 Unlike Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, some of us actually know what's in his new health care bill. Ted Bundy was more pro-life than this hate-filled, murderous prick Paul Ryan. It's 3 a.m. Tuesday, May 9th, 2017. I'm David Feldman. We got a lot of show. Let's get right to it. On today's program, Jackie the Jokeman Martling. The man cannot be stumped. You're gonna laugh today with Jackie the Jokeman Martling. This, I promise you, I guarantee you, you will laugh with Jackie the Jokeman Martling. There is not a joke on the planet that he has not heard. There isn't a joke he doesn't know. I continue to be amazed by giving him the punchlines to the most obscure jokes I've ever heard in my life. He knows the jokes. He is the world's leading curator of jokes, and he's on our show today, and he's coming back all the time. Jackie the Jokeman Martling. He cannot be stumped. Journalist Sam Kiniones is author of the new best-seller Dreamland, the true tale of America's opiate epidemic. He tells us why our country's growing OxyContin and heroin epidemic is actually good news for Donald Trump. We also have my friend. He hosts WFMU's Seven Second Delay with Kevin and Andy. WMFU is a legendary radio station in Jersey City, New Jersey. There's been a documentary about WFMU. One of the great, great radio stations. Andy Breckman, host of WFMU's Seven Second Delay with Kevin and Andy, stops by. Andy is also the creator of Monk, and he's written some of your favorite movies. He just won a Writers Guild Award, and one of the ways he keeps his sanity is by doing a radio show for WFMU. It's called Seven Second Delay with Kevin and Andy. Can you imagine that? A comedy writer who keeps his sanity by doing a radio show? I've never heard of anything like that. We go to Paris to catch up with World Politics Review editor-in-chief, Judah Grundstein, who tells us about the French voters' decision on Sunday to reject all things Trump. Fascism, nationalism, anti-intellectualism. They didn't vote for the Nazi in France. Also from Letterman and The Simpsons, author of Everything's Coming Up Prophets, The Golden Age of Industrial Musicals, Steve Young. We decided to put Andy Breckman and Steve Young to legendary comedy writers in the same room. They both wrote on Letterman, not at the same time. It's kind of interesting. Andy Breckman was one of Letterman's first writers. Steve Young was one of, I think he wrote for Letterman 26 years. I think that's a record. He's also doing a documentary based on the book, Everything's Coming Up Prophets, The Golden Age of Industrial Musicals. Howie Klein stops by to tell us, just when you think the Republican Party couldn't sink any lower, they strike oil. Stay with me. You're listening to the David Feldman radio program, Use Sad Pathetic Hump. Welcome to the broadcast. I'm David Feldman. DavidFeldmanshow.com. Please friend me on Facebook. Follow me on Twitter. Please do all your Amazon shopping via the David Feldman show website. Just go to davidfeldmanshow.com. We are lousy with Amazon banners. Click on one of them. You will immediately go to Amazon. Anything you purchase on Amazon, we get a small percentage and it doesn't cost you any more money. You'll be taking money out of Amazon's pocket. Help support this important show by becoming a monthly subscriber. Go to the David Feldman show. Hit the go premium button for as little as $5 a month or if you want to give more, you can gain access to all our premium content. We are going through our archives and finding things that are amazing. We've been doing this show since 2009. There are literally thousands of episodes. I know that's hard to believe because we rarely put out shows in the shows we do put out are so slender. We have found some amazing stuff. So you'll gain access to our premium content. We're posting new stuff, old stuff. And if you already are a subscriber and you forgot the password, please hit the contact button over davidfeldmanshow.com and say, Hey, I forgot the password. Can you send it to me? By the way, if you're a subscriber, you will be getting an email from me this month with the password. We haven't changed it, but we just want to remind you and encourage you to check out the premium content, especially if you're a monthly subscriber. We gave you a bonus episode on Sunday. We did a show on Friday live from QED in front of a live audience. That's fantastic. You should check that out. Angela Cobb, Sean Donnelly, and the most evil man in the world, Pat Dixon is on the show. And we did that in front of a live audience. And then on Sunday, we got pretty upset about this new health care bill. We've been fooling around a little too much on the show with the comedy. My producer, Alex Brazil, decided to run an episode from the vault called Medicare for All. We recorded this about three years ago. Strongly urge you to listen to it because it'll explain the problem with Obamacare. Why Obamacare isn't enough. Why we need Medicare for All that'll give you insight into the insurance companies and how we are the only industrialized nation that wants to murder its own. It's pretty, pretty shocking. Speaking of shocking, my good friend, Jimmy Lee Wirt, he works on this show. He does a lot of our web work. He's opened up a horrible store. It's called OMF, I'm sorry, omfgamazon.com. Check it out. It's some of the sickest stuff you'll ever see in your life. It's a store powered by Amazon. What Jimmy did is he curates the most horrible stuff for sale on Amazon. He is selling it on his store omfgamazon.com. That's omigod, amazon.com, but it's omfgamazon.com. Go check it out. There's like a, I think it's a 10-gall, I can't even tell. I can't even, we have too many serious people on today's show. Just check it out. It's pretty disgusting. Speaking of disgusting, Paul Ryan has been making the rounds of the talk shows defending his new healthcare plan. He says, you know, this healthcare plan is all about personal responsibility. Okay, Paul Ryan, you are personally responsible for 50 million dead Americans. Congratulations, Paul Ryan. Your new healthcare bill is going to kill more Americans than the Spanish flu. Sleep well. You cross between Eddie Munster and a worm-filled turd. All right, we're going to have fun today. We're going to have fun today, I promise you. We're going to talk Trump with Howie Klein, France with World Politics Review, Editor-in-Chief, Judah Grunstein. We're going to talk about the heroin, the opiate epidemic in America with Sam Kinones, author of Dreamland. But first we're going to have fun with Jackie the Joke Man. We're going to lighten the mood and talk about jokes and hear some jokes. And then we're going to talk to two comedy writers. So I've been trying to get in the same room for a couple of years, Andy Breckman and Steve Young. This will be very interesting because Andy was Letterman's first writer, Steve Young, his longest running writer. We'll talk about raising funny kids. And then we eat our vegetables with Sam Kinones, author of The New Best Seller Dreamland and Howie Klein and Judah Grunstein. Stay with me, please. You're listening to the David Feldman radio program. You sad, pathetic hump. Jackie the Joke Man. Now we can talk. Now we can talk. Jackie the Joke Man is no stranger to this show. Just a stranger to women who are under the age of 90. Please. Alex just reminded me that I know him. And he just reminded me that I hate him. You remember, right? He recorded like a two hour podcast. Up at your house. Right. And then announced that we didn't have it. I never heard that story. Have I got the right guy? Oh, that's great. It was killer. It was me and Micah Fox and some gorgeous stand up bass player and Liam Mechanekinigernagy. Are those at my show? Are you talking about my show? Liam's show. Because you did my live show a year and a half ago. No, no. They recorded it at my home up on my patio. I made them lunch and steak and maybe I had steak before they got there. I forget. And we did this incredible podcast and all of a sudden whoever was the engineer said, wow, we got a start over. Which is always a comedian's favorite thing. That was Alex who did that. I don't know if it was Alex, but he just, he never told me that. I know you from somewhere and he said, yeah, I was with Liam. We came out the house and all of a sudden I'm like, oh yeah, you ought to. Statue of limitations, you're off the cuff. And of course it was the, you know, if you forget a joke that you thought of, it was the greatest show. It was the greatest podcast. We'd be superstars if he had in a lost time. Thank you for having me here. The reason I'm out of my mind is because I looked on the map and I always do the thing where, okay, that's a thousand feet and this is Broadway Lafayette and this is 99 Avenue B, not to give away this apartment number 503, whatever it is. So of course I'm going to walk. It's a lot, you know, the thousand feats that I added together came to like less than a mile. I'm sure I walk 14 miles to get here. How far is it from Broadway Lafayette subway station to here? Is it healthy? Sure. It's healthy. We sent you a subway car. Oh my God. That's, I'm a David Feldman show. We spare no expense. We send you, we send you a subway car. I have greetings for you from Roy McDonald from Bright Shot. I don't know if you know him and Steve Grillo, formerly the Stern Show. We just had a nice and Monique. We had a great gang. Irene, we have a great gang we have lunch with. But I went, I actually went to meet with an agent because I want to get some acting roles and I thought I was going to walk in there. She said, okay, you got a resume and she talked to me for an hour and a half, you know? So I apologize for being late, but she feigned being interested. Well, Jonathan Katz says hello. Oh, I love the Jonathan man. How was you guy? We were down in Philadelphia doing a benefit and I said, I have to, I stayed overnight and I said, I have to get back, honey. And so he let me out of the bed and he said, tell Jackie. I said, he loves all your, we're talking about all the stuff, the merch that you give us. You know what Sin Bear used to call it? Jack's knick knacks. I got his knick knacks. I, let me introduce you to my audience. Hello audience. Because you are Jackie, the joke man. And you're David Feldman and everybody knows you and knows who you are. And I, I have been out of the comedy, the whole time I was on the Stern Show, I was not in any loop. I would go to Chicago and headline. I go to Denver and headline. It was usually not even an opening act. Like the local DJ'd say, here's Jackie and I do an hour or an hour and a half and get paid a fortune. So I was out of the whole comedy. So I don't know anybody. This agent I just met with, oh yeah, we handled the building, but I didn't have the heart to say, who the fuck are we terrestrial or can I say whatever you want. But, but so I don't know. So everybody's like David Feldman, David, you know, the palms for before your feet. And to tell you the truth, Alex, I haven't been impressed yet. I'll tell you one thing. I had as much fun in 10 minutes sitting at that stupid luncheonette that day as I've ever had. Was it as much fun as I thought? That's one of that. You got, you were lubing up the audience for Gilbert. You know, go figure, right? Right. I guess there's a beauty to it when he only does, only 10 minutes. You know, I got to go. I got to go. Jackie the Jokeman has a new book coming out. It's called The Jokeman, Bow to Stern by Jackie Martling, forward by Artie Lang. And it comes out around Thanksgiving. I believe it's going to come out October 24th, 2017. I can't wait. I'm so excited because it's right in time for Christmas. It's a perfect holiday gift. I tell everybody, I said to Artie, it's easy to wrap. And he thought, why would you wrap your book? I said, I don't mean easy, Jackie, go to Jackie. I'm talking to physically wrap as a holiday gift. And if you've got five friends that are Stern fans, you order five and you know, that's an extra two days shopping you don't have to do. You can go get high, you know. You were on the show a year and a half ago. We did a live show from QED and you were great. I had so much fun and I got in so much trouble that night. What happened? I'm still in such trouble because I'm just a jerk. You're Jackie the Jokeman. But I'm not a horny, lecherous, weird guy. You know, I've been fooling around with girls on stage for 30 years. I've been saying rude things, doing rude things, but I don't grab any buddy's boobs. But I'm very off color and do all kinds of crazy stuff. And I was doing Keith and the Girls podcast. I probably had done it three or four times. And then what I do is so opposite to them because, you know, he was with Kimda and then they broke up and now she's married to her husband who's a woman. And so it's politically wild all over the place and it's wonderful. And I completely support all of that, of course. And, you know, and people come on that show and then be young girls on the show and I would say, hey, you know, here's my email, send me an email. But it was never to flirt with anybody. The reason I want people's emails is, by the way, folks, Jokeland at AOL.com. Because I send out dirty jokes once a month. I say where I'm working and I send dirty jokes. And they're the best. And I send kids jokes for your grandchildren or your kids. You know, I mean, I got this disease that I have always had to share these jokes. You've watched it because it's just how I am. So I'm constantly getting people's email address. But guys, girls, whoever, never think in anything. And I know that I'm an odd guy and I tell my lesbian jokes and my black jokes. But I tell jokes about everything. And then Keith started having me just calling out of a clibless guy. I'd never be listening to the show. So all of a sudden, he'd take a phone call for me and in the middle of whoever they were talking to, which was you, somebody incredibly politically correct, I would tell a really foul off-color joke and then hang up. And his audience loved it. So I go to do your show. And I absolutely loved it. My girlfriend from 40 years ago, her brother's there. So long ago, I didn't recognize her brother. And it's like a nice little club. And it could have been a more fun atmosphere. And I think we were doing soundcheck. And I was standing up on the stage next to Hemda. And I never in my life have ever done this. But she was standing next to me and I goosed her. Like, you know, I don't mean I stuck my finger. I mean, I goosed her between the between the ass cheeks like goosed her. They won't talk to me. I'm not allowed near the show. If I talked to anybody, they're not allowed. I mean, I have apologized, emailed, told everybody I know. I have no idea. You know, it was like Flip Wills and the Devil made me do it. You know, there's nothing sexual about that. It's like tickling somebody. You know, I wasn't being sex. I was being an idiot. I was killing time while we're waiting for the levels to get right. And you and then all of a a sudden I was like, you know, and when are we on the show? We know you're just sitting there waiting to say something foul or to flirt with the girls. And you think that any of those girls are interested in an old man like you. I'm like, I wonder if they're thinking this the whole time. So I'm just using this platform. If you see them till I'm once again, Jackie is so sorry. And, you know, okay, I do, you know, I hope she didn't get pregnant from your hand. You know, it's so funny. I insulted Patty Davis Reagan on the show. And then it was a it was a huge thing. And she called I did it at an event and she called up and I'm apologizing to her. But if you're a comic, by the time you get to the apology, you got you got a record, you know, just like that. I like I just did, you know, what did you say? Now, Patty Davis is Ronald and Nancy's daughter. That is a chapter. That was one of the best chapters in the book. I love her because I don't know what you I'm curious to find out what you said. I always blame the children for the parents. It's not because the parents are sociopaths. So you have to blame the kids. So the kids steer them. Right, you know, right. My kids, if I have forced them to take a stand where where they might not have taken a stand otherwise, if I show up to a school event with a fleck of dandruff on my lapel, I am dead to my kids. How you embarrass me? Your glasses were dirty. Well, they know it was Coke. Yes. But you know, Jenna Bush, her father kills three million Iraqis. And they, you know, I love my daddy, Nancy Davis, Nancy Reagan had nerve to say two words. Yeah, right. Patty Davis disapproved of the Reagan administration. She disapproved of her mother and her father. And she spoke out and then spread her legs in Playboy. That's what she did. She said, I do not approve of what they're doing to the Sandinistas. I do not approve of tax cuts for the rich. Look at my vagina. Do you really not know the story? No. There's no big, you are the, you know, I'm going to wreck my book for the fans of this show. Not wreck my book. I'm going to wreck, I'm going to give one of the punch lines to my book. Okay. It's one of the best. Do you want me to tell you a story? By all means. Just to wreck your book, not for the show. Just wreck your book. So my book is coming out October 24th. And what it is, it's, I would say it's 30 or 40% me and then 40, you know, enough about me. What do you think of me? You know, it's like 30% me and then 70% me on the Stern Show. You know, my point of view, everybody knows everything that happened on that show, but it's from my point of view. And this, obviously some tidbits in there and stuff. People don't know, but not that much, but it's fun and it's funny. And everybody loves it. That's Reddit. My mother who's passed away. And really? So, yeah, so. Oh my God. No, she didn't really read it, but she really just passed away. So I got to cancel the room at the risk. So why didn't you tell, when did this happen? See, and we missed the whole story. I walked in here and David said, don't mind the smell. My roommate is in here and a whore died in here and we're doing everything we can to keep the smell here. It was the greatest joke in the world and it was lost, but I brought it back because I do that. So, so. Thank you for, thank you so much for talking about the locker room conversation that goes on before you. I'm giving you the first laugh. So that, if you predate it, that's, it was the first laugh of the podcast. So, so 30% of these stories about me, but my whole book is stories. They're like modular one page, three pages, eight pages, but you could sit down and read a chapter on the toilet. Your books are great for just a quick read. It's, it's, you can read one chapter or you can read 40, whatever you want to do. So, by the way, you, when you, your joke books, which I read, you use the greatest names. They're almost, almost everyone is an actual person. You know, there's a whole story that, you know, Simon Schuster hired me to do a book. Now, if I hire you to paint my house, I'm not going to tell you, no, no, you should give a three coats, not two coats. You're the painter. You know your stuff. They told me how many words, okay? So I went through my jokes and called enough for that amount of words. You know, this one went away and this one stays, you know, that's the, this is the jokes that made the team and inserted everybody's names that I know. I figured they know what they're doing. They were off by a factor of three. They, they, if for argument's sake, they told me 150,000 words and I only needed 50,000. The book is due. I'm like, what the, so I had to get rid of two thirds of the book. So I have people I hardly know whose names in the book. It's really funny. All right, so Patti Davis. So, so Patti Davis, what year are we talking about? 19, the issue is in Playboy. Oh, okay. I would guess 94, give or take three years, whatever. So, so each of these stories is modular. So this is the Patti Davis Reagan incident and she came on the show to promote the fact she was nude in Playboy and everybody knows the reason she came on. Well, you obviously know, the whole world doesn't know that she came and did went and did Playboy to shove it up her father's ass. Hey, you know, you were the president, I don't agree with you. And she was estranged from the family, et cetera. I got a call from Playboy. We need you to host a show at Webster Hall with Jenny McCarthy. And at the time, Jenny McCarthy was the host of a show called Hot Rocks, which was the Playboy version of MTV, you know, videos, but they were the videos that were too dirty or too hot for MTV, but they weren't too hot for the Playboy channel. So these very, very hot videos are being played and she's the DJ. So that was Harry, here's Charlie. I have my guest today is Jackie Maron. Say hello, Jackie. Hi everybody. Okay, that was and then introduce the next video. So she's doing the wraparounds downstairs. So they asked me to host this and they tell me who's they're going to be there. Grandpa Lewis, Gilbert Godfrey, Patty Davis Reagan, you know, as Mad Magazine would say, the usual gang of idiots. Okay. Al Lewis, grandpa from the Munsters. Grandpa from the Munsters, Gilbert Godfrey, Patty Davis Reagan, probably Mason Williams. What's that? Mason Reese. Mason Reese, you know, that that genre, you know, you know what I'm talking about, you know, one from column A, B, C, D. So I'm on my way in. I'm like, you know what, let me write a quick blurb about each person so that when we're introducing them, you know, we supposedly we're going to do some kind of show and there's going to be and I look over there is Gilbert Guy and look over there. Right. So I write a line about everybody and I write a joke about Patty Davis and I'm like, that's funny. Whoa, that's I get to the thing and it's a shitshow. There's room for 600 people. They invite 6,000 people. There's 6,000 guys and three girls jammed into Webster Hall. Sounds like my honeymoon. That's just the bedroom and it was crazy. So of course I don't get to do even say hello. There's everybody we say, I'm Jackie. This is Jenny. Isn't she hot? Have a good time. So we go downstairs or into the next room where my friend Eric Middlemann is producing the wrap arounds for Hot Rocks. They think it's fun to do the wrap arounds in the next room for where the Playboy party is. It's to give it some possession. Right. Yeah. So we're there and we're doing them and I'm drinking and Jenny's drinking and I never met her and we were hitting it off. We're having a great time. You know what I mean? I'm thinking, oh, I could bang her. You know, of course not. So I say, you know what, there was like a cameraman and Eric was the producer and the cameraman, like a lighting guy and make, you know, skeleton crew, five people. I said, you know, I wrote a joke on the way in here. It, you know, it's a little heavy, but it's so funny. Tell me if I should use this. I tell them the joke. They die. Jenny says, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. We come back. Hey, Jackie, you got any jokes? Well, as a matter of fact, and I told the joke and she's a sport. She laughs just as hard today and now everybody roars. Great, great, great, great. So I must add four or five, six beers. I killed them with the joke. I'm killing with Jenny's the best audience. I'm telling, you know, me, I get going. If somebody starts laughing at my jokes, they're in trouble because I just, you know, you know, they have to shut me up so they can go to the video. So I'm on fire and I go upstairs and walk through the double doors to the VIP door, VIP bar at, I think it was Webster Hall and the doors open and nose-to-nose, nose-to-nose with Patty Davis. And I go, Patty, you know, because I keep it on show, I think twice. And I said, Patty. And she knew who I was. I said, that's so funny. You know, I wrote a joke about you today. And I told her the joke. And as I'm saying the punchline to the joke, I realized that the joke is funny to every human being on the planet, accept her. Because I didn't know, but in the time lapse, from the time she posed naked to the party, her father's condition had worsened and she had been accepted back into the fold and they were a happy family again. I have no idea this. She went white. She went ballistic. It's a playboy party and she's Patty and I'm jacking the joke. Man, the bulbs are going off. It's crazy. I never talk so fast. And everybody's freaking out and it was so wild. And I'm like, holy shit. So the next day is Friday. So she yelled at you. Oh, she went ballistic. It's a miracle. She didn't kill me. And you know, and then we took a picture. Hold on. No, no, no. And then we took a picture after that. It was me and her. I'll show you the picture you got to put on your website. It's me and Patty and the playmate of the year from Russia and Jenny McCarthy and the four of us are there and three of us having time of our lives. Lives and Patty looks like she just ate a lemon. Okay. So the next day, nothing happens on a stern show. And I'm like, I skate. Meanwhile, the party was the night before. So of course there's nothing in. I'm a Long Island boy. I don't read the post, huge thing in the post. I don't see, of course, I walk in Monday, six o'clock in the morning, the mics go on. Well, Howard, he did it again. So she starts to say, read the thing that Jackie Marling insulted the ex-president's daughter and was so horrible on Jack, Jack, Jack and Howard's berating me and what's wrong with you and we can't send you out. And I mean, I'm getting scolded by my parents and 10 minutes, 15 minutes into it, Gary comes and says, Howard, a lot of phone calls. This is one of the jokes Howard. So he says, all right, and I tell them the joke. I'll tell you the joke. I tell them the joke and Howard is biting his fucking lip and Robin's, you know, to keep from laughing and trying to keep yelling at me. And then, of course, it finally calmed down after a half hour and an hour. The next morning, she calls in and Howard goes into the whole thing, belating me and going crazy. And I know that she only posed in Playboy to shove it up her faucet. And I'm like, I refuse to take it seriously. And as much as they try to make it serious, I'm trying to pick her up on the phone. By the way, your boobs look good. You know, whatever. So it was two days of, it was absolute unbelievable radio. And I really could have cared less. But the joke was, I said, Patty, you know, they say that you were the first one to know that your father at Alzheimer's because he started returning your phone calls. Which is a perfect joke. A perfect joke. I call Americans and get in there and delete that from that fucking show, man. I'm going to wind up getting killed by the sequence. Now it's like saying, don't you know? So that is one of the greatest. So she called in to complain about you? The next day. Well, and she's like everybody. She's calling in also. It doesn't hurt her name. And she knows she's got a... As I remember, she was so mad at you, she spread her legs for hustlers. Yeah. So when you're being braided by... It was so hypocritical. And I just then it made them nuts that they couldn't get me to crack and feel bad. You know, not to make a bad joke. But when they berate you, they're just doing it for entertainment. That's not heartfelt. No, no. And they know it. And sometimes it was like, you know, it was usually based on an actual lie. But sometimes, you know, and how it could be so convincing with the... I still have listed the gel on me. He's got me on Rodney Dangeville $3,000 and I borrowed $1,000 and it was paid back, you know. And, you know, one day we went to... There's a whole thing they play on the air all the time. And I'm the one that went around to Denver and Chicago. And, you know, I'd go and do a show. But I'd also do whatever the station wanted. You know, go to a gas station, go to a bookstore. You know, because I love it. I love people who are having fun, trying to get laid out thing. And so I knew all the owners and then the station owners and the general managers, then general manager down in Florida, you know, I'd go down there and done the Toys... I would say Toys for Tots. Toys for Tots motorcycle thing. You know, all this stuff. And me and Nancy never had it together, the book vacations. And all here is, you know, December. I'm like, oh, sure. So I called Dave in Florida. I said, Dave, me and Nancy, it was too late. Can you help us get a room? And he said, well, yeah, let me see. And he said, oh, you know what, Gloria Estefan and her husband have a place above the Cardozo Hotel. And then I could be there. They'll rent it to you, you know, for a decent price. You know, they have friends of mine. I never asked for discount. You know, I just said, sure, fine. So we go down, go on vacation and pay for the room the whole deal. And all of a sudden we come back after a bit. Uh-oh. Jackie called the manager and glommed himself a hotel room and he goes to the whole thing and goes, how you use in my name. I mean, well, networking is, first of all, the whole business and everybody knows that. Listeners don't know that. But of course, it's all trade and, you know, and I've done more than my share of favors anyway. But it wasn't a free room. So he goes on and on. How I glommed. You're using my name. You can't use my name. You went and got a room. You got, got, got, got, got, got. He goes to the whole thing. And he gets done. I said, all right, well, now that you're done with your phone, I think I only fear for me to tell you that we paid for the room. They edited that. Sorry, time it airs. They finless this thing that I ripped off. Which is, which is dirty pool, but that's, you know, this is the business we have chosen. You know, I didn't get upset at it every time. You know. Why do you think, I, I, I don't want to talk about Howard, but I just, very quickly, and then we'll move on. I, I never get, people come up and say, he asked me questions. They go, you must be sick of hearing that. If I ever get sick of that, punch me. I live in a house on the water. He paid for it. At least that's what he says. When did you, you joined the show? When? What year? That is that the epic tale of what led me there is a very important great part of my book. But what happened was I was a musician. I became a joke teller. I started making albums. I sent my albums to him in 1982 because I send them everywhere. And a couple months later he called up and said, Hey, we got your albums and we think you're funny. You know, every joke when we're doing a contest over the telephone on the show today. Do you want to come in? I had no idea who he was, what he was. All I know is that Harry Monacruz was down in. Washington. Garb. Garbans laugh. Told me this guy got fired down here. He's going to NBC. You should look him up. And me and my wife, it's one of my wife. Is Harry still around? Oh, yeah. Me and my wife are sending, by the time it got to be 1982, I had three comedy albums, three LPs, like LP LPs with the matching cassettes. And we sent them to everywhere. If I ran into you on the street and you said, Oh, yeah, my uncle has a club, you got the whole package. Hey, you should look up this guy, Howard Stern. Howard Stern care WNBC. That's how I got to him. That's how I got the Gershaw Legman, the classic. I was just going to talk about Gershaw Legman. Well, that guy, and that's how I got Rodney. A blind letter, right? So. So I started reading that book, by the way, that you gave me. The Gershaw Legman. The big, thick one? Yep. Oh, I'm so glad I sent it to you. That's great. Thank you for that. Go ahead. Oh, I liked you. So, I don't know why. So, we get the album. So I say sure. And I mean, I'm in my mother's attic. The first jokeland is in my mother's attic. And where I edited the albums and had my dial a joke and everything like that. And I said, sure. Nancy goes up and says, Oh, that disc jockey called. He wants you to come in. I call him up. He got right on the phone. So I went into NBC, you know, his Carson and his, you know, all these pictures. And it's like, it's a far cry from Governor's Comedy Shop in Levittown. And I walk in and it's Howard, Robin, Fred. And I sat down, which was the exact same combination my last day in March of 2001. Same for people. So we do this show. And I'm like, whoa, you know, and at the end of the show, how it's been, you're a lot of fun. Won't you come back next week? He could have just as well said, thank you very much. You know, it was nice to meet you. I got a hair in my throat. So I mean, while he's going Jackie 9 2 2 wine, Marling, you see him at governor's, he runs governor's comedy shop, 516 9 2 2 wine. The dial jokes is exploding. And then next week, yeah, yeah, Jackie 9 today. Won't you come back and after the second week he calls me up and says, I got some bad news. I'm like, well, it was fun while it lasted, you know, and he goes, listen, I can't say 516 9 2 2 1 on the air anymore because it's dirty and NBC is getting complaints. But we want you to come in. I'm like, fuck 9 2 2 wine. I thought you're calling up the telling cell. And I was I was there one day a week for free for three years. So I and along the way and finagling, you know, like, giving an idea here and a line there and kind of give me dirty looks like I don't need your help. And then how about some more help? And then when it came to 1986, he had been fired, rehired, he called up and said, David, I made millions of dollars. And we were on 55 cities. And we're the greatest radio show in history. And my entire job description, the entire 18 year run, Jackie, I need a price. We're going to mornings. I need two days a week. I want you to come in and do your thing with the notes. That was my total discussion, job discussion. I want you to come in and do your thing with the notes because at that point, it was to the point where I had a stack of paper, a sharpie, and I'm writing notes and putting them up and from and I went from two days to five days within a month or two. Because he was funny when I was there. I mean, you know, either you either you're running or you're running with wind at your back to the math, you know what I mean? So and that and that was the total discussion. That's as far as it ever went. And you know, people, some people knew I was writing notes. Some people didn't to this day is people that, you know, because I got picked on enough and laughed good enough that it almost was enough to justify my presence. You know, just being just laughing. And look at that. Yes, all over there. You know, in meanwhile, you have the things he's saying to me that are horrible. I'm right. You know, so what do you think? What do you think the stern phenomenon can be explained down to? Is it the authenticity, the honesty? No, it's as simple as he went where nobody ever went on the radio before he talked. He described when he was a kid. He listened to the radio and said, why don't these people talk like people? He came on the radio and talked like a person. Talk like the talk like kids in fifth grade. Right. You know, we used to say 24 hours of fifth grade fun was one of the promos, you know. But then it could get incredibly smart. It could be top of the line smart and then turn into a fart joke, which was the beauty of the whole thing. Gershon Legman, you are a genuine student of jokes. Well, that's the whole deal. And this book, you gave me part two, which is about a thousand pages. For you people that don't know, if you saw the aristocrats, there's a shot of Gershon Legman's book from the side, Rationale of the Dirty Joke, part two. There are two huge volumes, about two inches thick, volume one, volume two. This guy, Gershon Legman, was a guy that collected erotic folklore, which is a nice way of saying dirty jokes. All over the United States, he worked, he was at the University of Pennsylvania, they wouldn't give him a grant. So he's an expat expatriate. He went to France, fuck it, lived on the south of France. And he was a professor. He had been a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He was such a character. Now, I hadn't heard of him. Nobody that I knew is so happenstance. But when he wrote these books, he was kind enough to put the jokes themselves in italics, which is so great because you can just go from italics to italics. You can read it as a joke book. Now, I'm a guy who knows every joke in the world, and I would go through, and I've seen, damn there, every joke I know is in there. And then, you know, you can't, it's like the Bible, you can't sit and read a lot at one setting. I can only read five pages, 10 pages as much. I like jokes like, whoa. And it's all in there. And then I'll come across something like, oh, I get, that's in there, right? And, you know, jokes from Rodney's act that you think were written specifically for Rodney. Well, we've talked about this on the show, that my favorite joke is my wife cut me down once a week. That's not so bad, too. Guys, I know she cut out all together. Right. And on the last show, I mean, to me, that is the, the ur text of all comedy. That's the joke that somebody wrote for Rodney specifically for him, and it was two black guys talking to each other in the Civil War, and the subject was rationing. You know, they rationed cigarettes, they rationed chocolate. My wife even cut me down twice a week. Well, man, I know something. Could you cut down, cut out all together? And it's like, there's the joke. And I'm like, holy 1863. And meanwhile, that's from forever ago. So this guy, so I am a voracious joke teller. I love them. I knew them in the 70s. I was in a band and we told jokes. It wasn't even a band. It was two guys with guitars. We tell, play songs, original songs and tell jokes. And by then I knew all the jokes and I would take a break and somebody come up and say, all right, I got one you haven't heard. And you say, all right, I'll count down from 10. I want to get to zero if I don't know the joke, I'll buy you a beer. I never bought a beer. If a guy's saying, all right, a priest and a rabbi are going down the river in a canoe, two seconds in, I'm like, oh, this is the Indian and the nun on 40 seconds. I mean, I could see the whole thing, right? So we didn't know anything. So we're two guys playing guitars and telling jokes in the same two bars every week. Nobody bothered to tell us that a comedian has an act and plays the different audiences. So we're doing the same audience every week. So we got to have a different act every night. Not really an act, but I knew every joke, but you go through them all so fast. So we're going through voraciously through every book. We was every right. Fox album backwards and forwards and anything to get a new joke or a new line. I was like, I got a great new joke. I'm going to make Bates laugh. That was my partner. So I'm master Bates and I'm looking at the back of a comic book or some periodical. Any two books, 99 cents, you know what I mean, or any 12 books, one penny, you know those things like Columbia record club and you'll be hard pressed to pick nine albums that you really want. Count Basie plays Mary Poppins. You know, so I'm looking also and I see rationale of a dirty joke, part two. I'm like, even if it's a pedantic piece of crap, there's probably a joke or two in there. So I signed up for the other 45 books and this thing comes and it's this joke book with the jokes in italics and I'm like, what the wow. I feel like somebody just mailed me, you know, this I couldn't dream that this existed. So I go to the forward and the guy so he goes on and on and on and the forward is about 30 or 40 pages. So I start reading the forward and I get and so I flip to the end of the forward and it says G. Legman, Valbonne, France and a city code. I got nothing to lose. I write a letter. Dear Gershawn, I am flipping out as a joke teller at this book of yours. This is 1977. Forget internet. I have no idea where to go look for the first volume of this two volume set. No idea what to do. Can you help me at all? And I put in cassettes of our jokes and all kinds of horseshit. I got nothing to lose. I mailed to France a couple of weeks later. What a wonderful thing you said. I love your cassettes. You are the funniest son of a bitch. I really love it. You know, I have two copies of the first series. I don't need two of them. Send me $18 and I'll send you one. So I sent him my copy of the first volume has all his corrections in the margin and pencil because he had made the corrections for the second printing, which of course was never ever. I think they probably sold three books. So then I was like, whoa, and we became pen pals and we're writing back and forth. And then at some point, Martin Lewis, do you know who that is? The magician. We're down in flow. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, Martin Lewis. Martin Lewis. His father was a magician. Martin, I lived with Martin Lewis in Sacramento for a week because we were working together and they put us up in a house. This guy sent me out to buy a deck of cards and I handed it to him and he said, what do you want me to do? I said, deal me a full house. He would open it up. I had bought the deck of cards and he dealt me a full house. Is he not one of the best magicians? I'm working with him in Florida and I'm drunk most of the time. He's just at the light. It's me and him and Bob Nelson and Adam Leslie. And it could have been more fun. And all I remember is him saying to some of the audience, what is your name, sir? Have you any idea? So one night we're in the car and he tells us the aristocrats and then he tells the kernel joke, which I don't know if you know, but in the movie, the aristocrats, I said, well, the guy told me that I got to tell you. And so the kernel joke is in the DVD extras of the aristocrats. The aristocrats joke I noticed is at the very end of the Gershon. The Gershon book. That's the whole, and if you, did you see my dirty joke book? It's the last joke in my dirty joke book. That's an homage to Legman, okay? So I hear this joke from Martin Lewis and I love it. By the way, Gershon is a Hebrew name for pulling my, his real name is pulling my leg, man. My Legman, I followed and I'm sure your audience did do that, both smarter than us. So, so I tell the joke, nobody knew the joke except my friend Dave Hawthorne, who was partners with Billy Crystal in 1971. You know, he'd been around the block, but no comedians don't know jokes. I don't know from anything. And then at some point, I don't know why or where, you know, sometimes you start at the end of a book, I open to the end of the rationale. The second big thick joke book. It's the last joke on the last page of the second volume. I'm like, Jesus Christ, there's that joke, the aristocrats. Not only that, it was my favorite joke. And Legman's entire premise, if you've read enough about him, is that you are totally defined by what you think is funny. And I thought that was the funniest joke in the world. And he goes, and here's a joke that was told to me by a guy, and he goes to describe Jay Marshall, and he describes me. He said, here's a guy who was raised in squalor by two parents that constantly fought, but stayed together for the good of the children. I'm like, why was it my fucking house? And then, so me and Legman are writing back and forth, there was this thing called Sex to Sexy, this horrible trash magazine full of bad jokes from Texas, and there was some volumes I couldn't find. I sent him money, he would take the bus. Gershon Legman would take the bus, go to Cannes, and make me Xerox copies of each page, and send him, and then I started making more and more money with the Stern Show, so I'd send him $100 to take his wife out to dinner, and he had no money, so I like, and his daughters would run around the south of France wearing stumped joke man T-shirts, you know, it was like, and this is years, this is eons before the aristocrats movie, and what happened was when the internet happened, I put that joke, as told by him, on my webpage, and my version of the joke, and did a whole thing about the aristocrats, and when Paul Provenzen and Penjaleck came to my apartment, they said, Marlene, we have to put you in the movie, because we did a search on the web for the aristocrats joke, and we only got two hits, and they were both in your page. So that's the story. I had actually heard, when I was a kid, I had actually heard the aristocrats joke. Is that right? Yeah, so, but Gershon Legman going back to him, so he was a PhD, a doctor? I'm pretty sure he's PhD, and he was taught at University of Pennsylvania. Yeah, and like, it's all in the web, like he, he had a falling out because he wanted to pursue jokes, folklore and jokes, and he put out two huge volumes of limericks. I mean, this guy was crazy, you know. And he maintains, you say, that your favorite joke reveals who you are. So it's a Freudian, what is your favorite joke? Well, at that time, it was the aristocrats, but you know, for a while it was, it's a moving thing. Like, I always tell people my favorite joke is the newest one I heard that I'm going around telling them. So the aristocrats is your favorite joke because it's about a family that performs together. No, no, no, it just happened to be, it just the outrageous. But Legman would say, there's something revealing about you. Oh, absolutely, absolutely. Why that was so funny to me. Not that it was a conscious thing, like, wow, that reminds me, you know, it was like, it's a it's a lot more subtle than that. You know, but but I think I every time I laugh hard at a gay joke, I'm like, Oh, God, Gershon, you know, it's the way you laugh at a gay joke. Oh, my, you know, it is it is pretty interesting. You know, and the fact that some people, you know, I don't like dirty, you know, somebody, you know, H. Allen Smith wrote this great book called Rude Jokes. I've never been able to find it. I have a copy. It's falling apart. In the beginning, he says, I'd like to take all the people that don't like dirty jokes and put them in a canyon so the rest of us can stand on the rim of the canyon and piss on. And this guy had four pages talking about this friend of his that wrote Hairlip. Like, you know, it's written out. I'll send it. But what's the what's the Hairlip? A cleft palate. Yeah. But what's the joke? No, jokes about guys that there's a lot of jokes where there's a guy with a cleft palate in the joke because he's making fun of me. That's that's the classic. But you know, there's a classic where the guy's got a hairlip and he's so depressed, you know, commit suicide and what the hell he goes in and says goes to a bank and how do you like to hire me and get me married? I said, sorry, we have a general manager. Okay, thank you anytime. He goes to the next bank and how do you like to hire me and me and my sorry, we got a vice president. Okay, thank you. There's another bank. Yeah. I don't like it. Tell her. Sorry, we got all the television. Yeah. Okay. Okay. And he's so full on, he's walking on the streets, a beautiful blonde walking the other way. He says, hey, how do you like to have sex with a poor, poor one filler? She says, how do you like to kiss my ass? He says, well, I'm not saying I will. And I'm not saying I won't, but it's the best offer I've had. Oh, nothing. I will. I have never told that joke ever. And this joke's four pages long with H N R R T, you know, hello. Oh, and it's just fucking price. And who, he doesn't know who wrote the joke. No, no, no. This is his friend. He was quoting, he was probably cutting pasting his friends. He said, this is so-and-so from so-and-so. He was like a form of a legman. He said, I couldn't believe this guy could write hair lip because he knew just enough. It's like when you write a joke about a stutterer. You don't make every word a stutter. You make the hello, how you doing? I hope you're having a good, you know what I mean? There's an art. It's all art, you know. Do you have a hair lip? I have a comb over a lip. Meanwhile, the kid across the street from me growing up had a cleft palate, had a hair lip, but he was probably six or seven years older than me. Way back then, I was born in 48, way back then, they might as well have been operating on that with a pickaxe, you know what I mean? So, he really was money. And so, he had no friends. So, he taught me electricity. I had a puppet stage with a full-working curtain and electricity and everything because me and this older kid, he showed me how to do everything. It was, you know, he was my hot tray to show. His parents had a little bit of money. They lived in this old farmhouse across the street. He had a 16-millimeter sound projector. A sound projector, like he's showing Steamboat Willie in his attic, you know. I never saw anybody that had a, you know. But he was alone. And he was all alone and he had a huge train set, the length, you know, and I was his only friend. It was, you know, but so the hair lips, you know, it sent me through the roof, you know. Every joke is written down somewhere? Of mine? Yeah. Oh, yeah. You know, I said to my girlfriend, I got this lovely girlfriend, Barbara, and I said, you know what, I had an epiphany. The jokes are so important because for a finite amount of time, you are lasered in to only paying attention to that and where it's gone and it's your total escape from anything. It's, you know, even if you're watching a comedian and you're paying attention, you got to follow, but a joke is a finite thing. It's going to happen right here and you can't go anywhere. And I said, you know, and that's... There's a zen to it. It's an indelible, it's just the most wonderful fucking escape. Now, did we have, did we talk about Albert Einstein? All the great minds, not to pat myself on the back, but the great scientists, those guys are all huge fans of filthy jokes. Neil deGrasse Tyson loves jokes. This friend that I know, I'll tell you, or fear this guy, I know, gives millions of dollars to Noam Chomsky. And he said, I'm going to go to see him in Harvard and he's going to, you know, I give lots of money to his foundation. I'm going to watch his lecture and then we're going to sit in the green room and tell dick jokes. Noam Chomsky, okay? And I'm going to, I'm going to film festival two or three years ago and this guy's about my age, 65, 70 years old, comes up and said, Jackie, I know you're going to love this story. My music teacher years ago told me this story. His grandfather was one of the world's greatest cantors at the turn of the century. Yosele Rosenblatt, you can look it up, Yosele Rosenblatt. Edison loved him. He said he had the biggest range of anybody he ever read. Edison was deaf. Edison was deaf. Well, but he took people's word for it. And anti-Semitic. Who is it? So at any rate, this stuff's all in the web. But so Yosele Rosenblatt knew everybody at the turn of the century and his friends were Caruso and but one of his best friends was Albert Einstein. And I guess his grandfather had told the kid or however he found out that Albert Einstein was a huge fan of filthy jokes, which I thought was interesting. But now that I'm watching Einstein on TV, the show Genius, and I'm reading the book about him, and I, you know, he had girlfriends and he was banging his cousin. I mean, like the guy was a whore master, which doesn't make him a bad person. But also it makes it a lot easier to believe the thing about the dirty jokes because nothing leads to pussy like a dirty joke. And but this guy says, so Albert Einstein was a huge fan of dirty jokes. And his favorite dirty joke was, my dick isn't that big, but I love every foot of it. That's succinct and brilliant. And it's a dick joke. And oh, man. So that's, you know, that's my Albert Einstein story and I'm sticking to it. Now I'm trying to, I'm trying to get some, some stamp of approval for that. I'm dying to read in the book. And oh, yeah. And Albert loved to tell a joke. You know, I haven't gotten to that yet. Where do you keep your jokes? Is there a fault? It's in the computer years ago. What happens if the computer crashes? I got my head. The seriously, I mean, no, no, no, everything's everything's redundancy, if you cut, you got to come to my house. I mean, I have loose leaves up the yin yang double. When you hear a joke that you haven't heard before, what happens? It's very rare. I usually, if I like it, I'll retell it and tell it and retell it. But you write it down. I'll write it down. Sure. And how long could you go telling jokes till you ran out? I have six CDs. I'm talking about like if I said to you. No, no, I'm telling you. You mean if I said to you for charity, you're going to stand on this stage and tell jokes for as long as you can without picking up a book, without anybody talking to you, just jokes that come forth from your brain. How long could you go? I have no idea, but I'm sure hours and hours because something would spring. It's all springboard. If I'm standing there with you and him and you tell a joke, makes me think of one, and he tells one, makes me think of one, and all of a sudden while you're talking, I'm thinking of three more. By the time it gets to me, I've forgotten the first two, I was going to tell it like so. Why is that? Because somebody said to me, how do you remember jokes? That's how conversation, how do you know what you're going to say next in a conversation? Well, you know because it's something that I said or something that he said that made you think of something to say, only it's a joke, and the right thing just comes to you. Did I tell you about McCartney? Yes, you did, but you didn't tell me on the show. No, you did tell it, you did. But all of a sudden there he was, and I just, it wasn't like I said to myself, well, you know what, if I ever see Paul McCartney, I'll tell him this joke. All of a sudden there he was, and it was like, it was like, you know, the ball in the lottery came up and that was the right one, you know? You know what I found interesting reading the Legman book and reading your joke book? I never used to read joke books, because I said, I'm a stand-up, I'm a comedy writer, if I read jokes, I like. It's going to screw up your motive thinking or something. I just thought, I like hearing a joke, but reading a joke book is, I don't know, I just never read one before, so I read, start reading your book, because you gave me all these books. There was a joke in Legman's book about castration. He had a chapter on castration jokes. And so there's a history of castration jokes where the queen is visiting a guy in the hospital during World War One, and his balls got knocked off. And he said, don't worry, they would have missed yours, or some joke. But I'm reading, these aren't that funny, these aren't that funny. And then the version that I liked was President Lincoln got shot. Where did he get shot? Don't worry if he had been aiming for you, he would have missed. The implication is you have no brain. Oh, that's kind of interesting. I'm doing a horrible job. No, no, but I know what you're saying. And there's different ways of saying the same thing. And I thought, I remember reading that and going, wow, that's a 150-year-old joke. Well, my job, people say, you tell old jokes, blah, blah, blah. I've got lots of examples of jokes and I'll show you, all right, here's what I read and here's my joke. And aside from them being the same joke, they are not the same joke because the art of here's what I read. In other words, you took an old joke and reworked it. And yeah, and made it, for the most part, you could not go on stage and read from a joke book. You could not. They don't play. And the good thing about my joke books is if you're reading them, you're reading what I say on stage. Like when I had my Jackie's Joke Hunt for eight years, people are sitting there and reading jokes, but they might as well have been doing my act because they're reading them the way they meant. The example I would say, you're reading Playboy, you know, the foxy, unbelievable blonde saunters into the bar and perches on this bar stool and throws the minkstole over her head and she says bartender, I was thinking, I'm like, fuck you, girl walks in a bar bartender, can I have a drink? And you're to the joke, you know what I mean? Which is so important because otherwise it's a snooze fest. And the things that are important, I know enough to hit hard, slow down and hit hard, but it's, there's more to it than meets the eye, you know? And it's, I think it's really history has been written about jokes. You know, the Legman thing is great, but it's so pedantic and goes on and on so deep that, you know, Colin Quinn years ago, he said, come on, Jackie, why don't we get together and make a show about jokes, which I would really like to. And, you know, he moved out of the building, whatever, because I still think it'd be amazingly interesting. Like I did a show. Do we know what jokes were told in the 1500s? Do we know? Yeah, of course we do. The same ones. How do we know that? I bombed very badly at the Friars roast for Don King. And I told a joke that Adam Leslie told me that's so funny. And it's a boxing joke, or this version was a boxing joke, we're roasting Don King. Everybody's doing quick boom, boom, boom. I'm like, Jackie, the joke man is going to get up and tell a few jokes, which of course was the worst call. 2000 drunken businessmen don't have the attention span. Hello, I'm Jackie, they're already lost, okay? I did have, I did have a joke that made it AP worldwide. I said, you know, as people said Don King wasn't that good to Mike Tyson. At least that's what Mike told me when he was parking my car. And that was on AP around the world. But the joke was so great. And Alec Baldwin has a book out with the punch line is the title of his book. And I'm like, Jesus, I got to write to Alec and ask him if he knows that that word is the punch line of a joke. And today at lunch, Roy McDonald says to me, oh, that's so great that Alec Baldwin book, because he explains at the end where the title came from. And I'm like, oh, Jesus. And of course, a completely different version of this joke. But I'm answering your question. What's the title of the book? I'm not going to tell you the title, but you'll see in a second. Okay. So the version I told, which is an indication, because my version of the joke is from 1958. Here we are. It's 1958, the world's boxing championship, Madison Square Garden, and the announcer comes on. You know this joke. It's one of my favorite jokes. Okay. So the name Alec Baldwin's book is nevertheless. So for you folks that, you know, we'll get you the joke. You know, well, you're going to hear a version of the joke that you'll get the gist. So I go to see this one. My friend, John Ross, who listens to the show, who's a great comedian, he told me that joke. It was a Kate Smith joke at Yankee Stadium. Okay. I told that joke to, I did the show leverage and afterwards we're all getting drunk. Well, I wasn't drinking, but everybody's having fun because they just found out they were renewed. And even though I just shot one line in the show that wasn't going to air for six months, I took credit for the renewal. You know, I told that joke and Timothy Hutton leaped to his feet and hugged me because he laughed so fucking hard, right? And he had never heard it. No, no, no. So, so I'm, uh, this guy, uh, Chip, uh, Daffa, Daffa, do you know him? He's a screen, uh, a playwright. He wrote a one-man show called George M. Tonight. George M. Cohen, but a one-man show. So I'm sitting with him at his play and, and it's good. It's the story George M. Cohen told by George M, a guy playing George M. Cohen goes through his life. And at one point, uh, he says, then I came out and said, uh, and now Mary McConnell is going to sing for you. And someone in the balcony yelled, Mary McConnell's a whore. And I said, well, nevertheless, so it gets done. I go, Chip, I can't believe George M. Cohen used that joke. He goes, we don't know the truth, Jackie. Everything in the play tonight. Everything is absolute gospel except that I added that joke because I've always been in love with that joke. Cause when I was a kid, Carol Channing was a friend of the family and she told that joke to the family because it had been told to her by her grandmother, Carol Channing's grandmother. In other words, these things go back and back and back and they just do. You know, nowadays you tell a joke, you know, the jokes about, about Trump or Polish jokes or the jokes about Clinton where the jokes about Bush or the jokes about Elizabeth Taylor where the jokes about May West and on and on back to Eve, you know, and if you think about it, the way I heard that joke, and I'm not going to do it justice, but the way I heard that joke from John Ross was ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Yankee stadium. Lou Gehrig will be out here shortly to say farewell. But first, please rise for the national anthem sung by Kate Smith is a fat C word. Nobody would ever fuck her. She's a no talent C word. I hope she gets cancer and dies. Never laugh. So, so, so I tell that joke. It's the announcer at a boxing match in this corner, weighing in at 220 pounds in the black trunks, Ingemar Johansson, the challenger. Before we start our bout, we have to sing the national anthem, the lovely Kate Smith. And I go off the podium to be a guy sitting ringside and I go, Kate Smith, that fat cunt. And as I said that, I was looking in the eyes of Dionne Warwick. I swear, she was four feet from me. She was sitting ringside, sitting in the front. I want to go, Dionne, I love walking by. Please ignore what I'm saying. She probably saw that coming. Oh, God. She's, isn't she a psychic? Oh, I didn't even think about that. But, but the point is they've all been around. But what's so interesting, if you think you could come up with something about shit, piss, vomit, sex, farts that hasn't been said. So I gave him my sheets. There you go. I remember Tamara told that joke. So I gave him my underwear. One of the best jokes. I need a stool sample, a sperm sample, and a urine sample. So I gave him my underwear. He told that joke on stage one night. I had never heard it before. And I fell off my chair. Well, there's the, there's the entire premise of joke telling. If you've heard a joke before, it's an old joke. And if you haven't, it's a new joke. And that works individually for every human being, for every joke. Well, but it's interesting to me. Listen, I, I, in my life as a joke teller, I could tell jokes I knew since 1952. But if a joke just went around the pike a week or two ago, sometimes jokes get in the, in the mainstream for a few minutes, I couldn't tell that joke on stage because it'd be like, oh, that's an old joke. You know what I mean? And there's no such thing as an old joke. You know, and my jokes, people get mad at me. They go, fuck half the jokes you do. I know. And I'm already laughing while I'm saying myself, I know that joke already. And that's, that's where somewhat of the art of it comes into a couple of things. One is the nevertheless joke is not funny mathematically. Whereas, you know, like the joke, I need a urine sample, sperm sample, and a stool sample, so I gave him my underwear, that adds up. Nevertheless, doesn't add up. But it does. It does. You know, it's like, you know, you say, you say something hard, something horrible that's unset about someone, and, and the guy's just acknowledging it, you know, like they, it's a, but to me, it's a more elegant, nevertheless, is more elegant. Oh, it's, oh, it's frighteningly more. Oh, it couldn't be more elegant. You know, there was, if you, I don't know if it's, I've never Googled it, but Richard Dawson was on a show, some game show, for some reason, Richard Dawson and Gene Rayburn were on the same show. Match game. Whatever it was. Match game. And they were doing, they're in the middle of the game, and one of the contestants, they said something to the contestant, and the contestant said, nevertheless. And the two of them went down, and people like, what's going on? We can't explain. We can't explain. Both of them independently went down to their knees. I've never seen that, but I would imagine that's on YouTube. Sure, sure. Which is classic, you know. It's almost like, it's the equivalent of, oh, did you ever hear the man from Nantucket? You know, you don't have to keep going, you know what I mean? My favorite, one of my favorite jokes is, my favorite, beef and broccoli. Love that. Now, did that come up when we were there? We were doing a series together. When Frank, Frank went off the, off the deep end. I said, oh, we were doing this. I said, we were, I said, we were late because we had to do a show at the Chinese network. And I said, floor number 12, please. And the guy said, oh, beef and broccoli. And Frank went, but it's the Chinese couple in bed. And the man says, let's try 69. She says, I'm not going to give you beef and broccoli this hour. I love that joke. It's just, it's a perfect joke. Perfect joke. I mean, I've been telling, some joke, I've been telling that every night for ever and ever and ever. Well, because it's both sexual and makes fun of the Chinese. You just can't not laugh at that. You know, I remember, the most part, I remember people who told me what almost when, and that joke was telling me, told to me by Alan Pepper that on the bottom line, like in 1978 or something like that, you know, because you can remember not only the joke, not always, but a lot of them, a real lot of them. And I can remember laughing at them the first time. I'm going to ask you, so I remember as a kid, the first joke that I laughed at was stick it at your, stick it out the window and let it cool off. Do you know that one, please? Huh? My aspirins. My aspirins, my aspirins. I read that as a kid. I remember Josh freed told me that joke. We're playing football. I must have been five. And he told me that joke. And I thought it was the funniest thing. And that sticks. I'm telling you, I was, I tell it every night. I was in third grade and we have a snowball fight. And in those days, there's no such thing as a dryer to throw your clothes in and get warm. So you had to sit there and drip dry and try and get warm before you go out and finish the snowball fight. And we're sitting on the floor of my buddy's house. And I'm in third grade and he's in fourth grade and he's in second grade, small town. And there's maybe four, five, six of us sitting there. And my cousin walked in who's in eighth grade, which is way older. And he pulled out a piece of paper and he read a poem. And it was the night before Christmas, dirty parody. And I'm telling you, David, to this day, everybody was enchanted and laughing and it was the most bonding, wonderful. And some, you know, old years are getting famous and people say, what was your first joke? You never know. And you go back and you remember that something must have clicked in my head because I remember every joke since then. Okay, hang on for a second. So and eventually over time, I pieced that back together. And then it became one of those things that went around on Mimeograph. Remember Mimeograph? Like the church. And then it went around. It was the night before Christmas and all through the house, everybody in the family was drunk as a louse. Grandma and grandpa were singing a song and a boy in the bed was pounding the shit out of his dog. My the cat house and me out of jail just settled down for a nice piece of tail. I remembered not knowing what a cat house was and not knowing what a piece of tail was. I remember what he said. But over time, I pieced together what he had said because this piece of it here and there. And I remember at the end, I heard him exclaim as he drove out of sight, piss on your old spent a hell of a night. Another line that was then it was away the windows. I flew like a flash. I tripped over the rug and fell flat on my ass. And there's nothing funny than falling flat on your ass to a third grade kid. I would pee in my pants, you know. Okay. So I don't know if this isn't going to be interesting to my audience, but you're helping me remember my first laugh. Worcestershire sauce. What's the joke? I just remember laughing at a guy was trying that guy was invented a new sauce and he thought it was really great sauce and he was trying to come up with a name for it. And the janitor from the building walked in and tasted it and he said, what is his sauce? That's a true story. So the first two jokes, I remember sticking out the window and let it cool off. It was a woman complaining about she can't find her aspirin. And then he was obviously telling me a racist joke. Right. The first real and the Worcestershire sauce. I don't remember until you told me, I just remember laughing at Worcestershire sauce. Right. My buddy worked at my buddy Warren Merton's worked in a drug store. And his first day of work, this little black woman came in and says, what's that? He said, excuse me? She said, what's that? And he's like, he's embarrassed. You know, he said, I'm sorry, man. What'd you say? What's that? He goes in the back. This is not joy. He said, the boss does this little black old lady and I can't understand what the fuck she's saying. Just give her her Winstons and her Alka-Seltzer. That was a true story. What's that? Oh, so funny. Oh, God. Oh, man. I, you know, the earliest, I remember the, probably the first really disgusting joke or maybe not the first one, but it stands out my mind with the guy who was with the girl on the honeymoon or something. And the guy really had to take a dump. And he didn't know where the bathroom was on the train and he really had to take a dump. And the train comes to a tunnel. I think you're in a tunnel. So the guy pulls done, went to the train, sticks it out and starts taking a shit. They come out of the tunnel and conduct the system. Hey, you with the cigar in your mouth. Get your head back in. Which is the worst joke? Hey, buddy, you with the cigar. All right, so honest. What's more fun than jokes? Come on. What is more fun? When we went in sixth grade, we had a week at camp. This was the public school. Can you imagine a school now with helicopter parents and lawsuits, but we went the entire sixth grade class went on a camping trip and we had a cab and it's frightening what we used to do and the thought of the kids can't go next door without. So the jokes that I heard on that camping, the laughter I had never heard, bowels no move. To this day, to this day I use that line. Alex, do you know that joke? Chief bowels? Tell that joke. They're going to put the highway through and then he doesn't. How do you remember this? He doesn't want to give up his teepee and they say, chief, we're going to take down a teepee. He says, bowels no move. So they give him some laxatives and then they come the next day and say, you got to move this teepee, we're going to put the highway through. Bowels no move. They give him some more laxatives and then come the next day, you got to move these tenes. He says, bowels got to move, teepee full of shit. It makes no sense. I heard it differently. Then why'd you let me tell it? No, I heard that the punchline was, bowels still no move, but teepee full of shit. The other one, I told a joke to a kid and I told it to a young kid and it was my buddy's son and he was seven, eight years old and he was just getting the real love jokes. I said, I'm going to tell you a difficult one and I told him this joke and he loved it. So we're up skiing and the next day I'm skiing and I get on the, what's it called, the lift. So it's me and some stranger in the middle and little Vinny, little Vinny starts telling the joke to this guy and then I'm like, and the joke went on and on and on, but when he stuck on the lift and it was like, it was like that the squaw goes to the pharmacist, goes to the drug store and says, big chief no fart. Do you know that? Some pharmacist gives her a pill to give the chief and she goes back to the next day and says, big chief no fart. So he gives her three pills, she takes them home, the chief takes them and she comes back the next day and says, big chief no fart, so he gives her a whole bottle full of pills, gives them to him the next day, she comes to the pharmacist and says, big fart, no chief. And this poor guy is trying to be polite while this eight-year-old's trying to tell a joke. Do you remember patient jackass? Patience jackass? Patience jackass. Patience jackass. Because I did this. That's a joke form, I'm sure. One of my most vivid memories with one of my youngest daughters, I remember walking her. It's not like crunch dog my ass. Well, I was walking my daughter in nursery school in Los Angeles and it was about a half hour walk. We were going to walk and I told the joke about the man walking in the desert with his jackass and they're walking and they're walking and the jackass says, how much longer? Patience jackass. Patience jackass. And then they walk and then the desert comes to an end and then they see a movie theater and they say, should we go into the movie theater and the jackass says, no, I want to get to where we're going. How much longer? Patience jackass. And then finally my daughter says, when is this joke going to be over? And I go, patience jackass. Patience. And I look at her and she was like four years old. And she's hurt. No. And her eyes, she thought that was the most amazing joke. I never forgot that. And then I watched her try to tell it when she couldn't. But she thought that was like. Because it must have been an eternity. Yeah. And when I said, yeah. So what was the, what did that trigger when I said patience jackass, you thought it was what? There's a lot of, a lot of those, basically what you said, you know, like something where eventually something, you know, there was, there was a beautiful, I went on a windjam of barefoot crews and it was a girl that worked there that was so hot. And I was just in love with it. And they shanghied me and kept me for another week. So I'm, we're in between the weeks. So the whole crew is stuck in the Bahamas somewhere. We go out to dinner. It's me and this loudmouth bartender and another guy. And this beautiful girl. And I'm, you know, I'm trying to impress her and make her laugh and blah, blah, blah. And I, and I told one of those types stories and I can still see her screaming. I, you know, we're telling stories. You know, I said, Oh, you know, we used to have so much fun when I was a kid. You know, I don't know if I should tell you guys, you know, we, we, we used to go up to my uncle's farm and the kids up in the farm, you know, they were wild as hell. And they said, we have a lot of fun up here because we fuck the pigs. Well, like what? How's that possible? Well, it's simple, you know, you know, you just pick a nice good looking pig, like a nice fat one, you know, and you, and you throw a saddle on it, you know, and then you climb up behind it on, on a rock or on a crate and you tie the saddle, good and tight. And then, you know, you put your foot in the, in the, and of course, the guy said, the stirrup, I said, Oh, you fuck pigs. It's just, you see, it's the same thing. Like it's, it's, you know, it's the fish hook in the mouth. That's so great. Oh, and she went fucking ballistic. You know, this was the loudmouth. You know, we got us come up. Alex, I'll blow you for a glass of water. So I remember the, I'm just trying to remember the jokes that I laughed at the hardest. A guy named Greg, I think his name was Greg Lyon, a reporter, when I worked at KRON. Where are you from? I don't even know. I'm from New Jersey, but I was, I had a job. I should interview you next time. So I had a job in a newsroom in San Francisco. I was like low man on the totem pole. I answered phones and they used to tell jokes in the newsroom. And I remember Greg Lyon told me a joke and the punchline is, why do I need a baseball bat? And he said, Oh, you'll need the baseball bat because Harold don't go for that shit. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. Do you know that joke? Singaloo the cook. What is that? Singaloo the cook. What's Singaloo the cook? The guy, the guy is stuck in a, in a bar, in a town in the middle of Alaska. How do you fucking know this? Remember I just said I count down from 10 and by the time I got to zero, I would know that the guy with the baseball bat was the Chinese cook in Alaska. That's what I just did. That's what I just did. The guy says, listen, I'm really, I'm really horny. You got any women here? And they said, there's no women in this town, pal. We got Singaloo the cook in the back. And he said, Hey, I don't go for that shit, man. And a couple nights later, he's drinking, he's drinking, he says, come on, come on, he's just to your mother, anybody, I need a girl. We got no, we got Singaloo. I don't go for that shit. So finally he gets drunk and he says, all right, all right, all right, I'll take Singaloo the cook. And the guy's all right, go in the back room and I'll send back Singaloo, Singaloo and Alan John in a few minutes. He says, who's Alan John? They're going to hold them. He doesn't go for that shit. In my first book in 1981, so hang on. That joke is my first joke in 1981 and it's Dangerfield is a traveling salesman. That's how it begins. It's Dangerfield is the name in that joke. Thank you, Alan. That is such a great version of that joke, because you can't make up Singaloo. It's because it's racist. It's everything. They're going to hold the little Chinese guy. You can see the big tail. People have not, one of the things I do to my age group, the baby boomers, which is, you know, 50s, late 50s. How old are you? I'm 58. So you believe I'm so old that I would kill for 58? So one of the things that I do in my age group is somebody said, I just got back from China. And I always say, do you notice that the Coca-Cola tastes very salty over there? Or you have to keep an eye on your Coca-Cola? Okay, you lost me. Me tell joke, me go pee pee. And there isn't anybody my age who, if I say, if somebody said, you know, this is really offensive, I apologize to my listeners. But they'll say, oh, my sister and her husband, they just adopted a Chinese baby. And I'll go, you've got to be careful. My sister adopted a Chinese baby. And the Coke, ever since then, I don't know what it is. You have Coke and it just tastes horrible. And they lose it. They all know the me go pee pee in the Coke joke. I don't know what the joke is. Well, you know, it's funny because a girl that I went out with 15 years after I started telling that joke was Okie dokie, no more joking, no more P&T is how she used to tell it. The way I tell the joke is that there's businessmen that get drunk every day in Chinese restaurant, have lunch and get drunk in Chinese restaurant and they give the waiter hard time. Hey, hello, get over here. Give me some more fly like that. Give me fly like that. And one day one guy says, all right, you know what, every day we get drunk and we're so rude to the waiter and we're crappy. So I think it's time we straighten up and start being decent, true beings. Everybody's asked a good idea. Hey, come over. Because oh, look what I do for you. Listen, every day we get drunk every hard time. But for now, we're not going to give you a hard time and give you good tip every day. What do you think of that? You just have to piss on your coffee. Which is the joke you're talking about? Which makes no sense because the Chinese restaurant and my girlfriend said, no, no, Okie dokie, no more joking, no more P&T, which makes no sense. Well, the version I, as I remember it, it was hop sing from Bonanza. Oh, of course. It doesn't please hop sing, hung low. And it was me Chinese, me tell joke, me go pee pee in your coke. Maybe. No, no, no, what he's doing is. Do you know that joke? That's the same thing I just said that he's pissing in their coffee because he doesn't like, you know. Okay, so Jim Neighbors, when I was growing up, there was a rumor that Jim Neighbors was having an affair with Roman Gabriel, the quarterback for the LA Rams and was so bizarre. Because he was. Was that true? Oh, yeah. Jim Neighbors was, whoa. But Roman Gabriel from the LA Rams? I'm just making it up. Oh, okay. Well, they was called the Rams, but. You almost got me. I just couldn't believe it. Okay, then I go off to the sixth grade camp and they tell the joke, the Gomer pile joke. Do you remember this surprise, surprise? That ain't my finger. Do you know that joke? Oh, of course. I don't remember what the joke is. The guy who's getting an exam and the doctor sticks, you know, is given the guy exam and the guy says, Doc, stop fucking around, get your finger out of my ass. He says, I'm not fucking around and that's not my finger. But I had heard it. There's a million verses. The Gomer pile is with Bunny, Sarge's girlfriend, and she says, come on, Gomer. Stick it in. I don't, oh, Miss Buttock. All right, surprise, surprise. That's not my vagina and surprise, surprise. That's not my finger. Is that what you told me? Yeah. My father had two great jokes that he used to tell, the pretzel grip, the wrestler. That joke is in my very first book and the wrestler is Nelson, like in Bob Nelson, but like half Nelson. And I remember. How's your punch line? Well, but I remember telling my shrink, my, you know, I've been seeing a shrink since I was 18. It's not helping. And if I tell me about it, no, I'd be dead without a shrink. And I was in Freudian. And he asked me about jokes and what my father's favorite joke was. And my father's favorite joke was the pretzel grip. Pretzel hold. The pretzel hold. And he thought it, my, my shrink at the time thought it was very revealing, of course, that that was my father's favorite joke. See, he's another legman. But, you know, like, yeah. Is it more telling that that's his favorite joke or that he told his son that? You know, my father very rarely told jokes, but. Do you remember the pretzel grip? Please, please. Tell the pretzel grip. Nelson is the American champion wrestler and he's going to fight the French wrestler for the world championship. And the coach says, listen, Nelson, you're better than this guy. But he's got the pretzel hold and you got to be really careful because if he gets in a pretzel hold, you know, you're sunk. Nelson, don't worry coach, I'll stay away from him. So the, they go there and the match starts and within three seconds, the French guys got Nelson in the pretzel hold and the coach says, Jesus Christ, he throws it in the towel and goes back to the locker room. He uses this loud cheer and Nelson comes running into the locker room. He says, I did it, coach. I'm champion. The coach's like, what do you mean you're champion? He said, the guy got you in the pretzel hold right away. What the hell happened, Nelson? He says, I'll tell you what happened, coach. I was, I was out there and I thought I could stay away from him. Jesus Christ, right away, he gets him in that pretzel hold. I'm in this pretzel hold and I don't know what to do and I look and I look in front of my, right in front of my eyes. I see these two testicles. So I bit him. The coach says, I don't understand. He says, coach, you'd be surprised what you can do when you bite your own balls. That's what you're talking about. Yeah. My father's version of it. How are we doing on time? Okay. Can I get five minutes? What? I know. My father's version of the joke was there was a retired wrestler and he wanted to prove to his kids that he could still wrestle. So he calls his agent up. He says, I need one final match. I just want to prove to my kids that I still got it. It's fantastic. But every all roads, it's like putting a dart in a wall and you draw the target around it. But I think that that element is why it was my father's favorite joke. Oh, of course. Why it's Friday and the old man wanted to prove that he still got it. Absolutely. And then he bites his own balls. I was friendly with Richard Dawson's kids this is when you lived in LA and Richard actually told me this joke. The commandant thinks you're trying to escape. That's the punchline. Right. Right. They throw his arm out the plane and they throw his leg out of the plane or something like that. How do you know that? Of course, I know them all, man. But Richard told it. It was a RAF pilot. Of course, of course. Get shot down over Germany during World War Two. And the Germans go, we have bad news. We have to remove your leg. Because you do me a favor. Drop it over London on your next bombing mission. Do me a favor and drop it over London. That's just this miraculous joke. Yeah. We got bad news. You're the gangrene. We have to remove your right arm. Do me a favor. When you're flying over London, do me a favor. Just drop it over there. And we got more bad news. We have to remove the gangrene spread, your left arm. Could you do me a favor? No more. The commandant thinks you're trying to escape. It's just beautiful. You know, we used to sit around and play poker. And my father, as the years went by, he'd get drunker and drunker and come in later and later. And it was no source, I mean, no endless source of disgust and craziness. And my mother and father and the battles. But, meanwhile, that was just the background for the six guys, me and all my friends, all my brother and all his friends, playing poker. And it was like, you couldn't believe the scene. You know, forget about the reality shows. This was unbelievable. And we're all sitting around playing poker one night and the old man came in extra late and extra loaded. And I will never forget this. He comes in because he was not a joker. And he walks in and my mother's pissed off. And he goes, ah, yeah, I'm late. He's like, I got an accident. And, you know, me and all my friends, they're polite, you know, so that he's got their attention. And, you know, and he goes, yeah, I was coming up 106 and I hit a lady's cat with my car. And, you know, and, and she came out and I know she I went, I knocked on the door said, listen, your cat ran out in the street and I didn't see it coming. I ran over and I killed your cat. I'm really sorry. She comes out and looked at the cat. He says, listen, I feel really bad. I want to, I want to give you $20. And she says, I want $100. And I told her, listen, you know, I was, I'm being a nice guy. I'm coming up the road and he ran out of nowhere. And it wasn't my fault, but I want to give you $20. And she said, $100. And a cop pulls up and gave me a ticket. And of course, one of my friends says, what did you get a ticket for, Mr. Marling? And he says, discussed in the price of pussy in a pub. And this is my father and my friends went batshit. And my mother's trying to be mad at him. Oh God. Well, we have to wrap it up. Can we do this again? Well, you're asking me. JackieTheJokeMan.com. I think I'm going to stump you. Hold on. JackieTheJokeMan.com. If you click on that, it goes right to the Amazon page. Please buy my book. And I do, I tweet jokes every day at 420 marijuana time at Jackie Marling. And it's always fun. And I love it here. And you're, you are a delight. Obviously, we're both good audiences. So it's fun. Yes. And now if you stump me, I will blow you. And if you don't, you buy me dinner. Go ahead. My son, you will find as you get older, the first thing to go are your eyes. The Amazing Watson. God, damn it. What are we having for dinner? That. Why do you use to crush walnuts? And now you're crushing coconuts. With his cock. With his cock. My father, you said. That is the funniest fucking joke in the world. That is the greatest joke in the world. The Amazing Watson. It was the Amazing Rinaldo. It's our 40th anniversary. Let's go back and see the Amazing Watson. Let's end on this joke because this was my father's favorite joke. I heard a couple goes to Mexico to see the Amazing Rinaldo. A couple is in Las Vegas for their honeymoon and they see tonight the Amazing Watson and they go and to see the Amazing Watson and he comes out and puts three walnuts on a table, takes out his heart on and smashes the walnuts. And they're like, well, that's amazing. And then 40 years later, it's their 40th anniversary and they are in Las Vegas and they see signed tonight the Amazing Watson. They can't believe that it's still the Amazing Watson. So they go in and he comes out and he puts three coconuts on the table and smashes them with his cock. And they can't believe it. And they go in the dressing room and they have to say, wow, you're still here. But when we saw you 40 years ago, you were smithing walnuts and now you're smashing coconuts. And he says, yeah, well, my age, the eyesight starts to go. Which is just wonderful. But my father would tell the joke. We're going to wrap it up. We're wrapping it up. My father would tell that joke. It was the great Ronaldo and he would ride in on a white steed and he would jump off and people go, the great Ronaldo. And then he would whip out his cock and a woman would make it hard. Right. But you know, it's like, it's like anything. It's, it's, you know, you can create the tale. It's Charlie the boil sucker. You know, that joke. What's that? Charlie the boil sucker. No. And that you, Larry Miller used to make it longer every year. One year, I think at the comic strip Christmas party made like 55 minutes. But a guy needs a job and he gets a job sucking the boils off people. And his first day he goes to this lady's house and knocks on her door. It's a 450 pound woman. And she brings him into the living room. She takes down her panties and lifts up her dress. She got a huge boil on the inside of her thigh. So he wraps his lips around and he's sucking on his boil. It all sends you cuts this huge fart. And he goes, lady, you know, it's people like you to make my job disgusting. Now you can see how you can make that joke three hours, you know. Thank you, Jackie. I'm sure your father was a delight. This is a great show because it's two amazing comedy writers and they both come from opposite ends of the spectrum. I'm going to give these guys a proper introduction to my left or radio right is radio is Andy Breckman. And I wanted to put them on with Steve Young because they are two very amazing men, two great comedy writers, both of whom are legends, both of whom work for Letterman. Let me introduce legend. Legends is a funny word. That's an elastic word. Andy Breckman created Monk, the hit television show. He just won a Writers Guild Award. He has written on Saturday Night Live. He has written for Letterman. He was there at the beginning and he's written movies starring Meg Ryan and Walter Mathau. You are an actual movie writer. And I've been very lucky. Yeah. Well, yeah, some movies. Some movies, yeah. Movies with Steve Martin and you've written on the Academy Awards. I'm just going to keep going till I've had some movies made that I wish were it made. Yeah, that's true too. Steve Young, you weren't there at the beginning. Oh no, I was just a tiny boy when the Letterman show was launching. Steve Young, Harvard Lampoon, didn't even go to Harvard. That's how amazing he is. They just put him on the magazine. Simpsons. I think you were, I'm going to say without you, and you'll say no, but I would say, well, that's not fair to certain people. I would say you, David Letterman, if you think David Letterman is funny, which we all do, then Steve Young is funnier. I would assume that if you asked David Letterman, who's funnier, you or Steve Young, he would say Steve Young. Well, because you would have painted him into a corner and that would be the only gracious thing for him to say. And I think we must realistically say that Mr. Letterman has realms and reaches that very few mortals have and I'm not one of them. And he's certainly, if such a thing as possible, he's actually gotten more interesting. David Letterman, he is finding a way to his next chapter and it's even more fascinating. Both of you men teach comedy at NYU. In fact, our paths literally crossed last week. One of the relatively few times when it's okay to say literally. Yes, it actually happened. Steve's class had just ended and mine was just about to start and we met briefly in the lobby. Hey, you're that guy. Yeah, you're that guy. There we go. Well, did you go to the dinners? I know Letterman had these big dinners during the wrap up to the show. Didn't you guys meet at a steakhouse? Were you at the Friars Club thing? I was at the Friars Club thing and then I think David's referring to a dinner. Steve was not there. It was a dinner that we arranged the original writers and Mr. Letterman. Yeah, they didn't want me because I was only a tiny boy. It's true. I don't know if Steve had a chance. It's very interesting. I was glad I went to that dinner, that smaller private dinner with Letterman because I wanted to say thanks, really. Letterman, you were the Simpsons and you had a pedigree that I didn't have but Merrill Marko and Letterman gave me my first job in the business. My first break and you always remember the people that... What happened? That took you a chance on you. We just had Merrill Marko on the show. Yes, she was on and I would listen to it because again, if you're funny, she is funnier now than she's ever been in her life. Well, I owe her... She obviously predated Steve, I think, at the show. You predated Merrill Marko. Predated, I'm sorry, but I owe her... That's a good rumor to start though. I owe her my career. I owe her everything. What happened? It's not a great story, but if that's... That's what this shows. Lay it on us, yes. Even if I consciously stop and embellish it to the end, it won't be a great story. Just use the word sex dungeon and it'll be fine. I was performing. I was doing some performing. Got an agent. This is... And I applied to Saturday Night Live. I wrote some sketches. Saturday Night Live was turning over after the glory years, after the first five years. Lorne Michaels left, I'm sure you're aware, and all the cool kids left the show. And so there were some slots open in Saturday Night Live. And I wrote some sketches, four or five sketches, and had my agent submit them. And they were Saturday Night... The show passed. Then I got a very sweet letter from Ann Beatz, who... I don't know if you know Ann Beatz. She took the time to write a very nice rejection letter. And then I went on with my life. At that time, it meant working at a video store on 8th Street. That was my life, if you call it a life. But Ann Beatz... May I interrupt? Yes, sir. Steve, you had your hand up? Yes. This is a six-part question. You know what I love? You know what I love in politics when there's a press conference and a reporter says, I have a question and a follow-up question. They announce beforehand that they're not going to be satisfied with the answer. They're definitely know they have a follow-up. Well, let's just not answer the first one. Curious, what video format around 1980, because I don't think VHS had even taken on it. You're exactly right. The first video stores were at Photomat, by the way, the first video rentals. No one remembers this. But I was in one of the very first video rental stores in 1980. What was Photomat? Photomat was where you went to get photos developed before the instant cameras. There used to be these things called daguerreotypes. The video revolution was so new that I was working at a video store. There were only like 12 titles. Nine of them were porn. But the video revolution was so new that we had a woman come in the store, rent a videotape, and then take it home and then call us from home and say, now, where in the TV does it go? Really? Who she needed. That's how new it was. Anyway. I hope that wasn't porn. She doesn't know where that goes. I am very anxious to see this film, sir. I need to have this right up in the next few minutes. Yes. So anyway, I'm at the video store. Unbeknownst to me, my agent took the rejected SNL sketches, my four or five sketches, the SNL pass, and got them somehow to Merrimarco, who was assembling a writing staff for the late, the first late night staff. Letterman, you might remember, was being sort of kept on hold by NBC. His morning show had failed or had ended, I'm sorry. And he was on hold for a year. They were looking to do something with him. And they gave him this slot and they were looking to put it. So I got this call. Literally, it's like a bad old Hollywood story from the video store. My then girlfriend, soon to be wife, soon to be ex-wife, called and said, David Letterman is looking for you. And he's only in town for a day. And he's up at the Plaza Hotel. And they meet you right now if you can get up there. And he's leaving tomorrow. So I went racing up and was very excited. But I think, thankfully, I had no time to prep or get nervous or think about it. I just got on the subway and left. And it was one of those Kevin, watch the register. I got to go jumpstart my career. And then I went up town and there's Letterman on a couch and a t-shirt and jeans. He was the most casual guy. And at least when I knew him, very accessible. Steve might have a different, Steve might have met a different Letterman. Steve's not accessible. Exactly. He was always in a tux by the way. And I had the guts. I don't know how there was a coffee table in front of him. He was lying on the couch. There was a coffee table with some spare change on the table. And I don't know where I got the guts, but I came into the suite and sat down and there was a spare change. And I actually had the guts to say, can I have this? And I collected the change and actually put it in my pocket. And then there might be a lesson here. Did he laugh? Yeah, he did. I made him laugh. And there might be a lesson here and then I'll shut up and you can go on the real show. But the lesson that Merrill described the show that she wanted to do, that she already had it, the vision of it in her mind. And I think the DNA didn't really change for 30 years in some ways. I mean, it obviously mutated, but she had the vision of what she wanted to do, including death pieces and then remotes and the monologue and the attitude. She had it all. She actually, she would actually quote certain jokes that she said captured the essence of it, like you know, David Letterman's joke, McDonald's is now, hey, McDonald's is now serving breakfast. Now that's the dream come true. You know, that's the perfect letter. You know, that's so she, she described the show and my sketches didn't really fit what the format, but she liked the sketches, but she said, come up with, you know, come up with your own ideas and pitches for based on what I just described to you and send them to me. And I, this is a lesson, maybe if there are any young writers out there or would be writers out there. I didn't, I think it's important not to keep them waiting. I don't know if you guys agree. I ran home. I knew they were leaving for LA the next morning and I ran home and pulled an all-nighter and, and wrote up three or four pages that night just based on, you know, I was all fired up and adrenaline was popping and I got it at dawn. I got it to back to the Plaza Hotel for their flight back to LA. So, so in high, I'm so grateful that that number one, I was able to stay up all night, which I'm so grateful to myself that I, that I had the wherewithal to not keep them waiting. And I think that's, you know, if you have a good meeting and people are waiting on material, it's probably a good tip to get it to them as quick as you can. This is very exciting for me because you two, and I don't want to get into Sammy Davis territory, but does anybody have any meth? No, I don't want to get into Sammy Davis territory because... Junior or senior? Junior. Okay. The two of you share a lot of, you share a resume, but you also, when you walk into a room, everybody's glad to see you. There's this, you walk in and... Because, because the money. Because they know he's got a pocket full of change now. Exactly. No, it's just when you walk in, when the comedy, you're just, and your team players, and you're looking at, you're thinking about the show. And I love giving hand jobs. I don't want to say that. Steve Young, so how did you get your first job? What was your first job? My first TV job was not necessarily the news, the HBO show out in Los Angeles. And that was, I had gotten out of college a couple years before and knew I wanted to do this as a career, but there was not an immediate success at that. I did luckily have an agent, some junior level guy at William Morris who had come to the Harvard Lampoon and said, oh, we'd like to find some, some promising young comedy writers. And I said, William Morris, why is the cigarette company looking good? So I had no idea. But I wrote a Cheers spec script and printed it out on my pin feed, early generation Macintosh printer. And I'm sure it was fine for 21 year old or whatever. For a while I was bartending in Boston and just kind of scratching around trying to... Was there any business in Boston for a bartender? I can't imagine anybody drinking in Boston. It's a very tea totalish sort of town. So you went to work for, not necessarily, there was Pat Lee, John Moffitt, Rich Hall who was on the show last month. He had largely cycled out. He went to Letterman probably, right? He had been there. Did Rich write on Letterman? He did the morning show. I find that often in my career I arrive someplace just as the golden age has ended. In the case of not necessarily the news, the generation of performers that everyone knew and loved mostly had left. Conan had been a writer there like a year before and was gone now. Although I found his cartoons, scraps of paper with his drawings on them in the desk I was using. Did you keep them? No, no. I didn't have the, didn't have the foresight. Also my pockets were very full at the time. I did find that it was a fine place to work, but I was only there six weeks. I had been the sort of last hired, first fired at their first whiff of budget trouble. But I got a couple things on the show and actually got a Writers Guild Award out of that. So that was nice. And then I was in New York working on the comedy channel before it was Comedy Central. They were starting up in the fall of 89 and really didn't know what they were doing at that point. It was a lot of let's take old movies from the vault, cut five minute funny scenes out of them, just show the isolated scenes and have sort of VJs introducing each thing and doing pattern and little comedy bits between each thing. And so I was on one of those shows for a while. And so tell me how, very quickly, let's get to how you ended up becoming the legendary, I don't want to go ahead. How did you get on Letterman? That was early 1990. And the show, I think, had just had its eighth anniversary. And I believe it was out in LA and a lot of years. Yeah, this was 82 to 90 by this point. And a lot of writers went out to LA in addition to doing their work at the show that week, went on a lot of meetings. And in the coming month or so, about five or six of the old line guys said, Oh, by the way, we're leaving. Is that why Dave went to LA to get rid of everybody? I don't know if he's that strategic thinker about getting rid of writers. I think he has other ways of doing that. But suddenly, there was the sense that there were a lot of openings in the comedy Grapevine in New York, which I was tangentially plugged into. It was full of people saying, Oh, you got to get your sample in over at Letterman because all the writers are leaving. And this is a great time. And now, why did he require urine? Most people need... Can you back up? What was that? You mean the job interviews? No, the sample that they required was urine. Yeah, it doesn't have to be your own. Oh, okay. Go on. New York in 1990. You could get it on any street corner. You could write either 20 monologue jokes or you have vial of urine. Yeah. And the vial, a lot of people overlook that. It has to be a nice vial. It has to be glass. You can't come in there with some cheap styrene. And they don't return the vial. I think they're just in it for the vials. No, I was unusual, I've been told. I got the cap back. These are your comics. Well, reading the tea leaves there. But Steve, I know, you leapfrogged over The Simpsons just now, didn't you? The Simpsons was later. Oh, it was later, I'm sorry. I wrote one episode. It was a freelance thing. I was never on the staff there. Well, you know, I'm sorry. Being a freelancer on The Simpsons is a huge honor. That's not done a lot. Yeah, and I don't think they do freelance episodes anymore. I think after a couple of years or so when I did it in 96, I think they didn't do it too much. The Writer's Guild for a while required staff to hire freelancers. But this was before The Simpsons was a Guild show. Oh, no, I didn't. Oh, okay, so it doesn't apply. But luckily, my agent at the time was clever and said, let's get you this Simpsons gig as if it were a Guild show. And so you're going to get residuals for your episode and none of the other writers were doing that. Wow. Yeah, I still get an $11 check once in a while. Was that the same young William Morse agent that found you years earlier? I think by that time I had moved on as writers occasionally. So you get to Letterman? I get to Letterman and it was great. I was going to the big leagues from the comedy channel up to the Big 30 Rock legendary show. And I got there and there were a few old line writers left. Steve O'Donnell was the head writer who hired me and was this wonderful talent and a great friend to this day. And you had Randy Cohen and you had Adam Resnick still there and Jerry Mulligan, of course. Wow. And the old timers were shaking their heads sadly by, oh, things are so degraded now. Oh, it used to be good in the old days. Now we sit in this room all evening and think of things that we can't get on the air and it's just so debased compared to the glory days. Was the top 10 list? That was a staple. Yeah, that had been on for a few years by then. So that was a anchor point every day. You knew there'd be that, but just the quest for new ideas that Dave would get behind and actually do as was the case from the very beginning. Yeah, I was always a struggle. But that was a sort of quiet period and you felt like, wow, the show is reaching the end of history. And we had 25 years to go. Yeah. That sums up life itself too, doesn't it? Yes, I have 25 years to go. Yes, exactly. Where's it? It feels like the end. It feels like the end and it doesn't end. It's like a Samuel Beckett. Steve Young, you wrote on Letterman for 25 years? 25 years. Wow. Spring of 90 to the last day, spring of 2050. In the bunker. Yeah, I liked, I mean, there were different up and down periods. Some periods I recall less fondly than others. But the last few years at the show, I mean, it was limited what Dave wanted to do. He didn't do remotes anymore. He didn't want to do complicated things that required extensive rehearsal and all that. But within those parameters, we were still doing things that we all really enjoyed and that would, on a good day, really tickled Dave because he'd been doing the show for so long. He probably had more comedy come across his radar than almost anyone alive. And it was hard to get something that really made his eyelids open up and go, whoa, this is something we've never thought of before. This is a different land that's just opened up. And some days you could do that just in a line or a 30-second bit or something and just feel like, okay, 25 years on, no, it's not over. We're still mining good quality ore here. Andy Breckman, you worked at 30 Rock. I don't want to violate your privacy, but you had one of those amazing deals with Saturday Night Live where you could just come in. I went, I was at Saturday Night Live when they were sort of in transition, maybe struggling a little in the early, let me say, I did Letterman for a couple years and then Saturday Night Live. So the mid-80s, I did three years there full-time. And then I don't think they do this anymore, just as Steve's experience at The Simpsons. They brought me in for the next five or six or seven seasons. I was brought in as a guest writer four or five weeks, four or five shows a season. And you kicked ass. Well, I, you know, it's easy as a guest writer because you can make it look easy because you have all year to think of five. Everyone, the challenge is thinking of 22 ideas every week. But I had, all I had to do was think of five half-decent ideas. So I, yeah, I always came in with something, but I was trying to get a movie career going. What's interesting, yeah, and you did, what's interesting about the two of you is Steve is of the, you know, the regimentation of Harvard, work hard, play hard, Harvard, play hard. And, you know, Letterman and Andy, both of you came from it from two different, you entered comedy. You mean I don't work hard. You make it look a lot easier than I do. Because I don't work hard. But now did you go to college? I did not go to college. I came in and threw a different door. I was performing as a, as a, I went to BU for a semester, but I wanted to. And you dropped out of college? I dropped out of college to see if I could make a living performing. I thought I was, at the time, I thought I was Randy Newman or, right, you loud and wane, right? I don't know if you know that reference, but do we comedic music and songwriting and nobody, none of my so-called friends would tell me I had the courtesy to tell me I didn't have the talent to do it. So I tried it and the problem was, the problem was I didn't fail. I didn't succeed. Obviously I didn't, you know, I'm not a household name. Obviously I didn't succeed, but I didn't fail. I kept getting work enough to keep going. The carrot was just dangling and years went by the way years do and I was, I was in my mid-twenties and is this where we get to have the sex dungeon reference for you exactly? Yeah, I made a living. Let's just say that. So, yeah, so I made, I was doing, I was doing well enough to keep going and then thankfully, thankfully I stumbled backwards into, into sketch writing and found, before Letterman I had another credit on a kid's show, but thankfully I realized I could do something else because that's a tough life. Have I ever seen you stumped? I don't think there's ever been an idea presented to Andy Breckman that you couldn't solve. I don't honestly know what that means. No, seriously, a movie idea. I've pitched you crazy movie ideas and within five minutes. Well, that's my, my favorite thing to do is to break stories and to work on, in broad strokes, work on ideas and that's my favorite thing to do. My least favorite thing, like a lot of writers, is writing. That's hard, but I do love the, I do love the bantering and the kicking ideas around and my favorite place to be in the world is a good writer's room. I don't know if Steve agrees, but I loved the Letterman writer's room. I felt like this is where I am becoming the fully realized version of myself. I definitely agree. It's my favorite place to be and I'm working to get another show going, not to get a show on the air really or to write, which is going to be hard, but I just want to get a writer's room again. I just love being with the Harvard boys, love them. My favorite words in the English language are when the head writer says, I have to shut the door, but it's getting so. Because he's going to tell a joke or the room has just gotten. Yeah, we used to get, okay, close the door. We're going to talk about this and in terms that we don't want the rest of the world to hear. Are there women in the room at Letterman? Intermittently and usually, yes. I mean, that was always, I think increasingly over the years, a project that all these shows have grappled with because, yeah, we want it to be a place that people don't feel excluded from and all that. Did it damper some of the jokes that you were throwing around? Very little, very little. You're talking about jokes that weren't for the show? Yes, of course. Well, that's 99% of the jokes are. The shockingly, not even that it's graphic or crude, just like the conceptually horrifying sometimes was the direction we'd go. In my experience, and I think Dave, Dave, you'd agree, in my experience, the fun is being with funny people and poking at it, poking at them and poking them until you can get them to laugh. That often meant crossing some boundaries. Just getting people to respect, to crack up was the goal for me. They're not getting material on the air, but just making them laugh. Andy has this gift of pretending not to understand the assignment playing dumb. One of the most, Brian Reich, Brian Rich, I always mispronounce his name, it's Brian Rich. Very funny, very funny guy. You were probably in college with him. I think he was a little younger. And just a frighteningly brilliant guy. He invented the masturbating bear on Conan. Now, yes, but I think it's worth pointing out bears had been masturbating for millennia before this Conan business ever happened. But not while wearing a diaper. And Pimpbot. And what, I'm sorry? And Pimpbot on Conan. Oh, you never saw Pimpbot? It's amazing. Anyway, so Brian's like this frighteningly brilliantly funny guy. And we were traveling somewhere and Andy and Brian were in the backseat. Okay. And it was dumb and retarded. It was the most fascinating conversation for four hours. It's very easy for me to play dumb. The two of them just trying in a conversation. He is bringing it down. I mean, not dirty example. If you can make Brian laugh, that's made my day. If you can break him, that's because he's as smart and funny as anyone. But just you guys, I can't articulate it, but they would start a conversation that would go on for an hour and the premise would be wrong. It would be based on some wrong fact. And then they would pursue it down. It was it was fat. It was anyway. Yeah, Betsy Borns has a great comedy writer and writes about comedy and she has a new podcast. Going back to women, the first writing job I had was on Roseanne and she hired women. And my recollection of the female writers on Roseanne were they were as filthy, if not filthier than the guys. I mean, they would, I don't want to mention any names, but there were female writers who were doing Lucian Ethel with the candy pretending to be blowing guys. So the idea that women can't be as horrible in a room as a guy is. No, I wouldn't say that belief holds any water, but I do think that there are cultural influences that begin when you're a child. And if you're a girl, you may be influenced and socialized to think you're supposed to be the quieter one and boys are the boisterous, noisy attention getting ones. And then this is hard to overcome later. If you think, well, I'm a funny person, but I'm not used to thinking that I'm the one who's going to get up and get the attention. And maybe writing is a little different than performing in that. But I will tell you that in the later years of Letterman, I was looking at the writing submissions coming in. And even after we told agents, we are always very interested in seeing promising women writers. We don't want you to hold back on this. It was 25 to one men to women submitting to the Letterman show. And maybe by that point, we weren't the hottest show. Maybe there were other shows that the most talented women thought this is where I'm aiming for. So maybe that's not a real sample, but that has always stuck out to me as an example of the underlying social, cultural, blah, blah, blah hyphenated things that are going on. What I would do if I had a particularly raunchy joke in the room, and there was a woman in the room, is I would spell it. You didn't know that women can spell? What? They can spell. Holy, holy, there's a, there's a real flaw in my plan. Happiest day at the FLEW in my plan. Well, first of all, again, as with the bear, I'm going to point out, not all women can spell. So you may have been fine. Yeah, that's right. Well, yeah. We're looking for very funny, very illiterate women. Yeah. The women went out and created Broad City and Amy Schumer and Sarah, you know, right? And girls and all that kind of stuff. They probably... Well, they probably had a male producer helping. To help them with the spelling. Yeah, yeah. I think if I were a woman, I would... Those shows are so good, you've got to believe. It's funny that the Letterman show, Dave will say this, was created by, you know, Merrill Marko. Pretty much created the format. Many of his long-term producers were women, and there were very talented women coming in and out over the years. There is a... I was doing somebody's radio show the other day, and there were... It was me, the host, and three other women, and then Rich Voss came in, the great comedian Rich Voss, and the male energy took over, and we were... All three of us have daughters, and, you know, we look over and we see the women, and there is a male energy that is... Trying to impress them? Well, and it dominates... It's not necessarily more powerful, it's just louder. And there's a female energy. There is... There are two different energies. This confirms my theory that men want to get laid. I've been saying that for years. And you've just confirmed it. So that we were shown... Men are anxious to impress women. Yeah, it's... Well, look, I can't sink a three-point basket. I can't hit a curveball. This is all I can do to get women to... What about your comedy songs? Believe me, that doesn't work either. You've got to believe me. I tested that for 10 years. Have you ever laughed a woman into bed? Well, I don't have an option. I don't know what else do I have going for me. How does a comedy writer... Except now I could go up to a woman, you know, and say, I make a very handsome living. As a comedy writer, what do you do? You meet a woman. You hand some jokes to a funny guy. I don't know. Do you guys agree that I don't... I know you're single now. I don't know if you're dating. I don't know what Steve's situation is, but a woman who laughs is a gift from God. You know, just a real laughter. And I love both my... I've been married twice and both my wives were very generous with their laughter. And that's just the juice. That's the energy that keeps me going every day. But is that... I wouldn't know what to do with a tough room at home. That would be hell on earth. Tell what your daughter is to say. This is a tough room just sitting at the kitchen table. Tell what your daughter is to do. Oh, yes, my daughter at the dinner table. If dad, if I told a joke or tried to be funny, and it didn't work, if the joke wasn't funny, my daughter Rachel would start crying, playfully crying and saying, we're going to starve. That was her thing. Around the house. I'm not going to ask you personal questions, but let's just say, Steve Young, you've had children. That's right. I live in a dwelling. What's it like? Is it wonderful? It's not bad. Let me keep you out of the elements. I haven't met your kids. Andy Breckman's kids were raised... are being raised exactly how my kids were raised. No, actually, better because... I also know better. They are constantly pitching. You walk into the house. They're two beautiful kids. These are from the new marriage. All right, from Beth. Well, it's funny to say that as we're sitting here in New York and on the Lower East Side, my son, Evan, my 10-year-old son. Who I have a feud with. Who you're having a celebrity feud with my 10-year-old son. Good luck on that feud, by the way. He wouldn't do a roast battle with me. I wanted to do a roast battle with him. I have to pick him up. I have to leave it a few minutes to pick him up. He's at comedy class. He's doing stand-up comedy at the Gotham Comedy Club. He comes out and does like every... At the end of every semester, they come out and do five minutes. You've got to come to see it. Oh, my God. But his last comedy routine was... He came in and said, you know, every comedian needs a hook, needs a gimmick. I'm the comic without a phone. And he did a whole five minutes on how he doesn't have a phone. Very funny kid. And he doesn't have a phone because you're not funny and you're starving. Because he's 10. I don't know. When did your kids get phones? He's 10. So, wait a second. Don't you think this would have been funny? There was a bet of Andy, by the way, hosts for WFMU. I have a show not unlike this. And Steve Young should come on your show. He's always welcome. He has the most amazing show. You would have so much fun. I would go with you just to watch you go beyond his show. But Steve was telling us about his dwelling. No, I want to hang on for one second. So, they were doing a benefit for WFMU, which is the greatest radio station. I'm familiar with it. I know Erwin Chewson. Yes, he's by Leedon, actually, on Wednesdays. And there are two great radio stations in America. KPFK in Los Angeles, where my radio show is. And WFMU, and it's just a beautiful building. So they were doing a benefit at Monty Hall. That's the name of it. Oh, yes. I've been there. I've done a show in this. Oh, great. Oh, yes. By the way, I did your show. In Jersey City, it's now become a real hot venue. Yeah, you can get over there on the path train. Yes. It's a number of people who heard me on your show. Well. So anyway, they're doing a benefit for WFMU. And it was a talent show. And I said, why don't Evan, your 10-year-old son, and I do a roast battle? He doesn't know you. And I would kick his ass. That's just wrong. No, it isn't. It's hysterical. All right. Well, let me ask Steve Young. Let me ask Judge Young. I'm going to have to thread this needle very carefully. Exactly. The idea would be a roast battle. Right. And they introduced me as a guy who's written on roasts. He's written for Triumph the Ansel Comic Dog. And he's going to go up against Evan, this 10-year-old. And the print, you know, everybody automatically assumes that Evan is going to kick my ass. Well, but he doesn't. The point, the problem is he doesn't. David, God bless you. I love you. But he doesn't know you very well. I mean, you've been to the house a few times. But to say to Evan, you're going to go on stage in this man. This middle-aged man is going to ridicule you. If he has to tough sell to a 10-year-old. Why? But no, but for the funny. But for the funny. OK, maybe. But he doesn't know you. All right. What did he say to you? He doesn't love you. Most. I don't even. I didn't even. I don't know. You didn't pitch it. It used to be that your average 10-year-old knew all the Feldman references. Now I don't know if they do. I don't. Yeah. It's getting tougher and tougher to get him into your van, isn't it, Dave? I don't know. I just. Comedy van. Hey, kids, come in the van and we'll work on a routine. I wanted to do a double with my son. They call them doubles. And back in Foddfield. And I wanted to come out there and humiliate my son. And we used to do it at parties. It would be so much fun to have a father-son comedy team. I don't know. Has it ever, is it unprecedented? Yes. A father-son comedy team? Yeah, and we would do it. I mean, you've seen siblings, of course. We would do it when we had parties. My son and I would come out and I would really, you know, the comedy team. I don't want to mention the name, but I'd come out and everybody would automatically assume that he was going to make fun of me. And I just humiliated. I would pretend to read his report card just tell him what I caught. Tell people what I caught him doing. What I would do is I'd have ever come out and every time I moved he would flinch. Like he's scared of me. They will, I will, I will sit, once a year they dane to invite me to their beautiful home. They're always inviting. And the kids, when I walk in, they immediately start pitching me show ideas, jokes. And it's... You're all very show-busy people. This stuff doesn't happen at my house. Really? Yeah. The kids... Are your kids, have your kids gone into show business? No. That's a badge of honor for you. My older daughter is about to go to grad school to get a master's in social work. Fine, healthy sense of humor. But not seeming to be inclined toward that. I'm sure she's getting in in what? Social work. She wants to become a clinical therapist. Certainly very healthy and robust sense of humor. But doesn't seem to think that she needs to be creating it. So that's fine. The younger daughter is in college now and I don't know what she'll end up toward. She also is a very funny person, but she doesn't seem like she has a great drive to be brought into the world. Well, that means you raise them well. That means they're happy. That means they're well adjusted and they don't have that void in their life. One of my favorite quotes in the world is, happy people do not make history. Wow. History is being made by people that are driven. But I'm curious, and maybe before you go, if you could comment on this, there's this perception, maybe we even talked about this last time I was here, that comedy writers have to be bitter and neurotic in order to have this comedy engine fired up to deal with their issues through comedy. And I always felt growing up that I'm not really that way. I just like really weird, silly, funny, smart stuff. And I'm, I think, fairly well adjusted most of the time. I don't know. I don't know where it starts. I don't know. Like, I look at, I have five kids. I have three from a previous administration, as a Korean. And then two from a man. And four of the five are not interested at all in show business or entertaining people or getting on stage. But my fifth at my youngest, Evan, it is important to him. It's how he looks at the world and he filters everything through comedy. I don't know if it's genetic. I mean, I don't know if I raised him differently. So if I have another half dozen kids, I might get one. Yeah, I don't know if you want one. But I don't know if it's the lucky one or the unlucky one. But that's, you know, his identity is kind of built around being funny. And he loves making kids in the class laugh. And he will come home sometimes from school and say, I got off a great singer. Got off a great singer today. And that's who he is, just like you and I do. Is he at the point of trying to impress girls with this? Yeah, exactly. That's who we are. I mean, that's, and that's who we are. That's it. Do you give note? I got into trouble. I would note my kids. Oh, you would do a little policy. I did. It was like I would correct them. Yeah, yeah. Like it was like it was math. But that can be fine if they see that you're not trying to diminish them but actually trying to help them. Have you done that? Well, no, no one brings me comedy. Now I'm talking about during in a conversation with my kids. I've never tried to help your kids with comedy. They will make a joke. And I will, when they were younger and I would correct their witticisms. And they actually didn't complain to their credit. No, sometimes. There were so many more horrible things that I was doing. Sometimes around the dinner table, somebody will try a humorous remark and I'll say or this and I'll have the hopefully slightly punchier version. I'll go, oh, of course. Well, there you go. I think I know how they feel here. You're funnier than me right here. When your kids make you laugh. That's the greatest. It's the greatest. It's the greatest. But is it intentional? Because I found that most of the hilarious stuff I think that has ever happened in human history has been done by little kids who don't know what they're doing. But I think they try to make you laugh. And then if I really laugh and it's a genuine moment, it's not unlike I think maybe you and I shared, if you can get Letterman to crack up. If you can make that Letterman laugh, that was something you savored those moments. And they didn't happen every day, at least not for me. But and it's probably the same for kids making their deadly. I'm always amazed when my kids can do things comedically that I can't do. Like at a laugh. Like I can't do sarcasm. And both of you got, well, you're not sarcastic. Steve Young, obviously. I think it's in there somewhere. I have this and maybe this is a little different than the male comedy paradigm of being super loud and energetic. I usually find that I do well with the calm, deadpan. Just slip the shiv into your ribcage sort of thing. I've never been it. That's not in my DNA. It's not in my DNA either. I can't do it. I remember when we moved into our house, one of my daughters, 10 years old, we had gotten sconces. And I never thought. Oh my God, he's finally telling the sconce. I've been asking for this for I don't know how long. That's basically what my daughter said. That's exactly where my wife and I was like nine in the morning. We're both leaving for work. And we couldn't believe we had a living room with sconces and go. Oh, no, no, no. I want to hear the end. Now it's horrible. No, no, no. I'm so sorry. That was so you have to go. I do. I have tickets for Guardians of the Galaxy and I have to get back to New Jersey. Okay. Will Evan come in here? You should have the children of your guest as a sort of a little group. Have you done that on your show? No, it's a great idea. The children of the funniest friends you have bring their kids in. And just treat them like adults. Well, you'd get great stories. It certainly would be uninhibited. It would be fun to do the show with kids. No? Yes. Yeah, but it's a tough. Okay, I'll have to drive Evan down here to do it. It's a tough neighborhood. Would Evan do what I saw up front? Just call him on his phone. Thank you, Randy. Oh, hey, no, thanks very much. Steve, good to see you again. We're going to be right back. Andy Breckman, how do people reach you? How do they listen to the air? Dear God, how do they reach you? WFMU. Oh, WFMU on Wednesday evenings. And it's a great show. Well, that means a lot. Hey, and it meant a lot to be asked here. Steve, God bless you and your work. Okay. We'll be right back. So what do you have for us? Oh, well, David recalled from our time at Maya and Marty that I often relaxed and wasted time by getting out the guitar and doing my little finger-picking delights. I thought that was just not for relaxation. I thought you wanted to be alone when you whipped at your guitar. You were trying to get people to leave. Well, some people take the hint better than others. You actually studied guitar as I understand it as an adult. You didn't play it as a child, right? Yeah, in college I had lessons for a while and learned some chords and could just basically strum. And then I was, I don't know, almost 40, I think, when I decided I really want to get back into this. And I very luckily found a teacher in Manhattan who was excellent with finger-picking. And I thought, oh, I don't know anything about that. And it turned out, oh, my God, I was born to do this. And what if I had gone down to my grave, never knowing that the faucet was a trickle, and then it was a gush, and I just, oh, my gosh, this is great. I'll never be bored again. And then I went up to a different teacher. He said, I can't teach you anymore. The first teacher, yes, Val, a woman said, after a while, I'm going to have to pass you on to a higher-level teacher. But then she worked with me on piano and music theory for a little while. But then I worked with a teacher named Woody Mann, who's a hugely well-known and respected country blues, ragtime. I think he's also quite well-versed in jazz. And I learned a lot from him. Haven't taken lessons in a few years now, but the fingers still mostly work. And then I started writing little bits that would occasionally get on the Letterman show. So what do you have for us? Well, this was something we were doing, one of our staff Thanksgiving montages. And somebody said, oh, Steve, write a horrifying little song about Thanksgiving. And so I wrote this thing about how turkeys are slaughtered and processed. And I wrote it thinking, well, it's only going to be a little part of a montage. So there's actually not even the first part of the song there. It just sort of comes in in the middle. Right. Then this happens. Then this happens, as if something's already happened. But now I haven't rehearsed this. I think I can still get through it. But let's see. Then the next step after the slaughter. Loosen the feathers in boiling water. The heads cut off and the feathers are plucked. Now the insides we de-construct. Pull out the organs they must be inspected. No sign of disease can be detected. The gizzards, livers, necks and the hearts are set aside as the giblet parts. The carcass then must have a cleaning. The turkey carcass passes a screening. On Thanksgiving, let's all sing of industrial turkey processing. Gobble, gobble, gobble. Wow. You're listening to the David Feldman radio program. You sad, pathetic hump. Welcome back. And by the way, Andy Breckman has to go. He had to leave, which he pretty much said already. Are you teaching? Yeah, I'm just finishing my second semester as an instructor at NYU. They've got this dramatic writing department. And I'm not teaching a writing course per se. It's more of a TV history course. No, my name is David. Why do people always call me per se? Because they think that you must have something to do with that expensive restaurant. You look like a man who understands the finer things in life. So you're teaching drama? No, it's just a sort of TV history overview, whatever I wanted to talk about. So some of it has been based on my own experiences at certain shows and some of it is just reaching back further into history to things that are generally considered worth knowing about, but your average 20-year-old might not know about. For example? Well, the Dick Van Dyke show, Mary Tyler Moore, people may have seen these things because they've been on TV land or whatever, but then all the way back into The Honeymooners and I Love Lucy drag net in the 50s and then again in the 60s. All the early stuff like not only your show of shows, but also even like the Texaco Star Theatre with Milton Berle, but also all sorts of oddities, which some of which I bet you know, like Pink Lady and Jeff. Yeah, nobody had ever heard of that. Jeff Altman was a comedian. NBC was trying to bring back the Variety series, which was always hard to do. And they found two Japanese, I believe Japanese women who didn't speak English. Well, they were a singing sensation duo in Japan and they had some huge selling records and everything. And I think it was Fred Silverman at the time at NBC said, oh, we got to jump on this. We got to get them over, put them on a variety show. And somebody said, are we sure they speak English? Oh yeah, I'm pretty sure they do. And then they got the whole show started up. No, they didn't speak English at all. So it was all, they had to learn their lines phonetically and didn't really understand what they were saying at any given point. And you couldn't really do rewrites the last minute because they couldn't learn how to say a different string of nonsense syllables that meant nothing to them. Had it been a hit, it would have been considered a stroke of genius. It seemed like so far into left field as an idea that, yeah, I mean it could have been seen as who would have imagined it. But by this point, the variety show as a genre really was on its last legs. And I think this kind of killed it off. I talk about it in the class. Can you find it on YouTube? There's a few clips. There's like an 18 minute best of. And the word best is used under advisement, I think. But you can tell that this was a sort of remnant of the 50s and 60s TV world where variety shows presented unironically were no longer really going to fly. I mean, you had all the way into the 70s with Sonny and Cher and the Osmans. And by the, I think this was early 1980, we are several years into the world of SNL, national lampoon had also done a lot to build a new comedy sense and a new generation. And we were almost ready to have it really come into its own fully with David Letterman. So a non-ironic old line variety show was really a very risky move. And then this show's terrible fundamental flaws just sank it. I think they had five episodes that got on the air and there was a sixth that never aired. So you teach each week one television show? Well, or one either kind of genre, like one week we were talking about cop shows and that's when we were talking about Dragnet and Kojak and Hill Street Blues, which kind of brought it into the modern age with shows that don't neatly wrap up at the end of each hour and storylines go for months or even years. Some of it was, oh, let's talk about variety shows. And we ended up all the way down at Maya and Marty. Okay, so you would do a class and say police drama. How do you prep the class? Well, sometimes it's just, all right, here's some... How do you prep it? How do you get ready? Oh, how do I get ready? Well, I watch a lot of stuff and read a lot of stuff and write out notes because it is largely a lecture class, although with a lot of things to watch in the middle of it. So I don't talk for hours at a time, but... This, wait a second. So let me get this. Okay, police drama. The class is on what night? This semester it was Tuesday from 3.30 to 6.15. Okay, Wednesday. When do you start prepping the police drama on a Wednesday? The first semester, last fall, I spent more time just gearing up because I was coming from a standing start and I didn't really have anything put together. The second time through, I will, depending on how I felt the class went in the fall, all I need to completely rethink this or this was pretty well there, but I'll try to see if there's anything new I want to add. So it's a part-time job. It's not supposed to be a full-time job. But you write a lecture out. More or less, but within that time, let's watch this for half an hour. Let's watch that for half an hour. Hopefully have some class discussion to some extent. So it's not just me talking. And are there significant academic books written about TV police dramas? There are a lot of books about TV that go chronologically and then some that go by genre. David Biancouli, is that guy's name? He just had a book come out in the last year or so that has chapters on different genres, like kids' shows, cop shows, medical shows, late-night comedy variety shows, and he'll have his pick for what are the five most significant ones in each genre and write about them and then sometimes have interviews with significant people. So that book informed me. There were a few other books I bought. But a lot of stuff is just available on YouTube. Not everything. Sometimes I would have to go buy sets of DVDs to show them I Love Lucy or MASH or something. You are fascinated by industrial musicals. Yes, I am. They're working within the puzzle. The puzzle being... that you have to sell this product to the salesmen who are... Yeah, they in many ways resemble Broadway shows, but they were put on for an audience of dealers and salesmen within a company to motivate them to sell things, which is a different animal than writing for the general population and luring them to come into an entertainment. These dealers and salesmen, they were forced to go to these things. In some ways, you knew your show was going to be a success because they were going to put everybody in the seats and make them sit and watch it. Were there any industrial shows that got a standing ovation where people were just totally moved? Oh, absolutely. Many of them, the best ones, were actually thoroughly professional and full of genius. Many of them were cheap song parody and rip-off type things, but the best of them... And sometimes you'd see on the back of a record album like the 64 Ford Tractor Show, which was a Radio City Music Hall in front of 5,300 people. Ford had flown in from all over the world and there were all these quotes on the back of the record about how great the show was. And one Ford tractor dealer from Austria said, this was the most beautiful day of my life, which you always get a laugh by recounting that. And then I lead people through what it must have been like to be a Ford tractor dealer in some rural part of Europe who's been brought over to the U.S. like royalty and put up in a nice hotel and you're ushered into Radio City Music Hall and you see a quite impressively mounted musical about why the work you do is the underpinning of civilization and you are the linchpin of progress and what you do. God damn it, it matters. And you're a hero and I'm sure on many, many of these shows and composers have told me they would see this, people in the audience just with tears streaming down their faces like I've been validated, I've been entertained, I've been informed, I've been motivated, but really somebody gets it that I'm trying really hard and it has meaning which gets lost sometimes. Wow. So as corny and weird as it is, is worth studying partly because it gets down to these primal human needs and emotions which these things when done properly met expertly and thrillingly. So you appreciate the context. It has been a great way to learn about American history and culture and even the business world which I really knew nothing about but it's always just going to be funny to me that there are musicals about selling tires and bathtubs and all these things and that's what attracted me initially was it seemed like these things shouldn't exist. This is something that comedy writers surely must have come up with because this is too bizarre to believe and then no, it is really, this is a complete legitimate musical about selling BF Goodrich tires or air conditioners or whatever and not all of them were great but when they were good they really make you go oh my god this is, I've fallen into an alternate universe. So teaching a class in television what are the similarities between say an episode of Dragnet and an industrial musical because they're both there to sell a product? Well I do sometimes remind the class that all these shows are essentially beyond and above whatever artistic value they have they were aired because they were going to help an advertiser move products and sometimes we were talking about the quiz show scandals, the 50s and Geritol was very upset because that show was at 21 I think was the big show of the scandal. Herb Stemple was this sort of nervous less appealing guy and Geritol said we got to get him out of there. People don't like the show when he wins and we're not selling enough Geritol and so this is the sort of behind the scenes engine that moves things but that's interesting I didn't know that Geritol was behind the quiz show scandal. Well that particular show in those days many shows were sponsored by one company and Geritol itself was a fraud. And was it? That I don't know. Oh yeah Geritol was just some kind of liquid boost that I think might have had alcohol in it. I mean it was just Vitamid of Vegemence. Yeah it was Gerol at the time was as fraudulent as the quiz show scandal. Oh my goodness well that's a beautiful extra meta layer to it. But I actually appreciate industrials because they are not hiding their fundamental purpose of commerce. Any other kind of music or show has this artificial bubble that it lives in that's just look this is just a pure expression of artistic desire and flowering of human emotion and drama and all that and that may be true to the creator but whoever is putting it on television is doing it to make money. And there's this fiction that we often forget that yeah anything on TV or put in a movie studio is to make money. And do you think that's what causes people to go mad? The people who work in television the people who work in movies. You need the struggle between art and commerce. The people who understand that it's commerce live happily ever after. The people who are hired to be artists go mad. Maybe we talked about Rod Serling in my class who was always struggling with the network sensors and the sponsors had notes about this is too controversial and this will be a downer and don't do this. And Rod Serling was always pulling his hair out about these battles that he had. At first he started out in radio and then he was doing TV dramas. He did like Requiem for a heavy weight and they were telling him oh you can't you can't say you've got a match because this is being sponsored by Zippo so we have to have the guy have a lighter and it's just a thousand cuts like that. I don't know he wrote a great movie about the soullessness of corporations. I can't remember was it Fence? It's not Fence. I know it was like right before Requiem for a heavy weight. Yeah it's a great movie Ed Begley Senior is in it and it's patterns. Patterns it's a great movie thank you it's always on TCM and it is just an indictment of corporate America and yet it's not because it says this is what corporate America is don't expect anything else this is not about humanity this is about the bottom line. Well I think like anything else corporate America can have a spectrum of it's moral worth and ethical values and certainly there are and have been companies that have wanted to treat employees well and value their feeling taken care of. The one thing I like about working in an office and then we'll wrap it up is it strips away all the humanity and isolates one aspect of a human being their efficiency in a well-oiled company when people are just all focused on one thing for a while it can be beautiful it can be a beautiful thing and because it's clean there's no it's uncluttered I get turned on if I walk into a place that smells of carpet and coffee and that plastic of new furniture I feel renewal. Some sort of battle is going to be fought here that we can do something worthwhile. Well there's there's purpose but it's so it's not human it's it's it's and it's very specific and clean and you and controlled you can't control anything in your life and you can't control people but you can in an office there's somebody who's controlling behavior for the common good. But I wonder if that's true of sports teams also and professional athletes my entire being has been sort of winnowed down to how well I do this game with a ball and the coach is orchestrating how we're going to do that there's much more to me damn it I have thoughts I have feelings but when I come in here and put on the uniform maybe it's like somebody working in an office I'm I'm just needed to do this. Yeah are you a sports fan? Intermittently my experience with offices is I love offices I don't like what they're doing I cannot say the number of times I've worked in an office where I say if only if only all this energy was being used for something else. Yeah I well you've probably been in more offices than I have because I spent so long within the confines of one TV show and then since then I've only had relatively short gigs at a couple other places. My recollection when I then we'll wrap it up I wanted to be a journalist that was when I was in college I got summer jobs I was a police reporter for the Hudson Dispatch in New Jersey you would walk into the newsroom this was they had just gotten computers but there was still the clackety click-clack-clack the teletype thing yeah coming in. It was loud and you had the headline writers and the copy desk and it was electric it was alive and I can remember thinking walking into a newsroom this is there's so much juice here it could consume me for the rest of my life so much energy so much activity so much adrenaline this is what it's all about and you can believe in the underlying project of it in a way that you maybe couldn't with average corporate offices. Absolutely. And you could be a true believer in the whatever company you're working for and I'm sure many many companies have people who get there and say this is a product and a company and a vision I really believe in I don't look down on that at all but a newsroom for you was that. I walked into that newsroom two summers I had this job as a police reporter like you know when I moved to San Francisco I got a job at KORN the NBC affiliate I got a job in their newsroom and by then it was all computerized whisper was just a whisper everybody was a whisper and everybody in it was good looking and they were there to be famous it was local television news and everybody wanted to be famous. Everyone wanted to get up to the major market national blah blah blah yeah and I thought oh this is you know I guess what you think you want as a kid doesn't really exist right. Well you don't know what you're getting into when you're a kid and I don't know if you knew what you were getting into when you started in comedy I had a little notion of it myself but sometimes it's just a job sometimes it's flights of wild inspiration and and hanging out with other people that you really like talking to and it's great and then sometimes it's just grinding away word by word on something that you think this is going to end up compromised but it has to be done. Right I think laughs and laughs are like an orgasm in that some are amazing and some are oh I'm getting old. That was not Steve Young how do people follow you? Well I don't know are people necessarily to be followed? You have to be followed. All right fine well I have a Twitter pants Steve there's also industrial musicals there's the one I run there's also the industrial musicals documentary Twitter if you're if you're looking to follow things there are three of them. And when are you doing another live show? I don't know. Actually don't have any plans right now I'm kind of letting that lie a little bit fallow and perhaps we'll have a new onslaught of them once the documentary is done and out. Great and oh yeah Facebook has a wonderful industrial musicals page with. Oh really? Yeah and I put up little like album covers and labels and fun pictures and you can go to listen to some links that we have online but if anybody needs additional things on the internet yes certainly go ahead but I've lost interest in Twitter mainly I will say that I look at it like once a week or something and almost never post anything so don't try too hard to find me. Thank you Steve. On Wednesday Florida's Republican Governor Rick Scott officially declared his state's opiate epidemic a public health emergency this after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared a national opiate epidemic. For more on this we are joined by Sam Kinones he's the author of Dreamland as well as a journalist former LA Times reporter author and storyteller and he joins us today from Los Angeles. Thank you Sam. My pleasure how you doing? I'm doing okay I want to ask you about this opiate epidemic and I'm really playing devil's advocate here but when I see the governor of Florida Rick Scott saying there's an opiate epidemic I'm suspicious and I think back to the crack epidemic I remember in the 80s crack was insurmountable and we locked up a lot of people of color because of the crack epidemic. When I hear of Governor LaPage of Maine complaining about people of color coming in to his state in Maine to have sex with our women and then sell them drugs specifically opiates I'm suspicious when I hear that there's an opiate epidemic is there an opiate epidemic in this country? There certainly is the it's not based it's based on deaths the number of deaths have surpassed the number of first of all surpassed the number of traffic accident fatalities back in about oh sub-2008 I think it was and just recently of course they surpassed the number of deaths due to AIDS at the worst worst year in 1995 of that epidemic. Is that because cars getting safer and are we curing AIDS? Yeah part of it but it's also in the history of the of modern America we have never had a year when there's another accidental form of death that overtook automobiles that's part of it certainly but these are hitting stratospheric new levels for the country and again of course in 2015 there were more deaths due to due to opiate overdoses than than there were deaths due to AIDS in 1995 so the reason for calling it such is because it is the it is the worst drug spirit we've had in modern America if you're measuring by the number of deaths did overdose that's that's I think where people are coming down on this. Can you give me a number? Can you give me a number? Oh I can't remember what the latest numbers are but it's in the tens of thousands talking about 35,000 37,000 I think it was it's the numbers I don't have the numbers handy but but but it's it's very significant numbers of people and truthfully I think that's an undercount the reason I think that's an undercount is because a lot of this is happening in small counties counties that don't have really good death investigation systems they have coroners they have who are also maybe funeral directors maybe they're also ER docs with a full-time job they don't have a lot of money they don't have budgets for testing everybody who toxicology reports I think there have been reports out that that somewhere perhaps between 20 and 30 percent of the deaths that actually should be counted or not so it's likely that it's an undercount but nevertheless we've we've definitely had an enormous increase in deaths and these track almost and almost step by step they track with the amount of opiate painkillers that have been prescribed by doctors all across the country since the mid-1990s you can see them the two numbers moving in a lock right I want to get to that number of opiates and and the number of people dying right there's a twin story in dreamland one about the gangs who deal opiates and then the the cartels the illegal Mexican cartels I want to get to that in a second I just want to push back on this for for a second about people of color and the need to lock them up because that is the twin story there is a Purdue pharmaceuticals invented oxy cotton and then then we have the Mexican drug cartels who are dealing their own oxy cotton so I want to break this down are people dying more from heroin overdoses or oxy cotton overdoses oxy cotton is called will be heroin right right it depends when you're talking about I think for the first part of this scourge of their epidemic I would be very comfortable calling it an epidemic it was mostly pills people were dying from and I think one of the things that happened was that this affected this is all virtually all white people number one it's very important to keep that in mind all the people getting addicted I would say 90% are white this happened for a long time in Appalachia and certain rust belt areas that's kind of where the ground zero for this whole problem was southern Ohio used to Kentucky West Virginia but like that what years are we talking about beginning in about the mid 90s 96 97 98 and really running up into the 2000s for sure and we're talking about oxy cotton addiction that bled into heroin addiction yes but it was really oxy cotton addiction that people were dying from that and that was it'll be a prescribing was rampant it was without any thought it was and huge amounts we unleashed an unprecedented amount of opiates on the country in the form of a prescription pain killers first you know this the smaller doses would be but bike it in and perk a side and mothers like that but really was oxy cotton and oxy cotton was it was a game changer because it contains and it contained in its first 16 years of its life 14 years of its life no abuse deterrent the other drugs bike it in and perk a set contain acetaminophen or Tylenol these are these are combinations that prevent you from really developing an enormous tolerance and daily habit to these drugs because as you do that you're destroying your internal organs and so people didn't really die so much of that because it was very hard for you to get up to a very high tolerance that would be very dangerous for you but oxy cotton includes none of that for the first 14 years of its life until 2010 and so it takes people very to very very high tolerances and that's where it gets very dangerous and people begin experimenting with too much and that's also however why people begin then looking for substitute because on the street if you can't buy this from your doctor your doctor cuts you off your insurance cuts you off whatever you have to buy this on the street it becomes very expensive a dollar a milligram and you're usually up to 200 300 milligrams a day of the stuff that's when you begin to look for very cheap a substitute equally potent or more so but but cheaper much cheaper and that is where mexican heroine enters the picture i don't we would not have a heroine problem today were it not for oxy cotton that i think is very very clear we would not have the kind of heroine problem we have today were it not for very cheap heroine coming from Mexico we would not have this problem say back in the 1970s when a lot of our heroine was coming from the far east from turkey from Burma from Thailand it got here weak and cheap and expensive it was not really much of a substitute for high levels of addiction to oxy cotton but mexican heroine comes to our country very very cheap extraordinarily cheap and it's very potent and now very prevalent as well and so as people began to get up to those very high levels began to look around for a cheaper substitute and they found it in in very cheap mexican mexican heroine and this is a story that has repeated now all across the country but for a long time people were dying mainly from from prescription pills in combination with other stuff maybe also xanax benzos and that kind of thing but but but they were dying mostly from that now um as prescribing has somewhat tapered off as the pill mills have been shut down these kinds of things then uh now now it's heroin uh the people are dying from from mexico in your book dreamland you cover the cities in america that are being devastated by this epidemic and you've also spent years i believe you lived in mexico from 94 to 2004 right that was doing all kinds of stuff down there in mexico's covering economics politics a lot of things but you you learn a lot right well in the country what is an opiate uh it's a drug derived from the opium poppy which is the first drug i believe that humans as a species we as a species um harnessed as a first plant i'm sorry that we as a species harnessed as a drug going back thousands of years i mean the first production of uh the center of opium poppies was thieves in ancient egypt that's where we get the the the opiate seeding comes from that uh and through the years through the centuries the millennia really uh we have figured out that um this these drugs are enormously um a wonderful pain killers merciful pain killers truly and and then also extraordinarily enslaving addictive drugs as well and in in the 1800s we come up with with uh we derived morphine out of that um out of opium and we also come up with a hyperdermant needle um and in the end of the 1800s in germany they've they they they create the thing called that they eventually called heroin and um that becomes um that that really has no use in in in medicine um it's it's only survived heroin is only survived because of the underworld it's a magnificent drug drug traffickers it's it's very uh cheap to make it's easy to condense uh it's easy to dilute and when you get it it's unlike other opiates it sends you up and down very quickly so you have to be buying heroin two three four five times a day so as a as a as a trafficker you have a customer who buys from you um over and over in one day one day period so that's that's the goldmine uh right there no no for a long time opium was was was opium products were mainly uh smoked it was only because of traffickers diluting the heroin that we began to actually inject it and that began really in new york city with italian um uh mob type traffickers um diluting the heroin so badly that you had to you could no longer really smoke it normally you can smoke the stuff an opioid you can smoke and then that's opium and that's a better high than heroin because it hasn't been watered down you know it can be it can be the same the same uh kind of high heroin is the the molecular structure of heroin what it does to your body your brain i should say not your body what it does to your brain is it takes it high and then crashes you very similar i was a crime reporter during the crack years that's what crack used to do that's why crack was so um wonderful for for for um for for traffickers for dealers on on the street because they knew that every guy that they they sold to was going to have to buy from them okay three four five six times a day and that's first came opium is that correct more then came morphine then came heroin opium correct is something you smoke then they isolated it down to morphine which is something you inject and that has medicinal values what is the difference between an opium high and a morphine high i'm not sure i could tell you that honestly um i don't know is there a medicinal high on both of them is there anything medicinal to smoking opium if you're in pain i think it's a it's a painkiller if these are all painkillers that's that that's their main function that's the main of beneficial use to to humankind they don't have i believe any other medicinal if you're in a hospital and you're dying of cancer smoking opium would relieve the pain theoretically yeah they wouldn't give it to you but yeah they would instead shoot morphine into you which would relieve the pain yes actually morphine now comes in a pill so it's not shooting anybody but yeah and very cheaply too by the way it's wonderful very cheap painkiller can sense a pill or something like that and you get addicted to both i yes right you can sure you can get addicted to it is it psychologically and physiologically addictive or both both but but certainly physiologically addictive that's the difference here physiologically they change they change the brain chemistry in a significant way um that brain surgeons would be far better neurosciences will be far better able to to describe to you but certainly that's that's that's what opiates do is morphine used for end-of-life issues in other words if you're going in for major surgery they're not going to give you morphine because they're afraid you're going to become addicted to it is that a fair statement uh no i mean soldiers have been given morphine treated for many many many many years um i think i think no it's it's i was i just had a heart attack and i was given a morphine um you know uh during my operation so i think morphine is still very much in use and as well it should be it so these are good drugs to use in certain situation what about the so did you find it addictive did you know do you crave it no i just had very little amount and they didn't give me any to take home okay that's a big difference here okay and you're saying that heroin came from the streets of new york city this is fascinating you're saying that heroin came from the streets of new york city because the mafia was watering down well no it was invented by bayer and in germany really the um it's a long story but basically it was invented by bayer in in germany it then was pervaded by doctors as a non addictive painkiller and it was used in a lot of the elixirs i guess you might say at the late 1800s early 1900s until they began to realize that it was really addictive and then it becomes more uh the the cost and benefits of heroin the costs are far outweigh the benefits and so it really should have been pushed to the back of the shelf figure to be speaking and left that right well um it it wasn't because um the the underworld discovered it and in particularly in new york city that's where all the heroin manufacturers were when the drug was legal and it they remained as kind of the center and it began to get a lot of the opium from the far east once again why was heroin more attractive to the mob than opium because it's a perfect product for for you if you're a drug trafficker what you want is customers every day all the time you cannot not buy your product and heroin uh takes you up and high and down within a space of a few hours and so at each crash you need more um and so you are uh creating people who need to buy your product three four or five times a day at the same time it's very easy to conceal it's very condensable which is one reason why by for example a wall will not stop heroin from coming through the southwest border it's very condensable it's also easy to cut so you can you can take a kilo and cut it into three four kilos and it will still be able to be sold and then at the same time it's it's uh it's it's easy to you you can cut it and make a whole lot more money than you you have done than with with other drugs so you creating a faithful i would say enslaved customer base it's very cheap it's condensable it's easy to to make right easy and cheap to make and all of this was why this drug that really we should not even be talking about in medical terms there's no reason to ever use heroin i don't think there's other drugs that do better job okay killing pain without the right when you say they're able to cut it in other words they're they're putting diluted they're diluting it with like baby powder or whatever yes i see okay and the heroin epidemic blew up you say in the 60s the 70s when did it i mean we've had various surges of heroin heroin use charlotte charlotte parker was uh for example was one of the great purveyors of heroin in american uh underworld culture or or demimone culture uh because he was such an amazing saxophone player is horribly addicted died at 35 his body looked like he was at 55 at the time charlotte parker created a whole world of jazz that that in which people began to use uh heroin because bird did if everybody were allowed to grow opium in their backyard and could have pure heroin would it be safer would they be less likely to overdose no no why would no they would be more likely to overdose okay seems to me that they they would they would well you would see this though you would see people who sought and did and thought about only heroin talked about only about heroin thought and did nothing but but their lives their entire lives evolved around heroin because every day they had to do it four or five times a day and this is what distinguishes heroin addicts from people who are addicted to other opiates other opiates don't take you up and down so quickly methadone for example um very gradual thing that they can lead you throughout the day it's still very addictive but you don't end up talking about dope all day long you you can actually function as a as a human being in the world instead of constantly this is this is the common denominator among all uh heroin addicts they just want to talk about dope all day long they have no interest in anything else it's just as big kind of the most boring people in the world basically it's because all they want to do is talk about the the next time they buy dope or what good dope they had or where to get the next best dope i've heard that philip seamer hoffman who died from a heroin overdose and lennie bruce who died from a heroin overdose one narrative is that they were able to function on heroin that philip seamer hoffman was able to do death of a salesman every night well sure you you you can you can function on it but you are now you were always enslaved to it you can you can there are there yes or people can function on it but you must always be doing it all day long okay i just want to make sure i understand what heroin is before we get to oxycontin the image in the movies is the guy shooting up vomiting passing out i've been told that's not really what chippers do that they that they use heroin and they get through the day and they're able to write novels and there's a lot of that i think every i i would would you know i think charlie parker was a perfect example of that honestly that that here was one of the most creative improvisational minds of our of our century and um he was a slave he was a slave to that drug and he and a lot of younger guys got it enslaved to it as well i'd be hard pressed for me to say that he was more creative when he was on was it went on when he was on dope and he would not then he would have been had he not been on dope obviously i'm not pushing people to try heroin i just am suspicious of drug wars and you know eric Clapton wrote leila on heroin and my question is people are enslaved to alcohol and people are enslaved to heroin alcohol you can live longer because you can go to a bar and grab a quick drink and then go back to work i mean does heroin destroy your body or is it what it's mixed in with that's destroying your body no i think it doesn't destroy your body it's it controls your mind that's for sure i think you need it you have you feel this overpowering need for it you can never be far away from it and in some sense you know yes there's there are a lot of similarities between alcohol or cigarettes too you know you need when i used to smoke many many years ago i kind of needed a cigarette every um whatever it was every few minutes every half hour or whatever it was you know um with with with heroin you need you need a fix all all the time you're on and it's it's i believe it to be a more overpowering addiction i've actually read that cigarettes are as addictive as heroin i guess the question i have and i want to move on to oxy cotton my question is i was told as a kid don't ever try heroin if you so much as touch it you'll be enslaved to it for the rest of your life and it'll kill you and i just wonder how addictive heroin actually is and i wonder if the drug itself is going to kill me or is the dependency on the underworld for that drug the thing that ends up killing you that's what i wonder that's a that's a that's a good question much much feeling is though that these are um uh remarkably enslaving enslaving drugs they are there is no um i do not believe i grew up in the 70s when you could recreationally use marijuana and that kind of thing and those some other things you could kind of recreationally use i don't believe in the recreational use of these drugs of the opiate class of drugs i don't i believe that it is so dangerous it's more like kind of russian roulette and when you get addicted to this stuff it's it's it takes years to get off it's that's that's the thing it's um it is so scary it is so um mind control and basically it's in ens in enslavement uh cigarettes are also i can tell you a kind of an enslavement as well um there was not a a sense of um i did i was not going to overdose on nicotine and die right what i understood is that lennie bruce odeed and philip seymour hoffman odeed because they knew that the heroin had been diluted so they didn't know how much of it to shoot if there were a regulated heroin in america if you knew what you were getting then you would know the proper dosage that's possible that's why i suppose that's possible again i'm not defending i'm an alcohol i mean i hear you i hear what you're saying i'm not defending this that is that is that is i suppose that is possible it to me feels like a um i just seen the the uh remarkable enslavement that this creates and and um it is the one of the great threats to personal freedom in america today if you ask me is the opiate widespread availability of opiate class of drugs not only that but it turns everybody who uses them into the most boring the most sheep like people yeah um it's a very scary scary thing unlike cigarettes and unreally like alcohol too it's very scary thing to see how listless people who are addicted to to to to heroin uh uh can become and how very desperate very quickly yeah addicted to i know that there is an opiate epidemic i'm not arguing with you and i'm just playing devil's i'm just playing devil's advocate here i do believe on a gut level i have a friend who lives in vermont and she was telling me we have an opiate epidemic and we have to hire more police because people from new york are coming into vermont and dealing heroin to our kids and it just sounds like the same song i've heard over and over again there always has to be a boogie man for the police to ask for more money we always have an epidemic it's always a crisis there are always toe tags in the morgue that can be traced to a specific drug so that we can give money to the police and lock up more people of color it just seems to be the same song over and over again you mentioned 50 000 people dying each year from opiate overdoses more people are dying from medical malpractice in hospitals more people are dying from guns i mean we choose no that's not true that's not true 30 000 people kill themselves every year from guns right yeah that's right that's exactly right that's what says it's that the more people die from from from uh from this and from them from guns and and we have outstripped in many states homicides and suicides do not equal the number of people who have been dying from this how do you measure an opiate death does have to be an overdose yeah that's what they're measuring sometimes it can be poly drug use that's that means it's it's a little it can get a little fuzzy what exactly killed the person was it xanax was it right um was it a huge amount of boxy connor was it alcohol um but but but basically i think what they're what they're seeing is is that this is um this is killing people across the country all of coast to coast i'm just raising this possibility sure the police see what they want to see they write down what they want to write down when somebody dies and when they're pushing for funding because of a certain problem i e opiates that's the that's the new thing now okay he died from an opiate for you know he died from uh an overdose when in fact it could be a lot of things it's no no no no no no no police aren't first of all aren't doing this it's coroners who are doing this it's a medical examiners who are police don't have any role at all in saying why a person died that there's a group think among coroners now you don't know coroners you don't know coroners um if you say that no that's not true uh what there is a problem it i would say that this it's not a perfect system but the problem it would tend to lend lend itself to undercounting not over counting the the real problem is that across the country this starts the see this starts in areas that rural areas areas without a whole lot of budget small counties uh states with a lot way too many counties kentucky what's virgin kentucky has 120 counties now what does that mean with regard to this it means that in every there's four million people in kentucky we have and in california we have 58 million 58 counties for 40 million people right so in the kentucky context for example what you get are doctors who are overworked doctors who have regularized well as this responsibility they don't really want of being the coroner or the medical examiner um they don't have budgets they also have in these smallish counties you can kind of get certain influences people begging you you see the the the deceased parents in church all the time and they come up to you and say you know can you really lead out that that there was a needle by his side or the real cause of death can you can you fudge it somehow this kind of thing this starts because and is is kind of covered up because i think we have a medical examination death examination system in this in this country that is really underfunded or depends on counties so some counties have a lot of money they do well good job other counties don't they don't do with such a good job and so that is that is really where the problem wise it's not that the police are telling the coroners you have to say something about how this guy died that's nonsense that's baloney that's ridiculous it's a it's a it's a you need to understand how how these death systems work if you have death investigations work and that that is really what's what's what's going on in all this to me we have undercounted if anything the number of people dying from this i want to get out about it i want to get to oxy cotton the second we're talking with sam kinyones he's a journalist he's been with the la times for years his book dreamland is the tale of america's opiate epidemic it was published by bloomsbury press rave reviews from salon christian science monitor kirkus reviews and the people who work on the show have been trying to get you on it for a long time and i thank you for for taking time to do this i don't want to belabor the point about not trusting numbers when you don't have an answer to how somebody died one of the easiest things to say is oh overdose next no i mean when when no when you do have an answer the the the the thank you that's not how this works people do toxicology reports they come up with a number of drugs that are that are in the system and opiates are a big part of that that's how you make that determination not just winging it sometimes sometimes they do when they don't have money for those toxicology reports which is why i'm saying that frequently these these these drugs are um the as a cause of death are undercounted not over counted by the way you're right and i'm wrong i mean that but i just like to play the devil's advocate and there's this little there's this little piece in my brain especially because the crack epidemic in the eighties turned out to be hyperbole right uh depends on who you talk to well let me ask you about that because i i believed that we were lied to about the crack epidemic that that they said that crack is the hardest thing to kick that you can't kick crack once you smoke it you're addicted forever and they discovered that that wasn't true that it wasn't as dangerous well it's it is horribly difficult to kick i was a crime reporter during the during the crack years and it is no joke um um it is probably easier to kick those than opiates i would give it that um it will you be addicted for the rest of your life on crack no you can get off of it but my god i saw many people struggle and struggle and it was brutal right i was not a not a damn joke okay so rush lemba i guess 13 years ago 12 years ago was arrested in florida for illegally purchasing and using hillbilly heroin oxy cotton he was able to do his show every day he was taking like a handful of pills every day right when did oxy cotton begin 1996 is when they released it for the pharma the the company that that makes it well released a drug in 1996 and um it got the what makes a difference from other drugs is that um the way it was promoted promoted to doctors very very aggressively almost like over-the-counter medicine to doctors giveaways uh claims that this was virtually non-addictive when you should treat pain all of that kind of stuff um and that that's really what set that drug apart apart from the other thing that i mentioned earlier which is that this was an opiate without any abuse deterrent involved and that was a crucial that combination right there turned turned it into this major juggernaut of a drug 36 billion dollars i think was a figure i saw uh of sales of oxy cotton since 1996 when it came out um and it it again turned people into the kind of addicts that drugs up to that point had not that's also but also have to say that this point these were years also when doctors rethought completely how they prescribed this stuff they completely rethought how how it was supposed to be prescribed and they began sending huge amounts of of these drugs home with people that never ever happened that did not happen before like say the mid 90s roughly um and that is also a big part of why we got um a whole nation people strung out on the stuff a nation of people strung out on oxy cotton nobody should feel any pain nobody has to deal with the truth and how do that manifest itself in the 2016 presidential election vis-a-vis the 2012 presidential election i think in a lot of areas where donald trump needed donald trump needed to win in order to become president you can take a look at those areas those counties they're talking about delhio talking about pennsylvania north carolina wisconsin michigan those those swings states that and you take a look at the counties where he won by 65 70 75 percent as opposed to romney the four years before you know uh with 49 percent say all what what a lot of those counties have in common is widespread opiate addiction and not just widespread opiate addiction but widespread awareness that they now have a big problem with opiates and not kind of these are counties that we're doing actually fairly well if you just look at the very superficial unemployment numbers they drop from 2010 you can see drops from say 14 16 18 percent down in 2016 to five six seven percent unemployment of course that hid a real somber reality which is that a lot of people were too strung out to even look for work and so they weren't counted but also you would you would think with numbers like that that people would be more optimistic what what lends itself to a feeling of foreboding and pessimism is the fact that everybody knows somebody now who's it's strung out even if maybe in their own family it hasn't hasn't touched their their family everybody in that in that in that community knows somebody the pastor's kid the quarterback whatever it is um workers at the on the line where you where you where you might work um and this wins itself to a kind of a feeling of like things are not going well it's a kind of an opiate malaise I think that really I I believe was a was a crucial crucial I mean essential component in why Donald Trump won states that put him over the top those five states in particular that I mentioned it's a problem all over the country but if you look at the counties where he won really big in the state of Ohio the cruise a linchpin of all this you look at the state the counties he won really big by 70 75 percent all those counties have horrible horrible problems they also have problems with unemployment a whole bunch of other stuff but one of the common denominators is opiate addiction I think Trump in many ways is like oxy cotton he's the drug you know he's the well what what he has been is in my opinion is he a these pills offered an easy answer to a complicated problem right the complicated problem was the mystery of human pain how do you deal with it it's a it's a true mystery the pain in in the human body how do you deal with that medicine began to say we have one answer for everybody and it's an easy one it's cheap alleluia and it's called opiate painkillers and we just blast everybody with it and that's what happened for 20 what's been doing after 20 years they're taking for psychic pain as well right I mean that's where a variety of things it's so many examples of this it's you could go on and on and on right um but but the same thing I think is true of some of the policy prescriptions she's come up with primarily the the the wall to solve all our problems of drug addiction and immigration that the same thing this is a this seems to me to be uh again a a simple silver bullet magical solution to a very to a very very a set of a set of very very complicated uh problems that need to be dealt with in an adult way and not have a child as well right Sam Kinyones is a journalist he's former la times reporter his latest book is dreamland the true tale of america's opiate epidemic we didn't even scratch the surface thank you for your time my pleasure david have a good have a good day joining us from hollywood california is the founder and treasurer of the blue america pack which raises money for progressive candidates all around the country and he writes the down with tyranny blog how we climb how we climb paul ryan is making the rounds of the sunday talk shows defending the republican health care plan how does he sleep at night he may be a zombie and doesn't sleep i don't know but before we get into paul ryan and his hideous appearance yesterday with george stephanopoulos i mean on sunday um i just wanted to uh mention to you that i've never lived in hollywood in my entire life do you live in north hollywood no i don't i live in los fieles right but to most people that's hollywood why is that because hollywood is hollywood this is not hollywood you know that's where madonna lived and that's where all the young hip i think john ham lives there it's a very hip people don't want to live in hollywood if i may basically but hollywood isn't a geographic space it's it's a state of mind oh okay i mean it happens to hollywood happens to be a geographic space it also there's you know west hollywood is a separate city from los angeles part of los angeles county but its own city with its own mayor and legislative body and police force etc kind of police force and uh and then east hollywood is what it is and um and then los fieles is separate and and really not even contiguous i guess you're right i'm sorry you're right it's low it's low it's low so to say that so in the future when you introduce me you can say and now we have how we climb from los fieles or you could say los angeles right by the way i know we want to talk about paul ryan one of the one of the stories that is not getting covered that you really have been staying on top of and i notice by looking at the los angeles times it's being covered is the oppression of mexican americans the breaking up of families especially in los angeles ice is working overtime destroying lives in los angeles that's right and is los angeles cooperating with ice the city of los cooperating with ice the city of los angeles or los fieles sorry did you say los fieles or los angeles angeles los fieles is a neighborhood it doesn't have its own police force and they're not cooperating with ice i can guarantee you that los fieles is not cooperating with ice but los angeles is is is not breaking the war but they're not doing anything more than what the war requires and that's it right i was on the subway in new york yesterday and i saw a sign that says if one of your loved ones is missing call this number and it's from governor quomo the state of new york a lot of people are reporting their loved ones missing because they've been rounded up by ice and they can't find them it's pretty incredible isn't it it is amazing and there was a big story uh about a bunch of trump's voters who suddenly saw that you know someone who is a pillar of their community uh was just gone and he he never he didn't commit any crimes he was not uh he was not what trump called a bad ombre exactly described him as a good ombre and uh he was just you know summarily rounded up and deported and these are trump supporters who were aghast i i my guess is that they are completely turned off and lost to trumpism completely now they're being rounded up put on planes sent to guatemala honduras el salvador el salvador where they're rounded up and forced into gangs it's a mess it is it is just an absolute mess so it is a mess and if if trump was serious and he wanted to do a good thing that people at least in los angeles would appreciate he would really go after not people like that they have been rounding up easy target to they can just you know follow school buses home and grab but they would they would round round up the the really bad gangs many of whom are from el salvador as a matter of fact and or i mean is that one really really bad gang that everybody hates and everyone would like to see them gone and but that's hard you know that i'd like i just do that instead but you know they don't want to do that because that's dangerous they could get shot back at if you go after them you know poor struggling parents by following their child school bus home if chances are no one's going to shoot at you if you go after one of these really terrible the gangs uh... you know you get into a firefight get into a fight without doing that they talk about it they say they're going to you know uh... sessions was on one island the other day claiming he's going after this gang well they haven't then is that i mean maybe they have a little island but they sure haven't in los angeles ms-13 is in long island which i miss third exactly yeah i found that kind of really ms-13 is in in long island i found that a little bizarre okay let's talk about paul ryan and the health care bill yeah like i said he was on this week with george stephanopoulos yesterday and he was just giving his litany of lies just one after the other they've got their talking points they focused group tested them to make sure they had all the right words and the only problem is they're not true you know it's just one fallacy after another about how great this is and this uh... this trump care bill is going to be better for everybody's health and it's going to be cheaper and more wonderful and it just lie after lie after lie and then when you dispute it you know trump or ryan or whoever starts carrying on about fake news well the thing is you know they're not just attacking the new york times and the washington post they're attacking the march of dimes and the american medical association and the american cancer society i mean they're the a a r p i mean they're every professional medical group every consumer group all the groups that are interested and a nonpartisan that are interested in in health care are disputing these lies that ryan and trumpers are are spewing and they just think if they can just repeat them over and over and over ryan and trump think they can repeat them enough times there will be at least some people who will listen to them and believe them or or at least question the the evidence i mean this this has been you know there there has been a um a concerted effort by the republicans to discredit science and to discredit the media and to try the best they can to create a system where there is no alternative to what they say their their alternative facts they they want to be accepted as facts and they they they won't ever be accepted as facts unless you're on opioids and they're a trump voter that's interesting you bring up opioids because we have sam kiniones on the show today and he wrote dreamland about the opioid epidemic and may i may i read something sure that a friend of mine wrote it's marianne williamson i think you know her right yeah so she was a course in miracles that's right and she wrote an essay uh over the weekend at huff po and and it was about she didn't mention ryan per se but but i but it goes right to what we're talking about so what i'm reading now is her is her words political propaganda seeks to affect the way people perceive the world in order to affect the way they behave political propaganda is the biggest tool in the extremists arsenal it's an it's at an all-time high today in terms of sophistication and effectiveness as madison avenue public relations acumen has become insidiously and nefariously applied to the political sphere our problem is not just that some politicians flat out lie our bigger problem is the power of their propaganda to dismantle the ability within many people's minds to even realize they're being lied to people are vulnerable to extremism not because they like extremism but because in too many cases today extremism is usually successful at posing as something else whether or not a big lie has been proven to be false seems to have minimal bearing on whether or not it is believed it is the conviction and consistency with which the big lie is stated not to prove an accuracy or inaccuracy of its claim that determines its effect on the voters mind and thus the way they vote and that goes a long way towards explaining the persistence of the support that people like trump and ryan are still getting and it's it's why a lot of these republicans felt that it was worth taking the gamble of this vote remember 217 republicans voted for this bill only 20 voted against it and those 217 republicans many of whom hadn't read the bill many of whom felt the bill actually was a bad bill I mean I was just doing a story when you called just now about a guy in Florida or congressman Mario Diaz-Ballard down in the Miami area who voted who said he was wavering wasn't sure if he wanted to vote for it or not got his arm twisted voted for it and then was asked afterwards if he felt he voted for a bad bill or a good bill he said he voted for a bad bill but thinks maybe the senate will make it better I mean that's a congressman yes that is a congressman that's a republican congressman that's what they are today that were they kicking the can down the road hoping that the republicans and the senate would save them from this bill does Paul Ryan really want this bill passed? Paul Ryan want this bill Paul Ryan you know unlike what many people think is a dangerous ideologue and always has been people don't realize you know he's been painted so benignly by the by the media as a what are they like a wonk or something like that a policy wonk he's never been that he's never I've watched this guy's career from the very beginning from me the first time he ran for congress this guy it was nothing but a PR stooge you know he was like a sort of basically nice looking gym teacher and they they they just thought oh we could put anything in his head and get him to repeat it and that's what they got with him you know similar in some ways to to Ronald Reagan but I might add but they just just fill this guy's head up with a bunch of bullshit he already you know he started off well enough for them because the only book he's ever admitted to reading is the Fountainhead by Anne Rand he's a big Anne Rand supporter and he and his intellectual growth was stunted in high school after reading some Anne Rand books and he yes he very much believes in this this is his dream Paul Ryan who who only was able to go to college because of benefits from social security after his father passed away right and decided once he got up to the top to pull the ladder up after him typical of many Republicans like him who come from your Republicans who come from working-class families I've got mine screw you right that's him and you know he very much wants to turn the clock back and destroy everything that came out of the new deal that's Paul Ryan getting into his head should be pretty easy because it's empty what is he thinking you know that he doesn't believe he's a hateful human being I would assume that he believes Obamacare is a disaster because the premiums have gone up it has been pretty tough premiums gone up on Obamacare because it's been sabotaged the governor's of Republican state like Wisconsin his state have refused to do the Medicaid expansion without the Medicaid expansion which the government has put huge subsidies behind thinking that they would get Republican governors to back it and and many did they did get a lot of Republican governors backing it because it was the best thing for this state who I do not respect like John Kasich I don't like John Kasich I don't buy his bullshit but he had the good sense to do the right thing in this case for the people of Ohio even though he's a Republican even though he had a Republican completely Republican dominated legislature he's still past Medicaid expansion and several other and Christie did as well several other Republican governors did it in their states but in a state like Wisconsin where you've got another crackpot ideologue Scott Walker they didn't pass it so yes that's the reason why the premiums have gone up because of that and that's the only reason why you're saying that if all 50 states accepted the Medicaid then premiums would not go up because why well first of all I want to correct a misapprehension about premiums going up premiums may go up because the cost of healthcare goes up that's why premiums have gone up but they've gone up at a much much slower rate even under what I'm even under even with Republican sabotage they've gone up at a much slower rate than they had been going up so that's one thing to remember the other thing is the way insurance can be explained is that you take the people who have the biggest risk so in other words people with pre-existing conditions people older people who are likely to get sick you take them and you put them in as big a pool as possible with people who are healthy and people who are young and people who are likely not to get sick and you put them all together and then the cost goes down for the people who have to use healthcare that's the whole idea of spreading out the risk and that's what insurance is all about and with the Republicans what they're going to do is take the people with pre-existing conditions remove them from the pool and create a separate pool and lead it up to the states as to whether or not they're going to be funding that pool right well and the federal government no they're going to have to fund the pool in order to in order for in other words in order to get the waiver to create the pool they have to agree to fund it and the federal government has some money to do that as well however it only covers the plan that the that the republicans have in trump care only covers about 20 percent of the people who will be thrown into those pools so whenever those pools have been tried in the past first of all it takes between six months and a year or a year and a half sometimes to even get into them so then you're stuck you know say for an average of about a year with no insurance you can't get anything and then and then once you get in there are there are um still very very high costs which the subsidies are not going to cover so so the republicans like to talk about where you have access you have everyone's going to have access okay well you have access to buy a jet plane did you know that yeah sure yeah if you want you can buy a jet plane if you can't afford it it might be hard you still have access that's when they say that everybody is going to have access to health care that's true if you if you have a hundred and fifty thousand dollars to pay an annual premium if you have a pre-existing condition like breast cancer that's what it's going to cost if a woman has breast cancer she's her annual premium is a hundred and fifty thousand dollars how about that that's access yeah when they talk about access that's what they're talking about well they're saying that people with pre-existing conditions didn't take care of themselves properly and that's right or bad people and you know the implication being that god is punishing them so you know that's why they were so freaked out by what jimmy kimmel had to say about his newborn son being born with a congenital heart disease wow i read something in the washington times the day after jimmy gave that speech about his son and there's this well respected conservative i'm not going to even mention his name i don't want to give him any publicity he wrote a piece in the washington times attacking jimmy kimmel for being political taking his sick son and rolling around in the dirt by making it political how unseemly and ugly it was so hateful in the tone and as i'm reading it i'm thinking this is a death cult but the republicans the conservatives just want to see people die i mean they're they're that hateful it doesn't seem that way doesn't it i might i might say though in defense of some republicans although this one was an ex-democrat who's a republican senator from um louisiana now he said he's not voting for anything when it comes in front of the health care bill when it comes to the senate he's not voting for it unless it passes what he dubbed the jimmy kimmel test how much do you blame obama for not doing a public option wouldn't a public option have put these insurance companies out of business and isn't that the big issue we have to put these insurance companies out of business that's right and the public option would have eventually done that it would have led to that and uh and and i suspect that the democrats the democratic establishment got had lots and lots of reasons green ones with large denominations cannot do that and they didn't do it and it's not like they passed obama care with any republican support anyway so it's like it's so in other words who are they negotiating with who are the democrats negotiating with they by by killing the public option it didn't give them any republican support so so what was the purpose of it of course they were they were negotiating with their their own donors that's where that's what it came down to my contempt for Pelosi and the democrats has been born out of conversations with you and when i heard them singing goodbye after they voted to pass that in the house and Pelosi saying you will forever have this mark on your forehead and it will be lit up yeah as though good luck being re-elected in two years and and so many people who are immune to this stuff say to me well this is good for the democrats and i i i said how come the democrats never say this is good for the american people it's not a game this is i who cares if it's good for the democrats in two years the american well they they care because the main thing they care about are their careers that before that comes way before any kind of policies but the problem is the the majority of house democrats 108 now have cosponsored John Conyers legislation for Medicare for Medicare for all so the Medicare for all bill is in committee there are 108 democratic cosponsors but when you look at who's not a cosponsor you find Pelosi unbelievable you find any Hoyer you find the number three democrat who is you know they are picked to succeed them Joe Crowley you find basically the whole republican wing of the democratic party and by republican wing of the democratic party i mean the blue dogs and the new dems almost all of them are opposed to this so here we're talking about a policy Medicare for all which something like 75 percent of democrats grassroots democrats love a majority of independent voters love and even a plurality of republicans like even except even Hillary had nibbled around the edges of that kind of she was forced into it but that end of the party that establishment end of the party that gets so much money from the insurance companies they're very leery of this and they don't want to see it happen my point is can't the democrats offer something to get people enthusiastic no they just want to campaign on trump is a boogeyman ryan is evil both of which are true but why not offer something to get enthusiasm up to make people want to vote for democrats instead of saying well you know trump is so bad you know even if the democrats are bad there's a lesser of two evils that's all that that's all that the triple c ever does the democratic campaign congressional campaign committee d triple c d c c c they're all about lesser of two evils politics and that's a shame because there are things that they could offer that would be inspiring that would make people believe and make people want to vote for democrats and he and perfect would be medicare for all everybody wants medicare for all why won't they do it because they have more concerned about their own power which is paid for by insurance companies they're more concerned about their own career trajectories that's what they hear about not about the american people so don't ask that question again they don't care this country has turned into manhattan where there are no rules it's every human being for themselves corruption is the norm trump has pretty much sealed the deal that america now is manhattan where there are laws but only fools obey those laws dishonesty i have never seen the country uh are you coming back to la soon i miss it i obviously from what you just said one can sort of glean a little something there i think that donald trump has brought manhattan to america i think ronald reagan brought the worst parts of california to america i think trump has brought the manhattan mindset to the country lie cheat rip somebody off just sell you know build something and then if you get caught bribe the building inspector you need the mafia get the mafia that's what that's what this country kind of sort of was under the the bush administration and yeah during obama but now it's it's just accepted it's out in the open right it's it's just out in the open it does seem that way i think there's going to be reaction to it i'm hoping there is but um you certainly have a situation i mean that you probably saw this weekend where uh christian's sister was in beijing selling visas basically saying invest at least five hundred thousand dollars in the christian company and you will get a visa to come live in america and you know and there are slides with christian on the slide there's a there was one slide that i ran on my blog with trump and then chinese under his picture said this is the guy that decides and everybody knows that christian is his son in law and they're selling visas i have gone to canada on numerous occasions and while i'm going through customs my shoulders drop i'm happy i'm suddenly in canada i don't have to worry about getting shot if i get sick i know i'll be taken care of and i always ask what does it take for me to be allowed to live here and that's the number they say if you put five hundred thousand dollars into a bank account in canada they will let you stay there so how when i read that number i thought i remember being told you can't come here unless you give us five hundred thousand dollars why is that so wrong for kushner to say that i don't think that that's the case i don't think that canada um does anything about that i mean it does it seems weird to me maybe that's that you need that to disrupt the process of becoming a citizen i don't know but i mean you know i i i taught at mcgill and no one ever said that to me and and friends of my american friends of mine who taught at mcgill who live there full time never got any kind of hassle about that i mean they didn't put any five hundred thousand dollars in any bank account why is it wrong because trump is chasing immigrants out of the country and not all are not allowing people who need sanctuary to come to the country and then they're they're allowing rich people many of them mostly chinese rich people but also rich people from arab countries and from india and a few other places russia who who you know i hate to say this but a lot of these people have gotten their money by being crooked right and so if you're rich and you could throw on you could throw five hundred thousand dollars to jared kushner's company as an as a quote investment you you're welcome to come to america with with a visa and stay for you the rest of your life whereas if you're poor uh you're you're you're not welcome so they're saying if you invest in the kushner family yes that's what they were doing they were there they advertised they got a room full of millionaires they they grabbed this woman who was reporting for the washington post and dragged her out of the room uh because she was taking pictures of these slides which are now circulating on the internet and and yes that's what that's what it was it was not like you know invest in america it was no it was invest in kushner but is that legal no that was that's the point of what we're talking about i'm saying that there's going to be a backlash that this can't go on all right i i'd be curious i mean i'm and this is what i'm talking about down with tyranny dot com i got a story got the slides up you'll find it all right kushners will say no no it's perfectly legal if you invest $500 000 and an american company you can get a visa yes there is a program to do that is it legal for them to do it the way they're doing it they didn't think so which is why they kicked the media out of their little uh their little meeting it's unsame league give me marching orders what do we need to do what do we do tell us what to do we need to there's only one way to go about this i mean we have to you know keep up our vigilance do what we can as individuals and eventually it all is going to lead to the 2018 congressional midterm elections where we have to defeat every republican we can and replace them with good democrats that's not good enough that's what it is tell we need call Nancy Pelosi and say medicare for all you can do that too yes call Nancy Pelosi and say medicare for all i like that idea but waiting till 2018 seems kind of passive howie not waiting you know we've got to keep up the excitement level uh in the grassroots there are special elections there's one coming up in montana in uh two weeks there's and then there's of course the really important one in georgia you know these kinds of things are you know all gonna hopefully lead to the democrats taking back the senate i'm sorry taking back the house maybe the senate too but not not likely but certainly the house howie cline is the founder and treasurer of the blue america pack go to down with tyranny i'm gonna go there right now and read that story about the half a million dollar bribe to the kushner family thank you howie thank you we'll talk to you soon joining us from paris is juda grunstein he's the editor-in-chief of world politics review and his pod his podcast trend lines drops every friday hello juda you're joining us from paris right that's right a lot to discuss obviously immanuel macron i'm not pronouncing that properly but that's the way i that's where i roll he won the presidency i don't think he'd pronounce our names correctly either though so don't don't feel bad so he won with about 64 of the vote and marine le pen took in fewer than 40 percent she kind of tanked it didn't she at the at the last minute were they expecting it to be this bad for her well it's it really depends how you look at it to begin with she she she took 21 percent in the first round and to give you an idea that was already more than anyone from her party had ever taken in a presidential election basically it's been her father and her the party is sort of like a very lucrative family business that runs on anger and resentment what do you mean it's lucrative oh they they well i mean they it's their it's how they make their living right between that and she's a she's actually a member of the european parliament but they've been investigated for campaign financial fraud basically in france any any party over a certain percentage gets all of their campaign expenses reimbursed by the state and so the the fn has been investigated for uh basically contracting let's say uh they get their posters printed by someone who's a close associate of the party and uh he'll charge them twice as much as it actually costs to print the posters and then they'll get reimbursed by the state at the at the higher cost and the the rest of the money gets kicked back um so they've been they've been fined for stuff like that shenanigans like that are they getting rich off this uh from what i understand the it's the they're you know they're not out on the street they've got like a nice family compound outside of paris um but the the difference between her father and marine le Pen is that her father Jean Marie was always kind of happy with that arrangement he never he never really sought to popularize the party or or to win office he was always happy there being the sort of gadfly of french politics lots of provocative uh racist and anti-semitic remarks uh over the years that were you know worse than dog whistle dog whistle shout outs to his to his late in constituency um the the difference is that marine le Pen when she took over the party from him or when she inherited the party from him she actually had this vision where she could sort of normalize the party moderate its positions a little bit weed out some of the more hateful stuff and actually win elections and govern um and so what you saw happening especially over the last few years where immigration has become more and more of a a high profile issue here in france and then culminating in the terrorist attacks which which uh which sort of serve the law and order uh aspect of the fn's program and then also some of the mounting resentment against uh europe and the european union so she sort of used that uh to to to to grow the party's appeal at the same time she distanced some of the more sort of visibly anti-semitic people and racist people um and so when she got 21 in the first round it was i think the highest that she'd ever gotten and her father had ever gotten was something like 17 percent now to give you an idea the difference is that in 2002 her father made it to the second round of the election it was a seismic shock here people the entire country was in shock for about a week or two maybe longer he won something like 16 in the first round and won 17 percent in the second round so there was this nationwide what they called the republican front that blocked his way and he only won one percent more votes in the second round in the first round so for marina penn to go from 21 to 35 uh it it shows that there is a much bigger pool of of voters who will accept the national front candidate as a second choice now the the problem is they kind of painted themselves in a corner because they kept they kind of got into this enthusiasm after the first round and expected to do a lot better so they started talking about reaching a 40 threshold and they defined 40 percent as uh they're they're sort of cut off for being successful so fall into so it's only getting 35 percent as you said it it definitely uh it's created a bit of a backlash within the party actually and so there's going to be a little bit of a falling out probably after the legislative elections in a month where some of the hardliners are going to say see we told you so you shouldn't have moderated the position and others are going to say well we need to moderate a little more the legislative elections are a month away and there are members of the national front who serve in the parliament well here's the thing at this point i think they have only two members of parliament i think there's five hundred and sixty something or five hundred and seventy something uh members of parliament they have two five hundred and seventy the way in which france's electoral system works it's a two round first pass the poll which means that after the all the candidates that make that win more than i think 15 percent of the votes in the first round make it into the second round what's happened traditionally there's no proportional representation at all and so what's happened traditionally uh historically is that in any uh any voting districts where a fn candidate makes it into the second round and looks like they could possibly win if the other two major candidates stay in the race uh the weaker of the other two candidates drops out so the socialists will drop out and let a center write what's called the republicans party win if they finished behind and vice versa so the two major parties have effectively blocked the national front from any sort of popular representation uh beyond the municipal the municipal and local level now what the the problem this time is uh or rather not necessarily the problem it really depends how you look at it because clearly you have a party that that that has they polled i think 35 percent or 30 to 35 percent in the in the last regional elections the regions would be sort of like if you group together three or four states in america and there was a a election election between the state level and the federal level so those are the regions in france the the national front won about 35 in the first round and didn't win a single region and so they can regularly win 25 30 in various voting districts sometimes more there are some down south for instance where they win 45 of the vote in the first round but they get no representation in parliament so it's it's obviously anti anti democratic in a certain way what's what's happened now this time and we can get into that a little later is that because both of the major party candidates for the presidential election failed to make it into the second round i have my doubts as to whether the system for blocking the national front uh from representation in parliament will actually be as effective this this time there's going to be a lot of divisions a lot of people might just not want to sit out a second round uh because of uh the the kind of losses that both of the major parties might be expected to accumulate a lot of people sat at this election voter turnout was incredibly low even though it was an important election and a lot of people handed in blank ballots what is that about the protest well the protest vote even the the protest vote was enormous even if you look at the first round results so if you look at the first round results you basically had 20 percent or 85 split between the top four candidates and then there were a couple second tier candidates who got about five percent or so and then some marginal candidates the four candidates that made between the one between 20 and 25 percent of the vote one was Jean-Luc Mélenchon who is a pretty far left candidate who argued for massively massive hiring in the public sector raising the minimum wage renegotiating european treaties to make europe uh uh basically a social welfare union as opposed to a common market so this would be a populist from the left from the left um in a lot of ways he's the most entertaining theatrical candidate i really like him his style personally he's got some drawbacks in that he's got a soft spot for Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro and some of the the the less attractive models on the left in terms of their authoritarian practice why the lower voter turnout because people didn't get the candidate they wanted yeah definitely so absolutely so you have you have him on the left you have 20 per 21 percent who went to Marine Le Pen on the right so already you have 40 percent of the of the first round voters who were expressing an extreme dissatisfaction with the status quo not just around the margins or they want some change or some reform but in extreme dissatisfaction apparently quite a bit of the Mélenchon voters stayed home not as enormous as they expected but quite a bit did um and Marine Le Pen won out actually she won over some of the the conservative right candidate François Fion who lost in the first round also so um so there was definitely a sense that you know in 2002 when when her father made it to the second round there was an enormous outpouring of voter engagement socialist voters i have friends whose whose family are longtime socialist and communist voters there's still a french communist party here that runs candidates who literally cried voting for Jacques Chirac who was a conservative right politician against Jean-Marie Le Pen but they went and they did what they considered to be their duty as in terms of republican ideals republican meaning a republic not the republican party this time that didn't exist where people weren't willing to they didn't want to hold their noses and vote for the lesser exactly there was just the sense the sense that you know we've given enough over the years no one's listening to us and we're not going to do it again kind of similar to some of the very dedicated Bernie Sanders voters who refused to vote for Hillary Clinton i suspect at the same time uh at the same time the polling leading into the second round showed Macron ahead something like 60 to 40 percent and the french polling was pretty accurate so i think there was a sense that is there a brexit movement in there i mean was marine Le Pen for she's in the european parliament would she be against the eu oh yeah oh yeah that was a central part of her platform was pulling out of the eu and and the euro and it cost her significantly significantly um she's in she's a member of the european european parliament partly to be obstructionist partly because the that was where the fn did the best because i believe the european parliament is is uh proportional representation from the national elections i'd have to check on that but that's why they didn't get boxed out in a second round but for instance she's she's been accused of uh using uh EU parliamentary funds to hire people as parliamentary assistance for the european parliament and then dedicating them to basically national front campaign duties so she's being in it basically investigated for embezzling EU funds for her own national campaign what i like about the national front is at least we know where they are you know we kind of know they're in the republican party here in america but i kind of like the idea of one party of racist holocaust deniers what i didn't know about well at least you know you can they are what they are the national it you don't have to you know although increasingly because she's tried to normalize the party it's it's gotten a little cloudier so there've been uh for instance she stepped down as party president after the first round symbolically to show that she's rising above party politics and the person that she who took her place uh what like within days it was revealed that they'd given an interview 10 years ago denying that uh the gas chambers existed for instance that's what i wanted to ask you about the the national front i up until recently i didn't know this and i'm not sure it's true the vichy government went when the nazis invaded france they had a puppet regime the vichy government and there were collaborators and it was roughly about four years of french politicians doing the nazis business in france i always assumed there was shame associated with that and people would be busy denying their involvement with the nazis but from what i've been reading le pen and the national front kind of coalesced they were these were all people who were collaborators during world war two is is that a fair statement that the national front has its roots in the vichy government no i don't think so i mean the general generationally it's not the same generation her father founded the party i mean maybe in terms of legacy and inheritance from a previous generation of french sort of extreme right collaborationists that yes but in terms of the party itself growing out of that or being formed by people like that no i wouldn't say that it's it's very complicated because you have definitely you have instant i mean there were collaborationists in in in france and the you know the nowadays everyone was in everyone everyone was in the resistance right but you know at the time whether that was actually the case or not who knows but they say they all were it's complicated i don't think anyone actually celebrates the nazi occupation and i don't think you could celebrate the nazi occupation and actually succeed as a party but there's all sorts of dog whistle stuff about antisemitism revisionism and and holocaust denial and then obviously there's always a complicated aspect of sort of fetishizing the oppressor right so there was the nazi occupier and french who wanted to be like as strong as the nazis or as strong as the occupying force so in that in that case you know it's hard to decipher or hard to really thread out where one ends and the other begins i mean what we can say is that for sure even recently there was a part of one of the functionary of the party down south who had a bookstore and in his bookstore he was filmed there's a there's a secret back room with all these holocaust denial books which it's actually illegal to sell here in france and he was giving a tour to the initiated of the secret chamber of his of his bookstore you know and so he was forced to resign the party is just you know riddled with people like that because that's who it appealed to in the early days and that's who the father never really renounced appealing to and you know that even even if you don't go as far as collaboration is there's been a neo-nazi movement in europe since the you know since the 70s and the 80s and so the part of it part of the skinhead movement had a neo-nazi element to it and some of the younger far-right student groups had a neo-nazi element to it to them so whether or not they actually celebrate the occupation or are collaborationists there there's a sort of fetishizing of that historically for another show i would love to talk about the collaborators and how they were treated after the war and whether or not they have reunions and defend themselves and what happened to patan marshal patan and there's a there's a great documentary on that uh i forget the title it is it has chagrin in the title i can email it to you afterward if you'd like to set the star on the pity is it exactly that's it so there was actually a lot of women who were who had relationships with uh nazi soldiers had their hair shaved off and were publicly humiliated humiliated in in village squares and town squares and lots of lots of extrajudicial killings shall we say after the war some of it's hard to see is that determine whether it was just scores being settled but a lot of it was collaborating well i wrote a book defending the collaborators it wasn't about the nazis it was about state's rights that's why that's a joke i'm comparing it to think it was about states i don't know it might be too soon i know i know but there but there there isn't the kind of denial in france the way we have here in america when it comes to slavery they they kind of every every block you walk down you can see bullet holes and plaques that say on this site 40 jews were rounded up by you know a french yeah on another level i hear what you're saying but the french are masters of what the what's called here the non d the unsaid so there's a lot that hasn't been addressed i mean just to give you an example during the campaign marine le pen created a controversy by saying that when when the french vichy forces police force police officers rounded up jews for the for the germans for the nazis and deported them that it wasn't france that was responsible not jack chirac when he was president took the unprecedented step of apologizing and accepting responsibility on behalf of the french state even though at that time it was vichy and marine le pen went back on that and said no that wasn't france it was vichy france at the time was char de gaulle who was in london and france is not responsible vichy was and so there's still a lot of historical stuff that hasn't been addressed and and that's just world war two if you get into the algeria the the algerian war it's even more and that drives a lot of support for the national front a lot of who whom a lot of their supporters are either first generation or second generation french algerians who came back from algeria after the the war in algeria and who have a huge bitterness still to this day against the french state and against de gaulle for having pulled out of the war and allowing algeria to become independent uh jan marie le pen the father was a soldier in that war he's actually endorsed the torture that was committed by the french forces in the war so all of that stuff in terms of the historical aspects it's all there and a lot of it isn't really addressed or mentioned so but very fascinating stuff so there are speech codes in france there are certain things you're not allowed to say you'll be prosecuted yeah that was what i think the first time you invited me to talk on the show it had to do with that i was you know i was i was just going to talk about that i have two questions about that one is can a politician be brought up on speech code violations i would think le penne is saying things i mean as you pointed out the person who replaced her to head the party had been a holocaust denier um can you run for office and violate the speech codes no in other words it's not it's not protected speech just because you're a politician a politician campaigning for instance her father jan marie le penne was convicted on a couple of occasions for violating speech codes when it came to the holocaust and i believe maybe a racist remark or two but for instance he called uh he called the uh at one point when in talking about world war two he called the gas chamber is a detail of history and that it wasn't that the main story was world war two and the gas chambers were a detail and i believe he was convicted on that of apology for the holocaust is the is the term uh apology are you fine or what happens yeah yeah yeah fine you don't go to jail i'm not sure i'd have to check on that i don't think so but it depends i think if you called for violence based on on racial characteristics for instance that could be jail time a candidate running for president in france if he stirs up the popular could not question for instance the existence of the gas chambers and suppose they said something about the arab population like they're uh anything that could be considered uh targeting someone for their for the well first of all race isn't really uh accepted in france as a category it's it's not acknowledged but i mean for instance anyone who said for instance what what when donald trump said that uh muslims should be banned from entering during the campaign uh that would be uh that would not be protected speech here i don't believe again i'm not a lawyer so right i i i hesitate to be a hundred percent certain on this stuff but certainly disparaging uh someone because because of the racial characteristics even as a politician on the stump would be would be uh would not be protected speech but you'd still be allowed to run you'd be fine but you could probably still get elected president in france saying that i don't know i mean you can be excluded from seeking public office for instance uh if you've been convicted of corruption uh you can be excluded from public office office from one to ten years maybe more so hate speech is not protected in france and is there a anti-pc movement going on in france are there people saying this is mind control and language control and it's orwellian the way we no no not really that's pretty much accepted that's been litigated already i don't i mean it's france isn't the only country right i mean germany mind conf was just published last year i think for the first time or the year before and even that was controversial um you can't give the hitler salute for instance in germany it's illegal you and i first connected because you had written a piece for politico about charlie hebdo about i think it was two years ago the the satirical magazine charlie hebdo was shot up by extremists who were upset that charlie hebdo was making fun of mohammed and ala and did all these cartoons and you had written a piece in politico that i loved because it echoed what i believed which is yes there is the issue of freedom of speech but there's also why are you doing that why why is the satirical magazine choosing to punch down and pick on the muslim community and and incite them not that anybody deserves to be shot up but you did you took a chance by calling into question the wisdom of a satirical magazine trying to upset the oppressed i'd have to go through the piece again i think the point i'm not sure i would say that the point i was trying to make is that the people who were defending that first of all i was trying to make the point that freedom of speech means something very different in america than it does in france but also i think i was trying to point out the irony to me that a lot of that for instance i mean charlie hebdo their humor is extremely caustic and it's caustic toward certain things in particular religion and they don't respect any of the code so for instance of sort of political correctness in the us so for instance their cartoons about their cartoons that are trying to show that the national front is racist use very racially charged images of black people for instance so in a way like i think any publication that that played with that you know you you're a comedian right mm-hmm there's a third rail and you know it pretty much when you step on it right uh and and and it's you know it can be really really funny if you play with it right but once you step on the third whale you're just dead and there's no humor in it and i think that in some ways charlie hebdo i don't think they would be considered too funny in the us and they would probably be attacked and condemned for how close they come to the third rail of trying to attack racism but at the same time using certain imagery that that are born out of racist stereotypes and things like that i don't think they're racist by any means they're like really hardcore atheist communists uh but at the same time they they were completely uh they had no respect for any codes of correctness they were willing to offend everyone and anyone so you know i think that there aren't too many people in the us who embrace that fully the free speech code of of go ahead and you know you have the right to offend everyone is france racist in that your french first and everything else is tertiary so do they like when you fill out an application you don't identify your race for anything right no it's actually it's not legal if you're polling for instance to ask someone's race you can't actually do like sociologists have trouble here doing research on religion and race because you're not allowed to ask that question so for instance they get around it by saying they they know there's no real no uh census for instance of how many muslims there are in france uh so it's all sort of extrapolated from how many people are from north african descent and uh or from uh from muslim majority sub-saharan africa things like that there's no real there's no statistical count because it's illegal to do so um i don't know if i would say that it that's a race that's i think that's fascinating and it's a form of racism in that it's saying we don't respect anybody's race you're french that's your race i mean it's racist in the sense that like being colorblind can be accused of being racist it's sort of enforced colorblindness um yeah and and at the same time it's a response it's sort of a it's an attempt to create national cohesion in an increasingly diverse country it's the complete opposite it's the complete opposite of america it's fascinating would a comedian get away with in america would a comedian get away with doing the kind of jokes that they do here in the united states where you know ethnic humor and religious humor and yeah you can i mean there's uh there's there yeah definitely there's there's young comedians of especially of ethnic minority background who get away with it but i know that there was one who who's been some hate he got accused of some speech code violation i can't oh that's and that's uh jio donne who's in another category he he's sort of flirted he started out as like an anti-racist uh comedian he was in a in a duo with uh with a i think a jew french north african jewish guy elise moon uh and jio donne i think is from the french anti the french antilles um and although i could be wrong he might he might be from uh his family background might be through africa i'm not sure on that uh and then over the years he just started becoming more and more sort of he's kept getting closer and closer to that third rail especially when it came to antisemitic jokes and holocaust jokes and things like that and uh and at a certain point it was you know people scratching their heads because some of these far-right extreme neo-nazi groups were championing uh his show um and again it's a complicated question uh you know i i kind of go for the nat hentoff school of thought which is the the answer to bad speech is better speech um but france is a different culture well hang on that that's my hang on france france you said is a different culture yeah they have a different culture of free speech here right um in the same way that they have a different culture for instance of of uh of what it means what religious freedom means and tolerance and separation of church and state you can't wear a head uh you can't wear a either you can't wear a yarmulke or a head veil or a very uh what's the word i'm looking for very visible across to school if you're a school if you're in the public school here post is that a post world war two phenomenon or no that dates back to the mid-2000s 2007 i think it was or 2005 the anti-religion and again it's sort of dog whistle because generally it targets young uh muslim women who were beginning there was there there was a sort of a a trend towards more religious observance among sometimes not even immigrant immigrant children it was sometimes second and third generation french children of immigrant backgrounds um but at any rate it you know the there are differences even there american americans for american its separation of church and state which means you protect the church from the state in france it has it's a totally different religious history where the catholic church was actually uh a rival and threat to the state so in other words in america it's freedom of religion in france it's freedom from religion so the state was there to guarantee that the church did not exercise power in the public sphere and part of that means that pre-world war two right that goes back oh yeah that's well before world war two that's the the french law is from the turn of the century and it you know it dates back to the french revolution and even uh you know the the france had the papacy in in french territory at one point um so you know european history in terms of the struggle between national secular powers and and the and the catholic church goes back a long way and so it's a totally different history it's hard to explain that uh but when you've lived i mean from i won't say you i've lived here now for 16 16 years and it's almost like part of being bilingual is that when i'm here i understand it one way and when i'm in america i understand it another way and uh it's not that i say one is better one's worse or that i agree with either it's just that i understand things differently it's different sensibility it's a different mindset and a different culture before you go i want to ask you about france well hold on but i want to just ask you very quickly about freedom of speech because once a week i have you know when it's talking about the uh the election at all well yeah i thought you'd be really well i i have some questions but i i want to ask you about i have uh professor cori brechneider on the show once a week and we do a course in constitutional law and i'm always defending censorship as the devil's advocate and i say that to me language is kind of like zoning in your neighborhood i don't want a strip joint in my neighborhood and i have a right as a citizen to block a strip joint an adult bookstore from being around the corner from from my kids school i have every right to say i don't like that you can have it just don't have it around me and i think to some degree the same applies to speech that people have a right to say i don't want to hear that it's inappropriate knock it off go say that someplace else and then everybody says it's a slippery slope i say the people who are saying that are they government officials or are they just your neighbors who are saying don't come to the block party if you're going to talk like that i mean there's a difference right there is this knee jerk first amendment conversation that i find disturbing in that we have i have certain friends who say speech should not be monitored nobody should question speech everybody should be free to say whatever they want and i say if everybody's free to say whatever they want then i'm saying shut up just you know shut up and i'm not gonna i mean first amendment is only applies to government it doesn't apply even to private to private sector i mean you know you look at social media twitter facebook they can censor anything they want right so they're quite they're not government um and in fact they're they're they're they're expected to now for instance censor whether it's uh terrorists that use social media or racists or via people who are advocating violence uh so in terms of that i i think that you know you have to make the distinction between who's doing the separate who's doing the who's doing the censorship but i mean one thing i i just say you know in general like i remember last time we spoke we talked about we were talking about the american election i think and uh and you said something that that i i didn't i didn't call you on but i i never forgot it because you said no i believe you know you were talking about having faith in people and in in in talking with people because you said you could convince them if you could talk with someone you can convince them that you're right but to me having faith in people is sort of like you know what if they're right and the same thing with with censorship it's like who's the one who's deciding who gets censored is am i censoring you or are you censoring me i'm sure i'd be i don't particularly like censorship but i'm sure i'd find it a lot easier to deal with me censoring you than you censoring me right so i think that in general when we look around and and say who's talking who's saying what and who gets to say not to to be quiet it's similar to that respect that we that we have for each other democratically we need to we need to sort of put ourselves in the other person's position and say well maybe maybe uh maybe i wouldn't be too comfortable if someone were telling me what i could and couldn't say so let me just not tell other people what they can and can't say at the same time i think you're well within your rights and i agree uh you know if someone's saying you know someone's just saying things that you don't like or you don't agree with or that make you make you uncomfortable you you have every right to not listen to them and not offer them a platform certainly on your show for instance right so the the question i had was in france it's different they do guide they guide speech they monitor speech they listen to what people say they as i say they have you know zoning it seems to me yeah seems to me that they have a more rational political discourse in france that they are better read better informed informed they understand nuance and subtlety more so than they do in the united states it's a broad generalization i mean is there wouldn't you say the french electorate is better informed than the american electorate i'd say less and less so over the years but but but but but but overall yeah probably so so by guiding i mean not being at all qualified to make a judgment one way or the other my instinct would say yes yeah so there is some virtue to wise men and women saying watch your language mind your peas and cues you know again you have to look back at the different there there's a different it makes for better discourse there's a different history here too david you have to look back at that and and put it into the context here the you know europe is three generations removed from world war two and from the nazi ideology where it wasn't abstract and it wasn't speech so the these the things that our that are that are forbidden are things that had very real consequences here on on this continent obviously for the united states too in terms of american soldiers that fought here in america slaves and slaves but i i think for instance that i i don't i i don't know that the american experience was uh was as marked by that kind of speech and ideology but perhaps i'm mistaken what about what hang on for a second because i want to ask you about oh lord uh yeah we've learned the consequences of hate speech the civil war we know we know what language does that was more than speech but i i guess i'm trying to think through how i would feel if i were a black american and someone was saying uh maybe we should outlaw white supremacists discourse well i i because it had as even though it was 100 years ago or more than 100 more than 150 or it was 150 years ago as opposed to 60 years ago uh it had just as much human cost uh so there's no reason why it shouldn't be the same thing in france it's consistent in that it's racist racist speech is outlawed as well as anti-semitic speech so there's no inconsistency there i think the american culture of free speech is just completely different yeah well i think the the french are better educated and uh because they're watching what people say and they listen to what people say so very quickly before we wrap it up france we're all on was a socialist he did six years as president right after the five years right after the economic collapse the french decided unlike the united states to elect a socialist they said that's it the big we can't trust the big banks we were screwed we're putting a socialist in office and i liked oland i thought but everything worked against him didn't it he tried to maintain the safety net he couldn't and then he kind of turned his back on the safety net right well along i mean to begin with the socialist party is no longer socialist in terms of like socialism i mean they don't they're not talking about nationalizing industry for instance oland the problem oland had was that he campaigned on a pretty uh militant left program of his enemy being international finance and how he was going to break europe uh europe austerity and things like that and then basically he ran on a social democratic take uh or he governed as a social democrat uh mac home was actually his principal economic advisor and uh was his minister of the economy for a couple years and basically what he tried to do was was uh you know he he i don't think you would have been too supportive of it to be honest from what i know about your politics he used like uh tax credit incentives to try to get uh big businesses to hire uh he had a sort of uh almost like an informal non-binding pact of responsibility to to get big businesses to to hire and to get uh big tax credits uh in in exchange but they didn't actually end up hiring uh macron as the economy minister tried to lighten some of the regulations on the on the on on businesses and on the labor market that are extremely unpopular here i mean the the thing is what you know and i and i know what we'd probably disagree on the on the fundamentals of this uh politically but uh france has basically resisted sort of third way uh new left structural reforms uh over the last 20 years there just hasn't it's been at the margins but you know france while while while great britain and the us and then later germany were creating more flexibility in terms of hiring and firing and trying to create economies that that had more opportunity and more oxygen rather than social safety network nets uh for better and worse i'm not going to argue that that was all good france was actually reduced the the legal working week to 35 hours per week i did moderate raised the retirement age at the margins but not as not as much as other countries and still has very very onerous uh restrictions in terms of how permanent employees can be fired and what kind of um severance packages they get at the end of that and so what it does is that it creates there's certainly a better social safety net at the same time it creates these disincentives for hiring uh so you've had a younger generation that instead of having the very prized permanent job contract which creates the greatest security and the safety they they have these string of temporary contracts uh on which they can't rent apartments because it's it's not that it's too precarious for landlords they can't get loans to to buy property to buy an apartment or a house or a car because banks don't trust that they'll be employed so you've it's created this sort of second-class job citizenship where you have an older generation that has permanent jobs any younger generation that has temporary contracts and the the businesses are afraid to hire because uh you know business cycle is the business cycle is cyclic that's why it's called the business cycle cycle and when things go down for a small company uh that is particularly uh vulnerable to the business cycle they can't just lay people off like they can in the us now for better and worse again but what it does is it builds in a high structural unemployment here i mean the unemployment rate in france has been between seven and nine percent pretty much uniformly for the last 20 years seven to nine percent unemployment yeah it's built in it's cooked that's cooked into the recipe and so you know so so you have a high safety net all of these people get free health care right but again it sort of condemns uh you know youth unemployment i think is at 25 percent and it condemns people to to really long-term unemployment in a way that is very very you know destructive in in terms of people's lives we know what the impact that that has and so what macron uh what oran tried to do and and and and what macron is promising to do is to provide a little more flexibility for employers to increase training for workers to get into fields that are growth fields as opposed to legacy fields and to invest in uh in sort of green energy to invest in some of the innovative stuff high tech things like that i mean france has a has enormous enormous human capital in terms of its education system in terms of its high degree of technological innovation uh things like that so france has all the cards that can all the strong cards to play in in the global economy of today and what macron is trying to do is is try to say look we we need to be a little more audacious a little more a little a little less risk averse and that's a very hard sell here because people hear what it whereas an american thinks of opportunity right french people think of precarious precariousness yeah and so they don't they don't like an american person when they start a business right all their friends generally you know if you have a friend he says uh or he or she says you know i've got all this experience now i'm going to start my own business and go out on my own generally in the states we're like oh right on good luck i really hope it works well for you here in france if you say to someone yeah i'm going out on my own i'm starting my own business they're going to be like are you sure it's kind of dangerous and there's a real sort of risk averseness here when it comes to that kind of uh that kind of uh risk taking and and mcconnell is trying to reconcile is trying to say look he talked a lot about conquering france he's trying to say look we can do it but it's a hard sell here people really don't like uh that that kind of exposure juda grunstein is the editor-in-chief of world politics review trend lines every friday who's your guest the guest this friday should be richard bitzinger he wrote a great article for us that will be publishing tomorrow on china's expanding global security role in presence great thank you so much i really appreciate it been my pleasure as always david thanks for having me great thank you judo that's our show thanks for listening you can buy sam kenyon his book dreamland by going to amazon and you can go to amazon via the david feldman show website also if you're over the david 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