding is considered polluting but also scary and particularly, I think, to men. So probably some of the silencing around it comes from that. But again, I'm not an anthropologist and haven't really spent a lot of time looking at the sort of ancient taboos and beliefs around it because I'm sort of much more focused on how is it hindering girls and women's lives today? What can we be doing to help to overcome and change that? Let's talk about the refugee camps that you visited in Tanzania. They seem to be taking in women from what countries? These particular camps, I've spent time in a number of camps related to the project I wrote about but these are Congolese and Burundian populations who've been going back and forth across the border for I would say a number of years now. But that's who's in those camps. How are they being funded? Is it through the UN? I think different places. There's UN, certainly UNHCR is there. There are bilateral donors and by that I mean sort of some of the big western governments are funding them. Refugee camps are generally the responsibility of the host country government. So in this case it would be the Tanzanian government runs the camps but certainly there is a lot of UN and donor support for running the camps into the various as I mentioned NGOs earlier and non-governmental organizations that are in the camps helping to respond to the refugee's living circumstances. Is this a permanent state for them? There are Palestinians who are living in Lebanon and they call them refugee camps. They've been there since 1967 some of them since 1949. Is this a permanent base for these refugees? I don't think this particular refugee population I mean it certainly doesn't have the length of the Palestinians. People have been the so the Burundians who came to the camp many of them were here a number of years ago when there was turmoil in Burundi and then at some point they went back to Burundi and attempted to rebuild their lives there or you know and then sort of chaos and disruption and violence erupted again and so they fled they had fled and they're still sort of fleeing. It doesn't get into the US papers really but back to these camps and then the Congolese. So some of these camps have been there for probably over a decade but have closed at times reopened at times gotten smaller at times gotten bigger at times they may be more than a decade I'm not sure. The Congolese I think similarly back and forth depending on you know the elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo where they're from there's been violence sort of erupting around those elections that are sort of keeping postponed. So they similarly sort of when times are peaceful I think oftentimes people do try to go home and then violence erupts again and they flee again. So these women in these refugee camps in Tanzania are they living in tents? Are they living in sleeping bags out in the open? How are they housed? So these camps have a sort of range there are I don't know that anybody gets sleeping bags they get blankets. There are many many many tents you certainly see huge numbers of tents and then for the refugees who have been there longer and I don't totally know all the sort of machinations of how this works in the UN system they are building mud house small mud houses. So there are I think it's the population that's been there the longest is starting to get moved into these mud brick houses and then those who are newer are in the tents. What happens if you get your period in the refugee camp? So I would say the resilience of the human spirit is undiminished and they manage but I think it's very difficult. So the toilets again it's important to understand sort of where did these populations come from some came for example the Brindians from a more urban environment and may be used to having latrines or some kind of toilet facilities relatively nearby. Others are coming from rural areas who may have had latrines somewhere in their compound or may have been used to sort of going into the forest or someplace nearby. In the camps in any camps whether it's refugee camps or displacement internally displaced populations in other countries in the Tanzanian camps is one example there are both household sort of what wouldn't call latrine facilities and also communal or shared latrine facilities there when I was there about a year ago or not even a year ago about six months ago in these same camps they were wood structures with sort of this plastic sheeting wrapped around them so they didn't really have a door but you and they're just sort of built behind the houses or built sort of a small number for four households to share. Is there shame associated with bodily functions? I know that we've talked about menstruation but just going to the bathroom is there shame and embarrassment and a need for privacy in these cultures? I mean I think it's the same in most cultures around the world I think just like people in the US they want to be able to go and not be rushed and be private and I think also importantly they want to feel safe if there's no door on the toilet if there's no lock on the inside of the lock of whatever door may be there then you're vulnerable. Are you saying there's a universal need for privacy when it comes to bodily functions because I've read about the Romans who would just sit in public and defecate. I don't know yeah this was in ancient Rome they would go to the marketplace and I haven't been anywhere where that's you know I've done research administration in about six countries and advised on studies in probably another 10. I don't think it's ever come up that people were comfortable managing their periods and probably their other bodily functions in public. That is a universal trait in humans. I would take probably in most cultures it's something that people do privately but I don't know that they necessarily do it individually always. I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Eritrea and East Africa a long time ago and you know just as in the US two women will get up at a restaurant and go to the bathroom together you know people will sometimes go off together to the forest to do their business. And why do they go off together? I think good company you know someone to accompany you. I would say in context such as a displacement camp or refugee camp they may go for safety reasons they may go together. Women would be private about their periods because they're so vulnerable and weak that they're endangered so they'd want a door they want to be alone because men are lurking. Yeah I don't know that they're weak so much I would just say that you can't sort of change whatever cloth if you need to wash if you got blood on your skirt or your clothing it's messy unless it's sort of towards the end of your period in which case it's less messy. So you just need time and you need space to manage it and to not be worried somebody's going to walk in or harass you or sort of catch you in the middle of that when you're squatting or whatever body posture you use to manage. I guess the word weak is wrong but vulnerable and you're not feeling well as I understand it when it's that time of the month you want to lie down and it's not always a pleasant experience as I have seen in my house. Yeah I think again it depends I would say I certainly get cramps and it's pretty uncomfortable for a day or two a month but I and I think there's some women and adolescent girls who have it much worse than I do and may have to stay home from work or school or really lie down for extended periods and then I've certainly met girls and women who tell me I barely feel it. So I think that there really is the range. Many of us are uncomfortable many of us just sort of push through. I think one of the advantages you have in or I certainly know I am fortunate to have is access to pain medications so I can take you know whatever I need to do for the first day or two and go about my day and it may be a little uncomfortable but I'm certainly used to it. Some cultures may not be comfortable with the idea of pain medication it's not something they're familiar to it's not something they feel is appropriate but in other places it may be that they could really use pain medication and it's just not something that's accessible or something that they've been introduced to and that with pain not to say I'm pushing medicine but it certainly enables me to get through a lot of sort of difficult months. So again I think there's a spectrum but many women certainly and adolescent girls are uncomfortable particularly for the first day or the day before the day you know the second day. Well some of the resistance here in the United States to women in the military was how they're going to sit in a foxhole in the middle of the battle when they're getting their period. What is your answer to that? I mean my answer to be how primitive is that? There's resistance to women and also have been in historically all sorts of positions including the presidency because you know who knows what may happen they might get hysterical when they get their period. You know I think that we manage. I think that Gloria Steinem's comment what would the world look like if men could menstruate I think you know girls and women soldier on you know literally or figuratively and they would find a way to manage. So okay that's a vague answer you're talking to a man in his 50s. So more specifically how would they manage in the foxhole? Well yeah I mean there are a lot of men here in America who don't understand menstruation. It is a private thing. It's a bodily function. The cliche is that women are vulnerable when they're menstruating they don't feel well they want to lie down they need my doll their personality this is the stereotype that their personality changes when they're menstruating the same way my personality changes when I stub my toe yeah and I'm in pain. Tell me where I'm right where I'm wrong when I bring up the stereotype. So I think that probably that stereotype is utterly wrong for a lot of women and girls and perhaps a little bit more right for some of them and maybe it's just pieces of that stereotype for different women. I think that certainly for many women it's uncomfortable you have cramps your boobs hurt you know maybe you know you retain sodium so you feel thirsty you know your stomach doesn't feel right so certainly there's a lot of physical discomfort again wide range depending on the adolescent girl or woman and I keep saying adolescent girl because at least I think they get forgotten a lot as sort of a very you know big part of the population that's menstruating and often are struggling to sort of learn how to manage it. You use a tampon you use a pad you use a cup some women are on sort of fertility sort of family planning that sort of regulates their cycle it's predictable it may lessen the cramps or the amount of bleeding. So certainly I and then in terms of your mood I would say the vast majority of my co-workers or family members have absolutely no idea when I have my period and I'd say that's probably the case for most adolescent girls and women. Maybe I sometimes feel a little emotional once a month and you know and maybe I'll share the reason that I think I am or am not I do think all of that is very real you know we each noticed rhythms in our body whether anybody else has any idea what's actually happening I'm less certain that they really do I think women and girls are masterful at hiding it in societies around the world. I think one of the things that is really nice about the sort of the the outpouring of sort of new media and entrepreneurs and advocates out there talking about it is this realization that a lot of us have been doing the same thing to hide it and manage it you know we you know maybe we don't wear white on those days of the month so we don't have to worry you know if we have some kind of leak or accident that anybody's going to know we you know track it on a calendar so we can be ready and be carrying things although another thing for men to know is that it can be really irregular and some girls and women get it like clockwork and other skip months and others you know it's not something like on the 28th of every month that's when you get it you know it's very well what is there such thing as sink sisters I've heard about this you know I don't know what the science is I will say there are times in my life when I've spent a lot of time with women and we seem to start menstruating around the same time but I don't know the science and I don't know if there's anything to that and what do these women need from the United States are we providing enough the Trump administration has a new budget you write about yeah they have a new budget they want to give an extra 50 billion dollars to the Pentagon we have enough money to bomb Yemen and yet two thirds of that country is facing famine what is the Trump administration doing about all this you know it remains to be seen certainly it doesn't look very well look very good the funding that traditionally would go to organizations such as UNFPA and some of the other UN organizations that are a huge part of a response to assuring that girls and women's reproductive health needs menstrual hygiene needs whatever they are are being met whether it's in displacement camps refugee settings or just other low-income contexts it suggests they're going to cut the budget for public health across America and funding that goes to both science and refugee response around the world and all of these have huge implications for meeting girls and women's needs whether they are in such contexts or whether they're in living in a rural part of for example Tanzania and looking to some kind of development project that is going to assure that there are adequate toilets in that school or support a government that is trying to do a better job at assuring that the curriculum includes content that they need so they know about their bodies they feel empowered and have sort of strong self-esteem around how to manage their period and sort of their future fertility if they so choose yeah one of my daughters said to me and I just find this hard to accept as a man but I accept it is that you cannot address economic inequality until you address pro-choice issues a woman's right to an abortion has to be established before you can then venture into the realm of income inequality that was hard for me to understand when my daughter told me that I'm taking from what my daughter said menstruation and the problem women face as refugees is a serious issue that might have to be addressed before we get to the larger issues right it's a basic yeah I think it's a basic need and I think one of the things we come up against is people suggesting you know it's not a life-saving issue it's they're not dying of their periods but some of us would suggest how do you go stand in line to pick up your distribution in a in a displacement camp if you have to wait online for four to six hours to get your supply for that month how do you walk whatever distance you need to walk to fetch water for your family how do you go find firewood how do you just interact socially with those around you or sit in a classroom for eight hours a day or teach in front of a classroom of young people if you if you don't have access to safe clean toilets if you don't have some kind of supply whether that's a cloth or a pad or whatever it is that culturally and sort of and economically is you know your choice or available and if you don't have the information you need about your body I think some of the areas we need to learn more about there's been a real groundswell and attention to what are the challenges girls are facing in schools in low-income countries and the female teachers we spent a lot less time looking at how are girls and women managing and workplace environments how are they managing to go about their day in marketplaces in in factories in business offices how are they taking buses and transiting I think ultimately girls and women are incredibly resilient and strong and they find ways to manage and they use extra extra cloths and they wrap things around their waist so if they have an accident nobody sees I don't want in any way to suggest they're not out there doing their best but it's inequitable you know I don't know the difference between a panty shield a Tampax or a Kotex I don't I you know I just don't most men I think don't I would assume that third world nations don't have Kotex machines and Tampax machines in every restroom what do they use you say cloth well just to clear the record we don't have them in the U.S. either in every restroom most of our restrooms don't have them either so you have to have a supply with you or you have to be somewhere near a drugstore which fortunately if you're living in the U.S. there is often some kind of drugstore convenience store where you can go hasn't there been talk of free Kotex yeah but in terms of low-income countries generally people use pads disposable pads like you know the ones with wings on them you know a panty liner just you know is for lighter days when you don't have a lot of blood coming out a regular pad it comes in different sizes is better for the first few days and a lot of women use disposable pads in low-income countries if they can afford them or they use homemade pads reuse there's now a whole booming industry of reusable pads in many cultures they've traditionally just folded over cloth and found ways to hold that in place so that they can sort of go about their business and then if they can't afford cloth or don't have that sometimes they just use paper it starts to go down or or they stay home and then there's societies of which I know much less about that don't use anything and just bleed and stay close to home and what did they do three thousand years ago I have no idea but I think it depends on where you're talking about my guess it yeah right we've been talking with dr. Marnie summer she's an associate professor of socio-medical sciences at columbia university medical center and she's in tanzania today before you go and by the way thank you for taking time to be with me looking at the republicans there seems to be carelessness and conscious subjugation of women there's there's one part of these republicans in washington who are consciously subjugating women and then there's the republican who innocently doesn't care they just I don't know anything about fertility and menstruation what do you want from me how much of the menstruation problem women face in third world nations is because men just don't care because it doesn't involve them as glorious steinham said and how much of it is a conscious subjugation where they're aware that by making it hard for women to tend to their menstruation it weakens them and keeps men on top you know I don't know how I would split that I'm not sure that many people frankly think about menstruation I think that probably there's a lot more the men who act intentionally I think get that more of the reproduction issue and baby making issue I think most men honestly just haven't thought about it they don't menstruate they don't know what it feels like I think one of the reasons even amongst the community that has been trying to do something about this issue a lot of the engineers who work on toilets in a lot of these contexts are men and just frankly didn't think about it it's not something they'd experience it's not something they're familiar with I do think that the fact that women's bodily needs and adolescent girls by the needs are deemed less of a priority are deemed unimportant and in fact are deemed something that can be pushed back on or not supported obviously is hugely problematic but whether any of them have really thought about how their actions are impacting sort of a girls or women's ability to manage her period I'm guessing is highly doubtful so what can we do to help I think you can help to break the taboo you can talk about it you can help at least in the in the countries where you live and work to make it something that is acceptable to have conversations around support those organizations push back on governments that aren't providing adequate toilets water and information to the girls and women in their societies and and and even in the high income countries I think there's a growing realization that homeless girls and women others may not have the supplies that they need either and sort of girls and women or women in prisons so I think that finally there's it's something coming out of the closet as it were and it should never have been in the closet natural normal part of half the world's sort of all the girls and women out there of reproductive age that we're all experiencing right are there any charities specifically that you think are worthy yeah I mean UNICEF has been doing a lot water aid in the UK has been focused on sort of strengthening toilets saves that children is doing a lot I have a little nonprofit called grow and know we've been developing puberty books that include content on menstrual hygiene administration for girls and for boys how can people find out about growing though www.growandknow.org it's publishing books for girls about girls and boys we do careful data we work with girls and boys in different countries we work with the national governments and we come we collect girls stories about their first periods and how they manage and we come up with a book with local illustrators local publishing companies and then we sort of work with the government to get approval so it can be distributed in schools and then recognizing that nobody at all talks to boys some people talk to girls but nobody's talking to boys about wet dreams erections and girls periods you just tell them to listen to this show because that's all we talk about our wet dreams erections women's periods but I was a kid we used to trick or treat for UNICEF yeah that's a UN organization are they a good organization yeah they're a good organization they Columbia University where I am and UNICEF for the last five years have been hosting a virtual conference on addressing the issue of menstruation in schools and they really have been leaders in trying to push countries around the world to work with their local the national governments to at least try and address the issue in schools and it was something that UNICEF was responding to in the refugee camps in Tanzania as well fantastic Dr. Marnie Summers an associate professor of socio-medical sciences at Columbia University Medical Center she joined us today from Tanzania thank you so much for your work and your time thank you for having me you're listening to the David Feldman radio program you sad pathetic hump joining us as our resident film critic Michael Snyder these are the movies he's going to be talking about today pirates of the Caribbean dead men tell no tales Baywatch war machine Berlin syndrome long strange trip and the journey hey Johnny Depp is broke he requires two million dollars a month to live on even after he's paid off Amber heard he still needs two million dollars a month to live on you and I can live on half of that well hell I can live on you know what a hundred dollars a month if I'm crafty enough well was pirates of the Caribbean dead men tell no tales crafty for you oh my god this is a franchise that may very well have worn out it's wacky welcome I guess it's the fifth movie of these pirates of the Caribbean films and you know even though it's subtitled dead men tell no tales Johnny Depp's career is a dead man walking and it told this tale and maybe it's just that you know we're a little burned out on him this has been his cash cow the little films he's been making the indie stuff or the bar and stuff hasn't really registered and there's something about this fey indolin indestructible captain jack character that seems to keep the the the series rolling um you know this movie again this is a franchise based on a disney land ride it's it's the victim of the law of diminishing returns and and how many have they done this is the fifth the fifth film it's unbelievable and honestly the truth is this is one of that boy talk about damning with faint praise this is one of the better installments in the franchise but the bar is pretty low um you know I mean the first film was a surprise and very entertaining but they got more and more tedious and loaded with special effects and I mean when the series started Depp's drunken the diffident captain jack was pretty hilarious yeah I mean the idea of him inadvertently against his you know own better judgment or skills somehow surviving against like supernatural foes and and other pirates the guy that was kind of funny he stumbles the success in sword fights he survives ocean squalls he goes up against you know sorceress magic fueled enemies and there was this kind of because of the falling over and stuff and and his inebriation kind of a silent film slapstick charm to it um that reminded me a little of you know Keaton and Lloyd and maybe I'm giving Depp too much credit I mean he made me think of Jackie Chan's drunken master movies because that's another case where an actor basically fakes being allowed and you know and incompetent but somehow survives but I think that Depp is increasingly on autopilot in the series I know he's grateful that the money's coming in because of what you said but let's just say that he's navigating without a sextant he's almost an afterthought in the film to be honest with you the new one the thrust of it is this young guy trying to save his father and his father is the Orlando Bloom character of Will Turner from earlier in the series who has been eternally doomed to pilot the flying Dutchman ghost ship so the kid grows up and wants to save his dad and the only way he can do that is to find a mystical relic Neptune's Trident and so the only way you can do that is to find Captain Jack and and also maybe connect with this very smart and beautiful young woman and because she's a smart beautiful young woman back in these uh primitive times she's accused of being a witch of course in any event they go on this treasure hunt and they encounter uh an opposition in the form of Javier Bardem who was one of the best things about the movie um he's the ghostly villain Salazar who also wants to try it and so he he can become whole and human and alive again plus Jeffrey Rush and Oscar winner is back as Captain Barbosa who was kind of a more nuanced antagonist from earlier in the series so you got these veteran actors and the young leads uh Brenton Thwait and Kaius Goldario uh the skulls skull delario so I don't know anyway that you can't pronounce her name but she's incredibly likable and you got some good set pieces uh some of them are CGI and some of them are practical but maybe there's just too too many of these and um I think there's been four too many of the films um you know the film ends and it could be wrapping up the series in a nice little bow and then an end credit sequence hints that we're not done with the films nor with Jack Sparrow quite yet I don't know I don't know they're Disney property and you know I I don't think they're gonna kill the golden goose or the cash cow or whatever you want to call it something I don't want to watch time to talk about Baywatch yay or nay watch Michael Snell nay watch I mean I never watched nor did I ever care to original and seemingly ridiculous TV series Baywatch I mean this was a phenomena of the 90s I think it started in 89 or 88 and in international markets this TV program which was I don't know with crime fighting lifeguards living in an idealized sunny California I don't know how else to describe it this show turned David Hasselhoff and Pamela Anderson into stars and Hasselhoff became like gigantic in some markets particularly as we all now know Germany Germans love David Hasselhoff who was it who used to say that uh Norm McDonald he used to use that as a as a quip now and again on SNL but it's true and Hasselhoff played this lifeguard named Mitch Buchanan who led these busty and beautiful babes and a couple of guys in the lifeguard crew in all these various adventures so why do you want to remake a or make a movie based on this uh idiocy well tell you why because Hollywood has no uh comfort with original ideas and uh there's the old proof of concept this thing was successful back in the day it's kind of like why they made the Adams family movies you know based on a TV show that was based on a cartoon those films were clever because the people involved were smart and the scripts were good and the actors were good this on the other hand and not so much I get there's a camp and the nostalgia stuff and and they take a guy who has somehow continued to be great box office in most of the films he's done unlike uh Johnny Depp and they put this guy in the lead and it's Dwayne The Rock Johnson so he's everybody everybody's favorite and he's everywhere lately and so they decide they're going to make an action comedy based on the tv series emphasis on the comedy unfortunately none of it is any good Dwayne Johnson is Mitch Buchanan and he uncovers a criminal plot that threatens the future of the bay that they're watching I guess anyway you'll also get Zac Efron uh back he was pretty boy a good actress and a lovely woman Priyanka Chopra uh Alexandra Dadario a young actress of a limited skill but easy on the eyes and a few other uh appropriate uh choices and supporting roles but man is this unfunny and is this feeble uh you will choke over the low braille jokes as the Baywatch gang and including of course a few hotties that seem more like Hooters waitresses in red one-piece bathing suits than actual lifeguards I mean if they were serving me drinks on the beach I might take interest but anyway they seek new recruits including a disgraced alcoholic Olympic swimming champ played by Zac Efron and there's a chubby tech nerd who needs an inner tube or a life jacket in the kiddie pool but they need comic relief from all of this non-comedy and um you know so they have this chubby guy they they let him become a lifeguard it is sheer idiocy um you know you'll shudder at the stupid I mean Mitch and his crew go after yet another hottie this one is a sneering designer cloth real estate magnate and a drug dealer played by Priyanka Chopra uh and you got Johnson doing his usual shtick without any of the charm he sometimes displays uh how shall I put this here the rock does not roll um I felt like I was stuck between a rock and a dumb film anyway Baywatch uh don't watch is that it is that the easiest blurb we can give you mm-hmm war machine well this is a different uh kennel of fish entirely it's going for laughs in large part and it is a movie with a pretty good pedigree uh terrific cast an interesting bit of source material and is available for you to watch on netflix or you can go see it in the theater and it's not bad but it's not anywhere near as great and as interesting as I hoped it would be it's directed and written by David Michaud and it's based on a book called the operator the wild and terrifying inside story of america's war in afghanistan by uh michael hastings and what it does is it follows an arrogant uh you know and uh modern but kind of old school general played by brad pit and by the way brad pit excels in these sort of ambivalent anti-heroic lunatic characters uh and follows him as he's brought in um as the obama administration attempts to withdraw troops from afghanistan and yet continue to beat back the taliban and win the hearts and minds of the afghani citizenry uh so he's uh he's accompanied by a crew of of aides and uh fellow soldiers one of whom is anthony michael hall who's almost like a body guard type and boy he has become a burly chunk uh in his old age from saturday night live anthony michael anthony yeah from that from the breakfast club when he was a skinny little kind of archie andrews type yeah man same guy easily big thuggish fellow now and and you say like beefing up working out lifting weights yeah but he's beyond beef he's gone beyond the beef where's the beef well it's right there on anthony michael hall's body uh but it you have to pay a royalty net of clara paler's grandchildren for oh i'm sorry about that where's the beef well you also get ben kingsley who's here as karzai which is you know the kind of very funny droll performance on his part uh tofer grace plays basically um a media guy brought in to spiff up whatever news reports are coming up about general glenn mcman and his attempt to take over this afghani theater of war for the combined allied forces that are there you have all of the uh the interplay and the uh the the friction between the various countries that have banded together to help america task of bringing freedom to the afghanis um alan ruck plays one of the civilian you know meddlers that the government has sent in but ultimately it's brad pit um who is you know he makes the movie fail or succeed and i kind of enjoyed it but it just seemed like it started to sag in the middle and it wasn't anywhere near as funny as i wanted to uh have coming from the talent involved and you know it's interesting to see these guys and you know there's some really wonderful you know true to life escapades you know the soldiers are not always under fire and you see them uh you know between skirmishes you see them at camp you see them out in the field and i kind of wish it was a sharper satire or something and but you do get a good sense of what modern warfare is like and ye you know i mean it's dysfunctional when you think about it but um it's also uh really amazing to see something like this that is the antithesis of those classic war movies the saving private ryan's and and even movies from way earlier in hollywood history i enjoyed it i just wish it had been better it has good intentions but it just wasn't sharp enough and funny enough when you see a film like wag the dog about the political aspects of uh of the war machine not to use that phrase uh you know in a well advised way that to me is a piece of brilliance i hope that this would be as sharp and as topical as that and it is somewhat topical particularly as we face this idiocy uh on the governmental level these days but i i it just wasn't what i hoped it would be burlin syndrome um this is actually the best film of the films we've discussed so far and it's the movie you're least likely to see in your local theaters and and the movie probably you wouldn't necessarily jump to see on the other hand i thought it was really terrific i believe the director kate shortland is in australian her lead actress is uh teresa palmer and teresa palmer is a generally a young blonde who's in teen exploitation films or was or plays the you know the hot young college girl or the the female lead in some sort of young romance and she's frequently performed with an american accent and you wouldn't know that she's from down under but here she plays a real australian girl kind of a salt of the earth girl who's decided she's going to pursue her photography instead of a dead-end job back home and she's going to see the world so she takes off for a visit to berlin which is one of the great and most uh you know exciting capitals in all the world and certainly in europe and there she meets a local guy who was a teacher of english a german guy who teaches english in berlin and he kind of takes up with her and she takes up with him and it seems kind of cool and romantic and she's taking her photographs and then you find out that there's something very very sinister about the guy you know they connect and they have sex but things get very very ugly and very disturbing it's a thriller berlin syndrome doesn't do what you expect it's going to do with the very beginning but there are little clues that things aren't what they should be and i don't know if you've ever seen the movie the collector that starred samantha agar as a woman who was basically kidnapped by a guy who's obsessed with her and locked up and it's based on a book by uh john fowles who also wrote the french lieutenant's woman and this movie berlin syndrome is kind of a modern equivalent to the collector uh you know if if you if you want to be creeped out you need you know a good villain and max uh remelt who is a german actor who i haven't seen before i don't believe is first rate as andy this guy that uh that claire the Aussie photographer girl falls in with and man uh it is a creep show i thought it was exciting and tense and uh entirely plausible i mean berlin is such a big sprawling metropolis and all this building is going on there so there are all these nooks and crannies since the wall came down there's massive real estate development so various neighborhoods are you know kind of almost deserted or in the process of being rebuilt so it's kind of easy i think uh to lose somebody in this massive urban maze i thought that berlin syndrome was a terrific surprise and i think people should seek it out even if they only end up seeking it out on streaming it's a disturbing well done and clearly teresa palmer's best performance so far she actually her hair is dark in this uh brunette and she made me think uh if christian steward was an actress to to really conjure and she's done some good work lately this is she's like christian steward slightly more attractive sister and maybe slightly better actress long strange trip well this is the untold story of the grateful dead or that at least is the subtitle of the um movie's title and it's the most enormous and impressive and prodigious rock documentary about a band that's probably ever been made um how prodigious it's 239 minutes long and it was picked up for a distribution uh and availability online by amazon so i think you can probably pay to see it that way but i would recommend if you're a fan of the grateful dead the san francisco based progressive rock band that turned into a worldwide phenomenon with you know thousands of millions of dead heads um crazily devoted fans if you like this stuff seeing it in a movie theater with a big big sound system might be the way to go now um despite its length and all of its copious detail there are some kind of holes in the story and people that are sort of not given the attention you might see and that's it you know over 200 minutes worth of footage and archival footage and concert footage i think that's probably never been seen before interviews stills great historical detail about the band and how they came together uh keying on uh their lead guitarist their virtuoso lead guitarist and uh one of the band's two primary singers jerry garcia now sadly departed and then we also learned the kind of the why and the how of that as well um and we see a parade of their fans and we see talking head vignettes of people that you'll know famous and otherwise that speak about uh the band and what the band meant to them this was executive produced by martin scorsese and it was also also it was directed by amir barlev who directed the tilman story which is a pretty great documentary about spencer tilman and it shows you what can happen on a grassroots level if someone has talent and determination and never stops performing and creating um this is kind of an impressive saga and it'll definitely be of interest to their fans and i think if people are curious and have a love of adventurous music and patience uh this has really uh got a lot of uh gems and uh it's a worthwhile experience but you have to be a fan of uh popular music i think and and this is you know this is a very unique and specific sound one that spawned something called the the jam band scene which includes groups like fish but these guys are the granddaddies of that and uh you really are immersed in the grateful dead over the course of this thing and this is a group that this is a 30 year stretch that these guys have been around and kicking and uh you know a few of the guys are still alive and performing but uh obviously garcy is dead but you can relive some of his great moments and and the tragedy of his life over the course of this film again long strange trip which is actually the excerpt lyric from one of their more famous songs by the way before we get to the journey comedian michael mehan has a movie that came out do you know that i heard that that was the case i have not seen it nor have i been invited to check it out nor do i know anything about it but uh mike mehan is a very talented band and uh you know uh mazel tov have you seen the film no i read a great review of it and i contacted him so i'm trying to get him to come on the show the journey what's what's it what's it about before we get to the journey do you know it's about san francisco and it's a i guess it's a film noir the stars a lot of comics including levels brown and oh and kevin me oh how nice well there you go tell me you know i i can't tell you much about the journey i just wanted to bring it up because i noticed an interesting thing about it it doesn't open in the united united states for another couple weeks and it's basically a fictional account of what may or may not have happened when two guys on either side of the irish peace process uh the democratic unionist party leader a guy named ian paisley who was also a reverend and the shin fine politician martin mcginnis if they took a car ride during the middle of the peace talks what might have happened in that car ride they had never really met before in real life and i think they do take a short journey together or did in in the past but no one knows what went down as they traveled together and had to interact on a personal level for the first time this was a very major turning point in world politics when the troubles if you will well the horrible conflict between the protestants and catholics over the uh government purview of the british in northern ireland when that came to a head uh in the early 2000s or the mid to mid 2000s uh this thing you know is all i will tell you is that i love the film and timothy spaul as paisley and colmeny as mcginnis are absolutely great and there's terrific supporting work on freddy heimore and but now late john hurt probably one of the last films he did but in ireland the reviews were less than kind elsewhere where it has been reviewed it's been getting very positive notices and i wanted to bring that up because i i think there's a kind of a cultural and and national imperative in a situation like this when something is so close to home and so much of a tragedy and so deeply ingrained in a culture i think it's hard to look at it with uh you know uh eyes that aren't going to be affected by the prejudice one has built up over the years so it's it's amazing to note that the irish reviews have been sort of negative uh or um output you know these people have not been pleased with it i know one uk reviewer thought that the movie was misguided to dramatize the meeting um i on the other hand thought it was pretty good and we'll talk about it at greater length but it just struck me as interesting noticing the disparity between the irish and uk reviews and everywhere else that people have reviewed it so far again it doesn't open for another couple weeks in the states so i would just as soon uh restrain myself from any more discussion other than say two fantastic actors at the height of their powers before you go let's turn to sports i know you're a big 49ers fan tell me about colin cappernick well they let colin cappernick go and as anyone who pays any attention to the news probably noticed over the past years there's been a lot of controversy over the 49ers at that point long time quarterback colin cappernick um he is uh half black half white he's got a big old afro uh and he has taken a political stance over the past year or so to support such groups as black lives matter to point out the racism that's still inherent in this country and uh he initially brought attention to it by kneeling during the national anthem during exhibition games and eventually even regular season games over the past season infuriating this caught on the other school teams were doing it other players did and support players on rival teams where there was bad blood between the 49ers and the rival team members of the seahawks the 49ers arch enemies in the national football conference western division supported cappernick in this and uh and the patriots including the bonehead who's currently in the oval office railed against him and the far right and the middle right railed against him and anyone who fancied themselves they blitheringly uh you know chauvinistic patriotic type here in america thought that it was sinful to disrespect the national anthem as opposed to embracing the freedom of speech and freedom of expression that allows us to essentially protest things in our own country to oppose certain ideas to to question things on the authoritarian level and but people went crazy and actually i was surprised by the number of people who didn't go crazy i am surprised by the number of fellow teammates and as you said members of the nfl who joined him and how it's spread well that is that was heartening in a way i love america you know i am an american born in bread i believe in our system i believe in the country i at least i try to considering what's been happening lately um but the truth of it is that um i don't take any um i i don't think that standing for the anthem or singing along denotes any great patriotism uh you know uh it's what you do with your life and how you treat your fellow american and and fellow human being that is the true judge you know judge of your character so i found that really disingenuous for all these winers and haters people who truly um who truly are the sort of folks that that cavernic is protesting against all those guys were yelling how disrespectful it was and uh i mean the supreme court didn't they already throw out the the flag burning as a as a felony or whatever it was you know so i think kneeling during the the uh national anthem or refusing to sing the national anthem that's peanuts man so anyway the reason it's fresh in my mind at the moment is i just uh encountered this interesting piece of information john mara and by the way it does have a connection to um movies and tv and show business john mara who basically is the owner uh and i believe the son maybe the grandson of wellington mara longtime new york football giants owner operator john maras says he would not even think of signing the currently out of the league colin cavernic who by the way against statistically had a good season uh in the previous national football league season uh and can't get a job and roger gudell who was the head of the nfl has said this is due to um football issues not political issues well john mara just came out and said he would not sign the guy uh before he even considered it he got letter after letter from season ticket holders and fans saying that they would jump ship on the giants if he would ever uh sign this vile traitorous colin cavernic to a football contract in the coming season and um i just was sort of dumbstruck about this oddly enough the only team that has been sniffing around the guy right now the seattle seahawks the 49ers longtime rivals who have a quarterback who plays a style similar to cavernic and people have long compared russell wilson and cavernic particularly uh when the two of them were the quarterbacks in uh one first cavernic and then wilson in super bowls uh a few years back and of course wilson won his super bowl cavernic did not and their their careers diverged but i find it amazing that mara has gone on record now to say oh no our fans uh would not like this so i would not even think of doing this this is blind patriotic bowl makes me crazy and i will just say the john mara is i believe the father of actress kate mara and her sister actress rooney mara who are also the grandchildren of longtime pittsburgh steelers owner art rooney and then the rooney family so there's a weird connection here and by the way kate mara in a very interesting middle eastern war zone film coming up soon that we will review at some point okay but you know she's good but i mean wow we gotta wrap it i mean wow all i'm saying is wow what do you do about something yeah well i think 30 years from now colin cavernic will look back and be proud of what he did as long as he no longer plays football because if he continues to play football he won't remember what he did you've been you've been sitting and waiting to say yes i have been an avenue and i stumbled through i'm sorry i'm sorry we're up against up against the clock here michael sniders our resident film critic we'll talk to you next week thank you sir yep this is the david feldman radio network you're listening to the david feldman radio program you said pathetic hump john ross is back he joins us from deerfield massachusetts john is an amazing comedian he's been on conan he's an amazing comedy writer he's written on lucky louie he created marvin marvin you're in a truck in the rain i'm sitting outside my house in in a truck because the house is full people and kids and you know not good for for a podcast i love the sound of the rain hitting the truck oh great usually you're very sensitive i i listen to your podcast all the time and you're very sensitive about sounds and you know anything that's not exactly what you want or what a tour really we started together yeah we did in the 1980s and we had frets stoller on the show who's written a new book five minutes to kill about the 1989 young comedian special featuring warren thomas who you used to live with he's mentioned prominently i i helped uh friend a lot with that i mean he we had long conversations on the phone and long emails back and forth i got warren started he had never done stand-up comedy um and he i was bartending at a discotheque that's right uh it is silk and you were wearing a comedy button you were wearing a comedy button i had gone to the very first comedy day in the park and they were giving out buttons and i think i got a button from like jimmy celeste and i wore the button on my you know shirt that night and and this place was just uh a zoo this this you know you you just pour and drink and pour and drink so nobody's like hanging but this one guy comes up to me and he sees the button and he says you like comedy and i go yeah you know um i actually you know did it in the city and so he he walked away and came back and uh over the course of the night we started talking and um he actually at the end of the night you know because this place was open after hours and it's like four in the morning and he and he was coming back every time and making me laugh telling me stories about how some girl slapped his face or some guy was about to kick his ass because he was dancing with his girlfriend or something he was just being really funny and so then he come i'm cleaning up my bar the lights are coming on it's four in the morning he comes over to me and he says hey um you know you like baseball and i go yeah because you want to go see a game at candlestick they're they're playing tomorrow and i was like dying to go and at that point i hadn't done anything i thought it was only like going out at night you know what i mean like the comedians were like vampires we never got together during the day or anything and so uh he goes you want to go see game i go yeah all that that would be great so he takes a math book and he he writes in it and he hands it to me and i open it up and i look at it and it says warren five two seven seven seven two four your new negro friend and and i i just like i bust out like laughing and i and i look at him and he's just got that giant smile that impish kind of just teeth all the way and he's just kind of like laughing and and then we went to and i picked him up at his mom's house in albany and we went to the game and like from the minute i picked him up he had me in stitches and i remember we're like waiting in line to get in the candlestick park and you know we're in the car and like to park and we're sitting there and we're laughing and we're talking and so we're sort of distracted so when we pull up to the parking attendant like we don't have our money ready so we're like oh and like i'm like trying to fish around in my pocket and warren's kind of like fishing around in his pocket and it's taking like a while and and more just like leans across me out you know to the windows of the parking attendant goes we're going to hold a fundraising dinner and we'll get back to you and i'm like oh my god this is guys hilarious so then we get into the park and then he starts like doing this bit which he must have done before he couldn't have been completely improvising it but he was sort of improvising it where he was doing he called it the national inquirer play-by-play where he would go as a sharp ground ball the Juan Jury Bay who was picking his wife last night he goes and there's the throw to you know oh scoops nicely by Will Clark who was picking up a 15-year-old and he's just all this kind of lascivious you know stuff mixed in with like play-by-play and it was like seamless and hilarious and i'm just like oh my god this guy did like a genius and so that night uh we went back i went back to his house and i'm sitting around with him and his brother and i said oh my god you've got to do stand up like you've got to be you know go to the clubs and do an open mic and it's really interesting what he said he said i know i i couldn't i i wouldn't know who to be hmm and i will i what do you mean you wouldn't know who to be and he's like i mean what i like would i be rickles or would i be you know and he and i kind of get that because he didn't fit any of the molds you know like he wasn't like a typical black comedian like that's what was kind of even at that point jeff jen hadn't even really started but there still was that kind of like he wasn't prior you know what i mean he wasn't going to talk about you know black versus white he was he was going to just he was so himself he was just himself but he didn't know what that meant quite um and i said look don't worry about that and he was just i can't i can't i can't i said tell you what come with me i'm you know performing tomorrow night or i'm signing up tomorrow night at the holy city zoo and and watch the other people who go on stage and i promise you you're gonna say to yourself look i may suck i may be awful but i'm not gonna be a man as you know and i don't want to name all the names that you know the names i'm talking about you're talking to one of them right now well no i mean there were some people you remember all right so go ahead go go go on and so if it's exactly what happened i mean he watched and he went oh my god you know and so he went up you know the next night and then that was it and you know were you there took off yeah sure was he nervous and yeah i think so i think you know everybody's a little bit nervous but you know he was he's charming he's on like he was unbelievably so the first place he went up was the holy city zoo far as i know yes and what year was this this guy 80 it's either very late 81 yeah that's what i would figure yeah very late 81 and so yeah that that would be about when it was and when did when did when did you move in together that was later i i had when i first i lived in oakland um when i first moved there and that was craziness and then i moved in with warren spotwood oh my god yeah but that was there was another genius warren spotswood yeah right he was a big influence on me he he started taking lsb with him and um that sort of like broke my mind open um and i lived with warren and his wife and their crazy dog and if you remember that english bull terrier and then oh well no no no the wonder dog yeah max max well max well the wonder dog yeah max well the wonder dog warren spotswood used to host a show at cops and he would bring up acts with max well the wonder dog this predated well maybe letterman was dropping tv's from the balcony but max well the wonder dog in between acts would destroy things yeah he was remember the uh the first honda civics that came over uh they were really tiny i don't know if you remember the first honda civics it was like the first kind of compact car they were really small and they had these little tiny donut tires i thought that dog bite and pop a car tire it was unbelievable you know what warren spotswood told me you know what warren spotswood told me that the dog would start to shiver whenever he was walking him by cops that the dog associated stage fright with cops because he performed there when when they drove by cops max well would start barking and then start shivering like a nervous performer what kind of dog was max well english bull terrier the same kind of uh dog that paten had those spuds mckenzie same english bull terrier but he was a sweet he was a sweet dog who just liked to destroy things he was a sweet dog with people i think you had to keep him away from other dogs and he liked like an empty plastic milk carton would make him berserk he would bite it he would he would like try to bite it and it would shoot away from him and it would like squirt down the street and then finally he would like get some purchase on it he would get one paw on it and then a tooth would go in and then it would be like he'd just like plastic would be like you know ripping up like a cartoon and his mouth would get bloody because the you know the piece of the plastic would go into his gums and stuff and it would just be like a bloody mess and it was it was ferocious it was so ferocious now warren spotsford was older than we were he had a previous life as a trombone player in a your mother's mustache your father's mustache oh yeah and they appeared on the at selvon show so he had an entire background in show business that had nothing to do with stand-up he was also the most literate of us yeah yeah from alabama was he from alabama he's somewhere down south he definitely had that you know southern drawl and you know those guys yeah it sound like almost slightly gay you know that kind of like a dandy um but he was um quite the the ladies man i remember you know you used to sound gay whenever you did this and that's the sound of a penis in my mouth is that no a candidate just you eating a fancy canapé at a cocktail party he had a big influence on a whitney brown one spot i believe so and lsd but also lsd uh tell me about lsd because i've never done lsd and i tell people not to do lsd but some people say it has some kind of curative effect and mind altering effect oh it was it does have the mind altering effect and you know they're using it now in like with um terminal patients you know who are having problems um facing death and it apparently works uh amazingly well for that um because they want to die no because they just you know it they see kind of through to the other side and have this acceptance and there's this sort of you do have these moments of feeling like oh i get it all i get you know things that you understand intellectually like that everything is interconnected and all these things you suddenly like really see it and feel it and you think you're going to bring it back to you know your quote you know normal time and and then when it wears off it's kind of like you can't quite touch that feeling again but you did have it and there's it changes you somehow it's almost like i felt like you only have to do it once kind of like the first it's never is the first time you do it it's sort of the most sort of mind blowing and then it's a little bit diminished the next time you do it and a little bit diminished um and certainly it's almost like your brain needs to reset i found like if you tried to do it you know a week after you did it the last time it was not nearly but if you waited six months or a year and did it again it was a more powerful exposure neurotic um exposure neurotic and paranoid you know i i think i'm fairly neurotic and fairly paranoid i mean i don't know lsd was also a long especially the first time i did it it lasted it seemed you know the trip was almost 12 hours and then there was this kind of afterglow but there was a bunch of material that i did early on that came out of that first like i tripped and then the next place to be a substitute school teacher remember and i went in the next day and i you know it was the next day i thought i was fine but i was still you know kind of um in a somewhat altered state and then i did a bit about you know teaching on lsd that i did for a long time i don't even remember it now but it was a funny big part of my my hack it was really crazy um i don't know but it was it was it was a big commitment to do the lsd i only did it so many times mushrooms i felt a little better about because they're natural and like the high wasn't quite as intense and it didn't last so long i got um prevented was a guy who had never done anything like he didn't drink he didn't do anything and then he suddenly wanted to experiment and um i did mushrooms with him and i think that was like the beginning of him like going crazy not not crazy but like really starting to do a lot of different stuff um so yeah so i you know i remember cobs but i remember a guy named frank prinsie used to say to me oh where's frank let's send out the fast thing i would love to talk to frank i'd searched for him in so many ways facebook and everything he disappeared we were friends in san francisco then in la and then he left he went back to buffalo and i've just never been able to you know i would just love to say hi this is what i remember this is what i remember yeah early 80s ross is tending bar at cobs the show would be over at cobs the doors would be locked and you were tending bar and by tending bar you were just giving everybody free drinks do i remember correctly that there were a couple of nights a week where it was announced that ross was tending bar at cobs and all the alcoholics would run down there and get wasted i mean i just had bar but i was i was a conscientious bartender i i only gave you know drinks to anybody that ron kikiki wanted me to give drinks to i wasn't sneaking anything um to anybody i don't think i mean you own the place it was like you owned the place you would go behind the bar and just yeah pouring it was yeah now it was it was just we were big fish in a small pond the fact that you know you just walk in and walk behind the bar and take a beer and go hey uh you know i want to go on next like pump whoever's next and put me on you know and they and they would you know it was um it was magic warren thomas so yeah so then he you know and then then he and i started doing this thing like he was a little bit of a bad influence on me in a way because you know we started doing this thing where we started making fun of other comedians using their act you know what i'm talking about i remember like you remember that and it was like and and i was good at it because it was like it was almost like a sandy van sandy van is walking to the mound and she's saying throw this picture out throw this picture out right like a gray one like remember barry sobo used to do this bit about um jesus you know uh it's my body and i'll die if i want to die if i want to you would die too if they crucified you remember that yeah and so then we would turn that into uh it's my act and i'll die if i want to die if i want you would die too if you're an annoying jew we would take people to act and twist it into you know into a thing that made fun of them and and and and comics would like circle us me and warren they get in a circle around us and start like shouting names and go don't do bob saggett you know or do bob saw a lot do yeah and we would just like ridicule people i know different points what i remember it was hysterical yeah and it it was hysterical except it was mean and you know people started like not liking us and i started kind of not you know realizing oh this isn't a good you know way to be really and i did it a certain point find that um warren's humor was all kind of mean spirited it was all cut down it was all put down it was he was brilliant but he just was pretty mean spirited and not to mention you know it was too much partying like i couldn't see his constitution was crazy yeah but let's go back to let's go back to making fun let's go back to making fun of the other comedians yeah i remember that and i remember thinking why are they watching all these comedians why are they wasting time sitting watching all these horrible comedians why aren't they working on their acts well because you had a hangout to go on i mean you you know you were there and there was no it was just in the air you absorbed all these people's acts you know well a lot of but a lot of i didn't i didn't i didn't sit and watch the acts i hated watching bad comedy i hated you know what you're absolutely right you know that it was a it's a waste of and so did jake i think jake i think i think i remember you said to me when you fell in love with jake i remember you you had you just fell in love with jake and you said to me unlike warren jake doesn't sit and watch other acts and mock them he just works on his bits i'm not only that i mean what i what i found is that jake and i could be funny together like we could have fun and rift together and it didn't seem to be at anybody's expense right like it was just funny and we would bounce back and forth and i could and i felt good about it whereas with warren it only seemed to be oh let's make fun of someone and i didn't like that and i also you know i he this guy could every single night go out and he could operate on no sleep you know and he was unbelievable and i wanted to be healthy and i wanted to be you know emotionally healthy and so yeah i grabbed and jake and and prindy used to lift weights at this one um you know jim and i started going with them and working out with them and it just i was just trying to turn my life around right and so i i kind of had to distance myself from warren who was just kind of going into a darker and darker place and i think the cocaine kind of changes your personality so how many years were you in warren tight you know i'd say from 82 to 84 5 you know it was because jake and i became really close sometime in you know 83 84 you know so there was kind of a crossover where i was really good friends with both of them but i just had to start making the transition and then by 86 jake you know won the comedy competition moved to la and then i followed a year later that's that's a whole funny story when i went back to back to warren for a second back to warren for a second as fred stoller has a new book ad called five minutes to kill it's a kindle single he talks about the 1989 hbo young comedian special that he did with guys like warren thomas yes now i don't think people i think people think this is hyperbole but it's a fact warren would knock you to your knees with his comedy he would stand over you and rift where you were just curled up in a fetal position laughing hysterically and sometimes the police had to be called we got thrown out this is a true story there's a guitarist named stevie ger from san francisco he worn an eye went to a giants game and i was there when warren came up with the booty lick bit do you remember the booty lick bit yeah the guy selling booty lick booty lick yeah so we're talking and i watched him come up with i said uh i bet the concessions are different in in every stadium right like san francisco such a gay community they probably have concessions that are geared towards the gays and he immediately goes booty lick get your booty lick warm fresh booty lick and i start laughing and then it's like young man i'll have a booty lick and then he acts out the guy you know trying to walk through the stands bending over and the guy's and then he acts he does terry gillespie making a funny face doing his booty lick and while the guy's licking him the vendors screaming booty lick warm fresh booty lick and then he starts doing the wife going sydney you've had three booty licks today hey listen bitch it's sunday it's a doubleheader i work all week if i want to have a booty lick and yeah i start well stevie ger and i are laughing so i mean like where you're you know i have a loud laugh already yeah it turned into a scream where like i'm just ah and security i don't remember if they threw us out but i do remember like six times being told to stop laughing because warren wouldn't i mean he was killing me what was your bit about david hang on for one second david rebecca yeah what what do you remember who was david rebecca what were his politics what happened to him i believe in montreal and then what happened to him when he came back to play for the giants do you remember your bit about the heckler don't i never forgot it oh i apparently have david rebecca um got cancer he got a tumor in his arm and uh and then got it got the tumor cut out and then he um rehabilitated and came back but then broke his arm on a pitch like what threw hardened up that his arm broke it was like it was like the it was the baseball version of joe's thysman yes and he broke his arm and it sounded like a gunshot it was a crack you could hear it in the stands it was just horrifying yeah was it in montreal was in a montreal that it happened i don't think so it may have been playing montreal i thought it happened in candlestick okay and then he came back right it was a big emotional thing that he came back but we found out he didn't we find out that he was a member of the john birch society and we find out that a lot of those giants were very conservative yeah and i remember you had this i remember he came back and it was very emotional and he was pitching and he didn't do well when he came back and you were acting out the mean heckler screaming go back and bake that arm a few more minutes bake that arm you were referring to chemo and radiation is baking the arm and you were screaming at him because he's losing go back to the hospital and get that arm baked a few more minutes before you uh but warren would say warren would make you laugh as right yes and i think you know the problem for him he was it was a classic case of you had to be there like he couldn't recreate it he could do it in the moment but he didn't know how to kind of set up a thing like he couldn't do the thing about hey they have different you know foods at different stadiums and what about like or he could but he was just never nearly as like he automatically naturally said things in a funny way he was the exact opposite of every other comedian who like says things and then the next time polishes it and hones it and gets it a little bit better and then the next time you know says it a little bit better and you just keep kind of improving it he automatically the first time he said something that was the maximum funny it was going to be and then every time he said it again it got diminished he couldn't repeat you know things he really had to rip because what robin williams does is a magic trick he is making it look like he is coming up with this stuff off the top of his head and like it was almost like warren didn't get that he saw that that's what he was really doing and like i'm going to try that and it's a testament to what a genius warren was is that he almost could he could almost go on stage and just rip and talk and the more he tried to repeat material that he already did like that always sat a little flat you know what i mean it was it was in it was when he was being authentic and in the moment and just kind of talking as as if he was at the stadium with you and just coming up with this stuff was when he was at his most fun you know i'm reading i just finished mort sol's new biography and it's a comedy that's rooted in jazz where you really don't repeat the same notes and i often wonder had warren been able to find a safer place to perform where he could have just rift do his jazz riffs um that's interesting you open for mort sol at cobs this is what i remember mort sol was playing cobs you were supposed to open for mort sol and then you slept through your set and you took your watch as a public display you took your watch and stomped on it do you remember that yeah it was one of the things where it's like oh this is so important to me i want to do such a good job it's like i want to take a nap and like be like super charged and fresh for this like i'm gonna take a nap and i'm gonna drink a cup of coffee and go in and yeah you know i set the watch to you know the alarm for p.m instead of a m or vice versa whatever it was and i overslept but then there was also the problem i mean i i ended up i think i missed one of the shows but i didn't miss the other show but he didn't want like i so wanted to open for him and then introduce him and he didn't want that he he he wanted distance he he i was allowed to do my set but then we had to take a break and then he wanted like to be introduced for offstage and walk on like he didn't want to be associated at that time um and it was i kind of hurt my feelings i really wanted kind of a bunch of like political right but he doesn't want that but that's but that's what that's the classic story of the political satirist pulling into town and the the booker thinking oh he does political humor we'll get our political our local political satirist to poison the well for our headlighter right we should have had a ventriloquist or ventriloquist the exact opposite exactly you know i also remember about this he was playing cobs and larry brown larry bubbles brown had a trans am yeah the firebird the firebird he said he would pick mort up at the airport so he picks mort up because mort's a big fan of cars you know so yeah so it's a rainy night in san francisco and larry picks up mort and they're getting along and larry made the mistake of finding a parking spot on chestnut and he just pulls in and it's pouring rain and they walk to cobs and it never occurred to larry that maybe he would drop mort off in front of cobs so he wouldn't get wet and mort mort he said he so later that night larry goes mort stop talking to me i don't understand why i said retrace your steps yeah so you said you and i stopped talking what happened i can't believe you don't remember any of this like there's so many people who have stopped talking to me how can i what well you you should drive me crazy in a in a million different ways and i just i remember one time we were on the phone and we were having some conversation and you i don't know how we we were talking about saturday night live and you said that the best cast member of all time was garret morris okay you remember you remember this okay yeah i remember saying that yeah and that that he he was the most talented the most funny of anybody who had ever done um snl and i i was like ha ha ha that's very funny you're like no i'm serious i go yeah that's a very funny joke it's a very funny bit to maintain that garret morris who probably was the least funny of anybody who had ever done the show who wasn't even a comedian like an opera singer or something you know and to say that he was fun that he was the funniest he was funnier than chaser bill barry or anybody that i ha i go no i'm serious i go yeah come on and he go no i am serious and like you wouldn't let it go and it's like how can we have a conversation how can we have fun together it's like you're just going to be an asshole like if that's all he would just kept are you maintaining now to this day that garret morris is still the best person who's ever did sorry well i think i at one point i believe that i thought he was awesome you really believe this is it we're going wrong i feel like i'm back in 1987 or something talking to you but anyway i just remember i i remember thinking there was a period when he used to make me laugh really hard and he was underappreciated what can i tell you okay so that's why we stopped talking it was over garret morris that's not what i think there was a there was a million things you would let me write this down hang on hang on let me write this down because as you know i'm in a personal crisis a lot of people aren't talking to me so garret morris let me make a note to myself never say garret morris was the funniest let me go let me that's that's the specific let me go to no no go to specific i want to hear specifics not i'm gonna say don't say things purposely to piss people off that's that that would be the general so but you would do it a lot where you would say something purposely to instigate and then not back down and and like demand that you actually weren't saying it for that reason and you were being authentic whatever it was give me an example remember we were the big remember the strike um i guess it was the lead up to the strike what year was that the writers out in 2008 2000 and 2007 2007 so it's 2007 and you and i were going to a lot of the meetings you know i do remember this i do remember this yes yeah i do remember that and hang on for a second all i remember is going to a writer's guild meeting before the strike yep and speaking and then you got really mad at me well here's what happened we were there okay and the person was talking i think it might have been pat varone who is tell people who patrick varone is patrick varone was at that time president of the wga he's a writer he wrote for future rama and a bunch of other stuff and and he was um uh you know an organizer and uh and it became that the president and he was talking and you had some problem you were saying that he had had a meeting with roger ailes or something like that but whatever it was you were talking really loudly about him to me but you weren't talking to me you were using me to talk to everyone else in the room like you know what i'm saying like you weren't really you were trying to make some point and you were using me as if i was part of this conversation and but you were really trying to say other things to other people you wanted to be heard and it's like look you want to say things to people say things to people you want to accuse him of stuff but don't like use me as your pawn and you kept kind of interrupting or he was talking and you were trying to say things to the people around us by going hey i heard even whatever it was and i got up and i moved away from you because i just wanted to listen to the speech you know whatever he was saying and i got up and i moved away from you and you got really indignant about that it hurt your feelings or something and then you came over to me and you at the end of this and you said i hope you don't something about i hope you never treat your daughter the way you treat me or like something like that and you impugned my fatherhood the way i raised my daughter and i was like no no no no no you don't talk about how i raised my daughter you know you said something like don't you said something like that i remember that you know what i remember that you and that and i was just like hey you know what you just kept it you were very crazy at that time and you were getting super duper jewy and super duper like proselytizing like you wanted me to come to your temple all the time and you know i've got a bit of a thing with that you know my brother lives in israel and he's super duper jewy and i am basically an atheist and i don't know it and you were kind of crazed i thought i you know i do remember this is what i remember now that you bring it up but patrick verrone was either running for president of the writer's guild or was president of the writer's guild but we were gearing up for a strike and john wells who at the time was the showrunner an owner of he john wells owned er he owned the west wing and it was definitely a bubbling there's no question those are conflicts well let me let me explain to the audience i need to explain to the audience okay go yeah and i remember getting up and speaking oops i just hit the mic i remember getting up at the writer's guild and saying i want to know why john wells is the president of our union he is management he owns the west wing he owns er and yet we have to negotiate with the owners to determine what our benefits are he's one of the owners how can you be excuse me for one second excuse me for one second i i said is john wells a writer because i heard that john wells is not a writer that he takes a writer's credit and he sits around a table and says we'll use this bit and that bit and that bit and this bit but he's not actually writing so why is he allowed to own a television show and take a writing credit and how are we going to get a reliable negotiation going without a legitimate interlocutor and i i think you were pissed off that i use the term interlocutor i'm i'm myself again may i may i speak now yeah you're a hundred percent correct i mean and i share those same you know concerns i don't believe you got up and spoke at whatever meeting we were at together you may have spoke no no i did i remember specific i remember that night now i remember specifically getting up hang on for one second i remember get because i used to get very emotional at these writers guild meetings and yes and i remember specifically that night i remember you were there and i remember what i remember specifically saying can anybody show me a script that john wells wrote by himself you say he's a writer i would like to see a script that the president of this union has actually written and and and some people some people applauded and said you're absolutely right and some people got really pissed off and you didn't want to be associated with me i didn't want to be associated when you were using me you were talking to me to talk to other people like you were saying to me i wanted to see a script that he's written as opposed to getting up and i did i did get up and say that well we have to agree to disagree my pride i i was like fine get up and see whatever you want i did don't say it to me okay well we'll agree to disagree now look it's a tricky situation because you know tb writing isn't like writing you're not like a novelist you're not like a a magazine you're a journalist it is look you know i've some great great great head writers that i've worked with they are like conductors they're sitting at the head of the table and people are saying different things and they're going to get that no not not this and they're and they they can write and they have written but they don't necessarily that's not necessarily the job at that moment but they are definitely writers you know all right let me hang on ownership issue ownership issue is is it's hard you're negotiating against yourself can henry ford can henry ford build a model t could henry ford work the assembly line how would i know how would i know henry ford i don't know let me let me answer the question go ahead henry ford could work the assembly line he invented the model t he knows how to make a model t now he owns the company and he's hiring people right to make the model t is he's still a manufacturer is he still on the assembly line working but hang on for one second answered my question because i remember this argument it was 10 years ago and i got up and said this in public not only to you but to the to the writers guild and i said just because henry ford who owned ford knew how to make a model t didn't mean that he was on the assembly line and deserve to take a credit for making model t's he graduated to owner which means he doesn't get to say he's part of the assembly line that's what i said all right and so it would be the question and it would be the equivalent what's going on that would be the equivalent of henry ford negotiating for the assembly line on behalf of the assembly he would be negotiating against himself okay and that's what john wells was doing he was an owner negotiating here okay that's the point that's the issue it isn't whether he's written a script you show me a script matthew weiner is a writer you don't think matthew weiner is not a writer he writes episode he wrote episodes of mad men plenty of them but he also owned the show so you know show me an episode he wrote okay here but he's not negotiating on behalf of me he's not negotiating on behalf of the rank and file right because he's the owner it's immature whether he's written a script or not but john wells was representing me john wells was representing me i know i know i know how do you represent the rank and file if you're not part of the rank and file it's a legitimate question and i understand i don't know what you want me to say well that's that's what that's what i said that night and you and i had a blow up and i said to you all i innocently said is that you are beating your daughter it's munchausen by proxy you're not giving her the the medication she needs and then you give it to her so you can be the hero i said you're starving her you keep her chained to a radiator i need to call child protective services i said you murdered john bennett ramsey that's all i said and you took it and i appreciate that you said it innocently i said it innocently and you took it out of context you took it the wrong way but you know what i apologize and i hope that my apology so is that why we stop talking well it was a it was a i would say it was a number of things i thought you were acting crazier all the time and and it seemed like all of my conversations with you kind of ended in me being frustrated like you were just sort of spinning out of control and i i i got agita when i would speak with you and i could go you know what i need to speak with delton less and i think it just sort of it became less and less and you know you got busy with your stuff and i got busy with my stuff you know we both had kids and you know we just sort of stopped talking and then you know uh... i didn't see you for a long time and then i remember i saw you at the the four dad's show do you remember that was the first time i saw you in like a really long time and we were at the four dad's show which was who's that milk and dan st paul and tim bidore and some other guy and and when you saw me you started doing this thing you tried to we're doing a bit where you were like flinching every time like i would move like i was going to hit you and i was kind of like don't flatter yourself that like i'm so angry when i see you i'm like gonna punch you like oh my god like i had if i'm thinking about you that much so but let me just say hang on one second you weren't consumed by me no not right now i am now good i don't know yeah i also remember you complained i would call you with nothing to say yeah like i would yeah and now now i would love that now my life is falling apart and like i hear from you and i'm so happy i listen to your podcast just to hear your voice like make believe talking to me and then my name comes up when you're talking to jake or rad or something it's like it's unbelievable i'm so lonely and miserable and my life has you made me you made me you made me laugh so hard and my listeners are going to laugh really hard i'm going to tell them what you did you were you were going through some kind of emotional thing so i call you and i'm saying hang in there this two shall pass you're a great guy you got to treat yourself as well as you treat others you get you need to be kind to yourself you didn't do anything wrong and you said thank you so much and we're we're wrapping up the phone call and you say and do all your amazon shopping you couldn't help yourself no you imitated me yes imitated you i know i'm saying they wrap up a phone call now going for only five dollars a month you can become i think you'll get some solace from the premium content i think that will make you feel bad well i also think you resented my optimism that i'm basically an optimistic person and i don't think you should be right and i think you find that detestable i think you think it's fake um i don't know i don't know if i could say that maybe i'm jealous of it do you believe that there are neural pathways created through optimism john fuel saying who has every reason to be optimistic right i know but he said to me you do a 90 day positive thinking negative thinking cleanse cleanse yourself of negative thinking only think positive for 90 days he says it creates neural pathways here's what i did i i tried it at the beginning of the year i decided to write down all the good things in my life and the more i did that the more good came my way do you believe in that you know i i don't know but i mean i think i should and i think there's no harm in believing and trying it um i guess there's a part of me sometimes that i feel like i'm i'm being false you know what i mean like i'm being fake like i'm just saying these things that i don't believe and it's like i want to be honest with myself and call myself a piece of shit you know what i mean and and not uh you know it like like somehow i will overcome these problems if i can really face you know the truth of them and then overcome them rather than try to deny some you know um deny some truth but i absolutely i think that i need to you know um really believe and i'm trying i always talk about apollo 13 on the show yes there's an opportunity and then that's not the chinese word for crisis is opportunity crisis is opportunity yeah yeah well i mean i'm an absolute crisis now well but the movie apollo 13 ed harris is running mission control and the aquarius is falling apart and he says all right tell me what we have in the way of good like it's all falling apart give me some good information here yeah so i i never forgot that i'm not quoting it precisely i wish i were right i think i think when you focus on the good the universe rewards you and when you focus on the bad it just perpetuates the bad yeah you know it's newtonian things in motion stay in motion when you focus on the good it's that stays in motion when you focus on the bad that stays in motion right and i'm in this place where i just feel like i you know by denying what's going on the bad like on somehow not acknowledging you how much it it hurts but you have to kind of sit in the sadness and also at the same time kind of try to focus on the good but as jake told me the other day he said look you're standing in the bottom of a smoking crater you know the bomb just went off step one he's getting out of the crater so you know i i need to you know not try too hard right now to you know fix everything and all the positive thinking like you're gonna give myself a little bit of space right so you are you know do you mind if i tell the audience that you're the only person in the history of civilization to have somebody fall out of love with you do you mind if i mentioned that no you can go ahead because yeah it's true so you are the only person you're the only man in the history of civilization to discover that a person who you love no longer loves you and that's and you're the only one who ever went through that i feel like you're being sarcastic um it's horrible you know i know it's it's it's horrible my it was my whole conception of myself it's the whole reason i moved you know to massachusetts it's supposed to be all right we'll talk about that well it's okay yeah let's i don't like to do it i don't let's not bomb your audience well here's the thing about this the mission statement of the show i don't want to talk about people's problems i want to talk about how they solve them people's solutions the final solution cycle and no i i don't see any no i know it's no fresh and so raw but i do need your you're absolutely right and i'm gonna um and you're gonna call me every day and give me the pep talk well tell me what you're doing tell me what you're doing that's positive because you're you're fresh the wound is fresh tell me some good news well you know i'm reconnecting i you know i i disconnected from you know people like you and you know i'm fortunate with jake like we can go a really long time without talking and pick up right where we left off but you know people that i was really close to like jonathan groff you know i kind of i moved away from los angeles and i became this kind of homestead guy and a family guy and that became my whole identity so now it's like wait a minute i gotta reconnect and i'm so i'm reaching out and i'm being vulnerable i'm reaching back out to jonathan and to jake and to you and to you know all these people um and i'm and i'm trying to kind of recreate myself and find out you know what is it that i really want who am i outside of you know somebody husband and um you know so that's helpful and i'm i'm i'm rededicating myself to you know creating and you know writing and uh and and you know what you know the grief can be transformative if you let it and i'm gonna hope that this is going to be a tremendous opportunity to grow and i think my relationship with my daughter is going to improve looks like i sort of outsourced my relationship to my daughter to my wife and now now i'm going to really forge a better relationship and so those are those are positive things right yeah and i'm going to learn i'm learning german so that um when i go over there i can actually you know i'll be able to talk to one of your sons who's over there i know when you started doing stand-up when i started doing stand-up and then we'll wrap it up yeah i was in crisis and stand-up saved my life and what i did is i threw myself at the mercy of strangers i said i just went up on stage and you know like crowd surfing when the performer just dives into the audience and they carry him well that's kind of what stand-up is figuratively you throw yourself at the mercy of an audience and they heal you and then you have new friends and you become a different person i think that divorce i think crisis the only way you can survive is by throwing yourself at the mercy of the universe you're a bit of a control freak and i think and and so am i but if you just crowd surf you'll that's how you do it i don't you know i i think isolation is hell and i think not connecting with human beings for me the biggest problem is the fake connection of facebook and yeah the text text messaging a phone conversation is as close to human connection as you possibly can get especially if your pants are down around your ankles and you have a box of Kleenex and some jergens which i do right now but connecting with people through text and facebook you got to get on the phone and talk and you got to see them in person you got to be around you got to be around people well i'm going to a little get together this afternoon with some people who you know are being supportive um yeah that was my problem is that i isolated myself and i put all my chips you know i let my wife be you know my social life my you know i had no identity of my own and there was too much pressure on her she wanted me to you know be my own person but we also look no more problems just solutions let's stop boring your audience that would be a solution right now it would just feel so funny to hear a gunshot yes well that's uh we've been talking with john ross do all your amazon shopping feel the David felvin show what well you know what you have i'm going to give you a compliment what a many but besides being incredibly funny and smart you you have an amazing memory it's just a man you're a great storyteller remember alex and i drove up to do a show in your neck of the woods and alex and i drove home and he could not believe what a great storyteller you were in and your memory always always the attention to detail you can remember things from 30 years ago i'm used to getting worse remind me next time to tell you the rodney dangerfield story about memory it's pretty hilarious from when i worked on hollywood squares that's a great story um i i appreciate the compliment i love you my friend i did and let's buy i love myself too i love you too we've been talking with john ross how do people contact you on facebook or twitter you know i don't do twitter i'm on facebook but i don't really post or anything i like i said i've been isolated i don't know that i'm i'm going to start breaking out on social media anytime soon but um if people are free to contact me on facebook i guess thank you john you'll come back real soon stay on the line for one second well back by popular demand laura house hello laura house hi david for people who have never heard laura house she's an actress a comedy writer and comedian she's written on some of your favorite sitcoms she was one of the stars of an mtv series she's a great stand-up comedian she's in one of my favorite political movies of all time janine from demoine how are you that's so awesome uh i'm good i'm good david that was such a nice intro so you're in love you're in love you're excited about myself are you in love i i am in love yeah i had a big relationship end last summer and i did a lot of work working through that and um then i met someone on the on a dating app two weeks ago but it's like it's this amazing match you met somebody on a dating app isn't that crazy i never thought it would happen to me like you hope it'll happen and then it happens and you're like what yes dating apps women go on dating apps well i i don't think it's just women well i have not finished yet as i understand dating apps women go on dating apps and view the men the same way men view porn they like to flirt with the men but then when it comes to closing the deal and getting the date they run away that has been what i've heard mm-hmm that you like being flirted with but you really don't want to get off the couch and actually go out with a guy i is that the end of your point that's what i've heard um there's probably some people like that but i i in my experience boys and girls go on there and they talk a little and they date that's been i haven't had um so you've had you have friend like your friends have been um blown off well i have i have younger friends who are describing caligula's wet dream but they're young but tell me have you ever been on a dating app before yeah what yes yeah i did um i was married years ago and then um after that i got on a dating app and then um after this big big breakup i got in a dating app yeah you met and does it work yeah it's but i but i think my friend of mine my friend scott gave me the the best advice and i didn't follow it years ago because you what i think is like have you've been to jerry's deli you're the third person who's brought up jerry's deli no past two weeks yes no way okay so i heard jerry's deli closed i did it that's what i heard i can't where all the people gonna go um the one of the valley i guess is still open right oh yeah i yeah i think they still have a bowling alley do they still have yes yes by the bowling alley no they have a bowling alley yes they have a bowling alley pins with a z um no i i think i would feel it if the one of the valley closed but it's so the menu at jerry's deli is like overwhelming so i always feel like you have to be struck like you have to know what you want to eat and then go into the menu and find it that's what i think at jerry's deli so i it's the same with dating apps i think like you like my friend scott was like just no 99.9 percent of the people on there are awful this is the internet and i was like oh like that's and so at first i didn't think so because i i used i would feel bad like you know because based like if you're sitting at a bar and um okay i'll i'll put these in your your terms so you're sitting at uh at a bar and uh um cindy crawford approaches you and strikes up a conversation do you feel good or bad about yourself if who walks up to me cindy crawford she's a married woman i would say get away from me go back go back to a single woman who mr gerber is cindy crawford i'm sorry walks up to a single woman who looks a lot like cindy crawford beautiful walks up to you starts talking how do you feel about yourself i would i would say you should get that mole on your face looked at so okay this example is not going to work i'd come up with somebody else uh natalie portman walks up to you but a single woman who looks a lot like natalie portman walks up to you i would say you are a very attractive jewish woman you and scarlett joe hanson are my two favorite jewish women i would like to take you and scarlett joe hanson back to my apartment from a lot ménage à trois but since you're jewish we'll make it a ménage à deux oh nice thank you um so even though you blow it with her you probably feel pretty good about yourself that this beautiful woman if natalie portman walked up to me can i can i answer that question sure okay somebody sent me a picture of me on the tonight show and j leno is sitting to my left and jennifer gardener is clutching my arm i will post this to my website okay and what was that sound i we're under siege there's an airplane now it's passed and jennifer gardener who i don't know if you know this but she's very attractive it's clutching my arm and i i'm not making this up she is saying you're such a nasty nasty man like flirtatiously mm-hmm and i'm sending out signals of are you blind are you messing with me mm-hmm what do you think you're looking at not granted i was married and i wasn't going to act on it but and i knew that even if i try to act on it there would she would either come to her senses or say i always talk to men this way what why did you miss read these signals so if jennifer gardener or cindy crawford walked up to me and started flirting i immediately would say obviously i miss reading her signals okay so if someone who if a woman who looked like i don't want to be mean let's say looked something like a character ruth buzzy would play walks up to you mm-hmm how do you feel about yourself good or bad well or with your low self-esteem are you like yeah this makes sense yeah that makes sense well let's go back let's go back to your place and hit me with your purse the way you used to hit arty johnson well my point is on uh that i didn't make is on uh dating apps is i if you don't have in mind that 99 of the people are are gross then if 10 like 10 creepy gross people would message me or whatever and then i would i this is like 10 years ago i would think like oh i guess this is what i attract like oh i guess i'm not very appealing or i guess this is my level and you can't go into it you have to like know who you are and what you want and just be like no no no no okay like to look to find that unicorn that you like do you find that you go on a dating app and you see a picture of a guy and that picture informs how you understand all the other pertinent details about the guy like i'm filtering whatever i'm reading through that picture um maybe i guess i i do think the picture thing affects guys different than it does girls that i've been told is no longer true that women can be stimulated by porn that they can be stimulated visually oh yeah no i we've always been told that's not the case you know i i feel like i think it's it's less a matter of you can be stimulated and more a matter of whether that's the priority and i still think for women that's not necessarily the priority and i think it kind of is still the priority for guys if that makes sense women let me tell you something about women women women are women are like cholesterol okay yeah they dare you want them to go down on you they're right and they're murder on your heart and nobody will tell us the truth about cholesterol they say there's good cholesterol there's bad cholesterol but the bad cholesterol may be good and the bad cholesterol might be bad or the good might be good and the bad but we really don't know and we're going to do all these studies and now okay we've absolutely determined that a lot of cholesterol is bad for you but you should eat food that's high in cholesterol because it actually lowers your cholesterol that's what women are because we hear the same things about women that they crazy nonsense they don't care if a man is bald they don't care what a man looks like because but this is but here's the reason and i'll filter this down to one thing because it is case by case like i don't i don't inherently i don't like bald guys but this dude is kind of bald and i'm really i really like this guy so what do you mean you don't what do you mean you don't like bald guys i don't like bald guys who likes bald guys nobody that's why i got hair plugs right what about hair plugs but i don't but like some people are like oh i love bald guys because they were like you know had a an uncle who was bald i don't know what but i didn't grow up around i don't inherently like bald guys what about a bald guy who shaves his head but that's what i mean is like no like across the board i'm gonna say no but this guy is pretty much bald but i like him so it's fine does that make sense how important are looks so that's that's not me being twisty weird whatever that's me going it's other things are a priority for me looks are only important in they're not as a they're important in the sense of like i don't know you at all and there's a certain level of attractiveness i need to think i could be attracted to you but it's not that high and it's more of like who you are in an interesting way like um ultimate guy john goodman is he uh brad pit no he's john goodman what do you mean ultimate guy what do you mean oh the best guy if i could have any guy when you think of like your your fame crush john goodman you're wrong no you're wrong i'm not wrong he doesn't fit the but he's not a he he's overweight he doesn't fit he can't be no he's the guy he's the guy he's the guy so because he's so town he doesn't fit the like ooh hot guy but any woman would want to be with bill Murray but i get bill i get bill Murray i get so it's like so it's like that it's like you know generally if you go hey do you want a big giant fat guy and you're like i i don't know but maybe i you know generally i don't know i mean for me the answer is generally yes but it's like but if you saw john goodman he's a guy like my i like kind of a big fat funny guy but like my last boyfriend who i liked a lot and was with for years was very like lean and athletic so i just put up with it if what are you gonna stop taking care of yourself but it was annoying because he was just kind of vain like i just want like a normal you know like a nice guy with like a dad bod is like fine because it's like there's there's a cost to the person who like looks really good i find there's a like you're they're always late everywhere because they're they change clothes 10 times guys yes i was i don't i don't date women generally the guys are changing clothes 10 times i don't change my clothes 10 times a month i know not you you would be a perfect guy for me i just want a guy who doesn't care what he looks like someone like you david speaking of smell shouldn't dating apps have smell a vision shouldn't you be able to smell a potential date before you go out with him i guess that would be ideal wouldn't it it's all about smell i was interviewing an animal behaviorist last week and she says before she decides whether or not to go out on a second date she will sniff the guy's neck okay i mean is is that straight up smell or is that like a pheromone chemistry i guess the pheromones yeah she's very yeah well that's why like like i here was my experience with dating apps was like some some people like this this last guy we had we had we messaged quite a bit um and here's another reason i think women there's maybe a reputation of um they you know they want to talk to you and flirt and stuff and then they don't want to go out on a date is i had i had many situations of like you're talking to someone talking then they say something weird and gross and then you just stop talking to them so they they ended up being off-putting in some way that maybe men aren't working into that story and then she didn't go out with me sure i asked i told her i like to ask play but like i don't know why she had to be such a bitch about it like that's like she i guess she just wanted to sit on the sofa and not date it's like no like maybe that's why you have the messaging so you can go oh can i you know is something about you office some guys start in with like oh hey sweetie hey baby gross no you don't assume a relationship that doesn't exist or some guys go on too long and that's boring or they you know one guy was like we were talking real real you know pretty good and i was like oh i would meet this guy and then he was like oh my god can i um he was like oh you're a comedian can i go see a show i just think it'd be so cool to know a comedian i was like by like just guys if you talk to them too long they will say something that makes you not want to meet them so how accurate how accurate a barometer is the text messaging um i think it's pretty accurate like because you know if someone's bugging you or like if some like i've had stuff that like maybe something in their texting was like hitting me weird but i was like you know what i don't really know this person and then i met them and then that same thing i was like yeah there's something like passive aggressive about the way they are and that's what i was sensing the messages so i got that what about teasing you oh when guys tease because that i'm not into that but i'm also older older women i think it's not like i i can't believe i'm an older woman and i'm kind of bragging about it right now but it's like i that's that's more of like a younger woman a weighted trick younger women so it's not appealing to annoy women teasingly not not me but there was a time when yes that i only dated guys like that because it felt like banter and it felt like like i wanted guys to like me so much that it it kind of actually like turned up the volume on me wanting this guy to like me which is exactly what the the playbook says for like how to pick up women so it it it sadly like worked on me all the time um because it you know if a guy was teasing i don't know what then you know my reaction internally is like a giggle and like uh oh then i better not do that anymore or whatever it's sad but like a lot of younger women you want validation from men so much that like and then it's also like oh he's kind of cool and aloof and now i want him anymore you know now i want him more or whatever but as as a as an older woman i'm just looking for like a dude to like you know watch tv with till we die so like i just want a nice man like like hard to get or what like i i need a dude who like knows himself and is like loving open i'm interested in you can come out and say it can communicate like i i don't i've had so many bad experiences with because i've mostly just been attracted to like funny charming people and they're the worst they're the worst people that partner with so i like to lay on the couch with my kindle for 12 hours at a stretch oh my god look up at a woman and say so hot to me i like to look up at the woman every four hours and say fetch me a seltzer from the fridge doll uh huh is that unattractive you know what david we're friends so i don't want to flirt with you but to me that's very attractive that would be like the greatest thing to me because i would be yeah because i would be like i would come back with something other than what you asked for and be like why don't you here's this and you can also eat a dick and then we would just laugh and then i would go back to watching law and order and you're on kindle like i would it's kind of a great match mm-hmm but you didn't answer my question are you gonna fetch the seltzer for me i i might because also you've been you've been good and like not bothering me for four hours which i appreciate and then when you wave the seltzer in my face mm-hmm and you get between my eyes and the kindle with the seltzer and i say just put it on the on the table mm-hmm dismissively mm-hmm is that gonna make you if when i when okay if we're a couple and if when i bring you the seltzer it doesn't make you put the kindle down and want to make out with me then it's not gonna work but if you're like oh you brought me the seltzer let's make out for a while then i would be like okay nice but i'm nagging you by by saying put it on the table women like that it's a power thing um i'm playing with yourself is i'm playing with yourself esteem oh yeah yeah see that's not uh yeah again that was great for me as a as a younger lady i would be like oh i guess i should try harder to get this guy's attention because no one's dad really loved them right so i think women were always sort of trying to get dad's attention through you know some dude i i'm gonna say something as as the father of daughters yeah and a divorced man yeah i think my sister had a really great relationship with my father i think that was pretty healthy my father was pretty remarkable mm i know very few women who they always talk about men and their mommy issues i think some of the biggest problems in this world can be traced to women and their unresolved daddy issues oh yeah because i don't think we're gonna get into trouble here but so far i'm on your side um i i don't think like i i guess i wanted to sleep with my mother and kill my father right i i yeah i don't totally understand that well you've never seen my mother other than intellectually oh oh got it got it yeah but women froy the electro complex froy kind of threw up his hands and said i don't know i don't know what they want especially with their fathers is that is that fair to say that yeah i would say if someone made me on a podcast talk about this i would say i so much of my adult moves are to get my dad's attention and i didn't know till later like i you don't know at the time you feel like you're an independent strong woman but a lot of it like it only a cut like yours did i ever tell you the story that i was going to hang on for one second let's pursue this for a second okay are you looking for a man who's like your father no not consciously but unconsciously i was looking for someone i kept dating people who had the same interplay with me as my father which is stupid which is aloof which is aloof like i like guys who like they like me so they're around but also they're kind of not around they're kind of one foot out the door which was like kind of my dad but that's should i mean unless you're mckenzie philips's dad there are certain barriers between the father and the daughter right i guess but i think i you know maybe but like my friend katie for example her dad it was one of those like she was the apple of his eye like his her dad was crazy about her and her sister and not in a gross way in a very sweet way and and love them and and she married someone the nicest guy who was just like her dad but not but and just this great guy and i like always looked at that relationship like oh my god whereas i like oh this guy's kind of funny like my dad this guy's kind of funny and he he kind of likes me but i like i have to really work work for it he doesn't like tell me to leave but he's not really all it like and it was it was only later like it's only after like 20 years of doing that that you know you kind of realize like oh shit like like i basically had to realize like i'm never gonna be loved by my dad the way i wanted to be loved by my dad and i just had to go well that's fine then and like acknowledge it i think for me i for me i had to just be like yeah you're never gonna get that love from your dad like it's over like you had your childhood like you're not gonna get re-loved by your father so it was like oh all right do you travel around the world he did the best he could i travel i've been two places around the world i don't do you want if i ask you a personal question did you ever have i want to use this word an affair in another country in another country no you never had a foreign affair i know i didn't i think americans have a very transactional relationship with love and sex oh yeah no i think um you you scratch my back i'll scratch yours yeah i think we're real weird about it for sure because i also can't i can't overcome my whole culture um but yes we're very much like sex is like a much bigger deal hello yeah i'm listening oh yeah sex is like a much bigger deal and um we had sex what does that mean are you mine forever what's i don't want to make a wrong move here what's going on like no it's a very neurotic kind of needy weird thing for sure and yet we're told there's this whole hookup culture out there where people are having sex with no consequences yeah which is probably the way you're supposed to do it are we i i don't know i mean i to me all i don't have the answers i'm more of like i just had to figure out what made sense for for me like what i'm looking for and then i was really lucky and that i found i i like sort of tuned into what i was looking for and then i i seem to have found it well we'll see you know time will tell how long were you married i was married four and a half years and then my last relationship was longer like six people change oh yeah for sure also people some people change more than others like i think some people are in more like like i'm more prone to change because i'm like a right i'm like an artist i guess one could say like i'm a creative professional creative person so i'm more apt to change and then like some people in some professions and i just assume that that you know that's the same all over and some people are sort of more prone to change than other before we talk about how to hate yourself trump and handmade's tale i'm gonna get back to smell yeah this animal behavior oops like he's hitting the miss verdaline she's a professor we had around i think last week she said that since women have been on the birth control pill it has altered their smell their ability to smell and when they go off the birth control pill they smell differently and they're attracted to different types of men in other words when women are on the birth control pill they are attracted to the wrong men i that's fascinating and once they get off it then they are attracted to genetically the right men the men that can provide them with the right chromosomes and dna to make the right kind of child oh wow what a um terrible side effect i'm not joking around no i i i believe you and it seems like a terrible side effect that totally makes sense okay tell me about how to hate yourself don't you want to know what this guy does he's a professional jazz trumpeter the guy you're going at with yes is this la la land yes i'm an actress he's a jazz i love jazz well of course you do you're boring he's a jet he's a jazz yeah he is where does he play he plays um he plays all over he plays in lots of uh he's in several bands and um he's um uh he's in the band oingo boingo maybe you've heard of them are you kidding me no he has a regular gig downtown on a fancy restaurant rooftop once a week and yeah he really is like i'm in love he's traveled all over the world playing jazz trumpet and trumpet is like incredibly difficult to play and yeah he's really neat is he a good kisser yeah i've been jesus yeah his whole his his whole umberture yeah it all every most of his focus of his entire life has been put right in that area yeah it's very impressive hmm yeah he's uh great nice nice guy yeah so and because because he plays the hang on hang on let me take i gotta i got one for one second yeah hang on let me take a sip of coffee okay here we go he plays the trumpet so he's always horny oh boy you can have that you can have that one thank you let's call him right now i would date a jazz trumpeter no it's really cool because it's something i don't know anything about it i never had any interest in it but it's this sophisticated you know it's this man with this sophisticated culture you know that he's developed about himself he's really also just it yeah just a nice seems like a good guy again what are you thumping there there's some thumping sound going i don't know what it that is i'm sorry i touched the cord you've got to calm down do you talk that way to on go boingo man no i don't and what does on go boingo mean i get i get himself sir if he asked and calls me would you say baby doll if he calls me doll i bring him liquids do you know what i i've never called a woman babe sugar honey i guess that's it it doesn't suit you no it doesn't sarge i call women sorry no that's good like and yeah lieutenant lieutenant how to hate yourself that's anything military pretty sexy Colonel if you're feeling feeling it hey captain tell me about all the sexy nicknames no way talking about they're just laying there all the all the military fun nicknames uh i miss long a long-term relationship just because you know all the inside jokes and oh gosh yeah and although things you're not supposed to say that you get to say because you both agree this isn't the thing you're supposed to say so you say it oh it's so funny um yeah i um yeah i'd like to have that but that's what i want to have well if you went out with me i might treat you to an orgasm in which i scream at the top of my lungs i wish you were your sister i of all things i would be i don't have a sister so i would just i could probably handle that better than most i might be like wait you're who's who did you say your sister how about this making love to you and i go name name laura thank you but that's like i have good self-esteem so i wouldn't be like oh he didn't know my name i'd be like well this dementia's really joking around so tell me about like felt immense dementia is really on fire today are you funny when you're having sex yeah it turns out it turns out i am but in my last relationship boy he would just get mad if you would just be like that's not good could you just stop doing that it's not i was like oh like god forbid you're like playful you know or whatever and so i i found that's something i really have to have i'm very by the way i'm a very joke coming here we here it's here comes the joke i'm very generous during love making i i'm very i always say to the woman first here would you like to have the belt around your neck first before i put the belt around my neck mm-hmm where was the joke oh it was the okay i see i see what it was a oh the belt thing was the belt yeah yeah yeah no i get it now how was your memorial day today is memorial day uh good i don't i don't do a lot for memorial day i'll be honest um so it's fine i'm having what i think of as a pretty much a regular monday i went to my sisters last night and to open presents yes and they had they had fireworks for memorial memorial dave for memorial era of memorial day for they had fireworks i uh it doesn't thrill me i thought this is what it's like in syria every day right how your your sister's house just the sound of the fireworks oh god very militaristic and i thought what are we with trump it's just scary i think so many things are like but you're a big supporter you love avonka you you always talk about how she speaks for you and also what i appreciate is is melania staying out of the way do you know what i mean like give him some room to work good for her like she knows she would just be in the way and she's like i'll just live in another state it's fine does she have her own behind them does she have that's what a woman is supposed to do does she have her own agency and i don't mean modeling i mean does she have any freedom could she leave him or she trapped it's so hard to say i i maybe there's like if we can boil this down to two points of view which obviously there's more of the look here's here's the real truth of that family and the trump administration in that situation here's here's what it's really like like i'll take what it looks like and i'll tell you what's really happening and then there are like the pundits and stuff who are like i know this is there's nothing is it's exactly what it looks like like it's exactly some people are like this is exact he does not know what he's doing there is not a plan this it is exactly what it looks like i think it is i think it's exactly what it looks like yeah i'm asking you about malania yeah but that's what i mean is like i personally am and so i'm perplexed by everything about this man and everything around him so i i don't know i mean i thought i i've been wrong about everything like i thought uh if anyone would maybe um break what do they call it break out when you break away break ranks um it would be tiffany like what did she got to lose like she he treats her like shit anyway anyway and like you would get so much money in book deals or whatever you wouldn't need your dad's whatever he can give you so um which is another you know i would have to assume daddy issues are really at work in the women around this this dude she's got she's going to georgetown law school she's getting right into the thick of it i guess but i mean it because she's the one that's sort of almost publicly kind of out outstid by by that like like part of it but not really part of it and she doesn't seem that into it you know she's not like but you know toe in the party line like her sister so it just to me like i was hoping tiffany would be like you know what he's a real piece of shit or whatever but like no and then malania like i i don't because it's like could she could she leave and and be free yes but but could she do that mentally i don't know like like okay i wanted to be divorced for here's my only exact similarity that i can think of i my marriage when i was married it it did not work like from the beginning i was like oh no like he was like we should go live with my mom like all these insane things were said that i was like what like that i just didn't i didn't think a person would say or do or want so i was completely unprepared for who this person really was and he just thought life was done now that we were married like that was the end not like the beginning and i asked literally i asked the priest who married us for an annulment and he was like oh you know it's just hard in the beginning i complained to my mom oh it's tough in the beginning i wanted out and i stayed because like how maybe it is hard in the beginning maybe i i do just have to put maybe is fine maybe i would like i stayed for so many then my mom was diagnosed with cancer and then i had this other thing to deal with and then but like after my mom died um one year later one year and one day after my mom died i woke up and i was like i can just go and i did but it had never honestly i am i am smart i went to college i read pretty good but it had never actually occurred to me oh i can just go until that moment was the you know like um that was the the only way i could actually do it was when it actually you know sort of occurred to me so i i feel like melania is probably in so deep into something or other i don't know that it that she's thinking about leaving is there anything attractive that she doesn't seem like it is there anything that she would find attractive to about donald trump i i think that you can convince yourself to fall in love with somebody i'm reading the biography of prince charles and he said he thought diana was cute enough i could fall in love with her i could make myself fall in love with her is there anything a woman could do to make themselves fall in love with donald trump yeah i i think so i mean i think there i have been in the presence of a powerful rich ugly mean man i was i was a little turned on and there's and there's another woman who who worked for the same guy who talked about like primally it was so because she didn't like him but primally she was like drawn to him because he's so alpha and i was like yeah i i get it so like there is something about the presence of the bad guy girl yeah and a bad guy and a really confident guy and um also um are women capable of being attracted to a sociopath when they when the yeah when they know he's a sociopath that when they're surprised i think so because i you have you well i've i've had relationships where only later i realized i was uh like it only made sense to me when i realized i was being gas gaslighted um but otherwise like i'm a cape you've met me i you think i'm smart enough but like i was being gaslighted by this guy like i want to believe it so i'm believing it and you know even though a lot of this action doesn't really support that he cares about me that much like but he says he does so okay like i i think absolutely you also depends on like the holes in your soul you know that you that you're born with or that you had as a kid you know like like for example this rich powerful dude the people who seem to work around him a lot it just seemed to fit some thing they came with like it didn't seem to be like something they figured out it seemed to be like no no this is a thing i can deal you know my dad yelled a lot or you know whatever it was that it it it their prickliness filled in some gaps for them or you know was familiar or something in some way they could deal so yeah i i think you can be also people say when you talk to him when i'm one he's very charming so i are you talking about trump trump yeah so that's like a problem like that's kind of why i you know another word for charming is manipulative and like i've i used to just want to be with a charming guy and just have fun great banter all the time and now i'm like ugh they're just they're just lying they're terrible people charming well isn't something like one out of four humans are sociopaths is that true i think it's something like that i would figure one out of four people are sociopaths and one out of four people are charming i would assume they're the same people probably right because they're figuring one out of four regular people are sociopaths you got to figure the much higher for politicians right politicians actor anybody who like makes their living to the degree that people like them yeah that's a crazy person that you don't want to be with i think women change i think they have i think they have seasons to their life i think they have seasons to their month yes i don't think men change i think they get tired that i that's very interesting i agree i agree with you so far i am the same person i was i'm the same person i was when i was 16 i'm just tired really i think so i i think the energy less willing to put up with stuff less willing to bend or that sort of thing i have the same drive the same anxiety the same neuroses the same nagging doubts but they're all tired okay so that voice that voice that used to go you're nothing you're nothing you're nothing now goes you're nothing it's time you're nothing you're nothing but you know you're nothing you're gonna be nothing when you wake up yeah yeah the voice that's that's my how to hate yourself show is about that voice i never thought of it it gets tired as you get tired that's tell me about the how you how to hate yourself show what it was that the improv sold out you're doing them once a month it looks like it yeah um two years ago i did how to hate yourself as a solo show and it was just like my stories um i kind of do like two things of like me as me telling stories and then i book i sort of bookended it with like me as like almost like a like a send up of a motivational speaker or whatever of um you know like but i'm teaching you how to hate yourself with like great tips you know like like notice people who are better than you like just you know like stuff stuff people can really use what is the format of the show if i were to go to the improv and see it looks like a stand-up show so the the format of the show is i i come out i um sort of instill people with the philosophy i don't really do like a big character but it's the idea of like you know that little voice inside of doubt and shame and you've done all this stuff to get rid of it but it comes back why does it come back because that voice is right so let's just embrace it and like and then i i give some talks about like you know i found some great ways to hate you know um great techniques that can help you hate yourself like some people for example are like stuff is going well and they're like well how can i hate myself because things are going pretty good for me right now and i'm like oh no there's always a way you can hate yourself for example you just lost 10 pounds and you feel really good about it wasn't 20 now you can feel bad like double what you don't have double what you don't have oh i just there's always something to compare it to or um you know if you see a tesla you should feel bad you don't have a tesla they're better than you like there's if you're so if you're george cloney how can you feel bad right how can you hate yourself of your george cloney well you're not bill gates your wife is your your wife is taller than you are there's always something and my mind is particularly gifted at finding it so i can help you i can help anyone hate themselves so um i do a thing and then i like tell a story or do a bit or you know or whatever about how to hate yourself and then i introduce people in comics and storytellers so people some people do more or less stand up under the topic of how to hate yourself like stories or when it's come up or whatever and some people like tell a big story that might be saddened parts or whatever like tony cameen is a great comedian and he does not tell stories and he was like i don't know if this is funny at all but of course it is he's great um but he told this story of like just being a kid and his dad made him play baseball and it was terrible and you know like his he he faked a bike accident to like get a girl's attention and like catch up on to look like blood and this whole thing to like and like wrecked his bike like in her car and then she just ran in the house without even paying attention and then he he went and like knocked on the door and then then started his her mom was like oh come on you had an accident oh no yeah come in come in um and then she was like i saw everything i saw everything and he's like so like there's i just think everybody has you know this fucked up voice in their head um so yeah so self loathing self loathing self loathing is self loathing patriotic isn't that the american way aren't we supposed to hate ourselves so we consume to fill that void that's interesting because the message is so like proud to be an american but yes the the reality of being an american is you should always be buying something to feel better it's not enough to just be an american right right now i always say i don't hate myself i hate others but then other people say well you hate others because you hate yourself and i say no i'm pretty sure i just hate you yeah i think that's fair greg barron went up and talked about that he was like i don't know if i hate myself i definitely hate other people and that was fun too so it's but so by the end of it and people you know i have storytellers and comics and and sometimes singers and stuff and by the end of the night it's neat because and then i do you know i host the show so like by the end of the night it's it's a little deeper than than stand up but also it's been really funny and instead of just to me self loathing is like when you don't identify that it's a voice doing this thing you're just like oh i legitimately hate i hate myself how many comedians hate themselves oh i gotta say a hundred percent probably i think i think i think that when i started doing comedy i hated myself but over time i the audience and my then wife healed me i think if you can get enough love thrown your way you can be humanized yeah i i think so too but also you said you didn't change but now you just said you went from hating yourself to to to not hating yourself which is a big change yeah i i think the audience i think they help you it's sad that you need an audience but they do know that's a it's a very extreme thing to need people to applaud till you feel better it is it's it's when anybody's been like oh you do stand up that's so brave i'm like is it it's it seems much more like a needy mental illness but yeah yeah and i'm doing it in a way i'm gonna piss you people off i'm gonna say horrible things like you know my father killed 70 japanese during world war two he never talked about it because it was inside an internment camp in california i mean like a horrible horrible like now now do you love me why don't you love me i just said my father killed 75 i mean it's really sick i mean i can remember being on the road and doing jokes about tenting the fetus's head when i was making love to my pregnant wife and going why didn't that joke work why don't they love me and my friend my friend going because you just talked about poking your child in the head with your penis most normal people think that's offensive and i'm going but but it's not true it's not true it doesn't matter you were thinking that it's so valid um i saw you on stage in you know we go back to your being on the road and you were in austin but i saw you on stage and i remember like you so you're doing pretty good it was just like a regular it was a wednesday or thursday just like a right it wasn't like a big weekend night and um so you know an okay crowd but like it was going good for like like a half hour and then you you said something like you're i forget the joke exactly but how you're um you know you're like your kid makes art with you know string or macaroni or whatever you know some shitty kid art and you're like but when i make a tie out of human hair i'm the bad guy i forgot that something like that right i i i forgot that i can't remember something about there's no joke let me make a tie out of human hair and you're like like but i can't do that i know yeah something like my kid comes home and goes mommy i made a sculpture of abraham lincoln out of macaroni and everybody goes oh look how cute and beautiful that is but i come home with a tie made out of human hair and i'm sick yes now you said something like that and there was like a and you and you addressed it because i was sitting there learning from you and louis black and all the comics and like and that's all i cared about and can learn some great ones and uh and you were like you've been here i understand if this was the first joke i told you've been here for half hour enjoying laughing but suddenly you go oh he must have really done that like what's wrong with you you were like and i was like that's so great like you can buy into the of course i'm making all this up it's just funny weird wrong things to say and then suddenly you're like oh you shouldn't make a tie out of human hair that's that's not good that's not the proper thing a human does people remind me of jokes that i've done on stage and they're always the jokes that never work and and they're the ones that make me laugh the hardest oh i there is a joke that i did in vegas one night the court somebody reminded me of this joke and i tried this joke three times that it never worked it's me in vegas and i said you know i went to the mustang ranch or the bunny land ranch and i grabbed a prostitute by the neck started squeezing and said let me let me know when i get to three hundred dollars what's the only thing that's funny about that is that i told that like a fancy casino oh my god thinking well i certainly they know that i would never do that right but i'm i'm playing a character who's mentally ill the difference between luis black and andy kindler and me is you can go to luis black and say well this joke didn't work they didn't get it i don't know or they weren't smart enough and you can say to andy kindler it was too esoteric with me you can say usually it didn't work because they got it and they think you're an idiot like why would you tell that joke they they got it they usually when a joke doesn't work i know that they got it but they don't want to give it up for a guy squeezing a prostitute's neck and saying let me know when i get to three hundred dollars yeah i i i didn't even understand any of that because to me it's like you know you're in a comedy show like he's not a guy sitting to you on a next you're on a plane just telling you what he did last night like it's a comedy show you have a microphone in your hand yeah but but also i love comedy and like people who go to comedy shows are most likely a you know casual comedy goers you know like sure i like comedy you know it's it's not their number one thing they like so they're not like you build up like such an immune system to comedy that you need more and more wrong you know i just realized you don't i just you know i just we have to wrap it up but you know what i just realized about myself in talking to you what they're they're these husbands who are happily married they have kids they're active in the church they have a great job they carpool they mow the lawn and then every Tuesday night at three in the morning they sneak out go to the bus station and do something horrible to a runaway and then they come home oh okay and i think that's who i am with my comedy i'm on the right page when it comes to politics morality i don't gamble i don't drink i don't do drugs i don't chase women i don't cheat i don't lie i pay my taxes i'm a good decent hard working honest human being every week or two i'll go on my show or greg fit Simmons and say yeah i put my hands around a prostitute's neck and said stop me when i get to 300 bucks and then i get on with my life it's my one little thing that's your thing i i i'm a terrible i can only enable you i can only enable you with it because i'm like good for you i say i say it's okay to say horrible things don't do horrible things laura house how do people follow you this was so much fun this very good this was a good this was a good lazy memorial day conversation and this was this was good but you learned about yourself uh huh um yeah uh twitter i'm laura house i am i'm laura house laura house dot com is the website and um there's videos and stuff on there it's fun spend the day spend the day at laura house dot com great stay on the line we're gonna wrap it up thank you laura coming up mark hershawn the host of succotash this is the david feldman radio network joining us from beautiful saucelito how should i describe you you say you're a renaissance man without the black plague you truly you truly are a renaissance man there's so much that you do you're a cartoonist you are a screenwriter you've written the movies santa jr and monster makers for the hallmark channel you write for split cider huffington post you have succotash which is a comedy sound cot sound cast sound cast easy for you to say you're a branding expert there's so much that you do you are a master of of none you're a master of two dominican slaves you're jack of all trades and you live in saucelito yeah and you just came back from dan st paul's annual memorial day barbecue yeah exactly i saw a lot of our old friends who did you see i saw larry bubbles brown hey buddy yeah i saw bob sarlott wow i saw steven pearl steven pearl we just had him on the show yes i know it was a very good episode actually i enjoyed that um and then yeah some other folks that aren't actually work in comics uh like tom soyer we talk about tom soyer all the time on this show i'm sure you do i'm sure you do he actually has a really good trump impression by the way he was always a good impression tom soyer started cobs yes and was one of the early gatekeepers of the san francisco comedy scene as were you i can remember you booking the punchline before you went off and became a writer and performer remember you would come in from seattle to audition talent do you remember this i i do i actually i started out working in san francisco for fox productions and then uh we needed a club manager in seattle at the company underground so i went back up there um but i would yeah i would come down occasionally to look at uh guys that i'd say yeah well let's bring him up he's he's good or she's funny let's bring her up swannies swannies swannies swannies that's right that was the sports bar on street level and then we were downstairs in the basement i thought the holy city zoo was the most insane comedy club in the world until i played swannies that literally the inmates were running the asylum at swannies is that correct is that a fair statement i believe that it was it was uh yeah swannies is i think it's still around they've moved locations but at the time jim swanson who was the uh the titular owner i think he had people that actually had money behind him was like a triple a ball player as part of the mariner's uh farm system and uh never really made it into into the majors but decided to open up a sports bar spitting distance from the kingdom and uh i think everyone who worked for him was like some sort of baseball reject or something but whenever the there was a game it would be overflowing with his friends who played major league baseball yeah yeah yeah yeah and umpires and there all those other kind of hangers on but i thought one of the best play things about having a comedy club downstairs was every time we had like a heckler or somebody who was getting out of hand i could just go upstairs and get any number of giant hulking dudes to just come down and literally one night they actually lifted a guy up with his chair and just carried him out of the room one of my favorite places to play and there was a condo that was had a one of those spiral spiral staircases and i was dating my then ex-wife or assumed but i was dating my soon-to-be ex-wife i was opening for john fox the comedian oh i got a john fox story for you well there are a million john fox stories but yes no john fox was a great comedian we lost to me passed away yeah he was built for the road he was yeah so if science was gonna build a comedian for the road it would have been john fox there are great stories about him and one night i'm trying to convince my soon-to-be ex-wife who i was dating at the time that i was not a degenerate she came with me to seattle ah okay and i was sharing the condo with john fox and my woman was sleeping with me and the door they were there were pounding on the door all night john i need to see you john john i love you john all week and then saturday night sam kinnison is in town playing i think the paramount one of the big theaters yeah yeah he comes by to our show afterwards with seca there was a porn star named seca if i remember yeah yeah yeah and then sam brought seca up to the condo to have tea with john fox at four in the morning they were tea they're having high tea at four in the morning i don't know what they were doing and i was upstairs in my bedroom trying to convince my soon-to-be ex-wife i this is not my lifestyle i swear to you i swear anyway it was the most insane club on the planet tell me your john fox story yeah so john is headlining this was before your particular story he's headlining the club and he'd spent the weekend out on lake washington getting completely sourced and he's like wearing like a polo shirt and some cutoffs or some shorts and he just says look i gotta go back to the condo and you know grab a quick nap before the show i said okay well we're gonna start pretty soon because that's okay just give me a call like 10 minutes before i gotta be on because the condo was like a block away right so all right so i say you know what he was pretty out of it i'm gonna call 20 minutes before so i start calling go i get a busy signal you know back then that's what would happen when you would call a landline there was no call waiting i go okay well at least he's awake he's on the phone so i go okay great so another five minutes goes by i give him a call still busy i go okay now this is worrying me because he's got to go on in 15 minutes so uh i tell my assistant manager i'll be right back and i run down to the comedy condo and which is i was living in in the time at the time along with the comics so i'd keys so i go in and i find him stretched out on his bed still completely closed but with the phone receiver in his outstretched hand so off the hook which is why it was busy and i wake him up and go john john he goes so he said i said to call me and i pointed to the phone in his hand they go and what was going to happen and he goes oh and he throws the phone down and we are running down and he literally gets into the club the moment he's introduced wow and of course like we said he's built for comedy he didn't miss a trick no he had an act he was it was built like a tank the act he would go up on stage holding a glass of bourbon and he would sip the bourbon and extend his pinky every time he took a sip he would extend his pinky and i marveled at him i thought his act i always wanted that kind of act where it could just go anywhere yeah he was a great conic when did he pass away you know i think it was a couple of years ago now was i think he had pancreatic cancer i believe um yeah it was just amazing he just he went pretty quickly after he'd uh uh been diagnosed i think yeah now i want to talk to you about your movies for the hallmark channel and you're teaching improv and you do yeah cartoon you really are a renaissance man it's truly remarkable how much you do tell me about suckatash your podcast okay uh it's been going for six years i called the i was calling it the comedy podcast podcast the the initial thrust of the show was to play clips of other people's comedy podcast to just promote podcasts in general six years ago it was not the floodgates that it is now and i said you know it'd be great if there's someone who could promote some of these things you know some of these are kind of obscure and some of them are comics i know but they're not getting any kind of you know traction um and so that's what i started out doing and it was uh i think i'm sort of uh you know beloved by podcasters because i will play clips from their show right right but about a year and a half ago i got tired of sort of calling things podcasts because i mean that's what they are but the podcast name came from apple right because of their ipod and it occurred to me when they announced that they were discontinuing making ipods by that name that why are we still calling them podcasts you know if they changed the name of radio to something else would we still be listening to the radio uh so i decided i start calling them sound casts which who knows whether that will ever catch on but it's interesting because i just interviewed um a guy who has a show that's only available in audible you know audible dot com and their and their app they're not they're literally not available on itunes and they don't call the show's podcast they don't really have a generic name for it all it's just called his show which is the genius dialogues a guy named bob garfield pretty well known journalist um but anyway so that's why i've decided to call this the comedy sound cast sound cast and i i also do interviews you've been on the show before you're a past guest um and uh i alternate i have pot i have sound casts that are suck attached clips and i have sound cast that are suck attached chats just to differentiate the two why is it called suck attached it because it's a mishmash of people's shows and clips you know it's it's not a it's not my own format in terms of hey here's what my show is going to be and here's the bits i'm going to do it's here's a mixed bag collection of different comedy shows and some of them are dramas in terms of they're like a it's sort of like when you started doing your show it was it was more like an old radio show and it was very different from doing an interview show like you do now or it was four guys sitting around a basement in cleveland you know shooting the crap about something so it was this whole different collection of things so that's where suck attached came from you listen to podcasts specifically comedy podcasts that's what i feature on the show that's what i write about on splitsider.com uh the reviews that i do for huffington post i've begun to branch out a bit because it's amazing how expansive the world of sound casting has become i don't know if you're aware of some of these amazing dramas that people are doing now and just amazing journalist shows that people are doing now it's gone far beyond what it started out as 15 years ago what are some shows that i should be listening to um there are shows that are like just sort of uh condensed eight-part series shows like news shows like you know people are fairly familiar with serial you know the show uh so there's a lot that became a template for a number of different kinds of journalists from this american life right that's right it's been off from that uh where they you know followed this murder this cold case basically i mean it was a guy was convicted for the murder it's like why is this even a case and it's it's now resulted in the case the fact that the guy has gotten a new trial because the evidence was very flimsy and i if it wasn't for the publicity generated by that show i don't think that ever would have happened so its effects are being felt kind of far and wide there's an interesting show uh london or britain has a lot of interesting comedy shows there's one called my dad wrote a porno and it's a guy whose whose father wrote this this pornographic novel and he found it hilarious and he reads a chapter per episode to two of his friends who just do nothing but snipe it how bad the writing is it's horrible and and there's been like these amazing celebrities who listen to the show they love the show uh people like um elijah wood was a guest on the show just because he likes listening to how horrible it is well it's a show about wood why not have elijah ah see yeah see what i am horrible at how do people find podcasts uh very good question um i think there's the few that rise to the top i like i mean when when something like cereal became popular all of a sudden everybody was writing about it so people found out about it um i like to think things like the av club and splitsider.com and things like that where we're reviewing shows i think that starts to help bring it to the fore um comedians that have been doing podcasts or soundcasts talk them up when they're doing their shows and you know if you look at mark maren he was able to basically resuscitate a career that wasn't doing that well i think do largely to the popularity of of his show yeah i was with him the summer before he launched his podcast and he was doing his one-man show in montreal we were walking around montreal this i think was 2009 or 2010 yeah and he was in bad shape financially his one-man show was fantastic but he said you know i'm going to do this podcast thing and i condescendingly said yeah i think you'll enjoy it i have one and it took off why do you think mark's podcast gained such traction i think it was probably double pronged that it was he was willing to kind of open a vein on the microphone and talk about his life and i think people to some extent uh or another maybe got a little would have gotten a little tired of just that but he also began to have on an amazing array of guests you know it started with friends and comics and people that he either knew or he admired and it has become for better or worse it's become a little bit more like a commercial talk show you know i mean he's got guests on that he clearly doesn't really know but a you know a pr agent will say hey let's get you on maren's podcast and then i think the corner really got turned not that it wasn't popular or begin with but when he had obama on his show a couple of years ago i think you ask how do people find podcasts i think things like that when a when an event like that happens that suddenly spikes interest and people go hey how do i hear that thing how do i find out about that thing and so when you get on itunes and you go here's how i download it you suddenly realize wait a minute there's hundreds of shows on here this is not just one guy this is a whole array of things not just comedy either there's all the there's you know a figure i i keep banding around it's probably grown since i started using it but there are 300 000 podcasts out there which is an amazing amount of stuff to get through and the great thing about succotash is you're filtering it and if you listen to succotash you can kind of pick a la carte right yeah it's a it's a bit like a whitman sampler of comedy podcasts i try to keep it fresh i will occasionally you know repeat playing a show because somebody had somebody good on or said something funny or oftentimes if they mention succotash i will play a clip from their show mentioning my show but it is a way for people to to kind of get a feel for what's out there because i try to find the newer things that are out there like i just reviewed andy kindler he's got a new the thought spiral yes the thought spiral so i reviewed that for split setter this week and i'm going to clip it in my next show and so that's brand new and people go you know they know him because he's he's a guest on a lot of people's podcasts including this one and so now he's trying to do his own or he is doing his own when i say try he's doing his own and so it's nice to be able to tell people about that and i think i i know from a perspective of working with comedians i know they appreciate having the attention without having to go out of their way to to get you to do it you know to mention them uh you were there at the beginning of the comedy boom in san francisco i was i was does the podcasting boom remind you of the stand-up boom it really does uh i mean there's similarities it's not obviously a beat-for-beat element but it is it's interesting because you know i think rick ricky gervais had one of the first podcasts that was out there and in a way it's almost like each wave of comedy is touched off by sort of the dying embers of the wave that preceded it right i mean we had like a a whole kind of nightclub comic playboy club kind of comedian thing that was in the fifties into the sixties i mean george carlin came out of there and then began to develop his own style and move away from the establishment comedian and kind of just as that was beginning to fade whatever happened in like the early seventies i mean part of it's probably political with with watergate and that sort of thing but it seemed to touch off that next wave that started in the seventies and then that that really kind of caught fire moving into the eighties and we had this huge comedy boom that lasted into the early nineties and it began to sort of simmer down again it became kind of diluted and a lot of the the number one big comic draws we're getting television shows and moving out of the clubs and then once again i mean i'm not as hooked into comedy today as i was back then but it seems like there's a lot of live stand-up happening again so it's almost like again the the uh the blaze is being sort of brought up and podcasting has become the same thing there's a lot of comedians that now are having trouble getting booked on the road because they're old and it's harder to get those slots there's not as many clubs willing to pay the kind of money a headliner should get paid but comics still want to work they still are developing material and so they found their way into podcasting um and that's just the comedy end of it like i said it's this wide array of topics now so everybody's finding a way and i i was sort of a student of radio back in the day i started out in doing radio in the late seven why don't we start with what you haven't done i think that might be easier i've never made pretzels oh by the way i'm saving the best for last folks i'm gonna tell you a job that he has that uh will blow your mind yeah so radio is when radio started you know everyone had a radio station because it didn't take much they were in their basement their stations maybe went a block and a half and everybody had one this was like in the 20s and then the FCC sort of came into existence and began sort of turning the airwaves into real estate and so you didn't need a license at first not at all not at all but then these these legitimate i'm using air quotes legitimate stations started to come about and they were saying hey there's the there's a bunch of little stations in our town that are blocking out our signal and so all of a sudden they started pushing their muscle around all those little stations started to kind of disappear but to me that's what podcasting is now and i think we're beginning to see corporate america beginning to move into the territory like i said audible.com is now a place where they operate opposite you know apart from itunes they don't need itunes they're doing their own thing whether it lasts or not remains to be there is this model with audible that's a good question they're spending a lot of money to get stuff out there and i guess it'll all turn out whether you know uh commercials are going to be the thing that saved them because they're not causing they're not charging a subscription to listen to the show so it's all going to be based on sponsorship. When and where do people listen to podcasts the with radio as i understood it at least during the 80s and 90s if you capture the morning you capture your listener so everything is drive time get them from six till ten with podcasts do we know where and how and when people are listening it's a great question i think it's an individualized medium you know it's uh you know when people talked on the radio as announcers they would go okay folks and now i know it's a lot of podcasters they make it more personal like i'm just talking to you you've got earbuds in your face and i am talking just to you i'm not talking to a whole bunch of people and so i think the listening habits are as varied as people themselves i listen when i when i hike in the morning that's usually when i listen to the ones i'm going to be reviewing i listen in the car i've listened to my car radio in five years i just you know i bluetooth through the car speakers so i can listen to exactly what i want to listen to when i want to listen to it and i do listen during drive time because that's when i'm in the car so more and more people are going to be listening to podcasts in the next 10 years and i think it's safe to say that more and more aging baby boomers are going to finally figure out what a podcast is i i think so i my mother hasn't heard my show yet well she's not a baby boomer no she's not but uh she's she's on the cusp of the previous generation and you know they're making cars now more bluetooth friendly so it's much easier to get the content from your smartphone into the speakers in the car so i think you're right i think it's just going to continue to increase with um the ability to make listening that much easier yeah i find it really interesting and satisfying because television is the brass ring that's what everybody wants and yet you know i do greg fit simons podcast and every time i do it it's like i was just on the tonight show for some reason the reaction is i've got lawsuits death threats subpoenas i mean it's because audio connects with people in a way that nothing else does i always say it's pre-literate before we had reading we had people talking into your ear yeah yep and i think in fact i think the last time i reviewed greg's podcast was when you were on and you were about to undergo a a civil hearing of sorts yeah and uh it wasn't so civil but i mentioned if i you know is it a show i would have listened to if i didn't have earbuds to make it a very sort of private experience for me uh because you guys you know you guys had no restrictions on your language you had no restrictions on the subject matter and i was i mean i was literally running in the dark in the hills of mill valley laughing my ass off and i just i i'm sure i look quite insane if anybody had seen me but i don't think i would have done that if this was a medium where you've got the speakers on and you got it cranked up and you got the car windows down that's not the show for that because you're afraid somebody might hear it someone might hear it it might be inappropriate uh for any number of reasons but it's a very it can be a very personal experience which i think sets it apart from almost any kind of media we have had up to this time i agree i've been saying that podcasting is not a means it's an end in and of itself interesting because you know netflix is an end in and of itself and it changes the way you watch television you know this is hack me to say this but you binge watch an entire series in two days now yeah yeah which changes your among other things a screen writer so when you write a series the arc is completely different now yeah oh yeah you're writing a 12 part movie you're a branding expert that is true what is a branding expert uh it's somebody who really knows how to get a calf down on the ground and tie it off and then get that hot iron and just like you know exactly where to put it in what is branding mean and what is it branding i i i'm bearing the lead years ago i couldn't do it but you invited me up to san francisco for a naming ceremony you are the ilia kazan of the 21st century because you name names you are hired by companies to come up with names now i think you created the name guina motrin i was involved in the guina motrin now that now some of this is is sort of legally sticky right because i work for i was going to motrin yeah i see oh my god you should have come to that session i wish you had what is guina motrin it's a lubricant let's just say that okay a female lubricant um but uh yeah i mean i i work i work for a company now uh called land or associates in an international branding company i'm a senior manager of naming and verbal verbal identity uh what that means is i create names and also all the words that go around names like taglines and all the other elements of messaging that come with a brand right what you're going to read about it in the press and that sort of thing okay so what what does branding mean branding is the identification of a product or service or company uh by which it is identified so coca cola is a name for a beverage and it's also the company that produces the beverage and there's a logo that's part of the brand yes very much part of the brand there's a logo there's a there's a an advertising campaign there's as i said there's messaging so when people are uh that are in the the company are talking about it they have a a template for how they're going to talk about that particular brand so everybody has the same message going when you do that mean well when you give the information to an ad agency you want the the brand has a certain identity to it it has a certain it speaks with a certain voice and you want that voice to be consistent it's sugar water that gives you diabetes and makes your kid fat and rots their teeth those are the things you want to come up with the euphemisms for it's a it's a delightful refreshing beverage but i'm not in the advertising business i don't have to worry about that but i but so so branding is saying this is coca cola i would assume you associate red they have beads of condensation yeah yes yes and it's your thirst though those are parts of the element of it it's also you know they they have their catchphrases you know ever since you know we're going to teach the world to sing back back in those days i don't know how how coca cola was going to do that yeah but what does that have to do with being addicted to sugar and caffeine which is what coca cola makes its money off it's it's the idea that you want this in your lifestyle this this this in this case of coca cola this beverage fits my lifestyle i want to be refreshed i want to feel lively i like the taste of sugary water okay so i'm curious about this i think i'm immune to branding however late at night i'm traveling i'm on the road we stop at a denny's and i see something on the menu and it plants the picture of the food plants a taste in my mouth so that when the actual food arrives my sense memory can pull from the picture to compensate for the lack of taste in the actual food i'm eating and is that is that what branding is partially but you do enjoy that moons over my hammy i mean admit it and if it's your if it's your birthday it's free so why wouldn't you go so it's branding literally burning an image into your brain convincing you you're getting something that's non-existent that's that's more advertising branding is that is giving you a identification for a particular product when you go to denny's they don't want you to think oh this is almost like i'm at cocos or i'm at some other 24-hour restaurant joint no cocos gives me the runs denny's makes me vomit i know the difference that's right but they want you to you know they want that that image of what they are whatever that is to you they want that implanted indelibly so nobody else can sort of trod on their brand it's why coca-cola it's why clean you know kleenex fights so hard to keep people from calling tissue kleenex they don't want generic facial tissue to be called kleenex they're trying to protect their brand i mean there's there's a litany of of brands that have lost their branding power over the years that started out as a brand name and became a generic escalator used to be a brand name aspirin used to be a brand name and over the years they got diluted because everyone just referred to every headache remedy as aspirin and after a while they could no longer protect it because that's how it became generically known so companies spend thousands millions of dollars every year to try and protect that brand because are you allowed to tell me some of the names that you've come up with i am i am now some of them i will say i helped to come up with because i was working for one company or another at the time and i was part of a team before you give me the names two things hagan das is made up right that's not a word totally invented far vignugan i think that's actually got its roots in actual german quite frankly but it doesn't i think they brought it out to kind of mean this this spirit of volkswagen but i think it actually has a meaning but i don't speak german so isn't there a japanese car that's a made up japanese name oh there's a lot of made up names accuracy made up name um but i'm not sure which one you're referring to but there's there's there's some great naming stories like that you know like um when coca-cola going back to coca-cola when they they went to china they wanted people to pronounce coca-cola but there's no letters in the chinese alphabet that do that so what they do is that what's called a transliteration where they get words in chinese that sound like coca-cola and put them together so that's what they did and it turns out that the transliteration when you actually find out what the translation means means bite the wax tadpole seriously seriously that's serious so it shouldn't be in china dunco pp in this that's actually the transliteration for pepsi don't go pee pee in my coke i you know there's an age range of people who the minute you say coca-cola to me in china i'm immediately trying to figure out the pee pee in the coke joke but you have to be at a certain age to even to get that so what are some of the names that you've come up with uh the the blackberry name the original blackberry you named the blackberry i did i did uh i was working for a company called lexicon at the time and uh it was part of a massive naming program that we did for a company called research in motion in waterloo canada now i have a question for you yeah since the blackberry is always hanging from the back of your pants why wasn't it called the dingleberry you really people always put it in their back pocket no but you know sometimes i miss i missed the moment i couldn't come up with that one i always kicked in myself so you came up with the name blackberry yeah and how did you arrive at that are there such things as a blackberry there aren't but it's funny you say that because that is exactly the main reason why that became the name because uh and this rarely happens in fact it's never happened before or since but when we were initially being briefed by the company on this product and there was no telephone part of it it was just a it was about the size of a pager the original device and it was used to retrieve your desktop emails from your computer at the office when you're out of the office so you could kind of read what had come in and they put this little tiny keyboard onto a basically a little tiny pager so it was the little round black plastic keys and they're passing these prototypes around when we're being briefed on the product and i just i said it looks like a high-tech version of a blackberry because that's what it looked like to me and the guy from from the company in canada said wow that's really a cool idea i said what do you mean he says well there's no such thing in nature as a blackberry and we said yeah yeah there is and we literally showed him a picture in a picture dictionary of a blackberry uh and he says well he says i have never encountered this word before he says we have something called a loganberry where i'm from that's very similar but i've never heard that so anyway so okay it's just casual observation interesting idea we go on to develop literally hundreds and hundreds of names and do legal screening to make sure names are available and we do consumer research to see what people like and in the end there was a dozen names and the blackberry was one of them and the ceo at the time of research in motion had the exact same reaction he'd been brought up in waterloo canada he too had never heard the term blackberry so to him it was just this captivating idea that there were there was this high tech kind of berry that was black and never been seen before an apple is a fruit apple is a fruit and part of the reason blackberry was also something they liked was people were sort of getting even back then this was like in the late nineties they were getting sort of overwhelmed with emails and it was becoming this almost repulsive thing they didn't want to have to check their email so the idea that this fruit sound had this sort of more natural feeling and things like that we found out in consumer research that was very appealing to people that they weren't dealing with technology they were dealing with something more natural now blackberry is making a comeback right as i understand it well first of all they you know they renamed research in motion years later they called the company blackberry and then i think if i remember correctly and i don't really follow them but i think they sold off a lot of their business to a company in china to do a lot of their software and some of their hardware licensing and i think that's what's making a comeback is it's being sort of reborn in some different sort of forms and styles and coming from the east or something i'm not exactly sure but i think you're right i think there's a comeback of sorts in the works what other names did you come up with i worked on the team that did swiffer i love swiffer who doesn't love swiffer that's what i ask who doesn't you came up with the name swiffer i it again it was a naming session with a lot of people but the idea was the interesting idea was the folks at proctor and gamble they they insisted the word mop had to be in the name and we said why is that they said well no one will know what this device is for unless you tell them it's a mop and in the same sort of session they had us watch all these videos of people using the prototype these these homemakers and to a person they also this is so much better than mopping it's so fast it's so quick and we said why do you want to call your device a mop when clearly people don't like mops or mopping and so we took that idea of it being fast uh and i said well let's let's look at swift but swift is actually has that t at the end it slows it down so let's put two f's in there instead of the t so we have swift uh and then the er was added to make it more of an action word like a you know like a verb like almost like a person like a swiffer uh and that's that's how it was born um i meant i make it sound easy but it takes hours of like churning through words and ideas and reference materials and videos of people using the thing to start to get the feel of what's really appealing about this new technology to somebody did you know that they were a part of the pun clean up with a swiffer no not at the time what did you think it was because you know janine garofalo and i were talking about swiffer nothing brings me more pleasure than listening to music and using my swiffer i can do that i just i have ocd but i i did you had no idea how great that invention was do we know who invented the swiffer i it was somebody in the proctor and gamble laboratories i i it's a you know somebody faceless the guy named dusty do we so there's no hero there's no swiffer hero there's no hall of fame for people not that i not that i know you know i've i've met some of the the science folks at p and g over the years and nobody was sort of trotted out and here's the guy who so maybe it was a team thing i mean like you know post-its from 3m which i had nothing to do with the name by the way but post-its was a was an invention that was invented by two people 10 years apart at 3m uh this guy had invent was working on adhesives at 3m and thought he had this like a super glue kind of adhesive and it turned out it didn't hold anything it was horrible it was horrible it wouldn't stick together for two seconds they were called damn it's yeah so so he shelved his his glue and 10 years later a guy was looking for something else uh that was going to he wanted to make note paper that would stick as as notes for literally his his church choir uh so as a it wasn't even an official product it was just hey i found this really crappy glue and if i put it on this paper i can remove the paper later on and that became post-its and when you work for these companies and you invent these things i know that mike nestsmiths from the monkeys his mother invented liquid paper we know that's right yes but for the most part we don't know who invented these things and do they get rich because they invented it or they are just you know it's it kind of depends you know the we were talking about the ipod we'll go full circle here uh because there was a guy um and i'm going to forget his name in the moment unfortunately but he had you're supposed to be good with names i know and yet i cannot remember um but he had invented the the um one of the best mp3 players music players in the market and he took it to steve jobs at apple and steve jobs that gave him the idea for the ipod so he basically bought this guy's invention lock stock and barrel and gave him a job as a vice president in the company but basically took his technology and then improved on it and turned it into what we know is the ipod um and uh so yeah he's he's known i that is not part of the steve jobs legacy because it's not oh yeah most of most we all think he's this thomas alva edison but what we don't realize about thomas alva edison and steve jobs is they were businessmen who were buying up other people's inventions yeah and uh the gooey came from part what's it called um xerox park xerox park right yeah that's where they found the mouse yeah the mouse yeah um but it's interesting i the movie the fly with jeffrey goldblum i think is a great sort of parable about that because he was a guy who was a businessman who didn't know how the teleporter he was making worked he just hired the right people he just didn't like flying because he got air sick so so he hired a bunch of people to make a teleporter um one more name one more name one more name how about um uh let's see try to think of something that's impressive enough um how about crackle the sony sir the website sony's sony's network and website yeah it's a great name you came up with crackle i name crowd there was a there was a small company in sausalito called grouper which was they were trying to be a youtube kind of showing grouper although you know the name of a really ugly fish they thought it would be a people bringing their friends in to watch their videos having groups of people and sony was looking to have their own youtube but they didn't want to go to the trouble of setting up all the technology so they found grouper and bought it but they said we're only going to buy it if you change the name because we can't tell people that we acquired a company called grouper and so the president of grouper had met me through a mutual friend and hired me to help him with a new name so developed the name crackle for him and he got paid a lot of money a lot of money so before you go yes sir this has been fascinating this is one of the great things about the david feldman show you never know where the interview is going to go i knew that we were going to get to the names i knew we were going to get there folks kind of amazing if you were to give me a name if i was going to say to you get rid of david feldman could you could you do some research and tell me what name i should use well you know where i'm going to go and you know it's because you've paid the brand no real measured equity since you yourself developed it but there's still a lot of mileage left in feldow the clown oh my god and oh my god you were there you were there at the beginning of that i was there at the beginning of it and uh you made me know i just realized you made my life miserable you son of a bitch you booked me as feldow the clown you i remember i got my first i just remembered you gave me a hard time because i was trying to break free of feldow the clown and you insisted that i'm under contract i had to show up at the punchline in my clown suit yes because that was the brand we'd hired and you know john fox not the comedian john fox but the booker john fox he will forever remain in my heart i'll tell you why i was going up against you you were booking the punchline and you said do not show up without the clown suit if you are not wearing the clown suit don't bother coming and i put on a blazer and a shirt and i showed up and there was tension in the air people a lot of people showed up to see whether or not feldow the clown was going to wear his suit and john fox not the comedian the producer who was your boss yes i walk into the dressing room and john fox is standing there and he says to me that's a great clown suit have a great show tonight that's and i just went i almost broke down and cried like he gave me he gave me my manhood yes you got your life back i got my life back how is john do you ever um you know what i've treated email messages with him i think he's actually i think he's now running the comedy underground in seattle it seems like he's up i see his facebook posts occasionally and i think he's spending a lot of time up there so it's kind of funny that he's up there doing what i used to do right 35 years ago the comedy scene in san francisco as i understand it here in new york as i understand it yes there is the throckmorton in mill valley that's a tuesday night show you know but it is not the same scene it was when we were starting out now my question to you is this when we were starting out if we were to look at that scene would we call it a scene or were we so desperate for stage time and willing to go anywhere in other words there's probably still a scene but we're not privy to it because we can't dirty our hands playing laundry mat anymore right isn't that basically what it is i i think that's partially true but i think it was a scene in that there was a very clear hierarchy back when we were doing this because there was the holy city zoo and there was the other cafe and those were shows were or clubs where you could go and hang out and do sets but then there was there was cobs that was a little further up the ladder and then there was the punchline that was sort of like well if you're going to get hired and you want to get hired as a headliner if you can get into the punchline uh if you can even get in as a middle it would be a great thing and then there was the outline clubs in the outer bay area let alone the one let's not even talk about the one-nighters so i think it really was a scene uh you know i remember comics always talking about they could you know they could work pretty solidly year-round just going from gig to gig sometimes playing four or five sets a night some of which they were getting paid for some of which they weren't they could go and do a weekend walnut creek or they could do a weekend sunny veil or they could do some time in san jose so i think if you can legitimately say you you were earning a living in san francisco or in the bay area without having to leave i think that probably denotes a scene and i don't think that exists anymore i don't think so you'd be hard-pressed to kind of scrape together a true living i mean just let talk to our friend larry bubbles brown trying to do just shows in the bay area i think you have to go beyond the city limits to to really try and pull down some some dollars enough to live off and whose fault is that i blame myself good thank you i was going to say that whose fault is it i blame the audiences as well yes yes comedy became just too accessible i think with television and everything else so it became why do i need to go to a club when i can just sit in the comfort of my home and watch the exact same comic well yeah uh what they're not what what they're not seeing are the people that haven't been able to make it to tv yet and i think there's a richness in that level of comedy that as bad as some of it is there's some of it that's so genius those tv watching people will never see they will never appreciate some of those people that work so hard to bring such an original vision to the stage that the television industry said this is not for us bob rubens bob rubens a great example right i think people who listen to podcasts know that most television stinks i think that's why they're listening to podcasts and i think that's why comedy audiences also appreciate podcasts i think so too but then there's the there's this phenomenon i kind of think it's a new phenomenon at least when i was starting out this wasn't true when i was starting at all you had to do was be funny and then suddenly you had to be famous or maybe i wanted to be famous the fame certainly helped bring people in and i think it's also what helped kind of tear down that wave of comedy we were talking about that ended in the early 90s because you know the you know the people that were getting on karson and then after that letterman and doing a seven-minute set they had a whole act so if you went to go see them at the comedy underground or you saw them at punchline or or in new york somewhere you saw a show you saw 45 minutes to an hour and a half of fairly solid comedy and then once those people started moving up the ladder into television and the people down below them got bumped up to headliner they could do a seven-minute set on on you know the letterman show but they couldn't hold their their water trying to do a 45 minute set they didn't have the stuff and so the audience felt cheated and so the club owner started papering the room giving out free passes uh rick overton called those people pass holes and they went and the club owners just wanted to make the money off the drinks they didn't care that the free audience didn't have an appreciation for what they were watching on stage at that point and so what happened was david feldman had kids and moved to hollywood in the early 90s thinking well stand up as an avocation now yes and then people like patin oswald did what mortzall did i just read the mortzall biography oh how is it i'm not ready it's fantastic fan i want to get the author on the on the show fan it sated my obsession with mort because mort was everything i wanted to be and they you know he just covers everything and but you know i so i went off to los angeles and did stand up but i didn't work the road but there were guys like patin who said the hell with the clubs and then he found jazz clubs and rock and roll places and nurtured his own audience much the same way mortzall did with jazz clubs because he didn't want to play where shecky jacky was playing in the 50s and the 60s yeah and he found his audience exactly yeah uh and like mark maren did with with the podcast quite frankly he could do that material that wasn't working on stage for him uh and just talk and people began to listen you know i had jeremiah tower the great chef on the show and he is responsible for shea pennies and berkeley yeah stars in san francisco and revolutionize the way we eat and he left san francisco and i asked him do you hate san francisco why don't you stay there i said are you aware of the phenomenon of people who lived and work in san francisco and then leave and then get really angry at san francisco he kind of acknowledged it but wasn't willing to go there explain the phenomenon or maybe you think it doesn't exist of people who like me were nurtured pampered taken care of by san francisco married got their kids their manhood in san francisco and then they have to leave and they really resent san francisco that is an actual phenomenon right um i i've certainly heard it from people i i kept gravitating back here after i left but the resentment comes i have a theory as to where the resentment comes from okay i'd be curious to hear it because i i'm not as aware of it as as you get to live in san francisco ah there we go why do you get to stay in san francisco and i'm killing myself in now manhattan although i don't have what it takes to live in san francisco because lifestyle comes first in san francisco right well that's true that's why i live in marin because i i can't afford to live in san francisco either i don't have marin but marin happiness comes first then comes work right yeah that's well kind of yes i'll i'll accept that does that now you're a workaholic you do everything well a little yeah yeah do you sometimes feel that maybe san francisco doesn't have the desperate work ethic that you would find in new york or la i would definitely agree with that except in the sort of silicon valley high tech world that's that's where the work ethic is everywhere everything else it isn't it's it's much more of a sort of laid-back thing um i never liked when i am writing i prefer writing in la because there's a lot of people writing in la there's an energy in la when you go to starbucks here in san francisco people are just drinking coffee when you go to starbucks in la people are writing damn it people are happy in san francisco they can be they certainly can be they seem well they certainly seem self-satisfied i don't know if that counts as happiness i remember being a miserable beaten dog and i moved to san francisco and i healed just the air the people it's a very gentle place but yeah the weather isn't pleasant but it can only give you so much if you're looking for something right i think so i think so i mean if i was going to remain solidly a screenwriter i would have stayed in la because you can't you can't work up here you can't you know you've got to go to meetings and you've got to you know be able to you know write with other people and you you can do it at a distance but it's very difficult unless you have a you know huge reputation or a huge fortune socked away you you've got to be where the action is so you're right i think there is that idea that man i'd love to be able to do that up here but i can't i've you know i mentioned rick overton earlier i always say rick why he loves it up here i said why don't you move up and he always goes that's not where the cameras are plugged in pal yeah i mean you do get last-minute calls yeah to do things i uh yeah i always thought i could i had a fantasy of staying in san francisco but uh yeah god i always you know i blah blah i could just remember being in la we would drive up to san francisco the family and you get out of the car and suddenly you could breathe yeah it was shocking the the air the sea air is san francisco is the perfect antidote to la it is just the exact number of miles you need to be far away from la and yeah for for for years i was able to afford crappy rent in both cities and i lived like this bi metro lifestyle where i would work in la and then i'd come back up here for a couple of weeks and i just remember driving down the 580 through castro valley and then into the central bay area and the fog kind of comes in you roll the windows down and there's just this feeling of washing los angeles off of yourself and there's something bigger than fame and and fortune but now san francisco as i understand it it's impossible to afford to live there right you know i got people that work in the the branding company i work at there's there's some young people there they're in their 20s and they're living with four or five roommates uh in north beach or wherever because they simply can't afford an apartment by themselves yeah it's it's gotten kind of insane um and again i it's really the high tech community has has caused it the you know the googles and the apples and facebook and all this because they're you know paying a lot of money and they've got free commuter buses to and from the city with wi-fi and uh it's sort of infested the bay area with this idea that you gotta you know you have to have a lot of money to be able to live in the city now and they will furnish that lifestyle for you but not the community they will not pay their fair share of taxes they park their profits overseas and instead of paying their fair share of taxes companies like apple do not pay their fair share of taxes and so they don't have mass transit for the masses they only have buses for the apple and google employees right which use the the municipal bus stops to pick up their employees yeah yeah so it's a very unfair unbalanced situation yeah on that note mark her son is a brilliant man you really are and this was uh i i have to use the word delightful it was i it represented you it was all over the place and fascinating and we covered so many areas as do you you are mark her son a renaissance man without the black plague you are a screenwriter you are a performer you are a podcaster the name of the show is succotash you are a journalist your writings appear in splitsider and the huffington post and you are a namer yes absolutely and you'll come back i'd love to i'd love to are you kidding i love talking to you david uh the few times we we get to run into each other like during the year somewhere i just love having as much time as i can to talk to you because i don't know we just i love conversing with you this was great stay on the line for one second you got it thanks for listening that's our show i just posted a picture of me on the tonight show with jennifer gardener you can take a look at it over david helman show dot com you decide if i i had a chance with jennifer gardener but if you didn't think i had a chance keep it to yourself because i need to believe i did doctor summer's website is grow and know dot org howie kline's website is down with tyranny michael snider can be found over culture blast mark hershawn's weekly roundup of comedy podcasts is called succotash you can find it on itunes and laura house can be found over at laura house dot com for only five dollars a month you gain access to all our premium content by going to david helman show dot com hit the go premium button we accept all major credit cards please do all your amazon shopping via the david helman show website just go to david helman show dot com you'll see an amazon banner click on it you'll go right to the amazon store all the shopping that you do it's amazing we get a small percentage of everything you purchased during that shopping session it will not cost you any more money and you'll be supporting what i happen to think is a great show please hit the contact button and say hello tell me what you're thinking from the show briz studios in downtown manhattan medicare for all you're listening to the david feldman radio program use sad pathetic hump