Behind the Bastards - Part One Joe Pyne: The Man Who Invented Right Wing Talk Radio

Episode Date: October 12, 2021

Robert is joined by Tom Reimann to discuss Joe Pyne. FOOTNOTES: https://timeline.com/hot-seat-wally-george-edccf13491cf https://www.ocweekly.com/remembering-the-time-ocs-wacky-conservative-talk-show-host-wally-george-stood-up-to-white-supremacists/ https://joeleisenberg.medium.com/exposed-donald-trump-is-wally-george-bcb2f2040c0f https://web.archive.org/web/20200226051215/https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-07-11-ca-1344-story.html https://variety.com/2003/scene/people-news/wally-george-1117893638/ https://www.ocweekly.com/here-lies-wally-george-6428079/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/08/21/why-were-all-just-living-in-morton-downey-jr-s-talk-show-slime/?request-id=76a6a7b6-5e2f-4120-8982-74c4046cbff4&pml=1 https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/tv/ct-morton-downey-jr-documentary-20150817-story.html https://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/story?id=108365&page=1 https://www.cnn.com/2015/08/12/opinions/smerconish-morton-downey-era/index.html https://archive.is/mKfyB#selection-343.0-351.321 https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/joe-pyne-first-shock-jock-180963237/ https://s3.amazonaws.com/files.saturdayeveningpost.com/uploads/reprints/Hate_Hour/index.html?X-Amz-Content-Sha256=UNSIGNED-PAYLOAD&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Credential=AKIAI3QGKNAHC7QBOIAA%2F20210921%2Fus-east-1%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Date=20210921T071203Z&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Expires=300&X-Amz-Signature=871e048df2cb9da18c7eaae72514a8270428fd10ce5f4d0846d270d1ad1a7ffd https://www.thebdr.net/joe-pyne-talk-radio-pioneer/ https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/a-media-controversy-ignites-over-the-case-of-tawana-brawley https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/08/05/209194252/15-years-later-tawana-brawley-has-paid-1-percent-of-penalty https://www.kanw.com/post/racial-backdrop-tawana-brawley-case Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's desperately horny, my Saddam Hussein's best friend? I'm Robert Evans, host behind the bastards. The only podcast whose host owns two kittens named Saddam Hussein and Saddam Hussein's best friend. And due to a severe veterinarian shortage in northern Oregon, still can't get them spayed and neutered for another nine days. And Saddam Hussein's best friend is in heat and desperately trying to fuck her brother.

This has been an update for all of you. Why did you have to? Like maybe she didn't want you to disclose that information. She has been disclosing that she wants to fuck to literally every living creature that gets near her. If she had a microphone, she'd be saying the same thing. She will not stop presenting. But she does it and she did not give consent. It has been a problem. We are keeping them away because I do not want incest kittens. Although they may have been incest kittens. There's no way to know.

Incitins? Oh, I like that. And Robert, who is that other voice on this podcast that people are hearing? Oh, well the only person I would ever have on to talk about kitten incest, my friend Tom Reiman. Hey, hi, what's up? No, I'm glad you got me on to talk about these cats. This is going to be a three hour episode about my cat's sex life. Tom, you are the co-founder of Gamefully Unemployed, one of my favorite podcast networks. Host one of my most listened to shows, Fox Mulder is a maniac, which is a beautiful breakdown of Fox Mulder

and what a goddamn lunatic he is. Yeah. Tom. It's really fascinating when you watch the show with that context. It changes the show. It truly does. You guys do a lot of great stuff, great movie reviews. Oh, thanks. Role-playing games. People can find you Gamefully Unemployed on Patreon. Tom, you also are, what, an editor at Collider?

I forget what the job title is. I'm a senior editor of features at Collider. Features at Collider. And you and I worked together for all of my 20s more or less at a little website called Cracked that pivoted to video and went the way of the dodo. We got dragged to hell by Mark Zuckerberg. Yeah. I did come across a beautiful tweet earlier today that you'll appreciate, Tom. Oh, good, yeah. I can't wait to hear it.

Great radio. Great radio, yeah. Hold on while I look for something. A Neil Dash. Horse broke its legs, so we had to take it out back and help it pivot to video. Tom, how are you doing today? I'm doing okay. I'm doing pretty good. Thanks. How about you? How about yourself? Well, Tom, I'm thinking about the fact that there is a vast, incredibly well-financed

right-wing media operation that is seemingly dedicated to pushing a violent civil conflict that leads to a death toll that's truly astronomical in this nation. Do you think about that a lot? So good, right? So you're doing good? Doing great. Yeah. No, I've tried to think about it less in the past few months. I was just trying to take a break, but I'm getting plugged back into it. You sure are.

Yeah, god damn it. It doesn't seem like anything's gotten any better. It sure hasn't. It's fucking relentless. We got to the election, we're like, oh, thank god. And then, nope, that didn't go away. Yeah. No, it turns out that you can't vote these kind of problems away. And today, we're going to talk about where some of these problems started. Specifically, we're going to talk about the men who made right-wing media, and particularly, like, right-wing talk media.

So today, you've got guys like Stephen Crowder, Ben Shapiro, obviously Tucker Carlson being the big man at JAMA, you had people like Rush Limbaugh. I like all three of those people, all four of those people, you just named, got picked dead last for kickball for very different reasons. And they made it the entire world's problem. Yes, they sure did. So all of these folks, they all do slightly different variations of the same thing,

and they're not all, Rush is the only one who's really a talk radio host, but they all have podcasts and YouTube. They all do the modern equivalent of talk radio. And of like, yeah, we're going to talk about basically the people who invented the media space that these guys all live in now. These are the very first right-wing media personalities in a big way. So these are the people who prepared the soil for all of the different, you know, kind of quasi-fascist grifters we have today.

And they are, they're not all bastards in the traditional sense. They're not all people who on their own, if you didn't consider where everything went, would have qualified as bastards. They're all, I think, unpleasant people. But I think what's interesting is how they start off and kind of where they end, like the kind of people who inhabit this space at the beginning and the kind of people who inhabit it now. So this is going to be a fun episode, Tom.

You're going to listen to a lot of clips that you're just really going to dislike. Oh, good. I was so excited. So pumped. Yeah. I'm going to be so mad soon. I can't wait. You really are.

So one of the things that inspired this was coming across the fact that Tucker Carlson very recently alleged that the purpose of vaccine requirements in the military was to, quote, identify the sincere Christians in the ranks, the free thinkers, the men with high testosterone levels, and anybody else who doesn't love Joe Biden and make them leave immediately. The fuck is he talking about? He's getting into high T. Testosterone's low if you're getting Vax, that's soy boy shit.

Not choking on your own rotting lungs is soy. It's become, I mean, it's always been the case, but like in the past year or two, it's really become obvious that they just let him go on and say whatever. He just says things. Yeah. And I'm starting with Tucker because he's just off the fucking rails completely. And this is the end route of the journey that we're going to trace the start of today. And the thing that Tucker's been saying that most concerns me is he started sharing

great replacement style conspiracy theories, which are alleging that Democrats plan to, quote, change the population of this country in order to maintain power. This is functionally the same argument. Brenton Tarrant, the Christchurch shooter, made in the manifesto he wrote before shooting 50 Muslim worshipers to death. His manifesto was titled The Great Replacements, the same argument. Yeah.

I'm trying to remember my behind the bastards extended universe. That all comes from the Turner Diaries, right? I mean, it doesn't come from the Turner Diaries was like a big, definitely was pushing that. But this goes back a while for, I mean, you could even draw a line to like the original Nazis and kind of some of the shit Hitler was saying about the Aryan blood getting watered down from interbreeding in one. For sure.

Yeah. Yeah. It's a big, big white nationalist talking point. And the fact that this good went from great replacement went from like fringe Nazi, murderer manifesto in 2019 to Tucker Carlson talking to three million people on a major news network in 2021 shows like how fast things go now and how dangerous this all is. And I think it's important to start the stakes because it doesn't begin that way.

The guys who start this kind of right wing media space are, the first guy we're going to talk to is in a lot of ways kind of pleasant, at least compared to what came after. I don't think he's somebody I would have gotten along with, but it's... Don't believe you. It's weird. We'll see how you think. Okay.

Yeah. And we discussed this is probably going to be these episodes with a nice companion to our two-parter on Rush Limbaugh with Mr. Paul F. Tompkins. So, you know, if you're looking for a good four-episode spree to go together, listen to these two and then listen to those while you're... Oh, sweet. ...having a very long shit on a road trip. So, first guy we're talking about, Tom, is Joe Pine, P-Y-N-E.

Joe Pine was born in Chester, Pennsylvania on December 22nd, 1924. There's your problem. December 22nd or 1924. Pennsylvania. Oh, Pennsylvania. All of the above. Yeah. Get it out of there.

We don't need that state. So, again, you look at that. You look at those three pieces of information. Like, oh, this is like a 50-50 shot. This guy's going to be a real piece of shit. Yeah. Pennsylvania in the 20s. Yeah.

Oh, and a December baby. Fuck that. His dad was a brick maker and his mom was a mom, which was pretty much the only job most women could expect to work at that point in time and place. When Joe was little, his family moved to Atlantic City, which is like Las Vegas, but less fun and much sadder because it's on the East Coast. There's a good Bruce Springsteen song about that. He had a difficult childhood.

Joe had a pronounced stutter, and kids back then were even shittery about such things than they are today. He was bullied relentlessly. When Joe was 11, he lost his younger brother to an auto accident, which was not uncommon in those days because cars didn't crumple and seatbelts were but a fever dream in Ralph Nader's eye. By the time Joe was a teenager, his family left Atlantic City, which is always a good decision, and moved back to Chester, which is a more questionable decision.

Right. Yeah. It's all they knew. We're going to pile the family into our giant, unstoppable seat beltless car and drive back to Chester. He went to high school, and he joined the Marines in 1942, which was a popular decision at the time. He joined as early as he possibly could.

Yeah. Whatever reason, a lot of guys joined the military in 1942. Must have been good ads. Something's about to happen. He joined as the first day he possibly could. Obviously, the US had decided to enter World War II at this point. He was deployed against the Empire of Japan, and he fought in some of the war's worst battles across the South Pacific.

Joe survived the Battle of Okinawa, which is one of the worst fights you could possibly have been in that war. Real bad battle, Okinawa. During that battle, a Japanese plane bombed the forward base he was stationed on, seriously injuring his knee. He returned home scarred and seasoned by heavy combat. Joe had won three bronze stars for Valoran Battle and a Purple Heart, so he definitely saw some shit.

This is not one of the draft dodgy right wing guys. Right. This is not Ben Shapiro writing war fan fiction, like he went to war and got bombs dropped on his leg. He saw some of the worst shit you could have seen in that particular conflict. So he returns home real fucked up, probably with a head full of PTSD, but they didn't know PTSD was a thing, so I'm assuming he just drank, washed it down with cigarettes. Real head full of horny cats.

When he got home, he didn't know precisely what he wanted to do with his life, but he was certain that it involved putting himself in front of people and entertaining them. In order to do that, he felt he would need to deal with his speech impediment first. Using his GI- Just wondering what led him to that decision. I don't know. If relentlessly bullied, went to war, got bombed, his dead brother comes back, he's like, I'm going to be an entertainer.

I'm going to be an entertainer. I'm going to be an entertainer. I'm going to be a star. Where does that impulse come from? Yeah, we just don't know enough about his early life to know like what the fuck was going on. Maybe he just wanted to show people my speech impediment doesn't define me. I don't know.

I beat the Japanese. I can beat stuttering. So using his GI bill, Joe enrolled in a drama school. He forced himself through agonizing hours of live performances in front of his classmates to overcome his stutter. He locked himself away in his room and would perform hours and hours of speech drills every day and eventually he did overcome his speech impediment. Once he graduated, Joe became a taxi driver in Chester.

He continued to work on his speech while he was driving people around. Eventually he decided he'd come far enough and he started a career as a broadcaster. By this point, the way you phrase that made it sound like he was doing like his speeches to his passengers. Yeah, I think he was. Hold on. I'll listen to that. None of this.

Give me some notes. All right. I got a tight five. I'm going to run it by you. There's no seatbelt so you better laugh. We have an invented seatbelt. You are really dependent upon me. So he does this and yeah, he decides he's finished by like late 1946.

Now, again, 1940s radio is king, TV's coming around, but that's still not the number one way people get entertained. You're really radio is the top of the world and they assume it will be forever. But he was able to convince a station manager in Lumberton, North Carolina to give him a job on WTSB. The pay was $25 a week, which was not good money even back then. And he failed to stand out enough that he felt he had any hope of advancement. So after a year, he returned home, dejected.

But Joe kept pushing until he got another job at WPWA in Brookhaven, Pennsylvania. He got into a vicious argument with his boss while still knew on the job and was quickly fired. He moved to WILM of Wilmington, Delaware, where he was also quickly fired. Yeah, you get the feeling he was not easy to work with at this point. Thankfully, email didn't exist. So these people couldn't tell each other about Joe. He moved back to Chester after this and then to Kenosha next, where he got a job with a

new network called WILP. His job in all of these places was very straightforward. Introduce and play records with a minimum of fanfare. He was not being hired to be a personality. He was just who put the music on. So what did he do to get fired from the other places? He was just a dick. Was he just riffing?

Yeah, that was a big part of it. He would riff a lot. He got in trouble in Kenosha, and I think he'd gotten in trouble before. He would riff on politics and current events, which was not what you were supposed to do at the time. So his bosses are like, nobody, nobody, people are tuning in to hear, I don't know what the big music is. The big bopper.

Nobody wants you. Nobody gives a shit about what you have to say, Joe. They want to hear Chantilly Lace. Put on Chantilly Lace and shut your fucking mouth. Smoke a cigarette. Yeah, the kind of riffing that he thought was the future of radio was simply not done at the time. Commenters were part of the news department, and jockeys were not.

Disc jockeys were there to entertain, and he'd been hired as a disc jockey. So if you were going to be a commentator, if you were talking about the news, you didn't like give your opinion. You tried to just kind of like read, you know, like the AP wire, basically. One WLIP though took Collins listeners could dial in and request songs. But Joe started insisting on asking his listeners what they thought about the political issues of the day, which was the first time anyone had ever really done that on radio. Like take Collins and he kind of forced the issue of making them political.

One WLIP employee at the time recalled, he wanted to chat with them. But in those days, there was no way to put a phone line on the air. Joe would say, uh-huh, and then tell the listeners what the callers said. So this is like, this is the very first talk radio. He's just on the phone with them, be like, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. All right. So here's what he said. Let me tell you what Dennis from the Kipsy just said.

And you're like listening to almost dead air while he's listening to the person's talk. Wow, he's just on the phone. But this is literally the birth of talk radio. This is the first time anybody does this. Joe Pine, and he moves along eventually, and to explain that process, I'm going to read a quote from a write-up in Smithsonian Magazine. One caller objected to the young DJ's pro-union opinions. Do you know anything, sir, about the history of labor management relations?

Pine asked the man. After a moment of dead air, he continued, no, you keep your voice down. Pine was an expert interrupter, but this caller barely paused for breath. Listening, Pine had an idea. According to Raghane, who worked there, he held the phone receiver to his microphone. Now the caller was live on the air, and call-in radio was born. So that's 1949 in Kenosha. Joe Pine invents call-in radio by literally holding a phone up to the mic.

In fairness, some random dude calling in to request Frankie Valli, who had very strong opinions about labor unions, is who actually created call-radio. This guy's such an asshole, I gotta put him on. He's so pissed about it. That's a fair point. You gotta hear what a piece of shit this guy is. Let me invent a new discipline that will later ratchet the country towards violence. It was born in stupid anger, and it will kill us all with stupid anger.

And to stupid anger, it will return. Yeah, perfect. What a beautiful way for that to get started. Honestly, yeah. And I love, because this guy gives birth to right-wing radio, but the start of talk radio was him trying to defend the right to unionize, which is... Right, I was not expecting that to be the issue when you said it. I was like, really?

You could be pretty conservative and pro-union in those, because it wasn't... It was more racist back then, obviously, everything was, but politics in some ways was less dumb. It hadn't gotten to the point where it is with the right-wing, left-wing, like conservatism is such a part of my identity that I have this vested interest in demonizing anything. You did have a lot of... One of the union strongholds in the US for a long time was West fucking Virginia. People fought to the death for unions at West Virginia with rifles. And now it's Joe Manchin country.

So sorry, West Virginia. But things were different than politically is what I'm saying. So Joe was fired. I think this is part of what got him fired, because his boss at the station was like, you're supposed to be playing songs, Joe. What the fuck are you doing? No, holding the phone up to the goddamn microphone. Put on the goddamn wreck, put on the fucking twist.

Do you want to get a Rush Limbaugh, because that's how you get a Limbaugh. This is how we get a Limbaugh. Put the phone down. Put on the goddamn music. I don't want to listen to Steven Crowder's heart surgery problems in 25 years or 45 years. How many years? 100 years? 60 years?

Whatever. Too many years, Tom. 500 years, yeah. He's not even alive anymore. No, no. God, thank God. So despite inventing call in radio, Joe's boss did not appreciate him. He wanted someone to read ads and introduce songs.

The two fought constantly. At one point, Joe demanded a raise, which led to a fight. Another WLIP host later recalled stumbling in on the melee. Joe was yelling, she recalled. He had one hand on our boss's lapel. He picked up a typewriter and threw it against the wall. Oh, fuck. So that gives you a little bit of an idea of why this guy keeps having problems with

his co-workers. Yeah. He almost scored some points of me there, though, because he picked up a typewriter. I'm like, here we go. Here we go. Throw it against the wall. Hit him in the face. All right.

Well. Fair compromise. All right. Yeah. Throw it against the wall. So he gets fired again, and he continues to move around frequently while he's going from radio station to radio station. He marries a beauty queen.

He divorces her a year later because she gets sick of him. While he's working at WYLM, he starts a show called It's Your Nickel, so named because the nickel was the standard cost for a call on a pay phone. And this was the first, yeah, proper radio talk show, The It's Your Nickel, so he does get a job doing the thing that he invented. And that became a phrase like, it's your dime or it's your nickel or it's your dollar. That's like a phrase. Yeah.

Exactly. Yeah. And I don't know if that's the, he may have just been using that phrase because it was like what people said, but yeah, I mean, he may have invented it. I have not done that research, Tom, someone at home will. Yeah. Something that sticks out to me about old Joe Pine is that he has trouble forming lasting relationships.

Yeah. Seems like it. Like he goes from job to job, marries a woman, divorces her late. Like he seems like he might be impossible to be around. It does. And it also, again, this is one of those black box of history things. I do kind of wonder how much of this is a PTSD because that can make it real hard to get along with people and a hard to regulate your emotions and might make you more likely to throw a

typewriter. He did get bombed in one of the most notorious battles of World War II. So. Yeah. Yeah. Who knows? It's one of those things. It's like lead exposure, which I'm sure Joe Pine was also exposed to a tremendous amount

of lead. Like you wonder how much of an impact did this have on like the way people were back then? We wonder how many people were just walking around poisoned and crazy like 70 years ago, just because that's the way it was. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of like pretty strong evidence that at least the lead exposure may have been part of why there was so much more violence back, you know, even just like 20 something years ago.

Because everybody was inhaling lead and eating lead off the walls and I do want some delicious lead, Tom. Yeah. There's nothing that goes with like a nice brie. Like you get a lead chip and you just dip it in a brie. That's a good. Yeah. Nice mix of sweet and savory.

Yeah. Like a lead flight. Yeah. Like a lead flight. Like a flight of lead. I'm going to start a lead stirrant, Tom. I think you should. Yeah.

A lead bar. Lead in every food. Yeah. A little lead bar. Get the lead out, we'll call it. A lead chicken in every pot. Now, Tom, you know who else will expose you to tremendous amounts of lead? The X-Man Colossus?

That is probably accurate. I don't know as much about X-Men as you, but the products and services that support this podcast certainly will expose you to lead. That is the only guarantee we make about our sponsors. Every one of them filled with lead. Yeah. It's a powerful guarantee. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated

the racial justice demonstrations and you know what, they were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. He didn't inside his hearse with like a lot of guns.

He's a shark and not in the good and bad ass way and nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful

lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all

bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories.

But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your

podcasts. We're back. And I wanted to start this by letting my audience know that our guest today, Tom Reimann, has a bit of a superpower, which is, and everyone who knows you know this, Tom, which is that whenever you mention a movie and you'll talk about like, you know that guy who was in the background in that scene in American Beauty and you'll be like, oh yeah, it's such and such and this is the other films they were in. I've never known anybody who can do that the way that you can.

It's... You're a human IMDb. I thought you were going to tell everybody about my optic blasts, so I'm glad you didn't spill that secret. Keeping that a secret for when I was at Robba Bank. No, I've been, I don't know, I just, I do that. Like I keep it in cyclopedic record of dates and like people in movies and stuff. I don't know.

It's, I'm probably somewhere on the spectrum, but it's just a thing I do, I don't know. It's almost a super, like it is kind of a superpower, like it's really fun and it made like when we were all, I mean, I lived together with like half of the people we worked with at Cracked and you were always over and just the movie conversations with you and Dave were always a tremendous amount of fun, which is part of why I listened to your podcast. Oh, thanks. Yeah. We lived in your room.

Remember? Oh yeah, you did. Yeah, I was up in the mountains. I was, I was doing redacted things in the mountains and mostly not home at that point in time. I'd forgotten about that. Yeah. Yeah.

Oh, the days of our lives. Like sand through the hourglass, Tom. So like lead through the hourglass. Like lead through the hourglass, so Joe Pine gets his first proper radio talk show. It's your nickel on WILM and again, he's, he's out of there. He's in there. I think this is like his second time working for them. And this article from the broadcasters desktop resource makes it clear what kind of show

Joe ran the very first radio talk show, quote, in his nightly introduction, he said, the mic is open. My name's Joe Pine. I guess you know yours. This program is dedicated to the free exchange of ideas and to differences of opinion. I don't know. I don't propose to have all the answers, but I do promise to talk about the things that interest you.

So that's a nice little. There's that free exchange of ideas phrase. He did, I think kind of mean it as opposed to the people who say it today. I think they're aping him, but I'll play you some clips from his. He did, he was, yeah, it's interesting. Now the show did often become a shout, a shout fest with Pine definitely in control. No topic was sacred from sex to religion to politics, but when he felt a listener had gone on for too long or was making no sense, he would make a rude remark like you're sick

and hang up on the person, person, enduring Pine's abuse of rhetoric is the challenge for the audience, many of whom tried to debate him before he hung up on them. His views tended to be quite conservative most of the time and Pine seemed to dare his listeners to disagree with him. His style of arguing included using very derogatory terms known for being adept with words, his arsenal of insults and put downs became the stuff of legends. Among his best known were if your brains were dynamite, you couldn't blow your nose. There was also go gargle with razor blades and take your teeth out, put them in backwards

and bite your throat. Jesus Christ. At least the man's creative. That third one's pretty nice. Yeah, that's good. I'd heard the other two. I'm like, yeah, those are old standards and this turn your teeth around, I'm like, ooh. Yeah.

This is real. So when he, this is in 1951 too, while he's in the middle of changing radio forever, his old war injury flares up, badly enough that surgeons have to amputate his left leg from the knee down. Shit. So he's back in the studio with a prosthetic limb soon after and while the fake leg was obvious to everyone who saw him, he never meant, it did get mentioned on air, we'll talk about that a bit, but he refused to mention it on air.

Judging by his pro-union views, Joe was at least, at one point, at least more of a moderate than he became, but the longer he's on doing talk radio, he pulls further and further to the right. In 1953, he celebrated on air when the US electrocuted Julius and Ethel Rosenberg saying, we finally incinerated those commies. I hope it was slow and painful. Good shit. That's interesting that the longer, I mean, I'm sure you're going to make this connection,

but the longer he's on the air, the more conservative he pulls. And I wonder, could that be because having bad faith arguments to generate, we call them rage clicks now, but just to stoke controversy by needling people and by playing the devil's advocate just to get people heated and arguing to fuel ratings for his own show. Yeah. I really don't know. I'm sure that was an element of it because clearly he's going after controversy, he's going after rage clicks, but also we'll talk about it.

He was not always the guy you would expect. Yeah, so we're building that. So Joe had a keen understanding of how to communicate with the lowest common denominator in US politics. He told reporters quite without shame that radio was geared towards the mentality of 13-year-old kids and that most Americans were politically apathetic and easy to persuade of just about anything. He claimed that he used shocking language and would make extreme allegations in order

to get people to think. He told the LA Times that while his critics called him a hate monger, all he really did was encourage stimulating dialogue. You see, he knows what he's doing and I think that's a big part of why he gets more right wing in his because it's easier to kind of like, again, speak to the mentality of 13-year-old kids if you're just like making these kind of reactionary arguments. He wants to piss people off so that they react and he gets a shout out of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's a part of it. That's not all of it because there were times when he would be challenged and it kind of depended on how it was, if he found someone interesting, even if they were coming in from a very different perspective, he would let them talk and sometimes very respectfully. So he was not, well, he's the start and he's doing a lot of unpleasant stuff. He's also not, he's unequivocally a better person than Ben Shapiro was what I'm saying, right? Like his goal in any given conversation wasn't just to own them.

He would actually listen to people sometimes who were bringing up some pretty radical stuff. We'll get to that. In 1957, a little over, after a little over six years on air, Joe left WILM. This time it was his own choice. He was famous at least locally and his salary was $42,000 a year, which is almost 10 times the average salary of, it's about 400 grand a year in like modern dollars. Like he was making real good money. This time Joe left because his dreams had overgrown a very comfortable working condition.

He traveled to Riverside, California and he got a job at a local radio station that quickly leapt to a TV job at KTLA in Los Angeles. He would later claim that his first TV show, which was essentially a filmed version of It's Your Nickel, had been a huge success. But the show lasted less than a year and I found no clips of it anywhere. Joe moved back. I'd be surprised if there's any footage that still exists. There is a, we have some clips of his, the show that came next, but it's because there's

like a grassroots archival effort to like digitize all of the old tape, master tapes. So after his first year in LA, Joe moves back across the country to Chester, where he works for a Philadelphia TV station for a first time, for a short time, and then he goes back to WYLM. For a little while, he licks his wounds. He seemed to know that a show like his, a political talk show where people could scream about politics to a mass audience was the wave of the future and was going to be huge on television, but the world wasn't ready quite yet.

For a few years, Joe continued to broadcast, but in the early 1960s, he decided the time was finally right and he moved back to LA, where he got a job at K.A.B.C. And I'm going to quote from the broadcaster's desktop resource again. Once again, he polarized the audience with some listeners and guests complaining he was too caustic and others saying his candor was refreshing, but as in Wilmington, he had people talking about him and his show. From K.A.B.C., he went over to K.L.A.C. in 1965, doing the 9 p.m. to midnight shift. Over one to avoid controversial guests, he put Nazis and members of the Ku Klux Klan

on the air, earning the displeasure of the American Jewish Committee and a warning from the FCC. He also had guests to believe it in eugenics, guests who were racists, guests with strange theories about past lives or UFOs, and the arguments continued. Controversy sold. Joe's salary ballooned to $200,000 a year, which is nearly $2 million a year by modern standards. NBC, yeah, he's making it, dang.

He's giving people what Tucker Carlson and stuff. Now, I will be fair, when he has Nazis and KKK members on it, so that he can scream at them. Yeah, but it's still problematic, but it's not as problematic as it is today where you have people affiliated with similar organizations as you talk about hell, what a good point they made. Yeah, get the hell out of here. He was getting outrage clicks, but at least the understanding was people are going to

hate these Nazis. Right, this is bad. At least that was the understanding. Yeah, at least that was the fucking understanding. Yeah. Again, you can still argue, I think it is pretty irresponsible to do that, but at least the understanding was like, fuck these guys, let's yell at them. Let's hear them out.

Yeah. NBC Radio Network started syndicating his show nationally in March of 1966, and it was soon on more than 200 stations around the country. He called what he did fist in the mouth radio, and now that he was on a new time slot the mid-morning rather than the night, as he'd usually been before, his ratings exploded. This is generally thought to be due to the fact that being on earlier in the day opened him up to a vast new audience of boardhouse wives. People were titillated.

One of his networks advertised the show in a full-page newspaper spread, listing all the Nazis and Klansmen and other pieces of shit he'd had on his show, and then concluding with, you may agree or disagree with Joe Pine, you may scream in rage at some of his remarks, but you won't turn him off. Yeah. Is that? I mean- What's the intent of that today?

Is that, is that shaming me? Is that like- Yeah, what is- Yeah, do you want me to feel bad? I don't know what the tone of that is. I do. But you won't turn him off. Yeah, you motherfucker.

We can't do anything about it unless you turn him off. We want this motherfucker off the air, but we can't. You like him too much, you son of a bitch. We tried to look in the doors. He just shows up inside somehow. He has secret doors. So Joe was on both the radio and the TV, and his television show alone earned him more money per year than Mickey Mantle made playing for the Yankees.

So he's making, like, more than Mickey Mantle money. Now, professional sports players made less money in those days, but still, he's raking it in. He was the top-rated talk show host in the second largest market in the U.S. Yeah, it feels wrong. Yeah, I don't know. Like you said, professional athletes made less money back then, but it feels wrong that like...

It's Mickey Mantle. I know who Mickey Mantle is. If anyone, shouldn't he make all the money? So from Smithsonian Magazine, quote, at a time when TV's leading men included Walter Cronkite, Edward R. Murrow, Andy Griffith, and Captain Kangaroo, Pine was the medium's first shock jock, a firebrand who invited hippies, civil rights activists, and Ku Klux clansmen alike to take a hike or go gargle with razor blades. By the mid-60s, he was the most popular TV radio voice in America.

Johnny Carson had more television viewers, but Pine, with a syndicated TV show and 200 plus radio outlets, had an audience to rival Johnny's. Life Magazine called him, sadistic, a bar room tough, but millions turned in to watch the fireworks. When a guest advocating free love set off a melee, Pine's audience charged the set and knocked it flat. Oh, shit. When a guest, the suave TV personality David Susskind, earned a chorus of booze for calling

Pine's program an orgy for morons, host and guest both got a kick out of that. Yeah, this is like the first on-air fight. It's Springer, yeah. Yeah, yeah, he's also like Jerry Springer the first spring. He's the first. Mr. Geraldo and Morton Downey. Yeah, Morton, we'll be talking about Morton later. Oh, good.

Yeah. Yeah. Like all of it, it's not just like Tucker Carlson the type, it's like fucking... So this, he like, he cracked every aspect of this, like, arena. Yeah, he did. He's an important man to know about. Like he really... He figured this out.

Yeah. Yeah, he figured some shit out. Most of it shit I wish no one had figured out, but he did figure it out. I can make millions if I put Nazis on the air. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Now, I think it's probably a better time to give you a better idea of how Joe sounded. Because when you read it out the way I've put it together, it probably sounds like he's

like a stereotypical modern shock jock. And while he was the prototype for that, his actual broadcasting style was much more subdued and witty. Oh, man. In this clip, Joe interviews an early vegan activist in what he called his beef box. Check it out. That as you cannot hear the screams of a lamb in the slaughterhouse, you cannot hear the screams of your son on the battlefield.

I would like to ask you a meaningful question at this point. Are you a vegetarian? I am indeed. Do you ever eat tomatoes? I would say to you. Yes or no. For the last 3,000 years, man has created... Never mind.

I'm not asking you a question. Do you ever eat tomatoes? For the last 3,000 years? Do you eat tomatoes? Of course I do. You do? Do you know that there is now scientific proof that when you cut a tomato, it screams... There is electrical...

There is electrical... There are a killer of tomatoes. My friend, the tomato doesn't pray. The tomato feels no pain. The tomato's blood doesn't hold any agony. The tomato does not swallow tomatoes. Take a walk. Goodbye.

Oh, you're going to sing something? I would. All right. This is the tomato stump. As the animal dies, and you take the slaughter of that animal. All right. That's probably enough of that. So, yeah.

What do you think of that, Tom? That was not what I was expecting. He sounds like Walter Cronkite, and then he flips the fuck out. Yeah, and then he flips the fuck out, but he starts from this real low ebb. And he also does... Like, he says, get off, but then the guy's like, well, I want to sing, and he's like, absolutely. Yeah, please do.

No, this is great for me. Please do. Yeah, that's going to be incredible content. And that clip was from 66. Wow. Yeah, 1966. It feels extremely modern, especially like... Yeah, that could almost be on TV today.

His extremely bad faith argument. Yeah, it's all... He's a trailblazer, Tom. Yeah, this guy... You could put this dude on TV right now, and he would be the hottest thing. Yeah. On Fox News. It's amazing.

And he... Tom. There's a level of almost... Yeah, it's just different than the way they mock people today. It's almost more... It's almost gentler in a weird way. He's not the same as what came after. Again, he's this weird mix of what we have today and like Walter Cronkite.

It's fascinating to just listen to his stuff. When the Civil Rights Movement kicked off, Joe devoted a tremendous amount of time to discussing The Angry Negro, which is more or less what you'd expect. Oh boy. Yeah. Oh boy. Can't wait to hear that clip. In one episode, he brought on several militant black activists.

I believe they were Black Panthers, and in a heated moment during the show, I've not been able to find this clip, but it's very famous, during the show, he opens his desk drawer to show them his revolver, and he threatens them with it on air. He could go off. He advocated bombing North Vietnam back to the Stone Age, obviously, but he could also be a surprising man, and part because he came from an era in which political figures could admit to learning something and changing their opinion, and in part because some of the issues that are now very aggressive were a lot less settled in those days in terms of how it was

going to break down right or left. He conducted an interview with Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley-Brown, and he started the interview by calling her a dingbat, and then asked her to explain why girls should be considered equal to men in the workplace, but then he sat quietly while she gave her speech like explaining her peace on women's liberation, and he applauded her at the end of it. He was certainly more polite to women than towards men, and more polite to white people towards black people.

But even when interviewing people he clearly despised, Joe maintained an air that's just so much more congenial than what you see on TV today. Here he is talking to Paul Krasner, a left-wing magazine publisher who later went on to head high times. So this is him talking with someone he fucking hates. Well, I think that the President of the United States is at such a height that people have to realize that he is only a human being and does use a deodorant, like you and me. He's lighting a cigarette now.

So yeah, it's clearly, again, this is not somebody he particularly respects, but it's also like it's not a shouting debate I guess is what impresses, not impresses, is the thing that is interesting to me because you don't have that kind of like congenial distaste is how it feels watching them. Yeah, he feels more like Carson than like Tucker Carlson at this point. Yeah. And it's the kind, I wish I could find the thing, the interview he does with those black panthers where he shows them his revolver, because I've heard different descriptions

of it. Some that make it sound like he's threatening them with a gun and some that make it sound like he's just like, well, I have a gun too. And like, I really don't know. And I don't know what the actual tone was in that episode. Either one is entirely possible based on what you've shown me of this guy. Either one makes complete sense. Like he's more polite, but he's still, he's still, oh, for sure, he's making bad faith

arguments and he's being a shithead, so it's like, yeah. In the interview with Krasner, got markedly less friendly after the ad break from Smithsonian magazine, quote, why do you print the most obscene words Pine demanded? Do you edit your magazine because you were an unwanted child to which Krasner responds, no daddy. Their talk went downhill from there. He asked me about my acne scar, says Krasner, now 85. That was a low blow.

I said, let me ask you something, do you take off your wooden leg before you make love to your wife? And his jaw dropped. According to Krasner, the audience gasped while Pine's producers ever did their eyes and the atmosphere became surrealistic. That's good TV though, right there. That's good TV. So the listeners know this, what was his clip, 67?

Something like that? Yeah, 67. Yeah, do you fuck your wife with your fake leg? Imagine that on TV. 1967. In the 60s. Yeah. Andy Griffith is the biggest name in entertainment and this shits on TV.

Holy shit. And that's part of the other thing that's interesting, I'm going to guess a lot of his audience, if not most of it, weren't right-wing, a lot of them were probably people who liked guys like Paul Krasner, but want to see shit like this on TV. People have these kind of conversations, so talk to fucking anyone. And he could surprise you. But before we get into that, Tom, you know what else is going to surprise you? No.

The quality of the products and services that support this podcast. That would be a surprise. Yeah, it will be a surprise. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations, and you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy.

Next season, we'll take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark, and not in the good and bad ass way, he's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen.

Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole.

My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus, it's all made up? Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart.

And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back! And we're talking about what I think is one of the more surprising things I found. So Joe Pine was one of the very first major media figures in the United States to platform

a transgender woman discussing trans issues. And he did show in a way that is incredibly surprising for the time. This is from 1966. And I want to just play this. And the woman he's talking to, Christine Jorgensen, was one of the very first super public transgender media figures. Yeah, she's very famous. Yeah.

Very famous. She's certainly not the first person to talk to her, but he's one of the first people with a massive platform to sit down and have a long conversation with a transgender person in a major outlet. And I think the tone of the conversation, given where we are now with the right wing on this issue, is going to be surprising to people. It was our guest who first flushed the problems of transsexuals into the open. Christine Jorgensen was born a male.

She was ascribed in her high school annual as a clever lad. Later she became a private first class in the Army. Though outwardly a boy, Christine was sexually disturbed. The story of her later discovery and transformation electrified the world. It was the first chapter in a new outlook toward the transsexual phenomenon. And yet I can't believe that yours was the first operation of this type. It wasn't Joe. The first one was, I think, done somewhere in the area of 1926 or 27, there was a marvelous

doctor in Germany called Magnus Hirschfeldt, who started the whole investigation in our modern age. Let's put it that way. Before that there may have been others, but I know not of them. Is this a legal operation in the United States yet? Oh, yes. Oh, certainly. You know they're doing it at Johns Hopkins now in Baltimore.

Heavens to bless. Yes. And they're doing it at the University of Minnesota Medical School. They've done five cases to the best of my knowledge at the University of California Medical School. How many people in your particular predicament do you think there are today? I mean, not those who successfully, assuming you have successfully bridged the gap, but how many are in that spot where they need this?

Well, I can only judge by what I heard from Johns Hopkins. When I was in Baltimore several weeks ago, Dr. Money and I did a television show together and he's one of the doctors involved in Johns Hopkins. And he asked me if I thought I knew how many, and I said, I don't have the vaguest idea. And he said, according to his statistics, there should be 30,000 transsexuals of both sides in the United States. To get it straight, a transsexual and a transvestite differ in that the transvestite is addressing up type of homosexual, and you don't claim to be a homosexual.

No. I shouldn't say you claim you're not a homosexual. Well, an interesting point, if you say that if I was established and accepted by society for the first 26 years of my life as a male, then my emotional feelings during that period toward another male had to be considered a homosexual emotion in the eyes of society, although I never saw it that way in my own eyes. But again, Joe, may I correct something which has been very, is very startling, I think, that a transvestite, they have proven statistically that 99% of them are heterosexual.

Now, this is even more interesting than ever. I mean, people who, men who dress up in women's clothing are really by the world standards normal sexually? That's right. Wow. So, yeah. That's not what I expected. That's surprising.

Yeah. I mean, you know, he does say heavens to Betsy when she's talking about the different, but he's like... The terminology, again, this is 1967. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So, it is like, sure, okay, Joe, like he's actually like, okay, what's the proper term?

What's the difference? Yeah. Explain what your experience is. And he's very careful about gendering her properly. He's being very surprising, yeah. It's not what I would have said. Wow. Yeah.

I didn't. And I talked to a transgender friend of mine about this, and she did point out that Christine Jorgensen had some like kind of pretty anti-gay attitudes, and one of the things that was going on here, and one of the things that made her acceptable was that like, she was like, well, I'm not going to be like, people like me won't be homosexual if we get to transition. Right. Because then it's, yeah. And I didn't really catch that when I listened to the interview, but I can see how that could

have been an element here, although when he brings up homosexuality, I didn't note anything aggressive in it. Like, he was just kind of asking for clarification about, yeah. Not in this. I'm sure he was. Right? Yeah. There's no way.

Yeah. The interview I would have expected, and I think it says less about him than it just does about how the issue had not been politicized at this point, like the existence of transgender people had not been politicized to the extent that it is now, even though it was much more dangerous to consider transitioning back then. It also, there was not the kind of political ranker behind it. It's just a fascinating piece of history and evidence that like Joe Pine, again, you could be a right-wing firebrand on TV and encounter something you didn't understand and like learn

about it on air without it being like a thing. Yeah. Do you think that's a product of him being like a genuinely curious person? Like I want to learn new things, et cetera. Or is that more of a product of what you were saying about the issue where it wasn't clear which side of the political spectrum the issue was going to fall on so he didn't want to go as hard as he normally would had the issue been more firmly settled on one side? I don't know.

I've heard people theorize that part of why he was very polite and liked Christine Jorgensen is that she was a veteran like him and he had just that kind of level of respect for like, well, whatever else about this person, we fought in the same war together. I think some of it's also, I think the attitude and like the way people presented themselves, like he was a guy who was raised in a specific time where if people present themselves a specific way, you treat them a specific way, right? And I think people who kind of like Joe or Krasner, you know, it's kind of like a left wing hippie type.

Yeah. And so he did not feel the need to be respectful. Christine presented as like a very kind of like bougie upper middle class white woman and he treated her with respect as a result. The same was true of some other women he interviewed who he had a disagreement with. So I think some of it may just be that just like there was more of like a, well, regardless of your feelings, if somebody presents in this way, if they, if they match kind of our expectations of upper class white people behavior, you treat them with a certain level of respect

and regard because that's just how we are. No, it's, it's, it's a fascinating time, fascinating time capsule. And that was a, I think maybe the longest clip we've ever played on this show, but I just, I was really surprised when I came across that learning that this is the guy who gave mental birth to Rush Limbaugh and Tucker Carlson. Yeah. Not the interview you would expect. No.

No, Tom. That was surprising. As a last treat, I have one more thing I want to play for you. Oh, good. This is a segment from Joe's show where he talks with Anton LeVe, head of the search of Satanism. Oh boy. Oh boy, Tom.

You're going to have a good time with this one. Oh man. Hold on. Let me get some popcorn. Yeah. Yeah, you get Anton LeVe on the TV and you know you're going to have a good one. And how do you make your living as a counselor, sorcerer, practicing wizard, shaman, warlock, whatever you wish to call it.

You're also a male witch, a warlock. Well, a male witch is considered a warlock. You're, you, you claim to be a witch then? A male witch. Certainly, but not a white witch. Not like some of these people that have been on various shows that bend over backwards trying to convince everyone how good they are, that they never perform black magic, only white magic.

I think this is ridiculous. Could you make that man disappear out of the dock? Out of the dock? Why should I want to? Well, because we have somebody else coming up. Of course I can't make him disappear because I am naturally cast in the mold of a human being and I think this is. Want to bet?

If you look less human and more Mephistophelian to me. Thank you, sir. I call him a devil to compliment it. I just remarkable to me the degree to which Anton LeVe looks like Joe Cooke and from command and conquer. Yeah. The guy who played Kane, they're the same maybe Kane was Anton LeVe. That's my command and conquer theory.

That's going to be very funny. He does. He looks like the villain in every FMV computer game. Yeah. It's amazing. He's wearing a cape. He's wearing an amulet. He's such a dummy every time he goes on TV.

It's so funny. He's like, no, I can't make that guy disappear. All right. I've never seen white magic. What white magic are they doing? What white magic are you doing, Anton? Yeah. Yeah.

I have to side with Joe on this one. What are you? What kind of magic are you up to? What kind of magic are you going to do? Can you make that guy disappear? Yeah. By the late 1960s, Joe was a very wealthy man. He drove a Rolls-Royce, and when he parked at the studio, he was so frightened it would

be vandalized that he had his network hire a security guard to watch the car while he was on the air. Parking in the garage, man. What are you doing? Yeah, exactly. What are you doing? Yeah. On paper, in many ways, he sounded like the same kind of guy that many right-wing media

grifters are today, but the thing he had that they all lacked is a sense of charm. There's a level of class that you get with Joe that just like is completely absent from everyone who follows. Yeah, the more we hear of him, I had said he sounds like Cronkite earlier, but he really sounds more like Carson or like a talk show host where it's like he can be warm and supportive until he's not, and then he'll turn on you and kind of ridicule you, but in a polite way. I can see how a lot of people who disagreed profoundly with Joe Pine could enjoy listening

to his show in a way that like, I cannot with Tucker Carlson, or nobody like hate watches for enjoyment Tucker Carlson, it's just too like horrifying, like nobody does that with Ben Shapiro or whatever. No, no, no, that's an assignment. That's not something you do for fun. Yeah, that is an assignment. Yeah. That is conflict journalism, like you are taking on pain.

I'm looking at Sophie nodding. Yeah, but people could like enjoy, like you enjoy, like what, I recommend watching him talk to Anton LeVe. It's a hoot. Yeah. It's legitimately fun. Just two shitheads to fuck with each other. Two real shitheads just talking it up in the sixties.

At one point, he had Harlan Ellison on as a guest. Now Harlan Ellison is quite a fellow at the time he was a Los Angeles free press columnist and he's now a legendary dead sci-fi author, the author of I Have No Mouth, But I Must Scream and some other real. The way you phrase that made it sound like he's legendarily dead. He is. He is. A lot of people, I mean Harlan Ellison was a famous misanthrope.

He made a lot of enemies. He made a lot of enemies and politically he was pretty much the opposite of Joe Pine, although in terms of being unpleasant, they were both very unpleasant people famously. Harlan Ellison called Joe a hustler and a bully, but noted that he was very sharp. Quote, I thought I'd go on his show and beat him at his own game, but I blew it. I spent my time talking about the issues, civil liberties and all that, and he talked about America. The trouble with Pine was that he was really, really good at what he did.

That does get to like, yeah, you're never going to win talking about the issues with these guys. That's not, and you could only get Joe to listen when it wasn't something he saw as an issue. I think that's why that interview with Jorgensen went the way it did, is because it wasn't a political issue to him. It was just a thing of interest. It was a curiosity to him.

It was just curious. This isn't real. This is just some flighty nonsense. I don't even think he was treating it like nonsense. He was treating it like he was just learning a new science fact. It wasn't political. It was not a political issue. He definitely didn't treat it the same way he was treating the high times to Krasner

or Anton Leveille, but I feel like he probably considered them in the same bucket of like, well, this isn't, this is like a personal interest story. This isn't real news. Yeah, definitely in the same. He clearly respected her more than he did any, either of them, but yes. I think it was the same kind of like, well, this is not a political thing. This is personal interest. This is just something that people are going to be fascinated by that I can also like,

you can create a kind of like, fantastic title for it. It's something that'll get people, get eyeballs on the screen. In 1969, Joe started having trouble breathing. He was diagnosed with lung cancer. For years, he had jokingly called his cigarettes coffin nails and you saw him light up at least once in the flip side of the place. I think he smoked in all the clips we watched. He was always smoking.

They just issued them to you. He had repeatedly promised. Yeah. It's your government issue cigarettes. He had repeatedly promised that he would never give up smoking, but he quit after getting his diagnosis. It didn't help. When he got too sick to drive to the studio, he hosted his show from his home, making him

a trailblazer in yet another way. Wow. Yeah, he was the first one doing what we're doing, Tom. Yeah, what we're doing. At the very end of his life, he lay in his bed, ranting about the Peace Corps because they wanted to end the war in Vietnam. He died in 1970 at age 45. Thank you, comrades.

Wow. Yeah, 45. That dude was 45? That dude was mainlining cigarettes his entire adult life. From the time he was 14, he was probably smoking six packs a day. I want the listeners to understand that this motherfucker looks like in these clips we watched, he looks like he's at least 68. Yeah.

He looks so old. I mean, in fairness, some of that's World War II. I know. Yeah. I mean, it's like a joke on the internet where it's like, man, people who were like 38 in 1975. Looks like they were on the 60s door. Yeah.

But like, wow, yeah, yeah, no, 45. Yeah. He looks like Brendan Gleason now. Yeah, younger than, oh, what's the guy, the funny man, all the ladies like him. He's the Ant-Man. What's his fucking name? The Ant-Man. Paul Rudd.

Paul Rudd. Paul Rudd's older than Joe Pine died at now. Right. Paul Rudd is older than Joe Pine ever was and looks half his age. And when Paul Rudd is 70, he won't look as old as Joe Pine looked at. This dude looks older than Shatner. The Smithsonian magazine lays out how directly his influence led to the creation of some of the most influential careers in modern right-wing media.

Quote, one of Pine's protégés, the controversial radio shouter Bob Grant, followed his mentor Pine as a talk show shouter in Los Angeles before moving to New York, where Grant paved the way for his successor at WABC, Sean Hannity. Hannity had first gained national attention subbing for Rush Limbaugh, another Bob Grant fan. When Grant died in 2013, Hannity hailed him as one of the greatest pioneers of controversial opinionated talk radio. Grant in turn had acknowledged his debt to the founder of In Your Face Talk.

Even Vice President Mike Pence, who hosted a right-wing talk show in Indiana in the 1990s, was a successor of Pine's, according to Harlan Ellison, who admired Pine's shrewdness while loathing his politics. I've appeared on that sort of show all over the country. They call it controversy, but they're all about vilification and hostility, and their motto is Pine. And Pine is, again, an odd figure for me, because when I first started reading this kind of stuff about him, calling him a bully, I expected a different kind of bully than

the video's reveal. He's absolutely a bully, but he's subtler than the ones we see today. I found a column in the Saturday Evening Post from the 1960s where a left-wing reviewer tries to explain his appreciation for the Joe Pine show. After watching one of these shows, and it does not matter whether I loathed the guest, the host, or both, I feel somehow drained and less misanthropic. Not long ago, for example, I had a terrible day. I had a migraine, and my daughter sliced her finger with a razor blade, and I got a rejection

slip and a cop gave me a speeding ticket, my third this year, which means that I will probably lose my license, and in Los Angeles, that is like being a functional paraplegic. That night, I watched Joe Pine. His guests included a lady who complained that television sportscasters never carried drag racing results, a man who blamed the current racial unrest on Franklin Delano Roosevelt and a veteran who said we ought to drop the big bomb on Vietnam. The vet said he did not fight World War II to throw this one away. It turned out that he had been a Navy mailman.

I was outside the zoo looking in again. Life did not seem so bad after all. I went to bed and slept well. What's going on in that guy's life, though? Yeah, it is. He's lost his license. His daughter cut her finger up with a razor blade. What the fuck was she doing, man?

What was she got access to razor blades? What are you giving her razor blades for? It was a different time, Tom. I'm sure he was giving her cigarettes, too. Calm her down. This guy's life was already shaky before the Joe Pine show came into the picture. The appreciation you could have for Joe Pine if you weren't in the cult is part of what makes him different from what came later.

In part two, Tom, we're going to talk about what came later, but for right now, we need to talk about the shit you've got to plug. Oh, geez. All right. Well, yeah. I've got a Patreon. If you head over to patreon.com.com. You can find our podcast networks, me and David Bell, also from Cracked.

We do a bunch of shows every week. We just watched Hypecast. We do FoxMotor as a maniac, Tom and Jeff watch Batman, Star Trek the Next Futurama, a bunch of great shows you can check out there. So do writing over at Collider and for some more news and for 1,900 hot dog. So you can look at all of those things. Check it out. Oh, yeah.

All right. And you can, you know, you can go to hell. That's right. Mm-hmm. Go to hell. When you get to hell, tell Joe Pine that Robert sent you. Yeah. Tell Joe Pine, Robert sent you and then kick him in the nuts and scream.

The name Rush Limbaugh. He won't know what you're saying. He died decades before that man was relevant. I feel like in hell, they just make you listen to clips of everything that's on this episode on repeat. We haven't even gotten to the bag yet. Oh, I know. Wait for part two, yo.

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