Chapo Trap House - UNLOCKED: 441 - Orange Julius or Hi-C and Turkey? feat. Adam McKay (7/30/20)

Episode Date: August 9, 2020

Writer and director Adam McKay (Vice, The Big Short, every movie you quoted endlessly with your homies ~2004-2012) stops by to talk film, the giant sucking memory hole of the Bush presidency, balancing humor with anger, and wrangling with SNL censors. Be on the lookout for a new season of Adam’s Jeffrey Epstein podcast coming up this September.

hi Pearl you don't have to raise your voice I can give you half hey don't talk to me like that okay look I I thought I was clear in my email that I needed a couple weeks I just get two more weeks you need to relax I don't call me bitch I was listening to your guys show the other day where you talked about

barrel of them for a half hour and I was like why the fuck have I not been on the show half my life is spent talking about their home he is a genius yeah he is the guy bangin I was banging the drum on showgirls like ten years ago telling people like no no that thing is a satire of fascistic culture and what

it would have been like if the Nazis had won the war like and finally now I'm seeing that come around there's a couple books reevaluating showgirls which is pretty exciting Adam I hate it when people say showgirls is a movie that's so bad it's good like no showgirls is a great movie because he just essentially

what he does he does for sex in showgirls what he does for violence in robo cop and total recall he just pushes it to such an absurd upstream degree but like to the same end of portraying our absurd fascist culture oh hundred percent you can tell and it's funny too because I know some people who were involved in

the movie and they're like no no you're wrong he was partying he was being like you know gross Hollywood guy it doesn't matter like the satire is like traumatized into his muscles like he is walking fascist satire like he can't help himself we're saying the same thing about John Carpenter it's like John Carpenter I

don't know how conscious he is of what he's doing but it's just there no matter what maybe it's accidental it's like someone getting hit in the head who can remember you know every date of the calendar for a hundred years but yeah that's Farahoven for sure vibrating at a high frequency and yeah and probably

not even aware of it just like as an antenna that's that no one else has yeah okay we're rolling let's kick things off hello everybody it's choppo we're back again it's me will and I've got Matt and Amber joining me here today but that is not all we've got a very special guest for you I am pleased to welcome to the

show the former coordinator of falconry for Saturday Night Live Adam McKay Adam how's it going I'm good I'm good thanks for having me so I guess my my first question for you is having a falcon at your wrist the wind in your hair on the open stuff truly best in life I only got to experience it for two years and yes

it is I can say that empirically it is the best I see or this is from a profile in W magazine it says that you you know you became officially the head coordinator of falconry for Saturday Night Live but it's also said that you your colleagues started to get annoyed by this so I guess I'm wondering is what

do they have against falconry why do they resent these beautiful birds it's so funny I thought like I said can I name my own credit and they let me do it and I was like alright I'm coordinator of falconry and like veterans of the crew were like cornering me being like you know what that's not fucking funny

we work hard for our credits and I was like Jesus now I'm like the enemy of the working man and I was like yeah I can't firm on it though I was like you know what it's Saturday Night Live I'm gonna do it and so they like buried the credit at the end of the credits and I think it ran like twice and someone

sent me a frame grab of it but yes technically for two years I was the coordinator of falconry I mean did they resent when you sort of monopolize the craft service table for just like a you know sort of a panoply of these beautiful raptors and they're a little like they're blinders on you know you're

just like no no food that don't look at the raptor don't look at my falcon please yeah and I had like a buffet of like rabbit filets and martin meat and you know to make sure my beautiful like you said coterie of raptors were fed and were happy there about seven of them three times they got loose in the studio

and attacked people with big hair yeah there was a lot of difficulty and resentment but I'm like you know what you can't run a world-class organization without a I don't know what the plural is for falcons actually which is terrible given my past title but I'm gonna say a fist of falcons on hand at

all times so they they learned to deal with it well I mean the results speak for themselves frankly in terms of the sketches I mean I don't want to kiss your ass too much but I am a I'm a Saturday night live I am the Saturday night live lore master of the show I've been watching it since I was a kid and I've

I don't think I've missed an episode since I was like 10 and your sketches are in my opinion the pantheon best ones in fact I have a test I give my friends sometimes and I'm very eager to be able to ask it of you are you a high C in turkey guy or an orange Julius guy oh my god

Matt does not miss when it comes to SNL I mean that is yeah high C in Turkey I wrote that with Norm Hiscock who is the former head writer for Kids in the Hall he and I wrote a lot of those sketches there were ones that were not very popular with Lorne but we get enough laughs at the table like shit

we got to take this to dress and they would occasionally get through and I think eventually like after two years of Norm and I writing a lot of those kinds of sketches like high C in Turkey we wrote another one where two corporate VPs told one of their employees that didn't like his personality and they

wanted him to assume and an English accent and talk about the great war a lot and ride a big wheel and they kept talking with his personality but that was his cock and I would write those and eventually one of the producers came to us and said stop writing those sketches oh that's amazing to hear they

literally said this is too good what are you doing this is to actually funny that we're not enjoyed that I don't think good was what they were thinking but they were like we don't want to contend with them we don't want to build sets for them stop writing these damn sketches because we were getting them through the

read through and we had one that was a Will Ferrell knocks on Danny ILO's door at like three in the morning and we aged Ferrell up to match ILO's age and it was him with saying with a high school yearbook just saying high school was great wasn't it and it turns out he's an old high school friend who's never gotten

over high school and went and bought the old abandoned high school and is trying to get everyone that he went to school with to go back to the school and walk around school still going on and you have never seen 300 people put out willful silence they wanted to get a message across and dark and screwed up and the

only guy got was Kector was Doug's this guy who had had a head injury so they ended with Ferrell and Doug's looking at a broken window with like you know 867 5309 Jenny you know yeah those were not well-received I gotta say before swine as far as the the orange julia sketch goes I mean you I mean it's a it's a hilarious

sketch but in that sketch you did manage to wrangle one of the most genuinely heartfelt and emotionally affecting performances out of Sylvester Stallone absolutely and people talk about him in Copland I'm sorry he's way better the orange julia sketch it's it's just it's a like when he triumphs at the end of it

it was like yo tears in my eyes how does that sound Leon would you like to sell orange julias is in Germany be coming up there on his judo I mean Sylvester Stallone he a little bit broke my heart I read some article after he hosted because he was a nice guy and you know it's Sylvester Stallone

and and then like a year after he hosted a year after he hosted there was an article about how his whole like hundred million dollar art collection he had been scammed and the art collection was actually only like ten million dollars and they showed pictures of the art and it was like horrible

I literally said after he hosted like does he have someone looking out for him like I was like worried about him oh that's amazing that's exactly who you think that he is it's almost two on the nose yeah no the art scamos must have seen him coming a mile away

oh yeah the way he says damn he was funny he was so good the way he says a lot of them got sick some of them died just not not having the confidence to not hit that even though that's the punch line genius genius yeah I agree so Adam we we can talk SNL we got some some more SNL heaters coming for you but

I just wanted to begin by by saying that I recently Catherine my girlfriend and I we recently just watched The Other Guys which holds up still holds up still good and I was just it was funny because you know if you haven't seen the movie the end credits basically morphed into this kind of high energy infographic

about various financial crimes and the you know leading up to the Great Recession set to rage against the machine's cover of Maggie's farm and it seemed to me like that was like like that end credits there really sort of like led you into this path of like doing movies about things that are

that we like to laugh at to things that we love to be mad at and I'm just wondering like was there a sort of road to Damascus moment for you like what what like shifted your film output to like these more kind of like politely outwardly political films like so in other words what about The Other Guys

radicalized you yeah I think it's I'm sure you know we've all been living in this country together for quite a while and for a long time I was trying to do stuff through comedy you know we were doing like Anchorman was about sexism and you know the news becoming pure entertainment and we always had like

something like at least a little bit of a baseline that we were playing behind the absurd comedy that was a little bit about something and I think with The Other Guys it was just the financial collapse hit my dad lost his house the crimes were so flagrant there was never any comeuppance and I thought you can't do

a comedy about drug smugglers like you just can't that's not what the problem is so we tried to do this kind of slightly absurdist comedy that was also like an allegory for the whole financial collapse and we put all this work into it and really tried to craft the story and then the movie came out

and like no one cared like no one even noticed that we had done this so when I was putting the credits in the end I just go fuck it just make it naked like at least the credits will do it and so yeah a bunch of people responded to it like why did you do those credits in the end I was like no the whole movie

is about how the cops who are chasing drug dealers and destroying cars and car crashes are like a joke and the guy who's actually like looking at bureaucratic paperwork is the one who's like really finding where the real crimes are and like Wahlberg's characters always looking for drug smugglers and they ignore their

union and it turns out in the end that the union was being scammed so yeah that was kind of the first one where I started kind of being a little more overt but I realized kind of this you know comedy mixed with some commentary wasn't enough the world was just getting crazier

well yeah I mean on that on that tip on that transition oh wait first of all I thought this was true and then I looked it up on my phone just to make sure but do you know what a flock of Falcons is called? A cast like the cast of that in a life. That is good I like that. It's nice right yeah they've

all got their parts some of them some of them carry sketches some of them are more background players some of them you know do more character work you get the idea Do you guys know what a collection of Catholic more than five Catholic cardinals are called? A registry list. A lawsuit.

A cantaloupe. Yeah you actually got profiled by my buddy and my editor at Jacob and Connor Kilpatrick it was a it was a great profile. I remember that he was he was awesome. Yeah yeah he's great. He mentioned how divided the reviews were about vice

even though everyone had to admit the performances were amazing and you had this quote where you said uh I just had this fractured feeling that the press was mad that I was stepping in their backyard um we would know nothing about that obviously

but first of all it's funny they got their hackles up about that and not like Anchorman too but I I couldn't really pinpoint the animosity to that movie I couldn't figure out is the traditional media like territorial or like proprietary about like political

content because it's not like they were talking about Cheney they were maybe trying to forget that it happened um do you think maybe it's because you've primarily worked in comedy and they're like be funny be funny funny man uh what do you think accounts for the

reception I think there was some of that yeah I mean I and by the way I'm not going to maintain it's a perfect movie I mean there are people I knew that I respected who weren't huge fans I'm like that's fair enough but I thought some of the animosity was strange like we got fact checked by

political fact and the fact check was wrong like it was really weird it was like oh wait no we researched this movie for two years we know what we're talking about and I remember they put out a fact check on I was like well that's incorrect that's incorrect and I remember like Joe

Scarborough who was a guy who was really for the Iraq war had like a right wing movie critic on who was like I love the movie because I love Dick Cheney I thought he was great at it and Scarborough was laughing like yeah you're right like we could use someone competent instead of Trump now

and there was like this whole idea of you know at least Cheney was competent and I was like this is this is like out of a Verhoeven movie and so yeah there was some really strange kind of touchy nerves to that movie that went beyond just normal sort of I like the movie I didn't like the

movie which is a whole separate discussion uh there were some op-eds written from like journalists who were like rolling their eyes at like the characterization of W. Bush and it's like no no we we researched that we talked to people who were like yeah

he was manipulated by Cheney he was completely incompetent that was you know based on real stuff then that was also when I realized I was kind of stepping into an America where like stuff is really factionalized and really ugly out there I really thought there'd be more of a

rallying point around you know thank god this story was documented you know there's obviously great performances we needed it to be documented and nope that was not the case yeah I kind of wonder I kind of wondered if some of it wasn't

just that like no one has actually gone back and reconciled that period of history in their head anyway so it's really uncomfortable to look at it even though it was not that long ago yeah I wondered that too I think you're right a little bit with the comedy

thing too I think like the idea that the guy who did stepbrothers did this I think a lot of people assumed it was slapdash that we hadn't done all this research I saw people act like oh you know Ling Cheny's father you can't just say that I was like no no we

researched that we interviewed people from her town we looked at the police reports like so I think you're right some of the comedy thing hit in there and then I think a lot of it was just talk about a subject no one really wants to go back over people forget there was a lot of

people supporting that war and a lot of journalists who kind of missed the boat on what was really going on and it's not a very fun subject to go back to I don't know I don't know but yeah we definitely got very strong reactions on both sides like some people like loved it some people

hated it more than anything it was quite an experience um what you you mentioned like the the research you were doing when you were you know writing the screenplay for it so like in the course of doing that you must have sort of imbibed all kinds of cursed

knowledge about Dick Cheney and his role in shaping the presidency of George W. Bush so considering that like does it drive you fucking crazy to see W rehabilitated in the way he has now sort of as a foil for Trump I mean like just today he was speaking at John Lewis's

funeral and like you said there's just this this chorus of like man I remember when we had a competent Republican in office and it's just like what like does this drive you as insane as it does me yeah yeah sure yes I can't

I can't believe it I mean a million people die you know that war is going to end up costing five trillion there's a whole generation of young men who have like head trauma and injuries from that war it's it's it's kind of everything that's wrong with

our country we have more of like a slot machine's sense of history than you know a narrative sense of history it's like such a moment to moment kind of culture we've created I wanted to ask you guys though this must be strange for your show like

with everything that's happened I was actually thinking like oh my god like Chapo's almost like Politico or the Hill now like all your opinions and everything you've been talking about is like moderate now like I was joking about like Jacobin is like USA today now

have you guys felt this at all like with what you know you used to be considered like extreme left-wingers and it's like no pretty much everything you're saying we could have used right now well Adam we've we've always thought of ourselves as leaders

you know I mean I've always I've always viewed the show more as like a sort of a contemporary mallard film or you know just just bringing some political insight but also some laughs before I was on the cast I uh I said approvingly this podcast is uh Howard Sturd for the post cold war left

and uh initially people thought that that was like an insult but I only meant it as a compliment but I don't know I think it actually I don't think anyone sort of and I don't think the media leads anything I think they tend to sort of fill the spaces that are available to them and and we saw

something emerging kind of during the Obama years that people realize is you know is this all there is and we always sort of have the same politics anyway but it's like I think the best part about our show is that it's low brow and if you have if you if you want to have any kind of like cultural component

to a political project which only happens when there's some kind of politics to orient it around you can't start with culture first you're gonna need you're gonna need catalysts you're gonna need your high brow you're gonna need uh jackabin your middle brow and you're

gonna need you're gonna need your chopper your your low brow well god bless you I'm still gonna refer to you as the the new politico uh I hope we have three I give that statement three Pinocchios Adam three Pinocchios on that fact check I think one of the reasons that people

do end up one of the more benign reasons that people do end up venerating Bush by looking backward is that I mean the reason that I think one of the reasons you pick Cheney as the as the focal point for the movie trying to explicate you know all of the institutional rot that came to a

fruition during the Bush years after 9 11 is because he was a mastermind you know he was the guy behind the throne and one of the things that makes people especially liberals very anxious about the current moment is that there doesn't seem to be a mastermind I mean there are competent people in the

Trump administration like bar but if it's very clear that they are all just trying to work towards the orange man you know what I mean like they're trying to anticipate and and and soothe his ego and keep him from firing him but there doesn't seem to be like there's a Cheney-esque figure and I think a lot of

people want that even if he's evil at least he would have a plan and I'm wondering if you think that there are any is there any Cheney-esque figure in the current moment who could be said to be guiding anything or embodying any real trends with an ability to direct them or are we really just sort of at a

fatal stage of institutional compromise of our you know a function of government and media and everything and it's just everyone improvising their way into oblivion. Yeah I mean I've always compared it to like ants when ants go to get food they're kind of blind and they just kind of go everywhere and when

one of the ants finds food they start leaving scent trails for the other ants who then follow the scent trail which is why you always see that long line of ants by the way I'm a co-writer on M.M. I don't know if you know what I'm talking about. This band loves ants. And I think that's kind of what the

Republican Party is I think they just go everywhere and they take a little bite of everything and when something works you kind of see the line fall into place I think Cheney was a mastermind for a window of time but I think ultimately he was still a product of the Republican Party right who saw the window and the

opportunity and was you know an incredibly detail oriented guy who knew how the town worked. I definitely don't see that with Trump. I'm trying to think I think Barr you're right is the closest I think Stephen Miller is definitely pushing a lot of the immigration stuff and has very pointed ideas. I really do

think Trump got the idea for seizing the CDC numbers from Putin. I really think he had like a casual call with Putin and I'm not saying this in a shady conspiracy way I just think he was like I'm getting killed with these infection numbers and Putin's like well take the numbers because who else would have thought of

that. So no no I don't think there's a Cheney right now. I think Cheney was like the safe cracker like the really intelligent guy who understood how to undo the bureaucracy whereas I think Trump is what we're seeing now is more about cognitive dissonance. It's like robbing a bank by I'm trying to think of

the craziest image I can think of like a living skeleton from like the old Sinbad movies 69 like a post driver and and everyone is like what the fuck am I even looking at and meanwhile people are just cleaning out the safe and the background because we're seeing the strangest thing we've ever seen in

our life but yeah I don't think it's mastermind shit I think it's scent trails. I also think the fact that Trump is insecure enough to get rid of anyone he would resent a mastermind. He wants to be the mastermind whereas like W was insecure in such a way that he sort of sought protection, counsel, even

leadership in a cabinet. Their daddy issues manifested in very different ways. Right right as do all of ours. So actually though about that you said something before that we say on this show quite a bit and it's that the Trump administration has not been as devastating as the two Bush

administrations and this seems pretty much like common sense but there's a kind of historical amnesia that's set in and and the statement like elicits so much like confusion and anger and it's like that wasn't that long ago and we haven't started and we haven't obliterated any countries recently. I

don't know where do you think that that amnesia comes from? You know I think it's I mean that's a giant question but a good one. I think clearly you know the last 40 years of American history can almost be characterized more so by like you know the foods and TV shows and movies that we've enjoyed than the

political decisions as far as how people perceive the last 40 years. It's just been such a blast and so much like enjoyment and everyone just basically letting go of the reins of being like you know citizens and I think with Bush there was still they were they were half faking it. They were pretending

that they were professionals and if you squinted your eyes it kind of looked like a functioning government. So you know I always ask people when was the moment where it feels like the knee popped? When was the moment where like the back went out of alignment for you with America and for me it was always either

the Iraq war Citizens United when I was like oh boy that's not getting fixed and but I remember freaking out about Citizens United and having a lot of friends tell me to like calm down it's not that big a deal it's you know it's dirty anyway and and I think the fall out of the Iraq war rolled in over years

there was never kind of a reckoning moment where one day everyone said guess what there weren't nuclear arms or weapons and mass destruction but yeah I would say it's that the idea that this has been a continuing slow burn and I would include Clinton in that pretty heavily by the way. Absolutely. I really

think it was Clinton years were devastating. I mean what was done the deregulation the criminalization of the poor and people of color and you know deregulating the media and just on and on there's some really terrible stuff happened during those years but this it's been this slow burn off kind of this

peak of crazy wealth and but I still think people see things through that lens of celebrity and individuals rather than really this is a 40-year story in my mind not really about Trump Trump's celebrity is a suckle it's not it's not the story. That speaks to something that I've noticed in all of

your films really but especially the the more recent more politically charged ones is this through line of frustration with the way that popular culture is plays a role in obfuscating and distracting by by its very vapidity

and and that you know that our ability to reckon with the world that's being made around us is being compromised by the fact that our mediated experience of that reality is so trifling and so commercial and and easily distracted and and based on things like celebrity

and and and spectacle but you know you also work in Hollywood making movies you know so do you feel that like do you do you see that there is a way through that in Karen Cochrane do you think that there is a way to to redirect people's like energies through media or

would you say at the end of the day it doesn't really matter if it works or not it's still your moral responsibility as an artist to say what is on your mind and in your heart in a given moment yeah it's a tricky line because you're right

you know i'm living in los angeles where you know billions of dollars of giant media being churned out i mean for instance right now i'm in the set of a commercial i'm shooting for exxon and get that money get that money i mean you gotta you know on one hand i care about man come in but on the other

hand you gotta get paid now you know i it's the book that is a surprising book i read uh what like a year ago was that sapiens have you guys read that no i haven't heard of it it's it's pretty it's the uvall harari book and it's about just basically the

history of homo sapiens a lot of it's really good but there's one part that was like jaw dropping for me where he singles out that the single thing that separates us from other upright monkeys was our ability the reason we dominated the other upright monkeys was that we were able to use storytelling and

mythology to mobilize more than there's some kind of set number in nature it's like 185 is the number at which animals start to disperse and fight against each other but mankind was able to come up with storytelling and mythology to unite millions of homo sapiens for one purpose and he was talking about how

they found fossil records where like homo sapiens were battling neanderthals and they would lose like two battles but the third battle they would come back with six times the numbers and neanderthals were like stuck at that number i can't remember exactly what it is and i read this and it just blew me

away because i do think what's happened is the common mythology was pretty consciously manipulated and changed and i do think the story of this whole era that we're living in is about information warfare i think it's about advertising marketing coercive you know manipulation and so yeah anyway boy that

was a long-winded answer i apologize for that no i like that i like i like that mark's uh mark's called man the most gregarious animal and this guy says that uh we are the lying bullshit monkeys i like that yeah yeah i lying bullshit monkeys by the way you can name your autobiography your band your boat

anything you want you can name that i'm on board well adam you talked about like you said like in in terms of like the power of stories and myth make yeah and the powers of stories and myth making to uh so unite people and and you form the sort of broader cultures around it and then also like so much of our the

history of the last 40 years and people's the average person's understanding of it is basically what they've seen in movies about it so i mean just in thinking about a vice in the iraq war and george bush and this weird amnesia about his two terms in office is like what what do you think it counts for the fact that there

are so few memorable or even good american movies made about the iraq war is like there there was like you think about all the classic vietnam war movies like the big three like platoon pockels now full metal jacket they were all made within about 10 years of that war ending and i guess the iraq war is like technically

ended in what like 2011 but i mean it's still kind of going on but i i guess what i'm saying is like none of the movies made about it while it was going on or immediately after it ceased to be like a really vivid controversial thing in the american imagination uh like they've none of them have really

stuck around or like made any big of an impact and i'm just wondering what you think about that yeah i mean that was why i made the movie i i always joked with my editor when we were slaving away on a very difficult edit for that movie we're like we're the janitors who have to put the sawdust on the throw up like this is

not this is not a glory job like we could have gone and done you know a marvel movie we could have gone to you know shot a movie in like off the amalfi coast but we just felt like yeah it was like why like this story no one's ever gotten it down in a film the closest is w which i would say he did in w but other than

that the great iraq war movie is probably i'm trying to think uh there's not many that leap to mind oh there's what's the one uh captain bigelow did uh the one best picture oh right yeah her luck yeah but that's more of a character piece that's more about like what the adrenaline rush ptsd of war does

to an individual than it is about iraq it's a great movie so yeah i mean i don't know i mean the joke i've been saying you know we've been joking about lately is what's the epitaph for america and you know in the last 20 years especially i would say it's the customer is always right and it's just people do not want

unpleasant you know experiences people do not want like look at the news like i had a friend who was a news producer and she told me back in the 80s when all the news consultants came in and talked about how you have to change the colors on the set so they're more pleasant you have to change hairstyles and that's

happened with every tier of our society i mean i always think it's strange how you hear people say brand and content like those are boardroom terms but they've become main streams yeah like i i've started saying to friends lately like hey man what's up how's your quarterly earnings like i just want to like it's

like corporate terms became like hip hop terms so i think when it comes to the iraq war it's bad news it's like legitimately bad news that's a bummer who wants to take that on yeah nobody wants to be reveling in a bummer top they want to watch tom hanks win

world war two again yeah or forget about it or just move on and be like i had people on twitter when vice came out i had several people i was incredible to see and they weren't fake accounts saying like that happened so long ago why would you talk about that why would you make a movie about it

yeah i was like that did not happen long ago yeah yeah keeping in mind too that we will still make however many world war two movies every few years which happened before then um that was that was fun that was fun yeah we i don't i don't get uncomfortable though i don't like the world war two stuff

where they i don't know if the director changes it where they're fighting nazis like i'm part of a neo nazi group because i'm a patriot and like i want someone to make a world war two movie where they're not fighting nazis watch out cross of iron cross of iron by sam peckinpaw that's that's the film

for you my friend what is i haven't seen that oh it's so good it's literally like it's a vietnam war allegory but it's it's it's james coburn and is like uh is basically like the eastern front like nazi frontline trooper fighting the soviets and it like the movie

essentially makes you root for him but it's all but it's done but it's done in a way that's intentionally supposed to be really unpleasant and uncomfortable because it's peckinpaw but i check check out cross of iron yeah i love it well you said that like people don't want bad news and i think that that's true

to some degree but the success of something like you know the big short like the 2008 financial crisis was a fucking bummer um but explaining you know uh the housing market um you did that in a way that one like didn't talk down to people

um and two i guess made it entertaining and palatable i mean like it did prove that people actually are interested in the world around them my many of my family members who just have checked out of politics since the 90s since clinton sort of obliterated all of these you know you know industrial

towns and and you know what was left of our flimsy welfare state they avoid the stuff entirely because their sense is that like it's out of my hands i can't understand it it's too complicated it seems like you go into this sort of thing trying to show people that it's not as complicated as the like

intentional obscuratism as of the elites totally what would lead you to believe and that makes bad news feel like information that you can maybe do something with right well i i think you pointed at like a really interesting question which is you know you can work at these movie studios

or tv networks or you know friends i've had to work in the news and they'll hire consultants they'll do comps they'll do market tests they'll get test audience market groups you know focus groups are like i don't think americans realize how much focus groups are controlling our reality

but the question is like are the results they're giving you what they just want so like when they say americans don't want bad news like you're right like with the big short now i think why people like that movie was that it empowered them it kind of said here's real information it was playful there's some

funny stuff in it and then there was some grim stuff in it but it it sort of said to the audience you can handle this and you know to put it in crass terms like the movie made a bunch of money at the box office which should show that that can be profitable but

you're right like this customer is always right stuff is i don't think it's true i don't think that americans are all consumers that want to be babied but i think that's the way they're being treated and that difference between those two statements is really

interesting right i mean i i mean on this show someone once said something to me that you'd be funny about terrible things and people really respond to it and they're like well previously the relationship to politics is that you have to be sort of

the only experience you're allowed to have about injustice or exploitation or you know great criminal acts of the elites is just like pure rage and obviously you cannot do that forever so the ability to laugh at things that make you angry is kind of the separate is kind of like

the ingredient in something like like the big short that's why i don't know something like right yeah something like having you know the tongue and cheek like Selena Gomez in there or whatever it's like okay this is perspective it's power

because you're not being overtaken by the moment i mean and quite honestly that was harder with vice i mean vice was so upsetting and dark that we kept having to remember that we could be funny because it was so grim you're really looking at like the history of the decline of America and

all these like moments where we just kept going down and that's why the next movie i'm doing is much more of an overt comedy uh i'm just like after vice like i need to laugh a little bit right again like we're on a podcast

which is a weird conversational thing where it's comedic and political but we do try to balance like what we call the vegetables and the dessert of the programming because we don't want to be like totally dry and like purely didactic but we don't want to like

issue political commentary to just lean on jokes when you're working with stuff that sort of runs the gamut from like character driven pure comedy to like very serious political biography

like how do you write a balance between entertaining and informative and how do you decide what that tone is going to be i mean one of my favorite things we've done recently and this is more me as a producer and i directed the pilot but succession is a show i really like because for years

i was like how do you point out these you know medial oligarchs how do you get into this world and show what's really going on there and how do you do it without it becoming wealth porn and we're really lucky in that case because we had a collaborator jesse

armstrong was just brilliant has written some of my favorite movies and shows and peep show peep show all time oh peep show is the best and and in the loop is incredible and uh i think and it's not jesse armstrong but it's our amandu in uchi

i think death of stalin is like the movie for this time i've watched you love the inuchi right because it's it's not about it's not about politics it's about the office politics of politics yep and so succession was a show like when

we really started finding the way like oh wait a minute we're gonna shoot this like fox catcher we're gonna give it that kind of dark weight we're gonna score it like it's a you know a film adaptation of king lear with nick pertel

yet at the same time it can still be funny and i got really excited when we found that when that sauce was done and i was like oh this doesn't make me want to spit it out and uh so that that was a really exciting one

but that's kind of constantly what we're on the hunt for i mean this next one i'm doing is more of a dark comedy i would put it more in kind of that wag the dog network kind of zone even if it's half as good as those movies i'd be delighted but um that's the constant balance i feel like

you guys do it really well i mean like i said you're able to talk about verovin you're able to you know talk about kanye west but i but i also think it proves that the the pop the entertainment the sports all of it is connected way more than we think and i

think once again that boardroom culture has segmented these different subjects way too much and anytime i hear a show like your guys where you're letting them bleed into each other it's immediately a relief well adam when you like you're talking about you know succession and we've

talked about big short and vice but like there's like there's a whole host of projects that you're working on either writing and directing or producing like there is a you're working on a theranos elizabeth holmes thing you're working on a a podcast about um the epstein case and

particularly the the victims of him who are trying to seek justice and by the way you'll be hearing from our attorney and truanon's attorney we're joining actually a class action lawsuit against you for horning in on our fucking uh our racket here

no but i mean i guess like you look at all these stories and they're basically in one way or the other about like the complete failure of the people in charge like the complete venality and and and just like repellent nature of the elites and like their failure to

not just do their job but like be anything be anything approaching human and i'm wondering like do you see like in all these projects you're choosing like what do you think is like the thread that ties together like all of these kind of like these failures and crimes and like just truly grotesque

behavior of of the rich and powerful well i think we talked about some of the threads like information warfare marketing manipulation i think another one maybe we haven't talked about i just read that david halberstam book the best and the brightest ah yeah right and it's a

ah such a good book and it's amazing to see it pop up way back in the early sixties is careerism i think is another big part of this where you just look at your own ladder of ascension and chain is the ultimate careerist i mean that was something i really saw with him

uh and with all these stories you know yeah like once we put out the big short we became kind of known as the production company you call if you want to do stuff like that and fortunately there's a lot of really talented people doing cool stuff so we ended up developing a bunch of things

but you know theranos is a perfect example like she followed uh homes followed a careerist ladder that was very clearly laid out for i mean all those those tech ceo's basically told her what the ladder was you know she was mentored by larry

ellison and uh and it was like fake it till you make it fake it till the tech catches up well what no one mentioned to her was you don't do that when you're doing medical treatments yeah yet you know there's footage of her being fond over by bill clinton at some

clinton initiative or something like you know you're a you're an entrepreneur you're what's best about this country is like no she's completely empty there's no there there but i also ended up feeling a little bad for her because she was like a young person

who kind of just did what was told like all her mentors said do this yeah and uh she was totally rewarded yeah i mean she was worth what was it 10 billion dollars at one point and uh so i think it's a good common thread with all these stories we're working on

it's interesting i'm doing another podcast talk about like high low that's called death at the wing and it's about that rash of uh rising superstars who all died in the 80s and the 90s in the NBA you know like len bayer straza all right reggie louis benji well the

the list is like incredibly long and we're kind of looking at why all these players died and it's a similar thing it's like this combination of like three or four like large forces mixed with careerism mixed with grotesque money and that seems to be the recurring force in all these stories that we just keep

seeing over and over again is like you know the reagan revolution plus deregulation plus rewriting the mythology of american to you know america to you got to get yours screw everyone else and uh you know hopefully we'll figure out how to tell that story by the time we're done all these projects so i i i i love the

elizabeth holmes story like it first of all it's an amazing story of like a grift and i love every story about a grift um it's an evil grift it's not the kind of grift i actually like because i have a moral hierarchy of like hustles and grifts um hers could actually kill people and it's awful but she's like a

fascinating character and i agree and i the careerism too and how she was like rewarded and shaped by this kind of like ivy league you know venture capital thing i mean first of all it completely like reassures me that i am correct in being a slacker because it keeps me relatively

moral because i will totally bite the hand that feeds um so on that tip i actually wanted to just go back to uh when you made uh when you wrote for for snl a sort of an animation short called media oppily with robert smigel it's amazing speaking of biting the hand

that feeds um and it's like kind of a schoolhouse rock parody that talks about you know the media monopoly and also pretty like early on before that had been totally internalized is like yes this is what's going on now which is sad now because now no one even

knows to object to it but like that got it got you in trouble like is that you almost got fired and then you leaked the sketch to the press so that i would get out and learn was really mad at you and uh i gotta know did you know when you were making that that you would get in big trouble for it or were you trying to

get big trouble uh i wish i was that with it i was like i was like 28 years old or something i was like smigel's kind of a legendary writer from snl he came to me with that idea we wrote it together and i was like oh this is awesome and you know i gotta give lauren credit he lets you know

there's some sketches we got on when i was there that are pretty shocking and he really gives a ton of autonomy to the writers i don't know how it is now but back when i was there i i definitely got some sketches on i was shocked by um so yeah we put it on and the next morning we

heard one of the big executives from ge who owned nbc back then called up lauren and basically it was like what the fuck are you doing i think lauren was shocked and then i had a buddy who worked in the control room this guy he's since retired so i could say his name out bobby camminini

and bobby camminini is legitimately a communist like i you know i'm a democratic socialist i'm definitely you know but i'm not a communist this guy is really a communist so he calls me and he says uh okay they're pulling the the tv funhouse from the rerun they're not going to tell anyone

and i was like holy shit and i was like what do you do and then i realized you know from watching all the president's men or whatever i'm like you leak it like and uh so i called david corn and i called uh someone from the new york daily news i can't remember i called a

couple places it leaked and then i came in the next day or two days later and they're like lauren wants to see you and i was like oh shit and lauren's like i know you fucking did this adam i know you're the one who leaked it i was like i don't know what you're talking about he goes don't

fucking bullshit me that's a pretty good lord you uh six years with the guy i was like they want me to fire you i'm not going to fire you but don't fucking do this again i was like all right bye so i think what we're learning here is is the true villain of this story is smigel who set

you up like brendan dassey you poor sweet 28 year old boy no idea i was so innocent and smigel who is a veteran of the the corporate run media wanted to take me out i think that's what it was it was a careerism stab in the back uh yep i love this takeaway smigel is the villain you're

exactly right on that tip is there anything that you have tried to get made since you've been making movies or something you've thought of that you either have been told you wouldn't be able to get away with getting funding for or just didn't even try to yeah there's there's there was i tried

to do garth and it says the boys like years ago like before the big short and i wrote a few uh these two guys man freddy and hay wrote a really good script i did a rewrite with them i made like a pre-vis fake trailer and it was hard rated our superhero movie the superheroes did cocaine had orgies they

were basically backed by corporate america they kill tons of innocent by standards and i took it to every single studio financier half studio like literally like 18 places and did the whole dog and pony show and at the very end every single place was like no i'd never experienced that before even

anchorman everyone said no but one place dreamworks was like we'll develop it with you but in this case like everyone said no that's the biggest no i've ever gotten and then of course like three years later logan comes out rated our superhero and that's it it's off to the races and then they turned it into a

tv show so um that was one of the crazier ones we have a lee atwater script that jesse armstrong wrote that's really really good we've been trying to get that made and we may finally have an angle on doing that one uh let's just say the title the title to that movie should just be three specific

words in a row over and over again that's actually kind of genius you know three specific words over and over again um and then the last one we had a todd solans uh mini series he brought us and it involved like all the man's of the current world there was like a shooting there was like all this stuff but it was

done in that solans way we were like cocky about that we're like we're gonna sell this and like no one wanted it uh those are ones that spring it's it's a half hour sitcom about the dad from happiness by the way that's not that far off it was a little bit in that zone maybe i was i was a naive 46 year old at

that time but uh yeah test audiences needed a laugh track yeah adam i i know you got a i got got a heart out of two but i just have you know i have one more like you know i got one more heater for you you know we talk about some pretty deep political shit so like you know this is this is along those lines you

know like a pretty hard hitting question here uh so will ferrell and john c riley i mean like those guys must smoke like a ton of weed to be that funny like do they chief on the reg and is it like must be so cool to like roast the blunt with them awesome i love that you should call that the

twitter the twitter comment question to end every second yeah perfect pot weed marijuana weed emoji fire emoji marijuana weed emoji um i mean they're just it's just so they're so wow those guys are so they're so easy john c riley man he's a he's a force we just did a show about the lakers the

showtime lakers with him he plays jerry busk oh really fuck that's awesome yeah we did a mini series about the formation of the show time lakers and it's really good this guy max bornstein wrote it and i did the pilot and uh but god damn riley's so good right riley is like i he's

him and william defoe or like the two best living american actors right now john c rally can do anything that guy's range is astonishing uh without a doubt i would throw michael keaton in there too i can watch michael keaton do anything and i'm going to be happy frances mcdorman too would maybe get on

that list but yeah yeah i'm with that adam is really might be my as long as we're continuing with the uh the hollywood dick sucking i gotta say the uh the the long bit you do with keaton and the other guys about tlc song titles is is so good so i mean the problem with him in that movie was he i mean the

other bit that could have been four times longer was him doing the kind of daily briefing to his bed bath and beyond craze yeah and we kept confusing actual crime with i swear to god he improvised we threw around so much extra that could have been 14 minutes long like that guy oh yeah no it's definitely some

hollywood dick sucking but i think we're we're picking good uh good targets to talk yeah we're saying the good side well uh adam i want to thank you so much for joining us and like before you go could you just tell us just a little bit more about the epstein podcast you're doing before we sue your ass for uh

stealing from us yeah it's it's with julie brown you know the reporter from the mind oh wow yeah sort of yeah oh wait a minute so that means it'll be researched and have new information in it no thank you wild speculation that's what we do baby uh there there unfortunately is not a

wild and boy if there's ever a story for wild speculation that's it no it's really good it's this uh terrapal mary it's julie brown adam davidson's a producer on it and is definitely buttoned up but there's a ton of new stuff the whole focus is like through the victims and the idea of like fuck

epstein but at the same time we got to find out who the guys were that were with him that did this because they're all getting off scott free and it goes to some uh man i mean all of it's just as disgusting as any story ever but it definitely goes to like five or six places i did not expect there was

definitely a moment where i felt like george c scott in hardcore where i'm like i wish i turned it off it's gruesome but really really well done so that comes out in september and then the death of the wing should come out in like november or december i think well adam okay you know you're uh

you're you know you got a lot of talent i'm wishing you a lot best of luck in this podcast thing i think you really got something here you know what i think you have a bright future how do you just you know keep your nose to the grindstone um you know don't listen to the haters don't listen to the haters you know

my goal is to like get a really creepy consortium of like big money shady foreign money and come and like buy your show and make the money just like back breakingly high and start just playing geico commercials through your entire show yeah for the right price 100 i'll be the

caveman i'll go vintage i don't give a fuck i will be the hated uh the geico lizard amber according to my 23 and me results i will be the caveman okay i don't have all this neanderthal dna for nothing um adam okay thanks so much for hanging out with us this is really fun

yeah thank you and way overdue such a pleasure huge fan and uh yeah this was just pure enjoyment i'll see you Adam thank you so much thanks bye bye i believe i'm media i believe the whole media is controlled by a few corporations thanks to deregulation by the fcc i mean disney fox westinghouse and

good ol g e they own networks from cvs to cnbc they can use them to say whatever they please and put down the opinions of anyone who disagrees or stuff about pcb what are pcb they come from electric power plants built by westinghouse and g e they can give you lots of cancer that can hurt your body

but on edward tv you rarely hear anything bad about the nuclear industry like when westinghouse was sued for fraud which time the g made defective votes it was an unreported crime or when it was boy kind of robbering nuclear bomb plants just to squeeze a dime that's a footnote by the way a footnote protects you from

folks who doubt what you say now maybe the voices in my head will go away but the big shots don't care they're all sitting pretty thanks to corporate welfare what's that now they get billions in subsidies from the government it's supposed to create jobs but that's not how it's spent they use cash from soft

money to support congressmen who will overweap the programs again and let them dump toxic waste where the young ones play i and g e made the bullets that shot the fk you can trade you to this chain every time you buy a product sponsored on this show that's what nbc doesn't want you to know

all the next time please stand by please stand by the reasons technical difficulty supposedly so if you see a please stand by you'll know it's all part of these big lies why did you ignore McDonald's away cause they made too many jokes about okay this was lauren michael's overall now

don't be fooled he and barry and barry went through the same