Speaker 1: Fl media. Hey everybody, Robert here, and if you haven't
Speaker 1: heard recently, about a month ago, my dad took very ill,
Speaker 1: maybe more like two months ago now, and I wound
Speaker 1: up spending almost a solid month in Texas in the
Speaker 1: ICU with him every day and eventually hospice. The short
Speaker 1: answer to this is that he passed and I did
Speaker 1: not get him a lot of work done for a while.
Speaker 1: So we are taking another rewind week next week. It'll
Speaker 1: be new content again, new content for the foreseeable future
Speaker 1: after this, but we're taking one more week so that
Speaker 1: I can get back ahead on stuff. And I decided
Speaker 1: to run this series of three episodes that we did
Speaker 1: a couple of years back with Tom Ryman about some
Speaker 1: of the first right wing talk show grifter types, you know,
Speaker 1: the guys who really like set the stage for people
Speaker 1: like Tucker Carlson. And I wanted to do that because Tom,
Speaker 1: unfortunately is also dealing with a health scare for somebody
Speaker 1: close to him. His wife, Marina, who's also a wonderful person,
Speaker 1: a longtime friend of mine, has a high risk pregnancy
Speaker 1: and is going to be in the hospital for probably
Speaker 1: the foreseeable future until she has the kid. She got
Speaker 1: seven months in right now, so it's a sketchy situation
Speaker 1: for them unfortunately, and they are in need of some
Speaker 1: money to help cover their medical bills. So if you
Speaker 1: want to help out these two great people, and if
Speaker 1: you don't know Tom, check out Gamefully Unemployed. That's his
Speaker 1: podcast network. They do a lot of great TV show
Speaker 1: movie reviews. They have a great show about the X
Speaker 1: Files about how Crazy Fox Molder is where they go
Speaker 1: through every episode. It's one of my favorite things to
Speaker 1: listen to. But if you want to help them out,
Speaker 1: go to support Marina's High Risk pregnancy journey on go
Speaker 1: fund Me. You can just google go fund me, support
Speaker 1: Marina's High Risk Pregnancy Journey and donate there. So thank
Speaker 1: you all very much. We will be back with new
Speaker 1: stuff next week. But we've got three great rewinds for
Speaker 1: you this week. If you haven't listened to them before,
Speaker 1: you will enjoy them. If you have, why not listen
Speaker 1: to In What Desperately Horny My Saddam Hussein's Best Friend,
Speaker 1: I'm Robert Evans hosted Behind the Bastards, the only podcast
Speaker 1: whose host owns two kittens named Saddam Hussein and Saddam
Speaker 1: Hussein's best friend and due to a severe veterinarian shortage
Speaker 1: in northern Oregon, still can't get them spaded and nuted
Speaker 1: for another nine days. And Saddam Hussein's best friend is
Speaker 1: in heat and desperately trying to fuck her brother.
Speaker 2: This has been an update for all.
Speaker 1: That didn't you have to like maybe she didn't disclose
Speaker 1: that information. Now you're she has been disclosing that she
Speaker 1: wants to fuck to literally every living creature that gets
Speaker 1: near her.
Speaker 3: If she had a microphone, she'd be saying the same thing.
Speaker 3: She will not stop presenting, and she did not. It
Speaker 3: is it has been a problem. We are keeping them
Speaker 3: away because I do not want incest kittens. Although they
Speaker 3: may have been incestc there's no way to know in sittons.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like Robert, who is a lot of other voice
Speaker 2: on this podcast that people are here?
Speaker 1: Oh well, the only person I would ever have on
Speaker 1: to talk about kitten incest my friend Tom Ryman.
Speaker 2: Hello, Hey, Hi.
Speaker 3: What's up. No, I'm glad you got me on to
Speaker 3: talk about these cats.
Speaker 1: This is going to be a three hour episode about
Speaker 1: my cat's sex life. Tom, you are the co founder
Speaker 1: of Gamefully Unemployed, one of my favorite podcast networks hosts.
Speaker 1: One of my most listened to shows, Fox Molder is
Speaker 1: a Maniac, which is a beautiful breakdown of a Fox
Speaker 1: Molder and what a goddamn Lunatiki is.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Tom, it's really fascinating when you watch the show
Speaker 3: with that context.
Speaker 2: It changes the show. It truly does.
Speaker 1: You guys do a lot of great stuff, great movie reviews,
Speaker 1: and oh thanks, role playing games. People can find you
Speaker 1: gamefully unemployed on Patreon. Tom, you also are what an
Speaker 1: editor at Collider? Forget what a senior editor of features
Speaker 1: a Collider? And you and I worked together for all
Speaker 1: of my twenties more or less at a little website
Speaker 1: called Cracked that pivoted to video and uh and went
Speaker 1: the way of the Dodo.
Speaker 3: We got, we got, we got dragged to hell by
Speaker 3: Mark Zuckerberg. Yeah. I didn't come across a beautiful tweet
Speaker 3: earlier today that you'll appreciate.
Speaker 2: Tom.
Speaker 3: Oh good, Yeah, I can't wait to hear it. Great radio,
Speaker 3: great radio. Yeah, I look for something and Neil dash
Speaker 3: Horse broke its legs, so we had to take it
Speaker 3: out back and help it pivot to video.
Speaker 2: Oh Tom, how are you doing today?
Speaker 3: I'm doing okay, I'm doing pretty good. Thanks. Uh, you know,
Speaker 3: how about how about you? How about yourself?
Speaker 1: Well, Tom, I'm thinking about the fact that there is
Speaker 1: a vast, incredibly well financed right wing media operation that
Speaker 1: is seemingly dedicated to pushing a violent civil conflict that
Speaker 1: leads to a death toll that's truly astronomical in this nation.
Speaker 2: Do you think about that a lot?
Speaker 3: So good? Right, So you're doing good, doing great? Uh, yeah, no,
Speaker 3: I've tried to think about it less. But in the
Speaker 3: past few months. Just yeah, I was trying to take
Speaker 3: a break, but I'm getting plugged back into it.
Speaker 2: You sure are, And it's yeah, god, damn it.
Speaker 3: It's just it's just it doesn't seem like anything's gotten
Speaker 3: any better. It sure hasn't. It's fucking relentless. And there's
Speaker 3: this the election. We're like, oh, thank god, and then nope,
Speaker 3: that that didn't go away.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, it turns out that you can't. You can't
Speaker 1: vote these kind of problems away. And today we're going
Speaker 1: to talk about where some of these problems started. Specifically,
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about the men who made right
Speaker 1: wing media, and particularly like right wing talk media. So
Speaker 1: today you've got guys like Stephen Crowder, uh Be Shapiro obviously,
Speaker 1: Tucker Carlson being the big, the big Mamma Jammy. You
Speaker 1: had people like Rush Limball, like.
Speaker 3: All of all three of those people, all four of
Speaker 3: those people you just name got picked dead last for
Speaker 3: Kickball for very different reasons. Yeah, they did, and they
Speaker 3: made it the entire world's problem.
Speaker 1: Yes, So all of these folks, you know, some of
Speaker 1: the all they all do slightly different variations of the
Speaker 1: same thing. And they're not all you know, Rush is
Speaker 1: the only one who's like really a talk radio host,
Speaker 1: but they all have you know, podcasts and YouTube. They
Speaker 1: all do the modern equivalent of talk radio and and
Speaker 1: of like, yeah, we're gonna talk about basically the the
Speaker 1: people who invented the media space that these guys all
Speaker 1: live in. Now, these are the very first right wing
Speaker 1: media personalities in a big way. So these are these
Speaker 1: are the people who prepared the soil for all of
Speaker 1: the different, you know, kind of quasi fascist grifters we
Speaker 1: have today. And they are they're not all bastards in
Speaker 1: the traditional sense. They're not all people who, on their own,
Speaker 1: if you didn't consider where everything went, would have qualified
Speaker 1: as bastards. They're all, I think, unpleasant people, But I
Speaker 1: think what's interesting is how they how they start off
Speaker 1: and kind of where they end, Like the kind of
Speaker 1: people who inhabit this space at the beginning and the
Speaker 1: kind of people who inhabit it now. So this is
Speaker 1: gonna be a fun episode time. You're gonna listen to
Speaker 1: a lot of clips that you're just really gonna dislike.
Speaker 3: Oh good, ah, yeah, so excited, so pumped. Yeah, I'm
Speaker 3: gonna be so mad soon. Yeah wait, you really are so.
Speaker 1: One of the things that inspired this was coming across
Speaker 1: the fact that Tucker Carlson very recently alleged that the
Speaker 1: purpose of vaccine requirements in the military was to quote
Speaker 1: identify the sincere Christians in the ranks, the freethinkers, the
Speaker 1: men with height, testosterone levels, and anybody else who doesn't
Speaker 1: love Joe Biden and make them leave immediately. Fuck is
Speaker 1: he talking about he's getting into high TI just usterns low.
Speaker 1: If you're getting facts, the soy boys, shit, not choking
Speaker 1: on your own rotting lungs is soy.
Speaker 3: It's it's become I mean it was, it's always been
Speaker 3: the case, but like in the past year or two. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's really become obvious that they just let him go
Speaker 3: on and say what happened?
Speaker 2: He just says it's things.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I'm starting with Tucker because he's he's just
Speaker 3: off the fucking rails completely. And this is the end
Speaker 3: root of the journey that we're going to trace the
Speaker 3: start of today. And the thing that Tucker has been
Speaker 3: saying that most concerns me is he started sharing Great
Speaker 3: Replacement style conspiracy theists which are alleging that Democrats plan
Speaker 3: to quote change the population of this country in order
Speaker 3: to maintain power. This is functionally the same argument Brenton Tarrant,
Speaker 3: the christ shooter, made in the manifesto he wrote before
Speaker 3: shooting fifty Muslim worshippers to death. His manifest was titled
Speaker 3: The Great Replacements. The same argument that the yeah, I'm trying,
Speaker 3: I'm trying. I'm trying to remember my behind the Bastards
Speaker 3: extended universe that all comes from the Turner Diaries, right, I.
Speaker 1: Mean doesn't come for the Turner Diaries was like a
Speaker 1: big definitely was pushing that. But this goes back a
Speaker 1: while for I mean, you could even draw a line
Speaker 1: to like the original Nazis and kind of some of
Speaker 1: the shit Hitler was saying about Airyan blood getting watered
Speaker 1: down from inner breeding in one for sure.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, it's a big, big white nationalist talking point.
Speaker 1: And the fact that this good went from great replacement
Speaker 1: went from like fringe Nazi murderer manifesto in twenty nineteen
Speaker 1: to Tucker Carlson talking to three million people on a
Speaker 1: major news network in twenty twenty one, shows like how
Speaker 1: fast things go now and how how dangerous this all is.
Speaker 1: And I think it's important to start the stakes because
Speaker 1: it doesn't begin that way. The guys who start this
Speaker 1: kind of right wing media space.
Speaker 2: Are in.
Speaker 1: The first guy we're going to talk to is in
Speaker 1: a lot always kind of pleasant, at least compared to
Speaker 1: what came after. I don't think he's somebody would have
Speaker 1: gotten along with.
Speaker 3: But it's don't it's weird. It's weird. We'll see how
Speaker 3: you think. Okay, Yeah, And where we discussed this is
Speaker 3: probably going to be.
Speaker 1: These episodes me a nice companion to our two parter
Speaker 1: on Rush Limbaugh with mister Paul F. Tompkins. So you know,
Speaker 1: if you're if you're looking for a good four episodes
Speaker 1: spree to go together listen to these two and then
Speaker 1: listen to those. Well you're a sweet having a very
Speaker 1: long shit or on a road trip. So first guy
Speaker 1: we're talking about tom is Joe Pine Pya in the
Speaker 1: Joe Pine was born in Chester, Pennsylvania on December twenty second,
Speaker 1: nineteen twenty four.
Speaker 3: His dad's problem. It's December twenty second and nineteen twenty four. Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania,
Speaker 3: the US. Yeah, get it, get it out of there.
Speaker 3: We don't need that state. It's like you look at that,
Speaker 3: You look at those those three pieces of information, like
Speaker 3: this is like a fifty to fifty shot. This guy's
Speaker 3: gonna be real piece of Pennsylvania in the twenties. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I December baby.
Speaker 2: Fuck that.
Speaker 1: His dad was a brickmaker and his mom was a mom,
Speaker 1: which was pretty much the only job most women could
Speaker 1: expect to work at that point in time and place.
Speaker 1: When Joe was little, his family moved to Atlantic City,
Speaker 1: which is like Las Vegas, but less fun and much
Speaker 1: sadder because it's on the East coast. Here's a good
Speaker 1: Bruce Springsteen song about that. He had a difficult childhood.
Speaker 1: Joe had a pronounced stutter, and kids back then were
Speaker 1: even shitty about such things than they are today. He
Speaker 1: was bullied relentlessly. When Joe was eleven, he lost his
Speaker 1: younger brother to an auto accident, which was not uncommon
Speaker 1: in those days because cars didn't crumple and seat belts
Speaker 1: were but a fever dream in Ralph Nader's eye. By
Speaker 1: the time Joe was a teenager, his family left Atlantic City,
Speaker 1: which is always a good decision, and moved back to Chester,
Speaker 1: which is a more questionable decision. It's all they knew.
Speaker 1: It's all they knew.
Speaker 3: We're going to pile the family into our giant, unstoppable
Speaker 3: seat beltless car and drive back to Chester.
Speaker 1: He went to high school, and he joined the Marines
Speaker 1: in nineteen forty two, which was a popular decision at
Speaker 1: the time. He joined as early as he possibly Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, for whatever reason, a lot of guys in the
Speaker 3: military in nineteen forty two must have been good ads.
Speaker 2: Something's about to happen.
Speaker 1: He joined as the early, like the first day he
Speaker 1: possibly could, and obviously the US had decided to enter
Speaker 1: World War Two at this point. He was deployed against
Speaker 1: the Empire of Japan, and he fought in some of
Speaker 1: the war's worst battles across the South Pacific. Joe survived
Speaker 1: the Battle of Okinawa, which is one of the like, like,
Speaker 1: one of the worst fights you could possibly have been
Speaker 1: in that war, real bad battle Okinawa. During that battle,
Speaker 1: a Japanese plane bombed the forward base he was stationed on,
Speaker 1: seriously injuring his knee. He returned home scarred and seasoned
Speaker 1: by heavy combat. Joe had won three Bronze Stars for
Speaker 1: valor in battle and a purple Heart. So he definitely
Speaker 1: saw some shit. This is not one of like the
Speaker 1: draft dodgy right wing.
Speaker 3: Guys, right Ben Shapiro writing war fan fiction, like he
Speaker 3: win a war and got bombs dropped on his leg.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he saw some of the worst shit you could
Speaker 1: have seen in that particular conflict. So he returns home
Speaker 1: real fucked up, probably with a head full of PTSD,
Speaker 1: But they didn't know PTSD was that they. I'm assuming
Speaker 1: he just drank washed it down with cigarettes.
Speaker 3: Real headful of horny cats.
Speaker 1: Yeah, when he got home, he didn't know precisely what
Speaker 1: he wanted to do with his life, but he was
Speaker 1: certain that it involved putting himself in front of people
Speaker 1: and entertaining them. In order to do that, he felt
Speaker 1: he would need to deal with his speech impediment first
Speaker 1: using his.
Speaker 2: What led him to that decision. I don't know.
Speaker 3: I relentlessly bullied, went to war, got bombed, his dead
Speaker 3: brother comes back. He's like, I'm going to be an entertainer.
Speaker 2: I'm going to be an entertainer. I'm gonna be a.
Speaker 3: Where does that impulse come from?
Speaker 1: Yeah, we just don't know enough about his early life
Speaker 1: to know, like what the fuck was going on. Maybe
Speaker 1: he just wanted to show people my speech impediment doesn't
Speaker 1: to find me. I don't know. Sure I beat the
Speaker 1: Japanese I can beat stuttering. So, using his GI bill,
Speaker 1: Joe enrolled in a drama school. He forced himself through
Speaker 1: agonizing hours of live performances in front of his classmates
Speaker 1: to overcome his stutter. He locked himself away in his
Speaker 1: room and would perform hours and hours of speech drills
Speaker 1: every day, and eventually he did overcome his speech impediment.
Speaker 1: Once he graduated, Joe became a taxi driver in Chester.
Speaker 1: He continued to work on his speech while he was
Speaker 1: driving people around. Eventually, he decided he'd come far enough
Speaker 1: and he started a career as a broadcaster.
Speaker 3: By this way the Way, the way you phrased that
Speaker 3: made it sound like he was doing like his speeches
Speaker 3: to his passengers, I think.
Speaker 1: None, give me some notes. I got a tight five.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna run it by you. There's no seatbelt better last.
Speaker 2: You are really dependent upon me.
Speaker 1: So he does this, and yeah, he decides he's finished
Speaker 1: by like late nineteen forty six, now again nineteen forties.
Speaker 1: Radio is king. TV's coming around, but that's still not
Speaker 1: the number one way people get entertained. You're really radio
Speaker 1: is the top of the top of the world, and
Speaker 1: they assume it will be forever. He was able to
Speaker 1: convince a station manager in Lumberton, North Carolina, to give
Speaker 1: him a job on WTSB. The pay was twenty five
Speaker 1: dollars a week, which was not good money even back then,
Speaker 1: and he failed to stand out enough that he felt
Speaker 1: he had any hope of advancement. So after a year
Speaker 1: he returned home dejected, but Joe kept pushing until he
Speaker 1: got another job at WPWA in Brookhaven, Pennsylvania. He got
Speaker 1: into a vicious argument with his boss while still new
Speaker 1: on the job and was quickly fired. Next he moved
Speaker 1: to wilm of Wilmington, Delaware, where he was also quickly fired.
Speaker 1: Yet you get the feeling he was not easy to
Speaker 1: work with at this point. Thankfully email didn't exist, so
Speaker 1: these people couldn't tell each other about Joe. He moved
Speaker 1: back to Chester after this, and then the Kenosha next
Speaker 1: where he got a job with a new network called
Speaker 1: w I l P. His job in all of these
Speaker 1: places was very straightforward, introduce and play records with a
Speaker 1: minimum of fanfare. He was not being hired to be
Speaker 1: a personality. He was just put the music on. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that was a big part of it. He would riff
Speaker 1: a lot. He got in trouble in Kenosha, and I
Speaker 1: think he'd gotten in trouble before. He would riff on
Speaker 1: politics and current events, which was not what you were
Speaker 1: supposed to do at the time. So his bosses are
Speaker 1: like nobody, Nobody. People are tuning in to hear I
Speaker 1: don't know what the big music is that the big bopper.
Speaker 2: Nobody wants you.
Speaker 3: Nobody gives a shit about what you have to say
Speaker 3: to Yeah, put on Shan Telly lace and shut your
Speaker 3: fucking mouth. Smoke a cigarette.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: The kind of riffing that he thought was the future
Speaker 1: of radio was simply not done at the time, commenters
Speaker 1: were part of the news department and jockeys were not.
Speaker 1: Disc Jockeys were there to entertain, and he'd been hired
Speaker 1: as a disc jockey. So if you were going to
Speaker 1: be a commentator, if you were talking about the news,
Speaker 1: you didn't like give your opinion. You tried to just
Speaker 1: kind of like read, you know, like the ap wire. Basically, WLP,
Speaker 1: though took call ins. Listeners could dial in and request songs,
Speaker 1: but Joe started insisting on asking his listeners what they
Speaker 1: thought about the political issues of the day, which was
Speaker 1: the first time anyone had ever really done that on radio,
Speaker 1: like take callins, and he kind of forced the issue
Speaker 1: of making them political. One WLP employee at the time
Speaker 1: recalled he wanted to chat with them, but in those
Speaker 1: days there was no way to put a phone line
Speaker 1: on the air. Joe would say uh huh and hmm
Speaker 1: and then tell the call the listeners what the callers said.
Speaker 1: So this is like this is a very first talk radio.
Speaker 1: He's just on the phone with them, be like mmmm,
Speaker 1: all right, so here's what he said.
Speaker 3: Let me tell you what Dennis from Yeah and you're
Speaker 3: like listening to almost dead air while he's listening to
Speaker 3: the versus on the phone.
Speaker 1: But this is literally the birth of talk radio. This
Speaker 1: is the first time anybody does this Joe Pine, and
Speaker 1: he moves along eventually, and I'm going to explain that process.
Speaker 1: I'm going to read a quote from a write up
Speaker 1: in Smithsonian Magazine. One caller objected to the young DJ's
Speaker 1: pro union opinions. Do you know anything, sir, about the
Speaker 1: history of labor management relations, Pine asked the man. After
Speaker 1: a moment of dead air, he continued, no, you keep
Speaker 1: your voice down. Pine was an expert interrupter, but this
Speaker 1: caller barely paused for breath listening. Pine had an idea.
Speaker 1: According to Ragani, who worked there, he held the phone
Speaker 1: receiver to his microphone. Now the caller was life on
Speaker 1: the air and call in radio was born. So that's
Speaker 1: nineteen forty nine in Kenosha, Joe Pine invins call in
Speaker 1: radio by literally holding a phone up to the mic.
Speaker 3: In fairness, some random dude calling in to request Frankie
Speaker 3: Valley who had very strong opinions about labor unions. This
Speaker 3: who actually created call radio.
Speaker 2: This guy's such an asshole, I gotta put him on.
Speaker 3: He was so pissed about it. That's a fair point.
Speaker 3: You got to hear, what a piece of shit this
Speaker 3: guy is. Let me invent a new discipline that will
Speaker 3: later ratchet the country towards violence. Yeah, he was born
Speaker 3: in stupid anger and it will kill us all with
Speaker 3: stupid anger to stupid anger, it will return.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Perfect, What a beautiful way for that to get started. Honestly. Yeah,
Speaker 3: And I love because this guy gives birth to right
Speaker 3: wing radio. But he the start of talk radio is
Speaker 3: him trying to defend like the right to unionize, which
Speaker 3: is I was I was not expecting that to be
Speaker 3: the issue when you said it. I was like, really
Speaker 3: that you could be pretty conservative and pro union in
Speaker 3: those because it wasn't. It was more racist back then,
Speaker 3: obviously everything was, but politics in some ways was less dumb.
Speaker 2: It wasn't.
Speaker 1: It hadn't gotten to the point where it is with
Speaker 1: like the right wing left wing conservatism is such a
Speaker 1: part of my like identity that like I have this
Speaker 1: vested interest in like demonizing anything, like you did have
Speaker 1: a lot of u. I mean, like one of the
Speaker 1: union strongholds in the US for a long time was
Speaker 1: West fucking Virginia. You know, like people like fought to
Speaker 1: the death for unions at West Virginia with rifles and
Speaker 1: now it's Joe Mansion Country, So well sorry West Virginia.
Speaker 1: But like, yeah, the things were different than poetically, is
Speaker 1: what I'm saying. And yeah, so Joe was fired. I
Speaker 1: think this kind of is part of what got him
Speaker 1: fired because his boss at the station was like, you're
Speaker 1: supposed to be playing songs, Joe, what the fuck are
Speaker 1: you doing holding the phone out to the goddamn microphone.
Speaker 3: Put on the goddamn wreck, Put on the fucking twist. Yeah,
Speaker 3: do you want to get a Rush Limbaugh, Because that's
Speaker 3: how you get a Limbaugh. This is how we get
Speaker 3: a Limba. Put the phone down, Put on the goddamn music.
Speaker 3: I don't want to listen to Stephen Crowder's heart surgery
Speaker 3: problems in twenty five years or forty five years, how
Speaker 3: many years, one hundred years, sixty years, whatever, too many years, Tom,
Speaker 3: five hundred years, yeah, years ago. Nobody from even alive anymore.
Speaker 2: No, no, God, thank God.
Speaker 3: So, despite Yeah, inventing call in radio, Joe's boss did
Speaker 3: not appreciate him.
Speaker 1: He wanted someone to read ads and introduce songs. The
Speaker 1: two fought constantly at one point, Joe demanded a raise,
Speaker 1: which led to a fight. Another w l i P
Speaker 1: host later recalled stumbling in on the melee Joe was yelling.
Speaker 1: She recalled, he had one hand on our boss's lapel.
Speaker 1: He picked up a typewriter and threw it against the wall.
Speaker 3: Oh fuck, So that gives you a little bit of
Speaker 3: an idea of like why this guy keeps having problems
Speaker 3: with his coworkers. Yeah, he almost said that was danger.
Speaker 3: He almost scored some points of me there though, because
Speaker 3: you were like, he picked up a type roun.
Speaker 2: I'm like, here we go, here we go against the wall,
Speaker 2: hit him in the face.
Speaker 3: All right, Well, fair compromise, all right again, So he
Speaker 3: gets fired again, and he continues to move around frequently,
Speaker 3: you know, while he's going from radio station to radio station.
Speaker 1: He marries a beauty queen. He divorces here a year
Speaker 1: later because she gets sick of him. While he's working
Speaker 1: at WYLM, he starts a show called It's Your Nickel,
Speaker 1: so named because the nickel was the standard cost for
Speaker 1: a call on a payphone and this was the first, yeah,
Speaker 1: proper radio talk show, It's your Nickel. So he does
Speaker 1: get a job doing the thing that he invented, and
Speaker 1: that's that became a phrase like it's your dime or
Speaker 1: it's your nickel, or it's your dollar.
Speaker 2: It's like exactly.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I don't know if that's the He may
Speaker 3: have just been using that phrase because it was already
Speaker 3: like what people said.
Speaker 1: But yeah, I mean he may have invented it. I
Speaker 1: have not done that research. Tom someone at home.
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, something something that sticks out to me about
Speaker 3: old Joe Pine is that he has trouble forming a
Speaker 3: lasting relationships.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I was from job the job.
Speaker 3: Mary's a woman divorces her late like he seems like
Speaker 3: he might be impossible to be around.
Speaker 1: It does, and it also, again, this is one of
Speaker 1: those black box of history things. I do kind of
Speaker 1: wonder how much of this is a PTSD, because that
Speaker 1: can make it real hard to get along with people
Speaker 1: and hard to regulate your emotions and more likely to
Speaker 1: throw a typewriter.
Speaker 3: He did get bombed in one of the most notorious
Speaker 3: battles of World War two, so yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: Who knows.
Speaker 2: It's one of those things.
Speaker 1: It's like lead exposure, which I'm sure Joe Pine was
Speaker 1: also exposed to a tremendous amount of lead like you
Speaker 1: wonder how much of an impact did this have on
Speaker 1: like the way people were back then.
Speaker 3: You wonder how many people were just walking around poisoned
Speaker 3: and crazy like seventy years ago, just because that's the
Speaker 3: way it was.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean there's a lot of like pretty strong
Speaker 1: evidence that at least the lead exposure may have been
Speaker 1: part of why there was so much more violence back
Speaker 1: you know, even just like twenty something years ago, because
Speaker 1: everybody was inhaling lead and eating lead off the walls.
Speaker 1: And I do want some delicious lead, Tom. Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: nothing that goes with like a nice bree. Like you
Speaker 1: get a lead chip and you just dip it in
Speaker 1: a bree. That's a good Yeah, nice meat mix, a
Speaker 1: sweet and savory.
Speaker 2: It's like a lead flight.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like a lead flight, Like a flight of lead.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna start a leadstirant.
Speaker 3: I think you should. Yeah, lead in every food. Yeah,
Speaker 3: the lead bar, get the lead out. We'll call it
Speaker 3: a lead chicken in every pot. Now, Tom, you know
Speaker 3: who else will expose you to tremendous amounts of lead?
Speaker 3: M the X Men Colossus. That that is probably accurate.
Speaker 3: I don't know as much about x Men as you
Speaker 3: but but the products and services that support this podcast certainly.
Speaker 1: Will expose you to lead. That is the only guarantee
Speaker 1: we make about our sponsors, every one of them filled
Speaker 1: with lead.
Speaker 3: Yep, it's a powerful guarantee.
Speaker 2: We're back.
Speaker 1: And I wanted to start this by letting my letting
Speaker 1: my audience know that that our guest today, Tom Ryman,
Speaker 1: has a bit of a superpower, which is and everyone
Speaker 1: who knows you knows this, Tom, which is that.
Speaker 3: When you when you whenever you mention a movie and
Speaker 3: you will talk about, like you know that guy who
Speaker 3: was in the background and that in that scene in
Speaker 3: American Beauty, and you'll be like, oh, yeah, it's such
Speaker 3: and such, and this is the other films they were in.
Speaker 2: Know anybody who can do that the way that you.
Speaker 3: Can, it's.
Speaker 5: You.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I thought you were going to tell everybody about
Speaker 3: my optic blasts. So I'm glad.
Speaker 1: No, I'm glad I didn't secret keeping that a secret
Speaker 1: for when I rob a bank.
Speaker 2: No, I've been.
Speaker 3: I've been. I don't know. I just I do that
Speaker 3: like I keep it encyclopedic record of dates and like
Speaker 3: people in movies and stuff. I don't know, it's it's uh,
Speaker 3: I'm probably somewhere on the spectrum. But it's just a
Speaker 3: thing I do. I don't know.
Speaker 1: It's almost a super like it is kind of a superpower,
Speaker 1: like it's it's really it's really fun. And it made
Speaker 1: like when we when we were all I mean, I
Speaker 1: lived together with like half of the people we worked
Speaker 1: with at Cracked, and you were always over and just
Speaker 1: the movie conversations with you and Dave were always a
Speaker 1: tremendous amount of fun.
Speaker 3: I listened to your podcasts. Oh thanks, we lived in
Speaker 3: your room, remember, Oh yeah, you did in the mountains,
Speaker 3: lived in your room. I was I was doing redacted
Speaker 3: things in the mountains and and mostly not home at
Speaker 3: that point in time, I'd forgotten about that. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: Oh the days of our lives like sand through the hourglass,
Speaker 3: tom So, like lead through the hour glass, like lead
Speaker 3: through the hour glass. So Joe Pine gets his first
Speaker 3: proper radio talk show, It's Your Nickel on w I
Speaker 3: l M. And again he's out of there, he's in there.
Speaker 3: I think this is like his second time working for them,
Speaker 3: And this article from the broadcaster's desktop resource makes it
Speaker 3: clear what kind of show Joe ran. The very first
Speaker 3: radio talk show quote in his nightly introduction, he said,
Speaker 3: the mic is open. My name's Joe Pine. I guess
Speaker 3: you know yours the program. This program is dedicated to
Speaker 3: the free exchange of ideas and to differences of opinion.
Speaker 3: I don't propose to have all the answers, but I
Speaker 3: do promise to talk about the things that interest you.
Speaker 1: So that's a nice little.
Speaker 3: There's that free exchange of ideas craz He did, I think.
Speaker 1: Kind of mean it as opposed to the people who
Speaker 1: say it today. I think they're aping him. But I'll
Speaker 1: play you some clips from his he did. He was, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's interesting now. The show did often become a shout fest,
Speaker 1: with Pine definitely in control. No topic was sacred, from
Speaker 1: sex to religion to politics, but when he felt a
Speaker 1: listener had gone on for too long and was making
Speaker 1: no sense, he would make a rude remark, like you're
Speaker 1: sick and hang up on the post person.
Speaker 2: Enduring.
Speaker 1: Pine's abusive records the challenge to the audience, many of
Speaker 1: whom tried to debate him before he hung up on them.
Speaker 1: His views tended to be quite conservative most of the time,
Speaker 1: and Pine seemed to dare his listeners to disagree with him.
Speaker 1: His style of arguing included using very derogatory terms. Known
Speaker 1: for being adept with words, his arsenal of insults and
Speaker 1: put downs became the stuff of legends. Among his best
Speaker 1: known were if your brains were dynamite, you couldn't blow
Speaker 1: your nose. There was also go gargle with razor blades
Speaker 1: and take your teeth out, put him in backwards, and
Speaker 1: bite your throat Jesus Christ. At least the man's creative.
Speaker 1: That third one's pretty nice. Yeah, that's good. I'd heard
Speaker 1: the other two. I'm like, yeah, those are old standards.
Speaker 1: And this turn your teeth around him like ooh yeah.
Speaker 1: So when this is in nineteen fifty one two, while
Speaker 1: he's in the middle of changing Radio Forever, his old
Speaker 1: war injury flares up badly enough that surgeons have to
Speaker 1: amputate his left leg from the mid downhit. So he's
Speaker 1: back in the studio with a prosthetic limb soon after,
Speaker 1: and while the fake leg was obvious to everyone who
Speaker 1: saw him, he never meant it.
Speaker 2: Did get mentioned on air. We'll talk about that.
Speaker 1: In a bit, but he refused to mention it on air.
Speaker 1: Judging by his pro union views, Joe is at least
Speaker 1: at one point at least more of a moderate than
Speaker 1: he became. But the longer he's on doing talk radio,
Speaker 1: he pulls further and further to the right. In nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty three, he celebrated on air when the US electrocuted
Speaker 1: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, saying, we finally incinerated those comies.
Speaker 1: I hope it was slow and painful.
Speaker 5: Good.
Speaker 2: Uh, that's interesting that.
Speaker 3: The longer I mean, I'm sure you're going to make
Speaker 3: this connection, But the longer he's on the air, the
Speaker 3: more conservative he pulls.
Speaker 5: That.
Speaker 3: I wonder could that be because having bad faith arguments
Speaker 3: to generate we call them rage clicks now, but it's
Speaker 3: just to stoke controversy by needling people and by playing
Speaker 3: the devil's advocate just to get people heeded, and arguing
Speaker 3: to fuel the ratings for his own show.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I really don't know. I'm sure that was an
Speaker 1: element of it, because clearly he's going after controversy, he's
Speaker 1: going after rage kicks. But also we'll talk about it.
Speaker 1: He was not always the guy you would expect. That's yeah,
Speaker 1: So we're building that. So Joe had a keen understanding
Speaker 1: of how to communicate with the lowest common denominator in
Speaker 1: US politics. He told reporters, quite without shame, that radio
Speaker 1: was geared towards the mentality of thirteen year old kids,
Speaker 1: and that most Americans were politically apathetic and easy to
Speaker 1: persuade of just about anything. He claimed that he used
Speaker 1: shocking language and would make extreme allegations in order to
Speaker 1: get people to think. He told the La Times that
Speaker 1: while his critics called him a hate monger, all he
Speaker 1: really did was encourage stimulating dialogue. You see, he knows
Speaker 1: what he's doing. I think that's a big part of
Speaker 1: like why he gets more right wing in his because
Speaker 1: it's easier to kind of, like again, speak to the
Speaker 1: mentality of thirteen year old kids. If you're just like
Speaker 1: making these kind of reactionary arguments.
Speaker 3: He wants to piss people off so that they react
Speaker 3: and he gets a show out of it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a part of it. That's not
Speaker 1: all of it, because he is When there were times
Speaker 1: when he would be challenged, it kind of depended on
Speaker 1: how it was. If he found someone interesting, even if
Speaker 1: they were coming in from a very different perspective, he
Speaker 1: would let them talk and sometimes very respectfully so he
Speaker 1: was not, well, he's the start and he's doing a
Speaker 1: lot of unpleasant stuff. He's also not He's unequivocally a
Speaker 1: better person than Ben Shapiro, is what I'm saying, right, Like,
Speaker 1: his goal in any given conversation wasn't just to own them.
Speaker 1: He would actually listen to people sometimes who were bringing
Speaker 1: up some pretty radical stuff.
Speaker 2: We'll get to that.
Speaker 1: Nineteen fifty seven, a little over after a little over
Speaker 1: six years on air, Joe left Wylm. This time it
Speaker 1: was his own choice. He was famoused at least locally,
Speaker 1: and his salary was forty two thousand dollars a year,
Speaker 1: which is almost ten times the average salary for a
Speaker 1: it's about four hundred grand a year, and like modern
Speaker 1: dollars like, he was making real good money. This time,
Speaker 1: Joe left because his dreams had overgrown a very comfortable
Speaker 1: working condition. He traveled to Riverside, California, and he got
Speaker 1: a job at a local radio station that quickly led
Speaker 1: to a TV job at KTLA in Los Angeles. He
Speaker 1: would later claim that his first TV show, which was
Speaker 1: essentially a filmed version of It's Your Nickel, had been
Speaker 1: a huge success, but the show lasted less than a
Speaker 1: year and I found no clips of it anywhere.
Speaker 2: Joe moves back.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I'd be surprised if there's any footage that
Speaker 3: still exists.
Speaker 1: There is a we have some clips of his the
Speaker 1: show that Come Next, Came Next, but it's because there's
Speaker 1: like a grassroots archival effort to like digitize all of
Speaker 1: the old tape master tapes. So after his first year
Speaker 1: in la Joe moves back across the country to Chester
Speaker 1: where he works for a Philadelphia TV station for a
Speaker 1: first time for a short time, and then he goes
Speaker 1: back to wilm for a little while. He licks his wombs,
Speaker 1: he wounds. He seemed to know that a show like his,
Speaker 1: a political talk show where people could scream about pauloitics
Speaker 1: to a mass audience, was the wave of the future
Speaker 1: and was going to be huge on television, but the
Speaker 1: world wasn't ready quite yet. For a few years, Joe
Speaker 1: continued to broadcast, but in the early nineteen sixties he
Speaker 1: decided the time was finally right and he moved back
Speaker 1: to LA where he got a job at KABC. And
Speaker 1: I'm going to quote from the broadcaster's desktop resource again.
Speaker 1: Once again, he polarized the audience, with some listeners and
Speaker 1: guests complaining he was too caustic, and others saying his
Speaker 1: candor was refreshing. But as in Wilmington, he had people
Speaker 1: talking about him and his show From KABC, he went
Speaker 1: over to KLAC and set nineteen sixty five, doing the
Speaker 1: nine pm to midnight shift. Never wont to avoid controversial guests.
Speaker 1: He put Nazis and members of the Ku Klux Klan
Speaker 1: on the air displeasure Yeah, oh yeah, dope, earning the
Speaker 1: displeasure of the American Jewish Committee and a warning from
Speaker 1: the FCC. He also had guests who believe it in eugenics,
Speaker 1: guests who were racists, guests with strange theories about past
Speaker 1: lives or UFOs, and the arguments continued. Controversy sold Joe's
Speaker 1: salary balloon to two hundred thousand dollars a year, which
Speaker 1: is nearly two million a year by modern standards. Jesus NBC. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's making it back. I mean this is soon that
Speaker 1: he's giving people like what Tucker Carlson and stuff. Now,
Speaker 1: I will be fair when he has Nazis and KKK
Speaker 1: members on and so that he can scream at them
Speaker 1: like yeah, well it's still like, it's still there's it's
Speaker 1: still problematic, but it's not as problematic as it is today,
Speaker 1: where you have people affiliated with similar organizations were talking
Speaker 1: about how, yeah, he.
Speaker 3: Was getting outrage clicks. But at least the the understanding
Speaker 3: was people are going to hate these yead At least
Speaker 3: that was like the understanding. Yeah, at least that was
Speaker 3: the fucking understanding. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Again, you can still argue, and I think it is
Speaker 1: pretty irresponsible to do that, but at least the understanding
Speaker 1: was like, fuck these guys, let's let's yell at them.
Speaker 2: It's here, let's not let's hear them out. Yeah.
Speaker 1: NBC Radio Network started syndicating his show nationally in March
Speaker 1: of nineteen sixty six, and it was soon on more
Speaker 1: than two hundred stations around the country. He called what
Speaker 1: he did fist in the Mouth Radio, and now that
Speaker 1: he was on a new time slot the mid morning
Speaker 1: rather than the night as he'd usually been before, his
Speaker 1: ratings exploded. This is generally thought to be due to
Speaker 1: the fact that being on earlier in the day opened
Speaker 1: him up to a vast new audience of board housewives.
Speaker 1: People were titillated. One of his networks advertised the show
Speaker 1: in a full page newspaper spread listing all the Nazis
Speaker 1: and klansmen and other pieces of shit he'd had on
Speaker 1: his show, and then concluding with you may agree or
Speaker 1: disagree with Joe Pine, you may scream and rage at
Speaker 1: some of his remarks, but you won't turn him off. Yes,
Speaker 1: I mean, what's the antent of that?
Speaker 3: Stay?
Speaker 5: Is that?
Speaker 2: Is that shaming me? Is that?
Speaker 5: Like?
Speaker 3: Yes?
Speaker 2: Like, yeah, you heard the feel bad I do? Yeah,
Speaker 2: but you won't turn him off? Yeah?
Speaker 3: You motherfucker. This is on you unless you turn him off.
Speaker 3: We want this motherfucker off the air, but we can't.
Speaker 3: You like him too much? Just son of a bitch.
Speaker 3: We tried to look in the doors, he just shows
Speaker 3: up inside? What about.
Speaker 2: Secret doors?
Speaker 1: So Joe was on both the radio and the TV,
Speaker 1: and his television show A Learn alone earned him more
Speaker 1: money per year than Mickey Mantle played playing made playing
Speaker 1: for the Yankees. So he's making like more than Mickey
Speaker 1: Mantle money. Now, professional sports players made less money in
Speaker 1: those days, but still he's he's raking it in. He
Speaker 1: was the top rated talk show host and the second
Speaker 1: largest market in the US.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it feels wrong that I don't know. Yeah, like
Speaker 3: you said, for the professional athletes made less money back then.
Speaker 3: But look, I feels wrong that like's Mickey Mantle. I
Speaker 3: know who Mickey Mantle is. If anyone, shouldn't he make
Speaker 3: all the money?
Speaker 1: So from Smithsonian Magazine quote. At a time when TV's
Speaker 1: leading men included Walter Cronkite, Edward R. Murrow, Andy Griffith,
Speaker 1: and Captain Kangaroo, Pine was the medium's first shock jock,
Speaker 1: a firebrand who invited hippies, civil rights activists and Ku
Speaker 1: Klux Klansman alike to take a hike or go gargle
Speaker 1: with razor blades. By the mid sixties, he was the
Speaker 1: most popular TV radio voice in America. Johnny Carson had
Speaker 1: more television viewers, but Pine, with a syndicated TV show
Speaker 1: in two hundred plus radio outlets, had an audience to rifle.
Speaker 1: Johnny's Life magazine called him sadistic, a barroom tough, but
Speaker 1: millions turned in to watch the fireworks. When a guest
Speaker 1: advocating free love set off a melee Pines, audience charged
Speaker 1: the set and knocked it flat.
Speaker 2: Oh shit.
Speaker 1: One guest, the suave TV personality David Suskin, earned a
Speaker 1: chorus of booze for calling Pine's program an orgy for morons.
Speaker 1: Host and guest both got a kick out of that.
Speaker 1: So it is like the first on air fight ringer. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: he's also like Jerry Springer, the first Spring.
Speaker 2: He's the first Saldo and yeah, we'll be talking about
Speaker 2: Morton later.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like all of it's not just like Tucker Carlson
Speaker 1: the time.
Speaker 3: They cracked every aspect of this, like he really did.
Speaker 3: He he is an important man to know about, Like
Speaker 3: he really uh, he figured he was. Yeah, he figured
Speaker 3: some out. Most of it shit, I wish no one
Speaker 3: had figured out, but he did figure it out. I
Speaker 3: can make millions if I put Nazis on the air.
Speaker 3: Mm hmmm.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now, I think it's probably a better time to give
Speaker 1: you a better idea of how Joe sounded, because when
Speaker 1: you read it out the way I have put it together,
Speaker 1: it probably sounds like he's like a stereotypical modern shock jock.
Speaker 1: And while he was the prototype for that, his actual
Speaker 1: broadcasting style was much more subdued and witty. In this clip,
Speaker 1: Joe interviews an early vegan activist and what he called
Speaker 1: his beef box.
Speaker 6: Check it out as you cannot hear the screams of
Speaker 6: a lamb in this slaughterhouse. You cannot hear the screams
Speaker 6: of your son on the battlefield.
Speaker 5: I would like to ask you a meaningful question at
Speaker 5: this point.
Speaker 1: Are you a vegetarian?
Speaker 6: I am?
Speaker 1: Indeed? Do you ever eat tomatoes?
Speaker 6: I would say to you, yes, in the last three
Speaker 6: thousand years.
Speaker 1: Man, I'm asking you a question.
Speaker 5: Do you ever eat tomatoes?
Speaker 6: Three?
Speaker 2: Do you eat tomatoes?
Speaker 6: Of course?
Speaker 3: I do you do?
Speaker 5: Do you know that there is now scientific proof that
Speaker 5: when you cut a tomato with screams, there is electrical.
Speaker 2: There is killer of tomatoes, and tomato doesn't pay.
Speaker 6: Are the tomato feels no pain?
Speaker 7: Tomatoes blotoo, Tomato does.
Speaker 3: Not swater plato take a walk.
Speaker 2: By.
Speaker 1: Oh you're going to sing something I would This is
Speaker 1: a tomato stump.
Speaker 6: As the animal dies. So the slaughter of that animal.
Speaker 2: All right, that's probably enough of that. So yeah, what
Speaker 2: do you think of that?
Speaker 6: Top?
Speaker 3: Is not what I was expecting? I know, he sounds
Speaker 3: like Walter Cronkite. And then he flips the fuck out.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and then he flips the fuck out.
Speaker 1: But he starts from this real low ebb and he
Speaker 1: also does like he says, get off, but then the
Speaker 1: guy's like, well I want to sing, and he's like, oh, absolutely.
Speaker 2: Yeah, please do. This is great, dude. Yeah, that's going
Speaker 2: to be incredible content.
Speaker 3: And that clip was from sixty six. Wow.
Speaker 2: Yeah, nineteen sixties.
Speaker 3: It feels extremely modern, especially like almost to be on
Speaker 3: TV today. His bad his extremely bad faith argument. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's all he's he's a he's a trailblazer top. Yeah,
Speaker 3: this guy. You can put this dude on TV right
Speaker 3: now and he would be the hottest thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's amazing, and he there's a level of almost Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just different than the way they mock people today.
Speaker 1: It's almost more. It's almost gentler in a weird ways.
Speaker 1: He's not he's not the same as what came after Again,
Speaker 1: he's this weird mix of what we have today, and
Speaker 1: like Walter Cronkite's it's a fascinating it's fascinating to just
Speaker 1: listen to his stuff. When the civil rights movement kicked off,
Speaker 1: Joe devoted a tremendous amount of time to discussing the
Speaker 1: angry Negro, which it's more or less what you'd expect.
Speaker 3: Yeah, oh boy.
Speaker 1: Clips in one episode he brought on several militant black activists.
Speaker 1: I believe they were black panthers, and in a heated
Speaker 1: moment during the show. I've not been able to find
Speaker 1: this clip, but it's very famous. During the show, he
Speaker 1: opens his desk drawer to show them his revolver and
Speaker 1: he threatens them with it on air, so he we
Speaker 1: could he could go off. He advocated bombing North Vietnam
Speaker 1: back to the Stone Age, obviously, but he could also
Speaker 1: be a surprising man, And part became because he came
Speaker 1: from an era in which big political figures could admit
Speaker 1: to learning something and changing their opinion, and in part
Speaker 1: because some of the issues that are now very aggressive
Speaker 1: are a lot less. We're a lot less settled in
Speaker 1: those days in terms of like how it was going
Speaker 1: to break down, writer or left. So he conducted an
Speaker 1: interview with Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown, and he started
Speaker 1: the interview by calling her a dingbat and then asked
Speaker 1: her to explain why girls should be considered equal to
Speaker 1: men in the workplace. But then he sat quietly while
Speaker 1: she gave her speech like explaining her peace on women's liberation,
Speaker 1: and he applauded her at the end of it. He
Speaker 1: was certainly more polite to women than towards men, and
Speaker 1: more polite to white people towards black people. But even
Speaker 1: when in interviewing people he clearly despised, Joe maintained an
Speaker 1: air that's just so much more congenial than what you
Speaker 1: see on TV today. Here he is talking to Paul Krasner,
Speaker 1: a left wing magazine publisher who later went on to
Speaker 1: head High Times. So this is him talking with someone
Speaker 1: he fucking hates.
Speaker 5: Uh, which deodorant does Lyndon Johnson use?
Speaker 3: Now?
Speaker 1: What does that mean?
Speaker 3: What is that?
Speaker 1: Paul Krasner?
Speaker 2: What is that?
Speaker 1: Which deodorant does Lyndon Johnson use? That's your front page head?
Speaker 8: Yes, do you want to know which one? By brand name?
Speaker 5: No?
Speaker 1: I want to know what is that? What is the
Speaker 1: what is the reason for that?
Speaker 6: Well?
Speaker 8: I think that the present of the United States? Is
Speaker 8: it such a height that people have?
Speaker 2: What a height?
Speaker 1: Height?
Speaker 8: He's put out such a pedestal that people have to
Speaker 8: realize that he is only a human being and does
Speaker 8: use a deodorant like you and me.
Speaker 1: And I'm a little worried about you. I'm he's lighting
Speaker 1: a cigarette now, So yeah, that's like it's clearly again
Speaker 1: this is not somebody he particularly respects, but it's also
Speaker 1: like it's not a shouting debate. I guess that's what impresses.
Speaker 1: Not impresses. Is the thing that is interesting to me
Speaker 1: because like, you don't you don't have that kind of
Speaker 1: like congenial distaste. Is how it feels watching them.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he feels more like Carson than like, yeah, a
Speaker 3: Tucker Carlson at this point. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And it's the kind I wish I could find
Speaker 1: the thing the interview he does with those those black
Speaker 1: panthers where he shows them his revolver, because I've heard
Speaker 1: different descriptions of it, something that make it sound like
Speaker 1: he's threatening them with a gun and some that make
Speaker 1: it sound like he's just like, well, I have a
Speaker 1: gun too, and like I really don't know, and I
Speaker 1: don't I don't know what the actual tone was in
Speaker 1: that out.
Speaker 3: Either one is entirely possible based on what you've shown
Speaker 3: me exactly. Either one makes complete sense, like he's yeah,
Speaker 3: he's more polite, but he's still he's still, oh for.
Speaker 1: Sure, like yeah, And the interview with Krasner got markedly
Speaker 1: less friendly after the ad break from Smithsonian magazine quote,
Speaker 1: why do you print the most obscene words? Pine demanded,
Speaker 1: do you edit your magazine because you were an unwanted child,
Speaker 1: to which Krasner responds, no, daddy, They're talk one downhill
Speaker 1: from there. He asked me about my acne scar, says Krasner,
Speaker 1: now eighty five. That was a low blow. I said,
Speaker 1: let me ask you something. Do you take off your
Speaker 1: wooden leg before you make love to your wife? And
Speaker 1: is jaw dropped? According to Krasner, the audience gasped, while
Speaker 1: Pine's producers everted their eyes.
Speaker 2: Surrealistic.
Speaker 3: That's good TV though, right there, that's a good TV
Speaker 3: so the listeners know this cool? Was his clip sixty
Speaker 3: seven something, yeah, sixty seven, Yeah, do you fuck your wife?
Speaker 3: That's your fake leg nineteen sixty seven in the sixties.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Andy Griffith is the biggest name in entertainment, and this
Speaker 3: shit's on TV. Holy shit, like you could see like,
Speaker 3: and that's part of the other thing that's interesting. Like
Speaker 3: I'm gonna guess a lot of his audience, if not
Speaker 3: most of it, weren't right wing, Like a lot of
Speaker 3: them were probably people who like guys like Paul Krasner,
Speaker 3: but like want to see shit like this on TV.
Speaker 3: People have these kind of like conversations. He'll talk to
Speaker 3: fucking anyone and he could surprise you. But before we
Speaker 3: get into that, Tom, you know what else is gonna
Speaker 3: surprise you? Mmmmm, No, the quality of the.
Speaker 1: Products and services that support this.
Speaker 2: Podcast would be a surprise.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it will be a surprise.
Speaker 2: We're back.
Speaker 1: And we're talking about what I think is one of
Speaker 1: the more surprising things I found. So Jill Pine was
Speaker 1: one of the very first major media figures in the
Speaker 1: United States to platform a transgender woman discussing trans issues,
Speaker 1: and he did show in a way that is incredibly
Speaker 1: surprising for the time. This is from nineteen sixty six
Speaker 1: and I want to just play this, and the woman
Speaker 1: he's talking to, Christine Jorgensen, was like one of the
Speaker 1: very first super public transgender media figures, very famous, very famous.
Speaker 1: So he's certainly not the first person to talk to her,
Speaker 1: but he's one of the first people with a massive
Speaker 1: platform to sit down and have a long conversation with
Speaker 1: a transgender person and a major outlet. And I think
Speaker 1: the tone of the conversation, given where we are now
Speaker 1: with the right wing on this issue, is going to
Speaker 1: be surprising to people.
Speaker 5: It was our guests who first flushed the problems of
Speaker 5: transsexuals into the open. Christine Jorgensen was born a male.
Speaker 5: She was ascribed in her high school annual as a
Speaker 5: clever lad. Later she became a private first class in
Speaker 5: the Army. Though outwardly a boy, Christine was sexually disturbed.
Speaker 5: The story of her later discovery and transformation electrified the world.
Speaker 5: It was the first chapter in a new outlook toward
Speaker 5: the transsexual phenomenon. And yet I can't believe that yours
Speaker 5: was the first operation of this type.
Speaker 2: It wasn't Jill.
Speaker 4: The first one was I think done somewhere in the
Speaker 4: area of nineteen twenty six or twenty seven. There was
Speaker 4: a marvelous doctor in Germany called Magnus Hirschfeldt who started
Speaker 4: the whole investigation to our in our modern age, let's
Speaker 4: put it that way. Before that, there may have been others,
Speaker 4: but I know not of them.
Speaker 5: Is this a legal operation in the United States?
Speaker 1: Yet?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 4: Yes, Oh, certainly you know they're doing it a Johns
Speaker 4: Hopkins now in Baltimore, happens the best, Yes, And they're
Speaker 4: doing at the University of Minnesota Medical School. They've done
Speaker 4: five cases to the best of my knowledge at the
Speaker 4: University of California Medical School.
Speaker 5: How many people and your a particular predicament do you
Speaker 5: think there are today? I mean, not those who are
Speaker 5: successfully assuming you have successfully bridge the gap, but how
Speaker 5: many are in that spot where they need this?
Speaker 4: Well, I could only judge by what I heard from
Speaker 4: Johns Hopkins when I was in Baltimore several weeks ago.
Speaker 4: Doctor Money and I did a television show together, and
Speaker 4: he's one of the doctors involved in Johns Hopkins And
Speaker 4: he asked me if I thought I knew how many,
Speaker 4: and I said, I don't have the vaguest idea, And
Speaker 4: he said, according to his statistics, they should be thirty
Speaker 4: thousand transsexuals of both sides in the United States.
Speaker 5: To get it straight, at transsexual and a transvestite differ
Speaker 5: in that the transvestite is addressing up type of homosexual.
Speaker 5: And you don't claim to be a homosexual, Nona, I
Speaker 5: should say, you claim you were not a homosexual.
Speaker 4: Well, an interesting point if you say that if I
Speaker 4: was established and accepted by society for the first twenty
Speaker 4: six years of my life as a male, then my
Speaker 4: emotional feelings during that period toward another male had to
Speaker 4: be considered a homosexual emotion in the eyes of society,
Speaker 4: although I never saw it that way in my own eyes.
Speaker 4: But again, Joe, may I correct something which has been
Speaker 4: very is very startling. I think that a transvestite they
Speaker 4: have proven statistically that ninety nine percent of them are heterosexual.
Speaker 4: Now this is even more interesting than ever.
Speaker 1: People who men.
Speaker 5: Who dress up in women's clothing are really, by the
Speaker 5: world standards, normal sexual right.
Speaker 1: Wow, So yeah, that's that's what I expect.
Speaker 2: It surprising.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, you know he does say Heaven's to
Speaker 3: Betsy when she's she's talking about the different then he's.
Speaker 2: Like the terminology.
Speaker 3: Again, this is nineteen sixty seven, right, Yeah, so let's
Speaker 3: say it is like, sure, okay, Joe, Like he's actually like, okay,
Speaker 3: what's the proper term? What's the difference? Like explained, you're
Speaker 3: very careful about gendering her properly. He's being very surprising. Yeah,
Speaker 3: what I would have said this?
Speaker 2: Wow? Yeah, I didn't.
Speaker 1: And I talked to a transgender friend of mine about this,
Speaker 1: and she did point out that Christine Jorgensen had some
Speaker 1: like kind of pretty anti gay attitudes and one of
Speaker 1: the things that was going on here. And one of
Speaker 1: the things that made her acceptable is that, like she
Speaker 1: was like, well, I'm not going to be like people
Speaker 1: like me won't be homosexual if we get to transition, right,
Speaker 1: because then it's yeah. And I didn't really catch that
Speaker 1: when I listened to the interview, but I can see
Speaker 1: how that could have been an element here. Although when
Speaker 1: he brings up homosexuality, I didn't note anything aggressive in it,
Speaker 1: like he was just kind of asking for clarification about yeah,
Speaker 1: not in this.
Speaker 2: I'm sure.
Speaker 3: I'm sure he was right, yeah, there's some way yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 3: But but so not the interview I would have expected.
Speaker 3: And I think it says less about him than it
Speaker 3: just does about how the issue had not been politicized
Speaker 3: at this point, like the existence of transgender people had
Speaker 3: not been politicized to the extent that it is now,
Speaker 3: even though it was much more dangerous to consider transitioning
Speaker 3: back then. It also there was not the kind of
Speaker 3: political rancorbind It's just a fascinating piece of history and
Speaker 3: evidence that, like Joe Pine again, you could be a
Speaker 3: right wing firebrand on TV and encounter something you didn't
Speaker 3: understand and like learn about it on air without it
Speaker 3: being like a thing. Yeah, Do you think that's a
Speaker 3: product of him being like a genuinely curious person, like
Speaker 3: if I want to learn new things, etc. Or is
Speaker 3: that more of a product of what you were saying
Speaker 3: about the issue where it wasn't clear which side of
Speaker 3: the political spectrum the issue was going to fall on,
Speaker 3: so he didn't want to go as hard as he
Speaker 3: normally would had the issue been more firmly settled on
Speaker 3: one side.
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 1: I've heard people theorize that part of why he was
Speaker 1: very polite and liked Christine Jorgensen is that she was
Speaker 1: a veteran like him, and he had just that kind
Speaker 1: of le first act for like, well, whatever else about
Speaker 1: this person we fought in the same war together. I
Speaker 1: think some of it's also, I think the attitude and
Speaker 1: like the way people presented themselves, Like he was a
Speaker 1: guy who was raised in a specific time where if
Speaker 1: people present themselves a specific way, you treat them a
Speaker 1: specific way, right, And I think people who kind of
Speaker 1: like Joe or Krassner, you know, it's kind of like
Speaker 1: a left wing hippie type, and so he did not
Speaker 1: feel the need to be respectful Christine like presented as
Speaker 1: like a very kind of like bougie, upper middle class
Speaker 1: white woman, and he treated her with respect as a result.
Speaker 2: The same was true of.
Speaker 1: Some other women he interviewed who he had a disagreement with.
Speaker 1: So I think some of it may just be that
Speaker 1: just like there was more of like a well, regardless
Speaker 1: of your feelings, if somebody presents in this way, if
Speaker 1: they if they match kind of our expectations of upper
Speaker 1: class white people behavior, and you treat them with a
Speaker 1: certain level of respect and regard because that's just how
Speaker 1: we are. Yeah, it's a fascinating time, fascinating time capsule.
Speaker 1: And that was a I think maybe the longest clip
Speaker 1: we've ever played on this show. But I just I
Speaker 1: was really surprised when I came across that, learning like
Speaker 1: this is the guy who gave mental birth to Rush
Speaker 1: Limbaugh and Tucker Carlson.
Speaker 2: Yeah, not the interview you would expect.
Speaker 3: No.
Speaker 1: As a last treat, I have one more thing I
Speaker 1: want to play for you. This is a segment from
Speaker 1: Joe's show where he talks with Anton Levy, head of
Speaker 1: the Boy Tom.
Speaker 2: You're gonna have a good time with this one man popcorns.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, you get Antony on the TV, and you
Speaker 3: know you're gonna have a good one.
Speaker 7: And how do you make your living as a counselor sorcerer,
Speaker 7: practicing wizard, shaman, warlock, whatever you wish to call it.
Speaker 7: You're also a male witch, a warlock. Well, a male
Speaker 7: witch is considered a warlock. You're glad to be a
Speaker 7: witch then, uh, a male witch, but not a white witch,
Speaker 7: not like some of these people that have been on
Speaker 7: various shows that bend over backwards trying to convince everyone
Speaker 7: how good they are.
Speaker 1: They never perform.
Speaker 3: Black magic, only white magic.
Speaker 8: I think this is.
Speaker 7: Really make that man disappear out of the dock, out
Speaker 7: of the doc. Why should I want to?
Speaker 5: Because we have somebody else coming up?
Speaker 7: Of course I can't make him disappear because I am
Speaker 7: naturally casting the mold of a human being.
Speaker 2: And I think this.
Speaker 5: Less human and more methhrostophelean to me, thank you, sir.
Speaker 5: I call him a devil complimented.
Speaker 3: It's just remarkable to me, the degree, the degree to
Speaker 3: which Anton Levy looks like Joe Kuchan from Command and Conquer.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the guy who played Kane. They're the same.
Speaker 1: Maybe Kane was Anton Levy. That's my command and conquer theory.
Speaker 1: That's gonna be very funny. He doesn't.
Speaker 3: He looks He looks like the villain in every FMV
Speaker 3: computer game. That's amazing. I can't he's wearing an ambulant.
Speaker 3: He's such a dummy every time he goes on TV.
Speaker 3: It's so funny. He was like, no, I can't make
Speaker 3: that guy disappear. White magic? White magic?
Speaker 2: Are you doing?
Speaker 3: And yeah, I have to side with Joe on this one.
Speaker 3: What do you kind of magic? Are you up to?
Speaker 3: The magic are you going to do? Can you make
Speaker 3: that you disappear? Yeah.
Speaker 1: By the late nineteen sixties, Joe was a very wealthy man.
Speaker 1: He rove drove a Rolls Royce and when he parked
Speaker 1: at the studio he was so frightened it would be
Speaker 1: vandalized that he had his network hire a security guard
Speaker 1: to watch the car while he was on the air
Speaker 1: park in the garage.
Speaker 3: Man, what are you doing?
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly what are you doing? On paper?
Speaker 1: In many ways he sounded like the same kind of
Speaker 1: guy that many right wing media grifters are today. But
Speaker 1: the things he the thing he had that they all
Speaker 1: lacked is is a sense of charm. There's a level
Speaker 1: of class that you get with Joe that, just like
Speaker 1: is is completely absent from everyone who follows.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's it's it's more the more we hear of him.
Speaker 3: I had said he sounds like Cronkite earlier, but he
Speaker 3: really sounds more like like Carson or like a talk
Speaker 3: show most where it's like he can be warm and
Speaker 3: supportive until he's not, and then he'll turn on you
Speaker 3: and kind of ridicule you, but in a in a
Speaker 3: polite way.
Speaker 1: I can see how a lot of people who disagreed
Speaker 1: profoundly with Joe Pine could enjoy listening to his show
Speaker 1: in a way that like I cannot with Tucker Carlson
Speaker 1: or nobody's like nobody like hate watches for enjoyment Tucker Carlson.
Speaker 1: It's just too like horrifying, Like nobody does that with
Speaker 1: beIN Shapiro or whatever.
Speaker 3: No, no, no, that's an assignment. That's not something that is
Speaker 3: an assignment, that is that is a that is conflict journalism,
Speaker 3: like you.
Speaker 2: Are taking on pain. I'm looking at Sophie nodding.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but people could like enjoy like you enjoy, Like
Speaker 1: why I recommend watching him talk to Anton Leavey. It's yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's legitimately fun. Just too shad, too real shitheads
Speaker 1: just dogging it up in the sixties.
Speaker 2: At one point he had.
Speaker 3: One point he had Harlan Ellison on as a guest. Now,
Speaker 3: Harlan Ellison quite a fellow.
Speaker 1: At the time, he was a Los Angeles Free Press columnist,
Speaker 1: and he's now a legendary dead sci fi author, the
Speaker 1: author if I have no mouth, but I must scream
Speaker 1: and some other real.
Speaker 3: The way you phrased that made it sound like he's
Speaker 3: legendarily dead, he is.
Speaker 2: He is a lot of people.
Speaker 3: I mean, Harlan Ellison was a famous misanthrope.
Speaker 2: He made a lot of enemies.
Speaker 1: He made a lot of enemies, and politically he was
Speaker 1: pretty much the opposite of Joe Pine, although in terms
Speaker 1: of being unpleasant, they were both very unpleasant people. Famously,
Speaker 1: Harlan Ellison called Joe a hustler and a bully, but
Speaker 1: noted that he was very sharp.
Speaker 3: Quote.
Speaker 1: I thought I'd go on his show and beat him
Speaker 1: at his own game, but I blew it. I spent
Speaker 1: my time talking about the issues, civil liberties and all that,
Speaker 1: and he talked about America the trouble with Pine was
Speaker 1: that he was really really good at what he did now,
Speaker 1: and that does get to like, yeah, you're ever gonna
Speaker 1: win talking about the issues with these guys. That's not
Speaker 1: And you could only get Joe to listen when it
Speaker 1: wasn't something he saw as an issue. I think that's
Speaker 1: why his why that interview with Jurgensen went the way
Speaker 1: it did, is because it wasn't a political issue to.
Speaker 3: His experience of interest. To me, I was curious, Yeah,
Speaker 3: this isn't this isn't real. This is just some flighty nonsense,
Speaker 3: you know, Yeah.
Speaker 1: It's I mean, I don't even think he was treating
Speaker 1: it like nonsense. He was treating it like he was
Speaker 1: just learning a new science.
Speaker 5: Fate.
Speaker 3: It wasn't political, It was not a politic He definitely
Speaker 3: didn't treat it the same way he was treating the
Speaker 3: High Times dude or Anton Levey. But I feel like
Speaker 3: he probably considered them in the same bucket of like, well,
Speaker 3: this isn't this is like a personal interest story, this isn't.
Speaker 1: Yeah, definitely in the same I think he clearly respected
Speaker 1: her more than he did any either of them. But yes,
Speaker 1: I think it was the same kind of like well,
Speaker 1: this is not a political thing. This is this is
Speaker 1: personal interest. This is just something that people are going
Speaker 1: to be fascinated by that I can also like you can,
Speaker 1: you can you can create a kind of like fantastic
Speaker 1: title for it. You know, it's something that'll that'll get
Speaker 1: people get eyeball on the screen. In nineteen sixty nine,
Speaker 1: Joe started having trouble breathing. He was diagnosed with lung cancer.
Speaker 1: For years, he had jokingly called his cigarettes coffin nails,
Speaker 1: and you saw him light up at least one side.
Speaker 3: I think he smoked. In all the clips. He was
Speaker 3: always smoking. They just promise, yes, your government issue cigarettes.
Speaker 3: He had repeatedly promised that he would never give up smoking,
Speaker 3: but he quit after getting his diagnosis. It didn't help
Speaker 3: when he got too sick to drive to the studio.
Speaker 3: He hosted his show from his home, making him a
Speaker 3: trailblazer and yet another way, Wow, yeah, he was the first,
Speaker 3: first one.
Speaker 2: We're doing, tom Yeah, what we're doing. Yeah.
Speaker 1: At the very end of his life, he lay in
Speaker 1: his bed ranting about the Peace Corps because they wanted
Speaker 1: to end the war in Vietnam. He died in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy at age forty five, Thank you, comrades.
Speaker 3: Wow, yeah, forty five. That dude was forty five. That
Speaker 3: dude was mainline cigarettes his entire adult life. From the
Speaker 3: time he was fourteen. He was probably smoking six packs
Speaker 3: a day. I want the listeners to understand that this
Speaker 3: motherfucker looks like in these clips we watch, he looks
Speaker 3: like he's at least sixty eight. Yeah, like he looks
Speaker 3: so old. I mean, in fairness, some of that's World
Speaker 3: War two, I know. Yeah, I mean, it's like a
Speaker 3: joke on the Internet where it's like, man, people who
Speaker 3: were like thirty eight in nineteen seventy five, it's like
Speaker 3: they were on the door. But like I wonder, oh yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: no forty five. Yeah, dude, he's now yeah, younger than Oh,
Speaker 3: what's the guy?
Speaker 1: The funny man? All the ladies like him. He's the
Speaker 1: ant man. What's his fucking name?
Speaker 3: Aunt man?
Speaker 2: Paul Rudd. Paul Rudd.
Speaker 3: Paul Rudd's older than Joe Pine died at now right,
Speaker 3: Paul Rudd is older than Joe Pine ever was and
Speaker 3: looks half his way.
Speaker 2: And when Paul.
Speaker 3: Rudd is seventy, he won't look at his oldest Joe
Speaker 3: Pine looked at this dude.
Speaker 2: It looks older than Shatner.
Speaker 1: The Smithsonian magazine lays out how directly his influence led
Speaker 1: to the creation of some of the most influential careers
Speaker 1: in modern right wing media.
Speaker 2: Quote.
Speaker 1: One of Pine's protegees, the controversial radio shouter Bob Grant,
Speaker 1: followed his mentor Pine as a talk show shatter in
Speaker 1: Los Angeles before moving to New York, where Grant paved
Speaker 1: the way for his successor at WABC, Sean Hannity. Oh
Speaker 1: Hannity had first gained national attention subbing for Rush Limbaugh,
Speaker 1: another Bob Grant fan. When Grant died in twenty thirteen,
Speaker 1: Hannity hailed him as one of the greatest pioneers of controversial,
Speaker 1: opinionated talk radio. Grant, in turn, had acknowledged his debt
Speaker 1: to the founder of in your Face talk. Even Vice
Speaker 1: President Mike Pence, who hosted a right wing talk show
Speaker 1: in Indiana in the nineteen nineties, was a successor of Pines.
Speaker 1: According to Harlan Ellison, who admired Pine's shrewdness while loathing
Speaker 1: his politics, I've appeared on that sort of show all
Speaker 1: over the country. They call it controversy. But they're all
Speaker 1: about vilification and hostility, and their motto is p is Pine.
Speaker 1: And Pine is again an odd figure for me, because
Speaker 1: when I first started reading this kind of stuff about him,
Speaker 1: calling him a bully, I expected a different kind of
Speaker 1: bully than the videos reveal. He's absolutely a bully, but
Speaker 1: he's subtler than the ones we see today. I found
Speaker 1: a column in the Saturday Evening Post from the nineteen
Speaker 1: sixties where a left wing reviewer tries to explain his
Speaker 1: appreciation for the Joe Pine Show. Quote after watching one
Speaker 1: of these shows, and it does not matter whether I
Speaker 1: loaded the guests to the host or both, I feel
Speaker 1: somehow drained and less misanthropic. Not long ago, for example,
Speaker 1: I had a terrible day. I had a migraine, and
Speaker 1: my daughter sliced her finger with a razor blade, and
Speaker 1: I got a rejection slip and a cop gave me
Speaker 1: a speeding ticket, my third this year, which means that
Speaker 1: I will probably lose my license, and in Los Angeles,
Speaker 1: that is like being a functional paraplegic. That night, I
Speaker 1: watched Joe Pine. His guests included a lady who complained
Speaker 1: that television sportscasters never carried drag racing results, a man
Speaker 1: who blamed the current racial unrest on Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
Speaker 1: and a veteran who said we ought to drop the
Speaker 1: big bomb on Vietnam. The vet said he did not
Speaker 1: fight World War Two. To throw this one away, it
Speaker 1: turned out that he had been a Navy mail man.
Speaker 1: I was outside the zoo looking in again. Life did
Speaker 1: not seem so bad after all. I went to bed
Speaker 1: and slept.
Speaker 2: Well that what's going on in that guy's life?
Speaker 3: Though? Yeah, that is honest. We had lost his license,
Speaker 3: his daughter cut razor blade. Yeah wait, wait, she had
Speaker 3: access to razor blades. I'm not gonna blades. It was
Speaker 3: a different time, Tom. I'm sure he was giving her
Speaker 3: cigarettes too. This guy, this guy's life was already uh
Speaker 3: shaky for the Joe Pine show came to the picture.
Speaker 2: But yeah you could. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: The the appreciation you could have for Joe Pine if
Speaker 1: you weren't in the cult is part of what makes
Speaker 1: him different from what came later. And in part two, Tom,
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about what came later, But for
Speaker 1: right now, we need to talk about the ship You've
Speaker 1: got to plug. Oh geez, all right, Well, yeah, if you.
Speaker 3: Uh, I've got a Patreon if you had ever a
Speaker 3: Patreon dot com slash game flun Employed, you can uh
Speaker 3: find our podcast stories me and David Bell. But also
Speaker 3: from Cracked. We do a bunch of shows every week.
Speaker 3: We do We just watched Hypecast, We do Fox Volders,
Speaker 3: a Maniac, Tom and Jeff watch Batman, Start Trek, the
Speaker 3: Next Futurama. A bunch of great shows you can check
Speaker 3: out there. I also do writing over at Collider and
Speaker 3: for some more News and for one nine hundred hot Dog,
Speaker 3: So you can look at all of those things.
Speaker 1: Check it out. Yeah, all right, and you can you know,
Speaker 1: you can go to hell. That's right, go to hell.
Speaker 3: There.
Speaker 2: When you get to Hell, tell Joe Pine that Robert sent.
Speaker 3: Yeah, tell Joe Pine Robert Sinsha, and then kick him
Speaker 3: in the nuts and scream the name Rush Limbaugh. He
Speaker 3: won't know what you're saying. He died decades before that
Speaker 3: man was relevant.
Speaker 1: Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
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